The Works of

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

(1856-1950)

Contents

The Novels

THE IRRATIONAL KNOT

LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS

CASHEL BYRON’S PROFESSION

AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST

The Plays

WIDOWERS’ HOUSES

THE PHILANDERER

MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION

ARMS AND THE MAN

CANDIDA

THE MAN OF DESTINY

YOU NEVER CAN TELL

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

THE GADFLY

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE, OR CONSTANCY UNREWARDED

MAN AND SUPERMAN

JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND

HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND

MAJOR BARBARA

PASSION, POISON, AND PETRIFACTION

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

THE INTERLUDE AT THE PLAYHOUSE

GETTING MARRIED

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET

PRESS CUTTINGS

FASCINATING FOUNDLING: DISGRACE TO THE AUTHOR

THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY

SUGGESTED ACT III ENDING FOR BARKER’S ‘THE MADRAS HOUSE’

MISALLIANCE

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

FANNY’S FIRST PLAY

ANDROCLES AND THE LION

OVERRULED: A DEMONSTRATION

BEAUTY’S DUTY

PYGMALION

GREAT CATHERINE

THE MUSIC CURE

O’FLAHERTY, V. C.

THE INCA OF PERUSALEM

AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT

GLASTONBURY SKIT

MACBETH SKIT

SKIT FOR THE TIPTAFT REVUE

ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

BACK TO METHUSELAH: A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

THE WAR INDEMNITIES

The Non-Fiction

THE PERFECT WAGNERITE

QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM

THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF ANARCHISM

THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK AND POCKET COMPANION

MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS

The Criticism

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW by G. K. Chesterton

© Delphi Classics 2014

Version 1

The Works of

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

By Delphi Classics, 2014

The Novels

Shaw was born in Synge Street, Portobello, Dublin

Plaque celebrating Shaw’s birth in Synge Street

Shaw as a young man

THE IRRATIONAL KNOT

The Irrational Knot was first published in America in 1905 by Brentano, of New York, despite the work actually being composed twenty-five years earlier in 1880. It was the author’s second  novel and when he came to write the preface in 1905 he was very dismissive of his efforts, stating that while it is now possible for anyone to read the novel, ‘I do not recommend him to’. Shaw’s harsh opinion and assessment of his work quickly softened and after re-reading the work, he began to view his early attempt at writing much more favourably. He believed that his novel possessed one of the most important features of good fiction; ‘moral originality’. It was this virtue that the author so admired in Henrik Ibsen’s greatest works and wished to recreate to the best of his ability throughout his career.

Shaw explains that after multiple rejections by publishers, the radical political activist Annie Besant decided to support the author by publishing his novel in serial form in her socialist magazine. Despite ultimately expressing affection for the novel, Shaw distances himself from the work by invoking the idea that a person sheds and renews their body and soul every decade so the man who wrote The Irrational Knot no longer exists in any capacity in the George Bernard Shaw of 1905. The novel addresses issues with marriage and class; he reveals a great disdain for the preoccupations and lifestyle of the upper-class and the notion of inherited wealth and status. The ‘knot’ of the title is the marriage between the wealthy Marian Lind and Edward Conolly, a man not born into wealth and privilege. The book chronicles the increasing discontent and then misery of a union between the self-made rationalist Edward and the frivolous Marian.

Annie Besant (1847-1933) was a prominent British socialist, theosophist, women’s rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule.

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF 1905

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

BOOK II

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

BOOK III

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION OF 1905

This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of the life with which the book pretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels then. It was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first. That is to say, nobody would publish it, though I tried all the London publishers and some American ones. And I should not greatly blame them if I could feel sure that it was the book’s faults and not its qualities that repelled them.

I have narrated elsewhere how in the course of time the rejected MS. became Mrs. Annie Besant’s excuse for lending me her ever helping hand by publishing it as a serial in a little propagandist magazine of hers. That was how it got loose beyond all possibility of recapture. It is out of my power now to stand between it and the American public: all I can do is to rescue it from unauthorized mutilations and make the best of a jejune job.

At present, of course, I am not the author of The Irrational Knot. Physiologists inform us that the substance of our bodies (and consequently of our souls) is shed and renewed at such a rate that no part of us lasts longer than eight years: I am therefore not now in any atom of me the person who wrote The Irrational Knot in 1880. The last of that author perished in 1888; and two of his successors have since joined the majority. Fourth of his line, I cannot be expected to take any very lively interest in the novels of my literary great-grandfather. Even my personal recollections of him are becoming vague and overlaid with those most misleading of all traditions, the traditions founded on the lies a man tells, and at last comes to believe, about himself to himself. Certain things, however, I remember very well. For instance, I am significantly clear as to the price of the paper on which I wrote The Irrational Knot. It was cheap — a white demy of unpretentious quality — so that sixpennorth lasted a long time. My daily allowance of composition was five pages of this demy in quarto; and I held my natural laziness sternly to that task day in, day out, to the end. I remember also that Bizet’s Carmen being then new in London, I used it as a safety-valve for my romantic impulses. When I was tired of the sordid realism of Whatshisname (I have sent my only copy of The Irrational Knot to the printers, and cannot remember the name of my hero) I went to the piano and forgot him in the glamorous society of Carmen and her crimson toreador and yellow dragoon. Not that Bizet’s music could infatuate me as it infatuated Nietzsche. Nursed on greater masters, I thought less of him than he deserved; but the Carmen music was — in places — exquisite of its kind, and could enchant a man like me, romantic enough to have come to the end of romance before I began to create in art for myself.

When I say that I did and felt these things, I mean, of course, that the predecessor whose name I bear did and felt them. The I of to-day is (? am) cool towards Carmen; and Carmen, I regret to say, does not take the slightest interest in him (? me). And now enough of this juggling with past and present Shaws. The grammatical complications of being a first person and several extinct third persons at the same moment are so frightful that I must return to the ordinary misusage, and ask the reader to make the necessary corrections in his or her own mind.

This book is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take for example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical engineer. That was by no means a flight of fancy. For you must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living. I began trying to commit that sin against my nature when I was fifteen, and persevered, from youthful timidity and diffidence, until I was twenty-three. My last attempt was in 1879, when a company was formed in London to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison — a much too ingenious invention as it proved, being nothing less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion. This was not what the British stockbroker wanted; so the company was soon merged in the National Telephone Company, after making a place for itself in the history of literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a job. Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-hatted Englishman whose stiff politeness covered his conviction that they were, relatively to himself, inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British workman who did as little for his wages as he possibly could; never hurried himself; and had a deep reverence for anyone whose pocket could be tapped by respectful behavior. Need I add that they were contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as a parcel of outlandish adult boys, who sweated themselves for their employer’s benefit instead of looking after their own interests? They adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary; but each of them had (or pretended to have) on the brink of completion, an improvement on the telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were free-souled creatures, excellent company: sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers; with an air of making slow old England hum which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares from which they had to be retrieved like strayed sheep by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong.

In this environment I remained for some months. As I was interested in physics and had read Tyndall and Helmholtz, besides having learnt something in Ireland through a fortunate friendship with a cousin of Mr. Graham Bell who was also a chemist and physicist, I was, I believe, the only person in the entire establishment who knew the current scientific explanation of telephony; and as I soon struck up a friendship with our official lecturer, a Colchester man whose strong point was pre-scientific agriculture, I often discharged his duties for him in a manner which, I am persuaded, laid the foundation of Mr. Edison’s London reputation: my sole reward being my boyish delight in the half-concealed incredulity of our visitors (who were convinced by the hoarsely startling utterances of the telephone that the speaker, alleged by me to be twenty miles away, was really using a speaking-trumpet in the next room), and their obvious uncertainty, when the demonstration was over, as to whether they ought to tip me or not: a question they either decided in the negative or never decided at all; for I never got anything.

So much for my electrical engineer! To get him into contact with fashionable society before he became famous was also a problem easily solved. I knew of three English peers who actually preferred physical laboratories to stables, and scientific experts to gamekeepers: in fact, one of the experts was a friend of mine. And I knew from personal experience that if science brings men of all ranks into contact, art, especially music, does the same for men and women. An electrician who can play an accompaniment can go anywhere and know anybody. As far as mere access and acquaintance go there are no class barriers for him. My difficulty was not to get my hero into society, but to give any sort of plausibility to my picture of society when I got him into it. I lacked the touch of the literary diner-out; and I had, as the reader will probably find to his cost, the classical tradition which makes all the persons in a novel, except the comically vernacular ones, or the speakers of phonetically spelt dialect, utter themselves in the formal phrases and studied syntax of eighteenth century rhetoric. In short, I wrote in the style of Scott and Dickens; and as fashionable society then spoke and behaved, as it still does, in no style at all, my transcriptions of Oxford and Mayfair may nowadays suggest an unaccountable and ludicrous ignorance of a very superficial and accessible code of manners. I was not, however, so ignorant as might have been inferred at that time from my somewhat desperate financial condition.

I had, to begin with, a sort of backstairs knowledge; for in my teens I struggled for life in the office of an Irish gentleman who acted as land agent and private banker for many persons of distinction. Now it is possible for a London author to dine out in the highest circles for twenty years without learning as much about the human frailties of his hosts as the family solicitor or (in Ireland) the family land agent learns in twenty days; and some of this knowledge inevitably reaches his clerks, especially the clerk who keeps the cash, which was my particular department. He learns, if capable of the lesson, that the aristocratic profession has as few geniuses as any other profession; so that if you want a peerage of more than, say, half a dozen members, you must fill it up with many common persons, and even with some deplorably mean ones. For “service is no inheritance” either in the kitchen or the House of Lords; and the case presented by Mr. Barrie in his play of The Admirable Crichton, where the butler is the man of quality, and his master, the Earl, the man of rank, is no fantasy, but a quite common occurrence, and indeed to some extent an inevitable one, because the English are extremely particular in selecting their butlers, whilst they do not select their barons at all, taking them as the accident of birth sends them. The consequences include much ironic comedy. For instance, we have in England a curious belief in first rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable secondrateness of the people we do know, besides saving the credit of aristocracy as an institution. The unmet aristocrat is devoutly believed in; but he is always round the corner, never at hand. That the smart set exists; that there is above and beyond that smart set a class so blue of blood and exquisite in nature that it looks down even on the King with haughty condescension; that scepticism on these points is one of the stigmata of plebeian baseness: all these imaginings are so common here that they constitute the real popular sociology of England as much as an unlimited credulity as to vaccination constitutes the real popular science of England. It is, of course, a timid superstition. A British peer or peeress who happens by chance to be genuinely noble is just as isolated at court as Goethe would have been among all the other grandsons of publicans, if they had formed a distinct class in Frankfurt or Weimar. This I knew very well when I wrote my novels; and if, as I suspect, I failed to create a convincingly verisimilar atmosphere of aristocracy, it was not because I had any illusions or ignorances as to the common humanity of the peerage, and not because I gave literary style to its conversation, but because, as I had never had any money, I was foolishly indifferent to it, and so, having blinded myself to its enormous importance, necessarily missed the point of view, and with it the whole moral basis, of the class which rightly values money, and plenty of it, as the first condition of a bearable life.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis. Every teacher or twaddler who denies it or suppresses it, is an enemy of life. Money controls morality; and what makes the United States of America look so foolish even in foolish Europe is that they are always in a state of flurried concern and violent interference with morality, whereas they throw their money into the street to be scrambled for, and presently find that their cash reserves are not in their own hands, but in the pockets of a few millionaires who, bewildered by their luck, and unspeakably incapable of making any truly economic use of it, endeavor to “do good” with it by letting themselves be fleeced by philanthropic committee men, building contractors, librarians and professors, in the name of education, science, art and what not; so that sensible people exhale relievedly when the pious millionaire dies, and his heirs, demoralized by being brought up on his outrageous income, begin the socially beneficent work of scattering his fortune through the channels of the trades that flourish by riotous living.

This, as I have said, I did not then understand; for I knew money only by the want of it. Ireland is a poor country; and my father was a poor man in a poor country. By this I do not mean that he was hungry and homeless, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. My friend Mr. James Huneker, a man of gorgeous imagination and incorrigible romanticism, has described me to the American public as a peasant lad who has raised himself, as all American presidents are assumed to have raised themselves, from the humblest departments of manual labor to the loftiest eminence. James flatters me. Had I been born a peasant, I should now be a tramp. My notion of my father’s income is even vaguer than his own was — and that is saying a good deal — but he always had an income of at least three figures (four, if you count in dollars instead of pounds); and what made him poor was that he conceived himself as born to a social position which even in Ireland could have been maintained in dignified comfort only on twice or thrice what he had. And he married on that assumption. Fortunately for me, social opportunity is not always to be measured by income. There is an important economic factor, first analyzed by an American economist (General Walker), and called rent of ability. Now this rent, when the ability is of the artistic or political sort, is often paid in kind. For example, a London possessor of such ability may, with barely enough money to maintain a furnished bedroom and a single presentable suit of clothes, see everything worth seeing that a millionaire can see, and know everybody worth knowing that he can know. Long before I reached this point myself, a very trifling accomplishment gave me glimpses of the sort of fashionable life a peasant never sees. Thus I remember one evening during the novel-writing period when nobody would pay a farthing for a stroke of my pen, walking along Sloane Street in that blessed shield of literary shabbiness, evening dress. A man accosted me with an eloquent appeal for help, ending with the assurance that he had not a penny in the world. I replied, with exact truth, “Neither have I.” He thanked me civilly, and went away, apparently not in the least surprised, leaving me to ask myself why I did not turn beggar too, since I felt sure that a man who did it as well as he, must be in comfortable circumstances.

Another reminiscence. A little past midnight, in the same costume, I was turning from Piccadilly into Bond Street, when a lady of the pavement, out of luck that evening so far, confided to me that the last bus for Brompton had passed, and that she should be grateful to any gentleman who would give her a lift in a hansom. My old-fashioned Irish gallantry had not then been worn off by age and England: besides, as a novelist who could find no publisher, I was touched by the similarity of our trades and predicaments. I excused myself very politely on the ground that my wife (invented for the occasion) was waiting for me at home, and that I felt sure so attractive a lady would have no difficulty in finding another escort. Unfortunately this speech made so favorable an impression on her that she immediately took my arm and declared her willingness to go anywhere with me, on the flattering ground that I was a perfect gentleman. In vain did I try to persuade her that in coming up Bond Street and deserting Piccadilly, she was throwing away her last chance of a hansom: she attached herself so devotedly to me that I could not without actual violence shake her off. At last I made a stand at the end of Old Bond Street. I took out my purse; opened it; and held it upside down. Her countenance fell, poor girl! She turned on her heel with a melancholy flirt of her skirt, and vanished.

Now on both these occasions I had been in the company of people who spent at least as much in a week as I did in a year. Why was I, a penniless and unknown young man, admitted there? Simply because, though I was an execrable pianist, and never improved until the happy invention of the pianola made a Paderewski of me, I could play a simple accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs. It is true that the musical side of London society, with its streak of Bohemianism, and its necessary toleration of foreign ways and professional manners, is far less typically English than the sporting side or the political side or the Philistine side; so much so, indeed, that people may and do pass their lives in it without ever discovering what English plutocracy in the mass is really like: still, if you wander in it nocturnally for a fitful year or so as I did, with empty pockets and an utter impossibility of approaching it by daylight (owing to the deplorable decay of the morning wardrobe), you have something more actual to go on than the hallucinations of a peasant lad setting his foot manfully on the lowest rung of the social ladder. I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad novels.

Conceive me then at the writing of The Irrational Knot as a person neither belonging to the world I describe nor wholly ignorant of it, and on certain points quite incapable of conceiving it intuitively. A whole world of art which did not exist for it lay open to me. I was familiar with the greatest in that world: mighty poets, painters, and musicians were my intimates. I found the world of artificial greatness founded on convention and money so repugnant and contemptible by comparison that I had no sympathetic understanding of it. People are fond of blaming valets because no man is a hero to his valet. But it is equally true that no man is a valet to his hero; and the hero, consequently, is apt to blunder very ludicrously about valets, through judging them from an irrelevant standard of heroism: heroism, remember, having its faults as well as its qualities. I, always on the heroic plane imaginatively, had two disgusting faults which I did not recognize as faults because I could not help them. I was poor and (by day) shabby. I therefore tolerated the gross error that poverty, though an inconvenience and a trial, is not a sin and a disgrace; and I stood for my self-respect on the things I had: probity, ability, knowledge of art, laboriousness, and whatever else came cheaply to me. Because I could walk into Hampton Court Palace and the National Gallery (on free days) and enjoy Mantegna and Michael Angelo whilst millionaires were yawning miserably over inept gluttonies; because I could suffer more by hearing a movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony taken at a wrong tempo than a duchess by losing a diamond necklace, I was indifferent to the repulsive fact that if I had fallen in love with the duchess I did not possess a morning suit in which I could reasonably have expected her to touch me with the furthest protended pair of tongs; and I did not see that to remedy this I should have been prepared to wade through seas of other people’s blood. Indeed it is this perception which constitutes an aristocracy nowadays. It is the secret of all our governing classes, which consist finally of people who, though perfectly prepared to be generous, humane, cultured, philanthropic, public spirited and personally charming in the second instance, are unalterably resolved, in the first, to have money enough for a handsome and delicate life, and will, in pursuit of that money, batter in the doors of their fellow men, sell them up, sweat them in fetid dens, shoot, stab, hang, imprison, sink, burn and destroy them in the name of law and order. And this shews their fundamental sanity and rightmindedness; for a sufficient income is indispensable to the practice of virtue; and the man who will let any unselfish consideration stand between him and its attainment is a weakling, a dupe and a predestined slave. If I could convince our impecunious mobs of this, the world would be reformed before the end of the week; for the sluggards who are content to be wealthy without working and the dastards who are content to work without being wealthy, together with all the pseudo-moralists and ethicists and cowardice mongers generally, would be exterminated without shrift, to the unutterable enlargement of life and ennoblement of humanity. We might even make some beginnings of civilization under such happy circumstances.

In the days of The Irrational Knot I had not learnt this lesson; consequently I did not understand the British peerage, just as I did not understand that glorious and beautiful phenomenon, the “heartless” rich American woman, who so thoroughly and admirably understands that conscience is a luxury, and should be indulged in only when the vital needs of life have been abundantly satisfied. The instinct which has led the British peerage to fortify itself by American alliances is healthy and well inspired. Thanks to it, we shall still have a few people to maintain the tradition of a handsome, free, proud, costly life, whilst the craven mass of us are keeping up our starveling pretence that it is more important to be good than to be rich, and piously cheating, robbing, and murdering one another by doing our duty as policemen, soldiers, bailiffs, jurymen, turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and curates, at the command of those who know that the golden grapes are not sour. Why, good heavens! we shall all pretend that this straightforward truth of mine is mere Swiftian satire, because it would require a little courage to take it seriously and either act on it or make me drink the hemlock for uttering it.

There was the less excuse for my blindness because I was at that very moment laying the foundations of my high fortune by the most ruthless disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse. I was an ablebodied and ableminded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family, then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the conventions of peasant lad fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father’s old age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this was a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parent’s bread in some sordid trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family. My mother reinforced it by drudging in her elder years at the art of music which she had followed in her prime freely for love. I only helped to spend it. People wondered at my heartlessness: one young and romantic lady had the courage to remonstrate openly and indignantly with me, “for the which” as Pepys said of the shipwright’s wife who refused his advances, “I did respect her.” Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother’s expense) instead of a slave. And I protest that I will not suffer James Huneker or any romanticist to pass me off as a peasant boy qualifying for a chapter in Smiles’s Self Help, or a good son supporting a helpless mother, instead of a stupendously selfish artist leaning with the full weight of his hungry body on an energetic and capable woman. No, James: such lies are not only unnecessary, but fearfully depressing and fundamentally immoral, besides being hardly fair to the supposed peasant lad’s parents. My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers: therefore take off your hat to her, and blush.[A]

It is now open to anyone who pleases to read The Irrational Knot. I do not recommend him to; but it is possible that the same mysterious force which drove me through the labor of writing it may have had some purpose which will sustain others through the labor of reading it, and even reward them with some ghastly enjoyment of it. For my own part I cannot stand it. It is to me only one of the heaps of spoiled material that all apprenticeship involves. I consent to its publication because I remember that British colonel who called on Beethoven when the elderly composer was working at his posthumous quartets, and offered him a commission for a work in the style of his jejune septet. Beethoven drove the Colonel out of the house with objurgation. I think that was uncivil. There is a time for the septet, and a time for the posthumous quartets. It is true that if a man called on me now and asked me to write something like The Irrational Knot I should have to exercise great self-control. But there are people who read Man and Superman, and then tell me (actually to my face) that I have never done anything so good as Cashel Byron’s Profession. After this, there may be a public for even The Irrational Knot; so let it go.

LONDON, May 26, 1905.

[Footnote A: James, having read the above in proof, now protests he never called me a peasant lad: that being a decoration by the sub-editor. The expression he used was “a poor lad.” This is what James calls tact. After all, there is something pastoral, elemental, well aerated, about a peasant lad. But a mere poor lad! really, James, really — !!!]

P.S. — Since writing the above I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first order. By this I do not mean that it is a masterpiece in that order, or even a pleasant example of it, but simply that, such as it is, it is one of those fictions in which the morality is original and not readymade. Now this quality is the true diagnostic of the first order in literature, and indeed in all the arts, including the art of life. It is, for example, the distinction that sets Shakespear’s Hamlet above his other plays, and that sets Ibsen’s work as a whole above Shakespear’s work as a whole. Shakespear’s morality is a mere reach-me-down; and because Hamlet does not feel comfortable in it, and struggles against the misfit, he suggests something better, futile as his struggle is, and incompetent as Shakespear shews himself in his effort to think out the revolt of his feeling against readymade morality. Ibsen’s morality is original all through: he knows well that the men in the street have no use for principles, because they can neither understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive and inhuman, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble. Now to all writers of the first order, these rules, and the need for them produced by the moral and intellectual incompetence of the ordinary human animal, are no more invariably beneficial and respectable than the sunlight which ripens the wheat in Sussex and leaves the desert deadly in Sahara, making the cheeks of the ploughman’s child rosy in the morning and striking the ploughman brainsick or dead in the afternoon; no more inspired (and no less) than the religion of the Andaman islanders; as much in need of frequent throwing away and replacement as the community’s boots. By writers of the second order the readymade morality is accepted as the basis of all moral judgment and criticism of the characters they portray, even when their genius forces them to represent their most attractive heroes and heroines as violating the readymade code in all directions. Far be it from me to pretend that the first order is more readable than the second! Shakespear, Scott, Dickens, Dumas père are not, to say the least, less readable than Euripides and Ibsen. Nor is the first order always more constructive; for Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Larochefoucauld did not get further in positive philosophy than Ruskin and Carlyle, though they could snuff Ruskin’s Seven Lamps with their fingers without flinching. Still, the first order remains the first order and the second the second for all that: no man who shuts his eyes and opens his mouth when religion and morality are offered to him on a long spoon can share the same Parnassian bench with those who make an original contribution to religion and morality, were it only a criticism.

Therefore on coming back to this Irrational Knot as a stranger after 25 years, I am proud to find that its morality is not readymade. The drunken prima donna of a bygone type of musical burlesque is not depicted as an immoral person, but as a person with a morality of her own, no worse in its way than the morality of her highly respectable wine merchant in its way. The sociology of the successful inventor is his own sociology too; and it is by his originality in this respect that he passes irresistibly through all the readymade prejudices that are set up to bar his promotion. And the heroine, nice, amiable, benevolent, and anxious to please and behave well, but hopelessly secondhand in her morals and nicenesses, and consequently without any real moral force now that the threat of hell has lost its terrors for her, is left destitute among the failures which are so puzzling to thoughtless people. “I cannot understand why she is so unlucky: she is such a nice woman!”: that is the formula. As if people with any force in them ever were altogether nice!

And so I claim the first order for this jejune exploit of mine, and invite you to note that the final chapter, so remote from Scott and Dickens and so close to Ibsen, was written years before Ibsen came to my knowledge, thus proving that the revolt of the Life Force against readymade morality in the nineteenth century was not the work of a Norwegian microbe, but would have worked itself into expression in English literature had Norway never existed. In fact, when Miss Lord’s translation of A Doll’s House appeared in the eighteen-eighties, and so excited some of my Socialist friends that they got up a private reading of it in which I was cast for the part of Krogstad, its novelty as a morally original study of a marriage did not stagger me as it staggered Europe. I had made a morally original study of a marriage myself, and made it, too, without any melodramatic forgeries, spinal diseases, and suicides, though I had to confess to a study of dipsomania. At all events, I chattered and ate caramels in the back drawing-room (our green-room) whilst Eleanor Marx, as Nora, brought Helmer to book at the other side of the folding doors. Indeed I concerned myself very little about Ibsen until, later on, William Archer translated Peer Gynt to me viva voce, when the magic of the great poet opened my eyes in a flash to the importance of the social philosopher.

I seriously suggest that The Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the Life Force to write A Doll’s House in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged 24. And though I say it that should not, the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid instinctive force that has to work and become conscious of itself by means of human brains. If we could only realize that though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads, the peoples of the earth would learn some pity for their gods; and we should have a religion that would not be contradicted at every turn by the thing that is giving the lie to the thing that ought to be.

WELWYN, Sunday, June 25, 1905.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

At seven o’clock on a fine evening in April the gas had just been lighted in a room on the first floor of a house in York Road, Lambeth. A man, recently washed and brushed, stood on the hearthrug before a pier glass, arranging a white necktie, part of his evening dress. He was about thirty, well grown, and fully developed muscularly. There was no cloud of vice or trouble upon him: he was concentrated and calm, making no tentative movements of any sort (even a white tie did not puzzle him into fumbling), but acting with a certainty of aim and consequent economy of force, dreadful to the irresolute. His face was brown, but his auburn hair classed him as a fair man.

The apartment, a drawing-room with two windows, was dusty and untidy. The paint and wall paper had not been renewed for years; nor did the pianette, which stood near the fireplace, seem to have been closed during that time; for the interior was dusty, and the inner end of every key begrimed. On a table between the windows were some tea things, with a heap of milliner’s materials, and a brass candlestick which had been pushed back to make room for a partially unfolded cloth. There was a second table near the door, crowded with coils, batteries, a galvanometer, and other electrical apparatus. The mantelpiece was littered with dusty letters, and two trays of Doulton ware which ornamented it were filled with accounts, scraps of twine, buttons, and rusty keys.

A shifting, rustling sound, as of somebody dressing, which had been audible for some minutes through the folding doors, now ceased, and a handsome young woman entered. She had thick black hair, fine dark eyes, an oval face, a clear olive complexion, and an elastic figure. She was incompletely attired in a petticoat that did not hide her ankles, and stays of bright red silk with white laces and seams. Quite unconcerned at the presence of the man, she poured out a cup of tea; carried it to the mantelpiece; and began to arrange her hair before the glass. He, without looking round, completed the arrangement of his tie, looked at it earnestly for a moment, and said, “Have you got a pin about you?”

“There is one in the pincushion on my table,” she said; “but I think it’s a black one. I dont know where the deuce all the pins go to.” Then, casting off the subject, she whistled a long and florid cadenza, and added, by way of instrumental interlude, a remarkably close imitation of a violoncello. Meanwhile the man went into her room for the pin. On his return she suddenly became curious, and said, “Where are you going to-night, if one may ask?”

“I am going out.”

She looked at him for a moment, and turned contemptuously to the mirror, saying, “Thank you. Sorry to be inquisitive.”

“I am going to sing for the Countess of Carbury at a concert at
Wandsworth.”

“Sing! You! The Countess of Barbury! Does she live at Wandsworth?”

“No. She lives in Park Lane.”

“Oh! I beg her pardon.” The man made no comment on this; and she, after looking doubtfully at him to assure herself that he was in earnest, continued, “How does the Countess of Whatshername come to know you, pray?”

“Why not?”

A long pause ensued. Then she said: “Stuff!”, but without conviction. Her exclamation had no apparent effect on him until he had buttoned his waistcoat and arranged his watch-chain. Then he glanced at a sheet of pink paper which lay on the mantelpiece. She snatched it at once; opened it; stared incredulously at it; and said, “Pink paper, and scalloped edges! How filthily vulgar! I thought she was not much of a Countess! Ahem! ‘Music for the People. Parnassus Society. A concert will be given at the Town Hall, Wandsworth, on Tuesday, the 25th April, by the Countess of Carbury, assisted by the following ladies and gentlemen. Miss Elinor McQuinch’ — what a name! ‘Miss Marian Lind’ — who’s Miss Marian Lind?”

“How should I know?”

“I only thought, as she is a pal of the Countess, that you would most likely be intimate with her. ‘Mrs. Leith Fairfax.’ There is a Mrs. Leith Fairfax who writes novels, and very rotten novels they are, too. Who are the gentlemen? ‘Mr. Marmaduke Lind’ — brother to Miss Marian, I suppose. ‘Mr. Edward Conolly’ — save the mark! they must have been rather hard up for gentlemen when they put you down as one. The Conolly family is looking up at last. Hm! nearly a dozen altogether. ‘Tickets will be distributed to the families of working men by the Rev. George Lind’ — pity they didnt engage Jenny Lind on purpose to sing with you. ‘A limited number of front seats at one shilling. Please turn over. Part I. Symphony in F: Haydn. Arranged for four English concertinas by Julius Baker. Mr. Julius Baker; Master Julius Abt Baker; Miss Lisette Baker (aged 8); and Miss Totty Baker (aged 6-1/2)’. Good Lord! ‘Song: Rose softly blooming: Spohr. Miss Marian Lind.’ I wonder whether she can sing! ‘Polonaise in A flat major: Chopin’ — what rot! As if working people cared about Chopin! Miss Elinor McQuinch is a fool, I see. ‘Song: The Valley: Gounod.’ Of course: I knew you would try that. Oho! Here’s something sensible at last. ‘Nigger melody. Uncle Ned. Mr. Marmaduke Lind, accompanied by himself on the banjo.’

Dum, drum. Dum, drum. Dum, drum. Dum —
’And there was an ole nigga; and his name was Uncle Ned;
An’ him dead long ago, long ago.
An’ he had no hair on the top of his head
In the place where the wool ought to grow,’

Mr. Marmaduke Lind will get a double encore; and no one will take the least notice of you or the others. ‘Recitation. The Faithful Soul. Adelaide Proctor. Mrs. Leith Fairfax.’ Well, this certainly is a blessed attempt to amuse Wandsworth. Another reading by the Rev. — —”

Here Conolly, who had been putting on his overcoat, picked the program deftly from his sister’s fingers, and left the room. She, after damning him very heartily, returned to the glass, and continued dressing, taking her tea at intervals until she was ready to go out, when she sent for a cab, and bade the driver convey her to the Bijou Theatre, Soho.

Conolly, on arriving at the Wandsworth Town Hall, was directed to a committee room, which served as green-room on this occasion. He was greeted by a clean shaven young clergyman who protested that he was glad to see him there, but did not offer his hand. Conolly thanked him briefly, and went without further ceremony to the table, and was about to place his hat and overcoat on a heap of similar garments, when, observing that there were some hooks along the wall, he immediately crossed over and hung up his things on them, thereby producing an underbred effect of being more prudent and observant than the rest. Then he looked at his program, and calculated how soon his turn to sing would come. Then he unrolled his music, and placed two copies of Le Vallon ready to his hand upon the table. Having made these arrangements with a self-possession that quite disconcerted the clergyman, he turned to examine the rest of the company.

His first glance was arrested by the beauty of a young lady with light brown hair and gentle grey eyes, who sat near the fire. Beside her, on a lower chair, was a small, lean, and very restless young woman with keen dark eyes staring defiantly from a worn face. These two were attended by a jovial young gentleman with curly auburn hair, who was twanging a banjo, and occasionally provoking an exclamation of annoyance from the restless girl by requesting her opinion of his progress in tuning the instrument. Near them stood a tall man, dark and handsome. He seemed unused to his present circumstances, and contemptuous, not of the company nor the object for which they were assembled, but in the abstract, as if habitual contempt were part of his nature.

The clergyman, who had just conducted to the platform an elderly professor in a shabby frock coat, followed by three well-washed children, each of whom carried a concertina, now returned and sat down beside a middle-aged lady, who made herself conspicuous by using a gold framed eyeglass so as to convey an impression that she was an exceedingly keen observer.

“It is fortunate that the evening is so fine,” said the clergyman to her.

“Yes, is it not, Mr. Lind?”

“My throat is always affected by bad weather, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. I shall be so handicapped by the inevitable comparison of my elocution with yours, that I am glad the weather is favorable to me, though the comparison is not.”

“No,” said Mrs. Fairfax, with decision. “I am not in the least an orator. I can repeat a poem: that is all. Oh! I hope I have not broken my glasses.” They had slipped from her nose to the floor. Conolly picked them up and straightened them with one turn of his fingers.

“No harm done, madam,” said he, with a certain elocutionary correctness, and rather in the strong voice of the workshop than the subdued one of the drawing-room, handing the glasses to her ceremoniously as he spoke.

“Thank you. You are very kind, very kind indeed.”

Conolly bowed, and turned again toward the other group.

“Who is that?” whispered Mrs. Fairfax to the clergyman.

“Some young man who attracted the attention of the Countess by his singing. He is only a workman.”

“Indeed! Where did she hear him sing?”

“In her son’s laboratory, I believe. He came there to put up some electrical machinery, and sang into a telephone for their amusement. You know how fond Lord Jasper is of mechanics. Jasper declares that he is a genius as an electrician. Indeed it was he, rather than the Countess, who thought of getting him to sing for us.”

“How very interesting! I saw that he was clever when he spoke to me. There is so much in trifles — in byplay, Mr. Lind. Now, his manner of picking up my glass had his entire history in it. You will also see it in the solid development of his head. That young man deserves to be encouraged.”

“You are very generous, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. It would not be well to encourage him too much, however. You must recollect that he is not used to society. Injudicious encouragement might perhaps lead him to forget his real place in it.”

“I do not agree with you, Mr. Lind. You do not read human nature as I do. You know that I am an expert. I see men as he sees a telegraph instrument, quite uninfluenced by personal feeling.”

“True, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. But the heart is deceitful above all things and des — at least I should say — er. That is, you will admit that the finest perception may err in its estimate of the inscrutable work of the Almighty.”

“Doubtless. But really, Mr. Lind, human beings are so shallow! I assure you there is nothing at all inscrutable about them to a trained analyst of character. It may be a gift, perhaps; but people’s minds are to me only little machines made up of superficial motives.”

“I say,” said the young gentleman with the banjo, interrupting them: “have you got a copy of ‘Rose softly blooming’ there?”

“I!” said Mrs. Fairfax. “No, certainly not.”

“Then it’s all up with the concert. We have forgotten Marian’s music; and there is nothing for Nelly — I beg pardon, I mean Miss McQuinch — to play from. She is above playing by ear.”

“I cannot play by ear,” said the restless young lady, angrily.

“If you will sing ‘Coal black Rose’ instead, Marian, I can accompany you on the banjo, and back you up in the chorus. The Wandsworthers — if they survive the concertinas — will applaud the change as one man.”

“It is so unkind to joke about it,” said the beautiful young lady. “What shall I do? If somebody will vamp an accompaniment, I can get on very well without any music. But if I try to play for myself I shall break down.”

Conolly here stepped aside, and beckoned to the clergyman.

“That young man wants to speak to you,” whispered Mrs. Fairfax.

“Oh, indeed. Thank you,” said the Rev. Mr. Lind, stiffly. “I suppose I had better see what he requires.”

“I suppose you had,” said Mrs. Fairfax, with some impatience.

“I dont wish to intrude where I have no business,” said Conolly quietly to the clergyman; “but I can play that lady’s accompaniment, if she will allow me.”

The clergyman was too much afraid of Conolly by this time — he did not know why — to demur. “I am sure she will not object,” he said, pretending to be relieved by the offer. “Your services will be most acceptable. Excuse me for one moment, whilst I inform Miss Lind.”

He crossed the room to the lady, and said in a lower tone, “I think I have succeeded in arranging the matter, Marian. That man says he will play for you.”

“I hope he can play,” said Marian doubtfully. “Who is he?”

“It is Conolly. Jasper’s man.”

Miss Lind’s eyes lighted. “Is that he?” she whispered, glancing curiously across the room at him. “Bring him and introduce him to us.”

“Is that necessary?” said the tall man, without lowering his voice sufficiently to prevent Conolly from hearing him. The clergyman hesitated.

“It is quite necessary: I do not know what he must think of us already,” said Marian, ashamed, and looking apprehensively at Conolly. He was staring with a policemanlike expression at the tall man, who, after a vain attempt to ignore him, had eventually to turn away. The Rev. Mr. Lind then led the electrician forward, and avoided a formal presentation by saying with a simper: “Here is Mr. Conolly, who will extricate us from all our difficulties.”

Miss McQuinch nodded. Miss Lind bowed. Marmaduke shook hands good-naturedly, and retired somewhat abashed, thrumming his banjo. Just then a faint sound of clapping was followed by the return of the quartet party, upon which Miss Lind rose and moved hesitatingly toward the platform. The tall man offered his hand.

“Nonsense, Sholto,” said she, laughing. “They will expect you to do something if you appear with me.”

“Allow me, Marian,” said the clergyman, as the tall man, offended, bowed and stood aside. She, pretending not to notice her brother, turned toward Conolly, who at once passed the Rev. George, and led her to the platform.

“The original key?” he enquired, as they mounted the steps.

“I dont know,” she said, alarmed.

For a moment he was taken aback. Then he said, “What is the highest note you can sing?”

“I can sing A sometimes — only when I am alone. I dare not attempt it before people.”

Conolly sat down, knowing now that Miss Lind was a commonplace amateur. He had been contrasting her with his sister, greatly to the disparagement of his home life; and he was disappointed to find the lady break down where the actress would have succeeded so well. Consoling himself with the reflexion that if Miss Lind could not rap out a B flat like Susanna, neither could she rap out an oath, he played the accompaniment much better than Marian sang the song. Meanwhile, Miss McQuinch, listening jealously in the green-room, hated herself for her inferior skill.

“Cool, and reserved, is the modern Benjamin Franklin,” observed
Marmaduke to her.

“Better a reserved man who can do something than a sulky one who can do nothing,” she said, glancing at the tall man, with whom the clergyman was nervously striving to converse.

“Exquisite melody, is it not, Mr. Douglas?” said Mrs. Fairfax, coming to the clergyman’s rescue.

“I do not care for music,” said Douglas. “I lack the maudlin disposition in which the taste usually thrives.”

Miss McQuinch gave an expressive snap, but said nothing; and the conversation dropped until Miss Lind had sung her song, and received a round of respectful but not enthusiastic applause.

“Thank you, Mr. Conolly,” she said, as she left the platform. “I am afraid that Spohr’s music is too good for the people here. Dont you think so?”

“Not a bit of it,” replied Conolly. “There is nothing so very particular in Spohr. But he requires very good singing — better than he is worth.”

Miss Lind colored, and returned in silence to her seat beside Miss McQuinch, feeling that she had exposed herself to a remark that no gentleman would have made.

“Now then, Nelly,” said Marmaduke: “the parson is going to call time.
Keep up your courage. Come, get up, get up.”

“Do not be so boisterous, Duke,” said Marian. “It is bad enough to have to face an audience without being ridiculed beforehand.”

“Marian,” said Marmaduke, “if you think Nelly will hammer a love of music into the British workman, you err. Lots of them get their living by hammering, and they will most likely resent feminine competition. Bang! There she goes. Pity the sorrows of a poor old piano, and let us hope its trembling limbs wont come through the floor.”

“Really, Marmaduke,” said Marian, impatiently, “you are excessively foolish. You are like a boy fresh from school.”

Marmaduke, taken aback by her sharp tone, gave a long whispered whistle, and pretended to hide under the table. He had a certain gift of drollery which made it difficult not to laugh even at his most foolish antics, and Marian was giving way in spite of herself when she found Douglas bending over her and saying, in a low voice:

“You are tired of this place. The room is very draughty: I fear it will give you cold. Let me drive you home now. An apology can be made for whatever else you are supposed to do for these people. Let me get your cloak and call a cab.”

Marian laughed. “Thank you, Sholto,” she said; “but I assure you I am quite happy. Pray do not look offended because I am not so uncomfortable as you think I ought to be.”

“I am glad you are happy,” said Douglas in his former cold tone. “Perhaps my presence is rather a drawback to your enjoyment than otherwise.”

“I told you not to come, Sholto; but you would. Why not adapt yourself to the circumstances, and be agreeable?”

“I am not conscious of being disagreeable.”

“I did not mean that. Only I do not like to see you making an enemy of every one in the room, and forcing me to say things that I know must hurt you.”

“To the enmity of your new associates I am supremely indifferent, Marian. To that of your old friends I am accustomed. I am not in the mood to be lectured on my behavior at present; besides, the subject is hardly worth pursuing. May I gather from your remarks that I shall gratify you by withdrawing?”

“Yes,” said Marian, flushing slightly, and looking steadily at him. Then, controlling her voice with an effort, she added, “Do not try again to browbeat me into telling you a falsehood, Sholto.”

Douglas looked at her in surprise. Before he could answer, Miss McQuinch reappeared.

“Well, Nelly,” said Marmaduke: “is there any piano left?”

“Not much,” she replied, with a sullen laugh. “I never played worse in my life.”

“Wrong notes? or deficiency in the sacred fire?”

“Both.”

“I believe your song comes next,” said the clergyman to Conolly, who had been standing apart, listening to Miss McQuinch’s performance.

“Who is to accompany me, sir?”

“Oh — ah — Miss McQuinch will, I am sure,” replied the Rev. Mr. Lind, smiling nervously. Conolly looked grave. The young lady referred to closed her lips; frowned; said nothing. Marmaduke chuckled.

“Perhaps you would rather play your own accompaniment,” said the clergyman, weakly.

Conolly shook his head decisively, and said, “I can do only one thing at a time, sir.”

“Oh, they are not very critical: they are only workmen,” said the clergyman, and then reddened deeply as Marmaduke gave him a very perceptible nudge.

“I’ll not take advantage of that, as I am only a workman myself,” said
Conolly. “I had rather leave the song out than accompany myself.”

“Pray dont suppose that I wish to be disagreeable, Mr. Lind,” said Miss McQuinch, as the company looked doubtfully at her; “but I have disgraced myself too completely to trust my fingers again. I should spoil the song if I played the accompaniment.”

“I think you might try, Nell,” said Marmaduke, reproachfully.

“I might,” retorted Miss McQuinch; “but I wont.”

“If somebody doesnt go out and do something, there will be a shindy,” said Marmaduke.

Marian hesitated a moment and then rose. “I am a very indifferent player,” she said; “but since no better is to be had, I will venture — if Mr. Conolly will trust me.”

Conolly bowed.

“If you would rather not,” said Miss McQuinch, shamed into remorse, “I will try the accompaniment. But I am sure to play it all wrong.”

“I think Miss McQuinch had better play,” said Douglas.

Conolly looked at Marian; received a reassuring glance; and went to the platform with her without further ado. She was not a sympathetic accompanist; but, not knowing this, she was not at all put out by it. She felt too that she was, as became a lady, giving the workman a lesson in courtesy which might stand him in stead when he next accompanied “Rose, softly blooming.” She was a little taken aback on finding that he not only had a rich baritone voice, but was, as far as she could judge, an accomplished singer.

“Really,” she said as they left the platform, “you sing most beautifully.”

“One would hardly have expected it,” he said, with a smile.

Marian, annoyed at having this side of her compliment exposed, did not return the smile, and went to her chair in the green-room without taking any further notice of him.

“I congratulate you,” said Mrs. Leith Fairfax to Conolly, looking at him, like all the rest except Douglas, with a marked access of interest. “Ah! what wonderful depth there is in Gounod’s music!”

He assented politely with a movement of his head.

“I know nothing at all about music,” said Mrs. Fairfax.

“Very few people do.”

“I mean technically, of course,” she said, not quite pleased.

“Of course.”

A tremendous burst of applause here followed the conclusion of the first verse of “Uncle Ned.”

“Do come and listen, Nelly,” said Marian, returning to the door. Mrs. Fairfax and Conolly presently went to the door too.

“Would you not like to help in the chorus, Nelly?” said Marian in a low voice, as the audience began to join uproariously in the refrain.

“Not particularly,” said Miss McQuinch.

“Sholto,” said Marian, “come and share our vulgar joy. We want you to join in the chorus.”

“Thank you,” said Douglas, “I fear I am too indifferent a vocalist to do justice to the occasion.”

“Sing with Mr. Conolly and you cannot go wrong,” said Miss McQuinch.

“Hush,” said Marian, interposing quickly lest Douglas should retort.
“There is the chorus. Shall we really join?”

Conolly struck up the refrain without further hesitation. Marian sang with him. Mrs. Fairfax and the clergyman looked furtively at one another, but forbore to swell the chorus. Miss McQuinch sang a few words in a piercing contralto voice, and then stopped with a gesture of impatience, feeling that she was out of tune. Marian, with only Conolly to keep her in countenance, felt relieved when Marmaduke, thrice encored, entered the room in triumph. Whilst he was being congratulated, Douglas turned to Miss McQuinch, who was pretending to ignore Marmaduke’s success.

“I hope, Miss McQuinch,” he said in a low tone, “that you will be able to relieve Marian at the piano next time. You know how she dislikes having to play accompaniments for strangers.”

“How mean it is of you to be jealous of a plumber!” said Miss McQuinch, with a quick glance at him which she did not dare to sustain, so fiercely did he return it.

When she looked again, he seemed unconscious of her presence, and was buttoning his overcoat.

“Really going at last, Sholto?” said Marian. Douglas bowed.

“I told you you wouldnt be able to stand it, old man,” said Marmaduke. “Mrs. Bluestockings wont be pleased with you for not staying to hear her recite.” This referred to Mrs. Fairfax, who had just gone upon the platform.

“Good night,” said Miss McQuinch, shortly, anxious to test how far he was offended, but unwilling to appear solicitous for a reconciliation.

“Until to-morrow, farewell,” he said, approaching Marian, who gave him her hand with a smile: Conolly looking thoughtfully at him meanwhile. He left the room; and so, Mrs. Fairfax having gone to the platform to recite, quiet prevailed for a few minutes.

“Shall I have the pleasure of playing the accompaniment to your next song?” said Conolly, sitting down near Marian.

“Thank you,” said Marian, shrinking a little: “I think Miss McQuinch knows it by heart.” Then, still anxious to be affable to the workman, she added, “Lord Jasper says you are a great musician.”

“No, I am an electrician. Music is not my business: it is my amusement.”

“You have invented something very wonderful, have you not?”

“I have discovered something, and I am trying to invent a means of turning it to account. It will be only a cheap electro-motor if it comes to anything.”

“You must explain that to me some day, Mr. Conolly. I’m afraid I dont know what an electro-motor means.”

“I ought not to have mentioned it,” said Conolly. “It is so constantly in my mind that I am easily led to talk about it. I try to prevent myself, but the very effort makes me think of it more than ever.”

“But I like to hear you talk about it,” said Marian. “I always try to make people talk shop to me, and of course they always repay me by trying to keep on indifferent topics, of which I know as much — or as little — as they.”

“Well, then,” said Conolly, “an electro-motor is only an engine for driving machinery, just like a steam engine, except that it is worked by electricity instead of steam. Electric engines are so imperfect now that steam ones come cheaper. The man who finds out how to make the electric engine do what the steam engine now does, and do it cheaper, will make his fortune if he has his wits about him. Thats what I am driving at.”

Miss Lind, in spite of her sensible views as to talking shop, was not interested in the least. “Indeed!” she said. “How interesting that must be! But how did you find time to become so perfect a musician, and to sing so exquisitely?”

“I picked most of it up when I was a boy. My grandfather was an Irish sailor with such a tremendous voice that a Neapolitan music master brought him out in opera as a buffo. When he had roared his voice away, he went into the chorus. My father was reared in Italy, and looked more Italian than most genuine natives. He had no voice; so he became first accompanist, then chorus master, and finally trainer for the operatic stage. He speculated in an American tour; married out there; lost all his money; and came over to England, when I was only twelve, to resume his business at Covent Garden. I stayed in America, and was apprenticed to an electrical engineer. I worked at the bench there for six years.”

“I suppose your father taught you to sing.”

“No. He never gave me a lesson. The fact is, Miss Lind, he was a capital man to teach stage tricks and traditional renderings of old operas; but only the exceptionally powerful voices survived his method of teaching. He would have finished my career as a singer in two months if he had troubled himself to teach me. Never go to Italy to learn singing.”

“I fear you are a cynic. You ought either to believe in your father or else be silent about him.”

“Why?”

“Why! Surely we should hide the failings of those we love? I can understand now how your musical and electrical tastes became mixed up; but you should not confuse your duties. But please excuse me:” (Conolly’s eyes had opened a little wider) “I am lecturing you, without the least right to. It is a failing of mine which you must not mind.”

“Not at all. Youve a right to your opinion. But the world would never get on if every practical man were to stand by his father’s mistakes. However, I brought it on myself by telling you a long story. This is the first opportunity I ever had of talking about myself to a lady, and I suppose I have abused it.”

Marian laughed. “We had better stop apologizing to one another,” she said. “What about the accompaniments to our next songs?”

Meanwhile Marmaduke and Miss McQuinch were becoming curious about Marian and Conolly.

“I say, Nelly,” he whispered, “Marian and that young man seem to be getting on uncommonly well together. She looks sentimentally happy, and he seems pleased with himself. Dont you feel jealous?”

“Jealous! Why should I be?”

“Out of pure cussedness. Not that you care for the electric man, but because you hate any one to fall in love with any one else when you are by.”

“I wish you would go away.”

“Why? Dont you like me?”

“I loathe you. Now, perhaps you understand me.”

“That’s a nice sort of thing to say to a fellow,” said Marmaduke, roused. “I have a great mind to bring you to your senses as Douglas does, by not speaking to you for a week.”

“I wish you would let me come to my senses by not speaking to me at all.”

“Oh! Well, I am off; but mind, Nelly, I am offended. We are no longer on speaking terms. Look as contemptuous as you please: you will be sorry when you think over this. Remember: you said you loathed me.”

“So I do,” said Elinor, stubbornly.

“Very good,” said Marmaduke, turning his back on her. Just then the concertinists returned from the platform, and a waiter appeared with refreshments, which the clergyman invited Marmaduke to assist him in dispensing. Conolly, considering the uncorking of bottles of soda water a sufficiently skilled labor to be more interesting than making small talk, went to the table and busied himself with the corkscrew.

“Well, Nelly,” said Marian, drawing her chair close to Miss McQuinch, and speaking in a low voice, “what do you think of Jasper’s workman?”

“Not much,” replied Elinor, shrugging her shoulders. “He is very conceited, and very coarse.”

“Do you really think so? I expected to find you delighted with his unconventionality. I thought him rather amusing.”

“I thought him extremely aggravating. I hate to have to speak to people of that sort.”

“Then you consider him vulgar,” said Marian, disappointed.

“N — no. Not vulgarer than anybody else. He couldnt be that.”

“Sherry and soda, Marian?” said Marmaduke, approaching.

“No, thank you, Marmaduke. Get Nelly something.”

“As Miss McQuinch and I are no longer on speaking terms, I leave her to the care of yonder scientific amateur, who has just refused, on teetotal grounds, to pledge the Rev. George in a glass of eighteen shilling sherry.”

“Dont be silly, Marmaduke. Bring Nelly some soda water.”

“Do nothing of the sort,” said Miss McQuinch.

Marmaduke bowed and retired.

“What is the matter between you and Duke now?” said Marian.

“Nothing. I told him I loathed him.”

“Oh! I dont wonder at his being a little huffed. How can you say things you dont mean?”

“I do mean them. What with his folly, Sholto’s mean conceit, George’s hypocrisy, that man’s vulgarity, Mrs. Fairfax’s affectation, your insufferable amiability, and the dreariness of those concertina people, I feel so wretched that I could find it in my heart to loathe anybody and everybody.”

“Nonsense, Nelly! You are only in the blues.”

“Only in the blues!” said Miss McQuinch sarcastically. “Yes. That is all.”

“Take some sherry. It will brighten you up.”

“Dutch courage! Thank you: I prefer my present moroseness.”

“But you are not morose, Nelly.”

“Oh, stuff, Marian! Dont throw away your amiability on me. Here comes your new friend with refreshments. I wonder was he ever a waiter? He looks exactly like one.”

After this the conversation flagged. Mrs. Fairfax grew loquacious under the influence of sherry, but presently a reaction set in, and she began to yawn. Miss McQuinch, when her turn came, played worse than before, and the audience, longing for another negro melody, paid little attention to her. Marian sang a religious song, which was received with the respect usually accorded to a dull sermon. The clergyman read a comic essay of his own composition, and Mrs. Fairfax recited an ode to Mazzini. The concertinists played an arrangement of a quartet by Onslow. The working men and women of Wandsworth gaped, and those who sat near the door began to slip out. Even Miss McQuinch pitied them.

“The idea of expecting them to be grateful for an infliction like that!” she said. “What do people of their class care about Onslow’s quartets?”

“Do you think that people of any class, high or low, would be gratified by such an entertainment?” said Conolly, with some warmth. No one had sufficient spirit left to reply.

At last the concertinists went home, and the reading drew to a close. Conolly, again accompanied by Marian, sang “Tom Bowling.” The audience awoke, cheered the singer heartily, and made him sing again. On his return to the green-room, Miss McQuinch, much affected at the fate of Bowling, and indignant with herself for being so, stared defiantly at Conolly through a film of tears. When Marmaduke went out, the people also were so moved that they were ripe for laughter, and with roars of merriment forced him to sing three songs, in the choruses of which they joined. Eventually the clergyman had to bid them go home, as Mr. Lind had given them all the songs he knew.

“I suppose you will not come with us, Duke,” said Marian, when all was over, and they were preparing to leave. “We can drop you at your chambers if you like; but you will have to sit on the box. Mrs. Leith Fairfax, George, Nelly, and I, will be a carriageful.”

Marmaduke looked at his watch. “By Jove!” he cried, “it is only ten. I forgot how early we began to-night. No thank you, Marian: I am not going your way; but you may take the banjo and keep it until I call. Ta ta!”

They all went out together; and the ladies, followed by the clergyman, entered their carriage and drove away, leaving Marmaduke and Conolly standing on the pavement. Having shared the success of the concert, each felt well disposed to the other.

“What direction are you going in?” said Marmaduke.

“Westminster Bridge or thereabouts,” replied Conolly. “This place is rather out of the way.”

“Have you anything particular to do before you turn in for the night?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Then I’ll tell you what it is, old man. Lets take a hansom, and drive off to the Bijou. We shall just be in time to see Lalage Virtue in the burlesque; and — look here! I’ll introduce you to her: youre just the sort of chap she would like to know. Eh?”

Conolly looked at him, nodded, and burst out laughing. Marmaduke, who had set him down as a cool, undemonstrative man, was surprised at his hilarity for a moment, but presently joined in it. Whilst they were both laughing a hansom appeared, and Conolly, recovering himself, hailed the driver.

“We shall get on together, I see,” said Marmaduke, jumping into the cab. “Hallo! The Bijou Theatre, Soho, and drive as fast as you can afford to for half a sovereign.”

“Right you are, sir,” replied the driver, whipping his horse.

The rattling of the cab silenced Conolly; but his companion persisted for some time in describing the burlesque to which they were going, and particularly the attractions of Mademoiselle Lalage Virtue, who enacted a principal character therein, and with whom he seemed to be in love. When they alighted at the theatre Marmaduke payed the cabman, and Conolly took advantage of this to enter the theatre and purchase two stall tickets, an arrangement which Lind, suddenly recollecting his new friend’s position, disapproved of, but found it useless to protest against. He forgot it on hearing the voice of Lalage Virtue, who was at that moment singing within; and he went to his stall with his eyes turned to the stage, treading on toes and stumbling as children commonly do when they walk in one direction and look in another. An attendant, who seemed to know him, proffered a glass for hire. He took it, and leveled it at Mademoiselle Lalage, who was singing some trivial couplets much better than they deserved. Catching sight of him presently, she greeted him with a flash of her dark eye that made him writhe as though his heart had received a fillip from a ponderable missile. She did not spare these roguish glances. They darted everywhere; and Conolly, looking about him to note their effect, saw rows of callow young faces with parted lips and an expression which seemed to have been caught and fixed at the climax of a blissful chuckle. There were few women in the stalls, and the silly young faces were relieved only by stupid old ones.

The couplets ended amidst great applause. Marmaduke placed his glass on his knees, and, clapping his hands vigorously, turned to his companion with a triumphant smile, mutely inviting him to clamor for a repetition of the air. But Conolly sat motionless, with his arms folded, his cheek flushed, and his brow lowered.

“You dont seem used to this sort of thing,” said Lind, somewhat disgusted.

“It was well sung,” replied Conolly “ — better than most of these blackguards know.”

“Then why dont you clap?”

“Because she is not giving herself any trouble. That sort of thing, from a woman of her talent, is too cheap to say ‘thank you’ for.”

Marmaduke looked at him, and began to think that he was a priggish fellow after all. But as the burlesque went on, Mademoiselle Lalage charmed away this disagreeable impression. She warbled in an amorous duet, and then sang the pleasures of champagne; tossing her head; waving a gilt goblet; and, without the least appearance of effort, working hard to captivate those who were to be won by bold smiles and arch glances. She displayed her person less freely than her colleagues, being, not more modest, but more skilful in the art of seduction. The slang that served for dialogue in her part was delivered in all sorts of intonations, now demure and mischievous, anon strident and mock tragic. Marmaduke was delighted.

“What I like about her is that she is such a genuine little lady,” he said, as her exit released his attention. “With all her go, she is never a bit vulgar. Off the stage she is just the same. Not a spark of affectation about her. It is all natural.”

“You know her, then?” said Conolly.

“I should think I do,” replied Marmaduke, energetically. “You have no idea what a rattling sort she is.”

“To you, who only see her occasionally, no doubt she gives — as a rattling sort — a heightened charm to the order, the refinement, the — the beauty of the home life which you can enjoy. Excuse my introducing such a subject, Mr. Lind; but would you bring your cousin — the lady who sang to-night at the concert — to see this performance?”

“I would if she asked me to,” said Marmaduke, somewhat taken aback.

“No doubt. But should you be surprised if she asked you?”

“Not a bit. Fine ladies are neither such fools nor such angels as you — as some fellows think. Miss Lind’s notion is to see everything. And yet she is a thoroughly nice woman too. It is the same with Lalage there. She is not squeamish, and she is full of fun; but she knows as well as anybody how to pull up a man who doesnt behave himself.”

“And you actually think that this Lalage Virtue is as respectable a woman as your cousin?”

“Oh, I dont bother myself about it. I shouldnt have thought of comparing them if you hadnt started the idea. Marian’s way is not the other one’s way, and each of them is all right in her own way. Look here. I’ll introduce you to Lalage. We can pick up somebody else to make a party for you, and finish with a supper at Jellicoe’s.”

“Are you privileged to introduce whom you like to Miss Lalage?”

“Well, as to that, she doesnt stand much on ceremony; but then, you see, that cuts two ways. The mere introducing is no difficulty; but it depends on the man himself whether he gets snubbed afterward or not. By the bye, you must understand, if you dont know it already, that Lalage is as correct in her morals as a bishop’s wife. I just tell you, because some fellows seem to think that a woman who goes on the stage leaves her propriety behind as a matter of course. In fact, I rather thought so myself once. Not that you wont find loose women there as well as anywhere else, if you want to. But dont take it for granted, that’s all.”

“Well,” said Conolly, “you may introduce me, and we can consider the supper afterwards. Would it be indiscreet to ask how you obtained your own introduction? You dont, I suppose, move in the same circle as she; and if she is as particular as your own people, she can hardly form promiscuous acquaintanceships.”

“A man at the point of death does not stop to think about etiquet. She saved my life.”

“Saved your life! That sounds romantic.”

“There was precious little romance about it, though I owe my being alive now to her presence of mind. It happened in the rummest way. I was brought behind the scenes one night by a Cambridge chum. We were painting the town a bit red. We were not exactly drunk; but we were not particularly sober either; and I was very green at that time, and made a fool of myself about Lalage: staring; clapping like a madman in the middle of her songs; getting into the way of everybody and everything, and so on. Then a couple of fellows we knew turned up, and we got chatting at the wing with some girls. At last a fellow came in with a bag of cherries; and we began trying that old trick — you know — taking the end of a stalk between your lips and drawing the cherry into the mouth without touching it with your hand, you know. I tried it; and I was just getting the cherry into my mouth when some idiot gave me a drive in the waistcoat. I made a gulp; and the cherry stuck fast in my throat. I began to choke. Nobody knew what to do; and while they were pushing me about, some thinking I was only pretending, the girls beginning to get frightened, and the rest shouting at me to swallow the confounded thing, I was getting black in the face, and my head was bursting: I could see nothing but red spots. It was a near thing, I tell you. Suddenly I got a shake; and then a little fist gave me a stunning thump on the back, that made the cherry bounce out against my palate. I gasped and coughed like a grampus: the stalk was down my throat still. Then the little hand grabbed my throat and made me open my mouth wide; and the cherry was pulled out, stalk and all. It was Lalage who did this while the rest were gaping helplessly. I dont remember what followed. I thought I had fainted; but it appears that I nearly cried, and talked the most awful nonsense to her. I suppose the choking made me hysterical. However, I distinctly recollect the stage manager bullying the girls, and turning us all out. I was very angry with myself for being childish, as they told me I had been; and when I got back to Cambridge I actually took to reading. A few months afterward I made another trip to town, and went behind the scenes again. She recognized me, and chaffed me about the cherry. I jumped at my chance; I improved the acquaintance; and now I know her pretty well.”

“You doubt whether any of the ladies that were with us at the concert would have been equally useful in such an emergency?”

“I should think I do doubt it, my boy. Hush! Now that the ballet is over, we are annoying people by talking.”

“You are right,” replied Conolly. “Aha! Here is Miss Lalage again.”

Marmaduke raised his opera-glass to his eyes, eager for another smile from the actress. He seemed about to be gratified; for her glance was travelling toward him along the row of stalls. But it was arrested by Conolly, on whom she looked with perceptible surprise and dismay. Lind, puzzled, turned toward his companion, and found him smiling maliciously at Mademoiselle Lalage, who recovered her vivacity with an effort, and continued her part with more nervousness than he had ever seen her display before.

Shortly before the curtain fell, they left the theatre, and re-entered it by the stage door.

“Queer place, isnt it?” said Lind.

Conolly nodded, but went forward like one well accustomed to the dingy labyrinth of old-fashioned stages. Presently they came upon Lalage. She was much heated by her exertions, thickly painted, and very angry.

“Well?” she said quarrelsomely.

Marmaduke, perceiving that her challenge was not addressed to him, but to Conolly, looked from one to the other, mystified.

“I have come to see you act at last,” said Conolly.

“You might have told me you were coming. I could have got you a stall, although I suppose you would have preferred to throw away your money like a fool.”

“I must admit, my dear,” said Conolly, “that I could have spent it to much greater advantage.”

“Indeed! and you!” she said, turning to Lind, whose deepening color betrayed his growing mortification: “what is the matter with you?”

“I have played a trick on your friend,” said Conolly. “He suggested this visit; and I did not tell him of the relation between us. Finding us on terms of familiarity, if not of affection, he is naturally surprised.”

“As I have never tried to meddle with your private affairs,” said
Marmaduke to Lalage, “I need not apologize for not knowing your husband.
But I regret — —”

The actress laughed in spite of her vexation. “Why, you silly old thing!” she exclaimed, “he is no more my husband than you are!”

“Oh!” said Marmaduke. “Indeed!”

“I am her brother,” said Conolly considerately, stifling a smile.

“Why,” said Mademoiselle Lalage fiercely, raising her voice, “what else did you think?”

“Hush,” said Conolly, “we are talking too much in this crowd. You had better change your dress, Susanna, and then we can settle what to do next.”

“You can settle what you please,” she replied. “I am going home.”

“Mr. Lind has suggested our supping together,” said Conolly, observing her curiously.

Susanna looked quickly at them.

“Who is Mr. Lind?” she said.

“Your friend, of course,” said Conolly, with an answering flash of intelligence that brought out the resemblance between them startlingly. “Mr. Marmaduke Lind.”

Marmaduke became very red as they both waited for him to explain.

“I thought that you would perhaps join us at supper,” he said to
Susanna.

“Did you?” she said, threateningly. Then she turned her back on him and went to her dressing-room.

“Well, Mr. Lind,” said Conolly, “what do you think of Mademoiselle
Lalage now?”

“I think her annoyance is very natural,” said Marmaduke, gloomily. “No doubt you are right to take care of your sister, but you are very much mistaken if you think I meant to act badly toward her.”

“It is no part of my duty to take care of her,” said Conolly, seriously. “She is her own guardian, and she has never been encouraged to suppose that her responsibility lies with any one but herself.”

“It doesnt matter now,” said Marmaduke; “for I intend never to speak to her again.”

Conolly laughed. “However that may turn out,” he said, “we are evidently not in the mood for further conviviality, so let us postpone the supper to some other occasion. May I advise you not to wait until Susanna returns. There is no chance of a reconciliation to-night.”

“I dont want any reconciliation.”

“Of course not; I had forgotten,” replied Conolly, placably. “Then I suppose you will go before she has finished dressing.”

“I shall go now,” said Marmaduke, buttoning his overcoat, and turning away.

“Good-night,” said Conolly.

“Good-night,” muttered Marmaduke, petulantly, and disappeared.

Conolly waited a moment, so that he might not overtake Lind. He then went for a cab, and waited at the stage door until his sister came down, frowning. She got into the hansom without a word.

“Why dont you have a brougham, instead of going about in cabs?” he said, as they drove away.

“Because I like a hansom better than a brougham; and I had rather pay four shillings a night and travel comfortably, than thirteen and be half suffocated.”

“I thought the appearance of — —”

“There is no use in your talking to me. I cant hear a word you say going over these stones.”

When they were alone together in their drawing-room in Lambeth, he, after walking up and down the room a few times, and laughing softly to himself, began to sing the couplets from the burlesque.

“Are you aware,” she inquired, “that it is half past twelve, and that the people of the house are trying to sleep.”

“True,” said he, desisting. “By the bye, I, too, have had my triumphs this evening. I shared the honors of the concert with Master Lind, who was so delighted that he insisted on bringing me off to the Bijou. He loves you to distraction, poor devil!”

“Yes: you made a nice piece of mischief there. Where is he?”

“Gone away in a rage, swearing never to speak to you again.”

“Hm! And so his name is Lind, is it?”

“Didnt you know?”

“No, or I should have told you when I read the program this evening. The young villain pretended that his name was Marmaduke Sharp.”

“Ah! The name reminds me of one of his cousins, a little spitfire that snaps at every one who presumes to talk to her.”

“His cousins! Oh, of course; you met them at the concert. What are they like? Are they swells?”

“Yes, they seem to be. There were only two cousins, Miss McQuinch and a young woman named Marian, blonde and rather good looking. There was a brother of hers there, but he is only a parson, and a tall fellow named Douglas, who made rather a fool of himself. I could not make him out exactly.”

“Did they snub you?”

“I dont know. Probably they tried. Are you intimate with many of our young nobility under assumed names?”

“Steal a few more marches to the Bijou, and perhaps you will find out.”

“Good-night! Pardon my abrupt departure, but you are not the very sweetest of Susannas to-night.”

“Oh, good-night.”

“By the bye,” said Conolly, returning, “this must be the Mr. Duke Lind who is going to marry Lady Constance Carbury, my noble pupil’s sister.”

“I am sure it matters very little whom he marries.”

“If he will pay us a visit here, and witness the working of perfect frankness without affection, and perfect liberty without refinement, he may find reason to conclude that it matters a good deal. Good-night.”

CHAPTER II

Marian Lind lived at Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, with her father, the fourth son of a younger brother of the Earl of Carbury. Mr. Reginald Harrington Lind, at the outset of his career, had no object in life except that of getting through it as easily as possible; and this he understood so little how to achieve that he suffered himself to be married at the age of nineteen to a Lancashire cotton spinner’s heiress. She bore him three children, and then eloped with a professor of spiritualism, who deserted her on the eve of her fourth confinement, in the course of which she caught scarlet fever and died. Her child survived, but was sent to a baby farm and starved to death in the usual manner. Her husband, disgusted by her behavior (for she had been introduced by him to many noblemen and gentlemen, his personal friends, some one at least of whom, on the slightest encouragement, would, he felt sure, have taken the place of the foreign charlatan she had disgraced him by preferring), consoled himself for her bad taste by entering into her possessions, which comprised a quantity of new jewellery, new lace, and feminine apparel, and an income of nearly seven thousand pounds a year. After this, he became so welcome in society that he could have boasted with truth at the end of any July that there were few marriageable gentlewomen of twenty-six and upward in London who had not been submitted to his inspection with a view to matrimony. But finding it easy to delegate the care of his children to school principals and hospitable friends, he concluded that he had nothing to gain and much comfort to lose by adding a stepmother to his establishment; and, after some time, it became the custom to say of Mr. Lind that the memory of his first wife kept him single. Thus, whilst his sons were drifting to manhood through Harrow and Cambridge, and his daughter passing from one relative’s house to another’s on a continual round of visits, sharing such private tuition as the cousins with whom she happened to be staying happened to be receiving just then, he lived at his club and pursued the usual routine of a gentleman-bachelor in London.

In the course of time, Reginald Lind, the eldest child, entered the army, and went to India with his regiment. His brother George, less stolid, weaker, and more studious, preferred the Church. Marian, the youngest, from being constantly in the position of a guest, had early acquired habits of self-control and consideration for others, and escaped the effects, good and evil, of the subjection in which children are held by the direct authority of their parents.

Of the numerous domestic circles of her father’s kin, that with which she was the least familiar, because it was the poorest, had sprung from the marriage of one of her father’s sisters with a Wiltshire gentleman named Hardy McQuinch, who had a small patrimony, a habit of farming, and a love of hunting. In the estimation of the peasantry, who would not associate lands, horses, and a carriage, with want of money, he was a rich man; but Mrs. McQuinch found it hard to live like a lady on their income, and had worn many lines into her face by constantly and vainly wishing that she could afford to give a ball every season, to get a new carriage, and to appear at church with her daughters in new dresses oftener than twice a year. Her two eldest girls were plump and pleasant, good riders and hearty eaters; and she had reasonable hopes of marrying them to prosperous country gentlemen.

Elinor, her third and only other child, was one of her troubles. At an early age it was her practice, once a week or thereabouts, to disappear in the forenoon; be searched anxiously for all day; and return with a torn frock and dirty face at about six o’clock in the afternoon. She was stubborn, rebellious, and passionate under reproof or chastisement: governesses had left the house because of her; and from one school she had run away, from another eloped with a choir boy who wrote verses. Him she deserted in a fit of jealousy, quarter of an hour after her escape from school. The only one of her tastes that conduced to the peace of the house was for reading; and even this made her mother uneasy; for the books she liked best were fit, in Mrs. McQuinch’s opinion, for the bookcase only. Elinor read openly what she could obtain by asking, such as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Arabian Nights Entertainments were sternly refused her; so she read them by stealth; and from that day there was always a collection of books, borrowed from friends, or filched from the upper shelf in the library, beneath her mattress. Nobody thought of looking there for them; and even if they had, they might have paused to reflect on the consequences of betraying her. Her eldest sister having given her a small workbox on her eleventh birthday, had the present thrown at her head two days later for reporting to her parents that Nelly’s fondness for sitting in a certain secluded summer-house was due to her desire to read Lord Byron’s poetry unobserved. Miss Lydia’s forehead was severely cut; and Elinor, though bitterly remorseful, not only refused to beg pardon for her fault, but shattered every brittle article in the room to which she was confined for her contumacy. The vicar, on being consulted, recommended that she should be well whipped. This counsel was repugnant to Hardy McQuinch, but he gave his wife leave to use her discretion in the matter. The mother thought that the child ought to be beaten into submission; but she was afraid to undertake the task, and only uttered a threat, which was received with stubborn defiance. This was forgotten next day when Elinor, exhausted by a week of remorse, terror, rage, and suspense, became dangerously ill. When she recovered, her parents were more indulgent to her, and were gratified by finding her former passionate resistance replaced by sulky obedience. Five years elapsed, and Elinor began to write fiction. The beginning of a novel, and many incoherent verses imitated from Lara, were discovered by her mother, and burnt by her father. This outrage she never forgave. She was unable to make her resentment felt, for she no longer cared to break glass and china. She feared even to remonstrate lest she should humiliate herself by bursting into tears, as, since her illness, she had been prone to do in the least agitation. So she kept silence, and ceased to speak to either of her parents except when they addressed questions to her. Her father would neither complain of this nor confess the regret he felt for his hasty destruction of her manuscripts; but, whilst he proclaimed that he would burn every scrap of her nonsense that might come into his hands, he took care to be blind when he surprised her with suspicious bundles of foolscap, and snubbed his wife for hinting that Elinor was secretly disobeying him. Meanwhile her silent resentment never softened, and the life of the family was embittered by their consciousness of it. It never occurred to Mrs. McQuinch, an excellent mother to her two eldest daughters, that she was no more fit to have charge of the youngest than a turtle is to rear a young eagle. The discomfort of their relations never shook her faith in their “naturalness.” Like her husband and the vicar, she believed that when God sent children he made their parents fit to rule them. And Elinor resented her parents’ tyranny, as she felt it to be, without dreaming of making any allowances for their being in a false position towards her.

One morning a letter from London announced that Mr. Lind had taken a house in Westbourne Terrace, and intended to live there permanently with his daughter. Elinor had not come down to breakfast when the post came.

“Yes,” said Mrs. McQuinch, when she had communicated the news: “I knew there was something the matter when I saw Reginald’s handwriting. It must be fully eighteen months since I heard from him last. I am very glad he has settled Marian in a proper home, instead of living like a bachelor and leaving her to wander about from one house to another. I wish we could have afforded to ask her down here oftener.”

“Here is a note from Marian, addressed to Nelly,” said Lydia, who had been examining the envelope.

“To Nelly!” said Mrs. McQuinch, vexed. “I think she should have invited one of you first.”

“Perhaps it is not an invitation,” said Jane.

“What else is it likely to be, child?” said Mrs. McQuinch. Then, as she thought how much pleasanter her home would be without Elinor, she added, “After all, it will do Nelly good to get away from here. She needs change, I think. I wish she would come down. It is too bad of her to be always late like this.”

Elinor came in presently, wearing a neglected black gown; her face pale; her eyes surrounded by dark circles; her black hair straggling in wisps over her forehead. Her sisters, dressed twinlike in white muslin and gold lockets, emphasized her by contrast. Being blond and gregarious, they enjoyed the reputation of being pretty and affectionate. They had thriven in the soil that had starved Elinor.

“There’s a letter for you from Marian,” said Mrs. McQuinch.

“Thanks,” said Elinor, indifferently, putting the note into her pocket. She liked Marian’s letters, and kept them to read in her hours of solitude.

“What does she say?” said Mrs. McQuinch.

“I have not looked,” replied Elinor.

“Well,” said Mrs. McQuinch, plaintively, “I wish you would look. I want to know whether she says anything about this letter from your uncle Reginald.”

Elinor plucked the note from her pocket, tore it open, and read it.
Suddenly she set her face to hide some emotion from her family.

“Marian wants me to go and stay with her,” she said. “They have taken a house.”

“Poor Marian!” said Jane. “And will you go?”

“I will,” said Elinor. “Have you any objection?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Jane, smoothly.

“I suppose you will be glad to get away from your home,” said Mrs.
McQuinch, incontinently.

“Very glad,” said Elinor. Mr. McQuinch, hurt, looked at her over his newspaper. Mrs. McQuinch was huffed.

“I dont know what you are to do for clothes,” she said, “unless Lydia and Jane are content to wear their last winter’s dresses again this year.”

The faces of the young ladies elongated. “That’s nonsense, mamma,” said Lydia. “We cant wear those brown reps again.” Women wore reps in those days.

“You need not be alarmed,” said Elinor. “I dont want any clothes. I can go as I am.”

“You dont know what you are talking about, child,” said Mrs. McQuinch.

“A nice figure you would make in uncle Reginald’s drawing-room with that dress on!” said Lydia.

“And your hair in that state!” added Jane.

“You should remember that there are others to be considered besides yourself,” said Lydia. “How would you like your guests to look like scarecrows?”

“How could you expect Marian to go about with you, or into the Park? I suppose — —”

“Here, here!” said Mr. McQuinch, putting down his paper. “Let us have no more of this. What else do you need in the Park than a riding habit? You have that already. Whatever clothes you want you had better get in London, where you will get the proper things for your money.”

“Indeed, Hardy, she is not going to pay a London milliner four prices for things she can get quite as good down here.”

“I tell you I dont want anything,” said Elinor impatiently. “It will be time enough to begrudge me some decent clothes when I ask for them.”

“I dont begrudge — —”

Mrs. McQuinch’s husband interrupted her. “Thats enough, now, everybody. It’s settled that she is to go, as she wants to. I will get her what is necessary. Give me another egg, and talk about something else.”

Accordingly, Elinor went to live at Westbourne Terrace. Marian had spent a month of her childhood in Wiltshire, and had made of Elinor an exacting friend, always ready to take offence, and to remain jealous and sulky for days if one of her sisters, or any other little girl, engaged her cousin’s attention long. On the other hand, Elinor’s attachment was idolatrous in its intensity; and as Marian was sweet-tempered, and more apt to fear that she had disregarded Elinor’s feelings than to take offence at her waywardness, their friendship endured after they were parted. Their promises of correspondence were redeemed by Elinor with very long letters at uncertain intervals, and by Marian with shorter epistles notifying all her important movements. Marian, often called upon to defend her cousin from the charge of being a little shrew, was led to dwell upon her better qualities. Elinor found in Marian what she had never found at her own home, a friend, and in her uncle’s house a refuge from that of her father, which she hated. She had been Marian’s companion for four years when the concert took place at Wandsworth.

Next day they were together in the drawing-room at Westbourne Terrace: Marian writing, Elinor at the pianoforte, working at some technical studies, to which she had been incited by the shortcoming of her performance on the previous night. She stopped on hearing a bell ring.

“What o’clock is it?” she said, after listening a moment. “Surely it is too early for a visit.”

“It is only half past two,” replied Marian. “I hope it is not anybody. I have not half finished my correspondence.”

“If you please, Miss,” said a maid, entering, “Mr. Douglas wants to see you, and he wont come up.”

“I suppose he expects you to go down and talk to him in the hall,” said
Elinor.

“He is in the dining-room, and wishes to see you most particular,” said the maid.

“Tell him I will come down,” said Marian.

“He heard me practising,” said Elinor, “that is why he would not come up. I am in disgrace, I suppose.”

“Nonsense, Nelly! But indeed I have no doubt he has come to complain of our conduct, since he insists on seeing me alone.”

Miss McQuinch looked sceptically at Marian’s guileless eyes, but resumed her technical studies without saying anything. Marian went to the dining-room, where she found Douglas standing near the window, tall and handsome, frock coated and groomed to a spotless glossiness that established a sort of relationship between him and the sideboard, the condition of which did credit to Marian’s influence over her housemaids. He looked intently at her as she bade him good morning.

“I am afraid I am rather early,” he said, half stiffly, half apologetically.

“Not at all,” said Marian.

“I have come to say something which I do not care to keep unsaid longer than I can help; so I thought it better to come when I could hope to find you alone. I hope I have not disturbed you. I have something rather important to say.”

“You are the same as one of ourselves, of course, Sholto. But I believe you delight in stiffness and ceremony. Will you not come upstairs?”

“I wish to speak to you privately. First, I have to apologize to you for what passed last night.”

“Pray dont, Sholto: it doesnt matter. I am afraid we were rude to you.”

“Pardon me. It is I who am in fault. I never before made an apology to any human being; and I should not do so now without a painful conviction that I forgot what I owed to myself.”

“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself — I mean for never having apologized before. I am quite sure you have not got through life without having done at least one or two things that required an apology.”

“I am sorry you hold that opinion of me.”

“How is Brutus’s paw?”

“Brutus!”

“Yes. That abrupt way of changing the subject is what Mrs. Fairfax calls a display of tact. I know it is very annoying; so you may talk about anything you please. But I really want to hear how the poor dog is.”

“His paw is nearly healed.”

“I’m so glad — poor old dear!”

“You are aware that I did not come here to speak of my mother’s dog,
Marian?”

“I supposed not,” said Marian, with a smile. “But now that you have made your apology, wont you come upstairs? Nelly is there.”

“I have something else to say — to you alone, Marian. I entreat you to listen to it seriously.” Marian looked as grave as she could. “I confess that in some respects I do not understand you; and before you enter upon another London season, through which I cannot be at your side, I would obtain from you some assurance of the nature of your regard for me. I do not wish to harass you with jealous importunity. You have given me the most unequivocal tokens of a feeling different from that which inspires the ordinary intercourse of a lady and gentleman in society; but of late it has seemed to me that you maintain as little reserve toward other men as toward me. I am not thinking of Marmaduke: he is your cousin. But I observed that even the working man who sang at the concert last night was received — I do not say intentionally — with a cordiality which might have tempted a more humbly disposed person than he seemed to be to forget — —” Here Douglas, seeing Marian’s bearing change suddenly, hesitated. Her beautiful gray eyes, always pleading for peace like those of a good angel, were now full of reproach; and her mouth, but for those eyes, would have suggested that she was at heart an obstinate woman.

“Sholto,” she said, “I dont know what to say to you. If this is jealousy, it may be very flattering; but it is ridiculous. If it is a lecture, seriously intended, it is — it is really most insulting. What do you mean by my having given you unequivocal signs of regard? Of course I think of you very differently from the chance acquaintances I make in society. It would be strange if I did not, having known you so long and been your mother’s guest so often. But you talk almost as if I had been making love to you.”

“No,” said Douglas, forgetting his ceremonious manner and speaking angrily and naturally; “but you talk as though I had not been making love to you.”

“If you have, I never knew it. I never dreamt it.”

“Then, since you are not the stupidest lady of my acquaintance, you must be the most innocent.”

“Tell me of one single occasion on which anything has passed between us that justifies your speaking to me as you are doing now.”

“Innumerable occasions. But since I cannot compel you to acknowledge them, it would be useless to cite them.”

“All I can say is that we have utterly misunderstood one another,” she said, after a pause.

He said nothing, but took up his hat, and looked down at it with angry determination. Marian, too uneasy to endure silence, added:

“But I shall know better in future.”

“True,” said Douglas, hastily putting down his hat and advancing a step. “You cannot plead misunderstanding now. Can you give me the assurance I seek?”

“What assurance?”

Douglas shook his shoulders impatiently.

“You expect me to know everything by intuition,” she said.

“Well, my declaration shall be definite enough, even for you. Do you love me?”

“No, I dont think I do. In fact, I am quite sure I do not — in the way you mean. I wish you would not talk like this, Sholto. We have all got on so pleasantly together: you, and I, and Nelly, and Marmaduke, and my father. And now you begin making love, and stuff of that kind. Pray let us agree to forget all about it, and remain friends as before.”

“You need not be anxious about our future relations: I shall not embarrass you with my society again. I hoped to find you a woman capable of appreciating a man’s passion, even if you should be unable to respond to it. But I perceive that you are only a girl, not yet aware of the deeper life that underlies the ice of conventionality.”

“That is a very good metaphor for your own case,” said Marian, interrupting him. “Your ordinary manner is all ice, hard and chilling. One may suspect that there are depths beneath, but that is only an additional inducement to keep on the surface.”

“Then even your amiability is a delusion! Or is it that you are amiable to the rest of the world, and reserve taunts of coldness and treachery for me?”

“No, no,” she said, angelic again. “You have taken me up wrongly. I did not mean to taunt you.”

“You conceal your meaning as skilfully as — according to you — I have concealed mine. Good-morning.”

“Are you going already?”

“Do you care one bit for me, Marian?”

“I do indeed. Believe me, you are one of my special friends.”

“I do not want to be one of your friends. Will you be my wife?”

“Sholto!”

“Will you be my wife?”

“No. I — —”

“Pardon me. That is quite sufficient. Good-morning.”

The moment he interrupted her, a change in her face shewed she had a temper. She did not move a muscle until she heard the house door close behind him. Then she ran upstairs to the drawing-room, where Miss McQuinch was still practising.

“Oh, Nelly,” she cried, throwing herself into an easy chair, and covering her face with her hands. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” She opened her fingers and looked whimsically at her cousin, who, despising this stage business, said, impatiently:

“Well?”

“Do you know what Sholto came for?”

“To propose to you.”

“Stop, Nelly. You do not know what horrible things one may say in jest.
He has proposed.”

“When will the wedding be?”

“Dont joke about it, please. I scarcely know how I have behaved, or what the meaning of the whole scene is, yet. Listen. Did you ever suspect that he was — what shall I say? — courting me?”

“I saw that he was trying to be tender in his own conceited way. I fully expected he would propose some day, if he could once reconcile himself to a wife who was not afraid of him.”

“And you never told me.”

“I thought you saw it for yourself; particularly as you encouraged him.”

“There! The very thing he has been accusing me of! He said I had given him unequivocal tokens — yes, unequivocal tokens — that I was madly in love with him.”

“What did you say? — if I may ask.”

“I tried to explain things to him; but he persisted in asking me would I be his wife; and when I refused he would not listen to anything else, and went off in a rage.”

“Yes, I can imagine Sholto’s feelings on discovering that he had humbled himself in vain. Why did you refuse him?”

“Why! Fancy being Sholto’s wife! I would as soon think of marrying
Marmaduke. But I cannot forget what he said about my flirting with him.
Nelly: will you promise to tell me whenever you think I am behaving in a
way that might lead anybody on to — like Sholto, you know?”

“Nonsense! If men choose to make fools of themselves, you cannot prevent them. Hush! I hear someone coming upstairs. It is Marmaduke, I think.”

“Marmaduke would never come up so slowly. He generally comes up three steps at a time.”

“Sulky after last night, no doubt. I suppose he wont speak to me.”

Marmaduke entered listlessly. “Good morning, Marian,” he said, sitting down on an uncomfortable chair. “Good morrow, Nell.”

Elinor, surprised at the courtesy, looked up and saluted him snappishly.

“Is there anything the matter, Duke?” said Marian. “Are you ill?”

“No, I’m all right. Rather busy: thats all.”

“Busy!” said Elinor. “There must be something even more unusual than that, when you are too low spirited to keep up a quarrel with me. Why dont you sit on the easy chair, or sprawl on the ottoman, after your manner?”

“Anything for a quiet life,” he replied, moving to the ottoman.

“You must be hungry,” said Marian, puzzled by his obedience. “Let me get you something.”

“No, thank you,” said Marmaduke. “I couldnt eat. Just had lunch. Ive come to pack up a few things of mine that you have here.”

“We have your banjo.”

“Oh, I dont want that. You may keep it, or put it in the fire, for all I care. I want some clothes I left behind me when we had the theatricals.”

“Are you leaving London?”

“Yes. I am getting tired of loafing about here. I think I ought to go home for a while. My mother wants me to.”

Miss McQuinch, by a subdued but expressive snort, conveyed the most entire scepticism as to his solicitude about his mother. She then turned to the piano calmly, observing, “You have probably eaten something that disagrees with you.”

“What a shame!” said Marian. “Come, Duke: I have plenty of good news for you. Nelly and I are invited to Carbury Park for the autumn; and there will be no visitors but us three. We shall have the whole place to ourselves.”

“Time enough to think of the autumn yet awhile,” said Marmaduke, gloomily.

“Well,” said Miss McQuinch, “here is some better news for you.
Constance — Lady Constance — will be in town next week.”

Marmaduke muttered something.

“I beg your pardon?” said Elinor, quickly.

“I didnt say anything.”

“I may be wrong; but I thought I heard you say ‘Hang Lady Constance!’.”

“Oh, Marmaduke!” cried Marian, affectedly. “How dare you speak so of your betrothed, sir?”

“Who says she is my betrothed?” he said, turning on her angrily.

“Why, everybody. Even Constance admits it.”

“She ought to have the manners to wait until I ask her,” he said, subsiding. “I’m not betrothed to her; and I dont intend to become so in a hurry, if I can help it. But you neednt tell your father I said so. It might get round to my governor; and then there would be a row.”

“You must marry her some day, you know,” said Elinor, maliciously.

“Must I? I shant marry at all. I’ve had enough of women.”

“Indeed? Perhaps they have had enough of you.” Marmaduke reddened. “You seem to have exhausted the joys of this world since the concert last night. Are you jealous of Mr. Conolly’s success?”

“Your by-play when you found how early it was at the end of the concert was not lost on us,” said Marian demurely. “You were going somewhere, were you not?”

“Since you are so jolly curious,” said Marmaduke, unreasonably annoyed, “I went to the theatre with Connolly; and my by-play, as you call it, simply meant my delight at finding that we could get rid of you in time to enjoy the evening.”

“With Conolly!” said Marian, interested. What kind of man is he?”

“He is nothing particular. You saw him yourself.”

“Yes. But is he well educated, and — and so forth?”

“Dont know, I’m sure. We didnt talk about mathematics and classics.”

“Well; but — do you like him?”

“I tell you I dont care a damn about him one way or the other,” said Marmaduke, rising and walking away to the window. His cousins, astonished, exchanged looks.

“Very well, Marmaduke,” said Marian softly, after a pause: “I wont tease you any more. Dont be angry.”

“You havnt teased me,” said he, coming back somewhat shamefacedly from the window. “I feel savage to-day, though there is no reason why I should not be as jolly as a shrimp. Perhaps Nelly will play some Chopin, just to soothe me. I should like to hear that polonaise again.”

“I should enjoy nothing better than taking you at your word,” said Elinor. “But I heard Mr. Lind come in, a moment ago; and he is not so fond of Chopin as you and I.”

Mr. Lind entered whilst she was speaking. He was a dignified gentleman, with delicately chiselled features and portly figure. His silky light brown hair curled naturally about his brow and set it off imposingly. His hands were white and small, with tapering fingers, and small thumbs.

“How do you do, sir?” said Marmaduke, blushing.

“Thank you: I am better than I have been.”

Marmaduke murmured congratulations, and looked at his watch as if pressed for time. “I must be off now,” he said, rising. “I was just going when you came in.”

“So soon! Well, I must not detain you, Marmaduke. I heard from your father this morning. He is very anxious to see you settled in life.”

“I suppose I shall shake down some day, sir.”

“You have very good opportunities — very exceptional opportunities. Has
Marian told you that Constance is expected to arrive in town next week?”

“Yes: we told him,” said Marian.

“He thought it too good to be true, and would hardly believe us,” added
Elinor.

Mr. Lind smiled at his nephew, happily forgetful, worldly wise as he was, of the inevitable conspiracy of youth against age. They smiled too, except Marmaduke, who, being under observation, kept his countenance like the Man in the Iron Mask. “It is quite true, my boy,” said the uncle, kindly. “But before she arrives, I should like to have a talk with you. When can you come to breakfast with me?”

“Any day you choose to name, sir. I shall be very glad.”

“Let us say to-morrow morning. Will that be too soon?”

“Not at all. It will suit me quite well. Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening to you.”

When Marmaduke was in the street, he stood for a while considering which way to go. Before the arrival of his uncle, he had intended to spend the afternoon with his cousins. He was now at a loss for a means of killing time. On one point he was determined. There was a rehearsal that day at the Bijou Theatre; and thither, at least, he would not go. He drove to Charing Cross, and drifted back to Leicester Square. He turned away from the theatre, and wandered down Piccadilly. Then he thought he would return as far as the Criterion, and drink. Finally he arrived at the stage door of the Bijou Theatre, and inquired whether the rehearsal was over.

“Theyve bin at it since eleven this mornin, and will be pretty nigh til the stage is wanted for to-night,” said the janitor. “I’d as lief youd wait here as go up, if you dont mind, sir. The guvnor is above; and he aint in the best o’ tempers. I’ll send word up.”

Marmaduke looked round irresolutely. A great noise of tramping and singing began.

“Thats the new procession,” continued the doorkeeper. “Sixteen hextras took on for it. It’s Miss Virtue’s chance for lunch, sir: you wont have long to wait now.”

Here there was a rapid pattering of feet down the staircase. Marmaduke started, and stood biting his lips as Mademoiselle Lalage, busy, hungry, and in haste, hurried towards the door.

“Come! Come on,” she said impatiently to him, as she went out. “Go and get a cab, will you. I must have something to eat; and I have to get back sharp. Do be qu —— there goes a hansom. Hi!” She whistled shrilly, and waved her umbrella. The cab came, and was directed by Marmaduke to a restaurant in Regent Street.

“I am absolutely starving,” she said as they drove off. “I have been in since eleven this morning; and of course they only called the band for half-past. They are such damned fools: they drive me mad.”

“Why dont you walk out of the theatre, and make them arrange it properly for next day?”

“Oh yes! And throw the whole day after the half, and lose my rehearsal.
It is bad enough to lose my temper. I swore, I can tell you.”

“I have no doubt you did.”

“This horse thinks he’s at a funeral. What o’clock is it?”

“It’s only eight minutes past four. There is plenty of time.”

When they alighted, Lalage hurried into the restaurant; scrutinized the tables; and selected the best lighted one. The waiter, a decorous elderly man, approached with some severity of manner, and handed a bill of fare to Marmaduke. She snatched it from him, and addressed the waiter sharply.

“Bring me some thin soup; and get me a steak to follow. Let it be a thick juicy one. If its purple and raw I wont have it; and if its done to a cinder, I wont have it: it must be red. And get me some spring cabbage and potatoes, and a pint of dry champagne — the decentest you have. And be quick.”

“And what for you, sir?” said the waiter, turning to Marmaduke.

“Never mind him,” interrupted Susanna. “Go and attend to me.”

The waiter bowed and retired.

“Old stick-in-the-mud!” muttered Miss Lalage. “Is it half-past four yet?”

“No. It’s only quarter past. There’s lots of time.”

Mademoiselle Lalage ate until the soup, a good deal of bread, the steak, the vegetables, and the pint of champagne — less a glassful taken by her companion — had disappeared. Marmaduke watched her meanwhile, and consumed two ices.

“Have an ice to finish up with?” he said.

“No. I cant work on sweets,” she replied. “But I am beginning to feel alive again and comfortable. Whats the time?”

“Confound the time!” said Marmaduke. “It’s twenty minutes to five.”

“Well, I’ll drive back to the theatre. I neednt start for quarter of an hour yet.”

“Thank heaven!” said Marmaduke. “I was afraid I should not be able to get a word with you.”

“That reminds me of a crow I have to pluck with you, Mr. Marmaduke Lind.
What did you mean by telling me your name was Sharp?”

“It’s the name of a cousin of mine,” said Marmaduke, attempting to dismiss the subject with a laugh.

“It may be your cousin’s name; but it’s not yours. By the bye, is that the cousin youre engaged to?”

“What cousin? I’m not engaged to anybody.”

“That’s a lie, like your denial of your name. Come, come, Master Marmaduke: you cant humbug me. Youre too young. Hallo! What do you want?”

It was the waiter, removing some plates, and placing a bill on the table. Marmaduke put his hand into his pocket.

“Just wait a minute, please,” said Susanna. The waiter retired.

“Now then,” she resumed, placing her elbows on the table, “let us have no more nonsense. What is your little game? Are you going to pay that bill or am I?”

“I am, of course.”

“There is no of course in it — not yet, anyhow. What are you hanging about the theatre after me for? Tell me that. Dont stop to think.”

Marmaduke looked foolish, and then sulky. Finally he brightened, and said, “Look here. Youre angry with me for bringing your brother last night. But upon my soul I had no idea—”

“That’s not what I mean at all. You are dodging a plain question. When you came to the theatre, I thought you were a nice fellow; and I made friends with you. Now I find you have been telling me lies about yourself, and trying to play fast and loose. You must either give that up or give me up. I wont have you pass that stage door again if you only want to amuse yourself like other lounging cads about town.”

“What do you mean by playing fast and loose, and being a cad about town?” said Marmaduke angrily.

“I hope youre not going to make a row here in public.”

“No; but I have you where you cant make a row; and I intend to have it out with you once and for all. If you quarrel now, so help me Heaven I’ll never speak to you again!”

“It is you who are quarrelling.”

“Very well,” said Susanna, opening her purse as though the matter were decided. “Waiter.”

“I am going to pay.”

“So you can — for what you had yourself. I dont take dinners from strange men, nor pay for their ices.”

Marmaduke did not reply. He took out his purse determinedly; glanced angrily at her; and muttered, “I never thought you were that sort of woman.”

“What sort of woman?” demanded Susanna, in a tone that made the other occupants of the room turn and stare.

“Never mind,” said Marmaduke. She was about to retort, when she saw him looking into his purse with an expression of dismay. The waiter came. Susanna, instead of attempting to be beforehand in proffering the money, changed her mind, and waited. Marmaduke searched his pockets. Finding nothing, he muttered an imprecation, and, fingering his watch chain, glanced doubtfully at the waiter, who looked stolidly at the tablecloth.

“There,” said Susanna, putting down a sovereign.

Marmaduke looked on helplessly whilst the waiter changed the coin and thanked Susanna for her gratuity. Then he said, “You must let me settle with you for this to-night. Ive left nearly all my cash in the pocket of another waistcoat.”

“You will not have the chance of settling with me, either to-night or any other night. I am done with you.” And she rose and left the restaurant. Marmaduke sat doggedly for quarter of a minute. Then he went out, and ran along Regent Street, anxiously looking from face to face in search of her. At last he saw her walking at a great pace a little distance ahead of him. He made a dash and overtook her.

“Look here, Lalage,” he said, keeping up with her as she walked: “this is all rot. I didnt mean to offend you. I dont know what you mean, or what you want me to do. Dont be so unreasonable.”

No answer.

“I can stand a good deal from you; but it’s too much to be kept at your heels as if I were a beggar or a troublesome dog. Lalage.” She took no notice of him; and he stopped, trying to compose his features, which were distorted by rage. She walked on, turning into Glasshouse Street. When she had gone twenty yards, she heard him striding behind her.

“If you wont stop and talk to me,” he said, “I’ll make you. If anybody interferes with me I’ll smash him into jelly. It would serve you right if I did the same to you.”

He put his hand on her arm; and she instantly turned and struck him across the face, knocking off his hat. He, who a moment before had been excited, red, and almost in tears, was appalled. There was a crowd in a moment; and a cabman drew up close to the kerb with a calm conviction that his hansom would be wanted presently.

“How dare you put your hand on me, you coward?” she exclaimed, with remarkable crispness of utterance and energy of style. “Who are you? I dont know you. Where are the police?” She paused for a reply; and a bracelet, broken by the blow she had given him, dropped on the pavement, and was officiously picked up and handed to her by a battered old woman who shewed in every wrinkle her burning sympathy with Woman turning at bay against Man. Susanna looked at the broken bracelet, and tears of vexation sprang to her eyes. “Look at what youve done!” she cried, holding out the bracelet in her left hand and shewing a scrape which had drawn blood on her right wrist. “For two pins I’d knock your head off!”

Marmaduke, quite out of countenance, and yet sullenly very angry, vacillated for a moment between his conflicting impulses to knock her down and to fly to the utmost ends of the earth. If he had been ten years older he would probably have knocked her down: as it was, he signed to the cabman, who gathered up the reins and held them clear of his fare’s damaged hat with the gratification of a man whose judgment in a delicate matter had just been signally confirmed by events.

As they started, Susanna made a dash at the cab, which was pulled up, amid a shout from the crowd, just in time to prevent an accident. Then, holding on to the rail and standing on the step, she addressed herself to the cabman, and, sacrificing all propriety of language to intensity of vituperation, demanded whether he wanted to run his cab over her body and kill her. He, with undisturbed foresight, answered not a word, but again shifted the reins so as to make way for her bonnet. Acknowledging the attention with one more epithet, she seated herself in the cab, from which Marmaduke at once indignantly rose to escape. But the hardiest Grasmere wrestler, stooping under the hood of a hansom, could not resist a vigorous pull at his coat tails; and Marmaduke was presently back in his seat again, with Susanna clinging to him and half sobbing:

“Oh, Bob, youve killed me. How could you?” Then, with a suspiciously sudden recovery of energy, she screamed “Bijou Theatre. Drive on, will you” up at the cabman, who was looking down through the trapdoor. The horse plunged forward, and, with the jolt, she was fawning on Marmaduke’s arm again, saying, “Dont be brutal to me any more, Bob. I cant bear it. I have enough trouble without your turning on me.”

He was young and green, and too much confused by this time to feel sure that he had not been the aggressor. But he did, on the whole, the wisest thing — folded his arms and sat silent, with his cheeks burning.

“Say something to me,” she said, shaking his arm. “I have nothing to say,” he replied. “I shall leave town for home to-night. I cant shew my face again after this.”

“Home,” she said, in her former contemptuous tone, flinging his arm away. “That means your cousin Constance.”

“Who told you about her?”

“Never mind. You are engaged to her.”

“You lie!”

Susanna was shaken. She looked hard at him, wondering whether he was deceiving her or not. “Look me in the face, Bob,” she said. If he had complied, she would not have believed him. But he treated the challenge with supreme disdain and stared straight ahead, obeying his male instinct, which taught him that the woman, with all the advantages on her side, would nevertheless let him win if he held on. At last she came caressingly to his shoulder again, and said:

“Why didnt you tell me about her yourself?”

“Damn it all,” he exclaimed, violently, “there is nothing to tell! I am not engaged to her: on my oath I am not. My people at home talk about a match between us as if it were a settled thing, though they know I dont care for her. But if you want to have the truth, I cant afford to say that I wont marry her, because I am too hard up to quarrel with the governor, who has set his heart on it. You see, the way I am circumstanced — —”

“Oh, bother your circumstances! Look here, Bob, I dont want you to introduce me to your swell relations; it is not worth my while to waste time on people who cant earn their own living. And never mind your governor: we can get on without him. If you are hard up for money, and he is stingy, you had better get it from me than from the Jews.”

“I couldnt do that,” said Marmaduke, touched. “In fact, I am well enough off. By the bye, I must not forget to pay you for that lunch. But if I ever am hard up, I will come to you. Will that do?”

“Of course: that is what I meant. Confound it, here we are already. You mustnt come in, you would only be in the way. Come to-night after the burlesque, if you like. Youre not angry with me, are you?”

Her breast touched his arm just then; and as if she had released some spring, all his love for her suddenly surged up within him and got the better of him. “Wait — listen,” he said, in a voice half choked with tenderness. “Look here, Lalage: the honest truth is that I shall be ruined if I marry you openly. Let us be married quietly, and keep it dark until I am more independent.”

“Married! Catch me at it — if you can. No, dear boy, I am very fond of you, and you are one of the right sort to make me the offer; but I wont let you put a collar round my neck. Matrimony is all very fine for women who have no better way of supporting themselves, but it wouldnt suit me. Dont look so dazed. What difference does it make to you?”

“But — —” He stopped, bewildered, gazing at her.

“Get out, you great goose!” she said, and suddenly sprang out of the hansom and darted into the theatre.

He sat gaping after her, horrified — genuinely horrified.

CHAPTER III

The Earl of Carbury was a youngish man with no sort of turn for being a nobleman. He could not bring himself to behave as if he was anybody in particular; and though this passed for perfect breeding whenever he by chance appeared in his place in society, on the magisterial bench, or in the House of Lords, it prevented him from making the most of the earldom, and was a standing grievance with his relatives, many of whom were the most impudent and uppish people on the face of the earth. He was, if he had only known it, a born republican, with no natural belief in earls at all; but as he was rather too modest to indulge his consciousness with broad generalizations of this kind, all he knew about the matter was that he was sensible of being a bad hand at his hereditary trade of territorial aristocrat. At a very early age he had disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her, which was considerable. His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics. An apprenticeship of six years at the bench would have made an educated workman of him: as it was, he pottered at every mechanical pursuit as a gentleman amateur in a laboratory and workshop which he had got built for himself in his park. In this magazine of toys — for such it virtually was at first — he satisfied his itchings to play with tools and machines. He was no sportsman; but if he saw in a shop window the most trumpery patent improvement in a breechloader, he would go in and buy it; and as to a new repeating rifle or liquefied gas gun, he would travel to St. Petersburg to see it. He wrote very little; but he had sixteen different typewriters, each guaranteed perfect by an American agent, who had also pledged himself that the other fifteen were miserable impostures. A really ingenious bicycle or tricycle always found in him a ready purchaser; and he had patented a roller skate and a railway brake. When the electric chair for dental operations was invented, he sacrificed a tooth to satisfy his curiosity as to its operation. He could not play brass instruments to any musical purpose; but his collection of double slide trombones, bombardons with patent compensating pistons, comma trumpets, and the like, would have equipped a small military band; whilst his newly tempered harmonium with fifty-three notes to each octave, and his pianos with simplified keyboards that nobody could play on, were the despair of all musical amateurs who came to stay at Towers Cottage, as his place was called. He would buy the most expensive and elaborate lathe, and spend a month trying to make a true billiard ball at it. At the end of that time he would have to send for a professional hand, who would cornet the ball with apparently miraculous skill in a few seconds. He got on better with chemistry and photography; but at last he settled down to electrical engineering, and, giving up the idea of doing everything with his own half-trained hand, kept a skilled man always in his laboratory to help him out.

All along there had been a certain love of the marvelous at the bottom of his fancy for inventions. Therefore, though he did not in the least believe in ghosts, he would “investigate” spiritualism, and part with innumerable guineas to mediums, slatewriters, clairvoyants, and even of turbaned rascals from the East, who would boldly offer at midnight to bring him out into the back yard and there and then raise the devil for him. And just as his tendency was to magnify the success and utility of his patent purchases, so he would lend himself more or less to gross impostures simply because they interested him. This confirmed his reputation for being a bit of a crank; and as he had in addition all the restlessness and eccentricity of the active spirits of his class, arising from the fact that no matter what he busied himself with, it never really mattered whether he accomplished it or not, he remained an unsatisfied and (considering the money he cost) unsatisfactory specimen of a true man in a false position.

Towers Cottage was supposed to be a mere appendage to Carbury Towers, which had been burnt down, to the great relief of its noble owners, in the reign of William IV. The Cottage, a handsome one-storied Tudor mansion, with tall chimneys, gabled roofs, and transom windows, had since served the family as a very sufficient residence, needing a much smaller staff of servants than the Towers, and accommodating fewer visitors. At first it had been assumed on all hands that the stay at the Cottage was but a temporary one, pending the re-erection of the Towers on a scale of baronial magnificence; but this tradition, having passed through its primal stage of being a standing excuse with the elders into that of being a standing joke with the children, had naturally lapsed as the children grew up. Indeed, the Cottage was now too large for the family; for the Earl was still unmarried, and all his sisters had contracted splendid alliances except the youngest, Lady Constance Carbury, a maiden of twenty-two, with a thin face and slight angular figure, who was still on her mother’s hands. The illustrious matches made by her sisters had, in fact, been secured by extravagant dowering, which had left nothing for poor Lady Constance except a miserable three hundred pounds a year, at which paltry figure no man had as yet offered to take her. The Countess (Dowager) habitually assumed that Marmaduke Lind ardently desired the hand of his cousin; and Constance herself supported tacitly this view; but the Earl was apt to become restive when it was put forward, though he altogether declined to improve his sister’s pecuniary position, having already speculated quite heavily enough in brothers-in-law.

In the August following the Wandsworth concert Lord Carbury began to take his electrical laboratory with such intensified seriousness that he flatly refused to entertain any visitors until the 12th, and held fast to his determination in spite of his mother’s threat to leave the house, alleging, with a laugh, that he had got hold of a discovery with money in it at last. But he felt at such a disadvantage after this incredible statement that he hastened to explain that his objection to visitors did not apply to relatives who would be sufficiently at home at Towers Cottage to require no attention from him. Under the terms of this capitulation Marian, as universal favorite, was invited; and since there was no getting Marian down without Elinor, she was invited too, in spite of the Countess’s strong dislike for her, a sentiment which she requited with a pungent mixture of detestation and contempt. Marian’s brother, the Reverend George Lind, promised to come down in a day or two; and Marmaduke, who was also invited, did not reply.

The morning after her arrival, Marian was awakened at six o’clock by a wagon rumbling past the window of her room with a sound quite different from that made by the dust-cart in Westbourne Terrace. She peeped out at it, and saw that is was laden with packages of irregular shape, which, judging by some strange-looking metal rods that projected through the covering, she took to be apparatus for Lord Jasper’s laboratory. From the wagon, with its patiently trudging horse and dull driver, she lifted her eyes to the lawn, where the patches of wet shadow beneath the cedars refreshed the sunlit grass around them. It looked too fine a morning to spend in bed. Had Marian been able to taste and smell the fragrant country air she would not have hesitated a moment. But she had been accustomed to believe that fresh air was unhealthy at night, and though nothing would have induced her to wash in dirty water, she thought nothing of breathing dirty air; and so the window was shut and the room close. Still, the window did not exclude the loud singing of the birds or the sunlight. She ventured to open it a little, not without a sense of imprudence. Twenty minutes later she was dressed.

She first looked into the drawing-room, but it was stale and dreary. The dining-room, which she tried next, made her hungry. The arrival of a servant with a broom suggested to her that she had better get out of the way of the household work. She felt half sorry for getting up, and went out on the lawn to recover her spirits. There she heard a man’s voice trolling a stave somewhere in the direction of the laboratory. Thinking that it might be Lord Carbury, and that, if so, he would probably not wait until half past nine to break his fast, she ran gaily off round the southwest corner of the Cottage to a terrace, from which there was access through a great double window, now wide open, to a lofty apartment roofed with glass.

At a large table in the middle of the room sat a man with his back to the window. He had taken off his coat, and was bending over a small round block with little holes sunk into it. Each hole was furnished with a neat brass peg, topped with ebony; and the man was lifting and replacing one of these pegs whilst he gravely watched the dial of an instrument that resembled a small clock. A large straw hat concealed his head, and protected it from the rays that were streaming through the glass roof and open window. The apparent triviality of his occupation, and his intentness upon it, amused Marian. She stole into the laboratory, came close behind him, and said:

“Since you have nothing better to do than play cribbage with yourself,
I — —”

She had gently lifted up his straw hat, and found beneath a head that was not Lord Carbury’s. The man, who had cowered with surprise at her touch and voice, but had waited even then to finish an observation of his galvanometer before turning, now turned and stared at her.

“I beg your pardon,” said Marian, blushing vigorously. “I thought it was Lord Carbury. I have disturbed you very rudely. I — —”

“Not at all,” said the man. “I quite understand. I was not playing cribbage, but I was doing nothing very important. However, as you certainly did take me by surprise, perhaps you will excuse my coat.”

“Oh, pray dont mind me. I must not interrupt your work.” She looked at his face again, but only for an instant, as he was watching her. Then, with another blush, she put out her hand and said, “How do you do, Mr. Conolly. I did not recognize you at first.”

He shook hands, but did not offer any further conversation. “What a wonderful place!” she said, looking round, with a view to making herself agreeable by taking an interest in everything. “Wont you explain it all to me? To begin with, what is electricity?”

Conolly stared rather at this question, and then shook his head. “I dont know anything about that,” he said; “I am only a workman. Perhaps Lord Carbury can tell you: he has read a good deal about it.”

Marian looked incredulously at him. “I am sure you are joking,” she said. “Lord Carbury says you know ever so much more than he does. I suppose I asked a stupid question. What are those reels of green silk for?”

“Ah,” said Conolly, relaxing. “Come now, I can tell you that easily enough. I dont know what it is, but I know what it does, and I can lay traps to catch it. Here now, for instance — —”

And he went on to deliver a sort of chatty Royal Institution Children’s Lecture on Electricity which produced a great impression on Marian, who was accustomed to nothing better than small talk. She longed to interest him by her comments and questions, but she found that they had a most discouraging effect on him. Redoubling her efforts, she at last reduced him to silence, of which she availed herself to remark, with great earnestness, that science was a very wonderful thing.

“How do you know?” he said, a little bluntly.

“I am sure it must be,” she replied, brightening; for she thought he had now made a rather foolish remark. “Is Lord Carbury a very clever scientist?”

Conolly looked just grave enough to suggest that the question was not altogether a discreet one. Then, brushing off that consideration, he replied:

“He has seen a great deal and read a great deal. You see, he has great means at his disposal. His property is as good as a joint-stock company at his back. Practically, he is very good, considering his method of working: not so good, considering the means at his disposal.”

“What would you do if you had his means?”

Conolly made a gesture which plainly signified that he thought he could do a great many things.

“And is science, then, so expensive? I thought it was beyond the reach of money.”

“Oh, yes: science may be. But I am not a scientific man: I’m an inventor. The two things are quite different. Invention is the most expensive thing in the world. It takes no end of time, and no end of money. Time is money; so it costs both ways.”

“Then why dont you discover something and make your fortune?”

“I have already discovered something.”

“Oh! What is it?”

“That it costs a fortune to make experiments enough to lead to an invention.”

“You are exaggerating, are you not? What do you mean by a fortune?”

“In my case, at least four or five hundred pounds.”

“Is that all? Surely you would have no difficulty in getting five hundred pounds.”

Conolly laughed. “To be sure,” said he. “What is five hundred pounds?”

“A mere nothing — considering the importance of the object. You really ought not to allow such a consideration as that to delay your career. I have known people spend as much in one day on the most worthless things.”

“There is something in that, Miss Lind. How would you recommend me to begin?”

“First,” said Marian, with determination, “make up your mind to spend the money. Banish all scruples about the largeness of the sum. Resolve not to grudge even twice as much to science.”

“That is done already. I have quite made up my mind to spend the money.
What next?”

“Well, I suppose the next thing is to spend it.”

“Excuse me. The next thing is to get it. It is a mere detail, I know; but I should like to settle it before we go any further.”

“But how can I tell you that? You forget that I am quite unacquainted with your affairs. You are a man, and understand business, which of course I dont.”

“If you wanted five hundred pounds, Miss Lind, how would you set about getting it? — if I may ask.”

“What? I! But, as I say, I am only a woman. I should ask my father for it, or sign a receipt for my trustees, or something of that sort.”

“That is a very simple plan. But unfortunately I have no father and no trustees. Worse than that, I have no money. You must suggest some other way.”

“Do what everybody else does in your circumstances. Borrow it. I am sure
Lord Carbury would lend it to you.”

Conolly shook his head. “It doesnt do for a man in my position to start borrowing the moment he makes the acquaintance of a man in Lord Carbury’s,” he said. “We are working a little together already on one of my ideas, and that is as far as I care to ask him to go. I am afraid I must ask you for another suggestion.”

“Save up all your money until you have enough.”

“That would take some time. Let me see. As I am an exceptionally fortunate and specially skilled workman, I can now calculate on making from seventy shillings to six pounds a week. Say four pounds on the average.”

“Ah,” said Marian, despondingly, “you would have to wait more than two years to save five hundred pounds.”

“And to dispense with food, clothes, and lodging in the meantime.”

“True,” said Marian. “Of course, I see that it is impossible for you to save anything. And yet it seems absurd to be stopped by the want of such a sum. I have a cousin who has no money at all, and no experiments to make, and he paid a thousand pounds for a race-horse last spring.”

Conolly nodded, to intimate that he knew that such things happened.

Marian could think of no further expedient. She stood still, thinking, whilst Conolly took up a bit of waste and polished a brass cylinder.

“Mr. Conolly,” she said at last, “I cannot absolutely promise you; but I think I can get you five hundred pounds.” Conolly stopped polishing the cylinder, and stared at her. “If I have not enough, I am sure we could make the rest by a bazaar or something. I should like to begin to invest my money; and if you make some great invention, like the telegraph or steam engine, you will be able to pay it back to me, and to lend me money when I want it.”

Conolly blushed. “Thank you, Miss Lind,” said he, “thank you very much indeed. I — It would be ungrateful of me to refuse; but I am not so ready to begin my experiments as my talking might lead you to suppose. My estimate of their cost was a mere guess. I am not satisfied that it is not want of time and perseverance more than of money that is the real obstacle. However, I will — I will — a —— Have you any idea of the value of money, Miss Lind? Have you ever had the handling of it?”

“Of course,” said Marian, secretly thinking that the satisfaction of shaking his self-possession was cheap at five hundred pounds. “I keep house at home, and do all sorts of business things.”

Conolly glanced about him vaguely; picked up the piece of waste again as if he had been looking for that; recollected himself; and looked unintelligibly at her. Her uncertainty as to what he would do next was a delightful sensation: why, she did not know nor care. To her intense disappointment, Lord Carbury entered just then, and roused her from what was unaccountably like a happy dream.

Nothing more of any importance happened that day except the arrival of a letter from Paris, addressed to Lady Constance in Marmaduke’s handwriting. Miss McQuinch first heard of it in the fruit garden, where she found Constance sitting with her arm around Marian’s waist in a summer-house. She sat down opposite them, at a rough oak table.

“A letter, Nelly!” said Marian. “A letter! A letter from Marmaduke! I have extorted leave for you to read it. Here it is. Handle it carefully, pray.”

“Has he proposed?” said Elinor, taking it.

Constance changed color. Elinor opened the letter in silence, and read:

My dear Constance:

I hope you are quite well. I am having an awfully jolly time of it here. What a pity it is you dont come over! I was wishing for you yesterday in the Louvre, where we spent a pleasant day looking at the pictures. I send you the silk you wanted, and had great trouble hunting through half-a-dozen shops for it. Not that I mind the trouble, but just to let you see my devotion to you. I have no more to say at present, as it is nearly post hour. Remember me to the clan.

Yours ever,
DUKE.

P.S. — How do Nelly and your mother get along together?

Whilst Elinor was reading, the gardener passed the summer-house, and
Constance went out and spoke to him. Elinor looked significantly at
Marian.

“Nelly,” returned Marian, in hushed tones of reproach, “you have stabbed poor Constance to the heart by telling her that Marmaduke never proposed to her. That is why she has gone out.”

“Yes,” said Elinor, “it was brutal. But I thought, as you made such a fuss about the letter, that it must have been a proposal at least. It cant be helped now. It is one more enemy for me, that is all.”

“What do you think of the letter? Was it not kind of him to write — considering how careless he is usually?”

“Hm! Did he match the silk properly?”.

“To perfection. He must really have taken some trouble. You know how he botched getting the ribbon for his fancy dress at the ball last year.”

“That is just what I was thinking about. Do you remember also how he ridiculed the Louvre after his first trip to Paris, and swore that nothing would ever induce him to enter it again?”

“He has got more sense now. He says in the letter that he spent yesterday there.”

“Not exactly. He says ‘we spent a pleasant day looking at the pictures.’ Who is ‘we’?”

“Some companion of his, I suppose. Why?”

“I was just thinking could it be the person who has matched the silk so well. The same woman, I mean.”

“Oh, Nelly!”

“Oh, Marian! Do you suppose Marmaduke would spend an afternoon at the Louvre with a man, who could just as well go by himself? Do men match silks?”

“Of course they do. Any fly-fisher can do it better than a woman.
Really, Nell, you have an odious imagination.”

“Yes — when my imagination is started on an odious track. Nothing will persuade me that Marmaduke cares a straw for Constance. He does not want to marry her, though he is too great a coward to own it.”

“Why do you say so? I grant you he is unceremonious and careless. But he is the same to everybody.”

“Yes: to everybody we know. What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, Marian, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one.”

“There is no harm in giving people credit for being good.”

“Yes, there is, when people are not good, which is most often the case. It sets us wrong practically, and holds virtue cheap. If Marmaduke is a noble and warmhearted man, and Constance a lovable, innocent girl, all I can say is that it is not worth while to be noble or lovable. If amiability consists in maintaining that black is white, it is a quality anyone may acquire by telling a lie and sticking to it.”

“But I dont maintain that black is white. Only it seems to me that as regards white, you are color blind. Where I see white, you see black; and —— hush! Here is Constance.”

“Yes,” whispered Elinor: “she comes back quickly enough when it occurs to her that we are talking about her.”

Instead of simply asking why Constance should not behave in this very natural manner if she chose to, Marian was about to defend Constance warmly by denying all motive to her return, when that event took place and stopped the discussion. Marian and Nelly spent a considerable part of their lives in bandying their likes and dislikes under the impression that they were arguing important points of character and conduct.

They knew that Constance wanted to answer Marmaduke’s letter; so they alleged correspondence of their own, and left her to herself.

Lady Constance went to her brother’s study, where there was a comfortable writing-table. She began to write without hesitation, and her pen gabbled rapidly until she had covered two sheets of paper, when, instead of taking a fresh sheet, she wrote across the lines already written. After signing the letter, she read it through, and added two postscripts. Then she remembered something she had forgotten to say; but there was no more room on her two sheets, and she was reluctant to use a third, which might, in a letter to France, involve extra postage. Whilst she was hesitating her brother entered.

“Am I in your way?” she said. “I shall have done in a moment.”

“No, I am not going to write. By-the-bye, they tell me you had a letter from Marmaduke this morning. Has he anything particular to say?”

“Nothing very particular. He is in Paris.”

“Indeed? Are you writing to him?”

“Yes,” said Constance, irritated by his disparaging tone. “Why not?”

“Do as you please, of course. I am afraid he is a scamp.”

“Are you? You know a great deal about him, I dare say.”

“I am not much reassured by those who do know about him.”

“And who may they be? The only person you know who has seen much of him is Marian, and she doesnt speak ill of people behind their backs.”

“Marian takes rather a rose-colored view of everybody, Marmaduke included. You should talk to Nelly about him.”

“I knew it. I knew, the minute you began to talk, who had set you on.”

“I am afraid Nelly’s opinion is worth more than Marians.”

“Her opinion! Everybody knows what her opinion is. She is bursting with jealousy of me.”

“Jealousy!”

“What else? Marmaduke has never taken the least notice of her, and she is madly in love with him.”

“This is quite a new light upon the affair. Constance, are you sure you are not romancing?”

“Romancing! Why, she cannot conceal her venom. She taunted me this morning in the summer-house because Marmaduke has never made me a formal proposal. It was the letter that made her do it. Ask Marian.”

“I can hardly believe it: I should not have supposed, from what I have observed, that she cared about him.”

You should not have supposed it from what she said: is that what you mean? I dont care whether you believe it or not.”

“Well, if you are so confident, there is no occasion to be acrimonious about Elinor. She is more to be pitied than blamed.”

“Yes, everybody is to pity Elinor because she cant have her wish and make me wretched,” said Constance, beginning to cry. Whereupon Lord Carbury immediately left the room.

CHAPTER IV

Long before the harvest was home, preparations were made at Towers
Cottage to receive another visitor. The Rev. George Lind was coming.
Lord Carbury drove in the wagonet to the railway station, and met him on
the platform.

“How are you, my dear fellow?” cried the clergyman, shaking the earl’s hand. “Why did you trouble to meet me? I could have taken a fly. Most kind of you, I am sure. How is your dear mother? And Constance: how is she?”

“All quite well, thank you. Just show my fellow your traps; he will see to them.”

“Oh, there is no need to trouble him. I myself or a porter — oh, thank you, I am sure; the brown one with G.L. on it — and that small green metal box too, if you will be so good. Thank you very much. And how are you, Jasper, if I may call you so? Studious still, eh? I hope he will be careful of the box. No, not a word to him, I beg: it does not matter at all. What a charming little trap! What air! Happy man, Jasper! These fields are better than the close alleys and garrets to which my profession leads me.”

“Jump in.”

“Thank you. And how is Marian?”

“Quite well, thank you. Everybody is quite well. The girls are at a tennis party, or they would have come to meet you. Constance desired me particularly to apologize.”

“Oh, needless, most needless. Why should they not enjoy themselves? What a landscape! The smiling beauty of nature in the country is like a — like a message to us. This is indeed a delightful drive.”

“Yes, she is a capital trotter, this mare of mine. What do you think of her?”

“A noble animal, Jasper. Although I never studied horseflesh much, even in my university days, I can admire a spirited nag on occasion. But I have to content myself with humbler means of locomotion in my own calling. A poor parson cannot entertain his friends as a magnate like you can. Have you any one at the hall now, besides the girls?”

“No. The place will be rather dull for you, I am afraid.”

“Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all. I shall be satisfied and thankful under all circumstances.”

“We have led a humdrum life for the past month. Marian and Elinor have begun to potter about in my laboratory. They come there every day for an hour to work and study, as they call it.”

“Indeed! I have no doubt Marian will find the study of nature most improving. It is very generous of you to allow her to trespass on you.”

“I occupy myself chiefly with Nelly McQuinch. Marian is my assistant’s pupil, and he has made a very expert workwoman of her already. With a little direction, she can put a machine together as well as I can.”

“I am delighted to hear it. And dear Nelly?”

“Oh, dear Nelly treats the subject in her usual way. But she is very amusing.”

“Ah, Jasper! Ah! An unstable nature there, an unstable nature! Elinor has not been firmly trained. She needs to be tried by adversity.”

“No doubt she will be. Most of us are.”

“And dear Constance? Does she study?”

“No.”

“Ahem! A — have you —— ? That is St. Mildred’s yonder, is it not?”

“It is. They have put a new clock in the tower, worth about sixty pounds. I believe they collected a hundred and fifty for the purpose. But you were going to say something else.”

“No. At least, I intended to ask you about Marmaduke. He is coming down,
I understand.”

“I dont know what he is doing. Last week he wrote to us that he had just returned from Paris; but I happened to know that he had then been back for some time. He has arranged to come twice, but on each occasion, at the last moment, he has made excuses. He can do as he likes now. I wish he would say definitely that he doesnt intend to come, instead of shilly-shallying from week to week. Hallo, Prentice, have the ladies returned yet?” This was addressed to the keeper of the gate-lodge, at which they had now arrived. He replied that the ladies were still absent.

“Then,” said Lord Carbury, “we had better get down and stroll across the lawn. Perhaps you are tired, though?”

“Not at all. I should prefer it. What a lovely avenue! What greenery!
How—”

“We were talking about Marmaduke. Do you know what he is doing at present? He talks of being busy, and of not having a moment to spare. I can understand a fellow not having a moment to spare in June or July, but what Marmaduke has to do in London in September is more than I can imagine.”

“I do not care to enquire into these things too closely. I had intended to speak to you on the subject. Marmaduke, as I suppose you know, has taken a house at West Kensington.”

“A house at West Kensington! No, I did not know it. What has he done that for?”

“I fear he has been somewhat disingenuous with me on the subject. I think he tried to prevent the matter coming to my ears; and when I asked him about it, he certainly implied — in fact, I grieve to say he left me under the impression that he had taken the house with a view to marrying dear Constance, and settling down. I expressed some surprise at his going so far out of town; but he did not volunteer any further explanation, and so the matter dropped.” The Rev. George paused, and then continued in a lower tone, “Not long afterward I met him at a very late hour. He had perhaps exceeded a little in his cups; for he spoke to me with the most shocking cynicism, inviting me to supper at this house of his, and actually accusing me of knowing perfectly well the terrible truth about his occupation of it. He assured me that she — meaning, I presume, the unhappy person with whom he lives there — was exceptionally attractive; and I have since discovered that she is connected with the theatre, and of great notoriety. I need not tell you how dreadful all this is to me, Jasper; but to the best of my judgment, which I have fortified by earnest prayers for guidance, it is my imperative duty to tell you of it.”

“The vagabond! It is exactly as I have always said: Constance is too tame for him. He does not care a d — —”

“Jasper, my dear fellow, gently,” said the clergyman, pressing his arm.

“Pshaw!” said the Earl, “I dont care. I think Constance is well out of it. Let us drop the subject for the present. I hear the carriage.”

“Yes, here it is. Dear Lady Carbury has recognized me, and is waving her hand.” The Rev. George stood on tiptoe as he spoke, and flourished his low-crowned soft felt hat.

During the ensuing greetings Carbury stood silent, looking at the horses with an expression that made the coachman uneasy. At dinner he ate sedulously, and left the task of entertaining the visitor to his mother and the girls. The clergyman was at no loss for conversation. He was delighted with the dinner, delighted with the house, delighted to see the Countess looking so well, and delighted to hear that the tennis party that day had been a pleasant one. The Earl listened with impatience, and was glad when his mother rose. Before she quitted the dining-room he made a sign to her, and she soon returned, leaving Marian, Constance, and Elinor in the drawing-room.

“You will not mind my staying, I hope, George,” she said, as she resumed her seat.

“A delightful precedent, and from a distinguished source,” said the Rev.
George. “Allow me to pass the bottle. Ha! ha!”

“Thank you, no,” said the Countess. “I never take wine.” Her tone was inconclusive, as if she intended to take something else.

“Will you take brandy-and-soda?” said her son, rather brusquely.

Lady Carbury lowered her eyelids in protest. Then she said: “A very little, if you please, Jasper. I dare not touch wine,” she continued to the clergyman. “I am the slave of my medical man in all matters relating to my unfortunate digestion.”

“Mother,” said Jasper, “George has brought us a nice piece of news concerning your pet Marmaduke.”

The clergyman became solemn and looked steadily at his glass.

“I do not know that it is fair to describe him as my pet exactly,” said the Countess, a little troubled. “I trust there is nothing unpleasant the matter.”

“Oh, nothing! He has settled down domestically in a mansion at West
Kensington, that is all.”

“What! Married!”

“Unhappily,” said the Rev. George, “no, not married.”

“Oh!” said the Countess slowly, as an expression of relief. “It is very shocking, of course; very wrong indeed. Young men will do these things. It is especially foolish in Marmaduke’s case, for he really cannot afford to make any settlement such as this kind of complication usually involves when the time comes for getting rid of it. Pray do not let it come to Constance’s ears. It is not a proper subject for a girl.”

“Quite as proper a subject as marriage with a fellow like Marmaduke,” said Jasper, rising coolly and lighting a cigaret. “However, it will be time enough to trouble about that when there is any sign of his having the slightest serious intentions toward Constance. For my part I dont believe, and I never did believe, that there was anything real in the business. This last move of his proves it — to my satisfaction, at any rate.”

Lady Carbury, with a slight but impressive bridling, and yet with an evident sense of discomfiture, proceeded to assert herself before the clergyman. “I beg you will control yourself, Jasper,” she said. “I do not like to be spoken to in that tone. In discharging the very great responsibility which rests with a mother, I am compelled to take the world as I find it, and to acknowledge that certain very deplorable tendencies must be allowed for in society. You, in the solitude of your laboratory, contemplate an ideal state of things that we all, I am sure, long for, but which unhappily does not exist. I have never enquired into Marmaduke’s private life, and I think you ought not to have done so. I could not disguise from myself the possibility of his having entered into some such relations as those you have alluded to.”

Jasper, without the slightest appearance of having heard this speech, strolled casually out of the room. The Countess, baffled, turned to her sympathetic guest.

“I am sure that you, George, must feel that it is absolutely necessary for us to keep this matter to ourselves.”

The Rev. George said, gravely, “I do not indeed see what blessing can rest on our interference in such an inexpressibly shocking business. It is for Marmaduke to wrestle with his own conscience.”

“Quite so,” said the Countess, shrugging her shoulders as if to invite her absent son’s attention to this confirmation of her judgment. “Is it not absurd of Jasper to snatch at such an excuse for breaking off the match?”

“I can sympathize with Jasper’s feeling, I trust. It is natural for a candid nature to recoil from duplicity. But all our actions need charitable construction; and, remembering that, we should take heed to prevent our forebearance toward others from wavering. Who knows that the alliance with your pure and lovely daughter may not be the means specially ordained to rescue him from his present condition.”

“I think it very possible,” drawled the Countess, looking at him, nevertheless, with a certain contempt for what she privately considered his priggish, underbred cant. “Besides, such things are recognized, though of course they are not spoken of. No lady could with common decency pretend to know that such connexions are possible, much less assign one of them as a reason for breaking off an engagement.”

“Pardon me,” said the Rev. George; “but can these worldly considerations add anything to the approval of our consciences? I think not. We will keep our own counsel in this matter in the sight of Heaven. Then, whatever the world may think, all will surely come right in the end.”

“Oh, it is sure to come right in the end: these wretched businesses always do. I cannot imagine men having such low tastes — as if there were anything in these women more than in anybody else! Come into the drawing-room, George.”

They went into the drawing-room and found it deserted. The ladies were in the veranda. The Countess took up the paper and composed herself for a nap. George went into the porch, where the girls, having seen the sun go down, were now watching the deepening gloom among the trees that skirted the lawn. Marian proposed that they should walk through the plantation whilst there was still a little light left, and the clergyman readily assented. He rather repented of this when they got into the deep gloom under the trees, and Elinor began to tell stories about adders, wild cats, poachers, and anything else that could possibly make a nervous man uncomfortable under such circumstances. He was quite relieved when they saw the spark of a cigaret ahead of them and heard the voices of Jasper and Conolly coming toward them through the darkness.

“Oh, I believe I have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Conolly,” said the
Rev. George, formally, when they met. “I am glad to see you.”

“Thank you,” said Conolly. “If you ladies have thin shoes on as usual, we had better come out of this.”

“As we ladies happen to have our boots on,” said Marian, “we shall stay as long as we like.”

Nevertheless, they soon turned homeward, and as the path was narrow, they walked in pairs. The clergyman, with Constance, led the way. Lord Jasper followed with Elinor. Conolly and Marian came last.

“Does that young man — Mr. Conolly — live at the Hall?” was the Rev.
George’s first remark to Constance.

“No. He has rooms in Rose Cottage, that little place on Quilter’s farm.”

“Ha! Then he is very well off here.”

“A great deal too well off. Jasper allows him to speak to him as though he were an equal. However, I suppose Jasper knows his own business best.”

“I have observed that he is rather disposed to presume upon any encouragement he receives. It is a bad sign in a young man, and one, I fear, that will greatly interfere with his prospects.”

“He is an American, and I suppose thinks it a fine thing to be republican. But it is Jasper’s fault. He spoils him. He once wanted to have him in the drawing-room in the evenings to play accompaniments; but mamma positively refused to allow it. Jasper is excessively obstinate, and though he did not make a fuss, he got quite a habit of going over to Rose Cottage and spending his evenings there singing and playing. Everybody about the place used to notice it. Mamma was greatly disgusted.”

“Do you find him unpleasant — personally, I mean?”

“I! Oh dear, no! I should never dream of speaking to him. His presence is unpleasant, because he exercises a bad influence on Jasper; so I wish, on that account alone, that he would go.”

“I trust Marian is careful to limit her intercourse with him as much as possible.”

“Well, Marian learns electricity from him; and of course that makes a difference. I do not care about such things; and I never go into the laboratory when he is there; so I do not know whether Marian lets him be familiar with her or not. She is rather easygoing; and he is insufferably conceited. However, if she wants to learn electricity, I suppose she must put up with him. He is no worse, after all, than the rest of the people one has to learn things from. They are all impossible.”

“It is a strange fancy of the girls, to study science.”

“I am sure I dont know why they do it. It is great nonsense for Jasper to do it, either. He will never keep up his position properly until he shuts up that stupid workshop. He ought to hunt and shoot and entertain a great deal more than he does. It is very hard on us, for we are altogether in Jasper’s hands for such matters. I think he is very foolish.”

“Not foolish. Dont say that. Excuse my giving you a little lecture; but it is not right to speak, even without thought, of your brother as a fool. No doubt he is a little injudicious; but all men are not called to the same pursuits.”

“If people have a certain position, they ought to make up their minds to the duties of their position, whether they are called to them or not.”

The Rev. George, missing the deference with which ladies not related to him usually received his admonitions, changed the subject.

Meanwhile, Conolly and Marian, walking more slowly than the rest, had fallen far behind. They had been silent at first. She seemed to be in trouble. At last, after some wistful glances at him, she said:

“Have you resolved to go to London to-morrow; or will you wait until
Friday?”

“To-morrow, Miss Lind. Can I do anything for you in town?”

Marian hesitated painfully.

“Do not mind giving me plenty of bother,” he said. “I am so accustomed to superintend the transit of machines as cumbersome as trunks and as fragile as bonnet boxes, that the care of a houseful of ordinary luggage would be a mere amusement for me.”

“Thank you; but it is not that. I was only thinking — Are you likely to see my cousin, Mr. Marmaduke Lind, whilst you are in London?”

“N — no. Unless I call upon him, which I have no excuse for doing.”

“Oh! I thought you knew him.”

“I met him at that concert.”

“But I thought you were in the habit of going about with him. At least, I understood him one day to say that you had been to the theatre together.”

“So we were; but only once. We went there after the concert, and I have never seen him since.”

“Oh, indeed! I quite mistook.”

“If you have any particular reason for wishing me to see him, I will.
It will be all right if I have a message from you. Shall I call on him?
It will be no trouble to me.”

“No, oh no. I wanted — it was something that could only be told to him indirectly by an intimate friend — by some one with influence over him. More a hint than anything else. But it does not matter. At least, it cannot be helped.”

Conolly did not speak until they had gone some thirty yards or so in silence. Then he said: “If the matter is of serious importance to you, Miss Lind, I think I can manage to have a message conveyed to him by a person who has influence over him. I am not absolutely certain that I can; but probably I shall succeed without any great difficulty.”

Marian looked at him in some surprise. “I hardly know what I ought to do,” she said, doubtfully.

“Then do nothing,” said Conolly bluntly. “Or, if you want anything said to this gentleman, write to him yourself.”

“But I dont know his address, and my brother says I ought not to write to him. I dont think I ought, either; but I want him to be told something that may prevent a great deal of unhappiness. It seems so unfeeling to sit down quietly and say, ‘It is not my business to interfere,’ when the mischief might so easily be prevented.”

“I advise you to be very cautious, Miss Lind. Taking care of other people’s happiness is thankless and dangerous. You dont know your cousin’s address, you say?”

“No. I thought you did.”

Conolly shook his head. “Who does know it?” he said.

“My brother George does; but he refused to tell me. I shall not ask him again.”

“Of course not. I can find it out for you. But of what use will that be, since you think you ought not to write to him?”

“I assure you, Mr. Conolly, that if it only concerned myself, I would not hesitate to tell you the whole story, and ask your advice. I feel sure you would shew me what was right. But this is a matter which concerns other people only.”

“Then you have my advice without telling me. Dont meddle in it.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“After all, what I wish to do could not possibly bring about mischief. If Marmaduke could be given a hint to come down here at once — he has been invited, and is putting off his visit from week to week — it would be sufficient. He will get into trouble if he makes any more excuses. And he can set everything right by coming down now.”

“Are you sure you dont mean only that he can smooth matters over for the present?”

“No, you mistake. It is not so much to smooth matters over as to rescue him from a bad influence that is ruining him. There is a person in London from whom he must he got away at all hazards. If you only knew — I wish you knew.”

“Perhaps I know more than you suppose. Come, Miss Lind, let us understand one another. Your family want your cousin to marry Lady Constance. I know that. She does not object. I know that too. He does.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Marian, “you are wrong. He does not.”

“Anyhow,” continued Conolly, “he acts with a certain degree of indifference toward her — keeps away at present, for instance. I infer that the bad influence you have mentioned is the cause of his remissness.”

“Yes, you are right; only, looking at it all from without as you do, you are mistaken as to Marmaduke’s character. He is easily led away, and very careless about the little attentions that weigh so much with women; but he is thoroughly honorable, and incapable of trifling with Lady Constance. Unfortunately, he is easily imposed on, and impatient of company in which he cannot be a little uproarious. I fear that somebody has taken advantage of this part of his character to establish a great ascendency over him. I” — here Marian became nervous, and controlled her voice with difficulty— “I saw this person once in a theatre; and I can imagine how she would fascinate Marmaduke. She was so clever, so handsome, and — and so utterly abominable. I was angry with Duke for bringing us to the place; and I remember now that he was angry with me because I said she made me shudder.”

“Utterly abominable is a strong thing for one woman to say of another,” said Conolly, with a certain sternness. “However, I can understand your having that feeling about her. I know her; and it is through her that I hope to find out his address for you.”

“But her address is his address now, Mr. Conolly. I think it is somewhere in West Kensington.”

Conolly stopped, and turned upon her so suddenly that she recoiled a step, frightened.

“Since when, pray?”

“Very lately, I think. I do not know.”

They neither moved nor spoke for some moments: she earnestly regretting that she had lingered so far behind her companions in the terrible darkness. He walked on at last faster than before. No more words passed between them until they came out into the moonlight close to the veranda. Then he stopped again, and took off his hat.

“Permit me to leave you now,” he said, with an artificial politeness worthy of Douglas himself. “Good-night.”

“Good-night,” faltered Marian.

He walked gravely away. Marian hurried into the veranda, where she found
Jasper and Elinor. The other couple had gone into the drawing-room.

“Hallo!” said Jasper, “where is Conolly? I want to say a word to him before he goes.”

“He has just gone,” said Marian, pointing across the lawn. Jasper immediately ran out in the direction indicated, and left the two cousins alone together.

“Well, Marian,” said Elinor, “do you know that you have taken more than quarter of an hour longer to come from the plantation than we did, and that you look quite scared? Our sweet Constance, as the parson calls her, has been making some kind remarks about it.”

“Do I look disturbed? I hope Auntie wont notice it. I wish I could go straight to bed without seeing anybody.”

“Why? What is the matter?”

“I will tell you to-night when you come in to me. I am disgusted with myself; and I think Conolly is mad.”

“Mad!”

“On my word, I think Conolly has gone mad,” said Lord Jasper, returning at this moment out of breath and laughing.

Elinor, startled, glanced at Marian.

“He was walking quite soberly toward the fence of the yellow field when I caught sight of him. Just as I was about to hail him, he started off and cleared the fence at a running jump. He walked away at a furious rate, swinging his arms about, and laughing as if he was enjoying some uncommonly good joke. I am not sure that I did not see him dance a hornpipe; but as it is so dark I wont swear to that.”

“You had better not,” said Elinor, sceptically. “Let us go in; and pray do not encourage George to talk. I have a headache, and want to go to bed.”

“You have been in very good spirits, considering your headache,” he replied, in the same incredulous tone. “It has come on rather suddenly, has it not?”

When they went into the drawing-room they found that Constance had awakened her mother, and had already given her an account of their walk. Jasper added a description of what he had just witnessed. “I have not laughed so much for a long time,” he said, in conclusion. “He is usually such a steady sort of fellow.”

“I see nothing very amusing in the antics of a drunken workman,” said the Countess. “How you could have left Marian in his care even for a moment I am at a loss to conceive.”

“He was not drunk, indeed,” said Marian.

“Certainly not,” said Jasper, rather indignantly. “I was walking with him for some time before we met the girls. You are very pale, Marian. Have you also a headache?”

“I have been playing tennis all day; and I am quite tired out.”

Soon afterward, when Marian was in bed, and Miss McQuinch, according to a nightly custom of theirs, was seated on the coverlet with her knees doubled up to her chin inside her bedgown, they discussed the adventure very earnestly.

“Dont understand him at all, I confess,” said Elinor, when Marian had related what had passed in the plantation. “Wasnt it rather rash to make a confidant of him in such a delicate matter?”

“That is what makes me feel so utterly ashamed. He might have known that I only wanted to do good. I thought he was so entirely above false delicacy.”

“I dont mean that. How do you know that the story is true? You only have it from Mrs. Leith Fairfax’s letter; and she is perhaps the greatest liar in the world.”

“Oh, Nelly, you ought not to talk so strongly about people. She would never venture to tell me a made-up tale about Marmaduke.”

“In my opinion, she would tell anybody anything for the sake of using her tongue or pen.”

“It is so hard to know what to do. There was nobody whom I could trust, was there? Jasper has always been against Marmaduke; and Constance, of course, was out of the question. There was Auntie, but I did not like to tell her.”

“Because she is an evil-minded old Jezebel, whom no nice woman would talk to on such a subject,” said Elinor, giving the bed a kick with her heel.

“Hush, Nelly. I am always in terror lest you should say something like that before other people, out of sheer habit.”

“Never fear. Well, you have done the best you could. No use regretting what cannot be recalled. You cannot have the security of conventionality along with the self-respect of sincerity. By the bye, do you remember that Jasper and his fond mamma and George had a family council after dinner? You may be sure that George has told them everything.”

“What! Then my wretched attempt to have Marmaduke warned was useless. Oh, Nelly, this is too bad. Do you really think so? When I told him before dinner what Mrs. Leith Fairfax wrote, he only said he feared it was true, and refused to give me the address.”

“And so threw you back on Conolly. I am glad the responsibility rests with George. He knew very well that it was true; for he had only just been telling Jasper. Jasper told me as much in the plantation. Master Georgy has no right to be your brother. He is worse than a dissenter. Dissenters try to be gentlemen; but George has no misgivings about himself on that score; so he gives his undivided energy to his efforts to be parsonic. He is an arrant hypocrite.”

“I dont think he is a hypocrite. I think he sincerely believes that his duty to the Church requires him to behave as he does.”

“Then he is a donkey, which is worse.”

“I wish he were more natural in his manner.”

“He is natural enough. It is always the same with parsons: ‘it is their nature to.’ Good-night. Men are all the same, my dear, all the same.”

“How do you mean?”

“Never mind. Good-night.”

CHAPTER V

A little removed from a pretty road in West Kensington, and communicating with it by a shrubbery and an iron gate, there stood at this time a detached villa called Laurel Grove. On the opposite side were pairs of recently built houses, many of them still unlet. These, without depriving the neighbourhood of its suburban quietude, forbade any feeling of rustic seclusion, and so made it agreeable to Susanna Conolly, who lived at Laurel Grove with Marmaduke Lind.

One morning in September they were at breakfast together. Beside each was a pile of letters. Marmaduke deferred opening his until his hunger was satisfied; but Susanna, after pouring out tea for him, seized the uppermost envelope, thrust her little finger under the flap, and burst it open.

“Hm,” she said. “First rehearsal next Monday. Here he is at me again to make the engagement renewable after Christmas. What an old fool he must be not to guess why I dont want to be engaged next spring! Just look at the Times, Bob, and see if the piece is advertized yet.”

“I should think so, by Jupiter,” said Marmaduke, patiently interrupting his meal to open the newspaper.

“Here is a separate advertisement for everybody. ‘The latest Parisian
success. La petite Maison du Roi. Music by M. de Jongleur. Mr.
Faulkner has the honor to announce that an adaptation by Mr. Cribbs of
M. de Jongleur’s opera bouffe La petite Maison du Roi, entitled King
Lewis on the lewis’ — what the deuce does that mean?”

“On the loose, of course.”

“But it is spelt l-e-w —— oh! its a pun. What an infernal piece of idiocy! Then it goes on as usual, except that each name in the cast has a separate line of large print. Here you are: ‘Lalage Virtue as Madame Dubarry’ — —”

“Is that at the top?”

“Yes.”

“Before Rose Stella?”

“Yes. Why! — I didnt notice it before — you are down fifteen times!
Every alternate space has your name over again. ‘Lalage Virtue as Madame
Dubarry. Fred Smith as Louis XV. Lalage Virtue as the Dubarry. Felix
Sumner as the Due de Richelieu. Lalage Virtue as la belle Jeanneton.’
By the way, that is all rot. Cardinal Richelieu died four or five
hundred years before Madame Dubarry was born.”

“Let me see the paper. I see they have given Rose Stella the last line with a big AND before it. No matter. She is down only once; and I am down fifteen times.”

“I wonder what all these letters of mine are about! This is a bill, of course. The West Kensington Wine Company. Whew! We are getting through the champagne at the rate of about thirty pounds a month, not counting what we pay for when we dine in town.”

“Well, what matter! Champagne does nobody any harm; and I get awfully low without it.”

“All right, my dear. So long as you please yourself, and dont injure your health, I dont care. Here’s a letter of yours put among mine by mistake. It has been forwarded from your old diggings at Lambeth.”

“It’s from Ned,” said Susanna, turning pale. “He must be coming home, or he would not write. Yes, he is. What shall I do?”

“What does he say?” said Marmaduke, taking the letter from her. “‘Back at 6 on Wednesday evening. Have high tea. N.C.’ Short and sweet! Well, he will not turn up til to-morrow, at all events, even if he knows the address, which of course he doesnt.”

“He knows nothing. His note shews that. What will he do when he finds me gone? He may get the address at the post-office, where I told them to send on my letters. The landlady has most likely found out for her own information. There is no mistake about it,” said Susanna, rising and walking to the window: “I am in a regular funk about him. I have half a mind to go back to Lambeth and meet him. I could let the murder out gradually, or, perhaps, get him off to the country again before he discovers anything.”

“Go back! oh no, nonsense! The worst he can do is to cut you — and a good job too.”

“I wish he would. It would be a relief to me at present to know for certain that he would.”

“He cant be so very thin-skinned as you fancy, considering the time you have been on the stage.”

“There’s nothing wrong in being on the stage. There’s nothing wrong in being here either, in spite of Society. After all, what do I care about Ned, or anybody else? He always went his own way when it suited him; and he has no right to complain if I go mine. Let him come if he likes: he will not get much satisfaction from me.” Susanna sat down again, and drank some tea, partly defiant, partly disconsolate.

“Dont think any more about it,” said Marmaduke. “He wont come.”

“Oh, let him, if he likes,” said Susanna, impatiently. Marmaduke did not quite sympathize with her sudden recklessness. He hoped that Conolly would have the good sense to keep away.

“Look here, Bob,” said she, when they had finished breakfast. “Let us go somewhere to-day. I feel awfully low. Let us have a turn up the river.”

“All right,” said Marmaduke, with alacrity. “Whatever you please. How shall we go?”

“Anyhow. Let us go to Hampton by train. When we get there we can settle what to do afterward. Can you come now?”

“Yes, whenever you are ready.”

“Then I will run upstairs and dress. Go out and amuse yourself with that blessed old lawn-mower until I come.”

“Yes, I think I will,” said Marmaduke, seriously. “That plot near the gate wants a trimming badly.”

“What a silly old chap you are, Bob!” she said, stopping to kiss him on each cheek as she left the room.

Marmaduke had become attached to the pursuit of gardening since his domestication. He put on his hat; went out; and set to work on the plot near the gate. The sun was shining brightly; and when he had taken a few turns with the machine he stopped, raising his face to the breeze, and saw Conolly standing so close to him that he started backward, and made a vague movement as if to ward off a blow. Conolly, who seemed amused by the mowing, said quietly: “That machine wants oiling: the clatter prevented you from hearing me come. I have just returned from Carbury Towers. Miss Lind is staying there; and she has asked me to give you a message.”

This speech perplexed Marmaduke. He inferred from it that Conolly was ignorant of Susanna’s proceedings, but he had not sufficient effrontery to welcome him unconcernedly at once. So he stood still and stared at him.

“I am afraid I have startled you,” Conolly went on, politely. “I found the gate unlocked, and thought it would be an unnecessary waste of time to ring the bell. You have a charming little place here.”

“Yes, it’s a pretty little place, isnt it?” said Marmaduke. “A — wont you come in and have a — excuse my bringing you round this way, will you? My snuggery is at the back of the house.”

“Thank you; but I had rather not go in. I have a great deal of business to do in town to-day; so I shall just discharge my commission and go.”

“At any rate, come into the shade,” said Marmaduke, glancing uneasily toward the windows of the house. “This open place is enough to give us sunstroke.”

Conolly followed him to a secluded part of the shrubbery, where they sat down on a bench.

“Is there anything up?” said Marmaduke, much oppressed.

“Will you excuse my speaking without ceremony?”

“Oh, certainly. Fire away!”

“Thank you. I must then tell you that the relations between you and Lady Constance are a source of anxiety to her brother. You know the way men feel bound to look after their sisters. You have, I believe, sisters of your own?”

Marmaduke nodded, and stole a doubtful glance at Conolly’s face.

“It appears that Lord Carbury has all along considered your courtship too cool to be genuine. In this view he was quite unsupported, the Countess being strongly in your favor, and the young lady devoted to you.”

“Well, I knew all that. At least, I suspected it. What is up now?”

“This. The fact of your having taken a villa here has reached the ears of the family at Carbury. They are, not unnaturally, curious to know what use a bachelor can have for such an establishment.”

“But I have my rooms in Clarges Street still. This is not my house. It was taken for another person.”

“Precisely what they seem to think. But, to be brief with you, Miss Lind thinks that unless you wish to break with the Earl, and quarrel with your family, you should go down to Towers Cottage at once.”

“But I cant go away just now. There are reasons.”

“Miss Lind is fully acquainted with your reasons. They are her reasons for wishing you to leave London immediately. And now, having executed my commission, I must ask you to excuse me. My time is much occupied.”

“Well, I am greatly obliged to you for coming all this way out of town to give me the straight tip,” said Marmaduke, relieved at the prospect of getting rid of his visitor without alluding to Susanna. “It is very good of you; and I am very glad to see you. Jolly place, Carbury Park is, isnt it? How will the shooting be?”

“First rate, I am told. I do not know much about it myself.” They had risen, and were strolling along the path leading to the gate.

“Shall I see you down there — if I go?”

“Possibly. I shall have to go down for a day at least, to get my luggage, in case I decide not to renew my engagement with Lord Jasper.”

“I hope so,” said Marmaduke. Then, as they reached the gate, he proffered his hand, in spite of an inward shrinking, and said heartily, “Good-bye, old fellow. Youre looking as well as possible.”

Conolly took his hand, and retained it whilst he said: “Good-bye, Mr.
Lind. I am quite well, thank you. If I may ask — how is Susanna?”

Marmaduke was prevented by a spasm of the throat from replying. Before he recovered, Susanna herself, attired for her proposed trip to Hampton, emerged from the shrubbery and stood before them, confounded. Conolly, still wearing the cordial expression with which he had shaken Marmaduke’s hand, looked at her, then at her protector, and then at her again.

“I have been admiring the villa, Susanna,” said he, after an emphatic silence. “It is better than our place at Lambeth. You wont mind my hurrying away: I have a great deal to do in town. Good-bye. Good-bye, Mr. Lind.”

Susanna murmured something. Marmaduke, after making an effort to bid his guest good-bye genially, opened the gate, and stood for a minute watching him as he strode away.

“What does he care what becomes of me, the selfish brute!” cried
Susanna, passionately.

“He didnt complain: he has nothing to complain of,” said Marmaduke.
“Anyhow, why didnt he stay at home and look after you? By George,
Susanna, he is the coolest card I ever came across.”

“What brought him here?” she demanded, vehemently.

“That reminds me. I am afraid I must go down to Carbury for a few days.”

“And what am I to do here alone? Are you going to leave me too?”

“Well, I cannot be in two places at the same time. I suppose you can manage to get on without me for a few days.”

“I will go home. I can get on without you altogether. I will go home.”

“Come, Susanna! what is the use of kicking up a row? I cant afford to quarrel with all my people because you choose to be unreasonable.”

“What do I care about your people, or about you either?”

“Very well, then,” said Marmaduke, offended, “you can go home if you like. Perhaps your brother appreciates this sort of thing. I dont.”

“Ah, you coward! You taunt me because you think I have no home. Do you flatter yourself that I am dependent on you?”

“Hold your tongue,” said Marmaduke, fiercely. “Dont you turn on me in that fashion. Keep your temper if you want me to keep mine.”

“You have ruined me,” said Susanna, sitting down on the grass, and beginning to cry.

“Oh, upon my soul, this is too much,” said Marmaduke, with disgust. “Get up out of that and dont make a fool of yourself. Ruined indeed! Will you get up?”

“No!” screamed Susanna.

“Then stay where you are and be damned,” retorted Marmaduke, turning on his heel and walking toward the house. In the hall he met a maid carrying an empty champagne bottle and goblet.

“Missis is looking for you, sir,” said the maid.

“All right,” said Marmaduke, “I have seen her. Listen to me. I am going to the country. My man Mason will come here to-day to pack up my traps, and bring them after me. You had better take a note of my address from the card in the strap of my valise.”

“Yes, sir,” said the maid. “Any message for missis?”

“No,” said Marmaduke. He then changed his coat and hat, and went out again. As he approached the gate he met Susanna, who had risen and was walking toward the house.

“I am going to Carbury,” he said. “I dont know when I shall be back.”

She passed on disdainfully, as if she had not heard him.

CHAPTER VI

Three days later Lord Carbury came to luncheon with a letter in his hand. Marian had not yet come in; and the Rev. George was absent, his place being filled by Marmaduke.

“Good news for you and Constance, mother.”

“Indeed?” said the Countess, smiling.

“Yes. Conolly is coming down this afternoon to collect his traps and leave you forever.”

“Really, Jasper, you exaggerate Mr. Conolly’s importance. Intelligence of his movements can hardly be news — good or bad — either to me or to Constance.”

“I am glad he is going,” said Constance, “for Jasper’s sake.”

“Thank you,” replied Jasper. “I thought you would be. He will be a great loss to me.”

“Nonsense!” said the Countess. “If another workman is needed, another can easily be had.”

“If I can be of any assistance to you, old man,” said Marmaduke, “make what use of me you like. I picked up something about the business yesterday.”

“Yes,” said Elinor. “While you were away, Jasper, he went to the laboratory with Constance, and fired off a brass cannon with your new pile until he had used up all the gunpowder and spoiled the panels of the door. That is what he calls picking up something about the business.”

“Nothing like experiment for convincing you of the power of electricity,” said Marmaduke. “Is there, Conny?”

“It’s very wonderful; but I hate shots.”

“Where is Marian?” said Lady Carbury.

“I left her in the summer-house in the fruit garden,” said Elinor. “She was reading.”

“She must have forgotten the hour,” said the Countess. “She has been moping, I think, for the last few days. I hope she is not unwell. But she would never stay away from luncheon intentionally. I shall send for her.”

“I’ll go,” said Marmaduke, eagerly.

“No, no, Duke. You must not leave the table. I will send a servant.”

“I will fetch her here in half the time that any servant will. Poor
Marian, why shouldnt she have her lunch? I shall be back in a jiffy.”

“What a restless, extraordinary creature he is!” said Lady Carbury, displeased, as Marmaduke hastily left the room. “The idea of a man leaving the table in that way!”

“I suspect he has his reasons,” said Elinor.

“I think it is a perfectly natural thing for him to do,” said Constance, pettishly. “I see nothing extraordinary in it.”

Marmaduke found Marian reading in the summer-house in the fruit garden. She looked at him in lazy surprise as he seated himself opposite to her at the table.

“This is the first chance I’ve had of talking to you privately since I came down,” he said. “I believe you have been keeping out of my way on purpose.”

“Well, I concluded that you wanted as many chances as possible of talking to some one else in private; so I gave you as many as I could.”

“Yes, you and the rest have been uncommonly considerate in that respect: thank you all awfully. But I mean to have it out with you, Miss Marian, now that I have caught you alone.”

“With me! Oh, dear! What have I done?”

“What have you done? I’ll tell you what youve done. Why did you send Conolly, of all men in the world, to tell me that I was in disgrace here?”

“There was no one else, Marmaduke.”

“Well, suppose there wasn’t! Suppose there had been no one else alive on the earth except you, and I, and he, and Constance, and Su — and Constance! how could you have offered him such a job?”

“Why not? Was there any special reason—”

“Any special reason! Didnt your common sense tell you that a meeting between him and me must be particularly awkward for both of us?”

“No. At least I — . Marmaduke: I think you must fancy that I told him more than I did. I did not know where you were; and as he was going to London, and I thought you knew him well, and I had no other means of warning you, I had to make use of him. Jasper will tell you how thoroughly trustworthy he is. But all I said — and I really could not say less — was that I was afraid you were in bad company, or under bad influence, or something like that; and that I only wanted you to come down here at once.”

“Oh! Indeed! That was all, was it? Merely that I was in bad company.”

“I think I said under bad influence. I was told so; and I believed it at the time. I hope it’s not true, Marmaduke. If it is not, I beg your pardon with all my heart.”

Marmaduke stared very hard at her for a while, and then said, with the emphasis of a man baffled by utter unreason: “Well, I am damned!” at which breach of good manners she winced. “Hang me if I understand you, Marian,” he continued, more mildly. “Of course it’s not true. Bad influence is all bosh. But it was a queer thing to say to his face. He knew very well you meant his sister. Hallo! what’s the matter? Are you going to faint?”

“No, I — Never mind me.”

“Never mind you!” said Marmaduke. “What are you looking like that for?”

“Because — it is nothing: I only blushed. Dont be stupid, Duke.”

“Blushed! Why dont you blush red, like other people, and not green?
Shall I get you something?”

“No, no. Oh, Duke, why did you not tell me? How could you be so heartless as to leave us all in the dark when we were talking about you before him every day! Oh, are you in earnest, Duke? Pray dont jest about it. What do you mean by his sister? I never knew he had one. Who is she? What happened? I mean when you saw him?”

“Nothing happened. I was mowing in the garden. He just walked in; bade me good morning; admired the place; and told me he came with a message from you that things were getting hot here. Then he went off, as cool as you please. He didnt seem to mind.”

“And he warned you, in spite of all.”

“More for your sake than for mine, I suspect. He’s rather sweet on you, isnt he?”

“Oh, Duke, Duke, are you not ashamed of yourself?”

“Deuce a bit. But I’m in trouble; and I want you to stand by me. Look here, Marian, you have no nonsense about you, I know. I may tell you frankly how I am situated, maynt I?”

Marian looked at him apprehensively, and said nothing.

“You see you will only mix up matters worse than before unless you know the truth. Besides, I offered to marry her: upon my soul I did; but she refused. Her real name is Susanna Conolly: his sister, worse luck.”

“Dont tell me any more of this, Duke. It is not right.”

“I suppose it’s not right, as you say. But what am I to do? I must tell you; or you will go on making mischief with Constance.”

“As if I would tell her! I promise that she shall never know from me. Is that enough?”

“No: its too much. The plain truth is that I dont care whether she finds me out or not. I want her to understand thoroughly, once and for ever, that I wont marry her.”

“Marmaduke!”

“Not if I were fifty Marmadukes!”

“Then you will break her heart.”

“Never fear! Her heart is pretty tough, if she has one. Whether or no, I
am not going to have her forced on me by the Countess or any one else.
The truth is, Marian, they have all tried to bully me into this match.
Constance can’t complain.”

“No, not aloud.”

“Neither aloud or alow. I never proposed to her.”

“Very well, Marmaduke: there is no use now in blaming Auntie or excusing yourself. If you have made up your mind, there is an end.”

“But you cant make out that I am acting meanly, Marian. Why, I have everything to lose by giving her up. There is her money, and I suppose I must prepare for a row with the family; unless the match could be dropped quietly. Eh?”

“And is that what you want me to manage for you?”

“Well — . Come, Marian! dont be savage. I have been badly used in this affair. They forced it on me. I did all I could to keep out of it. She was thrown at my head. Besides, I once really used to think I could settle down with her comfortably some day. I only found out what an insipid little fool she was when I had a woman of sense to compare her with.”

“Dont say hard things about her. I think you might have a little forbearance towards her under the circumstances.”

“Hm! I dont feel very forbearing. She has been sticking to me for the last few days like a barnacle. Our respectable young ladies think a lot of themselves, but — except you and Nelly — I dont know a woman in society who has as much brains in her whole body as Susanna Conolly has in her little finger nail. I cant imagine how the deuce you all have the cheek to expect men to talk to you, much less marry you.”

“Perhaps there is something that honest men value more than brains.”

“I should like to know what it is. If it is something that ladies have and Susanna hasnt, it is not either good looks or good sense. If it’s respectability, that depends on what you consider respectable. If Conny’s respectable and Susanna isnt, then I prefer disrepu—”

“Hush, Duke, you know you have no right to speak to me like this. Let us think of poor Constance. How is she to be told the truth?”

“Let her find it out. I shall go back to London as soon as I can; and the affair will drop somehow or another. She will forget all about me.”

“Happy-go-lucky Marmaduke. I think if neglect and absence could make her forget you, you would have been forgotten before this.”

“Yes. You see you must admit that I gave her no reason to suppose I meant anything.”

“I am afraid you have consulted your own humor both in your neglect and your attentions, Duke. The more you try to excuse yourself, the more inexcusable your conduct appears. I do not know how to advise you. If Constance is told, you may some day forget all about your present infatuation; and then a mass of mischief and misery will have been made for nothing. If she is not told, you will be keeping up a cruel deception and wasting her chances of —— but she will never care for anybody else.”

“Better do as I say. Leave matters alone for the present. But mind! no speculating on my changing my intentions. I wont marry her.”

“I wish you hadnt told me about it.”

“Well, Marian, I couldnt help it. I know, of course, that you only wanted to make us all happy; but you nursed this match and kept it in Constance’s mind as much as you could. Besides — though it was not your fault — that mistake about Conolly was too serious not to explain. Dont be downcast: I am not blaming you a bit.”

“It seems to me that the worst view of things is always the true one in this world. Nelly and Jasper were right about you.”

“Aha! So they saw what I felt. You cant say I did not make my intentions plain enough to every unbiassed person. The Countess was determined to get Constance off her hands; Constance was determined to have me; and you were determined to stick up for your own notions of love and honeysuckles.”

“I was determined to stick up for you, Marmaduke.”

“Dont be indignant: I knew you would stick up for me in your own way. But what I want to shew is, that only three people believed that I was in earnest; and those three were prejudiced.”

“I wish you had enlightened Constance, and deceived all the rest of the world, instead. No doubt I was wrong, very wrong. I am very sorry.”

“Pshaw! It doesnt matter. It will all blow over some day. Hush, I hear the garden gate opening. It is Constance, come to spy what I am doing here with you. She is as jealous as a crocodile — very nearly made a scene yesterday because I played with Nelly against her at tennis. I have to drive her to Bushy Copse this afternoon, confound it!”

“And will you, after what you have just confessed?”

“I must. Besides, Jasper says that Conolly is coming this evening to pack up his traps and go; and I want to be out of the way when he is about.”

“This evening!”

“Yes. Between ourselves, Marian, Susanna and I were so put out by the cool way he carried on when he called, that we had a regular quarrel after he went; and we haven’t made it up yet.”

“Pray dont talk about it to me, Duke. Here is Constance.”

“So you are here,” said Constance, gaily, but with a quick glance at them. “That is a pretty way to bring your cousin in to luncheon, sir.”

“We got chatting about you, my ownest,” said Marmaduke; “and the subject was so sweet, and the moments were so fleet, that we talked for quite an hour on the strict q.t. Eh, Marian?”

“As a punishment, you shall have no lunch. Mamma is very angry with you both.”

“Always ready to make allowances for her, provided she sends you to lecture me, Conny. Why dont you wear your hat properly?” He arranged her hat as he spoke. Constance laughed and blushed. Marian shuddered. “Now youre all that fancy painted you: youre lovely, youre divine. Are you ready for Bushy Copse?”

Constance replied by singing:

”Oh yes, if you please, kind sir, she said; sir, she said; sir, she said;
Oh! yes if you ple — ease, kind sir, she said.”

“Then come along. After your ladyship,” he said, taking her elbows as if they were the handles of a wheelbarrow, and pushing her out before him through the narrow entrance to the summer-house. On the threshold he turned for a moment; met Marian’s reproachful eyes with a wink; grinned; and disappeared.

For half an hour afterward Marian sat alone in the summer-house, thinking of the mistake she had made. Then she returned to the Cottage, where she found Miss McQuinch writing in the library, and related to her all that had passed in the summer-house. Elinor listened, seated in a rocking-chair, restlessly clapping her protended ankles together. When she heard of Conolly’s relationship to Susanna, she kept still for a few moments, looking with widely opened eyes at Marian. Then, with a sharp laugh, she said:

“Well, I beg his pardon. I thought he was another of that woman’s retainers. I never dreamt of his being her brother.”

Marian was horror stricken. “You thought — ! Oh, Nelly, what puts such things into your head?”

“So would you have thought it if you had the least gumption about people. However, I was wrong; and I’m glad of it. However, I was right about Marmaduke. I told you so, over and over and over again.”

“I know you did; but I didnt think you were in earnest.”

“No, you never can conceive my being in earnest when I differ from you, until the event proves me to be right.”

“I am afraid it will kill Constance.”

“Dont, Marian!” cried Elinor, giving her chair a violent swing.

“I am quite serious. You know how delicate she is.”

“Well, if she dies of any sentiment, it will be wounded vanity. Serve her right for allowing a man to be forced into marrying her. I believe she knows in her soul that he does not care about her. Why else should she be jealous of me, of you, and of everybody?”

“It seems to me that instead of sympathizing with the unfortunate girl, both you and Marmaduke exult in her disappointment.”

“I pity her, poor little wretch. But I dont sympathize with her. I dont pity Marmaduke one bit: if the whole family cuts him he will deserve it richly, but I do sympathize with him. Can you wonder at his preference? When we went to see that woman last June I envied her. There she was, clever, independent, successful, holding her own in the world, earning her living, fascinating a crowd of people, whilst we poor respectable nonentities sat pretending to despise her — as if we were not waiting until some man in want of a female slave should offer us our board and lodging and the privilege of his lordly name with ‘Missis’ before it for our lifelong services. You may make up as many little bread-and-butter romances as you please, Marian; but I defy you to give me any sensible reason why Marmaduke should chain himself for ever to a little inane thing like Constance, when he can enjoy the society of a capable woman like that without binding himself at all.”

“Nonsense, Nelly! Really, you oughtnt to say such things.”

“No. I ought to keep both eyes tight shut so that I may be contented in that station to which it has pleased God to call me.”

“Imagine his proposing to marry her, Nell! I am just as wicked as you; for I am very glad she refused; though I cant conceive why she did it.”

“Perhaps,” said Miss McQuinch, becoming excited, “she refused because she had too much good sense: aye, and too much common decency to accept. It is all very well for us fortunate good-for-nothings to resort to prostitution — —”

“Oh, Nelly!”

“ — I say, to prostitution, to secure ourselves a home and an income. Somebody said openly in Parliament the other day that marriage was the true profession of women. So it is a profession; and except that it is a harder bargain for both parties, and that society countenances it, I dont see how it differs from what we — bless our virtuous indignation! — stigmatize as prostitution. I dont mean ever to be married, I can tell you, Marian. I would rather die than sell myself forever to a man, and stand in a church before a lot of people whilst George or somebody read out that cynically plain-spoken marriage service over me.”

“Stop Nelly! Pray stop! If you thought for a moment you would never say such awful things.”

“I thought we had agreed long ago that marriage is a mistake.”

“Yes; but that is very different to what you are saying now.”

“I cannot see — —”

“Pray stop, Nelly. Dont go on in that strain. It does no good; and it makes me very uncomfortable.”

“I’ll take it out in work,” said Nelly calmly, returning to her manuscript. “I can see that, as you say, talking does no good. All the more reason why I should have another try at earning my own living. When I become a great novelist I shall say what I like and do what I please. For the present I am your obedient, humble servant.”

At any other time Marian would have protested, and explained, and soothed. Now she was too heavily preoccupied by her guilty conscience. She strolled disconsolately to the window, and presently, seeing that Miss McQuinch was at work in earnest and had better not be disturbed, went off for a lonely walk. It was a glorious afternoon; and nature heaped its peculiar consolations on her; so that she never thought of returning until the sun was close to the horizon. As she came, tired, through the plantation, with the evening glow and the light wind, in which the branches were rustling and the leaves dropping, lulling her luxuriously, she heard some one striding swiftly along the path behind. She looked back; but there was a curve in the way; and she could not see who was coming. Then it occurred to her that it might be Conolly. Dreading to face him after what had happened, she stole aside among the trees a little way, and sat down on a stone, hoping that he might pass by without seeing her. The next moment he came round the curve, looking so resolute and vigorous that her heart became fainter as she watched him. Just opposite where she sat, he stopped, having a clear view of the path ahead for some distance, and appeared puzzled. Marian held her breath. He looked to the left through the trees, then to the right, where she was.

“Good-evening, Miss Lind,” he said respectfully, raising his hat.

“Good-evening,” said she, trembling.

“You are not looking quite well.”

“I have walked too much; and I feel a little tired. That is why I had to sit down. I shall be rested presently.”

Conolly sat down on a felled trunk opposite Marian. “This is my last visit to Carbury Towers,” he said. “No doubt you know that I am going for good.”

“Yes,” said Marian. “I — I am greatly obliged to you for all the pains you have taken with me in the laboratory. You have been very patient. I suppose I have often wasted your time unreasonably.”

“No,” said Conolly, unceremoniously, “you have not wasted my time: I never let anybody do that. My time belonged to Lord Carbury, not to myself. However, that is neither here nor there. I enjoyed giving you lessons. Unless you enjoyed taking them, the whole obligation rests on me.”

“They were very pleasant.”

He shifted himself into an easier position, looking well pleased. Then he said, carelessly, “Has Mr. Marmaduke Lind come down?”

Marian reddened and felt giddy.

“I want to avoid meeting him,” continued Conolly; “and I thought perhaps you might know enough of his movements this evening to help me to do so. It does not matter much; but I have a reason.”

Marian felt the hysteric globe at her throat as she tried to speak; but she repressed it, and said:

“Mr. Conolly: I know the reason. I did not know before: I am sure you did not think I did. I made a dreadful mistake.”

“Why!” said Conolly, with some indignation, “who has told you since?”

“Marmaduke,” said Marian, roused to reply quickly by the energy of the questioner. “He did not mean to be indiscreet: he thought I knew.”

“Thought! He never thought in his life, Miss Lind. However, he was right enough to tell you; and I am glad you know the truth, because it explains my behavior the last time we met. It took me aback a bit for the moment.”

“You were very forbearing. I hope you will not think me intrusive if I tell you how sincerely sorry I am for the misfortune which has come to you.”

“What misfortune?”

Marian lost confidence again, and looked at him in silent distress.

“To be sure,” he interposed, quickly. “I know; but you had put it all out of my head. I am much obliged to you. Not that I am much concerned about it. You will perhaps think it an instance of the depravity of my order, Miss Lind; but I am not one of those people who think it pious to consider their near relatives as if they were outside the natural course of things. I never was a good son or a good brother or a good patriot in the sense of thinking that my mother and my sister and my native country were better than other people’s because I happened to belong to them. I knew what would happen some day, though, as usual, my foreknowledge did not save me from a little emotion when the event came to pass. Besides, to tell you the truth, I dont feel it as a misfortune. You know what my sister’s profession is. You told me how you felt when you saw her act. Now, tell me fairly, and without stopping to think of whether your answer will hurt me, would you consent to know her in private even if you had heard nothing to her disadvantage? Would you invite her to your house, or go to a party at which all the other women were like her? Would you introduce young ladies to her, as you would introduce them to Miss McQuinch? Dont stop to imagine exceptional circumstances which might justify you in doing these things; but tell me yes or no, would you?”

“You see, Mr. Conolly, I should really never have an opportunity of doing them.”

“By your leave, Miss Lind, that means No. Honestly, then, what has Susanna to lose by disregarding your rules of behavior? Even if, by marrying, she conciliated the notions of your class, she would only give some man the right to ill-treat her and spend her earnings, without getting anything in return — and remember there is a special danger of that on the stage, for several reasons. She would not really conciliate you by marrying, for you wouldnt associate with her a bit the more because of her marriage certificate. Of course I am putting her self-respect out of the question, that being a matter between herself and her conscience, with which we have no concern. Believe me, neither actresses nor any other class will trouble themselves about the opinion of a society in which they are allowed to have neither part nor lot. Perhaps I am wrong to talk about such matters to you; but you are trained to feel all the worst that can be felt for my sister; and I feel bound to let you know that there is something to be said in her defence. I have no right to blame her, as she has done me no harm. The only way in which her conduct can influence my prospects will be through her being an undesirable sister-in-law in case I should want to marry.”

“If the person you choose hesitate on that account, you can let her go without regret,” said Marian. “She will not be worthy of your regard.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Conolly, laughing. “You see, Miss Lind, if that invention of mine succeeds, I may become a noted man; and it is fashionable nowadays for society to patronize geniuses who hit on a new illustration of what people call the marvels of science. I am ambitious. As a celebrity, I might win the affections of a duchess. Who knows?”

“I should not advise you to marry a duchess. I do not know many of them, as I am a comparatively humble person; but I am sure you would not like them.”

“Aye. And possibly a lady of gentle nurture would not like me.”

“On the contrary, clever people are so rare in society that I think you would have a better chance than most men.”

“Do you think my manners would pass? I learnt to dance and bow before I was twelve years old from the most experienced master in Europe; and I used to mix with all the counts, dukes, and queens in my father’s opera company, not to mention the fashionable people I have read about in novels.”

“You are jesting, Mr. Conolly. I do not believe that your manners give you the least real concern.”

“And you think that I may aspire in time — if I am successful in public — to the hand of a lady?”

“Surely you know as much of the world as I. Why should you not marry a lady, if you wish to?”

“I am afraid class prejudice would be too strong for me, after all.”

“I dont think so. What hour is it now, Mr. Conolly?”

“It wants ten minutes of seven.”

“Oh!” cried Marian, rising. “Miss McQuinch is probably wondering whether I am drowned or lost. I must get back to the Hall as fast as I can. They have returned from Bushy Copse before this; and I am sure they are asking about me.”

Conolly rose silently and walked with her as far as the path from the cottage to the laboratory.

“This is my way, Miss Lind,” said he. “I am going to the laboratory. Will you be so kind as to give my respects to Miss McQuinch. I shall not see her again, as I must return to town by the last train to-night.”

“And are you not coming back — not at all, I mean?”

“Not at all.”

“Oh!” said Marian slowly.

“Good bye, Miss Lind.”

He was about to raise his hat as usual; but Marian, with a smile, put out her hand. He took it for the first time; looked at her for a moment gravely; and left her.

Lest they should surprise one another in the act, neither of them looked back at the other as they went their several ways.

BOOK II

CHAPTER VII

In the spring, eighteen months after his daughter’s visit to Carbury Towers, Mr. Reginald Harrington Lind called at a house in Manchester Square and found Mrs. Douglas at home. Sholto’s mother was a widow lady older than Mr. Lind, with a rather glassy eye and shaky hand, who would have looked weak and shiftless in an almshouse, but who, with plenty of money, unlimited domestic service, and unhesitating deference from attendants who were all trained artists in their occupation, made a fair shew of being a dignified and interesting old lady. When he was seated, her first action was to take a new photograph from a little table at her side, and hand it to him without a word, awaiting his recognition of it with a shew of natural pride and affection which was amateurish in comparison to the more polished and skilful comedy with which her visitor took it and pretended to admire it.

“Capital. Capital,” said Mr. Lind. “He must give us one.”

“You dont think that the beard has spoiled him, do you?” said Mrs.
Douglas.

“Certainly not: it is an improvement,” said Mr. Lind, decisively. “You are glad to have him back again with you, I dare say. Ah yes, yes” (Mrs. Douglas’s eyes had answered for her). “Did he tell you that he met me? I saw him on Wednesday last for the first time since his return to London. How long was he away?”

“Two years,” she replied, with slow emphasis, as if such an absence were hardly credible. “Two long years. He has been staying in Paris, in Venice, in Florence: a month here, a week there, dissatisfied everywhere. He would have been almost as happy with me at home. And how is Marian?”

“Well,” said Mr. Lind, smiling, “I believe she is still disengaged; and she professes to be fancy free. She is fond of saying, generally, that she will never marry, and so forth. That is the new fashion with young women — if saying what they dont mean can be called a new fashion.”

“Marian is sure to get married,” said Mrs. Douglas. “She must have had offers already. There are few parents who have not cause to envy you.”

“We have both been happy in that respect, Mrs. Douglas. Sholto is a highly distinguished young man. I wish I had started in life with half his advantages. I thought at one time he was perhaps becoming attached to Marian.”

“You are quite sure, Mr. Lind, that you could forgive his being a plain gentleman? A little bird whispered to me that you desired a title for Marian.”

“My dear Mrs. Douglas, we, who are familiar with titles, understand their true value. I should be very sorry to see Marian lose, by an unsuitable alliance, the social position I have been able to give her. I should set my face resolutely against such an alliance. But few English titles can boast a pedigree comparable with Sholto’s. The name of Douglas is historic — far more so than that of Lind, which is not even English except by naturalization. Besides, Sholto’s talents are very remarkable. He will certainly adopt a political career; and, with his opportunities and abilities, a peerage is anything but a remote contingency.”

“Sholto, you know, is perfectly unembarrassed. There is not a charge on his property. I think that even Marian, good as she is, and lovely as she is, will not easily find a better match. But I am well known to be a little crazy about my dear boy. That is because I know him so much better than anyone else does. Now let us talk about other matters. Let me see. Oh yes, I got a prospectus of some company from the city the other day; and whose name should there be upon the list of directors but Reginald Harrington Lind’s! And Lord Carbury’s, too! Pray, is the entire family going into business?”

“Well, I believe the undertaking to be a commercially sound one; and—”

“Fancy you talking about commercial soundness!”

“True. It must sound strange to you. But it is no longer unusual for men in my position to take an active part in the direction of commerce. We have duties as well as privileges. I gave my name and took a few shares chiefly on the recommendation of Jasper and of my own stockbroker. I think there can be no doubt that Jasper and Mr. Conolly have made a very remarkable discovery, and one which must prove highly remunerative and beneficial.”

“What is the discovery? I did not quite understand the prospectus.”

“Well, it is called the Conolly Electro-motor.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And it — it turns all sorts of machinery. I cannot explain it scientifically to you: you would not understand me. But it is, in short, a method of driving machinery by electricity at a less cost than by steam. It is connected in principle with the conservation of energy and other technical matters. You must come and see the machinery at work some day.”

“I must, indeed. And is it true that Mr. Conolly was a common working man?”

“Yes, a practical man, undoubtedly, but highly educated. He speaks French and Italian fluently, and is a remarkable musician. Altogether a man of very superior attainments, and by no means deficient in culture.”

“Dear me! Jasper told me something of that sort about him; but Lady Carbury gave him a very different character. She assured me that he was sprung from the dregs of the people, and that she had a great deal of trouble to teach him his proper place. Still, we know that she is not very particular as to what she says when she dislikes people. Yet she ought to know; for he was Jasper’s laboratory servant — at least so she said.”

“Oh, surely not a servant. Jasper never regarded him in that light. The Countess disapproves of Jasper’s scientific pursuits, and sets her face against all who encourage him in them. However, I really know nothing about Mr. Conolly’s antecedents. His manner when he appears at our board meetings is quiet and not unpleasant. Marian, it appears, met him at Towers Cottage the year before last, and had some scientific lessons from him. He was quite unknown then. It was rather a curious coincidence. I did not know of it until about a month ago, when he read a paper at the Society of Arts on his invention. I attended the meeting with Marian; and when it was over, I introduced him to her, and was surprised to learn that they knew one another already. He told me afterward that Marian had shewn an unusual degree of cleverness in studying electricity, and that she greatly interested him at the time.”

“No doubt. Marian interests everybody; and even great discoverers, when they are young, are only human.”

“Ah! Perhaps so. But she must have shewn some ability or she would never have elicited a remark from him. He is full of his business.”

“And what is the latest news of the family scamp?”

“Do you mean my Reginald?”

“Dear me, no! What a shame to call poor Reggy a scamp! I mean young
Marmaduke, of course. Is it true that he has a daughter now?”

“Oh yes. Perfectly true.”

“The reprobate! And he was always such a pleasant fellow.”

“Yes; but he is annoyingly inconsiderate. About a fortnight ago, Marian and Elinor went to Putney to a private view at Mr. Scott’s studio. On their way back they saw Marmaduke on the river, and, rather unnecessarily, I think, entered into conversation with him. He begged them to come to Hammersmith in his boat, saying that he had something there to shew them. Elinor, it appears, had the sense to ask whether it was anything they ought not to see; but he replied on his honor that it was something perfectly innocent, and promised that they should be delighted with it. So they foolishly consented, and went with him to Hammersmith, where they left the river and walked some distance with him. He left them in a road somewhere in West Kensington, and came back after about fifteen minutes with a little girl. He actually presented her to Marian and Elinor as a member of the family whom they, as a matter of course, would like to know.”

“Well, such a thing to do! And what happened?”

“Marian seems to have thought of nothing but the prettiness of the unhappy child. She gravely informed me that she forgave Marmaduke everything when she saw how he doted on it. Elinor has always shewn a disposition to defend him — —”

“She is full of perversity, and always was.”

“ —— and this incident did not damage his credit with her. However, after the little waif had been sufficiently petted and praised to gratify Master Marmaduke’s paternal feelings, they came home, and, instead of holding their tongues, began to tell all our people what a dear little child Marmaduke had, and how they considered that it ought not to be made to suffer for his follies. In fact, I think they would have adopted it, if I had allowed them.”

“That is Marian all over. Some of her ideas will serve her very well when she goes to heaven; but they will get her into scrapes in this wicked world if you do not take care of her.”

“I fear so. For that reason I tolerate a degree of cynicism in Elinor’s character which would otherwise be most disagreeable to me. It is often useful in correcting Marian’s extravagances. Unfortunately, the incident at Hammersmith did not pass off without making mischief. It happens that my sister Julia is interested in a Home for foundling girls — a semi-private place, where a dozen children are trained as domestic servants.”

“Yes. I have been through it. It is very neat and pretty; but they really treat the poor girls as if they ought to be thankful for permission to exist. Their dresses are so ugly!”

“Possibly. I assure you that presentations are much sought after, and are very difficult to get. Julia is a patroness. Marian told her about this child of Marmaduke’s; and it happened that a vacancy had just occurred at the Home in consequence of one of the girls dying of melancholia and spinal affection. Julia, who has perhaps more piety than tact, wrote to Marmaduke offering to present his daughter, and expatiating on the advantages of the Home to the poor little lost one. In her desire to reclaim Marmaduke also, she entrusted the letter to George, who undertook to deliver it, and further Julia’s project by personal persuasion. George described the interview to me, and shewed me, I am sorry to say, how much downright ferocity may exist beneath an apparently frank, jovial, reckless exterior like Marmaduke’s.”

“Well, I hardly wonder at his refusing. Of course, he might have known that the motive of the offer was a kind one.”

“Refused! A gentleman can always refuse an offer with dignity. Marmaduke was outrageous. George — a clergyman — owed his escape from actual violence to the interference of the woman, and to a timely representation that he had undertaken to bear the message in order to soften any angry feelings that it might give rise to. Marmaduke repeatedly applied foul language to his aunt and to her offer; and George with great difficulty dissuaded him from writing a most offensive letter to her. Julia was so hurt by this that she complained to Dora — Marmaduke’s mother — who had up to that time been kept in ignorance of his doings; and now it is hard to say where the mischief will end. Dora is overwhelmed by the revelation of the life her son is leading. Marmaduke has consequently forfeited his father’s countenance, which had to be extended to him so far as to allow of his occasional appearance at home, in order to keep Dora in the dark. Now that she is enlightened, of course there is an end of all that, and he is forbidden the house.”

“What a lot of mischief! Dear me!”

“So I said to Marian. Had she refused to go up the river with Marmaduke, as she should have done, all this would not have occurred. She will not see it in that light, but lays all the blame on her aunt Julia, whose offer fell somewhat short of her own notions of providing for the child’s future.”

“How does Marmaduke stand with respect to money? I suppose his father has stopped his allowance.”

“No. He threatened to do it, and went so far as to make his solicitor write to that effect to Marmaduke, who had the consummate impudence to reply that he should in that case be compelled to provide for himself by contracting a marriage of which he could not expect his family to approve. Still, he added, if the family chose to sever their connexion with him, they could not expect him to consult their feelings in his future disposal of himself. In plain English, he threatened to marry this woman if his income was cut off. He carried his point, too; for no alteration has been made in his allowance. Indeed, as he has money of his own, and as part of the property is entailed, it would be easier to irritate him uselessly than to subject him to any material deprivation.”

“The young scamp! I wonder he was clever enough to take advantage like that.”

“He has shewn no lack of acuteness of late. I suspect he is under shrewd guidance.”

“Have you ever seen the — the guidance?”

“Not in person. I seldom enter a theatre now. But I am of course familiar with her appearance from the photographic portraits of her. They are in all the shop windows.”

“Yes. I think I have noticed them.”

“And now, Mrs. Douglas, I fear I have paid you a very long visit.”

“Why dont you come oftener?”

“I wish I could find time. I have not so much leisure for enjoyment as I used.”

“I am not so sure of that. But we are always glad to have a chat with one another, I know. We are agreed about the dear children, I think?”

“Cordially. Cordially. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

CHAPTER VIII

On the morning of the first Friday in May Marian received this letter:

“Uxbridge Road, Holland Park, W.

“DEAR MISS LIND: I must begin by explaining why I make this communication to you by letter instead of orally. It is because I am about to ask you to do me a favor. If you asked me to do anything for you, then, no matter how much my judgment might protest against my compliance, I could not without pain to myself refuse you face to face. I have no right to assume that your heart would plead on my behalf against your head in this fashion; but, on the other hand — the wish is father to the thought here — I have no right to assume that it would not. Therefore, to spare you all influences except the fair ones of your own interest and inclination, I make my proposal in writing. You will please put the usual construction on the word ‘proposal.’ What I desire is your consent to marry me. If your first impulse now is to refuse, I beg you to do so in plain terms at once, and destroy this letter without reading further. If you think, on the contrary, that we could achieve a future as pleasant as our past association has been — to me at least, here is what, as I think, you have to consider.

“You are a lady, rich, well-born, beautiful, loved by many persons besides myself, too happily circumstanced to have any pressing inducement to change your condition, and too fortunately endowed in every way to have reason to anticipate the least difficulty in changing it to the greatest worldly advantage when you please.

“What I am and have been, you know. I may estrange from you some of the society which you enjoy, and I can introduce you to none that would compensate you for the loss. I am what you call poor: my income at present does not amount to much more than fifteen hundred pounds; and I should not ask you to marry me if it were not that your own inheritance is sufficient, as I have ascertained, to provide for you in case of my early death. You know how my sister is situated; how your family are likely to feel toward me on her account and my own; and how impatient I am of devoting much time to what is fashionably supposed to be pleasure. On the other hand, as I am bidding for a consent and not for a refusal, I hope you will not take my disadvantages for more, or my advantages for less, than they are honestly worth. At Carbury Park you often said that you would never marry; and I have said the same myself. So, as we neither of us overrate the possibilities of happiness in marriage, perhaps we might, if you would be a little forbearing with me, succeed in proving that we have greatly underrated them. As for the prudence of the step, I have seen and practised too much prudence to believe that it is worth much as a rule of conduct in a world of accidents. If there were a science of life as there is one of mechanics, we could plan our lives scientifically and run no risks; but as it is, we must — together or apart — take our chance: cautiousness and recklessness divide the great stock of regrets pretty equally.

“Perhaps you will wonder at my selfishness in wanting you, for my own good, to forfeit your present happy independence among your friends, and involve your fortunes with those of a man whom you have only seen on occasions when ceremony compelled him to observe his best behavior. I can only excuse myself by reminding you that no matter whom you marry, you must do so at the same disadvantages, except as to the approval of your friends, of which the value is for you to consider. That being so, why should I not profit by your hazard as well as another? Besides, there are many other feelings impelling me. I should like to describe them to you, and would if I understood them well enough to do it accurately.

“However, nothing is further from my intention than to indite a love letter; so I will return to graver questions. One, in particular, must be clearly understood between us. You are too earnest to consider an allusion to religious matters out of place here. I do not know exactly what you believe; but I have gathered from stray remarks of yours that you belong to what is called the Broad Church. If so, we must to some extent agree to differ. I should never interfere in any way with your liberty as far as your actions concerned yourself only. But, frankly, I should not permit my wife to teach my children to know Christianity in any other way than that in which an educated Englishman knows Buddhism. I will not go through any ceremony whatever in a church, or enter one except to play the organ. I am prejudiced against religions of all sorts. The Church has made itself the natural enemy of the theatre; and I was brought up in the theatre until I became a poor workman earning wages, when I found the Church always taking part against me and my comrades with the rich who did no work. If the Church had never set itself against me, perhaps I should never have set myself against the Church; but what is done is done: you will find me irreligious, but not, I hope, unreasonable.

“I will be at the Academy to-morrow at about four o’clock, as I do not care to remain longer in suspense than is absolutely necessary; but if you are not prepared to meet me then, I shall faithfully help you in any effort I may perceive you make to avoid me.

”I am, dear Miss Lind,
”Yours sincerely,
”EDWARD CONOLLY.”

This letter conveyed to Marian hardly one of the considerations set forth in it. She thought it a frank, strong, admirable letter, just what she should have hoped from her highest estimate of him. In the quaint earnestness about religion, and the exaggerated estimate (as she thought) of the advantages which she might forfeit by marrying him, there was just enough of the workman to make them characteristic. She wished that she could make some real sacrifice for his sake. She was afraid to realize her situation at first, and, to keep it off, occupied herself during the forenoon with her household duties, with some pianoforte practice, and such other triflings as she could persuade herself were necessary. At last she quite suddenly became impatient of further delay. She sat down in a nook behind the window curtain, and re-read the letter resolutely. It disappointed her a little, so she read it again. The third time she liked it better than the first; and she would have gone through it yet again but for the arrival of Mrs. Leith Fairfax, with whom they had arranged to go to Burlington House.

“It is really a tax on me, this first day at the Academy,” said Mrs. Fairfax, when they were at luncheon. “I have been there at the press view, besides seeing all the pictures long ago in the studios. But, of course, I am expected to be there.”

“If I were in your place,” said Elinor, “I — —”

“Last night,” continued Mrs. Fairfax, deliberately ignoring her, “I was not in bed until half-past two o’clock. On the night before, I was up until five. On Tuesday I did not go to bed at all.”

“Why do you do such things?” said Marian.

“My dear, I must. John Metcalf, the publisher, came to me on Tuesday at three o’clock, and said he must have an article on the mango experiments at Kew ready for the printer before ten next morning. For his paper, the Fortnightly Naturalist, you know. ‘My dear John Metcalf,’ I said, ‘I dont know what a mango is.’ ‘No more do I, Mrs. Leith Fairfax,’ said he: ‘I think it’s something that blooms only once in a hundred years. No matter what it is, you must let me have the article. Nobody else can do it.’ I told him it was impossible. My London letter for the Hari Kari was not even begun; and the last post to catch the mail to Japan was at a quarter-past six in the morning. I had an article to write for your father, too. And, as the sun had been shining all day, I was almost distracted with hay fever. ‘If you were to go down on your knees,’ I said, ‘I could not find time to read up the flora of the West Indies and finish an article before morning.’ He went down on his knees. ‘Now Mrs. Leith Fairfax,’ said he, ‘I am going to stay here until you promise.’ What could I do but promise and get rid of him? I did it, too: how, I dont know; but I did it. John Metcalf told me yesterday that Sir James Hooker, the president of the Society for Naturalizing the Bread Fruit Tree in Britain, and the greatest living authority on the subject, has got the credit of having written my article.”

“How flattered he must feel!” said Elinor.

“What article had you to write for papa?” said Marian.

“On the electro-motor — the Conolly electro-motor. I went down to the City on Wednesday, and saw it working. It is most wonderful, and very interesting. Mr. Conolly explained it to me himself. I was able to follow every step that his mind has made in inventing it. I remember him as a common workman. He fitted the electric bell in my study four years ago with his own hands. You may remember that we met him at a concert once. He is a thorough man of business. The Company is making upward of fifty pounds an hour by the motor at present; and they expect their receipts to be a thousand a day next year. My article will be in the Dynamic Statistician next week. Have you seen Sholto Douglas since he came back from the continent?”

“No.”

“I want to see him. When you meet him next, tell him to call on me. Why has he not been here? Surely you are not keeping up your old quarrel?”

“What old quarrel?”

“I always understood that he went abroad on your account.”

“I never quarreled with him. Perhaps he did with me, as he has not come to see us since his return. It used to be so easy to offend him that his retirement in good temper after a visit was quite exceptional.”

“Come, come, my dear child! that is all nonsense. You must be kind to the poor fellow. Perhaps he will be at the Academy.”

“I hope not,” said Marian, quickly.

“Why?”

“I mean if he cherishes any grudge against me; for he will be very disagreeable.”

“A grudge against you! Ah, Marian, how little you understand him! What perverse creatures all you young people are! I must bring about an éclaircissement.”

“I advise you not to,” said Elinor. “If you succeed, no one will admit that you have done anything; and if you fail, everybody will blame you.”

“But there is nothing to be éclairci,” said Marian. We are talking nonsense, which is silly — —”

“And French, which is vulgar,” interposed Miss McQuinch, delivering the remark like a pistol shot at Mrs. Fairfax, who had been trying to convey by facial expression that she pitied the folly of Elinor’s advice, and was scandalized by her presumption in offering it. “It is time to start for the Academy.”

When they arrived at Burlington House, Mrs. Fairfax put on her gold rimmed spectacles, and led the way up the stairs like one having important business in a place to which others came for pleasure. When they had passed the turnstiles, Elinor halted, and said:

“There is no sort of reason for our pushing through this crowd in a gang of three. Besides, I want to look at the pictures, and not after you to see which way you go. I shall meet you here at six o’clock, sharp. Good-bye.”

“What an extraordinary girl!” said Mrs. Fairfax, as Elinor opened her catalogue at the end, and suddenly disappeared to the right amongst the crowd.

“She always does so,” said Marian; “and I think she is quite right. Two people cannot make their way about as easily as one; and they never want to see the same pictures.”

“But, my dear, consider the impropriety of a young girl walking about by herself.”

“Surely there is no impropriety in it. Lots of people — all sensible women do it. Who can tell, in this crowd, whether you are by yourself or not? And what does it matter if — —”

Here Mrs. Fairfax’s attention was diverted by the approach of one of her numerous acquaintances. Marian, after a moment’s indecision, slipped away and began her tour of the rooms alone, passing quickly through the first in order to escape pursuit. In the second she tried to look at the pictures; but as she now for the first time realized that she might meet Conolly at any moment, doubt as to what answer she should give him seized her; and she felt a strong impulse to fly. The pictures were unintelligible to her: she kept her face turned to the inharmonious shew of paint and gilding only because she shrank from looking at the people about. Whenever she stood still, and any man approached and remained near her, she contemplated the wall fixedly, and did not dare to look round or even to stir until he moved away, lest he should be Conolly. When she passed from the second room to the large one, she felt as though she were making a tremendous plunge; and indeed the catastrophe occurred before she had accomplished the movement, for she came suddenly face to face with him in the doorway. He did not flinch: he raised his hat, and prepared to pass on. She involuntarily put out her hand in remonstrance. He took it as a gift at once; and she, confused, said anxiously: “We must not stand in the doorway. The people cannot pass us,” as if her action had meant nothing more than an attempt to draw him out of the way. Then, perceiving the absurdity of this pretence, she was quite lost for a moment. When she recovered her self-possession they were standing together in the less thronged space near a bust of the Queen; and Conolly was saying:

“I have been here half an hour; and I have not seen a single picture.”

“Nor I,” she said timidly, looking down at her catalogue. “Shall we try to see some now?”

He opened his catalogue; and they turned together toward the pictures and were soon discussing them sedulously, as if they wished to shut out the subject of the very recent crisis in their affairs, which was nevertheless constantly present in their minds. Marian was saluted by many acquaintances. At each encounter she made an effort to appear unconcerned, and suffered immediately afterward from a suspicion that the effort had defeated its own object, as such efforts often do. Conolly had something to say about most of the pictures: generally an unanswerable objection to some historical or technical inaccuracy, which sometimes convinced her, and always impressed her with a confiding sense of ignorance in herself and infallible judgment in him.

“I think we have done enough for one day,” she said at last. “The watercolors and the sculpture must wait until next time.”

“We had better watch for a vacant seat. You must be tired.”

“I am, a little. I think I should like to sit in some other room. Mrs. Leith Fairfax is over there with Mr. Douglas — a gentleman whom I know and would rather not meet just now. You saw him at Wandsworth.”

“Yes. That tall man? He has let his beard grow since.”

“That is he. Let us go to the room where the drawings are: we shall have a better chance of a seat there. I have not seen Sholto for two years; and our last meeting was rather a stormy one.”

“What happened?”

Marian was a little hurt by being questioned. She missed the reticence of a gentleman. Then she reproached herself for not understanding that his frank curiosity was a delicate appeal to her confidence in him, and answered: “He proposed to me.”

Conolly immediately dropped the subject, and went in search of a vacant seat. They found one in the little room where the architects’ drawings languish. They were silent for some time.

Then he began, seriously: “Is it too soon to call you by your own name? ‘Miss Lind’ is distant; but ‘Marian’ might shock you if it came too confidently without preparation.”

“Whichever you please.”

“Whichever I please!”

“That is the worst of being a woman. Little speeches that are sheer coquetry when you analyze them, come to our lips and escape even when we are most anxious to be straightforward.”

“In the same way,” said Conolly, “the most enlightened men often express themselves in a purely conventional manner on subjects on which they have the deepest convictions.” This sententious utterance had the effect of extinguishing the conversation for some moments, Marian being unable to think of a worthy rejoinder. At last she said:

“What is your name?”

“Edward, or, familiarly, Ned. Commonly Ted. In America, Ed. With, of course, the diminutives Neddy, Teddy, and Eddy.”

“I think I should prefer Ned.”

“I prefer Ned myself.”

“Have you any other name?”

“Yes; but it is a secret. Why people should be plagued with two Christian names, I do not know. No one would have believed in the motor if they had known that my name was Sebastian.”

“Sebastian!”

“Hush. I was actually christened Edoardo Sebastiano Conolly. My father used to spell his name Conollj whilst he was out of Italy. I have frustrated the bounty of my godfathers by suppressing all but the sensible Edward Conolly.”

There was a pause. Then Marian spoke.

“Do you intend to make our — our engagement known at once?”

“I have considered the point; and as you are the person likely to be inconvenienced by its publication, I am bound to let you conceal it for the present, if you wish to. It must transpire sometime: the sooner the better. You will feel uncomfortably deceitful with such a secret; and as for me, every time your father greets me cordially in the City I shall feel mean. However, you can watch for your opportunity. Let me know at once when the cat comes out of the bag.”

“I will. I think, as you say, the right course is to tell at once.”

“Undoubtedly. But from the moment you do so until we are married you will be worried by remonstrances, entreaties, threats, and what not; so that we cannot possibly make that interval too short.”

“We must take Nelly into our confidence. You will not object to that?”

“Certainly not. I like Miss McQuinch.”

“You really do! Oh, I am so glad. Well, we are accustomed to go about together, especially to picture galleries. We can come to the Academy as often as we like; and you can come as often as you like, can you not?”

“Opening day, for instance.”

“Yes, if you wish.”

“Let us say between half-past four and five, then. I would willingly be here when the doors open in the morning; but my business will not do itself while I am philandering and making you tired of me before your time. The consciousness of having done a day’s work is necessary to my complete happiness.”

“I, too, have my day’s work to do, silly as it is. I have to housekeep, to receive visitors, to write notes about nothing, and to think of the future. We can say half-past four or any later hour that may suit you.”

“Agreed. And now, Marian — —”

“Dont let me disturb you,” said Miss McQuinch, at his elbow, to Marian; “but Mrs. Leith Fairfax will be here with Sholto Douglas presently; and I thought you might like to have an opportunity of avoiding him. How do you do, Mr. Conolly?”

“I must see him sooner or later,” said Marian, rising. “Better face him at once and get it over. I will go back by myself and meet them.” Then, with a smile at Conolly, she went out through the door leading to the water-color gallery.

“Marian does not stand on much ceremony with you, Mr. Conolly,” said
Miss McQuinch, glancing at him.

“No,” said Conolly. “Do you think you could face the Academy again on
Monday at half-past four?”

“Why?”

“Miss Lind is coming to meet me here at that hour.”

“Marian!”

“Precisely. Marian. She has promised to marry me. At present it is a secret. But it was to be mentioned to you.”

“It will not be a secret very long if you allow people to overhear you calling her by her Christian name in the middle of the Academy, as you did me just now,” said Elinor, privately much taken aback, but resolute not to appear so.

“Did you overhear us? I should have been more careful. You do not seem surprised.”

“Just a little, at your audacity. Not in the least at Marian’s consenting.”

“Thank you.”

“I did not mean it in that way at all,” said Elinor resentfully. “I think you have been very fortunate, as I suppose you would have married somebody in any case. I believe you are able to appreciate her. That’s a compliment.”

“Yes. I hope I deserve it. Do you think you will ever forgive me for supplanting the hero Marian deserves?”

“If you had let your chance of her slip, I should have despised you, I think: at least, I should if you had missed it with your eyes open. I am so far prejudiced in your favor that I think Marian would not like you unless you were good. I have known her to pity people who deserved to be strangled; but I never knew her to be attracted by any unworthy person except myself; and even I have my good points. You need not trouble yourself to agree with me: you could not do less, in common politeness. As I am rather tired, I shall go and sit in the vestibule until the others are ready to go home. In the meantime you can tell me all the particulars you care to trust me with. Marian will tell me the rest when we go home.”

“That is an undeserved stab,” said Conolly.

“Never mind: I am always stabbing people. I suppose I like it,” she added, as they went together to the vestibule.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Leith Fairfax had not been wasting her time. She had come upon Douglas in the large room, and had recognized him by his stature and proud bearing, in spite of the handsome Assyrian beard he had allowed to grow during his stay abroad.

“I have been very anxious to see you,” said she, forcing a conversation upon him, though he had saluted her formally, and had evidently intended to pass on without speaking. “If your time were not too valuable to be devoted to a poor hard-working woman, I should have asked you to call on me. Dont deprecate my forbearance. You are Somebody in the literary world now.”

“Indeed? I was not aware that I had done anything to raise me from obscurity.”

“I assure you you are very much mistaken, or else very modest. Has no one told you about the effect your book produced here?”

“I know nothing of it, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. I never enquire after the effect of my work. I have lived in comparative seclusion; and I scarcely know what collection of fugitive notes of mine you honor by describing as a book.”

“I mean your ‘Note on three pictures in last year’s Salon,’ with the sonnets, and the fragment from your unfinished drama. Is it finished, may I ask?”

“It is not finished. I shall never finish it now.”

“I will tell you — between ourselves — that I heard one of the foremost critics of the age say, in the presence of a great poet (whom we both know), that it was such another fragment as the Venus of Milo, ‘whose lost arms,’ said he, ‘we should fear to see, lest they should be unworthy of her.’ ‘You are right,’ said the poet: ‘I, for one, should shudder to see the fragment completed.’ That is a positive fact. But look at some of the sonnets! Burgraves says that his collection of English sonnets is incomplete because it does not contain your ‘Clytemnestra,’ which he had not seen when his book went to press. You stand in the very forefront of literature — far higher than I, who am — dont tell anybody — five years older than you.”

“You are very good. I do not value any distinction of the sort. I write sometimes because, I suppose, the things that are in me must come out, whether I will or not. Let us talk of something else. You are quite well I hope?”

“Very far from it. I am never well; but since I never have a moment’s rest from work, I must bear with it. People expect me to think, when I have hardly time to eat.”

“If you have no time to think, I envy you. But I am truly sorry that your health remains so bad.”

“Thank you. But what is the cause of all this gloomy cynicism, Mr. Douglas? Why should you, who are young, distinguished, gifted, and already famous, envy me for having no leisure to think?”

“You exaggerate the sadness of my unfortunate insensibility to the admiration of the crowd,” said Douglas, coldly. “I am, nevertheless, flattered by the interest you take in my affairs.”

“You need not be, Mr. Douglas,” said Mrs. Fairfax, earnestly, fearing that he would presently succeed in rebuffing her. “I think you are much better off than you deserve. You may despise your reputation as much as you like: that only affects yourself. But when a beautiful girl pays you the compliment of almost dying of love for you, I think you ought to buy a wedding-ring and jump for joy, instead of sulking in remote corners of the continent.”

“And pray, Mrs. Leith Fairfax, what lady has so honored me?”

“You must know, unless you are blind.”

“Pardon me. I do not habitually imply what is not the case. I beg you to believe that I do not know.”

“Not know! What moles men are! Poor Marian!”

“Oblige me by taking this seat,” said Douglas, sternly, pointing to one just vacated. “I shall not detain you many minutes,” he added, sitting down beside her. “May I understand that Miss Lind is the lady of whom you spoke just now?”

“Yes. Remember that I am speaking to you as a friend, and that I trust to you not to mention the effort I am making to clear up the misunderstanding which causes her so much unhappiness.”

“Are you then in Miss Lind’s confidence? Did she ask you to tell me this?”

“What do you mean, Mr. Douglas?”

“I am quite innocent of any desire to shock or offend you, Mrs. Leith
Fairfax. Does your question imply a negative?”

“Most certainly. Marian ask me to tell! you must be dreaming. Do you think, even if Marian were capable of making an advance, that I would consent to act as a go-between? Really, Mr. Douglas!”

“I confess I do not understand these matters; and you must bear with my ineptitude. If Miss Lind entertains any sentiment for me but one of mistrust and aversion, her behavior is singularly misleading.”

“Mistrust! Aversion! I tell you she is in love with you.”

“But you have not, you admit, her authority for saying so, whereas I have her authority for the contrary.”

“You do not understand girls. You are mistaken.”

“Possibly; but you must pardon me if I hesitate to set aside my own judgment in deference to your low estimate of it.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Fairfax, her patience yielding a little to his persistent stiffness: “be it so. Many men would be glad to beg what you will not be bribed to accept.”

“No doubt. I trust that when they so humble themselves they may not encounter a flippant repulse.”

“If they do, it will spring from her unmerited regard for you.”

He bowed slightly, and turned away, arranging his gloves as if about to rise.

“Pray what is that large picture which is skied over there to the right?” said Mrs. Fairfax, after a pause, during which she had feigned to examine her catalogue. “I cannot see the number at this distance.”

“Do you defend her conduct on the ground of that senseless and cruel caprice which your sex seem to consider becoming to them; or has she changed her mind in my absence?”

“Oh! you are talking of Marian. I do not know what you have to complain of in her conduct. Mind, she has never breathed a word to me on the subject. I am quite ignorant of the details of your difference with her. But she has confessed to me that she is very sorry for what passed — I am abusing her confidence by telling you so — and I am a woman, with eyes and brains, and know what the poor girl feels well enough. I will tell you nothing more: I have no right to; and Marian would be indignant if she knew how much I have said already. But I know what I should do were I in your place.”

“Expose myself to another refusal, perhaps?”

Mrs. Fairfax, learning now for the first time that he had actually proposed to Marian, looked at him for some moments in silence with a smile which was assumed to cover her surprise. He thought it expressed incredulity at the idea of his being refused again.

“Are you sure?” he began, speaking courteously to her for the first time. “May I rely upon the accuracy of your impressions on this subject? I know you are incapable of trifling in a matter which might expose me to humiliation; but can you give me any guarantee — any—”

“Certainly not, Mr. Douglas. I am really sorry that I cannot give you a written undertaking that your suit shall succeed: perhaps that might encourage you to brave the scorn of a poor child who adores you. But if you need so much encouragement, I fear you do not greatly relish the prospect of success. Doubtless it has already struck her that since you found absence from her very bearable for two years, and have avoided meeting her on your return, her society cannot be very important to your happiness.”

“But it was her own fault. If she accuses me of having gone away to enjoy myself, her thoughts are a bitter sarcasm on the truth.”

“Granted that it was her own fault, if you please. But surely you have punished her enough by your long seclusion, and can afford to shew a tardy magnanimity by this time. There she is, I think, just come in at the door on the left. My sight is so wretched. Is it not she?”

“Yes.”

“Then let us get up and speak to her. Come.”

“You must excuse me, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. I have distinctly given her my word that I will not intrude upon her again.”

“Dont be so foolish.”

Douglas’s face clouded. “You are privileged to say so,” he said.

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Fairfax, frightened. “But when I think of Marian, I feel like an old woman, and venture to remonstrate with all the presumption of age. I beg your pardon.”

He bowed. Then Marian joined them, and Mrs. Fairfax again gave tongue.

“Where have you been?” she cried. “You vanished from my side like a sprite. I have been searching for you ever since.”

“I have been looking at the pictures, of course. I am so glad you have come back, Sholto. I think you might have made time to pay us a visit before this. You look so strong and well! Your beard is a great improvement. Have you met Nelly?”

“I think we saw her at some distance,” said Douglas. “I have not been speaking to her.”

“How did you enjoy yourself while you were away?”

“As best I could.”

“You look as if you had succeeded very fairly. What o’clock is it?
Remember that we have to meet Nelly at the turnstiles at six.”

“It is five minutes to six now, Miss Lind.”

“Thank you, Mr. Douglas. We had better go, I think.”

As they left the room, Mrs. Fairfax purposely lingered behind them.

“Am I right in concluding that you are as frivolous as ever, Marian?” he said.

“Quite,” she replied. “To-day especially so. I am very happy to-day.”

“May I ask why?”

“Something has happened. I will tell you what it is some day perhaps, but not now. Something that realizes a romantic dream of mine. The dream has been hovering vaguely about me for nearly two years; but I never ventured to teach myself exactly what it was until to-day.”

“Realized here? in the Academy?”

“It was foreshadowed — promised, at home this morning; but it was realized here.”

“Did you know beforehand that I was coming?”

“Not until to-day. Mrs. Leith Fairfax said that you would most likely be here.”

“And you are happy?”

“So much so that I cannot help talking about my happiness to you, who are the very last person — as you will admit when everything is explained — to whom I should unlock my lips on the subject.”

“And why? Am I not interested in your happiness?”

“I suppose so. I hope so. But when you learn the truth, you will be more astonished than gratified.”

“I dare swear that you are mistaken. Is this dream of yours an affair of the heart?”

“Now you are beginning to ask questions.”

“Well, I will ask no more at present. But if you fear that my long absence has rendered me indifferent in the least degree to your happiness, you do me a great injustice.”

“Well, you were not in a very good humor with me when you went away.”

“I will forget that if you wish me to.”

“I do wish you to forget it. And you forgive me?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Then we are the best friends in the world again. This is a great deal better than meeting and pretending to ignore the very thing of which our minds are full. You will not delay visiting us any longer now, I hope.”

“I will call on your father to-morrow morning. May I?”

“He is out of town until Monday. He will be delighted to see you then. He has been talking to me about you a great deal of late. But if you want to see him in the morning you had better go to the club. I will write to him to-night if you like; so that he can write to you and make an appointment.”

“Do. Ah, Marian, instinct is better and truer than intellect. I have been for two years trying to believe all kinds of evil of you; and yet I knew all the time that you were an angel.”

Marian laughed. “I suppose that under our good understanding I must let you say pretty things to me. You must write me a sonnet before your enthusiasm evaporates. I am sure I deserve it as well as Clytemnestra.”

“I will. But I fear I shall tear it up for its unworthiness afterward.”

“Dont: I am not a critic. Talking of critics, where has Mrs. Leith
Fairfax gone to? Oh, there she is!”

Mrs. Fairfax came up when she saw Marian look round for her. “My dear,” she said: “it is past six. We must go. Elinor may be waiting for us.”

They found Elinor seated in the vestibule with Conolly, at whom Mrs. Fairfax plunged, full of words. Conolly and Douglas, introduced to one another by Marian, gravely raised their hats. When they had descended the stairs, they stood in a group near one of the doors whilst Conolly went aside to get their umbrellas. Just then Marmaduke Lind entered the building, and halted in surprise at finding himself among so many acquaintances.

“Hallo!” he cried, seizing Douglas’s hand, and attracting the attention of the bystanders by his boisterous tone. “Here you are again, old man! Delighted to see you. Didnt spot you at first, in the beard. George told me you were back. I met your mother in Knightsbridge last Thursday; but she pretended not to see me. How have you enjoyed yourself abroad, eh? Very much in the old style, I suppose?”

“Thank you,” said Douglas. “I trust your people are quite well.”

“Hang me if I know!” said Marmaduke. “I have not troubled them much of late. How d’ye do, Mrs. Leith Fairfax? How are all the celebrities?” Mrs. Fairfax bowed coldly.

“Dont roar so, Marmaduke,” said Marian. “Everybody is looking at you.”

“Everybody is welcome,” said Marmaduke, loudly. “Douglas: you must come and see me. By Jove, now that I think of it, come and see me, all of you. I am by myself on week-nights from six to twelve; and I should enjoy a housewarming. If Mrs. Leith Fairfax comes, it will be all proper and right. Let us have a regular party.”

Mrs. Fairfax looked indignantly at him. Elinor looked round anxiously for Conolly. Marian, struck with the same fear, moved toward the door.

“Here, Marmaduke,” she said, offering him her hand. “Good-bye. You are in one of your outrageous humors this afternoon.”

“What am I doing?” he replied. “I am behaving myself perfectly. Let us settle about the party before we go.”

“Good evening, Mr. Lind,” said Conolly, coming up to them with the umbrellas. “This is yours, I think, Mrs. Leith Fairfax.”

“Good evening,” said Marmaduke, subsiding. “I —— Well, you are all off, are you?”

“Quite time for us, I think,” said Elinor. “Good-bye.”

Mrs. Fairfax, with a second and more distant bow, passed out with
Conolly and Douglas. Elinor waited a moment to whisper to Marmaduke.

“First rate,” said Marmaduke, in reply to the whisper; “and beginning to talk like one o’clock. Oh yes, I tell you!” He shook Elinor’s hand at such length in his gratitude for the inquiry that she was much relieved when a servant in livery interrupted him.

“Missus wants to speak to you, sir, afore she goes,” said the man.

Elinor shook her head at Marmaduke, and hurried away to rejoin the rest outside. As they went through the courtyard, they passed an open carriage, in which reclined a pretty woman with dark eyes and delicate artificial complexion. Her beauty and the elegance of her dress attracted their attention. Suddenly Marian became aware that Conolly was watching her as she looked at the woman in the carriage. She was about to say something, when, to her bewilderment, Elinor nudged her. Then she understood too, and looked solemnly at Susanna. Susanna, observing her, stared insolently in return, and Marian averted her head like a guilty person and hurried on. Conolly saw it all, and did not speak until they rejoined Mrs. Fairfax and Douglas in Piccadilly.

“How do you propose to go home?” said Douglas.

“Walk to St. James’s Street, where the carriage is waiting at the club; take Uncle Reginald with us; and drive home through the park,” said Elinor.

“I will come with you as far as the club, if you will allow me,” said
Douglas.

Conolly then took leave of them, and stood still until they disappeared, when he returned to the courtyard, and went up to his sister’s carriage.

“Well, Susanna,” said he. “How are you?”

“Oh, there’s nothing the matter with me,” she replied carelessly, her eyes filling with tears, nevertheless.

“I hear that I have been an uncle for some time past.”

“Yes, on the wrong side of the blanket.”

“What is its name?” he said more gravely.

“Lucy.”

“Is it quite well?”

“I suppose not. According to Nurse, it is always ill.”

Conolly shrugged his shoulders, and relapsed into the cynical manner in which he had used to talk with his sister. “Tired of it already?” he said. “Poor little wretch!”

“It is very well off,” she retorted, angrily: “a precious deal better than I was at its age. It gets petting enough from its father, heaven knows! He has nothing else to do. I have to work.”

“You have it all your own way at the theatre now, I suppose. You are quite famous.”

“Yes,” she said, bitterly. “We are both celebrities. Rather different from old times.”

“We certainly used to get more kicks than halfpence. However, let us hope all that is over now.”

“Who were those women who were with you a minute ago?”

“Cousins of Lind. Miss Marian Lind and Miss McQuinch.”

“I remember. She is pretty. I suppose, as usual, she hasnt an idea to bless herself with. The other looks more of a devil. Now that you are a great man, why dont you marry a swell?”

“I intend to do so.”

“The Lord help her then!”

“Amen. Good-bye.”

“Oh, good-bye. Go on to Soho,” she added, to the coachman, settling herself fretfully on the cushions.

CHAPTER IX

On Monday morning Douglas received a note inviting him to lunch at Mr. Lind’s club. He had spent the greater part of the previous night composing a sonnet, which he carried with him in his pocket to St. James’s Street. Mr. Lind received him cordially; listened to an account of his recent stay abroad; and described his own continental excursions, both gentlemen expressing great interest at such coincidences as their having put up at the same hotel or travelled by the same line of railway. When luncheon was over, Mr. Lind proposed that they should retire to the smoking-room.

“I should like to have a few words with you first, as we are alone here,” said Douglas.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Lind, assuming a mild dignity in anticipation of being appealed to as a parent. “Certainly, Sholto.”

“What I have to say, coming so soon after my long absence, will probably surprise you. I had it in contemplation before my departure, and was only prevented from broaching it to you then by circumstances which have happily since lost their significance. When I tell you that my communication has reference to Marian, you will perhaps guess its nature.”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Lind, affecting surprise. “Well, Sholto, if it be so, you have my heartiest approval. You know what a lonely life her marriage will entail on me; so you will not expect me to consent without a few regrets. But I could not desire a better settlement for her. She must leave me some day. I have no right to complain.”

“We shall not be very far asunder, I hope; and it is in Marian’s nature to form many ties, but to break none.”

“She is an amiable girl, my — my darling child. Does she know anything of this?”

“I am here at her express request; and there remains to me the pleasure of getting her own final consent, which I would not press for until armed with your sanction.”

Except for an involuntary hitch of his eyelids, Mr. Lind looked as if he believed perfectly in Douglas’s respect for his parental claims. “Quite right,” he said, “quite right. You have my best wishes. I have no doubt you will succeed: none. There are, of course, a few affairs to be settled — a few contingencies to be provided for — children — accidents — and so forth. No difficulty is likely to arise between us on that score; but still, these things have to be arranged.”

“I propose a very simple method of arranging them. You are a man of honor, and more conversant with business than I. Give me your instructions. My lawyer shall have them within half an hour.”

“That is said like a gentleman and a Douglas, Sholto. But I must consider before giving you an answer. You have thrown upon me the duty of studying your position as well as Marian’s; and I must neither abuse your generosity nor neglect her interest.”

“You will, nevertheless, allow me to consider the conditions as settled, since I leave them entirely in your hands.”

“My own means have been seriously crippled by the extravagance of Reginald. Indeed both my boys have cost me much money. I had not, like you, the good fortune to be an only son. I was the fourth son of a younger son: there was very little left for me. I will treat Marian as liberally as I can; but I fear I cannot do anything for her that will bear comparison with your munificence.”

“Surely I can give her enough. I should prefer to be solely responsible for her welfare.”

“Oh no. That would be too bad. Oh no, Sholto: I will give her something, please God.”

“As you wish, Mr. Lind. We can arrange it to your satisfaction afterward. Do you intend returning to Westbourne Terrace soon?”

“I am afraid not. I have to go into the City. If you would care to come with me, I can shew you the Company’s place there, and the working of the motor. It is well worth seeing. Then you can return with me to the Terrace and dine with us. After dinner you can talk to Marian.”

Douglas consented; and they went to Queen Victoria Street, to a building which had on each doorpost a brass shield inscribed THE CONOLLY ELECTRO-MOTOR COMPANY OF LONDON, LIMITED. At the offices, on the first floor, they were received obsequiously and informed that Mr. Conolly was within. They then went to a door on which appeared the name of the inventor, and entered a handsomely furnished office containing several working models of machinery, and a writing-table, from his seat at which Conolly rose to salute his visitors.

“Good evening, Mr. Lind. How do you do, Mr. Douglas?”

“Oh!” said Mr. Lind. “You two are acquainted. I did not know that.”

“Yes,” said Conolly, “I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Douglas at the
Academy yesterday evening.”

“Indeed? Marian did not mention that you were there. Well, can we see the wonders of the place, Mr. Conolly; or do we disturb you?”

“Not at all,” replied Conolly, turning to one of the models, and beginning his showman’s lecture with disquieting promptitude. “Hitherto, as you are no doubt aware, Mr. Douglas, steam has kept electricity, as a motive power, out of the field; because it is much less expensive. Even induced magnetic currents, the cheapest known form of electric energy, can be obtained only by the use of steam power. You generate steam by the combustion of coal: electricity, without steam, can only be generated by the combustion of metals. Coal is much cheaper than metal: consider the vast amount of coal consumed in smelting metals. Still, electricity is a much greater force than steam: it’s stronger, so to speak. Sixpennorth of electricity would do more work than sixpennorth of steam if only you could catch it and hold it without waste. Up to the present the waste has been so enormous in electric engines as compared with steam engines that steam has held its own in spite of its inferior strength. What I have invented is, to put it shortly, an electric engine in which there is hardly any waste; and we can now pump water, turn mill-stones, draw railway trains, and lift elevators, at a saving, in fuel and labor, of nearly seventy per cent, of the cost of steam. And,” added Conolly, glancing at Douglas, “as a motor of six-horsepower can be made to weigh less than thirty pounds, including fuel, flying is now perfectly feasible.”

“What!” said Douglas, incredulously. “Does not all trustworthy evidence prove that flying is a dream?”

“So it did; because a combination of great power with little weight, such as an eagle, for instance, possesses, could not formerly be realized in a machine. The lightest known four-horse-power steam engine weighs nearly fifty pounds. With my motor, a machine weighing thirty pounds will give rather more than six-horse-power, or, in other words, will produce a wing power competent to overcome much more than its own gravity. If the Aeronautical Society does not, within the next few years, make a machine capable of carrying passengers through the air to New York in less than two days, I will make one myself.”

“Very wonderful, indeed,” said Douglas, politely, looking askance at him.

“No more wonderful than the flight of a sparrow, I assure you. We shall presently be conveyed to the top of this building by my motor. Here you have a model locomotive, a model steam hammer, and a sewing machine: all of which, as you see, I can set to work. However, this is mere show. You must always bear in mind that the novelty is not in the working of these machines, but the smallness of the cost of working.”

Douglas endured the rest of the exhibition in silence, understanding none of the contrivances until they were explained, and not always understanding them even then. It was disagreeable to be instructed by Conolly — to feel that there were matters of which Conolly knew everything and he nothing. If he could have but shaped a pertinent question or two, enough to prove that he was quite capable of the subject if he chose to turn his attention to it, he could have accepted Conolly’s information on the machinery as indifferently as that of a policeman on the shortest way to some place that it was no part of a gentleman’s routine to frequent. As it was, he took refuge in his habitual reserve, and, lest the exhibition should be prolonged on his account, took care to shew no more interest in it than was barely necessary to satisfy Mr. Lind. At last it was over; and they returned westward together in a hansom.

“He is a Yankee, I suppose,’” said Douglas, as if ingenuity were a low habit that must be tolerated in an American.

“Yes. They are a wonderful people for that sort of thing. Curious turn of mind the mechanical instinct is!”

“It is one with which I have no sympathy. It is generally subject to the delusion that it has a monopoly of utility. Your mechanic hates art; pelts it with lumps of iron; and strives to extinguish it beneath all the hard and ugly facts of existence. On the other hand, your artist instinctively hates machinery. I fear I am an artist.”

“I dont think you are quite right there, Sholto. No. Look at the steam engine, the electric telegraph, the — the other inventions of the century. How could we get on without them?”

“Quite as well as Athens got on without them. Our mechanical contrivances seem to serve us; but they are really mastering us, crowding and crushing the beauty out of our lives, and making commerce the only god.”

“I certainly admit that the coarser forms of Radicalism have made alarming strides under the influence of our modern civilization. But the convenience of steam conveyance is so remarkable that I doubt if we could now dispense with it. Nor, as a consistent Liberal, a moderate Liberal, do I care to advocate any retrogression, even in the direction of ancient Greece.”

Douglas was seized with a certain impatience of Mr. Lind, as of a well-mannered man who had never learned anything, and had forgotten all that he had been taught. He did not attempt to argue, but merely said, coldly: “I can only say that I wish Fate had made me an Athenian instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth century.”

Mr. Lind smiled complacently: he knew Douglas, if not Athens, better, but was in too tolerant a humor to say so. Little more passed between the two until they reached Westbourne Terrace, where Marian and her cousin were dressing for dinner. When Marian came down, her beauty so affected Douglas that his voice was low and his manner troubled as he greeted her. He took her in to dinner, and sat in silence beside her, heedless alike of his host’s commonplaces and Miss McQuinch’s acridities.

Mr. Lind unceremoniously took a nap after his wine that evening, and allowed his guest to go upstairs alone. Douglas hoped that Elinor would be equally considerate, but, to his disappointment, he found her by herself in the drawing-room. She hastened to explain.

“Marian is looking for some music. She will be back directly.”

He sat down and took an album from the table, saying: “Have you many new faces here?”

“Yes. But we never discard old faces for new ones. It is the old ones that are really interesting.”

“I have not seen this one of Mr. Lind before. It is capital. Ah! this of you is an old friend.”

“Yes. What do you think of the one of Constance on the opposite page?”

“She looks as if she were trying to be as lugubrious as possible. What dress is that? Is it a uniform?”

“Yes. She joined a nursing guild. Didnt Mrs. Douglas tell you?”

“I believe so. I forgot. She went into a cottage hospital or something of that kind, did she not?”

“She left it because one of the doctors offended her. He was rather dreadful. He said that in two months she had contributed more to the mortality among the patients than he had in two years, and told her flatly that she had been trained for the drawing-room and ought to stay there. She was glad enough to have an excuse for leaving; for she was heartily sick of making a fool of herself.”

“Indeed! Where is she now?”

“Back at Towers Cottage, moping, I suppose. That’s Mr. Conolly the inventor, there under Jasper.”

“So I perceive. Clever head, rather! A plain, hard nature, with no depths in it. Is that his wife, with the Swiss bonnet?”

“His wife! Why, that is a Swiss girl, the daughter of a guide at Chamounix, who nursed Marian when she sprained her ankle. Mr. Conolly is not married.”

“I thought men of his stamp always married early.”

“No. He is engaged, and engaged to a lady of very good position.”

“He owes that to the diseased craving of modern women for notoriety of any sort. What an admirable photograph of Marian! I never saw it before. It is really most charming. When was it taken?”

“Last August, at Geneva. She does not like it — thinks it too coquettish.”

“Then perhaps she will give it to me.”

“She will be only too glad, I daresay. You have caught her at a soft moment to-night.”

“I cannot find that duet anywhere,” said Marian, entering. “What! up already, Sholto? Where is papa?”

“I left him asleep in the dining-room. I have just been asking Miss
McQuinch whether she thought you would give me a copy of this carte.”

“That Geneva one. It is most annoying how people persist in admiring it. It always looks to me as if it belonged to an assortment of popular beauties at one shilling each. I dont think I have another. But you may take that if you wish.”

“Thank you,” said Douglas, drawing it from the book.

“I think you have a copy of every photograph I have had taken in my life,” she said, sitting down near him, and taking the album. “I have several of yours, too. You must get one taken soon for me; I have not got you with your beard yet. I have a little album upstairs which Aunt Dora gave me on my eighth birthday; and the first picture in it is you, dressed in flannels, holding a bat, and looking very stern as captain of your eleven at Eton. I used to stand in great awe of you then. Do you remember telling me once that ‘Zanoni’ was a splendid book, and that I ought to read it?”

“Pshaw! No. I must have been a young fool. But it seems that I had the grace even then to desire your sympathy.”

“I assure you I read it most reverently down in Wiltshire, where Nelly kept a select library of fiction concealed underneath her mattress; and I believed every word of it. Nelly and I agreed that you were exactly like Zanoni; but she was hardly to blame; for she had never seen you.”

“Things like that make deep impressions on children,” said Elinor, thoughtfully. “You were a Zanoni in my imagination for years before I saw you. When we first met you treated me insufferably. If you had known how my childish fancy had predisposed me to worship you, you might have vouchsafed me some more consideration, and I might have gone on believing you a demigod to the end of the chapter. I have hardly forgiven you yet for disenchanting me.”

“I am sorry,” said Douglas sarcastically. “I must have been sadly lacking in impressiveness. But on the other hand I recollect that you did not disappoint me in the least. You fully bore out the expectations I had been led to form of you.”

“I have no doubt I did,” said Elinor. “Yet I protest that my reputation was as unjust as yours. However, I have outlived my sensitiveness to this injustice, and have even contracted a bad habit of pretending to act up to it occasionally before foolish people. Marian: are you sure that duet is not on the sofa in my room?”

“Oh, the sofa! I looked only in the green case.”

“I will go and hunt it out myself. Excuse me for a few minutes.”

Douglas was glad to see her go. Yet he was confused when he was alone with Marian. He strolled to the window, outside which the roof of the porch had been converted into a summer retreat by a tent of pink-striped canvass. “The tent is up already,” he said. “I noticed it as we came in.”

“Yes. Would you prefer to sit there? We can carry out this little table, and put the lamp on it. There is just room for three chairs.”

“We need not crowd ourselves with the table,” he said. “There will be light enough. We only want to talk.”

“Very well,” said Marian, rising. “Will you give me that woolen thing that is on the sofa? It will do me for a shawl.” He placed it on her shoulders, and they went out.

“I will sit in this corner,” said Marian. “You are too big for the campstool. You had better bring a chair. I am fond of sitting here. When the crimson shade is on the lamp, and papa asleep in its roseate glow, the view is quite romantic: there is something ecstatically snug in hiding here and watching it.” Douglas smiled, and seated himself as she suggested, near her, with his shoulder against the stone balustrade.

“Marian,” said he, after a pause: “you remember what passed between us at the Academy yesterday?”

“You mean our solemn league and covenant. Yes.”

“Why did we not make that covenant before? Life is not so long, nor happiness so common, that we can afford to trifle away two years of it. I wish you had told me when I last came here of that old photograph of mine in your album.”

“But this is not a new covenant. It is only an old one mended. We were always good friends until you quarrelled and ran away.”

“That was not my fault, Marian.”

“Then it must have been mine. However, it does not matter now.”

“You are right. Prometheus is unbound now; and his despair is only a memory sanctifying his present happiness. You know why I called on your father this morning?”

“It was to see the electro-motor in the city, was it not?”

“Good Heavens, Marian!” he said, rising, “what spirit of woman or spirit of mischief tempts you to coquet with me even now?”

“I really thought that was the reason — besides, of course, your desire to make papa amends for not having been to see him sooner after your return.”

“Marian!” he said, still remonstrantly.

She looked at him with sudden dread, and instinctively recognized the expression in his face.

“You know as well as I,” he continued, “that I went to seek his consent to our solemn league and covenant, as you call it. If that covenant were written on your heart as it is on mine, you would not inflict on me this pretty petty torture. Your father has consented: he is delighted. Now may I make a guess at that happy secret you told me of yesterday, and promised I should know one day?”

“Stop! Wait,” said Marian, very pale. “I must tell you that secret myself.”

“Hush. Do not be so moved. Remember that your confession is to be whispered to me alone.”

“Dont talk like that. It is all a mistake. My secret has nothing to do with you.” Douglas drew back a little way.

“I am engaged to be married.”

“What do you mean?” he said sternly, advancing a step and looking down menacingly at her with his hand on the back of his chair.

“I have said what I mean,” replied Marian with dignity. But she rose quickly as soon as she had spoken, and got past him into the drawing-room. He followed her; and she turned and faced him in the middle of the room, paler than before.

“You are engaged to me,” he said.

“I am not,” she replied.

“That is a lie!” he exclaimed, struggling in his rage to break through the strong habit of self-control. “It is a damnable lie; but it is the most cruel way of getting rid of me, and therefore the one most congenial to your heartlessness.”

“Sholto,” said Marian, her cheeks beginning to redden: “you should not speak to me like that.”

“I say,” he cried fiercely, “that it is a lie!”

“Whats the matter?” said Elinor, coming hastily into the room.

“Sholto has lost his temper,” said Marian, firmly, her indignation getting the better of her fear now that she was no longer alone with him.

“It is a lie,” repeated Douglas, unable to shape a new sentence. Elinor and Marian looked at one another in perplexity. Then Mr. Lind entered.

“Gently, pray,” said he. “You can be heard all through the house.
Marian: what is the matter?”

She did not answer; but Douglas succeeded, after a few efforts, in speaking intelligibly. “Your daughter,” he said, “with the assistance of her friend Mrs. Leith Fairfax, and a sufficient degree of direct assurance on her own part, has achieved the triumph of bringing me to her feet a second time, after I had unfortunately wounded her vanity by breaking her chains for two years.”

“That is utterly false,” interrupted Marian, with excitement.

“I say,” said Douglas, in a deeper tone and with a more determined manner, “that she set Mrs. Leith Fairfax on me with a tale of love and regret for my absence. She herself with her own lips deliberately invited me to seek your consent to our union. She caused you to write me the invitation I received from you this morning. She told me that my return realized a dream that had been haunting her for two years. She begged me to forgive her the past, and to write her a sonnet, of which she said she was at least more worthy than Clytemnestra, and of which I say she is at best less worthy than Cressida.” He took a paper from his pocket as he spoke; and, with a theatrical gesture, tore it into fragments.

“This is very extraordinary,” said Mr. Lind irresolutely. “Is it some foolish quarrel, or what is the matter? Pray let us have no more unpleasantness.”

“You need fear none from me,” said Douglas. “I do not propose to continue my acquaintance with Miss Lind.”

“Mr. Douglas has proposed to marry me; and I have refused him,” said Marian. “He has lost his temper and insulted me. I think you ought to tell him to go away.”

“Gently, Marian, gently. What am I to believe about this?”

“What I have told you,” said Douglas, “I confirm on my honor, which you can weigh against the pretences of a twice perjured woman.”

“Sholto!”

“I have to speak plainly on my own behalf, Mr. Lind. I regret that you were not in a position this morning to warn me of your daughter’s notable secret.”

“If it is a secret, and you are a gentleman, you will hold your tongue,” interposed Elinor, sharply.

“Papa,” said Marian: “I became engaged yesterday to Mr. Conolly. I told Mr. Douglas this in order to save him from making me a proposal. That is the reason he has forgotten himself. I had not intended to tell you so suddenly; but this misunderstanding has forced me to.”

“Engaged to Mr. Conolly!” cried Mr. Lind. “I begin to fear that —— Enga — —” He took breath, and continued, to Marian: “I forbid you to entertain any such engagement. Sholto: there is evidently nothing to be gained by discussing this matter in hot blood. It is some girlish absurdity — some — some — some—”

“I apologize for having doubted the truth of the excuse,” said Douglas; “but I see that I have failed to gauge Miss Lind’s peculiar taste. I beg you to understand, Mr. Lind, that my pretensions are at an end. I do not aspire to the position of Mr. Conolly’s rival.”

“You are already in the position of Mr. Conolly’s unsuccessful rival; and you fill it with a very bad grace,” said Elinor.

“Pray be silent, Elinor,” said Mr. Lind. “This matter does not concern you. Marian: go to your room for the present. I shall speak to you afterwards.”

Marian flushed, and repressed a sob. “I wish I were under his protection now,” she said, looking reproachfully at Douglas as she crossed the room.

“What can you expect from a father but hostility?” said Elinor, bitterly. “You are a coward, like all your sex,” she added, turning to Douglas. Then she suddenly opened the door, and passed out through it with Marian, whilst the housemaids fled upstairs, the footman shrank into a corner of the landing, and the page hastily dragged the cook down to the kitchen.

The two men, left together in the drawing-room, were for some moments quite at a loss. Then Mr. Lind, after a preliminary cough or two, said: “Sholto: I cannot describe to you how shocked I am by what I have just heard. I am deeply disappointed in Marian. I trusted her implicitly; but of course I now see that I have been wrong in allowing her so much liberty. Evidently a great deal has been going on of which I had not any suspicion.”

Douglas said nothing. His resentment was unabated; but his rage, naturally peevish and thin in quality, was subsiding, though it surged back on him at intervals. But now that he no longer desired to speak passionately, he would not trust himself to speak at all. Suddenly Mr. Lind broke out with a fury that astonished him, preoccupied as he was.

“This — this fellow must have had opportunities of thrusting himself into her society of which I knew nothing. I thought she barely knew him. And if I had known, could I have suspected her of intriguing with an ill-bred adventurer! Yes, I might: my experience ought to have warned me that the taint was in her blood. Her mother did the same thing — left the position I had given her to run away with a charlatan, disgracing me without the shadow of an excuse or reason except her own innate love for what was low. I thought Marian had escaped that. I was proud of her — placed un — unbounded confidence in her.”

“She has struck me a blow,” said Douglas, “the infernal treachery —— .” He checked himself, and after a moment resumed in his ordinary formal manner. “I must leave you, Mr. Lind. I am quite unable at present to discuss what has passed. Any conventional expressions of regret would be —— Good-night.”

He bowed and left the room. Mr. Lind, taken aback, did not attempt to detain him or even return his bow, but stood biting his lips with a frown of discomfiture and menace. When he was alone, he paced the room several times. Then he procured some writing materials and sat down before them. He wrote nothing, but, after sitting for some time, he went upstairs. Passing Marian’s room he listened. The sharp voice and restless movements of his niece were the only sounds he heard. They seemed to frighten him; for he stole on quickly to his own room, and went to bed. Even there he could hear a shrill note of conversation occasionally from the opposite room, where Marian was sitting on a sofa, trying to subdue the hysteria which had been gaining on her since her escape from the balcony; whilst Elinor, seated on the corner of a drawer which projected from the dressing-table, talked incessantly in her most acrid tones.

“Henceforth,” she said, “Uncle Reginald is welcome to my heartiest detestation. I have been waiting ever since I knew him for an excuse to hate him; and now he has given me one. He has taken part — like a true parent — against you with a self-intoxicated fool whom he ought to have put out of the house. He has told me to mind my own business. I shall be even with him for that some day. I am as vindictive as an elephant: I hate people who are not vindictive: they are never grateful either, only incapable of any enduring sentiment. And Douglas! Sholto Douglas! The hero, the Newdigate poet, the handsome man! What a noble fellow he is when a little disappointment rubs his varnish off! I am glad I called him a coward to his face. I am thoroughly well satisfied with myself altogether: at last I have come out of a scene without having forgotten the right thing to say. You never see people in all their selfishness until they pretend to love you. See what you owe to your loving suitor, Sholto Douglas! See what you owe to your loving father, Reginald Lind!”

“I do not think that my father should have told me to leave the room,” said Marian. “It was Sholto’s place to have gone, not mine.”

“Mr. Lind, who has so suddenly and deservedly descended from ‘papa’ to ‘my father,’ judiciously sided with the stronger and richer party.”

“Nelly: I shall be as unhappy after this as even Sholto can desire. I feel very angry with papa; and yet I have no right to be. I suppose it is because I am in the wrong. I deceived him about the engagement.”

“Bosh! You didnt tell him because you knew you couldnt trust him; and now you see how right you were.”

“Even so, Nelly, I must not forget all his past care of me.”

“What care has he ever taken of you? He was very little better acquainted with you than he was with me, when you came to keep house for him and make yourself useful. Of course, he had to pay for your board and lodging and education. The police would not have allowed him to leave you to the parish. Besides, he was proud of having a nice, pretty daughter to dispose of. You were quite welcome to be happy so long as you did not do anything except what he approved of. But the moment you claim your independence as a grown woman, the moment you attempt to dispose of yourself instead of letting him dispose of you! Bah! I might have been my father’s pet, if I had been a nonentity. As it was, he spared no pains to make me miserable; and as I was only a helpless little devil of a girl, he succeeded to his heart’s content. Uncle Reginald will try to do exactly the same to-morrow, he will come and bully you, instead of apologizing as he ought. See if he doesnt!”

“If I had as much reason to complain of my childhood as you have, perhaps I should not feel so shocked and disappointed by his turning on me to-night. Surely, when he saw me attacked as I was, he ought to have come to my assistance.”

“Any stranger would have taken your part. The footman would, if you had asked him. But then, James is not your father.”

“It seems a very small thing to be bidden to leave the room. But I will never expose myself to a repetition of it.”

“Quite right. But what do you mean to do? for, after all, though parental love is an imposition, parental authority is a fact.”

“I will get married.”

“Out of the frying pan into the fire! Certainly, if you are resolved to marry, the present is as good as another time, and more convenient. But there must be some legal formalities to go through. You cannot turn into the first church you meet, and be married off-hand.”

“Ned must find out all that. I am sadly disappointed and disilluded,
Nelly.”

“Time will cure you as it does everybody; and you will be the better for being wiser. By the bye, what did Sholto mean about Mrs. Fairfax?”

“I dont know.”

“She has evidently been telling him a parcel of lies. Do you remember her hints about him yesterday at lunch? I have not the least doubt that she has told him you are frantically in love with him. She as good as told you the same about him.”

“Oh! she is not capable of doing such a thing.”

“Isnt she? We shall see.”

“I dont know what to think,” said Marian, despondently. “I used to believe that both you and Ned thought too little of other people; but it seems now that the world is nothing but a morass of wickedness and falsehood. And Sholto, too! Who would have believed that he could break out in that coarse way? Do you remember the day that Fleming, the coachman, lost his temper with Auntie down at the Cottage. Sholto was exactly like that; not a bit more refined or dignified.”

“Rather less so, because Fleming was in the right. Let us go to bed. We can do nothing to-night, but fret, and wish for to-morrow. Better get to sleep. Resentment does not keep me awake, I can vouch for that: I got well broken in to it when I was a child. I heard Uncle Reginald going to his room some time ago. I am getting sleepy, too, though I feel the better for the excitement.”

“Very well. To bed be it,” said Marian. But she did not sleep at all as well as Nelly.

CHAPTER X

Next morning Mr. Lind rose before his daughter was astir, and went to his club, where he breakfasted. He then went to the offices in Queen Victoria Street. Finding the board-room unoccupied, he sat down there, and said to one of the clerks:

“Go and tell Mr. Conolly that I desire to speak to him, if he is disengaged. And if anyone wants to come in, say that I am busy here. I do not wish to be disturbed for half an hour or so.”

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk, departing. A minute later, he returned, and said: “Mr. Conly is disengaged; and he says will you be so good as to come to his room, sir.”

“I told you to ask him to come here,” said Mr. Lind.

“Well, thats what he said, sir,” said the clerk, speaking in official
Board School English. “Shloy gow to him and tell him again?”

“No, no: it does not matter,” said Mr. Lind, and walked out through the office. The clerk held the door open for him, and carefully closed it when he had passed through.

“Ow, oy sy!” cried the clerk. “This is fawn, this is.”

“Wots the row?” said another clerk.

“Woy, owld Lind sends me in to Conly to cam in to him into the board-room. ‘Aw right,’ says Conly, ‘awsk him to cam in eah to me.’ You should ‘a seen the owld josser’s feaches wnoy towld im. ‘Oyd zoyred jou to sy e was to cam in eah to me.’ ‘Shloy gow and tell him again?’ I says, as cool as ennything. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘Oil gow myself.’ Thets wot Aw loike in Conly. He tikes tham fellers dahn wen they troy it on owver im.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Lind went to Conolly’s room; returned his greeting by a dignified inclination of the head; and accepted, with a cold “Thank you,” the chair offered him. Conolly, who had received him cordially, checked himself. There was a pause, during which Mr. Lind lost countenance a little. Then Conolly sat down, and waited.

“Ahem!” said Mr. Lind. “I have to speak to you with — with reference to — to a — a matter which has accidentally come to my knowledge. It would be painful and unnecessary — quite unnecessary, to go into particulars.”

Conolly remained politely attentive, but said nothing. Mr. Lind began to feel very angry, but this helped him to the point.

“I merely wish — that is, I quite wish you to understand that any intimacy that may have arisen between you and — and a member of my family must — must, in short, be considered to be at an end. My daughter is — I may tell you — engaged to Mr. Sholto Douglas, whom you know; and therefore — you understand.”

“Mr. Lind,” said Conolly, decisively: “your daughter is engaged to me.”

Mr. Lind lost his temper, and rose, exclaiming, “I beg you will not repeat that, either here or elsewhere.”

“Pray be seated,” said Conolly courteously.

“I have nothing more to say, sir.”

Conolly rose, as though the interview were at an end, and seemed to wait for his visitor to go.

“We understand one another, I presume,” said Mr. Lind, dubiously.

“Not quite, I think,” said Conolly, relenting. “I should suggest our discussing the matter in full, now that we have a favorable opportunity — if you will be so good.”

Mr. Lind sat down, and said with condescension, “I am quite willing to listen to you.”

“Thank you,” said Conolly. “Will you tell me what your objections are to my engagement with your daughter?”

“I had hoped, sir, that your common sense and knowledge of the world would have rendered an explanation superfluous.”

“They havnt,” said Conolly.

Mr. Lind rose to boiling point again. “Oh, Mr. Conolly, I assure you I have no objection to explain myself: none whatever. I merely wished to spare you as far as possible. Since you insist on my mentioning what I think you must be perfectly well aware of, I can only say that from the point of view of English society our positions are different; and therefore an engagement between you and any member of my family is unsuitable, and — in short — out of the question, however advantageous it might be to you. That is all.”

Mr. Lind considered he had had the better of that, and leaned back in his chair more confidently. Conolly smiled and shook his head, appreciative of the clearness with which Mr. Lind had put his case, but utterly unmoved by it. He considered for a moment, and then said, weighing his words carefully:

“Your daughter, with her natural refinement and delicate habits, is certainly not fit to be married to a foul-mouthed fellow, ignorant, dirty, besotted, and out of place in any company except at the bar in a public house. That is probably your idea of a workman. But the fact of her having consented to marry me is a proof that I do not answer to any such description. As you have hinted, it will be an advantage to me in some ways to have a lady for my wife; but I should have no difficulty in purchasing that advantage, even with my present means, which I expect to increase largely in the course of some years. Do you not underrate your daughter’s personal qualities when you assume that it was her position that induced me to seek her hand?”

“I am quite aware of my daughter’s personal advantages. They are additional reasons against her contracting an imprudent marriage.”

“Precisely. But in what respect would her marriage with me be imprudent? I possess actual competence, and a prospect of wealth. I come of a long lived and healthy family. My name is, beyond comparison, more widely known than yours. [Mr. Lind recoiled]. I now find myself everywhere treated with a certain degree of consideration, which an alliance with your daughter will not diminish.”

“In fact, you are conferring a great honor on my family by condescending to marry into it?”

“I dont understand that way of looking at things, Mr. Lind; and so I leave you to settle the question of honor as you please. But you must not condemn me for putting my position in the best possible light in order to reconcile you to an inevitable fact.”

“What do you mean by an inevitable fact, sir?”

“My marriage, of course. I assure you that it will take place.”

“But I shall not permit it to take place. Do you think to ignore me in the matter?”

“Practically so. If you give your consent, I shall be glad for the sake of Marian, who will be gratified by it. But if you withhold it, we must dispense with it. By opposing us, you will simply — by making Marian’s home unbearable to her — precipitate the wedding.” Conolly, under the influence of having put the case neatly, here relaxed his manner so far as to rest his elbows on the table and look pleasantly at his visitor.

“Do you know to whom you are speaking?” said Mr. Lind, driven by rage and a growing fear of defeat into desperate self-assertion.

“I am speaking,” said Conolly with a smile, “to my future father-in-law.”

“I am a director of this company, of which you are the servant, as you shall find to your cost if you persist in holding insulting language to me.”

“If I found any director of this company allowing other than strictly business considerations to influence him at the Board, I should insist on his resigning.”

Mr. Lind looked at him severely, then indignantly, then unsteadily, without moving him in the least. At last he said, more humbly: “I hope you will not abuse your position, Mr. Conolly. I do not know whether you have sufficient influence over Marian to induce her to defy me; but however that may be, I appeal to your better feelings. Put yourself in my place. If you had an only daughter — —”

“Excuse my interrupting you,” said Conolly, gently; “but that will not advance the argument unless you put yourself in mine. Besides, I am pledged to Marian. If she asks me to break off the match, I shall release her instantly.”

“You will bind yourself to do that?”

“I cannot help myself. I have no more power to make her marry me than you have to prevent her.”

“I have the authority of a parent. And I must tell you, Mr. Conolly, that it will be my duty to enlighten my poor child as to the effect a union with you must have on her social position. You have made the most of your celebrity and your prospects. She may be dazzled for the moment; but her good sense will come to the rescue yet, I am convinced.”

“I have certainly spared no pains to persuade her. Unless the habit of her childhood can induce Marian to defer to your prejudice — you must allow me to call it so: it is really nothing more — she will keep her word to me.”

Mr. Lind winced, recollecting how little his conduct toward Marian during her childhood was calculated to accustom her to his influence. “It seems to me, sir,” he said, suddenly thinking of a new form of reproach, “that, to use your own plain language, you are nothing more or less than a Radical.”

“Radicalism is not considered a reproach amongst workmen,” said Conolly.

“I shall not fail to let her know the confidence with which you boast of your power over her.”

“I have simply tried to be candid with you. You know exactly how I stand. If I have omitted anything, ask me, and I will tell you at once.”

Mr. Kind rose. “I know quite as much as I care to know,” he said. “I distinctly object to and protest against all your proceedings, Mr. Conolly. If my daughter marries you, she shall have neither my countenance in society nor one solitary farthing of the fortune I had destined for her. I recommend the latter point to your attention.”

“I have considered it carefully, Mr. Lind; and I am satisfied with what she possesses in her own right.”

“Oh! You have ascertained that, have you?”

“I should hardly have proposed to marry her but for her entire pecuniary independence of me.”

“Indeed. And have you explained to her that you wish to marry her for the sake of securing her income?”

“I have explained to her everything she ought to know, taking care, of course, to have full credit for my frankness.”

Mr. Lind, after regarding him with amazement for a moment, walked to the door.

“I am a gentleman,” he said, pausing there for a moment, “and too old-fashioned to discuss the obligations of good breeding with a Radical. If I had believed you capable of the cynical impudence with which you have just met my remonstrances, I should have spared myself this meeting. Good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” said Conolly, gravely. When the door closed, he sprang up and walked to and fro, chuckling, rubbing his hands, and occasionally uttering a short laugh. When he had sufficiently relieved himself by this exercise, he sat down at his desk, and wrote a note.

”The Conolly Electro-Motor Company of London, Limited. Queen
Victoria Street, E.C.

“This is to let your ever-radiant ladyship know that I am fresh from an encounter with your father, who has retired in great wrath, defeated, but of opinion that he deserved no better for arguing with a Radical. I thought it better to put forth my strength at once so as to save future trouble. I send this post haste in order that you may be warned in case he should go straight home and scold you. I hope he will not annoy you much. — E.C.”

Having despatched the office boy to Westbourne Terrace with this letter, Conolly went off to lunch. Mr. Lind went back to his club, and then to Westbourne Terrace, where he was informed that the young ladies were together in the drawing-room. Some minutes later, Marian, discussing Conolly’s letter with Elinor, was interrupted by a servant, who informed her that her father desired to see her in his study.

“Now for it, Marian!” said Nelly, when the servant was gone. “Remember that you have to meet the most unreasonable of adversaries, a parent asserting his proprietary rights in his child. Dont be sentimental. Leave that to him: he will be full of a father’s anguish on discovering that his cherished daughter has feelings and interests of her own. Besides, Conolly has crushed him; and he will try to crush you in revenge.”

“I wish I were not so nervous,” said Marian. “I am not really afraid, but for all that, my heart is beating very unpleasantly.”

“I wish I were in your place,” said Elinor. “I feel like a charger at the sound of the trumpet.”

“I am glad, for poor papa’s sake, that you are not,” said Marian, going out.

She knocked at the study door; and her father’s voice, as he bade her come in, impressed her more than ever before. He was seated behind the writing-table, in front of which a chair was set for his daughter. She, unaccustomed from her childhood to submit to any constraint but that which the position of a guest, which she so often occupied, had trained her to impose on herself, was rather roused than awed by this magisterial arrangement. She sat down with less than her usual grace of manner, and looked at him with her brows knitted. It was one of the rare moments in which she reminded him of her mother. An angry impulse to bid her not dare look so at him almost got the better of him. However, he began prudently with a carefully premeditated speech.

“It is my duty, Marian,” he said gravely, “to speak of the statement you made last night. We need not allude to the painful scene which took place then: better let that rest and be forgotten as soon as possible. But the discovery of what you have been doing without my knowledge has cost me a sleepless night and a great deal of anxiety. I wish to reason with you now quite calmly and dispassionately; and I trust you will remember that I am older and have far more experience of the world than you, and that I am a better judge of your interests than you yourself can possibly be. Ahem! I have been this morning to the City, where I saw Mr. Conolly, and endeavored to make him understand the true nature of his conduct toward me — and, I may add, toward you — in working his way clandestinely into an intimacy with you. I shall not describe to you what passed; but I may say that I have found him to be a person with whom you could not hope for a day’s happiness. Even apart from his habits and tastes, which are those of a mere workman, his social (and, I fear, his religious) views are such as no lady, no properly-minded woman of any class, could sympathize with. You will be better able to judge of his character when I tell you that he informed me of his having taken care, before making any advances to you, to ascertain how much money you had. He boasted in the coarsest terms of his complete influence over you, evidently without a suspicion of the impression of venality and indelicacy which his words were calculated to make on me. Besides, Marian, I am sure you would not like to contract a marriage which would give me the greatest pain; which would offend my family; and which would have the effect of shutting you out from all good society.”

“You are mistaken in him, papa.”

“I beg you will allow me to finish, Marian. [He had to think for a moment before he could substantiate this pretence of having something more to say.] I have quite made up my mind, from personal observation of Mr. Conolly, that even an ordinary acquaintance between you is out of the question. I, in short, refuse to allow anything of the kind to proceed; and I must ask you to respect my wishes in the matter. There is another subject which I will take this opportunity of mentioning; but as I have no desire to force your inclinations, I shall not press you for a declaration of your feelings at present. Sholto Douglas — —”

“I do not want to hear anything about Sholto Douglas,” said Marian, rising.

“I expect you, Marian, to listen to what I have to say.”

“On that subject I will not listen. I have felt very sore and angry ever since you told me last night to leave the room when Sholto insulted me, as if I were the aggressor.”

“Angry! I am sorry to hear you say so to me.”

“It is better to say so than to think so. There is no use in going on with this conversation, papa. It will only lead to more bitterness between us; and I had enough of that when I tasted it for the first time last night. We shall never agree about Mr. Conolly. I have promised to marry him; and therefore I am not free to withdraw, even if I wished to.”

“A promise made by you without my sanction is not binding. And — listen to me, if you please — I have obtained Mr. Conolly’s express assurance that if you wish to withdraw, he is perfectly willing that you should.”

“Of course, he would not marry me if I did not wish it.”

“But he is willing that you should withdraw. He leaves you quite free.”

“Yes; and, as you told me, he is quite confident that I will keep faith with him; and so I will. I have had a letter from him since you saw him.”

“What!” said Mr. Lind, rising also.

“Dont let us quarrel, papa,” said Marian, appealingly. “Why may I not marry whom I please?”

“Who wants to prevent you, pray? I have most carefully abstained from influencing you with regard to Sholto Douglas. But this is a totally different question. It is my duty to save you from disgracing yourself.”

“Where is the disgrace? Mr. Conolly is an eminent man. I am not poor, and can afford to marry anyone I can respect. I can respect him. What objection have you to him? I am sure he is far superior to Sholto.”

“Mr. Douglas is a gentleman, Marian: Mr. Conolly is not; and it is out of the question for you to ally yourself with a — a member of the proletariat, however skilful he may be in his handicraft.”

“What is a gentleman, papa?”

“A gentleman, Marian, is one who is well born and well bred, and who has that peculiar tone and culture which can only be acquired by intercourse with the best society. I think you should know that as well as I. I hope you do not put these questions from a desire to argue with me.”

“I only wish to do what is right. Surely there is no harm in arguing when one is not convinced.”

“Humph! Well, I have said all that is necessary. I am sure that you will not take any step calculated to inflict pain on me — at least an act of selfishness on your part would be a new and shocking experience for me.

“That is a very unfair way of putting it, papa. You give me no good reason for breaking my word, and making myself unhappy; and yet you accuse me of selfishness in not being ready to do both.”

“I think I have already given you my assurance, weighted as it is by my age, my experience, my regard for your welfare, and, I hope, my authority as a parent, that both your honor and happiness will be secured by your obeying me, and forfeited by following your own headstrong inclinations.”

Marian, almost crushed by this, hesitated a moment, twisting her fingers and looking pitiably at him. Then she thought of Conolly; rallied; and said: “I can only say that I am sorry to disagree with you; but I am not convinced.”

“Do you mean that you refuse to obey me?”

“I cannot obey you in this matter, papa. I—”

“That is enough,” said Mr. Lind, gravely, beginning, to busy himself with the writing materials. Marian for a moment seemed about to protest against this dismissal. Then she checked herself and went out of the room, closing the door quite quietly behind her, thereby unconsciously terrifying her father, who had calculated on a slam.

“Well,” said Elinor, when her cousin rejoined her in the drawing-room: “have you been selfish and disobedient? Have you lacerated a father’s heart?”

“He is thoroughly unfair,” said Marian. “However, it all comes to this: he is annoyed at my wanting to marry Ned: and I believe there will be no more peace for me until I am in a house of my own. What shall we do in the meantime? Where shall we go? I cannot stay here.”

“Why not? Uncle Reginald will sulk; sit at dinner without speaking to us; and keep out of our way as much as he can. But you can talk to me: we neednt mind him. It is he who will be out in the cold, biting his nose to vex his face. Such a state of things is new to you; but I have survived weeks of it without a single sympathizer, and been none the worse, except, perhaps, in temper. He will pretend to be inexorable at first: then he will come down to wounded affection; and he will end by giving in.”

“No, Nelly, I couldnt endure that sort of existence. If people cannot remain friends they should separate at once. I will not sleep in this house to-night.”

“Hurrah!” cried Miss McQuinch. “That will be beginning the war with spirit. If I were in your place, I would stay and fight it out at close quarters. I would make myself so disagreeable that nobody can imagine what life in this house would be. But your plan is the best — if you really mean it.”

“Certainly I mean it. Where shall we go, Nelly?”

“Hm! I am afraid none of the family would make us very comfortable under the circumstances, except Marmaduke. It would be a splendid joke to go to West Kensington; only it would tell as much against us and Ned as against the Roman father. I have it! We will go to Mrs. Toplis’s in St. Mary’s Terrace: my mother always stays there when she is in town. Mrs. Toplis knows us: if she has a room to spare she will give it to us without making any bother.”

“Yes, that will do. Are you ready to come now?”

“If you can possibly wait five minutes I should like to put on my hat and change my boots. We will have to come back and pack up when we have settled about the room. We cannot go without clothes. I should like to have a nightdress, at least. Have you any money?”

“I have the housekeeping money; but that, of course, I shall not take. I have thirty pounds of my own.”

“And I have my old stocking, which contains nearly seventeen. Say fifty in round numbers. That will keep us going very comfortably for a month.”

“Ridiculous! It will last longer than that. Oh!”

“Well?”

“We mustnt go, after all. I forgot you.”

“What of me?”

“Where will you go when I am married? You cant live by yourself; and papa may not welcome you back if you take my part against him.”

“He would not, in any case; so it makes no difference to me. I can go home if the worst comes to the worst. It does not matter: my present luxurious existence must come to an end some time or another, whether we go to Mrs. Toplis’s or not.”

“I am sure Ned will not object to your continuing with me, if I ask him.”

“No, poor fellow! He wont object — at first; but he might not like it. You have no right to inflict me on him. No: I stick to my resolution on that point. Send for the carriage. It is time for us to be off; and Mrs. Toplis will be more impressed if we come in state than if we trudge afoot.”

“Hush,” said Marian, who was standing near the window. “Here is George, with a face full of importance.”

“Uncle Reginald has written to him,” said Elinor.

“Then the sooner we go, the better,” said Marian.

“I do not care to have the whole argument over again with George.”

As they passed through the hall on their way out they met the clergyman.

“Well, George,” said Elinor, “how are the heathen getting on in
Belgravia? You look lively.”

“Are you going out, Marian,” he said, solemnly, disregarding his cousin’s banter.

“We are going to engage a couple of rooms for some errant members of the family,” said Elinor. “May we give you as a reference?”

“Certainly. I may want to speak to you before I go, Marian. When will you return?”

“I do not know. Probably we shall not be long. You will have plenty of opportunities, in any case.”

“Will you walk into the study, please, sir,” said the parlormaid.

The Rev. George was closeted with his father for an hour. When he came out, he left the house, and travelled by omnibus to Westbourne Grove, whence he walked to a house in Uxbridge Road. Here he inquired for Mr. Conolly, and, learning that he had just come in, sent up a card. He was presently ushered into a comfortable room, with a pleasant view of the garden. A meal of tea, wheatcakes, and fruit was ready on the table. Conolly greeted his visitor cordially, and rang for another cup. The Rev. George silently noted that his host dined in the middle of the day and had tea in the evening. Afraid though as he was of Conolly, he felt strengthened in his mission by these habits, quite out of the question for Marian. The tea also screwed up his courage a little; but he talked about the electro-motor in spite of himself until the cloth was removed, when Conolly placed two easy chairs opposite one another at the window; put a box of cigarets on a little table close at hand; and invited his visitor to smoke. But as it was now clearly time to come to business, the cigaret was declined solemnly. So Conolly, having settled himself in an easy attitude, waited for the clergyman to begin. The Rev. George seemed at a loss.

“Has your father spoken to you about an interview he had with me this morning?” said Conolly, good-naturedly helping him out.

“Yes. That, in fact, is one of the causes of my visit.”

“What does he say?”

“I believe he adheres to the opinion he expressed to you. But I fear he may not have exhibited that self-control in speaking to you which I fully admit you have as much right to expect as anyone else.”

“It does not matter. I can quite understand his feeling.”

“It does matter — pardon me. We should be sorry to appear wanting in consideration for you.”

“That is a trifle. Let us keep the question straight before us. We need make no show of consideration for one another. I have shown none toward your family.”

“But I assure you our only desire is to arrange everything in a friendly spirit.”

“No doubt. But when I am bent on doing a certain thing which you are equally bent on preventing, no very friendly spirit is possible except one of us surrender unconditionally.”

“Hear me a moment, Mr. Conolly. I have no doubt I shall be able to convince you that this romantic project of my sister’s is out of the question. Your ambition — if I may say so without offence — very naturally leads you to think otherwise; but the prompting of self-interest is not our safest guide in this life.”

“It is the only guide I recognize. If you are going to argue the question, and your arguments are to prevail, they must be addressed to my self-interest.”

“I cannot think you quite mean that, Mr. Conolly.”

“Well, waive the point for the present: I am open to conviction. You know what my mind is. I have not changed it since I saw your father this morning. You think I am wrong?”

“Not wrong. I do not say for a moment that you are wrong. I — —”

“Mistaken. Ill-advised. Any term you like.”

“I certainly believe that you are mistaken. Let me urge upon you first the fact that you are causing a daughter to disobey her father. Now that is an awful fact. May I — appealing to that righteousness in which I am sure you are not naturally deficient — ask you whether you have reflected on that fact?”

“It is not half so awful to me as the fact of a father forcing his daughter’s inclinations. However, awful is hardly the word for the occasion. Let us come to business, Mr. Lind. I want to marry your sister because I have fallen in love with her. You object. Have you any other motive than aristocratic exclusiveness?”

“Indeed, you quite mistake. I have no such feeling. We are willing to treat you with every possible consideration.”

“Then why object?”

“Well, we are bound to look to her happiness. We cannot believe that it would be furthered by an unsuitable match. I am now speaking to you frankly as a man of the world.”

“As a man of the world you know that she has a right to choose for herself. You see, our points of view are different. On Sundays, for instance, you preach to a highly privileged audience at your church in Belgravia; whilst I lounge here over my breakfast, reading Reynold’s Newspaper. I have not many social prejudices. Although a workman, I dont look on every gentleman as a bloodsucker who seizes on the fruits of my labor only to pursue a career of vice. I will even admit that there are gentlemen who deserve to be respected more than the workmen who have neglected all their opportunities — slender as they are — of cultivating themselves a little. You, on the other hand, know that an honest man’s the noblest work of God; that nature’s gentlemen are the only real gentlemen; that kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood, and so forth. But when your approval of these benevolent claptraps is brought to such a practical test as the marriage of your sister to a workman, you see clearly enough that they do not establish the suitability of personal intercourse between members of different classes. That being so, let us put our respective philosophies of society out of the question, and argue on the facts of this particular case. What qualifications do you consider essential in a satisfactory brother-in-law?”

“I am not bound to answer that; but, primarily, I should consider it necessary to my sister’s happiness that her husband should belong to the same rank as she.”

“You see you are changing your ground. I am not in the same rank — after your sense — as she; but a moment ago you objected to the match solely on the ground of unsuitability.”

“Where is the difference?” said the clergyman, with some warmth. “I have not changed my ground at all. It is the difference in rank that constitutes the unsuitability.

“Let us see, then, how far you are right — how far suitability is a question of rank. A gentleman may be, and frequently is, a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, or all three combined.”

“Stay, Mr. Conolly! You show how little you understand the only true significance — —”

“One moment, Mr. Lind. You are about to explain away the term gentleman into man of honor, honest man, or some other quite different thing. Let me put a case to you. I have a fellow at Queen Victoria Street working for thirty shillings a week, who is the honestest man I know. He is as steady as a rock; supports all his wife’s family without complaining; and denies himself beer to buy books for his son, because he himself has experienced what it is to be without education. But he is not a gentleman.”

“Pardon me, sir. He is a true gentleman.”

“Suppose he calls on you to-morrow, and sends up his name with a request for an interview. You wont know his name; and the first question you will put to your servant is ‘What sort of person is he?’ Suppose the servant knows him, and, sharing your professed opinion of the meaning of the word, replies ‘He is a gentleman!’ On the strength of that you will order him to be shewn in; and the moment you see him you will feel angry with your servant for deceiving you completely as to the sort of man you were to expect by using the word gentleman in what you call its true sense. Or reverse the case. Suppose the caller is your cousin, Mr. Marmaduke Lind, and your high-principled servant by mistaking the name or how not, causes you to ask the same question with respect to him. The answer will be that Mr. Marmaduke — being a scamp — is not a gentleman. You would be just as completely deceived as in the other case. No, Mr. Lind, you might as well say that this workman of mine is a true lord or a true prince as a true gentleman. A gentleman may be a rogue; and a knifegrinder may be a philosopher and philanthropist. But they dont change their ranks for all that.”

The clergyman hesitated. Then he said timidly, “Even admitting this peculiar view of yours, Mr. Conolly, does it not tell strongly against yourself in the present instance?”

“No; and I will presently shew you why not. When we digressed as to the meaning of the word gentleman, we were considering the matter of suitability. I was saying that a gentleman might be a drunkard, or, briefly, a scoundrel. A scoundrel would be a very unsuitable husband for Marian — I perceive I annoy you by calling her by her name.”

“N — no. Oh, no. It does not matter.”

“Therefore gentility alone is no guarantee of suitability. The only gentlemanliness she needs in a husband is ordinary good address, presentable manners, sense enough to avoid ridiculous solecisms in society, and so forth. Marian is satisfied with me on these points; and her approval settles the question finally. As to rank, I am a skilled workman, the first in my trade; and it is only by courtesy and forbearance that I suffer any man to speak of my class as inferior. Take us all, professions and trades together; and you will find by actual measurement round the head and round the chest, and round our manners and characters, if you like, that we are the only genuine aristocracy at present in existence. Therefore I meet your objection to my rank with a point-blank assertion of its superiority. Now let us have the other objections, if there are any others.”

The clergyman received this challenge in silence. Then, after clearing his throat uneasily twice, he said:

“I had hoped, Mr. Conolly, to have been able to persuade you on general grounds to relinquish your design. But as you are evidently not within reach of those considerations which I am accustomed to see universally admitted, it becomes my painful duty to assure you that a circumstance, on the secrecy of which you are relying, is known to me, and, through me, to my father.”

“What circumstance is that?”

“A circumstance connected with Mr. Marmaduke Lind, whom you mentioned just now. You understand me, I presume?”

“Oh! you have found that out?”

“I have. It only remains for me to warn my sister that she is about to contract a close relationship with one who is — I must say it — living in sin with our cousin.”

“What do you suppose will be the result of that?”

“I leave you to imagine,” said the clergyman indignantly, rising.

“Stop a bit. You do not understand me yet, I see. You have said that my views are peculiar. What if I have taken the peculiar view that I was bound to tell Marian this before proposing to her, and have actually told her?”

“But surely — That is not very likely.”

“The whole affair is not very likely. Our marriage is not likely; but it is going to happen, nevertheless. She knows this circumstance perfectly well. You told her yourself.”

“I! When?”

“The year before last, at Carbury Towers. It is worth your consideration, too, that by mistrusting Marian at that time, and refusing to give her my sister’s address, you forced her to appeal to me for help, and so advanced me from the position of consulting electrician to that of friend in need. She knew nothing about my relationship to the woman in a state of sin (as you call it), and actually deputed me to warn your cousin of the risk he was running by his intimacy with her. Whilst I was away running this queer errand for her, she found out that the woman was my sister, and of course rushed to the conclusion that she had inflicted the deepest pain on me. Her penitence was the beginning of the sentimental side of our acquaintance. Had you recognized that she was a woman with as good a right as you to know the truth concerning all matters in this world which she has to make her way through, you would have answered her question, and then I suppose I should have gone away without having exchanged a word with her on any more personal matters than induction coils and ohms of resistance; and in all probability you would have been spared the necessity of having me for a brother-in-law.”

“Well, sir,” said the Rev. George dejectedly, “if what you say be true, I cannot understand Marian, I can only grieve for her. I shall not argue with you on the nature of the influence you have obtained over her. I shall speak to her myself; since you will not hear me.”

“That is hardly fair. I have heard you, and am willing to hear more, if you have anything new to urge.”

“You have certainly listened to my voice, Mr. Conolly. But I fear I have used it to very little purpose.”

“You will fail equally with Marian, believe me. Even I, whose ability to exercise influence you admit, never obtained the least over my own sister. She knew me too well on my worst side and not at all on my best. If, as I presume, your father has tried in vain, what hope is there for you?”

“Only my humble trust that a priest may be blessed in his appeal to duty even where a father’s appeal to natural affection has been disregarded.”

“Well, well,” said Conolly, kindly, rising as his visitor disconsolately prepared to go, “you can try. I got on by dint of dogged faith in myself.”

“And I get on by lowly faith in my Master. I would I could imbue you with the same feeling!”

Conolly shook his head; and they went downstairs in silence. “Hallo!” said he, as he opened the door, “it is raining. Let me lend you a coat.”

“Thank you, no. Not at all. Good-night,” said the clergyman, quickly, and hastened away through the rain from Conolly’s civilities.

When he arrived at Westbourne Terrace, there was a cab waiting before the house. The door was opened to him by Marian’s maid, who was dressed for walking.

“Master is in the drawing-room, sir, with Miss McQuinch,” she said, meaning, evidently, “Look out for squalls.”

He went upstairs, and found Elinor, with her hat on, standing by the pianoforte, with battle in her nostrils. Mr. Lind, looking perplexed and angry, was opposite to her.

“George,” said Mr. Lind, “close the door. Do you know the latest news?”

“No.”

“Marian has run away!”

“Run away!”

“Yes,” said Miss McQuinch. “She has fled to Mrs. Toplis’s, at St. Mary’s Terrace, with — as Uncle Reginald was just saying — a most dangerous associate.”

“With — ?”

“With me, in short.”

“And you have counselled her to take this fatal step?”

“No. I advised her to stay. But she is not so well used to domestic discomfort as I am; so she insisted on going. We have got very nice rooms: you may come and see us, if you like.”

“Is this a time to display your bitter and flippant humor?” said the
Rev. George, indignantly. “I think the spectacle of a wrecked home—”

“Stuff!” interrupted Elinor, impatiently. “What else can I say? Uncle Reginald tells me I have corrupted Marian, and refuses to believe what I tell him. And now you attack me, as if it were my fault that you have driven her away. If you want to see her, she is within five minutes walk of you. It is you who have wrecked her home, not she who has wrecked yours.”

“There is no use in speaking to Elinor, George,” said Mr. Lind, with the air of a man who had tried it. “You had better go to Marian, and tell her what you mentioned this afternoon. What has been the result of your visit?”

“He maintains that she knows everything,” said the Rev. George, with a dispirited glance at Elinor. “I fear my visit has been worse than useless.”

“It is impossible that she should know. He lies,” said Mr. Lind. “Go and tell her the truth, George; and say that I desire her — I order her — to come back at once. Say that I am waiting here for her.”

“But, Uncle Reginald,” began Elinor, in a softer tone than before, whilst the clergyman stood in doubt —

“I think,” continued Mr. Lind, “that I must request you, Elinor, to occupy the rooms you have taken, until you return to your parents. I regret that you have forced me to take this step; but I cannot continue to offer you facilities for exercising your influence over my daughter. I will charge myself with all your expenses until you go to Wiltshire.”

Elinor looked at him as if she despaired of his reason. Then, seeing her cousin slowly going to the door, she said:

“You dont really mean to go on such a fool’s errand to Marian, George?”

“Elinor!” cried Mr. Lind.

“What else is it?” said Elinor. “You asserted all your authority yourself this morning, and only made matters worse. Yet you expect her to obey you at second hand. Besides, she is bound in honor not to desert me now; and I will tell her so, too, if I see any sign of her letting herself be bullied.”

“I fear Marian will not pay much heed to what I say to her,” said the clergyman.

“If you are coming,” said Elinor, “you had better come in my cab.
Good-night, Uncle Reginald.”

“Stay,” said Mr. Lind, irresolutely. “Elinor, I — you — Will you exercise your influence to induce Marian to return? I think you owe me at least so much.”

“I will if you will withdraw your opposition to her marriage and let her do as she likes. But if you can give her no better reason for returning than that she can be more conveniently persecuted here than at St. Mary’s Terrace, she will probably stay where she is, no matter how I may influence her.”

“If she is resolved to quarrel with me, I cannot help it,” said Mr.
Lind, pettishly.

“You know very well that she is the last person on earth to quarrel with anyone.”

“She has been indulged in every way. This is the first time she has been asked to sacrifice her own wishes.”

“To sacrifice her whole life, you mean. It is the first time she has ever hesitated to sacrifice her own comfort, and therefore the first time you are conscious that any sacrifice is required. Let me tell her that you will allow her to take her own course, Uncle Reginald. He is well enough off; and they are fond of one another. A man of genius is worth fifty men of rank.”

“Tell her, if you please, Elinor, that she must choose between Mr.
Conolly and me. If she prefers him, well and good: I have done with her.
That is my last word.”

“So now she has nobody to turn to in the world except him. That is sensible. Come, cousin George! I am off.”

“I do not think I should do any good by going,” said the clergyman.

“Then stay where you are,” said Elinor. “Good-night.” And she abruptly left the room.

“It was a dreadful mistake ever to have allowed that young fury to enter the house,” said Mr. Lind. “She must be mad. What did he say?”

“He said a great deal in attempted self-justification. But I could make no impression on him. We have no feelings in common with a man of his type. No. He is evidently bent on raising himself by a good marriage.”

“We cannot prevent it.”

“Oh, surely we — —”

“I tell you we cannot prevent it,” repeated Mr. Lind, turning angrily upon his son. “How can we? What can we do? She will marry this — this — this — this beggar. I wish to God I had never seen her mother.”

The clergyman stood by, cowed, and said nothing.

“You had better go to that woman of Marmaduke’s,” continued Mr. Lind, “and try whether she can persuade her brother to commute his interest in the company, and go back to America, or to the devil. I will take care that he gets good terms, even if I have to make them up out of my own pocket. If the worst comes, she must be persuaded to leave Marmaduke. Offer her money. Women of that sort drive a hard bargain; but they have their price.”

“But, sir, consider my profession. How can I go to drive a bargain with a woman of evil reputation?”

“Well, I must go myself, I suppose.”

“Oh, no. I will go. Only I thought I would mention it.”

“A clergyman can go anywhere. You are privileged. Come to breakfast in the morning: we can talk over matters then.”

CHAPTER XI

One morning the Rev. George Lind received a letter addressed in a handwriting which he did not remember and never thenceforth forgot. Within the envelope he found a dainty little bag made of blue satin, secured by ribbons of the same material. This contained a note written on scented paper, edged with gold, and decorated with a miniature representation of a pierrot, sitting cross-legged, conning a book, on the open pages of which appeared the letters L.V. The clergyman recognized the monogram no more than the writing. But as it was evidently from a lady, he felt a pleasant thrill of expectation as he unfolded the paper.

”Laurel Grove West Kensington
”Wednesday
”Dear Mr. George

“I have made poor little Lucy believe that Kew is the most heavenly place on earth to spend a May morning so Bob has had to promise to row her down there to-morrow (Thursday) after breakfast and I shall be at home alone from eleven to one this is very short notice I know but opportunities are scarce and another might not present itself for a month.

“Believe me Dear Mr. George

”Yours sincerely
Lalage Virtue.”

The Rev. George became thoughtful, and absently put the note in a little rack over the mantelpiece. Then, recollecting that a prying servant or landlady might misinterpret it, he transferred it to his pocket. After breakfast, having satisfied himself before the mirror that his dress was faultless, and his expression saintly, he went out and travelled by rail from Sloane Square to West Kensington, whence he walked to Laurel Grove. An elderly maid opened the gate. It was a rule with the Rev. George not to look at strange women; and this morning the asceticism which he thought proper to his office was unusually prominent in his thoughts. He did not look up once while the maid conducted him through the shrubbery to the house; and he fully believed that he had not seen at the first glance that she was remarkably plain, as Susanna took care that all her servants should be. Passing by the drawing-room, where he had been on a previous occasion, they went on to a smaller apartment at the back of the house.

“What room is this?” he asked, uneasily.

“Missus’s Purjin bodoor, sir,” replied the main.

She opened the door; and the clergyman, entering, found himself in a small room, luxuriously decorated in sham Persian, but containing ornaments of all styles and periods, which had been purchased and introduced just as they had caught Susanna’s fancy. She was seated on a ottoman, dressed in wide trousers, Turkish slippers, a voluminous sash, a short Greek jacket, a long silk robe with sleeves, and a turban, all of fine soft materials and rare colors. Her face was skilfully painted, and her dark hair disposed so as not to overweight her small head. The clergyman, foolishly resisting a natural impulse to admire her, felt like St. Anthony struggling with the fascination of a disguised devil. He responded to her smile of welcome by a stiff bow.

“Sit down,” she said. “You mustnt mind this absurd dress: it belongs to a new piece I am studying. I always study in character. It is the only way to identify myself with my part, you see.”

“It seems a very magnificent dress, certainly,” said the clergyman, nervously.

“Thank you for the compliment — —”

“No, no,” said he, hastily. “I had no such intention.”

“Of course not,” said Susanna, with a laugh. “It was merely an unpremeditated remark: all compliments are, of course. I know all about that. But do you think it a proper costume?”

“In what sense, may I ask?”

“Is it a correct Eastern dress? I am supposed to be one of the wives of the Caliph Somebody al Something. You have no idea how difficult it is to get a reliable model for a dress before laying out a heap of money on it. This was designed in Paris; but I should like to hear it criticized — chronologically, or whatever you call it — by a scholar.”

“I really do not know, Madam. I am not an Orientalist; and my studies take a widely different direction from yours.”

“Yes, of course,” said Susanna, with a sigh. “But I assure you I often wish for your advice, particularly as to my elocution, which is very faulty. You are such a master of the art.”

The clergyman bowed in acceptance of the compliment, and began to take heart; for to receive flattery from ladies in exchange for severe reproof was part of his daily experience.

“I have come here,” he said, “to have a very serious conversation with you.”

“All right, Doctor. Fire away.”

This sudden whim of conferring on him a degree in divinity, and her change of manner — implying that she had been laughing at him before — irritated him. “I presume,” he said, “that you are acquainted with the movements of your brother.”

“Of Ned?” said Susanna, frowning a little. “No. What should I know about him?”

“He is, I believe, about to be married.”

“No!” screamed Susanna, throwing herself back, and making her bangles and ornaments clatter. “Get out, Doctor. You dont mean it.”

“Certainly I mean it. It is not my profession to jest. I must also tell you that his marriage will make it quite impossible for you to continue here with my cousin.”

“Why? Who is he going to marry?”

“Ahem! He has succeeded in engaging the affections of my sister.”

“What! Your sister? Marian Lind?”

“Yes.”

Susanna uttered a long whistle, and then, with a conviction and simplicity which prevented even the Rev. George from being shocked, said: “Well, I am damned! I know more than one fool of a girl who will be sick and sorry to hear it.” She paused, and added carelessly: “I suppose all your people are delighted?”

“I do not know why you should suppose so. We have had no hand in the matter. My sister has followed her own inclinations.”

“Indeed! Let me tell you, young man, that your sister might have gone farther and fared worse.”

“Doubtless. However, you will see now how impossible it is that you should remain in your present — that you should continue here, in fact.”

“What do you mean?”

“You cannot,” said the clergyman, accustomed to be bold and stern with female sinners, “when you are sister-in-law to Miss Lind, live as you are now doing with her cousin.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would be a scandal. I will say nothing at present of the sin of it: you will have to account for that before a greater than I.”

“Just so, Doctor. You dont mind the sin; but when it comes to a scandal —— !”

“I did not say so. I abhor the sin. I have prayed earnestly for your awakening, and shall do so in spite of the unregenerate hardness of heart — —”

“Hallo, Doctor! draw it mild, if you please. I am not one of your parishioners, you know. Perhaps that is the reason your prayers for me have not met with much attention. Let us stick to business: you may talk shop as much as you please afterwards. What do you want me to do?”

“To sever your connexion with Marmaduke at once. Believe me, it will not prove so hard a step as it may seem. You have but to ask for strength to do it, and you will find yourself strong. It will profit you even more than poor Marmaduke.”

“Will it? I dont see it, Doctor. You think it will profit you: thats plain enough. But it wont profit me; it wont profit Bob; and it wont by any means profit the child.”

“Not immediately, perhaps, in a worldly sense — —”

“That is the sense I mean. Drop all that other stuff: I dont believe in you parsons: you are about the worst lot going, as far as I can see. Just tell me this, Doctor. Your sister is a very nice girl, I have no doubt: she would hardly have snapped up Ned if she wasn’t. But why is she to have everything her own way?”

“I do not understand.”

“Well, listen. Here is a young woman who has had every chance in life that hick could give her: silk cradles, gold rattles, rank, wealth, schooling, travelling, swell acquaintances, and anything else she chose to ask for. Even when she is fool enough to want to get married, her luck sticks to her, and she catches Ned, who is a man in a thousand — though Lord forbid we should have many of his sort about! Yet she’s not satisfied. She wants me to give up my establishment just to keep her family in countenance.”

“She knows nothing of my visit, I assure you.”

“Even if she doesnt, it makes no odds as to the facts. She can go her own way; and I will go mine. I shant want to visit her; and I dont suppose she will visit me. So she need trouble herself no more than if there was no such person as I in the world.”

“But you will find that it will be greatly to your advantage to leave this house. It is not our intention that you shall suffer in a pecuniary point of view by doing so. My father is rich — —”

“What is that to me? He doesnt want me to go and live with him, does he?”

“You quite misunderstand me. No such idea ever entered — —”

“There! go on. I only said that to get a rise out of you, Doctor. How do you make out that I should gain by leaving this house?”

“My father is willing to make you some amends for the withdrawal of such portion of Marmaduke’s income as you may forfeit by ceasing your connexion with him.”

“You have come to buy me out, in fact: is that it? What a clever old man your father must be! Knows the world thoroughly, eh?”

“I hope I have not offended you?”

“Bless you, Doctor! nobody could be offended with you. Suppose I agree to oblige you (you have a very seductive High Church way about you) who is to make Marmaduke amends for such portion of my income as our separation will deprive him of? Eh? I see that that staggers you a little. If you will just tot up the rent of this house since we have had it; the price of the furniture; our expenses, including my carriage and Marmaduke’s horse and the boat; six hundred pounds of debt that he ran up before he settled down with me; and other little things; and then find out from his father how much money he has drawn within the last two years, I think you will find it rather hard to make the two balance. Your uncle is far too good a man to give Marmaduke money to spend on me; but he was not too good to keep me playing in the provinces all through last autumn just to make both ends meet, when I ought to have been taking my holiday. I wish you would tell his mother, your blessed pious Aunt Dora, to send Bob the set of diamonds his grandmother left him, instead of sermons which he never reads.”

“I thought Marmaduke had nearly a thousand a year, independently of his father.”

“A thousand a year! What is that? And your uncle would stop even that, if he could, to keep it out of my hands. You may tell him that if it didnt come into my hands it would hardly last a week. Only for the child, and the garden, and the sort of quiet life he leads here, he would spend a thousand a month. And look at my expenses! Look at my dresses! I suppose you think that people wear cotton velvet and glazed calico on the stage, as Mrs. Siddons did in the old days when they acted by candlelight. Why, between dress and jewellery, I have about two hundred pounds on my back at the present moment; and you neednt think that any manager alive will find dresses to that tune. At the theatre they think me overpaid at fifty pounds a week, although they might shut up the house to-morrow if my name was taken out of the bills. Tell your father that so far from my living on Bob, it is as much as I can do to keep this place going by my work — not to mention the worry of it, which always falls on the woman.”

“I certainly had no idea of the case being as you describe,” said the clergyman, losing his former assurance. “But would it not then be better for you to separate?”

“Certainly not. I want my house and home. So does he. If an income is rather tight, halving it is a very good way to make it tighter. No: if I left Bob, he would go to the devil; and very likely I should go to the devil, too, and disgrace you in earnest.”

“But, my dear madam, consider the disgrace at present!”

“What disgrace? When your sister becomes Mrs. Ned, what will be the difference between her position and mine? Dont look aghast. What will be the difference?”

“Surely you do not suppose that she will dispense with the sacrament of marriage before casting in her lot with your brother!”

“I bet you my next week’s salary that you dont get Ned to enter a church. He will be tied up by a registrar. Of course, your sister will have the law of him somehow: she cant help herself. She is not independent; and so she must be guaranteed against his leaving her without bread and butter. I can support myself, and may shew Bob a clean pair of heels to-morrow, if I choose. Even if she has money of her own, she darent stick to her freedom for fear of society. I snap my fingers at society, and care as little about it as it cares about me; and I have no doubt she would be glad to do the same if she had the pluck. I confess I shouldnt like to make a regular legal bargain of going to live with a man. I dont care to make love a matter of money; it gives it a taste of the harem, or even worse. Poor Bob, meaning to be honorable, offered to buy me in the regular way at St. George’s, Hanover Square, before we came to live here; but, of course, I refused, as any decent woman in my circumstances would. Understand me now, Doctor: I dont want to give myself any virtuous airs, or to boast of behaving better than your sister. I know the world; and I know that she will marry Ned just as much because she thinks it right as because she cant help herself. But dont you try to make me swallow any gammon about my disgracing you and so forth. I intend to stay as I am. I can respect myself; and I dont care whether you or your family respect me or not. If you dont approve of me, why! nobody asks you to associate with me. If you want society, you have your own lot to mix with. If I want it, I can fill this house to-morrow. Not with stupid fine ladies, but with really clever people, who are not at all shy of me. Look at me at the present moment! I am receiving a morning visit from the best born and most popular parson in Belgravia. I wonder, Doctor, what your parishioners would think if they could see you now.”

“I must confess that I do not understand you at all. You seem to see everything reversed — upside down. You — I — you bewilder me, Miss Conol—”

“Sh! Mademoiselle Lalage Virtue, if you please. Or you may call me
Susanna, if you like, since we are as good as related.”

“I fear,” said the clergyman, blushing, “that we have no common ground on which to argue. I am sorry I have no power to influence you.”

“Oh, dont say that. I really like you, Doctor, and would do more for you than most people. If your father had had the cheek to come himself to offer me money, and so forth, I would have put him out of the house double quick; whereas I have listened to you like a lamb. Never mind your hat yet. Have a bottle of champagne with me?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Dont you drink at all?”

“No.”

“You should. It would give a fillip to your sermons. Let me send you a case of champagne. Promise to drink a bottle every Sunday in the vestry before you come out to preach, and I will take a pew for the season in your church. Thats good of me, isnt it?”

“I must go,” said the Rev. George, rising, after hastily pretending to look at his watch. “Will you excuse me?”

“Nonsense,” she said, rising also, and slipping her hand through his arm to detain him. “Wait and have some luncheon. Why, Doctor, I really think youre afraid of me. Do stay.”

“Impossible. I have much business which I am bound —— Pray, let me go,” pleaded the clergyman, piteously, ineffectually struggling with Susanna, who had now got his arm against her breast. “You must be mad!” he cried, drops of sweat breaking out on his brow as he felt himself being pulled helplessly toward the ottoman. She got her knee on it at last; and he made a desperate effort to free himself.

“Oh, how rough you are!” she exclaimed in her softest voice, adroitly tumbling into the seat as if he had thrown her down, and clinging to his arms; so that it was as much as he could do to keep his feet as he stooped over her, striving to get upright. At which supreme moment the door was opened by Marmaduke, who halted on the threshold to survey the two reproachfully for a moment. Then he said:

“George: I’m astonished at you. I have not much opinion of parsons as a rule; but I really did think that you were to be depended on.”

“Marmaduke,” said the clergyman, colouring furiously, and almost beside himself with shame and anger: “you know perfectly well that I am actuated in coming here by no motive unworthy of my profession. You misunderstand what you have seen. I will not hear my calling made a jest of.”

“Quite right, Doctor,” said Susanna, giving him a gentle pat of encouragement on the shoulder. “Defend the cloth, always. I was only asking him to stay to lunch, Bob. Cant you persuade him?”

“Do, old fellow,” said Marmaduke. “Come! you must: I havnt had a chat with you for ever so long. I’m really awfully sorry I interrupted you. What on earth did you make Susanna rig herself out like that for?”

“Hold your tongue, Bob. Mr. George has nothing to do with my being in character. This is what came last night in the box: I could not resist trying it on this morning. I am Zobeida, the light of the harem, if you please. I must have your opinion of the rouge song, Doctor. Observe. This is a powder puff: I suppose you never saw such a thing before. I am making up my face for a visit of the Sultan; and I am apologizing to the audience for using cosmetics. The original French is improper; so I will give you the English version, by the celebrated Robinson, the cleverest adapter of the day:

’Poor odalisques in captive thrall
Must never let their charms pall:
If they get the sack
They ne’er come back;
For the Bosphorus is the boss for all
In this harem, harem, harem, harem, harum scarum place.’

Intellectual, isnt it?”

Susanna, whilst singing, executed a fantastic slow dance, stopping at certain points to clink a pair of little cymbals attached to her ankles, and to look for a moment archly at the clergyman.

“No,” he said, hurt and offended into a sincerity of manner which compelled them to respect him for the first time, “I will not stay; and I am very sorry I came.” And he left the room, his cheeks tingling. Marmaduke followed him to the gate. “Come and look us up soon again, old fellow,” he said.

“Marmaduke,” said the clergyman: “you are travelling as fast as you can along the road to Hell.”

As he hurried away, Marmaduke leaned against the gate and made the villas opposite echo his laughter.

“On my soul, it’s a shame,” said he, when he returned to the house.
“Poor old George!”

“He found no worse than he had made up his mind to find,” said Susanna. “What right has he to come into my house and take it for granted, to my face, that I am a disgrace to his sister? One would think I was a common woman from the streets.”

“Pshaw! What does he know? He is only a molly-coddling parson, poor fellow. He will give them a rare account of you when he goes back.”

“Let him,” said Susanna. “He can tell them how little I care for their opinion, anyhow.”

The Rev. George took the next train to the City, and went to the offices of the Electro-Motor Company, where he found his father. They retired together to the board-room, which was unoccupied just then.

“I have been to that woman,” said the clergyman.

“Well, what does she say?”

“She is an entirely abandoned person. She glories in her shame. I have never before met with such an example of complete and unconscious depravity. Yet she is not unattractive. There is a wonderfully clever refinement even in her coarseness which goes far to account for her influence over Marmaduke.”

“No doubt; but apart from her personal charms, about which I am not curious, is she willing to assist us?”

“No. I could make no impression on her at all.”

“Well, it cannot be helped. Did you say anything about Conolly’s selling his interest here and leaving the country?”

“No,” said the clergyman, struck with a sense of remissness. “I forgot that. The fact is, I hardly had the oppor — —”

“Never mind. It is just as well that you did not: it might have made mischief.”

“I do not think it is of the least use to pursue her with any further overtures. Besides, I really could not undertake to conduct them.”

“May I ask,” said Mr. Lind, turning on him suddenly, “what objection you have to Marian’s wishes being consulted in this matter?”

The Rev. George recoiled, speechless.

“I certainly think,” said Mr. Lind, more smoothly, “that Marian might have trusted to my indulgence instead of hurrying away to a lodging and writing the news in all directions. But I must say I have received some very nice letters about it. Jasper is quite congratulatory. The Court Journal has a paragraph this week alluding to it with quite good taste. Conolly is a very remarkable man; and, as the Court Journal truly enough remarks, he has won a high place in the republic of art and science. As a Liberal, I cannot say that I disapprove of Marian’s choice; and I really think that it will be looked on in society as an interesting one.”

Mr. Lind’s son eyed him dubiously for quite a long time. Then he said, slowly, “Am I to understand that I may now speak of the marriage as a recognized thing?”

“Why not, pray?”

“Of course, since you wish it, and it cannot be helped—” The clergyman again looked at his father, still more dubiously. He saw in his eye that there would be a quarrel if the interview lasted much longer. So he said “I must go home now. I have to write my sermon for next Sunday.”

“Very good. Do not let me detain you. Good-bye.”

The Rev. George returned to his rooms quite dazed by the novelty of his sensations. He had always respected his father beyond other men; and now he knew that his father did not deserve his respect in the least. That was one conviction uprooted. And Susanna had done something to him — he did not exactly know what; but he felt altogether a different man from the clergyman of the day before. He had come face to face with what he called Vice for the first time, and found it not at all what he had supposed it to be. He had believed that he knew it to be most dangerously attractive to the physical, but utterly repugnant to the moral sense; and such fascination he was prepared to resist to the utmost. But he was attacked in just the opposite way, and thereby so thrown off his guard that he did not know he was attacked at all; so that he told himself vaingloriously that the shafts of the enemy had fallen harmlessly from his breastplate of faith. For he was not in the least charmed by Susanna’s person. He had detected the paint on her cheeks, and had noted with aversion a certain unhealthy bloat in her face, and an alcoholic taint in her breath. He exulted in the consciousness that he had been genuinely disgusted, not as a matter of duty, but unaffectedly, as a matter of simple nature. What interested him in her was her novel and bold moral attitude, her self-respect in the midst of her sin, her striking arguments in favor of an apparently indefensible course of life. Hers was no common case of loose living, he felt: there was a soul to be saved there, if only Heaven would raise her up a friend in some man absolutely proof against the vulgar fascination of her prettiness. He began to imagine a certain greatness of character about her, a capacity for heroic repentance as well as for heroic sin. Before long he was amusing himself by thinking how it might have gone with her if she had him for her counsellor instead of a gross and thoughtless rake like Marmaduke.

It is not necessary to follow the wild goose chase which the Rev. George’s imagination ran from this starting-point to the moment when he was suddenly awakened, by an unmistakable symptom, to the fact that he was being outwitted and beglamoured, like the utter novice he was, by a power which he believed to be the devil. He rushed to the little oratory he had arranged with a screen in the corner of his sitting-room, and prayed aloud, long and earnestly. But the hypnotizing process did not tranquilize him as usual. It excited him, and led him finally to a passionate appeal for pardon and intercession to a statuet of the Virgin Mother, of whom he was a very devout adorer. He had always regarded himself as her especial champion in the Church of England; and now he had been faithless to her, and indelicate into the bargain. And yet, in spite of his contrition, he felt that he was having a tremendous spiritual experience, which he would not for worlds have missed. The climax of it was the composition of his Sunday sermon, the labor of which secured him a sound sleep that night. It was duly delivered on the following Sunday morning in this form:

“Dearly beloved Brethren: In the twenty-third verse of the third chapter of St. Mark’s gospel, we find this question: ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ How can Satan cast out Satan? If you will read what follows, you will perceive that that question was not answered. My brethren, it is unanswerable: it never has been, and it never can be answered.

“In these latter days, when the power of Satan has become so vast, when his empire and throne tower in our midst so that the faithful are cast down by the exceeding great shadow thereof, and when temples innumerable are open for his worship, it is no strange thing that many faint-hearted ones should give half their hearts to Beelzebub, and should hope by the prince of devils to cast out devils. Yes, this is what is taking place daily around us. Oh, you, who seek to excuse this book to infidel philosophers by shewing with how much facility a glib tongue may reconcile it with their so-called science, I tell you that it is science and not the Bible that shall need that apology in the great day of wrath. And, therefore, I would have you, my brethren, earnestly discountenance all endeavors to justify the Word of God by explaining it in conformity with the imaginations of the men of science. How can Satan cast out Satan? He cannot; but he can lead you into the sin of adding to and of taking from the words of this book. He can add plagues unto you, and take away your part out of the holy city.

“In this great London which we inhabit we are come upon evil day’s. The rage of the blasphemer, the laugh at the scoffer, the heartless lip-service of the worldling, and the light dalliance of the daughters of music, are offered every hour upon a thousand Baal-altars within this very parish. I would ask some of you who spend your evenings in the playhouses which multiply around us like weeds sown in the rank soil of human frailty, what justification you make to yourselves when you are alone in the watches of the night, and your conscience saith, ‘What went ye out for to see?’ You will then complain of the bitterness of life, and prate of the refining influences of music; of the help to spiritual-mindedness given by the exhibition on the public stage of mockeries of God’s world, wherein some pitiful temporal triumph of simulated virtue in the last act is the apology for the vicious trifling that has gone before. And in whom do you there see typified that virtue which you should shield in your hearts from the contamination of the theatre? Is it not in some woman whose private life is the scandalous matter of your whispered conversations, and whose shameless face smirks at you from the windows of those picture-shops which are a disgrace to our national morality? Is it from such as she that you will learn to be spiritual-minded? Does she appear before your carnal crowds repentant, her forehead covered with ashes, her limbs covered with sackcloth? No! Her brow is glowing with unquenchable fire to kindle the fuel that the devil has hidden in your hearts. Her raiment is cloth of gold; and she is not covered with it. Naked and unashamed, she smiles and weeps in mockery of the virtue which you would persuade yourselves that she represents to you. Will you learn spiritual-mindedness from the sight of her eyes, from the sound of her mouth, from the measure of her steps, or from the music and the dancing that cease not within the doors of her temple? How can Satan cast out Satan? Whom think ye to deceive by whitening the sepulchre? Is it yourselves? The devil has blinded you already. Is it God? Who shall hide anything from Him? I tell you that he who makes the pursuit of virtue a luxury, and takes refuge from sin, not before the altar, but in the playhouse, is casting out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.

“As I look about me in this church; I see many things intended to give pleasure to the carnal eye. Were the cost of all these dainty robes, this delicate headgear, these clouds of silk, of satin, of lace, and of sparkling jewels, were the price of these things brought into the Church’s treasury, how loudly might the Gospel resound in lands between whose torrid shores and the tropical sun the holy shade of Calvary has not yet fallen! But, you will say, it is a good thing to be comely in the house of the Lord. The sight of what is beautiful elevates the mind. Uncleanness is a vice. This, then, is how you will war with uncleanness. Not by prayer and holy living. Not by pouring of your superfluity into the lap of the poor, and entering by the strait gate upon the narrow path in a garment without seam. No. By the dead and damning gold; by the purple and by the scarlet; by the brightness of the eyes that is born of new wine; by the mincing gait and the gloved fingers; and by the musk and civet instead of the myrrh and frankincense: by these things are you fain to purge your uncleanness. And will they suffice? Can Satan cast out Satan? Beware! ‘For though thou wash thee with nitre and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God.’ There shall come a day when your lace and feathers shall hang on you as heavy as your chains of gold, to drag you down to him in whose name you have thought to cast out devils. Do not think that these things are harmless vanities. Nothing can fill the human heart and be harmless. If your thoughts be not of God, they will keep your minds distraught from His grace as effectually as the blackest broodings of crime. ‘Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet my people have forgotten me days without number, saith the Lord God.’ Yes, your minds are too puny to entertain the full worship of God: do you think they are spacious enough to harbor the worship of Baal side by side with it? Much less dare you pretend that the Baal altar is erected for the honor of God, that you may come into His presence comely and clean. It is but a few days since I stood in the presence of a woman who boasted to me that she bore upon her the value of two hundred pounds of our money. I cared little for the value of money that was upon her. But what shall be said of the weight of sin her attire represented? For, those costly garments were the wages of sin — of hardened, shameless, damnable sin. Yet there is not before me a finer dress or a fairer face. Will you, my sisters, trust to the comeliness of visage and splendor of raiment in which such a woman as this can outshine you? Will you continue to cast out your devils by Beelzebub, the prince of devils? Be advised whilst there is yet time. Ask yourself again and again, how can Satan cast out Satan?

“When sin is committed in a great city for wages, is there no fault on the side of those who pay the wages? There is more than fault: there is crime. I trust there are few among you who have done such crime. But I know full well that it may be said of London to-day ‘Thou art full of stirs, a joyous city: thy slain men are not slain with the sword, nor dead in battle.’ No. Our young men are slain by the poison of Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. Nor is the crafty old subterfuge lacking here. There are lost ones in this town who say, ‘It is by our means that virtue is preserved to the rich: it is we who appease the wicked rage which would otherwise wreck society.’ There are men who boast that they have brought their sins only to the houses of shame, and that they have respected purity in the midst of their foulness. ‘Such things must be,’ they say: ‘let us alone, lest a worse thing ensue.’ When they are filled full with sin, they cry ‘Lo! our appetite has gone from us and we are clean.’ They are willing to slake lust with satiety, but not to combat it with prayer. They tread one woman into the mire, and excuse themselves because the garment of her sister is spotless. How vain is this lying homage to virtue! How can Satan cast out Satan?

“Oh, my brethren, this hypocrisy is the curse and danger of our age. The Atheist, no longer an execration, an astonishment, a curse, and a reproach, poses now as the friend of man and the champion of right. Those who incur the last and most terrible curse in this book, do so in the name of that truth for which they profess to be seeking. Art, profanely veiling its voluptuous nakedness with the attributes of religion, disguises folly so subtly that it seems like virtue in the slothful eyes of those who neglect continually to watch and pray. The vain woman puts on her ornaments to do honor to her Creator’s handiwork: the lustful man casts away his soul that society may be kept clean: there is not left in these latter days a sin that does not pretend to work the world’s salvation, nor a man who flatters not himself that the sin of one may be the purging of many. To such I say, Look to your own soul: of no other shall any account be demanded of you. A day shall come in which a fire shall be kindled among your gods. The Lord shall array Himself with this land as a shepherd putteth on his garment. Be sure that then if ye shall say ‘I am a devil; but I have cast out many devils,’ He will reply unto you, How can Satan cast out Satan? Who shall prompt you to an answer to that question? Nay, though in His boundless mercy He give you a thousand years to search, and spread before you all the books of science and sociology in which you were wont to find excuses for sin, what will it avail you? Will a scoff, or a quibble over a doubtful passage, serve your turn? No. You cannot scoff whilst your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth for fear, and there will be no passage doubtful in all the Scriptures on that day; for the light of the Lord’s countenance will be over all things.”

BOOK III

CHAPTER XII

One Sunday afternoon, as the sun was making rainbows in the cloud of spray thrown from the fountain in Kew Gardens, Sholto Douglas appeared there amongst the promenaders on the banks of the pond. He halted on the steps leading down to the basin, gazing idly at the waterfowl paddling at his feet. A lady in a becoming grey dress came to the top of the steps, and looked curiously at him. Somehow aware of this, he turned indifferently, as if to leave, and found that the lady was Marian. Her ripened beauty, her perfect self-possession, a gain in her as of added strength and wisdom, and a loss in her as of gentleness outgrown and timidity overcome, dazzled him for a moment — caused a revulsion in him which he half recognized as the beginning of a dangerous passion. His former love for her suddenly appeared boyish and unreal to him; and this ruin of a once cherished illusion cost him a pang. Meanwhile, there she was, holding out her hand and smiling with a cool confidence in the success of her advance that would have been impossible to Marian Lind.

“How do you do?” she said.

“Thank you: I am fairly well. You are quite well, I hope?”

“I am in rude health. I hardly knew you at first.”

“Am I altered?”

“You are growing stout.”

“Indeed? Time has not been so bounteous to me as to you.”

“You mean that I am stouter than you?” She laughed; and the sound startled him. He got from it an odd impression that her soul was gone. But he hastened to protest.

“No, no. You know I do not. I meant that you have achieved the impossible — altered for the better.”

“I am glad you think so. I cling to my good looks desperately now that I am growing matronly. How is Mrs. Douglas?”

“She is quite well, thank you. Mr. Conolly is, I trust—”

“He is suffering from Eucalyptus on the brain at present. Do not trouble yourself to maintain that admirable expression of shocked sadness. Eucalyptus means gum-tree; and Ned is at present studying the species somewhere in the neighborhood. He came here with that object: he never goes anywhere without an object. He wants to plant Eucalyptuses round some new works where the people suffer from ague.”

“Oh! You mean that he is here in the gardens.”

“Yes. I left him among the trees, as I prefer the flowers. I want to see the lilies. There used to be some in a hot-house, or rather a hot bath, near this.”

“That is it on our right. May I go through it with you?”

“Just as you please.”

“Thank you. It is a long time since we last met, is it not?”

“More than a year. Fifteen months. I have not seen you since I was married.”

Douglas looked rather foolish at this. He was fatter, lazier, altogether less tenacious of his dignity than of old; and his embarrassment brought out the change strikingly. Marian liked him all the better for it; he was less imposing; but he was more a man and less a mere mask. At last, reddening a little, he said, “I remember our last meeting very well. We were very angry then: I was infuriated. In fact, when I recognized you a minute ago, I was not quite sure that you would renew our acquaintance.”

“I had exactly the same doubt about you.”

“A very unnecessary doubt. Not a sincere one, I am afraid. You know too well that your least beck will bring me to you at any time.”

“Dont you think we had better not begin that. I generally repeat my conversations to Ned. Not that he will mind, if you dont.”

Douglas now felt at his ease and in his clement. He was clearly welcome to philander. Recovering his poise at once, he began, in his finest voice, “You need not chide me. There can be no mistake on my part now. You can entangle me without fear; and I can love without hope. Ned is an unrepealed statute of Forbiddance. Go on, Mrs. Conolly. Play with me: it will amuse you. And — spiritless wretch that I am! — it will help me to live until you throw me away, crushed again.”

“You seem to have been quite comfortable without me: at least you look extremely well. I suspect you are becoming a little lazy and attached to your dinner. Your old haughtiness seems to have faded into a mere habit. It used to be the most active principle in you. Are you quite sure that nobody else has been helping you to live, as you call it?”

“Helping me to forget, you mean. No, not one. Time has taught me the way to vegetate; and so I no longer need to live. As you have remarked, I have habits, not active principles. But one at least of these principles is blossoming again even as I speak. If I could only live as that lily lives now!”

“In a warm bath?”

“No. Floating on the surface of a quiet pool, looking up into your eyes, with no memory for the past, no anticipation of the future.”

“Delightful! especially for me. I think we had better go and look for
Ned.”

“Were I in his place I would not be absent from your side now — or ever.”

“That is to say, if you were in his place, you wouldnt be in his place — among the gum trees. Perhaps you would be right.”

“He is the only man I have ever stooped to envy.”

“You have reason to,” said Marian, suddenly grave.

“I envy him sometimes myself. What would you give to be never without a purpose, never with a regret, to regard life as a succession of objects each to be accomplished by so many days’ work; to take your pleasure in trifling lazily with the consciousness of possessing a strong brain; to study love, family affection, and friendship as a doctor studies breathing or digestion; to look on disinterestedness as either weakness or hypocrisy, and on death as a mere transfer of your social function to some member of the next generation?”

“I could achieve all that, if I would, at the cost of my soul. I would not for worlds be such a man, save on one condition.”

“To wit?”

“That only as such could I win the woman I loved.”

“Oh, you would not think so much of an insignificant factor like love if you were Ned.”

“May I ask, do you, too, think of love as ‘an insignificant factor’?”

“I? Oh, I am not a sociologist. Besides, I have never been in love.”

“What! You have never been in love?”

“Not the real, romantic, burning, suicidal love your sonnets used to breathe.”

“Then you do not know what love is.”

“Do you?”

“You should know whether I do or not.”

“Should I? Then I conclude that you do not. You are growing stout. Your dress is not in the least neglected. I am certain you enjoy life thoroughly. No, you have never known love in all its novelistic-poetic outrageousness. That respectable old passion is a myth.”

“You look for signs that only children shew. When an oak dies, it does not wither and fall at once as a sapling does. Perhaps you will one day know what it is to love.”

“Perhaps so.”

“In any case, you will be able to boast of having inspired the passion.”

“I hope so — at least, I mean that it is all nonsense. Do look at that vegetable lobster of a thing, that cactus.”

“In order to set off its ugliness properly, you should see yourself against the background of palms, with that great fan-like leaf for a halo, and — —”

“Thank you. I see it all in my mind’s eye by your eloquent description. You are quite right in supposing that I like compliments; but I am particular about their quality; and I dont need to be told I am pretty in comparison with a hideous cactus. You would not have condescended to make such a speech long ago. You are changed.”

“Not toward you, on my honor.”

“I did not mean that: I meant toward yourself.”

“I am glad you have taken even that slender note of me. I find you somewhat changed, too.”

“I did not know that I shewed it; but it is true. I feel as if Marian Lind was a person whom I knew once, but whom I should hardly know again.”

“The change in me has not produced that effect. I feel as though Marian
Lind were the history of my life.”

“You have become quite a master of the art of saying pretty things. You are nearly as glib at it as Ned.”

“We have the same incentive to admiration.”

“The same! You do not suppose that Ned pays me compliments. He never did such a thing in his life. No: I first discovered his talent in that direction at Palermo, where I surprised him in an animated discourse with the dark-eyed daughter of an innkeeper there. That was the first conversation in Italian I succeeded in following. A week later I could understand the language almost as well as he. However, dont let us waste the whole afternoon talking stuff. I want to ask you about your mother. I should greatly like to call upon her; but she has never made me any sign since my marriage; and Mrs. Leith Fairfax tells me that she never allows my name to be mentioned to her. I thought she was fond of me.”

“So she was. But she has never forgiven you for making me suffer as you did. You see she has more spirit than I. She would be angered if she saw me now tamely following the triumphal chariot of my fair tyrant.”

“Seriously, do you think, if I made a raid on Manchester Square some morning, I could coax back her old feeling for me?”

“I think you will be quite safe in calling, at all events. Tell me what day you intend to venture. I know my mother will not oppose me if I shew that I wish you to be kindly received.”

“Most disinterested of you. Thank you: I will fail or succeed on my own merits, not on your recommendation. You must not say a word to her about me or my project.”

“If you command me not to — —”

“I do command you.”

“I must obey. But I fear that the more submissive I am, the more imperious you will become.”

“Very likely. And now look along that avenue to the left. Do you see a man in a brown suit, with straw hat to match, walking towards us at a regular pace, and keeping in a perfectly straight course? He looks at everybody he passes as if he were counting them.”

“He is looking back at somebody now, as if he had missed the number.”

“Just so; but that somebody is a woman; doubtless a pretty one, probably dark. You recognize him, I see. There is a frost come over you which convinces me that you are preparing to receive him in your old ungracious way. I warn you that I am accustomed to see Ned made much of. He has caught sight of us.”

“And has just remarked that there is a man talking to his wife.”

“Quite right. See his speculative air! Now he no longer attends to us. He is looking at the passers-by as before. That means that he has recognized you, and has stowed the observation compactly away in his brain, to be referred to when he comes up to us.”

“So much method must economize his intellect very profitably. How do you do, Mr. Conolly? It is some time since we have had the pleasure of meeting.”

“Glad to see you, Mr. Douglas. We have been away all the winter. Are you staying in London?”

“Yes.”

“I hope you will spend an occasional hour with us at Holland Park.”

“You are very kind. Thank you: yes, if Mrs. Conolly will permit me.”

“I should make you come home with us now,” said Marian, “but for this Sunday being a special occasion. Nelly McQuinch is to spend the evening with us; and as I have not seen her since we came back, I must have her all to myself. Come next Sunday, if you care to.”

“Do,” said Conolly. “Half past three is our Sunday hour. If you cannot face that, we are usually at home afterwards the entire evening. Marian: we have exactly fifteen minutes to catch our train.”

“Oh! let us fly. If we miss it, Nelly will be kept waiting half an hour.”

Then they parted, Douglas promising to come to them on that day week.

“Dont you think he is growing very fat?” said she, as they walked away.

“Yes. He is beginning to take the world easily. He does not seem to be making much of his life.”

“What matter, so long as he enjoys it?”

“Pooh! He doesnt know what enjoyment means.”

They said nothing further until they were in the train, where Marian sat looking listlessly through the window, whilst Conolly, opposite, reclining against the cushions, looked thoughtfully at her.

“Ned,” said she, suddenly.

“My dear.”

“Do you know that Sholto is more infatuated about me than ever?”

“Naturally. You are lovelier than when he last saw you.”

“You are nearly as complimentary as he,” said Marian, blushing with a gratification which she was very unwilling to betray. “He noticed it sooner than you. I discovered it myself in the glass before either of you.”

“No doubt you did. What station is this?”

“I dont know.” Then, raising her voice so as to be overheard, she exclaimed “Here is a stupid man coming into our carriage.”

A young man entered the compartment, and, after one glance at Marian, who turned her back on him impatiently, spent the remainder of the journey making furtive attempts to catch a second glimpse of her face. Conolly looked a shade graver at his wife’s failure in perfect self-control; but he by no means shared her feelings toward the intrusive passenger. Marian and he were in different humors; and he did not wish to be left alone with her.

As they walked from Addison Road railway station to their house, Conolly mused in silence with his eyes on the gardens by the way. Marian, who wished to talk, followed his measured steps with impatience.

“Let me take your arm, Ned: I cannot keep up with you.”

“Certainly.”

“I hope I am not inconveniencing you,” she said, after a further interval of silence.

“Hm — no.”

“I am afraid I am. It does not matter. I can get on by myself.”

“Arm in arm is such an inconvenient and ridiculous mode of locomotion — you need not struggle in the public street: now that you have got my arm you shall keep it — I say it is such an inconvenient and ridiculous mode of locomotion that if you were any one else I should prefer to wheel you home in a barrow. Our present mode of proceeding would be inexcusable if I were a traction-engine, and you my tender.”

“Then let me go. What will the people think if they see a great engineer violating the laws of mechanics by dragging his wife by the arm?”

“They will appreciate my motives; and, in fact, if you watch them, you will detect a thinly-disguised envy in their countenances. I violate the laws of mechanics — to use your own sarcastic phrase — for many reasons. I like to be envied when there are solid reasons for it. It gratifies my vanity to be seen in this artistic quarter with a pretty woman on my arm. Again, the sense of possessing you is no longer an abstraction when I hold you bodily, and feel the impossibility of keeping step with you. Besides, Man, who was a savage only yesterday, has his infirmities, and finds a poetic pleasure in the touch of the woman he loves. And I may add that you have been in such a bad temper all the afternoon that I suspect you of an itching to box my ears, and therefore feel safer with your arm in my custody.”

“Oh! Indeed I have not been in a bad temper. I have been most anxious to spend a happy day.”

“And I have been placidly reflective, and not anxious at all. Is that what has provoked you?”

“I am not provoked. But you might tell me what your reflections are about.”

“They would fill volumes, if I could recollect them.”

“You must recollect some of them. From the time we left the station until a moment ago, when we began to talk, you were pondering something with the deepest seriousness. What was it?”

“I forget.”

“Of course you forget — just because I want to know. What a crowded road this is!” She disengaged herself from his arm; and this time he did not resist her.

“That reminds me of it. The crowd consists partly of people going to the pro-Cathedral. The pro-Cathedral contains an altar. An altar suggests kneeling on hard stone; and that brings me to the disease called ‘housemaids’ knee,’ which was the subject of my reflections.”

“A pleasant subject for a fine Sunday! Thank you. I dont want to hear any more.”

“But you will hear more of it; for I am going to have the steps of our house taken away and replaced by marble, or slate, or something that can be cleaned with a mop and a pail of water in five minutes.”

“Why?”

“My chain of thought began at the door steps we have passed, all whitened beautifully so as to display every footprint, and all representing an expenditure of useless, injurious labor in hearthstoning, that ought to madden an intelligent housemaid. I dont think our Armande is particularly intelligent; but I am resolved to spare her knees and her temper in future by banishing hearthstone from our establishment forever. I shudder to think that I have been walking upon those white steps and flag ways of ours every day without awakening to a sense of their immorality.”

“I cannot understand why you are always disparaging Armande. And I hate an ill-kept house front. None of our housemaids ever objected to hearthstoning, or were any the worse for it.”

“No. They would not have gained anything by objecting: they would only have lost their situations. You need not fear for your house front. I will order a porch with porphyry steps and alabaster pillars to replace your beloved hearthstone.”

“Yes. That will be clever. Do you know how easy it is to stain marble? Armande will be on her knees all day with a bottle of turpentine and a bit of flannel.”

“You are thinking of inkstains, Marian. You forget that it does not rain ink, and that Nelly will hardly select the porch to write her novels in.”

“Lots of people bring ink on a doorstep. Tax collectors and gasmen carry bottles in their pockets.”

“Ask them into the drawing-room when they call, my dear; or, better still, dont pay them, so that they will have no need to write a receipt. Let me remind you that ink shews as much on white hearthstone as it can possibly do on marble. Yet extensive disfigurements of steps from the visits of tax collectors are not common.”

“Now, Ned, you know that you are talking utter nonsense.”

“Yes, my dear. I think I perceive Nelly looking out of the window for us. Here she is at the door.”

Marian hastened forward and embraced her cousin. Miss McQuinch looked older; and her complexion was drier than before. But she had apparently begun to study her appearance; for her hat and shoes were neat and even elegant, which they had never been within Marian’s previous experience of her.

“You are not changed in the least,” she said, as she gave Conolly her hand. “I have just been wondering at the alteration in Marian. She has grown lovely.”

“I have been telling her so all day, in the vain hope of getting her into a better temper. Come into the drawing-room. Have you been waiting for us long?”

“About fifteen minutes. I have been admiring your organ. I should have tried the piano; but I did not know whether that was allowable on Sunday.”

“Oh! Why did you not pound it to your heart’s content? Ned scandalizes the neighbors every Sunday by continually playing. Armande: dinner as soon as possible, please.”

“I like this house. It is exactly my idea of a comfortable modern home.”

“You must stay long enough to find out its defects,” said Conolly. “We read your novel at Verona; but we could not agree as to which characters you meant to be taken as the good ones.”

“That was only Ned’s nonsense,” said Marian. “Most novels are such rubbish! I am sure you will be able to live by writing just as well as Mrs. Fairfax can.” Conolly shewed Miss McQuinch his opinion of this unhappy remark by a whimsical glance, which she repudiated by turning sharply away from him, and speaking as affectionately as she could to Marian.

After dinner they returned to the drawing-room, which ran from the front to the back of the house. Marian opened a large window which gave access to the garden, and sat down with Elinor on a little terrace outside. Conolly went to the organ.

“May I play a voluntary while you talk?” he asked. “I shall not scandalize any one: the neighbors think all music sacred when it is played on the organ.”

“We have a nice view of the sunset from here,” said Marian, in a low voice, turning her forehead to the cool evening breeze.

“Stuff!” said Elinor. “We didnt come here to talk about the sunset, and what a pretty house you have, and so forth. I want to know — good heavens! what a thundering sound that organ makes!”

“Please dont say anything about it to him: he likes it,” said Marian. “When he wishes to exalt himself, he goes to it and makes it roar until the whole house shakes. Whenever he feels an emotional impulse, he vents it at the organ or the piano, or by singing. When he stops, he is satisfied; his mind is cleared; and he is in a good-humored, playful frame of mind, such as I can gratify.”

“But you were always very fond of music. Dont you ever play together, as we used to do; or sing to one another’s accompaniments?”

“I cannot. I hardly ever touch the piano when he is in the house.”

“Why? Are you afraid of preventing him from having his turn?”

“No: it is not so much that. But — it sounds very silly — if I attempt to play or sing in his presence, I become so frightfully nervous that I hardly know what I am doing. I know he does not like my singing.”

“Are you sure that is not merely your fancy? It sounds very like it.”

“No. At first I used to play a good deal for him, knowing that he was fond of music, and fancying — poor fool that I was! [here Marian spoke so bitterly that Nelly turned and looked hard at her] that it was part of a married woman’s duty in a house to supply music after dinner. At that time he was working hard at his business; and he spent so much time in the city that he had to give up playing himself. Besides, we were flying all about England opening those branch offices, and what not. He always took me with him; and I really enjoyed it, and took quite an interest in the Company. When we were in London, although I was so much alone in the daytime, I was happy in anticipating our deferred honeymoon. Then the time for that paradise came. Ned said that the Company was able to walk by itself at last, and that he was going to have a long holiday after his dry-nursing of it. We went first to Paris, where we heard all the classical concerts that were given while we were there. I found that he never tired of listening to orchestral music; and yet he never ceased grumbling at it. He thought nothing of the great artists in Paris. Then we went for a tour through Brittany; and there, in spite of his classical tastes, he used to listen to the peasants’ songs and write them down. He seemed to like folk songs of all kinds, Irish, Scotch, Russian, German, Italian, no matter where from. So one evening, at a lodging where there was a piano, I played for him that old arrangement of Irish melodies — you know— ‘Irish Diamonds,’ it is called.”

“Oh Lord! Yes, I remember. ‘Believe me if all,’ with variations.”

“Yes. He thought I meant it in jest: he laughed at it, and played a lot of ridiculous variations to burlesque it. I didnt tell him that I had been in earnest: perhaps you can imagine how I felt about it. Then, after that, in Italy, he got permission — or rather bought it — to try the organ in a church. It was growing dusk; I was tired with walking; and somehow between the sense of repose, and the mysterious twilight in the old church, I was greatly affected by his playing. I thought it must be part of some great mass or symphony; and I felt how little I knew about music, and how trivial my wretched attempts must appear to him when he had such grand harmonies at his fingers’ ends. But he soon stopped; and when I was about to tell him how I appreciated his performance, he said, ‘What an abominable instrument a bad organ is!’ I had thought it beautiful, of course. I asked him what he had been playing. I said was it not by Mozart; and then I saw his eyebrows go up; so I added, as a saving clause, that perhaps it was something of his own. ‘My dear girl,’ said he, ‘it was only an entr’acte from an opera of Donizetti’s.’ He was carrying my shawl at the time; and he wrapped it about my shoulders in the tenderest manner as he said this, and made love to me all the evening to console me. In his opinion, the greatest misfortune that can happen anyone is to make a fool of oneself; and whenever I do it, he pets me in the most delicate manner, as if I were a child who had just got a tumble. When we settled down here and got the organ, he began to play constantly, and I used to practise the piano in the daytime so as to have duets with him. But though he was always ready to play whenever I proposed it, he was quite different then from what he was when he played by himself. He was all eyes and ears, and the moment I played a wrong note he would name the right one. Then I generally got worse and stopped. He never lost his patience or complained; but I used to feel that he was urging me on, or pulling me back, or striving to get me to do something which I could not grasp. Then he would give me up in despair, and play on mechanically from the notes before him, thinking of something else all the time. I practised harder, and tried again. I thought at first I had succeeded; because our duets went so smoothly and we were always so perfectly together. But I discovered — by instinct I believe — that instead of having a musical treat, he was only trying to please me. He thought I liked playing duets with him; and accordingly he used to sit down beside me and accompany me faithfully, no matter how I chose to play.”

“Dear me! Why doesnt he get Rubinstein to play with him, since he is so remarkably fastidious?”

“It is not so much mechanical skill that I lack; but there is something — I cannot tell what it is. I found it out one night when we were at Mrs. Saunders’s. She is an incurable flirt; and she was quite sure that she had captivated Ned, who is always ready to make love to anyone that will listen to him.”

“A nice sort of man to be married to!”

“He only does it to amuse himself. He does not really care for them: I almost wish he did, sometimes; but it is often none the less provoking. What is worse, no amount of flirtation on my part would make him angry. What happened at Mrs. Saunders’s was this. The Scotts, of Putney, were there; and the first remark Ned made to me was, ‘Who is the woman that knows how to walk?’ It was Mrs. Scott: you know you used to say she moved like a panther. Afterward Mrs. Scott sang ‘Caller Herrin’ in that vulgar Scotch accent that leaks out occasionally in her speech, with Ned at the piano. Everybody came crowding in to listen; and there was great applause. I cannot understand it: she is as hard and matter-of-fact as a woman can be: I dont believe the expression in her singing comes one bit from true feeling. I heard Ned say to her, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Scott: no Englishwoman has the secret of singing a ballad as you have it.’ I knew very well what that meant. I have not the secret. Well, Mrs. Scott came over to me and said ‘Mr. Conolly is a very pairtinaceous man. He persuaded me into shewing him the way the little song is sung in Scotland; and I stood up without thinking. And see now, I have been raguilarly singing a song in company for the first time in my life.’ Of course, it was a ridiculous piece of affectation. Ned talked about Mrs. Scott all the way home, and played ‘Caller Herrin’ four times next day. That finished my domestic musical career. I have never sung for him since, except once or twice when he has asked me to try the effect of some passage in one of his music-books.”

“And do you never sing when you go out, as you used to?”

“Only when he is not with me, or when people force me to. If he is in the room, I am so nervous that I can hardly get through the easiest song. He never offers to accompany me now, and generally leaves the room when I am asked to sing.”

“Perhaps he sees the effect his presence has on you.”

“Even so, he ought to stay. He used to like me to listen to him, at first.”

Miss McQuinch looked at the sunset with exceeding glumness. There was an ominous pause. Then she said, abruptly, “You remember how we used to debate whether marriage was a mistake or not. Have you found out?”

“I dont know.”

“That sounds rather as if you did know. Are you quite sure you are not in low spirits this evening? He was bantering you about being out of temper when you came in. Perhaps you quarrelled at Kew.”

“Quarrel! He quarrel! I cannot explain to you how we are situated,
Nelly. You would not understand me.”

“Suppose you try. For instance, is he as fond of you as he was before you married him?”

“I dont know.”

Miss McQuinch shrugged herself impatiently.

“Really I do not, Nelly. He has changed in a way — I do not quite know how or why. At first he was not very ceremonious. He used to make remarks about people, and discuss everything that came into his head quite freely before me. He was always kind, and never grumbled about his dinner, or lost his temper, or anything of that kind; but — it was not that he was coarse exactly: he was not that in the least; but he was very open and unreserved and plain in his language; and somehow I did not quite like it. He must have found this out: he sees and feels everything by instinct; for he slipped back into his old manner, and became more considerate and attentive than he had ever been before. I was made very happy at first by the change; but I do not think he quite understood what I wanted. I did not at all object to going down to the country with him on his business trips; but he always goes alone now; and he never mentions his work to me. And he is too careful as to what he says to me. Of course, I know that he is right not to speak ill of anybody; but still a man need not be so particular before his wife as before strangers. He has given up talking to me altogether: that is the plain truth, whatever he may pretend. When we do converse, his manner is something like what it was in the laboratory at the Towers. Of course, he sometimes becomes more familiar; only then he never seems in earnest, but makes love to me in a bantering, half playful, half sarcastic way.”

“You are rather hard to please, perhaps. I remember you used to say that a husband should be just as tender and respectful after marriage as before it. You seem to have broken poor Ned into this; and now you are not satisfied.”

“Nelly, if there is one subject on which girls are more idiotically ignorant than on any other, it is happiness in marriage. A courtier, a lover, a man who will not let the winds of heaven visit your face too harshly, is very nice, no doubt; but he is not a husband. I want to be a wife and not a fragile ornament kept in a glass case. He would as soon think of submitting any project of his to the judgment of a doll as to mine. If he has to explain or discuss any serious matter of business with me, he does so apologetically, as if he were treating me roughly.”

“Well, my dear, you see, when he tried the other plan, you did not like that either. What is the unfortunate man to do?”

“I dont know. I suppose I was wrong in shrinking from his confidence. I am always wrong. It seems to me that the more I try to do right, the more mischief I contrive to make.”

“This is all pretty dismal, Marian. What sort of conduct on his part would make you happy?”

“Oh, there are so many little things. He makes me jealous of everything and everybody. I am jealous of the men in the city — I was jealous of the sanitary inspector the other day — because he talks with interest to them. I know he stays in the city later than he need. It is a relief to me to go out in the evening, or to have a few people here once or twice a week; but I am angry because I know it is a relief to him too. I am jealous even of that organ. How I hale those Bach fugues! Listen to the maddening thing twisting and rolling and racing and then mixing itself up into one great boom. He can get on with Bach: he can’t get on with me. I have even condescended to be jealous of other women — of such women as Mrs. Saunders. He despises her: he plays with her as dexterously as she thinks she plays with him; but he likes to chat with her; and they rattle away for a whole evening without the least constraint. She has no conscience: she talks absolute nonsense about art and literature: she flirts even more disgustingly than she used to when she was Belle Woodward; but she is quickwitted, like most Irish people; and she enjoys a broad style of jesting which Ned is a great deal too tolerant of, though he would as soon die as indulge in it before me. Then there is Mrs. Scott, who is just as shrewd as Belle, and much cleverer. I have heard him ask her opinion as to whether he had acted well or not in some stroke of business — something that I had never heard of, of course. I wish I were half as hard and strong and self-reliant as she is. Her husband would be nothing without her.”

“I am afraid I was right all along, Marian. Marriage is a mistake. There is something radically wrong in the institution. If you and Ned cannot be happy, no pair in the world can.”

“We might be very happy if — —” Marian stopped to repress a sob.

“Anybody might be very happy If. There is not much consolation in Ifs. You could not be better off than you are unless you could be Marian Lind again. Think of all the women who would give their souls to have a husband who would neither drink, nor swear at them, nor kick them, nor sulk whenever he was kept waiting half a minute for anything. You have no little pests of children — —”

“I wish I had. That would give us some interest in common. We sometimes have Lucy, Marmaduke’s little girl, up here; and Ned seems to me to be fond of her. She is a very bold little thing.”

“I saw Marmaduke last week. He is not half so jolly as he was.”

“He lives in chambers in Westminster now, and only comes out in this direction occasionally to see Lucy. I am afraid she has taken to drinking. I believe she is going to America. I hope she is; for she makes me uncomfortable when I think of her.”

“Does your — your Ned ever speak of her?”

“No. He used to, before he changed as I described. Now, he never mentions her. Hush! Here he is.”

The sound of the organ had ceased; and Conolly came out and stood between them.

“How do you like my consoler, as Marian calls it?” said he.

“Do you mean the organ?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t listening to you.”

“You should have: I played the great fugue in A minor expressly for your entertainment: you used to work at Liszt’s transcription of it. The organ is only occasionally my consoler. For the most part I am driven to it by habit and a certain itching in my fingers. Marian is my real consoler.”

“So she has just been telling me,” said Elinor. Conolly’s surprise escaped him for just a moment in a quick glance at Marian. She colored, and looked reproachfully at her cousin, who added, “I am sure you must be a nuisance to the neighbors.”

“Probably,” said Conolly.

“I do not think you should play so much on Sunday,” said Marian.

“I know. [Marian winced.] Well, if the neighbors will either melt down the church bells they jangle so horribly within fifteen yards or so of my unfortunate ears, or else hang them up two hundred feet high in a beautiful tower where they would sound angelic, as they do at Utrecht, then perhaps I will stop the organ to listen to them. Until then, I will take the liberty of celebrating the day of rest with such devices as the religious folk cannot forbid me.”

“Pray do not begin to talk about religion, Ned.”

“My way of thinking is too robust for Marian, Miss McQuinch. I admit that it does not, at first sight, seem pretty or sentimental. But I do not know how even Marian can prefer the church bells to Bach.”

“What do you mean by ‘even Marian’?” said Elinor, sharply.

“I should have said, ‘Marian, who is tolerant and kind to everybody and everything.’ I hope you have forgiven me for carrying her off from you, Miss McQuinch. You are adopting an ominous tone toward me. I fear she has been telling you of our quarrels, and my many domestic shortcomings.”

“No,” said Elinor. “As far as I can judge from her account, you are a monotonously amiable husband.”

“Indeed! Hm! Would you like your coffee out here?”

“Yes.”

“Do not stir, Marian: I will ring for it.”

When he was gone, Marian said “Nelly: for Heaven’s sake say nothing that could make the slightest coldness between Ned and me. I am clinging to him with all my heart and soul; and you must help me. Those sharp things that you say to him stab me cruelly; and he is clever enough to guess everything I have said to you from them.”

“If I cannot keep myself from making mischief, I shall go away,” said Elinor. “Dont suppose I am in a huff: I am quite serious. I have an unlucky tongue; and my disposition is such that when I see that a jug is cracked, I feel more inclined to smash and have done with it than to mend it and handle it tenderly ever after. However, I hope your marriage is not a cracked jug yet.”

CHAPTER XIII

On the following Wednesday Douglas called on his mother at Manchester Square in the afternoon. As if to emphasize the purely filial motive of his visit, he saluted his mother so affectionately that she was emboldened to be more demonstrative with him than she usually ventured to be.

“My darling boy,” she said, holding him fondly for a moment, “this is the second visit you have paid your poor old mother this week. I want to speak to you about something, too. Marian has been with me this morning.”

“What! Has she gone?” said Douglas.

“Why?” said Mrs. Douglas. “Did you know she was coming?”

“She mentioned to me that she intended to come,” he replied, carelessly; “but she bade me not to tell you.”

“That accounts for your two visits. Well, Sholto, I do not blame you for spending your time in gayer places than this.”

“You must not reproach me for neglecting you, mother. You know my disposition. I am seldom good company for any one; and I do not care to come only to cast a damp on you and your friends when I am morose. I hope you received Marian kindly.”

“I did not expect to see her; and I told her so.”

“Mother!”

“But it made no difference. There is no holding her in check now, Sholto; she cares no more for what I say than if I was her father or you. What could I do but kiss and forgive her? She got the better of me.”

“Yes,” said Douglas, gloomily. “She has a wonderful face.”

“The less you see of her face, the better, Sholto. I hope you will not go to her house too often.”

“Do you doubt my discretion, mother?”

“No, no, Sholto. But I am afraid of any unpleasantness arising between you and that man. These working men are so savage to their wives, and so jealous of gentlemen. I hardly like your going into his house at all.”

“Absurd, mother! You must not think that he is a navvy in fustian and corduroys. He seems a sensible man: his address is really remarkably good, considering what he is. As to his being savage, he is quite the reverse. His head is full of figures and machinery; and I am told that he does nothing at home but play the piano. He must bore Marian terribly. I do not want to go to his house particularly; but Marian and he are, of course, very sensitive to anything that can be construed as a slight; and I shall visit them once or twice to prevent them from thinking that I wish to snub Conolly. He will be glad enough to have me at his dinner-table. I am afraid I must hurry away now: I have an appointment at the club. Can I do anything for you in town?”

“No, thank you, Sholto. I thought you would have stayed with me for a cup of tea.”

“Thank you, dear mother, no: not to-day. I promised to be at the club.”

“If you promised, of course, you must go. Good-bye. You will come again soon, will you not?”

“Some day next week, if not sooner. Good-bye, mother.”

Douglas left Manchester Square, not to go to his club, where he had no real appointment, but to avoid spending the afternoon with his mother, who, though a little hurt at his leaving her, was also somewhat relieved by being rid of him. They maintained toward one another an attitude which their friends found beautiful and edifying; but, like artists’ models, they found the attitude fatiguing, in spite of their practice and its dignity.

At Hyde Park Corner, Douglas heard his name unceremoniously shouted. Turning, he saw Marmaduke Lind, carelessly dressed, walking a little behind him.

“Where are you going to?” said Marmaduke, abruptly.

“Why do you ask?” said Douglas, never disposed to admit the right of another to question him.

“I want to have a talk with you. Come and lunch somewhere, will you?”

“Yes, if you wish.”

“Let’s go to the South Kensington Museum.”

“The South —— ! My dear fellow, why not suggest Putney, or the Star and Garter? Why do you wish to go westward from Hyde Park in search of luncheon?”

“I have a particular reason. I am to meet someone at the Museum this afternoon; and I want to ask your advice first. You might as well come; it’s only a matter of a few minutes if we drive.”

“Well, as you please. I have not been to the Museum for years.”

“All right. Come al —— oh, damn! There’s Lady Carbury and Constance coming out of the Park. Dont look at them. Come on.”

But Constance, sitting a little more uprightly than her mother, who was supine upon the carriage cushions, had seen the two gentlemen as they stood talking.

“Mamma,” she said, “there’s Marmaduke and Sholto Douglas.”

“Where???” said the Countess, lifting her head quickly. “Josephs, drive slowly. Where are they, Constance?”

“They are going away. I believe Marmaduke saw us. There he is, passing the hospital.”

“We must go and speak to them. Look pleasant, child; and dont make a fool of yourself.”

“Surely youll not speak to him, mamma! You dont expect me — —”

“Nonsense. I heard a great deal about him the other day. He has moved from where he was living, and is quite reformed. His father is very ill. Do as I tell you. Josephs, stop half way to the hotel.”

“I say,” said Marmaduke, finding himself out-manoeuvred: “come back.
There they are right ahead, confound them. What are they up to?”

“It cannot be helped,” said Douglas. “There is no escape. You must not cross: it would be pointedly rude.”

Marmaduke went on grumbling. When he attempted to pass, the Countess called his name, and greeted him with smiles.

“We want to know how your father is,” she said. “We have had such alarming accounts of him. I hope he is better.”

“They havnt told me much about him,” said Marmaduke. “There was deuced little the matter with the governor when I saw him last.”

“Wicked prodigal! What shall we do to reform him, Mr. Douglas? He has not been to see us for three years past, and during that time we have had the worst reports of him.”

“You never asked me to go and see you.”

“Silly fellow! Did you expect me to send you invitations and leave cards on you, who are one of ourselves? Come to-morrow to dinner. Your uncle the Bishop will be there; and you will see nearly all the family besides. You cannot plead that you have not been invited now. Will you come?”

“No. I cant stand the Bishop. Besides, I have taken to dining in the middle of the day.”

“Come after dinner, then?”

“Mamma,” said Constance, peevishly, “can’t you see that he does not want to come at all? What is the use of persecuting him?”

“No, I assure you,” said Marmaduke. “It’s only the Bishop I object to.
I’ll come after dinner, if I can.”

“And pray what is likely to prevent you?” said the Countess.

“Devilment of some sort, perhaps,” he replied. “Since you have all given me a bad name, I dont see why I should make any secret of earning it.”

The Countess smiled slyly at him, implying that she was amused, but must not laugh at such a sentiment in Constance’s presence. Then, turning so as to give the rest of the conversation an air of privacy, she whispered, “I must tell you that you no longer have a bad name. It is said that your wild oats are all sown, and I will answer for it that even the Bishop will receive you with open arms.”

“And dry my repentant tears on his apron, the old hypocrite,” said Marmaduke, speaking rather more loudly than before. “Well, we must be trotting. We are going to the South Kensington Museum — to improve our minds.”

“Why, that is where we are going; at least, Constance is. She is going to work at her painting while I pay a round of visits. Wont you come with us?”

“Thank you: I’d rather walk. A man should have gloves and a proper hat for your sort of travelling.”

“Nonsense! you look very nice. Besides, it is only down the Brompton
Road.”

“The worst neighborhood in London to be seen in with me. I know all sorts of queer people down Brompton way. I should have to bow to them if we met; and that wouldnt do before her,” — indicating Constance, who was conversing with Douglas.

“You are incorrigible: I give you up. Good-bye, and dont forget to-morrow evening.”

“I wonder,” said Marmaduke, as the carriage drove off, “what she’s saying about me to Constance now.”

“That you are the rudest man in London, perhaps.”

“Serve her right! I hate her. I have got so now that I can’t stand that sort of woman. You see her game, dont you; she can’t get Constance off her hands; and she thinks there’s a chance of me still. How well she knows about the governor’s state of health! And Conny, too, grinning at me as if we were the best friends in the world. If that girl had an ounce of spirit she would not look on the same side of the street with me.”

Douglas, without replying, called a cab. Marmaduke’s loud conversation was irksome in the street, and it was now clear that he was unusually excited. At the museum they alighted, and passed through the courts into the grill-room, where they sat down together at a vacant table, and ordered luncheon.

“You were good enough to ask my advice about something,” said Douglas.
“What is the matter?”

“Well,” said Marmaduke, “I am in a fix. Affairs have become so uncomfortable at home that I have had to take up my quarters elsewhere.”

“I did not know that you had been living at home. I thought your father and you were on the usual terms.”

“My father! Look here: I mean home — my home. My place at Hammersmith, not down at the governor’s.”

“Oh! I beg your pardon.”

“Of course, you know all about my establishment there with Lalage
Virtue? her real name is Susanna Conolly.”

“Is it true, then, that she is a cousin of Marian’s husband?”

“Cousin! She’s his sister, and Marian’s sister-in-law.”

“I never believed it.”

“It’s true enough. But thats not the mischief. Douglas: I tell you she’s the cleverest woman in London. She can do anything she likes. She can manage a conversation with any foreigner in his own language, whether she knows it or not. She gabbles Italian like a native. She can learn off her part in a new piece, music and all, between breakfast and luncheon, any day. She can cook: she can make a new bonnet out of the lining of an old coat: she can drive a bargain with a Jew. She says she never learns a thing at all unless she can learn it in ten minutes. She can fence, and shoot. She can dance anything in the world. I never knew such a mimic as she is. If you saw her take off the Bones at the Christy Minstrels, you’d say she was the lowest of the low. Next minute she will give herself the airs of a duchess, or do the ingenuous in a style that would make Conny burst with envy. To see her preaching like George would make you laugh for a week. There’s nothing she couldnt do if she chose. And now, what do you think she has taken to? Liquor. Champagne by the gallon. She used to drink it by the bottle: now she drinks it by the dozen — by the case. She wanted it to keep up her spirits. That was the way it began. If she felt down, a glass of champagne would set her up. Then she was always feeling down, and always setting herself up. At last feeling down came to mean the same thing as being sober. You dont know what a drunken woman is, Douglas, unless youve lived in the same house with one.” Douglas recoiled, and looked very sternly at Marmaduke, who proceeded more vehemently. “She’s nothing but a downright beast. She’s either screaming at you in a fit of rage, or clawing at you in a fit of fondness that makes you sick. When she falls asleep, there she is, a besotted heap tumbled anyhow into bed, snoring and grunting like a pig. When she wakes, she begins planning how to get more liquor. Think of what you or I would feel if we saw our mothers tipsy. By God, that child of mine wouldnt believe its eyes if it saw its mother sober. Only for Lucy, I’d have pitched her over long ago. I did all I could when I first saw that she was overdoing the champagne. I swore I’d break the neck of any man I caught bringing wine into the house. I sacked the whole staff of servants twice because I found a lot of fresh corks swept into the dustpan. I stopped drinking at home myself: I got in doctors to frighten her: I tried bribing, coaxing, threatening: I knocked her down once when I caught her with a bottle in her hand; and she fell with her head against the fender, and frightened me a good deal more than she hurt herself. It was no use. Sometimes she used to defy me, and say she would drink, she didnt care whether she was killing herself or not. Other times she cried; implored me to save her from destroying herself; asked me why I didnt thrash the life out of her whenever I caught her drunk; promised on her oath never to touch another drop. The same evening she would be drunk again, and, when I taxed her with it, say that she wasn’t drunk, that she was sick, and that she prayed the Almighty on her knees to strike her dead if she had a bottle in the house. Aye, and the very stool she knelt on would be a wine case with a red cloth stuck to it with a few gilt-headed nails to make it look like a piece of furniture. Next day she would laugh at me for believing her, and ask me what use I supposed there was in talking to her. How she managed to hold on at the theatre, I dont know. She wouldnt learn new parts, and stuck to old ones that she could do in her sleep, she knew them so well. She would go on the stage and get through a long part when she couldnt walk straight from the wing to her dressing-room. Of course, her voice went to the dogs long ago; but by dint of screeching and croaking she pulls through. She says she darent go on sober now; that she knows she should break down. The theatre has fallen off, too. The actors got out of the place one by one — they didnt like playing with her — and were replaced by a third-rate lot. The audiences used to be very decent: now they are all cads and fast women. The game is up for her in London. She has been offered an engagement in America on the strength of her old reputation; but what is the use of it if she continues drinking.”

“That is very sad,” said Douglas, with cold disgust, perfunctorily veiled by a conventional air of sympathy. “But if she is irreclaimable, why not leave her?”

“So I would, only for the child. I have left her — at least, I’ve taken lodgings in town; but I am always running out to Laurel Grove. I darent trust Lucy to her; and she knows it; for she wouldnt let me take the poor little creature away, although she doesnt care two straws for it. She knows that it gives her a grip over me. Well, I have not seen her for a week past. I have tried the trick of only going out in the evening when she has to be at the theatre. And now she has sent me a long letter; and I dont exactly know what to do about it. She swears she has given up drinking — not touched a spoonful since I saw her last. She’s as superstitious as an old woman; and yet she will swear to that lie with oaths that make me uncomfortable, although I am pretty thick-skinned in religious matters. Then she goes drivelling on about me having encouraged her to drink at first, and then turned upon her and deserted her when I found out the mischief I had done. I used to stand plenty of champagne, but I am sure I never thought what would come of it. Then she says she gave up every friend in the world for me: broke with her brother, and lost her place in society. Her place in society, mind you, Douglas! Thats not bad, is it? Then, of course, I am leaving her to die alone with her helpless child: I might have borne with her a little longer: she will not trouble me nor anyone else much more; and so on. The upshot is that she wants me to come back. She says I ought to be there to save the child from her, if I dont care to save her from herself; that I was the last restraint on her; and that if I dont come she will make an end of the business by changing her tipple to prussic acid. The whole thing is a string of maudlin rot from beginning to end; and I believe she primed herself with about four bottles of champagne to write it. Still, I dont want to leave her in the lurch. You are a man who stand pretty closely on your honor. Do you think I ought to go back? I may tell you that as regards money she is under no compliment to me. Her earnings were a good half of our income; and she saved nothing out of them. In fact, I owe her some money for two or three old debts she paid for me. We always shared like husband and wife.”

“I hardly understand your hesitation, Lind. You can take the little girl out of her hands; allow her something; and be quit of her.”

“Thats very easy to say; but I cant drag her child away from her if she insists on keeping it.”

“Well, so much the better for you. It would be a burden to you. Pay her for its maintenance: that is probably what she wants.”

“No, no,” said Marmaduke, impatiently. “You dont understand. Youre talking as if I were a rake living with a loose woman.”

Douglas looked at him doubtfully. “I confess I do not understand,” he said. “Perhaps you will be good enough to explain.”

“It’s very simple. I went to live with her because I fell in love with her, and she wouldnt marry me. She had a horror of marriage; and I was naturally not very eager for it myself. Matters must be settled between us as if we were husband and wife. Paying her off is all nonsense. She doesnt want money; and I want the child; so she has the advantage of me. Only for the drink I would go back to her to-morrow; but I cant stand her when she is not sober. I bore with it long enough; and now all I want is to get Lucy out of her hands and be quit of her, as you say — although it seems mean to leave her.”

“She must certainly be a very extraordinary woman if she refused to marry you. Are you sure she is not married already?”

“Bosh! Not she. She likes to be independent; and she has a sort of self-respect — not like Constance and the old Countess, who hunted me long enough in the hope of running me down at last in a church.”

“If you offered her marriage, that certainly frees you from the least obligation to stay with her. She reserved liberty to leave you; and, of course, the same privilege was implied on your part. If you have no sentimental wish to return to her, you are most decidedly not bound in honor to.”

“I’m fond enough of her when she is sober; but I loathe her when she is fuddled. If she would only give up drinking, we might make a fresh start. But she wont.”

“You must not think of doing that. Get rid of her, my dear fellow. This marriage of Marian’s has put the affair on a new footing altogether. I tell you candidly, I think that under the circumstances your connexion with Conolly’s sister is a disgraceful one.”

“Hang Conolly! Everybody thinks of Marian, and nobody of Susanna. I have heard enough of that side of the question. Marian married him with her eyes open.”

“Do you mean to say that she knew?”

“Of course she did. Conolly told her, fairly enough. He’s an extraordinary card, that fellow.”

“Reginald Lind told my mother that the discovery was made by accident after the marriage, and that they were all shocked by it. It was he who said that it was Conolly’s cousin that you were with.”

“Uncle Rej. is an old liar. So are most of the family: I never believe a word they say.”

“Marian must have been infatuated. I advise you to break the connexion. She will be glad to give you the child if she sees that you are resolved to leave her. She only holds on because she hopes to make it the means of bringing you back.”

“I expect youre about right. She wants me to meet her here to-day at half past three. Thats the reason I came.”

“Do you know that it now wants twenty minutes of four?”

“Whew! So it does. I had better go and look for her. I’m very much obliged to you, old fellow, for talking it over with me. I suppose you dont want to meet her.”

“I should be in the way at present.”

“Then good-bye.”

Marmaduke, leaving Douglas in the grill-room, went upstairs to the picture galleries, where several students were more or less busy at their easels. Lady Constance was in the Sheepshanks gallery, copying “Sterne’s Maria,” by Charles Landseer, as best she could. She had been annoyed some minutes before by the behavior of a stout woman in a rich costume of black silk, who had stopped for a moment to inspect her drawing. Lady Constance, by a look, had made her aware that she was considered intrusive, whereupon she had first stared Lady Constance out of countenance, and then deliberately scanned her work with an expression which conveyed a low opinion of its merit. Having thus revenged herself, she stood looking uneasily at the door for a minute, and at last wandered away into the adjoining gallery. A few minutes later Marmaduke entered, looking round as if in search of someone.

“Here I am,” said Constance to him, playfully.

“So I see,” said Marmaduke, recognizing her with rueful astonishment.
“You knew I was looking for you, did you?”

“Of course I did, sir.”

“Youre clever, so you are. What are you doing here?”

“Dont you see? I am copying a picture.”

“Oh! it’s very pretty. Which one are you copying?”

“What an impertinent question! You can tell my poor copy well enough, only you pretend not to.”

“Yes, now that I look closely at it, I fancy it’s a little like Mary the maid of the inn there.”

“It’s not Mary: it’s Maria — Sterne’s Maria.”

“Indeed! Do you read Sterne?”

“Certainly not,” said Constance, looking very serious.

“Then what do you paint his Maria for? How do you know whether she is a fit subject for you?”

“Hush, sir! You must not interrupt my work.”

“I suppose you have lots of fun here over your art studies, eh?”

“Who?”

“You, and all the other girls here.”

“Oh, I am sure I dont know any of them.”

“Quite right, too, your ladyship. Dont make yourself cheap. I hope none of the low beggars ever have the audacity to speak to you.”

“I dont know anything about them,” said Lady Constance, pettishly. “All
I mean is that they are strangers to me.”

“Most likely theyll remain so. You all seem to stick to the little pictures tremendously. Why dont you go in for high art? There’s a big picture of Adam and Eve! Why dont you paint that?”

“Will you soon be leaving town?” she replied, looking steadily at her work, and declining to discuss Adam and Eve, who were depicted naked. Receiving no reply, she looked round, and saw Marmaduke leaving the room with the woman in the black silk dress.

“Who is that girl?” said Susanna, as they went out.

“That’s Lady Constance, whom I was to have married.”

“I guessed as much when I saw you talking to her. She is a true English lady, heaven bless her! I took the liberty of looking at her painting; and she stared at me as if I had bitten her.”

“She is a little fool.”

“She will not be such a little fool as to try to snub me again, I think.
Bob: did you get my letter?”

“Of course I got it, or I shouldnt be here.”

“Well?”

“Well, I dont believe a word of it.”

“That’s plain speaking.”

“There is no use mincing matters. You are just as likely to stop drinking as you are to stop breathing.”

“Perhaps I shall stop breathing before long.”

“Very likely, at your present rate.”

“That will be a relief to you.”

“It will be a relief to everybody, and a release for yourself. You have made me miserable for a year past; and now you expect me to be frightened at the prospect of being rid of you.”

“I dont expect you to be frightened. I expect you to do what all men do: throw me aside as soon as I have served your turn.”

“Yes. Of course, you are the aggrieved party. Where’s Lucy?”

“I dont know, and I dont care.”

“Well, I want to know; and I do care. Is she at home?”

“How do I know whether she is at home or not. I left her there. Very likely she is with her Aunt Marian, telling stories about her mother.”

“She is better there than with you. What harm has she done you that you should talk about her in that way?”

“No harm. I dont object to her being there. She has very pleasant conversations with Mrs. Ned, which she retails to me at home. ‘Aunty Marian: why do you never drink champagne? Mamma is always drinking it.’ And then, ‘Mamma: why do you drink so much wine? Aunty Marian never drinks any.’ Good heavens! the little devil told me this morning by way of consolation that she always takes care not to tell her Aunty that I get drunk.”

“What did you do to her for saying it?”

“Dont lose your temper. I didnt strangle her, nor even box her ears.
Why should I? She only repeats what you teach her.”

“She repeats what her eyes and ears teach her. If she learned the word from me, she learned the meaning from you. A nice lesson for a child hardly three years old.”

Susanna sat down on a bench, and looked down at her feet. After a few moments, she tightened her lips; rose; and walked away.

“Hallo! Where are you going to?” said Marmaduke, following her.

“I’m going to get some drink. I have been sober and miserable ever since I wrote to you. I have not got much thanks for it, except to be made more miserable. So I’ll get drunk, and be happy.”

“No, you shant,” said Marmaduke, seizing her arm, and forcibly stopping her.

“What does it matter to you whether I do or not? You say you won’t come back. Then leave me to go my own way.”

“Here! you sit down,” he said, pushing her into a chair. “I know your game well enough. You think you have me safe as long as you have the child.”

“Oh, thats it, is it? Why dont you go out; take a cab; and go to Laurel
Grove for her? There is nothing to prevent you taking her away.”

“I have a good mind to do it.”

“Well, do it. I wont stop you. Why didnt you do it long ago? Her home is no place for her. I’m not fit to have charge of her. I have no fancy for having her talking about me, and most likely mimicking me to other people.”

“Thats exactly what I want to arrange with you to do, if you will only be reasonable. Listen. Let us part friends, Susanna, since there is no use in our going on together. You must give me the child. It would only be a burden to you; and I can have it well taken care of. You can keep the house just as it is: I will pay the rent of it.”

“What good is the house to me?”

“Can’t you hear me out? It will be good to you to live in, I suppose; or you can set it on fire, and wipe it off the face of the earth, for what I care. I can give you five hundred pounds down — —”

“Five hundred pounds! And what will you live on until your October dividends come in? On credit, I suppose. Do you think you can impose on me by flourishing money before me? I will never take a halfpenny from you; no, not if I starve for it.”

“Thats all nonsense, Susanna. You must.”

“Must I? Do you think you can make me take your money as you made me sit down here? by force!”

“I only offer you what I owe you. Those debts — —”

“I dont want what you owe me. If you think it mean to leave me, you shant plaster up your conscience with bank notes. You would like to be able to say in your club that you treated me handsomely.”

“I dont think it mean to leave you, not a bit of it. Any other man would have left you months ago. If I had married that little fool inside there, and she had taken to drink, I wouldnt have stood it a week. I have stood it from you nearly a year. Can you expect me to stay under the same roof with you, with the very thought of you making me sick and angry? I was looking at some of your old likenesses the other day; and I declare that it is enough to make a man cry to look at your face now and listen to your voice. When you used to lecture me for losing a twenty pound note at billiards, and coming home half screwed — no man shall ever see me drunk again — I little thought which of us would be the first to go to the dogs.”

“I shall not trouble you long.”

“What is the use of harping on that? I have seen you drunk so often that
I should almost be glad to see you dead.”

“Stop!” said Susanna, rising. “All right: you need say no more. Talking will not remedy matters; and it makes me feel pretty much as if you were throwing big stones at my heart. Youre in the right, I suppose: I’ve chosen to make a beast of myself, and I must take the consequences. You can have the child. I will send for my things: you wont see me at Laurel Grove again. Good-bye.”

“But — —”

“Dont say another word, Bob. Good-bye.” He took her hand irresolutely. She drew it quickly away; nodded to him; and went out, whilst he stood wondering whether it would be safe — seeing that he did not desire a reconciliation — to kiss her good-bye.

CHAPTER XIV

On Sunday afternoon Douglas walked, facing a glorious sunset, along Uxbridge Road to Holland Park, where he found Mrs. Conolly, Miss McQuinch, and Marmaduke. A little girl was playing in the garden. They were all so unconstrained, and so like their old selves, that Douglas at once felt that Conolly was absent.

“I am to make Ned’s excuses,” said Marian. “He has some pressing family affairs to arrange.” She seemed about to explain further; but Marmaduke looked so uneasily at her that she stopped. Then, resuming gaily, she added, “I told Ned that he need not stand on ceremony with you. Fancy my saying that of you, the most punctilious of men!”

“Quite right. I am glad that Mr. Conolly has not suffered me to interfere with his movements,” he replied, with a smile, which he suppressed as he turned and greeted Miss McQuinch with his usual cold composure. But to Marmaduke, who seemed much cast down, he gave an encouraging squeeze of the hand. Not that he was moved by the misfortunes of Marmaduke; but he was thawed by the beauty of Marian.

“We shall have a pleasant evening,” continued Marian. “Let us fancy ourselves back at Westbourne Terrace again. Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad. Let us think that it is one of our old Sunday afternoons. Sholto had better go upstairs and shave, to heighten the illusion.”

“Not for me, since I cannot see myself, particularly if I have to call you Mrs. Conolly. If I may call you Marian, as I used to do, I think that our conversation will contain fewer reminders of the lapse of time.”

“Of course,” said Marian, disregarding an anxious glance from Elinor. “What else should you call me? We were talking about Nelly’s fame when you came in. The colonial edition of her book has just appeared. Behold the advertisement!”

There was a newspaper open on the table; and Marian pointed to one of its columns as she spoke. Douglas took it up and read the following:

Now Ready, a New and Cheaper Edition, crown 8vo, 5s.

THE WATERS OF MARAH,

BY ELINOR MCQUINCH.

”Superior to many of the numerous tales which find a ready sale at
the railway bookstall.” Athenaeum.

”There is nothing to fatigue, and something to gratify, the idle
reader.” Examiner.

”There is a ring of solid metal in ‘The Waters of Marah.’” Daily
Telegraph.

”Miss McQuinch has fairly established her claim to be considered
the greatest novelist of the age.” Middlingtown Mercury.

”Replete with thrilling and dramatic incident….. Instinct with
passion and pathos.” Ladies’ Gazette.

TABUTEAU & SON, COVENT GARDEN.

“That is very flattering,” said Douglas, as he replaced the paper on the table.

“Highly so,” said Elinor. “Coriolanus displaying his wounds in the Forum is nothing to it.” And she abruptly took the paper, and threw it disgustedly behind the sofa. Just then a message from the kitchen engaged Marian’s attention, and Douglas, to relieve her from her guests for the moment, strolled out upon the little terrace, whither Marmaduke had moodily preceded him.

“Still in your difficulties, Lind?” he said, with his perfunctory air of concern, looking at the garden with some interest.

“I’m out of my difficulties clean enough,” said Marmaduke. “There’s the child among the currant bushes; and I am rid of her mother: for good, I suppose.”

“So much the better! I hope it has not cost you too much.”

“Not a rap. I met her in the museum after our confab on Wednesday, and told her what you recommended: that I must have the child, and that she must go. She said all right, and shook hands. I havnt seen her since.”

“I congratulate you.”

“I dont feel comfortable about her.”

“Absurd, man! What better could you have done?”

“Thats just what I say. It was her own fault; I did all in my power. I offered her five hundred pounds down. She wouldnt have it, of course; but could I help that? Next day, when she sent her maid for her things, I felt so uneasy that I came to Conolly, and told him the whole affair. He behaved very decently about it, and said that I might as well have left her six months ago for all the good my staying had done or was likely to do. He has gone off to see her to-day — she is in lodgings somewhere near the theatre; and he will let me know in case any money is required. I should like to know what they are saying to one another about me. They’re a rum pair.”

“Well, let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die,” said Douglas, with an unnatural attempt at humor. “Marian seems happy. We must not spoil her evening.”

“Yes: she is always in good spirits when he is away.”

“Indeed?”

“It seems to me that they dont pull together. I think she is afraid of him.”

“You dont mean to say that he ill-treats her?” said Douglas, fiercely.

“No: I dont mean that he thrashes her, or anything of that sort. And yet he is just that sort of chap that I shouldnt be surprised at anything he might do. As far as ordinary matters go, he seems to treat her particularly well. But Ive noticed that she shuts up and gets anxious when he comes into the room; and he has his own way in everything.”

“Is that all? He embarrasses her by his behavior, I suppose. Perhaps she is afraid of his allowing his breeding to peep out.”

“Not she. His manners are all right enough. Besides, as he is a genius and a celebrity and all that, people dont expect him to be conventional. He might stand on his head, if he chose.”

“Sholto,” said Marian, joining them: “have you spoken to little Lucy?”

“No.”

“Then you are unacquainted with the most absolute imp on the face of the earth,” said Elinor. “You neednt frown, Marmaduke: it is you who have made her so.”

“Leave her alone,” said Marmaduke to Marian, who was about to call the child. “Petting babies is not in Douglas’s line: she will only bore him.”

“Not at all,” said Douglas.

“It does not matter whether she bores him or not,” said Marian. “He must learn to take a proper interest in children. Lucy: come here.”

Lucy stopped playing, and said, “What for?”

“Because I ask you to, dear,” said Marian, gently.

The child considered for a while, and then resumed her play. Miss McQuinch laughed. Marmaduke muttered impatiently, and went down the garden. Lucy did not perceive him until he was within a few steps of her, when she gave a shrill cry of surprise, and ran to the other side of a flower-bed too wide for him to spring across. He gave chase; but she, with screams of laughter, avoided him by running to and fro so as to keep on the opposite side to him. Feeling that it was undignified to dodge his child thus, he stopped and bade her come to him; but she only laughed the more. He called her in tones of command, entreaty, expostulation, and impatience. At last he shouted to her menacingly. She placed her thumbnail against the tip of her nose; spread her fingers; and made him a curtsy. He uttered an imprecation, and returned angrily to the house, saying, between his teeth:

“Let her stay out, since she chooses to be obstinate.”

“She is really too bad to-day,” said Marian. “I am quite shocked at her.”

“She is quite right not to come in and be handed round for inspection like a doll,” said Elinor.

“She is very bold not to come when she is told,” said Marian.

“Yes, from your point of view,” said Elinor. “I like bold children.”

Marmaduke was sulky and Marian serious for some time after this
incident. They recovered their spirits at dinner, when Marian related to
Douglas how she had become reconciled to his mother. Afterward,
Marmaduke suggested a game at whist.

“Oh no, not on Sunday,” said Marian. “Whist is too wicked.”

“Then what the dickens may we do?” said Marmaduke. “May Nelly play écarté with me?”

“Well, please dont play for money. And dont sit close to the front window.”

“Come along, then, Nell. You two may sing hymns, if you like.”

“I wish you could sing, Sholto,” said Marian. “It is an age since we last had a game of chess together. Do you still play?”

“Yes,” said Douglas; “I shall be delighted. But I fear you will beat me now, as I suppose you have been practising with Mr. Conolly.”

“Playing with Ned! No: he hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time. He actually grumbled about the price of the table and the pieces; but I insisted on having them, I suppose in remembrance of you.”

“It is kind of you to say that, Marian. Will you have black or white?”

“White, please, unless you wish me to be always making moves with your men.”

“Now. Will you move?”

“I think I had rather you began. Remember our old conditions. You are not to checkmate me in three moves; and you are not to take my queen.”

“Very well. You may rely upon it I shall think more of my adversary than of my game. Check.”

“Oh! You have done it in three moves. That is not fair. I won’t play any more unless you take back that.”

“No, I assure you it is not checkmate. My bishop should be at the other side for that. There! of course, that will do.”

“What a noise Marmaduke makes over his cards! I hope the people next door will not hear him swearing.”

“Impossible. You must not move that knight: it exposes your king. Do you know, I think there is a great charm about this house.”

“Indeed? Yes, it is a pretty house.”

“And this sunset hour makes it additionally so; Besides, it is inexpressibly sad to see you here, a perfectly happy and perfectly beautiful mistress of this romantic foreign home.”

“What do you mean, Sholto?”

“I call it a foreign home because, though it is yours, I have no part nor lot in it. Remember, we are only playing at old times to-night. Everything around, from the organ to the ring on your finger, reminds me that I am a stranger here. It seems almost unkind of you to regret nothing whilst I am full of regrets.”

“Check,” said Marian. “Mind your game, sir.”

“Flippant!” exclaimed Douglas, impatiently moving his king. “I verily believe that if your husband were at the bottom of the Thames at this moment, you would fly off unconcernedly to some other nest, and break hearts with as much indifference as ever.”

“I wish you would not make suggestions of that sort, Sholto. You make me uncomfortable. Something might happen to Ned. I wish he were home. He is very late.”

“Happy man. You can be serious when you think about him. I envy him.”

“What! Sholto Douglas stoop to envy any mortal! Prodigious!”

“Yes: it has come to that with me. Why should I not envy him? His career has been upward throughout. He has been a successful worker in the world, where I have had nothing real to do. When the good things I had been dreaming of and longing for all my life came in his path, he had them for the mere asking. I valued them so highly that when I fancied I possessed them, I was the proudest of men. I am humble enough now that I am beggared.”

“You are really talking the greatest nonsense.”

“No doubt I am. Still in love, Marian, you see. There is no harm in telling you so now.”

“On the contrary, it is now that there is harm. For shame, Sholto!”

“I am not ashamed. I tell you of my love because now you can listen to me without uneasiness, knowing that it is no longer associated with hope, or desire, or anything but regret. You see that I do not affect the romantic lover. I eat very well; I play chess; I go into society; and you reproach me for growing fat.”

Marian bent over the chessboard for a moment to hide her face. Then she said in a lower voice, “I have thoroughly convinced myself that there is no such thing as love in the world.”

“That means that you have never experienced it.”

“I have told you already that I have never been in love, and that I dont believe a bit in it. I mean romantic love, of course.”

“I verily believe that you have not. The future has one more pang in store for me; for you will surely love some day.”

“I am getting too old for that, I fear. At what age, pray, did you receive the arrow in your heart?”

“When I was a boy, I loved a vision. The happiest hours of my life were those in which I was slowly, tremulously daring to believe that I had found my vision at last in you. And then the dreams that followed! What a career was to have been mine! I remember how you used to reproach me because I was austere with women and proud with men. How could I have been otherwise? I contrasted the gifts of all other women with those of my elect, and the lot of all other men with my own. Can you wonder that, doing so, I carried my head among the clouds? You must remember how unfamiliar failure was to me. At school, at Oxford, in society, I had sought distinction without misgiving, and attained it without difficulty. My one dearest object I deemed secure long before I opened my lips and asked expressly for it. I think I walked through life at that time like a somnambulist; for I have since seen that I must have been piling mistake upon mistake until out of a chaos of meaningless words and smiles I had woven a Paphian love temple. At the first menace of disappointment — a thing as new and horrible to me as death — I fled the country. I came back with only the ruins of the doomed temple. You were not content to destroy a ruin: the feat was too easy to be glorious. So you rebuilt it in one hour to the very dome, and lighted its altars with more than their former radiance. Then, as though it were but a house of cards — as indeed it was nothing else — you gave it one delicate touch and razed it to its foundations. Yet I am afraid those altar lamps were not wholly extinguished. They smoulder beneath the ruins still.”

“I wonder why they made you the Newdigate poet at Oxford, Sholto: you mix your metaphors most dreadfully. Dont be angry with me: I understand what you mean; and I am very sorry. I say flippant things because I must. How can one meet seriousness in modern society except by chaff?”

“I am not angry. I had rather you did not understand. The more flippant you are, the more you harden my heart; and I want it to be as hard as the nether millstone. Your pity would soften me; and I dread that.”

“I believe it does every man good to be softened. If you ever really felt what you describe, you greatly over-estimated me. What can you lose by a little more softness? I often think that men — particularly good men — make their way through the world too much as if it were a solid mass of iron through which they must cut — as if they dared not relax their hardest edge and finest temper for a moment. Surely, that is not the way to enjoy life.”

“Perhaps not. Still, it is the way to conquer in life. It may be pleasant to have a soft heart; but then someone is sure to break it.”

“I do not believe much in broken hearts. Besides, I do not mean that men should be too soft. For instance, sentimental young men of about twenty are odious. But for a man to get into a fighting attitude at the barest suggestion of sentiment; to believe in nature as something inexorable, and to aim at being as inexorable as nature: is not that almost as bad?”

“Do you know any such man? You must not attribute that sort of hardness to me.”

“Oh no; I was not thinking of you. I was not thinking of anyone in fact. I only put a case. I sometimes have disputes with Ned on the subject. One of his cardinal principles is that there is no use in crying for spilt milk. I always argue that as irremediable disasters are the only ones that deserve or obtain sympathy, he might as well say that there is no use in crying for anything. Then he slips out of the difficulty by saying that that was just what he meant, and that there is actually no place for regret in a well-regulated scheme of life. In debating with women, men brazen out all the ridiculous conclusions of which they are convicted; and then they say that there is no use in arguing with a woman. Neither is there, because the woman is always right.”

“Yes; because she suffers her heart to direct her.”

“You are just as bad as the rest of your sex, I see. Where you cannot withold credit from a woman, you give it to her heart and deny it to her head.”

“There! I wont play any more,” said Miss McQuinch, suddenly, at the other end of the room. “Have you finished your chess, Marian?”

“We are nearly done. Ring for the lamps, please, Nelly. Let us finish,
Sholto.”

“Whose turn is it to move? I beg your pardon for my inattention.”

“Mine — no, yours. Stop! it must be mine. I really dont know.”

“Nor do I. I have forgotten my game.”

“Then let us put up the board. We can finish some other night.”

It had become dark by this time; and the lamps were brought in whilst
Douglas was replacing the chessmen in their box.

“Now,” said Marian, “let us have some music. Marmaduke: will you sing
Uncle Ned for us? We have not heard you sing for ages.”

“I believe it is more than three years since that abominable concert at
Wandsworth; and I have not heard you sing since,” said Elinor.

“I forget all my songs — havnt sung one of them for months. However, here goes! Have you a banjo in the house?”

“No,” said Marian. “I will play an accompaniment for you.”

“All right. See here: you need only play these three chords. When one sounds wrong, play another. Youll learn it in a moment.”

Marmaduke’s voice was not so fresh, nor his fun so spontaneous, as at Wandsworth; but they were not critical enough to appreciate the difference: they laughed like children at him. Elinor was asked to play; but she would not: she had renounced that folly, she said. Then, at Douglas’s request, Marian sang, in memory of Wandsworth, “Rose, softly blooming.” When she had finished, Elinor asked for some old melodies, knowing that Marian liked these best. So she began gaily with The Oak and the Ash and Robin Adair. After that, finding both herself and the others in a more pathetic vein, she sang them The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington, and The Banks of Allan Water, at the end of which Marmaduke’s eyes were full of tears, and the rest sat quite still. She paused for a minute, and then broke the silence with Auld Robin Gray, which affected even Douglas, who had no ear. As she sang the last strain, the click of a latchkey was heard from without. Instantly she rose; closed the pianoforte softly; and sat down at some distance from it. Her action was reflected by a change in their behavior. They remembered that they were not at home, and became more or less uneasily self-conscious. Elinor was the least disturbed. Conolly’s first glance on entering was at the piano: his next went in search of his wife.

“Ah!” he said, surprised. “I thought somebody was singing.”

“Oh dear no!” said Elinor drily. “You must have been mistaken.”

“Perhaps so,” said he, smiling. “But I have been listening carefully at the window for ten minutes; and I certainly dreamt that I heard Auld Robin Gray.”

Marian blushed. Conolly did not seem to have been moved by the song. He was alert and loquacious: before he had finished his greeting and apology to Douglas, they all felt as little sentimental as they had ever done in their lives. Marian, after asking whether he had dined, became silent, and dropped the pretty airs of command which, as hostess, she had worn before.

“Have you any news?” said Marmaduke at last. “Douglas knows the whole business. We are all friends here.”

“Only what we expected,” said Conolly. “Affairs are exactly as they were. I called to-day at her address—”

“How did you get it?” said Marmaduke.

“I wrote for it to her at the theatre.”

“And did she send it?”

“Of course. But she did not give me any encouragement to call on her, and, in fact, evidently did not want to see me. Her appearance has altered very much for the worse. She is a confirmed dipsomaniac; and she knows it. I advised her to abstain in future. She asked me, in her sarcastic, sisterly way, whether I had any other advice to give her. I told her that if she meant to go on, her proper course was to purchase a hogshead of brandy; keep it by her side; and condense the process of killing herself, which may at present take some years, into a few days.”

“Oh, Ned, you did not really say that to her!” said Marian.

“I did indeed. The shocking part of the affair is not, as you seem to think, my giving the advice, but that it should be the very best advice I could have given.”

“I do not think I would have said so.”

“Most likely not,” said Conolly, with a smile. “You would have said something much prettier. But dipsomania is not one of the pretty things of life; nor can it by any stretch of benevolent hypocrisy be made to pass as one. When Susanna and I get talking, we do not waste time in trying to spare one another’s feelings. If we did, we should both see through the attempt and be very impatient of it.”

“Did she tell you what she intends to do?” said Marmaduke.

“She has accepted an American engagement. When that draws to a close, it will, she says, be time enough for her to consider her next step. But she has no intention of leaving the stage until she is compelled.”

“Has she any intention of reforming her habits?” said Elinor, bluntly.

“I should say every intention, but no prospect of doing so.
Dipsomaniacs are always intending to reform; but they rarely succeed.
Has Lucy been put to bed?”

“Lucy is in disgrace,” said Elinor. Marian looked at her apprehensively.

“In disgrace!” said Conolly, more seriously. “How so?”

Elinor described what had taken place in the garden. When she told how the child had disregarded Marian’s appeal, Conolly laughed.

“Lucy has no sense of how pretty she would have looked toddling in obediently because her aunt asked her to,” he said. “She is, like all children, very practical, and will not assist in getting up amiable little scenes without good reason rendered.”

Elinor glanced at Marian, and saw that though Douglas was speaking to her in a low voice, she was listening nervously to her husband. So she said sharply, “It is a pity you were not here to tell us what to do.”

“Apparently it is,” said Conolly, complacently.

“What would you have done?” said Marian suddenly, interrupting Douglas.

“I suppose,” said Conolly, looking round at her in surprise, “I should have answered her question — told her what she was wanted for. If I asked you to do anything, and you enquired why, you would be extremely annoyed if I answered, ‘because I ask you.’”

“I would not ask why,” said Marian. “I would do it.”

“That would be very nice of you,” said Conolly; “but you cannot: expect such a selfish, mistrustful, and curious animal as a little child to be equally kind and confiding. Lucy is too acute not to have learned long since that grown people systematically impose on the credulity and helplessness of children.”

“Thats true,” said Elinor, reluctantly. Marian turned away and quietly resumed her conversation with Douglas. After a minute she strolled with him into the garden, whither Marmaduke had already retired to smoke.

“Has the evening been a pleasant one, Miss McQuinch?” said Conolly, left alone with her.

“Yes: we have had a very pleasant evening indeed. We played chess and écarté; and we all agreed to make old times of it. Marmaduke sang for us; and Marian had us nearly in tears with those old ballads of hers.”

“And then I came in and spoiled it all. Eh?”

“Certainly not. Why do you say that?”

“Merely a mischievous impulse to say something true: jealousy, perhaps, because I missed being here earlier. You think, then, that if I had been here, the evening would have been equally pleasant, and Marian equally happy in her singing?”

“Dont you like Marian’s singing?”

“Could you not have refrained from that most indiscreet question?”

“I ought to have. It came out unawares. Do not answer it.”

“That would make matters worse. And there is no reason whatever why the plain truth should not be told. When I was a child I heard every day better performances than Marian’s. She believes there is something pretty and good in music, and patronizes it accordingly to the best of her ability. I do not like to hear music patronized; and when Marian, lovely as she is, gives her pretty renderings of songs which I have heard a hundred times from singers who knew what they were about, then, though I admire her as I must always, my admiration is rather increased than otherwise when she stops; because then I am no longer conscious of a deficiency which even my unfortunate sister could supply.”

“Your criticism of her singing sounds more sincere than your admiration of her loveliness. I am not musician enough to judge. All I know is that her singing is good enough for me.”

“I know you are displeased because it is not good enough for me; but how can I help myself? Poor Marian — —”

“Do hush!” said Elinor. “Here she is.”

“You need not be in such a hurry, Duke,” said Marian. “What can it matter to you how late you get back?”

“No,” said Marmaduke. “I’ve got to write home. The governor is ill; and my mammy will send me a five-sheet sermon if I neglect writing to-night. You will keep Lucy for another week, wont you? Box her ears if she gives you any cheek. She wants it: she’s been spoiled.”

“If we find we can do no better than that with her, we shall hand her back to you,” said Conolly. Then the visitors took their leave. Marian gently pressed Douglas’s hand and looked into his eyes as he bade her farewell. Elinor, seeing this, glanced uneasily at Conolly, and unexpectedly met his eye. There was a gleam of cynical intelligence in it that did not reassure her. A few minutes later she went to bed, leaving the couple alone together. Conolly looked at his wife for a moment with an amused expression; but she closed her lips irresponsively, and went to the table for a book which she wanted to bring upstairs. She would have gone without a word had he not spoken to her.

“Marian: Douglas is in love with you.”

She blushed; thought a moment; and said quietly, “Very well. I shall not ask him to come again.”

“Why?”

She colored more vividly and suddenly, and said, “I thought you cared. I beg your pardon.”

“My dear,” he replied, amiably: “if you exclude everybody who falls in love with you, we shall have no one in the house but blind men.”

“And do you like men to be in love with me?”

“Yes. It makes the house pleasant for them; it makes them attentive to you; and it gives you great power for good. When I was a romantic boy, any good woman could have made a saint of me. Let them fall in love with you as much as they please. Afterwards they will seek wives according to a higher standard than if they had never known you. But do not return the compliment, or your influence will become an evil one.”

“Ned: I had not intended to tell you this; but now I will. Sholto
Douglas not only loves me, but he told me so to-day.”

“Of course. A man always does tell it, sooner or later.”

Marian sat down on the sofa and looked at him for some time gravely and a little wistfully. “I think,” she said, “I should feel very angry if any woman made such a confession to you.”

“A Christian British lady does not readily forgive a breach of convention; nor a woman an invasion of her privileges, even when they have become a burden to her.”

“What do you mean by that?” she said, rising.

“Marian,” he said, looking straight at her: “are you dissatisfied?”

“What reason have I to—”

“Never mind the reasons. Are you?”

“No,” said she, steadfastly.

He smiled indulgently; pressed her hand for a moment against his cheek; and went out for the short walk he was accustomed to take before retiring.

CHAPTER XV

In October Marian was at Sark, holiday making at the house of Hardy McQuinch’s brother, who had recently returned to England with a fortune made in Australia. Conolly, having the house at Holland Park to himself, fitted a spare room as a laboratory, and worked there every night. One evening, returning home alone a little before five o’clock, he shut himself into this laboratory, and had just set to work when Armande, the housemaid, interrupted him.

“Mrs. Leith Fairfax, sir.”

Conolly had had little intercourse with Mrs. Fairfax since before his marriage, when he had once shewn her the working of his invention at Queen Victoria Street; and as Marian had since resented her share of Douglas’s second proposal by avoiding her society as far as possible without actually discontinuing her acquaintance, this visit was a surprise. Conolly looked darkly at Armande, and went to the drawing-room without a word.

“How do you do, Mr. Conolly?” said Mrs. Fairfax, as he entered. “I need not ask: you are looking so well. Have I disturbed you?”

“You have — most agreeably. Pray sit down.”

“I know your time is priceless. I should never have ventured to come, but that I felt sure you would like to hear all the news from Sark. I have been there for the last fortnight. Marian told me to call on you the moment I returned.”

“Yes,” said Conolly, convinced that this was not true. “She promised to do so in her last letter.”

Mrs. Fairfax, on the point of publishing a few supplementary fictions, checked herself, and looked suspiciously at him.

“The air of Sark has evidently benefited you,” he said, as she paused.
“You are looking very well — I had almost said charming.”

Mrs. Fairfax glanced archly at him, and said, “Nonsense! but, indeed, the trip was absolutely necessary for me. I should hardly have been alive had I remained at work; and poor Willie McQuinch was bent on having me.”

“He has been described to me as an inveterate lion hunter.”

“It is not at all pleasant, I assure you, to be persecuted with invitations from people who wish to see a real live novelist. But William McQuinch’s place at Sark is really palatial. He is called Sarcophagus on account of his wealth. A great many people whom he knew were staying in the island, besides those in the house with us. Marian was the beauty of the place. How every one admires her! Why do you not go down, Mr. Conolly?”

“I am too busy. Besides, it will do Marian good to be rid of me for a while.”

“Absurd, Mr. Conolly! You should not leave her there by herself.”

“By herself! Why, is not the place full?”

“Yes; but I do not mean that. There is nobody belonging to her there.”

“You forget. Miss McQuinch is her bosom friend. There is Marmaduke, her cousin; and his mother, her Aunt Dora. Then, is there not Mr. Sholto Douglas, one of her oldest and most attached friends?”

“Oh! Is Mr. Douglas in charge of her?”

“No doubt he will take charge of her, if she is overtaken by her second childhood whilst he is there. Meanwhile, she is in charge of herself, is she not? And there is hardly any danger of her feeling lonely.”

“No. Sholto Douglas will provide against that.”

“Your opinion confirms the accounts I have had from other sources. It appears that Mr. Douglas is very attentive to my wife.”

“Very, indeed, Mr. Conolly. You must not think that I am afraid of anything — anything—”

“Anything?”

“Well — Oh, you know what I mean. Anything wrong. At least, not exactly wrong, but—”

“Anything undomestic.”

“Yes. You see, Marian’s position is a very difficult one. She is so young and so good looking that she is very much observed; and it seems so strange her being without her husband.”

“Pretty ladies whose husbands are never seen, often get talked about in the world, do they not?”

“That is just what I mean. How cleverly you get everything out of me,
Mr. Conolly! I called here without the faintest idea of alluding to
Marian’s situation; and now you have made me say all sorts of things.
What a fortune you would have made at the bar!”

“I must apologize, I did not mean to cross-examine you. Naturally, of course, you would not like to make me uneasy about Marian.”

“It is the very last thing I should desire. But now that it has slipped out, I really think you ought to go to Sark.”

“Indeed! I rather infer that I should be very much in the way.”

“The more reason for you to go, Mr. Conolly.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. The attentions of a husband are stale, unsuited to holiday time. Picture to yourself my arrival at Sark with the tender assurance in my mouth, ‘Marian, I love you.’ She would reply, ‘So you ought. Am I not your wife?’ The same advance from another — Mr. Douglas, for instance — would affect her quite differently, and much more pleasantly.”

“Mr. Conolly; is this indifference, or supreme confidence?”

“Neither of these conjugal claptraps. I merely desire that Marian should enjoy herself as much as possible; and the more a woman is admired, the happier she is. Perhaps you think that, in deference to the general feeling in such matters, I should become jealous.”

Mrs. Fairfax again looked doubtfully at him. “I cannot make you out at all, Mr. Conolly,” she said submissively. “I hope I have not offended you.”

“Not in the least. I take it that having observed certain circumstances which seemed to threaten the welfare of one very dear to you (as, I am aware, Marian is), the trouble they caused you found unpremeditated expression in the course of a conversation with me.” Conolly beamed at her, as if he thought this rather neatly turned.

“Exactly so. But I do not wish you to think that I have observed anything particular.”

“Certainly not. Still, you think there would be no harm in my writing to Marian to say that her behavior has attracted your notice, and — —”

“Good heavens, Mr. Conolly, you must not mention me in the matter! You are so innocent — at least so frank, so workmanlike, if I may say so, in your way of dealing with things! I would not have Marian know what I have said — I really did not notice anything — for worlds. You had better not write at all, but just go down as if you went merely to enjoy yourself; and dont on any account let Marian suspect that you have heard anything. Goodness knows what mischief you might make, in your — your ingenuousness!”

“But I should have thought that the opinion of an old and valued friend like yourself would have special weight with her.”

“You know nothing about it. Clever engineer as you are, you do not understand the little wheels by which our great machine of society is worked.”

“True, Mrs. Leith Fairfax,” he rejoined, echoing the cadence of her sentence. “Educated as a mere mechanic, I am still a stranger to the elegancies of life. I usually depend on Marian for direction; but since you think that it would be injudicious to appeal to her in the present instance — —”

“Out of the question, Mr. Conolly.”

“ — I must trust to your guidance in the matter. What do you suggest?”

Mrs. Fairfax was about to reply, when the expression which she habitually wore like a mask in society, wavered and broke. Her lip trembled: her eyes filled with tears: she rose with a sniff that was half a sob. When she spoke, her voice was sincere for the first time, and at the sound of it Conolly’s steely, hard manner melted, and his inhuman self-possession vanished.

“You think,” she said, “that I came here to make mischief. I did not. Marian is nothing to me: she does not even like me; but I dont want to see her ruin herself merely because she is too inexperienced to know when she is well off. I have had to fight my way in London: and I know what it is, and what the world is. She is not fit to take charge of herself. Good-bye, Mr. Conolly: you are a great deal too young yourself to know the danger, for all your cleverness. You may tell her that I came here and gossipped against her, if you like. She will never speak to me again; but if it saves her, I dont care. Good-bye.”

“My dear Mrs. Fairfax,” he said, with entire frankness, “I am now deeply and sincerely obliged to you.” And in proof that he was touched, he kissed her hand with the ease and grace of a man who had been carefully taught how to do it. Mrs. Fairfax recovered herself and almost blushed as he went with her to the door, chatting easily about the weather and the Addison Road trains.

She was not the last visitor that evening. She had hardly been fifteen minutes gone when the Rev. George presented himself, and was conducted to the laboratory, where he found Conolly, with his coat off, surrounded by apparatus. The glowing fire, comfortable chairs, and preparations for an evening meal, gladdened him more than the presence of his brother-in-law, with whom he never felt quite at ease.

“You wont mind my fiddling with these machines while I talk,” said
Conolly.

“Not at all, not at all. I shall witness your operations with great interest. You must not think that the wonders of science are indifferent to me.”

“So you are going on to Sark, you say?”

“Yes. May I ask whether you will be persuaded to come?”

“No, for certain. I have other fish to fry here.”

“I think it would renovate your health to come for a few days.”

“My health is always right as long as I have work. Did you meet Mrs.
Fairfax outside?”

“A — yes. I passed her.”

“You spoke to her, I suppose?”

“A few words. Yes.”

“Do you know what she came here for?”

“No. But stay. I am wrong. She mentioned that she came for a book she lent you.”

“She mentioned what was not true. What did she say to you about Marian?”

“Well, she — She was just saying that it is perhaps as well that I should go down to Sark at once, as Marian is quite alone.”

The clergyman looked so guilty as he said this that Conolly laughed outright at him. “You mean,” he said, “that Marian is not quite alone. Well, very likely Douglas occupies himself a good deal with her. If so, there may be some busybody or another down there fool enough to tell her that people are talking about her. That would spoil her holiday; so it is lucky that you are going down. No one will take it upon themselves to speak to her when you are there; and if they say anything to you, you can let it in at one ear and out at the other.”

“That is, of course, unless I should see her really acting indiscreetly.”

“I had better tell you beforehand what you will see if you keep your eyes open. You will see very plainly that Douglas is in love with her. Also that she knows that he is in love with her. In fact, she told me so. And you will see she rather likes it. Every married woman requires a holiday from her husband occasionally, even when he suits her perfectly.”

The Rev. George stared. “If I follow you aright — I am not sure that I do — you impute to Marian the sin of entertaining feelings which it is her duty to repress.”

“I impute no sin to her. You might as well tell a beggar that he has no right to be hungry, as a woman that it is her duty to feel this and not to feel that.”

“But Marian has been educated to feel only in accordance with her duty.”

“So have you. How does it work? However,” continued Conolly, without waiting for an answer, “I dont deny that Marian shews the effects of her education. They are deplorably evident in all her conscientious actions.”

“You surprise and distress me. This is the first intimation I have received of your having any cause to complain of Marian.”

“Nonsense! I dont complain of her. But what you call her education, as far as I can make it out, appears to have consisted of stuffing her with lies, and making it a point of honor with her to believe them in spite of sense and reason. The sense of duty that rises on that sort of foundation is more mischievous than downright want of principle. I dont dispute your right, you who constitute polite society, to skin over all the ugly facts of life. But to make your daughters believe that the skin covers healthy flesh is a crime. Poor Marian thinks that a room is clean when all the dust is swept out of sight under the furniture; and if honest people rake it out to bring it under the notice of those whose duty it is to remove it, she is disgusted with them, and ten to one accuses them of having made it themselves. She doesnt know what sort of world she is in, thanks to the misrepresentations of those who should have taught her. She will deceive her children in just the same way, if she ever has any. If she had been taught the truth in her own childhood, she would know how to face it, and would be a strong woman as well as an amiable one. But it is too late now. The truth seems natural to a child; but to a grown woman or man, it is a bitter lesson in the learning, though it may be invigorating when it is well mastered. And you know how seldom a hard task forced on an unwilling pupil is well mastered.”

“What is truth?” said the clergyman, sententiously.

“All that we know, Master Pilate,” retorted Conolly with a laugh. “And we know a good deal. It may seem small in comparison with what we dont know; but it is more than any one of us can hold, for all that. We know, for instance, that the world was not planned by a sentimental landscape gardener. If Marian ever learns that — which she may, although I am neither able nor willing to teach it to her — she will not thank those who gave her so much falsehood to unlearn. Until then, she will, I am afraid, do little else than lay up a store of regrets for herself.”

“This is very strange. We always looked upon Marian as an exceptionally amiable girl.”

“So she is, unfortunately. There is no institution so villainous but she will defend it; no tyranny so oppressive but she will make a virtue of submitting to it; no social cancer so venomous but she will shrink from cutting it out, and plead that it is a comfortable thing, and much better as it is. She knows that she disobeyed her father, and that he deserved to be disobeyed; yet she condemns other women who are disobedient, and stands out against Nelly McQuinch in defence of the unselfishness of parental love. She knows that the increased freedom of movement allowed to her as a married woman has been healthy for her; yet she looks coldly at other young women who assert their right to freedom, and are not afraid to walk through the streets without a sheepdog, human or otherwise, at their heels. She knows that marriage is not what she expected it to be, and that it gives me many unfair advantages over her; and she knows also that ours is a happier marriage than most. Nevertheless she will encourage other girls to marry; she will maintain that the chain which galls her own wrists so often is a string of honeysuckles; and if a woman identifies herself with any public movement for the lightening of that chain, she wont allow that that woman is fit to be admitted into decent society. There is not one of these shams to which she clings that I would not like to take by the throat and shake the life out of; and she knows it. Even in that she has not the consistency to believe me wrong, because it is undutiful and out of keeping with the honeysuckles to lack faith in her husband. In order to blind herself to her inconsistencies, she has to live in a rose-colored fog; and what with me constantly, in spite of myself, blowing this fog away on the one side, and the naked facts of her everyday experience as constantly letting in the daylight on the other, she must spend half the time wondering whether she is mad or sane. Between her desire to do right and her discoveries that it generally leads her to do wrong, she passes her life in a wistful melancholy which I cant dispel. I can only pity her. I suppose I could pet her; but I hate treating a woman like a child: it means giving up all hope of her becoming rational. She may turn for relief any day either to love or religion; and for her own sake I hope she will choose the first. Of the two evils, it is the least permanent.” And Conolly, having disburdened himself, resumed his work without any pretence of waiting for the clergyman’s comments.

“Well,” said the Rev. George, cautiously, “I do not think I have quite followed your opinions, which seem to me to be exactly upside down, as if they were projected upon the retina of your mind’s eye — to use Shakspear’s happy phrase — just as they would be upon your — your real eye, you know. But I can assure you that your view of Marian is an entirely mistaken one. You seem to think that she does not give in her entire adherence to the doctrines of the Establishment. This is a matter which I venture to say you do not understand.”

“Admitted,” interposed Conolly, hastily. “Here is my workman’s tea. Are you fond of scones?”

“I hardly know. Anything — the simplest fare, will satisfy me.”

“So it does me, when I can get nothing better. Help yourself, pray.”

Conolly did not sit down to the meal, but worked whilst the clergyman ate. Presently the Rev. George, warmed by the fire and cheered by the repast, returned to the subject of his host’s domestic affairs.

“Come,” he said, “I am sure that a few judicious words would lead to an explanation between you and Marian.”

“I also think that a few words might do so. But they would not be judicious words.”

“Why not? Can it be injudicious to restore harmony in a household?”

“No; but that would not be the effect of an explanation, because the truth is not likely to reconcile us. If I were to explain the difficulty to a man, he would argue. But Marian would just infer that I despised her, and nothing else.”

“Oh no! Oh dear no! A few kind words; an appeal to her good sense; a little concession on both sides — —”

“All excellent for a pair estranged by a flash of temper, or a mother-in-law, or a trifle of jealousy, or too many evenings spent at the club on the man’s part, or too many dances with a gallant on the woman’s; but no good for us. We have never exchanged unkind words: there are no concessions to be made: her good sense is not at fault. Besides, these few kind words that are supposed to be such a sovereign remedy for all sorts of domestic understandings are generally a few kind fibs. If I told them, Marian wouldnt believe them. Fibs dont make lasting truces either. No: the situation is graver than you think. Just suppose, for instance, that you undertake to restore harmony, as you call it! what will you say to her?”

“Well, it would depend on circumstances.”

“But you know the circumstances on which it depends. How would you begin?”

“There are little ways of approaching delicate subjects with women. For instance, I might say, casually, that it was a pity that a pair so happily situated as you two should not agree perfectly.”

“You would get no further; for Marian would never admit that we do not agree. She does not know what her complaint is, and therefore feels bound in honor to maintain that she has nothing to complain of. She is not the woman to cast reproach on me for a discontent she cannot explain. Or, if she could explain it, how much wiser should you be? I have explained; and you confess you cannot understand me. The difference between us is neither her fault nor mine; and all the explanations in the world will not remove it.”

“If you would allow me to appeal to her religious duty — —”

“Religion! She doesnt believe in it.”

“What!” exclaimed the clergyman, unaffectedly shocked. “Surely, surely — —”

“Listen. To me, believing in a doctrine doesnt mean holding up your hand and saying, ‘Credo.’ It means habitually acting on the assumption that the doctrine is true. Marian thinks it wrong not to go to church; and she will hold up her hand and cry ‘Credo’ to the immortality of her soul, or to any verse in the New Testament. The shareholders of our concern in the city will do the same. But do they or she ever act on the assumption that they are immortal, or that riches are dross, or that class prejudice is damnable? Never. They dont believe it. You will find that Marian has been thoroughly trained to separate her practice from her religious professions; and if you allude to the inconsistency she will instinctively feel that you are offending against good taste. In short, her ‘Credo’ doesnt mean faith: it means church-going, which is practised because it is respectable, and is respectable because it is a habit of the upper caste. But church-going is church-going; and business is business, as Marian will soon let you know if you meddle with her business. However, we need not argue about that: we know one another’s views and can agree to differ.”

“I should be false to my duty as a Christian priest if I made any such agreement.”

“Perhaps so; but, at any rate, we cant spend all our lives over the same argument. No, as I was saying, take my advice, and let Marian alone.”

“But what do you intend to do, then?”

“What can I do but wait? Experience must wear out some of her illusions. She will at least find out that she is no worse off than other women, and better off than some of them. Since the job cannot be undone, we must try how making the best of it will work. I am pretty hopeful myself. How are affairs getting on at your chapel? I am told that the sermons of your locum tenens send the congregation asleep.”

“He is not at his best in the pulpit. A good fellow! a most loving man but not able to grapple with a large congregation. After all, I am obliged to confess that very few of our cloth are. The power of preaching is quite an exceptional one; and it is a gift as well as a trust. I humbly believe that the power of the tongue comes of a higher ordination than the bishop’s.”

Nothing further was said about Marian. The clergyman’s object in visiting Conolly was, it presently appeared, to borrow a portmanteau. When he was gone, Conolly returned to the laboratory, and wrote the following letter:

“My dear Marian

“I have just had two unexpected visits, one from Mrs. Fairfax, and one from George. Mrs. L.F. said you asked her to call and give me the news. When I told her, without blushing, that you had written to prepare me for her visit, she was rather put out, justly thinking me to mean that I did not believe her. As this is fully the thirty-sixth falsehood in which you have detected good Mrs. F., I fear you will be compelled, in spite of your principle of believing the best of everybody, to regard her in future as a not invariably accurate woman. She came with the object of making me go down to Sark. You were so young and so much admired: Mr. Douglas was so attentive: you should not be left entirely alone, and so forth. You will be angry with her; but she thinks Douglas so irresistible that she is genuinely anxious about you: I believe she really meant well this time. As to our reverend brother, his portmanteau burst in the train coming from Edinburgh; so he came to borrow mine, having apparently resolved to wear out those of all his friends before buying a new one. Unfortunately, he met Mrs. F. down the road; and she urged him to go down to Sark just as she had urged me. Now as George is incapable of holding his tongue when he ought, I feel sure that unless I tell you what Mrs. F. said, he will anticipate me. Otherwise I should not have mentioned it until your return, for fear of annoying you and spoiling your visit. So if his reverence hints or lectures, you will know what he means and not heed him. Mrs. F’s confidences have probably not been confined to me; but were I in your place, I should not make the slightest change in my conduct in consequence. At all events, if you feel constrained to display any sudden accession of reserve toward Douglas, tell him the reason; because if you dont, he will ascribe the change to coquetry.

“I have turned the spare room on the first floor into a laboratory, and am sitting in it now. I’m thinking of fitting it up like a studio, and having private views of my inventions, as Scott has of his pictures. Parson’s man came with some flowers the other day, and informed me that three balls, to the first of which he was invited, took place in the house while I was away. One or two trifling dilapidations, and the fact that somebody has been tampering with the locks of the organ and piano, dispose me to believe this tale. Parson’s man declares that he was too virtuous to come to the two last entertainments after finding out that the first was a clandestine one; but I believe he made himself disagreeable, and was not invited. Probably he quarrelled with some military follower of Armande’s; for he was particularly bitter on the subject of a common soldier making free in a gentleman’s house. I have not said anything to the two culprits; but I have contrived to make them suspect that I know all; and they now do their duty with trembling diligence. Some man sat on the little walnut table and broke it; but no other damage worth mentioning has been done. The table was absurdly repaired with a piece of twine, and pushed into the recess between the organ and the front window, whence I sometimes amuse myself by the experiment of pulling it into broad daylight. It is always pushed back again before I return in the evening.

“How are you off for money? I have plenty of loose cash just now. Madame called last Monday, and asked Matilda, who opened the door, when you would be back. Thereupon I interviewed her. I must say she is loyal to her clients; for I had great difficulty in extracting her bill, which was, of course, what she called about. She evidently recognizes the necessity of keeping husbands in the dark in such matters. One of the items was for the lace on your maccaroni-colored body, which, as I chanced to remember, you supplied yourself. After a brief struggle she deducted it; so I paid her the balance: only 35£ 13s. 9d.

“When are you coming back to me? After Sark I fear you will find home a little dull. Nevertheless, I should like to see you again. Come back before Christmas, at any rate.

”Yours, dear Marian, in solitude,
”NED.”

The answer came two days later than return of post, and ran thus:

”Melbourne House, Sark,
”Sunday.
”My dear Ned

“How very provoking about the servants! I do not mind Matilda so much; but I do think it hard that we could not depend on Armande, considering all the kindness we have shewn her. I can scarcely believe that she would have acted so badly unless she were led away by Matilda, whom I will pack off the moment I return. As to Armande, I will give her another chance; but she shall have a sharp talking to. I am quite sure that a great deal more mischief has been done than you noticed. If the carpet was danced on for three nights by men in heavy boots, it must be in ribbons. It is really too bad. I do not want any money. Indeed the twenty pounds you sent me last was quite unnecessary, as I have nearly sixteen left. What a rogue Madame is to try and make you pay for my lace! I am sorry you paid the bill. She had no business to call for her money: she is never paid so soon by anybody. We have had great fun down here. It has been one continual garden party all through; and the weather is still lovely. Mr. McQuinch is very colonial: but I think his ways make the house pleasanter than if he were still English. Carbury is quite stupid in comparison to this place. I have danced more than I ever did in my life before; and now we are so tired of frivolity that if any one ventures to strum a waltz or propose a game, we all protest. We tried to get up some choral music; but it was a failure. On Friday, George, who is looked on as a great man here, was asked to give us a Shakespeare reading. He was only too glad to be asked; for he had heard Simonton, the actor, read at a bazaar in Scotland, and was full of Richard the Third in consequence. He was not very bad; but his imitation of Simonton was so obvious and so queerly mixed with his own churchy style that he seemed rather monotonous and affected. At least I thought so. I was dreadfully uncomfortable during the reading because of Marmaduke, who behaved scandalously. There were some schoolboys present; and he not only encouraged them to misbehave themselves, but was worse than any of them himself. At last he pretended to be overcome by the heat, and went out of the room, to my great relief; but when the passage about the early village cock came, he crew outside the door, where he had been waiting expressly to do it. Nobody could help laughing; and the boys screamed so that Mr. McQuinch took two of them out by the collar. I believe he was glad of the excuse to go out and laugh himself. George was very angry, and no wonder! He will hardly speak to Marmaduke, who, of course, denies all knowledge of the interruption; but George knows better. All the Hardy McQuinches are down here. Uncle Hardy is rather stooped from rheumatism. Nelly is now the chief personage in the family: Lydia and Jane are nowhere beside her. They are good-humored, bouncing girls; but they are certainly not brilliant. I hope it is not Aunt Dora’s walnut table that is broken. Was it not mean of Parson’s man to tell on Armande? I think, since you have plenty of loose cash, we might venture on a set of those curtains we saw at Protheroe’s, for the drawing-room. I can easily use the ones that are there now for portières.

“You must not think that I have written this all at once. I shall be able to finish to-day, as it is Sunday, and I have made an excuse to stay away from church. George is to preach; and somehow I never feel toward the service as I ought when he officiates. I know you will laugh at this.

“The first part of your letter must have a paragraph all to itself. I hardly know what to say. I could not have believed that Mrs. Leith Fairfax would have behaved as she has done. I was so angry at first that for fully an hour I felt ill; and I spoke quite wickedly to George the day after he arrived, because he said that Sholto had better not take me down to dinner, although his doing so was quite accidental. I know you will believe me when I tell you that I was quite unconscious that he had been unusually attentive to me; and I was about to write you an indignant denial, only I shewed Nelly your letter, and she crushed me by telling me she had noticed it too. We nearly had a quarrel about it; but she counted up the number of times I had danced with him and sat beside him at dinner; and I suppose an evil-minded woman looking on might think what Mrs. Leith Fairfax thought. But there is no excuse for her. She knows that Sholto and I have been intimate since we were children; and there is something odious in her, of all people, pretending to misunderstand us. What is worse, she was particularly friendly and confidential with me while she was here; and although I tried to keep away from her at first, she persisted in conciliating me, and persuaded me that Douglas had entirely mistaken what she said that other time. Who could have expected her to turn round and calumniate me the moment my back was turned! How can people do such things! I hope we shall not meet her again; for I will never speak to her. I have not said anything to Douglas. How could I? It would only make mischief. I feel that the right course is to come home as soon as I can, and in the meantime to avoid him as much as possible. So you may expect me on Saturday next. Mr. McQuinch is quite dismayed at my departure, which he says will be the signal for a general breaking up; but this I cannot help. I shall be glad to go home, of course. Still, I am sorry to leave this place, where we have all been so jolly. I will write and let you know what train I shall come by; but you need not trouble to meet me, unless you like: I can get home quite well by myself. After all, it is just as well that I am getting away. It was pleasant enough; but now I feel utterly disgusted with everything and everybody. I find I must stop. They have just come in from church; and I must go down.

”Your affectionate
”MARIAN.”

CHAPTER XVI

One Saturday afternoon in December Marian and Elinor sat drinking tea in the drawing-room at Holland Park. Elinor was present as an afternoon caller: she no longer resided with the Conollys. Marian had been lamely excusing herself for not having read Elinor’s last book.

“Pray dont apologize,” said Elinor. “I remember the time when you would have forced yourself to read it from a sense of duty; and I am too delighted to find that nonsense washing out of you at last to feel the wound to my vanity. Oh, say no more, my dear you can read it still whenever you please. Brother George read it, and was shocked because the heroine loves the villain and tells him so without waiting to be asked. It is odd that long ago, when I believed so devoutly in the tender passion, I never could write a really flaming love story.”

“Dont begin to talk like that,” said Marian, crossly. “People do fall in love, fortunately for them. It may be injudicious; and it may turn out badly; but it fills up life in a way that all the barren philosophy and cynicism on earth cannot. Do you think I would not rather have to regret a lost love than to repine because I had been too cautious to love at all? The disappointments of love warm the heart more than the triumphs of insensibility.”

“Thats rather a good sentence,” said Elinor. “Your talk is more classical than my writing. But what would the departed Marian Lind have said?”

“The departed Marian Lind was so desperately wise that she neglected that excellent precept, ‘Be not righteous over much, neither make thyself over wise; why shouldest thou destroy thyself?’ I took up the Bible last night for the first time since my marriage; and I thought what fools we two used to be when we made up our minds to avoid all the mistakes and follies and feelings of other people, and to be quite superior and rational. ‘He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.’ It is all so true, in spite of what Ned says. We were very clever at observing the wind and regarding the clouds; and what are we the better for it? How much irreparable mischief, I wonder, did we do ourselves by letting our little wisdoms stifle all our big instincts! Look at those very other people whom we despised; how happy they are, in spite of their having always done exactly what their hearts told them!”

“I think we are pretty well off as people go. I know I am. Certainly it was part of our wisdom that marriage was a bad thing; and I grant that though you married in obedience to your instincts you are as well off as I. But I dont see that we are the worse for having thought a little.”

“I did not marry in obedience to my instincts, Nelly; and you know it. I made a disinterested marriage with a man whom I felt I could respect as my superior. I was convinced then that a grand passion was a folly.”

“And what do you think now?”

“I think that I did not know what I was talking about.”

“I believe you were in love with Ned when you married him, and long enough before that, too.”

“Of course I loved him. I love him still.”

“Do you, really? To hear you, one would think that you only respected him as a superior.”

“You have no right to say that. You dont understand.”

“Perhaps not. Would you mind explaining?”

“I do not mean anything particular; but there are two kinds of love. There is a love which one’s good sense suggests — a sort of moral approval — —”

Elinor laughed. “Go on,” she said. “What is the other sort?”

“The other sort has nothing to do with good sense. It is an overpowering impulse — a craving — a faith that defies logic — something to look forward to feeling in your youth, and look back to with a kindling heart in your age.”

“Indeed! Isnt the difference between the two sorts much the same as the difference between the old love and the new?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I will take another cup of tea. You neednt stop flying out at me, though: I dont mind it.”

“Excuse me. I did not mean to fly out at you.”

“It’s rather odd that we so seldom meet now without getting on this subject and having a row. Has that struck you at all?”

Marian turned to the fire, and remained silent.

“Listen to me, Marian. You are in the blues. Why dont you go to Ned, and tell him that he is a cast-iron walking machine, and that you are unhappy, and want the society of a flesh-and-blood man? Have a furious scene with him, and all will come right.”

“It is very easy to talk. I could not go to him and make myself ridiculous like that: the words would choke me. Besides, I am not unhappy.”

“What a lie! You wicked woman! A moment ago you were contemning all prudence; and now you will not speak your mind because you are afraid of being ridiculous. What is that but observing the wind and regarding the clouds, I should like to know?”

“I wish you would not speak harshly to me, even in jest. It hurts me.”

“Serve you right! I am not a bit remorseful. No matter: let us talk of something else. Where did those flowers come from?”

“Douglas sent them. I am going to the theatre to-night; and I wanted a bouquet.”

“Very kind of him. I wonder he did not bring it himself. He rarely misses an excuse for coming.”

“Why do you say that, Nelly? He comes here very seldom, except on
Sunday; and that is a regular thing, just as your coming is.”

“He was here on Tuesday; you saw him at Mrs. Saunders’s on Wednesday; he was at your at-home on Thursday; and he sends a bouquet on Saturday.”

“I cannot help meeting him out; and not to invite him to my at-home would be to cut him. Pray are you growing spiteful, like Mrs. Leith Fairfax?”

“Marian: you got out of bed at the wrong side this morning; and you have made that mistake oftener since your return from Sark than in all your life before. Douglas has become a lazy good-for-nothing; and he comes here a great deal too often. Instead of encouraging him to dangle after you as he does, and to teach you all those finely turned sentiments about love which you were airing a minute ago, you ought to make him get called to the bar, or sent into Parliament, or put to work in some fashion.”

“Nelly!”

“Bother Nelly! It is true; and you know it as well as I do.”

“If he fancies himself in love with me, I cannot help it.”

“You can help his following you about.”

“I cannot. He does not follow me about. Why does not Ned object? He knows that Sholto is in love with me; and he does not care.”

“Oh, if it is only to make Ned jealous, then I have nothing more to say: you may flirt away as hard as you please. There’s a knock at the door, just in time to prevent us from quarrelling. I know whose knock it is, too.”

Marian had flushed slightly at the sound; and Elinor, with her feet stretched out before her, lapped the carpet restlessly with her heels, and watched her cousin sourly as Douglas entered. He was in evening dress.

“Good-evening,” said Elinor. “So you are going to the theatre, too?”

“Why?” said Douglas. “Is any one coming with us? Shall we have the pleasure of your company?”

“No,” replied Elinor, drily. “I thought Mr. Conolly was perhaps going with you.”

“I shall be very glad, I am sure, if he will,” said Douglas.

“He will not,” said Marian. “I doubt if he will come home before we start.”

“You got my flowers safely, I see.”

“Yes, thank you. They are beautiful.”

“They need be, if you are to wear them.”

“I think I will go,” said Elinor, “if you can spare me. Marian has been far from amiable; and if you are going to pay her compliments, I shall very soon be as bad as she. Good-bye.” Douglas gratefully went with her to the door. She looked very hard at him, and almost made a grimace as they parted; but she said nothing.

“I am very glad she went,” said Marian, when Douglas returned. “She annoys me. Everything annoys me.”

“You are leading an impossible life here, Marian,” he said, putting his hand on her chair and bending over her. “Whilst it lasts, everything will annoy you; and I, who would give the last drop of my blood to spare you a moment’s pain, shall never experience the delight of seeing you happy.”

“What other life can I lead?”

Douglas made an impulsive movement, as though to reply; but he hesitated, and did not speak. Marian was not looking at him. She was gazing into the fire.

“Sholto,” she said, after an interval of silence, “you must not come here any more.”

“What!”

“You are too idle. You come here too often. Why do you not become a barrister, or go into Parliament, or at least write books? If Nelly can succeed as an author, surely you can.”

“I have left all that behind me. I am a failure: you know why. Let us talk no more of it.”

“Do not go on like that,” said Marian, pettishly. “I dont like it.”

“I am afraid to say or do anything, you are so easily distressed.”

“Yes, I know I am very cross. Elinor remarked it too. I think you might bear with me, Sholto.” Here, most unexpectedly, she rose and burst into tears. “When my whole life is one dreary record of misery, I cannot always be patient. I have been forbearing toward you many times.”

Douglas was at first frightened; for he had never seen her cry before. Then, as she sat down again, and covered her face with her handkerchief, he advanced, intending to kneel and put his arm about her; but his courage failed: he only drew a chair to the fire, and bent over, as he sat beside her, till his face was close to hers, saying, “It is all the fault of your mad marriage. You were happy until then. I have been silent hitherto; but now that I see your tears, I can no longer master myself. Listen to me, Marian. You asked me a moment since what other life was open to you. There is a better life. Leave England with me; and — and — —” Marian had raised her head; and as she looked steadily at him, he stopped, and his lips became white.

“Go on,” she said. “I am not angry. What else?”

“Nothing else except happiness.” His voice died away: there was a pause. Then, recovering himself, he went on with something of his characteristic stateliness. “There is no use in prolonging your present life; it is a failure, like mine. Why should you hesitate? You know how seldom the mere letter of duty leads to either happiness or justice. You can rescue me from a wasted existence. You can preserve your own heart from a horrible slow domestic decay. He will not care: he cares for nothing: he is morally murdering you. You have no children to think of. I love you; and I offer you your choice of the fairest spots in the wide world to pass our future in, with my protection to ensure your safety and comfort there, wherever it may be. You know what a hollow thing conventional virtue is. Who are the virtuous people about you? Mrs. Leith Fairfax, and her like. If you love me, you must know that you are committing a crime against nature in living as you are with a man who is as far removed from you in every human emotion as his workshop is from heaven. You have striven to do your duty by him in vain. He is none the happier: we are unutterably the more miserable. Let us try a new life. I have lived in society here all my days, and have found its atmosphere most worthless, most selfish, most impure. I want to be free — to shake the dust of London off my feet, and enter on a life made holy by love. You can respond to such an aspiration: you, too, must yearn for a pure and free life. It is within our reach: you have but to stretch out your hand. Say something to me. Are you listening?”

“It seems strange that I should be listening to you quite calmly, as I am; although you are proposing what the world thinks a disgraceful thing.”

“Does it matter what the world thinks? I would not, even to save myself from a wasted career, ask you to take a step that would really disgrace you. But I cannot bear to think of you looking back some day over a barren past, and knowing that you sacrificed your happiness to Fashion — an idol. Do you remember last Sunday when we discussed that bitter saying that women who have sacrificed their feelings to the laws of society secretly know that they have been fools for their pains? He did not deny it. You could give no good reason for disbelieving it. You know it to be true; and I am only striving to save you from that vain regret. You have shewn that you can obey the world with grace and dignity when the world is right. Shew now that you can defy it fearlessly when it is tyrannical. Trust your heart, Marian — my darling Marian: trust your heart — and mine.”

“For what hour have you ordered the carriage?”

“The carriage! Is that what you say to me at such a moment? Are you still flippant as ever?”

“I am quite serious. Say no more now. If I go, I will go deliberately, and not on the spur of your persuasion. I must have time to think. What hour did you say?”

“Seven.”

“Then it is time for me to dress. You will not mind waiting here alone?”

“If you would only give me one hopeful word, I think I could wait happily forever.”

“What can I say?”

“Say that you love me.”

“I am striving to discover whether I have always loved you or not.
Surely, if there be such a thing as love, we should be lovers.”

He was chilled by her solemn tone; but he made a movement as if to embrace her.

“No,” she said, stopping him. “I am his wife still. I have not yet pronounced my own divorce.”

She left the room; and he walked uneasily to and fro Until she returned, dressed in white. He gazed at her with quickened breath as she confronted him. Neither heeded the click of her husband’s latchkey in the door without.

“When I was a little boy, Marian,” he said, gazing at her, “I used to think that Paul Delaroche’s Christian martyr was the most exquisite vision of beauty in the world. I have the same feeling as I look at you now.”

“Marian reminds me of that picture too,” said Conolly. “I remember wondering,” he continued, smiling, as they started and turned toward him, “why the young lady — she was such a perfect lady — was martyred in a ball dress, as I took her costume to be. Marian’s wreath adds to the force of the reminiscence.”

“If I recollect aright,” said Marian, taking up his bantering tone with a sharper irony, “Delaroche’s martyr shewed a fine sense of the necessity of having her wrists gracefully tied. I am about to follow her example by wearing these bracelets, which I can never fasten. Be good enough to assist me, both of you.”

She extended a hand to each; and Conolly, after looking at the catch for a moment, closed it dexterously at the first snap. “By the bye,” he said, whilst Douglas fumbled at the other bracelet, “I have to run away to Glasgow to-night by the ten train. We shall not see one another again until Monday evening.”

Douglas’s hand began to shake so that the gold band chafed Marian’s arm.
“There, there,” she said, drawing it away from him, “you do it for me,
Ned. Sholto has no mechanical genius.” Her hand was quite steady as
Conolly shut the clasp. “Why must you go to Glasgow?”

“They have got into a mess at the works there; and the engineer has telegraphed for me to go down and see what is the matter. I shall certainly be back on Monday. Have something for me to eat at half past seven. I am sorry to be away from our Sunday dinner, Douglas; but you know the popular prejudice. If you want a thing done, see to it yourself.”

“Sholto has been very eloquent this evening on the subject of popular prejudices,” said Marian. “He says that to defy the world is a proof of honesty.”

“So it is,” said Conolly. “I get on in the world by defying its old notions, and taking nobody’s advice but my own. Follow Douglas’s precepts by all means. Do you know that it is nearly a quarter to eight?”

“Oh! Let us go. We shall be late.”

“I shall not see you to-morrow, Douglas. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Douglas, keeping at some distance; for he did not care to offer Conolly his hand before Marian now. “Pleasant journey.”

“Thank you. Hallo! [Marian had impatiently turned back.] What have you forgotten?”

“My opera-glass,” said Marian. “No, thanks: you would not know where to look for it: I will go myself.”

She went upstairs; and Conolly, after a pause, followed, and found her in their bedroom, closing the drawer from which she had just taken the opera-glass.

“Marian,” he said: “you have been crying to-day. Is anything wrong? or is it only nervousness?”

“Only nervousness,” said Marian. “How did you find out that I had been crying? it was only for an instant, because Nelly annoyed me. Does my face shew it?”

“It does to me, not to anyone else. Are you more cheerful now?”

“Yes, I am all right. I will go to Glasgow with you, if you like.”

Conolly recoiled, disconcerted. “Why?” he said. “Do you wish —— ?” He recovered himself, and added, “It is too cold, my dear; and I must travel very fast. I shall be busy all the time. Besides, you are forgetting the theatre and Douglas, who, by the bye, is catching cold on the steps.”

“Well, I had better go with Douglas, since it will make you happier.”

“Go with Douglas, my dear one, if it will make you happier,” said he, kissing her. To his surprise, she threw her arm round him, held him fast by the shoulder, and looked at him with extraordinary earnestness. He gave a little laugh, and disengaged himself gently, saying, “Dont you think your nervousness is taking a turn rather inconvenient for Douglas?” She let her hands fall; closed her lips; and passed quietly out. He went to the window and watched her as she entered the carriage. Douglas held the door open for her; and Conolly, looking at him with a sort of pity, noted that he was, in his way, a handsome man and that his habit of taking himself very seriously gave him a certain, dignity. The brougham rolled away into the fog. Conolly pulled down the blind, and began to pack his portmanteau to a vigorously whistled accompaniment.

CHAPTER XVII

Conolly returned from Glasgow a little before eight on Monday evening.
There was no light in the window when he entered the garden. Miss
McQuinch opened the door before he reached it.

“What!” he said. “Going the moment I come in!” Then, seeing her face by the hall lamp, he put down his bag quickly, and asked what the matter was.

“I dont know whether anything is the matter. I am very glad you have returned. Come into the drawing-room: I dont want the servants to hear us talking.”

“There is no light here,” he said, following her in. “Is it possible you have been waiting in the dark?”

He lit a candle, and was about to light a lamp when she exclaimed impatiently, “Oh, I did not notice it: what does it matter? Do let the lamp alone, and listen to me.” He obeyed, much amused at her irritation.

“Where has Marian gone to?” she asked.

“Is she out?” he said, suddenly grave. “You forget that I have come straight from Glasgow.”

“I have been here since three o’clock. Marian sent me a note not to come on Sunday — that she should be out and that you were away. But they tell me that she was at home all yesterday, except for two hours when she was out with Sholto. She packed her trunks in the evening, and went away with them. She told the cabman to drive to Euston. I dont know what it all means; and I have been half distracted waiting here for you. I thought you would never come. There is a note for you on your dressing-table.”

He pursed his lips a little and looked attentively at her, but said nothing.

“Wont you go and open it?” she said anxiously. “It must contain some explanation.”

“I am afraid the explanation is obvious.”

“You have no right to say that. How do you know? If you are not going to read her letter, you had better say so at once. I dont want to pry into it: I only want to know what is become of Marian.”

“You shall read it by all means. Will you excuse me whilst I fetch it?”

She stamped with impatience. He smiled and went for the letter, which, after a brief absence, he placed unopened on the table before her, saying:

“I suppose this is it. I laid my hand on it in the dark.”

“Are you going to open it?” she said, hardly able to contain herself.

“No.”

He had not raised his voice; but it struck her that he was in a rage. His friendly look and quiet attitude first reassured, then, on second thoughts, exasperated her.

“Why wont you?”

“I really dont know. Somehow, I am not curious. It interests you. Pray open it.”

“I will die first. If it lie there until I open it, it will lie there forever.”

He opened the envelope neatly with a paper cutter, and handed her the enclosure. She kept down her hands stubbornly. He smiled a little, still presenting it. At last she snatched it, much as she would have liked to snatch a handful of his hair. Having read it, she turned pale, and looked as she had used to in her childhood, when in disgrace and resolute not to cry. “I had rather have had my two hands cut off,” she said passionately, after a pause.

“It is very sad for you,” said Conolly, sympathetically. “He is an educated man; but I cannot think that he has much in him.”

“He is a selfish, lying, conceited hound. Educated, indeed! And what are you going to do, may I ask?”

“Eat my supper. I am as hungry as a bear.”

“Yes, you had better, I think. Good-evening.” He seemed to know that she would not leave; for he made no movement to open the door for her. On her way out, she turned, and so came at him with her fists clenched, that for a moment he was doubtful whether she would not bodily assault him.

“Are you a brute, or a fool, or both?” she said, letting her temper loose. “How long do you intend to stand there, doing nothing?”

“What can I do, Miss McQuinch?” he said, gently.

“You can follow her and bring her back before she has made an utter idiot of herself with that miserable blackguard. Are you afraid of him? If you are, I will go with you, and not let him touch you.”

“Thank you,” he said, good-humoredly. “But you see she does not wish to live with me.”

“Good God, man, what woman do you think could wish to live with you! I suppose Marian wanted a human being to live with, and not a calculating machine. You would drive any woman away. If you had feeling enough to have kicked him out of the house, and then beaten her black and blue for encouraging him, you would have been more of a man than you are: she would have loved you more. You are not a man: you are a stone full of brains — such as they are! Listen to me, Mr. Conolly. There is one chance left — if you will only make haste. Go after them; overtake them; thrash him within an inch of his life; and bring her back and punish her how you please so long as you shew her that you care. You can do it if you will only make up your mind: he is a coward; and he is afraid of you: I have seen it in his eye. You are worth fifty of him — if you would only not be so cold blooded — if you will only go — dear Mr. Conolly — youre not really insensible — you will, wont you?”

This, the first tender tone he had ever heard in her voice, made him look at her curiously. “What does the letter say?” he asked, still quietly, but inexorably.

She snatched it up again. “Here,” she said. “‘Our marriage was a mistake. I am going away with Douglas to the other side of the world. It is all I can do to mend matters. Pray forget me.’ That is what her letter says, since you condescend to ask.”

“It is too late, then. You felt that as you read it, I think?”

“Yes,” she cried, sitting down in a paroxysm of grief, but unable to weep. “It is too late; and it is all your fault. What business had you to go away? You knew what was going to happen. You intended it to happen. You wanted it to happen. You are glad it has happened; and it serves you right. ‘Pray forget her.’ Oh, yes, poor girl! she need not trouble about that. I declare there is nothing viler, meaner, cowardlier, selfisher on earth than a man. Oh, if we had only done what we always said we would do — kept free from you!”

“It was a good plan,” said Conolly, submissively.

“Was it? How were we to know that you were not made of flesh and blood, pray? There, let me go. [The table was between them; but she rose and shook off an imaginary detaining hand.] I dont want to hear anything more about it. I suppose you are right not to care. Very likely she was right to go, too; so we are all right, and everything is for the best, no doubt. Marian is ruined, of course; but what does that matter to you? She was only in your way. You can console yourself with your—” Here Armande came in; and Elinor turned quickly to the fireplace and stood there, so that the housemaid should not see her face.

“Your dinner, sir,” said Armande, with a certain artificiality of manner that was, under the circumstances, significant. “There is a nice fire in the laboratory.”

“Thank you,” said Conolly. “Presently, Armande.”

“The things will spoil if you wait too long, sir. The mistress was very particular with me and cook about it.” And Armande, with an air of declining further responsibility, went out.

“What shall I do without Marian?” said Conolly. “Not one woman in a hundred is capable of being a mistress to her servants. She saved me all the friction of housekeeping.”

“You are beginning to feel your loss,” said Elinor, facing him again. “A pleasant thing for a woman of her talent to be thrown away to save you the friction of housekeeping. If you had paid half the attention to her happiness that she did to your dinners you would not be in your present predicament.”

“Have you really calculated that it is twice as easy to make a woman happy as to feed a man?”

“Calc — ! Yes, I have. I tell you that it is three times as easy — six times as easy: more fool the woman! You can make a woman happy for a week by a word or a kiss. How long do you think it takes to order a week’s dinners? I suppose you consider a kiss a weakness?”

“I am afraid — judging by the result — that I am not naturally clever at kissing.”

“No, I should think not, indeed. Then you had better go and do what you are clever at — eat your dinner.”

“Miss McQuinch: did you ever see an unfortunate little child get a severe fall, and then, instead of a little kindly petting, catch a sound whacking from its nurse for daring to startle her and spoil its clothes?”

“Well, what is the point of that?”

“You remind me a little of the nurse. I have had a sort of fall this evening.”

“And now you are going to pretend to be hurt, I suppose; because you dont care to be told that it is your own fault. That is a common experience with children, too. I tell you plainly that I dont believe you are hurt at all; though you may not be exactly pleased — just for the moment. However, I did not mean to be uncivil. If you are really sorry, I am at least as sorry. I have not said all I think.”

“What more?”

“Nothing of any use to say. I see I am wasting my time here — and no doubt wasting yours too.”

“Well, I think you have had your turn. If you are not thoroughly satisfied, pray go on for ten minutes longer: your feelings do you credit, as the phrase goes. Still, do not forget that you thought just the same of me a week ago; and that if you had said as much then you might have prevented what has happened. Giving me a piece of your mind now is of no use except as far as it relieves you. To Marian or me or anyone else it does no good. So when you have said your worst, we cannot do better, I think, than set our wits to work about our next move.”

Elinor received this for a moment in dudgeon. Then she laughed sourly, and said, “There is some sense in that. I am as much to blame as anybody: I dont deny it — if that is any comfort to you. But as to the next move, you say yourself that it is too late to do anything; and I dont see that you can do much.”

“That is so. But there are a few things to be faced. First, I have to set Marian and myself free.”

“How?”

“Divorce her.”

“Divorce!” Elinor looked at him in dismay. He was unmoved. Then her gaze fell slowly, and she said: “Yes: I suppose you have a right to that.”

“She also.”

“So that she may marry him — from a sense of duty. That will be so happy for her!”

“She will have time, before she is free to find out whether she likes him or not. There will be a great fuss in the family over the scandal.”

“Do you care about that? I dont.”

“No. However, thats a detail. Marian will perhaps write to you. If so, just point out to her that her five hundred a year belongs to her still, and makes her quite independent of him and of me. That is all, I think. You need take no pains now to conceal what has happened: the servants below know it as well as we: in a week it will be town talk.”

Elinor looked wistfully at him, her impetuosity failing her as she felt how little effect it was producing. Yet her temper rather rose than fell at him. There was a much more serious hostility than before in her tone as she said:

“You seem to have been thoroughly prepared for what has happened. I do not want any instructions from you as to what I shall write to Marian about her money affairs: I want to know, in case she takes it into her head to come back when she has found what a fool she has made of herself, whether I may tell her that you are glad to be rid of her, and that there is no use in her humiliating herself by coming to your door and being turned away.”

“Shall I explain the situation to you from my point of view?” said he. At the sound of his voice she looked up in alarm. The indulgent, half-playful manner which she had almost lost the sense of because it was so invariable with him in speaking to ladies was suddenly gone. She felt that the real man was coming out now without ceremony. He was quick to perceive the effect he had produced. To soften it, he placed a comfortable chair on the hearthrug, and said, in his ordinary friendly way: “Sit nearer the fire: we can talk more comfortably. Now,” he continued, standing with his back to the mantelpiece, “let me tell you, Miss McQuinch, that when you talk of my turning people away from my door you are not talking fair and square sense to me. I dont turn my acquaintances off in that way, much less my friends; and a woman who has lived with me as my wife for eighteen months must always be a rather particular friend. I liked her before I was her husband, and I shall continue to like her when I am no longer her husband. So you need have no fear on that score. But I wont remain her husband. You said just now that I knew what was going to happen; that I intended it to happen, wanted it to happen, and am glad it happened. There is more truth in that than you thought when you said it. For some time past Marian has been staying with me as a matter of custom and convenience only, using me as a cover for her philandering with Douglas, and paying me by keeping the house very nicely for me. I had asked myself once or twice how long this was to last. I was in no hurry for the answer; for although I was wifeless and had no one to live with who really cared for me, I was quite prepared to wait a couple of years if necessary, on the chance of our making it up somehow. But sooner or later I should have insisted on closing our accounts and parting; and I am not sorry now that the end has come, since it was inevitable; though I am right sorry for the way it has come. Instead of eloping in the conventional way, she should have come to an understanding with me. I could easily have taken her for a trip in the States, where we could have stopped a few months in South Dakota and got divorced without any scandal. I have never made any claims on her since she found out that she didnt care for me; and she might have known from that that I was not the man to keep her against her will and play dog in the manger with a fellow like Douglas. However, thats past praying for now. She has had enough of me; and I have had more than enough of her set and her family, except that I should like to remain good friends with you. You are the only one of the whole lot worth your salt. It is understood, of course, that you take Marian’s part against me on all issues; but will you be friends as far as is consistent with that?”

“All right,” said Nelly, shortly.

“Shake hands on it; and I’ll tell you something else that will help you to understand me better,” he said, holding out his hand. She gave hers; and when the bargain was struck, he turned to the fire and seated himself on the edge of the table.

“You know that when I married,” he resumed, “I was promoted to mix in fashionable society for the first time. Of course you do: that was the whole excitement of the affair for the family. You know the impression I made on polite society better, probably, than I do. Now tell me: do you know what impression polite society made on me?”

“Dont understand.”

“Perhaps it has never occurred even to you, sharp as you are, that I could have taken society otherwise than at its own valuation of itself, as something much higher, more cultivated and refined than anything that I had been accustomed to. Well, I never believed in that much at any time; but it was not until I had made a mésalliance for Marian’s sake that I realized how infinitely beneath me and my class was the one I had married into.”

“Mésalliance! — with Marian! I take back the shake hands.”

“Mésalliance with her class, for her sake: I made the distinction purposely. Now what am I, Miss McQuinch? A worker. I belonged and belong to the class that keeps up the world by its millions of serviceable hands and serviceable brains. All the pride of caste in me settles on that point. I admit no loafer as my equal. The man who is working at the bench is my equal, whether he can do my day’s work or not, provided he is doing the best he can. But the man who does not work anyhow, and the class that does not work, is a class below mine. When I annoyed Marian by refusing to wear a tall hat and cuffs, I did so because I wanted to have it seen as I walked through Piccadilly and St. James’s Street that I did not belong there, just as your people walk through a poor street dressed so as to shew that they dont belong there. To me a man like your uncle, Marian’s father, or like Marmaduke or Douglas, loafing idly round spending money that has been made by the sweat of men like myself, are little better than thieves. They get on with the queerest makeshifts for self-respect: old Mr. Lind with family pride. Douglas with personal vanity, and Marmaduke with a sort of interest in his own appetites and his own jollity. Everything is a sham with them: they have drill and etiquet instead of manners, fashions instead of tastes, small talk instead of intercourse. Everything that is special to them as distinguished from workers is a sham: when you get down to the real element in them, good or bad, you find that it is something that is common to them and to all civilized mankind. The reason that this isnt as clear to other workmen who come among them as it is to me is that most workmen share their ignorance of the things they affect superiority in. Poor Jackson, whom you all call the Yankee cad, and who is not a cad at all in his proper place among the engineers at our works, believes in the sham refinements he sees around him at the at-homes he is so fond of. He has no art in him — no trained ear for music or for fine diction, no trained eye for pictures and colors and buildings, no cultivated sense of dignified movement, gesture, and manner. But he knows what fashionable London listens to and looks at, and how it talks and behaves; and he makes that his standard, and sets down what is different from it as vulgar. Now the difference between me and him is that I got an artistic training by accident when I was young, and had the natural turn to profit by it. Before I ever saw a West End Londoner I knew beautiful from ugly, rare from common, in music, speech, costume, and gesture; for in my father’s operatic and theatrical companies there did come now and then, among the crowd of thirdraters, a dancer, an actor, a scenepainter, a singer, or a bandsman or conductor who was a fine artist. Consequently, I was not to be taken in like Jackson by made-up faces, trashy pictures, drawling and lounging and strutting and tailoring, drawing-room singing and drawing-room dancing, any more than by bad ventilation and unwholesome hours and food, not to mention polite dram drinking, and the round of cruelties they call sport. I found that the moment I refused to accept the habits of the rich as standards of refinement and propriety, the whole illusion of their superiority vanished at once. When I married Marian I was false to my class. I had a sort of idea that my early training had accustomed me to a degree of artistic culture that I could not easily find in a working girl, and that would be quite natural to Marian. I soon found that she had the keenest sense of what was ladylike, and no sense of what was beautiful at all. A drawing, a photograph, or an engraving sensibly framed without a white mount round it to spoil it pained her as much as my wrists without cuffs on them. No mill girl could have been less in sympathy with me on the very points for which I had preferred her to the mill girls. The end of it was that I felt that love had made me do a thoroughly vulgar thing — marry beneath me. These aristocratic idle gentlemen will never be shamed out of their laziness and low-mindedness until the democratic working gentlemen refuse to associate with them instead of running after them and licking their boots. I am heartily glad now to be out of their set and rid of them, instead of having to receive them civilly in my house for Marian’s sake. The whole business was strangling me: the strain of keeping my feeling to myself was more than you can imagine. Do you know that there have been times when I have been so carried away with the idea that she must be as tired of the artificiality of our life as I was, that I have begun to speak my mind frankly to her; and when she recoiled, hurt and surprised and frightened that I was going to turn coarse at last, I have shut up and sat there apparently silent, but really saying under my breath: ‘Why dont you go? Why dont you leave me, vanish, fly away to your own people? You must be a dream: I never married you. You dont know me: you cant be my wife: your lungs were not made to breathe the air I live in.’ I have said a thousand things like that, and then wondered whether there was any truth in telepathy — whether she could possibly be having my thoughts transferred to her mind and thinking it only her imagination. I would ask myself whether I despised her or not, calling on myself for the truth as if I did not believe the excuses I made for her out of the fondness I could not get over. I am fond of her still, sometimes. I did not really — practically, I mean — despise her until I gave up thinking about her at all. There was a certain kind of contempt in that indifference, beyond a doubt: there is no use denying it. Besides, it is proved to me now by the new respect I feel for her because she has had the courage and grit to try going away with Douglas. But my love for her is over: nothing short of her being born over again — a thing that sometimes happens — will ever bring her into contact with me after this. To put it philosophically, she made the mistake of avoiding all realities, and yet marrying herself to the hardest of realities, a working man; so it was inevitable that she should go back at last to the region of shadows and mate with that ghostliest of all unrealities, the non-working man. Perhaps, too, the union may be more fruitful than ours: the cross between us was too violent. Now you have the whole story from my point of view. What do you—”

“Hush!” said Elinor, interrupting him. “What is that noise outside?”

The house bell began to ring violently; and they could hear a confused noise of voices and footsteps without.

“Can she have come back?” said Elinor, starting up.

“Impossible!” said Conolly, looking disturbed for the first time. They stood a moment listening, with averted eyes. A second peal from the bell was followed by roars of laughter, amid which a remonstrant voice was audible. Then the house door was hammered with a stick. Conolly ran downstairs at once and opened it. On the step he found Marmaduke reeling in the arms of the Rev. George.

“How are you, ol’ fler?” said Marmaduke, plunging into the hall. “The parson is tight. I found him tumbling about High Street, and brought him along.”

“Pray excuse this intrusion,” whispered the Rev. George. “You see the state he is in. He accosted me near Campden Hill; and I really could not be seen walking with him into town. I wonder he was not arrested.”

“He is the worse for drink; but he is sober enough to know how to amuse himself at your expense,” said Conolly, aloud. “Come up to the laboratory. Miss McQuinch is there.”

“But he is not fit,” urged the clergyman. “Look at him trying to hang up his hat. How absurd — I should rather say how deplorable! I assure you he is perfectly tipsy. He has been ringing the bells of the houses, and requesting females to accompany us. Better warn Elinor.”

“Nonsense!” said Conolly. “I have some news that will sober him. Here is
Miss McQuinch. Are you going?”

“Yes,” said Elinor. “I should lose my patience if I had to listen to
George’s comments; and I am tired. I would rather go.”

“Not yet, Nelly. Wont um stay and talk to um’s Marmadukes?”

“Let me go,” said Elinor, snatching away her hand, which he had seized. “You ought to be at home in bed. You are a sot.” At this Marmaduke laughed boisterously. She passed him contemptuously, and left. The three men then went upstairs, Marmaduke dropping his pretence of drunkenness under the influence of Conolly’s presence.

“Marian is not in, I presume,” said the clergyman, when they were seated.

“No.” said Conolly. “She has eloped with Douglas.”

They stared at him. Then Marmaduke gave a long whistle; and the clergyman rose, pale. “What do you mean, sir?” he said.

Conolly did not answer; and the Rev. George slowly sat down again.

“Well, I’m damned sorry for it,” said Marmaduke, emphatically. “It was a mean thing for Douglas to do, with all his brag about his honor.”

The Rev. George covered his face with his handkerchief and sobbed.

“Come, shut up, old fellow; and dont make an ass of yourself,” said
Marmaduke. “What are you going to do, Conolly?”

“I must simply divorce her.”

“Go for heavy damages, Conolly. Knock a few thousand out of him, just to punish him.”

“He could easily afford it. Besides, why should I punish him?”

“My dear friend,” cried the clergyman, “you must not dream of a divorce. I implore you to abandon such an idea. Consider the disgrace, the impiety! The publicity would kill my father.”

Conolly shook his head.

“There is no such thing as divorce known to the Church. ‘What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’”

“She had no right to bolt,” said Marmaduke. “Thats certain.”

“I was married by a registrar,” said Conolly; “and as there is no such thing as civil marriage known to the Church, our union, from the ecclesiastical point of view, has no existence. We were not joined by God, in fact, in your sense. To deny her the opportunity of remarrying would be to compel her to live as an adulteress in the eye of the law, which, by the bye, would make me the father of Douglas’s children. I cannot, merely because your people are afraid of scandal, take such a revenge on Marian as to refuse her the freedom she has sacrificed so much for. After all, since our marriage has proved a childless one, the only reason for our submitting to be handcuffed to one another, now that our hearts are no longer in the arrangement, is gone.”

“The game began at Sark,” said Marmaduke. “Douglas stuck to her there like a leech. He’s been about the house here a good deal since she came back. I often wondered you didnt kick him out. But, of course, it was not my business to say anything. Was she huffed into going? You hadnt any row with her just before, had you?

“We never had rows.”

“That was your mistake, Conolly. You should have heard poor Susanna and me fighting. We always ended by swearing we would never speak to one another again. Nothing duller than a smooth life. If you had given Marian something to complain of, she would have been too much taken up with it to bother about Douglas.”

“But have you ascertained whither they have gone?” said the clergyman, distractedly. “Will you not follow them?”

“I know nothing of their movements. Probably they are crossing to New
York.”

“But surely you ought to follow her,” said the Rev. George. “You may yet be in time to save her from worse than death.”

“Yah!” said Marmaduke. “Drop all that rot, George. Worse than death be hanged! Serves the family right! They are a jolly sight too virtuous: it will do them good to get shewn up a bit.”

“If you have no respect for the convictions of a priest,” exclaimed the Rev. George, shedding tears, “you might at least be silent in the presence of a heartbroken brother and husband.”

“Oh, I dont want to shew any want of consideration for you or Conolly,” said Marmaduke, sulkily. “No doubt it’s rough on you. But as to the feelings of the family, I tell you flatly that I dont care if the whole crew were brought to the Old Bailey to-morrow and convicted of bigamy. It would take the conceit out of them.”

“I know not how to break this wretched news to my father,” said the Rev.
George, turning disconsolately from his sottish cousin to Conolly.

“It is no such uncommon occurrence. The less fuss made about it the better. She is not to blame, and I shall not be heard crying out misery and disgrace. Your family can very well follow my example. I have nothing to say against her, and I believe she has nothing to say against me. Nothing can prevent such publicity as a petition for divorce must entail. Your father will survive it, never fear.”

The clergyman, remembering how vainly he had tried to change Conolly’s intention when Marian was to be married, felt that he should succeed no better now that she was to be divorced. Silent and cast down, he sat dangling his handkerchief between his knees and leaning forward on his elbows toward the fire.

“You must excuse me if I see my way straight through to the end. I daresay you would rather realize it gradually, inevitable as it is,” added Conolly, looking down with some pity at his drooping figure. “I cannot help my habit of mind. When are you going to be married?” he continued, to Marmaduke.

“I dont know. The Countess is in a hurry. I’m not. But I suppose it will be some time in spring.”

“You have made up your mind to it at last?”

“Oh, I never had any particular objection to it, only I dont like to be hunted into a corner. Conny is a good little girl, and will make a steady wife. I dont like her mother; but as for herself, she is fond of me; and after all, I did lead her a dance long ago. Besides, old boy, the Earl is forking out handsomely; and as I have some notion of settling down to farm, his dust will come in conveniently as capital.”

The clergyman rose, and slowly pulled on his woolen gloves.

“If youre going, I will see you part of the way,” said Marmaduke. “I’ll cheer you up. You know you neednt tell the governor until to-morrow.”

“I had rather go alone, if you intend to behave as you did before.”

“Never fear. I’m as sober as a judge now. Come along. Away with melancholy! Youll have Douglas for a brother-in-law before this time next year.”

This seemed to have been in the clergyman’s mind; for he shook hands with his host more distantly than usual. When they were gone, Conolly went to the laboratory, and rang for his neglected dinner, which he ate with all a traveller’s appetite. From the dinner table he went straight to the organ, and played until a little before midnight, when, after a brief turn in the open air, he retired to bed, and was soon quietly asleep.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XVIII

Miss McQuinch spent Christmas morning in her sitting-room reading; a letter which had come by the morning post. It was dated the 17th December at New York: and the formal beginning and ending were omitted. This was an old custom between Marian and her cousin. In their girlish correspondence they had expressed their affection by such modes of address as “My darling Marian,” and “My dearest Nelly.” Subsequently they became oppressed by these ceremonies and dropped them. Thereafter their letters contained only the matter to be communicated and the signature.

“You are the only person in England,” wrote Marian, “to whom I dare write now. A month ago I had more correspondents than I had time to answer. Do you know, Nelly, I hesitated before commencing this letter, lest you should no longer care to have anything to do with me. That may have been an unworthy thought for a friend: but it was an unavoidable one for a woman.

“And now comes the great vain question: What does everybody say? Oh, if I could only disembody myself; fly back to London for a few hours; and listen invisibly to society talking about me. I know this is mean: but one must fill up life with some mean curiosities. So please tell me what kind of sensation I have caused. Just the usual one. I suppose. Half the people never would have thought it; and the other half knew all along what it would come to. Well, I do not care much about the world in general; but I cannot quiet my conscience on the subject of my father and George. It must be very hard on papa that, after being disappointed in my marriage and having suffered long ago from what my mother did, he should now be disgraced by his daughter. For disgraced, alas! is the word. I am afraid poor George’s prospects must be spoiled by the scandal, which, I know well, must be terrible. I thought my first duty was to leave Ned free, and to free myself, at all hazards; and so I did not dwell on the feelings and interests of others as much as I perhaps ought to have done. There is one point about which I am especially anxious. It never occurred to me before I went that people might say that my going was Ned’s fault, and that he had treated me badly. You must contradict this with all your might and main if you hear it even hinted at.

“There is no use in putting off the confession any longer, Nelly: I have made an utter fool of myself. I wish I were back with Ned again. There! what do you think of that? Now for another great confession, and a most humiliating one. Sholto is a — I dont know what epithet is fair. I suppose I have no right to call him an impostor merely because we were foolish enough to overrate him. But I can hardly believe now that we ever really thought that there were great qualities and powers latent beneath his proud reserve. Ned, I know, never believed in Sholto; and I, in my infinite wisdom, set that down to his not understanding him. Ned was right, as usual. If you want to see how selfish people are, and how skin-deep fashionable politeness is, take a voyage. Go with a picked company of the nice people you have met for an hour or so at a dinner or an at-home; and see how different they will appear when they have been cooped up in a ship with you day and night for a week. An ocean steamer is the next worst thing to the Palace of Truth. Poor Sholto did not stand the ordeal. He was ridiculously distant in his manner to the rest of the passengers, and in little matters at table and so forth he was really just as selfish as he could be. He was impatient because I was ill the first two days, and afterwards he seemed to think that I ought not to speak to anyone but himself. The doctor, who was very attentive to me, was his particular aversion; and it was on his account that we had our first quarrel, the upshot of which was a scene between them, which I overheard. One very fine day, when all the passengers were on deck, Sholto met the doctor in the saloon, and offered him a guinea for his attendance on me, telling him in the most offensively polite way that I would not trouble him for any further services. The doctor retorted very promptly and concisely; and though what he said was not dignified, I sympathized with him, and took care to be very friendly with him at dinner. (Meals take place on hoard ship at intervals of ten minutes: it is horrifying to see the quantity of food the elderly people consume.) To prevent further hostilities I took care to be always in the way when the doctor encountered Sholto afterwards. I cannot imagine Ned involving himself in such a paltry squabble. It is odd how things come about. I used to take Sholto’s genius for granted, and think a great deal of it. In another sense, I used to take Ned’s genius for granted, and think nothing of it. Now I have found out in a single fortnight that we saw all of Sholto that there was to be seen. His reserves of talent existed only in our imagination. He has absolutely no sense of humor; and he is always grumbling. Neither the servants, nor the food, nor the rooms, nor the wine, satisfy him. Imagine how this comes home to me, who, from not having heard grumbling for two years, had forgotten that men ever were guilty of it. I flirted a little, a very little, with the doctor; not because I meant anything serious, but because it amused me and made the trip pleasant. Sholto will not understand this. One day, on board, I was indiscreet enough to ask Sholto the use of a piece of machinery belonging to the ship. Ned would have known, or, if he had not, would very soon have found out. Sholto didnt know, and was weak enough to pretend that he did; so he snubbed me by saying that I could not understand it. This put me on my mettle; and I asked the surgeon that afternoon about it. The surgeon didnt know, and said so; but he appealed to the first officer, who explained it. I intended to revenge myself on Sholto by retailing the explanation to him next day; but unfortunately, whether through the first officer’s want of perspicuity or my own stupidity, I was not a bit the wiser for the explanation.

“I can tell you nothing as to what we are likely to do next. As Sholto has given up all his prospects for me, I cannot honorably desert him. I know now that I have ruined myself for nothing, and I must at least try to hide from him that he has done likewise. I can see that he is not happy; but he tries so desperately to persuade himself that he is, and clings so to the idea that the world is well lost for me, that I have not the heart to undeceive him. So we are still lovers; and, cynical though it sounds, I make him a great deal happier in my insincerity than I could if I really loved him, because I humor him with a cunning quite incompatible with passion. He, on the other hand, being still sincere, tries my patience terribly with his jealousies and importunities. As he has nothing to do, he is almost always with me; and a man who has no office to go to — I dont care who he is — is a trial of which you can have no conception. So much for our present relations. But I fear — indeed I know — that they will not last long. I dare not look steadily at the future. In spite of all that he has sacrificed for me, I cannot live forever with him. There are times at which he inspires me with such a frenzy of aversion and disgust that I have to put the strongest constraint upon myself to avoid betraying my feelings to him. We intended going to the West Indies direct from here, in search of some idyllic retreat where we could live alone together. He still entertains this project; but as I have totally abandoned it I put him off with some pretext for remaining here whenever he mentions it. I have only one hope of gaining a separation without being open to the reproach of having deserted him. You remember how we disputed that Saturday about the merits of a grand passion, which I so foolishly longed for. Well, I have tried it, and proved it to be a lamentable delusion, selfish, obstinate, blind, intemperate, and transient. As it has evaporated from me, so it will evaporate from Sholto in the course of time. It would have done so already, but that his love was more genuine than mine. When the time comes, he will get rid of me without the least remorse; and so he will have no excuse for reviving his old complaints of my treachery.

“One new and very disagreeable feature in my existence, which I had partly prepared myself for, is the fear of detection. We sailed before our flight had become public; and as there was fortunately no one on board who knew us, I had a nine days’ respite, and could fearlessly approach the other women, who, I suppose, would not have spoken to me had they known the truth. But here it is different. Ned’s patents are so much more extensively worked here than in England, and the people are so go-ahead, that they take a great interest in him, and are proud of him as an American. The news got into the papers a few days after we arrived. To appreciate the full significance of this, you should know what American newspapers are. One of them actually printed a long account of my going away, with every paragraph headed in large print, ‘Domestic Unhappiness,’ ‘The Serpent in the Laboratory,’ ‘The Temptation,’ ‘The Flight,’ ‘The Pursuit,’ and so on, all invented, of course. Other papers give the most outrageous anecdotes. Old jokes are revived and ascribed to us. I am accused of tearing his hair out, and he of coming home late at nights drunk. Two portraits of ferocious old women supposed to be Ned’s mother-in-law have been published. The latest version appeared in a Sunday paper, and is quite popular in this hotel. According to it, Ned was in the habit of ‘devoting me to science’ by trying electrical experiments on me. ‘This,’ the account says, ‘was kind of rough on the poor woman.’ The day before I ‘scooted,’ a new machine appeared before the house, drawn by six horses. ‘What are them men foolin’ round with, Mr. C.?’ said I. ‘That’s hubby’s latest,’ replied Ned. ‘I guess it’s the boss electro-dynamic fixin’ in the universe. Full charge that battery with a pint of washing soda, an’ youll fetch up a current fit to ravage a cont’nent. You shall have a try t’morro’ mornin’, Sal. Youre better seasoned to it than most Britishers; but if it dont straighten your hair and lift the sparks outer your eyelashes — !’ ‘You bet it wont, Mr. C.,’ said I. That night (this is only what the paper says, mind) I stole out of bed; arranged the wires on each side of Ned so that if he stirred an inch he would make contact; charged the battery; and gently woke him, saying, ‘Mr. C, love, dont stir for your life. Them things that’s ticklin’ your whiskers is the conductors of that boss fixin’ o’ yourn. If I was you, I’d lie still until the battery runs down.’ ‘Darn it all,’ said Ned, afraid to lift his lips for a shout, and coming out in cold water all over the forehead, ‘it wont run down for a week clear.’ ‘That’ll answer me nicely,’ I replied. ‘Good-bye, Mr. C. Young Douglas from the corner grocery is waitin’ for me with a shay down the avenue.’ I cannot help laughing at these things, but they drive Sholto frantic. He is always described in them as a young man from some shop or other. He tries hard, out of delicacy, to keep the papers which contain them away from me; but I hear about them at breakfast, and buy them downstairs in the hall for myself. Another grievance of Sholto’s is that I will not have meals privately. But my dislike to being always alone with him is greater than my dread that my secret will leak out, and that some morning I shall see in the people’s faces that the Mrs. Forster who has so often been regaled with the latest account of the great scandal, is no other than the famous Mrs. Conolly. That evil day will come, sooner or later; but I had rather face it in one of these wonderful hotels than in a boarding-house, which I might be asked to leave. As to taking a house of our own, I shrink from any such permanent arrangement. We are noticed a good deal. Sholto is, of course, handsome and distinguished; and people take a fancy to me just as they used to long ago. I was once proud of this; but now it is a burden to me. For instance, there was a Mrs. Crawford staying here with her husband, a general, who has just built a house here. She was so determined to know me that I found it hard to keep her off without offending her. At last she got ill; and then I felt justified in nursing her. Sholto was very sulky because I did so, and wanted to know what business it was of mine. I did not trouble myself about his anger, and Mrs. Crawford was well in two days. In fact, I think Sholto was right in saying that she had only overeaten herself. After that I could avoid her no longer, and she was exceedingly kind to me. She wanted to introduce me to all her New York friends, and begged me to leave the hotel and go to her new mansion. There was plenty of room for us, she said. I did not know what to say. I could not repay her kindness by going to her house under false colors, and letting her introduce me to her circle; and yet I could make no reasonable excuse. At last, seeing that she attributed my refusals to pride, I told her plainly that if her friends were to learn my history by any accident they might not thank her for the introduction. She was quite confounded; but she did not abate her kindness in the least, although my reservation of confidence in only giving her a hint of the truth, checked her advances. You may think this an insane indiscretion on my part; but if you knew how often I have longed to stand up before everybody and proclaim who I am, and so get rid of the incubus of a perpetual falsehood, you would not be so much surprised. There is one unspeakable blessing in American law. It is quite easy to obtain a divorce. One can get free without sacrificing everything except bare existence. I do not care what anybody may argue to the contrary, our marriage laws are shameful.

“I shall expect to hear from you very soon. If you desert me, Nelly, there is no such thing as friendship in the world. I want particularly to know what Ned did — as far as you know — when he heard the news. Is papa very angry? And, above all, could you find out how Mrs. Douglas is? I thought that Sholto would be uneasy and remorseful about her; but he does not really care half so much as I do. How selfish I have been! I used to flatter myself that I was thoughtful for others because I made a habit — a detestably self-conscious habit — of being considerate in trifles. And in the end, after being so vain-gloriously attentive to the momentary comfort of all connected with me, I utterly forgot them and thought only of myself when their whole happiness was concerned. I never knew how high I stood in my own estimation until I found how far the discovery of my folly and selfishness made me fall. Tell me everything”. I cannot write any more now. My eyes are smarting: I feel as if I had been writing for a whole month instead of two days. Good-bye for three weeks.

“MARIAN.”

“P.S. I have just learnt from a very severe criticism in one of the papers that Mdlle. Lalage Virtue has failed here completely. I fear from the wording that her unfortunate habit was apparent to the audience.”

CHAPTER XIX

On a cold afternoon in January, Sholto Douglas entered a hold in New York, and ascended to a room on the first floor. Marian was sitting there, thinking, with a letter in her lap, She only looked up for a moment when he entered; and he plucked off his sealskin gloves and threw aside his overcoat in silence.

“It is an infernal day,” he said presently.

Marian sighed, and roused herself. “The rooms look cheerless in winter without the open fireplaces we are accustomed to in England.”

“Damn the rooms!” he muttered.

Marian took up her letter again.

“Do you know that he has filed a petition for divorce?” he said, aggressively.

“Yes.”

“You might have mentioned it to me. Probably you have known it for days past.”

“Yes. I thought it was a matter of course.”

“Or rather you did not think at nil. I suppose you would have left me in ignorance forever, if I had not heard from London myself.”

“Is it of importance, then?”

“Certainly it is — of vital importance.”

“Have you any other news? From whom have you heard?”

“I have received some private letters.”

“Oh! I beg your pardon.”

Five minutes passed in silence. He looked out of the window, frowning.
She sat as before.

“How much longer do you intend to stay in this place?” he said, turning upon her suddenly.

“In New York?”

“This is New York, I believe.”

“I think we may as well stay here as anywhere else.”

“Indeed! On what grounds have you arrived at that cheering conclusion?”

Marian shrugged her shoulders. “I dont know,” she said.

“Nor do I. You do not seem happy here. At least, if you are, you fail to communicate your state of mind to those about you.”

“So it seems.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you do not seem to be happy either.”

“How in the devil’s name can you expect me to be happy in this city? Do you think it is pleasant to have no alternative to the society of American men except that of a sulky woman?”

“Sholto!” said Marian, rising quickly, and looking at him in surprise.

“Spare me these airs,” he said, coldly. “You will have to accustom yourself to hear the truth occasionally.”

She sat down again. “I am not giving myself airs,” she said, earnestly.
“I am astonished. Have I really been sulky?”

“You have been in the sulks for days past: and you are in them at this moment.”

“There is some misunderstanding between us then; for you have seemed to me quite cross and out of sorts for the last week; and I thought you were out of temper when you came in just now.”

“That is rather an old-fashioned retort.”

“Sholto: I do not know whether you intend it or not; but you are speaking very slightingly to me.”

He muttered something, and walked across the room and back. “I am quite clear on one point at least,” he said. “It was not for this sort of thing that I crossed the Atlantic with you; and you had bettor make our relations more agreeable if you wish me to make them permanent.”

“You to make them permanent? I do not understand.”

“I shall not shrink from explaining myself. If your husband’s suit is undefended, he will obtain a decree which will leave you a single woman in six months. Now, whatever you may think to the contrary, there is not a club in London that would hold me in any way bound to marry you after the manner in which you have behaved. Let me remind you that your future position depends on your present conduct. You have apparently forgotten it.”

She looked at him; and he went back to the window.

“My husband’s suit cannot be defended,” she said. “Doubtless you will act according to the dictates of the London clubs.”

“I do not say so,” he said, turning angrily. “I shall act according to the dictates of my own common sense. And do not be too sure that the petition will be unopposed. The law recognizes the plea of connivance.”

“But it would be a false plea,” said Marian, raising her voice.

“I shall not discuss that with you. Whether your husband was blind, or merely kept his eyes shut will not be decided by us. You have been warned. We will drop the subject now, if you please.”

“Do you suppose,” said Marian, with a bright color in her cheeks, “that after what you have said, anything could induce me to marry you?”

He was startled, and remained for a moment motionless. Then he said, in his usual cold tone, “As you please. You may think better of it. I will leave you for the present. When we meet again, you will be calmer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Good-bye.”

Without answering, he changed his coat for a silk jacket, transferred his cigar-case to a pocket in it, and went out. When he had passed the threshold, he hesitated, and returned.

“Why do you say good-bye?” he said, after clearing his throat uneasily.

“I do not like to leave you without saying it.”

“I hope you have not misunderstood me, Marian. I did not mean that we should part.”

“I know that. Nevertheless, we shall part. I will never sleep beneath the same roof with you again.”

“Come!” he said, shutting the door: “this is nonsense. You are out of temper.”

“So you have already told me,” she said, becoming pale.

“Well, but — Marian: perhaps I may have spoken rather harshly just now; but I did not mean you to take it so. You must be reasonable.”

“Pray let us have no more words about it. I need no apologies, and desire no advances. Good-bye is enough.”

“But, Marian,” said he, coming nearer, “you must not fancy that I have ceased to love you.”

“Above all,” said Marian, “let us have no more of that. You say you hate this place and the life we lead here. I am heartily sick of it, and have been so for a long time.”

“Let us go elsewhere.”

“Yes, but not together. One word,” she added resolutely, seeing his expression become fierce. “I will not endure any violence, even of language, from you. I know of old what you are when you lose your temper; and if you insult me I will summon aid, and proclaim who I am.”

“Do you think I am going to strike you?”

“No, because you dare not. But I will not listen to oaths or abuse.”

“What have you to complain of? What is your grievance?”

“I make no complaint. I exercise the liberty I bought so dearly to go where I please and do what I please.”

“And to desert me when I have sacrificed everything for you. I have incurred enormous expenses; alienated my friends; risked my position in society; and broken my mother’s heart for your sake.”

“But for that I would have left you before. I am very sorry.”

“You have heard something in that letter which makes you hope that your husband will take you back. Not a woman in London will speak to you.”

“I tell you I am not going back. Oh, Sholto, dont be so mean. Can we not part with dignity? We have made a mistake. Let us acknowledge it quietly, and go our several ways.”

“I will not be got rid of so easily as you suppose,” he said, his face darkening menacingly. “Do you think I believe in your going out alone from this hotel and living by yourself in a strange city? Come! who is it?”

“Who is —— ? What do you mean?”

“What new connexion have you formed? You were very anxious about our ship returning the other day — anxious about the mails, of course. Perhaps also about the surgeon.”

“I understand. You think I am leaving you to go to some other man. I will tell you now the true reason.”

“Do,” said he, sarcastically, biting his lip.

“I will. I am leaving you because, instead of loving you, as I foolishly thought I could, I neither respect nor even like you. You are utterly selfish and narrow-minded; and I deserve my disappointment for having deserted for your sake a far better man. I am sorry you have sacrificed so much for me; but if you had been worthy of a woman’s regard, you would not have lost me.”

Douglas stared at her. “I selfish and narrow-minded!” he said, with the calm of stupefaction.

“Yes.”

“I may have been narrow-minded in devoting myself so entirely to you,” said he slowly, after a pause. “But, though I do not ask for gratitude, I think I have been sufficiently a loser to disregard such a monstrous assertion as that I am selfish.”

“You show your selfishness by dwelling on what you have lost. You never think of what I have lost. I make no profession of unselfishness. I am suffering for my folly and egoism; and I deserve to suffer.”

“In what way, pray, are you suffering? You came here because you had a wretched home, and a husband who was glad to be rid of you. You do what you like, and have what you like. Name one solitary wish of yours that has not been silently gratified.”

“I do not find fault with you. You have been generous in supplying me with luxuries such as money can obtain. But it was not the want of money that made me fancy my home wretched. It is not true that I can do as I like. How many minutes is it since you threatened to cast me off if I did not make myself agreeable to you? Can you boast of your generosity after taunting me with my dependence on you?”

“You misunderstood me, Marian. I neither boasted, nor threatened, nor taunted. I have even apologized for that moment’s irritation. If you cannot forgive such a trifle, you yourself can have very little generosity.”

“Perhaps not. I do not violently resent things; but I cannot forget them, nor feel as I did before they happened.”

“You think so at present. Let us cease this bickering. Lovers’ quarrels should not be carried too far.”

“I am longing to cease it. It worries me; and it does not alter my determination in the least.”

“Do you mean — —”

“I do mean. Dont look at me like that: you make me angry instead of frightening me.”

“And do you think I will suffer this quietly?”

“You may suffer it as you please,” said Marian, stepping quietly to the wall, and pressing a button. “I will never see you again if I can help it. If you follow me, or persecute me in any way, I will appeal to the police for protection as Mrs. Conolly. I despise you more than I do any one on earth.”

He turned away, and snatched up his coat and hat. She stood apparently watching him quietly, but really listening with quickened heart to his loud and irregular breathing. As he opened the door to go out, he was confronted on the threshold by a foreign waiter.

“Vas you reeng?” said the waiter doubtfully, retreating a step.

“I will not be accountable for that woman’s expenses from this time forth,” said Douglas, pointing at her, “You can keep her at your own risk, or turn her into the streets to pursue her profession, as you please.”

The waiter, smiting vaguely, looked first at the retreating figure of
Douglas, and then at Marian.

“I want another room, if you please,” she said. “One on any of the upper floors will do; but I must have my things moved there at once.”

Her instructions were carried out after some parley. In the meantime, Douglas’s man servant appeared, and said that he had been instructed to remove his master’s luggage.

“Is Mr. Forster leaving the hotel?” she asked.

“I dont know his arrangements, madam.”

“I guess I do, then,” said a sulky man, who was preparing to wheel away
Marian’s trunk. “He’s about to shift his billet to the Gran’ Central.”

Marian, still in a towering rage, sat down in her new room to consider her situation. To fix her attention, which repeatedly wandered to what had passed between her and Douglas, she counted her money, and found that she had, besides a twenty pound note which she had brought with her from London, only a few loose dollars in her purse. Her practice in housekeeping at Westbourne Terrace and Holland Park had taught her the value of money too well to let her suppose that she could afford to remain at a first rate American hotel with so small a sum in her possession. At home Conolly had made her keep a separate banking account; and there was money to her credit there; but in her ignorance of the law, she was not sure that she had not forfeited all her property by eloping. She resolved to move at once into some cheap lodging, and to live economically until she could ascertain the true state of her affairs, or until she could obtain some employment, to support her. She faced poverty without fear, never having experienced it.

It was still early in the afternoon when she left the hotel and drove to the Crawfords’.

“So you have come at last,” cried Mrs. Crawford, who was fifty years of age and stout, but leaner in the face than fat Englishwomen of that age usually are.

“I just expected you’d soon git tired of being grand all by yourself in the hotel yonder.”

“I fear I shall have to be the reverse of grand all by myself in some very shabby lodging,” said Marian. “Dont be surprised Mrs. Crawford. Can one live in New York on ten dollars a week?”

“You cant live on ten dollars a week in New York nor on a hundred. You rode here, didnt you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Of course. If you have only ten dollars a week you should have walked. I know the sort you are, Mrs. Forster. You wont be long getting rid of your money, no matter where you live. But whats wrong? Hows your husband?”

“I dont know. I hope he is quite well,” said Marian, her voice trembling a little. “Mrs. Crawford: you are the only friend I have in America; and you have been so very kind to me that since I must trouble some one, I have ventured to come to you. The truth is that I have left my husband; and I have only about one hundred dollars in the world. I must live on that until I get some employment, or perhaps some money of my own from England.”

“Chut, child! Nawnsnse!” exclaimed Mrs. Crawford, with benevolent intolerance. “You go right back to your husband. I spose youve had a rumpus with him; but you mustnt mind that. All men are a bit selfish; and I should say from what I have seen of him that he is no exception to the rule. But you cant have perfection. He’s a fine handsome fellow; and he knows it. And, as for you, I dont know what they reckon you in England; but youre the best-looking woman in Noo York: thats surtn. It’s a pity for such a pair to fall out.”

“He is not selfish,” said Marian. “You never saw him. I am afraid I must shock you, Mrs. Crawford. Mr. Forster is not my husband.”

“No! Do! Did you ever tell the General that?”

“General Crawford! Oh, no.”

“Think of that man being cuter than me, a woman! He always said so. And the grit you must have, to tell it out as cool as that! Well! I’m sorry to hear it though, Mrs. Forster. It’s a bad account — a very bad one. But if I take what you said just now rightly, youre married.”

“I am. I have deserted a very good husband.”

“It’s a pity you didnt find that out a little sooner, isnt it?”

“I know, Mrs. Crawford. I thought I was acting for the best.”

“Thought you were acting for the best in running away from a good husband! Well, you British aristocrats are singular. You throw stones at us because our women are so free and our divorces so easy. Yet youre always scandlizing us; and now you tell me youve done it on morl grounds! Who educated you, child? And what do you intend to do now?”

“For the present, only to get a lodging. Will you tell me where I should look for one? I dont know the east from the west end of this town; and I am so inexperienced that I might make a mistake easily as to the character of the places. Will you direct me to some street or quarter in which I should he likely to find suitable rooms? I can live very economically.”

“I dont know what to do,” said Mrs. Crawford, perplexedly, turning her rings on her fingers. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. And you so pretty!”

“Perhaps you would rather not assist me. You may tell me so candidly. I shall not be offended.”

“You mustnt take me up like that. I must have a talk with the General about you. I dont feel like letting you go into some ordinary place by yourself. But I cant ask you to stay here without consulting — —”

“Oh, no, you must not think of any such thing: I must begin to face the world alone at once. I assure you, Mrs. Crawford, I could not come here. I should only keep your friends away.”

“But nobody knows you.”

“Sooner or later I should meet someone who does. There are hundreds of people who know me by sight, who travel every year. Besides, my case is a very public one, unfortunately. May I take you into my confidence?”

“If you wish, my dear. I dont ask you for it; but I will take it kindly.”

“I know you will. You must have heard all about me. Mr. Forster’s real name is Douglas.”

Mrs. Crawford stifled a whoop of surprise. “And you! Are you —— ?”

“I am.”

“Only think! And that was Douglas! Why, I thought he was a straight-haired, sleeky, canting snake of a man. And you too are not a bit like what I thought. You are quite a person, Mrs. — Mrs. Conolly.”

“I have no right to bear that name any longer. Pray call me by my assumed name still, and keep my secret. I hope you do not believe all the newspapers said?”

“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Crawford. “But whose fault was it?”

“Mine. Altogether mine. I wish you would tell people that Mr. Conolly is blameless in the matter.”

“He will take care of his own credit, never fear. I am sure you got some provocation: I know what men are. The General is not my first husband.”

“No, I got no provocation. Mr. Conolly is not like other men. I got discontented because I had nothing to desire. And now, about the lodgings, Mrs. Crawford. Do not think I am changing the subject from reticence. It is the question of money that makes me anxious. All my resources would be swallowed up at the hotel in less than a week.”

“Lodgings? You mean rooms, I guess. People here mostly go to boarding-houses. And as to the cheapness, you dont know what cheapness is. Cant you make some arrangement with your great relations in England? Have you no property of your own?”

“I cannot tell whether my property remains my own or not. You must regard me as a poor woman. I am quite determined to have the lodgings; and I should like to arrange about them at once; for I am rather upset by something that happened this morning.”

“Well, if you must, you must, I know a place that might suit you: I lived in it myself when I was not so well off as I am at present. It is a little down-town; but you will have to put up with that for the sake of economy.”

Mrs. Crawford, who had read in the papers of her guest’s relationship to the Earl of Carbury, then sent for her carriage, and dressed herself handsomely. When they had gone some distance, they entered a wide street, crossed half way along by an avenue and an elevated railway.

“What do you think of this neighborhood?” said Mrs. Crawford.

“It is a fine, wide street,” replied Marian; “but it looks as if it needed to be swept and painted.”

“The other end is quieter. I’m afraid you wont like living here.”

Marian had hitherto thought of such streets as thoroughfares, not as places in which she could dwell. “Beggars cannot be choosers,” she said, with affected cheerfulness, looking anxiously ahead for the promised quiet part.

“Boarding-houses are so much the rule here, that it is not easy to get rooms. You will find Mrs. Myers a good soul, and though the house is not much to look at, it is comfortable enough inside.”

The appearance of the street improved as they went on; and the house they stopped at, though the windows were dingy and the paint old, was better than Marian had hoped for a minute before. She remained in the carriage whilst her companion conferred with the landlady within. Twenty minutes passed before Mrs. Crawford reappeared, looking much perplexed.

“Mrs. Myers has a couple of rooms that would do you very well; only you would be on the same floor with a woman who is always drunk. She has pawned a heap of clothes, and promises to leave every day; but Mrs. Myers hasnt got rid of her yet. It’s very provoking. She’s quiet, and doesnt trouble any one; but still, of course — —”

“She cannot interfere with me,” said Marian. “If that is the only objection, let it pass. I need have nothing to say to her. If she is not violent nor noisy, her habits are her own affair.”

“Oh, she wont trouble you. You can keep to yourself, English fashion.”

“Then let us agree at once. I cannot face any more searching and bargaining.”

“Youre looking pale. Are you sure you are not ill?”

“No. It is nothing. I am rather tired.”

They went in together; and Marian was introduced to Mrs. Myers, a nervous widow of fifty. The rooms were small, and the furniture and carpets old and worn; but all was clean; and there was an open fireplace in the sitting-room.

“They will do very nicely, thank you,” said Marian. “I will send for my luggage; and I think I will just telegraph my new address and a few words to a friend in London.”

“If you feel played out, I can see after your luggage,” said Mrs.
Crawford. “But I advise you to come back with me; have a good lunch at
Delmonico’s; and send your cablegram yourself.”

Marian roused herself from a lassitude which was coming upon her, and took Mrs. Crawford’s advice. When they returned to the richer quarter of the town, and especially after luncheon, her spirits revived. At the hotel she observed that the clerk was surprised when, arranging for the removal of her luggage and the forwarding of her letters, she mentioned her new address. Douglas, she found, had paid all expenses before leaving. She did not linger in the building; for the hotel staff stared at her curiously. She finished her business by telegraphing to Elinor: “Separated. Write to new address. Have I forfeited my money?” This cost her nearly five dollars.

“Only that you must find out about your money, I wouldnt have let you spend all that,” said Mrs. Crawford.

“I did not think it would have cost so much,” said Marian. “I was horrified when he named the price. However, it cannot be helped.”

“We may as well be getting back to Mrs. Myers’s now. It’s late.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Marian, sighing. “I am sorry I did not ask Nelly to telegraph me. I am afraid my funds will not last so long as I thought.”

“Well, we shall see. The General was greatly taken with you for the way you looked after me when I was ill yonder; so you have two friends in Noo York City, at any rate.”

“You have proved that to me to-day. I am afraid I shall have to trouble you further if I get bad news. You will have to help me to find some work.”

“Yes. Never mind that until the bad news comes. I hope you wont mope at
Mrs. Myers’s. How does the American air agree with you?”

“Pretty well. I was sick for the first two days of our passage across, and somehow my digestion seems to have got out of order in consequence. Of late I have been a little unwell in the mornings.”

“Oh! Thats so, is it? Humph! I see I shall have to come and look after you occasionally.”

“Why?”

“Never you mind, my dear. But dont go moping, nor going without food to save money. Take care of yourself.”

“It is nothing serious,” said Marian, with a smile. “Only a passing indisposition. You need not be uneasy about me. This is the house, is it not? I shall lose myself whenever I go out for a walk here.”

“This is it. Now good-bye. I’ll see you soon. Meanwhile, you take care of yourself, as youre told.”

It was dark when Marian entered her new residence. Mrs. Myers was standing at the open door, remonstrating with a milkman. Marian hastily assured her that she knew the way, and went upstairs alone. She was chilled and weary; her spirits had fallen again during her journey from the telegraph office. As she approached her room, hoping to find a good fire, she heard a flapping noise, which was suddenly interrupted by the rattle of a falling poker, followed by the exclamation, in a woman’s voice, “Och, musha, I wouldnt doubt you.” Marian, entering, saw a robust young woman kneeling before the grate, trying to improve a dull fire that burnt there. She had taken up the poker and placed it standing against the bars so that it pointed up the chimney; and she was now using her apron fanwise as a bellows. The fire glowed in the draught; and Marian, by its light, noted with displeasure that the young woman’s calico dress was soiled, and her hair untidy.

“I think — —”

“God bless us!” ejaculated the servant, starting and turning a comely dirty face toward Marian.

“Did I frighten you?” said Marian, herself startled by the exclamation.

“You put the life acrass in me,” said the servant, panting, and pressing her hand on her bosom.

“I am sorry for that. I was going to say that I think you need not take any further trouble with the fire. It will light of itself now.”

“Very well, miss.”

“What is your name?”

“Liza Redmon’, miss.”

“I should like some light, Eliza, if you please.”

“Yis, miss. Would you wish to take your tay now, miss?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Eliza went away with alacrity. Marian put off her bonnet and furs, and sat down before the fire to despond over the prospect of living in that shabby room, waited on by that slipshod Irish girl, who roused in her something very like racial antipathy. Presently Eliza returned, carrying a small tray, upon which she had crowded a lighted kerosene lamp, a china tea service, a rolled-up table cloth, a supply of bread and butter, and a copper kettle. When she had placed the lamp on the mantelpiece, and the kettle by the fire, she put the tray on the sofa, and proceeded to lay the cloth, which she shook from its folds and spread like a sail in the air by seizing two of the corners in her hands, and pulling them apart whilst she held the middle fold in her teeth. Then she adroitly wafted it over the table, making a breeze in which the lamp flared and Marian blinked. Her movements were very rapid; and in a few moments she had arranged the tea service, and was ready to withdraw.

“My luggage will be sent here this evening or to-morrow, Eliza. Will you tell me when it comes?”

“Yis, miss.”

“You know that my name is Mrs. Forster, do you not?”

“Mrs. Forster. Yis, miss.”

Marian made no further attempt to get miss changed to maam; and Eliza left the room. As she crossed the landing, she was called by someone on the same floor. Marian started at the sound. It was a woman’s voice, disagreeably husky: a voice she felt sure she had heard before, and yet one that was not familiar to her.

“Eliza. Eli-za!” Marian shuddered.

“Yis, yis,” said Eliza, impatiently, opening a door.

“Come here, alanna,” said the voice, with mock fondness. The door was then closed, and Marian could hear the murmur of the conversation which followed. It was still proceeding when Mrs. Myers came in.

“I didnt ought to have left you to find your way up here alone, Mrs. Forster,” she said; “but I do have such worry sometimes that I’m bound to leave either one thing or another undone.”

“It does not matter at all, Mrs. Myers. Your servant has been very attentive to me.”

“The hired girl? She’s smart, she is — does everything right slick away.
The only trouble is to keep her out of that room. She’s in there now.
Unless I am always after her, she is slipping out on errands, pawning
and buying drink for that unfortunate young creature.”

“For whom?”

“A person that Mrs. Crawford promised to tell you about.”

“So she did,” said Marian. “But I did not know she was young.”

“She’s older than you, a deal. I knew her when she was a little girl, and I often forget how old she is. She was the prettiest child! Even now she would talk you into anything. But I cant help her. It’s nothing but drink, drink, drink from morning til night. There’s Eliza coming out of her room. Eliza.”

“Yis, maam,” said Eliza, looking in.

“You stay in the house, Eliza, do you hear? I wont have you go out.”

“Could I spake a word to you, maam?” said Eliza, lowering her voice.

“No, Eliza. I’m engaged with Mrs. Forster.”

“She wants to see you,” whispered Eliza.

“Go downrs, Eliza, this minute. I wont see her.”

“Mrs. Myers,” cried the voice. Marian again shrank from the sound. “Mrs.
My-ers. Aunt Sally. Come to your poor Soozy.” Mrs. Myers looked
perplexedly at Marian. The voice resumed after a pause, with an affected
Yankee accent, “I guess I’ll raise a shine if you dont come.”

“I must go,” said Mrs. Myers. “I promise you, Mrs. Forster, she shall not annoy you. She shall go this week. It aint right that you should be disturbed by her.”

Mrs. Myers went into the other room. Eliza ran downrs, and Marian heard her open the house door softly and go out. She also heard indistinctly the voices of the landlady and her lodger. After a time these ceased, and she drank her tea in peace. She was glad that Mrs. Myers did not return, although she made no more comfortable use of her solitude than to think of her lost home in Holland Park, comparing it with her dingy apartment, and pressing her handkerchief upon her eyes when they became too full of tears. She had passed more than an hour thus when Eliza roused her by announcing the arrival of the luggage. Thereupon she bestirred herself to superintend its removal to her bedroom, where she unpacked a trunk which contained her writing-case and some books. With these were stowed her dresses, much miscellaneous finery, and some handsomely worked underclothing. Eliza, standing by, could not contain her admiration; and Marian, though she did not permit her to handle the clothes, had not the heart to send her away until she had seen all that the trunk contained. Marian heard her voice afterward in the apartment of the drunken lodger, and suspected from its emphasis that the girl was describing the rare things she had seen.

Marian imparted some interest to her surroundings that evening by describing them in a letter to Elinor. When she had finished, she was weary; and the fire was nearly out. She looked at her watch, and, finding to her surprise that is was two hours after midnight, rose to go to bed. Before leaving the room, she stood for a minute before the old-fashioned pier-glass, with one foot on the fender, and looked at her image, pitying her own weariness, and enjoying the soft beauty of her face and the gentleness of her expression. Her appearance did not always please her; but on this occasion the mirror added so much to the solace she had found in writing to Elinor, that she felt almost happy as she took the lamp to light her to her bedroom.

She had gone no farther than the landing when a sound of unsteady footsteps on the stairs caused her to stop. As she lifted the lamp and looked up, she saw a strange woman descending toward her, holding the balustrade, and moving as though with pains in her limbs. This woman, whose black hair fell nearly to her waist, was dressed in a crimson satin dressing-gown, warmly padded, and much stained and splashed. She had fine dark eyes, and was young, bold-looking, and handsome; but when she came nearer, the moist pallor of her skin, the slackness of her lower lip and jaw, and an eager and worn expression in her fine eyes, gave her a thirsty, reckless leer that filled Marian with loathing. Her aspect conveyed the same painful suggestion as her voice had done before, but more definitely; for it struck Marian, with a shock, that Conolly, in the grotesque metamorphosis of a nightmare, might appear in some such likeness. The lamp did not seem to attract her attention at first; but when she came within a few steps, she saw some one before her, and, dazzled by the light, peered at Marian, who lost her presence of mind, and stood motionless. Gradually the woman’s expression changed to one of astonishment. She came down to the landing; stopped, grasping the handrail to steady herself; and said in her husky voice:

“Oh, Lord! It’s not a woman at all. It’s D. Ts.” Then, not quite convinced by this explanation, she suddenly stretched out her hand and attempted to grasp Marian’s arm. Missing her aim, she touched her on the breast, and immediately cried, “Mrs. Ned!”

Marian shrank from her touch, and recovered her courage.

“Do you know me?” she said.

“I should rather think I do. I have gone off a good deal in my appearance, or you would know me. Youve seen me on the stage, I suppose. I’m your sister-in-law. Perhaps you didnt know you had one.”

“Are you Miss Susanna Conolly?”

“Thats who I am. At least I am what is left of Miss Susanna. You dont look overjoyed to make my acquaintance; but I was as good-looking as you once. Take my advice, Mrs. Ned: dont drink champagne. The end of champagne is brandy; and the end of brandy is — —” Susanna made a grimace and indicated herself.

“I am afraid we shall disturb the house if we talk here. We had better say good-night.”

“No, no. Dont be in such a hurry to get rid of me. Come into my room with me for a while. I’ll talk quietly: I’m not drunk. Ive just slept it off; and I was coming down for some more. You may as well keep me from it for a few minutes. I suppose Ned hasnt forbidden you to speak to me.”

“Oh, no,” said Marian, yielding to a feeling of pity. “Come into my room. There is a scrap of fire there still.”

“We used to lodge in this room long ago, in my father’s time,” said Susanna, following Marian into the room, and reclining with a groan on the sofa. “I’m rather in a fog, you know: I cant make out how the deuce you come to be here. Did Ned send you to look after me? Is he in New York? Is he here?”

“No,” said Marian, foreseeing with a bitter pang and a terrible blush what must follow. “He is in England. I am alone here.”

“Well, why — ? what — ? I dont understand.”

“Have you not read the papers?” said Marian, in a low voice, turning her head away.

“Papers! No, not since I saw an account of my brilliant debût here, of which I suppose you have heard. I never read: I do nothing but drink. What has happened?”

Marian hesitated.

“Is it any secret?” said Susanna.

“No, it is no secret,” said Marian, turning, and looking at her steadily. “All the world knows it. I have left your brother; and I do not know whether I am still his wife, or whether I am already divorced.”

“You dont mean to say youre on the loose!” cried Susanna.

Marian was silent.

“I always told Ned that no woman could stand him,” said Susanna, with sodden vivacity, after a pause, during which Marian had to endure her astonished stare. “He always thought you the very pink of propriety. Of course, there was another man in it. Whats become of him, if I may ask?”

“I have left him,” said Marian, sternly. “You need impute no fault to your brother in the matter, Miss Conolly. He is quite blameless.”

“Yes,” said Susanna, not in the least impressed, “he always is blameless. How is Bob? I mean Marmaduke, your cousin. I call him Bob, short for Cherry Bob.”

“He is very well, thank you.”

“Now, Bob was not a blameless man, but altogether the reverse; and he was a capital fellow to get on with. Ned was always right, always sure of himself; and there was an end. He has no variety. I wonder will Bob ever get married?”

“He is going to be married in the spring.”

“Who to?”

“To Lady Constance Car — —”

“Damn that woman!” exclaimed Susanna. “I hate her. She was always throwing herself at his head. Curse her! Damn her! I wish — —”

“Miss Conolly,” said Marian: “I hope you will not think me rude; but I am very tired, and it is very late. I must go to bed.”

“Well, will you come and see me to-morrow? It will be an act of charity. I am dying here all alone. You are a nice woman, and I know what you must feel about me; but you will get used to me. I wont annoy you. I wont swear. I wont say anything about your cousin. I’ll keep sober. Do come. You are a good sort: Bob always said so; and you might save me from destroying myself. Say youll come.”

“If you particularly wish it, I will,” said Marian, not disguising her reluctance.

“Youd rather not, of course,” said Susanna, despondently.

“I am afraid I cannot be of any use to you.”

“For that matter, no one is likely to be of much use to me. But it’s hard to be imprisoned in this den without anyone to speak to but Eliza. However, do as you please. I did as I pleased; and I must take the consequences. Just tell me one thing. Did you find me out by accident?”

“Quite.”

“That was odd.” Susanna groaned again as she rose from the sofa. “Well, since you wont have anything to do with me, good-bye. Youre quite right.”

“I will come and see you. I do not wish to avoid you if you are in trouble.”

“Do,” said Susanna, eagerly, touching Marian’s hand with her moist palm. “We’ll get on better than you think. I like you, and I’ll make you like me. If I could only keep from it for two days, I shouldnt be a bit disgusting. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Marian, overcoming her repugnance to Susanna’s hand, and clasping it. “Remember that my name here is Mrs. Forster.”

“All right. Good-night. Thank you. You will never be sorry for having compassion on me.”

“Wont you take a light?”

“I dont require one. I can find what I want in the dark.”

She went into her apartment. Marian went quickly up to her own bedroom and locked herself in. Her first loathing for Susanna had partly given way to pity; but the humiliation of confessing herself to such a woman as an unfaithful wife was galling. When she went to sleep she dreamed that she was unmarried and at home with her father, and that the household was troubled by Susanna, who lodged in a room upstairs.

CHAPTER XX

Sholto Douglas returned to England in the ship which carried Marian’s letter to Elinor. On reaching London he stayed a night in the hotel at Euston, and sent his man next day to take rooms for him at the West End. Early in the afternoon the man reported that he had secured apartments in Charles Street, St. James’s. It was a fine wintry day, and Douglas resolved to walk, not without a sense of being about to run the gauntlet.

It proved the most adventurous walk he had ever taken in his life. Everybody he knew seemed to be lying in wait for him. In Portland Place he met Miss McQuinch, who, with the letter fresh in her pocket, looked at him indignantly, and cut him. At the Laugham Hotel he passed a member of his club, who seemed surprised, but nodded coolly. In Regent Street he saw Lady Carbury’s carriage waiting before a shop. He hurried past the door, for he had lost courage at his encounter with Elinor. There were, however, two doors; and as he passed the second, the Countess, Lady Constance, and Marmaduke came out just before him.

“Where the devil is the carriage?” said Marmaduke, loudly.

“Hush! Everybody can hear you,” said Lady Constance.

“What do I care whether — Hal-lo! Douglas! How are you?”

Marmaduke proffered his hand. Lady Carbury plucked her daughter by the sleeve and hurried to her carriage, after returning Douglas’s stern look with the slightest possible bow. Constance imitated her mother. Douglas haughtily raised his hat.

“How obstinate Marmaduke is!” said the Countess, when she had bidden the coachman drive away at once. “He is going to walk down Regent Street with that man.”

“But you didnt cut him, mamma.”

“I never dreamed of his coming back so soon; and, of course, I cannot tell whether he will be cut or not. We must wait and see what other people will do. If we meet him again we had better not see him.”

“Look here, old fellow,” said Marmaduke, as he walked away with Douglas. “Youve come back too soon. It wont do. Take my advice and go away again until matters have blown over. Hang it, it’s too flagrant! You have not been away two months.”

“I believe you are going to be married,” said Douglas. “Allow me to congratulate you.”

“Thank you. Fine day, isnt it?”

“Very fine.”

Marmaduke walked on in silence. Douglas presently recommenced the conversation.

“I only arrived in London last night. I have come from New York.”

“Indeed. Pleasant voyage?”

“Very pleasant.”

Another pause.

“Has anything special happened during my absence?”

“Nothing special.”

“Was there much fuss made about my going?”

“Well, there was a great deal of fuss made about it. Excuse my alluding to the subject again. I shouldnt have done so if you hadnt asked me.”

“Oh, my dear fellow, you neednt stand on ceremony with me.”

“That’s all very well, Douglas; but when I alluded to it just now, you as good as told me to mind my own business.”

“I told you so!”

“Not in those words, perhaps. However, the matter is easily settled. You bolted with Marian. I know that, and you know it. If the topic is disagreeable, say so, and it is easily avoided. If you want to talk about it, better not change the subject when I mention it.”

“You have taken offence needlessly. I changed the subject inadvertently.”

“Hm! Well, has she come back with you?”

“No.”

“Do you mean that youve thrown her over?”

“I have said nothing of the kind. As a matter of fact, she has thrown me over.”

“Thats very strange. You are not going to marry her then, I suppose?”

“How can I? I tell you she has deserted me. Let me remind you, Lind, that I should not be bound to marry her in any case, and I shall certainly not do so now. If I chose to justify myself, I could easily do so by her own conduct.”

“I expect you will not be troubled for any justification. People seem to have made up their minds that you were wrong in the first instance, and you ought to keep out of the way until they have forgotten —— Oh, confound it, here’s Conolly! Now, for God’s sake, dont let us have any row.”

Douglas whitened, and took a step back into the roadway before he recovered himself; for Conolly had come upon them suddenly as they turned into Charles Street. A group of gentlemen stood on the steps of the clubhouse which stands at that corner.

“Bless me!” said Conolly, with perfect good humor. “Douglas back again! Why on earth did you run away with my wife? and what have you done with her?”

The party on the steps ceased chatting and began to stare.

“This is not the place to call me to account, sir,” said Douglas, still on his guard, and very ill at ease. “If you have anything to say to me which cannot be communicated through a friend, it had better be said in private.”

“I shall trouble you for a short conversation,” said Conolly. “How do you do, Lind? Where can we go? I do not belong to any club.”

“My apartments are at hand,” said Douglas.

“I suppose I had better leave you,” said Marmaduke.

“Your presence will not embarrass me in the least,” said Conolly.

“I have not sought this interview,” said Douglas. “I therefore prefer
Mr. Lind to witness what passes.”

Conolly nodded assent; and they went to a house on the doorstep of which
Douglas’s man was waiting, and ascended to the front drawing-room.

“Now, sir,” said Douglas, without inviting his guests to sit down. Conolly alone took off his hat. Marmaduke went aside, and looked out of the window.

“I know the circumstances that have led to your return,” said Conolly; “so we need not go into that. I want you, however, to assist me on one point. Do you know what Marian’s pecuniary position is at present?’

“I decline to admit that it concerns me in any way.”

“Of course not. But it concerns me, as I do not wish that she should be without money in a foreign city. She has telegraphed a question about her property to Miss McQuinch. That by itself is nothing; but her new address, which I first saw on a letter this morning, happens to be known to me as that of a rather shabby lodging-house.”

“I know nothing of it.”

“I do: it means that she is poor. I can guess at the sum she carried with her to America. Now, if you will be good enough to tell me whether you have ever given her money; if so, how much; and what her expenditure has been, you will enable me to estimate her position at present.”

“I do not know that you have any right to ask such questions.”

“I do not assert any right to ask them. On the contrary, I have explained their object. I shall not press them, if you think that an answer will in any way compromise you.”

“I have no fear of being compromised. None whatever.”

Conolly nodded, and waited for an answer.

“I may say that my late trip has cost me a considerable sum. I paid all the expenses; and Miss — Mrs. Conolly did not, to my knowledge, disburse a single fraction. She did not ask me to give her money. Had she done so, I should have complied at once.”

“Thank you. Thats all right: she will be able to hold out until she hears from us. Good-afternoon.”

“Allow me to add, sir, before you go,” said Douglas, asserting himself desperately against Conolly’s absolutely sincere disregard of him and preoccupation with Marian, “that Mrs. Conolly has been placed in her present position entirely through her own conduct. I repudiate the insinuation that I have deserted her in a foreign city; and I challenge inquiry on the point.”

“Quite so, quite so,” assented Conolly, carelessly. “Good-bye, Lind.”
And he took his hat and went out.

“By George!” said Marmaduke, admiringly, “he did that damned well — damned well. Look here, old man: take my advice and clear out for another year or so. You cant stay here. As a looker-on, I see most of the game; and thats my advice to you as a friend.”

Douglas, whose face had reddened and reddened with successive rushes of blood until it was now purple, lost all self-control at Marmaduke’s commiserating tone. “I will see whether I cannot put him in the wrong,” he burst out, in the debased voice of an ignobly angry man. “Do you think I will let him tell the world that I have been thrown over and fooled?”

“Thats your own story, isnt it? At least, I understood you to say so as we came along.”

“Let him say so, and I’ll thrash him like, a dog in the street.
I’ll — —”

“Whats the use of thrashing a man who will simply hand you over to the police? and quite right, too! What rot!”

“We shall see. We shall see.”

“Very well. Do as you like. You may twist one another’s heads off for what I care. He has had the satisfaction of putting you into a rage, at all events.”

“I am not in a rage.”

“Very well. Have it your own way.”

“Will you take a challenge to him from me?”

“No. I am not a born fool.”

“That is plain speaking.”

Marmaduke put his hands into his pockets, and whistled. “I think I will take myself off,” he said, presently.

“As you please,” replied Douglas, coldly.

“I will look in on you some day next week, when you have cooled down a bit. Good-bye.”

Douglas said nothing, and Marmaduke, with a nod, went out. Some minutes later the servant entered and said that Mr. Lind was below.

“What! Back again!” said Douglas, with an oath.

“No, sir. It’s old Mr. Lind — Mr. Reginald.”

“Did you say I was in?”

“The man belonging to the house did, sir.”

“Confound his officiousness! I suppose he must come up.”

Reginald Lind entered, and bowed. Douglas placed a chair for him, and waited, mute, and a little put out. Mr. Lind’s eyes and voice shewed that he also was not at his ease; but his manner was courtly and his expression grave, as Douglas had, in his boyhood, been accustomed to see them.

“I am sorry, Sholto,” said Mr. Lind, “that I cannot for the present meet you with the cordiality which formerly existed between us. However unbearable your disappointment at Marian’s marriage may have been, you should not have taken a reprehensible and desperate means of remedying it. I speak to you now as an old friend — as one who knew you when the disparity in our ages was more marked than it is at present.”

Douglas bowed.

“I have just heard from Mr. Conolly — whom I met accidentally in Pall Mall — that you have returned from America. He gave me no further account of you, except that he had met you and spoken to you here. I hope nothing unpleasant passed.”

“The meeting was not a pleasant one. I shall take steps to make Mr.
Conolly understand that.”

“Nothing approaching to violence, I trust.”

“No. Mr. Conolly’s discretion averted it. I am not sure that a second interview between us will end so quietly.”

“The interview should not have taken place at all, Sholto. I need not point out to you that prudence and good taste forbid any repetition of it.”

“I did not seek it, Mr. Lind. He forced it upon me. I promise you that if a second meeting takes place, it will be forced upon him by me, and will take place in another country.”

“That is a young man’s idea, Sholto. The day for such crimes, thank Heaven, is past and gone. Let us say no more of it. I was speaking to your mother on Sunday. Have you seen her yet?”

“No.”

“Sholto, you hit us all very hard that Monday before Christmas. I know what I felt about my daughter. But I can only imagine what your mother must have felt about her son.”

“I am not insensible to that. I has been rather my misfortune than my fault that I have caused you to suffer. If it will gratify you to know that I have suffered deeply myself, and am now, indeed, a broken man, I can assure you that such is the case.”

“It is fortunate for us all that matters are not absolutely irremediable. I will so far take you into my confidence as to tell you that I have never felt any satisfaction in Marian’s union with Mr. Conolly. Though he is unquestionably a remarkable man, yet there was a certain degree of incongruity in the match — you will understand me — which placed Marian apart from her family whilst she was with him. I have never entered my daughter’s house without a feeling that I was more or less a stranger there. Had she married you in the first instance, the case would have been different: I wish she had. However, that is past regretting now. What I wish to say is that I can still welcome you as Marian’s husband, even though she will have a serious error to live down; and I shall be no less liberal to her than if her previous marriage had never taken place.”

Douglas cleared his throat, but did not speak.

“Well?” said Mr. Lind after a pause, reddening.

“This is a very painful matter,” said Douglas at last. “As a man of the world, Mr. Lind, you must be aware that I am not bound to your daughter in any way.”

“I am not speaking to you as a man of the world. I am speaking as a father, and as a gentleman.”

“Doubtless your position as a father is an unfortunate one. I can sympathize with your feelings. But as a gentleman — —”

“Think of what you are going to say, Sholto. If you speak as a gentleman, you can have only one answer. If you have any other, you will speak as a scoundrel.” The last sentence came irrepressibly to Mr. Lind’s lips; but the moment he had uttered it, he felt that he had been too precipitate.

“Sir!”

“I repeat, as a scoundrel — if you deny your duty in the matter.”

“I decline to continue this conversation with you, Mr. Lind. You know as well as I do that no gentleman is expected or even permitted by society to take as his wife a woman who has lived with him as his mistress.”

“No man who betrays a lady and refuses to make her all the reparation in his power can claim to be a gentleman.”

“You are dreaming, Mr. Lind. Your daughter was the guardian of her own honor. I made her no promises. It is absurd to speak of a woman of her age and experience being betrayed, as though she were a child.”

“I always understood that you prided yourself on acting up to a higher standard of honorable dealing than other men. If this is your boasted — —”

“Mr. Lind,” said Douglas, interrupting him with determination, “no more of this, if you please. Briefly, I will have nothing whatever to say to Mrs. Conolly in the future. If her reputation were as unstained as your own, I would still refuse to know her. I have suffered from her the utmost refinements of caprice and treachery, and the coarsest tirades of abuse. She left me of her own accord, in spite of my entreaties to her to stay — entreaties which I made her in response to an exhibition of temper which would have justified me in parting from her there and then. It is true that I have moulded my life according to a higher standard of honor than ordinary men; and it is also true that that standard is never higher, never more fastidiously acted up to, than where a woman is concerned. I have only to add that I am perfectly satisfied as to the propriety of my behavior in Marian’s case, and that I absolutely refuse to hear another accusation of unworthiness from you, much as I respect you and your sorrow.”

Mr. Lind, though he saw that he must change his tone, found it hard to subdue his temper; for though not a strong man, he was unaccustomed to be thwarted. “Sholto,” he said: “you are not serious. You are irritated by some lovers’ quarrel.”

“I am justly estranged from your daughter, and I am resolved never to give her a place in my thoughts again. I have madly wasted my youth on her. Let her be content with that and the other things I have sacrificed for her sake.”

“But this is dreadful. Think of the life she must lead if you do not marry her. She will be an outcast. She will not even have a name.”

“She would not be advised. She made her choice in defiance of an explicit warning of the inevitable results, and she must abide by it. I challenge the most searching inquiry into my conduct, Mr. Lind. It will be found, if the truth be told, that I spared her no luxury before she left me; and that, far from being the aggressor, it is I who have the right to complain of insult and desertion.”

“Still, even granting that her unhappy position may have rendered her a little sore and impatient at times, do you not owe her some forbearance since she gave up her home and her friends for you?”

“Sacrifice for sacrifice, mine was the greater of the two. Like her, I have lost my friends and my position here — to some extent, at least. Worse, I have let my youth slip by in fruitless pursuit of her. For the home which she hated, I offered her one ten times more splendid. I gave her the devotion of a gentleman to replace the indifference of a blacksmith. What have I not done for her? I freed her from her bondage; I carried her across the globe; I watched her, housed her, fed her, clothed her as a princess. I loved her with a love that taught her a meaning of the word she had never known before. And when I had served her turn — when I had rescued her from her husband and placed her beyond his reach — when she became surfeited with a wealth of chivalrous love which she could not comprehend, and when a new world opened before her a fresh field for intrigue, I was assailed with slanderous lies, and forsaken. Do you think, Mr. Lind, that in addition to this, I will endure the reproaches of any man — even were he my own father?”

“But she suffers more, being a woman. The world will be comparatively lenient toward you. If you and she were married and settled, with no consciousness of being in a false position, and no wearing fear of detection, you would get on together quite differently.”

“It may be so, but I shall never put it to the test.”

“Listen a moment, Sholto. Just consider the matter calmly and rationally. I am a rich man — at least, I can endow Marian better than you perhaps think. I see that you feel aggrieved, and that you fear being forced into a marriage which you have, as you say — I fully admit it, most fully — a perfect right to decline. But I am urging you to make Marian your legal wife solely because it is the best course for both of you. That, I assure you, is the feeling of society in the matter. Everybody speaks to me of your becoming my son-in-law. The Earl says no other course is possible. I will give you ten thousand pounds down on her wedding-day. You will lose nothing: Conolly will not claim damages. He has contradicted the report that he would. I will pay the costs of the divorce as well. Mind! I do not mean that I will settle the money on her. I will give it to her unconditionally. In other words, it will become your property the moment you become her husband.”

“I understand,” said Douglas contemptuously. “However, as it is merely a question of making your daughter an honest woman in consideration of so much cash, I have no doubt you will find plenty of poorer men who will be glad to close with you for half the money. You are much in the city now, I believe. Allow me to suggest that you will find a dealer there more easily than in St. James’s.”

Mr. Lind reddened again. “I do not think you see the matter in the proper light,” he said. “You are asked to repair the disgrace you have brought on a lady and upon her family. I offer you a guarantee that you will not lose pecuniarily by doing so. Whatever other loss you may incur, you are bound to bear it as the penalty of your own act. I appeal to you, sir, as one gentleman appeals to another, to remove the dishonor you have brought upon my name.”

“To transfer it to my own, you mean. Thank you, Mr. Lind. The public is more accustomed to associate conjugal levity with the name of Lind than with that of Douglas.”

“If you refuse me the justice you owe to my daughter, you need not couple that refusal with an insult.”

“I have already explained that I owe your daughter nothing. You come here and offer me ten thousand pounds to marry her. I decline the bargain. You then take your stand upon the injury to your name. I merely remind you that your name was somewhat tarnished even before Mrs. Conolly changed it for the less distinguished one which she has really dishonored.”

“Douglas,” said Mr. Lind, trembling, “I will make you repent this. I will have satisfaction.”

“As you remarked when I declared my readiness to give satisfaction in the proper quarter, the practice you allude to is obsolete. Fortunately so, I think, in our case.”

“You are a coward, sir.” Douglas rang the bell. “I will expose you in every club in London.”

“Shew this gentleman out,” said Douglas to his servant.

“You have received that order because I told your master that he is a rascal,” said Mr. Lind to the man. “I shall say the same thing to every man I meet between this house and the committee-room of his club.”

The servant looked grave as Mr. Lind left the room. Soon after, Douglas, whose self-respect, annihilated by Conolly, had at first been thoroughly restored by Mr. Lind, felt upset again by the conclusion of the interview. Finding solitude and idleness intolerable, he went into the streets, though he no longer felt any desire to meet his acquaintances, and twice crossed the Haymarket to avoid them. As he strolled about, thinking of all that had been said to him that afternoon, he grew morose. Twice he calculated his expenditure on the American trip, and the difference that an increment of ten thousand pounds would make in his property. Suddenly, in turning out of Air Street into Piccadilly, he found himself face to face with Lord Carbury.

“How do you do?” said the latter pleasantly, but without the unceremonious fellowship that had formerly existed between them.

“Thank you,” said Douglas, “I am quite well.”

A pause followed, Jasper not knowing exactly what to say next.

“I am considering where I shall dine,” said Douglas. “Have you dined yet?”

“No. I promised to dine at home this evening. My mother likes to have a family dinner occasionally.”

Douglas knew that before the elopement he would have been asked to join the party. “I suppose people have been pleased to talk a good deal about me of late,” he said.

“Yes, I fear so. However, I hope it will pass over.”

“It shews no sign of passing over as yet, then?”

“Well, it has become a little stale as a topic; but there is undeniably a good deal of feeling about it still. If you will excuse my saying so, I think that perhaps you would do well to keep out of the way a little longer.”

“Presuming, of course, that popular feeling is a matter about which I am likely to concern myself.”

“That is a question for you to decide. Excuse the hint.”

“The question is whether it is not better to be on the spot, so as to strangle calumny at its source, than to hide myself abroad whilst a host of malicious tongues are busy with me.”

“As to that, Douglas, I assure you you have been very fairly treated. The chief blame, as usual, has fallen on the weaker sex. Nothing could exceed the moderation of those from whom the loudest complaints might have been expected. Reginald Lind has hardly ever mentioned the subject. Even to me, he only shook his head and said that it was an old attachment. As to Conolly, we have actually reproached him for making excuses for you.”

“Aye. A very astute method of bringing me into contempt. Allow me to enlighten you a little, Jasper. Lind, whose daughter I have discovered to be one of the worst of women, has just offered me ten thousand pounds to marry her. That speaks for itself. Conolly, who drove her into my arms by playing the tyrant whilst I played the lover, is only too glad to get rid of her. At the same time, he is afraid to fight me, and ashamed to say so. Therefore, he impudently pretends to pity me for being his gull in the matter. But I will stop that.”

“Conolly is a particular friend of mine, Douglas, Let us drop the subject, if you dont mind.”

“If he is your friend, of course I have nothing more to say. I think I will turn in here and dine. Good-evening.”

They parted without any salutation: and Douglas entered the restaurant and dined alone, he came out an hour later in improved spirits, and began to consider whether he would go to the theatre or venture into his club. He was close to a lamp at a corner of Leicester Square when he stopped to debate the point with himself; and in his preoccupation he did not notice a four-wheeled cab going slowly past him, carrying a lady in an old white opera cloak. This was Mrs. Leith Fairfax, who, recognizing him, called to the cabman to drive a little past the lamp and stop.

“Good heavens!” she said in a half-whisper: “you here! What madness possessed you to come back?”

“I had no further occasion to stay away.”

“How coolly you say so! You have iron nerves, all you Douglases. I have heard all, and I know what you have suffered. How soon will you leave London?”

“I have no intention of leaving it at present.”

“But you cannot stay here.”

“Pray why not? Is not London large enough for any man who does not live by the breath of the world?”

“Out of the question, Mr. Douglas. Absolutely out of the question. You must go away for a year at the very least. You must yield something to propriety.”

“I shall yield nothing. I can do without any section of society that may feel called upon to do without me.”

“Oh, you must subdue that imperious nature of yours for your mother’s sake if not for your own. Besides, you have been very wicked and reckless and daring, just like a Douglas. You ought to do penance with a good grace. I may conclude, since you are here, that Elinor McQuinch’s story is true as far as the facts go.”

“I have not heard her story.”

“It is only that you have parted from — you know.”

“That is true. Can I gratify your curiosity in any other particular?”

“Strive not to let yourself be soured, Mr. Douglas. I shudder when I think of what you have undergone at the hands of one woman. There! I will not allude to it again.”

“You will do wisely, Mrs. Leith Fairfax. What I have suffered, I have suffered. I desire no pity, and will endure none.”

“That is so like yourself. I must hurry on to Covent Garden, or I shall be late. Will you come and see me quietly some day before you go? I am never at home to any one on Tuesdays; but if you come at about five, Caroline will let you in. It will be dark: nobody will see you. We can have a chat then.”

“Thank you,” said Douglas, coldly, stepping back, and raising his hat,
“I shall not intrude on you. Good-evening.”

She waved her hand at him; and the cab departed. He walked quickly back to Charles Street, and called his servant.

“I suppose no one has called?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Douglas came very shortly after you went out. She wishes you to go to the Square this evening, sir.”

“This evening? I am afraid — Buckstone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she looking well?”

“A little tired, sir. But quite well, I have no doubt.”

“How much of the luggage have you unpacked?”

“Only your portmanteau, sir. I thought — —”

“So much the better. Pack it again. I am going to Brussels to-night. Find out about the trains. I shall want you to take a hansom and take a note to Chester Square; but come back at once without waiting to be spoken to.”

“Very good, sir.”

Douglas then sat down and wrote the note.

“My dear Mother:

“I am sorry I was out when you called. I did not expect you, as I am only passing through London on my way to Brussels. I am anxious to get clear of this vile city, and so shall start to-night. Buckstone tells me you are looking well; and this assurance must content me for the present, as I find it impossible to go to you. You were quite right in warning me against what has happened; but it is all past and broken off now, and I am still as ever,

”Your affectionate son,
”SHOLTO DOUGLAS.”

CHAPTER XXI

One day Eliza, out of patience, came to Mrs. Myers, and said:

“A’ thin, maam, will you come up and spake to Miss Conolly. She’s rasin ructions above stairs.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” said Mrs. Myers. “Cant you keep her quiet?”

“Arra, how can I kape her quiet, an she cryin an roarin, dyin an desarted?”

“Ask Mrs. Forster to go in and coax her to stop.”

“Mrs. Forsther’s at dhuddher ind o the town. Whisht! There she is, callin me. Youll have to gup to her, maam. Faith I wont go next or near her.”

“There’s no use in my going up, Eliza. What can I do?”

Eliza had nothing to suggest. “I’m sure, maam,” she pleaded, “if she wont mind you, she wont mind me — bad manners to her!”

Mrs. Myers hesitated. The lodger became noisier.

“I spose Ive got to go,” said Mrs. Myers, plaintively. She went upstairs and found Susanna lying on the sofa, groaning, with a dressing-gown and a pair of thick boots on.

“What is the matter with you, Miss Susan? Youre goin on fit to raise the street.”

“For God’s sake go and get something for me. Make the doctor do something. I’m famishing. I must be poisoned.”

“Lord forbid!”

“Look at me. I cant eat anything. Oh! I cant even drink. I tell you I am dying of thirst.”

“Well, Miss Susan, thers plenty for you to eat and drink.”

“What is the good of that, when I can neither eat nor drink? Nothing will stay inside me. If I could only swallow brandy, I shouldnt care. I thought I could die drunk. Oh! Send Eliza out for some laudanum. I cant stand this: I’ll kill myself.”

“Be quiet, Miss Susan: youll be better presently. Whats the use of talking-about the doctor? He says youll not be able to drink for days, and that you will get your health back in consequence. You are doing yourself no good by screeching like that, and you are ruining me and my house.”

“Your house is all you care about. Curse you! I hope you may die deserted yourself. Dont go away. Dear Aunt Sally, you wont leave me here alone, will you? If you do, I’ll scream like a hundred devils.”

“I dont know what to do with you,” said Mrs. Myers, crying. “Youll drive me as mad as yourself. Why did I ever let you into this house?”

“Oh, bother! Are you beginning to howl now? Have you any sardines, or anything spicy? I think I could eat some salted duck. No, I couldnt, though. Go for the doctor. There must be something that will do me good. What use is he if he can’t set me right? All I want is something that will make me able to drink a tumbler of brandy.”

“The Lord help you! Praise goodness! here’s Mrs. Forster coming up. Whatll she think of you if you keep moaning like that? Mrs. Forster: will you step in here and try to quiet her a bit? She’s clean mad.”

“Come here,” cried Susanna, as Marian entered. “Come and sit beside me.
You may get out, you old cat: I dont want you any longer.”

“Hush, pray,” said Marian, putting her bonnet aside and sitting down by the sofa. “What is the matter?”

“The same as last night, only a great deal worse,” said Susanna, shutting her eyes and turning her head aside. “It’s all up with me this time, Mrs. Ned. I’m dying, not of drink, but of the want of it. Is that fiend of a woman gone?”

“Yes. You ought not to wound her as you did just now. She has been very kind to you.”

“I dont care. Oh, dear me, I wonder how long this is going to last?”

“Shall I go for the doctor?”

“No; what can he do? Stay with me. I wish I could sleep or eat.”

“You will be better soon. The doctor says that Nature is making an effort to rescue you from your habit by making it impossible for you to drink. Try and be patient. Will you not take off those heavy boots?”

“No, I cant feel my feet without them. I shall never be better,” said Susanna, writhing impatiently. “I’m done for. How old are you? You neednt mind telling me. I shall soon be beyond repeating it.”

“I was twenty-five in June last”

“I am only twenty-nine. I started at eighteen, and got to the top of the tree in seven years. I came down quicker than I went up. I might have gone on easily for fifteen years more, only for drinking champagne. I wish I had my life to live over again: you wouldnt catch me playing burlesque. If I had got the chance, I know I could have played tragedy or real Italian opera. I had to work hard at first; and they wont fill my place, very readily: thats one comfort. My cleverness was my ruin. Ned was not half so quick. It used to take him months to learn things that I picked up offhand, and yet you see how much better he has done than I.”

“Do not disturb yourself with vain regrets. Think of something else.
Shall we talk about Marmaduke?”

“No, I dont particularly care to. Somehow, at my pass, one thinks most about one’s self, and about things that happened long ago. People that I came to know later on, like Bob, seem to be slipping away from me. There was a baritone in my father’s company, a tremendous man, with shining black eyes, and a voice like a great bell — quite pretty at the top, though: he must have been sixty at least; and he was very fat; but he was the most dignified man I ever saw. You should have heard him do the Duke in Lucrezia Borgia, or sing Pro Peccatis from Rossini’s Stabat Mater! I was ten years old when he was with us, and my grand ambition was to sing with him when I grew up. He would shake his head if he saw Susanetta now. I would rather hear him sing three bars than have ten visits from Bob. Oh, dear! I thought this cursed pain was getting numbed, but it is worse than ever.”

“Try to keep from thinking of it. I have often wondered that you never speak of your child. I have heard from my friend in London that it is very well and happy.”

“Oh, you mean Lucy. She was a lively little imp.”

“Would you not like to see her again?”

“No, thank you. She is well taken care of, I suppose. I am glad she is out of my hands. She was a nuisance to me, and I am not a very edifying example for her. What on earth should I want to see her for?”

“I wish I had the good fortune to be a mother.”

Susanna laughed. “Never say die, Mrs. Ned. You dont know what may happen to you yet. There now! I know, without opening my eyes, that you are shocked, bless your delicacy! How do you think I should have got through life if I’d been thin-skinned? What good does it do you? You are pining away in this hole of a lodging. You squirm when Mrs. Myers tries to be friendly with you; and I sometimes laugh at your expression when Eliza treats you to a little blarney about your looks. Now I would just as soon gossip and swear at her as go to tea with the Queen.”

“I am not shocked at all. You see as badly as other people when your eyes are shut.”

“They will soon shut up forever. I half wish they would do it at once, I wonder whether I will get any ease before there is an end of me.”

“Perhaps the end of you on earth will be a good beginning for you somewhere else, Susanna.”

“Thank you. Now the conversation has taken a nice, cheerful turn, hasnt it? Well, I cant be much worse off than I am at present. Anyhow, I must take my chance.”

“Would you like to see a clergyman? I dont want to alarm you: I am sure you will get better: the doctor told me so; but I will go for one if you like.”

“No: I dont want to be bothered — at least not yet. Besides, I hate clergymen, all except your brother, the doctor, who fell in love with me.”

“Very well. I only suggested it in case you should feel uneasy.”

“I dont feel quite easy; but I dont care sufficiently about it to make a fuss. It will be time enough when I am actually at death’s door. All I know is that if there is a place of punishment in the next world, it is very unfair, considering what we suffer in this. I didnt make myself or my circumstances. I think I will try to sleep. I am half dead as it is with pain and weariness. Dont go until I am asleep.”

“I will not. Let me get you another pillow.”

“No,” said Susanna, drowsily: “dont touch me.”

Marian sat listening to her moaning respiration for nearly half an hour. Then, having some letters to write, she went to her own room to fetch her desk. Whilst she was looking for her pen, which was mislaid, she heard Susanna stirring. The floor creaked, and there was a clink as of a bottle. A moment later, Marian, listening with awakened suspicion, was startled by the sound of a heavy fall mingled with a crash of breaking glass. She ran back into the next room just in time to see Susanna, on her hands and knees near the stove, lift her white face for a moment, displaying a bleeding wound on her temple, and then stumble forward and fall prone on the carpet. Marian saw this; saw the walls of the room revolve before her; and fainted upon the sofa, which she had reached without knowing how.

When she recovered the doctor was standing by her; and Eliza was picking up fragments of the broken bottle. The smell of the spilled brandy reminded her of what had happened.

“Where is Miss Conolly?” she said, trying to collect her wits. “I am afraid I fainted at the very moment when I was most wanted.”

“All right,” said the doctor. “Keep quiet; youll be well presently. Dont be in a hurry to talk.”

Marian obeyed; and the doctor, whose manner was kind, though different to that of the London physicians to whom she was accustomed, presently left the room and went upstairs. Eliza was howling like an animal. The sound irritated Marian even at that pass: she despised the whole Irish race on its account. She could hardly keep her temper as she said:

“Is Miss Conolly seriously hurt?”

“Oa, blessed hour! she’s kilt. Her head’s dhreepin wid blood.”

Marian shuddered and felt faint again.

“Lord Almighty save use, I doa knoa how she done it at all, at all. She must ha fell agin the stoave. It’s the dhrink, dhrink, dhrink, that brought her to it. It’s little I knew what that wairy bottle o brandy would do to her, or sorra bit o me would ha got it.”

“You did very wrong in getting it, Eliza.”

“What could I do, miss, when she axed me?”

“There is no use in crying over it now. It would have been kinder to have kept it from her.”

“Sure I know. Many’s the time I tould her so. But she could talk the birds off the bushes, and it wint to me heart to refuse her. God send her well out of her throuble!”

Here the doctor returned. “How are you now?” he said.

“I think I am better. Pray dont think of me. How is she?”

“It’s all over. Hallo! Come, Miss Biddy! you go and cry in the kitchen,” he added, pushing Eliza, who had set up an intolerable lamentation, out of the room.

“How awful!” said Marian, stunned. “Are you quite sure? She seemed better this morning.”

“Quite sure,” said the doctor, smiling grimly at the question. “She was practically dead when they carried her upstairs, poor girl. It’s easier to kill a person than you think, Mrs. Forster, although she tried so long and so hard without succeeding. But she’d have done it. She’d have been starved into health only to drink herself back into starvation, and the end would have been a very bad one. Better as it is, by far!”

“Doctor: I must go out and telegraph the news to London. I know one of her relatives there.”

The doctor shook his head. “I will telegraph if you like, but you must stay here. Youre not yet fit to go out.”

“I am afraid I have not been well lately,” said Marian. “I want to consult you about myself — not now, of course, after what has happened, but some day when you have leisure to call.”

“You can put off consulting me just as long as you please; but this accident is no reason why you shouldnt do it at once. If there is anything wrong, the sooner you have advice — you neednt have it from me if you prefer some other doctor — the better.”

Upon this encouragement Marian described to him her state of health. He seemed a little amused, asked her a few questions, and finally told her coolly that she might expect to become a mother next fall. She was so utterly dismayed that he began to look stern in anticipation of an appeal to him to avert this; an appeal which he had often had to refuse without ever having succeeded in persuading a woman that it was futile, or convincing her that it was immoral. But Marian spared him this: she was overwhelmed by the new certainty that a reconciliation with her husband was no longer possible. Her despair at the discovery shewed her for the first time how homesick she really was.

When the doctor left, Mrs. Myers came. She exclaimed; wept; and gossiped until two police officers arrived. Marian related to them what she had seen of the accident, and became indignant at the apparent incredulity with which they questioned her and examined the room. After their departure Eliza came to her, and invited her to go upstairs and see the body of Susanna. She refused with a shudder; but when she saw that the girl was hurt as well as astonished, it occurred to her that avoidance of the dead might, if it came to Conolly’s knowledge, be taken by him to indicate a lack of kind feeling toward his sister. So she overcame her repugnance, and went with Eliza. The window-shades were drawn down, and the dressing-table had been covered with a white cloth, on which stood a plaster statuet of the Virgin and Child, with two lighted candles before it. To please Eliza, who had evidently made these arrangements, Marian whispered a few words of approval, and turned curiously to the bed. The sight made her uncomfortable. The body was decently laid out, its wounded forehead covered with a bandage, and Eliza’s rosary and crucifix on its breast; but it did not, as Marian had hoped, suggest peace or sleep. It was not Susanna, but a vacant thing that had always underlain her, and which, apart from her, was ghastly.

“She died a good Catholic anyhow: the light o Heaven to her sowl!” said Eliza, whimpering, but speaking as though she expected and defied Marian to contradict her.

“Amen,” said Marian.

“It’s sure and sartin. There never was a Conolly a Prodestan yet.”

Marian left the room, resolving to avoid such sights in future. Mrs. Myers was below, anxious to resume the conversation which the visit of the police had interrupted. Marian could not bear this. To escape, she left the house, and went to her only friend in New York, Mrs. Crawford, whose frequent visits she had never before ventured to return. To her she narrated the events of the day.

“This business of the poor girl killing herself is real shocking,” said Mrs. Crawford. “Perhaps your husband will come over here now, and give you a chance of making up with him.”

“If he does, I must leave New York, Mrs. Crawford.”

“What are you frightened of? If he is as good a man as you say, you ought to be glad to see him. I’m sure he would have you back. Depend on it, he has been longing for you all this time; and when he sees you again as pretty as ever, he will open his arms to you. He wont like you any the worse for being a little bashful with him after such an escapade.”

“I would not meet him for any earthly consideration. After what the doctor told me to-day, I should throw myself out of the window, I think, if I heard him coming upstairs. I should like to see him, if I were placed where he could not see me; but face him I could not.”

“Well, my dear, I think it’s right silly of you, though the little stranger — it will be a regular stranger — is a difficulty: there’s no two ways about that.”

“Besides, I have been thinking over things alone in my room; and I see
that it is better for him to be free. I know he was disappointed in me.
He is not the sort of man to be tied down to such an ignorant woman as
I.”

“What does he expect from a woman? If youre not good enough for him, he must be very hard to please.”

Marian shook her head. “He is capable of pitying and being considerate with me,” she said: “I know that. But I am not sure that it is a good thing to be pitied and forborne with. There is something humiliating in it. I suppose I am proud, as you often tell me; but I should like to be amongst women what he is amongst men, supported by my own strength. Even within the last three weeks I have felt myself becoming more independent in my isolation. I was afraid to go about the streets by myself at first. Now I am getting quite brave. That unfortunate woman did me good. Taking care of her, and being relied on so much by her, has made me rely on myself more. Thanks to you, I have not much loneliness to complain of. And yet I have been utterly cast down sometimes. I cannot tell what is best. Sometimes I think that independence is worth all the solitary struggling it costs. Then again I remember how free from real care I was at home, and yearn to be back there. It is so hard to know what one ought to do.”

“You have been more lively since you got such a pleasant answer to your telegram. I wish the General would offer to let me keep my own money and as much more as I wanted. Not that he is close-fisted, poor man! That reminds me to tell you that you must stay the evening. He wants to see you as bad as can be — never stops asking me to bring you up some time when he’s at home. You mustnt excuse yourself: the General will see you safe back to your place.”

“But if visitors come, Mrs. Crawford?”

“Nobody will come. If they do, they will be glad to see you. What do they know about you? You cant live like a hermit all your life.”

Marian, sooner than go back to Mrs. Myers’s, stayed; and the evening passed pleasantly enough, although three visitors came: a gentleman, with his wife and brother. The lady, besides eating, and replying to the remarks with which Mrs. Crawford occasionally endeavored to entertain her, did nothing but admire Marian’s dress and listen to her conversation. Her husband was polite; but Marian, comparing him with the English gentlemen of her acquaintance, thought him rather oppressively respectful, and too much given to conversing in little speeches. He had been in London; and he described, in a correct narrative style, his impressions of St. Paul’s, the Tower, and Westminster Palace. His brother fell in love with Mrs. Forster at first sight, and sat silent until she remarked to him how strangely the hotel omnibuses resembled old English stage coaches, when he became recklessly talkative and soon convinced her that American society produced quite as choice a compound of off-handedness and folly as London could. But all this was amusing after her long seclusion; and once or twice, when the thought of dead Susanna came back to her, she was ashamed to be so gay.

No one was stirring at Mrs. Myers’s when she returned. They had left her lamp in the entry; and she took it upstairs with her, going softly lest she should disturb the household. Susanna’s usual call and petition for a few minutes talk was no longer to be feared, for Susanna was now only a memory. Marian tried not to think of the body in the room above. Though she was free from the dread which was just then making Eliza tremble, cry, and cross herself to sleep, she disliked the body all the more as she distinguished it from the no-longer existent woman: a feat quite beyond the Irish peasant girl. She sat down and began to think. The Crawfords and their friends had been very nice to her: no doubt the lady would not have been civil had she known all; but, then, the lady was a silly person. They were not exactly what Marian considered the best sort of people; but New York was not London. She would not stay at Mrs. Myers’s: her income would enable her to lodge more luxuriously. If she could afford to furnish some rooms for herself, she would get some curtains she had seen one day lately when shopping with Mrs. Crawford. They would go well with ——

A noise in the room overhead: Susanna’s death chamber. Marian gave a great start, and understood what Eliza meant by having “the life put across in her.” She listened, painfully conscious of the beats of her heart. The noise came again: a footstep, or a chair pushed back, or — she was not certain what. Could Mrs. Myers be watching at the bedside? It was not unlikely. Could Susanna be recovering — finding herself laid out for dead, and making a struggle for life up there alone? That would be inconvenient, undesirable: even Marian forgot just then to consider that obvious view wrong and unfeeling; but, anyhow, she must go and see, and, if necessary, help. She wished there were some one to keep her company; but was ashamed to call Eliza; and she felt that she would be as well by herself as with Mrs. Myers. There was nothing for it but to take a candle and go alone. No repetition of the noise occurred to daunt her afresh; and she reached the landing above almost reassured, and thinking how odd it was that the idea of finding somebody — Susanna — there, though it had come as a fear, was fading out as a disappointed hope.

Finding herself loth to open the door, she at last set her teeth and did it swiftly, as if to surprise someone within. She did surprise some one: her husband, sitting by his sister’s body. He started violently on seeing her, and rose; whilst she, mechanically shutting the door without turning, leaned back against it with her hand behind her, and looked at him open-mouthed.

“Marian,” he said, in a quite unexpectedly apprehensive tone, putting up his hand deprecatingly: “remember, here” — indicating the figure on the bed— “is an end of hypocrisy! No unrealities now: I cannot bear them. Let us have no trash of magnanimous injured husband, erring but repentant wife. We are man and woman, nothing less and nothing more. After our marriage you declined intercourse on those terms; and I accepted your conventions to please you. Now I refuse all conventions: you have broken them yourself. If you will not have the truth between us, avoid me until I have subsided into the old groove again. There!” he added, wincing, “dont blush. What have you to blush for? It was the only honest thing you ever did.”

“I dont understand.”

“No,” he said gently, but with a gesture of despair; “how could you? You never did, and you never will.”

“If you mean to accuse me of having deceived you,” said Marian, greatly relieved and encouraged by a sense of being now the injured party, “you are most unjust. I dont excuse myself for behaving wickedly, but I never deceived you or told you a falsehood. Never. When he first spoke wrongly to me, I told you at once; and you did not care.”

“Not a straw. It was nothing to me that he loved you: the point was, did you love him? If not, then all was well: if so, our marriage was already at an end. But you mistake my drift. Falsehood is something more than fibbing. You never told fibs — except the two or three dozen a week that mere politeness required and which you never thought of counting; but you never told me the truth, Marian, because you never told your self the truth. You told me what you told yourself, I grant you; and so you were not conscious of deceit. I dont reproach you. Surely you can bear to be told what every honest man tells himself almost daily.”

“I suppose I have deserved it,” said Marian; “but unkind words from you are a new experience. You are very unlike yourself to-night.”

He repressed, with visible effort, an explosion of impatience. “On the contrary, I am like myself — I actually am myself to-night, I hope.” Then the explosion came. “Is it utterly impossible for you to say something real to me? Only learn to do that, and you may have ten love romances every year with other men, if you like. Be anything rather than a ladylike slave and liar. There! as usual, the truth makes you shrink from me. As I said before, I refuse further intercourse on such terms. They have proved unkind in the long run.”

“You spoke plainly enough to her,” said Marian, glancing at the bed, “but in the long run it did her no good.”

“She would have laughed me to scorn if I had minced matters, for she never deceived herself. Society, by the power of the purse, set her to nautch-girl’s work, and forbade her the higher work that was equally within her power. Being enslaved and debauched in this fashion, how could she be happy except when she was not sober? It was her own immediate interest to drink; it was her tradesman’s interest that she should drink; it was her servants’ interest that she should be pleased with them for getting drink for her. She was clever, good-natured, more constant to her home and her man than you, a living fountain of innocent pleasure as a dancer, singer, and actress; and here she lies, after mischievously spending her talent in a series of entertainments too dull for hell and too debased for any better place, dead of a preventable disease, chiefly because most of the people she came in contact with had a direct pecuniary interest in depraving and poisoning her. Aye, look at her! with the cross on her breast, the virgin mother in plaster looking on from where she kept her mirror when she was alive, and the people outside complacently saying ‘Serve her right!’”

Marian feared for a moment that he would demolish Eliza’s altar by hurling the chair through it. “Dont, Ned,” she said, timidly, putting her hand on his arm.

“Dont what?” he said, taken aback. She drew her hand away and retreated a step, coloring at the wifely liberty she had permitted herself to take. “I beg your pardon. I thought — I thought you were going to take the cross away. No,” she added quickly, seeing him about to speak, and anticipating a burst of scepticism: “it is not that; but the servant is an Irish girl — a Roman Catholic. She put it there; and she meant well, and will be hurt if it is thrown aside.”

“And you think it better that she should remain in ignorance of what educated people think about her superstition than that she should suffer the mortification of learning that her opinions are not those of all the world! However, I had no such intention. Eliza’s idol is a respectable one as idols go.”

There was a pause. Then Marian said: “It must have been a great shock to you when you came and found what had happened. I am very sorry. But had we not better go downrs? It seems so unfeeling, somehow, to talk without minding her. I suppose you consider that foolish; but I think you are upset by it yourself.”

“You see a change in me, then?”

“You are not quite yourself, I think.”

“I tell you again that I am myself at last. You do not seem to like the real man any better than the unreal: I am afraid you will not have me on any terms. Well, let us go downstairs, since you prefer it.”

“Oh, not unless you wish it too,” said Marian, a little bewildered.

He took her candle and led the way out without another word or a look at the bed. Marian, as he stood aside to let her go downstairs before him, was suddenly seized with a fantastic fear that he was going to kill her. She did not condescend to hurry or look back; but she only felt safe when they were in her room, and he no longer behind her.

“Sit down,” he said, placing the candle on the mantelpiece. She sat down at the table, and he stood on the hearthrug. “Now,” said he, “about the future. Are you coming back? Will you give the life at Holland Park another trial?”

“I cannot,” she said, bending her head almost on her hands. “I should disgrace you. And there is another reason.”

“It is not in your power, nor in that of all London, to disgrace me if I do not feel disgraced. It is useless to say that you cannot. If you say ‘I will not,’ then that will settle it. What is the other reason?”

“It is not yet born. But it will be.”

“That is no reason to me. Do you think I shall be a worse father to it than he would have been?”

“No, indeed. But it would be unfair to you.” He made an impatient gesture. “I dont understand you, Ned. Would you not rather be free?”

“Freedom is a fool’s dream. I am free. I can divorce you if I please: if I live with you again it will be by my own choice. You are free too: you have burnt your boats, and are rid of fashionable society, of your family, your position, your principles, and all the rest of your chains forever. You are declassed by your own act; and if you can frankly give a sigh of relief and respect yourself for breaking loose from what is called your duty, then you are the very woman I want for a wife. I may not be the very man you want for a husband; but at all events you are free to choose, free to change after you choose if you choose me, free anyhow; for I will divorce you if you refuse; and then you will be — independent — your own mistress — absolute proprietor of your own child — everything that married women and girls envy. You have a foretaste of that freedom now. What is it worth? One or two conditions more or less to comply with, that is all: nature and society still have you hard and fast; the main rules of the game are inviolable.”

“I think it is a good thing to be free,” said Marian, timidly.

“That means ‘I will not.’”

“Not ‘will not’; but I think I had better not.”

“A characteristic distinction, Marian. I once thought, like you, that freedom was the one condition to be gained at all cost and hazard. My favorite psalm was that nonsense of John Hay’s:

’For always in thine eyes, O Liberty,
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.’

And she does slay us. Now I am for the fullest attainable life. That involves the least endurable liberty. You dont see that yet. Very well: you have liberty — liberty to hurt as well as help yourself; and you are right to try whether it will not make you happier than wedlock has done.”

“It was not your fault; and it is very good of you to offer to take me back, I know. Will my refusing disappoint you at all, Ned?”

“I am prepared for it. You may refuse or accept: I foresee how I shall adapt myself to either set of circumstances.”

“Yes, I forgot. You foresee everything,” said Marian, with some bitterness.

“No: I only face what I see. That is why you do not like living with me. Good-bye. Do not look troubled: we shall meet again to-morrow and often afterward, I hope; but to-night makes an end of the irrational knot.”

“Good-night,” said Marian rather forlornly, after a pause, proffering her hand.

“One folly more,” he said, taking her in his arms and kissing her. She made no resistance. “If such a moment could be eternal, we should never say good-bye,” he added. “As it is, we are wise not to tempt Fortune by asking her for such another.”

“You are too wise, Ned,” she said, suffering him to replace her gently in the chair.

“It is impossible to be too wise, dearest,” he said, and unhesitatingly turned and left her.

LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS

Love Among the Artists was first published in the USA in 1900, but did not receive a release in Britain until 1914. Shaw wrote the novel in 1881, but failed to find any success with the work during that period. Once again, in the preface to the novel the author reminds the reader that he is no longer the same man or artist that wrote the novel twenty years earlier. Shaw also stipulated that Love Among the Artists was written as a ‘novel with a purpose’ though he is now unable to properly articulate exactly the intended purpose. However, he does state that he has a vague recollection of attempting to ‘illustrate the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting...’ The author also makes clear that while he has tried to polish the work for publication, he is unable to substantially improve it, because he has ceased writing novels and does not possess the necessary skill to create a book of great artistic worth.

Shaw seeks to show the difference between the ‘true’ artist and those who have a manufactured enthusiasm for the medium through the characters of Adrian Herbert and Owen Jack. The former is a likable painter, though far from a true artist; he is a man that approaches his craft at a distance without any authentic expression. In contrast, Jack is a musical genius and real artist that possesses none of the required or expected social graces; he resolutely defies the imposed rules of society, which he views as designed to oppress and tyrannise. Shaw also explores the idea of what marriage means to an artist, how society thwarts and demonises those with talent and the need for true artists to remain pure, untainted and independent.

The first edition

CONTENTS

The Author to the Reader

Book I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Book II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

The Author to the Reader

Dear Sir or Madam:

Will you allow me a word of personal explanation now that I am, for the second time, offering you a novel which is not the outcome of my maturer experience and better sense? If you have read my Irrational Knot to the bitter end, you will not accuse me of mock modesty when I admit that it was very long; that it did not introduce you to a single person you could conceivably have been glad to know; and that your knowledge of the world must have forewarned you that no satisfactory ending was possible. You may, it is true, think that a story teller should not let a question of mere possibility stand between his audience and the satisfaction of a happy ending. Yet somehow my conscience stuck at it; for I am not a professional liar: I am even ashamed of the extent to which in my human infirmity I have been an amateur one. No: my stories were meant to be true ex hypothesi: the persons were fictitious; but had they been real, they must (or so I thought at the time) have acted as I said. For, if you can believe such a prodigy, I was but an infant of twenty-four when, being at that time, one of the unemployed, I sat down to mend my straitened fortunes by writing The Irrational Knot. I had done the same thing once before; and next year, still unemployed, I did it again. That third attempt of mine is about to see the light in this volume. And now a few words of warning to you before you begin it.

(1)Though the wisdom of the book is the fruit of a quarter century’s experience, yet the earlier years of that period were much preoccupied with questions of bodily growth and nutrition; so that it may be as well to bear in mind that even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes. (2)Love among the Artists is what is called a novel with a purpose; I will not undertake to say at this distant me what the main purpose was; but I remember that I had a notion of illustrating the difference between that enthusiasm for the fine arts which people gather from reading about them, and the genuine artistic faculty which cannot help creating, interpreting, and unaffectedly enjoying music and pictures. (3)This book has no winding-up at the end. Mind: it is not, as in The Irrational Knot, a case of the upshot being unsatisfactory! There is absolutely no upshot at all. The parties are married in the middle of the book; and they do not elope with or divorce one another, or do anything unusual or improper. When as much is told concerning them as seemed to me at the time germane to my purpose, the novel breaks off. But, if you prefer something more conclusive, pray do not scruple to add a final chapter of your own invention. (4)If you find yourself displeased with my story, remember that it is not I, but the generous and appreciative publisher of the book, who puts it forward as worth reading. I shall polish it up for you the best way I can, and here and there remove some absurdity out of which I have grown since I wrote it, but I cannot substantially improve it, much less make it what a novel ought to be; for I have given up novel writing these many years, during which I have lost the impudence of the apprentice without gaining the skill of the master.

There is an end to all things, even to stocks of unpublished manuscript. It may be a relief to you to know that when this “Love among the Artists” shall have run its course, you need apprehend no more furbished-up early attempts at fiction from me. I have written but five novels in my life; and of these there will remain then unpublished only the first — a very remarkable work, I assure you, but hardly one which I should be well advised in letting loose whilst my livelihood depends on my credit as a literary workman.

I can recall a certain difficulty, experienced even whilst I was writing the book, in remembering what it was about. Twice I clean forgot the beginning, and had to read back, as I might have read any other man’s novel, to learn the story. If I could not remember then, how can I presume on my knowledge of the book now so far as to make promises about it? But I suspect you will find yourself in less sordid company than that into which The Irrational Knot plunged you. And I can guarantee you against any plot. You will be candidly dealt with. None of the characters will turn out to be somebody else in the last chapter: no violent accidents or strokes of pure luck will divert events from their normal course: no forger, long lost heir, detective, nor any commonplace of the police court or of the realm of romance shall insult your understanding, or tempt you to read on when you might better be in bed or attending to your business. By this time you should be eager to be at the story. Meanwhile I must not forget that it is only by your exceptional indulgence that I have been suffered to detain you so long about a personal matter; and so I thank you and proceed to business.

29, Fitzroy Square, London, W.

Book I

Chapter I

One fine afternoon during the Easter holidays, Kensington Gardens were in their freshest spring green, and the steps of the Albert Memorial dotted with country visitors, who alternately conned their guidebooks and stared up at the golden gentleman under the shrine, trying to reconcile the reality with the description, whilst their Cockney friends, indifferent to shrine and statue, gazed idly at the fashionable drive below. One group in particular was composed of an old gentleman intent upon the Memorial, a young lady intent upon her guide-book, and a young gentleman intent upon the young lady. She looked a woman of force and intelligence; and her boldly curved nose and chin, elastic step, upright carriage, resolute bearing, and thick black hair, secured at the base of the neck by a broad crimson ribbon, made those whom her appearance pleased think her strikingly handsome. The rest thought her strikingly ugly; but she would perhaps have forgiven them for the sake of the implied admission that she was at least not commonplace ; for her costume, consisting of an ample black cloak lined with white fur, and a broad hat with red feather and underbrim of sea green silk, was of the sort affected by women who strenuously cultivate themselves, and insist upon their individuality. She was not at all like her father, the grey-haired gentleman who, scanning the Memorial with eager watery eyes, was uttering occasional ejaculations of wonder at the sum it must have cost. The younger man, who might have been thirty or thereabout, was slight and of moderate stature. His fine hair, of a pale golden color, already turning to a silvery brown, curled delicately over his temples, where it was beginning to wear away. A short beard set off his features, which were those of a man of exceptional sensitiveness and refinement. He was the Londoner of the party; and he waited with devoted patience whilst his companions satisfied their curiosity. It was pleasant to watch them, for he was not gloating over her, nor she too conscious that she was making the sunshine brighter for him; and yet they were quite evidently young lovers, and as happy as people at their age know how to be.

At last the old gentleman’s appetite for the Memorial yielded to the fatigue of standing on the stone steps and looking upwards. He proposed that they should find a seat and examine the edifice from a little distance.

“I think I see a bench down there with only one person on it, Mary,” he said, as they descended the steps at the west side. “Can you see whether he is respectable?”

The young lady, who was shortsighted, placed a pair of glasses on her salient nose, lifted her chin, and deliberately examined the person on the bench. He was a short, thick-chested young man, in an old creased frock coat, with a worn-out hat and no linen visible. His skin, pitted by smallpox, seemed grained with black, as though he had been lately in a coal mine, and had not yet succeeded in toweling the coal-dust from his pores. He sat with his arms folded, staring at the ground before him. One hand was concealed under his arm: the other displayed itself, thick in the palm, with short fingers, and nails bitten to the quick. He was clean shaven, and had a rugged, resolute mouth, a short nose, marked nostrils, dark eyes, and black hair, which curled over his low, broad forehead.

“He is certainly not a handsome man,” said the lady; “but he will do us no harm, I suppose?”

“Of course not,” said the younger gentleman seriously. “But I can get some chairs, if you prefer them.”

“Nonsense! I was only joking.” As she spoke, the man on the bench looked up at her; and the moment she saw his eyes, she began to stand in some awe of him. His vague stare changed to a keen scrutiny, which she returned hardily. Then he looked for a moment at her dress; glanced at her companions; and relapsed into his former attitude.

The bench accommodated four persons easily. The old gentleman sat at the unoccupied end, next his daughter. Their friend placed himself between her and the man, at whom she presently stole another look. His attention was again aroused: this time he was looking at a child who was eating an apple near him. His expression gave the lady an uncomfortable sensation. The child, too, caught sight of him, and stopped eating to regard him mistrustfully. He smiled with grim good humor, and turned his eyes to the gravel once more.

“It is certainly a magnificent piece of work, Herbert,” said the old gentleman. “To you, as an artist, it must be a treat indeed. I don’t know enough about art to appreciate it properly. Bless us! And are all those knobs made of precious stones?”

“More or less precious: yes, I believe so, Mr. Sutherland,” said Herbert, smiling.

“I must come and look at it again,” said Mr. Sutherland, turning from the memorial, and putting his spectacles on the bench beside him. “It is quite a study. I wish I had this business of Charlie’s off my mind.”

“You will find a tutor for him without any difficulty,” said Herbert. “There are hundreds to choose from in London.”

“Yes; but if there were a thousand, Charlie would find a new objection to every one of them. You see the difficulty is the music.”

Herbert, incommoded by a sudden movement of the strange man, got a little nearer to Mary, and replied, “I do not think the music ought to present much difficulty. Many young men qualifying for holy orders are very glad to obtain private tutorships; and nowadays a clergyman is expected to have some knowledge of music.”

“Yes.” said the lady; “but what is the use of that when Charlie expressly objects to clergymen? I sympathize with him there, for once. Divinity students are too narrow and dogmatic to be comfortable to live with.”

“There!” exclaimed Mr. Sutherland, suddenly indignant: “you are beginning to make objections. Do you expect to get an angel from heaven to teach Charlie?”

“No, papa; but I doubt if anything less will satisfy him.”

“I will speak to some of my friends about it,” said Herbert. “There is no hurry for a week or two, I suppose?”

“Oh, no, none whatever,” said Mr. Sutherland, ostentatiously serene after his outbreak: “there is no hurry certainly. But Charlie must not be allowed to contract habits of idleness; and if the matter cannot be settled to his liking, I shall exert my authority, and select a tutor myself. I cannot understand his objection to the man we saw at Archdeacon Downes’s. Can you, Mary?”

“I can understand that Charlie is too lazy to work,” said Mary. Then, as if tired of the subject, she turned to Herbert, and said, “You have not yet told us when we may come to your studio and see The Lady of Shalott. I am very anxious to see it. I shall not mind its being unfinished.”

“But I shall,” said Herbert, suddenly becoming self-conscious and nervous. “I fear the picture will disappoint you in any case; but at least I wish it to be as good as I can make it, before you see it. I must ask you to wait until Thursday.”

“Certainly, if you like,” said Mary earnestly. She was about to add something, when Mr. Sutherland, who had become somewhat restive when the conversation turned upon pictures, declared that he had sat long enough. So they rose to go; and Mary turned to get a last glimpse of the man. He was looking at them with a troubled expression; and his lips were white. She thought he was about to speak, and involuntarily retreated a step. But he said nothing: only she was struck, as he composed himself in his old attitude, by his extreme dejection.

“Did you notice that man sitting next you?” she whispered to Herbert, when they had gone a little distance.

“Not particularly.”

Do you think he is very poor?”

“He certainly does not appear to be very rich,” said Herbert, looking back.

“I saw a very odd look in his eyes. I hope he is not hungry.”

They stopped. Then Herbert walked slowly on. “I should think not so bad as that,” he said. “I don’t think his appearance would justify me in offering him—”

“Oh, dear, dear me!” said Mr Sutherland. “I am very stupid.”

“What is the matter now, papa?”

“I have lost my glasses. I must have left them on that seat. Just wait one moment whilst I go back for them. No, no, Herbert: I will go back myself. I recollect exactly where I laid them down. I shall be back in a moment.”

“Papa always takes the most exact notes of the places in which he puts things; and he always leaves them behind him after all,” said Mary. “There is that man in precisely the same position as when we first saw him.”

“No. He is saying something to your father, begging, I am afraid, or he would not stand up and lift his hat”

“How dreadful!”

Herbert laughed. “If, as you suspected, he is hungry, there is nothing very dreadful in it, poor fellow. It is natural enough.”

“I did not mean that. I meant that it was dreadful to think of his being forced to beg. Papa has not given him anything — I wish he would. He evidently wants to get rid of him, and, of course, does not know how to do it. Let us go back.”

“If you wish,” said Herbert, reluctantly. “But I warn you that London is full of begging impostors.”

Meanwhile Mr Sutherland, finding his spectacles where he had left them, took them up; wiped them with his handkerchief; and was turning away, when he found himself confronted by the strange man, who had risen.

“Sir,” said the man, raising his shabby hat, and speaking in a subdued voice of remarkable power: “I have been a tutor; and I am a musician. I can convince you that I am an honest and respectable man. I am in need of employment. Something I overheard just now leads me to hope that you can assist me. I will—” Here the man, though apparently self-possessed, stopped as if his breath had failed him.

Mr. Sutherland’s first impulse was to tell the stranger stiffly that he had no occasion for his services. But as there were no bystanders, and the man’s gaze was impressive, he became nervous, and said hastily, “Oh, thank you: I have not decided what I shall do as yet.” And he attempted to pass on.

The man immediately stepped aside, saying, “If you will favor me with your address, sir, I can send you testimonials which will prove that I have a right to seek such a place as you describe. If they do not satisfy you, I shall trouble you no further. Or if you will be so good as to accept my card, you can consider at your leisure whether to communicate with me or not.”

“Certainly, I will take your card,” said Mr. Sutherland, flurried and conciliatory. “Thank you. I can write to you, you, know, if I—”

“I am much obliged to you.” Here he produced an ordinary visiting card, with the name “Mr. Owen Jack” engraved, and an address at Church Street, Kensington, written in a crabbed but distinct hand in the corner. Whilst Mr. Sutherland was pretending to read it, his daughter came up, purse in hand, hurrying before Herbert, whose charity she wished to forestall. Mr. Owen Jack looked at her; and she hid her purse quickly. “I am sorry to have delayed you, sir,” he said. “Good morning.” He raised his hat again, and walked away.

“Good morning, sir,” said Mr Sutherland. “Lord bless me! that’s a cool fellow,” he added, recovering himself, and beginning to feel ashamed of having been so courteous to a poorly dressed stranger.

“What did he want, papa?”

“Indeed, my dear, he has shown me that we cannot be too careful of how we talk before strangers in London. By the purest accident — ,the merest chance, I happened, whilst we were sitting here five minutes ago, to mention that we wanted a tutor for Charlie. This man was listening to us; and now he has offered himself for the place. Just fancy the quickness of that. Here is his card.”

“Owen Jack!” said Mary. “What a name!”

“Did he overhear anything about the musical difficulty?” said Herbert. “Nature does not seem to have formed Mr Jack for the pursuit of a fine art.”

“Yes: he caught up even that. According to his own account, he understands music — , in fact he can do everything.”

Mary looked thoughtful. “After all,” she said slowly, “he might suit us. He is certainly not handsome; but he does not seem stupid; and he would probably not want a large salary. I think Archdeacon Downes’s man’s terms are perfectly ridiculous.”

“I am afraid it would be rather a dangerous experiment to give a responsible post to an individual whom we have chanced upon in a public park.” said Herbert.

“Oh! out of the question,” said Mr Sutherland. “I only took his card as the shortest way of getting rid of him. Perhaps I was wrong to do even that.”

“Of course we should have to make inquiries,” said Mary. “Somehow, I cannot get it out of my head that he is in very bad circumstances. He might be a gentleman. He does not look common.”

“I agree with you so far,” said Herbert. “And I am not sorry that such models are scarce. But of course you are quite right in desiring to assist this man, if he is unfortunate.”

“Engaging a tutor is a very commonplace affair,” said Mary; “but we may as well do some good by it if we can. Archdeacon Downes’s man is in no immediate want of a situation: he has dozens of offers to choose from. Why not give the place to whoever is in the greatest need of it?”

“Very well,” cried Mr. Sutherland. “Send after him and bring him home at once in a carriage and pair, since you have made up your mind not to hear to reason on the subject.”

“After all,” interposed Herbert, “it will do no harm to make a few inquiries. If you will allow me, I will take the matter in hand, so as to prevent all possibility of his calling on or disturbing you. Give me his card. I will write to him for his testimonials and references, and so forth; and if anything comes of it, I can then hand him over to you.”

Mary locked gratefully at him, and said, “Do, papa. Let Mr Herbert write. It cannot possibly do any harm; and it will be no trouble to you.”

“I do not object to the trouble” said Mr Sutherland. “I have taken the trouble of coming up to London, all the way from Windsor, solely for Charlie’s sake. However, Herbert, perhaps you could manage the affair better than I. In fact, I should prefer to remain in the background. But then your time is valuable—”

“It will cost me only a few minutes to write the necessary letters — minutes that would be no better spent in any case. I assure you it will be practically no trouble to me.”

“There, papa. Now we have settled that point, let us go on to the National Gallery. I wish we were going to your studio instead.”

“You must not ask for that yet,” said Herbert earnestly. “I promise you a special private view of The Lady of Shalott on Thursday next at latest.”

Chapter II

Sir — In answer to your letter of the 12th instant, I am instructed by Miss Wilson to inform you that Mr. Jack was engaged here for ten months as professor of music and elocution. At the end of that period he refused to impart any further musical instruction, to three young ladies who desired a set of finishing lessons. He therefore considered himself bound to vacate his post, though Miss Wilson desires me to state expressly that she did not insist on that course. She has much pleasure in testifying to the satisfactory manner in which Mr. Jack maintained his authority in the school. He is an exacting teacher, but a patient and thoroughly capable one. During his stay at Alton College, his general conduct was irreproachable, and his marked personal influence gained for him the respect and good wishes of his pupils. —
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Phillis Ward, F.C.P., etc.

14 West Precinct, Lipport Cathedral, South Wales.

Sir — Mr. Owen Jack is a native of this town, and was, in his boyhood, a member of the Cathedral Choir. He is respectably connected, and is personally known to me as a strictly honorable young man. He has musical talent of a certain kind, and is undoubtedly qualified to teach the rudiments of music, though he never, whilst under our guidance, gave any serious consideration to the higher forms of composition — more, I should add, from natural ineptitude than from want of energy and perseverance. I should be glad to hear of his obtaining a good position. —
Yours truly,
John Burton, Mus. Doc,

(These were the replies to the inquiries about Mr Jack.)

On Thursday afternoon Herbert stood before his easel, watching the light changing on his picture as the clouds shifted in the wind. At moments when the effect on the color pleased him, he wished that Mary would enter and see it so at her first glance. But as the afternoon wore it became duller; and when she at last arrived, he felt sorry he had not appointed one o’clock instead of three. She was accompanied by a tall lad of sixteen, with light blue eyes, fair hair, and an expression of irreverent good humor.

“How do you do” said Herbert. “Take care of those sketches, Charlie, old fellow. They are wet.”

“Papa felt very tired: he thought it best to lie down for a little,” said Mary, throwing off her cloak and appearing in a handsome dress of marmalade-colored silk. “He left the arrangements with Mr Jack to you. I suspect the dread of having to confront that mysterious stranger again had something to do with his fatigue. Is the Lady of Shalott ready to be seen?”

“The light is bad, I am sorry to say,” said Herbert, lingering whilst Mary made a movement towards the easel.

“Don’t push into the room like that, Mary,” said Charlie. “Artists always have models in their studios. Give the young lady time to dress herself.”

“There is a gleam of sunshine now,” said Herbert, gravely, ignoring the lad. “Better have your first look at it while it lasts.”

Mary placed herself before the easel, and gazed earnestly at it, finding that expression the easiest mask for a pang of disappointment which followed her first glance at the canvas. Herbert did not interrupt her for some moments. Then he said in a low voice: “You understand her action, do you not?”

“Yes. She has just seen the reflexion of Lancelot’s figure in the mirror; and she is turning round to look at the reality.”

“She has a deuce of a scraggy collar-bone,” said Charlie.

“Oh, hush, Charlie,” cried Mary, dreading that her brother might roughly express her own thoughts. “It seems quite right to me.”

“The action of turning to look over her shoulder brings out the clavicle,” said Herbert, smiling. “It is less prominent in the picture than it would be in nature: I had to soften it a little.”

“Why didn’t you paint her in some other attitude?” said Charlie.

“Because I happened to be aiming at the seizure of a poetic moment, and not at the representation of a pretty bust, my critical young friend,” said Herbert quietly. “I think you are a little too close to the canvas, Miss Sutherland. Remember: the picture is not quite finished.”

“She can’t see anything unless she is close to it,” said Charlie. “In fact, she never can get close enough, because her nose is longer than her sight. I don’t understand that window up there above the woman’s head. In reality there would be nothing to see through it except the sky. But there is a river, and flowers, and a man from the Lord Mayor’s show. Are they up on a mountain?”

“Charlie, please stop. How can you be so rude?”

“Oh, I am accustomed to criticism,” said Herbert. “You are a born critic, Charlie, since you cannot distinguish a mirror from a window. Have you never read your Tennyson?”

“Read Tennyson! I should think not. What sensible man would wade through the adventures of King Arthur and his knights? I one would think that Don Quixote had put a stop to that style of nonsense. Who was the Lady of Shalott? One of Sir Lancelot’s, or Sir Galahad’s, or Sir Somebody else’s young women, I suppose.”

“Do not mind him, Mr Herbert. It is pure affectation, He knows perfectly well.”

“I don’t,” said Charlie; “and what’s more, I don’t believe you know either.”

“The Lady of Shalott,” said Herbert, “had a task to perform; and whilst she was at work upon it, she was, on pain of a curse, only to see the outer world as it was reflected by a mirror which hung above her head. One day, Sir Lancelot rode by; and when she saw his image she forgot the curse and turned to look at him.”

“Very interesting and sensible,” said Charlie.

“Why mightn’t she as well have looked at the world Straight off out of the window, as seen it left handed in a mirror? The notion of a woman spending her life making a Turkey carpet is considered poetic, I sup- pose. What happened when she looked round?”

“Ah, I see you are interested. Nothing happened, except that the mirror broke and the lady died.”

“Yes, and then got into a boat; rowed herself down to Hampton Court into the middle of a water party; and arranged her corpse in an attitude for the benefit of Lancelot. I’ve seen a picture of that.

“I see you do know something about Tennyson. Now, Miss Sutherland, what is your honest opinion?”

“I think it is beautiful. The coloring seemed rather dull to me at first, because I had been thinking of the river bank, the golden grain, the dazzling sun, the gorgeous loom, the armor of Sir Lancelot, instead of the Lady herself. But now that I have grasped your idea, there is a certain sadness and weakness about her that is very pathetic.”

“Do you think the figure is weak?” said Herbert dubiously.

“Not really weak,” replied Mary hastily. “I mean that the weakness proper to her story is very touchingly expressed.”

“She means that it is too sober and respectable for her,” said Charlie. “She likes screaming colors. If you had dressed the lady in red and gold; painted the Turkey carpet in full bloom; and made Lancelot like a sugar stick, she would have liked it better. That armor, by the bye, would be the better for a rub of emery paper.”

“Armor is hard to manage, particularly in distance,” said Herbert. “Here I had to contend with the additional difficulty of not making the reflexion in the mirror seem too real.”

“You seem to have got over that pretty successfully,” said Charlie.

“Yes,” said Mary. “There is a certain unreality about the landscape and the figure in armor that I hardly understood at first. The more I strive to exercise my judgment upon art, the more I feel my ignorance. I wish you would always tell me when make foolish comments. There is someone knocking, I think.”

“It is only the housekeeper,” said Herbert, opening the door.

“Mr Jack, sir,” said the housekeeper.

“Dear me! we must have been very late,” said Mary. “It is four o’clock. Now Charlie, pray behave like a gentleman.”

“I suppose he had better come in here,” said Herbert. “Or would you rather not meet him?”

“Oh, I must meet him. Papa told me particularly to speak to him myself.”

Mr Jack was accordingly shewn in by the housekeeper. this time, he displayed linen — a clean collar; and he carried a new hat. He made a formal bow, and looked at the artist and his guests, who became a little nervous.

“Good evening, Mr Jack,” said Herbert. “I see you got my letter.”

“You are Mr Herbert?” said Jack, in his resonant voice which, in the lofty studio, had a bright, close quality like the middle notes of a trumpet. Herbert nodded. “You are not the gentleman to whom I spoke on Saturday?”

“No. Mr Sutherland is not well; and I am acting for him. This is the young gentleman whom I mentioned to you.”

Charlie blushed, and grinned. Then, seeing a humorous wrinkling in the stranger’s face, he stepped forward and offered him his hand. Jack shook it heartily. “I shall get on very well with you,” he said, “if you think you will like me as a tutor.”

“Charlie never works,” said Mary: “that is his great failing, Mr Jack.”

“You have no right to say that,” said Charlie, reddening. “How do you know whether I work or not? I can make a start with Mr Jack without being handicapped by your amiable recommendations.”

“This is Miss Sutherland,” said Herbert, interposing quickly. “She is the mistress of Mr Sutherland’s household; and she will explain to you how you will be circumstanced as regards your residence with the family.”

Jack bowed again. “I should like to know, first, at what studies this young gentleman requires my assistance.”

“I want to learn something about music — about the theory of music, you know,” said Charlie; “and I can grind at anything else you like.”

“His general education must not be sacrificed to the music,” said Mary anxiously.

“Oh! don’t you be afraid of my getting off too easily,” said Charlie. “I dare say Mr Jack knows his business without being told it by you.”

“Pray don’t interrupt me, Charlie. I wish you would go into the next room and look at the sketches. I shall have to arrange matters with Mr Jack which do not concern you.”

“Very well,” said Charlie, sulkily. “I don’t want to interfere with your arrangements; but don’t you interfere with mine. Let Mr Jack form his own opinion of me; and keep yours to yourself.” Then he left the studio.

“If there is to be any serious study of music — I understood from Mr. Herbert that your young brother desires to make it his profession — other matters must give place to it,” said Jack bluntly. “A little experience will shew us the best course to take with him.”

“Yes,” said Mary. After hesitating a moment she added timidly, “Then you are willing to undertake his instruction?”

“I am willing, so far,” said Jack.

Mary looked nervously at Herbert, who smiled, and said, “Since we are satisfied on that point, the only remaining question, I presume, is one of terms.”

“Sir,” said Jack abruptly, “I hate business and know nothing about it. Therefore excuse me if I put my terms in my own way. If I am to live with Mr Sutherland at Windsor, I shall want, besides food and lodging, a reasonable time to myself every day, with permission to use Miss Sutherland’s piano when I can do so without disturbing anybody, and money enough to keep me decently clothed, and not absolutely penniless. I will say thirty-five pounds a year.”

“Thirty-five pounds a year” repeated Herbert. “To confess the truth, I am not a man of business myself; but that seems quite reasonable.”

“Oh, quite,” said Mary. “I think papa would not mind giving more.”

“It is enough for me,” said Jack, with something like a suppressed chuckle at Mary’s simplicity. “Or, I will take a church organ in the neighborhood, if you can procure it for me, in lieu of salary.”

“I think we had better adhere to the usual arrangement,” said Herbert. Jack nodded, and said, “I have no further conditions to make.”

“Do you wish to say anything?” said Herbert, looking inquiringly at Mary.

“No, I — I think not. I thought Mr. Jack would like to know something of our domestic arrangements.”

“Thank you,” said Jack curtly, “I need not trouble you. If your house does not suit me, I can complain, or leave it.” He paused, and then added more courteously, “You may reassure yourself as to my personal comfort, Miss Sutherland. I am well used to greater privation than I am likely to suffer with you.”

Mary had nothing more to say. Herbert coughed and turned his ring round a few times upon his finger. Jack stood motionless, and looked very ugly.

“Although Mr. Sutherland has left this matter altogether in my hands,” said Herbert at last, “I hardly like to conclude it myself. He is staying close by, in Onslow Gardens. Would you mind calling on him now? If you will allow me, I will give you a note to the effect that our interview has been a satisfactory one.” Jack bowed. “Excuse me for one moment. My writing materials are in the next room. I will say a word or two to Charlie, and send him in to you.”

There was a mirror in the room, which Herbert had used as a model. It was so placed that Mary could see the image of the new tutor’s face, as, being now alone with her, he looked for the first time at the picture. A sudden setting of his mouth and derisive twinkle in his eye shewed that he found something half ludicrous, half contemptible, in the work; and she, observing this, felt hurt, and began to repent having engaged him. Then the expression softened to one of compassion; he sighed as he turned away from the easel. Before she could speak Charlie entered, saying:

“I am to go back with you to Onslow Gardens, Mr Jack, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, no, Charlie: you must stay with me,” said Mary.

“Don’t be alarmed: Adrian is going on to the Museum with you directly; and the housekeeper is here to do propriety. I have no particular fancy for lounging about that South Kensington crockery shop with you; and, besides, Mr Jack does not know his way to Jermyn’s. Here is Adrian.”

Herbert came in, and handed a note to the tutor, who took it; nodded briefly to them; and went out with Charlie.

“That is certainly the ugliest man I ever saw,” said Herbert. “I think he has got the better of us, too. We are a pretty pair to transact business.”

“Yes,” said Mary, laughing. “He said he was not a man of business; but I wonder what he thinks of us.”

“As of two young children whom fate has delivered into his hand, doubtless, shall we start now for South Kensington?”

“Yes. But I don’t want to disturb my impression of the Lady of Shalott by any more art to-day. It is so fine this afternoon that I think it would be more sensible for us to take a walk in the Park than to shut ourselves up in the Museum.”

Herbert agreeing, they walked together to Hyde Park. “Now that we are here,” said he, “where shall we go to? The Row?”

“Certainly not. It is the most vulgar place in London. If we could find a pleasant seat, I should like to rest.”

“We had better try Kensington Gardens, then.”

“No,” said Mary, remembering Mr Jack. “I do not like Kensington Gardens.”

“I have just thought of the very thing,” exclaimed Herbert. “Let us take a boat. The Serpentine is not so pretty as the Thames at Windsor; but it will have the charm of novelty for you. Will you come?”

“I should like it of all things. But I rely upon you as to the propriety of my going with you.”

Herbert hesitated. “I do not think there can be any harm.”

“There: I was only joking. Do you think I allow myself to be influenced by such nonsense as that? Let us go.”

So they went to the boat-house and embarked. Herbert sculled aimlessly about, enjoying the spring sunshine, until they found themselves in an unfrequented corner of the Serpentine, when he half shipped his sculls, and said, “Let us talk for a while now. I have worked enough, I think.”

“By all means,” said Mary. “May I begin?”

Herbert looked quickly at her, and seemed a little disconcerted. “Of course.” said he.

“I want to make a confession,” she said. “it concerns the Lady of Shalott, of which I have been busily thinking since we started.”

“Have you reconsidered your good opinion of it?”

“No. Better and yet worse than that. I have reconsidered my bad impression of it — at least, I do not mean that — I never had a bad impression of it, but my vacant, stupid first idea. My confession is that I was disappointed at the first sight of it. Wait: let me finish. It was different from what I imagined, as it ought to have been; for I am not an artist, and therefore do not imagine things properly. But it has grown upon me since; and now I like it better than if it had dazzled my ignorant eyes at first. I have been thinking that if it had the gaudy qualities I missed in it, I should not have respected you so much for painting it, nor should I have been forced to dwell on the poetry of the conception as I have been. I remember being secretly disappointed the first time we went to the National Gallery; and, as to my first opera, I suffered agonies of disenchantment. It is a comfort to me — a mean one, I fear — to know that Sir Joshua Reynolds was disappointed at his first glimpse of Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican, and that some of the great composers thought Beethoven’s music hideous before they became familiar with it.”

“You find that my picture improves on acquaintance?”

“Oh. yes! Very much. Or rather I improve.”

“But are you sure youre not coaxing yourself into a false admiration of it for my — to avoid hurting me?”

“No, indeed,” said Mary vehemently, trying by force of assertion to stifle this suspicion, which had come into her own mind before Herbert mentioned it.

“And do you still feel able to sympathize with my aims, and willing to encourage me, and to keep the highest aspects of my art before me, as you have done hitherto?”

“I feel willing, but not able. How often must I remind you that I owe all my feeling for art to you, and that I am only the faint reflexion of you in all matters concerning it?”

“Nevertheless without your help I should long ago have despaired. Are you quite sure — I beg you to answer me faithfully — that you do not despise me?”

“Mr. Herbert! How can you think such a thing of me? How can you think it of yourself?”

“I am afraid my constant self-mistrust is only too convincing a proof of my weakness. I sometimes despise myself.”

“It is a proof of your artistic sensibility. You do not need to learn from me that all the great artists have left passages behind them proving that they have felt sometimes as you feel now. Take the oars again; and let us spin down to the bridge. The exercise will cure your fancies.”

“Not yet. I have something else to say. Has it occurred to you that if by any accident — by the forming of a new tie, for instance — your sympathies came to be diverted from me, I should lose the only person whose belief in me has helped me to believe in myself? How utterly desolate I should be!”

“Desolate! Nonsense. Some day you will exhaust the variety of the sympathy you compliment me so highly upon. You will find it growing shallow and monotonous; and then you will not be sorry to be rid of it.”

“I am quite serious. Mary: I have felt for some time past that it is neither honest nor wise in me to trifle any longer with my only chance of happiness. Will you become engaged to me? You may meet many better and stronger men than I, but none who will value you more highly — perhaps none to whose life you can be so indispensable.”

There was a pause, Mary being too full of the responsibility she felt placed upon her to reply at once. Of the ordinary maidenly embarrassment she shewed not a trace.

“Why cannot we go on as we have been doing so happily?” she said, thoughtfully.

“Of course, if you wish it, we can. That is, if you do not know your own mind on the subject. But such happiness as there may be in our present indefinite relations will be all on your side.”

“It seems so ungrateful to hesitate. It is doubt of myself that makes me do so. You have always immensely overrated me; and I should not like you to feel at some future day that you had made a mistake. When you are famous, you will be able to choose whom you please, and where you please.”

“If that is the only consideration that hinders you, I claim your consent. Do you not think that I, too, do not feel how little worthy of your acceptance my offer is? But if we can love one another, what does all that matter? It is not as though we were strangers: we have proved one another. It is absurd that we two should say ‘Mr Herbert’ and ‘Miss Sutherland, as if our friendship were an acquaintance of ceremony.”

“I have often wished that you would call me Mary. At home we always speak of you as Adrian. But I could hardly have asked you to, could I?”

“I am sorry you did not. And now, will you give me a definite answer? Perhaps I have hardly made you a definite offer; but you know my position. I am too poor with my wretched £300 a year to give you a proper home at present. For that I must depend on my brush. You can fancy how I shall work when every exertion will bring my wedding day nearer; though, even at the most hopeful estimate, I fear I am condemning you to a long engagement. Are you afraid to venture on it?”

“Yes, I am afraid; but only lest you should find out the true worth of what you are waiting for. If you will risk that, I consent.”

Chapter III

On one of the last days of July, Mary Sutherland was in her father’s house at Windsor, copying a sketch signed A. H. The room had a French window opening on a little pleasure ground and shrubbery, far beyond which, through the swimming summer atmosphere, was the river threading the distant valley. But Mary did not look that way. With her attention concentrated on a stained scrap of paper, she might have passed for an æsthetic daughter of the Man with the Muck Rake. At last a shadow fell upon the drawing board. Then she turned, and saw a tall, handsome lady, a little past middle age, standing at the window.

“Mrs Herbert!” she exclaimed, throwing down her brush, and running to embrace the new-comer. “I thought you were in Scotland.”

“So I was, until last week. The first person I saw in London was your Aunt Jane; and she has persuaded me to stay at Windsor with her for a fortnight How well you are looking! I saw your portrait in Adrian’s studio; and it is not the least bit like you.”

“I hope you did not tell him so. Besides, it must be like me. All Adrian’s artistic friends admire it.”

“Yes; and he admires their works in return. It is a well understood bargain. Poor Adrian! He did not know that I was coming back from Scotland; and I gave him a very disagreeable surprise by walking into his studio on Monday afternoon.”

“Disagreeable! I am sure he was delighted.”

“He did not even pretend to be pleased. His manners are really getting worse and worse. Who is the curious person that opened the shrubbery gate for me? — a sort of Cyclop with a voice of bronze.”

“It is only Mr Jack, Charlie’s tutor. He has nothing to do at present, as Charlie is spending a fortnight at Cambridge.”

“Oh, indeed! Your Aunt Jane has a great deal to say about him. She does not like him; and his appearance rather confirms her, I must say, though he has good eyes. Whose whim was Mr Jack, pray?”

“Mine, they say; though I had no more to do with his being engaged than papa or Charlie had.”

“I am glad Adrian had nothing to do with it. Well, Mary, have you any news for me? Has anything wonderful happened since I went to Scotland?”

“No. At least, I think not. You heard of papa’s aunt Dorcas’s death.”

“That was in April, just before I went away. I heard that you left London early in the season. It is childish to bury yourself down here. You must get married, dear.”

Mary blushed. “Did Adrian tell you of his new plans?” she said.

“Adrian never tells me anything. And indeed I do not care to hear of any plans of his until he has, once for all, given up his absurd notion of becoming a painter. Of course he will not hear of that: he has never forgiven me for suggesting it. All that his fine art has done for him as yet is to make him dislike his mother; and I hope it may never do worse.”

“But, Mrs Herbert, you are mistaken: I assure you you are quite mistaken. He is a little sore, perhaps, because you do not appreciate his genius; but he loves you very dearly.”

“Do not trouble yourself about my not appreciating his genius, as you call it, my dear. I am not one bit prejudiced against art; and if Adrian had the smallest chance of becoming a good painter, I would share my jointure with him and send him abroad to study. But he will never paint. I am not what is called an &ligae;sthete; and pictures that are generally understood to be the perfection of modern art invariably bore me, because I do not understand them. But I do understand Adrian’s daubs; and I know that they are invariably weak and bad. All the Royal Academy could not persuade me to the contrary — though, indeed, they are not likely to try. I wish I could make you understand that anyone who dissuades Adrian from pursuing art will be his best friend. Don’t you feel that yourself when you look at his pictures, Mary?”

“No,” said Mary, fixing her glasses and looking boldly at her visitor, “I feel just the contrary.”

“Then you must be blind or infatuated. Take his portrait of you as an example! No one could recognize it. Even Adrian told me that he would have destroyed it, had you not forbidden him; though he was bursting with suppressed resentment because I did not pretend to admire it.”

“I believe that Adrian will be a great man yet, and that you will acknowledge that you were mistaken in him.”

“Well, my dear, you are young, and not very wise, for all your cleverness. Besides, you did not know Adrian’s father.”

“No; but I know Adrian — very well, I think. I have faith in the entire worthiness of his conceptions; and he has proved that he does not grudge the hard work which is all that is requisite to secure the power of executing what he conceives. You cannot expect him to be a great painter without long practice and study.”

“I do not understand metaphysics, Mary. Conceptions and executions are Greek to me. But I know very well that Adrian will never be happy until he is married to some sensible woman. And married he never can be whilst he remains an artist.”

“Why?”

“What a question! How can he marry with only three hundred a year? He would not accept an allowance from me, even if I could afford to make him one; for since we disagreed about this wretched art, he has withdrawn himself from me in every possible way, and with an ostentation, too, which — natural feeling apart — is in very bad taste. He will never add a penny to his income by painting: of that I am certain; and he has not enterprise enough to marry a woman with money. If he persists in his infatuation, you will find that he will drag out his life waiting for a success that will never come. And he has no social talents. If he were a genius, like Raphael, his crotchets would not matter. If he were a humbug, like his uncle John he would flourish as all humbugs do in this wicked world. But Adrian is neither: he is only a duffer, poor fellow.”

Mary reddened, and said nothing.

“Have you any influence over him?” said Mrs. Herbert, watching her.

“If I had,” replied Mary “I would not use it to discourage him.”

“I am sorry for that. I had some hope that you would help me to save him from wasting his opportunities. Your Aunt Jane has been telling me that you are engaged to him; but that is such an old story now that I never pay any attention to it.”

“Has Adrian not told you?”

“My dear, I have already said a dozen times that Adrian never tells me anything. The more important his affairs are, the more openly and purposely he excludes me from them. I hope you have not been so silly as to rely on his visions of fame for your future support.”

“The truth is that we have been engaged since last April. I wanted Adrian to write to you; but he said he preferred to speak to you about it. I thought he would have done so the moment you returned. However, I am sure he had good reasons for leaving me to tell you; and I am quite content to wait until he reaps the reward of his labor. We must agree to differ about his genius. I have perfect faith in him.”

“Well, Mary, I am very sorry for your sake. I am afraid, if you do not lose patience and desert him in time, you will live to see all your own money spent, and to try bringing up a family on three hundred a year. If you would only be advised, and turn him from his artistic conceit, you would be the best wife in England for him. You have such force of character — just what he wants.”

Mary laughed. “You are so mistaken in everything concerning Adrian!” she said. “It is he who has all the force of character: I am only his pupil. He has imposed all his ideas on me, more, perhaps, by dint of their purity and truth than of his own assertiveness; for he is no dogmatist. I am always the follower: he the leader.”

“All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense. However, since Adrian has turned your head, there is nothing for it but to wait until you both come to your senses. That must be your Aunt Jane at the door. She promised to follow me within half an hour.”

Mary frowned, and recovered her serenity with an effort as she rose to greet her aunt, Mrs. Beatty, an elderly lady, with features like Mr. Sutherland’s but fat and imperious. She exclaimed, “I hope I’ve not come too soon, Mary. How surprised you must have been to see Mrs Herbert!”

“Yes. Mr Jack let her into the shrubbery; and she appeared to me at the window without a word of warning.”

“Mr Jack is a nice person to have in a respectable house,” said Mrs. Beatty scornfully. “Do you know where I saw him last?”

“No,” said Mary impatiently; “and I do not want to know. I am tired of Mr Jack’s misdemeanors.”

“Misdemeanors! I call it scandal, Mary. A perfect disgrace!”

“Dear me! What has he done now?’

“You may well ask. He is at present shewing himself in the streets of Windsor in company with common soldiers, openly entering the taverns with them.”

“O Aunt Jane! Are you sure?”

Perhaps you will allow me to believe my senses. I drove through the town on my way here — you know what a small town is, Mrs Herbert, and how everybody knows everybody else by sight in it, let alone such a remarkable looking person as this Mr Jack; and the very first person I saw was Private Charles, the worst character in my husband’s regiment, conversing with my nephew’s tutor at the door of the ‘Green Man.’ They went into the bar together before my eyes. Now, what do you think of your Mr Jack?”

“He may have had some special reason”

“Special reason! Fiddlestick! What right has any servant of my brother’s to speak to a profligate soldier in broad daylight in the streets?* There can be no excuse for it. If Mr Jack, had a particle of self-respect he would maintain a proper distance between himself and even a full sergeant. But this Charles is such a drunkard that he spends half his time in cells. He would have been dismissed from the regiment long since, only he is a bandsman; and the bandmaster begs Colonel Beatty not to get rid of him, as he cannot be replaced.”

“If he is a bandsman,” said Mary, “that explains it. Mr Jack wanted musical information from him, I suppose.”

“I declare, Mary, it is perfectly wicked to hear you defend such conduct. Is a public house the proper place for learning music? Why could not Mr Jack apply to your uncle? If he had addressed himself properly to me, Colonel Beatty could have ordered the man to give him whatever information was required of him.”

“I must say, aunt, that you are the last person I should expect Mr Jack to ask a favor from, judging by your usual manner towards him.”

“There!” said Mrs Beatty, turning indignantly to Mrs Herbert. “That is the way I am treated in this house to gratify Mr Jack. Last week I was told that I was in the habit of gossiping with servants, because Mrs Williams housemaid met him in the Park on Sunday — on Sunday, mind — whistling and singing and behaving like a madman. And now, when Mary’s favorite is convicted in the very act of carousing with the lowest of the low, she turns it off by saying that I do not know how to behave myself before a tutor.”

“I did not say so, aunt; and you know that very well.”

“Oh, well, of course if you are going to fly out at me—”

“I am not flying at you, aunt; but you are taking offence without the least reason; and you are making Mrs Herbert believe that I am Mr Jack’s special champion — you called him my favorite. The truth is, Mrs Herbert, that nobody likes this Mr Jack; and we only keep him because Charlie makes some progress with him, and respects him. Aunt Jane took a violent dislike to him”

“I, Mary! What is Mr Jack to me that I should like or dislike him, pray?”

“ — and she is always bringing me stories of his misdoings, as if they were my fault. Then, when I try to defend him from obvious injustice, I am accused of encouraging and shielding him.”

“So you do,” said Mrs Beatty.

“I say whatever I can for him,” said Mary sharply, “because I dislike him too much to condescend to join in attacks made on him behind his back. And I am not afraid of him, though you are, and so is Papa.”

“Oh, really you are too ridiculous,” said Mrs Beatty. “Afraid!”

“I see,” said Mrs Herbert smoothly, “that my acquaintance the Cyclop has made himself a bone of contention here. Since you all dislike him, why not dismiss him and get a more popular character in his place? He is really not an ornament to your establishment. Where is your father, Mary?”

“He has gone out to dine at Eton; and he will not be back until midnight. He will be so sorry to have missed you. But he will see you to-morrow, of course.”

“And you are alone here?”

“Yes. Alone with my work.”

“Then what about our plan of taking you back with us and keeping you for the evening’”

“I think I would rather stay and finish my work.”

“Nonsense, child,” said Mrs Beatty. “You cannot be working always. Come out and enjoy yourself.”

Mary yielded with a sigh, and went for her hat.

“I am sure that all this painting and poetry reading is not good for a young girl,” said Mrs Beatty, whilst Mary was away. “It is very good of your Adrian to take such trouble to cultivate Mary’s mind; but so much study cannot but hurt her brain. She is very self-willed and full of outlandish ideas. She is not under proper control. Poor Charles has no more resolution than a baby. And she will not listen to me, alth—”

“I am ready,” said Mary, returning.

“You make me nervous — you do everything so quickly,” said Mrs. Beatty, querulously. “I wish you would take shorter steps,” she added, looking disparagingly at her niece’s skirts as they went out through the shrubbery. “It is not nice to see a girl striding like a man. It gives you quite a bold appearance when you swing along, peering at people through your glasses.”

“That is an old crime of mine, Mrs Herbert,” said Mary. “I never go out with Aunt Jane without being lectured for not walking as if I had high heeled boots. Even the Colonel took me too task one evening here. He said a man should walk like a horse, and a woman like a cow. His complaint was that I walked like a horse; and he said that you, aunt, walked properly, like a cow. It is not worth any woman’s while to gain such a compliment as that. It made Mr Jack laugh for the first and only time in our house.”

Mrs Beatty reddened, and seemed about to make an angry reply, when the tutor came in at the shrubbery gate, and held it open for them to pass. Mrs Herbert thanked him. Mrs Beatty, following her, tried to look haughtily at him, but quailed, and made him a slight bow, in response to which he took off his hat.

“Mr Jack,” said Mary, stopping: “if papa comes back before I am in, will you please tell him that I am at Colonel Beatty’s.”

“At what hour do you expect him?”

“Not until eleven, at soonest. I am almost sure to be back first; but if by any chance I should not be—”

“I will tell him,” said Jack. Mary passed on; and he watched them until Mrs Beatty’s carriage disappeared. Then he hurried indoors, and brought a heap of manuscript music into the room the ladies had just left. He opened the pianoforte and sat down before it; but instead of playing he began to write, occasionally touching the keys to try the effect of a progression, or rising to walk up and down the room with puckered brows.

He labored in this fashion until seven o’clock, when, hearing someone whistling in the road, he went out into the shrubbery, and presently came back with a soldier, not perfectly sober, who carried a roll of music paper and a case containing three clarionets.

“Now let us hear what you can make of it,” said Jack, seating himself at the piano.

“It’s cruel quick, that allagrow part is,” said the soldier, trying to make his sheet of music stand properly on Mary’s table easel. “Just give us your B fat, will you. Mister.” Jack struck the note; and the soldier blew. ‘“Them ladies’ singin’ pianos is always so damn low,” he grumbled. “I’ve drorn the slide as far as it’ll come. Just wait while I stick a washer in the bloomin’ thing.”

“It seems to me that you have been drinking instead of practising, since I saw you,” said Jack.

“S’ help me, governor, I’ve been practising all the afternoon. I only took a glass on my way here to set me to rights. Now, Mister, I’m ready.” Jack immediately attacked Mary’s piano with all the vigor of an orchestra; and the clarinet soon after made its entry with a brilliant cadenza. The soldier was a rapid expectant; his tone was fine; and the only varieties of expression he was capable of, the spirited and the pathetic, satisfied even Jack, who, on other points, soon began to worry the soldier by his fastidiousness.

“Stop,” he cried, “That is not the effect I want at all. It is not bright enough. Take the other clarinet. Try it in C.”

“Wot! Play all them flats on a clarinet in C! It can’t be done. Least ways I’m damned if I can — Hello! ‘Eire’s a gent for you, sir.”

Jack turned. Adrian Herbert was standing on the threshold, astonished, holding the handle of the open door. “I have been listening outside for some time,” he said politely. “I hope I do not disturb you.”

“No,” replied Jack. “Friend Charles here is worth listening to. Eh, Mr Herbert?”

Private Charles looked down modestly; jingled his spurs; coughed; and spat through the open window. Adrian did not appreciate his tone or his execution; but he did appreciate his sodden features, his weak and husky voice, and his barrack accent. Seeing a clarinet and a red handkerchief lying on a satin cushion which he had purchased for Mary at a bazaar, the looked at the soldier with disgust, and at Jack with growing indignation.

“I presume there is no one at home,” he said coldly.

“Miss Sutherland is at Mrs Beatty’s, and will not return until eleven,” said Jack, looking at Adrian with his most rugged expression, and not subduing his powerful voice, the sound of which always afflicted the artist with a sensation of insignificance. “Mrs Beatty and a lady who is visiting her called and brought her out with them. Mr Sutherland is at Eton, and will not be back till midnight. My pupil is still at Cambridge.”

“H’m” said Adrian. “I shall go on to Mrs Beatty’s. I should probably disturb you by remaining.”

Jack nodded and turned to the piano without further ceremony. Private Charles had taken one of Mary’s paint-brushes and fixed it upon the desk against his sheet of music, which was rolling itself up. This was the last thing Herbert saw before he left. As he walked away he heard the clarinet begin the slow movement of the concerto, a melody which, in spite of his annoyance, struck him as quite heavenly. He nevertheless hastened out of earshot, despising the whole art of music because a half-drunken soldier could so affect him by it.

Half a mile from the Sutherlands’ house was a gate, though which he passed into a flower-garden, in which a tall gentleman with sandy hair was smoking a cigar. This was Colonel Beatty, from whom he learnt that the ladies were in the drawing room. There he found his mother and Mrs Beatty working in colored wools, whilst Mary, at a distance from them, was reading a volume of Browning. She gave a sigh of relief as he entered.

“Is this your usual hour for making calls?” said Mrs Herbert, in response to her son’s cool “Good evening, mother.”

“Yes,” said he. “I cannot work at night.” He passed on and sat down beside Mary at the other end of the room. Mrs Beatty smiled significantly at Mrs Herbert, who shrugged her shoulders and went on with her work

“What is the matter, Adrian?” said Mary, in a low voice.

“Why?”

“You look annoyed.”

“I am not annoyed. But I am not quite satisfied with the way in which your household is managed in your absence by Mr Jack.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Mary, “you too! Am I never to hear the last of Mr Jack? It is bad enough to have to meet him every day, without having his misdeeds dinned into my ears from morning till night.”

“I think an end should be put to such a state of things, Mary. I have often reproached myself for having allowed you to engage this man with so little consideration. I thought his mere presence in the house could not affect you — that his business would be with Charlie only. My experience of the injury that can be done by the mere silent contact of coarse natures with fine ones should have taught me better. Mr Jack is not fit to live with you, Mary.”

“But perhaps it is our fault. He has no idea of the region of thought from which I wish I never had to descend; but, after all, we have no fault to find with him. We cannot send him away because he does not appreciate pictures.”

“No. But I have reason to believe that he is not quite so well-behaved in your absence as he is when you are at home. When I arrived tonight, for instance, I, of course, went straight to your house. There I heard a musical entertainment going forward. When I went in I was greeted with a volley of oaths which a drunken soldier was addressing to Jack. The two were in the drawing-room and did not perceive me at first, Jack being seated at your pianoforte, accompanying the soldier, who was playing a flageolet. The fellow was using your table easel for a desk, and your palette knife as a paper weight to keep his music flat. Has Jack your permission to introduce his military friends whenever you are out?”

“Certainly not,” said Mary, reddening. “I never heard of such a thing. I think Mr Jack is excessively impertinent.”

“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Beattv, perceiving that her niece was vexed.

“Nothing, aunt,” said Mary hastily. “Please do not tell Aunt Jane,” she added in an undertone to Adrian.

“Why not’”

“Oh, she will only worry about it. Pray do not mention it. What ought we to do about it, Adrian?”

“Simply dismiss Mr Jack forthwith?”

“But — Yes, I suppose we should. The only difficulty is—” Mary hesitated, and at last added, “I am afraid he will think that it is out of revenge for his telling Charlie not to take his ideas of music from my way of playing it, and because he despises my painting.”

“Despises your painting! Do you mean to say that he has been insolent to you? You should dismiss him at once. Surely such fears as you expressed just now have no weight with you, Mary?”

Mary reddened again, and said, a little angrily, “It is very easy for you to talk of dismissing people, Adrian; but if you had to do it yourself, you would feel how unpleasant it is.”

Adrian looked grave and did not reply. After a short silence Mary rose; crossed the room carelessly; and began to play the piano. Herbert, instead of sitting by her and listening, as his habit was, went out and joined the Colonel in the garden.

“What have you quarreled about, dear?” said Mrs Herbert.

“We have not quarreled,” said Mary. “What made you think that.”

“Adrian is offended.”

“Oh, no. At least I cannot imagine why he should be.”

“He is. I know what Adrian’s slightest shrug signifies.”

Mary shook her head and went on playing. Adrian did not return until they went into another room to sup. Then Mary said she must go home; and Herbert rose to accompany her.”

“Good-night, mother,” he said. “I shall see you tomorrow. I have a bed in the town, and will go there directly when I have left Mary safely at home.” He nodded; shook hands with Mrs Beatty and the Colonel; and went out with Mary. They walked a hundred yards in silence. Then Mary said:

“Are you offended, Adrian? Mrs Herbert said you were.”

He started as if he had been stung. “I do not believe I could make a movement,” he replied indignantly, “for which my mother would not find some unworthy motive. She never loses an opportunity to disparage me and to make mischief.”

“She does not mean it, Adrian. It is only that she does not quite understand you. You sometimes say hard things of her, although I know you do not mean to speak unkindly.”

“Pardon me, Mary, I do. I hate hypocrisy of all kinds; and you annoy me when you assume any tenderness on my part towards my mother. I dislike her. I believe I should do so even it she had treated me well, and shewed me the ordinary respect which I have much right to from a parent as from any other person. Our natures are antagonistic, our views of life and duty incompatible: we have nothing in common. That is the plain truth; and however much it may shock you, unless you are willing to accept it as unalterable, I had rather you would drop the subject.”

“Oh, Adrian, I do not think it is right to—”

“I do not think, Mary, that you can tell me anything concerning what is called filial duty that I am not already familiar with. I cannot help my likes and dislikes: I have to entertain them when they come to me, without regard to their propriety. You may be quite tranquil as far as my mother’s feelings are concerned. My undutiful sentiments afford her her chief delight a pretext for complaining of me.”

Mary looked wistfully at him, and walked on, down- east. He stopped; turned towards her gravely; and resumed: “Mary: I suspect from one or two things you have said, that you cherish a project for reconciling me to my mother. You must relinquish that idea. I myself exhausted every effort to that end long ago. I disguised the real nature of my feeling towards her until even self-deception, the most persistent of all forms of illusion, was no longer possible. In those days should have hailed your good offices with pleasure. Now I have not the least desire to be reconciled to her. As I have said, we have nothing in common: her affection would be a burden to me. Therefore think no more of it. Whenever you wish to see me in my least amiable mood, re-open the subject, and you will be gratified.”

“I shall avoid it since you wish me to. I only wished to say that you left me in an awkward position today by not telling her of our engagement.”

“True. That was inconsiderate of me. I intended to tell her; but I got no opportunity. It matters little; she would only have called me a fool. Did you tell her?”

“Yes, when I found that Aunt Jane had told her already.”

“And what did she say?”

‘Oh, nothing. She reminded me that you were not rich enough to marry.”

“And proclaimed her belief that I should never become so unless I gave up painting?”

“She was quite kind to me about it. But she is a little prejudiced—”

“Yes, I know. For heaven’s sake let us think and talk about something else. Look at the stars. What a splendid dome they make of the sky now that there is no moon to distract attention from them. And yet a great artist, with a miserable yard of canvas, can move us as much as that vast expanse of air and fire.”

“Yes. — I am very uncomfortable about Mr Jack, Adrian. If he is to be sent away, it must be done before Charlie returns, or else there will be a quarrel about it. But then, who is to speak to him? He is a very hard person to find fault with; and very likely papa will make excuses for him sooner than face him with a dismissal. Or, worse again, he might give him some false reason for sending him away, in order to avoid an explosion; and somehow I would rather do anything than condescend to tell Mr Jack a story. If he were anyone else I should not mind so much.”

“There is no occasion to resort to untruth, which is equally odious, no matter to whom it is addressed. It was agreed that his employment should be terminable by a month’s notice on either side. Let Mr. Sutherland write him a letter giving that notice. No reason need be mentioned; and the letter can be courteously worded, thanking him for his past services, and simply saying that Charlie is to be placed in other hands.”

“But it will be so unpleasant to have him with us for a month under a sentence of dismissal.”

“Well, it cannot be helped. There is no alternative but to turn him out of the house for misconduct.”

“That is impossible. A letter will be the best. I wish we had never Been him, or that he were gone already. Hush. Listen a moment.”

They stopped. The sound of a pianoforte came to their ears.

“He is playing still,” said Mary. “Let us go back for Colonel Beatty. He will know how to deal with the soldier.”

“The soldier must have left long ago,” said Adrian. “I can hear nothing but the piano. Let us go in. He is within his bargain as far as his own playing goes. He stipulated for that when we engaged him.”

They went on. As they neared the house, grotesque noises mingled with the notes of the pianoforte. Mary hesitated, and would have stopped again ; but Adrian, with a stern face, walked quickly ahead. Mary had a key of the shrubbery; and they went round that way, the noise becoming deafening as they approached. The player was not only pounding the keyboard so that the window rattled in its frame, but was making an extraordinary variety of sounds with his own larynx. Mary caught Adrian’s arm as they advanced to the window and looked in. Jack was alone, seated at the pianoforte, his brows knitted, his eyes glistening under them, his wrists bounding and rebounding upon the keys, his rugged countenance transfigured by an expression of extreme energy and exaltation. He was playing from a manuscript score, and was making up for the absence of an orchestra by imitations of the instruments. He was grunting and buzzing the bassoon parts, humming when the violoncello had the melody, whistling for the flutes, singing hoarsely for the horns, barking for the trumpets, squealing for the oboes, making indescribable sounds in imitation of clarionets and drums, and marking each sforzando by a toss of his head and a gnash of his teeth. At last, abandoning this eccentric orchestration, he chanted with the full strength of his formidable voice until he came to the final chord, which he struck violently, and repeated in every possible inversion from one end of the keyboard to the other. Then he sprang up, and strode excitedly to and fro in the room. At the second turn he saw Herbert and Mary, who had just entered, staring at him. He started, and stared back at them, quite disconcerted.

“I fear I have had the misfortune to disturb you a second time,” said Herbert, with suppressed anger.

“No,” said Jack, in a voice strained by his recent abuse of it, “I was playing by myself. The soldier whom you saw here has gone to his quarters.” As he mentioned the soldier, he looked at Mary.

“It was hardly necessary to mention that you were playing,” said Adriaa. “We heard you at a considerable distance.”

Jack’s cheek glowed like a sooty copper kettle, and he looked darkly at Herbert for a moment. Then, with some humor in his eye, he said, “Did you hear much of my performance?”

“We heard quite enough, Mr. Jack.” said Mary, approaching the piano to place her hat on it. Jack quickly took his manuscript away as she did so. “I am afraid you have not improved my poor spinet,” she added, looking ruefully at the keys.

“That is what a pianoforte is for,” said Jack gravely. “It may have suffered; but when next you touch it you will feel that the hands of a musician have been on it, and that its heart has beaten at last.” He looked hard at her for a moment after saying this, and then turned to Herbert, and continued, “Miss Sutherland was complaining some time ago that she had never heard me play. Neither had she, because she usually sits here when she is at home; and I do not care to disturb her then. I am glad she has been gratified at last by a performance which is, I assure you, very characteristic of me. Perhaps you thought it rather odd”’

“I did think so,” said Herbert, severely.

“Then,” said Jack, with a perceptible surge of his subsiding excitement, “I am fortunate in having escaped all observation except that of a gentleman who understands so well what an artist is. If I cannot compose as you paint, believe that it is because the art which I profess lies nearer to a strong man’s soul than one which nature has endowed you with the power of appreciating. Good-night.” He looked for a moment at the two; turned on his heel; and left the room. They stared after him in silence, and heard him laugh subduedly as he ascended the stairs.

“I will make papa write to him to-morrow,” said Mary, when she recovered herself. “No one shall have a second chance of addressing a sarcasm to you, Adrian, in my father’s house, whilst I am mistress of it.”

“Do not let that influence you, Mary. I am not disposed to complain of the man’s conceited ignorance. But he was impertinent to you.”

“I do not mind that.”

“But I do. Nothing could be more grossly insolent than what he said about your piano. Many of his former remarks have passed with us as the effect of a natural brusquerie, which he could not help. I believe now that he is simply ill-mannered and ill-conditioned. That sort of thing is not to be tolerated for one moment.”

“I have always tried to put the best construction on his actions, and to defend him from Aunt Jane,” said Mary. “I am very sorry now that I did so. The idea of his calling himself an artist!”

“Musicians often arrogate that title to themselves,” said Herbert; “and he does not seem overburdened with modesty. I think I hear Mr Sutherland letting himself in at the hall door. If so, I need not stay any longer, unless you wish me to speak to him about what has occurred.

“Oh no, not to-night: it would only spoil his rest. I will tell him in the morning.”

Herbert waited only to bid Mr. Sutherland good night Then he kissed his betrothed, and went to his lodging.

Chapter IV

Two days later, Mary was finishing the sketch which Mrs Herbert had interrupted. Something was wrong with her: at every sound in the house she changed color and stopped to listen. Suddenly the door was opened; and a housemaid entered, rigid with indignation.

“Oh Clara, you frightened me. What is it?”

“If you please, Miss, is it my place to be called names and swore at by the chootor?”

“Why? What has happened?”

“Master gave me a note after breakfast to give Mr Jack, Miss. He was not in his room then; so I left it on the table. As soon as I heard him moving about, I went and asked him had he got it. The answer I got — begging your pardon, Miss — was, ‘Go to the devil, you jade.’ If I am expected to put up with that from the likes of him, I should wish to give warning.”

“I am very sorry, Clara. Why did he behave so? Did you say anything rude to him?”

“Not likely, Miss. I hope I respect myself more than to stop and bandy words. His door was wide open; and he had his portmanteau in the middle of the floor, and was heaping his things into it as fast as he could. He was grinding his teeth, too, and looked reg’lar wicked.”

“Well, Clara, as Mr Jack will be leaving very soon, I think you had better pass it over.”

“Indeed, Miss? Is Mr Jack going?”

“Yes,” said Mary, turning to her easel.

“Oh!” said the housemaid slowly. After lingering a moment in vain for further information, she hastened to the kitchen to tell the news. She had closed the door; but it did not fasten, and presently a draught from an open window in the hall blew it softly open. Though Mary wanted it shut, so that Jack should not see her if he passed on his way out, she was afraid to stir. She had never been so unreasonably nervous in her life before; and she sat there helpless pretending to draw until she heard the dreaded footstep on the stairs. Her heart beat in a terrible crescendo as the steps approached, passed, stopped, returned, and entered the room. When she forced herself to look up, he was standing there eying her, with her father’s letter in his hand.

“What does this mean?” he said.

Mary glanced round as it to escape from his eyes but had to look at him as she replied faintly, “You had better ask Mr Sutherland.”

“Mr Sutherland has nothing to do with it. You are mistress here.”

He waited long enough for an answer to shew that she had none to make. Then, shaking his head, he deliberately tore the letter into fragments. That stung her into saying:

“I do not wish to pursue the subject with you.”

“I have not asked your leave,” he replied. “I give you a lesson for the benefit cf the next wretch that will hold my position at the mercy of your ignorant caprice. You have spoiled the labor of the past three months for me; upset my plans; ruined me, for aught I know. Tell your father, who wants to discharge me at the end of the month, that I discharge myself now. I am not a dog, to sit at his table after the injustice he has done me.”

“He has done you no injustice, Mr Jack. He has a perfect right to choose who shall remain in his household. And I think he has acted rightly. So does Mr Herbert.”

Jack laughed gruffly. “Poor devil!” he said, “he fancies he can give ideas to the world because a few great men have given some to him. I am sorry I let his stiff manners put me out of temper with him the other night. He hates me instinctively because he feels in me what he misses in himself. But you ought to know better. Why, he hated that drunken rascal I had here, because he could handle his clarinet like a man with stuff in him. I have no more time for talking now. I have been your friend and have worked hard with your brother for your sake, because I thought you helped me to this place when I was desperately circumstanced. But now I shall not easily forgive you.” He shook his head again at her, and walked out, shutting the door behind him. The housemaid was in the hall. “My portmanteau and a couple of other things are on the landing outside my door,” he said, stopping as he passed her. “You will please give them to the man I send.”

“And by whose orders am I to trouble myself about your luggage, pray?”

Jack turned and slowly advanced upon her until she, retreating, stood against the wall. “By my orders, Mrs. Boldface,” he said. “Do as you are bid — and paid for, you hussy.”

“Well, certainly,” began the housemaid, as he turned away, “that’s—”

Jack halted and looked round wickedly at her. She retired quickly, grumbling. As he left the house, Herbert, coming in at the gate, was surprised to see him laughing heartily; for he had never seen him in good humor before.

“Good morning, Mr Jack,” said Adrian as they passed.

“Goodbye,” said Jack, derisively. And he went on. Before Adrian reached the doorstep, he heard the other roaring with laughter in the road.

Jack, when he had had his laugh out, walked quickly away, chuckling, and occasionally shaking his fist at the sky. When he came to Colonel Beatty’s house, he danced fantastically past the gate, snapping his fingers. He laughed boisterously at this performance at intervals until he came into the streets. Here, under the eye of the town, he was constrained to behave himself less remarkably; and the constraint made him so impatient that he suddenly gave up an intention he had formed of taking a lodging there, and struck off to the railway station at Slough.

“When is there a train to London?” he said, presenting himself at the booking-office.

“There’s one going now,” replied the clerk coolly.

“Now!” exclaimed Jack. “Give me a ticket — third class — single.”

“Go to the other window. First class only here.”

“First class, then,” cried Jack, exasperated. “Quick.” And he pushed in a half sovereign.

The clerk, startled by Jack’s voice, hastily gave him a ticket and an installment of the change. Jack left the rest, and ran to the platform just in time to hear the engine whistle.

“Late, sir. You’re late,” said a man in the act of slamming the barrier. By way of reply, Jack dragged it violently back and rushed after the departing train. There was a shout and a rush of officials to stop him; and one of them seized him, but, failing to hold him, was sent reeling by the collision. The next moment Jack opened the door of a first-class carriage, and plunged in in great disorder. The door was shut after him by an official, who stood on the footboard to cry out, “You will be summonsed for this, sir, so you shall. You shall be sum—”

“Go to the deuce,” retorted Jack, in a thundering voice. As the man jumped off, he turned from the door, and found himself confronted by a tall thin old gentleman, sprucely dressed, who cried in a high voice:

“Sir, this is a private compartment. I have engaged this compartment. You have no business here.”

“You should have had the door locked then,” said Jack, with surly humor, seating himself, and folding his arms with an air of concentrated doggedness.

“I — I consider your intrusion most unwarrantable — most unjustifiable,” continued the the gentleman.

Jack chuckled too obviously, at the old gentleman’s curious high voice and at his discomfiture. Then, deferring a little to white hairs, he said, “Well, well: I can get into another carriage at the next station.”

“You can do nothing of the sort, sir,” cried the gentleman, more angrily than before. “This is an express train. It does not stop.”

“Then I do, — where I am,” aid Jack curtly, with a new and more serious expression of indignation; for he had just remarked that there was one other person in the carriage — a young lady.

“I will not submit to this, sir. I will stop the train.”

“Stop it then,” said Jack, scowling at him. “But let me alone.”

The gentleman, with flushes of color coming and going on his withered cheek, turned to the alarum and began to read the printed instructions as to its use. “You had better not stop the train, father,” said the lady. “You will only get fined. The half-crown you gave the guard does not—”

“Hold your tongue,” said the gentleman. “I desire you not to speak to me, Magdalen, on any pretext whatsoever.” Jack, who had relented a little on learning the innocent relationship between his fellow travellers glanced at the daughter. She was a tall lady with chestnut hair, burnished by the rays which came aslant through the carriage window. Her eyes were bright hazel; her mouth small, but with full lips, the upper one, like her nose, tending to curl upward. She was no more than twenty; but in spite of her youth and trivial style of beauty, her manner was self-reliant and haughty. She did not seem to enjoy her journey, and took no pains to conceal her ill-humor, which was greatly increased by the rebuke which her father had addressed to her. Her costume of maize color and pale blue was very elegant, and harmonized admirably with her fine complexion. Jack repeated his glance at short intervals until he discovered that her face was mirrored in the window next which he sat. He then turned away from her, and studied her appearance at his ease.

Meanwhile the gentleman, grumbling in an undertone, had seated himself without touching the alarum, and taken up a newspaper. Occasionally he looked over at his daughter, who, with her cheek resting on her glove, was frowning at the landscape as they passed swiftly through it. Presently he uttered an exclamation of impatience, and blew off some dust and soot which had just settled on his paper. Then he rose, and shut the window.

“Oh, pray don’t close it altogether, father,” said the lady. “It is too warm. I am half suffocated as it is.”

“Magdalen: I forbid you to speak to me.”

Magdalen pouted, and shook her shoulders angrily. Her father then went to the other door of the carriage, and closed the window there also. Jack instantly let it down with a crash, and stared truculently at him.

“Sir,” said the gentleman: “if, you — if sir — had you politely requested me not to close the window, I should not have — I would have respected your objection.”

“And if you, sir,” returned Jack, “had politely asked my leave before meddling with my window, I should, with equal politeness, have conveyed to you my invincible determination to comply with the lady’s reasonable request.”

“Ha! Indeed!” said the gentleman loftily. “I shall not — ah — dispute the matter with you.” And he resumed his seat, whilst his daughter, who had looked curiously at Jack for a moment, turned again to the landscape with her former chagrined expression.

For some time after this they travelled in peace: the old gentleman engaged with his paper: Jack chuckling over his recent retort. The speed of the train now increased speed; and the musician became exhilarated as the telegraph poles shot past, hardly visible.

When the train reached a part of the line at which the rails were elevated on iron chairs, the smooth grinding of the wheels changed to a rhythmic clatter. The racket became deafening; and Jack’s exhilaration had risen to a reckless excitement, when he was recalled to his senses by the gentleman, whom he had forgotten, calling out:

“Sir: will you oblige me by stopping those infernal noises.”

Jack, confused, suddenly ceased to grind his teeth and whistle through them. Then he laughed and said good-humoredly, “I beg your pardon: I am a composer.”

“Then have the goodness to remember that you are not now in a printing office,” said the gentleman, evidently Supposing him to be a compositor. “You are annoying this lady, and driving me distracted with your hissing.”

“I do not mind it in the least” said the lady stubbornly.

“Magdalen: I have already desired you twice to be silent.”

“I shall speak if I please,” she muttered. Her father pretended not to hear her, and sat still for the next ten minutes, during which he glanced at Jack several times, with an odd twinkle in his eye. Then he said:

“What did you say you were, sir, may I ask?”

“A composer.”

“You are a discomposer, sir,” cried the old gentleman man promptly. “You are a discomposer.” And he began a chirping laughter, which Jack, after a pause of wonder, drowned with a deep-toned roar of merriment. Even the lady, determined as she was to be sulky, could not help smiling. Her father then took up the newspaper, and hid his face with it, turning his back to Jack, who heard him occasionally laughing to himself.

“I wish I had something to read,” said the young lady after some time, turning discontentedly from the window.

“A little reflexion will do you no harm,” said her parent. “A little reflexion, and, I will add, Magdalen, a little repentance perhaps.”

“I have nothing but disappointment and misery to reflect about, and I have no reason to be repentant. Please get me a novel at the next station — or give me some money, and I will get one myself.”

“Certainly not. You are not to be trusted with money. I forbid you ever to open a novel again. It is from such pestilential nonsense that you got the ideas which led to your present disgraceful escapade. Now, I must beg of you not to answer me, Magdalen. I do not wish to enter into a discussion with you, particularly before strangers.”

“Then do not make strangers believe that—”

“Hold your tongue, Magdalen. Do you disobey me intentionally? You should be ashamed to speak to me.”

The young lady bit her lip and reddened. “I think—” she began.

“Be silent.” cried her father, seizing his umbrella and rapping it peremptorily on the floor. Jack sprang up.

“Sir,” he said: “how dare you behave so to a lady?”

“This lady is my daughter, k — k — confound your impertinence,” replied the other irascibly.

“Then don’t treat her as if she were your dog,” retorted Jack “I am an artist, sir — an artist — a poet; and I will not permit a young and beautiful woman to be tyrannized in my presence.”

“It I were a younger man—” began the gentleman, grasping his umbrella

“If you were,” shouted Jack, “you would have nothing but tenderness and respect for the lady; or else, by the power of sound, I would pulverize you—” allegro martellatissimo — on the spot.”

“Do not threaten me, sir,” said the old gentleman spiritedly, rising and confronting his adversary. “What right have you to interfere with the affairs of strangers — perfect strangers? Are you mad, sir; or are you merely ignorant?”

“Neither. I am as well versed in the usages of the world as you; and I have sworn not to comply with them when they demand a tacit tolerance of oppression. The laws of society, sir, are designed to make the world easy for cowards and liars. And lest by the infirmity of my nature I should become either the one or the other, or perhaps both, I never permit myself to witness tyranny without rebuking it, or to hear falsehood without exposing it. If more people were of my mind, you would never have dared to take it for granted that I would witness your insolence towards your daughter without interfering to protect her.”

To this speech the old gentleman could find no reply. He stared at Jack a few moments, and then, saying, “I request you to mind your own business, sir. I have nothing to say to you,” went back in dudgeon to his seat. The lady then leaned forward and said haughtily, “Your interference is quite unnecessary, thank you. I can take care of myself.”

“Aye,” retorted Jack, frowning at her: “you are like other children. I was not such a fool as to expect gratitude from you.” The girl blushed and looked away towards the landscape. Her father again stared at Jack, who resumed his seat with a bounce; folded his arms; and glowered. Five minutes later the train stopped; and the guard came for their tickets.

“I relied on you,” said the gentleman to him, for an empty carriage. Instead of that, I have had a most unpleasant journey. I have been annoyed — damnably annoyed.”

“Ha! ha!” roared Jack. “Ha! ha! ha!”

The guard turned sternly to him, and said, “Ticket, sir, please,” as though he expected the ticket to prove a third class one. When he received it he held it between his lips, whilst he opened a memorandum and then continued, “I want your name and address, sir, please.”

“What for?”

“For getting in when the train was in motion, sir, at Slough. The Company’s orders are strict against it. You might have been killed, sir.”

“And what the devil is it to the Company whether I am killed or not?”

“Be quick, sir, please,” said the guard, uncertain whether to coax or be peremptory. “Our time is up.”

Jack looked angry for a moment; then shrugged his shoulders and said, “My name is Jack; and I live nowhere.”

The man let his book fall to his side, and mutely appealed to the old gentleman to witness the treatment he was enduring.

“Come, sir,” be said, “what’s the use in this? We’ll only have to detain you; and that won’t be pleasant for either of us.”

“Is that a threat” said Jack fiercely.

“No, sir, There’s no one threatening you. We’re all gentlemen here. I only do my duty, as you understand, sir — none better. What is your name, sir?”

“My name is Jack. I tell you. Mr Owen Jack.”

“Oh! I didn’t take it rightly at first. Now your address, sir, please.”

“I have none. Did you never hear of a man without any home? If the place where 1 slept last night, and where my property is, will do you, you can put care of Mr Charles Sutherland, Beulah, Windsor. Here’s a card for you.”

“I know Mr Sutherland well, sir,” said the guard, putting up his book.”

“And by Heaven,” said Jack, vehemently, “if I hear another word of this, I will complain of you for taking half-a-crown from this gentleman and then shutting me and a lady in with him for a whole journey. I believe him to be insane.”

“Guard,” screamed the old gentleman, quite beside himself. But the guard, disconcerted at Jack’s allusion to the half-crown, hurried away and started the train. Nevertheless the gentleman would not be silenced. “How dare you, sir, speak of me as being insane?” he said.

“How dare you, sir, grumble at a journey which has only been marred by your own peevishness? I have enjoyed myself greatly. I have enjoyed the sunshine, the scenery, the rhythm of the train, and the company of my fellow travellers — except you, sir; and even your interruptions are no worse than untimely pleasantries. I never enjoyed a journey more in my life.”

“You are the most impertinent man I ever met, sir.”

“Precisely my opinion of you, sir. You commenced hostilities; and if you have caught a Tartar you have only yourself to thank.”

“You broke into my carriage.”

“Your carriage, sir! My carriage just as much as yours — more so. You are an unsocial person, sir.”

“Enough said, sir,” said the gentleman. “It does not matter. Enough said, if you please.”

“Well, sir,” said Jack, more good humoredly, “I apologize. I have been unnaturally repressed for the last three months; and I exploded this morning like a bombshell. The force of the explosion was not quite spent when I met you; and perhaps I had less regard for your seniority than I might have shewn at another time.”

“My seniority has nothing to do with the question, sir. My age is no concern of yours.”

“Hush, father,” whispered the lady. “Do not reply to him. It is not dignified.”

The old gentleman was about to make some angry reply, when the train ran alongside the platform at Paddington, and a porter opened the door, crying, “Ensom or foa’ w’eol, sir.”

“Get me a hansom, porter.”

“Right, sir. Luggage, sir?”

“There is a tin box,” said the lady, “a brown one With the initials M. B. on it.”

The porter touched his cap and went away. The gentleman got out, and stood wiih his daughter at the carriage door, awaiting the return of the porter. Jack slowly followed, and stood, irresolute, near them, the only person there without business or destination.

“I wonder what is delaying that fellow with our cab” said the old gentleman, after about fifteen seconds. “The vagabond has been picked up by someone else, and has forgotten us. Are we to stand here all day?”

“He will be here presently” said Magdalen. “He has not had time—”

“He has had time to call twenty cabs since. Remain here until I return, Madge. Do you hear?”

“Yes.” said the girl. He looked severely at her, and walked away towards the luggage van. Her color rose as she looked after him. Meanwhile the porter had placed the box on a cab; and he now returned to Magdalen.

“This way, Miss, W’ere’s the genlman?” She looked quickly at the porter; then towards the crowd in which her father had disappeared; then, after a moment of painful hesitation, at Jack, who was still standing near.

“Never mind the gentleman,” she said to the porter: “he is not coming with me.” And as he turned to lead the way to the cab, she pulled off her glove; took a ring from her finger; and addressed Jack with a burning but determined face.

“I have no money to pay for my cab. Will you give me some in exchange for this ring — a few shillings will be enough? Pray do not delay me. Yes or no?”

Jack lost only a second in staring amazedly at her before he thrust his hand in his pocket, and drew out a quantity of gold, silver and bronze coin, more than she could grasp with ease. “Keep the ring,” he said. “Away with you.”

“You must take it,” she said impatiently. “And I do not need all this money.”

“Thousand thunders!” exclaimed Jack with sudden excitement, “here is your father. Be quick.”

She looked round, scared; but as Jack pushed her unceremoniously towards the cab, she recovered herself and hurried into the hansom.

“Here, porter: give this ring to that gentleman,” she said, giving the man a shilling and the ring. “Why doesn’t he drive on?” she added, as the cab remained motionless, and the porter stood touching his cap.

“Whereto, Miss?”

“Bond Street,” she cried. “As fast as possible. Do make him start at once.”

“Bond Street, “ shouted Jack commandingly to the driver. “Make haste. Double fare. Prestissimo!” And the cab dashed out of the station as if the horse had caught Jack’s energy.

The lady gev me this for you, sir,” said the porter. Yes,” said Jack, “Thank you.” It was an old-fashioned ring, with a diamond and three emeralds, too small for his little finger. He pocketed it, and was considering what he should do next, when the old gentleman, no longer impatient and querulous, but pale and alarmed, came by, looking anxiously about him. When he saw Jack he made a movement as though to approach him, but checked himself and resumed his search in another direction. Jack began feel compunction; for the gentleman’s troubled expression was changing into one of grief and fear. The crowd and bustle were diminishing. Soon there was no difficulty in examining separately all the passengers who remained on the platform. Jack resolved to go lest he betray the young lady’s destination to her father; but he had walked only a few yards, when, hearing a voice behind him say “This is him, sir,” he turned and found himself face to face with the old gentleman. The porter stood by, saying, “How could I know, sir? I seen the gen’lman in the carriage with you, an’ I seen the lady speakin to him arterwards. She took money off him and gev him a ring, as I told you. If youd left the luggage to me, sir, ‘stead of going arter it to the wrong van, you wouldnt ha’ lost her.

“Very well: that will do.” The porter made a pretence of retiring but remained within hearing.

“Now, sir,” continued the gentleman, addressing Jack, “I know what you are, If you dont tell me once at once, the name and address of the theatrical scoundrels to whom you are spy and kidnapper: by — by — by God! I’ll give you to the nearest policeman.”

“Sir,” said Jack sternly: “if your daughter has run away from you. it is your own fault for not treating her kindly. The porter has told you what happened between us. I know no more of the matter than he does.”

“I don’t believe you. You followed her from Windsor. The porter saw you give her” (here the old gentleman choked)— “saw what passed here just now.”

“Yes, sir. You leave your daughter penniless, and compel her to offer her ornaments for sale to a stranger at a railway station. By my soul, you are a nice man to have charge of a young girl.”

“My daughter is incapable of speaking to a stranger. You are in the pay of one of those infernal theatrical agents with whom she has been corresponding. But I’ll unmask you, sir. I’ll unmask you.”

“If you were not an inveterately wrongheaded old fool,” said Jack hotly, “you would not mistake a man of genius for a crimp. You ought to be ashamed of your temper. You are collecting a crowd too. Do you want the whole railway staff to know that you have driven your daughter away?”

“You lie, you villain,” cried the gentleman, seizing him by the collar, “you lie. How dare you, you — you — pock-marked ruffian, say that I drove away my daughter? I have been invariably kind to her — no parent more so. She was my special favorite. If you repeat that slander, I’ll — I’ll “ He shook his fist in Jack’s face, and released him. Jack, who had suffered the grasp on his collar without moving, turned away deeply offended, and buttoned his coat. Then, as the other was about to recommence, he interrupted him by walking away. The gentleman followed him promptly.

“You shall not escape by running off,” he said, panting.

You have insulted me, sir,” said Jack. “If you address another word to me, I’ll hand you to the police. As I cannot protect myself against a man of your years, I will make the law protect me.”

The gentleman hesitated. Then his eyes brightened; and he said, “Then call the police. Call them quickly. You have a ring of mine about you — an heirloom of my family. You shall account for it. Ah! I have you now, you vagabond.”

“Pshaw!” said Jack, recovering from a momentary check, “she sent me the ring by the hands of that porter, although I refused it. I might as well accuse her of stealing my money.”

“It shall be refunded at once,” said the gentleman, reddening and pulling out his purse. “How much did you give her”’

“How should I know?” said Jack with scorn. “I do not count what I give to women who are in need. I gave her what I found in my pocket. Are you willing to give me what you find in yours?”

“By heaven, you are an incredibly impudent swindler,” cried the gentleman, looking at him with inexpressible feeling.

“Come, gentlemen. “ said an official, advancing between them, “couldn’t you settle your little difference somewhere else?*

“I am a passenger,” said Jack; “and am endeavoring to leave the station. If it is your business to keep order here, I wish you would rid me of this gentleman. He has annoyed me ever since the train started from Slough.”

“I am in a most painful position,” said the old gentleman, with emotion. “I have lost my child here; and this man knows her whereabouts. He will tell me nothing; and I — I don’t know what to do.” Then, turning to Jack with a fresh explosion of wrath, he cried, “Once for all, you villain, will you tell me who your employers are?”

“Once for all,” replied Jack, “I will tell you nothing, because I have nothing to tell you. You refuse to believe me; you are infernally impertinent to me; you talk about my employers and of spying and kidnapping: I think you are mad.”

“Are you not a theatrical agent? Answer that.”

“No. I am not a theatrical agent. As I told you before, I am a composer and teacher of music. If you have any pupils for me, I shall be glad to teach them: if not, go your way, and let me go mine. I am tired of you.”

“There, sir,” said the official, “the gentleman can’t answer you no fairer nor that. If you have a charge to make against him, why, charge him. If not, as he says, you had better move on. Let me call you a cab, and you can follow the young lady. That’s the best thing you can do. She might run as far as Scotland while you’re talking. Send down a ‘ansom there, Bill, will you?”

The man laid his hand persuasively on the arm of the old gentleman, who hesitated, with his lip trembling.

“Sir,” said Jack, with sudden dignity: “on my honor I am a perfect stranger to your daughter and her affairs. You know all that passed between us. If you do not wish to lose sight of me, give me your card; and I will send you my address as soon as I have one.”

“I request — I — I implore you not to trifle with me in this matter,” said the gentleman, slowly taking out his card case. “It would be a — a heartless thing to do. Here is my card. If you have any information, or can acquire any, it shall be liberally paid for — most liberally paid.

Jack, offended afresh, looked at him with scorn; snatched the card, and turned on his heel. The gentleman looked wistfully after him, sighed, shivered, and got into the cab.

The card was inscribed, “Mr. Sigismund Brailsford, Kensington Palace Gardens.”

Chapter V

A fortnight later the Sutherlands, accompanied by Mrs Beatty, were again in London, on their way to the Isle of Wight. It had been settled that Herbert should go to Ventnor for a month with his mother, so that Mary and he might sketch the scenery of the island together. He had resisted this arrangement at first on the ground that Mrs Herbert’s presence would interfere with his enjoyment; but Mary, who had lost her own mother when an infant, had ideas of maternal affection which made Adrian’s unfilial feeling shocking to her. She entreated him to come to Ventnor; and he yielded, tempted by the prospect of working beside her, and foreseeing that he could easily avoid his mother’s company whenever it became irksome to him.

One day, whilst they were still in London at the hotel in Onslow Gardens, Mr Sutherland, seeing his daughter with her hat and cloak on, asked whither she was going.

“I am going to the Brailsfords’, to see Madge,” she replied.

“Now what do you want to go there for?” grumbled Mr. Sutherland. “I do not like your associating with that girl.”

“Why, papa? Are you afraid that she will make me run away and go on the stage?”

“I didn’t say anything of the kind. But she can’t be a very right-minded young woman, or she wouldn’t have done so herself. However, I have no objection to your calling on the family. They are very nice people — well connected; and Mr. Brailsford is a clever man. But don’t go making a companion of Madge.”

“I shall not have the opportunity, I am sorry to say. Poor Madge! Nobody has a good word for her.”

Mr. Sutherland muttered a string t>f uncomplimentary epithets; but Mary went out without heeding him. At Kensington Palace Gardens she found Magdalen Brailsford alone.

“They are all out,” said Magdalen when Mary had done kissing her. “They are visiting, or shopping, or doing something else equally intellectual.I am supposed to be in disgrace; so I am never asked to go with them. As I would not go if they begged me on their knees, I bear the punishment with fortitude.”

“But what have you done, Madge? Won’t you tell me? Aunt Jane said that her conscience would not permit her to pour such a story into my young ears; and then, of course, I refused to hear it from anybody but yourself, much to Aunt Jane’s disgust; for she was burning to tell me. Except that you ran away and went on the stage, I know nothing.

“There is nothing else to know; for that is all that happened.”

“But how did it come about?”

“Will you promise not to tell?”

“I promise faithfully.”

“You must keep your promise; for I have accomplices who are not suspected, and who will help me when I repeat the exploit, as I fully intend to do the very instant I see my way to success. Do you know where we lived before we came to this house?”

“No. You have lived here ever since I knew you.”

“We had lodgings in Gower Street. Mary, did you ever ride in an omnibus?”

“No. But I should not be in the least ashamed to do so if I had occasion.”

“How would you like to have to make five pounds worth of clothes last you for two years?”

“I should not like that.”

“Lots of people have to do it. We had, when we lived in Gower Street. Father wrote for the papers; and we never had any money, and were always in debt. But we went to the theatres — with orders, of course — much oftener than we do now; and we either walked home or took our carriage, the omnibus. We were recklessly extravagant, and thought nothing of throwing away a shilling on flowers and paper fans to decorate the rooms. I am sure we spent a fortune on three-penny cretonne, to cover the furniture when its shabbiness became downright indecent. We were very fond of dwelling on the lavish way we would spend money if father ever came into the Brailsford property, which seemed the most unlikely thing in the world. But it happened, as unlikely things often do. All the rest of the family — I mean all of it that concerned us — were drowned in the Solent in a yacht accident; and we found ourselves suddenly very rich, and, as I suppose you have remarked — especially in Myra — very stingy. Poor father, whom we used to revile as a miser in Gower Street, is the only one of us who spends money as if he was above caring about it. But the worst of it is that we have got respectable, and taken to society — at least, society has taken to us; — and we have returned the compliment. I haven’t, though. I can’t stand these Kensington people with their dances and at-homes. It’s not what I call living really. In Grower Street we used to know a set that had some brains. We gave ourselves airs even then; hut still on Sunday evenings we used to have plenty of people with us to supper whom you are not likely to meet here. One of them was a man named Tarleton, who made money as a theatrical agent and lost it as a manager alternately.”

“And you fell in love with him, of course,” said Mary.

“Bosh! Fell in love with old Tommy Tarleton! This is not a romance, but a prosaic Gower Street narrative. I never thought about him after we came here until a month ago, when I saw that he was taking a company to Windsor. I always wanted to go on the stage, because nowadays a woman must be either an actress or nothing. So I wrote to him for an engagement, and sent him my photograph.”

“Oh, Madge!”

“Why not? His company was playing opera boufTe; and I knew he wanted good looks as much as talent. You don’t suppose I sent it as a love token. He wrote back that he had no part open that I could take, but that if I wished to accustom myself to the stage and would find my own dresses, he would let me walk on every night in the chorus, and perhaps find me a small part to understudy.”

“Very kind, indeed. And what did you say to his noble offer?”

“I accepted it, and was very glad to get it. It was better than sitting here quarreling with the girls, and going over the same weary argument with father about disgracing the family. I managed it easily enough, after all. There is a woman who keeps a lodging house in Church Street here, who is a sister of the landlady at Gower Street, and knows all about us. She has a second sister whose daughter is a ballet girl, and who is used to theatres. I ran away to Church Street — five minutes’ walk; told Polly what I had done; and made her send for Mrs Wilkins, the other sister, whom I carried off to Windsor as chaperon that evening. But the company turned out to be a third-rate one; and I wasn’t comfortable with them: they were rather rowdy. However, I did not stay long. I was recognized on the very first night by someone — I don’t know whom — who told Colonel Beatty. He wrote to my father; and I was captured on the third day. You can imagine the scene when the poor old governor walked suddenly into our lodging. He tried to be shocked and stern, and of course only succeeded in being furious. I was stubborn — I can be very mulish when I like; but I was getting tired of walking on in the chorus at night and spending the day with Mrs Wilkins; so I consented to go back with him. He took my purse, which I was foolish enough to leave within his reach whilst I was putting on my bonnet, and so left me without a farthing, helplessly dependent on him. He would not give it me back; and to revenge myself I became very uncivil to him; and then he forbade me to speak. I took him at his word, and made him still madder by taking no notice of the homilies on duty and respectability which he poured forth as we drove to the train.”

“Yes: I can quite imagine that. And so you came home and returned to the ways of well conducted girls.”

“Not at all. You have only heard the prologue to my real adventure. When we got to the railway station, father, who intended to preach at me during the whole journey, bribed the guard to prevent people from coming into our compartment. The train started, and I had just been requested to attend to something very that must be said to me, when there was an uproar on the platform, and a man burst headlong into the carriage, sat down, folded his arms, and stared majestically at father, who began to abuse him furiously for intruding on us. They quarreled all the way up to London. When they had exhausted the subject of our carriage being private, the man objected to the window being shut — I think because I had done so just before, though perhaps it was more from love of contradiction. Then father objected to his grinding his teeth. Then I interfered and was bidden to hold my tongue. Up jumped the man and asked father what he meant by speaking so to me. He even said — you will not repeat this, please, Mary.”

“No. Why? What did he say?”

“He said — it sounded ridiculous — that he would not permit a young and beautiful woman to be tyrannized over.”

“Oh! Was he very handsome?”

“N — no. He was not conventionally handsome; but there was something about him that I cannot very well describe. It was a sort of latent power. However, it does not matter, as I suppose I shall never see him again.”

“I think I can understand what you mean,” said Mary thoughtfully. “There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.”

“This man was not in the least like your Adrian, though, Mary. No two people could be more different.”

“I know. I was thinking of a very different person.”

“Father speaks of him as though he were a monster; but that is perfect nonsense.”

“Well, what was the upshot of this interference?”

“Oh, I thought they would have come to blows at first. Father would fight duels every day if they were still in fashion. But the man made an admirable speech which shewed me that his opinions were exactly the same as mine; and father could say nothing in reply. Then they accused each other of being insane, and kept exchanging insults until we came to Paddington, where the guard wanted to give the man to the police for getting into the train after it had started. At last we all got out; and then I committed my capital crime — it really was a dreadful thing to do. But ever since father had taken my purse and made a prisoner of me, I had been thinking of how I could give him the slip and come home just how and when I pleased. Besides, I was quite resolved to apply to a London agent for a regular engagement in some theatre. So when father got into a passion about my box not being found instantly, and went off to look for it, leaving me by myself, the idea of escaping and going to the agent at once occurred to me. I made up my mind and unmade it twenty times in every second. I should not have hesitated a moment if I had had my purse but as it was, I had only my ring;, so that I should have had to stop the cab at the nearest pawnbrokers and I was ashamed to go into such a place — although we sometimes used to send Mrs. Wilkina there, without letting father know, in the Gower Street days. Then the porter came up and said that the cab was waiting and I knew he would expect something then and there from me if I went off by myself. What do you think I did? I went straight up the the man who had travelled with us — he was standing close by, watching me, I think — and asked him to buy my ring.”

“Well. Madge: really — :”

“It was an impulse I don’t know what put it into my head but the desperate necessity paying the porter hurried me into obeying it. I said I had no money and asked him for a little in exchange for the ring. The man looked at me in the most terrifying way; and just as I was expecting him to seize me and deliver me up to father, he plunged his hand into his pocket and gave me a handful of money. He would not count it, nor touch the ring. I was insisting on his taking either the ring or the money, when he suddenly shouted at me that father was coming, and bundled me me into the cab before I had collected my wits. Then he startled the driver with another shout; and away went the cab. I managed to give the ring to the porter for him. I drove to the agents in Bond Street, and on my way counted the money: two sovereigns, three half-sovereigns, thirteen and sixpence in silver, and seven pennies.”

“Four pounds, four, and a penny,” said Mary.

“He must have been mad. But there was something chivalrous about it, especially for a nineteenth century incident at Paddington.”

“I think it was sheer natural nobility of heart, Mary. Father enrages me by saying that he was a thief, and made fifty pounds profit out of my innocence. As if his refusing the ring was not an absolute proof to the contrary. He got our address from father afterwards, and promised to send us his; but he has never done so.”

“I wonder why. He certainly ought to. Your ring is worth a great deal more than four pounds.”

“He might not wish to give it up to my father, as it was mine. If he wishes to keep it he is welcome. I am sure he deserves it. Mind: he refused it after giving me the money.”

“If you had a nose like mine, and wore a pince-nez, I doubt whether you would have found him so generous. I believe he fell in love with you.”

“Nonsense. Who ever knew a man to sacrifice all his money — all he had in the world, perhaps — for the sake of love? I know what men are too well. Besides, he was quite rude to me once in the carriage.”

“Well, since he has the ring, and intends to keep it, he has the best of the bargain. Go on with your own adventures. What did the agents say?”

“They all took half-crowns from me, and put my name on their books. They are to write to me if they can procure me an engagement; but I saw enough to convince me that there is not much chance. They are all very agreeable — that is, they thought themselves so — except one grumpy old man, who asked me what I expected when I could neither walk nor speak. That, and my sensations on the stage at Windsor, convinced me that I need some instruction; and I have set Mrs Simpson, the woman in Church Street, to find somebody who can teach me. However, to finish my story, when I saw that there was nothing more to be done that day or the next either, I told the cabman to drive me home, where I found father nearly in hysterics. As soon as the family recovered from their amazement at seeing me, we began to scold and abuse one another. They were so spiteful that father at last took my part; and poor mother vainly tried to keep the peace. At last they retreated, one by one crying, and left me alone with father. I fancy we gave them as good as they brought; for no allusion has been made to my escapade since.

Mary looked at her friend for a while. Then she said, “Madge: you are quite mad. There is not a doubt of it: that episode of the ring settles the question finally. I suppose you regard this bedlamite adventure as the most simple and natural thing in the world.”

“When I have my mind made up to do something, it seems the most natural thing in the world to go and do it. I hope you are not going to lecture me for adopting a profession, after all your rhapsodies about high art and so forth.”

“But opera bouffe is not high art, Madge. If you had appeared in one of Shakespeare’s characters, I should sympathize with you.”

“Yes, make a fool of myself as a lady amateur! I have no more ambition to play Shakespeare than you have to paint Transfigurations. Now, don’t begin to argue about Art. I have had enough of argument lately to last me for life.”

“And you mean to persist?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Of course, if you have talent—”

“Which you don’t believe, although you can see nothing ridiculous in your own dreams of being another Claude Lorraine. You are just like Myra, with her pet formula of, ‘Well, Madge, the idea of you being able to act!’ Why should I not be able to act as well as anybody else? I intend to try, at any rate.”

“You need not be angry with me, Madge. I don’t doubt your cleverness; but an actress’s life must be a very queer one. And I never said I could paint better than Claude. If you knew how wretched my own productions seem to me, you—”

“Yes, yes: I know all that stuff of Adrian’s by heart. If you don’t like your own pictures, you may depend upon it no one else will. I am going to be an actress because I think I can act. You are going to be a painter because you think you can’t paint. So there’s an end of that. Would you mind coming over to Polly’s with me?”

“Who is Polly?”

“Our old landlady’s sister — my accomplice — the woman who keeps the lodging house in Church Street, Mrs Simpson.”

“You don’t mean to run away again?”

“No. At least not yet. But she has a lodger who teaches elocution; and as he is very poor, Mrs. Wilkins — Polly’s other sister and my late chaperon — thinks he would give me some cheap lessons. And I must have them very cheap, or else go without; for father will hardly trust me with a shilling now. He has never even given me back my purse I have only the remainder of the man’s money, and ten pounds that I had laid up.”

“And are you going toke a lesson today?”

“No, no. I only want to see the man and ask his terms. If I try to go alone, I shall be watched and suspected. With you I shall be safe: they regard you as a monument of good sense and propriety. If we meet any of the girls, and they ask where we are going, do not mention Church Street.”

“But how can w< evade them if they ask us?”

“We won’t evade them. We will tell them a lie.”

“I certainly will not, Madge.

“I certainly will. If people interfere with my liberty, and ask have no business to ask, I will meet force with fraud, and fool them to the top of their bent, as your friend Shakespeare says. You need not look shocked. You, who are mistress of your house, and rule your father with a rod of iron, are no judge of my position. Put on your hat, and come along. We can walk there in five minutes.”

“I will go with but I shall not be a party to any deception.

Madge made a face, but got her bonnet without further words. They went out together, and traversed the passage from Kensington Palace Gardens to Church Street, where Magdalen led the way to a shabby house, with a card inscribed Furnished Apartments in the window.

“Is Mrs Simpson in her room?” said Magdalen, entering unceremoniously as soon as the door was opened.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the servant, whose rule it was to address women in bonnets as ma’am, and women in hats as Miss. “She ‘ave moved to the second floor since you was here last. The parlors is let.”

“I will go up,” said Magdalen. “Come on, Mary.” And she ran upstairs, followed more slowly by Mary, who thought the house close and ill kept, and gathered her cloak about her to prevent it touching the banisters. When they reached the second floor, they knocked at the door; but no one answered. Above them was a landing, accessible by a narrow uncarpeted stair. They could hear a shrill voice in conversation with a deep one on the third floor, Whilst they waited, the shrill voice rose higher and higher; and the deep voice began to growl ominously.

“A happy pair,” whispered Mary. “We had better go downstairs and get the servant to find Mrs Simpson.”

“No: wait a little. That is Polly’s voice, I am sure. Hark!”

The door above was opened violently and a powerful voice resounded, saying, “Begone, you Jezebel.”

“The man!” exclaimed Madge.

Mr Jack!” exclaimed Mary. And they looked wonderingly at one another, and listened.

“How dare you offer me sich language, sir? Do you know whose ‘ouse this is?”

“I tell you once for all that I am neither able nor willing to pay you one farthing. Hold your tongue until I have finished.” This command was emphasized by a stamp that shook the floor. “I have eaten nothing today; and I cannot afford to starve. Here is my shirt. Here is my waistcoat. Take them — come! take them, or I’ll stuff them down your throat — and give them to your servant to pawn: she has pawned the shirt before; and let her get me something to eat with the money. Do you hear?”

“I will not have my servant go to the pawnshop for you and get my house a bad name.”

“Then go and pawn them yourself. And do not come to this room again with your threats and complaints unless you wish to be strangled.*

“I’d like to see you lay a finger on me a married woman. Do you call yourself a gentleman—”

Here there was a low growl, a sound of hasty footprints, an inarticulate remonstrance, a checked scream, and then a burst of sobbing and then the words, “You’re as hard as a stone, Mr Jack. My poor little Rosie. Ohoo!”

“Stop that noise, you crocodile. What is the matter with you now?”

“My Rosie.”

“What is the matter with your Rosie? You are sniveling to have her back because she is happier in the country than stifling in this den with you, you ungovernable old hag.”

“God forgive you for that word — ohoo! She ain’t in the country.”

“Then where the devil is she; and what did you mean by telling me she was there?”

“She’s in the ‘ospittle. For the Lord’s sake don’t let it get out on me, Mr Jack, or I should have my house empty. The poor little darling took the scarlet fever; and — and—”

“And you deserve to be hanged for letting her catch it. Why didn’t you take proper care of her?”

“How could I help it, Mr. Jack? I’m sure if I could have took it myself instead—”

“I wish to Heaven you had, and the unfortunate child and everybody else might have been well rid of you.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Mr Jack. I may have spoke hasty to you; but its very hard to be owed money, and not be able to get the things for my blessed angel to be sent to the country in, and she going to be discharged on Friday. You needn’t look at me like that, Mr Jack. I wouldn’t deceive you of all people.”

“You would deceive your guardian angel — if you had one — for a shilling. Give me back those things. Here is a ring which you can pawn instead. It is worth something considerable, I suppose. Take what money you require for the child, and bring me the rest. But mind! Not one farthing of it shall you have for yourself, nor should you if I owed you ten years’ rent. I would not pawn it to save you from starvation. And get me some dinner, and some music paper — the same you used to get me, twenty-four staves to the page. Off with you. What are you gaping at?”

“Why, wherever did you get this ring, Mr. Jack?”

“That’s nothing to you. Take it away; and make haste with my dinner.”

“But did you buy it? Or was it—” The voice abruptly broke into a smothered remonstrance; and the landlady appeared on the landing, apparently pushed out by the shoulders. Then the lodger’s door slammed.

“Polly,” cried Magdalen impatiently. “Polly.”

“Lor’, Miss Madge!”

“Come down here. We have waited ten minutes for you.”

Mrs. Simpson came down, and brought her two visitors into her sitting-room on the second floor. “Won’t you sit down Miss?” she said to Mary. “Don’t pull that chair from the wall, Miss Madge, its leg is broke. Oh, dear! I’m greatly worrited, what with one thing and another.”

“We have been listening to a battle between you and the and the lodger upstairs” said Magdalen, “and you seemed to be getting the worst of it.”

“No one knows what I’ve gone through with that man.” said Mrs. Simpson, wiping her eyes. “He walked into the room a fortnight ago when I was out, without asking leave. Knocks at the door at one o’clock in the day and asks the girl if the garret is let to anyone. ‘No sir,’ says she. So he goes up and plants himself as if he owned the house. To be sure, she knew him of old; but that was all the more reason for keeping him out; for he never had a half-penny. The first thing he sent her to do was to pawn his watch. And the things I have to put up with from him! He thinks no more of calling me every name he can lay his tongue to, and putting me out of my own room than if he was a prince, and me his kitchen maid. He is as strong as a bull, and cares for nothing nor nobody but himself.”

“What is he?” said Magdalen. “His name is Jack, isn’t it?”

“Yes; and a fit name it is for him. He came here first, to my sorrow, last December, and took the garret for half-a-crown a week. He had a portmanteau then and some little money; and he was quiet enough for almost a month. But he kept very much to himself except for letting poor little Rosie play about his room, and teaching her little songs. You can’t think what a queer child she is, Miss Sutherland. I’m sure you’d say so if you saw Mr. Jack, the only lodger she took any fancy to. At last he sent the servant to pawn his things; and I, like a fool, was loath to see him losing his clothes, and offered to let the rent run if he could pay at the end of the month. Then it came out that he was in the music profession, and akshally expected to get pupils while he was living in a garret. I did a deal for him, although he was nothing to me. I got him a stationer’s daughter from High Street to teach. After six lessons, if you’ll believe it, Miss, and she as pleased as anything with the way she was getting along, he told the stationer that it was waste of money to have the girl taught, because she had no qualification but vanity. So he lost her; and now she has lessons at four guineas a dozen from a lady that gets all the credit for what he taught her. Then Simpson’s brother-in-law got him a place in a chapel in the Edgeware Road to play the harmonium and train the choir. But they couldn’t stand him. He treated them as if they were dogs; and the three richest old ladies in the congregation, who had led the singing for forty-five years, walked out the second night, and said they wouldn’t enter the chapel till he was gone. When the minister rebuked him, he up and said that if he was a God and they sang to him like that, he’d scatter ’em with lightning. That’s his notion of manners. So he had to leave; but a few of the choir liked him and got him occasionally to play the piano at a glee club on the first floor of B public house. he got five shillings once a fortnight or so for that; and not another halfpenny had he to live on except pawning his clothes bit by bit. You may imagine all the rent 1 got. At last he managed someway to get took on as tutor by a gentleman at Windsor. I had to release his clothes out of my own money before he could go. I was five pound out of pocket by him, between rent and other things.”

“Did he ever pay you?” said Mary.

“Oh, yes, Miss. He certainly sent me the money. I am far from saying that he is not honorable when he has the means.”

“It is a funny coincidence,” said Mary. “It was to us that Mr Jack came as tutor. He taught Charlie.”

“To you!” said Magdalen, surprised and by no means pleased. “Then you know him?”

·            Yes. He left us about a fortnight ago.”

“Just so,” said Mrs. Simpson, “and was glad enough to come straight back here without a penny in his pocket. And here he is like to be until some other situation drops into his lap. If I may ask, Miss, why did he leave you?”

“Oh. for no particular reason,” said Mary uneasily. “That is, my brother had left Windsor; and we did not require Mr Jack anymore.”

“So he was the tutor of whom Mrs Beatty told mother.” said Magdalen significantly.

“Yes.”

“I hope he was pleasanter in your house, Miss, than he is in mine. However, that’s not my business. I have no wish to intrude. Except the letter he wrote me with the money, not a civil word have I ever had from him.”

“A lady whom I know,” said Mary, “employed him, whilst he was with us, to correct some songs which she wrote. Perhaps I could induce her to give him some more. I should like to get him something to do. But I am afraid she was offended by the way he altered her composition last time.”

“Well, Polly,” said Magdalen, “we are forgetting my business. Where is the professor that Mrs Wilkins told me of? I wish Mr Jack gave lessons in elocution. I should like to have him for a master.”

“Why, Miss Madge, to tell you the honest truth, it is Mr Jack. But wait till I show you something. He’s given me a ring to pawn; and it’s the very moral of your own that you used to wear in Gower Street.”

“It is mine, Polly. I owe Mr Jack four guineas; and I must pay him today. Don’t stare: I will tell you all about it afterwards. I have to thank him too, for getting me out of a great scrape. Mary: do you wish to see him?”

“Well, I would rather not, “ said Mary slowly: “at least, I think it would be better not. But after all it can do no harm; and I suppose it would not be right for you to see him alone.”

“Oh, never mind that,” said Magdalen suspiciously. “I can have Polly with me.”

“If you had rather not have me present, I will go.”

“Oh, I don’t care. Only you seemed to make some difficulty about it yourself.”

“There can be no real difficulty, now that I come to consider it. Yet — I hardly know what I ought to do.”

“You had better make up your mind,” said Magdalen impatiently.

“Well, Madge, I have made up my mind,” said Mary, perching her spectacles and looking composedly at her friend. “I will stay.”

“Very well.” Said Madge, not with a very good grace: “I suppose we must not go to Mr. Jack, so he had better come to us. Polly go and tell him that two ladies wish to see him.”

“You had better say on business.” added Mary.

“And don’t mention our names I want to see whether he will know me again.” said Magdalen. Mary looked hard at her.

“D’ye really mean it, Miss Madge?”

“Good gracious, yes!” replied Magdalen angrily.

The landlady, after lingering a moment in doubt and wonder went out. Silence ensued. Magdalen’s color brightened; and she moved her chair to a place whence she could see herself in the mirror. Mary closed her lips, and sat motionless and rather pale. Not a word passed between them until the door opened abruptly and Jack, with his coat buttoned up to his chin, made a short step into the room. Recognizing Mary, he stopped and frowned.

“How do you do, Mr Jack?* she said, bowing steadily to him. He bowed slightly, and looked around the room. Seeing Magdalen, he was amazed. She bowed too, and he gave her a scared nod.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr Jack?” said the landlady, assuming the manner in which she was used to receive company.

“Have you pawned that ring yet?” he said, turning suddenly to her.

“No,” she retorted, scandalized.

“Then give it back to me.” She did so; and he looked at Magdalen, saying, “You have come just in time.”

“I came to thank you.”

“You need not thank me. I was sorry afterwards for having helped a young woman to run away from her father. If I were not the most hotheaded fool in England, I should have stopped you. I hope no harm came of it.”

“I am sorry to have caused you any uneasiness,” said Magdalen, coloring. “The young woman drove straight home after transacting some business that she wished to conceal from her father. That was all.”

“So much the better. If I had known you were at home, I should have sent you your ring.”

“My father expected you to write.”

“I told him I would; but I thought better of it. I had nothing to tell him.”

“You must allow me to repay you the sum you so kindly lent me that day, Mr. Jack,” said Magdalen in a lower voice, confusing herself by an unskilled effort to express gratitude by her tone and manner.

“It will be welcome, he replied moodily. Magdalen slowly took out a new purse. “Give it to Mrs. Simpson,” he added, turning away. The movement brought him face to face with Mary, before whom his brow gathered portentously. She bore his gaze steadily, but could not trust herself to speak.

“I have some further business, Mr Jack,” said Magdalen.

“I beg your pardon,” said he, turning again towards her.

“ Mrs. Simpson told me—”

“Ah!” said he, interrupting her, and casting a threatening look at the landlady. “It was she who told you where I was located, was it?”

“Well, I don’t see the harm if I did,” said Mrs. Simpson. “If you look on it as a liberty on my part to recommend you, Mr. Jack, I can easily stop doing it.”

“Recommend me! What does she mean, Miss Brailsford — you are Miss Brailsford, are you not?”

“Yes, I was about to say that Mrs Simpson told me that you gave — that is — I should perhaps explain first that I intend to go on the stage.”

“What do you want to go on the stage for?”

“The same as anybody else, I suppose,” said Mrs Simpson indignantly.

“I wish to make it my profession,” said Magdalen.

“Do you mean make your living by it?”

“I hope so.”

“Humph!”

“Do you think I should have any chance of success?”

“I suppose, if you have intelligence and perseverance, and can drudge and be compliant, and make stepping stones of your friends — but there! I know nothing about success. What have I got to do with it? Do you think, as your father did, that I am a theatrical agent?”

“Well I must say, Mr. Jack,” exclaimed the landlady, “that those who try to befriend you get very little encouragement. I am right sorry, so I am, that I brought Miss Madge to ask you for lessons.”

“Lessons!” said Jack. “Oh! I did not understand. Lessons in what? Music?”

“No,” said Magdalen. “I wanted lessons in elocution and so forth. At least, I was told the other day that I did not know how to speak.”

“Neither do you. That is true enough,” said Jack thoughtfully. “Well, I don’t profess to prepare people for the stage; but I can teach you to speak, if you have anything to say or any feeling for what better people put into your mouth.”

“You are not very sanguine as to the result, I fear.”

“The result, as far as it goes, is certain, if you practice. If not, I shall give you up. After all, there is no reason why you should not do something better than be a fine lady. Your appearance is good: all the rest can be acquired — except a genius for tomfoolery, which you must take your chance of. The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don’t want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive, as I hope you will; and poets and composers starve, as I do. When do you wish to begin?”

It was soon arranged that Magdalen should take lessons in Mrs Simpson’s sitting room, and in her presence, every second weekday, and that she should pay Mr Jack for them at the rate of three guineas a dozen. The first was to take place on the next day but one. Then the two ladies rose to go. But Magdalen first drew Mrs Simpson aside to pay her the money which Jack had lent her; so that he was left near the door with Mary, who had only spoken once since he entered the room.

“Mr. Jack,” she said, in an undertone: “I fear I have intruded on you. But I assure you I did not know who it was that we were coming to see.”

“Else you would not have come.”

“Only because I should have expected to be unwelcome.”

“It does not matter. I am glad to see you, though I have no reason to be. How is Mr Adrian?”

“Mr Herbert”

“I beg his pardon. Mr Herbert, of course.

“He is quite well, thank you.”

Jack rubbed hands stealthily, and looked at Mary as though the recollection of Adrian tickled his sense of humor. As she tried to look coldly at him, he said, with a shade of pity in his tone, “Ah, Miss Sutherland, it one thing to be very fond of music: it is quite another to be able to compose.”

“Is it?” said Mary, puzzled.

He shook his head. “You don’t see the relevance of that,” said he. “Well, never mind.”

She looked at him uneasily, and hesitated. Then she said slowly, “Mr. Jack: some people at Windsor, friends of mine, have been asking about you. I think, if you could come down once a week, I could get a music class together for you.”

“No doubt,” he said. his angry look returning. “They will take lessons because you ask them to be charitable to your discarded tutor. Why did you discard him if you think him fit to teach your friends?”

“Not at all. The project was mentioned last season, before I knew you. It is simply that we wish to take lessons. If you do not get the class somebody else will. It is very difficult to avoid offending you, Mr Jack.”

“Indeed! Why does the world torment me, if it expects to find me gracious to it? And who are the worthy people that are burning to soar in the realms of song?”

“Well, to begin with. I should l—”

“You! I would not give you lessons though your life depended on it. No, by Heaven! At least,” he continued, more placably, as she recoiled, evidently hurt, “you shall have no lessons from me for money. I will teach you, if you wish to learn; but you shall not try to make amends for your old caprice of beggaring me, by a new caprice to patronize me.”

“Then of course I cannot take any lessons.”

“I thought not. You will confer favors on your poor music maker; but you will not stoop to accept them from him. Your humble dog, Miss Sutherland.” He made her a bow.

“You quite mistake me,” said Mary, unable to control her vexation. “Will you take the class or not?”

“Where will the class be?”

“I could arrange to have it at our house if—”

“Never. I have crossed its threshold for the last time. So long as it is not there, I do not care where it is. Not less than one journey a week, and not less than a guinea clear profit for each journey. Those are my lowest terms: I will take as much more as I can get, but nothing less. Perhaps you are thinking better of getting the class for me.”

“I never break my word, Mr Jack.”

“Ha! Don’t you! I do. A fortnight ago I swore never to speak to you again. The same day I swore never to part with your friend’s ring except to herself. Well, here I am speaking to you for no better reason than that you met me and offered to put some money in my way. And you stopped me in the act of pawning her ring, which I was going to do because I thought I would rather have a beefsteak. But you are adamant. You never change your mind. You have a soul above fate and necessity! Ha! ha!”

“Magdalen,” said Mary, turning to her friend, who had waiting for the end of the conversation: “I think we had better go.” Mary was crimson with suppressed resentment; and Magdalen, not displeased to see it, advanced to bid Jack farewell in her most attractive manner. He immediately put off his bantering air, and ceremoniously accompanied them downstairs to the door, where Magdalen, going out first, gave him her hand. Mary hesitated; and he wrinkled his brow as he looked at her.

“I will tell Miss Cairns to write to you about the class,” she said. He listened to her with an attention which she thought derisive. Flushing with displeasure, she added, “And as Miss Cairns has done nothing to incur your anger, I beg, Mr Jack that you will remember that she is a lady, and will expect to be treated with common civility.”

“Oho!” said Jack, delighted. “Have I been rude? Have I?”

“You have been excessively rude, Mr. Jack.” She went out quickly, sending the words with an angry glance over her shoulder. He shut the door, and went upstairs to Mrs Simpson’s room, braying like a donkey.

“Well, Jezebel,” he cried. “Well, Polly. Well, Mrs. Quickly. How are you?”

“I never was so ashamed in my life, Mr Jack. There were those young ladies only too anxious to do what they could for you, and you like a bear. No wonder you can’t get on, when you won’t control yourself and have behavior.”

“I am a bear, am I? You had better recollect that I am a hungry bear, and that if my dinner does not come up, you will get a hug that will break every bone in your stays. Don’t forget the music paper. You have plenty of money now. Four pounds four and a penny, eh?”

“You’ve no call to fear: none of it will be stolen. Miss Madge thought you hadn’t counted it. Little did she know you.”

“She knew me better than you, you sordid hag. I counted my money that morning — four pounds nine and sevenpence. I gave the railway clerk ten shillings; he gave me five back — that left four pounds four and sevenpence. I arrived here with sixpence in my pocket; and from that I knew that I gave her four, four, and a penny. That reminds me that you sat there and let Miss Sutherland go away without making me ask her to send on my portmanteau, now that I have money to pay the carriage. You’re very stupid.”

“How could I tell whether you wanted me to mention it or not? I was thinking of it all the time; but—”

“You were thinking of it all the time!” cried Jack, in a frenzy. “And you never mentioned it! Here go for my dinner. You would drive the most patient man living out of his senses.”

Chapter VI

When Mrs Beatty had been a fortnight in the Isle of Wight with her brother’s family, her husband came down from Windsor to see her. On the morning after his arrival, they were in the garden, he smoking, and she in a rocking chair near him, with a newspaper in her hand.

“My dear,” he said, after a preliminary cough.

“Yes, Richard,” she said amiably, putting down the paper.

“I was saying last night that Clifton is leaving us.”

“Oh, the bandmaster! Yes” Mrs Beatty was not interested, and she took up the paper again.

“Mary was speaking to me about it this morning.”

Mrs Beatty put down the paper decisively, and looked at her husband.

“She wants me to get that fellow — Charlie’s tutor — into Clinton’s place. I don’t know whether he is fit for it?”

“You don’t know whether he is fit for it! Pray, Richard, did you allow Mary to think that we will countenance any further transactions between her and that man.”

“I thought I would speak to you about it.”

“She ought to ashamed of herself. Don’t listen to her on any account, Richard.”

“Well, will you speak to her? It is not exactly a subject that I can take her to task about; and I really don’t exactly know what to say to her when she comes at me. She always argues; and I hate argument.”

“Then I suppose I must face her arguments — I will make short work of them too. Whenever there is anything pleasant to be said in the family, you are willing enough to take it out of my mouth. The unpleasant things are left to me. Then people say, ‘Poor Colonel Beatty: he has such a disagreeable wife.”

“Who says so?”

“It is not your fault if they do not say so.”

“If the fellow comes into the regiment, he will soon be taught how to behave himself. Though for all I have seen to the contrary, he can behave himself well enough. That is my difficulty in talking to Mary. If she has no fault to find with him, I am sure I have none.”

“You are going to take his part against me, Colonel Beatty. It does not matter that he repeatedly insulted me — everybody does that. But I thought you might have had some little fault to find with a person who debauched your men and held drunken orgies in my brother’s house.”

“Well, Jane, if you come to that, you know very well that Charles was an incorrigible scamp long enough before Jack ever met him. As to bringing him to play at Beulah, Charles got five shillings for his trouble, and went as he might have gone to one of your dances. He spoke to me of Jack as a gentleman who had employed him, not as a comrade.”

“To you, no doubt he did. Adrian Herbert heard how he spoke to Jack.”

“Besides, Mary expressly says that she does not complain of that at all.”

“And what does she complain of?”

Colonel Beatty considered for a moment, and then answered, “She does not complain of anything, as far as I can make out.”

“Indeed! She dismissed him. You will at least not deny that.”

“My dear, I am not denying anyth—”

“Then let nothing induce you to bring them together again. You ought to understand that much without any hint from me, knowing. as you do, what a strange girl she is.”

“Why? Do you think there is anything between them?”

“I never said so. I know very well what I think.”

Colonel Beatty smoked a while in silence. Then, seeing Mary come from the house, carrying a box of colors, he busied himself with his pipe, and strolled away.

“What is the matter?” said Mary.

“Nothing that I am aware of,” said Mrs. Beatty. “Why?”

“You do not look happy. And Uncle Richard’s shoulders have a resigned set, as if he had been blown up lately.”

“Ha! Oh! You are a wonderful observer, Mary. Are you going out?”

“I am waiting for Adrian.”

Mary went round the garden in search of a flower. She was adorning her bosom with one, when Mrs. Beatty, who had been pretending to read, could contain herself no longer, and exclaimed:

“Now, Mary, it is of no use your asking Richard to get that man as bandmaster. He shall not do it.”

“So that is what was the matter,” said Mary coolly.

“I mean what I say, Mary. He shall never show his face in Windsor again with my consent.”

“He shows his face there once a week already, aunt. Miss Cairns writes to say that he has a singing class at their house, and three pianoforte pupils in the neighborhood.”

“If I had known that,” said Mrs Beatty, angrily, “I should not have left Windsor. It is of a piece with the rest of his conduct. However, no matter. We shall see how long he will keep his pupils after I go back.”

“Why, aunt? Would you take away his livelihood because you do not happen to like him personally?”

“I have nothing to do with his livelihood. I do not consider it proper for him to be at Windsor, after being dismissed by Richard. There are plenty of other places for him to go to. I have quite made up my mind on the subject. If you attempt to dispute me, I shall be offended.”

“I have made up my mind too. Whatever mischief you may do to Mr Jack at Windsor will be imputed to me, aunt.”

“I never said that I would do him any mischief.’

“You said you would drive him out of Windsor. As he lives by his teaching, I think that would be as great a mischief as it is in your power to do him.”

“Well, I cannot help it. It is your fault.”

“If I have helped to get him the pupils, and am begging you not to interfere with him, how is it my fault?”

“Ah! I thought you had something to do with it. And now let me tell you, Mary, that it is perfectly disgraceful, the open way in which you hanker after—”

“Aunt!”

“ — that common man. I wonder at a girl of your tastes and understanding having so little self-respect as to to let everybody see that your head has been turned by a creature without polish or appearance — not even a gentleman. And all this too while you are engaged to Adrian Herbert, his very opposite in every respect. I tell you, Mary, it’s not proper: it’s not decent. A tutor! If it were anybody else it would not matter so much — but Oh for shame, Mary, for shame.”

“Aunt Jane—”

“Hush, for goodness sake. Here he is.”

“Who?” cried Mary, turning quickly. But it was only Adrian, equipped for sketching.

“Good morning,” he said gaily, but with a thoughtful, polite gaiety. “This is the very sky we want for that bit of the undercliff.”

“We were just saying how late you were,” said Mrs Beatty graciously. He shook her hand, and looked in some surprise at Mary, whose expression, as she stood motionless, puzzled him.

“Do you know what we were really saying when you interrupted us, Adrian?”

“Mary,” exclaimed Mrs. Beatty.

“Aunt Jane was telling me,” continued Mary, not heeding her, “that I was hankering after Mr Jack, and that my conduct was not decent. Have you ever remarked anything indecent about my conduct, Adrian?”

Herbert looked helplessly from her to her aunt in silence. Mrs. Beatty’s confusion, culminating in a burst of tears, relieved him from answering.

“Do not listen to her,” she said presently, striving to control herself. “She is an ungrateful girl.”

“I have quoted her exact words,” said Mary, unmoved; “and I am certainly not grateful for them. Come, Adrian. We had better lose no more time if we are to finish our sketches before luncheon?”

“But we cannot leave Mrs. Beatty in this—”

“Never mind me: I am ashamed of myself for giving way, Mr Herbert. It was not your fault. I had rather not detain you.”

Adrian hesitated. But seeing that he had better go, he took up his bundle of easels and stools, and went out with Mary, who did not even look at her aunt. They had gone some distance before either spoke. Then he said, “I hope Mrs Beatty has not been worrying you, Mary?”

“If she has, I do not think she will do it again without serious reflexion. I have found that the way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud. Oh, I was very angry that time, Adrian.”

“But what brought Jack on the carpet again? I thought we were rid of him and done with him?”

“I heard that he was very badly off in London; and I asked Colonel Beatty to get him made bandmaster of the regiment in place of John Sebastian Clifton — the man you used to laugh at — who is going to America. Then Aunt Jane interfered, and imputed motives to my intercession — such motives as she could appreciate herself.”

“But bow did you find out Jack’s position in London.”

“From Madge Brailsford, who is taking lessons from him. Why? Are you jealous?”

“If you really mean that question, it will spoil my day’s work, or rather my day’s pleasure; for my work is all pleasure, nowadays.”

“No, of course I do not mean it. I beg your pardon.”

“Will you make a new contract with me, Mary’”

“What is it?”

“Never to allude to that execrable musician again. I have remarked that his name alone suffices to breed discord everywhere.”

“It is true,” said Mary, laughing. “I have quarreled a little with Madge, a great deal with Aunt Jane, almost with you, and quite with Charlie about him.”

Then let us consider him, from henceforth, in the Index expurgatorius. I swear never to mention him on a sketching excursion — never at all, in fact, unless on very urgent occasion, which is not likely to arise. Will you swear also?”

“I swear,” said Mary, raising her hand.” Lo giuroas they say in the Opera. But without prejudice to his bandmastership.”

“As to that, I am afraid you have spoiled his chance with Colonel Aunt Jane?”

“Yes,” said Mary slowly: “I forgot that. I was thinking only of my own outraged feelings when I took my revenge. And I had intended to coax her into seconding me in the matter.”

Herbert laughed.

“It is not at all a thing to be laughed at, Adrian, when you come to think of it. I used to fancy that I had set myself aside from the ordinary world to live a higher life than most of those about me. But I am beginning to find out that when I have to act, I do very much as they do. As I suppose they judge me by my actions and not by my inner life, no doubt they see me much as I see them. Perhaps they have an inner life too. If so, the only difference between us is that I have trained my eye to see more material for pictures in a landscape than they. They may even enjoy the landscape as much, without knowing why.”

“Do you know why?”

“I suppose not. I mean that I can point out those aspects of the landscape which please me, and they cannot. But that is not a moral difference. Art cannot take us out of the world.”

“Not if we are worldly, Mary.”

“But how can we help being worldly? I was born into the world: I have lived all my life in it: I have never seen or known a person or thing that did not belong to it. How can I be anything else than worldly?”

“Does the sun above us belong to it, Mary? Do the stars, the dreams that poets have left us, the realms that painters have shewn us, the thoughts you and I interchange sometimes when nothing has occurred to disturb your faith? Do these things belong to it?”

“I don’t believe they belong exclusively to us two. If they did, I think we should be locked up as lunatics for perceiving them. Do you know, Adrian, lots of people whom we consider quite foreign to us spiritually, are very romantic in their own way. Aunt Jane cries over novels which make me laugh. Your mother reads a good deal of history, and she likes pictures, I remember when she used to sing very nicely.”

“Yes. She likes pictures, provided they are not too good.”

“She says the same of you. And really, when she pats me on the shoulder in her wise way, and asks me when I will be tired of playing at what she calls transcendentalism, I hear, or fancy I hear, an echo of her thought in my own mind. I have been very happy in my art studies and I don’t think I shall ever find a way of life more tranquil and pleasant than they led me to; but, for all that, I have a notion sometimes that it is a way of life which I am outgrowing. I am getting wickeder as I get older, very likely.”

“You think so for the moment. If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling, Corrupt success, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavor in a labor of love.”

“Yes, Adrian. That used to suffice for me: indeed, it does so still when I am in the right frame of mind. But other worlds are appearing vaguely on the horizon. Perhaps woman’s art is of woman’s life a thing apart, ’tis man’s whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn’t.”

“It does not scan that way,” said Adrian, with an uneasy effort to be flippant.

No,” said Mary, laughing. “This is the place.”

“Yes,” said Adrian, unstrapping the easels. “You must paint off the fit of depression that is seizing you. The wind has gone round to the south-west. What an exquisite day!”

“It is a little oppressive, I think. I am just in the humor for a sharp evening breeze, with the sea broken up into slate colored waves, and the yachts ripping them up in their hurry home. Thank you, I would rather have the stool that has no back: I will settle the rest myself. Adrian: do you think me ill-tempered?”

“What a question to explode on me! Why?”

“No matter why. Answer my question.”

“I think you always control yourself admirably.”

“You mean when I am angry?”

“Yes.”

“But, putting my self-control out of the question, do you think I get angry often — too often, even though I do not let my anger get the better of me?”

“Not too often, certainly.”

“But often?”

“Well, no. That is, not absolutely angry. I think you are quick to perceive and repel an attack, even when it is only thoughtlessly implied. But now we must drop introspection for the present, Mary. If our sketches are to be finished before luncheon, I must work hard; and so must you. No more conversation until a quarter past one.”

“So be it,” said Mary, taking her seat on the campstool. They painted silently for two hours, interrupted occasionally by strollers, who stopped to look on, much to Herbert’s annoyance, and somewhat to Mary’s gratification. Meanwhile the day grew warmer and warmer; and the birds and insects sang and shrilled incessantly.

“Finished,” said Mary at last, putting down her palette “And not in the least like nature. I ventured a little Prussian blue in that corner of the sky, with disastrous results.”

“I will look presently,” said Herbert, without turning from his canvas, “It will take at least another day to finish mine.”

“You are too conscientious, Adrian. I feel sure your sketches have too much work in them.”

“I have seen many pictures without enough work in them: never with too much. I suppose I must stop now for the present. It is time to return.”

“Yes,” said Mary, packing her sketching furniture. “Oh, dear!” As Faulconbridge says, ‘Now, by my life, the day grows wondrous hot.’ Falonbridge, by the bye, would have thought us a pair of fools. Nevertheless I like him.”

“I am sorry to hear it. Most women like men who are arrogant bullies. Let me see your sketch.”

“It is not a masterpiece, as you may perceive.”

“No. You are impatient, Mary, and draw with a stiff, heavy hand. Look before you into the haze. There is no such thing as an outline in the landscape.”

“I cannot help it. I try to soften everything as much as possible; but it only makes the colors look sodden. It is all nonsense my trying to paint. I shall give it up.”

Must I pay you compliments to keep up your courage. You are unusually diffident today. You have done the cottage and the potato field better than I.”

“Very likely. My touch suits potato fields. I think I had better make a specialty of them. Since I can paint neither sky nor sea nor golden grain, I shall devote myself to potato fields in wet weather.”

Herbert, glancing up at her as he stooped to shoulder his easel, did not answer. A little later, when they were on their way home, he said, “Are you conscious of any change in yourself since you came down here, Mary?”

“No. What kind of change?” She had been striding along beside him, looking boldly ahead in her usual alert manner; but now she slackened her pace, and turned her eyes uneasily downward.

“I have noticed a certain falling off in the steady seriousness that used to be your chief characteristic. You are becoming a little inconsiderate and even frivolous about things that you formerly treated with unvarying sympathy and reverence. This makes me anxious. Our engagement is likely to be such a long one, that the least change in you alarms me. Mary: is it that you are getting tired of Art, or only of me?”

“Oh, absurd! nonsense, Adrian!”

“There is nothing of your old seriousness in that answer, Mary.”

“It is not so much a question as a reproach that you put to me. You should have more confidence in yourself; and then you would not fear my getting tired of you. As to Art, I am not exactly getting tired of it; but I find that I cannot live on Art alone; and I am beginning to doubt whether I might not spend my time better than in painting, at which I am sure I shall never do much good. If Art were a game of pure skill, I should persevere; but it is like whist, chance and skill mixed. Nature may have given you her ace of trumps — genius; but she has not given me any trumps at all — not even court cards.”

“If we all threw up our cards merely because we had not the ace of trumps in our hand, I fear there would be no more whist played in the world. But, to drop your metaphor, which I do not like, I can assure you that Nature has been kinder to you than to me. I had to paint harder and longer than you have before I could paint as well as you can.”

“That sort of encouragement kept up my ardor for a long time, Adrian; but its power is exhausted now. In future I may sketch to amuse myself and to keep mementos with which I have pleasant associations, but not to elevate my tastes and perfect my morals. Perhaps it is that change of intention which makes me frivolous, as you say I have suddenly become.

“And since when,” said Herbert gravely, “have you meditated this very important change?”

“I never meditated it at all. It came upon me unawares. I did not even know what it was until your question forced me to give an account of it. What an infidel I am! But let me tell you this, Adrian. If you suddenly found yourself a Turner, Titian, Michael Angelo and Holbein all rolled into one, would you be a bit happier?”

“I cannot conceive how r you can doubt it.”

“I know you would paint better” (Herbert winced), “but it is not at all obvious to me that you would be happier. However, I am in a silly humor to-day; for I can see nothing in a proper way. We had better talk about something else.”

“The humor has lasted for some days, already, Mary. And it must be talked about, and seriously too, if you have concluded, like my mother, that I am wasting my life in pursuit of a chimera. Has she been speaking to you about me?”

“Oh, Adrian, you are accusing me of treachery. You must not think, because I have lost faith in my own artistic destiny, that I have lost faith in yours also.”

“I fear, if you have lost your respect for Art, you have lost your respect for me. If so, you know that you may consider yourself free as far as I am concerned. You must not hold yourself in bondage to a dreamer, as people consider me.”

“I do not exactly understand. Are you offering me my liberty, or claiming your own?”

“I am offering you yours. I think you might have guessed that.”

“I don’t think I might. It is not pleasant to be invited to consider oneself free. If you really wish it, I shall consider myself so.”

“The question is, do you wish it?”

“Excuse me, Adrian: the question is, do you wish it?”

“My feelings towards you are quite unchanged.”

“And so are mine towards you.”

After this they walked for a little time in silence. Then Mary said, “Adrian: do you remember our congratulating ourselves last June on our immunity from the lovers’ quarrels which occur in the vulgar world? I think — perhaps it is due to my sudden secession from the worship of Art — I think we made a sort of first attempt at one that time.”

“Ha! ha! Yes. But we failed, did we not, Mary?”

“Thanks to our inexperience, we did. But not very disgracefully. We shall do better the next time, most likely.”

“Then I hope the next time will never come.”

“I hope not.” Here they reached the garden gate.

“You must come in and lunch with us, to save me from facing Aunt Jane after my revenge upon her this morning.”

Then they went in together, and found that Mrs Herbert had called and was at table with the Colonel and Mrs Beatty.

“Are we late?” said Mary.

Mrs. Beatty closed her lips and did not reply. The Colonel hastened to say that they had only just sat down. Mrs. Herbert promptly joined in the conversation; and the meal proceeded without Mrs Beatty’s determination not to speak to her niece becoming unpleasantly obvious, until Mary put on her eyeglasses and said, looking at her aunt in her searching myopic way:

“Aunt Jane: will you come with me to the two-forty train to meet papa?”

Mrs Beatty maintained her silence for a few seconds. Then she reddened, and said sulkily, “No, Mary, I will not. You can do without me very well.”

“Adrian: will you come?”

“Unfortunately,” said Mrs Herbert, “Adrian is bound to me for the afternoon. We are going to Portsmouth to pay a visit. It is time for us to go now,” she added, looking at her watch and rising.

During the leave taking which followed, Colonel Beatty got his hat, judging that he had better go out with the Herberts than stay between his wife and Mary in their present tempers. But Mrs Beatty did not care to face her niece alone. When the guests were gone, she moved towards the door.

“Aunt,” said Mary, “don’t go yet. I want to speak to you.”

Mrs. Beatty did not turn.

“Very well,” said Mary. “But remember, aunt, if there is to be a quarrel, it will not be of my making.”

Mrs. Beatty hesitated, and said, “As soon as you express your sorrow for your conduct this morning, I will speak to you.”

“I am very sorry for what passed.” Mary looked at her aunt as she spoke, not contritely. Mrs Beatty, dissatisfied, held the door handle for a moment longer, then slowly came back and sat down. “I am sure you ought to be.” she said.

I am sure you ought to be,” said Mary.

What!” cried Mrs. Beatty, about to rise again.

‘You should have taken what I said as an apology, and let well alone,” said Mary. “I am sorry that I resented your accusation this morning in a way that might have made mischief between me and Adrian. But you had no right to say what you did; and I had every right to be angry with you.”

“You have a right to be angry with me! Do you know who I am, Miss?”

“Aunt, if you are going to call me ‘Miss,’ we had better stop talking altogether.”

Mrs Beatty saw extreme vexation in her niece’s expression, and even a tear in her eye. She resolved to assert her authority. “Mary,” she said: “do you wish to provoke me into sending you to your room?”

Mary rose. “Aunt Jane,” she said, “if you don’t choose to treat me with due respect, as you have to treat other women, we must live apart. If you cannot understand my feelings, at least you know my age and position. This is the second time you have insulted me today.” She went to the door, looking indignantly at her aunt as she passed. The look was returned by one of alarm, as though Mrs Beatty were going to cry again. Mary, seeing this, restrained her anger with an effort as she reached the threshold, stood still for a moment, and then came back to the table.

“I am a fool to lose my temper with you, aunt,” she said, dropping into the rocking chair with an air of resolute good humor, which became her less than her anger; “but really you are very aggravating. Now, don’t make dignified speeches to me: it makes me feel like a housemaid and I’m sure it makes you feel 1 like a cook.” Mrs Beatty colored. In temper and figure she was sufficiently like the cook of caricature to make the allusion disagreeable to her. “I always feel ridiculous and remorseful after a quarrel,” continued Mary, “whether I am in the right or not — if there be any right in a quarrel.”

“You are a very strange girl,” said Mrs Beatty, ruefully. “When I was your age, I would not have dared to speak to my elders as you speak to me.”

“When you were young,” responded Mary, “the world was in a state of barbarism and young people used to spoil the old people, just as you fancy the old spoil the young nowadays. Besides, you are not so very much my elder, after all. I can remember quite well when you were married.”

“That may be,” said Mrs. Beatty, gravely. “It is not so much my age, perhaps; but you should remember, Mary, that I am related to your father.”

“So am I.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, child. Ah, what a pity it is that you have no mother, Mary! It is a greater loss to you than you think.”

“It is time to go to meet papa,” said Mary, rising. “I hope Uncle Richard will be at the station.”

“Why? What do you want with your Uncle Richard?”

“Only to tell him that we are on good terms again, and that he may regard Mr Jack as his future bandmaster.” She hurried away as she spoke; and Mrs Beatty’ s protest was wasted on the old-fashioned sideboard.

Chapter VII

Miss Cairns, of whom Mary Sutherland had spoken to her aunt, was an unmarried lady of thirty-four. She had read much for the purpose of remembering it at examinations ; had taken the of Bachelor of Science; had written two articles on Woman Suffrage, and one on the Higher Education of Women, for a Radical review; and was an earnest contender for the right of her sex to share in all public functions. Having in her student days resolved not to marry, she had kept her resolution, and endeavored to persuade other girls to follow her example, which a few, who could not help themselves, did. But, as she approached her fortieth year, and found herself tiring of books, lectures, university examinations of women, and second-hand ideas in general, she ceased to dissuade her friends from marrying, and even addicted herself with some zest to advising and gossiping on the subject of their love affairs. With Mary Sutherland, who had been her pupil, and was one of her most intimate friends, she frequently corresponded on the subject of Art, for which she had a vast reverence, based on extensive reading and entire practical ignorance of the subject. She knew Adrian, and had gained Mary’s gratitude by pronouncing him a great artist, though she had not seen his works. In person she was a slight, plain woman, with small features, soft brown hair, and a pleasant expresion. Much sedentary plodding had accustomed her to delicate health, but had not soured her temper, or dulled her habitual cheerfulness.

Early in September, she wrote to Mary Sutherland.

Newton Villa, Windsor,
4th September.

Dearest Mary — Many thanks for your pleasant letter, which makes me long to be at the seaside. I am sorry to hear that you are losing interest in your painting. Tell Mr Herbert that I am surprised at his not keeping you up to your work better. When you come back, you shall have a good lecture from me on the subject of lukewarm endeavor and laziness generally: however, if you are really going to study music instead, I excuse you.

“You will not be pleased to hear that the singing class is broken up. Mr Jack, unstable as dynamite, exploded yesterday, and scattered our poor choir in dismay to their homes. It happened in this way. There was a garden party at Mrs. Griffith’s, to which all the girls were invited; and accordingly they appeared at class in gay attire, and were rather talkative and inattentive. Mr Jack arrived punctually, looking black as thunder. He would not even acknowledge my greeting. Just before he came in, Louisa White had been strumming over a new set of quadrilles; and she unfortunately left the music on the desk of the pianoforte. Mr Jack, without saying a word to us, sat down on the music stool, and, of course, saw poor Louisa’s quadrilles, which he snatched, tore across, and threw on the floor. There was a dead silence, and Louisa looked at me, expecting me to interfere, but — I confess it — I was afraid to. Even you, audacious as you are, would have hesitated to provoke him. We sat looking at him ruefully whilst he played some chords, which he did as if he hated the piano. Then he said in a weary voice, ‘Go on, go on.’ I asked him what we should go on with. He looked savagely at me, and said, “Anything. Don’t—” He said the rest to himself; but I think he meant, ‘Don’t sit there sstaring like a fool.’ I distributed some music in a hurry, and put a copy before him. He was considerate enough not to tear that; but he took it off the desk and put it aside. Then he began playing the acccompaniment without book. We begain again and again and again, he listening with brooding desparation, like a man suffering from neuralgia. His silence alarmed me more than anything; for he usually shouts at us, and, if we sing a wrong note, sings the right one in a tremendous Voice. This went on for about twenty-five minutes, during which, I must confess, we got worse and Worse. At last Mr Jack rose, gave one terrible look at us, and buttoned his coat. The eyes of all were upon me — as if I could do anything. “Are you going Mr Jack!” No answer. “We shall see you on Friday as usual, I suppose Mr Jack?”

“Never, never again, by Heaven!” With this reply, made in a tortured voice with intense fervor, he walked out. Then arose a Babel of invective against Mr Jack, with infinite contradiction, and some vehement defence of him. Louisa White, torn quadrille in hand, began it by declaring that his conduct was disgraceful. ‘No wonder,’ cried Jane Lawrence, ‘with Hetty Grahame laughing openly at him from the ottoman.’ ‘It was at the singing I laughed,’ said Hetty indignantly: ‘it was enough to make anyone laugh.’ After this everybody spoke at once; but at last each agreed that all the rest had behaved very badly, and that Mr Jack had been scandalously treated. I thought, and I still think, that Mr. Jack has to thank his own ill-temper for the bad singing; and I will take care that he shall not have a second chance of being rude to me (I know by experience that it is a mistake to allow professors to trample on unprotected females), but of course I did not say so to the girls, as I do not wish to spoil his very unexpected popularity with them. He is a true male tyrant, and, like all idle women, they love tyrants — for which treachery to their working sisters they ought to be whipped and sent to bed. He is now, forsooth, to be begged to shew grace to his repentant handmaids, and to come down as usual on Friday, magnanimously overlooking his own bad behavior of yesterday. Can you manage to bring this about. You know him better than any of us; and we regard you as the proprietress of the class. Your notion that Mr. Jack objects to your join- ing it when you return to Windsor, is a piece of your crotchety nonsense. I asked him whether he expected you to do so, and he said he hoped so. That was not yesterday, of course, but at the previous lesson, when he was in unusually good spirits. So please try and induce his royal highness to come back to us. If you do not, I shall have to write myself, and then all will be lost; for I will encourage no living man to trample on my sex, even when they deserve it; and if I must write, Seigneur Jack shall have a glimpse of my mind. Please let me know soon what you can do for us: the girls are impatient to know the issue, and they keep calling and bothering me with questions. I will send you all the local news in my next letter, as it is too near post hour to add anything to this. —
Yours, dearest Mary, most affectionately.
“Letitia Cairns.”

Mary forthwith, in a glow of anger, wrote and despatched the following to Church Street, Kensington.

Bonchurch,
5th September.

“Dear Mr Jack —
I have been very greatly surprised and pained by hearing from my friend Miss Cairns that you have abruptly thrown up the class she was kind enough to form for you at Windsor. I have no right to express any opinion upon your determination not to teach her friends any more; but as I introduced you to her, I cannot but feel that I have been the means of exposing her to an affront which has evidently wounded her deeply. However, Miss Cairns, far from making any complaint, is anxious that you should continue your lessons, as it is the general desire of the class that you should do so —
Yours sincerely,
Mary Sutherland.

Early next afternoon, Miss Cairns was alone In her drawing room, preparing a lecture for a mutual improvement society which she had founded in Windsor. A servant came in.

“Please, Miss Tisha, can you see Mr Jack?”

Miss Cairns laid down her pen, and gazed at the woman. “Mr Jack! It is not his usual day.”

“No, Miss, but it’s him. I said you was busy; and he asked whether you told me to tell him so. I think he’s in a wus temper than last day.”

“You had better bring him up,” said Miss Cairns, touching her hair to test it, and covering up her manuscript. Jack came in hurriedly, and cut short her salutation by exclaiming in an agitated manner, “Miss Cairns I received a letter — an infamous letter. It says that you accuse me of having affronted you, and given up my I here, and other monstrous things. I have c>me to ask you whether you really said anything of the sort, and, if so, from whom you have heard these slanders.”

“I certainly never told anyone that you affronted me,” said Miss Cairns, turning pale. “I may have said that you gave up the class rather abruptly; but—”

“But who told you that I had given up the class? Why did you believe it before you had given me an opportunity of denying — of repudiating it. You do not know me, Miss Cairns. I have an unfortunate manner sometimes, because I am, in a worldly sense, an unfortunate man, though in my real life, heaven knows, a most happy and fortunate one. But I would cut off my right hand sooner than insult you. I am incapable of ingratitude; and I have the truest esteem and regard for you, not only because you have been kind to me but because I appreciate the noble qualities which raise you above your sex. So far from neglecting or wishing to abandon your friends, I have taken special pains with them, and shall always do so on your account, in spite of their magpie frivolity. You have seen for yourself my efforts to make them sing. But it is the accusation of rudeness to you personally that I am determined to refute. Who is the author of it?”

“I assure you,” said Miss Cairns, blushing, “that you did not offend me; and whoever told you I complained of your doing so must have misunderstood me. But as to your giving up the class—”

“Aye, aye. Somebody must have told you that.”

“You told me that yourself, Mr. Jack.”

He looked quickly at her, taken aback. Then he frowned obstinately, and began walking to and fro. “Ridiculous!” he said, impatiently. “I never said such a thing. You have made a mistake.”

“But—”

“How could I possibly have said it when the idea never entered my head?”

“All I can say is,” said Miss Cairns, firmly, being somewhat roused, “that when I asked you whether you were coming- again, you answered most emphatically, ‘Never’”

Jack stood still and considered a moment. “No, no.” he said, recommencing his walk, “I said nothing of the kind.”

She made no comment, but looked timidly at him, and drummed on the writing with her finger.

“At least,” he said, stopping again, “I may have said so thoughtlessly — as a mere passing remark. I meant nothing by it. I was little put out by the infernal manner in which the class behaved. Perhaps you did not perceive my annoyance, and so took whatever I said too seriously.”

“Yes, I think that must have been it,” said Miss Cairns slyly. “It was all a mistake of mine, I suppose you will continue our lessons as if nothing had happened.”

“Of course, certainly. Nothing has happened.”

“I am so sorry that you should have had the trouble of coming all the way from London. It is too bad.”

“Well, well, it is not your fault, Miss Cairns. It cannot be helped.

“May I ask, from whom did you hear of my mistake?”

“From whom! From Miss Sutherland, of course. There is no one else living under heaven who would have the heart to write such venom.”

“Miss Sutherland is a dear friend of mine, Mr Jack.”

“She is no friend of mine. Though I lived in her house for months, I never gave her the least cause of enmity against me. Yet she has never lost an opportunity of stabbing at me.”

“You are mistaken, Mr. Jack — won’t you sit down: I beg your pardon for not asking you before — Miss Sutherland has not the least enmity to you.”

“Read that,” said Jack, producing the letter. Miss Cairns read it, and felt ashamed of it. “I cannot imagine what made Mary write that,” she said. “I am sure my letter contained nothing that could justify her remark about me.”

“Sheer cruelty — want of consideration for others — natural love of inflicting pain. She has an overbearing disposition. Nothing is more hateful than an overbearing disposition.”

“You do not understand her, Mr Jack. She is only hasty. You will find that she wrote on the spur of the moment, fancying that I was annoyed. Pray think no more of it.”

“It does not matter, Miss Cairns. I will not meet her again; and I request you never to mention her name in my presence.”

“But she is going, I hope, to join the class on her return from Bonchurch.”

“The day she enters it, I leave it. I am in earnest. You may move heaven and earth more easily than me — on this point.”

“Really, Mr Jack, you are a little severe. Do not be offended if I say that you might find in your own impatience some excuse for hers.”

Jack recoiled. “My impatience!” he repeated slowly. “I, who have hardened myself into a stone statue of dogged patience, impatient!” He glared at her; ground his teeth; and continued vehemently, “Here am I, a master of my profession — no easy one to master — rotting, and likely to continue rotting unheard in the midst of a pack of shallow panders, who make a hotch-potch of what they can steal from better men, and share the spoil with the corrupt performers who thrust it upon the public for them. Either this or the accursed drudgery of teaching, or grinding an organ at the pleasure of some canting villain of a parson, or death by starvation, is the lot of a musician in this centuty. I have, in spite of this, never composed one page of music bad enough for publication or performance. I have drudged with pupils when I could get them, starved in a garret when I could not; endured to have my works returned to me unopened or declared inexecutable by shopkeepers and lazy conductors, written new ones without any hope of getting even a hearing for them; dragged myself by excess of this fruitless labor out of horrible fits of despair that come out my own nature; and throughout it all have neither complained nor prostituted myself to write shopware. I have listened to complacent assurances that publishers and concert-givers are only too anxious to get good, original work — that it is their own interest to do so. As if the dogs would know original work if they saw it: or rather as if they would not instinctively turn away from anything good and genuine! All this I have borne without suffering from it — without the humiliation of finding it able to give me one moment of disappointment or resentment; and now you tell me that I have no patience, because I have no disposition to humor the caprices of idle young ladies. I am accustomed to hear such things from fools — or I was when I had friends; but I expected more sense from you.”

Miss Cairns struggled with this speech in vain. All but the bare narrative in it seemed confused and inconsequent to her. “I did not know,” she said, looking perplexedly at him. “It never occurred to me that — at least—” She stopped, unable to arrange her ideas. Then she exclaimed, “And do you really love music, Mr. Jack?”

“What do you mean?” said he sternly.

“I thought you did not care for anything. I always felt that you knew your business; we all felt so; but we never thought you had any enthusiasm. Do not be angry with me for telling you so; for I am very glad to find that I was wrong.”

Jack’s features relaxed. He rose, and took another turn across the room, chuckling. “I am not fond of teaching,” he said; “but I must live. And so you all thought that an ugly man could not be a composer. Or was it because I don’t admire the drawling which you all flatter yourselves is singing, eh? I am not like the portraits of Mozart, Miss Cairns.”

“I am sure we never thought of that, only somehow we agreed that you were the very last person in the world to — to—”

“Ha! ha! Just so. I do not look like a writer of serenades. However, you were right about the enthusiasm. I am no enthusiast: I leave that to the ladies. Did you ever hear of an enthusiastically honest man, or an enthusiastic shoemaker? Never, and you are not likely to hear of an enthusiastic composer — at least not until after he is dead. No. He chuckled again, but seemed suddenly to recollect himself; for he added stiffly, “I beg your pardon. I am detaining you.”

“Not in the least,” said Miss Cairns, so earnestly that she blushed afterwards. “If you are not engaged, I wish you would stay for B few minutes and do me at favor.”

“Certainly. Most certainly,” he said. Then he added suspiciously, “What is it?”

“Only to play something for me before you go — if you don’t mind.” Her tone expressed that intense curiosity to witness a musical performance which is so common among unmusical people whose interest in the art has been roused by reading. Jack understood it quite well; but he seemed disposed to humor her.

“You want to see the figure work,” he said good-humoredly. “Very well. What shall it be?”

Miss Cairns, ignorant of music, but unaccustomed to appear ignorant of anything, was at a loss. “Some- thing classical then,” she ventured. “Do you know Thalberg’s piece called ‘Moses in Egypt’? I believe that is very fine; but it is also very difficult, is it not?”

He started, and looked at her with such an extraordinary grin that she almost began to mistrust him. Then he said, apparently to himself, “Candor, Jack, candor. You once thought so, perhaps, yourself.”

He twisted his fingers until their joints crackled; shook his shoulders and gnashed his teeth once or twice at the keyboard. Then he improvised a set of variations on the prayer fr<>m “Moses” which served Miss Cairns’s turn quite as well as if they had been note for note Thalberg’s. She listened, deeply impressed, and was rather jarred when he suddenly stopped and rose, saying, “Well, well: enough tomfoolery, Miss Cairns.”

“Not at all,” she said. “I have enjoyed it greatly. Thank you very much.”

“By the bye,” he said abruptly, “I am not to be asked to play for your acquaintances. Don’t go and talk about me: the mechanical toy will not perform for anyone else.”

“But is not that a pity, when you can give such pleasure?”

“Whenever I am in the humor to play, I play; sometimes without being asked. But I am not always in the humor, whereas people are always ready to pretend that they like listening to me, particularly those who are as deaf to music as they are to everything else that is good. And one word more, Miss Cairns. If your friends think me a mere schoolmaster, let them continue to think so. I live alone, and I sometimes talk more about myself than I intend. I did so today. Don’t repeat what I said.”

“Certainly not, since you do not wish me to.”

Jack looked into his hat; considered a moment; then made her a bow — a ceremony which he always performed with solemnity — and went away. Miss Cairns sat down by herself, and forgot all about her lecture. More accustomed to store her memory than to exercise her imagination she had a sensation of novelty in reflecting on the glimpse that she had got of Jack’s private life, and the possibilities which it suggested. Her mother came in presently, to inquire concerning the visitor; but Miss Cairns merely told who he was, and mentioned carelessly that the class was to go on as before. Mrs Cairns, who disapproved of Jack, said she was sorry to hear it. Her daughter, desiring to give utterance to her thoughts, and not caring to confide in her mother, recollected that she had to write to Mary. This second letter ran thus:

Newton Villa, Windsor.
6th September.

“Dearest Mary — I am going to give you a severe scolding for what you have done at Mr. Jack. He has just been here with your wicked letter, furious, and evidently not rembering a bit what he said last day. About the class, which he positively denies having given up; but he is very angry with you — not without reason, I think. Why will you be pugnacious? I tried to make your peace; but, for the present, at least, he is implacable. He is a very strange man. I think he is very clever; but I do not understamd him, though I have passed my life among professors and clever people of all sorts, and fancied I had exhausted the species. My logic and mathematics are no avail when I try to grapple with Mr Jack: he belongs, I think, to those regions of art which you have often urged me to explore, but of which, unhappily, I know hardly anything. I got him into good humor after a great deal of trouble, and actually asked him to play for me, which he did, most magnificently. You must never let him know that I told you this because he made me promise not to tell anyone and I am sure he is a terrible person to betray. His real character — so far as I can make it out — is quite different than what we all supposed — I must break off here to go to dinner. I have no doubt he will relent towards you after a time: his wrath does not endure forever. —
Ever your affectionate,
Letita Cairns

Miss Cairns had no sooner sent this to the post than she began to doubt whether it would not have been better to have burnt it.

Chapter VIII

The autumn passed; and the obscure days of the London winter set in. Adrian Herbert sat daily at work in his studio, painting a companion picture to the Lady of Shalott, and taking less exercise than was good either for himself or his work. His betrothed was at Windsor, studying Greek with Miss Cairns, and music with Jack. She had carried her point with Mrs. Beatty as to the bandmastership; and Jack had been invited to apply for it; but he, on learning that a large part of his duty would be to provide the officers of the regiment with agreeable music whilst they dined, had unexpectedly repudiated the offer in an intemperate letter to the adjutant, stating that he had refused as an organist to be subject to the ministers of religion, and that he should refuse, as a conductor, to be the hireling of professional homicides. Miss Cairns, when she heard of this, in the heat of her disappointment reproached him for needlessly making an enemy of the colonel; embittering the dislike of Mrs Beatty, and exposing Mary to their resentment. Jack thereupon left Newton Villa in anger; but Miss Cairns learned next day that he had written a letter of thanks to the colonel, in which he mentioned that the recent correspondence with the adjutant had unfortunately turned on the dignity of the musical profession, and begged that it might be disassociated entirely from the personal feeling to which he now sought to give expression. To Miss Cairns herself he also wrote briefly to say that it had occurred to him that Miss Sutherland might be willing to join the singing class, and that he hoped she would be asked to do so. Over this double concession Miss Cairns exulted; but Mary, humiliated by the failure of her effort to befriend him, would not join, and resisted all persuasion, until Jack, meeting her one day in the street, stopped her, inquired about Charlie, and finally asked her to come to one of the class meetings. Glad to have this excuse for relenting, she not only entered the class, but requested him to assist her in the study of harmony, which she had recently begun to teach herself from a treatise. As it proved, however, he confused rather than assisted her; for, though an adept in the use of chords, he could make no intelligible attempt to name or classify them; and her exercises, composed according to the instructions given in the treatise, exasperated him beyond measure.

Meanwhile, Magdalen Brailsford, with many impatient sighs, was learning to speak the English language with purity and distinction, and beginning to look on certain pronunciations for which she had ignorantly ridiculed famous actors, as enviable conditions of their superiority to herself. She did not enjoy her studies, for Jack was very exacting; and the romantic aspect of their first meeting at Paddington was soon forgotten in the dread he inspired as a master. She left Church Street after her first lesson in a state of exhaustion; and, long after she had come accustomed to endure his criticism for an hour without fatigue, she often could hardly restrain her tears when he emphasized her defects by angrily mimicking them, which was the most unpleasant, but not the least effective part of his system of teaching. He was particular, even in his cheerful moods, and all but violent in his angry ones; but he was indefatigable, and spared himself no trouble in forcing her to persevere in overcoming the slovenly habits of colloquial speech. The further she progressed, the less she could satisfy him. His ear was far more acute than hers; and he demanded from her beauties of tone of which she had no conception, and refinements of utterance which she could not distinguish. He repeated sounds which he declared were as distinct as day from night, and raged at her because she could hear no difference between them, He insisted that she was grinding her voice to pieces when she was hardly daring to make it audible. Often, when she was longing for the expiry of the hour to release her, he kept her until Mrs Simpson, who was always present, could bear it no longer, and interfered in spite of the frantic abuse to which a word from her during the lesson invariably provoked him. Magdalen would have given up her project altogether, for the sake of escaping the burden of his tuition, but for her fear of the contempt she knew he would feel for her if she proved recreant. So she toiled on without a word of encouragement or approval from him; and he grimly and doggedly kept her at it, until one day, near Christmas, she came to Church Street earlier than usual, and had a long conference with Mrs Simpson before he was informed of her presence. When he came down from his garret she screwed her courage up to desperation point, and informed him that she had obtained an engagement for a small part in the opening of a pantomime at Nottingham. Instead of exploding fiercely, he stared a little; rubbed his head perplexedly; and then said, “Well, well: you must begin somewhere: the sooner the better. You will have to do poor work, in poor company, for some time, perhaps, but you must believe in yourself, and not flinch a the drudgery of the first year or two. Keep the fire always alight on the altar, and every place you go into will become a temple. Don’t be mean: no grabbing at money, or opportunities, or effects! You can speak better than ninety-nine out of a hundred of them: remember that. If you ever want to do as they do, then your ear will be going wrong; and that will be a sign that your soul is going wrong too. Do you believe me, eh?”

“Yes,” said Madge, dutifully.”

He looked at her very suspiciously, and uttered a sort of growl, adding, “If you get hissed, occasionally, it will do you good; although you are more likely to get applauded and spoilt. Dont forget what I have taught you: you will see the use of it when you have begun to understand your profession.”

Magdalen protested that she mid never forget, and tried to express her gratitude for the trouble he had taken with her. She begged that he would not reveal her destination to anyone, as it was necessary for her to evade her family a second time in order to fulfill her engagement. He replied that her private arrangements were no business of his, advising her at the same time to reflect before she quitted a luxurious home for a precarious and vagabond career, and recommending Mrs Simpson to her as an old hag whose assistance would be useful in any business that required secrecy and lying. “If you want my help,” he added, “you can come and ask for it.”

“She can come and pay for it, and no thanks to you,” said Mrs. Simpson, goaded beyond endurance.

Jack turned on her, purple and glaring. Madge threw herself between them. Then he suddenly walked out; and, as they stood there trembling and looking at one another in silence, they heard him go upstairs to his garret.

“Oh, Polly, how could you?” said Madge at last, almost in a whisper.

“I wonder what he’s gone for,” said Mrs. Simpson. “There’s nothing upstairs that he can do any harm with. I didn’t mean anything.”

He came down presently, with an old wash-leather purse in his hand. “Here,” he said to Madge. They knew perfectly well, without further explanation, that it was the money she had paid him for her lessons.

“Mr Jack,” she stammered: “I cannot.”

“Come, take it,” he said. “She is right: the people at Windsor pay for my wants. I have no need to be supported twice over. Has she charged you anything for the room?”

“No,” said Madge.

“Then the more shame for me to charge you for your lessons,” said Jack. “I shall know better another time. Here: take the money, and let us think no more about it. Goodbye! I think I can work a little now, if I set about it at once.” He gave her the purse, which she did not dare refuse; shook her hand with both his; and went out hurriedly, but humbly.

Three days after this, Adrian Herbert was disturbed at his easel by Mr. Brailsford, who entered the studio in an extraordinarily excited condition,

“Mr. Brailsford! I am very glad to — What is the matter?”

“Do you know anything of Magdalen? She is missing again.” Herbert assumed an air of concern. “Herbert: I appeal to you, if she has confided her plans to you, not to ruin her by a misplaced respect for her foolish secrets.”

“I assure you I am as much surprised as you. Why should you assume that I am in her confidence?”

“You were much in her company during your recent visits to us; and you are the sort man a young girl would confide any crazy project to. You and she have talked together a good deal.”

“Well, we have had two conversations within the last six weeks, both of which came about by accident. We were speaking of my affairs only. You know Miss Sutherland is a friend of hers. She is our leading topic.”

“This is very disappointing, Herbert. Confoundedly so.”

“It is unfortunate; and I am sorry I know nothing.”

“Yes, yes: I knew you were not likely to: it was mere clutching at a straw. Herbert, when I get that girl back, I’ll lock her up, and not let her out of her room until she leaves it to be married.”

“When did she go?”

“Last night. We did not miss her until this morning. She has gone to disgrace herself a second time at some blackguard country theatre or other. And yet she has always been treated with the greatest indulgence at home. She is not like other girls who do not know the value of a comfortable home. In the days when I fought the world as a man of letters, she had opportunities of learning the value of money.” Mr. Brailsford, as he spoke, moved about constantly; pulled at his collar as if it were a stock which needed to be straightened; and fidgeted with his gloves. “I am powerless,” he added. “I cannot obtain the slightest clue. There is nothing for it but to sit down and let my child go.”

“Are you aware,” said Herbert thoughtfully, “that she has been taking lessons in acting from a professor of music during the last few months?”

“No, sir, I certainly am not aware of it,” said Brailsford fiercely. “I beg your pardon, my dear Herbert; but she is a damned ungrateful girl; and her loss is a great trouble to me. I did not know; and she could not have done it if her mother had looked after her properly.”

“It is certainly the case. I was very much surprised myself when Miss Sutherland told me of it, especially as I happened to have some knowledge of the person whom Miss Brailsford employed.”

“Perhaps he knows. Who is he and where is he to be found?”

“His name is an odd one — Jack.”

“Jack? I have heard that name somewhere. Jack? My memory is a wreck. But we are losing time. You know his address, I hope.”

“I believe I have it here among some old letters. Excuse me whilst I search.”

Herbert went into the ante-room. Mr. Brailsford continued his nervous movements; bit his nails; and made a dab at the picture with his glove, smudging it. The discovery that he had wantonly done mischief sobered him a little; and presently Adrian returned with one of Jack’s letters.

Church street, Kensington,” he said. *Will you go there?”

“Instantly, Herbert, instantly. Will you come?”

“If you wish,” said Adrian, hesitating.

“Certainly. You must come. This is some low villain who has pocketed the child’s money, and persuaded her that she is a Mrs Siddons. I had lessons myself long ago from the great Young, who thought highly of me, though not more so than I did of him. Perhaps I am dragging you away from your work, my dear fellow.”

“It is too dark to work much today. In any case the matter is too serious to be sacrificed to my routine”

Quarter of an hour later, Mrs. Simpson’s maid knocked at the door of Jack’s garret, and informed him that two gentlemen were waiting in the drawing room to see him.

“What are they like?” said Jack “Are you sure they want me?”

“Certain sure,” said the girl “one of ‘em’s a nice young gentleman with a flaxy beard; and the other his father, I think. Ain’t he a dapper old toff, too!”

“Give me my boots; and tell them I shall be down presently.”

The maid then appeared to Mr. Brailsford and Adrian, saying, “Mr Jax’ll be down in a minnit,” and vanished. Soon after, Jack came in. In an instant Mr. Brailsford’s eyes lit up as if he saw through the whole plot; and he rose threateningly. Jack bade good morning ceremoniously to Herbert, who was observing with alarm the movements of his companion.

“You know me, I think, sir,” said Mr. Brailsford, threateningly.

“I remember you very well,” replied Jack grimly. “Be pleased to sit down.”

Herbert hastily offered Mr Brailsford a chair, pushing it against his calves just in time to interrupt an angry speech at the beginning. The three sat down.

We have called on you, Mr Jack,” said Adrian, in the hope that you can throw some light on a matter which is a source of great anxiety to Mr Brailsford. Miss Brailsford has disappeared”

“What!” cried Jack. “Run away again. Ha! ha! I expected as much.”

“Pray be calm,” said Herbert, as Mr Brailsford made a frantic gesture. “Allow me to speak, Mr Jack: I believe you have lately been in communication with the young lady.”

“I have been teaching her for the last four months, if that is what you mean.”

“Pray understand that we attach no blame to you in the matter. We merely wish to ascertain the whereabouts of Miss Brailsford: and we thought you might be able to assist us. If so, I feel sure you will not hesitate to give this gentleman all the information in your power.”

“You may reassure yourself,” said Jack.” She has got an engagement at some theatre and has gone to fulfill it. “She told me so a few days ago, when she came to break off her lessons.”

“We particularly wish to find out where she has gone to,” said Herbert slowly.

“You must find that out as best you can,” said Jack, looking attentively at him. She mentioned the place to me; but she asked me not to repeat it, and it is not my business to do so.”

“Herbert,” cried Mr. Brailsford, “Herbert.”

“Pray: remonstrated Adrian. “Just allow me one word—”

“Herbert,” persisted the other: “this is the fellow of whom I told you as we came along in the cab. He is her accomplice. You know you are,” he continued, turning to Jack, and raising his voice. “Do you still deny that you are her agent?”

Jack stared at him imperturbably.

“It is a conspiracy,” said Mr Brailsford. “It, has been a conspiracy from the first; and you are the prime mover in it. You shall not bully me, sir. I will make you speak.”

“There, there,” said Jack. “Take him away, Mr Herbert.”

Adrian stepped hastily between them, fearing that his companion would proceed to violence. Before another word could be spoken the door was opened by Mrs Simpson, who started and stopped short when she saw visitors in the room.

“I beg pardon — Why, it’s Mr Brailsford,” she added, reddening. “I hope I see you well, sir,” she continued, advancing with a propitiatory air. “I am honored by having you in my house.”

“Indeed!” said the old gentleman, with a look which made her tremble. “So it is you who introduced Miss Magdalen to this man. Herbert, my dear boy, the thing is transparent. This woman is an old retainer of ours. It was her sister who took Madge away before. I told you it was all a conspiracy.”

“ Lord bless us!” exclaimed Mrs. Simpson. “I hope nothing ain’t happened to Miss Magdalen.”

“If anything has, you shall be held responsible for it. Where has she gone?”

“Oh, don’t go to tell me that my sweet Miss Magdalen has gone away again, sir!”

“You hear how they contradict one another, Herbert?”

Mrs Simpson looked mistrustfully at Jack, who was grinning at her with cynical admiration. “I don’t know what Mr. Jack may have put into your head about me, sir,” she said cautiously; “but I assure you I know nothing of poor Miss Magdalen’s doings. I haven’t seen her this past month.”

“You understand, of course,” remarked Jack, “that that is not true. Mrs. Simpson has always been present at your daughter’s lessons. She knows perfectly well that Miss Brailsford has gone to play at some theatre. She heard it in—”

“I wish you’d mind your own business, Mr Jack.” said the landlady, sharply.

“When lies are needed to serve Miss Brailsford, you can speak,” retorted Jack. “Until then, hold your tongue. It is clear to me, Mr Herbert, that you want this unfortunate young lady’s address for the purpose of attempting to drag her back from an honorable profession to a foolish and useless existence which she hates. Therefore I shall give you no information. If she is unhappy or unsuccessful in her new career, she will return of her own accord.”

“I fear,” said Herbert, embarrassed by the presence of Mrs Simpson, “that we can do no good by remaining here.”

“You arc right,” said Mr Brailsford. “I decline to address myself further to either of you. Other steps shall be taken. And you shall repent the part you have played on this occasion, Mrs. Simpson. As for you, sir, I can only say 1 trust this will prove our last meeting.”

“I shan’t repent nothink,” said Mrs. Simpson. “Why shouldn’t I assist the pretty—”

“Come!” said Jack, interrupting her, “we have said enough. Good evening, Mr Herbert.” Adrian colored, and moved towards the door, “You shall be welcome whenever you wish to see me,” added lack; “but at present you had better take this gentleman away.” Herbert bowed slightly, and went out, annoyed by the abrupt dismissal, and even more by the attempt to soften it. Mr Brailsford walked stiffly after him, staring indignantly at Mrs Simpson and her lodger. Provoked to mirth by this demonstration, Jack, who had hitherto behaved with dignity, rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand, and grinned hideously through his fingers at his visitor.

“As I told you before,” said Mr. Brailsford, turning as he reached the threshold, “you are a vile kidnapper; and I will see that your trade is exposed and put a stop to.”

“As I told you before,” said Jack, removing his hand from his nose, “you are an old fool; and I wish you good afternoon.”

“Sh — sh,” said Mrs Simpson, as Mr Brailsford, with a menacing wave of his glove, disappeared. “You didn’t ought to speak like that to an old gentleman, Mr. Jack.”

“His age gives him no right to be ill-tempered and abusive to me,” said Jack angrily.

“Humph!” retorted the landlady. “Your own tongue and temper are none of the sweetest. If I was you, I wouldn’t be so much took aback at seeing others do the same as myself.”

“Indeed. And how do you think being me would feel like, Mrs. Deceit?”

“I wouldn’t make out other people to be liars before their faces, at all events, Mr Jack.”

“You would prefer the truth to be told of you behind your back, perhaps. I sometimes wonder what part of my music will show the influence of your society upon me. My Giulietta Guicciardi!”

“Give me no more of your names,” said Mrs. Simpson, shortly, “I don’t need them.”

Jack left the room slowly as if he had forgotten her. Meanwhile Mr. Brailsford was denouncing him to Herbert. “From the moment I first saw him,” he said, “I felt an instinctive antipathy to him. I have never seen a worse face, or met with a worse nature.”

“I certainly do not like him,” said Herbert. “He has taken up an art as a trade, and knows nothing of the trials of a true artist’s career. No doubts of himself; no aspirations to suggest them; nothing but a stubborn narrow self-sufficiency. I half envy him.”

“The puppy!” exclaimed Mr Brailsford, not attending to Adrian: “to dare insult me! He shall suffer for it. I have put a bullet into a fellow — into a gentleman of good position — for less. And Magdalen — my daughter — is intimate with him — has visited him. Girls are going to the devil of late years, Herbert, going to the very devil. She shall not give me the slip again, when I catch her.”

Mr Brailsford, however, did not catch Magdalen. Her clear delivery of the doggerel allotted to her in the pantomime, gained the favor of the Nottingham playgoers. Their applause prevented her from growing weary of repeating her worthless part nightly for six weeks, and compensated her for the discomfort and humiliation of living among people whom she could not help regarding as her inferiors, and with whom she had to co-operate in entertaining vulgar people with vulgar pleasantries, fascinating them by a display of comeliness, not only of her face, hut of more of her person than she had been expected I to shew at Kensington Palace Gardens. Her costume shocked her at first; but she made up her mind to accept it without demur, partly because wearing such things was plainly part of an actress’s business and partly because she felt that any objection on her part would imply an immodest self-consciousness. Besides, she had no moral conviction that it was wrong, whereas she had no doubt at all that petticoats were a nuisance. She could not bring herself to accept with equal frankness the society which the pantomime company offered to her. Miss Lafitte, the chief performer, was a favorite with the public on account of her vivacity, her skill in clog-dancing, and her command of slang, which she uttered in a piercing voice with a racy Whitechapel accent. She took a fancy to Magdalen, who at first recoiled. But Miss Lafitte (in real life Mrs. Cohen) was so accustomed to live down aversion, that she only regarded it as a sort of shyness — as indeed it was. She was vigorous, loud spoken, always full of animal spirits, and too well appreciated by her audiences to be jealous. Magdalen, who had been made miserable at first by the special favor of permission to share the best dressing-room with her, soon found the advantage of having a good-natured and powerful companion. The drunken old woman who was attached to the theatre as dresser, needed to be kept efficient by sharp abuse and systematic bullying, neither of which Magdalen could have administered effectually. Miss Lafitte bullied her to perfection. Occasionally some of the actors would stroll into the dressing room, evidently without the least suspicion that Magdalen might prefer to put on her shoes, rouge herself, and dress her hair in private. Miss Lafitte, who had never objected to their presence on her own account, now bade them begone whenever they appeared, at which they seemed astonished, but having no intention of being intrusive, retired submissively.

“You make yourself easy, deah,” she said to Magdalen. “Awe-y-’ll take kee-yerr of you. Lor’ bless you, awe-y know wot you are. You’re a law’ydy. But you’ll get used to them. They don’t mean no ‘arm.

Magdalen, wondering what Jack would have said to Miss Lafitte’s vowels, disclaimed all pretension to be more of a lady than those with whom she worked; but Miss Lafitte, though, she patted the young novice on the back, and soothingly assented, nevertheless continued to make a difference between her own behavior in Magdalen’s presence, and the coarse chaff and reckless flirtation in which she indulged freely elsewhere. On Boxing night, when Madge was nerving herself to face the riotous audience, Miss Lafittc told her that she looked beautiful; exhorted her cheerfully to keep up her pecker and never say die; and, ridiculing her fear of putting too much paint on her face, plastered her cheeks and blackened the margins of her eyes until she blushed though the mask of pigment. When the call came, she went with her to the wing; pushed her on to the stage at the right instant; and praised her enthusiastically when she returned. Madge, who hardly knew what had passed on the stage, was grateful for these compliments, and tried to return them when Miss Lafitte came to the dressing, flushed with the exertion of singing a topical song with seven encore verses and dancing a breakdown between each.

“I’m used to it,” said Miss Lafitte. “It’s my knowledge of music-hall business that makes me what I am. You wouldn’t catch me on the stage at all, only that my husband’s a bit a swe11 in his own way — he’ll like you for that — and he thinks the theatre more respectable. It dont pay as well, I can tell you; but of course it’s surer and lasts longer.

“Were you nervous at your first appearance?” said Madge.

“Oh, wawn’t I though! Just a little few. I cried at havin’ to go on. I wasn’t cold and plucky like you; but I got over it sooner. I know your sort: you will be nervous all your life. I don’t care twopence for any audience now, nor ever did after my second night.”

“I may have looked cold and plucky,” said Madge, surprised. “but I never felt more miserable in my life before.”

“Yes. Ain’t it awful? Did you hear Lefanu? — stuck up little minx! Her song will be cut out tomorrow. She’s a reg’lar duffer, she is. She gives herself plenty of airs, and tells the people that she was never used to associate with us. I know who she is well enough: her father was an apothecary in Bayswater. She’s only fit to be a governess. You’re worth fifty of her, either on the boards or off.”

Madge did not reply. She was conscious of having contemplated escape from Miss Lafitte by attaching herself to Miss Lefanu, who was a ladylike young woman.

“She looks like a print gown after five washings,” continued Miss Lafitte; “and she don’t know how to speak. Now you speak lovely — almost as well as me, if you’d spit it out a bit more. Who taught you?”

When the pantomime had been played for a fortnight, Madge found herself contemptuously indifferent to Miss Lefanu, and fond of Miss Lafitte. When the latter invited her to a supper at her house, she could not refuse, though she accepted with misgiving. It proved a jovial entertainment — almost an orgie. Some of the women drank much champagne; spoke at the top of their voices; and screamed when they laughed. The men paid court to them with facetious compliments, and retorted their raillery with broad sarcasms. Madge got on best with the younger and less competent actors, who were mostly unpropertied gentlemen, with a feeble amateur bent for singing and acting, who had contrived to get on the stage, not because they were fit for it, but because society had not fitted them for anything else. They talked theatrical shop and green room scandal in addition to the usual topics of young gentlemen at dances; and they shielded Magdalen efficiently from the freer spirits. Sometimes an unusually coarse sally would reach her ears, and bring upon her a sense of disgust and humiliation; but, though she resolved to attend no more suppers, she was able next day to assure her hostess with perfect sincerity that she was none the worse for her evening’s experience and that she had never enjoyed herself as much at any Kensington supper party. Miss Lafitte thereupon embraced her, and told her that she had been the belle of the ball, and that Laddie (a Gentile abbreviation of Lazarus, her husband’s, name) had recognized her as a real lady, and was greatly pleased with her. Then she asked her whether she did not think Laddie a handsome man. Madge replied that she had been struck by his dark hair and eyes that his manners were elegant. “There is one thing” she added, “that puzzles me a little. I always call you Miss Lafitte here, but should I not call you by your real name at your house? I don’t know the etiquette, you see.”

“Call me Sal,” said Mrs Cohen, kissing her.

When the pantomime was over, and the company dispersed, the only member of whose departure she felt a loss was Miss Lafitte; and she never afterwards fell into the mistake of confounding incorrigible rowdyism and a Whitechapel accent with true unfitness for society. By her advice, Madge accepted an engagement as one of the stock company of the Nottingham theater at the salary — liberal for a novice — of two pounds per week. For this she did some hard work. Every night she had to act in a farce, and in a comedy which had become famous in London. In it, as in the pantomime, she had to play the same part nightly for two weeks. Then came three weeks of Shakespeare and the legitimate drama, in which she and the rest of the company had to support an eminent tragedian, a violent and exacting man, who expected them to be perfect in long parts at a day’s notice. When they disappointed him, as was usually the case, he kept them rehearsing from the forenoon to the hour of performance with hardly sufficient interval to allow of their dining. The stage manager, the musicians, the scene-painters and carpenters even, muttered sulkily that it was impossible to please him. He did not require the actors to enter into the spirit of their lines — it was supposed that he was jealous of their attempts at acting, which were certainly not always helpful — but he was inflexible in his determination to have them letter-perfect and punctual in the movements and positions he dictated to them. His displeasure was vented either in sarcasms or oaths; and often Madge, though nerved by intense indignation, could hardly refrain from weeping like many other members of the company, both male and female, from fatigue and mortification. She worked hard at her parts, which were fortunately not long ones, in order to escape the humiliation of being rebuked by him. Yet once or twice he excited her fear and hatred to such a degree that she was on the point of leaving the theatre, and abandoning her profession. It was far worse than what Jack had made her endure; for her submission to him had been voluntary; whilst with the tragedian she could not help herself, being paid to assist him, and ignorant of how to do it properly.

Towards the end of the second week her business became easier by repetition. She appeared as the player queen in Hamlet, the lady-in-waiting in Macbeth, and the widow of King Edward IV, and began to feel for the first time a certain respect for the silently listening, earnest audiences that crowded the house. It was the first dim Stirring in her of a sense that her relation as an actress to the people was above all her other relations. If the tragedian had felt this between the audience and the company of which he was a part, he might have inspired them to work all together with a will to realize the plays to the people. But he was a “star,” recognizing no part and no influence but his own. She and her colleagues were dwarfed and put out of countenance; their scenes were cut short and hurried through; the expert swordsman who, as Richmond and Macduff slew the star thrice a week in mortal combat was the only person who shared with him the compliment of a call before the curtain. Naturally, they all hated Shakespeare; and the audiences distinctly preferring the tragedian to the poet, never protested his palming off on them versions by Cibber or Garrick as genuine Shakespearian plays

On the second Saturday, when Madge was congratulating herself on having only six days more of the national Bard to endure, the principal actress sprained her ankle; and the arrangements for the ensuing week were thrown into confusion. The manager came to Madge’s lodging on Sunday morning, and told her that she must be prepared to play Ophelia, Lady Ann, and Marion Delorme (in Lytton’s “Richelieu”) in the course of the following week. It was, he added, a splendid chance for her. Madge was distracted. She said again and again that it was impossible, and at last ventured to remind the manager that she was not engaged for leading parts. He disposed of this objection by promising her an extra ten shillings for the week, and urged upon her that she would look lovely as Ophelia; that the tragedian had made a point of giving the parts to her because he liked her elocution; that his fierceness was only a little way of his which meant nothing; that he had already consented to substitute “Hamlet” and “Richelieu” for “Much Ado” and “Othello” because he was too considerate to ask her to play Beatrice and Desdemona; and, finally, that he would be enraged if she made any objection. She would, said the manager, shew herself as willing as old Mrs Walker, who had undertaken to play Lady Macbeth without a moment’s hesitation. Madge, ashamed to shrink from an emergency, and yet afraid of failing to please the tyrant at rehearsal, resisted the manager’s importunity until she felt hysterical. Then, in desperation, she consented, stipulating only that she should be released from playing in the farces. She spent that Sunday learning the part of Ophelia, and was able to master it and to persuade herself that the other two parts would not take long to learn, before she went to bed, dazed by study and wretched from dread of the morrow. “Hamlet” had been played twice already, and only the part of Ophelia and that of the player queen needed to be rehearsed anew. On Monday morning the tragedian was thoughtful and dignified, but hard to please. He kept Madge at his scene with Ophelia for more than an hour. She had intended to try and fancy that she was really Ophelia, and he really Hamlet; but when the time came to practice this primitive theory of acting, she did not dare to forget herself for a moment. She had to count her steps and repeat her entrance four times before she succeeded in placing herself at the right moment in the exact spot towards which the tragedian looked when exclaiming “Soft you now! The fair Ophelia.” For a long time she could not offer him the packet of letters in a satisfactory manner; and by the time this difficulty was mastered, she was so bewildered that when he said, “I loved you not,” she, instead of replying, “I was the more deceived,” said “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so,” whereupon he started; looked at her for a moment, uttered imprecations between his teeth, and abruptly walked off the stage, leaving her alone, wondering. Suddenly, she bethought herself of of what had done; and her cheeks began to tingle. She was relieved by the return of Hamlet, who, unable to find words to express his feelings, repeated his speech without making any verbal comment on her slip. This time she made the proper answer and the rehearsal proceeded. The new player queen suffered less than Madge had done a week before, the tragedian treating her with brief disdain. He was very particular about Ophelia’s chair and fan in the play scene; but when these were arranged, he left the theatre without troubling himself about the act in which he did not himself appear. Madge, left comparatively to her own devices in rehearsing it, soon felt the want of his peremptory guidance, and regretted his absence almost as much as she was relieved by it. The queen, jealous, like the other actresses, of Madge’s promotion, was disparaging in her manner; and the king rehearsed with ostentatious carelessness, being out of humor at having to rehearse at all. Everybody present shewed that they did not consider the scene of the least importance; and Madge sang her snatches of ballads with a disheartening sense of being unpopular and ridiculous.

The performance made amends to her for the rehearsal. The tragedian surpassed himself; and Madge was compelled to admire him, although he was in his fiftieth year and personally disagreeable to her. For her delivery of the soliloquy following her scene with him, she received, as her share of the enthusiasm he had excited, a round of applause which gratified her the more because she had no suspicion that he bad earned the best part of it. The scene of Ophelia’s madness was listened to with favor by the audience, who were impressed by the intensely earnest air which nervousness gave Madge, as well as by her good looks.

Next day she had leisure to study the part of Lady Anne in Cibber’s adaptation of “Richard III,” which was rehearsed on the Wednesday; and this time the tragedian was so overbearing, and corrected her so frequently and savagely, that when he handed her his sword, and requested her to stab him, she felt disposed to take him at his word. In the scene from Richard’s domestic life in which he informs his wife that he hates her, he not only spoke the text with a cold ferocity which chilled her, but cursed at her under his breath quite outrageously. At last she was stung to express her resentment by an indignant look, which fell immediately before his frown. When the rehearsal, which, though incomplete, lasted from eleven to four, was over, Madge was angry and very tired. As she was leaving, she passed near Richard, who was conversing graciously with the manager and one of the actors. The night before, he had threatened to leave the theatre because the one had curtailed his stage escort by two men; and he had accused the other of intentionally insulting him by appearing on the stage without spurs.

“Who is that little girl?” he said aloud, pointing to Madge.

The manager, surprised at the question, made some reply which did not reach her, his voice and utterance being less sonorous and distinct than the tragedian’s.

“Unquestionably she has played with me. I am aware of that. What is she called?”

The manager told him.

“Come here” he said to Madge, in his grand manner. She reddened and stopped.

“Come here,” he repeated, more emphatically. She was too inexperienced to feel sure of her right to be treated more respectfully, so she approached him slowly.

Who taught you to speak?

“A gentleman in London,” she said, coldly. “A Mr Jack.”

“Jack:” The tragedian paused. “Jack!” he repeated. Then, with a smile, and a graceful action of his wrists, “I never heard of him.” The other men laughed. “Would you like to tour through the provinces with me — to act with me every night?”

“Oho!”said the manager, jocularly, “I shall have something to say to that. I cannot afford to lose her.”

“You need not be alarmed,” said Madge, all her irritation suddenly exploding in one angry splutter. “I have not the slightest intention of breaking my present engagement, particularly now, when the most unpleasant part of it is nearly over.” And she walked away, pouting and scarlet. The manager told her next day that she had ruined herself, and had made a very ungrateful return for the kindness that she, a beginner, had received from the greatest actor on the stage. She replied that she was not conscious of having received anything but rudeness from the greatest actor on the stage, and that if she had offended him she was very glad. The manager shook his head and retired, muttering that a week’s leading business had turned her head. The tragedian, who had been, for so terrible a person, much wounded and put out of heart by her attack, took no further notice of her, demanding no fresh rehearsal of Ophelia, and only giving her a few curt orders in the small part of Marion Delorme. At last he departed from Nottingham; and Madge, for the first time since his arrival, lay down to sleep free from care.

Her next part was that of a peasant girl in an Irish melodrama. She looked very pretty in her Connemara cloak and short skirt, but was hampered by her stage brogue, which only made her accent aggressively English. During this period, she was annoyed by the constant attendance in the stalls of a young gentleman who flung bouquets to her; followed her to her lodging; and finally wrote her a letter in which he called her a fairy Red Riding Hood, describing his position and prospects, and begging her to marry him. Madge after some hesitation as to the advisability of noticing this appeal, replied by a note declining his offer, and requesting him to discontinue his gifts of flowers, which, she said, were a source of embarrassment, and not of pleasure, to her. After this, the young gentleman instead of applauding, as before, sat in his stall with folded arms and a gloomy expression. Madge, who was by this time sufficiently accustomed to the stage to recognize faces in the audience, took care not to look at him; and so, after a week, he ceased to attend and saw him no more.

The Irish melodrama passed on to the next town; and an English opera company came in its place for a fortnight, during which Madge found the time hung heavy on her hands, as she took no part in the performances, though she went to the theatre daily from habit. She was glad when she was at work again in a modern play with which a popular actress was making the tour of the provinces. This actress was an amiable woman; and Madge enacted Celia in As You Like It at her benefit without any revival of the dread of Shakespeare which the tragedian had implanted in her. She was now beginning to tread the boards with familiar ease. At first, the necessity of falling punctually into prearranged positions on the stage and of making her exits and entrances at prescribed sides, had so preoccupied her that all freedom of attention or identification of herself with the character she represented had been impossible. To go through her set task of speeches and man oeuvres with accuracy was the most she could hope to do. Now, however, there mechanical conditions of her art not only ceased to distract her, but enabled her to form plans of acting which stood the test of rehearsal. She became used to learning parts, not from a book of the play, but from a mere list of the fragments which she had to utter; so that she committed her lines to memory first, and found out what they were about afterwards. She was what is called by actors a quick study; and in Nottingham, where, besides the principal piece, one and often two farces were performed nightly, she had no lack of practice. In four months, she was second in skill only to the low comedian and the old woman, and decidedly superior to the rest of the stock company, most of whom had neither natural talent nor even taste for the stage, and only earned their livelihood on it because, their parents having been in the profession, they had been in a manner born into it.

Madge’s artistic experience thenceforth was varied, though her daily course was monotonous. Other tragedians came to Nottingham, but none nearly so terrible, nor, she reluctantly confessed, nearly so gifted as he who had taught her the scene from Hamlet. Some of them, indeed, objected to the trouble of rehearsing, and sent substitutes who imitated them in every movement and so drilled the company to act with them. Occasionally a part in a comedy of contemporary life enabled Madge to profit by her knowledge of fashionable society and her taste in modern dress. The next week, perhaps, she would have to act in a sensational melodrama, and, in a white muslin robe, to struggle in the arms of a pickpocket in corduroys, with his clothes and hands elaborately begrimed. Once she had to play with the wreck of a celebrated actress, who was never free from the effects of brandy, and who astonished Madge by walking steadily on the stage when she could hardly stand off it. Then Shakespeare, sensation drama, Irish melodrama, comic opera or pantomime, new comedy from London over again, with farce constantly. Study, rehearsal, and performance became part of her daily habits. Her old enthusiasm for the mock passions the stage left her, and was succeeded by a desire to increase her skill in speaking by acquiring as much resource in shades of meaning as Jack had given her in pure pronunciation, and to add as many effective gestures as possible to the stock she had already learnt. When she was not engaged at the theatre she was at her lodging, practicing the management of a train, trying to acquire the knack of disposing her dress prettily in the act of sitting down, or arranging her features into various expressions before a mirror. This last branch of her craft was the most troublesome to her. She had learned from Jack, much to her surprise, that she could not make her face express anger or scorn by merely feeling angry or scornful. The result of that method was a strained frown, disagreeable to behold; and it was long before she attained perfect control of her features, and artistic judgment in exercising it. Sometimes she erred on the side of exaggeration, and failed to conceal the effort which her studied acting required. Then she recoiled into tameness and conventionality. Then, waking from this, she tried a modification of her former manner, and presently became dissatisfied with that too, and re-modified it. Not until she had gone through two years of hard study and practice did she find herself mistress of a fairly complete method; and then indeed she felt herself an actress. She ridiculed the notion that emotion had anything to do with her art, and seriously began to think of taking a pupil, feeling that she could make an actress of any girl, the matter being merely one of training. When she had been some four months in this phase, she had a love affair with a young acting manager of a touring company. The immediate effect was to open her eyes to the fact that the people were tired of her complete method, and that she was tired of it too. She flung it at once to the winds for ever, and thenceforth greatly undervalued her obligations to the study it had cost her, declaring, in the teeth of her former opinion, that study and training were useless, and that the true method was to cultivate the heart and mind and let the acting take care of itself. She cultivated her mind by high reading and high thinking as far as she could. As to the cultivation of her heart, the acting manager taught her that the secret of that art was love. Now it happened that the acting manager, though pleasant-looking and good-natured, was by no means clever, provident, or capable of resisting temptation. Madge never could make up her mind whether he had entangled her or she him. In truth love entangled them both; and Madge found that love suited her excellently. It improved her health; it enlarged her knowledge of herself and of the world; it explained her roles to her, thawed the springs of emotion that had never flowed freely before either on or off the stage, threw down a barrier that had fenced her in from her kind, and replaced her vague aspirations, tremors, doubts, and fits of low spirits with an elate enjoyment in which she felt that she was a woman at last. Nevertheless, her attachment to the unconscious instrument of this mysterious change proved transient. The acting manager had but slender intellectual resources: when his courtship grew stale, he became a bore. After a while, their professional engagements carried them asunder; and as a correspondent he soon broke down. Madge, did not feel the parting: she found a certain delight in being fancy-free; and before that was exhausted she was already dreaming of a new lover, an innocent young English-opera librettist, whom she infatuated and ensnared and who came nearer than she suspected to blowing out his brains from remorse at having, as he thought, ensnared her. His love for her was abject in its devotion; but at last she went elsewhere and, as her letters also presently ceased, his parents, with much trouble, managed to convince him at last that no she no longer cared for him.

It must not be supposed that these proceedings cost Madge her self-respect. She stood on her honor according to her own instinct; took no gifts, tolerated no advances from men whose affections were not truly touched, absorbed all her passion in her art when there were no such deserving claimants, never sold herself or threw herself away. would content herself at any time with poetry without love rather than endure love without poetry. She rather pitied her married colleagues, knowing perfectly well that they were not free to be so fastidious, reserved, and temperate as her instinct told her a great artist should always be. Polite society pretended to respect her when it asked her to recite at bazaars or charity concerts: at other times it did not come into contact with her, nor trouble itself as to her conformity to its rules, since she, as an actress, was out of polite society from the start. The ostracism which is so terrible to women whose whole aim is to know and be known by people of admitted social standing cannot reach the woman who is busily working with a company bound together by a common co-operative occupation, and who obtains at least some word or sign of welcome from the people every night. As to the Church, it had never gained any hold on Madge: it was to her only a tedious hypocrisy out of all relation with her life. Her idea of religion was believing the Bible because God personally dictated it to Moses, and going to church because her father’s respectability required her to comply with that custom. Knowing from her secular education that such belief in the Bible was as exploded as belief in witchcraft, and despising respectability as those only can who have tasted the cream of it, she was perfectly free from all pious scruples. Habit, prejudice, and inherited moral cowardice just influenced her sufficiently to induce her to keep up appearances carefully, and to offer no contradiction to the normal assumption that her clandestine interludes of passion and poetry were sins. But she never had a moment of genuine remorse after once discovering that such sins were conditions of her full efficiency as an actress. They had brought tones into her voice that no teaching of Jack’s could have endowed her with; and so completely did she now judge herself by her professional powers, that this alone brought her an accession instead of a loss of self respect. She was humiliated only when she played badly. If one of the clergymen who occasionally asked her, with many compliments, to recite at their school fêtes and the like, had demanded instead what it could profit her to gain the whole world and lose her own soul, she might have replied with perfect sincerity from her point of view that she had given up the whole world of Mrs Grundy and gained her own soul, and that, whether he considered it judicious to mention it or not, the transaction had in fact profited her greatly.

But all this belonged to a later period than the novitiate of two and a half years which began at Nottingham. These thirty months did not pass without many fits of low spirits, during which she despaired of success and hated her profession. She remained at Nottingham until July, when the theatre there was closed for a time. She then joined a travelling company and went through several towns until she obtained an engagement at Leeds. Thence she went to Liverpool, where she remained for three months, at the expiration of which she accepted an offer made her by the the manager of a theatre in Edinburgh, and went thither with a salary of five pounds a week, the largest wage she had yet received for her services. There she stayed until August in second year of her professional life, when she acted in London for the first time, and was disgusted by the coldness of the metropolitan audiences which were, besides, but scanty at that period of the year. She was glad to return to the provinces, although her first task there was to support her old acquaintance the tragedian, with whom she quarrelled at the first rehearsal with spirit and success. Here, as leading lady, she attempted the parts of Beatrice, Portia, and Lady Macbeth, succeeding fairly in the first, triumphantly in the second and only escaping failure by her insignificance in the third. By that time she had come to be known by the provincial managers as a trustworthy, hard-working young woman, safe in the lighter sorts of leading business, and likely to improve with more experience. They hardly gave her credit enough, she thought, for what seemed to her the slow and painful struggle which her progress had cost her. Those were the days in which she was building up the complete method which, though it was a very necessary part of her training, proved so short-lived. She had had to exhaust the direct cultivation of her art before she could begin the higher work of cultivating herself as the source of that art.

Shortly after her flight from Kensington, her twenty-first birthday had placed her in a position to defy the interference of her family; and she had thereupon written to her father acquainting him with her whereabouts, and with her resolve to remain upon the stage at all hazards. He had replied through his solicitor, formally disowning her. She took no notice of this; and the solicitor then sent her a cheque for one hundred pounds, and informed her that this was all she had to expect from her father, with whom she was not to attempt to establish any further communication. Madge was about to return the money, but was vehemently dissuaded from doing so by Mrs Cohen, who had not at that time quitted Nottingham. It proved very useful to her afterwards for her stage wardrobe. In defiance of the solicitor’s injunction, she wrote to Mr Brailsford, thanking him for the money, and reproaching him for his opposition to her plans. He replied at great length; and eventually they corresponded regularly once a month, the family resigning themselves privately to Madge’s being an actress, but telling falsehoods publicly to account for her absence. The donation of one hundred pounds was repeated next year; and many an actress whose family heavily burdened instead of aiding her, envied Madge her independence.

She wrote once to Jack, telling him that all her success, and notably her early promotion from the part of the player queen to that of Ophelia was due to the method of delivering verse which he had taught her. He answered, after a long delay, with expressions of encouragement curiously mixed with inconsequent aphorisms; but his letter needed no reply and she did not venture to write again, though she felt a desire to do so.

This was the reality which took the place of Madge’s visions of the life of an actress.

Chapter IX

The year after that in which Madge had her autumnal glimpse of the London stage began with a General Election, followed by a change in the Ministry, a revival of trade, a general fancy that things were going to mend, and a sudden access of spirit in political agitation, commercial enterprise, public amusements, and private expenditure. The wave even reached a venerable artistic institution called the Antient Orpheus Society, established nearly a century ago for the performance of orchestral music, and since regarded as the pioneer of musical art in England. It had begun by producing Beethoven’s symphonies: it had ended by producing a typical collection of old fogeys, who pioneered backwards so fast and so far that they had not finished shaking their heads over the innovations in the overture to William Tell when the rest of the world were growing tired of the overture to Tannhauser. The younger critics had introduced a fashion of treating the Antient Orpheus as obsolescent; and even their elders began to forebode the extinction of the Society unless it were speedily rejuvenated by the supercession of the majority of the committee. But the warnings of the press, as usual, did not come until long after the public had begun to abstain from the Antient Orpheus concerts; and as the Society in its turn resisted the suggestions of the press until death or dotage reduced the conservative majority of the committee to a minority, the credit of the Antient Orpheus was almost past recovery when reform was at last decided on. When the new members of the rejuvenated committee — three of whom were under fifty — realized this, they became as eager to fill the concert programmes with new works as their predecessors had been determined to exclude them. But when the business of selecting the new works came to be considered, all was discord. Some urged the advisability of performing the works of English composers, a wilful neglect of which had been one of the of the practices of the old committee of which the press had most persistently complained. To this it was objected that in spite of the patriotic complaints of critics, the public had shewed their opinion of English composers by specially avoiding the few concerts to which they had been allowed to contribute. At last it was arranged that an English work should be given at the first concert of the season, and that care should be taken to neutralize its repellent effect on the public by engaging a young Polish lady, who had recently made an extraordinary success abroad as a pianist, to make her first appearance in England on the occasion. Matters being settled so far, question now arose as to what the new English work should be. Most of the Committee had manuscript scores of their own, composed posed thirty years before in the interval between leaving the academy and getting enough teaching to use up all their energy; but as works of this class had already been heard once or twice by the public with undisguised tedium, and as each composer hesitated to propose his own opus, the question was not immediately answered. Then a recently-elected member of the Committee, not a professional musician, mentioned a fantasia for pianoforte and orchestra of which he had some private knowledge. It was composed, he said, by a young man, a Mr Owen Jack. The chairman coughed, and remarked coldly that he did not recollect the name. A member asked bluntly who Mr Jack was, and whether anybody had ever heard of him. Another member protested against the suggestion of a fantasia, and declared that if this illustrious obscure did not know enough about musical form to write a concerto, the Antient Orpheus Society, which had subsisted for nearly a century without his assistance, could probably do so a little longer. When the laughter and applause which this speech evoked had subsided, a good natured member remarked that he had met a man of the name of Jack at somebody’s place in Windsor, and had heard him improvise variations on a song of the hostess’s in a rather striking manner. He therefore seconded the proposal that Jack’s fantasia should be immediately examined with a view to its performance by the Polish lady at the next concert. Another member, not good natured, but professionally jealous of the last speaker but one, supported the proposal on the ground that the notion that the Society could get on high-and-mightily without ever doing anything new was just what had brought it to death’s door. This naturally elicited a defiant statement that the Society had never been more highly esteemed than at that hour; and a debate ensued, in the course of which Jack’s ability was hotly attacked and defended in turn by persons who had never heard of him before that day. Eventually the member who had introduced the subject obtained permission to invite Mr Jack to submit his fantasia to the Committee.

At the next meeting an indignant member begged leave to call the attention of his colleagues to a document which had accompanied the score forwarded in response to the invitation by which the Antient Orpheus Society had honored Mr Owen Jack. It was a letter to the Secretary, in the following terms:

“Sir — Herewith you will find the instrumental partition of a fantasia composed by me for pianoforte and orchestra. I am willing to give the use of it to the Antient Orpheus Society gratuitously for one concert, on condition that the rehearsal be superintended by me, and that, if I require it, a second rehearsal be held.”

The member said he would not dwell on the propriety of this communication to the foremost musical society in Europe from a minor teacher, as he had ascertained Mr. Jack to be. It had been sufficiently rebuked by the Secretary’s reply, dispatched alter the partition had been duly examined, to the effect that the work, though not destitute of merit, was too eccentric in form, and crude in harmonic structure, to be suitable for public performance at the concerts of the Society. This had elicited a second letter from Mr. Jack, of which the member would say nothing, as he preferred to leave it to speak for itself and for the character of the writer.

Church Street,
Kensington, W.

Sir — Your criticism was uninvited, and is valueless except as an illustration of the invincible ignorance of the pedants whose mouthpiece you are. I am, sir,
Yours truly,
Owen Jack.”

The most astute diplomatist could not have written a more effective letter in Jack’s favor than this proved. The party of reform took it as an exquisite slap at their opponents, and at once determined to make the Secretary smart for rejecting the work without the authority of the whole Committee. Jack’s advocate produced a note from the Polish lady acknowledging the receipt of a pianoforte fantasia, and declaring that she should be enchanted to play for the first time to an English audience a work so poetic by one of their own nation. He explained that having borrowed a copy of the pianoforte part from a young lady relative of his who was studying it, he had sent it to the Polish artist, who had just arrived in England. Her opinion of it, he contended, was sufficient to show that the letter of the secretary was the result of an error of judgment which deserved no better answer than it had elicited. The secretary retorted that he had no right to avail himself of his private acquaintance with the pianist to influence the course of the Society, and stigmatized Jack’s letter as the coarse abuse natural to the vulgar mind of a self-assertive charlatan. On the other hand, it was maintained that Jack had only shewn the sensitiveness of an artist, and that to invite a composer to send in a work and then treat it as if it were an examination paper filled by a presumptuous novice, was an impertinence likely to bring ridicule as well as odium upon the Antient Orpheus. The senior member, who occupied the chair, now declared very solemnly that he had seen the fantasia, and that it was one of those lawless compositions unhappily common of late years, which were hurrying the beautiful art of Haydn and Mozart into the abyss of modern sensationalism. Hereupon someone remarked that the gentleman had frequently spoken of the works of Wagner in the same terms, although they all knew that Richard Wagner was the greatest composer of that or any other age. This assertion was vehemently repudiated by some, and loudly cheered by others In the hubbub which followed, Jack’s cause became identified with that of Wagner; and a motion to set aside the unauthorized rejection of the fantasia was carried by a majority of the admirers of the Prussian composer, not one of whom knew or cared a straw about the English one.

“I am glad we have won the day,” said Mr. Phipson, the proposer of this motion, to a friend, as the meeting broke up; “but we have certainly experienced the truth of Mary’s remark that this Jack creates nothing but discord in real life, whatever he may do in music.”

Jack at first refused to have anything further to do with the Antient Orpheus; but as it was evident that his refusal would harm nobody except himself, he yielded to the entreaties of Mary Sutherland, and consented to make use of the opportunity she had, through Mr. Phipson, procured for him. As the negotiation proceeded; and at last, one comfortless wet spring morning, Jack got out of an omnibus in Piccadilly, and walked through the mud to St. James’s Hall, where, in the gloomy rooms beneath the orchestra, he found a crowd of about eighty men, chatting, hugging themselves, and stamping because of the cold, stooping over black bags and boxes containing musical instruments, or reluctantly unwinding woolen mufflers and unbuttoning great coats. He passed them into a lower room, where he found three gentlemen standing in courtly attitudes before a young lady wrapped in furs, with a small head, light brown hair, and a pale face, rather toil worn. She received them with that natural air of a princess in her own right which is so ineffectually striven for by the ordinary princess in other people’s rights. As she spoke to the gentlemen in French, occasionally helping them to understand her by a few words of broken English, she smiled occasionally, apparently more from kindness than natural gaiety, for her features always relapsed into an expression of patient but not unhappy endurance. Near her sat an old foreign lady, brown skinned, tall, and very grim.

Jack advanced a few steps into the room; glanced at the gentlemen, and took a long look at the younger lady, who, like the rest, had had her attention arrested by his impressive ugliness. He scrutinized her so openly that she turned away displeased, and a little embarrassed. Two of the gentlemen stared at him stiffly. The third came forward, and said with polite severity, “What is your business here, sir?”

Jack looked at him for a moment, wrinkling his face hideously. “I am Jack,” he said, in the brassiest tone of his powerful voice. “Who are you?”

“Oh!” said the gentleman, relaxing a little. “I beg your pardon. I had not the pleasure of knowing you by sight, Mr Jack. My name is Manlius, at your service.” Mr Manlius was the conductor of the Antient Orpheus orchestra. He was a learned musician, generally respected because he had given instruction to members of the Royal family, and, when conducting, never allowed his orchestra to forget the restraint due to the presence of ladies and gentlemen in the sofa stalls.

Jack bowed. Mr Manlius considered whether he should introduce the composer to the young lady. Whilst he hesitated, a trampling overhead was succeeded by the sounding of a note first on the pianoforte and then on the oboe, instantly followed by the din of an indescribable discord of fifths from innumerable strings, varied by irrelevant chromatic scales from the wood wind, and a doleful timing of slides from the brass. Jack’s eyes gleamed. Troubling himself no further about Mr Manlius, he went out through a door leading to the stalls, where he found a knot of old gentlemen disputing. One of them immediately whispered something to the others; and they continued their discussion a in a lower tone. Jack looked at the orchestra for a few minutes, and then returned to the room he had left, where the elder lady was insisting in French that the pianoforte fantasia should be rehearsed before anything else, as she was not going to wait in the cold all day. Mr Manlius assured her that he had anticipated her suggestion, and should act upon it as a matter of course.

“It is oll the* same thinks,” said the young lady in English. Then in French. “Even if you begin with the fantasia, Monsieur, I shall assuredly wait to hear for the first time your famous band perform in this ancient hall.”

Manlius bowed. When he straightened himself again, he found Jack standing at his elbow. “Allow me to present to you Monsieur Jack,” he said.

“It is for Monsieur Jacques to allow,” she replied. The poor artist is honored by the presence of the illustrious English composer.”

Jack nodded gravely as acknowledging that the young woman expressed herself becomingly. Manlius grinned covertly, and proposed that they should go up on the orchestra, as the band was apt to get out of humor when too much time was wasted. She rose at once, and ascended the steps on the arm of the conductor. She was received with an encouraging clapping of hands and tapping of fiddle backs. Jack followed with the elder lady, who sat down on the top stair, and began to knit.

“If you wish to conduct the rehearsal,” said Manlius politely to Jack, “you are, of course, quite welcome to do so.”

“Thank you,” said Jack. “I will.” Manlius, who had hardly expected him to accept the offer, retired to the pianoforte, and prepared to turn over the leaves for the player.

“I think I can play it from memory,” she said to him, “unless Monsieur Jacques puts it all out of my head. Judging by his face, it is certain that he is not very patien — Ah ! Did I not say so?”

Jack had rapped the desk sharply with his stick, and was looking balefully at the men, who did not seem in any hurry to attend to him. He put down the stick, stepped from the desk, and stooped to the conductor’s ear.

I mentioned,” he said, “that some of the parts ought to be given to the men to study before rehearsal. Has that been done?”

Manlius smiled. “My dear sir,” he said, “I need hardly tell you that players of such standing as the members of the Antient Orpheus orchestra do not care to have suggestions of that kind offered to them. You have no cause to be uneasy. They can play anything — absolutely anything, at sight.”

Jack looked black, and returned to his desk without a word. He gave one more rap with his stick, and began. The players were attentive, but many of them tried not to look so.

For a few bars, Jack conducted under some restraint, apparently striving to repress a tendency to extravagant gesticulation. Then, as certain combinations and progressions sounded strange and far-fetched, slight bursts Of laughter were heard. Suddenly the first clarinetist, with an exclamation of impatience, put down his instrument.

“Well?” shouted Jack. The music ceased.

“I can’t play that.” said the clarinetist shortly.

“Can you play it?” said Jack, with suppressed rage, to the second clarinetist.

“No,” said he. “Nobody could play it.”

“That passage has been played; and it must be played. It has been played by a common soldier.”

“If a common soldier even attempted it, much less played it,” said the first clarinetist, with some contemptuous indignation at what he considered an evident falsehood, “he must have been drunk.” There was general titter at this.

Jack visibly wrestled with himself for a moment. Then, with a gleam of humor like a flash of sunshine through a black thundercloud, he said: “You are right. He was drunk.” The whole band roared with laughter.

“Well, I am not drunk,” said the clarinetist, folding his arms.

“But will you not just try wh—” Here Jack, choked by the effort to be persuasive and polite, burst out raging: “It can be done. It shall be done. It must be done. You are the best clarinet player in England. I know what you can do.” And Jack shook his fists wildly at the man as if he were accusing him of some infamous crime. But the compliment was loudly applauded, and the man reddened, not altogether displeased. A cornist who sat near him said soothingly in an Irish accent, “Aye, do, Joe. Try it.”

“You will: you can,” shouted Jack reassuringly, recovering his self-command. “Back to the double bar. Now!” The music recommenced; and the clarinetist, overborne, took up his instrument, and, when the passage was reached, played it easily, greatly to his own astonishment. The brilliancy of the effect, too, raised him for a time into a prominence which rivaled that of the pianist. The orchestra positively interrupted the movement to applaud it; and Jack joined in with high good humor.

“If you are uneasy about it,” said he, with an undisguised chuckle, “I can hand it over to the violins.”

“Oh, no, thank you,” said the clarinetist. “Now I’ve got it, I’ll keep it.”

Jack rubbed his nose until it glowed like a coal, and the movement proceeded without another stoppage, the men now seeing that Jack was in his right place. But when a theme marked andante cantabile, which formed the middle section of the fantasia, was commenced by the pianist, Jack turned to her, said quicker. Plus vite;” and began to mark his beat by striking the desk. She looked at him anxiously; played a few bars in the time indicated by him; and then threw up her hands and stopped.

“I cannot,” she exclaimed. “I must play it more slowly or not at all.”

“Certainly, it shall be slower if you desire it,” said the elder lady from the steps. Jack looked at her as he sometimes looked at Mrs Simpson. “Certainly it shall not be slower, if all the angels desired it,” he said, in well pronounced but barbarously ungrammatical French. Go on and take the time from my beat.

The Polish lady shook her head; folded her hands in her lap; and looked patiently at the music before her. There was a moment of silence, during which Jack, thus mutely defied, glared at her with distorted features. Manilius rose irresolutely. Jack stepped down from the desk; handed him the stick; and said in a smothered voice, “Be good enough to conduct this lady’s portion of the fantasia. When my music recommences, I will return.”

Manlius took the stick and mounted the desk, the orchestra receiving him with applause. In the midst of it Jack went out, giving the pianist a terrible look as he passed her, and transferring it to her companion, who raised her eyebrows and shoulders contemptuously.

Manlius was not the man to impose his own ideas of a composition on a refractory artist; and though he was privately disposed to agree with Jack that the Polish lady was misjudging the speed of the movement, he obediently followed her playing with his beat. But he soon lost his first impression, and began to be affected by a dread lest anyone should make a noise in the room. He moved his stick as quietly as possible, and raised his left hand as if to still the band, who were, however, either watching the pianist intently or playing without a trace of the expert offhandedness which they had affected at first. The pleasure of listening made Manlius forget to follow the score. When he roused himself and found his place, he perceived that the first horn player was altering a passage completely, though very happily. Looking questioningly in that direction, he saw Jack sitting beside the man with a pencil in his hand. Manlius observed for the first time that he had an expressive face and remarkable eyes, and was not, as he had previously seemed, unmitigatedly ugly. Meanwhile the knot of old gentlemen in the stalls, who had previously chattered subduedly, became quite silent; and a few of them closed their eyes rapturously. The lady on the steps alone did not seem to care about the music. At last the flow of melody waned and broke into snatches. The pianoforte seemed to appeal to the instruments to continue the song. A melancholy strain from the violas responded hopelessly; but the effect of this was marred by a stir in the orchestra. The trombone and trumpet players, hitherto silent, were taking up their instruments and pushing up their moustaches. The drummer, after some hasty screwing round his third drum, poised his sticks; and a supernumerary near him rose, cymbals in hand; fixed his eye on Manlius, and apparently stood ready to clap the head of the trumpet player in front of him as a lady claps a moth flying from a woolen curtain. Manlius looked at the score as if he did not quite understand the sequel. Suddenly, as the violas ceased,Jack shouted in a startling voice, “Let it be an avalanche from the top to the bottom of the Himalayas;” and rushed to the conductor’s desk. Manlius made way for him precipitately; and a tremendous sound followed. “Louder,” roared Jack. Less noise and more tone. Out with it like fifty million devils.” As he led the movement at a merciless speed. The pianist looked bewildered, like the band, most of whom lost their places after the first fifty bars; but when the turn of a player came, he found the conductor glaring at him, and was swept into his part without clearly knowing how. It was an insensate orgies of sound. Gay melodies, daintily given out by the pianoforte, or by the string instruments, were derisively brayed out immediately afterwards by cornets, harmonized in thirds with the most ingenious vulgarity. Cadenzas, agilely executed by the Poish lady, were uncouthly imitated by the double basses. Themes constructed like ballads with choruses were introduced instead of orthodox “subjects.” The old gentlemen in the stalls groaned and protested. The Polish lady, incommoded by the capricious and often excessive speed required of her, held on gallantly, Jack all the time grinding his teeth, dancing, gesticulating, and by turns shshsh-shing at the orchestra, or shouting to them for more tone and less noise. Even the lady on the steps had begun to nod to the impetuous rhythm, when the movement ended as suddenly as it had begun; and all the players rose to their feet, laughing and applauding heartily. Manlius, from whose mind the fantasia had banished all prejudice as to Jack’s rank as a musician, shook his hand warmly. The Polish lady, her face transfigured by musical excitement, offered her hand too. Jack took it and held it, saying abruptly, “Listen to me. You were quite right; and I am a fool. I did not know what there was in my own music, and would have spoiled it if you had not prevented me. You are a great player, because you get the most beautiful tone possible from every note you touch, and you make every phrase say all that it was meant to say, and more. You are an angel. I would rather hear you play scales than hear myself play sonatas. And—” here he lowered his voice and drew her aside— “I rely on you to make my work succeed at the concert. Manlius will conduct the band; but you must conduct Manlius. It is not enough to be a gentleman and a contrapuntist in order to conduct. You comprehend?”

“Yes, Monsieur; I understand perfectly, perfectly. I will do my best. I shall be inspired. How magnificent it is!”

“Allow me to congratulate you, sir,” said one of the old gentlemen, advancing. “Myself and colleagues have been greatly struck by your work. I am empowered to say on their behalf that whatever difference of opinion there may be among us as to the discretion with which you have employed your powers, of the extraordinary nature of those powers there can no longer be a doubt; and we are thoroughly gratified at having chosen for performance a work which displays so much originality and talent as your fantasia.”

“Ten years ago” said Jack, looking steadily at him, “I might have been glad to hear you say so. At present the time for compliments is past, unless you wish to congratulate me on the private interest that has gained my work a hearing. My talent and originality have been a my chief allies here.”

“Are you not a little hasty?” said the gentleman, disconcerted, “Success comes late in London; and you are still, if I may say so, a comparatively young man.”

“I am not old enough to harp on being comparatively young. I am thirty-four years old; and if I had adopted any other profession than that of composer of music, I should have been seeing a respectable livelihood by this time. As it is, I have never made a farthing by my compositions. I don’t blame those who have Stood between me and the public: their ignorance is their misfortune, and not their fault. But now that I have come to light by a chance in spite of their teeth, I am not in the humor to exchange pretty speeches with them. Understand, sir: I do not mean to rebuff you personally. But as for your colleagues, tell them that it does not become them to pretend to pretend to acknowledge spontaneously what I have just, after many hard years, forced them to admit. Look at those friends of yours shaking their heads over my score there. They have heard my music, but they do not know what to say until they see it. Would you like me to believe that they are admiring it?”

“I am confident that they cannot help doing so.”

“They are shewing one another why it ought not to have been written — hunting out my consecutive fifths and sevenths, and my false relations — looking for my first subject, my second subject, my working out, and the rest of the childishness that could be taught to a poodle. Don’t they wish they may find them?”

The gentleman seemed at a loss how to continue the conversation. “I hope you are satisfied with the orchestra,” he said after a pause.

“No, I am not,” said Jack. “They are over civilized. They are as much afraid of showing their individuality as if they were common gentlemen. You cannot handle a musical instrument with kid gloves on. However, they did better than I hoped. They are at least not coarse. That young woman is a genius.”

“Ye-es. Almost a genius. She is young, of course. She has not the — I should call it the gigantic power and energy of such a player, for instance, as—”

Pshaw!” said Jack, interrupting him. “I, or anybody else, can get excited with the swing of a Chopin’s polonaise, and thrash it out of the piano until the room shakes. But she! You talk of making a pianoforte sing — a child that can sing itself can do that. But she can make it speak. She has eloquence, the first and last quality of a great player, as it is of a great man. The finale of the fantasia is too coarse for her: it does violence to her nature. It was written to be played by a savage — like me.”

“Oh, undoubtedly, undoubtedly! She is a remarkable player. I did not for a moment intend to convey—” Here Manlius rapped his desk; and Jack, with a unceremonious nod to his interlocutor, left the platform. As he passed the door leading to the public part of the hall, he heard the voice of the elder lady. “My child, they seek to deceive you. This Monsieur Jacques, with whom you are to make your debut here, is he famous in England? Not at all. My God! He is an unknown man.”

“Be tranquil, mother. He will not long be unknown.

Jack opened the door a little way; thrust his face through; and smiled pleasantly at the pianist. Her mother, seeing her start, turned and saw him grimacing within a yard of her.

“Ah, Lord Jesus!” she exclaimed in German, recoiling from him. He chuckled and abruptly shut himself out of her view as the opening Coriolan overture sounded from the orchestra, The old gentleman who had congratulated him had rejoined the others in the stalls.

“Well,” said one of them: “is your man delighted with himself?”

“N-no, I cannot say that he is — or rather perhaps he is too much so. I am sorry to say that he appears to rather morose — soured by his early difficulties, perhaps. He is certainly not an agreeable person to speak to.”

“What did you expect?”said another gentleman coldly. “A man who degrades music to be the vehicle of his own coarse humor, and shews by his method of doing it an ignorant contempt for those laws by which the great composers established order in the chaos of sounds, is not likely to display a courteous disposition and refined nature in the ordinary business of life.”

“I assure you, Professor,” said a third, who had the score of the fantasia open on his knees, “this chap must know a devil of a lot. He plays old Harry with the sonata form; but he must do it on purpose, you know, really.”

The gentleman addressed as Professor looked severely and incredulously at the other. “I really cannot listen to such things whilst they are playing Beethoven,” he said. “I have protested against Mr Jack and his like; and my protest has passed unheeded. I wash my hands of the consequences. The Antient Orpheus Society will yet acknowledge that I did well when I counseled it to renounce the devil and all his works.” He turned away; sat down on a stall a little way off; and gave all his attention ostentatiously to “Coriolan.”

The pianist came presently and sat near him. The others quickly surrounded her; but she did not speak to them, and shewed by her attitude that she did not wish to be spoken to. Her mother, who did not care for Coriolan, and wanted to go home, knitted and looked appealingly at her from time to time, not venturing to express her impatience before so many members of the Antient Orpheus Society. At last Manlius came down; and the whole party rose and went into the performers’ room.

“How do you find our orchestra?” said Manlius to her as she took up her muff.

“It is magnificent,” she replied. “So refined, so quiet, so convenable! It is like the English gentleman.” Manlius smirked. Jack, who had reappeared on the outskirts of the group with his hat on — a desperately ill-used hat — added:

“A Lithuanian or Hungarian orchestra could not play like that, eh?”

“No, truly,” said the Polish lady, with a little shrug. “I do not think they could.”

“You flatter us,” said Manlius bowing. Jack began to laugh. The Polish lady hastily made her adieux and went out into Piccadilly, where a cab was brought for her. Her mother got in; and she was about follow when she heard Jack’s voice again, at her elbow.

“May I send you some music?”

“If you will so gracious, Monsieur.”

“Good. What direction shall I give your driver?”

“F — f — you call it Feetzroysquerre?”

“Fitzroy Square,” shouted Jack to the cabman. The hansom went off; and he, running recklessly through the mud to a passing Hammersmith omnibus, which was full inside, climbed to the roof, and was borne away in the rain.

Chapter X

It was a yearly custom of the Antient Orpheus Society to give what they called a soiree, to which they invited all the celebrated persons who were at all likely to come. These meetings took place at a house in Harley Street. Large gilt tickets, signed by three of the committee, were sent to any distinguished foreign composers who happened to be in London, as well as to the president of the Royal Academy, the musical Cabinet Minister (if there was one), the popular tragedian of the day, and a few other privileged persons. The rest had little cards of invitation from the members, who were each entitled to introduce a few guests.

To the one of these entertainments next following the fantasia concert came a mob of amateurs, and a select body of pianists, singers, fiddlers, painters, actors and journalists. The noble vice-president of the society, assisted by two of the committee, received the guests in a broad corridor which had been made to resemble a miniature picture gallery. The guests were announced by two Swiss waiters, who were supposed to be able to pronounce foreign names properly because they could not pronounce English ones. Over one name on a gilt ticket, that of a young lady, they broke down; and she entered unannounced with her mother. After her came a member and his party of four: Mr and Mrs Phipson, Mr Charles Sutherland, Miss Sutherland, and Mr Adrian Herbert. Then other members with their parties.

Then the last of the gilt tickets, Mr Owen Jack, who presented the novelty of a black silk handkerchief round the neck with the bow under his right ear.

The company was crowded into two large rooms. There were many more guests than seats; and those who were weak or already weary stood round the walls or by the pianoforte and got what support they could by leaning on them. Mary Sutherland was seated on the end of a settee which supported four other persons, and would have accommodated two comfortably.

“Well?” said Jack, coming behind the settee.

“Well,” echoed Mary.*Why are you so late?”

“For the usual reason — because women are so meddlesome. I could not find my studs, nor anything. I will endure Mother Simpson no longer. Next week I pack.”

“So you have been threatening at any time within the last two years. I wish you would really leave Church Street.”

“So you have been preaching anytime these fifty years. But I I must certainly do so: the woman is unendurable. There goes Charlie. He looks quite a man, like the rest of us, in his swallow-tail coat.”

“He looks and is insufferably self-conscious. How crowded the rooms are: They ought to give their conversazione in St James’s Hall as well as their concerts.”

“They never did and never will do anything as it ought to be done. Where’s your guide, philosopher, and friend?”

“Whom do you mean, Mr Jack?”

“What color is your dress?”

“Sea green. Why?”

“Nothing. I was admiring it just now.”

“Does my guide, philosopher, et cetera, mean Mr Herbert?”

“Yes, as you know perfectly well. You are not above giving yourself airs occasionally. Come, where is he? Why is he not by your side?”

“I do not know, I am sure. He came in with us — Charlie?”

“Well?” said Charlie, who was beginning to stand on his manhood. “What are you shouting at me for? Oh, how d’ye do, Mr Jack?”

“Where is Adrian?” said Mary.

“In the next room, of course.”

“Why of course?” said Jack.

“Because Miss Spitsneezncough — or whatever her unpronounceable name may be — is there. If I were you, Mary, I should look rather closely after Master Adrian’s attentions to the fair Polack.”

“Hush. Pray do not talk so loud, Charlie.” Charlie turned on his heel, and strolled away, buttoning on a white glove with a negligent air.

“Come into the next room,” said Jack.

“Thank you. I prefer to stay where I am.”

“Come, Mrs. Obstinate. I want to see the fair Polack too: I love her to distraction. You shall see Mister Herbert supplanting me in her affections.”

“I shall stay with Mrs. Phipson. Do not let me detain you, if you wish to go.”

“You are going to be ill-natured and spoil our evening, eh?”

Mary suppressed an exclamation of impatience, and rose. “If you insist on it, of course I will come. Mrs. Phipson: I am going to walk through the rooms with Mr Jack.”

Mrs Phipson, from mere habit, looked doubtful the propriety of the arrangement; but Jack walked off with Mary before anything further passed. In the next room they found a dense crowd and a very warm atmosphere. A violinist stood tuning his instrument near the pianoforte at which the young Polish lady sat. Close by was Adrian Herbert, looking intently at her.

“Aha!” said Jack, following his companion’s look, “Mister Adrian’s thoughts have come to an anchor at last.” As he spoke, the music began.

“What are they playing?” said Mary with affected indifference.

“The Kreutzer Sonata.”

“Oh! I am so glad.”

“Are you indeed? What a thing it is to be fond of music! Do you know that we shall have to stand here mumchance for the next twenty minutes listening to them?”

“Surely if I can enjoy the Kreutzer Sonata, you can. You are only pretending to be unmusical.”

“I wish they had chosen something shorter. How- ever, since we are here, we had better hold our tongues and listen.”

The Sonata proceeded; and Adrian listened, rapt. He did not join in the applause between the movements: it jarred on him.

Why don’t you teach yourself to play like that?” said Jack to Mary.

“I suppose because I have no genius,” she replied, not pleased by the question.

“Genius! Pshaw! What are you clapping your hands for?”

“You seem to be in a humor for asking unnecessary questions tonight, Mr Jack. I applaud Herr Josefs because I admire his playing.”

“And Mademoiselle. How do you like her?”

“She is very good, of course. But I really do not see that she is so much superior to other pianists as you seem to consider her. I enjoy Josefs’ playing more than hers.”

“Indeed,” said Jack. “Ho! Ho! Do you see that hoary-headed villain looking across at us? That is the man who protested against my fantasia as a work of the devil; and now he is coming to ask me to play.”

“And will you play?”

“Yes. I promised Miss Szczympliça that I would.”

“Then you had better take me back to Mrs Phipson.”

“What! You will not wait and listen to me?”

“It cannot possibly matter to you whether I listen or not. I cannot stand here alone.”

“Then come back to Mrs. Phipson. I will not play.”

“Now pray do not be so disagreeable, Mr Jack. I wish to go back because no one wants me here.”

“Either you will stay where you are, or I will not play.”

“I shall do as I please, Mr Jack. You have Mademoiselle Sczympliça to play for. I cannot stay here alone.”

“Mr Herbert will take care of you.”

“I do not choose to disturb Mr Herbert.”

“Well, well, here is your brother. Hush! — if you call him Charlie aloud here, he will be sulky. Mr Sutherland.”

“What’s the matter?” said Charlie gratefully. Jack handed Mary over to him and presently went to the piano at the invitation of the old gentleman he had pointed out, who wore a gold badge on his coat as one of the stewards of the entertainment. He had composed a symphony — his second — that year for the Antient Orpheus: a laborious, conscientious, arid symphony, full of unconscious pickings and stealings from Mendelssohn, his favorite master, scrupulously worked up into the strictest academic form. It was a theme from this symphony that Jack now sounded on the pianoforte with one finger.

“That is not very polite.” said Mr Phipson, after explaining this to the Polish lady. “Poor Maclagen! He does not seem to like having his theme treated in that fashion.”

“If he intends it derisively,” said Adrian indignantly, “it is in execrable taste. Mr Maclagan ought to leave the room.”

“You think like me, Monsieur Herbert,” said Mademoiselle Szczympliça “All must be forgiven to Monsieur Jacques; but he should not insult those who are less fortunately gifted than he. Besides, it is an old man.”

Jack then began improvising on the theme with a capriciousness of which the humor was lost on the majority of the guests. He treated it with an eccentricity which burlesqued his own style, and then with a pedantry which burlesqued that of the composer. At last, abandoning this ironical vein when it had culminated in an atrociously knock-kneed fugato, he exercised his musical fancy in earnest, and succeeded so well that Maclagan felt tempted to rewrite the middle section of the movement from which the subject was taken. The audience professed to be delighted, and were in truth dazzled when Jack finished by a commonplace form of variation in which he made a prodigious noise with his left hand, embroidered by showers of arpeggios with his right.

“ Magnificent!” said Mr Phipson, applauding. “Splendid.”

“Ah!” said Mdlle Szczympliça, sighing, “if I had but his strength, I should fear no competitor.”

“Is it possible,” said Herbert, “that you, who play so beautifully, can envy such a man as that. I would rather hear you play for one minute than listen to him for an hour.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Alas!” she said, “you know what I can do; and you are so good as to flatter me that I do it well. But I! I know what I cannot do.”

“How are you, Mademoiselle?” said Jack, approaching them without staying to answer several persons who were congratulating him. “Good evening, Mr Herbert. Ah, Mr Phipson.”

“Mademoiselle Szczympliça has been paying you a high compliment — I fully agree with Mr Herbert that it is an exaggerated one,” said Phipson, “She wishes she could play like you.”

“And so Mr Herbert thinks ‘God forbid! does he? Well, he is right Why do you want to trample on the pianoforte as I do, Fraulein, when you can do so much better? What would you think of a skiff on the waters envying the attempts of a cavalry charger to swim?”

“I see from your playing how far I fall short in the last movement of the fantasia, Monsieur Jacqes. I am not strong enough to play it as you think it should be played. Ah yes, yes, yes; but I know — I know.”

“No, Mademoiselle; nor are you strong enough to dance the war-dance as an Iroquois Indian thinks it should be danced. The higher you attain, the more you leave below you. Eh, Mr Herbert?”

“I am not a musician,” said Herbert, irritated by Jack’s whimsical appeals to him. “My confirmation of your opinion would not add much to its value.”

“Come,” said Jack: “I care nothing for professional opinions. According to them, I do not know the rudiments of music. Which would you rather hear the Fraulein play or me?”

“Since you compel me to express a preference, I had rather hear Mademoiselle Sczympliça.”

“I thought so,” said Jack, delighted “Now I must go back to Miss Sutherland, who has been left to take care of herself whilst I was playing.”

Herbert reddened. Jack nodded and walked away.

“Miss — Miss — , I cannot say it. She is the young lady who was with you at the concert, when Monsieur Feepzon introduced us. She is very dark, and wears lunettes. Is not that so?”

“Yes.”

“She is not stiff, like some of the English ladies. Is she a great friend of yours?”

“She — Her elder brother, who is married to Mrs Phipson’s daughter, was at school with me; and we were great friends.”

“Perhaps I should not have asked you. I fear I often shock your English ideas of reserve. I beg your pardon.”

“Not at all,” said Herbert, annoyed at himself for having betrayed his uneasiness. “Pray do not let any fear of our national shyness — for it is not really reserve — restrain you from questioning me whenever you are interested in anything concerning me. If you knew how much I prize that interest—” She drew back a little; and he stopped, afraid to go on without encouragement, and looking wistfully at her in the hope of seeing some in her face.

“How do you call this lady who is going to sing?” she said, judging it better to ask an irrelevant question than to look down and blush. Jack’s voice, speaking to Mary close by, interrupted them.

“I can listen to Josefs because he can play the fiddle,” said he, “and to Szczympliça because she can play the piano; and I would listen to her” — pointing to the singer — if she could sing. She is only about four years older than you; and already she dare attempt nothing that cannot be screamed through by main force. She has become what they call a dramatic singer, which means a singer with a worn out voice. Come, make haste: she is going to begin.”

“But perhaps she will feel hurt by your leaving the room. Now that you are famous, you cannot come and go unnoticed, as I can.”

“So much the worse for those who notice me. I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats. There she goes with her Divinités du Styx. Come away God’s sake.”

“I think this room is the pleas — No, I do not — Let us go.”

Mary’s habitual look of resolution had gathered into a frown. They went back to the settee which was now deserted: Mrs Phipson and her neighbors having gone to hear the music.

Ä penny for your thoughts,” said Jack, sitting down beside Mary. “Are you jealous?”

She started and said “What do you mean?” Then, recovering herself a little, “Jealous of whom; and why?”

“Jealous of Sczympliça because Master Herbert seems to forget that there anyone else in the whole world tonight.”

“] did not notice his absorption. I am sure she is very welcome. He ought to be tired of me by this time.”

“You think to hoodwink me, do you? I saw you watching him the whole time she was playing. I wish you would quarrel with him.”

“Why do you wish that.”

“Because I am tired of him. If you were well rid of the fellow, you would stick to your music; pitch your nasty oil paints into the Thames; and be friendly to me without accusing yourself of treason to him. He is the most uncomfortable chap I know, and the one least suited to you. Besides, he can’t paint. I could do better myself, if I tried.”

“Other people do not think so. I have suspected ever since I first met you in his studio you did not admire his painting.”

“You had the same idea yourself, or you would never have detected it in me. I am no draughtsman; but I recognize weakness by instinct. You feel that he is a duffer. So do I.”

“Do you think, if he were a duffer, that his picture of last year would have been hung on the line at the Academy; or that the Art Union would have bought it to engrave; or that the President would have spoken of it so highly to Adrian himself?”

“Pshaw! There must be nearly two hundred pictures on the line every year at the Academy; and did you, or anyone else, ever see an Academy exhibition with ten pictures in it that had twenty years of life in them? Did the President of the Academy of Music ever speak well of me; or, if he did, do you think I should fell honored by his approval? That is another superfine duffer’s quality in your Mr Adrian. He is brimming over with reverence. He is humble, and speaks with bated breath of every painter that has ever had a newspaper notice written about him. He grovels before his art because he thinks that grovelling becomes him.”

“I think his modesty and reverence do become him.”

“Perhaps they do, because he has nothing to be bumptious about; but they are not the qualities that make a creative artist. Ha! ha!”

Mary opened her fan, and began to fan herself, with her face turned away from Jack.

Well,” said he, “are you angry?”

“No. But if you must disparage Adrian, why do you do so to me? You know the relation between us.”

“I disparage him because I think he is a humbug. If he spends whole days in explaining to you what a man of genius is and feels, knowing neither the one nor the other, I do not see why I should not give you my opinion on the subject, since I am in my own way — not a humble way — a man of genius myself.”

“Adrian, unfortunately, has not the same faith in himself that you have.”

“Perhaps he has got a good reason. A man’s own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to to cheat than the rest of the world. I sometimes wonder whether I am not an impostor. Old Beethoven once asked a pupil whether he really considered him a good composer. Shakespeare, as far as I can make out, only succeeded about half-a-dozen times in his attempts at play writing. Do you suppose he didn’t know it?”

“Then why do you blame Adrian for his diffidence?”

“Ah! that’s a horse another color. He thinks himself worse than other men, mortal like himself. I think myself a fool occasionally, because there are times when composing music seems to me to be a ridiculous thing in itself. Why should a rational man spend his life in making jingle-jingle with twelve notes? But at such times, Bach seems just as great a fool as I. Ask me at any time whether I cannot compose as good or better music than any Tom, Dick, or Harry now walking upon two legs in England; and I shall not trouble you with any cant about my humbleness or unworthiness.”

“Can you compose better music than Mozart’s? I believe you are boasting out of sheer antipathy to poor Adrian.”

“Does Mozart’s music express me? If not, what does it matter to me whether it is better or worse? I must make my own music, such as it is or such as I am — and I would as soon be myself as Mozart or Beethoven or any of them. To hear your Adrian talk one would think he would rather be anybody than himself. Perhaps he is right there, too.”

“Let it be agreed, Mr Jack, that you have a low opinion of Adrian; and let us say no more about him.”

“Very well. But let us go back to the other room. You are in a bad humor for a quiet chat, Miss Mary.”

“Then go alone; and leave me here. I do not mind being here by myself at all. I know I am not gaily disposed; and I fear I am spoiling your evening.”

“You are gay enough for me. I hate women who are always grinning. Besides, Miss Mary, I am fond of you, and find attraction in all your moods.”

“Yes, I am sure you are very fond of me,” said Mary with listless irony, as she walked away with him. In the other room they came upon Herbert, seeking anxiously someone in the eddy near the door, formed by people going away. Mary did not attempt to disturb him; but he presently caught sight of her. Thinking that she was alone — for Jack, buttonholed by Phipson, had fallen behind for a moment — he made his way to her and said:

“Where is Mrs Phipson, Mary? Are you alone?”

“I have not seen her for some time.” She had all but added that she hoped he had not disturbed himself to come to her; but she refrained, feeling that spiteful speeches were unworthy of herself and of him.

“Where did you vanish to for so long?” he said. “I have hardly seen you the whole evening.”

“Were you looking for me?”

He avoided her eyes, and stepped aside to make way for a lady who was passing. “Shall I get you an ice he said, after this welcome interruption. “It is very warm in here.”

“No. thank you. You know that I never eat ices.”

“I thought that this furnace of a room might have prevailed over your hygienic principles. Have you enjoyed yourself?”

I have not been especially happy or the reverse. I enjoyed the music.”

“Oh yes. Don’t you think Mlle. Sczympliça plays beautifully?”

“I saw that you thought so. She is able to bring an expression into your face that I have never seen there before.”

Herbert looked at her quickly: he became quite red. “Yes.” he said, “she certainly plays most poetically. By the bye, I think Mr. Jack behaved very badly in publicly making game of Mr. Maclagan. Everyone in the room was disgusted.”

Mary was ready to retort in defence of Jack; but before she could utter it Mrs Phipson came up, aggrieved and and speaking more loudly than was at all necessary. “Well, Mr Herbert,” she was saying, “you really have behaved most charmingly to us all the evening. I think we may go now, Mary. Josefs has gone; and Szczympliça is going, so there is really nothing to stay for. Why Adrian Herbert is gone again! How excessively odd!”

“He is gone to get Mdlle Sczympliça’s carriage,” said Mary, quietly. “Be careful,” she added, in a lower tone: “Mdlle Sczympliça is close behind us.”

“Indeed! And who is to get our carriage?” said Mrs Phipson, crossly, declining to abate her voice in the least. “Oh, really, Mary, you must speak to him about this. What is the use of your being his fiancée if he never does anything for you? He has behaved very badly. Mr Phipson is with that Frenchwoman who sang. He is only happy when he is running errands for celebrities. I suppose we must either take care of ourselves, or wait until Adrian condescends to come back for us.”

“We had better not wait. I see Charlie in the next room: he will look after us. Come.”

The Polish lady passed them, and followed her mother down the staircase. The cloak room was crowded; but Madame Sczympliça fought her way in, and presently returned with an armful of furs. She was assisted into some of these by her daughter, who was about to wrap herself in a cloak, when it was taken from her by Herbert.

“Allow me,” he said, placing the cloak on her shoulders. “I must not delay you: your servant has brought up your carriage; but—”

“Let us go quickly, my child,” said Madame. “They scream like devils for us. Au revoir, Monsieur Herbert. Come, Aurélie!”

“Adieu,” said Aurélie, hurrying away. He kept beside her until she stepped into the carriage. “Certainly not adieu,” he said eagerly. “May I not come to see you, as we arranged?”

“No,” she replied. “Your place is beside Miss Sutherland, your affianced. Adieu.” The carriage sped off; and he stood, gaping, until a footman reminded him that he was in the way of the next party. He then returned to the hall, where Mrs Phipson informed him coldly that she was sorry she could not offer him a seat in her carriage, as there was no room. So he bade them good-night, and walked home.

Chapter XI

Every day, from ten in the forenoon to twelve, Mademoiselle Sczympliça practiced or neglected the pianoforte, according to her mood, whilst her mother discussed household matters with the landlady, and accompanied her to market. On the second morning after the conversazione, Madame went out as usual. No sooner had she disappeared in the direction of Tottenham Court Road than Adrian Herbert crossed from the opposite angle of the square, and knocked at the door of the house she had just left.

Whilst he waited on the doorstep, he could hear the exercise Aurélie was playing within. It was a simple affair, such as he had often heard little girls call “five-finger” exercises; and was slowly and steadily continued as if the player never meant to stop. The door was opened by a young woman, who, not expecting visitors at that hour, and being in a slatternly condition, hid her hand in her apron when she saw Adrian.

“Will you ask Miss Szczympliça whether she can see me, if you please.”

The servant hesitated, and then went into the parlor, closing the door behind her. Presently she came out, and said with some embarrassment, “Maddim Chimpleetsa is not at home, sir.”

“I know that,” said he. “Tell mademoiselle that I have a special reason for calling at this hour, and that I beg her to see me for a few moments.” He put his hand into his pocket for half-a-crown as he spoke; but the maid was gone before he had made up his mind to give it to her. Bribing a servant jarred his sense of honor.

“If it’s very particular, madamazel says will you please to walk in,” said she, returning.

Adrian followed her to the parlor, a lofty, spacious apartment with old fashioned wainscoting and a fireplace framed in white marble, carved with vases and garlands. The piano stood in the middle of the room; and the carpet was rolled up in a corner, so as not to deaden the resonance of the boards. Aurélie was standing by the piano, looking at him with a curious pucker of her shrewd face.

“I hope you are not angry with me,” said Herbert, with such evident delight in merely seeing her that she lowered her eyelids. “I know I have interrupted your practicing; and I have even watched to see madame go out before coming to you. But I could not endure another day like yesterday.”

Aureélie hesitated; then seated herself and motioned him to a chair, which he drew close to her. “What was the the matter yesterday?” she said, coquetting in spite of herself.

“It was a day of uncertainty as to the meaning of the change in your manner towards me at Harley Street on Monday, after I had left you for a few minutes.”

Aurélie made a little grimace, but did not look at him. “Why should I change?” she said.

“That is what I ask you. You did change — somebody had been telling you tales about me; and you believed them.” Aurélie’s eyes lightened hopefully. “Will you not charge me openly with whatever has displeased you; and so give me an opportunity to explain.”

“You must have strange customs in England,” she said, her eyes flashing again, this time with anger. “What right have I to charge you with anything? What interest have I in your affairs?”

“Aurélie,” he exclaimed, astonished: “do you not know that I love you like a madman?”

“You never told me so,” she said. “Do Englishwomen take such things for granted?” She blushed as she said so, and immediately bent her face into her hands; laughed a little and cried a little in a breath. This lasted only an instant; for, hearing Herbert’s chair drawn rapidly to the side of hers, she sat erect, and checked him by a movement of her wrist.

“Monsieur Herbert: according to our ideas in my country a declaration of love is always accompanied by an offer of marriage. Do you then offer me your love, and reserve your hand for Miss Sutherland?”

“You are unjust to yourself and to me, Aurélie. I offered you only my love because I could think of nothing else. I do not expect you to love me as blindly as I love you; but will you consent to be my wife? I feel — I know by instinct that there can be no more unhappiness for me in the world if you will only call me your dearest friend.” He said this in a moment of intoxication, produced by an accidental touch of her sleeve against his hand.

Aurélie became pensive. “No doubt you are our dear friend, Monsieur Herbert, We have not many friends. I do not find that there is any such thing as love”

“You do not care for me.” he said, dejected.

“Indeed, you must not think so,” she said quickly. “You have been so kind to us, though we are strangers. For we are strangers, are we not? You hardly know us. And you are so foreign!”

“I! I have not a drop of foreign blood in my veins. You are not accustomed to England yet. I hope you not think me too cold. Oh! I am jealous of all your countrymen!”

“You need not be, Heaven knows! We have few friends in Poland.”

“Aurélie do you know that you are saving ‘we,’ and ‘us,’ as if you did not understand that I love you alone — that I am here, not as a friend of your family, but as suitor to yourself, blind to the existence of any other person in the universe. In your presence I feel as if I were alone in some gallery of great pictures, or listening in a beautiful valley to the singing of angels, yet with some indescribable rapture added to that feeling. Since I saw you, all my old dreams and enthusiasms have come to life again. You can blot them out forever, or make them everlasting with one word. Do you love me?”

She turned hesitatingly towards him, but waited to say, “And it is then wholly false what Madame Feepson said that night?”

“What did she say?” demanded Herbert, turning red with disappointment.

She drew back, and looked earnestly at him. “Madame said,” she replied in a low voice, “that Miss Sutherland was your affianced.”

“Let me explain,” said Adrian, embarrassed. She rose at once, shocked. “Explain!” she repeated. “Oh, Monsieur, yes or no?”

“Yes, then, since you will not listen to me,” he said, with some dignity. She sat down again, slowly, looking round as if for counsel.

“What shall you not think of me if I listen now?” she said, speaking for the first time in English.

“I shall think that you love me a little, perhaps. You have condemned me on a very superficial inference, Aurélie. Engagements are not irrevocable in England. May I tell you the truth about Miss Sutherland?”

Aurélie shook her head doubtfully, and said nothing. But she listened.

“I became engaged to her more than two — nearly three years ago. As I told you, her elder brother, Mr Phipson’s son-in-law, is a great friend of mine; and through him I came to know her very intimately. I owe it to her to confess that her friendship sustained me through a period of loneliness and discouragement, a period in which my hand was untrained, and my acquaintances, led by my mother, were loud in their contempt for my ability as an artist and my perverseness and selfishness in throwing away opportunities of learning banking and stockbroking. Miss Sutherland is very clever and well read. She set herself to study painting with ardor when I brought it under her notice, and soon became a greater enthusiast than I. She probably exaggerated my powers as an artist: at all events I have no doubt that she gave me credit for much of the good influence upon her that was really wrought by her new acquaintance with the handiwork of great men. However that may be, we were united in our devotion to art; and I was deeply grateful to her for being my friend when I had no other. I was so lonely that, in my fear of losing her, I begged her to betroth herself to me. She consented without hesitation, though my circumstances necessitated a long engagement. That engagement has never been formally dissolved, but fulfillment of it is now impossible. Long before I saw you and found out for the first time what love really is, our relations had insensibly altered. Miss Sutherland cooled in her enthusiasm for painting as soon as she discovered that it could not be mastered like a foreign language or an era in history. She came under the influence of Mr Jack, who may be a man of genius — I am no judge of musical matters — and who is undoubtedly, in his own way, a man of honor. But he is so far from possessing the temperament of an artist, that his whole character, his way of living, and all his actions, are absolutely destructive of that atmosphere of melancholy grandeur in which great artists find their inspiration. His musical faculty, to my mind, is as extraordinary an accident as if it had occurred in a buffalo. However, Miss Sutherland turned to him for guidance in artistic matters; and doubtless he saved her the trouble of thinking for herself; for she did not question him as she had been in the habit of questioning me. Perhaps he understood her better than I. He certainly behaved towards her as I had never behaved; and, though it still seems to me that my method was the more respectful to her, he supplanted me in her regard most effectually. I do not mean to convey that he did so intentionally; for anything less suggestive of affection for any person — even for himself — than his general conduct, I cannot imagine; but she chose not to be displeased. I was hurt by her growing preference for him: it discouraged me more than the measure of success which I had begun to achieve in my profession elated me. Yet on my honor I never knew what jealousy meant until I saw you, playing Jack’s music. I did not admire you for your performance, nor for the applause you gained. There are little things that an artist sees, Aurélie, that surpass brilliant fingering of the keyboard. I cannot describe them; they came home to me as you appeared on the platform; as you slipped quietly into your place; as you replied to Manlius’s inquiring gesture by a look — it was not even a nod, and yet it reassured him instantly. When the music commenced you became dumb to me, though to the audience you began to speak. I only enjoyed that lovely strain in the middle of the fantasia, which by Jack’s own confession, owed all its eloquence to you alone. When Mr. Phipson brought us under the orchestra and introduced us to you, I hardly had a word to say; but I did not lose a tone or a movement of yours. You were a stranger, ignorant of my language, a privileged person in a place where I was only present on sufferance. For all I knew, you might have been married. Yet I felt that there was some tie between us that far transcended my friendship with Miss Sutherland, though she was bound to me by her relationship to my old school friend, and by every coincidence of taste, culture, and position that can exist between man and woman. I knew at once that I loved you, and had never loved her. Had I met her as I met you, do you think I would have troubled Mr Phipson to introduce me to her? My jealousy of Jack vanished: I was content that he should be your composer if I might be your friend. Mary’s attachment to him now became the source of my greatest happiness. His music and your playing were the attractions on which all the concerts relied. Jack went to these concerts: Mary went with Jack: I followed Mary. We always had an opportunity of speaking to you, thanks to my rival. It was he who encouraged Mary to call on you. It is to him that I owe my freedom from any serious obligation in respect of my long engagement; and hence it is through him also that I dare to come here and beg you to be my wife. Aurélie: I passed the whole of yesterday questioning myself as to the true story of my engagement, in Order that I might confess it to you with the most exact fidelity; and I believe I have told you the truth; but I could devise no speech that can convey to you what I feel towards you. Love does not describe it, it is something new — something extraordinary. There is a new sense — a new force, born in me. There are no words for it in any language:I could not tell you in my own. It—”

“I understand you very well. Your engagement with Miss S-Sutherland — she always pronounced this name with difficulty— “is not yet broken off?”

“Not explicitly. But if you need—”

“Hear me, Monsieur Herbert I will not come between her and her lover. But if you can affirm on your honor as an English gentleman that she no longer loves you, go and obtain an assurance from her that it is so.”

“And then?”

“And then — Come back to me; and we shall see. But I do not think she will release you.”

“She will. Would I have spoken to you if I had any doubts left? For, if she holds me to my word, I am, as you say, an English gentleman, and must keep it. But she will not.”

“You will nevertheless go to her, and renew your offer.”

“Do you mean my offer to you — or to her?”

“My God! he does not understand! Listen to me, Monsieur Herbert.” Here Aurélie again resorted to the English tongue. “You must go to her and say, ‘Marie: I come to fulfill my engagement.’ If she reply, ‘No, Monsieur Adrian, I no longer wish it,’ then — then, as I have said, we shall see. But if she say ‘yes,’ then you must never any more come back.”

“But—”

“No, no, no,” murmured Aurélie, turning away her head. “It must be exactly as I have said.”

“I will undertake to learn her true mind, Aurélie, and to abide by it. That I promise. But were I to follow your instructions literally, she too would hold herself bound by her word, and would say ‘yes,’ in spite of her heart. We should sacrifice each other and ourselves to a false sense of honor.” Aurélie twisted a button of her chair, and shook her head, unconvinced. “Aurélie,” he added gravely: “are you anxious to see her accept me? If so, it would be kinder to tell me so at once. Would you be so cruel as to involve me in an unhappy marriage merely to escape the unpleasantness of uttering a downright refusal?”

“Ah” she said, raising her head again, but still not looking at him, “I will not answer you. You seek to entrap me — you ask too much.” Then, after a pause, “Have I not told you that if she releases you, you may return here?”

“And I may infer from that — ?”

She clasped hands with a gesture of despair. “And they say these Englishmen think much of themselves! You will not believe it possible that a woman should care for you!” He hesitated even yet, until she made a sudden movement towards the door, when he seized her hand and kissed it. She drew it away quickly, checked him easily by begging him to excuse her, bowed, and left the room.

He went out elated, and had walked as far as Portland Place before he began to consider what he should say for himself at Cavendish Square, where Mary was staying with Mrs Phipson. At Fitzroy Square he had been helped by the necessity of speaking French, in which language he found it natural and easy to say many things which in English would have sounded extravagant to him. He had kissed Aurélie’s hand, as it were, in French. To kiss Mary’s hand would, he felt, be a ridiculous ceremony, unworthy of a civilized Englishman. A proposal to jilt her, which was the substance of his business with her now, was not easy to frame acceptably in any language.

When he reached the house he found her with her hat on and a workbag in her hand.

“I am waiting” for Miss Cairns, she said. “She is coming with me on an expedition. Guess what it is.”

“I cannot. I did not know that Miss Cairns was in town.”

“We have decided that the condition of Mr. Jack’s wardrobe is no longer tolerable. He is away at Birmingham today; and we are going to make a descent on his lodgings with a store of buttons and darning cotton, and a bottle of benzine. We shall make his garments respectable, and he will be none the wiser. Now, Adrian, do not look serious. You are worse than an old woman on questions of propriety.”

“It is a matter of taste,” said Herbert, shrugging his shoulders. “Is your expedition too important to be postponed for half an hour? I want to speak to you rather particularly.”

“If you wish,” said Mary slowly, her face lengthening a little. She was in the humor to sally out and play a prank on Jack, not to sit down and be serious with Herbert.

“It is possible,” he said, noticing this with some mortification, though it strung him up a little, too, “that when you have heard what I have to say, you will go on your expedition with a lighter heart. Nevertheless, I am sorry to detain you.”

“You need not apologize,” she said, irritated. “I am quite willing to wait, Adrian. What is the matter?”

“Are you quite sure we shall not be disturbed here, even by Miss Cairns?”

“If it is so particular as that, we had better go out into the Square. I cannot very well barricade myself in Mrs Phipson’ drawing room. There is hardly anybody in the Square at this hour.”

“Very well,” said Herbert, trying to repress a sensation of annoyance which he also began to experience. They left the house together in silence, opened the gate of the circular enclosure which occupies the centre of Cavendish Square, and found it deserted except for themselves and a few children. Mary walked beside him with knitted brows, waiting for him to begin.

“Mary: if I were asking you now for the first time the question I put to you that day when we rowed on the Serpentine, would you give me the same answer?”

She stopped, bewildered by this unexpected challenge.

“If you had not put that question before today, would you put it at all?” she said, walking on again.

“For Heaven’s sake,” he said, angry at at being being parried, “do not let us begin to argue. I did not mean to reproach you,”

Mary thought it better not to reply. Her temper was so far under control that she could suppress the bitter speeches which suggested themselves to her, but she could not think of any soft answers, and so she had either to retort or be silent.

“I have noticed — or at least I fancy so” — he said quietly, after a pause, “that our engagement has not been so pleasant a topic as it once was.”

“I am perfectly ready to fulfill it,” said Mary steadfastly.

“So am I,” said Adrian in the same tone. Another interval of silence ensued.

“The question is,” he said then, “whether you are willing as well as ready You would do me a cruel injustice if, having promised me your heart, you were to redeem that promise with your hand alone.”

“What have you to complain of, Adrian? I know that you are sensitive; but I have taken such pains to avoid giving you the least uneasiness during the last two years that I do not think you can reasonably reproach me. You agreed with me that my painting was mere waste of time, and that I was right to give it up.”

“Since you no longer cared for it.”

“I did not know that you felt sore about it.”

“Nor do I, Mary.”

“Then what is the matter?”

“Nothing is the matter, if you are satisfied.”

“And is that all you had to say to me, Adrian?” This with an attempt at gaiety.

Adrian mused awhile. “Mary,” he said: “I wish you in the first place to understand that I am not jealous of Mr Jack.” She opened her eyes widely, and looked at him. “But,” he continued, “I never was so happy with you as when we were merely friends. Since that time, I have become your professed lover; and Mr Jack has succeeded to the friendship which — without in the least intending it — I left vacant. I would willingly change places with him now.”

“You ask me to break off the engagement, then,” she said, half eager, half cautious.

“No. I merely feel bound to offer to release you if you desire it.”

“I am ready to keep my promise,” she rejoined stubbornly.

“So you say. I do not mean that you will not keep your word, but that your assurance is not given in a manner calculated to make me very happy. I often used to warn you that you thought too highly of me, Mary. You are revenging your own error on me now by letting me see that you do not think me worthy of the sacrifice you feel bound to make for me.”

“I never spoke of it as a sacrifice,” said Mary turning red, “I took particular care — I mean that you are groundlessly jealous of Mr Jack. If our engagement is to he broken off, Adrian, do not say that I broke it.”

“I do not think that I have broken it, Mary,” said Herbert, also reddening.

“Then I suppose it holds good,”she said. A long silence followed this. They walked once across the grass and half way back. There she stopped, and faced him bravely. “Adrian,” she said: “I have been fencing unworthily with you. Will you release me from the engagement, and let us be friends as we were before?”

“You do wish it, then,” he said, startled.

“I do; and I was hoping you would propose it yourself, and so be unable to reproach me with going back from my word. That was mean; and I came to my senses during that last turn across the square. I pledge you my word that I only want to be free to remain unmarried. It has nothing to do with Mr Jack or any other man. It is only that I should not be a good wife to you. I do not think I will marry at all. You are far too good for me, Adrian.”

Herbert, ashamed of himself, stood looking at her, unable to reply.

“I know I should have told you this frankly at first,” she continued anxiously. “But my want of straightforwardness only shows that I am not what you thought I was. I should be a perpetual disappointment to you if you married me. I hope I have not been too sudden. I thought — that is, I fancied — Well, I have been thinking a little about Mlle Szczympliça. If you remain friends with her, you will soon feel that I am no great loss.”

“I hope it is not on her account that—”

“No, no. It is solely for the reason I have given. We are not a bit suited to one another. I assure you that I have no other motive. Are you certain that you believe me, Adrian? If you suspect me of wanting to make way for another attachment, or of being merely huffed and jealous, you must think very ill of me.”

Herbert’s old admiration of her stirred within him, intensified by the remorse which he felt for having himself acted as she was blaming herself for acting. He was annoyed too, because now that circumstances had tested them equally, she had done the right thing and he the wrong thing. He had always been sincere in his protests that she thought too highly of him; but he had never expected to come out of any trial meanly in comparison with her. He thought of Aurélie with a sudden dread that perhaps she saw nothing more in him than this situation had brought out. But he maintained, by habit, all his old air of thoughtful superiority as he took up the conversation.

“Mary,” he said, earnestly: “I have never thought more highly of you than I do at this moment. But whatever you feel to be the right course for us is the right course. I have not been quite unprepared for this; and since it will make you happy, I am content to lose you as a wife, provided I do not lose you as a friend.”

“I shall always be proud to be your friend,” she said, offering him her hand. He took it, feeling quite noble again. “Now we are both free,” she continued, and I can wish for your happiness without feeling heavily responsible for it. And, Adrian: when we were engaged, you gave me some presents and wrote me some letters. May I keep them?”

“I shall be very much hurt if you return them; though I suppose that you have a right to do so if you wish.”

“I will keep them then.” They clasped hands once again before she resumed in her ordinary tone, “I wonder has Miss Cairns been waiting for me all this time.”

On the way to the house they chatted busily on indifferent matters, The servant who opened the door informed them that Miss Cairns was within. Mary entered; but Herbert did not follow.

“If you do not mind,” he Said, “I think I had rather not go in.” This seemed natural after what had passed. She smiled, and bade him goodbye.

“Goodbye, Mary,” he said. As the door closed on her, he turned towards Fitzroy Square; a feeling of being ill and out of conceit with himself made him turn back to a restaurant in Oxford Street, where he had a chop and glass of wine. After this, his ardor suddenly revived; and he hurried towards Aurélie’s residence by way of Wells Street. He soon lost his way in the labyrinth between Great Portland and Cleveland Streets, and at last emerged at Portland Road railway station. Knowing the way thence, he started afresh for Fitzroy Square. Before he had gone many steps he was arrested by his mother’s voice calling him. She was coming from the station and overtook him in the Euston Road, at the corner of Southampton Street.

“What on earth are you doing in this quarter of the town?” he said, stopping, and trying to conceal how unwelcome the interruption was.

“That is a question which you have no right to ask, Adrian. People who have ‘Where are you going?’ and ‘What are you doing?’ always in their mouths are social and domestic nuisances, as I have often told you. However, I am going to buy some curtains in Tottenham Court Road. Since you have set the example, may I now ask where you are going?”

“I? I am not going anywhere in particular just at present.”

“I only asked because you stopped as if you wished to turn down here. Do not let us stand in the street.”

She went on; and he accompanied her. Presently she said: “Have you any news?”

“No,” he replied, after pretending to consider. “I think not. Why?”

“I met Mary Sutherland with Miss Cairns in High Street as I was coming to the train; and she said that you had something to tell me about her.”

“It is only that our engagement is broken off.”

“Adrian!” she exclaimed, stopping so suddenly that a man walking behind them stumbled against her.

“Beg pwor’n, mum,” said he, civilly, as he passed on.

“Pray take care, mother,” remonstrated Herbert. “Come on.”

“Do not be impatient, Adrian. My dress is torn. I believe English workmen are the rudest class in the world. Will you hold my umbrella for one moment, please?

Adrian took the umbrella and waited, chafing. When they started again, Mrs Herbert walked quickly, taking short steps.

“It is thoroughly disheartening,” she said, “to find that you have undone the only sensible thing you ever did in your life. I thought your news would be that you had arranged for the wedding. I think you had better see Mary as soon as you can, and make up your foolish quarrel. She is not a girl to be trifled with.”

“Everything of that kind is at an end between Mary and me. There is no quarrel. The affair is broken off finally — completely — whether it pleases you or not.”

“Very well, Adrian. There is no occasion for you to be angry. I am content, if you are. I merely say that you have done a very foolish thing.”

“You do not know what I have done. You know absolutely—” He checked himself and walked on in silence.

“Adrian,” said Mrs. Herbert, with dignity: “you are going back to your childish habits, I think. You are in a rage.”

“If I am,” he replied bitterly, “you are the only person alive who takes any pleasure in putting me into one. I know that you consider me a fool.”

“I do not consider you a fool.”

“At any rate, mother, you have such an opinion of me me, that I would rather discuss my private affairs with any stranger than with you. Where do you intend to buy the curtains?”

Mrs. Herbert did not help him to change the subject. She remained silent for some time to compose herself; for Adrian’s remark had hurt her.

“I hope,” she said at last, “that these musical people have not brought about this quarrel — or breach, or whatever it is.”

“Who are ‘these musical people’?”

“Mr Jack.”

“He had nothing whatever to do with it. It was Mary who proposed to break the engagement: not I.”

“Mary! Oh! Well, it is your own fault: you should have married her long ago. But why should she object now more than another time? Has Mademoiselle — the pianist — anything to do with it?”

“With Mary’s withdrawing? No. How could it possibly concern Mademoiselle Szczympliça — if it is of her that you are speaking?”

“It is of her that I am speaking. I see she has taught you the balked sneeze with which her name begins. I call her Stchimpleetza, not having had the advantage of her tuition. Where does she live?”

Herbert felt that he was caught, and frowned. “She lives in Fitzroy Square,” he said shortly.

“A-ah! Indeed!” said Mrs. Herbert. Then she added sarcastically, “Do you happen to know that we are within a minute’s walk of Fitzroy Square?”

“I know it perfectly well. I am going there — to see her.”

“Adrian,” said his mother quickly, changing her tone: “you don’t mean anything serious, I hope?”

“You do not hope that I am trifling with her, do you, mother?”

Mrs. Herbert looked at him, startled. “Do you mean to say, Adrian, that you have thrown Mary over because—”

“Because it’s well to off with the old love, before you you are on with the new? You may put that construction on it if you like, although I have told you that it was Mary, and not I, who ended the engagement. I had better tell you the whole truth now, to avoid embittering our next meeting with useless complaints. I am going to ask Mademoiselle Szczympliça to be my wife.

“You foolish boy. She will not accept you. She is making a fortune, and does not wish to marry.”

“She may not need to. She wishes to: that is enough for me. She knows my mind. I am not going to change it.”

“I suppose not. I know of old your obstinacy when you are bent on ruining yourself. I have no doubt that you will marry her, particularly as she is not exactly the sort of person I should choose for a daughter=in-law. Will you expect me to receive her?”

“I shall trouble your house no more when I am married than I have done as a bachelor.”

She shrank for a moment, taken by surprise by this blow; but she did not retort. They presently stopped before the shop she wished to visit and as they stood together near the entry, she made an effort to speak kindly, and even put her hand caressingly on his arm. “Adrian: do not be so headstrong. Wait a little, I do not say ‘give her up.’ But wait a little longer. For my sake.”

Adrian bent his brows and collected all his hardness to resist this appeal. “Mother,” he said: “I never had a cherished project yet that you did not seek to defeat by sarcasms, by threats, and failing those, by cajolery.” Mrs. Herbert quickly took her hand away, and drew back. “And it has always turned out that I was right and that you were wrong. You would not allow that I could ever be a painter; and yet I am now able to marry without your assistance, by my success as a painter. I took one step which gained your approval — my engagement to Mary. Had I married her, I should be this day a wretched man. Now that I have the happiness to be loved by a lady whom all Europe admires, you would have me repudiate her, for no other reason that I can see under Heaven than that you make it your fixed principle to thwart me in everything. I am sorry to have to tell you plainly that I have come to look upon your influence as opposed to my happiness. It has been at the end of my tongue often; and you have forced me to let it slip at last.”

Mrs. Herbert listened attentively during this speech and for some seconds afterwards. Then she roused herself; made a gesture of acquiescence without opening her lips; and went into the shop, leaving him still angry, yet in doubt as to whether he had spoken wisely. But the interview had excited him; and from it and all other goading thoughts he turned to anticipations of his reception by Aurélie. Short though the distance was he drove to her in a hansom.

“Can I see Miss Szczympliça again?” he said to the servant, who now received him with interest, guessing that he came courting.

“She’s in the drawing-room, sir. You may go in.”

He went in and found Aurélie standing near the window in a black silk dress. which she had put on since his visit in the morning.

“Mr Erberts, mum;” said the servant. Lingering at the door to witness their meeting. Aurélie turned; made him a stately bow, and by a gesture, invited him to sit also. He obeyed; but when the door was shut, he got up and approached her.

“Aurélie, she begged me to break off the engagement, although, as you bade me, I offered to fulfill it. I am perfectly free — only for the instant, I hope.” She rose gravely. “Mademoiselle Szczympliç” he added, changing his familiarly eager manner to one of earnest politeness,”will you do me the honor to become my wife?”

“With pleasure, Monsieur Herbert, if my mother approves.”

He was not sure what he ought to do next. After a moment, he stooped and kissed her hand. Catching a roguish look in her face as he looked up, he clasped her in his arms and kissed her repeatedly.

“Enough Monsieur,” she said, laughing and disengaging herself. He then sat down, thinking that she had behaved with admirable grace, and he himself If with becoming audacity. “I thought you would expect me to be very cold and ceremonious,” she said, resuming her seat composedly. “In England one must always be solemn, I said to myself. But indeed you have as little self-command as anyone. Besides, you have not yet spoken to my mother.”

“You do not anticipate any objection from her, I hope.”

“How do I know? And your parents, what of them? I have seen your mother: she is like a great lady. It is only in England that such handsome mothers are to be seen. She is widowed, is she not?”

“Yes. I have no father. I wish to Heaven I had no mother either.”

“Oh, Monsieur Herbert! You are very wrong to say so. And such a gracious lady, too! Fie!”

“Aurélie: I am not jesting. Can you not understand that a mother and son may be so different in their dispositions that neither can sympathize with the other? It is my great misfortune to be such a son. I have found sympathetic friendship, encouragement, respect, faith in my abilities and love—” here he slipped his arm about her waist; and she murmured a remonstrance— “from strangers upon whom I had no claim. In my mother I found none of them: she felt nothing for me but a contemptuous fondness which I did not care to accept. She is a clever woman, impatient of sentiment, and fond of her own way. My father, like myself, was too diffident to push himself arrogantly through the world; and she despised him for it, thinking him a fool. When she saw that I was like him, she concluded that I, too, was a fool, and that she must arrange my life for me in some easy, lucrative, genteel, brainless, conventional way. I hardly ever dared to express the most modest aspiration, or assert the most ordinary claims to respect, for fear of exciting her quiet ridicule. She did not know how much her indifference tortured me, because she had no idea of any keener sensitiveness than her own. Everybody commits follies from youth and want of experience; and I hope most people humor and spare such follies as tenderly as they can. My mother did not even laugh at them. She saw through them and stamped them out with open contempt. She taught me to do without her consideration; and I learned the lesson. My friends will tell you that I am a bad son — never that she is a bad mother, or rather no mother. She has the power of bringing out everything that is hasty and disagreeable in my nature by her presence alone. This is why I wish I were wholly an orphan, and why I ask you, who are more to me than all the world besides, to judge me by what you see of me, and not by the reports you may hear of my behavior towards my own people.”

“Oh, it is frightful. My God! To hate your mother! If you do not love her, how will you love your wife?”

“With all the love my mother rejected, added to what you have yourself inspired. But I am glad you are surprised. You must be very fond of your own mother.”

“That is so different,”said Aurélie with a shrug, “Mother and son is a sacred relation. Mothers and daughters are fond of each other in an ordinary way as a matter of course. You must ask her pardon. Suppose she should curse you.”

“Parental curses are out of fashion in England,” said Adrian, amused, and yet a little vexed. “You will understand us better after a little while. Let us drop the subject of my old grievances. Are you fond of pictures, Aurélie?”

“You are for ever asking me that. Yes, I am very fond of some pictures. I have seen very few.”

But you have been in Dresden, in Munich, in Paris?”

“Yes. But I was playing everywhere — I had not a moment to myself. I intended to go to the gallery in Dresden; but I had to put it off. Are there any good pictures at Munich?”

“Have you not seen them?”

“No. I did not know of them. When I was in Paris, I went one day to the Louvre; but I could only stay half an hour; and I did not see much. I used to be able to draw very well. Is it hard to paint?”

“It is the most difficult art in the world, Aurélie.”

“You are laughing at me. Why, there are not a dozen players — real players — in Europe; and every city is full of painters.”

“Real painters, Aurélie?”

“Ah! perhaps not. I suppose there are second-rate painters, just like second-rate players. Is it not so, Me — Meestare Adrian?”

“You must not call me that, Aurélie. People who like each other never say ‘Mister.’ You say you used to draw?”

“Yes. Soldiers, and horses, and people whom we knew. Shall I draw you?”

By all means. How shall I sit? Profile?”

“You need not sit for me. I am not going to copy you: I am only going to make a little likeness. I can draw dark men as well as fair. You shall see.”

She took a piece of music, and set to work with a pencil on the margin. In a minute she shewed him two scratchy sketches, vilely drawn, but amusingly like Herbert and Jack.

“I can just recognize myself, “ he said, examining them them; “but that one of Jack is capital. Ha! ha!” Then he added sadly, “Professed painter as I am, I could not do that. Portraiture is my weak point. But I would not have left Dresden without seeing the Madonna di San Sisto.”

“Bah! Looking at pictures cannot make me draw well, no more than listening to others could make me play. But indeed I would have gone to the gallery had I foreseen that I should meet you. My God! Do not kiss me so suddenly. It is droll to think how punctilious and funereal you were the other day; and now you have less manners than a Cossack. Are you easily offended, Monsieur Adrian?”

“I hope not,” he replied. taken aback by a change in manner as she asked the question.”If you mean easily offended by you, certainly not. Easily hurt or easily pleased, yes. but not offended, my darling.”

“Mäi — mä—” what is that you said in English?

“Nothing. You can look it up in the dictionary when I am gone. But what am I to be offended at?”

“Only this. I want you to go away.”

“So soon!”

“Yes. I have not said anything to my mother yet. She will question me the moment she sees me in this dress. You must not be here then. Tomorrow you will call on her at four o’clock; and all will be well. Now go. I expect her every moment.”

“May I see you before to-morrow afternoon?”

“Why should you? I go to-night to play at the house of a great dame, Lady Gerald line Porter, who is the daughter of a nobleman and the wife of a baronet. My mother loves to be among such people. She will tell you all about our ancestry to-morrow.”

“Aurélie: I shall meet you there. Lady Geraldine is mother’s cousin and close friend, on which account I have not sought much after her. But she told me once that she would waste no more invitations on me — I never accepted them — but that I was welcome to come when I pleased. I shall please tonight, Aurélie. Hurrah!”

Heaven! you are all fire and flame in a moment. You will remember that at Lady Geraldine’s we are to be as we were before today. You will behave yourself?”

“Of course.”

“Now go, I beg of you. If you delay, you will — what is the matter now?”

“It has just come into my mind that my mother may be at Lady Geraldine’s. If so, would you mind — In short, do not let Madame Szczympliça speak to her of our engagement. Of course you will say nothing yourself.”

“Not if you do not wish me to,” said Aurélie, drawing back a step.

“You see, my darling, as I have not yet spoken to your mother, it would be a great breach of etiquette for you or Madame to pretend to know my intentions. That is nonsense, of course; but you know how formal we are in this country.”

“Oh, is that the reason? I am glad you told me; and I shall be very careful. So will my mother. Now go quickly. Au revoir”

Chapter XII

At that time, Jack was richer than he had ever been before. His works were performed at the principal concerts: He also gave lessons at the moderate rate of fifteen guineas a dozen, and had more applications for lessons at that rate than he had time to accept: publishers tempted him with offers of blank cheques for inane drawing room ballads with easy accompaniments. Every evening he went from his lodging in Church Street to some public entertainment at which he had to play or conduct, or to the house of some lady of fashion who considered her reception incomplete without him; for “society” found relief and excitement in the eccentric and often rude manner of the Welsh musician, and recognized his authority to behave as he pleased. At such receptions he received fresh invitations, some of which he flatly declined. Others he accepted, presenting himself duly, except when he forgot the invitation. When he did forget, and was reproached by the disappointed hostess, he denied all knowledge of her entertainment, and said that had he been asked he should have come as he never forgot anything. He made no calls, left no cards, and paid little attention to his dress.

One afternoon he went to the house of Mr Phipson, who had been of service to him at the Antient Orpheus. Among the guests there was Lady Geraldine Porter, Mrs Herbert’s friend, whom Jack did not know. She was a lady of strong common sense, resolutely intolerant of the eccentricities and affectations of artists. No man who wore a velveteen jacket and long hair had a chance of an introduction to or an invitation from Lady Geraldine. These people, she said, can behave themselves properly if they like. We have to learn manners before we go into society: let them do the same, since they are so clever. As to Jack, he was her pet aversion. Society, in her opinion, had one clear duty to Jack — to boycott him until he conformed to its reasonable usages. And she set an unavailing example, by refusing all intercourse with him in the drawing rooms where they frequently found themselves together.

When the inevitable entreaty from Mrs Phipson brought Jack to the piano, Lady Geraldine was sitting close behind him and next to Mrs Herbert. There was a buzz of conversation going on; and he struck a few chords to stop it. Those who affected Jack-worship h’shed at the talkers, and assumed an expression of enthusiastic expectation. The buzz subsided, but did not quite cease. Jack waited patiently, thrumming the keyboard. Still there was not silence. He turned round, and saw Lady Geraldine speaking earnestly to Mrs Herbert, heedless of what was passing in the room. He waited still, with his body twisted towards her and his right hand behind him on the keys, until her unconscious breach of good manners, becoming generally observed, brought about an awful pause. Mrs Herbert hastily warned her by a stealthy twitch. She stopped; looked up; took in the situation; and regarded Jack’s attitude with marked displeasure.

“You mustn’t talk,” he said, corrugating his nose. “You must listen to me.”

Lady Geraldine’s color rose slightly, a phenomenon which no one present had ever witnessed before. “I beg your pardon,” she said, bowing. Jack appreciated the dignity of her tone and gesture. He nodded approvingly — to her disappointment, for she had intended to abash him$mdash;and, turning to the piano, gave out his theme in the form of a stately minuet. Upon this he improvised for twenty-five minutes, to the delight of a few genuine amateurs present. The rest, though much fatigued, were loud in admiration of Jack’s genius; and many of them crowded about him in the hope of inducing him to give a similar performance at their own houses.

“Oh, how I adore music!”said one of them to him later on, when he came and sat by her. If I were only a great genius like you!” Instead of replying he looked indignantly at her. “I really don’t see why I am not supposed capable of appreciating anything,” she continued, “I am very fond of music.”

“Nobody says you’re not,” said Jack. “You are fond enough of music when it walks in its silver slippers — as Mr By-ends was fond of religion.”

The lady, who was a born Irish Protestant, a Roman Catholic by conversion, a sort of freethinker, after the fashionable broad-church manner, by habit, by conviction nothing at all, and very superstitious by nature, always suspected some personal application in allusions to religion. She looked askance at him, and said pettishly, “I wonder you condescend to converse with me at all, since you have such a low opinion of me.”

“I like talking to you — except when you go into rhapsodies over music. Do you know why?”

“I am sure I don’t,” she said, with a little laugh and a glance at him. “Why?”

“Because you are a chatterbox,” said Jack, relishing the glance. “Don’t think, madame, that it is because you are a kindred spirit and musical. I hate musical people. Who is that lady sitting next Mrs Herbert?”

“What! You don’t know! That explains your temerity. She is Lady Geraldine Porter; and you are the first mortal that ever ventured to rebuke her. It was delicious.”

“Is that the lady who would not have me at her house?”

Yes. You have revenged yourself, though.”

Plenty of fools will say so; and therefore I am sorry I spoke to her. However. I cannot be expected to know trifles of this kind, though I am in the confidence of pretty Mrs Saunders. Have you any wicked stories to tell me to-day?”

“No. Except what everybody knows, and what I suppose you knew before anybody — about your friend Miss Sutherland and Adrian Herbert.”

“What about them? Tell me nothing about Miss Sutherland unless you are sure it is true. I do not want to hear anything unpleasant of her.”

“You need not be so cross,” said Mrs. Saunders coolly. “You can ask her for the particulars. The main fact is that Mr Herbert, who was engaged to her, is going to marry Szczympliça, the pianist.”

“Pshaw! That is an old story. He has been seen speaking to her once or twice; and of course—”

“Now, Mr Jack, let me tell you that it is not the old story, which was mere gossip. I never repeat gossip. It is a new story, and a true one. Old Madame Szczympliça told me all about it. Her daughter actually refused Mr Herbert because of his former engagement; and then he went straight to Mary Sutherland, and asked her to give up her claim — which of course she had to do, poor girl. Then he went back to the Sczympliça, and prevailed with her. Miss Sutherland, with all her seriousness shewed that she knows her métier as well as the most frivolous of her sex — as myself, if you like; for she set to work at once to express her remorse at having jilted him. How transparent all our little artifices are after all Mr Jack.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.”

“You shall see. I did not believe it myself at first. But Miss Sutherlan told me in this very room the day before yesterday that Mr Herbert was no longer engaged to her, and that she particularly wished it to be understood that if there was any blame in the matter, it was due to her and not to him. Of course I took in the situation at once. She said it admirably, almost implying that she was magnanimously eager to shield poor Adrian Herbert from my busy tongue. Poor Mary! she is well rid of him if she only knew it. I wonder who will be the next candidate for the post he has deserted Mrs. Saunders, as she wondered, glanced at Jack’s eyes.

“Why need she fill it at all? Every woman’s head is not occupied with stuff of that sort.” Jack spoke gruffly, and seemed troubled, After a few moments, during which she leaned back lazily, and smiled at him, he rose. “Goodbye,” he said. “You are not very amusing to-day. I suppose you are telling this fine story of yours to whoever has time to listen to it.”

“Not at all, Mr Jack. Everybody is telling it to me. I am quite tired of it.”

Jack uttered a grunt, and left her. Meeting Mrs Herbert, he made his bow, and asked where Miss Sutherland was.

“She is in the conservatory,” said Mrs Herbert, hesitating. “But I think she will be engaged there for some time.” He thanked her, and wandered through the rooms for five minutes. Then, his patience being exhausted, he went into the conservatory, where he saw Lady Geraldine apparently arguing some point with Mary, who stood before her looking obstinately downward.

“It is quixotic nonsense,” Lady Geraldine was saying as Jack entered. “He has behaved very badly; and you know it as well as I do, only you feel bound to put yourself in a false position to screen him.”

“That is where I disagree with you, Lady Geraldine. I think my position the true one; and the one you would have me take, the false one.”

“My dear, listen to me. Do you not see that your efforts to exculpate Adrian only convince people of his meanness? The more you declare you deserted him, the more they are certain that it is a case of sour grapes, and that you are making the common excuse of girls who are jilted. Don’t be angry with me — nothing but brutal plain speaking will move you. You told Belle Woodward — Belle Saunders, I mean — that the fault was yours. Do you suppose she believed you?”

“Of course,” said Mary, vehemently, but evidently shocked by this view of the case.

“Then you are mistaken,” said Jack, advancing. “She has just given me the very version that this lady has so sensibly put to you.”

Lady Geraldine turned and looked at him in a way that would have swept an ordinary man speechless from the room.

Mary, accustomed to him, did not think of resenting his interference, and said, after considering distressedly for a moment, “But it is not my fault if Mrs Saunders chooses to say what is not true. I cannot adapt what has really happened to what she or anybody else may think.”

“I don’t know what has really happened,” said Jack. “But you can hold your tongue; and that is the proper thing for you to do. It is none of their business. It is none of yours, either, to white-wash Herbert, whether he needs it or not. I beg your pardon, ma’am,” he added, turning ceremoniously to Lady Geraldine. “I should have retired on seeing Miss Sutherland engaged, had I not accidentally overheard the excellent advice you were giving her.” With that he made his best old-fashioned bow, and went away.

“Well, really!’ said Lady Geraldine, staring after him, “Is this the newest species of artistic affectation, pray? It used to be priggishness, or loutishness, or exquisite sensibility. But now it seems to be outspoken common sense; and instead of being a relief, it is the most insufferable affectation of all. My dear: I hope I have not distressed you.”

“Oh, this world is not fit for any honest woman to live in,” cried Mary, indignantly. “It has some base construction to put on every effort to be just and tell the truth. If I had done my best to blacken Adrian after deserting him, I should be at no loss now for approval and sympathy. As it is, I am striving to do what is right; and I am made to appear contemptible for my pains.”

“It is not a very honest world, I grant you,” said Lady Geraldine quietly, “but it is not so bad as you think. Young people quarrel with it because it will not permit them to be heroic in season and out of season. You have made a mistake; and you want to be heroic out of season on the strength, or rather the weakness of that mistake. I, who know you well, do not suppose, as Belle Saunders does, that you are consciously making a virtue of a necessity; but I think there is a little spiritual pride in your resolution not to be betrayed into reproaching Adrian. In fact, all Quixotism is tainted with spiritual vainglory; and that is the reason that no one likes it, or even admires it heartily, in real life. Besides, my dear, nobody really cares a bit how Adrian behaved or how you behaved: they only care about the facts; and the facts, I must say, are plain enough. You and Adrian were unwise enough to enter into a long engagement. You got tired of one another — wait till I have finished; and then protest your fill. Adrian went behind your back and proposed to another woman, who was more honorable than he, and refused to let him smuggle her into your place. Then, instead of coming to demand his freedom straightforwardly, he came to fish for it — to entrap you into offering it to him; and he succeeded. The honest demand came from you instead of from him.”

“But I fished, too,” said Mary, piteously. “I was only honest when he drove me to it.”

“Of course,” said Lady Geraldine, impatiently. “You are not an angel; and the sooner you reconcile yourself to the few failings which you share with the rest of us, the happier you will be. None of us are honest in such matters except when our conscience drives us to it. The honestest people are only those who feel the constraint soonest and strongest. If you had held out a little longer, Adrian might have forestalled you. I say he might; but, in my opinion, he would most probably fastened a quarrel on you — about Jack or somebody else — and got out of his engagement that way.”

“Oh, no; for he spoke about Mr Jack, and said expressly that he did not mind him at all; but that if he had brought about any change in my feelings, I need not feel bound by the eng — There: I know that is additional proof of his faithlessness in your eyes.”

“It is a proof of what a thorough fool a man must be, to expect you to take such a bait. Please release me, Mr Herbert, that I may gratify my fancy for Mr Jack.’ That is such a likely thing for a woman to say!”

“I hope you are not in earnest about Mr Jack, Lady Geraldine.”

“I am not pleased about him, Mary. These friendships stand in a girl’s way. Of course I know you are not in love with him — at least, accustomed as I am to the folly of men and women about one another, even I cannot conceive such infatuation; but, Mary, do not flourish your admiration for his genius (I suppose he has genius) in the faces of other men.”

“I will go back to Windsor, and get clear of Mr Jack and Mr Herbert both. I wish people would mind their own business.”

“They never do, dear. But it is time for us to go. Have I dashed your spirits very much?”

“Not at all,” replied Mary absently.

“Then, if you are quite gay, you need not object to come somewhere with me this evening.”

“You mean to go out somewhere? I cannot, Lady Geraldine. I should only be a wet blanket. I am not in the vein for society to-day. Thank you, all the same, for trying to rescue me from my own thoughts.”

“Nonsense, Mary. You must come. It is only to the theatre. Mrs Herbert and we two will make a quiet party. After what has passed you cannot meet her too soon; and I know she is anxious to shew that she does not mean to take Adrian’s part against you.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that. So far from it, that I am afraid Adrian will think I am going to her to complain of him. There,” she added, seeing that this last doubt was too much for Lady Geraldine’s patience; “I will come. I know I am very hard to please; but indeed I did not feel in the humor for theatre-going.”

“You will be ready at half-past seven?”

Mary consented; sighed; and left the conservatory dejectedly with Lady Geraldine, who, on returning to the drawing-room had another conference with Mrs Herbert.

Meanwhile Jack, after chatting a while with Mrs Saunders, prepared to depart. He had put off his afternoon’s work in order to be at Mr Phipson’s disposal; and he felt indolent and morally lax in consequence, stopping as he made his way to the door, to speak to several ladies who seldom received even a nod from him. On the stairs he met the youngest Miss Phipson; and he lingered a while to chat with her. He then went down to the hall, and was about to leave the house when he heard his name pronounced sweetly behind him. He turned and saw Lady Geraldine at whom he gazed in unconcealed surprise.

“I forgot to thank you for your timely aid in the conservatory,” she said, in her most gracious manner. “I wonder whether you will allow me to ask for another and greater favor.”

“What is it?” said Jack, suspiciously.

“Mrs Herbert,” replied Lady Geraldine, with a polite simulation of embarrassment,” is going to make use of my box at the theatre this evening; and she and has asked Miss Sutherland there. We are very anxious that you should accompany us, if you have no important engagement. As I am the nominal owner of the box, may I beg you to come with us.”

Jack was not satisfied. The invitation was unaccountable to him, as he knew perfectly well what Lady Geraldine thought of him. Instead of answering, he stood looking at her in a perplexity which expressed itself unconsciously in hideous grimaces.

“Will you allow me to send my carriage to your house,” she said, when the pause became unbearable.

“Yes. No. I’ll join you at the theatre. Will that do?”

Lady Geraldine, resenting his manner, put strong constraint on herself, as, with careful courtesy she told him the name of the theatre and the hour of the performance. He listened to her attentively, but gave no sign of assent. When she had finished speaking, he looked absently up the staircase; shewed his teeth; and hammered a tune on his chin with the edge of his hat. The strain on Lady Geraldine’s forbearance became very great indeed.

“May we depend on your coming?” she said at last.

“Why do you want me to come?” he exclaimed suddenly. “You don’t like me.”

Lady Geraldine drew back a step. Then, losing patience, she said sharply, “What answer do you expect me to make to that, Mr. Jack?”

“None,” said he with mock gravity. “It is unanswerable. From Capharsalama on eagle wings I fly.” And after making her another bow, he left the house chuckling. As he disappeared, Mrs Herbert came downstairs and joined Lady Geraldine.

“Well,” she said. “Is Mary to be made happy at our expense?”

“Yes,” said Lady Geraldine. “I bearded the monster here, and got what I deserved for my pains. The man is a savage.”

“I told you what to expect.”

“That did not make it a bit pleasanter. You had better come and dine with me. Sir John is going to Greenwich; and we may as well enjoy ourselves together up to the last moment.”

That evening Mary Sutherland reluctantly accompanied Mrs Herbert and Lady Geraldine to the theatre, to witness the first performance in England of a newly translated French drama. When she had been a few minutes seated in their box, she was surprised by the entry of Jack, whose black silk kerchief, which he persisted in wearing instead of a necktie, was secured with a white pin, shewing that he had dressed himself with unusual care.

“Mr Jack!” exclaimed Mary.

“Just so, Mr Jack,” he said, hanging his only hat, which had suffered much from wet weather and bad use on a peg behind the door. “Did you not expect him?”

Mary, about to say no, hesitated, and glanced at Lady Geraldine.

“I see you did not,” said Jack, placing his chair behind hers. “A surprise, eh?”

“An agreeable surprise,” said Mrs Herbert smoothly, with her fan before her lips.

“An accidental one,” said Lady Geraldine. “I forgot to tell Miss Sutherland that you had been good enough to promise to come.”

Mrs Herbert is laughing at me,” said Jack, good-humoredly. “So are you. It was you who were good enough to ask me, not I who was good enough to come. Listen to the band. Those eighteen or twenty bad players cost more than six good ones would, and are not half so agreeable to listen to. Do you hear what they are playing? Can you imagine anyone writing such stuff?”

“It certainly sounds exceedingly ugly; but I am notoriously unmusical, so my opinion is not worth anything.”

“Still, so far as you can judge, you don’t like it?”

“Certainly not.”

I am beginning to like it,” said Mrs Herbert, coolly. “I am quite aware that it is one of your own compositions — or some arrangement of one.”

“Ha! ha! Souvenirs de Jack, they call it. This is what a composer has to surfer whenever he goes to a public entertainment, Lady Geraldine.”

“In revenge for which, he ungenerously lays traps for others, Mr Jack.”

“You are right,” said Jack, suddenly becoming moody. “It was ungenerous; but I shared the discomfiture. There they go at my fantasia. Accursed be the man — Hark! The dog has taken it upon himself to correct the harmony.” He ceased speaking, and leaned forward on his elbows, grinding his teeth and muttering. Mary, in low spirits herself, made an effort to soothe him.

“Surely you do not care about such a trifle as that,” she began. “What harm—”

“You call it a trifle,” he said, interrupting her threateningly.

“Certainly,” interposed Lady Geraldine, in ironically measured tones. “A composer such as you can afford to overlook an ephemeral travesty to which nobody is listening. Were I in your place, I would not suffer a thought of resentment to ruffle the calm surface of my contempt for it.”

“Wouldn’t you?” said Jack, sarcastically. “Tell me one thing. You are very rich — as rich in money as I am in music. Would you like to be robbed of a sovereign?”

“I am not fond of being robbed at all, Mr Jack.”

“Aha! Neither am I. You wouldn’t miss the sovereign — people would think you stingy for thinking about it. Perhaps I can afford to be misrepresented by a rascally fiddler for a few nights here as well as you could afford the pound. But I don’t like it.”

“You are always unanswerable,” said Lady Geraldine, good humoredly.

Jack stood up and looked round the theatre. “All the world and his wife are here tonight,” he said. That white-haired gentleman hiding at the back of the balcony is the father of an old pupil of mine — a man cursed with an ungovernable temper. His name is Brailsford. The youth with the eyeglass in the stalls is a critic: he called me a promising young composer the other day. Who is that coming into the box nearly opposite? The Sczympliça, is it not’ I see Madame’s top-knot coming in through the inner gloom. She takes the best seat, of course, just as naturally as if she was a child at her first pantomime. There is a handsome gentleman with a fair beard dimly visible behind. It must be Master Adrian. He has a queer notion of life — he added, forgetting that he was in the presence of “that chap’s” mother.

Mrs Herbert looked round gravely at him; and Lady Geraldine frowned. He did not notice them: he was watching Mary, who had shrunk for a moment behind the curtain, but was now sitting in full view of Herbert, looking at the stage, from which the curtain had just gone up.

Nothing more was said in the box until, at a few words words pronounced behind the scenes by a strange voice. Jack uttered an inarticulate sound and stood up.

Then there came upon the stage a lady, very pretty, very elegantly dressed, a little bold in her manner, a little over-rouged, fascinating because of these slight excesses, but stamped by them as foreign to the respectable society into which she was supposed to have intruded.

“Absurd!” said Mary suddenly, after gazing incredulously at the actress for a moment. “It cannot be. And yet I verily believe it is. Lady Geraldine: is not that Madge Brailsford?”

“I really think it is,” said Lady Geraldine, using her opera glass. “How shockingly she is painted! And yet I don’t believe it is, either. That woman is evidently very clever, which Madge never was, so far as I could see. And the voice is quite different.”

“Oho!” said Jack. “It was I who found that voice for her.”

Then it is Madge,” said Mary.

“Of course it is. Rub your eyes and see for yourself.” Mary looked and looked, as if she could hardly believe it yet. At the end of the act, the principal performers, including Magdalen, were called before the curtain and heartily applauded. Jack, though contemptuous of popular demonstrations, joined in this, making as much noise as possible, and impatiently bidding Mary take off her gloves, that she might clap her hands with more effect. A moment afterwards, there was a hasty knocking at the door of the box. Mary looked across the theatre; saw that Adrian’s chair was vacant; and turned red. Jack opened the door, and admitted, not Adrian, but Mr Brailsford, who hurried to the front of the box; shook Lady Geraldine’s hand nervously; made a hasty bow right and left to Mary and Mrs Herbert; and, after making as though he had something particular to say, sat down in Jack’s chair and said nothing. He was greatly agitated.

“Well, Mr Brailsford, said Lady Geraldine, smiling. “Dare I congratulate you?”

“Not a word — not a word,” he said, as if he were half-suffocated. “I beg your pardon for coming into your box. I am a broken man — disgraced by my own daughter. My favorite daughter, sir — madame — I beg your pardon again. You can tell this young lady that she was my favorite daughter.”

“But you must not take her brilliant success in this way,” said Lady Geraldine gently,looking at him with surprise and pity. “And remember that you have other girls.”

“Psha! Whish-h-h!” hissed the old gentleman, throwing up his hand and snapping his fingers. “They arc all born fools — like their mother. She is like me, the only one who is like me. Did you ever see such impudence? A girl brought up as she was, walking out of a house in Kensington Palace Gardens onto the stage, and playing a Parisian — a French — God bless me, a drab! to the life. It was perfection. I’ve seen everybody that ever acted — years before your ladyship was born. I remember Miss O’Neill, aye, and Mrs Jordan; Mars, Rachel, Piccolomini! she’s better than any of them, except Miss O’Neill — I was young in her time. She wouldn’t be kept from it. I set my face against it. So did her mother — who could no more appreciate her than a turnip could. So did we all. We locked her up; we took her money from her; I threatened to disown her — and so I will too; but she had her way in spite of us all. Just like me: exactly like me. Why, when I was her age, I cared no more for my family than I did for Buonaparte. It’s in her blood. I should have been on the stage myself only it’s a blackguard profession; and a man who can write tragedy does not need to act it. I will turn over some of my old manuscripts; and she shall show the world what her old father can do. And did you notice how self-possessed she was? I saw the nerves under it. I felt them. Nervousness always played the devil with me. I tell you, madame — and I am qualified to speak on the subject — that she walks the stage and gives out her lines in the true old style. You don’t know these things, Miss Mary: you are too young: you never saw great acting. But I know. I had lessons from the great Young: Edmund Kean was a mountebank beside him. I was the best pupil of Charles Mayne Young, and of little Dutch Sam — but that was another matter. No true lady would paint her face and make an exhibition of herself on a public stage for money. Still, it is a most extraordinary thing that a young girl like that, without any teaching or preparation, should walk out of a drawing room onto the stage, and take London by storm.”

“But has she not had some little experience in the provinces?” said Mary.

Certainly not,” said Mr Brailsford impatiently. Strolling about with a parcel of vagabond pantomimists is not experience — not proper experience for a young lady. She is the first Brailsford that ever played for money in a public theatre. She is not a Brailsford at all. I have forbidden her to use the name she’s disgraced.”

“Come,” said Lady Geraldine. “You are proud of her. You know you are.”

“I am not. I have refused to see her. I have disowned her. If I caught one of her sisters coming to witness this indecent French play of which she is the life and soul — what would it be without her, Lady Geraldine? Tell me that.”

“It would be the dullest business imaginable.”

“Hal ha:” cried Brailsford, with a triumphant gesture: “I should think so. Dull as ditch-water. Her voice alone would draw all London to listen.

Perhaps you think that I taught her to speak. I tell you, Mrs. Herbert, I would have slain her with my own hand as soon as trained her for such a profession. Who taught her then? Why — ?”

“I did,” said Jack. Mr Brailsford, who had not noticed his presence before, stared at him, and stiffened as he did so.

“I believe you are already acquainted with Mr Jack.” said Lady Geraldine, watching them with some anxiety.

“You see what she has made of herself,” said Jack, looking hard at him. “I helped her to do it: you opposed her. Which of us was in the right?”

“I will not go into that question with you, sir,” said Mr Brailsfod, raising his voice and waving his glove. Ï do not approve of my daughter’s proceedings.” He turned from Jack to Mrs Herbert, and made a brave effort to chat with her with a jaunty air. “A distinguished audience, tonight I think I saw somewhere in the house, your son, not the least distinguished of us. Painting is a noble art. I remember when painters did not stand as well in society as they do now; but never in my life have I failed in respect for them. Never. A man is the better for contemplating a great picture. Your son has an enviable career before him.”

“So I am told.”

“Not a doubt of it. He is a fine young man — as he indeed could not fail to be with such an inheritance of personal graces and mental endowments.”

“He is very like his father.”

“Possibly, madame,” said Mr. Brailsford, bowing. “But I never saw his father.”

“Whatever his career may be, I shall have little part in it. I did not encourage him to become an artist. I opposed his doing so as well as I could. I was mistaken, I suppose: it is easier than I thought to become a popular painter. But children never forgive such mistakes.”

“Forgive!” exclaimed Mr. Brailsford, his withered cheek reddening faintly. “If you have forgiven him for disregarding your wishes, you can hardly believe that he will be so unnatural as to cherish any bad feeling towards you. Eh?”

“It is not unnatural to resent an unmerited wound to one’s vanity. If I could honestly admire Adrian’s work even now, I have no doubt he would consent to be reconciled to me in time. But I cannot. His pictures seem weak and sentimental to me. I can see the deficiencies of his character in every line of them. I always thought that genius was an indispensable condition to success.”

“Ha! ha!” said Jack. “What you call success is the compensation of the man who has no genius. If you had believed in his genius, and yet wanted success for him, you might have opposed him with better reason. Some men begin by aiming high, and they have to wait till the world comes up to their level. Others aim low, and have to lift themselves to success. Happy follows like Mr Adrian hit the mark at once,being neither too good for the Academy people nor too bad for the public.”

“Probably you are right,” said Mrs Herbert. “I should have borne in mind that worse painters than he enjoy a fair share of toleration. However, I must abide by my error now.”

“But surely,” said Mr Brailsford, harping anxiously on the point, “You do not find that he persists in any little feeling of disappointment that you may have caused him formerly. No, no: he can’t do that. He must see that you were actuated by the truest regard for his welfare and — and so forth.”

“I find that his obstinacy, or perseverance rather, is as evident in his resentment against me as it was in his determination to make himself an artist in spite of me.”

Mr Brailsford, troubled, bit his nail, and glanced at Mrs Herbert twice or thrice, without speaking. Lady Geraldine watched him for a moment, and then said: “There is a difference between your case and Mrs Herbert’s.”

“Of course,” he said, hurriedly. “Oh, of course. Quite different I was not thinking of any such—”

“And yet, continued Lady Geraldine, “there is some likeness too. You both opposed your children’s tastes. But Mrs Herbert does not believe in Adrian’s talent, although she is glad he has made a position for himself. You, on the contrary, are carried away by Magdalen’s talent; but you are indignant at the position it has made for her.”

“I am not carried away. You entirely misapprehend my feelings. I deeply deplore her conduct. I have ceased to correspond with her even, since she set my feelings at defiance by accepting a London engagement.”

“In short,” said Lady Geraldine, with good-humored raillery, “you would not speak to her if she were to walk into this box.”

Mr. Brailsford started and looked round; but there was no one behind him: Jack had disappeared. “No,” he said, recovering himself. “Certainly not. I cannot believe that she would venture into my presence.”

The curtain went up as he spoke. When Madge again came on the stage, her business was of a more serious character than in the first act, and displayed the heartless determination of the adventuress rather than her amusing impudence. Lady Geraldine, admiring a certain illustration of this, turned with an approving glance to Mr. Brailsford. He was looking fixedly at the stage, no longer triumphant, almost haggard. He seemed relieved when the actress, being supposed to recognize an old lover, relented, and showed some capacity for sentiment. When the act was over, he still sat staring nervously at the curtain. Presently the box door opened; and he again looked round with a start. It was Jack, who, returning his testy regard with a grim smile, came close to him; stretched an arm over his head; and pulled over one of the curtains of the box so as to seclude it from the house. Mr Brailsford rose, trembling.

“I absolutely refuse—” he began.

Jack opened the door; and Madge, with her dress covered by a large domino cloak, hurried in. She threw off the cloak as soon as the door was closed, and then seized her father and kissed him. He said with difficulty, “My dear child,” sat down; and bent his head, overpowered by emotion for the moment. She stood with her hand on his shoulder, and bowed over him in a very self-possessed manner to Mary, whom she addressed as “Miss Sutherland,” and to the others.

“I have no business to be here,” she said, in a penetrating whisper. “It is against the rules. But when Mr Jack came and told me that my father was here, I could not let him go without speaking to him.”

Lady Geraldine bowed. She and her companions had been prepared to receive Madge with frank affection, but her appearance and manner quite disconcerted them. They recollected her as a pretty, petulant young lady: they had actually seen her as one only two minutes before on the stage. Yet here she was, apparently grown during those two minutes not only in stature but in frame. The slight and elegant lady of the play was in the box a large, strong woman, with resonant voice and measured speech. Even her hand, as she patted her father’s shoulder, moved rhythmically as if the gesture were studied. The kindly patronage with which Lady Geraldine had been willing to receive an impulsive, clever young girl, was forgotten in the midst of respect, disappointment, and even aversion inspired by the self-controlled and accomplished woman. Mary was the first to recover herself.

“Madge,” she said, “ — that is, if one may venture to call you Madge.”

“Indeed you may,” said Madge, nodding and smiling gracefully.

“You are a great deal more like yourself on the stage than off it.”

“Yes,” said Madge. “For the last two and a half years, I have not taken a single holiday.”

Mr Brailsford now sat upright; coughed; and looked severely round. His lip relaxed as his gaze fell on Magdalen; and after an apprehensive glance at her, he lost his assurance even more obviously than the others.

“You have grown a good deal, I think, my child,” he said nervously.

“Yes. I hardly expected you to know me. You are looking better than ever. How are the girls?”

“Quite well, thank you, my dear. Quite well.”

“And mother?”

“Oh, she is well. A little rheumatism, of course; and — a—”

I shall come and see you all to-morrow, at one o’clock. Be sure to stay at home for me, won’t you?”

“Certainly. Certainly. We shall be very glad to see you.”

“Now I must run away; and I shall not see you again tonight except across the footlights, Mr Jack: my domino.” Jack put the cloak upon her shoulders. “Is the corridor empty?” Jack looked out and reported it empty. “I must give you one more kiss, father.” She did so; and on this occasion Mr Brailsford did not exhibit emotion, but merely looked dazed. Then she bowed as sweetly as before to Lady Geraldine and Mrs. Herbert.

“Good night, Madge,” said Mary, putting up her spectacles, and peering boldly at her.

Good night, dear,” said Madge, passing her arm round Mary’s neck, and stooping to kiss her. “Come tomorrow; and I will tell you all the news about myself. May I fly now, Mr Jack?

“Come along,” said Jack; and she tripped out, whisking her domino dexterously through the narrow door, and revealing for an instant her small foot.

There was an awkward silence in the box for some moments after she left. It was broken by the chuckling of Jack, who presently said aside to Mary, “When I first saw that young lady, she was a helpless good-for-nothing piece of finery.”

“And now,” said Mary, she is an independent woman, and an accomplished artist. How I envy her!”

“Why?” said Jack.

“Because she is of some use in the world.”

“If you will allow me,” said Mr Brailsford, rising suddenly, “I will return to my own place, I am incommoding your friend, doubtless. Good night. “He offered a trembling hand to Lady Geraldine; made a courtly demonstration toward Mary and Mrs Herbert, and turned to go, On his way to the door, he stopped; confronted Jack, and made him a grave bow, which was returned with equal dignity. Then he went out slowly, like an infirm old man, without any sign of his habitual jauntiness.

“Poor devil.” said Jack.

“I beg your pardon?”said Lady Geraldine sharply.

“He finds his pet baby changed into a woman; and he doesn’t like it,” said Jack, not heeding her remonstrance. “Now, if she were still the cream-colored, helpless little beauty she used to be, quite dependent on him, he would be delighted to have such a pretty domestic toy to play with.”

“Perhaps so,” said Lady Geraldine. “But there is such a thing as parental feeling; and it is possible that Mr Brailsford may not be philosopher enough to rejoice at a change which has widened the distance between her youth and his age.”

“He need not be alarmed,” said Jack. “If he cannot make a toy of her any longer, she can make a toy of him. She is thinking already of setting up a white haired father as part of her equipment: I saw the idea come into the jade’s head whilst she was looking down at him in that chair. He looked effective. This family affection is half sense of property, and half sense of superiority. Miss Sutherland — who is no use in the world, poor young lady — had not such property in Miss Brailsford as her father expected to have, and no such comfortable power of inviting her to parties and getting her married as you look forward to. And consequently, she was the only one who bore the change in her with a good grace, and really welcomed her.”

“I am not conscious of having been otherwise than perfectly friendly to her.”

“Ain’t you?” said Jack, sceptically. Lady Geraldine reddened slightly; then smiled in spite of her vexation, and said, “Really, Mr. Jack, you are a sort of grown up enfant terrible, I confess that I was a little overpowered by her staginess. I can understand actors being insufferably stagey on the boards, and quite natural in a room; but I cannot make out how an actress can be perfectly natural on the boards, and stagey in private.”

“Acting has become natural to her; and she has lost the habit of your society; that is all. As you say, acting never becomes natural to bad actors. There she comes again.”

“The charm is considerably weakened.” said Lady Geraldine, turning toward the stage, She does not seem half so real as she did before.”

The play ended as successfully as it had begun. The translators responded to calls for the author; and Miss Madge Lancaster took the lion’s share of the rest of the applause. Then the pit and galleries emptied themselves into the street with much trampling of stairs. The occupants of the more expensive places made their way slowly through the crush-room, one step at a time: the men sliding their feet forward at every advance: the women holding warm head wrappings with one hand, and hanging awkwardly on to the arms of gentlemen with the other. Lady Geraldine got a glimpse of Mr Brailsford as she descended; but he hurried away, as if desirous to avoid further conversation. Jack who had amused her by showing some emotion at the pathetic passages in the play, and who had since been silent, walked gloomily beside Mary. They were detained for some minutes in the vestibule, Lady Geraldine’s footman not being at hand.

“Come,”said Jack sulkily, “Here is somebody happy at last.”

Mary looked and saw Herbert coming down the stairs with Aurélie. who was, like Jack, the subject of some whispering and pointing.

“Yes,” said Mary. “He is happy. I do not wonder at it: she is very gentle and lovely. She is a greater artist than Madge: yet she has none of Madge’s assurance, which would repel Adrian.”

“She has plenty of assurance in music, which is her trade. Miss Madge has plenty of assurance in manners, which are her trade.”

I am just thinking, Geraldine,” said Mrs Herbert, of the difference between Adrian and that girl — Madge Brailsford. She, capable, sensible, able to hold her own against the world. She is everything, in short, that Adrian is not, and that I have often wished him to be. Yet her father seems as far from being united to her as Adrian is from me. Query then: is there any use in caring for one’s children? I really don’t believe there is.”

“Not the least, after they have become independent of you,” said Lady Geraldine, looking impatiently towards the door. “Where is Williams? I think he must have gone mad.”

At this moment Aurélie, recognizing Mrs Herbert, made as though she would stop, and said something to Adrian which threw him into trouble and indecision at once. Apparently she was urging him, and he making excuses, taking care not to look towards his mother. This dumb show was perfectly intelligible to Mrs Herbert, who directed Lady Geraldine’s attention to it.

“It is all Williams’s fault,” said Lady Geraldine. We should have been out of this five minutes ago. You had better take the bull by the horns at once, Eliza. Go and speak to him — the vacillating idiot!”

“I will not, indeed,” said Mrs Herbert. “I hope he will have the firmness to make her go away.”

The question was settled by the appearance of Lady Geraldine’s servant, who hurried in, and began to explain the delay.

“There. I do not want to hear anything about it,” said Lady Geraldine. “Now, where is Mary. Mary was already hastening out with Jack. Herbert saw them go with a sensation of relief. When he reached his lodgings he was disagreeably relieved from some feelings of remorse at having avoided Mary. On the table lay a parcel containing all his letters and presents to her, with a note — beginning “Dear Mr Herbert” — in which she said briefly that on second thoughts she considered it best to follow the usual course, and begged him to believe that she was, sincerely his, Mary Sutherland.

Chapter XIII

Next day, in the afternoon, Jack left the room, the establishment of a celebrated firm of pianoforte manufacturers, where he gave his lessons, and walked homeward across Hyde Park. Here he saw approaching him a woman, dressed in light peacock blue, with a pale maize colored scarf on her neck and shoulders, and a large Spanish hat. Jack stood still and looked gloomily at her. She put on a pair of eye glasses; scrutinized him for a moment; and immediately shook them off her nose and stopped.

“You have finished work early to-day,” she said, smiling.

“I have not finished it,” he replied: “I have put them off. I want to go home and work: I cannot spend my life making money — not that I am likely to have the chance. Four lessons — five guineas — lost.”

“You wrote to them, I hope.”

“No. They will find out that I am not there when they call; and then they can teach themselves or go to the devil. They would put me off sooner than lose a tennis party. I will put them off sooner than lose a good afternoon’s work. I am losing my old independence over this money-making and society business — I don’t like it. No matter. Are you on your way to Cavendish Square?”

“Yes. But you must not turn back. You did not sacrifice your teaching to gad about the park with me. You want to compose. I know by your face.”

“Are you in a hurry”

“I am not; but—”

“Then come and gad about, as you call it, for a while. It is too fine a day to go indoors and grind tunes.”

She turned; and they strolled across the plain between the Serpentine and the Bayswater Road, crossing a vacant expanse of sward, or picking their way amongst idlers who lay prone on the grass, asleep, or basked supine in the sun. It was a warm afternoon and the sky was cloudless.

“You would not suppose, seeing the world look so pleasant that it is such a rascally place as it is,” said Jack, when they had walked some time in silence.

“It is not so very bad, though, after all, If you were a little of a painter, as I am, this sunlit sward and foliage would repay you for all the stupidities of people who have eyes, but cannot use them.”

“Äye, And painters suppose that their art is an ennobling one. Suppose I held up a lying, treacherous, cruel woman to the admiration of the painter, and reviled him as unimaginative if he would not accept her blue eyes, and silky hair, and fine figure as a compensation for her corrupt heart: he would call me names — cynical sensualist and so forth. What better is he with his boasted loveliness of Nature? There are moments when I should like to see a good hissing, scorching shower of brimstone sear the beauty out of her false face.

“Oh! What, is the matter to-day?”

“Spleen. I am poor. It is the source of most people’s complaints.”

“But you are not poor. Recollect that you have just thrown away five guineas, and that you will make ten to-morrow.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

“Well, are guineas wealth to a man who wants time and freedom from base people and base thoughts? No: I have starved out the first half of my life alone: I will fight through the second half on the same conditions. I get ten guineas a day at present for teaching female apes to scream, that they may be the better qualified for the marriage market. That is because I am the fashion. How long shall I remain the fashion? Until August, when the world — as it calls itself — will emigrate, and return next spring to make the fortune of the next lucky charlatan who makes a bid for my place. I shall be glad to be rid of them, in spite of their guineas: teaching them wastes my time, and does them no good. Then there is the profit on my compositions, of which I get five per cent, perhaps, in money, with all the honor and glory. The rest goes into the pockets of publishers and concert givers, some of whom will go down half-way to posterity on my back because they have given me, for a symphony with the fruits of twenty years’ hard work in it, about one-fifth of what is given for a trumpery picture or novel everyday. That fantasia of mine has been pirated and played in every musical capital in Europe; and I could not afford to buy you a sable jacket out of what I have made by it.”

“It is very hard, certainly. But do you really care about money?”

“Ha! ha! No, of course not. Music is its own reward. Composers are not human: they can live on diminished sevenths; and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartette for a family. Come,” he added boisterously, “enough of grumbling. When I took to composing, I knew I was bringing my pigs to a bad market. But don’t pretend to believe that a composer can satisfy either his appetite or his affections with music any more than a butcher or a baker can. I daresay I shall live all the more quietly for being an old bachelor.”

“I never dreamt that you would care to marry.”

“And who tells you that I would now?”

“I thought you were regretting your enforced celibacy,” she replied, laughing. He frowned; and she became serious. “Somehow,” she added, “I cannot fancy you as a married man.”

“Why?” he said, turning angrily upon her. “Am I a fish, or a musical box? Why have I less right to the common ties of social life than another man?”

“Of course you have as much right.” she said, surprised that her remark should have hurt him. “But I have known you so long as you are at present—”

“What am I at present?”

“A sort of inspired hermit,” she replied, undaunted. “It seems as if marriage would he an impossible condescension on your part. That is only a fancy, I know. If you could find any woman worthy of you and able to make you happy, I think you ought to marry. I should be delighted to see you surrounded by a pack of naughty children. You would never be an ogre any more then.”

“Do you think I am an ogre, then? Eh?”

“Sometimes. To-day, for instance, I think you are decidedly ogreish. I hope I am not annoying you with my frivolity. I am unusually frivolous to-day.”

“Hm! You seem to me to be speaking to the point pretty forcibly. So you would like to see me married?”

“Happily married, yes. I should be glad to think that your lonely, gloomy lodging was changed for a cheerful hearth; and that you had some person to take care of your domestic arrangements, which you are quite unfit to manage for yourself. Now that you have suggested the idea, it grows on me rapidly. May I set to work to find a wife for you?”

“Of course it does not occur to you,” he said, with unabated ill humor, “that I may have chosen for myself already — that I might actually have some sentimental bias in the business, for instance.”

Mary, much puzzled, put on her spectacles, and tried to find from his expression whether he was serious or joking. Failing, she laughed, and said, “I don’t believe you ever gave the matter a thought.”

“Just so. I am a privileged mortal, without heart or pockets. When you wake up and clap your hands after the coda of Mr Jack’s symphony, you have ministered to all his wants, and can keep the rest to yourself, love, money, and all.”

She could no longer doubt that he was in earnest: his tone touched her. “I had no idea—” she began. “Will you tell me who it is; or am I not to ask?”

He grinned in spite of himself. “What do you think of Mrs Simpson?” said he.

Mary’s mood had taken so grave a turn that she was for a moment unable to follow this relapse into banter.

“But,” she said, looking shocked, “Mr Simpson is alive.”

“Hence my unhappiness.” said Jack, with a snarl, disgusted at her entertaining his suggestion.

“I suppose,” she said slowly, after a pause of some moments, “that you mean to make me feel that I have no business with your private affairs. I did not mean—”

“You suppose nothing of the sort,” said he, losing his temper. “When have I concealed any of my affairs from you?”

“Then you do not really intend to — I mean, the person you said you were in love with, is a myth.”

“Pshaw! I never said I was in love with anyone.”

“I might have known as much if I had thought for a moment. I am very dull sometimes.”

This speech did not satisfy Jack. “What do you mean by that,” he said testily. “Why might you have known? I never said I was in love, certainly. Have I said I was not in love?

“Come,” she said gaily. “You shall not play shuttlecock with my brains any longer. Answer me plainly. Are you in love?”

“I tell such things as that to sincere friends only.”

Mary suddenly ceased to smile, and made no reply.

“Well, if you are my friend, what the devil do you see in my affairs to laugh at? You can be serious enough with other people.”

“I did not mean to laugh at your affairs.”

“What are you angry about?”

“I am not angry. moment ago you reproached me because I thought you wished to repel my curiosity. The reproach seemed to me to imply that you considered me a friend worthy of your confidence.”

“So I do.”

“And now you tell me that I am an insincere friend.”

“I never said anything of the kind.”

“You implied it. However, there is no reason why you should tell me anything unless you wish to. I do not complain, of course; your affairs are your affairs and not mine. But I do not like to be accused of insincerity. I have always been as sincere with you as I know how to be.”

For the next minute Jack walked on in silence, with his hands clasped behind him, and his head bent towards the ground. They were crossing a treeless part of the park, unoccupied save by a few sooty sheep. The afternoon sun had driven the loiterers into the shade; and there was no sound except a distant rattle of traffic from the north, and an occasional oar-splash from the south. Jack stopped, and said without looking up: “Tell me this. Is all that business between you and Herbert broken off and done with?”

“Completely.”

“Then listen to me,” he said, taking an attitude in which she had seen him once or twice before, when he had been illustrating his method of teaching elocution. “I am not a man to play the part of a lover with grace. Nature gave me a rough frame that I might contend the better with a rough fortune. Nevertheless I have a heart and affections like other men; and those affections have centred themselves on you.” Mary blanched, and looked at him in terror. “You are accustomed to my ardent temper; but I do not intend that you shall suffer from bad habits of mine, engendered by a life of solitude and the long deferring of my access, through my music, to my fellow creatures. No: I am aware of my failings, and shall correct them. You know my position; and so I shall make no boast of it. You may think me incapable of tenderness,but I am not: you will never have to complain that your husband does not love you.” He paused and looked at Mary’s face.

She had never had a thought of marrying Jack. Now that he had asked her to do so she felt that refusal would cause a wound she dared not inflict: she must must sacrifice herself to his demand. To fill the empty place in Jack’s heart seemed to her a duty laid on her. She summoned all her courage and endurance to say yes with the thought that she would not live long. Meanwhile, Jack was reading her face.

“I have committed my last folly,” he said, in a stirring voice, but with. his habitual abruptness. “Henceforth I shall devote myself to the only mistress I am fitted for, Music. She has not many such masters.

Mary, yielding to an extraordinary emotion, burst into tears.

“Come,” he said: “it is all over. I did not mean to to frighten you. I have broken with the world now; and my mind is the clearer and the easier for it. Why need you cry?”

She recovered herself, trying to find something to say to him. In her disquietude she began to speak before her agitation had subsided. “It is not,” she said with difficulty, “that I am ungrateful or insensible. But you do not know how far you stand beyond other—”

“Yes, yes,” he said soothingly. “I understand. You are right: I have no business in the domestic world, and must stick to music and Mrs Simpson to the end of the chapter. Come along; and think no more of it. I will put you into a cab and send you home.”

She turned with him; and they went together towards the Marble Arch: he no longer moody, but placid and benevolent: she disturbed, silent, and afraid to meet his gaze. It was growing late. One of the religious congregations which hold their summer meetings in the park had assembled; and their hymn could be heard, softened by distance. Jack hummed a bass to the tune, and looked along the line of trees that shut out the windows of Park Lane, and led away to the singular equestrian statue which then stood at Hyde Park Corner.

“This is a pretty place, after all,” he said. “There is enough blue sky and green sward here to compensate for a good deal of brick and mortar. Down there in the hollow there is silver water with white swans on it. I wonder how the swans keep themselves white. The sheep can’t.”

“Yes, it is an exquisite day,” said Mary, trying hard to interest herself in the scene, and to speak steadily, “There will be a fine sunset.”

“There is a good view of the Duke of Wellington here.”

“Happily, I cannot see so far. But I can imagine the monster swimming sooty in the ether.”

“Leave him in peace,” said Jack. “He is the only good statue in London: that is why no one has the courage to say a word in his defence. His horse is like a real horse with real harness. He is not exposed bareheaded in the weather, but wears a hat as any other man in the street does. He is not a stupid imitation of an antique bas-relef. He is characteristic of the century that made him; and he is unique, as a work of art should be. He is picturesque too, The — Come, come, Miss Mary, You have no more cause to to be unhappy than those children swinging on the rail there. What are those tears for?

“Not because I am unhappy,” she replied in a broken voice. “Perhaps because I have such a reason to be proud. Pray, do not mind me. I cannot help it.”

They were now close to the Marble Arch; and Jack hurried on that she might the sooner escape the staring of the loungers there. Outside he called a cab and assisted her to enter.

“You will never be afraid of me any more, I hope.” He said, pressing her hand. She attempted to speak; gulped down a sob; and nodded and smiled as gaily as she could, her tears falling meanwhile. He watched the cab until it was no longer distinguishable among the crowd of vehicles on Oxford Street, and then re-entered the Park and turned to the West, which was now beginning to glow with the fire of evening. When he reached the bridge at which the Serpentine of Hyde Park is supposed to turn into the Long Water of Kensington Gardens, he stopped to see the sun set behind the steeple of Bayswater Church, and to admire the clear depths of hazel green in the pools underneath the foliage on the left bank. “I hanker for a wife” he said, as he stood bolt upright, with his knuckles resting lightly on the parapet. I grovel after money! What dogs appetites have this worldly crew infected me with! No matter, I am free: I am myself again. Back to the holy garret, oh my soul.” And having stared the sunset out of countenance, which is soon done by a man old enough to have hackneyed the sentimentality it inspires, he walked steadfastly away, his mood becoming still more tranquil as the evening fell darker.

On reaching Church Street, he called for Mrs Simpson; gave her a number of postage stamps which he had just purchased; and ordered her to write in his name to all his pupils postponing their lessons until he should write to them again. Being an indifferent speller and a slovenly writer, she grumbled that he was risking his income by treating his pupils so cavalierly. It was his custom to meet her remonstrances, even when he acted on them, with oaths and abuse. This evening he let her say what she wished, meanwhile arranging his table to write at. His patience was so far from appeasing her that she at last ventured to say that she would not write his letters and turn good money away.

“You will do as you are told,” he said; “for the devils also believe and tremble.” And with that explanation, he bade her make him some coffee, and put her out of the room.

Whilst Mary was being driven home from the park, she was for some time afraid that she must succumb publicly to a fit of hysterics. But after a few painful minutes, her throat relaxed; a feeling of oppression at her chest ceased; and when the cab stopped at Mr Phipson’s house she was able to offer the fare composedly to the driver, who refused it, saying that the gentleman had paid it in advance. She then went upstairs to her own room to weep. When she arrived there, however, she found that she had no more tears to shed. She went to the mirror, and stood motionless before it. It shewed her a face expressing deep grief. She looked pityingly at it; and it looked back at her with intensified dolor. This lasted for more than a minute, during which she conveyed such a profundity of sadness into her face that she had no attention to spare for the lightening of her heart which was proceeding rapidly meanwhile. Then her nostrils gave a sudden twitch; she burst out laughing, and the self-reproach which followed this outrage on sentiment did not prevent her from immediately laughing all the more.

“After all,” she said, seizing a jug of cold water and emptying it with a splash into a basin, “it is not more ridiculous to laugh at nothing than to look miserable about it.” So she washed away the traces of her tears and went down to dinner as gaily as usual.

A fortnight elapsed, during which she heard nothing of Jack, and sometimes thought that she had done better when she had cried at his declaration, than when she had laughed at her own emotion. Then, one evening, Mr Phipson announced that the Antient Orpheus Society were about to make an important acquisition— “one, said he, looking at Mary, “that will specially interest you.”

“Something by old Jack?” said Charlie, who was dining there that day.

“A masterpiece by him, I hope,” said Mr. Phipson. “He has written to say that he has composed music to the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley: four scenes with chorus, a dialogue of Prometheus with the earth, an antiphony of the earth and moon, an overture, and a race of the hours.”

“Shelley!” exclaimed Mary incredulously.

“I should have thought that Dr. Johnson was the proper poet for Jack,” said Charlie.

“It is a magnificent subject,” continued Mr Phipson; “and if he has done justice to it, the work will be the crowning musical achievement of this century. I have no doubt whatever that he has succeeded; for he says himself that his music is the complement of the poetry, and fully worthy of it. He would never venture so say so if he were not conscious of having done something almost stupendous.”

“Modesty never was one of his failings,” remarked Charlie.

“I feel convinced that the music will be — will be—” said Mr. Phipson, waving his hand, and seeking an expressive word, “will be something apocalyptic, if I may use the term. We have agreed to offer him five hundred pounds for the copyright, with the exclusive privilege of performance in the British Isles; and we have reason to believe that he will accept this offer. Considering that the music will doubtless be very difficult, and will involve the expense of a chorus and an enlarged band, with several rehearsals, it is a fairly liberal offer. Maclagan objected, of course; and some of the others suggested three hundred and fifty; but I insisted on five hundred. We could not decently offer less. Besides, the Modern Orpheus will try to snatch the work from us. The overture is actually in the hand the copyist, and the rest will be complete in a month at latest.”

“Certainly you must have more money than you know what to do with, if you to pay five hundred pounds for a thing you have never seen,” said Mrs Phipson.

“We shall pay it without the least mistrust,” said Mr Phipson, pompously “Jack is a great composer; one whose rugged exterior conceals a wonderful gift, as pearl is protected by an oyster shell.

“But he cannot possibly have composed the whole work in a fortnight.” said Mary.

“Of course not. What makes you suggest a fortnight?

“Nothing,” said Mary. “At least I heard that he had given no lessons during the past fortnight.

“He has been planning it for a long time, you may depend upon it. Still, there are instances of extraordinary expedition in musical composition. The Messiah was completed by Handel in twenty-one days; and Mozart—”

Mr Phipson went on to relate anecdotes of overtures and and whole acts added to operas in a single night. He was a diligent concert-goer and always read the analytical programs carefully, so he had a fund of such tales, more or less authentic, to relate. Mary, who had heard most of them before, looked attentive and let her thoughts wander.

Some days later, however, when Mary asked for further news of Prometheus Unbound, she found his tone changed. On being pressed he admitted that he had induced the Antient Orpheus Society to make a doubtful bargain. The overture and two of the scenes had been completed and delivered to the society by Jack; and no one, said Mr Phipson, had been able to contradict Maclagan’s verdict that “the music, most fortunately, was inexecutable.” A letter had been carefully drawn up to inform Jack as gently as possible of the fate of his work. “So prodigious,” it said, “were the technical difficulties of the work; so large and expensive the forces required to present it adequately; and so doubtful the prospect of its acceptance by a miscellaneous audience in the existing condition of public taste, that the Committee were obliged to confess, with deep regret, that they dared not make arrangements for its early production. If Mr. Jack had by him any more practicable composition, however short it might fall of the Prometheus in point of vastness of design, they would be willing to permit of its being substituted without prejudice to those conditions in their agreement which had been inserted in the interest of the composer.”

To this Jack had replied that they should have Prometheus or nothing; that there was not a note in the score which was not practicable with a reasonable degree of trouble; that he could find no precedents on which to base the slightest regard for the sagacity of the Society; that he cared not one demi-semi-quaver whether they held to their bargain or not, as he would find no difficulty in disposing of his work; and that he insisted on their either returning the score at once, or paying the first installment of five hundred pounds for it, as agreed upon. He added in a postscript that if they accepted the work, he should require strict fulfillment of the clause binding the Society to one public performance of it in London. The Society, which was old enough to have shelved certain works purchased from Beethoven for similar reasons those given to Jack, hesitated, quarreled internally, and at last resolved to hold a private rehearsal of the overture before deciding. Manlius made earnest efforts to comprehend and like this section of the work, which was to occupy half an hour in performance, and was, in fact, a symphony. He only partially succeeded, and he found the task of conducting the rehearsal unusually disagreeable. The players, confident and willing, did wonders in the estimation of Maclagan, but the first repetition broke down twice, and those who who were at fault lost temper and cursed mutinously within hearing of Manlius, who was himself confused and angry. When it was over at last, a dubious murmur rose from the stalls Where the Committee sat in judgment, and a few of the older members protested against a second trial. They were overruled, and the overture was repeated, this time without any stoppage.

“Certainly,” said Mr Phipson, describing his sensations to Mary, “It contained grand traits. But these were only glimpses in the midst of chaos, I had to give in to Maclagan, acknowledging that the most favorable account I could give of it was that it impressed me as might the aberrations of a demented giant. He was quite frantic about it, and fairly talked us down with examples of false relations and incorrect progressions from every bar of the score. Old Brailsford, who is one of the old committee, turned up for the first time in years expressly to support Jack’s interests. He said it was the most infernal conglomeration of sounds he had ever listened to, and I must say many of us privately agreed with him.

This conversation took place at the dinner table, and was prolonged by Mrs Phipson, who taunted her husband with his disregard of her warning not to pay five hundred pounds for what she termed a pig in a poke. She was a talkative woman, shallow, jolly, and unscrupulous, with a shrewd and selfish side to her character which indulgent people never saw. Mary saw it clearly; and as, to her taste, Mrs Phipson was vulgar, she was not very fond of her, and often felt indignant at her ridicule of her husband’s boastful but sincere love of music. On this occasion, seeing that Mr Phipson was getting sulky, and that his wife was perversely minded to make him worse, she left the table quietly without waiting for her hostess, and went upstairs alone to the drawing-room. There, to her surprise, she found a strange man, lounging on a sofa with an album in his hands.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mary, retreating.

“Not at all,” said the man, rising in disorder. “I hope I’m not in the way. Miss Sutherland, perhaps.”

“Yes,” said Mary coldly; for she could not see him distinctly, and his manner of addressing her, though a little confused, struck her as being too familiar.

“Very happy to make your acquaintance, Miss Sutherland. Nanny wrote me word that you were staying here. I recognize you by your photograph too. I hope I don’t disturb you.” He added this doubtfully, her attitude being still anything but reassuring.

“Not at all,” said Mary, taking the nearest seat, which happened to be a piece of furniture shaped like the letter S, with a seat in each loop, so that the occupants, placed opposite one another, could converse at their ease across the rail. She then settled her glasses deliberately upon her nose and looked at him with a certain hardihood of manner which came to her whenever she was seized with nervousness, and was determined not to give way to it. He was a tall, jovial looking man, not yet quite middle-aged, stout, or florid, but, as she judged, within five years of being all three. He had sandy hair and a red beard, cleft into two long whiskers of the shape formerly known to fashion as “weepers.” His expression was good-natured and, at this moment, conciliatory, as though he wished to disarm any further stiffness on her part. But she thought she saw also saw admiration in his eyes and she continued to gaze at him inflexibly. He looked wistfully at the conversation chair but sat down on the sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“This is a very convenient neighborhood, isn’t it?” he said.

“Very.”’

“Yes. T am sure you must find it so. You are within easy distance of both the parks, and all the theatres. Kensington is too far out of the way for my fancy. How long does it take to go from here to Covent Garden Market now, for instance?”

“I am sorry I cannot tell you,” said Mary calmly, looking at him with unflinching eyes: “I never go there.”

“Indeed! I wonder at that. You can get tremendous bargains in flowers, I believe, if you go there early in the morning. Do you like flowers?”

“I do not share the fashionable mania for cut flowers. I like gardening.”

“I quite agree with you, Miss Sutherland. I often think, when I see every little vase or knick-knack in a room stuffed with tulips and lilies and things, what a want of real taste it shews. I was looking at that beautiful painting over the music stand just before you came in. May I ask is it one of yours?”

“Yes. If you look closely at it you will see my name written in large vermilion letters in the left hand corner.”

·

o           I saw it. That’s how I knew it to be yours. It’s a capital picture: I often regret

that I never learned to paint, though I know I should never have done it half as well as you. It’s a very nice occupation for a lady. It is mere child’s play to you, I suppose.”

“I have given it up because I find it too difficult.”

“But nobody could do it better than you. However, it runs away with your time, no doubt. Still, if I were you, I wouldn’t give it up altogether.”

“You are fond of pictures, I presume.”

“Yes. I have a great taste for them. I go to the National Gallery whenever I come to London, to have a look at Landseer’s pictures. I sometimes see young ladies copying the pictures there. Did you ever copy one of Landseer’s?”

“No. Strange as it may appear to you, there are some pictures there which I prefer to Landseer’s.”

“You understand the old masters, you see. I don’t, unfortunately. I should like to be able to talk to you about them; but if I tried it on, you would find out in no time that I know nothing about it. Put me into a gallery, and I can tell you what pictures I like: that’s about as far as I can go.”

“I wish I could go as far.”

“I am afraid you are chaffing me, Miss Sutherland.”

Mary did not condescend to reply. The strange man, now somewhat discomfited, rose and stood with his back to the fireplace, as if to warm himself at the Japanese umbrella that protruded from it.

“Beautiful weather,” he said after a pause.

“Very beautiful indeed.” she replied, gravely. Then, to prevent herself from laughing at him, “Have you been long in London?”

“Arrived yesterday.” he said, brightening. “I came straight from New York via Liverpool. I’m always traveling. Have you ever been to the States?”

“No.”

You should go there and see what real life is. We’re all asleep here. I only left England last March; and I’ve started six branches of our company since that, besides obtaining judgment against two scoundrels who infringed our patent. Quick work, that.”

“Is it?”

“I should think so. It would have taken two years to do here. More: five years perhaps. The Americans can’t resist a new thing as we do. But no matter, unless they look alive here, they will be driven out of the market by foreign manufacturers using our cheap power.”

“Your cheap power! What is that?”

“I thought you knew. Why, the Conolly electro-motor, which will drive any machinery at half — aye, at a quarter of the cost of steam. You have heard of it, of course.”

“I think so. I have met Mr. Conolly. He does not seem like a man who could do anything badly.”

“Badly! I should think not. He’s an amazing man. They talk of Seth Jones’s motor; and Van Print claims to be the original inventor of Conolly’s commutator. But they are a couple of thieves. I can shew you the report of Conolly versus the Pacific—”

“Johnny!” exclaimed Mrs. Phipson, entering. “I thought it was your voice.”

“How d’ye do, Nan?” said he. “How are the bairns?”

“Oh, we’re all first rate. Have you been here long?”

“It seems only half a minute, Miss Sutherland has been entertaining me so pleasantly.” And he winked and frowned at Mrs Phipson, to intimate that he desired to be introduced.

“Then you know each other already,” she said. “This is my brother, Mr Hoskyn. I hope you have not been bothering Mary with your electro business.”

“Mr Hoskyn was giving me a most interesting account of it when you came in,” said Mary.

“You can finish it some other time,” said Mrs Phipson. “Inflict it on the next person who has the misfortune to get shut into a railway carriage with you. When did you come back?”

Mr Hoskyn glanced apprehensively at Mary, and did not seem to like his sister’s remark, though he laughed good-humoredly at it. The conversation then turned upon his recent movements; the length of time he expected to remain in London; and so forth.

Mary gathered that he had invested money in the Conolly Electro-Motor Company, and that he occupied himself in traveling to countries where the electro-motor was yet unknown, establishing companies for its exploitation; and making them pay for the right to use it. Mrs. Phipson was evidently tired of the subject, and made attempts to prevent his dwelling on it; but, in spite of her, he boasted a good deal of the superiority of Connely’s invention, and predicted ruin for certain other companies which had been set on foot to promote rival projects. He was effectually interrupted at last by the appearance of the younger children, who were excited by the arrival of Uncle Johnnie, and, Mary thought, looked forward to being the richer for his visit. Mr Hoskyn’s attention to them, however, flagged after the first few minutes; and Mrs Phipson, who was always impatient of her children’s presence, presently bade them to go and tell their father that Uncle Johnnie had come. They were, she added, on no account to return to the drawing-room. Their faces lengthened at this dismissal; but they did not venture to disregard it. Then Mr Phipson came; and his brother-in-law said much to him of what he had said before. Mary took no part in the conversation; but she occupied a considerable share of Mr Hoskyn’s attention. Whenever he pronounced an opinion, or cracked a joke, he glanced at her to see whether she approved of it, and always found her in the same attitude, self-possessed, with her upper lip lifted a little from her teeth by the poise of her head, which she held well up in order to maintain her glasses in their position; and by a slight contraction of her brows to shade her eyes from the superfluous rays.

“I need hardly ask whether Miss Sutherland sings,” he said, when he had repeated all his news to Mr Phipson.

“Very seldom,” replied his sister. Now Mary had a powerful and rather strident contralto voice, which enabled her to sing dramatic music with startling expression and energy. Mrs Phipson, who did not like these qualities, said “Very seldom,” in order to deter her brother from pressing his suggestion. But Mr Phipson, who relished Mary’s performances, and was also fond of playing accompaniments, immediately went to the piano, and opened it.

“I would give anything to hear you,” said Hoskyn, “if you will condescend to sing for such an ignorant audience as me.”

“I had much rather not,” said Mary, shewing signs of perturbation for the first time. “I sing nothing that would amuse you.”

“Of course not,” said he. “I know you don’t sing ballads and such trash. Something Italian, I should like to hear.”

“Come,” said Mr. Phipson. “Give us Che faro senza Euridice, And he began to play it.

Mary, after a moment’s hesitation, resigned herself, and went to the instrument. Mrs Phipson sighed. Hoskyn sat down on the ottoman; leaned attentively forward; and smiled continuously until the song was over, when he cried with enthusiasm: “Bravo! Splendid, splendid! You are quite equal to any professional singer I ever heard, Miss Sutherland. There is nothing like real Italian music after all. Thank you very much: I cannot remember when I enjoyed anything half so well”

“It is not Italian music,” said Mary, resuming her former attitude in the causeuse. “It is German music With Italian words.”

“It might as well be Chinese music fur all he knows about it.” said Mrs Phipson spitefully.

“I know that I enjoyed it thoroughly, at any rate,” said Hoskyn. “I have taken such a fancy to that picture on the wall that I should like to see some of your sketches, if you will favor me so far.”

Mary felt bound to be civil to Mrs Phipson’s brother: else she might have lost patience with Mr Hoskyn. “My sketches are in that book,” she said, pointing to a portfolio. “But they are not intended for show purposes, and if you have no real curiosity to see them, pray do not be at the trouble of turning them over. I do not paint for the sake of displaying an extra accomplishment.

“I quite understand that. It is as natural to you to do all these things as it is for me to walk or sleep. You can hardly think how much pleasure a song or a sketch gives me, because, you see, they are everyday things with you, whereas I could no more paint or sing in Italian than little Nettie upstairs. So, if you’ll allow me, I’ll take a peep. If I bring them over here, you can show them to me better.” And, on this pretext, he got into the causeuse with her at last.

“Fool!” commented Mrs. Phipson through her teeth to Mr Phipson, who smiled and strummed on the piano. Hoskyn meanwhile examined the sketches one by one; demanded a particular account of each; and, when they represented places at which he had been, related such circumstances of his visit as he could recollect, usually including the date, the hotel charges, and particulars of his fellow travelers; as, for instance, that there were two Italian ladies staying there; or that a lot of Russians took the whole of the first floor, and were really very polite people when you came to know them. Mary answered his questions patiently, and occasionally, when he appealed to her for confirmation of his opinions, gave him a cool nod, after each of which he grew more pleased and talkative. He praised her drawings extravagantly; and she, seeing that the worst satisfied him as well as the best, made no further attempt to deprecate his admiration, listening to it with self-possessed indifference. Mrs Phipson yawned conspicuously all the time. Failing to move him by this means, she at last asked him whether he would take supper with them, or return at once to wherever he was staying. He replied that he was staying round the corner at the Langham Hotel, and that he would wait for supper, to which Mrs Phipson assented with a bad grace. Just then Mary, hearing screams from the nursery pretended that she wished to see what was the matter, and left the room. She did not return; and Hoskyn, on going down to supper, was informed, to his heavy disappointment, that she never partook of that meal.

“So you might have saved yourself the trouble of staying, after all,” said Mrs Phipson. “Will you have a wing or a bit of the breast?”

“Anything, please. On my soul, Phipson, I think she is the nicest girl I ever met. She is really very handsome.”

“Handsome!” cried Mrs Phipson, indignantly. Don’t be a fool, Johnny.”

“Why? Don’t you think she is?”

“She isn’t even plain: she is downright ugly.”

“Oh come, Nanny! That is a little too much. What fault can you find with her face?”

“What fault is there that I cannot find? To say nothing of her features, which even you can hardly defend, look at her coarse black hair and thick eyebrows. And then she wears spectacles.”

“No. Not spectacles. Only nosers, Nanny. They are quite the fashion now.”

“Well, whatever you choose to call them. If you consider a pince-nez ornamental, your taste is peculiar.”

“I agree with you, John,” said Mr Phipson. “I admire Mary greatly.”

‘*If she were twice as handsome,” interposed Mrs Phipson, as Hoskyn’s eyes brightened triumphantly, “it would be none the better for you. She is engaged.”

Hoskyn looked at her in dismay. Mr Phipson Seemed surprised.

“Engaged to Adrian Herbert, the artist,” continued Mrs Phipson, “who can talk to her about high art until she fancies him the greatest genius in England: not like you, who think yourself very clever when you have spent an hour in shewing her that you know nothing about it.”

“My dear,” remonstrated Mr Phipson: “that business with Herbert is all broken off. You should be a little careful. He is going to be married to Sczympliça.”

“You may believe as much of that as you please,” said Mrs Phipson. “Even supposing that she really is done with Herbert, there is Jack. A nice chance you have Johnny, with the greatest lion in London for a rival.”

“Annie,” said Mr Phipson: “you are talking recklessly. There is no reason to suppose that there is anything between Mary and Jack. Jack is not — in that sense, at least — a ladies’ man.”

“As to that,” said Hoskyn, “I will take my chance beside any artist that ever walked on two legs. They can talk to her about things that I may not be exactly au fait at; but, for the matter of that, if I chose to talk shop, I could tell her a few things that she would be a long time finding out from them. No, Nanny: the question is, Is she engaged? If she is, then I’m off; and there’s an end of the business. If not, I guess I’ll try and see some more of her, in spite of all the painters and musicians in creation. So, which is it?”

“She is quite free,” said Mr. Phipson. “She was engaged to Herbert; but it was an old arrangement, made when they were children, I believe; and at all events it was given up some time ago. I think there will be a little money too, John. And I fancy from her manner that she was struck with you.” Mr Phipson winked at his wife, and laughed.

“I don’t know about that,” said Hoskyn; “but I am out-and-out struck with her. As to money, that needn’t stand in the way, though I shan’t object to take whatever is going.”

“You are so particularly well suited to a girl who cares for nothing but fine art crazes of which you don’t even know the names,” said Mrs Phipson sourly, “that she will jump at your offer, no doubt. It is no wonder for her to be shortsighted, she reads so much. And she knows half the languages of Europe.”

“I should think so,” said Hoskyn. “You can see intellect in her face. That’s the sort of woman I like. None of your empty headed wax dolls. I’m not surprised that you don’t approve of her, Nanny. You are sharp enough, but you never knew anything, and never will.”

“I don’t pretend to be clever. And I don’t disapprove of her; but I disapprove of you, at your age, thinking of a girl who is, in every way, unfit for you.”

“We shall see all about that. I am quite content to take my chance, if she is. She can’t live on high art, and I expect she is sensible enough in everyday matters. Besides, I shall not interfere with her. The more she paints and sings, the better pleased I shall be.”

“Hear, hear,” said Mr Phipson. “Let us about a license at once. The season will be over in three weeks and, of course, you Would prefer to be married before then.”

“ Chaff away,” said Hoskyn, rising. “I must be off now. You may expect to see me pretty soon again, and if you don’t hear people wondering ring next season how Johnny Hoskyn managed to get such a clever wife — why, I shall be worse disappointed than you. Good night.”

Chapter XIV

During the remaining weeks of the season, Mary witnessed a series of entertainments of a kind quite new to her. Since her childhood she had never visited the Crystal Palace except for the Saturday afternoon classical concerts. Now she spent a whole day there with Mr Hoskyn, his sister, and the children, and waited for the display of fireworks. She saw acrobats, conjurers, Christy Minstrels, panoramas, and shows of cats, goats, and dairy implements; and she felt half ashamed of herself for enjoying them. She went for the first time in her life to a circus, to a music hall, and to athletic sports at Lillie Bridge. After the athletic sports, she went up the river in a cheap excursion steamer to Hampton Court, where she hardly looked at the pictures, and occupied herself solely with the other objects of interest, which she had neglected on previous visits. Finally she went to Madame Tussaud’s.

Hoskyn had proposed all these amusements on behalf of the children; and it was supposed that Mary and Mrs Phipson, on going to them, were good-naturedly co-operating with Uncle Johnny to make the little Phipsons happy. In the character of Uncle Johnny, Hoskyn frequented the house in Cavendish Square at all hours, and was soon on familiar terms with Mary. He was good-humored, and apparently quite satisfied with himself. In arranging excursions, procuring and paying for vehicles, spying out and pushing his way to seats left accidentally vacant in the midst of packed audiences, looking after the children, and getting as much value as possible for his money on every occasion, he was never embarrassed or inefficient. He was very inquisitive, and took every opportunity of entering into conversation with railway officials, steamboat captains, cab-men, and policemen, and learning from them all about their various occupations. When this habit of his caused him to neglect Mary for a while, he never pestered her with apologies, and always told her what he had learnt without any doubt that it would interest her. And it did interest her more than she would have believed beforehand, although sometimes its interest arose from the obvious mendacity of Hoskyn’s informants: he being as credulous of particulars extracted bu casual pumping as he was sceptical of any duly authorized and published statement. In his company Mary felt neither the anxiety to appear at her best with which Herbert’s delicate taste and nervous solicitude for her dignity had always inspired her, nor the circumspection which she had found necessary to avoid offending the exacting temper of Jack. In their different ways, both men had humbled her. Hoskyn admired her person, and held her acquirements to awe, without being himself in the least humbled, although he exalted her without stint. She began to feel too, that she, by her apprenticeship to the two artists, had earned the right to claim rank as an adept in modern culture before such men as Hoskyn. When they went to the Academy, he was quite delighted to find that she despised all the pictures he preferred. In about an hour, however, both had had enough of picture seeing and they finished the day by the trip to Hampton Court.

When the season was over, it was arranged that Mr Phipson should take his family to Trouville for the month of August. Hoskyn, who was to accompany them, never doubted that Mary would be one of the party until she announced the date of her departure for Sir John Porter’s country seat in Devonshire. She had accepted Lady Geraldine’s invitation a month before. Hoskyn listened in dismay, and instead of proposing some excursion to pass away the time, moped about the house during the remainder of the afternoon. Shortly after luncheon he was alone in the drawing room, staring disconsolately out of window, when Mary entered. She sat down without ceremony, and opened a book.

“Look here,” he said presently. “This is a regular sell about Trouville.”

“How so? Has anything happened?”

“I mean your not coming.”

“But nobody ever supposed that I was coming. It was arranged long ago that I should go to Devonshire.”

“I never heard a word about Devonshire until you mentioned it at lunch. Couldn’t you make some excuse — tell Lady Porter that you have been ordered abroad for your health, or that Nanny will be offended if you don’t go with her, or something of that sort?”

“But why? I want to go to Devonshire and I don’t want to go to Trouville.”

“Oh! In that case I suppose you will leave us.”

“Certainly. I hope you are not going to make a grievance of my desertion.”

“Oh no. But it knocks all the fun of the thing on the head.”

“What a pity!”

“I am quite in earnest, you know.”

“Nobody could doubt it, looking at your face. Can nothing be done to console you?”

“Poking fun at me is not the way to console me. Why do you want to go to Devonshire. It’s about the worst climate in England for anyone with a weak chest: muggy, damp and tepid.”

“I have not a weak chest, I am glad to say. Have you ever been in Devonshire?”

“No. But I have heard about it from people who lived there for years and had to leave it at last.”

“I am going for a month only.”

Hoskyn began to twirl the cord of the blind round his forefinger. When he had dashed the tassel twice against the pane Mary interfered.

“Would it not be better to open the window if you wish to let in the fresh air?”

“All I can say is,” said he, dropping the tassel, “that you really might come with us.”

“Very true, but there are many things I really might do, which I really won’t do. And one of them is to disappoint Lady Geraldine.”

“Hang Lady Geraldine. At least, not if she is a friend of yours, but I wish she had invited you at any other time.”

“I think you have now made quite enough fuss about my going away. I am flattered, Mr Hoskyn, and feel how poignantly you will all miss me. So let us drop the subject.”

“When shall I see you again, then?”

“Really I do not know. I hope I shall have the pleasure of meeting you next season. Until then I shall probably be lost to view in Windsor.”

“If you mean that we may meet at dances, and that sort of thing, we are likely never to meet at all; for I never go to them.”

“Then you had better take lessons in dancing, and change your habits.”

“Not I. It is bad enough to be made a fool of by you without making one of myself.”

Mary grew nervous. “I think we are going back to the old subject,” she said.

“No. I was thinking of something else. Miss Sutherland.” here he suddenly raised his voice, which broke, and compelled him to pause and clear his throat— “Miss Sutherland: I hope I am not going to bungle this business by being too hasty — too precipitate, as it were. But if you are really going away, would you mind telling me first whether you have any objection to think over becoming Mrs Hoskyn. Just to think over it, you know.”

“Are you serious?” said Mary, incredulously.

“Of course I am. You don’t suppose I would say such a thing in jest?”

Mary discomfited, privately deplored her womanly disability to make friends with a man without being proposed to. “I think we had better drop this subject too, Mr. Hoskyn,” she replied. Then, recovering her courage, she added, “Of all the arrangements you have proposed, I think this is the most injudicious.’

“We will drop it of you like. I am in no hurry — at least I mean that I don’t wish to hurry you. But you will think it over won’t you?”

“Had you not better think over it yourself, Mr Hoskyn?”

“I have thought of it — let me see! I guess I saw you first about twenty-one days and two hours ago. Well, I have thinking over it constantly all that time.”

“Think better of it.”

“I will. The more I think of it, the better I think of it. And if you will only say yes, I shan’t think the worse of it in this world. Tell me one thing, Miss Sutherland, did you ever know me to make a mistake yet?”

“Not in my twenty-two days and two hour’s experience of you.”

“Twenty-one days and two hours. Well, I am not making a mistake now. Don’t concern yourself about my prospects: stick to your own. If you can hit it off with me. depend on it, my family affairs are settled to my satisfaction forever. What do you think?”

“I still think we had better abandon the subject.”

“For the present?”

“Forever, if you please, Mr Hoskyn.”

“For ever is a long word. I’ve been too abrupt. But you can turn it over in your mind whilst amusing yourself in Devonshire. There is no use in bothering yourself about it now, when we are all separating. Hush. Here’s Nanny.”

Mary was prevented by the entrance of Mrs Phipson from distinctly refusing Mr Hoskyn’s proposal. He, during the rest of the day, seemed to have regained his usual good spirits, and chatted with Mary without embarrassment, although he contrived not to not to be left alone with her. When she retired for the night, he had a short conversation with his sister, who asked whether he had said anything to Mary.

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say much. She was rather floored: I knew I was beginning too soon. We agreed to let the matter stand over. But I expect it will be all right.”

“What on earth do you mean by agreeing to let the matter stand over? Did she say yes or no?”

“She did not jump at me. In fact she said no; but she didn’t mean it.”

“Hoity-toity! I wonder whom she would consider good enough for her. She may refuse once too often.”

“She won’t refuse me. Though, if she does, I don’t see why you should lose your temper on that score, since you have always maintained that I had no chance.”

“I am not losing my temper. I knew perfectly well that she would refuse; but I think she may go further and fare worse.”

“She hasn’t refused. And — now you mind what I am telling you, Nanny — not a word to her on the subject. Hold your tongue; and don’t pretend to know anything about my plans. Do you hear?”

“You need not make such a to-do about it, Johnny. I don’t want to speak to her. I am sure I don’t care whether she marries you or not.”

“So much the better. If you give her a hint about going further and faring worse — I know you would like to — it is all up with me.”

Mary heard no more about Mr Hoskyn’s suit just then. She left Cavendish Square next day, and went with Lady Geraldine to the south-west of Devonshire, where Sir John Porter owned a large white house with a Doric portico, standing in a park surrounded by wooded hills. Mary began sketching on the third day, in spite of her former resolution to discontinue the practice. Lady Geraldine was too busy recovering the management of her house and dairy farm after her season’s absence, to interfere with the occupation of her guest; but at the end of the week she remarked one evening with a sigh:

“No more solitude for us, Mary. Sir John is coming tomorrow, and is bringing Mr Conolly as a prisoner of the invading army of autumn visitors. Since Sir John became a director of the Electro-motor company, he become bent on having everything here done by electricity. We shall have a couple of electro-motors harnessed to the pony phaeton shortly.”

“Mr Conolly is coming on business then.”

“Of course he is coming to pay a visit and make a holiday. But he will incidentally take notes of how the place can be most inconveniently upset with his machinery.”

“You are not glad that he is coming.”

“I am indifferent. So many people come here in the autumn whom I don’t care for that I have become hardened to the labor of entertaining them. I like to have young people about me. Sir John, of course, has to do with men of business and politicians; and he invites them all to run down for a fortnight it in the off season. So they run down; and it is seldom by any means possible to wind them up for conversational purposes until they go away again.”

“Mr. Conolly never seems to require winding up. Don’t you like him?”

“He never seems to require anything, and it is partly for that reason that I don’t like him. I have no fault to find with him — that is another reason, I think. Since I met him I have become ever so much more tolerant of human frailty. I respect the brute; but I don’t like him.

This Mr Conolly was known to Mary as a man who, having been an obscure workman, had suddenly become famous as the inventor of something called an electro-motor, by which he had made much money. He had then married a highly born young lady, celebrated in society for her beauty. Not long afterwards she had eloped with a gentleman of her own rank, whom she had known all her life. Conolly had thereupon divorced her, and resumed his bachelor life, displaying so little concern, that many who knew her had since regarded him with mistrust and dislike, feeling that he was not the man to make a home for a young woman accustomed to the tenderest consideration and most chivalrous courtesy in her father’s set. Even women, whose sympathy he would not keep in countenance by any pretense of broken-heartedness, had taken his wife’s part so far as to say that he ought never to have married her. Mary had heard this much of his history in the course of gossip, and had met him a few times in society in London.

“I don’t dislike him,” she said, in reply to Lady Geraldine’s last remark; “but he is an unanswerable sort of person; and I doubt if it would make the slightest difference to him whether the whole world hated or loved him.”

“Just so. Can anything be more unamiable? Such a man ought to be a judge, or an executioner.”

“After all, he is only a man; and he must have some feeling,” said Mary.

“If he has he ought to show it,” said Lady Geraldine. A servant just then entered with letters which had come by the evening mail. There were some for Mary; among them one addressed in a rapid business hand which she did not recognize. She opened them absently, thinking that a little experience of Herbert and Jack would soon remove Lady Geraldine’s objection to Conolly’s power of self-control. Then she read the letters. One was from Miss Cairns, who was at a hydropathic establishment in Derbyshire. Another was from her father, who was glad she had arrived safely in Devonshire and hoped she would enjoy herself, was sure that the country air would benefit her health, and had nothing more to say at present but would write soon again. The third letter, a long one in a strange hand, roused her attention.

Langham Hotel, London,
W., 10th August

Dear Miss Sutherland — I have returned for a few days from Trouville, where I left Nanny and the children comfortably settled. I was recalled by a telegram from our head office and now that my business there is transacted, I have nothing to do except lounge around this great barrack of a hotel until I take it into my head to go back to Trouville. I miss Cavendish Square greatly. Three or four time day I find myself preparing to go there, forgetting that there is nobody in the house, unless Nanny has left the cat to starve, as she did two years ago. You cannot imagine how lonely I find London. The hotel is full of Americans; and I have scraped acquaintance with most of them; but I am none the livelier for that: somebody or something has left a hole in this metropolis that all the Americans alive cannot fill. Tonight after dinner I felt especially dull. There are no plays worth seeing at this season; and even if there were, it is no pleasure to me to go to the theatre by myself. I have got out of the way of doing so lately; and I don’t feel as if I could ever get into it again. So I thought that writing to you would pass the time as pleasantly as anything.

You remember, I hope, a certain conversation we had on the 2nd inst. I agreed not to return to the subject until you came back from Lady Porter’s; but I was so flurried by having to speak to you sooner than I intended, that I have been doubtful ever since whether I put it to you in the right way. I am afraid I was rather vague; and though it does not do to be too business-like on such occasions, still, you have a right to know to a fraction what my proposal means. I know you are too sensible to suppose that I am going into particulars from want of the good old-fashioned sentiment which ought to be the main point in all such matters, or by way of offering you an additional inducement. If you had only yourself to look to, I think I should have pluck enough to ask you to shut your eyes and open your mouth so far as money is concerned; but when other interested parties who may come on the scene hereafter are to be considered, it is not only allowable but right to go into figures.

There are just four points, as I reckon it: 1, I am thirty-five years of age, and have no person depending on me for support. 2, I can arrange matters so that if anything happens to me you shall have a permanent income of five hundred pounds per annum. 3, I can afford to spend a thousand a year at present, without crippling myself. 4, These figures are calculated at a percentage off the minimum, and far understate what I may reasonably expect my resources to be in the course of a few years.

I won’t go any closer into money matters with you, because I feel that bargaining would be out of place between as. You may trust me that you shall want for nothing, if — !!! I wish you would help me over that if. We got along very well together in July — at least I thought so and you seemed to think so too. Our tastes fit in together to a T. You have genius and I admire it. If I had it myself, I should be jealous of you, don’t you see? As it is, the more you sing and paint and play, the more pleased am I, though I don’t say that I would not be writing this letter all the same if you didn’t know B-flat from a bull’s foot. If you will just for this once screw up your courage and say yes, I undertake on my on my part that you shall never regret it.

An early answer will shorten my suspense. Not that I want you to write without taking plenty of time for consideration; but just remember that it will appear cent per cent longer to me than to you. Hoping you will excuse me if I have been unreasonable in following up my wishes, — I am, dear Miss Sutherland,
Sincerely yours,
John Hoskyn.

Mary thrust the letter into its envelope, and knit her brows. Lady Geraldine watched her, pretending meanwhile to be occupied with her own correspondence. “Do you know any of Mrs. Phipson’s family?” said Mary slowly, after some minutes.

“No,” replied Lady Geraldine, somewhat contemptuously. Then, recollecting that Mr Phipson’s daughter was Mary’s sister-in-law, she added, “There are brothers in Australia and Columbia who are very rich; and the youngest is a friend of Sir John’s. He’s in the Conolly Company, and is said to be a shrewd man of business. They all were, I believe. Then there were two sisters, Sarah and Lizzie Hoskyn. I can remember Lizzie when she was exactly like your brother Dick’s wife. She married a great Cornhill goldsmith in her first season. Altogether, they are a wonderful family: making money, marrying money, putting each other in the way of making and marrying more, and falling on their feet everywhere.”

“Are they the sort of people you like?”

“What do you mean by that, my dear?”

“I think I mean what I say,” said Mary laughing. “But do you think, for example, that Mrs. Phipson’s brothers and sisters are ladies and gentlemen?”

“Whether Dick’s wife’s aunts or uncles are ladies and gentlemen, eh?”

“Never mind about Dick. I have a reason for asking.”

“Well then, I think it must be sufficiently obvious to everybody that they are not what used to be called ladies and gentlemen. But what has that to do with it? Rich middle class tradespeople have had their own way in society and in everything else as long as I can remember. Even if we could go back to the ladies and gentlemen now, we could not stand them. Look at the county set here — either vapid people with affected manners, or pigheaded people with no manners at all. Each set seems the worst until you try another.”

“I quite agree with you — I mean about the Hoskyns, “ said Mary. And she changed the subject. But at bedtime, when she bade Lady Geraldine goodnight, she handed her Hoskyn’s letter, saying, “Read that; and tell me tomorrow what you think of it.”

Lady Geraldine read the letter in bed, and lay awake, thinking of it for half an hour later than usual. In the morning, Mary, before leaving her room, received a note. It ran:

“Sir John will come by the three train. We can chat afterwards — when he and Mr Conolly are settled here and off my mind. —
G. P.

Mary understood from this that she was not to approach the subject of Mr Hoskyn until Lady Geraldine invited her. At breakfast no allusion was made to him, except that once, when they chanced to look at one another, they laughed. But Lady Geraldine immediately after became graver than usual, and began to talk about the dairy farm.

At three o’clock Sir John, heavy, double chinned and white haired arrived with a younger man in a grey suit.

“Well, Mr Conolly,” said Sir John, as they passed under the Doric portico, “Here we are at last.”

“At home,” said Conolly, contentedly. Lady Geraldine, who was there to welcome them, looked at him quickly, her hospitality gratified by the word. Then the thought of what what he had made of his own home hardened her heart against him. Her habitual candid manner and abundance of shrewd comment forsook her in his presence. She was silent and scrupulously polite, and by that Mary and Sir John knew that she was under the constraint of strong dislike to her guest.

Later in the afternoon, Conolly asked permission to visit the farm, and inquired whether there was any running water in the neighborhood. Sir John proposed to accompany him; but he declined, on the ground that a prospecting engineer was the worst of bad company. When he was gone, Lady Geraldine’s bosom heaved with relief: she recovered her spirits, and presently followed Sir John to the library, where they had a long conversation together. Having concluded it to her satisfaction, she was leaving the room, when Sir John, who was seated at a writing table, coughed and said mildly:

“ My dear.”

Lady Geraldine closed the door again, and turned to listen.

“I was thinking, as we came down together,” said Sir John slowly, smiling and combing his beard with his fingers, “that perhaps he might take a fancy that way.”

“Who?”

“Conolly, my dear.”

“Stuff!” said Lady Geraldine sharply. Sir John smiled in deprecation. “At least,” she added, repenting, “I mean that he is married already.”

“But he is free to marry again.”

“Besides, he is not a gentleman.”

“Well,” said Sir John, good humoredly, “I think we agreed just now that that did not matter.”

“Yes, in Hoskyn’s case.”

“Just so. Now Conolly is a man of greater culture than Hoskyn. Of course, it is only a notion of mine; and I dare say you are quite right if you disapprove of it. But since Mary is a girl with nice tastes — for art and so forth — I thought that perhaps she might not suit a thorough man of business. Hoskyn is only an Americanized commercial traveler.”

“Conolly is an American too. But that has nothing to do with it. Conolly treated his wife badly: that is enough for me. I am certain he would make any woman miserable.”

“If he really did.”

“But, dear,” interrupted Lady Geraldine, with restrained impatience, “don’t you know he did? Everybody knows it.”

Sir John shrugged himself placidly. “They say so,” he said. “I am afraid he was not all that he should have been to her. She was a charming creature — a great beauty, and, I thought, great rectitude. Dear me! You are right, as usual, Joldie, it would not suit.”

Lady Geraldine left the library, and went to dress for dinner, disturbed by the possibility which Sir John had suggested. At dinner she watched Conolly and observed that he conversed chiefly with Mary, and seemed to know more than she on all her favorite subjects. Afterwards, when they were in the drawing room, Mary asked him whether he played the piano. As he replied in the affirmative, Lady Geraldine was compelled to ask him to favor her with a performance. At their request he played some of Jack’s music, much more calmly and accurately than Jack, himself played it. Then he made Mary sing, and was struck by her declamatory style, which jarred Lady Geraldine’s nerves nearly as much as it had Mrs Phipson’s. He next sang himself, Mary accompanying him, and at first soothed Lady Geraldine by his rich baritone voice, and then roused her suspicions by singing a serenade with great expression, which she privately set down as a cold-blooded hypocrisy on his part. She at last persuaded herself that he was deliberately trying to engage the affections of Mary, with the intention of making her his second wife. Afterwards, he went out with Sir John, who often smoked cigars after dinner in the portico, and was fond of having a companion on such occasions.

“Thank goodness!” said Lady Geraldine. “Bluebeard has gone; and we can have our chat at last.”

“Why Bluebeard?” said Mary, laughing. “His beard is auburn. Has he been married more than once?”

“No. But mark my words, he will marry at least half-a-dozen times; and he will kill all his wives, unless they run away from him, as poor Marian did. However, so long as he does not marry us, he can do as he likes. The question of the day is, what are you going to say to Mr John Hoskyn?”

“Oh!” said Mary, her face clouding. “Let Mr John Hoskyn wait. I wish he were in America.”

“And why?” said Lady Geraldine in an obstinate tone.

“Because I want to enjoy my visit here and not be worried by his proposals.”

“You can answer him in five minutes, and then enjoy your visit as much as if he actually were in America.”

“That is true. Except that it will take much longer than five minutes to devise a letter that will not hurt his feelings too much.”

“I could write a sensible letter for you that would not hurt his feelings at all.”

“Will you? I shall be so much obliged. I hate refusing people.”

“Mary: I hope you are not going to be foolish about this offer.”

“Do you mean,” said Mary, astonished, “that you advise me to accept it?”

“Most decidedly.”

“But you said last night that he was not even a gentleman.”

“Oh, a gentleman! Nonsense! What is a gentleman? Who is a gentleman nowadays? Is Mr Conolly, with whom you seem so well pleased” (Mary opened her eyes widely) a gentleman? Or Mr. Jack?”

“Do you consider Mr. Herbert a gentleman?”

“Yes, I grant you that. I forgot him, but I only conclude from your experience of him that a mere gentleman would not do for you at all. Do you dislike Mr Hoskyn?”

“No. But then I do not absolutely dislike any man; and I know nearly a hundred.”

“Is there anyone whom you like better?”

“N–no. Of course I am speaking only of people whom I could marry. Still that is not saying much. If I heard that he was leaving the country for ever, I should be rather relieved than otherwise.”

“Yes, my dear, I know it is very annoying to be forced to make up one’s mind. But you will gain nothing by putting off. I have been speaking to Sir John about Mr Hoskyn and everything he has told me is satisfactory in the highest degree.”

“I am sure of it. Respectable, well off, rising, devotedly attached to me, calculates his figures at a percentage off the minimum, and so forth.”

“Mary,” said Lady Geraldine gravely: “have I mentioned I even one of those points to you?”

“No,” said Mary, taken a little aback. “But what other light can you see him in?”

“In the best of all lights: that of a comfortable husband. I am in dread for you lest your notions of high art should make you do something foolish. When you have had as much experience as I, you will know that genius no more qualifies a man to be a husband than good looks, or fine manners, or noble birth, or anything else out of a story book.”

“But want of genius is still less a qualification.”

“Genius, Mary, is a positive disqualification. Geniuses are morbid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with. Look at the matter practically. Do you suppose, you foolish child, that I am a bit less happy because Sir John does not know a Raphael from a Redgrave, and would accept the last waltz cheerfully as a genuine something-or-other by Bach in B minor? Our tastes are quite different; and, to confess the truth, I was no more romantically in love with him when we were married than you are at present with Mr Hoskyn. Yet where will you find such a modern Darby and Joan as we are? You hear Belle Saunders complaining that she has ‘nothing in common’ with her husband. What cant! As if any two beings living in the same world must not have more things in common than not; especially a husband and wife living in the same house, on the same income, and owning the same children. Why, I have something in common with Macalister, the gardener. I can find you a warning as well as an example, I knew Mr Conolly’s wife well before she was married. She was a woman of whom it was impossible to believe anything bad. In an evil hour she met Conolly at a charity concert where they had both promised to sing. Of course he sang as if he was all softness and gentleness, much as he did just now, probably. Then there was a charming romance. She like you, was fond of books, pictures, and music. He knew all about them. She was very honest and candid: he a statue of probity. He was a genius too; and his fame was a novelty then: everybody talked of him. Never was there such an match. She was the only woman in England worthy of him: he the only man worthy of her. Well, she married him, in spite of the patent fact that with all his genius, he is a most uncomfortable person. She endured him for two years then ran away with an arrogant blockhead who had nothing to recommend him to her except an imposing appearance and an extreme unlikeness to her husband. She has never been heard of since. If she had married man like Hoskyn, she could have been a happy wife and mother today. But she was like you she thought that taking a husband was the same thing as engaging gentleman to talk art criticism with.”

“I think I had better advertise, ‘Wanted: a comfortable husband. Applicants need not be handsome, as the lady is short-sighted. It sounds very prosaic, Lady Geraldine.”

“It is prosaic. I told you once before that the world is is not a stage for you to play the heroine on. Like all young people, you want an exalted motive for every step you take.”

“I confess I do. However, you have forgotten to apply your argument to Mr. Hoskyn’s case. If people with artistic tastes are all uncomfortable, I must be uncomfortable; and that is not fair to him.”

“No matter. He is in love with you. Besides, you are not artistic enough to be uncomfortable. You have been your father’s housekeeper too long.”

“And you really advise me to marry Mr. Hoskyn?”

Lady. Geraldine hesitated. “I think you can hardly expect me to take the responsibility of directly advising you to marry any man. It is one of the things that people must do for themselves. But I certainly advise you not to be deterred from marrying him by any supposed incompatibility in your tastes, or by his not being a man of genius.”

“I wonder would Mr. Conolly marry me.”

“Mary!”

“It was an unmaidenly remark,” said Mary, laughing.”

“It is undignified for a sensible girl to play at being silly, Mary. I hope you have no serious intention beneath your jesting. If you have, I shall be very sorry indeed for having allowed Mr. Conolly to meet you here.”

“Not the slightest, I assure you. Why, Lady Geraldine, you look quite alarmed.”

“I do not trust Mr. Conolly much. Marian Lind was infatuated by him; and another woman may share her fate — unless she happens to share my feeling towards him, in which case she may be regarded as perfectly safe. He is a dangerous subject. Let us leave him and come back to our main business. Is Mr. Hoskyn to be made happy or not?”

“I don’t want to marry at all. Let him have Miss Cairns: she would suit him exactly.”

“Well, if you don’t want to marry at all, my dear, there is an end of it. I have said all I can. You must decide for yourself.”

Mary, perceiving that Lady Geraldine felt offended, was about to make a soothing speech, when she heard a chair move, and, looking up saw that Conolly was in the room.

“Do I disturb you?”

Not at all,” Said Lady Geraldine with dignity, looking at him rather severely and wondering how long he had been there.

“We were discussing sociology.” said Mary.

“Ah!” he said, serenely. “And have you arrived at any important generalizations?”

“Most important ones.”

“What about? — if I may ask.”

“About marriage.” Lady Geraldine stamped hastily on Mary’s foot, and looked reproachfully at her.

Mary felt her color deepen, but she faced him boldly.

“And have you come the usual conclusions?” he said, sitting down near them.

“What are the usual conclusions?” said Mary.

“That marriage is a mistake. That men who surrender their liberty, and women who surrender their independence are fools. That children are a nuisance, and so forth.”

“We have come to any such conclusions. We rather started in with the assumption that marriage is a necessary evil, and were debating how to make the best of it.”

“On which point you differed, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Because Lady Geraldine is married and you are not. Can I help you to arrive at a compromise? I am peculiarly fitted for the task, because I am not married, and yet I have been married.”

Lady Geraldine, who had turned her chair so as to avert her face from him, looked round. Disregarding this mute protest, he continued, addressing Mary. “Will you tell me the point at issue?”

“It is not so very important,” said Mary, a little confused. “We were only exchanging a few casual remarks. A question arose as to whether the best men make the best husbands. I mean the cleverest men — men of genius, for instance. Lady Geraldine said no. She maintains that a good-natured blockhead makes a far better husband than a Caesar or a Shakespeare.”

“Did you say that?” said Conolly to Lady Geraldine, with a smile.

“No,” she replied, almost uncivilly. “Blockheads are never good-natured. At best, they are only lazy. I said that a man might be a very good husband without any special culture in the arts and sciences. Mary seemed to think that any person who understands as much of painting as an artist, is a person who sympathizes with that artist, and therefore a suitable match for her — or him. I disagree with her. I believe that community of taste for art has just as much to do with matrimonial happiness as community of taste for geography or roast mutton, and no more.”

“And no more,” repeated Conolly. “You are quite right. Heroes are ill adapted to domestic purposes. That is what you mean, is it not? Perhaps Miss Sutherland will be content with nothing less than a hero.”

“No,” said Mary. “But T will never admit that a man is not the better for being a hero. According to you, he is the worse. I heartily despise a woman who marries a fool in order that she may live comfortably despotic in her own house. I do not make absolute heroism an indispensable condition — I do not know exactly what heroism means; but I think a man may reasonably be expected to be free from vulgar prejudices against the efforts of artists to make life beautiful; and to have so disciplined himself that a wife can always depend on his self-control and moral rectitude. It must be terrible to live in constant dread of childish explosions of temper from one’s husband, or to fear, at every crisis, that he will not act like a man of sense and honor.”

Conolly looked at her curiously, and then, with an intent deliberation, that gave the fullest emphasis to his words, leaned a little toward her with his hands upon his knees, and said “Did you ever live with a person whose temper was imperturbable — who never hesitated to apply his principles, and never swerved from acting as they dictated? One who, whatever he might be to himself, was to you so void of petty jealousies, irritabilities and superstitions of ordinary men, that, as far as you understood his view of life, you could calculate his correct behavior beforehand in every crisis with as much certainty as upon the striking of a clock?”

“No,” said Lady Geraldine emphatically, before Mary could reply; “and I should not like to, either.”

“You are always right,” said Conolly. “Yet such a person would fulfill Miss Sutherland’s conditions. Like Hamlet,” he continued, turning to Mary, “you want a man that is not Passion’s slave. I hope you may never get him, for I assure you, you will not like him. He would make an excellent God, but a most unpleasant man, and an unbearable husband. What could you be to a wholly self-sufficient man? Affection would be a superfluity with which you would be ashamed to trouble him. I once knew a lady whom I thought the most beautiful, the most accomplished, and the most honest of her sex. This lady met a man who had learned to stand alone in the world — a hard lesson, but one that is relentlessly forced on every sensitive but unlovable boy who has his own way to make, and who knows that, outside himself, there is no God to help him. This man had realized all that is humanly possible in your ideal of a self-disciplined man. The lady was young, and, unlike Lady Geraldine, not wise. Instead of avoiding his imperturbable self-sufficiency, she admired it, loved it, and married it. She found in her husband all that you demand. She never had reason to dread his temper, or to doubt his sense and honor. He needed no petting, no counsel, no support. He had no vulgar prejudices against art, and, indeed, was fonder of it than she was. What she felt about him I can only conjecture. But I know that she ceased to love him, whilst around her thousands of wives were clinging fondly to husbands who bullied and beat them, to fools, savages, drunkards, knaves, Passion’s slaves of many patterns, but all weak enough to need caresses and forgiveness occasionally. Eventually she left him, and it served him right; for this model husband, who had never forfeited his wife’s esteem, or tried her forbearance by word or deed, had led her to believe that he would be as happy without her as with her. A man who is complete in himself needs no wife. If you value your happiness, seek for someone who needs you, who begs for you, and who, because loneliness is death to him, will never cease to need you. Have I made myself clear?”

“ Yes,” said Mary. “I think I understand, though I do not say I agree.”

Sir John came in just then, opportunely enough, and he found Conolly quite willing to talk about the prospects of the Company, although the ladies were thereby excluded from any part or interest in the conversation. Mary took the opportunity to slip away, unnoticed save by her hostess. When Conolly’s attention was released by Sir John going to the library fore some papers, he found himself alone with Lady Geraldine.

“Mr Conolly,”said Lady Geraldine, overcoming , with obvious effort, her reluctance to speak to him: “although you were of course not aware of it, you chose a most unfortunate moment for explaining your views to Miss Sutherland. There are circumstances which render it very undesirable that her judgment should be biased against marriage just at present.”

“I hardly follow you,” said Conolly, with a benignant self-possession which made Lady Geraldine privately quail. “Are you opposed to the suit of Mr Hoskyn?” She looked at him in consternation.” I see you are surprised by my knowledge of Miss Sutherland’s affairs,” he continued. “But that only convinces me that you do not know Mr Hoskyn. In business matters he can sometimes keep a secret. In personal matters he is indiscretion personified. Everybody in Queen Victoria Street, from the messenger to the Chairman, is informed of the state of his affections.”

“But why, if you knew this, did you talk as you did?”

“Because,” said he, smiling at her impatience, “I did not then know that you disapproved of his proposal.”

“Mr Conolly,” said Lady Geraldine, trying to speak politely: “I don’t disapprove of it.”

“Then we are somehow at cross purposes. I too, approve; and as Hoskyn is not, to my knowledge, likely to be a hero in the eyes of a young lady of Miss Sutherland’s culture, I ventured to warn her that he might be all the better qualified to make her happy.”

“I told her so myself. But if you want to encourage a young girl to marry, surely it is not a very judicious thing to give such a bad account of your own married life.”

“Of my own married life?”

“I mean,” said Lady Geraldine, coloring deeply, “of your own experience of married life — what you have observed in others.” She stopped, feeling that this was a paltry evasion, and added, “I beg your pardon. I fear I have made a very painful blunder.”

“No. An allusion to my marriage — from you — does not pain me. I know your sympathies are not with me; and I am pleased to think that they are therefore where they are most needed and deserved. As to Miss Sutherland, I do not think that what I said will have the effect you fear. In any case, my words are beyond recall. If she refuses Mr Hoskyn, I shall bear the blame. If she accepts him; I will claim to have been your ally.

“She would be angry if she knew that you were aware, all the time you were talking, of her position.”

“Angry with me: yes. That does not matter. But if she knew that Mr. Hoskyn had told me, she would be angry with him; and that would matter very much.”

Before Lady Geraldine could reply, her husband returned; and Conolly withdrew shortly afterwards for the night.

Next day, Mary received from Hoskyn a second letter begging her to postpone her answer until he had seen her, as he had become convinced that such matters ought to be conducted personally instead of by writing. As soon as he had ascertained which hotel was the near Sir John’s house, he would, he wrote, put up there and ask Mary to contrive one long interview. She was not to mention his presence to Lady Geraldine, lest she should think he expected to be asked on a visit. Mary immediately made Lady Geraldine promise that he should not be asked on a visit; and then, to avoid the threatened interview, made up her mind and wrote to him as follows:

Dear Mr. Hoskyn —
I shall not give you the trouble of coming down here to urge what you so frankly proposed in your first letter. 1 trust it will relieve your anxiety to learn that I have decided to accept your offer. However, as the position we are now in is one that we could not properly maintain whilst visiting at the house of a friend, I beg that you will give up all idea of seeing me until I leave Devonshire. My social duties here are so heavy that I can hardly, without seeming rude, absent myself to write a long letter. I suppose you will go back to Trouville until we all return to London. — I am, dear Mr. Hoskyn,
Yours sincerely,
Mary Sutherland.

Mary composed this letter with difficulty, and submitted it to Lady Geraldine, who said, “It is not very loving. That about your social duties is a fib. And you want him to go to Trouville because he cannot write so often.”

“I can do no better,” said Mary. “But you are right. I will burn it and write him another, refusing him point blank. That will be the shortest.”

“No, thank you. This will do very well.” And Lady Geraldine closed it with her own hands and sent it to the post. Later in the afternoon Mary said, “I am exceedingly sorry I sent that letter. I have found out my real mind about Mr Hoskyn at last. I detest him.”

Lady Geraldine only laughed at her.

Book II

Chapter I

One evening the concert room in St. James’s Hall was crowded with people waiting to hear the first public performance of a work by Mr Owen Jack, entitled Prometheus Unbound. It wanted but a minute to eight o’clock; the stalls were filling rapidly; the choristers were already in their seats; and there was a din of tuning from the band. Not far from the orchestra sat Mr John Hoskyn, with a solemn air of being prepared for the worst, and carefully finished at the tie, gloves and hair. Next him was his wife, in a Venetian dress of garnet colored plush. Her black hair was gathered upon her neck by a knot of deep sea green; and her dark eyes peered through lenses framed in massive gold.

On the foremost side bench, still nearer to the orchestra, was a young lady with a beautiful and intelligent face. She was more delicately shaped than Mrs Hoskyn, and was dressed in white. Her neighbors pointed her out to one another as the Szczympliça; but she was now Mrs Adrian Herbert. Her husband was with her; and his regular features seemed no less refined and more thoughtful than those of his wife. Mrs Hoskyn looked at him earnestly for some time. Then she turned as though to look at her husband; but she checked herself in this movement, and directed her attention to the entry of Manlius.

I have counted the band,” whispered Hoskyn; “and it’s eighty-five strong. They can’t give them much less than seven and sixpence apiece for the night, which makes thirty-two pounds all but half a crown, without counting the singers.”

“Nonsense,” said Mary, after looking round apprehensively to see whether her husband’s remark had been overheard. Five pounds apiece would be nearer the — Hush.”

The music had just begun; and Hoskyn had to confine his repudiation of Mary’s estimate to an emphatic shake of the head. The overture, anxiously conducted by Manlius, who was very nervous, lasted nearly half an hour. When it was over, there was silence for a moment, then faint applause, then sounds of disapproval, then sufficient applause to overpower these and finally a buzz of conversation. A popular baritone singer, looking very uncomfortable, rose to carry on his part of dialogue between Promethius and the earth, which was the next number of the work. The chorus singers also rose, and fixed their eyes stolidly, but desperately, on the conductor, who hardly ventured to look at them. The dialogue commenced, but the the attention of the audience was presently diverted by the appearance of Jack himself, who was seen to cross the room with an angry countenance, and go out. The conclusion of the dialogue was unbroken silence, in the midst of which the popular baritone sat down with an air of relief.

“I find that the music is beginning to grow upon me, said Mrs Hoskyn.

“Do you?” said Hoskyn. “I wish it would grow quicker. I’m only joking,” he added, seeing that she was disappointed. “It’s splendid. I wish I knew enough about it to like it; but I can see that it has the real classical style. When those brass things come in, it’s magnificent.”

Two eminent songstresses now came forward as Asia and Panthea; and the audience prepared themselves for the relief of a pretty duet. But Asia and Panthea sang as strangely as Prometheus, in spite of which they gained some slow, uncertain, grudging applause. The Race of the Hours, which followed, was of great length, progressing from a lugubrious midnight hour in E flat minor to a sunrise in A major, and culminating with a jubilant clangor of orchestra and chorus which astounded the audience, and elicited a partly hysterical mixture of hand clapping and protesting hisses.

“How stupid these people are!” exclaimed Mrs Adrian Herbert. “What imbecility! They do not know that it is good music. Heaven!”

“I must confess that, to my ear, there is not a note of music in it,” said Adrian.

“Is it possible!” said Aurélie. “But it is superb! Splendid!”

“It is ear splitting,” said Adrian. “Your ears are hardier than mine, perhaps. I hope we shall hear some melody in the next part, by way of variety.”

“Without doubt we shall. It is a work full of melody.”

Herbert was confirmed in his opinion by the final number, entitled, “Antiphony of the Earth and Moon,” which was listened to in respectful bewilderment by the audience, and executed with symptoms of exhaustion by the chorus.

“By George,” said Hoskyn, joining heartily in some applause which began in the cheaper seats, “that sounded stupendous. I’d like to hear it again.”

The clapping, though not enthusiastic, was now general, all being good-naturedly willing that the composer should be called forward in acknowledgment of his efforts, if not of his success. Jack, who had returned to hear the “Race of the Hours,” again arose; and those who knew him clapped more loudly, thinking that he was on his way to the orchestra. It proved that he was on his way to the door; for he went out as ungraciously as before.

“How disappointing.”said Mary. “He is so hasty.

“Serves them right,”said Hoskyn. “I like his pluck; and you make take my word for it, Mary, that is a sterling piece of music. It reminds me of the Pacific railroad.”

“Of course it is. Even you can see that,” said Mary, who did not quite see it herself. “It is mere professional jealousy that prevents the people here from applauding properly, They are all musicians of some kind or another.”

“They are going to give us ten minutes law before they begin again. Let us take a walk round, and find what Nanny thinks.”

Meanwhile Aurélie was almost in tears. Mr Phipson had just come up to them, shaking his head sadly. “As I feared,” he said. “As I feared.”

“It is a shame,” she said indignantly, “a shame unworthy of the English people. Of what use is it to write music for such a world?”

“It is far above their heads,” said Phipson. “I told him so.”

“And their insolence is far beneath his feet,” said Aurélie. “Oh, it is a scene to plunge an artist in despair.”

“It does not plunge me into despair,” said Adrian, with quiet conviction. “The work has failed; and I venture to say that it deserved to fail.”

“It is unworthy of you to say so,” exclaimed Aurélie passionately, throwing herself back in her seat and turning away from him.

“Deserved is perhaps a hard word under the circumstances, Mr Herbert,” said Phipson. “The work is a very remarkable one, and far beyond the comprehension of the public. Jack has been much too bold. Even our audiences will not listen with patience to movements of such length and complication. I greatly regret what has happened; for the people who are attracted by our concerts are representative of the highest musical culture in England. A work which fails here from its abstruseness has not the ghost of a chance of success elsewhere. Ah! Here is Mary.”

Some introductions followed. Hoskyn shook Adrian’s hand cordially, and made a low bow to Aurélie, whom he stole an occasional glance at, but did not at first venture to address. Aurélie looked at Mary’s dress with wonder.

“I am greatly annoyed by the way Mr Jack has been treated,” said Mary. “An audience of working people could not be more insensible to his genius than the people here have shewn themselves tonight.”

My wife is quite angry with me because I, too, am insensible to the beauties of Mr Jack’s composition,” said Herbert

“You always were,” said Mary. “Mr Hoskyn is delighted with Prometheus.”

“Is Mr Hoskyn musical?”

“More so than you, it appears, since he can appreciate Mr Jack.”

“Phipson then struck in on the merits of the music; and he, Mary, and Adrian, being old friends, fell into conversation together, to the exclusion of the husband and wife so recently added to their circle. Hoskyn, under these circumstances, felt bound to entertain Aurélie.

“I consider that we have had a most enjoyable evening,” he said. “I think there can be no doubt that Jack’s music is first rate of its kind.”

“Ah? Monsieur Jacque’s music. You find it goodh.”

“Very good indeed,”said Hoskyn, speaking loudly, as if to a deaf person. “Jilitrouvsplongdeed,” he added rashly.

“You are right, monsieur,” said Aurélie, speaking rapidly in French. “But it seems to me that there is unworthy — something infamous, in the icy stupidity of these people here: Of what use is it to compose great works when one is held in contempt because of them? It is necessary to be a trader here in order to have success. Commerce is the ruin of England. It renders the people quite inartistic.

“Jinipweevoocomprongder,” murmured Hoskyn. “The fact is,” he added, more boldly, “I only dropped a French word to help you out a little; but you mustn’t take advantage of that to talk to me out of my native language. I can speak French pretty well; but I never could understand other people speaking it.”

“Ah,” said Aurélie, who listened to his English with strained attention. “You understand me not very goodh. It is like me with English. But in this moment I make much progress. I have lesson every day from Monsieur Herbert.”

“You speak very well. Vooparlaytraybyang—” tootafaycumoononglays. Jinisoray — I mean I should not know from your speaking that you were a foreigner — oonaytronzhare.”

“Vraiment?” cried Aurélie, greatly pleased.

“Vraymong, “ said Hoskyn, nodding emphatically.

“It is sthrench. There is only a few months since I know not a word of the English.”

“You see you knew the universal language before.”

“Comment? La langue universelle?”

“I mean music. Music!” he repeated, seeing her still bewildered.

“Ah, yes,” said Aurélie, her puzzled expression vanishing. “You call music the universal language. It is true. You say very goodh.”

“It must be easy to learn anything after learning music. Music is so desperately hard. I am sure learning it must make people — spiritual, you know.”

“Yes, yes. You observe very justly, monsieur. I am quite of your advice. Understand you?”

“Parfatemong byang, “ said Hoskyn, confidently.

Here Mary interrupted the conversation by warning her husband that it was time to return to their places. As they did so, she said:

‘You must excuse me for abandoning you to the Szympliça, John. I suppose you could not say a word to one another.”

·            Why not? She’s a very nice woman; and we got on together

splendidly. I always do manage to hit it off with foreigners, However, it was easy enough in her case; for she could speak broken English and didn’t understand it, whereas I could speak French but couldn’t understand the way she talked it — she’s evidently not a Frenchwoman. So she spoke to me in English; I answered her in French; and we talked as easily as I talk to you.”

Meanwhile Adrian could not refrain from commenting on Mary’s choice. “I wonder why she married that man,” he said to Aurélie. “I cannot believe that she would stoop to marry for money; and yet, seeing what he is, it is hard to believe that she loves him.”

“But why?” said Aurélie. “He is a little commercial; but all the English are so. And he is a man of intelligence. He has very choice ideas.”

“You think so, Aurélie!”

“Certainly. He has spoken very well to me. I assure you he has a very fine perception of music. It is difficult to understand him, because he does not speak French as well as I speak English; but it is evident that he has reflected much. As for her, she is fortunate to have so good a husband. What an absurd dress she wears. In any other part of the world she would be mocked at as a madwoman. Your scientific Mademoiselle Sutherland is, in my opinion, no great things.”

Adrian looked at his wife with surprise, and with some displeasure; but the music recommenced just then, and the conversation dropped. Some compositions of Mendelssohn were played; and these he applauded emphatically, whilst she sat silent with averted face. When the concert was over they saw the Hoskyns drive away in a neat carriage; and Herbert, who had never in his bachelor days envied any man the possession of such a luxury, felt sorry that he had to hire a hansom for his wife’s accommodation.

Adrian had not yet found a suitable permanent residence. They lived on the first floor of a house in the Kensington Road. Aurélie, who had always left domestic matters to her mother, knew little about house-keeping, and could not be induced to take an interest in house-hunting. The landlady at Kensington Road supplied them with food; and Adrian paid a heavy bill every week, Aurélie exclaiming that the amount was unheard of, and the woman wicked, but not taking any steps to introduce a more economical system.

They reached their lodging at a quarter before twelve; and Adrian, when Aurélie had gone upstairs, turned out the gas and chained the door, knowing that the rest of the household were in bed. As he followed her up, he heard the pianoforte, and, entering the room, saw her seated at it. She did not look round at him, but continued playing, with her face turned slightly upward and to one side — an attitude habitual to her in her musical moments. He moved uneasily about the room for some time; put aside his overcoat; turned down a jet of gas that flared; and rearranged some trifles on the mantelpiece. Then he said:

“Is it not rather late for the pianoforte, Aurélie? It is twelve o’clock: and the people of the house must be asleep.”

Aurélie started as if awakened; shrugged her shoulders; closed the instrument softly; and went to an easy chair, in which she sat down wearily.

Herbert was dissatisfied with himself for interrupting her, and angry with her for being the cause of his dissatisfaction Nevertheless, looking at her as she reclined in the chair, and seemed again to have forgotten his existence, he became enamored.

“My darling!”

“Eh?” she said.waking again, “Qu’est-ce, que c’est?”

“It has turned rather cold tonight Is it wise to sit in that thin dress when there is no fire?”

“I do not know.”

“Shall I get you a shawl?”

“It does not matter: I am not cold.” She spoke as if his solicitude only disturbed her.

“Aurélie,” he said, after a pause: “I heard tonight that my mother has returned to town.”

No answer.

“Aurélie,” he repeated petulantly. “Are you listening me?”

“Yes. I listen.” But she did not look at him.

“I said that my mother was in town. I think we had better call on her.*

“Doubtless you will call on her, if it pleases you to do so. Is she not your mother?”

“But you will come with me, Aurélie, will you not”

“Never. Never.”

“Not to oblige me. Aurélie?”

“It is not the same thing to oblige you as to oblige your mother. I am not married to your mother.”

Herbert winced. “That is a very harsh speech to English ears,” he said.

“I do not speak in English: I speak the language of my heart. Your mother has insulted me; and you are wrong to ask me to go to her. My mother has never offended you; and yet I sent her away because you did not like her, and because it is not the English custom that she should continue with me. I know you did not marry her; and I do not reproach you with harshness because she is separated from me. I will have the like freedom for myself.”

“Aurélie,” cried Herbert, who had been staring during most of her speech: “you are most unjust. Have I ever failed in courtesy towards your mother? Did I ever utter a word expressive of dislike to her?”

“You were towards her as you were towards all the world. You were very kind: I do not say otherwise.”

“In what way can my mother have insulted you? You have never spoken to her; and since a month before our wedding she has been in Scotland.”

“Where she went lest I should speak to her, no doubt. Why did she not speak to me when I last met her? She knew well that I was betrothed to you. She is proud, perhaps. Well, be it so. I also am proud. I am an artist; and queens have given me their hands frankly. Your mother holds that an English lady is above all queens. I hold that an artist is above all ladies. We can live without one another, as we have done hitherto. I do not seek to hinder you from going to her; but I will not go.”

“You mistake my mother’s motive altogether. She is not proud — in that way. She was angry because I did not allow her to choose a wife for me.”

“Well, she is angry still, no doubt. Of what use is it to anger her further?”

“She has too much sense to persist in protesting against what is irrevocable. You need not fear a cold welcome, Aurélie. I will make sure, before I allow you to go, that you shall be properly received.”

“I pray you, Adrian, annoy me no more about your mother. I do not know her: I will not know her. It is her own choice; and she must abide by it. Can you not go to her without me?”

“Why should I go to her without you”’ said Adrian, distressed. “Your love is far more precious to me than hers. You know how little tenderness there is between her and me. But family feuds are very objectionable. They are always in bad taste, and often lead to serious consequences. I wish you would for this once sacrifice your personal inclination, and help me to avert a permanent estrangement.”

“Ah yes,” exclaimed Aurélie,” rising indignantly. “You will sacrifice my honor to the conventions of your world.”

“It is an exaggeration to speak of such a trifle as affecting your honor. However, I will say no more. I would do much greater things for you than this that you will not do for me, Aurélie. But then I love you.”

“I do not want you to love me,” said Aurélie, turning towards the door with a shrug. “Go and love somebody else. Love Madame Hoskyn; and tell her how badly your wife uses you.”

Herbert made a step after her. “Aurélie,” he said: “if I submit to this treatment from you, I shall be the most infatuated slave in England.”

“I cannot help that. And I do not like you when you are a slave. It grows late.”

“Are you going to bed already?”

“Already! My God, it is half an hour after midnight! You are going mad, I think.”

“I think I am. Aurélie: tell me the truth honestly now: I cannot bear to discover it by the slow torture of watching you grow colder to me. Do you no longer love me?”

“Perhaps,” she said, indifferently. “I do not love you to-night, that is certain. You have been very tiresome.” And she left the room without looking at him. For some moments after her departure he remained motionless. Then he set his lips together; went to a bureau and took some money from it; put on his hat and overcoat; and took a sheet of paper from his desk. But after dipping a pen in the ink several times, he cast it aside without writing anything. As he did so, he saw on the mantelpiece a little brooch which Aurélie often wore at her throat. He took this up, and was about to put it into his pocket, when, giving way to a sudden impulse, he dashed it violently on the hearthstone. He then extinguished the light, and went out. When he had descended one stair, he heard a door above open, and a light foot fall on the landing above. He stopped and held his breath.

“Adrian, my dear, art thou there?”

“What is it?”

“When thou comest, bring me the little volume which lies on the piano. It is red; and my handkerchief is between the pages for a mark.”

He hesitated a moment. Then, saying, “Yes, my darling,” me he stole back into the drawing room; undid his preparations for flight; got the red book, and went upstairs, where he found his wife in bed, placidly unconscious of his recent proceedings, with the reading lamp casting a halo on her pillow.

It was Adrian’s habit to rise promptly when the servant knocked at his door at eight o’clock every morning. Aurélie, on the the contrary, was lazy, and often left her husband to breakfast by himself. On the morning after the concert he rose as usual, and made as much noise as possible in order to wake her. Not succeeding, he retired to his dressing room and, after a great splashing and rubbing, returned clad in a dressing gown.

“Aurélie.” A pause during which her regular breathing was audible. Then, more loudly “Aurélie.” She replied with a murmur. He added very loudly and distinctly, “It is twenty minutes past eight.”

She moved a little and uttered a strange sound, which he did not understand, but recognized as Polish. Then she said, drowsily in French, “Presently.”

“At once, if you please.” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Must I shake you?”

“No, no,” she rousing herself a little more. “Don’t shake me, I implore you.” Then, petulantly, “I will not be shaken. I am going to get up. Are there any letters?”

“I have not been downstairs yet.”

“Go and see.”

“You will be sure not to sleep again.”

“Yes, yes. I shall be down almost as soon as you. Bring me up the letters, if there are any.”

He returned to his dressing room; finished his toilet; and went downstairs. There were some letters. He looked at them, and went back to Aurélie. She was fast asleep.

“Oh, Anrelie! Aurélie! Really it is too bad. You are asleep again.”

“How you disturb me!” she said, opening her eyes, and sighing impatiently. “What hour is it?”

“You may well ask. It is twenty-five minutes to nine.”

“Is that all?”

“All! Come, Aurélie, there are three letters for you. Two are from Vienna.”

Aurélie sat up, awake and excited. “Quick,” she said. “Give them to me.”

“I left them downstairs.”

“Oh,” said Aurélie, disgusted. Adrian hurried from the room lest she should prevail upon him to bring up the letters. He occupied himself with the newspaper for the next fifteen minutes, at the end of which she appeared and addressed herself to her correspondence, leaving him to pour out tea for himself and for her. Nothing was said for some time. Then she exclaimed with emphasis, as though in contradiction of what she read:

“But it is certain that I will go.”

“Go where?” said Adrian, turning pale.

“To Vienna — to Prague — to Budapesth, my beloved Budapesth.”

“To Vienna!”

“They are going to give a Schumann concert in Vienna. They want me; and they shall have me. I have a specialty for the music of Schumann: no one in the world can play it as I can. And I long to see my Viennese friends. It is so stupid here.”

“But, Aurélie, I have my work to do. I cannot go abroad at this season of the year.”

“It is not necessary. I did not think of asking you to come. No. My mother will accompany me everywhere. She likes our old mode of life.”

“You mean, in short, to leave me,” he said, looking shocked.

“My poor Adrian,” she said, leaning over to caress him: “wilt thou be desolate without me? But fret not thyself: I will return with much money, and console thee. Music is my destiny, as painting is thine. We shall be parted but a little time.”

Adrian was pained, but could only look wistfully at her and say, “You seem to enjoy the prospect of leaving me, Aurélie.”

“I am tired of this life. I am forgotten in the world; and others take my place.”

“And will you be happier in Vienna than here?”

“Assuredly. Else wherefor should I desire to go? When I read in the journals of all the music in which I have no share, I almost die of impatience.”

“And I sometimes, when I am working alone in my studio, almost die of impatience to return to your side.”

“Bah! That is another reason for my going. It is not good for you to be so loving.”

“I fear that it too true, Aurélie. But will it be good for you to have no one near you who loves you?

“Oh, those who love me are everywhere. In Vienna there is a man — a student — six feet high, with fair hair, who gets a friend to make me deplorable verses which he pretends are his own. Heaven, how he loves me! At Leipzig there is an old professor, almost as foolish as thou, my Adrian. Ah, yes: I shall not want for lovers anywhere.”

“Aurélie, are you mad, or cruel, or merely simple, that you say these things to me?”

“Are you then jealous? Ha! ha! He is jealous of my fair-haired student and of my old professor. But fear nothing, my friend. For all these men my mother is a veritable dragon. They fear her more than they fear the devil, in whom, indeed, they do not believe.”

“If I cannot trust you, Aurélie, I cannot trust your mother.”

“You say well. And when you do not trust me, you shall never see me again. I was only mocking. But I must start the day after to-morrow. You must come with me to Victoria, and see that my luggage is right. I shall not know how to travel without my mother.”

“Until you are in her hands, I will not lose sight of you, my dear treasure,” said Adrian tenderly. “You will write often to me, will you not, Aurélie?”

“I cannot write — you know it, Adrian. Mamma shall write to you: she always has abundance to say. I must practise hard; and I cannot sit down and cramp my fingers with a pen. I will write occasionally — I am sure to want something.”

Adrian finished his breakfast in silence, glancing at her now and again with a mixture of rapture and despair.

“And so,” he said, when the meal was over, “I am to lose you, Aurélie.”

Go, go,” she replied: “I have much preparation to make; and you are in my way. You must paint hard in your studio until very late this evening.”

“I thought of giving myself a holiday, and staying at home with you, dearest, as we are so soon to be separated.”

“Impossible,” cried Aurélie, alarmed. “My God, what a proposition! You must stay away more than ever, I have to practise, and to think of my dresses: I must absolutely be alone” Adrian took up his hat dejectedly. “My soul and my life, how I tear thy heart!” she added fondly, taking his face between her hands and kissing him. He went out pained, humiliated, and ecstatically happy.

Aurélie was busy all the morning. Early in the afternoon she placed Schumann’s concerto in A minor on the desk of the pianoforte, arranged her seat before it, and left the room. When she returned, she had changed her dress and was habited in silk. She bore her slender and upright figure more proudly before her imaginary audience than she usually ventured to do before a real one, and when had taken her place at the instrument, she played the concerto as she was not always fortunate to play it in public. Before she had finished the door was thrown open, and a servant announced “Mrs Herbert.” Aurélie started up frowning, and had but just time to regain her thoughtful expression and native distinction of manner when her mother-in-law entered, looking as imposing as a well-bred Englishwoman can without making herself ridiculous.

“I fear I disturbed you,” she said, advancing graciously.

“Not at all. I am very honored, madame. Please to sit down.”

Mrs Herbert had intended to greet her son’s wife with a kiss. But Aurélie, giving her hand with dignified courtesy, was not approachable enough for that. She was not distant; but neither was she cordial. Mrs Herbert sat down, a little impressed.

Is it a long time, madame, that you are in London?”

I only arrived the day before yesterday,” replied Mrs. Herbert in French, which, like Adrian, she spoke fluently. “I am always compelled to pass the winter in Scotland, because of my health.”

“The climate of Scotland, then, is softer than that of England. Is it so?”

“It is perhaps not softer; but it suits me better,” said Mrs. Herbert, looking hard at Aurélie, who was gazing pensively at the fireplace.

“Your health is, I hope, perfectly re-established?”

“Perfectly, thank you. Are you quite sure I have not interrupted you? I heard you playing as I came in; and I know how annoying a visit is when it interferes with serious employment.”

“I am very content to be entertained by you, madame, instead of studying solitarily.”

“You still study?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“You are very fond of playing, then?

“It is my profession.”

“Since I am Adrian’s mother,” said Mrs. Herbert with some emphasis, as if she thought that fact was being overlooked, “will you allow me to ask you a question?”

Aurélie bowed.

“Do you study with a view to resuming your public career at some future time?”

“Surely. I am going to play next week at Vienna.”

Mrs Herbert bent her head in surprised assent to this intelligence. *I thought Adrian contemplated your retirement into private life,” she said. “However, let me hasten to add that I think you have shewn wisdom in overruling him. Will he accompany you abroad?”

“It is not necessary that he should. I shall travel, as usual, with my mother.”

“Your mother is quite well, I hope?”

“Quite well, thank you, madame.”

Then there was a gap in the conversation. Mrs Herbert felt that she was being treated as a distinguished stranger in her son’s home; but she was uncertain whether this was the effect of timidity, or the execution of a deliberate design on Aurelie’s part. Inclining to the former opinion, she resolved to make an advance.

“My dear,” she said, may I ask how your friends usually call you?”

“Since my marriage, my friends usually call me Madame Sczympliça”

“I could not call you that,” interposed Mrs Herbert, smiling. “I could not pronounce it.”

“It is incorrect, of course” continued Aurélie, without responding to the smile; “but it is customary for artists to retain, after marriage, the name by which they have been known. I intend to do so. My English acquaintances call me Mrs Herbert.”

“But what is your Christian name?”

Aurélie. But that is only used by my husband and my mother — and by a few others who are dear to me.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Herbert, with some impatience, “as it is quite impossible for me to address you as Mrs Herbert, I must really ask you to let me call you Aurélie.”

“Whatever is customary, madame,” said Aurélie, bending her head submissively. “You know far better than I.”

Mrs. Herbert watched her in silence after this, wondering whether she was a knave or fool — whether to attack or encourage her.

“You enjoyed your voyage in Scotland, I hope.” said Aurélie, dutifully making conversation for her guest.

“Very much indeed. But I grew a little tired of it, and shall probably remain in London now until August. When may I expect to see you at my house?”

“You are very good, madame: I am very sensible of your kindness. But — Mrs Herbert looked up quickly — I set out immediately for Vienna, whence I go to Leipzig and many other cities. I shall not be at my own disposal again for a long time.”

Mrs. Herbert reflected for a moment, and then rose. Aurélie rose also.

“Adieu,” said Mrs. Herbert suavely, offering her hand.

“Adieu, madame,” said Aurélie, saluting her with earnest courtesy. Then Mrs. Herbert withdrew. On reaching the street she hailed a hansom, and drove to her son’s studio in the Fulham Road. She found him at his easel, working more rapidly and less attentively than in the old days.

“How d’ye do, mother,” he said, “Sit down on the throne.” The throne was a chair elevated on a platform for the accommodation of live models. “We should have gone to see you; but Aurélie is going abroad. She has not a moment to spare.”

“No, Adrian, that is precisely what you should not have done, though you might have done it. It was my duty to call on your wife first; and I have accordingly just come from your house.”

“Indeed?” said Adrian eagerly, and a little anxiously. “Did you see Aurélie?”

“I saw Aurélie.”

“Well? What did you think of her?”

“I think her manners perfect, and her dress and appearance above criticism.”

“And was there — did you get on well together?”

“Your wife is a lady, Adrian, and I am a lady. Under such circumstances there is no room for unpleasantness of any kind. It is quite understood, though not expressed, that I shall not present myself at your house again, and that your wife’s engagements will prevent her from returning my visit.”

“Mother, are you serious?”

“Quite serious, Adrian. I have come here to ask you whether your wife merely carries out your wishes, or whether she prefers for herself not to cultivate acquaintances in your family.”

“Pshaw! You must have taken some imaginary offence.”

“Is that the most direct and sensible answer you can think of?”

“There is no lack of sense in the supposition that Aurélie, being a foreigner, may not understand the English etiquette for the occasion. You may have mistaken her. Even you are fallible, mother.”

“I have already told you that your wife’s manners are perfect. If you assume that my judgment is not to be relied on, there is no use in our talking to one another at all. What I wish to know is this. Admitting, for the sake of avoiding argument, that I am right in my view of the matter, did your wife behave as she did by your orders, or of her own free will?”

“Most certainly not by my orders,” said Adrian, angrily. “I am not in the habit of giving her orders. If I were, they should not be of that nature. If Aurélie treated you with politeness, I do not see what more you had any right to expect. She admired you greatly when she first saw you; but I know she was hurt by your avoidance of her after our engagement became known, even when you were in the same room with her.”

“She has not the least right to feel aggrieved on that account. It was your business to have introduced her to me as the lady you intended to marry.”

“I did not feel encouraged to do so by what had passed between us on the subject,” said Adrian, coldly.

“Well we need not go over that again. I merely wish to ask you whether you expect me to make any further concessions. You have lately acquired a habit of accusing me of various shortcomings in my duty to you; and I do not wish you to impute any estrangement between your wife and me to my neglect. I have called on her; and she did not ask me to call again. I endeavored to treat her as one of my family: she politely insisted on the most distant acquaintanceship. I asked her to call on me and she excused herself. Could I have done more?”

“I think you might, in the first instance.”

·            Can I do more now?”

“You can answer that yourself better than I can.”

·            I fear so, since you seem unable to give me a

straightforward or civil answer. However, if you have nothing to suggest, please let it be understood in future that I was perfectly willing to receive your wife, that I made the usual advances, and that they came to nothing through her action, not through mine.

“Very well, though I do not think the point will excite much interest in the world.

“Thank you, Adrian. I think T will go now. I hope you treat your wife in a more manly and considerate way than you have begun to treat me of late.”

“She does not complain, mother. And I never intended to treat you inconsiderately. But you sometimes attack me in a fashion which paralyses my constant wish to conciliate you. I am sorry you have not succeeded better with Aurélie.”

“So am I. I did not think she was long enough married to have lost the wish to please you. Perhaps, though, she thought she she would please you best by holding aloof from me.”

“You are full of unjust suspicion. The fact is just the contrary. She knows that I have a horror of estrangements in families.”

“Then she doesn’t study very hard to please you.”

Adrian reddened and was silent.

“And you? Are you still as infatuated I as you were last year?”

“Yes, “ said Adrian defiantly, with his cheeks burning. “I love her more than ever. I am longing to be at home with her at this moment. When she goes away, I shall be miserable. Of all the lies invented by people who never felt love, the lie of marriage extinguishing love is the falsest, as it is the most worldly and cynical.”

Mrs. Herbert looked at him in surprise and doubt. “You are an extraordinary boy,” she said. “Why then do you not go with her to the Continent?”

“She does not wish me to,” said Herbert shortly, averting his face, and pretending to resume his work.

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Herbert. “And you will not cross her, even in that?”

“She is quite right to wish me to stay here. I should only be wasting time; and I should be out of place at a string of concerts. I will stay behind — if I can.”

“If you can?”

“Yes, mother, if I can. But I believe I shall rejoin her before she is absent a week. I may have been an indifferent son; and I know I am a bad husband; but I am the most infatuated lover in the world.”

“Yet you say you are a bad husband!”

“Not to her. But I fall short in my duty to myself.”

Mrs. Herbert laughed. “Do not let that trouble you,” she said. “Time will cure you of that fault, if it exists anywhere but in your imagination. I never knew a man who failed in taking care of himself. Goodbye, Adrian.”

“Goodbye, mother.”

“What an ass I am to speak of my feelings to her!” he said to himself, when she was gone. “Well, well: at least if she does not understand them, she does not pretend to do so, she has not sympathy enough for that. She did not even ask to see my pictures. That would have hurt me once. At present I have exchanged the burden of disliking my mother the heavier one of loving my wife.” He sighed, and resumed his work in spite of the fading light.

Chapter II

One moonlit night, in an empty street in Paris, a door suddenly opened; and three persons were thrust violently out with much scuffling and cursing. One of them was a woman, elegantly dressed, but flushed with drink and excitement. The others were a loose-jointed, large-boned, fair young Englishman of about eighteen or twenty, and a slim Frenchman with pointed black moustaches and a vicious expression. The Englishman, like the woman, was heated and intoxicated: his companion was angry, but had not lost his self-control. The moment they passed the threshold, the door was slammed; and the younger man, without heeding the torrent of foul utterance to which the woman promptly betook herself, began kicking the panels furiously.

“Bah!” said the woman, recovering herself with a shrill laugh. “Come, Anatole.” And she drew away her compatriot, who was watching the door-kicking process derisively.

“Hallo!” shouted the Englishman, hurrying after them. “Hallo, you! This lady stays with me, if you please. I should think that she has had about enough of you, you damned blackleg, since she has been pitched out of a gambling hell on your account. You had better clear out unless you want your neck broken — and if you were anything like a fair match for me, I’d break it as soon as look at you.”

“What does he say, Nata “ whispered the Frenchman, keeping his eye on the other as if he guessed his meaning.

The woman. with an insolent snap of her fingers, made a perfunctory translation of as much of the Englishman’s words as she understood.

“Look, you, little one, said the Frenchman, advancing to within a certain distance of his adversary, “the night air is not right for you. I would counsel you to go home and put yourself to bed, lest I should have to give your nurse the trouble of carrying you thither.”

“You advise me to go to bed, do you? I’ll let you see all about that.” retorted the young man, posing himself clumsily in attitude of an English pugilist, and breathing scorn at his opponent. Anatole instantly dealt him a kick beneath the nose which made him stagger. The pain of it was so intolerable that he raised his right hand to his mouth. The moment he thus uncovered his body, the Frenchman turned swiftly, and, looking back at his adversary over his shoulder, lashed out his toe with the vigor of a colt, and sent it into the pit of the young man’s stomach, flinging him into the roadway, supine, gasping, and all but insensible.

“Ha!” said Anatole, panting after this double feat. “Prrr’lotte! So much for thy English boxer, Nata.”

“Cre’matin! What a devil thou art, Anatole. Come, let us save ourselves.”

A minute later the street was again as quiet, and, except for the motionless body on the roadway, solitary as before. Presently a vehicle entered from a side street. It was a close carriage like an English brougham, and contained one passenger, a lady with a white woolen shawl wrapped about her head, and an opera cloak over her rich dress. She was leaning back in a deep reverie when the horse stopped so suddenly that she was thrown forward; and the coachman uttered a warning cry. Recovering herself, she looked out of the window, and, saw, with a sickening sensation, a man stagger out on his hands and knees from between the horse’s feet, and then roll over on his back with a long groaning sigh.

“My God!” exclaimed the lady, hastily opening the carriage door, and alighting. “Bring me one of the lamps. It is a young gentleman. Pray God he be not dead.”

The coachman reluctantly descended from his box, and approached with a lamp. The lady looked at him impatiently, expecting him to lift the insensible stranger; but he only looked down dubiously at him, and kept aloof.

“Can you not rouse him, or help him to stand up?” she said indignantly.

“I am not such a fool as that,” said the man. “Better not meddle with him. It is an affair for the police.”

The lady pouted scornfully and stooped over the sufferer, who lifted his eyes feebly. Seeing her face, he opened his eyes widely and quickly, looking up at her with wonder, and raising his hand appealingly. She caught it without hesitation, and said anxiously:

“You are better now, monsieur, are you not? I hope you are not seriously hurt.”

“Wha’s matter?” said the young man indistinctly. “Are you hurt?” she repeated in English.

“Nor’at all,” he replied, with drunken joviality.

Then he attempted to laugh, but immediately winced, and after a flew plunges, staggered to his feet. The coach man recoiled, but the lady did not move.

“Where is he,” he continued, looking round. “Yah! You’ll kick, will you? Come out, you coward. Come out and shew yourself. Yah! Kick, then run away and hide! I’ll slog the kicking out of you. Will you face me with your fists like a man?” He uttered the last sentence with an accession of fury, and menaced the coachman, who retreated. The stranger struck at him, but the blow, reaching nothing, swung the striker round until he was face to face with the lady, whom he regarded with astonishment.

“I beg your par’n,” he said, subsiding into humbleness. “I really beg your par’n. The fellow gave me a fearf’ kick in the face, and I barely know where I am yet. ‘Pon my soul,” he added, with foolish glee, “it’s the mos’extor’nary thing. Where has he gone?”

“Of whom do you speak” said the lady in French.

“Of — of — je parle d’polisson qui m’a donne un affreux coup de pied under the nose. Jái un grand desir dénfoncer ce lâche maudit.”

“Unhappily, monsieur, it was my horse that hurt you. I am in despair—”

“No, no. I tell you it was a fellow named Annatoal, a card sharper. If I ever catch him again, I’ll teach him the English version of the savate. I’ll kick him from one end of Paris to the other.” As he spoke he reeled against the carriage, and, as the horse stirred uneasily, clutched at the door to save himself from falling.

“ Madame,” said the coachman, who had been looking anxiously for the approach of the police: “do you not see that this is a sot? Better leave him to himself.”

“I am not drunk,” said the young man earnestly “I have been drinking; but upon my solemn word I am not drunk. I have been attacked and knocked about the head; and I feel very queer. I can’t remember how you came here exactly, though I remember your picking me up. I hope you won’t leave me.”

The lady, moved by his boyish appearance and the ingenious faith with which he made this appeal, was much perplexed, pitying, but not knowing what to do with him. “Where do you live?” she said. “I will drive you home with pleasure.”

He became very red. “Thanks awfully,” he said; “but the fact is, I don’t live anywhere in particular. I must go to some hotel. You are very kind; but I won’t trouble you any further. I am all right now.” But he was evidently not all right; for after standing a moment away from the carriage, shamefacedly waiting for the lady to reply, he sat down hastily on the kerbstone, and added, after panting a little, “You must excuse me, Mrs Herbert. I can’t stand very well yet. You had better leave me here: I shall pick myself up presently.”

“Tiens, tiens, tiens! You seem to know me, monsieur. I, too, recollect your face, but not your name.”

“Everybody knows you. You may have seen me at Mrs. Phipson’s, in London. I’ve been there when you were there. But really you’d better drive on. This house is a gambling den; and the people may come out at any minute. Don’t let your carriage be seen stopping here.”

“But I hardly like to leave you here alone and hurt.”

“Never mind me: it serves me right. Besides, I’d rather you’d leave me, I would indeed.”

She turned reluctantly toward the carriage, put her foot on the step, and looked back. He was gazing wistfully after her. “But it is inhuman!” she exclaimed, returning. “Come, monsieur, I dare not leave you in such a condition: it is the fault of my horse. I will bring you where you shall be taken care of until you are restored.”

“It’s awfully good of you” he murmured, rising unsteadily and making his way to the carriage door, which he held whilst she got in. He followed, and was about to place himself bashfully on the front seat, when the coachman, ill-humoredly using his whip, started the vehicle and upset him into the vacant space next Aurélie. He uttered an imprecation, and sat bolt upright for a moment. Then, sinking back against the cushion, and moving his hand until it touched her dress, he said drowsily, “It’s really mos’awfully good of you,” and fell asleep.

He was aroused by a shaking which made his head ache. An old and ugly woman held him by one shoulder, and the coachman, cursing him for a besotted pig, was about to drag him out by the other. He started up and got out of the carriage, the two roughly saving him from stumbling forward. In spite of his protests that he could walk alone they pulled him indoors between them. He struggled to free himself, but the woman was too strong for him: he was hauled ignominiously into a decent room, where sofa had been prepared for him with a couple of rugs and a woman’s shawl. Here he was forced to lie down, and bidden to be quiet until the doctor came. The coachman, with a parting curse, then withdrew; and his voice, deferentially pitched, was audible as he reported what he had done to the lady without. There was another person speaking also; but she spoke in a tone of vehement remonstrance, and in a strange language.

“Look here, ma’am,” said the young man from the sofa. “You needn’t trouble sending for a doctor. There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Silence, great sot,” chattered the old woman.”I have other things to do than to listen to thy gibberish. Lay thyself down this instant.”

“Will I, by Jove!” he said, kicking off the rug and sitting up. “Can you buy soda water anywhere at this hour?”

“Ah, ingrate! Is it thus that thou obeyest the noble lady who succored thee. Fie!”

“What is the matter, madame,” said Aurélie, entering.

“I was only asking her not to send for a doctor. I have no bones broken; and a doctor is no use. Please don’t fetch one. If I could have a little plain water — or even soda water — to drink, I should be all right.” Whilst he was speaking, an old lady appeared behind Aurélie. She seemed to suffer from a severe cold; for she had tied up her face in a red handkerchief, which gave her a grim aspect as she looked resentfully at him.

“I shall bring you some drink,” said Aurélie quietly. “Mamma,” she added, turning to the older lady; “pray return to your bed. Your face will be swollen again if you stand in the draught. I have but to get this young gentleman what he asks for.”

“The young gentleman has no business here,” said the lady. “You are imprudent, Aurélie, and frightfully self-willed.” She then disappeared. The stranger reddened and attempted to rise; but Aurélie, also blushing, quieted him by a gesture, whilst the old woman shook her fist at him. Aurélie then left the room, promising to return, and leaving him alone with the woman, who seized the opportunity to recommence her reproaches, which were too voluble to be intelligible to the English ears of the patient.

“You may just as well hold your tongue,” he said, as she paused at last for a reply, “for I don’t understand a word you say.”

“Say then, coquin,” repeated the woman, “what wert thou doing in the roadway there when thou gotst beneath the horse’s feet?”

·            Je m’ètais évanoui.”

“How? Ah, I understand, But why? What brought thee to such a pass?”

“N’ímporte. Cést pas convenable pour une juene femme d’entendre pareilles choses. That ought to fetch you if you can understand it.

“Ah, thou mockst me. Knowest thou, profligate, that thou art in my apartment, and that I have the right to throw you through the door if I please? Eh?”

“Votre discours se fait trés penible, ma mere. Voulez-vous avoir la bonté de shut up?”

“What does that mean?” said the woman, checked by the unknown verb.

‘Oh, you are talking too much,” said Aurélie, returning with some soda water. “You must not encourage him to speak, madame.”

“He needs little encouragement,” said the old woman. “You are far too good for him, mademoiselle.”

“How do you feel now, monsieur? Better, I hope.”

“Thanks very much: I feel quite happy. I have something to shew you. Just wait a—” Here he twisted himself round upon his elbow, and after some struggling with the rug and his coat, pulled from his breast pocket some old letters, which presently slipped from his hand and were scattered on the floor.

“Sot,” cried the old woman, darting at them, and angrily pushing back the hand with which he was groping for them. “Here — put them up again. What has madame to do with thy letters, thinkst thou?”

“Don’t you be in a hurry, Mrs. Jones,” he retorted confidently, beginning to fumble at the letters. “Where the — I’ll take my oath I had it this mor — oh, here it is. Did you ever see him before?” he asked triumphantly, handing a photograph to Aurélie.

“Tiens! it is Adrian,” she exclaimed. “My husband,” she added, to the old woman, who received the explanation sardonically. “Are you then a friend of Monsieur Herbert?”

“I have known him since I was a boy, “ said the youth. Aurélie smiled: she thought him a boy still. “But this was only taken last week,” she said. “I have only just received a copy for myself. Did he send it to you?”

“My sister sent it to me. I suppose you know who I am now.”

“No, truly, monsieur. I have seen you certainly; but I cannot recall your name.”

“You’ve seen me at Phipson’s, talking to Mr. Jack. Can’t you guess?”

Aurélie shook her head. The old woman, curious, but unable to follow a conversation carried on by one party in French and by the other in English, muttered impatiently, “What gibberish! It is a horror.”

The youth looked shyly at Aurélie. “Then, as if struck by a new thought, he said, “My name is — Beatty.”

Aurélie bowed. “Yes,” she said, “I have assuredly heard my husband speak of that name. I am greatly troubled to think that your misfortune should have been brought about by my carriage. Madame: Monsieur Beatty will need a pillow. Will you do me the kindness to bring one from my room?”

Monsieur Beatty began to protest that he would prefer to remain as he was, but he was checked by a gesture from the woman, who silently pointed to a pillow which was on a chair.

“Ah, true. Thank you,” said Aurélie, “Now, let me see. Yes, he had better have my little gong,in case he should become worse in the night, and need to summon help. It is on my table, I believe.

The old woman looked hard at Aurélie for a moment, and withdrew slowly.

“Now that that lady is gone,” said the patient, blushing, “I want to tell you how grateful I am for the way you have helped me. If you knew what I felt when I opened my eyes as I lay there on the stones, and saw your face looking down at me, you would feel sure, without being told, that I am ready to do anything to prove my gratitude. I wish I could die for you. Not that that would be much; for my life is not worth a straw to me or anyone else. I am old enough to be tired of it.”

“Young enough to be tired of it, you mean,” said Aurélie, laughing, but pleased by his earnestness. “Well, I do not doubt that you are very grateful. How did you come under my carriage? Were you really knocked down; or did you only dream it?”

“I was really knocked down. I can’t tell you how it came about. It served me right; for I was where I had no business to be — in bad company.”

“Ah,” said Aurélie gravely, approaching him with the pillow. “You must not do so any more, if we are to remain friends.”

“I will never do so again, so help me God!” he protested. “You have cured me of all taste for that sort of thing.”

“Raise yourself for one moment — so,” said Aurélie, stooping over him and placing the pillow beneath his head. His color rose as he looked up at her. Then, as she was in the act of withdrawing, he uttered, a stifled exclamation; threw his arm about her; and pressing his lips to her cheek, was about to kiss her, when he fell back with a sharp groan, and lay bathed in perspiration, and flinching from the pain of his wounded face. Aurélie, astonished and outraged, stood erect and regarded him indignantly.

“Ah,” she said. “That was an unworthy act. You, whom I have succored — my husband’s friend! My God, is it possible that an English gentleman can be so base!”

“Curse the fellow!” cried the young man, writhing and shedding tears of pain. “Give me something to stop this agony — some chloroform or something. Send for a doctor. I shall go mad. Oh, Lord !”

“You deserve it well,” said Aurélie, “Come, monsieur, control yourself. This is childish.” As he subsided, exhausted, and only fetching a deep sigh at intervals, she relented and called the old woman who seemed to have been waiting outside for she came at once.

“He has hurt his wound,” said Aurélie in an undertone. “What can we do for him?”

The woman shrugged herself, and had nothing to suggest. “Let him make the best of it,” she said, “I can do nothing for him.”

They stood by the sofa and watched him for some time in silence. At last he opened his eyes, and began to appear more at ease.

“Would you like to drink something?” said Aurélie coldly.

“Yes.”

“Give him some soda water,” she said to the old woman.

“Never mind,” he said, speaking indistinctly in his effort to avoid stirring his upper lip. “I don’t want anything. The cartilage of my nose is frightfully tender, but the pain is going off.

“It is now very late, and I must retire, monsieur. Can we do anything further to ensure your comfort?”

“Nothing, thank you.” Aurélie turned to go.

“Mrs, Herbert.” She paused. “I suppose no one could behave worse than I have. Never mind my speaking before the old lady: she doesn’t understand me. I wish you would forgive me. I have been severely punished. You cannot even imagine the torture I have undergone in the last ten minutes.”

“If you regret your conduct as you ought,” began Aurélie severely.

“I am ashamed of it and of myself; and I will try hard to be sorry — in fact, I am very sorry I was disappointed. I should be more than mortal if I felt otherwise. But I will never do such a thing again.”

“Adieu, monsieur,” said Aurélie coldly. “I shall not see you again, as you will be gone before I am abroad tomorrow.” And she left the room with a gravity that quelled him.

“What hast thou been doing now, rogue?” said the old woman, preparing to follow Aurélie. “What is it thou shouldst regret?”

By way of reply, he leered at her, and stretched out his arms invitingly.

“Thou shalt go out from my house to-morrow,” she said threateningly; and went out, taking the lamp with her. He laughed, and composed himself for sleep. But he was thirsty and restless, and his face began to pain him continuously. The moon was still shining; and by its light he rose and prowled about softly in his stockings, prying into drawers and chiffoniers, and bringing portable objects to the window, where he could see them better.

When he had examined everything, he sparred at the mantelpiece, and imagined

himself taking vengeance on Anatole. At last, having finished the soda water, he lay down again, and slept uneasily until six o’clock, when he rose and looked at himself in a mirror. His hair was disheveled and dusty; his lip discolored; his eyes were inflamed; but the thought of rubbing his soiled face with a towel, or even touching it with water made him wince. Seeing that he was unpresentable, and being sober enough to judge his last nights conduct, he resolved to make off before any of the household were astir. Accordingly, he made himself as clean as he could without hurting himself. From his vest pockets, which contained fourteen francs, an English half-crown, a latchkey. a lead pencil, and a return ticket to Charing Cross, he took ten francs and left them on the table with a scrap of paper inscribed Pour la belle propriétaire — Hommage du misérable Anglais.” Then, on another scrap, which he directed to Aurélie, as follows:

“I hope you will forgive me for behaving like an unmitigated cad last night, As I was not sober and had had my sense almost knocked out of me by a foul blow, I was hardly accountable for what I was doing. I can never repay your kindness nor expiate my own ingratitude; but please do not say anything about me to Mr Herbert, as you would get me into no end of trouble by doing so. I am running away early early because I should be ashamed to look you in the face now that I have recovered my senses — Yours, most gratefully—”

He “took several minutes to consider how he should sign this note. Eventually he put down the initial C only. After draining the soda-water bottle of the few flat and sickly drops he had left in it the night before, he left the room and crept downstairs, where he succeeded in letting himself out without alarming the household. The empty street looked white and spacious in the morning sun; and the young man — first looking round to see that no one was at hand to misinterpret his movements — took to his heels and ran until he turned a corner and saw a policeman, who seemed half disposed to arrest him on suspicion. Escaping this danger, he went on until he found a small eating house where some workmen were breakfasting. Here he procured a cheap but plentiful meal,and was directed to the railway station, whither he immediately hastened. A train had just arrived as he entered. As he stood for a moment to watch the passengers coming out, a hand was laid gently on his arm. He turned, and confronted Adrian Herbert, who looked at him with a quiet smile.

“Well, Charlie,” he said: “so this is Hounslow, is it? What particular branch of engineering are you studying here?”

“Who told you I was at Hounslow?” said Charlie, with a grin.

“Your father, whom I met yesterday at Mrs. Hoskyn’s. He told me that you were working very hard at engineering with a tutor. I am sorry to see that your exertions have quite knocked you up.”

“On the contrary, somebody else’s exertions have knocked me down. No, I ran over here a few days ago for a little change. Of course I didn’t mention it to the governor: he thinks Paris a sink of iniquity. You needn’t mention it to him either, unless you like.”

“I hope I am too discreet for that. Did you know that Mrs. Herbert is in Paris?”

“Is she? No, I didn’t know it: I thought she was with you in Kensington. I hope you will have a good time here. ‘‘

“Thank you. How long do you intend to stay?”

“Oh, I am going back directly. If I don’t get a train soon, I shall starve; for I have only two or three francs left to keep me in sandwiches during the voyage.”

“Draw on me if you are inconvenienced.”

Thanks,” said Carlie, coloring. “but I can get on well enough with what I have — at least if you could spare me I if you could spare me five franks — Thanks awfully. I have run a rig rather this time; for I owe Mary five pounds already on the strength of this trip. It is a mistake coming to Paris. I wish I had stayed at home.”

“Well, at least you have had some experience for your money. What has happened to your lip? Is it a bruise?”

“Yes, I got a toss. It’s nothing. I’m awfully obliged for—”

“Not at all. Have you breakfasted yet? What, already! You are an early bird. I was thinking of asking you to breakfast with me. I do not wish to disturb my wife too early, and so will have to kill some time for a while. By the by, have you ever been introduced to her?

“No,” “said Charlie hastily; but nothing would induce to me to face her in this trim. I know I look a perfect blackguard. I can’t wash my face; and I have a blue and and green spot right here” — touching the hollow of his chest— “which would make me screech if anyone rubbed me with a brush. In fact I shall take it as a particular favor if you wont mention to her that you have met me. Not that it matters much, of course; but still—”

“Very well, I shall not breathe a word of it to anyone. Goodbye.*’

Charlie shook his hand; and they parted. “Now,” thought Charlie, looking after him with a grin, and jingling the borrowed money in his pocket, “if his wife will only hold her tongue, I shall be all right. I wish she was my wife.” And heaving a sigh, he walked slowly away to inquire about the trains.

Herbert breakfasted alone. When his appetite was appeased, he sat trying to read, and looking repeatedly at his watch. He had resolved not to seek his wife until ten o’clock; but he had miscalculated his patience; and he soon convinced himself that half past nine, or even nine, would be more convenient. Eventually he arrived at ten minutes to nine, and found Madame Szczympliça alone at table in an old crimson bed gown, with her hair as her pillow had left it.

“Monsieur Adrian!” she exclaimed, much discomposed. “Ah, you take us by surprise. I had but just stepped in to make coffee for the little one. She will be enchanted to see you. And I also.”

“Do not let me disturb you. I have breakfasted already. Is Aurélie up?”

“She will be here immediately. How delighted she will be! Are you quite well?”

Not badly, madame. And you?” I have suffered frightfully with my face. Last night I was unable to go to the concert with Aurélie. It is a great misfortune for me, this neuralgia.”

“I am very sorry. It is indeed a terrible affliction. Are you quite sure that Aurélie is not fast asleep?”

“I have made her coffee, mon cher; and I know her too well to do that before she is afoot. Trust me, she will be here in a moment. I hope it is nothing wrong that has brought you to Paris.”

“Oh no. I wanted a little change; and when you came so near, I determined to run over and meet you. You have been all round Europe since I last saw you.”

“Ah, what successes, Monsieur Adrian! You cannot figure to yourself how she was received at Budapesth. And at Leipzig too! It was — behold her!”

Aurélie stopped on the threshold and regarded Adrian with successive expressions of surprise, protest and resignation. He advanced and kissed her cheek gently, longing to clasp her in his arms, but restrained by the presence of her mother. Aurélie paused on her way to the table just long enough to suffer this greeting, and then sat down, exclaiming:

“I knew it! I knew it from that last letter! Oh thou silly one! Could not Mrs. Hoskyn console thee for yet another week?”

“How Indifferent she is,” said Madame Sczympliça. “She is glad at heart to see you, Mr. Adrian.” Now, this interference of his mother-in law, though made with amiable intention, irritated Herbert. He smiled politely, and turned a little away from her and towards Aurélie”.

“And SO you have had nothing but triumphs since we parted,” he said, looking fondly at her.

“What do you know of my triumphs!” she said, raising her head. “You only care for the tunes that one whistles in the streets’ At Prague I turned the world upside down with Monsieur Jacques fantasia. How long do you intend to stay here’”

“Until you can return with me, of course.”

“A whole week. You will be tired of your life, unless you go to the Louvre or some such stupidity, and paint.”

“I shall be content, Aurélie, never fear. Perhaps you will grow a little tired of me.”

“Oh no, I shall be too busy for that. I have to practise, and to attend rehearsals, and concerts, and private engagements. Oh, I shall not have time to think of you.”

“Private engagements. Do you mean playing at private houses?”

“Yes. This afternoon I play at the reception of the Princess — what is she called, mamma?”

“It does not matter what she is called,” said Herbert. “Surely you are not paid for playing on such occasions?”

“What! You do not suppose that I play for nothing for people whom I do not know — whose very names I forget. No, I play willingly for my friends, or for the poor; but if the great world wishes to hear me, it must pay. Why do you look so shocked? Would you, then, decorate the saloon of the Princess with pictures for nothing, if she asked you?”

“It is not exactly the same thing — at least the world does not think so, Aurélie. I do not like the thought of you going into society as a hired entertainer.”

Aurélie shrugged herself. “I must go for some reason,” she said. “If they did not pay me I should not go at all. It is an artist’s business to do such things.”

“My dear Mr. Adrian,” said Madame Szczympliça, “she is always the most honored guest. The most distinguished persons crowd about her; and the most beautiful women are deserted for her. It is always a veritable little court that she holds.”

“It is as I thought,” said Aurélie. “You came across the Channel only to quarrel with me.” Herbert attempted to protest; but she went on without heeding him. “Mamma: have you finished your breakfast?”

“Yes, my child.”

“Then go; and put off that terrible robe of thine. Leave us to ourselves: if we must quarrel, there is no reason why you should be distressed by our bickerings”

“I hope you are not really running away from me,” said Herbert, politely accompanying Madame Sczympliça to the door, and opening it for her.

“No, no, mon cher,” she replied with a Sigh. “I must do as I am bidden. I grow old; and she becomes a greater tyrant daily to all about her.”

“Now, malcontent,” said Aurélie, when the door was closed, “proceed with thy reproaches. How many thousand things hast thou to complain of? Let us hear how sad it has made thee to think that I have been happy and successful, and that thou hast not once been able to cast my happiness back in my — Heaven wouldst th eat me, Adrian?” He was straining her to his breast and kissing her vehemently.

“You are rightt,” he said breathlessly. “Love is altogether selfish. Every fresh account of your triumphs only redoubled my longing to have you back with me again. You do not know what I Buffered during all these weary weeks. I lived in my studio, and tried to paint you out of my head; but I could not paint your out of my heart. My work, which once seemed a wifer thing than my mind could contain, was only a wearisome trade to me. I rehearsed imaginary versions of our next meeting” for hours together, whilst my picture hung forgotten before me. I made a hundred sketches of you, and, in my rage at their badness, destroyed them as fast as I made them. In the evenings, I either wandered about the streets thinking of you”

“Or went to see Mrs. Hoskyn?”

“Who told you that?” said Herbert, discomfited.

“Ah!” cried Aurélie, laughing â€” almost crowing with delight, “I guessed it. Oh, that poor Monsieur Hoskyn! And me also! Is this thy fidelity — this the end of all thy thoughts of me?”

“I wish your jealousy were real,” said Herbert, with a sort of desperation. “I believe you would not care if I had gone to Mrs. Hoskyn as her lover. Why did I go to her? Simply because she was the only friend I had who would listen patiently whilst I spoke endlessly of you — she, whose esteem I risked, and whose respect I fear I lost, for your sake. But I have ceased to respect myself now, Aurélie. It is my misfortune to love you so much that you make light of me for being so infatuated.”

“Well,” said Aurélie soothingly, “you must try and not love me so much. I will help you as much as I can by making myself very disagreeable. I am far too indulgent to you, Adrian.”

“You hurt me sometimes very keenly, Aurélie, though you do not intend it. But I have never loved you less for that. I fear your plan would make me worse.”

“Ah, I see. You want to be made love to, and cured in that way.”

“I am afraid I should go mad then, Aurélie.”

“I will not try. I think you are very injudicious to care so much for love. To me, it is the most stupid thing in the world. I prefer music. No matter, my cherished one: I am very fond of thee, in spite of thy follies. Art thou not my husband? Now I must make an end here, and go to practise.”

“Never mind practising this morning, Aurdlie. Let us talk.”

“Why, have we not already talked? No, when I miss my little half hour of seeking for my fine touch, I play as all the world; and that is not just to myself, or to the Princess, who pays me more than she pays the others. One must be honest, Adrian. There, your face is clouded again. You are ashamed of me.”

“It is because I am so proud of you that I shrink from the thought of your talent being marketed. Let us change the subject. Have you met any of our friends in Paris?”

“Not one. I have not heard an English voice since we came here. But I must not stop to gossip.” She took his hand , pressed it for an instant against her bosom; and left the room. Herbert, troubled by the effort to enjoy fully the delight this caress gave him, sat down for a moment, panting. When he was calmer, he took his hat and went downstairs, intending to take a stroll in the sunshine. he was arrested at the door of one of the lower rooms by the porter’s wife, who held in her shaking hand some money and a scrap of paper, the sight of which seemed to frenzy her; for she was railing volubly at some person unknown to Adrian. lie looked at her with some curiosity, and was about to pass on, when she stepped before him.

“Look you, monsieur,” she said. “Be so good as to tell madame that my house is not a hospital for sots. And tell your friend, he whose nose someone has righteously crushed, that he had better take good care not to come to see me again. I will make him a bad quarter of an hour if he does.”

“My friend, madame!” said Herbert, alarmed by her shrewishness.

“Your wife’s friend, then, whom she brings home drunk in her carriage at midnight, and who kicks my sofa to pieces, and makes shameless advances to me beneath my husband’s roof, and flies like a thief in the night, leaving for me this insult.” And she held out the scrap of paper to Adrian. “With ten francs. What is ten francs to me!” Adrian, bewildered, looked unintelligently at the message. “Come you, monsieur, and see for yourself that I speak truly,” she continued, bringing him by a gesture into the room. “See there, my sofa ripped up and soiled with his heels. See madame’s fine rug trampled on the floor. See the pillow which she put under his wicked head with her own hands—”

“What are you talking about?” said Adrian sternly. For whom do you take me?”

“Are you not Monsieur Herbert?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I should think so. Well, Monsieur Herbert, it is your dear friend, who carries your portrait next his heart, who has treated me thus.”

“Really,” said Adrian, “I do not understand you. You speak of me — of my wife — of some friend of mine with my portrait—”

“And the nose of him crushed.”

“ — all in a breath. What do you mean? As you know, I only arrived here this morning.”

“Truly, monsieur, you have arrived a day after the fair. All I tell y<>u is that madame came home last night with a drunken robber, a young English sprig, who slept here. He has run away; and heaven knows what he has taken with him. He leaves me this money, and this note to mock me because I scorned his vile seductions. Behold the table where he left it.”

Adrian, hardly venturing to understand the woman, looked upon the table, and saw a note which had escaped her attention. She, following his glance, exclaimed:

“What! Another.”

“It is addressed to my wife,” said Adrian, taking it, and losing color as he did so. “Doubtless it contains an explanation of his conduct. I recognize the handwriting as that of a young friend of mine. Did you hear his name?”

“It was an English name. English names are all alike to me.

“Did he call himself Sutherland?”

“Yes, it was like that, quite English.”

“It is all right then. He is but a foolish boy, the brother of an old friend of mine.”

“Truly a strong boy for his years. He is your old friend, of course. It is always so. Ah, monsieur, if I were one to talk and make mischief, I could—”

“Thank you,” said Adrian, interrupting her firmly. “I can hear the rest from Madame Herbert, if there is anything else to hear.” And he left the room. On the landing without, he saw Madame Sczympliça, who, overlooking him, addressed herelf angrily to the old woman.

“Why is this noise made?” she demanded. “How is it possible for Mademoiselle to practise with this hurly-burly in her ears?”

“And why should I not make a noise,” retorted the woman, “when I am insulted in my own house by the friends of Mademoiselle?”

“What is the matter?” cried a voice from above. The woman became silent as if struck dumb; and for a moment there was no sound except the light descending footfall of Aurélie. “What is the matter?” she repeated, as she came into their view.

“Nothing at all,” muttered the old woman sulkily, glancing apprehensively at Adrian.

“You make a very great noise about nothing at all,” said Aurélie coolly, pausing with her hand on the balustrade. “Have you quite done; and may I now practise in peace?”

“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” said the woman apologetically, but still grumbling. “I was speaking to Monsieur.”

“Monsieur must either go out, or come upstairs and read the journals quietly,” said Aurélie.

“I will come upstairs,” said Adrian, in a tone that made her look at him with momentary curiosity. The old woman meanwhile retreated into her apartment; and Madame Sczympliça, who had listened submissively to her daughter, disappeared also. Aurélie, on returning to the room in which she practised, found herself once more alone with Adrian.

“Oh, it is a troublesome woman,” she said. “All proprietresses are so. I should like to live in a palace with silent black slaves to come and go when I clap my hands. She has spoiled my practice. And you seem quite put out.”

“I — Aurélie: I met Mrs. Hoskyn’s brother at the railway station this morning.”

“Really! I thought he was in India.”

“I mean her younger brother.”

“Ah, I did not know that she had another.”

Herbert Looked aghast at her. She had spoken carelessly, and was brushing some specks of dust from the keyboard of the pianoforte, as to the cleanliness of which she was always fastidious.

“He did not tell me that he had seen you, Aurélie,” he said, controlling himself. “Under the circumstances I thought that rather strange. He even affected surprise when I mentioned that you were in Paris.”

She forgot the keyboard, and looked at him with wonder and some amusement “You thought it very Strange!” she said. “What are you dreaming of? What else should he say, since he never saw me, nor I him, in our lives — except at a concert? Have I not said that I did not know of his existence until you told me?”

“Aurélie he exclaimed in a strange voice, turning pallid. She also changed color; came to him quickly; and caught his arm, saying, “Heaven! What is the matter with thee?”

“Aurélie,” he said, recovering his self-control, and disengaging himself quietly from her hold; “pray be serious. Why should you, even in jest, deceive me about Sutherland? If he has done anything wrong, I will not blame you for it.”

She retreated a step, and slowly raised her head and slowly raised her head in a haughtier attitude. “You speak of deceit!” she said. Then, shaking her finger at him, she added indignantly, “Ah, take care, Adrian, take care.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said sternly, “that you have not made the acquaintance of Sutherland here?”

“I do tell you so. And it seems to me that you do not believe me.”

“And that he has not passed the night here.”

“Oh!” she cried, and shrank a little.

“Aurélie,” he said, with a menacing expression which so disfigured and debased his face that she involuntarily recoiled and covered her eyes with her hands: “I have never before opened a letter addressed to you; but I will do so now. There are occasions when confidence is mere infatuation; and it is time, I fear, to shew you that my infatuation is not so blind as you suppose. This note was left for you this morning, under circumstances which have been explained to me by the woman downstairs.” A silence followed whilst he opened the note and read it. Then, looking up, and finding her looking at him quite calmly, he said sadly, “There is nothing in it that you need be ashamed of, Aurélie. You might have told me the truth. It is in the handwriting of Charlie Sutherland.”

This startled her for a moment. “Ah,” she said, “the scamp gave me a false name. But as for thee, unhappy one,” she added, as a ray of hope appeared in Herbert’s eyes, “adieu for ever.” And she was gone before he recovered himself.

His first impulse was to follow her and apologize, so simply and completely did her exclamation that Sutherland had given her a false name seem to explain her denial of having met him. Then he asked himself how came she to bring home a young man in her carriage; and why had she made a secret of it? She had said, he now remembered, that she had not heard any English voice except his own since she had come to Paris. Herbert was constitutionally apt to feel at a disadvantage with other men, and to give credit to the least sign that they were preferred to himself. He did not even now accuse his wife of infidelity; but he had long felt that she misunderstood him, withheld her confidence from him, and kept him apart from those friends of hers in whose society she felt happy and unrestrained. In the thought of this there was for him there was more jealousy and mortification than a coarser man might have suffered from a wicked woman. Whilst he was thinking over it all, the door opened and Madame Sczympliça, in tears, entered hastily.

“My God, Monsieur Adrian, what is the matter betwixt you and Aurélie?”

“Nothing at all,’ said Herbert, with constrained politeness. “Nothing of any consequence.”

“Do not tell me that,” she protested pathetically. “I know her too well to believe it. She is going away and she will not tell me why. And now you will not tell me either. I am made nothing of.”

“Did you say she is going away?*

“Yes. What have you done to her? — my poor child!”

Herbert did not feel bound to account for his conduct to his mother-in-law: yet he felt that she was entitled to some answer. “Madame Sczympliça, “ he said, after a moment’s reflexion: “can you tell me under what circumstances Aurélie met the young gentleman who was here last night?”

“That is it, is it? I knew it: I told Aurélie that she was acting foolishly. But there was nothing in that to quarrel about.”

“I do not say there was. How did it happen?”

“Nothing in the world but this. I had neuralgia; and Aurélie would not suffer me to accompany her to the concert. As she was returning, her carriage knocked down this miserable boy, who was drunk. You know how impetuous she is. She would not leave him there insensible; and she took him into the carriage and brought him here. She made the woman below harbor him for the night in her sitting room. That is all.”

“But did he not behave himself badly?”

“Mon cher, he was drunk — drunk as a beast, with his nose beaten in.”

“It is strange that Aurélie never told me of such a remarkable incident.”

“Why, you are not an hour arrived; and the poor child has been full of the joy and surprise of seeing you so unexpectedly. It is necessary to be reasonable, Monsieur Adrian.”

“The fact is, madame, that I have had a misunderstanding with Aurélie in which neither of us was to blame. I should not have doubted her, perhaps; but I think, under the circumstances, my mistake was excusable. I owe her an apology, and will make it at once.”

Wait a little, “ said Madame Szczympliça nervously, as he moved towards the door. “You had better let me go first: I will ask her to receive you. She is excessively annoyed.”

Herbert did not like this suggestion; but he submitted to it, and sat down at the pianoforte to await Madame Sczympliça’s return. To while away the time and and to persuade himself that he was not too fearful of the result of her mission he played softly as much of his favorite Mendelssohnian airs as conld be accompanied by the three chords which exhausted his knowledge of the art of harmonizing. At last, after a long absence, bis mother-in-law returned, evidently much troubled.

“I am a most unlucky mother,” she said, seating herself, and trying to keep back her tears. “She will not listen to me. Oh, Monsieur Adrien, what can have passed between you to enrage her so? You, who are always so gentle! — she will not let me mention your name.”

“But have you explained to her — ?”

“What is the use of explaining? She is not rational.”

“What does she say?”

“She says absurd things. Recollect that she is as yet only a child. She says you have betrayed your real opinion of her at last. I told her that circumstances seemed at the time to prove that she had acted foolishly, but that you now admitted your error.”

“And then—”

“Then she said that her maid might have doubted her, and afterwards admitted her error on the same ground. Oh, she is a strange creature, is Aurélie. What can one do with such a terrible child? She is positive that she will never speak to you again; and I fear she is in earnest. I can do no more. I have argued — implored — wept; but she is an ingrate, a heart of marble.”

Here there was a tap at the door; and a servant appeared.

“Madame Herbert wishes you to accompany her to the pianoforte place, madame. She is going thither to practise.”

Herbert only looked downcast; and Madame Szczympliça left the room stifling a sob. Herbert knew not what to do. A domestic quarrel involving the interference of a mother-in-law had always seemed to him an incident common among vulgar people, but quite foreign to his own course of life; and now that it had actually occurred to him, he felt humiliated. He found a little relief as the conviction grew upon him that he, and not Aurélie, was to blame. There was nothing new to him in the reflexion that he had been weak and hasty: there would be pleasure in making reparation, in begging her forgiveness, in believing in and loving her more than ever. But this would be on condition that she ultimately forgave him, of which he did not feel at all sure, as indeed he never felt sure of her on any point, not even that she had really loved him.

In this state of mind he saw her carriage arrive, and heard her descend the stairs and pass the door of the room where he was. Whilst he was hesitating as to whether he should go out and speak to her then, she drove away; and the opportunity, now that it was lost, seemed a precious one. He went downstairs, and asked the old woman when she expected Madame Herbert to return. Not until six o’clock, she told him. he resigned himself to eight hours’ suspense, and went to the Luxembourg, where he enjoyed such pleasure as he could obtain by admiring the works of men who could paint better than he. It was a long day; but it came to an end at last.

“I will announce you, monsieur,” said the old woman hastily, as she admitted him at half-past six.

“No,” he said firmly, resolved not to give Aurélie an opportunity of escaping from him. “I will announce myself.” And he passed the portress, who seemed disposed, but afraid, to bar his path. As he went up, he heard the pianoforte played in a style which he hardly recognized. The touch was hard and impatient; and false notes were struck, followed by almost violent repetitions of the passage in which they occurred. He stood at the door a moment, listening.

“My child,” said Madame Sczympliça’s voice: “that is not practice. You become worse every moment: and you are spoiling the instrument.”

“Let me alone. It is a detestable piano; and I hope I may break it.”

Herbert’s courage sank at the angry tone of his wife’s voice.

“You let yourself be put out by nothing at all. Do I not tell you that everybody thought you played like an angel?”

“I will not be told so again. I played vilely. I will give up music. I hate it: and I never shall be able to play. I have tried and failed. It was a mistake for me ever to have attempted it.”

At this moment Adrian, hearing the footsteps of the old woman, who was coming up to listen at the keyhole, entered the room. Madame Sczympliça stared at him in consternation. He walked quickly across the room, and sat down close to his wife at the pianoforte.

“Aurélie,” he said: “you must forgive me.”

“Never, never, never,” she cried, turning quickly round so as to confront him. “I have this day disgraced myself: and it is your fault.”

“My fault, Aurélie?”

“Do not call me Aurélie. Now you smile because you have had your revenge. Am I not unhappy enough without being forced to see and speak to you, who have made me unhappy? Go: disembarrass me, or I will myself seek some other roof. What madness possessed me, an artist, to marry? Did I not know that it is ever the end of an artist’s career?”

“You cannot believe, “ he said, much agitated, “that I would wilfully cause you a moment’s pain. I love—”

“Ah, yes, you love me. It is because you love me that you insult me. It is because you love me that you are ashamed of me and reproach me with playing for hire. It is because you love me that I have failed before the whole world, and lost the fruit of long years of work. You will find my mother’s scissors in that box. Why do you not cut off my fingers, since you have paralysed them?”

Adrian, shuddering in every fibre at the suggestion, caught her proffered fingers and squeezed them in his hands. “My darling,” he said: “you pain me acutely by your reproaches. Will you not forgive me?”

“You waste your breath,” she said obdurately, disengaging herself petulantly. “I am not listening to you.” And she began to play again.

“Aurélie,” he said presently.

She played attentively, and did not seem to hear him.

“Aurélie,” he repeated urgently. No answer. “Do cease that horrible thing, my darling, and listen to me.”

This stopped her. She turned with tears in her eyes, and exclaimed, “Yes, it is horrible. Everything that I touch is horrible now.” She shut the piano as she spoke. “I will never open it more. Mamma.”

“My angel,” replied Madame Sczympliça, starting.

“Tell them to send for it tomorrow. I do not want even to see it when I come down in the morning.”

“But,” said Herbert, “you quite misunderstand me. Can you suppose that I think your playing horrible, or that, if I thought it, I would be so brutal as to say so.

“You do think it horrible. Everyone finds it horrible. So you are right.”

“It was only what you were playing”

“I was one of Chopin’s studies. You used to like Chopin. You would do better to be silent: every word you utter betrays your real thoughts.”

Herbert gently reopened the pianoforte. “If it were the singing of angels, Aurélie, it would be horrible to me as long as it delayed the assurance I am waiting for — of your forgiveness.”

“You shall never have it. Nor do I believe that you care for it.”

“Never is a long word. You have said it very often this evening, Aurélie. You will never play again. You will never speak to me again. You will never forgive me.”

“Do not argue with me. You fatigue me.” She turned away, and began to improvise, looking upward at the cornice with a determined expression which gradually faded and vanished. Herbert, discouraged by her last retort, did not venture to interrupt her until the last trace of displeasure had disappeared from her face. Then he pleaded in a low voice. “Aurélie.” The frown reappeared instantly. “Do not stop playing. I only wish to assure you that I was not jealous this morning.”

“O — h!” she ejaculated, taking her hands from the keyboard, and letting them fall supine in her lap. Herbert, taken aback by the prolonged and expressive interjection, looked at her in silent discomfiture. “Mamma: thou hearest him! He says he was not jealous. Oh, Adrian, how art thou fallen, thou, who wast truth itself! Thou art learning to play the husband well.”

“I thought you had deceived me, dearest; but I was not jealous.”

“Then you do not love me.”

“Let me explain. I thought you had deceived me in your account of — of that wretched boy whom we shall never allude to again—”

“There, there. Do not remind me of it. You were base: you were beneath yourself: no explanation can change that. But my failure at the Princess’s is so much greater a misfortune that it has put all that out of my head.”

“Aurélie,” remonstrated Herbert involuntarily.

“What! you begin to complain already — before I have half relented?”

“I know too well,” he replied sadly, “that your art is as much dearer to you than I, as you are dearer to me than mine. Well, well, I plead guilty to everything except want of love for you. Now will you forgive me?”

Instead of replying she began to play merrily. Presently she looked over her shoulder, and said, “You will promise never to commit such a sin again.”

“I swear it.”

“And you are very sorry?”

“I am desolate, Auré1ie.”

“Be pardoned, then. If thou art truly penitent, I will accompany thee to the Louvre; and thou shalt shew me the pictures.”

She played away without intermission whilst she spoke, disregarding the kiss which he, in spite of Madame Sczympliça’s presence, could not refrain from pressing on her cheek.

Chapter III

When the novelty of Mrs. Hoskyn’s first baby had worn off, she successfully resisted the temptation to abandon it to the care of her servants, as an exacting little nuisance; but her incorrigible interest in art, no longer totally eclipsed by the cradle, retook possession of her mind. This interest, as usual, took the form of curiosity as to what Adrian Herbert was doing. Now that her domestic affections were satisfied and centred by Hoskyn, and that the complete absorption of Herbert’s affections by his wife was beyond all suspicion, she felt easier and more earnest in her friendship for him than ever before. Marriage had indeed considerably deepened her capacity for friendship.

One morning, Hoskyn looked up from his paper and said, “Have you looked at the Times. There is something in it about Herbert that he won’t like.”

“I hope not. The Times always spoke well of him.”

Hoskyn, without a word, handed her the sheet he had been reading and took up another.

“Oh John,” said Mary, putting down the paper in dismay; “what is to be done?”

“Done! What about?”

“About Adrian.”

“I don’t know,” said Hoskyn, placably. “Why should we do anything?”

“I for one, shall be very sorry if he loses his position, after all his early struggling.”

“He won’t lose it. Who cares about the Times?”

“But I am greatly afraid that the Times is right.”

“If you think so, why, that’s another thing. In that case, Herbert had better work a little harder.”

“Yes; but he always used to work so hard.”

“Well, he must keep at it, you know.”

Mary fell a-musing; and Hoskyn went on reading.

“Adrian should never have married,” she said presently.

“Why not, my dear”’

“Because of that,” she replied, pointing to the paper.

“They don’t find fault with him for being a married man, though.”

“They find fault with him for being what his marriage has made him. He neither thinks n<>r cares about anything but his wife.”

“That needn’t prevent his working,” said Hoskyn. “I contrive to do a goodish deal of work,” he added with an amorous glance, “without caring any the less for my wife.”

“Your wife does not run away from you to the other end of Europe at a moment’s notice, John. She does not laugh at your business and treat you as if you were a little boy who sometimes gets troublesome.”

“Still,” said Hoskyn reflectively, “she has a sort of fascination about her.”

“Nonsense,” said Mary, supposing that her husband had been paying her a compliment, whereas he had really referred to Aurel “I feel very much in earnest about this. It is quite pitiable to see a man like Adrian become the slave of a woman who obviously docs not care for him — or perhaps I should not say that; but she certainly does not care for him as he deserves to be cared for. I am beginning to think that she cares for nothing but money.”

“Oh, come!” remonstrated Hoskyn. “You’re too hard on her, Mary. She certainly doesn’t seem to concern herself much about Herbert: but then I fancy that he is rather a milk-and-water sort of man. I know he is a very good fellow, and all that; but there is a something wanting in him — not exactly stamina, but — but something or other.”

“There is a great want of worldliness and indifference in him; and I hope there always will be, although a little of both would help him to bring his wife to her senses. Still, Adrian is weak.”

“I should think so. For my part,” said Hoskyn, scratching his beard, and glancing at his wife as if he were going to make a venturesome remark, “I wonder how any woman could be bothered with him! I may be prejudiced: but that’s my opinion.”

“Oh, that is absurd,” said Mary. “She may consider herself very fortunate in getting so good a man. He is too good for her: that is where the real difficulty lies. He is neglecting himself on her account. Do you think I ought to speak to him seriously about it?”

“Humph!” muttered Hoskyn cautiously. “It’s generally rather unwise to mix oneself up with other people’s affairs, particularly family affairs. You don’t as a rule get thanked for it.”

“I know that. But is it right to hold aloof when one might do some good by disregarding considerations of that sort? It is always safest to do nothing. But I doubt if it is generous.”

“Well, you can do as you like. If I were in your place, I wouldn’t meddle.”

“You are running away with an idea that I am going to make mischief, and talk to Adrian about his wife. I only want to give him a little lecture, such as I have given him twenty times before. I am in some sort his fellow student. Don’t you think I might venture? I cannot see how I can do any harm by speaking to him about what the Times says.”

Hoskyn pursed his lips, and shook his head. Mary, who had made up her mind to exhort Adrian, and wanted to be advised to do so, added, with some vexation, “Of course I will not go if you do not wish me to.”

“I! Oh Lord no, my dear: I don’t want to interfere with you. Go by all means if you like.”

“Very well, John. I think I had better.” As she said this as if she were about to go in deference to his wishes, he seemed inclined to remonstrate; but he thought better of it, and buried himself in the newspaper until it was time for him to go to the city.

After luncheon that day, Mary put on her broad hat and cloak — her matronhood had not reconciled her to bonnets — walked and to South Kensington where Herbert still kept his studio. The Avenue, Fulham Road, resembles a lane leading to the gates of the back-gardens of the neighboring houses rather than an artist’s courtyard. Except when some plaster colossus, crowded out of a sculptors studio, appears incongruously at the extremity of the short perspective, no person would dream of turning down there in quest of statues or pictures. Disregarding a gigantic clay horse which ramped in the sun, its nostrils carved into a snort of a type made familiar to Mary by the Elgin marbles and the knights in her set of chessmen, she entered at a door on the right which led to a long corridor, on each side of which were the studios. In one of these she found Adrian, with his palette set and his canvas uncovered on the easel, but with the Times occupying all his attention as he sat uncomfortably on the rung of a broken chair.

Mrs. Hoskyn!” he exclaimed, rising hastily.

‘Yes, Adrian. Mrs. Hoskyn’s compliments; and she is surprised to see Mr. Herbert reading the newspapers which he once despised, and neglecting the art in which he once gloried.”

“I have taken to doing both since I established myself as a family man,” he replied with a sigh. “Will you ascend the throne? It is the only seat in the place that can be depended upon not to break down.”

“Thank you. Have you been reading the Times ever since your breakfast?”

“Have you seen it, Mary?”

“Yes.”

Herbert laughed, and then glanced anxiously at her.

“It is all very well to laugh,” she said, “ — and, as you know, nobody despises newspaper criticism more thoroughly than I, when it is prejudiced or flippant.”

“In this instance, perhaps you agree with the Times.”

Mary immediately put on her glasses, and looked hardily at him, by which he knew that she was going to say “I do.” When she had said it, he smiled patiently.

Adrian,” she said, with some remorse: “do you feel it to be true yourself? If you do not, then I shall admit that I am in error.”

“There may be some truth in it — I am hardly an impartial judge in the matter. It is not easy to explain my feeling concerning it. To begin with, I am afraid that when I used to preach to you about the necessity of devoting oneself wholly and earnestly to the study of art in order to attain true excellence, I was talking nonsense — or at least exaggerating mere practice, which is a condition of success in tinkering and tailoring as much as in painting, into a great central principle peculiar to art. I have discovered since that life is larger than any special craft. The difficulty once seemed to lie in expanding myself to the universal comprehensiveness of art: now I perceive that it lies in contracting myself within the limits of my profession, and I am not sure that that is quite desirable.”

“Well, of course, if you have lost your conviction that it is worth while to be an artist, I do not know what to say to you. You once thought it worth any sacrifice.

“Yes, when I was a boy, and had nothing to sacrifice. But I do not say that it is not worth while to be an artist; for, you see, I have not given up my profession.”

“But you have brought the Times down on you.”

“True. The Times now sees defects in my work which I cannot see. Just as it formerly failed to see defects in my early work which are very plain to me now. It says very truly that I no longer take infinite pains. I do my best still; but I confess that I work less at my pictures than I used to, because then I strove to make up for my shortcomings by being laborious, whereas I now perceive that mere laboriousness does not and cannot amend any shortcoming in art except the want of itself, which is not always a shortcoming — sometimes quite the reverse. Laboriousness is, at best, only an appeal ad miseracordiam to oneself and the critics. ‘Sir Lancelot’ is a bad picture, if you like; but do you suppose that any expenditure of patience would have tortured it into a good one? My dear Mary — I beg Mr Hoskyn’s pardon—”

“Beg Mrs Herbert’s, rather. Go on.”

“Mrs Herbert is a very good example of my next heresy, which is, that earnestness of intention, and faith in the higher mission of art, are impotent to add an inch to my artistic capacity. They rather produce a mental stress fatal to all freedom of conception and execution. I cannot bring them to bear on drawing and painting: they seem to me to be more the concern of clergymen and statesmen. Your husband once told my mother that art was a backwater into which the soft chaps got to be out of the crush in the middle of the stream. He was thinking about me, I suppose — oh, don’t apologize, Mary: I quite agree with him. It is a backwater; and faith and earnestness are of no use in it: mere brute skill carries everything before it. You once asked me how I should like to be Titian and a lot of other great painters all rolled into one. At present I should be only too glad to be as good as Titian alone; but I would not pay five years of my life for the privilege: it would not be worth it. What view did Titian take of his mission in life? Simply that he was to paint pictures and sell them. He painted religious pictures when the church paid him to do it; he painted indecent pictures when licentious noblemen paid him to do it; and he painted portraits for the wealthy public generally. Believe me, Mary, out in the middle the stream of life, from the turbulences and vulgarities of which we agreed to hold aloof, there may be many different sorts of men — earnest men, frivolous men, faithful men, cynical men and so forth; for the backwater there are only two sorts of painters, dexterous ones and maladroit ones. I am not a dexterous one; and that is all about it: self-criticism on moral principles, and the culture of the backwater library, won’t mend my eyes and fingers. I said that Aurélie’s was a case in point. Even the Times does not deny that she is a perfect artist. Yet if you spoke of her being a moral teacher with a great gift and a a great trust, she would not understand you, although she has some distorted fancy about her touch on the piano being a moral faculty. She thinks your husband a most original and profound thinker because he once happened to remark to her that musical people were generally clever. As I failed to be overwhelmed by her account of this, she, I believe, thought I was jealous of him because I had not hit on the observation myself.”

“Perhaps she would play still better if she did look upon herself as the holder of a great gift and a great trust.”

“Did I paint the Lady of Shalott the better because I would have mixed the colors with my blood if the picture would have gained by my doing so? No: I could paint it twice as well now, though I should not waste half as much thought on it. But put Aurélie out of the question, since you do not admire her. Take—”

‘ ‘Oh, Adrian, I ad—”

“ — the case of Jack. You will admit that he is a genius: he has the inexhaustible flow of ugly sounds which constitutes a composer a genius nowadays. I take Aurélie’s word and yours that he is a great musician, in spite of the evidence of my own ears. Judging him as a mere unit of society, he is perhaps the most uncouth savage in London. Does he ever think of himself as having a mission, or a gift, or a trust?”

“I am sure he does. Consider how much he endured formerly because he would not write down to the level of the popular taste.”

“Depend upon it, either he did not get the chance or he could not. Mozart, I believe, wrote ballets and Masses in the Italian style. If Jack had Mozart’s versatility, he would, in similar circumstances, act just as Mozart acted. I do not make a virtue of never having condescended to draw for the illustrated papers, because if anyone had asked me to do it, I should certainly have tried, and probably have failed.”

“Adrian,” said Mary, coming down from the throne, and approaching him: “do you know that it gives me great pain to hear you talk in this way? If there was one vice more than another which I felt sure could never taint your nature, it was the vice of cynicism.”

“You reproach me with cynicism!” he said, with a smile, evidently enjoying some inconsistency in her.

“Why not?”

“There is, of course, no reason why you should not — , except that you seem to have come to very similar conclusions yourself.”

“You never made a greater mistake, Adrian. My faith in the ennobling power of Art, and in the august mission of the artist, is steadfast as it was years ago, when you first instilled it into me.”

“And that faith has never wavered?*

“Never.”

“Not even for a moment”

“Not even for a moment.”

A slight shrug was his only comment. He took up his palette and busied himself with it, with a curious expression at the corners of his mouth.

“What do you mean, Adrian?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“You used to be more candid than that.”

“I used to be many that I am not now.”

“You admit that you are changed!”

“Surely.”

“Then the change in me that you hint at is only a change in your way of looking at me.”

“Perhaps so.”

A pause followed, during which he put a few touches on the canvas, and she watched him in growing doubt.”

“You won’t mind my working whilst you are here.” he said, presently.

“Adrian: do you remember that day on the undercliff at Bonchurch, when I announced my falling off, in principle, from the austerity of our worship of art?”

“I do. Why do you ask?”

“I little thought, then, which of us would be the first to fall off in practice. If a prophet had shewn you to me as you are now, contemning loftiness of purpose and renouncing arduous work, I should have been at a loss for words strong enough to express my repudiation of the forecast.”

“I cannot say that I did not suspect then who would be the first to fall off,” said Adrian, quietly, though his color deepened a little. “But I should have been as sceptical as you, if your prophet had shewn me you—” He checked himself.

“Well, Adrian?”

“No. I beg your pardon: I was going to say something I have no right to say.”

“Whatever it may be, you think it: and I have a right to hear it, so that I may justify myself. How could a prophet have shewn me so as to astonish you?”

“As Mrs Hoskyn,” he replied, looking at her steadily for a moment, and then resuming his work.

“I don’t understand,” said Mary anxiously, after a pause.

“I told you there was nothing to understand,” said he, relieved. “I meant that it is odd in the first place that we are both married, and not to one another — I suppose you don’t mind my alluding to that. It is still odder that I should be married to Aurélie, who knows nothing about painting. But it is oddest that you should be married to Mr Hoskyn, who knows nothing about art at all.”

Mary, understanding him well now, became very red, and for a moment tried hard to keep back a retort which came to her lips. He continued to paint attentively. Then she said indignantly, “Do you conclude that I do not care for my husband because I can still work and think and respect myself — because I am not his slave when he is present, and a slave to my thoughts of him when he is absent?”

“Mary!” exclaimed Herbert, putting down his palette and confronting her with a color as deep as her own. She stood her ground without flinching. Then he recovered himself, and said, “I beg your pardon. I was quite wrong to say anything about your marriage. Have I annoyed you?”

“You have let slip your opinion of me, Adrian.”

“And you yours of me, I think, Mary.”

After this there was another strained pause, disconcerting to both. This time Mary gained her self-possession first. “I was annoyed just now,” she said: “but I did not mean that we should quarrel. I hope you did not.”

“No, indeed,” he said fervently. “I trust we shall never have any such meaning, whatever may pass between us.”

“Then,” she rejoined, instinctively responding to his emotion with an impulse of confession, “let me tell you candidly how far you were right in what you said. I married because I discovered, as you have that the world is larger than Art and that there is plenty of interest in it for those who do not even know what Art means. But I have never been in love in the story-book fashion; and I had given up all belief in the reality of that fashion when I cast in my lot with John’s, though I am very fond of him, and do not at all regret being Mrs. Hoskyn.”

“It is curious that our courses of action should be so similar and our motives so different! My confession is so obvious that it is hardly worth while to make it. I did fall in love in the story-book fashion: and that is the true explanation of what the Times notices in my work. I will not say that I can no longer work, think, or respect myself — I hope I am not so bad as that: but the rest is true. I am a slave to her when she is present, and a slave to my thoughts of her when she is absent. Perhaps you despise me for it.”

“I can hardly despise you for loving your wife. It would be rather unreasonable.”

“There are many things which are not reasonable, and are yet quite natural. I sometimes despise myself. That occurs when I contrast Aurélie’s influence on my work with yours. Before I met her, I worked steadfastly in this studio, thinking of you whenever my work palled on me, and never failing to derive fresh courage from you. I know now, better than I did then, how much of my first success, and of the resolute labor that won it, was due to you. The new influence is a different — a disturbing one. When I think of Aurélie, there is an end of my work. Where in the old time I used to be reinforced and concentrated, I am now excited and distracted; impatient for some vague to-morrow that never comes; capable of nothing but trouble or ecstasy. Imagine, then, how I value your friendship — for you must not think that you have lost your old power over me. Even to-day, because I have had this opportunity of talking with you, I feel more like my old artist self than I have been for a longtime. We understand each other: I could not say the same to Aurélie. Therefore, Mary, will you — however ill I may in your opinion have deserved it — will you still stand my friend, and help me to regain the ground I have lost, as you formerly helped me to win it?”

“Most willingly, “said Mary with enthusiasm, holding out both her hands to him. “I will take your word for my ability to help you, though I know that you used to help yourself by helping me. Now we are fast friends again, are we not?”

“Fast friends,” he repeated, taking her hands, and turning her with affectionate admiration and gratitude.

“Aha!” cried a voice. They released each other’s hands quickly, and turned, pale and startled, towards the newcomer. Aurélie, in a light summer dress, was smiling at them from the doorway.

“I fear I derange you,” she said in English, which she now spoke easily and carelessly, though with a soft foreign accent. “How do you do, Madame Hoskyn? Am I too much? Eh?”

Mary, confused by the surprise of her entry, and still more by the innocent and caressing manner in which she spoke, murmured some words of salutation.

This is a very unusual honor, Aurélie,” said Herbert, affecting to laugh.

“Yes, I did not know of it beforehand myself. I got into the wrong train, and was carried to South Kensington instead of to Addison Road. So I said, ‘I will give Adrian a surprise.’ And so I have.”

“You came in at an interesting moment,” said Mary, who had now partly regained some of her self-possession, and all her boldness. “Mr Herbert and I have had a serious quarrel; and we are just making it up. English fashion.”

“Oh, it is not an English fashion. People quarrel like that everywhere. And you are now greater friends than ever. Is it not so?”

“I hope so,” said Mary.

“I knew it,” said Aurélie, with a wave of her fingers. “The human nature is the same things throughout the world. Ah yes. What an untidy atelier is this ! How can you expect that great ladies will come here to sit for their portraits?”

“I do not desire that they should, Aurélie.”

“But it is by portraits that the English artists make great sums of money. Why do you not cure him of these strange notions, Madame? You have so much sense; and he respects you so. He mocks at me when I speak of painting: yet I am sure I am right.”

Mary smiled uneasily, not knowing exactly how to reply. Aurélie wandered about the studio, picking up sketches and putting them down without looking at them; peeping into corners; and behaving like a curious child. At last her husband, seeing her about to disturb a piece of drapery, cried out to her to take care.

“What is the matter now?” said she. “Is there somebody behind it? Ciell! it is a great doll.”

“Please do not touch it,” he said. “I am drawing from it; and the change of a single fold will waste all my labor.”

“Yes; but that is not fair. You should not copy things into your pictures: you should paint them all out of your head.” She went over to the easel. “Is this the great work for next year? Why has that man a bonnet on?”

“It is not a bonnet: it is a helmet.”

“Ah! He is a fireman then. Tiens! You have drawn him with long curling hair! There — I know — he is a knight of the round table: all your knights are the same. Of what use are such barbarians? I prefer the Nibelungs and Wotan and Thor — in Wagner’s music. His arm is a deal too long, and the little boy’s head is not half large enough in proportion to height. The child is like a man in miniature. Madame Hoskyn: will you do me a great favor — that is, if you are disengaged?”

“I have no engagements today, happily,” said Mary. You may command me.”

·            Then you will come back with us to our house, and stay to dinner. Oh, you must

not refuse me. We will send a telegram to Mr Hoskyn to come too. En famille, you understand. Adrian will entertain you; I will play for you; my mother will shew you the bambino. He is a droll child — you shall see if he is not”

“You are very kind,” said Mary, wavering. “Mr Hoskyn expects me to dine at home with him; but—” She looked inquiringly at Adrian.

“As Aurélie says, we can ask Mr Hoskyn by telgraph. I hope you will come, Mary.”

Mary blushed at his use of her Christian name, accustomed as she was to it. “Thank you,”she said. “I will come with pleasure.”

“Ah, that is very good,” said Aurélie, apparently delighted. “Come then,” she added, in French, to Adrian. “Put away thy sottises and let us go at once.”

“You hear?” he remarked. She calls my canvas and brushes sottises” He put them away resignedly, nevertheless. Aurélie, chatting light-heartedly with Mary, meanwhile. When he was ready, they went out together past the white horse, whose shadow was tending at some length eastward, and sallied into the Fulham Road, where they halted to consider whether they should walk or drive, Whilst they stood, a young man with a serious expression, long and curly fair hair, and a velveteen jacket, approached them. He was reading a book as he walked, taking no note of the persons whom he passed.

“Why, here is Charlie,” exclaimed Mary. The young man looked up, and immediately stopped and shut his book, exhibiting a remarkable degree of confusion. Then, to the surprise of his sister, he raised his hat, and attempted to pass on.

“Charlie,” she said: “are you going to cut us?” At this he stopped again, and stood looking at them discomfitedly.

“How do you do?” said Adrian, offering his hand, which was eagerly accepted. Charlie now ventured to glance at Aurélie, becoming redder as he did so. She was waiting with perfect composure and apparently without interest for the upshot of the encounter.

“I thought you knew Mrs Herbert,” said Mary, puzzled. “My brother, Mrs Herbert,” she added, turning to Aurélie.

Charlie removed his hat solemnly, and received in acknowledgement what was rather a droop of the eyelids than a bow.

Herbert, seeing that an awkward silence was likely to ensue, interposed goodhumoredly. “What is your latest project?” he said. “If you are an engineer still your exterior is singularly unprofessional. Judging by appearances, I should say that I must be the engineer and you the artist.”

Oh, I’ve given up engineering,” said Charlie. It’s a mere trade. The fact is, I have come round at last to your idea that there is nothing like Art. I have turned my attention to literature of late.”

“Poetry, I presume,” said Herbert, drawing the book from beneath his arm and looking at the title.

“I wish I had the least scrap of genius to make me a poet. In any ease I must give up the vagabond life I have been leading, and settle down to some earnest pursuit. I may not ever be able to write a decent book; but I at least can persevere in the study of Art and literature and — and so forth.”

“Persevere in literature:” repeated Mary. “Oh, Charlie! How many novels and tragedies have you begun since we went to live at Beulah? and not one of them ever got to the second chapter.”

“I shewed my good sense in not finishing any of them. What has become of the pictures you used to work so hard at, and of the great compositions that were to have come of your studies with Jack?

“I think,” said Herbert jocularly, “that if we wait here until you and Mary agree on the subject of your perseverance, our dinner will be cold. Mrs. Hoskyn is coming to dine with us this evening, Charlie. Suppose you join us.”

“Thank you,” he said, hastily: “I should like it of all things; but I am not dressed; and—”

“You can hardly propose to dress for dinner on my account at this late stage of our acquaintance: and Mrs. Herbert will excuse you, I think.”

“You shall be the welcome, monsieur,” said Aurélie, who had been gazing abstractedly down the vista at the white h<>rse.

“Thanks, very much indeed,” said Charlie. This decided, it was arranged that they should go by train to High Street, and walk thence to Herbert’s lodging: for he had never fulfilled his intention of taking a house, his wife being only nominally more at home in London than in the other European capitals. They accordingly moved towards the railway station, Adrian going first with Mary, and Charlie following with Aurélie, who seemed unconscious of his presence, although his uneasiness, his frequent glances sidelong at her, and his occasional dumb efforts to hazard some commonplace remark, were much more obvious than he suspected. In this way they came within a hundred yards of the South Kensington station without having exchanged a word, his dismay increasing at every step. He stole another look at her, and this time met her eye, which fixed him as if it had been that of the ancient mariner: and the longer she looked, the redder and more disconcerted he became.

“Well Monsieur Beatty,” she said composedly.

He glanced apprehensively at Adrian, who was within earshot. “I hardly know how to tell you,” he said: “but my name is not Beatty.”

“Is it possible! I beg your pardon, monsieur: I mistook you for a zhentleman of that name, whom I met at Paris. You resemble him very much.”

“No, I assure you,” said Charlie eagerly. “I am not in the least like him. I know the fellow you mean: he was a drunken wretch whom you rescued from being run over or robbed in the street, and who made a most miserable ass of himself in return. He is dead.”

“Jesu Christ!” ejaculated Aurélie with an irrepressible start: “do not say such things. What do you mean?”

“Dead as a doornail,” said Charlie, triumphant at having shaken her composure, but still very earnest. “He was killed, scotched, stamped out of existence by remorse, and by being unable to endure the contrast between his worthlcssness and your — your goodness. If you would only forget him, and not think of him whenever you see me, you would confer a great favor on me — far greater than I deserve. Will you do this please, Mrs Herbert?

“I believe you will make great success as poet,” said Aurélie, looking oddly at him. “You are — what you call clever. Ach! This underground railway is a horror.”

They said nothing more to one another until they left the train at High Street, fromm which they walked in the same order as before. Charlie again at a loss for something to say, but no longer afraid to speak. His first effort was:

“I hope, Madame Sczympliça is quite well.”

“Thank you, she is qute well. You will see her presently.”

“What! Is she staying with you?”

“Yes. You are glad of that?”

“No, I’m not,” he said blunt1y.”How could I be glad? She remembers that vagabond of whom we were speaking. What shall I do?”

Aurélie shook her head gravely. “Truly, I do not know,” she replied. “You had better prepare for the worst.”

“It is very easy for you to make a jest of the affair, Mrs Herbert. If you had as much cause to be ashamed of meeting her as I have, you would not laugh at me. However, since you have forgiven me, I think she may very well do so.”

Madame Sczympliça did, in fact, receive him without betraying the slightest emotion. She did not remember him. All her attention was absorbed by other considerations, which led her to draw her daughter into a private conversation on the stairs whilst their guests supposed her to be fetching the baby.

“My child: have you brought home dinner as well as guests? What are they to eat? Do you think that the proprietress can provide a double dinner at a moment’s notice?”

“She must, maman. It is very simple. Let her go to the shops — to the pastrycooks. Let her go wherever she will, so that the dinner be ready. Perhaps there is enough in the house.”

“And how—”

“There, there. She will manage easily. If not, how can I help it? I know nothing about such things. Go for the bambinotelegraph; and do not fret about the dinner. All will be well, depend upon it.” And she retreated quickly into the drawing-room. Madame Szczympliça raised her hands in protest; let them fall in resignation; and went upstairs, whence she presently returned with a small baby who looked very sad and old.

“Behold it!” said Aurélie, interlacing her fingers behind her back, and nodding from a distance towards her child. “See how solemn he looks! He is a true Englishman.” The baby uttered a plaintive sound and stretched out one fist. “Aha! Knowest thou thy mother’s voice, rogue? Does he not resemble Adrian?”

Mary took the infant gently; kissed it; shook its toes, called it endearing names; and elicited several inarticulate remonstrances from it. Adrian felt ridiculous, and acknowledged his condition by a faint smile. Charlie kept cautiously aloof. Mary was in act of handing the child carefully hack to Madame Sczympliça, when Aurélie interposed swiftly; tossed it up to the ceiling; and caught it dexterously.Adrian stepped forward in alarm; Madame uttered a Polish exclamation; and the baby itself growled angrily. Being sent aloft a second time, it howled with all its might.

“Now you shall see,” said Aurélie, suddenly placing it supine and screaming, on the pianoforte. She began to play the Skater’s Quadrille from Meyerbeer’s opera of The Prophet. The baby immediately ceased to kick, became silent, and lay still with the bland expression of a dog being scratched, or a lady having her hair combed.

“Ït has a vile taste in music,” she said, when the performance was over. “It is old fashioned in everything. Ah Monsieur Sutherland: would you kindly pass the little one to my mother?”

Madam Madame Sczympliça hastily advanced to forestall Charlie’s compliance with this request, made purposely to embarrass him. But he lifted the baby very expertly, and even gave it a kiss before he handed it to the old lady, who watched him as if he were handling a valuable piece of china.

“There. Take it away,” said Aurélie. “You would make a good nurse, monsieur.”

“What a mother!” whispered Madame Szczympliça. “Poor infant!” and she indignantly carried it away.

“I wish he would grow up all at once,” said Aurélie. “By the time he is a man, I shall be an old woman, half deaf, with gout in my fingers. He will go to hear the new players, and wonder how I got my reputation. Ah, it is a stupid world! One may say so before you, madame, because you are a philosopher.”

Madame Szczympliça soon returned, and was of much service in maintaining conversation, as she was not, like the other three, unable to avoid keeping a furtive watch on her daughter. At dinner, Aurélie, when she found that the talk would go on without her help, said no more, eating but little, and drinking water. In her abstraction, she engaged their attention more than ever. Mary, trying to puzzle out the real nature of Adrian’s wife, considered her carefully, but vainly. The pianist’s character appeared as vaguely to her mind as the face did to her short-sighted eyes. Even Herbert, though he ate with the appetite of a husband, often glanced along the table with the admiration of a lover. Charlie did not dare to look often; but he sought for distorted images of her face in glass vessels and bowls of spoons, and gazed at them instead. At last Mary, oppressed by her silence, determined to make her speak.

“Is it possible that you never drink wine?” she said: “you, who work so hard!”

“Never,” said Aurélie, resuming her volition instantly. “I have in the tip of every finger a sensation of touch the most subtle, the most delicate, that you can conceive. It is a — chose — a species of nervous organization. One single glass of wine would put all those little nerves to sleep. My fingers would become hammers, like the fingers of all the world; and I should be excited, and have a great pleasure to hammer, as all the world has. But I could no longer make music.”

“Aurélie has rearkable theories of what she calls her fine touch,” said Herbert. “Practically, I find that when she is in a musical humor, and enjoys her own playing, she says she has ‘found her fingers’; but when only other people enjoy it, then the touch is gone; the fingers are like the fingers of all the world; and I receive formal notice that Mlle Sczympliça is about to retire from the musical profession.

“Yes, yes, you are very wise. You have not this fine touch; and you do not understand. If you had, ah, how you would draw! You would greater than no matter what artist in the world.”

Mary burned with indignation at Aurélie, knowing how it hurt Herbert to be reminded that he was not a first-rate artist. Aurélie, indifferent to the effect of her speech, relapsed into meditation until they left the table, when she seated herself at the pianoforte and permitted Charlie to engage her in conversation, whilst Herbert became engrossed by a discussion with Mary on painting. and Madame Sczympliça sat still in a corner, knitting.

“What!” said Aurélie, when Charlie had been speaking for some time: “were you at that concert too?”

“YeS.”

“Then you have been at every concert where I have played since I returned to London. Do you go to all concerts?”

“To all of those at which you play. Not to the others.”

“Oh, I understand. You pay me a compliment. I am very — very recognizant, do you call it? — of your appreciation.”

“I am musical, you know. I was to have been a musician, and had lessons from old Jack in the noble art. But I gave it up, I am sorry to say.”

“What presumption! It does not become you to speak of a great man in that fashion, Monsieur Charles.”

“True, Mrs Herbert. But then nobody minds what I say.”

“Tiens!” said Aurélie, with a light laugh. “You are right. You know how to make everything gay. And so you gave up the music, and are now to be a poet. Can you think of no more suitable profession than that?”

“It’s the only one left to me, except the army; and that is considered closed to me because my brother — Phipson’s daughter’s husband, you know — is there already. First I was to be a college don — a professor. Then I took to music. Then I tried the bar, the medical, engineering, the Indian civil service, and got tired of them all. In fact I only drew the line at the church.”

“What is that? You drew a line at the church!”

“It is what you very properly call an idiotisme. I mean that I would not condescend to be a parson.”

“What a philosopher! Proceed.”

“I am now — if the poetry fails, which it most likely will — going into business. I shall try for a post in the Conolly Electro-Motor Company.”

“I think that will suit you best. I will play you something to encourage you.”

She began to play a polonaise by Chopin. Herbert and Mary ceased speaking, but presently resumed their conversation in subdued tones. Charlie listened eagerly. When the polonaise was finished, she did not stop, but played on, looking at the ceiling, and occasionally glancing at Charlie’s face.

“Aurélie,” said Herbert, raising his voice suddenly: “where are those sketches that Mrs. Scott left here last Tuesday?”

“Oh, I say!” said Charlie, in a tone of strong remonstrance, as the music ceased. Herbert, not understanding, looked inquiringly at him. Aurélie rose, took the sketches from her music stand; and handed them silently to Mary.

“I am afraid we have interrupted you,” said Mary, coloring. Aurélie deprecated the apology by a gesture and sat down in a loww chair near the window.

“I wish you’d play again, if you’re not tired, Mrs Herbert,” said Charlie timidly.

She shook her head.

“It is hard that I should have to suffer because my sister has a wooden head with no ears on it,” he whispered, glancing angrily not at Mary, but at Adrian. I was comfortably settled in in heaven when they interrupted you. I wish Jack was here. He would have given them a piece of his mind.”

“Mr Herbert does not like Monsieur Jacques.”

“Monsieur Jacques doesn’t like Mr Herbert either. There is no love lost between them. Adrian hates Jack’s music; and Jack laughs at Adrian’s pictures.

“Maman: ring the bell. Tell them to bring some tea.”

“Yes, my angel.”

“The conversation now became general and desultory. Mary, fearing that she had already been rudely inattentive to her hostess, thought it better not to continue her chat with Adrian. “I see our telegram is of no avail, “ she said. “Mr. Hoskyn has probably dined at his club.”

“The more fool he,” said Charlie, morosely.

“What is that for?” said Mary, surprised by his tone. He looked sulkily at the piano, and did not reply. Then he stole a glance at Aurélie, and was much put out to find that she was tendering him her empty teacup. He took it, and replaced it on the table in confusion.

“And so,” she said, when he was again seated near her, “you have succeeded in none of your professions.”

This sudden return to a dropped subject put him out still more. “I — you mean my — ?”

“Your metiers — whatever you call them. I am not surprised, Monsieur Charles. You have no patience.”

“I can be patient enough when I like.”

“Do you ever like?”

“Sometimes. When you play, for instance, I could listen for a year without getting tired.”

“You would get very hungry. And I should get very tired of playing. Besides—”

“A thud, followed by babyish screams, interrupted her. She listened for a moment, and left the room, followed by her mother. Mary and Adrian, accustomed to such incidents, did not stir. Charlie, reassured by their composure, took up the book of sketches.

Adrian,” said Mary in a low voice: “do you think Mrs Herbert is annoyed with me?”

“No.Why”

“I mean, was she annoyed — to-day — in the studio?”

“I should not think so. N — no. Why should she annoyed with you?”

“Not perhaps with me particularly. But with both of us. You must know what I mean, Adrian. I felt in an excessively false position when she came in. I do not mean exactly that she might be jealous: but —

“Reassure yourself, Mary,” he replied, with a sad smile. She is not jealous. I wish she were.”

“You wish it!”

“Yes. It would be proof of love. I doubt if she is capable of jealousy.

“I hope not. She must have thought it very odd; and, of course, we looked as guilty as possible. Innocent people always do. Hush! here she is. Have you restored peace to the nursery, Mrs Herbert?

“My mother is doing so.” said Aurélie. “It is a very unlucky child. It is impossible to find a cot that it cannot fall out of. But do not rise. Is it it possible that you are going?”

Mary, who in spite of Herbert’s assurance was not comfortable, invented unanswerable reasons for returning home at once. Charlie had to go with her. He tried to bid Aurélie good night unconcernedly, but failed. Mary remarked to Herbert, who accompanied them to the door, that Charlie had behaved himself much 1ess akwardly a boy than he did now as a man. Adrian assented; let them out; stood for a moment to admire the beauty of the evening; and returned to the drawing-room, where Aurélie was sitting on an ottoman, apparently deep in thought.

“Come!” he said spiritedly: “does not Mrs Hoskyn improve on acquaintance? Is she not a nice woman?”

Aurélie looked at him dreamily for a moment, and then said, “Charming.”

“I knew you would like her. That was a happy thought of yours to ask her to dinner. I am very glad you did.”

“I owed you some reparation, Adrian.”

“What for?” he said, instinctively feeling damped.”

“For interrupting your tete-a-tete.”

He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “But you owe me no reparation for that. You came most opportunely.”

“That is quite what I thought. Ah, my friend, how much more I admire you when you are in love with Mrs. Hoskyn than when you are in love with me! You are so much more manly and thoughtful. And you abandoned her to marry me! What folly!”

Adrian stood open-mouthed, not only astonished, but anxious that she should perceive his astonishment. “Aurélie,” he exclaimed: “is it possible — it is hardly conceivable — that you are jealous?”

“N — no,” replied she, after some consideration. “I do not think I am jealous. Perhaps Mr. Hoskyn will be, if he happens upon another tete-a-tete. But you do not fight in England, so it does not matter.”

“Aurélie: are you serious?”

“Wherefore should I not be serious?” she said, rousing herself a little.

“Because,” he answered, gravely, “your words imply that you have a vile opinion of Mrs. Hoskyn and of me.”

“Oh, no, no,” she said, carelessly reassuring him. “I not think that you arc a wicked gallant, like Don Juan. I know you would both think that a great English sin. I suspect you of nothing except what I saw in your face when you had her hands clasped in yours. You could not look at me so.”

“What do you mean?” said he, indignantly.

“I will shew you,” she replied calmly, rising and approaching him. “Give me your hands.”

“Aurélie: this is chil—”

“Both your hands. Give them to me.”

She took them as she spoke, he looking foolish meanwhile.

“Now, she aid. taking a step back so that they were nearly at arms length. “behold what I mean. Look into my eyes as you looked at hers, if you can.” She waited; but his face expressed nothing bn1 confusion. “You cannot,” she added, attempting to loose his hands. But he grasped her tightly, drew her towards him, and kissed her. “Ah,” she said, disengaging herself quietly, “I did not see that part of it. I was only at the door for a moment before I spoke.”

“Nonsense, Aurélie‚ I do not mean that I kissed Mrs. Hoskyn.”

“Then you should have. When a woman gives you both her hands, that is what she expects.”

“But I pledge you my word that you are mistaken. We were simply shaking hands on a bargain: the commonnest thing possible in England.”

“A bargain?”

“An agreement — a species of arrangement between us.”

“Eh bien! And what was this agreement that called such a light into your eyes?”

Adrian, about to reply confidently, hesitated when he realized the impression which his words would probably convey. “It is rather difficult to explain,” he began.

“Then do not explain it; for it is very easy to understand. I know. I know. My poor Adrian: you are in love without knowing it. Ah! I envy Mrs Hoskyn.”

“If you really mean that,” he said eagerly, “I will forgive you all the rest.”

“I envy her the power to be in love,” rejoined Aurélie, sitting down again, and speaking meditatively. “I cannot love. I can feel it in the music — in the romance — in the poetry; but in real life — it is impossible. I am fond of mamman, fond of the bambino, fond of you sometimes; but this is not love — not such love as you used to feel for me — as she feels now for you. I see people and things too clearly to love. Ah well! I must content myself with the music. It is but a shadow. Perhaps it is as real as love is, after all.”

“In short, Aurélie, you do not love me, and never have loved me.”

“Not in your way.”

“Why did you not tell me this before?”

“Because, whilst you loved me, it would have wounded you.”

“I love you still; and you know it. Why did you not tell me so before we were married?”

“Ah, I had forgotten that. I must have loved you then. But you were only half real: I did not know you. What is the matter with you?”

“You ask me what is the matter, after — after—”

“Come and sit by me, and be tranquil. You are making grimaces like a comedian. I do more for you than you deserve; for I still cherish you as my husband, whilst you make bargains, as you call it, with other women.”

“Aurélie,” he said, sternly: “there is one course, and only one, left to us. We must separate.”

“Separate! And for why?”

“Because you do not love me. I suspected it before: now I know it. Your respect for me has vanished too. I can at least set you free: I owe that much to myself. You may not see the necessity for this; and I cannot make you see it. None the less, we must separate.”

“And what shall I do for a husband? Do you forget your duty to me and to my child? Well, it does not matter. Go. But look you, Adrian, if you abandon your home only to draw that woman away from hers, it will be an infamy — one that will estrange me from you forever. Do not hope, when you tire of her — for one tires of all pronounced people, and she, in face and character, is very pronounced — do not hope to console yourself with me. You may be weak and foolish if you will; but when you cease to be a man of honor, you are no longer my Adrian.”

“And how, in heaven’s name, shall I be the worse for that, since already I am no longer your Adrian? You have told me that vou never cared for me—”

“Chut! I tell thee that I am not of a nature to fall in love. Becalm ; and do not talk of separation, and such silly things. Have I not been good to her and to you this day?”

“Upon my soul,” cried Adrian despairingly, “I believe you are either mad or anxious to make me mad.”

“He is swearing!” she ejaculated, lifting her hands.

“I am not in love with Mary,” he continued. “It is a gross and absurd libel on both of us to say so. If anyone be to blame, you are — yes, you, Aurélie. You have put the vilest construction on a perfectly innocent action of mine; and now you tell me with the most cynical coolness that you do not care for me.

Aurélie, implying by a little shrug that she gave him up, rose and went to the piano. The moment her fingers touched the keys, she seemed to forget him. But she stopped presently, and said with grave surprise, “What did you say, Adrian?”

“Nothing,” he replied shortly.

“Nothing!” she repeated incredulously.

“Nothing that was intended for your ears. Since you overheard me, I beg your pardon. I do not often offend you with such language; but tonight I do say with all my soul, ‘Damn that pianoforte.’”

“Without doubt you have often said so before under your breath,” said Aurélie, closing the instrument quietly.

“Are you going?” he said anxiously, as she moved toward the door. “No,” he exclaimed, springing forward, and timidly putting his arm about her, “I did not mean that I disliked your playing. I only hate the piano when you make me jealous of it — when you go to it to forget me.”

“It does not matter. Be tranquil. I am not offended,” she said coldly, trying to disengage herself.

“You are indeed, Aurélie. Pray do not be so quick to—”

“Adrian: you are worrying me — you will make me cry; and then I will never forgive you. Let me go.”

At the threat of crying he released her, and stood looking piteously at her.

“You should nut make scenes with me,” she said plaintively. “Where is my handkerchief? I had it a moment ago.”

“Here it is, my darling.” he said humbly, picking it from the floor where it had fallen. She took it without thanking him. Then, glancing petulantly at him, and seeing him dejected and wistful, she relented and stretched out her arms for a caress.

“Mon âme,” she whispered, as she rested her face against his.

“Ma vie,” he said fervently, and clasped her with a shudder of delight to his breast.

Chapter IV

Early in the afternoon of the following day, which was Sunday, Charlie Sutherland presented himself at Church Street, Kensington and asked Mrs Simpson, who opened the door, if Mr Jack was within.

“No, sir,” said Mrs. Simpson, gravely. “He is not in just at present.”

On being pressed as to when he would be in, Mrs. Simpson became vague and evasive, although she expressed sympathy for the evident disappointment of the visitor. At last he said he would probably call again, and turned disconsolately away. He had not gone far when, hearing a shout, he looked back, and saw Jack, uncombed, unshaven, in broken slippers, and a stained and tattered coat, running after him, bareheaded.

“Come up — come back,” cried Jack, his brazen tones somewhat forced by loss of breath. “It’s all a mistake. That jade — come along.” He seized Charlie by the arm, and began to drag him back to the house as he spoke. The boys of the neighborhood soon assembled to look with awe at the capture of Charlie, only a few of the older and less reverent venturing to ridicule the scene by a derisive cheer. Jack marched his visitor upstairs to a large room, which occupied nearly the whole of the first floor. A grand pianoforte in the centre was covered with writing materials, music in print and manuscript, old newspapers, and unwashed coffee cups. The surrounding carpet was in such a state as to make it appear that periodically, when the litter became too cumbrous, it was swept away and permitted to lie on the floor just it chanced to fall. The chairs, the cushions of which seemed to have been much used as pen-wipers, were occupied, some with heaps of clothes, others with books turned inside out to mark the place at which the reader had put them down, one with a boot, the fellow of which lay in the fender, and one with a kettle, which had been recently lifted from the fire which, in spite of the season, burnt in the grate.

Black, brown and yellow stains of ink, coffee, and yolk of egg were on everything in the place.

“Sit down,” said Jack, impetuously thrusting his former pupil into the one empty chair, a comfortable one with elbows, shiny with constant use. He then sought a seat for himself, and in so doing became aware of Mrs Simpsom, who had come in during his absence with the hopeless project of making the room ready for the visitor.

“Here,” he said, “Get some more coffee, and some buttered rolls. Where have you taken all the chairs? I told you not to touch anything in this — why, what the devil do you mean by putting the kettle down on a chair?

“Not likely, Mr Jack said the landlady, “that I would do such a thing. Oh dear! and one of my yellow chairs too. It’s too bad.”

“You must have done it: there was nobody else in the room. Be off: and get the coffee.

“I did not do it,” said Mrs Simpson, raising her voice; “and well you know it. And I would be thankful to you to make up your mind whether you are to be in or out when people call, and not be making a liar of me as you did before this gentleman.”

“You are a liar ready made, and a slattern to boot,” retorted Jack. “Look at the state of this room.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Simpson, with a sniff. “Look at it indeed. I ask your pardon, sir,” she added, turning to Charlie, “but what would anybody think of me if they was told that this was my drawing room?”

Jack, his attention thus recalled to his guest, checked himself on the verge of a fresh outburst, and pointed to the door. Mrs. Simpson looked at him scornfully, but went out without further ado. Jack then seized a chair by the back, shook its contents on to the floor, and sat down near Charlie.

“I should not have spoken as I did just now,” he said, with compunction. “Let me give you a word of advice, Charles. Never live in the house with an untidy woman.”

“It must be an awful nuisance, Mr Jack.”

“It is sure to lead to bad habits in yourself. How is your sister, and your father?”

“Mary is just the same as ever; and so is the governor. I was with him at Birmingham last autumn. We heard the Prometheus. By Jove, Mr Jack, that is something to listen to! The St Matthew Passion, the Ninth Symphony, and the Nibelung’s Ring, are the only works that are fit to be put behind it. The overture alone is something screeching.”

“You like it? That’s right, that’s right. And what are you doing at present? Working hard, eh?”

“The old story, Mr Jack. I have failed in everything just as I failed at the music, though I stuck to that better than any of the rest, whilst I had you to help me.”

“You began everything too young. No matter. There is plenty of time yet. Well, well. What’s the news?”

“I’m going to an at-home at Madge Lancaster’s — the actress, you know. She made me promise I’d call on my way and mention casually where I was going. She thought that you’d perhaps come with me — at least I expect that was her game.”

“She, asked me to come some Sunday; and I told her I would. Is this Sunday?”

“Yes, Mr. Jack, I hope you won’t think it cool of me helping her to collar you in this way.”

Jack made some inarticulate reply; pulled his coat off; and began to throw about the clothes which were heaped on the chairs. Presently he rang the bell furiously, and, after waiting for about twenty seconds for a response, went to th< door and shouted for Mrs Simpson in a stunning voice. This had no more effect than the bell; and he returned, muttering execrations, to resume his search. When he had added considerably to the disorder, Mrs Simpson entered with ostentatious unconcern, carrying a tray with coffee and rolls.

“Where would you wish me to put these things, sir?” she said with a patient air, after looking in vain for a vacant space on the pianoforte.

“What things? What do you mean by bringing them? Who asked for them?

“You did, Mr Jack. Perhaps a you would like to deny it to this gentleman’s face, who heard you give the order.”

“Oh!” said Jack, discomfited. “Charles: will you take some coffee whilst I am dressing. Put the tray on the floor if you can’t find room for it elsewhere.”

Mrs Simpson immediately placed it at Charlie’s feet.

“Now,” said Jack, looking malignantly at her, “be so good as to find my coat for me; and in future, when I leave it in a particular place, don’t take it away from there.”

“Yes, sir. And where did you leave it last, if I may make bold to ask?”

“I left it on that chair,” said Jack violently. “Do you see? On that chair.”

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Simpson, with open scorn. “You gave it out to me yesterday to brush; and a nice job I have had with it: it took a whole bottle of benzine to fetch out the stains. It’s upstairs in your room; and I beg you will be more careful with it in future, or else send it to the dyers to be cleaned instead of to me. Shall I bring it to you?”

“No. Go to the — go to the kitchen; and hold your tongue. Charlie: I shall be back presently, my boy, if you will wait. And take some coffee. Put the tray anywhere. Confound that — that — that — that woman.” He left the room then, and after some time reappeared in a clean shirt and a comparatively respectable black frock coat.

“Where does she live?” he said.

“In the Marylebone Road. Her at-homes are great fun. Her sisters don’t consider it proper for a young unmarried woman to give at-homes on her own hook; and so they never go. I believe they would cut her altogether, only they can’t afford to, because she gives them a new dress occasionally. It will be a regular swagger for me to go in with you. Next to being a celebrity oneself, the best thing is to know a celebrity.”

Jack only grunted, and allowed Charlie to talk until they arrived at the house in the Marylebone Road. The door was opened by a girl in a neat dress of dark green, with a miniature mob-cap on her head.

“I feel half inclined to ask her for a programme, and tip her sixpence,” whispered Charlie, as they followed her upstairs. “We may consider that she is conducting us to our stalls. Mr Jack and Mr Charles Sutherland,” he added aloud to the girl as they reached the landing.

Mr Sutherland and Mr Charles Sutherland,” she answered, coldly correcting him.

Jack, meanwhile had advanced to where Madge stood. She wore a dress of pale blue velvet, made in Venetian style imitated from old Paul Veronese. Round her neck was a threefold string of amber beads, and she was shod with slippers of the same hue and material as her dress. Her complexion, skilfully put on, did not disgust Charlie, but rather inspired him with a gentle regret that it was too good to be genuine. The arrangement of the room was as remarkable as the costume of the hostess. The folding doors had been removed, and the partition built into an arch with a white pillar at each side. A curtain of silvery plush was gathered to one of side of this arch. The walls were painted a delicate sheeny grey, and the carpet resembled a piece of thick whitey-brown paper. The chairs of unvarnished wood, had rush seats, or else cushions of dull straw color or cinnamon. In compliance with a freak of fashion which prevailed just then, there were no less than eight lamps distributed about the apartments. These lamps had monstrous stems of pottery ware, gnarled and uncouth in design. Most of them represented masses of rock with strings of ivy leaves clinging to them. The ceiling was of a light maize color.

Magdalen, surprised by the announcement of Mr Sutherland, was looking towards the door for him over the head of Jack, than whom she was nearly a head taller.

“How d’ye do?” he said, startling her with his brassy voice.

“My dear master,” she exclaimed, in the pure, distinct tone to which she owed much of her success on the stage. “So you have come to me at last.”

“Aye, I have come at last,” he said, with a suspicious look. “I forgot all about you; but I was put in mind of your invitation by Charles. where’s Charles?”

Charles was behind him, waiting to be received.

“I am deeply grateful to you,” said Magdalen, pressing his hand. Charles, rather embarrassed than gratified, replied inarticulately; vouched for the health of his family; and retreated into the crowd.

“I had ceased to hope that we should ever meet again,” she said, turning again to Jack. “I have sent you box after box that you might see your old pupil in her best parts; but when the nights came, the boxes were empty always.”

“I intended to go — I should have gone. But somehow I forgot the time, or lost the tickets, or something. My landlady mislays things of that sort; or very likely she burns them.”

“Poor Mrs Simpson! How is she?”

“Alive, and mischievous, and long tongued as ever. I must leave that place. I can stand her no longer. Her slovenliness, her stupidity, and her disregard of truth are beyond belief.”

“Dear, dear! I am very sorry to hear that, Mr. Jack.” Magdalen turned her eyes upon him with an expression of earnest sympathy which had cost her much study to perfect. Jack, who seldom recollected that the subject of Mrs Simpson’s failings was not so serious to the rest of the world as to himself, thought Magdalen’s concern by no means overstrained, and was about to enlarge on his domestic discomfort, when the servant announced “Mr Brailsford.”

Jack slipped away, and his old enemy advanced, as sprucely dressed as ever, but a little more uncertain in his movements. Magdalen kissed him with graceful respect, as she would have kissed an actor engaged to impersonate her father for so many pounds a week. When he passed on and mingled with the crowd like any other visitor, she forgot him, and looked round for Jack. But he, in spite of his attempt to avoid Mr Brailsford, had just come face to face with him in a remote corner whither chance had led them both. Jack at once asked him how he did.

“How de do,” said the old gentleman with nervous haste. “Glad to — I am sure.” Here he found his eyeglass, and was able to distinguish Jack’s features.

“Sir,” said Jack: “I am an ill-mannered man on occasion; but perhaps you will overlook that and allow me to claim your acquaintance.”

“Sir,” replied Brailsford, tremulously clasping his proffered hand: “I have always honored and admired men of genius, and protested against the infamous oppression to which the world subjects them. You may count upon me always.”

“There was a time,” said Jack, with a glance at the maize-colored ceiling, “when neither of us would have believed that we should come to make two in a crowd of fashionable celebrities sitting round her footstool.”

“She has made a proud position for herself, certainly. Thanks, as she always acknowledges, above all things to your guidance.”

“Humph,” said Jack doubtfully. “I taught her to make the best of such vowels as there are left in our spoken language; but her furniture and her receptions are her own idea.”

“They are the most ridiculous absurdities in London,” whispered Brailsford with sudden warmth. “To you, sir, I express my opinion without reserve. I come here because my presence may give a certain tone — a sanction — you understand me?” Jack nodded. “But I do not approve of such entertainments. I am at a loss to comprehend how the actress can so far forget the lady. This room is not respectable, Mr Jack: it is an outrage on taste and sensibility. However, it is not my choice: it is hers; and de gustibus non est disputandum. You will excuse my quoting my old school books. I never did so, sir, in my youth, when every fool’s mouth was full of scraps of Latin.”

“There is a bad side to this sort of thing,” said Jack. “These fellows waste their time coming here; and she wastes her money on extravagances for them to talk about. But after all, there is a bad side to everything: she might indulge herself with worse follies. Now that she is her own mistress, we must all stand further off. Her affairs are not our business.”

The old gentleman nodded several times in a melancholy manner. “There you have hit the truth, sir,” he said in a low voice. “We must all stand further off — I as well as others. A very just observation.”

This dialogue, exceptionally long for a crowded afternoon reception in London, was interrupted by Magdalen coming to invite Jack to play, which he peremptorily refused to do, remarking that if the company were in a humor to listen to music, they had better go to church. The rebuff caused much disappointment; for Jack’s appearances in society, common as they had been during the season which preceded the first performance of Promethius, had since been very rare. Stories of his eccentricity and inaccessible solitude had passed from mouth to mouth until they became too stale to amuse or too exaggerated to be believed. His refusal to play was considered so characteristic that some of the guests withdrew at once in order that they might be the first to narrate the circumstances in artistic circles, which are more “at home*’ on Sundays than those of the more purely fashionable ones which have nothing particular to do on week days. Jack was about to go himself when the blue velvet sleeve touched his arm, and Magdalen whispered:

“They will all go in a very few minutes now. Will you stay and let me have a moment with you alone? It is so long since I have had a word of advice from you.”

Jack again looked suspiciously at her; but as she looked very pretty, he relented, saying good humoredly, “Get rid of them quickly, then. I have no time to waste waiting for them.”

She set herself to get rid of them as well as she could, by pretending to mistake the purpose of men who came up to converse with her, and surprising them with effusive farewells. To certain guests with whom she did not stand on ceremony she confided her desire to clear the room; and they immediately conveyed her wishes to their intimate friends, besides setting an example to others by taking leave ostentatiously, or declaring in loud whispers that it was shamefully late; that dear Madge must be tired to death; and that they were full of remorse at having been induced by her delightful hospitality to stay so long. In fifteen minutes the company was reduced to five or six persons, who seemed to think, now that the crowd was over, that the time had come for enjoying themselves. A few of them, who knew each other, relaxed their ceremonious bearing; raised their voices; and entered into a discussion on theatrical topics in which they evidently expected Magdalen to join. The rest wandered about the rooms, and made the most of their opportunity of having a good look at the great actress and the great composer, who was standing at a window with his hands clasped behind him, frowning unapproachably. Mr Brailsford also remained; and he was the first to notice the air of exhaustion with which his daughter was mutely appealing to her superfluous guests.

“My child,” he said: “are you fatigued?”

“I am worn out,” she replied, in a whisper which reached the furthest corner of the room. “How I long to be alone!”

“Why did you not tell me so before,” said Brailsford, offended. “I shall not trouble you any longer, Magdalen. Good evening.”

“Hush,” she said, laying her arm caressingly on his, and speaking this time in a real whisper. “I meant that for the others. I want you to do something for me. Mr Jack is waiting to go with you; and I particularly want to speak to him alone — about a pupil. Could you slip away without his seeing you? Do, dear old daddy; for I may never have another chance of catching him in a good humor. Magdalen knew that her father would be jealous of having to leave before Jack unless she could contrive to make him do so of his own accord. The stratagem succeeded and Mr Brailsford left the room with precaution, glancing apprehensively at the musician, who still presented a stolid back view to the company. The group of talkers, warned by Madge’s penetrating whisper, submissively followed him, leaving only one young man who was anxious to go and did not know how to do it. She relieved him by giving him her hand, and expressing a hope that she should see him next Sunday, He promised earnestly, and departed.

“Now,” said Jack, wheeling round the instant the door closed. “What can I do for you? Your few minutes have spun themselves out to twenty.”

“Did they seem so very long?” she said, seating herself upon an ottoman and throwing her dress into graceful folds.

“Yes,” said Jack, bluntly.

“So they did to me. Won’t you sit down?”

Jack pushed an oaken stool opposite to her with his foot, and sat upon it, much as, in a Scandinavian story, a dwarf might have sat at the feet of a princess. “Well, mistress,” he said. “Things have changed since I taught you. Eh?”

“Some things have.”

“You have become great; and so — in my small way — have I.”

“I have become what you call great,” she said. But you have not changed. People have found out your greatness, that is all.”

“Well said,” said Jack, approvingly. “They starved me long enough first, damn them. Used I to swear at you when I was teaching you?”

“I think you used to. Just a little, when I was very dull.”

“It is a bad habit — a stupid one, as all low habits are. I rarely fall into it. And so you stuck to your work, and fought your way. That was right. Are you as fond of the stage as ever?”

“It is my profession,” said Madge, with a disparaging shrug. “One’s profession is only half of one’s life. Acting in London, where the same play runs for a whole season, leaves one time to think of other things. ‘‘

“Sundays at home, and fine furniture, for instance.”

“Things that they vainly pretend to supply. I have told you that my profession is only half my life — the public half. Now that I have established that firmly, I begin to find that the private and personal half, the half which is concerned with home and — and domestic ties, must be well established too, or else the life remains incomplete, and the heart unsatisfied.”

“In plain English, you have too much leisure which you can employ no better than in grumbling.”

“Perhaps so; but am I much at fault? When I entered upon my profession, its difficulties so filled my mind with hopes and fears, and its actual work so fully occupied my time, that I forgot every other consideration and cut myself off from my family and friends with as little hesitation as a child might feel in exchanging an estate for a plaything. Now that the difficulties are overcome, the hopes fulfilled (or abandoned) and the fears dispelled — now that I find that my profession does not suffice to fill my life, and that I have not only time, but desire, for other interests, I find how thoughtless I was when I ran away from all the affection I had unwittingly gathered to myself as I grew.”

“Why? What have you lost? You have your family still.”

“I am as completely estranged from them by my profession as if it had transported me to another world.”

“I doubt if they are any great loss to you. The public are fond of you, ain’t they?”

“They pay me to please them. If I disappeared, they would forget me in a week.”

“Why shouldn’t they? How long do you think they should wear mourning for you? Have you made no friends in your own way of life?”

“Friends? Yes, I suppose so.”

“You suppose so! What is the matter, then? What more do you want?”

Magdalen raised her eyelids for an instant, and looked at him. Then she said, “Nothing,” and let the lids fall with the cadence of her voice.

“Listen to me,” said Jack, after a pause, drawing his seat nearer to her, and watching her keenly. “You want to be romantic. You won’t succeed. Look at the way we cling to the stage, to music, and poetry, and so forth. Why do you think we do that? Just because we long to be romantic, and when we try it in real life, facts and duties baffle us at every turn. Men who write plays for you to act, cook up the facts and duties so as to heighten the romance; and so we all say ‘How wonderfully true to nature!’ and feel that the theatre is the happiest sphere for us all. Heroes and heroines are to be depended on: there is no more chance of their acting prosaically than there is of a picture in the Royal Academy having stains on its linen, or blacks in its sky. But in real life it is just the other way. The incompatibility is not in the world, but in ourselves. Your father is a romantic man; and so am I; but how much of our romance have we ever been able to put into practice?”

“More than you recollect, perhaps,” said Madge, unmoved (for constant preoccupation with her own person had made her a bad listener), “but more than I shall ever forget. There has been one piece of romance in my life — a very practical piece. A perfect stranger once gave me, at my mere request, all the money he had in the world.”

“Perhaps he fell in love with you at first sight. Or perhaps — which is much the same thing — he was a fool.”

“Perhaps so. It occurred at Paddington Station some years ago.”

“Oh! Is that what you are thinking of? Well, that is a good illustration of what I am saying. Did any romance come out of that? In three weeks, time you were grubbing away at elocution with me at so much a lesson.”

“I know that no romance came out of it — for you.”

“So you think,” said Jack complacently; “but romance comes out of everything for me. Where do you suppose I get the supplies for my music? And what passion there is in that! — what fire — what disregard of conventionality! In the music, you understand: not in my everyday life.”

“Your art, then, is enough for you,” said Madge, in a touching tone.

“I like to hear you speak,” observed Jack: “you do it very well. Yes: my art is enough for me, more than I have time and energy for occasionally. However, I will tell you a little romance about myself which may do you some good. Eh? Have you the patience to listen?”

“Patience!”echoed Madge, in a low steady voice. “Try whether you can tire me.”

“Very well: you shall hear. You must know that when, after a good many years of poverty and neglect, I found myself a known man, earning over a hundred a year, I felt for a while as if my house was built and I had no more to do than to put it in repair from time to time — much as you think you have mastered the art of acting, and need only learn a new part occasionally to keep your place on the stage. And so it came about that I — Owen Jack — began to languish in my solitude; to pine for a partner; and, in short, to suffer from all those symptoms which you so admirably described just now.” He gave this account of himself with a derision so uncouth that Madge lost for the moment her studied calm, and shrank back a little. “I was quite proud to think that I had the affections of a man as well as the inspiration of a musician; and I selected the lady; fell in love as hard as I could; and made my proposals in due form. I was luckier than I deserved to be. Her admiration of me was strictly impersonal; and she nearly had a fit at the idea of marrying me. She is now the wife of a city speculator; and I have gone back to my old profession of musical student, and quite renounced the dignity of past master of the art. I sometimes shudder when I think that I was once within an ace of getting a wife and family.”

“And so your heart is dead?”

“No: it is marriage that kills the heart and keeps it dead. Better starve the heart than overfeed it. Better still to feed it only on fine food, like music. Besides, I sometimes think I will marry Mrs Simpson when I grow a little older.”

“You are jesting: you have been jesting all along. It is not possible that a woman refused your love.”

“It is quite possible, and has happened. And,” here he rose and prepared to go, “I should do the same good service to a woman, if one were so foolish as to persuade herself on the same grounds that she loved me.”

“You would not believe that she could love you on any deeper and truer grounds?” said Madge, rising slowly without taking her eyes off his face.

“Stuff! Wake up, Miss Madge; and realize what nonsense you are talking. Rub your eyes and look at me, a Kobold — a Cyclop, as that fine woman Mrs Herbert once described inc. What sane person under forty would be likely to fall in love with me? And what do I care about women over forty, except perhaps Mrs. Herbert — or Mrs. Simpson I like them young and beautiful, like you.”

Madge, as if unconsciously, raised her hand, half offering it to him. He took it promptly, and continued humorously, “And I love you, and have always done so. Who could know such a lovely woman and fine genius as you without loving her? But,” he added, shaking her fingers warningly, “you must not love me. My time for playing Romeo was over before you ever saw me; and Juliet must not fall in love with Friar Lawrence, even when he is a great composer.”

“Not if he forbids her — and she can help it,” said Madge with solemn sadness, letting her hand drop as he released it.

“Not on any account,” said Jack. “Come, he added, turning to her imperiously: “we are not a pair, you and I. I know how to respect myself: do you learn to know yourself. We two are artists, as you are aware. Well, there is an art that is inspired by nothing but a passion for shamming; and that is yours, so far. There is an art which is inspired by a passion for beauty, but only in men who can never associate beauty with a lie. That is my art. Master that and you will be able to make true love. At present you only know how to make scenes, which is too common an accomplishment to interest me. You see you have not quite finished you lessons yet. Goodbye.”

“Adieu,” said Madge, like a statue.

He walked out in the most prosaic manner possible; and she sank on the ottoman in an attitude of despair, and — finding herself at her ease in it, and not understanding him in the least — kept it up long after he, by closing the door, had, as it were, let fall the curtain. For it was her habit to attitudinize herself when alone quite as often as to other people, in whose minds the pleasure of attitudinizing is unalloyed by association with the labor of breadwinning.

Jack, meanwhile, had let himself out of the house. It had become dusk by this time; and he walked away in a sombre mood, from which he presently roused himself to shake his head at the house he had just left, and to say aloud, “You are a bold-faced jade.” This remark, which was followed by muttered imprecations, was ill-received by a passing woman who, applying it to herself, only waited until he was at a safe distance before retorting with copious and shrill abuse, which soon caused many persons to stop and stare after him. But he, hardly conscious of the tumult, and not suspecting that it had anything to do with him, walked on without raising his head, and was presently lost to them in the deepening darkness.

All this time, Charlie, who had been among the first to leave Madge’s rooms, was wandering about Kensington in the neighborhood of Herbert’s lodging. He felt restless and unsatisfied, shrinking from the observation of the passers-by, with a notion that they might suspect and ridicule the motive of his lurking, there. He turned into Campden Hill at last, and went to his sister’s. Mary usually had visitors on Sunday evenings; and some of them might help him to pass away the evening pleasantly in spite of Hoskyn’s prose. Perhaps even — but here he shook off further speculation, and knocked at the door.

“Anyone upstairs?” he asked carelessly of the maid, as he hung up his hat.

“Only one lady, sir. Mrs Herbert.”

Something within him s make a spring at the name. He glanced at himself in the mirror before going into the drawing room, where, to his extreme disappointment, he found Mary conversing, not with Herbert’s wife, but with his mother. She had but just arrived, and was explaining to Mary that she had returned the day before, from a prolonged absence in Scotland. Charlie never enjoyed his encounters with Mrs Herbert; for she had known him as a boy, and had not yet got out the of habit of treating him as one. So, hearing that Hoskyn was in another room, smoking, he pleaded a desire for a cigar, and went off to join him, leaving the two ladies together.

“You were saying — ?” said Mary, resuming the conversation which his entrance had Interrupted.

“I was saying,” said Mrs Herbert, “that I have never been able to sympathize with the interest which you take in Adrian’s life and opinions. Geraldine tells me that I have no maternal instinct; but then Geraldine has no sons, and does not quite know what she is talking about. I look on Adrian as a failure, and I really cannot take an interest in a man who is a failure. His being my son only makes the fact disappointing to me personally. I retain a kind of nursery affection for my boy; but of what use that to him, since he has given up his practice of stabbing me through it? I would go to him if he were ill; and help him if he were in trouble; but as to maintaining a constant concern on his account, really I do not see why I should. You, with your own little dear one a fresh possession — almost a part of yourself still, doubtless think me very heartless; but you will learn that children have their separate lives and interests as completely independent of their parents as the remotest strangers. I do not think Adrian would even like me, were it not for his sense of duty. You will understand some day that the common notion of parental and filial relations are more unpractical than even those of love and marriage.

Mary, who ^had already made some discoveries in this direction, did not protest as “ she would have done in her maiden time. “What surprises me chiefly is that Mrs Herbert should have been rude to you,” she said. “I doubt whether she is particularly fond of me: indeed, I am sure she is not; but nothing could be more exquisitely polite and kind than her manner to me, especially in her own house.”

“I grant you the perfection of her manners, dear. She was not rude to me. Not that they are exactly the manners of good society; but they are perfect of their kind, for all that. Hush! I think — did I not hear Adrian’s voice that time?”

Adrian was, in fact, speaking in the hall to Hoskyn, who had just appeared there with Charlie on his way to the drawing room. Aurélie was with her husband. They all went for a moment into the study, which served on Sunday evenings as a cloak room.

“I assure you, Mrs. Herbert,” said Hoskyn, officiously helping Aurélie to take off her mantle, “I am exceedingly glad to see you.”

“Ah, yes,” said Aurélie; “but this is quite wrong. It is you who should render me a visit in this moment, because I ask you to dine with me; and you do not come.”

“You have turned up at a very good time,’ said Charlie mischievously. “Mrs. Herbert is upstairs.”

“My mother!” said Adrian, in consternation.

“Shall we go upstairs?” said Hoskyn, leading the way with resolute cheerfulness.

Ädrian looked at Aurélie. She had dropped the lively manner in which she had spoken to Hoskyn, and was now moving towards the door with ominous grace and calm.

“Aurélie,” he said, detaining her in the room for a moment: “my mother is here. You will speak to her — for my sake — will you not?”

She only raised her hand to signify that she was not to be troubled, and then, without heeding his look of pain and disappointment, passed out and followed Hoskyn to the drawing-room, where Mary and Mrs Herbert, having heard her foreign voice, were waiting, scarcely less disturbed than Adrian by their fear of how she might act.

“Mrs Herbert junior has actually condescended to pay you a visit, Mary,” said Hoskyn.

“How do you do?” said Mary, with misgiving. “I am so very glad to see you.”

“So often have I to reproach myself not to have called on my friends,” said Aurélie in her sweetest voice, “that I yielded to Adrian at the risk of deranging you by coming on the Sunday evening.” A pause followed, during which she looked inquisitively around. “Ah!” she exclaimed, with an air of surprise and pleasure, as she recognized Mrs. Herbert, “is it possible? You are again in London, madame.”

She advanced and offered her hand. Mrs Herbert, who had sat calmly looking at her, made the greeting as brief as possible, and turned her attention to Adrian. Nevertheless, Aurélie drew a chair close to hers, and sat down there.

“You are looking very well, mother,” said Adrian. “When did you return?”

“Only yesterday, Adrian.” There was a brief silence. Adrian looked anxiously at Aurélie; and his mother mutely declined to look at her.

“But behold what is absurd!” said Aurélie. “You, madame, who are encore so young — so beautiful — here Mrs. Herbert, who had turned to her with patient attention, could not hide an expression of wonder&mdash”you are already a grandmother. Adrian has what you call a son and heir. It is true.”

“Yes, I am aware of that,” said Mrs. Herbert coolly.

A slight change appeared for an instant in Aurélie’s face; and she glanced for a moment gravely at her husband. He, with disgust only half concealed,said, “You could not broach a subject less interesting to my mother,” and turned away to speak to Mary.

“Adrian,” began Mrs. Herbert, who found herself unexpectedly disturbed by the implied imputation of want of feeling: “I do not think—” Then, as he was not attending to her, she turned to Aurélie and said, “You really must not accept everything that Adrian says seriously. Pray tell me all about your boy — my grandson, I should say.”

“He is like you,” said Aurélie, trying to conceal the chill which had fallen upon her. “Perhaps you will like to see him. If so, I shall bring him to you, if you will permit me.”

“I shall be very glad,” said Mrs. Herbert, rather surprised. “Let me say that I have been expecting you to call on me for some time.”

“You are very good,” said Aurélie. “But think of how I live. I am always voyaging; and you also are seldom in London. Besides, when one is an artist one neglects things. Forget, I pray you, my — my — ach! I do not know how to say it. But I will come to you with Monsieur Jean Sczympliça Herbert. That reminds me: I know not your address.

Mrs Herbert supplied the information; and the conversation then proceeded amicably with occasional help from Hoskyn and Charlie. Mary and Adrian had withdrawn to another part of the room, and were engrossed in a discussion. In the course of it Mary remarked that matters were evidently smooth between the two Mrs Herberts.

“I am glad of it,” said Adrian, not looking glad. “I was disposed to think Aurélie in fault on that point; but I see plainly enough now how the coolness was brought about. I should not have blamed Aurélie at all if she had repaid my mother’s insolence — I do not think that at all too strong a word — in kind. Poor Aurélie! I have been all this time secretly thinking hardly of her for having, I thought, rebuffed my mother. Unjust and stupid that I am not to have known better from my lifelong experience of the one, and my daily observation of the other! Aurélie has conciliated her tonight solely because I begged her to do so as we came upstairs. You cannot deny that my wife can be perfectly kind and self-sacrificing whenever there is occasion for it.”

“I cannot deny it! Adrian: you speak as though I were in the habit of disparaging her. You are quite wrong. No one can admire her more than I. My only fear is that she is too sweet, and may spoil you. How could I resist her? Even your mother, prejudiced as she certainly was against her, has yielded. You can see by her face that she has given up the battle. I think we had better join them. We have a very rude habit of getting into a corner by ourselves. I am sure, in spite of all you say, that Mrs Herbert is too fond of you to like it.”

“Mrs Herbert is a strange being,” said Adrian, rising. “I no longer pretend to understand her likes and dislikes.”

Mary made a mental note that Aurélie had probably had more to say on the subject of what she saw in the studio than Adrian had expected. The general conversation which ensued did not run on personal matters. Aurélie was allowed to lead it, as it was tacitly understood that the interest of the occasion in some manner centred in her. Mrs Herbert laughingly asked her for the secret of managing Adrian; but she adroitly passed on to some other question, and would not discuss him or in any way treat him more familiarly than she did Hoskyn or Charlie.

Later on, Hoskyn proposed that they should go downstairs to a room which communicated with the garden by a large window and a small grassy terrace. As the night was sultry, they readily agreed, and were soon seated below at a light supper, after which Hoskyn strolled out into the garden with Adrian to smoke another cigar and to shew a recently purchased hose and lawn mower, it being his habit to require his visitors to interest themselves in his latest acquisitions, whether of children, furniture or gardening implements. Mrs Herbert, who, despite the glory of the moon, could not overcome her belief that fresh air, to be safely sat in, should tempered by a roof, did not venture beyond the carpet; and and Mary felt bound to remain in the room with her. Aurélie walked out to the edge of the terrace, clasped her hands behind her, and became rapt in contemplation of the cloudless sky, which was like a vast moonlit plain. Her attention was recalled by the voice of Charlie beside her.

“Awfully jolly night, isn’t it, Mrs Herbert?”

“Yes, it is very fine.”

“I suppose you find no end of poetry in all those stars.”

“Poetry! I am not at all poetic, Monsieur Charles.”

“I don’t altogether believe that, you know. You look poetic.”

“It is therefore that people mistake me. They are very arbitrary. They say ‘Madamoiselle Sczympliça has such and such a face and figure. In our minds such a face and figure associate with poetry. Therefore must she be poetic. We will have it so; and if she disappoints us, we will be very angry with her.’ And I do disappoint them. When they talk poetically of music and things I am impatient myself to be at home with mamman, who never talks of such things, and the bambino, who never talks at all. What, think you, do I find in those stars? I am looking for Aurélie and Thekla in what you call Charles’s wain. Aha! I did not think of that before. You are Monsieur Charles, to whom belongs the wain.”

“Yes, I have put my hand to the plough and turned back often enough. What may Aurélie and Thekla be?”

“Aurélie is myself; and Thekla is my doll. In my infancy I named a star after every one whom I liked. Only very particular persons were given a place in Charles’s wain. It was the great chariot of honor; and in the end I found no one worthy of it but my doll and myself. Behold how I am poetic! I was a silly child; for I forgot to give my mother a star — I forgot all my family. When my mother found that out one day, she said I had no heart. And, indeed, I fear I have none.”

“Heaven forbid!”

“Look you, Monsieur Charles,” she said, with a sudden air of shrewdness, unclasping her hands to shake her finger at him: “I am not what you think me to be. I am the very other things of it. I have the soul commercial within me.”

“I am glad of that,” he said eagerly; “for I want to make a business proposal to you. Will you give me lessons?”

‘Give you lesson! Lesson of what?”

“Lessons in playing. I want awfully to become a good pianist, and I have never had any really good teaching since I was a boy.”

“Vraiment? Ah! You think that as you persevered so well in the different professions, you will find it easy to become a player. Is it not so?”

“Not at all. I know that playing requires years of perseverance. But I think I can persevere if you will teach me.”

“Monsieur Charles — what shall I call you? You are an ingenious infant, I think.”

“Don’t make fun of me, Mrs. Herbert. I’m perfectly in earnest.” Here, to his confusion, his voice broke with emotion.

“You think I am mocking you!” she said, not seeming to notice the accident.

“I am not fool enough to suppose that you care what I think.” he said lamely, losing his self-possession. “I know you won’t give me the lessons. I knew it before.”

“And wherefore then, did you ask me?”

“Because I love you,” he replied, with symptoms of hysterical distress. “I love you.”

“Ah,” said Aurélie severely, “Do you see my husband there looking at you? And do you not know that it is very wicked to say such a thing to me? Remember, Monsieur Charles, you are quite sober now. I shall not excuse you as I did before.”

“I couldn’t help it,” said Charlie, half crestfallen, half desperate, “I know it’s hopeless: I felt it the moment I had said it. But I can’t always act like a man of the world. I wish I had never met you.”

“And why?”’ I Like you very well when you are good. But this is already twice that you forget to be an honest gentleman. Is it not dishonorable thus to envy your friend? If Monsieur Herbert had a fine watch, would you wish to possess it? No, the thought that it was his would impeach — would hinder you to form such a wish. Well, you must look upon me as a watch of his. You must not even think such things as you have just said. I will not be angry with you, Monsieur Sutherland, because you are very young, and you have admirable qualities. But you have done wrong.”

Before he could reply, she moved away and joined her husband at the end of the garden. Charlie, with his mouth hanging open, stared at her for some seconds, and then went into the supper room, where he incommoded Mary and Mrs. Herbert by lounging about, occasionally taking a grape [from the table or pouring out a glass of wine. At last he strolled to the drawing-room, where he was found with a book in his hand, pretending to read, by the others when they came upstairs some time after. He did not speak again until he bade farewell to the elder Mrs. Herbert, who departed under Hoskyn’s escort. Aurélie, before following her example, went to the nursery with Mary, to have a peep at Master Richard Hoskyn, as he lay in his cot.

“He smiles,” said Aurélie. “What a charming infant! The bambino never smiles. He is so triste, like Adrian!” As they turned to leave the room, she added, “Poor Adrian! I think of going to America this year; but he does not know. You will take care of him whilst I am away, will you not?”

Mary, seeing that she was serious, was puzzled how to reply. “As far as I can, I will, certainly,” she said after some hesitation. Then, laughing, she continued, “It is rather an odd commission.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Aurélie, still serious. “He has great esteem for you, madame — greater than for no matter what person in the world.”

Mary opened her lips to say, “Except you”; but somehow she did not dare, Instead, she remarked that perhaps Adrian would accompany his wife to America. The trip, she suggested, would do him good.

“No, no,” said Aurélie, quickly. “He does not breathe freely in the artists’ room at a concert. He is out of place there. My mother will come with me. Do not speak of it to him yet: I know not whether they will guarantee me a sufficient sum. But even should I not go, I shall still be much away. As I have told you, I leave England for six weeks on the first of next month. You will not suffer Adrian to mope; and you will speak to him of his pictures, about which I am so épouvantably stupid.”

“I will do my best,” said Mary, privately thinking that Aurélie was truly an unaccountable person.

Whilst she was speaking, they re-entered the drawing room.

“Now, Adrian. I am ready.”

“Yes,” said Herbert “Good night, Mary.”

“I think I heard you say that Mrs Herbert is going off on a long tour,” said Charlie, coming forward, and speaking boldly, although his face was very red.

“Yes,” said Adrian. “Not a very long tour though, thank goodness.”

Then I shall not see her againmdash;at least not for some time. I have made up my mind to take that post in the Conolly Company’s branch at Leeds; and I shall be off before Mrs Herbert returns from the continent”

“This is a sudden resolution,” said Mary, in some astonishment.

“I hope Mrs. Herbert thinks it a wise one,” said Charlie. “She has often made fun of my attempts at settling myself in the world.”

“Yes,” said Aurélie, “it is very wise, and quite right. Your instinct tells you so. Good-night and bon voyage, Monsieur Charles.”

“My instinct tells me that it is very foolish and quite wrong,” he said, taking her proffered hand timidly; “but I see nothing else for it under the circumstances. I don’t look forward to enjoying myself. Goodbye.” Mary then went downstairs with her guests; but he turned back into the room, and watched their departure from the window.

THE END

CASHEL BYRON’S PROFESSION

Cashel Byron’s Profession was first published in March 1886 by the Modern Press, whose owner was Henry Hyde Champion. Shaw was not entirely happy with the quality of these first editions, which had been released in the shilling form. In an 1887 letter to the publisher William Swan Sonnenschein, the author complains that Champion did not have the power and influence to push the work within the industry and as a result the favourably reviewed book did not reach a very wide audience. Shaw managed to get the rights to work back and requested Sonnenschein to republish it. He asked for a fresh reprint of the work to be reissued in unison with his new novel so that the work could be properly advertised. Sadly Shaw was not successful in his attempts to persuade the publisher to release Cashel Byron’s Profession and he continued to wrangle with Sonnenschein over the rights to his next novel.

The plot centres on the eponymous Cashel, who as a teenager attends an illegal bare-fist boxing match before running away from home and boarding a ship to Australia. He quickly encounters a skilled ex-fighter, who recognises Cashel’s talent as a boxer and begins to tutor him. In his mid-twenties the young man returns to England where he trains on the grounds of Wilstoken Castle, which is owned by the cultured, genteel and intelligent young heiress, Lydia Carew.  There is an immediate attraction between the two and Lydia mistakenly believes Cashel to be gentleman, as he desperately attempts to conceal his illegal fighting from her. Shaw interweaves characters from his past novels into Cashel’s Byron’s Profession, highlighting the intersecting London social scene. The story unfolds as Cashel’s secret is discovered and he must attempt to earn enough money in a short time in order to cease fighting and become an acceptable romantic prospect for Lydia.

Once again, like his assessments of his other novels, Shaw was highly critical of this work, though he appreciated it had the potential to be a commercial success, unlike his next book, An Unsocial Socialist.

1886 advertisement for the novel

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

The first printing of the novel in book form

PROLOGUE

I

Moncrief House, Panley Common. Scholastic establishment for the sons of gentlemen, etc.

Panley Common, viewed from the back windows of Moncrief House, is a tract of grass, furze and rushes, stretching away to the western horizon.

One wet spring afternoon the sky was full of broken clouds, and the common was swept by their shadows, between which patches of green and yellow gorse were bright in the broken sunlight. The hills to the northward were obscured by a heavy shower, traces of which were drying off the slates of the school, a square white building, formerly a gentleman’s country-house. In front of it was a well-kept lawn with a few clipped holly-trees. At the rear, a quarter of an acre of land was enclosed for the use of the boys. Strollers on the common could hear, at certain hours, a hubbub of voices and racing footsteps from within the boundary wall. Sometimes, when the strollers were boys themselves, they climbed to the coping, and saw on the other side a piece of common trampled bare and brown, with a few square yards of concrete, so worn into hollows as to be unfit for its original use as a ball-alley. Also a long shed, a pump, a door defaced by innumerable incised inscriptions, the back of the house in much worse repair than the front, and about fifty boys in tailless jackets and broad, turned-down collars. When the fifty boys perceived a stranger on the wall they rushed to the spot with a wild halloo, overwhelmed him with insult and defiance, and dislodged him by a volley of clods, stones, lumps of bread, and such other projectiles as were at hand.

On this rainy spring afternoon a brougham stood at the door of Moncrief House. The coachman, enveloped in a white india-rubber coat, was bestirring himself a little after the recent shower. Within-doors, in the drawing-room, Dr. Moncrief was conversing with a stately lady aged about thirty-five, elegantly dressed, of attractive manner, and only falling short of absolute beauty in her complexion, which was deficient in freshness.

“No progress whatever, I am sorry to say,” the doctor was remarking.

“That is very disappointing,” said the lady, contracting her brows.

“It is natural that you should feel disappointed,” replied the doctor. “I would myself earnestly advise you to try the effect of placing him at some other—” The doctor stopped. The lady’s face had lit up with a wonderful smile, and she had raised her hand with a bewitching gesture of protest.

“Oh, no, Dr. Moncrief,” she said. “I am not disappointed with YOU; but I am all the more angry with Cashel, because I know that if he makes no progress with you it must be his own fault. As to taking him away, that is out of the question. I should not have a moment’s peace if he were out of your care. I will speak to him very seriously about his conduct before I leave to-day. You will give him another trial, will you not?”

“Certainly. With the greatest pleasure,” exclaimed the doctor, confusing himself by an inept attempt at gallantry. “He shall stay as long as you please. But” — here the doctor became grave again— “you cannot too strongly urge upon him the importance of hard work at the present time, which may be said to be the turning-point of his career as a student. He is now nearly seventeen; and he has so little inclination for study that I doubt whether he could pass the examination necessary to entering one of the universities. You probably wish him to take a degree before he chooses a profession.”

“Yes, of course,” said the lady, vaguely, evidently assenting to the doctor’s remark rather than expressing a conviction of her own. “What profession would you advise for him? You know so much better than I.”

“Hum!” said Dr. Moncrief, puzzled. “That would doubtless depend to some extent on his own taste—”

“Not at all,” said the lady, interrupting him with vivacity. “What does he know about the world, poor boy? His own taste is sure to be something ridiculous. Very likely he would want to go on the stage, like me.”

“Oh! Then you would not encourage any tendency of that sort?”

“Most decidedly not. I hope he has no such idea.”

“Not that I am aware of. He shows so little ambition to excel in any particular branch that I should say his choice of a profession may be best determined by his parents. I am, of course, ignorant whether his relatives possess influence likely to be of use to him. That is often the chief point to be considered, particularly in cases like your son’s, where no special aptitude manifests itself.”

“I am the only relative he ever had, poor fellow,” said the lady, with a pensive smile. Then, seeing an expression of astonishment on the doctor’s face, she added, quickly, “They are all dead.”

“Dear me!”

“However,” she continued, “I have no doubt I can make plenty of interest for him. But it is difficult to get anything nowadays without passing competitive examinations. He really must work. If he is lazy he ought to be punished.”

The doctor looked perplexed. “The fact is,” he said, “your son can hardly be dealt with as a child any longer. He is still quite a boy in his habits and ideas; but physically he is rapidly springing up into a young man. That reminds me of another point on which I will ask you to speak earnestly to him. I must tell you that he has attained some distinction among his school-fellows here as an athlete. Within due bounds I do not discourage bodily exercises: they are a recognized part of our system. But I am sorry to say that Cashel has not escaped that tendency to violence which sometimes results from the possession of unusual strength and dexterity. He actually fought with one of the village youths in the main street of Panley some months ago. The matter did not come to my ears immediately; and, when it did, I allowed it to pass unnoticed, as he had interfered, it seems, to protect one of the smaller boys. Unfortunately he was guilty of a much more serious fault a little later. He and a companion of his had obtained leave from me to walk to Panley Abbey together. I afterwards found that their real object was to witness a prize-fight that took place — illegally, of course — on the common. Apart from the deception practised, I think the taste they betrayed a dangerous one; and I felt bound to punish them by a severe imposition, and restriction to the grounds for six weeks. I do not hold, however, that everything has been done in these cases when a boy has been punished. I set a high value on a mother’s influence for softening the natural roughness of boys.”

“I don’t think he minds what I say to him in the least,” said the lady, with a sympathetic air, as if she pitied the doctor in a matter that chiefly concerned him. “I will speak to him about it, of course. Fighting is an unbearable habit. His father’s people were always fighting; and they never did any good in the world.”

“If you will be so kind. There are just the three points: the necessity for greater — much greater — application to his studies; a word to him on the subject of rough habits; and to sound him as to his choice of a career. I agree with you in not attaching much importance to his ideas on that subject as yet. Still, even a boyish fancy may be turned to account in rousing the energies of a lad.”

“Quite so,” assented the lady. “I will certainly give him a lecture.”

The doctor looked at her mistrustfully, thinking perhaps that she herself would be the better for a lecture on her duties as a mother. But he did not dare to tell her so; indeed, having a prejudice to the effect that actresses were deficient in natural feeling, he doubted the use of daring. He also feared that the subject of her son was beginning to bore her; and, though a doctor of divinity, he was as reluctant as other men to be found wanting in address by a pretty woman. So he rang the bell, and bade the servant send Master Cashel Byron. Presently a door was heard to open below, and a buzz of distant voices became audible. The doctor fidgeted and tried to think of something to say, but his invention failed him: he sat in silence while the inarticulate buzz rose into a shouting of “By-ron!” “Cash!” the latter cry imitated from the summons usually addressed to cashiers in haberdashers’ shops. Finally there was a piercing yell of “Mam-ma-a-a-a-ah!” apparently in explanation of the demand for Byron’s attendance in the drawing-room. The doctor reddened. Mrs. Byron smiled. Then the door below closed, shutting out the tumult, and footsteps were heard on the stairs.

“Come in,” cried the doctor, encouragingly.

Master Cashel Byron entered blushing; made his way awkwardly to his mother, and kissed the critical expression which was on her upturned face as she examined his appearance. Being only seventeen, he had not yet acquired a taste for kissing. He inexpertly gave Mrs. Byron quite a shock by the collision of their teeth. Conscious of the failure, he drew himself upright, and tried to hide his hands, which were exceedingly dirty, in the scanty folds of his jacket. He was a well-grown youth, with neck and shoulders already strongly formed, and short auburn hair curling in little rings close to his scalp. He had blue eyes, and an expression of boyish good-humor, which, however, did not convey any assurance of good temper.

“How do you do, Cashel?” said Mrs. Byron, in a queenly manner, after a prolonged look at him.

“Very well, thanks,” said he, grinning and avoiding her eye.

“Sit down, Byron,” said the doctor. Byron suddenly forgot how to sit down, and looked irresolutely from one chair to another. The doctor made a brief excuse, and left the room; much to the relief of his pupil.

“You have grown greatly, Cashel. And I am afraid you are very awkward.” Cashel colored and looked gloomy.

“I do not know what to do with you,” continued Mrs. Byron. “Dr. Moncrief tells me that you are very idle and rough.”

“I am not,” said Cashel, sulkily. “It is bec—”

“There is no use in contradicting me in that fashion,” said Mrs. Byron, interrupting him sharply. “I am sure that whatever Dr. Moncrief says is perfectly true.”

“He is always talking like that,” said Cashel, plaintively. “I can’t learn Latin and Greek; and I don’t see what good they are. I work as hard as any of the rest — except the regular stews, perhaps. As to my being rough, that is all because I was out one day with Gully Molesworth, and we saw a crowd on the common, and when we went to see what was up it was two men fighting. It wasn’t our fault that they came there to fight.”

“Yes; I have no doubt that you have fifty good excuses, Cashel. But I will not allow any fighting; and you really must work harder. Do you ever think of how hard I have to work to pay Dr. Moncrief one hundred and twenty pounds a year for you?”

“I work as hard as I can. Old Moncrief seems to think that a fellow ought to do nothing else from morning till night but write Latin verses. Tatham, that the doctor thinks such a genius, does all his constering from cribs. If I had a crib I could conster as well — very likely better.”

“You are very idle, Cashel; I am sure of that. It is too provoking to throw away so much money every year for nothing. Besides, you must soon be thinking of a profession.”

“I shall go into the army,” said Cashel. “It is the only profession for a gentleman.”

Mrs. Byron looked at him for a moment as if amazed at his presumption. But she checked herself and only said, “I am afraid you will have to choose some less expensive profession than that. Besides, you would have to pass an examination to enable you to enter the army; and how can you do that unless you study?”

“Oh, I shall do that all right enough when the time comes.”

“Dear, dear! You are beginning to speak so coarsely, Cashel. After all the pains I took with you at home!”

“I speak the same as other people,” he replied, sullenly. “I don’t see the use of being so jolly particular over every syllable. I used to have to stand no end of chaff about my way of speaking. The fellows here know all about you, of course.”

“All about me?” repeated Mrs. Byron, looking at him curiously.

“All about your being on the stage, I mean,” said Cashel. “You complain of my fighting; but I should have a precious bad time of it if I didn’t lick the chaff out of some of them.”

Mrs. Byron smiled doubtfully to herself, and remained silent and thoughtful for a moment. Then she rose and said, glancing at the weather, “I must go now, Cashel, before another shower begins. And do, pray, try to learn something, and to polish your manners a little. You will have to go to Cambridge soon, you know.”

“Cambridge!” exclaimed Cashel, excited. “When, mamma? When?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Not yet. As soon as Dr. Moncrief says you are fit to go.”

“That will be long enough,” said Cashel, much dejected by this reply. “He will not turn one hundred and twenty pounds a year out of doors in a hurry. He kept big Inglis here until he was past twenty. Look here, mamma; might I go at the end of this half? I feel sure I should do better at Cambridge than here.”

“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Byron, decidedly. “I do not expect to have to take you away from Dr. Moncrief for the next eighteen months at least, and not then unless you work properly. Now don’t grumble, Cashel; you annoy me exceedingly when you do. I am sorry I mentioned Cambridge to you.”

“I would rather go to some other school, then,” said Cashel, ruefully. “Old Moncrief is so awfully down on me.”

“You only want to leave because you are expected to work here; and that is the very reason I wish you to stay.”

Cashel made no reply; but his face darkened ominously.

“I have a word to say to the doctor before I go,” she added, reseating herself. “You may return to your play now. Good-bye, Cashel.” And she again raised her face to be kissed.

“Good-bye,” said Cashel, huskily, as he turned toward the door, pretending that he had not noticed her action.

“Cashel!” she said, with emphatic surprise. “Are you sulky?”

“No,” he retorted, angrily. “I haven’t said anything. I suppose my manners are not good enough, I’m very sorry; but I can’t help it.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Byron, firmly. “You can go, Cashel. I am not pleased with you.”

Cashel walked out of the room and slammed the door. At the foot of the staircase he was stopped by a boy about a year younger than himself, who accosted him eagerly.

“How much did she give you?” he whispered.

“Not a halfpenny,” replied Cashel, grinding his teeth.

“Oh, I say!” exclaimed the other, much disappointed. “That was beastly mean.”

“She’s as mean as she can be,” said Cashel. “It’s all old Monkey’s fault. He has been cramming her with lies about me. But she’s just as bad as he is. I tell you, Gully, I hate my mother.”

“Oh, come!” said Gully, shocked. “That’s a little too strong, old chap. But she certainly ought to have stood something.”

“I don’t know what you intend to do, Gully; but I mean to bolt. If she thinks I am going to stick here for the next two years she is jolly much mistaken.”

“It would be an awful lark to bolt,” said Gully, with a chuckle. “But,” he added, seriously, “if you really mean it, by George, I’ll go too! Wilson has just given me a thousand lines; and I’ll be hanged if I do them.”

“Gully,” said Cashel, his eyes sparkling, “I should like to see one of those chaps we saw on the common pitch into the doctor — get him on the ropes, you know.”

Gully’s mouth watered. “Yes,” he said, breathlessly; “particularly the fellow they called the Fibber. Just one round would be enough for the old beggar. Let’s come out into the playground; I shall catch it if I am found here.”

II

That night there was just sufficient light struggling through the clouds to make Panley Common visible as a black expanse, against the lightest tone of which a piece of ebony would have appeared pale. Not a human being was stirring within a mile of Moncrief House, the chimneys of which, ghostly white on the side next the moon, threw long shadows on the silver-gray slates. The stillness had just been broken by the stroke of a quarter past twelve from a distant church tower, when, from the obscurity of one of these chimney shadows, a head emerged. It belonged to a boy, whose body presently wriggled through an open skylight. When his shoulders were through he turned himself face upward, seized the miniature gable in which the skylight was set, drew himself completely out, and made his way stealthily down to the parapet. He was immediately followed by another boy.

The door of Moncrief House was at the left-hand corner of the front, and was surmounted by a tall porch, the top of which was flat and could be used as a balcony. A wall, of the same height as the porch, connected the house front with the boundary wall, and formed part of the enclosure of a fruit garden which lay at the side of the house between the lawn and the playground. When the two boys had crept along the parapet to a point directly above the porch they stopped, and each lowered a pair of boots to the balcony by means of fishing-lines. When the boots were safely landed, their owners let the lines drop and reentered the house by another skylight. A minute elapsed. Then they reappeared on the top of the porch, having come out through the window to which it served as a balcony. Here they put on their boots, and stepped on to the wall of the fruit garden. As they crawled along it, the hindmost boy whispered.

“I say, Cashy.”

“Shut up, will you,” replied the other under his breath. “What’s wrong?”

“I should like to have one more go at old mother Moncrief’s pear-tree; that’s all.”

“There are no pears on it this season, you fool.”

“I know. This is the last time we shall go this road, Cashy. Usen’t it to be a lark? Eh?”

“If you don’t shut up, it won’t be the last time; for you’ll be caught. Now for it.”

Cashel had reached the outer wall, and he finished his sentence by dropping from it to the common. Gully held his breath for some moments after the noise made by his companion’s striking the ground. Then he demanded in a whisper whether all was right.

“Yes,” returned Cashel, impatiently. “Drop as soft as you can.”

Gully obeyed; and was so careful lest his descent should shake the earth and awake the doctor, that his feet shrank from the concussion. He alighted in a sitting posture, and remained there, looking up at Cashel with a stunned expression.

“Crikey!” he ejaculated, presently. “That was a buster.”

“Get up, I tell you,” said Cashel. “I never saw such a jolly ass as you are. Here, up with you! Have you got your wind back?”

“I should think so. Bet you twopence I’ll be first at the cross roads. I say, let’s pull the bell at the front gate and give an awful yell before we start. They’ll never catch us.”

“Yes,” said Cashel, ironically; “I fancy I see myself doing it, or you either. Now then. One, two, three, and away.”

They ran off together, and reached the cross roads about eight minutes later; Gully completely out of breath, and Cashel nearly so. Here, according to their plan, Gully was to take the north road and run to Scotland, where he felt sure that his uncle’s gamekeeper would hide him. Cashel was to go to sea; where, he argued, he could, if his affairs became desperate, turn pirate, and achieve eminence in that profession by adding a chivalrous humanity to the ruder virtues for which it is already famous.

Cashel waited until Gully had recovered from his race. Then he said.

“Now, old fellow, we’ve got to separate.”

Gully, thus confronted with the lonely realities of his scheme, did not like the prospect. After a moment’s reflection he exclaimed:

“Damme, old chap, but I’ll come with you. Scotland may go and be hanged.”

But Cashel, being the stronger of the two, was as anxious to get rid of Gully as Gully was to cling to him. “No,” he said; “I’m going to rough it; and you wouldn’t be able for that. You’re not strong enough for a sea life. Why, man, those sailor fellows are as hard as nails; and even they can hardly stand it.”

“Well, then, do you come with me,” urged Gully. “My uncle’s gamekeeper won’t mind. He’s a jolly good sort; and we shall have no end of shooting.”

“That’s all very well for you, Gully; but I don’t know your uncle; and I’m not going to put myself under a compliment to his gamekeeper. Besides, we should run too much risk of being caught if we went through the country together. Of course I should be only too glad if we could stick to one another, but it wouldn’t do; I feel certain we should be nabbed. Good-bye.”

“But wait a minute,” pleaded Gully. “Suppose they do try to catch us; we shall have a better chance against them if there are two of us.”

“Stuff!” said Cashel. “That’s all boyish nonsense. There will be at least six policemen sent after us; and even if I did my very best, I could barely lick two if they came on together. And you would hardly be able for one. You just keep moving, and don’t go near any railway station, and you will get to Scotland all safe enough. Look here, we have wasted five minutes already. I have got my wind now, and I must be off. Good-bye.”

Gully disdained to press his company on Cashel any further. “Good-bye,” he said, mournfully shaking his hand. “Success, old chap.”

“Success,” echoed Cashel, grasping Gully’s hand with a pang of remorse for leaving him. “I’ll write to you as soon as I have anything to tell you. It may be some months, you know, before I get regularly settled.”

He gave Gully a final squeeze, released him, and darted off along the road leading to Panley Village. Gully looked after him for a moment, and then ran away Scotlandwards.

Panley Village consisted of a High Street, with an old-fashioned inn at one end, a modern railway station and bridge at the other, and a pump and pound midway between. Cashel stood for a while in the shadow under the bridge before venturing along the broad, moonlit street. Seeing no one, he stepped out at a brisk walking pace; for he had by this time reflected that it was not possible to run all the way to the Spanish main. There was, however, another person stirring in the village besides Cashel. This was Mr. Wilson, Dr. Moncrief’s professor of mathematics, who was returning from a visit to the theatre. Mr. Wilson had an impression that theatres were wicked places, to be visited by respectable men only on rare occasions and by stealth. The only plays he went openly to witness were those of Shakespeare; and his favorite was “As You Like It”; Rosalind in tights having an attraction for him which he missed in Lady Macbeth in petticoats. On this evening he had seen Rosalind impersonated by a famous actress, who had come to a neighboring town on a starring tour. After the performance he had returned to Panley, supped there with a friend, and was now making his way back to Moncrief House, of which he had been intrusted with the key. He was in a frame of mind favorable for the capture of a runaway boy. An habitual delight in being too clever for his pupils, fostered by frequently overreaching them in mathematics, was just now stimulated by the effect of a liberal supper and the roguish consciousness of having been to the play. He saw and recognized Cashel as he approached the village pound. Understanding the situation at once, he hid behind the pump, waited until the unsuspecting truant was passing within arm’s-length, and then stepped out and seized him by the collar of his jacket.

“Well, sir,” he said. “What are you doing here at this hour? Eh?”

Cashel, scared and white, looked up at him, and could not answer a word.

“Come along with me,” said Wilson, sternly.

Cashel suffered himself to be led for some twenty yards. Then he stopped and burst into tears.

“There is no use in my going back,” he said, sobbing. “I have never done any good there. I can’t go back.”

“Indeed,” said Wilson, with magisterial sarcasm. “We shall try to make you do better in future.” And he forced the fugitive to resume his march.

Cashel, bitterly humiliated by his own tears, and exasperated by a certain cold triumph which his captor evinced on witnessing them, did not go many steps farther without protest.

“You needn’t hold me,” he said, angrily; “I can walk without being held.” The master tightened his grasp and pushed his captive forward. “I won’t run away, sir,” said Cashel, more humbly, shedding fresh tears. “Please let me go,” he added, in a suffocated voice, trying to turn his face toward his captor. But Wilson twisted him back again, and urged him still onward. Cashel cried out passionately, “Let me go,” and struggled to break loose.

“Come, come, Byron,” said the master, controlling him with a broad, strong hand; “none of your nonsense, sir.”

Then Cashel suddenly slipped out of his jacket, turned on Wilson, and struck up at him savagely with his right fist. The master received the blow just beside the point of his chin; and his eyes seemed to Cashel roll up and fall back into his head with the shock. He drooped forward for a moment, and fell in a heap face downward. Cashel recoiled, wringing his hand to relieve the tingling of his knuckles, and terrified by the thought that he had committed murder. But Wilson presently moved and dispelled that misgiving. Some of Cashel’s fury returned as he shook his fist at his prostrate adversary, and, exclaiming, “YOU won’t brag much of having seen me cry,” wrenched the jacket from him with unnecessary violence, and darted away at full speed.

Mr. Wilson, though he was soon conscious and able to rise, did not feel disposed to stir for a long time. He began to moan with a dazed faith that some one would eventually come to him with sympathy and assistance. Five minutes elapsed, and brought nothing but increased cold and pain. It occurred to him that if the police found him they would suppose him to be drunk; also that it was his duty to go to them and give them the alarm. He rose, and, after a struggle with dizziness and nausea, concluded that his most pressing duty was to get to bed, and leave Dr. Moncrief to recapture his ruffianly pupil as best he could.

Accordingly, at half-past one o’clock, the doctor was roused by a knocking at his chamber-door, outside which he presently found his professor of mathematics, bruised, muddy, and apparently inebriated. Five minutes elapsed before Wilson could get his principal’s mind on the right track. Then the boys were awakened and the roll called. Byron and Molesworth were reported absent. No one had seen them go; no one had the least suspicion of how they got out of the house. One little boy mentioned the skylight; but observing a threatening expression on the faces of a few of the bigger boys, who were fond of fruit, he did not press his suggestion, and submitted to be snubbed by the doctor for having made it. It was nearly three o’clock before the alarm reached the village, where the authorities tacitly declined to trouble themselves about it until morning. The doctor, convinced that the lad had gone to his mother, did not believe that any search was necessary, and contented himself with writing a note to Mrs. Byron describing the attack on Mr. Wilson, and expressing regret that no proposal having for its object the readmission of Master Byron to the academy could be entertained.

The pursuit was now directed entirely after Molesworth, an it wan plain, from Mr. Wilson’s narrative, that he had separated from Cashel outside Panley. Information was soon forthcoming. Peasants in all parts of the country had seen, they said, “a lad that might be him.” The search lasted until five o’clock next afternoon, when it was rendered superfluous by the appearance of Gully in person, footsore and repentant. After parting from Cashel and walking two miles, he had lost heart and turned back. Half way to the cross roads he had reproached himself with cowardice, and resumed his flight. This time he placed eight miles betwixt himself and Moncrief House. Then he left the road to make a short cut through a plantation, and went astray. After wandering until morning, thinking dejectedly of the story of the babes in the wood, he saw a woman working in a field, and asked her the shortest way to Scotland. She had never heard of Scotland; and when he asked the way to Panley she lost patience and threatened to set her dog at him. This discouraged him so much that he was afraid to speak to the other strangers whom he met. Having the sun as a compass, he oscillated between Scotland and Panley according to the fluctuation of his courage. At last he yielded to hunger, fatigue, and loneliness, devoted his remaining energy to the task of getting back to school; struck the common at last, and hastened to surrender himself to the doctor, who menaced him with immediate expulsion. Gully was greatly concerned at having to leave the place he had just run away from, and earnestly begged the doctor to give him another chance. His prayer was granted. After a prolonged lecture, the doctor, in consideration of the facts that Gully had been seduced by the example of a desperate associate, that he had proved the sincerity of his repentance by coming back of his own accord, and had not been accessory to the concussion of the brain from which Mr. Wilson supposed himself to be suffering, accepted his promise of amendment and gave him a free pardon. It should be added that Gully kept his promise, and, being now the oldest pupil, graced his position by becoming a moderately studious, and, on one occasion, even a sensible lad.

Meanwhile Mrs. Byron, not suspecting the importance of the doctor’s note, and happening to be in a hurry when it arrived, laid it by unopened, intending to read it at her leisure. She would have forgotten it altogether but for a second note which came two days later, requesting some acknowledgment of the previous communication. On learning the truth she immediately drove to Moncrief House, and there abused the doctor as he had never been abused in his life before; after which she begged his pardon, and implored him to assist her to recover her darling boy. When he suggested that she should offer a reward for information and capture she indignantly refused to spend a farthing on the little ingrate; wept and accused herself of having driven him away by her unkindness; stormed and accused the doctor of having treated him harshly; and, finally, said that she would give one hundred pounds to have him back, but that she would never speak to him again. The doctor promised to undertake the search, and would have promised anything to get rid of his visitor. A reward of fifty pounds was offered. But whether the fear of falling into the clutches of the law for murderous assault stimulated Cashel to extraordinary precaution, or whether he had contrived to leave the country in the four days which elapsed between his flight and the offer of the reward, the doctor’s efforts were unsuccessful; and he had to confess their failure to Mrs. Byron. She agreeably surprised him by writing a pleasant letter to the effect that it was very provoking, and that she could never thank him sufficiently for all the trouble he had taken. And so the matter dropped.

Long after that generation of scholars had passed away from Moncrief House, the name of Cashel Byron was remembered there as that of a hero who, after many fabulous exploits, had licked a master and bolted to the Spanish Main.

III

There was at this time in the city of Melbourne, in Australia, a wooden building, above the door of which was a board inscribed “GYMNASIUM AND SCHOOL OF ARMS.” In the long, narrow entry hung a framed manuscript which set forth that Ned Skene, ex-champion of England and the colonies, was to be heard of within daily by gentlemen desirous of becoming proficient in the art of self-defence. Also the terms on which Mrs. Skene, assisted by a competent staff of professors, would give lessons in dancing, deportment, and calisthenics.

One evening a man sat smoking on a common wooden chair outside the door of this establishment. On the ground beside him were some tin tacks and a hammer, with which he had just nailed to the doorpost a card on which was written in a woman’s handwriting: “WANTED A MALE ATTENDANT WHO CAN KEEP ACCOUNTS. INQUIRE WITHIN.” The smoker was a powerful man, with a thick neck that swelled out beneath his broad, flat ear-lobes. He had small eyes, and large teeth, over which his lips were slightly parted in a good-humored but cunning smile. His hair was black and close-cut; his skin indurated; and the bridge of his nose smashed level with his face. The tip, however, was uninjured. It was squab and glossy, and, by giving the whole feature an air of being on the point of expanding to its original shape, produced a snubbed expression which relieved the otherwise formidable aspect of the man, and recommended him as probably a modest and affable fellow when sober and unprovoked. He seemed about fifty years of age, and was clad in a straw hat and a suit of white linen.

He had just finished his pipe when a youth stopped to read the card on the doorpost. This youth was attired in a coarse sailor’s jersey and a pair of gray tweed trousers, which he had considerably outgrown.

“Looking for a job?” inquired the ex-champion of England and the colonies.

The youth blushed and replied, “Yes. I should like to get something to do.”

Mr. Skene stared at him with stern curiosity. His piofessional pursuits had familiarized him with the manners and speech of English gentlemen, and he immediately recognized the shabby sailor lad as one of that class.

“Perhaps you’re a scholar,” said the prize-fighter, after a moment’s reflection.

“I have been at school; but I didn’t learn much there,” replied the youth. “I think I could bookkeep by double entry,” he added, glancing at the card.

“Double entry! What’s that?”

“It’s the way merchants’ books are kept. It is called so because everything is entered twice over.”

“Ah!” said Skene, unfavorably impressed by the system; “once is enough for me. What’s your weight?”

“I don’t know,” said the lad, with a grin.

“Not know your own weight!” exclaimed Skene. “That ain’t the way to get on in life.”

“I haven’t been weighed since I was in England,” said the other, beginning to get the better of his shyness. “I was eight stone four then; so you see I am only a light-weight.”

“And what do you know about light-weights? Perhaps, being so well educated, you know how to fight. Eh?”

“I don’t think I could fight you,” said the youth, with another grin.

Skene chuckled; and the stranger, with boyish communicativeness, gave him an account of a real fight (meaning, apparently, one between professional pugilists) which he had seen in England. He went on to describe how he had himself knocked down a master with one blow when running away from school. Skene received this sceptically, and cross-examined the narrator as to the manner and effect of the blow, with the result of convincing himself that the story was true. At the end of a quarter of an hour the lad had commended himself so favorably by his conversation that the champion took him into the gymnasium, weighed him, measured him, and finally handed him a pair of boxing gloves and invited him to show what he was made of. The youth, though impressed by the prize-fighter’s attitude with a hopeless sense of the impossibility of reaching him, rushed boldly at him several times, knocking his face on each occasion against Skene’s left fist, which seemed to be ubiquitous, and to have the property of imparting the consistency of iron to padded leather. At last the novice directed a frantic assault at the champion’s nose, rising on his toes in his excitement as he did so. Skene struck up the blow with his right arm, and the impetuous youth spun and stumbled away until he fell supine in a corner, rapping his head smartly on the floor at the same time. He rose with unabated cheerfulness and offered to continue the combat; but Skene declined any further exercise just then, and, much pleased with his novice’s game, promised to give him a scientific education and make a man of him.

The champion now sent for his wife, whom he revered as a preeminently sensible and well-mannered woman. The newcomer could see in her only a ridiculous dancing-mistress; but he treated her with great deference, and thereby improved the favorable opinion which Skene had already formed of him. He related to her how, after running away from school, he had made his way to Liverpool, gone to the docks, and contrived to hide himself on board a ship bound for Australia. Also how he had suffered severely from hunger and thirst before he discovered himself; and how, notwithstanding his unpopular position as stowaway, he had been fairly treated as soon as he had shown that he was willing to work. And in proof that he was still willing, and had profited by his maritime experience, he offered to sweep the floor of the gymnasium then and there. This proposal convinced the Skenes, who had listened to his story like children listening to a fairy tale, that he was not too much of a gentleman to do rough work, and it was presently arranged that he should thenceforth board and lodge with them, have five shillings a week for pocket-money, and be man-of-all-work, servant, gymnasium-attendant, clerk, and apprentice to the ex-champion of England and the colonies.

He soon found his bargain no easy one. The gymnasium was open from nine in the morning until eleven at night, and the athletic gentlemen who came there not only ordered him about without ceremony, but varied the monotony of being set at naught by the invincible Skene by practising what he taught them on the person of his apprentice, whom they pounded with great relish, and threw backwards, forwards, and over their shoulders as though he had been but a senseless effigy, provided for that purpose. Meanwhile the champion looked on and laughed, being too lazy to redeem his promise of teaching the novice to defend himself. The latter, however, watched the lessons which he saw daily given to others, and, before the end of a month, he so completely turned the tables on the amateur pugilists of Melbourne that Skene one day took occasion to remark that he was growing uncommon clever, but that gentlemen liked to be played easy with, and that he should be careful not to knock them about too much. Besides these bodily exertions, he had to keep account of gloves and foils sold and bought, and of the fees due both to Mr. and Mrs. Skene. This was the most irksome part of his duty; for he wrote a large, schoolboy hand, and was not quick at figures. When he at last began to assist his master in giving lessons the accounts had fallen into arrear, and Mrs. Skene had to resume her former care of them; a circumstance which gratified her husband, who regarded it as a fresh triumph of her superior intelligence. Then a Chinaman was engaged to do the more menial work of the establishment. “Skene’s novice,” as he was now generally called, was elevated to the rank of assistant professor to the champion, and became a person of some consequence in the gymnasium.

He had been there more than nine months, and had developed from an active youth into an athletic young man of eighteen, when an important conversation took place between him and his principal. It was evening, and the only persons in the gymnasium were Ned Skene, who sat smoking at his ease with his coat off, and the novice, who had just come down-stairs from his bedroom, where he had been preparing for a visit to the theatre.

“Well, my gentleman,” said Skene, mockingly; “you’re a fancy man, you are. Gloves too! They’re too small for you. Don’t you get hittin’ nobody with them on, or you’ll mebbe sprain your wrist.”

“Not much fear of that,” said the novice, looking at his watch, and, finding that he had some minutes to spare, sitting down opposite Skene.

“No,” assented the champion. “When you rise to be a regular professional you won’t care to spar with nobody without you’re well paid for it.”

“I may say I am in the profession already. You don’t call me an amateur, do you?”

“Oh, no,” said Skene, soothingly; “not so bad as that. But mind you, my boy, I don’t call no man a fighting-man what ain’t been in the ring. You’re a sparrer, and a clever, pretty sparrer; but sparring ain’t the real thing. Some day, please God, we’ll make up a little match for you, and show what you can do without the gloves.”

“I would just as soon have the gloves off as on,” said the novice, a little sulkily.

“That’s because you have a heart as big as a lion,” said Skene, patting him on the shoulder. But the novice, who was accustomed to hear his master pay the same compliment to his patrons whenever they were seized with fits of boasting (which usually happened when they got beaten), looked obdurate and said nothing.

“Sam Ducket, of Milltown, was here to-day while you was out giving Captain Noble his lesson,” continued Skene, watching his apprentice’s face cunningly. “Now Sam is a real fighting-man, if you like.”

“I don’t think much of him. He’s a liar, for one thing.”

“That’s a failing of the profession. I don’t mind telling YOU so,” said Skene, mournfully. Now the novice had found out this for himself, already. He never, for instance, believed the accounts which his master gave of the accidents and conspiracies which had led to his being defeated three times in the ring. However, as Skene had won fifteen battles, his next remark was undeniable. “Men fight none the worse for being liars. Sam Ducket bet Ebony Muley in twenty minutes.”

“Yes,” said the novice, scornfully; “and what is Ebony Muley? A wretched old nigger nearly sixty years old, who is drunk seven days in the week, and would sell a fight for a glass of brandy! Ducket ought to have knocked him out of time in seventy seconds. Ducket has no science.”

“Not a bit,” said Ned. “But he has lots of game.”

“Pshaw! Come, now, Ned; you know as well as I do that that is one of the stalest commonplaces going. If a fellow knows how to box, they always say he has science but no pluck. If he doesn’t know his right hand from his left, they say that he isn’t clever but that he is full of game.”

Skene looked with secret wonder at his pupil, whose powers of observation and expression sometimes seemed to him almost to rival those of Mrs. Skene. “Sam was saying something like that to-day,” he remarked. “He says you’re only a sparrer, and that you’d fall down with fright if you was put into a twenty-four-foot ring.”

The novice flushed. “I wish I had been here when Sum Ducket said that.”

“Why, what could you ha’ done to him?” said Skene, his small eyes twinkling.

“I’d have punched his head; that’s what I could and would have done to him.”

“Why, man, he’d eat you.”

“He might. And he might eat you too, Ned, if he had salt enough with you. He talks big because he knows I have no money; and he pretends he won’t strip for less than fifty pounds a side.”

“No money!” cried Skene. “I know them as’ll make up fifty pound before twelve to-morrow for any man as I will answer for. There’d be a start for a young man! Why, my fust fight was for five shillings in Tott’nam Fields; and proud I was when I won it. I don’t want to set you on to fight a crack like Sam Ducket anyway against your inclinations; but don’t go for to say that money isn’t to be had. Let Ned Skene pint to a young man and say, ‘That’s the young man as Ned backs,’ and others will come for’ard — ay, crowds of ‘em.”

The novice hesitated. “Do you think I ought to, Ned?” he said.

“That ain’t for me to say,” said Skene, doggedly. “I know what I would ha’ said at your age. But perhaps you’re right to be cautious. I tell you the truth, I wouldn’t care to see you whipped by the like of Sam Ducket.”

“Will you train me if I challenge him?”

“Will I train you!” echoed Skene, rising with enthusiasm. “Ay will I train you, and put my money on you, too; and you shall knock fireworks out of him, my boy, as sure as my name’s Ned Skene.”

“Then,” cried the novice, reddening with excitement, “I’ll fight him. And if I lick him you will have to hand over your belt as champion of the colonies to me.”

“So I will,” said Skene, affectionately. “Don’t out late; and don’t for your life touch a drop of liquor. You must go into training to-morrow.”

This was Cashel Byron’s first professional engagement.

CHAPTER I

Wiltstoken Castle was a square building with circular bastions at the corners, each bastion terminating skyward in a Turkish minaret. The southwest face was the front, and was pierced by a Moorish arch fitted with glass doors, which could be secured on occasion by gates of fantastically hammered iron. The arch was enshrined by a Palladian portico, which rose to the roof, and was surmounted by an open pediment, in the cleft of which stood a black-marble figure of an Egyptian, erect, and gazing steadfastly at the midday sun. On the ground beneath was an Italian terrace with two great stone elephants at the ends of the balustrade. The windows on the upper story were, like the entrance, Moorish; but the principal ones below were square bays, mullioned. The castle was considered grand by the illiterate; but architects and readers of books on architecture condemned it as a nondescript mixture of styles in the worst possible taste. It stood on an eminence surrounded by hilly woodland, thirty acres of which were enclosed as Wiltstoken Park. Half a mile south was the little town of Wiltstoken, accessible by rail from London in about two hours.

Most of the inhabitants of Wiltstoken were Conservatives. They stood in awe of the castle; and some of them would at any time have cut half a dozen of their oldest friends to obtain an invitation to dinner, or oven a bow in public, from Miss Lydia Carew, its orphan mistress. This Miss Carew was a remarkable person. She had inherited the castle and park from her aunt, who had considered her niece’s large fortune in railways and mines incomplete without land. So many other legacies had Lydia received from kinsfolk who hated poor relations, that she was now, in her twenty-fifth year, the independent possessor of an annual income equal to the year’s earnings of five hundred workmen, and under no external compulsion to do anything in return for it. In addition to the advantage of being a single woman in unusually easy circumstances, she enjoyed a reputation for vast learning and exquisite culture. It was said in Wiltstoken that she knew forty-eight living languages and all dead ones; could play on every known musical instrument; was an accomplished painter, and had written poetry. All this might as well have been true as far as the Wiltstokeners were concerned, since she knew more than they. She had spent her life travelling with her father, a man of active mind and bad digestion, with a taste for sociology, science in general, and the fine arts. On these subjects he had written books, by which he had earned a considerable reputation as a critic and philosopher. They were the outcome of much reading, observation of men and cities, sight-seeing, and theatre-going, of which his daughter had done her share, and indeed, as she grew more competent and he weaker and older, more than her share. He had had to combine health-hunting with pleasure-seeking; and, being very irritable and fastidious, had schooled her in self-control and endurance by harder lessons than those which had made her acquainted with the works of Greek and German philosophers long before she understood the English into which she translated them.

When Lydia was in her twenty-first year her father’s health failed seriously. He became more dependent on her; and she anticipated that he would also become more exacting in his demands on her time. The contrary occurred. One day, at Naples, she had arranged to go riding with an English party that was staying there. Shortly before the appointed hour he asked her to make a translation of a long extract from Lessing. Lydia, in whom self-questionings as to the justice of her father’s yoke had been for some time stirring, paused thoughtfully for perhaps two seconds before she consented. Carew said nothing, but he presently intercepted a servant who was bearing an apology to the English party, read the note, and went back to his daughter, who was already busy at Lessing.

“Lydia,” he said, with a certain hesitation, which she would have ascribed to shyness had that been at all credible of her father when addressing her, “I wish you never to postpone your business to literary trifling.”

She looked at him with the vague fear that accompanies a new and doubtful experience; and he, dissatisfied with his way of putting the case, added, “It is of greater importance that you should enjoy yourself for an hour than that my book should be advanced. Far greater!”

Lydia, after some consideration, put down her pen and said, “I shall not enjoy riding if there is anything else left undone.”

“I shall not enjoy your writing if your excursion is given up for it,” he said. “I prefer your going.”

Lydia obeyed silently. An odd thought struck her that she might end the matter gracefully by kissing him. But as they were unaccustomed to make demonstrations of this kind, nothing came of the impulse. She spent the day on horseback, reconsidered her late rebellious thoughts, and made the translation in the evening.

Thenceforth Lydia had a growing sense of the power she had unwittingly been acquiring during her long subordination. Timidly at first, and more boldly as she became used to dispense with the parental leading-strings, she began to follow her own bent in selecting subjects for study, and even to defend certain recent developments of art against her father’s conservatism. He approved of this independent mental activity on her part, and repeatedly warned her not to pin her faith more on him than on any other critic. She once told him that one of her incentives to disagree with him was the pleasure it gave her to find out ultimately that he was right. He replied gravely:

“That pleases me, Lydia, because I believe you. But such things are better left unsaid. They seem to belong to the art of pleasing, which you will perhaps soon be tempted to practise, because it seems to all young people easy, well paid, amiable, and a mark of good breeding. In truth it is vulgar, cowardly, egotistical, and insincere: a virtue in a shopman; a vice in a free woman. It is better to leave genuine praise unspoken than to expose yourself to the suspicion of flattery.”

Shortly after this, at his desire, she spent a season in London, and went into English polite society, which she found to be in the main a temple for the worship of wealth and a market for the sale of virgins. Having become familiar with both the cult and the trade elsewhere, she found nothing to interest her except the English manner of conducting them; and the novelty of this soon wore off. She was also incommoded by her involuntary power of inspiring affection in her own sex. Impulsive girls she could keep in awe; but old women, notably two aunts who had never paid her any attention during her childhood, now persecuted her with slavish fondness, and tempted her by mingled entreaties and bribes to desert her father and live with them for the remainder of their lives. Her reserve fanned their longing to have her for a pet; and, to escape them, she returned to the Continent with her father, and ceased to hold any correspondence with London. Her aunts declared themselves deeply hurt, and Lydia was held to have treated them very injudiciously; but when they died, and their wills became public, it was found that they had vied with one another in enriching her.

When she was twenty-five years old the first startling event of her life took place. This was the death of her father at Avignon. No endearments passed between them even on that occasion. She was sitting opposite to him at the fireside one evening, reading aloud, when he suddenly said, “My heart has stopped, Lydia. Good-bye!” and immediately died. She had some difficulty in quelling the tumult that arose when the bell was answered. The whole household felt bound to be overwhelmed, and took it rather ill that she seemed neither grateful to them nor disposed to imitate their behavior.

Carew’s relatives agreed that he had made a most unbecoming will. It was a brief document, dated five years before his death, and was to the effect that he bequeathed to his dear daughter Lydia all he possessed. He had, however, left her certain private instructions. One of these, which excited great indignation in his family, was that his body should be conveyed to Milan, and there cremated. Having disposed of her father’s remains as he had directed, she came to set her affairs in order in England, where she inspired much hopeless passion in the toilers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Chancery Lane, and agreeably surprised her solicitors by evincing a capacity for business, and a patience with the law’s delay, that seemed incompatible with her age and sex. When all was arranged, and she was once more able to enjoy perfect tranquillity, she returned to Avignon, and there discharged her last duty to her father. This was to open a letter she had found in his desk, inscribed by his hand: “For Lydia. To be read by her at leisure when I and my affairs shall be finally disposed of.” The letter ran thus:

“MY DEAR LYDIA, — I belong to the great company of disappointed men. But for you, I should now write myself down a failure like the rest. It is only a few years since it first struck me that although I had failed in many ambitions with which (having failed) I need not trouble you now, I had achieved some success as a father. I had no sooner made this discovery than it began to stick in my thoughts that you could draw no other conclusion from the course of our life together than that I have, with entire selfishness, used you throughout as my mere amanuensis and clerk, and that you are under no more obligation to me for your attainments than a slave is to his master for the strength which enforced labor has given to his muscles. Lest I should leave you suffering from so mischievous and oppressive an influence as a sense of injustice, I now justify myself to you.

“I have never asked you whether you remember your mother. Had you at any time broached the subject, I should have spoken quite freely to you on it; but as some wise instinct led you to avoid it, I was content to let it rest until circumstances such as the present should render further reserve unnecessary. If any regret at having known so little of the woman who gave you birth troubles you, shake it off without remorse. She was the most disagreeable person I ever knew. I speak dispassionately. All my bitter personal feeling against her is as dead while I write as it will be when you read. I have even come to cherish tenderly certain of her characteristics which you have inherited, so that I confidently say that I never, since the perishing of the infatuation in which I married, felt more kindly toward her than I do now. I made the best, and she the worst, of our union for six years; and then we parted. I permitted her to give what account of the separation she pleased, and allowed her about five times as much money as she had any right to expect. By these means I induced her to leave me in undisturbed possession of you, whom I had already, as a measure of precaution, carried off to Belgium. The reason why we never visited England during her lifetime was that she could, and probably would, have made my previous conduct and my hostility to popular religion an excuse for wresting you from me. I need say no more of her, and am sorry it was necessary to mention her at all.

“I will now tell you what induced me to secure you for myself. It was not natural affection; I did not love you then, and I knew that you would be a serious encumbrance to me. But, having brought you into the world, and then broken through my engagements with your mother, I felt bound to see that you should not suffer for my mistake. Gladly would I have persuaded myself that she was (as the gossips said) the fittest person to have charge of you; but I knew better, and made up my mind to discharge my responsibility as well as I could. In course of time you became useful to me; and, as you know, I made use of you without scruple, but never without regard to your own advantage. I always kept a secretary to do whatever I considered mere copyist’s work. Much as you did for me, I think I may say with truth that I never imposed a task of absolutely no educational value on you. I fear you found the hours you spent over my money affairs very irksome; but I need not apologize for that now: you must already know by experience how necessary a knowledge of business is to the possessor of a large fortune.

“I did not think, when I undertook your education, that I was laying the foundation of any comfort for myself. For a long time you were only a good girl, and what ignorant people called a prodigy of learning. In your circumstances a commonplace child might have been both. I subsequently came to contemplate your existence with a pleasure which I never derived from the contemplation of my own. I have not succeeded, and shall not succeed in expressing the affection I feel for you, or the triumph with which I find that what I undertook as a distasteful and thankless duty has rescued my life and labor from waste. My literary travail, seriously as it has occupied us both, I now value only for the share it has had in educating you; and you will be guilty of no disloyalty to me when you come to see that though I sifted as much sand as most men, I found no gold. I ask you to remember, then, that I did my duty to you long before it became pleasurable or even hopeful. And, when you are older and have learned from your mother’s friends how I failed in my duty to her, you will perhaps give me some credit for having conciliated the world for your sake by abandoning habits and acquaintances which, whatever others may have thought of them, did much while they lasted to make life endurable to me.

“Although your future will not concern me, I often find myself thinking of it. I fear you will soon find that the world has not yet provided a place and a sphere of action for wise and well-instructed women. In my younger days, when the companionship of my fellows was a necessity to me, I voluntarily set aside my culture, relaxed my principles, and acquired common tastes, in order to fit myself for the society of the only men within my reach; for, if I had to live among bears, I had rather be a bear than a man. Let me warn you against this. Never attempt to accommodate yourself to the world by self-degradation. Be patient; and you will enjoy frivolity all the more because you are not frivolous: much as the world will respect your knowledge all the more because of its own ignorance.

“Some day, I expect and hope, you will marry. You will then have an opportunity of making an irremediable mistake, against the possibility of which no advice of mine or subtlety of yours can guard you. I think you will not easily find a man able to satisfy in you that desire to be relieved of the responsibility of thinking out and ordering our course of life that makes us each long for a guide whom we can thoroughly trust. If you fail, remember that your father, after suffering a bitter and complete disappointment in his wife, yet came to regard his marriage as the happiest event in his career. Let me remind you also, since you are so rich, that it would be a great folly for you to be jealous of your own income, and to limit your choice of a husband to those already too rich to marry for money. No vulgar adventurer will be able to recommend himself to you; and better men will be at least as much frightened as attracted by your wealth. The only class against which I need warn you is that to which I myself am supposed to belong. Never think that a man must prove a suitable and satisfying friend for you merely because he has read much criticism; that he must feel the influences of art as you do because he knows and adopts the classification of names and schools with which you are familiar; or that because he agrees with your favorite authors he must necessarily interpret their words to himself as you understand them. Beware of men who have read more than they have worked, or who love to read better than to work. Beware of painters, poets, musicians, and artists of all sorts, except very great artists: beware even of them as husbands and fathers. Self-satisfied workmen who have learned their business well, whether they be chancellors of the exchequer or farmers, I recommend to you as, on the whole, the most tolerable class of men I have met.

“I shall make no further attempt to advise you. As fast as my counsels rise to my mind follow reflections that convince me of their futility.

“You may perhaps wonder why I never said to you what I have written down here. I have tried to do so and failed. If I understand myself aright, I have written these lines mainly to relieve a craving to express my affection for you. The awkwardness which an over-civilized man experiences in admitting that he is something more than an educated stone prevented me from confusing you by demonstrations of a kind I had never accustomed you to. Besides, I wish this assurance of my love — my last word — to reach you when no further commonplaces to blur the impressiveness of its simple truth are possible.

“I know I have said too much; and I feel that I have not said enough. But the writing of this letter has been a difficult task. Practised as I am with my pen, I have never, even in my earliest efforts, composed with such labor and sense of inadequacy — —”

Here the manuscript broke off. The letter had never been finished.

CHAPTER II

In the month of May, seven years after the flight of the two boys from Moncrief House, a lady sat in an island of shadow which was made by a cedar-tree in the midst of a glittering green lawn. She did well to avoid the sun, for her complexion was as delicately tinted as mother-of-pearl. She was a small, graceful woman, with sensitive lips and nostrils, green eyes, with quiet, unarched brows, and ruddy gold hair, now shaded by a large, untrimmed straw hat. Her dress of Indian muslin, with half-sleeves terminating at the elbows in wide ruffles, hardly covered her shoulders, where it was supplemented by a scarf through which a glimpse of her throat was visible in a nest of soft Tourkaris lace. She was reading a little ivory-bound volume — a miniature edition of the second part of Goethe’s “Faust.”

As the afternoon wore on and the light mellowed, the lady dropped her book and began to think and dream, unconscious of a prosaic black object crossing the lawn towards her. This was a young gentleman in a frock coat. He was dark, and had a long, grave face, with a reserved expression, but not ill-looking.

“Going so soon, Lucian?” said the lady, looking up as he came into the shadow.

Lucian looked at her wistfully. His name, as she uttered it, always stirred him vaguely. He was fond of finding out the reasons of things, and had long ago decided that this inward stir was due to her fine pronunciation. His other intimates called him Looshn.

“Yes,” he said. “I have arranged everything, and have come to give an account of my stewardship, and to say good-bye.”

He placed a garden-chair near her and sat down. She laid her hands one on the other in her lap, and composed herself to listen.

“First,” he said, “as to the Warren Lodge. It is let for a month only; so you can allow Mrs. Goff to have it rent free in July if you still wish to. I hope you will not act so unwisely.”

She smiled, and said, “Who are the present tenants? I hear that they object to the dairymaids and men crossing the elm vista.”

“We must not complain of that. It was expressly stipulated when they took the lodge that the vista should be kept private for them. I had no idea at that time that you were coming to the castle, or I should of course have declined such a condition.”

“But we do keep it private for them; strangers are not admitted. Our people pass and repass once a day on their way to and from the dairy; that is all.”

“It seems churlish, Lydia; but this, it appears, is a special case — a young gentleman, who has come to recruit his health. He needs daily exercise in the open air; but he cannot bear observation, and he has only a single attendant with him. Under these circumstances I agreed that they should have the sole use of the elm vista. In fact, they are paying more rent than would be reasonable without this privilege.”

“I hope the young gentleman is not mad.”

“I satisfied myself before I let the lodge to him that he would be a proper tenant,” said Lucian, with reproachful gravity. “He was strongly recommended to me by Lord Worthington, whom I believe to be a man of honor, notwithstanding his inveterate love of sport. As it happens, I expressed to him the suspicion you have just suggested. Worthington vouched for the tenant’s sanity, and offered to take the lodge in his own name and be personally responsible for the good behavior of this young invalid, who has, I fancy, upset his nerves by hard reading. Probably some college friend of Worthington’s.”

“Perhaps so. But I should rather expect a college friend of Lord Worthington’s to be a hard rider or drinker than a hard reader.”

“You may be quite at ease, Lydia. I took Lord Worthington at his word so far as to make the letting to him. I have never seen the real tenant. But, though I do not even recollect his name, I will venture to answer for him at second-hand.”

“I am quite satisfied, Lucian; and I am greatly obliged to you. I will give orders that no one shall go to the dairy by way of the warren. It is natural that he should wish to be out of the world.”

“The next point,” resumed Lucian, “is more important, as it concerns you personally. Miss Goff is willing to accept your offer. And a most unsuitable companion she will be for you!”

“Why, Lucian?”

“On all accounts. She is younger than you, and therefore cannot chaperone you. She has received only an ordinary education, and her experience of society is derived from local subscription balls. And, as she is not unattractive, and is considered a beauty in Wiltstoken, she is self-willed, and will probably take your patronage in bad part.”

“Is she more self-willed than I?”

“You are not self-willed, Lydia; except that you are deaf to advice.”

“You mean that I seldom follow it. And so you think I had better employ a professional companion — a decayed gentlewoman — than save this young girl from going out as a governess and beginning to decay at twenty-three?”

“The business of getting a suitable companion, and the pleasure or duty of relieving poor people, are two different things, Lydia.”

“True, Lucian. When will Miss Goff call?”

“This evening. Mind; nothing is settled as yet. If you think better of it on seeing her you have only to treat her as an ordinary visitor and the subject will drop. For my own part, I prefer her sister; but she will not leave Mrs. Goff, who has not yet recovered from the shock of her husband’s death.”

Lydia looked reflectively at the little volume in her hand, and seemed to think out the question of Miss Goff. Presently, with an air of having made up her mind, she said, “Can you guess which of Goethe’s characters you remind me of when you try to be worldly-wise for my sake?”

“When I try — What an extraordinary irrelevance! I have not read Goethe lately. Mephistopheles, I suppose. But I did not mean to be cynical.”

“No; not Mephistopheles, but Wagner — with a difference. Wagner taking Mephistopheles instead of Faust for his model.” Seeing by his face that he did not relish the comparison, she added, “I am paying you a compliment. Wagner represents a very clever man.”

“The saving clause is unnecessary,” he said, somewhat sarcastically. “I know your opinion of me quite well, Lydia.”

She looked quickly at him. Detecting the concern in her glance, he shook his head sadly, saying, “I must go now, Lydia. I leave you in charge of the housekeeper until Miss Goff arrives.”

She gave him her hand, and a dull glow came into his gray jaws as he took it. Then he buttoned his coat and walked gravely away. As he went, she watched the sun mirrored in his glossy hat, and drowned in his respectable coat. She sighed, and took up Goethe again.

But after a little while she began to be tired of sitting still, and she rose and wandered through the park for nearly an hour, trying to find the places in which she had played in her childhood during a visit to her late aunt. She recognized a great toppling Druid’s altar that had formerly reminded her of Mount Sinai threatening to fall on the head of Christian in “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Farther on she saw and avoided a swamp in which she had once earned a scolding from her nurse by filling her stockings with mud. Then she found herself in a long avenue of green turf, running east and west, and apparently endless. This seemed the most delightful of all her possessions, and she had begun to plan a pavilion to build near it, when she suddenly recollected that this must be the elm vista of which the privacy was so stringently insisted upon, by her invalid tenant at the Warren Lodge. She fled into the wood at once, and, when she was safe there, laughed at the oddity of being a trespasser in her own domain. She made a wide detour in order to avoid intruding a second time; consequently, after walking for a quarter of an hour, she lost herself. The trees seemed never ending; she began to think she must possess a forest as well as a park. At last she saw an opening. Hastening toward it, she came again into the sunlight, and stopped, dazzled by an apparition which she at first took to be a beautiful statue, but presently recognized, with a strange glow of delight, as a living man.

To so mistake a gentleman exercising himself in the open air on a nineteenth-century afternoon would, under ordinary circumstances, imply incredible ignorance either of men or statues. But the circumstances in Miss Carew’s case were not ordinary; for the man was clad in a jersey and knee-breeches of white material, and his bare arms shone like those of a gladiator. His broad pectoral muscles, in their white covering, were like slabs of marble. Even his hair, short, crisp, and curly, seemed like burnished bronze in the evening light. It came into Lydia’s mind that she had disturbed an antique god in his sylvan haunt. The fancy was only momentary; for she perceived that there was a third person present; a man impossible to associate with classic divinity. He looked like a well to do groom, and was contemplating his companion much as a groom might contemplate an exceptionally fine horse. He was the first to see Lydia; and his expression as he did so plainly showed that he regarded her as a most unwelcome intruder. The statue-man, following his sinister look, saw her too, but with different feelings; for his lips parted, his color rose, and he stared at her with undisguised admiration and wonder. Lydia’s first impulse was to turn and fly; her next, to apologize for her presence. Finally she went away quietly through the trees.

The moment she was out of their sight she increased her pace almost to a run. The day was too warm for rapid movement, and she soon stopped and listened. There were the usual woodland sounds; leaves rustling, grasshoppers chirping, and birds singing; but not a human voice or footstep. She began to think that the god-like figure was only the Hermes of Praxiteles, suggested to her by Goethe’s classical Sabbat, and changed by a day-dream into the semblance of a living reality. The groom must have been one of those incongruities characteristic of dreams — probably a reminiscence of Lucian’s statement that the tenant of the Warren Lodge had a single male attendant. It was impossible that this glorious vision of manly strength and beauty could be substantially a student broken down by excessive study. That irrational glow of delight, too, was one of the absurdities of dreamland; otherwise she should have been ashamed of it.

Lydia made her way back to the castle in some alarm as to the state of her nerves, but dwelling on her vision with a pleasure that she would not have ventured to indulge had it concerned a creature of flesh and blood. Once or twice it recurred to her so vividly that she asked herself whether it could have been real. But a little reasoning convinced her that it must have been an hallucination.

“If you please, madam,” said one of her staff of domestics, a native of Wiltstoken, who stood in deep awe of the lady of the castle, “Miss Goff is waiting for you in the drawing-room.”

The drawing-room of the castle was a circular apartment, with a dome-shaped ceiling broken into gilt ornaments resembling thick bamboos, which projected vertically downward like stalagmites. The heavy chandeliers were loaded with flattened brass balls, magnified fac-similes of which crowned the uprights of the low, broad, massively-framed chairs, which were covered in leather stamped with Japanese dragon designs in copper-colored metal. Near the fireplace was a great bronze bell of Chinese shape, mounted like a mortar on a black wooden carriage for use as a coal-scuttle. The wall was decorated with large gold crescents on a ground of light blue.

In this barbaric rotunda Miss Carew found awaiting her a young lady of twenty-three, with a well-developed, resilient figure, and a clear complexion, porcelain surfaced, and with a fine red in the cheeks. The lofty pose of her head expressed an habitual sense of her own consequence given her by the admiration of the youth of the neighborhood, which was also, perhaps, the cause of the neatness of her inexpensive black dress, and of her irreproachable gloves, boots, and hat. She had been waiting to introduce herself to the lady of the castle for ten minutes in a state of nervousness that culminated as Lydia entered.

“How do you do, Miss Goff, Have I kept you waiting? I was out.”

“Not at all,” said Miss Goff, with a confused impression that red hair was aristocratic, and dark brown (the color of her own) vulgar. She had risen to shake hands, and now, after hesitating a moment to consider what etiquette required her to do next, resumed her seat. Miss Carew sat down too, and gazed thoughtfully at her visitor, who held herself rigidly erect, and, striving to mask her nervousness, unintentionally looked disdainful.

“Miss Goff,” said Lydia, after a silence that made her speech impressive, “will you come to me on a long visit? In this lonely place I am greatly in want of a friend and companion of my own age and position. I think you must be equally so.”

Alice Goff was very young, and very determined to accept no credit that she did not deserve. With the unconscious vanity and conscious honesty of youth, she proceeded to set Miss Carew right as to her social position, not considering that the lady of the castle probably understood it better than she did herself, and indeed thinking it quite natural that she should be mistaken.

“You are very kind,” she replied, stiffly; “but our positions are quite different, Miss Carew. The fact is that I cannot afford to live an idle life. We are very poor, and my mother is partly dependent on my exertions.”

“I think you will be able to exert yourself to good purpose if you come to me,” said Lydia, unimpressed. “It is true that I shall give you very expensive habits; but I will of course enable you to support them.”

“I do not wish to contract expensive habits,” said Alice, reproachfully. “I shall have to content myself with frugal ones throughout my life.”

“Not necessarily. Tell me, frankly: how had you proposed to exert yourself? As a teacher, was it not?”

Alice flushed, but assented.

“You are not at all fitted for it; and you will end by marrying. As a teacher you could not marry well. As an idle lady, with expensive habits, you will marry very well indeed. It is quite an art to know how to be rich — an indispensable art, if you mean to marry a rich man.”

“I have no intention of marrying,” said Alice, loftily. She thought it time to check this cool aristocrat. “If I come at all I shall come without any ulterior object.”

“That is just what I had hoped. Come without condition, or second thought of any kind.”

“But—” began Alice, and stopped, bewildered by the pace at which the negotiation was proceeding. She murmured a few words, and waited for Lydia to proceed. But Lydia had said her say, and evidently expected a reply, though she seemed assured of having her own way, whatever Alice’s views might be.

“I do not quite understand, Miss Carew. What duties? — what would you expect of me?”

“A great deal,” said Lydia, gravely. “Much more than I should from a mere professional companion.”

“But I am a professional companion,” protested Alice.

“Whose?”

Alice flushed again, angrily this time. “I did not mean to say—”

“You do not mean to say that you will have nothing to do with me,” said Lydia, stopping her quietly. “Why are you so scrupulous, Miss Goff? You will be close to your home, and can return to it at any moment if you become dissatisfied with your position here.”

Fearful that she had disgraced herself by ill manners; loath to be taken possession of as if her wishes were of no consequence when a rich lady’s whim was to be gratified; suspicious — since she had often heard gossiping tales of the dishonesty of people in high positions — lest she should be cheated out of the salary she had come resolved to demand; and withal unable to defend herself against Miss Carew, Alice caught at the first excuse that occurred to her.

“I should like a little time to consider,” she said.

“Time to accustom yourself to me, is it not? You can have as long as you plea-”

“Oh, I can let you know tomorrow,” interrupted Alice, officiously.

“Thank you. I will send a note to Mrs. Goff to say that she need not expect you back until tomorrow.”

“But I did not mean — I am not prepared to stay,” remonstrated Alice, feeling that she was being entangled in a snare.

“We shall take a walk after dinner, then, and call at your house, where you can make your preparations. But I think I can supply you with all you will require.”

Alice dared make no further objection. “I am afraid,” she stammered, “you will think me horribly rude; but I am so useless, and you are so sure to be disappointed, that — that—”

“You are not rude, Miss Goff; but I find you very shy. You want to run away and hide from new faces and new surroundings.” Alice, who was self-possessed and even overbearing in Wiltstoken society, felt that she was misunderstood, but did not know how to vindicate herself. Lydia resumed, “I have formed my habits in the course of my travels, and so live without ceremony. We dine early — at six.”

Alice had dined at two, but did not feel bound to confess it.

“Let me show you your room,” said Lydia, rising. “This is a curious drawingroom,” she added, glancing around. “I only use it occasionally to receive visitors.” She looked about her again with some interest, as if the apartment belonged to some one else, and led the way to a room on the first floor, furnished as a lady’s bed-chamber. “If you dislike this,” she said, “or cannot arrange it to suit you, there are others, of which you can have your choice. Come to my boudoir when you are ready.”

“Where is that?” said Alice, anxiously.

“It is — You had better ring for some one to show you. I will send you my maid.”

Alice, even more afraid of the maid than of the mistress, declined hastily. “I am accustomed to attend to myself, Miss Carew,” with proud humility.

“You will find it more convenient to call me Lydia,” said Miss Carew. “Otherwise you will be supposed to refer to my grandaunt, a very old lady.” She then left the room.

Alice was fond of thinking that she had a womanly taste and touch in making a room pretty. She was accustomed to survey with pride her mother’s drawing-room, which she had garnished with cheap cretonnes, Japanese paper fans, and knick-knacks in ornamental pottery. She felt now that if she slept once in the bed before her, she could never be content in her mother’s house again. All that she had read and believed of the beauty of cheap and simple ornament, and the vulgarity of costliness, recurred to her as a hypocritical paraphrase of the “sour grapes” of the fox in the fable. She pictured to herself with a shudder the effect of a sixpenny Chinese umbrella in that fireplace, a cretonne valance to that bed, or chintz curtains to those windows. There was in the room a series of mirrors consisting of a great glass in which she could see herself at full length, another framed in the carved oaken dressing-table, and smaller ones of various shapes fixed to jointed arms that turned every way. To use them for the first time was like having eyes in the back of the head. She had never seen herself from all points of view before. As she gazed, she strove not to be ashamed of her dress; but even her face and figure, which usually afforded her unqualified delight, seemed robust and middle-class in Miss Carew’s mirrors.

“After all,” she said, seating herself on a chair that was even more luxurious to rest in than to look at; “putting the lace out of the question — and my old lace that belongs to mamma is quite as valuable — her whole dress cannot have cost much more than mine. At any rate, it is not worth much more, whatever she may have chosen to pay for it.”

But Alice was clever enough to envy Miss Carew her manners more than her dress. She would not admit to herself that she was not thoroughly a lady; but she felt that Lydia, in the eye of a stranger, would answer that description better than she. Still, as far as she had observed, Miss Carew was exceedingly cool in her proceedings, and did not take any pains to please those with whom she conversed. Alice had often made compacts of friendship with young ladies, and had invited them to call her by her Christian name; but on such occasions she had always called themn “dear” or “darling,” and, while the friendship lasted (which was often longer than a month, for Alice was a steadfast girl), had never met them without exchanging an embrace and a hearty kiss.

“And nothing,” she said, springing from the chair as she thought of this, and speaking very resolutely, “shall tempt me to believe that there is anything vulgar in sincere affection. I shall be on my guard against this woman.”

Having settled that matter for the present, she resumed her examination of the apartment, and was more and more attracted by it as she proceeded. For, thanks to her eminence as a local beauty, she had not that fear of beautiful and rich things which renders abject people incapable of associating costliness with comfort. Had the counterpane of the bed been her own, she would have unhesitatingly converted it into a ball-dress. There were toilet appliances of which she had never felt the need, and could only guess the use. She looked with despair into the two large closets, thinking how poor a show her three dresses, her ulster, and her few old jackets would make there. There was also a dressing-room with a marble bath that made cleanliness a luxury instead of one of the sternest of the virtues, as it seemed at home. Yet she remarked that though every object was more or less ornamental, nothing had been placed in the rooms for the sake of ornament alone. Miss Carew, judged by her domestic arrangements, was a utilitarian before everything. There was a very handsome chimney piece; but as there was nothing on the mantel board, Alice made a faint effort to believe that it was inferior in point of taste to that in her own bedroom, which was covered with blue cloth, surrounded by fringe and brass headed nails, and laden with photographs in plush frames.

The striking of the hour reminded her that she had forgotten to prepare for dinner. Khe hastily took off her hat, washed her hands, spent another minute among the mirrors, and was summoning courage to ring the bell, when a doubt occurred to her. Ought she to put on her gloves before going down or not? This kept her in perplexity for many seconds. At last she resolved to put her gloves in her pocket, and be guided as to their further disposal by the example of her hostess. Then, not daring to hesitate any longer, she rang the bell, and was presently joined by a French lady of polished manners — Miss Carew’s maid who conducted her to the boudoir, a hexagonal apartment that, Alice thought, a sultana might have envied. Lydia was there, reading. Alice noted with relief that she had not changed her dress, and that she was ungloved.

Miss Goff did not enjoy the dinner. There was a butler who seemed to have nothing to do but stand at a buffet and watch her. There was also a swift, noiseless footman who presented himself at her elbow at intervals and compelled her to choose on the instant between unfamiliar things to eat and drink. She envied these men their knowledge of society, and shrank from their criticism. Once, after taking a piece of asparagus in her hand, she was deeply mortified at seeing her hostess consume the vegetable with the aid of a knife and fork; but the footman’s back was turned to her just then, and the butler, oppressed by the heat of the weather, was in a state of abstraction bordering on slumber. On the whole, by dint of imitating Miss Oarew, who did not plague her with any hostess-like vigilance, she came off without discredit to her breeding.

Lydia, on her part, acknowledged no obligation to entertain her guest by chatting, and enjoyed her thoughts and her dinner in silence. Alice began to be fascinated by her, and to wonder what she was thinking about. She fancied that the footman was not quite free from the same influence. Even the butler might have been meditating himself to sleep on the subject. Alice felt tempted to offer her a penny for her thoughts. But she dared not be so familiar as yet. And, had the offer been made and accepted, butler, footman, and guest would have been plunged into equal confusion by the explanation, which would have run thus:

“I saw a vision of the Hermes of Praxiteles in a sylvan haunt to-day; and I am thinking of that.”

CHAPTER III.

Next day Alice accepted Miss Carew’s invitation. Lydia, who seemed to regard all conclusions as foregone when she had once signified her approval of them, took the acceptance as a matter of course. Alice thereupon thought fit to remind her that there were other persons to be considered. So she said, “I should not have hesitated yesterday but for my mother. It seems so heartless to leave her.”

“You have a sister at home, have you not?”

“Yes. But she is not very strong, and my mother requires a great deal of attention.” Alice paused, and added in a lower voice, “She has never recovered from the shock of my father’s death.”

“Your father is then not long dead?” said Lydia in her usual tone.

“Only two years,” said Alice, coldly. “I hardly know how to tell my mother that I am going to desert her.”

“Go and tell her today, Alice. You need not be afraid of hurting her. Grief of two years’ standing is only a bad habit.”

Alice started, outraged. Her mother’s grief was sacred to her; and yet it was by her experience of her mother that she recognized the truth of Lydia’s remark, and felt that it was unanswerable. She frowned; but the frown was lost: Miss Carew was not looking at her. Then she rose and went to the door, where she stopped to say,

“You do not know our family circumstances. I will go now and try to prevail on my mother to let me stay with you.”

“Please come back in good time for dinner,” said Lydia, unmoved. “I will introduce you to my cousin Lucian Webber. I have just received a telegram from him. He is coming down with Lord Worthington. I do not know whether Lord Worthington will come to dinner or not. He has an invalid friend at the Warren, and Lucian does not make it clear whether he is coming to visit him or me. However, it is of no consequence; Lord Worthington is only a young sportsman. Lucian is a clever man, and will be an eminent one some day. He is secretary to a Cabinet Minister, and is very busy; but we shall probably see him often while the Whitsuntide holidays last. Excuse my keeping you waiting at the door to hear that long history. Adieu!” She waved her hand; Alice suddenly felt that it was possible to be very fond of Miss Carew.

She spent an unhappy afternoon with her mother. Mrs. Goff had had the good-fortune to marry a man of whom she was afraid, and who made himself very disagreeable whenever his house or his children were neglected in the least particular. Making a virtue of necessity, she had come to be regarded in Wiltstoken as a model wife and mother. At last, when a drag ran over Mr. Goff and killed him, she was left almost penniless, with two daughters on her hands. In this extremity she took refuge in grief, and did nothing. Her daughters settled their father’s affairs as best they could, moved her into a cheap house, and procured a strange tenant for that in which they had lived during many years. Janet, the elder sister, a student by disposition, employed herself as a teacher of the scientific fashions in modern female education, rumors of which had already reached Wiltstoken. Alice was unable to teach mathematics and moral science; but she formed a dancing-class, and gave lessons in singing and in a language which she believed to be current in France, but which was not intelligible to natives of that country travelling through Wiltstoken. Both sisters were devoted to one another and to their mother. Alice, who had enjoyed the special affection of her self-indulgent father, preserved some regard for his memory, though she could not help wishing that his affection had been strong enough to induce him to save a provision for her. She was ashamed, too, of the very recollection of his habit of getting drunk at races, regattas, and other national festivals, by an accident at one of which he had met his death.

Alice went home from the castle expecting to find the household divided between joy at her good-fortune and grief at losing her; for her views of human nature and parental feeling were as yet pure superstitions. But Mrs. Goff at once became envious of the luxury her daughter was about to enjoy, and overwhelmed her with accusations of want of feeling, eagerness to desert her mother, and vain love of pleasure. Alice, who loved Mrs. Goff so well that she had often told her as many as five different lies in the course of one afternoon to spare her some unpleasant truth, and would have scouted as infamous any suggestion that her parent was more selfish than saintly, soon burst into tears, declaring that she would not return to the castle, and that nothing would have induced her to stay there the night before had she thought that her doing so could give pain at home. This alarmed Mrs. Goff, who knew by experience that it was easier to drive Alice upon rash resolves than to shake her in them afterwards. Fear of incurring blame in Wiltstoken for wantonly opposing her daughter’s obvious interests, and of losing her share of Miss Carew’s money and countenance, got the better of her jealousy. She lectured Alice severely for her headstrong temper, and commanded her, on her duty not only to her mother, but also and chiefly to her God, to accept Miss Carew’s offer with thankfulness, and to insist upon a definite salary as soon as she had, by good behavior, made her society indispensable at the castle. Alice, dutiful as she was, reduced Mrs. Goff to entreaties, and even to symptoms of an outburst of violent grief for the late Mr. Goff, before she consented to obey her. She would wait, she said, until Janet, who was absent teaching, came in, and promised to forgive her for staying away the previous night (Mrs. Goff had falsely represented that Janet had been deeply hurt, and had lain awake weeping during the small hours of the morning). The mother, seeing nothing for it but either to get rid of Alice before Janet’s return or to be detected in a spiteful untruth, had to pretend that Janet was spending the evening with some friends, and to urge the unkindness of leaving Miss Carew lonely. At last Alice washed away the traces of her tears and returned to the castle, feeling very miserable, and trying to comfort herself with the reflection that her sister had been spared the scene which had just passed.

Lucian Webber had not arrived when she reached the castle. Miss Carew glanced at her melancholy face as she entered, but asked no questions. Presently, however, she put down her book, considered for a moment, and said,

“It is nearly three years since I have had a new dress.” Alice looked up with interest. “Now that I have you to help me to choose, I think I will be extravagant enough to renew my entire wardrobe. I wish you would take this opportunity to get some things for yourself. You will find that my dress-maker, Madame Smith, is to be depended on for work, though she is expensive and dishonest. When we are tired of Wiltstoken we will go to Paris, and be millinered there; but in the meantime we can resort to Madame Smith.”

“I cannot afford expensive dresses,” said Alice.

“I should not ask you to get them if you could not afford them. I warned you that I should give you expensive habits.”

Alice hesitated. She had a healthy inclination to take whatever she could get on all occasions; and she had suffered too much from poverty not to be more thankful for her good-fortune than humiliated by Miss Carew’s bounty. But the thought of being driven, richly attired, in one of the castle carriages, and meeting Janet trudging about her daily tasks in cheap black serge and mended gloves, made Alice feel that she deserved all her mother’s reproaches. However, it was obvious that a refusal would be of no material benefit to Janet, so she said,

“Really I could not think of imposing on your kindness in this wholesale fashion. You are too good to me.”

“I will write to Madame Smith this evening,” said Lydia.

Alice was about to renew her protest more faintly, when a servant entered and announced Mr. Webber. She stiffened herself to receive the visitor. Lydia’s manner did not alter in the least. Lucian, whose demeanor resembled Miss Goff’s rather than his cousin’s, went through the ceremony of introduction with solemnity, and was received with a dash of scorn; for Alice, though secretly awe-stricken, bore herself tyrannically towards men from habit.

In reply to Alice, Mr. Webber thought the day cooler than yesterday. In reply to Lydia, he admitted that the resolution of which the leader of the opposition had given notice was tantamount to a vote of censure on the government. He was confident that ministers would have a majority. He had no news of any importance. He had made the journey down with Lord Worthington, who had come to Wiltstoken to see the invalid at the Warren. He had promised to return with him in the seven-thirty train.

When they went down to dinner, Alice, profiting by her experience of the day before, faced the servants with composure, and committed no solecisms. Unable to take part in the conversation, as she knew little of literature and nothing of politics, which were the staple of Lucian’s discourse, she sat silent, and reconsidered an old opinion of hers that it was ridiculous and ill-bred in a lady to discuss anything that was in the newspapers. She was impressed by Lucian’s cautious and somewhat dogmatic style of conversation, and concluded that he knew everything. Lydia seemed interested in his information, but quite indifferent to his opinions.

Towards half-past seven Lydia proposed that they should walk to the railway station, adding, as a reason for going, that she wished to make some bets with Lord Worthington. Lucian looked grave at this, and Alice, to show that she shared his notions of propriety, looked shocked. Neither demonstration had the slightest effect on Lydia. On their way to the station he remarked,

“Worthington is afraid of you, Lydia — needlessly, as it seems.”

“Why?”

“Because you are so learned, and he so ignorant. He has no culture save that of the turf. But perhaps you have more sympathy with his tastes than he supposes.”

“I like him because I have not read the books from which he has borrowed his opinions. Indeed, from their freshness, I should not be surprised to learn that he had them at first hand from living men, or even from his own observation of life.”

“I may explain to you, Miss Goff,” said Lucian, “that Lord Worthiugton is a young gentleman—”

“Whose calendar is the racing calendar,” interposed Lydia, “and who interests himself in favorites and outsiders much as Lucian does in prime-ministers and independent radicals. Would you like to go to Ascot, Alice?”

Alice answered, as she felt Lucian wished her to answer, that she had never been to a race, and that she had no desire to go to one.

“You will change your mind in time for next year’s meeting. A race interests every one, which is more than can be said for the opera or the Academy.”

“I have been at the Academy,” said Alice, who had made a trip to London once.

“Indeed!” said Lydia. “Were you in the National Gallery?”

“The National Gallery! I think not. I forget.”

“I know many persons who never miss an Academy, and who do not know where the National Gallery is. Did you enjoy the pictures, Alice?”

“Oh, very much indeed.”

“You will find Ascot far more amusing.”

“Let me warn you,” said Lucian to Alice, “that my cousin’s pet caprice is to affect a distaste for art, to which she is passionately devoted; and for literature, in which she is profoundly read.”

“Cousin Lucian,” said Lydia, “should you ever be cut off from your politics, and disappointed in your ambition, you will have an opportunity of living upon art and literature. Then I shall respect your opinion of their satisfactoriness as a staff of life. As yet you have only tried them as a sauce.”

“Discontented, as usual,” said Lucian.

“Your one idea respecting me, as usual,” replied Lydia, patiently, as they entered the station.

The train, consisting of three carriages and a van, was waiting at the platform. The engine was humming subduedly, and the driver and fireman were leaning out; the latter, a young man, eagerly watching two gentlemen who were standing before the first-class carriage, and the driver sharing his curiosity in an elderly, preoccupied manner. One of the persons thus observed was a slight, fair-haired man of about twenty-five, in the afternoon costume of a metropolitan dandy. Lydia knew the other the moment she came upon the platform as the Hermes of the day before, modernized by a straw hat, a canary-colored scarf, and a suit of a minute black-and-white chess-board pattern, with a crimson silk handkerchief overflowing the breast pocket of the coat. His hands were unencumbered by stick or umbrella; he carried himself smartly, balancing himself so accurately that he seemed to have no weight; and his expression was self-satisfied and good-humored. But — ! Lydia felt that there was a “but” somewhere — that he must be something more than a handsome, powerful, and light-hearted young man.

“There is Lord Worthington,” she said, indicating the slight gentleman. “Surely that cannot be his invalid friend with him?”

“That is the man that lives at the Warren,” said Alice. “I know his appearance.”

“Which is certainly not suggestive of a valetudinarian,” remarked Lucian, looking hard at the stranger.

They had now come close to the two, and could hear Lord Worthington, as he prepared to enter the carriage, saying, “Take care of yourself, like a good fellow, won’t you? Remember! if it lasts a second over the fifteen minutes, I shall drop five hundred pounds.”

Hermes placed his arm round the shoulders of the young lord and gave him a playful roll. Then he said with good accent and pronunciation, but with a certain rough quality of voice, and louder than English gentlemen usually speak, “Your money is as safe as the mint, my boy.”

Evidently, Alice thought, the stranger was an intimate friend of Lord Worthington. She resolved to be particular in her behavior before him, if introduced.

“Lord Worthington,” said Lydia.

At the sound of her voice he climbed hastily down from the step of the carriage, and said in some confusion, “How d’ do, Miss Carew. Lovely country and lovely weather — must agree awfully well with you. Plenty of leisure for study, I hope.”

“Thank you; I never study now. Will you make a book for me at Ascot?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I am ashamed of my low tastes,” he said; “but I haven’t the heap to distinguish myself in your — Eh?”

Miss Carew was saying in a low voice, “If your friend is my tenant, introduce him to me.”

Lord Worthington hesitated, looked at Lucian, seemed perplexed and amused at the name time, and at last said,

“You really wish it?”

“Of course,” said Lydia. “Is there any reason—”

“Oh, not the least in the world since you wish it,” he replied quickly, his eyes twinkling mischievously as he turned to his companion who was standing at the carriage door admiring Lydia, and being himself admired by the stoker. “Mr. Cashel Byron: Miss Carew.”

Mr. Cashel Byron raised his straw hat and reddened a little; but, on the whole, bore himself like an eminent man who was not proud. As, however, he seemed to have nothing to say for himself, Lord Worthington hastened to avert silence by resuming the subject of Ascot. Lydia listened to him, and looked at her new acquaintance. Now that the constraint of society had banished his former expression of easy good-humor, there was something formidable in him that gave her an unaccountable thrill of pleasure. The same impression of latent danger had occurred, less agreeably, to Lucian, who was affected much as he might have been by the proximity of a large dog of doubtful temper. Lydia thought that Mr. Byron did not, at first sight, like her cousin; for he was looking at him obliquely, as though steadily measuring him.

The group was broken up by the guard admonishing the gentlemen to take their seats. Farewells were exchanged; and Lord Worthington cried, “Take care of yourself,” to Cashel Byron, who replied somewhat impatiently, and with an apprehensive glance at Miss Carew, “All right! all right! Never you fear, sir.” Then the train went off, and he was left on the platform with the two ladies.

“We are returning to the park, Mr. Cashel Byron,” said Lydia.

“So am I,” said he. “Perhaps—” Here he broke down, and looked at Alice to avoid Lydia’s eye. Then they went out together.

When they had walked some distance in silence, Alice looking rigidly before her, recollecting with suspicion that he had just addressed Lord Worthington as “sir,” while Lydia was admiring his light step and perfect balance, which made him seem like a man of cork; he said,

“I saw you in the park yesterday, and I thought you were a ghost. But my trai — my man, I mean — saw you too. I knew by that that you were genuine.”

“Strange!” said Lydia. “I had the same fancy about you.”

“What! You had!” he exclaimed, looking at her. While thus unmindful of his steps, he stumbled, and recovered himself with a stifled oath. Then he became very red, and remarked that it was a warm evening.

Miss Goff, whom he had addressed, assented. “I hope,” she added, “that you are better.”

He looked puzzled. Concluding, after consideration, that she had referred to his stumble, he said,

“Thank you: I didn’t hurt myself.”

“Lord Worthington has been telling us about you,” said Lydia. He recoiled, evidently deeply mortified. She hastened to add, “He mentioned that you had come down here to recruit your health; that is all.”

Cashel’s features relaxed into a curious smile. But presently he became suspicious, and said, anxiously, “He didn’t tell you anything else about me, did he?”

Alice stared at him superciliously. Lydia replied, “No. Nothing else.”

“I thought you might have heard my name somewhere,” he persisted.

“Perhaps I have; but I cannot recall in what connection. Why? Do you know any friend of mine?”

“Oh, no. Only Lord Worthington.”

“I conclude then that you are celebrated, and that I have the misfortune not to know it, Mr. Cashel Byron. Is it so?”

“Not a bit of it,” he replied, hastily. “There’s no reason why you should ever have heard of me. I am much obliged to you for your kind inquiries,” he continued, turning to Alice. “I’m quite well now, thank you. The country has set me right again.”

Alice, who was beginning to have her doubts of Mr. Byron, in spite of his familiarity with Lord Worthington, smiled falsely and drew herself up a little. He turned away from her, hurt by her manner, and so ill able to conceal his feelings that Miss Carew, who was watching him, set him down privately as the most inept dissimulator she had ever met. He looked at Lydia wistfully, as if trying to read her thoughts, which now seemed to be with the setting sun, or in some equally beautiful and mysterious region. But he could see that there was no reflection of Miss Goff’s scorn in her face.

“And so you really took me for a ghost,” he said.

“Yes. I thought at first that you were a statue.”

“A statue!”

“You do not seem flattered by that.”

“It is not flattering to be taken for a lump of stone,” he replied, ruefully.

Lydia looked at him thoughtfully. Here was a man whom she had mistaken for the finest image of manly strength and beauty in the world; and he was so devoid of artistic culture that he held a statue to be a distasteful lump of stone.

“I believe I was trespassing then,” she said; “but I did so unintentionally. I had gone astray; for I am comparatively a stranger here, and cannot find my way about the park yet.”

“It didn’t matter a bit,” said Cashel, impetuously. “Come as often as you want. Mellish fancies that if any one gets a glimpse of me he won’t get any odds. You see he would like people to think—” Cashel checked himself, and added, in some confusion, “Mellish is mad; that’s about where it is.”

Alice glanced significantly at Lydia. She had already suggested that madness was the real reason of the seclusion of the tenants at the Warren. Cashel saw the glance, and intercepted it by turning to her and saying, with an attempt at conversational ease,

“How do you young ladies amuse yourselves in the country? Do you play billiards ever?”

“No,” said Alice, indignantly. The question, she thought, implied that she was capable of spending her evenings on the first floor of a public-house. To her surprise, Lydia remarked,

“I play — a little. I do not care sufficiently for the game to make myself proficient. You were equipped for lawn-tennis, I think, when I saw you yesterday. Miss Goff is a celebrated lawn-tennis player. She vanquished the Australian champion last year.”

It seemed that Byron, after all, was something of a courtier; for he displayed great astonishment at this feat. “The Australian champion!” he repeated. “And who may HE — Oh! you mean the lawn-tennis champion. To be sure. Well, Miss Goff, I congratulate you. It is not every amateur that can brag of having shown a professional to a back seat.”

Alice, outraged by the imputation of bragging, and certain that slang was vulgar, whatever billiards might be, bore herself still more loftily, and resolved to snub him explicitly if he addressed her again. But he did not; for they presently came to a narrow iron gate in the wall of the park, at which Lydia stopped.

“Let me open it for you,” said Cashel. She gave him the key, and he seized one of the bars of the gate with his left hand, and stooped as though he wanted to look into the keyhole. Yet he opened it smartly enough.

Alice was about to pass in with a cool bow when she saw Miss Carew offer Cashel her hand. Whatever Lydia did was done so well that it seemed the right thing to do. He took it timidly and gave it a little shake, not daring to meet her eyes. Alice put out her hand stiffly. Cashel immediately stepped forward with his right foot and enveloped her fingers with the hardest clump of knuckles she had ever felt. Glancing down at this remarkable fist, she saw that it was discolored almost to blackness. Then she went in through the gate, followed by Lydia, who turned to close it behind her. As she pushed, Cashel, standing outside, grasped a bar and pulled. She at once relinquished to him the labor of shutting the gate, and smiled her thanks as she turned away; but in that moment he plucked up courage to look at her. The sensation of being so looked at was quite novel to her and very curious. She was even a little out of countenance, but not so much so as Cashel, who nevertheless could not take his eyes away.

“Do you think,” said Alice, as they crossed the orchard, “that that man is a gentleman?”

“How can I possibly tell? We hardly know him.”

“But what do you think? There is always a certain something about a gentleman that one recognizes by instinct.”

“Is there? I have never observed it.”

“Have you not?” said Alice, surprised, and beginning uneasily to fear that her superior perception of gentility was in some way the effect of her social inferiority to Miss Carew. “I thought one could always tell.”

“Perhaps so,” said Lydia. “For my own part I have found the same varieties of address in every class. Some people enjoy a native distinction and grace of manner—”

“That is what I mean,” said Alice.

“ — but they are seldom ladies and gentlemen; often actors, gypsies, and Celtic or foreign peasants. Undoubtedly one can make a fair guess, but not in the case of this Mr. Cashel Byron. Are you curious about him?”

“I!” exclaimed Alice, superbly. “Not in the least.”

“I am. He interests me. I seldom see anything novel in humanity; and he is a very singular man.”

“I meant,” said Alice, crestfallen, “that I take no special interest in him.”

Lydia, not being curious as to the exact degree of Alice’s interest, merely nodded, and continued, “He may, as you suppose, be a man of humble origin who has seen something of society; or he may be a gentleman unaccustomed to society. Probably the latter. I feel no conviction either way.”

“But he speaks very roughly; and his slang is disgusting. His hands are hard and quite black. Did you not notice them?”

“I noticed it all; and I think that if he were a man of low condition he would be careful not to use slang. Self-made persons are usually precise in their language; they rarely violate the written laws of society. Besides, his pronunciation of some words is so distinct that an idea crossed me once that he might be an actor. But then it is not uniformly distinct. I am sure that he has some object or occupation in life: he has not the air of an idler. Yet I have thought of all the ordinary professions, and he does not fit one of them. This is perhaps what makes him interesting. He is unaccountable.”

“He must have some position. He was very familiar with Lord Worthington.”

“Lord Worthington is a sportsman, and is familiar with all sorts of people.”

“Yes; but surely he would not let a jockey, or anybody of that class, put his arm round his neck, as we saw Mr. Byron do.”

“That is true,” said Lydia, thoughtfully. “Still,” she added, clearing her brow and laughing, “I am loath to believe that he is an invalid student.”

“I will tell you what he is,” said Alice suddenly. “He is companion and keeper to the man with whom he lives. Do you recollect his saying ‘Mellish is mad’?”

“That is possible,” said Lydia. “At all events we have got a topic; and that is an important home comfort in the country.”

Just then they reached the castle. Lydia lingered for a moment on the terrace. The Gothic chimneys of the Warren Lodge stood up against the long, crimson cloud into which the sun was sinking. She smiled as if some quaint idea had occurred to her; raised her eyes for a moment to the black-marble Egyptian gazing with unwavering eyes into the sky; and followed Alice in-doors.

Later on, when it was quite dark, Cashel sat in a spacious kitchen at the lodge, thinking. His companion, who had laid his coat aside, was at the fire, smoking, and watching a saucepan that simmered there. He broke the silence by remarking, after a glance at the clock, “Time to go to roost.”

“Time to go to the devil,” said Cashel. “I am going out.”

“Yes, and get a chill. Not if I know it you don’t.”

“Well, go to bed yourself, and then you won’t know it. I want to take a walk round the place.”

“If you put your foot outside that door to-night Lord Worthington will lose his five hundred pounds. You can’t lick any one in fifteen minutes if you train on night air. Get licked yourself more likely.”

“Will you bet two to one that I don’t stay out all night and knock the Flying Dutchman out of time in the first round afterwards? Eh?”

“Come,” said Mellish, coaxingly; “have some common-sense. I’m advising you for your good.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be advised for my good. Eh? Hand me over that lemon. You needn’t start a speech; I’m not going to eat it.”

“Blest if he ain’t rubbing his ‘ands with it!” exclaimed Mellish, after watching him for some moments. “Why, you bloomin’ fool, lemon won’t ‘arden your ‘ands. Ain’t I took enough trouble with them?”

“I want to whiten them,” said Cashel, impatiently throwing the lemon under the grate; “but it’s no use; I can’t go about with my fists like a nigger’s. I’ll go up to London to-morrow and buy a pair of gloves.”

“What! Real gloves? Wearin’ gloves?”

“You thundering old lunatic,” said Cashel, rising and putting on his hat; “is it likely that I want a pair of mufflers? Perhaps YOU think you could teach me something with them. Ha! ha! By-the-bye — now mind this, Mellish — don’t let it out down here that I’m a fighting man. Do you hear?”

“Me let it out!” cried Mellish, indignantly. “Is it likely? Now, I asts you, Cashel Byron, is it likely?”

“Likely or not, don’t do it,” said Cashel. “You might get talking with some of the chaps about the castle stables. They are generous with their liquor when they can get sporting news for it.”

Mellish looked at him reproachfully, and Cashel turned towards the door. This movement changed the trainer’s sense of injury into anxiety. He renewed his remonstrances as to the folly of venturing into the night air, and cited many examples of pugilists who had suffered defeat in consequence of neglecting the counsel of their trainers. Cashel expressed his disbelief in these anecdotes in brief and personal terms; and at last Mellish had to content himself with proposing to limit the duration of the walk to half an hour.

“Perhaps I will come back in half an hour,” said Cashel, “and perhaps I won’t.”

“Well, look here,” said Mellish; “we won’t quarrel about a minute or two; but I feel the want of a walk myself, and I’ll come with you.”

“I’m d — d if you shall,” said Cashel. “Here, let me out; and shut up. I’m not going further than the park. I have no intention of making a night of it in the village, which is what you are afraid of. I know you, you old dodger. If you don’t get out of my way I’ll seat you on the fire.”

“But duty, Cashel, duty,” pleaded Mellish, persuasively. “Every man oughter do his duty. Consider your duty to your backers.”

“Are you going to get out of my way, or must I put you out of it?” said Cashel, reddening ominously.

Mellish went back to his chair, bowed his head on his hands, and wept. “I’d sooner be a dog nor a trainer,” he exclaimed. “Oh! the cusseduess of bein’ shut up for weeks with a fightin’ man! For the fust two days they’re as sweet as treacle; and then their con trairyness comes out. Their tempers is puffict ‘ell.”

Cashel, additionally enraged by a sting of remorse, went out and slammed the door. He made straight towards the castle, and watched its windows for nearly half an hour, keeping in constant motion so as to avert a chill. At last an exquisitely toned bell struck the hour from one of the minarets. To Cashel, accustomed to the coarse jangling of ordinary English bells, the sound seemed to belong to fairyland. He went slowly back to the Warren Lodge, and found his trainer standing at the open door, smoking, and anxiously awaiting his return. Cashel rebuffed certain conciliatory advances with a haughty reserve more dignified, but much less acceptable to Mr. Mellish, than his former profane familiarity, and went contemplatively to bed.

CHAPTER IV

One morning Miss Carew sat on the bank of a great pool in the park, throwing pebbles two by two into the water, and intently watching the intersection of the circles they made on its calm surface. Alice was seated on a camp-stool a little way off, sketching the castle, which appeared on an eminence to the southeast. The woodland rose round them like the sides of an amphitheatre; but the trees did not extend to the water’s edge, where there was an ample margin of bright greensward and a narrow belt of gravel, from which Lydia was picking her pebbles.

Presently, hearing a footstep, she looked back, and saw Cashel Byron standing behind Alice, apparently much interested in her drawing. He was dressed as she had last seen him, except that he wore primrose gloves and an Egyptian red scarf. Alice turned, and surveyed him with haughty surprise; but he made nothing of her looks; and she, after glancing at Lydia to reassure herself that she was not alone, bade him good-morning, and resumed her work.

“Queer place,” he remarked, after a pause, alluding to the castle. “Chinese looking, isn’t it?”

“It is considered a very fine building,” said Alice.

“Oh, hang what it is considered!” said Cashel. “What IS it? That is the point to look to.”

“It is a matter of taste,” said Alice, very coldly.

“Mr. Cashel Byron.”

Cashel started and hastened to the bank. “How d’ye do, Miss Carew,” he said. “I didn’t see you until you called me.” She looked at him; and he, convicted of a foolish falsehood, quailed. “There is a splendid view of the castle from here,” he continued, to change the subject. “Miss Goff and I have just been talking about it.”

“Yes. Do you admire it?”

“Very much indeed. It is a beautiful place. Every one must acknowledge that.”

“It is considered kind to praise my house to me, and to ridicule it to other people. You do not say, ‘Hang what it is considered,’ now.”

Cashel, with an unaccustomed sense of getting the worst of an encounter, almost lost heart to reply. Then he brightened, and said, “I can tell you how that is. As far as being a place to sketch, or for another person to look at, it is Chinese enough. But somehow your living in it makes a difference. That is what I meant; upon my soul it is.”

Lydia smiled; but he, looking down at her, did not see the smile because of her coronet of red hair, which seemed to flame in the sunlight. The obstruction was unsatisfactory to him; he wanted to see her face. He hesitated, and then sat down on the ground beside her cautiously, as if getting into a very hot bath.

“I hope you won’t mind my sitting here,” he said, timidly. “It seems rude to talk down at you from a height.”

She shook her head and threw two more stones into the pool. He could think of nothing further to say, and as she did not speak, but gravely watched the circles in the water, he began to stare at them too; and they sat in silence for some minutes, steadfastly regarding the waves, she as if there were matter for infinite thought in them, and he as though the spectacle wholly confounded him. At last she said,

“Have you ever realized what a vibration is?”

“No,” said Cashel, after a blank look at her.

“I am glad to hear you make that admission. Science has reduced everything nowadays to vibration. Light, sound, sensation — all the mysteries of nature are either vibrations or interference of vibrations. There,” she said, throwing another pair of pebbles in, and pointing to the two sets of widening rings as they overlapped one another; “the twinkling of a star, and the pulsation in a chord of music, are THAT. But I cannot picture the thing in my own mind. I wonder whether the hundreds of writers of text-books on physics, who talk so glibly of vibrations, realize them any better than I do.”

“Not a bit of it. Not one of them. Not half so well,” said Cashel, cheerfully, replying to as much of her speech as he understood.

“Perhaps the subject does not interest you,” she said, turning to him.

“On the contrary; I like it of all things,” said he, boldly.

“I can hardly say so much for my own interest in it. I am told that you are a student, Mr. Cashel Byron. What are your favorite studies? — or rather, since that is generally a hard question to answer, what are your pursuits?”

Alice listened.

Cashel looked doggedly at Lydia, and his color slowly deepened. “I am a professor,” he said.

“A professor of what? I know I should ask of where; but that would only elicit the name of a college, which would convey no real information to me.”

“I am a professor of science,” said Cashel, in a low voice, looking down at his left fist, which he was balancing in the air before him, and stealthily hitting his bent knee as if it were another person’s face.

“Physical or moral science?” persisted Lydia.

“Physical science,” said Cashel. “But there’s more moral science in it than people think.”

“Yes,” said Lydia, seriously. “Though I have no real knowledge of physics, I can appreciate the truth of that. Perhaps all the science that is not at bottom physical science is only pretentious nescience. I have read much of physics, and have often been tempted to learn something of them — to make the experiments with my own hands — to furnish a laboratory — to wield the scalpel even. For, to master science thoroughly, I believe one must take one’s gloves off. Is that your opinion?”

Cashel looked hard at her. “You never spoke a truer word,” he said. “But you can become a very respectable amateur by working with the gloves.”

“I never should. The many who believe they are the wiser for reading accounts of experiments deceive themselves. It is as impossible to learn science from theory as to gain wisdom from proverbs. Ah, it is so easy to follow a line of argument, and so difficult to grasp the facts that underlie it! Our popular lecturers on physics present us with chains of deductions so highly polished that it is a luxury to let them slip from end to end through our fingers. But they leave nothing behind but a vague memory of the sensation they afforded. Excuse me for talking figuratively. I perceive that you affect the opposite — a reaction on your part, I suppose, against tall talk and fine writing. Pray, should I ever carry out my intention of setting to work in earnest at science, will you give me some lessons?”

“Well,” said Cashel, with a covert grin, “I would rather you came to me than to another professor; but I don’t think it would suit you. I should like to try my hand on your friend there. She’s stronger and straighter than nine out of ten men.”

“You set a high value on physical qualifications then. So do I.”

“Only from a practical point of view, mind you,” said Cashel, earnestly. “It isn’t right to be always looking at men and women as you would at horses. If you want to back them in a race or in a fight, that’s one thing; but if you want a friend or a sweetheart, that’s another.”

“Quite so,” said Lydia, smiling. “You do not wish to commit yourself to any warmer feeling towards Miss Goff than a critical appreciation of her form and condition.”

“Just that,” said Cashel, satisfied. “YOU understand me, Miss Carew. There are some people that you might talk to all day, and they’d be no wiser at the end of it than they were at the beginning. You’re not one of that sort.”

“I wonder do we ever succeed really in communicating our thoughts to one another. A thought must take a new shape to fit itself into a strange mind. You, Mr. Professor, must have acquired special experience of the incommunicability of ideas in the course of your lectures and lessons.”

Cashel looked uneasily at the water, and said in a lower voice, “Of course you may call me just whatever you like; but — if it’s all the same to you — I wish you wouldn’t call me professor.”

“I have lived so much in countries where professors expect to be addressed by their titles on all occasions, that I may claim to be excused for having offended on that point. Thank you for telling me. But I am to blame for discussing science with you. Lord Worthington told us that you had come down here expressly to escape from it — to recruit yourself after an excess of work.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Cashel.

“I have not done harm enough to be greatly concerned; but I will not offend again. To change the subject, let us look at Miss Goff’s sketch.”

Miss Carew had hardly uttered this suggestion, when Cashel, in a business-like manner, and without the slightest air of gallantry, expertly lifted her and placed her on her feet. This unexpected attention gave her a shock, followed by a thrill that was not disagreeable. She turned to him with a faint mantling on her cheeks. He was looking with contracted brows at the sky, as though occupied with some calculation.

“Thank you,” she said; “but pray do not do that again. It is a little humiliating to be lifted like a child. You are very strong.”

“There is not much strength needed to lift such a feather-weight as you. Seven stone two, I should judge you to be, about. But there’s a great art in doing these things properly. I have often had to carry off a man of fourteen stone, resting him all the time as if he was in bed.”

“Ah,” said Lydia; “I see you have had some hospital practice. I have often admired the skill with which trained nurses handle their patients.”

Cashel made no reply, but, with a sinister grin, followed her to where Alice sat.

“It is very foolish of me, I know,” said Alice, presently; “but I never can draw when any one is looking at me.”

“You fancy that everybody is thinking about how you’re doing it,” said Cashel, encouragingly. “That’s always the way with amateurs. But the truth is that not a soul except yourself is a bit concerned about it. EX-cuse me,” he added, taking up the drawing, and proceeding to examine it leisurely.

“Please give me my sketch, Mr. Byron,” she said, her cheeks red with anger. Puzzled, he turned to Lydia for an explanation, while Alice seized the sketch and packed it in her portfolio.

“It is getting rather warm,” said Lydia. “Shall we return to the castle?”

“I think we had better,” said Alice, trembling with resentment as she walked away quickly, leaving Lydia alone with Cashel, who presently exclaimed,

“What in thunder have I done?”

“You have made an inconsiderate remark with unmistakable sincerity.”

“I only tried to cheer her up. She must have mistaken what I said.”

“I think not. Do you believe that young ladies like to be told that there is no occasion for them to be ridiculously self-conscious?”

“I say that! I’ll take my oath I never said anything of the sort.”

“You worded it differently. But you assured her that she need not object to have her drawing overlooked, as it is of no importance to any one.”

“Well, if she takes offence at that she must be a born fool. Some people can’t bear to be told anything. But they soon get all that thin-skinned nonsense knocked out of them.”

“Have you any sisters, Mr. Cashel Byron?”

“No. Why?”

“Or a mother?”

“I have a mother; but I haven’t seen her for years; and I don’t much care if I never see her. It was through her that I came to be what I am.”

“Are you then dissatisfied with your profession?”

“No — I don’t mean that. I am always saying stupid things.”

“Yes. That comes of your ignorance of a sex accustomed to have its silliness respected. You will find it hard to keep on good terms with my friend without some further study of womanly ways.”

“As to her, I won’t give in that I’m wrong unless I AM wrong. The truth’s the truth.”

“Not even to please Miss Goff?”

“Not even to please you. You’d only think the worse of me afterwards.”

“Quite true, and quite right,” said Lydia, cordially. “Good-bye, Mr. Cashel Byron. I must rejoin Miss Goff.”

“I suppose you will take her part if she keeps a down on me for what I said to her.”

“What is ‘a down’? A grudge?”

“Yes. Something of that sort.”

“Colonial, is it not?” pursued Lydia, with the air of a philologist.

“Yes; I believe I picked it up in the colonies.” Then he added, sullenly, “I suppose I shouldn’t use slang in speaking to you. I beg your pardon.”

“I do not object to it. On the contrary, it interests me. For example, I have just learned from it that you have been in Australia.”

“So I have. But are you out with me because I annoyed Miss Goff?”

“By no means. Nevertheless, I sympathize with her annoyance at the manner, if not the matter, of your rebuke.”

“I can’t, for the life of me, see what there was in what I said to raise such a fuss about. I wish you would give me a nudge whenever you see me making a fool of myself. I will shut up at once and ask no questions.”

“So that it will be understood that my nudge means ‘Shut up, Mr. Cashel Byron; you are making a fool of yourself’?”

“Just so. YOU understand me. I told you that before, didn’t I?”

“I am afraid,” said Lydia, her face bright with laughter, “that I cannot take charge of your manners until we are a little better acquainted.”

He seemed disappointed. Then his face clouded; and he began, “If you regard it as a liberty—”

“Of course I regard it as a liberty,” she said, neatly interrupting him. “Is not my own conduct a sufficient charge upon my attention? Why should I voluntarily assume that of a strong man and learned professor as well?”

“By Jingo!” exclaimed Cashel, with sudden excitement, “I don’t care what you say to me. You have a way of giving things a turn that makes it a pleasure to be shut up by you; and if I were a gentleman, as I ought to be, instead of a poor devil of a professional pug, I would—” He recollected himself, and turned quite pale. There was a pause.

“Let me remind you,” said Lydia, composedly, though she too had changed color at the beginning of his outburst, “that we are both wanted elsewhere at present; I by Miss Goff, and you by your servant, who has been hovering about us and looking at you anxiously for some minutes.”

Cashel turned fiercely, and saw Mellish standing a little way off, sulkily watching him. Lydia took the opportunity, and left the place. As she retreated she could hear that they were at high words together; but she could not distinguish what they were saying. Fortunately so; for their language was villainous.

She found Alice in the library, seated bolt upright in a chair that would have tempted a good-humored person to recline. Lydia sat down in silence. Alice, presently looking at her, discovered that she was in a fit of noiseless laughter. The effect, in contrast to her habitual self-possession, was so strange that Alice almost forgot to be offended.

“I am glad to see that it is not hard to amuse you,” she said.

Lydia waited to recover herself thoroughly, and then replied, “I have not laughed so three times in my life. Now, Alice, put aside your resentment of our neighbor’s impudence for the moment, and tell me what you think of him.”

“I have not thought about him at all, I assure you,” said Alice, disdainfully.

“Then think about him for a moment to oblige me, and let me know the result.”

“Really, you have had much more opportunity of judging than I. I have hardly spoken to him.”

Lydia rose patiently and went to the bookcase. “You have a cousin at one of the universities, have you not?” she said, seeking along the shelf for a volume.

“Yes,” replied Alice, speaking very sweetly to atone for her want of amiability on the previous subject.

“Then perhaps you know something of university slang?”

“I never allow him to talk slang to me,” said Alice, quickly.

“You may dictate modes of expression to a single man, perhaps, but not to a whole university,” said Lydia, with a quiet scorn that brought unexpected tears to Alice’s eyes. “Do you know what a pug is?”

“A pug!” said Alice, vacantly. “No; I have heard of a bulldog — a proctor’s bulldog, but never a pug.”

“I must try my slang dictionary,” said Lydia, taking down a book and opening it. “Here it is. ‘Pug — a fighting man’s idea of the contracted word to be produced from pugilist.’ What an extraordinary definition! A fighting man’s idea of a contraction! Why should a man have a special idea of a contraction when he is fighting; or why should he think of such a thing at all under such circumstances? Perhaps ‘fighting man’ is slang too. No; it is not given here. Either I mistook the word, or it has some signification unknown to the compiler of my dictionary.”

“It seems quite plain to me,” said Alice. “Pug means pugilist.”

“But pugilism is boxing; it is not a profession. I suppose all men are more or less pugilists. I want a sense of the word in which it denotes a calling or occupation of some kind. I fancy it means a demonstrator of anatomy. However, it does not matter.”

“Where did you meet with it?”

“Mr. Byron used it just now.”

“Do you really like that man?” said Alice, returning to the subject more humbly than she had quitted it.

“So far, I do not dislike him. He puzzles me. If the roughness of his manner is an affectation I have never seen one so successful before.”

“Perhaps he does not know any better. His coarseness did not strike me as being affected at all.”

“I should agree with you but for one or two remarks that fell from him. They showed an insight into the real nature of scientific knowledge, and an instinctive sense of the truths underlying words, which I have never met with except in men of considerable culture and experience. I suspect that his manner is deliberately assumed in protest against the selfish vanity which is the common source of social polish. It is partly natural, no doubt. He seems too impatient to choose his words heedfully. Do you ever go to the theatre?”

“No,” said Alice, taken aback by this apparent irrelevance. “My father disapproved of it. But I was there once. I saw the ‘Lady of Lyons.’”

“There is a famous actress, Adelaide Gisborne—”

“It was she whom I saw as the Lady of Lyons. She did it beautifully.”

“Did Mr. Byron remind you of her?”

Alice stared incredulously at Lydia. “I do not think there can be two people in the world less like one another,” she said.

“Nor do I,” said Lydia, meditatively. “But I think their dissimilarity owes its emphasis to some lurking likeness. Otherwise how could he have reminded me of her?” Lydia, as she spoke, sat down with a troubled expression, as if trying to unravel her thoughts. “And yet,” she added, presently, “my theatrical associations are so complex that—” A long silence ensued, during which Alice, conscious of some unusual stir in her patroness, watched her furtively and wondered what would happen next.

“Alice.”

“Yes.”

“My mind is exercising itself in spite of me on small and impertinent matters — a sure symptom of failing mental health. My presence here is only one of several attempts that I have made to live idly since my father’s death. They have all failed. Work has become necessary to me. I will go to London tomorrow.”

Alice looked up in dismay; for this seemed equivalent to a dismissal. But her face expressed nothing but polite indifference.

“We shall have time to run through all the follies of the season before June, when I hope to return here and set to work at a book I have planned. I must collect the material for it in London. If I leave town before the season is over, and you are unwilling to come away with me, I can easily find some one who will take care of you as long as you please to stay. I wish it were June already!”

Alice preferred Lydia’s womanly impatience to her fatalistic calm. It relieved her sense of inferiority, which familiarity had increased rather than diminished. Yet she was beginning to persuade herself, with some success, that the propriety of Lydia’s manners was at least questionable. That morning Miss Carew had not scrupled to ask a man what his profession was; and this, at least, Alice congratulated herself on being too well-bred to do. She had quite lost her awe of the servants, and had begun to address them with an unconscious haughtiness and a conscious politeness that were making the word “upstart” common in the servants’ hall. Bashville, the footman, had risked his popularity there by opining that Miss Goff was a fine young woman.

Bashville was in his twenty-fourth year, and stood five feet ten in his stockings. At the sign of the Green Man in the village he was known as a fluent orator and keen political debater. In the stables he was deferred to as an authority on sporting affairs, and an expert wrestler in the Cornish fashion. The women servants regarded him with undissembled admiration. They vied with one another in inventing expressions of delight when he recited before them, which, as he had a good memory and was fond of poetry, he often did. They were proud to go out walking with him. But his attentions never gave rise to jealousy; for it was an open secret in the servants’ hall that he loved his mistress. He had never said anything to that effect, and no one dared allude to it in his presence, much less rally him on his weakness; but his passion was well known for all that, and it seemed by no means so hopeless to the younger members of the domestic staff as it did to the cook, the butler, and Bashville himself. Miss Carew, who knew the value of good servants, appreciated her footman’s smartness, and paid him accordingly; but she had no suspicion that she was waited on by a versatile young student of poetry and public affairs, distinguished for his gallantry, his personal prowess, his eloquence, and his influence on local politics.

It was Bashville who now entered the library with a salver, which he proffered to Alice, saying, “The gentleman is waiting in the round drawing-room, miss.”

Alice took the gentleman’s card, and read, “Mr. Wallace Parker.”

“Oh!” she said, with vexation, glancing at Bashville as if to divine his impression of the visitor. “My cousin — the one we were speaking of just now — has come to see me.”

“How fortunate!” said Lydia. “He will tell me the meaning of pug. Ask him to lunch with us.”

“You would not care for him,” said Alice. “He is not much used to society. I suppose I had better go and see him.”

Miss Carew did not reply, being plainly at a loss to understand how there could be any doubt about the matter. Alice went to the round drawing-room, where she found Mr. Parker examining a trophy of Indian armor, and presenting a back view of a short gentleman in a spruce blue frock-coat. A new hat and pair of gloves were also visible as he stood looking upward with his hands behind him. When he turned to greet Alice lie displayed a face expressive of resolute self-esteem, with eyes whose watery brightness, together with the bareness of his temples, from which the hair was worn away, suggested late hours and either very studious or very dissipated habits. He advanced confidently, pressed Alice’s hand warmly for several seconds, and placed a chair for her, without noticing the marked coldness with which she received his attentions.

“I was surprised, Alice,” he said, when he had seated himself opposite to her, “to learn from Aunt Emily that you had come to live here without consulting me. I—”

“Consult you!” she said, contemptuously, interrupting him. “I never heard of such a thing! Why should I consult you as to my movements?”

“Well, I should not have used the word consult, particularly to such an independent little lady as sweet Alice Goff. Still, I think you might — merely as a matter of form, you know — have informed me of the step you were taking. The relations that exist between us give me a right to your confidence.”

“What relations, pray?”

“What relations!” he repeated, with reproachful emphasis.

“Yes. What relations?”

He rose, and addressed her with tender solemnity. “Alice,” he began; “I have proposed to you at least six times—”

“And have I accepted you once?”

“Hear me to the end, Alice. I know that you have never explicitly accepted me; but it has always been understood that my needy circumstances were the only obstacle to our happiness. We — don’t interrupt me, Alice; you little know what’s coming. That obstacle no longer exists. I have been made second master at Sunbury College, with three hundred and fifty pounds a year, a house, coals, and gas. In the course of time I shall undoubtedly succeed to the head mastership — a splendid position, worth eight hundred pounds a year. You are now free from the troubles that have pressed so hard upon you since your father’s death; and you can quit at once — now — instantly, your dependent position here.”

“Thank you: I am very comfortable here. I am staying on a visit with Miss Carew.”

Silence ensued; and he sat down slowly. Then she added, “I am exceedingly glad that you have got something good at last. It must be a great relief to your poor mother.”

“I fancied, Alice — though it may have been only fancy — I fancied that YOUR mother was colder than usual in her manner this morning. I hope that the luxuries of this palatial mansion are powerless to corrupt your heart. I cannot lead you to a castle and place crowds of liveried servants at your beck and call; but I can make you mistress of an honorable English home, independent of the bounty of strangers. You can never be more than a lady, Alice.”

“It is very good of you to lecture me, I am sure.”

“You might be serious with me,” he said, rising in ill-humor, and walking a little way down the room.

“I think the offer of a man’s hand ought to be received with respect.”

“Oh! I did not quite understand. I thought we agreed that you are not to make me that offer every time we meet.”

“It was equally understood that the subject was only deferred until I should be in a position to resume it without binding you to a long engagement. That time has come now; and I expect a favorable answer at last. I am entitled to one, considering how patiently I have waited for it.”

“For my part, Wallace, I must say I do not think it wise for you to think of marrying with only three hundred and fifty pounds a year.”

“With a house: remember that; and coals and gas! You are becoming very prudent, now that you live with Miss Whatshername here. I fear you no longer love me, Alice.”

“I never said I loved you at any time.”

“Pshaw! You never said so, perhaps; but you always gave me to understand that—”

“I did nothing of the sort, Wallace; and I won’t have you say so.”

“In short,” he retorted, bitterly, “you think you will pick up some swell here who will be a better bargain than I am.”

“Wallace! How dare you?”

“You hurt my feelings, Alice, and I speak out. I know how to behave myself quite as well as those who have the entree here; but when my entire happiness is at stake I do not stand on punctilio. Therefore, I insist on a straightforward answer to my fair, honorable proposal.”

“Wallace,” said Alice, with dignity; “I will not be forced into giving an answer against my will. I regard you as a cousin.”

“I do not wish to be regarded as a cousin. Have I ever regarded you as a cousin?”

“And do you suppose, Wallace, that I should permit you to call me by my Christian name, and be as familiar as we have always been together, if you were not my cousin? If so, you must have a very strange opinion of me.”

“I did not think that luxury could so corrupt—”

“You said that before,” said Alice, pettishly. “Do not keep repeating the same thing over and over; you know it is one of your bad habits. Will you stay to lunch? Miss Carew told me to ask you.”

“Indeed! Miss Carew is very kind. Please inform her that I am deeply honored, and that I feel quite disturbed at being unable to accept her patronage.”

Alice poised her head disdainfully. “No doubt it amuses you to make yourself ridiculous,” she said; “but I must say I do not see any occasion for it.”

“I am sorry that my behavior is not sufficiently good for you. You never found any cause to complain of it when our surroundings were less aristocratic. I am quite ashamed of taking so much of your valuable time. GOOD-morning.”

“Good-morning. But I do not see why you are in such a rage.”

“I am not in a rage. I am only grieved to find that you are corrupted by luxury. I thought your principles were higher. Good-morning, Miss Goff. I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you again in this very choice mansion.”

“Are you really going, Wallace?” said Alice, rising.

“Yes. Why should I stay?”

She rang the bell, greatly disconcerting him; for he had expected her to detain him and make advances for a reconciliation. Before they could exchange more words, Bashville entered.

“Good-bye,” said Alice, politely.

“Good-bye,” he replied, through his teeth. He walked loftily out, passing Bashville with marked scorn.

He had left the house, and was descending the terrace steps, when he was overtaken by the footman, who said, civilly,

“Beg your pardon, sir. You’ve forgotten this, I think.” And he handed him a walking-stick.

Parker’s first idea was that his stick had attracted the man’s attention by the poor figure it made in the castle hall, and that Bashville was requesting him, with covert superciliousness, to remove his property. On second thoughts, his self-esteem rejected this suspicion as too humiliating; but he resolved to show Bashville that he had a gentleman to deal with. So he took the stick, and instead of thanking Bashville, handed him five shillings.

Bashville smiled and shook his head. “Oh, no, sir,” he said, “thank you all the same! Those are not my views.”

“The more fool you,” said Parker, pocketing the coins, and turning away.

Bashville’s countenance changed. “Come, come, sir,” he said, following Parker to the foot of the stops, “fair words deserve fair words. I am no more a fool than you are. A gentleman should know his place as well as a servant.”

“Oh, go to the devil,” muttered Parker, turning very red and hurrying away.

“If you weren’t my mistress’s guest,” said Bashville, looking menacingly after him, “I’d send you to bed for a week for sending me to the devil.”

CHAPTER V

Miss Carew remorselessly carried out her intention of going to London, where she took a house in Regent’s Park, to the disappointment of Alice, who had hoped to live in Mayfair, or at least in South Kensington. But Lydia set great store by the high northerly ground and open air of the park; and Alice found almost perfect happiness in driving through London in a fine carriage and fine clothes. She liked that better than concerts of classical music, which she did not particularly relish, or even than the opera, to which they went often. The theatres pleased her more, though the amusements there were tamer than she had expected. Society was delightful to her because it was real London society. She acquired a mania for dancing; went out every night, and seemed to herself far more distinguished and attractive than she had ever been in Wiltstoken, where she had nevertheless held a sufficiently favorable opinion of her own manners and person.

Lydia did not share all these dissipations. She easily procured invitations and chaperones for Alice, who wondered why so intelligent a woman would take the trouble to sit out a stupid concert, and then go home, just as the real pleasure of the evening was beginning.

One Saturday morning, at breakfast, Lydia said,

“Your late hours begin to interfere with the freshness of your complexion, Alice. I am getting a little fatigued, myself, with literary work. I will go to the Crystal Palace to-day, and wander about the gardens for a while; there is to be a concert in the afternoon for the benefit of Madame Szczymplica, whose playing you do not admire. Will you come with me?”

“Of course,” said Alice, resolutely dutiful.

“Of choice; not of course,” said Lydia. “Are you engaged for to-morrow evening?”

“Sunday? Oh, no. Besides, I consider all my engagements subject to your convenience.”

There was a pause, long enough for this assurance to fall perfectly flat. Alice bit her lip. Then Lydia said, “Do you know Mrs. Hoskyn?”

“Mrs. Hoskyn who gives Sunday evenings? Shall we go there?” said Alice, eagerly. “People often ask me whether I have been at one of them. But I don’t know her — though I have seen her. Is she nice?”

“She is a young woman who has read a great deal of art criticism, and been deeply impressed by it. She has made her house famous by bringing there all the clever people she meets, and making them so comfortable that they take care to come again. But she has not, fortunately for her, allowed her craze for art to get the better of her common-sense. She married a prosperous man of business, who probably never read anything but a newspaper since he left school; and there is probably not a happier pair in England.”

“I presume she had sense enough to know that she could not afford to choose,” said Alice, complacently. “She is very ugly.”

“Do you think so? She has many admirers, and was, I am told, engaged to Mr. Herbert, the artist, before she met Mr. Hoskyn. We shall meet Mr. Herbert there to-morrow, and a number of celebrated persons besides — his wife, Madame Szczymplica the pianiste, Owen Jack the composer, Hawkshaw the poet, Conolly the inventor, and others. The occasion will be a special one, as Herr Abendgasse, a remarkable German socialist and art critic, is to deliver a lecture on ‘The True in Art.’ Be careful, in speaking of him in society, to refer to him as a sociologist, and not as a socialist. Are you particularly anxious to hear him lecture?”

“No doubt it will be very interesting,” said Alice. “I should not like to miss the opportunity of going to Mrs. Hoskyn’s. People so often ask me whether I have been there, and whether I know this, that, and the other celebrated person, that I feel quite embarrassed by my rustic ignorance.”

“Because,” pursued Lydia, “I had intended not to go until after the lecture. Herr Abendgasse is enthusiastic and eloquent, but not original; and as I have imbibed all his ideas direct from their inventors, I do not feel called upon to listen to his exposition of them. So that, unless you are specially interested—”

“Not at all. If he is a socialist I should much rather not listen to him, particularly on Sunday evening.”

So it was arranged that they should go to Mrs. Hoskyn’s after the lecture. Meanwhile they went to Sydenham, where Alice went through the Crystal Palace with provincial curiosity, and Lydia answered her questions encyclopedically. In the afternoon there was a concert, at which a band played several long pieces of music, which Lydia seemed to enjoy, though she found fault with the performers. Alice, able to detect neither the faults in the execution nor the beauty of the music, did as she saw the others do — pretended to be pleased and applauded decorously. Madame Szczymplica, whom she expected to meet at Mrs. Hoskyn’s, appeared, and played a fantasia for pianoforte and orchestra by the famous Jack, another of Mrs. Hoskyn’s circle. There was in the programme an analysis of this composition from which Alice learned that by attentively listening to the adagio she could hear the angels singing therein. She listened as attentively as she could, but heard no angels, and was astonished when, at the conclusion of the fantasia, the audience applauded Madame Szczymplica as if she had made them hear the music of the spheres. Even Lydia seemed moved, and said,

“Strange, that she is only a woman like the rest of us, with just the same narrow bounds to her existence, and just the same prosaic cares — that she will go by train to Victoria, and from thence home in a common vehicle instead of embarking in a great shell and being drawn by swans to some enchanted island. Her playing reminds me of myself as I was when I believed in fairyland, and indeed knew little about any other land.”

“They say,” said Alice, “that her husband is very jealous, and that she leads him a terrible life.”

“THEY SAY anything that brings gifted people to the level of their own experience. Doubtless they are right. I have not met Mr. Herbert, but I have seen his pictures, which suggest that he reads everything and sees nothing; for they all represent scenes described in some poem. If one could only find an educated man who had never read a book, what a delightful companion he would be!”

When the concert was over they did not return directly to town, as Lydia wished to walk awhile in the gardens. In consequence, when they left Sydenham, they got into a Waterloo train, and so had to change at Clapham Junction. It was a fine summer evening, and Alice, though she thought that it became ladies to hide themselves from the public in waiting-rooms at railway stations, did not attempt to dissuade Lydia from walking to and fro at an unfrequented end of the platform, which terminated in a bank covered with flowers.

“To my mind,” said Lydia, “Clapham Junction is one of the prettiest places about London.”

“Indeed!” said Alice, a little maliciously. “I thought that all artistic people looked on junctions and railway lines as blots on the landscape.”

“Some of them do,” said Lydia; “but they are not the artists of our generation; and those who take up their cry are no better than parrots. If every holiday recollection of my youth, every escape from town to country, be associated with the railway, I must feel towards it otherwise than did my father, upon whose middle age it came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing. Its pure, white fleece of steam harmonizes with every variety of landscape. And its sound! Have you ever stood on a sea-coast skirted by a railway, and listened as the train came into hearing in the far distance? At first it can hardly be distinguished from the noise of the sea; then you recognize it by its vibration; one moment smothered in a deep cutting, and the next sent echoing from some hillside. Sometimes it runs smoothly for many minutes, and then breaks suddenly into a rhythmic clatter, always changing in distance and intensity. When it comes near, you should get into a tunnel, and stand there while it passes. I did that once, and it was like the last page of an overture by Beethoven — thunderingly impetuous. I cannot conceive how any person can hope to disparage a train by comparing it with a stage-coach; and I know something of stage-coaches — or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men employed about them ought to decide the superiority of steam without further argument. I have never observed an engine-driver who did not seem an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again — is not that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at the third platform from this. He—” She stopped.

Alice looked, but could see neither Lord Worthington nor the cause of a subtle but perceptible change in Lydia, who said, quickly,

“He is probably coming to our train. Come to the waiting-room.” She walked swiftly along the platform as she spoke. Alice hurried after her; and they had but just got into the room, the door of which was close to the staircase which gave access to the platform, when a coarse din of men’s voices showed that a noisy party were ascending the steps. Presently a man emerged reeling, and at once began to execute a drunken dance, and to sing as well as his condition and musical faculty allowed. Lydia stood near the window of the room and watched in silence. Alice, following her example, recognized the drunken dancer as Mellish. He was followed by three men gayly attired and highly elated, but comparatively sober. After them came Cashel Byron, showily dressed in a velveteen coat, and tightly-fitting fawn-colored pantaloons that displayed the muscles of his legs. He also seemed quite sober; but he was dishevelled, and his left eye blinked frequently, the adjacent brow and cheek being much yellower than his natural complexion, which appeared to advantage on the right side of his face. Walking steadily to Mellish, who was now asking each of the bystanders in turn to come and drink at his expense, he seized him by the collar and sternly bade him cease making a fool of himself. Mellish tried to embrace him.

“My own boy,” he exclaimed, affectionately. “He’s my little nonpareil. Cashel Byron again’ the world at catch weight. Bob Mellish’s money—”

“You sot,” said Cashel, rolling him about until he was giddy as well as drunk, and then forcing him to sit down on a bench; “one would think you never saw a mill or won a bet in your life before.”

“Steady, Byron,” said one of the others. “Here’s his lordship.” Lord Worthington was coming up the stairs, apparently the most excited of the party.

“Fine man!” he cried, patting Cashel on the shoulder. “Splendid man! You have won a monkey for me to-day; and you shall have your share of it, old boy.”

“I trained him,” said Mellish, staggering forward again. “I trained him. You know me, my lord. You know Bob Mellish. A word with your lordship in c-confidence. You ask who knows how to make the beef go and the muscle come. You ask — I ask your lordship’s pard’n. What’ll your lordship take?”

“Take care, for Heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Lord Worthington, clutching at him as he reeled backward towards the line. “Don’t you see the train?”

“I know,” said Mellish, gravely. “I am all right; no man more so. I am Bob Mellish. You ask—”

“Here. Come out of this,” said one of the party, a powerful man with a scarred face and crushed nose, grasping Mellish and thrusting him into the train. “Y’ll ‘ave to clap a beefsteak on that ogle of yours, where you napped the Dutchman’s auctioneer, Byron. It’s got more yellow paint on it than y’ll like to show in church to-morrow.”

At this they all gave a roar of laughter, and entered a third-class carriage. Lydia and Alice had but just time to take their places in the train before it started.

“Eeally, I must say,” said Alice, “that if those were Mr. Cashel Byron’s and Lord Worthington’s associates, their tastes are very peculiar.”

“Yes,” said Lydia, almost grimly. “I am a fair linguist; but I did not understand a single sentence of their conversation, though I heard it all distinctly.”

“They were not gentlemen,” said Alice. “You say that no one can tell by a person’s appearance whether he is a gentleman or not; but surely you cannot think that those men are Lord Worthington’s equals.”

“I do not,” said Lydia. “They are ruffians; and Cashel Byron is the most unmistakable ruffian of them all.”

Alice, awestruck, did not venture to speak again until they left the train at Victoria. There was a crowd outside the carriage in which Cashel had travelled. They hastened past; but Lydia asked a guard whether anything was the matter. He replied that a drunken man, alighting from the train, had fallen down upon the rails, and that, had the carriage been in motion, he would have been killed. Lydia thanked her informant, and, as she turned from him, found Bashville standing before her, touching his hat. She had given him no instructions to attend. However, she accepted his presence as a matter of course, and inquired whether the carriage was there.

“No, madam,” replied Bashville. “The coachman had no orders.”

“Quite right. A hansom, if you please.” When he was gone she said to Alice, “Did you tell Bashville to meet us?”

“Oh, DEAR, no,” said Alice. “I should not think of doing such a thing.”

“Strange! However, he knows his duties better than I do; so I have no doubt that he has acted properly. He has been waiting all the afternoon, I suppose, poor fellow.”

“He has nothing else to do,” said Alice, carelessly. “Here he is. He has picked out a capital horse for us, too.”

Meanwhile, Mellish had been dragged from beneath the train and seated on the knee of one of his companions. He was in a stupor, and had a large lump on his brow. His eye was almost closed. The man with the crushed nose now showed himself an expert surgeon. While Cashel supported the patient on the knee of another man, and the rest of the party kept off the crowd by mingled persuasion and violence, he produced a lancet and summarily reduced the swelling by lancing it. He then dressed the puncture neatly with appliances for that purpose which he carried about him, and shouted in Mellish’s ear to rouse him. But the trainer only groaned, and let his head drop inert on his breast. More shouting was resorted to, but in vain. Cashel impatiently expressed an opinion that Mellish was shamming, and declared that he would not stand there to be fooled with all the evening.

“If he was my pal ‘stead o’ yours,” said the man with the broken nose, “I’d wake him up fast enough.”

“I’ll save you the trouble,” said Cashel, coolly stooping and seizing between his teeth the cartilage of the trainer’s ear.

“That’s the way to do it,” said the other, approvingly, as Mellish screamed and started to his feet. “Now, then. Up with you.”

He took Mellish’s right arm, Cashel took the left, and they brought him away between them without paying the least heed to his tears, his protestations that he was hurt, his plea that he was an old man, or his bitter demand as to where Cashel would have been at that moment without his care.

Lord Worthington had taken advantage of this accident to slip away from his travelling companions and drive alone to his lodgings in Jermyn Street. He was still greatly excited; and when his valet, an old retainer with whom he was on familiar terms, brought him a letter that had arrived during his absence, he asked him four times whether any one had called, and four times interrupted him by scraps of information about the splendid day he had had and the luck he was in.

“I bet five hundred even that it would be over in a quarter of an hour; and then I bet Byron two hundred and fifty to one that it wouldn’t. That’s the way to doit; eh, Bedford? Catch Cashel letting two hundred and fifty slip through his fingers! By George, though, he’s an artful card. At the end of fourteen minutes I thought my five hundred was corpsed. The Dutchman was full of fight; and Cashel suddenly turned weak and tried to back out of the rally. You should have seen the gleam in the Dutchman’s eye when he rushed in after him. He made cock-sure of finishing him straight off.”

“Indeed, my lord. Dear me!”

“I should think so: I was taken in by it myself. It was only done to draw the poor devil. By George, Bedford, you should have seen the way Cashel put in his right. But you couldn’t have seen it; it was too quick. The Dutchman was asleep on the grass before he knew he’d been hit. Byron had collected fifteen pounds for him before he came to. His jaw must feel devilish queer after it. By Jove, Bedford, Cashel is a perfect wonder. I’d back him for every cent I possess against any man alive. He makes you feel proud of being an Englishman.”

Bedford looked on with submissive wonder as his master, transfigured with enthusiasm, went hastily to and fro through the room, occasionally clinching his fist and smiting an imaginary Dutchman. The valet at last ventured to remind him that he had forgotten the letter.

“Oh, hang the letter!” said Lord Worthington. “It’s Mrs. Hoskyn’s writing — an invitation, or some such rot. Here; let’s see it.”

“Campden Hill Road, Saturday.

“My dear Lord Worthington, — I have not forgotten my promise to obtain for you a near view of the famous Mrs. Herbert— ‘Madame Simplicita,’ as you call her. She will be with us to-morrow evening; and we shall be very happy to see you then, if you care to come. At nine o’clock, Herr Abendgasse, a celebrated German art critic and a great friend of mine, will read us a paper on ‘The True in Art’; but I will not pay you the compliment of pretending to believe that that interests you, so you may come at ten or half-past, by which hour all the serious business of the evening will be over.”

“Well, there is nothing like cheek,” said Lord Worthington, breaking off in his perusal. “These women think that because I enjoy life in a rational way I don’t know the back of a picture from the front, or the inside of a book from the cover. I shall go at nine sharp.”

“If any of your acquaintances take an interest in art, I will gladly make them welcome. Could you not bring me a celebrity or two? I am very anxious to have as good an audience as possible for Herr Abendgasse. However, as it is, he shall have no reason to complain, as I flatter myself that I have already secured a very distinguished assembly. Still, if you can add a second illustrious name to my list, by all means do so.”

“Very good, Mrs. Hoskyn,” said Lord Worthington, looking cunningly at the bewildered Bedford. “You shall have a celebrity — a real one — none of your mouldy old Germans — if I can only get him to come. If any of her people don’t like him they can tell him so. Eh, Bedford?”

CHAPTER VI

Next evening, Lydia and Alice reached Mrs. Hoskyn’s house in Campden Hill Road a few minutes before ten o’clock. They found Lord Worthington in the front garden, smoking and chatting with Mr. Hoskyn. He threw away his cigar and returned to the house with the two ladies, who observed that he was somewhat flushed with wine. They went into a parlor to take off their wraps, leaving him at the foot of the stairs. Presently they heard some one come down and address him excitedly thus,

“Worthington. Worthington. He has begun making a speech before the whole room. He got up the moment old Abendgasse sat down. Why the deuce did you give him that glass of champagne?”

“Sh-sh-sh! You don’t say so! Come with me; and let us try to get him away quietly.”

“Did you hear that?” said Alice. “Something must have happened.”

“I hope so,” said Lydia. “Ordinarily, the fault in these receptions is that nothing happens. Do not announce us, if you please,” she added to the servant, as they ascended the stairs. “Since we have come late, let us spare the feelings of Herr Abendgasse by going in as quietly as possible.”

They had no difficulty in entering unnoticed, for Mrs. Hoskyn considered obscurity beautiful; and her rooms were but dimly lighted by two curious lanterns of pink glass, within which were vaporous flames. In the middle of the larger apartment was a small table covered with garnet-colored plush, with a reading-desk upon it, and two candles in silver candlesticks, the light of which, being brighter than the lanterns, cast strong double shadows from a group of standing figures about the table. The surrounding space was crowded with chairs, occupied chiefly by ladies. Behind them, along the wall, stood a row of men, among whom was Lucian Webber. All were staring at Cashel Byron, who was making a speech to some bearded and spectacled gentlemen at the table. Lydia, who had never before seen him either in evening dress or quite at his ease, was astonished at his bearing. His eyes were sparkling, his confidence overbore the company, and his rough voice created the silence it broke. He was in high good-humor, and marked his periods by the swing of his extended left arm, while he held his right hand close to his body and occasionally pointed his remarks by slyly wagging his forefinger.

“ — executive power,” he was saying as Lydia entered. “That’s a very good expression, gentlemen, and one that I can tell you a lot about. We have been told that if we want to civilize our neighbors we must do it mainly by the example of our own lives, by each becoming a living illustration of the highest culture we know. But what I ask is, how is anybody to know that you’re an illustration of culture. You can’t go about like a sandwich man with a label on your back to tell all the fine notions you have in your head; and you may be sure no person will consider your mere appearance preferable to his own. You want an executive power; that’s what you want. Suppose you walked along the street and saw a man beating a woman, and setting a bad example to the roughs. Well, you would be bound to set a good example to them; and, if you’re men, you’d like to save the woman; but you couldn’t do it by merely living; for that would be setting the bad example of passing on and leaving the poor creature to be beaten. What is it that you need to know then, in order to act up to your fine ideas? Why, you want to know how to hit him, when to hit him, and where to hit him; and then you want the nerve to go in and do it. That’s executive power; and that’s what’s wanted worse than sitting down and thinking how good you are, which is what this gentleman’s teaching comes to after all. Don’t you see? You want executive power to set an example. If you leave all that to the roughs, it’s their example that will spread, and not yours. And look at the politics of it. We’ve heard a good deal about the French to-night. Well, they’ve got executive power. They know how to make a barricade, and how to fight behind it when they’ve made it. What’s the result? Why, the French, if they only knew what they wanted, could have it to-morrow for the asking — more’s the pity that they don’t know. In this country we can do nothing; and if the lords and the landlords, or any other collection of nobs, were to drive us into the sea, what could we do but go? There’s a gentleman laughing at me for saying that; but I ask him what would he do if the police or the soldiers came this evening and told him to turn out of his comfortable house into the Thames? Tell ’em he wouldn’t vote for their employers at the next election, perhaps? Or, if that didn’t stop them, tell ’em that he’d ask his friends to do the same? That’s a pretty executive power! No, gentlemen. Don’t let yourself be deceived by people that have staked their money against you. The first thing to learn is how to fight. There’s no use in buying books and pictures unless you know how to keep them and your own head as well. If that gentleman that laughed know how to fight, and his neighbors all knew how to fight too, he wouldn’t need to fear police, nor soldiers, nor Russians, nor Prussians, nor any of the millions of men that may be let loose on him any day of the week, safe though he thinks himself. But, says you, let’s have a division of labor. Let’s not fight for ourselves, but pay other men to fight for us. That shows how some people, when they get hold of an idea, will work it to that foolish length that it’s wearisome to listen to them. Fighting is the power of self-preservation; another man can’t do it for you. You might as well divide the labor of eating your dinner, and pay one fellow to take the beef, another the beer, and a third the potatoes. But let us put it for the sake of argument that you do pay others to fight for you. Suppose some one else pays them higher, and they fight a cross, or turn openly against you! You’d have only yourself to blame for giving the executive power to money. And so long as the executive power is money the poor will be kept out of their corner and fouled against the ropes; whereas, by what I understand, the German professor wants them to have their rights. Therefore I say that a man’s first duty is to learn to fight. If he can’t do that he can’t set an example; he can’t stand up for his own rights or his neighbors’; he can’t keep himself in bodily health; and if he sees the weak ill-used by the strong, the most he can do is to sneak away and tell the nearest policeman, who most likely won’t turn up until the worst of the mischief is done. Coming to this lady’s drawing-room, and making an illustration of himself, won’t make him feel like a man after that. Let me be understood, though, gentlemen: I don’t intend that you should take everything I say too exactly — too literally, as it were. If you see a man beating a woman, I think you should interfere on principle. But don’t expect to be thanked by her for it; and keep your eye on her; don’t let her get behind you. As for him, just give him a good one and go away. Never stay to get yourself into a street fight; for it’s low, and generally turns out badly for all parties. However, that’s only a bit of practical advice. It doesn’t alter the great principle that you should get an executive power. When you get that, you’ll have courage in you; and, what’s more, your courage will be of some use to you. For though you may have courage by nature, still, if you haven’t executive power as well, your courage will only lead you to stand up to be beaten by men that have both courage and executive power; and what good does that do you? People say that you’re a game fellow; but they won’t find the stakes for you unless you can win them. You’d far better put your game in your pocket, and throw up the sponge while you can see to do it.

“Now, on this subject of game, I’ve something to say that will ease the professor’s mind on a point that he seemed anxious about. I am no musician; but I’ll just show you how a man that understands one art understands every art. I made out from the gentleman’s remarks that there is a man in the musical line named Wagner, who is what you might call a game sort of composer; and that the musical fancy, though they can’t deny that his tunes are first-rate, and that, so to speak, he wins his fights, yet they try to make out that he wins them in an outlandish way, and that he has no real science. Now I tell the gentleman not to mind such talk. As I have just shown you, his game wouldn’t be any use to him without science. He might have beaten a few second-raters with a rush while he was young; but he wouldn’t have lasted out as he has done unless he was clever as well. You will find that those that run him down are either jealous, or they are old stagers that are not used to his style, and think that anything new must be bad. Just wait a bit, and, take my word for it, they’ll turn right round and swear that his style isn’t new at all, and that he stole it from some one they saw when they were ten years old. History shows us that that is the way of such fellows in all ages, as the gentleman said; and he gave you Beethoven as an example. But an example like that don’t go home to you, because there isn’t one man in a million that ever heard of Beethoven. Take a man that everybody has heard of — Jack Randall! The very same things were said of HIM. After that, you needn’t go to musicians for an example. The truth is, that there are people in the world with that degree of envy and malice in them that they can’t bear to allow a good man his merits; and when they have to admit that he can do one thing, they try to make out that there’s something else he can’t do. Come: I’ll put it to you short and business-like. This German gentleman, who knows all about music, tells you that many pretend that this Wagner has game but no science. Well, I, though I know nothing about music, will bet you twenty-five pounds that there’s others that allow him to be full of science, but say that he has no game, and that all he does comes from his head, and not from his heart. I will. I’ll bet twenty-five pounds on it, and let the gentleman of the house be stakeholder, and the German gentleman referee. Eh? Well, I’m glad to see that there are no takers.

“Now we’ll go to another little point that the gentleman forgot. He recommended you to LEARN — to make yourselves better and wiser from day to day. But he didn’t tell you why it is that you won’t learn, in spite of his advice. I suppose that, being a foreigner, he was afraid of hurting your feelings by talking too freely to you. But you’re not so thin-skinned as to take offence at a little plain-speaking, I’ll be bound; so I tell you straight out that the reason you won’t learn is not that you don’t want to be clever, or that you are lazier than many that have learned a great deal, but just because you’d like people to think that you know everything already — because you’re ashamed to be seen going to school; and you calculate that if you only hold your tongue and look wise you’ll get through life without your ignorance being found out. But where’s the good of lies and pretence? What does it matter if you get laughed at by a cheeky brat or two for your awkward beginnings? What’s the use of always thinking of how you’re looking, when your sense might tell you that other people are thinking about their own looks and not about yours? A big boy doesn’t look well on a lower form, certainly, but when he works his way up he’ll be glad he began. I speak to you more particularly because you’re Londoners; and Londoners beat all creation for thinking about themselves. However, I don’t go with the gentleman in everything he said. All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake; not because it isn’t a good thing to improve the world if you know how to do it, but because striving and struggling is the worst way you could set about doing anything. It gives a man a bad style, and weakens him. It shows that he don’t believe in himself much. When I heard the professor striving and struggling so earnestly to set you to work reforming this, that, and the other, I said to myself, ‘He’s got himself to persuade as well as his audience. That isn’t the language of conviction.’ Whose—”

“Really, sir,” said Lucian Webber, who had made his way to the table, “I think, as you have now addressed us at considerable length, and as there are other persons present whose opinions probably excite as much curiosity as yours—” He was interrupted by a, “Hear, hear,” followed by “No, no,” and “Go on,” uttered in more subdued tones than are customary at public meetings, but with more animation than is usually displayed in drawing-rooms. Cashel, who had been for a moment somewhat put out, turned to Lucian and said, in a tone intended to repress, but at the same time humor his impatience, “Don’t you be in a hurry, sir. You shall have your turn presently. Perhaps I may tell you something you don’t know, before I stop.” Then he turned again to the company, and resumed.

“We were talking about effort when this young gentleman took it upon himself to break the ring. Now, nothing can be what you might call artistically done if it’s done with an effort. If a thing can’t be done light and easy, steady and certain, let it not be done at all. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But I’ll tell you a stranger thing. The more effort you make, the less effect you produce. A WOULD-BE artist is no artist at all. I see that in my own profession (never mind what that profession is just at present, as the ladies might think the worse of me for it). But in all professions, any work that shows signs of labor, straining, yearning — as the German gentleman said — or effort of any kind, is work beyond the man’s strength that does it, and therefore not well done. Perhaps it’s beyond his natural strength; but it is more likely that he was badly taught. Many teachers set their pupils on to strain, and stretch, so that they get used up, body and mind, in a few months. Depend upon it, the same thing is true in other arts. I once taught a fiddler that used to get a hundred guineas for playing two or three tunes; and he told me that it was just the same thing with the fiddle — that when you laid a tight hold on your fiddle-stick, or even set your teeth hard together, you could do nothing but rasp like the fellows that play in bands for a few shillings a night.”

“How much more of this nonsense must we endure?” said Lucian, audibly, as Cashel stopped for breath. Cashel turned and looked at him.

“By Jove!” whispered Lord Worthington to his companion, “that fellow had better be careful. I wish he would hold his tongue.”

“You think it’s nonsense, do you?” said Cashel, after a pause. Then he raised one of the candles, and illuminated a picture that hung on the wall, “Look at that picture,” he said. “You see that fellow in armor — St. George and the dragon, or whatever he may be. He’s jumped down from his horse to fight the other fellow — that one with his head in a big helmet, whose horse has tumbled. The lady in the gallery is half crazy with anxiety for St. George; and well she may be. THERE’S a posture for a man to fight in! His weight isn’t resting on his legs; one touch of a child’s finger would upset him. Look at his neck craned out in front of him, and his face as flat as a full moon towards his man, as if he was inviting him to shut up both his eyes with one blow. You can all see that he’s as weak and nervous as a cat, and that he doesn’t know how to fight. And why does he give you that idea? Just because he’s all strain and stretch; because he isn’t at his ease; because he carries the weight of his body as foolishly as one of the ladies here would carry a hod of bricks; because he isn’t safe, steady, and light on his pins, as he would be if he could forget himself for a minute, and leave his body to find its proper balance of its own accord. If the painter of that picture had known his business he would never have sent his man up to the scratch in such a figure and condition as that. But you can see with one eye that he didn’t understand — I won’t say the principles of fighting, but the universal principles that I’ve told you of, that ease and strength, effort and weakness, go together. Now,” added Cashel, again addressing Lucian; “do you still think that notion of mine nonsense?” And he smacked his lips with satisfaction; for his criticism of the picture had produced a marked sensation, and he did not know that this was due to the fact that the painter, Mr. Adrian Herbert, was present.

Lucian tried to ignore the question; but he found it impossible to ignore the questioner. “Since you have set the example of expressing opinions without regard to considerations of common courtesy,” he said, shortly, “I may say that your theory, if it can be called one, is manifestly absurd.”

Cashel, apparently unruffled, but with more deliberation of manner than before, looked about him as if in search of a fresh illustration. His glance finally rested on the lecturer’s seat, a capacious crimson damask arm-chair that stood unoccupied at some distance behind Lucian.

“I see you’re no judge of a picture,” said he, good-humoredly, putting down the candle, and stepping in front of Lucian, who regarded him haughtily, and did not budge. “But just look at it in this way. Suppose you wanted to hit me the most punishing blow you possibly could. What would you do? Why, according to your own notion, you’d make a great effort. ‘The more effort the more force,’ you’d say to yourself. ‘I’ll smash him even if I burst myself in doing it.’ And what would happen then? You’d only cut me and make me angry, besides exhausting all your strength at one gasp. Whereas, if you took it easy — like this—” Here he made a light step forward and placed his open palm gently against the breast of Lncian, who instantly reeled back as if the piston-rod of a steam-engine had touched him, and dropped into the chair.

“There!” exclaimed Cashel, standing aside and pointing to him. “It’s like pocketing a billiard-ball!”

A chatter of surprise, amusement, and remonstrance spread through the rooms; and the company crowded towards the table. Lucian rose, white with rage, and for a moment entirely lost his self-control. Fortunately, the effect was to paralyze him; he neither moved nor spoke, and only betrayed his condition by his pallor and the hatred in his expression. Presently he felt a touch on his arm and heard his name pronounced by Lydia. Her voice calmed him. He tried to look at her, but his vision was disturbed; he saw double; the lights seemed to dunce before his eyes; and Lord Worthington’s voice, saying to Cashel, “Rather too practical, old fellow,” seemed to come from a remote corner of the room, and yet to be whispered into his ear. He was moving irresolutely in search of Lydia when his senses and his resentment were restored by a clap on the shoulder.

“You wouldn’t have believed that now, would you?” said Cashel. “Don’t look startled; you’ve no bones broken. You had your little joke with me in your own way; and I had mine in MY own way. That’s only—”

He stopped; his brave bearing vanished; he became limp and shamefaced. Lucian, without a word, withdrew with Lydia to the adjoining apartment, and left him staring after her with wistful eyes and slackened jaw.

In the meantime Mrs. Hoskyn, an earnest-looking young woman, with striking dark features and gold spectacles, was looking for Lord Worthington, who betrayed a consciousness of guilt by attempting to avoid her. But she cut off his retreat, and confronted him with a steadfast gaze that compelled him to stand and answer for himself.

“Who is that gentleman whom you introduced to me? I do not recollect his name.”

“I am really awfully sorry, Mrs. Hoskyn. It was too bad of Byron. But Webber was excessively nasty.”

Mrs. Hoskyn, additionally annoyed by apologies which she had not invited, and which put her in the ignominious position of a complainant, replied coldly, “Mr. Byron! Thank you; I had forgotten,” and was turning away when Lydia came up to introduce Alice, and to explain why she had entered unannounced. Lord Worthington then returned to the subject of Cashel, hoping to improve his credit by claiming Lydia’s acquaintance with him.

“Did you hear our friend Byron’s speech, Miss Carew? Very characteristic, I thought.”

“Very,” said Lydia. “I hope Mrs. Hoskyn’s guests are all familiar with his style. Otherwise they must find him a little startling.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hoskyn, beginning to wonder whether Cashel could be some well-known eccentric genius. “He is very odd. I hope Mr. Webber is not offended.”

“He is the less pleased as he was in the wrong,” said Lydia. “Intolerant refusal to listen to an opponent is a species of violence that has no business in such a representative nineteenth-century drawing-room as yours, Mrs. Hoskyn. There was a fitness in rebuking it by skilled physical violence. Consider the prodigious tact of it, too! One gentleman knocks another half-way across a crowded room, and yet no one is scandalized.”

“You see, Mrs. Hoskyn, the general verdict is ‘Served him right,’” said Lord Worthington.

“With a rider to the effect that both gentlemen displayed complete indifference to the comfort of their hostess,” said Lydia. “However, men so rarely sacrifice their manners to their minds that it would be a pity to blame them. You do not encourage conventionality, Mrs. Hoskyn?”

“I encourage good manners, though certainly not conventional manners.”

“And you think there is a difference?”

“I FEEL that there is a difference,” said Mrs. Hoskyn, with dignity.

“So do I,” said Lydia; “but one can hardly call others to account for one’s own subjective ideas.”

Lydia went away to another part of the room without waiting for a reply. Meanwhile, Cashel stood friendless in the middle of the room, stared at by most of his neighbors, and spoken to by none. Women looked at him coldly lest it should be suspected that they were admiring him; and men regarded him stiffly according to the national custom. Since his recognition of Lydia, his self-confidence had given place to a misgiving that he had been making a fool of himself. He began to feel lonely and abashed; and but for his professional habit of maintaining a cheerful countenance under adverse circumstances, he would have hid himself in the darkest corner of the room. He was getting sullen, and seeking consolation in thoughts of how terribly he could handle all these distantly-mannered, black-coated gentlemen if he chose, when Lord Worthington came up to him.

“I had no idea you were such an orator, Byron,” he said. “You can go into the Church when you cut the other trade. Eh?”

“I wasn’t brought up to the other trade,” said Cashel; “and I know how to talk to ladies and gentlemen as well as to what you’d suppose to be my own sort. Don’t you be anxious about me, my lord. I know how to make myself at home.”

“Of course, of course,” said Lord Worthington, soothingly. “Every one can see by your manners that you are a gentleman; they recognize that even in the ring. Otherwise — I know you will excuse my saying so — I daren’t have brought you here.”

Cashel shook his head, but was pleased. He thought he hated flattery; had Lord Worthington told him that he was the best boxer in England — which he probably was — he would have despised him. But he wished to believe the false compliment to his manners, and was therefore perfectly convinced of its sincerity. Lord Worthington perceived this, and retired, pleased with his own tact, in search of Mrs. Hoskyn, to claim her promise of an introduction to Madame Szczymplica, which Mrs. Hoskyn had, by way of punishing him for Cashel’s misdemeanor, privately determined not to redeem.

Cashel began to think he had better go. Lydia was surrounded by men who were speaking to her in German. He felt his own inability to talk learnedly even in English; and he had, besides, a conviction that she was angry with him for upsetting her cousin, who was gravely conversing with Miss Goff. Suddenly a horrible noise caused a general start and pause. Mr. Jack, the eminent composer, had opened the piano-forte, and was illustrating some points in a musical composition under discussion by making discordant sounds with his voice, accompanied by a few chords. Cashel laughed aloud in derision as he made his way towards the door through the crowd, which was now pressing round the pianoforte at which Madame Szczymplica had just come to the assistance of Jack. Near the door, and in a corner remote from the instrument, he came upon Lydia and a middle-aged gentleman, evidently neither a professor nor an artist.

“Ab’n’gas is a very clever man,” the gentleman was saying. “I am sorry I didn’t hear the lecture. But I leave all that to Mary. She receives the people who enjoy high art up-stairs; and I take the sensible men down to the garden or the smoking-room, according to the weather.”

“What do the sensible women do?” said Lydia.

“They come late,” said Mr. Hoskyn, and then laughed at his repartee until he became aware of the vicinity of Cashel, whose health he immediately inquired after, shaking his hand warmly and receiving a numbing grip in return. As soon as he saw that Lydia and Cashel were acquainted, he slipped away and left them to entertain one another.

“I wonder how he knows me,” said Cashel, heartened by her gracious reception of a nervous bow. “I never saw him before in my life.”

“He does not know you,” said Lydia, with some sternness. “He is your host, and therefore concludes that he ought to know you.”

“Oh! That was it, was it?” He paused, at a loss for conversation. She did not help him. At last he added, “I haven’t seen you this long time, Miss Carew.”

“It is not very long since I saw you, Mr. Cashel Byron. I saw you yesterday at some distance from London.”

“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Cashel, “don’t say that. You’re joking, ain’t you?”

“No. Joking, in that sense, does not amuse me.”

Cashel looked at her in consternation. “You don’t mean to say that you went to see a — a — Where — when did you see me? You might tell me.”

“Certainly. It was at Clapham Junction, at a quarter-past six.”

“Was any one with me?”

“Your friend, Mr. Mellish, Lord Worthington, and some other persons.”

“Yes. Lord Worthington was there. But where were you?”

“In a waiting-room, close to you.”

“I never saw you,” said Cashel, growing red as he recalled the scene. “We must have looked very queer. I had had an accident to my eye, and Mellish was not sober. Did you think I was in bad company?”

“That was not my business, Mr. Cashel Byron.”

“No,” said Cashel, with sudden bitterness. “What did YOU care what company I kept? You’re mad with me because I made your cousin look like a fool, I suppose. That’s what’s the matter.”

Lydia looked around to see that no one was within earshot, and, speaking in a low tone to remind him that they were not alone, said, “There is nothing the matter, except that you are a grown-up boy rather than a man. I am not mad with you because of your attack upon my cousin; but he is very much annoyed, and so is Mrs. Hoskyn, whose guest you were bound to respect.”

“I knew you’d be down on me. I wouldn’t have said a word if I’d known that you were here,” said Cashel, dejectedly. “Lie down and be walked over; that’s what you think I’m fit for. Another man would have twisted his head off.”

“Is it possible that you do not know that gentlemen never twist one another’s heads off in society, no matter how great may be the provocation?”

“I know nothing,” said Cashel with plaintive sullenness. “Everything I do is wrong. There. Will that satisfy you?”

Lydia looked up at him in doubt. Then, with steady patience, she added: “Will you answer me a question on your honor?”

He hesitated, fearing that she was going to ask what he was.

“The question is this,” she said, observing the hesitation. “Are you a simpleton, or a man of science pretending to be a simpleton for the sake of mocking me and my friends?”

“I am not mocking you; honor bright! All that about science was only a joke — at least, it’s not what you call science. I’m a real simpleton in drawing-room affairs; though I’m clever enough in my own line.”

“Then try to believe that I take no pleasure in making you confess yourself in the wrong, and that you cannot have a lower opinion of me than the contrary belief implies.”

“That’s just where you’re mistaken,” said Cashel, obstinately. “I haven’t got a low opinion of you at all. There’s such a thing as being too clever.”

“You may not know that it is a low opinion. Nevertheless, it is so.”

“Well, have it your own way. I’m wrong again; and you’re right.”

“So far from being gratified by that, I had rather that we were both in the right and agreed. Can you understand that?”

“I can’t say I do. But I give in to it. What more need you care for?”

“I had rather you understood. Let me try to explain. You think that I like to be cleverer than other people. You are mistaken. I should like them all to know whatever I know.”

Cashel laughed cunningly, and shook his head. “Don’t you make any mistake about that,” he said. “You don’t want anybody to be quite as clever as yourself; it isn’t in human nature that you should. You’d like people to be just clever enough to show you off — to be worth beating. But you wouldn’t like them to be able to beat you. Just clever enough to know how much cleverer you are; that’s about the mark. Eh?”

Lydia made no further effort to enlighten him. She looked at him thoughtfully, and said, slowly, “I begin to hold the clew to your idiosyncrasy. You have attached yourself to the modern doctrine of a struggle for existence, and look on life as a perpetual combat.”

“A fight? Just so. What is life but a fight? The curs forfeit or get beaten; the rogues sell the fight and lose the confidence of their backers; the game ones and the clever ones win the stakes, and have to hand over the lion’s share of them to the loafers; and luck plays the devil with them all in turn. That’s not the way they describe life in books; but that’s what it is.”

“Oddly put, but perhaps true. Still, is there any need of a struggle? Is not the world large enough for us all to live peacefully in?”

“YOU may think so, because you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But if you hadn’t to fight for that silver spoon, some one else had; and no doubt he thought it hard that it should be taken away from him and given to you. I was a snob myself once, and thought the world was made for me to enjoy myself and order about the poor fellows whose bread I was eating. But I was left one day where I couldn’t grab any more of their bread, and had to make some for myself — ay, and some extra for loafers that had the power to make me pay for what they didn’t own. That took the conceit out of me fast enough. But what do you know about such things?”

“More than you think, perhaps. These are dangerous ideas to take with you into English society.”

“Hmf!” growled Cashel. “They’d be more dangerous if I could give every man that is robbed of half what he earns twelve lessons — in science.”

“So you can. Publish your lessons. ‘Twelve lectures on political economy, by Cashel Byron.’ I will help you to publish them, if you wish.”

“Bless your innocence!” said Cashel: “the sort of political economy I teach can’t be learned from a book.”

“You have become an enigma again. But yours is not the creed of a simpleton. You are playing with me — revealing your wisdom from beneath a veil of infantile guilelessness. I have no more to say.”

“May I be shot if I understand you! I never pretended to be guileless. Come: is it because I raised a laugh against your cousin that you’re so spiteful?”

Lydia looked earnestly and doubtfully at him; and he instinctively put his head back, as if it were in danger. “You do not understand, then?” she said. “I will test the genuineness of your stupidity by an appeal to your obedience.”

“Stupidity! Go on.”

“But will you obey me, if I lay a command upon you?”

“I will go through fire and water for you.”

Lydia blushed faintly, and paused to wonder at the novel sensation before she resumed. “You had better not apologize to my cousin: partly because you would only make matters worse; chiefly because he does not deserve it. But you must make this speech to Mrs. Hoskyn when you are going: ‘I am very sorry I forgot myself’—”

“Sounds like Shakespeare, doesn’t it?” observed Cashel.

“Ah! the test has found you out; you are only acting after all. But that does not alter my opinion that you should apologize.”

“All right. I don’t know what you mean by testing and acting; and I only hope you know yourself. But no matter; I’ll apologize; a man like me can afford to. I’ll apologize to your cousin, too, if you like.”

“I do not like. But what has that to do with it? I suggest these things, as you must be aware, for your own sake and not for mine.”

“As for my own, I don’t care twopence: I do it all for you. I don’t even ask whether there is anything between you and him.”

“Would you like to know?” said Lydia, deliberately, after a pause of astonishment.

“Do you mean to say you’ll tell me?” he exclaimed. “If you do, I’ll say you’re as good as gold.”

“Certainly I will tell you. There is an old friendship and cousinship between us; but we are not engaged, nor at all likely to be. I tell you so because, if I avoided the question, you would draw the opposite and false conclusion.”

“I am glad of it,” said Cashel, unexpectedly becoming very gloomy. “He isn’t man enough for you. But he’s your equal, damn him!”

“He is my cousin, and, I believe, my sincere friend. Therefore please do not damn him.”

“I know I shouldn’t have said that. But I am only damning my own luck.”

“Which will not improve it in the least.”

“I know that. You needn’t have said it. I wouldn’t have said a thing like that to you, stupid as I am.”

“Evidently you suppose me to have meant more than I really did. However, that does not matter. You are still an enigma to me. Had we not better try to hear a little of Madame Szczymplica’s performance?”

“I’m a pretty plain enigma, I should think,” said Cashel, mournfully. “I would rather have you than any other woman in the world; but you’re too rich and grand for me. If I can’t have the satisfaction of marrying you, I may as well have the satisfaction of saying I’d like to.”

“Hardly a fair way of approaching the subject,” said Lydia, composedly, but with a play of color again in her cheeks. “Allow me to forbid it unconditionally. I must be plain with you, Mr. Cashel Byron. I do not know what you are or who you are; and I believe you have tried to mystify me on both points—”

“And you never shall find out either the one or the other, if I can help it,” put in Cashel; “so that we’re in a preciously bad way of coming to a good understanding.”

“True,” assented Lydia. “I do not make secrets; I do not keep them; and I do not respect them. Your humor clashes with my principle.”

“You call it a humor!” said Cashel, angrily. “Perhaps you think I am a duke in disguise. If so, you may think better of it. If you had a secret, the discovery of which would cause you to be kicked out of decent society, you would keep it pretty tight. And that through no fault of your own, mind you; but through downright cowardice and prejudice in other people.”

“There are at least some fears and prejudices common in society that I do not share,” said Lydia, after a moment’s reflection. “Should I ever find out your secret, do not too hastily conclude that you have forfeited my consideration.”

“You are just the last person on earth by whom I want to be found out. But you’ll find out fast enough. Pshaw!” cried Cashel, with a laugh, “I’m as well known as Trafalgar Square. But I can’t bring myself to tell you; and I hate secrets as much as you do; so let’s drop it and talk about something else.”

“We have talked long enough. The music is over, and the people will return to this room presently, perhaps to ask me who and what is the stranger who made them such a remarkable speech.”

“Just a word. Promise me that you won’t ask any of THEM that.”

“Promise you! No. I cannot promise that.”

“Oh, Lord!” said Cashel, with a groan.

“I have told you that I do not respect secrets. For the present I will not ask; but I may change my mind. Meanwhile we must not hold long conversations. I even hope that we shall not meet. There is only one thing that I am too rich and grand for. That one thing — mystification. Adieu.”

Before he could reply she was away from him in the midst of a number of gentlemen, and in conversation with one of them. Cashel seemed overwhelmed. But in an instant he recovered himself, and stepped jauntily before Mrs. Hoskyn, who had just come into his neighborhood.

“I’m going, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you for a pleasant evening — I’m very sorry I forgot myself. Good-night.”

Mrs. Hoskyn, naturally frank, felt some vague response within herself to this address. But, though not usually at a loss for words in social emergencies, she only looked at him, blushed slightly, and offered her hand. He took it as if it were a tiny baby’s hand and he afraid of hurting it, gave it a little pinch, and turned to go. Mr. Adrian Herbert, the painter, was directly in his way, with his back towards him.

“If YOU please, sir,” said Cashel, taking him gently by the ribs, and moving him aside. The artist turned indignantly, but Cashel was passing the doorway. On the stairs he met Lucian and Alice, and stopped a moment to take leave of them.

“Good-night, Miss Goff,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see the country roses in your cheeks.” He lowered his voice as he added, to Lucian, “Don’t you worry yourself over that little trick I showed you. If any of your friends chafe you about it, tell them that it was Cashel Byron did it, and ask them whether they think they could have helped themselves any better than you could. Don’t ever let a person come within distance of you while you’re standing in that silly way on both your heels. Why, if a man isn’t properly planted on his pins, a broom-handle falling against him will upset him. That’s the way of it. Good-night.”

Lucian returned the salutation, mastered by a certain latent dangerousness in Cashel, suggestive that he might resent a snub by throwing the offender over the balustrade. As for Alice, she had entertained a superstitious dread of him ever since Lydia had pronounced him a ruffian. Both felt relieved when the house door, closing, shut them out of his reach.

CHAPTER VII

Society was much occupied during Alice’s first season in London with the upshot of an historical event of a common kind. England, a few years before, had stolen a kingdom from a considerable people in Africa, and seized the person of its king. The conquest proved useless, troublesome, and expensive; and after repeated attempts to settle the country on impracticable plans suggested to the Colonial Office by a popular historian who had made a trip to Africa, and by generals who were tired of the primitive remedy of killing the natives, it appeared that the best course was to release the captive king and get rid of the unprofitable booty by restoring it to him. In order, however, that the impression made on him by England’s short-sighted disregard of her neighbor’s landmark abroad might be counteracted by a glimpse of the vastness of her armaments and wealth at home, it was thought advisable to take him first to London, and show him the wonders of the town. But when the king arrived, his freedom from English prepossessions made it difficult to amuse, or even to impress him. A stranger to the idea that a private man could own a portion of the earth and make others pay him for permission to live on it, he was unable to understand why such a prodigiously wealthy nation should be composed partly of poor and uncomfortable persons toiling incessantly to create riches, and partly of a class that confiscated and dissipated the wealth thus produced without seeming to be at all happier than the unfortunate laborers at whose expense they existed. He was seized with strange fears, first for his health, for it seemed to him that the air of London, filthy with smoke, engendered puniness and dishonesty in those who breathed it; and eventually for his life, when he learned that kings in Europe were sometimes shot at by passers-by, there being hardly a monarch there who had not been so imperilled more than once; that the Queen of England, though accounted the safest of all, was accustomed to this variety of pistol practice; and that the autocrat of an empire huge beyond all other European countries, whose father had been torn asunder in the streets of his capital, lived surrounded by soldiers who shot down all strangers that approached him even at his own summons, and was an object of compassion to the humblest of his servants. Under these circumstances, the African king was with difficulty induced to stir out of doors; and he only visited Woolwich Arsenal — the destructive resources of which were expected to influence his future behavior in a manner favorable to English supremacy — under compulsion. At last the Colonial Office, which had charge of him, was at its wit’s end to devise entertainments to keep him in good-humor until the appointed time for his departure.

On the Tuesday following Mrs. Hoskyn’s reception, Lucian Webber called at his cousin’s house in Regent’s Park, and said, in the course of a conversation with the two ladies there,

“The Colonial Office has had an idea. The king, it appears, is something of an athlete, and is curious to witness what Londoners can do in that way. So a grand assault-at-arms is to be held for him.”

“What is an assault-at-arms?” said Lydia. “I have never been at one; and the name suggests nothing but an affray with bayonets.”

“It is an exhibition of swordsmanship, military drill, gymnastics, and so forth.”

“I will go to that,” said Lydia. “Will you come, Alice?”

“Is it usual for ladies to go to such exhibitions?” said Alice, cautiously.

“On this occasion ladies will go for the sake of seeing the king,” said Lucian. “The Olympian gymnastic society, which has undertaken the direction of the part of the assault that is to show off the prowess of our civilians, expects what they call a flower-show audience.”

“Will you come, Lucian?”

“If I can be spared, yes. If not, I will ask Worthington to go with you. He understands such matters better than I.”

“Then let us have him, by all means,” said Lydia.

“I cannot see why you are so fond of Lord Worthington,” said Alice. “His manners are good; but there is nothing in him. Besides, he is so young. I cannot endure his conversation. He has begun to talk about Goodwood already.”

“He will grow out of his excessive addiction to sport,” said Lucian.

“Indeed,” said Lydia. “And what will he grow into?”

“Possibly into a more reasonable man,” said Lucian, gravely.

“I hope so,” said Lydia; “but I prefer a man who is interested in sport to a gentleman who is interested in nothing.”

“Much might indubitably be said from that point of view. But it is not necessary that Lord Worthington should waste his energy on horse-racing. I presume you do not think political life, for which his position peculiarly fits him, unworthy his attention.”

“Party tactics are both exciting and amusing, no doubt. But are they better than horse-racing? Jockeys and horse-breakers at least know their business; our legislators do not. Is it pleasant to sit on a bench — even though it be the treasury bench — and listen to either absolute nonsense or childish disputes about conclusions that were foregone in the minds of all sensible men a hundred years ago?”

“You do not understand the duties of a government, Lydia. You never approach the subject without confirming my opinion that women are constitutionally incapable of comprehending it.”

“It is natural for you to think so, Lucian. The House of Commons is to you the goal of existence. To me it is only an assemblage of ill-informed gentlemen who have botched every business they have ever undertaken, from the first committee of supply down to the last land act; and who arrogantly assert that I am not good enough to sit with them.”

“Lydia,” said Lucian, annoyed; “you know that I respect women in their own sphere—”

“Then give them another sphere, and perhaps they will earn your respect in that also. I am sorry to say that men, in THEIR sphere, have not won my respect. Enough of that for the present. I have to make some domestic arrangements, which are of more immediate importance than the conversion of a good politician into a bad philosopher. Excuse me for five minutes.”

She left the room. Lucian sat down and gave his attention to Alice, who had still enough of her old nervousness to make her straighten her shoulders and look stately. But he did not object to this; a little stiffness of manner gratified his taste.

“I hope,” he said, “that my cousin has not succeeded in inducing you to adopt her peculiar views.”

“No,” said Alice. “Of course her case is quite exceptional — she is so wonderfully accomplished. In general, I do not think women should have views. There are certain convictions which every lady holds: for instance, we know that Roman Catholicism is wrong. But that can hardly be called a view; indeed it would be wicked to call it so, as it is one of the highest truths. What I mean is that women should not be political agitators.”

“I understand, and quite agree with you. Lydia is, as you say, an exceptional case. She has lived much abroad; and her father was a very singular man. Even the clearest heads, when removed from the direct influence of English life and thought, contract extraordinary prejudices. Her father at one time actually attempted to leave a large farm to the government in trust for the people; but fortunately he found that it was impossible; no such demise was known to the English law or practicable by it. He subsequently admitted the folly of this by securing Lydia’s rights as his successor as stringently as he could. It is almost a pity that such strength of mind and extent of knowledge should be fortified by the dangerous independence which great wealth confers. Advantages like these bring with them certain duties to the class that has produced them — duties to which Lydia is not merely indifferent, but absolutely hostile.”

“I never meddle with her ideas on — on these subjects. I am too ignorant to understand them. But Miss Carew’s generosity to me has been unparalleled. And she does not seem to know that she is generous. I owe more to her than I ever can repay. At least,” Alice added, to herself, “I am not ungrateful.”

Miss Carew now reappeared, dressed in a long, gray coat and plain beaver hat, and carrying a roll of writing materials.

“I am going to the British Museum to read,” said she.

“To walk! — alone!” said Lucian, looking at her costume.

“Yes. Prevent me from walking, and you deprive me of my health. Prevent me from going alone where I please and when I please, and you deprive me of my liberty — tear up Magna Charta, in effect. But I do not insist upon being alone in this instance. If you can return to your office by way of Regent’s Park and Gower Street without losing too much time, I shall be glad of your company.”

Lucian decorously suppressed his eagerness to comply by looking at his watch and pretending to consider his engagements. In conclusion, he said that he should be happy to accompany her.

It was a fine summer afternoon, and there were many people in the park. Lucian was soon incommoded by the attention his cousin attracted. In spite of the black beaver, her hair shone like fire in the sun. Women stared at her with unsympathetic curiosity, and turned as they passed to examine her attire. Men resorted to various subterfuges to get a satisfactory look without rudely betraying their intention. A few stupid youths gaped; and a few impudent ones smiled. Lucian would gladly have kicked them all, without distinction. He at last suggested that they should leave the path, and make a short cut across the green-sward. As they emerged from the shade of the trees he had a vague impression that the fineness of the weather and the beauty of the park made the occasion romantic, and that the words by which he hoped to make the relation between him and his cousin dearer and closer would be well spoken there. But he immediately began to talk, in spite of himself, about the cost of maintaining the public parks, of the particulars of which he happened to have some official knowledge. Lydia, readily interested by facts of any sort, thought the subject not a bad one for a casual afternoon conversation, and pursued it until they left the turf and got into the Euston Road, where the bustle of traffic silenced them for a while. When they escaped from the din into the respectable quietude of Gower Street, he suddenly said,

“It is one of the evils of great wealth in the hands of a woman, that she can hardly feel sure—” His ideas fled suddenly. He stopped; but he kept his countenance so well that he had the air of having made a finished speech, and being perfectly satisfied with it.

“Do you mean that she can never feel sure of the justice of her title to her riches? That used to trouble me; but it no longer does so.”

“Nonsense!” said Lucian. “I alluded to the disinterestedness of your friends.”

“That does not trouble me either. Absolutely disinterested friends I do not seek, as I should only find them among idiots or somnambulists. As to those whose interests are base, they do not know how to conceal their motives from me. For the rest, I am not so unreasonable as to object to a fair account being taken of my wealth in estimating the value of my friendship.”

“Do you not believe in the existence of persons who would like you just as well if you were poor?”

“Such persons would, merely to bring me nearer to themselves, wish me to become poor; for which I should not thank them. I set great store by the esteem my riches command, Lucian. It is the only set-off I have against the envy they inspire.”

“Then you would refuse to believe in the disinterestedness of any man who — who—”

“Who wanted to marry me? On the contrary: I should be the last person to believe that a man could prefer my money to myself. If he wore independent, and in a fair way to keep his place in the world without my help, I should despise him if he hesitated to approach me for fear of misconstruction. I do not think a man is ever thoroughly honest until he is superior to that fear. But if he had no profession, no money, and no aim except to live at my expense, then I should regard him as an adventurer, and treat him as one — unless I fell in love with him.”

“Unless you fell in love with him!”

“That — assuming that such things really happen — would make a difference in my feeling, but none in my conduct. I would not marry an adventurer under any circumstances. I could cure myself of a misdirected passion, but not of a bad husband.”

Lucian said nothing; he walked on with long, irregular steps, lowering at the pavement as if it were a difficult problem, and occasionally thrusting at it with his stick. At last he looked up, and said,

“Would you mind prolonging your walk a little by going round Bedford Square with me? I have something particular to say.”

She turned and complied without a word; and they had traversed one side of the square before he spoke again, in these terms:

“On second thoughts, Lydia, this is neither the proper time nor place for an important communication. Excuse me for having taken you out of your way for nothing.”

“I do not like this, Lucian. Important communications — in this case — corrupt good manners. If your intended speech is a sensible one, the present is as good a time, and Bedford Square as good a place, as you are likely to find for it. If it is otherwise, confess that you have decided to leave it unsaid. But do not postpone it. Reticence is always an error — even on the treasury bench. It is doubly erroneous in dealing with me; for I have a constitutional antipathy to it.”

“Yes,” he said, hurriedly; “but give me one moment — until the policeman has passed.”

The policeman went leisurely by, striking the flags with his heels, and slapping his palm with a white glove.

“The fact is, Lydia, that — I feel great difficulty—”

“What is the matter?” said Lydia, after waiting in vain for further particulars. “You have broken down twice in a speech.” There was a pause. Then she looked at him quickly, and added, incredulously, “Are you going to get married? Is that the secret that ties your practised tongue?”

“Not unless you take part in the ceremony.”

“Very gallant; and in a vein of humor that is new in my experience of you. But what have you to tell me, Lucian? Frankly, your hesitation is becoming ridiculous.”

“You have certainly not made matters easier for me, Lydia. Perhaps you have a womanly intuition of my purpose, and are intentionally discouraging me.”

“Not the least. I am not good at speculations of that sort. On my word, if you do not confess quickly, I will hurry away to the museum.”

“I cannot find a suitable form of expression,” said Lucian, in painful perplexity. “I am sure you will not attribute any sordid motive to my — well, to my addresses, though the term seems absurd. I am too well aware that there is little, from the usual point of view, to tempt you to unite yourself to me. Still—”

A rapid change in Lydia’s face showed him that he had said enough. “I had not thought of this,” she said, after a silence that seemed long to him. “Our observations are so meaningless until we are given the thread to string them on! You must think better of this, Lucian. The relation that at present exists between us is the very best that our different characters will admit of. Why do you desire to alter it?”

“Because I would make it closer and more permanent. I do not wish to alter it otherwise.”

“You would run some risk of simply destroying it by the method you propose,” said Lydia, with composure. “We could not co-operate. There are differences of opinion between us amounting to differences of principle.”

“Surely you are not serious. Your political opinions, or notions, are not represented by any party in England; and therefore they are practically ineffective, and could not clash with mine. And such differences are not personal matters.”

“Such a party might be formed a week after our marriage — will, I think, be formed a long time before our deaths. In that case I fear that our difference of opinion would become a very personal matter.”

He began to walk more quickly as he replied, “It is too absurd to set up what you call your opinions as a serious barrier between us. You have no opinions, Lydia. The impracticable crotchets you are fond of airing are not recognized in England as sane political convictions.”

Lydia did not retort. She waited a minute in pensive silence, and then said,

“Why do you not marry Alice Goff?”

“Oh, hang Alice Goff!”

“It is so easy to come at the man beneath the veneer by expertly chipping at his feelings,” said Lydia, laughing. “But I was serious, Lucian. Alice is energetic, ambitious, and stubbornly upright in questions of principle. I believe she would assist you steadily at every step of your career. Besides, she has physical robustness. Our student-stock needs an infusion of that.”

“Many thanks for the suggestion; but I do not happen to want to marry Miss Goff.”

“I invite you to consider it. You have not had time yet to form any new plans.”

“New plans! Then you absolutely refuse me — without a moment’s consideration?”

“Absolutely, Lucian. Does not your instinct warn you that it would be a mistake for you to marry me?”

“No; I cannot say that it does.”

“Then trust to mine, which gives forth no uncertain note on this question, as your favorite newspapers are fond of saying.”

“It is a question of feeling,” he said, in a constrained voice.

“Is it?” she replied, with interest. “You have surprised me somewhat, Lucian. I have never observed any of the extravagances of a lover in your conduct.”

“And you have surprised me very unpleasantly, Lydia. I do not think now that I ever had much hope of success; but I thought, at least, that my disillusion would be gently accomplished.”

“What! Have I been harsh?”

“I do not complain.”

“I was unlucky, Lucian; not malicious. Besides, the artifices by which friends endeavor to spare one another’s feelings are pretty disloyalties. I am frank with you. Would you have me otherwise?”

“Of course not. I have no right to be offended.”

“Not the least. Now add to that formal admission a sincere assurance that you ARE not offended.”

“I assure you I am not,” said Lucian, with melancholy resignation.

They had by this time reached Charlotte Street, and Lydia tacitly concluded the conference by turning towards the museum, and beginning to talk upon indifferent subjects. At the corner of Russell Street he got into a cab and drove away, dejectedly acknowledging a smile and wave of the hand with which Lydia tried to console him. She then went to the national library, where she forgot Lucian. The effect of the shock of his proposal was in store for her, but as yet she did not feel it; and she worked steadily until the library was closed and she had to leave. As she had been sitting for some hours, and it was still light, she did not take a cab, and did not even walk straight home. She had heard of a bookseller in Soho who had for sale a certain scarce volume which she wanted; and it occurred to her that the present was a good opportunity to go in search of him. Now, there was hardly a capital in western Europe that she did not know better than London. She had an impression that Soho was a region of quiet streets and squares, like Bloomsbury. Her mistake soon became apparent; but she felt no uneasiness in the narrow thoroughfares, for she was free from the common prejudice of her class that poor people are necessarily ferocious, though she often wondered why they were not so. She got as far as Great Pulteney Street in safety; but in leaving it she took a wrong turning and lost herself in a labyrinth of courts where a few workmen, a great many workmen’s wives and mothers, and innumerable workmen’s children were passing the summer evening at gossip and play. She explained her predicament to one of the women, who sent a little boy wilh her to guide her. Business being over for the day, the street to which the boy led her was almost deserted. The only shop that seemed to be thriving was a public-house, outside which a few roughs were tossing for pence.

Lydia’s guide, having pointed out her way to her, prepared to return to his playmates. She thanked him, and gave him the smallest coin in her purse, which happened to be a shilling. He, in a transport at possessing what was to him a fortune, uttered a piercing yell, and darted off to show the coin to a covey of small ragamuffins who had just raced into view round the corner at which the public-house stood. In his haste he dashed against one of the group outside, a powerfully built young man, who turned and cursed him. The boy retorted passionately, and then, overcome by pain, began to cry. When Lydia came up the child stood whimpering directly in her path; and she, pitying him, patted him on the head and reminded him of all the money he had to spend. He seemed comforted, and scraped his eyes with his knuckles in silence; but the man, who, having received a sharp kick on the ankle, was stung by Lydia’s injustice in according to the aggressor the sympathy due to himself, walked threateningly up to her and demanded, with a startling oath, whether HE had offered to do anything to the boy. And, as he refrained from applying any epithet to her, he honestly believed that in deference to Lydia’s sex and personal charms, he had expressed himself with studied moderation. She, not appreciating his forbearance, recoiled, and stepped into the roadway in order to pass him. Indignant at this attempt to ignore him, he again placed himself in her path, and was repeating his question with increased sternness, when a jerk in the pit of his stomach caused him a severe internal qualm, besides disturbing his equilibrium so rudely that he narrowly escaped a fall against the curb-stone. When he recovered himself he saw before him a showily dressed young man, who accosted him thus:

“Is that the way to talk to a lady, eh? Isn’t the street wide enough for two? Where’s your manners?”

“And who are you; and where are you shoving your elbow to?” said the man, with a surpassing imprecation.

“Come, come,” said Cashel Byron, admonitorily. “You’d better keep your mouth clean if you wish to keep your teeth inside it. Never you mind who I am.”

Lydia, foreseeing an altercation, and alarmed by the threatening aspect of the man, attempted to hurry away and send a policeman to Cashel’s assistance. But, on turning, she discovered that a crowd had already gathered, and that she was in the novel position of a spectator in the inner ring at what promised to be a street fight. Her attention was recalled to the disputants by a violent demonstration on the part of her late assailant. Cashel seemed alarmed; for he hastily retreated a step without regard to the toes of those behind him, and exclaimed, waving the other off with his open hand,

“Now, you just let me alone. I don’t want to have anything to say to you. Go away from me, I tell you.”

“You don’t want to have nothink to say to me! Oh! And for why? Because you ain’t man enough; that’s why. Wot do you mean by coming and shoving your elbow into a man’s bread-basket for, and then wanting to sneak off? Did you think I’d ‘a’ bin frightened of your velvet coat?”

“Very well,” said Cashel, pacifically; “we’ll say that I’m not man enough for you. So that’s settled. Are you satisfied?”

But the other, greatly emboldened, declared with many oaths that he would have Cashel’s heart out, and also that of Lydia, to whom he alluded in coarse terms. The crowd cheered, and called upon him to “go it.” Cashel then said, sullenly,

“Very well. But don’t you try to make out afterwards that I forced a quarrel on you. And now,” he added, with a grim change of tone that made Lydia shudder, and shifted her fears to the account of his antagonist, “I’ll make you wish you’d bit your tongue out before you said what you did a moment ago. So, take care of yourself.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of myself,” said the man, defiantly. “Put up your hands.”

Cashel surveyed his antagonist’s attitude with unmistakable disparagement. “You will know when my hands are up by the feel of the pavement,” he said, at last. “Better keep your coat on. You’ll fall softer.”

The rough expressed his repudiation of this counsel by beginning to strip energetically. A thrill of delight passed through the crowd. Those who had bad places pressed forward, and those who formed the inner ring pressed back to make room for the combatants. Lydia, who occupied a coveted position close to Cashel, hoped to be hustled out of the throng; for she was beginning to feel faint and ill. But a handsome butcher, who had made his way to her side, gallantly swore that she should not be deprived of her place in the front row, and bade her not be frightened, assuring her that he would protect her, and that the fight would be well worth seeing. As he spoke, the mass of faces before Lydia seemed to give a sudden lurch. To save herself from falling, she slipped her arm through the butcher’s; and he, much gratified, tucked her close to him, and held her up effectually. His support was welcome, because it was needed.

Meanwhile, Cashel stood motionless, watching with unrelenting contempt the movements of his adversary, who rolled up his discolored shirt-sleeves amid encouraging cries of “Go it, Teddy,” “Give it ‘im, Ted,” and other more precise suggestions. But Teddy’s spirit was chilled; he advanced with a presentiment that he was courting destruction. He dared not rush on his foe, whose eye seemed to discern his impotence. When at last he ventured to strike, the blow fell short, as Cashel evidently knew it would; for he did not stir. There was a laugh and a murmur of impatience in the crowd.

“Are you waiting for the copper to come and separate you?” shouted the butcher. “Come out of your corner and get to work, can’t you?”

This reminder that the police might balk him of his prey seemed to move Cashel. He took a step forward. The excitement of the crowd rose to a climax; and a little man near Lydia cut a frenzied caper and screamed, “Go it, Cashel Byron.”

At these words Teddy was terror-stricken. He made no attempt to disguise his condition. “It ain’t fair,” he exclaimed, retreating as far as the crowd would permit him. “I give in. Cut it, master; you’re too clever for me.” But his comrades, with a pitiless jeer, pushed him towards Cashel, who advanced remorselessly. Teddy dropped on both knees. “Wot can a man say more than that he’s had enough?” he pleaded. “Be a Englishman, master; and don’t hit a man when he’s down.”

“Down!” said Cashel. “How long will you stay down if I choose to have you up?” And, suiting the action to the word, he seized Teddy with his left hand, lifted him to his feet, threw him into a helpless position across his knee, and poised his right fist like a hammer over his upturned face. “Now,” he said, “you’re not down. What have you to say for yourself before I knock your face down your throat?”

“Don’t do it, gov’nor,” gasped Teddy. “I didn’t mean no harm. How was I to know that the young lady was a pal o’ yourn?” Here he struggled a little; and his face assumed a darker hue. “Let go, master,” he cried, almost inarticulately. “You’re ch — choking me.”

“Pray let him go,” said Lydia, disengaging herself from the butcher and catching Cashel’s arm.

Cashel, with a start, relaxed his grasp; and Teddy rolled on the ground. He went away thrusting his hands iuto his sleeves, and out-facing his disgrace by a callous grin. Cashel, without speaking, offered Lydia his arm; and she, seeing that her best course was to get away from that place with as few words as possible, accepted it, and then turned and thanked the butcher, who blushed and became speechless. The little man whose exclamation had interrupted the combat, now waved his hat, and cried,

“The British Lion forever! Three cheers for Cashel Byron.”

Cashel turned upon him curtly, and said, “Don’t you make so free with other people’s names, or perhaps you may get into trouble yourself.”

The little man retreated hastily; but the crowd responded with three cheers as Cashel, with Lydia on his arm, withdrew through a lane of disreputable-looking girls, roughs of Teddy’s class, white-aproned shopmen who had left their counters to see the fight, and a few pale clerks, who looked with awe at the prize-fighter, and with wonder at the refined appearance of his companion. The two were followed by a double file of boys, who, with their eyes fixed earnestly on Cashel, walked on the footways while he conducted Lydia down the middle of the narrow street. Not one of them turned a somersault or uttered a shout. Intent on their hero, they pattered along, coming into collision with every object that lay in their path. At last Cashel stopped. They instantly stopped too. He took some bronze coin from his pocket, rattled it in his hand, and addressed them.

“Boys!” Dead silence. “Do you know what I have to do to keep up my strength?” The hitherto steadfast eyes wandered uneasily. “I have to eat a little boy for supper every night, the last thing before to bed. Now, I haven’t quite made up my mind which of you would be the most to my taste; but if one of you comes a step further, I’ll eat HIM. So, away with you.” And he jerked the coin to a considerable distance. There was a yell and a scramble; and Cashel and Lydia pursued their way unattended.

Lydia had taken advantage of the dispersion of the boys to detach herself from Cashel’s arm. She now said, speaking to him for the first time since she had interceded for Teddy,

“I am sorry to have given you so much trouble, Mr. Cashel Byron. Thank you for interfering to protect me; but I was in no real danger. I would gladly have borne with a few rough words for the sake of avoiding a disturbance.”

“There!” cried Cashel. “I knew it. You’d a deal rather I had minded my own business and not interfered. You’re sorry for the poor fellow I treated so badly; ain’t you now? That’s a woman all over.”

“I have not said one of these things.”

“Well, I don’t see what else you mean. It’s no pleasure to me to fight chance men in the streets for nothing: I don’t get my living that way. And now that I have done it for your sake, you as good as tell me I ought to have kept myself quiet.”

“Perhaps I am wrong. I hardly understand what passed. You seemed to drop from the clouds.”

“Aha! You were glad when you found me at your elbow, in spite of your talk. Come now; weren’t you glad to see me?”

“I was — very glad indeed. But by what magic did you so suddenly subdue that man? And was it necessary to sully your hands by throttling him?”

“It was a satisfaction to me; and it served him right.”

“Surely a very poor satisfaction! Did you notice that some one in the crowd called out your name, and that it seemed to frighten the man terribly?”

“Indeed? Odd, wasn’t it? But you were saying that you thought I dropped from the sky. Why, I had been following you for five minutes before! What do you think of that? If I may take the liberty of asking, how did you come to be walking round Soho at such an hour with a little ragged boy?”

Lydia explained. When she finished, it was nearly dark, and they had reached Oxford Street, where, like Lucian in Regent’s Park that afternoon, she became conscious that her companion was an object of curiosity to many of the young men who were lounging in that thoroughfare.

“Alice will think that I am lost,” she said, making a signal to a cabman. “Good-bye; and many thanks. I am always at home on Fridays, and shall be very happy to see you.”

She handed him a card. He took it, read it, looked at the back to see if there was anything written there, and then said, dubiously,

“I suppose there will be a lot of people.”

“Yes; you will meet plenty of people.”

“Hm! I wish you’d let me see you home now. I won’t ask to go any further than the gate.”

Lydia laughed. “You should be very welcome,” she said; “but I am quite safe, thank you. I need not trouble you.”

“But suppose the cabman bullies you for double fare,” persisted Cashel. “I have business up in Finchley; and your place is right in any way there. Upon my soul I have,” he added, suspecting that she doubted him. “I go every Tuesday evening to the St. John’s Wood Cestus Club.”

“I am hungry and in a hurry to got home,” said Lydia. “‘I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’ Come if you will; but in any case let us go at once.”

She got into the cab, and Cashel followed, making some remark which she did not quite catch about its being too dark for any one to recognize him. They spoke little during the drive, which was soon over. Bashville was standing at the open door as they came to the house. When Cashel got out the footman looked at him with interest and some surprise, But when Lydia alighted he was so startled that he stood open-mouthed, although he was trained to simulate insensibility to everything except his own business, and to do that as automatically as possible. Cashel bade Lydia good-bye, and shook hands with her. As she went into the house, she asked Bashville whether Miss Goff was within. To her surprise, he paid no attention to her, but stared after the retreating cab. She repeated the question.

“Madam,” he said, recovering himself with a start, “she has asked for you four times.”

Lydia, relieved of a disagreeable suspicion that her usually faultless footman must be drunk, thanked him and went up-stairs.

CHAPTER VIII

One morning a handsome young man, elegantly dressed, presented himself at Downing Street, and asked to see Mr. Lucian Webber. He declined to send in a card, and desired to be announced simply as “Bashville.” Lucian ordered him to be admitted at once, and, when he entered, nodded amiably to him and invited him to sit down.

“I thank you, sir,” said Bashville, seating himself. It struck Lucian then, from a certain strung-up resolution in his visitor’s manner, that he had come on some business of his own, and not, as he had taken for granted, with a message from his mistress.

“I have come, sir, on my own responsibility this morning. I hope you will excuse the liberty.”

“Certainly. If I can do anything for you, Bashville, don’t be afraid to ask. But be as brief as you can. I am so busy that every second I give you will probably be subtracted from my night’s rest. Will ten minutes be enough?”

“More than enough, sir, thank you. I only wish to ask one question. I own that I am stepping out of my place to ask it; but I’ll risk all that. Does Miss Carew know what the Mr. Cashel Byron is that she receives every Friday with her other friends?”

“No doubt she does,” said Lucian, at once becoming cold in his manner, and looking severely at Bashville. “What business is that of yours?”

“Do YOU know what he is, sir?” said Bashville, returning Lucian’s gaze steadily.

Lucian changed countenance, and replaced a pen that had slipped from a rack on his desk. “He is not an acquaintance of mine,” he said. “I only know him as a friend of Lord Worthington’s.”

“Sir,” said Bashville, with sudden vehemence, “he is no more to Lord Worthington than the racehorse his lordship bets on. I might as well set up to be a friend of his lordship because I, after a manner of speaking, know him. Byron is in the ring, sir. A common prize-fighter!”

Lucian, recalling what had passed at Mrs. Hoskyn’s, and Lord Worthington’s sporting habits, believed the assertion at once. But he made a faint effort to resist conviction. “Are you sure of this, Bashville?” he said. “Do you know that your statement is a very serious one?”

“There is no doubt at all about it, sir. Go to any sporting public-house in London and ask who is the best-known fighting man of the day, and they’ll tell you, Cashel Byron. I know all about him, sir. Perhaps you have heard tell of Ned Skene, who was champion, belike, when you were at school.”

“I believe I have heard the name.”

“Just so, sir. Ned Skene picked up this Cashel Byron in the streets of Melbourne, where he was a common sailor-boy, and trained him for the ring. You may have seen his name in the papers, sir. The sporting ones are full of him; and he was mentioned in the Times a month ago.”

“I never read articles on such subjects. I have hardly time to glance through the ones that concern me.”

“That’s the way it is with everybody, sir. Miss Carew never thinks of reading the sporting intelligence in the papers; and so he passes himself off on her for her equal. He’s well known for his wish to be thought a gentleman, sir, I assure you.”

“I have noticed his manner as being odd, certainly.”

“Odd, sir! Why, a child might see through him; for he has not the sense to keep his own secret. Last Friday he was in the library, and he got looking at the new biographical dictionary that Miss Carew contributed the article on Spinoza to. And what do you think he said, sir? ‘This is a blessed book,’ he says. ‘Here’s ten pages about Napoleon Bonaparte, and not one about Jack Randall; as if one fighting man wasn’t as good as another!’ I knew by the way the mistress took up that saying, and drew him out, so to speak, on the subject, that she didn’t know who she had in her house; and then I determined to tell you, sir. I hope you won’t think that I come here behind his back out of malice against him. All I want is fair play. If I passed myself off on Miss Carew as a gentleman, I should deserve to be exposed as a cheat; and when he tries to take advantages that don’t belong to him, I think I have a right to expose him.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said Lucian, who cared nothing for Bashville’s motives. “I suppose this Byron is a dangerous man to have any personal unpleasantness with.”

“He knows his business, sir. I am a better judge of wrestling than half of these London professionals; but I never saw the man that could put a hug on him. Simple as he is, sir, he has a genius for fighting, and has beaten men of all sizes, weights, and colors. There’s a new man from the black country, named Paradise, who says he’ll beat him; but I won’t believe it till I see it.”

“Well,” said Lucian, rising, “I am much indebted to you, Bashville, for your information; and I will take care to let Miss Carew know how you have—”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Bashville; “but, if you please, no. I did not come to recommend myself at the cost of another man; and perhaps Miss Carew might not think it any great recommendation neither.” Lucian looked quickly at him, and seemed about to speak, but checked himself. Bashville continued, “If he denies it, you may call me as a witness, and I will tell him to his face that he lies — and so I would if he were twice as dangerous; but, except in that way, I would ask you, sir, as a favor, not to mention my name to Miss Carew.”

“As you please,” said Lucian, taking out his purse. “Perhaps you are right. However, you shall not have your trouble for nothing.”

“I couldn’t, really, sir,” said Bashville, retreating a step. “You will agree with me, I’m sure, that this is not a thing that a man should take payment for. It is a personal matter between me and Byron, sir.”

Lucian, displeased that a servant should have any personal feelings on any subject, much more one that concerned his mistress, put back his purse without comment and said, “Will Miss Carew be at home this afternoon between three and four?”

“I have not heard of any arrangement to the contrary, sir. I will telegraph to you if she goes out — if you wish.”

“It does not matter. Thank you. Good-morning.”

“Good-morning, sir,” said Bashville, respectfully, as he withdrew. Outside the door his manner changed. He put on a pair of primrose gloves, took up a silver-mounted walking-stick that he had left in the corridor, and walked from Downing Street into Whitehall. A party of visitors from the country, who were standing there examining the buildings, guessed that he was a junior lord of the Treasury.

He waited in vain that afternoon for Lucian to appear at the house in Regent’s Park. There were no callers, and he wore away the time by endeavoring, with the aid of a library that Miss Carew had placed at the disposal of her domestics, to unravel the philosophy of Spinoza. At the end of an hour, feeling satisfied that he had mastered that author’s views, he proceeded to vary the monotony of the long summer’s day by polishing Lydia’s plate.

Meanwhile, Lucian was considering how he could best make Lydia not only repudiate Cashel’s acquaintance, but feel thoroughly ashamed of herself for having encouraged him, and wholesomely mistrustful of her own judgment for the future. His parliamentary experience had taught him to provide himself with a few well-arranged, relevant facts before attempting to influence the opinions of others on any subject. He knew no more of prize-fighting than that it was a brutal and illegal practice, akin to cock-fighting, and, like it, generally supposed to be obsolete. Knowing how prone Lydia was to suspect any received opinion of being a prejudice, he felt that he must inform himself more particularly. To Lord Worthington’s astonishment, he not only asked him to dinner next evening, but listened with interest while he descanted to his heart’s content on his favorite topic of the ring.

As the days passed, Bashville became nervous, and sometimes wondered whether Lydia had met her cousin and heard from him of the interview at Downing Street. He fancied that her manner towards him was changed; and he was once or twice on the point of asking the most sympathetic of the housemaids whether she had noticed it. On Wednesday his suspense ended. Lucian came, and had a long conversation with Lydia in the library. Bashville was too honorable to listen at the door; but he felt a strong temptation to do so, and almost hoped that the sympathetic housemaid might prove less scrupulous. But Miss Carew’s influence extended farther than her bodily presence; and Lucian’s revelation was made in complete privacy.

When he entered the library he looked so serious that she asked him whether he had neuralgia, from which he occasionally suffered. He replied with some indignation that he had not, and that he had a communication of importance to make to her.

“What! Another!”

“Yes, another,” he said, with a sour smile; “but this time it does not concern myself. May I warn you as to the character of one of your guests without overstepping my privilege?”

“Certainly. But perhaps you mean Vernet. If so, I am perfectly aware that he is an exiled Communard.”

“I do not mean Monsieur Vernet. You understand, I hope, that I do not approve of him, nor of your strange fancy for Nihilists, Fenians, and other doubtful persons; but I think that even you might draw the line at a prize-fighter.”

Lydia lost color, and said, almost inaudibly, “Cashel Byron!”

“Then you KNEW!” exclaimed Lucian, scandalized.

Lydia waited a moment to recover, settled herself quietly in her chair, and replied, calmly, “I know what you tell me — nothing more. And now, will you explain to me exactly what a prize-fighter is?”

“He is simply what his name indicates. He is a man who fights for prizes.”

“So does the captain of a man-of-war. And yet society does not place them in the same class — at least, I do not think so.”

“As if there could be any doubt that society does not! There is no analogy whatever between the two cases. Let me endeavor to open your eyes a little, if that be possible, which I am sometimes tempted to doubt. A prize-fighter is usually a man of naturally ferocious disposition, who has acquired some reputation among his associates as a bully; and who, by constantly quarrelling, has acquired some practice in fighting. On the strength of this reputation he can generally find some gambler willing to stake a sum of money that he will vanquish a pugilist of established fame in single combat. Bets are made between the admirers of the two men; a prize is subscribed for, each party contributing a share; the combatants are trained as racehorses, gamecocks, or their like are trained; they meet, and beat each other as savagely as they can until one or the other is too much injured to continue the combat. This takes place in the midst of a mob of such persons as enjoy spectacles of the kind; that is to say, the vilest blackguards whom a large city can afford to leave at large, and many whom it cannot. As the prize-money contributed by each side often amounts to upwards of a thousand pounds, and as a successful pugilist commands far higher terms for giving tuition in boxing than a tutor at one of the universities does for coaching, you will see that such a man, while his youth and luck last, may have plenty of money, and may even, by aping the manners of the gentlemen whom he teaches, deceive careless people — especially those who admire eccentricity — as to his character and position.”

“What is his true position? I mean before he becomes a prize-fighter.”

“Well, he may be a handicraftsman of some kind: a journeyman butcher, skinner, tailor, or baker. Possibly a soldier, sailor, policeman, gentleman’s servant, or what not? But he is generally a common laborer. The waterside is prolific of such heroes.”

“Do they never come from a higher rank?”

“Never even from the better classes in their own. Broken-down gentlemen are not likely to succeed at work that needs the strength and endurance of a bull and the cruelty of a butcher.”

“And the end of a prize-fighter. What is that like?”

“He soon has to give up his trade. For, if he be repeatedly beaten, no one will either bet on him or subscribe to provide him with a stake. If he is invariably successful, those, if any, who dare fight him find themselves in a like predicament. In either case his occupation is gone. If he has saved money he opens a sporting public-house, where he sells spirits of the worst description to his old rivals and their associates, and eventually drinks himself to death or bankruptcy. If, however, he has been improvident or unfortunate, he begs from his former patrons and gives lessons. Finally, when the patrons are tired of him and the pupils fail, he relapses into the laboring class with a ruined constitution, a disfigured face, a brutalized nature, and a tarnished reputation.”

Lydia remained silent so long after this that Lucian’s expression of magisterial severity first deepened, then wavered, and finally gave way to a sense of injury; for she seemed to have forgotten him. He was about to protest against this treatment, when she looked at him again, and said,

“Why did Lord Worthington introduce a man of this class to me?”

“Because you asked him to do so. Probably he thought that if you chose to make such a request without previous inquiry, you should not blame him if you found yourself saddled with an undesirable acquaintance. Recollect that you asked for the introduction on the platform at Wiltstoken, in the presence of the man himself. Such a ruffian would be capable of making a disturbance for much less offence than an explanation and refusal would have given him.”

“Lucian,” said Lydia, in a tone of gentle admonition, “I asked to be introduced to my tenant, for whose respectability you had vouched by letting the Warren Lodge to him.” Lucian reddened. “How does Lord Worthington explain Mr. Byron’s appearance at Mrs. Hoskyn’s?”

“It was a stupid joke. Mrs. Hoskyn had worried Worthington to bring some celebrity to her house; and, in revenge, he took his pugilistic protege.”

“Hm!”

“I do not defend Worthington. But discretion is hardly to be expected from him.”

“He has discretion enough to understand a case of this kind thoroughly. But let that pass. I have been thinking upon what you tell me about these singular people, whose existence I hardly knew of before. Now, Lucian, in the course of my reading I have come upon denunciations of every race and pursuit under the sun. Very respectable and well-informed men have held that Jews, Irishmen, Christians, atheists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, actors, artists, flesh-eaters, and spirit-drinkers are all of necessity degraded beings. Such statements can be easily proved by taking a black sheep from each flock, and holding him up as the type. It is more reasonable to argue a man’s character from the nature of his profession; and yet even that is very unsafe. War is a cruel business; but soldiers are not necessarily bloodthirsty and inhuman men. I am not quite satisfied that a prize-fighter is a violent and dangerous man because he follows a violent and dangerous profession — I suppose they call it a profession.”

Lucian was about to speak; but she interrupted him by continuing,

“And yet that is not what concerns me at present. Have you found out anything about Mr. Byron personally? Is he an ordinary representative of his class?”

“No; I should rather think — and hope — that he is a very extraordinary representative of it. I have traced his history back to his boyhood, when he was a cabin-boy. Having apparently failed to recommend himself to his employers in that capacity, he became errand-boy to a sort of maitre d’armes at Melbourne. Here he discovered where his genius lay; and he presently appeared in the ring with an unfortunate young man named Ducket, whose jaw he fractured. This laid the foundation of his fame. He fought several battles with unvarying success; but at last he allowed his valor to get the better of his discretion so far as to kill an Englishman who contended with him with desperate obstinacy for two hours. I am informed that the particular blow by which he felled the poor wretch for the last time is known in pugilistic circles as ‘Cashel’s killer,’ and that he has attempted to repeat it in all his subsequent encounters, without, however, achieving the same fatal result. The failure has doubtless been a severe disappointment to him. He fled from Australia and reappeared in America, where he resumed his victorious career, distinguishing himself specially by throwing a gigantic opponent in some dreadful fashion that these men have, and laming him for life. He then—”

“Thank you, Lucian,” said Lydia rather faintly. “That is quite enough. Are you sure that it is all true?”

“My authority is Lord Worthington, and a number of newspaper reports which he showed me. Byron himself will probably be proud to give you the fullest confirmation of the record. I should add, in justice to him, that he is looked upon as a model — to pugilists — of temperance and general good conduct.”

“Do you remember my remarking a few days ago, on another subject, how meaningless our observations are until we are given the right thread to string them on?”

“Yes,” said “Webber, disconcerted by the allusion.

“My acquaintance with this man is a case in point. He has obtruded his horrible profession upon me every time we have met. I have actually seen him publicly cheered as a pugilist-hero; and yet, being off the track, and ignorant of the very existence of such a calling, I have looked on and seen nothing.”

Lydia then narrated her adventure in Soho, and listened with the perfect patience of indifference to his censure of her imprudence in going there alone.

“And now, Lydia,” he added, “may I ask what you intend to do in this matter?”

“What would you have me do?”

“Drop his acquaintance at once. Forbid him your house in the most explicit terms.”

“A pleasant task!” said Lydia, ironically. “But I will do it — not so much, perhaps, because he is a prize-fighter, as because he is an impostor. Now go to the writing-table and draft me a proper letter to send him.”

Lucian’s face elongated. “I think,” he said, “you can do that better for yourself. It is a delicate sort of thing.”

“Yes. It is not so easy as you implied a moment ago. Otherwise I should not require your assistance. As it is—” She pointed again to the table.

Lucian was not ready with an excuse. He sat down reluctantly, and, after some consideration, indited the following:

“Miss Carew presents her compliments to Mr. Cashel Byron, and begs to inform him that she will not be at home during the remainder of the season as heretofore. She therefore regrets that she cannot have the pleasure of receiving him on Friday afternoon.”

“I think you will find that sufficient,” said Lucian.

“Probably,” said Lydia, smiling as she read it. “But what shall I do if he takes offence; calls here, breaks the windows, and beats Bashville? Were I in his place, that is what such a letter would provoke me to do.”

“He dare not give any trouble. But I will warn the police if you feel anxious.”

“By no means. We must not show ourselves inferior to him in courage, which is, I suppose, his cardinal virtue.”

“If you write the note now, I will post it for you.”

“No, thank you. I will send it with my other letters.”

Lucian would rather have waited; but she would not write while he was there. So he left, satisfied on the whole with the success of his mission. When he was gone, she took a pen, endorsed his draft neatly, placed it in a drawer, and wrote to Cashel thus:

“Dear Mr. Cashel Byron, — I have just discovered your secret. I am sorry; but you must not come again. Farewell. Yours faithfully,

“Lydia Carew.”

Lydia kept this note by her until next morning, when she read it through carefully. She then sent Bashville to the post with it.

CHAPTER IX

Cashel’s pupils frequently requested him to hit them hard — not to play with them — to accustom them to regular, right down, severe hitting, and no nonsense. He only pretended to comply; for he knew that a black eye or loosened tooth would be immoderately boasted of if received in combat with a famous pugilist, and that the sufferer’s friends would make private notes to avoid so rough a professor. But when Miss Carew’s note reached him he made an exception to his practice in this respect. A young guardsman, whose lesson began shortly after the post arrived, remarked that Cashel was unusually distraught. He therefore exhorted his instructor to wake up and pitch into him in earnest. Immediately he received a blow in the epigastrium that stretched him almost insensible on the floor. Rising with his complexion considerably whitened, he recollected an appointment which would prevent him from finishing his lesson, and withdrew, declaring in a somewhat shaky voice that that was the sort of bout he really enjoyed.

Cashel did not at first make any profitable use of the leisure thus earned. He walked to and fro, cursing, and occasionally stopping to read the letter. His restlessness only increased his agitation. The arrival of a Frenchman whom he employed to give lessons in fencing made the place unendurable to him. He changed his attire, went out, called a cab, and bade the driver, with an oath, drive to Lydia’s house as fast as the horse could go. The man made all the haste he could, and was presently told impatiently that there was no hurry. Accustomed to this sort of inconsistency, he was not surprised when, as they approached the house, he was told not to stop but to drive slowly past. Then, in obedience to further instructions, he turned and repassed the door. As he did so a lady appeared for an instant at a window. Immediately his fare, with a groan of mingled rage and fear, sprang from the moving vehicle, rushed up the steps of the mansion, and rang the bell violently. Bashville, faultlessly dressed and impassibly mannered, opened the door. In reply to Cashel’s half-inarticulate inquiry, he said,

“Miss Carew is not at home.”

“You lie,” said Cashel, his eyes suddenly dilating. “I saw her.”

Bashville reddened, but replied, coolly, “Miss Carew cannot see you to-day.”

“Go and ask her,” returned Cashel sternly, advancing.

Bashville, with compressed lips, seized the door to shut him out; but Cashel forced it back against him, sent him reeling some paces by its impact, went in, and shut the door behind him. He had to turn from Bashville for a moment to do this, and before he could face him again he was clutched, tripped, and flung down upon the tessellated pavement of the hall.

When Cashel gave him the lie, and pushed the door against him, the excitement he had been suppressing since his visit to Lucian exploded. He had thrown Cashel in Cornish fashion, and now desperately awaited the upshot.

Cashel got up so rapidly that he seemed to rebound from the flags. Bashville, involuntarily cowering before his onslaught, just escaped his right fist, and felt as though his heart had been drawn with it as it whizzed past his ear. He turned and fled frantically up-stairs, mistaking for the clatter of pursuit the noise with which Cashel, overbalanced by his ineffectual blow, stumbled against the banisters.

Lydia was in her boudoir with Alice when Bashville darted in and locked the door. Alice rose and screamed. Lydia, though startled, and that less by the unusual action than by the change in a familiar face which she had never seen influenced by emotion before, sat still and quietly asked what was the matter. Bashville checked himself for a moment. Then he spoke unintelligibly, and went to the window, which he opened. Lydia divined that he was about to call for help to the street.

“Bashville,” she said, authoritatively: “be silent, and close the window. I will go down-stairs myself.”

Bashville then ran to prevent her from unlocking the door; but she paid no attention to him. He did not dare to oppose her forcibly. He was beginning to recover from his panic, and to feel the first stings of shame for having yielded to it.

“Madam,” he said: “Byron is below; and he insists on seeing you. He’s dangerous; and he’s too strong for me. I have done my best — on my honor I have. Let me call the police. Stop,” he added, as she opened the door. “If either of us goes, it must be me.”

“I will see him in the library,” said Lydia, composedly. “Tell him so; and let him wait there for me — if you can approach him without running any risk.”

“Oh, pray let him call the police,” urged Alice. “Don’t attempt to go to that man.”

“Nonsense!” said Lydia, good-humoredly. “I am not in the least afraid. We must not fail in courage when we have a prize-fighter to deal with.”

Bashville, white, and preventing with difficulty his knees from knocking together, went down-stairs and found Cashel leaning upon the balustrade, panting, and looking perplexedly about him as he wiped his dabbled brow. Bashville approached him with the firmness of a martyr, halted on the third stair, and said,

“Miss Carew will see you in the library. Come this way, please.”

Cashel’s lips moved, but no sound came from them; he followed Bashville in silence. When they entered the library Lydia was already there. Bashville withdrew without a word. Then Cashel sat down, and, to her consternation, bent his head on his hand and yielded to an hysterical convulsion. Before she could resolve how to act he looked up at her with his face distorted and discolored, and tried to speak.

“Pray be calm,” said Lydia. “I am told that you wish to speak to me.”

“I don’t wish to speak to you ever again,” said Cashel, hoarsely. “You told your servant to throw me down the steps. That’s enough for me.”

Lydia caught from him the tendency to sob which he was struggling with; but she repressed it, and answered, firmly, “If my servant has been guilty of the least incivility to you, Mr. Cashel Byron, he has exceeded his orders.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Cashel. “He may thank his luck that he has his head on. If I had planted on him that time — but HE doesn’t matter. Hold on a bit — I can’t talk — I shall get my second wind presently, and then—” Cashel stopped a moment to pant, and then asked, “Why are you going to give me up?”

Lydia ranged her wits in battle array, and replied,

“Do you remember our conversation at Mrs. Hoskyn’s?”

“Yes.”

“You admitted then that if the nature of your occupation became known to me our acquaintance should cease. That has now come to pass.”

“That was all very fine talk to excuse my not telling you. But I find, like many another man when put to the proof, that I didn’t mean it. Who told you I was a fighting man?”

“I had rather not tell you that.”

“Aha!” said Cashel, with a triumph that was half choked by the remnant of his hysteria. “Who is trying to make a secret now, I should like to know?”

“I do so in this instance because I am afraid to expose a friend to your resentment.”

“And why? He’s a man, of course; else you wouldn’t be afraid. You think that I’d go straight off and murder him. Perhaps he told you that it would come quite natural to a man like me — a ruffian like me — to smash him up. That comes of being a coward. People run my profession down; not because there is a bad one or two in it — there’s plenty of bad bishops, if you come to that — but because they’re afraid of us. You may make yourself easy about your friend. I am accustomed to get well paid for the beatings I give; and your own common-sense ought to tell you that any one who is used to being paid for a job is just the last person in the world to do it for nothing.”

“I find the contrary to be the case with first-rate artists,” said Lydia.

“Thank you,” retorted Cashel, sarcastically. “I ought to make you a bow for that. I’m glad you acknowledge that it IS an art.”

“But,” said Lydia seriously, “it seems to me that it is an art wholly anti-social and retrograde. And I fear that you have forced this interview on me to no purpose.”

“I don’t know whether it’s anti-social or not. But I think it hard that I should be put out of decent society when fellows that do far worse than I are let in. Who did I see here last Friday, the most honored of your guests? Why, that Frenchman with the gold spectacles. What do you think I was told when I asked what HIS little game was? Baking dogs in ovens to see how long a dog could live red hot! I’d like to catch him doing it to a dog of mine. Ay; and sticking a rat full of nails to see how much pain a rat could stand. Why, it’s just sickening. Do you think I’d have shaken hands with that chap? If he hadn’t been a guest of yours I’d have given him a notion of how much pain a Frenchman can stand without any nails in him. And HE’S to be received and made much of, while I am kicked out! Look at your relation, the general. What is he but a fighting man, I should like to know? Isn’t it his pride and boast that as long as he is paid so much a day he’ll ask no questions whether a war is fair or unfair, but just walk out and put thousands of men in the best way to kill and be killed? — keeping well behind them himself all the time, mind you. Last year he was up to his chin in the blood of a lot of poor blacks that were no more a match for his armed men than a feather-weight would be for me. Bad as I am, I wouldn’t attack a feather-weight, or stand by and see another heavy man do it. Plenty of your friends go pigeon-shooting to Hurlingham. THERE’S a humane and manly way of spending a Saturday afternoon! Lord Worthington, that comes to see you when he likes, though he’s too much of a man or too little of a shot to kill pigeons, thinks nothing of fox-hunting. Do you think foxes like to be hunted, or that the people that hunt them have such fine feelings that they can afford to call prize-fighters names? Look at the men that get killed or lamed every year at steeple-chasing, fox-hunting, cricket, and foot-ball! Dozens of them! Look at the thousands killed in battle! Did you ever hear of any one being killed in the ring? Why, from first to last, during the whole century that prize-fighting has been going on, there’s not been six fatal accidents at really respectable fights. It’s safer than dancing; many a woman has danced her skirt into the fire and been burned. I once fought a man who had spoiled his constitution with bad living; and he exhausted himself so by going on and on long after he was beaten that he died of it, and nearly finished me, too. If you’d heard the fuss that even the oldest fighting men made over it you’d have thought that a baby had died from falling out of its cradle. A good milling does a man more good than harm. And if all these — dog-bakers, and soldiers, and pigeon-shooters, and fox-hunters, and the rest of them — are made welcome here, why am I shut out like a brute beast?”

“Truly I do not know,” said Lydia, puzzled; “unless it be that your colleagues have failed to recommend themselves to society by their extra-professional conduct as the others have.”

“I grant you that fighting men ar’n’t gentlemen, as a rule. No more were painters, or poets, once upon a time. But what I want to know is this: Supposing a fighting man has as good manners as your friends, and is as well born, why shouldn’t he mix with them and be considered their equal?”

“The distinction seems arbitrary, I confess. But perhaps the true remedy would be to exclude the vivisectors and soldiers, instead of admitting the prize-fighters. Mr. Cashel Byron,” added Lydia, changing her manner, “I cannot discuss this with you. Society has a prejudice against you. I share it; and I cannot overcome it. Can you find no nobler occupation than these fierce and horrible encounters by which you condescend to gain a living?”

“No,” said Cashel, flatly. “I can’t. That’s just where it is.”

Lydia looked grave, and said nothing.

“You don’t see it?” said Cashel. “Well, I’ll just tell you all about myself, and then leave you to judge. May I sit down while I talk?” He had risen in the course of his remarks on Lydia’s scientific and military acquaintances.

She pointed to a chair near her. Something in the action brought color to his cheeks.

“I believe I was the most unfortunate devil of a boy that ever walked,” he began, when he was seated. “My mother was — and is — an actress, and a tiptop crack in her profession. One of the first things I remember is sitting on the floor in the corner of a room where there was a big glass, and she flaring away before it, attitudinizing and spouting Shakespeare like mad. I was afraid of her, because she was very particular about my manners and appearance, and would never let me go near a theatre. I know very little about either my people or hers; for she boxed my ears one day for asking who my father was, and I took good care not to ask her again. She was quite young when I was a child; at first I thought her a sort of angel — I should have been fond of her, I think, if she had let me. But she didn’t, somehow; and I had to keep my affection for the servants. I had plenty of variety in that way; for she gave her whole establishment the sack about once every two months, except a maid who used to bully her, and gave me nearly all the nursing I ever got. I believe it was my crying about some housemaid or other who went away that first set her abusing me for having low tastes — a sort of thing that used to cut me to the heart, and which she kept up till the very day I left her for good. We were a precious pair: I sulky and obstinate, she changeable and hot-tempered. She used to begin breakfast sometimes by knocking me to the other side of the room with a slap, and finish it by calling me her darling boy and promising me all manner of toys and things. I soon gave up trying to please her, or like her, and became as disagreeable a young imp as you’d ask to see. My only thought was to get all I could out of her when she was in a good-humor, and to be sullen and stubborn when she was in a tantrum. One day a boy in the street threw some mud at me, and I ran in crying and complained to her. She told me I was a little coward. I haven’t forgiven her for that yet — perhaps because it was one of the few true things she ever said to me. I was in a state of perpetual aggravation; and I often wonder that I wasn’t soured for life at that time. At last I got to be such a little fiend that when she hit me I used to guard off her blows, and look so wicked that I think she got afraid of me. Then she put me to school, telling me that I had no heart, and telling the master that I was an ungovernable young brute. So I, like a little fool, cried at leaving her; and she, like a big one, cried back again over me — just after telling the master what a bad one I was, mind you — and off she went, leaving her darling boy and blessed child howling at his good luck in getting rid of her.

“I was a nice boy to let loose in a school. I could speak as well as an actor, as far as pronunciation goes; but I could hardly read words of one syllabile; and as to writing, I couldn’t make pothooks and hangers respectably. To this day, I can no more spell than old Ned Skene can. What was a worse sort of ignorance was that I had no idea of fair play. I thought that all servants would be afraid of me, and that all grown-up people would tyrannize over me. I was afraid of everybody; afraid that my cowardice would be found out; and as angry and cruel in my ill-tempers as cowards always are. Now you’ll hardly believe this; but what saved me from going to the bad altogether was my finding out that I was a good one to fight. The bigger boys were given to fighting, and used to have mills every Saturday afternoon, with seconds, bottle-holders, and everything complete, except the ropes and stakes. We little chaps used to imitate them among ourselves as best we could. At first, when they made me fight, I shut my eyes and cried; but for all that I managed to catch the other fellow tight round the waist and throw him. After that it became a regular joke to make me fight, for I always cried. But the end of it was that I learned to keep my eyes open and hit straight. I had no trouble about fighting then. Somehow, I could tell by instinct when the other fellow was going to hit me, and I always hit him first. It’s the same with me now in the ring; I know what a man is going to do before he rightly knows himself. The power that this gave me, civilized me. It made me cock of the school; and I had to act accordingly. I had enough good-nature left to keep me from being a bully; and, as cock, I couldn’t be mean or childish. There would be nothing like fighting for licking boys into shape if every one could be cock; but every one can’t; so I suppose it does more harm than good.

“I should have enjoyed school well enough if I had worked at my books. But I wouldn’t study; and the masters were all down on me as an idler — though I shouldn’t have been like that if they had known how to teach — I have learned since what teaching is. As to the holidays, they were the worst part of the year to me. When I was left at school I was savage at not being let go home; and when I went home my mother did nothing but find fault with my school-boy manners. I was getting too big to be cuddled as her darling boy, you understand. In fact, her treatment of me was just the old game with the affectionate part left out. It wasn’t pleasant, after being cock of the school, to be made feel like a good-for-nothing little brat tied to her apron-strings. When she saw that I was learning nothing she sent me to another school at a place in the north called Panley. I stayed there until I was seventeen; and then she came one day, and we had a row, as usual. She said she wouldn’t let me leave school until I was nineteen; and so I settled that question by running away the same night. I got to Liverpool, where I hid in a ship bound for Australia. When I was starved out they treated me better than I expected; and I worked hard enough to earn my passage and my victuals. But when I wad left ashore in Melbourne I was in a pretty pickle. I knew nobody, and I had no money. Everything that a man could live by was owned by some one or other. I walked through the town looking for a place where they might want a boy to run errands or to clean windows. But somehow I hadn’t the cheek to go into the shops and ask. Two or three times, when I was on the point of trying, I caught sight of some cad of a shopman, and made up my mind that I wouldn’t be ordered about by HIM, and that since I had the whole town to choose from I might as well go on to the next place. At last, quite late in the afternoon, I saw an advertisement stuck up on a gymnasium, and, while I was reading it, I got talking to old Ned Skene, the owner, who was smoking at the door. He took a fancy to me, and offered to have me there as a sort of lad-of-all-work. I was only too glad to get the chance, and I closed with him at once. As time went on I became so clever with the gloves that Ned matched me against a light-weight named Ducket, and bet a lot of money that I would win. Well, I couldn’t disappoint him after his being so kind to me — Mrs. Skene had made as much of me as if I was her own son. What could I do but take my bread as it came to me? I was fit for nothing else. Even if I had been able to write a good hand and keep accounts I couldn’t have brought myself to think that quill-driving and counting other people’s money was a fit employment for a man. It’s not what a man would like to do that he must do in this world, it’s what he CAN do; and the only mortal thing I could do properly was to fight. There was plenty of money and plenty of honor and glory among my acquaintances to be got by fighting. So I challenged Ducket, and knocked him all to pieces in about ten minutes. I half killed him because I didn’t know my own strength and was afraid of him. I have been at the same work ever since. I was training for a fight when I was down at Wiltstoken; and Mellish was my trainer. It came off the day you saw me at Clapham; that was how I came to have a black eye. Wiltstoken did for me. With all my nerve and science, I’m no better than a baby at heart; and ever since I found out that my mother wasn’t an angel I have always had a notion that a real angel would turn up some day. You see, I never cared much for women. Bad as my mother was as far as being what you might call a parent went, she had something in her looks and manners that gave me a better idea of what a nice woman was like than I had of most things; and the girls I met in Australia and America seemed very small potatoes to me in comparison with her. Besides, of course they were not ladies. I was fond of Mrs. Skene because she was good to me; and I made myself agreeable, for her sake, to the girls that came to see her; but in reality I couldn’t stand them. Mrs. Skene said that they were all setting their caps at me — women are death on a crack fighter — but the more they tried it on the less I liked them. It was no go; I could get on with the men well enough, no matter how common they were; but the snobbishness of my breed came out with regard to the women. When I saw you that day at Wiltstoken walk out of the trees and stand looking so quietly at me and Mellish, and then go back out of sight without a word, I’m blessed if I didn’t think you were the angel come at last. Then I met you at the railway station and walked with you. You put the angel out of my head quick enough; for an angel, after all, is only a shadowy, childish notion — I believe it’s all gammon about there being any in heaven — but you gave me a better idea than mamma of what a woman should be, and you came up to that idea and went beyond it. I have been in love with you ever since; and if I can’t have you, I don’t care what becomes of me. I know I am a bad lot, and have always been one; but when I saw you taking pleasure in the society of fellows just as bad as myself, I didn’t see why I should keep away when I was dying to come. I am no worse than the dog-baker, any how. And hang it, Miss Lydia, I don’t want to brag; but I never fought a cross or struck a foul blow in my life; and I have never been beaten, though I’m only a middle-weight, and have stood up with the best fourteen-stone men in the Colonies, the States, or in England.”

Cashel ceased. As he sat eying her wistfully, Lydia, who had been perfectly still, said musingly,

“Strange! that I should be so much more prejudiced than I knew. What will you think of me when I tell you that your profession does not seem half so shocking now that I know you to be the son of an artist, and not a journeyman butcher or a laborer, as my cousin told me.”

“What!” exclaimed Cashel. “That lantern-jawed fellow told you I was a butcher!”

“I did not mean to betray him; but, as I have already said, I am bad at keeping secrets. Mr. Lucian Webber is my cousin and friend, and has done me many services. May I rest assured that he has nothing to fear from you?”

“He has no right to tell lies about me. He is sweet on you, too: I twigged that at Wiltstoken. I have a good mind to let him know whether I am a butcher or not.”

“He did not say so. What he told me of you, as far as it went, is exactly confirmed by what you have said yourself. But I happened to ask him to what class men of your calling usually belonged; and he said that they were laborers, butchers, and so forth. Do you resent that?”

“I see plainly enough that you won’t let me resent it. I should like to know what else he said of me. But he was right enough about the butchers. There are all sorts of blackguards in the ring: there’s no use in denying it. Since it’s been made illegal, decent men won’t go into it. But, all the same, it’s not the fighting men, but the betting men, that bring discredit on it. I wish your cousin had held his confounded tongue.”

“I wish you had forestalled him by telling me the truth.”

“I wish I had, now. But what’s the use of wishing? I didn’t dare run the chance of losing you. See how soon you forbade me the house when you did find out.”

“It made little difference,” said Lydia, gravely.

“You were always friendly to me,” said Cashel, plaintively.

“More so than you were to me. You should not have deceived me. And now I think we had better part. I am glad to know your history; and I admit that when you embraced your profession you made perhaps the best choice that society offered you. I do not blame you.”

“But you give me the sack. Is that it?”

“What do you propose, Mr. Cashel Byron? Is it to visit my house in the intervals of battering and maiming butchers and laborers?”

“No, it’s not,” retorted Cashel. “You’re very aggravating. I won’t stay much longer in the ring now, because my luck is too good to last. I shall have to retire soon, luck or no luck, because no one can match me. Even now there’s nobody except Bill Paradise that pretends to be able for me; and I’ll settle him in September if he really means business. After that, I’ll retire. I expect to be worth ten thousand pounds then. Ten thousand pounds, I’m told, is the same as five hundred a year. Well, I suppose, judging from the style you keep here, that you’re worth as much more, besides your place in the country; so, if you will marry me, we shall have a thousand a year between us. I don’t know much of money matters; but at any rate we can live like fighting-cocks on that much. That’s a straight and business-like proposal, isn’t it?”

“And if I refuse?” said Lydia, with some sternness.

“Then you may have the ten thousand pounds to do what you like with,” said Cashel, despairingly. “It won’t matter what becomes of me. I won’t go to the devil for you or any woman if I can help it; and I — but where’s the good of saying IF you refuse. I know I don’t express myself properly; I’m a bad hand at sentimentality; but if I had as much gab as a poet, I couldn’t be any fonder of you, or think more highly of you.”

“But you are mistaken as to the amount of my income.”

“That doesn’t matter a bit. If you have more, why, the more the merrier. If you have less, or if you have to give up all your property when you’re married, I will soon make another ten thousand to supply the loss. Only give me one good word, and, by George, I’ll fight the seven champions of Christendom, one down and t’other come on, for five thousand a side each. Hang the money!”

“I am richer than you suppose,” said Lydia, unmoved. “I cannot tell you exactly how much I possess; but my income is about forty thousand pounds.”

“Forty thousand pounds!” ejaculated Cashel.

“Holy Moses! I didn’t think the queen had so much as that.”

He paused a moment, and became very red. Then, in a voice broken by mortification, he said, “I see I have been making a fool of myself,” and took his hat and turned to go.

“It does not follow that you should go at once without a word,” said Lydia, betraying nervousness for the first time during the interview.

“Oh, that’s all rot,” said Cashel. “I may be a fool while my eyes are shut, but I’m sensible enough when they’re open. I have no business here. I wish to the Lord I had stayed in Australia.”

“Perhaps it would have been better,” said Lydia, troubled. “But since we have met, it is useless to deplore it; and — Let me remind you of one thing. You have pointed out to me that I have made friends of men whose pursuits are no better than yours. I do not wholly admit that; but there is one respect in which they are on the same footing as you. They are all, as far as worldly gear is concerned, much poorer than I. Many of them, I fear, are much poorer than you are.”

Cashel looked up quickly with returning hope; but it lasted only a moment. He shook his head dejectedly.

“I am at least grateful to you,” she continued, “because you have sought me for my own sake, knowing nothing of my wealth.”

“I should think not,” groaned Cashel. “Your wealth may be a very fine thing for the other fellows; and I’m glad you have it, for your own sake. But it’s a settler for me. It’s knocked me out of time, so it has. I sha’n’t come up again; and the sooner the sponge is chucked up in my corner, the better. So good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Lydia, almost as pale as he had now become, “since you will have it so.”

“Since the devil will have it so,” said Cashel, ruefully. “It’s no use wishing to have it any other way. The luck is against me. I hope, Miss Carew, that you’ll excuse me for making such an ass of myself. It’s all my blessed innocence; I never was taught any better.”

“I have no quarrel with you except on the old score of hiding the truth from me; and that I forgive you — as far as the evil of it affects me. As for your declaration of attachment to me personally, I have received many similar ones that have flattered me less. But there are certain scruples between us. You will not court a woman a hundred-fold richer than yourself; and I will not entertain a prize-fighter. My wealth frightens every man who is not a knave; and your profession frightens every woman who is not a fury.”

“Then you — Just tell me this,” said Cashel, eagerly. “Suppose I were a rich swell, and were not a—”

“No,” said Lydia, peremptorily interrupting him. “I will suppose nothing but what is.”

Cashel relapsed into melancholy. “If you only hadn’t been kind to me!” he said. “I think the reason I love you so much is that you’re the only person that is not afraid of me. Other people are civil because they daren’t be otherwise to the cock of the ring. It’s a lonely thing to be a champion. You knew nothing about that; and you knew I was afraid of you; and yet you were as good as gold.”

“It is also a lonely thing to be a very rich woman. People are afraid of my wealth, and of what they call my learning. We two have at least one experience in common. Now do me a great favor, by going. We have nothing further to say.”

“I’ll go in two seconds. But I don’t believe much in YOUR being lonely. That’s only fancy.”

“Perhaps so. Most feelings of this kind are only fancies.”

There was a pause. Then Cashel said,

“I don’t feel half so downhearted as I did a minute ago. Are you sure that you’re not angry with me?”

“Quite sure. Pray let me say good-bye.”

“And may I never see you again? Never at all? — world without end, amen?”

“Never as the famous prize-fighter. But if a day should come when Mr. Cashel Byron will be something better worthy of his birth and nature, I will not forget an old friend. Are you satisfied now?”

Cashel’s face began to glow, and the roots of his hair to tingle. “One thing more,” he said. “If you meet me by chance in the street before that, will you give me a look? I don’t ask for a regular bow, but just a look to keep me going?”

“I have no intention of cutting you,” said Lydia, gravely. “But do not place yourself purposely in my way.”

“Honor bright, I won’t. I’ll content myself with walking through that street in Soho occasionally. Now I’m off; I know you’re in a hurry to be rid of me. So good-b — Stop a bit, though. Perhaps when that time you spoke of comes, you will be married.”

“It is possible; but I am not likely to marry. How many more things have you to say that you have no right to say?”

“Not one,” said Cashel, with a laugh that rang through the house. “I never was happier in my life, though I’m crying inside all the time. I’ll have a try for you yet. Good-bye. No,” he added, turning from her proffered hand; “I daren’t touch it; I should eat you afterwards.” And he ran out of the room.

In the hall was Bashville, pale and determined, waiting there to rush to the assistance of his mistress at her first summons. He had a poker concealed at hand. Having just heard a great laugh, and seeing Cashel come down-stairs in high spirits, he stood stock-still, and did not know what to think.

“Well, old chap,” said Cashel, boisterously, slapping him on the shoulder, “so you’re alive yet. Is there any one in the dining-room?”

“No,” said Bashville.

“There’s a thick carpet there to fall soft on,” said Cashel, pulling Bashville into the room. “Come along. Now, show me that little trick of yours again. Come, don’t be afraid. Down with me. Take care you don’t knock my head against the fire-irons.”

“But—”

“But be hanged. You were spry enough at it before. Come!”

Bashville, after a moment’s hesitation, seized Cashel, who immediately became grave and attentive, and remained imperturbably so while Nashville expertly threw him. He sat for a moment thinking on the hearth-rug before he rose. “I see,” he said, then, getting up. “Now, do it again.”

“But it makes such a row,” remonstrated Bashville.

“Only once more. There’ll be no row this time.”

“Well, you ARE an original sort of cove,” said Bashville, complying. But instead of throwing his man, he found himself wedged into a collar formed by Cashel’s arms, the least constriction of which would have strangled him. Cashel again roared with laughter as he released him.

“That’s the way, ain’t it?” he said. “You can’t catch an old fox twice in the same trap. Do you know any more falls?”

“I do,” said Bashville; “but I really can’t show them to you here. I shall get into trouble on account of the noise.”

“You can come down to me whenever you have an evening out,” said Cashel, handing him a card, “to that address, and show me what you know, and I’ll see what I can do with you. There’s the making of a man in you.”

“You’re very kind,” said Bashville, pocketing the card with a grin.

“And now let me give you a word of advice that will be of use to you as long as you live,” said Cashel, impressively. “You did a very silly thing to-day. You threw a man down — a fighting-man — and then stood looking at him like a fool, waiting for him to get up and kill you. If ever you do that again, fall on him as heavily as you can the instant he’s off his legs. Drop your shoulder well into him, and, if he pulls you over, make play with the back of your head. If he’s altogether too big for you, put your knee on his throat as if by accident. But, on no account, stand and do nothing. It’s flying in the face of Providence.”

Cashel emphasized these counsels by taps of his forefinger on one of Bashville’s buttons. In conclusion, he nodded, opened the house-door, and walked away in buoyant spirits.

Lydia, standing year the library window, saw him pass, and observed how his light, alert step and a certain gamesome assurance of manner marked him off from a genteelly promenading middle-aged gentleman, a trudging workman, and a vigorously striding youth who were also passing by. The iron railings through which she saw him reminded her of the admirable and dangerous creatures which were passing and repassing behind iron bars in the park yonder. But she exulted, in her quiet manner, in the thought that, dangerous as he was, she had no fear of him. When his cabman had found him and driven him off she went to her desk, opened a private drawer in it, took out her falher’s last letter, and sat for some time looking at it without unfolding it.

“It would be a strange thing, father,” she said, as if he were actually there to hear her, “if your paragon should turn aside from her friends, the artists, philosophers, and statesmen, to give herself to an illiterate prize-fighter. I felt a pang of absolute despair when he replied to my forty thousand pounds a year with an unanswerable good-bye.”

She locked up her father, as it were, in the drawer again, and rang the bell. Bashville appeared, somewhat perturbed.

“If Mr. Byron calls again, admit him if I am at home.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Thank you.”

“Begging your pardon, madam, but may I ask has any complaint been made of me?”

“None.” Bashville was reluctantly withdrawing when she added, “Mr. Byron gave me to understand that you tried to prevent his entrance by force. You exposed yourself to needless risk by doing so; and you may make a rule in future that when people are importunate, and will not go away when asked, they had better come in until you get special instructions from me. I am not finding fault; on the contrary, I approve of your determination to carry out your orders; but under exceptional circumstances you may use your own discretion.”

“He shoved the door into my face, and I acted on the impulse of the moment, madam. I hope you will forgive the liberty I took in locking the door of the boudoir. He is older and heavier than I am, madam; and he has the advantage of being a professional. Else I should have stood my ground.”

“I am quite satisfied,” said Lydia, a little coldly, as she left the room.

“How long you have been!” cried Alice, almost in hysterics, as Lydia entered. “Is he gone? What were those dreadful noises? IS anything the matter?”

“Dancing and late hours are the matter,” said Lydia, coolly. “The season is proving too much for you, Alice.”

“It is not the season; it is the man,” said Alice, with a sob.

“Indeed? I have been in conversation with the man for more than half an hour; and Bashville has been in actual combat with him; yet we are not in hysterics. You have been sitting here at your ease, have you not?”

“I am not in hysterics,” said Alice, indignantly.

“So much the better,” said Lydia, gravely, placing her hand on the forehead of Alice, who subsided with a sniff.

CHAPTER X

Mrs. Byron, under her stage name of Adelaide Gisborne, was now, for the second time in her career, much talked of in London, where she had boon for many years almost forgotten. The metropolitan managers of her own generation had found that her success in new parts was very uncertain; that she was more capricious than the most petted favorites of the public; and that her invariable reply to a business proposal was that she detested the stage, and was resolved never to set foot upon it again. So they had managed to do without her for so long that the younger London playgoers knew her by reputation only as an old-fashioned actress who wandered through the provinces palming herself off on the ignorant inhabitants as a great artist, and boring them with performances of the plays of Shakespeare. It suited Mrs. Byron well to travel with the nucleus of a dramatic company from town to town, staying a fortnight in each, and repeating half a dozen characters in which she was very effective, and which she knew so well that she never thought about them except when, as indeed often happened, she had nothing else to think about. Most of the provincial populations received her annual visits with enthusiasm. Among them she found herself more excitingly applauded before the curtain, her authority more despotic behind it, her expenses smaller, and her gains greater than in London, for which she accordingly cared as little as London cared for her. As she grew older she made more money and spent less. When she complained to Cashel of the cost of his education, she was rich. Since he had relieved her of that cost she had visited America, Egypt, India, and the colonies, and had grown constantly richer. From this great tour she had returned to England on the day when Cashel added the laurels of the Flying Dutchman to his trophies; and the next Sunday’s paper had its sporting column full of the prowess of Cashel Byron, and its theatrical column full of the genius of Adelaide Gisborne. But she never read sporting columns, nor he theatrical ones.

The managers who had formerly avoided Mrs. Byron were by this time dead, bankrupt, or engaged in less hazardous pursuits. One of their successors had lately restored Shakespeare to popularity as signally as Cashel had restored the prize ring. He was anxious to produce the play of “King John,” being desirous of appearing as Faulconbridge, a part for which he was physically unfitted. Though he had no suspicion of his unfitness, he was awake to the fact that the favorite London actresses, though admirable in modern comedy, were not mistresses of what he called, after Sir Walter Scott, the “big bow wow” style required for the part of Lady Constance in Shakespeare’s history. He knew that he could find in the provinces many veteran players who knew every gesture and inflection of voice associated by tradition with the part; but he was afraid that they would remind Londoners of Richardson’s show, and get Faulconbridge laughed at. Then he thought of Adelaide Gisborne. For some hours after the idea came to him he was gnawed at by the fear that her performance would throw his into the shade. But his confidence in his own popularity helped his love of good acting to prevail; and he made the newly returned actress a tempting offer, instigating some journalist friends of his at the same time to lament over the decay of the grand school of acting, and to invent or republish anecdotes of Mrs. Siddons.

This time Mrs. Byron said nothing about detesting the stage. She had really detested it once; but by the time she was rich enough to give up the theatre she had worn that feeling out, and had formed a habit of acting which was as irksome to shake off as any other habit. She also found a certain satisfaction in making money with ease and certainty, and she made so much that at last she began to trifle with plans of retirement, of playing in Paris, of taking a theatre in London, and other whims. The chief public glory of her youth had been a sudden triumph in London on the occasion of her first appearance on any stage; and she now felt a mind to repeat this and crown her career where it had begun. So she accepted the manager’s offer, and even went the length of reading the play of “King John” in order to ascertain what it was all about.

The work of advertisement followed her assent. Portraits of Adelaide Gisborne were displayed throughout the town. Paragraphs in the papers mentioned large sums as the cost of mounting the historical masterpiece of the national bard. All the available seats in the theatre — except some six or seven hundred in the pit and gallery — were said to be already disposed of for the first month of the expected run of the performance. The prime minister promised to be present on the opening night. Absolute archaeologic accuracy was promised. Old paintings were compared to ascertain the dresses of the period. A scene into which the artist had incautiously painted a pointed arch was condemned as an anachronism. Many noblemen gave the actor-manager access to their collections of armor and weapons in order that his accoutrement should exactly counterfeit that of a Norman baron. Nothing remained doubtful except the quality of the acting.

It happened that one of the most curious documents of the period in question was a scrap of vellum containing a fragment of a chronicle of Prince Arthur, with an illuminated portrait of his mother. It had been purchased for a trifling sum by the late Mr. Carew, and was now in the possession of Lydia, to whom the actor-manager applied for leave to inspect it. Leave being readily given, he visited the house in Regent’s Park, which he declared to be an inexhaustible storehouse of treasure. He deeply regretted, he said, that he could not show the portrait to Miss Gisborne. Lydia replied that if Miss Gisborne would come and look at it, she should be very welcome. Two days later, at noon, Mrs. Byron arrived and found Lydia alone; Alice having contrived to be out, as she felt that it was better not to meet an actress — one could never tell what they might have been.

The years that had elapsed since Mrs. Byron’s visit to Dr. Moncrief had left no perceptible trace on her; indeed she looked younger now than on that occasion, because she had been at the trouble of putting on an artificial complexion. Her careless refinement of manner was so different from the studied dignity and anxious courtesy of the actor-manager, that Lydia could hardly think of them as belonging to the same profession. Her voice was not her stage voice; it gave a subtle charm to her most commonplace remarks, and it was as different as possible from Cashel’s rough tones. Yet Lydia was convinced by the first note of it that she was Cashel’s mother. Besides, their eyes were so like that they might have made an exchange without altering their appearance.

Mrs. Byron, coming to the point without delay, at once asked to see the drawing. Lydia brought her to the library, were several portfolios were ready for inspection. The precious fragment of vellum was uppermost.

“Very interesting, indeed,” said Mrs. Byron, throwing it aside after one glance at it, and turning over some later prints, while Lydia, amused, looked on in silence. “Ah,” she said, presently, “here is something that will suit me exactly. I shall not trouble to go through the rest of your collection, thank you. They must do that robe for me in violet silk. What is your opinion of it, Miss Carew? I have noticed, from one or two trifles, that your taste is exquisite.”

“For what character do you intend the dress?”

“Constance, in ‘King John.’”

“But silk was not made in western Europe until three hundred years after Constance’s death. And that drawing is a sketch of Marie de Medicis by Rubens.”

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Byron, smoothly. “What does a dress three hundred years out of date matter when the woman inside it is seven hundred years out? What can be a greater anachronism than the death of Prince Arthur three months hence on the stage of the Panopticon Theatre? I am an artist giving life to a character in romance, I suppose; certainly not a grown-up child playing at being somebody out of Mrs. Markham’s history of England. I wear whatever becomes me. I cannot act when I feel dowdy.”

“But what will the manager say?”

“I doubt if he will say anything. He will hardly venture to press on me anything copied from that old parchment. As he will wear a suit of armor obviously made the other day in Birmingham, why — !” Mrs. Byron shrugged her shoulders, and did not take sufficient interest in the manager’s opinion to finish her sentence.

“After all, Shakespeare concerned himself very little about such matters,” said Lydia, conversationally.

“No doubt. I seldom read him.”

“Is this part of Lady Constance a favorite one of yours?”

“Troublesome, my dear,” said Mrs. Byron, absently. “The men look ridiculous in it; and it does not draw.”

“No doubt,” said Lydia, watching her face. “But I spoke rather of your personal feeling towards the character. Do you, for instance, like portraying maternal tenderness on the stage?”

“Maternal tenderness,” said Mrs. Byron with sudden nobleness, “is far too sacred a thing to be mimicked. Have you any children?”

“No,” said Lydia, demurely. “I am not married.”

“Of course not. You should get married. Maternity is a liberal education in itself.”

“Do you think that it suits every woman?”

“Undoubtedly. Without exception. Only think, dear Miss Carew, of the infinite patieuce with which you must tend a child, of the necessity of seeing with its little eyes and with your own wise ones at the same time, of bearing without reproach the stabs it innocently inflicts, of forgiving its hundred little selfishnesses, of living in continual fear of wounding its exquisite sensitiveness, or rousing its bitter resentment of injustice and caprice. Think of how you must watch yourself, check yourself, exercise and develop everything in you that can help to attract and retain the most jealous love in the world! Believe me, it is a priceless trial to be a mother. It is a royal compensation for having been born a woman.”

“Nevertheless,” said Lydia, “I wish I had been born a man. Since you seem to have thought deeply into these problems, I will venture to ask you a question. Do you not think that the acquirement of an art demanding years of careful self-study and training — such as yours, for example — is also of great educational value? Almost a sufficient discipline to make one a good mother?”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Byron, decidedly. “People come into the world ready-made. I went on the stage when I was eighteen, and succeeded at once. Had I known anything of the world, or been four years older, I should have been weak, awkward, timid, and flat; it would have taken me twelve years to crawl to the front. But I was young, passionate, beautiful, and indeed terrible; for I had run away from home two years before, and been cruelly deceived. I learned the business of the stage as easily and thoughtlessly as a child learns a prayer; the rest came to me by nature. I have seen others spend years in struggling with bad voices, uncouth figures, and diffidence; besides a dozen defects that existed only in their imaginations. Their struggles may have educated them; but had they possessed sufficient genius they would have had neither struggle nor education. Perhaps that is why geniuses are such erratic people, and mediocrities so respectable. I grant you that I was very limited when I first came out; I was absolutely incapable of comedy. But I never took any trouble about it; and by and by, when I began to mature a little, and to see the absurdity of most of the things I had been making a fuss about, comedy came to me unsought, as romantic tragedy had come before. I suppose it would have come just the same if I had been laboring to acquire it, except that I would have attributed its arrival to my own exertions. Most of the laborious people think they have made themselves what they are — much as if a child should think it had made itself grow.”

“You are the first artist I ever met,” said Lydia, “who did not claim art as the most laborious of all avocations. They all deny the existence of genius, and attribute everything to work.”

“Of course one picks up a great deal from experience; and there is plenty of work on the stage. But it in my genius which enables me to pick up things, and to work on the stage instead of in a kitchen or laundry.”

“You must be very fond of your profession.”

“I do not mind it now; I have shrunk to fit it. I began because I couldn’t help myself; and I go on because, being an old woman, I have nothing else to do. Bless me, how I hated it after the first month! I must retire soon, now. People are growing weary of me.”

“I doubt that. I am bound to assume that you are an old woman, since you say so; but you must be aware, flattery apart, that you hardly seem to have reached your prime yet.”

“I might be your mother, my dear. I might be a grand mother. Perhaps I am.” There was a plaintive tone in the last sentence; and Lydia seized the opportunity.

“You spoke of maternity then from experience, Miss Gisborne?”

“I have one son — a son who was sent to me in my eighteenth year.”

“I hope he inherits his mother’s genius and personal grace.”

“I am sure I don’t know,” said Mrs. Byron, pensively. “He was a perfect devil. I fear I shock you, Miss Carew; but really I did everything for him that the most devoted mother could do; and yet he ran away from me without making a sign of farewell. Little wretch!”

“Boys do cruel things sometimes in a spirit of adventure,” said Lydia, watching her visitor’s face narrowly.

“It was not that. It was his temper, which was ungovernable. He was sulky and vindictive. It is quite impossible to love a sulky child. I kept him constantly near me when he was a tiny creature; and when he got too big for that I spent oceans of money on his education. All in vain! He never showed any feeling towards me except a sense of injury that no kindness could remove. And he had nothing to complain of. Never was there a worse son.”

Lydia remained silent and grave. Mrs. Byron looked rather beside her than at her. Suddenly she added,

“My poor, darling Cashel” (Lydia suppressed a start), “what a shame to talk of you so! You see, I love him in spite of his wickedness.” Mrs. Byron took out her handkerchief, and Lydia for a moment was alarmed by the prospect of tears. But Miss Gisborne only blew her nose with perfect composure, and rose to take her leave. Lydia, who, apart from her interest in Cashel’s mother, was attracted and amused by the woman herself, induced her to stay for luncheon, and presently discovered from her conversation that she had read much romance of the Werther sort in her youth, and had, since then, employed her leisure in reading every book that came in her way without regard to its quality. Her acquirements were so odd, and her character so unreasonable, that Lydia, whose knowledge was unusually well organized, and who was eminently reasonable, concluded that she was a woman of genius. For Lydia knew the vanity of her own attainments, and believed herself to be merely a patient and well-taught plodder. Mrs. Byron happening to be pleased with the house, the luncheon, and Lydia’s intelligent listening, her unaccountable natural charm became so intensified by her good-humor that Lydia became conscious of it, and began to wonder what its force might have been if some influence — that of a lover, for instance — had ever made Mrs. Byron ecstatically happy. She surprised herself at last in the act of speculating whether she could ever make Cashel love her as his father must, for a time at least, have loved her visitor.

When Lydia was alone, she considered whether she was justified in keeping Mrs. Byron apart from her son. It seemed plain that at present Cashel was a disgrace to his mother, and had better remain hidden from her. But if he should for any reason abandon his ruffianly pursuits, as she had urged him to do, then she could bring about a meeting between them; and the truant’s mother might take better care of him in the future, besides making him pecuniarily independent of prize-fighting. This led Lydia to ask what new profession Cashel could adopt, and what likelihood there was of his getting on with his mother any better than formerly. No satisfactory answer was forthcoming. So she went back to the likelihood of his reforming himself for her sake. On this theme her imagination carried her so far from all reasonable probability, that she was shaking her head at her own folly when Bashville appeared and announced Lord Worthington, who came into the room with Alice. Lydia had not seen him since her discovery of the true position of the tenant he had introduced to her, and he was consequently a little afraid to meet her. To cover his embarrassment, he began to talk quickly on a number of commonplace topics. But when some time had elapsed, he began to show signs of fresh uneasiness. He looked at his watch, and said,

“I don’t wish to hurry you, ladies; but this affair commences at three.”

“What affair?” said Lydia, who had been privately wondering why he had come.

“The assault-at-arms. King What’s-his-name’s affair. Webber told me he had arranged that you should come with me.”

“Oh, you have come to take us there. I had forgotten. Did I promise to go?”

“Webber said so. He was to have taken you himself; but, failing that, he promised to do a good thing for me and put me in his place. He said you particularly wanted to go, hang him!”

Lydia then rose promptly and sent for her carriage. “There is no hurry,” bhe said. “We can drive to St. James’s Hall in twelve minutes.”

“Hut we have to go to Islington, to the Agricultural Hall. There will be cavalry charges, and all sorts of fun.”

“Bless me!” said Lydia. “Will there be any boxing?”

“Yes,” said Lord Worthington, reddening, but unabashed. “Lots of it. It will be by gentlemen, though, except perhaps one bout to show the old king our professional form.”

“Then excuse me while I go for my hat,” said Lydia, leaving the room. Alice had gone some time before to make a complete change in her dress, as the occasion was one for display of that kind.

“You look awfully fetching, Miss Goff,” Lord Worthington said, as he followed them to the carriage. Alice did not deign to reply, but tossed her head superbly, and secretly considered whether people would, on comparison, think her overdressed or Lydia underdressed. Lord Worthington thought they both looked their best, and reflected for several seconds on the different styles of different women, and how what would suit one would not do at all for another. It seemed to him that Miss Carew’s presence made him philosophical.

The Agricultural Hall struck Alice at first sight as an immense barn round which heaps of old packing-cases had been built into race-course stands, scantily decorated with red cloth and a few flags. She was conducted to a front seat in one of these balconies, which overhung the tan-strewn arena. Just below her were the palisades, ornamented at intervals with evergreens in tubs, and pressed against from without by a crowd who had paid a shilling apiece for the privilege of admission. She remarked that it was little to the credit of the management that these people should be placed so close beneath her that she could hear their conversation; but as Lydia did not seem to share her disgust, she turned her attention to the fashionable part of the audience. On the opposite side of the arena the balconies seemed like beds of flowers in bloom, blacknesses formed here and there by the hats and coats of gentlemen representing the interspaces of clay. In the midst of the flowers was a gaudy dais, on which a powerfully-built black gentleman sat in a raised chair, his majestic impassivity contrasting with the overt astonishment with which a row of savagely ugly attendant chiefs grinned and gaped on either side of him.

“What a pity we are not nearer the king!” said Alice. “I can hardly see the dear old fellow.”

“You will find these the best seats for seeing the assault. It will be all right,” said Lord Worthington.

Lydia’s attention was caught by something guilty in his manner. Following a furtive glance of his, she saw in the arena, not far from her, an enclosure about twenty feet square, made with ropes and stakes. It was unoccupied, and there were a few chairs, a basin, and a sponge, near it.

“What is that?” she asked.

“That! Oh, that’s the ring.”

“It is not a ring. It is square.”

“They call it the ring. They have succeeded in squaring the circle.”

Here there was a piercing bugle-call, and a troop of cavalry trotted into the arena. Lydia found it pleasant enough to sit lazily admiring the horses and men, and comparing the members of the Olympian Club, who appeared when the soldiers retired, to the marble gods of Athens, and to the Bacchus or David of Michael Angelo. They fell short of the Greek statues in refinement, and of the Italian in impressiveness as they vaulted over a wooden horse, and swung upon horizontal bars, each cheapening the exploits of his forerunner by out-doing them. Lord Worthington, who soon grew tired of this, whispered that when all that rubbish was over, a fellow would cut a sheep in two with a sword, after which there would be some boxing.

“Do you mean to say,” said Lydia, indignantly, “that they are going to turn a sheep loose and hunt it on horseback with swords?”

Lord Worthington laughed and said yes; but it presently appeared that by a sheep was meant a lean carcass of mutton. A stalwart sergeant cut it in half as a climax to slicing lemons, bars of lead, and silk handkerchiefs; and the audience, accustomed to see much more disgusting sights in butchers’ shops, liberally applauded him.

Two gentlemen of the Olympian Club now entered the enclosure which Lord Worthington called the ring. After shaking hands with one another as well as their huge padded gloves permitted, they hugged themselves with their right arms as if there were some danger of their stomachs falling out if not held tightly in, and danced round one another, throwing out and retracting their left fists like pawing horses. They were both, as Lydia learned from the announcement of their names and achievements by the master of the ceremonies, amateur champions. She thought their pawing and dancing ridiculous; and when they occasionally rushed together and scuffled, she could distinguish nothing of the leading off, stopping, ducking, countering, guarding, and getting away to which Lord Worthington enthusiastically invited her attention, and which elicited alternate jeers and applause from the shilling audience below. She laughed outright when, at the expiration of three minutes, the two dropped supine into chairs at opposite corners of the ring as if they had sustained excessive fatigue. At the end of a minute, some one hoarsely cried “Time!” and they rose and repeated their previous performance for three minutes more. Another minute of rest followed; and then the dancing and pawing proceeded for four minutes, after which the champions again shook hands and left the arena.

“And is that all?” said Lydia.

“That’s all,” said Lord Worthington. “It’s the most innocent thing in the world, and the prettiest.”

“It does not strike me as being pretty,” said Lydia; “but it seems as innocent as inanity can make it.” Her mind misgave her that she had ignorantly and unjustly reproached Cashel Byron with ferocity merely because he practised this harmless exercise.

The show progressed through several phases of skilled violence. Besides single combats between men armed in various fashions, there were tilts, tent-peggings, drilling and singlestick practice by squads of British tars, who were loudly cheered, and more boxing and vaulting by members of the club. Lydia’s attention soon began to wander from the arena. Looking down at the crowd outside the palisades, she saw a small man whom she vaguely remembered, though his face was turned from her. In conversation with him was a powerful man dressed in a yellow tweed suit and green scarf. He had a coarse, strong voice, and his companion a shrill, mean one, so that their remarks could be heard by an attentive listener above the confused noise of the crowd.

“Do you admire that man?” said Lord Worthington, following Lydia’s gaze.

“No. Is he anybody in particular?”

“He was a great man once — in the days of the giants. He was champion of England. He has a special interest for us as the preceptor of a mutual friend of ours.”

“Please name him,” said Lydia, intending that the mutual friend should be named.

“Ned Skene,” said Lord Worthington, taking her to mean the man below. “He has done so well in the colonies that he has indulged himself and his family with a trip to England. His arrival made quite a sensation in this country: last week he had a crowded benefit, at which he sparred with our mutual friend and knocked him about like a baby. Our mutual behaved very well on the occasion in letting himself be knocked about. You see he could have killed old Skene if he had tried in earnest.”

“Is that Skene?” said Lydia, looking at him with an earnest interest that astonished Lord Worthington. “Ah! Now I recognize the man with him. He is one of my tenants at the Warren Lodge — I believe I am indebted to you for the introduction.”

“Mellish the trainer?” said Lord Worthington, looking a little foolish. “So it is. What a lovely bay that lancer has! — the second from the far end.”

But Lydia would not look at the lancer’s horse. “Paradise!” she heard Skene exclaim just then with scornful incredulity. “Ain’t it likely?” It occurred to her that if he was alluding to his own chance of arriving there, it was not likely.

“Less likely things have happened,” said Mellish. “I won’t say that Cashel Byron is getting stale; but I will say that his luck is too good to last; and I know for a fact that he’s gone quite melancholy of late.”

“Melancholy be blowed!” said Skene. “What should he go melancholy for?”

“Oh, I know,” said Mellish, reticently.

“You know a lot,” retorted Skene with contempt. “I s’pose you mean the young ‘oman he’s always talking to my missis about.”

“I mean a young woman that he ain’t likely to get. One of the biggest swells in England — a little un with a face like the inside of a oyster-shell, that he met down at Wiltstoken, where I trained him to fight the Flying Dutchman. He went right off his training after he met her — wouldn’t do anything I told him. I made so cock-sure that he’d be licked that I hedged every penny I had laid on him except twenty pound that I got a flat to bet agin him down at the fight after I had changed my mind. Curse that woman! I lost a hundred pound by her.”

“And served you right, too, you old stupid. You was wrong then; and you’re wrong now, with your blessed Paradise.”

“Paradise has never been licked yet.”

“No more has my boy.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“We’ll see! I tell you I’ve seed for myself. I’ve seed Billy Paradise spar; and it ain’t fighting, it’s ruffianing: that’s what it is. Ruffianing! Why, my old missis has more science.”

“Mebbe she has,” said Mellish. “But look at the men he’s licked that were chock full of science. Shepstone, clever as he is, only won a fight from him by claiming a foul, because Billy lost his temper and spiked him. That’s the worst of Billy; he can’t keep his feelings in. But no fine-lady sparrer can stand afore that ugly rush of his. Do you think he’ll care for Cashel’s showy long shots? Not he: he’ll just take ’em on that mahogany nut of his, and give him back one o’ them smashers that he settled poor Dick Weeks with.”

“I’ll lay you any money he don’t. If he does, I’ll go back into the ring myself, and bust his head off for it.” Here Skene, very angry, applied several epithets to Paradise, and became so excited that Mellish had to soothe him by partially retracting his forebodings, and asking how Cashel had been of late.

“He’s not been taking care of himself as he oughter,” said Skene, gloomily. “He’s showing the London fashions to the missis and Fanny — they’re here in the three-and-sixpenny seats, among the swells. Theatres every night; and walks every day to see the queen drive through the park, or the like. My Fan likes to have him with her on account of his being such a gentleman: she don’t hardly think her own father not good enough to walk down Piccadilly with. Wants me to put on a black coat and make a parson of myself. The missis just idolizes him. She thinks the boy far too good for the young ‘oman you was speaking of, and tells him that she’s only letting on not to care for him to raise her price, just as I used to pretend to be getting beat, to set the flats betting agin me. The women always made a pet of him. In Melbourne it was not what I liked for dinner: it was always what the boy ‘ud like, and when it ‘ud please him to have it. I’m blest if I usen’t to have to put him up to ask for a thing when I wanted it myself. And you tell me that that’s the lad that’s going to let Billy Paradise lick him, I s’pose. Walker!”

Lydia, with Mrs. Byron’s charm fresh upon her, wondered what manner of woman this Mrs. Skene could be who had supplanted her in the affections of her son, and yet was no more than a prize-fighter’s old missis. Evidently she was not one to turn a young man from a career in the ring. Again the theme of Cashel’s occupation and the chances of his quitting it ran away with Lydia’s attention. She sat with her eyes fixed on the arena, without seeing the soldiers, swordsmen, or athletes who were busy there; her mind wandered further and further from the place; and the chattering of the people resolved itself into a distant hum and was forgotten.

Suddenly she saw a dreadful-looking man coming towards her across the arena. His face had the surface and color of blue granite; his protruding jaws and retreating forehead were like those of an orang-outang. She started from her reverie with a shiver, and, recovering her hearing as well as her vision of external things, became conscious of an attempt to applaud this apparition by a few persons below. The man grinned ferociously, placed one hand on a stake of the ring, and vaulted over the ropes. Lydia now remarked that, excepting his hideous head and enormous hands and feet, he was a well-made man, with loins and shoulders that shone in the light, and gave him an air of great strength and activity.

“Ain’t he a picture?” she heard Mellish exclaim, ecstatically. “There’s condition for you!”

“Ah!” said Skene, disparagingly. “But ain’t HE the gentleman! Just look at him. It’s like the Prince of Wales walking down Pall Mall.”

Lydia, hearing this, looked again, and saw Cashel Byron, exactly as she had seen him for the first time in the elm vista at Wiltstoken, approaching the ring with the indifferent air of a man going through some tedious public ceremony.

“A god coming down to compete with a gladiator,” whispered Lord Worthington, eagerly. “Isn’t it, Miss Carew? Apollo and the satyr! You must admit that our mutual friend is a splendid-looking fellow. If he could go into society like that, by Jove, the women—”

“Hush,” said Lydia, as if his words were intolerable.

Cashel did not vault over the ropes. He stepped through them languidly, and, rejecting the proffered assistance of a couple of officious friends, drew on a boxing-glove fastidiously, like an exquisite preparing for a fashionable promenade. Having thus muffled his left hand so as to make it useless for the same service to his right, he dipped his fingers into the other glove, gripped it between his teeth, and dragged it on with the action of a tiger tearing its prey. Lydia shuddered again.

“Bob Mellish,” said Skene, “I’ll lay you twenty to one he stops that rush that you think so much of. Come: twenty to one!”

Mellish shook his head. Then the master of the ceremonies, pointing to the men in succession, shouted, “Paradise: a professor. Cashel Byron: a professor. Time!”

Cashel now looked at Paradise, of whose existence he had not before seemed to be aware. The two men advanced towards the centre of the ring, shook hands at arm’s-length, cast off each other’s grasp suddenly, fell back a step, and began to move warily round one another from left to right like a pair of panthers.

“I think they might learn manners from the gentlemen, and shake hands cordially,” said Alice, trying to appear unconcerned, but oppressed by a vague dread of Cashel.

“That’s the traditional manner,” said Lord Worthington. “It is done that way to prevent one from holding the other; pulling him over, and hitting him with the disengaged hand before he could get loose.”

“What abominable treachery!” exclaimed Lydia.

“It’s never done, you know,” said Lord Worthington, apologetically. “Only it might be.”

Lydia turned away from him, and gave all her attention to the boxers. Of the two, Paradise shocked her least. He was evidently nervous and conscious of a screwed-up condition as to his courage; but his sly grin implied a wild sort of good-humor, and seemed to promise the spectators that he would show them some fun presently. Cashel watched his movements with a relentless vigilance and a sidelong glance in which, to Lydia’s apprehension, there was something infernal.

Suddenly the eyes of Paradise lit up: he lowered his head, made a rush, balked himself purposely, and darted at Cashel. There was a sound like the pop of a champagne-cork, after which Cashel was seen undisturbed in the middle of the ring, and Paradise, flung against the ropes and trying to grin at his discomfiture, showed his white teeth through a mask of blood.

“Beautiful!” cried Skene with emotion. “Beautiful! There ain’t but me and my boy in the world can give the upper cut like that! I wish I could see my old missis’s face now! This is nuts to her.”

“Let us go away,” said Alice.

“That was a very different blow to any that the gentlemen gave,” said Lydia, without heeding her, to Lord Worthington. “The man is bleeding horribly.”

“It’s only his nose,” said Lord Worthington. “He’s used to it.”

Meanwhile Cashel had followed Paradise to the ropes.

“Now he has him,” chuckled Skene. “My boy’s got him agin the ropes; and he means to keep him there. Let him rush now, if he can. See what it is to have a good judgment.”

Mellish shook his head again despondently. The remaining minutes of the round were unhappy ones for Paradise. He struck viciously at his opponent’s ribs; but Cashel stepped back just out of his reach, and then returned with extraordinary swiftness and dealt him blows from which, with the ropes behind him, he had no room to retreat, and which he was too slow to stop or avoid. His attempts to reach his enemy’s face were greatly to the disadvantage of his own; for Cashel’s blows were never so tremendous as when he turned his head deftly out of harm’s way, and met his advancing foe with a counter hit. He showed no chivalry and no mercy, and revelled in the hardness of his hitting; his gloves either resounding on Paradise’s face or seeming to go almost through his body. There was little semblance to a contest: to Lydia there was nothing discernible but a cruel assault by an irresistible athlete on a helpless victim. The better sort among the spectators were disgusted by the sight; for, as Paradise bled profusely, and as his blood besmeared the gloves and the gloves besmeared the heads and bodies of both combatants, they were soon stained with it from their waists upward. The managers held a whispered consultation as to whether the sparring exhibition had not better be stopped; but they decided to let it proceed on seeing the African king, who had watched the whole entertainment up to the present without displaying the least interest, now raise his hands and clap them with delight.

“Billy don’t look half pleased with hisself,” observed Mellish, as the two boxers sat down. “He looks just like he did when he spiked Shepstone.”

“What does spiking mean?” said Lydia.

“Treading on a man’s foot with spiked boots,” replied Lord Worthington. “Don’t be alarmed; they have no spikes in their shoes to-day. It is not my fault that they do such things, Miss Carew. Really, you make me feel quite criminal when you look at me in that way.”

Time was now called; and the pugilists, who had, by dint of sponging, been made somewhat cleaner, rose with mechanical promptitude at the sound, Cashel had hardly advanced two steps when, though his adversary seemed far out of his reach, he struck him on the forehead with such force as to stagger him, and then jumped back laughing. Paradise rushed forward; but Cashel eluded him, and fled round the ring, looking back derisively over his shoulder. Paradise now dropped all pretence of good-humor. With an expression of reckless ferocity, he dashed at Cashel; endured a startling blow without flinching, and engaged him at close quarters. For a moment the falling of their blows reminded Lydia of the rush of raindrops against a pane in a sudden gust of wind. The next moment Cashel was away; and Paradise, whose blood was again flowing, was trying to repeat his manoeuvre, to be met this time by a blow that brought him upon one knee. He had scarcely risen when Cashel sprang at him; dealt him four blows with dazzling rapidity; drove him once more against the ropes; but this time, instead of keeping him there, ran away in the manner of a child at play. Paradise, with foam as well as blood at his lips, uttered a howl, and tore off his gloves. There was a shout of protest from the audience; and Cashel, warned by it, tried to get off his gloves in turn. But Paradise was upon him before he could accomplish this, and the two men laid hold of one another amid a great clamor, Lord Worthington and others rising and excitedly shouting, “Against the rules! No wrestling!” followed by a roar of indignation as Paradise was seen to seize Cashel’s shoulder in his teeth as they struggled for the throw. Lydia, for the first time in her life, screamed. Then she saw Cashel, his face fully as fierce as Paradise’s, get his arm about his neck; lift him as a coal-heaver lifts a sack, and fling him over his back, heels over head, to the ground, where he instantly dropped on him with his utmost weight and impetus. The two were at once separated by a crowd of managers, umpires, policemen, and others who had rushed towards the ring when Paradise had taken off his gloves. A distracting wrangle followed. Skene had climbed over the palisade, and was hurling oaths, threats, and epithets at Paradise, who, unable to stand without assistance, was trying to lift his leaden eyelids and realize what had happened to him. A dozen others were trying to bring him to his senses, remonstrating with him on his conduct, or trying to pacify Skene. Cashel, on the other side, raged at the managers, who were reminding him that the rules of glove-fighting did not allow wrestling and throwing.

“Rules be d — d,” Lydia heard him shouting. “He bit me; and I’ll throw him to—” Then everybody spoke at once; and she could only conjecture where he would throw him to. He seemed to have no self-control: Paradise, when he came to himself, behaved better. Lord Worthington descended into the ring and tried to calm the hubbub; but Cashel shook his hand fiercely from his arm; menaced a manager who attempted to call him sternly to order; frantically pounded his wounded shoulder with his clenched fist, and so outswore and outwrangled them all, that even Skene began to urge that there had been enough fuss made. Then Lord Worthington whispered a word more; and Cashel suddenly subsided, pale and ashamed, and sat down on a chair in his corner as if to hide himself. Five minutes afterwards, he stepped out from the crowd with Paradise, and shook hands with him amid much cheering. Cashel was the humbler of the two. He did not raise his eyes to the balcony once; and he seemed in a hurry to retire. But he was intercepted by an officer in uniform, accompanied by a black chief, who came to conduct him to the dais and present him to the African king; an honor which he was not permitted to decline.

The king informed him, through an interpreter, that he had been unspeakably gratified by what he had just witnessed; expressed great surprise that Cashel, notwithstanding his prowess, was neither in the army nor in Parliament; and finally offered to provide him with three handsome wives if he would come out to Africa in his suite. Cashel was much embarrassed; but he came off with credit, thanks to the interpreter, who was accustomed to invent appropriate speeches for the king on public occasions, and was kind enough to invent equally appropriate ones for Cashel on this.

Meanwhile, Lord Worthington had returned to his place. “It is all settled now,” he said to Lydia. “Byron shut up when I told him his aristocratic friends were looking at him; and Paradise has been so bullied that he is crying in a corner down-stairs. He has apologized; but he still maintains that he can beat our mutual friend without the gloves; and his backers apparently think so too, for it is understood that they are to fight in the autumn for a thousand a side.”

“To fight! Then he has no intention of giving up his profession?”

“No!” said Lord Worthington, astonished. “Why on earth should he give it up? Paradise’s money is as good as in his pocket. You have seen what he can do.”

“I have seen enough. Alice, I am ready to go as soon as you are.”

Early in the following week Miss Carew returned to Wiltstoken. Miss Goff remained in London to finish the season in charge of a friendly lady who, having married off all her own daughters, was willing to set to work again to marry Alice sooner than remain idle.

CHAPTER XI

Alice was more at her ease during the remnant of the London season. Though she had been proud of her connection with Lydia, she had always felt eclipsed in her presence; and now that Lydia was gone, the pride remained and the sense of inferiority was forgotten. Her freedom emboldened and improved her. She even began to consider her own judgment a safer guide in the affairs of every day than the example of her patroness. Had she not been right in declaring Cashel Byron an ignorant and common man when Lydia, in spite of her warning, had actually invited him to visit them? And now all the newspapers were confirming the opinion she had been trying to impress on Lydia for months past. On the evening of the assault-at-arms, the newsmen had shouted through the streets, “Disgraceful scene between two pugilists at Islington in the presence of the African king.” Next day the principal journals commented on the recent attempt to revive the brutal pastime of prize-fighting; accused the authorities of conniving at it, and called on them to put it down at once with a strong hand. “Unless,” said a clerical organ, “this plague-spot be rooted out from our midst, it will no longer be possible for our missionaries to pretend that England is the fount of the Gospel of Peace.” Alice collected these papers, and forwarded them to Wiltstoken.

On this subject one person at least shared her bias. Whenever she met Lucian Webber, they talked about Cashel, invariably coming to the conclusion that though the oddity of his behavior had gratified Lydia’s unfortunate taste for eccentricity, she had never regarded him with serious interest, and would not now, under any circumstances, renew her intercourse with him. Lucian found little solace in these conversations, and generally suffered from a vague sense of meanness after them. Yet next time they met he would drift into discussing Cashel over again; and he always rewarded Alice for the admirable propriety of her views by dancing at least three times with her when dancing was the business of the evening. The dancing was still less congenial than the conversation. Lucian, who had at all times too much of the solemnity of manner for which Frenchmen reproach Englishmen, danced stiffly and unskilfully. Alice, whose muscular power and energy were superior to anything of the kind that Mr. Mellish could artificially produce, longed for swift motion and violent exercise, and, even with an expert partner, could hardly tame herself to the quietude of dancing as practised in London. When waltzing with Lucian she felt as though she were carrying a stick round the room in the awkward fashion in which Punch carries his baton. In spite of her impression that he was a man of unusually correct morals and great political importance, and greatly to be considered in private life because he was Miss Carew’s cousin, it was hard to spend quarter-hours with him that some of the best dancers in London asked for.

She began to tire of the subject of Cashel and Lydia. She began to tire of Lucian’s rigidity. She began to tire exceedingly of the vigilance she had to maintain constantly over her own manners and principles. Somehow, this vigilance defeated itself; for she one evening overheard a lady of rank speak of her as a stuck-up country girl. The remark gave her acute pain: for a week afterwards she did not utter a word or make a movement in society without first considering whether it could by any malicious observer be considered rustic or stuck-up. But the more she strove to attain perfect propriety of demeanor, the more odious did she seem to herself, and, she inferred, to others. She longed for Lydia’s secret of always doing the right thing at the right moment, even when defying precedent. Sometimes she blamed the dulness of the people she met for her shortcomings. It was impossible not to be stiff with them. When she chatted with an entertaining man, who made her laugh and forget herself for a while, she was conscious afterwards of having been at her best with him. But she saw others who, in stupid society, were pleasantly at their ease. She began to fear at last that she was naturally disqualified by her comparatively humble birth from acquiring the well-bred air for which she envied those among whom she moved.

One day she conceived a doubt whether Lucian was so safe an authority and example in matters of personal deportment as she had hitherto unthinkingly believed. He could not dance; his conversation was priggish; it was impossible to feel at ease when speaking to him. Was it courageous to stand in awe of his opinion? Was it courageous to stand in awe of anybody? Alice closed her lips proudly and began to be defiant. Then a reminiscence, which had never before failed to rouse indignation in her, made her laugh. She recalled the scandalous spectacle of Lucian’s formal perpendicularity overbalanced and doubled up into Mrs. Hoskyn’s gilded arm-chair in illustration of the prize-fighter’s theory of effort defeating itself. After all, what was that caressing touch of Cashel’s hand in comparison with the tremendous rataplan he had beaten on the ribs of Paradise? Could it be true that effort defeated itself — in personal behavior, for instance? A ray of the truth that underlay Cashel’s grotesque experiment was flickering in her mind as she asked herself that question. She thought a good deal about it; and one afternoon, when she looked in at four at-homes in succession, she studied the behavior of the other guests from a new point of view, comparing the most mannered with the best mannered, and her recent self with both. The result half convinced her that she had been occupied during her first London season in displaying, at great pains, a very unripe self-consciousness — or, as she phrased it, in making an insufferable fool of herself.

Shortly afterwards, she met Lucian at a cinderella, or dancing-party concluding at midnight. He came at eleven, and, as usual, gravely asked whether he might have the pleasure of dancing with her. This form of address he never varied. To his surprise, she made some difficulty about granting the favor, and eventually offered him “the second extra.” He bowed. Before he could resume a vertical position a young man came up, remarked that he thought this was his turn, and bore Alice away. Lucian smiled indulgently, thinking that though Alice’s manners were wonderfully good, considering her antecedents, yet she occasionally betrayed a lower tone than that which he sought to exemplify in his own person.

“I wish you would learn to reverse,” said Alice unexpectedly to him, when they had gone round the room twice to the strains of the second extra.

“I DO reverse,” he said, taken aback, and a little indignant.

“Everybody does — that way.”

This silenced him for a moment. Then he said, slowly, “Perhaps I am rather out of practice. I am not sure that reversing is quite desirable. Many people consider it bad form.”

When they stopped — Alice was always willing to rest during a waltz with Lucian — he asked her whether she had heard from Lydia.

“You always ask me that,” she replied. “Lydia never writes except when she has something particular to say, and then only a few lines.”

“Precisely. But she might have had something particular to say since we last met.”

“She hasn’t had,” said Alice, provoked by an almost arch smile from him.

“She will be glad to hear that I have at last succeeded in recovering possession of the Warren Lodge from its undesirable tenants.”

“I thought they went long ago,” said Alice, indifferently.

“The men have not been there for a month or more. The difficulty was to get them to remove their property. However, we are rid of them now. The only relic of their occupation is a Bible with half the pages torn out, and the rest scrawled with records of bets, recipes for sudorific and other medicines, and a mass of unintelligible memoranda. One inscription, in faded ink, runs, ‘To Robert Mellish, from his affectionate mother, with her sincere hope that he may ever walk in the ways of this book.’ I am afraid that hope was not fulfilled.”

“How wicked of him to tear a Bible!” said Alice, seriously. Then she laughed, and added, “I know I shouldn’t; but I can’t help it.”

“The incident strikes me rather as being pathetic,” said Lucian, who liked to show that he was not deficient in sensibility. “One can picture the innocent faith of the poor woman in her boy’s future, and so forth.”

“Inscriptions in books are like inscriptions on tombstones,” said Alice, disparagingly. “They don’t mean much.”

“I am glad that these men have no further excuse for going to Wiltstoken. It was certainly most unfortunate that Lydia should have made the acquaintance of one of them.”

“So you have said at least fifty times,” replied Alice, deliberately. “I believe you are jealous of that poor boxer.”

Lucian became quite red. Alice trembled at her own audacity, but kept a bold front.

“Really — it’s too absurd,” he said, betraying his confusion by assuming a carelessness quite foreign to his normal manner. “In what way could I possibly be jealous, Miss Goff?”

“That is best known to yourself.”

Lucian now saw plainly that there was a change in Alice, and that he had lost ground with her. The smarting of his wounded vanity suddenly obliterated his impression that she was, in the main, a well-conducted and meritorious young woman. But in its place came another impression that she was a spoiled beauty. And, as he was by no means fondest of the women whose behavior accorded best with his notions of propriety, he found, without at once acknowledging to himself, that the change was not in all respects a change for the worse. Nevertheless, he could not forgive her last remark, though he took care not to let her see how it stung him.

“I am afraid I should cut a poor figure in an encounter with my rival,” he said, smiling.

“Call him out and shoot him,” said Alice, vivaciously. “Very likely he does not know how to use a pistol.”

He smiled again; but had Alice known how seriously he entertained her suggestion for some moments before dismissing it as impracticable, she would not have offered it. Putting a bullet into Cashel struck him rather as a luxury which he could not afford than as a crime. Meanwhile, Alice, being now quite satisfied that this Mr. Webber, on whom she had wasted so much undeserved awe, might be treated as inconsiderately as she used to treat her beaux at Wiltstoken, proceeded to amuse herself by torturing him a little.

“It is odd,” she said, reflectively, “that a common man like that should be able to make himself so very attractive to Lydia. It was not because he was such a fine man; for she does not care in the least about that. I don’t think she would give a second look at the handsomest man in London, she is so purely intellectual. And yet she used to delight in talking to him.”

“Oh, that is a mistake. Lydia has a certain manner which leads people to believe that she is deeply interested in the person she happens to be speaking to; But it is only manner — it means nothing.”

“I know that manner of hers perfectly well. But this was something quite different.”

Lucian shook his head reproachfully. “I cannot jest on so serious a matter,” he said, resolving to make the attempt to re-establish his dignity with Alice. “I think, Miss Groff, that you perhaps hardly know how absurd your supposition is. There are not many men of distinction in Europe with whom my cousin is not personally acquainted. A very young girl, who had seen little of the world, might possibly be deceived by the exterior of such a man as Byron. A woman accustomed to associate with writers, thinkers, artists, statesmen, and diplomatists could make no such mistake. No doubt the man’s vulgarity and uncouth address amused her for a moment; but—”

“But why did she ask him to come to her Friday afternoons?”

“A mere civility which she extended to him because he assisted her in some difficulty she got into in the streets.”

“She might as well have asked a policeman to come to see her. I don’t believe that was it.”

Lucian at that moment hated Alice. “I am sorry you think such a thing possible,” he said. “Shall we resume our waltz?”

Alice was not yet able to bear an implication that she did not understand society sufficiently to appreciate the distance between Lydia and Cashel.

“Of course I know it is impossible,” she said, in her old manner. “I did not mean it.”

Lucian found some difficulty in gathering from this what she did mean; and they presently took refuge in waltzing. Subsequently, Alice, fearing that her new lights had led her too far, drew back a little; led the conversation to political matters, and expressed her amazement at the extent and variety of the work he performed in Downing Street. He accepted her compliments with perfect seriousness; and she felt satisfied that she had, on the whole, raised herself in his esteem by her proceedings during the evening. But she was mistaken. She knew nothing of politics or official work, and he knew the worthlessness of her pretended admiration of his share in them, although he felt that it was right that she should revere his powers from the depths of her ignorance. What stuck like a burr in his mind was that she thought him small enough to be jealous of the poor boxer, and found his dancing awkward.

After that dance Alice thought much about Lucian, and also about the way in which society regulated marriages. Before Miss Carew sent for her she had often sighed because all the nice men she knew of moved in circles into which an obscure governess had no chance of admission. She had received welcome attentions from them occasionally at subscription balls; but for sustained intimacy and proposals of marriage she had been dependent on the native youth of Wiltstoken, whom she looked upon as louts or prigs, and among whom Wallace Parker had shone pre-eminent as a university man, scholar, and gentleman. And now that she was a privileged beauty in society which would hardly tolerate Wallace Parker, she found that the nice men were younger sons, poor and extravagant, far superior to Lucian Webber as partners for a waltz, but not to be thought of as partners in domestic economy. Alice had experienced the troubles of poverty, and had never met with excellence in men except in poems, which she had long ago been taught to separate from the possibilities of actual life. She had, therefore, no conception of any degree of merit in a husband being sufficient to compensate for slender means of subsistence. She was not base-minded; nothing could have induced her to marry a man, however rich, whom she thought wicked. She wanted money; but she wanted more than money; and here it was that she found supply failing to answer the demand. For not only were all the handsome, gallant, well-bred men getting deeply into debt by living beyond smaller incomes than that with which Wallace Parker had tempted her, but many of those who had inherited both riches and rank were as inferior to him, both in appearance and address, as they were in scholarship. No man, possessing both wealth and amiability, had yet shown the least disposition to fall in love with her.

One bright forenoon in July, Alice, attended by a groom, went to the park on horseback. The Row looked its best. The freshness of morning was upon horses and riders; there were not yet any jaded people lolling supine in carriages, nor discontented spectators sitting in chairs to envy them. Alice, who was a better horsewoman than might have been expected from the little practice she had had, appeared to advantage in the saddle. She had just indulged in a brisk canter from the Corner to the Serpentine, when she saw a large white horse approaching with Wallace Parker on its back.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, expertly wheeling his steed and taking off his hat at the same time with an intentional display of gallantry and horsemanship. “How are you, Alice?”

“Goodness!” cried Alice, forgetting her manners in her astonishment. “What brings you here; and where on earth did you get that horse?”

“I presume, Alice,” said Parker, satisfied with the impression he had made, “that I am here for much the same reason as you are — to enjoy the morning in proper style. As for Rozinante, I borrowed him. Is that chestnut yours? Excuse the rudeness of the question.”

“No,” said Alice, coloring a little. “This seems such an unlikely place to meet you.”

“Oh, no. I always take a turn in the season. But certainly it would have been a very unlikely place for us to meet a year ago.”

So far, Alice felt, she was getting the worst of the conversation. She changed the subject. “Have you been to Wiltstoken since I last saw you?”

“Yes. I go there once every week at least.”

“Every week! Janet never told me.”

Parker implied by a cunning air that he thought he knew the reason of that; but he said nothing. Alice, piqued, would not condescend to make inquiries. So he said, presently,

“How is Miss Thingumbob?”

“I do not know any one of that name.”

“You know very well whom I mean. Your aristocratic patron, Miss Carew.”

Alice flushed. “You are very impertinent, Wallace,” she said, grasping her riding-whip. “How dare you call Miss Carew my patron?”

Wallace suddenly became solemn. “I did not know that you objected to be reminded of all you owe her,” he said. “Janet never speaks ungratefully of her, though she has done nothing for Janet.”

“I have not spoken ungratefully,” protested Alice, almost in tears. “I feel sure that you are never tired of speaking ill of me to them at home.”

“That shows how little you understand my real character. I always make excuses for you.”

“Excuses for what? What have I done? What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t mean anything, if you don’t. I thought from your beginning to defend yourself that you felt yourself to be in the wrong.”

“I did not defend myself; and I won’t have you say so, Wallace.”

“Always your obedient, humble servant,” he replied, with complacent irony.

She pretended not to hear him, and whipped up her horse to a smart trot. The white steed being no trotter, Parker followed at a lumbering canter. Alice, possessed by a shamefaced fear that he was making her ridiculous, soon checked her speed; and the white horse subsided to a walk, marking its paces by deliberate bobs of its unfashionably long mane and tail.

“I have something to tell you,” said Parker at last.

Alice did not deign to reply.

“I think it better to let you know at once,” he continued. “The fact is, I intend to marry Janet.”

“Janet won’t,” said Alice, promptly, retorting first, and then reflecting on the intelligence, which surprised her more than it pleased her.

Parker smiled conceitedly, and said, “I don’t think she will raise any difficulty if you give her to understand that it is all over between US.”

“That what is all over?”

“Well, if you prefer it, that there never has been anything between us. Janet believes that we were engaged. So did a good many other people until you went into high life.”

“I cannot help what people thought.”

“And they all know that I, at least, was ready to perform my part of the engagement honorably.”

“Wallace,” she said, with a sudden change of tone; “I think we had better separate. It is not right for me to be riding about the park with you when I have nobody belonging to me here except a man-servant.”

“Just as you please,” he said, coolly, halting. “May I assure Janet that you wish her to marry me?”

“Most certainly not. I do not wish anyone to marry you, much less my own sister. I am far inferior to Janet; and she deserves a much better husband than I do.”

“I quite agree with you, though I don’t quite see what that has to do with it. As far as I understand you, you will neither marry me yourself — mind, I am quite willing to fulfil my engagement still — nor let any one else have me. Is that so?”

“You may tell Janet,” said Alice, vigorously, her face glowing, “that if we — you and I — were condemned to live forever on a desert isl — No; I will write to her. That will be the best way. Good-morning.”

Parker, hitherto imperturbable, now showed signs of alarm. “I beg, Alice,” he said, “that you will say nothing unfair to her of me. You cannot with truth say anything bad of me.”

“Do you really care for Janet?” said Alice, wavering.

“Of course,” he replied, indignantly. “Janet is a very superior girl.”

“I have always said so,” said Alice, rather angry because some one else had forestalled her with the meritorious admission. “I will tell her the simple truth — that there has never been anything between us except what is between all cousins; and that there never could have been anything more on my part. I must go now. I don’t know what that man must think of me already.”

“I should be sorry to lower you in his esteem,” said Parker, maliciously. “Good-bye, Alice.” Uttering the last words in a careless tone, he again pulled up the white horse’s head, raised his hat, and sped away. It was not true that he was in the habit of riding in the park every season. He had learned from Janet that Alice was accustomed to ride there in the forenoon; and he had hired the white horse in order to meet her on equal terms, feeling that a gentleman on horseback in the road by the Serpentine could be at no social disadvantage with any lady, however exalted her associates.

As for Alice, she went home with his reminder that Miss Carew was her patron rankling in her. The necessity for securing an independent position seemed to press imminently upon her. And as the sole way of achieving this was by marriage, she felt for the time willing to marry any man, without regard to his person, age, or disposition, if only he could give her a place equal to that of Miss Carew in the world, of which she had lately acquired the manners and customs.

CHAPTER XII

When the autumn set in, Alice was in Scotland learning to shoot; and Lydia was at Wiltstoken, preparing her father’s letters and memoirs for publication. She did not write at the castle, all the rooms in which were either domed, vaulted, gilded, galleried, three-sided, six-sided, anything except four-sided, or in some way suggestive of the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” and out of keeping with the associations of her father’s life. In her search for a congruous room to work in, the idea of causing a pavilion to be erected in the elm vista occurred to her. But she had no mind to be disturbed just then by the presence of a troop of stone-masons, slaters, and carpenters, nor any time to lose in waiting for the end of their operations. So she had the Warren Lodge cleansed and lime washed, and the kitchen transformed into a comfortable library, where, as she sat facing the door at her writing-table, in the centre of the room, she could see the elm vista through one window and through another a tract of wood and meadow land intersected by the high-road and by a canal, beyond which the prospect ended in a distant green slope used as a sheep run. The other apartments were used by a couple of maid-servants, who kept the place well swept and dusted, prepared Miss Carew’s lunch, answered her bell, and went on her errands to the castle; and, failing any of these employments, sat outside in the sun, reading novels. When Lydia had worked in this retreat daily for two months her mind became so full of the old life with her father that the interruptions of the servants often recalled her to the present with a shock. On the twelfth of August she was bewildered for a moment when Phoebe, one of the maids, entered and said,

“If you please, miss, Bashville is wishful to know can he speak to you a moment?”

Permission being given, Bashville entered. Since his wrestle with Cashel he had never quite recovered his former imperturbability. His manner and speech were as smooth and respectful as before, but his countenance was no longer steadfast; he was on bad terms with the butler because he had been reproved by him for blushing. On this occasion he came to beg leave to absent himself during the afternoon. He seldom asked favors of this kind, and was of course never refused.

“The road is quite thronged to-day,” she observed, as he thanked her. “Do you know why?”

“No, madam,” said Bashville, and blushed.

“People begin to shoot on the twelfth,” she said; “but I suppose it cannot have anything to do with that. Is there a race, or a fair, or any such thing in the neighborhood?”

“Not that I am aware of, madam.”

Lydia dipped her pen in the ink and thought no more of the subject. Bashville returned to the castle, attired himself like a country gentleman of sporting tastes, and went out to enjoy his holiday.

The forenoon passed away peacefully. There was no sound in the Warren Lodge except the scratching of Lydia’s pen, the ticking of her favorite skeleton clock, an occasional clatter of crockery from the kitchen, and the voices of the birds and maids without. The hour for lunch approached, and Lydia became a little restless. She interrupted her work to look at the clock, and brushed a speck of dust from its dial with the feather of her quill. Then she looked absently through the window along the elm vista, where she had once seen, as she had thought, a sylvan god. This time she saw a less romantic object — a policeman. She looked again, incredulously, there he was still, a black-bearded, helmeted man, making a dark blot in the green perspective, and surveying the landscape cautiously. Lydia rang the bell, and bade Phoebe ask the man what he wanted.

The girl soon returned out of breath, with the news that there were a dozen more constables hiding in the road, and that the one she had spoken to had given no account of himself, but had asked her how many gates there were to the park; whether they were always locked, and whether she had seen many people about. She felt sure that a murder had been committed somewhere. Lydia shrugged her shoulders, and ordered luncheon, during which Phoebe gazed eagerly through the window, and left her mistress to wait on herself.

“Phoebe,” said Lydia, when the dishes were removed; “you may go to the gate lodge, and ask them there what the policemen want. But do not go any further. Stay. Has Ellen gone to the castle with the things?”

Phoebe reluctantly admitted that Ellen had.

“Well, you need not wait for her to return; but come back as quickly as you can, in case I should want anybody.”

“Directly, miss,” said Phoebe, vanishing.

Lydia, left alone, resumed her work leisurely, occasionally pausing to gaze at the distant woodland, and note with transient curiosity a flock of sheep on the slope, or a flight of birds above the tree-tops. Something more startling occurred presently. A man, apparently half-naked, and carrying a black object under his arm, darted through a remote glade with the swiftness of a stag, and disappeared. Lydia concluded that he had been disturbed while bathing in the canal, and had taken flight with his wardrobe under his arm. She laughed at the idea, turned to her manuscript again, and wrote on. Suddenly there was a rustle and a swift footstep without. Then the latch was violently jerked up, and Cashel Byron rushed in as far as the threshold, where he stood, stupefied at the presence of Lydia, and the change in the appearance of the room.

He was himself remarkably changed. He was dressed in a pea-jacket, which evidently did not belong to him, for it hardly reached his middle, and the sleeves were so short that his forearms were half bare, showing that he wore nothing beneath this borrowed garment. Below it he had on white knee-breeches, with green stains of bruised grass on them. The breeches were made with a broad ilap in front, under which, and passing round his waist, was a scarf of crimson silk. From his knees to his socks, the edges of which had fallen over his laced boots, his legs were visible, naked, and muscular. On his face was a mask of sweat, dust, and blood, partly rubbed away in places by a sponge, the borders of its passage marked by black streaks. Underneath his left eye was a mound of bluish flesh nearly as large as a walnut. The jaw below it, and the opposite cheek, were severely bruised, and his lip was cut through at one corner. He had no hat; his close-cropped hair was disordered, and his ears were as though they had been rubbed with coarse sand-paper.

Lydia looked at him for some seconds, and he at her, speechless. Then she tried to speak, failed, and sunk into her chair.

“I didn’t know there was any one here,” he said, in a hoarse, panting whisper. “The police are after me. I have fought for an hour, and run over a mile, and I’m dead beat — I can go no farther. Let me hide in the back room, and tell them you haven’t seen any one, will you?”

“What have you done?” she said, conquering her weakness with an effort, and standing up.

“Nothing,” he replied, groaning occasionally as he recovered breath. “Business, that’s all.”

“Why are the police pursuing you? Why are you in such a dreadful condition?”

Cashel seemed alarmed at this. There was a mirror in the lid of a paper-case on the table. He took it up and looked at himself anxiously, but was at once relieved by what he saw. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m not marked. That mouse” — he pointed gayly to the lump under his eye-”will run away to-morrow. I am pretty tidy, considering. But it’s bellows to mend with me at present. Whoosh! My heart is as big as a bullock’s after that run.”

“You ask me to shelter you,” said Lydia, sternly. “What have you done? Have you committed murder?”

“No!” exclaimed Cashel, trying to open his eyes widely in his astonishment, but only succeeding with one, as the other was gradually closing. “I tell you I have been fighting; and it’s illegal. You don’t want to see me in prison, do you? Confound him,” he added, reverting to her question with sudden wrath; “a steam-hammer wouldn’t kill him. You might as well hit a sack of nails. And all my money, my time, my training, and my day’s trouble gone for nothing! It’s enough to make a man cry.”

“Go,” said Lydia, with uncontrollable disgust. “And do not let me see which way you go. How dare you come to me?”

The sponge-marks on Cashel’s face grew whiter, and he began, to pant heavily again. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll go. There isn’t a boy in your stables that would give me up like that.”

As he spoke, he opened the door; but he involuntarily shut it again immediately. Lydia looked through the window, and saw a crowd of men, police and others, hurrying along the elm vista. Cashel cast a glance round, half piteous, half desperate, like a hunted animal. Lydia could not resist it. “Quick!” she cried, opening one of the inner doors. “Go in there, and keep quiet — if you can.” And, as he sulkily hesitated a moment, she stamped vehemently. He slunk in submissively. She shut the door and resumed her place at the writing-table, her heart beating with a kind of excitement she had not felt since, in her early childhood, she had kept guilty secrets from her nurse.

There was a tramping without, and a sound of voices. Then two peremptory raps at the door.

“Come in,” said Lydia, more composedly than she was aware of. The permission was not waited for. Before she ceased speaking a policeman opened the door and looked quickly round the room. He seemed rather taken aback by what he saw, and finally touched his helmet to signify respect for Lydia. He was about to speak, when Phoebe, flushed with running, pushed past him, put her hand on the door, and pertly asked what he wanted.

“Come away from the door, Phoebe,” said Lydia. “Wait here with me until I give you leave to go,” she added, as the girl moved towards the inner door. “Now,” she said, turning courteously to the policeman, “what is the matter?”

“I ask your pardon, mum,” said the constable, agreeably. “Did you happen to see any one pass hereabouts lately?”

“Do you mean a man only partly dressed, and carrying a black coat?” said Lydia.

“That’s him, miss,” said the policeman, greatly interested.” Which way did he go?”

“I will show you where I saw him,” said Lydia, quietly rising and going with the man to the door, outside which she found a crowd of rustics, and five policemen, having in custody two men, one of whom was Mellish (without a coat), and the other a hook-nosed man, whose like Lydia had seen often on race-courses. She pointed out the glade across which she had seen Cashel run, and felt as if the guilt of the deception she was practising was wrenching some fibre in her heart from its natural order. But she spoke with apparent self-possession, and no shade of suspicion fell on the minds of the police.

Several peasants now came forward, each professing to know exactly whither Cashel had been making when he crossed the glade. While they were disputing, many persons resembling the hook-nosed captive in general appearance sneaked into the crowd and regarded the police with furtive hostility. Soon after, a second detachment of police came up, with another prisoner and another crowd, among whom was Bashville.

“Better go in, mum,” said the policeman who had spoken to Lydia first. “We must keep together, being so few, and he ain’t fit for you to look at.”

But Lydia had looked already, and had guessed that the last prisoner was Paradise, although his countenance was damaged beyond recognition. His costume was like that of Cashel, except that he was girt with a blue handkerchief with white spots, and his shoulders were wrapped in a blanket, through one of the folds of which his naked ribs could be seen, tinged with every hue that a bad bruise can assume. A shocking spectacle appeared where his face had formerly been. A crease and a hole in the midst of a cluster of lumps of raw flesh indicated the presence of an eye and a mouth; the rest of his features were indiscernible. He could still see a little, for he moved his puffed and lacerated hand to arrange his blanket, and demanded hoarsely, and with greatly impeded articulation, whether the lady would stand a dram to a poor fighting man wot had done his best for his backers. On this some one produced a flask, and Mellish volunteered, provided he were released for a moment, to get the contents down Paradise’s throat. As soon as the brandy had passed his swollen lips he made a few preliminary sounds, and then shouted,

“He sent for the coppers because he couldn’t stand another round. I am ready to go on.”

The policemen bade him hold his tongue, closed round him, and hid him from Lydia, who, without showing the mingled pity and loathing with which his condition inspired her, told them to bring him to the castle, and have him attended to there. She added that the whole party could obtain refreshment at the same time. The sergeant, who was very tired and thirsty, wavered in his resolution to continue the pursuit. Lydia, as usual, treated the matter as settled.

“Bashville,” she said, “will you please show them the way, and see that they are satisfied.”

“Some thief has stole my coat,” said Mellish, sullenly, to Bashville. “If you’ll lend me one, governor, and these blessed policemen will be so kind as not to tear it off my back, I’ll send it down to you in a day or two. I’m a respectable man, and have been her ladyship’s tenant here.”

“Your pal wants it worse than you,” said the sergeant. “If there was an old coachman’s cape or anything to put over him, I would see it returned safe. I don’t want to bring him round the country in a blanket, like a wild Injin.”

“I have a cloak inside,” said Bashville. “I’ll get it for you.” And before Lydia could devise a pretext for stopping him, he went out, and she heard him reentering the lodge by the back door. It seemed to her that a silence fell on the crowd, as if her deceit were already discovered. Then Mellish, who had been waiting for an opportunity to protest against the last remark of the policeman, said, angrily,

“Who are you calling my pal? I hope I may be struck dead for a liar if ever I set my eyes on him in my life before.”

Lydia looked at him as a martyr might look at a wretch to whom she was to be chained. He was doing as she had done — lying. Then Bashville, having passed through the other rooms, came into the library by the inner door, with an old livery cloak on his arm.

“Put that on him,” he said, “and come along to the castle with me. You can see the roads for five miles round from the south tower, and recognize every man on them, through the big telescope. By your leave, madam, I think Phoebe had better come with us to help.”

“Certainly,” said Lydia, looking steadfastly at him.

“I’ll get clothes at the castle for the man that wants them,” he added, trying to return her gaze, but failing with a blush. “Now boys. Come along.”

“I thank your ladyship,” said the sergeant. “We have had a hard morning of it, and we can do no more at present than drink your health.” He touched his helmet again, and Lydia bowed to him. “Keep close together, men,” he shouted, as the crowd moved off with Bashville.

“Ah,” sneered Mellish, “keep close together like the geese do. Things has come to a pretty pass when an Englishman is run in for stopping when he sees a crowd.”

“All right,” said the sergeant. “I have got that bundle of colored handkerchiefs you were selling; and I’ll find the other man before you’re a day older. It’s a pity, seeing how you’ve behaved so well and haven’t resisted us, that you won’t drop a hint of where those ropes and stakes are hid. I might have a good word at the sessions for any one who would put me in the way of finding them.”

“Ropes and stakes! Fiddlesticks and grandmothers! There weren’t no ropes and stakes. It was only a turn-up — that is, if there was any fighting at all. I didn’t see none; but I s’pose you did. But then you’re clever, and I’m not.”

By this time the last straggler of the party had disappeared from Lydia, who had watched their retreat from the door of the Warren Lodge. When she turned to go in she saw Cashel cautiously entering from the room in which he had lain concealed. His excitement had passed off; he looked cold and anxious, as if a reaction were setting in.

“Are they all gone?” he said. “That servant of yours is a good sort. He has promised to bring me some clothes. As for you, you’re better than — What’s the matter? Where are you going to?”

Lydia had put on her hat, and was swiftly wrapping herself in a shawl. Wreaths of rosy color were chasing each other through her cheeks; and her eyes and nostrils, usually so tranquil, were dilated.

“Won’t you speak to me?” he said, irresolutely.

“Just this,” she replied, with passion. “Let me never see you again. The very foundations of my life are loosened: I have told a lie. I have made my servant — an honorable man — an accomplice in a lie. We are worse than you; for even your wild-beast’s handiwork is a less evil than the bringing of a falsehood into the world. This is what has come to me out of our acquaintance. I have given you a hiding-place. Keep it. I will never enter it again.”

Cashel, appalled, shrank back with an expression such as a child wears when, in trying to steal sweet-meats from a high shelf, it pulls the whole cupboard down about its ears. He neither spoke nor stirred as she left the lodge.

Finding herself presently at the castle, she went to her boudoir, where she found her maid, the French lady, from whose indignant description of the proceedings below she gathered that the policemen were being regaled with bread and cheese, and beer; and that the attendance of a surgeon had been dispensed with, Paradise’s wounds having been dressed skilfully by Mellish. Lydia bade her send Bashville to the Warren Lodge to see that there were no strangers loitering about it, and ordered that none of the female servants should return there until he came back. Then she sat down and tried not to think. But she could not help thinking; so she submitted and tried to think the late catastrophe out. An idea that she had disjointed the whole framework of things by creating a false belief filled her imagination. The one conviction that she had brought out of her reading, observing, reflecting, and living was that the concealment of a truth, with its resultant false beliefs, must produce mischief, even though the beginning of that mischief might be as inconceivable as the end. She made no distinction between the subtlest philosophical misconception and the vulgarest lie. The evil of Cashel’s capture was measurable, the evil of a lie beyond all measure. She felt none the less assured of that evil because she could not foresee one bad consequence likely to ensue from what she had done. Her misgivings pressed heavily upon her; for her father, a determined sceptic, had taught her his own views, and she was, therefore, destitute of the consolations which religion has for the wrongdoer. It was plainly her duty to send for the policeman and clear up the deception she had practised on him. But this she could not do. Her will, in spite of her reason, acted in the opposite direction. And in this paralysis of her moral power she saw the evil of the lie beginning. She had given it birth, and nature would not permit her to strangle the monster.

At last her maid returned and informed her that the canaille had gone away. When she was again alone, she rose and walked slowly to and fro through the room, forgetting the lapse of time in the restless activity of her mind, until she was again interrupted, this time by Bashville.

“Well?”

He was daunted by her tone; for he had never before heard her speak haughtily to a servant. He did not understand that he had changed subjectively, and was now her accomplice.

“He’s given himself up.”

“What do you mean?” she said, with sudden dismay.

“Byron, madam. I brought some clothes to the lodge for him, but when I got there he was gone. I went round to the gates in search of him, and found him in the hands of the police. They told me he’d just given himself up. He wouldn’t give any account of himself; and he looked — well, sullen and beaten down like.”

“What will they do with him?” she asked, turning quite pale.

“A man got six weeks’ hard labor, last month, for the same offence. Most probably that’s what he’ll get. And very little for what’s he’s done, as you’d say if you saw him doing it, madam.”

“Then,” said Lydia, sternly, “it was to see this” — she shrank from naming it— “this fight, that you asked my permission to go out!”

“Yes, madam, it was,” said Bashville, with some bitterness. “I recognized Lord Worthington and plenty more noblemen and gentlemen there.”

Lydia was about to reply sharply; but she checked herself; and her usual tranquil manner came back as she said, “That is no reason why you should have been there.”

Bashville’s color began to waver, and his voice to need increased control. “It’s in human nature to go to such a thing once,” he said; “but once is enough, at least for me. You’ll excuse my mentioning it, madam; but what with Lord Worthington and the rest of Byron’s backers screaming oaths and abuse at the other man, and the opposite party doing the same to Byron — well, I may not be a gentleman; but I hope I can conduct myself like a man, even when I’m losing money.”

“Then do not go to such an exhibition again, Bashville. I must not dictate to you what your amusements shall be; but I do not think you are likely to benefit yourself by copying Lord Worthington’s tastes.”

“I copy no lord’s tastes,” said Bashville, reddening. “You hid the man that was fighting, Miss Carew. Why do you look down on the man that was only a bystander?”

Lydia’s color rose, too. Her first impulse was to treat this outburst as rebellion against her authority, and crush it. But her sense of justice withheld her.

“Would you have had me betray a fugitive who took refuge in my house, Bashville? YOU did not betray him.”

“No,” said Bashville, his expression subdued to one of rueful pride. “When I am beaten by a better man, I have courage enough to get out of his way and take no mean advantage of him.”

Lydia, not understanding, looked inquiringly at him. He made a gesture as if throwing something from him, and continued recklessly,

“But one way I’m as good as he, and better. A footman is held more respectable than a prize-fighter. He’s told you that he’s in love with you; and if it is to be my last word, I’ll tell you that the ribbon round your neck is more to me than your whole body and soul is to him or his like. When he took an unfair advantage of me, and pretended to be a gentleman, I told Mr. Lucian of him, and showed him up for what he was. But when I found him to-day hiding in the pantry at the Lodge, I took no advantage of him, though I knew well that if he’d been no more to you than any other man of his sort, you’d never have hid him. You know best why he gave himself up to the police after your seeing his day’s work. But I will leave him to his luck. He is the best man: let the best man win. I am sorry,” added Bashville, recovering his ordinary suave manner with an effort, “to inconvenience you by a short notice, but I should take it as a particular favor if I might go this evening.”

“You had better,” said Lydia, rising quite calmly, and keeping resolutely away from her the strange emotional result of being astonished, outraged, and loved at one unlooked-for stroke. “It is not advisable that you should stay after what you have just—”

“I knew that when I said it,” interposed Bashville hastily and doggedly.

“In going away you will be taking precisely the course that would be adopted by any gentleman who had spoken to the same effect. I am not offended by your declaration: I recognize your right to make it. If you need my testimony to further your future arrangements, I shall be happy to say that I believe you to be a man of honor.”

Bashville bowed, and said in a low voice, very nervously, that he had no intention of going into service again, but that he should always be proud of her good opinion.

“You are fitted for better things,” she said. “If you embark in any enterprise requiring larger means than you possess, I will be your security. I thank you for your invariable courtesy to me in the discharge of your duties. Good-bye.”

She bowed to him and left the room. Bashville, awestruck, returned her salutation as best he could, and stood motionless after she disappeared; his mind advancing on tiptoe to grasp what had just passed. His chief sensation was one of relief. He no longer dared to fancy himself in love with such a woman. Her sudden consideration for him as a suitor overwhelmed him with a sense of his unfitness for such a part. He saw himself as a very young, very humble, and very ignorant man, whose head had been turned by a pleasant place and a kind mistress. Wakened from his dream, he stole away to pack his trunk, and to consider how best to account to his fellow-servants for his departure.

CHAPTER XIII

Lydia resumed her work next day with shaken nerves and a longing for society. Many enthusiastic young ladies of her acquaintance would have brought her kisses and devotion by the next mail in response to a telegram; and many more practical people would have taken considerable pains to make themselves agreeable to her for the sake of spending the autumn at Wiltstoken Castle. But she knew that they would only cause her to regret her former solitude. She shrank from the people who attached themselves to her strength and riches even when they had not calculated her gain, and were conscious only of admiration and gratitude. Alice, as a companion, had proved a failure. She was too young, and too much occupied with the propriety of her own behavior, to be anything more to Lydia than an occasional tax upon her patience. Lydia, to her own surprise, thought several times of Miss Gisborne, and felt tempted to invite her, but was restrained by mistrust of the impulse to communicate with Cashel’s mother, and reluctance to trace it to its source. Eventually she resolved to conquer her loneliness, and apply herself with increased diligence to the memoir of her father. To restore her nerves, she walked for an hour every day in the neighborhood, and drove out in a pony carriage, in the evening. Bashville’s duties were now fulfilled by the butler and Phoebe, Lydia being determined to admit no more young footmen to her service.

One afternoon, returning from one of her daily walks, she found a stranger on the castle terrace, in conversation with the butler. As it was warm autumn weather, Lydia was surprised to see a woman wearing a black silk mantle trimmed with fur, and heavily decorated with spurious jet beads. However, as the female inhabitants of Wiltstoken always approached Miss Carew in their best raiment, without regard to hours or seasons, she concluded that she was about to be asked for a subscription to a school treat, a temperance festival, or perhaps a testimonial to one of the Wiltstoken curates.

When she came nearer she saw that the stranger was an elderly lady — or possibly not a lady — with crimped hair, and ringlets hanging at each ear in a fashion then long obsolete.

“Here is Miss Carew,” said the butler, shortly, as if the old lady had tried his temper. “You had better talk to her yourself.”

At this she seemed fluttered, and made a solemn courtesy. Lydia, noticing the courtesy and the curls, guessed that her visitor kept a dancing academy. Yet a certain contradictory hardihood in her frame and bearing suggested that perhaps she kept a tavern. However, as her face was, on the whole, an anxious and a good face, and as her attitude towards the lady of the castle was one of embarrassed humility, Lydia acknowledged her salutation kindly, and waited for her to speak.

“I hope you won’t consider it a liberty,” said the stranger, tremulously. “I’m Mrs. Skene.”

Lydia became ominously grave; and Mrs. Skene reddened a little. Then she continued, as if repeating a carefully prepared and rehearsed speech, “It would be esteemed a favor if I might have the honor of a few words in private with your ladyship.”

Lydia looked and felt somewhat stern; but it was not in her nature to rebuff any one without strong provocation. She invited her visitor to enter, and led the way to the circular drawing-room, the strange decorations of which exactly accorded with Mrs. Skene’s ideas of aristocratic splendor. As a professor of deportment and etiquette, the ex-champion’s wife was nervous under the observation of such an expert as Lydia; but she got safely seated without having made a mistake to reproach herself with. For, although entering a room seems a simple matter to many persons, it was to Mrs. Skene an operation governed by the strict laws of the art she professed, and one so elaborate that few of her pupils mastered it satisfactorily with less than a month’s practice. Mrs Skene soon dismissed it from her mind. She was too old to dwell upon such vanities when real anxieties were pressing upon her.

“Oh, miss,” she began, appealingly, “the boy!”

Lydia knew at once who was meant. But she repeated, as if at a loss, “The boy?” And immediately accused herself of insincerity.

“Our boy, ma’am. Cashel.”

“Mrs. Skene!” said Lydia, reproachfully.

Mrs. Skene understood all that Lydia’s tone implied. “I know, ma’am,” she pleaded. “I know well. But what could I do but come to you? Whatever you said to him, it has gone to his heart; and he’s dying.”

“Pardon me,” said Lydia, promptly; “men do not die of such things; and Mr. Cashel Byron is not so deficient either in robustness of body or hardness of heart as to be an exception to THAT rule.”

“Yes, miss,” said Mrs. Skene, sadly. “You are thinking of the profession. You can’t believe he has any feelings because he fights. Ah, miss, if you only knew them as I do! More tender-hearted men don’t breathe. Cashel is like a young child, his feelings are that easily touched; and I have known stronger than he to die of broken hearts only because they were unlucky in their calling. Just think what a high-spirited young man must feel when a lady calls him a wild beast. That was a cruel word, miss; it was, indeed.”

Lydia was so disconcerted by this attack that she had to pause awhile before replying. Then she said, “Are you aware, Mrs. Skene, that my knowledge of Mr. Byron is very slight — that I have not seen him ten times in my life? Perhaps you do not know the circumstances in which I last saw him. I was greatly shocked by the injuries he had inflicted on another man; and I believe I spoke of them as the work of a wild beast. For your sake, I am sorry I said so; for he has told me that he regards you as his mother; and—”

“Oh, no! Far from it, miss. I ask your pardon a thousand times for taking the word out of your mouth; but me and Ned is no more to him than your housekeeper or governess might be to you. That’s what I’m afraid you don’t understand, miss. He’s no relation of ours. I do assure you that he’s a gentleman born and bred; and when we go back to Melbourne next Christmas, it will be just the same as if he had never known us.”

“I hope he will not be so ungrateful as to forget you. He has told me his history.”

“That’s more than he ever told me, miss; so you may judge how much he thinks of you.”

A pause followed this. Mrs. Skene felt that the first exchange was over, and that she had got the better in it.

“Mrs. Skene,” said Lydia then, penetratingly; “when you came to pay me this visit, what object did you propose to yourself? What do you expect me to do?”

“Well, ma’am,” said Mrs. Skene, troubled, “the poor lad has had crosses lately. There was the disappointment about you — the first one, I mean — that had been preying on his mind for a long time. Then there was that exhibition spar at the Agricultural Hall, when Paradise acted so dishonorable. Cashel heard that you were looking on; and then he read the shameful way the newspapers wrote of him; and he thought you’d believe it all. I couldn’t get that thought out of his head. I said to him, over and over again—”

“Excuse me,” said Lydia, interrupting. “We had better be frank with one another. It is useless to assume that he mistook my feeling on that subject. I WAS shocked by the severity with which he treated his opponent.”

“But bless you, that’s his business,” said Mrs. Skone, opening her eyes widely. “I put it to you, miss,” she continued, as if mildly reprobating some want of principle on Lydia’s part, “whether an honest man shouldn’t fulfil his engagements. I assure you that the pay a respectable professional usually gets for a spar like that is half a guinea; and that was all Paradise got. But Cashel stood on his reputation, and wouldn’t take less than ten guineas; and he got it, too. Now many another in his position would have gone into the ring and fooled away the time pretending to box, and just swindling those that paid him. But Cashel is as honest and high-minded as a king. You saw for yourself the trouble he took. He couldn’t have spared himself less if he had been fighting for a thousand a side and the belt, instead of for a paltry ten guineas. Surely you don’t think the worse of him for his honesty, miss?”

“I confess,” said Lydia, laughing in spite of herself, “that your view of the transaction did not occur to me.”

“Of course not, ma’am; no more it wouldn’t to any one, without they were accustomed to know the right and wrong of the profession. Well, as I was saying, miss, that was a fresh disappointment to him. It worrited him more than you can imagine. Then came a deal of bother about the match with Paradise. First Paradise could only get five hundred pounds; and the boy wouldn’t agree for less than a thousand. I think it’s on your account that he’s been so particular about the money of late; for he was never covetous before. Then Mellish was bent on its coming off down hereabouts; and the poor lad was so mortal afraid of its getting to your ears, that he wouldn’t consent until they persuaded him you would be in foreign parts in August. Glad I was when the articles were signed at last, before he was worrited into his grave. All the time he was training he was longing for a sight of you; but he went through with it as steady and faithful as a man could. And he trained beautiful. I saw him on the morning of the fight; and he was like a shining angel; it would have done a lady’s heart good to look at him. Ned went about like a madman offering twenty to one on him: if he had lost, we should have been ruined at this moment. And then to think of the police coming just as he was finishing Paradise. I cried like a child when I heard of it: I don’t think there was ever anything so cruel. And he could have finished him quarter of an hour sooner, only he held back to make the market for Ned.” Here Mrs. Skene, overcome, blew her nose before proceeding. “Then, on the top of that, came what passed betwixt you and him, and made him give himself up to the police. Lord Worthington bailed him out; but what with the disgrace and the disappointment, and his time and money thrown away, and the sting of your words, all coming together, he was quite broken-hearted. And now he mopes and frets; and neither me nor Ned nor Fan can get any good of him. They tell me that he won’t be sent to prison; but if he is” — here Mrs. Skene broke down and began to cry—” it will be the death of him, and God forgive those that have brought it about.”

Sorrow always softened Lydia; but tears hardened her again; she had no patience with them.

“And the other man?” she said. “Have you heard anything of him? I suppose he is in some hospital.”

“In hospital!” repeated Mrs. Skene, checking her tears in alarm. “Who?”

“Paradise,” replied Lydia, pronouncing the name reluctantly.

“He in hospital! Why, bless your innocence, miss, I saw him yesterday, looking as well as such an ugly brute could look — not a mark on him, and he bragging what he would have done to Cashel if the police hadn’t come up. He’s a nasty, low fighting man, so he is; and I’m only sorry that our boy demeaned himself to strip with the like of him. I hear that Cashel made a perfect picture of him, and that you saw him. I suppose you were frightened, ma’am, and very naturally, too, not being used to such sights. I have had my Ned brought home to me in that state that I have poured brandy into his eye, thinking it was his mouth; and even Cashel, careful as he is, has been nearly blind for three days. It is not to be expected that they could have all the money for nothing. Don’t let it prey on your mind, miss. If you married — I am only supposing it,” said Mrs. Skene in soothing parenthesis as she saw Lydia shrink from the word— “if you were married to a great surgeon, as you might be without derogation to your high rank, you’d be ready to faint if you saw him cut off a leg or an arm, as he would have to do every day for his livelihood; but you’d be proud of his cleverness in being able to do it. That’s how I feel with regard to Ned. I tell you the truth, ma’am, I shouldn’t like to see him in the ring no more than the lady of an officer in the Guards would like to see her husband in the field of battle running his sword into the poor blacks or into the French; but as it’s his profession, and people think so highly of him for it, I make up my mind to it; and now I take quite an interest in it, particularly as it does nobody any harm. Not that I would have you think that Ned ever took the arm or leg off a man: Lord forbid — or Cashel either. Oh, ma’am, I thank you kindly, and I’m sorry you should have given yourself the trouble.” This referred to the entry of a servant with tea.

“Still,” said Lydia, when they were at leisure to resume the conversation, “I do not quite understand why you have come to me. Personally you are quite welcome; but in what way did you expect to relieve Mr. Byron’s mind by visiting me? Did he ask you to come?”

“He’d have died first. I came down of my own accord, knowing what was the matter with him.”

“And what then?”

Mrs. Skene looked around to satisfy herself that they were alone. Then she leaned towards Lydia, and said in an emphatic whisper,

“Why won’t you marry him, miss?”

“Because I don’t choose, Mrs. Skene,” said Lydia, with perfect good-humor.

“But consider a little, miss. Where will you ever get such another chance? Only think what a man he is! champion of the world and a gentleman as well. The two things have never happened before, and never will again. I have known lots of champions, but they were not fit company for the like of you. Ned was champion when I married him; and my family thought that I lowered myself in doing it, although I was only a professional dancer on the stage. The men in the ring are common men mostly; and so, though they are the best men in the kingdom, ladies are cut off from their society. But it has been your good luck to take the fancy of one that’s a gentleman. What more could a lady desire? Where will you find his equal in health, strength, good looks, or good manners? As to his character, I can tell you about that. In Melbourne, as you may suppose, all the girls and women were breaking their hearts for his sake. I declare to you that I used to have two or three of them in every evening merely to look at him, and he, poor innocent lad, taking no more notice of them than if they were cabbages. He used to be glad to get away from them by going into the saloon and boxing with the gentlemen; and then they used to peep at him through the door. They never got a wink from him. You were the first, Miss Carew; and, believe me, you will be the last. If there had ever been another he couldn’t have kept it from me; because his disposition is as open as a child’s. And his honesty is beyond everything you can imagine. I have known him to be offered eight hundred pounds to lose a fight that he could only get two hundred by winning, not to mention his chance of getting nothing at all if he lost honestly. You know — for I see you know the world, ma’am — how few men would be proof against such a temptation. There are men high up in their profession — so high that you’d as soon suspect the queen on her throne of selling her country’s battles as them — that fight cross on the sly when it’s made worth their while. My Ned is no low prize-fighter, as is well known; but when he let himself be beat by that little Killarney Primrose, and went out and bought a horse and trap next day, what could I think? There, ma’am, I tell you that of my own husband; and I tell you that Cashel never was beaten, although times out of mind it would have paid him better to lose than to win, along of those wicked betting men. Not an angry word have I ever had from him, nor the sign of liquor have I ever seen on him, except once on Ned’s birthday; and then nothing but fun came out of him in his cups, when the truth comes out of all men. Oh, do just think how happy you ought to be, miss, if you would only bring yourself to look at it in the proper light. A gentleman born and bred, champion of the world, sober, honest, spotless as the unborn babe, able to take his own part and yours in any society, and mad in love with you! He thinks you an angel from heaven and so I am sure you are, miss, in your heart. I do assure you that my Fan gets quite put out because she thinks he draws comparisons to her disadvantage. I don’t think you can be so hard to please as to refuse him, miss.”

Lydia leaned back in her chair and looked at Mrs. Skene with a curious expression which soon brightened into an irrepressible smile. Mrs. Skene smiled very slightly in complaisance, but conveyed by her serious brow that what she had said was no laughing matter.

“I must take some time to consider all that you have so eloquently urged,” said Lydia. “I am in earnest, Mrs. Skene; you have produced a great effect upon me. Now let us talk of something else for the present. Your daughter is quite well, I hope.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am, she enjoys her health.”

“And you also?”

“I am as well as can be expected,” said Mrs. Skene, too fond of commiseration to admit that she was perfectly well.

“You must have a rare sense of security,” said Lydia, watching her, “being happily married to so celebrated a — a professor of boxing as Mr. Skene. Is it not pleasant to have a powerful protector?”

“Ah, miss, you little know,” exclaimed Mrs. Skene, falling into the trap baited by her own grievances, and losing sight of Cashel’s interests. “The fear of his getting into trouble is never off my mind. Ned is quietness itself until he has a drop of drink in him; and then he is like the rest — ready to fight the first that provokes him. And if the police get hold of him he has no chance. There’s no justice for a fighting man. Just let it be said that he’s a professional, and that’s enough for the magistrate; away with him to prison, and good-by to his pupils and his respectability at once. That’s what I live in terror of. And as to being protected, I’d let myself be robbed fifty times over sooner than say a word to him that might bring on a quarrel. Many a time when we were driving home of a night have I overpaid the cabman on the sly, afraid he would grumble and provoke Ned. It’s the drink that does it all. Gentlemen are proud to be seen speaking with him in public; and they come up one after another asking what he’ll have, until the next thing he knows is that he’s in bed with his boots on, his wrist sprained, and maybe his eye black, trying to remember what he was doing the night before. What I suffered the first three years of our marriage none can tell. Then he took the pledge, and ever since that he’s been very good — I haven’t seen him what you could fairly call drunk, not more than three times a year. It was the blessing of God, and a beating he got from a milkman in Westminster, that made him ashamed of himself. I kept him to it and made him emigrate out of the way of his old friends. Since that, there has been a blessing on him; and we’ve prospered.”

“Is Cashel quarrelsome?”

At the tone of this question Mrs. Skene suddenly realized the untimeliness of her complaints. “No, no,” she protested. “He never drinks; and as to fighting, if you can believe such a thing, miss, I don’t think he has had a casual turnup three times in his life — not oftener, at any rate. All he wants is to be married; and then he’ll be steady to his grave. But if he’s left adrift now, Lord knows what will become of him. He’ll mope first — he’s moping at present — then he’ll drink; then he’ll lose his pupils, get out of condition, be beaten, and — One word from you, miss, would save him. If I might just tell him—”

“Nothing,” said Lydia. “Absolutely nothing. The only assurance I can give you is that you have softened the hard opinion that I had formed of some of his actions. But that I should marry Mr. Cashel Byron is simply the most improbable thing in the world. All questions of personal inclination apart, the mere improbability is enough in itself to appal an ordinary woman.”

Mrs. Skene did not quite understand this; but she understood sufficiently for her purpose. She rose to go, shaking her head despondently, and saying, “I see how it is, ma’am. You think him beneath you. Your relations wouldn’t like it.”

“There is no doubt that my relatives would be greatly shocked; and I am bound to take that into account for — what it is worth.”

“We should never trouble you,” said Mrs. Skene, lingering. “England will see the last of us in a month of two.”

“That will make no difference to me, except that I shall regret not being able to have a pleasant chat with you occasionally.” This was not true; but Lydia fancied she was beginning to take a hardened delight in lying.

Mrs. Skene was not to be consoled by compliments. She again shook her head. “It is very kind of you to give me good words, miss,” she said; “but if I might have one for the boy you could say what you liked to me.”

Lydia considered far before she replied. At last she said, “I am sorry I spoke harshly to him, since, driven as he was by circumstances, I cannot see how he could have acted otherwise than he did. And I overlooked the economic conditions of his profession. In short, I am not used to fisticuffs; and what I saw shocked me so much that I was unreasonable. But,” continued Lydia, checking Mrs. Skene’s rising hope with a warning finger, “how, if you tell him this, will you make him understand that I say so as an act of justice, and not in the least as a proffer of affection?”

“A crumb of comfort will satisfy him, miss. I’ll just tell him that I’ve seen you, and that you meant nothing by what you said the other day; and—”

“Mrs. Skene,” said Lydia, interrupting her softly; “tell him nothing at all as yet. I have made up my mind at last. If he does not hear from me within a fortnight you may tell him what you please. Can you wait so long?”

“Of course. Whatever you wish, ma’am. But Mellish’s benefit is to be to-morrow night; and—”

“What have I to do with Mellish or his benefit?”

Mrs. Skene, abashed, murmured apologetically that she was only wishful that the boy should do himself credit.

“If he is to benefit Mellish by beating somebody, he will not be behindhand. Remember you are not to mention me for a fortnight. Is that a bargain?”

“Whatever you wish, ma’am,” repeated Mrs. Skene, hardly satisfied. But Lydia gave her no further comfort; so she begged to take her leave, expressing a hope that things would turn out to the advantage of all parties. Then Lydia insisted on her partaking of some solid refreshment, and afterwards drove her to the railway station in the pony-carriage. Just before they parted Lydia, suddenly recurring to their former subject, said,

“Does Mr. Byron ever THINK?”

“Think!” said Mrs. Skene emphatically. “Never. There isn’t a more cheerful lad in existence, miss.”

Then Mrs. Skene was carried away to London, wondering whether it could be quite right for a young lady to live in a gorgeous castle without any elder of her own sex, and to speak freely and civilly to her inferiors. When she got home she said nothing of her excursion to Mr. Skene, in whose disposition valor so entirely took the place of discretion that he had never been known to keep a secret except as to the whereabouts of a projected fight. But she sat up late with her daughter Fanny, tantalizing her by accounts of the splendor of the castle, and consoling her by describing Miss Carew as a slight creature with red hair and no figure (Fanny having jet black hair, fine arms, and being one of Cashel’s most proficient pupils).

“All the same, Fan,” added Mrs. Skene, as she took her candlestick at two in the morning, “if it comes off, Cashel will never be master in his own house.”

“I can see that very plain,” said Fanny; “but if respectable professional people are not good enough for him, he will have only himself to thank if he gets himself looked down upon by empty-headed swells.”

Meanwhile, Lydia, on her return to the castle after a long drive round the country, had attempted to overcome an attack of restlessness by setting to work on the biography of her father. With a view to preparing a chapter on his taste in literature she had lately been examining his favorite books for marked passages. She now resumed this search, not setting methodically to work, but standing perched on the library ladder, taking down volume after volume, and occasionally dipping into the contents for a few pages or so. At this desultory work the time passed as imperceptibly as the shadows lengthened. The last book she examined was a volume of poems. There were no marks in it; but it opened at a page which had evidently lain open often before. The first words Lydia saw were these:

“What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through Instead of this heart of stone ice-cold whatever I do; Hard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all.”

Lydia hastily stepped down from the ladder, and recoiled until she reached a chair, where she sat and read and reread these lines. The failing light roused her to action. She replaced the book on the shelf, and said, as she went to the writing-table, “If such a doubt as that haunted my father it will haunt me, unless I settle what is to be my heart’s business now and forever. If it be possible for a child of mine to escape this curse of autovivisection, it must inherit its immunity from its father, and not from me — from the man of emotion who never thinks, and not from the woman of introspection, who cannot help thinking. Be it so.”

CHAPTER XIV

Before many days had elapsed a letter came for Cashel as he sat taking tea with the Skene family. When he saw the handwriting, a deep red color mounted to his temples.

“Oh, Lor’!” said Miss Skene, who sat next him. “Let’s read it.”

“Go to the dickens,” cried Cashel, hastily baffling her as she snatched at it.

“Don’t worrit him, Fan,” said Mrs. Skene, tenderly.

“Not for the world, poor dear,” said Miss Skene, putting her hand affectionately on his shoulder. “Let me just peep at the name — to see who it’s from. Do, Cashel, DEAR.”

“It’s from nobody,” said Cashel. “Here, get out. If you don’t let me alone I’ll make it warm for you the next time you come to me for a lesson.”

“Very likely,” said Fanny, contemptuously. “Who had the best of it to-day, I should like to know?”

“Gev’ him a hot un on the chin with her right as ever I see,” observed Skene, with hoarse mirth.

Cashel went away from the table, out of Fanny’s reach; and read the letter, which ran thus:

“Regent’s Park.

“Dear Mr. Cashel Byron, — I am desirous that you should meet a lady friend of mine. She will be here at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. You would oblige me greatly by calling on me at that hour.

“Yours faithfully,

“Lydia Carew.”

There was a long pause, during which there was no sound in the room except the ticking of the clock and the munching of shrimps by the ex-champion.

“Good news, I hope, Cashel,” said Mrs. Skene, at last, tremulously.

“Blow me if I understand it,” said Cashel. “Can you make it out?” And he handed the letter to his adopted mother. Skene ceased eating to see his wife read, a feat which was to him one of the wonders of science.

“I think the lady she mentions must be herself,” said Mrs. Skene, after some consideration.

“No,” said Cashel, shaking his head. “She always says what she means.”

“Ah,” said Skene, cunningly; “but she can’t write it though. That’s the worst of writing; no one can’t never tell exactly what it means. I never signed articles yet that there weren’t some misunderstanding about; and articles is the best writing that can be had anywhere.”

“You’d better go and see what it means,” said Mrs. Skene.

“Right,” said Skene. “Go and have it out with her, my boy.”

“It is short, and not particularly sweet,” said Fanny. “She might have had the civility to put her crest at the top.”

“What would you give to be her?” said Cashel, derisively, catching the letter as she tossed it disdainfully to him.

“If I was I’d respect myself more than to throw myself at YOUR head.”

“Hush, Fanny,” said Mrs. Skene; “you’re too sharp. Ned, you oughtn’t to encourage her by laughing.”

Next day Cashel rose early, went for a walk, paid extra attention to his diet, took some exercise with the gloves, had a bath and a rub down, and presented himself at Regent’s Park at three o’clock in excellent condition. Expecting to see Bashville, he was surprised when the door was opened by a female servant.

“Miss Carew at home?”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl, falling in love with him at first sight. “Mr. Byron, sir?”

“That’s me,” said Cashel. “I say, is there any one with her?”

“Only a lady, sir.”

“Oh, d — n! Well, it can’t be helped. Never say die.”

The girl led him then to a door, opened it, and when he entered shut it softly without announcing him. The room in which he found himself was a long one, lighted from the roof. The walls were hung with pictures. At the far end, with their backs towards him, were two ladies: Lydia, and a woman whose noble carriage and elegant form would, have raised hopes of beauty in a man less preoccupied than Cashel. But he, after advancing some distance with his eyes on Lydia, suddenly changed countenance, stopped, and was actually turning to fly, when the ladies, hearing his light step, faced about and rooted him to the spot. As Lydia offered him her hand, her companion, who had surveyed the visitor first with indifference, and then with incredulous surprise, exclaimed, with a burst of delighted recognition, like a child finding a long-lost plaything, “My darling boy!” And going to Cashel with the grace of a swan, she clasped him in her arms. In acknowledgment of which he thrust his red, discomfited face over her shoulder, winked at Lydia with his tongue in his cheek, and said,

“This is what you may call the voice of nature, and no mistake.”

“What a splendid creature you are!” said Mrs. Byron, holding him a little way from her, the better to admire him. “Do you know how handsome you are, you wretch?”

“How d’ye do, Miss Carew,” said Cashel, breaking loose, and turning to Lydia. “Never mind her; it’s only my mother. At least,” he added, as if correcting himself, “she’s my mamma.”

“And where have you come from? Where have you been? Do you know that I have not seen you for seven years, you unnatural boy? Think of his being my son, Miss Carew. Give me another kiss, my own,” she continued, grasping his arm affectionately.

“What a muscular creature you are!”

“Kiss away as much as you like,” said Cashel, struggling with the old school-boy sullenness as it returned oppressively upon him. “I suppose you’re well. You look right enough.”

“Yes,” she said, mockingly, beginning to despise him for his inability to act up to her in this thrilling scene; “I AM right enough. Your language is as refined as ever. And why do you get your hair cropped close like that? You must let it grow, and—”

“Now, look here,” said Cashel, stopping her hand neatly as she raised it to rearrange his locks. “You just drop it, or I’ll walk out at that door and you won’t see me again for another seven years. You can either take me as you find me, or let me alone. Absalom and Dan Mendoza came to grief through wearing their hair long, and I am going to wear mine short.”

Mrs. Byron became a shade colder. “Indeed!” she said. “Just the same still, Cashel?”

“Just the same, both one and other of us,” he replied. “Before you spoke six words I felt as if we’d parted only yesterday.”

“I am rather taken aback by the success of my experiment,” interposed Lydia. “I invited you purposely to meet one another. The resemblance between you led me to suspect the truth, and my suspicion was confirmed by the account Mr. Byron gave me of his adventures.”

Mrs. Byron’s vanity was touched. “Is he like me?” she said, scanning his features. He, without heeding her, said to Lydia with undisguised mortification,

“And was THAT why you sent for me?”

“Are you disappointed?” said Lydia.

“He is not in the least glad to see me,” said Mrs. Byron, plaintively. “He has no heart.”

“Now she’ll go on for the next hour,” said Cashel, looking to Lydia, obviously because he found it much pleasanter than looking at his mother. “However, if you don’t care, I don’t. So, fire away, mamma.”

“And you think we are really like one another?” said Mrs. Byron, not heeding him. “Yes; I think we are. There is a certain — Are you married, Cashel?” with sudden mistrust.

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted Cashel. “No; but I hope to be, some day,” he added, venturing to glance again at Lydia, who was, however, attentively observing Mrs. Byron.

“Well, tell me everything about yourself. What are you? Now, I do hope, Cashel, that you have not gone upon the stage.”

“The stage!” said Cashel, contemptuously. “Do I look like it?”

“You certainly do not,” said Mrs. Byron, whimsically— “although you have a certain odious professional air, too. What did you do when you ran away so scandalously from that stupid school in the north? How do you earn your living? Or DO you earn it?”

“I suppose I do, unless I am fed by ravens, as Elijah was. What do you think I was best fitted for by my education and bringing up? Sweep a crossing, perhaps! When I ran away from Panley, I went to sea.”

“A sailor, of all things! You don’t look like one. And pray, what rank have you attained in your profession?”

“The front rank. The top of the tree,” said Cashel, shortly.

“Mr. Byron is not at present following the profession of a sailor; nor has he done so for many years,” said Lydia.

Cashel looked at her, half in appeal, half in remonstrance.

“Something very different, indeed,” pursued Lydia, with quiet obstinacy. “And something very startling.”

“CAN’T you shut up?” exclaimed Cashel. “I should have expected more sense from you. What’s the use of setting her on to make a fuss and put me in a rage? I’ll go away if you don’t stop.”

“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Byron. “Have you been doing anything disgraceful, Cashel?”

“There she goes. I told you so. I keep a gymnasium, that’s all. There’s nothing disgraceful in that, I hope.”

“A gymnasium?” repeated Mrs. Byron, with imperious disgust. “What nonsense! You must give up everything of that kind, Cashel. It is very silly, and very low. You were too ridiculously proud, of course, to come to me for the means of keeping yourself in a proper position. I suppose I shall have to provide you with—”

“If I ever take a penny from you, may I—” Cashel caught Lydia’s anxious look, and checked himself. He paused and got away a step, a cunning smile flickering on his lips. “No,” he said; “it’s just playing into your hands to lose temper with you. You think you know me, and you want to force the fighting. Well, we’ll see. Make me angry now if you can.”

“There is not the slightest reason for anger,” said Mrs. Byron, angry herself. “Your temper seems to have become ungovernable — or, rather, to have remained so; for it was never remarkable for sweetness.”

“No,” retorted Cashel, jeering good-humoredly. “Not the slightest occasion to lose my temper! Not when I am told that I am silly and low! Why, I think you must fancy that you’re talking to your little Cashel, that blessed child you were so fond of. But you’re not. You’re talking — now for a screech, Miss Carew! — to the champion of Australia, the United States, and England, holder of three silver belts and one gold one (which you can have to wear in ‘King John’ if you think it’ll become you); professor of boxing to the nobility and gentry of St. James’s, and common prize-fighter to the whole globe, without reference to weight or color, for not less than five hundred pounds a side. That’s Cashel Byron.”

Mrs. Byron recoiled, astounded. After a pause she said, “Oh, Cashel, how COULD you?” Then, approaching him again, “Do you mean to say that you go out and fight those great rough savages?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And that you BEAT them?”

“Yes. Ask Miss Carew how Billy Paradise looked after standing before me for an hour.”

“You wonderful boy! What an occupation! And you have done all this in your own name?”

“Of course I have. I am not ashamed of it. I often wondered whether you had seen my name in the papers.”

“I never read the papers. But you must have heard of my return to England. Why did you not come to see me?”

“I wasn’t quite certain that you would like it,” said Cashel, uneasily, avoiding her eye. “Hullo!” he exclaimed, as he attempted to refresh himself by another look at Lydia, “she’s given us the slip.”

“She is quite right to leave us alone together under the circumstances. And now tell me why my precious boy should doubt that his own mother wished to see him.”

“I don’t know why he should,” said Cashel, with melancholy submission to her affection. “But he did.”

“How insensible you are! Did you not know that you were always my cherished darling — my only son?”

Cashel, who was now sitting beside her on an ottoman, groaned and moved restlessly, but said nothing.

“Are you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” said Cashel, dismally, “I suppose I am. I — By Jingo,” he cried, with sudden animation, “perhaps you can give me a lift here. I never thought of that. I say, mamma; I am in great trouble at present, and I think you can help me if you will.”

Mrs. Byron looked at him satirically. But she said, soothingly, “Of course I will help you — as far as I am able — my precious one. All I possess is yours.”

Cashel ground his feet on the floor impatiently, and then sprang up. After an interval, during which he seemed to be swallowing some indignant protest, he said,

“You may put your mind at rest, once and for all, on the subject of money. I don’t want anything of that sort.”

“I am glad you are so independent, Cashel.”

“So am I.”

“Do, pray, be more amiable.”

“I am amiable enough,” he cried, desperately, “only you won’t listen.”

“My treasure,” said Mrs. Byron, remorsefully. “What is the matter?”

“Well,” said Cashel, somewhat mollified, “it is this. I want to marry Miss Carew; that’s all.”

“YOU marry Miss Carew!” Mrs. Byron’s tenderness had vanished, and her tone was shrewd and contemptuous. “Do you know, you silly boy, that—”

“I know all about it,” said Cashel, determinedly— “what she is, and what I am, and the rest of it. And I want to marry her; and, what’s more, I will marry her, if I have to break the neck of every swell in London first. So you can either help me or not, as you please; but if you won’t, never call me your precious boy any more. Now!”

Mrs. Byron abdicated her dominion there and then forever. She sat with quite a mild expression for some time in silence. Then she said,

“After all, I do not see why you should not. It would be a very good match for you.”

“Yes; but a deuced bad one for her.”

“Really, I do not see that, Cashel. When your uncle dies, I suppose you will succeed to the Dorsetshire property.”

“I the heir to a property! Are you in earnest?”

“Of course. Don’t you know who your people are?”

“How could I? You never told me. Do you mean to say that I have an uncle?”

“Old Bingley Byron? Certainly.”

“Well, I AM blowed. But — but — I mean — Supposing he IS my uncle, am I his lawful heir?”

“Yes. Walford Byron, the only other brother of your father, died years ago, while you were at Moncrief’s; and he had no sons. Bingley is a bachelor.”

“But,” said Cashel, cautiously, “won’t there be some bother about my — at least—”

“My dearest child, what are you thinking or talking about? Nothing can be clearer than your title.”

“Well,” said Cashel, blushing, “a lot of people used to make out that you weren’t married at all.”

“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Byron, indignantly. “Oh, they DARE not say so! Impossible. Why did you not tell me at once?”

“I didn’t think about it,” said Cashel, hastily excusing himself. “I was too young to care. It doesn’t matter now. My father is dead, isn’t he?”

“He died when you were a baby. You have often made me angry with you, poor little innocent, by reminding me of him. Do not talk of him to me.”

“Not if you don’t wish. Just one thing, though, mamma. Was he a gentleman?”

“Of course. What a question!”

“Then I am as good as any of the swells that think themselves her equals? She has a cousin in the government office; a fellow who gives out that he is the home secretary, and most likely sits in a big chair in a hall and cheeks the public. Am I as good as he is?”

“You are perfectly well connected by your mother’s side, Cashel. The Byrons are only commoners; but even they are one of the oldest county families in England.”

Cashel began to show signs of excitement. “How much a year are they worth?” he demanded.

“I do not know how much they are worth now. Your father was always in difficulties, and so was his father. But Bingley is a miser. Five thousand a year, perhaps.”

“That’s an independence. That’s enough. She said she couldn’t expect a man to be so thunderingly rich as she is.”

“Indeed? Then you have discussed the question with her?”

Cashel was about to speak, when a servant entered to say that Miss Carew was in the library, and begged that they would come to her as soon as they were quite disengaged. When the maid withdrew he said, eagerly,

“I wish you’d go home, mamma, and let me catch her in the library by herself. Tell me where you live, and I’ll come in the evening and tell you all about it. That is, if you have no objection.”

“What objection could I possibly have, dearest one? Are you sure that you are not spoiling your chance by too much haste? She has no occasion to hurry, Cashel, and she knows it.”

“I am dead certain that now is my time or never. I always know by instinct when to go in and finish. Here’s your mantle.”

“In such a hurry to get rid of your poor old mother, Cashel?”

“Oh, bother! you’re not old. You won’t mind my wanting you to go for this once, will you?”

She smiled affectionately, put on her mantle, and turned her cheek towards him to be kissed. The unaccustomed gesture alarmed him; he retreated a step, and involuntary assumed an attitude of self-defence, as if the problem before him were a pugilistic one. Recovering himself immediately, he kissed her, and impatiently accompanied her to the house door, which he closed softly behind her, leaving her to walk in search of her carriage alone. Then he stole up-stairs to the library, where he found Lydia reading.

“She’s gone,” he said.

Lydia put down her book, looked up at him, saw what was coming, looked down again to hide a spasm of terror, and said, with a steady severity that cost her a great effort, “I hope you have not quarrelled.”

“Lord bless you, no! We kissed one another like turtle-doves. At odd moments she wheedles me into feeling fond of her in spite of myself. She went away because I asked her to.”

“And why do you ask my guests to go away?”

“Because I wanted to be alone with you. Don’t look as if you didn’t understand. She’s told me a whole heap of things about myself that alter our affairs completely. My birth is all right; I’m heir to a county family that came over with the Conqueror, and I shall have a decent income. I can afford to give away weight to old Webber now.”

“Well,” said Lydia, sternly.

“Well,” said Cashel, unabashed, “the only use of all that to me is that I may marry if I like. No more fighting or teaching now.”

“And when you are married, will you be as tender to your wife as you are to your mother?”

Cashel’s elation vanished. “I knew you’d think that,” he said. “I am always the same with her; I can’t help it. She makes me look like a fool, or like a brute. Have I ever been so with you?”

“Yes,” said Lydia. “Except,” she added, “that you have never shown absolute dislike to me.”

“Ah! EXCEPT! That’s a very big except. But I don’t dislike her. Blood is thicker than water, and I have a softness for her; only I won’t put up with her nonsense. But it’s different with you. I don’t know how to say it; I’m not good at sentiment — not that there’s any sentiment about it. At least, I don’t mean that; but — You’re fond of me in a sort of way, ain’t you?”

“Yes; I’m fond of you in a sort of way.”

“Well, then,” he said, uneasily, “won’t you marry me? I’m not such a fool as you think; and you’ll like me better after a while.”

Lydia became very pale. “Have you considered,” she said, “that henceforth you will be an idle man, and that I shall always be a busy woman, preoccupied with the work that may seem very dull to you?”

“I won’t be idle. There’s lots of things I can do besides boxing. We’ll get on together, never fear. People that are fond of one another never have any difficulty; and people that hate each other never have any comfort. I’ll be on the lookout to make you happy. You needn’t fear my interrupting your Latin and Greek: I won’t expect you to give up your whole life to me. Why should I? There’s reason in everything. So long as you are mine, and nobody else’s, I’ll be content. And I’ll be yours and nobody else’s. What’s the use of supposing half a dozen accidents that may never happen? Let’s sign reasonable articles, and then take our chance. You have too much good-nature ever to be nasty.”

“It would be a hard bargain,” she said, doubtfully; “for you would have to give up your occupation; and I should give up nothing but my unfruitful liberty.”

“I will swear never to fight again; and you needn’t swear anything. If that is not an easy bargain, I don’t know what is.”

“Easy for me, yes. But for you?”

“Never mind me. You do whatever you like; and I’ll do whatever you like. You have a conscience; so I know that whatever you like will be the best thing. I have the most science; but you have the most sense. Come!”

Lydia looked around, as if for a means of escape. Cashel waited anxiously. There was a long pause.

“It can’t be,” he said, pathetically, “that you are afraid of me because I was a prize-fighter.”

“Afraid of you! No: I am afraid of myself; afraid of the future; afraid FOR you. But my mind is already made up on this subject. When I brought about this meeting between you and your mother I determined to marry you if you asked me again.”

She stood up, quietly, and waited. The rough hardihood of the ring fell from him like a garment: he blushed deeply, and did not know what to do. Nor did she; but without willing it she came a step closer to him, and turned up her face towards his. He, nearly blind with confusion, put his arms about her and kissed her. Suddenly she broke loose from his arms, seized the lapels of his coat tightly in her hands, and leaned back until she nearly hung from him with all her weight.

“Cashel,” she said, “we are the silliest lovers in the world, I believe — we know nothing about it. Are you really fond of me?”

She recovered herself immediately, and made no further demonstration of the kind. He remained shy, and was so evidently anxious to go, that she presently asked him to leave her for a while, though she was surprised to feel a faint pang of disappointment when he consented.

On leaving the house he hurried to the address which his mother had given him: a prodigious building in Westminster, divided into residential flats, to the seventh floor of which he ascended in a lift. As he stepped from it he saw Lucian Webber walking away from him along a corridor. Obeying a sudden impulse, he followed, and overtook him just as he was entering a room. Lucian, finding that some one was resisting his attempt to close the door, looked out, recognized Cashel, turned white, and hastily retreated into the apartment, where, getting behind a writing-table, he snatched a revolver from a drawer. Cashel recoiled, amazed and frightened, with his right arm up as if to ward off a blow.

“Hullo!” he cried. “Drop that d — d thing, will you? If you don’t, I’ll shout for help.”

“If you approach me I will fire,” said Lucian, excitedly. “I will teach you that your obsolete brutality is powerless against the weapons science has put into the hands of civilized men. Leave my apartments. I am not afraid of you; but I do not choose to be disturbed by your presence.”

“Confound your cheek,” said Cashel, indignantly; “is that the way you receive a man who comes to make a friendly call on you?”

“Friendly NOW, doubtless, when you see that I am well protected.”

Cashel gave a long whistle. “Oh,” he said, “you thought I came to pitch into you. Ha! ha! And you call that science — to draw a pistol on a man. But you daren’t fire it, and well you know it. You’d better put it up, or you may let it off without intending to: I never feel comfortable when I see a fool meddling with firearms. I came to tell you that I’m going to be married to your cousin. Ain’t you glad?”

Lucian’s face changed. He believed; but he said, obstinately, “I don’t credit that statement. It is a lie.”

This outraged Cashel. “I tell you again,” he said, in a menacing tone, “that your cousin is engaged to me. Now call me a liar, and hit me in the face, if you dare. Look here,” he added, taking a leather case from his pocket, and extracting from it a bank note, “I’ll give you that twenty-pound note if you will hit me one blow.”

Lucian, sick with fury, and half paralyzed by a sensation which he would not acknowledge as fear, forced himself to come forward. Cashel thrust out his jaw invitingly, and said, with a sinister grin, “Put it in straight, governor. Twenty pounds, remember.”

At that moment Lucian would have given all his political and social chances for the courage and skill of a prize-fighter. He could see only one way to escape the torment of Cashel’s jeering and the self-reproach of a coward. He desperately clenched his fist and struck out. The blow wasted itself on space; and he stumbled forward against his adversary, who laughed uproariously, grasped his hand, clapped him on the back, and exclaimed,

“Well done, my boy. I thought you were going to be mean; but you’ve been game, and you’re welcome to the stakes. I’ll tell Lydia that you have fought me for twenty pounds and won on your merits. Ain’t you proud of yourself for having had a go at the champion?”

“Sir—” began Lucian. But nothing coherent followed.

“You just sit down for a quarter of an hour, and don’t drink anything, and you’ll be all right. When you recover you’ll be glad you showed pluck. So, good-night, for the present — I know how you feel, and I’ll be off. Be sure not to try to settle yourself with wine; it’ll only make you worse. Ta-ta!”

As Cashel withdrew, Lucian collapsed into a chair, shaken by the revival of passions and jealousies which he had thought as completely outgrown as the school-boy jackets in which he had formerly experienced them. He tried to think of some justification of his anger — some better reason for it than the vulgar taunt of a bully. He told himself presently that the idea of Lydia marrying such a man had maddened him to strike. As Cashel had predicted, he was beginning to plume himself on his pluck. This vein of reflection, warring with his inner knowledge that he had been driven by fear and hatred into a paroxysm of wrath against a man to whom he should have set an example of dignified self-control, produced an exhausting whirl in his thoughts, which were at once quickened and confused by the nervous shock of bodily violence, to which he was quite unused. Unable to sit still, he rose, put on his hat, went out, and drove to the house in Regent’s Park.

Lydia was in her boudoir, occupied with a book, when he entered. He was not an acute observer; he could see no change in her. She was as calm as ever; her eyes were not even fully open, and the touch of her hand subdued him as it had always done. Though he had never entertained any hope of possessing her since the day when she had refused him in Bedford Square, a sense of intolerable loss came upon him as he saw her for the first time pledged to another — and such another!

“Lydia,” he said, trying to speak vehemently, but failing to shake off the conventional address of which he had made a second nature, “I have heard something that has filled me with inexpressible dismay. Is it true?”

“The news has travelled fast,” she said. “Yes; it is true.” She spoke composedly, and so kindly that he choked in trying to reply.

“Then, Lydia, you are the chief actor in a greater tragedy than I have ever witnessed on the stage.”

“It is strange, is it not?” she said, smiling at his effort to be impressive.

“Strange! It is calamitous. I trust I may be allowed to say so. And you sit there reading as calmly as though nothing had happened.”

She handed him the book without a word.

“‘Ivanhoe’!” he said. “A novel!”

“Yes. Do you remember once, before you knew me very well, telling me that Scott’s novels were the only ones that you liked to see in the hands of ladies?”

“No doubt I did. But I cannot talk of literature just—”

“I am not leading you away from what you want to talk about. I was about to tell you that I came upon ‘Ivanhoe’ by chance half an hour ago, when I was searching — I confess it — for something very romantic to read. Ivanhoe was a prize-fighter — the first half of the book is a description of a prize-fight. I was wondering whether some romancer of the twenty-fourth century will hunt out the exploits of my husband, and present him to the world as a sort of English nineteenth-century Cyd, with all the glory of antiquity upon his deeds.”

Lucian made a gesture of impatience. “I have never been able to understand,” he said, “how it is that a woman of your ability can habitually dwell on perverse and absurd ideas. Oh, Lydia, is this to be the end of all your great gifts and attainments? Forgive me if I touch a painful chord; but this marriage seems to me so unnatural that I must speak out. Your father made you one of the richest and best-educated women in the world. Would he approve of what you are about to do?”

“It almost seems to me that he educated me expressly to some such end. Whom would you have me marry?”

“Doubtless few men are worthy of you, Lydia. But this man least of all. Could you not marry a gentleman? If he were even an artist, a poet, or a man of genius of any kind, I could bear to think of it; for indeed I am not influenced by class prejudice in the matter. But a — I will try to say nothing that you must not in justice admit to be too obvious to be ignored — a man of the lower orders, pursuing a calling which even the lower orders despise; illiterate, rough, awaiting at this moment a disgraceful sentence at the hands of the law! Is it possible that you have considered all these things?”

“Not very deeply; they are not of a kind to concern me much. I can console you as to one of them. I have always recognized him as a gentleman, in your sense of the word. He proves to be so — one of considerable position, in fact. As to his approaching trial, I have spoken with Lord Worthington about it, and also with the lawyers who have charge of the case; and they say positively that, owing to certain proofs not being in the hands of the police, a defence can be set up that will save him from imprisonment.”

“There is no such defence possible,” said Lucian, angrily.

“Perhaps not. As far as I understand it, it is rather an aggravation of the offence than an excuse for it. But if they imprison him it will make no difference. He can console himself by the certainty that I will marry him at once when he is released.”

Lucian’s face lengthened. He abandoned the argument, and said, blankly, “I cannot suppose that you would allow yourself to be deceived. If he is a gentleman of position, that of course alters the case completely.”

“Very little indeed from my point of view. Hardly at all. And now, worldly cousin Lucian, I have satisfied you that I am not going to connect you by marriage with a butcher, bricklayer, or other member of the trades from which Cashel’s profession, as you warned me, is usually recruited. Stop a moment. I am going to do justice to you. You want to say that my unworldly friend Lucian is far more deeply concerned at seeing the phoenix of modern culture throw herself away on a man unworthy of her.”

“That IS what I mean to say, except that you put it too modestly. It is a case of the phoenix, not only of modern culture, but of natural endowment and of every happy accident of the highest civilization, throwing herself away on a man specially incapacitated by his tastes and pursuits from comprehending her or entering the circle in which she moves.”

“Listen to me patiently, Lucian, and I will try to explain the mystery to you, leaving the rest of the world to misunderstand me as it pleases. First, you will grant me that even a phoenix must marry some one in order that she may hand on her torch to her children. Her best course would be to marry another phoenix; but as she — poor girl! — cannot appreciate even her own phoenixity, much less that of another, she must perforce be content with a mere mortal. Who is the mortal to be? Not her cousin Lucian; for rising young politicians must have helpful wives, with feminine politics and powers of visiting and entertaining; a description inapplicable to the phoenix. Not, as you just now suggested, a man of letters. The phoenix has had her share of playing helpmeet to a man of letters, and does not care to repeat that experience. She is sick to death of the morbid introspection and womanish self-consciousness of poets, novelists, and their like. As to artists, all the good ones are married; and ever since the rest have been able to read in hundreds of books that they are the most gifted and godlike of men, they are become almost as intolerable as their literary flatterers. No, Lucian, the phoenix has paid her debt to literature and art by the toil of her childhood. She will use and enjoy both of them in future as best she can; but she will never again drudge in their laboratories. You say that she might at least have married a gentleman. But the gentlemen she knows are either amateurs of the arts, having the egotism of professional artists without their ability, or they are men of pleasure, which means that they are dancers, tennis-players, butchers, and gamblers. I leave the nonentities out of the question. Now, in the eyes of a phoenix, a prize-fighter is a hero in comparison with a wretch who sets a leash of greyhounds upon a hare. Imagine, now, this poor phoenix meeting with a man who had never been guilty of self-analysis in his life — who complained when he was annoyed, and exulted when he was glad, like a child (and unlike a modern man) — who was honest and brave, strong and beautiful. You open your eyes, Lucian: you do not do justice to Cashel’s good looks. He is twenty-five, and yet there is not a line in his face. It is neither thoughtful, nor poetic, nor wearied, nor doubting, nor old, nor self-conscious, as so many of his contemporaries’ faces are — as mine perhaps is. The face of a pagan god, assured of eternal youth, and absolutely disqualified from comprehending ‘Faust.’ Do you understand a word of what I am saying, Lucian?”

“I must confess that I do not. Either you have lost your reason, or I have. I wish you had never taking to reading ‘Faust.’”

“It is my fault. I began an explanation, and rambled off, womanlike, into praise of my lover. However, I will not attempt to complete my argument; for if you do not understand me from what I have already said, the further you follow the wider you will wander. The truth, in short, is this: I practically believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my brain morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind a trustworthy one. You can understand that; it is a plain proposition in eugenics. But if I tell you that I have chosen this common pugilist because, after seeing half the culture of Europe, I despaired of finding a better man, you will only tell me again that I have lost my reason.”

“I know that you will do whatever you have made up your mind to do,” said Lucian, desolately.

“And you will make the best of it, will you not?”

“The best or the worst of it does not rest with me. I can only accept it as inevitable.”

“Not at all. You can make the worst of it by behaving distantly to Cashel; or the best of it by being friendly with him.”

Lucian reddened and hesitated. She looked at him, mutely encouraging him to be generous.

“I had better tell you,” he said. “I have seen him since — since—” Lydia nodded. “I mistook his object in coming into my room as he did, unannounced. In fact, he almost forced his way in. Some words arose between us. At last he taunted me beyond endurance, and offered me — characteristically — twenty pounds to strike him. And I am sorry to say that I did so.”

“You did so! And what followed?”

“I should say rather that I meant to strike him; for he avoided me, or else I missed my aim. He only gave the money and went away, evidently with a high opinion of me. He left me with a very low one of myself.”

“What! He did not retaliate!” exclaimed Lydia, recovering her color, which had fled. “And you STRUCK him!” she added.

“He did not,” replied Lucian, passing by the reproach. “Probably he despised me too much.”

“That is not fair, Lucian. He behaved very well — for a prize-fighter! Surely you do not grudge him his superiority in the very art you condemn him for professing.”

“I was wrong, Lydia; but I grudged him you. I know I have acted hastily; and I will apologize to him. I wish matters had fallen out otherwise.”

“They could not have done so; and I believe you will yet acknowledge that they have arranged themselves very well. And now that the phoenix is disposed of, I want to read you a letter I have received from Alice Goff, which throws quite a new light on her character. I have not seen her since June, and she seems to have gained three years’ mental growth in the interim. Listen to this, for example.”

And so the conversation turned upon Alice.

When Lucian returned to his chambers, he wrote the following note, which he posted to Cashel Byron before going to bed:

“Dear Sir, — I beg to enclose you a bank-note which you left here this evening. I feel bound to express my regret for what passed on that occasion, and to assure you that it proceeded from a misapprehension of your purpose in calling on me. The nervous disorder into which the severe mental application and late hours of the past session have thrown me must be my excuse. I hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again soon, and offering you personally my congratulations on your approaching marriage. “I am, dear sir, yours truly, “Lucian Webber.”

CHAPTER XV

In the following month Cashel Byron, William Paradise, and Robert Mellish appeared in the dock together, the first two for having been principals in a prize-fight, and Mellish for having acted as bottle-holder to Paradise. These offences were verbosely described in a long indictment which had originally included the fourth man who had been captured, but against whom the grand jury had refused to find a true bill. The prisoners pleaded not guilty.

The defence was that the fight, the occurrence of which was admitted, was not a prize-fight, but the outcome of an enmity which had subsisted between the two men since one of them, at a public exhibition at Islington, had attacked and bitten the other. In support of this, it was shown that Byron had occupied a house at Wiltstoken, and had lived there with Mellish, who had invited Paradise to spend a holiday with him in the country. This accounted for the presence of the three men at Wiltstoken on the day in question. Words had arisen between Byron and Paradise on the subject of the Islington affair; and they had at last agreed to settle the dispute in the old English fashion. They had adjourned to a field, and fought fairly and determinedly until interrupted by the police, who were misled by appearances into the belief that the affair was a prize-fight.

Prize-fighting was a brutal pastime, Cashel Byron’s counsel said; but a fair, stand-up fight between two unarmed men, though doubtless technically a breach of the peace, had never been severely dealt with by a British jury or a British judge; and the case would be amply met by binding over the prisoners, who were now on the best of terms with one another, to keep the peace for a reasonable period. The sole evidence against this view of the case, he argued, was police evidence; and the police were naturally reluctant to admit that they had found a mare’s nest. In proof that the fight had been premeditated, and was a prize-fight, they alleged that it had taken place within an enclosure formed with ropes and stakes. But where were those ropes and stakes? They were not forthcoming; and he (counsel) submitted that the reason was not, as had been suggested, because they had been spirited away, for that was plainly impossible; but because they had existed only in the excited imagination of the posse of constables who had arrested the prisoners.

Again, it had been urged that the prisoners were in fighting costume. But cross-examination had elicited that fighting costume meant practically no costume at all: the men had simply stripped in order that their movements might be unembarrassed. It had been proved that Paradise had been — well, in the traditional costume of Paradise (roars of laughter) until the police borrowed a blanket to put upon him.

That the constables had been guilty of gross exaggeration was shown by their evidence as to the desperate injuries the combatants had inflicted upon one another. Of Paradise in particular it had been alleged that his features were obliterated. The jury had before them in the dock the man whose features had been obliterated only a few weeks previously. If that were true, where had the prisoner obtained the unblemished lineaments which he was now, full of health and good-humor, presenting to them? (Renewed laughter. Paradise grinning in confusion.) It was said that these terrible injuries, the traces of which had disappeared so miraculously, were inflicted by the prisoner Byron, a young gentleman tenderly nurtured, and visibly inferior in strength and hardihood to his herculean opponent. Doubtless Byron had been emboldened by his skill in mimic combat to try conclusions, under the very different conditions of real fighting, with a man whose massive shoulders and determined cast of features ought to have convinced him that such an enterprise was nothing short of desperate. Fortunately the police had interfered before he had suffered severely for his rashness. Yet it had been alleged that he had actually worsted Paradise in the encounter — obliterated his features. That was a fair sample of the police evidence, which was throughout consistently incredible and at variance with the dictates of common-sense.

Attention was then drawn to the honorable manner in which Byron had come forward and given himself up to the police the moment he became aware that they were in search of him. Paradise would, beyond a doubt, have adopted the same course had he not been arrested at once, and that, too, without the least effort at resistance on his part. That was hardly the line of conduct that would have suggested itself to two lawless prize-fighters.

An attempt had been made to prejudice the prisoner Byron by the statement that he was a notorious professional bruiser. But no proof of that was forthcoming; and if the fact were really notorious there could be no difficulty in proving it. Such notoriety as Mr. Byron enjoyed was due, as appeared from the evidence of Lord Worthington and others, to his approaching marriage to a lady of distinction. Was it credible that a highly connected gentleman in this enviable position would engage in a prize-fight, risking disgrace and personal disfigurement, for a sum of money that could be no object to him, or for a glory that would appear to all his friends as little better than infamy?

The whole of the evidence as to the character of the prisoners went to show that they were men of unimpeachable integrity and respectability. An impression unfavorable to Paradise might have been created by the fact that he was a professional pugilist and a man of hasty temper; but it had also transpired that he had on several occasions rendered assistance to the police, thereby employing his skill and strength in the interests of law and order. As to his temper, it accounted for the quarrel which the police — knowing his profession — had mistaken for a prize-fight.

Mellish was a trainer of athletes, and hence the witnesses to his character were chiefly persons connected with sport; but they were not the less worthy of credence on that account.

In fine, the charge would have been hard to believe even if supported by the strongest evidence. But when there was no evidence — when the police had failed to produce any of the accessories of a prize-fight — when there were no ropes nor posts — no written articles — no stakes nor stakeholders — no seconds except the unfortunate man Mellish, whose mouth was closed by a law which, in defiance of the obvious interests of justice, forbade a prisoner to speak and clear himself — nothing, in fact, but the fancies of constables who had, under cross-examination, not only contradicted one another, but shown the most complete ignorance (a highly creditable ignorance) of the nature and conditions of a prize-fight; then counsel would venture to say confidently that the theory of the prosecution, ingenious as it was, and ably as it had been put forward, was absolutely and utterly untenable.

This, and much more argument of equal value, was delivered with relish by a comparatively young barrister, whose spirits rose as he felt the truth change and fade while he rearranged its attendant circumstances. Cashel listened for some time anxiously. He flushed and looked moody when his marriage was alluded to; but when the whole defence was unrolled, he was awestruck, and stared at his advocate as if he half feared that the earth would gape and swallow such a reckless perverter of patent facts. Even the judge in the city; and was eventually invited to represent a Dorsetshire constituency in Parliament in the Radical interest. He was returned by a large majority; and, having a loud voice and an easy manner, he soon acquired some reputation both in and out of the House of Commons by the popularity of his own views, and the extent of his wife’s information, which he retailed at second hand. He made his maiden speech in the House unabashed the first night he sat there. Indeed, he was afraid of nothing except burglars, big dogs, doctors, dentists, and street-crossings. Whenever any accident occurred through any of these he preserved the newspaper in which it was reported, read it to Lydia very seriously, and repeated his favorite assertion that the only place in which a man was safe was the ring. As he objected to most field sports on the ground of inhumanity, she, fearing that he would suffer in health and appearance from want of systematic exercise, suggested that he should resume the practice of boxing with gloves. But he was lazy in this matter, and had a prejudice that boxing did not become a married man. His career as a pugilist was closed by his marriage.

His admiration for his wife survived the ardor of his first love for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her children inherited her acuteness and refinement with their father’s robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent, had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother principally by running to her when they were in difficulties. She never punished nor scolded them; but she contrived to make their misdeeds recoil naturally upon them so inevitably that they soon acquired a lively moral sense which restrained them much more effectually than the usual methods of securing order in the nursery. Cashel treated them kindly for the purpose of conciliating them; and when Lydia spoke of them to him in private, he seldom said more than that the imps were too sharp for him, or that he was blest if he didn’t believe that they were born older than their father. Lydia often thought so too; but the care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her little time to think about herself, or about the fact that when the illusion of her love passed away Cashel fell in her estimation. But the children were a success; and she soon came to regard him as one of them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.

Alice Goff, when she heard of Lydia’s projected marriage, saw that she must return to Wiltstoken, and forget her brief social splendor as soon as possible. She therefore thanked Miss Carew for her bounty, and begged to relinquish her post of companion. Lydia assented, but managed to delay this sacrifice to a sense of duty and necessity until a day early in winter, when Lucian gave way to a hankering after smiled once or twice; and when he did so the jurymen grinned, but recovered their solemnity suddenly when the bench recollected itself and became grave again. Every one in court knew that the police were right — that there had been a prize-fight — that the betting on it had been recorded in all the sporting papers for weeks beforehand — that Cashel was the most terrible fighting man of the day, and that Paradise had not dared to propose a renewal of the interrupted contest. And they listened with admiration and delight while the advocate proved that these things were incredible and nonsensical.

It remained for the judge to sweep away the defence, or to favor the prisoners by countenancing it. Fortunately for them, he was an old man; and could recall, not without regret, a time when the memory of Cribb and Molyneux was yet green. He began his summing-up by telling the jury that the police had failed to prove that the fight was a prize-fight. After that, the public, by indulging in roars of laughter whenever they could find a pretext for doing so without being turned out of court, showed that they had ceased to regard the trial seriously.

Finally the jury acquitted Mellish, and found Cashel and Paradise guilty of a common assault. They were sentenced to two days’ imprisonment, and bound over to keep the peace for twelve months in sureties of one hundred and fifty pounds each. The sureties were forthcoming; and as the imprisonment was supposed to date from the beginning of the sessions, the prisoners were at once released.

CHAPTER XVI

Miss Carew, averse to the anomalous relations of courtship, made as little delay as possible in getting married. Cashel’s luck was not changed by the event. Bingley Byron died three weeks after the ceremony (which was civic and private); and Cashel had to claim possession of the property in Dorsetshire, in spite of his expressed wish that the lawyers would take themselves and the property to the devil, and allow him to enjoy his honeymoon in peace. The transfer was not, however, accomplished at once. Owing to his mother’s capricious reluctance to give the necessary information without reserve, and to the law’s delay, his first child was born some time before his succession was fully established and the doors of his ancestral hall opened to him. The conclusion of the business was a great relief to his attorneys, who had been unable to shake his conviction that the case was clear enough, but that the referee had been squared. By this he meant that the Lord Chancellor had been bribed to keep him out of his property.

His marriage proved an unusually happy one. To make up for the loss of his occupation, he farmed, and lost six thousand pounds by it; tried gardening with better success; began to meddle in commercial enterprises, and became director of several trading companies in the city; and was eventually invited to represent a Dorsetshire constituency in Parliament in the Radical interest. He was returned by a large majority; and, having a loud voice and an easy manner, he soon acquired some reputation both in and out of the House of Commons by the popularity of his own views, and the extent of his wife’s information, which he retailed at second hand. He made his maiden speech in the House unabashed the first night he sat there. Indeed, he was afraid of nothing except burglars, big dogs, doctors, dentists, and street-crossings. Whenever any accident occurred through any of these he preserved the newspaper in which it was reported, read it to Lydia very seriously, and repeated his favorite assertion that the only place in which a man was safe was the ring. As he objected to most field sports on the ground of inhumanity, she, fearing that he would suffer in health and appearance from want of systematic exercise, suggested that he should resume the practice of boxing with gloves. But he was lazy in this matter, and had a prejudice that boxing did not become a married man. His career as a pugilist was closed by his marriage.

His admiration for his wife survived the ardor of his first love for her, and she employed all her forethought not to disappoint his reliance on her judgment. She led a busy life, and wrote some learned monographs, as well as a work in which she denounced education as practised in the universities and public schools. Her children inherited her acuteness and refinement with their father’s robustness and aversion to study. They were precocious and impudent, had no respect for Cashel, and showed any they had for their mother principally by running to her when they were in difficulties. She never punished nor scolded them; but she contrived to make their misdeeds recoil naturally upon them so inevitably that they soon acquired a lively moral sense which restrained them much more effectually than the usual methods of securing order in the nursery. Cashel treated them kindly for the purpose of conciliating them; and when Lydia spoke of them to him in private, he seldom said more than that the imps were too sharp for him, or that he was blest if he didn’t believe that they were born older than their father. Lydia often thonght so too; but the care of this troublesome family had one advantage for her. It left her little time to think about herself, or about the fact that when the illusion of her love passed away Cashel fell in her estimation. But the children were a success; and she soon came to regard him as one of them. When she had leisure to consider the matter at all, which seldom occurred, it seemed to her that, on the whole, she had chosen wisely.

Alice Goff, when she heard of Lydia’s projected marriage, saw that she must return to Wiltstoken, and forget her brief social splendor as soon as possible. She therefore thanked Miss Carew for her bounty, and begged to relinquish her post of companion. Lydia assented, but managed to delay this sacrifice to a sense of duty and necessity until a day early in winter, when Lucian gave way to a hankering after domestic joys that possessed him, and allowed his cousin to persuade him to offer his hand to Alice. She indignantly refused — not that she had any reason to complain of him, but because the prospect of returning to Wiltstoken made her feel ill used, and she could not help revenging her soreness upon the first person whom she could find a pretext for attacking. He, lukewarm before, now became eager, and she was induced to relent without much difficulty. Lucian was supposed to have made a brilliant match; and, as it proved, he made a fortunate one. She kept his house, entertained his guests, and took charge of his social connections so ably that in course of time her invitations came to be coveted by people who were desirous of moving in good society. She was even better looking as a matron than she had been as a girl; and her authority in matters of etiquette inspired nervous novices with all the terrors she had herself felt when she first visited Wiltstoken Castle. She invited her brother-in-law and his wife to dinner twice a year — at midsummer and Easter; but she never admitted that either Wallace Parker or Cashel Byron were gentlemen, although she invited the latter freely, notwithstanding the frankness with which he spoke to strangers after dinner of his former exploits, without deference to their professions or prejudices. Her respect for Lydia remained so great that she never complained to her of Cashel save on one occasion, when he had shown a bishop, whose house had been recently broken into and robbed, how to break a burglar’s back in the act of grappling with him.

The Skenes returned to Australia and went their way there, as Mrs. Byron did in England, in the paths they had pursued for years before. Cashel spoke always of Mrs. Skene as “mother,” and of Mrs. Byron as “mamma.”

William Paradise, though admired by the fair sex for his strength, courage, and fame, was not, like Cashel and Skene, wise or fortunate enough to get a good wife. He drank so exceedingly that he had but few sober intervals after his escape from the law. He claimed the title of champion of England on Cashel’s retirement from the ring, and challenged the world. The world responded in the persons of sundry young laboring men with a thirst for glory and a taste for fighting. Paradise fought and prevailed twice. Then he drank while in training, and was beaten. But by this time the ring had again fallen into the disrepute from which Cashel’s unusual combination of pugilistic genius with honesty had temporarily raised it; and the law, again seizing Paradise as he was borne vanquished from the field, atoned for its former leniency by incarcerating him for six months. The abstinence thus enforced restored him to health and vigor; and he achieved another victory before he succeeded in drinking himself into his former state. This was his last triumph. With his natural ruffianism complicated by drunkenness, he went rapidly down the hill into the valley of humiliation. After becoming noted for his readiness to sell the victories he could no longer win, he only appeared in the ring to test the capabilities of untried youths, who beat him to their hearts’ content. He became a potman, and was immediately discharged as an inebriate. He had sunk into beggary when, hearing in his misery that his former antagonist was contesting a parliamentary election, he applied to him for alms. Cashel at the time was in Dorsetshire; but Lydia relieved the destitute wretch, whose condition was now far worse than it had been at their last meeting. At his next application, which followed soon, he was confronted by Cashel, who bullied him fiercely, threatened to break every bone in his skin if he ever again dared to present himself before Lydia, flung him five shillings, and bade him be gone. For Cashel retained for Paradise that contemptuous and ruthless hatred in which a duly qualified professor holds a quack. Paradise bought a few pence-worth of food, which he could hardly eat, and spent the rest in brandy, which he drank as fast as his stomach would endure it. Shortly afterwards a few sporting papers reported his death, which they attributed to “consumption, brought on by the terrible injuries sustained by him in his celebrated fight with Cashel Byron.”

AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST

An Unsocial Socialist was written and completed in 1883 and published in serialised form by ‘To-Day’ magazine between March and December 1884.  Shaw suffered a series of rejections from publishers, including Macmillan, who declined to publish the novel, although they suggested they were possibly interested in some of the author’s other works. In 1885 Shaw began to negotiate with Swan Sonneneschein & Co over publication rights including the length of the copyright lease and a greater than 10% share of the market price. In April 1885 Shaw agreed to a deal which allowed Sonneneschien a lease of the copyright for seven years with a 10% royalty for the author. It was Shaw’s first work to be published quickly after it was written, in spite of the fact it is often regarded as being his least accessible novel. In a May 1887 review in The Guardian newspaper the reviewer describes An Unsocial Socialist as ‘very nearly a good book, and still more nearly a bad one’ and is critical of the work’s lack of focus and vision as he believes Shaw ‘created his monster of social discontent, but does not know what to do with him’.

This ‘monster’ is Sidney Trefusis, a man of high birth, who has recently left his new wife after being married for only a matter of weeks. He professes to be disillusioned and repelled by the exploitation of the working class by the wealthy and therefore he decides to disguise himself as a worker called Jeff Smilash. He begins to devote his time to the socialist cause, while also indulging in flirtations with the rich girls that attend the exclusive private school next to where he is staying. Sidney’s treatment of his abandoned wife is cruel throughout and his political endeavours are timid at best and undertaken from a position of personal and social privilege, with the full knowledge that he has another life open to him should he wish to resume it.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

APPENDIX

CHAPTER I

In the dusk of an October evening, a sensible looking woman of forty came out through an oaken door to a broad landing on the first floor of an old English country-house. A braid of her hair had fallen forward as if she had been stooping over book or pen; and she stood for a moment to smooth it, and to gaze contemplatively — not in the least sentimentally — through the tall, narrow window. The sun was setting, but its glories were at the other side of the house; for this window looked eastward, where the landscape of sheepwalks and pasture land was sobering at the approach of darkness.

The lady, like one to whom silence and quiet were luxuries, lingered on the landing for some time. Then she turned towards another door, on which was inscribed, in white letters, Class Room No. 6. Arrested by a whispering above, she paused in the doorway, and looked up the stairs along a broad smooth handrail that swept round in an unbroken curve at each landing, forming an inclined plane from the top to the bottom of the house.

A young voice, apparently mimicking someone, now came from above, saying,

“We will take the Etudes de la Velocite next, if you please, ladies.”

Immediately a girl in a holland dress shot down through space; whirled round the curve with a fearless centrifugal toss of her ankle; and vanished into the darkness beneath. She was followed by a stately girl in green, intently holding her breath as she flew; and also by a large young woman in black, with her lower lip grasped between her teeth, and her fine brown eyes protruding with excitement. Her passage created a miniature tempest which disarranged anew the hair of the lady on the landing, who waited in breathless alarm until two light shocks and a thump announced that the aerial voyagers had landed safely in the hall.

“Oh law!” exclaimed the voice that had spoken before. “Here’s Susan.”

“It’s a mercy your neck ain’t broken,” replied some palpitating female. “I’ll tell of you this time, Miss Wylie; indeed I will. And you, too, Miss Carpenter: I wonder at you not to have more sense at your age and with your size! Miss Wilson can’t help hearing when you come down with a thump like that. You shake the whole house.”

“Oh bother!” said Miss Wylie. “The Lady Abbess takes good care to shut out all the noise we make. Let us—”

“Girls,” said the lady above, calling down quietly, but with ominous distinctness.

Silence and utter confusion ensued. Then came a reply, in a tone of honeyed sweetness, from Miss Wylie:

“Did you call us, DEAR Miss Wilson?”

“Yes. Come up here, if you please, all three.”

There was some hesitation among them, each offering the other precedence. At last they went up slowly, in the order, though not at all in the manner, of their flying descent; followed Miss Wilson into the class-room; and stood in a row before her, illumined through three western windows with a glow of ruddy orange light. Miss Carpenter, the largest of the three, was red and confused. Her arms hung by her sides, her fingers twisting the folds of her dress. Miss Gertrude Lindsay, in pale sea-green, had a small head, delicate complexion, and pearly teeth. She stood erect, with an expression of cold distaste for reproof of any sort. The holland dress of the third offender had changed from yellow to white as she passed from the gray eastern twilight on the staircase into the warm western glow in the room. Her face had a bright olive tone, and seemed to have a golden mica in its composition. Her eyes and hair were hazel-nut color; and her teeth, the upper row of which she displayed freely, were like fine Portland stone, and sloped outward enough to have spoilt her mouth, had they not been supported by a rich under lip, and a finely curved, impudent chin. Her half cajoling, half mocking air, and her ready smile, were difficult to confront with severity; and Miss Wilson knew it; for she would not look at her even when attracted by a convulsive start and an angry side glance from Miss Lindsay, who had just been indented between the ribs by a finger tip.

“You are aware that you have broken the rules,” said Miss Wilson quietly.

“We didn’t intend to. We really did not,” said the girl in holland, coaxingly.

“Pray what was your intention then, Miss Wylie?”

Miss Wylie unexpectedly treated this as a smart repartee instead of a rebuke. She sent up a strange little scream, which exploded in a cascade of laughter.

“Pray be silent, Agatha,” said Miss Wilson severely. Agatha looked contrite. Miss Wilson turned hastily to the eldest of the three, and continued:

“I am especially surprised at you, Miss Carpenter. Since you have no desire to keep faith with me by upholding the rules, of which you are quite old enough to understand the necessity, I shall not trouble you with reproaches, or appeals to which I am now convinced that you would not respond,” (here Miss Carpenter, with an inarticulate protest, burst into tears); “but you should at least think of the danger into which your juniors are led by your childishness. How should you feel if Agatha had broken her neck?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Agatha, putting her hand quickly to her neck.

“I didn’t think there was any danger,” said Miss Carpenter, struggling with her tears. “Agatha has done it so oft — oh dear! you have torn me.” Miss Wylie had pulled at her schoolfellow’s skirt, and pulled too hard.

“Miss Wylie,” said Miss Wilson, flushing slightly, “I must ask you to leave the room.”

“Oh, no,” exclaimed Agatha, clasping her hands in distress. “Please don’t, dear Miss Wilson. I am so sorry. I beg your pardon.”

“Since you will not do what I ask, I must go myself,” said Miss Wilson sternly. “Come with me to my study,” she added to the two other girls. “If you attempt to follow, Miss Wylie, I shall regard it as an intrusion.”

“But I will go away if you wish it. I didn’t mean to diso—”

“I shall not trouble you now. Come, girls.”

The three went out; and Miss Wylie, left behind in disgrace, made a surpassing grimace at Miss Lindsay, who glanced back at her. When she was alone, her vivacity subsided. She went slowly to the window, and gazed disparagingly at the landscape. Once, when a sound of voices above reached her, her eyes brightened, and her ready lip moved; but the next silent moment she relapsed into moody indifference, which was not relieved until her two companions, looking very serious, re-entered.

“Well,” she said gaily, “has moral force been applied? Are you going to the Recording Angel?”

“Hush, Agatha,” said Miss Carpenter. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“No, but you ought, you goose. A nice row you have got me into!”

“It was your own fault. You tore my dress.”

“Yes, when you were blurting out that I sometimes slide down the banisters.”

“Oh!” said Miss Carpenter slowly, as if this reason had not occurred to her before. “Was that why you pulled me?”

“Dear me! It has actually dawned upon you. You are a most awfully silly girl, Jane. What did the Lady Abbess say?”

Miss Carpenter again gave her tears way, and could not reply.

“She is disgusted with us, and no wonder,” said Miss Lindsay.

“She said it was all your fault,” sobbed Miss Carpenter.

“Well, never mind, dear,” said Agatha soothingly. “Put it in the Recording Angel.”

“I won’t write a word in the Recording Angel unless you do so first,” said Miss Lindsay angrily. “You are more in fault than we are.”

“Certainly, my dear,” replied Agatha. “A whole page, if you wish.”

“I b-believe you LIKE writing in the Recording Angel,” said Miss Carpenter spitefully.

“Yes, Jane. It is the best fun the place affords.”

“It may be fun to you,” said Miss Lindsay sharply; “but it is not very creditable to me, as Miss Wilson said just now, to take a prize in moral science and then have to write down that I don’t know how to behave myself. Besides, I do not like to be told that I am ill-bred!”

Agatha laughed. “What a deep old thing she is! She knows all our weaknesses, and stabs at us through them. Catch her telling me, or Jane there, that we are ill-bred!”

“I don’t understand you,” said Miss Lindsay, haughtily.

“Of course not. That’s because you don’t know as much moral science as I, though I never took a prize in it.”

“You never took a prize in anything,” said Miss Carpenter.

“And I hope I never shall,” said Agatha. “I would as soon scramble for hot pennies in the snow, like the street boys, as scramble to see who can answer most questions. Dr. Watts is enough moral science for me. Now for the Recording Angel.”

She went to a shelf and took down a heavy quarto, bound in black leather, and inscribed, in red letters, MY FAULTS. This she threw irreverently on a desk, and tossed its pages over until she came to one only partly covered with manuscript confessions.

“For a wonder,” she said, “here are two entries that are not mine. Sarah Gerram! What has she been confessing?”

“Don’t read it,” said Miss Lindsay quickly. “You know that it is the most dishonorable thing any of us can do.”

“Poch! Our little sins are not worth making such a fuss about. I always like to have my entries read: it makes me feel like an author; and so in Christian duty I always read other people’s. Listen to poor Sarah’s tale of guilt. ‘1st October. I am very sorry that I slapped Miss Chambers in the lavatory this morning, and knocked out one of her teeth. This was very wicked; but it was coming out by itself; and she has forgiven me because a new one will come in its place; and she was only pretending when she said she swallowed it. Sarah Gerram.”’

“Little fool!” said Miss Lindsay. “The idea of our having to record in the same book with brats like that!”

“Here is a touching revelation. ‘4th October. Helen Plantagenet is deeply grieved to have to confess that I took the first place in algebra yesterday unfairly. Miss Lindsay prompted me;’ and—”

“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Lindsay, reddening. “That is how she thanks me for prompting her, is it? How dare she confess my faults in the Recording Angel?”

“Serves you right for prompting her,” said Miss Carpenter. “She was always a double-faced cat; and you ought to have known better.”

“Oh, I assure you it was not for her sake that I did it,” replied Miss Lindsay. “It was to prevent that Jackson girl from getting first place. I don’t like Helen Plantagenet; but at least she is a lady.’

“Stuff, Gertrude,” said Agatha, with a touch of earnestness. “One would think, to hear you talk, that your grandmother was a cook. Don’t be such a snob.”

“Miss Wylie,” said Gertrude, becoming scarlet: “you are very — oh! oh! Stop Ag — oh! I will tell Miss — oh!” Agatha had inserted a steely finger between her ribs, and was tickling her unendurably.

“Sh-sh-sh,” whispered Miss Carpenter anxiously. “The door is open.”

“Am I Miss Wylie?” demanded Agatha, relentlessly continuing the torture. “Am I very — whatever you were going to say? Am I? am I? am I?”

“No, no,” gasped Gertrude, shrinking into a chair, almost in hysterics. “You are very unkind, Agatha. You have hurt me.”

“You deserve it. If you ever get sulky with me again, or call me Miss Wylie, I will kill you. I will tickle the soles of your feet with a feather,” (Miss Lindsay shuddered, and hid her feet beneath the chair) “until your hair turns white. And now, if you are truly repentant, come and record.”

“You must record first. It was all your fault.”

“But I am the youngest,” said Agatha.

“Well, then,” said Gertrude, afraid to press the point, but determined not to record first, “let Jane Carpenter begin. She is the eldest.”

“Oh, of course,” said Jane, with whimpering irony. “Let Jane do all the nasty things first. I think it’s very hard. You fancy that Jane is a fool; but she isn’t.”

“You are certainly not such a fool as you look, Jane,” said Agatha gravely. “But I will record first, if you like.”

“No, you shan’t,” cried Jane, snatching the pen from her. “I am the eldest; and I won’t be put out of my place.”

She dipped the pen in the ink resolutely, and prepared to write. Then she paused; considered; looked bewildered; and at last appealed piteously to Agatha.

“What shall I write?” she said. “You know how to write things down; and I don’t.”

“First put the date,” said Agatha.

“To be sure,” said Jane, writing it quickly. “I forgot that. Well?”

“Now write, ‘I am very sorry that Miss Wilson saw me when I slid down the banisters this evening. Jane Carpenter.’”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all: unless you wish to add something of your own composition.”

“I hope it’s all right,” said Jane, looking suspiciously at Agatha. “However, there can’t be any harm in it; for it’s the simple truth. Anyhow, if you are playing one of your jokes on me, you are a nasty mean thing, and I don’t care. Now, Gertrude, it’s your turn. Please look at mine, and see whether the spelling is right.”

“It is not my business to teach you to spell,” said Gertrude, taking the pen. And, while Jane was murmuring at her churlishness, she wrote in a bold hand:

“I have broken the rules by sliding down the banisters to-day with Miss Carpenter and Miss Wylie. Miss Wylie went first.”

“You wretch!” exclaimed Agatha, reading over her shoulder. “And your father is an admiral!”

“I think it is only fair,” said Miss Lindsay, quailing, but assuming the tone of a moralist. “It is perfectly true.”

“All my money was made in trade,” said Agatha; “but I should be ashamed to save myself by shifting blame to your aristocratic shoulders. You pitiful thing! Here: give me the pen.”

“I will strike it out if you wish; but I think—”

“No: it shall stay there to witness against you. Now see how I confess my faults.” And she wrote, in a fine, rapid hand:

“This evening Gertrude Lindsay and Jane Carpenter met me at the top of the stairs, and said they wanted to slide down the banisters and would do it if I went first. I told them that it was against the rules, but they said that did not matter; and as they are older than I am, I allowed myself to be persuaded, and did.”

“What do you think of that?” said Agatha, displaying the page.

They read it, and protested clamorously.

“It is perfectly true,” said Agatha, solemnly.

“It’s beastly mean,” said Jane energetically. “The idea of your finding fault with Gertrude, and then going and being twice as bad yourself! I never heard of such a thing in my life.”

“‘Thus bad begins; but worse remains behind,’ as the Standard Elocutionist says,” said Agatha, adding another sentence to her confession.

“But it was all my fault. Also I was rude to Miss Wilson, and refused to leave the room when she bade me. I was not wilfully wrong except in sliding down the banisters. I am so fond of a slide that I could not resist the temptation.”

“Be warned by me, Agatha,” said Jane impressively. “If you write cheeky things in that book, you will be expelled.”

“Indeed!” replied Agatha significantly. “Wait until Miss Wilson sees what you have written.”

“Gertrude,” cried Jane, with sudden misgiving, “has she made me write anything improper? Agatha, do tell me if—”

Here a gong sounded; and the three girls simultaneously exclaimed “Grub!” and rushed from the room.

CHAPTER II

One sunny afternoon, a hansom drove at great speed along Belsize Avenue, St. John’s Wood, and stopped before a large mansion. A young lady sprang out; ran up the steps, and rang the bell impatiently. She was of the olive complexion, with a sharp profile: dark eyes with long lashes; narrow mouth with delicately sensuous lips; small head, feet, and hands, with long taper fingers; lithe and very slender figure moving with serpent-like grace. Oriental taste was displayed in the colors of her costume, which consisted of a white dress, close-fitting, and printed with an elaborate china blue pattern; a yellow straw hat covered with artificial hawthorn and scarlet berries; and tan-colored gloves reaching beyond the elbow, and decorated with a profusion of gold bangles.

The door not being opened immediately, she rang again, violently, and was presently admitted by a maid, who seemed surprised to see her. Without making any inquiry, she darted upstairs into a drawing-room, where a matron of good presence, with features of the finest Jewish type, sat reading. With her was a handsome boy in black velvet, who said:

“Mamma, here’s Henrietta!”

“Arthur,” said the young lady excitedly, “leave the room this instant; and don’t dare to come back until you get leave.”

The boy’s countenance fell, and he sulkily went out without a word.

“Is anything wrong?” said the matron, putting away her book with the unconcerned resignation of an experienced person who foresees a storm in a teacup. “Where is Sidney?”

“Gone! Gone! Deserted me! I—” The young lady’s utterance failed, and she threw herself upon an ottoman, sobbing with passionate spite.

“Nonsense! I thought Sidney had more sense. There, Henrietta, don’t be silly. I suppose you have quarrelled.”

“No! No!! No!!!” cried Henrietta, stamping on the carpet. “We had not a word. I have not lost my temper since we were married, mamma; I solemnly swear I have not. I will kill myself; there is no other way. There’s a curse on me. I am marked out to be miserable. He—”

“Tut, tut! What has happened, Henrietta? As you have been married now nearly six weeks, you can hardly be surprised at a little tiff arising. You are so excitable! You cannot expect the sky to be always cloudless. Most likely you are to blame; for Sidney is far more reasonable than you. Stop crying, and behave like a woman of sense, and I will go to Sidney and make everything right.”

“But he’s gone, and I can’t find out where. Oh, what shall I do?”

“What has happened?”

Henrietta writhed with impatience. Then, forcing herself to tell her story, she answered:

“We arranged on Monday that I should spend two days with Aunt Judith instead of going with him to Birmingham to that horrid Trade Congress. We parted on the best of terms. He couldn’t have been more affectionate. I will kill myself; I don’t care about anything or anybody. And when I came back on Wednesday he was gone, and there was this letter.” She produced a letter, and wept more bitterly than before.

“Let me see it.”

Henrietta hesitated, but her mother took the letter from her, sat down near the window, and composed herself to read without the least regard to her daughter’s vehement distress. The letter ran thus:

“Monday night.

“My Dearest: I am off — surfeited with endearment — to live my own life and do my own work. I could only have prepared you for this by coldness or neglect, which are wholly impossible to me when the spell of your presence is upon me. I find that I must fly if I am to save myself.

“I am afraid that I cannot give you satisfactory and intelligible reasons for this step. You are a beautiful and luxurious creature: life is to you full and complete only when it is a carnival of love. My case is just the reverse. Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke myself for folly and insincerity. Before a caress has had time to cool, a strenuous revulsion seizes me: I long to return to my old lonely ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought. I married in an insane fit of belief that I had a share of the natural affection which carries other men through lifetimes of matrimony. Already I am undeceived. You are to me the loveliest woman in the world. Well, for five weeks I have walked and tallied and dallied with the loveliest woman in the world, and the upshot is that I am flying from her, and am for a hermit’s cave until I die. Love cannot keep possession of me: all my strongest powers rise up against it and will not endure it. Forgive me for writing nonsense that you won’t understand, and do not think too hardly of me. I have been as good to you as my selfish nature allowed. Do not seek to disturb me in the obscurity which I desire and deserve. My solicitor will call on your father to arrange business matters, and you shall be as happy as wealth and liberty can make you. We shall meet again — some day.

“Adieu, my last love,

“Sidney Trefusis.”

“Well?” cried Mrs. Trefusis, observing through her tears that her mother had read the letter and was contemplating it in a daze.

“Well, certainly!” said Mrs. Jansenius, with emphasis. “Do you think he is quite sane, Henrietta? Or have you been plaguing him for too much attention? Men are not willing to give up their whole existence to their wives, even during the honeymoon.”

“He pretended that he was never happy out of my presence,” sobbed Henrietta. “There never was anything so cruel. I often wanted to be by myself for a change, but I was afraid to hurt his feelings by saying so. And now he has no feelings. But he must come back to me. Mustn’t he, mamma?”

“He ought to. I suppose he has not gone away with anyone?”

Henrietta sprang up, her cheeks vivid scarlet. “If I thought that I would pursue him to the end of the earth, and murder her. But no; he is not like anybody else. He hates me! Everybody hates me! You don’t care whether I am deserted or not, nor papa, nor anyone in this house.”

Mrs. Jansenius, still indifferent to her daughter’s agitation, considered a moment, and then said placidly:

“You can do nothing until we hear from the solicitor. In the meantime you may stay with us, if you wish. I did not expect a visit from you so soon; but your room has not been used since you went away.”

Mrs. Trefusis ceased crying, chilled by this first intimation that her father’s house was no longer her home. A more real sense of desolation came upon her. Under its cold influence she began to collect herself, and to feel her pride rising like a barrier between her and her mother.

“I won’t stay long,” she said. “If his solicitor will not tell me where he is, I will hunt through England for him. I am sorry to trouble you.”

“Oh, you will be no greater trouble than you have always been,” said Mrs. Jansenius calmly, not displeased to see that her daughter had taken the hint. “You had better go and wash your face. People may call, and I presume you don’t wish to receive them in that plight. If you meet Arthur on the stairs, please tell him he may come in.”

Henrietta screwed her lips into a curious pout and withdrew. Arthur then came in and stood at the window in sullen silence, brooding over his recent expulsion. Suddenly he exclaimed: “Here’s papa, and it’s not five o’clock yet!” whereupon his mother sent him away again.

Mr. Jansenius was a man of imposing presence, not yet in his fiftieth year, but not far from it. He moved with dignity, bearing himself as if the contents of his massive brow were precious. His handsome aquiline nose and keen dark eyes proclaimed his Jewish origin, of which he was ashamed. Those who did not know this naturally believed that he was proud of it, and were at a loss to account for his permitting his children to be educated as Christians. Well instructed in business, and subject to no emotion outside the love of family, respectability, comfort, and money, he had maintained the capital inherited from his father, and made it breed new capital in the usual way. He was a banker, and his object as such was to intercept and appropriate the immense saving which the banking system effects, and so, as far as possible, to leave the rest of the world working just as hard as before banking was introduced. But as the world would not on these terms have banked at all, he had to give them some of the saving as an inducement. So they profited by the saving as well as he, and he had the satisfaction of being at once a wealthy citizen and a public benefactor, rich in comforts and easy in conscience.

He entered the room quickly, and his wife saw that something had vexed him.

“Do you know what has happened, Ruth?” he said.

“Yes. She is upstairs.”

Mr. Jansenius stared. “Do you mean to say that she has left already?” he said. “What business has she to come here?”

“It is natural enough. Where else should she have gone?”

Mr. Jansenius, who mistrusted his own judgment when it differed from that of his wife, replied slowly, “Why did she not go to her mother?”

Mrs. Jansenius, puzzled in her turn, looked at him with cool wonder, and remarked, “I am her mother, am I not?”

“I was not aware of it. I am surprised to hear it, Ruth. Have you had a letter too. I have seen the letter. But what do you mean by telling me that you do not know I am Henrietta’s mother? Are you trying to be funny?”

“Henrietta! Is she here? Is this some fresh trouble?”

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about Agatha Wylie.”

“Oh! I was talking about Henrietta.”

“Well, what about Henrietta?”

“What about Agatha Wylie?”

At this Mr. Jansenius became exasperated, and he deemed it best to relate what Henrietta had told her. When she gave him Trefusis’s letter, he said, more calmly: “Misfortunes never come singly. Read that,” and handed her another letter, so that they both began reading at the same time.

Mrs. Jansenius read as follows:

“Alton College, Lyvern.

“To Mrs. Wylie, Acacia Lodge, Chiswick.

“Dear Madam: I write with great regret to request that you will at once withdraw Miss Wylie from Alton College. In an establishment like this, where restraint upon the liberty of the students is reduced to a minimum, it is necessary that the small degree of subordination which is absolutely indispensable be acquiesced in by all without complaint or delay. Miss Wylie has failed to comply with this condition. She has declared her wish to leave, and has assumed an attitude towards myself and my colleagues which we cannot, consistently with our duty to ourselves and her fellow students, pass over. If Miss Wylie has any cause to complain of her treatment here, or of the step which she has compelled us to take, she will doubtless make it known to you.

“Perhaps you will be so good as to communicate with Miss Wylie’s guardian, Mr. Jansenius, with whom I shall be happy to make an equitable arrangement respecting the fees which have been paid in advance for the current term.

“I am, dear madam,

“Yours faithfully,

“Maria Wilson.”

“A nice young lady, that!” said Mrs. Jansenius.

“I do not understand this,” said Mr. Jansenius, reddening as he took in the purport of his son-in-law’s letter. “I will not submit to it. What does it mean, Ruth?”

“I don’t know. Sidney is mad, I think; and his honeymoon has brought his madness out. But you must not let him throw Henrietta on my hands again.”

“Mad! Does he think he can shirk his responsibility to his wife because she is my daughter? Does he think, because his mother’s father was a baronet, that he can put Henrietta aside the moment her society palls on him?”

“Oh, it’s nothing of that sort. He never thought of us. But I will make him think of us,” said Mr. Jansenius, raising his voice in great agitation. “He shall answer for it.”

Just then Henrietta returned, and saw her father moving excitedly to and fro, repeating, “He shall answer to me for this. He shall answer for it.”

Mrs. Jansenius frowned at her daughter to remain silent, and said soothingly, “Don’t lose your temper, John.”

“But I will lose my temper. Insolent hound! Damned scoundrel!”

“He is not,” whimpered Henrietta, sitting down and taking out her handkerchief.

“Oh, come, come!” said Mrs. Jansenius peremptorily, “we have had enough crying. Let us have no more of it.”

Henrietta sprang up in a passion. “I will say and do as I please,” she exclaimed. “I am a married woman, and I will receive no orders. And I will have my husband back again, no matter what he does to hide himself. Papa, won’t you make him come back to me? I am dying. Promise that you will make him come back.”

And, throwing herself upon her father’s bosom, she postponed further discussion by going into hysterics, and startling the household by her screams.

CHAPTER III

One of the professors at Alton College was a Mrs. Miller, an old-fashioned schoolmistress who did not believe in Miss Wilson’s system of government by moral force, and carried it out under protest. Though not ill-natured, she was narrow-minded enough to be in some degree contemptible, and was consequently prone to suspect others of despising her. She suspected Agatha in particular, and treated her with disdainful curtness in such intercourse as they had — it was fortunately little. Agatha was not hurt by this, for Mrs. Miller was an unsympathetic woman, who made no friends among the girls, and satisfied her affectionate impulses by petting a large cat named Gracchus, but generally called Bacchus by an endearing modification of the harsh initial consonant.

One evening Mrs. Miller, seated with Miss Wilson in the study, correcting examination papers, heard in the distance a cry like that of a cat in distress. She ran to the door and listened. Presently there arose a prolonged wail, slurring up through two octaves, and subsiding again. It was a true feline screech, impossible to localize; but it was interrupted by a sob, a snarl, a fierce spitting, and a scuffling, coming unmistakably from a room on the floor beneath, in which, at that hour, the older girls assembled for study.

“My poor Gracchy!” exclaimed Mrs. Miller, running downstairs as fast as she could. She found the room unusually quiet. Every girl was deep in study except Miss Carpenter, who, pretending to pick up a fallen book, was purple with suppressed laughter and the congestion caused by stooping.

“Where is Miss Ward?” demanded Mrs. Miller.

“Miss Ward has gone for some astronomical diagrams in which we are interested,” said Agatha, looking up gravely. Just then Miss Ward, diagrams in hand, entered.

“Has that cat been in here?” she said, not seeing Mrs. Miller, and speaking in a tone expressive of antipathy to Gracchus.

Agatha started and drew up her ankles, as if fearful of having them bitten. Then, looking apprehensively under the desk, she replied, “There is no cat here, Miss Ward.”

“There is one somewhere; I heard it,” said Miss Ward carelessly, unrolling her diagrams, which she began to explain without further parley. Mrs. Miller, anxious for her pet, hastened to seek it elsewhere. In the hall she met one of the housemaids.

“Susan,” she said, “have you seen Gracchus?”

“He’s asleep on the hearthrug in your room, ma’am. But I heard him crying down here a moment ago. I feel sure that another cat has got in, and that they are fighting.”

Susan smiled compassionately. “Lor’ bless you, ma’am,” she said, “that was Miss Wylie. It’s a sort of play-acting that she goes through. There is the bee on the window-pane, and the soldier up the chimley, and the cat under the dresser. She does them all like life.”

“The soldier in the chimney!” repeated Mrs. Miller, shocked.

“Yes, ma’am. Like as it were a follower that had hid there when he heard the mistress coming.”

Mrs. Miller’s face set determinedly. She returned to the study and related what had just occurred, adding some sarcastic comments on the efficacy of moral force in maintaining collegiate discipline. Miss Wilson looked grave; considered for some time; and at last said: “I must think over this. Would you mind leaving it in my hands for the present?”

Mrs. Miller said that she did not care in whose hands it remained provided her own were washed of it, and resumed her work at the papers. Miss Wilson then, wishing to be alone, went into the empty classroom at the other side of the landing. She took the Fault Book from its shelf and sat down before it. Its record closed with the announcement, in Agatha’s handwriting:

“Miss Wilson has called me impertinent, and has written to my uncle that I have refused to obey the rules. I was not impertinent; and I never refused to obey the rules. So much for Moral Force!”

Miss Wilson rose vigorously, exclaiming: “I will soon let her know whether—” She checked herself, and looked round hastily, superstitiously fancying that Agatha might have stolen into the room unobserved. Reassured that she was alone, she examined her conscience as to whether she had done wrong in calling Agatha impertinent, justifying herself by the reflection that Agatha had, in fact, been impertinent. Yet she recollected that she had refused to admit this plea on a recent occasion when Jane Carpenter had advanced it in extenuation of having called a fellow-student a liar. Had she then been unjust to Jane, or inconsiderate to Agatha?

Her casuistry was interrupted by some one softly whistling a theme from the overture to Masaniello, popular at the college in the form of an arrangement for six pianofortes and twelve hands. There was only one student unladylike and musical enough to whistle; and Miss Wilson was ashamed to find herself growing nervous at the prospect of an encounter with Agatha, who entered whistling sweetly, but with a lugubrious countenance. When she saw in whose presence she stood, she begged pardon politely, and was about to withdraw, when Miss Wilson, summoning all her Judgment and tact, and hoping that they would — contrary to their custom in emergencies — respond to the summons, said:

“Agatha, come here. I want to speak to you.”

Agatha closed her lips, drew in a long breath through her nostrils, and marched to within a few feet of Miss Wilson, where she halted with her hands clasped before her.

“Sit down.”

Agatha sat down with a single movement, like a doll.

“I don’t understand that, Agatha,” said Miss Wilson, pointing to the entry in the Recording Angel. “What does it mean?”

“I am unfairly treated,” said Agatha, with signs of agitation.

“In what way?”

“In every way. I am expected to be something more than mortal. Everyone else is encouraged to complain, and to be weak and silly. But I must have no feeling. I must be always in the right. Everyone else may be home-sick, or huffed, or in low spirits. I must have no nerves, and must keep others laughing all day long. Everyone else may sulk when a word of reproach is addressed to them, and may make the professors afraid to find fault with them. I have to bear with the insults of teachers who have less self-control than I, a girl of seventeen! and must coax them out of the difficulties they make for themselves by their own ill temper.”

“But, Agatha—”

“Oh, I know I am talking nonsense, Miss Wilson; but can you expect me to be always sensible — to be infallible?”

“Yes, Agatha; I do not think it is too much to expect you to be always sensible; and—”

“Then you have neither sense nor sympathy yourself,” said Agatha.

There was an awful pause. Neither could have told how long it lasted. Then Agatha, feeling that she must do or say something desperate, or else fly, made a distracted gesture and ran out of the room.

She rejoined her companions in the great hall of the mansion, where they were assembled after study for “recreation,” a noisy process which always set in spontaneously when the professors withdrew. She usually sat with her two favorite associates on a high window seat near the hearth. That place was now occupied by a little girl with flaxen hair, whom Agatha, regardless of moral force, lifted by the shoulders and deposited on the floor. Then she sat down and said:

“Oh, such a piece of news!”

Miss Carpenter opened her eyes eagerly. Gertrude Lindsay affected indifference.

“Someone is going to be expelled,” said Agatha.

“Expelled! Who?”

“You will know soon enough, Jane,” replied Agatha, suddenly grave. “It is someone who made an impudent entry in the Recording Angel.”

Fear stole upon Jane, and she became very red. “Agatha,” she said, “it was you who told me what to write. You know you did, and you can’t deny it.”

“I can’t deny it, can’t I? I am ready to swear that I never dictated a word to you in my life.”

“Gertrude knows you did,” exclaimed Jane, appalled, and almost in tears.

“There,” said Agatha, petting her as if she were a vast baby. “It shall not be expelled, so it shan’t. Have you seen the Recording Angel lately, either of you?”

“Not since our last entry,” said Gertrude.

“Chips,” said Agatha, calling to the flaxen-haired child, “go upstairs to No. 6, and, if Miss Wilson isn’t there, fetch me the Recording Angel.”

The little girl grumbled inarticulately and did not stir.

“Chips,” resumed Agatha, “did you ever wish that you had never been born?”

“Why don’t you go yourself?” said the child pettishly, but evidently alarmed.

“Because,” continued Agatha, ignoring the question, “you shall wish yourself dead and buried under the blackest flag in the coal cellar if you don’t bring me the book before I count sixteen. One — two—”

“Go at once and do as you are told, you disagreeable little thing,” said Gertrude sharply. “How dare you be so disobliging?”

“ — nine — ten — eleven—” pursued Agatha.

The child quailed, went out, and presently returned, hugging the Recording Angel in her arms.

“You are a good little darling — when your better qualities are brought out by a judicious application of moral force,” said Agatha, good-humoredly. “Remind me to save the raisins out of my pudding for you to-morrow. Now, Jane, you shall see the entry for which the best-hearted girl in the college is to be expelled. Voila!”

The two girls read and were awestruck; Jane opening her mouth and gasping, Gertrude closing hers and looking very serious.

“Do you mean to say that you had the dreadful cheek to let the Lady Abbess see that?” said Jane.

“Pooh! she would have forgiven that. You should have heard what I said to her! She fainted three times.”

“That’s a story,” said Gertrude gravely.

“I beg your pardon,” said Agatha, swiftly grasping Gertrude’s knee.

“Nothing,” cried Gertrude, flinching hysterically. “Don’t, Agatha.”

“How many times did Miss Wilson faint?”

“Three times. I will scream, Agatha; I will indeed.”

“Three times, as you say. And I wonder that a girl brought up as you have been, by moral force, should be capable of repeating such a falsehood. But we had an awful row, really and truly. She lost her temper. Fortunately, I never lose mine.”

“Well, I’m browed!” exclaimed Jane incredulously. “I like that.”

“For a girl of county family, you are inexcusably vulgar, Jane. I don’t know what I said; but she will never forgive me for profaning her pet book. I shall be expelled as certainly as I am sitting here.”

“And do you mean to say that you are going away?” said Jane, faltering as she began to realize the consequences.

“I do. And what is to become of you when I am not here to get you out of your scrapes, or of Gertrude without me to check her inveterate snobbishness, is more than I can foresee.”

“I am not snobbish,” said Gertrude, “although I do not choose to make friends with everyone. But I never objected to you, Agatha.”

“No; I should like to catch you at it. Hallo, Jane!” (who had suddenly burst into tears): “what’s the matter? I trust you are not permitting yourself to take the liberty of crying for me.”

“Indeed,” sobbed Jane indignantly, “I know that I am a f — fool for my pains. You have no heart.”

“You certainly are a f — fool, as you aptly express it,” said Agatha, passing her arm round Jane, and disregarding an angry attempt to shake it off; “but if I had any heart it would be touched by this proof of your attachment.”

“I never said you had no heart,” protested Jane; “but I hate when you speak like a book.”

“You hate when I speak like a book, do you? My dear, silly old Jane! I shall miss you greatly.”

“Yes, I dare say,” said Jane, with tearful sarcasm. “At least my snoring will never keep you awake again.”

“You don’t snore, Jane. We have been in a conspiracy to make you believe that you do, that’s all. Isn’t it good of me to tell you?”

Jane was overcome by this revelation. After a long pause, she said with deep conviction, “I always knew that I didn’t. Oh, the way you kept it up! I solemnly declare that from this time forth I will believe nobody.”

“Well, and what do you think of it all?” said Agatha, transferring her attention to Gertrude, who was very grave.

“I think — I am now speaking seriously, Agatha — I think you are in the wrong.”

“Why do you think that, pray?” demanded Agatha, a little roused.

“You must be, or Miss Wilson would not be angry with you. Of course, according to your own account, you are always in the right, and everyone else is always wrong; but you shouldn’t have written that in the book. You know I speak as your friend.”

“And pray what does your wretched little soul know of my motives and feelings?”

“It is easy enough to understand you,” retorted Gertrude, nettled. “Self-conceit is not so uncommon that one need be at a loss to recognize it. And mind, Agatha Wylie,” she continued, as if goaded by some unbearable reminiscence, “if you are really going, I don’t care whether we part friends or not. I have not forgotten the day when you called me a spiteful cat.”

“I have repented,” said Agatha, unmoved. “One day I sat down and watched Bacchus seated on the hearthrug, with his moony eyes looking into space so thoughtfully and patiently that I apologized for comparing you to him. If I were to call him a spiteful cat he would only not believe me.”

“Because he is a cat,” said Jane, with the giggle which was seldom far behind her tears.

“No; but because he is not spiteful. Gertrude keeps a recording angel inside her little head, and it is so full of other people’s faults, written in large hand and read through a magnifying glass, that there is no room to enter her own.”

“You are very poetic,” said Gertrude; “but I understand what you mean, and shall not forget it.”

“You ungrateful wretch,” exclaimed Agatha, turning upon her so suddenly and imperiously that she involuntarily shrank aside: “how often, when you have tried to be insolent and false with me, have I not driven away your bad angel — by tickling you? Had you a friend in the college, except half-a-dozen toadies, until I came? And now, because I have sometimes, for your own good, shown you your faults, you bear malice against me, and say that you don’t care whether we part friends or not!”

“I didn’t say so.”

“Oh, Gertrude, you know you did,” said Jane.

“You seem to think that I have no conscience,” said Gertrude querulously.

“I wish you hadn’t,” said Agatha. “Look at me! I have no conscience, and see how much pleasanter I am!”

“You care for no one but yourself,” said Gertrude. “You never think that other people have feelings too. No one ever considers me.”

“Oh, I like to hear you talk,” cried Jane ironically. “You are considered a great deal more than is good for you; and the more you are considered the more you want to be considered.”

“As if,” declaimed Agatha theatrically, “increase of appetite did grow by what it fed on. Shakespeare!”

“Bother Shakespeare,” said Jane, impetuously, “ — old fool that expects credit for saying things that everybody knows! But if you complain of not being considered, Gertrude, how would you like to be me, whom everybody sets down as a fool? But I am not such a fool as—”

“As you look,” interposed Agatha. “I have told you so scores of times, Jane; and I am glad that you have adopted my opinion at last. Which would you rather be, a greater fool than y—”

“Oh, shut up,” said Jane, impatiently; “you have asked me that twice this week already.”

The three were silent for some seconds after this: Agatha meditating, Gertrude moody, Jane vacant and restless. At last Agatha said:

“And are you two also smarting under a sense of the inconsiderateness and selfishness of the rest of the world — both misunderstood — everything expected from you, and no allowances made for you?”

“I don’t know what you mean by both of us,” said Gertrude coldly.

“Neither do I,” said Jane angrily. “That is just the way people treat me. You may laugh, Agatha; and she may turn up her nose as much as she likes; you know it’s true. But the idea of Gertrude wanting to make out that she isn’t considered is nothing but sentimentality, and vanity, and nonsense.”

“You are exceedingly rude, Miss Carpenter,” said Gertrude.

“My manners are as good as yours, and perhaps better,” retorted Jane. “My family is as good, anyhow.”

“Children, children,” said Agatha, admonitorily, “do not forget that you are sworn friends.”

“We didn’t swear,” said Jane. “We were to have been three sworn friends, and Gertrude and I were willing, but you wouldn’t swear, and so the bargain was cried off.”

“Just so,” said Agatha; “and the result is that I spend all my time in keeping peace between you. And now, to go back to our subject, may I ask whether it has ever occurred to you that no one ever considers me?”

“I suppose you think that very funny. You take good care to make yourself considered,” sneered Jane.

“You cannot say that I do not consider you,” said Gertrude reproachfully.

“Not when I tickle you, dear.”

“I consider you, and I am not ticklesome,” said Jane tenderly.

“Indeed! Let me try,” said Agatha, slipping her arm about Jane’s ample waist, and eliciting a piercing combination of laugh and scream from her.

“Sh — sh,” whispered Gertrude quickly. “Don’t you see the Lady Abbess?”

Miss Wilson had just entered the room. Agatha, without appearing to be aware of her presence, stealthily withdrew her arm, and said aloud:

“How can you make such a noise, Jane? You will disturb the whole house.”

Jane reddened with indignation, but had to remain silent, for the eyes of the principal were upon her. Miss Wilson had her bonnet on. She announced that she was going to walk to Lyvern, the nearest village. Did any of the sixth form young ladies wish to accompany her?

Agatha jumped from her seat at once, and Jane smothered a laugh.

“Miss Wilson said the sixth form, Miss Wylie,” said Miss Ward, who had entered also. “You are not in the sixth form.”

“No,” said Agatha sweetly, “but I want to go, if I may.”

Miss Wilson looked round. The sixth form consisted of four studious young ladies, whose goal in life for the present was an examination by one of the Universities, or, as the college phrase was, “the Cambridge Local.” None of them responded.

“Fifth form, then,” said Miss Wilson.

Jane, Gertrude, and four others rose and stood with Agatha.

“Very well,” said Miss Wilson. “Do not be long dressing.”

They left the room quietly, and dashed at the staircase the moment they were out of sight. Agatha, though void of emulation for the Cambridge Local, always competed with ardor for the honor of being first up or down stairs.

They soon returned, clad for walking, and left the college in procession, two by two, Jane and Agatha leading, Gertrude and Miss Wilson coming last. The road to Lyvern lay through acres of pasture land, formerly arable, now abandoned to cattle, which made more money for the landlord than the men whom they had displaced. Miss Wilson’s young ladies, being instructed in economics, knew that this proved that the land was being used to produce what was most wanted from it; and if all the advantage went to the landlord, that was but natural, as he was the chief gentleman in the neighborhood. Still the arrangement had its disagreeable side; for it involved a great many cows, which made them afraid to cross the fields; a great many tramps, who made them afraid to walk the roads; and a scarcity of gentlemen subjects for the maiden art of fascination.

The sky was cloudy. Agatha, reckless of dusty stockings, waded through the heaps of fallen leaves with the delight of a child paddling in the sea; Gertrude picked her steps carefully, and the rest tramped along, chatting subduedly, occasionally making some scientific or philosophical remark in a louder tone, in order that Miss Wilson might overhear and give them due credit. Save a herdsman, who seemed to have caught something of the nature and expression of the beasts he tended, they met no one until they approached the village, where, on the brow of an acclivity, masculine humanity appeared in the shape of two curates: one tall, thin, close-shaven, with a book under his arm, and his neck craned forward; the other middle-sized, robust, upright, and aggressive, with short black whiskers, and an air of protest against such notions as that a clergyman may not marry, hunt, play cricket, or share the sports of honest laymen. The shaven one was Mr. Josephs, his companion Mr. Fairholme. Obvious scriptural perversions of this brace of names had been introduced by Agatha.

“Here come Pharaoh and Joseph,” she said to Jane. “Joseph will blush when you look at him. Pharaoh won’t blush until he passes Gertrude, so we shall lose that.”

“Josephs, indeed!” said Jane scornfully.

“He loves you, Jane. Thin persons like a fine armful of a woman. Pharaoh, who is a cad, likes blue blood on the same principle of the attraction of opposites. That is why he is captivated by Gertrude’s aristocratic air.”

“If he only knew how she despises him!”

“He is too vain to suspect it. Besides, Gertrude despises everyone, even us. Or, rather, she doesn’t despise anyone in particular, but is contemptuous by nature, just as you are stout.”

“Me! I had rather be stout than stuck-up. Ought we to bow?”

“I will, certainly. I want to make Pharoah blush, if I can.”

The two parsons had been simulating an interest in the cloudy firmament as an excuse for not looking at the girls until close at hand. Jane sent an eyeflash at Josephs with a skill which proved her favorite assertion that she was not so stupid as people thought. He blushed and took off his soft, low-crowned felt hat. Fairholme saluted very solemnly, for Agatha bowed to him with marked seriousness. But when his gravity and his stiff silk hat were at their highest point she darted a mocking smile at him, and he too blushed, all the deeper because he was enraged with himself for doing so.

“Did you ever see such a pair of fools?” whispered Jane, giggling.

“They cannot help their sex. They say women are fools, and so they are; but thank Heaven they are not quite so bad as men! I should like to look back and see Pharaoh passing Gertrude; but if he saw me he would think I was admiring him; and he is conceited enough already without that.”

The two curates became redder and redder as they passed the column of young ladies. Miss Lindsay would not look to their side of the road, and Miss Wilson’s nod and smile were not quite sincere. She never spoke to curates, and kept up no more intercourse with the vicar than she could not avoid. He suspected her of being an infidel, though neither he nor any other mortal in Lyvern had ever heard a word from her on the subject of her religious opinions. But he knew that “moral science” was taught secularly at the college; and he felt that where morals were made a department of science the demand for religion must fall off proportionately.

“What a life to lead and what a place to live in!” exclaimed Agatha. “We meet two creatures, more like suits of black than men; and that is an incident — a startling incident — in our existence!”

“I think they’re awful fun,” said Jane, “except that Josephs has such large ears.”

The girls now came to a place where the road dipped through a plantation of sombre sycamore and horsechestnut trees. As they passed down into it, a little wind sprang up, the fallen leaves stirred, and the branches heaved a long, rustling sigh.

“I hate this bit of road,” said Jane, hurrying on. “It’s just the sort of place that people get robbed and murdered in.”

“It is not such a bad place to shelter in if we get caught in the rain, as I expect we shall before we get back,” said Agatha, feeling the fitful breeze strike ominously on her cheek. “A nice pickle I shall be in with these light shoes on! I wish I had put on my strong boots. If it rains much I will go into the old chalet.”

“Miss Wilson won’t let you. It’s trespassing.”

“What matter! Nobody lives in it, and the gate is off its hinges. I only want to stand under the veranda — not to break into the wretched place. Besides, the landlord knows Miss Wilson; he won’t mind. There’s a drop.”

Miss Carpenter looked up, and immediately received a heavy raindrop in her eye.

“Oh!” she cried. “It’s pouring. We shall be drenched.”

Agatha stopped, and the column broke into a group about her.

“Miss Wilson,” she said, “it is going to rain in torrents, and Jane and I have only our shoes on.”

Miss Wilson paused to consider the situation. Someone suggested that if they hurried on they might reach Lyvern before the rain came down.

“More than a mile,” said Agatha scornfully, “and the rain coming down already!”

Someone else suggested returning to the college.

“More than two miles,” said Agatha. “We should be drowned.”

“There is nothing for it but to wait here under the trees,” said Miss Wilson.

“The branches are very bare,” said Gertrude anxiously. “If it should come down heavily they will drip worse than the rain itself.”

“Much worse,” said Agatha. “I think we had better get under the veranda of the old chalet. It is not half a minute’s walk from here.”

“But we have no right—” Here the sky darkened threateningly. Miss Wilson checked herself and said, “I suppose it is still empty.”

“Of course,” replied Agatha, impatient to be moving. “It is almost a ruin.”

“Then let us go there, by all means,” said Miss Wilson, not disposed to stand on trifles at the risk of a bad cold.

They hurried on, and came presently to a green hill by the wayside. On the slope was a dilapidated Swiss cottage, surrounded by a veranda on slender wooden pillars, about which clung a few tendrils of withered creeper, their stray ends still swinging from the recent wind, now momentarily hushed as if listening for the coming of the rain. Access from the roadway was by a rough wooden gate in the hedge. To the surprise of Agatha, who had last seen this gate off its hinges and only attached to the post by a rusty chain and padlock, it was now rehung and fastened by a new hasp. The weather admitting of no delay to consider these repairs, she opened the gate and hastened up the slope, followed by the troop of girls. Their ascent ended with a rush, for the rain suddenly came down in torrents.

When they were safe under the veranda, panting, laughing, grumbling, or congratulating themselves on having been so close to a place of shelter, Miss Wilson observed, with some uneasiness, a spade — new, like the hasp of the gate — sticking upright in a patch of ground that someone had evidently been digging lately. She was about to comment on this sign of habitation, when the door of the chalet was flung open, and Jane screamed as a man darted out to the spade, which he was about to carry in out of the wet, when he perceived the company under the veranda, and stood still in amazement. He was a young laborer with a reddish-brown beard of a week’s growth. He wore corduroy trousers and a linen-sleeved corduroy vest; both, like the hasp and spade, new. A coarse blue shirt, with a vulgar red-and-orange neckerchief, also new, completed his dress; and, to shield himself from the rain, he held up a silk umbrella with a silver-mounted ebony handle, which he seemed unlikely to have come by honestly. Miss Wilson felt like a boy caught robbing an orchard, but she put a bold face on the matter and said:

“Will you allow us to take shelter here until the rain is over?”

“For certain, your ladyship,” he replied, respectfully applying the spade handle to his hair, which was combed down to his eyebrows. “Your ladyship does me proud to take refuge from the onclemency of the yallovrments beneath my ‘umble rooftree.” His accent was barbarous; and he, like a low comedian, seemed to relish its vulgarity. As he spoke he came in among them for shelter, and propped his spade against the wall of the chalet, kicking the soil from his hobnailed blucher boots, which were new.

“I came out, honored lady,” he resumed, much at his ease, “to house my spade, whereby I earn my living. What the pen is to the poet, such is the spade to the working man.” He took the kerchief from his neck, wiped his temples as if the sweat of honest toil were there, and calmly tied it on again.

“If you’ll ‘scuse a remark from a common man,” he observed, “your ladyship has a fine family of daughters.”

“They are not my daughters,” said Miss Wilson, rather shortly.

“Sisters, mebbe?”

“No.”

“I thought they mout be, acause I have a sister myself. Not that I would make bold for to dror comparisons, even in my own mind, for she’s only a common woman — as common a one as ever you see. But few women rise above the common. Last Sunday, in yon village church, I heard the minister read out that one man in a thousand had he found, ‘but one woman in all these,’ he says, ‘have I not found,’ and I thinks to myself, ‘Right you are!’ But I warrant he never met your ladyship.”

A laugh, thinly disguised as a cough, escaped from Miss Carpenter.

“Young lady a-ketchin’ cold, I’m afeerd,” he said, with respectful solicitude.

“Do you think the rain will last long?” said Agatha politely.

The man examined the sky with a weather-wise air for some moments. Then he turned to Agatha, and replied humbly: “The Lord only knows, Miss. It is not for a common man like me to say.”

Silence ensued, during which Agatha, furtively scrutinizing the tenant of the chalet, noticed that his face and neck were cleaner and less sunburnt than those of the ordinary toilers of Lyvern. His hands were hidden by large gardening gloves stained with coal dust. Lyvern laborers, as a rule, had little objection to soil their hands; they never wore gloves. Still, she thought, there was no reason why an eccentric workman, insufferably talkative, and capable of an allusion to the pen of the poet, should not indulge himself with cheap gloves. But then the silk, silvermounted umbrella —

“The young lady’s hi,” he said suddenly, holding out the umbrella, “is fixed on this here. I am well aware that it is not for the lowest of the low to carry a gentleman’s brolly, and I ask your ladyship’s pardon for the liberty. I come by it accidental-like, and should be glad of a reasonable offer from any gentleman in want of a honest article.”

As he spoke two gentlemen, much in want of the article, as their clinging wet coats showed, ran through the gateway and made for the chalet. Fairholme arrived first, exclaiming: “Fearful shower!” and briskly turned his back to the ladies in order to stand at the edge of the veranda and shake the water out of his hat. Josephs came next, shrinking from the damp contact of his own garments. He cringed to Miss Wilson, and hoped that she had escaped a wetting.

“So far I have,” she replied. “The question is, how are we to get home?”

“Oh, it’s only a shower,” said Josephs, looking up cheerfully at the unbroken curtain of cloud. “It will clear up presently.”

“It ain’t for a common man to set up his opinion again’ a gentleman wot have profesh’nal knowledge of the heavens, as one may say,” said the man, “but I would ‘umbly offer to bet my umbrellar to his wideawake that it don’t cease raining this side of seven o’clock.”

“That man lives here,” whispered Miss Wilson, “and I suppose he wants to get rid of us.”

“H’m!” said Fairholme. Then, turning to the strange laborer with the air of a person not to be trifled with, he raised his voice, and said: “You live here, do you, my man?”

“I do, sir, by your good leave, if I may make so bold.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jeff Smilash, sir, at your service.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Brixtonbury, sir.”

“Brixtonbury! Where’s that?”

“Well, sir, I don’t rightly know. If a gentleman like you, knowing jography and such, can’t tell, how can I?”

“You ought to know where you were born, man. Haven’t you got common sense?”

“Where could such a one as me get common sense, sir? Besides, I was only a foundling. Mebbe I warn’s born at all.”

“Did I see you at church last Sunday?”

“No, sir. I only come o’ Wensday.”

“Well, let me see you there next Sunday,” said Fairholme shortly, turning away from him.

Miss Wilson looked at the weather, at Josephs, who was conversing with Jane, and finally at Smilash, who knuckled his forehead without waiting to be addressed.

“Have you a boy whom you can send to Lyvern to get us a conveyance — a carriage? I will give him a shilling for his trouble.”

“A shilling!” said Smilash joyfully. “Your ladyship is a noble lady. Two four-wheeled cabs. There’s eight on you.”

“There is only one cab in Lyvern,” said Miss Wilson. “Take this card to Mr. Marsh, the jotmaster, and tell him the predicament we are in. He will send vehicles.”

Smilash took the card and read it at a glance. He then went into the chalet. Reappearing presently in a sou’wester and oilskins, he ran off through the rain and vaulted over the gate with ridiculous elegance. No sooner had he vanished than, as often happens to remarkable men, he became the subject of conversation.

“A decent workman,” said Josephs. “A well-mannered man, considering his class.”

“A born fool, though,” said Fairholme.

“Or a rogue,” said Agatha, emphasizing the suggestion by a glitter of her eyes and teeth, whilst her schoolfellows, rather disapproving of her freedom, stood stiffly dumb. “He told Miss Wilson that he had a sister, and that he had been to church last Sunday, and he has just told you that he is a foundling, and that he only came last Wednesday. His accent is put on, and he can read, and I don’t believe he is a workman at all. Perhaps he is a burglar, come down to steal the college plate.”

“Agatha,” said Miss Wilson gravely, “you must be very careful how you say things of that kind.”

“But it is so obvious. His explanation about the umbrella was made up to disarm suspicion. He handled it and leaned on it in a way that showed how much more familiar it was to him than that new spade he was so anxious about. And all his clothes are new.”

“True,” said Fairholme, “but there is not much in all that. Workmen nowadays ape gentlemen in everything. However, I will keep an eye on him.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Agatha. Fairholme, suspecting mockery, frowned, and Miss Wilson looked severely at the mocker. Little more was said, except as to the chances — manifestly small — of the rain ceasing, until the tops of a cab, a decayed mourning coach, and three dripping hats were seen over the hedge. Smilash sat on the box of the coach, beside the driver. When it stopped, he alighted, re-entered the chalet without speaking, came out with the umbrella, spread it above Miss Wilson’s head, and said:

“Now, if your ladyship will come with me, I will see you dry into the stray, and then I’ll bring your honored nieces one by one.”

“I shall come last,” said Miss Wilson, irritated by his assumption that the party was a family one. “Gertrude, you had better go first.”

“Allow me,” said Fairholme, stepping forward, and attempting to take the umbrella.

“Thank you, I shall not trouble you,” she said frostily, and tripped away over the oozing field with Smilash, who held the umbrella over her with ostentatious solicitude. In the same manner he led the rest to the vehicles, in which they packed themselves with some difficulty. Agatha, who came last but one, gave him threepence.

“You have a noble ‘art and an expressive hi, Miss,” he said, apparently much moved. “Blessings on both! Blessings on both!”

He went back for Jane, who slipped on the wet grass and fell. He had to put forth his strength as he helped her to rise. “Hope you ain’t sopped up much of the rainfall, Miss,” he said. “You are a fine young lady for your age. Nigh on twelve stone, I should think.”

She reddened and hurried to the cab, where Agatha was. But it was full; and Jane, much against her will, had to get into the coach, considerably diminishing the space left for Miss Wilson, to whom Smilash had returned.

“Now, dear lady,” he said, “take care you don’t slip. Come along.”

Miss Wilson, ignoring the invitation, took a shilling from her purse.

“No, lady,” said Smilash with a virtuous air. “I am an honest man and have never seen the inside of a jail except four times, and only twice for stealing. Your youngest daughter — her with the expressive hi — have paid me far beyond what is proper.”

“I have told you that these young ladies are not my daughters,” said Miss Wilson sharply. “Why do you not listen to what is said to you?”

“Don’t be too hard on a common man, lady,” said Smilash submissively. “The young lady have just given me three ‘arf-crowns.”

“Three half-crowns!” exclaimed Miss Wilson, angered at such extravagance.

“Bless her innocence, she don’t know what is proper to give to a low sort like me! But I will not rob the young lady. ‘Arf-a-crown is no more nor is fair for the job, and arf-a-crown will I keep, if agreeable to your noble ladyship. But I give you back the five bob in trust for her. Have you ever noticed her expressive hi?”

“Nonsense, sir. You had better keep the money now that you have got it.”

“Wot! Sell for five bob the high opinion your ladyship has of me! No, dear lady; not likely. My father’s very last words to me was—”

“You said just now that you were a foundling,” said Fairholme. “What are we to believe? Eh?”

“So I were, sir; but by mother’s side alone. Her ladyship will please to take back the money, for keep it I will not. I am of the lower orders, and therefore not a man of my word; but when I do stick to it, I stick like wax.”

“Take it,” said Fairholme to Miss Wilson. “Take it, of course. Seven and sixpence is a ridiculous sum to give him for what he has done. It would only set him drinking.”

“His reverence says true, lady. The one ‘arfcrown will keep me comfortably tight until Sunday morning; and more I do not desire.”

“Just a little less of your tongue, my man,” said Fairholme, taking the two coins from him and handing them to Miss Wilson, who bade the clergymen good afternoon, and went to the coach under the umbrella.

“If your ladyship should want a handy man to do an odd job up at the college I hope you will remember me,” Smilash said as they went down the slope.

“Oh, you know who I am, do you?” said Miss Wilson drily.

“All the country knows you, Miss, and worships you. I have few equals as a coiner, and if you should require a medal struck to give away for good behavior or the like, I think I could strike one to your satisfaction. And if your ladyship should want a trifle of smuggled lace—”

“You had better be careful or you will get into trouble, I think,” said Miss Wilson sternly. “Tell him to drive on.”

The vehicles started, and Smilash took the liberty of waving his hat after them. Then he returned to the chalet, left the umbrella within, came out again, locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and walked off through the rain across the hill without taking the least notice of the astonished parsons.

In the meantime Miss Wilson, unable to contain her annoyance at Agatha’s extravagance, spoke of it to the girls who shared the coach with her. But Jane declared that Agatha only possessed threepence in the world, and therefore could not possibly have given the man thirty times that sum. When they reached the college, Agatha, confronted with Miss Wilson, opened her eyes in wonder, and exclaimed, laughing: “I only gave him threepence. He has sent me a present of four and ninepence!”

CHAPTER IV

Saturday at Alton College, nominally a half holiday, was really a whole one. Classes in gymnastics, dancing, elocution, and drawing were held in the morning. The afternoon was spent at lawn tennis, to which lady guests resident in the neighborhood were allowed to bring their husbands, brothers, and fathers — Miss Wilson being anxious to send her pupils forth into the world free from the uncouth stiffness of schoolgirls unaccustomed to society.

Late in October came a Saturday which proved anything but a holiday for Miss Wilson. At half-past one, luncheon being over, she went out of doors to a lawn that lay between the southern side of the college and a shrubbery. Here she found a group of girls watching Agatha and Jane, who were dragging a roller over the grass. One of them, tossing a ball about with her racket, happened to drive it into the shrubbery, whence, to the surprise of the company, Smilash presently emerged, carrying the ball, blinking, and proclaiming that, though a common man, he had his feelings like another, and that his eye was neither a stick nor a stone. He was dressed as before, but his garments, soiled with clay and lime, no longer looked new.

“What brings you here, pray?” demanded Miss Wilson.

“I was led into the belief that you sent for me, lady,” he replied. “The baker’s lad told me so as he passed my ‘umble cot this morning. I thought he were incapable of deceit.”

“That is quite right; I did send for you. But why did you not go round to the servants’ hall?”

“I am at present in search of it, lady. I were looking for it when this ball cotch me here” (touching his eye). “A cruel blow on the hi’ nat’rally spires its vision and expression and makes a honest man look like a thief.”

“Agatha,” said Miss Wilson, “come here.”

“My dooty to you, Miss,” said Smilash, pulling his forelock.

“This is the man from whom I had the five shillings, which he said you had just given him. Did you do so?”

“Certainly not. I only gave him threepence.”

“But I showed the money to your ladyship,” said Smilash, twisting his hat agitatedly. “I gev it you. Where would the like of me get five shillings except by the bounty of the rich and noble? If the young lady thinks I hadn’t ort to have kep’ the tother ‘arfcrown, I would not object to its bein’ stopped from my wages if I were given a job of work here. But—”

“But it’s nonsense,” said Agatha. “I never gave you three half-crowns.”

“Perhaps you mout ‘a’ made a mistake. Pence is summat similar to ‘arf-crowns, and the day were very dark.”

“I couldn’t have,” said Agatha. “Jane had my purse all the earlier part of the week, Miss Wilson, and she can tell you that there was only threepence in it. You know that I get my money on the first of every month. It never lasts longer than a week. The idea of my having seven and sixpence on the sixteenth is ridiculous.”

“But I put it to you, Miss, ain’t it twice as ridiculous for me, a poor laborer, to give up money wot I never got?”

Vague alarm crept upon Agatha as the testimony of her senses was contradicted. “All I know is,” she protested, “that I did not give it to you; so my pennies must have turned into half-crowns in your pocket.”

“Mebbe so,” said Smilash gravely. “I’ve heard, and I know it for a fact, that money grows in the pockets of the rich. Why not in the pockets of the poor as well? Why should you be su’prised at wot ‘appens every day?”

“Had you any money of your own about you at the time?”

“Where could the like of me get money? — asking pardon for making so bold as to catechise your ladyship.”

“I don’t know where you could get it,” said Miss Wilson testily; “I ask you, had you any?”

“Well, lady, I disremember. I will not impose upon you. I disremember.”

“Then you’ve made a mistake,” said Miss Wilson, handing him back his money. “Here. If it is not yours, it is not ours; so you had better keep it.”

“Keep it! Oh, lady, but this is the heighth of nobility! And what shall I do to earn your bounty, lady?”

“It is not my bounty: I give it to you because it does not belong to me, and, I suppose, must belong to you. You seem to be a very simple man.”

“I thank your ladyship; I hope I am. Respecting the day’s work, now, lady; was you thinking of employing a poor man at all?”

“No, thank you; I have no occasion for your services. I have also to give you the shilling I promised you for getting the cabs. Here it is.”

“Another shillin’!” cried Smilash, stupefied.

“Yes,” said Miss Wilson, beginning to feel very angry. “Let me hear no more about it, please. Don’t you understand that you have earned it?”

“I am a common man, and understand next to nothing,” he replied reverently. “But if your ladyship would give me a day’s work to keep me goin’, I could put up all this money in a little wooden savings bank I have at home, and keep it to spend when sickness or odd age shall, in a manner of speaking, lay their ‘ends upon me. I could smooth that grass beautiful; them young ladies ‘ll strain themselves with that heavy roller. If tennis is the word, I can put up nets fit to catch birds of paradise in. If the courts is to be chalked out in white, I can draw a line so straight that you could hardly keep yourself from erecting an equilateral triangle on it. I am honest when well watched, and I can wait at table equal to the Lord Mayor o’ London’s butler.”

“I cannot employ you without a character,” said Miss Wilson, amused by his scrap of Euclid, and wondering where he had picked it up.

“I bear the best of characters, lady. The reverend rector has known me from a boy.”

“I was speaking to him about you yesterday,” said Miss Wilson, looking hard at him, “and he says you are a perfect stranger to him.”

“Gentlemen is so forgetful,” said Smilash sadly. “But I alluded to my native rector — meaning the rector of my native village, Auburn. ‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,’ as the gentleman called it.”

“That was not the name you mentioned to Mr. Fairholme. I do not recollect what name you gave, but it was not Auburn, nor have I ever heard of any such place.”

“Never read of sweet Auburn!”

“Not in any geography or gazetteer. Do you recollect telling me that you have been in prison?”

“Only six times,” pleaded Smilash, his features working convulsively. “Don’t bear too hard on a common man. Only six times, and all through drink. But I have took the pledge, and kep’ it faithful for eighteen months past.”

Miss Wilson now set down the man as one of those keen, half-witted country fellows, contemptuously styled originals, who unintentionally make themselves popular by flattering the sense of sanity in those whose faculties are better adapted to circumstances.

“You have a bad memory, Mr. Smilash,” she said good-humoredly. “You never give the same account of yourself twice.”

“I am well aware that I do not express myself with exactability. Ladies and gentlemen have that power over words that they can always say what they mean, but a common man like me can’t. Words don’t come natural to him. He has more thoughts than words, and what words he has don’t fit his thoughts. Might I take a turn with the roller, and make myself useful about the place until nightfall, for ninepence?”

Miss Wilson, who was expecting more than her usual Saturday visitors, considered the proposition and assented. “And remember,” she said, “that as you are a stranger here, your character in Lyvern depends upon the use you make of this opportunity.”

“I am grateful to your noble ladyship. May your ladyship’s goodness sew up the hole which is in the pocket where I carry my character, and which has caused me to lose it so frequent. It’s a bad place for men to keep their characters in; but such is the fashion. And so hurray for the glorious nineteenth century!”

He took off his coat, seized the roller, and began to pull it with an energy foreign to the measured millhorse manner of the accustomed laborer. Miss Wilson looked doubtfully at him, but, being in haste, went indoors without further comment. The girls mistrusting his eccentricity, kept aloof. Agatha determined to have another and better look at him. Racket in hand, she walked slowly across the grass and came close to him just as he, unaware of her approach, uttered a groan of exhaustion and sat down to rest.

“Tired already, Mr. Smilash?” she said mockingly.

He looked up deliberately, took off one of his washleather gloves, fanned himself with it, displaying a white and fine hand, and at last replied, in the tone and with the accent of a gentleman:

“Very.”

Agatha recoiled. He fanned himself without the least concern.

“You — you are not a laborer,” she said at last.

“Obviously not.”

“I thought not.”

He nodded.

“Suppose I tell on you,” she said, growing bolder as she recollected that she was not alone with him.

“If you do I shall get out of it just as I got out of the half-crowns, and Miss Wilson will begin to think that you are mad.”

“Then I really did not give you the seven and sixpence,” she said, relieved.

“What is your own opinion?” he answered, taking three pennies from his pocket, jingling them in his palm. “What is your name?”

“I shall not tell you,” said Agatha with dignity.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “I would not tell you mine if you asked me.”

“I have not the slightest intention of asking you.”

“No? Then Smilash shall do for you, and Agatha will do for me.”

“You had better take care.”

“Of what?”

“Of what you say, and — are you not afraid of being found out?”

“I am found out already — by you, and I am none the worse.”

“Suppose the police find you out!”

“Not they. Besides, I am not hiding from the police. I have a right to wear corduroy if I prefer it to broadcloth. Consider the advantages of it! It has procured me admission to Alton College, and the pleasure of your acquaintance. Will you excuse me if I go on with my rolling, just to keep up appearances? I can talk as I roll.”

“You may, if you are fond of soliloquizing,” she said, turning away as he rose.

“Seriously, Agatha, you must not tell the others about me.”

“Do not call me Agatha,” she said impetuously. “What shall I call you, then?”

“You need not address me at all.”

“I need, and will. Don’t be ill-natured.”

“But I don’t know you. I wonder at your—” she hesitated at the word which occurred to her, but, being unable to think of a better one, used it— “at your cheek.”

He laughed, and she watched him take a couple of turns with the roller. Presently, refreshing himself by a look at her, he caught her looking at him, and smiled. His smile was commonplace in comparison with the one she gave him in return, in which her eyes, her teeth, and the golden grain in her complexion seemed to flash simultaneously. He stopped rolling immediately, and rested his chin on the handle of the roller.

“If you neglect your work,” said she maliciously, “you won’t have the grass ready when the people come.”

“What people?” he said, taken aback.

“Oh, lots of people. Most likely some who know you. There are visitors coming from London: my guardian, my guardianess, their daughter, my mother, and about a hundred more.”

“Four in all. What are they coming for? To see you?”

“To take me away,” she replied, watching for signs of disappointment on his part.

They were at once forthcoming. “What the deuce are they going to take you away for?” he said. “Is your education finished?”

“No. I have behaved badly, and I am going to be expelled.”

He laughed again. “Come!” he said, “you are beginning to invent in the Smilash manner. What have you done?”

“I don’t see why I should tell you. What have you done?”

“I! Oh, I have done nothing. I am only an unromantic gentleman, hiding from a romantic lady who is in love with me.”

“Poor thing,” said Agatha sarcastically. “Of course, she has proposed to you, and you have refused.”

“On the contrary, I proposed, and she accepted. That is why I have to hide.”

“You tell stories charmingly,” said Agatha. “Good-bye. Here is Miss Carpenter coming to hear what we are taking about.”

“Good-bye. That story of your being expelled beats — Might a common man make so bold as to inquire where the whitening machine is, Miss?”

This was addressed to Jane, who had come up with some of the others. Agatha expected to see Smilash presently discovered, for his disguise now seemed transparent; she wondered how the rest could be imposed on by it. Two o’clock, striking just then, reminded her of the impending interview with her guardian. A tremor shook her, and she felt a craving for some solitary hiding-place in which to await the summons. But it was a point of honor with her to appear perfectly indifferent to her trouble, so she stayed with the girls, laughing and chatting as they watched Smilash intently marking out the courts and setting up the nets. She made the others laugh too, for her hidden excitement, sharpened by irrepressible shootings of dread, stimulated her, and the romance of Smilash’s disguise gave her a sensation of dreaming. Her imagination was already busy upon a drama, of which she was the heroine and Smilash the hero, though, with the real man before her, she could not indulge herself by attributing to him quite as much gloomy grandeur of character as to a wholly ideal personage. The plot was simple, and an old favorite with her. One of them was to love the other and to die broken-hearted because the loved one would not requite the passion. For Agatha, prompt to ridicule sentimentality in her companions, and gifted with an infectious spirit of farce, secretly turned for imaginative luxury to visions of despair and death; and often endured the mortification of the successful clown who believes, whilst the public roar with laughter at him, that he was born a tragedian. There was much in her nature, she felt, that did not find expression in her popular representation of the soldier in the chimney.

By three o’clock the local visitors had arrived, and tennis was proceeding in four courts, rolled and prepared by Smilash. The two curates were there, with a few lay gentlemen. Mrs. Miller, the vicar, and some mothers and other chaperons looked on and consumed light refreshments, which were brought out upon trays by Smilash, who had borrowed and put on a large white apron, and was making himself officiously busy.

At a quarter past the hour a message came from Miss Wilson, requesting Miss Wylie’s attendance. The visitors were at a loss to account for the sudden distraction of the young ladies’ attention which ensued. Jane almost burst into tears, and answered Josephs rudely when he innocently asked what the matter was. Agatha went away apparently unconcerned, though her hand shook as she put aside her racket.

In a spacious drawing-room at the north side of the college she found her mother, a slight woman in widow’s weeds, with faded brown hair, and tearful eyes. With her were Mrs. Jansenius and her daughter. The two elder ladies kept severely silent whilst Agatha kissed them, and Mrs. Wylie sniffed. Henrietta embraced Agatha effusively.

“Where’s Uncle John?” said Agatha. “Hasn’t he come?”

“He is in the next room with Miss Wilson,” said Mrs. Jansenius coldly. “They want you in there.”

“I thought somebody was dead,” said Agatha, “you all look so funereal. Now, mamma, put your handkerchief back again. If you cry I will give Miss Wilson a piece of my mind for worrying you.”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Wylie, alarmed. “She has been so nice!”

“So good!” said Henrietta.

“She has been perfectly reasonable and kind,” said Mrs. Jansenius.

“She always is,” said Agatha complacently. “You didn’t expect to find her in hysterics, did you?”

“Agatha,” pleaded Mrs. Wylie, “don’t be headstrong and foolish.”

“Oh, she won’t; I know she won’t,” said Henrietta coaxingly. “Will you, dear Agatha?”

“You may do as you like, as far as I am concerned,” said Mrs. Jansenius. “But I hope you have more sense than to throw away your education for nothing.”

“Your aunt is quite right,” said Mrs. Wylie. “And your Uncle John is very angry with you. He will never speak to you again if you quarrel with Miss Wilson.”

“He is not angry,” said Henrietta, “but he is so anxious that you should get on well.”

“He will naturally be disappointed if you persist in making a fool of yourself,” said Mrs. Jansenius.

“All Miss Wilson wants is an apology for the dreadful things you wrote in her book,” said Mrs. Wylie. “You’ll apologize, dear, won’t you?”

“Of course she will,” said Henrietta.

“I think you had better,” said Mrs. Jansenius.

“Perhaps I will,” said Agatha.

“That’s my own darling,” said Mrs. Wylie, catching her hand.

“And perhaps, again, I won’t.”

“You will, dear,” urged Mrs. Wylie, trying to draw Agatha, who passively resisted, closer to her. “For my sake. To oblige your mother, Agatha. You won’t refuse me, dearest?”

Agatha laughed indulgently at her parent, who had long ago worn out this form of appeal. Then she turned to Henrietta, and said, “How is your caro sposo? I think it was hard that I was not a bridesmaid.”

The red in Henrietta’s cheeks brightened. Mrs. Jansenius hastened to interpose a dry reminder that Miss Wilson was waiting.

“Oh, she does not mind waiting,” said Agatha, “because she thinks you are all at work getting me into a proper frame of mind. That was the arrangement she made with you before she left the room. Mamma knows that I have a little bird that tells me these things. I must say that you have not made me feel any goody-goodier so far. However, as poor Uncle John must be dreadfully frightened and uncomfortable, it is only kind to put an end to his suspense. Good-bye!” And she went out leisurely. But she looked in again to say in a low voice: “Prepare for something thrilling. I feel just in the humor to say the most awful things.” She vanished, and immediately they heard her tapping at the door of the next room.

Mr. Jansenius was indeed awaiting her with misgiving. Having discovered early in his career that his dignified person and fine voice caused people to stand in some awe of him, and to move him into the chair at public meetings, he had grown so accustomed to deference that any approach to familiarity or irreverence disconcerted him exceedingly. Agatha, on the other hand, having from her childhood heard Uncle John quoted as wisdom and authority incarnate, had begun in her tender years to scoff at him as a pompous and purseproud city merchant, whose sordid mind was unable to cope with her transcendental affairs. She had habitually terrified her mother by ridiculing him with an absolute contempt of which only childhood and extreme ignorance are capable. She had felt humiliated by his kindness to her (he was a generous giver of presents), and, with the instinct of an anarchist, had taken disparagement of his advice and defiance of his authority as the signs wherefrom she might infer surely that her face was turned to the light. The result was that he was a little tired of her without being quite conscious of it; and she not at all afraid of him, and a little too conscious of it.

When she entered with her brightest smile in full play, Miss Wilson and Mr. Jansenius, seated at the table, looked somewhat like two culprits about to be indicted. Miss Wilson waited for him to speak, deferring to his imposing presence. But he was not ready, so she invited Agatha to sit down.

“Thank you,” said Agatha sweetly. “Well, Uncle John, don’t you know me?”

“I have heard with regret from Miss Wilson that you have been very troublesome here,” he said, ignoring her remark, though secretly put out by it.

“Yes,” said Agatha contritely. “I am so very sorry.”

Mr. Jansenius, who had been led by Miss Wilson to expect the utmost contumacy, looked to her in surprise.

“You seem to think,” said Miss Wilson, conscious of Mr. Jansenius’s movement, and annoyed by it, “that you may transgress over and over again, and then set yourself right with us,” (Miss Wilson never spoke of offences as against her individual authority, but as against the school community) “by saying that you are sorry. You spoke in a very different tone at our last meeting.”

“I was angry then, Miss Wilson. And I thought I had a grievance — everybody thinks they have the same one. Besides, we were quarrelling — at least I was; and I always behave badly when I quarrel. I am so very sorry.”

“The book was a serious matter,” said Miss Wilson gravely. “You do not seem to think so.”

“I understand Agatha to say that she is now sensible of the folly of her conduct with regard to the book, and that she is sorry for it,” said Mr. Jansenius, instinctively inclining to Agatha’s party as the stronger one and the least dependent on him in a pecuniary sense.

“Have you seen the book?” said Agatha eagerly.

“No. Miss Wilson has described what has occurred.”

“Oh, do let me get it,” she cried, rising. “It will make Uncle John scream with laughing. May I, Miss Wilson?”

“There!” said Miss Wilson, indignantly. “It is this incorrigible flippancy of which I have to complain. Miss Wylie only varies it by downright insubordination.”

Mr. Jansenius too was scandalized. His fine color mounted at the idea of his screaming. “Tut, tut!” he said, “you must be serious, and more respectful to Miss Wilson. You are old enough to know better now, Agatha — quite old enough.”

Agatha’s mirth vanished. “What have I said What have I done?” she asked, a faint purple spot appearing in her cheeks.

“You have spoken triflingly of — of the volume by which Miss Wilson sets great store, and properly so.”

“If properly so, then why do you find fault with me?”

“Come, come,” roared Mr. Jansenius, deliberately losing his temper as a last expedient to subdue her, “don’t be impertinent, Miss.”

Agatha’s eyes dilated; evanescent flushes played upon her cheeks and neck; she stamped with her heel. “Uncle John,” she cried, “if you dare to address me like that, I will never look at you, never speak to you, nor ever enter your house again. What do you know about good manners, that you should call me impertinent? I will not submit to intentional rudeness; that was the beginning of my quarrel with Miss Wilson. She told me I was impertinent, and I went away and told her that she was wrong by writing it in the fault book. She has been wrong all through, and I would have said so before but that I wanted to be reconciled to her and to let bygones be bygones. But if she insists on quarrelling, I cannot help it.”

“I have already explained to you, Mr. Jansenius,” said Miss Wilson, concentrating her resentment by an effort to suppress it, “that Miss Wylie has ignored all the opportunities that have been made for her to reinstate herself here. Mrs. Miller and I have waived merely personal considerations, and I have only required a simple acknowledgment of this offence against the college and its rules.”

“I do not care that for Mrs. Miller,” said Agatha, snapping her fingers. “And you are not half so good as I thought.”

“Agatha,” said Mr. Jansenius, “I desire you to hold your tongue.”

Agatha drew a deep breath, sat down resignedly, and said: “There! I have done. I have lost my temper; so now we have all lost our tempers.”

“You have no right to lose your temper, Miss,” said Mr. Jansenius, following up a fancied advantage.

“I am the youngest, and the least to blame,” she replied. “There is nothing further to be said, Mr. Jansenius,” said Miss Wilson, determinedly. “I am sorry that Miss Wylie has chosen to break with us.”

“But I have not chosen to break with you, and I think it very hard that I am to be sent away. Nobody here has the least quarrel with me except you and Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller is annoyed because she mistook me for her cat, as if that was my fault! And really, Miss Wilson, I don’t know why you are so angry. All the girls will think I have done something infamous if I am expelled. I ought to be let stay until the end of the term; and as to the Rec — the fault book, you told me most particularly when I first came that I might write in it or not just as I pleased, and that you never dictated or interfered with what was written. And yet the very first time I write a word you disapprove of, you expel me. Nobody will ever believe now that the entries are voluntary.”

Miss Wilson’s conscience, already smitten by the coarseness and absence of moral force in the echo of her own “You are impertinent,” from the mouth of Mr. Jansenius, took fresh alarm. “The fault book,” she said, “is for the purpose of recording self-reproach alone, and is not a vehicle for accusations against others.”

“I am quite sure that neither Jane nor Gertrude nor I reproached ourselves in the least for going downstairs as we did, and yet you did not blame us for entering that. Besides, the book represented moral force — at least you always said so, and when you gave up moral force, I thought an entry should be made of that. Of course I was in a rage at the time, but when I came to myself I thought I had done right, and I think so still, though it would perhaps have been better to have passed it over.”

“Why do you say that I gave up moral force?”

“Telling people to leave the room is not moral force. Calling them impertinent is not moral force.”

“You think then that I am bound to listen patiently to whatever you choose to say to me, however unbecoming it may be from one in your position to one in mine?”

“But I said nothing unbecoming,” said Agatha. Then, breaking off restlessly, and smiling again, she said: “Oh, don’t let us argue. I am very sorry, and very troublesome, and very fond of you and of the college; and I won’t come back next term unless you like.”

“Agatha,” said Miss Wilson, shaken, “these expressions of regard cost you so little, and when they have effected their purpose, are so soon forgotten by you, that they have ceased to satisfy me. I am very reluctant to insist on your leaving us at once. But as your uncle has told you, you are old and sensible enough to know the difference between order and disorder. Hitherto you have been on the side of disorder, an element which was hardly known here until you came, as Mrs. Trefusis can tell you. Nevertheless, if you will promise to be more careful in future, I will waive all past cause of complaint, and at the end of the term I shall be able to judge as to your continuing among us.”

Agatha rose, beaming. “Dear Miss Wilson,” she said, “you are so good! I promise, of course. I will go and tell mamma.”

Before they could add a word she had turned with a pirouette to the door, and fled, presenting herself a moment later in the drawing-room to the three ladies, whom she surveyed with a whimsical smile in silence.

“Well?” said Mrs. Jansenius peremptorily.

“Well, dear?” said Mrs. Trefusis, caressingly.

Mrs. Wylie stifled a sob and looked imploringly at her daughter.

“I had no end of trouble in bringing them to reason,” said Agatha, after a provoking pause. “They behaved like children, and I was like an angel. I am to stay, of course.”

“Blessings on you, my darling,” faltered Mrs. Wylie, attempting a kiss, which Agatha dexterously evaded.

“I have promised to be very good, and studious, and quiet, and decorous in future. Do you remember my castanet song, Hetty?

“‘Tra! lalala, la! la! la! Tra! lalala, la! la! la! Tra! lalalalalalalalalalala!’”

And she danced about the room, snapping her fingers instead of castanets.

“Don’t be so reckless and wicked, my love,” said Mrs. Wylie. “You will break your poor mother’s heart.”

Miss Wilson and Mr. Jansenius entered just then, and Agatha became motionless and gazed abstractedly at a vase of flowers. Miss Wilson invited her visitors to join the tennis players. Mr. Jansenius looked sternly and disappointedly at Agatha, who elevated her left eyebrow and depressed her right simultaneously; but he, shaking his head to signify that he was not to be conciliated by facial feats, however difficult or contrary to nature, went out with Miss Wilson, followed by Mrs. Jansenius and Mrs. Wylie.

“How is your Hubby?” said Agatha then, brusquely, to Henrietta.

Mrs. Trefusis’s eyes filled with tears so quickly that, as she bent her head to hide them, they fell, sprinkling Agatha’s hand.

“This is such a dear old place,” she began. “The associations of my girlhood—”

“What is the matter between you and Hubby?” demanded Agatha, interrupting her. “You had better tell me, or I will ask him when I meet him.”

“I was about to tell you, only you did not give me time.”

“That is a most awful cram,” said Agatha. “But no matter. Go on.”

Henrietta hesitated. Her dignity as a married woman, and the reality of her grief, revolted against the shallow acuteness of the schoolgirl. But she found herself no better able to resist Agatha’s domineering than she had been in her childhood, and much more desirous of obtaining her sympathy. Besides, she had already learnt to tell the story herself rather than leave its narration to others, whose accounts did not, she felt, put her case in the proper light. So she told Agatha of her marriage, her wild love for her husband, his wild love for her, and his mysterious disappearance without leaving word or sign behind him. She did not mention the letter.

“Have you had him searched for?” said Agatha, repressing an inclination to laugh.

“But where? Had I the remotest clue, I would follow him barefoot to the end of the world.”

“I think you ought to search all the rivers — you would have to do that barefoot. He must have fallen in somewhere, or fallen down some place.”

“No, no. Do you think I should be here if I thought his life in danger? I have reasons — I know that he is only gone away.”

“Oh, indeed! He took his portmanteau with him, did he? Perhaps he has gone to Paris to buy you something nice and give you a pleasant surprise.”

“No,” said Henrietta dejectedly. “He knew that I wanted nothing.”

“Then I suppose he got tired of you and ran away.”

Henrietta’s peculiar scarlet blush flowed rapidly over her cheeks as she flung Agatha’s arm away, exclaiming, “How dare you say so! You have no heart. He adored me.”

“Bosh!” said Agatha. “People always grow tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.”

“I know you are,” said Henrietta, pained and spiteful. “You have always been particularly fond of yourself.”

“Very likely he resembles me in that respect. In that case he will grow tired of himself and come back, and you will both coo like turtle doves until he runs away again. Ugh! Serve you right for getting married. I wonder how people can be so mad as to do it, with the example of their married acquaintances all warning them against it.”

“You don’t know what it is to love,” said Henrietta, plaintively, and yet patronizingly. “Besides, we were not like other couples.”

“So it seems. But never mind, take my word for it, he will return to you as soon as he has had enough of his own company. Don’t worry thinking about him, but come and have a game at lawn tennis.”

During this conversation they had left the drawing-room and made a detour through the grounds. They were now approaching the tennis courts by a path which wound between two laurel hedges through the shrubbery. Meanwhile, Smilash, waiting on the guests in his white apron and gloves (which he had positively refused to take off, alleging that he was a common man, with common hands such as born ladies and gentlemen could not be expected to take meat and drink from), had behaved himself irreproachably until the arrival of Miss Wilson and her visitors, which occurred as he was returning to the table with an empty tray, moving so swiftly that he nearly came into collision with Mrs. Jansenius. Instead of apologizing, he changed countenance, hastily held up the tray like a shield before his face, and began to walk backward from her, stumbling presently against Miss Lindsay, who was running to return a ball. Without heeding her angry look and curt rebuke, he half turned, and sidled away into the shrubbery, whence the tray presently rose into the air, flew across the laurel hedge, and descended with a peal of stage thunder on the stooped shoulders of Josephs. Miss Wilson, after asking the housekeeper with some asperity why she had allowed that man to interfere in the attendance, explained to the guests that he was the idiot of the countryside. Mr. Jansenius laughed, and said that he had not seen the man’s face, but that his figure reminded him forcibly of some one; he could not just then recollect exactly whom.

Smilash, making off through the shrubbery, found the end of his path blocked by Agatha and a young lady whose appearance alarmed him more than had that of Mrs. Jansenius. He attempted to force his tray through the hedge, but in vain; the laurel was impenetrable, and the noise he made attracted the attention of the approaching couple. He made no further effort to escape, but threw his borrowed apron over his head and stood bolt upright with his back against the bushes.

“What is that man doing there?” said Henrietta, stopping mistrustfully.

Agatha laughed, and said loudly, so that he might hear: “It is only a harmless madman that Miss Wilson employs. He is fond of disguising himself in some silly way and trying to frighten us. Don’t be afraid. Come on.”

Henrietta hung back, but her arm was linked in Agatha’s, and she was drawn along in spite of herself. Smilash did not move. Agatha strolled on coolly, and as she passed him, adroitly caught the apron between her finger and thumb and twitched it from his face. Instantly Henrietta uttered a piercing scream, and Smilash caught her in his arms.

“Quick,” he said to Agatha, “she is fainting. Run for some water. Run!” And he bent over Henrietta, who clung to him frantically. Agatha, bewildered by the effect of her practical joke, hesitated a moment, and then ran to the lawn.

“What is the matter?” said Fairholme.

“Nothing. I want some water — quick, please. Henrietta has fainted in the shrubbery, that is all.”

“Please do not stir,” said Miss Wilson authoritatively, “you will crowd the path and delay useful assistance. Miss Ward, kindly get some water and bring it to us. Agatha, come with me and point out where Mrs. Trefusis is. You may come too, Miss Carpenter; you are so strong. The rest will please remain where they are.”

Followed by the two girls, she hurried into the shrubbery, where Mr. Jansenius was already looking anxiously for his daughter. He was the only person they found there. Smilash and Henrietta were gone.

At first the seekers, merely puzzled, did nothing but question Agatha incredulously as to the exact spot on which Henrietta had fallen. But Mr. Jansenius soon made them understand that the position of a lady in the hands of a half-witted laborer was one of danger. His agitation infected them, and when Agatha endeavored to reassure him by declaring that Smilash was a disguised gentleman, Miss Wilson, supposing this to be a mere repetition of her former idle conjecture, told her sharply to hold her tongue, as the time was not one for talking nonsense. The news now spread through the whole company, and the excitement became intense. Fairholme shouted for volunteers to make up a searching party. All the men present responded, and they were about to rush to the college gates in a body when it Occurred to the cooler among them that they had better divide into several parties, in order that search might be made at once in different quarters. Ten minutes of confusion followed. Mr. Jansenius started several times in quest of Henrietta, and, when he had gone a few steps, returned and begged that no more time should be wasted. Josephs, whose faith was simple, retired to pray, and did good, as far as it went, by withdrawing one voice from the din of plans, objections, and suggestions which the rest were making; each person trying to be heard above the others.

At last Miss Wilson quelled the prevailing anarchy. Servants were sent to alarm the neighbors and call in the village police. Detachments were sent in various directions under the command of Fairholme and other energetic spirits. The girls formed parties among themselves, which were reinforced by male deserters from the previous levies. Miss Wilson then went indoors and conducted a search through the interior of the college. Only two persons were left on the tennis ground — Agatha and Mrs. Jansenius, who had been surprisingly calm throughout.

“You need not be anxious,” said Agatha, who had been standing aloof since her rebuff by Miss Wilson. “I am sure there is no danger. It is most extraordinary that they have gone away; but the man is no more mad than I am, and I know he is a gentleman He told me so.”

“Let us hope for the best,” said Mrs. Jansenius, smoothly. “I think I will sit down — I feel so tired. Thanks.” (Agatha had handed her a chair.) “What did you say he told you — this man?”

Agatha related the circumstances of her acquaintance with Smilash, adding, at Mrs. Jansenius’s request, a minute description of his personal appearance. Mrs. Jansenius remarked that it was very singular, and that she was sure Henrietta was quite safe. She then partook of claret-cup and sandwiches. Agatha, though glad to find someone disposed to listen to her, was puzzled by her aunt’s coolness, and was even goaded into pointing out that though Smilash was not a laborer, it did not follow that he was an honest man. But Mrs. Jansenius only said: “Oh, she is safe — quite safe! At least, of course, I can only hope so. We shall have news presently,” and took another sandwich.

The searchers soon began to return, baffled. A few shepherds, the only persons in the vicinity, had been asked whether they had seen a young lady and a laborer. Some of them had seen a young woman with a basket of clothes, if that mout be her. Some thought that Phil Martin the carrier would see her if anybody would. None of them had any positive information to give.

As the afternoon wore on, and party after party returned tired and unsuccessful, depression replaced excitement; conversation, no longer tumultuous, was carried on in whispers, and some of the local visitors slipped away to their homes with a growing conviction that something unpleasant had happened, and that it would be as well not to be mixed up in it. Mr. Jansenius, though a few words from his wife had surprised and somewhat calmed him, was still pitiably restless and uneasy.

At last the police arrived. At sight of their uniforms excitement revived; there was a general conviction that something effectual would be done now. But the constables were only mortal, and in a few moments a whisper spread that they were fooled. They doubted everything told them, and expressed their contempt for amateur searching by entering on a fresh investigation, prying with the greatest care into the least probable places. Two of them went off to the chalet to look for Smilash. Then Fairholme, sunburnt, perspiring, and dusty, but still energetic, brought back the exhausted remnant of his party, with a sullen boy, who scowled defiantly at the police, evidently believing that he was about to be delivered into their custody.

Fairholme had been everywhere, and, having seen nothing of the missing pair, had come to the conclusion that they were nowhere. He had asked everybody for information, and had let them know that he meant to have it too, if it was to be had. But it was not to be had. The sole resort of his labor was the evidence of the boy whom he didn’t believe.

“‘Im!” said the inspector, not quite pleased by Fairholme’s zeal, and yet overborne by it. “You’re Wickens’s boy, ain’t you?”

“Yes, I am Wickens’s boy,” said the witness, partly fierce, partly lachrymose, “and I say I seen him, and if anyone sez I didn’t see him, he’s a lie.”

“Come,” said the inspector sharply, “give us none of your cheek, but tell us what you saw, or you’ll have to deal with me afterwards.”

“I don’t care who I deal with,” said the boy, at bay. “I can’t be took for seein’ him, because there’s no lor agin it. I was in the gravel pit in the canal meadow—”

“What business had you there?” said the inspector, interrupting.

“I got leave to be there,” said the boy insolently, but reddening.

“Who gave you leave?” said the inspector, collaring him. “Ah,” he added, as the captive burst into tears, “I told you you’d have to deal with me. Now hold your noise, and remember where you are and who you’re speakin’ to; and perhaps I mayn’t lock you up this time. Tell me what you saw when you were trespassin’ in the meadow.”

“I sor a young ‘omen and a man. And I see her kissin’ him; and the gentleman won’t believe me.”

“You mean you saw him kissing her, more likely.”

“No, I don’t. I know wot it is to have a girl kiss you when you don’t want. And I gev a screech to friken ‘em. And he called me and gev me tuppence, and sez, ‘You go to the devil,’ he sez, ‘and don’t tell no one you seen me here, or else,’ he sez, ‘I might be tempted to drownd you,’ he sez, ‘and wot a shock that would be to your parents!’ ‘Oh, yes, very likely,’ I sez, jes’ like that. Then I went away, because he knows Mr. Wickens, and I was afeerd of his telling on me.”

The boy being now subdued, questions were put to him from all sides. But his powers of observation and description went no further. As he was anxious to propitiate his captors, he answered as often as possible in the affirmative. Mr. Jansenius asked him whether the young woman he had seen was a lady, and he said yes. Was the man a laborer? Yes — after a moment’s hesitation. How was she dressed? He hadn’t taken notice. Had she red flowers in her hat? Yes. Had she a green dress? Yes. Were the flowers in her hat yellow? (Agatha’s question.) Yes. Was her dress pink? Yes. Sure it wasn’t black? No answer.

“I told you he was a liar,” said Fairholme contemptuously.

“Well, I expect he’s seen something,” said the inspector, “but what it was, or who it was, is more than I can get out of him.”

There was a pause, and they looked askance upon Wickens’s boy. His account of the kissing made it almost an insult to the Janseniuses to identify with Henrietta the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant “sh-sh-sh,” accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was brought into the midst of the company it appeared that he had twisted a red handkerchief about his face as if to soothe a toothache. He had a particularly hangdog expression as he stood before the inspector with his head bowed and his countenance averted from Mr. Jansenius, who, attempting to scrutinize his features, could see nothing but a patch of red handkerchief.

One of the policemen described how they had found Smilash in the act of entering his dwelling; how he had refused to give any information or to go to the college, and had defied them to take him there against his will; and how, on their at last proposing to send for the inspector and Mr. Jansenius, he had called them asses, and consented to accompany them. The policeman concluded by declaring that the man was either drunk or designing, as he could not or would not speak sensibly.

“Look here, governor,” began Smilash to the inspector, “I am a common man — no commoner goin’, as you may see for—”

“That’s ‘im,” cried Wickens’s boy, suddenly struck with a sense of his own importance as a witness. “That’s ‘im that the lady kissed, and that gev me tuppence and threatened to drownd me.”

“And with a ‘umble and contrite ‘art do I regret that I did not drownd you, you young rascal,” said Smilash. “It ain’t manners to interrupt a man who, though common, might be your father for years and wisdom.”

“Hold your tongue,” said the inspector to the boy. “Now, Smilash, do you wish to make any statement? Be careful, for whatever you say may be used against you hereafter.”

“If you was to lead me straight away to the scaffold, colonel, I could tell you no more than the truth. If any man can say that he has heard Jeff Smilash tell a lie, let him stand forth.”

“We don’t want to hear about that,” said the inspector. “As you are a stranger in these parts, nobody here knows any bad of you. No more do they know any good of you neither.”

“Colonel,” said Smilash, deeply impressed, “you have a penetrating mind, and you know a bad character at sight. Not to deceive you, I am that given to lying, and laziness, and self-indulgence of all sorts, that the only excuse I can find for myself is that it is the nature of the race so to be; for most men is just as bad as me, and some of ’em worsen I do not speak pers’nal to you, governor, nor to the honorable gentlemen here assembled. But then you, colonel, are a hinspector of police, which I take to be more than merely human; and as to the gentlemen here, a gentleman ain’t a man — leastways not a common man — the common man bein’ but the slave wot feeds and clothes the gentleman beyond the common.”

“Come,” said the inspector, unable to follow these observations, “you are a clever dodger, but you can’t dodge me. Have you any statement to make with reference to the lady that was last seen in your company?”

“Take a statement about a lady!” said Smilash indignantly. “Far be the thought from my mind!”

“What have you done with her?” said Agatha, impetuously. “Don’t be silly.”

“You’re not bound to answer that, you know,” said the inspector, a little put out by Agatha’s taking advantage of her irresponsible unofficial position to come so directly to the point. “You may if you like, though. If you’ve done any harm, you’d better hold your tongue. If not, you’d better say so.”

“I will set the young lady’s mind at rest respecting her honorable sister,” said Smilash. “When the young lady caught sight of me she fainted. Bein’ but a young man, and not used to ladies, I will not deny but that I were a bit scared, and that my mind were not open to the sensiblest considerations. When she unveils her orbs, so to speak, she ketches me round the neck, not knowin’ me from Adam the father of us all, and sez, ‘Bring me some water, and don’t let the girls see me.’ Through not ‘avin’ the intelligence to think for myself, I done just what she told me. I ups with her in my arms — she bein’ a light weight and a slender figure — and makes for the canal as fast as I could. When I got there, I lays her on the bank and goes for the water. But what with factories, and pollutions, and high civilizations of one sort and another, English canal water ain’t fit to sprinkle on a lady, much less for her to drink. Just then, as luck would have it, a barge came along and took her aboard, and—”

“To such a thing,” said Wickens’s boy stubbornly, emboldened by witnessing the effrontery of one apparently of his own class. “I sor you two standin’ together, and her a kissin’ of you. There worn’s no barge.”

“Is the maiden modesty of a born lady to be disbelieved on the word of a common boy that only walks the earth by the sufferance of the landlords and moneylords he helps to feed?” cried Smilash indignantly. “Why, you young infidel, a lady ain’t made of common brick like you. She don’t know what a kiss means, and if she did, is it likely that she’d kiss me when a fine man like the inspector here would be only too happy to oblige her. Fie, for shame! The barge were red and yellow, with a green dragon for a figurehead, and a white horse towin’ of it. Perhaps you’re color-blind, and can’t distinguish red and yellow. The bargee was moved to compassion by the sight of the poor faintin’ lady, and the offer of ‘arf-a-crown, and he had a mother that acted as a mother should. There was a cabin in that barge about as big as the locker where your ladyship keeps your jam and pickles, and in that locker the bargee lives, quite domestic, with his wife and mother and five children. Them canal boats is what you may call the wooden walls of England.”

“Come, get on with your story,” said the inspector. “We know what barges is as well as you.”

“I wish more knew of ‘em,” retorted Smilash; “perhaps it ‘ud lighten your work a bit. However, as I was sayin’, we went right down the canal to Lyvern, where we got off, and the lady she took the railway omnibus and went away in it. With the noble openhandedness of her class, she gave me sixpence; here it is, in proof that my words is true. And I wish her safe home, and if I was on the rack I could tell no more, except that when I got back I were laid hands on by these here bobbies, contrary to the British constitooshun, and if your ladyship will kindly go to where that constitooshun is wrote down, and find out wot it sez about my rights and liberties — for I have been told that the working-man has his liberties, and have myself seen plenty took with him — you will oblige a common chap more than his education will enable him to express.”

“Sir,” cried Mr. Jansenius suddenly, “will you hold up your head and look me in the face?”

Smilash did so, and immediately started theatrically, exclaiming, “Whom do I see?”

“You would hardly believe it,” he continued, addressing the company at large, “but I am well beknown to this honorable gentleman. I see it upon your lips, governor, to ask after my missus, and I thank you for your condescending interest. She is well, sir, and my residence here is fully agreed upon between us. What little cloud may have rose upon our domestic horizon has past away; and, governor,” — here Smilash’s voice fell with graver emphasis— “them as interferes betwixt man and wife now will incur a heavy responsibility. Here I am, such as you see me, and here I mean to stay, likewise such as you see me. That is, if what you may call destiny permits. For destiny is a rum thing, governor. I came here thinking it was the last place in the world I should ever set eyes on you in, and blow me if you ain’t a’most the first person I pops on.”

“I do not choose to be a party to this mummery of—”

“Asking your leave to take the word out of your mouth, governor, I make you a party to nothink. Respecting my past conduct, you may out with it or you may keep it to yourself. All I say is that if you out with some of it I will out with the rest. All or none. You are free to tell the inspector here that I am a bad ‘un. His penetrating mind have discovered that already. But if you go into names and particulars, you will not only be acting against the wishes of my missus, but you will lead to my tellin’ the whole story right out afore everyone here, and then goin’ away where no one won’t never find me.”

“I think the less said the better,” said Mrs. Jansenius, uneasily observant of the curiosity and surprise this dialogue was causing. “But understand this, Mr.—”

“Smilash, dear lady; Jeff Smilash.”

“Mr. Smilash, whatever arrangement you may have made with your wife, it has nothing to do with me. You have behaved infamously, and I desire to have as little as possible to say to you in future! I desire to have nothing to say to you — nothing,” said Mr. Jansenius. “I look on your conduct as an insult to me, personally. You may live in any fashion you please, and where you please. All England is open to you except one place — my house. Come, Ruth.” He offered his arm to his wife; she took it, and they turned away, looking about for Agatha, who, disgusted at the gaping curiosity of the rest, had pointedly withdrawn beyond earshot of the conversation.

Miss Wilson looked from Smilash — who had watched Mr. Jansenius’s explosion of wrath with friendly interest, as if it concerned him as a curious spectator only — to her two visitors as they retreated. “Pray, do you consider this man’s statement satisfactory?” she said to them. “I do not.”

“I am far too common a man to be able to make any statement that could satisfy a mind cultivated as yours has been,” said Smilash, “but I would ‘umbly pint out to you that there is a boy yonder with a telegram trying to shove hisself through the ‘iborn throng.”

“Miss Wilson!” cried the boy shrilly.

She took the telegram; read it; and frowned. “We have had all our trouble for nothing, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, with suppressed vexation. “Mrs. Trefusis says here that she has gone back to London. She has not considered it necessary to add any explanation.”

There was a general murmur of disappointment.

“Don’t lose heart, ladies,” said Smilash. “She may be drowned or murdered for all we know. Anyone may send a telegram in a false name. Perhaps it’s a plant. Let’s hope for your sakes that some little accident — on the railway, for instance — may happen yet.”

Miss Wilson turned upon him, glad to find someone with whom she might justly be angry. “You had better go about your business,” she said. “And don’t let me see you here again.”

“This is ‘ard,” said Smilash plaintively. “My intentions was nothing but good. But I know wot it is. It’s that young varmint a-saying that the young lady kissed me.”

“Inspector,” said Miss Wilson, “will you oblige me by seeing that he leaves the college as soon as possible?”

“Where’s my wages?” he retorted reproachfully. “Where’s my lawful wages? I am su’prised at a lady like you, chock full o’ moral science and political economy, wanting to put a poor man off. Where’s your wages fund? Where’s your remuneratory capital?”

“Don’t you give him anything, ma’am,” said the inspector. “The money he’s had from the lady will pay him very well. Move on here, or we’ll precious soon hurry you.”

“Very well,” grumbled Smilash. “I bargained for ninepence, and what with the roller, and opening the soda water, and shoving them heavy tables about, there was a decomposition of tissue in me to the tune of two shillings. But all I ask is the ninepence, and let the lady keep the one and threppence as the reward of abstinence. Exploitation of labor at the rate of a hundred and twenty-five per cent., that is. Come, give us ninepence, and I’ll go straight off.”

“Here is a shilling,” said Miss Wilson. “Now go.”

“Threppence change!” cried Smilash. “Honesty has ever been—”

“You may keep the change.”

“You have a noble ‘art, lady; but you’re flying in the face of the law of supply and demand. If you keep payin’ at this rate, there’ll be a rush of laborers to the college, and competition’ll soon bring you down from a shilling to sixpence, let alone ninepence. That’s the way wages go down and death rates goes up, worse luck for the likes of hus, as has to sell ourselves like pigs in the market.”

He was about to continue when the policeman took him by the arm, turned him towards the gate, and pointed expressively in that direction. Smilash looked vacantly at him for a moment. Then, with a wink at Fairholme, he walked gravely away, amid general staring and silence.

CHAPTER V

What had passed between Smilash and Henrietta remained unknown except to themselves. Agatha had seen Henrietta clasping his neck in her arms, but had not waited to hear the exclamation of “Sidney, Sidney,” which followed, nor to see him press her face to his breast in his anxiety to stifle her voice as he said, “My darling love, don’t screech I implore you. Confound it, we shall have the whole pack here in a moment. Hush!”

“Don’t leave me again, Sidney,” she entreated, clinging faster to him as his perplexed gaze, wandering towards the entrance to the shrubbery, seemed to forsake her. A din of voices in that direction precipitated his irresolution.

“We must run away, Hetty,” he said “Hold fast about my neck, and don’t strangle me. Now then.” He lifted her upon his shoulder and ran swiftly through the grounds. When they were stopped by the wall, he placed her atop of it, scrabbled over, and made her jump into his arms. Then he staggered away with her across the fields, gasping out in reply to the inarticulate remonstrances which burst from her as he stumbled and reeled at every hillock, “Your weight is increasing at the rate of a stone a second, my love. If you stoop you will break my back. Oh, Lord, here’s a ditch!”

“Let me down,” screamed Henrietta in an ecstasy of delight and apprehension. “You will hurt yourself, and — Oh, DO take—”

He struggled through a dry ditch as she spoke, and came out upon a grassy place that bordered the towpath of the canal. Here, on the bank of a hollow where the moss was dry and soft, he seated her, threw himself prone on his elbows before her, and said, panting:

“Nessus carrying off Dejanira was nothing to this! Whew! Well, my darling, are you glad to see me?”

“But—”

“But me no buts, unless you wish me to vanish again and for ever. Wretch that I am, I have longed for you unspeakably more than once since I ran away from you. You didn’t care, of course?”

“I did. I did, indeed. Why did you leave me, Sidney?”

“Lest a worse thing might befall. Come, don’t let us waste in explanations the few minutes we have left. Give me a kiss.”

“Then you are going to leave me again. Oh, Sidney—”

“Never mind to-morrow, Hetty. Be like the sun and the meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter. Why do you stare at that cursed canal, blindly dragging its load of filth from place to place until it pitches it into the sea — just as a crowded street pitches its load into the cemetery? Stare at ME, and give me a kiss.”

She gave him several, and said coaxingly, with her arm still upon his shoulder: “You only talk that way to frighten me, Sidney; I know you do.”

“You are the bright sun of my senses,” he said, embracing her. “I feel my heart and brain wither in your smile, and I fling them to you for your prey with exultation. How happy I am to have a wife who does not despise me for doing so — who rather loves me the more!”

“Don’t be silly,” said Henrietta, smiling vacantly. Then, stung by a half intuition of his meaning, she repulsed him and said angrily, “YOU despise ME.”

“Not more than I despise myself. Indeed, not so much; for many emotions that seem base from within seem lovable from without.”

“You intend to leave me again. I feel it. I know it.”

“You think you know it because you feel it. Not a bad reason, either.”

“Then you ARE going to leave me?”

“Do you not feel it and know it? Yes, my cherished Hetty, I assuredly am.”

She broke into wild exclamations of grief, and he drew her head down and kissed her with a tender action which she could not resist, and a wry face which she did not see.

“My poor Hetty, you don’t understand me.”

“I only understand that you hate me, and want to go away from me.”

“That would be easy to understand. But the strangeness is that I LOVE you and want to go away from you. Not for ever. Only for a time.”

“But I don’t want you to go away. I won’t let you go away,” she said, a trace of fierceness mingling with her entreaty. “Why do you want to leave me if you love me?”

“How do I know? I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator in perpetual motion to do. I am too much a pessimist to respect my own affections. Do you know what a pessimist is?”

“A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

“So, or thereabout. Modern English polite society, my native sphere, seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob, that, having lost the fear of hell, and not replaced it by the love of justice, cares for nothing but the lion’s share of the wealth wrung by threat of starvation from the hands of the classes that create it. If you interrupt me with a silly speech, Hetty, I will pitch you into the canal, and die of sorrow for my lost love afterwards. You know what I am, according to the conventional description: a gentleman with lots of money. Do you know the wicked origin of that money and gentility?”

“Oh, Sidney; have you been doing anything?”

“No, my best beloved; I am a gentleman, and have been doing nothing. That a man can do so and not starve is nowadays not even a paradox. Every halfpenny I possess is stolen money; but it has been stolen legally, and, what is of some practical importance to you, I have no means of restoring it to the rightful owners even if I felt inclined to. Do you know what my father was?”

“What difference can that make now? Don’t be disagreeable and full of ridiculous fads, Sidney dear. I didn’t marry your father.”

“No; but you married — only incidentally, of course — my father’s fortune. That necklace of yours was purchased with his money; and I can almost fancy stains of blood.”

“Stop, Sidney. I don’t like this sort of romancing. It’s all nonsense. DO be nice to me.”

“There are stains of sweat on it, I know.”

“You nasty wretch!”

“I am thinking, not of you, my dainty one, but of the unfortunate people who slave that we may live idly. Let me explain to you why we are so rich. My father was a shrewd, energetic, and ambitious Manchester man, who understood an exchange of any sort as a transaction by which one man should lose and the other gain. He made it his object to make as many exchanges as possible, and to be always the gaining party in them. I do not know exactly what he was, for he was ashamed both of his antecedents and of his relatives, from which I can only infer that they were honest, and, therefore, unsuccessful people. However, he acquired some knowledge of the cotton trade, saved some money, borrowed some more on the security of his reputation for getting the better of other people in business, and, as he accurately told me afterwards, started FOR HIMSELF. He bought a factory and some raw cotton. Now you must know that a man, by laboring some time on a piece of raw cotton, can turn it into a piece of manufactured cotton fit for making into sheets and shifts and the like. The manufactured cotton is more valuable than the raw cotton, because the manufacture costs wear and tear of machinery, wear and tear of the factory, rent of the ground upon which the factory is built, and human labor, or wear and tear of live men, which has to be made good by food, shelter, and rest. Do you understand that?”

“We used to learn all about it at college. I don’t see what it has to do with us, since you are not in the cotton trade.”

“You learned as much as it was thought safe to teach you, no doubt; but not quite all, I should think. When my father started for himself, there were many men in Manchester who were willing to labor in this way, but they had no factory to work in, no machinery to work with, and no raw cotton to work on, simply because all this indispensable plant, and the materials for producing a fresh supply of it, had been appropriated by earlier comers. So they found themselves with gaping stomachs, shivering limbs, and hungry wives and children, in a place called their own country, in which, nevertheless, every scrap of ground and possible source of subsistence was tightly locked up in the hands of others and guarded by armed soldiers and policemen. In this helpless condition, the poor devils were ready to beg for access to a factory and to raw cotton on any conditions compatible with life. My father offered them the use of his factory, his machines, and his raw cotton on the following conditions: They were to work long and hard, early and late, to add fresh value to his raw cotton by manufacturing it. Out of the value thus created by them, they were to recoup him for what he supplied them with: rent, shelter, gas, water, machinery, raw cotton — everything, and to pay him for his own services as superintendent, manager, and salesman. So far he asked nothing but just remuneration. But after this had been paid, a balance due solely to their own labor remained. ‘Out of this,’ said my father, ‘you shall keep just enough to save you from starving, and of the rest you shall make me a present to reward me for my virtue in saving money. Such is the bargain I propose. It is, in my opinion, fair and calculated to encourage thrifty habits. If it does not strike you in that light, you can get a factory and raw cotton for yourselves; you shall not use mine.’ In other words, they might go to the devil and starve — Hobson’s choice! — for all the other factories were owned by men who offered no better terms. The Manchesterians could not bear to starve or to see their children starve, and so they accepted his terms and went into the factory. The terms, you see, did not admit of their beginning to save for themselves as he had done. Well, they created great wealth by their labor, and lived on very little, so that the balance they gave for nothing to my father was large. He bought more cotton, and more machinery, and more factories with it; employed more men to make wealth for him, and saw his fortune increase like a rolling snowball. He prospered enormously, but the work men were no better off than at first, and they dared not rebel and demand more of the money they had made, for there were always plenty of starving wretches outside willing to take their places on the old terms. Sometimes he met with a check, as, for instance, when, in his eagerness to increase his store, he made the men manufacture more cotton than the public needed; or when he could not get enough of raw cotton, as happened during the Civil War in America. Then he adapted himself to circumstances by turning away as many workmen as he could not find customers or cotton for; and they, of course, starved or subsisted on charity. During the war-time a big subscription was got up for these poor wretches, and my father subscribed one hundred pounds, in spite, he said, of his own great losses. Then he bought new machines; and, as women and children could work these as well as men, and were cheaper and more docile, he turned away about seventy out of every hundred of his HANDS (so he called the men), and replaced them by their wives and children, who made money for him faster than ever. By this time he had long ago given up managing the factories, and paid clever fellows who had no money of their own a few hundreds a year to do it for him. He also purchased shares in other concerns conducted on the same principle; pocketed dividends made in countries which he had never visited by men whom he had never seen; bought a seat in Parliament from a poor and corrupt constituency, and helped to preserve the laws by which he had thriven. Afterwards, when his wealth grew famous, he had less need to bribe; for modern men worship the rich as gods, and will elect a man as one of their rulers for no other reason than that he is a millionaire. He aped gentility, lived in a palace at Kensington, and bought a part of Scotland to make a deer forest of. It is easy enough to make a deer forest, as trees are not necessary there. You simply drive off the peasants, destroy their houses, and make a desert of the land. However, my father did not shoot much himself; he generally let the forest out by the season to those who did. He purchased a wife of gentle blood too, with the unsatisfactory result now before you. That is how Jesse Trefusis, a poor Manchester bagman, contrived to be come a plutocrat and gentleman of landed estate. And also how I, who never did a stroke of work in my life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the deuce knows where. What do you think of that, my love?”

“What is the use of worrying about it, Sidney? It cannot be helped now. Besides, if your father saved money, and the others were improvident, he deserved to make a fortune.”

“Granted; but he didn’t make a fortune. He took a fortune that others made. At Cambridge they taught me that his profits were the reward of abstinence — the abstinence which enabled him to save. That quieted my conscience until I began to wonder why one man should make another pay him for exercising one of the virtues. Then came the question: what did my father abstain from? The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of their families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living, which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so sooner than people in our circumstances. Yet no one rewarded them for their abstinence. The reward came to my father, who abstained from none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart’s content. Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical to infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty thousand a year as when he had only five thousand. Here was a problem for my young mind. Required, something from which my father abstained and in which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and more as he grew richer and richer. The only thing that answered this description was hard work, and as I never met a sane man willing to pay another for idling, I began to see that these prodigious payments to my father were extorted by force. To do him justice, he never boasted of abstinence. He considered himself a hard-worked man, and claimed his fortune as the reward of his risks, his calculations, his anxieties, and the journeys he had to make at all seasons and at all hours. This comforted me somewhat until it occurred to me that if he had lived a century earlier, invested his money in a horse and a pair of pistols, and taken to the road, his object — that of wresting from others the fruits of their labor without rendering them an equivalent — would have been exactly the same, and his risk far greater, for it would have included risk of the gallows. Constant travelling with the constable at his heels, and calculations of the chances of robbing the Dover mail, would have given him his fill of activity and anxiety. On the whole, if Jesse Trefusis, M.P., who died a millionaire in his palace at Kensington, had been a highwayman, I could not more heartily loathe the social arrangements that rendered such a career as his not only possible, but eminently creditable to himself in the eyes of his fellows. Most men make it their business to imitate him, hoping to become rich and idle on the same terms. Therefore I turn my back on them. I cannot sit at their feasts knowing how much they cost in human misery, and seeing how little they produce of human happiness. What is your opinion, my treasure?”

Henrietta seemed a little troubled. She smiled faintly, and said caressingly, “It was not your fault, Sidney. I don’t blame you.”

“Immortal powers!” he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and appealing to the skies, “here is a woman who believes that the only concern all this causes me is whether she thinks any the worse of me personally on account of it!”

“No, no, Sidney. It is not I alone. Nobody thinks the worse of you for it.”

“Quite so,” he returned, in a polite frenzy. “Nobody sees any harm in it. That is precisely the mischief of it.”

“Besides,” she urged, “your mother belonged to one of the oldest families in England.”

“And what more can man desire than wealth with descent from a county family! Could a man be happier than I ought to be, sprung as I am from monopolists of all the sources and instruments of production — of land on the one side, and of machinery on the other? This very ground on which we are resting was the property of my mother’s father. At least the law allowed him to use it as such. When he was a boy, there was a fairly prosperous race of peasants settled here, tilling the soil, paying him rent for permission to do so, and making enough out of it to satisfy his large wants and their own narrow needs without working themselves to death. But my grandfather was a shrewd man. He perceived that cows and sheep produced more money by their meat and wool than peasants by their husbandry. So he cleared the estate. That is, he drove the peasants from their homes, as my father did afterwards in his Scotch deer forest. Or, as his tombstone has it, he developed the resources of his country. I don’t know what became of the peasants; HE didn’t know, and, I presume, didn’t care. I suppose the old ones went into the workhouse, and the young ones crowded the towns, and worked for men like my father in factories. Their places were taken by cattle, which paid for their food so well that my grandfather, getting my father to take shares in the enterprise, hired laborers on the Manchester terms to cut that canal for him. When it was made, he took toll upon it; and his heirs still take toll, and the sons of the navvies who dug it and of the engineer who designed it pay the toll when they have occasion to travel by it, or to purchase goods which have been conveyed along it. I remember my grandfather well. He was a well-bred man, and a perfect gentleman in his manners; but, on the whole, I think he was wickeder than my father, who, after all, was caught in the wheels of a vicious system, and had either to spoil others or be spoiled by them. But my grandfather — the old rascal! — was in no such dilemma. Master as he was of his bit of merry England, no man could have enslaved him, and he might at least have lived and let live. My father followed his example in the matter of the deer forest, but that was the climax of his wickedness, whereas it was only the beginning of my grandfather’s. Howbeit, whichever bears the palm, there they were, the types after which we all strive.”

“Not all, Sidney. Not we two. I hate tradespeople and country squires. We belong to the artistic and cultured classes, and we can keep aloof from shopkeepers.”

“Living, meanwhile, at the rate of several thousand a year on rent and interest. No, my dear, this is the way of those people who insist that when they are in heaven they shall be spared the recollection of such a place as hell, but are quite content that it shall exist outside their consciousness. I respect my father more — I mean I despise him less — for doing his own sweating and filching than I do the sensitive sluggards and cowards who lent him their money to sweat and filch with, and asked no questions provided the interest was paid punctually. And as to your friends the artists, they are the worst of all.”

“Oh, Sidney, you are determined not to be pleased. Artists don’t keep factories.”

“No; but the factory is only a part of the machinery of the system. Its basis is the tyranny of brain force, which, among civilized men, is allowed to do what muscular force does among schoolboys and savages. The schoolboy proposition is: ‘I am stronger than you, therefore you shall fag for me.’ Its grown up form is: ‘I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.’ The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not. A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food to enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable him to do his. He talks of the higher quality of his work, as if the higher quality of it were of his own making — as if it gave him a right to work less for his neighbor than his neighbor works for him — as if the ploughman could not do better without him than he without the ploughman — as if the value of the most celebrated pictures has not been questioned more than that of any straight furrow in the arable world — as if it did not take an apprenticeship of as many years to train the hand and eye of a mason or blacksmith as of an artist — as if, in short, the fellow were a god, as canting brain worshippers have for years past been assuring him he is. Artists are the high priests of the modern Moloch. Nine out of ten of them are diseased creatures, just sane enough to trade on their own neuroses. The only quality of theirs which extorts my respect is a certain sublime selfishness which makes them willing to starve and to let their families starve sooner than do any work they don’t like.”

“INDEED you are quite wrong, Sidney. There was a girl at the Slade school who supported her mother and two sisters by her drawing. Besides, what can you do? People were made so.”

“Yes; I was made a landlord and capitalist by the folly of the people; but they can unmake me if they will. Meanwhile I have absolutely no means of escape from my position except by giving away my slaves to fellows who will use them no better than I, and becoming a slave myself; which, if you please, you shall not catch me doing in a hurry. No, my beloved, I must keep my foot on their necks for your sake as well as for my own. But you do not care about all this prosy stuff. I am consumed with remorse for having bored my darling. You want to know why I am living here like a hermit in a vulgar two-roomed hovel instead of tasting the delights of London society with my beautiful and devoted young wife.”

“But you don’t intend to stay here, Sidney?”

“Yes, I do; and I will tell you why. I am helping to liberate those Manchester laborers who were my father’s slaves. To bring that about, their fellow slaves all over the world must unite in a vast international association of men pledged to share the world’s work justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a farthing — charity apart — to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than their share of work. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish, because working-men, like the people called their betters, do not always understand their own interests, and will often actually help their oppressors to exterminate their saviours to the tune of ‘Rule Britannia,’ or some such lying doggerel. We must educate them out of that, and, meanwhile, push forward the international association of laborers diligently. I am at present occupied in propagating its principles. Capitalism, organized for repressive purposes under pretext of governing the nation, would very soon stop the association if it understood our aim, but it thinks that we are engaged in gunpowder plots and conspiracies to assassinate crowned heads; and so, whilst the police are blundering in search of evidence of these, our real work goes on unmolested. Whether I am really advancing the cause is more than I can say. I use heaps of postage stamps, pay the expenses of many indifferent lecturers, defray the cost of printing reams of pamphlets and hand-bills which hail the laborer flatteringly as the salt of the earth, write and edit a little socialist journal, and do what lies in my power generally. I had rather spend my ill-gotten wealth in this way than upon an expensive house and a retinue of servants. And I prefer my corduroys and my two-roomed chalet here to our pretty little house, and your pretty little ways, and my pretty little neglect of the work that my heart is set upon. Some day, perhaps, I will take a holiday; and then we shall have a new honeymoon.”

For a moment Henrietta seemed about to cry. Suddenly she exclaimed with enthusiasm: “I will stay with you, Sidney. I will share your work, whatever it may be. I will dress as a dairymaid, and have a little pail to carry milk in. The world is nothing to me except when you are with me; and I should love to live here and sketch from nature.”

He blenched, and partially rose, unable to conceal his dismay. She, resolved not to be cast off, seized him and clung to him. This was the movement that excited the derision of Wickens’s boy in the adjacent gravel pit. Trefusis was glad of the interruption; and, when he gave the boy twopence and bade him begone, half hoped that he would insist on remaining. But though an obdurate boy on most occasions, he proved complaisant on this, and withdrew to the high road, where he made over one of his pennies to a phantom gambler, and tossed with him until recalled from his dual state by the appearance of Fairholme’s party.

In the meantime, Henrietta urgently returned to her proposition.

“We should be so happy,” she said. “I would housekeep for you, and you could work as much as you pleased. Our life would be a long idyll.”

“My love,” he said, shaking his head as she looked beseechingly at him, “I have too much Manchester cotton in my constitution for long idylls. And the truth is, that the first condition of work with me is your absence. When you are with me, I can do nothing but make love to you. You bewitch me. When I escape from you for a moment, it is only to groan remorsefully over the hours you have tempted me to waste and the energy you have futilized.”

“If you won’t live with me you had no right to marry me.”

“True. But that is neither your fault nor mine. We have found that we love each other too much — that our intercourse hinders our usefulness — and so we must part. Not for ever, my dear; only until you have cares and business of your own to fill up your life and prevent you from wasting mine.”

“I believe you are mad,” she said petulantly. “The world is mad nowadays, and is galloping to the deuce as fast as greed can goad it. I merely stand out of the rush, not liking its destination. Here comes a barge, the commander of which is devoted to me because he believes that I am organizing a revolution for the abolition of lock dues and tolls. We will go aboard and float down to Lyvern, whence you can return to London. You had better telegraph from the junction to the college; there must be a hue and cry out after us by this time. You shall have my address, and we can write to one another or see one another whenever we please. Or you can divorce me for deserting you.”

“You would like me to, I know,” said Henrietta, sobbing.

“I should die of despair, my darling,” he said complacently. “Ship aho-o-o-y! Stop crying, Hetty, for God’s sake. You lacerate my very soul.”

“Ah-o-o-o-o-o-o-oy, master!” roared the bargee.

“Good arternoon, sir,” said a man who, with a short whip in his hand, trudged beside the white horse that towed the barge. “Come up!” he added malevolently to the horse.

“I want to get on board, and go up to Lyvern with you,” said Trefusis. “He seems a well fed brute, that.”

“Better fed nor me,” said the man. “You can’t get the work out of a hunderfed ‘orse that you can out of a hunderfed man or woman. I’ve bin in parts of England where women pulled the barges. They come cheaper nor ‘orses, because it didn’t cost nothing to get new ones when the old ones we wore out.”

“Then why not employ them?” said Trefusis, with ironical gravity. “The principle of buying laborforce in the cheapest market and selling its product in the dearest has done much to make Englishmen — what they are.”

“The railway comp’nies keeps ‘orspittles for the like of ‘IM,” said the man, with a cunning laugh, indicating the horse by smacking him on the belly with the butt of the whip. “If ever you try bein’ a laborer in earnest, governor, try it on four legs. You’ll find it far preferable to trying on two.”

“This man is one of my converts,” said Trefusis apart to Henrietta. “He told me the other day that since I set him thinking he never sees a gentleman without feeling inclined to heave a brick at him. I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons. Now I am going to carry you along this plank. If you keep quiet, we may reach the barge. If not, we shall reach the bottom of the canal.”

He carried her safely over, and exchanged some friendly words with the bargee. Then he took Henrietta forward, and stood watching the water as they were borne along noiselessly between the hilly pastures of the country.

“This would be a fairy journey,” he said, “if one could forget the woman down below, cooking her husband’s dinner in a stifling hole about as big as your wardrobe, and—”

“Oh, don’t talk any more of these things,” she said crossly; “I cannot help them. I have my own troubles to think of. HER husband lives with her.”

“She will change places with you, my dear, if you make her the offer.”

She had no answer ready. After a pause he began to speak poetically of the scenery and to offer her loverlike speeches and compliments. But she felt that he intended to get rid of her, and he knew that it was useless to try to hide that design from her. She turned away and sat down on a pile of bricks, only writhing angrily when he pressed her for a word. As they neared the end of her voyage, and her intense protest against desertion remained, as she thought, only half expressed, her sense of injury grew almost unbearable.

They landed on a wharf, and went through an unswept, deeply-rutted lane up to the main street of Lyvern. Here he became Smilash again, walking deferentially a little before her, as if she had hired him to point out the way. She then saw that her last opportunity of appealing to him had gone by, and she nearly burst into tears at the thought. It occurred to her that she might prevail upon him by making a scene in public. But the street was a busy one, and she was a little afraid of him. Neither consideration would have checked her in one of her ungovernable moods, but now she was in an abject one. Her moods seemed to come only when they were harmful to her. She suffered herself to be put into the railway omnibus, which was on the point of starting from the innyard when they arrived there, and though he touched his hat, asked whether she had any message to give him, and in a tender whisper wished her a safe journey, she would not look at or speak to him. So they parted, and he returned alone to the chalet, where he was received by the two policemen who subsequently brought him to the college.

CHAPTER VI

The year wore on, and the long winter evenings set in. The studious young ladies at Alton College, elbows on desk and hands over ears, shuddered chillily in fur tippets whilst they loaded their memories with the statements of writers on moral science, or, like men who swim upon corks, reasoned out mathematical problems upon postulates. Whence it sometimes happened that the more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which few trustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

Agatha, not studious, and apt to shiver in winter, began to break Rule No. 17 with increasing frequency. Rule No. 17 forbade the students to enter the kitchen, or in any way to disturb the servants in the discharge of their duties. Agatha broke it because she was fond of making toffee, of eating it, of a good fire, of doing any forbidden thing, and of the admiration with which the servants listened to her ventriloquial and musical feats. Gertrude accompanied her because she too liked toffee, and because she plumed herself on her condescension to her inferiors. Jane went because her two friends went, and the spirit of adventure, the force of example, and the love of toffee often brought more volunteers to these expeditions than Agatha thought it safe to enlist. One evening Miss Wilson, going downstairs alone to her private wine cellar, was arrested near the kitchen by sounds of revelry, and, stopping to listen, overheard the castanet dance (which reminded her of the emphasis with which Agatha had snapped her fingers at Mrs. Miller), the bee on the window pane, “Robin Adair” (encored by the servants), and an imitation of herself in the act of appealing to Jane Carpenter’s better nature to induce her to study for the Cambridge Local. She waited until the cold and her fear of being discovered spying forced her to creep upstairs, ashamed of having enjoyed a silly entertainment, and of conniving at a breach of the rules rather than face a fresh quarrel with Agatha.

There was one particular in which matters between Agatha and the college discipline did not go on exactly as before. Although she had formerly supplied a disproportionately large number of the confessions in the fault book, the entry which had nearly led to her expulsion was the last she ever made in it. Not that her conduct was better — it was rather the reverse. Miss Wilson never mentioned the matter, the fault book being sacred from all allusion on her part. But she saw that though Agatha would not confess her own sins, she still assisted others to unburden their consciences. The witticisms with which Jane unsuspectingly enlivened the pages of the Recording Angel were conclusive on this point.

Smilash had now adopted a profession. In the last days of autumn he had whitewashed the chalet, painted the doors, windows, and veranda, repaired the roof and interior, and improved the place so much that the landlord had warned him that the rent would be raised at the expiration of his twelvemonth’s tenancy, remarking that a tenant could not reasonably expect to have a pretty, rain-tight dwelling-house for the same money as a hardly habitable ruin. Smilash had immediately promised to dilapidate it to its former state at the end of the year. He had put up a board at the gate with an inscription copied from some printed cards which he presented to persons who happened to converse with him.

JEFFERSON SMILASH

PAINTER, DECORATOR, GLAZIER, PLUMBER & GARDENER. Pianofortes tuned. Domestic engineering in all its Branches. Families waited upon at table or otherwise.

CHAMOUNIX VILLA, LYVERN. (N.B. Advice Gratis. No Reasonable offer refused.)

The business thus announced, comprehensive as it was, did not flourish. When asked by the curious for testimony to his competence and respectability, he recklessly referred them to Fairholme, to Josephs, and in particular to Miss Wilson, who, he said, had known him from his earliest childhood. Fairholme, glad of an opportunity to show that he was no mealy mouthed parson, declared, when applied to, that Smilash was the greatest rogue in the country. Josephs, partly from benevolence, and partly from a vague fear that Smilash might at any moment take an action against him for defamation of character, said he had no doubt that he was a very cheap workman, and that it would be a charity to give him some little job to encourage him. Miss Wilson confirmed Fairholme’s account; and the church organist, who had tuned all the pianofortes in the neighborhood once a year for nearly a quarter of a century, denounced the newcomer as Jack of all trades and master of none. Hereupon the radicals of Lyvern, a small and disreputable party, began to assert that there was no harm in the man, and that the parsons and Miss Wilson, who lived in a fine house and did nothing but take in the daughters of rich swells as boarders, might employ their leisure better than in taking the bread out of a poor work man’s mouth. But as none of this faction needed the services of a domestic engineer, he was none the richer for their support, and the only patron he obtained was a housemaid who was leaving her situation at a country house in the vicinity, and wanted her box repaired, the lid having fallen off. Smilash demanded half-a-crown for the job, but on her demurring, immediately apologized and came down to a shilling. For this sum he repainted the box, traced her initials on it, and affixed new hinges, a Bramah lock, and brass handles, at a cost to himself of ten shillings and several hours’ labor. The housemaid found fault with the color of the paint, made him take off the handles, which, she said, reminded her of a coffin, complained that a lock with such a small key couldn’t be strong enough for a large box, but admitted that it was all her own fault for not employing a proper man. It got about that he had made a poor job of the box; and as he, when taxed with this, emphatically confirmed it, he got no other commission; and his signboard served thenceforth only for the amusement of pedestrian tourists and of shepherd boys with a taste for stone throwing.

One night a great storm blew over Lyvern, and those young ladies at Alton College who were afraid of lightning, said their prayers with some earnestness. At half-past twelve the rain, wind, and thunder made such a din that Agatha and Gertrude wrapped themselves in shawls, stole downstairs to the window on the landing outside Miss Wilson’s study, and stood watching the flashes give vivid glimpses of the landscape, and discussing in whispers whether it was dangerous to stand near a window, and whether brass stair-rods could attract lightning. Agatha, as serious and friendly with a single companion as she was mischievous and satirical before a larger audience, enjoyed the scene quietly. The lightning did not terrify her, for she knew little of the value of life, and fancied much concerning the heroism of being indifferent to it. The tremors which the more startling flashes caused her, only made her more conscious of her own courage and its contrast with the uneasiness of Gertrude, who at last, shrinking from a forked zigzag of blue flame, said:

“Let us go back to bed, Agatha. I feel sure that we are not safe here.”

“Quite as safe as in bed, where we cannot see anything. How the house shakes! I believe the rain will batter in the windows before—”

“Hush,” whispered Gertrude, catching her arm in terror. “What was that?”

“What?”

“I am sure I heard the bell — the gate bell. Oh, do let us go back to bed.”

“Nonsense! Who would be out on such a night as this? Perhaps the wind rang it.”

They waited for a few moments; Gertrude trembling, and Agatha feeling, as she listened in the darkness, a sensation familiar to persons who are afraid of ghosts. Presently a veiled clangor mingled with the wind. A few sharp and urgent snatches of it came unmistakably from the bell at the gate of the college grounds. It was a loud bell, used to summon a servant from the college to open the gates; for though there was a porter’s lodge, it was uninhabited.

“Who on earth can it be?” said Agatha. “Can’t they find the wicket, the idiots?”

“Oh, I hope not! Do come upstairs, Agatha.”

“No, I won’t. Go you, if you like.” But Gertrude was afraid to go alone. “I think I had better waken Miss Wilson, and tell her,” continued Agatha. “It seems awful to shut anybody out on such a night as this.”

“But we don’t know who it is.”

“Well, I suppose you are not afraid of them, in any case,” said Agatha, knowing the contrary, but recognizing the convenience of shaming Gertrude into silence.

They listened again. The storm was now very boisterous, and they could not hear the bell. Suddenly there was a loud knocking at the house door. Gertrude screamed, and her cry was echoed from the rooms above, where several girls had heard the knocking also, and had been driven by it into the state of mind which accompanies the climax of a nightmare. Then a candle flickered on the stairs, and Miss Wilson’s voice, reassuringly firm, was heard.

“Who is that?”

“It is I, Miss Wilson, and Gertrude. We have been watching the storm, and there is some one knocking at the—” A tremendous battery with the knocker, followed by a sound, confused by the gale, as of a man shouting, interrupted her.

“They had better not open the door,” said Miss Wilson, in some alarm. “You are very imprudent, Agatha, to stand here. You will catch your death of — Dear me! What can be the matter? She hurried down, followed by Agatha, Gertrude, and some of the braver students, to the hall, where they found a few shivering servants watching the housekeeper, who was at the keyhole of the house door, querulously asking who was there. She was evidently not heard by those without, for the knocking recommenced whilst she was speaking, and she recoiled as if she had received a blow on the mouth. Miss Wilson then rattled the chain to attract attention, and demanded again who was there.

“Let us in,” was returned in a hollow shout through the keyhole. “There is a dying woman and three children here. Open the door.”

Miss Wilson lost her presence of mind. To gain time, she replied, “I — I can’t hear you. What do you say?”

“Damnation!” said the voice, speaking this time to some one outside. “They can’t hear.” And the knocking recommenced with increased urgency. Agatha, excited, caught Miss Wilson’s dressing gown, and repeated to her what the voice had said. Miss Wilson had heard distinctly enough, and she felt, without knowing clearly why, that the door must be opened, but she was almost over-mastered by a vague dread of what was to follow. She began to undo the chain, and Agatha helped with the bolts. Two of the servants exclaimed that they were all about to be murdered in their beds, and ran away. A few of the students seemed inclined to follow their example. At last the door, loosed, was blown wide open, flinging Miss Wilson and Agatha back, and admitting a whirlwind that tore round the hall, snatched at the women’s draperies, and blew out the lights. Agatha, by a hash of lightning, saw for an instant two men straining at the door like sailors at a capstan. Then she knew by the cessation of the whirlwind that they had shut it. Matches were struck, the candles relighted, and the newcomers clearly perceived.

Smilash, bareheaded, without a coat, his corduroy vest and trousers heavy with rain; a rough-looking, middle-aged man, poorly dressed like a shepherd, wet as Smilash, with the expression, piteous, patient, and desperate, of one hard driven by ill-fortune, and at the end of his resources; two little children, a boy and a girl, almost naked, cowering under an old sack that had served them as an umbrella; and, lying on the settee where the two men had laid it, a heap of wretched wearing apparel, sacking, and rotten matting, with Smilash’s coat and sou’wester, the whole covering a bundle which presently proved to be an exhausted woman with a tiny infant at her breast. Smilash’s expression, as he looked at her, was ferocious.

“Sorry fur to trouble you, lady,” said the man, after glancing anxiously at Smilash, as if he had expected him to act as spokesman; “but my roof and the side of my house has gone in the storm, and my missus has been having another little one, and I am sorry to ill-convenience you, Miss; but — but—”

“Inconvenience!” exclaimed Smilash. “It is the lady’s privilege to relieve you — her highest privilege!”

The little boy here began to cry from mere misery, and the woman roused herself to say, “For shame, Tom! before the lady,” and then collapsed, too weak to care for what might happen next in the world. Smilash looked impatiently at Miss Wilson, who hesitated, and said to him:

“What do you expect me to do?”

“To help us,” he replied. Then, with an explosion of nervous energy, he added: “Do what your heart tells you to do. Give your bed and your clothes to the woman, and let your girls pitch their books to the devil for a few days and make something for these poor little creatures to wear. The poor have worked hard enough to clothe THEM. Let them take their turn now and clothe the poor.”

“No, no. Steady, master,” said the man, stepping forward to propitiate Miss Wilson, and evidently much oppressed by a sense of unwelcomeness. “It ain’t any fault of the lady’s. Might I make so bold as to ask you to put this woman of mine anywhere that may be convenient until morning. Any sort of a place will do; she’s accustomed to rough it. Just to have a roof over her until I find a room in the village where we can shake down.” Here, led by his own words to contemplate the future, he looked desolately round the cornice of the hall, as if it were a shelf on which somebody might have left a suitable lodging for him.

Miss Wilson turned her back decisively and contemptuously on Smilash. She had recovered herself. “I will keep your wife here,” she said to the man. “Every care shall be taken of her. The children can stay too.”

“Three cheers for moral science!” cried Smilash, ecstatically breaking into the outrageous dialect he had forgotten in his wrath. “Wot was my words to you, neighbor, when I said we should bring your missus to the college, and you said, ironical-like, ‘Aye, and bloomin’ glad they’ll be to see us there.’ Did I not say to you that the lady had a noble ‘art, and would show it when put to the test by sech a calamity as this?”

“Why should you bring my hasty words up again’ me now, master, when the lady has been so kind?” said the man with emotion. “I am humbly grateful to you, Miss; and so is Bess. We are sensible of the ill-convenience we—”

Miss Wilson, who had been conferring with the housekeeper, cut his speech short by ordering him to carry his wife to bed, which he did with the assistance of Smilash, now jubilant. Whilst they were away, one of the servants, bidden to bring some blankets to the woman’s room, refused, saying that she was not going to wait on that sort of people. Miss Wilson gave her warning almost fiercely to quit the college next day. This excepted, no ill-will was shown to the refugees. The young ladies were then requested to return to bed.

Meanwhile the man, having laid his wife in a chamber palatial in comparison with that which the storm had blown about her ears, was congratulating her on her luck, and threatening the children with the most violent chastisement if they failed to behave themselves with strict propriety whilst they remained in that house. Before leaving them he kissed his wife; and she, reviving, asked him to look at the baby. He did so, and pensively apostrophized it with a shocking epithet in anticipation of the time when its appetite must be satisfied from the provision shop instead of from its mother’s breast. She laughed and cried shame on him; and so they parted cheerfully. When he returned to the hall with Smilash they found two mugs of beer waiting for them. The girls had retired, and only Miss Wilson and the housekeeper remained.

“Here’s your health, mum,” said the man, before drinking; “and may you find such another as yourself to help you when you’re in trouble, which Lord send may never come!”

“Is your house quite destroyed?” said Miss Wilson. “Where will you spend the night?”

“Don’t you think of me, mum. Master Smilash here will kindly put me up ‘til morning.”

“His health!” said Smilash, touching the mug with his lips.

“The roof and south wall is browed right away,” continued the man, after pausing for a moment to puzzle over Smilash’s meaning. “I doubt if there’s a stone of it standing by this.”

“But Sir John will build it for you again. You are one of his herds, are you not?”

“I am, Miss. But not he; he’ll be glad it’s down. He don’t like people livin’ on the land. I have told him time and again that the place was ready to fall; but he said I couldn’t expect him to lay out money on a house that he got no rent for. You see, Miss, I didn’t pay any rent. I took low wages; and the bit of a hut was a sort of set-off again’ what I was paid short of the other men. I couldn’t afford to have it repaired, though I did what I could to patch and prop it. And now most like I shall be blamed for letting it be blew down, and shall have to live in half a room in the town and pay two or three shillin’s a week, besides walkin’ three miles to and from my work every day. A gentleman like Sir John don’t hardly know what the value of a penny is to us laborin’ folk, nor how cruel hard his estate rules and the like comes on us.”

“Sir John’s health!” said Smilash, touching the mug as before. The man drank a mouthful humbly, and Smilash continued, “Here’s to the glorious landed gentry of old England: bless ‘em!”

“Master Smilash is only jokin’,” said the man apologetically. “It’s his way.”

“You should not bring a family into the world if you are so poor,” said Miss Wilson severely. “Can you not see that you impoverish yourself by doing so — to put the matter on no higher grounds.”

“Reverend Mr. Malthus’s health!” remarked Smilash, repeating his pantomime.

“Some say it’s the children, and some say it’s the drink, Miss,” said the man submissively. “But from what I see, family or no family, drunk or sober, the poor gets poorer and the rich richer every day.”

“Ain’t it disgustin’ to hear a man so ignorant of the improvement in the condition of his class?” said Smilash, appealing to Miss Wilson.

“If you intend to take this man home with you,” she said, turning sharply on him, “you had better do it at once.”

“I take it kind on your part that you ask me to do anythink, after your up and telling Mr. Wickens that I am the last person in Lyvern you would trust with a job.”

“So you are — the very last. Why don’t you drink your beer?”

“Not in scorn of your brewing, lady; but because, bein’ a common man, water is good enough for me.”

“I wish you good-night, Miss,” said the man; “and thank you kindly for Bess and the children.”

“Good-night,” she replied, stepping aside to avoid any salutation from Smilash. But he went up to her and said in a low voice, and with the Trefusis manner and accent:

“Good-night, Miss Wilson. If you should ever be in want of the services of a dog, a man, or a domestic engineer, remind Smilash of Bess and the children, and he will act for you in any of those capacities.”

They opened the door cautiously, and found that the wind, conquered by the rain, had abated. Miss Wilson’s candle, though it flickered in the draught, was not extinguished this time; and she was presently left with the housekeeper, bolting and chaining the door, and listening to the crunching of feet on the gravel outside dying away through the steady pattering of the rain.

CHAPTER VII

Agatha was at this time in her seventeenth year. She had a lively perception of the foibles of others, and no reverence for her seniors, whom she thought dull, cautious, and ridiculously amenable by commonplaces. But she was subject to the illusion which disables youth in spite of its superiority to age. She thought herself an exception. Crediting Mr. Jansenius and the general mob of mankind with nothing but a grovelling consciousness of some few material facts, she felt in herself an exquisite sense and all-embracing conception of nature, shared only by her favorite poets and heroes of romance and history. Hence she was in the common youthful case of being a much better judge of other people’s affairs than of her own. At the fellow-student who adored some Henry or Augustus, not from the drivelling sentimentality which the world calls love, but because this particular Henry or Augustus was a phoenix to whom the laws that govern the relations of ordinary lads and lasses did not apply, Agatha laughed in her sleeve. The more she saw of this weakness in her fellows, the more satisfied she was that, being forewarned, she was also forearmed against an attack of it on herself, much as if a doctor were to conclude that he could not catch smallpox because he had seen many cases of it; or as if a master mariner, knowing that many ships are wrecked in the British channel, should venture there without a pilot, thinking that he knew its perils too well to run any risk of them. Yet, as the doctor might hold such an opinion if he believed himself to be constituted differently from ordinary men; or the shipmaster adopt such a course under the impression that his vessel was a star, Agatha found false security in the subjective difference between her fellows seen from without and herself known from within. When, for instance, she fell in love with Mr. Jefferson Smilash (a step upon which she resolved the day after the storm), her imagination invested the pleasing emotion with a sacredness which, to her, set it far apart and distinct from the frivolous fancies of which Henry and Augustus had been the subject, and she the confidant.

“I can look at him quite coolly and dispassionately,” she said to herself. “Though his face has a strange influence that must, I know, correspond to some unexplained power within me, yet it is not a perfect face. I have seen many men who are, strictly speaking, far handsomer. If the light that never was on sea or land is in his eyes, yet they are not pretty eyes — not half so clear as mine. Though he wears his common clothes with a nameless grace that betrays his true breeding at every step, yet he is not tall, dark, and melancholy, as my ideal hero would be if I were as great a fool as girls of my age usually are. If I am in love, I have sense enough not to let my love blind my judgment.”

She did not tell anyone of her new interest in life. Strongest in that student community, she had used her power with good-nature enough to win the popularity of a school leader, and occasionally with unscrupulousness enough to secure the privileges of a school bully. Popularity and privilege, however, only satisfied her when she was in the mood for them. Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex. Agatha knew by experience that though a weak woman cannot understand why her stronger sister should wish to lean upon her, she may triumph in the fact without understanding it, and give chaff instead of consolation. Agatha wanted to be understood and not to be chaffed. Finding herself unable to satisfy both these conditions, she resolved to do without sympathy and to hold her tongue. She had often had to do so before, and she was helped on this occasion by a sense of the ridiculous appearance her passion might wear in the vulgar eye. Her secret kept itself, as she was supposed in the college to be insensible to the softer emotions. Love wrought no external change upon her. It made her believe that she had left her girlhood behind her and was now a woman with a newly-developed heart capacity at which she would childishly have scoffed a little while before. She felt ashamed of the bee on the window pane, although it somehow buzzed as frequently as before in spite of her. Her calendar, formerly a monotonous cycle of class times, meal times, play times, and bed time, was now irregularly divided by walks past the chalet and accidental glimpses of its tenant.

Early in December came a black frost, and navigation on the canal was suspended. Wickens’s boy was sent to the college with news that Wickens’s pond would bear, and that the young ladies should be welcome at any time. The pond was only four feet deep, and as Miss Wilson set much store by the physical education of her pupils, leave was given for skating. Agatha, who was expert on the ice, immediately proposed that a select party should go out before breakfast next morning. Actions not in themselves virtuous often appear so when performed at hours that compel early rising, and some of the candidates for the Cambridge Local, who would not have sacrificed the afternoon to amusement, at once fell in with her suggestion. But for them it might never have been carried out; for when they summoned Agatha, at half-past six next morning, to leave her warm bed and brave the biting air, she would have refused without hesitation had she not been shamed into compliance by these laborious ones who stood by her bedside, blue-nosed and hungry, but ready for the ice. When she had dressed herself with much shuddering and chattering, they allayed their internal discomfort by a slender meal of biscuits, got their skates, and went out across the rimy meadows, past patient cows breathing clouds of steam, to Wickens’s pond. Here, to their surprise, was Smilash, on electro-plated acme skates, practicing complicated figures with intense diligence. It soon appeared that his skill came short of his ambition; for, after several narrow escapes and some frantic staggering, his calves, elbows, and occiput smote the ice almost simultaneously. On rising ruefully to a sitting posture he became aware that eight young ladies were watching his proceedings with interest.

“This comes of a common man putting himself above his station by getting into gentlemen’s skates,” he said. “Had I been content with a humble slide, as my fathers was, I should ha’ been a happier man at the present moment.” He sighed, rose, touched his hat to Miss Ward, and took off his skates, adding: “Good-morning, Miss. Miss Wilson sent me word to be here sharp at six to put on the young ladies’ skates, and I took the liberty of trying a figure or two to keep out the cold.”

“Miss Wilson did not tell me that she ordered you to come,” said Miss Ward.

“Just like her to be thoughtful and yet not let on to be! She is a kind lady, and a learned — like yourself, Miss. Sit yourself down on the camp-stool and give me your heel, if I may be so bold as to stick a gimlet into it.”

His assistance was welcome, and Miss Ward allowed him to put on her skates. She was a Canadian, and could skate well. Jane, the first to follow her, was anxious as to the strength of the ice; but when reassured, she acquitted herself admirably, for she was proficient in outdoor exercises, and had the satisfaction of laughing in the field at those who laughed at her in the study. Agatha, contrary to her custom, gave way to her companions, and her boots were the last upon which Smilash operated.

“How d’you do, Miss Wylie?” he said, dropping the Smilash manner now that the rest were out of earshot.

“I am very well, thank you,” said Agatha, shy and constrained. This phase of her being new to him, he paused with her heel in his hand and looked up at her curiously. She collected herself, returned his gaze steadily, and said: “How did Miss Wilson send you word to come? She only knew of our party at half-past nine last night.”

“Miss Wilson did not send for me.”

“But you have just told Miss Ward that she did.”

“Yes. I find it necessary to tell almost as many lies now that I am a simple laborer as I did when I was a gentleman. More, in fact.”

“I shall know how much to believe of what you say in the future.”

“The truth is this. I am perhaps the worst skater in the world, and therefore, according to a natural law, I covet the faintest distinction on the ice more than immortal fame for the things in which nature has given me aptitude to excel. I envy that large friend of yours — Jane is her name, I think — more than I envy Plato. I came down here this morning, thinking that the skating world was all a-bed, to practice in secret.”

“I am glad we caught you at it,” said Agatha maliciously, for he was disappointing her. She wanted him to be heroic in his conversation; and he would not.

“I suppose so,” he replied. “I have observed that Woman’s dearest delight is to wound Man’s self-conceit, though Man’s dearest delight is to gratify hers. There is at least one creature lower than Man. Now, off with you. Shall I hold you until your ankles get firm?”

“Thank you,” she said, disgusted: “I can skate pretty well, and I don’t think you could give me any useful assistance.” And she went off cautiously, feeling that a mishap would be very disgraceful after such a speech.

He stood on the shore, listening to the grinding, swaying sound of the skates, and watching the growing complexity of the curves they were engraving on the ice. As the girls grew warm and accustomed to the exercise they laughed, jested, screamed recklessly when they came into collision, and sailed before the wind down the whole length of the pond at perilous speed. The more animated they became, the gloomier looked Smilash. “Not two-penn’orth of choice between them and a parcel of puppies,” he said; “except that some of them are conscious that there is a man looking at them, although he is only a blackguard laborer. They remind me of Henrietta in a hundred ways. Would I laugh, now, if the whole sheet of ice were to burst into little bits under them?”

Just then the ice cracked with a startling report, and the skaters, except Jane, skimmed away in all directions.

“You are breaking the ice to pieces, Jane,” said Agatha, calling from a safe distance. “How can you expect it to bear your weight?”

“Pack of fools!” retorted Jane indignantly. “The noise only shows how strong it is.”

The shock which the report had given Smilash answered him his question. “Make a note that wishes for the destruction of the human race, however rational and sincere, are contrary to nature,” he said, recovering his spirits. “Besides, what a precious fool I should be if I were working at an international association of creatures only fit for destruction! Hi, lady! One word, Miss!” This was to Miss Ward, who had skated into his neighborhood. “It bein’ a cold morning, and me havin’ a poor and common circulation, would it be looked on as a liberty if I was to cut a slide here or take a turn in the corner all to myself?”

“You may skate over there if you wish,” she said, after a pause for consideration, pointing to a deserted spot at the leeward end of the pond, where the ice was too rough for comfortable skating.

“Nobly spoke!” he cried, with a grin, hurrying to the place indicated, where, skating being out of the question, he made a pair of slides, and gravely exercised himself upon them until his face glowed and his fingers tingled in the frosty air. The time passed quickly; when Miss Ward sent for him to take off her skates there was a general groan and declaration that it could not possibly be half-past eight o’clock yet. Smilash knelt before the camp-stool, and was presently busy unbuckling and unscrewing. When Jane’s turn came, the camp-stool creaked beneath her weight. Agatha again remonstrated with her, but immediately reproached herself with flippancy before Smilash, to whom she wished to convey an impression of deep seriousness of character.

“Smallest foot of the lot,” he said critically, holding Jane’s foot between his finger and thumb as if it were an art treasure which he had been invited to examine. “And belonging to the finest built lady.”

Jane snatched away her foot, blushed, and said:

“Indeed! What next, I wonder?”

“T’other ‘un next,” he said, setting to work on the remaining skate. When it was off, he looked up at her, and she darted a glance at him as she rose which showed that his compliment (her feet were, in fact, small and pretty) was appreciated.

“Allow me, Miss,” he said to Gertrude, who was standing on one leg, leaning on Agatha, and taking off her own skates.

“No, thank you,” she said coldly. “I don’t need your assistance.”

“I am well aware that the offer was overbold,” he replied, with a self-complacency that made his profession of humility exasperating. “If all the skates is off, I will, by Miss Wilson’s order, carry them and the camp-stool back to the college.”

Miss Ward handed him her skates and turned away. Gertrude placed hers on the stool and went with Miss Ward. The rest followed, leaving him to stare at the heap of skates and consider how he should carry them. He could think of no better plan than to interlace the straps and hang them in a chain over his shoulder. By the time he had done this the young ladies were out of sight, and his intention of enjoying their society during the return to the college was defeated. They had entered the building long before he came in sight of it.

Somewhat out of conceit with his folly, he went to the servants’ entrance and rang the bell there. When the door was opened, he saw Miss Ward standing behind the maid who admitted him.

“Oh,” she said, looking at the string of skates as if she had hardly expected to see them again, “so you have brought our things back?”

“Such were my instructions,” he said, taken aback by her manner. “You had no instructions. What do you mean by getting our skates into your charge under false pretences? I was about to send the police to take them from you. How dare you tell me that you were sent to wait on me, when you know very well that you were nothing of the sort?”

“I couldn’t help it, Miss,” he replied submissively. “I am a natural born liar — always was. I know that it must appear dreadful to you that never told a lie, and don’t hardly know what a lie is, belonging as you do to a class where none is ever told. But common people like me tells lies just as a duck swims. I ask your pardon, Miss, most humble, and I hope the young ladies’ll be able to tell one set of skates from t’other; for I’m blest if I can.”

“Put them down. Miss Wilson wishes to speak to you before you go. Susan, show him the way.”

“Hope you ain’t been and got a poor cove into trouble, Miss?”

“Miss Wilson knows how you have behaved.”

He smiled at her benevolently and followed Susan upstairs. On their way they met Jane, who stole a glance at him, and was about to pass by, when he said:

“Won’t you say a word to Miss Wilson for a poor common fellow, honored young lady? I have got into dreadful trouble for having made bold to assist you this morning.”

“You needn’t give yourself the pains to talk like that,” replied Jane in an impetuous whisper. “We all know that you’re only pretending.”

“Well, you can guess my motive,” he whispered, looking tenderly at her.

“Such stuff and nonsense! I never heard of such a thing in my life,” said Jane, and ran away, plainly understanding that he had disguised himself in order to obtain admission to the college and enjoy the happiness of looking at her.

“Cursed fool that I am!” he said to himself; “I cannot act like a rational creature for five consecutive minutes.”

The servant led him to the study and announced, “The man, if you please, ma’am.”

“Jeff Smilash,” he added in explanation.

“Come in,” said Miss Wilson sternly.

He went in, and met the determined frown which she cast on him from her seat behind the writing table, by saying courteously:

“Good-morning, Miss Wilson.”

She bent forward involuntarily, as if to receive a gentleman. Then she checked herself and looked implacable.

“I have to apologize,” he said, “for making use of your name unwarrantably this morning — telling a lie, in fact. I happened to be skating when the young ladies came down, and as they needed some assistance which they would hardly have accepted from a common man — excuse my borrowing that tiresome expression from our acquaintance Smilash — I set their minds at ease by saying that you had sent for me. Otherwise, as you have given me a bad character — though not worse than I deserve — they would probably have refused to employ me, or at least I should have been compelled to accept payment, which I, of course, do not need.”

Miss Wilson affected surprise. “I do not understand you,” she said.

“Not altogether,” he said smiling. “But you understand that I am what is called a gentleman.”

“No. The gentlemen with whom I am conversant do not dress as you dress, nor speak as you speak, nor act as you act.”

He looked at her, and her countenance confirmed the hostility of her tone. He instantly relapsed into an aggravated phase of Smilash.

“I will no longer attempt to set myself up as a gentleman,” he said. “I am a common man, and your ladyship’s hi recognizes me as such and is not to be deceived. But don’t go for to say that I am not candid when I am as candid as ever you will let me be. What fault, if any, do you find with my putting the skates on the young ladies, and carryin’ the campstool for them?”

“If you are a gentleman,” said Miss Wilson, reddening, “your conduct in persisting in these antics in my presence is insulting to me. Extremely so.”

“Miss Wilson,” he replied, unruffled, “if you insist on Smilash, you shall have Smilash; I take an insane pleasure in personating him. If you want Sidney — my real Christian name — you can command him. But allow me to say that you must have either one or the other. If you become frank with me, I will understand that you are addressing Sidney. If distant and severe, Smilash.”

“No matter what your name may be,” said Miss Wilson, much annoyed, “I forbid you to come here or to hold any communication whatever with the young ladies in my charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I choose.”

“There is much force in that reason, Miss Wilson; but it is not moral force in the sense conveyed by your college prospectus, which I have read with great interest.”

Miss Wilson, since her quarrel with Agatha, had been sore on the subject of moral force. “No one is admitted here,” she said, “without a trustworthy introduction or recommendation. A disguise is not a satisfactory substitute for either.”

“Disguises are generally assumed for the purpose of concealing crime,” he remarked sententiously.

“Precisely so,” she said emphatically.

“Therefore, I bear, to say the least, a doubtful character. Nevertheless, I have formed with some of the students here a slight acquaintance, of which, it seems, you disapprove. You have given me no good reason why I should discontinue that acquaintance, and you cannot control me except by your wish — a sort of influence not usually effective with doubtful characters. Suppose I disregard your wish, and that one or two of your pupils come to you and say: ‘Miss Wilson, in our opinion Smilash is an excellent fellow; we find his conversation most improving. As it is your principle to allow us to exercise our own judgment, we intend to cultivate the acquaintance of Smilash.’ How will you act in that case?”

“Send them home to their parents at once.”

“I see that your principles are those of the Church of England. You allow the students the right of private judgment on condition that they arrive at the same conclusions as you. Excuse my saying that the principles of the Church of England, however excellent, are not those your prospectus led me to hope for. Your plan is coercion, stark and simple.”

“I do not admit it,” said Miss Wilson, ready to argue, even with Smilash, in defence of her system. “The girls are quite at liberty to act as they please, but I reserve my equal liberty to exclude them from my college if I do not approve of their behavior.”

“Just so. In most schools children are perfectly at liberty to learn their lessons or not, just as they please; but the principal reserves an equal liberty to whip them if they cannot repeat their tasks.”

“I do not whip my pupils,” said Miss Wilson indignantly. “The comparison is an outrage.”

“But you expel them; and, as they are devoted to you and to the place, expulsion is a dreaded punishment. Yours is the old system of making laws and enforcing them by penalties, and the superiority of Alton College to other colleges is due, not to any difference of system, but to the comparative reasonableness of its laws and the mildness and judgment with which they are enforced.”

“My system is radically different from the old one. However, I will not discuss the matter with you. A mind occupied with the prejudices of the old coercive despotism can naturally only see in the new a modification of the old, instead of, as my system is, an entire reversal or abandonment of it.”

He shook his head sadly and said: “You seek to impose your ideas on others, ostracizing those who reject them. Believe me, mankind has been doing nothing else ever since it began to pay some attention to ideas. It has been said that a benevolent despotism is the best possible form of government. I do not believe that saying, because I believe another one to the effect that hell is paved with benevolence, which most people, the proverb being too deep for them, misinterpret as unfulfilled intentions. As if a benevolent despot might not by any error of judgment destroy his kingdom, and then say, like Romeo when he got his friend killed, ‘I thought all for the best!’ Excuse my rambling. I meant to say, in short, that though you are benevolent and judicious you are none the less a despot.”

Miss Wilson, at a loss for a reply, regretted that she had not, before letting him gain so far on her, dismissed him summarily instead of tolerating a discussion which she did not know how to end with dignity. He relieved her by adding unexpectedly:

“Your system was the cause of my absurd marriage. My wife acquired a degree of culture and reasonableness from her training here which made her seem a superior being among the chatterers who form the female seasoning in ordinary society. I admired her dark eyes, and was only too glad to seize the excuse her education offered me for believing her a match for me in mind as well as in body.”

Miss Wilson, astonished, determined to tell him coldly that her time was valuable. But curiosity took possession of her in the act of utterance, and the words that came were, “Who was she?”

“Henrietta Jansenius. She is Henrietta Trefusis, and I am Sidney Trefusis, at your mercy. I see I have aroused your compassion at last.”

“Nonsense!” said Miss Wilson hastily; for her surprise was indeed tinged by a feeling that he was thrown away on Henrietta.

“I ran away from her and adopted this retreat and this disguise in order to avoid her. The usual rebuke to human forethought followed. I ran straight into her arms — or rather she ran into mine. You remember the scene, and were probably puzzled by it.”

“You seem to think your marriage contract a very light matter, Mr. Trefusis. May I ask whose fault was the separation? Hers, of course.”

“I have nothing to reproach her with. I expected to find her temper hasty, but it was not so — her behavior was unexceptionable. So was mine. Our bliss was perfect, but unfortunately, I was not made for domestic bliss — at all events I could not endure it — so I fled, and when she caught me again I could give no excuse for my flight, though I made it clear to her that I would not resume our connubial relations just yet. We parted on bad terms. I fully intended to write her a sweet letter to make her forgive me in spite of herself, but somehow the weeks have slipped away and I am still fully intending. She has never written, and I have never written. This is a pretty state of things, isn’t it, Miss Wilson, after all her advantages under the influence of moral force and the movement for the higher education of women?”

“By your own admission, the fault seems to lie upon your moral training and not upon hers.”

“The fault was in the conditions of our association. Why they should have attracted me so strongly at first, and repelled me so horribly afterwards, is one of those devil’s riddles which will not be answered until we shall have traced all the yet unsuspected reactions of our inveterate dishonesty. But I am wasting your time, I fear. You sent for Smilash, and I have responded by practically annihilating him. In public, however, you must still bear with his antics. One moment more. I had forgotten to ask you whether you are interested in the shepherd whose wife you sheltered on the night of the storm?”

“He assured me, before he took his wife away, that he was comfortably settled in a lodging in Lyvern.”

“Yes. Very comfortably settled indeed. For half-a-crown a week he obtained permission to share a spacious drawing-room with two other families in a ten-roomed house in not much better repair than his blown-down hovel. This house yields to its landlord over two hundred a year, or rather more than the rent of a commodious mansion in South Kensington. It is a troublesome rent to collect, but on the other hand there is no expenditure for repairs or sanitation, which are not considered necessary in tenement houses. Our friend has to walk three miles to his work and three miles back. Exercise is a capital thing for a student or a city clerk, but to a shepherd who has been in the fields all day, a long walk at the end of his work is somewhat too much of a good thing. He begged for an increase of wages to compensate him for the loss of the hut, but Sir John pointed out to him that if he was not satisfied his place could be easily filled by less exorbitant shepherds. Sir John even condescended to explain that the laws of political economy bind employers to buy labor in the cheapest market, and our poor friend, just as ignorant of economics as Sir John, of course did not know that this was untrue. However, as labor is actually so purchased everywhere except in Downing Street and a few other privileged spots, I suggested that our friend should go to some place where his market price would be higher than in merry England. He was willing enough to do so, but unable from want of means. So I lent him a trifle, and now he is on his way to Australia. Workmen are the geese that lay the golden eggs, but they fly away sometimes. I hear a gong sounding, to remind me of the fight of time and the value of your share of it. Good-morning!”

Miss Wilson was suddenly moved not to let him go without an appeal to his better nature. “Mr. Trefusis,” she said, “excuse me, but are you not, in your generosity to others a little forgetful of your duty to yourself; and—”

“The first and hardest of all duties!” he exclaimed. “I beg your pardon for interrupting you. It was only to plead guilty.”

“I cannot admit that it is the first of all duties, but it is sometimes perhaps the hardest, as you say. Still, you could surely do yourself more justice without any great effort. If you wish to live humbly, you can do so without pretending to be an uneducated man and without taking an irritating and absurd name. Why on earth do you call yourself Smilash?”

“I confess that the name has been a failure. I took great pains, in constructing it, to secure a pleasant impression. It is not a mere invention, but a compound of the words smile and eyelash. A smile suggests good humor; eyelashes soften the expression and are the only features that never blemish a face. Hence Smilash is a sound that should cheer and propitiate. Yet it exasperates. It is really very odd that it should have that effect, unless it is that it raises expectations which I am unable to satisfy.”

Miss Wilson looked at him doubtfully. He remained perfectly grave. There was a pause. Then, as if she had made up her mind to be offended, she said, “Good-morning,” shortly.

“Good-morning, Miss Wilson. The son of a millionaire, like the son of a king, is seldom free from mental disease. I am just mad enough to be a mountebank. If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him. Whether you ask me to forget myself for a moment, or to remember myself for a moment, I reply that I am the son of my father, and cannot. With my egotism, my charlatanry, my tongue, and my habit of having my own way, I am fit for no calling but that of saviour of mankind — just of the sort they like.” After an impressive pause he turned slowly and left the room.

“I wonder,” he said, as he crossed the landing, “whether, by judiciously losing my way, I can catch a glimpse of that girl who is like a golden idol?”

Downstairs, on his way to the door, he saw Agatha coming towards him, occupied with a book which she was tossing up to the ceiling and catching. Her melancholy expression, habitual in her lonely moments, showed that she was not amusing herself, but giving vent to her restlessness. As her gaze travelled upward, following the flight of the volume, it was arrested by Smilash. The book fell to the floor. He picked it up and handed it to her, saying:

“And, in good time, here is the golden idol!”

“What?” said Agatha, confused.

“I call you the golden idol,” he said. “When we are apart I always imagine your face as a face of gold, with eyes and teeth of bdellium, or chalcedony, or agate, or any wonderful unknown stones of appropriate colors.”

Agatha, witless and dumb, could only look down deprecatingly.

“You think you ought to be angry with me, and you do not know exactly how to make me feel that you are so. Is that it?”

“No. Quite the contrary. At least — I mean that you are wrong. I am the most commonplace person you can imagine — if you only knew. No matter what I may look, I mean.”

“How do you know that you are commonplace?”

“Of course I know,” said Agatha, her eyes wandering uneasily.

“Of course you do not know; you cannot see yourself as others see you. For instance, you have never thought of yourself as a golden idol.”

“But that is absurd. You are quite mistaken about me.”

“Perhaps so. I know, however, that your face is not really made of gold and that it has not the same charm for you that it has for others — for me.”

“I must go,” said Agatha, suddenly in haste.

“When shall we meet again?”

“I don’t know,” she said, with a growing sense of alarm. “I really must go.”

“Believe me, your hurry is only imaginary. Do you fancy that you are behaving in a manner of quite ubdued ardor that affected Agatha strangely.

“But first tell me whether it is new to you or not.”

“It is not an emotion at all. I did not say that it was.”

“Do not be afraid of it. It is only being alone with a man whom you have bewitched. You would be mistress of the situation if you only knew how to manage a lover. It is far easier than managing a horse, or skating, or playing the piano, or half a dozen other feats of which you think nothing.”

Agatha colored and raised her head.

“Forgive me,” he said, interrupting the action. “I am trying to offend you in order to save myself from falling in love with you, and I have not the heart to let myself succeed. On your life, do not listen to me or believe me. I have no right to say these things to you. Some fiend enters into me when I am at your side. You should wear a veil, Agatha.”

She blushed, and stood burning and tingling, her presence of mind gone, and her chief sensation one of relief to hear — for she did not dare to see — that he was departing. Her consciousness was in a delicious confusion, with the one definite thought in it that she had won her lover at last. The tone of Trefusis’s voice, rich with truth and earnestness, his quick insight, and his passionate warning to her not to heed him, convinced her that she had entered into a relation destined to influence her whole life.

“And yet,” she said remorsefully, “I cannot love him as he loves me. I am selfish, cold, calculating, worldly, and have doubted until now whether such a thing as love really existed. If I could only love him recklessly and wholly, as he loves me!”

Smilash was also soliloquizing as he went on his way.

“Now I have made the poor child — who was so anxious that I should not mistake her for a supernaturally gifted and lovely woman as happy as an angel; and so is that fine girl whom they call Jane Carpenter. I hope they won’t exchange confidences on the subject.”

CHAPTER VIII

Mrs. Trefusis found her parents so unsympathetic on the subject of her marriage that she left their house shortly after her visit to Lyvern, and went to reside with a hospitable friend. Unable to remain silent upon the matter constantly in her thoughts, she discussed her husband’s flight with this friend, and elicited an opinion that the behavior of Trefusis was scandalous and wicked. Henrietta could not bear this, and sought shelter with a relative. The same discussion arising, the relative said:

“Well, Hetty, if I am to speak candidly, I must say that I have known Sidney Trefusis for a long time, and he is the easiest person to get on with I ever met. And you know, dear, that you are very trying sometimes.”

“And so,” cried Henrietta, bursting into tears, “after the infamous way he has treated me I am to be told that it is all my own fault.”

She left the house next day, having obtained another invitation from a discreet lady who would not discuss the subject at all. This proved quite intolerable, and Henrietta went to stay with her uncle Daniel Jansenius, a jolly and indulgent man. He opined that things would come right as soon as both parties grew more sensible; and, as to which of them was, in fault, his verdict was, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Whenever he saw his niece pensive or tearful he laughed at her and called her a grass widow. Henrietta found that she could endure anything rather than this. Declaring that the world was hateful to her, she hired a furnished villa in St. John’s Wood, whither she moved in December. But, suffering much there from loneliness, she soon wrote a pathetic letter to Agatha, entreating her to spend the approaching Christmas vacation with her, and promising her every luxury and amusement that boundless affection could suggest and boundless means procure. Agatha’s reply contained some unlooked-for information.

“Alton College, Lyvern,

“14th December.

“Dearest Hetty: I don’t think I can do exactly what you want, as I must spend Xmas with Mamma at Chiswick; but I need not get there until Xmas Eve, and we break up here on yesterday week, the 20th. So I will go straight to you and bring you with me to Mamma’s, where you will spend Xmas much better than moping in a strange house. It is not quite settled yet about my leaving the college after this term. You must promise not to tell anyone; but I have a new friend here — a lover. Not that I am in love with him, though I think very highly of him — you know I am not a romantic fool; but he is very much in love with me; and I wish I could return it as he deserves. The French say that one person turns the cheek and the other kisses it. It has not got quite so far as that with us; indeed, since he declared what he felt he has only been able to snatch a few words with me when I have been skating or walking. But there has always been at least one word or look that meant a great deal.

“And now, who do you think he is? He says he knows you. Can you guess? He says you know all his secrets. He says he knows your husband well; that he treated you very badly, and that you are greatly to be pitied. Can you guess now? He says he has kissed you — for shame, Hetty! Have you guessed yet? He was going to tell me something more when we were interrupted, and I have not seen him since except at a distance. He is the man with whom you eloped that day when you gave us all such a fright — Mr. Sidney. I was the first to penetrate his disguise; and that very morning I had taxed him with it, and he had confessed it. He said then that he was hiding from a woman who was in love with him; and I should not be surprised if it turned out to be true; for he is wonderfully original — in fact what makes me like him is that he is by far the cleverest man I have ever met; and yet he thinks nothing of himself. I cannot imagine what he sees in me to care for, though he is evidently ensnared by my charms. I hope he won’t find out how silly I am. He called me his golden idol—”

Henrietta, with a scream of rage, tore the letter across, and stamped upon it. When the paroxysm subsided she picked up the pieces, held them together as accurately as her trembling hands could, and read on.

“ — but he is not all honey, and will say the most severe things sometimes if he thinks he ought to. He has made me so ashamed of my ignorance that I am resolved to stay here for another term at least, and study as hard as I can. I have not begun yet, as it is not worth while at the eleventh hour of this term; but when I return in January I will set to work in earnest. So you may see that his influence over me is an entirely good one. I will tell you all about him when we meet; for I have no time to say anything now, as the girls are bothering me to go skating with them. He pretends to be a workman, and puts on our skates for us; and Jane Carpenter believes that he is in love with her. Jane is exceedingly kindhearted; but she has a talent for making herself ridiculous that nothing can suppress. The ice is lovely, and the weather jolly; we do not mind the cold in the least. They are threatening to go without me — good-bye!

“Ever your affectionate

“Agatha.”

Henrietta looked round for something sharp. She grasped a pair of scissors greedily and stabbed the air with them. Then she became conscious of her murderous impulse, and she shuddered at it; but in a moment more her jealousy swept back upon her. She cried, as if suffocating, “I don’t care; I should like to kill her!” But she did not take up the scissors again.

At last she rang the bell violently and asked for a railway guide. On being told that there was not one in the house, she scolded her maid so unreasonably that the girl said pertly that if she were to be spoken to like that she should wish to leave when her month was up. This check brought Henrietta to her senses. She went upstairs and put on the first cloak at hand, which was fortunately a heavy fur one. Then she took her bonnet and purse, left the house, hailed a passing hansom, and bade the cabman drive her to St. Pancras.

When the night came the air at Lyvern was like iron in the intense cold. The trees and the wind seemed ice-bound, as the water was, and silence, stillness, and starlight, frozen hard, brooded over the country. At the chalet, Smilash, indifferent to the price of coals, kept up a roaring fire that glowed through the uncurtained windows, and tantalized the chilled wayfarer who did not happen to know, as the herdsmen of the neighborhood did, that he was welcome to enter and warm himself without risk of rebuff from the tenant. Smilash was in high spirits. He had become a proficient skater, and frosty weather was now a luxury to him. It braced him, and drove away his gloomy fits, whilst his sympathies were kept awake and his indignation maintained at an exhilarating pitch by the sufferings of the poor, who, unable to afford fires or skating, warmed themselves in such sweltering heat as overcrowding produces in all seasons.

It was Smilash’s custom to make a hot drink of oatmeal and water for himself at half-past nine o’clock each evening, and to go to bed at ten. He opened the door to throw out some water that remained in the saucepan from its last cleansing. It froze as it fell upon the soil. He looked at the night, and shook himself to throw off an oppressive sensation of being clasped in the icy ribs of the air, for the mercury had descended below the familiar region of crisp and crackly cold and marked a temperature at which the numb atmosphere seemed on the point of congealing into black solidity. Nothing was stirring.

“By George!” he said, “this is one of those nights on which a rich man daren’t think!”

He shut the door, hastened back to his fire, and set to work at his caudle, which he watched and stirred with a solicitude that would have amused a professed cook. When it was done he poured it into a large mug, where it steamed invitingly. He took up some in a spoon and blew upon it to cool it. Tap, tap, tap, tap! hurriedly at the door.

“Nice night for a walk,” he said, putting down the spoon; then shouting, “Come in.”

The latch rose unsteadily, and Henrietta, with frozen tears on her cheeks, and an unintelligible expression of wretchedness and rage, appeared. After an instant of amazement, he sprang to her and clasped her in his arms, and she, against her will, and protesting voicelessly, stumbled into his embrace.

“You are frozen to death,” he exclaimed, carrying her to the fire. “This seal jacket is like a sheet of ice. So is your face” (kissing it). “What is the matter? Why do you struggle so?”

“Let me go,” she gasped, in a vehement whisper. “I h — hate you.”

“My poor love, you are too cold to hate anyone — even your husband. You must let me take off these atrocious French boots. Your feet must be perfectly dead.”

By this time her voice and tears were thawing in the warmth of the chalet and of his caresses. “You shall not take them off,” she said, crying with cold and sorrow. “Let me alone. Don’t touch me. I am going away — straight back. I will not speak to you, nor take off my things here, nor touch anything in the house.”

“No, my darling,” he said, putting her into a capacious wooden armchair and busily unbuttoning her boots, “you shall do nothing that you don’t wish to do. Your feet are like stones. Yes, yes, my dear, I am a wretch unworthy to live. I know it.”

“Let me alone,” she said piteously. “I don’t want your attentions. I have done with you for ever.”

“Come, you must drink some of this nasty stuff. You will need strength to tell your husband all the unpleasant things your soul is charged with. Take just a little.”

She turned her face away and would not answer. He brought another chair and sat down beside her. “My lost, forlorn, betrayed one—”

“I am,” she sobbed. “You don’t mean it, but I am.”

“You are also my dearest and best of wives. If you ever loved me, Hetty, do, for my once dear sake, drink this before it gets cold.”

She pouted, sobbed, and yielded to some gentle force which he used, as a child allows herself to be half persuaded, half compelled, to take physic.

“Do you feel better and more comfortable now?” he said.

“No,” she replied, angry with herself for feeling both.

“Then,” he said cheerfully, as if she had uttered a hearty affirmative, “I will put some more coals on the fire, and we shall be as snug as possible. It makes me wildly happy to see you at my fireside, and to know that you are my own wife.”

“I wonder how you can look me in the face and say so,” she cried.

“I should wonder at myself if I could look at your face and say anything else. Oatmeal is a capital restorative; all your energy is coming back. There, that will make a magnificent blaze presently.”

“I never thought you deceitful, Sidney, whatever other faults you might have had.”

“Precisely, my love. I understand your feelings. Murder, burglary, intemperance, or the minor vices you could have borne; but deceit you cannot abide.”

“I will go away,” she said despairingly, with a fresh burst of tears. “I will not be laughed at and betrayed. I will go barefooted.” She rose and attempted to reach the door; but he intercepted her and said:

“My love, there is something serious the matter. What is it? Don’t be angry with me.”

He brought her back to the chair. She took Agatha’s letter from the pocket of her fur cloak, and handed it to him with a faint attempt to be tragic.

“Read that,” she said. “And never speak to me again. All is over between us.”

He took it curiously, and turned it to look at the signature. “Aha!” he said, “my golden idol has been making mischief, has she?”

“There!” exclaimed Henrietta. “You have said it to my face! You have convicted yourself out of your own mouth!”

“Wait a moment, my dear. I have not read the letter yet.”

He rose and walked to and fro through the room, reading. She watched him, angrily confident that she should presently see him change countenance. Suddenly he drooped as if his spine had partly given way; and in this ungraceful attitude he read the remainder of the letter. When he had finished he threw it on the table, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and roared with laughter, huddling himself together as if he could concentrate the joke by collecting himself into the smallest possible compass. Henrietta, speechless with indignation, could only look her feelings. At last he came and sat down beside her.

“And so,” he said, “on receiving this you rushed out in the cold and came all the way to Lyvern. Now, it seems to me that you must either love me very much—”

“I don’t. I hate you.”

“Or else love yourself very much.”

“Oh!” And she wept afresh. “You are a selfish brute, and you do just as you like without considering anyone else. No one ever thinks of me. And now you won’t even take the trouble to deny that shameful letter.”

“Why should I deny it? It is true. Do you not see the irony of all this? I amuse myself by paying a few compliments to a schoolgirl for whom I do not care two straws more than for any agreeable and passably clever woman I meet. Nevertheless, I occasionally feel a pang of remorse because I think that she may love me seriously, although I am only playing with her. I pity the poor heart I have wantonly ensnared. And, all the time, she is pitying me for exactly the same reason! She is conscience-stricken because she is only indulging in the luxury of being adored ‘by far the cleverest man she has ever met,’ and is as heart-whole as I am! Ha, ha! That is the basis of the religion of love of which poets are the high-priests. Each worshipper knows that his own love is either a transient passion or a sham copied from his favorite poem; but he believes honestly in the love of others for him. Ho, ho! Is it not a silly world, my dear?”

“You had no right to make love to Agatha. You have no right to make love to anyone but me; and I won’t bear it.”

“You are angry because Agatha has infringed your monopoly. Always monopoly! Why, you silly girl, do you suppose that I belong to you, body and soul? — that I may not be moved except by your affection, or think except of your beauty?”

“You may call me as many names as you please, but you have no right to make love to Agatha.”

“My dearest, I do not recollect calling you any names. I think you said something about a selfish brute.”

“I did not. You called me a silly girl.”

“But, my love, you are.”

“And so YOU are. You are thoroughly selfish.”

“I don’t deny it. But let us return to our subject. What did we begin to quarrel about?”

“I am not quarrelling, Sidney. It is you.”

“Well, what did I begin to quarrel about?”

“About Agatha Wylie.”

“Oh, pardon me, Hetty; I certainly did not begin to quarrel about her. I am very fond of her — more so, it appears, than she is of me. One moment, Hetty, before you recommence your reproaches. Why do you dislike my saying pretty things to Agatha?”

Henrietta hesitated, and said: “Because you have no right to. It shows how little you care for me.”

“It has nothing to do with you. It only shows how much I care for her.”

“I will not stay here to be insulted,” said Hetty, her distress returning. “I will go home.”

“Not to-night; there is no train.”

“I will walk.”

“It is too far.”

“I don’t care. I will not stay here, though I die of cold by the roadside.”

“My cherished one, I have been annoying you purposely because you show by your anger that you have not ceased to care for me. I am in the wrong, as I usually am, and it is all my fault. Agatha knows nothing about our marriage.”

“I do not blame you so much,” said Henrietta, suffering him to place her head on his shoulder; “but I will never speak to Agatha again. She has behaved shamefully to me, and I will tell her so.”

“No doubt she will opine that it is all your fault, dearest, and that I have behaved admirably. Between you I shall stand exonerated. And now, since it is too cold for walking, since it is late, since it is far to Lyvern and farther to London, I must improvise some accommodation for you here.”

“But—”

“But there is no help for it. You must stay.”

CHAPTER IX

Next day Smilash obtained from his wife a promise that she would behave towards Agatha as if the letter had given no offence. Henrietta pleaded as movingly as she could for an immediate return to their domestic state, but he put her off with endearing speeches, promised nothing but eternal affection, and sent her back to London by the twelve o’clock express. Then his countenance changed; he walked back to Lyvern, and thence to the chalet, like a man pursued by disgust and remorse. Later in the afternoon, to raise his spirits, he took his skates and went to Wickens’s pond, where, it being Saturday, he found the ice crowded with the Alton students and their half-holiday visitors. Fairholme, describing circles with his habitual air of compressed hardihood, stopped and stared with indignant surprise as Smilash lurched past him.

“Is that man here by your permission?” he said to Farmer Wickens, who was walking about as if superintending a harvest.

“He is here because he likes, I take it,” said Wickens stubbornly. “He is a neighbor of mine and a friend of mine. Is there any objections to my having a friend on my own pond, seein’ that there is nigh on two or three ton of other people’s friends on it without as much as a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave.”

“Oh, no,” said Fairholme, somewhat dashed. “If you are satisfied there can be no objection.”

“I’m glad on it. I thought there mout be.”

“Let me tell you,” said Fairholme, nettled, “that your landlord would not be pleased to see him here. He sent one of Sir John’s best shepherds out of the country, after filling his head with ideas above his station. I heard Sir John speak very warmly about it last Sunday.”

“Mayhap you did, Muster Fairholme. I have a lease of this land — and gravelly, poor stuff it is — and I am no ways beholden to Sir John’s likings and dislikings. A very good thing too for Sir John that I have a lease, for there ain’t a man in the country ‘ud tak’ a present o’ the farm if it was free to-morrow. And what’s a’ more, though that young man do talk foolish things about the rights of farm laborers and such-like nonsense, if Sir John was to hear him layin’ it down concernin’ rent and improvements, and the way we tenant farmers is put upon, p’raps he’d speak warmer than ever next Sunday.”

And Wickens, with a smile expressive of his sense of having retorted effectively upon the parson, nodded and walked away.

Just then Agatha, skating hand in hand with Jane Carpenter, heard these words in her ear: “I have something very funny to tell you. Don’t look round.”

She recognized the voice of Smilash and obeyed.

“I am not quite sure that you will enjoy it as it deserves,” he added, and darted off again, after casting an eloquent glance at Miss Carpenter.

Agatha disengaged herself from her companion, made a circuit, and passed near Smilash, saying: “What is it?”

Smilash flitted away like a swallow, traced several circles around Fairholme, and then returned to Agatha and proceeded side by side with her.

“I have read the letter you wrote to Hetty,” he said.

Agatha’s face began to glow. She forgot to maintain her balance, and almost fell.

“Take care. And so you are not fond of me — in the romantic sense?”

No answer. Agatha dumb and afraid to lift her eyelids.

“That is fortunate,” he continued, “because — good evening, Miss Ward; I have done nothing but admire your skating for the last hour — because men were deceivers ever; and I am no exception, as you will presently admit.”

Agatha murmured something, but it was unintelligible amid the din of skating.

“You think not? Well, perhaps you are right; I have said nothing to you that is not in a measure true. You have always had a peculiar charm for me. But I did not mean you to tell Hetty. Can you guess why?”

Agatha shook her head.

“Because she is my wife.”

Agatha’s ankles became limp. With an effort she kept upright until she reached Jane, to whom she clung for support.

“Don’t,” screamed Jane. “You’ll upset me.”

“I must sit down,” said Agatha. “I am tired. Let me lean on you until we get to the chairs.”

“Bosh! I can skate for an hour without sitting down,” said Jane. However, she helped Agatha to a chair and left her. Then Smilash, as if desiring a rest also, sat down close by on the margin of the pond.

“Well,” he said, without troubling himself as to whether their conversation attracted attention or not, “what do you think of me now?”

“Why did you not tell me before, Mr. Trefusis?”

“That is the cream of the joke,” he replied, poising his heels on the ice so that his skates stood vertically at legs’ length from him, and looking at them with a cynical air. “I thought you were in love with me, and that the truth would be too severe a blow to you. Ha! ha! And, for the same reason, you generously forbore to tell me that you were no more in love with me than with the man in the moon. Each played a farce, and palmed it off on the other as a tragedy.”

“There are some things so unmanly, so unkind, and so cruel,” said Agatha, “that I cannot understand any gentleman saying them to a girl. Please do not speak to me again. Miss Ward! Come to me for a moment. I — I am not well.”

Ward hurried to her side. Smilash, after staring at her for a moment in astonishment, and in some concern, skimmed away into the crowd. When he reached the opposite bank he took off his skates and asked Jane, who strayed intentionally in his direction, to tell Miss Wylie that he was gone, and would skate no more there. Without adding a word of explanation he left her and made for his dwelling. As he went down into the hollow where the road passed through the plantation on the college side of the chalet he descried a boy, in the uniform of the post office, sliding along the frozen ditch. A presentiment of evil tidings came upon him like a darkening of the sky. He quickened his pace.

“Anything for me?” he said.

The boy, who knew him, fumbled in a letter case and produced a buff envelope. It contained a telegram.

From Jansenius, London.

TO J. Smilash, Chamoounix Villa, Lyvern.

Henrietta dangerously ill after journey wants to see you doctors say must come at once.

There was a pause. Then he folded the paper methodically and put it in his pocket, as if quite done with it.

“And so,” he said, “perhaps the tragedy is to follow the farce after all.”

He looked at the boy, who retreated, not liking his expression.

“Did you slide all the way from Lyvern?”

“Only to come quicker,” said the messenger, faltering. “I came as quick as I could.”

“You carried news heavy enough to break the thickest ice ever frozen. I have a mind to throw you over the top of that tree instead of giving you this half-crown.”

“You let me alone,” whimpered the boy, retreating another pace.

“Get back to Lyvern as fast as you can run or slide, and tell Mr. Marsh to send me the fastest trap he has, to drive me to the railway station. Here is your half-crown. Off with you; and if I do not find the trap ready when I want it, woe betide you.”

The boy came for the money mistrustfully, and ran off with it as fast as he could. Smilash went into the chalet and never reappeared. Instead, Trefusis, a gentleman in an ulster, carrying a rug, came out, locked the door, and hurried along the road to Lyvern, where he was picked up by the trap, and carried swiftly to the railway station, just in time to catch the London train.

“Evening paper, sir?” said a voice at the window, as he settled himself in the corner of a first-class carriage.

“No, thank you.”

“Footwarmer, sir?” said a porter, appearing in the news-vender’s place.

“Ah, that’s a good idea. Yes, let me have a footwarmer.”

The footwarmer was brought, and Trefusis composed himself comfortably for his journey. It seemed very short to him; he could hardly believe, when the train arrived in London, that he had been nearly three hours on the way.

There was a sense of Christmas about the travellers and the people who were at the terminus to meet them. The porter who came to the carriage door reminded Trefusis by his manner and voice that the season was one at which it becomes a gentleman to be festive and liberal.

“Wot luggage, sir? Hansom or fourweoll, sir?”

For a moment Trefusis felt a vagabond impulse to resume the language of Smilash and fable to the man of hampers of turkey and plum-pudding in the van. But he repressed it, got into a hansom, and was driven to his father-in-law’s house in Belsize Avenue, studying in a gloomily critical mood the anxiety that surged upon him and made his heart beat like a boy’s as he drew near his destination. There were two carriages at the door when he alighted. The reticent expression of the coachmen sent a tremor through him.

The door opened before he rang. “If you please, sir,” said the maid in a low voice, “will you step into the library; and the doctor will see you immediately.”

On the first landing of the staircase two gentlemen were speaking to Mr. Jansenius, who hastily moved out of sight, not before a glimpse of his air of grief and discomfiture had given Trefusis a strange twinge, succeeded by a sensation of having been twenty years a widower. He smiled unconcernedly as he followed the girl into the library, and asked her how she did. She murmured some reply and hurried away, thinking that the poor young man would alter his tone presently.

He was joined at once by a gray whiskered gentleman, scrupulously dressed and mannered. Trefusis introduced himself, and the physician looked at him with some interest. Then he said:

“You have arrived too late, Mr. Trefusis. All is over, I am sorry to say.”

“Was the long railway journey she took in this cold weather the cause of her death?”

Some bitter words that the physician had heard upstairs made him aware that this was a delicate question. But he said quietly: “The proximate cause, doubtless. The proximate cause.”

“She received some unwelcome and quite unlooked-for intelligence before she started. Had that anything to do with her death, do you think?”

“It may have produced an unfavorable effect,” said the physician, growing restive and taking up his gloves. “The habit of referring such events to such causes is carried too far, as a rule.”

“No doubt. I am curious because the event is novel in my experience. I suppose it is a commonplace in yours. Pardon me. The loss of a lady so young and so favorably circumstanced is not a commonplace either in my experience or in my opinion.” The physician held up his head as he spoke, in protest against any assumption that his sympathies had been blunted by his profession.

“Did she suffer?”

“For some hours, yes. We were able to do a little to alleviate her pain — poor thing!” He almost forgot Trefusis as he added the apostrophe.

“Hours of pain! Can you conceive any good purpose that those hours may have served?”

The physician shook his head, leaving it doubtful whether he meant to reply in the negative or to deplore considerations of that nature. He also made a movement to depart, being uneasy in conversation with Trefusis, who would, he felt sure, presently ask questions or make remarks with which he could hardly deal without committing himself in some direction. His conscience was not quite at rest. Henrietta’s pain had not, he thought, served any good purpose; but he did not want to say so, lest he should acquire a reputation for impiety and lose his practice. He believed that the general practitioner who attended the family, and had called him in when the case grew serious, had treated Henrietta unskilfully, but professional etiquette bound him so strongly that, sooner than betray his colleague’s inefficiency, he would have allowed him to decimate London.

“One word more,” said Trefusis. “Did she know that she was dying?”

“No. I considered it best that she should not be informed of her danger. She passed away without any apprehension.”

“Then one can think of it with equanimity. She dreaded death, poor child. The wonder is that there was not enough folly in the household to prevail against your good sense.”

The physician bowed and took his leave, esteeming himself somewhat fortunate in escaping without being reproached for his humanity in having allowed Henrietta to die unawares.

A moment later the general practitioner entered. Trefusis, having accompanied the consulting physician to the door, detected the family doctor in the act of pulling a long face just outside it. Restraining a desire to seize him by the throat, he seated himself on the edge of the table and said cheerfully:

“Well, doctor, how has the world used you since we last met?”

The doctor was taken aback, but the solemn disposition of his features did not relax as he almost intoned: “Has Sir Francis told you the sad news, Mr. Trefusis?”

“Yes. Frightful, isn’t it? Lord bless me, we’re here to-day and gone to-morrow.”

“True, very true!”

“Sir Francis has a high opinion of you.”

The doctor looked a little foolish. “Everything was done that could be done, Mr. Trefusis; but Mrs. Jansenius was very anxious that no stone should be left unturned. She was good enough to say that her sole reason for wishing me to call in Sir Francis was that you should have no cause to complain.”

“Indeed!”

“An excellent mother! A sad event for her! Ah, yes, yes! Dear me! A very sad event!”

“Most disagreeable. Such a cold day too. Pleasanter to be in heaven than here in such weather, possibly.”

“Ah!” said the doctor, as if much sound comfort lay in that. “I hope so; I hope so; I do not doubt it. Sir Francis did not permit us to tell her, and I, of course, deferred to him. Perhaps it was for the best.”

“You would have told her, then, if Sir Francis had not objected?”

“Well, there are, you see, considerations which we must not ignore in our profession. Death is a serious thing, as I am sure I need not remind you, Mr. Trefusis. We have sometimes higher duties than indulgence to the natural feelings of our patients.”

“Quite so. The possibility of eternal bliss and the probability of eternal torment are consolations not to be lightly withheld from a dying girl, eh? However, what’s past cannot be mended. I have much to be thankful for, after all. I am a young man, and shall not cut a bad figure as a widower. And now tell me, doctor, am I not in very bad repute upstairs?”

“Mr. Trefusis! Sir! I cannot meddle in family matters. I understand my duties and never over step them.” The doctor, shocked at last, spoke as loftily as he could.

“Then I will go and see Mr. Jansenius,” said Trefusis, getting off the table.

“Stay, sir! One moment. I have not finished. Mrs. Jansenius has asked me to ask — I was about to say that I am not speaking now as the medical adviser of this family; but although an old friend — and — ahem! Mrs. Jansenius has asked me to ask — to request you to excuse Mr. Jansenius, as he is prostrated by grief, and is, as I can — as a medical man — assure you, unable to see anyone. She will speak to you herself as soon as she feels able to do so — at some time this evening. Meanwhile, of course, any orders you may give — you must be fatigued by your journey, and I always recommend people not to fast too long; it produces an acute form of indigestion — any orders you may wish to give will, of course, be attended to at once.”

“I think,” said Trefusis, after a moment’s reflection, “I will order a hansom.”

“There is no ill-feeling,” said the doctor, who, as a slow man, was usually alarmed by prompt decisions, even when they seemed wise to him, as this one did. “I hope you have not gathered from anything I have said—”

“Not at all; you have displayed the utmost tact. But I think I had better go. Jansenius can bear death and misery with perfect fortitude when it is on a large scale and hidden in a back slum. But when it breaks into his own house, and attacks his property — his daughter was his property until very recently — he is just the man to lose his head and quarrel with me for keeping mine.”

The doctor was unable to cope with this speech, which conveyed vaguely monstrous ideas to him. Seeing Trefusis about to leave, he said in a low voice: “Will you go upstairs?”

“Upstairs! Why?”

“I — I thought you might wish to see—” He did not finish the sentence, but Trefusis flinched; the blank had expressed what was meant.

“To see something that was Henrietta, and that is a thing we must cast out and hide, with a little superstitious mumming to save appearances. Why did you remind me of it?”

“But, sir, whatever your views may be, will you not, as a matter of form, in deference to the feelings of the family—”

“Let them spare their feelings for the living, on whose behalf I have often appealed to them in vain,” cried Trefusis, losing patience. “Damn their feelings!” And, turning to the door, he found it open, and Mrs. Jansenius there listening.

Trefusis was confounded. He knew what the effect of his speech must be, and felt that it would be folly to attempt excuse or explanation. He put his hands into his pockets, leaned against the table, and looked at her, mutely wondering what would follow on her part.

The doctor broke the silence by saying tremulously, “I have communicated the melancholy intelligence to Mr. Trefusis.”

“I hope you told him also,” she said sternly, “that, however deficient we may be in feeling, we did everything that lay in our power for our child.”

“I am quite satisfied,” said Trefusis.

“No doubt you are — with the result,” said Mrs. Jansenius, hardly. “I wish to know whether you have anything to complain of.”

“Nothing.”

“Please do not imply that anything has happened through our neglect.”

“What have I to complain of? She had a warm room and a luxurious bed to die in, with the best medical advice in the world. Plenty of people are starving and freezing to-day that we may have the means to die fashionably; ask THEM if they have any cause for complaint. Do you think I will wrangle over her body about the amount of money spent on her illness? What measure is that of the cause she had for complaint? I never grudged money to her — how could I, seeing that more than I can waste is given to me for nothing? Or how could you? Yet she had great reason to complain of me. You will allow that to be so.”

“It is perfectly true.”

“Well, when I am in the humor for it, I will reproach myself and not you.” He paused, and then turned forcibly on her, saying, “Why do you select this time, of all others, to speak so bitterly to me?”

“I am not aware that I have said anything to call for such a remark. Did YOU,” (appealing to the doctor) “hear me say anything?”

“Mr. Trefusis does not mean to say that you did, I am sure. Oh, no. Mr. Trefusis’s feelings are naturally — are harrowed. That is all.”

“My feelings!” cried Trefusis impatiently. “Do you suppose my feelings are a trumpery set of social observances, to be harrowed to order and exhibited at funerals? She has gone as we three shall go soon enough. If we were immortal, we might reasonably pity the dead. As we are not, we had better save our energies to minimize the harm we are likely to do before we follow her.”

The doctor was deeply offended by this speech, for the statement that he should one day die seemed to him a reflection upon his professional mastery over death. Mrs. Jansenius was glad to see Trefusis confirming her bad opinion and report of him by his conduct and language in the doctor’s presence. There was a brief pause, and then Trefusis, too far out of sympathy with them to be able to lead the conversation into a kinder vein, left the room. In the act of putting on his overcoat in the hall, he hesitated, and hung it up again irresolutely. Suddenly he ran upstairs. At the sound of his steps a woman came from one of the rooms and looked inquiringly at him.

“Is it here?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered.

A painful sense of constriction came in his chest, and he turned pale and stopped with his hand on the lock.

“Don’t be afraid, sir,” said the woman, with an encouraging smile. “She looks beautiful.”

He looked at her with a strange grin, as if she had uttered a ghastly but irresistible joke. Then he went in, and, when he reached the bed, wished he had stayed without. He was not one of those who, seeing little in the faces of the living miss little in the faces of the dead. The arrangement of the black hair on the pillow, the soft drapery, and the flowers placed there by the nurse to complete the artistic effect to which she had so confidently referred, were lost on him; he saw only a lifeless mask that had been his wife’s face, and at sight of it his knees failed, and he had to lean for support on the rail at the foot of the bed.

When he looked again the face seemed to have changed. It was no longer a waxlike mask, but Henrietta, girlish and pathetically at rest. Death seemed to have cancelled her marriage and womanhood; he had never seen her look so young. A minute passed, and then a tear dropped on the coverlet. He started; shook another tear on his hand, and stared at it incredulously.

“This is a fraud of which I have never even dreamed,” he said. “Tears and no sorrow! Here am I crying! growing maudlin! whilst I am glad that she is gone and I free. I have the mechanism of grief in me somewhere; it begins to turn at sight of her though I have no sorrow; just as she used to start the mechanism of passion when I had no love. And that made no difference to her; whilst the wheels went round she was satisfied. I hope the mechanism of grief will flag and stop in its spinning as soon as the other used to. It is stopping already, I think. What a mockery! Whilst it lasts I suppose I am really sorry. And yet, would I restore her to life if I could? Perhaps so; I am therefore thankful that I cannot.” He folded his arms on the rail and gravely addressed the dead figure, which still affected him so strongly that he had to exert his will to face it with composure. “If you really loved me, it is well for you that you are dead — idiot that I was to believe that the passion you could inspire, you poor child, would last. We are both lucky; I have escaped from you, and you have escaped from yourself.”

Presently he breathed more freely and looked round the room to help himself into a matter-of-fact vein by a little unembarrassed action, and the commonplace aspect of the bedroom furniture. He went to the pillow, and bent over it, examining the face closely.

“Poor child!” he said again, tenderly. Then, with sudden reaction, apostrophizing himself instead of his wife, “Poor ass! Poor idiot! Poor jackanapes! Here is the body of a woman who was nearly as old as myself, and perhaps wiser, and here am I moralizing over it as if I were God Almighty and she a baby! The more you remind a man of what he is, the more conceited he becomes. Monstrous! I shall feel immortal presently.”

He touched the cheek with a faint attempt at roughness, to feel how cold it was. Then he touched his own, and remarked:

“This is what I am hastening toward at the express speed of sixty minutes an hour!” He stood looking down at the face and tasting this sombre reflection for a long time. When it palled on him, he roused himself, and exclaimed more cheerfully:

“After all, she is not dead. Every word she uttered — every idea she formed and expressed, was an inexhaustible and indestructible impulse.” He paused, considered a little further, and relapsed into gloom, adding, “and the dozen others whose names will be with hers in the ‘Times’ to-morrow? Their words too are still in the air, to endure there to all eternity. Hm! How the air must be crammed with nonsense! Two sounds sometimes produce a silence; perhaps ideas neutralize one another in some analogous way. No, my dear; you are dead and gone and done with, and I shall be dead and gone and done with too soon to leave me leisure to fool myself with hopes of immortality. Poor Hetty! Well, good-by, my darling. Let us pretend for a moment that you can hear that; I know it will please you.”

All this was in a half-articulate whisper. When he ceased he still bent over the body, gazing intently at it. Even when he had exhausted the subject, and turned to go, he changed his mind, and looked again for a while. Then he stood erect, apparently nerved and refreshed, and left the room with a firm step. The woman was waiting outside. Seeing that he was less distressed than when he entered, she said:

“I hope you are satisfied, sir!”

“Delighted! Charmed! The arrangements are extremely pretty and tasteful. Most consolatory.” And he gave her half a sovereign.

“I thank you, sir,” she said, dropping a curtsey. “The poor young lady! She was anxious to see you, sir. To hear her say that you were the only one that cared for her! And so fretful with her mother, too. ‘Let him be told that I am dangerously ill,’ says she, ‘and he’ll come.’ She didn’t know how true her word was, poor thing; and she went off without being aware of it.”

“Flattering herself and flattering me. Happy girl!”

“Bless you, I know what her feelings were, sir; I have had experience.” Here she approached him confidentially, and whispered: “The family were again’ you, sir, and she knew it. But she wouldn’t listen to them. She thought of nothing, when she was easy enough to think at all, but of your coming. And — hush! Here’s the old gentleman.”

Trefusis looked round and saw Mr. Jansenius, whose handsome face was white and seamed with grief and annoyance. He drew back from the proffered hand of his son-in-law, like an overworried child from an ill-timed attempt to pet it. Trefusis pitied him. The nurse coughed and retired.

“Have you been speaking to Mrs. Jansenius?” said Trefusis.

“Yes,” said Jansenius offensively.

“So have I, unfortunately. Pray make my apologies to her. I was rude. The circumstances upset me.”

“You are not upset, sir,” said Jansenius loudly. “You do not care a damn.”

Trefusis recoiled.

“You damned my feelings, and I will damn yours,” continued Jansenius in the same tone. Trefusis involuntarily looked at the door through which he had lately passed. Then, recovering himself, he said quietly:

“It does not matter. She can’t hear us.”

Before Jansenius could reply his wife hurried upstairs, caught him by the arm, and said, “Don’t speak to him, John. And you,” she added, to Trefusis, “WILL you begone?”

“What!” he said, looking cynically at her. “Without my dead! Without my property! Well, be it so.”

“What do you know of the feelings of a respectable man?” persisted Jansenius, breaking out again in spite of his wife. “Nothing is sacred to you. This shows what Socialists are!”

“And what fathers are, and what mothers are,” retorted Trefusis, giving way to his temper. “I thought you loved Hetty, but I see that you only love your feelings and your respectability. The devil take both! She was right; my love for her, incomplete as it was, was greater than yours.” And he left the house in dudgeon.

But he stood awhile in the avenue to laugh at himself and his father-in-law. Then he took a hansom and was driven to the house of his solicitor, whom he wished to consult on the settlement of his late wife’s affairs.

CHAPTER X

The remains of Henrietta Trefusis were interred in Highgate Cemetery the day before Christmas Eve. Three noblemen sent their carriages to the funeral, and the friends and clients of Mr. Jansenius, to a large number, attended in person. The bier was covered with a profusion of costly Bowers. The undertaker, instructed to spare no expense, provided long-tailed black horses, with black palls on their backs and black plumes upon their foreheads; coachmen decorated with scarves and jack-boots, black hammercloths, cloaks, and gloves, with many hired mourners, who, however, would have been instantly discharged had they presumed to betray emotion, or in any way overstep their function of walking beside the hearse with brass-tipped batons in their hands.

Among the genuine mourners were Mr. Jansenius, who burst into tears at the ceremony of casting earth on the coffin; the boy Arthur, who, preoccupied by the novelty of appearing in a long cloak at the head of a public procession, felt that he was not so sorry as he ought to be when he saw his papa cry; and a cousin who had once asked Henrietta to marry him, and who now, full of tragic reflections, was enjoying his despair intensely.

The rest whispered, whenever they could decently do so, about a strange omission in the arrangements. The husband of the deceased was absent. Members of the family and intimate friends were told by Daniel Jansenius that the widower had acted in a blackguard way, and that the Janseniuses did not care two-pence whether he came or stayed at home; that, but for the indecency of the thing, they were just as glad that he was keeping away. Others, who had no claim to be privately informed, made inquiries of the undertaker’s foreman, who said he understood the gentleman objected to large funerals. Asked why, he said he supposed it was on the ground of expense. This being met by a remark that Mr. Trefusis was very wealthy, he added that he had been told so, but believed the money had not come from the lady; that people seldom cared to go to a great expense for a funeral unless they came into something good by the death; and that some parties the more they had the more they grudged. Before the funeral guests dispersed, the report spread by Mr. Jansenius’s brother had got mixed with the views of the foreman, and had given rise to a story of Trefusis expressing joy at his wife’s death with frightful oaths in her father’s house whilst she lay dead there, and refusing to pay a farthing of her debts or funeral expenses.

Some days later, when gossip on the subject was subsiding, a fresh scandal revived it. A literary friend of Mr. Jansenius’s helped him to compose an epitaph, and added to it a couple of pretty and touching stanzas, setting forth that Henrietta’s character had been one of rare sweetness and virtue, and that her friends would never cease to sorrow for her loss. A tradesman who described himself as a “monumental mason” furnished a book of tomb designs, and Mr. Jansenius selected a highly ornamental one, and proposed to defray half the cost of its erection. Trefusis objected that the epitaph was untrue, and said that he did not see why tombstones should be privileged to publish false statements. It was reported that he had followed up his former misconduct by calling his father-in-law a liar, and that he had ordered a common tombstone from some cheap-jack at the East-end. He had, in fact, spoken contemptuously of the monumental tradesman as an “exploiter” of labor, and had asked a young working mason, a member of the International Association, to design a monument for the gratification of Jansenius.

The mason, with much pains and misgiving, produced an original design. Trefusis approved of it, and resolved to have it executed by the hands of the designer. He hired a sculptor’s studio, purchased blocks of marble of the dimensions and quality described to him by the mason, and invited him to set to work forthwith.

Trefusis now encountered a difficulty. He wished to pay the mason the just value of his work, no more and no less. But this he could not ascertain. The only available standard was the market price, and this he rejected as being fixed by competition among capitalists who could only secure profit by obtaining from their workmen more products than they paid them for, and could only tempt customers by offering a share of the unpaid-for part of the products as a reduction in price. Thus he found that the system of withholding the indispensable materials for production and subsistence from the laborers, except on condition of their supporting an idle class whilst accepting a lower standard of comfort for themselves than for that idle class, rendered the determination of just ratios of exchange, and consequently the practice of honest dealing, impossible. He had at last to ask the mason what he would consider fair payment for the execution of the design, though he knew that the man could no more solve the problem than he, and that, though he would certainly ask as much as he thought he could get, his demand must be limited by his poverty and by the competition of the monumental tradesman. Trefusis settled the matter by giving double what was asked, only imposing such conditions as were necessary to compel the mason to execute the work himself, and not make a profit by hiring other men at the market rate of wages to do it.

But the design was, to its author’s astonishment, to be paid for separately. The mason, after hesitating a long time between two-pounds-ten and five pounds, was emboldened by a fellow-workman, who treated him to some hot whiskey and water, to name the larger sum. Trefusis paid the money at once, and then set himself to find out how much a similar design would have cost from the hands of an eminent Royal Academician. Happening to know a gentleman in this position, he consulted him, and was informed that the probable cost would be from five hundred to one thousand pounds. Trefusis expressed his opinion that the mason’s charge was the more reasonable, somewhat to the indignation of his artist friend, who reminded him of the years which a Royal Academician has to spend in acquiring his skill. Trefusis mentioned that the apprenticeship of a mason was quite as long, twice as laborious, and not half so pleasant. The artist now began to find Trefusis’s Socialistic views, with which he had previously fancied himself in sympathy, both odious and dangerous. He demanded whether nothing was to be allowed for genius. Trefusis warmly replied that genius cost its possessor nothing; that it was the inheritance of the whole race incidentally vested in a single individual, and that if that individual employed his monopoly of it to extort money from others, he deserved nothing better than hanging. The artist lost his temper, and suggested that if Trefusis could not feel that the prerogative of art was divine, perhaps he could understand that a painter was not such a fool as to design a tomb for five pounds when he might be painting a portrait for a thousand. Trefusis retorted that the fact of a man paying a thousand pounds for a portrait proved that he had not earned the money, and was therefore either a thief or a beggar. The common workman who sacrificed sixpence from his week’s wages for a cheap photograph to present to his sweetheart, or a shilling for a pair of chromolithographic pictures or delft figures to place on his mantelboard, suffered greater privation for the sake of possessing a work of art than the great landlord or shareholder who paid a thousand pounds, which he was too rich to miss, for a portrait that, like Hogarth’s Jack Sheppard, was only interesting to students of criminal physiognomy. A lively quarrel ensued, Trefusis denouncing the folly of artists in fancying themselves a priestly caste when they were obviously only the parasites and favored slaves of the moneyed classes, and his friend (temporarily his enemy) sneering bitterly at levellers who were for levelling down instead of levelling up. Finally, tired of disputing, and remorseful for their acrimony, they dined amicably together.

The monument was placed in Highgate Cemetery by a small band of workmen whom Trefusis found out of employment. It bore the following inscription:

THIS IS THE MONUMENT OF HENRIETTA JANSENIUS WHO WAS BORN ON THE 26TH JULY, 1856, MARRIED TO SIDNEY TREFUSIS ON THE 23RD AUGUST, 1875, AND WHO DIED ON THE 21ST DECEMBER IN THE SAME YEAR.

Mr. Jansenius took this as an insult to his daughter’s memory, and, as the tomb was much smaller than many which had been erected in the cemetery by families to whom the Janseniuses claimed superiority, cited it as an example of the widower’s meanness. But by other persons it was so much admired that Trefusis hoped it would ensure the prosperity of its designer. The contrary happened. When the mason attempted to return to his ordinary work he was informed that he had contravened trade usage, and that his former employers would have nothing more to say to him. On applying for advice and assistance to the trades-union of which he was a member he received the same reply, and was further reproached for treachery to his fellow-workmen. He returned to Trefusis to say that the tombstone job had ruined him. Trefusis, enraged, wrote an argumentative letter to the “Times,” which was not inserted, a sarcastic one to the trades-union, which did no good, and a fierce one to the employers, who threatened to take an action for libel. He had to content himself with setting the man to work again on mantelpieces and other decorative stone-work for use in house property on the Trefusis estate. In a year or two his liberal payments enabled the mason to save sufficient to start as an employer, in which capacity he soon began to grow rich, as he knew by experience exactly how much his workmen could be forced to do, and how little they could be forced to take. Shortly after this change in his circumstances he became an advocate of thrift, temperance, and steady industry, and quitted the International Association, of which he had been an enthusiastic supporter when dependent on his own skill and taste as a working mason.

During these occurrences Agatha’s school-life ended. Her resolution to study hard during another term at the college had been formed, not for the sake of becoming learned, but that she might become more worthy of Smilash; and when she learned the truth about him from his own lips, the idea of returning to the scene of that humiliation became intolerable to her. She left under the impression that her heart was broken, for her smarting vanity, by the law of its own existence, would not perceive that it was the seat of the injury. So she bade Miss Wilson adieu; and the bee on the window pane was heard no more at Alton College.

The intelligence of Henrietta’s death shocked her the more because she could not help being glad that the only other person who knew of her folly with regard to Smilash (himself excepted) was now silenced forever. This seemed to her a terrible discovery of her own depravity. Under its influence she became almost religious, and caused some anxiety about her health to her mother, who was puzzled by her unwonted seriousness, and, in particular, by her determination not to speak of the misconduct of Trefusis, which was now the prevailing topic of conversation in the family. She listened in silence to gossiping discussions of his desertion of his wife, his heartless indifference to her decease, his violence and bad language by her deathbed, his parsimony, his malicious opposition to the wishes of the Janseniuses, his cheap tombstone with the insulting epitaph, his association with common workmen and low demagogues, his suspected connection with a secret society for the assassination of the royal family and blowing up of the army, his atheistic denial, in a pamphlet addressed to the clergy, of a statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury that spiritual aid alone could improve the condition of the poor in the East-end of London, and the crowning disgrace of his trial for seditious libel at the Old Bailey, where he was condemned to six months’ imprisonment; a penalty from which he was rescued by the ingenuity of his counsel, who discovered a flaw in the indictment, and succeeded, at great cost to Trefusis, in getting the sentence quashed. Agatha at last got tired of hearing of his misdeeds. She believed him to be heartless, selfish, and misguided, but she knew that he was not the loud, coarse, sensual, and ignorant brawler most of her mother’s gossips supposed him to be. She even felt, in spite of herself, an emotion of gratitude to the few who ventured to defend him.

Preparation for her first season helped her to forget her misadventure. She “came out” in due time, and an extremely dull season she found it. So much so, that she sometimes asked herself whether she should ever be happy again. At the college there had been good fellowship, fun, rules, and duties which were a source of strength when observed and a source of delicious excitement when violated, freedom from ceremony, toffee making, flights on the banisters, and appreciative audiences for the soldier in the chimney.

In society there were silly conversations lasting half a minute, cool acquaintanceships founded on such half-minutes, general reciprocity of suspicion, overcrowding, insufficient ventilation, bad music badly executed, late hours, unwholesome food, intoxicating liquors, jealous competition in useless expenditure, husband-hunting, flirting, dancing, theatres, and concerts. The last three, which Agatha liked, helped to make the contrast between Alton and London tolerable to her, but they had their drawbacks, for good partners at the dances, and good performances at the spiritless opera and concerts, were disappointingly scarce. Flirting she could not endure; she drove men away when they became tender, seeing in them the falsehood of Smilash without his wit. She was considered rude by the younger gentlemen of her circle. They discussed her bad manners among themselves, and agreed to punish her by not asking her to dance. She thus got rid, without knowing why, of the attentions she cared for least (she retained a schoolgirl’s cruel contempt for “boys”), and enjoyed herself as best she could with such of the older or more sensible men as were not intolerant of girls.

At best the year was the least happy she had ever spent. She repeatedly alarmed her mother by broaching projects of becoming a hospital nurse, a public singer, or an actress. These projects led to some desultory studies. In order to qualify herself as a nurse she read a handbook of physiology, which Mrs. Wylie thought so improper a subject for a young lady that she went in tears to beg Mrs. Jansenius to remonstrate with her unruly girl. Mrs. Jansenius, better advised, was of opinion that the more a woman knew the more wisely she was likely to act, and that Agatha would soon drop the physiology of her own accord. This proved true. Agatha, having finished her book by dint of extensive skipping, proceeded to study pathology from a volume of clinical lectures. Finding her own sensations exactly like those described in the book as symptoms of the direst diseases, she put it by in alarm, and took up a novel, which was free from the fault she had found in the lectures, inasmuch as none of the emotions it described in the least resembled any she had ever experienced.

After a brief interval, she consulted a fashionable teacher of singing as to whether her voice was strong enough for the operatic stage. He recommended her to study with him for six years, assuring her that at the end of that period — if she followed his directions — she should be the greatest singer in the world. To this there was, in her mind, the conclusive objection that in six years she should be an old woman. So she resolved to try privately whether she could not get on more quickly by herself. Meanwhile, with a view to the drama in case her operatic scheme should fail, she took lessons in elocution and gymnastics. Practice in these improved her health and spirits so much that her previous aspirations seemed too limited. She tried her hand at all the arts in succession, but was too discouraged by the weakness of her first attempts to persevere. She knew that as a general rule there are feeble and ridiculous beginnings to all excellence, but she never applied general rules to her own case, still thinking of herself as an exception to them, just as she had done when she romanced about Smilash. The illusions of adolescence were thick upon her.

Meanwhile her progress was creating anxieties in which she had no share. Her paroxysms of exhilaration, followed by a gnawing sense of failure and uselessness, were known to her mother only as “wildness” and “low spirits,” to be combated by needlework as a sedative, or beef tea as a stimulant. Mrs. Wylie had learnt by rote that the whole duty of a lady is to be graceful, charitable, helpful, modest, and disinterested whilst awaiting passively whatever lot these virtues may induce. But she had learnt by experience that a lady’s business in society is to get married, and that virtues and accomplishments alike are important only as attractions to eligible bachelors. As this truth is shameful, young ladies are left for a year or two to find it out for themselves; it is seldom explicitly conveyed to them at their entry into society. Hence they often throw away capital bargains in their first season, and are compelled to offer themselves at greatly reduced prices subsequently, when their attractions begin to stale. This was the fate which Mrs. Wylie, warned by Mrs. Jansenius, feared for Agatha, who, time after time when a callow gentleman of wealth and position was introduced to her, drove him brusquely away as soon as he ventured to hint that his affections were concerned in their acquaintanceship. The anxious mother had to console herself with the fact that her daughter drove away the ineligible as ruthlessly as the eligible, formed no unworldly attachments, was still very young, and would grow less coy as she advanced in years and in what Mrs. Jansenius called sense.

But as the seasons went by it remained questionable whether Agatha was the more to be congratulated on having begun life after leaving school or Henrietta on having finished it.

CHAPTER XI

Brandon Beeches, in the Thames valley, was the seat of Sir Charles Brandon, seventh baronet of that name. He had lost his father before attaining his majority, and had married shortly afterwards; so that in his twenty-fifth year he was father to three children. He was a little worn, in spite of his youth, but he was tall and agreeable, had a winning way of taking a kind and soothing view of the misfortunes of others, could tell a story well, liked music and could play and sing a little, loved the arts of design and could sketch a little in water colors, read every magazine from London to Paris that criticised pictures, had travelled a little, fished a little, shot a little, botanized a little, wandered restlessly in the footsteps of women, and dissipated his energies through all the small channels that his wealth opened and his talents made easy to him. He had no large knowledge of any subject, though he had looked into many just far enough to replace absolute unconsciousness of them with measurable ignorance. Never having enjoyed the sense of achievement, he was troubled with unsatisfied aspirations that filled him with melancholy and convinced him that he was a born artist. His wife found him selfish, peevish, hankering after change, and prone to believe that he was attacked by dangerous disease when he was only catching cold.

Lady Brandon, who believed that he understood all the subjects he talked about because she did not understand them herself, was one of his disappointments. In person she resembled none of the types of beauty striven after by the painters of her time, but she had charms to which few men are insensible. She was tall, soft, and stout, with ample and shapely arms, shoulders, and hips. With her small head, little ears, pretty lips, and roguish eye, she, being a very large creature, presented an immensity of half womanly, half infantile loveliness which smote even grave men with a desire to clasp her in their arms and kiss her. This desire had scattered the desultory intellectual culture of Sir Charles at first sight. His imagination invested her with the taste for the fine arts which he required from a wife, and he married her in her first season, only to discover that the amativeness in her temperament was so little and languid that she made all his attempts at fondness ridiculous, and robbed the caresses for which he had longed of all their anticipated ecstasy. Intellectually she fell still further short of his hopes. She looked upon his favorite art of painting as a pastime for amateur and a branch of the house-furnishing trade for professional artists. When he was discussing it among his friends, she would offer her opinion with a presumption which was the more trying as she frequently blundered upon a sound conclusion whilst he was reasoning his way to a hollow one with his utmost subtlety and seriousness. On such occasions his disgust did not trouble her in the least; she triumphed in it. She had concluded that marriage was a greater folly, and men greater fools, than she had supposed; but such beliefs rather lightened her sense of responsibility than disappointed her, and, as she had plenty of money, plenty of servants, plenty of visitors, and plenty of exercise on horseback, of which she was immoderately fond, her time passed pleasantly enough. Comfort seemed to her the natural order of life; trouble always surprised her. Her husband’s friends, who mistrusted every future hour, and found matter for bitter reflection in many past ones, were to her only examples of the power of sedentary habits and excessive reading to make men tripped and dull.

One fine May morning, as she cantered along the avenue at Brandon Beeches on a powerful bay horse, the gates at the end opened and a young man sped through them on a bicycle. He was of slight frame, with fine dark eyes and delicate nostrils. When he recognized Lady Brandon he waved his cap, and when they met he sprang from his inanimate steed, at which the bay horse shied.

“Don’t, you silly beast!” she cried, whacking the animal with the butt of her whip. “Though it’s natural enough, goodness knows! How d’ye do? The idea of anyone rich enough to afford a horse riding on a wheel like that!”

“But I am not rich enough to afford a horse,” he said, approaching her to pat the bay, having placed the bicycle against a tree. “Besides, I am afraid of horses, not being accustomed to them; and I know nothing about feeding them. My steed needs no food. He doesn’t bite nor kick. He never goes lame, nor sickens, nor dies, nor needs a groom, nor—”

“That’s all bosh,” said Lady Brandon impetuously. “It stumbles, and gives you the most awful tosses, and it goes lame by its treadles and thingamejigs coming off, and it wears out, and is twice as much trouble to keep clean and scrape the mud off as a horse, and all sorts of things. I think the most ridiculous sight in the world is a man on a bicycle, working away with his feet as hard as he possibly can, and believing that his horse is carrying him instead of, as anyone can see, he carrying the horse. You needn’t tell me that it isn’t easier to walk in the ordinary way than to drag a great dead iron thing along with you. It’s not good sense.”

“Nevertheless I can carry it a hundred miles further in a day than I can carry myself alone. Such are the marvels of machinery. But I know that we cut a very poor figure beside you and that magnificent creature not that anyone will look at me whilst you are by to occupy their attention so much more worthily.”

She darted a glance at him which clouded his vision and made his heart beat more strongly. This was an old habit of hers. She kept it up from love of fun, having no idea of the effect it produced on more ardent temperaments than her own. He continued hastily:

“Is Sir Charles within doors?”

“Oh, it’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of in my life,” she exclaimed. “A man that lives by himself in a place down by the Riverside Road like a toy savings bank — don’t you know the things I mean? — called Sallust’s House, says there is a right of way through our new pleasure ground. As if anyone could have any right there after all the money we have spent fencing it on three sides, and building up the wall by the road, and levelling, and planting, and draining, and goodness knows what else! And now the man says that all the common people and tramps in the neighborhood have a right to walk across it because they are too lazy to go round by the road. Sir Charles has gone to see the man about it. Of course he wouldn’t do as I wanted him.”

“What was that?”

“Write to tell the man to mind his own business, and to say that the first person we found attempting to trespass on our property should be given to the police.”

“Then I shall find no one at home. I beg your pardon for calling it so, but it is the only place like home to me.”

“Yes; it is so comfortable since we built the billiard room and took away those nasty hangings in the hall. I was ever so long trying to per—”

She was interrupted by an old laborer, who hobbled up as fast as his rheumatism would allow him, and began to speak without further ceremony than snatching off his cap.

“Th’ave coom to the noo groups, my lady, crowds of ‘em. An’ a parson with ‘em, an’ a flag! Sur Chorles he don’t know what to say; an’ sooch doin’s never was.”

Lady Brandon turned pale and pulled at her horse as if to back him out of some danger. Her visitor, puzzled, asked the old man what he meant.

“There’s goin’ to be a proceyshon through the noo groups,” he replied, “an’ the master can’t stop ‘em. Th’ave throon down the wall; three yards of it is lyin’ on Riverside Road. An’ there’s a parson with ‘em, and a flag. An’ him that lives in Sallust’s hoos, he’s there, hoddin’’em on.”

“Thrown down the wall!” exclaimed Lady Brandon, scarlet with indignation and pale with apprehension by turns. “What a disgraceful thing! Where are the police? Chester, will you come with me and see what they are doing? Sir Charles is no use. Do you think there is any danger?”

“There’s two police,” said the old man, “an’ him that lives at Sallust’s dar’d them stop him. They’re lookin’ on. An’ there’s a parson among ‘em. I see him pullin’ away at the wall with his own han’s.”

“I will go and see the fun,” said Chester.

Lady Brandon hesitated. But her anger and curiosity vanquished her fears. She overtook the bicycle, and they went together through the gates and by the highroad to the scene the old man had described. A heap of bricks and mortar lay in the roadway on each side of a breach in the newly built wall, over which Lady Brandon, from her eminence on horseback, could see, coming towards her across the pleasure ground, a column of about thirty persons. They marched three abreast in good order and in silence; the expression of all except a few mirthful faces being that of devotees fulfilling a rite. The gravity of the procession was deepened by the appearance of a clergyman in its ranks, which were composed of men of the middle class, and a few workmen carrying a banner inscribed THE SOIL or ENGLAND THE BIRTHRIGHT OF ALL HER PEOPLE. There were also four women, upon whom Lady Brandon looked with intense indignation and contempt. None of the men of the neighborhood had dared to join; they stood in the road whispering, and occasionally venturing to laugh at the jests of a couple of tramps who had stopped to see the fun, and who cared nothing for Sir Charles.

He, standing a little way within the field, was remonstrating angrily with a man of his own class, who stood with his back to the breach and his hands in the pockets of his snuff-colored clothes, contemplating the procession with elate satisfaction. Lady Brandon, at once suspecting that this was the man from Sallust’s House, and encouraged by the loyalty of the crowd, most of whom made way for her and touched their hats, hit the bay horse smartly with her whip and rode him, with a clatter of hoofs and scattering of clods, right at the snuff-colored enemy, who had to spring hastily aside to avoid her. There was a roar of laughter from the roadway, and the man turned sharply on her. But he suddenly smiled affably, replaced his hands in his pockets after raising his hat, and said:

“How do you do, Miss Carpenter? I thought you were a charge of cavalry.”

“I am not Miss Carpenter, I am Lady Brandon; and you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Smilash, if it is you that have brought these disgraceful people here.”

His eyes as he replied were eloquent with reproach to her for being no longer Miss Carpenter. “I am not Smilash,” he said; “I am Sidney Trefusis. I have just had the pleasure of meeting Sir Charles for the first time, and we shall be the best friends possible when I have convinced him that it is hardly fair to seize on a path belonging to the people and compel them to walk a mile and a half round his estate instead of four hundred yards between two portions of it.”

“I have already told you, sir,” said Sir Charles, “that I intend to open a still shorter path, and to allow all the well-conducted work-people to pass through twice a day. This will enable them to go to their work and return from it; and I will be at the cost of keeping the path in repair.”

“Thank you,” said Trefusis drily; “but why should we trouble you when we have a path of our own to use fifty times a day if we choose, without any man barring our way until our conduct happens to please him? Besides, your next heir would probably shut the path up the moment he came into possession.”

“Offering them a path is just what makes them impudent,” said Lady Brandon to her husband. “Why did you promise them anything? They would not think it a hardship to walk a mile and a half, or twenty miles, to a public-house, but when they go to their work they think it dreadful to have to walk a yard. Perhaps they would like us to lend them the wagonette to drive in?”

“I have no doubt they would,” said Trefusis, beaming at her.

“Pray leave me to manage here, Jane; this is no place for you. Bring Erskine to the house. He must be—”

“Why don’t the police make them go away?” said Lady Brandon, too excited to listen to her husband.

“Hush, Jane, pray. What can three men do against thirty or forty?”

“They ought to take up somebody as an example to the rest.”

“They have offered, in the handsomest manner, to arrest me if Sir Charles will give me in charge,” said Trefusis.

“There!” said Lady Jane, turning to her husband. “Why don’t you give him — or someone — in charge?”

“You know nothing about it,” said Sir Charles, vexed by a sense that she was publicly making him ridiculous.

“If you don’t, I will,” she persisted. “The idea of having our ground broken into and our new wall knocked down! A nice state of things it would be if people were allowed to do as they liked with other peoples’ property. I will give every one of them in charge.”

“Would you consign me to a dungeon?” said Trefusis, in melancholy tones.

“I don’t mean you exactly,” she said, relenting. “But I will give that clergyman into charge, because he ought to know better. He is the ringleader of the whole thing.”

“He will be delighted, Lady Brandon; he pines for martyrdom. But will you really give him into custody?”

“I will,” she said vehemently, emphasizing the assurance by a plunge in the saddle that made the bay stagger.

“On what charge?” he said, patting the horse and looking up at her.

“I don’t care what charge,” she replied, conscious that she was being admired, and not displeased. “Let them take him up, that’s all.”

Human beings on horseback are so far centaurs that liberties taken with their horses are almost as personal as liberties taken with themselves. When Sir Charles saw Trefusis patting the bay he felt as much outraged as if Lady Brandon herself were being patted, and he felt bitterly towards her for permitting the familiarity. He uas relieved by the arrival of the procession. It halted as the leader came up to Trefusis, who said gravely:

“Gentlemen, I congratulate you on the firmness with which you have this day asserted the rights of the people of this place to the use of one of the few scraps of mother earth of which they have not been despoiled.”

“Gentlemen,” shouted an excited member of the procession, “three cheers for the resumption of the land of England by the people of England! Hip, hip, hurrah!”

The cheers were given with much spirit, Sir Charles’s cheeks becoming redder at each repetition. He looked angrily at the clergyman, now distracted by the charms of Lady Brandon, whose scorn, as she surveyed the crowd, expressed itself by a pout which became her pretty lips extremely.

Then a middle-aged laborer stepped from the road into the field, hat in hand, ducked respectfully, and said: “Look ‘e here, Sir Charles. Don’t ‘e mind them fellers. There ain’t a man belonging to this neighborhood among ‘em; not one in your employ or on your land. Our dooty to you and your ladyship, and we will trust to you to do what is fair by us. We want no interlopers from Lunnon to get us into trouble with your honor, and—”

“You unmitigated cur,” exclaimed Trefusis fiercely, “what right have you to give away to his unborn children the liberty of your own?”

“They’re not unborn,” said Lady Brandon indignantly. “That just shows how little you know about it.”

“No, nor mine either,” said the man, emboldened by her ladyship’s support. “And who are you that call me a cur?”

“Who am I! I am a rich man — one of your masters, and privileged to call you what I please. You are a grovelling famine-broken slave. Now go and seek redress against me from the law. I can buy law enough to ruin you for less money than it would cost me to shoot deer in Scotland or vermin here. How do you like that state of things? Eh?”

The man was taken aback. “Sir Charles will stand by me,” he said, after a pause, with assumed confidence, but with an anxious glance at the baronet.

“If he does, after witnessing the return you have made me for standing by you, he is a greater fool than I take him to be.”

“Gently, gently,” said the clergyman. “There is much excuse to be made for the poor fellow.”

“As gently as you please with any man that is a free man at heart,” said Trefusis; “but slaves must be driven, and this fellow is a slave to the marrow.”

“Still, we must be patient. He does not know—”

“He knows a great deal better than you do,” said Lady Brandon, interrupting. “And the more shame for you, because you ought to know best. I suppose you were educated somewhere. You will not be satisfied with yourself when your bishop hears of this. Yes,” she added, turning to Trefusis with an infantile air of wanting to cry and being forced to laugh against her will, “you may laugh as much as you please — don’t trouble to pretend it’s only coughing — but we will write to his bishop, as he shall find to his cost.”

“Hold your tongue, Jane, for God’s sake,” said Sir Charles, taking her horse by the bridle and backing him from Trefusis.

“I will not. If you choose to stand here and allow them to walk away with the walls in their pockets, I don’t, and won’t. Why cannot you make the police do something?”

“They can do nothing,” said Sir Charles, almost beside himself with humiliation. “I cannot do anything until I see my solicitor. How can you bear to stay here wrangling with these fellows? It is SO undignified!”

“It’s all very well to talk of dignity, but I don’t see the dignity of letting people trample on our grounds without leave. Mr. Smilash, will you make them all go away, and tell them that they shall all be prosecuted and put in prison?”

“They are going to the crossroads, to hold a public meeting and — of course — make speeches. I am desired to say that they deeply regret that their demonstration should have disturbed you personally, Lady Brandon.”

“So they ought,” she replied. “They don’t look very sorry. They are getting frightened at what they have done, and they would be glad to escape the consequences by apologizing, most likely. But they shan’t. I am not such a fool as they think.”

“They don’t think so. You have proved the contrary.”

“Jane,” said Sir Charles pettishly, “do you know this gentleman?”

“I should think I do,” said Lady Brandon emphatically.

Trefusis bowed as if he had just been formally introduced to the baronet, who, against his will, returned the salutation stiffly, unable to ignore an older, firmer, and quicker man under the circumstances.

“This seems an unneighborly business, Sir Charles,” said Trefusis, quite at his ease; “but as it is a public question, it need not prejudice our private relations. At least I hope not.”

Sir Charles bowed again, more stiffly than before.

“I am, like you, a capitalist and landlord.”

“Which it seems to me you have no right to be, if you are in earnest,” struck in Chester, who had been watching the scene in silence by Sir Charles’s side.

“Which, as you say, I have undoubtedly no right to be,” said Trefusis, surveying him with interest; “but which I nevertheless cannot help being. Have I the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Chichester Erskine, author of a tragedy entitled ‘The Patriot Martyrs,’ dedicated with enthusiastic devotion to the Spirit of Liberty and half a dozen famous upholders of that principle, and denouncing in forcible language the tyranny of the late Tsar of Russia, Bomba of Naples, and Napoleon the Third?”

“Yes, sir,” said Erskine, reddening; for he felt that this description might make his drama seem ridiculous to those present who had not read it.

“Then,” said Trefusis, extending his hand — Erskine at first thought for a hearty shake— “give me half-a-crown towards the cost of our expedition here to-day to assert the right of the people to tread the soil we are standing upon.”

“You shall do nothing of the sort, Chester,” cried Lady Brandon. “I never heard of such a thing in my life! Do you pay us for the wall and fence your people have broken, Mr. Smilash; that would be more to the purpose.”

“If I could find a thousand men as practical as you, Lady Brandon, I might accomplish the next great revolution before the end of this season.” He looked at her for a moment curiously, as if trying to remember; and then added inconsequently: “How are your friends? There was a Miss — Miss — I am afraid I have forgotten all the names except your own.”

“Gertrude Lindsay is staying with us. Do you remember her?”

“I think — no, I am afraid I do not. Let me see. Was she a haughty young lady?”

“Yes,” said Lady Brandon eagerly, forgetting the wall and fence. “But who do you think is coming next Thursday? I met her accidentally the last time I was in town. She’s not a bit changed. You can’t forget her, so don’t pretend to be puzzled.”

“You have not told me who she is yet. And I shall probably not remember her. You must not expect me to recognize everyone instantaneously, as I recognized you.”

“What stuff! You will know Agatha fast enough.”

“Agatha Wylie!” he said, with sudden gravity.

“Yes. She is coming on Thursday. Are you glad?”

“I fear I shall have no opportunity of seeing her.”

“Oh, of course you must see her. It will be so jolly for us all to meet again just as we used. Why can’t you come to luncheon on Thursday?”

“I shall be delighted, if you will really allow me to come after my conduct here.”

“The lawyers will settle that. Now that you have found out who we are you will stop pulling down our walls, of course.”

“Of course,” said Trefusis, smiling, as he took out a pocket diary and entered the engagement. “I must hurry away to the crossroads. They have probably voted me into the chair by this time, and are waiting for me to open their meeting. Good-bye. You have made this place, which I was growing tired of, unexpectedly interesting to me.”

They exchanged glances of the old college pattern. Then he nodded to Sir Charles, waved his hand familiarly to Erskine, and followed the procession, which was by this time out of sight.

Sir Charles, who, waiting to speak, had been repeatedly baffled by the hasty speeches of his wife and the unhesitating replies of Trefusis, now turned angrily upon her, saying:

“What do you mean by inviting that fellow to my house?”

“Your house, indeed! I will invite whom I please. You are getting into one of your tempers.”

Sir Charles looked about him. Erskine had discreetly slipped away, and was in the road, tightening a screw in his bicycle. The few persons who remained were out of earshot.

“Who and what the devil is he, and how do you come to know him?” he demanded. He never swore in the presence of any lady except his wife, and then only when they were alone.

“He is a gentleman, which is more than you are,” she retorted, and, with a cut of her whip that narrowly missed her husband’s shoulder, sent the bay plunging through the gap.

“Come along,” she said to Erskine. “We shall be late for luncheon.”

“Had we not better wait for Sir Charles?” he asked injudiciously.

“Never mind Sir Charles, he is in the sulks,” she said, without abating her voice. “Come along.” And she went off at a canter, Erskine following her with a misgiving that his visit was unfortunately timed.

CHAPTER XII

On the following Thursday Gertrude, Agatha, and Jane met for the first time since they had parted at Alton College. Agatha was the shyest of the three, and externally the least changed. She fancied herself very different from the Agatha of Alton; but it was her opinion of herself that had altered, not her person. Expecting to find a corresponding alteration in her friends, she had looked forward to the meeting with much doubt and little hope of its proving pleasant.

She was more anxious about Gertrude than about Jane, concerning whom, at a brief interview in London, she had already discovered that Lady Brandon’s manner, mind, and speech were just what Miss Carpenter’s had been. But, even from Agatha, Jane commanded more respect than before, having changed from an overgrown girl into a fine woman, and made a brilliant match in her first season, whilst many of her pretty, proud, and clever contemporaries, whom she had envied at school, were still unmarried, and were having their homes made uncomfortable by parents anxious to get rid of the burthen of supporting them, and to profit in purse or position by their marriages.

This was Gertrude’s case. Like Agatha, she had thrown away her matrimonial opportunities. Proud of her rank and exclusiveness, she had resolved to have as little as possible to do with persons who did not share both with her. She began by repulsing the proffered acquaintance of many families of great wealth and fashion, who either did not know their grandparents or were ashamed of them. Having shut herself out of their circle, she was presented at court, and thenceforth accepted the invitations of those only who had, in her opinion, a right to the same honor. And she was far stricter on that point than the Lord Chamberlain, who had, she held, betrayed his trust by practically turning Leveller. She was well educated, refined in her manners and habits, skilled in etiquette to an extent irritating to the ignorant, and gifted with a delicate complexion, pearly teeth, and a face that would have been Grecian but for a slight upward tilt of the nose and traces of a square, heavy type in the jaw. Her father was a retired admiral, with sufficient influence to have had a sinecure made by a Conservative government expressly for the maintenance of his son pending alliance with some heiress. Yet Gertrude remained single, and the admiral, who had formerly spent more money than he could comfortably afford on her education, and was still doing so upon her state and personal adornment, was complaining so unpleasantly of her failure to get taken off his hands, that she could hardly bear to live at home, and was ready to marry any thoroughbred gentleman, however unsuitable his age or character, who would relieve her from her humiliating dependence. She was prepared to sacrifice her natural desire for youth, beauty, and virtue in a husband if she could escape from her parents on no easier terms, but she was resolved to die an old maid sooner than marry an upstart.

The difficulty in her way was pecuniary. The admiral was poor. He had not quite six thousand a year, and though he practiced the utmost economy in order to keep up the most expensive habits, he could not afford to give his daughter a dowry. Now the well born bachelors of her set, having more blue bood, but much less wealth, than they needed, admired her, paid her compliments, danced with her, but could not afford to marry her. Some of them even told her so, married rich daughters of tea merchants, iron founders, or successful stocktrokers, and then tried to make matches between her and their lowly born brothers-in-law.

So, when Gertrude met Lady Brandon, her lot was secretly wretched, and she was glad to accept an invitation to Brandon Beeches in order to escape for a while from the admiral’s daily sarcasms on the marriage list in the “Times.” The invitation was the more acceptable because Sir Charles was no mushroom noble, and, in the schooldays which Gertrude now remembered as the happiest of her life, she had acknowledged that Jane’s family and connections were more aristocratic than those of any other student then at Alton, herself excepted. To Agatha, whose grandfather had amassed wealth as a proprietor of gasworks (novelties in his time), she had never offered her intimacy. Agatha had taken it by force, partly moral, partly physical. But the gasworks were never forgotten, and when Lady Brandon mentioned, as a piece of delightful news, that she had found out their old school companion, and had asked her to join them, Gertrude was not quite pleased. Yet, when they met, her eyes were the only wet ones there, for she was the least happy of the three, and, though she did not know it, her spirit was somewhat broken. Agatha, she thought, had lost the bloom of girlhood, but was bolder, stronger, and cleverer than before. Agatha had, in fact, summoned all her self-possession to hide her shyness. She detected the emotion of Gertrude, who at the last moment did not try to conceal it. It would have been poured out freely in words, had Gertrude’s social training taught her to express her feelings as well as it had accustomed her to dissemble them.

“Do you remember Miss Wilson?” said Jane, as the three drove from the railway station to Brandon Beeches. “Do you remember Mrs. Miller and her cat? Do you remember the Recording Angel? Do you remember how I fell into the canal?”

These reminiscences lasted until they reached the house and went together to Agatha’s room. Here Jane, having some orders to give in the household, had to leave them — reluctantly; for she was jealous lest Gertrude should get the start of her in the renewal of Agatha’s affection. She even tried to take her rival away with her; but in vain. Gertrude would not budge.

“What a beautiful house and splendid place!” said Agatha when Jane was gone. “And what a nice fellow Sir Charles is! We used to laugh at Jane, but she can afford to laugh at the luckiest of us now. I always said she would blunder into the best of everything. Is it true that she married in her first season?”

“Yes. And Sir Charles is a man of great culture. I cannot understand it. Her size is really beyond everything, and her manners are bad.”

“Hm!” said Agatha with a wise air. “There was always something about Jane that attracted men. And she is more knave than fool. But she is certainly a great ass.”

Gertrude looked serious, to imply that she had grown out of the habit of using or listening to such language. Agatha, stimulated by this, continued:

“Here are you and I, who consider ourselves twice as presentable and conversable as she, two old maids.” Gertrude winced, and Agatha hastened to add: “Why, as for you, you are perfectly lovely! And she has asked us down expressly to marry us.”

“She would not presume—”

“Nonsense, my dear Gertrude. She thinks that we are a couple of fools who have mismanaged our own business, and that she, having managed so well for herself, can settle us in a jiffy. Come, did she not say to you, before I came, that it was time for me to be getting married?”

“Well, she did. But—”

“She said exactly the same thing to me about you when she invited me.”

“I would leave her house this moment,” said Gertrude, “if I thought she dared meddle in my affairs. What is it to her whether I am married or not?”

“Where have you been living all these years, if you do not know that the very first thing a woman wants to do when she has made a good match is to make ones for all her spinster friends. Jane does not mean any harm. She does it out of pure benevolence.”

“I do not need Jane’s benevolence.”

“Neither do I; but it doesn’t do any harm, and she is welcome to amuse herself by trotting out her male acquaintances for my approval. Hush! Here she comes.”

Gertrude subsided. She could not quarrel with Lady Brandon without leaving the house, and she could not leave the house without returning to her home. But she privately resolved to discourage the attentions of Erskine, suspecting that instead of being in love with her as he pretended, he had merely been recommended by Jane to marry her.

Chichester Erskine had made sketches in Palestine with Sir Charles, and had tramped with him through many European picture galleries. He was a young man of gentle birth, and had inherited fifteen hundred a year from his mother, the bulk of the family property being his elder brother’s. Having no profession, and being fond of books and pictures, he had devoted himself to fine art, a pursuit which offered him on the cheapest terms a high opinion of the beauty and capacity of his own nature. He had published a tragedy entitled, “The Patriot Martyrs,” with an etched frontispiece by Sir Charles, and an edition of it had been speedily disposed of in presentations to the friends of the artist and poet, and to the reviews and newspapers. Sir Charles had asked an eminent tragedian of his acquaintance to place the work on the stage and to enact one of the patriot martyrs. But the tragedian had objected that the other patriot martyrs had parts of equal importance to that proposed for him. Erskine had indignantly refused to cut these parts down or out, and so the project had fallen through.

Since then Erskine had been bent on writing another drama, without regard to the exigencies of the stage, but he had not yet begun it, in consequence of his inspiration coming upon him at inconvenient hours, chiefly late at night, when he had been drinking, and had leisure for sonnets only. The morning air and bicycle riding were fatal to the vein in which poetry struck him as being worth writing. In spite of the bicycle, however, the drama, which was to be entitled “Hypatia,” was now in a fair way to be written, for the poet had met and fallen in love with Gertrude Lindsay, whose almost Grecian features, and some knowledge of the different calculua which she had acquired at Alton, helped him to believe that she was a fit model for his heroine.

When the ladies came downstairs they found their host and Erskine in the picture gallery, famous in the neighborhood for the sum it had cost Sir Charles. There was a new etching to be admired, and they were called on to observe what the baronet called its tones, and what Agatha would have called its degrees of smudginess. Sir Charles’s attention often wandered from this work of art. He looked at his watch twice, and said to his wife:

“I have ordered them to be punctual with the luncheon.”

“Oh, yes; it’s all right,” said Lady Brandon, who had given orders that luncheon was not to be served until the arrival of another gentleman. “Show Agatha the picture of the man in the—”

“Mr. Trefusis,” said a servant.

Mr. Trefusis, still in snuff color, entered; coat unbuttoned and attention unconstrained; exasperatingly unconscious of any occasion for ceremony.

“Here you are at last,” said Lady Brandon. “You know everybody, don’t you?”

“How do you do?” said Sir Charles, offering his hand as a severe expression of his duty to his wife’s guest, who took it cordially, nodded to Erskine, looked without recognition at Gertrude, whose frosty stillness repudiated Lady Brandon’s implication that the stranger was acquainted with her, and turned to Agatha, to whom he bowed. She made no sign; she was paralyzed. Lady Brandon reddened with anger. Sir Charles noted his guest’s reception with secret satisfaction, but shared the embarrassment which oppressed all present except Trefusis, who seemed quite indifferent and assured, and unconsciously produced an impression that the others had not been equal to the occasion, as indeed they had not.

“We were looking at some etchings when you came in,” said Sir Charles, hastening to break the silence. “Do you care for such things?” And he handed him a proof.

Trefusis looked at it as if he had never seen such a thing before and did not quite know what to make of it. “All these scratches seem to me to have no meaning,” he said dubiously.

Sir Charles stole a contemptuous smile and significant glance at Erskine. He, seized already with an instinctive antipathy to Trefusis, said emphatically:

“There is not one of those scratches that has not a meaning.”

“That one, for instance, like the limb of a daddy-long-legs. What does that mean?”

Erskine hesitated a moment; recovered himself; and said: “Obviously enough — to me at least — it indicates the marking of the roadway.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Trefusis. “There never was such a mark as that on a road. It may be a very bad attempt at a briar, but briars don’t straggle into the middle of roads frequented as that one seems to be — judging by those overdone ruts.” He put the etching away, showing no disposition to look further into the portfolio, and remarked, “The only art that interests me is photography.”

Erskine and Sir Charles again exchanged glances, and the former said:

“Photography is not an art in the sense in which I understand the term. It is a process.”

“And a much less troublesome and more perfect process than that,” said Trefusis, pointing to the etching. “The artists are sticking to the old barbarous, difficult, and imperfect processes of etching and portrait painting merely to keep up the value of their monopoly of the required skill. They have left the new, more complexly organized, and more perfect, yet simple and beautiful method of photography in the hands of tradesmen, sneering at it publicly and resorting to its aid surreptitiously. The result is that the tradesmen are becoming better artists than they, and naturally so; for where, as in photography, the drawing counts for nothing, the thought and judgment count for everything; whereas in the etching and daubing processes, where great manual skill is needed to produce anything that the eye can endure, the execution counts for more than the thought, and if a fellow only fit to carry bricks up a ladder or the like has ambition and perseverance enough to train his hand and push into the van, you cannot afford to put him back into his proper place, because thoroughly trained hands are so scarce. Consider the proof of this that you have in literature. Our books are manually the work of printers and papermakers; you may cut an author’s hand off and he is as good an author as before. What is the result? There is more imagination in any number of a penny journal than in half-a-dozen of the Royal Academy rooms in the season. No author can live by his work and be as empty-headed as an average successful painter. Again, consider our implements of music — our pianofortes, for example. Nobody but an acrobat will voluntarily spend years at such a difficult mechanical puzzle as the keyboard, and so we have to take our impressions of Beethoven’s sonatas from acrobats who vie with each other in the rapidity of their prestos, or the staying power of their left wrists. Thoughtful men will not spend their lives acquiring sleight-of-hand. Invent a piano which will respond as delicately to the turning of a handle as our present ones do to the pressure of the fingers, and the acrobats will be driven back to their carpets and trapezes, because the sole faculty necessary to the executant musician will be the musical faculty, and no other will enable him to obtain a hearing.”

The company were somewhat overcome by this unexpected lecture. Sir Charles, feeling that such views bore adversely on him, and were somehow iconoclastic and low-lived, was about to make a peevish retort, when Erskine forestalled him by asking Trefusis what idea he had formed of the future of the arts. He replied promptly. “Photography perfected in its recently discovered power of reproducing color as well as form! Historical pictures replaced by photographs of tableaux vivants formed and arranged by trained actors and artists, and used chiefly for the instruction of children. Nine-tenths of painting as we understand it at present extinguished by the competition of these photographs, and the remaining tenth only holding its own against them by dint of extraordinary excellence! Our mistuned and unplayable organs and pianofortes replaced by harmonious instruments, as manageable as barrel organs! Works of fiction superseded by interesting company and conversation, and made obsolete by the human mind outgrowing the childishness that delights in the tales told by grownup children such as novelists and their like! An end to the silly confusion, under the one name of Art, of the tomfoolery and make-believe of our play-hours with the higher methods of teaching men to know themselves! Every artist an amateur, and a consequent return to the healthy old disposition to look on every man who makes art a means of money-getting as a vagabond not to be entertained as an equal by honest men!”

“In which case artists will starve, and there will be no more art.”

“Sir,” said Trefusis, excited by the word, “I, as a Socialist, can tell you that starvation is now impossible, except where, as in England, masterless men are forcibly prevented from producing the food they need. And you, as an artist, can tell me that at present great artists invariably do starve, except when they are kept alive by charity, private fortune, or some drudgery which hinders them in the pursuit of their vocation.”

“Oh!” said Erskine. “Then Socialists have some little sympathy with artists after all.”

“I fear,” said Trefusis, repressing himself and speaking quietly again, “that when a Socialist hears of a hundred pounds paid for a drawing which Andrea del Sarto was glad to sell for tenpence, his heart is not wrung with pity for the artist’s imaginary loss as that of a modern capitalist is. Yet that is the only way nowadays of enlisting sympathy for the old masters. Frightful disability, to be out of the reach of the dearest market when you want to sell your drawings! But,” he added, giving himself a shake, and turning round gaily, “I did not come here to talk shop. So — pending the deluge — let us enjoy ourselves after our manner.”

“No,” said Jane. “Please go on about Art. It’s such a relief to hear anyone talking sensibly about it. I hate etching. It makes your eyes sore — at least the acid gets into Sir Charles’s, and the difference between the first and second states is nothing but imagination, except that the last state is worse than the — here’s luncheon!”

They went downstairs then. Trefusis sat between Agatha and Lady Brandon, to whom he addressed all his conversation. They chatted without much interruption from the business of the table; for Jane, despite her amplitude, had a small appetite, and was fearful of growing fat; whilst Trefusis was systematically abstemious. Sir Charles was unusually silent. He was afraid to talk about art, lest he should be contradicted by Trefusis, who, he already felt, cared less and perhaps knew more about it than he. Having previously commented to Agatha on the beauty of the ripening spring, and inquired whether her journey had fatigued her, he had said as much as he could think of at a first meeting. For her part, she was intent on Trefusis, who, though he must know, she thought, that they were all hostile to him except Jane, seemed as confident now as when he had befooled her long ago. That thought set her teeth on edge. She did not doubt the sincerity of her antipathy to him even when she detected herself in the act of protesting inwardly that she was not glad to meet him again, and that she would not speak to him. Gertrude, meanwhile, was giving short answers to Erskine and listening to Trefusis. She had gathered from the domestic squabbles of the last few days that Lady Brandon, against her husband’s will, had invited a notorious demagogue, the rich son of a successful cotton-spinner, to visit the Beeches. She had made up her mind to snub any such man. But on recognizing the long-forgotten Smilash, she had been astonished, and had not known what to do. So, to avoid doing anything improper, she had stood stilly silent and done nothing, as the custom of English ladies in such cases is. Subsequently, his unconscious self-assertion had wrought with her as with the others, and her intention of snubbing him had faded into the limbo of projects abandoned without trial. Erskine alone was free from the influence of the intruder. He wished himself elsewhere; but beside Gertrude the presence or absence of any other person troubled him very little.

“How are the Janseniuses?” said Trefusis, suddenly turning to Agatha.

“They are quite well, thank you,” she said in measured tones.

“I met John Jansenius in the city lately. You know Jansenius?” he added parenthetically to Sir Charles. “Cotman’s bank — the last Cotman died out of the firm before we were born. The Chairman of the Transcanadian Railway Company.”

“I know the name. I am seldom in the city.”

“Naturally,” assented Trefusis; “for who would sadden himself by pushing his way through a crowd of such slaves, if he could help it? I mean slaves of Mammon, of course. To run the gauntlet of their faces in Cornhill is enough to discourage a thoughtful man for hours. Well, Jansenius, being high in the court of Mammon, is looking out for a good post in the household for his son. Jansenius, by-the-bye is Miss Wylie’s guardian and the father of my late wife.”

Agatha felt inclined to deny this; but, as it was true, she had to forbear. Resolved to show that the relations between her family and Trefusis were not cordial ones, she asked deliberately, “Did Mr. Jansenius speak to you?”

Gertrude looked up, as if she thought this scarcely ladylike.

“Yes,” said Trefusis. “We are the best friends in the world — as good as possible, at any rate. He wanted me to subscribe to a fund for relieving the poor at the east end of London by assisting them to emigrate.”

“I presume you subscribed liberally,” said Erskine. “It was an opportunity of doing some practical good.”

“I did not,” said Trefusis, grinning at the sarcasm. “This Transcanadian Railway Company, having got a great deal of spare land from the Canadian government for nothing, thought it would be a good idea to settle British workmen on it and screw rent out of them. Plenty of British workmen, supplanted in their employment by machinery, or cheap foreign labor, or one thing or another, were quite willing to go; but as they couldn’t afford to pay their passages to Canada, the Company appealed to the benevolent to pay for them by subscription, as the change would improve their miserable condition. I did not see why I should pay to provide a rich company with tenant farmers, and I told Jansenius so. He remarked that when money and not talk was required, the workmen of England soon found out who were their real friends.”

“I know nothing about these questions,” said Sir Charles, with an air of conclusiveness; “but I see no objection to emigration.” “The fact is,” said Trefusis, “the idea of emigration is a dangerous one for us. Familiarize the workman with it, and some day he may come to see what a capital thing it would be to pack off me, and you, with the peerage, and the whole tribe of unprofitable proprietors such as we are, to St. Helena; making us a handsome present of the island by way of indemnity! We are such a restless, unhappy lot, that I doubt whether it would not prove a good thing for us too. The workmen would lose nothing but the contemplation of our elegant persons, exquisite manners, and refined tastes. They might provide against that loss by picking out a few of us to keep for ornament’s sake. No nation with a sense of beauty would banish Lady Brandon, or Miss Lindsay, or Miss Wylie.”

“Such nonsense!” said Jane.

“You would hardly believe how much I have spent in sending workmen out of the country against my own view of the country’s interest,” continued Trefusis, addressing Erskine. “When I make a convert among the working classes, the first thing he does is to make a speech somewhere declaring his new convictions. His employer immediately discharges him— ‘gives him the sack’ is the technical phrase. The sack is the sword of the capitalist, and hunger keeps it sharp for him. His shield is the law, made for the purpose by his own class. Thus equipped, he gives the worst of it to my poor convert, who comes ruined to me for assistance. As I cannot afford to pension him for life, I get rid of him by assisting him to emigrate. Sometimes he prospers and repays me; sometimes I hear no more of him; sometimes he comes back with his habits unsettled. One man whom I sent to America made his fortune, but he was not a social democrat; he was a clerk who had embezzled, and who applied to me for assistance under the impression that I considered it rather meritorious to rob the till of a capitalist.”

“He was a practical Socialist, in fact,” said Erskine.

“On the contrary, he was a somewhat too grasping Individualist. Howbeit, I enabled him to make good his defalcation — in the city they consider a defalcation made good when the money is replaced — and to go to New York. I recommended him not to go there; but he knew better than I, for he made a fortune by speculating with money that existed only in the imagination of those with whom he dealt. He never repaid me; he is probably far too good a man of business to pay money that cannot be extracted from him by an appeal to the law or to his commercial credit. Mr. Erskine,” added Trefusis, lowering his voice, and turning to the poet, “you are wrong to take part with hucksters and money-hunters against your own nature, even though the attack upon them is led by a man who prefers photography to etching.”

“But I assure you — You quite mistake me,” said Erskine, taken aback. “I—”

He stopped, looked to Sir Charles for support, and then said airily: “I don’t doubt that you are quite right. I hate business and men of business; and as to social questions, I have only one article of belief, which is, that the sole refiner of human nature is fine art.”

“Whereas I believe that the sole refiner of art is human nature. Art rises when men rise, and grovels when men grovel. What is your opinion?”

“I agree with you in many ways,” replied Sir Charles nervously; for a lack of interest in his fellow-creatures, and an excess of interest in himself, had prevented him from obtaining that power of dealing with social questions which, he felt, a baronet ought to possess, and he was consequently afraid to differ from anyone who alluded to them with confidence. “If you take an interest in art, I believe I can show you a few things worth seeing.”

“Thank you. In return I will some day show you a remarkable collection of photographs I possess; many of them taken by me. I venture to think they will teach you something.”

“No doubt,” said Sir Charles. “Shall we return to the gallery? I have a few treasures there that photography is not likely to surpass for some time yet.”

“Let’s go through the conservatory,” said Jane. “Don’t you like flowers, Mr. Smi — I never can remember your proper name.”

“Extremely,” said Trefusis.

They rose and went out into a long hothouse. Here Lady Brandon, finding Erskine at her side, and Sir Charles before her with Gertrude, looked round for Trefusis, with whom she intended to enjoy a trifling flirtation under cover of showing him the flowers. He was out of sight; but she heard his footsteps in the passage on the opposite side of the greenhouse. Agatha was also invisible. Jane, not daring to rearrange their procession lest her design should become obvious, had to walk on with Erskine.

Agatha had turned unintentionally into the opposite alley to that which the others had chosen. When she saw what she had done, and found herself virtually alone with Trefusis, who had followed her, she blamed him for it, and was about to retrace her steps when he said coolly:

“Were you shocked when you heard of Henrietta’s sudden death?”

Agatha struggled with herself for a moment, and then said in a suppressed voice: “How dare you speak to me?”

“Why not?” said he, astonished.

“I am not going to enter into a discussion with you. You know what I mean very well.”

“You mean that you are offended with me; that is plain enough. But when I part with a young lady on good terms, and after a lapse of years, during which we neither meet nor correspond, she asks me how I dare speak to her, I am naturally startled.”

“We did not part on good terms.”

Trefusis stretched his eyebrows, as if to stretch his memory. “If not,” he said, “I have forgotten it, on my honor. When did we part, and what happened? It cannot have been anything very serious, or I should remember it.”

His forgetfulness wounded Agatha. “No doubt you are well accustomed to—” She checked herself, and made a successful snatch at her normal manner with gentlemen. “I scarcely remember what it was, now that I begin to think. Some trifle, I suppose. Do you like orchids?”

“They have nothing to do with our affairs at present. You are not in earnest about the orchids, and you are trying to run away from a mistake instead of clearing it up. That is a short-sighted policy, always.”

Agatha grew alarmed, for she felt his old influence over her returning. “I do not wish to speak of it,” she said firmly.

Her firmness was lost on him. “I do not even know what it means yet,” he said, “and I want to know, for I believe there is some misunderstanding between us, and it is the trick of your sex to perpetuate misunderstandings by forbidding all allusions to them. Perhaps, leaving Lyvern so hastily, I forgot to fulfil some promise, or to say farewell, or something of that sort. But do you know how suddenly I was called away? I got a telegram to say that Henrietta was dying, and I had only time to change my clothes — you remember my disguise — and catch the express. And, after all, she was dead when I arrived.”

“I know that,” said Agatha uneasily. “Please say no more about it.”

“Not if it distresses you. Just let me hope that you did not suppose I blamed you for your share in the matter or that I told the Janseniuses of it. I did not. Yes, I like orchids. A plant that can subsist on a scrap of board is an instance of natural econ—”

“YOU blame ME!” cried Agatha. “I never told the Janseniuses. What would they have thought of you if I had?”

“Far worse of you than of me, however unjustly. You were the immediate cause of the tragedy; I only the remote one. Jansenius is not far-seeing when his feelings are touched. Few men are.”

“I don’t understand you in the least. What tragedy do you mean?”

“Henrietta’s death. I call it a tragedy conventionally. Seriously, of course, it was commonplace enough.”

Agatha stopped and faced him. “What do you mean by what you said just now? You said that I was the immediate cause of the tragedy, and you say that you were talking of Henrietta’s — of Henrietta. I had nothing to do with her illness.”

Trefusis looked at her as if considering whether he would go any further. Then, watching her with the curiosity of a vivisector, he said: “Strange to say, Agatha,” (she shrank proudly at the word), “Henrietta might have been alive now but for you. I am very glad she is not; so you need not reproach yourself on my account. She died of a journey she made to Lyvern in great excitement and distress, and in intensely cold weather. You caused her to make that journey by writing her a letter which made her jealous.”

“Do you mean to accuse me—”

“No; stop!” he said hastily, the vivisecting spirit in him exorcised by her shaking voice; “I accuse you of nothing. Why do you not speak honestly to me when you are at your ease? If you confess your real thoughts only under torture, who can resist the temptation to torture you? One must charge you with homicide to make you speak of anything but orchids.”

But Agatha had drawn the new inference from the old facts, and would not be talked out of repudiating it. “It was not my fault,” she said. “It was yours — altogether yours.”

“Altogether,” he assented, relieved to find her indignant instead of remorseful.

She was not to be soothed by a verbal acquiescence. “Your behavior was most unmanly, and I told you so, and you could not deny it. You pretended that you — You pretended to have feelings — You tried to make me believe that Oh, I am a fool to talk to you; you know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Perfectly. I tried to make you believe that I was in love with you. How do you know I was not?”

She disdained to answer; but as he waited calmly she said, “You had no right to be.”

“That does not prove that I was not. Come, Agatha, you pretended to like me when you did not care two straws about me. You confessed as much in that fatal letter, which I have somewhere at home. It has a great rent right across it, and the mark of her heel; she must have stamped on it in her rage, poor girl! So that I can show your own hand for the very deception you accused me — without proof — of having practiced on you.”

“You are clever, and can twist things. What pleasure does it give you to make me miserable?”

“Ha!” he exclaimed, in an abrupt, sardonic laugh. “I don’t know; you bewitch me, I think.”

Agatha made no reply, but walked on quickly to the end of the conservatory, where the others were waiting for them.

“Where have you been, and what have you been doing all this time?” said Jane, as Trefusis came up, hurrying after Agatha. “I don’t know what you call it, but I call it perfectly disgraceful!”

Sir Charles reddened at his wife’s bad taste, and Trefusis replied gravely: “We have been admiring the orchids, and talking about them. Miss Wylie takes an interest in them.”

CHAPTER XIII

One morning Gertrude got a letter from her father:

“My Dear Gerty: I have just received a bill for L110 from Madame Smith for your dresses. May I ask you how long this sort of thing is to go on? I need not tell you that I have not the means to support you in such extravagance. I am, as you know, always anxious that you should go about in a style worthy of your position, but unless you can manage without calling on me to pay away hundreds of pounds every season to Madame Smith, you had better give up society and stay at home. I positively cannot afford it. As far as I can see, going into society has not done you much good. I had to raise L500 last month on Franklands; and it is too bad if I must raise more to pay your dressmaker. You might at least employ some civil person, or one whose charges are moderate. Madame Smith tells me that she will not wait any longer, and charges L50 for a single dress. I hope you fully understand that there must be an end to this.

“I hear from your mother that young Erskine is with you at Brandon’s. I do not think much of him. He is not well off, nor likely to get on, as he has taken to poetry and so forth. I am told also that a man named Trefusis visits at the Beeches a good deal now. He must be a fool, for he contested the last Birmingham election, and came out at the foot of the poll with thirty-two votes through calling himself a Social Democrat or some such foreign rubbish, instead of saying out like a man that he was a Radical. I suppose the name stuck in his throat, for his mother was one of the Howards of Breconcastle; so he has good blood in him, though his father was nobody. I wish he had your bills to pay; he could buy and sell me ten times over, after all my twenty-five years’ service.

“As I am thinking of getting something done to the house, I had rather you did not come back this month, if you can possibly hold on at Brandon’s. Remember me to him, and give our kind regards to his wife. I should be obliged if you would gather some hemlock leaves and send them to me. I want them for my ointment; the stuff the chemists sell is no good. Your mother’s eyes are bad again; and your brother Berkeley has been gambling, and seems to think I ought to pay his debts for him. I am greatly worried over it all, and I hope that, until you have settled yourself, you will be more reasonable, and not run these everlasting bills upon me. You are enjoying yourself out of reach of all the unpleasantness; but it bears hardly upon

“Your affectionate father,

“C.B. LINDSAY.”

A faint sketch of the lines Time intended to engrave on Gertrude’s brow appeared there as she read the letter; but she hastened to give the admiral’s kind regards to her host and hostess, and discussed her mother’s health feelingly with them. After breakfast she went to the library, and wrote her reply:

“BRANDON BEECHES,

“Tuesday.

“Dear Papa: Considering that it is more than three years since you paid Madame Smith last, and that then her bill, which included my court dress, was only L150, I cannot see how I could possibly have been more economical, unless you expect me to go in rags. I am sorry that Madame Smith has asked for the money at such an inconvenient time, but when I begged you to pay her something in March last year you told me to keep her quiet by giving her a good order. I am not surprised at her not being very civil, as she has plenty of tradesmen’s daughters among her customers who pay her more than L300 a year for their dresses. I am wearing a skirt at present which I got two years ago.

“Sir Charles is going to town on Thursday; he will bring you the hemlock. Tell mamma that there is an old woman here who knows some wonderful cure for sore eyes. She will not tell what the ingredients are, but it cures everyone, and there is no use in giving an oculist two guineas for telling us that reading in bed is bad for the eyes, when we know perfectly well that mamma will not give up doing it. If you pay Berkeley’s debts, do not forget that he owes me L3.

“Another schoolfellow of mine is staying here now, and I think that Mr. Trefusis will have the pleasure of paying her bills some day. He is a great pet of Lady Brandon’s. Sir Charles was angry at first because she invited him here, and we were all surprised at it. The man has a bad reputation, and headed a mob that threw down the walls of the park; and we hardly thought he would be cool enough to come after that. But he does not seem to care whether we want him or not; and he comes when he likes. As he talks cleverly, we find him a godsend in this dull place. It is really not such a paradise as you seem to think, but you need not be afraid of my returning any sooner than I can help.

“Your affectionate daughter,

“Gertrude Lindsay.”

When Gertrude had closed this letter, and torn up her father’s, she thought little more about either. They might have made her unhappy had they found her happy, but as hopeless discontent was her normal state, and enjoyment but a rare accident, recriminatory passages with her father only put her into a bad humor, and did not in the least disappoint or humiliate her.

For the sake of exercise, she resolved to carry her letter to the village post office and return along the Riverside Road, whereby she had seen hemlock growing. She took care to go out unobserved, lest Agatha should volunteer to walk with her, or Jane declare her intention of driving to the post office in the afternoon, and sulk for the rest of the day unless the trip to the village were postponed until then. She took with her, as a protection against tramps, a big St. Bernard dog named Max. This animal, which was young and enthusiastic, had taken a strong fancy to her, and had expressed it frankly and boisterously; and she, whose affections had been starved in her home and in society, had encouraged him with more kindness than she had ever shown to any human being.

In the village, having posted her letter, she turned towards a lane that led to the Riverside Road. Max, unaware of her reason for choosing the longest way home, remonstrated by halting in the middle of the lane, wagging his tail rapidly, and uttering gruff barks.

“Don’t be stupid, sir,” said Gertrude impatiently. “I am going this way.”

Max, apparently understanding, rushed after her, passed her, and disappeared in a cloud of dust raised by his effort to check himself when he had left her far enough behind. When he came back she kissed his nose, and ran a race with him until she too was panting, and had to stand still to recover her breath, whilst he bounded about, barking ferociously. She had not for many years enjoyed such a frolic, and the thought of this presently brought tears to her eyes. Rather peevishly she bade Max be quiet, walked slowly to cool herself, and put up her sunshade to avert freckles.

The sun was now at the meridian. On a slope to Gertrude’s right hand, Sallust’s House, with its cinnamon-colored walls and yellow frieze, gave a foreign air to the otherwise very English landscape. She passed by without remembering who lived there. Further down, on some waste land separated from the road by a dry ditch and a low mud wall, a cluster of hemlocks, nearly six feet high, poisoned the air with their odor. She crossed the ditch, took a pair of gardening gloves from her plaited straw hand-basket, and busied herself with the hemlock leaves, pulling the tender ones, separating them from the stalk, and filling the basket with the web. She forgot Max until an impression of dead silence, as if the earth had stopped, caused her to look round in vague dread. Trefusis, with his hand abandoned to the dog, who was trying how much of it he could cram into his mouth, was standing within a few yards of her, watching her intently. Gertrude turned pale, and came out hastily from among the bushes. Then she had a strange sensation as if something had happened high above her head. There was a threatening growl, a commanding exclamation, and an unaccountable pause, at the expiration of which she found herself supine on the sward, with her parasol between her eyes and the sun. A sudden scoop of Max’s wet warm tongue in her right ear startled her into activity. She sat up, and saw Trefusis on his knees at her side holding the parasol with an unconcerned expression, whilst Max was snuffing at her in restless anxiety opposite.

“I must go home,” she said. “I must go home instantly.”

“Not at all,” said Trefusis, soothingly. “They have just sent word to say that everything is settled satisfactorily and that you need not come.”

“Have they?” she said faintly. Then she lay down again, and it seemed to her that a very long time elapsed. Suddenly recollecting that Trefusis had supported her gently with his hand to prevent her falling back too rudely, she rose again, and this time got upon her feet with his help.

“I must go home,” she said again. “It is a matter of life or death.”

“No, no,” he said softly. “It is all right. You may depend on me.”

She looked at him earnestly. He had taken her hand to steady her, for she was swaying a little. “Are you sure,” she said, grasping his arm. “Are you quite sure?”

“Absolutely certain. You know I am always right, do you not?”

“Yes, oh, yes; you have always been true to me. You—” Here her senses came back with a rush. Dropping his hand as if it had become red hot, she said sharply, “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” he said, resuming his indifferent manner with a laugh. “Are you better? Let me drive you to the Beeches. My stable is within a stone’s throw; I can get a trap out in ten minutes.”

“No, thank you,” said Gertrude haughtily. “I do not wish to drive.” She paused, and added in some bewilderment, “What has happened?”

“You fainted, and—”

“I did not faint,” said Gertrude indignantly. “I never fainted in my life.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Trefusis. I did not.”

“You shall judge for yourself. I was coming through this field when I saw you gathering hemlock. Hemlock is interesting on account of Socrates, and you were interesting as a young lady gathering poison. So I stopped to look on. Presently you came out from among the bushes as if you had seen a snake there. Then you fell into my arms — which led me to suppose that you had fainted — and Max, concluding that it was all my fault, nearly sprang at my throat. You were overpowered by the scent of the water-hemlock, which you must have been inhaling for ten minutes or more.”

“I did not know that there was any danger,” said Gertrude, crestfallen. “I felt very tired when I came to. That was why I lay so long the second time. I really could not help it.”

“You did not lie very long.”

“Not when I first fell; that was only a few seconds, I know. But I must have lain there nearly ten minutes after I recovered.”

“You were nearly a minute insensible when you first fell, and when you recovered you only rested for about one second. After that you raved, and I invented suitable answers until you suddenly asked me what I was talking about.”

Gertrude reddened a little as the possibility of her having raved indiscreetly occurred to her. “It was very silly of me to faint,” she said.

“You could not help it; you are only human. I shall walk with you to the Beeches.”

“Thank you; I will not trouble you,” she said quickly.

He shook his head. “I do not know how long the effect of that abominable water-weed may last,” he said, “and I dare not leave you to walk alone. If you prefer it I can send you in a trap with my gardener, but I had rather accompany you myself.”

“You are giving yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble. I will walk. I am quite well again and need no assistance.”

They started without another word. Gertrude had to concentrate all her energy to conceal from him that she was giddy. Numbness and lassitude crept upon her, and she was beginning to hope that she was only dreaming it all when he roused her by saying,

“Take my arm.”

“No, thank you.”

“Do not be so senselessly obstinate. You will have to lean on the hedge for support if you refuse my help. I am sorry I did not insist on getting the trap.”

Gertrude had not been spoken to in this tone since her childhood. “I am perfectly well,” she said sharply. “You are really very officious.”

“You are not perfectly well, and you know it. However, if you make a brave struggle, you will probably be able to walk home without my assistance, and the effort may do you good.”

“You are very rude,” she said peremptorily.

“I know it,” he replied calmly. “You will find three classes of men polite to you — slaves, men who think much of their manners and nothing of you, and your lovers. I am none of these, and therefore give you back your ill manners with interest. Why do you resist your good angel by suppressing those natural and sincere impulses which come to you often enough, and sometimes bring a look into your face that might tame a bear — a look which you hasten to extinguish as a thief darkens his lantern at the sound of a footstep.”

“Mr. Trefusis, I am not accustomed to be lectured.”

“That is why I lecture you. I felt curious to see how your good breeding, by which I think you set some store, would serve you in entirely novel circumstances — those of a man speaking his mind to you, for instance. What is the result of my experiment? Instead of rebuking me with the sweetness and dignity which I could not, in spite of my past observation, help expecting from you, you churlishly repel my offer of the assistance you need, tell me that I am very rude, very officious, and, in short, do what you can to make my position disagreeable and humiliating.”

She looked at him haughtily, but his expression was void of offence or fear, and he continued, unanswered.

“I would bear all this from a working woman without remonstrance, for she would owe me no graces of manner or morals. But you are a lady. That means that many have starved and drudged in uncleanly discomfort in order that you may have white and unbroken hands, fine garments, and exquisite manners — that you may be a living fountain of those influences that soften our natures and lives. When such a costly thing as a lady breaks down at the first touch of a firm hand, I feel justified in complaining.”

Gertrude walked on quickly, and said between her teeth, “I don’t want to hear any of your absurd views, Mr. Trefusis.”

He laughed. “My unfortunate views!” he said. “Whenever I make an inconvenient remark it is always set aside as an expression of certain dangerous crazes with which I am supposed to be afflicted. When I point out to Sir Charles that one of his favorite artists has not accurately observed something before attempting to draw it, he replies, ‘You know our views differ on these things, Trefusis.’ When I told Miss Wylie’s guardian that his emigration scheme was little better than a fraud, he said, ‘You must excuse me, but I cannot enter into your peculiar views.’ One of my views at present is that Miss Lindsay is more amiable under the influence of hemlock than under that of the social system which has made her so unhappy.”

“Well!” exclaimed Gertrude, outraged. Then, after a pause, “I was under the impression that I had accepted the escort of a gentleman.” Then, after another pause, Trefusis being quite undisturbed, “How do you know that I am unhappy?”

“By a certain defect in your countenance, which lacks the crowning beauty of happiness; and a certain defect in your voice which will never disappear until you learn to love or pity those to whom you speak.”

“You are wrong,” said Gertrude, with calm disdain. “You do not understand me in the least. I am particularly attached to my friends.”

“Then I have never seen you in their company.”

“You are still wrong.”

“Then how can you speak as you do, look as you do, act as you do?”

“What do you mean? HOW do I look and act?”

“Like one of the railings of Belgrave Square, cursed with consciousness of itself, fears of the judgment of the other railings, and doubts of their fitness to stand in the same row with it. You are cold, mistrustful, cruel to nervous or clumsy people, and more afraid of the criticisms of those with whom you dance and dine than of your conscience. All of which prevents you from looking like an angel.”

“Thank you. Do you consider paying compliments the perfection of gentlemanly behavior?”

“Have I been paying you many? That last remark of mine was not meant as one. On my honor, the angels will not disappoint me if they are no lovelier than you should be if you had that look in your face and that tone in your voice I spoke of just now. It can hardly displease you to hear that. If I were particularly handsome myself, I should like to be told so.”

“I am sorry I cannot tell you so.”

“Oh! Ha! ha! What a retort, Miss Lindsay! You are not sorry either; you are rather glad.”

Gertrude knew it, and was angry with herself, not because her retort was false, but because she thought it unladylike. “You have no right to annoy me,” she exclaimed, in spite of herself.

“None whatever,” he said, humbly. “If I have done so, forgive me before we part. I will go no further with you; Max will give the alarm if you faint in the avenue, which I don’t think you are likely to do, as you have forgotten all about the hemlock.”

“Oh, how maddening!” she cried. “I have left my basket behind.”

“Never mind; I will find it and have it filled and sent to you.”

“Thank you. I am sorry to trouble you.”

“Not at all. I hope you do not want the hemlock to help you to get rid of the burden of life.”

“Nonsense. I want it for my father, who uses it for medicine.”

“I will bring it myself to-morrow. Is that soon enough?”

“Quite. I am in no hurry. Thank you, Mr. Trefusis. Good-bye.”

She gave him her hand, and even smiled a little, and then hurried away. He stood watching her as she passed along the avenue under the beeches. Once, when she came into a band of sunlight at a gap in the trees, she made so pretty a figure in her spring dress of violet and white that his eyes kindled as he gazed. He took out his note-book, and entered her name and the date, with a brief memorandum.

“I have thawed her,” he said to himself as he put up his book. “She shall learn a lesson or two to hand on to her children before I have done with her. A trifle underbred, too, or she would not insist so much on her breeding. Henrietta used to wear a dress like that. I am glad to see that there is no danger of her taking to me personally.”

He turned away, and saw a crone passing, bending beneath a bundle of sticks. He eyed it curiously; and she scowled at him and hurried on.

“Hallo,” he said.

She continued for a few steps, but her courage failed her and she stopped.

“You are Mrs. Hickling, I think?”

“Yes, please your worship.”

“You are the woman who carried away an old wooden gate that lay on Sir Charles Brandon’s land last winter and used it for firewood. You were imprisoned for seven days for it.”

“You may send me there again if you like,” she retorted, in a cracked voice, as she turned at bay. “But the Lord will make me even with you some day. Cursed be them that oppress the poor and needy; it is one of the seven deadly sins.”

“Those green laths on your back are the remainder of my garden gate,” he said. “You took the first half last Saturday. Next time you want fuel come to the house and ask for coals, and let my gates alone. I suppose you can enjoy a fire without stealing the combustibles. Stow pay me for my gate by telling me something I want to know.”

“And a kind gentleman too, sir; blessings.”

“What is the hemlock good for?”

“The hemlock, kind gentleman? For the evil, sir, to be sure.”

“Scrofulous ulcers!” he exclaimed, recoiling. “The father of that beautiful girl!” He turned homeward, and trudged along with his head bent, muttering, “All rotten to the bone. Oh, civilization! civilization! civilization!”

CHAPTER XIV

“What has come over Gertrude?” said Agatha one day to Lady Brandon.

“Why? Is anything the matter with her?”

“I don’t know; she has not been the same since she poisoned herself. And why did she not tell about it? But for Trefusis we should never have known.”

“Gertrude always made secrets of things.”

“She was in a vile temper for two days after; and now she is quite changed. She falls into long reveries, and does not hear a word of what is going on around. Then she starts into life again, and begs your pardon with the greatest sweetness for not catching what you have said.”

“I hate her when she is polite; it is not natural to her. As to her going to sleep, that is the effect of the hemlock. We know a man who took a spoonful of strychnine in a bath, and he never was the same afterwards.”

“I think she is making up her mind to encourage Erskine,” said Agatha. “When I came here he hardly dared speak to her — at least, she always snubbed him. Now she lets him talk as much as he likes, and actually sends him on messages and allows him to carry things for her.”

“Yes. I never saw anybody like Gertrude in my life. In London, if men were attentive to her, she sat on them for being officious; and if they let her alone she was angry at being neglected. Erskine is quite good enough for her, I think.”

Here Erskine appeared at the door and looked round the room.

“She’s not here,” said Jane.

“I am seeking Sir Charles,” he said, withdrawing somewhat stiffly.

“What a lie!” said Jane, discomfited by his reception of her jest. “He was talking to Sir Charles ten minutes ago in the billiard room. Men are such conceited fools!”

Agatha had strolled to the window, and was looking discontentedly at the prospect, as she had often done at school when alone, and sometimes did now in society. The door opened again, and Sir Charles appeared. He, too, looked round, but when his roving glance reached Agatha, it cast anchor; and he came in.

“Are you busy just now, Miss Wylie?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jane hastily. “She is going to write a letter for me.”

“Really, Jane,” he said, “I think you are old enough to write your letters without troubling Miss Wylie.”

“When I do write my own letters you always find fault with them,” she retorted.

“I thought perhaps you might have leisure to try over a duet with me,” he said, turning to Agatha.

“Certainly,” she replied, hoping to smooth matters by humoring him. “The letter will do any time before post hour.”

Jane reddened, and said shortly, “I will write it myself, if you will not.”

Sir Charles quite lost his temper. “How can you be so damnably rude?” he said, turning upon his wife. “What objection have you to my singing duets with Miss Wylie?”

“Nice language that!” said Jane. “I never said I objected; and you have no right to drag her away to the piano just when she is going to write a letter for me.”

“I do not wish Miss Wylie to do anything except what pleases her best. It seems to me that writing letters to your tradespeople cannot be a very pleasant occupation.”

“Pray don’t mind me,” said Agatha. “It is not the least trouble to me. I used to write all Jane’s letters for her at school. Suppose I write the letter first, and then we can have the duet. You will not mind waiting five minutes?”

“I can wait as long as you please, of course. But it seems such an absurd abuse of your good nature that I cannot help protest!”

“Oh, let it wait!” exclaimed Jane. “Such a ridiculous fuss to make about asking Agatha to write a letter, just because you happen to want her to play you your duets! I am certain she is heartily sick and tired of them.”

Agatha, to escape the altercation, went to the library and wrote the letter. When she returned to the drawing-room, she found no one there; but Sir Charles came in presently.

“I am so sorry, Miss Wylie,” he said, as he opened the piano for her, “that you should be incommoded because my wife is silly enough to be jealous.”

“Jealous!”

“Of course. Idiocy!”

“Oh, you are mistaken,” said Agatha, incredulously. “How could she possibly be jealous of me?”

“She is jealous of everybody and everything,” he replied bitterly, “and she cares for nobody and for nothing. You do not know what I have to endure sometimes from her.”

Agatha thought her most discreet course was to sit down immediately and begin “I would that my love.” Whilst she played and sang, she thought over what Sir Charles had just let slip. She had found him a pleasant companion, light-hearted, fond of music and fun, polite and considerate, appreciative of her talents, quick-witted without being oppressively clever, and, as a married man, disinterested in his attentions. But it now occurred to her that perhaps they had been a good deal together of late.

Sir Charles had by this time wandered from his part into hers; and he now recalled her to the music by stopping to ask whether he was right. Knowing by experience what his difficulty was likely to be, she gave him his note and went on. They had not been singing long when Jane came back and sat down, expressing a hope that her presence would not disturb them. It did disturb them. Agatha suspected that she had come there to watch them, and Sir Charles knew it. Besides, Lady Brandon, even when her mind was tranquil, was habitually restless. She could not speak because of the music, and, though she held an open book in her hand, she could not read and watch simultaneously. She gaped, and leaned to one end of the sofa until, on the point of overbalancing’ she recovered herself with a prodigious bounce. The floor vibrated at her every movement. At last she could keep silence no longer.

“Oh, dear!” she said, yawning audibly. “It must be five o’clock at the very earliest.”

Agatha turned round upon the piano-stool, feeling that music and Lady Brandon were incompatible. Sir Charles, for his guest’s sake, tried hard to restrain his exasperation.

“Probably your watch will tell you,” he said.

“Thank you for nothing,” said Jane. “Agatha, where is Gertrude?”

“How can Miss Wylie possibly tell you where she is, Jane? I think you have gone mad to-day.”

“She is most likely playing billiards with Mr. Erskine,” said Agatha, interposing quickly to forestall a retort from Jane, with its usual sequel of a domestic squabble.

“I think it is very strange of Gertrude to pass the whole day with Chester in the billiard room,” said Jane discontentedly.

“There is not the slightest impropriety in her doing so,” said Sir Charles. “If our hospitality does not place Miss Lindsay above suspicion, the more shame for us. How would you feel if anyone else made such a remark?”

“Oh, stuff!” said Jane peevishly. “You are always preaching long rigmaroles about nothing at all. I did not say there was any impropriety about Gertrude. She is too proper to be pleasant, in my opinion.”

Sir Charles, unable to trust himself further, frowned and left the room, Jane speeding him with a contemptuous laugh.

“Don’t ever be such a fool as to get married,” she said, when he was gone. She looked up as she spoke, and was alarmed to see Agatha seated on the pianoforte, with her ankles swinging in the old school fashion.

“Jane,” she said, surveying her hostess coolly, “do you know what I would do if I were Sir Charles?”

Jane did not know.

“I would get a big stick, beat you black and blue, and then lock you up on bread and water for a week.”

Jane half rose, red and angry. “Wh — why?” she said, relapsing upon the sofa.

“If I were a man, I would not, for mere chivalry’s sake, let a woman treat me like a troublesome dog. You want a sound thrashing.”

“I’d like to see anybody thrash me,” said Jane, rising again and displaying her formidable person erect. Then she burst into tears, and said, “I won’t have such things said to me in my own house. How dare you?”

“You deserve it for being jealous of me,” said Agatha.

Jane’s eyes dilated angrily. “I! — I! — jealous of you!” She looked round, as if for a missile. Not finding one, she sat down again, and said in a voice stifled with tears, “J — Jealous of YOU, indeed!”

“You have good reason to be, for he is fonder of me than of you.”

Jane opened her mouth and eyes convulsively, but only uttered a gasp, and Agatha proceeded calmly, “I am polite to him, which you never are. When he speaks to me I allow him to finish his sentence without expressing, as you do, a foregone conclusion that it is not worth attending to. I do not yawn and talk whilst he is singing. When he converses with me on art or literature, about which he knows twice as much as I do, and at least ten times as much as you.” (Jane gasped again) “I do not make a silly answer and turn to my neighbor at the other side with a remark about the tables or the weather. When he is willing to be pleased, as he always is, I am willing to be pleasant. And that is why he likes me.”

“He does NOT like you. He is the same to everyone.”

“Except his wife. He likes me so much that you, like a great goose as you are, came up here to watch us at our duets, and made yourself as disagreeable as you possibly could whilst I was making myself charming. The poor man was ashamed of you.”

“He wasn’t,” said Jane, sobbing. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything. I won’t bear it. I will get a divorce. I will—”

“You will mend your ways if you have any sense left,” said Agatha remorselessly. “Do not make such a noise, or someone will come to see what is the matter, and I shall have to get down from the piano, where I am very comfortable.”

“It is you who are jealous.”

“Oh, is it, Jane? I have not allowed Sir Charles to fall in love with me yet, but I can do so very easily. What will you wager that he will not kiss me before to-morrow evening?”

“It will be very mean and nasty of you if he does. You seem to think that I can be treated like a child.”

“So you are a child,” said Agatha, descending from her perch and preparing to go. “An occasional slapping does you good.”

“It is nothing to you whether I agree with my husband or not,” said Jane with sudden fierceness.

“Not if you quarrel with him in private, as wellbred couples do. But when it occurs in my presence it makes me uncomfortable, and I object to being made uncomfortable.”

“You would not be here at all if I had not asked you.”

“Just think how dull the house would be without me, Jane!”

“Indeed! It was not dull before you came. Gertrude always behaved like a lady, at least.”

“I am sorry that her example was so utterly lost on you.”

“I won’t bear it,” said Jane with a sob and a plunge upon the sofa that made the lustres of the chandeliers rattle. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I had thought you could be so hateful. I will never ask you again.”

“I will make Sir Charles divorce you for incompatibility of temper and marry me. Then I shall have the place to myself.”

“He can’t divorce me for that, thank goodness. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Agatha laughed. “Come,” she said good-humoredly, “don’t be an old ass, Jane. Wash your face before anyone sees it, and remember what I have told you about Sir Charles.”

“It is very hard to be called an ass in one’s own house.”

“It is harder to be treated as one, like your husband. I am going to look for him in the billiard room.”

Jane ran after her, and caught her by the sleeve.

“Agatha,” she pleaded, “promise me that you won’t be mean. Say that you won’t make love to him.”

“I will consider about it,” replied Agatha gravely.

Jane uttered a groan and sank into a chair, which creaked at the shock. Agatha turned on the threshold, and seeing her shaking her head, pressing her eyes, and tapping with her heel in a restrained frenzy, said quickly,

“Here are the Waltons, and the Fitzgeorges, and Mr. Trefusis coming upstairs. How do you do, Mrs. Walton? Lady Brandon will be SO glad to see you. Good-evening, Mr. Fitzgeorge.”

Jane sprang up, wiped her eyes, and, with her hands on her hair, smoothing it, rushed to a mirror. No visitors appearing, she perceived that she was, for perhaps the hundredth time in her life, the victim of an imposture devised by Agatha. She, gratified by the success of her attempt to regain her old ascendancy over Jane — she had made it with misgiving, notwithstanding her apparent confidence — went downstairs to the library, where she found Sir Charles gloomily trying to drown his domestic troubles in art criticism.

“I thought you were in the billiard room,” said Agatha.

“I only peeped in,” he replied; “but as I saw something particular going on, I thought it best to slip away, and I have been alone ever since.”

The something particular which Sir Charles had not wished to interrupt was only a game of billiards.

It was the first opportunity Erskine had ever enjoyed of speaking to Gertrude at leisure and alone. Yet their conversation had never been so commonplace. She, liking the game, played very well and chatted indifferently; he played badly, and broached trivial topics in spite of himself. After an hour-and-a-half’s play, Gertrude had announced that this game must be their last. He thought desperately that if he were to miss many more strokes the game must presently end, and an opportunity which might never recur pass beyond recall. He determined to tell her without preface that he adored her, but when he opened his lips a question came forth of its own accord relating to the Persian way of playing billiards. Gertrude had never been in Persia, but had seen some Eastern billiard cues in the India museum. Were not the Hindoos wonderful people for filigree work, and carpets, and such things? Did he not think the crookedness of their carpet patterns a blemish? Some people pretended to admire them, but was not that all nonsense? Was not the modern polished floor, with a rug in the middle, much superior to the old carpet fitted into the corners of the room? Yes. Enormously superior. Immensely —

“Why, what are you thinking of to-day, Mr. Erskine? You have played with my ball.”

“I am thinking of you.”

“What did you say?” said Gertrude, not catching the serious turn he had given to the conversation, and poising her cue for a stroke. “Oh! I am as bad as you; that was the worst stroke I ever made, I think. I beg your pardon; you said something just now.”

“I forget. Nothing of any consequence.” And he groaned at his own cowardice.

“Suppose we stop,” she said. “There is no use in finishing the game if our hands are out. I am rather tired of it.”

“Certainly — if you wish it.”

“I will finish if you like.”

“Not at all. What pleases you, pleases me.”

Gertrude made him a little bow, and idly knocked the balls about with her cue. Erskine’s eyes wandered, and his lip moved irresolutely. He had settled with himself that his declaration should be a frank one — heart to heart. He had pictured himself in the act of taking her hand delicately, and saying, “Gertrude, I love you. May I tell you so again?” But this scheme did not now seem practicable.

“Miss Lindsay.”

Gertrude, bending over the table, looked up in alarm.

“The present is as good an opportunity as I will — as I shall — as I will.”

“Shall,” said Gertrude.

“I beg your pardon?”

“SHALL,” repeated Gertrude. “Did you ever study the doctrine of necessity?”

“The doctrine of necessity?” he said, bewildered.

Gertrude went to the other side of the table in pursuit of a ball. She now guessed what was coming, and was willing that it should come; not because she intended to accept, but because, like other young ladies experienced in such scenes, she counted the proposals of marriage she received as a Red Indian counts the scalps he takes.

“We have had a very pleasant time of it here,” he said, giving up as inexplicable the relevance of the doctrine of necessity. “At least, I have.”

“Well,” said Gertrude, quick to resent a fancied allusion to her private discontent, “so have I.”

“I am glad of that — more so than I can convey by words.”

“Is it any business of yours?” she said, following the disagreeable vein he had unconsciously struck upon, and suspecting pity in his efforts to be sympathetic.

“I wish I dared hope so. The happiness of my visit has been due to you entirely.”

“Indeed,” said Gertrude, wincing as all the hard things Trefusis had told her of herself came into her mind at the heels of Erskine’s unfortunate allusion to her power of enjoying herself.

“I hope I am not paining you,” he said earnestly.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, standing erect with sudden impatience. “You seem to think that it is very easy to pain me.”

“No,” he said timidly, puzzled by the effect he had produced. “I fear you misunderstand me. I am very awkward. Perhaps I had better say no more.” Gertrude, by turning away to put up her cue, signified that that was a point for him to consider; she not intending to trouble herself about it. When she faced him again, he was motionless and dejected, with a wistful expression like that of a dog that has proffered a caress and received a kick. Remorse, and a vague sense that there was something base in her attitude towards him, overcame her. She looked at him for an instant and left the room.

The look excited him. He did not understand it, nor attempt to understand it; but it was a look that he had never before seen in her face or in that of any other woman. It struck him as a momentary revelation of what he had written of in “The Patriot Martyrs” as

“The glorious mystery of a woman’s heart,”

and it made him feel unfit for ordinary social intercourse. He hastened from the house, walked swiftly down the avenue to the lodge, where he kept his bicycle, left word there that he was going for an excursion and should probably not return in time for dinner, mounted, and sped away recklessly along the Riverside Road. In less than two minutes he passed the gate of Sallust’s House, where he nearly ran over an old woman laden with a basket of coals, who put down her burthen to scream curses after him. Warned by this that his headlong pace was dangerous, he slackened it a little, and presently saw Trefusis lying prone on the river bank, with his cheeks propped on his elbows, reading intently. Erskine, who had presented him, a few days before, with a copy of “The Patriot Martyrs and other Poems,” tried to catch a glimpse of the book over which Trefusis was so serious. It was a Blue Book, full of figures. Erskine rode on in disgust, consoling himself with the recollection of Gertrude’s face.

The highway now swerved inland from the river, and rose to a steep acclivity, at the brow of which he turned and looked back. The light was growing ruddy, and the shadows were lengthening. Trefusis was still prostrate in the meadow, and the old woman was in a field, gathering hemlock.

Erskine raced down the hill at full speed, and did not look behind him again until he found himself at nightfall on the skirts of a town, where he purchased some beer and a sandwich, which he ate with little appetite. Gertrude had set up a disturbance within him which made him impatient of eating.

It was now dark. He was many miles from Brandon Beeches, and not sure of the way back. Suddenly he resolved to complete his unfinished declaration that evening. He now could not ride back fast enough to satisfy his impatience. He tried a short cut, lost himself, spent nearly an hour seeking the highroad, and at last came upon a railway station just in time to catch a train that brought him within a mile of his destination.

When he rose from the cushions of the railway carriage he found himself somewhat fatigued, and he mounted the bicycle stiffly. But his resolution was as ardent as ever, and his heart beat strongly as, after leaving his bicycle at the lodge, he walked up the avenue through the deep gloom beneath the beeches. Near the house, the first notes of “Grudel perche finora” reached him, and he stepped softly on to the turf lest his footsteps on the gravel should rouse the dogs and make them mar the harmony by barking. A rustle made him stop and listen. Then Gertrude’s voice whispered through the darkness:

“What did you mean by what you said to me within?”

An extraordinary sensation shook Erskine; confused ideas of fairyland ran through his imagination. A bitter disappointment, like that of waking from a happy dream, followed as Trefusis’s voice, more finely tuned than he had ever heard it before, answered,

“Merely that the expanse of stars above us is not more illimitable than my contempt for Miss Lindsay, nor brighter than my hopes of Gertrude.”

“Miss Lindsay always to you, if you please, Mr. Trefusis.”

“Miss Lindsay never to me, but only to those who cannot see through her to the soul within, which is Gertrude. There are a thousand Miss Lindsays in the world, formal and false. There is but one Gertrude.”

“I am an unprotected girl, Mr. Trefusis, and you can call me what you please.”

It occurred to Erskine that this was a fit occasion to rush forward and give Trefusis, whose figure he could now dimly discern, a black eye. But he hesitated, and the opportunity passed.

“Unprotected!” said Trefusis. “Why, you are fenced round and barred in with conventions, laws, and lies that would frighten the truth from the lips of any man whose faith in Gertrude was less strong than mine. Go to Sir Charles and tell him what I have said to Miss Lindsay, and within ten minutes I shall have passed these gates with a warning never to approach them again. I am in your power, and were I in Miss Lindsay’s power alone, my shrift would be short. Happily, Gertrude, though she sees as yet but darkly, feels that Miss Lindsay is her bitterest foe.”

“It is ridiculous. I am not two persons; I am only one. What does it matter to me if your contempt for me is as illimitable as the stars?”

“Ah, you remember that, do you? Whenever you hear a man talking about the stars you may conclude that he is either an astronomer or a fool. But you and a fine starry night would make a fool of any man.”

“I don’t understand you. I try to, but I cannot; or, if I guess, I cannot tell whether you are in earnest or not.”

“I am very much in earnest. Abandon at once and for ever all misgivings that I am trifling with you, or passing an idle hour as men do when they find themselves in the company of beautiful women. I mean what I say literally, and in the deepest sense. You doubt me; we have brought society to such a state that we all suspect one another. But whatever is true will command belief sooner or later from those who have wit enough to comprehend truth. Now let me recall Miss Lindsay to consciousness by remarking that we have been out for ten minutes, and that our hostess is not the woman to allow our absence to pass without comment.”

“Let us go in. Thank you for reminding me.”

“Thank you for forgetting.”

Erskine heard their footsteps retreating, and presently saw the two enter the glow of light that shone from the open window of the billiard room, through which they went indoors. Trefusis, a man whom he had seen that day in a beautiful landscape, blind to everything except a row of figures in a Blue Book, was his successful rival, although it was plain from the very sound of his voice that he did not — could not — love Gertrude. Only a poet could do that. Trefusis was no poet, but a sordid brute unlikely to inspire interest in anything more human than a public meeting, much less in a woman, much less again in a woman so ethereal as Gertrude. She was proud too, yet she had allowed the fellow to insult her — had forgiven him for the sake of a few broad compliments. Erskine grew angry and cynical. The situation did not suit his poetry. Instead of being stricken to the heart with a solemn sorrow, as a Patriot Martyr would have been under similar circumstances, he felt slighted and ridiculous. He was hardly convinced of what had seemed at first the most obvious feature of the case, Trefusis’s inferiority to himself.

He stood under the trees until Trefusis reappeared on his way home, making, Erskine thought, as much noise with his heels on the gravel as a regiment of delicately bred men would have done. He stopped for a moment to make inquiry at the lodge as he went out; then his footsteps died away in the distance.

Erskine, chilled, stiff, and with a sensation of a bad cold coming on, went into the house, and was relieved to find that Gertrude had retired, and that Lady Brandon, though she had been sure that he had ridden into the river in the dark, had nevertheless provided a warm supper for him.

CHAPTER XV

Erskine soon found plenty of themes for his newly begotten cynicism. Gertrude’s manner towards him softened so much that he, believing her heart given to his rival, concluded that she was tempting him to make a proposal which she had no intention of accepting. Sir Charles, to whom he told what he had overheard in the avenue, professed sympathy, but was evidently pleased to learn that there was nothing serious in the attentions Trefusis paid to Agatha. Erskine wrote three bitter sonnets on hollow friendship and showed them to Sir Charles, who, failing to apply them to himself, praised them highly and showed them to Trefusis without asking the author’s permission. Trefusis remarked that in a corrupt society expressions of dissatisfaction were always creditable to a writer’s sensibility; but he did not say much in praise of the verse.

“Why has he taken to writing in this vein?” he said. “Has he been disappointed in any way of late? Has he proposed to Miss Lindsay and been rejected?”

“No,” said Sir Charles surprised by this blunt reference to a subject they had never before discussed. “He does not intend to propose to Miss Lindsay.”

“But he did intend to.”

“He certainly did, but he has given up the idea.”

“Why?” said Trefusis, apparently disapproving strongly of the renunciation.

Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.

“I am sorry to hear it. I wish you could induce him to change his mind. He is a nice fellow, with enough to live on comfortably, whilst he is yet what is called a poor man, so that she could feel perfectly disinterested in marrying him. It will do her good to marry without making a pecuniary profit by it; she will respect herself the more afterwards, and will neither want bread and butter nor be ashamed of her husband’s origin, in spite of having married for love alone. Make a match of it if you can. I take an interest in the girl; she has good instincts.”

Sir Charles’s suspicion that Trefusis was really paying court to Agatha returned after this conversation, which he repeated to Erskine, who, much annoyed because his poems had been shown to a reader of Blue Books, thought it only a blind for Trefusis’s design upon Gertrude. Sir Charles pooh-poohed this view, and the two friends were sharp with one another in discussing it. After dinner, when the ladies had left them, Sir Charles, repentant and cordial, urged Erskine to speak to Gertrude without troubling himself as to the sincerity of Trefusis. But Erskine, knowing himself ill able to brook a refusal, was loth to expose himself.

“If you had heard the tone of her voice when she asked him whether he was in earnest, you would not talk to me like this,” he said despondently. “I wish he had never come here.”

“Well, that, at least, was no fault of mine, my dear fellow,” said Sir Charles. “He came among us against my will. And now that he appears to have been in the right — legally — about the field, it would look like spite if I cut him. Besides, he really isn’t a bad man if he would only let the women alone.”

“If he trifles with Miss Lindsay, I shall ask him to cross the Channel, and have a shot at him.”

“I don’t think he’d go,” said Sir Charles dubiously. “If I were you, I would try my luck with Gertrude at once. In spite of what you heard, I don’t believe she would marry a man of his origin. His money gives him an advantage, certainly, but Gertrude has sent richer men to the rightabout.”

“Let the fellow have fair play,” said Erskine. “I may be wrong, of course; all men are liable to err in judging themselves, but I think I could make her happier than he can.”

Sir Charles was not so sure of that, but he cheerfully responded, “Certainly. He is not the man for her at all, and you are. He knows it, too.”

“Hmf!” muttered Erskine, rising dejectedly. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“By-the-bye, we are to call on him to-morrow, to go through his house, and his collection of photographs. Photographs! Ha, ha! Damn his house!” said Erskine.

Next day they went together to Sallust’s House. It stood in the midst of an acre of land, waste except a little kitchen garden at the rear. The lodge at the entrance was uninhabited, and the gates stood open, with dust and fallen leaves heaped up against them. Free ingress had thus been afforded to two stray ponies, a goat, and a tramp, who lay asleep in the grass. His wife sat near, watching him.

“I have a mind to turn back,” said Sir Charles, looking about him in disgust. “The place is scandalously neglected. Look at that rascal asleep within full view of the windows.”

“I admire his cheek,” said Erskine. “Nice pair of ponies, too.”

Sallust’s House was square and painted cinnamon color. Beneath the cornice was a yellow frieze with figures of dancing children, imitated from the works of Donatello, and very unskilfully executed. There was a meagre portico of four columns, painted red, and a plain pediment, painted yellow. The colors, meant to match those of the walls, contrasted disagreeably with them, having been applied more recently, apparently by a color-blind artist. The door beneath the portico stood open. Sir Charles rang the bell, and an elderly woman answered it; but before they could address her, Trefusis appeared, clad in a painter’s jacket of white jean. Following him in, they found that the house was a hollow square, enclosing a courtyard with a bath sunk in the middle, and a fountain in the centre of the bath. The courtyard, formerly open to the sky, was now roofed in with dusty glass; the nymph that had once poured out the water of the fountain was barren and mutilated; and the bath was partly covered in with loose boards, the exposed part accommodating a heap of coals in one corner, a heap of potatoes in another, a beer barrel, some old carpets, a tarpaulin, and a broken canoe. The marble pavement extended to the outer walls of the house, and was roofed in at the sides by the upper stories which were supported by fluted stone columns, much stained and chipped. The staircase, towards which Trefusis led his visitors, was a broad one at the end opposite the door, and gave access to a gallery leading to the upper rooms.

“This house was built in 1780 by an ancestor of my mother,” said Trefusis. “He passed for a man of exquisite taste. He wished the place to be maintained forever — he actually used that expression in his will — as the family seat, and he collected a fine library here, which I found useful, as all the books came into my hands in good condition, most of them with the leaves uncut. Some people prize uncut copies of old editions; a dealer gave me three hundred and fifty pounds for a lot of them. I came into possession of a number of family fetishes — heirlooms, as they are called. There was a sword that one of my forbears wore at Edgehill and other battles in Charles the First’s time. We fought on the wrong side, of course, but the sword fetched thirty-five shillings nevertheless. You will hardly believe that I was offered one hundred and fifty pounds for a gold cup worth about twenty-five, merely because Queen Elizabeth once drank from it. This is my study. It was designed for a banqueting hall.”

They entered a room as long as the wall of the house, pierced on one side by four tall windows, between which square pillars, with Corinthian capitals supporting the cornice, were half sunk in the wall. There were similar pillars on the opposite side, but between them, instead of windows, were arched niches in which stood life-size plaster statues, chipped, broken, and defaced in an extraordinary fashion. The flooring, of diagonally set narrow boards, was uncarpeted and unpolished. The ceiling was adorned with frescoes, which at once excited Sir Charles’s interest, and he noted with indignation that a large portion of the painting at the northern end had been destroyed and some glass roofing inserted. In another place bolts had been driven in to support the ropes of a trapeze and a few other pieces of gymnastic apparatus. The walls were whitewashed, and at about four feet from the ground a dark band appeared, produced by pencil memoranda and little sketches scribbled on the whitewash. One end of the apartment was unfurnished, except by the gymnastic apparatus, a photographer’s camera, a ladder in the corner, and a common deal table with oil cans and paint pots upon it. At the other end a comparatively luxurious show was made by a large bookcase, an elaborate combination of bureau and writing desk, a rack with a rifle, a set of foils, and an umbrella in it, several folio albums on a table, some comfortable chairs and sofas, and a thick carpet under foot. Close by, and seeming much out of place, was a carpenter’s bench with the usual implements and a number of boards of various thicknesses.

“This is a sort of comfort beyond the reach of any but a rich man,” said Trefusis, turning and surprising his visitors in the act of exchanging glances of astonishment at his taste. “I keep a drawing-room of the usual kind for receiving strangers with whom it is necessary to be conventional, but I never enter it except on such occasions. What do you think of this for a study?”

“On my soul, Trefusis, I think you are mad,” said Sir Charles. “The place looks as if it had stood a siege. How did you manage to break the statues and chip the walls so outrageously?”

Trefusis took a newspaper from the table and said, “Listen to this: ‘In spite of the unfavorable nature of the weather, the sport of the Emperor and his guests in Styria has been successful. In three days 52 chamois and 79 stags and deer fell to 19 single-barrelled rifles, the Emperor allowing no more on this occasion.’

“I share the Emperor’s delight in shooting, but I am no butcher, and do not need the royal relish of blood to my sport. And I do not share my ancestors’ taste in statuary. Hence—” Here Trefusis opened a drawer, took out a pistol, and fired at the Hebe in the farthest niche.

“Well done!” said Erskine coolly, as the last fragment of Hebe’s head crumbled at the touch of the bullet.

“Very fruitlessly done,” said Trefusis. “I am a good shot, but of what use is it to me? None. I once met a gamekeeper who was a Methodist. He was a most eloquent speaker, but a bad shot. If he could have swapped talents with me I would have given him ten thousand pounds to boot willingly, although he would have profited as much as I by the exchange alone. I have no more desire or need to be a good shot than to be king of England, or owner of a Derby winner, or anything else equally ridiculous, and yet I never missed my aim in my life — thank blind fortune for nothing!”

“King of England!” said Erskine, with a scornful laugh, to show Trefusis that other people were as liberty-loving as he. “Is it not absurd to hear a nation boasting of its freedom and tolerating a king?”

“Oh, hang your republicanism, Chester!” said Sir Charles, who privately held a low opinion of the political side of the Patriot Martyrs.

“I won’t be put down on that point,” said Erskine. “I admire a man that kills a king. You will agree with me there, Trefusis, won’t you?”

“Certainly not,” said Trefusis. “A king nowadays is only a dummy put up to draw your fire off the real oppressors of society, and the fraction of his salary that he can spend as he likes is usually far too small for his risk, his trouble, and the condition of personal slavery to which he is reduced. What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch? We deny him all privacy; he may not marry whom he chooses, consort with whom he prefers, dress according to his taste, or live where he pleases. I don’t believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best; a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council. We dictate everything except his thoughts and dreams, and even these he must keep to himself if they are not suitable, in our opinion, to his condition. The work we impose on him has all the hardship of mere task work; it is unfruitful, incessant, monotonous, and has to be transacted for the most part with nervous bores. We make his kingdom a treadmill to him, and drive him to and fro on the face of it. Finally, having taken everything else that men prize from him, we fall upon his character, and that of every person to whom he ventures to show favor. We impose enormous expenses on him, stint him, and then rail at his parsimony. We use him as I use those statues — stick him up in the place of honor for our greater convenience in disfiguring and abusing him. We send him forth through our crowded cities, proclaiming that he is the source of all good and evil in the nation, and he, knowing that many people believe it, knowing that it is a lie, and that he is powerless to shorten the working day by one hour, raise wages one penny, or annul the smallest criminal sentence, however unjust it may seem to him; knowing that every miner in the kingdom can manufacture dynamite, and that revolvers are sold for seven and sixpence apiece; knowing that he is not bullet proof, and that every king in Europe has been shot at in the streets; he must smile and bow and maintain an expression of gracious enjoyment whilst the mayor and corporation inflict upon him the twaddling address he has heard a thousand times before. I do not ask you to be loyal, Erskine; but I expect you, in common humanity, to sympathize with the chief figure in the pageant, who is no more accountable for the manifold evils and abominations that exist in his realm than the Lord Mayor is accountable for the thefts of the pickpockets who follow his show on the ninth of November.”

Sir Charles laughed at the trouble Trefusis took to prove his case, and said soothingly, “My dear fellow, kings are used to it, and expect it, and like it.”

“And probably do not see themselves as I see them, any more than common people do,” assented Trefusis.

“What an exquisite face!” exclaimed Erskine suddenly, catching sight of a photograph in a rich gold and coral frame on a miniature easel draped with ruby velvet. Trefusis turned quickly, so evidently gratified that Sir Charles hastened to say, “Charming!” Then, looking at the portrait, he added, as if a little startled, “It certainly is an extraordinarily attractive face.”

“Years ago,” said Trefusis, “when I saw that face for the first time, I felt as you feel now.”

Silence ensued, the two visitors looking at the portrait, Trefusis looking at them.

“Curious style of beauty,” said Sir Charles at last, not quite so assuredly as before.

Trefusis laughed unpleasantly. “Do you recognize the artist — the enthusiastic amateur — in her?” he said, opening another drawer and taking out a bundle of drawings, which he handed to be examined.

“Very clever. Very clever indeed,” said Sir Charles. “I should like to meet the lady.”

“I have often been on the point of burning them,” said Trefusis; “but there they are, and there they are likely to remain. The portrait has been much admired.”

“Can you give us an introduction to the original, old fellow?” said Erskine.

“No, happily. She is dead.”

Disagreeably shocked, they looked at him for a moment with aversion. Then Erskine, turning with pity and disappointment to the picture, said, “Poor girl! Was she married?”

“Yes. To me.”

“Mrs. Trefusis!” exclaimed Sir Charles. “Ah! Dear me!”

Erskine, with proof before him that it was possible for a beautiful girl to accept Trefusis, said nothing.

“I keep her portrait constantly before me to correct my natural amativeness. I fell in love with her and married her. I have fallen in love once or twice since but a glance at my lost Hetty has cured me of the slightest inclination to marry.”

Sir Charles did not reply. It occurred to him that Lady Brandon’s portrait, if nothing else were left of her, might be useful in the same way.

“Come, you will marry again one of these days,” said Erskine, in a forced tone of encouragement.

“It is possible. Men should marry, especially rich men. But I assure you I have no present intention of doing so.”

Erskine’s color deepened, and he moved away to the table where the albums lay.

“This is the collection of photographs I spoke of,” said Trefusis, following him and opening one of the books. “I took many of them myself under great difficulties with regard to light — the only difficulty that money could not always remove. This is a view of my father’s house — or rather one of his houses. It cost seventy-five thousand pounds.”

“Very handsome indeed,” said Sir Charles, secretly disgusted at being invited to admire a photograph, such as house agents exhibit, of a vulgarly designed country house, merely because it had cost seventy-five thousand pounds. The figures were actually written beneath the picture.

“This is the drawing-room, and this one of the best bedrooms. In the right-hand corner of the mount you will see a note of the cost of the furniture, fittings, napery, and so forth. They were of the most luxurious description.”

“Very interesting,” said Sir Charles, hardly disguising the irony of the comment.

“Here is a view — this is the first of my own attempts — of the apartment of one of the under servants. It is comfortable and spacious, and solidly furnished.”

“So I perceive.”

“These are the stables. Are they not handsome?”

“Palatial. Quite palatial.”

“There is every luxury that a horse could desire, including plenty of valets to wait on him. You are noting the figures, I hope. There is the cost of the building and the expenditure per horse per annum.”

“I see.”

“Here is the exterior of a house. What do you think of it?”

“It is rather picturesque in its dilapidation.”

“Picturesque! Would you like to live in it?”

“No,” said Erskine. “I don’t see anything very picturesque about it. What induced you to photograph such a wretched old rookery?”

“Here is a view of the best room in it. Photography gives you a fair idea of the broken flooring and patched windows, but you must imagine the dirt and the odor of the place. Some of the stains are weather stains, others came from smoke and filth. The landlord of the house holds it from a peer and lets it out in tenements. Three families occupied that room when I photographed it. You will see by the figures in the corner that it is more profitable to the landlord than an average house in Mayfair. Here is the cellar, let to a family for one and sixpence a week, and considered a bargain. The sun never shines there, of course. I took it by artificial light. You may add to the rent the cost of enough bad beer to make the tenant insensible to the filth of the place. Beer is the chloroform that enables the laborer to endure the severe operation of living; that is why we can always assure one another over our wine that the rascal’s misery is due to his habit of drinking. We are down on him for it, because, if he could bear his life without beer, we should save his beer-money — get him for lower wages. In short, we should be richer and he soberer. Here is the yard; the arrangements are indescribable. Seven of the inhabitants of that house had worked for years in my father’s mill. That is, they had created a considerable part of the vast sums of money for drawing your attention to which you were disgusted with me just now.”

“Not at all,” said Sir Charles faintly.

“You can see how their condition contrasts with that of my father’s horses. The seven men to whom I have alluded, with three hundred others, were thrown destitute upon the streets by this.” (Here he turned over a leaf and displayed a photograph of an elaborate machine.) “It enabled my father to dispense with their services, and to replace them by a handful of women and children. He had bought the patent of the machine for fifty pounds from the inventor, who was almost ruined by the expenses of his ingenuity, and would have sacrificed anything for a handful of ready money. Here is a portrait of my father in his masonic insignia. He believed that freemasons generally get on in the world, and as the main object of his life was to get on, he joined them, and wanted me to do the same. But I object to pretended secret societies and hocus pocus, and would not. You see what he was — a portly, pushing, egotistical tradesman. Mark the successful man, the merchant prince with argosies on every sea, the employer of thousands of hands, the munificent contributor to public charities, the churchwarden, the member of parliament, and the generous patron of his relatives his self-approbation struggling with the instinctive sense of baseness in the money-hunter, the ignorant and greedy filcher of the labor of others, the seller of his own mind and manhood for luxuries and delicacies that he was too lowlived to enjoy, and for the society of people who made him feel his inferiority at every turn.”

“And the man to whom you owe everything you possess,” said Erskine boldly.

“I possess very little. Everything he left me, except a few pictures, I spent long ago, and even that was made by his slaves and not by him. My wealth comes day by day fresh from the labor of the wretches who live in the dens I have just shown you, or of a few aristocrats of labor who are within ten shillings a week of being worse off. However, there is some excuse for my father. Once, at an election riot, I got into a free fight. I am a peaceful man, but as I had either to fight or be knocked down and trampled upon, I exchanged blows with men who were perhaps as peacefully disposed as I. My father, launched into a free competition (free in the sense that the fight is free: that is, lawless) — my father had to choose between being a slave himself and enslaving others. He chose the latter, and as he was applauded and made much of for succeeding, who dare blame him? Not I. Besides, he did something to destroy the anarchy that enabled him to plunder society with impunity. He furnished me, its enemy, with the powerful weapon of a large fortune. Thus our system of organizing industry sometimes hatches the eggs from which its destroyers break. Does Lady Brandon wear much lace?”

“I — No; that is — How the deuce do I know, Trefusis? What an extraordinary question!”

“This is a photograph of a lace school. It was a filthy room, twelve feet square. It was paved with brick, and the children were not allowed to wear their boots, lest the lace should get muddy. However, as there were twenty of them working there for fifteen hours a day — all girls — they did not suffer much from cold. They were pretty tightly packed — may be still, for aught I know. They brought three or four shillings a week sometimes to their fond parents; and they were very quick-fingered little creatures, and stuck intensely to their work, as the overseer always hit them when they looked up or—”

“Trefusis,” said Sir Charles, turning away from the table, “I beg your pardon, but I have no appetite for horrors. You really must not ask me to go through your collection. It is no doubt very interesting, but I can’t stand it. Have you nothing pleasant to entertain me with?”

“Pooh! you are squeamish. However, as you are a novice, let us put off the rest until you are seasoned. The pictures are not all horrible. Each book refers to a different country. That one contains illustrations of modern civilization in Germany, for instance. That one is France; that, British India. Here you have the United States of America, home of liberty, theatre of manhood suffrage, kingless and lordless land of Protection, Republicanism, and the realized Radical Programme, where all the black chattel slaves were turned into wage-slaves (like my father’s white fellows) at a cost of 800,000 lives and wealth incalculable. You and I are paupers in comparison with the great capitalists of that country, where the laborers fight for bones with the Chinamen, like dogs. Some of these great men presented me with photographs of their yachts and palaces, not anticipating the use to which I would put them. Here are some portraits that will not harrow your feelings. This is my mother, a woman of good family, every inch a lady. Here is a Lancashire lass, the daughter of a common pitman. She has exactly the same physical characteristics as my well-born mother — the same small head, delicate features, and so forth; they might be sisters. This villainous-looking pair might be twin brothers, except that there is a trace of good humor about the one to the right. The good-humored one is a bargee on the Lyvern Canal. The other is one of the senior noblemen of the British Peerage. They illustrate the fact that Nature, even when perverted by generations of famine fever, ignores the distinctions we set up between men. This group of men and women, all tolerably intelligent and thoughtful looking, are so-called enemies of society — Nihilists, Anarchists, Communards, members of the International, and so on. These other poor devils, worried, stiff, strumous, awkward, vapid, and rather coarse, with here and there a passably pretty woman, are European kings, queens, grand-dukes, and the like. Here are ship-captains, criminals, poets, men of science, peers, peasants, political economists, and representatives of dozens of degrees. The object of the collection is to illustrate the natural inequality of man, and the failure of our artificial inequality to correspond with it.”

“It seems to me a sort of infernal collection for the upsetting of people’s ideas,” said Erskine. “You ought to label it ‘A Portfolio of Paradoxes.’”

“In a rational state of society they would be paradoxes; but now the time gives them proof — like Hamlet’s paradox. It is, however, a collection of facts; and I will give no fanciful name to it. You dislike figures, don’t you?”

“Unless they are by Phidias, yes.”

“Here are a few, not by Phidias. This is the balance sheet of an attempt I made some years ago to carry out the idea of an International Association of Laborers — commonly known as THE International — or union of all workmen throughout the world in defence of the interests of labor. You see the result. Expenditure, four thousand five hundred pounds. Subscriptions received from working-men, twenty-two pounds seven and ten pence halfpenny. The British workmen showed their sense of my efforts to emancipate them by accusing me of making a good thing out of the Association for my own pocket, and by mobbing and stoning me twice. I now help them only when they show some disposition to help themselves. I occupy myself partly in working out a scheme for the reorganization of industry, and partly in attacking my own class, women and all, as I am attacking you.”

“There is little use in attacking us, I fear,” said Sir Charles.

“Great use,” said Trefusis confidently. “You have a very different opinion of our boasted civilization now from that which you held when I broke your wall down and invited those Land Nationalization zealots to march across your pleasure ground. You have seen in my album something you had not seen an hour ago, and you are consequently not quite the same man you were an hour ago. My pictures stick in the mind longer than your scratchy etchings, or the leaden things in which you fancy you see tender harmonies in gray. Erskine’s next drama may be about liberty, but its Patriot Martyrs will have something better to do than spout balderdash against figure-head kings who in all their lives never secretly plotted as much dastardly meanness, greed, cruelty, and tyranny as is openly voted for in London by every half-yearly meeting of dividend-consuming vermin whose miserable wage-slaves drudge sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.”

“What is going to be the end of it all?” said Sir Charles, a little dazed.

“Socialism or Smash. Socialism if the race has at last evolved the faculty of coordinating the functions of a society too crowded and complex to be worked any longer on the old haphazard private-property system. Unless we reorganize our society socialistically — humanly a most arduous and magnificent enterprise, economically a most simple and sound one — Free Trade by itself will ruin England, and I will tell you exactly how. When my father made his fortune we had the start of all other nations in the organization of our industry and in our access to iron and coal. Other nations bought our products for less than they must have spent to raise them at home, and yet for so much more than they cost us, that profits rolled in Atlantic waves upon our capitalists. When the workers, by their trades-unions, demanded a share of the luck in the form of advanced wages, it paid better to give them the little they dared to ask than to stop gold-gathering to fight and crush them. But now our customers have set up in their own countries improved copies of our industrial organization, and have discovered places where iron and coal are even handier than they are by this time in England. They produce for themselves, or buy elsewhere, what they formerly bought from us. Our profits are vanishing, our machinery is standing idle, our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop the mills and fight and crush the unions when the men strike, no longer for an advance, but against a reduction. Now that these unions are beaten, helpless, and drifting to bankruptcy as the proportion of unemployed men in their ranks becomes greater, they are being petted and made much of by our class; an infallible sign that they are making no further progress in their duty of destroying us. The small capitalists are left stranded by the ebb; the big ones will follow the tide across the water, and rebuild their factories where steam power, water power, labor power, and transport are now cheaper than in England, where they used to be cheapest. The workers will emigrate in pursuit of the factory, but they will multiply faster than they emigrate, and be told that their own exorbitant demand for wages is driving capital abroad, and must continue to do so whilst there is a Chinaman or a Hindoo unemployed to underbid them. As the British factories are shut up, they will be replaced by villas; the manufacturing districts will become fashionable resorts for capitalists living on the interest of foreign investments; the farms and sheep runs will be cleared for deer forests. All products that can in the nature of things be manufactured elsewhere than where they are consumed will be imported in payment of deer-forest rents from foreign sportsmen, or of dividends due to shareholders resident in England, but holding shares in companies abroad, and these imports will not be paid for by ex ports, because rent and interest are not paid for at all — a fact which the Free Traders do not yet see, or at any rate do not mention, although it is the key to the whole mystery of their opponents. The cry for Protection will become wild, but no one will dare resort to a demonstrably absurd measure that must raise prices before it raises wages, and that has everywhere failed to benefit the worker. There will be no employment for anyone except in doing things that must be done on the spot, such as unpacking and distributing the imports, ministering to the proprietors as domestic servants, or by acting, preaching, paving, lighting, housebuilding, and the rest; and some of these, as the capitalist comes to regard ostentation as vulgar, and to enjoy a simpler life, will employ fewer and fewer people. A vast proletariat, beginning with a nucleus of those formerly employed in export trades, with their multiplying progeny, will be out of employment permanently. They will demand access to the land and machinery to produce for themselves. They will be refused. They will break a few windows and be dispersed with a warning to their leaders. They will burn a few houses and murder a policeman or two, and then an example will be made of the warned. They will revolt, and be shot down with machine-guns — emigrated — exterminated anyhow and everyhow; for the proprietary classes have no idea of any other means of dealing with the full claims of labor. You yourself, though you would give fifty pounds to Jansenius’s emigration fund readily enough, would call for the police, the military, and the Riot Act, if the people came to Brandon Beeches and bade you turn out and work for your living with the rest. Well, the superfluous proletariat destroyed, there will remain a population of capitalists living on gratuitous imports and served by a disaffected retinue. One day the gratuitous imports will stop in consequence of the occurrence abroad of revolution and repudiation, fall in the rate of interest, purchase of industries by governments for lump sums, not reinvestable, or what not. Our capitalist community is then thrown on the remains of the last dividend, which it consumes long before it can rehabilitate its extinct machinery of production in order to support itself with its own hands. Horses, dogs, cats, rats, blackberries, mushrooms, and cannibalism only postpone—”

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted Sir Charles. “On my honor, I thought you were serious at first, Trefusis. Come, confess, old chap; it’s all a fad of yours. I half suspected you of being a bit of a crank.” And he winked at Erskine.

“What I have described to you is the inevitable outcome of our present Free Trade policy without Socialism. The theory of Free Trade is only applicable to systems of exchange, not to systems of spoliation. Our system is one of spoliation, and if we don’t abandon it, we must either return to Protection or go to smash by the road I have just mapped. Now, sooner than let the Protectionists triumph, the Cobden Club itself would blow the gaff and point out to the workers that Protection only means compelling the proprietors of England to employ slaves resident in England and therefore presumably — though by no means necessarily — Englishmen. This would open the eyes of the nation at last to the fact that England is not their property. Once let them understand that and they would soon make it so. When England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively, England becomes socialistic. Artificial inequality will vanish then before real freedom of contract; freedom of competition, or unhampered emulation, will keep us moving ahead; and Free Trade will fulfil its promises at last.”

“And the idlers and loafers,” said Erskine. “What of them?”

“You and I, in fact,” said Trefusis, “die of starvation, I suppose, unless we choose to work, or unless they give us a little out-door relief in consideration of our bad bringing-up.”

“Do you mean that they will plunder us?” said Sir Charles.

“I mean that they will make us stop plundering them. If they hesitate to strip us naked, or to cut our throats if we offer them the smallest resistance, they will show us more mercy than we ever showed them. Consider what we have done to get our rents in Ireland and Scotland, and our dividends in Egypt, if you have already forgotten my photographs and their lesson in our atrocities at home. Why, man, we murder the great mass of these toilers with overwork and hardship; their average lifetime is not half as long as ours. Human nature is the same in them as in us. If we resist them, and succeed in restoring order, as we call it, we will punish them mercilessly for their insubordination, as we did in Paris in 1871, where, by-the-bye, we taught them the folly of giving their enemies quarter. If they beat us, we shall catch it, and serve us right. Far better turn honest at once and avert bloodshed. Eh, Erskine?”

Erskine was considering what reply he should make, when Trefusis disconcerted him by ringing a bell. Presently the elderly woman appeared, pushing before her an oblong table mounted on wheels, like a barrow.

“Thank you,” said Trefusis, and dismissed her. “Here is some good wine, some good water, some good fruit, and some good bread. I know that you cling to wine as to a good familiar creature. As for me, I make no distinction between it and other vegetable poisons. I abstain from them all. Water for serenity, wine for excitement. I, having boiling springs of excitement within myself, am never at a loss for it, and have only to seek serenity. However,” (here he drew a cork), “a generous goblet of this will make you feel like gods for half an hour at least. Shall we drink to your conversion to Socialism?”

Sir Charles shook his head.

“Come, Mr. Donovan Brown, the great artist, is a Socialist, and why should not you be one?”

“Donovan Brown!” exclaimed Sir Charles with interest. “Is it possible? Do you know him personally?”

“Here are several letters from him. You may read them; the mere autograph of such a man is interesting.”

Sir Charles took the letters and read them earnestly, Erskine reading over his shoulder.

“I most cordially agree with everything he says here,” said Sir Charles. “It is quite true, quite true.”

“Of course you agree with us. Donovan Brown’s eminence as an artist has gained me one recruit, and yours as a baronet will gain me some more.”

“But—”

“But what?” said Trefusis, deftly opening one of the albums at a photograph of a loathsome room.

“You are against that, are you not? Donovan Brown is against it, and I am against it. You may disagree with us in everything else, but there you are at one with us. Is it not so?”

“But that may be the result of drunkenness, improvidence, or—”

“My father’s income was fifty times as great as that of Donovan Brown. Do you believe that Donovan Brown is fifty times as drunken and improvident as my father was?”

“Certainly not. I do not deny that there is much in what you urge. Still, you ask me to take a rather important step.”

“Not a bit of it. I don’t ask you to subscribe to, join, or in any way pledge yourself to any society or conspiracy whatsoever. I only want your name for private mention to cowards who think Socialism right, but will not say so because they do not think it respectable. They will not be ashamed of their convictions when they learn that a baronet shares them. Socialism offers you something already, you see; a good use for your hitherto useless title.”

Sir Charles colored a little, conscious that the example of his favorite painter had influenced him more than his own conviction or the arguments of Trefusis.

“What do you think, Chester?” he said. “Will you join?”

“Erskine is already committed to the cause of liberty by his published writings,” said Trefusis. “Three of the pamphlets on that shelf contain quotations from ‘The Patriot Martyrs.’”

Erskine blushed, flattered by being quoted; an attention that had been shown him only once before, and then by a reviewer with the object of proving that the Patriot Martyrs were slovenly in their grammar.

“Come!” said Trefusis. “Shall I write to Donovan Brown that his letters have gained the cordial assent and sympathy of Sir Charles Brandon?”

“Certainly, certainly. That is, if my unknown name would be of the least interest to him.”

“Good,” said Trefusis, filling his glass with water. “Erskine, let us drink to our brother Social Democrat.”

Erskine laughed loudly, but not heartily. “What an ass you are, Brandon!” he said. “You, with a large landed estate, and bags of gold invested in railways, calling yourself a Social Democrat! Are you going to sell out and distribute — to sell all that thou hast and give to the poor?”

“Not a penny,” replied Trefusis for him promptly. “A man cannot be a Christian in this country. I have tried it and found it impossible both in law and in fact. I am a capitalist and a landholder. I have railway shares, mining shares, building shares, bank shares, and stock of most kinds; and a great trouble they are to me. But these shares do not represent wealth actually in existence; they are a mortgage on the labor of unborn generations of laborers, who must work to keep me and mine in idleness and luxury. If I sold them, would the mortgage be cancelled and the unborn generations released from its thrall? No. It would only pass into the hands of some other capitalist, and the working class would be no better off for my self-sacrifice. Sir Charles cannot obey the command of Christ; I defy him to do it. Let him give his land for a public park; only the richer classes will have leisure to enjoy it. Plant it at the very doors of the poor, so that they may at last breathe its air, and it will raise the value of the neighboring houses and drive the poor away. Let him endow a school for the poor, like Eton or Christ’s Hospital, and the rich will take it for their own children as they do in the two instances I have named. Sir Charles does not want to minister to poverty, but to abolish it. No matter how much you give to the poor, everything except a bare subsistence wage will be taken from them again by force. All talk of practicing Christianity, or even bare justice, is at present mere waste of words. How can you justly reward the laborer when you cannot ascertain the value of what he makes, owing to the prevalent custom of stealing it? I know this by experience. I wanted to pay a just price for my wife’s tomb, but I could not find out its value, and never shall. The principle on which we farm out our national industry to private marauders, who recompense themselves by black-mail, so corrupts and paralyzes us that we cannot be honest even when we want to. And the reason we bear it so calmly is that very few of us really want to.”

“I must study this question of value,” said Sir Charles dubiously, refilling his goblet. “Can you recommend me a good book on the subject?”

“Any good treatise on political economy will do,” said Trefusis. “In economics all roads lead to Socialism, although in nine cases out of ten, so far, the economist doesn’t recognize his destination, and incurs the malediction pronounced by Jeremiah on those who justify the wicked for reward. I will look you out a book or two. And if you will call on Donovan Brown the next time you are in London, he will be delighted, I know. He meets with very few who are capable of sympathizing with him from both his points of view — social and artistic.”

Sir Charles brightened on being reminded of Donovan Brown. “I shall esteem an introduction to him a great honor,” he said. “I had no idea that he was a friend of yours.”

“I was a very practical young Socialist when I first met him,” said Trefusis. “When Brown was an unknown and wretchedly poor man, my mother, at the petition of a friend of his, charitably bought one of his pictures for thirty pounds, which he was very glad to get. Years afterwards, when my mother was dead, and Brown famous, I was offered eight hundred pounds for this picture, which was, by-the-bye, a very bad one in my opinion. Now, after making the usual unjust allowance for interest on thirty pounds for twelve years or so that had elapsed, the sale of the picture would have brought me in a profit of over seven hundred and fifty pounds, an unearned increment to which I had no righteous claim. My solicitor, to whom I mentioned the matter, was of opinion that I might justifiably pocket the seven hundred and fifty pounds as reward for my mother’s benevolence in buying a presumably worthless picture from an obscure painter. But he failed to convince me that I ought to be paid for my mother’s virtues, though we agreed that neither I nor my mother had received any return in the shape of pleasure in contemplating the work, which had deteriorated considerably by the fading of the colors since its purchase. At last I went to Brown’s studio with the picture, and told him that it was worth nothing to me, as I thought it a particularly bad one, and that he might have it back again for fifteen pounds, half the first price. He at once told me that I could get from any dealer more for it than he could afford to give me; but he told me too that I had no right to make a profit out of his work, and that he would give me the original price of thirty pounds. I took it, and then sent him the man who had offered me the eight hundred. To my discomfiture Brown refused to sell it on any terms, because he considered it unworthy of his reputation. The man bid up to fifteen hundred, but Brown held out; and I found that instead of putting seven hundred and seventy pounds into his pocket I had taken thirty out of it. I accordingly offered to return the thirty pieces. Brown, taking the offer as an insult, declined all further communication with me. I then insisted on the matter being submitted to arbitration, and demanded fifteen hundred pounds as the full exchange value of the picture. All the arbitrators agreed that this was monstrous, whereupon I contended that if they denied my right to the value in exchange, they must admit my right to the value in use. They assented to this after putting off their decision for a fortnight in order to read Adam Smith and discover what on earth I meant by my values in use and exchange. I now showed that the picture had no value in use to me, as I disliked it, and that therefore I was entitled to nothing, and that Brown must take back the thirty pounds. They were glad to concede this also to me, as they were all artist friends of Brown, and wished him not to lose money by the transaction, though they of course privately thought that the picture was, as I described it, a bad one. After that Brown and I became very good friends. He tolerated my advances, at first lest it should seem that he was annoyed by my disparagement of his work. Subsequently he fell into my views much as you have done.”

“That is very interesting,” said Sir Charles. “What a noble thing — refusing fifteen hundred pounds! He could ill afford it, probably.”

“Heroic — according to nineteenth century notions of heroism. Voluntarily to throw away a chance of making money! that is the ne plus ultra of martyrdom. Brown’s wife was extremely angry with him for doing it.”

“It is an interesting story — or might be made so,” said Erskine. “But you make my head spin with your confounded exchange values and stuff. Everything is a question of figures with you.”

“That comes of my not being a poet,” said Trefusis. “But we Socialists need to study the romantic side of our movement to interest women in it. If you want to make a cause grow, instruct every woman you meet in it. She is or will one day be a wife, and will contradict her husband with scraps of your arguments. A squabble will follow. The son will listen, and will be set thinking if he be capable of thought. And so the mind of the people gets leavened. I have converted many young women. Most of them know no more of the economic theory of Socialism than they know of Chaldee; but they no longer fear or condemn its name. Oh, I assure you that much can be done in that way by men who are not afraid of women, and who are not in too great a hurry to see the harvest they have sown for.”

“Take care. Some of your lady proselytes may get the better of you some day. The future husband to be contradicted may be Sidney Trefusis. Ha! ha! ha!” Sir Charles had emptied a second large goblet of wine, and was a little flushed and boisterous.

“No,” said Trefusis, “I have had enough of love myself, and am not likely to inspire it. Women do not care for men to whom, as Erskine says, everything is a question of figures. I used to flirt with women; now I lecture them, and abhor a man-flirt worse than I do a woman one. Some more wine? Oh, you must not waste the remainder of this bottle.”

“I think we had better go, Brandon,” said Erskine, his mistrust of Trefusis growing. “We promised to be back before two.”

“So you shall,” said Trefusis. “It is not yet a quarter past one. By-the-bye, I have not shown you Donovan Brown’s pet instrument for the regeneration of society. Here it is. A monster petition praying that the holding back from the laborer of any portion of the net value produced by his labor be declared a felony. That is all.”

Erskine nudged Sir Charles, who said hastily, “Thank you, but I had rather not sign anything.”

“A baronet sign such a petition!” exclaimed Trefusis. “I did not think of asking you. I only show it to you as an interesting historical document, containing the autographs of a few artists and poets. There is Donovan Brown’s for example. It was he who suggested the petition, which is not likely to do much good, as the thing cannot be done in any such fashion However, I have promised Brown to get as many signatures as I can; so you may as well sign it, Erskine. It says nothing in blank verse about the holiness of slaying a tyrant, but it is a step in the right direction. You will not stick at such a trifle — unless the reviews have frightened you. Come, your name and address.”

Erskine shook his head.

“Do you then only commit yourself to revolutionary sentiments when there is a chance of winning fame as a poet by them?”

“I will not sign, simply because I do not choose to,” said Erskine warmly.

“My dear fellow,” said Trefusis, almost affectionately, “if a man has a conscience he can have no choice in matters of conviction. I have read somewhere in your book that the man who will not shed his blood for the liberty of his brothers is a coward and a slave. Will you not shed a drop of ink — my ink, too — for the right of your brothers to the work of their hands? I at first sight did not care to sign this petition, because I would as soon petition a tiger to share his prey with me as our rulers to relax their grip of the stolen labor they live on. But Donovan Brown said to me, ‘You have no choice. Either you believe that the laborer should have the fruit of his labor or you do not. If you do, put your conviction on record, even if it should be as useless as Pilate’s washing his hands.’ So I signed.”

“Donovan Brown was right,” said Sir Charles. “I will sign.” And he did so with a flourish.

“Brown will be delighted,” said Trefusis. “I will write to him to-day that I have got another good signature for him.”

“Two more,” said Sir Charles. “You shall sign, Erskine; hang me if you shan’t! It is only against rascals that run away without paying their men their wages.”

“Or that don’t pay them in full,” observed Trefusis, with a curious smile. “But do not sign if you feel uncomfortable about it.”

“If you don’t sign after me, you are a sneak, Chester,” said Sir Charles.

“I don’t know what it means,” said Erskine, wavering. “I don’t understand petitions.”

“It means what it says; you cannot be held responsible for any meaning that is not expressed in it,” said Trefusis. “But never mind. You mistrust me a little, I fancy, and would rather not meddle with my petitions; but you will think better of that as you grow used to me. Meanwhile, there is no hurry. Don’t sign yet.”

“Nonsense! I don’t doubt your good faith,” said Erskine, hastily disavowing suspicions which he felt but could not account for. “Here goes!” And he signed.

“Well done!” said Trefusis. “This will make Brown happy for the rest of the month.”

“It is time for us to go now,” said Erskine gloomily.

“Look in upon me at any time; you shall be welcome,” said Trefusis. “You need not stand upon any sort of ceremony.”

Then they parted; Sir Charles assuring Trefusis that he had never spent a more interesting morning, and shaking hands with him at considerable length three times. Erskine said little until he was in the Riverside Road with his friend, when he suddenly burst out:

“What the devil do you mean by drinking two tumblers of such staggering stuff at one o’clock in the day in the house of a dangerous man like that? I am very sorry I went into the fellow’s place. I had misgivings about it, and they have been fully borne out.”

“How so?” said Sir Charles, taken aback.

“He has overreached us. I was a deuced fool to sign that paper, and so were you. It was for that that he invited us.”

“Rubbish, my dear boy. It was not his paper, but Donovan Brown’s.”

“I doubt it. Most likely he talked Brown into signing it just as he talked us. I tell you his ways are all crooked, like his ideas. Did you hear how he lied about Miss Lindsay?”

“Oh, you were mistaken about that. He does not care two straws for her or for anyone.”

“Well, if you are satisfied, I am not. You would not be in such high spirits over it if you had taken as little wine as I.”

“Pshaw! you’re too ridiculous. It was capital wine. Do you mean to say I am drunk?”

“No. But you would not have signed if you had not taken that second goblet. If you had not forced me — I could not get out of it after you set the example — I would have seen him d — d sooner than have had anything to do with his petition.”

“I don’t see what harm can come of it,” said Sir Charles, braving out some secret disquietude.

“I will never go into his house again,” said Erskine moodily. “We were just like two flies in a spider’s web.”

Meanwhile, Trefusis was fulfilling his promise to write to Donovan Brown.

“Sallust’s House.

“Dear Brown: I have spent the forenoon angling for a couple of very young fish, and have landed them with more trouble than they are worth. One has gaudy scales: he is a baronet, and an amateur artist, save the mark. All my arguments and my little museum of photographs were lost on him; but when I mentioned your name, and promised him an introduction to you, he gorged the bait greedily. He was half drunk when he signed; and I should not have let him touch the paper if I had not convinced myself beforehand that he means well, and that my wine had only freed his natural generosity from his conventional cowardice and prejudice. We must get his name published in as many journals as possible as a signatory to the great petition; it will draw on others as your name drew him. The second novice, Chichester Erskine, is a young poet. He will not be of much use to us, though he is a devoted champion of liberty in blank verse, and dedicates his works to Mazzini, etc. He signed reluctantly. All this hesitation is the uncertainty that comes of ignorance; they have not found out the truth for themselves, and are afraid to trust me, matters having come to the pass at which no man dares trust his fellow.

“I have met a pretty young lady here who might serve you as a model for Hypatia. She is crammed with all the prejudices of the peerage, but I am effecting a cure. I have set my heart on marrying her to Erskine, who, thinking that I am making love to her on my own account, is jealous. The weather is pleasant here, and I am having a merry life of it, but I find myself too idle. Etc., etc., etc.”

CHAPTER XVI

One sunny forenoon, as Agatha sat reading on the doorstep of the conservatory, the shadow of her parasol deepened, and she, looking up for something denser than the silk of it, saw Trefusis.

“Oh!”

She offered him no further greeting, having fallen in with his habit of dispensing, as far as possible, with salutations and ceremonies. He seemed in no hurry to speak, and so, after a pause, she began, “Sir Charles—”

“Is gone to town,” he said. “Erskine is out on his bicycle. Lady Brandon and Miss Lindsay have gone to the village in the wagonette, and you have come out here to enjoy the summer sun and read rubbish. I know all your news already.”

“You are very clever, and, as usual, wrong. Sir Charles has not gone to town. He has only gone to the railway station for some papers; he will be back for luncheon. How do you know so much of our affairs?”

“I was on the roof of my house with a field-glass. I saw you come out and sit down here. Then Sir Charles passed. Then Erskine. Then Lady Brandon, driving with great energy, and presenting a remarkable contrast to the disdainful repose of Gertrude.”

“Gertrude! I like your cheek.”

“You mean that you dislike my presumption.”

“No, I think cheek a more expressive word than presumption; and I mean that I like it — that it amuses me.”

“Really! What are you reading?”

“Rubbish, you said just now. A novel.”

“That is, a lying story of two people who never existed, and who would have acted very differently if they had existed.”

“Just so.”

“Could you not imagine something just as amusing for yourself?”

“Perhaps so; but it would be too much trouble. Besides, cooking takes away one’s appetite for eating. I should not relish stories of my own confection.”

“Which volume are you at?”

“The third.”

“Then the hero and heroine are on the point of being united?”

“I really don’t know. This is one of your clever novels. I wish the characters would not talk so much.”

“No matter. Two of them are in love with one another, are they not?”

“Yes. It would not be a novel without that.”

“Do you believe, in your secret soul, Agatha — I take the liberty of using your Christian name because I wish to be very solemn — do you really believe that any human being was ever unselfish enough to love another in the story-book fashion?”

“Of course. At least I suppose so. I have never thought much about it.”

“I doubt it. My own belief is that no latter-day man has any faith in the thoroughness or permanence of his affection for his mate. Yet he does not doubt the sincerity of her professions, and he conceals the hollowness of his own from her, partly because he is ashamed of it, and partly out of pity for her. And she, on the other side, is playing exactly the same comedy.”

“I believe that is what men do, but not women.”

“Indeed! Pray do you remember pretending to be very much in love with me once when—”

Agatha reddened and placed her palm on the step as if about to spring up. But she checked herself and said: “Stop, Mr. Trefusis. If you talk about that I shall go away. I wonder at you! Have you no taste?’,

“None whatever. And as I was the aggrieved party on that — stay, don’t go. I will never allude to it again. I am growing afraid of you. You used to be afraid of me.”

“Yes; and you used to bully me. You have a habit of bullying women who are weak enough to fear you. You are a great deal cleverer than I, and know much more, I dare say; but I am not in the least afraid of you now.”

“You have no reason to be, and never had any. Henrietta, if she were alive, could testify that it there is a defect in my relations with women, it arises from my excessive amiability. I could not refuse a woman anything she had set her heart upon — except my hand in marriage. As long as your sex are content to stop short of that they can do as they please with me.”

“How cruel! I thought you were nearly engaged to Gertrude.”

“The usual interpretation of a friendship between a man and a woman! I have never thought of such a thing; and I am sure she never has. We are not half so intimate as you and Sir Charles.”

“Oh, Sir Charles is married. And I advise you to get married if you wish to avoid creating misunderstandings by your friendships.”

Trefusis was struck. Instead of answering, he stood, after one startled glance at her, looking intently at the knuckle of his forefinger.

“Do take pity on our poor sex,” said Agatha maliciously. “You are so rich, and so very clever, and really so nice looking that you ought to share yourself with somebody. Gertrude would be only too happy.”

Trefusis grinned and shook his head, slowly but emphatically.

“I suppose I should have no chance,” continued Agatha pathetically.

“I should be delighted, of course,” he replied with simulated confusion, but with a lurking gleam in his eye that might have checked her, had she noticed it.

“Do marry me, Mr. Trefusis,” she pleaded, clasping her hands in a rapture of mischievous raillery. “Pray do.”

“Thank you,” said Trefusis determinedly; “I will.”

“I am very sure you shan’t,” said Agatha, after an incredulous pause, springing up and gathering her skirt as if to run away. “You do not suppose I was in earnest, do you?”

“Undoubtedly I do. I am in earnest.”

Agatha hesitated, uncertain whether he might not be playing with her as she had just been playing with him. “Take care,” she said. “I may change my mind and be in earnest, too; and then how will you feel, Mr. Trefusis?”

“I think, under our altered relations, you had better call me Sidney.”

“I think we had better drop the joke. It was in rather bad taste, and I should not have made it, perhaps.”

“It would be an execrable joke; therefore I have no intention of regarding it as one. You shall be held to your offer, Agatha. Are you in love with me?”

“Not in the least. Not the very smallest bit in the world. I do not know anybody with whom I am less in love or less likely to be in love.”

“Then you must marry me. If you were in love with me, I should run away. My sainted Henrietta adored me, and I proved unworthy of adoration — though I was immensely flattered.”

“Yes; exactly! The way you treated your first wife ought to be sufficient to warn any woman against becoming your second.”

“Any woman who loved me, you mean. But you do not love me, and if I run away you will have the advantage of being rid of me. Our settlements can be drawn so as to secure you half my fortune in such an event.”

“You will never have a chance of running away from me.”

“I shall not want to. I am not so squeamish as I was. No; I do not think I shall run away from you.”

“I do not think so either.”

“Well, when shall we be married?”

“Never,” said Agatha, and fled. But before she had gone a step he caught her.

“Don’t,” she said breathlessly. “Take your arm away. How dare you?”

He released her and shut the door of the conservatory. “Now,” he said, “if you want to run away you will have to run in the open.”

“You are very impertinent. Let me go in immediately.”

“Do you want me to beg you to marry me after you have offered to do it freely?”

“But I was only joking; I don’t care for you,” she said, looking round for an outlet.

“Agatha,” he said, with grim patience, “half an hour ago I had no more intention of marrying you than of making a voyage to the moon. But when you made the suggestion I felt all its force in an instant, and now nothing will satisfy me but your keeping your word. Of all the women I know, you are the only one not quite a fool.”

“I should be a great fool if—”

“If you married me, you were going to say; but I don’t think so. I am the only man, not quite an ass, of your acquaintance. I know my value, and yours. And I loved you long ago, when I had no right to.”

Agatha frowned. “No,” she said. “There is no use in saying anything more about it. It is out of the question.”

“Come, don’t be vindictive. I was more sincere then than you were. But that has nothing to do with the present. You have spent our renewed acquaintance on the defensive against me, retorting upon me, teasing and tempting me. Be generous for once, and say Yes with a good will.”

“Oh, I NEVER tempted you,” cried Agatha. “I did not. It is not true.” He said nothing, but offered his hand. “No; go away; I will not.” He persisted, and she felt her power of resistance suddenly wane. Terror-stricken, she said hastily, “There is not the least use in bothering me; I will tell you nothing to-day.”

“Promise me on your honor that you will say Yes to-morrow, and I will leave you in peace until then.”

“I will not.”

“The deuce take your sex,” he said plaintively.

“You know my mind now, and I have to stand here coquetting because you don’t know your own. If I cared for my comfort I should remain a bachelor.”

“I advise you to do so,” she said, stealing backward towards the door. “You are a very interesting widower. A wife would spoil you. Consider the troubles of domesticity, too.”

“I like troubles. They strengthen — Aha!” (she had snatched at the knob of the door, and he swiftly put his hand on hers and stayed her). “Not yet, if you please. Can you not speak out like a woman — like a man, I mean? You may withhold a bone from Max until he stands on his hind legs to beg for it, but you should not treat me like a dog. Say Yes frankly, and do not keep me begging.”

“What in the world do you want to marry me for?”

“Because I was made to carry a house on my shoulders, and will do so. I want to do the best I can for myself, and I shall never have such a chance again. And I cannot help myself, and don’t know why; that is the plain truth of the matter. You will marry someone some day.” She shook her head. “Yes, you will. Why not marry me?”

Agatha bit her nether lip, looked ruefully at the ground, and, after a long pause, said reluctantly, “Very well. But mind, I think you are acting very foolishly, and if you are disappointed afterwards, you must not blame ME.”

“I take the risk of my bargain,” he said, releasing her hand, and leaning against the door as he took out his pocket diary. “You will have to take the risk of yours, which I hope may not prove the worse of the two. This is the seventeenth of June. What date before the twenty-fourth of July will suit you?”

“You mean the twenty-fourth of July next year, I presume?”

“No; I mean this year. I am going abroad on that date, married or not, to attend a conference at Geneva, and I want you to come with me. I will show you a lot of places and things that you have never seen before. It is your right to name the day, but you have no serious business to provide for, and I have.”

“But you don’t know all the things I shall — I should have to provide. You had better wait until you come back from the continent.”

“There is nothing to be provided on your part but settlements and your trousseau. The trousseau is all nonsense; and Jansenius knows me of old in the matter of settlements. I got married in six weeks before.”

“Yes,” said Agatha sharply, “but I am not Henrietta.”

“No, thank Heaven,” he assented placidly.

Agatha was struck with remorse. “That was a vile thing for me to say,” she said; “and for you too.”

“Whatever is true is to the purpose, vile or not. Will you come to Geneva on the twenty-fourth?”

“But — I really was not thinking when I — I did not intend to say that I would — I—”

“I know. You will come if we are married.”

“Yes. IF we are married.”

“We shall be married. Do not write either to your mother or Jansenius until I ask you.”

“I don’t intend to. I have nothing to write about.”

“Wretch that you are! And do not be jealous if you catch me making love to Lady Brandon. I always do so; she expects it.”

“You may make love to whom you please. It is no concern of mine.”

“Here comes the wagonette with Lady Brandon and Ger — and Miss Lindsay. I mustn’t call her Gertrude now except when you are not by. Before they interrupt us, let me remind you of the three points we are agreed upon. I love you. You do not love me. We are to be married before the twenty-fourth of next month. Now I must fly to help her ladyship to alight.”

He hastened to the house door, at which the wagonette had just stopped. Agatha, bewildered, and ashamed to face her friends, went in through the conservatory, and locked herself in her room.

Trefusis went into the library with Gertrude whilst Lady Brandon loitered in the hall to take off her gloves and ask questions of the servants. When she followed, she found the two standing together at the window. Gertrude was listening to him with the patient expression she now often wore when he talked. He was smiling, but it struck Jane that he was not quite at ease. “I was just beginning to tell Miss Lindsay,” he said, “of an extraordinary thing that has happened during your absence.”

“I know,” exclaimed Jane, with sudden conviction. “The heater in the conservatory has cracked.”

“Possibly,” said Trefusis; “but, if so, I have not heard of it.”

“If it hasn’t cracked, it will,” said Jane gloomily. Then, assuming with some effort an interest in Trefusis’s news, she added: “Well, what has happened?”

“I was chatting with Miss Wylie just now, when a singular idea occurred to us. We discussed it for some time; and the upshot is that we are to be married before the end of next month.”

Jane reddened and stared at him; and he looked keenly back at her. Gertrude, though unobserved, did not suffer her expression of patient happiness to change in the least; but a greenish-white color suddenly appeared in her face, and only gave place very slowly to her usual complexion.

“Do you mean to say that you are going to marry AGATHA?” said Lady Brandon incredulously, after a pause.

“Yes. I had no intention of doing so when I last saw you or I should have told you.”

“I never heard of such a thing in my life! You fell in love with one another in five minutes, I suppose.”

“Good Heavens, no! we are not in love with one another. Can you believe that I would marry for such a frivolous reason? No. The subject turned up accidentally, and the advantage of a match between us struck me forcibly. I was fortunate enough to convert her to my opinion.”

“Yes; she wanted a lot of pressing, I dare say,” said Jane, glancing at Gertrude, who was smiling unmeaningly.

“As you imply,” said Trefusis coolly, “her reluctance may have been affected, and she only too glad to get such a charming husband. Assuming that to be the case, she dissembled remarkably well.”

Gertrude took off her bonnet, and left the room without speaking.

“This is my revenge upon you for marrying Brandon,” he said then, approaching Jane.

“Oh, yes,” she retorted ironically. “I believe all that, of course.”

“You have the same security for its truth as for that of all the foolish things I confess to you. There!” He pointed to a panel of looking glass, in which Jane’s figure was reflected at full length.

“I don’t see anything to admire,” said Jane, looking at herself with no great favor. “There is plenty of me, if you admire that.”

“It is impossible to have too much of a good thing. But I must not look any more. Though Agatha says she does not love me, I am not sure that she would be pleased if I were to look for love from anyone else.”

“Says she does not love you! Don’t believe her; she has taken trouble enough to catch you.”

“I am flattered. You caught me without any trouble, and yet you would not have me.”

“It is manners to wait to be asked. I think you have treated Gertrude shamefully — I hope you won’t be offended with me for saying so. I blame Agatha most. She is an awfully double-faced girl.”

“How so?” said Trefusis, surprised. “What has Miss Lindsay to do with it?”

“You know very well.”

“I assure you I do not. If you were speaking of yourself I could understand you.”

“Oh, you can get out of it cleverly, like all men; but you can’t hoodwink me. You shouldn’t have pretended to like Gertrude when you were really pulling a cord with Agatha. And she, too, pretending to flirt with Sir Charles — as if he would care twopence for her!”

Trefusis seemed a little disturbed. “I hope Miss Lindsay had no such — but she could not.”

“Oh, couldn’t she? You will soon see whether she had or not.”

“You misunderstood us, Lady Brandon; Miss Lindsay knows better. Remember, too, that this proposal of mine was quite unpremeditated. This morning I had no tender thoughts of anyone except one whom it would be improper to name.”

“Oh, that is all talk. It won’t do now.”

“I will talk no more at present. I must be off to the village to telegraph to my solicitor. If I meet Erskine I will tell him the good news.”

“He will be delighted. He thought, as we all did, that you were cutting him out with Gertrude.”

Trefusis smiled, shook his head, and, with a glance of admiring homage to Jane’s charms, went out. Jane was contemplating herself in the glass when a servant begged her to come and speak to Master Charles and Miss Fanny. She hurried upstairs to the nursery, where her boy and girl, disputing each other’s prior right to torture the baby, had come to blows. They were somewhat frightened, but not at all appeased, by Jane’s entrance. She scolded, coaxed, threatened, bribed, quoted Dr. Watts, appealed to the nurse and then insulted her, demanded of the children whether they loved one another, whether they loved mamma, and whether they wanted a right good whipping. At last, exasperated by her own inability to restore order, she seized the baby, which had cried incessantly throughout, and, declaring that it was doing it on purpose and should have something real to cry for, gave it an exemplary smacking, and ordered the others to bed. The boy, awed by the fate of his infant brother, offered, by way of compromise, to be good if Miss Wylie would come and play with him, a proposal which provoked from his jealous mother a box on the ear that sent him howling to his cot. Then she left the room, pausing on the threshold to remark that if she heard another sound from them that day, they might expect the worst from her. On descending, heated and angry, to the drawing-room, she found Agatha there alone, looking out of window as if the landscape were especially unsatisfactory this time.

“Selfish little beasts!” exclaimed Jane, making a miniature whirlwind with her skirts as she came in. “Charlie is a perfect little fiend. He spends all his time thinking how he can annoy me. Ugh! He’s just like his father.”

“Thank you, my dear,” said Sir Charles from the doorway.

Jane laughed. “I knew you were there,” she said. “Where’s Gertrude?”

“She has gone out,” said Sir Charles.

“Nonsense! She has only just come in from driving with me.”

“I do not know what you mean by nonsense,” said Sir Charles, chafing. “I saw her walking along the Riverside Road. I was in the village road, and she did not see me. She seemed in a hurry.”

“I met her on the stairs and spoke to her,” said Agatha, “but she didn’t hear me.”

“I hope she is not going to throw herself into the river,” said Jane. Then, turning to her husband, she added: “Have you heard the news?”

“The only news I have heard is from this paper,” said Sir Charles, taking out a journal and flinging it on the table. “There is a paragraph in it stating that I have joined some infernal Socialistic league, and I am told that there is an article in the ‘Times’ on the spread of Socialism, in which my name is mentioned. This is all due to Trefusis; and I think he has played me a most dishonorable trick. I will tell him so, too, when next I see him.”

“You had better be careful what you say of him before Agatha,” said Jane. “Oh, you need not be alarmed, Agatha; I know all about it. He told us in the library. We went out this morning — Gertrude and I — and when we came back we found Mr. Trefusis and Agatha talking very lovingly to one another on the conservatory steps, newly engaged.”

“Indeed!” said Sir Charles, disconcerted and displeased, but trying to smile. “I may then congratulate you, Miss Wylie?”

“You need not,” said Agatha, keeping her countenance as well as she could. “It was only a joke. At least it came about in a jest. He has no right to say that we are engaged.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Jane. “That won’t do, Agatha. He has gone off to telegraph to his solicitor. He is quite in earnest.”

“I am a great fool,” said Agatha, sitting down and twisting her hands perplexedly. “I believe I said something; but I really did not intend to. He surprised me into speaking before I knew what I was saying. A pretty mess I have got myself into!”

“I am glad you have been outwitted at last,” said Jane, laughing spitefully. “You never had any pity for me when I could not think of the proper thing to say at a moment’s notice.”

Agatha let the taunt pass unheeded. Her gaze wandered anxiously, and at last settled appealingly upon Sir Charles. “What shall I do?” she said to him.

“Well, Miss Wylie,” he said gravely, “if you did not mean to marry him you should not have promised. I don’t wish to be unsympathetic, and I know that it is very hard to get rid of Trefusis when he makes up his mind to act something out of you, but still—”

“Never mind her,” said Jane, interrupting him. “She wants to marry him just as badly as he wants to marry her. You would be preciously disappointed if he cried off, Agatha; for all your interesting reluctance.”

“That is not so, really,” said Agatha earnestly. “I wish I had taken time to think about it. I suppose he has told everybody by this time.”

“May we then regard it as settled?” said Sir Charles.

“Of course you may,” said Jane contemptuously.

“Pray allow Miss Wylie to speak for herself, Jane. I confess I do not understand why you are still in doubt — if you have really engaged yourself to him.”

“I suppose I am in for it,” said Agatha. “I feel as if there were some fatal objection, if I could only remember what it is. I wish I had never seen him.”

Sir Charles was puzzled. “I do not understand ladies’ ways in these matters,” he said. “However, as there seems to be no doubt that you and Trefusis are engaged, I shall of course say nothing that would make it unpleasant for him to visit here; but I must say that he has — to say the least — been inconsiderate to me personally. I signed a paper at his house on the implicit understanding that it was strictly private, and now he has trumpeted it forth to the whole world, and publicly associated my name not only with his own, but with those of persons of whom I know nothing except that I would rather not be connected with them in any way.”

“What does it matter?” said Jane. “Nobody cares twopence.”

“I care,” said Sir Charles angrily. “No sensible person can accuse me of exaggerating my own importance because I value my reputation sufficiently to object to my approval being publicly cited in support of a cause with which I have no sympathy.”

“Perhaps Mr. Trefusis has had nothing to do with it,” said Agatha. “The papers publish whatever they please, don’t they?”

“That’s right, Agatha,” said Jane maliciously. “Don’t let anyone speak ill of him.”

“I am not speaking ill of him,” said Sir Charles, before Agatha could retort. “It is a mere matter of feeling, and I should not have mentioned it had I known the altered relations between him and Miss Wylie.”

“Pray don’t speak of them,” said Agatha. “I have a mind to run away by the next train.”

Sir Charles, to change the subject, suggested a duet.

Meanwhile Erskine, returning through the village from his morning ride, had met Trefusis, and attempted to pass him with a nod. But Trefusis called to him to stop, and he dismounted reluctantly.

“Just a word to say that I am going to be married,” said Trefusis.

“To — ?” Erskine could not add Gertrude’s name.

“To one of our friends at the Beeches. Guess to which.”

“To Miss Lindsay, I presume.”

“What in the fiend’s name has put it into all your heads that Miss Lindsay and I are particularly attached to one another?” exclaimed Trefusis. “YOU have always appeared to me to be the man for Miss Lindsay. I am going to marry Miss Wylie.”

“Really!” exclaimed Erskine, with a sensation of suddenly thawing after a bitter frost.

“Of course. And now, Erskine, you have the advantage of being a poor man. Do not let that splendid girl marry for money. If you go further you are likely to fare worse; and so is she.” Then he nodded and walked away, leaving the other staring after him.

“If he has jilted her, he is a scoundrel,” said Erskine. “I am sorry I didn’t tell him so.”

He mounted and rode slowly along the Riverside Road, partly suspecting Trefusis of some mystification, but inclining to believe in him, and, in any case, to take his advice as to Gertrude. The conversation he had overheard in the avenue still perplexed him. He could not reconcile it with Trefusis’s profession of disinterestedness towards her.

His bicycle carried him noiselessly on its india-rubber tires to the place by which the hemlock grew and there he saw Gertrude sitting on the low earthen wall that separated the field from the road. Her straw bag, with her scissors in it, lay beside her. Her fingers were interlaced, and her hands rested, palms downwards, on her knee. Her expression was rather vacant, and so little suggestive of any serious emotion that Erskine laughed as he alighted close to her.

“Are you tired?” he said.

“No,” she replied, not startled, and smiling mechanically — an unusual condescension on her part.

“Indulging in a day-dream?”

“No.” She moved a little to one side and concealed the basket with her dress.

He began to fear that something was wrong. “Is it possible that you have ventured among those poisonous plants again?” he said. “Are you ill?”

“Not at all,” she replied, rousing herself a little. “Your solicitude is quite thrown away. I am perfectly well.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, snubbed. “I thought — Don’t you think it dangerous to sit on that damp wall?”

“It is not damp. It is crumbling into dust with dryness.” An unnatural laugh, with which she concluded, intensified his uneasiness.

He began a sentence, stopped, and to gain time to recover himself, placed his bicycle in the opposite ditch; a proceeding which she witnessed with impatience, as it indicated his intention to stay and talk. She, however, was the first to speak; and she did so with a callousness that shocked him.

“Have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“About Mr. Trefusis and Agatha. They are engaged.”

“So Trefusis told me. I met him just now in the village. I was very glad to hear it.”

“Of course.”

“But I had a special reason for being glad.”

“Indeed?”

“I was desperately afraid, before he told me the truth, that he had other views — views that might have proved fatal to my dearest hopes.”

Gertrude frowned at him, and the frown roused him to brave her. He lost his self-command, already shaken by her strange behavior. “You know that I love you, Miss Lindsay,” he said. “It may not be a perfect love, but, humanly speaking, it is a true one. I almost told you so that day when we were in the billiard room together; and I did a very dishonorable thing the same evening. When you were speaking to Trefusis in the avenue I was close to you, and I listened.”

“Then you heard him,” cried Gertrude vehemently. “You heard him swear that he was in earnest.”

“Yes,” said Erskine, trembling, “and I thought he meant in earnest in loving you. You can hardly blame me for that: I was in love myself; and love is blind and jealous. I never hoped again until he told me that he was to be married to Miss Wylie. May I speak to you, now that I know I was mistaken, or that you have changed your mind?”

“Or that he has changed his mind,” said Gertrude scornfully.

Erskine, with a new anxiety for her sake, checked himself. Her dignity was dear to him, and he saw that her disappointment had made her reckless of it. “Do not say anything to me now, Miss Lindsay, lest—”

“What have I said? What have I to say?”

“Nothing, except on my own affairs. I love you dearly.”

She made an impatient movement, as if that were a very insignificant matter.

“You believe me, I hope,” he said, timidly.

Gertrude made an effort to recover her habitual ladylike reserve, but her energy failed before she had done more than raise her head. She relapsed into her listless attitude, and made a faint gesture of intolerance.

“You cannot be quite indifferent to being loved,” he said, becoming more nervous and more urgent. “Your existence constitutes all my happiness. I offer you my services and devotion. I do not ask any reward.” (He was now speaking very quickly and almost inaudibly.) “You may accept my love without returning it. I do not want — seek to make a bargain. If you need a friend you may be able to rely on me more confidently because you know I love you.”

“Oh, you think so,” said Gertrude, interrupting him; “but you will get over it. I am not the sort of person that men fall in love with. You will soon change your mind.”

“Not the sort! Oh, how little you know!” he said, becoming eloquent. “I have had plenty of time to change, but I am as fixed as ever. If you doubt, wait and try me. But do not be rough with me. You pain me more than you can imagine when you are hasty or indifferent. I am in earnest.”

“Ha, ha! That is easily said.”

“Not by me. I change in my judgment of other people according to my humor, but I believe steadfastly in your goodness and beauty — as if you were an angel. I am in earnest in my love for you as I am in earnest for my own life, which can only be perfected by your aid and influence.”

“You are greatly mistaken if you suppose that I am an angel.”

“You are wrong to mistrust yourself; but it is what I owe to you and not what I expect from you that I try to express by speaking of you as an angel. I know that you are not an angel to yourself. But you are to me.”

She sat stubbornly silent.

“I will not press you for an answer now. I am content that you know my mind at last. Shall we return together?”

She looked round slowly at the hemlock, and from that to the river. Then she took up her basket, rose, and prepared to go, as if under compulsion.

“Do you want any more hemlock?” he said. “If so, I will pluck some for you.”

“I wish you would let me alone,” she said, with sudden anger. She added, a little ashamed of herself, “I have a headache.”

“I am very sorry,” he said, crestfallen.

“It is only that I do not wish to be spoken to. It hurts my head to listen.”

He meekly took his bicycle from the ditch and wheeled it along beside her to the Beeches without another word. They went in through the conservatory, and parted in the dining-room. Before leaving him she said with some remorse, “I did not mean to be rude, Mr. Erskine.”

He flushed, murmured something, and attempted to kiss her hand. But she snatched it away and went out quickly. He was stung by this repulse, and stood mortifying himself by thinking of it until he was disturbed by the entrance of a maid-servant. Learning from her that Sir Charles was in the billiard room, he joined him there, and asked him carelessly if he had heard the news.

“About Miss Wylie?” said Sir Charles. “Yes, I should think so. I believe the whole country knows it, though they have not been engaged three hours. Have you seen these?” And he pushed a couple of newspapers across the table.

Erskine had to make several efforts before he could read. “You were a fool to sign that document,” he said. “I told you so at the time.”

“I relied on the fellow being a gentleman,” said Sir Charles warmly. “I do not see that I was a fool. I see that he is a cad, and but for this business of Miss Wylie’s I would let him know my opinion. Let me tell you, Chester, that he has played fast and loose with Miss Lindsay. There is a deuce of a row upstairs. She has just told Jane that she must go home at once; Miss Wylie declares that she will have nothing to do with Trefusis if Miss Lindsay has a prior claim to him, and Jane is annoyed at his admiring anybody except herself. It serves me right; my instinct warned me against the fellow from the first.” Just then luncheon was announced. Gertrude did not come down. Agatha was silent and moody. Jane tried to make Erskine describe his walk with Gertrude, but he baffled her curiosity by omitting from his account everything except its commonplaces.

“I think her conduct very strange,” said Jane. “She insists on going to town by the four o’clock train. I consider that it’s not polite to me, although she always made a point of her perfect manners. I never heard of such a thing!”

When they had risen from the table, they went together to the drawing-room. They had hardly arrived there when Trefusis was announced, and he was in their presence before they had time to conceal the expression of consternation his name brought into their faces.

“I have come to say good-bye,” he said. “I find that I must go to town by the four o’clock train to push my arrangements in person; the telegrams I have received breathe nothing but delay. Have you seen the ‘Times’?”

“I have indeed,” said Sir Charles, emphatically.

“You are in some other paper too, and will be in half-a-dozen more in the course of the next fortnight. Men who have committed themselves to an opinion are always in trouble with the newspapers; some because they cannot get into them, others because they cannot keep out. If you had put forward a thundering revolutionary manifesto, not a daily paper would have dared allude to it: there is no cowardice like Fleet Street cowardice! I must run off; I have much to do before I start, and it is getting on for three. Good-bye, Lady Brandon, and everybody.”

He shook Jane’s hand, dealt nods to the rest rapidly, making no distinction in favor of Agatha, and hurried away. They stared after him for a moment and then Erskine ran out and went downstairs two steps at a time. Nevertheless he had to run as far as the avenue before he overtook his man.

“Trefusis,” he said breathlessly, “you must not go by the four o’clock train.”

“Why not?”

“Miss Lindsay is going to town by it.”

“So much the better, my dear boy; so much the better. You are not jealous of me now, are you?”

“Look here, Trefusis. I don’t know and I don’t ask what there has been between you and Miss Lindsay, but your engagement has quite upset her, and she is running away to London in consequence. If she hears that you are going by the same train she will wait until to-morrow, and I believe the delay would be very disagreeable. Will you inflict that additional pain upon her?”

Trefusis, evidently concerned, looking doubtfully at Erskine, and pondered for a moment. “I think you are on a wrong scent about this,” he said. “My relations with Miss Lindsay were not of a sentimental kind. Have you said anything to her — on your own account, I mean?”

“I have spoken to her on both accounts, and I know from her own lips that I am right.”

Trefusis uttered a low whistle.

“It is not the first time I have had the evidence of my senses in the matter,” said Erskine significantly. “Pray think of it seriously, Trefusis. Forgive my telling you frankly that nothing but your own utter want of feeling could excuse you for the way in which you have acted towards her.”

Trefusis smiled. “Forgive me in turn for my inquisitiveness,” he said. “What does she say to your suit?”

Erskine hesitated, showing by his manner that he thought Trefusis had no right to ask the question. “She says nothing,” he answered.

“Hm!” said Trefusis. “Well, you may rely on me as to the train. There is my hand upon it.”

“Thank you,” said Erskine fervently. They shook hands and parted, Trefusis walking away with a grin suggestive of anything but good faith.

CHAPTER XVII

Gertrude, unaware of the extent to which she had already betrayed her disappointment, believed that anxiety for her father’s health, which she alleged as the motive of her sudden departure, was an excuse plausible enough to blind her friends to her overpowering reluctance to speak to Agatha or endure her presence; to her fierce shrinking from the sort of pity usually accorded to a jilted woman; and, above all, to her dread of meeting Trefusis. She had for some time past thought of him as an upright and perfect man deeply interested in her. Yet, comparatively liberal as her education had been, she had no idea of any interest of man in woman existing apart from a desire to marry. He had, in his serious moments, striven to make her sensible of the baseness he saw in her worldliness, flattering her by his apparent conviction — which she shared — that she was capable of a higher life. Almost in the same breath, a strain of gallantry which was incorrigible in him, and to which his humor and his tenderness to women whom he liked gave variety and charm, would supervene upon his seriousness with a rapidity which her far less flexible temperament could not follow. Hence she, thinking him still in earnest when he had swerved into florid romance, had been dangerously misled. He had no conscientious scruples in his love-making, because he was unaccustomed to consider himself as likely to inspire love in women; and Gertrude did not know that her beauty gave to an hour spent alone with her a transient charm which few men of imagination and address could resist. She, who had lived in the marriage market since she had left school, looked upon love-making as the most serious business of life. To him it was only a pleasant sort of trifling, enhanced by a dash of sadness in the reflection that it meant so little.

Of the ceremonies attending her departure, the one that cost her most was the kiss she felt bound to offer Agatha. She had been jealous of her at college, where she had esteemed herself the better bred of the two; but that opinion had hardly consoled her for Agatha’s superior quickness of wit, dexterity of hand, audacity, aptness of resource, capacity for forming or following intricate associations of ideas, and consequent power to dazzle others. Her jealousy of these qualities was now barbed by the knowledge that they were much nearer akin than her own to those of Trefusis. It mattered little to her how she appeared to herself in comparison with Agatha. But it mattered the whole world (she thought) that she must appear to Trefusis so slow, stiff, cold, and studied, and that she had no means to make him understand that she was not really so. For she would not admit the justice of impressions made by what she did not intend to do, however habitually she did it. She had a theory that she was not herself, but what she would have liked to be. As to the one quality in which she had always felt superior to Agatha, and which she called “good breeding,” Trefusis had so far destroyed her conceit in that, that she was beginning to doubt whether it was not her cardinal defect.

She could not bring herself to utter a word as she embraced her schoolfellow; and Agatha was tongue-tied too. But there was much remorseful tenderness in the feelings that choked them. Their silence would have been awkward but for the loquacity of Jane, who talked enough for all three. Sir Charles was without, in the trap, waiting to drive Gertrude to the station. Erskine intercepted her in the hall as she passed out, told her that he should be desolate when she was gone, and begged her to remember him, a simple petition which moved her a little, and caused her to note that his dark eyes had a pleading eloquence which she had observed before in the kangaroos at the Zoological Society’s gardens.

On the way to the train Sir Charles worried the horse in order to be excused from conversation on the sore subject of his guest’s sudden departure. He had made a few remarks on the skittishness of young ponies, and on the weather, and that was all until they reached the station, a pretty building standing in the open country, with a view of the river from the platform. There were two flies waiting, two porters, a bookstall, and a refreshment room with a neglected beauty pining behind the bar. Sir Charles waited in the booking office to purchase a ticket for Gertrude, who went through to the platform. The first person she saw there was Trefusis, close beside her.

“I am going to town by this train, Gertrude,” he said quickly. “Let me take charge of you. I have something to say, for I hear that some mischief has been made between us which must be stopped at once. You—”

Just then Sir Charles came out, and stood amazed to see them in conversation.

“It happens that I am going by this train,” said Trefusis. “I will see after Miss Lindsay.”

“Miss Lindsay has her maid with her,” said Sir Charles, almost stammering, and looking at Gertrude, whose expression was inscrutable.

“We can get into the Pullman car,” said Trefusis. “There we shall be as private as in a corner of a crowded drawing-room. I may travel with you, may I not?” he said, seeing Sir Charles’s disturbed look, and turning to her for express permission.

She felt that to deny him would be to throw away her last chance of happiness. Nevertheless she resolved to do it, though she should die of grief on the way to London. As she raised her head to forbid him the more emphatically, she met his gaze, which was grave and expectant. For an instant she lost her presence of mind, and in that instant said, “Yes. I shall be very glad.”

“Well, if that is the case,” said Sir Charles, in the tone of one whose sympathy had been alienated by an unpardonable outrage, “there can be no use in my waiting. I leave you in the hands of Mr. Trefusis. Good-bye, Miss Lindsay.”

Gertrude winced. Unkindness from a man usually kind proved hard to bear at parting. She was offering him her hand in silence when Trefusis said:

“Wait and see us off. If we chance to be killed on the journey — which is always probable on an English railway — you will reproach yourself afterwards if you do not see the last of us. Here is the train; it will not delay you a minute. Tell Erskine that you saw me here; that I have not forgotten my promise, and that he may rely on me. Get in at this end, Miss Lindsay.”

“My maid,” said Gertrude hesitating; for she had not intended to travel so expensively. “She—”

“She comes with us to take care of me; I have tickets for everybody,” said Trefusis, handing the woman in.

“But—”

“Take your seats, please,” said the guard. “Going by the train, sir?”

“Good-bye, Sir Charles. Give my love to Lady Brandon, and Agatha, and the dear children; and thanks so much for a very pleasant—” Here the train moved off, and Sir Charles, melting, smiled and waved his hat until he caught sight of Trefusis looking back at him with a grin which seemed, under the circumstances, so Satanic, that he stopped as if petrified in the midst of his gesticulations, and stood with his arm out like a semaphore.

The drive home restored him somewhat, but he was still full of his surprise when he rejoined Agatha, his wife, and Erskine in the drawing-room at the Beeches. The moment he entered, he said without preface, “She has gone off with Trefusis.”

Erskine, who had been reading, started up, clutching his book as if about to hurl it at someone, and cried, “Was he at the train?”

“Yes, and has gone to town by it.”

“Then,” said Erskine, flinging the book violently on the floor, “he is a scoundrel and a liar.”

“What is the matter?” said Agatha rising, whilst Jane stared open-mouthed at him.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Wylie, I forgot you. He pledged me his honor that he would not go by that train. I will.” He hurried from the room. Sir Charles rushed after him, and overtook him at the foot of the stairs.

“Where are you going? What do you want to do?”

“I will follow the train and catch it at the next station. I can do it on my bicycle.”

“Nonsense! you’re mad. They have thirty-five minutes start; and the train travels forty-five miles an hour.”

Erskine sat down on the stairs and gazed blankly at the opposite wall.

“You must have mistaken him,” said Sir Charles. “He told me to tell you that he had not forgotten his promise, and that you may rely on him.”

“What is the matter?” said Agatha, coming down, followed by Lady Brandon.

“Miss Wylie,” said Erskine, springing up, “he gave me his word that he would not go by that train when I told him Miss Lindsay was going by it. He has broken his word and seized the opportunity I was mad and credulous enough to tell him of. If I had been in your place, Brandon, I would have strangled him or thrown him under the wheels sooner than let him go. He has shown himself in this as in everything else, a cheat, a conspirator, a man of crooked ways, shifts, tricks, lying sophistries, heartless selfishness, cruel cynicism—” He stopped to catch his breath, and Sir Charles interposed a remonstrance.

“You are exciting yourself about nothing, Chester. They are in a Pullman, with her maid and plenty of people; and she expressly gave him leave to go with her. He asked her the question flatly before my face, and I must say I thought it a strange thing for her to consent to. However, she did consent, and of course I was not in a position to prevent him from going to London if he pleased. Don’t let us have a scene, old man. It can’t be helped.”

“I am very sorry,” said Erskine, hanging his head. “I did not mean to make a scene. I beg your pardon.”

He went away to his room without another word. Sir Charles followed and attempted to console him, but Erskine caught his hand, and asked to be left to himself. So Sir Charles returned to the drawing-room, where his wife, at a loss for once, hardly ventured to remark that she had never heard of such a thing in her life.

Agatha kept silence. She had long ago come unconsciously to the conclusion that Trefusis and she were the only members of the party at the Beeches who had much common-sense, and this made her slow to believe that he could be in the wrong and Erskine in the right in any misunderstanding between them. She had a slovenly way of summing up as “asses” people whose habits of thought differed from hers. Of all varieties of man, the minor poet realized her conception of the human ass most completely, and Erskine, though a very nice fellow indeed, thoroughly good and gentlemanly, in her opinion, was yet a minor poet, and therefore a pronounced ass. Trefusis, on the contrary, was the last man of her acquaintance whom she would have thought of as a very nice fellow or a virtuous gentleman; but he was not an ass, although he was obstinate in his Socialistic fads. She had indeed suspected him of weakness almost asinine with respect to Gertrude, but then all men were asses in their dealings with women, and since he had transferred his weakness to her own account it no longer seemed to need justification. And now, as her concern for Erskine, whom she pitied, wore off, she began to resent Trefusis’s journey with Gertrude as an attack on her recently acquired monopoly of him. There was an air of aristocratic pride about Gertrude which Agatha had formerly envied, and which she still feared Trefusis might mistake for an index of dignity and refinement. Agatha did not believe that her resentment was the common feeling called jealousy, for she still deemed herself unique, but it gave her a sense of meanness that did not improve her spirits.

The dinner was dull. Lady Brandon spoke in an undertone, as if someone lay dead in the next room. Erskine was depressed by the consciousness of having lost his head and acted foolishly in the afternoon. Sir Charles did not pretend to ignore the suspense they were all in pending intelligence of the journey to London; he ate and drank and said nothing. Agatha, disgusted with herself and with Gertrude, and undecided whether to be disgusted with Trefusis or to trust him affectionately, followed the example of her host. After dinner she accompanied him in a series of songs by Schubert. This proved an aggravation instead of a relief. Sir Charles, excelling in the expression of melancholy, preferred songs of that character; and as his musical ideas, like those of most Englishmen, were founded on what he had heard in church in his childhood, his style was oppressively monotonous. Agatha took the first excuse that presented itself to leave the piano. Sir Charles felt that his performance had been a failure, and remarked, after a cough or two, that he had caught a touch of cold returning from the station. Erskine sat on a sofa with his head drooping, and his palms joined and hanging downward between his knees. Agatha stood at the window, looking at the late summer afterglow. Jane yawned, and presently broke the silence.

“You look exactly as you used at school, Agatha. I could almost fancy us back again in Number Six.”

Agatha shook her head.

“Do I ever look like that — like myself, as I used to be?”

“Never,” said Agatha emphatically, turning and surveying the figure of which Miss Carpenter had been the unripe antecedent.

“But why?” said Jane querulously. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I am not so changed.”

“You have become an exceedingly fine woman, Jane,” said Agatha gravely, and then, without knowing why, turned her attentive gaze upon Sir Charles, who bore it uneasily, and left the room. A minute later he returned with two buff envelopes in his hand.

“A telegram for you, Miss Wylie, and one for Chester.” Erskine started up, white with vague fears. Agatha’s color went, and came again with increased richness as she read:

“I have arrived safe and ridiculously happy. Read a thousand things between the lines. I will write tomorrow. Good night.”

“You may read it,” said Agatha, handing it to Jane.

“Very pretty,” said Jane. “A shilling’s worth of attention — exactly twenty words! He may well call himself an economist.”

Suddenly a crowing laugh from Erskine caused them to turn and stare at him. “What nonsense!” he said, blushing. “What a fellow he is! I don’t attach the slightest importance to this.”

Agatha took a corner of his telegram and pulled it gently.

“No, no,” he said, holding it tightly. “It is too absurd. I don’t think I ought—”

Agatha gave a decisive pull, and read the message aloud. It was from Trefusis, thus:

“I forgive your thoughts since Brandon’s return. Write her to-night, and follow your letter to receive an affirmative answer in person. I promised that you might rely on me. She loves you.”

“I never heard of such a thing in my life,” said Jane. “Never!”

“He is certainly a most unaccountable man,” said Sir Charles.

“I am glad, for my own sake, that he is not so black as he is painted,” said Agatha. “You may believe every word of it, Mr. Erskine. Be sure to do as he tells you. He is quite certain to be right.”

“Pooh!” said Erskine, crumpling the telegram and thrusting it into his pocket as if it were not worth a second thought. Presently he slipped away, and did not reappear. When they were about to retire, Sir Charles asked a servant where he was.

“In the library, Sir Charles; writing.”

They looked significantly at one another and went to bed without disturbing him.

CHAPTER XVIII

When Gertrude found herself beside Trefusis in the Pullman, she wondered how she came to be travelling with him against her resolution, if not against her will. In the presence of two women scrutinizing her as if they suspected her of being there with no good purpose, a male passenger admiring her a little further off, her maid reading Trefusis’s newspapers just out of earshot, an uninterested country gentleman looking glumly out of window, a city man preoccupied with the “Economist,” and a polite lady who refrained from staring but not from observing, she felt that she must not make a scene; yet she knew he had not come there to hold an ordinary conversation. Her doubt did not last long. He began promptly, and went to the point at once.

“What do you think of this engagement of mine?”

This was more than she could bear calmly. “What is it to me?” she said indignantly. “I have nothing to do with it.”

“Nothing! You are a cold friend to me then. I thought you one of the surest I possessed.”

She moved as if about to look at him, but checked herself, closed her lips, and fixed her eyes on the vacant seat before her. The reproach he deserved was beyond her power of expression.

“I cling to that conviction still, in spite of Miss Lindsay’s indifference to my affairs. But I confess I hardly know how to bring you into sympathy with me in this matter. In the first place, you have never been married, I have. In the next, you are much younger than I, in more respects than that of years. Very likely half your ideas on the subject are derived from fictions in which happy results are tacked on to conditions very ill-calculated to produce them — which in real life hardly ever do produce them. If our friendship were a chapter in a novel, what would be the upshot of it? Why, I should marry you, or you break your heart at my treachery.”

Gertrude moved her eyes as if she had some intention of taking to flight.

“But our relations being those of real life — far sweeter, after all — I never dreamed of marrying you, having gained and enjoyed your friendship without that eye to business which our nineteenth century keeps open even whilst it sleeps. You, being equally disinterested in your regard for me, do not think of breaking your heart, but you are, I suppose, a little hurt at my apparently meditating and resolving on such a serious step as marriage with Agatha without confiding my intention to you. And you punish me by telling me that you have nothing to do with it — that it is nothing to you. But I never meditated the step, and so had nothing to conceal from you. It was conceived and executed in less than a minute. Although my first marriage was a silly love match and a failure, I have always admitted to myself that I should marry again. A bachelor is a man who shirks responsibilities and duties; I seek them, and consider it my duty, with my monstrous superfluity of means, not to let the individualists outbreed me. Still, I was in no hurry, having other things to occupy me, and being fond of my bachelor freedom, and doubtful sometimes whether I had any right to bring more idlers into the world for the workers to feed. Then came the usual difficulty about the lady. I did not want a helpmeet; I can help myself. Nor did I expect to be loved devotedly, for the race has not yet evolved a man lovable on thorough acquaintance; even my self-love is neither thorough nor constant. I wanted a genial partner for domestic business, and Agatha struck me quite suddenly as being the nearest approach to what I desired that I was likely to find in the marriage market, where it is extremely hard to suit oneself, and where the likeliest bargains are apt to be snapped up by others if one hesitates too long in the hope of finding something better. I admire Agatha’s courage and capability, and believe I shall be able to make her like me, and that the attachment so begun may turn into as close a union as is either healthy or necessary between two separate individuals. I may mistake her character, for I do not know her as I know you, and have scarcely enough faith in her as yet to tell her such things as I have told you. Still, there is a consoling dash of romance in the transaction. Agatha has charm. Do you not think so?”

Gertrude’s emotion was gone. She replied with cool scorn, “Very romantic indeed. She is very fortunate.”

Trefusis half laughed, half sighed with relief to find her so self-possessed. “It sounds like — and indeed is — the selfish calculation of a disilluded widower. You would not value such an offer, or envy the recipient of it?”

“No,” said Gertrude with quiet contempt.

“Yet there is some calculation behind every such offer. We marry to satisfy our needs, and the more reasonable our needs are, the more likely are we to get them satisfied. I see you are disgusted with me; I feared as much. You are the sort of woman to admit no excuse for my marriage except love — pure emotional love, blindfolding reason.”

“I really do not concern myself—”

“Do not say so, Gertrude. I watch every step you take with anxiety; and I do not believe you are indifferent to the worthiness of my conduct. Believe me, love is an overrated passion; it would be irremediably discredited but that young people, and the romancers who live upon their follies, have a perpetual interest in rehabilitating it. No relation involving divided duties and continual intercourse between two people can subsist permanently on love alone. Yet love is not to be despised when it comes from a fine nature. There is a man who loves you exactly as you think I ought to love Agatha — and as I don’t love her.”

Gertrude’s emotion stirred again, and her color rose. “You have no right to say these things now,” she said.

“Why may I not plead the cause of another? I speak of Erskine.” Her color vanished, and he continued, “I want you to marry him. When you are married you will understand me better, and our friendship, shaken just now, will be deepened; for I dare assure you, now that you can no longer misunderstand me, that no living woman is dearer to me than you. So much for the inevitable selfish reason. Erskine is a poor man, and in his comfortable poverty — save the mark — lies your salvation from the baseness of marrying for wealth and position; a baseness of which women of your class stand in constant peril. They court it; you must shun it. The man is honorable and loves you; he is young, healthy, and suitable. What more do you think the world has to offer you?”

“Much more, I hope. Very much more.”

“I fear that the names I give things are not romantic enough. He is a poet. Perhaps he would be a hero if it were possible for a man to be a hero in this nineteenth century, which will be infamous in history as a time when the greatest advances in the power of man over nature only served to sharpen his greed and make famine its avowed minister. Erskine is at least neither a gambler nor a slave-driver at first hand; if he lives upon plundered labor he can no more help himself than I. Do not say that you hope for much more; but tell me, if you can, what more you have any chance of getting? Mind, I do not ask what more you desire; we all desire unutterable things. I ask you what more you can obtain!”

“I have not found Mr. Erskine such a wonderful person as you seem to think him.”

“He is only a man. Do you know anybody more wonderful?”

“Besides, my family might not approve.”

“They most certainly will not. If you wish to please them, you must sell yourself to some rich vampire of the factories or great landlord. If you give yourself away to a poor poet who loves you, their disgust will be unbounded. If a woman wishes to honor her father and mother to their own satisfaction nowadays she must dishonor herself.”

“I do not understand why you should be so anxious for me to marry someone else?”

“Someone else?” said Trefusis, puzzled.

“I do not mean someone else,” said Gertrude hastily, reddening. “Why should I marry at all?”

“Why do any of us marry? Why do I marry? It is a function craving fulfilment. If you do not marry betimes from choice, you will be driven to do so later on by the importunity of your suitors and of your family, and by weariness of the suspense that precedes a definite settlement of oneself. Marry generously. Do not throw yourself away or sell yourself; give yourself away. Erskine has as much at stake as you; and yet he offers himself fearlessly.”

Gertrude raised her head proudly.

“It is true,” continued Trefusis, observing the gesture with some anger, “that he thinks more highly of you than you deserve; but you, on the other hand, think too lowly of him. When you marry him you must save him from a cruel disenchantment by raising yourself to the level he fancies you have attained. This will cost you an effort, and the effort will do you good, whether it fail or succeed. As for him, he will find his just level in your estimation if your thoughts reach high enough to comprehend him at that level.”

Gertrude moved impatiently.

“What!” he said quickly. “Are my long-winded sacrifices to the god of reason distasteful? I believe I am involuntarily making them so because I am jealous of the fellow after all. Nevertheless I am serious; I want you to get married; though I shall always have a secret grudge against the man who marries you. Agatha will suspect me of treason if you don’t. Erskine will be a disappointed man if you don’t. You will be moody, wretched, and — and unmarried if you don’t.”

Gertrude’s cheeks flushed at the word jealous, and again at his mention of Agatha. “And if I do,” she said bitterly, “what then?”

“If you do, Agatha’s mind will be at ease, Erskine will be happy, and you! You will have sacrificed yourself, and will have the happiness which follows that when it is worthily done.”

“It is you who have sacrificed me,” she said, casting away her reticence, and looking at him for the first time during the conversation.

“I know it,” he said, leaning towards her and half whispering the words. “Is not renunciation the beginning and the end of wisdom? I have sacrificed you rather than profane our friendship by asking you to share my whole life with me. You are unfit for that, and I have committed myself to another union, and am begging you to follow my example, lest we should tempt one another to a step which would soon prove to you how truly I tell you that you are unfit. I have never allowed you to roam through all the chambers of my consciousness, but I keep a sanctuary there for you alone, and will keep it inviolate for you always. Not even Agatha shall have the key, she must be content with the other rooms — the drawing-room, the working-room, the dining-room, and so forth. They would not suit you; you would not like the furniture or the guests; after a time you would not like the master. Will you be content with the sanctuary?” Gertrude bit her lip; tears came into her eyes. She looked imploringly at him. Had they been alone, she would have thrown herself into his arms and entreated him to disregard everything except their strong cleaving to one another.

“And will you keep a corner of your heart for me?”

She slowly gave him a painful look of acquiescence. “Will you be brave, and sacrifice yourself to the poor man who loves you? He will save you from useless solitude, or from a worldly marriage — I cannot bear to think of either as your fate.”

“I do not care for Mr. Erskine,” she said, hardly able to control her voice; “but I will marry him if you wish it.”

“I do wish it earnestly, Gertrude.”

“Then, you have my promise,” she said, again with some bitterness.

“But you will not forget me? Erskine will have all but that — a tender recollection — nothing.”

“Can I do more than I have just promised?”

“Perhaps so; but I am too selfish to be able to conceive anything more generous. Our renunciation will bind us to one another as our union could never have done.”

They exchanged a long look. Then he took out his watch, and began to speak of the length of their journey, now nearly at an end. When they arrived in London the first person they recognized on the platform was Mr. Jansenius.

“Ah! you got my telegram, I see,” said Trefusis. “Many thanks for coming. Wait for me whilst I put this lady into a cab.”

When the cab was engaged, and Gertrude, with her maid, stowed within, he whispered to her hurriedly:

“In spite of all, I have a leaden pain here” (indicating his heart). “You have been brave, and I have been wise. Do not speak to me, but remember that we are friends always and deeply.”

He touched her hand, and turned to the cabman, directing him whither to drive. Gertrude shrank back into a corner of the vehicle as it departed. Then Trefusis, expanding his chest like a man just released from some cramping drudgery, rejoined Mr. Jansenius.

“There goes a true woman,” he said. “I have been persuading her to take the very best step open to her. I began by talking sense, like a man of honor, and kept at it for half an hour, but she would not listen to me. Then I talked romantic nonsense of the cheapest sort for five minutes, and she consented with tears in her eyes. Let us take this hansom. Hi! Belsize Avenue. Yes; you sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanishness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly. Have you ever made up your mind, Jansenius, whether I am an unusually honest man, or one of the worst products of the social organization I spend all my energies in assailing — an infernal scoundrel, in short?”

“Now pray do not be absurd,” said Mr. Jansenius. “I wonder at a man of your ability behaving and speaking as you sometimes do.”

“I hope a little insincerity, when meant to act as chloroform — to save a woman from feeling a wound to her vanity — is excusable. By-the-bye, I must send a couple of telegrams from the first post-office we pass. Well, sir, I am going to marry Agatha, as I sent you word. There was only one other single man and one other virgin down at Brandon Beeches, and they are as good as engaged. And so —

“‘Jack shall have Jill, Nought shall go ill, The man shall have his mare again; And all shall be well.’”

APPENDIX

LETTER TO THE AUTHOR FROM MR. SIDNEY TREFUSIS.

My Dear Sir: I find that my friends are not quite satisfied with the account you have given of them in your clever novel entitled “An Unsocial Socialist.” You already understand that I consider it my duty to communicate my whole history, without reserve, to whoever may desire to be guided or warned by my experience, and that I have no sympathy whatever with the spirit in which one of the ladies concerned recently told you that her affairs were no business of yours or of the people who read your books. When you asked my permission some years ago to make use of my story, I at once said that you would be perfectly justified in giving it the fullest publicity whether I consented or not, provided only that you were careful not to falsify it for the sake of artistic effect. Now, whilst cheerfully admitting that you have done your best to fulfil that condition, I cannot help feeling that, in presenting the facts in the guise of fiction, you have, in spite of yourself, shown them in a false light. Actions described in novels are judged by a romantic system of morals as fictitious as the actions themselves. The traditional parts of this system are, as Cervantes tried to show, for the chief part, barbarous and obsolete; the modern additions are largely due to the novel readers and writers of our own century — most of them half-educated women, rebelliously slavish, superstitious, sentimental, full of the intense egotism fostered by their struggle for personal liberty, and, outside their families, with absolutely no social sentiment except love. Meanwhile, man, having fought and won his fight for this personal liberty, only to find himself a more abject slave than before, is turning with loathing from his egotist’s dream of independence to the collective interests of society, with the welfare of which he now perceives his own happiness to be inextricably bound up. But man in this phase (would that all had reached it!) has not yet leisure to write or read novels. In noveldom woman still sets the moral standard, and to her the males, who are in full revolt against the acceptance of the infatuation of a pair of lovers as the highest manifestation of the social instinct, and against the restriction of the affections within the narrow circle of blood relationship, and of the political sympathies within frontiers, are to her what she calls heartless brutes. That is exactly what I have been called by readers of your novel; and that, indeed, is exactly what I am, judged by the fictitious and feminine standard of morality. Hence some critics have been able plausibly to pretend to take the book as a satire on Socialism. It may, for what I know, have been so intended by you. Whether or no, I am sorry you made a novel of my story, for the effect has been almost as if you had misrepresented me from beginning to end.

At the same time, I acknowledge that you have stated the facts, on the whole, with scrupulous fairness. You have, indeed, flattered me very strongly by representing me as constantly thinking of and for other people, whereas the rest think of themselves alone, but on the other hand you have contradictorily called me “unsocial,” which is certainly the last adjective I should have expected to find in the neighborhood of my name. I deny, it is true, that what is now called “society” is society in any real sense, and my best wish for it is that it may dissolve too rapidly to make it worth the while of those who are “not in society” to facilitate its dissolution by violently pounding it into small pieces. But no reader of “An Unsocial Socialist” needs to be told how, by the exercise of a certain considerate tact (which on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact), I have contrived to maintain genial terms with men and women of all classes, even those whose opinions and political conduct seemed to me most dangerous.

However, I do not here propose to go fully into my own position, lest I should seem tedious, and be accused, not for the first time, of a propensity to lecture — a reproach which comes naturally enough from persons whose conceptions are never too wide to be expressed within the limits of a sixpenny telegram. I shall confine myself to correcting a few misapprehensions which have, I am told, arisen among readers who from inveterate habit cannot bring the persons and events of a novel into any relation with the actual conditions of life.

In the first place, then, I desire to say that Mrs. Erskine is not dead of a broken heart. Erskine and I and our wives are very much in and out at one another’s houses; and I am therefore in a position to declare that Mrs. Erskine, having escaped by her marriage from the vile caste in which she was relatively poor and artificially unhappy and ill-conditioned, is now, as the pretty wife of an art-critic, relatively rich, as well as pleasant, active, and in sound health. Her chief trouble, as far as I can judge, is the impossibility of shaking off her distinguished relatives, who furtively quit their abject splendor to drop in upon her for dinner and a little genuine human society much oftener than is convenient to poor Erskine. She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position. She has also, as might have been expected, become an extreme advocate of socialism; and indeed, being in a great hurry for the new order of things, looks on me as a lukewarm disciple because I do not propose to interfere with the slowly grinding mill of Evolution, and effect the change by one tremendous stroke from the united and awakened people (for such she — vainly, alas! — believes the proletariat already to be). As to my own marriage, some have asked sarcastically whether I ran away again or not; others, whether it has been a success. These are foolish questions. My marriage has turned out much as I expected it would. I find that my wife’s views on the subject vary with the circumstances under which they are expressed.

I have now to make one or two comments on the impressions conveyed by the style of your narrative. Sufficient prominence has not, in my opinion, been given to the extraordinary destiny of my father, the true hero of a nineteenth century romance. I, who have seen society reluctantly accepting works of genius for nothing from men of extraordinary gifts, and at the same time helplessly paying my father millions, and submitting to monstrous mortgages of its future production, for a few directions as to the most business-like way of manufacturing and selling cotton, cannot but wonder, as I prepare my income-tax returns, whether society was mad to sacrifice thus to him and to me. He was the man with power to buy, to build, to choose, to endow, to sit on committees and adjudicate upon designs, to make his own terms for placing anything on a sound business footing. He was hated, envied, sneered at for his low origin, reproached for his ignorance, yet nothing would pay unless he liked or pretended to like it. I look round at our buildings, our statues, our pictures, our newspapers, our domestic interiors, our books, our vehicles, our morals, our manners, our statutes, and our religion, and I see his hand everywhere, for they were all made or modified to please him. Those which did not please him failed commercially: he would not buy them, or sell them, or countenance them; and except through him, as “master of the industrial situation,” nothing could be bought, or sold, or countenanced. The landlord could do nothing with his acres except let them to him; the capitalist’s hoard rotted and dwindled until it was lent to him; the worker’s muscles and brain were impotent until sold to him. What king’s son would not exchange with me — the son of the Great Employer — the Merchant Prince? No wonder they proposed to imprison me for treason when, by applying my inherited business talent, I put forward a plan for securing his full services to society for a few hundred a year. But pending the adoption of my plan, do not describe him contemptuously as a vulgar tradesman. Industrial kingship, the only real kingship of our century, was his by divine right of his turn for business; and I, his son, bid you respect the crown whose revenues I inherit. If you don’t, my friend, your book won’t pay.

I hear, with some surprise, that the kindness of my conduct to Henrietta (my first wife, you recollect) has been called in question; why, I do not exactly know. Undoubtedly I should not have married her, but it is waste of time to criticise the judgment of a young man in love. Since I do not approve of the usual plan of neglecting and avoiding a spouse without ceasing to keep up appearances, I cannot for the life of me see what else I could have done than vanish when I found out my mistake. It is but a short-sighted policy to wait for the mending of matters that are bound to get worse. The notion that her death was my fault is sheer unreason on the face of it; and I need no exculpation on that score; but I must disclaim the credit of having borne her death like a philosopher. I ought to have done so, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at the moment, and the proof of it is that I and Jansenius (the only other person who cared) behaved in a most unbecoming fashion, as men invariably do when they are really upset. Perfect propriety at a death is seldom achieved except by the undertaker, who has the advantage of being free from emotion.

Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious and natural, but which you somehow seem to have missed. Granted that my fancy for Hetty was only a cloud of illusions, still I could not, within a few days of her sudden death, go in cold blood to take part in a grotesque and heathenish mummery over her coffin. I should have broken out and strangled somebody. But on every other point I — weakly enough — sacrificed my own feelings to those of Jansenius. I let him have his funeral, though I object to funerals and to the practice of sepulture. I consented to a monument, although there is, to me, no more bitterly ridiculous outcome of human vanity than the blocks raised to tell posterity that John Smith, or Jane Jackson, late of this parish, was born, lived, and died worth enough money to pay a mason to distinguish their bones from those of the unrecorded millions. To gratify Jansenius I waived this objection, and only interfered to save him from being fleeced and fooled by an unnecessary West End middleman, who, as likely as not, would have eventually employed the very man to whom I gave the job. Even the epitaph was not mine. If I had had my way I should have written: “HENRIETTA JANSENIUS WAS BORN ON SUCH A DATE, MARRIED A MAN NAMED TREFUSIS, AND DIED ON SUCH ANOTHER DATE; AND NOW WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER SHE DID OR NOT?” The whole notion conveyed in the book that I rode rough-shod over everybody in the affair, and only consulted my own feelings, is the very reverse of the truth.

As to the tomfoolery down at Brandon’s, which ended in Erskine and myself marrying the young lady visitors there, I can only congratulate you on the determination with which you have striven to make something like a romance out of such very thin material. I cannot say that I remember it all exactly as you have described it; my wife declares flatly there is not a word of truth in it as far as she is concerned, and Mrs. Erskine steadily refuses to read the book.

On one point I must acknowledge that you have proved yourself a master of the art of fiction. What Hetty and I said to one another that day when she came upon me in the shrubbery at Alton College was known only to us two. She never told it to anyone, and I soon forgot it. All due honor, therefore, to the ingenuity with which you have filled the hiatus, and shown the state of affairs between us by a discourse on “surplus value,” cribbed from an imperfect report of one of my public lectures, and from the pages of Karl Marx! If you were an economist I should condemn you for confusing economic with ethical considerations, and for your uncertainty as to the function which my father got his start by performing. But as you are only a novelist, I compliment you heartily on your clever little pasticcio, adding, however, that as an account of what actually passed between myself and Hetty, it is the wildest romance ever penned. Wickens’s boy was far nearer the mark.

In conclusion, allow me to express my regret that you can find no better employment for your talent than the writing of novels. The first literary result of the foundation of our industrial system upon the profits of piracy and slave-trading was Shakspere. It is our misfortune that the sordid misery and hopeless horror of his view of man’s destiny is still so appropriate to English society that we even to-day regard him as not for an age, but for all time. But the poetry of despair will not outlive despair itself. Your nineteenth century novelists are only the tail of Shakspere. Don’t tie yourself to it: it is fast wriggling into oblivion.

I am, dear sir, yours truly,

SIDNEY TREFUSIS.

The Plays

Shaw’s last home in Ireland, before he left for London in 1876. The building now functions as The Harcourt Hotel, Dublin.

WIDOWERS’ HOUSES

Widowers’ Houses (1892) was the first of Shaw’s plays to be staged. It is one of the three plays Shaw published as Plays Unpleasant in 1898. It was deemed “unpleasant” because its purpose is not to entertain its audience — as the traditional Victorian theatre was expected to do — but to raise awareness of social problems and to censure the exploitation of the poor by the unproductive upper class.

Shaw, 1894

CONTENTS

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act I

In the garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine, on a fine afternoon in August in the eighteen-eighties. Looking down the Rhine towards Bonn, the gate leading from the garden to the riverside is seen on the right. The hotel is on the left. It has a wooden annex with an entrance marked Table d’Hote. A waiter is in attendance.

A couple of English tourists come out of the hotel. The younger, Dr Harry Trench, is about 24, stoutly built, thick in the neck, close-cropped and black in the hair, with undignified medical-student manners, frank, hasty, rather boyish. The other, Mr William de Burgh Cokane, is older probably over 40, possibly 50 an ill-nourished, scanty-haired gentleman, with affected manners; fidgety, touchy, and constitutionally ridiculous in uncompassionate eyes.

COKANE [on the threshold of the hotel, calling peremptorily to the waiter] Two beers for us out here. [The waiter goes for the beer.] Cokane comes into the garden]. We have got the room with the best view in the hotel, Harry, thanks to my tact. We’ll leave in the morning and do Mainz and Frankfurt. There is a very graceful female statue in the private house of a nobleman in Frankfurt. Also a zoo. Next day, Nuremberg! finest collection of instruments of torture in the world.

TRENCH All right. You look out the trains, will you? [He takes out a Continental Bradshaw, and tosses it on one of the tables].

COKANE [baulking himself in the act of sitting down] Pah! the seat is all dusty. These foreigners are deplorably unclean in their habits.

TRENCH [buoyantly] Never mind : It dont matter, old chappie. Buck up, Billy, buck up. Enjoy yourself. [He throws Cokane into the chair, and sits down opposite him, taking out his pipe, and singing noisily]

Pour out the Rhine wine: let it flow

Like a free and bounding river

COKANE [scandalized] In the name of common decency, Harry, will you remember that you are a gentleman and not a coster on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holiday? Would you dream of behaving like this in London?

TRENCH Oh, rot! Ive come abroad to enjoy myself. So would you if youd just passed an examination after four years in the medical school and walking the hospital. [He again bursts into song.]

COKANE [rising] Trench: either you travel as a gentleman, or you travel alone. This is what makes Englishmen unpopular on the Continent. It may not matter before the natives; but the people who came on board the steamer at Bonn are English. I have been uneasy all the afternoon about what they must think of us. Look at our appearance.

TRENCH Whats wrong with our appearance?

COKANE Negligé, my dear fellow, negligé. On the steamboat a little negligé was quite en regie; but here, in this hotel, some of them are sure to dress for dinner; and you have nothing but that Norfolk jacket. How are they to know that you are well connected if you do not shew it by your manners?

TRENCH Pooh! the steamboat people were the scum of the earth Americans and all sorts. They may go hang themselves, Billy. I shall not bother about them. [He strikes a match, and proceeds to light his pipe.]

COKANE Do drop calling me Billy in public, Trench. My name is Cokane. I am sure they were persons of consequence: you were struck with the distinguished appearance of the father yourself.

TRENCH [sobered at once] What! those people? [He blows out the match and puts up his pipe.]

COKANE [following up his advantage triumphantly] Here, Harry, here: at this hotel. I recognized the father’s umbrella in the hall.

TRENCH [with a touch of genuine shame] I suppose I ought to have brought a change. But a lot of luggage is such a nuisance; and [rising abruptly] at all events we can go and have a wash. [He turns to go into the hotel, but stops in consternation, seeing some people coming up to the riverside gate]. Oh, I say! Here they are.

A lady and gentleman, followed by a porter with some light parcels, not luggage, but shop purchases, come into the garden. They are apparently father and daughter. The gentleman is 50, tall, well preserved, and of upright carriage. His incisive, domineering utterance and imposing style, with his strong aquiline nose and resolute clean-shaven mouth, give him an air of importance. He wears a light grey frock-coat with silk linings, a white hat, and a field-glass slung in a new leather case. A self-made man, formidable to servants, not easily accessible to anyone. His daughter is a well-dressed, well-fed, good-looking, strong-minded young woman, presentably ladylike, but still her father’s daughter. Nevertheless fresh and attractive, and none the worse for being vital and energetic rather than delicate and refined.

COKANE [quickly taking the arm of Trench, who is staring as if transfixed] Recollect yourself, Harry: presence of mind, presence of mind! [He strolls with him towards the hotel. The waiter comes out with the beer]. Kellner: Ceci-la est notre table. Est-ce que vous comprenez Français?

WAITER Yes, zare. Oil right, zare.

THE GENTLEMAN [to his porter] Place those things on that table. [The porter does not understand]

WAITER [interposing] Zese zhentellmen are using zis table, zare. Vould you mind?

THE GENTLEMAN [severely] You should have told me so before. [To Cokane, with fierce condescension] I regret the mistake, sir.

COKANE Dont mention it, my dear sir: dont mention it. Retain the place, I beg.

THE GENTLEMAN {coldly turning his back on him] Thank you. [To the porter] Place them on that table. [The porter makes no movement until the gentleman points to the parcels and peremptorily raps on another table, nearer the gate].

PORTER Ja wohl, gnad’g’ Herr. [He puts down the parcels].

THE GENTLEMAN [taking out a handful of money] Waiter.

WAITER [awestruck] Yes, zare.

THE GENTLEMAN Tea. For two. Out here.

WAITER Yes, zare. [He goes into the hotel.]

The gentleman selects a small coin from his handful of money, and gives it to the porter, who receives it with a submissive touch to his cap, and goes out, not daring to speak. His daughter sits down and opens a parcel of photographs. The gentleman takes out a Baedeker; places a chair for himself; and then, before sitting down, looks truculently at Cokane,as if waiting for him to take himself off. Cokane, not at all abashed, resumes his place at the other table with an air of modest good breeding, and calls to Trench, who is prowling irresolutely in the background.

COKANE Trench, my dear fellow: your beer is waiting for you. [He drinks.]

TRENCH [glad of the excuse to come back to his chair] Thank you, Cokane. [He also drinks.]

COKANE By the way, Harry, I have often meant to ask you: is Lady Roxdale your mother’s sister or your father’s? [This shot tells immediately. The gentleman is perceptibly interested.]

TRENCH My mother’s, of course. What put that into your head?

COKANE Nothing. I was just thinking hm! She will expect you to marry, Harry: a doctor ought to marry.

TRENCH What has she got to do with it?

COKANE A great deal, dear boy. She looks forward to floating your wife in society in London.

TRENCH What rot!

COKANE Ah, you are young, dear boy: You dont know the importance of these things apparently idle ceremonial trifles, really the springs and wheels of a great aristocratic system. [The waiter comes back with the tea things, which he brings to the gentleman’s table. Cokane rises and addresses the gentleman] My dear sir, excuse my addressing you; but I cannot help feeling that you prefer this table and that we are in your way.

THE GENTLEMAN [grafiously] Thank you. Blanche: This gentleman very kindly offers us his table, if you would prefer it.

BLANCHE Oh, thanks: It makes no difference.

THE GENTLEMAN [to Cokane} We are fellow travellers, I believe, sir.

COKANE Fellow travellers and fellow countrymen. Ah, we rarely feel the charm of our own tongue until it reaches our ears under a foreign sky. You have no doubt noticed that?

THE GENTLEMAN [a little puzzled] Hm! From a romantic point of view, possibly, very possibly. As a matter of fact, the sound of English makes me feel at home; and I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. It is not precisely what one goes to the expense for. [He looks at Trench] I think this gentleman travelled with us also.

COKANE [acting as master of the ceremonies] My valued friend, Dr Trench. [The gentleman and Trench rise.] Trench, my dear fellow, allow me to introduce you to er? [He looks enquiringly at the gentleman, waiting for the name.]

THE GENTLEMAN Permit me to shake your hand, Dr Trench. My name is Sartorius; and I have the honor of being known to Lady Roxdale, who is, I believe, a near relative of yours. Blanche, [She looks up.] Dr Trench. [They bow.]

TRENCH Perhaps I should introduce my friend Cokane to you, Mr Sartorius: Mr William de Burgh Cokane. [Cokane makes an elaborate bow. Sartorius accepts it with dignity. The waiter meanwhile returns with teapot, hot water, etc.]

SARTORIUS [to the waiter] Two more cups.

WAITER Yes, zare. [He goes into the hotel.]

BLANCHE Do you take sugar, Mr Cokane?

COKANE Thank you. [To Sartorius] This is really too kind. Harry: Bring your chair round.

SARTORIUS You are very welcome. [Trench brings his chair to the tea table; and they all sit round it. The waiter returns with two more cups.]

WAITER Table d’hote at ‘alf past zix, zhentellmenn. Ahnyzing else now, zare?

SARTORIUS No. You can go. [The waiter goes.]

COKANE [very agreeably] Do you contemplate a long stay here, Miss Sartorius?

BLANCHE We were thinking of going on to Rolandseck. Is it as nice as this place?

COKANE Harry: The Baedeker. Thank you. [He consults the index, and looks out Rolandseck.]

BLANCHE Sugar, Dr Trench?

TRENCH Thanks. [She hands him the cup, and looks meaningly at him for an instant. He looks down hastily, and glances apprehensively at Sartorius, who is preoccupied with a piece of bread and butter].

COKANE Rolandseck appears to be an extremely interesting place. [Rereads] “It is one of the most beautiful and frequented spots on the river, and is surrounded with numerous villas and pleasant gardens, chiefly belonging to wealthy merchants from the Lower Rhine, and extending along the wooded slopes at the back of the village.”

BLANCHE That sounds civilized and comfortable. I vote we go there.

SARTORIUS Quite like our place at Surbiton, my dear.

BLANCHE Quite.

COKANE You have a place down the river? Ah, I envy you.

SARTORIUS No: I have merely taken a furnished villa at Surbiton for the summer. I live in Bedford Square. I am a vestryman and must reside in the parish.

BLANCHE Another cup, Mr Cokane?

COKANE Thank you, no. [To Sartorius] I presume you have been round this little place. Not much to see here, except the Apollinaris Church.

SARTORIUS [scandalized] The what!

COKANE The Apollinaris Church.

SARTORIUS A strange name to give a church. Very continental, I must say.

COKANE Ah, yes, yes, yes. That is where our neighbors fall short sometimes, Mr Sartorius: Taste, taste is what they occasionally fail in. But in this instance they are not to blame. The water is called after the church, not the church after the water.

SARTORIUS [as if this were an extenuating circumstance but not a complete excuse] I am glad to hear it. Is the church a celebrated one?

COKANE Baedeker stars it.

SARTORIUS [respectfully] Oh, in that case I should like to see it.

COKANE [reading] “...erected in 1839 by Zwirner, the late eminent architect of the cathedral of Cologne, at the expense of Count Fiirstenberg-Stammheim.”

SARTORIUS [much impressed] We must certainly see that, Mr Cokane. I had no idea that the architect of Cologne cathedral lived so recently.

BLANCHE Dont let us bother about any more churches, papa. Theyre all the same; and I’m tired to death of them.

SARTORIUS Well, my dear, if you think it sensible to take a long and expensive journey to see what there is to be seen, and then go away without seeing it

BLANCHE Not this afternoon, papa, please.

SARTORIUS My dear: I should like you to see everything. It is part of your education

BLANCHE [rising, with a petulant sigh] Oh, my education! Very well, very well: I suppose I must go through with it. Are you coming, Dr Trench? [with a grimace] I’m sure the Johannis Church will be a treat for you.

COKANE [laughing softly and archly] Ah, excellent, excellent: Very good, indeed. [Seriously] But do you know, Miss Sartorius, there actually are Johannis churches here several of them as well as Apollinaris ones?

SARTORIUS [Sententiously, taking out his field-glass and leading the way to the gate] There is many a true word spoken in jest, Mr Cokane.

COKANE [accompanying him] How true! How true! [They go out together, ruminating profoundly. Blanche makes no movement to follow them. She watches until they are safely out of sight, and then posts herself before Trench, looking at him with an enigmatic smile, which he returns with a half sheepish, half conceited grin.]

BLANCHE Well! So you have done it at last.

TRENCH Yes. At least Cokane’s done it. I told you he’d manage it. He’s rather an ass in some ways; but he has tremendous tact.

BLANCHE [contemptuously] Tact! Thats not tact : thats inquisitiveness. Inquisitive people always have a lot of practice in getting into conversation with strangers. Why didnt you speak to my father yourself on the boat? You were ready enough to speak to me without any introduction.

TRENCH I didnt particularly want to talk to him.

BLANCHE It didnt occur to you, I suppose, that you put me in a false position by that.

TRENCH Oh, I dont see that, exactly. Besides, your father isnt an easy man to tackle. Of course, now that I know him, I see that he’s pleasant enough; but then youve got to know him first, havnt you?

BLANCHE [impatiently] Everybody is afraid of papa: I’m sure I dont know why. [She sits down again, pouting a little.]

TRENCH [tenderly] However, it’s all right now: Isnt it? [He sits near her.]

BLANCHE [sharply] I dont know. How should I? You had no right to speak to me that day on board the steamer. You thought I was alone, because [with false pathos] I had no mother with me.

TRENCH [protesting] Oh, I say! Come! It was you who spoke to me. Of course I was only too glad of the chance; but on my word I shouldnt have moved an eyelid if you hadnt given me a lead.

BLANCHE I only asked you the name of a castle. There was nothing unladylike in that.

TRENCH Of course not. Why shouldnt you? [With renewed tenderness] But it’s all right now: Isnt it?

BLANCHE [softly, looking subtly at him] Is it?

TRENCH [suddenly becoming shy] I, I suppose so. By the way, what about the Apollinaris Church? Your father expects us to follow him, doesnt he?

BLANCHE [with suppressed resentment] Dont let me detain you if you wish to see it.

TRENCH Wont you come?

BLANCHE No. [She turns her face away moodily.]

TRENCH [alarmed] I say: youre not offended, are you? [She looks round at him for a moment with a reproachful film on her eyes.] Blanche — [She bristles instantly; overdoes it and frightens him.] I beg your pardon for calling you by your name; but I er — [She corrects her mistake by softening her expression eloquently. He responds with a gush] You dont mind, do you? I felt sure you wouldnt, somehow. Well, look here. I have no idea how you will receive this: It must seem horribly abrupt; but the circumstances do not admit of — The fact is, my utter want of tact — [he founders more and more, unable to see that she can hardly contain her eagerness.] Now, if it were Cokane —

BLANCHE [impatiently] Cokane!

TRENCH [terrified] No, not Cokane. Though I assure you I was only going to say about him that —

BLANCHE That he will be back presently with papa.

TRENCH [stupidly] Yes: They cant be very long now. I hope I’m not detaining you.

BLANCHE I thought you were detaining me because you had something to say.

TRENCH [totally unnerved] Not at all. At least, nothing very particular. That is, I’m afraid you wouldnt think it very particular. Another time, perhaps —

BLANCHE What other time? How do you know that we shall ever meet again? [Desperately] Tell me now. I want you to tell me now.

TRENCH Well, I was thinking that if we could make up our minds to or not to at least er-[His nervousness deprives him of the power of speech]

BLANCHE [giving him up as hopeless] I dont think theres much danger of your making up your mind, Dr Trench.

TRENCH [stammering] I only thought — [He stops and looks at her piteously. She hesitates a moment, and then puts her hands into his with calculated impulsiveness. He catches her in his arms with a cry of relief.] Dear Blanche! I thought I should never have said it. I believe I should have stood stuttering here all day if you hadnt helped me out with it.

BLANCHE [trying to get away from him] I didnt help you out with it.

TRENCH [holding her] I dont mean that you did it on purpose, of course. Only instinctively.

BLANCHE [still a little anxious] But you havnt said anything.

TRENCH What more can I say than this? [He kisses her again.]

BLANCHE [overcome by the kiss, but holding on to her point] But Harry-

TRENCH [delighted at the name] Yes?

BLANCHE When shall we be married?

TRENCH At the first church we meet: the Apollinaris Church, if you like.

BLANCHE No, but seriously. This is serious, Harry: you musnt joke about it.

TRENCH [looking suddenly round to the riverside gate and quickly releasing her] Sh! Here they are back again.

BLANCHE Oh, d — [The word is drowned by the clangor of a bell from within the hotel. The waiter appears on the steps, ringing it. Cokane and Sartorius are seen returning by the river gate]

WAITER Table d’h6te in dwendy minutes, ladies and zhentellmenn. [He goes into the hotel.]

SARTORIUS [gravely] I intended you to accompany us, Blanche.

BLANCHE Yes, papa. We were just about to start.

SARTORIUS We are rather dusty : we must make ourselves presentable at the table d’hote. I think you had better come in with me, my child. Come. [He offers Blanche his arm. The gravity of his manner overawes them all. Blanche silently takes his arm and goes into the hotel with him. Cokane, hardly less momentous than Sartorius himself, contemplates Trench with the severity of a judge].

COKANE [with reprobation] No, my dear boy. No, no. Never. I blush for you was never so ashamed in my life. You have been taking advantage of that unprotected girl.

TRENCH [hotly] Cokane!

COKANE [inexorable] Her father seems to be a perfect gentleman. I obtained the privilege of his acquaintance: I introduced you: I allowed him to believe that he might leave his daughter in your charge with absolute confidence. And what did I see on our return? what did her father see? Oh, Trench, Trench! No, my dear fellow, no, no. Bad taste, Harry, bad form!

TRENCH Stuff! There was nothing to see.

COKANE Nothing to see! She, a perfect lady, a person of the highest breeding, actually in your arms; and you say there was nothing to see! With a waiter there actually ringing a heavy bell to call attention to his presence. [Lecturing him with redoubled severity] Have you no principles, Trench? Have you no religious convictions? Have you no acquaintance with the usages of society? You actually kissed-

TRENCH You didnt see me kiss her.

COKANE We not only saw but heard it: The report positively reverberated down the Rhine. Dont condescend to subterfuge, Trench.

TRENCH Nonsense, my dear Billy. You —

COKANE There you go again. Dont use that low abbreviation. How am I to preserve the respect of fellow travellers of position and wealth, if I am to be Billied at every turn? My name is William : William de Burgh Cokane.

TRENCH Oh, bother! There: Dont be offended, old chap. Whats the use of putting your back up at every trifle? It comes natural to me to call you Billy: it suits you, somehow.

COKANE [mortified] You have no delicacy of feeling Trench, no tact. I never mention it to anyone; but nothing, I am afraid, will ever make a true gentleman of you. [Sartorius appears on the threshold of the hotel.] Here is my friend Sartorius, coming, no doubt, to ask you for an explanation of your conduct. I really should not have been surprised to see him bring a horsewhip with him. I shall not intrude on the painful scene.

TRENCH Dont go, confound it. I dont want to meet him alone just now.

COKANE [shaking his head] Delicacy, Harry, delicacy! Good taste! Savoir faire! [He walks away. Trench tries to escape in the opposite direction by strolling off towards the garden entrance.]

SARTORIUS [mesmerically] Dr Trench.

TRENCH [stopping and fuming] Oh, is that you, Mr Sartorius? How did you find the church?

[Sartorius, without a word, points to a seat. Trench, half hypnotized by his own nervousness and the impressiveness of Sartorius, sits down helplessly.]

SARTORIUS {also seating himself] You have been speaking to my daughter, Dr Trench.

TRENCH [with an attempt at ease of manner] Yes: we had a conversation quite a chat, in fact whilst you were at the church with Cokane. How did you get on with Cokane, Mr Sartorius? I always think he has such wonderful tact.

SARTORIUS [ignoring the digression] I have just had a word with my daughter, Dr Trench; and I find her underthe impression that something has passed between you which it is my duty as a father, the father of a motherless girl, to inquire into at once. My daughter, perhaps foolishly, has taken you quite seriously; and —

TRENCH But —

SARTORIUS One moment, if you will be so good. I have been a young man myself younger, perhaps, than you would suppose from my present appearance. I mean, of course, in character. If you were not serious —

TRENCH [ingenuously] But I was perfectly serious. I want to marry your daughter, Mr Sartorius. I hope you dont object.

SARTORIUS [condescending to Trench’s humility from the mere instinct to seize an advantage, and yet deferring to Lady Roxdale’s relative] So far, no. I may say that your proposal seems to be an honorable and straightforward one, and that it is very gratifying to me personally.

TRENCH [agreeably surprised] Then I suppose we may consider the affair as settled. It’s really very good of you.

SARTORIUS Gently, Dr Trench, gently. Such a transaction as this cannot be settled offhand.

TRENCH Not offhand, no. There are settlements and things, of course. But it may be regarded as settled between ourselves, maynt it?

‘SARTORIUS Hm! Have you nothing further to mention?

TRENCH Only that, that- No: I dont know that I have, except that I love —

SARTORIUS [interrupting] Anything about your family, for example? You do not anticipate any objection on their part, do you?

TRENCH Oh, they have nothing to do with it.

SARTORIUS [warmly] Excuse me, sir: They have a great deal to do with it. [Trench is abashed] I am resolved that my daughter shall approach no circle in which she will not be received with the full consideration to which her education and her breeding — [here his self-control slips a little; and he repeats, as if Trench had contradicted him] — I say, her breeding entitle her.

TRENCH {bewildered] Of course not. But what makes you think my family wont like Blanche? Of course my father was a younger son; and Ive had to take to a profession and all that; so my people wont expect us to entertain them: Theyll know we cant afford it. But theyll entertain us: They always ask me.

SARTORIUS That wont do for me, sir. Families often think it due to themselves to turn their backs on newcomers whom they may not think quite good enough for them.

TRENCH But I assure you my people arnt a bit snobbish. Blanche is a lady: thatll be good enough for them.

SARTORIUS [moved] I am glad you think so. [He offers his hand. Trench, astonished, takes it] I think so myself. [He presses Trenctis hand gratefully and releases it.] And now, Dr Trench, since you have acted handsomely, you shall have no cause to complain of me. There shall be no difficulty about money: You shall entertain as much as you please: I will guarantee all that. But I must have a guarantee on my side that she will be received on equal terms by your family.

TRENCH Guarantee!

SARTORIUS Yes, a reasonable guarantee. I shall expect you to write to your relatives explaining your intention, and adding what you think proper as to my daughter’s fitness for the best society. When you can shew me a few letters from the principal members of your family, congratulating you in a fairly cordial way, I shall be satisfied. Can I say more?

TRENCH [much puzzled, but grateful] No indeed. You are really very good. Many thanks. Since you wish it, I’ll write to my people. But I assure you youll find them as jolly as possible over it. I’ll make them write by return.

SARTORIUS Thank you. In the meantime, I must ask you not to regard the matter as settled.

TRENCH Oh! Not to regard the- I see. You mean between Blanche and —

SARTORIUS I mean between you and Miss Sartorius. When I interrupted your conversation here some time ago, you and she were evidently regarding it as settled. In case difficulties arise, and the match — you see I call it a match — be broken off, I should not wish Blanche to think that she had allowed a gentleman to, to- [Trench nods sympathetically] Quite so. May I depend on you to keep a fair distance, and so spare me the necessity of having to restrain an intercourse which promises to be very pleasant to us all?

TRENCH Certainly; since you prefer it. [They shake hands on it.]

SARTORIUS [rising] You will write to-day, I think you said?

TRENCH [eagerly] I’ll write now, before I leave here, straight off.

SARTORIUS I will leave you to yourself then. [He hesitates, the conversation having made him self-conscious and embarrassed; then recovers himself with an effort and adds with dignity, as he turns to go] I am pleased to have come to an understanding with you. [He goes into the hotel and Cokane, who has been hanging about inquisitively , emerges from the shrubbery.]

TRENCH [excitedly] Billy, old chap: youre just in time to do me a favour. I want you to draft a letter for me to copy out.

COKANE I came with you on this tour as a friend, Trench: not as a secretary.

TRENCH Well, youll write as a friend. It’s to my Aunt Maria, about Blanche and me. To tell her, you know.

COKANE Tell her about Blanche and you! Tell her about your conduct! Betray you, my friend; and forget that I am writing to a lady? Never!

TRENCH Bosh, Billy: dont pretend you dont understand. We’re engaged engaged, my boy: What do you think of that? I must write by to-night’s post. You are the man to tell me what to say. Come, old chap [coaxing him to sit down at one of the tables]: Here’s a pencil. Have you a bit of oh, here: This’ll do: Write it on the back of the map. [He tears the map out of his Baedeker and spreads it face downwards on the table. Cokane takes the pencil and prepares to write] Thats right. Thanks awfully, old chap! Now fire away. [Anxiously] Be careful how you word it, though, Cokane.

COKANE [putting down the pencil] If you doubt my ability to express myself becomingly to Lady Roxdale —

TRENCH [propitiating him] All right, old fellow, all right: theres not a man alive who could do it half so well as you. I only wanted to explain. You see, Sartorius has got it into his head, somehow, that my people will snub Blanche; and he wont consent unless they send letters and invitations and congratulations and the deuce knows what not. So just put it in such a way that Aunt Maria will write by return saying she is delighted, and asking us — Blanche and me — you know, to stay with her, and so forth. You know what I mean. Just tell her all about it in a chatty way; and —

COKANE [crushingly] If you will tell me all about it in a chatty way, I daresay I can communicate it to Lady Roxdale with proper delicacy. What is Sartorius?

TRENCH [taken aback] I dont know: I didnt ask. It’s a sort of question you cant very well put to a man at least a man like him. Do you think you could word the letter so as to pass all that over? I really dont like to ask him.

COKANE I can pass it over if you wish. Nothing easier. But if you think Lady Roxdale will pass it over, I differ from you. I may be wrong: No doubt I am. I generally am wrong, I believe; but that is my opinion.

TRENCH [much perplexed] Oh, confound it! What the deuce am I to do? Cant you say he’s a gentleman: That wont commit us to anything. If you dwell on his being well off, and Blanche an only child, Aunt Maria will be satisfied.

COKANE Henry Trench: when will you begin to get a little sense? This is a serious business. Act responsibly, Harry: Act responsibly.

TRENCH Bosh! Dont be moral!

COKANE I am not moral, Trench. At least I am not a moralist: that is the expression I should have used moral, but not a moralist. If you are going to get money with your wife, doesnt it concern your family to know how that money was made? Doesnt it concern you, Harry? [Trench looks at him helplessly, twisting his fngers nervously. Cokane throws down the pencil and leans back with ostentatious indifference.] Of course it is no business of mine: I only throw out the suggestion. Sartorius may be a retired burglar for all I know. [Sartorius and Blanche, ready for dinner, come from the hotel.]

TRENCH Sh! Here they come. Get the letter finished before dinner, like a good old chappie : I shall be awfully obliged to you.

COKANE [impatiently] Leave me, leave me: You disturb me. [He waves him off and begins to write.]

TRENCH [humbfy and gratefully] Yes, old chap. Thanks awfully.

[By this time Blanche has left her father and is strolling off towards the riverside. Sartorius comes down the garden, Baedeker in hand, and sits near Cokane, reading. Trench addresses him.]’ You wont mind my taking Blanche in to dinner, I hope, sir?

SARTORIUS By all means, Dr Trench. Pray do so. [He graciously waves him off to join Blanche. Trench hurries after her through the gate. The light reddens as the Rhenish sunset begins. Cokane, making wry faces in the agonies of composition, is disconcerted to find Sartorius’ eye upon him.]

SARTORIUS I do not disturb you, I hope, Mr Cokane.

COKANE By no means. Our friend Trench has entrusted me with a difficult and delicate task. He has requested me, as a friend of the family, to write to them on a subject that concerns you.

SARTORIUS Indeed, Mr Cokane. Well, the communication could not be in better hands.

COKANE [with an air of modesty] Ah, that is going too far, my dear sir, too far. Still, you see what Trench is. A capital fellow in his way, Mr Sartorius, an excellent young fellow. But family communications like these require good manners. They require tact; and tact is Trench’s weak point. He has an excellent heart, but no tact — none whatever. Everything depends on the way the matter is put to Lady Roxdale. But as to that, you may rely on me. I understand the sex.

SARTORIUS Well, however she may receive it and I care as little as any man, Mr Cokane, how people may choose to receive me, I trust I may at least have the pleasure of seeing you sometimes at my house when we return to England.

COKANE [overwhelmed] My dear sir! You express yourself in the true spirit of an English gentleman.

SARTORIUS Not at all. You will always be most welcome. But I fear I have disturbed you in the composition of your letter. Pray resume it. I shall leave you to yourself. [He pretends to rise, but checks himself to add:] Unless indeed I can assist you in any way? By clearing up any point on which you are not informed, for instance; or even, if I may so far presume on my years, giving you the benefit of my experience as to the best way of wording the matter. [Cokane looks a little surprised at this. Sartorius looks hard at him, and continues deliberately and meaningly:] I shall always be happy to help any friend of Dr Trench’s, in any way, to the best of my ability and of my means.

COKANE My dear sir : you are really very good. Trench and I were putting our heads together over the letter just now; and there certainly were one or two points on which we were a little in the dark. [Scrupulously] But I would not permit Harry to question you. No. I pointed out to him that, as a matter of taste, it would be more delicate to wait until you volunteered the necessary information.

SARTORIUS Hm! May I ask what you have said, so far?

COKANE “My dear Aunt Maria.” That is, Trench’s dear Aunt Maria, my friend Lady Roxdale. You understand that I am only drafting a letter for Trench to copy.

SARTORIUS Quite so. Will you proceed; or would it help you if I were to suggest a word or two?

COKANE [effusively] Your suggestions will be most valuable, my dear sir, most welcome.

‘SARTORIUS I think I should begin in some such way as this: “In travelling with my friend Mr Cokane up the Rhine—”

COKANE [murmuring as he -writes] Invaluable, invaluable. The very thing. “ — my friend Mr Cokane up the Rhine—”

SARTORIUS “I have made the acquaintance of” or you may say “picked up,” or “come across,” if you think that would suit your friend’s style better. We must not be too formal.

COKANE “ Picked up “! oh no : too dégagé, Mr Sartorius, too dégagé. I should say “had the privilege of becoming acquainted with—”

SARTORIUS [quickly] By no means: Lady Roxdale must judge of that for herself. Let it stand as I said. “I have made the acquaintance of a young lady, the daughter of—” [He hesitates]

COKANE [writing] “ — acquaintance of a young lady, the daughter of—” yes?

SARTORIUS “of — you had better say — a gentleman.”

COKANE [surprised] Of course.

SARTORIUS [with sudden passion] It is not of course, sir. [Cokane, startled, looks at him with dawning suspicion. Sartorius recovers himself somewhat shamefacedly]. Hm! “ — of a gentleman of considerable wealth and position.”

COKANE [echoing him with a new note of coldness in his voice as he writes the last words] “ — and position—”

‘SARTORIUS “ — which, however, he has made entirely for himself.” [Cokane, now fully enlightened, stares at him instead of writing.] Have you written that?

COKANE [expanding into an attitude of patronage and encouragement] Ah, indeed. Quite so, quite so. [He writes] “ — entirely for himself.” Just so. Proceed, Mr Sartorius, proceed. Very clearly expressed.

SARTORIUS “The young lady will inherit the bulk of her father’s fortune, and will be liberally treated on her marriage. Her education has been of the most expensive and complete kind obtainable; and her surroundings have been characterized by the strictest refinement. She is in every essential particular—”

COKANE [interrupting] Excuse the remark; but dont you think this is rather too much in the style of a prospectus of the young lady? I throw out the suggestion as a matter of taste.

SARTORIUS [troubled] Perhaps you are right. I am of course not dictating the exact words-

COKANE Of course not: Of course not.

SARTORIUS — but I desire that there may be no wrong impression as to my daughter’s — er — breeding. As to myself —

COKANE Oh, it will be sufficient to mention your profession, or pursuits, or — [He pauses; and they look pretty hard at one another].

SARTORIUS [very deliberately] My income, sir, is derived from the rental of a very extensive real estate in London. Lady Roxdale is one of the head landlords; and Dr Trench holds a mortgage from which, if I mistake not, his entire income is derived. The truth is, Mr Cokane, I am quite well acquainted with Dr Trench’s position and affairs; and I have long desired to know him personally.

COKANE [again obsequious, but still inquisitive] What a remarkable coincidence! In what quarter is the estate situated, did you say?

SARTORIUS In London, sir. Its management occupies as much of my time as is not devoted to the ordinary pursuits of a gentleman. [He rises and takes out his card case]. The rest I leave to your discretion. [He leaves a card on the table]. That is my address at Surbiton. If it should unfortunately happen, Mr Cokane, that this leads to nothing but a disappointment for Blanche, probably she would rather not see you afterwards. But if all turns out as we hope, Dr Trench’s best friends will then be our best friends.

COKANE [rising and confronting Sartorius confidently, pencil and paper in hand] Rely on me, Mr Sartorius. The letter is already finished here [pointing to his brain]. In five minutes it will be finished there [He points to the paper, nods to emphasize the assertion, and begins to pace up and down the garden, writing, and tapping his forehead from time to time as he goes, with every appearance of severe intellectual exertion.]

SARTORIUS [calling through the gate after a glance at his watch] Blanche.

BLANCHE [replying in the distance] Yes?

SARTORIUS Time, my dear. [He goes into the table d’hote].

BLANCHE [nearer] Coming. [She comes back through the gate, followed by Trench.]

TRENCH [in a half whisper, as Blanche goes towards the table d’hote] Blanche: stop one moment. [She stops.] We must be careful when your father is by. I had to promise him not to regard anything as settled until I hear from my people at home.

BLANCHE [chilled] Oh, I see. Your family may object to me; and then it will be all over between us. They are almost sure to.

TRENCH [anxiously] Dont say that, Blanche: It sounds as if you didnt care. I hope you regard it as settled. You havnt made any promise, you know.

BLANCHE [earnestly] Yes, I have : / promised papa too. But I have broken my promise for your sake. I suppose I am not so conscientious as you. And if the matter is not to be regarded as settled, family or no family, promise or no promise, let us break it off here and now.

TRENCH [intoxicated with affection] Blanche: On my most sacred honor, family or no family, promise or no promise [ The waiter reappears at the table d’hote entrance, ringing his bell loudly.] Damn that noise!

COKANE [as he comes to them, flourishing the letter] Finished, dear boy, finished. Done to a turn, punctually to the second. C’est fini, mon cher garçon, c’est fini. [Sartorius returns].

SARTORIUS. Will you take Blanche in, Dr Trench? [Trench takes Blanche into the table d’hote.] Is the letter finished, Mr Cokane?

COKANE [with an author’s pride, handing his draft to Sartorius] There! [Sartorius reads it, nodding gravely over it with complete approval.]

SARTORIUS [returning the draft] Thank you, Mr Cokane. You have the pen of a ready writer.

COKANE [as they go in together] Not at all, not at all. A little tact, Mr Sartorius; a little knowledge of the world; a little experience of women. [They disappear into the annexe.]

Act II

In the library of a handsomely appointed villa at Surbiton on a sunny forenoon in September. Sartorius is busy at a writing table, littered with business letters. The fireplace, decorated for summer, is close behind him : the window is in the opposite wall. Between the table and the window Blanche, in her prettiest frock, sits reading The Queen. The door, painted, like all the woodwork, in the blackest shade of red, with brass fittings and moulded posts and pediment, is in the middle. All the walls are lined with shelves of smartly tooled books, fitting into their places like bricks. A library ladder stands in the corner.

SARTORIUS Blanche.

BLANCHE Yes, papa.

SARTORIUS I have some news here.

BLANCHE What is it?

SARTORIUS I mean news for you from Trench.

BLANCHE [with affected indifference] Indeed?

SARTORIUS “Indeed?”! Is that all you have to say to me? Oh, very well. [He resumes his work. Silence.]

BLANCHE What do his people say, papa?

SARTORIUS His people! I dont know. [Still busy. Another pause.]

BLANCHE What does he say?

SARTORIUS He! He says nothing. [He folds a letter leisurely and looks for the envelope.] He prefers to communicate the result of his where did I put — Oh, here. Yes: He prefers to communicate the result in person.

BLANCHE [springing up] Oh, papa! When is he coming?

SARTORIUS If he walks from the station, he may arrive in the course of the next halfhour. If he drives, he may be here at any moment.

BLANCHE [making hastily for the door] Oh!

SARTORIUS Blanche.

BLANCHE Yes, papa.

SARTORIUS You will of course not meet him until he has spoken to me.

BLANCHE [hypocritically] Of course not, papa. I shouldnt have thought of such a thing.

SARTORIUS That is all. [She is going, when he puts out his hand, and says with fatherly emotion:] My dear child. [She responds by going over to kiss him. A tap at the door.] Come in. [Lickcheese enters, carrying a black handbag. He is a shabby, needy man, with dirty face and linen, scrubby beard and whiskers, going bald. A nervous, wiry, pertinacious sort of human terrier, judged by his mouth and eyes, but miserably apprehensive and servile before Sartorius. He bids Blanche “Good morning, miss.” and she passes out with a slight and contemptuous recognition of him.]

LICKCHEESE Good morning, sir.

SARTORIUS [harsh and peremptory] Good morning.

LICKCHEESE [taking a little sack of money from his bag] Not much this morning, sir. I have just had the honor of making Dr Trench’s acquaintance, sir.

SARTORIUS [looking up from his writing, displeased] Indeed?

LICKCHEESE Yes, sir. Dr Trench asked his way of me, and was kind enough to drive me from the station.

SARTORIUS Where is he, then?

LICKCHEESE I left him in the hall, with his friend, sir. I should think he is speaking to Miss Sartorius.

SARTORIUS Hm! What do you mean by his friend?

LICKCHEESE There is a Mr Cokane with him, sir.

SARTORIUS I see you have been talking to him, eh?

LICKCHEESE As we drove along: yes, sir.

SARTORIUS [sharply] Why did you not come by the nine o’clock train?

LICKCHEESE I thought —

SARTORIUS It cannot be helped now; so never mind what you thought. But do not put off my business again to the last moment. Has there been any further trouble about the St Giles property?

LICKCHEESE The Sanitary Inspector has been complaining again about No. 13 Robbins’s Row. He says he’ll bring it before the vestry.

SARTORIUS Did you tell him that I am on the vestry?

LICKCHEESE Yes, Sir.

SARTORIUS What did he say to that?

LICKCHEESE Said he supposed so, or you wouldnt dare to break the law so scand’lous. I only tell you what he said.

SARTORIUS Hm! Do you know his name!

LICKCHEESE Yes, sir. Speakman.

SARTORIUS Write it down in the diary for the day of the next meeting of the Health Committee. I will teach Mr Speakman his duty to members of the vestry.

LICKCHEESE [doubtfully] The vestry cant hurt him, sir. He’s under the Local Government Board.

SARTORIUS I did not ask you that. Let me see the books. [Lickcheese produces the rent book, and hands it to Sartorius; then makes the desired entry in the diary on the table, watching Sartorius with misgiving as the rent book is examined. Sartorius rises, frowning] £1:4s for repairs to No. 13. What does this mean?

LICKCHEESE Well, sir, it was the staircase on the third floor. It was downright dangerous: There werent but three whole steps in it, and no handrail. I thought it best to have a few boards put in.

SARTORIUS Boards! Firewood, sir, firewood! They will burn every stick of it. You have spent twenty-four shillings of my money on firewood for them.

LICKCHEESE There ought to be stone stairs, sir: it would be a saving in the long run. The clergyman says —

SARTORIUS What! who says?

LICKCHEESE The clergyman, sir, only the clergyman. Not that I make much account of him; but if you knew how he has worried me over that staircase —

SARTORIUS I am an Englishman; and I will suffer no priest to interfere in my business. [He turns suddenly on Lickcheese.] Now look here, Mr Lickcheese! This is the third time this year that you have brought me a bill of over a pound for repairs. I have warned you repeatedly against dealing with these tenement houses as if they were mansions in a West-End square. I have had occasion to warn you too against discussing my affairs with strangers. You have chosen to disregard my wishes. You are discharged.

LICKCHEESE [dismayed] Oh, sir, dont say that.

SARTORIUS [fiercely] You are discharged.

LICKCHEESE Well, Mr Sartorius, it is hard, so it is. No man alive could have screwed more out of them poor destitute devils for you than I have, or spent less in doing it. I have dirtied my hands at it until theyre not fit for clean work hardly; and now you turn me —

SARTORIUS [interrupting him menacingly] What do you mean by dirtying your hands? If I find that you have stepped an inch outside the letter of the law, Mr Lickcheese, I will prosecute you myself. The way to keep your hands clean is to gain the confidence of your employers. You will do well to bear that in mind in your next situation.

THE PARLOR MAID [opening the door] Mr Trench and Mr Cokane. [Cokane and Trench come in: Trench festively dressed and in buoyant spirits, Cokane highly self-satisfed.]

SARTORIUS How do you do, Dr Trench? Good morning, Mr Cokane. I am pleased to see you here. Mr Lickcheese: You will place your accounts and money on the table: I will examine them and settle with you presently. [Lickcheese retires to the table, and begins to arrange his accounts, greatly depressed.]

TRENCH [glancing at Lickcheese] I hope we’re not in the way.

SARTORIUS By no means. Sit down, pray. I fear you have been kept waiting.

TRENCH {taking Blanche’s chair] Not at all. Weve only just come in. [He takes out a packet of letters and begins untying them.]

COKANE [going to a chair nearer the window, but stopping to look admiringly round before sitting down] You must be happy here with all these books, Mr Sartorius. A literary atmosphere.

SARTORIUS [resuming his seat] I have not looked into them. They are pleasant for Blanche occasionally when she wishes to read. I chose the house because it is on gravel. The death-rate is very low.

TRENCH [triumphantly] I have any amount of letters for you. All my people are delighted that I am going to settle. Aunt Maria wants Blanche to be married from her house. [He hands Sartorius a letter.]

SARTORIUS Aunt Maria?

COKANE Lady Roxdale, my dear sir: He means Lady Roxdale. Do express yourself with a little more tact, my dear fellow.

TRENCH Lady Roxdale, of course. Uncle Harry —

COKANE Sir Harry Trench. His godfather, my dear sir, his godfather.

TRENCH Just so. The pleasantest fellow for his age you ever met. He offers us his house at St Andrews for a couple of months, if we care to pass our honeymoon there. [He hands Sartorius another letter.] It’s the sort of house nobody can live in, you know; but it’s a nice thing for him to offer. Dont you think so?

SARTORIUS {dissembling a thrill at the titles] No doubt. These seem very gratifying, Dr Trench.

TRENCH Yes, arnt they? Aunt Maria has really behaved like a brick. If you read the postscript youll see she spotted Cokane’s hand in my letter. [Chuckling] He wrote it for me.

SARTORIUS {glancing at Cokane] Indeed! Mr Cokane evidently did it with great tact.

COKANE [returning the glance] Dont mention it.

TRENCH [gleefully] Well, what do you say now, Mr Sartorius? May we regard the matter as settled at last?

SARTORIUS Quite settled. [He rises and offers his hand. Trench, glowing with gratitude, rises and shakes it vehemently, unable to find words for his feelings.]

COKANE [coming between them] Allow me to congratulate you both. [He shakes hands with the two at the same time,]

SARTORIUS And now, gentlemen, I have a word to say to my daughter. Dr Trench: You will not, I hope, grudge me the pleasure of breaking this news to her: I have had to disappoint her more than once since I last saw you. Will you excuse me for ten minutes?

COKANE [in a flush of friendly protest] My dear sir : can you ask?

TRENCH Certainly.

SARTORIUS Thank you. [He goes out.]

TRENCH [chuckling again] He wont have any news to break, poor old boy: she’s seen all the letters already.

COKANE I must say your behavior has been far from straightforward, Harry. You have been carrying on a clandestine correspondence.

LICKCHEESE [stealthily] Gentlemen —

TENCH & COKANE [Turning — They had forgotten his presence] Hallo!

LICKCHEESE [coming between them very humbly, but in mortal anxiety and haste] Look here, gentlemen. [To Trench] You, sir, I address myself to more particlar. Will you say a word in my favor to the guvnor? He’s just given me the sack; and I have four children looking to me for their bread. A word from you, sir, on this happy day, might get him to take me on again.

TRENCH [embarrassed] Well, you see, Mr Lickcheese, I dont see how I can interfere. I’m very sorry, of course.

COKANE Certainly you cannot interfere. It would be in the most execrable taste.

LICKCHEESE Oh, gentlemen, youre young; and you dont know what loss of employment means to the like of me. What harm would it do you to help a poor man? Just listen to the circumstances, sir. I only —

TRENCH [moved, but snatching at an excuse for taking a high tone in avoiding the unpleasantness of helping him.] No: I had rather not. Excuse my saying plainly that I think Mr Sartorius is not a man to act hastily or harshly. I have always found him very fair and generous; and I believe he is a better judge of the circumstances than I am.

COKANE [inquisitive] I think you ought to hear the circumstances, Harry. It can do no harm. Hear the circumstances by all means.

LICKCHEESE Never mind, sir: it aint any use. When I hear that man called generous and fair! well, never mind.

TRENCH [severely] If you wish me to do anything for you, Mr Lickcheese, let me tell you that you are not going the right way about it in speaking ill of Mr Sartorius.

LICKCHEESE Have I said one word against him, sir? I leave it to your friend: Have I said a word?

COKANE True: True. Quite true. Harry: be just.

LICKCHEESE Mark my words, gentlemen: He’ll find what a man he’s lost the very first week’s rents the new man’ll bring him. Youll find the difference yourself, Dr Trench, if you or your children come into the property. Ive took money there when no other collector alive would have wrung it out. And this is the thanks I get for it! Why, see here, gentlemen! Look at that bag of money on the table. Hardly a penny of that but there was a hungry child crying for the bread it would have bought. But I got it for him, screwed and worried and bullied it out of them. I look here, gentlemen : I’m pretty seasoned to the work; but theres money there that I couldnt have taken if it hadnt been for the thought of my own children depending on me for giving him satisfaction. And because I charged him four-and-twenty shillin’ to mend a staircase that three women have been hurt on, and that would have got him prosecuted for manslaughter if it had been let go much longer, he gives me the sack. Wouldnt listen to a word, though I would have offered to make up the money out of my own pocket aye, and am willing to do it still if you will only put in a word for me.

TRENCH [aghast] You took money that ought to have fed starving children! Serve you right! If I had been the father of one of those children, I’d have given you something worse than the sack. I wouldnt say a word to save your soul, if you have such a thing. Mr Sartorius was quite right.

LICKCHEESE [Staring at him, surprised into contemptuous amusement in the midst of his anxiety.] Just listen to this! Well, you are an innocent young gentleman. Do you suppose he sacked me because I was too hard? Not a bit on it: It was because I wasnt hard enough. I never heard him say he was satisfied yet: No, nor he wouldnt, not if I skinned em alive, I dont say he’s the worst landlord in London: He couldnt be worse than some; but he’s no better than the worst I ever had to do with. And, though I say it, I’m better than the best collector he ever done business with. Ive screwed more and spent less on his properties than anyone would believe that knows what such properties are. I know my merits, Dr Trench, and will speak for myself if no one else will.

COKANE What description of properties? Houses?

LICKCHEESE Tenement houses, let from week to week by the room or half room aye, or quarter room. It pays when you know how to work it, sir. Nothing like it. It’s been calculated on the cubic foot of space, sir, that you can get higher rents letting by the room than you can for a mansion in Park Lane.

TRENCH I hope Mr Sartorius hasnt much of that sort of property, however it may pay.

LICKCHEESE He has nothing else, sir; and he shews his sense in it, too. Every few hundred pounds he could scrape together he bought old houses with houses that you wouldnt hardly look at without holding your nose. He has em in St Giles’s: He has em in Marylebone: He has em in Bethnal Green. Just look how he lives himself, and youll see the good of it to him. He likes a low death-rate and a gravel soil for himself, he does. You come down with me to Robbins’s Row; and I’ll shew you a soil and a death-rate, so I will! And, mind you, it’s me that makes it pay him so well. Catch him going down to collect his own rents! Not likely!

TRENCH Do you mean to say that all his property all his means come from this sort of thing?

LICKCHEESE Every penny of it, sir. [Trench, overwhelmed, has to sit down.]

COKANE [looking compassionately at him] Ah, my dear fellow, the love of money is the root of all evil.

LICKCHEESE Yes, sir; and we’d all like to have the tree growing in our garden.

COKANE [revolted] Mr Lickcheese: I did not address myself to you. I do not wish to be severe with you; but there is something peculiarly repugnant to my feelings in the calling of a rent collector.

LICKCHEESE It’s no worse than many another. I have my children looking to me.

COKANE True: I admit it. So has our friend Sartorius. His affection for his daughter is a redeeming point, a redeeming point, certainly.

LICKCHEESE She’s a lucky daughter, sir. Many another daughter has been turned out upon the streets to gratify his affection for her. Thats what business is, sir, you see. Come, sir: I think your friend will say a word for me now he knows I’m not in fault.

TRENCH [rising angrily] I will not. It’s a damnable business from beginning to end; and you deserve no better luck for helping in it. Ive seen it all among the outpatients at the hospital; and it used to make my blood boil to think that such things couldnt be prevented.

LICKCHEESE [his suppressed spleen breaking out] Oh indeed, sir. But I suppose youll take your share when you marry Miss Blanche, all the same. [Furiously] Which of us is the worse, I should like to know: Me that wrings the money out to keep a home over my children, or you that spend it and try to shove the blame on to me?

COKANE A most improper observation to address to a gentleman, Mr Lickcheese! A most revolutionary sentiment!

LICKCHEESE Perhaps so. But then Robbins’s Row aint a school for manners. You collect a week or two there youre welcome to my place if I cant keep it for myself and youll hear a little plain speaking, so you will.

COKANE [with dignity] Do you know to whom you are speaking, my good man?

LICKCHEESE [recklessly] I know well enough who I’m speaking to. What do I care for you, or a thousand such? I’m poor: Thats enough to make a rascal of me. No consideration for me, nothing to be got by saying a word for me! [Suddenly cringing to Trench] Just a word, sir. It would cost you nothing. [Sarforius appears at the door, unobserved.] Have some feeling for the poor.

TRENCH I’m afraid you have shewn very little, by your own confession.

LICKCHEESE [breaking out again] More than your precious father-in-law, anyhow. I — [Sartorius’s voice, striking in with deadly coldness, paralyzes him.]

SARTORIUS You will come here to-morrow, not later than ten, Mr Lickcheese, to conclude our business. I shall trouble you no further to-day. {Lickcheese, cowed, goes out amid dead silence. Sartorius continues, after an awkward pause] He is one of my agents, or rather was; for I have unfortunately had to dismiss him for repeatedly disregarding my instructions. [Trench says nothing. Sartorius throws off his embarrassment, and assumes a jocose, rallying air, unbecoming to him under any circumstances, and just now almost unbearably jarring.] Blanche will be down presently, Harry [Trench recoils] I suppose I must call you Harry now. What do you say to a stroll through the garden, Mr Cokane? We are celebrated here for our flowers.

COKANE Charmed, my dear sir, charmed. Life here is an idyll a perfect idyll. We were just dwelling on it.

SARTORIUS [slyly] Harry can follow with Blanche. She will be down directly.

TRENCH [hastily] No. I cant face her just now.

SARTORIUS [rallying him] Indeed! Ha, ha! [The laugh, the first they have heard from him, sets Trench’s teeth on edge. Cokane is taken aback, but instantly recovers himself.]

COKANE Ha! ha! ha! Ho! ho!

TRENCH But you dont understand.

SARTORIUS Oh, I think we do, I think we do. Eh, Mr Cokane? Ha! ha!

COKANE I should think we do. Ha! ha! ha!

[They go out together, laughing at him. He collapses into a chair, shuddering in every nerve. Blanche appears at the door. Her face lights up when she sees that he is alone. She trips noiselessly to the back of his chair and clasps her hands over his eyes. With a convulsive start and exclamation he springs up and breaks away from her.]

BLANCHE [astonished] Harry!

TRENCH [with distracted politeness] I beg your pardon. I was thinking wont you sit down?

BLANCHE [looking suspiciously at him] Is anything the matter? [She sits down slowly near the writing table. He takes Cokane’s chair.]

TRENCH No. Oh no.

BLANCHE Papa has not been disagreeable, I hope.

TRENCH No: I have hardly spoken to him since I was with you. [He rises; takes up his chair; and plants it beside hers. This pleases her better. She looks at him with her most winning smile. A sort of sob breaks from him; and he catches her hands and kisses them passionately. Then, looking into her eyes with intense earnestness, he says:] Blanche: are you fond of money?

BLANCHE [gaily] Very. Are you going to give me any?

TRENCH [wincing] Dont make a joke of it: I’m serious. Do you know that we shall be very poor?

BLANCHE Is that what made you look as if you had neuralgia?

TRENCH [pleadingly] My dear: it’s no laughing matter. Do you know that I have a bare seven hundred a year to live on?

BLANCHE How dreadful!

TRENCH Blanche: It’s very serious indeed: I assure you it is.

BLANCHE It would keep me rather short in my housekeeping, dearest boy, if I had nothing of my own. But papa has promised me that I shall be richer than ever when we are married.

TRENCH We must do the best we can with seven hundred. I think we ought to be self supporting.

BLANCHE Thats just what I mean to be, Harry. If I were to eat up half your £700, I should be making you twice as poor; but I’m going to make you twice as rich instead. [He shakes his head.] Has papa made any difficulty?

TRENCH [rising with a sigh and taking his chair back to its former place] No, none at all. [He sits down dejectedly. When Blanche speaks again her face and voice betray the beginning of a struggle with her temper.]

BLANCHE Harry : are you too proud to take money from my father?

TRENCH Yes, Blanche: I am too proud.

BLANCHE [after a pause] That is not nice to me, Harry.

TRENCH You must bear with me, Blanche. I — , I cant explain. After all, it’s very natural.

BLANCHE Has it occurred to you that I may be proud, too?

TRENCH Oh, thats nonsense. No one will accuse you of marrying for money.

BLANCHE No one would think the worse of me if I did, or of you either. [She rises and begins to walk restlessly about.] We really cannot live on seven hundred a year, Harry; and I dont think it quite fair of you to ask me merely because youre afraid of people talking.

TRENCH It’s not that alone, Blanche.

BLANCHE What else is it, then?

TRENCH Nothing. I —

BLANCHE [getting behind him, and speaking with forced playfulness as she bends over him, her hands on his shoulders] Of course it’s nothing. Now dont be absurd, Harry: be good; and listen to me: I know how to settle it. You are too proud to owe anything to me; and I am too proud to owe anything to you. You have seven hundred a year. Well, I will take just seven hundred a year from papa at first; and then we shall be quits. Now, now, Harry, you know youve not a word to say against that.

TRENCH It’s impossible.

BLANCHE Impossible!

TRENCH Yes, impossible. I have resolved not to take any money from your father.

BLANCHE But he’ll give the money to me, not to you.

TRENCH It’s the same thing. [With an effort to be sentimental] I love you too well to see any distinction. [He puts up his hand half-heartedly: she takes it over his shoulder with equal indecision. They are both trying hard to conciliate one another.]

BLANCHE Thats a very nice way of putting it, Harry; but I’m sure theres something I ought to know. Has papa been disagreeable?

TRENCH No : he has been very kind to me, at least. It’s not that. It’s nothing you can guess, Blanche. It would only pain you perhaps offend you. I dont mean, of course, that we shall live always on seven hundred a year. I intend to go at my profession in earnest, and work my fingers to the bone.

BLANCHE [playing with his fingers, still over his shoulder] But I shouldnt like you with your fingers worked to the bone, Harry. I must be told what the matter is. [He takes his hand quickly away: she flushes angrily; and her voice is no longer even an imitation of the voice of a lady as she exclaims:] I hate secrets; and I dont like to be treated as if I were a child.

TRENCH [annoyed by her tone] Theres nothing to tell. I dont choose to trespass on your father’s generosity: thats all.

BLANCHE You had no objection half an hour ago, when you met me in the hall, and shewed me all the letters. Your family doesnt object. Do you object?

TRENCH [earnestly] I do not indeed. It’s only a question of money.

BLANCHE [Imploringly, the voice softening and refining for the last time.] Harry: theres no use in our fencing in this way. Papa will never consent to my being absolutely dependent on you; and I dont like the idea of it myself. If you even mention such a thing to him you will break off the match: you will indeed.

TRENCH [obstinately] I cant help that.

BLANCHE [white with rage] You cant help! Oh, I’m beginning to understand. I will save you the trouble. You can tell papa that I have broken off the match; and then there will be no further difficulty.

TRENCH [taken aback] What do you mean, Blanche? Are you offended?

BLANCHE Offended! How dare you ask me?

TRENCH Dare!

BLANCHE How much more manly it would have been to confess that you were trifling with me that time on the Rhine! Why did you come here to-day? Why did you write to your people?

TRENCH Well, Blanche, if you are going to lose your temper —

BLANCHE Thats no answer. You depended on your family to get you out of your engagement; and they did not object: they were only too glad to be rid of you. You were not mean enough to stay away, and not manly enough to tell the truth. You thought you could provoke me to break the engagement: thats so like a man to try to put the woman in the wrong. Well, you have your way: I release you. I wish youd opened my eyes by downright brutality by striking me by anything rather than shuffling as you have done.

TRENCH [hotly] Shuffle! If I’d thought you capable of turning on me like this, I’d never have spoken to you. Ive a good mind never to speak to you again.

BLANCHE You shall not. not ever. I will take care of that [going to the door.]

TRENCH [alarmed] What are you going to do?

BLANCHE To get your letters, your false letters, and your presents, your hateful presents, to return them to you. I’m very glad it’s all broken off; and if — [as she puts her hand to the door it is opened from without by Sartorius, who enters and shuts it behind him.]

SARTORIUS [interrupting her severely] Hush, pray, Blanche : you are forgetting yourself: you can be heard all over the house. What is the matter?

BLANCHE [too angry to care whether she is overheard or not] You had better ask him. He has some excuse about money.

SARTORIUS Excuse! Excuse for what?

BLANCHE For throwing me over.

TRENCH [vehemently] I declare I never —

BLANCHE [interrupting him still more vehemently] You did. You did. You are doing nothing else [Trench begins repeating his contradiction and she her assertion; so that they both speak angrily together.]

SARTORIUS [in desperation at the noise] Silence! [Still more formidably] Silence! [They obey. He proceeds firmly] Blanche: you must control your temper : I will not have these repeated scenes within hearing of the servants. Dr Trench will answer for himself to me. You had better leave us. [He opens the door, and calls:] Mr Cokane: Will you kindly join us here.

COKANE [in the conservatory] Coming, my dear sir, coming. [He appears at the door.]

BLANCHE I’m sure I have no wish to stay. I hope I shall find you alone when I come back.

[An inarticulate exclamation bursts from Trench. She goes out, passing Cokane resentfully. He looks after her in surprise; then looks questioningly at the two men. Sartorius shuts the door with an angry stroke, and turns to Trench.]

SARTORIUS [aggressively] Sir —

TRENCH [interrupting him more aggressively] Well, sir?

COKANE [getting between them] Gently, dear boy, gently. Suavity, Harry, suavity.

SARTORIUS [mastering himself] If you have anything to say to me, Dr Trench, I will listen to you patiently. You will then allow me to say what I have to say on my part.

TRENCH [ashamed] I beg your pardon. Of course, yes. Fire away.

SARTORIUS May I take it that you have refused to fulfil your engagement with my daughter?

TRENCH Certainly not: your daughter has refused to fulfil her engagement with me. But the match is broken off, if thats what you mean.

SARTORIUS Dr Trench: I will be plain with you. I know that Blanche has a quick temper. It is part of her strong character and her physical courage, which is greater than that of most men, I can assure you. You must be prepared for that. If this quarrel is only Blanche’s temper, you may take my word for it that it will be over before to-morrow. But I understood from what she said just now that you have made some difficulty on the score of money.

TRENCH [with renewed excitement] It was Miss Sartorius who made the difficulty. I shouldnt have minded that so much, if it hadnt been for the things she said. She shewed that she doesnt care that [snapping his fingers] for me.

COKANE [soothingly] Dear boy —

TRENCH Hold your tongue, Billy: it’s enough to make a man wish he’d never seen a woman. Look here, Mr Sartorius: I put the matter to her as delicately and considerately as possible, never mentioning a word of my reasons, but just asking her to be content to live on my own little income; and yet she turned on me as if I’d behaved like a savage.

SARTORIUS Live on your income! Impossible: My daughter is accustomed to a proper establishment. Did I not expressly undertake to provide for that? Did she not tell you I promised her to do so?

TRENCH Yes, I know all about that, Mr Sartorius; and I’m greatly obliged to you; but I’d rather not take anything from you except Blanche herself.

SARTORIUS And why did you not say so before?

TRENCH No matter why. Let us drop the subject.

SARTORIUS No matter! But it does matter, sir. I insist on an answer. Why did you not say so before?

TRENCH I didnt know before.

SARTORIUS [provoked] Then you ought to have known your own mind before entering into such a very serious engagement. [He flings angrily away across the room and back.]

TRENCH [much injured] I ought to have known! Cokane: is this reasonable? [Cokane’s features are contorted by an air of judicial consideration; but he says nothing; and Trench again addresses Sartorius, this time with a marked diminution of respect]. How the deuce could I have known? You didnt tell me.

SARTORIUS You are trifling with me, sir. You say that you did not know your own mind before.

TRENCH I say nothing of the sort. I say that I did not know where your money came from before.

SARTORIUS That is not true, sir. I —

COKANE Gently, my dear sir. Gently, Harry, dear boy. Suaviter in modo: fort —

TRENCH Let him begin, then. What does he mean by attacking me in this fashion?

SARTORIUS Mr Cokane: you will bear me out. I was explicit on the point. I said I was a self-made man; and I am not ashamed of it.

TRENCH You are nothing of the sort. I found out this morning from your man Lickcheese, or whatever his confounded name is that your fortune has been made out of a parcel of unfortunate creatures that have hardly enough to keep body and soul together made by screwing, and bullying, and driving, and all sorts of pettifogging tyranny.

SARTORIUS [outraged] Sir! [They confront one another threateningly.]

COKANE [softly] Rent must be paid, dear boy. It is inevitable, Harry, inevitable.

[Trench turns away petulantly. Sartorius looks after him reflectively for a moment; then resumes his former deliberate and dignified manner, and addresses Trench with studied consideration, but with a perceptible condescension to his youth and folly.]

SARTORIUS I am afraid, Dr Trench, that you are a very young hand at business; and I am sorry I forgot that for a moment or so. May I ask you to suspend your judgment until we have a little quiet discussion of this sentimental notion of yours? if you will excuse me for calling it so. [He takes a chair, and motions Trench to another on his right.]

COKANE Very nicely put, my dear sir. Come, Harry: sit down and listen; and consider the matter calmly and judicially. Dont be headstrong.

TRENCH I have no objection to sit down and listen; but I dont see how that can make black white; and I am tired of being turned on as if I were in the wrong. [He sits down. Cokane sits at his elbow, on his right. They compose themselves for a conference.]

SARTORIUS I assume, to begin with, Dr Trench, that you are not a Socialist, or anything of that sort.

TRENCH Certainly not. I’m a Conservative — at least, if I ever took the trouble to vote, I should vote for the Conservative and against the other fellow.

COKANE True blue, Harry, true blue!

SARTORIUS I am glad to find that so far we are in perfect sympathy. I am, of course, a Conservative; not a narrow or prejudiced one, I hope, nor at all opposed to true progress, but still a sound Conservative. As to Lickcheese, I need say no more about him than that I have dismissed him from my service this morning for a breach of trust; and you will hardly accept his testimony as friendly or disinterested. As to my business, it is simply to provide homes suited to the small means of very poor people, who require roofs to shelter them just like other people. Do you suppose I can keep up those roofs for nothing?

TRENCH Yes: thats all very fine; but the point is, what sort of homes do you give them for their money? People must live somewhere, or else go to jail. Advantage is taken of that to make them pay for houses that are not fit for dogs. Why dont you build proper dwellings, and give fair value for the money you take?

SARTORIUS [pitying his innocence] My young friend: These poor people do not know how to live in proper dwellings: they would wreck them in a week. You doubt me: Try it for yourself. You are welcome to replace all the missing bannisters, handrails, cistern lids and dusthole tops at your own expense; and you will find them missing again in less than three days burnt, sir, every stick of them. I do not blame the poor creatures: They need fires, and often have no other way of getting them. But I really cannot spend pound after pound in repairs for them to pull down, when I can barely get them to pay me four and sixpence a week for a room, which is the recognized fair London rent. No, gentlemen: When people are very poor, you cannot help them, no matter how much you may sympathize with them. It does them more harm than good in the long run. I prefer to save my money in order to provide additional houses for the homeless, and to lay by a little for Blanche. [He looks at them. They are silent: Trench unconvinced, but talked down; Cokane humanely perplexed. Sartorius bends his brows; comes forward in his chair as if gathering himself together for a spring; and addresses himself, with impressive significance, to Trench.] And now, Dr Trench, may I ask what your income is derived from?

TRENCH {defiantly] From interest not from houses. My hands are clean as far as that goes. Interest on a mortgage.

SARTORIUS [forcibly] Yes: a mortgage on my property. When I, to use your own words, screw, and bully, and drive these people to pay what they have freely undertaken to pay me, I cannot touch one penny of the money they give me until I have first paid you your £700 out of it. What Lickcheese did for me, I do for you. He and I are alike intermediaries: you are the principal. It is because of the risks I run through the poverty of my tenants that you exact interest from me at the monstrous and exorbitant rate of seven per cent, forcing me to exact the uttermost farthing in my turn from the tenants. And yet, Dr Trench, you have not hesitated to speak contemptuously of me because I have applied my industry and forethought to the management of our property, and am maintaining it by the same honorable means.

COKANE [greatly relieved] Admirable, my dear sir, excellent! I felt instinctively that Trench was talking unpractical nonsense. Let us drop the subject, my dear boy: you only make an ass of yourself when you meddle in business matters. I told you it was inevitable.

TRENCH {dazed] Do you mean to say that I am just as bad as you are?

COKANE Shame, Harry, shame! Grossly bad taste! Be a gentleman. Apologize.

SARTORIUS Allow me, Mr Cokane. [To Trench] If, when you say you are just as bad as I am, you mean that you are just as powerless to alter the state of society, then you are unfortunately quite right. [Trench does not at once reply. He stares at Sartorius, and then hangs his head and gazes stupidly at the floor, morally beggared, with his clasped knuckles between his knees, a living picture of disillusion. Cokane comes sympathetically to him and puts an encouraging hand on his shoulder].

COKANE [gently] Come, Harry, come! Pull yourself together. You owe a word to Mr Sartorius.

TRENCH [Still stupefed, slowly unlaces his flngers; puts his hands on his knees, and lifts himself upright; pulls his waistcoat straight with a tug; and tries to take his disenchantment philosophically as he turns to Sartorius.] Well, people who live in glass houses have no right to throw stones. But, on my honor, I never knew that my house was a glass one until you pointed it out. I beg your pardon. [He offers his hand.]

SARTORIUS Say no more, Harry: your feelings do you credit: I assure you I feel exactly as you do, myself. Every man who has a heart must wish that a better state of things was practicable. But unhappily it is not.

TRENCH [a little consoled] I suppose not.

COKANE Not a doubt of it, my dear sir: Not a doubt of it. The increase of the population is at the bottom of it all.

SARTORIUS [to Trench] I trust I have convinced you that you need no more object to Blanche sharing my fortune, than I need object to her sharing yours.

TRENCH [with dull wistfulness] It seems so. We’re all in the same swim, it appears. I hope youll excuse my making such a fuss.

SARTORIUS Not another word. In fact, I thank you for refraining from explaining the nature of your scruples to Blanche: I admire that in you, Harry. Perhaps it will be as well to leave her in ignorance.

TRENCH [anxiously] But I must explain now. You saw how angry she was.

SARTORIUS You had better leave that to me. [He looks at his watch, and rings the bell.] Lunch is nearly due: While you are getting ready for it I can see Blanche; and I hope the result will be quite satisfactory to us all. [The parlor maid answers the bell: He addresses her with his habitual peremptoriness] Tell Miss Blanche I want her.

THE PARLOR MAID [her face falling expressively] Yes, sir. [She turns reluctantly to go.]

SARTORIUS [on second thoughts] Stop. [She stops.] My love to Miss Blanche; I am alone here and would like to see her for a moment if she is not busy.

PARLOR MAID [Much relieved] Yes, sir. [She goes out.]

SARTORIUS I will shew you your room, Harry. I hope you will soon be perfectly at home in it. You also, Mr Cokane, must learn your way about here. Let us go before Blanche comes. [He leads the way to the door.]

COKANE... [cheerily, following him] Our little discussion has given me quite an appetite.

TRENCH [moodily] It’s taken mine away. [They go out, Sartorius holding the door for them. He is following when the parlor maid reappears. She is a snivelling, sympathetic creature, and is on the verge of tears.]

SARTORIUS Well: Is Miss Blanche coming?

THE PARLOR MAID Yes, sir. I think so, sir.

SARTORIUS Wait here until she comes; and tell her that I will be back in a moment.

THE PARLOR MAID Yes, sir. [She comes into the room. Sartorius looks suspiciously at her as she passes him. He half closes the door and follows her.]

SARTORIUS [lowering his voice] Whats the matter with you?

THE PARLOR MAID [whimpering] Nothing, sir.

SARTORIUS [at the same pitch, more menacingly] Take care how you behave yourself when there are visitors present. Do you hear?

THE PARLOR MAID Yes, sir. [Sartorius goes out.]

SARTORIUS [outside] Excuse me: I had a word to say to the servant. [Trench is heard replying “Not at all” and Cokane “Dont mention it, my dear sir.” The murmur of their voices passes out of hearing. The parlor maid sniffs; dries her eyes; goes to one of the bookcases; and takes some brown paper and a ball of string from a drawer. She puts them on the table and wrestles with another sob. Blanche comes in, with a jewel box in her hands. Her expression is that of a strong and determined woman in an intense passion. The maid looks at her with a mixture of abject wounded affection and bodily terror.]

BLANCHE [looking round] Where’s my father?

THE PARLOR MAID [tremulously propitiatory] He left word he’d be back directly, miss. I’m sure he wont be long. Here’s the paper and string all ready, miss. [She spreads the paper on the table] Can I do the parcel for you, miss?

BLANCHE No. Mind your own business. [She empties the box on the sheet of brown paper. It contains a packet of letters and some jewellery. She plucks a ring from her finger and throws it down on the heap so angrily that it rolls away and falls on the carpet. The maid submissively picks it up and puts it on the table, again sniffing and drying her eyes.] What are you crying for?

THE PARLOR MAID [plaintively] You speak so brutal to me, Miss Blanche; and I do love you so. I’m sure no one else would stay and put up with what I have to put up with.

BLANCHE Then go. I dont want you. Do you hear. Go.

THE PARLOR MAID [piteously, falling on her knees] Oh no, Miss Blanche. Dont send me away from you: Dont.

BLANCHE [with fierce disgust] Agh! I hate the sight of you. [The maid, wounded to the heart, cries bitterly.] Hold your tongue. Are those two gentlemen gone?

THE PARLOR MAID [weeping] Oh, how could you say such a thing to me, Miss Blanche: Me that —

BLANCHE [seizing her by the hair and throat] Stop that noise, I tell you, unless you want me to kill you.

THE PARLOR MAID [protesting and imploring, but in a carefully subdued voice] Let me go, Miss Blanche: You know youll be sorry: You always are. Remember how dreadfully my head was cut last time.

BLANCHE [raging] Answer me, will you. Have they gone?

THE PARLOR MAID Lickcheese has gone, looking dreadf — [She breaks off with a stifled cry as Blanche’s fingers tighten furiously on her.]

BLANCHE Did I ask you about Lickcheese? You beast: You know who I mean: youre doing it on purpose.

‘THE PARLOR MAID [in a gasp] Theyre staying to lunch.

BLANCHE [looking intently into her face] He?

THE PARLOR MAID [whispering with a sympathetic nod] Yes, miss. [Blanche slowly releases her and stands upright with clenched fists and set face. The parlor maid, recognizing the passing of the crisis of passion, and fearing no further violence, sits discomfitedly on her heels, and tries to arrange her hair and cap, whimpering a little with exhaustion and soreness.] Now youve set my hands all trembling; and I shall jingle the things on the tray at lunch so that everybody will notice me. It’s too bad of you, Miss. [Sartorius coughs outside.]

BLANCHE [quickly] Sh! Get up. [The parlor maid hastily gets up, and goes out as demurely as she can, passing Sartorius on her way to the door. He glances sternly at her and comes to Blanche. The parlor maid shuts the door softly behind her]

SARTORIUS [mournfully] My dear: can you not make a little better fight with your temper?

BLANCHE [panting with the subsidence of her fit] No I cant. I wont. I do my best. Nobody who really cares for me gives me up because of my temper. I never shew my temper to any of the servants but that girl; and she is the only one that will stay with us.

SARTORIUS But, my dear, remember that we have to meet our visitors at luncheon presently. I have run down before them to say that I have arranged that little difficulty with Trench. It was only a piece of mischief made by Lickcheese. Trench is a young fool; but it is all right now.

BLANCHE I dont want to marry a fool.

SARTORIUS Then you will have to take a husband over thirty, Blanche. You must not expect too much, my child. You will be richer than your husband, and, I think, cleverer too. I am better pleased that it should be so.

BLANCHE [seizing his arm] Papa.

SARTORIUS Yes, my dear.

BLANCHE May I do as I like about this marriage; or must I do as you like?

SARTORIUS [uneasily] Blanche —

BLANCHE No, papa: You must answer me.

SARTORIUS [Abandoning his self-control, and giving way recklessly to his affection for her] You shall do as you like now and always, my beloved child. I only wish to do as my own darling pleases.

BLANCHE Then I will not marry him. He has played fast and loose with me. He thinks us beneath him: He is ashamed of us: He dared to object to being benefited by you as if it were not natural for him to owe you everything; and yet the money tempted him after all. [She throws her arms hysterically about his neck] Papa: I dont want to marry: I only want to stay with you and be happy as we have always been. I hate the thought of being married: I dont care for him: I dont want to leave you. [Trench and Cokane come in; but she can hear nothing but her own voice and does not notice them.] Only send him away: Promise me that you will send him away and keep me here with you as we have always — [seeing Trench] Oh! [She hides her face on her father’s breast]

TRENCH [nervously] I hope we are not intruding.

SARTORIUS [formidably] Dr Trench: My daughter has changed her mind.

TRENCH [disconcerted] Am I to understand —

COKANE [striking in in his most vinegary manner] I think, Harry, under the circumstances, we have no alternative but to seek luncheon elsewhere.

TRENCH But, Mr Sartorius, have you explained?

SARTORIUS [straight in Trench’s face] I have explained, sir. Good morning. [Trench, outraged, advances a step. Blanche sinks away from her father into a chair. Sartorius stands his ground rigidly.]

TRENCH [turning away indignantly] Come on, Cokane.

COKANE Certainly, Harry, certainly. [Trench goes out, very angry. The parlor maid, with a tray jingling in her hands, passes outside. To Sartorius:] You have disappointed me, sir, very acutely. Good morning. [He follows Trench].

Act III

The drawing-room in Sartorius’s house in Bedford Square. Winter evening: Fire burning, curtains drawn and lamps lighted. Sartorius and Blanche are sitting glumly near the fire. The parlor maid, who has just brought in coffee, is placing it on a small table between them. There is a large table in the middle of the room. Looking from it towards the two windows, the pianoforte, a grand, is on the right, with a photographic portrait of Blanche on a miniature easel on the top. There are two doors, one on the left, further forward than the fireplace, leading to the study; the other by the corner nearest the right hand window, leading to the lobby. Blanche has her work basket at hand, and is knitting. Sartorius, closer to the fire, has a newspaper. The parlor maid goes out.

SARTORIUS Blanche, my love.

BLANCHE Yes.

SARTORIUS I had a long talk to the doctor to-day about our going abroad.

BLANCHE [impatiently] I am quite well; and I will not go abroad. I loathe the very thought of the Continent. Why will you bother me so about my health?

SARTORIUS It was not about your health, Blanche, but about my own.

BLANCHE [rising] Yours! [She goes anxiously to him.] Oh, papa, theres nothing the matter with you, I hope?

SARTORIUS There will be, there must be, Blanche, long before you begin to consider yourself an old woman.

BLANCHE But theres nothing the matter now?

SARTORIUS Well, my dear, the doctor says I need change, travel, excitement —

BLANCHE Excitement! You need excitement! [She laughs joylessly, and sits down on the rug at his feet] How is it, papa, that you, who are so clever with everybody else, are not a bit clever with me? Do you think I cant see through your little plan to take me abroad? Since I will not be the invalid and allow you to be the nurse, you are to be the invalid and I am to be the nurse.

SARTORIUS Well, Blanche, if you will have it that you are well and have nothing preying on your spirits, I must insist on being ill and have something preying on mine. And indeed, my girl, there is no use in our going on as we have for the last four months. You have not been happy; and I have been far from comfortable. [Blanche’s face clouds : she turns away from him and sits dumb and brooding. He waits in vain for some reply; then adds in a lower tone:] Need you be so inflexible, Blanche?

BLANCHE I thought you admired inflexibility: You have always prided yourself on it.

SARTORIUS Nonsense, my dear, nonsense. I have had to give in often enough. And I could shew you plenty of soft fellows who have done as well as I, and enjoyed themselves more, perhaps. If it is only for the sake of inflexibility that you are standing out.

BLANCHE I am not standing out. I dont know what you mean. [She tries to rise and go away.]

SARTORIUS [Catching her arm and arresting her on her knees.] Come, my child: you must not trifle with me as if I were a stranger. You are fretting because —

BLANCHE [violently twisting herself free and speaking as she rises] If you say it, papa, I will kill myself. It is not true. If he were here on his knees to-night, I would walk out of the house sooner than endure it. [She goes out excitedly. Sartorius, greatly troubled, turns again to the fire with a heavy sigh]

SARTORIUS [gazing gloomily into the glow] Now if I fight it out with her, no more comfort for months! I might as well live with my clerk or my servant. And if I give in now, I shall have to give in always. Well! I cant help it. I have stuck to having my own way all my life; but there must be an end to that drudgery some day. She is young: Let her have her turn at it. [The parlor maid comes in.]

THE PARLOR MAID Please, sir, Mr Lickcheese wants to see you very particlar. On important business your business, he told me to say.

SARTORIUS Mr Lickcheese! Do you mean Lickcheese who used to come here on my business?

THE PARLOR MAID Yes, sir. But indeed, sir, youd scarcely know him.

SARTORIUS [frowning] Hm! Starving, I suppose. Come to beg?

THE PARLOR MAID [intensely repudiating the idea] O-o-o-o-h no, sir. Quite the gentleman, sir! Sealskin overcoat, sir! Come in a hansom, all shaved and clean! I’m sure he’s come into a fortune, sir.

SARTORIUS Hm! Shew him up.

[Lickcheese, who has been waiting at the door, instantly comes in. The change in his appearance is dazzling. He is in evening dress, with an overcoat lined throughout with furs presenting all the hues of the tiger. His shirt is fastened at the breast with a single diamond stud. His silk hat is of the glossiest black; a handsome gold watch-chain hangs like a garland on his jilled-out waistcoat; he has shaved his whiskers and grown a moustache, the ends of which are waxed and pointed. As Sartorius stares speechless at him, he stands, smiling, to be

admired, intensely enjoying the effect he is producing. The parlor maid, hardly less pleased with her own share in this coup-de-theatre, goes out beaming, full of the news for the kitchen. Lickcheese clinches the situation by a triumphant nod at Sartorius.]

SARTORIUS [bracing himself hostile] Well?

LICKCHEESE Quite well, Sartorius, thankee.

SARTORIUS I was not asking after your health, sir, as you know, I think, as well as I do. What is your business?

LICKCHEESE Business that I can take elsewhere if I meet with less civility than I please to put up with, Sartorius. You and me is man and man now. It was money that used to be my master, and not you: Dont think it. Now that I’m independent in respect of money —

SARTORIUS [crossing determinedly to tke door, and holding it open] You can take your independence out of my house, then. I wont have it here.

LICKCHEESE [indulgently] Come, Sartorius: Dont be stiffnecked. I come here as a friend to put money in your pocket. No use in your lettin on to me that youre above money. Eh?

SARTORIUS [hesitates, and at last shuts the door, saying guardedly] How much money?

LICKCHEESE [victorious, going to Blanche’ s chair and taking off his overcoat] Ah! there you speak like yourself, Sartorius. Now suppose you ask me to sit down and make myself comfortable.

SARTORIUS [coming from the door] I have a mind to put you downstairs by the back of your neck, you infernal blackguard.

LICKCHEESE [Not a bit ruffled, he hangs his overcoat on the back of Blanche’s chair, pulling a cigar case out of one of the pockets as he does so.] You and me is too much of a pair for me to take anything you say in bad part, Sartorius. ‘Ave a cigar.

SARTORIUS No smoking here : This is my daughter’s room. However, sit down, sit down. [They sit’]

LICKCHEESE I bin gittin on a little since I saw you last.

SARTORIUS So I see.

LICKCHEESE I owe it partly to you, you know. Does that surprise you?

SARTORIUS It doesnt concern me.

LICKCHEESE So you think, Sartorius, because it never did concern you how I got on, so long as I got you on by bringin in the rents. But I picked up something for myself down at Robbins’s Row.

SARTORIUS I always thought so. Have you come to make restitution?

LICKCHEESE You wouldnt take it if I offered it to you, Sartorius. It wasnt money: It was knowledge, knowledge of the great public question of the Housing of the Working Classes. You know theres a Royal Commission on it, dont you?

SARTORIUS Oh, I see. Youve been giving evidence.

LICKCHEESE Giving evidence! Not me. What good would that do me? Only my expenses; and that not on the professional scale, neither. No: I gev no evidence. But I’ll tell you what I did. I kep it back, jest to oblige one or two people whose feelins would a bin urt by seein their names in a bluebook as keepin a fever den. Their Agent got so friendly with me over it that he put his name on a bill of mine to the tune of well, no matter: It gev me a start; and a start was all I ever wanted to get on my feet. Ive got a copy of the first report of the Commission in the pocket of my overcoat. [He rises and gets at his overcoat, from a pocket of which he takes a bluebook] I turned down the page to shew you: I thought youd like to see it. [He doubles the book back at the place indicated, and hands it to Sartorius]

SARTORIUS So blackmail is the game, eh? [He puts the book on the table without looking at it, and strikes it emphatically with his fist] I dont care that for my name being in bluebooks. My friends dont read them; and I’m neither a Cabinet Minister nor a candidate for Parliament. Theres nothing to be got out of me on that lay.

LICKCHEESE [sbocked] Blackmail! Oh, Mr Sartorius, do you think I would let out a word about your premises? Round on an old pal! No: that aint Lickcheese’s way. Besides, they know all about you already. Them stairs that you and me quarrelled about, they was a whole arternoon examinin the clergyman that made such a fuss you remember? About the women that was urt on it. He made the worst he could of it, in an ungentlemanly, unchristian spirit. I wouldnt have that clergyman’s disposition for worlds. Oh no: Thats not what was in my thoughts.

SARTORIUS Come, come, man: What was in your thoughts? Out with it.

LICKCHEESE [With provoking deliberation, smiling and looking mysteriously at him] You aint spent a few hundreds in repairs since we parted, ave you? [Sartorius, losing patience, makes a threatening movement.] Now dont fly out at me. I know a landlord that owned as beastly a slum as you could find in London, down there by the Tower. By my advice that man put half the houses into first-class repair, and let the other half to a new Company: The North Thames Iced Mutton Depot Company, of which I hold a few shares promoters’ shares. And what was the end of it, do you think?

SARTORIUS Smash, I suppose.

LICKCHEESE Smash! Not a bit of it. Compensation, Mr Sartorius, compensation. Do you understand that?

SARTORIUS Compensation for what?

LICKCHEESE Why, the land was wanted for an extension of the Mint; and the Company had to be bought out, and the buildings compensated for. Somebody has to know these things beforehand, you know, no matter how dark theyre kept.

SARTORIUS [interested, but cautious] Well?

LICKCHEESE Is that all you have to say to me, Mr Sartorius? “Well!” As if I was next door’s dog! Suppose I’d got wind of a new street that would knock down Robbins’s Row and turn Burke’s Walk into a frontage worth thirty pound a foot! Would you say no more to me than [mimicking] “Well?” [Sartorius hesitates, looking at him in great doubt. Lickcheese rises and exhibits himself] Come: Look at my get-up, Mr Sartorius. Look at this watchchain! Look at the corporation Ive got on me! Do you think all that came from keeping my mouth shut? No: It came from keeping my ears and eyes open. [Blanche comes in, followed by the parlor maid, who has a silver tray on which she collects the coffee cups. Sartorius, impatient at the interruption, rises and motions Lickcheese to the door of the study.]

SARTORIUS Sh! We must talk this over in the study. There is a good fire there; and you can smoke. Blanche: An old friend of ours.

LICKCHEESE And a kind one to me. I hope I see you well, Miss Blanche.

BLANCHE Why, it’s Mr Lickcheese! I hardly knew you.

LICKCHEESE I find you a little changed yourself, miss.

BLANCHE [hastily] Oh, I am the same as ever. How are Mrs Lickcheese and the chil —

SARTORIUS [impatiently] We have business to transact, Blanche. You can talk to Mr Lickcheese afterwards. Come on. [Sartorius and Lickcheese go into the study. Blanche, surprised at her father’s abruptness, looks after them for a moment. Then, seeing Lickcheese’s overcoat on her chair, she takes it up, amused, and looks at the fur.]

THE PARLOR MAID Oh, we are fine, aint we, Miss Blanche? I think Mr Lickcheese must have come into a legacy. [Confidentially] I wonder what he can want with the master, Miss Blanche! He brought him this big book. [She shews the bluebook to Blanche.]

BLANCHE [her curiosity roused] Let me see. [She takes the book and looks at it.] Theres something about papa in it. [She sits down and begins to read.]

THE PARLOR MAID [folding the tea-table and putting it out of the way] He looks ever s’much younger, Miss Blanche, dont he? I couldnt help laughing when I saw him with his whiskers shaved off: It do look so silly when youre not accustomed to it. [No answer from Blanche.] You havnt finished your coffee, Miss: I suppose I may take it away? [No answer.] Oh, you are interested in Mr Lickcheese’s book, Miss. [Blanche springs up. The parlor maid looks at her face, and instantly hurries out of the room on tiptoe with her tray.]

BLANCHE So that was why he would not touch the money. [She tries to tear the book across; but that is impossible; so she throws it violently into the fireplace. It falls into the fender.] Oh, if only a girl could have no father, no family, just as I have no mother! Clergyman! Beast! “The worst slum landlord in London.” “Slum landlord.” Oh! [She covers her face with her hands and sinks shuddering into the chair on which the overcoat lies. The study door opens.]

LICKCHEESE [in the study] You just wait five minutes: I’ll fetch him. [Blanche snatches a piece of work from her basket and sits erect and quiet, stitching at it. Lickcheese coomes back, speaking to Sartorius, who follows him.] He lodges round the corner in Gower Street; and my private ‘ansom’s at the door. By your leave, Miss Blanche. [pulling gently at his overcoat.]

BLANCHE [rising] I beg your pardon. I hope I havnt crushed it.

LICKCHEESE [gallantly, as he gets into the coat] Youre welcome to crush it again now, Miss Blanche. Dont say good evenin to me, miss: I’m comin’ back presently, me and a friend or two. Ta ta, Sartorius: I shant be long. [He goes out. Sartorius looks about for the blue book.]

BLANCHE I thought we were done with Lickcheese.

SARTORIUS Not quite yet, I think. He left a book here for me to look over, a large book in a blue paper cover. Has the girl put it away? [He sees it in the fender, looks at Blanche, and adds:] Have you seen it?

BLANCHE No. Yes. [Angrily] No: I have not seen it. What have I to do with it? [Sartorius picks the book up and dusts it; then sits down quietly to read. After a glance up and down the columns, he nods assentingly, as if he found there exactly what he expected.]

SARTORIUS It’s a curious thing, Blanche, that the Parliamentary gentlemen who write such books as these should be so ignorant of practical business. One would suppose, to read this, that we are the most grasping, grinding, heartless pair in the world, you and I.

BLANCHE Is it not true about the state of the houses, I mean?

SARTORIUS [calmly] Oh, quite true.

BLANCHE Then it is not our fault?

SARTORIUS My dear: if we made the houses any better, the rents would have to be raised so much that the poor people would be unable to pay, and would be thrown homeless on the streets.

BLANCHE Well, turn them out and get in a respectable class of people. Why should we have the disgrace of harbouring such wretches?

SARTORIUS [opening his eyes] That sounds a little hard on them, doesnt it, my child?

‘BLANCHE Oh, I hate the poor. At least, I hate those dirty, drunken, disreputable people who live like pigs. If they must be provided for, let other people look after them. How can you expect anyone to think well of us when such things are written about us in that infamous book?

SARTORIUS [coldly and a little wistfully] I see I have made a real lady of you, Blanche.

BLANCHE [defiantly] Well, are you sorry for that?

SARTORIUS No, my dear: Of course not. But do you know, Blanche, that my mother was a very poor woman, and that her poverty was not her fault?

BLANCHE I suppose not; but the people we want to mix with now dont know that. And it was not my fault; so I dont see why I should be made to suffer for it.

SARTORIUS [enraged] Who makes you suffer for it, miss? What would you be now but for what your grandmother did for me when she stood at her wash-tub for thirteen hours a day and thought herself rich when she made fifteen shillings a week?

BLANCHE [angrily] I suppose I should have been down on her level instead of being raised above it, as I am now. Would you like us to go and live in that place in the book for the sake of grandmamma? I hate the idea of such things. I dont want to know about them. I love you because you brought me up to something better. [Half aside, as she turns a way from him.] I should hate you if you had not.

SARTORIUS [giving in] Well, my child, I suppose it is natural for you to feel that way, after your bringing up. It is the ladylike view of the matter. So dont let us quarrel, my girl. You shall not be made to suffer any more. I have made up my mind to improve the property, and get in quite a new class of tenants. There! does that satisfy you? I am only waiting for the consent of the ground landlord, Lady Roxdale.

BLANCHE Lady Roxdale!

SARTORIUS Yes. But I shall expect the mortgagee to take his share of the risk.

BLANCHE The mortgagee! Do you mean — [She cannot finish the sentence: Sartorius does it for her.]

SARTORIUS Harry Trench. Yes. And remember, Blanche: if he consents to join me in the scheme, I shall have to be friends with him.

BLANCHE And to ask him to the house?

SARTORIUS Only on business. You need not meet him unless you like.

BLANCHE [overwhelmed] When is he coming?

SARTORIUS There is no time to be lost. Lickcheese has gone to ask him to come round.

BLANCHE [in dismay] Then he will be here in a few minutes! What shall I do?

SARTORIUS I advise you to receive him as if nothing had happened, and then go out and leave us to our business. You are not afraid to meet him?

BLANCHE Afraid! No, most certainly not. But [Lickcheese’s voice is heard without] Here they are. Dont say I’m here, papa. [She rushes away into the study.]

[Lickcheese comes in with Trench and Cokane. Cokane shakes hands effusively with Bartorius. Trench, who is coarsened and sullen, and has evidently not been making the best of his disappointment, bows shortly and resentfully. Lickcheese covers the general embarrassment by talking cheerfully until they are all seated round the large table: Trench nearest the freplace; Cokane nearest the piano; and the other two between them, with Lickcheese next Cokane.]

LICKCHEESE Here we are, all friends round St Paul’s. You remember Mr Cokane: He does a little business for me now as a friend, and gives me a help with my correspondence– sekketerry we call it. Ive no litery style, and thats the truth; so Mr Cokane kindly puts it into my letters and draft prospectuses and advertisements and the like. Dont you, Cokane? Of course you do: Why shouldnt you? He’s been helping me tonight to persuade his old friend, Dr Trench, about the matter we were speaking of.

COKANE [austerely] No, Mr Lickcheese, not trying to persuade him. No: This is a matter of principle with me. I say it is your duty, Henry your duty to put those abominable buildings into proper and habitable repair. As a man of science you owe it to the community to perfect the sanitary arrangements. In questions of duty there is no room for persuasion, even from the oldest friend.

SARTORIUS [to Trench] I certainly feel, as Mr Cokane puts it, that it is our duty: One which I have perhaps too long neglected out of regard for the poorest class of tenants.

LICKCHEESE Not a doubt of it, gents, a dooty. I can be as sharp as any man when it’s a question of business; but dooty’s another thing.

TRENCH Well, I dont see that it’s any more my duty now than it was four months ago. I look at it simply as a question of so much money.

COKANE Shame, Harry, shame! Shame!

TRENCH Oh, shut up, you fool. [Cokane springs up. Lickcheese catches his coat and holds him.]

LICKCHEESE Steady, steady, Mr Sekketerry. Dr Trench is only joking.

COKANE I insist on the withdrawal of that expression. I have been called a fool.

TRENCH [morosely] So you are a fool.

‘COKANE Then you are a damned fool. Now, sir!

TRENCH All right. Now weve settled that. [Cokane, with a snort, sits down.] What I mean is this. Dont lets have any nonsense about this job. As I understand it, Robbins’s Row is to be pulled down to make way for the new street into the Strand; and the straight tip now is to go for compensation.

LICKCHEESE [chuckling] That’so, Dr Trench. Thats it.

TRENCH {continuing] Well, it appears that the dirtier a place is the more rent you get; and the decenter it is, the more compensation you get. So we’re to give up dirt and go in for decency.

SARTORIUS I should not put it exactly in that way; but —

COKANE Quite right, Mr Sartorius, quite right. The case could not have been stated in worse taste or with less tact.

LICKCHEESE Sh-sh-sh-sh!

SARTORIUS I do not quite go with you there, Mr Cokane. Dr Trench puts the case frankly as a man of business. I take the wider view of a public man. We live in a progressive age; and humanitarian ideas are advancing and must be taken into account. But my practical conclusion is the same as his. I should hardly feel justified in making a large claim for compensation under existing circumstances.

LICKCHEESE Of course not; and you wouldnt get it if you did. You see, it’s like this, Dr Trench. Theres no doubt that the Vestries has legal powers to play old Harry with slum properties, and spoil the houseknacking game if they please. That didnt matter in the good old times, because the Vestries used to be us ourselves. Nobody ever knew a word about the election; and we used to get ten of us into a room and elect one another, and do what we liked. Well, that cock wont fight any longer; and, to put it short, the game is up for men in the position of you and Mr Sartorius. My advice to you is, take the present chance of getting out of it. Spend a little money on the block at the Cribbs Market end enough to make it look like a model dwelling; and let the other block to me on fair terms for a depot of the North Thames Iced Mutton Company. Theyll be knocked down inside of two year to make room for the new north and south main thoroughfare; and youll be compensated to the tune of double the present valuation, with the cost of the improvements thrown in. Leave things as they are; and you stand a good chance of being fined, or condemned, or pulled down before long. Now’s your time.

COKANE Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Admirably put from the business point of view! I recognize the uselessness of putting the moral point of view to you, Trench; but even you must feel the cogency of Mr Lickcheese’s business statement.

TRENCH But why cant you act without me? What have I got to do with it? I’m only a mortgagee.

SARTORIUS There is a certain risk in this compensation investment, Dr Trench. The County Council may alter the line of the new street. If that happens, the money spent in improving the houses will be thrown away, simply thrown away. Worse than thrown away, in fact; for the new buildings may stand unlet, or half let, for years. But you will expect your seven per cent as usual.

TRENCH A man must live.

COCKANE Je n’en vois pas la necessite.

TRENCH Shut up, Billy; or else speak some language you understand. No, Mr Sartorius: I should be very glad to stand in with you if I could afford it; but I cant; so theres an end of that.

LICKCHEESE Well, all I can say is that youre a very foolish young man.

COKANE What did I tell you, Harry?

TRENCH I dont see that it’s any business of yours, Mr Lickcheese.

LICKCHEESE It’s a free country: Every man has a right to his opinion. [Cokane cries “Hear, hear!”] Come: wheres your feelins for them poor people, Dr Trench? Remember how it went to your heart when I first told you about them. What! Are you going to turn hard?

TRENCH No: It wont do: You cant get over me that way. You proved to me before that there was no use in being sentimental over that slum shop of ours; and it’s no good your turning round on the philanthropic tack now that you want me to put my capital into your speculation. Ive had my lesson; and I’m going to stick to my present income. It’s little enough for me as it is.

SARTORIUS It really matters nothing to me, Dr Trench, how you decide. I can easily raise the money elsewhere and pay you off. Then, since you are resolved to run no risks, you can invest your £10,000 in Consols and get 250 a year for it instead of 700. [Trench, completely outwitted, stares at them in consternation. Cokane breaks the silence.]

COKANE This is what comes of being avaricious, Harry. Two thirds of your income gone at one blow. And I must say it serves you right.

TRENCH Thats all very fine; but I dont understand it. If you can do this to me, why didnt you do it long ago?

SARTORIUS Because, as I should probably have had to borrow at the same rate, I should have saved nothing; whereas you would have lost over £400 a very serious matter for you. I had no desire to be unfriendly; and even now I should be glad to let the mortgage stand, were it not that the circumstances mentioned by Mr Lickcheese force my hand. Besides, Dr Trench, I hoped for some time that our interests might be joined by closer ties even than those of friendship.

LICKCHEESE [jumping up, relieved] There! Now the murder’s out. Excuse me, Dr Trench. Excuse me, Mr Sartorius: excuse my freedom. Why not Dr Trench marry Miss Blanche, and settle the whole affair that way? [Sensation. Lickcheese sits down triumphant.]

COKANE You forget, Mr Lickcheese, that the young lady, whose taste has to be considered, decisively objected to him.

TRENCH Oh! Perhaps you think she was struck with you.

COKANE I do not say so, Trench. No man of any delicacy would suggest such a thing. You have an untutored mind, Trench, an untutored mind.

TRENCH Well, Cokane : Ive told you my opinion of you already.

COKANE {rising wildly] And I have told you my opinion of you. I will repeat it if you wish. I am ready to repeat it.

LICKCHEESE Come, Mr Sekketerry: You and me, as married men, is out of the ‘unt as far as young ladies is concerned. I know Miss Blanche: She has her father’s eye for business. Explain this job to her; and she’ll make it up with Dr Trench. Why not have a bit of romance in business when it costs nothing? We all have our feelins: We aint mere calculatin machines.

SARTORIUS [revolted] Do you think, Lickcheese, that my daughter is to be made part of a money bargain between you and these gentlemen?

LICKCHEESE Oh come, Sartorius: Dont talk as if you was the only father in the world. I have a daughter too; and my feelins in that matter is just as fine as yours. I propose nothing but what is for Miss Blanche’s advantage and Dr Trench’s.

COKANE Lickcheese expresses himself roughly, Mr Sartorius; but his is a sterling nature; and what he says is to the point. If Miss Sartorius can really bring herself to care for Harry, I am far from desiring to stand in the way of such an arrangement.

TRENCH Why, what have you got to do with it?

LICKCHEESE Easy, Dr Trench, easy. We want your opinion. Are you still on for marrying Miss Blanche if she’s agreeable?

TRENCH [shortly] I dont know that I am. [Sartorius rises indignantly.]

LICKCHEESE Easy one moment, Mr Sartorius. [To Trench:] Come, Dr Trench: You say you dont know that you are. But do you know that you aint? Thats what we want to know.

TRENCH [sulkily] I wont have the relations between Miss Sartorius and myself made part of a bargain. [He rises to leave the table.]

LICKCHEESE [rising] Thats enough: A gentleman could say no less. [Insinuatingly] Now, would you mind me and Cokane and the guvnor steppin into the study to arrange about the lease to the North Thames Iced Mutton Company?

TRENCH Oh, I dont mind. I’m going home. Theres nothing else to say.

LICKCHEESE No, dont go. Only just a minute: me and Cokane will be back in no time to see you home. Youll wait for us, wont you? theres a good fellow!

TRENCH Well, if you wish, yes.

LICKCHEESE [cheerily] Didnt I know you would!

SARTORIUS [at the study door, to Cokane] After you, sir. [Cokane bows formally and goes into the study.]

LICKCHEESE [at the door, aside to Sartorius] You never ad such a managin man as me, Sartorius. [He goes into the study chuckling, followed by Sartorius.]

[Trench, left alone, looks round carefully and listens a moment. Then he goes on tiptoe to the piano and leans upon it with folded arms, gazing at Blanche’s portrait. Blanche herself appears presently at the study door. When she sees how he is occupied, she closes it softly and steals over to him, watching him intently. He rises from his leaning attitude, and takes the portrait from the easel, holding it out before him at arms length; then, taking a second look round to reassure himself that nobcdy is watching him, finds Blanche close upon him. He drops the portrait and stares at her without the least presence of mind.]

BLANCHE [shrewishly] Well? So you have come back here. You have had the meanness to come into this house again. [He flushes and retreats a step. She follows him up remorselessly.] What a poor spirited creature you must be! Why dont you go?

[Red and wincing, he starts huffily to get his hat from the table; but when he turns to the door with it she deliberately gets in his way, so that he has to stop.] I dont want you to stay. [For a moment they stand face to face, quite close to one another, she provocative, taunting, half defying, half inviting him to advance, in a flush of undisguised animal excitement. It suddenly flashes on him that all this ferocity is erotic that she is making love to him. His eye lights up: a cunning expression comes into the corners of his mouth: With a heavy assumption of indifference he walks straight back to his chair, and plants himself in it with his arms folded. She comes down the room after him.]

Blanche But I forgot: You have found that there is some money to be made here. Lickcheese told you. You, who were so disinterested, so independent, that you could not accept anything from my father! [At the end of every sentence she waits to see what execution she has done.] I suppose you will try to persuade me that you have come down here on a great philanthropic enterprise to befriend the poor by having those houses rebuilt, eh? [Trench maintains his attitude and makes no sign.] Yes: when my father makes you do it. And when Lickcheese has discovered some way of making it profitable. Oh, I know papa; and I know you. And for the sake of that, you come back here into the house where you were refused, ordered out. [Trench’s face darkens: her eyes gleam as she sees it.] Aha! you remember that. You know it’s true: You cant deny it. [She sits down, and softens her tone a little as she affects to pity him.] Ah, let me tell you that you cut a poor figure; a very, very poor figure, Harry. [At the word “Harry” he relaxes the fold of his arms; and a faint grin of anticipated victory appears on his face.] And you, too, a gentleman! So highly connected! With such distinguished relations! So particular as to where your money comes from! I wonder at you. I really wonder at you. I should have thought that if your family brought you nothing else, it might at least have brought you some sense of personal dignity. Perhaps you think you look dignified at present, eh? [No reply.] Well, I can assure you that you dont: You look most ridiculous as foolish as a man could look. You dont know what to say; and you dont know what to do. But after all, I really dont see what anyone could say in defence of such conduct. [He looks straight in front of him, and purses up his lips as if whistling. This annoys her; and she becomes affectedly polite.] I am afraid I am in your way, Dr Trench. [She rises.] I shall not intrude on you any longer. You seem so perfectly at home that I need make no apology for leaving you to yourself. [She makes a feint of going to the door; but he does not budge; and she returns and comes behind his chair.] Harry. [He does not turn. She comes a step nearer.] Harry : I want you to answer me a question. [Earnestly, stooping over him] Look me in the face. [No reply.] Do you hear? [Putting her hand on his shoulder] Look me in the face. [He still stares straight in front of him. She suddenly kneels down beside him with her breast against his right shoulder, and, taking his face in her hands, twists it sharply towards her.] Harry: what were you doing with my photograph just now, when you thought you were alone? [His face writhes as he tries hard not to smile. She flings her arms round him, and crushes him in an ecstatic embrace as she adds, with furious tenderness:] How dare you touch anything belonging to me? [The study door opens and voices are heard.]

TRENCH I hear some one coming. [She regains her chair with a bound, and pushes it back as far as possible. Cokane, Lickcheese and Sartorius come from the study. Sartorius and Lickcheese come to Trench. Cokane crosses to Blanche in his most killing manner.]

COKANE How do you do, Miss Sartorius? Nice weather for the return of l’enfant prodigue, eh?

BLANCHE Capital, Mr Cokane. So glad to see you. [She gives him her hand, which he kisses with gallantry.]

LICKCHEESE [on Trench’s left, in a low voice] Any noos for us, Dr Trench?

TRENCH [to Sartorius, on his right] I’ll stand in, compensation or no compensation. [He shakes Sartorius’ s hand. The parlor maid has just appeared at the door.]

BLANCHE Supper is ready, papa.

COKANE Allow me.

[Exeunt omnes: Blanche on Cokane’s arm; Lickcheese jocosely taking Sartorius on one arm, and Trench on the other.]

THE PHILANDERER

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT I

A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing-room of a flat in Ashly Gardens in the Victoria district of London. It is past ten at night. The walls are hung with theatrical engravings and photographs — Kemble as Hamlet, Mrs. Siddons as Queen Katharine pleading in court, Macready as Werner (after Maclise), Sir Henry Irving as Richard III (after Long), Miss Ellen Terry, Mrs. Kendal, Miss Ada Rehan, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. A. W. Pinero, Mr. Sydney Grundy, and so on, but not the Signora Duse or anyone connected with Ibsen. The room is not a perfect square, the right hand corner at the back being cut off diagonally by the doorway, and the opposite corner rounded by a turret window filled up with a stand of flowers surrounding a statue of Shakespear. The fireplace is on the right, with an armchair near it. A small round table, further forward on the same side, with a chair beside it, has a yellow-backed French novel lying open on it. The piano, a grand, is on the left, open, with the keyboard in full view at right angles to the wall. The piece of music on the desk is “When other lips.” Incandescent lights, well shaded, are on the piano and mantelpiece. Near the piano is a sofa, on which the lady and gentleman are seated affectionately side by side, in one another’s arms.

The lady, Grace Tranfield, is about 32, slight of build, delicate of feature, and sensitive in expression. She is just now given up to the emotion of the moment; but her well closed mouth, proudly set brows, firm chin, and elegant carriage show plenty of determination and self respect. She is in evening dress.

The gentleman, Leonard Charteris, a few years older, is unconventionally but smartly dressed in a velvet jacket and cashmere trousers. His collar, dyed Wotan blue, is part of his shirt, and turns over a garnet coloured scarf of Indian silk, secured by a turquoise ring. He wears blue socks and leather sandals. The arrangement of his tawny hair, and of his moustaches and short beard, is apparently left to Nature; but he has taken care that Nature shall do him the fullest justice. His amative enthusiasm, at which he is himself laughing, and his clever, imaginative, humorous ways, contrast strongly with the sincere tenderness and dignified quietness of the woman.

CHARTERIS (impulsively clasping Grace). My dearest love.

GRACE (responding affectionately). My darling. Are you happy?

CHARTERIS. In Heaven.

GRACE. My own.

CHARTERIS. My heart’s love. (He sighs happily, and takes her hands in his, looking quaintly at her.) That must positively be my last kiss, Grace, or I shall become downright silly. Let us talk. (Releases her and sits a little apart from her.) Grace: is this your first love affair?

GRACE. Have you forgotten that I am a widow? Do you think I married Tranfield for money?

CHARTERIS. How do I know? Besides, you might have married him not because you loved him, but because you didn’t love anybody else. When one is young, one marries out of mere curiosity, just to see what it’s like.

GRACE. Well, since you ask me, I never was in love with Tranfield, though I only found that out when I fell in love with you. But I used to like him for being in love with me. It brought out all the good in him so much that I have wanted to be in love with some one ever since. I hope, now that I am in love with you, you will like me for it just as I liked Tranfield.

CHARTERIS. My dear, it is because I like you that I want to marry you. I could love anybody — any pretty woman, that is.

GRACE. Do you really mean that, Leonard?

CHARTERIS. Of course. Why not?

GRACE (reflecting). Never mind why. Now tell me, is this your first love affair?

CHARTERIS (amazed at the simplicity of the question). No, bless my soul. No — nor my second, nor my third.

GRACE. But I mean your first serious one.

CHARTERIS (with a certain hesitation). Yes. (There is a pause. She is not convinced. He adds, with a very perceptible load on his conscience.) It is the first in which I have been serious.

GRACE (searchingly). I see. The other parties were always serious.

CHARTERIS. No, not always — heaven forbid!

GRACE. How often?

CHARTERIS. Well, once.

GRACE. Julia Craven?

CHARTERIS (recoiling). Who told you that? (She shakes her head mysteriously, and he turns away from her moodily and adds) You had much better not have asked.

GRACE (gently). I’m sorry, dear. (She puts out her hand and pulls softly at him to bring him near her again.)

CHARTERIS (yielding mechanically to the pull, and allowing her hand to rest on his arm, but sitting squarely without the least attempt to return the caress). Do I feel harder to the touch than I did five minutes ago?

GRACE. What nonsense!

CHARTERIS. I feel as if my body had turned into the toughest of hickory. That is what comes of reminding me of Julia Craven. (Brooding, with his chin on his right hand and his elbow on his knee.) I have sat alone with her just as I am sitting with you —

GRACE (shrinking from him). Just!

CHARTERIS (sitting upright and facing her steadily). Just exactly. She has put her hands in mine, and laid her cheek against mine, and listened to me saying all sorts of silly things. (Grace, chilled to the soul, rises from the sofa and sits down on the piano stool, with her back to the keyboard.) Ah, you don’t want to hear any more of the story. So much the better.

GRACE (deeply hurt, but controlling herself). When did you break it off?

CHARTERIS (guiltily). Break it off?

GRACE (firmly). Yes, break it off.

CHARTERIS. Well, let me see. When did I fall in love with you?

GRACE. Did you break it off then?

CHARTERIS (mischievously, making it plainer and plainer that it has not been broken off). It was clear then, of course, that it must be broken off.

GRACE. And did you break it off?

CHARTERIS. Oh, yes: I broke it off,

GRACE. But did she break it off?

CHARTERIS (rising). As a favour to me, dearest, change the subject. Come away from the piano: I want you to sit here with me. (Takes a step towards her.)

GRACE. No. I also have grown hard to the touch — much harder than hickory for the present. Did she break it off?

CHARTERIS. My dear, be reasonable. It was fully explained to her that it was to be broken off.

GRACE. Did she accept the explanation?

CHARTERIS. She did what a woman like Julia always does. When I explained personally, she said it was not not my better self that was speaking, and that she knew I still really loved her. When I wrote it to her with brutal explicitness, she read the letter carefully and then sent it back to me with a note to say that she had not had the courage to open it, and that I ought to be ashamed of having written it. (Comes beside Grace, and puts his left hand caressingly round her neck.) You see, dearie, she won’t look the situation in the face.

GRACE. (shaking off his hand and turning a little away on the stool). I am afraid, from the light way in which you speak of it, you did not sound the right chord.

CHARTERIS. My dear, when you are doing what a woman calls breaking her heart, you may sound the very prettiest chords you can find on the piano; but to her ears it is just like this — (Sits down on the bass end of the keyboard. Grace puts her fingers in her ears. He rises and moves away from the piano, saying) No, my dear: I’ve been kind; I’ve been frank; I’ve been everything that a goodnatured man could be: she only takes it as the making up of a lover’s quarrel. (Grace winces.) Frankness and kindness: one is as the other — especially frankness. I’ve tried both. (He crosses to the fireplace, and stands facing the fire, looking at the ornaments on the mantelpiece and warming his hands.)

GRACE (Her voice a little strained). What are you going to try now?

CHARTERIS (on the hearthrug, turning to face her). Action, my dear! Marriage!! In that she must believe. She won’t be convinced by anything short of it, because, you see, I have had some tremendous philanderings before and have gone back to her after them.

GRACE. And so that is why you want to marry me?

CHARTERIS. I cannot deny it, my love. Yes: it is your mission to rescue me from Julia.

GRACE (rising). Then, if you please, I decline to be made use of for any such purpose. I will not steal you from another woman. (She begins to walk up and down the room with ominous disquiet.)

CHARTERIS. Steal me! (Comes towards her.) Grace: I have a question to put to you as an advanced woman. Mind! as an advanced woman. Does Julia belong to me? Am I her owner — her master?

GRACE. Certainly not. No woman is the property of a man. A woman belongs to herself and to nobody else.

CHARTERIS. Quite right. Ibsen for ever! That’s exactly my opinion. Now tell me, do I belong to Julia; or have I a right to belong to myself?

GRACE (puzzled). Of course you have; but —

CHARTERIS (interrupting her triumphantly). Then how can you steal me from Julia if I don’t belong to her? (Catching her by the shoulders and holding her out at arm’s length in front of him.) Eh, little philosopher? No, my dear: if Ibsen sauce is good for the goose, it’s good for the gander as well. Besides (coaxing her) it was nothing but a philander with Julia — nothing else in the world, I assure you.

GRACE (breaking away from him). So much the worse! I hate your philanderings: they make me ashamed of you and of myself. (Goes to the sofa and sits in the right hand corner of it, leaning gloomily on her elbow with her face averted.)

CHARTERIS. Grace: you utterly misunderstand the origin of my philanderings. (Sits down beside her.) Listen to me: am I a particularly handsome man?

GRACE (turning to him as if astonished at his conceit). No!

CHARTERIS (triumphantly). You admit it. Am I a well dressed man?

GRACE. Not particularly.

CHARTERIS. Of course not. Have I a romantic mysterious charm about me? — do I look as if a secret sorrow preyed on me? — am I gallant to women?

GRACE. Not in the least.

CHARTERIS. Certainly not. No one can accuse me of it. Then whose fault is it that half the women I speak to fall in love with me? Not mine: I hate it: it bores me to distraction. At first it flattered me — delighted me — that was how Julia got me, because she was the first woman who had the pluck to make me a declaration. But I soon had enough of it; and at no time have I taken the initiative and persecuted women with my advances as women have persecuted me. Never. Except, of course, in your case.

GRACE. Oh, you need not make any exception. I had a good deal of trouble to induce you to come and see us. You were very coy.

CHARTERIS (fondly, taking her hand). With you, dearest, the coyness was sheer coquetry. I loved you from the first, and fled only that you might pursue. But come! let us talk about something really interesting. (Takes her in his arms.) Do you love me better than anyone else in the world?

GRACE. I don’t think you like to be loved too much.

CHARTERIS. That depends on who the person is. You (pressing her to his heart) cannot love me too much: you cannot love me half enough. I reproach you every day for your coldness — your — (Violent double knock heard without. They start and listen, still in one another’s arms, hardly daring to breathe.) Who the deuce is calling at this hour?

GRACE. I can’t imagine. (They listen guiltily. The door of the flat is opened without. They hastily get away from one another.)

A WOMAN’S VOICE OUTSIDE. Is Mr. Charteris here?

CHARTERIS (springing up). Julia! The devil! (Stands at the left of the sofa with his hands on it, bending forward with his eyes fixed on the door.)

GRACE (rising also). What can she want?

THE VOICE. Never mind: I will announce myself. (A beautiful, dark, tragic looking woman, in mantle and bonnet, appears at the door, raging furiously.) Oh, this is charming. I have interrupted a pretty tete-a-tete. Oh, you villain! (She comes straight at Grace. Charteris runs across behind the sofa and stops her. She struggles furiously with him. Grace preserves her self possession, but retreats quietly to the piano. Julia, finding Charteris too strong for her, gives up her attempt to get at Grace, but strikes him in the face as she frees herself.)

CHARTERIS (shocked). Oh, Julia, Julia! This is too bad.

JULIA. Is it, indeed, too bad? What are you doing up here with that woman? You scoundrel! But now listen to me; Leonard: you have driven me to desperation; and I don’t care what I do, or who hears me. I’ll not bear it. She shall not have my place with you —

CHARTERIS. Sh-sh!

JULIA. No, no: I don’t care: I will expose her true character before everybody. You belong to me: you have no right to be here; and she knows it.

CHARTERIS. I think you had better let me take you home, Julia.

JULIA. I will not. I am not going home: I am going to stay here — here — until I have made you give her up.

CHARTERIS. My dear, you must be reasonable. You really cannot stay in Mrs. Tranfield’s house if she objects. She can ring the bell and have us both put out.

JULIA. Let her do it then. Let her ring the bell if she dares. Let us see how this pure virtuous creature will face the scandal of what I will declare about her. Let us see how you will face it. I have nothing to lose. Everybody knows how you have treated me: you have boasted of your conquests, you poor pitiful, vain creature — I am the common talk of your acquaintances and hers. Oh, I have calculated my advantage (tearing off her mantle): I am a most unhappy and injured woman; but I am not the fool you take me to be. I am going to stay — see! (She flings the mantle on the round table; puts her bonnet on it, and sits down.) Now, Mrs. Tranfield: there is the bell: (pointing to the button beside the fireplace) why don’t you ring? (Grace, looking attentively at Charteris, does not move.) Ha! ha! I thought so.

CHARTERIS (quietly, without relaxing his watch on Julia). Mrs. Tranfield: I think you had better go into another room. (Grace makes a movement towards the door, but stops and looks inquiringly at Charteris as Julia springs up. He advances a step so as to prevent her from getting to the door.)

JULIA. She shall not. She shall stay here. She shall know what you are, and how you have been in love with me — how it is not two days since you kissed me and told me that the future would be as happy as the past. (Screaming at him) You did: deny it if you dare.

CHARTERIS (to Grace in a low voice). Go!

GRACE (with nonchalant disgust — going). Get her away as soon as you can, Leonard.

(Julia, with a stifled cry of rage, rushes at Grace, who is crossing behind the sofa towards door. Charteris seizes her and prevents her from getting past the sofa. Grace goes out. Charteris, holding Julia fast, looks around to the door to see whether Grace is safely out of the room.)

JULIA (suddenly ceasing to struggle and speaking with the most pathetic dignity). Oh, there is no need to be violent. (He passes her across to the left end of the sofa, and leans against the right end, panting and mopping his forehead). That is worthy of you! — to use brute force — to humiliate me before her! (She breaks down and bursts into tears.)

CHARTERIS (to himself with melancholy conviction). This is going to be a cheerful evening. Now patience, patience, patience! (Sits on a chair near the round table.)

JULIA (in anguish). Leonard, have you no feeling for me?

CHARTERIS. Only an intense desire to get you safely out of this.

JULIA (fiercely). I am not going to stir.

CHARTERIS (wearily). Well, well. (Heaves a long sigh. They sit silent for awhile, Julia struggling, not to regain her self control, but to maintain her rage at boiling point.)

JULIA (rising suddenly). I am going to speak to that woman.

CHARTERIS (jumping up). No, no. Hang it, Julia, don’t let’s have another wrestling match. I have the strength, but not the wind: you’re too young for me. Sit down or else let me take you home. Suppose her father comes in.

JULIA. I don’t care. It rests with you. I am ready to go if she will give you up: until then I stay. Those are my terms: you owe me that, (She sits down determinedly. Charteris looks at her for a moment; then, making up his mind, goes resolutely to the couch, sits down near the right hand end of it, she being at the left; and says with biting emphasis) —

CHARTERIS. I owe you just exactly nothing.

JULIA (reproachfully). Nothing! You can look me in the face and say that? Oh, Leonard!

CHARTERIS. Let me remind you, Julia, that when first we became acquainted, the position you took up was that of a woman of advanced views.

JULIA. That should have made you respect me the more.

CHARTERIS (placably). So it did, my dear. But that is not the point. As a woman of advanced views, you were determined to be free. You regarded marriage as a degrading bargain, by which a woman sold herself to a man for the social status of a wife and the right to be supported and pensioned in old age out of his income. That’s the advanced view — our view. Besides, if you had married me, I might have turned out a drunkard, a criminal, an imbecile, a horror to you; and you couldn’t have released yourself. Too big a risk, you see. That’s the rational view — our view. Accordingly, you reserved the right to leave me at any time if you found our companionship incompatible with — what was the expression you used? — with your full development as a human being: I think that was how you put the Ibsenist view — our view. So I had to be content with a charming philander, which taught me a great deal, and brought me some hours of exquisite happiness.

JULIA. Leonard: you confess then that you owe me something?

CHARTERIS (haughtily). No: what I received, I paid. Did you learn nothing from me? — was there no delight for you in our friendship?

JULIA (vehemently and movingly; for she is now sincere). No. You made me pay dearly for every moment of happiness. You revenged yourself on me for the humiliation of being the slave of your passion for me. I was never sure of you for a moment. I trembled whenever a letter came from you, lest it should contain some stab for me. I dreaded your visits almost as much as I longed for them. I was your plaything, not your companion. (She rises, exclaiming) Oh, there was such suffering in my happiness that I hardly knew joy from pain. (She sinks on the piano stool, and adds, as she buries her face in her hands and turns away from him) Better for me if I had never met you!

CHARTERIS (rising indignantly). You ungenerous wretch! Is this your gratitude for the way I have just been flattering you? What have I not endured from you — endured with angelic patience? Did I not find out, before our friendship was a fortnight old, that all your advanced views were merely a fashion picked up and followed like any other fashion, without understanding or meaning a word of them? Did you not, in spite of your care for your own liberty, set up claims on me compared to which the claims of the most jealous wife would have been trifles. Have I a single woman friend whom you have not abused as old, ugly, vicious —

JULIA (quickly looking up). So they are.

CHARTERIS. Well, then, I’ll come to grievances that even you can understand. I accuse you of habitual and intolerable jealousy and ill temper; of insulting me on imaginary provocation: of positively beating me; of stealing letters of mine —

JULIA (rising). Yes, nice letters.

CHARTERIS. — of breaking your solemn promises not to do it again; of spending hours — aye, days! piecing together the contents of my waste paper basket in your search for more letters; and then representing yourself as an ill used saint and martyr wantonly betrayed and deserted by a selfish monster of a man.

JULIA. I was justified in reading your letters. Our perfect confidence in one another gave me the right to do it.

CHARTERIS. Thank you. Then I hasten to break off a confidence which gives such rights. (Sits down sulkily on sofa.)

JULIA (with her right hand on the back of the sofa, bending over him threateningly). You have no right to break it off.

CHARTERIS. I have. You refused to marry me because —

JULIA. I did not. You never asked me. If we were married, you would never dare treat me as you are doing now.

CHARTERIS (laboriously going back to his argument). It was understood between us as people of advanced views that we were not to marry because, as the law stands, I might have become a drunkard, a —

JULIA. — a criminal, an imbecile or a horror. You said that before. (Sits down beside him with a fling.)

CHARTERIS (politely). I beg your pardon, my dear. I know I have a habit of repeating myself. The point is that you reserved your freedom to give me up when you pleased.

JULIA. Well, what of that? I do not please to give you up; and I will not. You have not become a drunkard or a criminal.

CHARTERIS. You don’t see the point yet, Julia. You seem to forget that in reserving your freedom to leave me in case I should turn out badly, you also reserved my freedom to leave you in case you should turn out badly.

JULIA. Very ingenious. And pray, have I become a drunkard, or a criminal, or an imbecile?

CHARTERIS (rising). You have become what is infinitely worse than all three together — a jealous termagant.

JULIA (shaking her head bitterly). Yes, abuse me — call me names.

CHARTERIS. I now assert the right I reserved — the right of breaking with you when I please. Advanced views, Julia, involve advanced duties: you cannot be an advanced woman when you want to bring a man to your feet, and a conventional woman when you want to hold him there against his will. Advanced people form charming friendships: conventional people marry. Marriage suits a good deal of people; and its first duty is fidelity. Friendship suits some people; and its first duty is unhesitating, uncomplaining acceptance of a notice of a change of feeling from either side. You chose friendship instead of marriage. Now do your duty, and accept your notice.

JULIA. Never! We are engaged in the eye of — the eye of —

CHARTERIS (sitting down quickly beside her). Yes, Julia. Can’t you get it out? In the eye of something that advanced women don’t believe in, en?

JULIA (throwing herself at his feet). O Leonard, don’t be cruel. I am too miserable to argue — to think. I only know I love you. You reproach me with not wanting to marry you. I would have married you at any time after I came to love you, if you had asked me. I will marry you now if you will.

CHARTERIS. I won’t, my dear. That’s flat. We’re intellectually incompatible.

JULIA. But why? We could be so happy. You love me — I know you love me — I feel it. You say “My dear” to me: you have said it several times this evening. I know I have been wicked, odious, bad. I say nothing in defence of myself. But don’t be hard on me. I was distracted by the thought of losing you. I can’t face life without you Leonard. I was happy when I met you: I had never loved anyone; and if you had only let me alone I could have gone on contentedly by myself. But I can’t now. I must have you with me. Don’t cast me off without a thought of all I have at stake. I could be a friend to you if you would only let me — if you would only tell me your plans — give me a share in your work — treat me as something more than the amusement of an idle hour. Oh Leonard, Leonard, you’ve never given me a chance: indeed you haven’t. I’ll take pains; I’ll read; I’ll try to think; I’ll conquer my jealousy; I’ll — (She breaks down, rocking her head desperately on his knee and writhing.) Oh, I’m mad: I’m mad: you’ll kill me if you desert me.

CHARTERIS (petting her). My dear love, don’t cry — don’t go on in this way. You know I can’t help it.

JULIA (sobbing as he rises and coaxingly lifts her with him). Oh, you can, you can. One word from you will make us happy for ever.

CHARTERIS (diplomatically). Come, my dear: we really must go. We can’t stay until Cuthbertson comes. (Releases her gently and takes her mantle from the table.) Here is your mantle: put it on and be good. You have given me a terrible evening: you must have some consideration for me.

JULIA (dangerous again). Then I am to be cast off.

CHARTERIS (coaxingly). You are to put on your bonnet, dearest. (He puts the mantle on her shoulders.)

JULIA (with a bitter half laugh, half sob). Well, I suppose I must do what I am told. (She goes to the table, and looks for her bonnet. She sees the yellow-backed French novel.) Ah, look at that! (holds it out to him.) Look — look at what the creature reads — filthy, vile French stuff that no decent woman would touch. And you — you have been reading it with her.

CHARTERIS. You recommended that book to me yourself.

JULIA. Faugh! (Dashes it on the floor.)

CHARTERIS (running anxiously to the book). Don’t damage property, Julia. (He picks it up and dusts it.) Making scenes is an affair of sentiment: damaging property is serious. (Replaces it on the table.) And now do pray come along.

JULIA (implacably). You can go: there is nothing to prevent you. I will not stir. (She sits down stubbornly on the sofa.)

CHARTERIS (losing patience). Oh come! I am not going to begin all this over again. There are limits even to my forbearance. Come on.

JULIA. I will not, I tell you.

CHARTERIS. Then good night. (He makes resolutely for the door. With a rush, she gets there before him, and bars his way.) I thought you wanted me to go.

JULIA (at the door). You shall not leave me here alone.

CHARTERIS. Then come with me.

JULIA. Not until you have sworn to me to give up that woman.

CHARTERIS. My dear, I will swear anything if you will only come away and put an end to this.

JULIA (perplexed — doubting him). You will swear?

CHARTERIS. Solemnly. Propose the oath. I have been on the point of swearing for the last half hour.

JULIA (despairingly). You are only making fun of me. I want no oaths. I want your promise — your sacred word of honour.

CHARTERIS. Certainly — anything you demand, on condition that you come away immediately. On my sacred word of honour as a gentleman — as an Englishman — as anything you like — I will never see her again, never speak to her, never think of her. Now come.

JULIA. But are you in earnest? Will you keep your word?

CHARTERIS (smiling subtly). Now you are getting unreasonable. Do come along without any more nonsense. At any rate, I am going. I am not strong enough to carry you home; but I am strong enough to make my way through that door in spite of you. You will then have a new grievance against me for my brutal violence. (He takes a step towards the door.)

JULIA (solemnly). If you do, I swear I will throw myself from that window, Leonard, as you pass out.

CHARTERIS (unimpressed). That window is at the back of the building. I shall pass out at the front; so you will not hurt me. Good night. (He approaches the door.)

JULIA. Leonard: have you no pity?

CHARTERIS. Not in the least. When you condescend to these antics you force me to despise you. How can a woman who behaves like a spoiled child and talks like a sentimental novel have the audacity to dream of being a companion for a man of any sort of sense or character? (She gives an inarticulate cry and throws herself sobbing on his breast.) Come, don’t cry, my dear Julia: you don’t look half so beautiful as when you’re happy; and it takes all the starch out of my shirt front. Come along.

JULIA (affectionately). I’ll come, dear, if you wish it. Give me one kiss.

CHARTERIS (exasperated). This is too much. No: I’m dashed if I will. Here, let me go, Julia. (She clings to him.) Will you come without another word if I give you a kiss?

JULIA. I will do anything you wish, darling.

CHARTERIS. Well, here. (He takes her in his arms and gives her an unceremonious kiss.) Now remember your promise. Come along.

JULIA. That was not a nice kiss, dearest. I want one of our old real kisses.

CHARTERIS (furious). Oh, go to the deuce. (He disengages himself impulsively; and she, as if he had flung her down, falls pathetically with a stifled moan. With an angry look at her, he strides out and slams the door. She raises herself on one hand, listening to his retreating footsteps. They stop. Her face lights up with eager, triumphant cunning. The steps return hastily. She throws herself down again as before. Charteris reappears, in the utmost dismay, exclaiming) Julia: we’re done. Cuthbertson’s coming upstairs with your father — (she sits up quickly) do you hear? — the two fathers.

JULIA (sitting on the floor). Impossible. They don’t know one another.

CHARTERIS (desperately). I tell you they are coming up together like brothers. What on earth are we to do?

JULIA (scrambling up with the help of his hand). Quick, the lift: we can go down in that. (She rushes to the table for her bonnet.)

CHARTERIS. No, the man’s gone home; and the lift’s locked.

JULIA (putting on bonnet at express speed). Let’s go up to the next floor.

CHARTERIS. There’s no next floor. We’re at the top of the house. No, no, you must invent some thumping lie. I can’t think of one: you can, Julia. Exercise all your genius. I’ll back you up.

JULIA. But ——  —

CHARTERIS. Sh-sh! Here they are. Sit down and look at home. (Julia tears off her bonnet and mantle; throws them on the table; and darts to the piano at which she seats herself.)

JULIA. Come and sing. (She plays the symphony to “When other lips.” He stands at the piano, as if about to sing. Two elderly gentlemen enter. Julia stops playing.)

The elder of the two gentlemen, Colonel Daniel Craven, affects the bluff, simple veteran, and carries it off pleasantly and well, having a fine upright figure, and being, in fact, a goodnaturedly impulsive, credulous person who, after an entirely thoughtless career as an officer and a gentleman, is now being startled into some sort of self-education by the surprising proceedings of his children.

His companion, Mr. Joseph Cuthbertson, Grace’s father, has none of the Colonel’s boyishness. He is a man of fervent idealistic sentiment, so frequently outraged by the facts of life, that he has acquired an habitually indignant manner, which unexpectedly becomes enthusiastic or affectionate when he speaks.

The two men differ greatly in expression. The Colonel’s face is lined with weather, with age, with eating and drinking, and with the cumulative effects of many petty vexations, but not with thought: he is still fresh, and he has by no means full expectations of pleasure and novelty. Cuthbertson has the lines of sedentary London brain work, with its chronic fatigue and longing for rest and recreative emotion, and its disillusioned indifference to adventure and enjoyment, except as a means of recuperation.

They are both in evening dress; and Cuthbertson wears his fur collared overcoat, which, with his vigilant, irascible eye, piled up hair, and the honorable earnestness with which he takes himself, gives him an air of considerable consequence.

CUTHBERTSON (with a hospitable show of delight at finding visitors). Don’t stop, Miss Craven. Go on, Charteris. (He comes down behind the sofa, and hangs his overcoat on it, after taking an opera glass and a theatre programme from the pockets, and putting them down on the piano. Craven meanwhile goes to the fire-place and stands on the hearthrug.)

CHARTERIS. No, thank you. Miss Craven has just been taking me through an old song; and I’ve had enough of it. (He takes the song off the piano desk and lays it aside; then closes the lid over the keyboard.)

JULIA (passing between the sofa and piano to shake hands with Cuthbertson). Why, you’ve brought Daddy! What a surprise! (Looking across to Craven.) So glad you’ve come, Dad. (She takes a chair near the window, and sits there.)

CUTHBERTSON. Craven: let me introduce you to Mr. Leonard Charteris, the famous Ibsenist philosopher.

CRAVEN. Oh, we know one another already. Charteris is quite at home at our house, Jo.

CUTHBERTSON. I beg both your pardons. (Charteris sits down on the piano stool.) He’s quite at home here too. By the bye, where’s Grace?

JULIA and CHARTERIS. Er — (They stop and look at one another.)

JULIA (politely). I beg your pardon, Mr. Charteris: I interrupted you.

CHARTERIS. Not at all, Miss Craven. (An awkward pause.)

CUTHBERTSON (to help them out). You were going to tell about Grace, Charteris.

CHARTERIS. I was only going to say that I didn’t know that you and Craven were acquainted.

CRAVEN. Why, I didn’t know it until to-night. It’s a most extraordinary thing. We met by chance at the theatre; and he turns out to be my oldest friend.

CUTHBERTSON (energetically). Yes, Craven; and do you see how this proves what I was saying to you about the breaking up of family life? Here are all our young people — Grace and Miss Julia and the rest — bosom friends, inseparables; and yet we two, who knew each other before they were born, might never have met again if you hadn’t popped into the stall next to mine to-night by pure chance. Come, sit down (bustling over to him affectionately and pushing him into the arm chair above the fire): there’s your place, by my fireside, whenever you choose to fill it. (He posts himself at the right end of the sofa, leaning against it and admiring Craven.) Just imagine your being Dan Craven!

CRAVEN. Just imagine your being Jo Cuthbertson, though! That’s a far more extraordinary coincidence, because I’d got it into my head that your name was Tranfield.

CUTHBERTSON. Oh, that’s my daughter’s name. She’s a widow, you know. How uncommonly well you look, Dan! The years haven’t hurt you much.

CRAVEN (suddenly becoming unnaturally gloomy). I look well. I even feel well. But my days are numbered.

CUTHBERTSON (alarmed). Oh don’t say that, my dear fellow. I hope not.

JULIA (with anguish in her voice). Daddy! (Cuthbertson looks inquiringly around at her.)

CRAVEN. There, there, my dear: I was wrong to talk of it. It’s a sad subject. But it’s better that Cuthbertson should know. We used to be very close friends, and are so still, I hope. (Cuthbertson goes to Craven and presses his hand silently; then returns to sofa and sits, pulling out his handkerchief and displaying some emotion. )

CHARTERIS (a little impatiently). The fact is, Cuthbertson, Craven’s a devout believer in the department of witchcraft called medical science. He’s celebrated in all the medical schools as an example of the newest sort of liver complaint. The doctors say he can’t last another year; and he has fully made up his mind not to survive next Easter, just to oblige them.

CRAVEN (with military affectation). It’s very kind of you to try to keep up my spirits by making light of it, Charteris. But I shall be ready when my time comes. I’m a soldier. (A sob from Julia.) Don’t cry, Julia.

CUTHBERTSON (huskily). I hope you may long be spared, Dan.

CRAVEN. To oblige me, Jo, change the subject. (He gets up and again posts himself on the hearthrug with his back to the fire.)

CHARTERIS. Try and persuade him to join our club, Cuthbertson. He mopes.

JULIA. It’s no use. Sylvia and I are always at him to join; but he won’t.

CRAVEN. My child, I have my own club.

CHARTERIS (contemptuously). Yes, the Junior Army and Navy! Do you call that a club? Why, they daren’t let a woman cross the doorstep!

CRAVEN (a little ruffled). Clubs are a matter of taste, Charteris. You like a cock and hen club: I don’t. It’s bad enough to have Julia and her sister — a girl under twenty — spending half their time at such a place. Besides, now really, such a name for a club! The Ibsen club! I should be laughed out of London. The Ibsen club! Come, Cuthbertson, back me up. I’m sure you agree with me.

CHARTERIS. Cuthbertson’s a member.

CRAVEN (amazed). No! Why, he’s been talking to me all the evening about the way in which everything is going to the dogs through advanced ideas in the younger generation.

CHARTERIS. Of course. He’s been studying it in the club. He’s always there.

CUTHBERTSON (warmly). Not always. Don’t exaggerate, Charteris. You know very well that though I joined the club on Grace’s account, thinking that her father’s presence there would be a protection and a — a sort of sanction, as it were — I never approved of it.

CRAVEN (tactlessly harping on Cuthbertson’s inconsistency). Well, you know, this is unexpected: now it’s really very unexpected. I should never have thought it from hearing you talk, Jo. Why, you said the whole modern movement was abhorrent to you because your life had been passed in witnessing scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men and deuce knows what else. Is it at the Ibsen club that you see all this manliness and womanliness?

CHARTERIS. Certainly not: the rules of the club forbid anything of that sort. Every candidate for membership must be nominated by a man and a woman, who both guarantee that the candidate, if female, is not womanly, and if male, is not manly.

CRAVEN (chuckling cunningly and stooping to press his heated trousers against his legs, which are chilly). Won’t do, Charteris. Can’t take me in with so thin a story as that.

CUTHBERTSON (vehemently). It’s true. It’s monstrous, but it’s true.

CRAVEN (with rising indignation, as he begins to draw the inevitable inferences). Do you mean to say that somebody had the audacity to guarantee that my Julia is not a womanly woman?

CHARTERIS (darkly). It sounds incredible; but a man was found ready to take that inconceivable lie on his conscience.

JULIA (firing up). If he has nothing worse than that on his conscience, he may sleep pretty well. In what way am I more womanly than any of the rest of them, I should like to know? They are always saying things like that behind my back — I hear of them from Sylvia. Only the other day a member of the committee said I ought never to have been elected — that you (to Charteris) had smuggled me in. I should like to see her say it to my face: that’s all.

CRAVEN. But, my precious, I most sincerely hope she was right. She paid you the highest compliment. Why, the place must be a den of infamy.

CUTHBERTSON (emphatically). So it is, Craven, so it is.

CHARTERIS. Exactly. That’s what keeps it so select: nobody but people whose reputations are above suspicion dare belong to it. If we once got a good name, we should become a mere whitewashing shop for all the shady characters in London. Better join us, Craven. Let me put you up.

CRAVEN. What! Join a club where there’s some scoundrel who guaranteed my daughter to be an unwomanly woman! If I weren’t an invalid, I’d kick him.

CHARTERIS. Oh don’t say that. It was I who did it.

CRAVEN (reproachfully). You! Now upon my soul, Charteris, this is very vexing. Now how could you bring yourself to do such a thing?

CHARTERIS. She made me. Why, I had to guarantee Cuthbertson as unmanly; and he’s the leading representative of manly sentiment in London.

CRAVEN. That didn’t do Jo any harm: but it took away my Julia’s character.

JULIA (outraged). Daddy!

CHARTERIS. Not at the Ibsen club, quite the contrary. After all, what can we do? You know what breaks up most clubs for men and women. There’s a quarrel — a scandal — cherchez la femme — always a woman at the bottom of it. Well, we knew this when we founded the club; but we noticed that the woman at the bottom of it was always a womanly woman. The unwomanly women who work for their living and know how to take care of themselves never give any trouble. So we simply said we wouldn’t have any womanly women; and when one gets smuggled in she has to take care not to behave in a womanly way. We get on all right. (He rises.) Come to lunch with me there tomorrow and see the place.

CUTHBERTSON (rising). No, he’s engaged to me. But you can join us.

CHARTERIS. What hour?

CUTHBERTSON. Any time after twelve. (To Craven) It’s at 90 Cork street, at the other end of the Burlington Arcade.

CRAVEN (making a note). 90, you say. After twelve. (He suddenly relapses into gloom.) By the bye, don’t order anything special for me. I’m not allowed wine — only Apollinaris. No meat either — only a scrap of fish occasionally. I’m to have a short life, but not a merry one. (Sighing.) Well, well. (Bracing himself up.) Now, Julia, it’s time for us to be off. (Julia rises.)

CUTHBERTSON. But where on earth is Grace? I must go and look for her. (He turns to the door.)

JULIA (stopping him). Oh, pray don’t disturb her, Mr. Cuthbertson. She’s so tired.

CUTHBERTSON. But just for a moment to say good night. (Julia and Charteris look at one another in dismay. Cuthbertson looks quickly at them, perceiving that something is wrong.)

CHARTERIS. We must make a clean breast of it, I see.

CUTHBERTSON. Clean breast?

CHARTERIS. The truth is, Cuthbertson, Mrs. Tranfield, who is, as you know, the most thoughtful of women, took it into her head that I — well, that I particularly wanted to speak to Miss Craven alone. So she said she was tired and wanted to go to bed.

CRAVEN (scandalized). Tut! tut!

CUTHBERTSON. Oho! is that it? Then it’s all right. She never goes to bed as early as this. I’ll fetch her in a moment. (He goes out confidently, leaving Charteris aghast.)

JULIA. Now you’ve done it. (She rushes to the round table and snatches up her mantle and bonnet.) I’m off. (She makes for the door.)

CRAVEN (horrified). What are you doing, Julia? You can’t go until you’ve said good night to Mrs. Tranfield. It would be horribly rude.

JULIA. You can stay if you like, Daddy: I can’t. I’ll wait for you in the hall. (She hurries out.)

CRAVEN (following her). But what on earth am I to say? (Stopping as she disappears, and turning to Charteris grumbling) Now really you know, Charteris, this is devilish awkward, upon my life it is. That was a most indelicate thing of you to say plump out before us all — that about you and Julia.

CHARTERIS. I’ll explain it all to-morrow. Just at present we’d really better follow Julia’s example and bolt. (He starts for the door.)

CRAVEN (intercepting him). Stop! don’t leave me like this: I shall look like a fool. Now I shall really take it in bad part if you run away, Charteris.

CHARTERIS (resignedly). All right. I’ll stay. (Lifts himself on to the shoulder of the grand piano and sits there swinging his legs and contemplating Craven resignedly.)

CRAVEN (pacing up and down). I’m excessively vexed about Julia’s conduct, I am indeed. She can’t bear to be crossed in the slightest thing, poor child. I’ll have to apologize for her you know: her going away is a downright slap in the face for these people here. Cuthbertson may be offended already for all I know.

CHARTERIS. Oh never mind about him. Mrs. Tranfield bosses this establishment.

CRAVEN (cunningly). Ah, that’s it, is it? He’s just the sort of fellow that would have no control over his daughter. (He goes back to his former place on the hearthrug with his back to the fire.) By the bye, what the dickens did he mean by all that about passing his life amid — what was it?— “scenes of suffering nobly endured and sacrifice willingly rendered by womanly women and manly men” and a lot more of the same sort? I suppose he’s something in a hospital.

CHARTERIS. Hospital! Nonsense: he’s a dramatic critic. Didn’t you hear me say that he was the leading representative of manly sentiment in London?

CRAVEN. You don’t say so. Now really, who’d have thought it! How jolly it must be to be able to go to the theatre for nothing! I must ask him to get me a few tickets occasionally. But isn’t it ridiculous for a man to talk like that! I’m hanged if he don’t take what he sees on the stage quite seriously.

CHARTERIS. Of course: that’s why he’s a good critic. Besides, if you take people seriously off the stage, why shouldn’t you take them seriously on it, where they’re under some sort of decent restraint? (He jumps down off piano and goes up to the window. Cuthbertson comes back.)

CUTHBERTSON (to Craven, rather sheepishly). The fact is, Grace has gone to bed. I must apologize to you and Miss — (He turns to Julia’s seat, and stops on seeing it vacant.)

CRAVEN (embarrassed). It is I who have to apologize for Julia, Jo. She —

CHARTERIS (interrupting). She said she was quite sure that if we didn’t go, you’d persuade Mrs. Tranfield to get up to say good night for the sake of politeness; so she went straight off.

CUTHBERTSON. Very kind of her indeed. I’m really ashamed —

CRAVEN. Don’t mention it, Jo, don’t mention it. She’s waiting for me below. (Going.) Good night. Good night, Charteris.

CHARTERIS. Good night.

CUTHBERTSON (seeing Craven out). Goodnight. Say good night and thanks to Miss Craven for me. To-morrow any time after twelve, remember. (They go out; and Charteris with a long sigh crosses to the fireplace, thoroughly tired out.)

CRAVEN (outside). All right.

CUTHBERTSON (outside). Take care of the stairs; they’re rather steep. Good night. (The outside door shuts; and Cuthbertson returns. Instead of entering, he stands in the doorway with one hand in the breast of his waistcoat, eyeing Charteris sternly.)

CHARTERIS. What’s the matter?

CUTHBERTSON (sternly). Charteris: what’s been going on here? I insist on knowing. Grace has not gone to bed: I have seen and spoken with her. What is it all about?

CHARTERIS. Ask your theatrical experience, Cuthbertson. A man, of course.

CUTHBERTSON (coming forward and confronting him). Don’t play the fool with me, Charteris: I’m too old a hand to be amused by it. I ask you, seriously, what’s the matter?

CHARTERIS. I tell you, seriously, I’m the matter, Julia wants to marry me: I want to marry Grace. I came here to-night to sweetheart Grace. Enter Julia. Alarums and excursions. Exit Grace. Enter you and Craven. Subterfuges and excuses. Exeunt Craven and Julia. And here we are. That’s the whole story. Sleep over it. Good night. (He leaves.)

CUTHBERTSON (staring after him). Well I’ll be — (The act drop descends.)

END OF ACT I.

ACT II

Next day at noon, in the Library of the Ibsen club. A spacious room, with glass doors right and left. At the back, in the middle, is the fireplace, surmounted by a handsome mantelpiece, with a bust of Ibsen, and decorated inscriptions of the titles of his plays. There are circular recesses at each side of fireplace, with divan seats running round them, and windows at the top, the space between the divan and the window sills being lined with books. A long settee is placed before the fire. Along the back of the settee, and touching it, is a green table, littered with journals. A revolving bookcase stands in the foreground, a little to the left, with an easy chair close to it. On the right, between the door and the recess, is a light library stepladder. Placards inscribed “silence” are conspicuously exhibited here and there.

(Cuthbertson is seated in the easy chair at the revolving bookstand, reading the “Daily Graphic.” Dr. Paramore is on the divan in the right hand recess, reading “The British Medical Journal.” He is young as age is counted in the professions — barely forty. His hair is wearing bald on his forehead; and his dark arched eyebrows, coming rather close together, give him a conscientiously sinister appearance. He wears the frock coat and cultivates the “bedside manner” of the fashionable physician with scrupulous conventionality. Not at all a happy or frank man, but not consciously unhappy nor intentionally insincere, and highly self satisfied intellectually.

Sylvia Craven is sitting in the middle of the settee before the fire, only the back of her head being visible. She is reading a volume of Ibsen. She is a girl of eighteen, small and trim, wearing a smart tailor-made dress, rather short, and a Newmarket jacket, showing a white blouse with a light silk sash and a man’s collar and watch chain so arranged as to look as like a man’s waistcoat and shirt-front as possible without spoiling the prettiness of the effect. A Page Boy’s voice, monotonously calling for Dr. Paramore, is heard approaching outside on the right.)

PAGE (outside). Dr. Paramore, Dr. Paramore, Dr. Paramore. (He enters carrying a salver with a card on it.) Dr. Par —

PARAMORE (sharply, sitting up). Here, boy. (The boy presents the salver. Paramore takes the card and looks at it.) All right: I’ll come down to him. (The boy goes. Paramore rises, and comes from the recess, throwing his paper on the table.) Good morning, Mr. Cuthbertson (stopping to pull out his cuffs and shake his coat straight) Mrs. Tranfield quite well, I hope?

SYLVIA (turning her head indignantly). Sh — sh — sh! (Paramore turns, surprised. Cuthbertson rises energetically and looks across the bookstand to see who is the author of this impertinence.)

PARAMORE (to Sylvia — stiffly). I beg your pardon, Miss Craven: I did not mean to disturb you.

SYLVIA (flustered and self assertive). You may talk as much as you like if you will only have the common consideration to first ask whether the other people object. What I protest against is your assumption that my presence doesn’t matter because I’m only a female member. That’s all. Now go on, pray: you don’t disturb me in the least. (She turns to the fire, and again buries herself in Ibsen.)

CUTHBERTSON (with emphatic dignity). No gentleman would have dreamt of objecting to our exchanging a few words, madam. (She takes no notice. He resumes angrily.) As a matter of fact I was about to say to Dr. Paramore that if he would care to bring his visitor up here, I should not object. The impudence! (Dashes his paper down on the chair.)

PARAMORE. Oh, many thanks; but it’s only an instrument maker.

CUTHBERTSON. Any new medical discoveries, doctor?

PARAMORE. Well, since you ask me, yes — perhaps a most important one. I have discovered something that has hitherto been overlooked — a minute duct in the liver of the guinea pig. Miss Craven will forgive my mentioning it when I say that it may throw an important light on her father’s case. The first thing, of course, is to find out what the duct is there for.

CUTHBERTSON (reverently — feeling that he is in the presence of science). Indeed. How will you do that?

PARAMORE. Oh, easily enough, by simply cutting the duct and seeing what will happen to the guinea pig. (Sylvia rises, horrified.) I shall require a knife specially made to get at it. The man who is waiting for me downstairs has brought me a few handles to try before fitting it and sending it to the laboratory. I am afraid it would not do to bring such weapons up here.

SYLVIA. If you attempt such a thing, Dr. Paramore, I will complain to the committee. The majority of the committee are anti-vivisectionists. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. (She flounces out at the right hand door.)

PARAMORE (with patient contempt). That’s the sort of thing we scientific men have to put up with nowadays, Mr. Cuthbertson. Ignorance, superstition, sentimentality: they are all one. A guinea pig’s convenience is set above the health and lives of the entire human race.

CUTHBERTSON (vehemently). It’s not ignorance or superstition, Paramore: it’s sheer downright Ibsenism: that’s what it is. I’ve been wanting to sit comfortably at the fire the whole morning; but I’ve never had a chance with that girl there. I couldn’t go and plump myself down on a seat beside her: goodness knows what she’d think I wanted. That’s one of the delights of having women in the club: when they come in here they all want to sit at the fire and adore that bust. I sometimes feel that I should like to take the poker and fetch it a wipe across the nose — ugh!

PARAMORE. I must say I prefer the elder Miss Craven to her sister.

CUTHBERTSON (his eyes lighting up). Ah, Julia! I believe you. A splendid fine creature — every inch a woman. No Ibsenism about her!

PARAMORE. I quite agree with you there, Mr. Cuthbertson. Er — by the way, do you think is Miss Craven attached to Charteris at all?

CUTHBERTSON. What, that fellow! Not he. He hangs about after her; but he’s not man enough for her. A woman of that sort likes a strong, manly, deep-throated, broad-chested man.

PARAMORE (anxiously). Hm, a sort of sporting character, you think?

CUTHBERTSON. Oh, no, no. A scientific man, perhaps, like yourself. But you know what I mean — a MAN. (Strikes himself a sounding blow on the chest.)

PARAMORE. Of course; but Charteris is a man.

CUTHBERTSON. Pah! you don’t see what I mean. (The Page Boy returns with his salver.)

PAGE BOY (calling monotonously as before). Mr. Cuthbertson, Mr. Cuthbertson, Mr. Cuth —

CUTHBERTSON. Here, boy. (He takes a card from the salver.) Bring the gentleman up here. (The boy goes out.) It’s Craven. He’s coming to lunch with me and Charteris. You might join us if you’ve nothing better to do, when you’ve finished with the instrument man. If Julia turns up I’ll ask her too.

PARAMORE (flushing with pleasure). I shall be very happy. Thank you. (He is going out at the right hand door when Craven enters.) Good morning, Colonel Craven.

CRAVEN (at the door). Good morning — glad to see you. I’m looking for Cuthbertson.

PARAMORE (smiling). There he is. (He goes out.)

CUTHBERTSON (greeting Craven effusively). Delighted to see you. Now will you come to the smoking room, or will you sit down here and have a chat while we’re waiting for Charteris. If you like company, the smoking room is always full of women. Here we shall have it pretty well all to ourselves until about three o’clock.

CRAVEN. I don’t like to see women smoking. I’ll make myself comfortable here. (Sits in an easy chair on the right.)

CUTHBERTSON (taking a chair beside him, on his left). Neither do I. There’s not a room in this club where I can enjoy a pipe quietly without a woman coming in and beginning to roll a cigarette. It’s a disgusting habit in a woman: it’s not natural to her sex.

CRAVEN (sighing). Ah, Jo, times have changed since we both courted Molly Ebden all those years ago. I took my defeat well, old chap, didn’t I?

CUTHBERTSON (with earnest approval). You did, Dan. The thought of it has often helped me to behave well myself: it has, on my honour.

CRAVEN. Yes, you always believe in hearth and home, Jo — in a true English wife and a happy wholesome fireside. How did Molly turn out?

CUTHBERTSON (trying to be fair to Molly). Well, not bad. She might have been worse. You see I couldn’t stand her relations: all the men were roaring cads; and she couldn’t get on with my mother. And then she hated being in town; and of course I couldn’t live in the country on account of my work. But we hit it off as well as most people, until we separated.

CRAVEN (taken aback). Separated! (He is irresistibly amused.) Oh, that was the end of the hearth and home, Jo, was it?

CUTHBERTSON (warmly). It was not my fault, Dan. (Sentimentally.) Some day the world will know how I loved that woman. But she was incapable of valuing a true man’s affection. Do you know, she often said she wished she’d married you instead.

CRAVEN (sobered by the suggestion). Dear me, dear me! Well, perhaps it was better as it was. You heard about my marriage, I suppose.

CUTHBERTSON. Oh yes: we all heard of it.

CRAVEN. Well, Jo, I may as well make a clean breast of it — everybody knew it. I married for money.

CUTHBERTSON (encouragingly). And why not, Dan, why not? We can’t get on without it, you know.

CRAVEN (with sincere feeling). I got to be very fond of her, Jo. I had a home until she died. Now everything’s changed. Julia’s always here. Sylvia’s of a different nature; but she’s always here too.

CUTHBERTSON (sympathetically). I know. It’s the same with Grace. She’s always here.

CRAVEN. And now they want me to be always here. They’re at me every day to join the club — to stop my grumbling, I suppose. That’s what I want to consult you about. Do you think I ought to join?

CUTHBERTSON. Well, if you have no conscientious objection —

CRAVEN (testily interrupting him). I object to the existence of the place on principle; but what’s the use of that? Here it is in spite of my objection, and I may as well have the benefit of any good that may be in it.

CUTHBERTSON (soothing him). Of course: that’s the only reasonable view of the matter. Well, the fact is, it’s not so inconvenient as you might think. When you’re at home, you have the house more to yourself; and when you want to have your family about you, you can dine with them at the club.

CRAVEN (not much attracted by this). True.

CUTHBERTSON. Besides, if you don’t want to dine with them, you needn’t.

CRAVEN (convinced). True, very true. But don’t they carry on here, rather?

CUTHBERTSON. Oh, no, they don’t exactly carry on. Of course the usual tone of the club is low, because the women smoke and earn their own living and all that; but still there’s nothing actually to complain of. And it’s convenient, certainly. (Charteris comes in, looking round for them.)

CRAVEN (rising). Do you know, I’ve a great mind to join, just to see what it’s like. Would you mind putting me up?

CUTHBERTSON. Delighted, Dan, delighted. (He grasps Craven’s hand.)

CHARTERIS (putting one hand on Craven’s shoulder and the other on Cuthbertson’s). Bless you, my children! (Cuthbertson, a little wounded in his dignity, moves away. The Colonel takes the jest in the utmost good humor.)

CRAVEN (cordially). Hallo!

CHARTERIS (to Craven). Hope I haven’t disturbed your chat by coming too soon.

CRAVEN. Not at all. Welcome, dear boy. (Shakes his hand.)

CHARTERIS. That’s right. I’m earlier than I intended. The fact is, I have something rather pressing to say to Cuthbertson.

CRAVEN. Private!

CHARTERIS. Not particularly. (To Cuthbertson.) Only what we were speaking of last night.

CUTHBERTSON. Well, Charteris, I think that is private, or ought to be.

CRAVEN (going up towards the table). I’ll just take a look at the Times —

CHARTERIS (stopping him). Oh, it’s no secret: everybody in the club guesses it. (To Cuthbertson.) Has Grace never mentioned to you that she wants to marry me?

CUTHBERTSON (indignantly). She has mentioned that you want to marry her.

CHARTERIS. Ah; but then it’s not what I want, but what Grace wants, that will weigh with you.

CRAVEN (a little shocked). Excuse me Charteris: this is private. I’ll leave you to yourselves. (Again moves towards the table.)

CHARTERIS. Wait a bit, Craven: you’re concerned in this. Julia wants to marry me too.

CRAVEN (in a tone of the strongest remonstrance). Now really! Now upon my life and soul!

CHARTERIS. It’s a fact, I assure you. Didn’t it strike you as rather odd, our being up there last night and Mrs. Tranfield not with us?

CRAVEN. Well, yes it did. But you explained it. And now really, Charteris, I must say your explanation was in shocking bad taste before Julia.

CHARTERIS. Never mind. It was a good, fat, healthy, bouncing lie.

CRAVEN and CUTHBERTSON. Lie!

CHARTERIS. Didn’t you suspect that?

CRAVEN. Certainly not. Did you, Jo?

CUTHBERTSON. No, most emphatically.

CRAVEN. What’s more, I don’t believe you. I’m sorry to have to say such a thing; but you forget that Julia was present and didn’t contradict you.

CHARTERIS. She didn’t want to.

CRAVEN. Do you mean to say that my daughter deceived me?

CHARTERIS. Delicacy towards me compelled her to, Craven.

CRAVEN (taking a very serious tone). Now look here, Charteris: have you any proper sense of the fact that you’re standing between two fathers?

CUTHBERTSON. Quite right, Dan, quite right. I repeat the question on my own account.

CHARTERIS. Well, I’m a little dazed still by standing for so long between two daughters; but I think I grasp the situation. (Cuthbertson flings away with an exclamation of disgust.)

CRAVEN. Then I’m sorry for your manners, Charteris: that’s all. (He turns away sulkily; then suddenly fires up and turns on Charteris.) How dare you tell me my daughter wants to marry you. Who are you, pray, that she should have any such ambition?

CHARTERIS. Just so; she couldn’t have made a worse choice. But she won’t listen to reason. I’ve talked to her like a father myself — I assure you, my dear Craven, I’ve said everything that you could have said; but it’s no use: she won’t give me up. And if she won’t listen to me, what likelihood is there of her listening to you?

CRAVEN (in angry bewilderment). Cuthbertson: did you ever hear anything like this?

CUTHBERTSON. Never! Never!

CHARTERIS. Oh, bother? Come, don’t behave like a couple of conventional old fathers: this is a serious affair. Look at these letters (producing a letter and a letter-card.) This (showing the card) is from Grace — by the way, Cuthbertson, I wish you’d ask her not to write on letter-cards: the blue colour makes it so easy for Julia to pick the bits out of my waste paper basket and piece them together. Now listen. “My dear Leonard: Nothing could make it worth my while to be exposed to such scenes as last night’s. You had much better go back to Julia and forget me. Yours sincerely, Grace Tranfield.”

CUTHBERTSON (infuriated). Damnation!

CHARTERIS (turning to Craven and preparing to read the letter). Now for Julia. (The Colonel turns away to hide his face from Charteris, anticipating a shock, and puts his hand on a chair to steady himself.) “My dearest boy. Nothing will make me believe that this odious woman can take my place in your heart. I send some of the letters you wrote me when we first met; and I ask you to read them. They will recall what you felt when you wrote them. You cannot have changed so much as to be indifferent to me: whoever may have struck your fancy for the moment, your heart is still mine” — and so on: you know the sort of thing— “Ever and always your loving Julia.” (The Colonel sinks on the chair and covers his face with his hand.) You don’t suppose she’s serious, do you: that’s the sort of thing she writes me three times a day. (To Cuthbertson) Grace is in earnest though, confound it. (He holds out Grace’s letter.) A blue card as usual! This time I shall not trust the waste paper basket. (He goes to the fire, and throws the letters into it.)

CUTHBERTSON (facing him with folded arms as he comes down again). May I ask, Mr. Charteris, is this the New Humour?

CHARTERIS (still too preoccupied with his own difficulty to have any sense of the effect he is producing on the others). Oh, stuff! Do you suppose it’s a joke to be situated as I am? You’ve got your head so stuffed with the New Humour and the New Woman and the New This, That and the Other, all mixed up with your own old Adam, that you’ve lost your senses.

CUTHBERTSON (strenuously). Do you see that old man, grown grey in the honoured service of his country, whose last days you have blighted?

CHARTERIS (surprised, looking at Craven and realizing his distress with genuine concern). I’m very sorry. Come, Craven; don’t take it to heart. (Craven shakes his head.) I assure you it means nothing: it happens to me constantly.

CUTHBERTSON. There is only one excuse for you. You are not fully responsible for your actions. Like all advanced people, you have got neurasthenia.

CHARTERIS (appalled). Great Heavens! what’s that?

CUTHBERTSON. I decline to explain. You know as well as I do. I am going downstairs now to order lunch. I shall order it for three; but the third place is for Paramore, whom I have invited, not for you. (He goes out through the left hand door.)

CHARTERIS (putting his hand on Craven’s shoulder). Come, Craven; advise me. You’ve been in this sort of fix yourself probably.

CRAVEN. Charteris: no woman writes such letters to a man unless he has made advances to her.

CHARTERIS (mournfully). How little you know the world, Colonel! The New Woman is not like that.

CRAVEN. I can only give you very old fashioned advice, my boy; and that is that it’s well to be off with the Old Woman before you’re on with the New. I’m sorry you told me. You might have waited for my death: it’s not far off now. (His head droops again. Julia and Paramore enter on the right. Julia stops as she catches sight of Charteris, her face clouding and her breast heaving. Paramore, seeing the Colonel apparently ill, hurries down to him with the bedside manner in full play.)

CHARTERIS (seeing Julia). Oh Lord! (He retreats under the lee of the revolving bookstand.)

PARAMORE (sympathetically to the Colonel). Allow me. (Takes his wrist and begins to count his pulse.)

CRAVEN (looking up). Eh? (Withdraws his hand and rises rather crossly.) No, Paramore: it’s not my liver now: it’s private business. (A chase now begins between Julia and Charteris, all the more exciting to them because the huntress and her prey must alike conceal the real object of their movements from the others. Charteris first makes for the right hand door. Julia immediately moves back to it, barring his path. He doubles back round the bookstand, setting it whirling as he makes for the left door, Julia crossing in pursuit of him. He is about to escape when he is cut off by the return of Cuthbertson. He turns back and sees Julia close upon him. There being nothing else for it, he bolts up into the recess to the left of the fireplace.)

CUTHBERTSON. Good morning, Miss Craven. (They shake hands.) Won’t you join us at lunch? Paramore’s coming too.

JULIA. Thanks: I shall be very pleased. (She goes up with affected purposelessness towards the recess. Charteris, almost trapped in it, crosses to the right hand recess by way of the fender, knocking down the fire irons with a crash as he does so.)

CRAVEN (who has crossed to the whirling bookcase and stopped it). What the dickens are you doing there, Charteris?

CHARTERIS. Nothing. It’s such a confounded room to get about in.

JULIA (maliciously). Yes, isn’t it. (She is moving back to guard the right hand door, when Cuthbertson appears at it.)

CUTHBERTSON. May I take you down? (He offers her his arm.)

JULIA. No, really: you know it’s against the rules of the club to coddle women in any way. Whoever is nearest to the door goes first.

CUTHBERTSON. Oh well, if you insist. Come, gentlemen: let us go to lunch in the Ibsen fashion — the unsexed fashion. (He goes out on the left followed by Paramore, laughing. Craven goes last. He turns at the door to see whether Julia is coming, and stops when he sees she is not.)

CRAVEN. Come, Julia.

JULIA (with patronising affection). Yes, Daddy, dear, presently. (Charteris is meanwhile stealing to the right hand door.) Don’t wait for me: I’ll come in a moment. (The Colonel hesitates.) It’s all right, Daddy.

CRAVEN (very gravely). Don’t be long, my dear. (He goes out.)

CHARTERIS. I’m off. (Makes a dash for the right hand door.)

JULIA (darting at him and seizing his wrist). Aren’t you coming?

CHARTERIS. No. Unhand me Julia. (He tries to get away: she holds him.) If you don’t let me go, I’ll scream for help.

JULIA (reproachfully). Leonard! (He breaks away from her.) Oh, how can you be so rough with me, dear. Did you get my letter?

CHARTERIS. Burnt it — (she turns away, struck to the heart, and buries her face in her hands) — along with hers.

JULIA (quickly turning again). Hers! Has she written to you?

CHARTERIS. Yes, to break off with me on your account.

JULIA (her eyes gleaming). Ah!

CHARTERIS. You are pleased. Wretch! Now you have lost the last scrap of my regard. (He turns to go, but is stopped by the return of Sylvia. Julia turns away and stands pretending to read a paper which she picks up from the table.)

SYLVIA (offhandedly). Hallo, Charteris: how are you getting on? (She takes his arm familiarly and walks down the room with him.) Have you seen Grace Tranfield this morning? (Julia drops the paper and comes a step nearer to listen.) You generally know where she is to be found.

CHARTERIS. I shall never know any more, Sylvia. She’s quarrelled with me.

SYLVIA. Sylvia! How often am I to tell you that I am not Sylvia at the club?

CHARTERIS. I forgot. I beg your pardon, Craven, old chap (slaps her on the shoulder).

SYLVIA. That’s better — a little overdone, but better.

JULIA. Don’t be a fool, Silly.

SYLVIA. Remember, Julia, if you please, that here we are members of the club, not sisters. I don’t take liberties with you here on family grounds: don’t you take any with me. (She goes to the settee and resumes her former place.)

CHARTERIS. Quite right, Craven. Down with the tyranny of the elder sister!

JULIA. You ought to know better than to encourage a child to make herself ridiculous, Leonard, even at my expense.

CHARTERIS (seating himself on the edge of the table). Your lunch will be cold, Julia. (Julia is about to retort furiously when she is checked by the reappearance of Cuthbertson at the left hand door.)

CUTHBERTSON. What has become of you, Miss Craven? Your father is getting quite uneasy. We’re all waiting for you.

JULIA. So I have just been reminded, thank you. (She goes out angrily past him, Sylvia looking round to see.)

CUTHBERTSON (looking first after her, then at Charteris). More neurasthenia. (He follows her.)

SYLVIA (jumping up on her knees on the settee and speaking over the back of it). What’s up, Charteris? Julia been making love to you?

CHARTERIS (speaking to her over his shoulder). No. Blowing me up for making love to Grace.

SYLVIA. Serve you right. You are an awful devil for philandering.

CHARTERIS (calmly). Do you consider it good club form to talk that way to a man who might nearly be your father?

SYLVIA (knowingly). Oh, I know you, my lad.

CHARTERIS. Then you know that I never pay any special attention to any woman.

SYLVIA (thoughtfully). Do you know, Leonard, I really believe you. I don’t think you care a bit more for one woman than for another.

CHARTERIS. You mean I don’t care a bit less for one woman than another.

SYLVIA. That makes it worse. But what I mean is that you never bother about their being only women: you talk to them just as you do to me or any other fellow. That’s the secret of your success. You can’t think how sick they get of being treated with the respect due to their sex.

CHARTERIS. Ah, if Julia only had your wisdom, Craven! (He gets off the table with a sigh and perches himself reflectively on the stepladder.)

SYLVIA. She can’t take things easy, can she, old man? But don’t you be afraid of breaking her heart: she gets over her little tragedies. We found that out at home when our great sorrow came.

CHARTERIS. What was that?

SYLVIA. I mean when we learned that poor papa had Paramore’s disease. But it was too late to inoculate papa. All they could do was to prolong his life for two years more by putting him on a strict diet. Poor old boy! they cut off his liquor; and he’s not allowed to eat meat.

CHARTERIS. Your father appears to me to be uncommonly well.

SYLVIA. Yes, you would think he was a great deal better. But the microbes are at work, slowly but surely. In another year it will be all over. Poor old Dad! it’s unfeeling to talk about him in this attitude: I must sit down properly. (She comes down from the settee and takes the chair near the bookstand.) I should like papa to live for ever just to take the conceit out of Paramore. I believe he’s in love with Julia.

CHARTERIS (starting up excitedly). In love with Julia! A ray of hope on the horizon! Do you really mean it?

SYLVIA. I should think I do. Why do you suppose he’s hanging about the club to-day in a beautiful new coat and tie instead of attending to his patients? That lunch with Julia will finish him. He’ll ask Daddy’s consent before they come back — I’ll bet you three to one he will, in anything you please.

CHARTERIS. Gloves?

SYLVIA. No: cigarettes.

CHARTERIS. Done! But what does she think about it? Does she give him any encouragement?

SYLVIA. Oh, the usual thing. Enough to keep any other woman from getting him.

CHARTERIS. Just so. I understand. Now listen to me: I am going to speak as a philosopher. Julia is jealous of everybody — everybody. If she saw you flirting with Paramore she’d begin to value him directly. You might play up a little, Craven, for my sake — eh?

SYLVIA (rising). You’re too awful, Leonard. For shame? However, anything to oblige a fellow Ibsenite. I’ll bear your affair in mind. But I think it would be more effective if you got Grace to do it.

CHARTERIS. Think so? Hm! perhaps you’re right.

PAGE BOY (outside as before). Dr. Paramore, Dr. Paramore, Dr. Paramore —

SYLVIA. They ought to get that boy’s voice properly cultivated: it’s a disgrace to the club. (She goes into the recess on Ibsen’s left. The page enters carrying the British Medical Journal.)

CHARTERIS (calling to the page). Dr. Paramore is in the dining room.

PAGE BOY. Thank you, sir. (He is about to go into the dining room when Sylvia swoops on him.)

SYLVIA. Here: where are you taking that paper? It belongs to this room.

PAGE BOY. It’s Dr. Paramore’s particular orders, miss. The British Medical Journal has always to be brought to him dreckly it comes.

SYLVIA. What cheek? Charteris: oughtn’t we to stop this on principle?

CHARTERIS. Certainly not. Principle’s the poorest reason I know for making yourself nasty.

SYLVIA. Bosh! Ibsen!

CHARTERIS (to the page). Off with you, my boy: Dr. Paramore’s waiting breathless with expectation.

PAGE BOY (seriously). Indeed, sir. (He hurries off.)

CHARTERIS. That boy will make his way in this country. He has no sense of humour. (Grace comes in. Her dress, very convenient and businesslike, is made to please herself and serve her own purposes without the slightest regard to fashion, though by no means without a careful concern for her personal elegance. She enters briskly, like an habitually busy woman.)

SYLVIA (running to her). Here you are at last Tranfield, old girl. I’ve been waiting for you this last hour. I’m starving.

GRACE. All right, dear. (To Charteris.) Did you get my letter?

CHARTERIS. Yes. I wish you wouldn’t write on those confounded blue letter cards.

SYLVIA (to Grace). Shall I go down first and secure a table?

CHARTERIS (taking the reply out of Grace’s mouth). Do, old boy.

SYLVIA. Don’t be too long. (She goes into the dining room.)

GRACE. Well?

CHARTERIS. I’m afraid to face you after last night. Can you imagine a more horrible scene? Don’t you hate the very sight of me after it?

GRACE. Oh, no.

CHARTERIS. Then you ought to. Ugh! it was hideous — an insult — an outrage. A nice end to all my plans for making you happy — for making you an exception to all the women who swear I have made them miserable!

GRACE (sitting down placidly). I am not at all miserable. I’m sorry; but I shan’t break my heart.

CHARTERIS. No: yours is a thoroughbred heart: you don’t scream and cry every time it’s pinched. That’s why you are the only possible woman for me.

GRACE (shaking her head). Not now. Never any more.

CHARTERIS. Never! What do you mean?

GRACE. What I say, Leonard.

CHARTERIS. Jilted again! The fickleness of women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. Well, well! I see how it is, Grace: you can’t get over that horrible scene last night. Imagine her saying I had kissed her within the last two days!

GRACE (rising eagerly). Was that not true?

CHARTERIS. True! No: a thumping lie.

GRACE. Oh, I’m so glad. That was the only thing that really hurt me.

CHARTERIS. Just why she said it. How adorable of you to care! My darling. (He seizes her hands and presses them to his breast.)

GRACE. Remember! it’s all broken off.

CHARTERIS. Ah yes: you have my heart in your hands. Break it. Throw my happiness out of the window.

GRACE. Oh, Leonard, does your happiness really depend on me?

CHARTERIS (tenderly). Absolutely. (She beams with delight. A sudden revulsion comes to him at the sight: he recoils, dropping her hands and crying) Ah no: why should I lie to you? (He folds his arms and adds firmly) My happiness depends on nobody but myself. I can do without you.

GRACE (nerving herself). So you shall. Thank you for the truth. Now I will tell you the truth.

CHARTERIS (unfolding his arms and again recoiling). No, please. Don’t. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I don’t like it: it hurts.

GRACE (quietly). It’s only that I love you.

CHARTERIS. Ah! that’s not a philosophic truth. You may tell me that as often as you like. (He takes her in his arms.)

GRACE. Yes, Leonard; but I’m an advanced woman. (He checks himself and looks at her in some consternation.) I’m what my father calls a New Woman. (He lets her go and stares at her.) I quite agree with all your ideas.

CHARTERIS (scandalized). That’s a nice thing for a respectable woman to say! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

GRACE. I am quite in earnest about them too, though you are not; and I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me: I should be utterly in his power. That’s what the New Woman is like. Isn’t she right, Mr. Philosopher?

CHARTERIS. The struggle between the Philosopher and the Man is fearful, Grace. But the Philosopher says you are right.

GRACE. I know I am right. And so we must part.

CHARTERIS. Not at all. You must marry some one else; and then I’ll come and philander with you. (Sylvia comes back.)

SYLVIA (holding the door open). Oh, I say: come along. I’m starving.

CHARTERIS. So am I. I’ll lunch with you if I may.

SYLVIA. I thought you would. I’ve ordered soup for three. (Grace passes out. Sylvia continues, to Charteris) You can watch Paramore from our table: he’s pretending to read the British Medical Journal; but he must be making up his mind for the plunge: he looks green with nervousness.

CHARTERIS. Good luck to him. (He goes out, followed by Sylvia.)

END OF ACT II.

ACT III

Still the library. Ten minutes later. Julia, angry and miserable, comes in from the dining room, followed by Craven. She crosses the room tormentedly, and throws herself into a chair.

CRAVEN (impatiently). What is the matter? Has everyone gone mad to-day? What do you mean by suddenly getting up from the table and tearing away like that? What does Paramore mean by reading his paper and not answering when he’s spoken to? (Julia writhes impatiently.) Come, come (tenderly): won’t my pet tell her own father what — (irritably) what the devil is wrong with everybody? Do pull yourself straight, Julia, before Cuthbertson comes. He’s only paying the bill: he’ll be here in a moment.

JULIA. I couldn’t bear it any longer. Oh, to see them sitting there at lunch together, laughing, chatting, making game of me! I should have screamed out in another moment — I should have taken a knife and killed her — I should have — (Cuthbertson appears with the luncheon bill in his hand. He stuffs it into his waistcoat pocket as he comes to them. He begins speaking the moment he enters.)

CUTHBERTSON. I’m afraid you’ve had a very poor lunch, Dan. It’s disheartening to see you picking at a few beans and drinking soda water. I wonder how you live!

JULIA. That’s all he ever takes, Mr. Cuthbertson, I assure you. He hates to be bothered about it.

CRAVEN. Where’s Paramore?

CUTHBERTSON. Reading his paper, I asked him wasn’t he coming; but he didn’t hear me. It’s amazing how anything scientific absorbs him. Clever man! Monstrously clever man!

CRAVEN (pettishly). Oh yes, that’s all very well, Jo; but it’s not good manners at table: he should shut up the shop sometimes. Heaven knows I am only too anxious to forget his science, since it has pronounced my doom. (He sits down with a melancholy air.)

CUTHBERTSON (compassionately). You mustn’t think about that, Craven: perhaps he was mistaken. (He sighs deeply and sits down.) But he is certainly a very clever fellow. He thinks twice before he commits himself. (They sit in silence, full of the gloomiest thoughts. Suddenly Paramore enters, pale and in the utmost disorder, with the British Medical Journal in his clenched hand. They rise in alarm. He tries to speak, but chokes, clutches at his throat, and staggers. Cuthbertson quickly takes his chair and places it behind Paramore, who sinks into it as they crowd about him, Craven at his right shoulder, Cuthbertson on his left, and Julia behind Craven.)

CRAVEN. What’s the matter, Paramore?

JULIA. Are you ill?

CUTHBERTSON. No bad news, I hope?

PARAMORE (despairingly). The worst of news! Terrible news! Fatal news! My disease —

CRAVEN (quickly). Do you mean my disease?

PARAMORE (fiercely). I mean my disease — Paramore’s disease — the disease I discovered — the work of my life. Look here (pointing to the B. M. J. with a ghastly expression of horror.) If this is true, it was all a mistake: there is no such disease. (Cuthbertson and Julia look at one another, hardly daring to believe the good news.)

CRAVEN (in strong remonstrance). And you call this bad news! Now really, Paramore —

PARAMORE (cutting him short hoarsely). It’s natural for you to think only of yourself. I don’t blame you: all invalids are selfish. Only a scientific man can feel what I feel now. (Writhing under a sense of intolerable injustice.) It’s the fault of the wickedly sentimental laws of this country. I was not able to make experiments enough — only three dogs and a monkey. Think of that, with all Europe full of my professional rivals — men burning to prove me wrong! There is freedom in France — enlightened republican France. One Frenchman experiments on two hundred monkeys to disprove my theory. Another sacrifices 36 pounds — three hundred dogs at three francs apiece — to upset the monkey experiments. A third proves them to be both wrong by a single experiment in which he gets the temperature of a camel’s liver 60 degrees below zero. And now comes this cursed Italian who has ruined me. He has a government grant to buy animals with, besides the run of the largest hospital in Italy. (With desperate resolution) But I won’t be beaten by any Italian. I’ll go to Italy myself. I’ll re-discover my disease: I know it exists; I feel it; and I’ll prove it if I have to experiment on every mortal animal that’s got a liver at all. (He folds his arms and breathes hard at them.)

CRAVEN (his sense of injury growing upon him). Am I to understand, Paramore, that you took it on yourself to pass sentence of death — yes, of Death — on me, on the strength of three dogs and an infernal monkey?

PARAMORE (utterly contemptuous of Craven’s narrow personal view of the matter). Yes. That was all I could get a license for.

CRAVEN. Now upon my soul, Paramore, I’m vexed at this. I don’t wish to be unfriendly; but I’m extremely vexed, really. Why, confound it, do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve cut off my meat and drink for a year — made me an object of public scorn — a miserable vegetarian and a teetotaller.

PARAMORE (rising). Well, you can make up for lost time now. (Bitterly, shewing Craven the Journal) There! you can read for yourself. The camel was fed on beef dissolved in alcohol; and he gained weight under it. Eat and drink as much as you please. (Still unable to stand without support, he makes his way past Cuthbertson to the revolving bookcase and stands there with his back to them, leaning on it with his head on his hand.)

CRAVEN (grumbling). Oh yes, it’s very easy for you to talk, Paramore. But what am I to say to the Humanitarian societies and the Vegetarian societies that have made me a Vice President?

CUTHBERTSON (chuckling). Aha! You made a virtue of it, did you, Dan?

CRAVEN (warmly). I made a virtue of necessity, Jo. No one can blame me.

JULIA (soothing him). Well, never mind, Daddy. Come back to the dining room and have a good beefsteak.

CRAVEN (shuddering). Ugh! (Plaintively) No: I’ve lost my old manly taste for it. My very nature’s been corrupted by living on pap. (To Paramore.) That’s what comes of all this vivisection. You go experimenting on horses; and of course the result is that you try to get me into condition by feeding me on beans.

PARAMORE (curtly, without changing his position). Well, if they’ve done you good, so much the better for you.

CRAVEN (querulously). That’s all very well; but it’s very vexing. You don’t half see how serious it is to make a man believe that he has only another year to live: you really don’t, Paramore: I can’t help saying it. I’ve made my will, which was altogether unnecessary; and I’ve been reconciled to a lot of people I’d quarrelled with — people I can’t stand under ordinary circumstances. Then I’ve let the girls get round me at home to an extent I should never have done if I’d had my life before me. I’ve done a lot of serious thinking and reading and extra church going. And now it turns out simple waste of time. On my soul, it’s too disgusting: I’d far rather die like a man when I said I would.

PARAMORE (as before). Perhaps you may. Your heart’s shaky, if that’s any satisfaction to you.

CRAVEN (offended). You must excuse me, Paramore, if I say that I no longer feel any confidence in your opinion as a medical man. (Paramore’s eye flashes: he straightens himself and listens.) I paid you a pretty stiff fee for that consultation when you condemned me; and I can’t say I think you gave me value for it.

PARAMORE (turning and facing Craven with dignity). That’s unanswerable, Colonel Craven. I shall return the fee.

CRAVEN. Oh, it’s not the money; but I think you ought to realize your position. (Paramore turns stiffly away. Craven follows him impulsively, exclaiming remorsefully) Well, perhaps it was a nasty thing of me to allude to it. (He offers Paramore his hand.)

PARAMORE (conscientiously taking it). Not at all. You are quite in the right, Colonel Craven. My diagnosis was wrong; and I must take the consequences.

CRAVEN (holding his hand). No, don’t say that. It was natural enough: my liver is enough to set any man’s diagnosis wrong. (A long handshake, very trying to Paramore’s nerves. Paramore then retires to the recess on Ibsen’s left, and throws himself on the divan with a half suppressed sob, bending over the British Medical Journal with his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees.)

CUTHBERTSON (who has been rejoicing with Julia at the other side of the room). Well, let’s say no more about it. I congratulate you, Craven, and hope you may long be spared. (Craven offers his hand.) No, Dan: your daughter first. (He takes Julia’s hand gently and hands her across to Craven, into whose arms she flies with a gush of feeling.)

JULIA. Dear old Daddy!

CRAVEN. Ah, is Julia glad that the old Dad is let off for a few years more?

JULIA (almost crying). Oh, so glad: so glad! (Cuthbertson sobs audibly. The Colonel is affected. Sylvia, entering from the dining room, stops abruptly at the door on seeing the three. Paramore, in the recess, escapes her notice.)

SYLVIA. Hallo!

CRAVEN. Tell her the news, Julia: it would sound ridiculous from me. (He goes to the weeping Cuthbertson, and pats him consolingly on the shoulder.)

JULIA. Silly: only think! Dad’s not ill at all. It was only a mistake of Dr. Paramore’s. Oh, dear! (She catches Craven’s left hand and stoops to kiss it, his right hand being still on Cuthbertson’s shoulder.)

SYLVIA (contemptuously). I knew it. Of course it was nothing but eating too much. I always said Paramore was an ass. (Sensation. Cuthbertson, Craven and Julia turn in consternation.)

PARAMORE (without malice). Never mind, Miss Craven. That is what is being said all over Europe now. Never mind.

SYLVIA (a little abashed). I’m so sorry, Dr. Paramore. You must excuse a daughter’s feelings.

CRAVEN (huffed). It evidently doesn’t make much difference to you, Sylvia.

SYLVIA. I’m not going to be sentimental over it, Dad, you may bet. (Coming to Craven.) Besides, I knew it was nonsense all along. (Petting him.) Poor dear old Dad! why should your days be numbered any more than any one else’s? (He pats her cheek, mollified. Julia impatiently turns away from them.) Come to the smoking room, and let’s see what you can do after teetotalling for a year.

CRAVEN (playfully). Vulgar little girl! (He pinches her ear.) Shall we come, Jo! You’ll be the better for a pick-me-up after all this emotion.

CUTHBERTSON. I’m not ashamed of it, Dan. It has done me good. (He goes up to the table and shakes his fist at the bust over the mantelpiece.) It would do you good too if you had eyes and ears to take it in.

CRAVEN (astonished). Who?

SYLVIA. Why, good old Henrik, of course.

CRAVEN (puzzled). Henrik?

CUTHBERTSON (impatiently). Ibsen, man: Ibsen. (He goes out by the staircase door followed by Sylvia, who kisses her hand to the bust as she passes. Craven stares blankly after her, and then up at the bust. Giving the problem up as insoluble, he shakes his head and follows them. Near the door he checks himself and comes back.)

CRAVEN (softly). By the way, Paramore? —

PARAMORE (rousing himself with an effort). Yes?

CRAVEN. You weren’t in earnest that time about my heart, were you?

PARAMORE. Oh, nothing, nothing. There’s a slight murmur — mitral valves a little worn, perhaps; but they’ll last your time if you’re careful. Don’t smoke too much.

CRAVEN. What! More privations! Now really, Paramore, really —

PARAMORE (rising distractedly). Excuse me: I can’t pursue the subject. I — I —

JULIA. Don’t worry him now, Daddy.

CRAVEN. Well, well: I won’t. (He comes to Paramore, who is pacing restlessly up and down the middle of the room.) Come, Paramore, I’m not selfish, believe me: I can feel for your disappointment. But you must face it like a man. And after all, now really, doesn’t this shew that there’s a lot of rot about modern science? Between ourselves, you know, it’s horribly cruel: you must admit that it’s a deuced nasty thing to go ripping up and crucifying camels and monkeys. It must blunt all the finer feelings sooner or later.

PARAMORE (turning on him). How many camels and horses and men were ripped up in that Soudan campaign where you won your Victoria Cross, Colonel Craven?

CRAVEN (firing up). That was fair fighting — a very different thing, Paramore.

PARAMORE. Yes, Martinis and machine guns against naked spearmen.

CRAVEN (hotly). I took my chance with the rest, Dr. Paramore. I risked my own life: don’t forget that.

PARAMORE (with equal spirit). And I have risked mine, as all doctors do, oftener than any soldier.

CRAVEN. That’s true. I didn’t think of that. I beg your pardon, Paramore: I’ll never say another word against your profession. But I hope you’ll let me stick to the good old-fashioned shaking up treatment for my liver — a clinking run across country with the hounds.

PARAMORE (with bitter irony). Isn’t that rather cruel — a pack of dogs ripping up a fox?

JULIA (coming coaxingly between them). Oh, please don’t begin arguing again. Do go to the smoking room, Daddy: Mr. Cuthbertson will wonder what has become of you.

CRAVEN. Very well, very well: I’ll go. But you’re really not reasonable to-day, Paramore, to talk that way of fair sport —

JULIA. Sh — sh (coaxing him toward the door).

CRAVEN. Well, well, I’m off. (He goes good-humoredly, pushed out by Julia.)

JULIA (turning at the door with her utmost witchery of manner). Don’t look so disappointed, Dr. Paramore. Cheer up. You’ve been most kind to us; and you’ve done papa a lot of good.

PARAMORE (delighted, rushing over to her). How beautiful it is of you to say that to me, Miss Craven!

JULIA. I hate to see any one unhappy. I can’t bear unhappiness. (She runs out, casting a Parthian glance at him as she flies. Paramore stands enraptured, gazing after her through the glass door. Whilst he is thus absorbed Charteris comes in from the dining room and touches him on the arm.)

PARAMORE (starting). Eh! What’s the matter?

CHARTERIS (significantly). Charming woman, isn’t she, Paramore? (Looking admiringly at him.) How have you managed to fascinate her?

PARAMORE. I! Do you really mean — (He looks at him; then recovers himself and adds coldly.) Excuse me: this is a subject I do not care to jest about. (He walks away from Charteris down the side of the room, and sits down in an easy chair reading his Journal to intimate that he does not wish to pursue the conversation.)

CHARTERIS (ignoring the hint and coolly taking a chair beside him). Why don’t you get married, Paramore? You know it’s a scandalous thing for a man in your profession to be single.

PARAMORE (shortly, still pretending to read). That’s my own business, not yours.

CHARTERIS. Not at all: it’s pre-eminently a social question. You’re going to get married, aren’t you?

PARAMORE. Not that I am aware of.

CHARTERIS (alarmed). No! Don’t say that. Why?

PARAMORE (rising angrily and rapping one of the SILENCE placards). Allow me to call your attention to that. (He crosses to the easy chair near the revolving bookstand, and flings himself into it with determined hostility.)

CHARTERIS (following him, too deeply concerned to mind the rebuff). Paramore: you alarm me more than I can say. You’ve been and muffed this business somehow. I know perfectly well what you’ve been up to; and I fully expected to find you a joyful accepted suitor.

PARAMORE (angrily). Yes, you have been watching me because you admire Miss Craven yourself. Well, you may go in and win now. You will be pleased to hear that I am a ruined man.

CHARTERIS. You! Ruined! How? The turf?

PARAMORE (contemptuously). The turf!! Certainly not.

CHARTERIS. Paramore: if the loan of all I possess will help you over this difficulty, you’re welcome to it.

PARAMORE (rising in surprise). Charteris! I — (suspiciously.) Are you joking?

CHARTERIS. Why on earth do you always suspect me of joking? I never was more serious in my life.

PARAMORE (shamed by Charteris’s generosity). Then I beg your pardon. I thought the news would please you.

CHARTERIS (deprecating this injustice to his good feeling). My dear fellow — !

PARAMORE. I see I was wrong. I am really very sorry. (They shake hands.) And now you may as well learn the truth. I had rather you heard it from me than from the gossip of the club. My liver discovery has been — er — er — (he cannot bring himself to say it).

CHARTERIS (helping him out). Confirmed? (Sadly.) I see: the poor Colonel’s doomed.

PARAMORE. No: on the contrary, it has been — er — called in question. The Colonel now believes himself to be in perfectly good health; and my friendly relations with the Cravens are entirely spoiled.

CHARTERIS. Who told him about it?

PARAMORE. I did, of course, the moment I read the news in this. (He shews the Journal and puts it down on the bookstand.)

CHARTERIS. Why, man, you’ve been a messenger of glad tidings! Didn’t you congratulate him?

PARAMORE (scandalised). Congratulate him! Congratulate a man on the worst blow pathological science has received for the last three hundred years!

CHARTERIS. No, no, no. Congratulate him on having his life saved. Congratulate Julia on having her father spared. Swear that your discovery and your reputation are as nothing to you compared with the pleasure of restoring happiness to the household in which the best hopes of your life are centred. Confound it, man, you’ll never get married if you can’t turn things to account with a woman in these little ways.

PARAMORE (gravely). Excuse me; but my self-respect is dearer to me even than Miss Craven. I cannot trifle with scientific questions for the sake of a personal advantage. (He turns away coldly and goes toward the table.)

CHARTERIS. Well, this beats me! The nonconformist conscience is bad enough; but the scientific conscience is the very devil. (He follows Paramore and puts his arm familiarly round his shoulder, bringing him back again whilst he speaks.) Now look here, Paramore: I’ve got no conscience in that sense at all: I loathe it as I loathe all the snares of idealism; but I have some common humanity and common sense. (He replaces him in the easy chair and sits down opposite him.) Come: what is a really scientific theory? — a true theory, isn’t it?

PARAMORE. No doubt.

CHARTERIS. For instance, you have a theory about Craven’s liver, eh?

PARAMORE. I still believe that to be a true theory, though it has been upset for the moment.

CHARTERIS. And you have a theory that it would be pleasant to be married to Julia?

PARAMORE. I suppose so — in a sense.

CHARTERIS. That theory also will be upset, probably, before you’re a year older.

PARAMORE. Always cynical, Charteris.

CHARTERIS. Never mind that. Now it’s a perfectly damnable thing for you to hope that your liver theory is true, because it amounts to hoping that Craven will die an agonizing death. (This strikes Paramore as paradoxical; but it startles him.) But it’s amiable and human to hope that your theory about Julia is right, because it amounts to hoping that she may live happily ever after.

PARAMORE. I do hope that with all my soul — (correcting himself) I mean with all my function of hoping.

CHARTERIS. Then, since both theories are equally scientific, why not devote yourself, as a humane man, to proving the amiable theory rather than the damnable one?

PARAMORE. But how?

CHARTERIS. I’ll tell you. You think I’m fond of Julia myself. So I am; but then I’m fond of everybody; so I don’t count. Besides, if you try the scientific experiment of asking her whether she loves me, she’ll tell you that she hates and despises me. So I’m out of the running. Nevertheless, like you, I hope that she may be happy with all my — what did you call your soul?

PARAMORE (impatiently). Oh, go on, go on: finish what you were going to say.

CHARTERIS (suddenly affecting complete indifference, and rising carelessly). I don’t know that I have anything more to say. If I were you I should invite the Cravens to tea in honor of the Colonel’s escape from a horrible doom. By the way, if you’ve done with that British Medical Journal, I should like to see how they’ve smashed your theory up.

PARAMORE (wincing as he also rises). Oh, certainly, if you wish it. I have no objection. (He takes the Journal from the bookstand.) I admit that the Italian experiments apparently upset my theory. But please remember that it is doubtful — extremely doubtful — whether anything can be proved by experiments on animals. (He hands Charteris the Journal.)

CHARTERIS (taking it). It doesn’t matter: I don’t intend to make any. (He retires to the recess on Ibsen’s right, picking up the step ladder as he passes and placing it so that he is able to use it for a leg rest as he settles himself to read on the divan with his back to the corner of the mantelpiece. Paramore goes to the left hand door, and is about to leave the library when he meets Grace entering.)

GRACE. How do you do, Dr. Paramore. So glad to see you. (They shake hands.)

PARAMORE. Thanks. Quite well, I hope?

GRACE. Quite, thank you. You’re looking overworked. We must take more care of you, Doctor.

PARAMORE. You are very kind.

GRACE. It is you who are too kind — to your patients. You sacrifice yourself. Have a little rest. Come and talk to me — tell me all about the latest scientific discoveries, and what I ought to read to keep myself up to date. But perhaps you’re busy.

PARAMORE. No, not at all. Only too delighted. (They go into the recess on Ibsen’s left, and sit there chatting in whispers, very confidentially.)

CHARTERIS. How they all love a doctor! They can say what they like to him! (Julia returns. He takes his feet down from the ladder and sits up.) Whew! (Julia wanders down his side of the room, apparently looking for someone. Charteris steals after her.)

CHARTERIS (in a low voice). Looking for me, Julia?

JULIA (starting violently). Oh! How you startled me!

CHARTERIS. Sh! I want to shew you something. Look! (He points to the pair in the recess.)

JULIA (jealously). That woman!

CHARTERIS. My young woman, carrying off your young man.

JULIA. What do you mean? Do you dare insinuate —

CHARTERIS. Sh — sh — sh! Don’t disturb them. (Paramore rises; takes down a book; and sits on a footstool at Grace’s feet.)

JULIA. Why are they whispering like that?

CHARTERIS. Because they don’t want anyone to hear what they are saying to one another. (Paramore shews Grace a picture in the book. They both laugh heartily over it.)

JULIA. What is he shewing her?

CHARTERIS. Probably a diagram of the liver. (Julia, with an exclamation of disgust makes for the recess. Charteris catches her sleeve.) Stop: be careful, Julia. (She frees herself by giving him a push which upsets him into the easy chair; then crosses to the recess and stands looking down at Grace and Paramore from the corner next the fireplace.)

JULIA (with suppressed fury). You seem to have found a very interesting book, Dr. Paramore. (They look up, astonished.) May I ask what it is? (She stoops swiftly; snatches the book from Paramore; and comes down to the table quickly to look at it whilst they rise in amazement.) Good Words! (She flings it on the table and sweeps back past Charteris, exclaiming contemptuously) You fool! (Paramore and Grace, meanwhile, come from the recess; Paramore bewildered, Grace very determined.)

CHARTERIS (aside to Julia as he gets out of the easy chair). Idiot! She’ll have you turned out of the club for this.

JULIA (terrified). She can’t — can she?

PARAMORE. What is the matter, Miss Craven?

CHARTERIS (hastily). Nothing — my fault — a stupid, practical joke. I beg your pardon and Mrs. Tranfield’s.

GRACE (firmly). It is not your fault in the least, Mr. Charteris. Dr. Paramore: will you oblige me by finding Sylvia Craven for me, if you can?

PARAMORE (hesitating). But —

GRACE. I want you to go now, if you please.

PARAMORE (succumbing). Certainly. (He bows and goes out by the staircase door.)

GRACE. You are going with him, Charteris.

JULIA. You will not leave me here to be insulted by this woman, Mr. Charteris. (She takes his arm as if to go with him.)

GRACE. When two ladies quarrel in this club, it is against the rules to settle it when there are gentlemen present — especially the gentleman they are quarrelling about. I presume you do not wish to break that rule, Miss Craven. (Julia sullenly drops Charteris’s arm. Grace turns to Charteris and adds) Now! Trot off.

CHARTERIS. Certainly, certainly. (He follows Paramore ignominiously.)

GRACE (to Julia, with quiet peremptoriness). Now: what have you to say to me?

JULIA (suddenly throwing herself tragically on her knees at Grace’s feet). Don’t take him from me. Oh don’t — don’t be so cruel. Give him back to me. You don’t know what you’re doing — what our past has been — how I love him. You don’t know —

GRACE. Get up; and don’t be a fool. Suppose anyone comes in and sees you in that ridiculous attitude!

JULIA. I hardly know what I’m doing. I don’t care what I’m doing: I’m too miserable. Oh, won’t you listen to me?

GRACE. Do you suppose I am a man to be imposed on by this sort of rubbish?

JULIA (getting up and looking darkly at her). You intend to take him from me, then?

GRACE. Do you expect me to help you to keep him after the way you have behaved?

JULIA (trying her theatrical method in a milder form — reasonable and impulsively goodnatured instead of tragic). I know I was wrong to act as I did last night. I beg your pardon. I am sorry. I was mad.

GRACE. Not a bit mad. You calculated to an inch how far you could go. When he is present to stand between us and play out the scene with you, I count for nothing. When we are alone you fall back on your natural way of getting anything you want — crying for it like a baby until it is given to you.

JULIA (with unconcealed hatred). You learnt this from him.

GRACE. I learnt it from yourself, last night and now. How I hate to be a woman when I see, by you, what wretched childish creatures we are! Those two men would cut you dead and have you turned out of the club if you were a man and had behaved in such a way before them. But because you are only a woman, they are forbearing, sympathetic, gallant — Oh, if you had a scrap of self-respect, their indulgence would make you creep all over. I understand now why Charteris has no respect for women.

JULIA. How dare you say that?

GRACE. Dare! I love him. And I have refused his offer to marry me.

JULIA (incredulous but hopeful). You have refused!

GRACE. Yes: because I will not give myself to any man who has learnt how to treat women from you and your like. I can do without his love, but not without his respect; and it is your fault that I cannot have both. Take his love then; and much good may it do you! Run to him and beg him to have mercy on you and take you back.

JULIA. Oh, what a liar you are! He loved me before he ever saw you — before he ever dreamt of you, you pitiful thing. Do you think I need go down on my knees to men to make them come to me? That may be your experience, you creature with no figure: it is not mine. There are dozens of men who would give their souls for a look from me. I have only to lift my finger.

GRACE. Lift it then; and see whether he will come.

JULIA. How I should like to kill you! I don’t know why I don’t.

GRACE. Yes: you like to get out of your difficulties cheaply — at other people’s expense. It is something to boast of, isn’t it, that dozens of men would make love to you if you invited them?

JULIA (sullenly). I suppose it’s better to be like you, with a cold heart and a serpent’s tongue. Thank Heaven, I have a heart: that is why you can hurt me as I cannot hurt you. And you are a coward. You are giving him up to me without a struggle.

GRACE. Yes, it is for you to struggle. I wish you success. (She turns away contemptuously and is going to the dining-room door when Sylvia enters on the opposite side, followed by Cuthbertson and Craven, who come to Julia, whilst Sylvia crosses to Grace.)

SYLVIA. Here I am, sent by the faithful Paramore. He hinted that I’d better bring the elder members of the family too: here they are. What’s the row?

GRACE (quietly). Nothing, dear. There’s no row.

JULIA (hysterically, tottering and stretching out her arms to Craven). Daddy!

CRAVEN (taking her in his arms). My precious! What’s the matter?

JULIA (through her tears). She’s going to have me expelled from the club; and we shall all be disgraced. Can she do it, Daddy?

CRAVEN. Well, really, the rules of this club are so extraordinary that I don’t know. (To Grace.) May I ask, Mrs. Tranfield, whether you have any complaint to make of my daughter’s conduct?

GRACE. Yes, Colonel Craven. I am going to complain to the committee.

SYLVIA. I knew you’d overdo it some day, Julia. (Craven, at a loss, looks at Cuthbertson.)

CUTHBERTSON. Don’t look at me, Dan. Within these walls a father’s influence counts for nothing.

CRAVEN. May I ask the ground of complaint, Mrs. Tranfield?

GRACE. Simply that Miss Craven is essentially a womanly woman, and, as such, not eligible for membership.

JULIA. It’s false. I’m not a womanly woman. I was guaranteed when I joined just as you were.

GRACE. By Mr. Charteris, I think, at your own request. I shall call him as a witness to your thoroughly womanly conduct just now in his presence and Dr. Paramore’s.

CRAVEN. Cuthbertson: are they joking; or am I dreaming?

CUTHBERTSON (grimly). It’s real, Dan: you’re awake.

SYLVIA (taking Craven’s left arm and hugging it affectionately). Dear old Rip Van Winkle!

CRAVEN. Well, Mrs. Tranfield, all I can say is that I hope you will succeed in establishing your complaint, and that Julia may soon see the last of this most outrageous institution. (Sylvia, still caressing his arm, laughs at him; Charteris returns.)

CHARTERIS (at the door). May I come in?

SYLVIA (releasing the Colonel). Yes: you’re wanted here as a witness. (Charteris comes in.) It’s a bad case of womanliness.

GRACE (half aside to him, significantly). You understand. (Julia, watching them jealously, leaves her father and gets close to Charteris. Grace adds aloud) I shall expect your support before the committee.

JULIA. If you have a scrap of manhood you will take my part.

CHARTERIS. But then I shall be expelled for being a manly man. Besides, I’m on the committee myself; I can’t act as judge and witness, too. You must apply to Paramore: he saw it all.

GRACE. Where is Dr. Paramore?

CHARTERIS. Just gone home.

JULIA (with sudden resolution). What is Dr. Paramore’s number in Savile Row?

CHARTERIS. Seventy-nine. (Julia goes out quickly by the staircase door, to their astonishment. Charteris follows her to the door, which swings back in his face, leaving him staring after her through, the glass. Sylvia runs to Grace.)

SYLVIA. Grace: go after her. Don’t let her get beforehand with Paramore. She’ll tell him the most heartbreaking stories about how she’s been treated, and get him round completely.

CRAVEN (floundering). Sylvia! Is that the way to speak of your sister, miss? (Grace squeezes Sylvia’s hand to console her, and sits down calmly. Sylvia posts herself behind Grace’s chair, leaning over the back to watch the ensuing colloquy between the three men.) I assure you, Mrs. Tranfield, Dr. Paramore has just invited us all to take afternoon tea with him; and if my daughter has gone to his house, she is simply taking advantage of his invitation to extricate herself from a very embarrassing scene here. We’re all going there. Come, Sylvia. (He turns to go, followed by Cuthbertson.)

CHARTERIS (in consternation). Stop! (He gets between Craven and Cuthbertson.) What hurry is there? Can’t you give the man time?

CRAVEN. Time! What for?

CHARTERIS (talking foolishly in his agitation). Well, to get a little rest, you know — a busy professional man like that! He’s not had a moment to himself all day.

CRAVEN. But Julia’s with him.

CHARTERIS. Well, no matter: she’s only one person. And she ought to have an opportunity of laying her case before him. As a member of the committee, I think that’s only just. Be reasonable, Craven: give him half an hour.

CUTHBERTSON (sternly). What do you mean by this, Charteris?

CHARTERIS. Nothing, I assure you. Only common consideration for poor Paramore.

CUTHBERTSON. You’ve some motive. Craven: I strongly advise that we go at once. (He grasps the door handle.)

CHARTERIS (coaxingly). No, no. (He puts his hand persuasively on Craven’s arm, adding) It’s not good for your liver, Craven, to rush about immediately after lunch.

CUTHBERTSON. His liver’s cured. Come on. Craven. (He opens the door.)

CHARTERIS (catching Cuthbertson by the sleeve). Cuthbertson, you’re mad. Paramore’s going to propose to Julia. We must give him time: he’s not the man to come to the point in three minutes as you or I would. (Turning to Craven) Don’t you see? — that will get me out of the difficulty we were speaking of this morning — you and I and Cuthbertson. You remember?

CRAVEN. Now, is this a thing to say plump out before everybody, Charteris? Confound it, have you no decency?

CUTHBERTSON (severely). None whatever.

CHARTERIS (turning to Cuthbertson). No — don’t be unkind, Cuthbertson. Back me up. My future, her future, Mrs. Tranfield’s future, Craven’s future, everybody’s future depends on our finding Julia Paramore’s affianced bride when we go over to Savile Row. He’s certain to propose if you’ll only give him time. You know you’re a kindly and sensible man as well as a deucedly clever one, Cuthbertson, in spite of all your nonsense. Say a word for me.

CRAVEN. I’m quite willing to leave the decision to Cuthbertson; and I have no doubt whatever as to what that decision will be. (Cuthbertson carefully shuts the door, and comes back into the room with an air of weighty reflection.)

CUTHBERTSON. I am now going to speak as a man of the world: that is, without moral responsibility.

CRAVEN. Quite so, Jo. Of course.

CUTHBERTSON. Therefore, though I have no sympathy whatever with Charteris’s views, I think we can do no harm by waiting — say ten minutes or so. (He sits down.)

CHARTERIS (delighted). Ah, there’s nobody like you after all, Cuthbertson, when there’s a difficult situation to be judged.

CRAVEN (deeply disappointed). Oh, well, Jo, if that is your decision, I must keep my word and abide by it. Better sit down and make ourselves comfortable, I suppose. (He sits also, under protest.)

CHARTERIS (fidgeting about). I can’t sit down: I’m too restless. The fact is, Julia has made me so nervous that I can’t answer for myself until I know her decision. Mrs. Tranfield will tell you what a time I’ve had lately. Julia’s really a most determined woman, you know.

CRAVEN (starting up). Well, upon my life! Upon my honor and conscience!! Now really!!! I shall go this instant. Come on, Sylvia. Cuthbertson: I hope you’ll mark your sense of this sort of thing by coming on to Paramore’s with us at once. (He marches to the door.)

CHARTERIS (desperately). Craven: you’re trifling with your daughter’s happiness. I only ask five minutes more.

CRAVEN. Not five seconds, sir. Fie for shame, Charteris! (He goes out.)

CUTHBERTSON (to Charteris, as he passes him on his way to the door). Bungler! (He follows Craven.)

SYLVIA. Serve you right, you duffer! (She follows Cuthbertson.)

CHARTERIS. Oh, these headstrong old men! (To Grace) Nothing to be done now but go with them and delay the Colonel as much as possible. So I’m afraid I must leave you.

GRACE (rising). Not at all. Paramore invited me, too, when we were talking over there.

CHARTERIS (aghast). You don’t mean to say you’re coming!

GRACE. Most certainly. Do you suppose I will let that woman think I am afraid to meet her? (Charteris sinks on a chair with a prolonged groan.) Come: don’t be silly: you’ll not overtake the Colonel if you delay any longer.

CHARTERIS. Why was I ever born, child of misfortune that I am! (He rises despairingly.) Well, if you must come, you must. (He offers his arm, which she takes.) By the way, what happened after I left you?

GRACE. I gave her a lecture on her behavior which she will remember to the last day of her life.

CHARTERIS (approvingly). That was right, darling. (He slips his arm round her waist.) Just one kiss — to soothe me.

GRACE (complacently offering her cheek). Foolish boy! (He kisses her.) Now come along. (They go out together.)

END OF ACT III.

ACT IV

Sitting-room in Paramore’s apartments in Savile Row. The darkly respectable furniture is, so to speak, en suite with Paramore’s frock coat and cuffs. Viewing the room from the front windows, the door is seen in the opposite wall near the left hand corner. Another door, a light, noiseless partition one covered with a green baize, is in the right hand wall toward the back, leading to Paramore’s consulting room. The fireplace is on the left. At the nearest corner of it a couch is placed at right angles to the wall, settlewise. On the right the wall is occupied by a bookcase, further forward than the green baize door. Beyond the door is a cabinet of anatomical preparations, with a framed photograph of Rembrandt’s School of Anatomy hanging on the wall above it. In front, a little to the right, a tea-table.

Paramore is seated in a round-backed chair, on castors, pouring out tea. Julia sits opposite him, with her back to the fire. He is in high spirits: she very downcast.

PARAMORE (handing her the cup he has just filled). There! Making tea is one of the few things I consider myself able to do thoroughly well. Cake?

JULIA. No, thank you. I don’t like sweet things. (She sets down the cup untasted.)

PARAMORE. Anything wrong with the tea?

JULIA. No, it’s very nice.

PARAMORE. I’m afraid I’m a very bad entertainer. The fact is, I’m too professional. I only shine in consultation. I almost wish you had something the matter with you; so that you might call out my knowledge and sympathy. As it is, I can only admire you, and feel how pleasant it is to have you here.

JULIA (bitterly). And pet me, and say pretty things to me! I wonder you don’t offer me a saucer of milk at once?

PARAMORE (astonished). Why?

JULIA. Because you seem to regard me very much as if I were a Persian cat.

PARAMORE (in strong remonstrance). Miss Cra —

JULIA (cutting him short). Oh, you needn’t protest. I’m used to it: It’s the only sort of attachment I seem always to inspire. (Ironically) You can’t think how flattering it is!

PARAMORE. My dear Miss Craven, what a cynical thing to say! You! who are loved at first sight by the people in the street as you pass. Why, in the club I can tell by the faces of the men whether you have been lately in the room or not.

JULIA (shrinking fiercely). Oh, I hate that look in their faces. Do you know that I have never had one human being care for me since I was born?

PARAMORE. That’s not true, Miss Craven. Even if it were true of your father, and of Charteris, who loves you madly in spite of your dislike for him, it is not true of me.

JULIA (startled). Who told you that about Charteris?

PARAMORE. Why, he himself.

JULIA (with deep, poignant conviction). He cares for only one person in the world; and that is himself. There is not in his whole nature one unselfish spot. He would not spend one hour of his real life with — (a sob chokes her: she rises passionately, crying) You are all alike, every one of you. Even my father only makes a pet of me. (She goes away to the fireplace and stands with her back to him.)

PARAMORE (following her humbly). I don’t deserve this from you: indeed I do not.

JULIA (rating him). Then why do you talk about me with Charteris, behind my back?

PARAMORE. We said nothing disparaging of you. Nobody shall ever do that in my presence. We spoke of the subject nearest our hearts.

JULIA. His heart! Oh, God, his heart! (She sits down on the couch and hides her face.)

PARAMORE (sadly). I am afraid you love him, for all that, Miss Craven.

JULIA (raising her head instantly). If he says that, he lies. If ever you hear it said that I cared for him, contradict it: it is false.

PARAMORE (quickly advancing to her). Miss Craven: is the way clear for me then?

JULIA (pettishly — losing interest in the conversation and looking crossly into the fire). What do you mean?

PARAMORE (impetuously). You must see what I mean. Contradict the rumour of your attachment to Charteris, not by words — it has gone too far for that — but by becoming my wife. (Earnestly.) Believe me: it is not merely your beauty that attracts me: (Julia, interested, looks up at him quickly) I know other beautiful women. It is your heart, your sincerity, your sterling reality, (Julia rises and gazes at him, breathless with a new hope) your great gifts of character that are only half developed because you have never been understood by those about you.

JULIA (looking intently at him, and yet beginning to be derisively sceptical in spite of herself). Have you really seen all that in me?

PARAMORE. I have felt it. I have been alone in the world; and I need you, Julia. That is how I have divined that you, also, are alone in the world.

JULIA (with theatrical pathos). You are right there. I am indeed alone in the world.

PARAMORE (timidly approaching her). With you I should not be alone. And you? — with me?

JULIA. You! (She gets quickly out of his reach, taking refuge at the tea-table.) No, no. I can’t bring myself — (She breaks off, perplexed, and looks uneasily about her.) Oh, I don’t know what to do. You will expect too much from me. (She sits down.)

PARAMORE. I have more faith in you than you have in yourself. Your nature is richer than you think.

JULIA (doubtfully). Do you really believe that I am not the shallow, jealous, devilish tempered creature they all pretend I am?

PARAMORE. I am ready to place my happiness in your hands. Does that prove what I think of you?

JULIA. Yes: I believe you really care for me. (He approaches her eagerly: she has a violent revulsion, and rises with her hand raised as if to beat him off, crying) No, no, no, no. I cannot. It’s impossible. (She goes towards the door.)

PARAMORE (looking wistfully after her). Is it Charteris?

JULIA (stopping and turning). Ah, you think that! (She comes back.) Listen to me. If I say yes, will you promise not to touch me — to give me time to accustom myself to the idea of our new relations?

PARAMORE. I promise most faithfully. I would not press you for the world.

JULIA. Then — then — yes: I promise. (He is about to utter his rapture; she will not have it.) Now, not another word of it. Let us forget it. (She resumes her seat at the table.) Give me some more tea. (He hastens to his former seat. As he passes, she puts her left hand on his arm and says) Be good to me, Percy, I need it sorely.

PARAMORE (transported). You have called me Percy! Hurrah! (Charteris and Craven come in. Paramore hastens to meet them, beaming.) Delighted to see you here with me, Colonel Craven. And you, too, Charteris. Sit down. (The Colonel sits down on the end of the couch.) Where are the others?

CHARTERIS. Sylvia has dragged Cuthbertson off into the Burlington Arcade to buy some caramels. He likes to encourage her in eating caramels: he thinks it’s a womanly taste. Besides, he likes them himself. They’ll be here presently. (He strolls across to the cabinet and pretends to study the Rembrandt photograph, so as to be as far out of Julia’s reach as possible.)

CRAVEN. Yes; and Charteris has been trying to persuade me that there’s a short cut between Cork Street and Savile Row somewhere in Conduit Street. Now did you ever hear such nonsense? Then he said my coat was getting shabby, and wanted me to go into Poole’s and order a new one. Paramore: is my coat shabby?

PARAMORE. Not that I can see.

CRAVEN. I should think not. Then he wanted to draw me into a dispute about the Egyptian war. We should have been here quarter of an hour ago only for his nonsense.

CHARTERIS (still contemplating Rembrandt). I did my best to keep him from disturbing you, Paramore.

PARAMORE (gratefully). You have come in the nick of time. Colonel Craven: I have something very particular to say to you.

CRAVEN (springing up in alarm). In private, Paramore: now really it must be in private.

PARAMORE (surprised). Of course. I was about to suggest my consulting room: there’s nobody there. Miss Craven: will you excuse me: Charteris will entertain you until I return. (He leads the way to the green baize door.)

CHARTERIS (aghast). Oh, I say, hadn’t you better wait until the others come?

PARAMORE (exultant). No need for further delay now, my best friend. (He wrings Charteris’s hand.) Will you come, Colonel?

CRAVEN. At your service, Paramore: at your service. (Craven and Paramore go into the consulting room. Julia turns her head and stares insolently at Charteris. His nerves play him false: he is completely out of countenance in a moment. She rises suddenly. He starts, and comes hastily forward between the table and the bookcase. She crosses to that side behind the table; and he immediately crosses to the opposite side in front of it, dodging her.)

CHARTERIS (nervously). Don’t, Julia. Now don’t abuse your advantage. You’ve got me here at your mercy. Be good for once; and don’t make a scene.

JULIA (contemptuously). Do you suppose I am going to touch you?

CHARTERIS. No. Of course not. (She comes forward on her side of the table. He retreats on his side of it. She looks at him with utter scorn; sweeps across to the couch; and sits down imperially. With a great sigh of relief he drops into Paramore’s chair.)

JULIA. Come here. I have something to say to you.

CHARTERIS. Yes? (He rolls the chair a few inches towards her.)

JULIA. Come here, I say. I am not going to shout across the room at you. Are you afraid of me?

CHARTERIS. Horribly. (He moves the chair slowly, with great misgiving, to the end of the couch.)

JULIA (with studied insolence). Has that woman told you that she has given you up to me without an attempt to defend her conquest?

CHARTERIS (whispering persuasively). Shew that you are capable of the same sacrifice. Give me up, too.

JULIA. Sacrifice! And so you think I’m dying to marry you, do you?

CHARTERIS. I am afraid your intentions have been honourable, Julia.

JULIA. You cad!

CHARTERIS (with a sigh). I confess I am something either more or less than a gentleman, Julia. You once gave me the benefit of the doubt.

JULIA. Indeed! I never told you so. If you cannot behave like a gentleman, you had better go back to the society of the woman who has given you up — if such a cold-blooded, cowardly creature can be called a woman. (She rises majestically; he makes his chair fly back to the table.) I know you now, Leonard Charteris, through and through, in all your falseness, your petty spite, your cruelty and your vanity. The place you coveted has been won by a man more worthy of it.

CHARTERIS (springing up, and coming close to her, gasping with eagerness). What do you mean? Out with it. Have you accep —

JULIA. I am engaged to Dr. Paramore.

CHARTERIS (enraptured). My own Julia! (He attempts to embrace her.)

JULIA (recoiling — he catching her hands and holding them). How dare you! Are you mad? Do you wish me to call Dr. Paramore?

CHARTERIS. Call everybody, my darling — everybody in London. Now I shall no longer have to be brutal — to defend myself — to go in fear of you. How I have looked forward to this day! You know now that I don’t want you to marry me or to love me: Paramore can have all that. I only want to look on and rejoice disinterestedly in the happiness of (kissing her hand) my dear Julia (kissing the other), my beautiful Julia. (She tears her hands away and raises them as if to strike him, as she did the night before at Cuthbertson’s.) No use to threaten me now: I am not afraid of those hands — the loveliest hands in the world.

JULIA. How have you the face to turn round like this after insulting and torturing me!

CHARTERIS. Never mind, dearest: you never did understand me; and you never will. Our vivisecting friend has made a successful experiment at last.

JULIA (earnestly). It is you who are the vivisector — a far crueller, more wanton vivisector than he.

CHARTERIS. Yes; but then I learn so much more from my experiments than he does! And the victims learn as much as I do. That’s where my moral superiority comes in.

JULIA (sitting down again on the couch with rueful humour). Well, you shall not experiment on me any more. Go to your Grace if you want a victim. She’ll be a tough one.

CHARTERIS (reproachfully sitting down beside her). And you drove me to propose to her to escape from you! Suppose she had accepted me, where should I be now?

JULIA. Where I am, I suppose, now that I have accepted Paramore.

CHARTERIS. But I should have made Grace unhappy. (Julia sneers). However, now I come to think of it, you’ll make Paramore unhappy. And yet if you refused him he would be in despair. Poor devil!

JULIA (her temper flashing up for a moment again). He is a better man than you.

CHARTERIS (humbly). I grant you that, my dear.

JULIA (impetuously). Don’t call me your dear. And what do you mean by saying that I shall make him unhappy? Am I not good enough for him?

CHARTERIS (dubiously). Well, that depends on what you mean by good enough.

JULIA (earnestly). You might have made me good if you had chosen to. You had a great power over me. I was like a child in your hands; and you knew it.

CHARTERIS (with comic acquiescence). Yes, my dear. That means that whenever you got jealous and flew into a violent rage, I could always depend on it’s ending happily if I only waited long enough, and petted you very hard all the time. When you had had your fling, and called the object of your jealousy every name you could lay your tongue to, and abused me to your heart’s content for a couple of hours, then the reaction would come; and you would at last subside into a soothing rapture of affection which gave you a sensation of being angelically good and forgiving. Oh, I know that sort of goodness! You may have thought on these occasions that I was bringing out your latent amiability; but I thought you were bringing out mine, and using up rather more than your fair share of it.

JULIA. According to you, then, I have no good in me! I am an utterly vile, worthless woman. Is that it?

CHARTERIS. Yes, if you are to be judged as you judge others. From the conventional point of view, there’s nothing to be said for you, Julia — nothing. That’s why I have to find some other point of view to save my self-respect when I remember how I have loved you. Oh, what I have learnt from you! — from you, who could learn nothing from me! I made a fool of you; and you brought me wisdom: I broke your heart; and you brought me joy: I made you curse your womanhood; and you revealed my manhood to me. Blessings forever and ever on my Julia’s name! (With genuine emotion, he takes her hand to kiss it again.)

JULIA (snatching her hand away in disgust). Oh, stop talking that nasty sneering stuff.

CHARTERIS (laughingly appealing to the heavens). She calls it nasty sneering stuff! Well, well: I’ll never talk like that to you again, dearest. It only means that you are a beautiful woman, and that we all love you.

JULIA. Don’t say that: I hate it. It sounds as if I were a mere animal.

CHARTERIS. Hm! A fine animal is a very wonderful thing. Don’t let us disparage animals, Julia.

JULIA. That is what you really think me.

CHARTERIS. Come, Julia: you don’t expect me to admire you for your moral qualities, do you? (She turns and looks hard at him. He starts up apprehensively and backs away from her. She rises and follows him up slowly and intently.)

JULIA (deliberately). I have seen you very much infatuated with this depraved creature who has no moral qualities.

CHARTERIS (retreating). Keep off, Julia. Remember your new obligations to Paramore.

JULIA (overtaking him in the middle of the room). Never mind Paramore: that is my business. (She grasps the lappels of his coat in her hands, and looks fixedly at him.) Oh, if the people you talk so cleverly to could only know you as I know you! Sometimes I wonder at myself for ever caring for you.

CHARTERIS (beaming at her). Only sometimes?

JULIA. You fraud! You humbug! You miserable little plaster saint! (He looks delighted.) Oh! (In a paroxysm half of rage, half of tenderness, she shakes him, growling over him like a tigress over her cub. Paramore and Craven at this moment return from the consulting room, and are thunderstruck at the spectacle.)

CRAVEN (shouting, utterly scandalized). Julia!! (Julia releases Charteris, but stands her ground disdainfully as they come forward, Craven on her left, Paramore on her right.)

PARAMORE. What’s the matter?

CHARTERIS. Nothing, nothing. You’ll soon get used to this, Paramore.

CRAVEN. Now really, Julia, this is a very extraordinary way to behave. It’s not fair to Paramore.

JULIA (coldly). If Dr. Paramore objects he can break off our engagement. (To Paramore) Pray don’t hesitate.

PARAMORE (looking doubtfully and anxiously at her). Do you wish me to break it off?

CHARTERIS (alarmed). Nonsense! don’t act so hastily. It was my fault. I annoyed Miss Craven — insulted her. Hang it all, don’t go and spoil everything like this.

CRAVEN. This is most infernally perplexing. I can’t believe that you insulted Julia, Charteris. I’ve no doubt you annoyed her — you’d annoy anybody; upon my soul you would — but insult! — now what do you mean by that?

PARAMORE (very earnestly). Miss Craven; delicacy and sincerity I ask you to be frank with me. What are the relations between you and Charteris?

JULIA. Ask him. (She goes to the fireplace, her back on them.)

CHARTERIS. Certainly: I’ll confess. I’m in love with Miss Craven — always have been; and I’ve persecuted her with my addresses ever since I knew her. It’s been no use: she utterly despises me. A moment ago the spectacle of a rival’s happiness stung me to make a nasty, sneering speech; and she — well, she just shook me a little, as you saw.

PARAMORE (chivalrously). I shall never forget that you helped me to win her, Charteris. (Julia quickly, a spasm of fury in her face.)

CHARTERIS. Sh! For Heaven’s sake don’t mention it.

CRAVEN. This is a very different story to the one you told Cuthbertson and myself this morning. You’ll excuse my saying that it sounds much more like the the truth. Come: you were humbugging us, weren’t you?

CHARTERIS. Ask Julia. (Paramore and Craven turn to Julia. Charteris remains doggedly looking straight before him.)

JULIA. It’s quite true. He has been in love with me; he has persecuted me; and I utterly despise him.

GRAVEN. Don’t rub it in, Julia: it’s not kind. No man is quite himself when he’s crossed in love. (To Charteris.) Now listen to me, Charteris. When I was a young fellow, Cuthbertson and I fell in love with the same woman. She preferred Cuthbertson. I was taken aback: I won’t deny it. But I knew my duty; and I did it. I gave her up and wished Cuthbertson joy. He told me this morning, when we met after many years, that he has respected and liked me ever since for it. And I believe him and feel the better for it. (Impressively.) Now, Charteris, Paramore and you stand to-day where Cuthbertson and I stood on a certain July evening thirty-five years ago. How are you going to take it?

JULIA (indignantly). How is he going to take it, indeed! Really, papa, this is too much. If Mrs. Cuthbertson wouldn’t have you, it may have been very noble of you to make a virtue of giving her up, just as you made a virtue of being a teetotaller when Percy cut off your wine. But he shan’t be virtuous over me. I have refused him; and if he doesn’t like it he can — he can —

CHARTERIS. I can lump it. Precisely. Craven: you can depend on me. I’ll lump it. (He moves off nonchalantly, and leans against the bookcase with his hands in his pockets.)

CRAVEN (hurt). Julia: you don’t treat me respectfully. I don’t wish to complain; but that was not a becoming speech.

JULIA (bursting into tears and throwing herself into the large chair). Is there anyone in the world who has any feeling for me — who does not think me utterly vile? (Craven and Paramore hurry to her in the greatest consternation.)

CRAVEN (remorsefully). My pet: I didn’t for a moment mean —

JULIA. Must I stand to be bargained for by two men — passed from one to the other like a slave in the market, and not say a word in my own defence?

CRAVEN. But, my love —

JULIA. Oh, go away, all of you. Leave me. I — oh — (She gives way to a passion of tears.)

PARAMORE (reproachfully to Craven). You’ve wounded her cruelly, Colonel Craven — cruelly.

CRAVEN. But I didn’t mean to: I said nothing. Charteris: was I harsh?

CHARTERIS. You forget the revolt of the daughters, Craven. And you certainly wouldn’t have gone on like that to any grown up woman who was not your daughter.

CRAVEN. Do you mean to say that I am expected to treat my daughter the same as I would any other girl?

PARAMORE. I should say certainly, Colonel Craven.

CRAVEN. Well, dash me if I will. There!

PARAMORE. If you take that tone, I have nothing more to say. (He crosses the room with offended dignity and posts himself with his back to the bookcase beside Charteris.)

JULIA (with a sob). Daddy.

CRAVEN (turning solicitously to her). Yes, my love.

JULIA (looking up at him tearfully and kissing his hand). Don’t mind them. You didn’t mean it, Daddy, did you?

CRAVEN. No, no, my precious. Come: don’t cry.

PARAMORE (to Charteris, looking at Julia with delight). How beautiful she is!

CHARTERIS (throwing up his hands). Oh, Lord help you, Paramore! (He leaves the bookcase and sits at the end of the couch farthest from the fire. Meanwhile Sylvia arrives.)

SYLVIA (contemplating Julia). Crying again! Well, you are a womanly one!

CRAVEN. Don’t worry your sister, Sylvia. You know she can’t bear it.

SYLVIA. I speak for her good, Dad. All the world can’t be expected to know that she’s the family baby.

JULIA. You will get your ears boxed presently, Silly.

CRAVEN. Now, now, now, my dear children, really now! Come, Julia: put up your handkerchief before Mrs. Tranfield sees you. She’s coming along with Jo.

JULIA (rising). That woman again!

SYLVIA. Another row! Go it, Julia!

CRAVEN. Hold your tongue, Sylvia. (He turns commandingly to Julia.) Now look here, Julia.

CHARTERIS. Hallo! A revolt of the fathers!

CRAVEN. Silence, Charteris. (To Julia, unanswerably.) The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. Anybody can behave well when things are going smoothly. Now you said to-day, at that iniquitous club, that you were not a womanly woman. Very well: I don’t mind. But if you are not going to behave like a lady when Mrs. Tranfield comes into this room, you’ve got to behave like a gentleman; or fond as I am of you, I’ll cut you dead exactly as I would if you were my son.

PARAMORE (remonstrating). Colonel Craven —

CRAVEN (cutting him short). Don’t be a fool, Paramore.

JULIA (tearfully excusing herself). I’m sure, Daddy —

CRAVEN. Stop snivelling. I’m not speaking as your Daddy now: I’m speaking as your commanding officer.

SYLVIA. Good old Victoria Cross! (Craven turns sharply on her; and she darts away behind Charteris, and presently seats herself on the couch, so that she and Charteris are shoulder to shoulder, facing opposite ways. Cuthbertson arrives with Grace, who remains near the door whilst her father joins the others.)

CRAVEN. Ah, Jo, here you are. Now, Paramore, tell ’em the news.

PARAMORE. Mrs. Tranfield — Cuthbertson — allow me to introduce you to my future wife.

CUTHBERTSON (coming forward to shake hands with Paramore). My heartiest congratulations! (Paramore goes to shake hands with Grace.) Miss Craven: you will accept Grace’s congratulations as well as mine, I hope.

CRAVEN. She will, Jo. (In a tone of command.) Now, Julia. (Julia slowly rises.)

CUTHBERTSON. Now, Grace. (He conducts her to Julia’s right; then posts himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, watching them. The Colonel keeps guard on the other side.)

GRACE (speaking in a low voice to Julia alone). So you have shewn him that you can do without him! Now I take back everything I said. Will you shake hands with me? (Julia gives her hand painfully, with her face averted.) They think this a happy ending, Julia — these men — our lords and masters! (The two stand silent, hand in hand.)

SYLVIA (leaning back across the couch, aside to Charteris). Has she really chucked you? (He nods assent. She looks at him dubiously, and adds) I expect you chucked her.

CUTHBERTSON. And now, Paramore, mind you don’t stand any chaff from Charteris about this. He’s in the same predicament himself. He’s engaged to Grace.

JULIA (dropping Grace’s hand, and speaking with breathless anguish, but not violently). Again!

CHARTERIS (rising hastily). Don’t be alarmed. It’s all off.

SYLVIA (rising indignantly). What! You’ve chucked Grace too! What a shame! (She goes to the other side of the room, fuming.)

CHARTERIS (following her and putting his hand soothingly on her shoulder). She won’t have me, old chap — that is (turning to the others) unless Mrs. Tranfield has changed her mind again.

GRACE. No: we shall remain very good friends, I hope; but nothing would induce me to marry you. (She goes to chair above the fireplace and sits down with perfect composure.)

JULIA. Ah! (She sits down with a great sigh of relief.)

SYLVIA (consoling Charteris). Poor old Leonard!

CHARTERIS. Yes: this is the doom of the philanderer. I shall have to go on philandering now all my life. No domesticity, no fireside, no little ones, nothing at all in Cuthbertson’s line! Nobody will marry me — unless you, Sylvia — eh?

SYLVIA. Not if I know it, Charteris.

CHARTERIS (to them all). You see!

CRAVEN (coming between Charteris and Sylvia). Now you really shouldn’t make a jest of these things: upon my life and soul you shouldn’t, Charteris.

CUTHBERTSON (on the hearthrug). The only use he can find for sacred things is to make a jest of them. That’s the New Order. Thank Heaven, we belong to the Old Order, Dan!

CHARTERIS. Cuthbertson: don’t be symbolic.

CUTHBERTSON (outraged). Symbolic! That is an accusation of Ibsenism. What do you mean?

CHARTERIS. Symbolic of the Old Order. Don’t persuade yourself that you represent the Old Order. There never was any Old Order.

CRAVEN. There I flatly contradict you and stand up for Jo. I’d no more have behaved as you do when I was a young man than I’d have cheated at cards. I belong to the Old Order.

CHARTERIS. You’re getting old, Craven; and you want to make a merit of it, as usual.

CRAVEN. Come, now, Charteris: you’re not offended, I hope. (With a conciliatory outburst.) Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that about cheating at cards. I withdraw it (offering his hand).

CHARTERIS (taking Craven’s hand). No offence, my dear Craven: none in the world. I didn’t mean to shew any temper. But (aside, after looking round to see whether the others are listening) only just consider! — the spectacle of a rival’s happiness!

CRAVEN (aloud, decisively). Charteris: now you’ve got to behave like a man. Your duty’s plain before you. (To Cuthbertson.) Am I right, Jo?

CUTHBERTSON (firmly). You are, Dan.

CRAVEN (to Charteris). Go straight up and congratulate Julia. And do it like a gentleman, smiling.

CHARTERIS. Colonel: I will. Not a muscle shall betray the conflict within.

CRAVEN. Julia: Charteris has not congratulated you yet. He’s coming to do it. (Julia rises and fixes a dangerous look on Charteris.)

SYLVIA (whispering quickly behind Charteris as he is about to advance). Take care. She’s going to hit you. I know her. (Charteris stops and looks cautiously at Julia, measuring the situation. They regard one another steadfastly for a moment. Grace softly rises and gets close to Julia.)

CHARTERIS (whispering over his shoulder to Sylvia). I’ll chance it. (He walks confidently up to Julia.) Julia? (He proffers his hand.)

JULIA (exhausted, allowing herself to take it). You are right. I am a worthless woman.

CHARTERIS (triumphant, and gaily remonstrating). Oh, why?

JULIA. Because I am not brave enough to kill you.

GRACE (taking her in her arms as she sinks, almost fainting, away from him). Oh, no. Never make a hero of a philanderer. (Charteris, amused and untouched, shakes his head laughingly. The rest look at Julia with concern, and even a little awe, feeling for the first time the presence of a keen sorrow.)

CURTAIN.

MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION

CONTENTS

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

Mrs Warren’s Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked. What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck, exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I “cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it”. Truly my play must be more needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.

Do not suppose, however, that the consternation of the Press reflects any consternation among the general public. Anybody can upset the theatre critics, in a turn of the wrist, by substituting for the romantic commonplaces of the stage the moral commonplaces of the pulpit, platform, or the library. Play Mrs Warren’s Profession to an audience of clerical members of the Christian Social Union and of women well experienced in Rescue, Temperance, and Girls’ Club work, and no moral panic will arise; every man and woman present will know that as long as poverty makes virtue hideous and the spare pocket-money of rich bachelordom makes vice dazzling, their daily hand-to-hand fight against prostitution with prayer and persuasion, shelters and scanty alms, will be a losing one. There was a time when they were able to urge that though “the white-lead factory where Anne Jane was poisoned” may be a far more terrible place than Mrs Warren’s house, yet hell is still more dreadful. Nowadays they no longer believe in hell; and the girls among whom they are working know that they do not believe in it, and would laugh at them if they did. So well have the rescuers learnt that Mrs Warren’s defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on “pleasant plays” for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work. Mrs Warren’s Profession is the one play of mine which I could submit to a censorship without doubt of the result; only, it must not be the censorship of the minor theatre critic, nor of an innocent court official like the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner, much less of people who consciously profit by Mrs Warren’s profession, or who personally make use of it, or who hold the widely whispered view that it is an indispensable safety-valve for the protection of domestic virtue, or, above all, who are smitten with a sentimental affection for our fallen sister, and would “take her up tenderly, lift her with care, fashioned so slenderly, young, and SO fair.” Nor am I prepared to accept the verdict of the medical gentlemen who would compulsorily sanitate and register Mrs Warren, whilst leaving Mrs Warren’s patrons, especially her military patrons, free to destroy her health and anybody else’s without fear of reprisals. But I should be quite content to have my play judged by, say, a joint committee of the Central Vigilance Society and the Salvation Army. And the sterner moralists the members of the committee were, the better.

Some of the journalists I have shocked reason so unripely that they will gather nothing from this but a confused notion that I am accusing the National Vigilance Association and the Salvation Army of complicity in my own scandalous immorality. It will seem to them that people who would stand this play would stand anything. They are quite mistaken. Such an audience as I have described would be revolted by many of our fashionable plays. They would leave the theatre convinced that the Plymouth Brother who still regards the playhouse as one of the gates of hell is perhaps the safest adviser on the subject of which he knows so little. If I do not draw the same conclusion, it is not because I am one of those who claim that art is exempt from moral obligations, and deny that the writing or performance of a play is a moral act, to be treated on exactly the same footing as theft or murder if it produces equally mischievous consequences. I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. I have pointed out again and again that the influence of the theatre in England is growing so great that whilst private conduct, religion, law, science, politics, and morals are becoming more and more theatrical, the theatre itself remains impervious to common sense, religion, science, politics, and morals. That is why I fight the theatre, not with pamphlets and sermons and treatises, but with plays; and so effective do I find the dramatic method that I have no doubt I shall at last persuade even London to take its conscience and its brains with it when it goes to the theatre, instead of leaving them at home with its prayer-book as it does at present. Consequently, I am the last man in the world to deny that if the net effect of performing Mrs Warren’s Profession were an increase in the number of persons entering that profession, its performance should be dealt with accordingly.

Now let us consider how such recruiting can be encouraged by the theatre. Nothing is easier. Let the King’s Reader of Plays, backed by the Press, make an unwritten but perfectly well understood regulation that members of Mrs Warren’s profession shall be tolerated on the stage only when they are beautiful, exquisitely dressed, and sumptuously lodged and fed; also that they shall, at the end of the play, die of consumption to the sympathetic tears of the whole audience, or step into the next room to commit suicide, or at least be turned out by their protectors and passed on to be “redeemed” by old and faithful lovers who have adored them in spite of their levities. Naturally, the poorer girls in the gallery will believe in the beauty, in the exquisite dresses, and the luxurious living, and will see that there is no real necessity for the consumption, the suicide, or the ejectment: mere pious forms, all of them, to save the Censor’s face. Even if these purely official catastrophes carried any conviction, the majority of English girls remain so poor, so dependent, so well aware that the drudgeries of such honest work as is within their reach are likely enough to lead them eventually to lung disease, premature death, and domestic desertion or brutality, that they would still see reason to prefer the primrose path to the strait path of virtue, since both, vice at worst and virtue at best, lead to the same end in poverty and overwork. It is true that the Board School mistress will tell you that only girls of a certain kind will reason in this way. But alas! that certain kind turns out on inquiry to be simply the pretty, dainty kind: that is, the only kind that gets the chance of acting on such reasoning. Read the first report of the Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes [Bluebook C 4402, 8d., 1889]; read the Report on Home Industries (sacred word, Home!) issued by the Women’s Industrial Council [Home Industries of Women in London, 1897, 1s., 12 Buckingham Street, W. C.]; and ask yourself whether, if the lot in life therein described were your lot in life, you would not prefer the lot of Cleopatra, of Theodora, of the Lady of the Camellias, of Mrs Tanqueray, of Zaza, of Iris. If you can go deep enough into things to be able to say no, how many ignorant half-starved girls will believe you are speaking sincerely? To them the lot of Iris is heavenly in comparison with their own. Yet our King, like his predecessors, says to the dramatist, “Thus, and thus only, shall you present Mrs Warren’s profession on the stage, or you shall starve. Witness Shaw, who told the untempting truth about it, and whom We, by the Grace of God, accordingly disallow and suppress, and do what in Us lies to silence.” Fortunately, Shaw cannot be silenced. “The harlot’s cry from street to street” is louder than the voices of all the kings. I am not dependent on the theatre, and cannot be starved into making my play a standing advertisement of the attractive side of Mrs Warren’s business.

Here I must guard myself against a misunderstanding. It is not the fault of their authors that the long string of wanton’s tragedies, from Antony and Cleopatra to Iris, are snares to poor girls, and are objected to on that account by many earnest men and women who consider Mrs Warren’s Profession an excellent sermon. Mr Pinero is in no way bound to suppress the fact that his Iris is a person to be envied by millions of better women. If he made his play false to life by inventing fictitious disadvantages for her, he would be acting as unscrupulously as any tract writer. If society chooses to provide for its Irises better than for its working women, it must not expect honest playwrights to manufacture spurious evidence to save its credit. The mischief lies in the deliberate suppression of the other side of the case: the refusal to allow Mrs Warren to expose the drudgery and repulsiveness of plying for hire among coarse, tedious drunkards; the determination not to let the Parisian girl in Brieux’s Les Avaries come on the stage and drive into people’s minds what her diseases mean for her and for themselves. All that, says the King’s Reader in effect, is horrifying, loathsome.

Precisely: what does he expect it to be? would he have us represent it as beautiful and gratifying? The answer to this question, I fear, must be a blunt Yes; for it seems impossible to root out of an Englishman’s mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it is privation. At all events, as long as the tempting side of it is kept towards the public, and softened by plenty of sentiment and sympathy, it is welcomed by our Censor, whereas the slightest attempt to place it in the light of the policeman’s lantern or the Salvation Army shelter is checkmated at once as not merely disgusting, but, if you please, unnecessary.

Everybody will, I hope, admit that this state of things is intolerable; that the subject of Mrs Warren’s profession must be either tapu altogether, or else exhibited with the warning side as freely displayed as the tempting side. But many persons will vote for a complete tapu, and an impartial sweep from the boards of Mrs Warren and Gretchen and the rest; in short, for banishing the sexual instincts from the stage altogether. Those who think this impossible can hardly have considered the number and importance of the subjects which are actually banished from the stage. Many plays, among them Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, have no sex complications: the thread of their action can be followed by children who could not understand a single scene of Mrs Warren’s Profession or Iris. None of our plays rouse the sympathy of the audience by an exhibition of the pains of maternity, as Chinese plays constantly do. Each nation has its own particular set of tapus in addition to the common human stock; and though each of these tapus limits the scope of the dramatist, it does not make drama impossible. If the Examiner were to refuse to license plays with female characters in them, he would only be doing to the stage what our tribal customs already do to the pulpit and the bar. I have myself written a rather entertaining play with only one woman in it, and she is quite heartwhole; and I could just as easily write a play without a woman in it at all. I will even go so far as to promise the Mr Redford my support if he will introduce this limitation for part of the year, say during Lent, so as to make a close season for that dullest of stock dramatic subjects, adultery, and force our managers and authors to find out what all great dramatists find out spontaneously: to wit, that people who sacrifice every other consideration to love are as hopelessly unheroic on the stage as lunatics or dipsomaniacs. Hector is the world’s hero; not Paris nor Antony.

But though I do not question the possibility of a drama in which love should be as effectively ignored as cholera is at present, there is not the slightest chance of that way out of the difficulty being taken by the Mr Redford. If he attempted it there would be a revolt in which he would be swept away in spite of my singlehanded efforts to defend him. A complete tapu is politically impossible. A complete toleration is equally impossible to Mr Redford, because his occupation would be gone if there were no tapu to enforce. He is therefore compelled to maintain the present compromise of a partial tapu, applied, to the best of his judgement, with a careful respect to persons and to public opinion. And a very sensible English solution of the difficulty, too, most readers will say. I should not dispute it if dramatic poets really were what English public opinion generally assumes them to be during their lifetime: that is, a licentiously irregular group to be kept in order in a rough and ready way by a magistrate who will stand no nonsense from them. But I cannot admit that the class represented by Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, Shakespear, Goethe, Ibsen, and Tolstoy, not to mention our own contemporary playwrights, is as much in place in Mr Redford’s office as a pickpocket is in Bow Street. Further, it is not true that the Censorship, though it certainly suppresses Ibsen and Tolstoy, and would suppress Shakespear but for the absurd rule that a play once licensed is always licensed (so that Wycherly is permitted and Shelley prohibited), also suppresses unscrupulous playwrights. I challenge Mr Redford to mention any extremity of sexual misconduct which any manager in his senses would risk presenting on the London stage that has not been presented under his license and that of his predecessor. The compromise, in fact, works out in practice in favor of loose plays as against earnest ones.

To carry conviction on this point, I will take the extreme course of narrating the plots of two plays witnessed within the last ten years by myself at London West End theatres, one licensed by the late Queen Victoria’s Reader of Plays, the other by the present Reader to the King. Both plots conform to the strictest rules of the period when La Dame aux Camellias was still a forbidden play, and when The Second Mrs Tanqueray would have been tolerated only on condition that she carefully explained to the audience that when she met Captain Ardale she sinned “but in intention.”

Play number one. A prince is compelled by his parents to marry the daughter of a neighboring king, but loves another maiden. The scene represents a hall in the king’s palace at night. The wedding has taken place that day; and the closed door of the nuptial chamber is in view of the audience. Inside, the princess awaits her bridegroom. A duenna is in attendance. The bridegroom enters. His sole desire is to escape from a marriage which is hateful to him. An idea strikes him. He will assault the duenna, and get ignominiously expelled from the palace by his indignant father-in-law. To his horror, when he proceeds to carry out this stratagem, the duenna, far from raising an alarm, is flattered, delighted, and compliant. The assaulter becomes the assaulted. He flings her angrily to the ground, where she remains placidly. He flies. The father enters; dismisses the duenna; and listens at the keyhole of his daughter’s nuptial chamber, uttering various pleasantries, and declaring, with a shiver, that a sound of kissing, which he supposes to proceed from within, makes him feel young again.

In deprecation of the scandalized astonishment with which such a story as this will be read, I can only say that it was not presented on the stage until its propriety had been certified by the chief officer of the Queen of England’s household.

Story number two. A German officer finds himself in an inn with a French lady who has wounded his national vanity. He resolves to humble her by committing a rape upon her. He announces his purpose. She remonstrates, implores, flies to the doors and finds them locked, calls for help and finds none at hand, runs screaming from side to side, and, after a harrowing scene, is overpowered and faints. Nothing further being possible on the stage without actual felony, the officer then relents and leaves her. When she recovers, she believes that he has carried out his threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented as vainly vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in love with him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her. Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain falls on their happiness.

This story was certified by the present King’s Reader, acting for the Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of “anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage.” But let nobody conclude therefore that Mr Redford is a monster, whose policy it is to deprave the theatre. As a matter of fact, both the above stories are strictly in order from the official point of view. The incidents of sex which they contain, though carried in both to the extreme point at which another step would be dealt with, not by the King’s Reader, but by the police, do not involve adultery, nor any allusion to Mrs Warren’s profession, nor to the fact that the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted, as those of Mrs Warren’s group are in my play, with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity. In short, by depending wholly on the coarse humors and the physical fascination of sex, they comply with all the formulable requirements of the Censorship, whereas plays in which these humors and fascinations are discarded, and the social problems created by sex seriously faced and dealt with, inevitably ignore the official formula and are suppressed. If the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex relations on stage were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the only result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs Dane’s Defence, and Iris would be swept from the stage, and placed under the same ban as Tolstoy’s Dominion of Darkness and Mrs Warren’s Profession, whilst such plays as the two described above would have a monopoly of the theatre as far as sexual interest is concerned.

What is more, the repulsiveness of the worst of the certified plays would protect the Censorship against effective exposure and criticism. Not long ago an American Review of high standing asked me for an article on the Censorship of the English stage. I replied that such an article would involve passages too disagreeable for publication in a magazine for general family reading. The editor persisted nevertheless; but not until he had declared his readiness to face this, and had pledged himself to insert the article unaltered (the particularity of the pledge extending even to a specification of the exact number of words in the article) did I consent to the proposal. What was the result?

The editor, confronted with the two stories given above, threw his pledge to the winds, and, instead of returning the article, printed it with the illustrative examples omitted, and nothing left but the argument from political principles against the Censorship. In doing this he fired my broadside after withdrawing the cannon balls; for neither the Censor nor any other Englishman, except perhaps Mr Leslie Stephen and a few other veterans of the dwindling old guard of Benthamism, cares a dump about political principle. The ordinary Briton thinks that if every other Briton is not kept under some form of tutelage, the more childish the better, he will abuse his freedom viciously. As far as its principle is concerned, the Censorship is the most popular institution in England; and the playwright who criticizes it is slighted as a blackguard agitating for impunity. Consequently nothing can really shake the confidence of the public in the Lord Chamberlain’s department except a remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the licentious fictions which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it with the approval of the Throne. But since these narrations cannot be made public without great difficulty, owing to the obligation an editor is under not to deal unexpectedly with matters that are not virginibus puerisque, the chances are heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all remonstrance. With the exception of such comments as I was able to make in my own critical articles in The World and The Saturday Review when the pieces I have described were first produced, and a few ignorant protests by churchmen against much better plays which they confessed they had not seen nor read, nothing has been said in the press that could seriously disturb the easygoing notion that the stage would be much worse than it admittedly is but for the vigilance of the King’s Reader. The truth is, that no manager would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces he can now get royal certificates for at two guineas per piece.

I hasten to add that I believe these evils to be inherent in the nature of all censorship, and not merely a consequence of the form the institution takes in London. No doubt there is a staggering absurdity in appointing an ordinary clerk to see that the leaders of European literature do not corrupt the morals of the nation, and to restrain Sir Henry Irving, as a rogue and a vagabond, from presuming to impersonate Samson or David on the stage, though any other sort of artist may daub these scriptural figures on a signboard or carve them on a tombstone without hindrance. If the General Medical Council, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Incorporated Law Society, and Convocation were abolished, and their functions handed over to the Mr Redford, the Concert of Europe would presumably declare England mad, and treat her accordingly. Yet, though neither medicine nor painting nor law nor the Church moulds the character of the nation as potently as the theatre does, nothing can come on the stage unless its dimensions admit of its passing through Mr Redford’s mind! Pray do not think that I question Mr Redford’s honesty. I am quite sure that he sincerely thinks me a blackguard, and my play a grossly improper one, because, like Tolstoy’s Dominion of Darkness, it produces, as they are both meant to produce, a very strong and very painful impression of evil. I do not doubt for a moment that the rapine play which I have described, and which he licensed, was quite incapable in manuscript of producing any particular effect on his mind at all, and that when he was once satisfied that the ill-conducted hero was a German and not an English officer, he passed the play without studying its moral tendencies. Even if he had undertaken that study, there is no more reason to suppose that he is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a competent mathematician. But truly it does not matter whether he is a moralist or not. Let nobody dream for a moment that what is wrong with the Censorship is the shortcoming of the gentleman who happens at any moment to be acting as Censor. Replace him to-morrow by an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Dramatic Poetry, and the new and enlarged filter will still exclude original and epoch-making work, whilst passing conventional, old-fashioned, and vulgar work without question. The conclave which compiles the index of the Roman Catholic Church is the most august, ancient, learned, famous, and authoritative censorship in Europe. Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that the comparatively infinitesimal office of the Lord Chamberlain? On the contrary, it has reduced itself to a degree of absurdity which makes a Catholic university a contradiction in terms. All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current concepts, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

It will be asked whether theatrical managers are to be allowed to produce what they like, without regard to the public interest. But that is not the alternative. The managers of our London music-halls are not subject to any censorship. They produce their entertainments on their own responsibility, and have no two-guinea certificates to plead if their houses are conducted viciously. They know that if they lose their character, the County Council will simply refuse to renew their license at the end of the year; and nothing in the history of popular art is more amazing than the improvement in music-halls that this simple arrangement has produced within a few years. Place the theatres on the same footing, and we shall promptly have a similar revolution: a whole class of frankly blackguardly plays, in which unscrupulous low comedians attract crowds to gaze at bevies of girls who have nothing to exhibit but their prettiness, will vanish like the obscene songs which were supposed to enliven the squalid dulness, incredible to the younger generation, of the music-halls fifteen years ago. On the other hand, plays which treat sex questions as problems for thought instead of as aphrodisiacs will be freely performed. Gentlemen of Mr Redford’s way of thinking will have plenty of opportunity of protesting against them in Council; but the result will be that the Mr Redford will find his natural level; Ibsen and Tolstoy theirs; so no harm will be done.

This question of the Censorship reminds me that I have to apologize to those who went to the recent performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession expecting to find it what I have just called an aphrodisiac. That was not my fault; it was Mr Redford’s. After the specimens I have given of the tolerance of his department, it was natural enough for thoughtless people to infer that a play which overstepped his indulgence must be a very exciting play indeed. Accordingly, I find one critic so explicit as to the nature of his disappointment as to say candidly that “such airy talk as there is upon the matter is utterly unworthy of acceptance as being a representation of what people with blood in them think or do on such occasions.” Thus am I crushed between the upper millstone of the Mr Redford, who thinks me a libertine, and the nether popular critic, who thinks me a prude. Critics of all grades and ages, middle-aged fathers of families no less than ardent young enthusiasts, are equally indignant with me. They revile me as lacking in passion, in feeling, in manhood. Some of them even sum the matter up by denying me any dramatic power: a melancholy betrayal of what dramatic power has come to mean on our stage under the Censorship! Can I be expected to refrain from laughing at the spectacle of a number of respectable gentlemen lamenting because a playwright lures them to the theatre by a promise to excite their senses in a very special and sensational manner, and then, having successfully trapped them in exceptional numbers, proceeds to ignore their senses and ruthlessly improve their minds? But I protest again that the lure was not mine. The play had been in print for four years; and I have spared no pains to make known that my plays are built to induce, not voluptuous reverie but intellectual interest, not romantic rhapsody but humane concern. Accordingly, I do not find those critics who are gifted with intellectual appetite and political conscience complaining of want of dramatic power. Rather do they protest, not altogether unjustly, against a few relapses into staginess and caricature which betray the young playwright and the old playgoer in this early work of mine.

As to the voluptuaries, I can assure them that the playwright, whether he be myself or another, will always disappoint them. The drama can do little to delight the senses: all the apparent instances to the contrary are instances of the personal fascination of the performers. The drama of pure feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with Wagner’s Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often is in Germany. Indeed, it needed no Wagner to convince the public of this. The voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod’s Faust and Bizet’s Carmen has captured the common playgoer; and there is, flatly, no future now for any drama without music except the drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time without knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as the normal materiel of the drama.

That this determination will throw me into a long conflict with our theatre critics, and with the few playgoers who go to the theatre as often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side. In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable drama has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably produces at first an overwhelming impression of coldness and inhuman rationalism. But this will soon pass away. When the intellectual muscle and moral nerve of the critics has been developed in the struggle with modern problem plays, the pettish luxuriousness of the clever ones, and the sulky sense of disadvantaged weakness in the sentimental ones, will clear away; and it will be seen that only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem. The vapidness of such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies in the fact that in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted, is shewn in conflict, not with real circumstances, but with a set of conventions and assumptions half of which do not exist off the stage, whilst the other half can either be evaded by a pretence of compliance or defied with complete impunity by any reasonably strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that such conventions are really compulsory; and consequently nobody can believe in the stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in the genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting at such plays, we do not believe: we make-believe. And the habit of make-believe becomes at last so rooted that criticism of the theatre insensibly ceases to be criticism at all, and becomes more and more a chronicle of the fashionable enterprises of the only realities left on the stage: that is, the performers in their own persons. In this phase the playwright who attempts to revive genuine drama produces the disagreeable impression of the pedant who attempts to start a serious discussion at a fashionable at-home. Later on, when he has driven the tea services out and made the people who had come to use the theatre as a drawing-room understand that it is they and not the dramatist who are the intruders, he has to face the accusation that his plays ignore human feeling, an illusion produced by that very resistance of fact and law to human feeling which creates drama. It is the deus ex machina who, by suspending that resistance, makes the fall of the curtain an immediate necessity, since drama ends exactly where resistance ends. Yet the introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression of heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed up the impression made on him by Mrs Warren’s Profession, by declaring that “the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and the spirit of Mr Shaw is the difference between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of Euclid.” But the epigram would be as good if Tolstoy’s name were put in place of mine and D’Annunzio’s in place of Tolstoy. At the same time I accept the enormous compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere complacency; and I promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently accustomed to and therefore undazzled by problem on the stage to be able to attend to the familiar factor of humanity in it as well as to the unfamiliar one of a real environment, he will both see and feel that Mrs Warren’s Profession is no mere theorem, but a play of instincts and temperaments in conflict with each other and with a flinty social problem that never yields an inch to mere sentiment.

I go further than this. I declare that the real secret of the cynicism and inhumanity of which shallower critics accuse me is the unexpectedness with which my characters behave like human beings, instead of conforming to the romantic logic of the stage. The axioms and postulates of that dreary mimanthropometry are so well known that it is almost impossible for its slaves to write tolerable last acts to their plays, so conventionally do their conclusions follow from their premises. Because I have thrown this logic ruthlessly overboard, I am accused of ignoring, not stage logic, but, of all things, human feeling. People with completely theatrified imaginations tell me that no girl would treat her mother as Vivie Warren does, meaning that no stage heroine would in a popular sentimental play. They say this just as they might say that no two straight lines would enclose a space. They do not see how completely inverted their vision has become even when I throw its preposterousness in their faces, as I repeatedly do in this very play. Praed, the sentimental artist (fool that I was not to make him a theatre critic instead of an architect!) burlesques them by expecting all through the piece that the feelings of others will be logically deducible from their family relationships and from his “conventionally unconventional” social code. The sarcasm is lost on the critics: they, saturated with the same logic, only think him the sole sensible person on the stage. Thus it comes about that the more completely the dramatist is emancipated from the illusion that men and women are primarily reasonable beings, and the more powerfully he insists on the ruthless indifference of their great dramatic antagonist, the external world, to their whims and emotions, the surer he is to be denounced as blind to the very distinction on which his whole work is built. Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle’s suggested painting of parliament sitting without its clothes.

I now come to those critics who, intellectually baffled by the problem in Mrs Warren’s Profession, have made a virtue of running away from it. I will illustrate their method by quotation from Dickens, taken from the fifth chapter of Our Mutual Friend:

“Hem!” began Wegg. “This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off — —” here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

“What’s the matter, Wegg?”

“Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,” said Wegg with an air of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), “that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you right in; only something put it out of my head. I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?”

“It is Rooshan; ain’t it, Wegg?”

“No, sir. Roman. Roman.”

“What’s the difference, Wegg?”

“The difference, sir?” Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. “The difference, sir? There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it.”

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air, and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy, “In Mrs Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!” turned the disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very painful manner.

I am willing to let Mr Wegg drop it on these terms, provided I am allowed to mention here that Mrs Warren’s Profession is a play for women; that it was written for women; that it has been performed and produced mainly through the determination of women that it should be performed and produced; that the enthusiasm of women made its first performance excitingly successful; and that not one of these women had any inducement to support it except their belief in the timeliness and the power of the lesson the play teaches. Those who were “surprised to see ladies present” were men; and when they proceeded to explain that the journals they represented could not possibly demoralize the public by describing such a play, their editors cruelly devoted the space saved by their delicacy to an elaborate and respectful account of the progress of a young lord’s attempt to break the bank at Monte Carlo. A few days sooner Mrs Warren would have been crowded out of their papers by an exceptionally abominable police case. I do not suggest that the police case should have been suppressed; but neither do I believe that regard for public morality had anything to do with their failure to grapple with the performance by the Stage Society. And, after all, there was no need to fall back on Silas Wegg’s subterfuge. Several critics saved the faces of their papers easily enough by the simple expedient of saying all they had to say in the tone of a shocked governess lecturing a naughty child. To them I might plead, in Mrs Warren’s words, “Well, it’s only good manners to be ashamed, dearie;” but it surprises me, recollecting as I do the effect produced by Miss Fanny Brough’s delivery of that line, that gentlemen who shivered like violets in a zephyr as it swept through them, should so completely miss the full width of its application as to go home and straightway make a public exhibition of mock modesty.

My old Independent Theatre manager, Mr Grein, besides that reproach to me for shattering his ideals, complains that Mrs Warren is not wicked enough, and names several romancers who would have clothed her black soul with all the terrors of tragedy. I have no doubt they would; but if you please, my dear Grein, that is just what I did not want to do. Nothing would please our sanctimonious British public more than to throw the whole guilt of Mrs Warren’s profession on Mrs Warren herself. Now the whole aim of my play is to throw that guilt on the British public itself. You may remember that when you produced my first play, Widowers’ Houses, exactly the same misunderstanding arose. When the virtuous young gentleman rose up in wrath against the slum landlord, the slum landlord very effectively shewed him that slums are the product, not of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else’s labor. The notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren is as silly as the notion — prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in Temperance circles — that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of the publican. Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable daughter who cannot endure her. Her indifference to the ultimate social consequences of her means of making money, and her discovery of that means by the ordinary method of taking the line of least resistance to getting it, are too common in English society to call for any special remark. Her vitality, her thrift, her energy, her outspokenness, her wise care of her daughter, and the managing capacity which has enabled her and her sister to climb from the fried fish shop down by the Mint to the establishments of which she boasts, are all high English social virtues. Her defence of herself is so overwhelming that it provokes the St James Gazette to declare that “the tendency of the play is wholly evil” because “it contains one of the boldest and most specious defences of an immoral life for poor women that has ever been penned.” Happily the St James Gazette here speaks in its haste. Mrs Warren’s defence of herself is not only bold and specious, but valid and unanswerable. But it is no defence at all of the vice which she organizes. It is no defence of an immoral life to say that the alternative offered by society collectively to poor women is a miserable life, starved, overworked, fetid, ailing, ugly. Though it is quite natural and RIGHT for Mrs Warren to choose what is, according to her lights, the least immoral alternative, it is none the less infamous of society to offer such alternatives. For the alternatives offered are not morality and immorality, but two sorts of immorality. The man who cannot see that starvation, overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as prostitution — that they are the vices and crimes of a nation, and not merely its misfortunes — is (to put it as politely as possible) a hopelessly Private Person.

The notion that Mrs Warren must be a fiend is only an example of the violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex arouses in undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural for our lawgivers to punish silly and negligible indecencies with a ferocity unknown in dealing with, for example, ruinous financial swindling. Had my play been titled Mr Warren’s Profession, and Mr Warren been a bookmaker, nobody would have expected me to make him a villain as well. Yet gambling is a vice, and bookmaking an institution, for which there is absolutely nothing to be said. The moral and economic evil done by trying to get other people’s money without working for it (and this is the essence of gambling) is not only enormous but uncompensated. There are no two sides to the question of gambling, no circumstances which force us to tolerate it lest its suppression lead to worse things, no consensus of opinion among responsible classes, such as magistrates and military commanders, that it is a necessity, no Athenian records of gambling made splendid by the talents of its professors, no contention that instead of violating morals it only violates a legal institution which is in many respects oppressive and unnatural, no possible plea that the instinct on which it is founded is a vital one. Prostitution can confuse the issue with all these excuses: gambling has none of them. Consequently, if Mrs Warren must needs be a demon, a bookmaker must be a cacodemon. Well, does anybody who knows the sporting world really believe that bookmakers are worse than their neighbors? On the contrary, they have to be a good deal better; for in that world nearly everybody whose social rank does not exclude such an occupation would be a bookmaker if he could; but the strength of character for handling large sums of money and for strict settlements and unflinching payment of losses is so rare that successful bookmakers are rare too. It may seem that at least public spirit cannot be one of a bookmaker’s virtues; but I can testify from personal experience that excellent public work is done with money subscribed by bookmakers. It is true that there are abysses in bookmaking: for example, welshing. Mr Grein hints that there are abysses in Mrs Warren’s profession also. So there are in every profession: the error lies in supposing that every member of them sounds these depths. I sit on a public body which prosecutes Mrs Warren zealously; and I can assure Mr Grein that she is often leniently dealt with because she has conducted her business “respectably” and held herself above its vilest branches. The degrees in infamy are as numerous and as scrupulously observed as the degrees in the peerage: the moralist’s notion that there are depths at which the moral atmosphere ceases is as delusive as the rich man’s notion that there are no social jealousies or snobberies among the very poor. No: had I drawn Mrs Warren as a fiend in human form, the very people who now rebuke me for flattering her would probably be the first to deride me for deducing her character logically from occupation instead of observing it accurately in society.

One critic is so enslaved by this sort of logic that he calls my portraiture of the Reverend Samuel Gardner an attack on religion.

According to this view Subaltern Iago is an attack on the army, Sir John Falstaff an attack on knighthood, and King Claudius an attack on royalty. Here again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised by so many critics when they are confronted by the real thing on the stage, is really a clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort of logic. The dramatic reason for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren calls “an old stick-in-the-mud,” whose son, in spite of much capacity and charm, is a cynically worthless member of society, is to set up a mordant contrast between him and the woman of infamous profession, with her well brought-up, straightforward, hardworking daughter. The critics who have missed the contrast have doubtless observed often enough that many clergymen are in the Church through no genuine calling, but simply because, in circles which can command preferment, it is the refuge of “the fool of the family”; and that clergymen’s sons are often conspicuous reactionists against the restraints imposed on them in childhood by their father’s profession. These critics must know, too, from history if not from experience, that women as unscrupulous as Mrs Warren have distinguished themselves as administrators and rulers, both commercially and politically. But both observation and knowledge are left behind when journalists go to the theatre. Once in their stalls, they assume that it is “natural” for clergymen to be saintly, for soldiers to be heroic, for lawyers to be hard-hearted, for sailors to be simple and generous, for doctors to perform miracles with little bottles, and for Mrs Warren to be a beast and a demon. All this is not only not natural, but not dramatic. A man’s profession only enters into the drama of his life when it comes into conflict with his nature. The result of this conflict is tragic in Mrs Warren’s case, and comic in the clergyman’s case (at least we are savage enough to laugh at it); but in both cases it is illogical, and in both cases natural. I repeat, the critics who accuse me of sacrificing nature to logic are so sophisticated by their profession that to them logic is nature, and nature absurdity.

Many friendly critics are too little skilled in social questions and moral discussions to be able to conceive that respectable gentlemen like themselves, who would instantly call the police to remove Mrs Warren if she ventured to canvass them personally, could possibly be in any way responsible for her proceedings. They remonstrate sincerely, asking me what good such painful exposures can possibly do. They might as well ask what good Lord Shaftesbury did by devoting his life to the exposure of evils (by no means yet remedied) compared to which the worst things brought into view or even into surmise by this play are trifles. The good of mentioning them is that you make people so extremely uncomfortable about them that they finally stop blaming “human nature” for them, and begin to support measures for their reform.

Can anything be more absurd than the copy of The Echo which contains a notice of the performance of my play? It is edited by a gentleman who, having devoted his life to work of the Shaftesbury type, exposes social evils and clamors for their reform in every column except one; and that one is occupied by the declaration of the paper’s kindly theatre critic, that the performance left him “wondering what useful purpose the play was intended to serve.” The balance has to be redressed by the more fashionable papers, which usually combine capable art criticism with West-End solecism on politics and sociology. It is very noteworthy, however, on comparing the press explosion produced by Mrs Warren’s Profession in 1902 with that produced by Widowers’ Houses about ten years earlier, that whereas in 1892 the facts were frantically denied and the persons of the drama flouted as monsters of wickedness, in 1902 the facts are admitted and the characters recognized, though it is suggested that this is exactly why no gentleman should mention them in public. Only one writer has ventured to imply this time that the poverty mentioned by Mrs Warren has since been quietly relieved, and need not have been dragged back to the footlights. I compliment him on his splendid mendacity, in which he is unsupported, save by a little plea in a theatrical paper which is innocent enough to think that ten guineas a year with board and lodging is an impossibly low wage for a barmaid. It goes on to cite Mr Charles Booth as having testified that there are many laborers’ wives who are happy and contented on eighteen shillings a week. But I can go further than that myself. I have seen an Oxford agricultural laborer’s wife looking cheerful on eight shillings a week; but that does not console me for the fact that agriculture in England is a ruined industry. If poverty does not matter as long as it is contented, then crime does not matter as long as it is unscrupulous. The truth is that it is only then that it does matter most desperately. Many persons are more comfortable when they are dirty than when they are clean; but that does not recommend dirt as a national policy.

Here I must for the present break off my arduous work of educating the Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success of the first representation. It is not often that an author, after a couple of hours of those rare alternations of excitement and intensely attentive silence which only occur in the theatre when actors and audience are reacting on one another to the utmost, is able to step on the stage and apply the strong word genius to the representation with the certainty of eliciting an instant and overwhelming assent from the audience. That was my good fortune on the afternoon of Sunday, the fifth of January last. I was certainly extremely fortunate in my interpreters in the enterprise, and that not alone in respect of their artistic talent; for had it not been for their superhuman patience, their imperturbable good humor and good fellowship, there could have been no performance. The terror of the Censor’s power gave us trouble enough to break up any ordinary commercial enterprise. Managers promised and even engaged their theatres to us after the most explicit warnings that the play was unlicensed, and at the last moment suddenly realized that Mr Redford had their livelihoods in the hollow of his hand, and backed out. Over and over again the date and place were fixed and the tickets printed, only to be canceled, until at last the desperate and overworked manager of the Stage Society could only laugh, as criminals broken on the wheel used to laugh at the second stroke. We rehearsed under great difficulties. Christmas pieces and plays for the new year were being produced in all directions; and my six actor colleagues were busy people, with engagements in these pieces in addition to their current professional work every night. On several raw winter days stages for rehearsal were unattainable even by the most distinguished applicants; and we shared corridors and saloons with them whilst the stage was given over to children in training for Boxing night. At last we had to rehearse at an hour at which no actor or actress has been out of bed within the memory of man; and we sardonically congratulated one another every morning on our rosy matutinal looks and the improvement wrought by our early rising in our health and characters. And all this, please observe, for a society without treasury or commercial prestige, for a play which was being denounced in advance as unmentionable, for an author without influence at the fashionable theatres! I victoriously challenge the West End managers to get as much done for interested motives, if they can.

Three causes made the production the most notable that has fallen to my lot. First, the veto of the Censor, which put the supporters of the play on their mettle. Second, the chivalry of the Stage Society, which, in spite of my urgent advice to the contrary, and my demonstration of the difficulties, dangers, and expenses the enterprise would cost, put my discouragements to shame and resolved to give battle at all costs to the attempt of the Censorship to suppress the play. Third, the artistic spirit of the actors, who made the play their own and carried it through triumphantly in spite of a series of disappointments and annoyances much more trying to the dramatic temperament than mere difficulties.

The acting, too, required courage and character as well as skill and intelligence. The veto of the Censor introduced quite a novel element of moral responsibility into the undertaking. And the characters were very unusual on the English stage. The younger heroine is, like her mother, an Englishwoman to the backbone, and not, like the heroines of our fashionable drama, a prima donna of Italian origin. Consequently she was sure to be denounced as unnatural and undramatic by the critics. The most vicious man in the play is not in the least a stage villain; indeed, he regards his own moral character with the sincere complacency of a hero of melodrama. The amiable devotee of romance and beauty is shewn at an age which brings out the futilization which these worships are apt to produce if they are made the staple of life instead of the sauce. The attitude of the clever young people to their elders is faithfully represented as one of pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic criticism, and forms a spectacle incredible to those who, when young, were not cleverer than their nearest elders, and painful to those sentimental parents who shrink from the cruelty of youth, which pardons nothing because it knows nothing. In short, the characters and their relations are of a kind that the routineer critic has not yet learned to place; so that their misunderstanding was a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, there was no hesitation behind the curtain. When it went up at last, a stage much too small for the company was revealed to an auditorium much too small for the audience. But the players, though it was impossible for them to forget their own discomfort, at once made the spectators forget theirs. It certainly was a model audience, responsive from the first line to the last; and it got no less than it deserved in return.

I grieve to add that the second performance, given for the edification of the London Press and of those members of the Stage Society who cannot attend the Sunday performances, was a less inspiriting one than the first. A solid phalanx of theatre-weary journalists in an afternoon humor, most of them committed to irreconcilable disparagement of problem plays, and all of them bound by etiquette to be as undemonstrative as possible, is not exactly the sort of audience that rises at the performers and cures them of the inevitable reaction after an excitingly successful first night. The artist nature is a sensitive and therefore a vindictive one; and masterful players have a way with recalcitrant audiences of rubbing a play into them instead of delighting them with it. I should describe the second performance of Mrs Warren’s Profession, especially as to its earlier stages, as decidedly a rubbed-in one. The rubbing was no doubt salutary; but it must have hurt some of the thinner skins. The charm of the lighter passages fled; and the strong scenes, though they again carried everything before them, yet discharged that duty in a grim fashion, doing execution on the enemy rather than moving them to repentance and confession. Still, to those who had not seen the first performance, the effect was sufficiently impressive; and they had the advantage of witnessing a fresh development in Mrs Warren, who, artistically jealous, as I took it, of the overwhelming effect of the end of the second act on the previous day, threw herself into the fourth act in quite a new way, and achieved the apparently impossible feat of surpassing herself. The compliments paid to Miss Fanny Brough by the critics, eulogistic as they are, are the compliments of men three-fourths duped as Partridge was duped by Garrick. By much of her acting they were so completely taken in that they did not recognize it as acting at all. Indeed, none of the six players quite escaped this consequence of their own thoroughness. There was a distinct tendency among the less experienced critics to complain of their sentiments and behavior. Naturally, the author does not share that grievance.

PICCARD’S COTTAGE, JANUARY 1902.

MRS WARREN’S PROFESSION

[Mrs Warren’s Profession was performed for the first time in the theatre of the New Lyric Club, London, on the 5th and 6th January 1902, with Madge McIntosh as Vivie, Julius Knight as Praed, Fanny Brough as Mrs Warren, Charles Goodhart as Crofts, Harley Granville-Barker as Frank, and Cosmo Stuart as the Reverend Samuel Gardner.]

ACT I

[Summer afternoon in a cottage garden on the eastern slope of a hill a little south of Haslemere in Surrey. Looking up the hill, the cottage is seen in the left hand corner of the garden, with its thatched roof and porch, and a large latticed window to the left of the porch. A paling completely shuts in the garden, except for a gate on the right. The common rises uphill beyond the paling to the sky line. Some folded canvas garden chairs are leaning against the side bench in the porch. A lady’s bicycle is propped against the wall, under the window. A little to the right of the porch a hammock is slung from two posts. A big canvas umbrella, stuck in the ground, keeps the sun off the hammock, in which a young lady is reading and making notes, her head towards the cottage and her feet towards the gate. In front of the hammock, and within reach of her hand, is a common kitchen chair, with a pile of serious-looking books and a supply of writing paper on it.]

[A gentleman walking on the common comes into sight from behind the cottage. He is hardly past middle age, with something of the artist about him, unconventionally but carefully dressed, and clean-shaven except for a moustache, with an eager susceptible face and very amiable and considerate manners. He has silky black hair, with waves of grey and white in it. His eyebrows are white, his moustache black. He seems not certain of his way. He looks over the palings; takes stock of the place; and sees the young lady.]

THE GENTLEMAN [taking off his hat] I beg your pardon. Can you direct me to Hindhead View — Mrs Alison’s?

THE YOUNG LADY [glancing up from her book] This is Mrs Alison’s. [She resumes her work].

THE GENTLEMAN. Indeed! Perhaps — may I ask are you Miss Vivie Warren?

THE YOUNG LADY [sharply, as she turns on her elbow to get a good look at him] Yes.

THE GENTLEMAN [daunted and conciliatory] I’m afraid I appear intrusive. My name is Praed. [Vivie at once throws her books upon the chair, and gets out of the hammock]. Oh, pray don’t let me disturb you.

VIVIE [striding to the gate and opening it for him] Come in, Mr Praed. [He comes in]. Glad to see you. [She proffers her hand and takes his with a resolute and hearty grip. She is an attractive specimen of the sensible, able, highly-educated young middle-class Englishwoman. Age 22. Prompt, strong, confident, self-possessed. Plain business-like dress, but not dowdy. She wears a chatelaine at her belt, with a fountain pen and a paper knife among its pendants].

PRAED. Very kind of you indeed, Miss Warren. [She shuts the gate with a vigorous slam. He passes in to the middle of the garden, exercising his fingers, which are slightly numbed by her greeting]. Has your mother arrived?

VIVIE [quickly, evidently scenting aggression] Is she coming?

PRAED [surprised] Didn’t you expect us?

VIVIE. No.

PRAED. Now, goodness me, I hope I’ve not mistaken the day. That would be just like me, you know. Your mother arranged that she was to come down from London and that I was to come over from Horsham to be introduced to you.

VIVIE [not at all pleased] Did she? Hm! My mother has rather a trick of taking me by surprise — to see how I behave myself while she’s away, I suppose. I fancy I shall take my mother very much by surprise one of these days, if she makes arrangements that concern me without consulting me beforehand. She hasnt come.

PRAED [embarrassed] I’m really very sorry.

VIVIE [throwing off her displeasure] It’s not your fault, Mr Praed, is it? And I’m very glad you’ve come. You are the only one of my mother’s friends I have ever asked her to bring to see me.

PRAED [relieved and delighted] Oh, now this is really very good of you, Miss Warren!

VIVIE. Will you come indoors; or would you rather sit out here and talk?

PRAED. It will be nicer out here, don’t you think?

VIVIE. Then I’ll go and get you a chair. [She goes to the porch for a garden chair].

PRAED [following her] Oh, pray, pray! Allow me. [He lays hands on the chair].

VIVIE [letting him take it] Take care of your fingers; theyre rather dodgy things, those chairs. [She goes across to the chair with the books on it; pitches them into the hammock; and brings the chair forward with one swing].

PRAED [who has just unfolded his chair] Oh, now do let me take that hard chair. I like hard chairs.

VIVIE. So do I. Sit down, Mr Praed. [This invitation she gives with a genial peremptoriness, his anxiety to please her clearly striking her as a sign of weakness of character on his part. But he does not immediately obey].

PRAED. By the way, though, hadnt we better go to the station to meet your mother?

VIVIE [coolly] Why? She knows the way.

PRAED [disconcerted] Er — I suppose she does [he sits down].

VIVIE. Do you know, you are just like what I expected. I hope you are disposed to be friends with me.

PRAED [again beaming] Thank you, my dear Miss Warren; thank you. Dear me! I’m so glad your mother hasnt spoilt you!

VIVIE. How?

PRAED. Well, in making you too conventional. You know, my dear Miss Warren, I am a born anarchist. I hate authority. It spoils the relations between parent and child; even between mother and daughter. Now I was always afraid that your mother would strain her authority to make you very conventional. It’s such a relief to find that she hasnt.

VIVIE. Oh! have I been behaving unconventionally?

PRAED. Oh no: oh dear no. At least, not conventionally unconventionally, you understand. [She nods and sits down. He goes on, with a cordial outburst] But it was so charming of you to say that you were disposed to be friends with me! You modern young ladies are splendid: perfectly splendid!

VIVIE [dubiously] Eh? [watching him with dawning disappointment as to the quality of his brains and character].

PRAED. When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of each other: there was no good fellowship. Nothing real. Only gallantry copied out of novels, and as vulgar and affected as it could be. Maidenly reserve! gentlemanly chivalry! always saying no when you meant yes! simple purgatory for shy and sincere souls.

VIVIE. Yes, I imagine there must have been a frightful waste of time. Especially women’s time.

PRAED. Oh, waste of life, waste of everything. But things are improving. Do you know, I have been in a positive state of excitement about meeting you ever since your magnificent achievements at Cambridge: a thing unheard of in my day. It was perfectly splendid, your tieing with the third wrangler. Just the right place, you know. The first wrangler is always a dreamy, morbid fellow, in whom the thing is pushed to the length of a disease.

VIVIE. It doesn’t pay. I wouldn’t do it again for the same money.

PRAED [aghast] The same money!

VIVIE. Yes. Fifty pounds. Perhaps you don’t know how it was. Mrs Latham, my tutor at Newnham, told my mother that I could distinguish myself in the mathematical tripos if I went in for it in earnest. The papers were full just then of Phillipa Summers beating the senior wrangler. You remember about it, of course.

PRAED [shakes his head energetically] !!!

VIVIE. Well, anyhow, she did; and nothing would please my mother but that I should do the same thing. I said flatly that it was not worth my while to face the grind since I was not going in for teaching; but I offered to try for fourth wrangler or thereabouts for fifty pounds. She closed with me at that, after a little grumbling; and I was better than my bargain. But I wouldn’t do it again for that. Two hundred pounds would have been nearer the mark.

PRAED [much damped] Lord bless me! Thats a very practical way of looking at it.

VIVIE. Did you expect to find me an unpractical person?

PRAED. But surely it’s practical to consider not only the work these honors cost, but also the culture they bring.

VIVIE. Culture! My dear Mr Praed: do you know what the mathematical tripos means? It means grind, grind, grind for six to eight hours a day at mathematics, and nothing but mathematics.

I’m supposed to know something about science; but I know nothing except the mathematics it involves. I can make calculations for engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on; but I know next to nothing about engineering or electricity or insurance. I don’t even know arithmetic well. Outside mathematics, lawn-tennis, eating, sleeping, cycling, and walking, I’m a more ignorant barbarian than any woman could possibly be who hadn’t gone in for the tripos.

PRAED [revolted] What a monstrous, wicked, rascally system! I knew it! I felt at once that it meant destroying all that makes womanhood beautiful!

VIVIE. I don’t object to it on that score in the least. I shall turn it to very good account, I assure you.

PRAED. Pooh! In what way?

VIVIE. I shall set up chambers in the City, and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing. Under cover of that I shall do some law, with one eye on the Stock Exchange all the time. I’ve come down here by myself to read law: not for a holiday, as my mother imagines. I hate holidays.

PRAED. You make my blood run cold. Are you to have no romance, no beauty in your life?

VIVIE. I don’t care for either, I assure you.

PRAED. You can’t mean that.

VIVIE. Oh yes I do. I like working and getting paid for it. When I’m tired of working, I like a comfortable chair, a cigar, a little whisky, and a novel with a good detective story in it.

PRAED [rising in a frenzy of repudiation] I don’t believe it. I am an artist; and I can’t believe it: I refuse to believe it. It’s only that you havn’t discovered yet what a wonderful world art can open up to you.

VIVIE. Yes I have. Last May I spent six weeks in London with Honoria Fraser. Mamma thought we were doing a round of sightseeing together; but I was really at Honoria’s chambers in Chancery Lane every day, working away at actuarial calculations for her, and helping her as well as a greenhorn could. In the evenings we smoked and talked, and never dreamt of going out except for exercise. And I never enjoyed myself more in my life.

I cleared all my expenses and got initiated into the business without a fee in the bargain.

PRAED. But bless my heart and soul, Miss Warren, do you call that discovering art?

VIVIE. Wait a bit. That wasn’t the beginning. I went up to town on an invitation from some artistic people in Fitzjohn’s Avenue: one of the girls was a Newnham chum. They took me to the National Gallery —

PRAED [approving] Ah!! [He sits down, much relieved].

VIVIE [continuing] — to the Opera —

PRAED [still more pleased] Good!

VIVIE. — and to a concert where the band played all the evening: Beethoven and Wagner and so on. I wouldn’t go through that experience again for anything you could offer me. I held out for civility’s sake until the third day; and then I said, plump out, that I couldn’t stand any more of it, and went off to Chancery Lane. N o w you know the sort of perfectly splendid modern young lady I am. How do you think I shall get on with my mother?

PRAED [startled] Well, I hope — er —

VIVIE. It’s not so much what you hope as what you believe, that I want to know.

PRAED. Well, frankly, I am afraid your mother will be a little disappointed. Not from any shortcoming on your part, you know: I don’t mean that. But you are so different from her ideal.

VIVIE. Her what?!

PRAED. Her ideal.

VIVIE. Do you mean her ideal of ME?

PRAED. Yes.

VIVIE. What on earth is it like?

PRAED. Well, you must have observed, Miss Warren, that people who are dissatisfied with their own bringing-up generally think that the world would be all right if everybody were to be brought up quite differently. Now your mother’s life has been — er — I suppose you know —

VIVIE. Don’t suppose anything, Mr Praed. I hardly know my mother. Since I was a child I have lived in England, at school or at college, or with people paid to take charge of me. I have been boarded out all my life. My mother has lived in Brussels or Vienna and never let me go to her. I only see her when she visits England for a few days. I don’t complain: it’s been very pleasant; for people have been very good to me; and there has always been plenty of money to make things smooth. But don’t imagine I know anything about my mother. I know far less than you do.

PRAED [very ill at ease] In that case — [He stops, quite at a loss. Then, with a forced attempt at gaiety] But what nonsense we are talking! Of course you and your mother will get on capitally. [He rises, and looks abroad at the view]. What a charming little place you have here!

VIVIE [unmoved] Rather a violent change of subject, Mr Praed. Why won’t my mother’s life bear being talked about?

PRAED. Oh, you mustn’t say that. Isn’t it natural that I should have a certain delicacy in talking to my old friend’s daughter about her behind her back? You and she will have plenty of opportunity of talking about it when she comes.

VIVIE. No: she won’t talk about it either. [Rising] However, I daresay you have good reasons for telling me nothing. Only, mind this, Mr Praed, I expect there will be a battle royal when my mother hears of my Chancery Lane project.

PRAED [ruefully] I’m afraid there will.

VIVIE. Well, I shall win because I want nothing but my fare to London to start there to-morrow earning my own living by devilling for Honoria. Besides, I have no mysteries to keep up; and it seems she has. I shall use that advantage over her if necessary.

PRAED [greatly shocked] Oh no! No, pray. Youd not do such a thing.

VIVIE. Then tell me why not.

PRAED. I really cannot. I appeal to your good feeling. [She smiles at his sentimentality]. Besides, you may be too bold. Your mother is not to be trifled with when she’s angry.

VIVIE. You can’t frighten me, Mr Praed. In that month at Chancery Lane I had opportunities of taking the measure of one or two women v e r y like my mother. You may back me to win. But if I hit harder in my ignorance than I need, remember it is you who refuse to enlighten me. Now, let us drop the subject. [She takes her chair and replaces it near the hammock with the same vigorous swing as before].

PRAED [taking a desperate resolution] One word, Miss Warren. I had better tell you. It’s very difficult; but —

[Mrs Warren and Sir George Crofts arrive at the gate. Mrs Warren is between 40 and 50, formerly pretty, showily dressed in a brilliant hat and a gay blouse fitting tightly over her bust and flanked by fashionable sleeves. Rather spoilt and domineering, and decidedly vulgar, but, on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman.]

[Crofts is a tall powerfully-built man of about 50, fashionably dressed in the style of a young man. Nasal voice, reedier than might be expected from his strong frame. Clean-shaven bulldog jaws, large flat ears, and thick neck: gentlemanly combination of the most brutal types of city man, sporting man, and man about town.]

VIVIE. Here they are. [Coming to them as they enter the garden] How do, mater? Mr Praed’s been here this half hour, waiting for you.

MRS WARREN. Well, if you’ve been waiting, Praddy, it’s your own fault: I thought youd have had the gumption to know I was coming by the 3.10 train. Vivie: put your hat on, dear: youll get sunburnt. Oh, I forgot to introduce you. Sir George Crofts: my little Vivie.

[Crofts advances to Vivie with his most courtly manner. She nods, but makes no motion to shake hands.]

CROFTS. May I shake hands with a young lady whom I have known by reputation very long as the daughter of one of my oldest friends?

VIVIE [who has been looking him up and down sharply] If you like.

[She takes his tenderly proferred hand and gives it a squeeze that makes him open his eyes; then turns away, and says to her mother] Will you come in, or shall I get a couple more chairs? [She goes into the porch for the chairs].

MRS WARREN. Well, George, what do you think of her?

CROFTS [ruefully] She has a powerful fist. Did you shake hands with her, Praed?

PRAED. Yes: it will pass off presently.

CROFTS. I hope so. [Vivie reappears with two more chairs. He hurries to her assistance]. Allow me.

MRS WARREN [patronizingly] Let Sir George help you with the chairs, dear.

VIVIE [pitching them into his arms] Here you are. [She dusts her hands and turns to Mrs Warren]. Youd like some tea, wouldn’t you?

MRS WARREN [sitting in Praed’s chair and fanning herself] I’m dying for a drop to drink.

VIVIE. I’ll see about it. [She goes into the cottage].

[Sir George has by this time managed to unfold a chair and plant it by Mrs Warren, on her left. He throws the other on the grass and sits down, looking dejected and rather foolish, with the handle of his stick in his mouth. Praed, still very uneasy, fidgets around the garden on their right.]

MRS WARREN [to Praed, looking at Crofts] Just look at him, Praddy: he looks cheerful, don’t he? He’s been worrying my life out these three years to have that little girl of mine shewn to him; and now that Ive done it, he’s quite out of countenance. [Briskly] Come! sit up, George; and take your stick out of your mouth. [Crofts sulkily obeys].

PRAED. I think, you know — if you don’t mind my saying so — that we had better get out of the habit of thinking of her as a little girl. You see she has really distinguished herself; and I’m not sure, from what I have seen of her, that she is not older than any of us.

MRS WARREN [greatly amused] Only listen to him, George! Older than any of us! Well she has been stuffing you nicely with her importance.

PRAED. But young people are particularly sensitive about being treated in that way.

MRS WARREN. Yes; and young people have to get all that nonsense taken out of them, and good deal more besides. Don’t you interfere, Praddy: I know how to treat my own child as well as you do. [Praed, with a grave shake of his head, walks up the garden with his hands behind his back. Mrs Warren pretends to laugh, but looks after him with perceptible concern. Then, she whispers to Crofts] Whats the matter with him? What does he take it like that for?

CROFTS [morosely] Youre afraid of Praed.

MRS WARREN. What! Me! Afraid of dear old Praddy! Why, a fly wouldn’t be afraid of him.

CROFTS. You’re afraid of him.

MRS WARREN [angry] I’ll trouble you to mind your own business, and not try any of your sulks on me. I’m not afraid of y o u, anyhow. If you can’t make yourself agreeable, youd better go home. [She gets up, and, turning her back on him, finds herself face to face with Praed]. Come, Praddy, I know it was only your tender-heartedness. Youre afraid I’ll bully her.

PRAED. My dear Kitty: you think I’m offended. Don’t imagine that: pray don’t. But you know I often notice things that escape you; and though you never take my advice, you sometimes admit afterwards that you ought to have taken it.

MRS WARREN. Well, what do you notice now?

PRAED. Only that Vivie is a grown woman. Pray, Kitty, treat her with every respect.

MRS WARREN [with genuine amazement] Respect! Treat my own daughter with respect! What next, pray!

VIVIE [appearing at the cottage door and calling to Mrs Warren] Mother: will you come to my room before tea?

MRS WARREN. Yes, dearie. [She laughs indulgently at Praed’s gravity, and pats him on the cheek as she passes him on her way to the porch]. Don’t be cross, Praddy. [She follows Vivie into the cottage].

CROFTS [furtively] I say, Praed.

PRAED. Yes.

CROFTS. I want to ask you a rather particular question.

PRAED. Certainly. [He takes Mrs Warren’s chair and sits close to Crofts].

CROFTS. Thats right: they might hear us from the window. Look here: did Kitty every tell you who that girl’s father is?

PRAED. Never.

CROFTS. Have you any suspicion of who it might be?

PRAED. None.

CROFTS [not believing him] I know, of course, that you perhaps might feel bound not to tell if she had said anything to you. But it’s very awkward to be uncertain about it now that we shall be meeting the girl every day. We don’t exactly know how we ought to feel towards her.

PRAED. What difference can that make? We take her on her own merits. What does it matter who her father was?

CROFTS [suspiciously] Then you know who he was?

PRAED [with a touch of temper] I said no just now. Did you not hear me?

CROFTS. Look here, Praed. I ask you as a particular favor. If you do know [movement of protest from Praed] — I only say, if you know, you might at least set my mind at rest about her. The fact is, I fell attracted.

PRAED [sternly] What do you mean?

CROFTS. Oh, don’t be alarmed: it’s quite an innocent feeling. Thats what puzzles me about it. Why, for all I know, I might be her father.

PRAED. You! Impossible!

CROFTS [catching him up cunningly] You know for certain that I’m not?

PRAED. I know nothing about it, I tell you, any more than you. But really, Crofts — oh no, it’s out of the question. Theres not the least resemblance.

CROFTS. As to that, theres no resemblance between her and her mother that I can see. I suppose she’s not y o u r daughter, is she?

PRAED [rising indignantly] Really, Crofts — !

CROFTS. No offence, Praed. Quite allowable as between two men of the world.

PRAED [recovering himself with an effort and speaking gently and gravely] Now listen to me, my dear Crofts. [He sits down again].

I have nothing to do with that side of Mrs Warren’s life, and never had. She has never spoken to me about it; and of course I have never spoken to her about it. Your delicacy will tell you that a handsome woman needs some friends who are not — well, not on that footing with her. The effect of her own beauty would become a torment to her if she could not escape from it occasionally. You are probably on much more confidential terms with Kitty than I am. Surely you can ask her the question yourself.

CROFTS. I h a v e asked her, often enough. But she’s so determined to keep the child all to herself that she would deny that it ever had a father if she could. [Rising] I’m thoroughly uncomfortable about it, Praed.

PRAED [rising also] Well, as you are, at all events, old enough to be her father, I don’t mind agreeing that we both regard Miss Vivie in a parental way, as a young girl who we are bound to protect and help. What do you say?

CROFTS [aggressively] I’m no older than you, if you come to that.

PRAED. Yes you are, my dear fellow: you were born old. I was born a boy: Ive never been able to feel the assurance of a grown-up man in my life. [He folds his chair and carries it to the porch].

MRS WARREN [calling from within the cottage] Prad-dee! George! Tea-ea-ea-ea!

CROFTS [hastily] She’s calling us. [He hurries in].

[Praed shakes his head bodingly, and is following Crofts when he is hailed by a young gentleman who has just appeared on the common, and is making for the gate. He is pleasant, pretty, smartly dressed, cleverly good-for-nothing, not long turned 20, with a charming voice and agreeably disrespectful manners. He carries a light sporting magazine rifle.]

THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN. Hallo! Praed!

PRAED. Why, Frank Gardner! [Frank comes in and shakes hands cordially]. What on earth are you doing here?

FRANK. Staying with my father.

PRAED. The Roman father?

FRANK. He’s rector here. I’m living with my people this autumn for the sake of economy. Things came to a crisis in July: the Roman father had to pay my debts. He’s stony broke in consequence; and so am I. What are you up to in these parts? do you know the people here?

PRAED. Yes: I’m spending the day with a Miss Warren.

FRANK [enthusiastically] What! Do you know Vivie? Isn’t she a jolly girl? I’m teaching her to shoot with this [putting down the rifle]. I’m so glad she knows you: youre just the sort of fellow she ought to know. [He smiles, and raises the charming voice almost to a singing tone as he exclaims] It’s e v e r so jolly to find you here, Praed.

PRAED. I’m an old friend of her mother. Mrs Warren brought me over to make her daughter’s acquaintance.

FRANK. The mother! Is she here?

PRAED. Yes: inside, at tea.

MRS WARREN [calling from within] Prad-dee-ee-ee-eee! The tea-cake’ll be cold.

PRAED [calling] Yes, Mrs Warren. In a moment. I’ve just met a friend here.

MRS WARREN. A what?

PRAED [louder] A friend.

MRS WARREN. Bring him in.

PRAED. All right. [To Frank] Will you accept the invitation?

FRANK [incredulous, but immensely amused] Is that Vivie’s mother?

PRAED. Yes.

FRANK. By Jove! What a lark! Do you think she’ll like me?

PRAED. I’ve no doubt youll make yourself popular, as usual. Come in and try [moving towards the house].

FRANK. Stop a bit. [Seriously] I want to take you into my confidence.

PRAED. Pray don’t. It’s only some fresh folly, like the barmaid at Redhill.

FRANK. It’s ever so much more serious than that. You say you’ve only just met Vivie for the first time?

PRAED. Yes.

FRANK [rhapsodically] Then you can have no idea what a girl she is. Such character! Such sense! And her cleverness! Oh, my eye, Praed, but I can tell you she is clever! And — need I add? — she loves me.

CROFTS [putting his head out of the window] I say, Praed: what are you about? Do come along. [He disappears].

FRANK. Hallo! Sort of chap that would take a prize at a dog show, ain’t he? Who’s he?

PRAED. Sir George Crofts, an old friend of Mrs Warren’s. I think we had better come in.

[On their way to the porch they are interrupted by a call from the gate. Turning, they see an elderly clergyman looking over it.]

THE CLERGYMAN [calling] Frank!

FRANK. Hallo! [To Praed] The Roman father. [To the clergyman] Yes, gov’nor: all right: presently. [To Praed] Look here, Praed: youd better go in to tea. I’ll join you directly.

PRAED. Very good. [He goes into the cottage].

[The clergyman remains outside the gate, with his hands on the top of it. The Rev. Samuel Gardner, a beneficed clergyman of the Established Church, is over 50. Externally he is pretentious, booming, noisy, important. Really he is that obsolescent phenomenon the fool of the family dumped on the Church by his father the patron, clamorously asserting himself as father and clergyman without being able to command respect in either capacity.]

REV. S. Well, sir. Who are your friends here, if I may ask?

FRANK. Oh, it’s all right, gov’nor! Come in.

REV. S. No, sir; not until I know whose garden I am entering.

FRANK. It’s all right. It’s Miss Warren’s.

REV. S. I have not seen her at church since she came.

FRANK. Of course not: she’s a third wrangler. Ever so intellectual. Took a higher degree than you did; so why should she go to hear you preach?

REV. S. Don’t be disrespectful, sir.

FRANK. Oh, it don’t matter: nobody hears us. Come in. [He opens the gate, unceremoniously pulling his father with it into the garden]. I want to introduce you to her. Do you remember the advice you gave me last July, gov’nor?

REV. S. [severely] Yes. I advised you to conquer your idleness and flippancy, and to work your way into an honorable profession and live on it and not upon me.

FRANK. No: thats what you thought of afterwards. What you actually said was that since I had neither brains nor money, I’d better turn my good looks to account by marrying someone with both. Well, look here. Miss Warren has brains: you can’t deny that.

REV. S. Brains are not everything.

FRANK. No, of course not: theres the money —

REV. S. [interrupting him austerely] I was not thinking of money, sir. I was speaking of higher things. Social position, for instance.

FRANK. I don’t care a rap about that.

REV. S. But I do, sir.

FRANK. Well, nobody wants y o u to marry her. Anyhow, she has what amounts to a high Cambridge degree; and she seems to have as much money as she wants.

REV. S. [sinking into a feeble vein of humor] I greatly doubt whether she has as much money as y o u will want.

FRANK. Oh, come: I havn’t been so very extravagant. I live ever so quietly; I don’t drink; I don’t bet much; and I never go regularly to the razzle-dazzle as you did when you were my age.

REV. S. [booming hollowly] Silence, sir.

FRANK. Well, you told me yourself, when I was making every such an ass of myself about the barmaid at Redhill, that you once offered a woman fifty pounds for the letters you wrote to her when —

REV. S. [terrified] Sh-sh-sh, Frank, for Heaven’s sake! [He looks round apprehensively Seeing no one within earshot he plucks up courage to boom again, but more subduedly]. You are taking an ungentlemanly advantage of what I confided to you for your own good, to save you from an error you would have repented all your life long. Take warning by your father’s follies, sir; and don’t make them an excuse for your own.

FRANK. Did you ever hear the story of the Duke of Wellington and his letters?

REV. S. No, sir; and I don’t want to hear it.

FRANK. The old Iron Duke didn’t throw away fifty pounds: not he. He just wrote: “Dear Jenny: publish and be damned! Yours affectionately, Wellington.” Thats what you should have done.

REV. S. [piteously] Frank, my boy: when I wrote those letters I put myself into that woman’s power. When I told you about them I put myself, to some extent, I am sorry to say, in your power. She refused my money with these words, which I shall never forget. “Knowledge is power” she said; “and I never sell power.”

Thats more than twenty years ago; and she has never made use of her power or caused me a moment’s uneasiness. You are behaving worse to me than she did, Frank.

FRANK. Oh yes I dare say! Did you ever preach at her the way you preach at me every day?

REV. S. [wounded almost to tears] I leave you, sir. You are incorrigible. [He turns towards the gate].

FRANK [utterly unmoved] Tell them I shan’t be home to tea, will you, gov’nor, like a good fellow? [He moves towards the cottage door and is met by Praed and Vivie coming out].

VIVIE [to Frank] Is that your father, Frank? I do so want to meet him.

FRANK. Certainly. [Calling after his father] Gov’nor. Youre wanted. [The parson turns at the gate, fumbling nervously at his hat. Praed crosses the garden to the opposite side, beaming in anticipation of civilities]. My father: Miss Warren.

VIVIE [going to the clergyman and shaking his hand] Very glad to see you here, Mr Gardner. [Calling to the cottage] Mother: come along: youre wanted.

[Mrs Warren appears on the threshold, and is immediately transfixed, recognizing the clergyman.]

VIVIE [continuing] Let me introduce —

MRS WARREN [swooping on the Reverend Samuel] Why it’s Sam Gardner, gone into the Church! Well, I never! Don’t you know us, Sam? This is George Crofts, as large as life and twice as natural. Don’t you remember me?

REV. S. [very red] I really — er —

MRS WARREN. Of course you do. Why, I have a whole album of your letters still: I came across them only the other day.

REV. S. [miserably confused] Miss Vavasour, I believe.

MRS WARREN [correcting him quickly in a loud whisper] Tch! Nonsense! Mrs Warren: don’t you see my daughter there?

ACT II

[Inside the cottage after nightfall. Looking eastward from within instead of westward from without, the latticed window, with its curtains drawn, is now seen in the middle of the front wall of the cottage, with the porch door to the left of it. In the left-hand side wall is the door leading to the kitchen. Farther back against the same wall is a dresser with a candle and matches on it, and Frank’s rifle standing beside them, with the barrel resting in the plate-rack. In the centre a table stands with a lighted lamp on it. Vivie’s books and writing materials are on a table to the right of the window, against the wall. The fireplace is on the right, with a settle: there is no fire. Two of the chairs are set right and left of the table.]

[The cottage door opens, shewing a fine starlit night without; and Mrs Warren, her shoulders wrapped in a shawl borrowed from Vivie, enters, followed by Frank, who throws his cap on the window seat. She has had enough of walking, and gives a gasp of relief as she unpins her hat; takes it off; sticks the pin through the crown; and puts it on the table.]

MRS WARREN. O Lord! I don’t know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do. I could do with a whisky and soda now very well, if only they had such a things in this place.

FRANK. Perhaps Vivie’s got some.

MRS WARREN. Nonsense! What would a young girl like her be doing with such things! Never mind: it don’t matter. I wonder how she passes her time here! I’d a good deal rather be in Vienna.

FRANK. Let me take you there. [He helps her to take off her shawl, gallantly giving her shoulders a very perceptible squeeze as he does so].

MRS WARREN. Ah! would you? I’m beginning to think youre a chip of the old block.

FRANK. Like the gov’nor, eh? [He hangs the shawl on the nearest chair, and sits down].

MRS WARREN. Never you mind. What do you know about such things?

Youre only a boy. [She goes to the hearth to be farther from temptation].

FRANK. Do come to Vienna with me? It’d be ever such larks.

MRS WARREN. No, thank you. Vienna is no place for you — at least not until youre a little older. [She nods at him to emphasize this piece of advice. He makes a mock-piteous face, belied by his laughing eyes. She looks at him; then comes back to him]. Now, look here, little boy [taking his face in her hands and turning it up to her]: I know you through and through by your likeness to your father, better than you know yourself. Don’t you go taking any silly ideas into your head about me. Do you hear?

FRANK [gallantly wooing her with his voice] Can’t help it, my dear Mrs Warren: it runs in the family.

[She pretends to box his ears; then looks at the pretty laughing upturned face of a moment, tempted. At last she kisses him, and immediately turns away, out of patience with herself.]

MRS WARREN. There! I shouldn’t have done that. I am wicked. Never you mind, my dear: it’s only a motherly kiss. Go and make love to Vivie.

FRANK. So I have.

MRS WARREN [turning on him with a sharp note of alarm in her voice] What!

FRANK. Vivie and I are ever such chums.

MRS WARREN. What do you mean? Now see here: I won’t have any young scamp tampering with my little girl. Do you hear? I won’t have it.

FRANK [quite unabashed] My dear Mrs Warren: don’t you be alarmed. My intentions are honorable: ever so honorable; and your little girl is jolly well able to take care of herself. She don’t need looking after half so much as her mother. She ain’t so handsome, you know.

MRS WARREN [taken aback by his assurance] Well, you have got a nice healthy two inches of cheek all over you. I don’t know where you got it. Not from your father, anyhow.

CROFTS [in the garden] The gipsies, I suppose?

REV. S. [replying] The broomsquires are far worse.

MRS WARREN [to Frank] S-sh! Remember! you’ve had your warning.

[Crofts and the Reverend Samuel Gardner come in from the garden, the clergyman continuing his conversation as he enters.]

REV. S. The perjury at the Winchester assizes is deplorable.

MRS WARREN. Well? what became of you two? And wheres Praddy and Vivie?

CROFTS [putting his hat on the settle and his stick in the chimney corner] They went up the hill. We went to the village. I wanted a drink. [He sits down on the settle, putting his legs up along the seat].

MRS WARREN. Well, she oughtn’t to go off like that without telling me. [To Frank] Get your father a chair, Frank: where are your manners? [Frank springs up and gracefully offers his father his chair; then takes another from the wall and sits down at the table, in the middle, with his father on his right and Mrs Warren on his left]. George: where are you going to stay to-night? You can’t stay here. And whats Praddy going to do?

CROFTS. Gardner’ll put me up.

MRS WARREN. Oh, no doubt you’ve taken care of yourself! But what about Praddy?

CROFTS. Don’t know. I suppose he can sleep at the inn.

MRS WARREN. Havn’t you room for him, Sam?

REV. S. Well — er — you see, as rector here, I am not free to do as I like. Er — what is Mr Praed’s social position?

MRS WARREN. Oh, he’s all right: he’s an architect. What an old stick-in-the-mud you are, Sam!

FRANK. Yes, it’s all right, gov’nor. He built that place down in Wales for the Duke. Caernarvon Castle they call it. You must have heard of it. [He winks with lightning smartness at Mrs Warren, and regards his father blandly].

REV. S. Oh, in that case, of course we shall only be too happy. I suppose he knows the Duke personally.

FRANK. Oh, ever so intimately! We can stick him in Georgina’s old room.

MRS WARREN. Well, thats settled. Now if those two would only come in and let us have supper. Theyve no right to stay out after dark like this.

CROFTS [aggressively] What harm are they doing you?

MRS WARREN. Well, harm or not, I don’t like it.

FRANK. Better not wait for them, Mrs Warren. Praed will stay out as long as possible. He has never known before what it is to stray over the heath on a summer night with my Vivie.

CROFTS [sitting up in some consternation] I say, you know! Come!

REV. S. [rising, startled out of his professional manner into real force and sincerity] Frank, once and for all, it’s out of the question. Mrs Warren will tell you that it’s not to be thought of.

CROFTS. Of course not.

FRANK [with enchanting placidity] Is that so, Mrs Warren?

MRS WARREN [reflectively] Well, Sam, I don’t know. If the girl wants to get married, no good can come of keeping her unmarried.

REV. S. [astounded] But married to him! — your daughter to my son! Only think: it’s impossible.

CROFTS. Of course it’s impossible. Don’t be a fool, Kitty.

MRS WARREN [nettled] Why not? Isn’t my daughter good enough for your son?

REV. S. But surely, my dear Mrs Warren, you know the reasons —

MRS WARREN [defiantly] I know no reasons. If you know any, you can tell them to the lad, or to the girl, or to your congregation, if you like.

REV. S. [collapsing helplessly into his chair] You know very well that I couldn’t tell anyone the reasons. But my boy will believe me when I tell him there a r e reasons.

FRANK. Quite right, Dad: he will. But has your boy’s conduct ever been influenced by your reasons?

CROFTS. You can’t marry her; and thats all about it. [He gets up and stands on the hearth, with his back to the fireplace, frowning determinedly].

MRS WARREN [turning on him sharply] What have you got to do with it, pray?

FRANK [with his prettiest lyrical cadence] Precisely what I was going to ask, myself, in my own graceful fashion.

CROFTS [to Mrs Warren] I suppose you don’t want to marry the girl to a man younger than herself and without either a profession or twopence to keep her on. Ask Sam, if you don’t believe me. [To the parson] How much more money are you going to give him?

REV. S. Not another penny. He has had his patrimony; and he spent the last of it in July. [Mrs Warren’s face falls].

CROFTS [watching her] There! I told you. [He resumes his place on the settle and puts his legs on the seat again, as if the matter were finally disposed of].

FRANK [plaintively] This is ever so mercenary. Do you suppose Miss Warren’s going to marry for money? If we love one another —

MRS WARREN. Thank you. Your love’s a pretty cheap commodity, my lad. If you have no means of keeping a wife, that settles it; you can’t have Vivie.

FRANK [much amused] What do y o u say, gov’nor, eh?

REV. S. I agree with Mrs Warren.

FRANK. And good old Crofts has already expressed his opinion.

CROFTS [turning angrily on his elbow] Look here: I want none of your cheek.

FRANK [pointedly] I’m e v e r so sorry to surprise you, Crofts; but you allowed yourself the liberty of speaking to me like a father a moment ago. One father is enough, thank you.

CROFTS [contemptuously] Yah! [He turns away again].

FRANK [rising] Mrs Warren: I cannot give my Vivie up, even for your sake.

MRS WARREN [muttering] Young scamp!

FRANK [continuing] And as you no doubt intend to hold out other prospects to her, I shall lose no time in placing my case before her. [They stare at him; and he begins to declaim gracefully] He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch, To gain or lose it all.

[The cottage doors open whilst he is reciting; and Vivie and Praed come in. He breaks off. Praed puts his hat on the dresser. There is an immediate improvement in the company’s behavior. Crofts takes down his legs from the settle and pulls himself together as Praed joins him at the fireplace. Mrs Warren loses her ease of manner and takes refuge in querulousness.]

MRS WARREN. Wherever have you been, Vivie?

VIVIE [taking off her hat and throwing it carelessly on the table] On the hill.

MRS WARREN. Well, you shouldn’t go off like that without letting me know. How could I tell what had become of you? And night coming on too!

VIVIE [going to the door of the kitchen and opening it, ignoring her mother] Now, about supper? [All rise except Mrs Warren] We shall be rather crowded in here, I’m afraid.

MRS WARREN. Did you hear what I said, Vivie?

VIVIE [quietly] Yes, mother. [Reverting to the supper difficulty] How many are we? [Counting] One, two, three, four, five, six. Well, two will have to wait until the rest are done: Mrs Alison has only plates and knives for four.

PRAED. Oh, it doesn’t matter about me. I —

VIVIE. You have had a long walk and are hungry, Mr Praed: you shall have your supper at once. I can wait myself. I want one person to wait with me. Frank: are you hungry?

FRANK. Not the least in the world. Completely off my peck, in fact.

MRS WARREN [to Crofts] Neither are you, George. You can wait.

CROFTS. Oh, hang it, I’ve eaten nothing since tea-time. Can’t Sam do it?

FRANK. Would you starve my poor father?

REV. S. [testily] Allow me to speak for myself, sir. I am perfectly willing to wait.

VIVIE [decisively] There’s no need. Only two are wanted. [She opens the door of the kitchen]. Will you take my mother in, Mr Gardner. [The parson takes Mrs Warren; and they pass into the kitchen. Praed and Crofts follow. All except Praed clearly disapprove of the arrangement, but do not know how to resist it. Vivie stands at the door looking in at them]. Can you squeeze past to that corner, Mr Praed: it’s rather a tight fit. Take care of your coat against the white-wash: that right. Now, are you all comfortable?

PRAED [within] Quite, thank you.

MRS WARREN [within] Leave the door open, dearie. [Vivie frowns; but Frank checks her with a gesture, and steals to the cottage door, which he softly sets wide open]. Oh Lor, what a draught! Youd better shut it, dear.

[Vivie shuts it with a slam, and then, noting with disgust that her mother’s hat and shawl are lying about, takes them tidily to the window seat, whilst Frank noiselessly shuts the cottage door.]

FRANK [exulting] Aha! Got rid of em. Well, Vivvums: what do you think of my governor?

VIVIE [preoccupied and serious] I’ve hardly spoken to him. He doesn’t strike me as a particularly able person.

FRANK. Well, you know, the old man is not altogether such a fool as he looks. You see, he was shoved into the Church, rather; and in trying to live up to it he makes a much bigger ass of himself than he really is. I don’t dislike him as much as you might expect. He means well. How do you think youll get on with him?

VIVIE [rather grimly] I don’t think my future life will be much concerned with him, or with any of that old circle of my mother’s, except perhaps Praed. [She sits down on the settle] What do you think of my mother?

FRANK. Really and truly?

VIVIE. Yes, really and truly.

FRANK. Well, she’s ever so jolly. But she’s rather a caution, isn’t she? And Crofts! Oh, my eye, Crofts! [He sits beside her].

VIVIE. What a lot, Frank!

FRANK. What a crew!

VIVIE [with intense contempt for them] If I thought that I was like that — that I was going to be a waster, shifting along from one meal to another with no purpose, and no character, and no grit in me, I’d open an artery and bleed to death without one moment’s hesitation.

FRANK. Oh no, you wouldn’t. Why should they take any grind when they can afford not to? I wish I had their luck. No: what I object to is their form. It isn’t the thing: it’s slovenly, ever so slovenly.

VIVIE. Do you think your form will be any better when youre as old as Crofts, if you don’t work?

FRANK. Of course I do. Ever so much better. Vivvums mustn’t lecture: her little boy’s incorrigible. [He attempts to take her face caressingly in his hands].

VIVIE [striking his hands down sharply] Off with you: Vivvums is not in a humor for petting her little boy this evening. [She rises and comes forward to the other side of the room].

FRANK [following her] How unkind!

VIVIE [stamping at him] Be serious. I’m serious.

FRANK. Good. Let us talk learnedly, Miss Warren: do you know that all the most advanced thinkers are agreed that half the diseases of modern civilization are due to starvation of the affections of the young. Now, I —

VIVIE [cutting him short] You are very tiresome. [She opens the inner door] Have you room for Frank there? He’s complaining of starvation.

MRS WARREN [within] Of course there is [clatter of knives and glasses as she moves the things on the table]. Here! theres room now beside me. Come along, Mr Frank.

FRANK. Her little boy will be ever so even with his Vivvums for this. [He passes into the kitchen].

MRS WARREN [within] Here, Vivie: come on you too, child. You must be famished. [She enters, followed by Crofts, who holds the door open with marked deference. She goes out without looking at him; and he shuts the door after her]. Why George, you can’t be done: you’ve eaten nothing. Is there anything wrong with you?

CROFTS. Oh, all I wanted was a drink. [He thrusts his hands in his pockets, and begins prowling about the room, restless and sulky].

MRS WARREN. Well, I like enough to eat. But a little of that cold beef and cheese and lettuce goes a long way. [With a sigh of only half repletion she sits down lazily on the settle].

CROFTS. What do you go encouraging that young pup for?

MRS WARREN [on the alert at once] Now see here, George: what are you up to about that girl? I’ve been watching your way of looking at her. Remember: I know you and what your looks mean.

CROFTS. Theres no harm in looking at her, is there?

MRS WARREN. I’d put you out and pack you back to London pretty soon if I saw any of your nonsense. My girl’s little finger is more to me than your whole body and soul. [Crofts receives this with a sneering grin. Mrs Warren, flushing a little at her failure to impose on him in the character of a theatrically devoted mother, adds in a lower key] Make your mind easy: the young pup has no more chance than you have.

CROFTS. Mayn’t a man take an interest in a girl?

MRS WARREN. Not a man like you.

CROFTS. How old is she?

MRS WARREN. Never you mind how old she is.

CROFTS. Why do you make such a secret of it?

MRS WARREN. Because I choose.

CROFTS. Well, I’m not fifty yet; and my property is as good as it ever was —

MRS [interrupting him] Yes; because youre as stingy as youre vicious.

CROFTS [continuing] And a baronet isn’t to be picked up every day.

No other man in my position would put up with you for a mother-in-law. Why shouldn’t she marry me?

MRS WARREN. You!

CROFTS. We three could live together quite comfortably. I’d die before her and leave her a bouncing widow with plenty of money. Why not? It’s been growing in my mind all the time I’ve been walking with that fool inside there.

MRS WARREN [revolted] Yes; it’s the sort of thing that would grow in your mind.

[He halts in his prowling; and the two look at one another, she steadfastly, with a sort of awe behind her contemptuous disgust: he stealthily, with a carnal gleam in his eye and a loose grin.]

CROFTS [suddenly becoming anxious and urgent as he sees no sign of sympathy in her] Look here, Kitty: youre a sensible woman: you needn’t put on any moral airs. I’ll ask no more questions; and you need answer none. I’ll settle the whole property on her; and if you want a checque for yourself on the wedding day, you can name any figure you like — in reason.

MRS WARREN. So it’s come to that with you, George, like all the other worn-out old creatures!

CROFTS [savagely] Damn you!

[Before she can retort the door of the kitchen is opened; and the voices of the others are heard returning. Crofts, unable to recover his presence of mind, hurries out of the cottage. The clergyman appears at the kitchen door.]

REV. S. [looking round] Where is Sir George?

MRS WARREN. Gone out to have a pipe. [The clergyman takes his hat from the table, and joins Mrs Warren at the fireside. Meanwhile, Vivie comes in, followed by Frank, who collapses into the nearest chair with an air of extreme exhaustion. Mrs Warren looks round at Vivie and says, with her affectation of maternal patronage even more forced than usual] Well, dearie: have you had a good supper?

VIVIE. You know what Mrs Alison’s suppers are. [She turns to Frank and pets him] Poor Frank! was all the beef gone? did it get nothing but bread and cheese and ginger beer? [Seriously, as if she had done quite enough trifling for one evening] Her butter is really awful. I must get some down from the stores.

FRANK. Do, in Heaven’s name!

[Vivie goes to the writing-table and makes a memorandum to order the butter. Praed comes in from the kitchen, putting up his handkerchief, which he has been using as a napkin.]

REV. S. Frank, my boy: it is time for us to be thinking of home.

Your mother does not know yet that we have visitors.

PRAED. I’m afraid we’re giving trouble.

FRANK [rising] Not the least in the world: my mother will be delighted to see you. She’s a genuinely intellectual artistic woman; and she sees nobody here from one year’s end to another except the gov’nor; so you can imagine how jolly dull it pans out for her. [To his father] Y o u r e not intellectual or artistic: are you pater? So take Praed home at once; and I’ll stay here and entertain Mrs Warren. Youll pick up Crofts in the garden. He’ll be excellent company for the bull-pup.

PRAED [taking his hat from the dresser, and coming close to Frank] Come with us, Frank. Mrs Warren has not seen Miss Vivie for a long time; and we have prevented them from having a moment together yet.

FRANK [quite softened, and looking at Praed with romantic admiration] Of course. I forgot. Ever so thanks for reminding me. Perfect gentleman, Praddy. Always were. My ideal through life. [He rises to go, but pauses a moment between the two older men, and puts his hand on Praed’s shoulder]. Ah, if you had only been my father instead of this unworthy old man! [He puts his other hand on his father’s shoulder].

REV. S. [blustering] Silence, sir, silence: you are profane.

MRS WARREN [laughing heartily] You should keep him in better order, Sam. Good-night. Here: take George his hat and stick with my compliments.

REV. S. [taking them] Good-night. [They shake hands. As he passes Vivie he shakes hands with her also and bids her good-night. Then, in booming command, to Frank] Come along, sir, at once. [He goes out].

MRS WARREN. Byebye, Praddy.

PRAED. Byebye, Kitty.

[They shake hands affectionately and go out together, she accompanying him to the garden gate.]

FRANK [to Vivie] Kissums?

VIVIE [fiercely] No. I hate you. [She takes a couple of books and some paper from the writing-table, and sits down with them at the middle table, at the end next the fireplace].

FRANK [grimacing] Sorry. [He goes for his cap and rifle. Mrs Warren returns. He takes her hand] Good-night, dear Mrs Warren. [He kisses her hand. She snatches it away, her lips tightening, and looks more than half disposed to box his ears. He laughs mischievously and runs off, clapping-to the door behind him].

MRS WARREN [resigning herself to an evening of boredom now that the men are gone] Did you ever in your life hear anyone rattle on so? Isn’t he a tease? [She sits at the table]. Now that I think of it, dearie, don’t you go encouraging him. I’m sure he’s a regular good-for-nothing.

VIVIE [rising to fetch more books] I’m afraid so. Poor Frank! I shall have to get rid of him; but I shall feel sorry for him, though he’s not worth it. That man Crofts does not seem to me to be good for much either: is he? [She throws the books on the table rather roughly].

MRS WARREN [galled by Vivie’s indifference] What do you know of men, child, to talk that way of them? Youll have to make up your mind to see a good deal of Sir George Crofts, as he’s a friend of mine.

VIVIE [quite unmoved] Why? [She sits down and opens a book]. Do you expect that we shall be much together? You and I, I mean?

MRS WARREN [staring at her] Of course: until youre married. Youre not going back to college again.

VIVIE. Do you think my way of life would suit you? I doubt it.

MRS WARREN. Y o u r way of life! What do you mean?

VIVIE [cutting a page of her book with the paper knife on her chatelaine] Has it really never occurred to you, mother, that I have a way of life like other people?

MRS WARREN. What nonsense is this youre trying to talk? Do you want to shew your independence, now that youre a great little person at school? Don’t be a fool, child.

VIVIE [indulgently] Thats all you have to say on the subject, is it, mother?

MRS WARREN [puzzled, then angry] Don’t you keep on asking me questions like that. [Violently] Hold your tongue. [Vivie works on, losing no time, and saying nothing]. You and your way of life, indeed! What next? [She looks at Vivie again. No reply].

Your way of life will be what I please, so it will. [Another pause]. Ive been noticing these airs in you ever since you got that tripos or whatever you call it. If you think I’m going to put up with them, youre mistaken; and the sooner you find it out, the better. [Muttering] All I have to say on the subject, indeed! [Again raising her voice angrily] Do you know who youre speaking to, Miss?

VIVIE [looking across at her without raising her head from her book] No. Who are you? What are you?

MRS WARREN [rising breathless] You young imp!

VIVIE. Everybody knows my reputation, my social standing, and the profession I intend to pursue. I know nothing about you. What is that way of life which you invite me to share with you and Sir George Crofts, pray?

MRS WARREN. Take care. I shall do something I’ll be sorry for after, and you too.

VIVIE [putting aside her books with cool decision] Well, let us drop the subject until you are better able to face it. [Looking critically at her mother] You want some good walks and a little lawn tennis to set you up. You are shockingly out of condition: you were not able to manage twenty yards uphill today without stopping to pant; and your wrists are mere rolls of fat. Look at mine. [She holds out her wrists].

MRS WARREN [after looking at her helplessly, begins to whimper] Vivie —

VIVIE [springing up sharply] Now pray don’t begin to cry. Anything but that. I really cannot stand whimpering. I will go out of the room if you do.

MRS WARREN [piteously] Oh, my darling, how can you be so hard on me? Have I no rights over you as your mother?

VIVIE. A r e you my mother?

MRS WARREN. Am I your mother? Oh, Vivie!

VIVIE. Then where are our relatives? my father? our family friends? You claim the rights of a mother: the right to call me fool and child; to speak to me as no woman in authority over me at college dare speak to me; to dictate my way of life; and to force on me the acquaintance of a brute whom anyone can see to be the most vicious sort of London man about town. Before I give myself the trouble to resist such claims, I may as well find out whether they have any real existence.

MRS WARREN [distracted, throwing herself on her knees] Oh no, no.

Stop, stop. I am your mother: I swear it. Oh, you can’t mean to turn on me — my own child! it’s not natural. You believe me, don’t you? Say you believe me.

VIVIE. Who was my father?

MRS WARREN. You don’t know what youre asking. I can’t tell you.

VIVIE [determinedly] Oh yes you can, if you like. I have a right to know; and you know very well that I have that right. You can refuse to tell me if you please; but if you do, you will see the last of me tomorrow morning.

MRS WARREN. Oh, it’s too horrible to hear you talk like that. You wouldn’t — you couldn’t leave me.

VIVIE [ruthlessly] Yes, without a moment’s hesitation, if you trifle with me about this. [Shivering with disgust] How can I feel sure that I may not have the contaminated blood of that brutal waster in my veins?

MRS WARREN. No, no. On my oath it’s not he, nor any of the rest that you have ever met. I’m certain of that, at least.

[Vivie’s eyes fasten sternly on her mother as the significance of this flashes on her.]

VIVIE [slowly] You are certain of that, at least. Ah! You mean that that is all you are certain of. [Thoughtfully] I see. [Mrs Warren buries her face in her hands]. Don’t do that, mother: you know you don’t feel it a bit. [Mrs Warren takes down her hands and looks up deplorably at Vivie, who takes out her watch and says] Well, that is enough for tonight. At what hour would you like breakfast? Is half-past eight too early for you?

MRS WARREN [wildly] My God, what sort of woman are you?

VIVIE [coolly] The sort the world is mostly made of, I should hope. Otherwise I don’t understand how it gets its business done.

Come [taking her mother by the wrist and pulling her up pretty resolutely]: pull yourself together. Thats right.

MRS WARREN [querulously] Youre very rough with me, Vivie.

VIVIE. Nonsense. What about bed? It’s past ten.

MRS WARREN [passionately] Whats the use of my going to bed? Do you think I could sleep?

VIVIE. Why not? I shall.

MRS WARREN. You! you’ve no heart. [She suddenly breaks out vehemently in her natural tongue — the dialect of a woman of the people — with all her affectations of maternal authority and conventional manners gone, and an overwhelming inspiration of true conviction and scorn in her] Oh, I wont bear it: I won’t put up with the injustice of it. What right have you to set yourself up above me like this? You boast of what you are to me — to me, who gave you a chance of being what you are. What chance had I? Shame on you for a bad daughter and a stuck-up prude!

VIVIE [sitting down with a shrug, no longer confident; for her replies, which have sounded sensible and strong to her so far, now begin to ring rather woodenly and even priggishly against the new tone of her mother] Don’t think for a moment I set myself above you in any way. You attacked me with the conventional authority of a mother: I defended myself with the conventional superiority of a respectable woman. Frankly, I am not going to stand any of your nonsense; and when you drop it I shall not expect you to stand any of mine. I shall always respect your right to your own opinions and your own way of life.

MRS WARREN. My own opinions and my own way of life! Listen to her talking! Do you think I was brought up like you? able to pick and choose my own way of life? Do you think I did what I did because I liked it, or thought it right, or wouldn’t rather have gone to college and been a lady if I’d had the chance?

VIVIE. Everybody has some choice, mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between ragpicking and flowerselling, according to her taste. People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

MRS WARREN. Oh, it’s easy to talk, isn’t it? Here! would you like to know what my circumstances were?

VIVIE. Yes: you had better tell me. Won’t you sit down?

MRS WARREN. Oh, I’ll sit down: don’t you be afraid. [She plants her chair farther forward with brazen energy, and sits down. Vivie is impressed in spite of herself]. D’you know what your gran’mother was?

VIVIE. No.

MRS WARREN. No, you don’t. I do. She called herself a widow and had a fried-fish shop down by the Mint, and kept herself and four daughters out of it. Two of us were sisters: that was me and Liz; and we were both good-looking and well made. I suppose our father was a well-fed man: mother pretended he was a gentleman; but I don’t know. The other two were only half sisters: undersized, ugly, starved looking, hard working, honest poor creatures: Liz and I would have half-murdered them if mother hadn’t half-murdered us to keep our hands off them. They were the respectable ones. Well, what did they get by their respectability? I’ll tell you. One of them worked in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week until she died of lead poisoning. She only expected to get her hands a little paralyzed; but she died. The other was always held up to us as a model because she married a Government laborer in the Deptford victualling yard, and kept his room and the three children neat and tidy on eighteen shillings a week — until he took to drink. That was worth being respectable for, wasn’t it?

VIVIE [now thoughtfully attentive] Did you and your sister think so?

MRS WARREN. Liz didn’t, I can tell you: she had more spirit. We both went to a church school — that was part of the ladylike airs we gave ourselves to be superior to the children that knew nothing and went nowhere — and we stayed there until Liz went out one night and never came back. I know the schoolmistress thought I’d soon follow her example; for the clergyman was always warning me that Lizzie’d end by jumping off Waterloo Bridge. Poor fool: that was all he knew about it! But I was more afraid of the whitelead factory than I was of the river; and so would you have been in my place. That clergyman got me a situation as a scullery maid in a temperance restaurant where they sent out for anything you liked. Then I was a waitress; and then I went to the bar at Waterloo station: fourteen hours a day serving drinks and washing glasses for four shillings a week and my board. That was considered a great promotion for me. Well, one cold, wretched night, when I was so tired I could hardly keep myself awake, who should come up for a half of Scotch but Lizzie, in a long fur cloak, elegant and comfortable, with a lot of sovereigns in her purse.

VIVIE [grimly] My aunt Lizzie!

MRS WARREN. Yes; and a very good aunt to have, too. She’s living down at Winchester now, close to the cathedral, one of the most respectable ladies there. Chaperones girls at the country ball, if you please. No river for Liz, thank you! You remind me of Liz a little: she was a first-rate business woman — saved money from the beginning — never let herself look too like what she was — never lost her head or threw away a chance. When she saw I’d grown up good-looking she said to me across the bar “What are you doing there, you little fool? wearing out your health and your appearance for other people’s profit!” Liz was saving money then to take a house for herself in Brussels; and she thought we two could save faster than one. So she lent me some money and gave me a start; and I saved steadily and first paid her back, and then went into business with her as a partner. Why shouldn’t I have done it? The house in Brussels was real high class: a much better place for a woman to be in than the factory where Anne Jane got poisoned. None of the girls were ever treated as I was treated in the scullery of that temperance place, or at the Waterloo bar, or at home. Would you have had me stay in them and become a worn out old drudge before I was forty?

VIVIE [intensely interested by this time] No; but why did you choose that business? Saving money and good management will succeed in any business.

MRS WARREN. Yes, saving money. But where can a woman get the money to save in any other business? Could y o u save out of four shillings a week and keep yourself dressed as well? Not you. Of course, if youre a plain woman and can’t earn anything more; or if you have a turn for music, or the stage, or newspaper-writing: thats different. But neither Liz nor I had any turn for such things at all: all we had was our appearance and our turn for pleasing men. Do you think we were such fools as to let other people trade in our good looks by employing us as shopgirls, or barmaids, or waitresses, when we could trade in them ourselves and get all the profits instead of starvation wages? Not likely.

VIVIE. You were certainly quite justified — from the business point of view.

MRS WARREN. Yes; or any other point of view. What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him? — as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing! Oh, the hypocrisy of the world makes me sick! Liz and I had to work and save and calculate just like other people; elseways we should be as poor as any good-for-nothing drunken waster of a woman that thinks her luck will last for ever. [With great energy] I despise such people: theyve no character; and if theres a thing I hate in a woman, it’s want of character.

VIVIE. Come now, mother: frankly! Isn’t it part of what you call character in a woman that she should greatly dislike such a way of making money?

MRS WARREN. Why, of course. Everybody dislikes having to work and make money; but they have to do it all the same. I’m sure I’ve often pitied a poor girl, tired out and in low spirits, having to try to please some man that she doesn’t care two straws for — some half-drunken fool that thinks he’s making himself agreeable when he’s teasing and worrying and disgusting a woman so that hardly any money could pay her for putting up with it. But she has to bear with disagreeables and take the rough with the smooth, just like a nurse in a hospital or anyone else. It’s not work that any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows; though to hear the pious people talk you would suppose it was a bed of roses.

VIVIE. Still, you consider it worth while. It pays.

MRS WARREN. Of course it’s worth while to a poor girl, if she can resist temptation and is good-looking and well conducted and sensible. It’s far better than any other employment open to her.

I always thought that it oughtn’t to be. It can’t be right, Vivie, that there shouldn’t be better opportunities for women. I stick to that: it’s wrong. But it’s so, right or wrong; and a girl must make the best of it. But of course it’s not worth while for a lady. If you took to it youd be a fool; but I should have been a fool if I’d taken to anything else.

VIVIE [more and more deeply moved] Mother: suppose we were both as poor as you were in those wretched old days, are you quite sure that you wouldn’t advise me to try the Waterloo bar, or marry a laborer, or even go into the factory?

MRS WARREN [indignantly] Of course not. What sort of mother do you take me for! How could you keep your self-respect in such starvation and slavery? And whats a woman worth? whats life worth? without self-respect! Why am I independent and able to give my daughter a first-rate education, when other women that had just as good opportunities are in the gutter? Because I always knew how to respect myself and control myself. Why is Liz looked up to in a cathedral town? The same reason. Where would we be now if we’d minded the clergyman’s foolishness? Scrubbing floors for one and sixpence a day and nothing to look forward to but the workhouse infirmary. Don’t you be led astray by people who don’t know the world, my girl. The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. If she’s in his own station of life, let her make him marry her; but if she’s far beneath him she can’t expect it: why should she? it wouldn’t be for her own happiness. Ask any lady in London society that has daughters; and she’ll tell you the same, except that I tell you straight and she’ll tell you crooked. Thats all the difference.

VIVIE [fascinated, gazing at her] My dear mother: you are a wonderful woman: you are stronger than all England. And are you really and truly not one wee bit doubtful — or — or — ashamed?

MRS WARREN. Well, of course, dearie, it’s only good manners to be ashamed of it: it’s expected from a woman. Women have to pretend to feel a great deal that they don’t feel. Liz used to be angry with me for plumping out the truth about it. She used to say that when every woman could learn enough from what was going on in the world before her eyes, there was no need to talk about it to her. But then Liz was such a perfect lady! She had the true instinct of it; while I was always a bit of a vulgarian. I used to be so pleased when you sent me your photos to see that you were growing up like Liz: you’ve just her ladylike, determined way. But I can’t stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way. No: I never was a bit ashamed really. I consider I had a right to be proud of how we managed everything so respectably, and never had a word against us, and how the girls were so well taken care of. Some of them did very well: one of them married an ambassador. But of course now I daren’t talk about such things: whatever would they think of us! [She yawns]. Oh dear! I do believe I’m getting sleepy after all. [She stretches herself lazily, thoroughly relieved by her explosion, and placidly ready for her night’s rest].

VIVIE. I believe it is I who will not be able to sleep now. [She goes to the dresser and lights the candle. Then she extinguishes the lamp, darkening the room a good deal]. Better let in some fresh air before locking up. [She opens the cottage door, and finds that it is broad moonlight]. What a beautiful night! Look! [She draws the curtains of the window. The landscape is seen bathed in the radiance of the harvest moon rising over Blackdown].

MRS WARREN [with a perfunctory glance at the scene] Yes, dear; but take care you don’t catch your death of cold from the night air.

VIVIE [contemptuously] Nonsense.

MRS WARREN [querulously] Oh yes: everything I say is nonsense, according to you.

VIVIE [turning to her quickly] No: really that is not so, mother.

You have got completely the better of me tonight, though I intended it to be the other way. Let us be good friends now.

MRS WARREN [shaking her head a little ruefully] So it has been the other way. But I suppose I must give in to it. I always got the worst of it from Liz; and now I suppose it’ll be the same with you.

VIVIE. Well, never mind. Come: good-night, dear old mother. [She takes her mother in her arms].

MRS WARREN [fondly] I brought you up well, didn’t I, dearie?

VIVIE. You did.

MRS WARREN. And youll be good to your poor old mother for it, won’t you?

VIVIE. I will, dear. [Kissing her] Good-night.

MRS WARREN [with unction] Blessings on my own dearie darling! a mother’s blessing!

[She embraces her daughter protectingly, instinctively looking upward for divine sanction.]

ACT III

[In the Rectory garden next morning, with the sun shining from a cloudless sky. The garden wall has a five-barred wooden gate, wide enough to admit a carriage, in the middle. Beside the gate hangs a bell on a coiled spring, communicating with a pull outside. The carriage drive comes down the middle of the garden and then swerves to its left, where it ends in a little gravelled circus opposite the Rectory porch. Beyond the gate is seen the dusty high road, parallel with the wall, bounded on the farther side by a strip of turf and an unfenced pine wood. On the lawn, between the house and the drive, is a clipped yew tree, with a garden bench in its shade. On the opposite side the garden is shut in by a box hedge; and there is a little sundial on the turf, with an iron chair near it. A little path leads through the box hedge, behind the sundial.]

[Frank, seated on the chair near the sundial, on which he has placed the morning paper, is reading The Standard. His father comes from the house, red-eyed and shivery, and meets Frank’s eye with misgiving.]

FRANK [looking at his watch] Half-past eleven. Nice hour for a rector to come down to breakfast!

REV. S. Don’t mock, Frank: don’t mock. I am a little — er — [Shivering] —

FRANK. Off color?

REV. S. [repudiating the expression] No, sir: unwell this morning. Where’s your mother?

FRANK. Don’t be alarmed: she’s not here. Gone to town by the 11.13 with Bessie. She left several messages for you. Do you feel equal to receiving them now, or shall I wait til you’ve breakfasted?

REV. S. I h a v e breakfasted, sir. I am surprised at your mother going to town when we have people staying with us. They’ll think it very strange.

FRANK. Possibly she has considered that. At all events, if Crofts is going to stay here, and you are going to sit up every night with him until four, recalling the incidents of your fiery youth, it is clearly my mother’s duty, as a prudent housekeeper, to go up to the stores and order a barrel of whisky and a few hundred siphons.

REV. S. I did not observe that Sir George drank excessively.

FRANK. You were not in a condition to, gov’nor.

REV. S. Do you mean to say that I — ?

FRANK [calmly] I never saw a beneficed clergyman less sober. The anecdotes you told about your past career were so awful that I really don’t think Praed would have passed the night under your roof if it hadnt been for the way my mother and he took to one another.

REV. S. Nonsense, sir. I am Sir George Crofts’ host. I must talk to him about something; and he has only one subject. Where is Mr Praed now?

FRANK. He is driving my mother and Bessie to the station.

REV. S. Is Crofts up yet?

FRANK. Oh, long ago. He hasn’t turned a hair: he’s in much better practice than you. Has kept it up ever since, probably. He’s taken himself off somewhere to smoke.

[Frank resumes his paper. The parson turns disconsolately towards the gate; then comes back irresolutely.]

REV. S. Er — Frank.

FRANK. Yes.

REV. S. Do you think the Warrens will expect to be asked here after yesterday afternoon?

FRANK. Theyve been asked already.

REV. S. [appalled] What!!!

FRANK. Crofts informed us at breakfast that you told him to bring Mrs Warren and Vivie over here to-day, and to invite them to make this house their home. My mother then found she must go to town by the 11.13 train.

REV. S. [with despairing vehemence] I never gave any such invitation. I never thought of such a thing.

FRANK [compassionately] How do you know, gov’nor, what you said and thought last night?

PRAED [coming in through the hedge] Good morning.

REV. S. Good morning. I must apologize for not having met you at breakfast. I have a touch of — of —

FRANK. Clergyman’s sore throat, Praed. Fortunately not chronic.

PRAED [changing the subject] Well I must say your house is in a charming spot here. Really most charming.

REV. S. Yes: it is indeed. Frank will take you for a walk, Mr Praed, if you like. I’ll ask you to excuse me: I must take the opportunity to write my sermon while Mrs Gardner is away and you are all amusing yourselves. You won’t mind, will you?

PRAED. Certainly not. Don’t stand on the slightest ceremony with me.

REV. S. Thank you. I’ll — er — er — [He stammers his way to the porch and vanishes into the house].

PRAED. Curious thing it must be writing a sermon every week.

FRANK. Ever so curious, if he did it. He buys em. He’s gone for some soda water.

PRAED. My dear boy: I wish you would be more respectful to your father. You know you can be so nice when you like.

FRANK. My dear Praddy: you forget that I have to live with the governor. When two people live together — it don’t matter whether theyre father and son or husband and wife or brother and sister — they can’t keep up the polite humbug thats so easy for ten minutes on an afternoon call. Now the governor, who unites to many admirable domestic qualities the irresoluteness of a sheep and the pompousness and aggressiveness of a jackass —

PRAED. No, pray, pray, my dear Frank, remember! He is your father.

FRANK. I give him due credit for that. [Rising and flinging down his paper] But just imagine his telling Crofts to bring the Warrens over here! He must have been ever so drunk. You know, my dear Praddy, my mother wouldn’t stand Mrs Warren for a moment. Vivie mustn’t come here until she’s gone back to town.

PRAED. But your mother doesn’t know anything about Mrs Warren, does she? [He picks up the paper and sits down to read it].

FRANK. I don’t know. Her journey to town looks as if she did. Not that my mother would mind in the ordinary way: she has stuck like a brick to lots of women who had got into trouble. But they were all nice women. Thats what makes the real difference. Mrs Warren, no doubt, has her merits; but she’s ever so rowdy; and my mother simply wouldn’t put up with her. So — hallo! [This exclamation is provoked by the reappearance of the clergyman, who comes out of the house in haste and dismay].

REV. S. Frank: Mrs Warren and her daughter are coming across the heath with Crofts: I saw them from the study windows. What am I to say about your mother?

FRANK. Stick on your hat and go out and say how delighted you are to see them; and that Frank’s in the garden; and that mother and Bessie have been called to the bedside of a sick relative, and were ever so sorry they couldn’t stop; and that you hope Mrs Warren slept well; and — and — say any blessed thing except the truth, and leave the rest to Providence.

REV. S. But how are we to get rid of them afterwards?

FRANK. Theres no time to think of that now. Here! [He bounds into the house].

REV. S. He’s so impetuous. I don’t know what to do with him, Mr Praed.

FRANK [returning with a clerical felt hat, which he claps on his father’s head]. Now: off with you. [Rushing him through the gate]. Praed and I’ll wait here, to give the thing an unpremeditated air. [The clergyman, dazed but obedient, hurries off].

FRANK. We must get the old girl back to town somehow, Praed. Come! Honestly, dear Praddy, do you like seeing them together?

PRAED. Oh, why not?

FRANK [his teeth on edge] Don’t it make your flesh creep ever so little? that wicked old devil, up to every villainy under the sun, I’ll swear, and Vivie — ugh!

PRAED. Hush, pray. Theyre coming.

[The clergyman and Crofts are seen coming along the road, followed by Mrs Warren and Vivie walking affectionately together.]

FRANK. Look: she actually has her arm round the old woman’s waist. It’s her right arm: she began it. She’s gone sentimental, by God! Ugh! ugh! Now do you feel the creeps? [The clergyman opens the gate: and Mrs Warren and Vivie pass him and stand in the middle of the garden looking at the house. Frank, in an ecstasy of dissimulation, turns gaily to Mrs Warren, exclaiming] Ever so delighted to see you, Mrs Warren. This quiet old rectory garden becomes you perfectly.

MRS WARREN. Well, I never! Did you hear that, George? He says I look well in a quiet old rectory garden.

REV. S. [still holding the gate for Crofts, who loafs through it, heavily bored] You look well everywhere, Mrs Warren.

FRANK. Bravo, gov’nor! Now look here: lets have a treat before lunch. First lets see the church. Everyone has to do that. It’s a regular old thirteenth century church, you know: the gov’nor’s ever so fond of it, because he got up a restoration fund and had it completely rebuilt six years ago. Praed will be able to shew its points.

PRAED [rising] Certainly, if the restoration has left any to shew.

REV. S. [mooning hospitably at them] I shall be pleased, I’m sure, if Sir George and Mrs Warren really care about it.

MRS WARREN. Oh, come along and get it over.

CROFTS [turning back toward the gate] I’ve no objection.

REV. S. Not that way. We go through the fields, if you don’t mind. Round here. [He leads the way by the little path through the box hedge].

CROFTS. Oh, all right. [He goes with the parson].

[Praed follows with Mrs Warren. Vivie does not stir: she watches them until they have gone, with all the lines of purpose in her face marking it strongly.]

FRANK. Ain’t you coming?

VIVIE. No. I want to give you a warning, Frank. You were making fun of my mother just now when you said that about the rectory garden. That is barred in the future. Please treat my mother with as much respect as you treat your own.

FRANK. My dear Viv: she wouldn’t appreciate it: the two cases require different treatment. But what on earth has happened to you? Last night we were perfectly agreed as to your mother and her set. This morning I find you attitudinizing sentimentally with your arm around your parent’s waist.

VIVIE [flushing] Attitudinizing!

FRANK. That was how it struck me. First time I ever saw you do a second-rate thing.

VIVIE [controlling herself] Yes, Frank: there has been a change: but I don’t think it a change for the worse. Yesterday I was a little prig.

FRANK. And today?

VIVIE [wincing; then looking at him steadily] Today I know my mother better than you do.

FRANK. Heaven forbid!

VIVIE. What do you mean?

FRANK. Viv: theres a freemasonry among thoroughly immoral people that you know nothing of. You’ve too much character. That’s the bond between your mother and me: that’s why I know her better than youll ever know her.

VIVIE. You are wrong: you know nothing about her. If you knew the circumstances against which my mother had to struggle —

FRANK [adroitly finishing the sentence for her] I should know why she is what she is, shouldn’t I? What difference would that make?

Circumstances or no circumstances, Viv, you won’t be able to stand your mother.

VIVIE [very angry] Why not?

FRANK. Because she’s an old wretch, Viv. If you ever put your arm around her waist in my presence again, I’ll shoot myself there and then as a protest against an exhibition which revolts me.

VIVIE. Must I choose between dropping your acquaintance and dropping my mother’s?

FRANK [gracefully] That would put the old lady at ever such a disadvantage. No, Viv: your infatuated little boy will have to stick to you in any case. But he’s all the more anxious that you shouldn’t make mistakes. It’s no use, Viv: your mother’s impossible. She may be a good sort; but she’s a bad lot, a very bad lot.

VIVIE [hotly] Frank — ! [He stands his ground. She turns away and sits down on the bench under the yew tree, struggling to recover her self-command. Then she says] Is she to be deserted by the world because she’s what you call a bad lot? Has she no right to live?

FRANK. No fear of that, Viv: she won’t ever be deserted. [He sits on the bench beside her].

VIVIE. But I am to desert her, I suppose.

FRANK [babyishly, lulling her and making love to her with his voice] Mustn’t go live with her. Little family group of mother and daughter wouldn’t be a success. Spoil o u r little group.

VIVIE [falling under the spell] What little group?

FRANK. The babes in the wood: Vivie and little Frank. [He nestles against her like a weary child]. Lets go and get covered up with leaves.

VIVIE [rhythmically, rocking him like a nurse] Fast asleep, hand in hand, under the trees.

FRANK. The wise little girl with her silly little boy.

VIVIE. The dear little boy with his dowdy little girl.

FRANK. Ever so peaceful, and relieved from the imbecility of the little boy’s father and the questionableness of the little girl’s —

VIVIE [smothering the word against her breast] Sh-sh-sh-sh! little girl wants to forget all about her mother. [They are silent for some moments, rocking one another. Then Vivie wakes up with a shock, exclaiming] What a pair of fools we are! Come: sit up. Gracious! your hair. [She smooths it]. I wonder do all grown up people play in that childish way when nobody is looking.

I never did it when I was a child.

FRANK. Neither did I. You are my first playmate. [He catches her hand to kiss it, but checks himself to look around first. Very unexpectedly, he sees Crofts emerging from the box hedge]. Oh damn!

VIVIE. Why damn, dear?

FRANK [whispering] Sh! Here’s this brute Crofts. [He sits farther away from her with an unconcerned air].

CROFTS. Could I have a few words with you, Miss Vivie?

VIVIE. Certainly.

CROFTS [to Frank] Youll excuse me, Gardner. Theyre waiting for you in the church, if you don’t mind.

FRANK [rising] Anything to oblige you, Crofts — except church. If you should happen to want me, Vivvums, ring the gate bell. [He goes into the house with unruffled suavity].

CROFTS [watching him with a crafty air as he disappears, and speaking to Vivie with an assumption of being on privileged terms with her] Pleasant young fellow that, Miss Vivie. Pity he has no money, isn’t it?

VIVIE. Do you think so?

CROFTS. Well, whats he to do? No profession. No property. Whats he good for?

VIVIE. I realize his disadvantages, Sir George.

CROFTS [a little taken aback at being so precisely interpreted] Oh, it’s not that. But while we’re in this world we’re in it; and money’s money. [Vivie does not answer]. Nice day, isn’t it?

VIVIE [with scarcely veiled contempt for this effort at conversation] Very.

CROFTS [with brutal good humor, as if he liked her pluck] Well thats not what I came to say. [Sitting down beside her] Now listen, Miss Vivie. I’m quite aware that I’m not a young lady’s man.

VIVIE. Indeed, Sir George?

CROFTS. No; and to tell you the honest truth I don’t want to be either. But when I say a thing I mean it; and when I feel a sentiment I feel it in earnest; and what I value I pay hard money for. Thats the sort of man I am.

VIVIE. It does you great credit, I’m sure.

CROFTS. Oh, I don’t mean to praise myself. I have my faults, Heaven knows: no man is more sensible of that than I am. I know I’m not perfect: thats one of the advantages of being a middle-aged man; for I’m not a young man, and I know it. But my code is a simple one, and, I think, a good one. Honor between man and man; fidelity between man and woman; and no can’t about this religion or that religion, but an honest belief that things are making for good on the whole.

VIVIE [with biting irony] “A power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” eh?

CROFTS [taking her seriously] Oh certainly. Not ourselves, of course. Y o u understand what I mean. Well, now as to practical matters. You may have an idea that I’ve flung my money about; but I havn’t: I’m richer today than when I first came into the property. I’ve used my knowledge of the world to invest my money in ways that other men have overlooked; and whatever else I may be, I’m a safe man from the money point of view.

VIVIE. It’s very kind of you to tell me all this.

CROFTS. Oh well, come, Miss Vivie: you needn’t pretend you don’t see what I’m driving at. I want to settle down with a Lady Crofts. I suppose you think me very blunt, eh?

VIVIE. Not at all: I am very much obliged to you for being so definite and business-like. I quite appreciate the offer: the money, the position, Lady Crofts, and so on. But I think I will say no, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not. [She rises, and strolls across to the sundial to get out of his immediate neighborhood].

CROFTS [not at all discouraged, and taking advantage of the additional room left him on the seat to spread himself comfortably, as if a few preliminary refusals were part of the inevitable routine of courtship] I’m in no hurry. It was only just to let you know in case young Gardner should try to trap you. Leave the question open.

VIVIE [sharply] My no is final. I won’t go back from it.

[Crofts is not impressed. He grins; leans forward with his elbows on his knees to prod with his stick at some unfortunate insect in the grass; and looks cunningly at her. She turns away impatiently.]

CROFTS. I’m a good deal older than you. Twenty-five years: quarter of a century. I shan’t live for ever; and I’ll take care that you shall be well off when I’m gone.

VIVIE. I am proof against even that inducement, Sir George. Don’t you think youd better take your answer? There is not the slightest chance of my altering it.

CROFTS [rising, after a final slash at a daisy, and coming nearer to her] Well, no matter. I could tell you some things that would change your mind fast enough; but I wont, because I’d rather win you by honest affection. I was a good friend to your mother: ask her whether I wasn’t. She’d never have make the money that paid for your education if it hadnt been for my advice and help, not to mention the money I advanced her. There are not many men who would have stood by her as I have. I put not less than forty thousand pounds into it, from first to last.

VIVIE [staring at him] Do you mean to say that you were my mother’s business partner?

CROFTS. Yes. Now just think of all the trouble and the explanations it would save if we were to keep the whole thing in the family, so to speak. Ask your mother whether she’d like to have to explain all her affairs to a perfect stranger.

VIVIE. I see no difficulty, since I understand that the business is wound up, and the money invested.

CROFTS [stopping short, amazed] Wound up! Wind up a business thats paying 35 per cent in the worst years! Not likely. Who told you that?

VIVIE [her color quite gone] Do you mean that it is still — ? [She stops abruptly, and puts her hand on the sundial to support herself. Then she gets quickly to the iron chair and sits down].

What business are you talking about?

CROFTS. Well, the fact is it’s not what would considered exactly a high-class business in my set — the country set, you know — o u r set it will be if you think better of my offer. Not that theres any mystery about it: don’t think that. Of course you know by your mother’s being in it that it’s perfectly straight and honest. I’ve known her for many years; and I can say of her that she’d cut off her hands sooner than touch anything that was not what it ought to be. I’ll tell you all about it if you like. I don’t know whether you’ve found in travelling how hard it is to find a really comfortable private hotel.

VIVIE [sickened, averting her face] Yes: go on.

CROFTS. Well, thats all it is. Your mother has got a genius for managing such things. We’ve got two in Brussels, one in Ostend, one in Vienna, and two in Budapest. Of course there are others besides ourselves in it; but we hold most of the capital; and your mother’s indispensable as managing director. You’ve noticed, I daresay, that she travels a good deal. But you see you can’t mention such things in society. Once let out the word hotel and everybody thinks you keep a public-house. You wouldn’t like people to say that of your mother, would you? Thats why we’re so reserved about it. By the way, youll keep it to yourself, won’t you? Since it’s been a secret so long, it had better remain so.

VIVIE. And this is the business you invite me to join you in?

CROFTS. Oh no. My wife shan’t be troubled with business. Youll not be in it more than you’ve always been.

VIVIE. I always been! What do you mean?

CROFTS. Only that you’ve always lived on it. It paid for your education and the dress you have on your back. Don’t turn up your nose at business, Miss Vivie: where would your Newnhams and Girtons be without it?

VIVIE [rising, almost beside herself] Take care. I know what this business is.

CROFTS [starting, with a suppressed oath] Who told you?

VIVIE. Your partner. My mother.

CROFTS [black with rage] The old —

VIVIE. Just so.

[He swallows the epithet and stands for a moment swearing and raging foully to himself. But he knows that his cue is to be sympathetic. He takes refuge in generous indignation.]

CROFTS. She ought to have had more consideration for you. I’d never have told you.

VIVIE. I think you would probably have told me when we were married: it would have been a convenient weapon to break me in with.

CROFTS [quite sincerely] I never intended that. On my word as a gentleman I didn’t.

[Vivie wonders at him. Her sense of the irony of his protest cools and braces her. She replies with contemptuous self-possession.]

VIVIE. It does not matter. I suppose you understand that when we leave here today our acquaintance ceases.

CROFTS. Why? Is it for helping your mother?

VIVIE. My mother was a very poor woman who had no reasonable choice but to do as she did. You were a rich gentleman; and you did the same for the sake of 35 per cent. You are a pretty common sort of scoundrel, I think. That is my opinion of you.

CROFTS [after a stare: not at all displeased, and much more at his ease on these frank terms than on their former ceremonious ones] Ha! ha! ha! ha! Go it, little missie, go it: it doesn’t hurt me and it amuses you. Why the devil shouldn’t I invest my money that way? I take the interest on my capital like other people: I hope you don’t think I dirty my own hands with the work.

Come! you wouldn’t refuse the acquaintance of my mother’s cousin the Duke of Belgravia because some of the rents he gets are earned in queer ways. You wouldn’t cut the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suppose, because the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have a few publicans and sinners among their tenants. Do you remember your Crofts scholarship at Newnham? Well, that was founded by my brother the M.P. He gets his 22 per cent out of a factory with 600 girls in it, and not one of them getting wages enough to live on. How d’ye suppose they manage when they have no family to fall back on? Ask your mother. And do you expect me to turn my back on 35 per cent when all the rest are pocketing what they can, like sensible men? No such fool! If youre going to pick and choose your acquaintances on moral principles, youd better clear out of this country, unless you want to cut yourself out of all decent society.

VIVIE [conscience stricken] You might go on to point out that I myself never asked where the money I spent came from. I believe I am just as bad as you.

CROFTS [greatly reassured] Of course you are; and a very good thing too! What harm does it do after all? [Rallying her jocularly] So you don’t think me such a scoundrel now you come to think it over. Eh?

VIVIE. I have shared profits with you: and I admitted you just now to the familiarity of knowing what I think of you.

CROFTS [with serious friendliness] To be sure you did. You won’t find me a bad sort: I don’t go in for being superfine intellectually; but Ive plenty of honest human feeling; and the old Crofts breed comes out in a sort of instinctive hatred of anything low, in which I’m sure youll sympathize with me. Believe me, Miss Vivie, the world isn’t such a bad place as the croakers make out. As long as you don’t fly openly in the face of society, society doesn’t ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses. In the class of people I can introduce you to, no lady or gentleman would so far forget themselves as to discuss my business affairs or your mothers. No man can offer you a safer position.

VIVIE [studying him curiously] I suppose you really think youre getting on famously with me.

CROFTS. Well, I hope I may flatter myself that you think better of me than you did at first.

VIVIE [quietly] I hardly find you worth thinking about at all now. When I think of the society that tolerates you, and the laws that protect you! when I think of how helpless nine out of ten young girls would be in the hands of you and my mother! the unmentionable woman and her capitalist bully —

CROFTS [livid] Damn you!

VIVIE. You need not. I feel among the damned already.

[She raises the latch of the gate to open it and go out. He follows her and puts his hand heavily on the top bar to prevent its opening.]

CROFTS [panting with fury] Do you think I’ll put up with this from you, you young devil?

VIVIE [unmoved] Be quiet. Some one will answer the bell. [Without flinching a step she strikes the bell with the back of her hand. It clangs harshly; and he starts back involuntarily. Almost immediately Frank appears at the porch with his rifle].

FRANK [with cheerful politeness] Will you have the rifle, Viv; or shall I operate?

VIVIE. Frank: have you been listening?

FRANK [coming down into the garden] Only for the bell, I assure you; so that you shouldn’t have to wait. I think I shewed great insight into your character, Crofts.

CROFTS. For two pins I’d take that gun from you and break it across your head.

FRANK [stalking him cautiously] Pray don’t. I’m ever so careless in handling firearms. Sure to be a fatal accident, with a reprimand from the coroner’s jury for my negligence.

VIVIE. Put the rifle away, Frank: it’s quite unnecessary.

FRANK. Quite right, Viv. Much more sportsmanlike to catch him in a trap. [Crofts, understanding the insult, makes a threatening movement]. Crofts: there are fifteen cartridges in the magazine here; and I am a dead shot at the present distance and at an object of your size.

CROFTS. Oh, you needn’t be afraid. I’m not going to touch you.

FRANK. Ever so magnanimous of you under the circumstances! Thank you.

CROFTS. I’ll just tell you this before I go. It may interest you, since youre so fond of one another. Allow me, Mister Frank, to introduce you to your half-sister, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Samuel Gardner. Miss Vivie: you half-brother. Good morning! [He goes out through the gate and along the road].

FRANK [after a pause of stupefaction, raising the rifle] Youll testify before the coroner that it’s an accident, Viv. [He takes aim at the retreating figure of Crofts. Vivie seizes the muzzle and pulls it round against her breast].

VIVIE. Fire now. You may.

FRANK [dropping his end of the rifle hastily] Stop! take care. [She lets it go. It falls on the turf]. Oh, you’ve given your little boy such a turn. Suppose it had gone off! ugh! [He sinks on the garden seat, overcome].

VIVIE. Suppose it had: do you think it would not have been a relief to have some sharp physical pain tearing through me?

FRANK [coaxingly] Take it ever so easy, dear Viv. Remember: even if the rifle scared that fellow into telling the truth for the first time in his life, that only makes us the babes in the woods in earnest. [He holds out his arms to her]. Come and be covered up with leaves again.

VIVIE [with a cry of disgust] Ah, not that, not that. You make all my flesh creep.

FRANK. Why, whats the matter?

VIVIE. Goodbye. [She makes for the gate].

FRANK [jumping up] Hallo! Stop! Viv! Viv! [She turns in the gateway] Where are you going to? Where shall we find you?

VIVIE. At Honoria Fraser’s chambers, 67 Chancery Lane, for the rest of my life. [She goes off quickly in the opposite direction to that taken by Crofts].

FRANK. But I say — wait — dash it! [He runs after her].

ACT IV

[Honoria Fraser’s chambers in Chancery Lane. An office at the top of New Stone Buildings, with a plate-glass window, distempered walls, electric light, and a patent stove. Saturday afternoon. The chimneys of Lincoln’s Inn and the western sky beyond are seen through the window. There is a double writing table in the middle of the room, with a cigar box, ash pans, and a portable electric reading lamp almost snowed up in heaps of papers and books. This table has knee holes and chairs right and left and is very untidy. The clerk’s desk, closed and tidy, with its high stool, is against the wall, near a door communicating with the inner rooms. In the opposite wall is the door leading to the public corridor. Its upper panel is of opaque glass, lettered in black on the outside, FRASER AND WARREN. A baize screen hides the corner between this door and the window.]

[Frank, in a fashionable light-colored coaching suit, with his stick, gloves, and white hat in his hands, is pacing up and down in the office. Somebody tries the door with a key.]

FRANK [calling] Come in. It’s not locked.

[Vivie comes in, in her hat and jacket. She stops and stares at him.]

VIVIE [sternly] What are you doing here?

FRANK. Waiting to see you. I’ve been here for hours. Is this the way you attend to your business? [He puts his hat and stick on the table, and perches himself with a vault on the clerk’s stool, looking at her with every appearance of being in a specially restless, teasing, flippant mood].

VIVIE. I’ve been away exactly twenty minutes for a cup of tea. [She takes off her hat and jacket and hangs them behind the screen]. How did you get in?

FRANK. The staff had not left when I arrived. He’s gone to play cricket on Primrose Hill. Why don’t you employ a woman, and give your sex a chance?

VIVIE. What have you come for?

FRANK [springing off the stool and coming close to her] Viv: lets go and enjoy the Saturday half-holiday somewhere, like the staff.

What do you say to Richmond, and then a music hall, and a jolly supper?

VIVIE. Can’t afford it. I shall put in another six hours work before I go to bed.

FRANK. Can’t afford it, can’t we? Aha! Look here. [He takes out a handful of sovereigns and makes them chink]. Gold, Viv: gold!

VIVIE. Where did you get it?

FRANK. Gambling, Viv: gambling. Poker.

VIVIE. Pah! It’s meaner than stealing it. No: I’m not coming. [She sits down to work at the table, with her back to the glass door, and begins turning over the papers].

FRANK [remonstrating piteously] But, my dear Viv, I want to talk to you ever so seriously.

VIVIE. Very well: sit down in Honoria’s chair and talk here. I like ten minutes chat after tea. [He murmurs]. No use groaning: I’m inexorable. [He takes the opposite seat disconsolately]. Pass that cigar box, will you?

FRANK [pushing the cigar box across] Nasty womanly habit. Nice men don’t do it any longer.

VIVIE. Yes: they object to the smell in the office; and we’ve had to take to cigarets. See! [She opens the box and takes out a cigaret, which she lights. She offers him one; but he shakes his head with a wry face. She settles herself comfortably in her chair, smoking]. Go ahead.

FRANK. Well, I want to know what you’ve done — what arrangements you’ve made.

VIVIE. Everything was settled twenty minutes after I arrived here. Honoria has found the business too much for her this year; and she was on the point of sending for me and proposing a partnership when I walked in and told her I hadn’t a farthing in the world. So I installed myself and packed her off for a fortnight’s holiday. What happened at Haslemere when I left?

FRANK. Nothing at all. I said youd gone to town on particular business.

VIVIE. Well?

FRANK. Well, either they were too flabbergasted to say anything, or else Crofts had prepared your mother. Anyhow, she didn’t say anything; and Crofts didn’t say anything; and Praddy only stared. After tea they got up and went; and I’ve not seen them since.

VIVIE [nodding placidly with one eye on a wreath of smoke] Thats all right.

FRANK [looking round disparagingly] Do you intend to stick in this confounded place?

VIVIE [blowing the wreath decisively away, and sitting straight up] Yes. These two days have given me back all my strength and self-possession. I will never take a holiday again as long as I live.

FRANK [with a very wry face] Mps! You look quite happy. And as hard as nails.

VIVIE [grimly] Well for me that I am!

FRANK [rising] Look here, Viv: we must have an explanation. We parted the other day under a complete misunderstanding. [He sits on the table, close to her].

VIVIE [putting away the cigaret] Well: clear it up.

FRANK. You remember what Crofts said.

VIVIE. Yes.

FRANK. That revelation was supposed to bring about a complete change in the nature of our feeling for one another. It placed us on the footing of brother and sister.

VIVIE. Yes.

FRANK. Have you ever had a brother?

VIVIE. No.

FRANK. Then you don’t know what being brother and sister feels like? Now I have lots of sisters; and the fraternal feeling is quite familiar to me. I assure you my feeling for you is not the least in the world like it. The girls will go their way; I will go mine; and we shan’t care if we never see one another again. Thats brother and sister. But as to you, I can’t be easy if I have to pass a week without seeing you. Thats not brother and sister. Its exactly what I felt an hour before Crofts made his revelation. In short, dear Viv, it’s love’s young dream.

VIVIE [bitingly] The same feeling, Frank, that brought your father to my mother’s feet. Is that it?

FRANK [so revolted that he slips off the table for a moment] I very strongly object, Viv, to have my feelings compared to any which the Reverend Samuel is capable of harboring; and I object still more to a comparison of you to your mother. [Resuming his perch] Besides, I don’t believe the story. I have taxed my father with it, and obtained from him what I consider tantamount to a denial.

VIVIE. What did he say?

FRANK. He said he was sure there must be some mistake.

VIVIE. Do you believe him?

FRANK. I am prepared to take his word against Crofts’.

VIVIE. Does it make any difference? I mean in your imagination or conscience; for of course it makes no real difference.

FRANK [shaking his head] None whatever to me.

VIVIE. Nor to me.

FRANK [staring] But this is ever so surprising! [He goes back to his chair]. I thought our whole relations were altered in your imagination and conscience, as you put it, the moment those words were out of that brute’s muzzle.

VIVIE. No: it was not that. I didn’t believe him. I only wish I could.

FRANK. Eh?

VIVIE. I think brother and sister would be a very suitable relation for us.

FRANK. You really mean that?

VIVIE. Yes. It’s the only relation I care for, even if we could afford any other. I mean that.

FRANK [raising his eyebrows like one on whom a new light has dawned, and rising with quite an effusion of chivalrous sentiment] My dear Viv: why didn’t you say so before? I am ever so sorry for persecuting you. I understand, of course.

VIVIE [puzzled] Understand what?

FRANK. Oh, I’m not a fool in the ordinary sense: only in the Scriptural sense of doing all the things the wise man declared to be folly, after trying them himself on the most extensive scale. I see I am no longer Vivvums’s little boy. Don’t be alarmed: I shall never call you Vivvums again — at least unless you get tired of your new little boy, whoever he may be.

VIVIE. My new little boy!

FRANK [with conviction] Must be a new little boy. Always happens that way. No other way, in fact.

VIVIE. None that you know of, fortunately for you.

[Someone knocks at the door.]

FRANK. My curse upon yon caller, whoe’er he be!

VIVIE. It’s Praed. He’s going to Italy and wants to say goodbye. I asked him to call this afternoon. Go and let him in.

FRANK. We can continue our conversation after his departure for Italy. I’ll stay him out. [He goes to the door and opens it]. How are you, Praddy? Delighted to see you. Come in.

[Praed, dressed for travelling, comes in, in high spirits.]

PRAED. How do you do, Miss Warren? [She presses his hand cordially, though a certain sentimentality in his high spirits jars upon her]. I start in an hour from Holborn Viaduct. I wish I could persuade you to try Italy.

VIVIE. What for?

PRAED. Why, to saturate yourself with beauty and romance, of course.

[Vivie, with a shudder, turns her chair to the table, as if the work waiting for her there were a support to her. Praed sits opposite to her. Frank places a chair near Vivie, and drops lazily and carelessly into it, talking at her over his shoulder.]

FRANK. No use, Praddy. Viv is a little Philistine. She is indifferent to my romance, and insensible to my beauty.

VIVIE. Mr Praed: once for all, there is no beauty and no romance in life for me. Life is what it is; and I am prepared to take it as it is.

PRAED [enthusiastically] You will not say that if you come with me to Verona and on to Venice. You will cry with delight at living in such a beautiful world.

FRANK. This is most eloquent, Praddy. Keep it up.

PRAED. Oh, I assure you I have cried — I shall cry again, I hope — at fifty! At your age, Miss Warren, you would not need to go so far as Verona. Your spirits would absolutely fly up at the mere sight of Ostend. You would be charmed with the gaiety, the vivacity, the happy air of Brussels.

VIVIE [springing up with an exclamation of loathing] Agh!

PRAED [rising] Whats the matter?

FRANK [rising] Hallo, Viv!

VIVIE [to Praed, with deep reproach] Can you find no better example of your beauty and romance than Brussels to talk to me about?

PRAED [puzzled] Of course it’s very different from Verona. I don’t suggest for a moment that —

VIVIE [bitterly] Probably the beauty and romance come to much the same in both places.

PRAED [completely sobered and much concerned] My dear Miss Warren: I — [looking enquiringly at Frank] Is anything the matter?

FRANK. She thinks your enthusiasm frivolous, Praddy. She’s had ever such a serious call.

VIVIE [sharply] Hold your tongue, Frank. Don’t be silly.

FRANK [sitting down] Do you call this good manners, Praed?

PRAED [anxious and considerate] Shall I take him away, Miss Warren? I feel sure we have disturbed you at your work.

VIVIE. Sit down: I’m not ready to go back to work yet. [Praed sits]. You both think I have an attack of nerves. Not a bit of it. But there are two subjects I want dropped, if you don’t mind.

One of them [to Frank] is love’s young dream in any shape or form: the other [to Praed] is the romance and beauty of life, especially Ostend and the gaiety of Brussels. You are welcome to any illusions you may have left on these subjects: I have none. If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business, permanently single [to Frank] and permanently unromantic [to Praed].

FRANK. I also shall remain permanently single until you change your mind. Praddy: change the subject. Be eloquent about something else.

PRAED [diffidently] I’m afraid theres nothing else in the world that I can talk about. The Gospel of Art is the only one I can preach. I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On; but we can’t discuss that without hurting your feelings, Frank, since you are determined not to get on.

FRANK. Oh, don’t mind my feelings. Give me some improving advice by all means: it does me ever so much good. Have another try to make a successful man of me, Viv. Come: lets have it all: energy, thrift, foresight, self-respect, character. Don’t you hate people who have no character, Viv?

VIVIE [wincing] Oh, stop, stop. Let us have no more of that horrible cant. Mr Praed: if there are really only those two gospels in the world, we had better all kill ourselves; for the same taint is in both, through and through.

FRANK [looking critically at her] There is a touch of poetry about you today, Viv, which has hitherto been lacking.

PRAED [remonstrating] My dear Frank: aren’t you a little unsympathetic?

VIVIE [merciless to herself] No: it’s good for me. It keeps me from being sentimental.

FRANK [bantering her] Checks your strong natural propensity that way, don’t it?

VIVIE [almost hysterically] Oh yes: go on: don’t spare me. I was sentimental for one moment in my life — beautifully sentimental — by moonlight; and now —

FRANK [quickly] I say, Viv: take care. Don’t give yourself away.

VIVIE. Oh, do you think Mr Praed does not know all about my mother? [Turning on Praed] You had better have told me that morning, Mr Praed. You are very old fashioned in your delicacies, after all.

PRAED. Surely it is you who are a little old fashioned in your prejudices, Miss Warren. I feel bound to tell you, speaking as an artist, and believing that the most intimate human relationships are far beyond and above the scope of the law, that though I know that your mother is an unmarried woman, I do not respect her the less on that account. I respect her more.

FRANK [airily] Hear! hear!

VIVIE [staring at him] Is that all you know?

PRAED. Certainly that is all.

VIVIE. Then you neither of you know anything. Your guesses are innocence itself compared with the truth.

PRAED [rising, startled and indignant, and preserving his politeness with an effort] I hope not. [More emphatically] I hope not, Miss Warren.

FRANK [whistles] Whew!

VIVIE. You are not making it easy for me to tell you, Mr Praed.

PRAED [his chivalry drooping before their conviction] If there is anything worse — that is, anything else — are you sure you are right to tell us, Miss Warren?

VIVIE. I am sure that if I had the courage I should spend the rest of my life in telling everybody — stamping and branding it into them until they all felt their part in its abomination as I feel mine. There is nothing I despise more than the wicked convention that protects these things by forbidding a woman to mention them. And yet I can’t tell you. The two infamous words that describe what my mother is are ringing in my ears and struggling on my tongue; but I can’t utter them: the shame of them is too horrible for me. [She buries her face in her hands. The two men, astonished, stare at one another and then at her. She raises her head again desperately and snatches a sheet of paper and a pen]. Here: let me draft you a prospectus.

FRANK. Oh, she’s mad. Do you hear, Viv? mad. Come! pull yourself together.

VIVIE. You shall see. [She writes]. “Paid up capital: not less than forty thousand pounds standing in the name of Sir George Crofts, Baronet, the chief shareholder. Premises at Brussels, Ostend, Vienna, and Budapest. Managing director: Mrs Warren”; and now don’t let us forget h e r qualifications: the two words. [She writes the words and pushes the paper to them]. There! Oh no: don’t read it: don’t! [She snatches it back and tears it to pieces; then seizes her head in her hands and hides her face on the table].

[Frank, who has watched the writing over her shoulder, and opened his eyes very widely at it, takes a card from his pocket; scribbles the two words on it; and silently hands it to Praed, who reads it with amazement, and hides it hastily in his pocket.]

FRANK [whispering tenderly] Viv, dear: thats all right. I read what you wrote: so did Praddy. We understand. And we remain, as this leaves us at present, yours ever so devotedly.

PRAED. We do indeed, Miss Warren. I declare you are the most splendidly courageous woman I ever met.

[This sentimental compliment braces Vivie. She throws it away from her with an impatient shake, and forces herself to stand up, though not without some support from the table.]

FRANK. Don’t stir, Viv, if you don’t want to. Take it easy.

VIVIE. Thank you. You an always depend on me for two things: not to cry and not to faint. [She moves a few steps towards the door of the inner room, and stops close to Praed to say] I shall need much more courage than that when I tell my mother that we have come to a parting of the ways. Now I must go into the next room for a moment to make myself neat again, if you don’t mind.

PRAED. Shall we go away?

VIVIE. No: I’ll be back presently. Only for a moment. [She goes into the other room, Praed opening the door for her].

PRAED. What an amazing revelation! I’m extremely disappointed in Crofts: I am indeed.

FRANK. I’m not in the least. I feel he’s perfectly accounted for at last. But what a facer for me, Praddy! I can’t marry her now.

PRAED [sternly] Frank! [The two look at one another, Frank unruffled, Praed deeply indignant]. Let me tell you, Gardner, that if you desert her now you will behave very despicably.

FRANK. Good old Praddy! Ever chivalrous! But you mistake: it’s not the moral aspect of the case: it’s the money aspect. I really can’t bring myself to touch the old woman’s money now.

PRAED. And was that what you were going to marry on?

FRANK. What else? I havn’t any money, nor the smallest turn for making it. If I married Viv now she would have to support me; and I should cost her more than I am worth.

PRAED. But surely a clever bright fellow like you can make something by your own brains.

FRANK. Oh yes, a little. [He takes out his money again]. I made all that yesterday in an hour and a half. But I made it in a highly speculative business. No, dear Praddy: even if Bessie and Georgina marry millionaires and the governor dies after cutting them off with a shilling, I shall have only four hundred a year. And he won’t die until he’s three score and ten: he hasn’t originality enough. I shall be on short allowance for the next twenty years. No short allowance for Viv, if I can help it. I withdraw gracefully and leave the field to the gilded youth of England. So that settled. I shan’t worry her about it: I’ll just send her a little note after we’re gone. She’ll understand.

PRAED [grasping his hand] Good fellow, Frank! I heartily beg your pardon. But must you never see her again?

FRANK. Never see her again! Hang it all, be reasonable. I shall come along as often as possible, and be her brother. I can not understand the absurd consequences you romantic people expect from the most ordinary transactions. [A knock at the door]. I wonder who this is. Would you mind opening the door? If it’s a client it will look more respectable than if I appeared.

PRAED. Certainly. [He goes to the door and opens it. Frank sits down in Vivie’s chair to scribble a note]. My dear Kitty: come in: come in.

[Mrs Warren comes in, looking apprehensively around for Vivie. She has done her best to make herself matronly and dignified. The brilliant hat is replaced by a sober bonnet, and the gay blouse covered by a costly black silk mantle. She is pitiably anxious and ill at ease: evidently panic-stricken.]

MRS WARREN [to Frank] What! Y o u r e here, are you?

FRANK [turning in his chair from his writing, but not rising] Here, and charmed to see you. You come like a breath of spring.

MRS WARREN. Oh, get out with your nonsense. [In a low voice] Where’s Vivie?

[Frank points expressively to the door of the inner room, but says nothing.]

MRS WARREN [sitting down suddenly and almost beginning to cry] Praddy: won’t she see me, don’t you think?

PRAED. My dear Kitty: don’t distress yourself. Why should she not?

MRS WARREN. Oh, you never can see why not: youre too innocent. Mr Frank: did she say anything to you?

FRANK [folding his note] She must see you, if [very expressively] you wait til she comes in.

MRS WARREN [frightened] Why shouldn’t I wait?

[Frank looks quizzically at her; puts his note carefully on the ink-bottle, so that Vivie cannot fail to find it when next she dips her pen; then rises and devotes his attention entirely to her.]

FRANK. My dear Mrs Warren: suppose you were a sparrow — ever so tiny and pretty a sparrow hopping in the roadway — and you saw a steam roller coming in your direction, would you wait for it?

MRS WARREN. Oh, don’t bother me with your sparrows. What did she run away from Haslemere like that for?

FRANK. I’m afraid she’ll tell you if you rashly await her return.

MRS WARREN. Do you want me to go away?

FRANK. No: I always want you to stay. But I advise you to go away.

MRS WARREN. What! And never see her again!

FRANK. Precisely.

MRS WARREN [crying again] Praddy: don’t let him be cruel to me. [She hastily checks her tears and wipes her eyes]. She’ll be so angry if she sees I’ve been crying.

FRANK [with a touch of real compassion in his airy tenderness] You know that Praddy is the soul of kindness, Mrs Warren. Praddy: what do you say? Go or stay?

PRAED [to Mrs Warren] I really should be very sorry to cause you unnecessary pain; but I think perhaps you had better not wait. The fact is — [Vivie is heard at the inner door].

FRANK. Sh! Too late. She’s coming.

MRS WARREN. Don’t tell her I was crying. [Vivie comes in. She stops gravely on seeing Mrs Warren, who greets her with hysterical cheerfulness]. Well, dearie. So here you are at last.

VIVIE. I am glad you have come: I want to speak to you. You said you were going, Frank, I think.

FRANK. Yes. Will you come with me, Mrs Warren? What do you say to a trip to Richmond, and the theatre in the evening? There is safety in Richmond. No steam roller there.

VIVIE. Nonsense, Frank. My mother will stay here.

MRS WARREN [scared] I don’t know: perhaps I’d better go. We’re disturbing you at your work.

VIVIE [with quiet decision] Mr Praed: please take Frank away. Sit down, mother. [Mrs Warren obeys helplessly].

PRAED. Come, Frank. Goodbye, Miss Vivie.

VIVIE [shaking hands] Goodbye. A pleasant trip.

PRAED. Thank you: thank you. I hope so.

FRANK [to Mrs Warren] Goodbye: youd ever so much better have taken my advice. [He shakes hands with her. Then airily to Vivie] Byebye, Viv.

VIVIE. Goodbye. [He goes out gaily without shaking hands with her].

PRAED [sadly] Goodbye, Kitty.

MRS WARREN [snivelling] — oobye!

[Praed goes. Vivie, composed and extremely grave, sits down in Honoria’s chair, and waits for her mother to speak. Mrs Warren, dreading a pause, loses no time in beginning.]

MRS WARREN. Well, Vivie, what did you go away like that for without saying a word to me! How could you do such a thing! And what have you done to poor George? I wanted him to come with me; but he shuffled out of it. I could see that he was quite afraid of you. Only fancy: he wanted me not to come. As if [trembling] I should be afraid of you, dearie. [Vivie’s gravity deepens]. But of course I told him it was all settled and comfortable between us, and that we were on the best of terms. [She breaks down]. Vivie: whats the meaning of this? [She produces a commercial envelope, and fumbles at the enclosure with trembling fingers]. I got it from the bank this morning.

VIVIE. It is my month’s allowance. They sent it to me as usual the other day. I simply sent it back to be placed to your credit, and asked them to send you the lodgment receipt. In future I shall support myself.

MRS WARREN [not daring to understand] Wasn’t it enough? Why didn’t you tell me? [With a cunning gleam in her eye] I’ll double it: I was intending to double it. Only let me know how much you want.

VIVIE. You know very well that that has nothing to do with it. From this time I go my own way in my own business and among my own friends. And you will go yours. [She rises]. Goodbye.

MRS WARREN [rising, appalled] Goodbye?

VIVIE. Yes: goodbye. Come: don’t let us make a useless scene: you understand perfectly well. Sir George Crofts has told me the whole business.

MRS WARREN [angrily] Silly old — [She swallows an epithet, and then turns white at the narrowness of her escape from uttering it].

VIVIE. Just so.

MRS WARREN. He ought to have his tongue cut out. But I thought it was ended: you said you didn’t mind.

VIVIE [steadfastly] Excuse me: I do mind.

MRS WARREN. But I explained —

VIVIE. You explained how it came about. You did not tell me that it is still going on [She sits].

[Mrs Warren, silenced for a moment, looks forlornly at Vivie, who waits, secretly hoping that the combat is over. But the cunning expression comes back into Mrs Warren’s face; and she bends across the table, sly and urgent, half whispering.]

MRS WARREN. Vivie: do you know how rich I am?

VIVIE. I have no doubt you are very rich.

MRS WARREN. But you don’t know all that that means; youre too young. It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of servants; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means everything you like, everything you want, everything you can think of. And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year. Think over it. [Soothingly] Youre shocked, I know. I can enter into your feelings; and I think they do you credit; but trust me, nobody will blame you: you may take my word for that. I know what young girls are; and I know youll think better of it when you’ve turned it over in your mind.

VIVIE. So that’s how it is done, is it? You must have said all that to many a woman, to have it so pat.

MRS WARREN [passionately] What harm am I asking you to do? [Vivie turns away contemptuously. Mrs Warren continues desperately] Vivie: listen to me: you don’t understand: you were taught wrong on purpose: you don’t know what the world is really like.

VIVIE [arrested] Taught wrong on purpose! What do you mean?

MRS WARREN. I mean that youre throwing away all your chances for nothing. You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it’s not: it’s all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet. Do you want to find that out, like other women, at forty, when you’ve thrown yourself away and lost your chances; or won’t you take it in good time now from your own mother, that loves you and swears to you that it’s truth: gospel truth? [Urgently] Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what I think. I know plenty of them. I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to make friends of for you. I don’t mean anything wrong: thats what you don’t understand: your head is full of ignorant ideas about me. What do the people that taught you know about life or about people like me? When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or let anyone tell them about me? the fools! Would they ever have done anything for you if I hadn’t paid them? Havn’t I told you that I want you to be respectable? Havn’t I brought you up to be respectable? And how can you keep it up without my money and my influence and Lizzie’s friends? Can’t you see that youre cutting your own throat as well as breaking my heart in turning your back on me?

VIVIE. I recognize the Crofts philosophy of life, mother. I heard it all from him that day at the Gardners’.

MRS WARREN. You think I want to force that played-out old sot on you! I don’t, Vivie: on my oath I don’t.

VIVIE. It would not matter if you did: you would not succeed. [Mrs Warren winces, deeply hurt by the implied indifference towards her affectionate intention. Vivie, neither understanding this nor concerning herself about it, goes on calmly] Mother: you don’t at all know the sort of person I am. I don’t object to Crofts more than to any other coarsely built man of his class. To tell you the truth, I rather admire him for being strongminded enough to enjoy himself in his own way and make plenty of money instead of living the usual shooting, hunting, dining-out, tailoring, loafing life of his set merely because all the rest do it. And I’m perfectly aware that if I’d been in the same circumstances as my aunt Liz, I’d have done exactly what she did.

I don’t think I’m more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I’m less. I’m certain I’m less sentimental. I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly be without having a word said to me about it. But I don’t want to be worthless. I shouldn’t enjoy trotting about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of diamonds.

MRS WARREN [bewildered] But —

VIVIE. Wait a moment: I’ve not done. Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it. Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her. Why don’t you do the same?

MRS WARREN. Oh, it’s all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I’m fit for it and not for anything else. If I didn’t do it somebody else would; so I don’t do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No: it’s no use: I can’t give it up — not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I’ll never mention it. I’ll keep Crofts away. I’ll not trouble you much: you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. Youll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE. No: I am my mother’s daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my work is not your work, and my way is not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years, we shall never meet: thats all.

MRS WARREN [her voice stifled in tears] Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed.

VIVIE. It’s no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay.

MRS WARREN [wildly] Oh, you call a mother’s tears cheap.

VIVIE. They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together?

MRS WARREN [lapsing recklessly into her dialect] We’re mother and daughter. I want my daughter. I’ve a right to you. Who is to care for me when I’m old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. You’ve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter.

VIVIE [jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother’s voice] My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I don’t want a mother; and I don’t want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you?

MRS WARREN [violently] Oh, I know the sort you are: no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I don’t want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there’s a Heaven above us.

VIVIE. Strangle me, perhaps.

MRS WARREN. No: I’d bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me: yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I’d bring you up in my own house, I would.

VIVIE [quietly] In one of your own houses.

MRS WARREN [screaming] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother’s grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother’s curse on her.

VIVIE. I wish you wouldn’t rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don’t spoil it all now.

MRS WARREN. Yes, Heaven forgive me, it’s true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it! the injustice! the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave-driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I were a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I’d talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I’ll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I’ll prosper on it.

VIVIE. Yes: it’s better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am I not?

MRS WARREN [taken aback] Right to throw away all my money!

VIVIE. No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to. Isn’t that so?

MRS WARREN [sulkily] Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I’d better go than stay where I’m not wanted. [She turns to the door].

VIVIE [kindly] Won’t you shake hands?

MRS WARREN [after looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her] No, thank you. Goodbye.

VIVIE [matter-of-factly] Goodbye. [Mrs Warren goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on Vivie’s face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds Frank’s note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it]. And goodbye, Frank. [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in its figures].

ARMS AND THE MAN

Arms and the Man was first performed in April 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and a Broadway production opened in the September of the same year. The play has proven to be popular in the last 60 years with many stage productions and adaptations of the work. There was the famous London revival in 1944 at The Old Vic starring Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, and Marlon Brandon’s final stage appearance was in the 1953 production of play. There was a 1932 British film adaptation of the work directed by Cecil Lewis and a German film in 1958, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Arms and the Man is a comedic play, set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian war, which lasted fourteen days from 14 to 28 of November. The play opens in the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman who is with her mother as they hear the news of a great Bulgarian battle victory led by Raina’s fiancé Sergius Saranoff. The young woman greatly romanticises her fiancé, his bravery and the glory of his commitment to the war.

Serbian soldiers begin to roam the streets outside the Petkoff residence and before Raina can secure her home, a Swiss mercenary hired by the Serbian army enters her house and threatens to kill her if she does not conceal him from the Bulgarian forces. Once the danger has passed, Raina and the soldier, Captain Bluntschili, begin to interact and she is perplexed by his pragmatic and unromantic approach to war, which contrasts sharply with her own views. The war soon ends and the play then details the shifting relations between Raina and those around her, including her fiancé, an independently minded servant girl called Louka and Bluntschili. Shaw crafts a witty and amusing play, which also serves to undermine and ridicule the notion that war is a noble and romantic endeavour to be idealised or romanticised.

The London theatre where ‘Arms and the Man’ was first performed in 1894.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

A scene from a 1910 London production

INTRODUCTION

To the irreverent — and which of us will claim entire exemption from that comfortable classification? — there is something very amusing in the attitude of the orthodox criticism toward Bernard Shaw. He so obviously disregards all the canons and unities and other things which every well-bred dramatist is bound to respect that his work is really unworthy of serious criticism (orthodox). Indeed he knows no more about the dramatic art than, according to his own story in “The Man of Destiny,” Napoleon at Tavazzano knew of the Art of War. But both men were successes each in his way — the latter won victories and the former gained audiences, in the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the theatre. Shaw does not know that it is unpardonable sin to have his characters make long speeches at one another, apparently thinking that this embargo applies only to long speeches which consist mainly of bombast and rhetoric. There never was an author who showed less predilection for a specific medium by which to accomplish his results. He recognized, early in his days, many things awry in the world and he assumed the task of mundane reformation with a confident spirit. It seems such a small job at twenty to set the times aright. He began as an Essayist, but who reads essays now-a-days? — he then turned novelist with no better success, for no one would read such preposterous stuff as he chose to emit. He only succeeded in proving that absolutely rational men and women — although he has created few of the latter — can be most extremely disagreeable to our conventional way of thinking.

As a last resort, he turned to the stage, not that he cared for the dramatic art, for no man seems to care less about “Art for Art’s sake,” being in this a perfect foil to his brilliant compatriot and contemporary, Wilde. He cast his theories in dramatic forms merely because no other course except silence or physical revolt was open to him. For a long time it seemed as if this resource too was doomed to fail him. But finally he has attained a hearing and now attempts at suppression merely serve to advertise their victim.

It will repay those who seek analogies in literature to compare Shaw with Cervantes. After a life of heroic endeavor, disappointment, slavery, and poverty, the author of “Don Quixote” gave the world a serious work which caused to be laughed off the world’s stage forever the final vestiges of decadent chivalry.

The institution had long been outgrown, but its vernacular continued to be the speech and to express the thought “of the world and among the vulgar,” as the quaint, old novelist puts it, just as to-day the novel intended for the consumption of the unenlightened must deal with peers and millionaires and be dressed in stilted language. Marvellously he succeeded, but in a way he least intended. We have not yet, after so many years, determined whether it is a work to laugh or cry over. “It is our joyfullest modern book,” says Carlyle, while Landor thinks that “readers who see nothing more than a burlesque in ‘Don Quixote’ have but shallow appreciation of the work.”

Shaw in like manner comes upon the scene when many of our social usages are outworn. He sees the fact, announces it, and we burst into guffaws. The continuous laughter which greets Shaw’s plays arises from a real contrast in the point of view of the dramatist and his audiences. When Pinero or Jones describes a whimsical situation we never doubt for a moment that the author’s point of view is our own and that the abnormal predicament of his characters appeals to him in the same light as to his audience. With Shaw this sense of community of feeling is wholly lacking. He describes things as he sees them, and the house is in a roar. Who is right? If we were really using our own senses and not gazing through the glasses of convention and romance and make-believe, should we see things as Shaw does?

Must it not cause Shaw to doubt his own or the public’s sanity to hear audiences laughing boisterously over tragic situations? And yet, if they did not come to laugh, they would not come at all. Mockery is the price he must pay for a hearing. Or has he calculated to a nicety the power of reaction? Does he seek to drive us to aspiration by the portrayal of sordidness, to disinterestedness by the picture of selfishness, to illusion by disillusionment? It is impossible to believe that he is unconscious of the humor of his dramatic situations, yet he stoically gives no sign. He even dares the charge, terrible in proportion to its truth, which the most serious of us shrinks from — the lack of a sense of humor. Men would rather have their integrity impugned.

In “Arms and the Man” the subject which occupies the dramatist’s attention is that survival of barbarity — militarism — which raises its horrid head from time to time to cast a doubt on the reality of our civilization. No more hoary superstition survives than that the donning of a uniform changes the nature of the wearer. This notion pervades society to such an extent that when we find some soldiers placed upon the stage acting rationally, our conventionalized senses are shocked. The only men who have no illusions about war are those who have recently been there, and, of course, Mr. Shaw, who has no illusions about anything.

It is hard to speak too highly of “Candida.” No equally subtle and incisive study of domestic relations exists in the English drama. One has to turn to George Meredith’s “The Egoist” to find such character dissection. The central note of the play is, that with the true woman, weakness which appeals to the maternal instinct is more powerful than strength which offers protection. Candida is quite unpoetic, as, indeed, with rare exceptions, women are prone to be. They have small delight in poetry, but are the stuff of which poems and dreams are made. The husband glorying in his strength but convicted of his weakness, the poet pitiful in his physical impotence but strong in his perception of truth, the hopelessly de-moralized manufacturer, the conventional and hence emotional typist make up a group which the drama of any language may be challenged to rival.

In “The Man of Destiny” the object of the dramatist is not so much the destruction as the explanation of the Napoleonic tradition, which has so powerfully influenced generation after generation for a century. However the man may be regarded, he was a miracle. Shaw shows that he achieved his extraordinary career by suspending, for himself, the pressure of the moral and conventional atmosphere, while leaving it operative for others. Those who study this play — extravaganza, that it is — will attain a clearer comprehension of Napoleon than they can get from all the biographies.

“You Never Can Tell” offers an amusing study of the play of social conventions. The “twins” illustrate the disconcerting effects of that perfect frankness which would make life intolerable. Gloria demonstrates the powerlessness of reason to overcome natural instincts. The idea that parental duties and functions can be fulfilled by the light of such knowledge as man and woman attain by intuition is brilliantly lampooned. Crampton, the father, typifies the common superstition that among the privileges of parenthood are inflexibility, tyranny, and respect, the last entirely regardless of whether it has been deserved.

The waiter, William, is the best illustration of the man “who knows his place” that the stage has seen. He is the most pathetic figure of the play. One touch of verisimilitude is lacking; none of the guests gives him a tip, yet he maintains his urbanity. As Mr. Shaw has not yet visited America he may be unaware of the improbability of this situation.

To those who regard literary men merely as purveyors of amusement for people who have not wit enough to entertain themselves, Ibsen and Shaw, Maeterlinck and Gorky must remain enigmas. It is so much pleasanter to ignore than to face unpleasant realities — to take Riverside Drive and not Mulberry Street as the exponent of our life and the expression of our civilization. These men are the sappers and miners of the advancing army of justice. The audience which demands the truth and despises the contemptible conventions that dominate alike our stage and our life is daily growing. Shaw and men like him — if indeed he is not absolutely unique — will not for the future lack a hearing.

M.

ACT I

Night. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass. It is late in November in the year 1885, and through an open window with a little balcony on the left can be seen a peak of the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in the starlit snow. The interior of the room is not like anything to be seen in the east of Europe. It is half rich Bulgarian, half cheap Viennese. The counterpane and hangings of the bed, the window curtains, the little carpet, and all the ornamental textile fabrics in the room are oriental and gorgeous: the paper on the walls is occidental and paltry. Above the head of the bed, which stands against a little wall cutting off the right hand corner of the room diagonally, is a painted wooden shrine, blue and gold, with an ivory image of Christ, and a light hanging before it in a pierced metal ball suspended by three chains. On the left, further forward, is an ottoman. The washstand, against the wall on the left, consists of an enamelled iron basin with a pail beneath it in a painted metal frame, and a single towel on the rail at the side. A chair near it is Austrian bent wood, with cane seat. The dressing table, between the bed and the window, is an ordinary pine table, covered with a cloth of many colors, but with an expensive toilet mirror on it. The door is on the right; and there is a chest of drawers between the door and the bed. This chest of drawers is also covered by a variegated native cloth, and on it there is a pile of paper backed novels, a box of chocolate creams, and a miniature easel, on which is a large photograph of an extremely handsome officer, whose lofty bearing and magnetic glance can be felt even from the portrait. The room is lighted by a candle on the chest of drawers, and another on the dressing table, with a box of matches beside it.

The window is hinged doorwise and stands wide open, folding back to the left. Outside a pair of wooden shutters, opening outwards, also stand open. On the balcony, a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty is a part of it, is on the balcony, gazing at the snowy Balkans. She is covered by a long mantle of furs, worth, on a moderate estimate, about three times the furniture of her room.

Her reverie is interrupted by her mother, Catherine Petkoff, a woman over forty, imperiously energetic, with magnificent black hair and eyes, who might be a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer, but is determined to be a Viennese lady, and to that end wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions.

CATHERINE (entering hastily, full of good news). Raina — (she pronounces it Rah-eena, with the stress on the ee) Raina — (she goes to the bed, expecting to find Raina there.) Why, where — (Raina looks into the room.) Heavens! child, are you out in the night air instead of in your bed? You’ll catch your death. Louka told me you were asleep.

RAINA (coming in). I sent her away. I wanted to be alone. The stars are so beautiful! What is the matter?

CATHERINE. Such news. There has been a battle!

RAINA (her eyes dilating). Ah! (She throws the cloak on the ottoman, and comes eagerly to Catherine in her nightgown, a pretty garment, but evidently the only one she has on.)

CATHERINE. A great battle at Slivnitza! A victory! And it was won by Sergius.

RAINA (with a cry of delight). Ah! (Rapturously.) Oh, mother! (Then, with sudden anxiety) Is father safe?

CATHERINE. Of course: he sent me the news. Sergius is the hero of the hour, the idol of the regiment.

RAINA. Tell me, tell me. How was it! (Ecstatically) Oh, mother, mother, mother! (Raina pulls her mother down on the ottoman; and they kiss one another frantically.)

CATHERINE (with surging enthusiasm). You can’t guess how splendid it is. A cavalry charge — think of that! He defied our Russian commanders — acted without orders — led a charge on his own responsibility — headed it himself — was the first man to sweep through their guns. Can’t you see it, Raina; our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff. And you — you kept Sergius waiting a year before you would be betrothed to him. Oh, if you have a drop of Bulgarian blood in your veins, you will worship him when he comes back.

RAINA. What will he care for my poor little worship after the acclamations of a whole army of heroes? But no matter: I am so happy — so proud! (She rises and walks about excitedly.) It proves that all our ideas were real after all.

CATHERINE (indignantly). Our ideas real! What do you mean?

RAINA. Our ideas of what Sergius would do — our patriotism — our heroic ideals. Oh, what faithless little creatures girls are! — I sometimes used to doubt whether they were anything but dreams. When I buckled on Sergius’s sword he looked so noble: it was treason to think of disillusion or humiliation or failure. And yet — and yet — (Quickly.) Promise me you’ll never tell him.

CATHERINE. Don’t ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.

RAINA. Well, it came into my head just as he was holding me in his arms and looking into my eyes, that perhaps we only had our heroic ideas because we are so fond of reading Byron and Pushkin, and because we were so delighted with the opera that season at Bucharest. Real life is so seldom like that — indeed never, as far as I knew it then. (Remorsefully.) Only think, mother, I doubted him: I wondered whether all his heroic qualities and his soldiership might not prove mere imagination when he went into a real battle. I had an uneasy fear that he might cut a poor figure there beside all those clever Russian officers.

CATHERINE. A poor figure! Shame on you! The Servians have Austrian officers who are just as clever as our Russians; but we have beaten them in every battle for all that.

RAINA (laughing and sitting down again). Yes, I was only a prosaic little coward. Oh, to think that it was all true — that Sergius is just as splendid and noble as he looks — that the world is really a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance! What happiness! what unspeakable fulfilment! Ah! (She throws herself on her knees beside her mother and flings her arms passionately round her. They are interrupted by the entry of Louka, a handsome, proud girl in a pretty Bulgarian peasant’s dress with double apron, so defiant that her servility to Raina is almost insolent. She is afraid of Catherine, but even with her goes as far as she dares. She is just now excited like the others; but she has no sympathy for Raina’s raptures and looks contemptuously at the ecstasies of the two before she addresses them.)

LOUKA. If you please, madam, all the windows are to be closed and the shutters made fast. They say there may be shooting in the streets. (Raina and Catherine rise together, alarmed.) The Servians are being chased right back through the pass; and they say they may run into the town. Our cavalry will be after them; and our people will be ready for them you may be sure, now that they are running away. (She goes out on the balcony and pulls the outside shutters to; then steps back into the room.)

RAINA. I wish our people were not so cruel. What glory is there in killing wretched fugitives?

CATHERINE (business-like, her housekeeping instincts aroused). I must see that everything is made safe downstairs.

RAINA (to Louka). Leave the shutters so that I can just close them if I hear any noise.

CATHERINE (authoritatively, turning on her way to the door). Oh, no, dear, you must keep them fastened. You would be sure to drop off to sleep and leave them open. Make them fast, Louka.

LOUKA. Yes, madam. (She fastens them.)

RAINA. Don’t be anxious about me. The moment I hear a shot, I shall blow out the candles and roll myself up in bed with my ears well covered.

CATHERINE. Quite the wisest thing you can do, my love. Good-night.

RAINA. Good-night. (They kiss one another, and Raina’s emotion comes back for a moment.) Wish me joy of the happiest night of my life — if only there are no fugitives.

CATHERINE. Go to bed, dear; and don’t think of them. (She goes out.)

LOUKA (secretly, to Raina). If you would like the shutters open, just give them a push like this. (She pushes them: they open: she pulls them to again.) One of them ought to be bolted at the bottom; but the bolt’s gone.

RAINA (with dignity, reproving her). Thanks, Louka; but we must do what we are told. (Louka makes a grimace.) Good-night.

LOUKA (carelessly). Good-night. (She goes out, swaggering.)

(Raina, left alone, goes to the chest of drawers, and adores the portrait there with feelings that are beyond all expression. She does not kiss it or press it to her breast, or shew it any mark of bodily affection; but she takes it in her hands and elevates it like a priestess.)

RAINA (looking up at the picture with worship.) Oh, I shall never be unworthy of you any more, my hero — never, never, never.

(She replaces it reverently, and selects a novel from the little pile of books. She turns over the leaves dreamily; finds her page; turns the book inside out at it; and then, with a happy sigh, gets into bed and prepares to read herself to sleep. But before abandoning herself to fiction, she raises her eyes once more, thinking of the blessed reality and murmurs)

My hero! my hero!

(A distant shot breaks the quiet of the night outside. She starts, listening; and two more shots, much nearer, follow, startling her so that she scrambles out of bed, and hastily blows out the candle on the chest of drawers. Then, putting her fingers in her ears, she runs to the dressing-table and blows out the light there, and hurries back to bed. The room is now in darkness: nothing is visible but the glimmer of the light in the pierced ball before the image, and the starlight seen through the slits at the top of the shutters. The firing breaks out again: there is a startling fusillade quite close at hand. Whilst it is still echoing, the shutters disappear, pulled open from without, and for an instant the rectangle of snowy starlight flashes out with the figure of a man in black upon it. The shutters close immediately and the room is dark again. But the silence is now broken by the sound of panting. Then there is a scrape; and the flame of a match is seen in the middle of the room.)

RAINA (crouching on the bed). Who’s there? (The match is out instantly.) Who’s there? Who is that?

A MAN’S VOICE (in the darkness, subduedly, but threateningly). Sh — sh! Don’t call out or you’ll be shot. Be good; and no harm will happen to you. (She is heard leaving her bed, and making for the door.) Take care, there’s no use in trying to run away. Remember, if you raise your voice my pistol will go off. (Commandingly.) Strike a light and let me see you. Do you hear? (Another moment of silence and darkness. Then she is heard retreating to the dressing-table. She lights a candle, and the mystery is at an end. A man of about 35, in a deplorable plight, bespattered with mud and blood and snow, his belt and the strap of his revolver case keeping together the torn ruins of the blue coat of a Servian artillery officer. As far as the candlelight and his unwashed, unkempt condition make it possible to judge, he is a man of middling stature and undistinguished appearance, with strong neck and shoulders, a roundish, obstinate looking head covered with short crisp bronze curls, clear quick blue eyes and good brows and mouth, a hopelessly prosaic nose like that of a strong-minded baby, trim soldierlike carriage and energetic manner, and with all his wits about him in spite of his desperate predicament — even with a sense of humor of it, without, however, the least intention of trifling with it or throwing away a chance. He reckons up what he can guess about Raina — her age, her social position, her character, the extent to which she is frightened — at a glance, and continues, more politely but still most determinedly) Excuse my disturbing you; but you recognise my uniform — Servian. If I’m caught I shall be killed. (Determinedly.) Do you understand that?

RAINA. Yes.

MAN. Well, I don’t intend to get killed if I can help it. (Still more determinedly.) Do you understand that? (He locks the door with a snap.)

RAINA (disdainfully). I suppose not. (She draws herself up superbly, and looks him straight in the face, saying with emphasis) Some soldiers, I know, are afraid of death.

MAN (with grim goodhumor). All of them, dear lady, all of them, believe me. It is our duty to live as long as we can, and kill as many of the enemy as we can. Now if you raise an alarm —

RAINA (cutting him short). You will shoot me. How do you know that I am afraid to die?

MAN (cunningly). Ah; but suppose I don’t shoot you, what will happen then? Why, a lot of your cavalry — the greatest blackguards in your army — will burst into this pretty room of yours and slaughter me here like a pig; for I’ll fight like a demon: they shan’t get me into the street to amuse themselves with: I know what they are. Are you prepared to receive that sort of company in your present undress? (Raina, suddenly conscious of her nightgown, instinctively shrinks and gathers it more closely about her. He watches her, and adds, pitilessly) It’s rather scanty, eh? (She turns to the ottoman. He raises his pistol instantly, and cries) Stop! (She stops.) Where are you going?

RAINA (with dignified patience). Only to get my cloak.

MAN (darting to the ottoman and snatching the cloak). A good idea. No: I’ll keep the cloak: and you will take care that nobody comes in and sees you without it. This is a better weapon than the pistol. (He throws the pistol down on the ottoman.)

RAINA (revolted). It is not the weapon of a gentleman!

MAN. It’s good enough for a man with only you to stand between him and death. (As they look at one another for a moment, Raina hardly able to believe that even a Servian officer can be so cynically and selfishly unchivalrous, they are startled by a sharp fusillade in the street. The chill of imminent death hushes the man’s voice as he adds) Do you hear? If you are going to bring those scoundrels in on me you shall receive them as you are. (Raina meets his eye with unflinching scorn. Suddenly he starts, listening. There is a step outside. Someone tries the door, and then knocks hurriedly and urgently at it. Raina looks at the man, breathless. He throws up his head with the gesture of a man who sees that it is all over with him, and, dropping the manner which he has been assuming to intimidate her, flings the cloak to her, exclaiming, sincerely and kindly) No use: I’m done for. Quick! wrap yourself up: they’re coming!

RAINA (catching the cloak eagerly). Oh, thank you. (She wraps herself up with great relief. He draws his sabre and turns to the door, waiting.)

LOUKA (outside, knocking). My lady, my lady! Get up, quick, and open the door.

RAINA (anxiously). What will you do?

MAN (grimly). Never mind. Keep out of the way. It will not last long.

RAINA (impulsively). I’ll help you. Hide yourself, oh, hide yourself, quick, behind the curtain. (She seizes him by a torn strip of his sleeve, and pulls him towards the window.)

MAN (yielding to her). There is just half a chance, if you keep your head. Remember: nine soldiers out of ten are born fools. (He hides behind the curtain, looking out for a moment to say, finally) If they find me, I promise you a fight — a devil of a fight! (He disappears. Raina takes of the cloak and throws it across the foot of the bed. Then with a sleepy, disturbed air, she opens the door. Louka enters excitedly.)

LOUKA. A man has been seen climbing up the water-pipe to your balcony — a Servian. The soldiers want to search for him; and they are so wild and drunk and furious. My lady says you are to dress at once.

RAINA (as if annoyed at being disturbed). They shall not search here. Why have they been let in?

CATHERINE (coming in hastily). Raina, darling, are you safe? Have you seen anyone or heard anything?

RAINA. I heard the shooting. Surely the soldiers will not dare come in here?

CATHERINE. I have found a Russian officer, thank Heaven: he knows Sergius. (Speaking through the door to someone outside.) Sir, will you come in now! My daughter is ready.

(A young Russian officer, in Bulgarian uniform, enters, sword in hand.)

THE OFFICER. (with soft, feline politeness and stiff military carriage). Good evening, gracious lady; I am sorry to intrude, but there is a fugitive hiding on the balcony. Will you and the gracious lady your mother please to withdraw whilst we search?

RAINA (petulantly). Nonsense, sir, you can see that there is no one on the balcony. (She throws the shutters wide open and stands with her back to the curtain where the man is hidden, pointing to the moonlit balcony. A couple of shots are fired right under the window, and a bullet shatters the glass opposite Raina, who winks and gasps, but stands her ground, whilst Catherine screams, and the officer rushes to the balcony.)

THE OFFICER. (on the balcony, shouting savagely down to the street). Cease firing there, you fools: do you hear? Cease firing, damn you. (He glares down for a moment; then turns to Raina, trying to resume his polite manner.) Could anyone have got in without your knowledge? Were you asleep?

RAINA. No, I have not been to bed.

THE OFFICER. (impatiently, coming back into the room). Your neighbours have their heads so full of runaway Servians that they see them everywhere. (Politely.) Gracious lady, a thousand pardons. Good-night. (Military bow, which Raina returns coldly. Another to Catherine, who follows him out. Raina closes the shutters. She turns and sees Louka, who has been watching the scene curiously.)

RAINA. Don’t leave my mother, Louka, whilst the soldiers are here. (Louka glances at Raina, at the ottoman, at the curtain; then purses her lips secretively, laughs to herself, and goes out. Raina follows her to the door, shuts it behind her with a slam, and locks it violently. The man immediately steps out from behind the curtain, sheathing his sabre, and dismissing the danger from his mind in a businesslike way.)

MAN. A narrow shave; but a miss is as good as a mile. Dear young lady, your servant until death. I wish for your sake I had joined the Bulgarian army instead of the Servian. I am not a native Servian.

RAINA (haughtily). No, you are one of the Austrians who set the Servians on to rob us of our national liberty, and who officer their army for them. We hate them!

MAN. Austrian! not I. Don’t hate me, dear young lady. I am only a Swiss, fighting merely as a professional soldier. I joined Servia because it was nearest to me. Be generous: you’ve beaten us hollow.

RAINA. Have I not been generous?

MAN. Noble! — heroic! But I’m not saved yet. This particular rush will soon pass through; but the pursuit will go on all night by fits and starts. I must take my chance to get off during a quiet interval. You don’t mind my waiting just a minute or two, do you?

RAINA. Oh, no: I am sorry you will have to go into danger again. (Motioning towards ottoman.) Won’t you sit — (She breaks off with an irrepressible cry of alarm as she catches sight of the pistol. The man, all nerves, shies like a frightened horse.)

MAN (irritably). Don’t frighten me like that. What is it?

RAINA. Your pistol! It was staring that officer in the face all the time. What an escape!

MAN (vexed at being unnecessarily terrified). Oh, is that all?

RAINA (staring at him rather superciliously, conceiving a poorer and poorer opinion of him, and feeling proportionately more and more at her ease with him). I am sorry I frightened you. (She takes up the pistol and hands it to him.) Pray take it to protect yourself against me.

MAN (grinning wearily at the sarcasm as he takes the pistol). No use, dear young lady: there’s nothing in it. It’s not loaded. (He makes a grimace at it, and drops it disparagingly into his revolver case.)

RAINA. Load it by all means.

MAN. I’ve no ammunition. What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead; and I finished the last cake of that yesterday.

RAINA (outraged in her most cherished ideals of manhood). Chocolate! Do you stuff your pockets with sweets — like a schoolboy — even in the field?

MAN. Yes. Isn’t it contemptible?

(Raina stares at him, unable to utter her feelings. Then she sails away scornfully to the chest of drawers, and returns with the box of confectionery in her hand.)

RAINA. Allow me. I am sorry I have eaten them all except these. (She offers him the box.)

MAN (ravenously). You’re an angel! (He gobbles the comfits.) Creams! Delicious! (He looks anxiously to see whether there are any more. There are none. He accepts the inevitable with pathetic goodhumor, and says, with grateful emotion) Bless you, dear lady. You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub. Thank you. (He hands back the box. She snatches it contemptuously from him and throws it away. This impatient action is so sudden that he shies again.) Ugh! Don’t do things so suddenly, gracious lady. Don’t revenge yourself because I frightened you just now.

RAINA (superbly). Frighten me! Do you know, sir, that though I am only a woman, I think I am at heart as brave as you.

MAN. I should think so. You haven’t been under fire for three days as I have. I can stand two days without shewing it much; but no man can stand three days: I’m as nervous as a mouse. (He sits down on the ottoman, and takes his head in his hands.) Would you like to see me cry?

RAINA (quickly). No.

MAN. If you would, all you have to do is to scold me just as if I were a little boy and you my nurse. If I were in camp now they’d play all sorts of tricks on me.

RAINA (a little moved). I’m sorry. I won’t scold you. (Touched by the sympathy in her tone, he raises his head and looks gratefully at her: she immediately draws hack and says stiffly) You must excuse me: our soldiers are not like that. (She moves away from the ottoman.)

MAN. Oh, yes, they are. There are only two sorts of soldiers: old ones and young ones. I’ve served fourteen years: half of your fellows never smelt powder before. Why, how is it that you’ve just beaten us? Sheer ignorance of the art of war, nothing else. (Indignantly.) I never saw anything so unprofessional.

RAINA (ironically). Oh, was it unprofessional to beat you?

MAN. Well, come, is it professional to throw a regiment of cavalry on a battery of machine guns, with the dead certainty that if the guns go off not a horse or man will ever get within fifty yards of the fire? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it.

RAINA (eagerly turning to him, as all her enthusiasm and her dream of glory rush back on her). Did you see the great cavalry charge? Oh, tell me about it. Describe it to me.

MAN. You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?

RAINA. How could I?

MAN. Ah, perhaps not — of course. Well, it’s a funny sight. It’s like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one comes; then two or three close behind him; and then all the rest in a lump.

RAINA (her eyes dilating as she raises her clasped hands ecstatically). Yes, first One! — the bravest of the brave!

MAN (prosaically). Hm! you should see the poor devil pulling at his horse.

RAINA. Why should he pull at his horse?

MAN (impatient of so stupid a question). It’s running away with him, of course: do you suppose the fellow wants to get there before the others and be killed? Then they all come. You can tell the young ones by their wildness and their slashing. The old ones come bunched up under the number one guard: they know that they are mere projectiles, and that it’s no use trying to fight. The wounds are mostly broken knees, from the horses cannoning together.

RAINA. Ugh! But I don’t believe the first man is a coward. I believe he is a hero!

MAN (goodhumoredly). That’s what you’d have said if you’d seen the first man in the charge to-day.

RAINA (breathless). Ah, I knew it! Tell me — tell me about him.

MAN. He did it like an operatic tenor — a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting a war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills. We nearly burst with laughter at him; but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us they’d sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldn’t fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life, though I’ve been in one or two very tight places. And I hadn’t even a revolver cartridge — nothing but chocolate. We’d no bayonets — nothing. Of course, they just cut us to bits. And there was Don Quixote flourishing like a drum major, thinking he’d done the cleverest thing ever known, whereas he ought to be courtmartialled for it. Of all the fools ever let loose on a field of battle, that man must be the very maddest. He and his regiment simply committed suicide — only the pistol missed fire, that’s all.

RAINA (deeply wounded, but steadfastly loyal to her ideals). Indeed! Would you know him again if you saw him?

MAN. Shall I ever forget him. (She again goes to the chest of drawers. He watches her with a vague hope that she may have something else for him to eat. She takes the portrait from its stand and brings it to him.)

RAINA. That is a photograph of the gentleman — the patriot and hero — to whom I am betrothed.

MAN (looking at it). I’m really very sorry. (Looking at her.) Was it fair to lead me on? (He looks at the portrait again.) Yes: that’s him: not a doubt of it. (He stifles a laugh.)

RAINA (quickly). Why do you laugh?

MAN (shamefacedly, but still greatly tickled). I didn’t laugh, I assure you. At least I didn’t mean to. But when I think of him charging the windmills and thinking he was doing the finest thing — (chokes with suppressed laughter).

RAINA (sternly). Give me back the portrait, sir.

MAN (with sincere remorse). Of course. Certainly. I’m really very sorry. (She deliberately kisses it, and looks him straight in the face, before returning to the chest of drawers to replace it. He follows her, apologizing.) Perhaps I’m quite wrong, you know: no doubt I am. Most likely he had got wind of the cartridge business somehow, and knew it was a safe job.

RAINA. That is to say, he was a pretender and a coward! You did not dare say that before.

MAN (with a comic gesture of despair). It’s no use, dear lady: I can’t make you see it from the professional point of view. (As he turns away to get back to the ottoman, the firing begins again in the distance.)

RAINA (sternly, as she sees him listening to the shots). So much the better for you.

MAN (turning). How?

RAINA. You are my enemy; and you are at my mercy. What would I do if I were a professional soldier?

MAN. Ah, true, dear young lady: you’re always right. I know how good you have been to me: to my last hour I shall remember those three chocolate creams. It was unsoldierly; but it was angelic.

RAINA (coldly). Thank you. And now I will do a soldierly thing. You cannot stay here after what you have just said about my future husband; but I will go out on the balcony and see whether it is safe for you to climb down into the street. (She turns to the window.)

MAN (changing countenance). Down that waterpipe! Stop! Wait! I can’t! I daren’t! The very thought of it makes me giddy. I came up it fast enough with death behind me. But to face it now in cold blood! — (He sinks on the ottoman.) It’s no use: I give up: I’m beaten. Give the alarm. (He drops his head in his hands in the deepest dejection.)

RAINA (disarmed by pity). Come, don’t be disheartened. (She stoops over him almost maternally: he shakes his head.) Oh, you are a very poor soldier — a chocolate cream soldier. Come, cheer up: it takes less courage to climb down than to face capture — remember that.

MAN (dreamily, lulled by her voice). No, capture only means death; and death is sleep — oh, sleep, sleep, sleep, undisturbed sleep! Climbing down the pipe means doing something — exerting myself — thinking! Death ten times over first.

RAINA (softly and wonderingly, catching the rhythm of his weariness). Are you so sleepy as that?

MAN. I’ve not had two hours’ undisturbed sleep since the war began. I’m on the staff: you don’t know what that means. I haven’t closed my eyes for thirty-six hours.

RAINA (desperately). But what am I to do with you.

MAN (staggering up). Of course I must do something. (He shakes himself; pulls himself together; and speaks with rallied vigour and courage.) You see, sleep or no sleep, hunger or no hunger, tired or not tired, you can always do a thing when you know it must be done. Well, that pipe must be got down — (He hits himself on the chest, and adds) — Do you hear that, you chocolate cream soldier? (He turns to the window.)

RAINA (anxiously). But if you fall?

MAN. I shall sleep as if the stones were a feather bed. Good-bye. (He makes boldly for the window, and his hand is on the shutter when there is a terrible burst of firing in the street beneath.)

RAINA (rushing to him). Stop! (She catches him by the shoulder, and turns him quite round.) They’ll kill you.

MAN (coolly, but attentively). Never mind: this sort of thing is all in my day’s work. I’m bound to take my chance. (Decisively.) Now do what I tell you. Put out the candles, so that they shan’t see the light when I open the shutters. And keep away from the window, whatever you do. If they see me, they’re sure to have a shot at me.

RAINA (clinging to him). They’re sure to see you: it’s bright moonlight. I’ll save you — oh, how can you be so indifferent? You want me to save you, don’t you?

MAN. I really don’t want to be troublesome. (She shakes him in her impatience.) I am not indifferent, dear young lady, I assure you. But how is it to be done?

RAINA. Come away from the window — please. (She coaxes him back to the middle of the room. He submits humbly. She releases him, and addresses him patronizingly.) Now listen. You must trust to our hospitality. You do not yet know in whose house you are. I am a Petkoff.

MAN. What’s that?

RAINA (rather indignantly). I mean that I belong to the family of the Petkoffs, the richest and best known in our country.

MAN. Oh, yes, of course. I beg your pardon. The Petkoffs, to be sure. How stupid of me!

RAINA. You know you never heard of them until this minute. How can you stoop to pretend?

MAN. Forgive me: I’m too tired to think; and the change of subject was too much for me. Don’t scold me.

RAINA. I forgot. It might make you cry. (He nods, quite seriously. She pouts and then resumes her patronizing tone.) I must tell you that my father holds the highest command of any Bulgarian in our army. He is (proudly) a Major.

MAN (pretending to be deeply impressed). A Major! Bless me! Think of that!

RAINA. You shewed great ignorance in thinking that it was necessary to climb up to the balcony, because ours is the only private house that has two rows of windows. There is a flight of stairs inside to get up and down by.

MAN. Stairs! How grand! You live in great luxury indeed, dear young lady.

RAINA. Do you know what a library is?

MAN. A library? A roomful of books.

RAINA. Yes, we have one, the only one in Bulgaria.

MAN. Actually a real library! I should like to see that.

RAINA (affectedly). I tell you these things to shew you that you are not in the house of ignorant country folk who would kill you the moment they saw your Servian uniform, but among civilized people. We go to Bucharest every year for the opera season; and I have spent a whole month in Vienna.

MAN. I saw that, dear young lady. I saw at once that you knew the world.

RAINA. Have you ever seen the opera of Ernani?

MAN. Is that the one with the devil in it in red velvet, and a soldier’s chorus?

RAINA (contemptuously). No!

MAN (stifling a heavy sigh of weariness). Then I don’t know it.

RAINA. I thought you might have remembered the great scene where Ernani, flying from his foes just as you are tonight, takes refuge in the castle of his bitterest enemy, an old Castilian noble. The noble refuses to give him up. His guest is sacred to him.

MAN (quickly waking up a little). Have your people got that notion?

RAINA (with dignity). My mother and I can understand that notion, as you call it. And if instead of threatening me with your pistol as you did, you had simply thrown yourself as a fugitive on our hospitality, you would have been as safe as in your father’s house.

MAN. Quite sure?

RAINA (turning her back on him in disgust.) Oh, it is useless to try and make you understand.

MAN. Don’t be angry: you see how awkward it would be for me if there was any mistake. My father is a very hospitable man: he keeps six hotels; but I couldn’t trust him as far as that. What about YOUR father?

RAINA. He is away at Slivnitza fighting for his country. I answer for your safety. There is my hand in pledge of it. Will that reassure you? (She offers him her hand.)

MAN (looking dubiously at his own hand). Better not touch my hand, dear young lady. I must have a wash first.

RAINA (touched). That is very nice of you. I see that you are a gentleman.

MAN (puzzled). Eh?

RAINA. You must not think I am surprised. Bulgarians of really good standing — people in OUR position — wash their hands nearly every day. But I appreciate your delicacy. You may take my hand. (She offers it again.)

MAN (kissing it with his hands behind his back). Thanks, gracious young lady: I feel safe at last. And now would you mind breaking the news to your mother? I had better not stay here secretly longer than is necessary.

RAINA. If you will be so good as to keep perfectly still whilst I am away.

MAN. Certainly. (He sits down on the ottoman.)

(Raina goes to the bed and wraps herself in the fur cloak. His eyes close. She goes to the door, but on turning for a last look at him, sees that he is dropping of to sleep.)

RAINA (at the door). You are not going asleep, are you? (He murmurs inarticulately: she runs to him and shakes him.) Do you hear? Wake up: you are falling asleep.

MAN. Eh? Falling aslee — ? Oh, no, not the least in the world: I was only thinking. It’s all right: I’m wide awake.

RAINA (severely). Will you please stand up while I am away. (He rises reluctantly.) All the time, mind.

MAN (standing unsteadily). Certainly — certainly: you may depend on me.

(Raina looks doubtfully at him. He smiles foolishly. She goes reluctantly, turning again at the door, and almost catching him in the act of yawning. She goes out.)

MAN (drowsily). Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, slee — (The words trail off into a murmur. He wakes again with a shock on the point of falling.) Where am I? That’s what I want to know: where am I? Must keep awake. Nothing keeps me awake except danger — remember that — (intently) danger, danger, danger, dan — Where’s danger? Must find it. (He starts of vaguely around the room in search of it.) What am I looking for? Sleep — danger — don’t know. (He stumbles against the bed.) Ah, yes: now I know. All right now. I’m to go to bed, but not to sleep — be sure not to sleep — because of danger. Not to lie down, either, only sit down. (He sits on the bed. A blissful expression comes into his face.) Ah! (With a happy sigh he sinks back at full length; lifts his boots into the bed with a final effort; and falls fast asleep instantly.)

(Catherine comes in, followed by Raina.)

RAINA (looking at the ottoman). He’s gone! I left him here.

CATHERINE, Here! Then he must have climbed down from the —

RAINA (seeing him). Oh! (She points.)

CATHERINE (scandalized). Well! (She strides to the left side of the bed, Raina following and standing opposite her on the right.) He’s fast asleep. The brute!

RAINA (anxiously). Sh!

CATHERINE (shaking him). Sir! (Shaking him again, harder.) Sir!! (Vehemently shaking very bard.) Sir!!!

RAINA (catching her arm). Don’t, mamma: the poor dear is worn out. Let him sleep.

CATHERINE (letting him go and turning amazed to Raina). The poor dear! Raina!!! (She looks sternly at her daughter. The man sleeps profoundly.)

ACT II

The sixth of March, 1886. In the garden of major Petkoff’s house. It is a fine spring morning; and the garden looks fresh and pretty. Beyond the paling the tops of a couple of minarets can be seen, shewing that there is a valley there, with the little town in it. A few miles further the Balkan mountains rise and shut in the view. Within the garden the side of the house is seen on the right, with a garden door reached by a little flight of steps. On the left the stable yard, with its gateway, encroaches on the garden. There are fruit bushes along the paling and house, covered with washing hung out to dry. A path runs by the house, and rises by two steps at the corner where it turns out of the right along the front. In the middle a small table, with two bent wood chairs at it, is laid for breakfast with Turkish coffee pot, cups, rolls, etc.; but the cups have been used and the bread broken. There is a wooden garden seat against the wall on the left.

Louka, smoking a cigaret, is standing between the table and the house, turning her back with angry disdain on a man-servant who is lecturing her. He is a middle-aged man of cool temperament and low but clear and keen intelligence, with the complacency of the servant who values himself on his rank in servility, and the imperturbability of the accurate calculator who has no illusions. He wears a white Bulgarian costume jacket with decorated harder, sash, wide knickerbockers, and decorated gaiters. His head is shaved up to the crown, giving him a high Japanese forehead. His name is Nicola.

NICOLA. Be warned in time, Louka: mend your manners. I know the mistress. She is so grand that she never dreams that any servant could dare to be disrespectful to her; but if she once suspects that you are defying her, out you go.

LOUKA. I do defy her. I will defy her. What do I care for her?

NICOLA. If you quarrel with the family, I never can marry you. It’s the same as if you quarrelled with me!

LOUKA. You take her part against me, do you?

NICOLA (sedately). I shall always be dependent on the good will of the family. When I leave their service and start a shop in Sofia, their custom will be half my capital: their bad word would ruin me.

LOUKA. You have no spirit. I should like to see them dare say a word against me!

NICOLA (pityingly). I should have expected more sense from you, Louka. But you’re young, you’re young!

LOUKA. Yes; and you like me the better for it, don’t you? But I know some family secrets they wouldn’t care to have told, young as I am. Let them quarrel with me if they dare!

NICOLA (with compassionate superiority). Do you know what they would do if they heard you talk like that?

LOUKA. What could they do?

NICOLA. Discharge you for untruthfulness. Who would believe any stories you told after that? Who would give you another situation? Who in this house would dare be seen speaking to you ever again? How long would your father be left on his little farm? (She impatiently throws away the end of her cigaret, and stamps on it.) Child, you don’t know the power such high people have over the like of you and me when we try to rise out of our poverty against them. (He goes close to her and lowers his voice.) Look at me, ten years in their service. Do you think I know no secrets? I know things about the mistress that she wouldn’t have the master know for a thousand levas. I know things about him that she wouldn’t let him hear the last of for six months if I blabbed them to her. I know things about Raina that would break off her match with Sergius if —

LOUKA (turning on him quickly). How do you know? I never told you!

NICOLA (opening his eyes cunningly). So that’s your little secret, is it? I thought it might be something like that. Well, you take my advice, and be respectful; and make the mistress feel that no matter what you know or don’t know, they can depend on you to hold your tongue and serve the family faithfully. That’s what they like; and that’s how you’ll make most out of them.

LOUKA (with searching scorn). You have the soul of a servant, Nicola.

NICOLA (complacently). Yes: that’s the secret of success in service.

(A loud knocking with a whip handle on a wooden door, outside on the left, is heard.)

MALE VOICE OUTSIDE. Hollo! Hollo there! Nicola!

LOUKA. Master! back from the war!

NICOLA (quickly). My word for it, Louka, the war’s over. Off with you and get some fresh coffee. (He runs out into the stable yard.)

LOUKA (as she puts the coffee pot and the cups upon the tray, and carries it into the house). You’ll never put the soul of a servant into me.

(Major Petkoff comes from the stable yard, followed by Nicola. He is a cheerful, excitable, insignificant, unpolished man of about 50, naturally unambitious except as to his income and his importance in local society, but just now greatly pleased with the military rank which the war has thrust on him as a man of consequence in his town. The fever of plucky patriotism which the Servian attack roused in all the Bulgarians has pulled him through the war; but he is obviously glad to be home again.)

PETKOFF (pointing to the table with his whip). Breakfast out here, eh?

NICOLA. Yes, sir. The mistress and Miss Raina have just gone in.

PETKOFF (fitting down and taking a roll). Go in and say I’ve come; and get me some fresh coffee.

NICOLA. It’s coming, sir. (He goes to the house door. Louka, with fresh coffee, a clean cup, and a brandy bottle on her tray meets him.) Have you told the mistress?

LOUKA. Yes: she’s coming.

(Nicola goes into the house. Louka brings the coffee to the table.)

PETKOFF. Well, the Servians haven’t run away with you, have they?

LOUKA. No, sir.

PETKOFF. That’s right. Have you brought me some cognac?

LOUKA (putting the bottle on the table). Here, sir.

PETKOFF. That’s right. (He pours some into his coffee.)

(Catherine who has at this early hour made only a very perfunctory toilet, and wears a Bulgarian apron over a once brilliant, but now half worn out red dressing gown, and a colored handkerchief tied over her thick black hair, with Turkish slippers on her bare feet, comes from the house, looking astonishingly handsome and stately under all the circumstances. Louka goes into the house.)

CATHERINE. My dear Paul, what a surprise for us. (She stoops over the back of his chair to kiss him.) Have they brought you fresh coffee?

PETKOFF. Yes, Louka’s been looking after me. The war’s over. The treaty was signed three days ago at Bucharest; and the decree for our army to demobilize was issued yesterday.

CATHERINE (springing erect, with flashing eyes). The war over! Paul: have you let the Austrians force you to make peace?

PETKOFF (submissively). My dear: they didn’t consult me. What could I do? (She sits down and turns away from him.) But of course we saw to it that the treaty was an honorable one. It declares peace —

CATHERINE (outraged). Peace!

PETKOFF (appeasing her). — but not friendly relations: remember that. They wanted to put that in; but I insisted on its being struck out. What more could I do?

CATHERINE. You could have annexed Servia and made Prince Alexander Emperor of the Balkans. That’s what I would have done.

PETKOFF. I don’t doubt it in the least, my dear. But I should have had to subdue the whole Austrian Empire first; and that would have kept me too long away from you. I missed you greatly.

CATHERINE (relenting). Ah! (Stretches her hand affectionately across the table to squeeze his.)

PETKOFF. And how have you been, my dear?

CATHERINE. Oh, my usual sore throats, that’s all.

PETKOFF (with conviction). That comes from washing your neck every day. I’ve often told you so.

CATHERINE. Nonsense, Paul!

PETKOFF (over his coffee and cigaret). I don’t believe in going too far with these modern customs. All this washing can’t be good for the health: it’s not natural. There was an Englishman at Phillipopolis who used to wet himself all over with cold water every morning when he got up. Disgusting! It all comes from the English: their climate makes them so dirty that they have to be perpetually washing themselves. Look at my father: he never had a bath in his life; and he lived to be ninety-eight, the healthiest man in Bulgaria. I don’t mind a good wash once a week to keep up my position; but once a day is carrying the thing to a ridiculous extreme.

CATHERINE. You are a barbarian at heart still, Paul. I hope you behaved yourself before all those Russian officers.

PETKOFF. I did my best. I took care to let them know that we had a library.

CATHERINE. Ah; but you didn’t tell them that we have an electric bell in it? I have had one put up.

PETKOFF. What’s an electric bell?

CATHERINE. You touch a button; something tinkles in the kitchen; and then Nicola comes up.

PETKOFF. Why not shout for him?

CATHERINE. Civilized people never shout for their servants. I’ve learnt that while you were away.

PETKOFF. Well, I’ll tell you something I’ve learnt, too. Civilized people don’t hang out their washing to dry where visitors can see it; so you’d better have all that (indicating the clothes on the bushes) put somewhere else.

CATHERINE. Oh, that’s absurd, Paul: I don’t believe really refined people notice such things.

(Someone is heard knocking at the stable gates.)

PETKOFF. There’s Sergius. (Shouting.) Hollo, Nicola!

CATHERINE. Oh, don’t shout, Paul: it really isn’t nice.

PETKOFF. Bosh! (He shouts louder than before.) Nicola!

NICOLA (appearing at the house door). Yes, sir.

PETKOFF. If that is Major Saranoff, bring him round this way. (He pronounces the name with the stress on the second syllable — Sarah-noff.)

NICOLA. Yes, sir. (He goes into the stable yard.)

PETKOFF. You must talk to him, my dear, until Raina takes him off our hands. He bores my life out about our not promoting him — over my head, mind you.

CATHERINE. He certainly ought to be promoted when he marries Raina. Besides, the country should insist on having at least one native general.

PETKOFF. Yes, so that he could throw away whole brigades instead of regiments. It’s no use, my dear: he has not the slightest chance of promotion until we are quite sure that the peace will be a lasting one.

NICOLA (at the gate, announcing). Major Sergius Saranoff! (He goes into the house and returns presently with a third chair, which he places at the table. He then withdraws.)

(Major Sergius Saranoff, the original of the portrait in Raina’s room, is a tall, romantically handsome man, with the physical hardihood, the high spirit, and the susceptible imagination of an untamed mountaineer chieftain. But his remarkable personal distinction is of a characteristically civilized type. The ridges of his eyebrows, curving with a ram’s-horn twist round the marked projections at the outer corners, his jealously observant eye, his nose, thin, keen, and apprehensive in spite of the pugnacious high bridge and large nostril, his assertive chin, would not be out of place in a Paris salon. In short, the clever, imaginative barbarian has an acute critical faculty which has been thrown into intense activity by the arrival of western civilization in the Balkans; and the result is precisely what the advent of nineteenth-century thought first produced in England: to-wit, Byronism. By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries. Altogether it is clear that here or nowhere is Raina’s ideal hero. Catherine is hardly less enthusiastic, and much less reserved in shewing her enthusiasm. As he enters from the stable gate, she rises effusively to greet him. Petkoff is distinctly less disposed to make a fuss about him.)

PETKOFF. Here already, Sergius. Glad to see you!

CATHERINE. My dear Sergius!(She holds out both her hands.)

SERGIUS (kissing them with scrupulous gallantry). My dear mother, if I may call you so.

PETKOFF (drily). Mother-in-law, Sergius; mother-in-law! Sit down, and have some coffee.

SERGIUS. Thank you, none for me. (He gets away from the table with a certain distaste for Petkoff’s enjoyment of it, and posts himself with conscious grace against the rail of the steps leading to the house.)

CATHERINE. You look superb — splendid. The campaign has improved you. Everybody here is mad about you. We were all wild with enthusiasm about that magnificent cavalry charge.

SERGIUS (with grave irony). Madam: it was the cradle and the grave of my military reputation.

CATHERINE. How so?

SERGIUS. I won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way. That upset their plans, and wounded their self-esteem. Two of their colonels got their regiments driven back on the correct principles of scientific warfare. Two major-generals got killed strictly according to military etiquette. Those two colonels are now major-generals; and I am still a simple major.

CATHERINE. You shall not remain so, Sergius. The women are on your side; and they will see that justice is done you.

SERGIUS. It is too late. I have only waited for the peace to send in my resignation.

PETKOFF (dropping his cup in his amazement). Your resignation!

CATHERINE. Oh, you must withdraw it!

SERGIUS (with resolute, measured emphasis, folding his arms). I never withdraw!

PETKOFF (vexed). Now who could have supposed you were going to do such a thing?

SERGIUS (with fire). Everyone that knew me. But enough of myself and my affairs. How is Raina; and where is Raina?

RAINA (suddenly coming round the corner of the house and standing at the top of the steps in the path). Raina is here. (She makes a charming picture as they all turn to look at her. She wears an underdress of pale green silk, draped with an overdress of thin ecru canvas embroidered with gold. On her head she wears a pretty Phrygian cap of gold tinsel. Sergius, with an exclamation of pleasure, goes impulsively to meet her. She stretches out her hand: he drops chivalrously on one knee and kisses it.)

PETKOFF (aside to Catherine, beaming with parental pride). Pretty, isn’t it? She always appears at the right moment.

CATHERINE (impatiently). Yes: she listens for it. It is an abominable habit.

(Sergius leads Raina forward with splendid gallantry, as if she were a queen. When they come to the table, she turns to him with a bend of the head; he bows; and thus they separate, he coming to his place, and she going behind her father’s chair.)

RAINA (stooping and kissing her father). Dear father! Welcome home!

PETKOFF (patting her cheek). My little pet girl. (He kisses her; she goes to the chair left by Nicola for Sergius, and sits down.)

CATHERINE. And so you’re no longer a soldier, Sergius.

SERGIUS. I am no longer a soldier. Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms. Eh, Major!

PETKOFF. They wouldn’t let us make a fair stand-up fight of it. However, I suppose soldiering has to be a trade like any other trade.

SERGIUS. Precisely. But I have no ambition to succeed as a tradesman; so I have taken the advice of that bagman of a captain that settled the exchange of prisoners with us at Peerot, and given it up.

PETKOFF. What, that Swiss fellow? Sergius: I’ve often thought of that exchange since. He over-reached us about those horses.

SERGIUS. Of course he over-reached us. His father was a hotel and livery stable keeper; and he owed his first step to his knowledge of horse-dealing. (With mock enthusiasm.) Ah, he was a soldier — every inch a soldier! If only I had bought the horses for my regiment instead of foolishly leading it into danger, I should have been a field-marshal now!

CATHERINE. A Swiss? What was he doing in the Servian army?

PETKOFF. A volunteer of course — keen on picking up his profession. (Chuckling.) We shouldn’t have been able to begin fighting if these foreigners hadn’t shewn us how to do it: we knew nothing about it; and neither did the Servians. Egad, there’d have been no war without them.

RAINA. Are there many Swiss officers in the Servian Army?

PETKOFF. No — all Austrians, just as our officers were all Russians. This was the only Swiss I came across. I’ll never trust a Swiss again. He cheated us — humbugged us into giving him fifty able bodied men for two hundred confounded worn out chargers. They weren’t even eatable!

SERGIUS. We were two children in the hands of that consummate soldier, Major: simply two innocent little children.

RAINA. What was he like?

CATHERINE. Oh, Raina, what a silly question!

SERGIUS. He was like a commercial traveller in uniform. Bourgeois to his boots.

PETKOFF (grinning). Sergius: tell Catherine that queer story his friend told us about him — how he escaped after Slivnitza. You remember? — about his being hid by two women.

SERGIUS (with bitter irony). Oh, yes, quite a romance. He was serving in the very battery I so unprofessionally charged. Being a thorough soldier, he ran away like the rest of them, with our cavalry at his heels. To escape their attentions, he had the good taste to take refuge in the chamber of some patriotic young Bulgarian lady. The young lady was enchanted by his persuasive commercial traveller’s manners. She very modestly entertained him for an hour or so and then called in her mother lest her conduct should appear unmaidenly. The old lady was equally fascinated; and the fugitive was sent on his way in the morning, disguised in an old coat belonging to the master of the house, who was away at the war.

RAINA (rising with marked stateliness). Your life in the camp has made you coarse, Sergius. I did not think you would have repeated such a story before me. (She turns away coldly.)

CATHERINE (also rising). She is right, Sergius. If such women exist, we should be spared the knowledge of them.

PETKOFF. Pooh! nonsense! what does it matter?

SERGIUS (ashamed). No, Petkoff: I was wrong. (To Raina, with earnest humility.) I beg your pardon. I have behaved abominably. Forgive me, Raina. (She bows reservedly.) And you, too, madam. (Catherine bows graciously and sits down. He proceeds solemnly, again addressing Raina.) The glimpses I have had of the seamy side of life during the last few months have made me cynical; but I should not have brought my cynicism here — least of all into your presence, Raina. I — (Here, turning to the others, he is evidently about to begin a long speech when the Major interrupts him.)

PETKOFF. Stuff and nonsense, Sergius. That’s quite enough fuss about nothing: a soldier’s daughter should be able to stand up without flinching to a little strong conversation. (He rises.) Come: it’s time for us to get to business. We have to make up our minds how those three regiments are to get back to Phillipopolis: — there’s no forage for them on the Sofia route. (He goes towards the house.) Come along. (Sergius is about to follow him when Catherine rises and intervenes.)

CATHERINE. Oh, Paul, can’t you spare Sergius for a few moments? Raina has hardly seen him yet. Perhaps I can help you to settle about the regiments.

SERGIUS (protesting). My dear madam, impossible: you —

CATHERINE (stopping him playfully). You stay here, my dear Sergius: there’s no hurry. I have a word or two to say to Paul. (Sergius instantly bows and steps back.) Now, dear (taking Petkoff’s arm), come and see the electric bell.

PETKOFF. Oh, very well, very well. (They go into the house together affectionately. Sergius, left alone with Raina, looks anxiously at her, fearing that she may be still offended. She smiles, and stretches out her arms to him.)

(Exit R. into house, followed by Catherine.)

SERGIUS (hastening to her, but refraining from touching her without express permission). Am I forgiven?

RAINA (placing her hands on his shoulder as she looks up at him with admiration and worship). My hero! My king.

SERGIUS. My queen! (He kisses her on the forehead with holy awe.)

RAINA. How I have envied you, Sergius! You have been out in the world, on the field of battle, able to prove yourself there worthy of any woman in the world; whilst I have had to sit at home inactive, — dreaming — useless — doing nothing that could give me the right to call myself worthy of any man.

SERGIUS. Dearest, all my deeds have been yours. You inspired me. I have gone through the war like a knight in a tournament with his lady looking on at him!

RAINA. And you have never been absent from my thoughts for a moment. (Very solemnly.) Sergius: I think we two have found the higher love. When I think of you, I feel that I could never do a base deed, or think an ignoble thought.

SERGIUS. My lady, and my saint! (Clasping her reverently.)

RAINA (returning his embrace). My lord and my g —

SERGIUS. Sh — sh! Let me be the worshipper, dear. You little know how unworthy even the best man is of a girl’s pure passion!

RAINA. I trust you. I love you. You will never disappoint me, Sergius. (Louka is heard singing within the house. They quickly release each other.) Hush! I can’t pretend to talk indifferently before her: my heart is too full. (Louka comes from the house with her tray. She goes to the table, and begins to clear it, with her back turned to them.) I will go and get my hat; and then we can go out until lunch time. Wouldn’t you like that?

SERGIUS. Be quick. If you are away five minutes, it will seem five hours. (Raina runs to the top of the steps and turns there to exchange a look with him and wave him a kiss with both hands. He looks after her with emotion for a moment, then turns slowly away, his face radiant with the exultation of the scene which has just passed. The movement shifts his field of vision, into the corner of which there now comes the tail of Louka’s double apron. His eye gleams at once. He takes a stealthy look at her, and begins to twirl his moustache nervously, with his left hand akimbo on his hip. Finally, striking the ground with his heels in something of a cavalry swagger, he strolls over to the left of the table, opposite her, and says) Louka: do you know what the higher love is?

LOUKA (astonished). No, sir.

SERGIUS. Very fatiguing thing to keep up for any length of time, Louka. One feels the need of some relief after it.

LOUKA (innocently). Perhaps you would like some coffee, sir? (She stretches her hand across the table for the coffee pot.)

SERGIUS (taking her hand). Thank you, Louka.

LOUKA (pretending to pull). Oh, sir, you know I didn’t mean that. I’m surprised at you!

SERGIUS (coming clear of the table and drawing her with him). I am surprised at myself, Louka. What would Sergius, the hero of Slivnitza, say if he saw me now? What would Sergius, the apostle of the higher love, say if he saw me now? What would the half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine say if they caught us here? (Letting go her hand and slipping his arm dexterously round her waist.) Do you consider my figure handsome, Louka?

LOUKA. Let me go, sir. I shall be disgraced. (She struggles: he holds her inexorably.) Oh, will you let go?

SERGIUS (looking straight into her eyes). No.

LOUKA. Then stand back where we can’t be seen. Have you no common sense?

SERGIUS. Ah, that’s reasonable. (He takes her into the stableyard gateway, where they are hidden from the house.)

LOUKA (complaining). I may have been seen from the windows: Miss Raina is sure to be spying about after you.

SERGIUS (stung — letting her go). Take care, Louka. I may be worthless enough to betray the higher love; but do not you insult it.

LOUKA (demurely). Not for the world, sir, I’m sure. May I go on with my work please, now?

SERGIUS (again putting his arm round her). You are a provoking little witch, Louka. If you were in love with me, would you spy out of windows on me?

LOUKA. Well, you see, sir, since you say you are half a dozen different gentlemen all at once, I should have a great deal to look after.

SERGIUS (charmed). Witty as well as pretty. (He tries to kiss her.)

LOUKA (avoiding him). No, I don’t want your kisses. Gentlefolk are all alike — you making love to me behind Miss Raina’s back, and she doing the same behind yours.

SERGIUS (recoiling a step). Louka!

LOUKA. It shews how little you really care!

SERGIUS (dropping his familiarity and speaking with freezing politeness). If our conversation is to continue, Louka, you will please remember that a gentleman does not discuss the conduct of the lady he is engaged to with her maid.

LOUKA. It’s so hard to know what a gentleman considers right. I thought from your trying to kiss me that you had given up being so particular.

SERGIUS (turning from her and striking his forehead as he comes back into the garden from the gateway). Devil! devil!

LOUKA. Ha! ha! I expect one of the six of you is very like me, sir, though I am only Miss Raina’s maid. (She goes back to her work at the table, taking no further notice of him.)

SERGIUS (speaking to himself). Which of the six is the real man? — that’s the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard. (He pauses and looks furtively at Louka, as he adds with deep bitterness) And one, at least, is a coward — jealous, like all cowards. (He goes to the table.) Louka.

LOUKA. Yes?

SERGIUS. Who is my rival?

LOUKA. You shall never get that out of me, for love or money.

SERGIUS. Why?

LOUKA. Never mind why. Besides, you would tell that I told you; and I should lose my place.

SERGIUS (holding out his right hand in affirmation). No; on the honor of a — (He checks himself, and his hand drops nerveless as he concludes, sardonically) — of a man capable of behaving as I have been behaving for the last five minutes. Who is he?

LOUKA. I don’t know. I never saw him. I only heard his voice through the door of her room.

SERGIUS. Damnation! How dare you?

LOUKA (retreating). Oh, I mean no harm: you’ve no right to take up my words like that. The mistress knows all about it. And I tell you that if that gentleman ever comes here again, Miss Raina will marry him, whether he likes it or not. I know the difference between the sort of manner you and she put on before one another and the real manner. (Sergius shivers as if she had stabbed him. Then, setting his face like iron, he strides grimly to her, and grips her above the elbows with both bands.)

SERGIUS. Now listen you to me!

LOUKA (wincing). Not so tight: you’re hurting me!

SERGIUS. That doesn’t matter. You have stained my honor by making me a party to your eavesdropping. And you have betrayed your mistress —

LOUKA (writhing). Please —

SERGIUS. That shews that you are an abominable little clod of common clay, with the soul of a servant. (He lets her go as if she were an unclean thing, and turns away, dusting his hands of her, to the bench by the wall, where he sits down with averted head, meditating gloomily.)

LOUKA (whimpering angrily with her hands up her sleeves, feeling her bruised arms). You know how to hurt with your tongue as well as with your hands. But I don’t care, now I’ve found out that whatever clay I’m made of, you’re made of the same. As for her, she’s a liar; and her fine airs are a cheat; and I’m worth six of her. (She shakes the pain off hardily; tosses her head; and sets to work to put the things on the tray. He looks doubtfully at her once or twice. She finishes packing the tray, and laps the cloth over the edges, so as to carry all out together. As she stoops to lift it, he rises.)

SERGIUS. Louka! (She stops and looks defiantly at him with the tray in her hands.) A gentleman has no right to hurt a woman under any circumstances. (With profound humility, uncovering his head.) I beg your pardon.

LOUKA. That sort of apology may satisfy a lady. Of what use is it to a servant?

SERGIUS (thus rudely crossed in his chivalry, throws it off with a bitter laugh and says slightingly). Oh, you wish to be paid for the hurt? (He puts on his shako, and takes some money from his pocket.)

LOUKA (her eyes filling with tears in spite of herself). No, I want my hurt made well.

SERGIUS (sobered by her tone). How?

(She rolls up her left sleeve; clasps her arm with the thumb and fingers of her right hand; and looks down at the bruise. Then she raises her head and looks straight at him. Finally, with a superb gesture she presents her arm to be kissed. Amazed, he looks at her; at the arm; at her again; hesitates; and then, with shuddering intensity, exclaims)

SERGIUS. Never! (and gets away as far as possible from her.)

(Her arm drops. Without a word, and with unaffected dignity, she takes her tray, and is approaching the house when Raina returns wearing a hat and jacket in the height of the Vienna fashion of the previous year, 1885. Louka makes way proudly for her, and then goes into the house.)

RAINA. I’m ready! What’s the matter? (Gaily.) Have you been flirting with Louka?

SERGIUS (hastily). No, no. How can you think such a thing?

RAINA (ashamed of herself). Forgive me, dear: it was only a jest. I am so happy to-day.

(He goes quickly to her, and kisses her hand remorsefully. Catherine comes out and calls to them from the top of the steps.)

CATHERINE (coming down to them). I am sorry to disturb you, children; but Paul is distracted over those three regiments. He does not know how to get them to Phillipopolis; and he objects to every suggestion of mine. You must go and help him, Sergius. He is in the library.

RAINA (disappointed). But we are just going out for a walk.

SERGIUS. I shall not be long. Wait for me just five minutes. (He runs up the steps to the door.)

RAINA (following him to the foot of the steps and looking up at him with timid coquetry). I shall go round and wait in full view of the library windows. Be sure you draw father’s attention to me. If you are a moment longer than five minutes, I shall go in and fetch you, regiments or no regiments.

SERGIUS (laughing). Very well. (He goes in. Raina watches him until he is out of her sight. Then, with a perceptible relaxation of manner, she begins to pace up and down about the garden in a brown study.)

CATHERINE. Imagine their meeting that Swiss and hearing the whole story! The very first thing your father asked for was the old coat we sent him off in. A nice mess you have got us into!

RAINA (gazing thoughtfully at the gravel as she walks). The little beast!

CATHERINE. Little beast! What little beast?

RAINA. To go and tell! Oh, if I had him here, I’d stuff him with chocolate creams till he couldn’t ever speak again!

CATHERINE. Don’t talk nonsense. Tell me the truth, Raina. How long was he in your room before you came to me?

RAINA (whisking round and recommencing her march in the opposite direction). Oh, I forget.

CATHERINE. You cannot forget! Did he really climb up after the soldiers were gone, or was he there when that officer searched the room?

RAINA. No. Yes, I think he must have been there then.

CATHERINE. You think! Oh, Raina, Raina! Will anything ever make you straightforward? If Sergius finds out, it is all over between you.

RAINA (with cool impertinence). Oh, I know Sergius is your pet. I sometimes wish you could marry him instead of me. You would just suit him. You would pet him, and spoil him, and mother him to perfection.

CATHERINE (opening her eyes very widely indeed). Well, upon my word!

RAINA (capriciously — half to herself). I always feel a longing to do or say something dreadful to him — to shock his propriety — to scandalize the five senses out of him! (To Catherine perversely.) I don’t care whether he finds out about the chocolate cream soldier or not. I half hope he may. (She again turns flippantly away and strolls up the path to the corner of the house.)

CATHERINE. And what should I be able to say to your father, pray?

RAINA (over her shoulder, from the top of the two steps). Oh, poor father! As if he could help himself! (She turns the corner and passes out of sight.)

CATHERINE (looking after her, her fingers itching). Oh, if you were only ten years younger! (Louka comes from the house with a salver, which she carries hanging down by her side.) Well?

LOUKA. There’s a gentleman just called, madam — a Servian officer —

CATHERINE (flaming). A Servian! How dare he — (Checking herself bitterly.) Oh, I forgot. We are at peace now. I suppose we shall have them calling every day to pay their compliments. Well, if he is an officer why don’t you tell your master? He is in the library with Major Saranoff. Why do you come to me?

LOUKA. But he asks for you, madam. And I don’t think he knows who you are: he said the lady of the house. He gave me this little ticket for you. (She takes a card out of her bosom; puts it on the salver and offers it to Catherine.)

CATHERINE (reading). “Captain Bluntschli!” That’s a German name.

LOUKA. Swiss, madam, I think.

CATHERINE (with a bound that makes Louka jump back). Swiss! What is he like?

LOUKA (timidly). He has a big carpet bag, madam.

CATHERINE. Oh, Heavens, he’s come to return the coat! Send him away — say we’re not at home — ask him to leave his address and I’ll write to him — Oh, stop: that will never do. Wait! (She throws herself into a chair to think it out. Louka waits.) The master and Major Saranoff are busy in the library, aren’t they?

LOUKA. Yes, madam.

CATHERINE (decisively). Bring the gentleman out here at once. (Imperatively.) And be very polite to him. Don’t delay. Here (impatiently snatching the salver from her): leave that here; and go straight back to him.

LOUKA. Yes, madam. (Going.)

CATHERINE. Louka!

LOUKA (stopping). Yes, madam.

CATHERINE. Is the library door shut?

LOUKA. I think so, madam.

CATHERINE. If not, shut it as you pass through.

LOUKA. Yes, madam. (Going.)

CATHERINE. Stop! (Louka stops.) He will have to go out that way (indicating the gate of the stable yard). Tell Nicola to bring his bag here after him. Don’t forget.

LOUKA (surprised). His bag?

CATHERINE. Yes, here, as soon as possible. (Vehemently.) Be quick! (Louka runs into the house. Catherine snatches her apron off and throws it behind a bush. She then takes up the salver and uses it as a mirror, with the result that the handkerchief tied round her head follows the apron. A touch to her hair and a shake to her dressing gown makes her presentable.) Oh, how — how — how can a man be such a fool! Such a moment to select! (Louka appears at the door of the house, announcing “Captain Bluntschli;” and standing aside at the top of the steps to let him pass before she goes in again. He is the man of the adventure in Raina’s room. He is now clean, well brushed, smartly uniformed, and out of trouble, but still unmistakably the same man. The moment Louka’s back is turned, Catherine swoops on him with hurried, urgent, coaxing appeal.) Captain Bluntschli, I am very glad to see you; but you must leave this house at once. (He raises his eyebrows.) My husband has just returned, with my future son-in-law; and they know nothing. If they did, the consequences would be terrible. You are a foreigner: you do not feel our national animosities as we do. We still hate the Servians: the only effect of the peace on my husband is to make him feel like a lion baulked of his prey. If he discovered our secret, he would never forgive me; and my daughter’s life would hardly be safe. Will you, like the chivalrous gentleman and soldier you are, leave at once before he finds you here?

BLUNTSCHLI (disappointed, but philosophical). At once, gracious lady. I only came to thank you and return the coat you lent me. If you will allow me to take it out of my bag and leave it with your servant as I pass out, I need detain you no further. (He turns to go into the house.)

CATHERINE (catching him by the sleeve). Oh, you must not think of going back that way. (Coaxing him across to the stable gates.) This is the shortest way out. Many thanks. So glad to have been of service to you. Good-bye.

BLUNTSCHLI. But my bag?

CATHERINE. It will be sent on. You will leave me your address.

BLUNTSCHLI. True. Allow me. (He takes out his card-case, and stops to write his address, keeping Catherine in an agony of impatience. As he hands her the card, Petkoff, hatless, rushes from the house in a fluster of hospitality, followed by Sergius.)

PETKOFF (as he hurries down the steps). My dear Captain Bluntschli —

CATHERINE. Oh Heavens! (She sinks on the seat against the wall.)

PETKOFF (too preoccupied to notice her as he shakes Bluntschli’s hand heartily). Those stupid people of mine thought I was out here, instead of in the — haw! — library. (He cannot mention the library without betraying how proud he is of it.) I saw you through the window. I was wondering why you didn’t come in. Saranoff is with me: you remember him, don’t you?

SERGIUS (saluting humorously, and then offering his hand with great charm of manner). Welcome, our friend the enemy!

PETKOFF. No longer the enemy, happily. (Rather anxiously.) I hope you’ve come as a friend, and not on business.

CATHERINE. Oh, quite as a friend, Paul. I was just asking Captain Bluntschli to stay to lunch; but he declares he must go at once.

SERGIUS (sardonically). Impossible, Bluntschli. We want you here badly. We have to send on three cavalry regiments to Phillipopolis; and we don’t in the least know how to do it.

BLUNTSCHLI (suddenly attentive and business-like). Phillipopolis! The forage is the trouble, eh?

PETKOFF (eagerly). Yes, that’s it. (To Sergius.) He sees the whole thing at once.

BLUNTSCHLI. I think I can shew you how to manage that.

SERGIUS. Invaluable man! Come along! (Towering over Bluntschli, he puts his hand on his shoulder and takes him to the steps, Petkoff following. As Bluntschli puts his foot on the first step, Raina comes out of the house.)

RAINA (completely losing her presence of mind). Oh, the chocolate cream soldier!

(Bluntschli stands rigid. Sergius, amazed, looks at Raina, then at Petkoff, who looks back at him and then at his wife.)

CATHERINE (with commanding presence of mind). My dear Raina, don’t you see that we have a guest here — Captain Bluntschli, one of our new Servian friends?

(Raina bows; Bluntschli bows.)

RAINA. How silly of me! (She comes down into the centre of the group, between Bluntschli and Petkoff) I made a beautiful ornament this morning for the ice pudding; and that stupid Nicola has just put down a pile of plates on it and spoiled it. (To Bluntschli, winningly.) I hope you didn’t think that you were the chocolate cream soldier, Captain Bluntschli.

BLUNTSCHLI (laughing). I assure you I did. (Stealing a whimsical glance at her.) Your explanation was a relief.

PETKOFF (suspiciously, to Raina). And since when, pray, have you taken to cooking?

CATHERINE. Oh, whilst you were away. It is her latest fancy.

PETKOFF (testily). And has Nicola taken to drinking? He used to be careful enough. First he shews Captain Bluntschli out here when he knew quite well I was in the — hum! — library; and then he goes downstairs and breaks Raina’s chocolate soldier. He must — (At this moment Nicola appears at the top of the steps R., with a carpet bag. He descends; places it respectfully before Bluntschli; and waits for further orders. General amazement. Nicola, unconscious of the effect he is producing, looks perfectly satisfied with himself. When Petkoff recovers his power of speech, he breaks out at him with) Are you mad, Nicola?

NICOLA (taken aback). Sir?

PETKOFF. What have you brought that for?

NICOLA. My lady’s orders, sir. Louka told me that —

CATHERINE (interrupting him). My orders! Why should I order you to bring Captain Bluntschli’s luggage out here? What are you thinking of, Nicola?

NICOLA (after a moment’s bewilderment, picking up the bag as he addresses Bluntschli with the very perfection of servile discretion). I beg your pardon, sir, I am sure. (To Catherine.) My fault, madam! I hope you’ll overlook it! (He bows, and is going to the steps with the bag, when Petkoff addresses him angrily.)

PETKOFF. You’d better go and slam that bag, too, down on Miss Raina’s ice pudding! (This is too much for Nicola. The bag drops from his hands on Petkoff’s corns, eliciting a roar of anguish from him.) Begone, you butter-fingered donkey.

NICOLA (snatching up the bag, and escaping into the house). Yes, sir.

CATHERINE. Oh, never mind, Paul, don’t be angry!

PETKOFF (muttering). Scoundrel. He’s got out of hand while I was away. I’ll teach him. (Recollecting his guest.) Oh, well, never mind. Come, Bluntschli, lets have no more nonsense about you having to go away. You know very well you’re not going back to Switzerland yet. Until you do go back you’ll stay with us.

RAINA. Oh, do, Captain Bluntschli.

PETKOFF (to Catherine). Now, Catherine, it’s of you that he’s afraid. Press him and he’ll stay.

CATHERINE. Of course I shall be only too delighted if (appealingly) Captain Bluntschli really wishes to stay. He knows my wishes.

BLUNTSCHLI (in his driest military manner). I am at madame’s orders.

SERGIUS (cordially). That settles it!

PETKOFF (heartily). Of course!

RAINA. You see, you must stay!

BLUNTSCHLI (smiling). Well, If I must, I must! (Gesture of despair from Catherine.)

ACT III

In the library after lunch. It is not much of a library, its literary equipment consisting of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper-covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed, and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gift books on them, the rest of the wall space being occupied by trophies of war and the chase. But it is a most comfortable sitting-room. A row of three large windows in the front of the house shew a mountain panorama, which is just now seen in one of its softest aspects in the mellowing afternoon light. In the left hand corner, a square earthenware stove, a perfect tower of colored pottery, rises nearly to the ceiling and guarantees plenty of warmth. The ottoman in the middle is a circular bank of decorated cushions, and the window seats are well upholstered divans. Little Turkish tables, one of them with an elaborate hookah on it, and a screen to match them, complete the handsome effect of the furnishing. There is one object, however, which is hopelessly out of keeping with its surroundings. This is a small kitchen table, much the worse for wear, fitted as a writing table with an old canister full of pens, an eggcup filled with ink, and a deplorable scrap of severely used pink blotting paper.

At the side of this table, which stands on the right, Bluntschli is hard at work, with a couple of maps before him, writing orders. At the head of it sits Sergius, who is also supposed to be at work, but who is actually gnawing the feather of a pen, and contemplating Bluntschli’s quick, sure, businesslike progress with a mixture of envious irritation at his own incapacity, and awestruck wonder at an ability which seems to him almost miraculous, though its prosaic character forbids him to esteem it. The major is comfortably established on the ottoman, with a newspaper in his hand and the tube of the hookah within his reach. Catherine sits at the stove, with her back to them, embroidering. Raina, reclining on the divan under the left hand window, is gazing in a daydream out at the Balkan landscape, with a neglected novel in her lap.

The door is on the left. The button of the electric bell is between the door and the fireplace.

PETKOFF (looking up from his paper to watch how they are getting on at the table). Are you sure I can’t help you in any way, Bluntschli?

BLUNTSCHLI (without interrupting his writing or looking up). Quite sure, thank you. Saranoff and I will manage it.

SERGIUS (grimly). Yes: we’ll manage it. He finds out what to do; draws up the orders; and I sign ‘em. Division of labour, Major. (Bluntschli passes him a paper.) Another one? Thank you. (He plants the papers squarely before him; sets his chair carefully parallel to them; and signs with the air of a man resolutely performing a difficult and dangerous feat.) This hand is more accustomed to the sword than to the pen.

PETKOFF. It’s very good of you, Bluntschli, it is indeed, to let yourself be put upon in this way. Now are you quite sure I can do nothing?

CATHERINE (in a low, warning tone). You can stop interrupting, Paul.

PETKOFF (starting and looking round at her). Eh? Oh! Quite right, my love, quite right. (He takes his newspaper up, but lets it drop again.) Ah, you haven’t been campaigning, Catherine: you don’t know how pleasant it is for us to sit here, after a good lunch, with nothing to do but enjoy ourselves. There’s only one thing I want to make me thoroughly comfortable.

CATHERINE. What is that?

PETKOFF. My old coat. I’m not at home in this one: I feel as if I were on parade.

CATHERINE. My dear Paul, how absurd you are about that old coat! It must be hanging in the blue closet where you left it.

PETKOFF. My dear Catherine, I tell you I’ve looked there. Am I to believe my own eyes or not? (Catherine quietly rises and presses the button of the electric bell by the fireplace.) What are you shewing off that bell for? (She looks at him majestically, and silently resumes her chair and her needlework.) My dear: if you think the obstinacy of your sex can make a coat out of two old dressing gowns of Raina’s, your waterproof, and my mackintosh, you’re mistaken. That’s exactly what the blue closet contains at present. (Nicola presents himself.)

CATHERINE (unmoved by Petkoff’s sally). Nicola: go to the blue closet and bring your master’s old coat here — the braided one he usually wears in the house.

NICOLA. Yes, madam. (Nicola goes out.)

PETKOFF. Catherine.

CATHERINE. Yes, Paul?

PETKOFF. I bet you any piece of jewellery you like to order from Sofia against a week’s housekeeping money, that the coat isn’t there.

CATHERINE. Done, Paul.

PETKOFF (excited by the prospect of a gamble). Come: here’s an opportunity for some sport. Who’ll bet on it? Bluntschli: I’ll give you six to one.

BLUNTSCHLI (imperturbably). It would be robbing you, Major. Madame is sure to be right. (Without looking up, he passes another batch of papers to Sergius.)

SERGIUS (also excited). Bravo, Switzerland! Major: I bet my best charger against an Arab mare for Raina that Nicola finds the coat in the blue closet.

PETKOFF (eagerly). Your best char —

CATHERINE (hastily interrupting him). Don’t be foolish, Paul. An Arabian mare will cost you 50,000 levas.

RAINA (suddenly coming out of her picturesque revery). Really, mother, if you are going to take the jewellery, I don’t see why you should grudge me my Arab.

(Nicola comes back with the coat and brings it to Petkoff, who can hardly believe his eyes.)

CATHERINE. Where was it, Nicola?

NICOLA. Hanging in the blue closet, madam.

PETKOFF. Well, I am d —

CATHERINE (stopping him). Paul!

PETKOFF. I could have sworn it wasn’t there. Age is beginning to tell on me. I’m getting hallucinations. (To Nicola.) Here: help me to change. Excuse me, Bluntschli. (He begins changing coats, Nicola acting as valet.) Remember: I didn’t take that bet of yours, Sergius. You’d better give Raina that Arab steed yourself, since you’ve roused her expectations. Eh, Raina? (He looks round at her; but she is again rapt in the landscape. With a little gush of paternal affection and pride, he points her out to them and says) She’s dreaming, as usual.

SERGIUS. Assuredly she shall not be the loser.

PETKOFF. So much the better for her. I shan’t come off so cheap, I expect. (The change is now complete. Nicola goes out with the discarded coat.) Ah, now I feel at home at last. (He sits down and takes his newspaper with a grunt of relief.)

BLUNTSCHLI (to Sergius, handing a paper). That’s the last order.

PETKOFF (jumping up). What! finished?

BLUNTSCHLI. Finished. (Petkoff goes beside Sergius; looks curiously over his left shoulder as he signs; and says with childlike envy) Haven’t you anything for me to sign?

BLUNTSCHLI. Not necessary. His signature will do.

PETKOFF. Ah, well, I think we’ve done a thundering good day’s work. (He goes away from the table.) Can I do anything more?

BLUNTSCHLI. You had better both see the fellows that are to take these. (To Sergius.) Pack them off at once; and shew them that I’ve marked on the orders the time they should hand them in by. Tell them that if they stop to drink or tell stories — if they’re five minutes late, they’ll have the skin taken off their backs.

SERGIUS (rising indignantly). I’ll say so. And if one of them is man enough to spit in my face for insulting him, I’ll buy his discharge and give him a pension. (He strides out, his humanity deeply outraged.)

BLUNTSCHLI (confidentially). Just see that he talks to them properly, Major, will you?

PETKOFF (officiously). Quite right, Bluntschli, quite right. I’ll see to it. (He goes to the door importantly, but hesitates on the threshold.) By the bye, Catherine, you may as well come, too. They’ll be far more frightened of you than of me.

CATHERINE (putting down her embroidery). I daresay I had better. You will only splutter at them. (She goes out, Petkoff holding the door for her and following her.)

BLUNTSCHLI. What a country! They make cannons out of cherry trees; and the officers send for their wives to keep discipline! (He begins to fold and docket the papers. Raina, who has risen from the divan, strolls down the room with her hands clasped behind her, and looks mischievously at him.)

RAINA. You look ever so much nicer than when we last met. (He looks up, surprised.) What have you done to yourself?

BLUNTSCHLI. Washed; brushed; good night’s sleep and breakfast. That’s all.

RAINA. Did you get back safely that morning?

BLUNTSCHLI. Quite, thanks.

RAINA. Were they angry with you for running away from Sergius’s charge?

BLUNTSCHLI. No, they were glad; because they’d all just run away themselves.

RAINA (going to the table, and leaning over it towards him). It must have made a lovely story for them — all that about me and my room.

BLUNTSCHLI. Capital story. But I only told it to one of them — a particular friend.

RAINA. On whose discretion you could absolutely rely?

BLUNTSCHLI. Absolutely.

RAINA. Hm! He told it all to my father and Sergius the day you exchanged the prisoners. (She turns away and strolls carelessly across to the other side of the room.)

BLUNTSCHLI (deeply concerned and half incredulous). No! you don’t mean that, do you?

RAINA (turning, with sudden earnestness). I do indeed. But they don’t know that it was in this house that you hid. If Sergius knew, he would challenge you and kill you in a duel.

BLUNTSCHLI. Bless me! then don’t tell him.

RAINA (full of reproach for his levity). Can you realize what it is to me to deceive him? I want to be quite perfect with Sergius — no meanness, no smallness, no deceit. My relation to him is the one really beautiful and noble part of my life. I hope you can understand that.

BLUNTSCHLI (sceptically). You mean that you wouldn’t like him to find out that the story about the ice pudding was a — a — a — You know.

RAINA (wincing). Ah, don’t talk of it in that flippant way. I lied: I know it. But I did it to save your life. He would have killed you. That was the second time I ever uttered a falsehood. (Bluntschli rises quickly and looks doubtfully and somewhat severely at her.) Do you remember the first time?

BLUNTSCHLI. I! No. Was I present?

RAINA. Yes; and I told the officer who was searching for you that you were not present.

BLUNTSCHLI. True. I should have remembered it.

RAINA (greatly encouraged). Ah, it is natural that you should forget it first. It cost you nothing: it cost me a lie! — a lie!! (She sits down on the ottoman, looking straight before her with her hands clasped on her knee. Bluntschli, quite touched, goes to the ottoman with a particularly reassuring and considerate air, and sits down beside her.)

BLUNTSCHLI. My dear young lady, don’t let this worry you. Remember: I’m a soldier. Now what are the two things that happen to a soldier so often that he comes to think nothing of them? One is hearing people tell lies (Raina recoils): the other is getting his life saved in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people.

RAINA (rising in indignant protest). And so he becomes a creature incapable of faith and of gratitude.

BLUNTSCHLI (making a wry face). Do you like gratitude? I don’t. If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.

RAINA. Gratitude! (Turning on him.) If you are incapable of gratitude you are incapable of any noble sentiment. Even animals are grateful. Oh, I see now exactly what you think of me! You were not surprised to hear me lie. To you it was something I probably did every day — every hour. That is how men think of women. (She walks up the room melodramatically.)

BLUNTSCHLI (dubiously). There’s reason in everything. You said you’d told only two lies in your whole life. Dear young lady: isn’t that rather a short allowance? I’m quite a straightforward man myself; but it wouldn’t last me a whole morning.

RAINA (staring haughtily at him). Do you know, sir, that you are insulting me?

BLUNTSCHLI. I can’t help it. When you get into that noble attitude and speak in that thrilling voice, I admire you; but I find it impossible to believe a single word you say.

RAINA (superbly). Captain Bluntschli!

BLUNTSCHLI (unmoved). Yes?

RAINA (coming a little towards him, as if she could not believe her senses). Do you mean what you said just now? Do you know what you said just now?

BLUNTSCHLI. I do.

RAINA (gasping). I! I!!! (She points to herself incredulously, meaning “I, Raina Petkoff, tell lies!” He meets her gaze unflinchingly. She suddenly sits down beside him, and adds, with a complete change of manner from the heroic to the familiar) How did you find me out?

BLUNTSCHLI (promptly). Instinct, dear young lady. Instinct, and experience of the world.

RAINA (wonderingly). Do you know, you are the first man I ever met who did not take me seriously?

BLUNTSCHLI. You mean, don’t you, that I am the first man that has ever taken you quite seriously?

RAINA. Yes, I suppose I do mean that. (Cosily, quite at her ease with him.) How strange it is to be talked to in such a way! You know, I’ve always gone on like that — I mean the noble attitude and the thrilling voice. I did it when I was a tiny child to my nurse. She believed in it. I do it before my parents. They believe in it. I do it before Sergius. He believes in it.

BLUNTSCHLI. Yes: he’s a little in that line himself, isn’t he?

RAINA (startled). Do you think so?

BLUNTSCHLI. You know him better than I do.

RAINA. I wonder — I wonder is he? If I thought that — ! (Discouraged.) Ah, well, what does it matter? I suppose, now that you’ve found me out, you despise me.

BLUNTSCHLI (warmly, rising). No, my dear young lady, no, no, no a thousand times. It’s part of your youth — part of your charm. I’m like all the rest of them — the nurse — your parents — Sergius: I’m your infatuated admirer.

RAINA (pleased). Really?

BLUNTSCHLI (slapping his breast smartly with his hand, German fashion). Hand aufs Herz! Really and truly.

RAINA (very happy). But what did you think of me for giving you my portrait?

BLUNTSCHLI (astonished). Your portrait! You never gave me your portrait.

RAINA (quickly). Do you mean to say you never got it?

BLUNTSCHLI. No. (He sits down beside her, with renewed interest, and says, with some complacency.) When did you send it to me?

RAINA (indignantly). I did not send it to you. (She turns her head away, and adds, reluctantly.) It was in the pocket of that coat.

BLUNTSCHLI (pursing his lips and rounding his eyes). Oh-o-oh! I never found it. It must be there still.

RAINA (springing up). There still! — for my father to find the first time he puts his hand in his pocket! Oh, how could you be so stupid?

BLUNTSCHLI (rising also). It doesn’t matter: it’s only a photograph: how can he tell who it was intended for? Tell him he put it there himself.

RAINA (impatiently). Yes, that is so clever — so clever! What shall I do?

BLUNTSCHLI. Ah, I see. You wrote something on it. That was rash!

RAINA (annoyed almost to tears). Oh, to have done such a thing for you, who care no more — except to laugh at me — oh! Are you sure nobody has touched it?

BLUNTSCHLI. Well, I can’t be quite sure. You see I couldn’t carry it about with me all the time: one can’t take much luggage on active service.

RAINA. What did you do with it?

BLUNTSCHLI. When I got through to Peerot I had to put it in safe keeping somehow. I thought of the railway cloak room; but that’s the surest place to get looted in modern warfare. So I pawned it.

RAINA. Pawned it!!!

BLUNTSCHLI. I know it doesn’t sound nice; but it was much the safest plan. I redeemed it the day before yesterday. Heaven only knows whether the pawnbroker cleared out the pockets or not.

RAINA (furious — throwing the words right into his face). You have a low, shopkeeping mind. You think of things that would never come into a gentleman’s head.

BLUNTSCHLI (phlegmatically). That’s the Swiss national character, dear lady.

RAINA. Oh, I wish I had never met you. (She flounces away and sits at the window fuming.)

(Louka comes in with a heap of letters and telegrams on her salver, and crosses, with her bold, free gait, to the table. Her left sleeve is looped up to the shoulder with a brooch, shewing her naked arm, with a broad gilt bracelet covering the bruise.)

LOUKA (to Bluntschli). For you. (She empties the salver recklessly on the table.) The messenger is waiting. (She is determined not to be civil to a Servian, even if she must bring him his letters.)

BLUNTSCHLI (to Raina). Will you excuse me: the last postal delivery that reached me was three weeks ago. These are the subsequent accumulations. Four telegrams — a week old. (He opens one.) Oho! Bad news!

RAINA (rising and advancing a little remorsefully). Bad news?

BLUNTSCHLI. My father’s dead. (He looks at the telegram with his lips pursed, musing on the unexpected change in his arrangements.)

RAINA. Oh, how very sad!

BLUNTSCHLI. Yes: I shall have to start for home in an hour. He has left a lot of big hotels behind him to be looked after. (Takes up a heavy letter in a long blue envelope.) Here’s a whacking letter from the family solicitor. (He pulls out the enclosures and glances over them.) Great Heavens! Seventy! Two hundred! (In a crescendo of dismay.) Four hundred! Four thousand!! Nine thousand six hundred!!! What on earth shall I do with them all?

RAINA (timidly). Nine thousand hotels?

BLUNTSCHLI. Hotels! Nonsense. If you only knew! — oh, it’s too ridiculous! Excuse me: I must give my fellow orders about starting. (He leaves the room hastily, with the documents in his hand.)

LOUKA (tauntingly). He has not much heart, that Swiss, though he is so fond of the Servians. He has not a word of grief for his poor father.

RAINA (bitterly). Grief! — a man who has been doing nothing but killing people for years! What does he care? What does any soldier care? (She goes to the door, evidently restraining her tears with difficulty.)

LOUKA. Major Saranoff has been fighting, too; and he has plenty of heart left. (Raina, at the door, looks haughtily at her and goes out.) Aha! I thought you wouldn’t get much feeling out of your soldier. (She is following Raina when Nicola enters with an armful of logs for the fire.)

NICOLA (grinning amorously at her). I’ve been trying all the afternoon to get a minute alone with you, my girl. (His countenance changes as he notices her arm.) Why, what fashion is that of wearing your sleeve, child?

LOUKA (proudly). My own fashion.

NICOLA. Indeed! If the mistress catches you, she’ll talk to you. (He throws the logs down on the ottoman, and sits comfortably beside them.)

LOUKA. Is that any reason why you should take it on yourself to talk to me?

NICOLA. Come: don’t be so contrary with me. I’ve some good news for you. (He takes out some paper money. Louka, with an eager gleam in her eyes, comes close to look at it.) See, a twenty leva bill! Sergius gave me that out of pure swagger. A fool and his money are soon parted. There’s ten levas more. The Swiss gave me that for backing up the mistress’s and Raina’s lies about him. He’s no fool, he isn’t. You should have heard old Catherine downstairs as polite as you please to me, telling me not to mind the Major being a little impatient; for they knew what a good servant I was — after making a fool and a liar of me before them all! The twenty will go to our savings; and you shall have the ten to spend if you’ll only talk to me so as to remind me I’m a human being. I get tired of being a servant occasionally.

LOUKA (scornfully). Yes: sell your manhood for thirty levas, and buy me for ten! Keep your money. You were born to be a servant. I was not. When you set up your shop you will only be everybody’s servant instead of somebody’s servant.

NICOLA (picking up his logs, and going to the stove). Ah, wait till you see. We shall have our evenings to ourselves; and I shall be master in my own house, I promise you. (He throws the logs down and kneels at the stove.)

LOUKA. You shall never be master in mine. (She sits down on Sergius’s chair.)

NICOLA (turning, still on his knees, and squatting down rather forlornly, on his calves, daunted by her implacable disdain). You have a great ambition in you, Louka. Remember: if any luck comes to you, it was I that made a woman of you.

LOUKA. You!

NICOLA (with dogged self-assertion). Yes, me. Who was it made you give up wearing a couple of pounds of false black hair on your head and reddening your lips and cheeks like any other Bulgarian girl? I did. Who taught you to trim your nails, and keep your hands clean, and be dainty about yourself, like a fine Russian lady? Me! do you hear that? me! (She tosses her head defiantly; and he rises, ill-humoredly, adding more coolly) I’ve often thought that if Raina were out of the way, and you just a little less of a fool and Sergius just a little more of one, you might come to be one of my grandest customers, instead of only being my wife and costing me money.

LOUKA. I believe you would rather be my servant than my husband. You would make more out of me. Oh, I know that soul of yours.

NICOLA (going up close to her for greater emphasis). Never you mind my soul; but just listen to my advice. If you want to be a lady, your present behaviour to me won’t do at all, unless when we’re alone. It’s too sharp and imprudent; and impudence is a sort of familiarity: it shews affection for me. And don’t you try being high and mighty with me either. You’re like all country girls: you think it’s genteel to treat a servant the way I treat a stable-boy. That’s only your ignorance; and don’t you forget it. And don’t be so ready to defy everybody. Act as if you expected to have your own way, not as if you expected to be ordered about. The way to get on as a lady is the same as the way to get on as a servant: you’ve got to know your place; that’s the secret of it. And you may depend on me to know my place if you get promoted. Think over it, my girl. I’ll stand by you: one servant should always stand by another.

LOUKA (rising impatiently). Oh, I must behave in my own way. You take all the courage out of me with your cold-blooded wisdom. Go and put those logs on the fire: that’s the sort of thing you understand. (Before Nicola can retort, Sergius comes in. He checks himself a moment on seeing Louka; then goes to the stove.)

SERGIUS (to Nicola). I am not in the way of your work, I hope.

NICOLA (in a smooth, elderly manner). Oh, no, sir, thank you kindly. I was only speaking to this foolish girl about her habit of running up here to the library whenever she gets a chance, to look at the books. That’s the worst of her education, sir: it gives her habits above her station. (To Louka.) Make that table tidy, Louka, for the Major. (He goes out sedately.)

(Louka, without looking at Sergius, begins to arrange the papers on the table. He crosses slowly to her, and studies the arrangement of her sleeve reflectively.)

SERGIUS. Let me see: is there a mark there? (He turns up the bracelet and sees the bruise made by his grasp. She stands motionless, not looking at him: fascinated, but on her guard.) Ffff! Does it hurt?

LOUKA. Yes.

SERGIUS. Shall I cure it?

LOUKA (instantly withdrawing herself proudly, but still not looking at him). No. You cannot cure it now.

SERGIUS (masterfully). Quite sure? (He makes a movement as if to take her in his arms.)

LOUKA. Don’t trifle with me, please. An officer should not trifle with a servant.

SERGIUS (touching the arm with a merciless stroke of his forefinger). That was no trifle, Louka.

LOUKA. No. (Looking at him for the first time.) Are you sorry?

SERGIUS (with measured emphasis, folding his arms). I am never sorry.

LOUKA (wistfully). I wish I could believe a man could be so unlike a woman as that. I wonder are you really a brave man?

SERGIUS (unaffectedly, relaxing his attitude). Yes: I am a brave man. My heart jumped like a woman’s at the first shot; but in the charge I found that I was brave. Yes: that at least is real about me.

LOUKA. Did you find in the charge that the men whose fathers are poor like mine were any less brave than the men who are rich like you?

SERGIUS (with bitter levity.) Not a bit. They all slashed and cursed and yelled like heroes. Psha! the courage to rage and kill is cheap. I have an English bull terrier who has as much of that sort of courage as the whole Bulgarian nation, and the whole Russian nation at its back. But he lets my groom thrash him, all the same. That’s your soldier all over! No, Louka, your poor men can cut throats; but they are afraid of their officers; they put up with insults and blows; they stand by and see one another punished like children — aye, and help to do it when they are ordered. And the officers! — well (with a short, bitter laugh) I am an officer. Oh, (fervently) give me the man who will defy to the death any power on earth or in heaven that sets itself up against his own will and conscience: he alone is the brave man.

LOUKA. How easy it is to talk! Men never seem to me to grow up: they all have schoolboy’s ideas. You don’t know what true courage is.

SERGIUS (ironically). Indeed! I am willing to be instructed.

LOUKA. Look at me! how much am I allowed to have my own will? I have to get your room ready for you — to sweep and dust, to fetch and carry. How could that degrade me if it did not degrade you to have it done for you? But (with subdued passion) if I were Empress of Russia, above everyone in the world, then — ah, then, though according to you I could shew no courage at all; you should see, you should see.

SERGIUS. What would you do, most noble Empress?

LOUKA. I would marry the man I loved, which no other queen in Europe has the courage to do. If I loved you, though you would be as far beneath me as I am beneath you, I would dare to be the equal of my inferior. Would you dare as much if you loved me? No: if you felt the beginnings of love for me you would not let it grow. You dare not: you would marry a rich man’s daughter because you would be afraid of what other people would say of you.

SERGIUS (carried away). You lie: it is not so, by all the stars! If I loved you, and I were the Czar himself, I would set you on the throne by my side. You know that I love another woman, a woman as high above you as heaven is above earth. And you are jealous of her.

LOUKA. I have no reason to be. She will never marry you now. The man I told you of has come back. She will marry the Swiss.

SERGIUS (recoiling). The Swiss!

LOUKA. A man worth ten of you. Then you can come to me; and I will refuse you. You are not good enough for me. (She turns to the door.)

SERGIUS (springing after her and catching her fiercely in his arms). I will kill the Swiss; and afterwards I will do as I please with you.

LOUKA (in his arms, passive and steadfast). The Swiss will kill you, perhaps. He has beaten you in love. He may beat you in war.

SERGIUS (tormentedly). Do you think I believe that she — she! whose worst thoughts are higher than your best ones, is capable of trifling with another man behind my back?

LOUKA. Do you think she would believe the Swiss if he told her now that I am in your arms?

SERGIUS (releasing her in despair). Damnation! Oh, damnation! Mockery, mockery everywhere: everything I think is mocked by everything I do. (He strikes himself frantically on the breast.) Coward, liar, fool! Shall I kill myself like a man, or live and pretend to laugh at myself? (She again turns to go.) Louka! (She stops near the door.) Remember: you belong to me.

LOUKA (quietly). What does that mean — an insult?

SERGIUS (commandingly). It means that you love me, and that I have had you here in my arms, and will perhaps have you there again. Whether that is an insult I neither know nor care: take it as you please. But (vehemently) I will not be a coward and a trifler. If I choose to love you, I dare marry you, in spite of all Bulgaria. If these hands ever touch you again, they shall touch my affianced bride.

LOUKA. We shall see whether you dare keep your word. But take care. I will not wait long.

SERGIUS (again folding his arms and standing motionless in the middle of the room). Yes, we shall see. And you shall wait my pleasure.

(Bluntschli, much preoccupied, with his papers still in his hand, enters, leaving the door open for Louka to go out. He goes across to the table, glancing at her as he passes. Sergius, without altering his resolute attitude, watches him steadily. Louka goes out, leaving the door open.)

BLUNTSCHLI (absently, sitting at the table as before, and putting down his papers). That’s a remarkable looking young woman.

SERGIUS (gravely, without moving). Captain Bluntschli.

BLUNTSCHLI. Eh?

SERGIUS. You have deceived me. You are my rival. I brook no rivals. At six o’clock I shall be in the drilling-ground on the Klissoura road, alone, on horseback, with my sabre. Do you understand?

BLUNTSCHLI (staring, but sitting quite at his ease). Oh, thank you: that’s a cavalry man’s proposal. I’m in the artillery; and I have the choice of weapons. If I go, I shall take a machine gun. And there shall be no mistake about the cartridges this time.

SERGIUS (flushing, but with deadly coldness). Take care, sir. It is not our custom in Bulgaria to allow invitations of that kind to be trifled with.

BLUNTSCHLI (warmly). Pooh! don’t talk to me about Bulgaria. You don’t know what fighting is. But have it your own way. Bring your sabre along. I’ll meet you.

SERGIUS (fiercely delighted to find his opponent a man of spirit). Well said, Switzer. Shall I lend you my best horse?

BLUNTSCHLI. No: damn your horse! — thank you all the same, my dear fellow. (Raina comes in, and hears the next sentence.) I shall fight you on foot. Horseback’s too dangerous: I don’t want to kill you if I can help it.

RAINA (hurrying forward anxiously). I have heard what Captain Bluntschli said, Sergius. You are going to fight. Why? (Sergius turns away in silence, and goes to the stove, where he stands watching her as she continues, to Bluntschli) What about?

BLUNTSCHLI. I don’t know: he hasn’t told me. Better not interfere, dear young lady. No harm will be done: I’ve often acted as sword instructor. He won’t be able to touch me; and I’ll not hurt him. It will save explanations. In the morning I shall be off home; and you’ll never see me or hear of me again. You and he will then make it up and live happily ever after.

RAINA (turning away deeply hurt, almost with a sob in her voice). I never said I wanted to see you again.

SERGIUS (striding forward). Ha! That is a confession.

RAINA (haughtily). What do you mean?

SERGIUS. You love that man!

RAINA (scandalized). Sergius!

SERGIUS. You allow him to make love to you behind my back, just as you accept me as your affianced husband behind his. Bluntschli: you knew our relations; and you deceived me. It is for that that I call you to account, not for having received favours that I never enjoyed.

BLUNTSCHLI (jumping up indignantly). Stuff! Rubbish! I have received no favours. Why, the young lady doesn’t even know whether I’m married or not.

RAINA (forgetting herself). Oh! (Collapsing on the ottoman.) Are you?

SERGIUS. You see the young lady’s concern, Captain Bluntschli. Denial is useless. You have enjoyed the privilege of being received in her own room, late at night —

BLUNTSCHLI (interrupting him pepperily). Yes; you blockhead! She received me with a pistol at her head. Your cavalry were at my heels. I’d have blown out her brains if she’d uttered a cry.

SERGIUS (taken aback). Bluntschli! Raina: is this true?

RAINA (rising in wrathful majesty). Oh, how dare you, how dare you?

BLUNTSCHLI. Apologize, man, apologize! (He resumes his seat at the table.)

SERGIUS (with the old measured emphasis, folding his arms). I never apologize.

RAINA (passionately). This is the doing of that friend of yours, Captain Bluntschli. It is he who is spreading this horrible story about me. (She walks about excitedly.)

BLUNTSCHLI. No: he’s dead — burnt alive.

RAINA (stopping, shocked). Burnt alive!

BLUNTSCHLI. Shot in the hip in a wood yard. Couldn’t drag himself out. Your fellows’ shells set the timber on fire and burnt him, with half a dozen other poor devils in the same predicament.

RAINA. How horrible!

SERGIUS. And how ridiculous! Oh, war! war! the dream of patriots and heroes! A fraud, Bluntschli, a hollow sham, like love.

RAINA (outraged). Like love! You say that before me.

BLUNTSCHLI. Come, Saranoff: that matter is explained.

SERGIUS. A hollow sham, I say. Would you have come back here if nothing had passed between you, except at the muzzle of your pistol? Raina is mistaken about our friend who was burnt. He was not my informant.

RAINA. Who then? (Suddenly guessing the truth.) Ah, Louka! my maid, my servant! You were with her this morning all that time after — after — Oh, what sort of god is this I have been worshipping! (He meets her gaze with sardonic enjoyment of her disenchantment. Angered all the more, she goes closer to him, and says, in a lower, intenser tone) Do you know that I looked out of the window as I went upstairs, to have another sight of my hero; and I saw something that I did not understand then. I know now that you were making love to her.

SERGIUS (with grim humor). You saw that?

RAINA. Only too well. (She turns away, and throws herself on the divan under the centre window, quite overcome.)

SERGIUS (cynically). Raina: our romance is shattered. Life’s a farce.

BLUNTSCHLI (to Raina, goodhumoredly). You see: he’s found himself out now.

SERGIUS. Bluntschli: I have allowed you to call me a blockhead. You may now call me a coward as well. I refuse to fight you. Do you know why?

BLUNTSCHLI. No; but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t ask the reason when you cried on; and I don’t ask the reason now that you cry off. I’m a professional soldier. I fight when I have to, and am very glad to get out of it when I haven’t to. You’re only an amateur: you think fighting’s an amusement.

SERGIUS. You shall hear the reason all the same, my professional. The reason is that it takes two men — real men — men of heart, blood and honor — to make a genuine combat. I could no more fight with you than I could make love to an ugly woman. You’ve no magnetism: you’re not a man, you’re a machine.

BLUNTSCHLI (apologetically). Quite true, quite true. I always was that sort of chap. I’m very sorry. But now that you’ve found that life isn’t a farce, but something quite sensible and serious, what further obstacle is there to your happiness?

RAINA (riling). You are very solicitous about my happiness and his. Do you forget his new love — Louka? It is not you that he must fight now, but his rival, Nicola.

SERGIUS. Rival!! (Striking his forehead.)

RAINA. Did you not know that they are engaged?

SERGIUS. Nicola! Are fresh abysses opening! Nicola!!

RAINA (sarcastically). A shocking sacrifice, isn’t it? Such beauty, such intellect, such modesty, wasted on a middle-aged servant man! Really, Sergius, you cannot stand by and allow such a thing. It would be unworthy of your chivalry.

SERGIUS (losing all self-control). Viper! Viper! (He rushes to and fro, raging.)

BLUNTSCHLI. Look here, Saranoff; you’re getting the worst of this.

RAINA (getting angrier). Do you realize what he has done, Captain Bluntschli? He has set this girl as a spy on us; and her reward is that he makes love to her.

SERGIUS. False! Monstrous!

RAINA. Monstrous! (Confronting him.) Do you deny that she told you about Captain Bluntschli being in my room?

SERGIUS. No; but —

RAINA (interrupting). Do you deny that you were making love to her when she told you?

SERGIUS. No; but I tell you —

RAINA (cutting him short contemptuously). It is unnecessary to tell us anything more. That is quite enough for us. (She turns her back on him and sweeps majestically back to the window.)

BLUNTSCHLI (quietly, as Sergius, in an agony of mortification, rinks on the ottoman, clutching his averted head between his fists). I told you you were getting the worst of it, Saranoff.

SERGIUS. Tiger cat!

RAINA (running excitedly to Bluntschli). You hear this man calling me names, Captain Bluntschli?

BLUNTSCHLI. What else can he do, dear lady? He must defend himself somehow. Come (very persuasively), don’t quarrel. What good does it do? (Raina, with a gasp, sits down on the ottoman, and after a vain effort to look vexedly at Bluntschli, she falls a victim to her sense of humor, and is attacked with a disposition to laugh.)

SERGIUS. Engaged to Nicola! (He rises.) Ha! ha! (Going to the stove and standing with his back to it.) Ah, well, Bluntschli, you are right to take this huge imposture of a world coolly.

RAINA (to Bluntschli with an intuitive guess at his state of mind). I daresay you think us a couple of grown up babies, don’t you?

SERGIUS (grinning a little). He does, he does. Swiss civilization nursetending Bulgarian barbarism, eh?

BLUNTSCHLI (blushing). Not at all, I assure you. I’m only very glad to get you two quieted. There now, let’s be pleasant and talk it over in a friendly way. Where is this other young lady?

RAINA. Listening at the door, probably.

SERGIUS (shivering as if a bullet had struck him, and speaking with quiet but deep indignation). I will prove that that, at least, is a calumny. (He goes with dignity to the door and opens it. A yell of fury bursts from him as he looks out. He darts into the passage, and returns dragging in Louka, whom he flings against the table, R., as he cries) Judge her, Bluntschli — you, the moderate, cautious man: judge the eavesdropper.

(Louka stands her ground, proud and silent.)

BLUNTSCHLI (shaking his head). I mustn’t judge her. I once listened myself outside a tent when there was a mutiny brewing. It’s all a question of the degree of provocation. My life was at stake.

LOUKA. My love was at stake. (Sergius flinches, ashamed of her in spite of himself.) I am not ashamed.

RAINA (contemptuously). Your love! Your curiosity, you mean.

LOUKA (facing her and retorting her contempt with interest). My love, stronger than anything you can feel, even for your chocolate cream soldier.

SERGIUS (with quick suspicion — to Louka). What does that mean?

LOUKA (fiercely). It means —

SERGIUS (interrupting her slightingly). Oh, I remember, the ice pudding. A paltry taunt, girl.

(Major Petkoff enters, in his shirtsleeves.)

PETKOFF. Excuse my shirtsleeves, gentlemen. Raina: somebody has been wearing that coat of mine: I’ll swear it — somebody with bigger shoulders than mine. It’s all burst open at the back. Your mother is mending it. I wish she’d make haste. I shall catch cold. (He looks more attentively at them.) Is anything the matter?

RAINA. No. (She sits down at the stove with a tranquil air.)

SERGIUS. Oh, no! (He sits down at the end of the table, as at first.)

BLUNTSCHLI (who is already seated). Nothing, nothing.

PETKOFF (sitting down on the ottoman in his old place). That’s all right. (He notices Louka.) Anything the matter, Louka?

LOUKA. No, sir.

PETKOFF (genially). That’s all right. (He sneezes.) Go and ask your mistress for my coat, like a good girl, will you? (She turns to obey; but Nicola enters with the coat; and she makes a pretence of having business in the room by taking the little table with the hookah away to the wall near the windows.)

RAINA (rising quickly, as she sees the coat on Nicola’s arm). Here it is, papa. Give it to me, Nicola; and do you put some more wood on the fire. (She takes the coat, and brings it to the Major, who stands up to put it on. Nicola attends to the fire.)

PETKOFF (to Raina, teasing her affectionately). Aha! Going to be very good to poor old papa just for one day after his return from the wars, eh?

RAINA (with solemn reproach). Ah, how can you say that to me, father?

PETKOFF. Well, well, only a joke, little one. Come, give me a kiss. (She kisses him.) Now give me the coat.

RAINA. Now, I am going to put it on for you. Turn your back. (He turns his back and feels behind him with his arms for the sleeves. She dexterously takes the photograph from the pocket and throws it on the table before Bluntschli, who covers it with a sheet of paper under the very nose of Sergius, who looks on amazed, with his suspicions roused in the highest degree. She then helps Petkoff on with his coat.) There, dear! Now are you comfortable?

PETKOFF. Quite, little love. Thanks. (He sits down; and Raina returns to her seat near the stove.) Oh, by the bye, I’ve found something funny. What’s the meaning of this? (He put his hand into the picked pocket.) Eh? Hallo! (He tries the other pocket.) Well, I could have sworn — (Much puzzled, he tries the breast pocket.) I wonder — (Tries the original pocket.) Where can it — (A light flashes on him; he rises, exclaiming) Your mother’s taken it.

RAINA (very red). Taken what?

PETKOFF. Your photograph, with the inscription: “Raina, to her Chocolate Cream Soldier — a souvenir.” Now you know there’s something more in this than meets the eye; and I’m going to find it out. (Shouting) Nicola!

NICOLA (dropping a log, and turning). Sir!

PETKOFF. Did you spoil any pastry of Miss Raina’s this morning?

NICOLA. You heard Miss Raina say that I did, sir.

PETKOFF. I know that, you idiot. Was it true?

NICOLA. I am sure Miss Raina is incapable of saying anything that is not true, sir.

PETKOFF. Are you? Then I’m not. (Turning to the others.) Come: do you think I don’t see it all? (Goes to Sergius, and slaps him on the shoulder.) Sergius: you’re the chocolate cream soldier, aren’t you?

SERGIUS (starting up). I! a chocolate cream soldier! Certainly not.

PETKOFF. Not! (He looks at them. They are all very serious and very conscious.) Do you mean to tell me that Raina sends photographic souvenirs to other men?

SERGIUS (enigmatically). The world is not such an innocent place as we used to think, Petkoff.

BLUNTSCHLI (rising). It’s all right, Major. I’m the chocolate cream soldier. (Petkoff and Sergius are equally astonished.) The gracious young lady saved my life by giving me chocolate creams when I was starving — shall I ever forget their flavour! My late friend Stolz told you the story at Peerot. I was the fugitive.

PETKOFF. You! (He gasps.) Sergius: do you remember how those two women went on this morning when we mentioned it? (Sergius smiles cynically. Petkoff confronts Raina severely.) You’re a nice young woman, aren’t you?

RAINA (bitterly). Major Saranoff has changed his mind. And when I wrote that on the photograph, I did not know that Captain Bluntschli was married.

BLUNTSCHLI (much startled protesting vehemently). I’m not married.

RAINA (with deep reproach). You said you were.

BLUNTSCHLI. I did not. I positively did not. I never was married in my life.

PETKOFF (exasperated). Raina: will you kindly inform me, if I am not asking too much, which gentleman you are engaged to?

RAINA. To neither of them. This young lady (introducing Louka, who faces them all proudly) is the object of Major Saranoff’s affections at present.

PETKOFF. Louka! Are you mad, Sergius? Why, this girl’s engaged to Nicola.

NICOLA (coming forward ). I beg your pardon, sir. There is a mistake. Louka is not engaged to me.

PETKOFF. Not engaged to you, you scoundrel! Why, you had twenty-five levas from me on the day of your betrothal; and she had that gilt bracelet from Miss Raina.

NICOLA (with cool unction). We gave it out so, sir. But it was only to give Louka protection. She had a soul above her station; and I have been no more than her confidential servant. I intend, as you know, sir, to set up a shop later on in Sofia; and I look forward to her custom and recommendation should she marry into the nobility. (He goes out with impressive discretion, leaving them all staring after him.)

PETKOFF (breaking the silence). Well, I am — hm!

SERGIUS. This is either the finest heroism or the most crawling baseness. Which is it, Bluntschli?

BLUNTSCHLI. Never mind whether it’s heroism or baseness. Nicola’s the ablest man I’ve met in Bulgaria. I’ll make him manager of a hotel if he can speak French and German.

LOUKA (suddenly breaking out at Sergius). I have been insulted by everyone here. You set them the example. You owe me an apology. (Sergius immediately, like a repeating clock of which the spring has been touched, begins to fold his arms.)

BLUNTSCHLI (before he can speak). It’s no use. He never apologizes.

LOUKA. Not to you, his equal and his enemy. To me, his poor servant, he will not refuse to apologize.

SERGIUS (approvingly). You are right. (He bends his knee in his grandest manner.) Forgive me!

LOUKA. I forgive you. (She timidly gives him her hand, which he kisses.) That touch makes me your affianced wife.

SERGIUS (springing up). Ah, I forgot that!

LOUKA (coldly). You can withdraw if you like.

SERGIUS. Withdraw! Never! You belong to me! (He puts his arm about her and draws her to him.) (Catherine comes in and finds Louka in Sergius’s arms, and all the rest gazing at them in bewildered astonishment.)

CATHERINE. What does this mean? (Sergius releases Louka.)

PETKOFF. Well, my dear, it appears that Sergius is going to marry Louka instead of Raina. (She is about to break out indignantly at him: he stops her by exclaiming testily.) Don’t blame me: I’ve nothing to do with it. (He retreats to the stove.)

CATHERINE. Marry Louka! Sergius: you are bound by your word to us!

SERGIUS (folding his arms). Nothing binds me.

BLUNTSCHLI (much pleased by this piece of common sense). Saranoff: your hand. My congratulations. These heroics of yours have their practical side after all. (To Louka.) Gracious young lady: the best wishes of a good Republican! (He kisses her hand, to Raina’s great disgust.)

CATHERINE (threateningly). Louka: you have been telling stories.

LOUKA. I have done Raina no harm.

CATHERINE (haughtily). Raina! (Raina is equally indignant at the liberty.)

LOUKA. I have a right to call her Raina: she calls me Louka. I told Major Saranoff she would never marry him if the Swiss gentleman came back.

BLUNTSCHLI (surprised). Hallo!

LOUKA (turning to Raina). I thought you were fonder of him than of Sergius. You know best whether I was right.

BLUNTSCHLI. What nonsense! I assure you, my dear Major, my dear Madame, the gracious young lady simply saved my life, nothing else. She never cared two straws for me. Why, bless my heart and soul, look at the young lady and look at me. She, rich, young, beautiful, with her imagination full of fairy princes and noble natures and cavalry charges and goodness knows what! And I, a common-place Swiss soldier who hardly knows what a decent life is after fifteen years of barracks and battles — a vagabond — a man who has spoiled all his chances in life through an incurably romantic disposition — a man —

SERGIUS (starting as if a needle had pricked him and interrupting Bluntschli in incredulous amazement). Excuse me, Bluntschli: what did you say had spoiled your chances in life?

BLUNTSCHLI (promptly). An incurably romantic disposition. I ran away from home twice when I was a boy. I went into the army instead of into my father’s business. I climbed the balcony of this house when a man of sense would have dived into the nearest cellar. I came sneaking back here to have another look at the young lady when any other man of my age would have sent the coat back —

PETKOFF. My coat!

BLUNTSCHLI. — Yes: that’s the coat I mean — would have sent it back and gone quietly home. Do you suppose I am the sort of fellow a young girl falls in love with? Why, look at our ages! I’m thirty-four: I don’t suppose the young lady is much over seventeen. (This estimate produces a marked sensation, all the rest turning and staring at one another. He proceeds innocently.) All that adventure which was life or death to me, was only a schoolgirl’s game to her — chocolate creams and hide and seek. Here’s the proof! (He takes the photograph from the table.) Now, I ask you, would a woman who took the affair seriously have sent me this and written on it: “Raina, to her chocolate cream soldier — a souvenir”? (He exhibits the photograph triumphantly, as if it settled the matter beyond all possibility of refutation.)

PETKOFF. That’s what I was looking for. How the deuce did it get there?

BLUNTSCHLI (to Raina complacently). I have put everything right, I hope, gracious young lady!

RAINA (in uncontrollable vexation). I quite agree with your account of yourself. You are a romantic idiot. (Bluntschli is unspeakably taken aback.) Next time I hope you will know the difference between a schoolgirl of seventeen and a woman of twenty-three.

BLUNTSCHLI (stupefied). Twenty-three! (She snaps the photograph contemptuously from his hand; tears it across; and throws the pieces at his feet.)

SERGIUS (with grim enjoyment of Bluntschli’s discomfiture). Bluntschli: my one last belief is gone. Your sagacity is a fraud, like all the other things. You have less sense than even I have.

BLUNTSCHLI (overwhelmed). Twenty-three! Twenty-three!! (He considers.) Hm! (Swiftly making up his mind.) In that case, Major Petkoff, I beg to propose formally to become a suitor for your daughter’s hand, in place of Major Saranoff retired.

RAINA. You dare!

BLUNTSCHLI. If you were twenty-three when you said those things to me this afternoon, I shall take them seriously.

CATHERINE (loftily polite). I doubt, sir, whether you quite realize either my daughter’s position or that of Major Sergius Saranoff, whose place you propose to take. The Petkoffs and the Saranoffs are known as the richest and most important families in the country. Our position is almost historical: we can go back for nearly twenty years.

PETKOFF. Oh, never mind that, Catherine. (To Bluntschli.) We should be most happy, Bluntschli, if it were only a question of your position; but hang it, you know, Raina is accustomed to a very comfortable establishment. Sergius keeps twenty horses.

BLUNTSCHLI. But what on earth is the use of twenty horses? Why, it’s a circus.

CATHERINE (severely). My daughter, sir, is accustomed to a first-rate stable.

RAINA. Hush, mother, you’re making me ridiculous.

BLUNTSCHLI. Oh, well, if it comes to a question of an establishment, here goes! (He goes impetuously to the table and seizes the papers in the blue envelope.) How many horses did you say?

SERGIUS. Twenty, noble Switzer!

BLUNTSCHLI. I have two hundred horses. (They are amazed.) How many carriages?

SERGIUS. Three.

BLUNTSCHLI. I have seventy. Twenty-four of them will hold twelve inside, besides two on the box, without counting the driver and conductor. How many tablecloths have you?

SERGIUS. How the deuce do I know?

BLUNTSCHLI. Have you four thousand?

SERGIUS. NO.

BLUNTSCHLI. I have. I have nine thousand six hundred pairs of sheets and blankets, with two thousand four hundred eider-down quilts. I have ten thousand knives and forks, and the same quantity of dessert spoons. I have six hundred servants. I have six palatial establishments, besides two livery stables, a tea garden and a private house. I have four medals for distinguished services; I have the rank of an officer and the standing of a gentleman; and I have three native languages. Show me any man in Bulgaria that can offer as much.

PETKOFF (with childish awe). Are you Emperor of Switzerland?

BLUNTSCHLI. My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.

CATHERINE. Then Captain Bluntschli, since you are my daughter’s choice, I shall not stand in the way of her happiness. (Petkoff is about to speak.) That is Major Petkoff’s feeling also.

PETKOFF. Oh, I shall be only too glad. Two hundred horses! Whew!

SERGIUS. What says the lady?

RAINA (pretending to sulk). The lady says that he can keep his tablecloths and his omnibuses. I am not here to be sold to the highest bidder.

BLUNTSCHLI. I won’t take that answer. I appealed to you as a fugitive, a beggar, and a starving man. You accepted me. You gave me your hand to kiss, your bed to sleep in, and your roof to shelter me —

RAINA (interrupting him). I did not give them to the Emperor of Switzerland!

BLUNTSCHLI. That’s just what I say. (He catches her hand quickly and looks her straight in the face as he adds, with confident mastery) Now tell us who you did give them to.

RAINA (succumbing with a shy smile). To my chocolate cream soldier!

BLUNTSCHLI (with a boyish laugh of delight). That’ll do. Thank you. (Looks at his watch and suddenly becomes businesslike.) Time’s up, Major. You’ve managed those regiments so well that you are sure to be asked to get rid of some of the Infantry of the Teemok division. Send them home by way of Lom Palanka. Saranoff: don’t get married until I come back: I shall be here punctually at five in the evening on Tuesday fortnight. Gracious ladies — good evening. (He makes them a military bow, and goes.)

SERGIUS. What a man! What a man!

CANDIDA

Candida was written in 1894 and first published in 1898 as part of Plays Pleasant. Shaw had been unsuccessful in his attempts to have the play staged during the 1890’s but by the early years of the new century the work had become a hit on the New York stage and in 1904 there was a Royal Court Theatre production, which proved to be popular. There have been a series of productions and adaptations over the last century including a 1946 production featuring the famed actors Katharine Cornell and Marlon Brando, a February 2009 BBC Radio 7 version starring Hannah Gordon and Edward Petherbridge and a 2009 Writer’s Theatre musical adaption of the play entitled ‘A Minister’s Wife’. The central characters in the play are: Candid; her Christian Socialist clergyman husband Mr Morell; the young poet Eugene Marchbanks; Mr Morell’s typist Prossy, and Burgess, the unscrupulous father-in-law, who wishes to ingratiate himself with the Morell family.

The play opens in October 1894 in the drawing room of the Morell’s home in East London. The minister Morell is discussing his hectic schedule with his efficient and devoted typist, Prossy. After a long absence Burgess decides to visit his son-in-law to convince the minister that he is a reformed character and attempts to demonstrate this by stating that he has raised the wages of his underpaid workers. Candida then arrives home with an eighteen year old poet, who quickly reveals to Morell that he is in love with his wife and he has come to rescue her from her undeserving husband. When the clergyman ignores the young man, he becomes shaken and his confidence and faith in his marriage is severely undermined. Shaw ably portrays how all the traits and qualities often associated with the ideal husband are easily threatened by the unconventional ideals espoused by Eugene. The rest of the play involves the unfolding of the love triangle between the three central characters and the opposing views that Morell and Marchbanks have on love, while Candida ultimately determines to be with the man whom she believes is weakest and therefore most in need of her love, affection and protection.

Poster advertising an American production

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT I

A fine October morning in the north east suburbs of London, a vast district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James’s, much less known there than the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs Elysees, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums; strong in comfortable, prosperous middle class life; wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well-served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, tram lines, and a perpetual stream of yellow cars; enjoying in its main thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown “front gardens,” untrodden by the foot of man save as to the path from the gate to the hall door; but blighted by an intolerable monotony of miles and miles of graceless, characterless brick houses, black iron railings, stony pavements, slaty roofs, and respectably ill dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else’s work, which they would not do if they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that crop up show themselves in cockney cupidity and business “push.” Even the policemen and the chapels are not infrequent enough to break the monotony. The sun is shining cheerfully; there is no fog; and though the smoke effectually prevents anything, whether faces and hands or bricks and mortar, from looking fresh and clean, it is not hanging heavily enough to trouble a Londoner.

This desert of unattractiveness has its oasis. Near the outer end of the Hackney Road is a park of 217 acres, fenced in, not by railings, but by a wooden paling, and containing plenty of greensward, trees, a lake for bathers, flower beds with the flowers arranged carefully in patterns by the admired cockney art of carpet gardening and a sandpit, imported from the seaside for the delight of the children, but speedily deserted on its becoming a natural vermin preserve for all the petty fauna of Kingsland, Hackney and Hoxton. A bandstand, an unfinished forum for religious, anti-religious and political orators, cricket pitches, a gymnasium, and an old fashioned stone kiosk are among its attractions. Wherever the prospect is bounded by trees or rising green grounds, it is a pleasant place. Where the ground stretches far to the grey palings, with bricks and mortar, sky signs, crowded chimneys and smoke beyond, the prospect makes it desolate and sordid.

The best view of Victoria Park is from the front window of St. Dominic’s Parsonage, from which not a single chimney is visible. The parsonage is a semi-detached villa with a front garden and a porch. Visitors go up the flight of steps to the porch: tradespeople and members of the family go down by a door under the steps to the basement, with a breakfast room, used for all meals, in front, and the kitchen at the back. Upstairs, on the level of the hall door, is the drawing-room, with its large plate glass window looking on the park. In this room, the only sitting-room that can be spared from the children and the family meals, the parson, the Reverend James Mavor Morell does his work. He is sitting in a strong round backed revolving chair at the right hand end of a long table, which stands across the window, so that he can cheer himself with the view of the park at his elbow. At the opposite end of the table, adjoining it, is a little table; only half the width of the other, with a typewriter on it. His typist is sitting at this machine, with her back to the window. The large table is littered with pamphlets, journals, letters, nests of drawers, an office diary, postage scales and the like. A spare chair for visitors having business with the parson is in the middle, turned to his end. Within reach of his hand is a stationery case, and a cabinet photograph in a frame. Behind him the right hand wall, recessed above the fireplace, is fitted with bookshelves, on which an adept eye can measure the parson’s divinity and casuistry by a complete set of Browning’s poems and Maurice’s Theological Essays, and guess at his politics from a yellow backed Progress and Poverty, Fabian Essays, a Dream of John Ball, Marx’s Capital, and half a dozen other literary landmarks in Socialism. Opposite him on the left, near the typewriter, is the door. Further down the room, opposite the fireplace, a bookcase stands on a cellaret, with a sofa near it. There is a generous fire burning; and the hearth, with a comfortable armchair and a japanned flower painted coal scuttle at one side, a miniature chair for a boy or girl on the other, a nicely varnished wooden mantelpiece, with neatly moulded shelves, tiny bits of mirror let into the panels, and a travelling clock in a leather case (the inevitable wedding present), and on the wall above a large autotype of the chief figure in Titian’s Virgin of the Assumption, is very inviting. Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper, vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but elsewhere mistress of the situation. The furniture, in its ornamental aspect, betrays the style of the advertised “drawing-room suite” of the pushing suburban furniture dealer; but there is nothing useless or pretentious in the room. The paper and panelling are dark, throwing the big cheery window and the park outside into strong relief.

The Reverend James Mavor Morell is a Christian Socialist clergyman of the Church of England, and an active member of the Guild of St. Matthew and the Christian Social Union. A vigorous, genial, popular man of forty, robust and goodlooking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty, considerate manners, and a sound, unaffected voice, which he uses with the clean, athletic articulation of a practised orator, and with a wide range and perfect command of expression. He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and recuperation triumphantly. Withal, a great baby, pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself. He has a healthy complexion, a good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the eyes bright and eager, a mouth resolute, but not particularly well cut, and a substantial nose, with the mobile, spreading nostrils of the dramatic orator, but, like all his features, void of subtlety.

The typist, Miss Proserpine Garnett, is a brisk little woman of about 30, of the lower middle class, neatly but cheaply dressed in a black merino skirt and a blouse, rather pert and quick of speech, and not very civil in her manner, but sensitive and affectionate. She is clattering away busily at her machine whilst Morell opens the last of his morning’s letters. He realizes its contents with a comic groan of despair.

PROSERPINE. Another lecture?

MORELL. Yes. The Hoxton Freedom Group want me to address them on Sunday morning (great emphasis on “Sunday,” this being the unreasonable part of the business). What are they?

PROSERPINE. Communist Anarchists, I think.

MORELL. Just like Anarchists not to know that they can’t have a parson on Sunday! Tell them to come to church if they want to hear me: it will do them good. Say I can only come on Mondays and Thursdays. Have you the diary there?

PROSERPINE (taking up the diary). Yes.

MORELL. Have I any lecture on for next Monday?

PROSERPINE (referring to diary). Tower Hamlets Radical Club.

MORELL. Well, Thursday then?

PROSERPINE. English Land Restoration League.

MORELL. What next?

PROSERPINE. Guild of St. Matthew on Monday. Independent Labor Party, Greenwich Branch, on Thursday. Monday, Social-Democratic Federation, Mile End Branch. Thursday, first Confirmation class — (Impatiently). Oh, I’d better tell them you can’t come. They’re only half a dozen ignorant and conceited costermongers without five shillings between them.

MORELL (amused). Ah; but you see they’re near relatives of mine, Miss Garnett.

PROSERPINE (staring at him). Relatives of YOURS!

MORELL. Yes: we have the same father — in Heaven.

PROSERPINE (relieved). Oh, is that all?

MORELL (with a sadness which is a luxury to a man whose voice expresses it so finely). Ah, you don’t believe it. Everybody says it: nobody believes it — nobody. (Briskly, getting back to business.) Well, well! Come, Miss Proserpine, can’t you find a date for the costers? What about the 25th?: that was vacant the day before yesterday.

PROSERPINE (referring to diary). Engaged — the Fabian Society.

MORELL. Bother the Fabian Society! Is the 28th gone too?

PROSERPINE. City dinner. You’re invited to dine with the Founder’s Company.

MORELL. That’ll do; I’ll go to the Hoxton Group of Freedom instead. (She enters the engagement in silence, with implacable disparagement of the Hoxton Anarchists in every line of her face. Morell bursts open the cover of a copy of The Church Reformer, which has come by post, and glances through Mr. Stewart Hendlam’s leader and the Guild of St. Matthew news. These proceedings are presently enlivened by the appearance of Morell’s curate, the Reverend Alexander Mill, a young gentleman gathered by Morell from the nearest University settlement, whither he had come from Oxford to give the east end of London the benefit of his university training. He is a conceitedly well intentioned, enthusiastic, immature person, with nothing positively unbearable about him except a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed for half an inch from each corner, a finicking arthulation, and a set of horribly corrupt vowels, notably ow for o, this being his chief means of bringing Oxford refinement to bear on Hackney vulgarity. Morell, whom he has won over by a doglike devotion, looks up indulgently from The Church Reformer as he enters, and remarks) Well, Lexy! Late again, as usual.

LEXY. I’m afraid so. I wish I could get up in the morning.

MORELL (exulting in his own energy). Ha! ha! (Whimsically.) Watch and pray, Lexy: watch and pray.

LEXY. I know. (Rising wittily to the occasion.) But how can I watch and pray when I am asleep? Isn’t that so, Miss Prossy?

PROSERPINE (sharply). Miss Garnett, if you please.

LEXY. I beg your pardon — Miss Garnett.

PROSERPINE. You’ve got to do all the work to-day.

LEXY. Why?

PROSERPINE. Never mind why. It will do you good to earn your supper before you eat it, for once in a way, as I do. Come: don’t dawdle. You should have been off on your rounds half an hour ago.

LEXY (perplexed). Is she in earnest, Morell?

MORELL (in the highest spirits — his eyes dancing). Yes. I am going to dawdle to-day.

LEXY. You! You don’t know how.

MORELL (heartily). Ha! ha! Don’t I? I’m going to have this day all to myself — or at least the forenoon. My wife’s coming back: she’s due here at 11.45.

LEXY (surprised). Coming back already — with the children? I thought they were to stay to the end of the month.

MORELL. So they are: she’s only coming up for two days, to get some flannel things for Jimmy, and to see how we’re getting on without her.

LEXY (anxiously). But, my dear Morell, if what Jimmy and Fluffy had was scarlatina, do you think it wise —

MORELL. Scarlatina! — rubbish, German measles. I brought it into the house myself from the Pycroft Street School. A parson is like a doctor, my boy: he must face infection as a soldier must face bullets. (He rises and claps Lexy on the shoulder.) Catch the measles if you can, Lexy: she’ll nurse you; and what a piece of luck that will be for you! — eh?

LEXY (smiling uneasily). It’s so hard to understand you about Mrs. Morell —

MORELL (tenderly). Ah, my boy, get married — get married to a good woman; and then you’ll understand. That’s a foretaste of what will be best in the Kingdom of Heaven we are trying to establish on earth. That will cure you of dawdling. An honest man feels that he must pay Heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard, unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. Get a wife like my Candida; and you’ll always be in arrear with your repayment. (He pats Lexy affectionately on the back, and is leaving the room when Lexy calls to him.)

LEXY. Oh, wait a bit: I forgot. (Morell halts and turns with the door knob in his hand.) Your father-in-law is coming round to see you. (Morell shuts the door again, with a complete change of manner.)

MORELL (surprised and not pleased). Mr. Burgess?

LEXY. Yes. I passed him in the park, arguing with somebody. He gave me good day and asked me to let you know that he was coming.

MORELL (half incredulous). But he hasn’t called here for — I may almost say for years. Are you sure, Lexy? You’re not joking, are you?

LEXY (earnestly). No, sir, really.

MORELL (thoughtfully). Hm! Time for him to take another look at Candida before she grows out of his knowledge. (He resigns himself to the inevitable, and goes out. Lexy looks after him with beaming, foolish worship.)

LEXY. What a good man! What a thorough, loving soul he is! (He takes Morell’s place at the table, making himself very comfortable as he takes out a cigaret.)

PROSERPINE (impatiently, pulling the letter she has been working at off the typewriter and folding it.) Oh, a man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

LEXY (shocked). Oh, Miss Prossy!

PROSERPINE (rising busily and coming to the stationery case to get an envelope, in which she encloses the letter as she speaks). Candida here, and Candida there, and Candida everywhere! (She licks the envelope.) It’s enough to drive anyone out of their SENSES (thumping the envelope to make it stick) to hear a perfectly commonplace woman raved about in that absurd manner merely because she’s got good hair, and a tolerable figure.

LEXY (with reproachful gravity). I think her extremely beautiful, Miss Garnett. (He takes the photograph up; looks at it; and adds, with even greater impressiveness) EXTREMELY beautiful. How fine her eyes are!

PROSERPINE. Her eyes are not a bit better than mine — now! (He puts down the photograph and stares austerely at her.) And you know very well that you think me dowdy and second rate enough.

LEXY (rising majestically). Heaven forbid that I should think of any of God’s creatures in such a way! (He moves stiffly away from her across the room to the neighbourhood of the bookcase.)

PROSERPINE. Thank you. That’s very nice and comforting.

LEXY (saddened by her depravity). I had no idea you had any feeling against Mrs. Morell.

PROSERPINE (indignantly). I have no feeling against her. She’s very nice, very good-hearted: I’m very fond of her and can appreciate her real qualities far better than any man can. (He shakes his head sadly and turns to the bookcase, looking along the shelves for a volume. She follows him with intense pepperiness.) You don’t believe me? (He turns and faces her. She pounces at him with spitfire energy.) You think I’m jealous. Oh, what a profound knowledge of the human heart you have, Mr. Lexy Mill! How well you know the weaknesses of Woman, don’t you? It must be so nice to be a man and have a fine penetrating intellect instead of mere emotions like us, and to know that the reason we don’t share your amorous delusions is that we’re all jealous of one another! (She abandons him with a toss of her shoulders, and crosses to the fire to warm her hands.)

LEXY. Ah, if you women only had the same clue to Man’s strength that you have to his weakness, Miss Prossy, there would be no Woman Question.

PROSERPINE (over her shoulder, as she stoops, holding her hands to the blaze). Where did you hear Morell say that? You didn’t invent it yourself: you’re not clever enough.

LEXY. That’s quite true. I am not ashamed of owing him that, as I owe him so many other spiritual truths. He said it at the annual conference of the Women’s Liberal Federation. Allow me to add that though they didn’t appreciate it, I, a mere man, did. (He turns to the bookcase again, hoping that this may leave her crushed.)

PROSERPINE (putting her hair straight at the little panel of mirror in the mantelpiece). Well, when you talk to me, give me your own ideas, such as they are, and not his. You never cut a poorer figure than when you are trying to imitate him.

LEXY (stung). I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.

PROSERPINE (coming at him again on her way back to her work). Yes, you do: you IMITATE him. Why do you tuck your umbrella under your left arm instead of carrying it in your hand like anyone else? Why do you walk with your chin stuck out before you, hurrying along with that eager look in your eyes — you, who never get up before half past nine in the morning? Why do you say “knoaledge” in church, though you always say “knolledge” in private conversation! Bah! do you think I don’t know? (She goes back to the typewriter.) Here, come and set about your work: we’ve wasted enough time for one morning. Here’s a copy of the diary for to-day. (She hands him a memorandum.)

LEXY (deeply offended). Thank you. (He takes it and stands at the table with his back to her, reading it. She begins to transcribe her shorthand notes on the typewriter without troubling herself about his feelings. Mr. Burgess enters unannounced. He is a man of sixty, made coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce, and later on softened into sluggish bumptiousness by overfeeding and commercial success. A vulgar, ignorant, guzzling man, offensive and contemptuous to people whose labor is cheap, respectful to wealth and rank, and quite sincere and without rancour or envy in both attitudes. Finding him without talent, the world has offered him no decently paid work except ignoble work, and he has become in consequence, somewhat hoggish. But he has no suspicion of this himself, and honestly regards his commercial prosperity as the inevitable and socially wholesome triumph of the ability, industry, shrewdness and experience in business of a man who in private is easygoing, affectionate and humorously convivial to a fault. Corporeally, he is a podgy man, with a square, clean shaven face and a square beard under his chin; dust colored, with a patch of grey in the centre, and small watery blue eyes with a plaintively sentimental expression, which he transfers easily to his voice by his habit of pompously intoning his sentences.)

BURGESS (stopping on the threshold, and looking round). They told me Mr. Morell was here.

PROSERPINE (rising). He’s upstairs. I’ll fetch him for you.

BURGESS (staring boorishly at her). You’re not the same young lady as used to typewrite for him?

PROSERPINE. No.

BURGESS (assenting). No: she was younger. (Miss Garnett stolidly stares at him; then goes out with great dignity. He receives this quite obtusely, and crosses to the hearth-rug, where he turns and spreads himself with his back to the fire.) Startin’ on your rounds, Mr. Mill?

LEXY (folding his paper and pocketing it). Yes: I must be off presently.

BURGESS (momentously). Don’t let me detain you, Mr. Mill. What I come about is private between me and Mr. Morell.

LEXY (huffily). I have no intention of intruding, I am sure, Mr. Burgess. Good morning.

BURGESS (patronizingly). Oh, good morning to you. (Morell returns as Lexy is making for the door.)

MORELL (to Lexy). Off to work?

LEXY. Yes, sir.

MORELL (patting him affectionately on the shoulder). Take my silk handkerchief and wrap your throat up. There’s a cold wind. Away with you.

(Lexy brightens up, and goes out.)

BURGESS. Spoilin’ your curates, as usu’l, James. Good mornin’. When I pay a man, an’ ‘is livin’ depen’s on me, I keep him in his place.

MORELL (rather shortly). I always keep my curates in their places as my helpers and comrades. If you get as much work out of your clerks and warehousemen as I do out of my curates, you must be getting rich pretty fast. Will you take your old chair?

(He points with curt authority to the arm chair beside the fireplace; then takes the spare chair from the table and sits down in front of Burgess.)

BURGESS (without moving). Just the same as hever, James!

MORELL. When you last called — it was about three years ago, I think — you said the same thing a little more frankly. Your exact words then were: “Just as big a fool as ever, James?”

BURGESS (soothingly). Well, perhaps I did; but (with conciliatory cheerfulness) I meant no offence by it. A clergyman is privileged to be a bit of a fool, you know: it’s on’y becomin’ in his profession that he should. Anyhow, I come here, not to rake up hold differences, but to let bygones be bygones. (Suddenly becoming very solemn, and approaching Morell.) James: three year ago, you done me a hill turn. You done me hout of a contrac’; an’ when I gev you ‘arsh words in my nat’ral disappointment, you turned my daughrter again me. Well, I’ve come to act the part of a Cherischin. (Offering his hand.) I forgive you, James.

MORELL (starting up). Confound your impudence!

BURGESS (retreating, with almost lachrymose deprecation of this treatment). Is that becomin’ language for a clergyman, James? — and you so partic’lar, too?

MORELL (hotly). No, sir, it is not becoming language for a clergyman. I used the wrong word. I should have said damn your impudence: that’s what St. Paul, or any honest priest would have said to you. Do you think I have forgotten that tender of yours for the contract to supply clothing to the workhouse?

BURGESS (in a paroxysm of public spirit). I acted in the interest of the ratepayers, James. It was the lowest tender: you can’t deny that.

MORELL. Yes, the lowest, because you paid worse wages than any other employer — starvation wages — aye, worse than starvation wages — to the women who made the clothing. Your wages would have driven them to the streets to keep body and soul together. (Getting angrier and angrier.) Those women were my parishioners. I shamed the Guardians out of accepting your tender: I shamed the ratepayers out of letting them do it: I shamed everybody but you. (Boiling over.) How dare you, sir, come here and offer to forgive me, and talk about your daughter, and —

BURGESS. Easy, James, easy, easy. Don’t git hinto a fluster about nothink. I’ve howned I was wrong.

MORELL (fuming about). Have you? I didn’t hear you.

BURGESS. Of course I did. I hown it now. Come: I harsk your pardon for the letter I wrote you. Is that enough?

MORELL (snapping his fingers). That’s nothing. Have you raised the wages?

BURGESS (triumphantly). Yes.

MORELL (stopping dead). What!

BURGESS (unctuously). I’ve turned a moddle hemployer. I don’t hemploy no women now: they’re all sacked; and the work is done by machinery. Not a man ‘as less than sixpence a hour; and the skilled ‘ands gits the Trade Union rate. (Proudly.) What ‘ave you to say to me now?

MORELL (overwhelmed). Is it possible! Well, there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth — (Going to Burgess with an explosion of apologetic cordiality.) My dear Burgess, I most heartily beg your pardon for my hard thoughts of you. (Grasps his hand.) And now, don’t you feel the better for the change? Come, confess, you’re happier. You look happier.

BURGESS (ruefully). Well, p’raps I do. I s’pose I must, since you notice it. At all events, I git my contrax asseppit (accepted) by the County Council. (Savagely.) They dussent’ave nothink to do with me unless I paid fair wages — curse ’em for a parcel o’ meddlin’ fools!

MORELL (dropping his hand, utterly discouraged). So that was why you raised the wages! (He sits down moodily.)

BURGESS (severely, in spreading, mounting tones). Why else should I do it? What does it lead to but drink and huppishness in workin’ men? (He seats himself magisterially in the easy chair.) It’s hall very well for you, James: it gits you hinto the papers and makes a great man of you; but you never think of the ‘arm you do, puttin’ money into the pockets of workin’ men that they don’t know ‘ow to spend, and takin’ it from people that might be makin’ a good huse on it.

MORELL (with a heavy sigh, speaking with cold politeness). What is your business with me this morning? I shall not pretend to believe that you are here merely out of family sentiment.

BURGESS (obstinately). Yes, I ham — just family sentiment and nothink else.

MORELL (with weary calm). I don’t believe you!

BURGESS (rising threateningly). Don’t say that to me again, James Mavor Morell.

MORELL (unmoved). I’ll say it just as often as may be necessary to convince you that it’s true. I don’t believe you.

BURGESS (collapsing into an abyss of wounded feeling). Oh, well, if you’re determined to be unfriendly, I s’pose I’d better go. (He moves reluctantly towards the door. Morell makes no sign. He lingers.) I didn’t hexpect to find a hunforgivin’ spirit in you, James. (Morell still not responding, he takes a few more reluctant steps doorwards. Then he comes back whining.) We huseter git on well enough, spite of our different opinions. Why are you so changed to me? I give you my word I come here in pyorr (pure) frenliness, not wishin’ to be on bad terms with my hown daughrter’s ‘usban’. Come, James: be a Cherishin and shake ‘ands. (He puts his hand sentimentally on Morell’s shoulder.)

MORELL (looking up at him thoughtfully). Look here, Burgess. Do you want to be as welcome here as you were before you lost that contract?

BURGESS. I do, James. I do — honest.

MORELL. Then why don’t you behave as you did then?

BURGESS (cautiously removing his hand). ‘Ow d’y’mean?

MORELL. I’ll tell you. You thought me a young fool then.

BURGESS (coaxingly). No, I didn’t, James. I —

MORELL (cutting him short). Yes, you did. And I thought you an old scoundrel.

BURGESS (most vehemently deprecating this gross self-accusation on Morell’s part). No, you didn’t, James. Now you do yourself a hinjustice.

MORELL. Yes, I did. Well, that did not prevent our getting on very well together. God made you what I call a scoundrel as he made me what you call a fool. (The effect of this observation on Burgess is to remove the keystone of his moral arch. He becomes bodily weak, and, with his eyes fixed on Morell in a helpless stare, puts out his hand apprehensively to balance himself, as if the floor had suddenly sloped under him. Morell proceeds in the same tone of quiet conviction.) It was not for me to quarrel with his handiwork in the one case more than in the other. So long as you come here honestly as a self-respecting, thorough, convinced scoundrel, justifying your scoundrelism, and proud of it, you are welcome. But (and now Morell’s tone becomes formidable; and he rises and strikes the back of the chair for greater emphasis) I won’t have you here snivelling about being a model employer and a converted man when you’re only an apostate with your coat turned for the sake of a County Council contract. (He nods at him to enforce the point; then goes to the hearth-rug, where he takes up a comfortably commanding position with his back to the fire, and continues) No: I like a man to be true to himself, even in wickedness. Come now: either take your hat and go; or else sit down and give me a good scoundrelly reason for wanting to be friends with me. (Burgess, whose emotions have subsided sufficiently to be expressed by a dazed grin, is relieved by this concrete proposition. He ponders it for a moment, and then, slowly and very modestly, sits down in the chair Morell has just left.) That’s right. Now, out with it.

BURGESS (chuckling in spite of himself.) Well, you ARE a queer bird, James, and no mistake. But (almost enthusiastically) one carnt ‘elp likin’ you; besides, as I said afore, of course one don’t take all a clorgyman says seriously, or the world couldn’t go on. Could it now? (He composes himself for graver discourse, and turning his eyes on Morell proceeds with dull seriousness.) Well, I don’t mind tellin’ you, since it’s your wish we should be free with one another, that I did think you a bit of a fool once; but I’m beginnin’ to think that p’r’aps I was be’ind the times a bit.

MORELL (delighted ). Aha! You’re finding that out at last, are you?

BURGESS (portentously). Yes, times ‘as changed mor’n I could a believed. Five yorr (year) ago, no sensible man would a thought o’ takin’ up with your ideas. I hused to wonder you was let preach at all. Why, I know a clorgyman that ‘as bin kep’ hout of his job for yorrs by the Bishop of London, although the pore feller’s not a bit more religious than you are. But to-day, if henyone was to offer to bet me a thousan’ poun’ that you’ll end by bein’ a bishop yourself, I shouldn’t venture to take the bet. You and yore crew are gettin’ hinfluential: I can see that. They’ll ‘ave to give you something someday, if it’s only to stop yore mouth. You ‘ad the right instinc’ arter all, James: the line you took is the payin’ line in the long run fur a man o’ your sort.

MORELL (decisively — offering his hand). Shake hands, Burgess. Now you’re talking honestly. I don’t think they’ll make me a bishop; but if they do, I’ll introduce you to the biggest jobbers I can get to come to my dinner parties.

BURGESS (who has risen with a sheepish grin and accepted the hand of friendship). You will ‘ave your joke, James. Our quarrel’s made up now, isn’t it?

A WOMAN’S VOICE. Say yes, James.

Startled, they turn quickly and find that Candida has just come in, and is looking at them with an amused maternal indulgence which is her characteristic expression. She is a woman of 33, well built, well nourished, likely, one guesses, to become matronly later on, but now quite at her best, with the double charm of youth and motherhood. Her ways are those of a woman who has found that she can always manage people by engaging their affection, and who does so frankly and instinctively without the smallest scruple. So far, she is like any other pretty woman who is just clever enough to make the most of her sexual attractions for trivially selfish ends; but Candida’s serene brow, courageous eyes, and well set mouth and chin signify largeness of mind and dignity of character to ennoble her cunning in the affections. A wisehearted observer, looking at her, would at once guess that whoever had placed the Virgin of the Assumption over her hearth did so because he fancied some spiritual resemblance between them, and yet would not suspect either her husband or herself of any such idea, or indeed of any concern with the art of Titian.

Just now she is in bonnet and mantle, laden with a strapped rug with her umbrella stuck through it, a handbag, and a supply of illustrated papers.

MORELL (shocked at his remissness). Candida! Why — (looks at his watch, and is horrified to find it so late.) My darling! (Hurrying to her and seizing the rug strap, pouring forth his remorseful regrets all the time.) I intended to meet you at the train. I let the time slip. (Flinging the rug on the sofa.) I was so engrossed by — (returning to her) — I forgot — oh! (He embraces her with penitent emotion.)

BURGESS (a little shamefaced and doubtful of his reception). How ors you, Candy? (She, still in Morell’s arms, offers him her cheek, which he kisses.) James and me is come to a unnerstandin’ — a honourable unnerstandin’. Ain’ we, James?

MORELL (impetuously). Oh, bother your understanding! You’ve kept me late for Candida. (With compassionate fervor.) My poor love: how did you manage about the luggage? — how —

CANDIDA (stopping him and disengaging herself ). There, there, there. I wasn’t alone. Eugene came down yesterday; and we traveled up together.

MORELL (pleased). Eugene!

CANDIDA. Yes: he’s struggling with my luggage, poor boy. Go out, dear, at once; or he will pay for the cab; and I don’t want that. (Morell hurries out. Candida puts down her handbag; then takes off her mantle and bonnet and puts them on the sofa with the rug, chatting meanwhile.) Well, papa, how are you getting on at home?

BURGESS. The ‘ouse ain’t worth livin’ in since you left it, Candy. I wish you’d come round and give the gurl a talkin’ to. Who’s this Eugene that’s come with you?

CANDIDA. Oh, Eugene’s one of James’s discoveries. He found him sleeping on the Embankment last June. Haven’t you noticed our new picture (pointing to the Virgin)? He gave us that.

BURGESS (incredulously). Garn! D’you mean to tell me — your hown father! — that cab touts or such like, orf the Embankment, buys pictur’s like that? (Severely.) Don’t deceive me, Candy: it’s a ‘Igh Church pictur; and James chose it hisself.

CANDIDA. Guess again. Eugene isn’t a cab tout.

BURGESS. Then wot is he? (Sarcastically.) A nobleman, I ‘spose.

CANDIDA (delighted — nodding). Yes. His uncle’s a peer — a real live earl.

BURGESS (not daring to believe such good news). No!

CANDIDA. Yes. He had a seven day bill for 55 pounds in his pocket when James found him on the Embankment. He thought he couldn’t get any money for it until the seven days were up; and he was too shy to ask for credit. Oh, he’s a dear boy! We are very fond of him.

BURGESS (pretending to belittle the aristocracy, but with his eyes gleaming). Hm, I thort you wouldn’t git a piorr’s (peer’s) nevvy visitin’ in Victoria Park unless he were a bit of a flat. (Looking again at the picture.) Of course I don’t ‘old with that pictur, Candy; but still it’s a ‘igh class, fust rate work of art: I can see that. Be sure you hintroduce me to him, Candy. (He looks at his watch anxiously.) I can only stay about two minutes.

Morell comes back with Eugene, whom Burgess contemplates moist-eyed with enthusiasm. He is a strange, shy youth of eighteen, slight, effeminate, with a delicate childish voice, and a hunted, tormented expression and shrinking manner that show the painful sensitiveness that very swift and acute apprehensiveness produces in youth, before the character has grown to its full strength. Yet everything that his timidity and frailty suggests is contradicted by his face. He is miserably irresolute, does not know where to stand or what to do with his hands and feet, is afraid of Burgess, and would run away into solitude if he dared; but the very intensity with which he feels a perfectly commonplace position shows great nervous force, and his nostrils and mouth show a fiercely petulant wilfulness, as to the quality of which his great imaginative eyes and fine brow are reassuring. He is so entirely uncommon as to be almost unearthly; and to prosaic people there is something noxious in this unearthliness, just as to poetic people there is something angelic in it. His dress is anarchic. He wears an old blue serge jacket, unbuttoned over a woollen lawn tennis shirt, with a silk handkerchief for a cravat, trousers matching the jacket, and brown canvas shoes. In these garments he has apparently lain in the heather and waded through the waters; but there is no evidence of his having ever brushed them.

As he catches sight of a stranger on entering, he stops, and edges along the wall on the opposite side of the room.

MORELL (as he enters). Come along: you can spare us quarter of an hour, at all events. This is my father-in-law, Mr. Burgess — Mr. Marchbanks.

MARCHBANKS (nervously backing against the bookcase). Glad to meet you, sir.

BURGESS (crossing to him with great heartiness, whilst Morell joins Candida at the fire). Glad to meet YOU, I’m shore, Mr. Morchbanks. (Forcing him to shake hands.) ‘Ow do you find yoreself this weather? ‘Ope you ain’t lettin’ James put no foolish ideas into your ‘ed?

MARCHBANKS. Foolish ideas! Oh, you mean Socialism. No.

BURGESS. That’s right. (Again looking at his watch.) Well, I must go now: there’s no ‘elp for it. Yo’re not comin’ my way, are you, Mr. Morchbanks?

MARCHBANKS. Which way is that?

BURGESS. Victawriar Pork station. There’s a city train at 12.25.

MORELL. Nonsense. Eugene will stay to lunch with us, I expect.

MARCHBANKS (anxiously excusing himself). No — I — I —

BURGESS. Well, well, I shan’t press you: I bet you’d rather lunch with Candy. Some night, I ‘ope, you’ll come and dine with me at my club, the Freeman Founders in Nortn Folgit. Come, say you will.

MARCHBANKS. Thank you, Mr. Burgess. Where is Norton Folgate — down in Surrey, isn’t it? (Burgess, inexpressibly tickled, begins to splutter with laughter.)

CANDIDA (coming to the rescue). You’ll lose your train, papa, if you don’t go at once. Come back in the afternoon and tell Mr. Marchbanks where to find the club.

BURGESS (roaring with glee). Down in Surrey — har, har! that’s not a bad one. Well, I never met a man as didn’t know Nortn Folgit before.(Abashed at his own noisiness.) Good-bye, Mr. Morchbanks: I know yo’re too ‘ighbred to take my pleasantry in bad part. (He again offers his hand.)

MARCHBANKS (taking it with a nervous jerk). Not at all.

BURGESS. Bye, bye, Candy. I’ll look in again later on. So long, James.

MORELL. Must you go?

BURGESS. Don’t stir. (He goes out with unabated heartiness.)

MORELL. Oh, I’ll see you out. (He follows him out. Eugene stares after them apprehensively, holding his breath until Burgess disappears.)

CANDIDA (laughing). Well, Eugene. (He turns with a start and comes eagerly towards her, but stops irresolutely as he meets her amused look.) What do you think of my father?

MARCHBANKS. I — I hardly know him yet. He seems to be a very nice old gentleman.

CANDIDA (with gentle irony). And you’ll go to the Freeman Founders to dine with him, won’t you?

MARCHBANKS (miserably, taking it quite seriously). Yes, if it will please you.

CANDIDA (touched). Do you know, you are a very nice boy, Eugene, with all your queerness. If you had laughed at my father I shouldn’t have minded; but I like you ever so much better for being nice to him.

MARCHBANKS. Ought I to have laughed? I noticed that he said something funny; but I am so ill at ease with strangers; and I never can see a joke! I’m very sorry. (He sits down on the sofa, his elbows on his knees and his temples between his fists, with an expression of hopeless suffering.)

CANDIDA (bustling him goodnaturedly). Oh, come! You great baby, you! You are worse than usual this morning. Why were you so melancholy as we came along in the cab?

MARCHBANKS. Oh, that was nothing. I was wondering how much I ought to give the cabman. I know it’s utterly silly; but you don’t know how dreadful such things are to me — how I shrink from having to deal with strange people. (Quickly and reassuringly.) But it’s all right. He beamed all over and touched his hat when Morell gave him two shillings. I was on the point of offering him ten. (Candida laughs heartily. Morell comes back with a few letters and newspapers which have come by the midday post.)

CANDIDA. Oh, James, dear, he was going to give the cabman ten shillings — ten shillings for a three minutes’ drive — oh, dear!

MORELL (at the table, glancing through the letters). Never mind her, Marchbanks. The overpaying instinct is a generous one: better than the underpaying instinct, and not so common.

MARCHBANKS (relapsing into dejection). No: cowardice, incompetence. Mrs. Morell’s quite right.

CANDIDA. Of course she is. (She takes up her handbag.) And now I must leave you to James for the present. I suppose you are too much of a poet to know the state a woman finds her house in when she’s been away for three weeks. Give me my rug. (Eugene takes the strapped rug from the couch, and gives it to her. She takes it in her left hand, having the bag in her right.) Now hang my cloak across my arm. (He obeys.) Now my hat. (He puts it into the hand which has the bag.) Now open the door for me. (He hurries up before her and opens the door.) Thanks. (She goes out; and Marchbanks shuts the door.)

MORELL (still busy at the table). You’ll stay to lunch, Marchbanks, of course.

MARCHBANKS (scared). I mustn’t. (He glances quickly at Morell, but at once avoids his frank look, and adds, with obvious disingenuousness) I can’t.

MORELL (over his shoulder). You mean you won’t.

MARCHBANKS (earnestly). No: I should like to, indeed. Thank you very much. But — but —

MORELL (breezily, finishing with the letters and coming close to him). But — but — but — but — bosh! If you’d like to stay, stay. You don’t mean to persuade me you have anything else to do. If you’re shy, go and take a turn in the park and write poetry until half past one; and then come in and have a good feed.

MARCHBANKS. Thank you, I should like that very much. But I really mustn’t. The truth is, Mrs. Morell told me not to. She said she didn’t think you’d ask me to stay to lunch, but that I was to remember, if you did, that you didn’t really want me to. (Plaintively.) She said I’d understand; but I don’t. Please don’t tell her I told you.

MORELL (drolly). Oh, is that all? Won’t my suggestion that you should take a turn in the park meet the difficulty?

MARCHBANKS. How?

MORELL (exploding good-humoredly). Why, you duffer — (But this boisterousness jars himself as well as Eugene. He checks himself, and resumes, with affectionate seriousness) No: I won’t put it in that way. My dear lad: in a happy marriage like ours, there is something very sacred in the return of the wife to her home. (Marchbanks looks quickly at him, half anticipating his meaning.) An old friend or a truly noble and sympathetic soul is not in the way on such occasions; but a chance visitor is. (The hunted, horror-stricken expression comes out with sudden vividness in Eugene’s face as he understands. Morell, occupied with his own thought, goes on without noticing it.) Candida thought I would rather not have you here; but she was wrong. I’m very fond of you, my boy, and I should like you to see for yourself what a happy thing it is to be married as I am.

MARCHBANKS, Happy! — YOUR marriage! You think that! You believe that!

MORELL (buoyantly). I know it, my lad. La Rochefoucauld said that there are convenient marriages, but no delightful ones. You don’t know the comfort of seeing through and through a thundering liar and rotten cynic like that fellow. Ha, ha! Now off with you to the park, and write your poem. Half past one, sharp, mind: we never wait for anybody.

MARCHBANKS (wildly). No: stop: you shan’t. I’ll force it into the light.

MORELL (puzzled). Eh? Force what?

MARCHBANKS. I must speak to you. There is something that must be settled between us.

MORELL (with a whimsical glance at the clock). Now?

MARCHBANKS (passionately). Now. Before you leave this room. (He retreats a few steps, and stands as if to bar Morell’s way to the door.)

MORELL (without moving, and gravely, perceiving now that there is something serious the matter). I’m not going to leave it, my dear boy: I thought YOU were. (Eugene, baffled by his firm tone, turns his back on him, writhing with anger. Morell goes to him and puts his hand on his shoulder strongly and kindly, disregarding his attempt to shake it off) Come: sit down quietly; and tell me what it is. And remember; we are friends, and need not fear that either of us will be anything but patient and kind to the other, whatever we may have to say.

MARCHBANKS (twisting himself round on him). Oh, I am not forgetting myself: I am only (covering his face desperately with his hands) full of horror. (Then, dropping his hands, and thrusting his face forward fiercely at Morell, he goes on threateningly.) You shall see whether this is a time for patience and kindness. (Morell, firm as a rock, looks indulgently at him.) Don’t look at me in that self-complacent way. You think yourself stronger than I am; but I shall stagger you if you have a heart in your breast.

MORELL (powerfully confident). Stagger me, my boy. Out with it.

MARCHBANKS. First —

MORELL. First?

MARCHBANKS. I love your wife.

(Morell recoils, and, after staring at him for a moment in utter amazement, bursts into uncontrollable laughter. Eugene is taken aback, but not disconcerted; and he soon becomes indignant and contemptuous.)

MORELL (sitting down to have his laugh out). Why, my dear child, of course you do. Everybody loves her: they can’t help it. I like it. But (looking up whimsically at him) I say, Eugene: do you think yours is a case to be talked about? You’re under twenty: she’s over thirty. Doesn’t it look rather too like a case of calf love?

MARCHBANKS (vehemently). YOU dare say that of her! You think that way of the love she inspires! It is an insult to her!

MORELL (rising; quickly, in an altered tone). To her! Eugene: take care. I have been patient. I hope to remain patient. But there are some things I won’t allow. Don’t force me to show you the indulgence I should show to a child. Be a man.

MARCHBANKS (with a gesture as if sweeping something behind him). Oh, let us put aside all that cant. It horrifies me when I think of the doses of it she has had to endure in all the weary years during which you have selfishly and blindly sacrificed her to minister to your self-sufficiency — YOU (turning on him) who have not one thought — one sense — in common with her.

MORELL (philosophically). She seems to bear it pretty well. (Looking him straight in the face.) Eugene, my boy: you are making a fool of yourself — a very great fool of yourself. There’s a piece of wholesome plain speaking for you.

MARCHBANKS. Oh, do you think I don’t know all that? Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? (Morell’s gaze wavers for the first time. He instinctively averts his face and stands listening, startled and thoughtful.) They are more true: they are the only things that are true. You are very calm and sensible and moderate with me because you can see that I am a fool about your wife; just as no doubt that old man who was here just now is very wise over your socialism, because he sees that YOU are a fool about it. (Morell’s perplexity deepens markedly. Eugene follows up his advantage, plying him fiercely with questions.) Does that prove you wrong? Does your complacent superiority to me prove that I am wrong?

MORELL (turning on Eugene, who stands his ground). Marchbanks: some devil is putting these words into your mouth. It is easy — terribly easy — to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work. Take care of what you are doing. Take care.

MARCHBANKS (ruthlessly). I know. I’m doing it on purpose. I told you I should stagger you.

(They confront one another threateningly for a moment. Then Morell recovers his dignity.)

MORELL (with noble tenderness). Eugene: listen to me. Some day, I hope and trust, you will be a happy man like me. (Eugene chafes intolerantly, repudiating the worth of his happiness. Morell, deeply insulted, controls himself with fine forbearance, and continues steadily, with great artistic beauty of delivery) You will be married; and you will be working with all your might and valor to make every spot on earth as happy as your own home. You will be one of the makers of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; and — who knows? — you may be a pioneer and master builder where I am only a humble journeyman; for don’t think, my boy, that I cannot see in you, young as you are, promise of higher powers than I can ever pretend to. I well know that it is in the poet that the holy spirit of man — the god within him — is most godlike. It should make you tremble to think of that — to think that the heavy burthen and great gift of a poet may be laid upon you.

MARCHBANKS (unimpressed and remorseless, his boyish crudity of assertion telling sharply against Morell’s oratory). It does not make me tremble. It is the want of it in others that makes me tremble.

MORELL (redoubling his force of style under the stimulus of his genuine feeling and Eugene’s obduracy). Then help to kindle it in them — in ME — not to extinguish it. In the future — when you are as happy as I am — I will be your true brother in the faith. I will help you to believe that God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise. I will help you to believe that every stroke of your work is sowing happiness for the great harvest that all — even the humblest — shall one day reap. And last, but trust me, not least, I will help you to believe that your wife loves you and is happy in her home. We need such help, Marchbanks: we need it greatly and always. There are so many things to make us doubt, if once we let our understanding be troubled. Even at home, we sit as if in camp, encompassed by a hostile army of doubts. Will you play the traitor and let them in on me?

MARCHBANKS (looking round him). Is it like this for her here always? A woman, with a great soul, craving for reality, truth, freedom, and being fed on metaphors, sermons, stale perorations, mere rhetoric. Do you think a woman’s soul can live on your talent for preaching?

MORELL (Stung). Marchbanks: you make it hard for me to control myself. My talent is like yours insofar as it has any real worth at all. It is the gift of finding words for divine truth.

MARCHBANKS (impetuously). It’s the gift of the gab, nothing more and nothing less. What has your knack of fine talking to do with the truth, any more than playing the organ has? I’ve never been in your church; but I’ve been to your political meetings; and I’ve seen you do what’s called rousing the meeting to enthusiasm: that is, you excited them until they behaved exactly as if they were drunk. And their wives looked on and saw clearly enough what fools they were. Oh, it’s an old story: you’ll find it in the Bible. I imagine King David, in his fits of enthusiasm, was very like you. (Stabbing him with the words.) “But his wife despised him in her heart.”

MORELL (wrathfully). Leave my house. Do you hear? (He advances on him threateningly.)

MARCHBANKS (shrinking back against the couch). Let me alone. Don’t touch me. (Morell grasps him powerfully by the lapel of his coat: he cowers down on the sofa and screams passionately.) Stop, Morell, if you strike me, I’ll kill myself. I won’t bear it. (Almost in hysterics.) Let me go. Take your hand away.

MORELL (with slow, emphatic scorn.) You little snivelling, cowardly whelp. (Releasing him.) Go, before you frighten yourself into a fit.

MARCHBANKS (on the sofa, gasping, but relieved by the withdrawal of Morell’s hand). I’m not afraid of you: it’s you who are afraid of me.

MORELL (quietly, as he stands over him). It looks like it, doesn’t it?

MARCHBANKS (with petulant vehemence). Yes, it does. (Morell turns away contemptuously. Eugene scrambles to his feet and follows him.) You think because I shrink from being brutally handled — because (with tears in his voice) I can do nothing but cry with rage when I am met with violence — because I can’t lift a heavy trunk down from the top of a cab like you — because I can’t fight you for your wife as a navvy would: all that makes you think that I’m afraid of you. But you’re wrong. If I haven’t got what you call British pluck, I haven’t British cowardice either: I’m not afraid of a clergyman’s ideas. I’ll fight your ideas. I’ll rescue her from her slavery to them: I’ll pit my own ideas against them. You are driving me out of the house because you daren’t let her choose between your ideas and mine. You are afraid to let me see her again. (Morell, angered, turns suddenly on him. He flies to the door in involuntary dread.) Let me alone, I say. I’m going.

MORELL (with cold scorn). Wait a moment: I am not going to touch you: don’t be afraid. When my wife comes back she will want to know why you have gone. And when she finds that you are never going to cross our threshold again, she will want to have that explained, too. Now I don’t wish to distress her by telling her that you have behaved like a blackguard.

MARCHBANKS (Coming back with renewed vehemence). You shall — you must. If you give any explanation but the true one, you are a liar and a coward. Tell her what I said; and how you were strong and manly, and shook me as a terrier shakes a rat; and how I shrank and was terrified; and how you called me a snivelling little whelp and put me out of the house. If you don’t tell her, I will: I’ll write to her.

MORELL (taken aback.) Why do you want her to know this?

MARCHBANKS (with lyric rapture.) Because she will understand me, and know that I understand her. If you keep back one word of it from her — if you are not ready to lay the truth at her feet as I am — then you will know to the end of your days that she really belongs to me and not to you. Good-bye. (Going.)

MORELL (terribly disquieted). Stop: I will not tell her.

MARCHBANKS (turning near the door). Either the truth or a lie you MUST tell her, if I go.

MORELL (temporizing). Marchbanks: it is sometimes justifiable.

MARCHBANKS (cutting him short). I know — to lie. It will be useless. Good-bye, Mr. Clergyman.

(As he turns finally to the door, it opens and Candida enters in housekeeping attire.)

CANDIDA. Are you going, Eugene?(Looking more observantly at him.) Well, dear me, just look at you, going out into the street in that state! You ARE a poet, certainly. Look at him, James! (She takes him by the coat, and brings him forward to show him to Morell.) Look at his collar! look at his tie! look at his hair! One would think somebody had been throttling you. (The two men guard themselves against betraying their consciousness.) Here! Stand still. (She buttons his collar; ties his neckerchief in a bow; and arranges his hair.) There! Now you look so nice that I think you’d better stay to lunch after all, though I told you you mustn’t. It will be ready in half an hour. (She puts a final touch to the bow. He kisses her hand.) Don’t be silly.

MARCHBANKS. I want to stay, of course — unless the reverend gentleman, your husband, has anything to advance to the contrary.

CANDIDA. Shall he stay, James, if he promises to be a good boy and to help me to lay the table? (Marchbanks turns his head and looks steadfastly at Morell over his shoulder, challenging his answer.)

MORELL (shortly). Oh, yes, certainly: he had better. (He goes to the table and pretends to busy himself with his papers there.)

MARCHBANKS (offering his arm to Candida). Come and lay the table.(She takes it and they go to the door together. As they go out he adds) I am the happiest of men.

MORELL. So was I — an hour ago.

ACT II

The same day. The same room. Late in the afternoon. The spare chair for visitors has been replaced at the table, which is, if possible, more untidy than before. Marchbanks, alone and idle, is trying to find out how the typewriter works. Hearing someone at the door, he steals guiltily away to the window and pretends to be absorbed in the view. Miss Garnett, carrying the notebook in which she takes down Morell’s letters in shorthand from his dictation, sits down at the typewriter and sets to work transcribing them, much too busy to notice Eugene. Unfortunately the first key she strikes sticks.

PROSERPINE. Bother! You’ve been meddling with my typewriter, Mr. Marchbanks; and there’s not the least use in your trying to look as if you hadn’t.

MARCHBANKS (timidly). I’m very sorry, Miss Garnett. I only tried to make it write.

PROSERPINE. Well, you’ve made this key stick.

MARCHBANKS (earnestly). I assure you I didn’t touch the keys. I didn’t, indeed. I only turned a little wheel. (He points irresolutely at the tension wheel.)

PROSERPINE. Oh, now I understand. (She sets the machine to rights, talking volubly all the time.) I suppose you thought it was a sort of barrel-organ. Nothing to do but turn the handle, and it would write a beautiful love letter for you straight off, eh?

MARCHBANKS (seriously). I suppose a machine could be made to write love-letters. They’re all the same, aren’t they!

PROSERPINE (somewhat indignantly: any such discussion, except by way of pleasantry, being outside her code of manners). How do I know? Why do you ask me?

MARCHBANKS. I beg your pardon. I thought clever people — people who can do business and write letters, and that sort of thing — always had love affairs.

PROSERPINE (rising, outraged). Mr. Marchbanks! (She looks severely at him, and marches with much dignity to the bookcase.)

MARCHBANKS (approaching her humbly). I hope I haven’t offended you. Perhaps I shouldn’t have alluded to your love affairs.

PROSERPINE (plucking a blue book from the shelf and turning sharply on him). I haven’t any love affairs. How dare you say such a thing?

MARCHBANKS (simply). Really! Oh, then you are shy, like me. Isn’t that so?

PROSERPINE. Certainly I am not shy. What do you mean?

MARCHBANKS (secretly). You must be: that is the reason there are so few love affairs in the world. We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry Of our hearts; but we dare not utter our longing: we are too shy. (Very earnestly.) Oh, Miss Garnett, what would you not give to be without fear, without shame —

PROSERPINE (scandalized), Well, upon my word!

MARCHBANKS (with petulant impatience). Ah, don’t say those stupid things to me: they don’t deceive me: what use are they? Why are you afraid to be your real self with me? I am just like you.

PROSERPINE. Like me! Pray, are you flattering me or flattering yourself? I don’t feel quite sure which. (She turns to go back to the typewriter.)

MARCHBANKS (stopping her mysteriously). Hush! I go about in search of love; and I find it in unmeasured stores in the bosoms of others. But when I try to ask for it, this horrible shyness strangles me; and I stand dumb, or worse than dumb, saying meaningless things — foolish lies. And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it. (Almost whispering.) It must be asked for: it is like a ghost: it cannot speak unless it is first spoken to. (At his normal pitch, but with deep melancholy.) All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy. That is the world’s tragedy. (With a deep sigh he sits in the spare chair and buries his face in his hands.)

PROSERPINE (amazed, but keeping her wits about her — her point of honor in encounters with strange young men). Wicked people get over that shyness occasionally, don’t they?

MARCHBANKS (scrambling up almost fiercely). Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because they don’t need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give. (He collapses into his seat, and adds, mournfully) But we, who have love, and long to mingle it with the love of others: we cannot utter a word. (Timidly.) You find that, don’t you?

PROSERPINE. Look here: if you don’t stop talking like this, I’ll leave the room, Mr. Marchbanks: I really will. It’s not proper. (She resumes her seat at the typewriter, opening the blue book and preparing to copy a passage from it.)

MARCHBANKS (hopelessly). Nothing that’s worth saying IS proper. (He rises, and wanders about the room in his lost way, saying) I can’t understand you, Miss Garnett. What am I to talk about?

PROSERPINE (snubbing him). Talk about indifferent things, talk about the weather.

MARCHBANKS. Would you stand and talk about indifferent things if a child were by, crying bitterly with hunger?

PROSERPINE. I suppose not.

MARCHBANKS. Well: I can’t talk about indifferent things with my heart crying out bitterly in ITS hunger.

PROSERPINE. Then hold your tongue.

MARCHBANKS. Yes: that is what it always comes to. We hold our tongues. Does that stop the cry of your heart? — for it does cry: doesn’t it? It must, if you have a heart.

PROSERPINE (suddenly rising with her hand pressed on her heart). Oh, it’s no use trying to work while you talk like that. (She leaves her little table and sits on the sofa. Her feelings are evidently strongly worked on.) It’s no business of yours, whether my heart cries or not; but I have a mind to tell you, for all that.

MARCHBANKS. You needn’t. I know already that it must.

PROSERPINE. But mind: if you ever say I said so, I’ll deny it.

MARCHBANKS (compassionately). Yes, I know. And so you haven’t the courage to tell him?

PROSERPINE (bouncing up). HIM! Who?

MARCHBANKS. Whoever he is. The man you love. It might be anybody. The curate, Mr. Mill, perhaps.

PROSERPINE (with disdain). Mr. Mill!!! A fine man to break my heart about, indeed! I’d rather have you than Mr. Mill.

MARCHBANKS (recoiling). No, really — I’m very sorry; but you mustn’t think of that. I —

PROSERPINE. (testily, crossing to the fire and standing at it with her back to him). Oh, don’t be frightened: it’s not you. It’s not any one particular person.

MARCHBANKS. I know. You feel that you could love anybody that offered —

PROSERPINE (exasperated). Anybody that offered! No, I do not. What do you take me for?

MARCHBANKS (discouraged). No use. You won’t make me REAL answers — only those things that everybody says. (He strays to the sofa and sits down disconsolately.)

PROSERPINE (nettled at what she takes to be a disparagement of her manners by an aristocrat). Oh, well, if you want original conversation, you’d better go and talk to yourself.

MARCHBANKS. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it’s horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

PROSERPINE. Wait until Mr. Morell comes. HE’LL talk to you. (Marchbanks shudders.) Oh, you needn’t make wry faces over him: he can talk better than you. (With temper.) He’d talk your little head off. (She is going back angrily to her place, when, suddenly enlightened, he springs up and stops her.)

MARCHBANKS. Ah, I understand now!

PROSERPINE (reddening). What do you understand?

MARCHBANKS. Your secret. Tell me: is it really and truly possible for a woman to love him?

PROSERPINE (as if this were beyond all bounds). Well!!

MARCHBANKS (passionately). No, answer me. I want to know: I MUST know. I can’t understand it. I can see nothing in him but words, pious resolutions, what people call goodness. You can’t love that.

PROSERPINE (attempting to snub him by an air of cool propriety). I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t understand you.

MARCHBANKS (vehemently). You do. You lie —

PROSERPINE. Oh!

MARCHBANKS. You DO understand; and you KNOW. (Determined to have an answer.) Is it possible for a woman to love him?

PROSERPINE (looking him straight in the face.) Yes. (He covers his face with his hands.) Whatever is the matter with you! (He takes down his hands and looks at her. Frightened at the tragic mask presented to her, she hurries past him at the utmost possible distance, keeping her eyes on his face until he turns from her and goes to the child’s chair beside the hearth, where he sits in the deepest dejection. As she approaches the door, it opens and Burgess enters. On seeing him, she ejaculates) Praise heaven, here’s somebody! (and sits down, reassured, at her table. She puts a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter as Burgess crosses to Eugene.)

BURGESS (bent on taking care of the distinguished visitor). Well: so this is the way they leave you to yourself, Mr. Morchbanks. I’ve come to keep you company. (Marchbanks looks up at him in consternation, which is quite lost on him.) James is receivin’ a deppitation in the dinin’ room; and Candy is hupstairs educatin’ of a young stitcher gurl she’s hinterusted in. She’s settin’ there learnin’ her to read out of the “‘Ev’nly Twins.” (Condolingly.) You must find it lonesome here with no one but the typist to talk to. (He pulls round the easy chair above fire, and sits down.)

PROSERPINE (highly incensed). He’ll be all right now that he has the advantage of YOUR polished conversation: that’s one comfort, anyhow. (She begins to typewrite with clattering asperity.)

BURGESS (amazed at her audacity). Hi was not addressin’ myself to you, young woman, that I’m awerr of.

PROSERPINE (tartly, to Marchbanks). Did you ever see worse manners, Mr. Marchbanks?

BURGESS (with pompous severity). Mr. Morchbanks is a gentleman and knows his place, which is more than some people do.

PROSERPINE (fretfully). It’s well you and I are not ladies and gentlemen: I’d talk to you pretty straight if Mr. Marchbanks wasn’t here. (She pulls the letter out of the machine so crossly that it tears.) There, now I’ve spoiled this letter — have to be done all over again. Oh, I can’t contain myself — silly old fathead!

BURGESS (rising, breathless with indignation). Ho! I’m a silly ole fathead, am I? Ho, indeed (gasping). Hall right, my gurl! Hall right. You just wait till I tell that to your employer. You’ll see. I’ll teach you: see if I don’t.

PROSERPINE. I —

BURGESS (cutting her short). No, you’ve done it now. No huse a-talkin’ to me. I’ll let you know who I am. (Proserpine shifts her paper carriage with a defiant bang, and disdainfully goes on with her work.) Don’t you take no notice of her, Mr. Morchbanks. She’s beneath it. (He sits down again loftily.)

MARCHBANKS (miserably nervous and disconcerted). Hadn’t we better change the subject. I — I don’t think Miss Garnett meant anything.

PROSERPINE (with intense conviction). Oh, didn’t I though, just!

BURGESS. I wouldn’t demean myself to take notice on her.

(An electric bell rings twice.)

PROSERPINE (gathering up her note-book and papers). That’s for me. (She hurries out.)

BURGESS (calling after her). Oh, we can spare you. (Somewhat relieved by the triumph of having the last word, and yet half inclined to try to improve on it, he looks after her for a moment; then subsides into his seat by Eugene, and addresses him very confidentially.) Now we’re alone, Mr. Morchbanks, let me give you a friendly ‘int that I wouldn’t give to everybody. ‘Ow long ‘ave you known my son-in-law James here?

MARCHBANKS. I don’t know. I never can remember dates. A few months, perhaps.

BURGESS. Ever notice anything queer about him?

MARCHBANKS. I don’t think so.

BURGESS (impressively). No more you wouldn’t. That’s the danger in it. Well, he’s mad.

MARCHBANKS. Mad!

BURGESS. Mad as a Morch ‘are. You take notice on him and you’ll see.

MARCHBANKS (beginning). But surely that is only because his opinions —

BURGESS (touching him with his forefinger on his knee, and pressing it as if to hold his attention with it). That’s wot I used tee think, Mr. Morchbanks. Hi thought long enough that it was honly ‘is hopinions; though, mind you, hopinions becomes vurry serious things when people takes to hactin on ’em as ‘e does. But that’s not wot I go on. (He looks round to make sure that they are alone, and bends over to Eugene’s ear.) Wot do you think he says to me this mornin’ in this very room?

MARCHBANKS. What?

BURGESS. He sez to me — this is as sure as we’re settin’ here now — he sez: “I’m a fool,” he sez;— “and yore a scounderl” — as cool as possible. Me a scounderl, mind you! And then shook ‘ands with me on it, as if it was to my credit! Do you mean to tell me that that man’s sane?

MORELL. (outside, calling to Proserpine, holding the door open). Get all their names and addresses, Miss Garnett.

PROSERPINE (in the distance). Yes, Mr. Morell.

(Morell comes in, with the deputation’s documents in his hands.)

BURGESS (aside to Marchbanks). Yorr he is. Just you keep your heye on him and see. (Rising momentously.) I’m sorry, James, to ‘ave to make a complaint to you. I don’t want to do it; but I feel I oughter, as a matter o’ right and duty.

MORELL. What’s the matter?

BURGESS. Mr. Morchbanks will bear me out: he was a witness. (Very solemnly.) Your young woman so far forgot herself as to call me a silly ole fat ‘ead.

MORELL (delighted — with tremendous heartiness). Oh, now, isn’t that EXACTLY like Prossy? She’s so frank: she can’t contain herself! Poor Prossy! Ha! Ha!

BURGESS (trembling with rage). And do you hexpec me to put up with it from the like of ‘ER?

MORELL. Pooh, nonsense! you can’t take any notice of it. Never mind. (He goes to the cellaret and puts the papers into one of the drawers.)

BURGESS. Oh, I don’t mind. I’m above it. But is it RIGHT? — that’s what I want to know. Is it right?

MORELL. That’s a question for the Church, not for the laity. Has it done you any harm, that’s the question for you, eh? Of course, it hasn’t. Think no more of it. (He dismisses the subject by going to his place at the table and setting to work at his correspondence.)

BURGESS (aside to Marchbanks). What did I tell you? Mad as a ‘atter. (He goes to the table and asks, with the sickly civility of a hungry man) When’s dinner, James?

MORELL. Not for half an hour yet.

BURGESS (with plaintive resignation). Gimme a nice book to read over the fire, will you, James: thur’s a good chap.

MORELL. What sort of book? A good one?

BURGESS (with almost a yell of remonstrance). Nah-oo! Summat pleasant, just to pass the time. (Morell takes an illustrated paper from the table and offers it. He accepts it humbly.) Thank yer, James. (He goes back to his easy chair at the fire, and sits there at his ease, reading.)

MORELL (as he writes). Candida will come to entertain you presently. She has got rid of her pupil. She is filling the lamps.

MARCHBANKS (starting up in the wildest consternation). But that will soil her hands. I can’t bear that, Morell: it’s a shame. I’ll go and fill them. (He makes for the door.)

MORELL. You’d better not. (Marchbanks stops irresolutely.) She’d only set you to clean my boots, to save me the trouble of doing it myself in the morning.

BURGESS (with grave disapproval). Don’t you keep a servant now, James?

MORELL. Yes; but she isn’t a slave; and the house looks as if I kept three. That means that everyone has to lend a hand. It’s not a bad plan: Prossy and I can talk business after breakfast whilst we’re washing up. Washing up’s no trouble when there are two people to do it.

MARCHBANKS (tormentedly). Do you think every woman is as coarse-grained as Miss Garnett?

BURGESS (emphatically). That’s quite right, Mr. Morchbanks. That’s quite right. She IS corse-grained.

MORELL (quietly and significantly). Marchbanks!

MARCHBANKS. Yes.

MORELL. How many servants does your father keep?

MARCHBANKS. Oh, I don’t know. (He comes back uneasily to the sofa, as if to get as far as possible from Morell’s questioning, and sits down in great agony of mind, thinking of the paraffin.)

MORELL. (very gravely). So many that you don’t know. (More aggressively.) Anyhow, when there’s anything coarse-grained to be done, you ring the bell and throw it on to somebody else, eh? That’s one of the great facts in YOUR existence, isn’t it?

MARCHBANKS. Oh, don’t torture me. The one great fact now is that your wife’s beautiful fingers are dabbling in paraffin oil, and that you are sitting here comfortably preaching about it — everlasting preaching, preaching, words, words, words.

BURGESS (intensely appreciating this retort). Ha, ha! Devil a better. (Radiantly.) ‘Ad you there, James, straight.

(Candida comes in, well aproned, with a reading lamp trimmed, filled, and ready for lighting. She places it on the table near Morell, ready for use.)

CANDIDA (brushing her finger tips together with a slight twitch of her nose). If you stay with us, Eugene, I think I will hand over the lamps to you.

MARCHBANKS. I will stay on condition that you hand over all the rough work to me.

CANDIDA. That’s very gallant; but I think I should like to see how you do it first. (Turning to Morell.) James: you’ve not been looking after the house properly.

MORELL. What have I done — or not done — my love?

CANDIDA (with serious vexation). My own particular pet scrubbing brush has been used for blackleading. (A heart-breaking wail bursts from Marchbanks. Burgess looks round, amazed. Candida hurries to the sofa.) What’s the matter? Are you ill, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS. No, not ill. Only horror, horror, horror! (He bows his head on his hands.)

BURGESS (shocked). What! Got the ‘orrors, Mr. Morchbanks! Oh, that’s bad, at your age. You must leave it off grajally.

CANDIDA (reassured). Nonsense, papa. It’s only poetic horror, isn’t it, Eugene? (Petting him.)

BURGESS (abashed). Oh, poetic ‘orror, is it? I beg your pordon, I’m shore. (He turns to the fire again, deprecating his hasty conclusion.)

CANDIDA. What is it, Eugene — the scrubbing brush? (He shudders.) Well, there! never mind. (She sits down beside him.) Wouldn’t you like to present me with a nice new one, with an ivory back inlaid with mother-of-pearl?

MARCHBANKS (softly and musically, but sadly and longingly). No, not a scrubbing brush, but a boat — a tiny shallop to sail away in, far from the world, where the marble floors are washed by the rain and dried by the sun, where the south wind dusts the beautiful green and purple carpets. Or a chariot — to carry us up into the sky, where the lamps are stars, and don’t need to be filled with paraffin oil every day.

MORELL (harshly). And where there is nothing to do but to be idle, selfish and useless.

CANDIDA (jarred). Oh, James, how could you spoil it all!

MARCHBANKS (firing up). Yes, to be idle, selfish and useless: that is to be beautiful and free and happy: hasn’t every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves? That’s my ideal: what’s yours, and that of all the dreadful people who live in these hideous rows of houses? Sermons and scrubbing brushes! With you to preach the sermon and your wife to scrub.

CANDIDA (quaintly). He cleans the boots, Eugene. You will have to clean them to-morrow for saying that about him.

MARCHBANKS. Oh! don’t talk about boots. Your feet should be beautiful on the mountains.

CANDIDA. My feet would not be beautiful on the Hackney Road without boots.

BURGESS (scandalized). Come, Candy, don’t be vulgar. Mr. Morchbanks ain’t accustomed to it. You’re givin’ him the ‘orrors again. I mean the poetic ones.

(Morell is silent. Apparently he is busy with his letters: really he is puzzling with misgiving over his new and alarming experience that the surer he is of his moral thrusts, the more swiftly and effectively Eugene parries them. To find himself beginning to fear a man whom he does not respect affects him bitterly.)

(Miss Garnett comes in with a telegram.)

PROSERPINE (handing the telegram to Morell). Reply paid. The boy’s waiting. (To Candida, coming back to her machine and sitting down.) Maria is ready for you now in the kitchen, Mrs. Morell. (Candida rises.) The onions have come.

MARCHBANKS (convulsively). Onions!

CANDIDA. Yes, onions. Not even Spanish ones — nasty little red onions. You shall help me to slice them. Come along.

(She catches him by the wrist and runs out, pulling him after her. Burgess rises in consternation, and stands aghast on the hearth-rug, staring after them.)

BURGESS. Candy didn’t oughter ‘andle a peer’s nevvy like that. It’s goin’ too fur with it. Lookee ‘ere, James: do ‘e often git taken queer like that?

MORELL (shortly, writing a telegram). I don’t know.

BURGESS (sentimentally). He talks very pretty. I allus had a turn for a bit of potery. Candy takes arter me that-a-way: huse ter make me tell her fairy stories when she was on’y a little kiddy not that ‘igh (indicating a stature of two feet or thereabouts).

MORELL (preoccupied). Ah, indeed. (He blots the telegram, and goes out.)

PROSERPINE. Used you to make the fairy stories up out of your own head?

(Burgess, not deigning to reply, strikes an attitude of the haughtiest disdain on the hearth-rug.)

PROSERPINE (calmly). I should never have supposed you had it in you. By the way, I’d better warn you, since you’ve taken such a fancy to Mr. Marchbanks. He’s mad.

BURGESS. Mad! Wot! ‘Im too!!

PROSERPINE. Mad as a March hare. He did frighten me, I can tell you just before you came in that time. Haven’t you noticed the queer things he says?

BURGESS. So that’s wot the poetic ‘orrors means. Blame me if it didn’t come into my head once or twyst that he must be off his chump! (He crosses the room to the door, lifting up his voice as he goes.) Well, this is a pretty sort of asylum for a man to be in, with no one but you to take care of him!

PROSERPINE (as he passes her). Yes, what a dreadful thing it would be if anything happened to YOU!

BURGESS (loftily). Don’t you address no remarks to me. Tell your hemployer that I’ve gone into the garden for a smoke.

PROSERPINE (mocking). Oh!

(Before Burgess can retort, Morell comes back.)

BURGESS (sentimentally). Goin’ for a turn in the garden to smoke, James.

MORELL (brusquely). Oh, all right, all right. (Burgess goes out pathetically in the character of the weary old man. Morell stands at the table, turning over his papers, and adding, across to Proserpine, half humorously, half absently) Well, Miss Prossy, why have you been calling my father-in-law names?

PROSERPINE (blushing fiery red, and looking quickly up at him, half scared, half reproachful). I — (She bursts into tears.)

MORELL (with tender gaiety, leaning across the table towards her, and consoling her). Oh, come, come, come! Never mind, Pross: he IS a silly old fathead, isn’t he?

(With an explosive sob, she makes a dash at the door, and vanishes, banging it. Morell, shaking his head resignedly, sighs, and goes wearily to his chair, where he sits down and sets to work, looking old and careworn.)

(Candida comes in. She has finished her household work and taken of the apron. She at once notices his dejected appearance, and posts herself quietly at the spare chair, looking down at him attentively; but she says nothing.)

MORELL (looking up, but with his pen raised ready to resume his work). Well? Where is Eugene?

CANDIDA. Washing his hands in the scullery — under the tap. He will make an excellent cook if he can only get over his dread of Maria.

MORELL (shortly). Ha! No doubt. (He begins writing again.)

CANDIDA (going nearer, and putting her hand down softly on his to stop him, as she says). Come here, dear. Let me look at you. (He drops his pen and yields himself at her disposal. She makes him rise and brings him a little away from the table, looking at him critically all the time.) Turn your face to the light. (She places him facing the window.) My boy is not looking well. Has he been overworking?

MORELL. Nothing more than usual.

CANDIDA. He looks very pale, and grey, and wrinkled, and old. (His melancholy deepens; and she attacks it with wilful gaiety.) Here (pulling him towards the easy chair) you’ve done enough writing for to-day. Leave Prossy to finish it and come and talk to me.

MORELL. But —

CANDIDA. Yes, I MUST be talked to sometimes. (She makes him sit down, and seats herself on the carpet beside his knee.) Now (patting his hand) you’re beginning to look better already. Why don’t you give up all this tiresome overworking — going out every night lecturing and talking? Of course what you say is all very true and very right; but it does no good: they don’t mind what you say to them one little bit. Of course they agree with you; but what’s the use of people agreeing with you if they go and do just the opposite of what you tell them the moment your back is turned? Look at our congregation at St. Dominic’s! Why do they come to hear you talking about Christianity every Sunday? Why, just because they’ve been so full of business and money-making for six days that they want to forget all about it and have a rest on the seventh, so that they can go back fresh and make money harder than ever! You positively help them at it instead of hindering them.

MORELL (with energetic seriousness). You know very well, Candida, that I often blow them up soundly for that. But if there is nothing in their church-going but rest and diversion, why don’t they try something more amusing — more self-indulgent? There must be some good in the fact that they prefer St. Dominic’s to worse places on Sundays.

CANDIDA. Oh, the worst places aren’t open; and even if they were, they daren’t be seen going to them. Besides, James, dear, you preach so splendidly that it’s as good as a play for them. Why do you think the women are so enthusiastic?

MORELL (shocked). Candida!

CANDIDA. Oh, I know. You silly boy: you think it’s your Socialism and your religion; but if it was that, they’d do what you tell them instead of only coming to look at you. They all have Prossy’s complaint.

MORELL. Prossy’s complaint! What do you mean, Candida?

CANDIDA. Yes, Prossy, and all the other secretaries you ever had. Why does Prossy condescend to wash up the things, and to peel potatoes and abase herself in all manner of ways for six shillings a week less than she used to get in a city office? She’s in love with you, James: that’s the reason. They’re all in love with you. And you are in love with preaching because you do it so beautifully. And you think it’s all enthusiasm for the kingdom of Heaven on earth; and so do they. You dear silly!

MORELL. Candida: what dreadful, what soul-destroying cynicism! Are you jesting? Or — can it be? — are you jealous?

CANDIDA (with curious thoughtfulness). Yes, I feel a little jealous sometimes.

MORELL (incredulously). What! Of Prossy?

CANDIDA (laughing). No, no, no, no. Not jealous of anybody. Jealous for somebody else, who is not loved as he ought to be.

MORELL. Me!

CANDIDA. You! Why, you’re spoiled with love and worship: you get far more than is good for you. No: I mean Eugene.

MORELL (startled). Eugene!

CANDIDA. It seems unfair that all the love should go to you, and none to him, although he needs it so much more than you do. (A convulsive movement shakes him in spite of himself.) What’s the matter? Am I worrying you?

MORELL (hastily). Not at all. (Looking at her with troubled intensity.) You know that I have perfect confidence in you, Candida.

CANDIDA. You vain thing! Are you so sure of your irresistible attractions?

MORELL. Candida: you are shocking me. I never thought of my attractions. I thought of your goodness — your purity. That is what I confide in.

CANDIDA. What a nasty, uncomfortable thing to say to me! Oh, you ARE a clergyman, James — a thorough clergyman.

MORELL (turning away from her, heart-stricken). So Eugene says.

CANDIDA (with lively interest, leaning over to him with her arms on his knee). Eugene’s always right. He’s a wonderful boy: I have grown fonder and fonder of him all the time I was away. Do you know, James, that though he has not the least suspicion of it himself, he is ready to fall madly in love with me?

MORELL (grimly). Oh, he has no suspicion of it himself, hasn’t he?

CANDIDA. Not a bit. (She takes her arms from his knee, and turns thoughtfully, sinking into a more restful attitude with her hands in her lap.) Some day he will know when he is grown up and experienced, like you. And he will know that I must have known. I wonder what he will think of me then.

MORELL. No evil, Candida. I hope and trust, no evil.

CANDIDA (dubiously). That will depend.

MORELL (bewildered). Depend!

CANDIDA (looking at him). Yes: it will depend on what happens to him. (He look vacantly at her.) Don’t you see? It will depend on how he comes to learn what love really is. I mean on the sort of woman who will teach it to him.

MORELL (quite at a loss). Yes. No. I don’t know what you mean.

CANDIDA (explaining). If he learns it from a good woman, then it will be all right: he will forgive me.

MORELL. Forgive!

CANDIDA. But suppose he learns it from a bad woman, as so many men do, especially poetic men, who imagine all women are angels! Suppose he only discovers the value of love when he has thrown it away and degraded himself in his ignorance. Will he forgive me then, do you think?

MORELL. Forgive you for what?

CANDIDA (realizing how stupid he is, and a little disappointed, though quite tenderly so). Don’t you understand? (He shakes his head. She turns to him again, so as to explain with the fondest intimacy.) I mean, will he forgive me for not teaching him myself? For abandoning him to the bad women for the sake of my goodness — my purity, as you call it? Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity! I would give them both to poor Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were nothing else to restrain me. Put your trust in my love for you, James, for if that went, I should care very little for your sermons — mere phrases that you cheat yourself and others with every day. (She is about to rise.)

MORELL. HIS words!

CANDIDA (checking herself quickly in the act of getting up, so that she is on her knees, but upright). Whose words?

MORELL. Eugene’s.

CANDIDA (delighted). He is always right. He understands you; he understands me; he understands Prossy; and you, James — you understand nothing. (She laughs, and kisses him to console him. He recoils as if stung, and springs up.)

MORELL. How can you bear to do that when — oh, Candida (with anguish in his voice) I had rather you had plunged a grappling iron into my heart than given me that kiss.

CANDIDA (rising, alarmed). My dear: what’s the matter?

MORELL (frantically waving her off). Don’t touch me.

CANDIDA (amazed). James!

(They are interrupted by the entrance of Marchbanks, with Burgess, who stops near the door, staring, whilst Eugene hurries forward between them.)

MARCHBANKS. Is anything the matter?

MORELL (deadly white, putting an iron constraint on himself). Nothing but this: that either you were right this morning, or Candida is mad.

BURGESS (in loudest protest). Wot! Candy mad too! Oh, come, come, come! (He crosses the room to the fireplace, protesting as he goes, and knocks the ashes out of his pipe on the bars. Morell sits down desperately, leaning forward to hide his face, and interlacing his fingers rigidly to keep them steady.)

CANDIDA (to Morell, relieved and laughing). Oh, you’re only shocked! Is that all? How conventional all you unconventional people are!

BURGESS. Come: be’ave yourself, Candy. What’ll Mr. Morchbanks think of you?

CANDIDA. This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does. But now, because I have just thought something different! — look at him — just look!

(She points to Morell, greatly amused. Eugene looks, and instantly presses his band on his heart, as if some deadly pain had shot through it, and sits down on the sofa like a man witnessing a tragedy.)

BURGESS (on the hearth-rug). Well, James, you certainly ain’t as himpressive lookin’ as usu’l.

MORELL (with a laugh which is half a sob). I suppose not. I beg all your pardons: I was not conscious of making a fuss. (Pulling himself together.) Well, well, well, well, well! (He goes back to his place at the table, setting to work at his papers again with resolute cheerfulness.)

CANDIDA (going to the sofa and sitting beside Marchbanks, still in a bantering humor). Well, Eugene, why are you so sad? Did the onions make you cry?

(Morell cannot prevent himself from watching them.)

MARCHBANKS (aside to her). It is your cruelty. I hate cruelty. It is a horrible thing to see one person make another suffer.

CANDIDA (petting him ironically). Poor boy, have I been cruel? Did I make it slice nasty little red onions?

MARCHBANKS (earnestly). Oh, stop, stop: I don’t mean myself. You have made him suffer frightfully. I feel his pain in my own heart. I know that it is not your fault — it is something that must happen; but don’t make light of it. I shudder when you torture him and laugh.

CANDIDA (incredulously). I torture James! Nonsense, Eugene: how you exaggerate! Silly! (She looks round at Morell, who hastily resumes his writing. She goes to him and stands behind his chair, bending over him.) Don’t work any more, dear. Come and talk to us.

MORELL (affectionately but bitterly). Ah no: I can’t talk. I can only preach.

CANDIDA (caressing him). Well, come and preach.

BURGESS (strongly remonstrating). Aw, no, Candy. ‘Ang it all! (Lexy Mill comes in, looking anxious and important.)

LEXY (hastening to shake hands with Candida). How do you do, Mrs. Morell? So glad to see you back again.

CANDIDA. Thank you, Lexy. You know Eugene, don’t you?

LEXY. Oh, yes. How do you do, Marchbanks?

MARCHBANKS. Quite well, thanks.

LEXY (to Morell). I’ve just come from the Guild of St. Matthew. They are in the greatest consternation about your telegram. There’s nothing wrong, is there?

CANDIDA. What did you telegraph about, James?

LEXY (to Candida). He was to have spoken for them tonight. They’ve taken the large hall in Mare Street and spent a lot of money on posters. Morell’s telegram was to say he couldn’t come. It came on them like a thunderbolt.

CANDIDA (surprized, and beginning to suspect something wrong). Given up an engagement to speak!

BURGESS. First time in his life, I’ll bet. Ain’ it, Candy?

LEXY (to Morell). They decided to send an urgent telegram to you asking whether you could not change your mind. Have you received it?

MORELL (with restrained impatience). Yes, yes: I got it.

LEXY. It was reply paid.

MORELL. Yes, I know. I answered it. I can’t go.

CANDIDA. But why, James?

MORELL (almost fiercely). Because I don’t choose. These people forget that I am a man: they think I am a talking machine to be turned on for their pleasure every evening of my life. May I not have ONE night at home, with my wife, and my friends?

(They are all amazed at this outburst, except Eugene. His expression remains unchanged.)

CANDIDA. Oh, James, you know you’ll have an attack of bad conscience to-morrow; and I shall have to suffer for that.

LEXY (intimidated, but urgent). I know, of course, that they make the most unreasonable demands on you. But they have been telegraphing all over the place for another speaker: and they can get nobody but the President of the Agnostic League.

MORELL (promptly). Well, an excellent man. What better do they want?

LEXY. But he always insists so powerfully on the divorce of Socialism from Christianity. He will undo all the good we have been doing. Of course you know best; but — (He hesitates.)

CANDIDA (coaxingly). Oh, DO go, James. We’ll all go.

BURGESS (grumbling). Look ‘ere, Candy! I say! Let’s stay at home by the fire, comfortable. He won’t need to be more’n a couple-o’-hour away.

CANDIDA. You’ll be just as comfortable at the meeting. We’ll all sit on the platform and be great people.

EUGENE (terrified). Oh, please don’t let us go on the platform. No — everyone will stare at us — I couldn’t. I’ll sit at the back of the room.

CANDIDA. Don’t be afraid. They’ll be too busy looking at James to notice you.

MORELL (turning his head and looking meaningly at her over his shoulder). Prossy’s complaint, Candida! Eh?

CANDIDA (gaily). Yes.

BURGESS (mystified). Prossy’s complaint. Wot are you talking about, James?

MORELL (not heeding him, rises; goes to the door; and holds it open, shouting in a commanding voice). Miss Garnett.

PROSERPINE (in the distance). Yes, Mr. Morell. Coming. (They all wait, except Burgess, who goes stealthily to Lexy and draws him aside.)

BURGESS. Listen here, Mr. Mill. Wot’s Prossy’s complaint? Wot’s wrong with ‘er?

LEXY (confidentially). Well, I don’t exactly know; but she spoke very strangely to me this morning. I’m afraid she’s a little out of her mind sometimes.

BURGESS (overwhelmed). Why, it must be catchin’! Four in the same ‘ouse! (He goes back to the hearth, quite lost before the instability of the human intellect in a clergyman’s house.)

PROSERPINE (appearing on the threshold). What is it, Mr. Morell?

MORELL. Telegraph to the Guild of St. Matthew that I am coming.

PROSERPINE (surprised). Don’t they expect you?

MORELL (peremptorily). Do as I tell you.

(Proserpine frightened, sits down at her typewriter, and obeys. Morell goes across to Burgess, Candida watching his movements all the time with growing wonder and misgiving.)

MORELL. Burgess: you don’t want to come?

BURGESS (in deprecation). Oh, don’t put it like that, James. It’s only that it ain’t Sunday, you know.

MORELL. I’m sorry. I thought you might like to be introduced to the chairman. He’s on the Works Committee of the County Council and has some influence in the matter of contracts. (Burgess wakes up at once. Morell, expecting as much, waits a moment, and says) Will you come?

BURGESS (with enthusiasm). Course I’ll come, James. Ain’ it always a pleasure to ‘ear you.

MORELL (turning from him). I shall want you to take some notes at the meeting, Miss Garnett, if you have no other engagement. (She nods, afraid to speak.) You are coming, Lexy, I suppose.

LEXY. Certainly.

CANDIDA. We are all coming, James.

MORELL. No: you are not coming; and Eugene is not coming. You will stay here and entertain him — to celebrate your return home. (Eugene rises, breathless.)

CANDIDA. But James —

MORELL (authoritatively). I insist. You do not want to come; and he does not want to come. (Candida is about to protest.) Oh, don’t concern yourselves: I shall have plenty of people without you: your chairs will be wanted by unconverted people who have never heard me before.

CANDIDA (troubled). Eugene: wouldn’t you like to come?

MORELL. I should be afraid to let myself go before Eugene: he is so critical of sermons. (Looking at him.) He knows I am afraid of him: he told me as much this morning. Well, I shall show him how much afraid I am by leaving him here in your custody, Candida.

MARCHBANKS (to himself, with vivid feeling). That’s brave. That’s beautiful. (He sits down again listening with parted lips.)

CANDIDA (with anxious misgiving). But — but — Is anything the matter, James? (Greatly troubled.) I can’t understand —

MORELL. Ah, I thought it was I who couldn’t understand, dear. (He takes her tenderly in his arms and kisses her on the forehead; then looks round quietly at Marchbanks.)

ACT III

Late in the evening. Past ten. The curtains are drawn, and the lamps lighted. The typewriter is in its case; the large table has been cleared and tidied; everything indicates that the day’s work is done.

Candida and Marchbanks are seated at the fire. The reading lamp is on the mantelshelf above Marchbanks, who is sitting on the small chair reading aloud from a manuscript. A little pile of manuscripts and a couple of volumes of poetry are on the carpet beside him. Candida is in the easy chair with the poker, a light brass one, upright in her hand. She is leaning back and looking at the point of it curiously, with her feet stretched towards the blaze and her heels resting on the fender, profoundly unconscious of her appearance and surroundings.

MARCHBANKS (breaking off in his recitation): Every poet that ever lived has put that thought into a sonnet. He must: he can’t help it. (He looks to her for assent, and notices her absorption in the poker.) Haven’t you been listening? (No response.) Mrs. Morell!

CANDIDA (starting). Eh?

MARCHBANKS. Haven’t you been listening?

CANDIDA (with a guilty excess of politeness). Oh, yes. It’s very nice. Go on, Eugene. I’m longing to hear what happens to the angel.

MARCHBANKS (crushed — the manuscript dropping from his hand to the floor). I beg your pardon for boring you.

CANDIDA. But you are not boring me, I assure you. Please go on. Do, Eugene.

MARCHBANKS. I finished the poem about the angel quarter of an hour ago. I’ve read you several things since.

CANDIDA (remorsefully). I’m so sorry, Eugene. I think the poker must have fascinated me. (She puts it down.)

MARCHBANKS. It made me horribly uneasy.

CANDIDA. Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have put it down at once.

MARCHBANKS. I was afraid of making you uneasy, too. It looked as if it were a weapon. If I were a hero of old, I should have laid my drawn sword between us. If Morell had come in he would have thought you had taken up the poker because there was no sword between us.

CANDIDA (wondering). What? (With a puzzled glance at him.) I can’t quite follow that. Those sonnets of yours have perfectly addled me. Why should there be a sword between us?

MARCHBANKS (evasively). Oh, never mind. (He stoops to pick up the manuscript.)

CANDIDA. Put that down again, Eugene. There are limits to my appetite for poetry — even your poetry. You’ve been reading to me for more than two hours — ever since James went out. I want to talk.

MARCHBANKS (rising, scared). No: I mustn’t talk. (He looks round him in his lost way, and adds, suddenly) I think I’ll go out and take a walk in the park. (Making for the door.)

CANDIDA. Nonsense: it’s shut long ago. Come and sit down on the hearth-rug, and talk moonshine as you usually do. I want to be amused. Don’t you want to?

MARCHBANKS (in half terror, half rapture). Yes.

CANDIDA. Then come along. (She moves her chair back a little to make room. He hesitates; then timidly stretches himself on the hearth-rug, face upwards, and throws back his head across her knees, looking up at her.)

MARCHBANKS. Oh, I’ve been so miserable all the evening, because I was doing right. Now I’m doing wrong; and I’m happy.

CANDIDA (tenderly amused at him). Yes: I’m sure you feel a great grown up wicked deceiver — quite proud of yourself, aren’t you?

MARCHBANKS (raising his head quickly and turning a little to look round at her). Take care. I’m ever so much older than you, if you only knew. (He turns quite over on his knees, with his hands clasped and his arms on her lap, and speaks with growing impulse, his blood beginning to stir.) May I say some wicked things to you?

CANDIDA (without the least fear or coldness, quite nobly, and with perfect respect for his passion, but with a touch of her wise-hearted maternal humor). No. But you may say anything you really and truly feel. Anything at all, no matter what it is. I am not afraid, so long as it is your real self that speaks, and not a mere attitude — a gallant attitude, or a wicked attitude, or even a poetic attitude. I put you on your honor and truth. Now say whatever you want to.

MARCHBANKS (the eager expression vanishing utterly from his lips and nostrils as his eyes light up with pathetic spirituality). Oh, now I can’t say anything: all the words I know belong to some attitude or other — all except one.

CANDIDA. What one is that?

MARCHBANKS (softly, losing himself in the music of the name). Candida, Candida, Candida, Candida, Candida. I must say that now, because you have put me on my honor and truth; and I never think or feel Mrs. Morell: it is always Candida.

CANDIDA. Of course. And what have you to say to Candida?

MARCHBANKS. Nothing, but to repeat your name a thousand times. Don’t you feel that every time is a prayer to you?

CANDIDA. Doesn’t it make you happy to be able to pray?

MARCHBANKS. Yes, very happy.

CANDIDA. Well, that happiness is the answer to your prayer. Do you want anything more?

MARCHBANKS (in beatitude). No: I have come into heaven, where want is unknown.

(Morell comes in. He halts on the threshold, and takes in the scene at a glance.)

MORELL (grave and self-contained). I hope I don’t disturb you. (Candida starts up violently, but without the smallest embarrassment, laughing at herself. Eugene, still kneeling, saves himself from falling by putting his hands on the seat of the chair, and remains there, staring open mouthed at Morell.)

CANDIDA (as she rises). Oh, James, how you startled me! I was so taken up with Eugene that I didn’t hear your latch-key. How did the meeting go off? Did you speak well?

MORELL. I have never spoken better in my life.

CANDIDA. That was first rate! How much was the collection?

MORELL. I forgot to ask.

CANDIDA (to Eugene). He must have spoken splendidly, or he would never have forgotten that. (To Morell.) Where are all the others?

MORELL. They left long before I could get away: I thought I should never escape. I believe they are having supper somewhere.

CANDIDA (in her domestic business tone). Oh; in that case, Maria may go to bed. I’ll tell her. (She goes out to the kitchen.)

MORELL (looking sternly down at Marchbanks). Well?

MARCHBANKS (squatting cross-legged on the hearth-rug, and actually at ease with Morell — even impishly humorous). Well?

MORELL. Have you anything to tell me?

MARCHBANKS. Only that I have been making a fool of myself here in private whilst you have been making a fool of yourself in public.

MORELL. Hardly in the same way, I think.

MARCHBANKS (scrambling up — eagerly). The very, very, VERY same way. I have been playing the good man just like you. When you began your heroics about leaving me here with Candida —

MORELL (involuntarily). Candida?

MARCHBANKS. Oh, yes: I’ve got that far. Heroics are infectious: I caught the disease from you. I swore not to say a word in your absence that I would not have said a month ago in your presence.

MORELL. Did you keep your oath?

MARCHBANKS. (suddenly perching himself grotesquely on the easy chair). I was ass enough to keep it until about ten minutes ago. Up to that moment I went on desperately reading to her — reading my own poems — anybody’s poems — to stave off a conversation. I was standing outside the gate of Heaven, and refusing to go in. Oh, you can’t think how heroic it was, and how uncomfortable! Then —

MORELL (steadily controlling his suspense). Then?

MARCHBANKS (prosaically slipping down into a quite ordinary attitude in the chair). Then she couldn’t bear being read to any longer.

MORELL. And you approached the gate of Heaven at last?

MARCHBANKS. Yes.

MORELL. Well? (Fiercely.) Speak, man: have you no feeling for me?

MARCHBANKS (softly and musically). Then she became an angel; and there was a flaming sword that turned every way, so that I couldn’t go in; for I saw that that gate was really the gate of Hell.

MORELL (triumphantly). She repulsed you!

MARCHBANKS (rising in wild scorn). No, you fool: if she had done that I should never have seen that I was in Heaven already. Repulsed me! You think that would have saved me — virtuous indignation! Oh, you are not worthy to live in the same world with her. (He turns away contemptuously to the other side of the room.)

MORELL (who has watched him quietly without changing his place). Do you think you make yourself more worthy by reviling me, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS. Here endeth the thousand and first lesson. Morell: I don’t think much of your preaching after all: I believe I could do it better myself. The man I want to meet is the man that Candida married.

MORELL. The man that — ? Do you mean me?

MARCHBANKS. I don’t mean the Reverend James Mavor Morell, moralist and windbag. I mean the real man that the Reverend James must have hidden somewhere inside his black coat — the man that Candida loved. You can’t make a woman like Candida love you by merely buttoning your collar at the back instead of in front.

MORELL (boldly and steadily). When Candida promised to marry me, I was the same moralist and windbag that you now see. I wore my black coat; and my collar was buttoned behind instead of in front. Do you think she would have loved me any the better for being insincere in my profession?

MARCHBANKS (on the sofa hugging his ankles). Oh, she forgave you, just as she forgives me for being a coward, and a weakling, and what you call a snivelling little whelp and all the rest of it. (Dreamily.) A woman like that has divine insight: she loves our souls, and not our follies and vanities and illusions, or our collars and coats, or any other of the rags and tatters we are rolled up in. (He reflects on this for an instant; then turns intently to question Morell.) What I want to know is how you got past the flaming sword that stopped me.

MORELL (meaningly). Perhaps because I was not interrupted at the end of ten minutes.

MARCHBANKS (taken aback). What!

MORELL. Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.

MARCHBANKS. It’s false: there can he dwell for ever and there only. It’s in the other moments that he can find no rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. Where would you have me spend my moments, if not on the summits?

MORELL. In the scullery, slicing onions and filling lamps.

MARCHBANKS. Or in the pulpit, scrubbing cheap earthenware souls?

MORELL. Yes, that, too. It was there that I earned my golden moment, and the right, in that moment, to ask her to love me. I did not take the moment on credit; nor did I use it to steal another man’s happiness.

MARCHBANKS (rather disgustedly, trotting back towards the fireplace). I have no doubt you conducted the transaction as honestly as if you were buying a pound of cheese. (He stops on the brink of the hearth-rug and adds, thoughtfully, to himself, with his back turned to Morell) I could only go to her as a beggar.

MORELL (starting). A beggar dying of cold — asking for her shawl?

MARCHBANKS (turning, surprised). Thank you for touching up my poetry. Yes, if you like, a beggar dying of cold asking for her shawl.

MORELL (excitedly). And she refused. Shall I tell you why she refused? I CAN tell you, on her own authority. It was because of —

MARCHBANKS. She didn’t refuse.

MORELL. Not!

MARCHBANKS. She offered me all I chose to ask for, her shawl, her wings, the wreath of stars on her head, the lilies in her hand, the crescent moon beneath her feet —

MORELL (seizing him). Out with the truth, man: my wife is my wife: I want no more of your poetic fripperies. I know well that if I have lost her love and you have gained it, no law will bind her.

MARCHBANKS (quaintly, without fear or resistance). Catch me by the shirt collar, Morell: she will arrange it for me afterwards as she did this morning. (With quiet rapture.) I shall feel her hands touch me.

MORELL. You young imp, do you know how dangerous it is to say that to me? Or (with a sudden misgiving) has something made you brave?

MARCHBANKS. I’m not afraid now. I disliked you before: that was why I shrank from your touch. But I saw to-day — when she tortured you — that you love her. Since then I have been your friend: you may strangle me if you like.

MORELL (releasing him). Eugene: if that is not a heartless lie — if you have a spark of human feeling left in you — will you tell me what has happened during my absence?

MARCHBANKS. What happened! Why, the flaming sword — (Morell stamps with impatience.) Well, in plain prose, I loved her so exquisitely that I wanted nothing more than the happiness of being in such love. And before I had time to come down from the highest summits, you came in.

MORELL (suffering deeply). So it is still unsettled — still the misery of doubt.

MARCHBANKS. Misery! I am the happiest of men. I desire nothing now but her happiness. (With dreamy enthusiasm.) Oh, Morell, let us both give her up. Why should she have to choose between a wretched little nervous disease like me, and a pig-headed parson like you? Let us go on a pilgrimage, you to the east and I to the west, in search of a worthy lover for her — some beautiful archangel with purple wings —

MORELL. Some fiddlestick. Oh, if she is mad enough to leave me for you, who will protect her? Who will help her? who will work for her? who will be a father to her children? (He sits down distractedly on the sofa, with his elbows on his knees and his head propped on his clenched fists.)

MARCHBANKS (snapping his fingers wildly). She does not ask those silly questions. It is she who wants somebody to protect, to help, to work for — somebody to give her children to protect, to help and to work for. Some grown up man who has become as a little child again. Oh, you fool, you fool, you triple fool! I am the man, Morell: I am the man. (He dances about excitedly, crying.) You don’t understand what a woman is. Send for her, Morell: send for her and let her choose between — (The door opens and Candida enters. He stops as if petrified.)

CANDIDA (amazed, on the threshold). What on earth are you at, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS (oddly). James and I are having a preaching match; and he is getting the worst of it. (Candida looks quickly round at Morell. Seeing that he is distressed, she hurries down to him, greatly vexed, speaking with vigorous reproach to Marchbanks.)

CANDIDA. You have been annoying him. Now I won’t have it, Eugene: do you hear? (Putting her hand on Morell’s shoulder, and quite forgetting her wifely tact in her annoyance.) My boy shall not be worried: I will protect him.

MORELL (rising proudly). Protect!

CANDIDA (not heeding him — to Eugene). What have you been saying?

MARCHBANKS (appalled). Nothing —

CANDIDA. Eugene! Nothing?

MARCHBANKS (piteously). I mean — I — I’m very sorry. I won’t do it again: indeed I won’t. I’ll let him alone.

MORELL (indignantly, with an aggressive movement towards Eugene). Let me alone! You young —

CANDIDA (Stopping him). Sh — no, let me deal with him, James.

MARCHBANKS. Oh, you’re not angry with me, are you?

CANDIDA (severely). Yes, I am — very angry. I have a great mind to pack you out of the house.

MORELL (taken aback by Candida’s vigor, and by no means relishing the sense of being rescued by her from another man). Gently, Candida, gently. I am able to take care of myself.

CANDIDA (petting him). Yes, dear: of course you are. But you mustn’t be annoyed and made miserable.

MARCHBANKS (almost in tears, turning to the door). I’ll go.

CANDIDA. Oh, you needn’t go: I can’t turn you out at this time of night. (Vehemently.) Shame on you! For shame!

MARCHBANKS (desperately). But what have I done?

CANDIDA. I know what you have done — as well as if I had been here all the time. Oh, it was unworthy! You are like a child: you cannot hold your tongue.

MARCHBANKS. I would die ten times over sooner than give you a moment’s pain.

CANDIDA (with infinite contempt for this puerility). Much good your dying would do me!

MORELL. Candida, my dear: this altercation is hardly quite seemingly. It is a matter between two men; and I am the right person to settle it.

CANDIDA. Two MEN! Do you call that a man? (To Eugene.) You bad boy!

MARCHBANKS (gathering a whimsically affectionate courage from the scolding). If I am to be scolded like this, I must make a boy’s excuse. He began it. And he’s bigger than I am.

CANDIDA (losing confidence a little as her concern for Morell’s dignity takes the alarm). That can’t be true. (To Morell.) You didn’t begin it, James, did you?

MORELL (contemptuously). No.

MARCHBANKS (indignant). Oh!

MORELL (to Eugene). YOU began it — this morning. (Candida, instantly connecting this with his mysterious allusion in the afternoon to something told him by Eugene in the morning, looks quickly at him, wrestling with the enigma. Morell proceeds with the emphasis of offended superiority.) But your other point is true. I am certainly the bigger of the two, and, I hope, the stronger, Candida. So you had better leave the matter in my hands.

CANDIDA (again soothing him). Yes, dear; but — (Troubled.) I don’t understand about this morning.

MORELL (gently snubbing her). You need not understand, my dear.

CANDIDA. But, James, I — (The street bell rings.) Oh, bother! Here they all come. (She goes out to let them in.)

MARCHBANKS (running to Morell ). Oh, Morell, isn’t it dreadful? She’s angry with us: she hates me. What shall I do?

MORELL (with quaint desperation, clutching himself by the hair). Eugene: my head is spinning round. I shall begin to laugh presently. (He walks up and down the middle of the room.)

MARCHBANKS (following him anxiously). No, no: she’ll think I’ve thrown you into hysterics. Don’t laugh. (Boisterous voices and laughter are heard approaching. Lexy Mill, his eyes sparkling, and his bearing denoting unwonted elevation of spirit, enters with Burgess, who is greasy and self-complacent, but has all his wits about him. Miss Garnett, with her smartest hat and jacket on, follows them; but though her eyes are brighter than before, she is evidently a prey to misgiving. She places herself with her back to her typewriting table, with one hand on it to rest herself, passes the other across her forehead as if she were a little tired and giddy. Marchbanks relapses into shyness and edges away into the corner near the window, where Morell’s books are.)

MILL (exhilaratedly). Morell: I MUST congratulate you. (Grasping his hand.) What a noble, splendid, inspired address you gave us! You surpassed yourself.

BURGESS. So you did, James. It fair kep’ me awake to the last word. Didn’t it, Miss Garnett?

PROSERPINE (worriedly). Oh, I wasn’t minding you: I was trying to make notes. (She takes out her note-book, and looks at her stenography, which nearly makes her cry.)

MORELL. Did I go too fast, Pross?

PROSERPINE. Much too fast. You know I can’t do more than a hundred words a minute. (She relieves her feelings by throwing her note-book angrily beside her machine, ready for use next morning.)

MORELL (soothingly). Oh, well, well, never mind, never mind, never mind. Have you all had supper?

LEXY. Mr. Burgess has been kind enough to give us a really splendid supper at the Belgrave.

BURGESS (with effusive magnanimity). Don’t mention it, Mr. Mill. (Modestly.) You’re ‘arty welcome to my little treat.

PROSERPINE. We had champagne! I never tasted it before. I feel quite giddy.

MORELL (surprised). A champagne supper! That was very handsome. Was it my eloquence that produced all this extravagance?

MILL (rhetorically). Your eloquence, and Mr. Burgess’s goodness of heart. (With a fresh burst of exhilaration.) And what a very fine fellow the chairman is, Morell! He came to supper with us.

MORELL (with long drawn significance, looking at Burgess). O-o-o-h, the chairman. NOW I understand.

(Burgess, covering a lively satisfaction in his diplomatic cunning with a deprecatory cough, retires to the hearth. Lexy folds his arms and leans against the cellaret in a high-spirited attitude. Candida comes in with glasses, lemons, and a jug of hot water on a tray.)

CANDIDA. Who will have some lemonade? You know our rules: total abstinence. (She puts the tray on the table, and takes up the lemon squeezers, looking enquiringly round at them.)

MORELL. No use, dear. They’ve all had champagne. Pross has broken her pledge.

CANDIDA (to Proserpine). You don’t mean to say you’ve been drinking champagne!

PROSERPINE (stubbornly). Yes, I do. I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. I don’t like beer. Are there any letters for me to answer, Mr. Morell?

MORELL. No more to-night.

PROSERPINE. Very well. Good-night, everybody.

LEXY (gallantly). Had I not better see you home, Miss Garnett?

PROSERPINE. No, thank you. I shan’t trust myself with anybody to-night. I wish I hadn’t taken any of that stuff. (She walks straight out.)

BURGESS (indignantly). Stuff, indeed! That gurl dunno wot champagne is! Pommery and Greeno at twelve and six a bottle. She took two glasses a’most straight hoff.

MORELL (a little anxious about her). Go and look after her, Lexy.

LEXY (alarmed). But if she should really be — Suppose she began to sing in the street, or anything of that sort.

MORELL. Just so: she may. That’s why you’d better see her safely home.

CANDIDA. Do, Lexy: there’s a good fellow. (She shakes his hand and pushes him gently to the door.)

LEXY. It’s evidently my duty to go. I hope it may not be necessary. Good-night, Mrs. Morell. (To the rest.) Good-night. (He goes. Candida shuts the door.)

BURGESS. He was gushin’ with hextra piety hisself arter two sips. People carn’t drink like they huseter. (Dismissing the subject and bustling away from the hearth.) Well, James: it’s time to lock up. Mr. Morchbanks: shall I ‘ave the pleasure of your company for a bit of the way home?

MARCHBANKS (affrightedly). Yes: I’d better go. .(He hurries across to the door; but Candida places herself before it, barring his way.)

CANDIDA (with quiet authority). You sit down. You’re not going yet.

MARCHBANKS (quailing). No: I — I didn’t mean to. (He comes back into the room and sits down abjectly on the sofa.)

CANDIDA. Mr. Marchbanks will stay the night with us, papa.

BURGESS. Oh, well, I’ll say good-night. So long, James. (He shakes hands with Morell and goes on to Eugene.) Make ’em give you a night light by your bed, Mr. Morchbanks: it’ll comfort you if you wake up in the night with a touch of that complaint of yores. Good-night.

MARCHBANKS. Thank you: I will. Good-night, Mr. Burgess. (They shake hands and Burgess goes to the door.)

CANDIDA (intercepting Morell, who is following Burgess). Stay here, dear: I’ll put on papa’s coat for him. (She goes out with Burgess.)

MARCHBANKS. Morell: there’s going to be a terrible scene. Aren’t you afraid?

MORELL. Not in the least.

MARCHBANKS. I never envied you your courage before. (He rises timidly and puts his hand appealingly on Morell’s forearm.) Stand by me, won’t you?

MORELL (casting him off gently, but resolutely). Each for himself, Eugene. She must choose between us now. (He goes to the other side of the room as Candida returns. Eugene sits down again on the sofa like a guilty schoolboy on his best behaviour.)

CANDIDA (between them, addressing Eugene). Are you sorry?

MARCHBANKS (earnestly). Yes, heartbroken.

CANDIDA. Well, then, you are forgiven. Now go off to bed like a good little boy: I want to talk to James about you.

MARCHBANKS (rising in great consternation). Oh, I can’t do that, Morell. I must be here. I’ll not go away. Tell her.

CANDIDA (with quick suspicion). Tell me what? (His eyes avoid hers furtively. She turns and mutely transfers the question to Morell.)

MORELL (bracing himself for the catastrophe). I have nothing to tell her, except (here his voice deepens to a measured and mournful tenderness) that she is my greatest treasure on earth — if she is really mine.

CANDIDA (coldly, offended by his yielding to his orator’s instinct and treating her as if she were the audience at the Guild of St. Matthew). I am sure Eugene can say no less, if that is all.

MARCHBANKS (discouraged). Morell: she’s laughing at us.

MORELL (with a quick touch of temper). There is nothing to laugh at. Are you laughing at us, Candida?

CANDIDA (with quiet anger). Eugene is very quick-witted, James. I hope I am going to laugh; but I am not sure that I am not going to be very angry. (She goes to the fireplace, and stands there leaning with her arm on the mantelpiece and her foot on the fender, whilst Eugene steals to Morell and plucks him by the sleeve.)

MARCHBANKS (whispering). Stop Morell. Don’t let us say anything.

MORELL (pushing Eugene away without deigning to look at him). I hope you don’t mean that as a threat, Candida.

CANDIDA (with emphatic warning). Take care, James. Eugene: I asked you to go. Are you going?

MORELL (putting his foot down). He shall not go. I wish him to remain.

MARCHBANKS. I’ll go. I’ll do whatever you want. (He turns to the door.)

CANDIDA. Stop! (He obeys.) Didn’t you hear James say he wished you to stay? James is master here. Don’t you know that?

MARCHBANKS (flushing with a young poet’s rage against tyranny). By what right is he master?

CANDIDA (quietly). Tell him, James.

MORELL (taken aback). My dear: I don’t know of any right that makes me master. I assert no such right.

CANDIDA (with infinite reproach). You don’t know! Oh, James, James! (To Eugene, musingly.) I wonder do you understand, Eugene! No: you’re too young. Well, I give you leave to stay — to stay and learn. (She comes away from the hearth and places herself between them.) Now, James: what’s the matter? Come: tell me.

MARCHBANKS (whispering tremulously across to him). Don’t.

CANDIDA. Come. Out with it!

MORELL (slowly). I meant to prepare your mind carefully, Candida, so as to prevent misunderstanding.

CANDIDA. Yes, dear: I am sure you did. But never mind: I shan’t misunderstand.

MORELL. Well — er — (He hesitates, unable to find the long explanation which he supposed to be available.)

CANDIDA. Well?

MORELL (baldly). Eugene declares that you are in love with him.

MARCHBANKS (frantically). No, no, no, no, never. I did not, Mrs. Morell: it’s not true. I said I loved you, and that he didn’t. I said that I understood you, and that he couldn’t. And it was not after what passed there before the fire that I spoke: it was not, on my word. It was this morning.

CANDIDA (enlightened). This morning!

MARCHBANKS. Yes. (He looks at her, pleading for credence, and then adds, simply) That was what was the matter with my collar.

CANDIDA (after a pause; for she does not take in his meaning at once). His collar! (She turns to Morell, shocked.) Oh, James: did you — (she stops)?

MORELL (ashamed). You know, Candida, that I have a temper to struggle with. And he said (shuddering) that you despised me in your heart.

CANDIDA (turning quickly on Eugene). Did you say that?

MARCHBANKS (terrified). No!

CANDIDA (severely). Then James has just told me a falsehood. Is that what you mean?

MARCHBANKS. No, no: I — I — (blurting out the explanation desperately) — it was David’s wife. And it wasn’t at home: it was when she saw him dancing before all the people.

MORELL (taking the cue with a debater’s adroitness). Dancing before all the people, Candida; and thinking he was moving their hearts by his mission when they were only suffering from — Prossy’s complaint. (She is about to protest: he raises his hand to silence her, exclaiming) Don’t try to look indignant, Candida: —

CANDIDA (interjecting). Try!

MORELL (continuing). Eugene was right. As you told me a few hours after, he is always right. He said nothing that you did not say far better yourself. He is the poet, who sees everything; and I am the poor parson, who understands nothing.

CANDIDA (remorsefully). Do you mind what is said by a foolish boy, because I said something like it again in jest?

MORELL. That foolish boy can speak with the inspiration of a child and the cunning of a serpent. He has claimed that you belong to him and not to me; and, rightly or wrongly, I have come to fear that it may be true. I will not go about tortured with doubts and suspicions. I will not live with you and keep a secret from you. I will not suffer the intolerable degradation of jealousy. We have agreed — he and I — that you shall choose between us now. I await your decision.

CANDIDA (slowly recoiling a step, her heart hardened by his rhetoric in spite of the sincere feeling behind it). Oh! I am to choose, am I? I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other.

MORELL (firmly). Quite. You must choose definitely.

MARCHBANKS (anxiously). Morell: you don’t understand. She means that she belongs to herself.

CANDIDA (turning on him). I mean that and a good deal more, Master Eugene, as you will both find out presently. And pray, my lords and masters, what have you to offer for my choice? I am up for auction, it seems. What do you bid, James?

MORELL (reproachfully). Cand — (He breaks down: his eyes and throat fill with tears: the orator becomes the wounded animal.) I can’t speak —

CANDIDA (impulsively going to him). Ah, dearest —

MARCHBANKS (in wild alarm). Stop: it’s not fair. You mustn’t show her that you suffer, Morell. I am on the rack, too; but I am not crying.

MORELL (rallying all his forces). Yes: you are right. It is not for pity that I am bidding. (He disengages himself from Candida.)

CANDIDA (retreating, chilled). I beg your pardon, James; I did not mean to touch you. I am waiting to hear your bid.

MORELL (with proud humility). I have nothing to offer you but my strength for your defence, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer to a woman.

CANDIDA (quite quietly). And you, Eugene? What do you offer?

MARCHBANKS. My weakness! my desolation! my heart’s need!

CANDIDA (impressed). That’s a good bid, Eugene. Now I know how to make my choice.

She pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has changed into heartbreaking dread at Eugene’s bid, loses all power of concealing his anxiety. Eugene, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle.

MORELL (in a suffocated voice — the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish). Candida!

MARCHBANKS (aside, in a flash of contempt). Coward!

CANDIDA (significantly). I give myself to the weaker of the two.

Eugene divines her meaning at once: his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it.

MORELL (bowing his head with the calm of collapse). I accept your sentence, Candida.

CANDIDA. Do you understand, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS. Oh, I feel I’m lost. He cannot bear the burden.

MORELL (incredulously, raising his bead with prosaic abruptness). Do you mean, me, Candida?

CANDIDA (smiling a little). Let us sit and talk comfortably over it like three friends. (To Morell.) Sit down, dear. (Morell takes the chair from the fireside — the children’s chair.) Bring me that chair, Eugene. (She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next Morell, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.) You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters and successful brothers of yours were your mother’s and father’s pets: how miserable you were at Eton: how your father is trying to starve you into returning to Oxford: how you have had to live without comfort or welcome or refuge, always lonely, and nearly always disliked and misunderstood, poor boy!

MARCHBANKS (faithful to the nobility of his lot). I had my books. I had Nature. And at last I met you.

CANDIDA. Never mind that just at present. Now I want you to look at this other boy here — MY boy — spoiled from his cradle. We go once a fortnight to see his parents. You should come with us, Eugene, and see the pictures of the hero of that household. James as a baby! the most wonderful of all babies. James holding his first school prize, won at the ripe age of eight! James as the captain of his eleven! James in his first frock coat! James under all sorts of glorious circumstances! You know how strong he is (I hope he didn’t hurt you) — how clever he is — how happy! (With deepening gravity.) Ask James’s mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask ME what it costs to be James’s mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so. (With sweet irony.) And when he thought I might go away with you, his only anxiety was what should become of ME! And to tempt me to stay he offered me (leaning forward to stroke his hair caressingly at each phrase) his strength for MY defence, his industry for my livelihood, his position for my dignity, his — (Relenting.) Ah, I am mixing up your beautiful sentences and spoiling them, am I not, darling? (She lays her cheek fondly against his.)

MORELL (quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness). It’s all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.

CANDIDA (in his arms, smiling, to Eugene). Am I YOUR mother and sisters to you, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS (rising with a fierce gesture of disgust). Ah, never. Out, then, into the night with me!

CANDIDA (rising quickly and intercepting him). You are not going like that, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS (with the ring of a man’s voice — no longer a boy’s — in the words). I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done.

MORELL (rising from his knee, alarmed). Candida: don’t let him do anything rash.

CANDIDA (confident, smiling at Eugene). Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness.

MARCHBANKS. I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James: I give you my happiness with both hands: I love you because you have filled the heart of the woman I loved. Good-bye. (He goes towards the door.)

CANDIDA. One last word. (He stops, but without turning to her.) How old are you, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS. As old as the world now. This morning I was eighteen.

CANDIDA (going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder). Eighteen! Will you, for my sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me?

MARCHBANKS (without moving). Say the sentences.

CANDIDA. When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.

MARCHBANKS (turning to her). In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.

CANDIDA. Good-bye. (She takes his face in her hands; and as he divines her intention and bends his knee, she kisses his forehead. Then he flies out into the night. She turns to Morell, holding out her arms to him.) Ah, James! (They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet’s heart.)

THE MAN OF DESTINY

The twelfth of May, 1796, in north Italy, at Tavazzano, on the road from Lodi to Milan. The afternoon sun is blazing serenely over the plains of Lombardy, treating the Alps with respect and the anthills with indulgence, not incommoded by the basking of the swine and oxen in the villages nor hurt by its cool reception in the churches, but fiercely disdainful of two hordes of mischievous insects which are the French and Austrian armies. Two days before, at Lodi, the Austrians tried to prevent the French from crossing the river by the narrow bridge there; but the French, commanded by a general aged 27, Napoleon Bonaparte, who does not understand the art of war, rushed the fireswept bridge, supported by a tremendous cannonade in which the young general assisted with his own hands. Cannonading is his technical specialty; he has been trained in the artillery under the old regime, and made perfect in the military arts of shirking his duties, swindling the paymaster over travelling expenses, and dignifying war with the noise and smoke of cannon, as depicted in all military portraits. He is, however, an original observer, and has perceived, for the first time since the invention of gunpowder, that a cannon ball, if it strikes a man, will kill him. To a thorough grasp of this remarkable discovery, he adds a highly evolved faculty for physical geography and for the calculation of times and distances. He has prodigious powers of work, and a clear, realistic knowledge of human nature in public affairs, having seen it exhaustively tested in that department during the French Revolution. He is imaginative without illusions, and creative without religion, loyalty, patriotism or any of the common ideals. Not that he is incapable of these ideals: on the contrary, he has swallowed them all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and stage manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a would-be author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof and punishment as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape from dismissal from the service so narrow that if the emigration of the nobles had not raised the value of even the most rascally lieutenant to the famine price of a general he would have been swept contemptuously from the army: these trials have ground the conceit out of him, and forced him to be self-sufficient and to understand that to such men as he is the world will give nothing that he cannot take from it by force. In this the world is not free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a merciless cannonader of political rubbish, is making himself useful. indeed, it is even now impossible to live in England without sometimes feeling how much that country lost in not being conquered by him as well as by Julius Caesar.

However, on this May afternoon in 1796, it is early days with him. He is only 26, and has but recently become a general, partly by using his wife to seduce the Directory (then governing France) partly by the scarcity of officers caused by the emigration as aforesaid; partly by his faculty of knowing a country, with all its roads, rivers, hills and valleys, as he knows the palm of his hand; and largely by that new faith of his in the efficacy of firing cannons at people. His army is, as to discipline, in a state which has so greatly shocked some modern writers before whom the following story has been enacted, that they, impressed with the later glory of “L’Empereur,” have altogether refused to credit it. But Napoleon is not “L’Empereur” yet: he has only just been dubbed “Le Petit Caporal,” and is in the stage of gaining influence over his men by displays of pluck. He is not in a position to force his will on them, in orthodox military fashion, by the cat o’ nine tails. The French Revolution, which has escaped suppression solely through the monarchy’s habit of being at least four years in arrear with its soldiers in the matter of pay, has substituted for that habit, as far as possible, the habit of not paying at all, except in promises and patriotic flatteries which are not compatible with martial law of the Prussian type. Napoleon has therefore approached the Alps in command of men without money, in rags, and consequently indisposed to stand much discipline, especially from upstart generals. This circumstance, which would have embarrassed an idealist soldier, has been worth a thousand cannon to Napoleon. He has said to his army, “You have patriotism and courage; but you have no money, no clothes, and deplorably indifferent food. In Italy there are all these things, and glory as well, to be gained by a devoted army led by a general who regards loot as the natural right of the soldier. I am such a general. En avant, mes enfants!” The result has entirely justified him. The army conquers Italy as the locusts conquered Cyprus. They fight all day and march all night, covering impossible distances and appearing in incredible places, not because every soldier carries a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack, but because he hopes to carry at least half a dozen silver forks there next day.

It must be understood, by the way, that the French army does not make war on the Italians. It is there to rescue them from the tyranny of their Austrian conquerors, and confer republican institutions on them; so that in incidentally looting them, it merely makes free with the property of its friends, who ought to be grateful to it, and perhaps would be if ingratitude were not the proverbial failing of their country. The Austrians, whom it fights, are a thoroughly respectable regular army, well disciplined, commanded by gentlemen trained and versed in the art of war: at the head of them Beaulieu, practising the classic art of war under orders from Vienna, and getting horribly beaten by Napoleon, who acts on his own responsibility in defiance of professional precedents or orders from Paris. Even when the Austrians win a battle, all that is necessary is to wait until their routine obliges them to return to their quarters for afternoon tea, so to speak, and win it back again from them: a course pursued later on with brilliant success at Marengo. On the whole, with his foe handicapped by Austrian statesmanship, classic generalship, and the exigencies of the aristocratic social structure of Viennese society, Napoleon finds it possible to be irresistible without working heroic miracles. The world, however, likes miracles and heroes, and is quite incapable of conceiving the action of such forces as academic militarism or Viennese drawing-roomism. Hence it has already begun to manufacture “L’Empereur,” and thus to make it difficult for the romanticists of a hundred years later to credit the little scene now in question at Tavazzano as aforesaid.

The best quarters at Tavazzano are at a little inn, the first house reached by travellers passing through the place from Milan to Lodi. It stands in a vineyard; and its principal room, a pleasant refuge from the summer heat, is open so widely at the back to this vineyard that it is almost a large veranda. The bolder children, much excited by the alarums and excursions of the past few days, and by an irruption of French troops at six o’clock, know that the French commander has quartered himself in this room, and are divided between a craving to peep in at the front windows and a mortal terror of the sentinel, a young gentleman-soldier, who, having no natural moustache, has had a most ferocious one painted on his face with boot blacking by his sergeant. As his heavy uniform, like all the uniforms of that day, is designed for parade without the least reference to his health or comfort, he perspires profusely in the sun; and his painted moustache has run in little streaks down his chin and round his neck except where it has dried in stiff japanned flakes, and had its sweeping outline chipped off in grotesque little bays and headlands, making him unspeakably ridiculous in the eye of History a hundred years later, but monstrous and horrible to the contemporary north Italian infant, to whom nothing would seem more natural than that he should relieve the monotony of his guard by pitchforking a stray child up on his bayonet, and eating it uncooked. Nevertheless one girl of bad character, in whom an instinct of privilege with soldiers is already dawning, does peep in at the safest window for a moment, before a glance and a clink from the sentinel sends her flying. Most of what she sees she has seen before: the vineyard at the back, with the old winepress and a cart among the vines; the door close down on her right leading to the inn entry; the landlord’s best sideboard, now in full action for dinner, further back on the same side; the fireplace on the other side, with a couch near it, and another door, leading to the inner rooms, between it and the vineyard; and the table in the middle with its repast of Milanese risotto, cheese, grapes, bread, olives, and a big wickered flask of red wine.

The landlord, Giuseppe Grandi, is also no novelty. He is a swarthy, vivacious, shrewdly cheerful, black-curled, bullet headed, grinning little man of 40. Naturally an excellent host, he is in quite special spirits this evening at his good fortune in having the French commander as his guest to protect him against the license of the troops, and actually sports a pair of gold earrings which he would otherwise have hidden carefully under the winepress with his little equipment of silver plate.

Napoleon, sitting facing her on the further side of the table, and Napoleon’s hat, sword and riding whip lying on the couch, she sees for the first time. He is working hard, partly at his meal, which he has discovered how to dispatch, by attacking all the courses simultaneously, in ten minutes (this practice is the beginning of his downfall), and partly at a map which he is correcting from memory, occasionally marking the position of the forces by taking a grapeskin from his mouth and planting it on the map with his thumb like a wafer. He has a supply of writing materials before him mixed up in disorder with the dishes and cruets; and his long hair gets sometimes into the risotto gravy and sometimes into the ink.

GIUSEPPE. Will your excellency —

NAPOLEON (intent on his map, but cramming himself mechanically with his left hand). Don’t talk. I’m busy.

GIUSEPPE (with perfect goodhumor). Excellency: I obey.

NAPOLEON. Some red ink.

GIUSEPPE. Alas! excellency, there is none.

NAPOLEON (with Corsican facetiousness). Kill something and bring me its blood.

GIUSEPPE (grinning). There is nothing but your excellency’s horse, the sentinel, the lady upstairs, and my wife.

NAPOLEON. Kill your wife.

GIUSEPPE. Willingly, your excellency; but unhappily I am not strong enough. She would kill me.

NAPOLEON. That will do equally well.

GIUSEPPE. Your excellency does me too much honor. (Stretching his hand toward the flask.) Perhaps some wine will answer your excellency’s purpose.

NAPOLEON (hastily protecting the flask, and becoming quite serious). Wine! No: that would be waste. You are all the same: waste! waste! waste! (He marks the map with gravy, using his fork as a pen.) Clear away. (He finishes his wine; pushes back his chair; and uses his napkin, stretching his legs and leaning back, but still frowning and thinking.)

GIUSEPPE (clearing the table and removing the things to a tray on the sideboard). Every man to his trade, excellency. We innkeepers have plenty of cheap wine: we think nothing of spilling it. You great generals have plenty of cheap blood: you think nothing of spilling it. Is it not so, excellency?

NAPOLEON. Blood costs nothing: wine costs money. (He rises and goes to the fireplace. )

GIUSEPPE. They say you are careful of everything except human life, excellency.

NAPOLEON. Human life, my friend, is the only thing that takes care of itself. (He throws himself at his ease on the couch.)

GIUSEPPE (admiring him). Ah, excellency, what fools we all are beside you! If I could only find out the secret of your success!

NAPOLEON. You would make yourself Emperor of Italy, eh?

GIUSEPPE. Too troublesome, excellency: I leave all that to you. Besides, what would become of my inn if I were Emperor? See how you enjoy looking on at me whilst I keep the inn for you and wait on you! Well, I shall enjoy looking on at you whilst you become Emperor of Europe, and govern the country for me. (Whilst he chatters, he takes the cloth off without removing the map and inkstand, and takes the corners in his hands and the middle of the edge in his mouth, to fold it up.)

NAPOLEON. Emperor of Europe, eh? Why only Europe?

GIUSEPPE. Why, indeed? Emperor of the world, excellency! Why not? (He folds and rolls up the cloth, emphasizing his phrases by the steps of the process.) One man is like another (fold): one country is like another (fold): one battle is like another. (At the last fold, he slaps the cloth on the table and deftly rolls it up, adding, by way of peroration) Conquer one: conquer all. (He takes the cloth to the sideboard, and puts it in a drawer.)

NAPOLEON. And govern for all; fight for all; be everybody’s servant under cover of being everybody’s master: Giuseppe.

GIUSEPPE (at the sideboard). Excellency.

NAPOLEON. I forbid you to talk to me about myself.

GIUSEPPE (coming to the foot of the couch). Pardon. Your excellency is so unlike other great men. It is the subject they like best.

NAPOLEON. Well, talk to me about the subject they like next best, whatever that may be.

GIUSEPPE (unabashed). Willingly, your excellency. Has your excellency by any chance caught a glimpse of the lady upstairs?

(Napoleon promptly sits up and looks at him with an interest which entirely justifies the implied epigram.)

NAPOLEON. How old is she?

GIUSEPPE. The right age, excellency.

NAPOLEON. Do you mean seventeen or thirty?

GIUSEPPE. Thirty, excellency.

NAPOLEON. Goodlooking?

GIUSEPPE. I cannot see with your excellency’s eyes: every man must judge that for himself. In my opinion, excellency, a fine figure of a lady. (Slyly.) Shall I lay the table for her collation here?

NAPOLEON (brusquely, rising). No: lay nothing here until the officer for whom I am waiting comes back. (He looks at his watch, and takes to walking to and fro between the fireplace and the vineyard.)

GIUSEPPE (with conviction). Excellency: believe me, he has been captured by the accursed Austrians. He dare not keep you waiting if he were at liberty.

NAPOLEON (turning at the edge of the shadow of the veranda). Giuseppe: if that turns out to be true, it will put me into such a temper that nothing short of hanging you and your whole household, including the lady upstairs, will satisfy me.

GIUSEPPE. We are all cheerfully at your excellency’s disposal, except the lady. I cannot answer for her; but no lady could resist you, General.

NAPOLEON (sourly, resuming his march). Hm! You will never be hanged. There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

GIUSEPPE (sympathetically). Not the least in the world, excellency: is there? (Napoleon again looks at his watch, evidently growing anxious.) Ah, one can see that you are a great man, General: you know how to wait. If it were a corporal now, or a sub-lieutenant, at the end of three minutes he would be swearing, fuming, threatening, pulling the house about our ears.

NAPOLEON. Giuseppe: your flatteries are insufferable. Go and talk outside. (He sits down again at the table, with his jaws in his hands, and his elbows propped on the map, poring over it with a troubled expression.)

GIUSEPPE. Willingly, your excellency. You shall not be disturbed. (He takes up the tray and prepares to withdraw.)

NAPOLEON. The moment he comes back, send him to me.

GIUSEPPE. Instantaneously, your excellency.

A LADY’S VOICE (calling from some distant part of the inn). Giusep-pe! (The voice is very musical, and the two final notes make an ascending interval.)

NAPOLEON (startled). What’s that? What’s that?

GIUSEPPE (resting the end of his tray on the table and leaning over to speak the more confidentially). The lady, excellency.

NAPOLEON (absently). Yes. What lady? Whose lady?

GIUSEPPE. The strange lady, excellency.

NAPOLEON. What strange lady?

GIUSEPPE (with a shrug). Who knows? She arrived here half an hour before you in a hired carriage belonging to the Golden Eagle at Borghetto. Actually by herself, excellency. No servants. A dressing bag and a trunk: that is all. The postillion says she left a horse — a charger, with military trappings, at the Golden Eagle.

NAPOLEON. A woman with a charger! That’s extraordinary.

THE LADY’S VOICE (the two final notes now making a peremptory descending interval). Giuseppe!

NAPOLEON (rising to listen). That’s an interesting voice.

GIUSEPPE. She is an interesting lady, excellency. (Calling.) Coming, lady, coming. (He makes for the inner door.)

NAPOLEON (arresting him with a strong hand on his shoulder). Stop. Let her come.

VOICE. Giuseppe!! (Impatiently.)

GIUSEPPE (pleadingly). Let me go, excellency. It is my point of honor as an innkeeper to come when I am called. I appeal to you as a soldier.

A MAN’s VOICE (outside, at the inn door, shouting). Here, someone. Hello! Landlord. Where are you? (Somebody raps vigorously with a whip handle on a bench in the passage.)

NAPOLEON (suddenly becoming the commanding officer again and throwing Giuseppe off). There he is at last. (Pointing to the inner door.) Go. Attend to your business: the lady is calling you. (He goes to the fireplace and stands with his back to it with a determined military air.)

GIUSEPPE (with bated breath, snatching up his tray). Certainly, excellency. (He hurries out by the inner door.)

THE MAN’s VOICE (impatiently). Are you all asleep here? (The door opposite the fireplace is kicked rudely open; and a dusty sub-lieutenant bursts into the room. He is a chuckle-headed young man of 24, with the fair, delicate, clear skin of a man of rank, and a self-assurance on that ground which the French Revolution has failed to shake in the smallest degree. He has a thick silly lip, an eager credulous eye, an obstinate nose, and a loud confident voice. A young man without fear, without reverence, without imagination, without sense, hopelessly insusceptible to the Napoleonic or any other idea, stupendously egotistical, eminently qualified to rush in where angels fear to tread, yet of a vigorous babbling vitality which bustles him into the thick of things. He is just now boiling with vexation, attributable by a superficial observer to his impatience at not being promptly attended to by the staff of the inn, but in which a more discerning eye can perceive a certain moral depth, indicating a more permanent and momentous grievance. On seeing Napoleon, he is sufficiently taken aback to check himself and salute; but he does not betray by his manner any of that prophetic consciousness of Marengo and Austerlitz, Waterloo and St. Helena, or the Napoleonic pictures of Delaroche and Meissonier, which modern culture will instinctively expect from him.)

NAPOLEON (sharply). Well, sir, here you are at last. Your instructions were that I should arrive here at six, and that I was to find you waiting for me with my mail from Paris and with despatches. It is now twenty minutes to eight. You were sent on this service as a hard rider with the fastest horse in the camp. You arrive a hundred minutes late, on foot. Where is your horse!

THE LIEUTENANT (moodily pulling off his gloves and dashing them with his cap and whip on the table). Ah! where indeed? That’s just what I should like to know, General. (With emotion.) You don’t know how fond I was of that horse.

NAPOLEON (angrily sarcastic). Indeed! (With sudden misgiving.) Where are the letters and despatches?

THE LIEUTENANT (importantly, rather pleased than otherwise at having some remarkable news). I don’t know.

NAPOLEON (unable to believe his ears). You don’t know!

LIEUTENANT. No more than you do, General. Now I suppose I shall be court-martialled. Well, I don’t mind being court-martialled; but (with solemn determination) I tell you, General, if ever I catch that innocent looking youth, I’ll spoil his beauty, the slimy little liar! I’ll make a picture of him. I’ll —

NAPOLEON (advancing from the hearth to the table). What innocent looking youth? Pull yourself together, sir, will you; and give an account of yourself.

LIEUTENANT (facing him at the opposite side of the table, leaning on it with his fists). Oh, I’m all right, General: I’m perfectly ready to give an account of myself. I shall make the court-martial thoroughly understand that the fault was not mine. Advantage has been taken of the better side of my nature; and I’m not ashamed of it. But with all respect to you as my commanding officer, General, I say again that if ever I set eyes on that son of Satan, I’ll —

NAPOLEON (angrily). So you said before.

LIEUTENANT (drawing himself upright). I say it again, just wait until I catch him. Just wait: that’s all. (He folds his arms resolutely, and breathes hard, with compressed lips.)

NAPOLEON. I AM waiting, sir — for your explanation.

LIEUTENANT (confidently). You’ll change your tone, General, when you hear what has happened to me.

NAPOLEON. Nothing has happened to you, sir: you are alive and not disabled. Where are the papers entrusted to you?

LIEUTENANT. Nothing! Nothing!! Oho! Well, we’ll see. (Posing himself to overwhelm Napoleon with his news.) He swore eternal brotherhood with me. Was that nothing? He said my eyes reminded him of his sister’s eyes. Was that nothing? He cried — actually cried — over the story of my separation from Angelica. Was that nothing? He paid for both bottles of wine, though he only ate bread and grapes himself. Perhaps you call that nothing! He gave me his pistols and his horse and his despatches — most important despatches — and let me go away with them. (Triumphantly, seeing that he has reduced Napoleon to blank stupefaction.) Was THAT nothing?

NAPOLEON (enfeebled by astonishment). What did he do that for?

LIEUTENANT (as if the reason were obvious). To show his confidence in me. (Napoleon’s jaw does not exactly drop; but its hinges become nerveless. The Lieutenant proceeds with honest indignation.) And I was worthy of his confidence: I brought them all back honorably. But would you believe it? — when I trusted him with MY pistols, and MY horse, and MY despatches —

NAPOLEON (enraged). What the devil did you do that for?

LIEUTENANT. Why, to show my confidence in him, of course. And he betrayed it — abused it — never came back. The thief! the swindler! the heartless, treacherous little blackguard! You call that nothing, I suppose. But look here, General: (again resorting to the table with his fist for greater emphasis) YOU may put up with this outrage from the Austrians if you like; but speaking for myself personally, I tell you that if ever I catch —

NAPOLEON (turning on his heel in disgust and irritably resuming his march to and fro). Yes: you have said that more than once already.

LIEUTENANT (excitedly). More than once! I’ll say it fifty times; and what’s more, I’ll do it. You’ll see, General. I’ll show my confidence in him, so I will. I’ll —

NAPOLEON. Yes, yes, sir: no doubt you will. What kind of man was he?

LIEUTENANT. Well, I should think you ought to be able to tell from his conduct the sort of man he was.

NAPOLEON. Psh! What was he like?

LIEUTENANT. Like! He’s like — well, you ought to have just seen the fellow: that will give you a notion of what he was like. He won’t be like it five minutes after I catch him; for I tell you that if ever —

NAPOLEON (shouting furiously for the innkeeper). Giuseppe! (To the Lieutenant, out of all patience.) Hold your tongue, sir, if you can.

LIEUTENANT. I warn you it’s no use to try to put the blame on me. (Plaintively.) How was I to know the sort of fellow he was? (He takes a chair from between the sideboard and the outer door; places it near the table; and sits down.) If you only knew how hungry and tired I am, you’d have more consideration.

GIUSEPPE (returning). What is it, excellency?

NAPOLEON (struggling with his temper). Take this — this officer. Feed him; and put him to bed, if necessary. When he is in his right mind again, find out what has happened to him and bring me word. (To the Lieutenant.) Consider yourself under arrest, sir.

LIEUTENANT (with sulky stiffness). I was prepared for that. It takes a gentleman to understand a gentleman. (He throws his sword on the table. Giuseppe takes it up and politely offers it to Napoleon, who throws it violently on the couch.)

GIUSEPPE (with sympathetic concern). Have you been attacked by the Austrians, lieutenant? Dear, dear, dear!

LIEUTENANT (contemptuously). Attacked! I could have broken his back between my finger and thumb. I wish I had, now. No: it was by appealing to the better side of my nature: that’s what I can’t get over. He said he’d never met a man he liked so much as me. He put his handkerchief round my neck because a gnat bit me, and my stock was chafing it. Look! (He pulls a handkerchief from his stock. Giuseppe takes it and examines it.)

GIUSEPPE (to Napoleon). A lady’s handkerchief, excellency. (He smells it.) Perfumed!

NAPOLEON. Eh? (He takes it and looks at it attentively.) Hm! (He smells it.) Ha! (He walks thoughtfully across the room, looking at the handkerchief, which he finally sticks in the breast of his coat.)

LIEUTENANT. Good enough for him, anyhow. I noticed that he had a woman’s hands when he touched my neck, with his coaxing, fawning ways, the mean, effeminate little hound. (Lowering his voice with thrilling intensity.) But mark my words, General. If ever —

THE LADY’S VOICE (outside, as before). Giuseppe!

LIEUTENANT (petrified). What was that?

GIUSEPPE. Only a lady upstairs, lieutenant, calling me.

LIEUTENANT. Lady!

VOICE. Giuseppe, Giuseppe: where ARE you?

LIEUTENANT (murderously). Give me that sword. (He strides to the couch; snatches the sword; and draws it.)

GIUSEPPE (rushing forward and seizing his right arm.) What are you thinking of, lieutenant? It’s a lady: don’t you hear that it’s a woman’s voice?

LIEUTENANT. It’s HIS voice, I tell you. Let me go. (He breaks away, and rushes to the inner door. It opens in his face; and the Strange Lady steps in. She is a very attractive lady, tall and extraordinarily graceful, with a delicately intelligent, apprehensive, questioning face — perception in the brow, sensitiveness in the nostrils, character in the chin: all keen, refined, and original. She is very feminine, but by no means weak: the lithe, tender figure is hung on a strong frame: the hands and feet, neck and shoulders, are no fragile ornaments, but of full size in proportion to her stature, which considerably exceeds that of Napoleon and the innkeeper, and leaves her at no disadvantage with the lieutenant. Only her elegance and radiant charm keep the secret of her size and strength. She is not, judging by her dress, an admirer of the latest fashions of the Directory; or perhaps she uses up her old dresses for travelling. At all events she wears no jacket with extravagant lappels, no Greco-Tallien sham chiton, nothing, indeed, that the Princesse de Lamballe might not have worn. Her dress of flowered silk is long waisted, with a Watteau pleat behind, but with the paniers reduced to mere rudiments, as she is too tall for them. It is cut low in the neck, where it is eked out by a creamy fichu. She is fair, with golden brown hair and grey eyes.)

(She enters with the self-possession of a woman accustomed to the privileges of rank and beauty. The innkeeper, who has excellent natural manners, is highly appreciative of her. Napoleon, on whom her eyes first fall, is instantly smitten self-conscious. His color deepens: he becomes stiffer and less at ease than before. She perceives this instantly, and, not to embarrass him, turns in an infinitely well bred manner to pay the respect of a glance to the other gentleman, who is staring at her dress, as at the earth’s final masterpiece of treacherous dissimulation, with feelings altogether inexpressible and indescribable. As she looks at him, she becomes deadly pale. There is no mistaking her expression: a revelation of some fatal error utterly unexpected, has suddenly appalled her in the midst of tranquillity, security and victory. The next moment a wave of color rushes up from beneath the creamy fichu and drowns her whole face. One can see that she is blushing all over her body. Even the lieutenant, ordinarily incapable of observation, and just now lost in the tumult of his wrath, can see a thing when it is painted red for him. Interpreting the blush as the involuntary confession of black deceit confronted with its victim, he points to it with a loud crow of retributive triumph, and then, seizing her by the wrist, pulls her past him into the room as he claps the door to, and plants himself with his back to it.)

LIEUTENANT. So I’ve got you, my lad. So you’ve disguised yourself, have you? (In a voice of thunder.) Take off that skirt.

GIUSEPPE (remonstrating). Oh, lieutenant!

LADY (affrighted, but highly indignant at his having dared to touch her). Gentlemen: I appeal to you. Giuseppe. (Making a movement as if to run to Giuseppe.)

LIEUTENANT (interposing, sword in hand). No you don’t.

LADY (taking refuge with Napoleon). Ah, sir, you are an officer — a general. You will protect me, will you not?

LIEUTENANT. Never you mind him, General. Leave me to deal with him.

NAPOLEON. With him! With whom, sir? Why do you treat this lady in such a fashion?

LIEUTENANT. Lady! He’s a man! the man I showed my confidence in. (Advancing threateningly.) Here you —

LADY (running behind Napoleon and in her agitation embracing the arm which he instinctively extends before her as a fortification). Oh, thank you, General. Keep him away.

NAPOLEON. Nonsense, sir. This is certainly a lady (she suddenly drops his arm and blushes again); and you are under arrest. Put down your sword, sir, instantly.

LIEUTENANT. General: I tell you he’s an Austrian spy. He passed himself off on me as one of General Massena’s staff this afternoon; and now he’s passing himself off on you as a woman. Am I to believe my own eyes or not?

LADY. General: it must be my brother. He is on General Massena’s staff. He is very like me.

LIEUTENANT (his mind giving way). Do you mean to say that you’re not your brother, but your sister? — the sister who was so like me? — who had my beautiful blue eyes? It was a lie: your eyes are not like mine: they’re exactly like your own. What perfidy!

NAPOLEON. Lieutenant: will you obey my orders and leave the room, since you are convinced at last that this is no gentleman?

LIEUTENANT. Gentleman! I should think not. No gentleman would have abused my confi —

NAPOLEON (out of all patience). Enough, sir, enough. Will you leave the room. I order you to leave the room.

LADY. Oh, pray let ME go instead.

NAPOLEON (drily). Excuse me, madame. With all respect to your brother, I do not yet understand what an officer on General Massena’s staff wants with my letters. I have some questions to put to you.

GIUSEPPE (discreetly). Come, lieutenant. (He opens the door.)

LIEUTENANT. I’m off. General: take warning by me: be on your guard against the better side of your nature. (To the lady.) Madame: my apologies. I thought you were the same person, only of the opposite sex; and that naturally misled me.

LADY (sweetly). It was not your fault, was it? I’m so glad you’re not angry with me any longer, lieutenant. (She offers her hand.)

LIEUTENANT (bending gallantly to kiss it). Oh, madam, not the lea — (Checking himself and looking at it.) You have your brother’s hand. And the same sort of ring.

LADY (sweetly). We are twins.

LIEUTENANT. That accounts for it. (He kisses her hand.) A thousand pardons. I didn’t mind about the despatches at all: that’s more the General’s affair than mine: it was the abuse of my confidence through the better side of my nature. (Taking his cap, gloves, and whip from the table and going.) You’ll excuse my leaving you, General, I hope. Very sorry, I’m sure. (He talks himself out of the room. Giuseppe follows him and shuts the door.)

NAPOLEON (looking after them with concentrated irritation). Idiot! (The Strange Lady smiles sympathetically. He comes frowning down the room between the table and the fireplace, all his awkwardness gone now that he is alone with her.)

LADY. How can I thank you, General, for your protection?

NAPOLEON (turning on her suddenly). My despatches: come! (He puts out his hand for them.)

LADY. General! (She involuntarily puts her hands on her fichu as if to protect something there.)

NAPOLEON. You tricked that blockhead out of them. You disguised yourself as a man. I want my despatches. They are there in the bosom of your dress, under your hands.

LADY (quickly removing her hands). Oh, how unkindly you are speaking to me! (She takes her handkerchief from her fichu.) You frighten me. (She touches her eyes as if to wipe away a tear.)

NAPOLEON. I see you don’t know me madam, or you would save yourself the trouble of pretending to cry.

LADY (producing an effect of smiling through her tears). Yes, I do know you. You are the famous General Buonaparte. (She gives the name a marked Italian pronunciation Bwaw-na-parr-te.)

NAPOLEON (angrily, with the French pronunciation). Bonaparte, madame, Bonaparte. The papers, if you please.

LADY. But I assure you — (He snatches the handkerchief rudely from her.) General! (Indignantly.)

NAPOLEON (taking the other handkerchief from his breast). You were good enough to lend one of your handkerchiefs to my lieutenant when you robbed him. (He looks at the two handkerchiefs.) They match one another. (He smells them.) The same scent. (He flings them down on the table.) I am waiting for the despatches. I shall take them, if necessary, with as little ceremony as the handkerchief. (This historical incident was used eighty years later, by M. Victorien Sardou, in his drama entitled “Dora.”)

LADY (in dignified reproof). General: do you threaten women?

NAPOLEON (bluntly). Yes.

LADY (disconcerted, trying to gain time). But I don’t understand. I —

NAPOLEON. You understand perfectly. You came here because your Austrian employers calculated that I was six leagues away. I am always to be found where my enemies don’t expect me. You have walked into the lion’s den. Come: you are a brave woman. Be a sensible one: I have no time to waste. The papers. (He advances a step ominously).

LADY (breaking down in the childish rage of impotence, and throwing herself in tears on the chair left beside the table by the lieutenant). I brave! How little you know! I have spent the day in an agony of fear. I have a pain here from the tightening of my heart at every suspicious look, every threatening movement. Do you think every one is as brave as you? Oh, why will not you brave people do the brave things? Why do you leave them to us, who have no courage at all? I’m not brave: I shrink from violence: danger makes me miserable.

NAPOLEON (interested). Then why have you thrust yourself into danger?

LADY. Because there is no other way: I can trust nobody else. And now it is all useless — all because of you, who have no fear, because you have no heart, no feeling, no — (She breaks off, and throws herself on her knees.) Ah, General, let me go: let me go without asking any questions. You shall have your despatches and letters: I swear it.

NAPOLEON (holding out his hand). Yes: I am waiting for them. (She gasps, daunted by his ruthless promptitude into despair of moving him by cajolery; but as she looks up perplexedly at him, it is plain that she is racking her brains for some device to outwit him. He meets her regard inflexibly.)

LADY (rising at last with a quiet little sigh). I will get them for you. They are in my room. (She turns to the door.)

NAPOLEON. I shall accompany you, madame.

LADY (drawing herself up with a noble air of offended delicacy).I cannot permit you, General, to enter my chamber.

NAPOLEON. Then you shall stay here, madame, whilst I have your chamber searched for my papers.

LADY (spitefully, openly giving up her plan). You may save yourself the trouble. They are not there.

NAPOLEON. No: I have already told you where they are. (Pointing to her breast.)

LADY (with pretty piteousness). General: I only want to keep one little private letter. Only one. Let me have it.

NAPOLEON (cold and stern). Is that a reasonable demand, madam?

LADY (encouraged by his not refusing point blank). No; but that is why you must grant it. Are your own demands reasonable? thousands of lives for the sake of your victories, your ambitions, your destiny! And what I ask is such a little thing. And I am only a weak woman, and you a brave man. (She looks at him with her eyes full of tender pleading and is about to kneel to him again.)

NAPOLEON (brusquely). Get up, get up. (He turns moodily away and takes a turn across the room, pausing for a moment to say, over his shoulder) You’re talking nonsense; and you know it. (She gets up and sits down in almost listless despair on the couch. When he turns and sees her there, he feels that his victory is complete, and that he may now indulge in a little play with his victim. He comes back and sits beside her. She looks alarmed and moves a little away from him; but a ray of rallying hope beams from her eye. He begins like a man enjoying some secret joke.) How do you know I am a brave man?

LADY (amazed). You! General Buonaparte. (Italian pronunciation.)

NAPOLEON. Yes, I, General Bonaparte (emphasizing the French pronunciation).

LADY. Oh, how can you ask such a question? you! who stood only two days ago at the bridge at Lodi, with the air full of death, fighting a duel with cannons across the river! (Shuddering.) Oh, you DO brave things.

NAPOLEON. So do you.

LADY. I! (With a sudden odd thought.) Oh! Are you a coward?

NAPOLEON (laughing grimly and pinching her cheek). That is the one question you must never ask a soldier. The sergeant asks after the recruit’s height, his age, his wind, his limb, but never after his courage. (He gets up and walks about with his hands behind him and his head bowed, chuckling to himself.)

LADY (as if she had found it no laughing matter). Ah, you can laugh at fear. Then you don’t know what fear is.

NAPOLEON (coming behind the couch). Tell me this. Suppose you could have got that letter by coming to me over the bridge at Lodi the day before yesterday! Suppose there had been no other way, and that this was a sure way — if only you escaped the cannon! (She shudders and covers her eyes for a moment with her hands.) Would you have been afraid?

LADY. Oh, horribly afraid, agonizingly afraid. (She presses her hands on her heart.) It hurts only to imagine it.

NAPOLEON (inflexibly). Would you have come for the despatches?

LADY (overcome by the imagined horror). Don’t ask me. I must have come.

NAPOLEON. Why?

LADY. Because I must. Because there would have been no other way.

NAPOLEON (with conviction). Because you would have wanted my letter enough to bear your fear. There is only one universal passion: fear. Of all the thousand qualities a man may have, the only one you will find as certainly in the youngest drummer boy in my army as in me, is fear. It is fear that makes men fight: it is indifference that makes them run away: fear is the mainspring of war. Fear! I know fear well, better than you, better than any woman. I once saw a regiment of good Swiss soldiers massacred by a mob in Paris because I was afraid to interfere: I felt myself a coward to the tips of my toes as I looked on at it. Seven months ago I revenged my shame by pounding that mob to death with cannon balls. Well, what of that? Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted — or a woman either? Never. Come with me; and I will show you twenty thousand cowards who will risk death every day for the price of a glass of brandy. And do you think there are no women in the army, braver than the men, because their lives are worth less? Psha! I think nothing of your fear or your bravery. If you had had to come across to me at Lodi, you would not have been afraid: once on the bridge, every other feeling would have gone down before the necessity — the necessity — for making your way to my side and getting what you wanted.

And now, suppose you had done all this — suppose you had come safely out with that letter in your hand, knowing that when the hour came, your fear had tightened, not your heart, but your grip of your own purpose — that it had ceased to be fear, and had become strength, penetration, vigilance, iron resolution — how would you answer then if you were asked whether you were a coward?

LADY (rising). Ah, you are a hero, a real hero.

NAPOLEON. Pooh! there’s no such thing as a real hero. (He strolls down the room, making light of her enthusiasm, but by no means displeased with himself for having evoked it.)

LADY. Ah, yes, there is. There is a difference between what you call my bravery and yours. You wanted to win the battle of Lodi for yourself and not for anyone else, didn’t you?

NAPOLEON. Of course. (Suddenly recollecting himself.) Stop: no. (He pulls himself piously together, and says, like a man conducting a religious service) I am only the servant of the French republic, following humbly in the footsteps of the heroes of classical antiquity. I win battles for humanity — for my country, not for myself.

LADY (disappointed). Oh, then you are only a womanish hero, after all. (She sits down again, all her enthusiasm gone, her elbow on the end of the couch, and her cheek propped on her hand.)

NAPOLEON (greatly astonished). Womanish!

LADY (listlessly). Yes, like me. (With deep melancholy.) Do you think that if I only wanted those despatches for myself, I dare venture into a battle for them? No: if that were all, I should not have the courage to ask to see you at your hotel, even. My courage is mere slavishness: it is of no use to me for my own purposes. It is only through love, through pity, through the instinct to save and protect someone else, that I can do the things that terrify me.

NAPOLEON (contemptuously). Pshaw! (He turns slightingly away from her.)

LADY. Aha! now you see that I’m not really brave. (Relapsing into petulant listlessness.) But what right have you to despise me if you only win your battles for others? for your country! through patriotism! That is what I call womanish: it is so like a Frenchman!

NAPOLEON (furiously). I am no Frenchman.

LADY (innocently). I thought you said you won the battle of Lodi for your country, General Bu — shall I pronounce it in Italian or French?

NAPOLEON. You are presuming on my patience, madam. I was born a French subject, but not in France.

LADY (folding her arms on the end of the couch, and leaning on them with a marked access of interest in him). You were not born a subject at all, I think.

NAPOLEON (greatly pleased, starting on a fresh march). Eh? Eh? You think not.

LADY. I am sure of it.

NAPOLEON. Well, well, perhaps not. (The self-complacency of his assent catches his own ear. He stops short, reddening. Then, composing himself into a solemn attitude, modelled on the heroes of classical antiquity, he takes a high moral tone.) But we must not live for ourselves alone, little one. Never forget that we should always think of others, and work for others, and lead and govern them for their own good. Self-sacrifice is the foundation of all true nobility of character.

LADY (again relaxing her attitude with a sigh). Ah, it is easy to see that you have never tried it, General.

NAPOLEON (indignantly, forgetting all about Brutus and Scipio). What do you mean by that speech, madam?

LADY. Haven’t you noticed that people always exaggerate the value of the things they haven’t got? The poor think they only need riches to be quite happy and good. Everybody worships truth, purity, unselfishness, for the same reason — because they have no experience of them. Oh, if they only knew!

NAPOLEON (with angry derision). If they only knew! Pray, do you know?

LADY (with her arms stretched down and her hands clasped on her knees, looking straight before her). Yes. I had the misfortune to be born good. (Glancing up at him for a moment.) And it is a misfortune, I can tell you, General. I really am truthful and unselfish and all the rest of it; and it’s nothing but cowardice; want of character; want of being really, strongly, positively oneself.

NAPOLEON. Ha? (Turning to her quickly with a flash of strong interest.)

LADY (earnestly, with rising enthusiasm). What is the secret of your power? Only that you believe in yourself. You can fight and conquer for yourself and for nobody else. You are not afraid of your own destiny. You teach us what we all might be if we had the will and courage; and that (suddenly sinking on her knees before him) is why we all begin to worship you. (She kisses his hands.)

NAPOLEON (embarrassed). Tut, tut! Pray rise, madam.

LADY. Do not refuse my homage: it is your right. You will be emperor of France.

NAPOLEON (hurriedly). Take care. Treason!

LADY (insisting). Yes, emperor of France; then of Europe; perhaps of the world. I am only the first subject to swear allegiance. (Again kissing his hand.) My Emperor!

NAPOLEON (overcome, raising her). Pray, pray. No, no, little one: this is folly. Come: be calm, be calm. (Petting her.) There, there, my girl.

LADY (struggling with happy tears). Yes, I know it is an impertinence in me to tell you what you must know far better than I do. But you are not angry with me, are you?

NAPOLEON. Angry! No, no: not a bit, not a bit. Come: you are a very clever and sensible and interesting little woman. (He pats her on the cheek.) Shall we be friends?

LADY (enraptured). Your friend! You will let me be your friend! Oh! (She offers him both her hands with a radiant smile.) You see: I show my confidence in you.

NAPOLEON (with a yell of rage, his eyes flashing). What!

LADY. What’s the matter?

NAPOLEON. Show your confidence in me! So that I may show my confidence in you in return by letting you give me the slip with the despatches, eh? Ah, Dalila, Dalila, you have been trying your tricks on me; and I have been as great a gull as my jackass of a lieutenant. (He advances threateningly on her.) Come: the despatches. Quick: I am not to be trifled with now.

LADY (flying round the couch). General —

NAPOLEON. Quick, I tell you. (He passes swiftly up the middle of the room and intercepts her as she makes for the vineyard.)

LADY (at bay, confronting him). You dare address me in that tone.

NAPOLEON. Dare!

LADY. Yes, dare. Who are you that you should presume to speak to me in that coarse way? Oh, the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer comes out in you very easily.

NAPOLEON (beside himself). You she devil! (Savagely.) Once more, and only once, will you give me those papers or shall I tear them from you — by force?

LADY (letting her hands fall ). Tear them from me — by force! (As he glares at her like a tiger about to spring, she crosses her arms on her breast in the attitude of a martyr. The gesture and pose instantly awaken his theatrical instinct: he forgets his rage in the desire to show her that in acting, too, she has met her match. He keeps her a moment in suspense; then suddenly clears up his countenance; puts his hands behind him with provoking coolness; looks at her up and down a couple of times; takes a pinch of snuff; wipes his fingers carefully and puts up his handkerchief, her heroic pose becoming more and more ridiculous all the time.)

NAPOLEON (at last). Well?

LADY (disconcerted, but with her arms still crossed devotedly). Well: what are you going to do?

NAPOLEON. Spoil your attitude.

LADY. You brute! (abandoning the attitude, she comes to the end of the couch, where she turns with her back to it, leaning against it and facing him with her hands behind her.)

NAPOLEON. Ah, that’s better. Now listen to me. I like you. What’s more, I value your respect.

LADY. You value what you have not got, then.

NAPOLEON. I shall have it presently. Now attend to me. Suppose I were to allow myself to be abashed by the respect due to your sex, your beauty, your heroism and all the rest of it? Suppose I, with nothing but such sentimental stuff to stand between these muscles of mine and those papers which you have about you, and which I want and mean to have: suppose I, with the prize within my grasp, were to falter and sneak away with my hands empty; or, what would be worse, cover up my weakness by playing the magnanimous hero, and sparing you the violence I dared not use, would you not despise me from the depths of your woman’s soul? Would any woman be such a fool? Well, Bonaparte can rise to the situation and act like a woman when it is necessary. Do you understand?

The lady, without speaking, stands upright, and takes a packet of papers from her bosom. For a moment she has an intense impulse to dash them in his face. But her good breeding cuts her off from any vulgar method of relief. She hands them to him politely, only averting her head. The moment he takes them, she hurries across to the other side of the room; covers her face with her hands; and sits down, with her body turned away to the back of the chair.

NAPOLEON (gloating over the papers). Aha! That’s right. That’s right. (Before opening them he looks at her and says) Excuse me. (He sees that she is hiding her face.) Very angry with me, eh? (He unties the packet, the seal of which is already broken, and puts it on the table to examine its contents.)

LADY (quietly, taking down her hands and showing that she is not crying, but only thinking). No. You were right. But I am sorry for you.

NAPOLEON (pausing in the act of taking the uppermost paper from the packet). Sorry for me! Why?

LADY. I am going to see you lose your honor.

NAPOLEON. Hm! Nothing worse than that? (He takes up the paper.)

LADY. And your happiness.

NAPOLEON. Happiness, little woman, is the most tedious thing in the world to me. Should I be what I am if I cared for happiness? Anything else?

LADY. Nothing — (He interrupts her with an exclamation of satisfaction. She proceeds quietly) except that you will cut a very foolish figure in the eyes of France.

NAPOLEON (quickly). What? (The hand holding the paper involuntarily drops. The lady looks at him enigmatically in tranquil silence. He throws the letter down and breaks out into a torrent of scolding.) What do you mean? Eh? Are you at your tricks again? Do you think I don’t know what these papers contain? I’ll tell you. First, my information as to Beaulieu’s retreat. There are only two things he can do — leatherbrained idiot that he is! — shut himself up in Mantua or violate the neutrality of Venice by taking Peschiera. You are one of old Leatherbrain’s spies: he has discovered that he has been betrayed, and has sent you to intercept the information at all hazards — as if that could save him from ME, the old fool! The other papers are only my usual correspondence from Paris, of which you know nothing.

LADY (prompt and businesslike). General: let us make a fair division. Take the information your spies have sent you about the Austrian army; and give me the Paris correspondence. That will content me.

NAPOLEON (his breath taken away by the coolness of the proposal). A fair di — (He gasps.) It seems to me, madame, that you have come to regard my letters as your own property, of which I am trying to rob you.

LADY (earnestly). No: on my honor I ask for no letter of yours — not a word that has been written by you or to you. That packet contains a stolen letter: a letter written by a woman to a man — a man not her husband — a letter that means disgrace, infamy —

NAPOLEON. A love letter?

LADY (bitter-sweetly). What else but a love letter could stir up so much hate?

NAPOLEON. Why is it sent to me? To put the husband in my power, eh?

LADY. No, no: it can be of no use to you: I swear that it will cost you nothing to give it to me. It has been sent to you out of sheer malice — solely to injure the woman who wrote it.

NAPOLEON. Then why not send it to her husband instead of to me?

LADY (completely taken aback). Oh! (Sinking back into the chair.) I — I don’t know. (She breaks down.)

NAPOLEON. Aha! I thought so: a little romance to get the papers back. (He throws the packet on the table and confronts her with cynical goodhumor.) Per Bacco, little woman, I can’t help admiring you. If I could lie like that, it would save me a great deal of trouble.

LADY (wringing her hands). Oh, how I wish I really had told you some lie! You would have believed me then. The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.

NAPOLEON (with coarse familiarity, treating her as if she were a vivandiere). Capital! Capital! (He puts his hands behind him on the table, and lifts himself on to it, sitting with his arms akimbo and his legs wide apart.) Come: I am a true Corsican in my love for stories. But I could tell them better than you if I set my mind to it. Next time you are asked why a letter compromising a wife should not be sent to her husband, answer simply that the husband would not read it. Do you suppose, little innocent, that a man wants to be compelled by public opinion to make a scene, to fight a duel, to break up his household, to injure his career by a scandal, when he can avoid it all by taking care not to know?

LADY (revolted). Suppose that packet contained a letter about your own wife?

NAPOLEON (offended, coming off the table). You are impertinent, madame.

LADY (humbly). I beg your above suspicion.

NAPOLEON (with a deliberate assumption of superiority). You have committed an indiscretion. I pardon you. In future, do not permit yourself to introduce real persons in your romances.

LADY (politely ignoring a speech which is to her only a breach of good manners, and rising to move towards the table). General: there really is a woman’s letter there. (Pointing to the packet.) Give it to me.

NAPOLEON (with brute conciseness, moving so as to prevent her getting too near the letters). Why?

LADY. She is an old friend: we were at school together. She has written to me imploring me to prevent the letter falling into your hands.

NAPOLEON. Why has it been sent to me?

LADY. Because it compromises the director Barras.

NAPOLEON (frowning, evidently startled). Barras! (Haughtily.) Take care, madame. The director Barras is my attached personal friend.

LADY (nodding placidly). Yes. You became friends through your wife.

NAPOLEON. Again! Have I not forbidden you to speak of my wife? (She keeps looking curiously at him, taking no account of the rebuke. More and more irritated, he drops his haughty manner, of which he is himself somewhat impatient, and says suspiciously, lowering his voice) Who is this woman with whom you sympathize so deeply?

LADY. Oh, General! How could I tell you that?

NAPOLEON (ill-humoredly, beginning to walk about again in angry perplexity). Ay, ay: stand by one another. You are all the same, you women.

LADY (indignantly). We are not all the same, any more than you are. Do you think that if I loved another man, I should pretend to go on loving my husband, or be afraid to tell him or all the world? But this woman is not made that way. She governs men by cheating them; and (with disdain) they like it, and let her govern them. (She sits down again, with her back to him.)

NAPOLEON (not attending to her). Barras, Barras I — (Turning very threateningly to her, his face darkening.) Take care, take care: do you hear? You may go too far.

LADY (innocently turning her face to him). What’s the matter?

NAPOLEON. What are you hinting at? Who is this woman?

LADY (meeting his angry searching gaze with tranquil indifference as she sits looking up at him with her right arm resting lightly along the back of her chair, and one knee crossed over the other). A vain, silly, extravagant creature, with a very able and ambitious husband who knows her through and through — knows that she has lied to him about her age, her income, her social position, about everything that silly women lie about — knows that she is incapable of fidelity to any principle or any person; and yet could not help loving her — could not help his man’s instinct to make use of her for his own advancement with Barras.

NAPOLEON (in a stealthy, coldly furious whisper). This is your revenge, you she cat, for having had to give me the letters.

LADY. Nonsense! Or do you mean that YOU are that sort of man?

NAPOLEON (exasperated, clasps his hands behind him, his fingers twitching, and says, as he walks irritably away from her to the fireplace). This woman will drive me out of my senses. (To her.) Begone.

LADY (seated immovably). Not without that letter.

NAPOLEON. Begone, I tell you. (Walking from the fireplace to the vineyard and back to the table.) You shall have no letter. I don’t like you. You’re a detestable woman, and as ugly as Satan. I don’t choose to be pestered by strange women. Be off. (He turns his back on her. In quiet amusement, she leans her cheek on her hand and laughs at him. He turns again, angrily mocking her.) Ha! ha! ha! What are you laughing at?

LADY. At you, General. I have often seen persons of your sex getting into a pet and behaving like children; but I never saw a really great man do it before.

NAPOLEON (brutally, flinging the words in her face). Pooh: flattery! flattery! coarse, impudent flattery!

LADY (springing up with a bright flush in her cheeks). Oh, you are too bad. Keep your letters. Read the story of your own dishonor in them; and much good may they do you. Good-bye. (She goes indignantly towards the inner door.)

NAPOLEON. My own — ! Stop. Come back. Come back, I order you. (She proudly disregards his savagely peremptory tone and continues on her way to the door. He rushes at her; seizes her by the wrist; and drags her back.) Now, what do you mean? Explain. Explain, I tell you, or — (Threatening her. She looks at him with unflinching defiance.) Rrrr! you obstinate devil, you. Why can’t you answer a civil question?

LADY (deeply offended by his violence). Why do you ask me? You have the explanation.

NAPOLEON. Where?

LADY (pointing to the letters on the table). There. You have only to read it. (He snatches the packet up, hesitates; looks at her suspiciously; and throws it down again.)

NAPOLEON. You seem to have forgotten your solicitude for the honor of your old friend.

LADY. She runs no risk now: she does not quite understand her husband.

NAPOLEON. I am to read the letter, then? (He stretches out his hand as if to take up the packet again, with his eye on her.)

LADY. I do not see how you can very well avoid doing so now. (He instantly withdraws his hand.) Oh, don’t be afraid. You will find many interesting things in it.

NAPOLEON. For instance?

LADY. For instance, a duel — with Barras, a domestic scene, a broken household, a public scandal, a checked career, all sorts of things.

NAPOLEON. Hm! (He looks at her, takes up the packet and looks at it, pursing his lips and balancing it in his hand; looks at her again; passes the packet into his left hand and puts it behind his back, raising his right to scratch the back of his head as he turns and goes up to the edge of the vineyard, where he stands for a moment looking out into the vines, deep in thought. The Lady watches him in silence, somewhat slightingly. Suddenly he turns and comes back again, full of force and decision.) I grant your request, madame. Your courage and resolution deserve to succeed. Take the letters for which you have fought so well; and remember henceforth that you found the vile, vulgar Corsican adventurer as generous to the vanquished after the battle as he was resolute in the face of the enemy before it. (He offers her the packet.)

LADY (without taking it, looking hard at him). What are you at now, I wonder? (He dashes the packet furiously to the floor.) Aha! I’ve spoiled that attitude, I think. (She makes him a pretty mocking curtsey.)

NAPOLEON (snatching it up again). Will you take the letters and begone (advancing and thrusting them upon her)?

LADY (escaping round the table). No: I don’t want letters.

NAPOLEON. Ten minutes ago, nothing else would satisfy you.

LADY (keeping the table carefully between them). Ten minutes ago you had not insulted me past all bearing.

NAPOLEON. I — (swallowing his spleen) I apologize.

LADY (coolly). Thanks. (With forced politeness he offers her the packet across the table. She retreats a step out of its reach and says) But don’t you want to know whether the Austrians are at Mantua or Peschiera?

NAPOLEON. I have already told you that I can conquer my enemies without the aid of spies, madame.

LADY. And the letter! don’t you want to read that?

NAPOLEON. You have said that it is not addressed to me. I am not in the habit of reading other people’s letters. (He again offers the packet.)

LADY. In that case there can be no objection to your keeping it. All I wanted was to prevent your reading it. (Cheerfully.) Good afternoon, General. (She turns coolly towards the inner door.)

NAPOLEON (furiously flinging the packet on the couch). Heaven grant me patience! (He goes up determinedly and places himself before the door.) Have you any sense of personal danger? Or are you one of those women who like to be beaten black and blue?

LADY. Thank you, General: I have no doubt the sensation is very voluptuous; but I had rather not. I simply want to go home: that’s all. I was wicked enough to steal your despatches; but you have got them back; and you have forgiven me, because (delicately reproducing his rhetorical cadence) you are as generous to the vanquished after the battle as you are resolute in the face of the enemy before it. Won’t you say good-bye to me? (She offers her hand sweetly.)

NAPOLEON (repulsing the advance with a gesture of concentrated rage, and opening the door to call fiercely). Giuseppe! (Louder.) Giuseppe! (He bangs the door to, and comes to the middle of the room. The lady goes a little way into the vineyard to avoid him.)

GIUSEPPE (appearing at the door). Excellency?

NAPOLEON. Where is that fool?

GIUSEPPE. He has had a good dinner, according to your instructions, excellency, and is now doing me the honor to gamble with me to pass the time.

NAPOLEON. Send him here. Bring him here. Come with him. (Giuseppe, with unruffled readiness, hurries off. Napoleon turns curtly to the lady, saying) I must trouble you to remain some moments longer, madame. (He comes to the couch. She comes from the vineyard down the opposite side of the room to the sideboard, and posts herself there, leaning against it, watching him. He takes the packet from the couch and deliberately buttons it carefully into his breast pocket, looking at her meanwhile with an expression which suggests that she will soon find out the meaning of his proceedings, and will not like it. Nothing more is said until the lieutenant arrives followed by Giuseppe, who stands modestly in attendance at the table. The lieutenant, without cap, sword or gloves, and much improved in temper and spirits by his meal, chooses the Lady’s side of the room, and waits, much at his ease, for Napoleon to begin.)

NAPOLEON. Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT (encouragingly). General.

NAPOLEON. I cannot persuade this lady to give me much information; but there can be no doubt that the man who tricked you out of your charge was, as she admitted to you, her brother.

LIEUTENANT (triumphantly). What did I tell you, General! What did I tell you!

NAPOLEON. You must find that man. Your honor is at stake; and the fate of the campaign, the destiny of France, of Europe, of humanity, perhaps, may depend on the information those despatches contain.

LIEUTENANT. Yes, I suppose they really are rather serious (as if this had hardly occurred to him before).

NAPOLEON (energetically). They are so serious, sir, that if you do not recover them, you will be degraded in the presence of your regiment.

LIEUTENANT. Whew! The regiment won’t like that, I can tell you.

NAPOLEON. Personally, I am sorry for you. I would willingly conceal the affair if it were possible. But I shall be called to account for not acting on the despatches. I shall have to prove to all the world that I never received them, no matter what the consequences may be to you. I am sorry; but you see that I cannot help myself.

LIEUTENANT (goodnaturedly). Oh, don’t take it to heart, General: it’s really very good of you. Never mind what happens to me: I shall scrape through somehow; and we’ll beat the Austrians for you, despatches or no despatches. I hope you won’t insist on my starting off on a wild goose chase after the fellow now. I haven’t a notion where to look for him.

GIUSEPPE (deferentially). You forget, Lieutenant: he has your horse.

LIEUTENANT (starting). I forgot that. (Resolutely.) I’ll go after him, General: I’ll find that horse if it’s alive anywhere in Italy. And I shan’t forget the despatches: never fear. Giuseppe: go and saddle one of those mangy old posthorses of yours, while I get my cap and sword and things. Quick march. Off with you (bustling him).

GIUSEPPE. Instantly, Lieutenant, instantly. (He disappears in the vineyard, where the light is now reddening with the sunset.)

LIEUTENANT (looking about him on his way to the inner door). By the way, General, did I give you my sword or did I not? Oh, I remember now. (Fretfully.) It’s all that nonsense about putting a man under arrest: one never knows where to find — (Talks himself out of the room.)

LADY (still at the sideboard). What does all this mean, General?

NAPOLEON. He will not find your brother.

LADY. Of course not. There’s no such person.

NAPOLEON. The despatches will be irrecoverably lost.

LADY. Nonsense! They are inside your coat.

NAPOLEON. You will find it hard, I think, to prove that wild statement. (The Lady starts. He adds, with clinching emphasis) Those papers are lost.

LADY (anxiously, advancing to the corner of the table). And that unfortunate young man’s career will be sacrificed.

NAPOLEON. HIS career! The fellow is not worth the gunpowder it would cost to have him shot. (He turns contemptuously and goes to the hearth, where he stands with his back to her.)

LADY (wistfully). You are very hard. Men and women are nothing to you but things to be used, even if they are broken in the use.

NAPOLEON (turning on her). Which of us has broken this fellow — I or you? Who tricked him out of the despatches? Did you think of his career then?

LADY (naively concerned about him). Oh, I never thought of that. It was brutal of me; but I couldn’t help it, could I? How else could I have got the papers? (Supplicating.) General: you will save him from disgrace.

NAPOLEON (laughing sourly). Save him yourself, since you are so clever: it was you who ruined him. (With savage intensity.) I HATE a bad soldier.

He goes out determinedly through the vineyard. She follows him a few steps with an appealing gesture, but is interrupted by the return of the lieutenant, gloved and capped, with his sword on, ready for the road. He is crossing to the outer door when she intercepts him.

LADY. Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT (importantly). You mustn’t delay me, you know. Duty, madame, duty.

LADY (imploringly). Oh, sir, what are you going to do to my poor brother?

LIEUTENANT. Are you very fond of him?

LADY. I should die if anything happened to him. You must spare him. (The lieutenant shakes his head gloomily.) Yes, yes: you must: you shall: he is not fit to die. Listen to me. If I tell you where to find him — if I undertake to place him in your hands a prisoner, to be delivered up by you to General Bonaparte — will you promise me on your honor as an officer and a gentleman not to fight with him or treat him unkindly in any way?

LIEUTENANT. But suppose he attacks me. He has my pistols.

LADY. He is too great a coward.

LIEUTENANT. I don’t feel so sure about that. He’s capable of anything.

LADY. If he attacks you, or resists you in any way, I release you from your promise.

LIEUTENANT. My promise! I didn’t mean to promise. Look here: you’re as bad as he is: you’ve taken an advantage of me through the better side of my nature. What about my horse?

LADY. It is part of the bargain that you are to have your horse and pistols back.

LIEUTENANT. Honor bright?

LADY. Honor bright. (She offers her hand.)

LIEUTENANT (taking it and holding it). All right: I’ll be as gentle as a lamb with him. His sister’s a very pretty woman. (He attempts to kiss her.)

LADY (slipping away from him). Oh, Lieutenant! You forget: your career is at stake — the destiny of Europe — of humanity.

LIEUTENANT. Oh, bother the destiny of humanity (Making for her.) Only a kiss.

LADY (retreating round the table). Not until you have regained your honor as an officer. Remember: you have not captured my brother yet.

LIEUTENANT (seductively). You’ll tell me where he is, won’t you?

LADY. I have only to send him a certain signal; and he will be here in quarter of an hour.

LIEUTENANT. He’s not far off, then.

LADY. No: quite close. Wait here for him: when he gets my message he will come here at once and surrender himself to you. You understand?

LIEUTENANT (intellectually overtaxed). Well, it’s a little complicated; but I daresay it will be all right.

LADY. And now, whilst you’re waiting, don’t you think you had better make terms with the General?

LIEUTENANT. Oh, look here, this is getting frightfully complicated. What terms?

LADY. Make him promise that if you catch my brother he will consider that you have cleared your character as a soldier. He will promise anything you ask on that condition.

LIEUTENANT. That’s not a bad idea. Thank you: I think I’ll try it.

LADY. Do. And mind, above all things, don’t let him see how clever you are.

LIEUTENANT. I understand. He’d be jealous.

LADY. Don’t tell him anything except that you are resolved to capture my brother or perish in the attempt. He won’t believe you. Then you will produce my brother —

LIEUTENANT (interrupting as he masters the plot). And have the laugh at him! I say: what a clever little woman you are! (Shouting.) Giuseppe!

LADY. Sh! Not a word to Giuseppe about me. (She puts her finger on her lips. He does the same. They look at one another warningly. Then, with a ravishing smile, she changes the gesture into wafting him a kiss, and runs out through the inner door. Electrified, he bursts into a volley of chuckles. Giuseppe comes back by the outer door.)

GIUSEPPE. The horse is ready, Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT. I’m not going just yet. Go and find the General, and tell him I want to speak to him.

GIUSEPPE (shaking his head). That will never do, Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT. Why not?

GIUSEPPE. In this wicked world a general may send for a lieutenant; but a lieutenant must not send for a general.

LIEUTENANT. Oh, you think he wouldn’t like it. Well, perhaps you’re right: one has to be awfully particular about that sort of thing now we’ve got a republic.

Napoleon reappears, advancing from the vineyard, buttoning the breast of his coat, pale and full of gnawing thoughts.

GIUSEPPE (unconscious of Napoleon’s approach). Quite true, Lieutenant, quite true. You are all like innkeepers now in France: you have to be polite to everybody.

NAPOLEON (putting his hand on Giuseppe’s shoulder). And that destroys the whole value of politeness, eh?

LIEUTENANT. The very man I wanted! See here, General: suppose I catch that fellow for you!

NAPOLEON (with ironical gravity). You will not catch him, my friend.

LIEUTENANT. Aha! you think so; but you’ll see. Just wait. Only, if I do catch him and hand him over to you, will you cry quits? Will you drop all this about degrading me in the presence of my regiment? Not that I mind, you know; but still no regiment likes to have all the other regiments laughing at it.

NAPOLEON. (a cold ray of humor striking pallidly across his gloom). What shall we do with this officer, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong.

GIUSEPPE (promptly). Make him a general, excellency; and then everything he says will be right.

LIEUTENANT (crowing). Haw-aw! (He throws himself ecstatically on the couch to enjoy the joke.)

NAPOLEON (laughing and pinching Giuseppe’s ear). You are thrown away in this inn, Giuseppe. (He sits down and places Giuseppe before him like a schoolmaster with a pupil.) Shall I take you away with me and make a man of you?

GIUSEPPE (shaking his head rapidly and repeatedly). No, thank you, General. All my life long people have wanted to make a man of me. When I was a boy, our good priest wanted to make a man of me by teaching me to read and write. Then the organist at Melegnano wanted to make a man of me by teaching me to read music. The recruiting sergeant would have made a man of me if I had been a few inches taller. But it always meant making me work; and I am too lazy for that, thank Heaven! So I taught myself to cook and became an innkeeper; and now I keep servants to do the work, and have nothing to do myself except talk, which suits me perfectly.

NAPOLEON (looking at him thoughtfully). You are satisfied?

GIUSEPPE (with cheerful conviction). Quite, excellency.

NAPOLEON. And you have no devouring devil inside you who must be fed with action and victory — gorged with them night and day — who makes you pay, with the sweat of your brain and body, weeks of Herculean toil for ten minutes of enjoyment — who is at once your slave and your tyrant, your genius and your doom — who brings you a crown in one hand and the oar of a galley slave in the other — who shows you all the kingdoms of the earth and offers to make you their master on condition that you become their servant! — have you nothing of that in you?

GIUSEPPE. Nothing of it! Oh, I assure you, excellency, MY devouring devil is far worse than that. He offers me no crowns and kingdoms: he expects to get everything for nothing — sausages, omelettes, grapes, cheese, polenta, wine — three times a day, excellency: nothing less will content him.

LIEUTENANT. Come, drop it, Giuseppe: you’re making me feel hungry again.

(Giuseppe, with an apologetic shrug, retires from the conversation, and busies himself at the table, dusting it, setting the map straight, and replacing Napoleon’s chair, which the lady has pushed back.)

NAPOLEON (turning to the lieutenant with sardonic ceremony). I hope I have not been making you feel ambitious.

LIEUTENANT. Not at all: I don’t fly so high. Besides: I’m better as I am: men like me are wanted in the army just now. The fact is, the Revolution was all very well for civilians; but it won’t work in the army. You know what soldiers are, General: they WILL have men of family for their officers. A subaltern must be a gentleman, because he’s so much in contact with the men. But a general, or even a colonel, may be any sort of riff-raff if he understands the shop well enough. A lieutenant is a gentleman: all the rest is chance. Why, who do you suppose won the battle of Lodi? I’ll tell you. My horse did.

NAPOLEON (rising) Your folly is carrying you too far, sir. Take care.

LIEUTENANT. Not a bit of it. You remember all that red-hot cannonade across the river: the Austrians blazing away at you to keep you from crossing, and you blazing away at them to keep them from setting the bridge on fire? Did you notice where I was then?

NAPOLEON (with menacing politeness). I am sorry. I am afraid I was rather occupied at the moment.

GIUSEPPE (with eager admiration). They say you jumped off your horse and worked the big guns with your own hands, General.

LIEUTENANT. That was a mistake: an officer should never let himself down to the level of his men. (Napoleon looks at him dangerously, and begins to walk tigerishly to and fro.) But you might have been firing away at the Austrians still, if we cavalry fellows hadn’t found the ford and got across and turned old Beaulieu’s flank for you. You know you daren’t have given the order to charge the bridge if you hadn’t seen us on the other side. Consequently, I say that whoever found that ford won the battle of Lodi. Well, who found it? I was the first man to cross: and I know. It was my horse that found it. (With conviction, as he rises from the couch.) That horse is the true conqueror of the Austrians.

NAPOLEON (passionately). You idiot: I’ll have you shot for losing those despatches: I’ll have you blown from the mouth of a cannon: nothing less could make any impression on you. (Baying at him.) Do you hear? Do you understand?

A French officer enters unobserved, carrying his sheathed sabre in his hand.

LIEUTENANT (unabashed). IF I don’t capture him, General. Remember the if.

NAPOLEON. If! If!! Ass: there is no such man.

THE OFFICER (suddenly stepping between them and speaking in the unmistakable voice of the Strange Lady). Lieutenant: I am your prisoner. (She offers him her sabre. They are amazed. Napoleon gazes at her for a moment thunderstruck; then seizes her by the wrist and drags her roughly to him, looking closely and fiercely at her to satisfy himself as to her identity; for it now begins to darken rapidly into night, the red glow over the vineyard giving way to clear starlight.)

NAPOLEON. Pah! (He flings her hand away with an exclamation of disgust, and turns his back on her with his hand in his breast and his brow lowering.)

LIEUTENANT (triumphantly, taking the sabre). No such man: eh, General? (To the Lady.) I say: where’s my horse?

LADY. Safe at Borghetto, waiting for you, Lieutenant.

NAPOLEON (turning on them). Where are the despatches?

LADY. You would never guess. They are in the most unlikely place in the world. Did you meet my sister here, any of you?

LIEUTENANT. Yes. Very nice woman. She’s wonderfully like you; but of course she’s better looking.

LADY (mysteriously). Well, do you know that she is a witch?

GIUSEPPE (running down to them in terror, crossing himself). Oh, no, no, no. It is not safe to jest about such things. I cannot have it in my house, excellency.

LIEUTENANT. Yes, drop it. You’re my prisoner, you know. Of course I don’t believe in any such rubbish; but still it’s not a proper subject for joking.

LADY. But this is very serious. My sister has bewitched the General. (Giuseppe and the Lieutenant recoil from Napoleon.) General: open your coat: you will find the despatches in the breast of it. (She puts her hand quickly on his breast.) Yes: there they are: I can feel them. Eh? (She looks up into his face half coaxingly, half mockingly.) Will you allow me, General? (She takes a button as if to unbutton his coat, and pauses for permission.)

NAPOLEON (inscrutably). If you dare.

LADY. Thank you. (She opens his coat and takes out the despatches.) There! (To Giuseppe, showing him the despatches.) See!

GIUSEPPE (flying to the outer door). No, in heaven’s name! They’re bewitched.

LADY (turning to the Lieutenant). Here, Lieutenant: YOU’RE not afraid of them.

LIEUTENANT (retreating). Keep off. (Seizing the hilt of the sabre.) Keep off, I tell you.

LADY (to Napoleon). They belong to you, General. Take them.

GIUSEPPE. Don’t touch them, excellency. Have nothing to do with them.

LIEUTENANT. Be careful, General: be careful.

GIUSEPPE. Burn them. And burn the witch, too.

LADY (to Napoleon). Shall I burn them?

NAPOLEON (thoughtfully). Yes, burn them. Giuseppe: go and fetch a light.

GIUSEPPE (trembling and stammering). Do you mean go alone — in the dark — with a witch in the house?

NAPOLEON. Psha! You’re a poltroon. (To the Lieutenant.) Oblige me by going, Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT (remonstrating). Oh, I say, General! No, look here, you know: nobody can say I’m a coward after Lodi. But to ask me to go into the dark by myself without a candle after such an awful conversation is a little too much. How would you like to do it yourself?

NAPOLEON (irritably). You refuse to obey my order?

LIEUTENANT (resolutely). Yes, I do. It’s not reasonable. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If Giuseppe goes, I’ll go with him and protect him.

NAPOLEON (to Giuseppe). There! will that satisfy you? Be off, both of you.

GIUSEPPE (humbly, his lips trembling). W — willingly, your excellency. (He goes reluctantly towards the inner door.) Heaven protect me! (To the lieutenant.) After you, Lieutenant.

LIEUTENANT. You’d better go first: I don’t know the way.

GIUSEPPE. You can’t miss it. Besides (imploringly, laying his hand on his sleeve), I am only a poor innkeeper; and you are a man of family.

LIEUTENANT. There’s something in that. Here: you needn’t be in such a fright. Take my arm. (Giuseppe does so.) That’s the way.(They go out, arm in arm. It is now starry night. The lady throws the packet on the table and seats herself at her ease on the couch enjoying the sensation of freedom from petticoats.)

LADY. Well, General: I’ve beaten you.

NAPOLEON (walking about). You have been guilty of indelicacy — of unwomanliness. Do you consider that costume a proper one to wear?

LADY. It seems to me much the same as yours.

NAPOLEON. Psha! I blush for you.

LADY (naively). Yes: soldiers blush so easily! (He growls and turns away. She looks mischievously at him, balancing the despatches in her hand.) Wouldn’t you like to read these before they’re burnt, General? You must be dying with curiosity. Take a peep. (She throws the packet on the table, and turns her face away from it.) I won’t look.

NAPOLEON. I have no curiosity whatever, madame. But since you are evidently burning to read them, I give you leave to do so.

LADY. Oh, I’ve read them already.

NAPOLEON (starting). What!

LADY. I read them the first thing after I rode away on that poor lieutenant’s horse. So you see I know what’s in them; and you don’t.

NAPOLEON. Excuse me: I read them there in the vineyard ten minutes ago.

LADY. Oh! (Jumping up.) Oh, General I’ve not beaten you. I do admire you so. (He laughs and pats her cheek.) This time really and truly without shamming, I do you homage (kissing his hand).

NAPOLEON (quickly withdrawing it). Brr! Don’t do that. No more witchcraft.

LADY. I want to say something to you — only you would misunderstand it.

NAPOLEON. Need that stop you?

LADY. Well, it is this. I adore a man who is not afraid to be mean and selfish.

NAPOLEON (indignantly). I am neither mean nor selfish.

LADY. Oh, you don’t appreciate yourself. Besides, I don’t really mean meanness and selfishness.

NAPOLEON. Thank you. I thought perhaps you did.

LADY. Well, of course I do. But what I mean is a certain strong simplicity about you.

NAPOLEON. That’s better.

LADY. You didn’t want to read the letters; but you were curious about what was in them. So you went into the garden and read them when no one was looking, and then came back and pretended you hadn’t. That’s the meanest thing I ever knew any man do; but it exactly fulfilled your purpose; and so you weren’t a bit afraid or ashamed to do it.

NAPOLEON (abruptly). Where did you pick up all these vulgar scruples — this (with contemptuous emphasis) conscience of yours? I took you for a lady — an aristocrat. Was your grandfather a shopkeeper, pray?

LADY. No: he was an Englishman.

NAPOLEON. That accounts for it. The English are a nation of shopkeepers. Now I understand why you’ve beaten me.

LADY. Oh, I haven’t beaten you. And I’m not English.

NAPOLEON. Yes, you are — English to the backbone. Listen to me: I will explain the English to you.

LADY (eagerly). Do. (With a lively air of anticipating an intellectual treat, she sits down on the couch and composes herself to listen to him. Secure of his audience, he at once nerves himself for a performance. He considers a little before he begins; so as to fix her attention by a moment of suspense. His style is at first modelled on Talma’s in Corneille’s “Cinna;” but it is somewhat lost in the darkness, and Talma presently gives way to Napoleon, the voice coming through the gloom with startling intensity.)

NAPOLEON. There are three sorts of people in the world, the low people, the middle people, and the high people. The low people and the high people are alike in one thing: they have no scruples, no morality. The low are beneath morality, the high above it. I am not afraid of either of them: for the low are unscrupulous without knowledge, so that they make an idol of me; whilst the high are unscrupulous without purpose, so that they go down before my will. Look you: I shall go over all the mobs and all the courts of Europe as a plough goes over a field. It is the middle people who are dangerous: they have both knowledge and purpose. But they, too, have their weak point. They are full of scruples — chained hand and foot by their morality and respectability.

LADY. Then you will beat the English; for all shopkeepers are middle people.

NAPOLEON. No, because the English are a race apart. No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible. Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases him and grabs what he wants: like the shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with the industry and steadfastness that come from strong religious conviction and deep sense of moral responsibility. He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven. In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the moment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day. He makes two revolutions, and then declares war on our one in the name of law and order. There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles, and cuts off his king’s head on republican principles. His watchword is always duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost. He —

LADY. W-w-w-w-w-wh! Do stop a moment. I want to know how you make me out to be English at this rate.

NAPOLEON (dropping his rhetorical style). It’s plain enough. You wanted some letters that belonged to me. You have spent the morning in stealing them — yes, stealing them, by highway robbery. And you have spent the afternoon in putting me in the wrong about them — in assuming that it was I who wanted to steal YOUR letters — in explaining that it all came about through my meanness and selfishness, and your goodness, your devotion, your self-sacrifice. That’s English.

LADY. Nonsense. I am sure I am not a bit English. The English are a very stupid people.

NAPOLEON. Yes, too stupid sometimes to know when they’re beaten. But I grant that your brains are not English. You see, though your grandfather was an Englishman, your grandmother was — what? A Frenchwoman?

LADY. Oh, no. An Irishwoman.

NAPOLEON (quickly). Irish! (Thoughtfully.) Yes: I forgot the Irish. An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general. (He pauses, and adds, half jestingly, half moodily) At all events, YOU have beaten me; and what beats a man first will beat him last. (He goes meditatively into the moonlit vineyard and looks up. She steals out after him. She ventures to rest her hand on his shoulder, overcome by the beauty of the night and emboldened by its obscurity.)

LADY (softly). What are you looking at?

NAPOLEON (pointing up). My star.

LADY. You believe in that?

NAPOLEON. I do. (They look at it for a moment, she leaning a little on his shoulder.)

LADY. Do you know that the English say that a man’s star is not complete without a woman’s garter?

NAPOLEON (scandalized — abruptly shaking her off and coming back into the room). Pah! The hypocrites! If the French said that, how they would hold up their hands in pious horror! (He goes to the inner door and holds it open, shouting) Hallo! Giuseppe. Where’s that light, man. (He comes between the table and the sideboard, and moves the chair to the table, beside his own.) We have still to burn the letter. (He takes up the packet. Giuseppe comes back, pale and still trembling, carrying a branched candlestick with a couple of candles alight, in one hand, and a broad snuffers tray in the other.)

GIUSEPPE (piteously, as he places the light on the table). Excellency: what were you looking up at just now — out there? (He points across his shoulder to the vineyard, but is afraid to look round.)

NAPOLEON (unfolding the packet). What is that to you?

GIUSEPPE (stammering). Because the witch is gone — vanished; and no one saw her go out.

LADY (coming behind him from the vineyard). We were watching her riding up to the moon on your broomstick, Giuseppe. You will never see her again.

GIUSEPPE. Gesu Maria! (He crosses himself and hurries out.)

NAPOLEON (throwing down the letters in a heap on the table). Now. (He sits down at the table in the chair which he has just placed.)

LADY. Yes; but you know you have THE letter in your pocket. (He smiles; takes a letter from his pocket; and tosses it on the top of the heap. She holds it up and looks at him, saying) About Caesar’s wife.

NAPOLEON. Caesar’s wife is above suspicion. Burn it.

LADY (taking up the snuffers and holding the letter to the candle flame with it). I wonder would Caesar’s wife be above suspicion if she saw us here together!

NAPOLEON (echoing her, with his elbows on the table and his cheeks on his hands, looking at the letter). I wonder! (The Strange Lady puts the letter down alight on the snuffers tray, and sits down beside Napoleon, in the same attitude, elbows on table, cheeks on hands, watching it burn. When it is burnt, they simultaneously turn their eyes and look at one another. The curtain steals down and hides them.)

YOU NEVER CAN TELL

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT I

In a dentist’s operating room on a fine August morning in 1896. Not the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fashionable watering place. The operating chair, with a gas pump and cylinder beside it, is half way between the centre of the room and one of the corners. If you look into the room through the window which lights it, you will see the fireplace in the middle of the wall opposite you, with the door beside it to your left; an M.R.C.S. diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench, with vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right. Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch. Recognising this as a dental drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing table, towards the door, is a leather covered sofa. The opposite wall, close on your right, is occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose, facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left. You observe that the professional furniture and apparatus are new, and that the wall paper, designed, with the taste of an undertaker, in festoons and urns, the carpet with its symmetrical plans of rich, cabbagy nosegays, the glass gasalier with lustres; the ornamental gilt rimmed blue candlesticks on the ends of the mantelshelf, also glass draped with lustres, and the ormolu clock under a glass-cover in the middle between them, its uselessness emphasized by a cheap American clock disrespectfully placed beside it and now indicating 12 o’clock noon, all combine with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

There is no shadow of this on the two persons who are occupying the room just now. One of them, a very pretty woman in miniature, her tiny figure dressed with the daintiest gaiety, is of a later generation, being hardly eighteen yet. This darling little creature clearly does not belong to the room, or even to the country; for her complexion, though very delicate, has been burnt biscuit color by some warmer sun than England’s; and yet there is, for a very subtle observer, a link between them. For she has a glass of water in her hand, and a rapidly clearing cloud of Spartan obstinacy on her tiny firm set mouth and quaintly squared eyebrows. If the least line of conscience could be traced between those eyebrows, an Evangelical might cherish some faint hope of finding her a sheep in wolf’s clothing — for her frock is recklessly pretty — but as the cloud vanishes it leaves her frontal sinus as smoothly free from conviction of sin as a kitten’s.

The dentist, contemplating her with the self-satisfaction of a successful operator, is a young man of thirty or thereabouts. He does not give the impression of being much of a workman: his professional manner evidently strikes him as being a joke, and is underlain by a thoughtless pleasantry which betrays the young gentleman still unsettled and in search of amusing adventures, behind the newly set-up dentist in search of patients. He is not without gravity of demeanor; but the strained nostrils stamp it as the gravity of the humorist. His eyes are clear, alert, of sceptically moderate size, and yet a little rash; his forehead is an excellent one, with plenty of room behind it; his nose and chin cavalierly handsome. On the whole, an attractive, noticeable beginner, of whose prospects a man of business might form a tolerably favorable estimate.

THE YOUNG LADY (handing him the glass). Thank you. (In spite of the biscuit complexion she has not the slightest foreign accent.)

THE DENTIST (putting it down on the ledge of his cabinet of instruments). That was my first tooth.

THE YOUNG LADY (aghast). Your first! Do you mean to say that you began practising on me?

THE DENTIST. Every dentist has to begin on somebody.

THE YOUNG LADY. Yes: somebody in a hospital, not people who pay.

THE DENTIST (laughing). Oh, the hospital doesn’t count. I only meant my first tooth in private practice. Why didn’t you let me give you gas?

THE YOUNG LADY. Because you said it would be five shillings extra.

THE DENTIST (shocked). Oh, don’t say that. It makes me feel as if I had hurt you for the sake of five shillings.

THE YOUNG LADY (with cool insolence). Well, so you have! (She gets up.) Why shouldn’t you? it’s your business to hurt people. (It amuses him to be treated in this fashion: he chuckles secretly as he proceeds to clean and replace his instruments. She shakes her dress into order; looks inquisitively about her; and goes to the window.) You have a good view of the sea from these rooms! Are they expensive?

THE DENTIST. Yes.

THE YOUNG LADY. You don’t own the whole house, do you?

THE DENTIST. No.

THE YOUNG LADY (taking the chair which stands at the writing-table and looking critically at it as she spins it round on one leg.) Your furniture isn’t quite the latest thing, is it?

THE DENTIST. It’s my landlord’s.

THE YOUNG LADY. Does he own that nice comfortable Bath chair? (pointing to the operating chair.)

THE DENTIST. No: I have that on the hire-purchase system.

THE YOUNG LADY (disparagingly). I thought so. (Looking about her again in search of further conclusions.) I suppose you haven’t been here long?

THE DENTIST. Six weeks. Is there anything else you would like to know?

THE YOUNG LADY (the hint quite lost on her). Any family?

THE DENTIST. I am not married.

THE YOUNG LADY. Of course not: anybody can see that. I meant sisters and mother and that sort of thing.

THE DENTIST. Not on the premises.

THE YOUNG LADY. Hm! If you’ve been here six weeks, and mine was your first tooth, the practice can’t be very large, can it?

THE DENTIST. Not as yet. (He shuts the cabinet, having tidied up everything.)

THE YOUNG LADY. Well, good luck! (She takes our her purse.) Five shillings, you said it would be?

THE DENTIST. Five shillings.

THE YOUNG LADY (producing a crown piece). Do you charge five shillings for everything?

THE DENTIST. Yes.

THE YOUNG LADY. Why?

THE DENTIST. It’s my system. I’m what’s called a five shilling dentist.

THE YOUNG LADY. How nice! Well, here! (holding up the crown piece) a nice new five shilling piece! your first fee! Make a hole in it with the thing you drill people’s teeth with and wear it on your watch-chain.

THE DENTIST. Thank you.

THE PARLOR MAID (appearing at the door). The young lady’s brother, sir.

A handsome man in miniature, obviously the young lady’s twin, comes in eagerly. He wears a suit of terra-cotta cashmere, the elegantly cut frock coat lined in brown silk, and carries in his hand a brown tall hat and tan gloves to match. He has his sister’s delicate biscuit complexion, and is built on the same small scale; but he is elastic and strong in muscle, decisive in movement, unexpectedly deeptoned and trenchant in speech, and with perfect manners and a finished personal style which might be envied by a man twice his age. Suavity and self-possession are points of honor with him; and though this, rightly considered, is only the modern mode of boyish self-consciousness, its effect is none the less staggering to his elders, and would be insufferable in a less prepossessing youth. He is promptitude itself, and has a question ready the moment he enters.

THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN. Am I on time?

THE YOUNG LADY. No: it’s all over.

THE YOUNG GENTLEMAN. Did you howl?

THE YOUNG LADY. Oh, something awful. Mr. Valentine: this is my brother Phil. Phil: this is Mr. Valentine, our new dentist. (Valentine and Phil bow to one another. She proceeds, all in one breath.) He’s only been here six weeks; and he’s a bachelor. The house isn’t his; and the furniture is the landlord’s; but the professional plant is hired. He got my tooth out beautifully at the first go; and he and I are great friends.

PHILIP. Been asking a lot of questions?

THE YOUNG LADY (as if incapable of doing such a thing). Oh, no.

PHILIP. Glad to hear it. (To Valentine.) So good of you not to mind us, Mr. Valentine. The fact is, we’ve never been in England before; and our mother tells us that the people here simply won’t stand us. Come and lunch with us. (Valentine, bewildered by the leaps and bounds with which their acquaintanceship is proceeding, gasps; but he has no opportunity of speaking, as the conversation of the twins is swift and continuous.)

THE YOUNG LADY. Oh, do, Mr. Valentine.

PHILIP. At the Marine Hotel — half past one.

THE YOUNG LADY. We shall be able to tell mamma that a respectable Englishman has promised to lunch with us.

PHILIP. Say no more, Mr. Valentine: you’ll come.

VALENTINE. Say no more! I haven’t said anything. May I ask whom I have the pleasure of entertaining? It’s really quite impossible for me to lunch at the Marine Hotel with two perfect strangers.

THE YOUNG LADY (flippantly). Ooooh! what bosh! One patient in six weeks! What difference does it make to you?

PHILIP (maturely). No, Dolly: my knowledge of human nature confirms Mr. Valentine’s judgment. He is right. Let me introduce Miss Dorothy Clandon, commonly called Dolly. (Valentine bows to Dolly. She nods to him.) I’m Philip Clandon. We’re from Madeira, but perfectly respectable, so far.

VALENTINE. Clandon! Are you related to —

DOLLY (unexpectedly crying out in despair). Yes, we are.

VALENTINE (astonished). I beg your pardon?

DOLLY. Oh, we are, we are. It’s all over, Phil: they know all about us in England. (To Valentine.) Oh, you can’t think how maddening it is to be related to a celebrated person, and never be valued anywhere for our own sakes.

VALENTINE. But excuse me: the gentleman I was thinking of is not celebrated.

DOLLY (staring at him). Gentleman! (Phil is also puzzled.)

VALENTINE. Yes. I was going to ask whether you were by any chance a daughter of Mr. Densmore Clandon of Newbury Hall.

DOLLY (vacantly). No.

PHILIP. Well come, Dolly: how do you know you’re not?

DOLLY (cheered). Oh, I forgot. Of course. Perhaps I am.

VALENTINE. Don’t you know?

PHILIP. Not in the least.

DOLLY. It’s a wise child —

PHILIP (cutting her short). Sh! (Valentine starts nervously; for the sound made by Philip, though but momentary, is like cutting a sheet of silk in two with a flash of lightning. It is the result of long practice in checking Dolly’s indiscretions.) The fact is, Mr. Valentine, we are the children of the celebrated Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon, an authoress of great repute — in Madeira. No household is complete without her works. We came to England to get away from them. The are called the Twentieth Century Treatises.

DOLLY. Twentieth Century Cooking.

PHILIP. Twentieth Century Creeds.

DOLLY. Twentieth Century Clothing.

PHILIP. Twentieth Century Conduct.

DOLLY. Twentieth Century Children.

PHILIP. Twentieth Century Parents.

DOLLY. Cloth limp, half a dollar.

PHILIP. Or mounted on linen for hard family use, two dollars. No family should be without them. Read them, Mr. Valentine: they’ll improve your mind.

DOLLY. But not till we’ve gone, please.

PHILIP. Quite so: we prefer people with unimproved minds. Our own minds are in that fresh and unspoiled condition.

VALENTINE (dubiously). Hm!

DOLLY (echoing him inquiringly). Hm? Phil: he prefers people whose minds are improved.

PHILIP. In that case we shall have to introduce him to the other member of the family: the Woman of the Twentieth Century; our sister Gloria!

DOLLY (dithyrambically). Nature’s masterpiece!

PHILIP. Learning’s daughter!

DOLLY. Madeira’s pride!

PHILIP. Beauty’s paragon!

DOLLY (suddenly descending to prose). Bosh! No complexion.

VALENTINE (desperately). May I have a word?

PHILIP (politely). Excuse us. Go ahead.

DOLLY (very nicely). So sorry.

VALENTINE (attempting to take them paternally). I really must give a hint to you young people —

DOLLY (breaking out again). Oh, come: I like that. How old are you?

PHILIP. Over thirty.

DOLLY. He’s not.

PHILIP (confidently). He is.

DOLLY (emphatically). Twenty-seven.

PHILIP (imperturbably). Thirty-three.

DOLLY. Stuff!

PHILIP (to Valentine). I appeal to you, Mr. Valentine.

VALENTINE (remonstrating). Well, really — (resigning himself.) Thirty-one.

PHILIP (to Dolly). You were wrong.

DOLLY. So were you.

PHILIP (suddenly conscientious). We’re forgetting our manners, Dolly.

DOLLY (remorseful). Yes, so we are.

PHILIP (apologetic). We interrupted you, Mr. Valentine.

DOLLY. You were going to improve our minds, I think.

VALENTINE. The fact is, your —

PHILIP (anticipating him). Our appearance?

DOLLY. Our manners?

VALENTINE (ad misericordiam). Oh, do let me speak.

DOLLY. The old story. We talk too much.

PHILIP. We do. Shut up, both. (He seats himself on the arm of the opposing chair.)

DOLLY. Mum! (She sits down in the writing-table chair, and closes her lips tight with the tips of her fingers.)

VALENTINE. Thank you. (He brings the stool from the bench in the corner; places it between them; and sits down with a judicial air. They attend to him with extreme gravity. He addresses himself first to Dolly.) Now may I ask, to begin with, have you ever been in an English seaside resort before? (She shakes her head slowly and solemnly. He turns to Phil, who shakes his head quickly and expressively.) I thought so. Well, Mr. Clandon, our acquaintance has been short; but it has been voluble; and I have gathered enough to convince me that you are neither of you capable of conceiving what life in an English seaside resort is. Believe me, it’s not a question of manners and appearance. In those respects we enjoy a freedom unknown in Madeira. (Dolly shakes her head vehemently.) Oh, yes, I assure you. Lord de Cresci’s sister bicycles in knickerbockers; and the rector’s wife advocates dress reform and wears hygienic boots. (Dolly furtively looks at her own shoe: Valentine catches her in the act, and deftly adds) No, that’s not the sort of boot I mean. (Dolly’s shoe vanishes.) We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because, as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners. But — and now will you excuse my frankness? (They nod.) Thank you. Well, in a seaside resort there’s one thing you must have before anybody can afford to be seen going about with you; and that’s a father, alive or dead. (He looks at them alternately, with emphasis. They meet his gaze like martyrs.) Am I to infer that you have omitted that indispensable part of your social equipment? (They confirm him by melancholy nods.) Them I’m sorry to say that if you are going to stay here for any length of time, it will be impossible for me to accept your kind invitation to lunch. (He rises with an air of finality, and replaces the stool by the bench.)

PHILIP (rising with grave politeness). Come, Dolly. (He gives her his arm.)

DOLLY. Good morning. (They go together to the door with perfect dignity.)

VALENTINE (overwhelmed with remorse). Oh, stop, stop. (They halt and turn, arm in arm.) You make me feel a perfect beast.

DOLLY. That’s your conscience: not us.

VALENTINE (energetically, throwing off all pretence of a professional manner). My conscience! My conscience has been my ruin. Listen to me. Twice before I have set up as a respectable medical practitioner in various parts of England. On both occasions I acted conscientiously, and told my patients the brute truth instead of what they wanted to be told. Result, ruin. Now I’ve set up as a dentist, a five shilling dentist; and I’ve done with conscience forever. This is my last chance. I spent my last sovereign on moving in; and I haven’t paid a shilling of rent yet. I’m eating and drinking on credit; my landlord is as rich as a Jew and as hard as nails; and I’ve made five shillings in six weeks. If I swerve by a hair’s breadth from the straight line of the most rigid respectability, I’m done for. Under such a circumstance, is it fair to ask me to lunch with you when you don’t know your own father?

DOLLY. After all, our grandfather is a canon of Lincoln Cathedral.

VALENTINE (like a castaway mariner who sees a sail on the horizon). What! Have you a grandfather?

DOLLY. Only one.

VALENTINE. My dear, good young friends, why on earth didn’t you tell me that before? A cannon of Lincoln! That makes it all right, of course. Just excuse me while I change my coat. (He reaches the door in a bound and vanishes. Dolly and Phil stare after him, and then stare at one another. Missing their audience, they droop and become commonplace at once.)

PHILIP (throwing away Dolly’s arm and coming ill-humoredly towards the operating chair). That wretched bankrupt ivory snatcher makes a compliment of allowing us to stand him a lunch — probably the first square meal he has had for months. (He gives the chair a kick, as if it were Valentine.)

DOLLY. It’s too beastly. I won’t stand it any longer, Phil. Here in England everybody asks whether you have a father the very first thing.

PHILIP. I won’t stand it either. Mamma must tell us who he was.

DOLLY. Or who he is. He may be alive.

PHILIP. I hope not. No man alive shall father me.

DOLLY. He might have a lot of money, though.

PHILIP. I doubt it. My knowledge of human nature leads me to believe that if he had a lot of money he wouldn’t have got rid of his affectionate family so easily. Anyhow, let’s look at the bright side of things. Depend on it, he’s dead. (He goes to the hearth and stands with his back to the fireplace, spreading himself. The parlor maid appears. The twins, under observation, instantly shine out again with their former brilliancy.)

THE PARLOR MAID. Two ladies for you, miss. Your mother and sister, miss, I think.

Mrs. Clandon and Gloria come in. Mrs. Clandon is between forty and fifty, with a slight tendency to soft, sedentary fat, and a fair remainder of good looks, none the worse preserved because she has evidently followed the old tribal matronly fashion of making no pretension in that direction after her marriage, and might almost be suspected of wearing a cap at home. She carries herself artificially well, as women were taught to do as a part of good manners by dancing masters and reclining boards before these were superseded by the modern artistic cult of beauty and health. Her hair, a flaxen hazel fading into white, is crimped, and parted in the middle with the ends plaited and made into a knot, from which observant people of a certain age infer that Mrs. Clandon had sufficient individuality and good taste to stand out resolutely against the now forgotten chignon in her girlhood. In short, she is distinctly old fashioned for her age in dress and manners. But she belongs to the forefront of her own period (say 1860-80) in a jealously assertive attitude of character and intellect, and in being a woman of cultivated interests rather than passionately developed personal affections. Her voice and ways are entirely kindly and humane; and she lends herself conscientiously to the occasional demonstrations of fondness by which her children mark their esteem for her; but displays of personal sentiment secretly embarrass her: passion in her is humanitarian rather than human: she feels strongly about social questions and principles, not about persons. Only, one observes that this reasonableness and intense personal privacy, which leaves her relations with Gloria and Phil much as they might be between her and the children of any other woman, breaks down in the case of Dolly. Though almost every word she addresses to her is necessarily in the nature of a remonstrance for some breach of decorum, the tenderness in her voice is unmistakable; and it is not surprising that years of such remonstrance have left Dolly hopelessly spoiled.

Gloria, who is hardly past twenty, is a much more formidable person than her mother. She is the incarnation of haughty highmindedness, raging with the impatience of an impetuous, dominative character paralyzed by the impotence of her youth, and unwillingly disciplined by the constant danger of ridicule from her lighter-handed juniors. Unlike her mother, she is all passion; and the conflict of her passion with her obstinate pride and intense fastidiousness results in a freezing coldness of manner. In an ugly woman all this would be repulsive; but Gloria is an attractive woman. Her deep chestnut hair, olive brown skin, long eyelashes, shaded grey eyes that often flash like stars, delicately turned full lips, and compact and supple, but muscularly plump figure appeal with disdainful frankness to the senses and imagination. A very dangerous girl, one would say, if the moral passions were not also marked, and even nobly marked, in a fine brow. Her tailor-made skirt-and-jacket dress of saffron brown cloth, seems conventional when her back is turned; but it displays in front a blouse of sea-green silk which upsets its conventionality with one stroke, and sets her apart as effectually as the twins from the ordinary run of fashionable seaside humanity.

Mrs. Clandon comes a little way into the room, looking round to see who is present. Gloria, who studiously avoids encouraging the twins by betraying any interest in them, wanders to the window and looks out with her thoughts far away. The parlor maid, instead of withdrawing, shuts the door and waits at it.

MRS. CLANDON. Well, children? How is the toothache, Dolly?

DOLLY. Cured, thank Heaven. I’ve had it out. (She sits down on the step of the operating chair. Mrs. Clandon takes the writing-table chair.)

PHILIP (striking in gravely from the hearth). And the dentist, a first-rate professional man of the highest standing, is coming to lunch with us.

MRS. CLANDON (looking round apprehensively at the servant). Phil!

THE PARLOR MAID. Beg pardon, ma’am. I’m waiting for Mr. Valentine. I have a message for him.

DOLLY. Who from?

MRS. CLANDON (shocked). Dolly! (Dolly catches her lips with her finger tips, suppressing a little splutter of mirth.)

THE PARLOR MAID. Only the landlord, ma’am.

Valentine, in a blue serge suit, with a straw hat in his hand, comes back in high spirits, out of breath with the haste he has made. Gloria turns from the window and studies him with freezing attention.

PHILIP. Let me introduce you, Mr. Valentine. My mother, Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon. (Mrs. Clandon bows. Valentine bows, self-possessed and quite equal to the occasion.) My sister Gloria. (Gloria bows with cold dignity and sits down on the sofa. Valentine falls in love at first sight and is miserably confused. He fingers his hat nervously, and makes her a sneaking bow.)

MRS. CLANDON. I understand that we are to have the pleasure of seeing you at luncheon to-day, Mr. Valentine.

VALENTINE. Thank you — er — if you don’t mind — I mean if you will be so kind — (to the parlor maid testily) What is it?

THE PARLOR MAID. The landlord, sir, wishes to speak to you before you go out.

VALENTINE. Oh, tell him I have four patients here. (The Clandons look surprised, except Phil, who is imperturbable.) If he wouldn’t mind waiting just two minutes, I — I’ll slip down and see him for a moment. (Throwing himself confidentially on her sense of the position.) Say I’m busy, but that I want to see him.

THE PARLOR MAID (reassuringly). Yes, sir. (She goes.)

MRS. CLANDON (on the point of rising). We are detaining you, I am afraid.

VALENTINE. Not at all, not at all. Your presence here will be the greatest help to me. The fact is, I owe six week’s rent; and I’ve had no patients until to-day. My interview with my landlord will be considerably smoothed by the apparent boom in my business.

DOLLY (vexed). Oh, how tiresome of you to let it all out! And we’ve just been pretending that you were a respectable professional man in a first-rate position.

MRS. CLANDON (horrified). Oh, Dolly, Dolly! My dearest, how can you be so rude? (To Valentine.) Will you excuse these barbarian children of mine, Mr. Valentine?

VALENTINE. Thank you, I’m used to them. Would it be too much to ask you to wait five minutes while I get rid of my landlord downstairs?

DOLLY. Don’t be long. We’re hungry.

MRS. CLANDON (again remonstrating). Dolly, dear!

VALENTINE (to Dolly). All right. (To Mrs. Clandon.) Thank you: I shan’t be long. (He steals a look at Gloria as he turns to go. She is looking gravely at him. He falls into confusion.) I — er — er — yes — thank you (he succeeds at last in blundering himself out of the room; but the exhibition is a pitiful one).

PHILIP. Did you observe? (Pointing to Gloria.) Love at first sight. You can add his scalp to your collection, Gloria.

MRS. CLANDON. Sh — sh, pray, Phil. He may have heard you.

PHILIP. Not he. (Bracing himself for a scene.) And now look here, mamma. (He takes the stool from the bench; and seats himself majestically in the middle of the room, taking a leaf out of Valentine’s book. Dolly, feeling that her position on the step of the operating chair is unworthy of the dignity of the occasion, rises, looking important and determined; crosses to the window; and stands with her back to the end of the writing-table, her hands behind her and on the table. Mrs. Clandon looks at them, wondering what is coming. Gloria becomes attentive. Philip straightens his back; places his knuckles symmetrically on his knees; and opens his case.) Dolly and I have been talking over things a good deal lately; and I don’t think, judging from my knowledge of human nature — we don’t think that you (speaking very staccato, with the words detached) quite appreciate the fact —

DOLLY (seating herself on the end of the table with a spring). That we’ve grown up.

MRS. CLANDON. Indeed? In what way have I given you any reason to complain?

PHILIP. Well, there are certain matters upon which we are beginning to feel that you might take us a little more into your confidence.

MRS. CLANDON (rising, with all the placidity of her age suddenly broken up; and a curious hard excitement, dignified but dogged, ladylike but implacable — the manner of the Old Guard of the Women’s Rights movement — coming upon her). Phil: take care. Remember what I have always taught you. There are two sorts of family life, Phil; and your experience of human nature only extends, so far, to one of them. (Rhetorically.) The sort you know is based on mutual respect, on recognition of the right of every member of the household to independence and privacy (her emphasis on “privacy” is intense) in their personal concerns. And because you have always enjoyed that, it seems such a matter of course to you that you don’t value it. But (with biting acrimony) there is another sort of family life: a life in which husbands open their wives’ letters, and call on them to account for every farthing of their expenditure and every moment of their time; in which women do the same to their children; in which no room is private and no hour sacred; in which duty, obedience, affection, home, morality and religion are detestable tyrannies, and life is a vulgar round of punishments and lies, coercion and rebellion, jealousy, suspicion, recrimination — Oh! I cannot describe it to you: fortunately for you, you know nothing about it. (She sits down, panting. Gloria has listened to her with flashing eyes, sharing all her indignation.)

DOLLY (inaccessible to rhetoric). See Twentieth Century Parents, chapter on Liberty, passim.

MRS. CLANDON (touching her shoulder affectionately, soothed even by a gibe from her). My dear Dolly: if you only knew how glad I am that it is nothing but a joke to you, though it is such bitter earnest to me. (More resolutely, turning to Philip.) Phil, I never ask you questions about your private concerns. You are not going to question me, are you?

PHILIP. I think it due to ourselves to say that the question we wanted to ask is as much our business as yours.

DOLLY. Besides, it can’t be good to keep a lot of questions bottled up inside you. You did it, mamma; but see how awfully it’s broken out again in me.

MRS. CLANDON. I see you want to ask your question. Ask it.

DOLLY AND PHILIP (beginning simultaneously). Who — (They stop.)

PHILIP. Now look here, Dolly: am I going to conduct this business or are you?

DOLLY. You.

PHILIP. Then hold your mouth. (Dolly does so literally.) The question is a simple one. When the ivory snatcher —

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Phil!

PHILIP. Dentist is an ugly word. The man of ivory and gold asked us whether we were the children of Mr. Densmore Clandon of Newbury Hall. In pursuance of the precepts in your treatise on Twentieth Century Conduct, and your repeated personal exhortations to us to curtail the number of unnecessary lies we tell, we replied truthfully the we didn’t know.

DOLLY. Neither did we.

PHILIP. Sh! The result was that the gum architect made considerable difficulties about accepting our invitation to lunch, although I doubt if he has had anything but tea and bread and butter for a fortnight past. Now my knowledge of human nature leads me to believe that we had a father, and that you probably know who he was.

MRS. CLANDON (her agitation returning). Stop, Phil. Your father is nothing to you, nor to me (vehemently). That is enough. (The twins are silenced, but not satisfied. Their faces fall. But Gloria, who has been following the altercation attentively, suddenly intervenes.)

GLORIA (advancing). Mother: we have a right to know.

MRS. CLANDON (rising and facing her). Gloria! “We!” Who is “we”?

GLORIA (steadfastly). We three. (Her tone is unmistakable: she is pitting her strength against her mother for the first time. The twins instantly go over to the enemy.)

MRS. CLANDON (wounded). In your mouth “we” used to mean you and I, Gloria.

PHILIP (rising decisively and putting away the stool). We’re hurting you: let’s drop it. We didn’t think you’d mind. I don’t want to know.

DOLLY (coming off the table). I’m sure I don’t. Oh, don’t look like that, mamma. (She looks angrily at Gloria.)

MRS. CLANDON (touching her eyes hastily with her handkerchief and sitting down again). Thank you, my dear. Thanks, Phil.

GLORIA (inexorably). We have a right to know, mother.

MRS. CLANDON (indignantly). Ah! You insist.

GLORIA. Do you intend that we shall never know?

DOLLY. Oh, Gloria, don’t. It’s barbarous.

GLORIA (with quiet scorn). What is the use of being weak? You see what has happened with this gentleman here, mother. The same thing has happened to me.

MRS. CLANDON } (all { What do you mean?

DOLLY } together). { Oh, tell us.

PHILIP } { What happened to you?

GLORIA. Oh, nothing of any consequence. (She turns away from them and goes up to the easy chair at the fireplace, where she sits down, almost with her back to them. As they wait expectantly, she adds, over her shoulder, with studied indifference.) On board the steamer the first officer did me the honor to propose to me.

DOLLY. No, it was to me.

MRS. CLANDON. The first officer! Are you serious, Gloria? What did you say to him? (correcting herself) Excuse me: I have no right to ask that.

GLORIA. The answer is pretty obvious. A woman who does not know who her father was cannot accept such an offer.

MRS. CLANDON. Surely you did not want to accept it?

GLORIA (turning a little and raising her voice). No; but suppose I had wanted to!

PHILIP. Did that difficulty strike you, Dolly?

DOLLY. No, I accepted him.

GLORIA } (all crying { Accepted him!

MRS. CLANDON } out { Dolly!

PHILIP } together) { Oh, I say!

DOLLY (naively). He did look such a fool!

MRS. CLANDON. But why did you do such a thing, Dolly?

DOLLY. For fun, I suppose. He had to measure my finger for a ring. You’d have done the same thing yourself.

MRS. CLANDON. No, Dolly, I would not. As a matter of fact the first officer did propose to me; and I told him to keep that sort of thing for women were young enough to be amused by it. He appears to have acted on my advice. (She rises and goes to the hearth.) Gloria: I am sorry you think me weak; but I cannot tell you what you want. You are all too young.

PHILIP. This is rather a startling departure from Twentieth Century principles.

DOLLY (quoting). “Answer all your children’s questions, and answer them truthfully, as soon as they are old enough to ask them.” See Twentieth Century Motherhood —

PHILIP. Page one —

DOLLY. Chapter one —

PHILIP. Sentence one.

MRS. CLANDON. My dears: I did not say that you were too young to know. I said you were too young to be taken into my confidence. You are very bright children, all of you; but I am glad for your sakes that you are still very inexperienced and consequently very unsympathetic. There are some experiences of mine that I cannot bear to speak of except to those who have gone through what I have gone through. I hope you will never be qualified for such confidences. But I will take care that you shall learn all you want to know. Will that satisfy you?

PHILIP. Another grievance, Dolly.

DOLLY. We’re not sympathetic.

GLORIA (leaning forward in her chair and looking earnestly up at her mother). Mother: I did not mean to be unsympathetic.

MRS. CLANDON (affectionately). Of course not, dear. Do you think I don’t understand?

GLORIA (rising). But, mother —

MRS. CLANDON (drawing back a little). Yes?

GLORIA (obstinately). It is nonsense to tell us that our father is nothing to us.

MRS. CLANDON (provoked to sudden resolution). Do you remember your father?

GLORIA (meditatively, as if the recollection were a tender one). I am not quite sure. I think so.

MRS. CLANDON (grimly). You are not sure?

GLORIA. No.

MRS. CLANDON (with quiet force). Gloria: if I had ever struck you — (Gloria recoils: Philip and Dolly are disagreeably shocked; all three start at her, revolted as she continues) — struck you purposely, deliberately, with the intention of hurting you, with a whip bought for the purpose! Would you remember that, do you think? (Gloria utters an exclamation of indignant repulsion.) That would have been your last recollection of your father, Gloria, if I had not taken you away from him. I have kept him out of your life: keep him now out of mine by never mentioning him to me again. (Gloria, with a shudder, covers her face with her hands, until, hearing someone at the door, she turns away and pretends to occupy herself looking at the names of the books in the bookcase. Mrs. Clandon sits down on the sofa. Valentine returns.).

VALENTINE. I hope I’ve not kept you waiting. That landlord of mine is really an extraordinary old character.

DOLLY (eagerly). Oh, tell us. How long has he given you to pay?

MRS. CLANDON (distracted by her child’s bad manners). Dolly, Dolly, Dolly dear! You must not ask questions.

DOLLY (demurely). So sorry. You’ll tell us, won’t you, Mr. Valentine?

VALENTINE. He doesn’t want his rent at all. He’s broken his tooth on a Brazil nut; and he wants me to look at it and to lunch with him afterwards.

DOLLY. Then have him up and pull his tooth out at once; and we’ll bring him to lunch, too. Tell the maid to fetch him along. (She runs to the bell and rings it vigorously. Then, with a sudden doubt she turns to Valentine and adds) I suppose he’s respectable — really respectable.

VALENTINE. Perfectly. Not like me.

DOLLY. Honest Injun? (Mrs. Clandon gasps faintly; but her powers of remonstrance are exhausted.)

VALENTINE. Honest Injun!

DOLLY. Then off with you and bring him up.

VALENTINE (looking dubiously at Mrs. Clandon). I daresay he’d be delighted if — er — ?

MRS. CLANDON (rising and looking at her watch). I shall be happy to see your friend at lunch, if you can persuade him to come; but I can’t wait to see him now: I have an appointment at the hotel at a quarter to one with an old friend whom I have not seen since I left England eighteen years ago. Will you excuse me?

VALENTINE. Certainly, Mrs. Clandon.

GLORIA. Shall I come?

MRS. CLANDON. No, dear. I want to be alone. (She goes out, evidently still a good deal troubled. Valentine opens the door for her and follows her out.)

PHILIP (significantly — to Dolly). Hmhm!

DOLLY (significantly to Philip). Ahah! (The parlor maid answers the bell.)

DOLLY. Show the old gentleman up.

THE PARLOR MAID (puzzled). Madam?

DOLLY. The old gentleman with the toothache.

PHILIP. The landlord.

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr. Crampton, Sir?

PHILIP. Is his name Crampton?

DOLLY (to Philip). Sounds rheumaticky, doesn’t it?

PHILIP. Chalkstones, probably.

DOLLY (over her shoulder, to the parlor maid). Show Mr. Crampstones up. (Goes R. to writing-table chair).

THE PARLOR MAID (correcting her). Mr. Crampton, miss. (She goes.)

DOLLY (repeating it to herself like a lesson). Crampton, Crampton, Crampton, Crampton, Crampton. (She sits down studiously at the writing-table.) I must get that name right, or Heaven knows what I shall call him.

GLORIA. Phil: can you believe such a horrible thing as that about our father — what mother said just now?

PHILIP. Oh, there are lots of people of that kind. Old Chalice used to thrash his wife and daughters with a cartwhip.

DOLLY (contemptuously). Yes, a Portuguese!

PHILIP. When you come to men who are brutes, there is much in common between the Portuguese and the English variety, Doll. Trust my knowledge of human nature. (He resumes his position on the hearthrug with an elderly and responsible air.)

GLORIA (with angered remorse). I don’t think we shall ever play again at our old game of guessing what our father was to be like. Dolly: are you sorry for your father — the father with lots of money?

DOLLY. Oh, come! What about your father — the lonely old man with the tender aching heart? He’s pretty well burst up, I think.

PHILIP. There can be no doubt that the governor is an exploded superstition. (Valentine is heard talking to somebody outside the door.) But hark: he comes.

GLORIA (nervously). Who?

DOLLY. Chalkstones.

PHILIP. Sh! Attention. (They put on their best manners. Philip adds in a lower voice to Gloria) If he’s good enough for the lunch, I’ll nod to Dolly; and if she nods to you, invite him straight away.

(Valentine comes back with his landlord. Mr. Fergus Crampton is a man of about sixty, tall, hard and stringy, with an atrociously obstinate, ill tempered, grasping mouth, and a querulously dogmatic voice. Withal he is highly nervous and sensitive, judging by his thin transparent skin marked with multitudinous lines, and his slender fingers. His consequent capacity for suffering acutely from all the dislike that his temper and obstinacy can bring upon him is proved by his wistful, wounded eyes, by a plaintive note in his voice, a painful want of confidence in his welcome, and a constant but indifferently successful effort to correct his natural incivility of manner and proneness to take offence. By his keen brows and forehead he is clearly a shrewd man; and there is no sign of straitened means or commercial diffidence about him: he is well dressed, and would be classed at a guess as a prosperous master manufacturer in a business inherited from an old family in the aristocracy of trade. His navy blue coat is not of the usual fashionable pattern. It is not exactly a pilot’s coat; but it is cut that way, double breasted, and with stout buttons and broad lapels, a coat for a shipyard rather than a counting house. He has taken a fancy to Valentine, who cares nothing for his crossness of grain and treats him with a sort of disrespectful humanity, for which he is secretly grateful.)

VALENTINE. May I introduce — this is Mr. Crampton — Miss Dorothy Clandon, Mr. Philip Clandon, Miss Clandon. (Crampton stands nervously bowing. They all bow.) Sit down, Mr. Crampton.

DOLLY (pointing to the operating chair). That is the most comfortable chair, Mr. Ch — crampton.

CRAMPTON. Thank you; but won’t this young lady — (indicating Gloria, who is close to the chair)?

GLORIA. Thank you, Mr. Crampton: we are just going.

VALENTINE (bustling him across to the chair with good-humored peremptoriness). Sit down, sit down. You’re tired.

CRAMPTON. Well, perhaps as I am considerably the oldest person present, I — (He finishes the sentence by sitting down a little rheumatically in the operating chair. Meanwhile, Philip, having studied him critically during his passage across the room, nods to Dolly; and Dolly nods to Gloria.)

GLORIA. Mr. Crampton: we understand that we are preventing Mr. Valentine from lunching with you by taking him away ourselves. My mother would be very glad, indeed, if you would come too.

CRAMPTON (gratefully, after looking at her earnestly for a moment). Thank you. I will come with pleasure.

GLORIA } (politely { Thank you very much — er —

DOLLY } murmuring).{ So glad — er —

PHILIP } { Delighted, I’m sure — er —

(The conversation drops. Gloria and Dolly look at one another; then at Valentine and Philip. Valentine and Philip, unequal to the occasion, look away from them at one another, and are instantly so disconcerted by catching one another’s eye, that they look back again and catch the eyes of Gloria and Dolly. Thus, catching one another all round, they all look at nothing and are quite at a loss. Crampton looks about him, waiting for them to begin. The silence becomes unbearable.)

DOLLY (suddenly, to keep things going). How old are you, Mr. Crampton?

GLORIA (hastily). I am afraid we must be going, Mr. Valentine. It is understood, then, that we meet at half past one. (She makes for the door. Philip goes with her. Valentine retreats to the bell.)

VALENTINE. Half past one. (He rings the bell.) Many thanks. (He follows Gloria and Philip to the door, and goes out with them.)

DOLLY (who has meanwhile stolen across to Crampton). Make him give you gas. It’s five shillings extra: but it’s worth it.

CRAMPTON (amused). Very well. (Looking more earnestly at her.) So you want to know my age, do you? I’m fifty-seven.

DOLLY (with conviction). You look it.

CRAMPTON (grimly). I dare say I do.

DOLLY. What are you looking at me so hard for? Anything wrong? (She feels whether her hat is right.)

CRAMPTON. You’re like somebody.

DOLLY. Who?

CRAMPTON. Well, you have a curious look of my mother.

DOLLY (incredulously). Your mother!!! Quite sure you don’t mean your daughter?

CRAMPTON (suddenly blackening with hate). Yes: I’m quite sure I don’t mean my daughter.

DOLLY (sympathetically). Tooth bad?

CRAMPTON. No, no: nothing. A twinge of memory, Miss Clandon, not of toothache.

DOLLY. Have it out. “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow:” with gas, five shillings extra.

CRAMPTON (vindictively). No, not a sorrow. An injury that was done me once: that’s all. I don’t forget injuries; and I don’t want to forget them. (His features settle into an implacable frown.)

(re-enter Philip: to look for Dolly. He comes down behind her unobserved.)

DOLLY (looking critically at Crampton’s expression). I don’t think we shall like you when you are brooding over your sorrows.

PHILIP (who has entered the room unobserved, and stolen behind her). My sister means well, Mr. Crampton: but she is indiscreet. Now Dolly, outside! (He takes her towards the door.)

DOLLY (in a perfectly audible undertone). He says he’s only fifty-seven; and he thinks me the image of his mother; and he hates his daughter; and — (She is interrupted by the return of Valentine.)

VALENTINE. Miss Clandon has gone on.

PHILIP. Don’t forget half past one.

DOLLY. Mind you leave Mr. Crampton with enough teeth to eat with. (They go out. Valentine comes down to his cabinet, and opens it.)

CRAMPTON. That’s a spoiled child, Mr. Valentine. That’s one of your modern products. When I was her age, I had many a good hiding fresh in my memory to teach me manners.

VALENTINE (taking up his dental mirror and probe from the shelf in front of the cabinet). What did you think of her sister?

CRAMPTON. You liked her better, eh?

VALENTINE (rhapsodically). She struck me as being — (He checks himself, and adds, prosaically) However, that’s not business. (He places himself behind Crampton’s right shoulder and assumes his professional tone.) Open, please. (Crampton opens his mouth. Valentine puts the mirror in, and examines his teeth.) Hm! You have broken that one. What a pity to spoil such a splendid set of teeth! Why do you crack nuts with them? (He withdraws the mirror, and comes forward to converse with Crampton.)

CRAMPTON. I’ve always cracked nuts with them: what else are they for? (Dogmatically.) The proper way to keep teeth good is to give them plenty of use on bones and nuts, and wash them every day with soap — plain yellow soap.

VALENTINE. Soap! Why soap?

CRAMPTON. I began using it as a boy because I was made to; and I’ve used it ever since. And I never had toothache in my life.

VALENTINE. Don’t you find it rather nasty?

CRAMPTON. I found that most things that were good for me were nasty. But I was taught to put up with them, and made to put up with them. I’m used to it now: in fact, I like the taste when the soap is really good.

VALENTINE (making a wry face in spite of himself). You seem to have been very carefully educated, Mr. Crampton.

CRAMPTON (grimly). I wasn’t spoiled, at all events.

VALENTINE (smiling a little to himself). Are you quite sure?

CRAMPTON. What d’y’ mean?

VALENTINE. Well, your teeth are good, I admit. But I’ve seen just as good in very self-indulgent mouths. (He goes to the ledge of cabinet and changes the probe for another one.)

CRAMPTON. It’s not the effect on the teeth: it’s the effect on the character.

VALENTINE (placably). Oh, the character, I see. (He recommences operations.) A little wider, please. Hm! That one will have to come out: it’s past saving. (He withdraws the probe and again comes to the side of the chair to converse.) Don’t be alarmed: you shan’t feel anything. I’ll give you gas.

CRAMPTON. Rubbish, man: I want none of your gas. Out with it. People were taught to bear necessary pain in my day.

VALENTINE. Oh, if you like being hurt, all right. I’ll hurt you as much as you like, without any extra charge for the beneficial effect on your character.

CRAMPTON (rising and glaring at him). Young man: you owe me six weeks’ rent.

VALENTINE. I do.

CRAMPTON. Can you pay me?

VALENTINE. No.

CRAMPTON (satisfied with his advantage). I thought not. How soon d’y’ think you’ll be able to pay me if you have no better manners than to make game of your patients? (He sits down again.)

VALENTINE. My good sir: my patients haven’t all formed their characters on kitchen soap.

CRAMPTON (suddenly gripping him by the arm as he turns away again to the cabinet). So much the worse for them. I tell you you don’t understand my character. If I could spare all my teeth, I’d make you pull them all out one after another to shew you what a properly hardened man can go through with when he’s made up his mind to do it. (He nods at him to enforce the effect of this declaration, and releases him.)

VALENTINE (his careless pleasantry quite unruffled). And you want to be more hardened, do you?

CRAMPTON. Yes.

VALENTINE (strolling away to the bell). Well, you’re quite hard enough for me already — as a landlord. (Crampton receives this with a growl of grim humor. Valentine rings the bell, and remarks in a cheerful, casual way, whilst waiting for it to be answered.) Why did you never get married, Mr. Crampton? A wife and children would have taken some of the hardness out of you.

CRAMPTON (with unexpected ferocity). What the devil is that to you? (The parlor maid appears at the door.)

VALENTINE (politely). Some warm water, please. (She retires: and Valentine comes back to the cabinet, not at all put out by Crampton’s rudeness, and carries on the conversation whilst he selects a forceps and places it ready to his hand with a gag and a drinking glass.) You were asking me what the devil that was to me. Well, I have an idea of getting married myself.

CRAMPTON (with grumbling irony). Naturally, sir, naturally. When a young man has come to his last farthing, and is within twenty-four hours of having his furniture distrained upon by his landlord, he marries. I’ve noticed that before. Well, marry; and be miserable.

VALENTINE. Oh, come, what do you know about it?

CRAMPTON. I’m not a bachelor.

VALENTINE. Then there is a Mrs. Crampton?

CRAMPTON (wincing with a pang of resentment). Yes — damn her!

VALENTINE (unperturbed). Hm! A father, too, perhaps, as well as a husband, Mr. Crampton?

CRAMPTON. Three children.

VALENTINE (politely). Damn them? — eh?

CRAMPTON (jealously). No, sir: the children are as much mine as hers. (The parlor maid brings in a jug of hot water.)

VALENTINE. Thank you. (He takes the jug from her, and brings it to the cabinet, continuing in the same idle strain) I really should like to know your family, Mr. Crampton. (The parlor maid goes out: and he pours some hot water into the drinking glass.)

CRAMPTON. Sorry I can’t introduce you, sir. I’m happy to say that I don’t know where they are, and don’t care, so long as they keep out of my way. (Valentine, with a hitch of his eyebrows and shoulders, drops the forceps with a clink into the glass of hot water.) You needn’t warm that thing to use on me. I’m not afraid of the cold steel. (Valentine stoops to arrange the gas pump and cylinder beside the chair.) What’s that heavy thing?

VALENTINE. Oh, never mind. Something to put my foot on, to get the necessary purchase for a good pull. (Crampton looks alarmed in spite of himself. Valentine stands upright and places the glass with the forceps in it ready to his hand, chatting on with provoking indifference.) And so you advise me not to get married, Mr. Crampton? (He stoops to fit the handle on the apparatus by which the chair is raised and lowered.)

CRAMPTON (irritably). I advise you to get my tooth out and have done reminding me of my wife. Come along, man. (He grips the arms of the chair and braces himself.)

VALENTINE (pausing, with his hand on the lever, to look up at him and say). What do you bet that I don’t get that tooth out without your feeling it?

CRAMPTON. Your six week’s rent, young man. Don’t you gammon me.

VALENTINE (jumping at the bet and winding him aloft vigorously). Done! Are you ready? (Crampton, who has lost his grip of the chair in his alarm at its sudden ascent, folds his arms: sits stiffly upright: and prepares for the worst. Valentine lets down the back of the chair to an obtuse angle.)

CRAMPTON (clutching at the arms of the chair as he falls back). Take care man. I’m quite helpless in this po —

VALENTINE (deftly stopping him with the gag, and snatching up the mouthpiece of the gas machine). You’ll be more helpless presently. (He presses the mouthpiece over Crampton’s mouth and nose, leaning over his chest so as to hold his head and shoulders well down on the chair. Crampton makes an inarticulate sound in the mouthpiece and tries to lay hands on Valentine, whom he supposes to be in front of him. After a moment his arms wave aimlessly, then subside and drop. He is quite insensible. Valentine, with an exclamation of somewhat preoccupied triumph, throws aside the mouthpiece quickly: picks up the forceps adroitly from the glass: and — the curtain falls.)

END OF ACT I.

ACT II

On the terrace at the Marine Hotel. It is a square flagged platform, with a parapet of heavy oil jar pilasters supporting a broad stone coping on the outer edge, which stands up over the sea like a cliff. The head waiter of the establishment, busy laying napkins on a luncheon table with his back to the sea, has the hotel on his right, and on his left, in the corner nearest the sea, the flight of steps leading down to the beach.

When he looks down the terrace in front of him he sees a little to his left a solitary guest, a middle-aged gentleman sitting on a chair of iron laths at a little iron table with a bowl of lump sugar and three wasps on it, reading the Standard, with his umbrella up to defend him from the sun, which, in August and at less than an hour after noon, is toasting his protended insteps. Just opposite him, at the hotel side of the terrace, there is a garden seat of the ordinary esplanade pattern. Access to the hotel for visitors is by an entrance in the middle of its facade, reached by a couple of steps on a broad square of raised pavement. Nearer the parapet there lurks a way to the kitchen, masked by a little trellis porch. The table at which the waiter is occupied is a long one, set across the terrace with covers and chairs for five, two at each side and one at the end next the hotel. Against the parapet another table is prepared as a buffet to serve from.

The waiter is a remarkable person in his way. A silky old man, white-haired and delicate looking, but so cheerful and contented that in his encouraging presence ambition stands rebuked as vulgarity, and imagination as treason to the abounding sufficiency and interest of the actual. He has a certain expression peculiar to men who have been extraordinarily successful in their calling, and who, whilst aware of the vanity of success, are untouched by envy.

The gentleman at the iron table is not dressed for the seaside. He wears his London frock coat and gloves; and his tall silk hat is on the table beside the sugar bowl. The excellent condition and quality of these garments, the gold-rimmed folding spectacles through which he is reading the Standard, and the Times at his elbow overlaying the local paper, all testify to his respectability. He is about fifty, clean shaven, and close-cropped, with the corners of his mouth turned down purposely, as if he suspected them of wanting to turn up, and was determined not to let them have their way. He has large expansive ears, cod colored eyes, and a brow kept resolutely wide open, as if, again, he had resolved in his youth to be truthful, magnanimous, and incorruptible, but had never succeeded in making that habit of mind automatic and unconscious. Still, he is by no means to be laughed at. There is no sign of stupidity or infirmity of will about him: on the contrary, he would pass anywhere at sight as a man of more than average professional capacity and responsibility. Just at present he is enjoying the weather and the sea too much to be out of patience; but he has exhausted all the news in his papers and is at present reduced to the advertisements, which are not sufficiently succulent to induce him to persevere with them.

THE GENTLEMAN (yawning and giving up the paper as a bad job). Waiter!

WAITER. Sir? (coming down C.)

THE GENTLEMAN. Are you quite sure Mrs. Clandon is coming back before lunch?

WAITER. Quite sure, sir. She expects you at a quarter to one, sir. (The gentleman, soothed at once by the waiter’s voice, looks at him with a lazy smile. It is a quiet voice, with a gentle melody in it that gives sympathetic interest to his most commonplace remark; and he speaks with the sweetest propriety, neither dropping his aitches nor misplacing them, nor committing any other vulgarism. He looks at his watch as he continues) Not that yet, sir, is it? 12:43, sir. Only two minutes more to wait, sir. Nice morning, sir?

THE GENTLEMAN. Yes: very fresh after London.

WAITER. Yes, sir: so all our visitors say, sir. Very nice family, Mrs. Clandon’s, sir.

THE GENTLEMAN. You like them, do you?

WAITER. Yes, sir. They have a free way with them that is very taking, sir, very taking indeed, sir: especially the young lady and gentleman.

THE GENTLEMAN. Miss Dorothea and Mr. Philip, I suppose.

WAITER. Yes, sir. The young lady, in giving an order, or the like of that, will say, “Remember, William, we came to this hotel on your account, having heard what a perfect waiter you are.” The young gentleman will tell me that I remind him strongly of his father (the gentleman starts at this) and that he expects me to act by him as such. (Soothing, sunny cadence.) Oh, very pleasant, sir, very affable and pleasant indeed!

THE GENTLEMAN. You like his father! (He laughs at the notion.)

WAITER. Oh, we must not take what they say too seriously, sir. Of course, sir, if it were true, the young lady would have seen the resemblance, too, sir.

THE GENTLEMAN. Did she?

WAITER. No, sir. She thought me like the bust of Shakespear in Stratford Church, sir. That is why she calls me William, sir. My real name is Walter, sir. (He turns to go back to the table, and sees Mrs. Clandon coming up to the terrace from the beach by the steps.) Here is Mrs. Clandon, sir. (To Mrs. Clandon, in an unobtrusively confidential tone) Gentleman for you, ma’am.

MRS. CLANDON. We shall have two more gentlemen at lunch, William.

WAITER. Right, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. (He withdraws into the hotel. Mrs. Clandon comes forward looking round for her visitor, but passes over the gentleman without any sign of recognition.)

THE GENTLEMAN (peering at her quaintly from under the umbrella). Don’t you know me?

MRS. CLANDON (incredulously, looking hard at him) Are you Finch McComas?

McCOMAS. Can’t you guess? (He shuts the umbrella; puts it aside; and jocularly plants himself with his hands on his hips to be inspected.)

MRS. CLANDON. I believe you are. (She gives him her hand. The shake that ensues is that of old friends after a long separation.) Where’s your beard?

McCOMAS (with humorous solemnity). Would you employ a solicitor with a beard?

MRS. CLANDON (pointing to the silk hat on the table). Is that your hat?

McCOMAS. Would you employ a solicitor with a sombrero?

MRS. CLANDON. I have thought of you all these eighteen years with the beard and the sombrero. (She sits down on the garden seat. McComas takes his chair again.) Do you go to the meetings of the Dialectical Society still?

McCOMAS (gravely). I do not frequent meetings now.

MRS. CLANDON. Finch: I see what has happened. You have become respectable.

McCOMAS. Haven’t you?

MRS. CLANDON. Not a bit.

McCOMAS. You hold to your old opinions still?

MRS. CLANDON. As firmly as ever.

McCOMAS. Bless me! And you are still ready to make speeches in public, in spite of your sex (Mrs. Clandon nods); to insist on a married woman’s right to her own separate property (she nods again); to champion Darwin’s view of the origin of species and John Stuart Mill’s essay on Liberty (nod); to read Huxley, Tyndall and George Eliot (three nods); and to demand University degrees, the opening of the professions, and the parliamentary franchise for women as well as men?

MRS. CLANDON (resolutely). Yes: I have not gone back one inch; and I have educated Gloria to take up my work where I left it. That is what has brought me back to England: I felt that I had no right to bury her alive in Madeira — my St. Helena, Finch. I suppose she will be howled at as I was; but she is prepared for that.

McCOMAS. Howled at! My dear good lady: there is nothing in any of those views now-a-days to prevent her from marrying a bishop. You reproached me just now for having become respectable. You were wrong: I hold to our old opinions as strongly as ever. I don’t go to church; and I don’t pretend I do. I call myself what I am: a Philosophic Radical, standing for liberty and the rights of the individual, as I learnt to do from my master Herbert Spencer. Am I howled at? No: I’m indulged as an old fogey. I’m out of everything, because I’ve refused to bow the knee to Socialism.

MRS. CLANDON (shocked). Socialism.

McCOMAS. Yes, Socialism. That’s what Miss Gloria will be up to her ears in before the end of the month if you let her loose here.

MRS. CLANDON (emphatically). But I can prove to her that Socialism is a fallacy.

McCOMAS (touchingly). It is by proving that, Mrs. Clandon, that I have lost all my young disciples. Be careful what you do: let her go her own way. (With some bitterness.) We’re old-fashioned: the world thinks it has left us behind. There is only one place in all England where your opinions would still pass as advanced.

MRS. CLANDON (scornfully unconvinced). The Church, perhaps?

McCOMAS. No, the theatre. And now to business! Why have you made me come down here?

MRS. CLANDON. Well, partly because I wanted to see you —

McCOMAS (with good-humored irony). Thanks.

MRS. CLANDON. — and partly because I want you to explain everything to the children. They know nothing; and now that we have come back to England, it is impossible to leave them in ignorance any longer. (Agitated.) Finch: I cannot bring myself to tell them. I — (She is interrupted by the twins and Gloria. Dolly comes tearing up the steps, racing Philip, who combines a terrific speed with unhurried propriety of bearing which, however, costs him the race, as Dolly reaches her mother first and almost upsets the garden seat by the precipitancy of her arrival.)

DOLLY (breathless). It’s all right, mamma. The dentist is coming; and he’s bringing his old man.

MRS. CLANDON. Dolly, dear: don’t you see Mr. McComas? (Mr. McComas rises, smilingly.)

DOLLY (her face falling with the most disparagingly obvious disappointment). This! Where are the flowing locks?

PHILIP (seconding her warmly). Where the beard? — the cloak? — the poetic exterior?

DOLLY. Oh, Mr. McComas, you’ve gone and spoiled yourself. Why didn’t you wait till we’d seen you?

McCOMAS (taken aback, but rallying his humor to meet the emergency). Because eighteen years is too long for a solicitor to go without having his hair cut.

GLORIA (at the other side of McComas). How do you do, Mr. McComas? (He turns; and she takes his hand and presses it, with a frank straight look into his eyes.) We are glad to meet you at last.

McCOMAS. Miss Gloria, I presume? (Gloria smiles assent, and releases his hand after a final pressure. She then retires behind the garden seat, leaning over the back beside Mrs. Clandon.) And this young gentleman?

PHILIP. I was christened in a comparatively prosaic mood. My name is —

DOLLY (completing his sentence for him declamatorily). “Norval. On the Grampian hills” —

PHILIP (declaiming gravely). “My father feeds his flock, a frugal swain” —

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Dear, dear children: don’t be silly. Everything is so new to them here, Finch, that they are in the wildest spirits. They think every Englishman they meet is a joke.

DOLLY. Well, so he is: it’s not our fault.

PHILIP. My knowledge of human nature is fairly extensive, Mr. McComas; but I find it impossible to take the inhabitants of this island seriously.

McCOMAS. I presume, sir, you are Master Philip (offering his hand)?

PHILIP (taking McComas’s hand and looking solemnly at him). I was Master Philip — was so for many years; just as you were once Master Finch. (He gives his hand a single shake and drops it; then turns away, exclaiming meditatively) How strange it is to look back on our boyhood! (McComas stares after him, not at all pleased.)

DOLLY (to Mrs. Clandon). Has Finch had a drink?

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Dearest: Mr. McComas will lunch with us.

DOLLY. Have you ordered for seven? Don’t forget the old gentleman.

MRS. CLANDON. I have not forgotten him, dear. What is his name?

DOLLY. Chalkstones. He’ll be here at half past one. (To McComas.) Are we like what you expected?

MRS. CLANDON (changing her tone to a more earnest one). Dolly: Mr. McComas has something more serious than that to tell you. Children: I have asked my old friend to answer the question you asked this morning. He is your father’s friend as well as mine: and he will tell you the story more fairly than I could. (Turning her head from them to Gloria.) Gloria: are you satisfied?

GLORIA (gravely attentive). Mr. McComas is very kind.

McCOMAS (nervously). Not at all, my dear young lady: not at all. At the same time, this is rather sudden. I was hardly prepared — er —

DOLLY (suspiciously). Oh, we don’t want anything prepared.

PHILIP (exhorting him). Tell us the truth.

DOLLY (emphatically). Bald headed.

McCOMAS (nettled). I hope you intend to take what I have to say seriously.

PHILIP (with profound mock gravity). I hope it will deserve it, Mr. McComas. My knowledge of human nature teaches me not to expect too much.

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Phil —

PHILIP. Yes, mother, all right. I beg your pardon, Mr. McComas: don’t mind us.

DOLLY (in conciliation). We mean well.

PHILIP. Shut up, both.

(Dolly holds her lips. McComas takes a chair from the luncheon table; places it between the little table and the garden seat with Dolly on his right and Philip on his left; and settles himself in it with the air of a man about to begin a long communication. The Clandons match him expectantly.)

McCOMAS. Ahem! Your father —

DOLLY (interrupting). How old is he?

PHILIP. Sh!

MRS. CLANDON (softly). Dear Dolly: don’t let us interrupt Mr. McComas.

McCOMAS (emphatically). Thank you, Mrs. Clandon. Thank you. (To Dolly.) Your father is fifty-seven.

DOLLY (with a bound, startled and excited). Fifty-seven! Where does he live?

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Dolly, Dolly!

McCOMAS (stopping her). Let me answer that, Mrs. Clandon. The answer will surprise you considerably. He lives in this town. (Mrs. Clandon rises. She and Gloria look at one another in the greatest consternation.)

DOLLY (with conviction). I knew it! Phil: Chalkstones is our father.

McCOMAS. Chalkstones!

DOLLY. Oh, Crampstones, or whatever it is. He said I was like his mother. I knew he must mean his daughter.

PHILIP (very seriously). Mr. McComas: I desire to consider your feelings in every possible way: but I warn you that if you stretch the long arm of coincidence to the length of telling me that Mr. Crampton of this town is my father, I shall decline to entertain the information for a moment.

McCOMAS. And pray why?

PHILIP. Because I have seen the gentleman; and he is entirely unfit to be my father, or Dolly’s father, or Gloria’s father, or my mother’s husband.

McCOMAS. Oh, indeed! Well, sir, let me tell you that whether you like it or not, he is your father, and your sister’ father, and Mrs. Clandon’s husband. Now! What have you to say to that!

DOLLY (whimpering). You needn’t be so cross. Crampton isn’t your father.

PHILIP. Mr. McComas: your conduct is heartless. Here you find a family enjoying the unspeakable peace and freedom of being orphans. We have never seen the face of a relative — never known a claim except the claim of freely chosen friendship. And now you wish to thrust into the most intimate relationship with us a man whom we don’t know —

DOLLY (vehemently). An awful old man! (reproachfully) And you began as if you had quite a nice father for us.

McCOMAS (angrily). How do you know that he is not nice? And what right have you to choose your own father? (raising his voice.) Let me tell you, Miss Clandon, that you are too young to —

DOLLY (interrupting him suddenly and eagerly). Stop, I forgot! Has he any money?

McCOMAS. He has a great deal of money.

DOLLY (delighted). Oh, what did I always say, Phil?

PHILIP. Dolly: we have perhaps been condemning the old man too hastily. Proceed, Mr. McComas.

McCOMAS. I shall not proceed, sir. I am too hurt, too shocked, to proceed.

MRS. CLANDON (urgently). Finch: do you realize what is happening? Do you understand that my children have invited that man to lunch, and that he will be here in a few moments?

McCOMAS (completely upset). What! do you mean — am I to understand — is it —

PHILIP (impressively). Steady, Finch. Think it out slowly and carefully. He’s coming — coming to lunch.

GLORIA. Which of us is to tell him the truth? Have you thought of that?

MRS. CLANDON. Finch: you must tell him.

DOLLY Oh, Finch is no good at telling things. Look at the mess he has made of telling us.

McCOMAS. I have not been allowed to speak. I protest against this.

DOLLY (taking his arm coaxingly). Dear Finch: don’t be cross.

MRS. CLANDON. Gloria: let us go in. He may arrive at any moment.

GLORIA (proudly). Do not stir, mother. I shall not stir. We must not run away.

MRS. CLANDON (delicately rebuking her). My dear: we cannot sit down to lunch just as we are. We shall come back again. We must have no bravado. (Gloria winces, and goes into the hotel without a word.) Come, Dolly. (As she goes into the hotel door, the waiter comes out with plates, etc., for two additional covers on a tray.)

WAITER. Gentlemen come yet, ma’am?

MRS. CLANDON. Two more to come yet, thank you. They will be here, immediately. (She goes into the hotel. The waiter takes his tray to the service table.)

PHILIP. I have an idea. Mr. McComas: this communication should be made, should it not, by a man of infinite tact?

McCOMAS. It will require tact, certainly.

PHILIP Good! Dolly: whose tact were you noticing only this morning?

DOLLY (seizing the idea with rapture). Oh, yes, I declare! William!

PHILIP. The very man! (Calling) William!

WAITER. Coming, sir.

McCOMAS (horrified). The waiter! Stop, stop! I will not permit this. I —

WAITER (presenting himself between Philip and McComas). Yes, sir. (McComas’s complexion fades into stone grey; and all movement and expression desert his eyes. He sits down stupefied.)

PHILIP. William: you remember my request to you to regard me as your son?

WAITER (with respectful indulgence). Yes, sir. Anything you please, sir.

PHILIP. William: at the very outset of your career as my father, a rival has appeared on the scene.

WAITER. Your real father, sir? Well, that was to be expected, sooner or later, sir, wasn’t it? (Turning with a happy smile to McComas.) Is it you, sir?

McCOMAS (renerved by indignation). Certainly not. My children know how to behave themselves.

PHILIP. No, William: this gentleman was very nearly my father: he wooed my mother, but wooed her in vain.

McCOMAS (outraged). Well, of all the —

PHILIP. Sh! Consequently, he is only our solicitor. Do you know one Crampton, of this town?

WAITER. Cock-eyed Crampton, sir, of the Crooked Billet, is it?

PHILIP. I don’t know. Finch: does he keep a public house?

McCOMAS (rising scandalized). No, no, no. Your father, sir, is a well-known yacht builder, an eminent man here.

WAITER (impressed). Oh, beg pardon, sir, I’m sure. A son of Mr. Crampton’s! Dear me!

PHILIP. Mr. Crampton is coming to lunch with us.

WAITER (puzzled). Yes, sir. (Diplomatically.) Don’t usually lunch with his family, perhaps, sir?

PHILIP (impressively). William: he does not know that we are his family. He has not seen us for eighteen years. He won’t know us. (To emphasize the communication he seats himself on the iron table with a spring, and looks at the waiter with his lips compressed and his legs swinging.)

DOLLY. We want you to break the news to him, William.

WAITER. But I should think he’d guess when he sees your mother, miss. (Philip’s legs become motionless at this elucidation. He contemplates the waiter raptly.)

DOLLY (dazzled). I never thought of that.

PHILIP. Nor I. (Coming off the table and turning reproachfully on McComas.) Nor you.

DOLLY. And you a solicitor!

PHILIP. Finch: Your professional incompetence is appalling. William: your sagacity puts us all to shame.

DOLLY You really are like Shakespear, William.

WAITER. Not at all, sir. Don’t mention it, miss. Most happy, I’m sure, sir. (Goes back modestly to the luncheon table and lays the two additional covers, one at the end next the steps, and the other so as to make a third on the side furthest from the balustrade.)

PHILIP (abruptly). Finch: come and wash your hands. (Seizes his arm and leads him toward the hotel.)

McCOMAS. I am thoroughly vexed and hurt, Mr. Clandon —

PHILIP (interrupting him). You will get used to us. Come, Dolly. (McComas shakes him off and marches into the hotel. Philip follows with unruffled composure.)

DOLLY (turning for a moment on the steps as she follows them). Keep your wits about you, William. There will be fire-works.

WAITER. Right, miss. You may depend on me, miss. (She goes into the hotel.)

(Valentine comes lightly up the steps from the beach, followed doggedly by Crampton. Valentine carries a walking stick. Crampton, either because he is old and chilly, or with some idea of extenuating the unfashionableness of his reefer jacket, wears a light overcoat. He stops at the chair left by McComas in the middle of the terrace, and steadies himself for a moment by placing his hand on the back of it.)

CRAMPTON. Those steps make me giddy. (He passes his hand over his forehead.) I have not got over that infernal gas yet.

(He goes to the iron chair, so that he can lean his elbows on the little table to prop his head as he sits. He soon recovers, and begins to unbutton his overcoat. Meanwhile Valentine interviews the waiter.)

VALENTINE. Waiter!

WAITER (coming forward between them). Yes, sir.

VALENTINE. Mrs. Lanfrey Clandon.

WAITER (with a sweet smile of welcome). Yes, sir. We’re expecting you, sir. That is your table, sir. Mrs. Clandon will be down presently, sir. The young lady and young gentleman were just talking about your friend, sir.

VALENTINE. Indeed!

WAITER (smoothly melodious). Yes, sire. Great flow of spirits, sir. A vein of pleasantry, as you might say, sir. (Quickly, to Crampton, who has risen to get the overcoat off.) Beg pardon, sir, but if you’ll allow me (helping him to get the overcoat off and taking it from him). Thank you, sir. (Crampton sits down again; and the waiter resumes the broken melody.) The young gentleman’s latest is that you’re his father, sir.

CRAMPTON. What!

WAITER. Only his joke, sir, his favourite joke. Yesterday, I was to be his father. To-day, as soon as he knew you were coming, sir, he tried to put it up on me that you were his father, his long lost father — not seen you for eighteen years, he said.

CRAMPTON (startled). Eighteen years!

WAITER. Yes, sir. (With gentle archness.) But I was up to his tricks, sir. I saw the idea coming into his head as he stood there, thinking what new joke he’d have with me. Yes, sir: that’s the sort he is: very pleasant, ve — ry off hand and affable indeed, sir. (Again changing his tempo to say to Valentine, who is putting his stick down against the corner of the garden seat) If you’ll allow me, sir? (Taking Valentine’s stick.) Thank you, sir. (Valentine strolls up to the luncheon table and looks at the menu. The waiter turns to Crampton and resumes his lay.) Even the solicitor took up the joke, although he was in a manner of speaking in my confidence about the young gentleman, sir. Yes, sir, I assure you, sir. You would never imagine what respectable professional gentlemen from London will do on an outing, when the sea air takes them, sir.

CRAMPTON. Oh, there’s a solicitor with them, is there?

WAITER. The family solicitor, sir — yes, sir. Name of McComas, sir. (He goes towards hotel entrance with coat and stick, happily unconscious of the bomblike effect the name has produced on Crampton.)

CRAMPTON (rising in angry alarm). McComas! (Calls to Valentine.) Valentine! (Again, fiercely.) Valentine!! (Valentine turns.) This is a plant, a conspiracy. This is my family — my children — my infernal wife.

VALENTINE (coolly). On, indeed! Interesting meeting! (He resumes his study of the menu.)

CRAMPTON. Meeting! Not for me. Let me out of this. (Calling to the waiter.) Give me that coat.

WAITER. Yes, sir. (He comes back, puts Valentine’s stick carefully down against the luncheon table; and delicately shakes the coat out and holds it for Crampton to put on.) I seem to have done the young gentleman an injustice, sir, haven’t I, sir.

CRAMPTON. Rrrh! (He stops on the point of putting his arms into the sleeves, and turns to Valentine with sudden suspicion.) Valentine: you are in this. You made this plot. You —

VALENTINE (decisively). Bosh! (He throws the menu down and goes round the table to look out unconcernedly over the parapet.)

CRAMPTON (angrily). What d’ye — (McComas, followed by Philip and Dolly, comes out. He vacillates for a moment on seeing Crampton.)

WAITER (softly — interrupting Crampton). Steady, sir. Here they come, sir. (He takes up the stick and makes for the hotel, throwing the coat across his arm. McComas turns the corners of his mouth resolutely down and crosses to Crampton, who draws back and glares, with his hands behind him. McComas, with his brow opener than ever, confronts him in the majesty of a spotless conscience.)

WAITER (aside, as he passes Philip on his way out). I’ve broke it to him, sir.

PHILIP. Invaluable William! (He passes on to the table.)

DOLLY (aside to the waiter). How did he take it?

WAITER (aside to her). Startled at first, miss; but resigned — very resigned, indeed, miss. (He takes the stick and coat into the hotel.)

McCOMAS (having stared Crampton out of countenance). So here you are, Mr. Crampton.

CRAMPTON. Yes, here — caught in a trap — a mean trap. Are those my children?

PHILIP (with deadly politeness). Is this our father, Mr. McComas?

McCOMAS. Yes — er — (He loses countenance himself and stops.)

DOLLY (conventionally). Pleased to meet you again. (She wanders idly round the table, exchanging a smile and a word of greeting with Valentine on the way.)

PHILIP. Allow me to discharge my first duty as host by ordering your wine. (He takes the wine list from the table. His polite attention, and Dolly’s unconcerned indifference, leave Crampton on the footing of the casual acquaintance picked up that morning at the dentist’s. The consciousness of it goes through the father with so keen a pang that he trembles all over; his brow becomes wet; and he stares dumbly at his son, who, just conscious enough of his own callousness to intensely enjoy the humor and adroitness of it, proceeds pleasantly.) Finch: some crusted old port for you, as a respectable family solicitor, eh?

McCOMAS (firmly). Apollinaris only. I prefer to take nothing heating. (He walks away to the side of the terrace, like a man putting temptation behind him.)

PHILIP. Valentine — ?

VALENTINE. Would Lager be considered vulgar?

PHILIP. Probably. We’ll order some. Dolly takes it. (Turning to Crampton with cheerful politeness.) And now, Mr. Crampton, what can we do for you?

CRAMPTON. What d’ye mean, boy?

PHILIP. Boy! (Very solemnly.) Whose fault is it that I am a boy?

(Crampton snatches the wine list rudely from him and irresolutely pretends to read it. Philip abandons it to him with perfect politeness.)

DOLLY (looking over Crampton’s right shoulder). The whisky’s on the last page but one.

CRAMPTON. Let me alone, child.

DOLLY. Child! No, no: you may call me Dolly if you like; but you mustn’t call me child. (She slips her arm through Philip’s; and the two stand looking at Crampton as if he were some eccentric stranger.)

CRAMPTON (mopping his brow in rage and agony, and yet relieved even by their playing with him). McComas: we are — ha! — going to have a pleasant meal.

McCOMAS (pusillanimously). There is no reason why it should not be pleasant. (He looks abjectly gloomy.)

PHILIP. Finch’s face is a feast in itself. (Mrs. Clandon and Gloria come from the hotel. Mrs. Clandon advances with courageous self-possession and marked dignity of manner. She stops at the foot of the steps to address Valentine, who is in her path. Gloria also stops, looking at Crampton with a certain repulsion.)

MRS. CLANDON. Glad to see you again, Mr. Valentine. (He smiles. She passes on and confronts Crampton, intending to address him with perfect composure; but his aspect shakes her. She stops suddenly and says anxiously, with a touch of remorse.) Fergus: you are greatly changed.

CRAMPTON (grimly). I daresay. A man does change in eighteen years.

MRS. CLANDON (troubled). I — I did not mean that. I hope your health is good.

CRAMPTON. Thank you. No: it’s not my health. It’s my happiness: that’s the change you meant, I think. (Breaking out suddenly.) Look at her, McComas! Look at her; and look at me! (He utters a half laugh, half sob.)

PHILIP. Sh! (Pointing to the hotel entrance, where the waiter has just appeared.) Order before William!

DOLLY (touching Crampton’s arm warningly with her finger). Ahem! (The waiter goes to the service table and beckons to the kitchen entrance, whence issue a young waiter with soup plates, and a cook, in white apron and cap, with the soup tureen. The young waiter remains and serves: the cook goes out, and reappears from time to time bringing in the courses. He carves, but does not serve. The waiter comes to the end of the luncheon table next the steps.)

MRS. CLANDON (as they all assemble about the table). I think you have all met one another already to-day. Oh, no, excuse me. (Introducing) Mr. Valentine: Mr. McComas. (She goes to the end of the table nearest the hotel.) Fergus: will you take the head of the table, please.

CRAMPTON. Ha! (Bitterly.) The head of the table!

WAITER (holding the chair for him with inoffensive encouragement). This end, sir. (Crampton submits, and takes his seat.) Thank you, sir.

MRS. CLANDON. Mr. Valentine: will you take that side (indicating the side nearest the parapet) with Gloria? (Valentine and Gloria take their places, Gloria next Crampton and Valentine next Mrs. Clandon.) Finch: I must put you on this side, between Dolly and Phil. You must protect yourself as best you can. (The three take the remaining side of the table, Dolly next her mother, Phil next his father, and McComas between them. Soup is served.)

WAITER (to Crampton). Thick or clear, sir?

CRAMPTON (to Mrs. Clandon). Does nobody ask a blessing in this household?

PHILIP (interposing smartly). Let us first settle what we are about to receive. William!

WAITER. Yes, sir. (He glides swiftly round the table to Phil’s left elbow. On his way he whispers to the young waiter) Thick.

PHILIP. Two small Lagers for the children as usual, William; and one large for this gentleman (indicating Valentine). Large Apollinaris for Mr. McComas.

WAITER. Yes, sir.

DOLLY. Have a six of Irish in it, Finch?

McCOMAS (scandalized). No — no, thank you.

PHILIP. Number 413 for my mother and Miss Gloria as before; and — (turning enquiringly to Crampton) Eh?

CRAMPTON (scowling and about to reply offensively). I —

WAITER (striking in mellifluously). All right, sir. We know what Mr. Crampton likes here, sir. (He goes into the hotel.)

PHILIP (looking gravely at his father). You frequent bars. Bad habit! (The cook, accompanied by a waiter with a supply of hot plates, brings in the fish from the kitchen to the service table, and begins slicing it.)

CRAMPTON. You have learnt your lesson from your mother, I see.

MRS. CLANDON. Phil: will you please remember that your jokes are apt to irritate people who are not accustomed to us, and that your father is our guest to-day.

CRAMPTON (bitterly). Yes, a guest at the head of my own table. (The soup plates are removed.)

DOLLY (sympathetically). Yes: it’s embarrassing, isn’t it? It’s just as bad for us, you know.

PHILIP. Sh! Dolly: we are both wanting in tact. (To Crampton.) We mean well, Mr. Crampton; but we are not yet strong in the filial line. (The waiter returns from the hotel with the drinks.) William: come and restore good feeling.

WAITER (cheerfully). Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. Small Lager for you, sir. (To Crampton.) Seltzer and Irish, sir. (To McComas.) Apollinaris, sir. (To Dolly.) Small Lager, miss. (To Mrs. Clandon, pouring out wine.) 413, madam. (To Valentine.) Large Lager for you, sir. (To Gloria.) 413, miss.

DOLLY (drinking). To the family!

PHILIP. (drinking). Hearth and Home! (Fish is served.)

McCOMAS (with an obviously forced attempt at cheerful domesticity). We are getting on very nicely after all.

DOLLY (critically). After all! After all what, Finch?

CRAMPTON (sarcastically). He means that you are getting on very nicely in spite of the presence of your father. Do I take your point rightly, Mr. McComas?

McCOMAS (disconcerted). No, no. I only said “after all” to round off the sentence. I — er — er — er —

WAITER (tactfully). Turbot, sir?

McCOMAS (intensely grateful for the interruption). Thank you, waiter: thank you.

WAITER (sotto voce). Don’t mention it, sir. (He returns to the service table.)

CRAMPTON (to Phil). Have you thought of choosing a profession yet?

PHILIP. I am keeping my mind open on that subject. William!

WAITER. Yes, sir.

PHILIP. How long do you think it would take me to learn to be a really smart waiter?

WAITER. Can’t be learnt, sir. It’s in the character, sir. (Confidentially to Valentine, who is looking about for something.) Bread for the lady, sir? yes, sir. (He serves bread to Gloria, and resumes at his former pitch.) Very few are born to it, sir.

PHILIP. You don’t happen to have such a thing as a son, yourself, have you?

WAITER. Yes, sir: oh, yes, sir. (To Gloria, again dropping his voice.) A little more fish, miss? you won’t care for the joint in the middle of the day.

GLORIA. No, thank you. (The fish plates are removed.)

DOLLY. Is your son a waiter, too, William?

WAITER (serving Gloria with fowl). Oh, no, miss, he’s too impetuous. He’s at the Bar.

McCOMAS (patronizingly). A potman, eh?

WAITER (with a touch of melancholy, as if recalling a disappointment softened by time). No, sir: the other bar — your profession, sir. A Q.C., sir.

McCOMAS (embarrassed). I’m sure I beg your pardon.

WAITER. Not at all, sir. Very natural mistake, I’m sure, sir. I’ve often wished he was a potman, sir. Would have been off my hands ever so much sooner, sir. (Aside to Valentine, who is again in difficulties.) Salt at your elbow, sir. (Resuming.) Yes, sir: had to support him until he was thirty-seven, sir. But doing well now, sir: very satisfactory indeed, sir. Nothing less than fifty guineas, sir.

McCOMAS. Democracy, Crampton! — modern democracy!

WAITER (calmly). No, sir, not democracy: only education, sir. Scholarships, sir. Cambridge Local, sir. Sidney Sussex College, sir. (Dolly plucks his sleeve and whispers as he bends down.) Stone ginger, miss? Right, miss. (To McComas.) Very good thing for him, sir: he never had any turn for real work, sir. (He goes into the hotel, leaving the company somewhat overwhelmed by his son’s eminence.)

VALENTINE. Which of us dare give that man an order again!

DOLLY. I hope he won’t mind my sending him for ginger-beer.

CRAMPTON (doggedly). While he’s a waiter it’s his business to wait. If you had treated him as a waiter ought to be treated, he’d have held his tongue.

DOLLY. What a loss that would have been! Perhaps he’ll give us an introduction to his son and get us into London society. (The waiter reappears with the ginger-beer.)

CRAMPTON (growling contemptuously). London society! London society!! You’re not fit for any society, child.

DOLLY (losing her temper). Now look here, Mr. Crampton. If you think —

WAITER (softly, at her elbow). Stone ginger, miss.

DOLLY (taken aback, recovers her good humor after a long breath and says sweetly). Thank you, dear William. You were just in time. (She drinks.)

McCOMAS (making a fresh effort to lead the conversation into dispassionate regions). If I may be allowed to change the subject, Miss Clandon, what is the established religion in Madeira?

GLORIA. I suppose the Portuguese religion. I never inquired.

DOLLY. The servants come in Lent and kneel down before you and confess all the things they’ve done: and you have to pretend to forgive them. Do they do that in England, William?

WAITER. Not usually, miss. They may in some parts: but it has not come under my notice, miss. (Catching Mrs. Clandon’s eye as the young waiter offers her the salad bowl.) You like it without dressing, ma’am: yes, ma’am, I have some for you. (To his young colleague, motioning him to serve Gloria.) This side, Jo. (He takes a special portion of salad from the service table and puts it beside Mrs. Clandon’s plate. In doing so he observes that Dolly is making a wry face.) Only a bit of watercress, miss, got in by mistake. (He takes her salad away.) Thank you, miss. (To the young waiter, admonishing him to serve Dolly afresh.) Jo. (Resuming.) Mostly members of the Church of England, miss.

DOLLY. Members of the Church of England! What’s the subscription?

CRAMPTON (rising violently amid general consternation). You see how my children have been brought up, McComas. You see it; you hear it. I call all of you to witness — (He becomes inarticulate, and is about to strike his fist recklessly on the table when the waiter considerately takes away his plate.)

MRS. CLANDON (firmly). Sit down, Fergus. There is no occasion at all for this outburst. You must remember that Dolly is just like a foreigner here. Pray sit down.

CRAMPTON (subsiding unwillingly). I doubt whether I ought to sit here and countenance all this. I doubt it.

WAITER. Cheese, sir; or would you like a cold sweet?

CRAMPTON (take aback). What? Oh! — cheese, cheese.

DOLLY. Bring a box of cigarettes, William.

WAITER. All ready, miss. (He takes a box of cigarettes from the service table and places them before Dolly, who selects one and prepares to smoke. He then returns to his table for a box of vestas.)

CRAMPTON (staring aghast at Dolly). Does she smoke?

DOLLY (out of patience). Really, Mr. Crampton, I’m afraid I’m spoiling your lunch. I’ll go and have my cigarette on the beach. (She leaves the table with petulant suddenness and goes down the steps. The waiter attempts to give her the matches; but she is gone before he can reach her.)

CRAMPTON (furiously). Margaret: call that girl back. Call her back, I say.

McCOMAS (trying to make peace). Come, Crampton: never mind. She’s her father’s daughter: that’s all.

MRS. CLANDON (with deep resentment). I hope not, Finch. (She rises: they all rise a little.) Mr. Valentine: will you excuse me: I am afraid Dolly is hurt and put out by what has passed. I must go to her.

CRAMPTON. To take her part against me, you mean.

MRS. CLANDON (ignoring him). Gloria: will you take my place whilst I am away, dear. (She crosses to the steps. Crampton’s eyes follow her with bitter hatred. The rest watch her in embarrassed silence, feeling the incident to be a very painful one.)

WAITER (intercepting her at the top of the steps and offering her a box of vestas). Young lady forgot the matches, ma’am. If you would be so good, ma’am.

MRS. CLANDON (surprised into grateful politeness by the witchery of his sweet and cheerful tones). Thank you very much. (She takes the matches and goes down to the beach. The waiter shepherds his assistant along with him into the hotel by the kitchen entrance, leaving the luncheon party to themselves.)

CRAMPTON (throwing himself back in his chair). There’s a mother for you, McComas! There’s a mother for you!

GLORIA (steadfastly). Yes: a good mother.

CRAMPTON. And a bad father? That’s what you mean, eh?

VALENTINE (rising indignantly and addressing Gloria). Miss Clandon: I —

CRAMPTON (turning on him). That girl’s name is Crampton, Mr. Valentine, not Clandon. Do you wish to join them in insulting me?

VALENTINE (ignoring him). I’m overwhelmed, Miss Clandon. It’s all my fault: I brought him here: I’m responsible for him. And I’m ashamed of him.

CRAMPTON. What d’y’ mean?

GLORIA (rising coldly). No harm has been done, Mr. Valentine. We have all been a little childish, I am afraid. Our party has been a failure: let us break it up and have done with it. (She puts her chair aside and turns to the steps, adding, with slighting composure, as she passes Crampton.) Good-bye, father.

(She descends the steps with cold, disgusted indifference. They all look after her, and so do not notice the return of the waiter from the hotel, laden with Crampton’s coat, Valentine’s stick, a couple of shawls and parasols, a white canvas umbrella, and some camp stools.)

CRAMPTON (to himself, staring after Gloria with a ghastly expression). Father! Father!! (He strikes his fist violently on the table.) Now —

WAITER (offering the coat). This is yours, sir, I think, sir. (Crampton glares at him; then snatches it rudely and comes down the terrace towards the garden seat, struggling with the coat in his angry efforts to put it on. McComas rises and goes to his assistance; then takes his hat and umbrella from the little iron table, and turns towards the steps. Meanwhile the waiter, after thanking Crampton with unruffled sweetness for taking the coat, offers some of his burden to Phil.) The ladies’ sunshades, sir. Nasty glare off the sea to-day, sir: very trying to the complexion, sir. I shall carry down the camp stools myself, sir.

PHILIP. You are old, Father William; but you are the most considerate of men. No: keep the sunshades and give me the camp stools (taking them).

WAITER (with flattering gratitude). Thank you, sir.

PHILIP. Finch: share with me (giving him a couple). Come along. (They go down the steps together.)

VALENTINE (to the waiter). Leave me something to bring down — one of these. (Offering to take a sunshade.)

WAITER (discreetly). That’s the younger lady’s, sir. (Valentine lets it go.) Thank you, sir. If you’ll allow me, sir, I think you had better have this. (He puts down the sunshades on Crampton’s chair, and produces from the tail pocket of his dress coat, a book with a lady’s handkerchief between the leaves, marking the page.) The eldest young lady is reading it at present. (Valentine takes it eagerly.) Thank you, sir. Schopenhauer, sir, you see. (He takes up the sunshades again.) Very interesting author, sir: especially on the subject of ladies, sir. (He goes down the steps. Valentine, about to follow him, recollects Crampton and changes his mind.)

VALENTINE (coming rather excitedly to Crampton). Now look here, Crampton: are you at all ashamed of yourself?

CRAMPTON (pugnaciously). Ashamed of myself! What for?

VALENTINE. For behaving like a bear. What will your daughter think of me for having brought you here?

CRAMPTON. I was not thinking of what my daughter was thinking of you.

VALENTINE. No, you were thinking of yourself. You’re a perfect maniac.

CRAMPTON (heartrent). She told you what I am — a father — a father robbed of his children. What are the hearts of this generation like? Am I to come here after all these years — to see what my children are for the first time! to hear their voices! — and carry it all off like a fashionable visitor; drop in to lunch; be Mr. Crampton — M i s t e r Crampton! What right have they to talk to me like that? I’m their father: do they deny that? I’m a man, with the feelings of our common humanity: have I no rights, no claims? In all these years who have I had round me? Servants, clerks, business acquaintances. I’ve had respect from them — aye, kindness. Would one of them have spoken to me as that girl spoke? — would one of them have laughed at me as that boy was laughing at me all the time? (Frantically.) My own children! M i s t e r Crampton! My —

VALENTINE. Come, come: they’re only children. The only one of them that’s worth anything called you father.

CRAMPTON (wildly). Yes: “good-bye, father.” Oh, yes: she got at my feelings — with a stab!

VALENTINE (taking this in very bad part). Now look here, Crampton: you just let her alone: she’s treated you very well. I had a much worse time of it at lunch than you.

CRAMPTON. You!

VALENTINE (with growing impetuosity). Yes: I. I sat next to her; and I never said a single thing to her the whole time — couldn’t think of a blessed word. And not a word did she say to me.

CRAMPTON. Well?

VALENTINE. Well? Well??? (Tackling him very seriously and talking faster and faster.) Crampton: do you know what’s been the matter with me to-day? You don’t suppose, do you, that I’m in the habit of playing such tricks on my patients as I played on you?

CRAMPTON. I hope not.

VALENTINE. The explanation is that I’m stark mad, or rather that I’ve never been in my real senses before. I’m capable of anything: I’ve grown up at last: I’m a Man; and it’s your daughter that’s made a man of me.

CRAMPTON (incredulously). Are you in love with my daughter?

VALENTINE (his words now coming in a perfect torrent). Love! Nonsense: it’s something far above and beyond that. It’s life, it’s faith, it’s strength, certainty, paradise —

CRAMPTON (interrupting him with acrid contempt). Rubbish, man! What have you to keep a wife on? You can’t marry her.

VALENTINE. Who wants to marry her? I’ll kiss her hands; I’ll kneel at her feet; I’ll live for her; I’ll die for her; and that’ll be enough for me. Look at her book! See! (He kisses the handkerchief.) If you offered me all your money for this excuse for going down to the beach and speaking to her again, I’d only laugh at you. (He rushes buoyantly off to the steps, where he bounces right into the arms of the waiter, who is coming up form the beach. The two save themselves from falling by clutching one another tightly round the waist and whirling one another around.)

WAITER (delicately). Steady, sir, steady.

VALENTINE (shocked at his own violence). I beg your pardon.

WAITER. Not at all, sir, not at all. Very natural, sir, I’m sure, sir, at your age. The lady has sent me for her book, sir. Might I take the liberty of asking you to let her have it at once, sir?

VALENTINE. With pleasure. And if you will allow me to present you with a professional man’s earnings for six weeks — (offering him Dolly’s crown piece.)

WAITER (as if the sum were beyond his utmost expectations). Thank you, sir: much obliged. (Valentine dashes down the steps.) Very high-spirited young gentleman, sir: very manly and straight set up.

CRAMPTON (in grumbling disparagement). And making his fortune in a hurry, no doubt. I know what his six weeks’ earnings come to. (He crosses the terrace to the iron table, and sits down.)

WAITER (philosophically). Well, sir, you never can tell. That’s a principle in life with me, sir, if you’ll excuse my having such a thing, sir. (Delicately sinking the philosopher in the waiter for a moment.) Perhaps you haven’t noticed that you hadn’t touched that seltzer and Irish, sir, when the party broke up. (He takes the tumbler from the luncheon table, and sets if before Crampton.) Yes, sir, you never can tell. There was my son, sir! who ever thought that he would rise to wear a silk gown, sir? And yet to-day, sir, nothing less than fifty guineas, sir. What a lesson, sir!

CRAMPTON. Well, I hope he is grateful to you, and recognizes what he owes you.

WAITER. We get on together very well, very well indeed, sir, considering the difference in our stations. (With another of his irresistible transitions.) A small lump of sugar, sir, will take the flatness out of the seltzer without noticeably sweetening the drink, sir. Allow me, sir. (He drops a lump of sugar into the tumbler.) But as I say to him, where’s the difference after all? If I must put on a dress coat to show what I am, sir, he must put on a wig and gown to show what he is. If my income is mostly tips, and there’s a pretence that I don’t get them, why, his income is mostly fees, sir; and I understand there’s a pretence that he don’t get them! If he likes society, and his profession brings him into contact with all ranks, so does mine, too, sir. If it’s a little against a barrister to have a waiter for his father, sir, it’s a little against a waiter to have a barrister for a son: many people consider it a great liberty, sir, I assure you, sir. Can I get you anything else, sir?

CRAMPTON. No, thank you. (With bitter humility.) I suppose that’s no objection to my sitting here for a while: I can’t disturb the party on the beach here.

WAITER (with emotion). Very kind of you, sir, to put it as if it was not a compliment and an honour to us, Mr. Crampton, very kind indeed. The more you are at home here, sir, the better for us.

CRAMPTON (in poignant irony). Home!

WAITER (reflectively). Well, yes, sir: that’s a way of looking at it, too, sir. I have always said that the great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life, sir.

CRAMPTON. I missed that advantage to-day, I think.

WAITER. You did, sir, you did. Dear me! It’s the unexpected that always happens, isn’t it? (Shaking his head.) You never can tell, sir: you never can tell. (He goes into the hotel.)

CRAMPTON (his eyes shining hardly as he props his drawn, miserable face on his hands). Home! Home!! (He drops his arms on the table and bows his head on them, but presently hears someone approaching and hastily sits bolt upright. It is Gloria, who has come up the steps alone, with her sunshade and her book in her hands. He looks defiantly at her, with the brutal obstinacy of his mouth and the wistfulness of his eyes contradicting each other pathetically. She comes to the corner of the garden seat and stands with her back to it, leaning against the end of it, and looking down at him as if wondering at his weakness: too curious about him to be cold, but supremely indifferent to their kinship.) Well?

GLORIA. I want to speak with you for a moment.

CRAMPTON (looking steadily at her). Indeed? That’s surprising. You meet your father after eighteen years; and you actually want to speak to him for a moment! That’s touching: isn’t it? (He rests his head on his hands, and looks down and away from her, in gloomy reflection.)

GLORIA. All that is what seems to me so nonsensical, so uncalled for. What do you expect us to feel for you — to do for you? What is it you want? Why are you less civil to us than other people are? You are evidently not very fond of us — why should you be? But surely we can meet without quarrelling.

CRAMPTON (a dreadful grey shade passing over his face). Do you realize that I am your father?

GLORIA. Perfectly.

CRAMPTON. Do you know what is due to me as your father?

GLORIA. For instance — ?

CRAMPTON (rising as if to combat a monster). For instance! For instance!! For instance, duty, affection, respect, obedience —

GLORIA (quitting her careless leaning attitude and confronting him promptly and proudly). I obey nothing but my sense of what is right. I respect nothing that is not noble. That is my duty. (She adds, less firmly) As to affection, it is not within my control. I am not sure that I quite know what affection means. (She turns away with an evident distaste for that part of the subject, and goes to the luncheon table for a comfortable chair, putting down her book and sunshade.)

CRAMPTON (following her with his eyes). Do you really mean what you are saying?

GLORIA (turning on him quickly and severely). Excuse me: that is an uncivil question. I am speaking seriously to you; and I expect you to take me seriously. (She takes one of the luncheon chairs; turns it away from the table; and sits down a little wearily, saying) Can you not discuss this matter coolly and rationally?

CRAMPTON. Coolly and rationally! No, I can’t. Do you understand that? I can’t.

GLORIA (emphatically). No. That I c a n n o t understand. I have no sympathy with —

CRAMPTON (shrinking nervously). Stop! Don’t say anything more yet; you don’t know what you’re doing. Do you want to drive me mad? (She frowns, finding such petulance intolerable. He adds hastily) No: I’m not angry: indeed I’m not. Wait, wait: give me a little time to think. (He stands for a moment, screwing and clinching his brows and hands in his perplexity; then takes the end chair from the luncheon table and sits down beside her, saying, with a touching effort to be gentle and patient) Now, I think I have it. At least I’ll try.

GLORIA (firmly). You see! Everything comes right if we only think it resolutely out.

CRAMPTON (in sudden dread). No: don’t think. I want you to feel: that’s the only thing that can help us. Listen! Do you — but first — I forgot. What’s your name? I mean you pet name. They can’t very well call you Sophronia.

GLORIA (with astonished disgust). Sophronia! My name is Gloria. I am always called by it.

CRAMPTON (his temper rising again). Your name is Sophronia, girl: you were called after your aunt Sophronia, my sister: she gave you your first Bible with your name written in it.

GLORIA. Then my mother gave me a new name.

CRAMPTON (angrily). She had no right to do it. I will not allow this.

GLORIA. You had no right to give me your sister’s name. I don’t know her.

CRAMPTON. You’re talking nonsense. There are bounds to what I will put up with. I will not have it. Do you hear that?

GLORIA (rising warningly). Are you resolved to quarrel?

CRAMPTON (terrified, pleading). No, no: sit down. Sit down, won’t you? (She looks at him, keeping him in suspense. He forces himself to utter the obnoxious name.) Gloria. (She marks her satisfaction with a slight tightening of the lips, and sits down.) There! You see I only want to shew you that I am your father, my — my dear child. (The endearment is so plaintively inept that she smiles in spite of herself, and resigns herself to indulge him a little.) Listen now. What I want to ask you is this. Don’t you remember me at all? You were only a tiny child when you were taken away from me; but you took plenty of notice of things. Can’t you remember someone whom you loved, or (shyly) at least liked in a childish way? Come! someone who let you stay in his study and look at his toy boats, as you thought them? (He looks anxiously into her face for some response, and continues less hopefully and more urgently) Someone who let you do as you liked there and never said a word to you except to tell you that you must sit still and not speak? Someone who was something that no one else was to you — who was your father.

GLORIA (unmoved). If you describe things to me, no doubt I shall presently imagine that I remember them. But I really remember nothing.

CRAMPTON (wistfully). Has your mother never told you anything about me?

GLORIA. She has never mentioned your name to me. (He groans involuntarily. She looks at him rather contemptuously and continues) Except once; and then she did remind me of something I had forgotten.

CRAMPTON (looking up hopefully). What was that?

GLORIA (mercilessly). The whip you bought to beat me with.

CRAMPTON (gnashing his teeth). Oh! To bring that up against me! To turn from me! When you need never have known. (Under a grinding, agonized breath.) Curse her!

GLORIA (springing up). You wretch! (With intense emphasis.) You wretch!! You dare curse my mother!

CRAMPTON. Stop; or you’ll be sorry afterwards. I’m your father.

GLORIA. How I hate the name! How I love the name of mother! You had better go.

CRAMPTON. I — I’m choking. You want to kill me. Some — I — (His voice stifles: he is almost in a fit.)

GLORIA (going up to the balustrade with cool, quick resourcefulness, and calling over to the beach). Mr. Valentine!

VALENTINE (answering from below). Yes.

GLORIA. Come here a moment, please. Mr. Crampton wants you. (She returns to the table and pours out a glass of water.)

CRAMPTON (recovering his speech). No: let me alone. I don’t want him. I’m all right, I tell you. I need neither his help nor yours. (He rises and pulls himself together.) As you say, I had better go. (He puts on his hat.) Is that your last word?

GLORIA. I hope so. (He looks stubbornly at her for a moment; nods grimly, as if he agreed to that; and goes into the hotel. She looks at him with equal steadiness until he disappears, when she makes a gesture of relief, and turns to speak to Valentine, who comes running up the steps.)

VALENTINE (panting). What’s the matter? (Looking round.) Where’s Crampton?

GLORIA. Gone. (Valentine’s face lights up with sudden joy, dread, and mischief. He has just realized that he is alone with Gloria. She continues indifferently) I thought he was ill; but he recovered himself. He wouldn’t wait for you. I am sorry. (She goes for her book and parasol.)

VALENTINE. So much the better. He gets on my nerves after a while. (Pretending to forget himself.) How could that man have so beautiful a daughter!

GLORIA (taken aback for a moment; then answering him with polite but intentional contempt). That seems to be an attempt at what is called a pretty speech. Let me say at once, Mr. Valentine, that pretty speeches make very sickly conversation. Pray let us be friends, if we are to be friends, in a sensible and wholesome way. I have no intention of getting married; and unless you are content to accept that state of things, we had much better not cultivate each other’s acquaintance.

VALENTINE (cautiously). I see. May I ask just this one question? Is your objection an objection to marriage as an institution, or merely an objection to marrying me personally?

GLORIA. I do not know you well enough, Mr. Valentine, to have any opinion on the subject of your personal merits. (She turns away from him with infinite indifference, and sits down with her book on the garden seat.) I do not think the conditions of marriage at present are such as any self-respecting woman can accept.

VALENTINE (instantly changing his tone for one of cordial sincerity, as if he frankly accepted her terms and was delighted and reassured by her principles). Oh, then that’s a point of sympathy between us already. I quite agree with you: the conditions are most unfair. (He takes off his hat and throws it gaily on the iron table.) No: what I want is to get rid of all that nonsense. (He sits down beside her, so naturally that she does not think of objecting, and proceeds, with enthusiasm) Don’t you think it a horrible thing that a man and a woman can hardly know one another without being supposed to have designs of that kind? As if there were no other interests — no other subjects of conversation — as if women were capable of nothing better!

GLORIA (interested). Ah, now you are beginning to talk humanly and sensibly, Mr. Valentine.

VALENTINE (with a gleam in his eye at the success of his hunter’s guile). Of course! — two intelligent people like us. Isn’t it pleasant, in this stupid, convention-ridden world, to meet with someone on the same plane — someone with an unprejudiced, enlightened mind?

GLORIA (earnestly). I hope to meet many such people in England.

VALENTINE (dubiously). Hm! There are a good many people here — nearly forty millions. They’re not all consumptive members of the highly educated classes like the people in Madeira.

GLORIA (now full of her subject). Oh, everybody is stupid and prejudiced in Madeira — weak, sentimental creatures! I hate weakness; and I hate sentiment.

VALENTINE. That’s what makes you so inspiring.

GLORIA (with a slight laugh). Am I inspiring?

VALENTINE Yes. Strength’s infectious.

GLORIA. Weakness is, I know.

VALENTINE (with conviction). Y o u’re strong. Do you know that you changed the world for me this morning? I was in the dumps, thinking of my unpaid rent, frightened about the future. When you came in, I was dazzled. (Her brow clouds a little. He goes on quickly.) That was silly, of course; but really and truly something happened to me. Explain it how you will, my blood got — (he hesitates, trying to think of a sufficiently unimpassioned word) — oxygenated: my muscles braced; my mind cleared; my courage rose. That’s odd, isn’t it? considering that I am not at all a sentimental man.

GLORIA (uneasily, rising). Let us go back to the beach.

VALENTINE (darkly — looking up at her). What! you feel it, too?

GLORIA. Feel what?

VALENTINE. Dread.

GLORIA. Dread!

VALENTINE. As if something were going to happen. It came over me suddenly just before you proposed that we should run away to the others.

GLORIA (amazed). That’s strange — very strange! I had the same presentiment.

VALENTINE. How extraordinary! (Rising.) Well: shall we run away?

GLORIA. Run away! Oh, no: that would be childish. (She sits down again. He resumes his seat beside her, and watches her with a gravely sympathetic air. She is thoughtful and a little troubled as she adds) I wonder what is the scientific explanation of those fancies that cross us occasionally!

VALENTINE. Ah, I wonder! It’s a curiously helpless sensation: isn’t it?

GLORIA (rebelling against the word). Helpless?

VALENTINE. Yes. As if Nature, after allowing us to belong to ourselves and do what we judged right and reasonable for all these years, were suddenly lifting her great hand to take us — her two little children — by the scruff’s of our little necks, and use us, in spite of ourselves, for her own purposes, in her own way.

GLORIA. Isn’t that rather fanciful?

VALENTINE (with a new and startling transition to a tone of utter recklessness). I don’t know. I don’t care. (Bursting out reproachfully.) Oh, Miss Clandon, Miss Clandon: how could you?

GLORIA. What have I done?

VALENTINE. Thrown this enchantment on me. I’m honestly trying to be sensible — scientific — everything that you wish me to be. But — but — oh, don’t you see what you have set to work in my imagination?

GLORIA (with indignant, scornful sternness). I hope you are not going to be so foolish — so vulgar — as to say love.

VALENTINE (with ironical haste to disclaim such a weakness). No, no, no. Not love: we know better than that. Let’s call it chemistry. You can’t deny that there is such a thing as chemical action, chemical affinity, chemical combination — the most irresistible of all natural forces. Well, you’re attracting me irresistibly — chemically.

GLORIA (contemptuously). Nonsense!

VALENTINE. Of course it’s nonsense, you stupid girl. (Gloria recoils in outraged surprise.) Yes, stupid girl: t h a t’s a scientific fact, anyhow. You’re a prig — a feminine prig: that’s what you are. (Rising.) Now I suppose you’ve done with me for ever. (He goes to the iron table and takes up his hat.)

GLORIA (with elaborate calm, sitting up like a High-school-mistress posing to be photographed). That shows how very little you understand my real character. I am not in the least offended. (He pauses and puts his hat down again.) I am always willing to be told of my own defects, Mr. Valentine, by my friends, even when they are as absurdly mistaken about me as you are. I have many faults — very serious faults — of character and temper; but if there is one thing that I am not, it is what you call a prig. (She closes her lips trimly and looks steadily and challengingly at him as she sits more collectedly than ever.)

VALENTINE (returning to the end of the garden seat to confront her more emphatically). Oh, yes, you are. My reason tells me so: my knowledge tells me so: my experience tells me so.

GLORIA. Excuse my reminding you that your reason and your knowledge and your experience are not infallible. At least I hope not.

VALENTINE. I must believe them. Unless you wish me to believe my eyes, my heart, my instincts, my imagination, which are all telling me the most monstrous lies about you.

GLORIA (the collectedness beginning to relax). Lies!

VALENTINE (obstinately). Yes, lies. (He sits down again beside her.) Do you expect me to believe that you are the most beautiful woman in the world?

GLORIA. That is ridiculous, and rather personal.

VALENTINE. Of course it’s ridiculous. Well, that’s what my eyes tell me. (Gloria makes a movement of contemptuous protest.) No: I’m not flattering. I tell you I don’t believe it. (She is ashamed to find that this does not quite please her either.) Do you think that if you were to turn away in disgust from my weakness, I should sit down here and cry like a child?

GLORIA (beginning to find that she must speak shortly and pointedly to keep her voice steady). Why should you, pray?

VALENTINE (with a stir of feeling beginning to agitate his voice). Of course not: I’m not such an idiot. And yet my heart tells me I should — my fool of a heart. But I’ll argue with my heart and bring it to reason. If I loved you a thousand times, I’ll force myself to look the truth steadily in the face. After all, it’s easy to be sensible: the facts are the facts. What’s this place? it’s not heaven: it’s the Marine Hotel. What’s the time? it’s not eternity: it’s about half past one in the afternoon. What am I? a dentist — a five shilling dentist!

GLORIA. And I am a feminine prig.

VALENTINE. (passionately). No, no: I can’t face that: I must have one illusion left — the illusion about you. I love you. (He turns towards her as if the impulse to touch her were ungovernable: she rises and stands on her guard wrathfully. He springs up impatiently and retreats a step.) Oh, what a fool I am! — an idiot! You don’t understand: I might as well talk to the stones on the beach. (He turns away, discouraged.)

GLORIA (reassured by his withdrawal, and a little remorseful). I am sorry. I do not mean to be unsympathetic, Mr. Valentine; but what can I say?

VALENTINE (returning to her with all his recklessness of manner replaced by an engaging and chivalrous respect). You can say nothing, Miss Clandon. I beg your pardon: it was my own fault, or rather my own bad luck. You see, it all depended on your naturally liking me. (She is about to speak: he stops her deprecatingly.) Oh, I know you mustn’t tell me whether you like me or not; but —

GLORIA (her principles up in arms at once). Must not! Why not? I am a free woman: why should I not tell you?

VALENTINE (pleading in terror, and retreating). Don’t. I’m afraid to hear.

GLORIA (no longer scornful). You need not be afraid. I think you are sentimental, and a little foolish; but I like you.

VALENTINE (dropping into the iron chair as if crushed). Then it’s all over. (He becomes the picture of despair.)

GLORIA (puzzled, approaching him). But why?

VALENTINE. Because liking is not enough. Now that I think down into it seriously, I don’t know whether I like you or not.

GLORIA (looking down at him with wondering concern). I’m sorry.

VALENTINE (in an agony of restrained passion). Oh, don’t pity me. Your voice is tearing my heart to pieces. Let me alone, Gloria. You go down into the very depths of me, troubling and stirring me — I can’t struggle with it — I can’t tell you —

GLORIA (breaking down suddenly). Oh, stop telling me what you feel: I can’t bear it.

VALENTINE (springing up triumphantly, the agonized voice now solid, ringing, and jubilant). Ah, it’s come at last — my moment of courage. (He seizes her hands: she looks at him in terror.) Our moment of courage! (He draws her to him; kisses her with impetuous strength; and laughs boyishly.) Now you’ve done it, Gloria. It’s all over: we’re in love with one another. (She can only gasp at him.) But what a dragon you were! And how hideously afraid I was!

PHILIP’S VOICE (calling from the beach). Valentine!

DOLLY’S VOICE. Mr. Valentine!

VALENTINE. Good-bye. Forgive me. (He rapidly kisses her hands, and runs away to the steps, where he meets Mrs. Clandon, ascending. Gloria, quite lost, can only start after him.)

MRS. CLANDON. The children want you, Mr. Valentine. (She looks anxiously around.) Is he gone?

VALENTINE (puzzled). He? (Recollecting.) Oh, Crampton. Gone this long time, Mrs. Clandon. (He runs off buoyantly down the steps.)

GLORIA (sinking upon the seat). Mother!

MRS. CLANDON (hurrying to her in alarm). What is it, dear?

GLORIA (with heartfelt, appealing reproach). Why didn’t you educate me properly?

MRS. CLANDON (amazed). My child: I did my best.

GLORIA. Oh, you taught me nothing — nothing.

MRS. CLANDON. What is the matter with you?

GLORIA (with the most intense expression). Only shame — shame — shame. (Blushing unendurably, she covers her face with her hands and turns away from her mother.)

END OF ACT II.

ACT III

The Clandon’s sitting room in the hotel. An expensive apartment on the ground floor, with a French window leading to the gardens. In the centre of the room is a substantial table, surrounded by chairs, and draped with a maroon cloth on which opulently bound hotel and railway guides are displayed. A visitor entering through the window and coming down to this central table would have the fireplace on his left, and a writing table against the wall on his right, next the door, which is further down. He would, if his taste lay that way, admire the wall decoration of Lincrusta Walton in plum color and bronze lacquer, with dado and cornice; the ormolu consoles in the corners; the vases on pillar pedestals of veined marble with bases of polished black wood, one on each side of the window; the ornamental cabinet next the vase on the side nearest the fireplace, its centre compartment closed by an inlaid door, and its corners rounded off with curved panes of glass protecting shelves of cheap blue and white pottery; the bamboo tea table, with folding shelves, in the corresponding space on the other side of the window; the pictures of ocean steamers and Landseer’s dogs; the saddlebag ottoman in line with the door but on the other side of the room; the two comfortable seats of the same pattern on the hearthrug; and finally, on turning round and looking up, the massive brass pole above the window, sustaining a pair of maroon rep curtains with decorated borders of staid green. Altogether, a room well arranged to flatter the occupant’s sense of importance, and reconcile him to a charge of a pound a day for its use.

Mrs. Clandon sits at the writing table, correcting proofs. Gloria is standing at the window, looking out in a tormented revery.

The clock on the mantelpiece strikes five with a sickly clink, the bell being unable to bear up against the black marble cenotaph in which it is immured.

MRS. CLANDON. Five! I don’t think we need wait any longer for the children. The are sure to get tea somewhere.

GLORIA (wearily). Shall I ring?

MRS. CLANDON. Do, my dear. (Gloria goes to the hearth and rings.) I have finished these proofs at last, thank goodness!

GLORIA (strolling listlessly across the room and coming behind her mother’s chair). What proofs?

MRS. CLANDON The new edition of Twentieth Century Women.

GLORIA (with a bitter smile). There’s a chapter missing.

MRS. CLANDON (beginning to hunt among her proofs). Is there? Surely not.

GLORIA. I mean an unwritten one. Perhaps I shall write it for you — when I know the end of it. (She goes back to the window.)

MRS. CLANDON. Gloria! More enigmas!

GLORIA. Oh, no. The same enigma.

MRS. CLANDON (puzzled and rather troubled; after watching her for a moment). My dear.

GLORIA (returning). Yes.

MRS. CLANDON. You know I never ask questions.

GLORIA (kneeling beside her chair). I know, I know. (She suddenly throws her arms about her mother and embraces her almost passionately.)

MRS. CLANDON. (gently, smiling but embarrassed). My dear: you are getting quite sentimental.

GLORIA (recoiling). Ah, no, no. Oh, don’t say that. Oh! (She rises and turns away with a gesture as if tearing herself.)

MRS. CLANDON (mildly). My dear: what is the matter? What — (The waiter enters with the tea tray.)

WAITER (balmily). This was what you rang for, ma’am, I hope?

MRS. CLANDON. Thank you, yes. (She turns her chair away from the writing table, and sits down again. Gloria crosses to the hearth and sits crouching there with her face averted.)

WAITER (placing the tray temporarily on the centre table). I thought so, ma’am. Curious how the nerves seem to give out in the afternoon without a cup of tea. (He fetches the tea table and places it in front of Mrs. Cladon, conversing meanwhile.) the young lady and gentleman have just come back, ma’am: they have been out in a boat, ma’am. Very pleasant on a fine afternoon like this — very pleasant and invigorating indeed. (He takes the tray from the centre table and puts it on the tea table.) Mr. McComas will not come to tea, ma’am: he has gone to call upon Mr. Crampton. (He takes a couple of chairs and sets one at each end of the tea table.)

GLORIA (looking round with an impulse of terror). And the other gentleman?

WAITER (reassuringly, as he unconsciously drops for a moment into the measure of “I’ve been roaming,” which he sang as a boy.) Oh, he’s coming, miss, he’s coming. He has been rowing the boat, miss, and has just run down the road to the chemist’s for something to put on the blisters. But he will be here directly, miss — directly. (Gloria, in ungovernable apprehension, rises and hurries towards the door.)

MRS. CLANDON. (half rising). Glo — (Gloria goes out. Mrs. Clandon looks perplexedly at the waiter, whose composure is unruffled.)

WAITER (cheerfully). Anything more, ma’am?

MRS. CLANDON. Nothing, thank you.

WAITER. Thank you, ma’am. (As he withdraws, Phil and Dolly, in the highest spirits, come tearing in. He holds the door open for them; then goes out and closes it.)

DOLLY (ravenously). Oh, give me some tea. (Mrs. Clandon pours out a cup for her.) We’ve been out in a boat. Valentine will be here presently.

PHILIP. He is unaccustomed to navigation. Where’s Gloria?

MRS. CLANDON (anxiously, as she pours out his tea). Phil: there is something the matter with Gloria. Has anything happened? (Phil and Dolly look at one another and stifle a laugh.) What is it?

PHILIP (sitting down on her left). Romeo —

DOLLY (sitting down on her right). — and Juliet.

PHILIP (taking his cup of tea from Mrs. Clandon). Yes, my dear mother: the old, old story. Dolly: don’t take all the milk. (He deftly takes the jug from her.) Yes: in the spring —

DOLLY. — a young man’s fancy —

PHILIP. — lightly turns to — thank you (to Mrs. Clandon, who has passed the biscuits) — thoughts of love. It also occurs in the autumn. The young man in this case is —

DOLLY. Valentine.

PHILIP. And his fancy has turned to Gloria to the extent of —

DOLLY. — kissing her —

PHILIP. — on the terrace —

DOLLY (correcting him). — on the lips, before everybody.

MRS. CLANDON (incredulously). Phil! Dolly! Are you joking? (They shake their heads.) Did she allow it?

PHILIP. We waited to see him struck to earth by the lightning of her scorn; —

DOLLY. — but he wasn’t.

PHILIP. She appeared to like it.

DOLLY. As far as we could judge. (Stopping Phil, who is about to pour out another cup.) No: you’ve sworn off two cups.

MRS. CLANDON (much troubled). Children: you must not be here when Mr. Valentine comes. I must speak very seriously to him about this.

PHILIP. To ask him his intentions? What a violation of Twentieth Century principles!

DOLLY. Quite right, mamma: bring him to book. Make the most of the nineteenth century while it lasts.

PHILIP. Sh! Here he is. (Valentine comes in.)

VALENTINE Very sorry to be late for tea, Mrs. Clandon. (She takes up the tea-pot.) No, thank you: I never take any. No doubt Miss Dolly and Phil have explained what happened to me.

PHILIP (momentously rising). Yes, Valentine: we have explained.

DOLLY (significantly, also rising). We have explained very thoroughly.

PHILIP. It was our duty. (Very seriously.) Come, Dolly. (He offers Dolly his arm, which she takes. They look sadly at him, and go out gravely, arm in arm. Valentine stares after them, puzzled; then looks at Mrs. Clandon for an explanation.)

MRS. CLANDON (rising and leaving the tea table). Will you sit down, Mr. Valentine. I want to speak to you a little, if you will allow me. (Valentine sits down slowly on the ottoman, his conscience presaging a bad quarter of an hour. Mrs. Clandon takes Phil’s chair, and seats herself deliberately at a convenient distance from him.) I must begin by throwing myself somewhat at your consideration. I am going to speak of a subject of which I know very little — perhaps nothing. I mean love.

VALENTINE. Love!

MRS. CLANDON. Yes, love. Oh, you need not look so alarmed as that, Mr. Valentine: I am not in love with you.

VALENTINE (overwhelmed). Oh, really, Mrs. — (Recovering himself.) I should be only too proud if you were.

MRS. CLANDON. Thank you, Mr. Valentine. But I am too old to begin.

VALENTINE. Begin! Have you never — ?

MRS. CLANDON. Never. My case is a very common one, Mr. Valentine. I married before I was old enough to know what I was doing. As you have seen for yourself, the result was a bitter disappointment for both my husband and myself. So you see, though I am a married woman, I have never been in love; I have never had a love affair; and to be quite frank with you, Mr. Valentine, what I have seen of the love affairs of other people has not led me to regret that deficiency in my experience. (Valentine, looking very glum, glances sceptically at her, and says nothing. Her color rises a little; and she adds, with restrained anger) You do not believe me?

VALENTINE (confused at having his thought read). Oh, why not? Why not?

MRS. CLANDON. Let me tell you, Mr. Valentine, that a life devoted to the Cause of Humanity has enthusiasms and passions to offer which far transcend the selfish personal infatuations and sentimentalities of romance. Those are not your enthusiasms and passions, I take it? (Valentine, quite aware that she despises him for it, answers in the negative with a melancholy shake of the head.) I thought not. Well, I am equally at a disadvantage in discussing those so-called affairs of the heart in which you appear to be an expert.

VALENTINE (restlessly). What are you driving at, Mrs. Clandon?

MRS. CLANDON. I think you know.

VALENTINE. Gloria?

MRS. CLANDON. Yes. Gloria.

VALENTINE (surrendering). Well, yes: I’m in love with Gloria. (Interposing as she is about to speak.) I know what you’re going to say: I’ve no money.

MRS. CLANDON. I care very little about money, Mr. Valentine.

VALENTINE. Then you’re very different to all the other mothers who have interviewed me.

MRS. CLANDON. Ah, now we are coming to it, Mr. Valentine. You are an old hand at this. (He opens his mouth to protest: she cuts him short with some indignation.) Oh, do you think, little as I understand these matters, that I have not common sense enough to know that a man who could make as much way in one interview with such a woman as my daughter, can hardly be a novice!

VALENTINE. I assure you —

MRS. CLANDON (stopping him). I am not blaming you, Mr. Valentine. It is Gloria’s business to take care of herself; and you have a right to amuse yourself as you please. But —

VALENTINE (protesting). Amuse myself! Oh, Mrs. Clandon!

MRS. CLANDON (relentlessly). On your honor, Mr. Valentine, are you in earnest?

VALENTINE (desperately). On my honor I am in earnest. (She looks searchingly at him. His sense of humor gets the better of him; and he adds quaintly) Only, I always have been in earnest; and yet — here I am, you see!

MRS. CLANDON. This is just what I suspected. (Severely.) Mr. Valentine: you are one of those men who play with women’s affections.

VALENTINE. Well, why not, if the Cause of Humanity is the only thing worth being serious about? However, I understand. (Rising and taking his hat with formal politeness.) You wish me to discontinue my visits.

MRS. CLANDON. No: I am sensible enough to be well aware that Gloria’s best chance of escape from you now is to become better acquainted with you.

VALENTINE (unaffectedly alarmed). Oh, don’t say that, Mrs. Clandon. You don’t think that, do you?

MRS. CLANDON. I have great faith, Mr. Valentine, in the sound training Gloria’s mind has had since she was a child.

VALENTINE (amazingly relieved). O-oh! Oh, that’s all right. (He sits down again and throws his hat flippantly aside with the air of a man who has no longer anything to fear.)

MRS. CLANDON (indignant at his assurance). What do you mean?

VALENTINE (turning confidentially to her). Come: shall I teach you something, Mrs. Clandon?

MRS. CLANDON (stiffly). I am always willing to learn.

VALENTINE. Have you ever studied the subject of gunnery — artillery — cannons and war-ships and so on?

MRS. CLANDON. Has gunnery anything to do with Gloria?

VALENTINE. A great deal — by way of illustration. During this whole century, my dear Mrs. Clandon, the progress of artillery has been a duel between the maker of cannons and the maker of armor plates to keep the cannon balls out. You build a ship proof against the best gun known: somebody makes a better gun and sinks your ship. You build a heavier ship, proof against that gun: somebody makes a heavier gun and sinks you again. And so on. Well, the duel of sex is just like that.

MRS. CLANDON. The duel of sex!

VALENTINE. Yes: you’ve heard of the duel of sex, haven’t you? Oh, I forgot: you’ve been in Madeira: the expression has come up since your time. Need I explain it?

MRS. CLANDON (contemptuously). No.

VALENTINE. Of course not. Now what happens in the duel of sex? The old fashioned mother received an old fashioned education to protect her against the wiles of man. Well, you know the result: the old fashioned man got round her. The old fashioned woman resolved to protect her daughter more effectually — to find some armor too strong for the old fashioned man. So she gave her daughter a scientific education — your plan. That was a corker for the old fashioned man: he said it wasn’t fair — unwomanly and all the rest of it. But that didn’t do him any good. So he had to give up his old fashioned plan of attack — you know — going down on his knees and swearing to love, honor and obey, and so on.

MRS. CLANDON. Excuse me: that was what the woman swore.

VALENTINE. Was it? Ah, perhaps you’re right — yes: of course it was. Well, what did the man do? Just what the artillery man does — went one better than the woman — educated himself scientifically and beat her at that game just as he had beaten her at the old game. I learnt how to circumvent the Women’s Rights woman before I was twenty- three: it’s all been found out long ago. You see, my methods are thoroughly modern.

MRS. CLANDON (with quiet disgust). No doubt.

VALENTINE. But for that very reason there’s one sort of girl against whom they are of no use.

MRS. CLANDON. Pray which sort?

VALENTINE. The thoroughly old fashioned girl. If you had brought up Gloria in the old way, it would have taken me eighteen months to get to the point I got to this afternoon in eighteen minutes. Yes, Mrs. Clandon: the Higher Education of Women delivered Gloria into my hands; and it was you who taught her to believe in the Higher Education of Women.

MRS. CLANDON (rising). Mr. Valentine: you are very clever.

VALENTINE (rising also). Oh, Mrs. Clandon!

MRS. CLANDON And you have taught me n o t h i n g. Good-bye.

VALENTINE (horrified). Good-bye! Oh, mayn’t I see her before I go?

MRS. CLANDON. I am afraid she will not return until you have gone Mr. Valentine. She left the room expressly to avoid you.

VALENTINE (thoughtfully). That’s a good sign. Good-bye. (He bows and makes for the door, apparently well satisfied.)

MRS. CLANDON (alarmed). Why do you think it a good sign?

VALENTINE (turning near the door). Because I am mortally afraid of her; and it looks as if she were mortally afraid of me. (He turns to go and finds himself face to face with Gloria, who has just entered. She looks steadfastly at him. He stares helplessly at her; then round at Mrs. Clandon; then at Gloria again, completely at a loss.)

GLORIA (white, and controlling herself with difficulty). Mother: is what Dolly told me true?

MRS. CLANDON. What did she tell you, dear?

GLORIA. That you have been speaking about me to this gentleman.

VALENTINE (murmuring). This gentleman! Oh!

MRS. CLANDON (sharply). Mr. Valentine: can you hold your tongue for a moment? (He looks piteously at them; then, with a despairing shrug, goes back to the ottoman and throws his hat on it.)

GLORIA (confronting her mother, with deep reproach). Mother: what right had you to do it?

MRS. CLANDON. I don’t think I have said anything I have no right to say, Gloria.

VALENTINE (confirming her officiously). Nothing. Nothing whatever. (Gloria looks at him with unspeakable indignation.) I beg your pardon. (He sits down ignominiously on the ottoman.)

GLORIA. I cannot believe that any one has any right even to think about things that concern me only. (She turns away from them to conceal a painful struggle with her emotion.)

MRS. CLANDON. My dear, if I have wounded your pride —

GLORIA (turning on them for a moment). My p r i d e! My pride!! Oh, it’s gone: I have learnt now that I have no strength to be proud of. (Turning away again.) But if a woman cannot protect herself, no one can protect her. No one has any right to try — not even her mother. I know I have lost your confidence, just as I have lost this man’s respect; — (She stops to master a sob.)

VALENTINE (under his breath). This man! (Murmuring again.) Oh!

MRS. CLANDON (in an undertone). Pray be silent, sir.

GLORIA (continuing). — but I have at least the right to be left alone in my disgrace. I am one of those weak creatures born to be mastered by the first man whose eye is caught by them; and I must fulfill my destiny, I suppose. At least spare me the humiliation of trying to save me. (She sits down, with her handkerchief to her eyes, at the farther end of the table.)

VALENTINE (jumping up). Look here —

MRS. CLANDON. Mr. Va —

VALENTINE (recklessly). No: I will speak: I’ve been silent for nearly thirty seconds. (He goes up to Gloria.) Miss Clandon —

GLORIA (bitterly). Oh, not Miss Clandon: you have found that it is quite safe to call me Gloria.

VALENTINE. No, I won’t: you’ll throw it in my teeth afterwards and accuse me of disrespect. I say it’s a heartbreaking falsehood that I don’t respect you. It’s true that I didn’t respect your old pride: why should I? It was nothing but cowardice. I didn’t respect your intellect: I’ve a better one myself: it’s a masculine specialty. But when the depths stirred! — when my moment came! — when you made me brave! — ah, then, then, t h e n!

GLORIA. Then you respected me, I suppose.

VALENTINE. No, I didn’t: I adored you. (She rises quickly and turns her back on him.) And you can never take that moment away from me. So now I don’t care what happens. (He comes down the room addressing a cheerful explanation to nobody in particular.) I’m perfectly aware that I’m talking nonsense. I can’t help it. (To Mrs. Clandon.) I love Gloria; and there’s an end of it.

MRS. CLANDON (emphatically). Mr. Valentine: you are a most dangerous man. Gloria: come here. (Gloria, wondering a little at the command, obeys, and stands, with drooping head, on her mother’s right hand, Valentine being on the opposite side. Mrs. Clandon then begins, with intense scorn.) Ask this man whom you have inspired and made brave, how many women have inspired him before (Gloria looks up suddenly with a flash of jealous anger and amazement); how many times he has laid the trap in which he has caught you; how often he has baited it with the same speeches; how much practice it has taken to make him perfect in his chosen part in life as the Duellist of Sex.

VALENTINE. This isn’t fair. You’re abusing my confidence, Mrs. Clandon.

MRS. CLANDON. Ask him, Gloria.

GLORIA (in a flush of rage, going over to him with her fists clenched). Is that true?

VALENTINE. Don’t be angry —

GLORIA (interrupting him implacably). Is it true? Did you ever say that before? Did you ever feel that before — for another woman?

VALENTINE (bluntly). Yes. (Gloria raises her clenched hands.)

MRS. CLANDON (horrified, springing to her side and catching her uplifted arm). Gloria!! My dear! You’re forgetting yourself. (Gloria, with a deep expiration, slowly relaxes her threatening attitude.)

VALENTINE. Remember: a man’s power of love and admiration is like any other of his powers: he has to throw it away many times before he learns what is really worthy of it.

MRS. CLANDON. Another of the old speeches, Gloria. Take care.

VALENTINE (remonstrating). Oh!

GLORIA (to Mrs. Clandon, with contemptuous self-possession). Do you think I need to be warned now? (To Valentine.) You have tried to make me love you.

VALENTINE. I have.

GLORIA. Well, you have succeeded in making me hate you — passionately.

VALENTINE (philosophically). It’s surprising how little difference there is between the two. (Gloria turns indignantly away from him. He continues, to Mrs. Clandon) I know men whose wives love them; and they go on exactly like that.

MRS. CLANDON. Excuse me, Mr. Valentine; but had you not better go?

GLORIA. You need not send him away on my account, mother. He is nothing to me now; and he will amuse Dolly and Phil. (She sits down with slighting indifference, at the end of the table nearest the window.)

VALENTINE (gaily). Of course: that’s the sensible way of looking at it. Come, Mrs. Clandon: you can’t quarrel with a mere butterfly like me.

MRS. CLANDON. I very greatly mistrust you, Mr. Valentine. But I do not like to think that your unfortunate levity of disposition is mere shamelessness and worthlessness; —

GLORIA (to herself, but aloud). It is shameless; and it is worthless.

MRS. CLANDON. — so perhaps we had better send for Phil and Dolly and allow you to end your visit in the ordinary way.

VALENTINE (as if she had paid him the highest compliment). You overwhelm me, Mrs. Clandon. Thank you. (The waiter enters.)

WAITER. Mr. McComas, ma’am.

MRS. CLANDON. Oh, certainly. Bring him in.

WAITER. He wishes to see you in the reception-room, ma’am.

MRS. CLANDON. Why not here?

WAITER. Well, if you will excuse my mentioning it, ma’am, I think Mr. McComas feels that he would get fairer play if he could speak to you away from the younger members of your family, ma’am.

MRS. CLANDON. Tell him they are not here.

WAITER. They are within sight of the door, ma’am; and very watchful, for some reason or other.

MRS. CLANDON (going). Oh, very well: I’ll go to him.

WAITER (holding the door open for her). Thank you, ma’am. (She goes out. He comes back into the room, and meets the eye of Valentine, who wants him to go.) All right, sir. Only the tea-things, sir. (Taking the tray.) Excuse me, sir. Thank you sir. (He goes out.)

VALENTINE (to Gloria). Look here. You will forgive me, sooner or later. Forgive me now.

GLORIA (rising to level the declaration more intensely at him). Never! While grass grows or water runs, never, never, never!!!

VALENTINE (unabashed). Well, I don’t care. I can’t be unhappy about anything. I shall never be unhappy again, never, never, never, while grass grows or water runs. The thought of you will always make me wild with joy. (Some quick taunt is on her lips: he interposes swiftly.) No: I never said that before: that’s new.

GLORIA. It will not be new when you say it to the next woman.

VALENTINE. Oh, don’t, Gloria, don’t. (He kneels at her feet.)

GLORIA. Get up. Get up! How dare you? (Phil and Dolly, racing, as usual, for first place, burst into the room. They check themselves on seeing what is passing. Valentine springs up.)

PHILIP (discreetly). I beg your pardon. Come, Dolly. (He turns to go.)

GLORIA (annoyed). Mother will be back in a moment, Phil. (Severely.) Please wait here for her. (She turns away to the window, where she stands looking out with her back to them.)

PHILIP (significantly). Oh, indeed. Hmhm!

DOLLY. Ahah!

PHILIP. You seem in excellent spirits, Valentine.

VALENTINE. I am. (Comes between them.) Now look here. You both know what’s going on, don’t you? (Gloria turns quickly, as if anticipating some fresh outrage.)

DOLLY. Perfectly.

VALENTINE. Well, it’s all over. I’ve been refused — scorned. I’m only here on sufferance. You understand: it’s all over. Your sister is in no sense entertaining my addresses, or condescending to interest herself in me in any way. (Gloria, satisfied, turns back contemptuously to the window.) Is that clear?

DOLLY. Serve you right. You were in too great a hurry.

PHILIP (patting him on the shoulder). Never mind: you’d never have been able to call your soul your own if she’d married you. You can now begin a new chapter in your life.

DOLLY. Chapter seventeen or thereabouts, I should imagine.

VALENTINE (much put out by this pleasantry). No: don’t say things like that. That’s just the sort of thoughtless remark that makes a lot of mischief.

DOLLY. Oh, indeed. Hmhm!

PHILIP. Ahah! (He goes to the hearth and plants himself there in his best head-of-the-family attitude.)

McComas, looking very serious, comes in quickly with Mrs. Clandon, whose first anxiety is about Gloria. She looks round to see where she is, and is going to join her at the window when Gloria comes down to meet her with a marked air of trust and affection. Finally, Mrs. Clandon takes her former seat, and Gloria posts herself behind it. McComas, on his way to the ottoman, is hailed by Dolly.

DOLLY. What cheer, Finch?

McCOMAS (sternly). Very serious news from your father, Miss Clandon. Very serious news indeed. (He crosses to the ottoman, and sits down. Dolly, looking deeply impressed, follows him and sits beside him on his right.)

VALENTINE. Perhaps I had better go.

McCOMAS. By no means, Mr. Valentine. You are deeply concerned in this. (Valentine takes a chair from the table and sits astride of it, leaning over the back, near the ottoman.) Mrs. Clandon: your husband demands the custody of his two younger children, who are not of age. (Mrs. Clandon, in quick alarm, looks instinctively to see if Dolly is safe.)

DOLLY (touched). Oh, how nice of him! He likes us, mamma.

McCOMAS. I am sorry to have to disabuse you of any such idea, Miss Dorothea.

DOLLY (cooing ecstatically). Dorothee-ee-ee-a! (Nestling against his shoulder, quite overcome.) Oh, Finch!

McCOMAS (nervously, moving away). No, no, no, no!

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). D e a r e s t Dolly! (To McComas.) The deed of separation gives me the custody of the children.

McCOMAS. It also contains a covenant that you are not to approach or molest him in any way.

MRS. CLANDON. Well, have I done so?

McCOMAS. Whether the behavior of your younger children amounts to legal molestation is a question on which it may be necessary to take counsel’s opinion. At all events, Mr. Crampton not only claims to have been molested; but he believes that he was brought here by a plot in which Mr. Valentine acted as your agent.

VALENTINE. What’s that? Eh?

McCOMAS. He alleges that you drugged him, Mr. Valentine.

VALENTINE. So I did. (They are astonished.)

McCOMAS. But what did you do that for?

DOLLY. Five shillings extra.

McCOMAS (to Dolly, short-temperedly). I must really ask you, Miss Clandon, not to interrupt this very serious conversation with irrelevant interjections. (Vehemently.) I insist on having earnest matters earnestly and reverently discussed. (This outburst produces an apologetic silence, and puts McComas himself out of countenance. He coughs, and starts afresh, addressing himself to Gloria.) Miss Clandon: it is my duty to tell you that your father has also persuaded himself that Mr. Valentine wishes to marry you —

VALENTINE (interposing adroitly). I do.

McCOMAS (offended). In that case, sir, you must not be surprised to find yourself regarded by the young lady’s father as a fortune hunter.

VALENTINE. So I am. Do you expect my wife to live on what I earn? ten-pence a week!

McCOMAS (revolted). I have nothing more to say, sir. I shall return and tell Mr. Crampton that this family is no place for a father. (He makes for the door.)

MRS. CLANDON (with quiet authority). Finch! (He halts.) If Mr. Valentine cannot be serious, you can. Sit down. (McComas, after a brief struggle between his dignity and his friendship, succumbs, seating himself this time midway between Dolly and Mrs. Clandon.) You know that all this is a made up case — that Fergus does not believe in it any more than you do. Now give me your real advice — your sincere, friendly advice: you know I have always trusted your judgment. I promise you the children will be quiet.

McCOMAS (resigning himself). Well, well! What I want to say is this. In the old arrangement with your husband, Mrs. Clandon, you had him at a terrible disadvantage.

MRS. CLANDON. How so, pray?

McCOMAS. Well, you were an advanced woman, accustomed to defy public opinion, and with no regard for what the world might say of you.

MRS. CLANDON (proud of it). Yes: that is true. (Gloria, behind the chair, stoops and kisses her mother’s hair, a demonstration which disconcerts her extremely.)

McCOMAS. On the other hand, Mrs. Clandon, your husband had a great horror of anything getting into the papers. There was his business to be considered, as well as the prejudices of an old-fashioned family.

MRS. CLANDON. Not to mention his own prejudices.

McCOMAS. Now no doubt he behaved badly, Mrs. Clandon —

MRS. CLANDON (scornfully). No doubt.

McCOMAS. But was it altogether his fault?

MRS. CLANDON. Was it mine?

McCOMAS (hastily). No. Of course not.

GLORIA (observing him attentively). You do not mean that, Mr. McComas.

McCOMAS. My dear young lady, you pick me up very sharply. But let me just put this to you. When a man makes an unsuitable marriage (nobody’s fault, you know, but purely accidental incompatibility of tastes); when he is deprived by that misfortune of the domestic sympathy which, I take it, is what a man marries for; when in short, his wife is rather worse than no wife at all (through no fault of his own, of course), is it to be wondered at if he makes matters worse at first by blaming her, and even, in his desperation, by occasionally drinking himself into a violent condition or seeking sympathy elsewhere?

MRS. CLANDON. I did not blame him: I simply rescued myself and the children from him.

McCOMAS. Yes: but you made hard terms, Mrs. Clandon. You had him at your mercy: you brought him to his knees when you threatened to make the matter public by applying to the Courts for a judicial separation. Suppose he had had that power over you, and used it to take your children away from you and bring them up in ignorance of your very name, how would you feel? what would you do? Well, won’t you make some allowance for his feelings? — in common humanity.

MRS. CLANDON. I never discovered his feelings. I discovered his temper, and his — (she shivers) the rest of his common humanity.

McCOMAS (wistfully). Women can be very hard, Mrs. Clandon.

VALENTINE. That’s true.

GLORIA (angrily). Be silent. (He subsides.)

McCOMAS (rallying all his forces). Let me make one last appeal. Mrs. Clandon: believe me, there are men who have a good deal of feeling, and kind feeling, too, which they are not able to express. What you miss in Crampton is that mere veneer of civilization, the art of shewing worthless attentions and paying insincere compliments in a kindly, charming way. If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces. But think of the other side of it! Think of the people who do kind things in an unkind way — people whose touch hurts, whose voices jar, whose tempers play them false, who wound and worry the people they love in the very act of trying to conciliate them, and yet who need affection as much as the rest of us. Crampton has an abominable temper, I admit. He has no manners, no tact, no grace. He’ll never be able to gain anyone’s affection unless they will take his desire for it on trust. Is he to have none — not even pity — from his own flesh and blood?

DOLLY (quite melted). Oh, how beautiful, Finch! How nice of you!

PHILIP (with conviction). Finch: this is eloquence — positive eloquence.

DOLLY. Oh, mamma, let us give him another chance. Let us have him to dinner.

MRS. CLANDON (unmoved). No, Dolly: I hardly got any lunch. My dear Finch: there is not the least use in talking to me about Fergus. You have never been married to him: I have.

McCOMAS (to Gloria). Miss Clandon: I have hitherto refrained from appealing to you, because, if what Mr. Crampton told me to be true, you have been more merciless even than your mother.

GLORIA (defiantly). You appeal from her strength to my weakness!

McCOMAS. Not your weakness, Miss Clandon. I appeal from her intellect to your heart.

GLORIA. I have learnt to mistrust my heart. (With an angry glance at Valentine.) I would tear my heart and throw it away if I could. My answer to you is my mother’s answer. (She goes to Mrs. Clandon, and stands with her arm about her; but Mrs. Clandon, unable to endure this sort of demonstrativeness, disengages herself as soon as she can without hurting Gloria’s feelings.)

McCOMAS (defeated). Well, I am very sorry — very sorry. I have done my best. (He rises and prepares to go, deeply dissatisfied.)

MRS. CLANDON. But what did you expect, Finch? What do you want us to do?

McCOMAS. The first step for both you and Crampton is to obtain counsel’s opinion as to whether he is bound by the deed of separation or not. Now why not obtain this opinion at once, and have a friendly meeting (her face hardens) — or shall we say a neutral meeting? — to settle the difficulty — here — in this hotel — to-night? What do you say?

MRS. CLANDON. But where is the counsel’s opinion to come from?

McCOMAS. It has dropped down on us out of the clouds. On my way back here from Crampton’s I met a most eminent Q.C., a man whom I briefed in the case that made his name for him. He has come down here from Saturday to Monday for the sea air, and to visit a relative of his who lives here. He has been good enough to say that if I can arrange a meeting of the parties he will come and help us with his opinion. Now do let us seize this chance of a quiet friendly family adjustment. Let me bring my friend here and try to persuade Crampton to come, too. Come: consent.

MRS. CLANDON (rather ominously, after a moment’s consideration). Finch: I don’t want counsel’s opinion, because I intend to be guided by my own opinion. I don’t want to meet Fergus again, because I don’t like him, and don’t believe the meeting will do any good. However (rising), you have persuaded the children that he is not quite hopeless. Do as you please.

McCOMAS (taking her hand and shaking it). Thank you, Mrs. Clandon. Will nine o’clock suit you?

MRS. CLANDON. Perfectly. Phil: will you ring, please. (Phil rings the bell.) But if I am to be accused of conspiring with Mr. Valentine, I think he had better be present.

VALENTINE (rising). I quite agree with you. I think it’s most important.

McCOMAS. There can be no objection to that, I think. I have the greatest hopes of a happy settlement. Good-bye for the present. (He goes out, meeting the waiter; who holds the door for him to pass through.)

MRS. CLANDON. We expect some visitors at nine, William. Can we have dinner at seven instead of half-past?

WAITER (at the door). Seven, ma’am? Certainly, ma’am. It will be a convenience to us this busy evening, ma’am. There will be the band and the arranging of the fairy lights and one thing or another, ma’am.

DOLLY. The fairy lights!

PHILIP. The band! William: what mean you?

WAITER. The fancy ball, miss —

DOLLY and PHILIP (simultaneously rushing to him). Fancy ball!

WAITER. Oh, yes, sir. Given by the regatta committee for the benefit of the Life-boat, sir. (To Mrs. Clandon.) We often have them, ma’am: Chinese lanterns in the garden, ma’am: very bright and pleasant, very gay and innocent indeed. (To Phil.) Tickets downstairs at the office, sir, five shillings: ladies half price if accompanied by a gentleman.

PHILIP (seizing his arm to drag him off). To the office, William!

DOLLY (breathlessly, seizing his other arm). Quick, before they’re all sold. (They rush him out of the room between them.)

MRS. CLANDON. What on earth are they going to do? (Going out.) I really must go and stop this — (She follows them, speaking as she disappears. Gloria stares coolly at Valentine, and then deliberately looks at her watch.)

VALENTINE. I understand. I’ve stayed too long. I’m going.

GLORIA (with disdainful punctiliousness). I owe you some apology, Mr. Valentine. I am conscious of having spoken somewhat sharply — perhaps rudely — to you.

VALENTINE. Not at all.

GLORIA. My only excuse is that it is very difficult to give consideration and respect when there is no dignity of character on the other side to command it.

VALENTINE (prosaically). How is a man to look dignified when he’s infatuated?

GLORIA (effectually unstilted). Don’t say those things to me. I forbid you. They are insults.

VALENTINE. No: they’re only follies. I can’t help them.

GLORIA. If you were really in love, it would not make you foolish: it would give you dignity — earnestness — even beauty.

VALENTINE. Do you really think it would make me beautiful? (She turns her back on him with the coldest contempt.) Ah, you see you’re not in earnest. Love can’t give any man new gifts. It can only heighten the gifts he was born with.

GLORIA (sweeping round at him again). What gifts were you born with, pray?

VALENTINE. Lightness of heart.

GLORIA. And lightness of head, and lightness of faith, and lightness of everything that makes a man.

VALENTINE. Yes, the whole world is like a feather dancing in the light now; and Gloria is the sun. (She rears her head angrily.) I beg your pardon: I’m off. Back at nine. Good-bye. (He runs off gaily, leaving her standing in the middle of the room staring after him.)

END OF ACT III

ACT IV

The same room. Nine o’clock. Nobody present. The lamps are lighted; but the curtains are not drawn. The window stands wide open; and strings of Chinese lanterns are glowing among the trees outside, with the starry sky beyond. The band is playing dance-music in the garden, drowning the sound of the sea.

The waiter enters, shewing in Crampton and McComas. Crampton looks cowed and anxious. He sits down wearily and timidly on the ottoman.

WAITER. The ladies have gone for a turn through the grounds to see the fancy dresses, sir. If you will be so good as to take seats, gentlemen, I shall tell them. (He is about to go into the garden through the window when McComas stops him.)

McCOMAS. One moment. If another gentleman comes, shew him in without any delay: we are expecting him.

WAITER. Right, sir. What name, sir?

McCOMAS. Boon. Mr. Boon. He is a stranger to Mrs. Clandon; so he may give you a card. If so, the name is spelt B.O.H.U.N. You will not forget.

WAITER (smiling). You may depend on me for that, sir. My own name is Boon, sir, though I am best known down here as Balmy Walters, sir. By rights I should spell it with the aitch you, sir; but I think it best not to take that liberty, sir. There is Norman blood in it, sir; and Norman blood is not a recommendation to a waiter.

McCOMAS. Well, well: “True hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.”

WAITER. That depends a good deal on one’s station in life, sir. If you were a waiter, sir, you’d find that simple faith would leave you just as short as Norman blood. I find it best to spell myself B. double-O.N., and to keep my wits pretty sharp about me. But I’m taking up your time, sir. You’ll excuse me, sir: your own fault for being so affable, sir. I’ll tell the ladies you’re here, sir. (He goes out into the garden through the window.)

McCOMAS. Crampton: I can depend on you, can’t I?

CRAMPTON. Yes, yes. I’ll be quiet. I’ll be patient. I’ll do my best.

McCOMAS. Remember: I’ve not given you away. I’ve told them it was all their fault.

CRAMPTON. You told me that it was all my fault.

McCOMAS. I told you the truth.

CRAMPTON (plaintively). If they will only be fair to me!

McCOMAS. My dear Crampton, they won’t be fair to you: it’s not to be expected from them at their age. If you’re going to make impossible conditions of this kind, we may as well go back home at once.

CRAMPTON. But surely I have a right —

McCOMAS (intolerantly). You won’t get your rights. Now, once for all, Crampton, did your promises of good behavior only mean that you won’t complain if there’s nothing to complain of? Because, if so — (He moves as if to go.)

CRAMPTON (miserably). No, no: let me alone, can’t you? I’ve been bullied enough: I’ve been tormented enough. I tell you I’ll do my best. But if that girl begins to talk to me like that and to look at me like — (He breaks off and buries his head in his hands.)

McCOMAS (relenting). There, there: it’ll be all right, if you will only bear and forbear. Come, pull yourself together: there’s someone coming. (Crampton, too dejected to care much, hardly changes his attitude. Gloria enters from the garden; McComas goes to meet her at the window; so that he can speak to her without being heard by Crampton.) There he is, Miss Clandon. Be kind to him. I’ll leave you with him for a moment. (He goes into the garden. Gloria comes in and strolls coolly down the middle of the room.)

CRAMPTON (looking round in alarm). Where’s McComas?

GLORIA (listlessly, but not unsympathetically). Gone out — to leave us together. Delicacy on his part, I suppose. (She stops beside him and looks quaintly down at him.) Well, father?

CRAMPTON (a quaint jocosity breaking through his forlornness). Well, daughter? (They look at one another for a moment, with a melancholy sense of humor.)

GLORIA. Shake hands. (They shake hands.)

CRAMPTON (holding her hand). My dear: I’m afraid I spoke very improperly of your mother this afternoon.

GLORIA. Oh, don’t apologize. I was very high and mighty myself; but I’ve come down since: oh, yes: I’ve been brought down. (She sits on the floor beside his chair.)

CRAMPTON. What has happened to you, my child?

GLORIA. Oh, never mind. I was playing the part of my mother’s daughter then; but I’m not: I’m my father’s daughter. (Looking at him funnily.) That’s a come down, isn’t it?

CRAMPTON (angry). What! (Her odd expression does not alter. He surrenders.) Well, yes, my dear: I suppose it is, I suppose it is. (She nods sympathetically.) I’m afraid I’m sometimes a little irritable; but I know what’s right and reasonable all the time, even when I don’t act on it. Can you believe that?

GLORIA. Believe it! Why, that’s myself — myself all over. I know what’s right and dignified and strong and noble, just as well as she does; but oh, the things I do! the things I do! the things I let other people do!!

CRAMPTON (a little grudgingly in spite of himself). As well as she does? You mean your mother?

GLORIA (quickly). Yes, mother. (She turns to him on her knees and seizes his hands.) Now listen. No treason to her: no word, no thought against her. She is our superior — yours and mine — high heavens above us. Is that agreed?

CRAMPTON. Yes, yes. Just as you please, my dear.

GLORIA (not satisfied, letting go his hands and drawing back from him). You don’t like her?

CRAMPTON. My child: you haven’t been married to her. I have. (She raises herself slowly to her feet, looking at him with growing coldness.) She did me a great wrong in marrying me without really caring for me. But after that, the wrong was all on my side, I dare say. (He offers her his hand again.)

GLORIA (taking it firmly and warningly). Take care. That’s a dangerous subject. My feelings — my miserable, cowardly, womanly feelings — may be on your side; but my conscience is on hers.

CRAMPTON. I’m very well content with that division, my dear. Thank you. (Valentine arrives. Gloria immediately becomes deliberately haughty.)

VALENTINE. Excuse me; but it’s impossible to find a servant to announce one: even the never failing William seems to be at the ball. I should have gone myself; only I haven’t five shillings to buy a ticket. How are you getting on, Crampton? Better, eh?

CRAMPTON. I am myself again, Mr. Valentine, no thanks to you.

VALENTINE. Look at this ungrateful parent of yours, Miss Clandon! I saved him from an excruciating pang; and he reviles me!

GLORIA (coldly). I am sorry my mother is not here to receive you, Mr. Valentine. It is not quite nine o’clock; and the gentleman of whom Mr. McComas spoke, the lawyer, is not yet come.

VALENTINE. Oh, yes, he is. I’ve met him and talked to him. (With gay malice.) You’ll like him, Miss Clandon: he’s the very incarnation of intellect. You can hear his mind working.

GLORIA (ignoring the jibe). Where is he?

VALENTINE. Bought a false nose and gone into the fancy ball.

CRAMPTON (crustily, looking at his watch). It seems that everybody has gone to this fancy ball instead of keeping to our appointment here.

VALENTINE. Oh, he’ll come all right enough: that was half an hour ago. I didn’t like to borrow five shillings from him and go in with him; so I joined the mob and looked through the railings until Miss Clandon disappeared into the hotel through the window.

GLORIA. So it has come to this, that you follow me about in public to stare at me.

VALENTINE. Yes: somebody ought to chain me up.

Gloria turns her back on him and goes to the fireplace. He takes the snub very philosophically, and goes to the opposite side of the room. The waiter appears at the window, ushering in Mrs. Clandon and McComas.

MRS. CLANDON (hurrying in). I am so sorry to have kept you waiting.

A grotesquely majestic stranger, in a domino and false nose, with goggles, appears at the window.

WAITER (to the stranger). Beg pardon, sir; but this is a private apartment, sir. If you will allow me, sir, I will shew you to the American bar and supper rooms, sir. This way, sir.

He goes into the gardens, leading the way under the impression that the stranger is following him. The majestic one, however, comes straight into the room to the end of the table, where, with impressive deliberation, he takes off the false nose and then the domino, rolling up the nose into the domino and throwing the bundle on the table like a champion throwing down his glove. He is now seen to be a stout, tall man between forty and fifty, clean shaven, with a midnight oil pallor emphasized by stiff black hair, cropped short and oiled, and eyebrows like early Victorian horsehair upholstery. Physically and spiritually, a coarsened man: in cunning and logic, a ruthlessly sharpened one. His bearing as he enters is sufficiently imposing and disquieting; but when he speaks, his powerful, menacing voice, impressively articulated speech, strong inexorable manner, and a terrifying power of intensely critical listening raise the impression produced by him to absolute tremendousness.

THE STRANGER. My name is Bohun. (General awe.) Have I the honor of addressing Mrs. Clandon? (Mrs. Clandon bows. Bohun bows.) Miss Clandon? (Gloria bows. Bohun bows.) Mr. Clandon?

CRAMPTON (insisting on his rightful name as angrily as he dares). My name is Crampton, sir.

BOHUN. Oh, indeed. (Passing him over without further notice and turning to Valentine.) Are you Mr. Clandon?

VALENTINE (making it a point of honor not to be impressed by him). Do I look like it? My name is Valentine. I did the drugging.

BOHUN. Ah, quite so. Then Mr. Clandon has not yet arrived?

WAITER (entering anxiously through the window). Beg pardon, ma’am; but can you tell me what became of that — (He recognizes Bohun, and loses all his self-possession. Bohun waits rigidly for him to pull himself together. After a pathetic exhibition of confusion, he recovers himself sufficiently to address Bohun weakly but coherently.) Beg pardon, sir, I’m sure, sir. Was — was it you, sir?

BOHUN (ruthlessly). It was I.

WAITER (brokenly). Yes, sir. (Unable to restrain his tears.) You in a false nose, Walter! (He sinks faintly into a chair at the table.) I beg pardon, ma’am, I’m sure. A little giddiness —

BOHUN (commandingly). You will excuse him, Mrs. Clandon, when I inform you that he is my father.

WAITER (heartbroken). Oh, no, no, Walter. A waiter for your father on the top of a false nose! What will they think of you?

MRS. CLANDON (going to the waiter’s chair in her kindest manner). I am delighted to hear it, Mr. Bohun. Your father has been an excellent friend to us since we came here. (Bohun bows gravely.)

WAITER (shaking his head). Oh, no, ma’am. It’s very kind of you — very ladylike and affable indeed, ma’am; but I should feel at a great disadvantage off my own proper footing. Never mind my being the gentleman’s father, ma’am: it is only the accident of birth after all, ma’am. (He gets up feebly.) You’ll all excuse me, I’m sure, having interrupted your business. (He begins to make his way along the table, supporting himself from chair to chair, with his eye on the door.)

BOHUN. One moment. (The waiter stops, with a sinking heart.) My father was a witness of what passed to-day, was he not, Mrs. Clandon?

MRS. CLANDON. Yes, most of it, I think.

BOHUN. In that case we shall want him.

WAITER (pleading). I hope it may not be necessary, sir. Busy evening for me, sir, with that ball: very busy evening indeed, sir.

BOHUN (inexorably). We shall want you.

MRS. CLANDON (politely). Sit down, won’t you?

WAITER (earnestly). Oh, if you please, ma’am, I really must draw the line at sitting down. I couldn’t let myself be seen doing such a thing, ma’am: thank you, I am sure, all the same. (He looks round from face to face wretchedly, with an expression that would melt a heart of stone.)

GLORIA. Don’t let us waste time. William only wants to go on taking care of us. I should like a cup of coffee.

WAITER (brightening perceptibly). Coffee, miss? (He gives a little gasp of hope.) Certainly, miss. Thank you, miss: very timely, miss, very thoughtful and considerate indeed. (To Mrs. Clandon, timidly but expectantly.) Anything for you, ma’am?

MRS. CLANDON Er — oh, yes: it’s so hot, I think we might have a jug of claret cup.

WAITER (beaming). Claret cup, ma’am! Certainly, ma’am.

GLORIA Oh, well I’ll have a claret cup instead of coffee. Put some cucumber in it.

WAITER (delighted). Cucumber, miss! yes, miss. (To Bohun.) Anything special for you, sir? You don’t like cucumber, sir.

BOHUN. If Mrs. Clandon will allow me — syphon — Scotch.

WAITER. Right, sir. (To Crampton.) Irish for you, sir, I think, sir? (Crampton assents with a grunt. The waiter looks enquiringly at Valentine.)

VALENTINE. I like the cucumber.

WAITER. Right, sir. (Summing up.) Claret cup, syphon, one Scotch and one Irish?

MRS. CLANDON. I think that’s right.

WAITER (perfectly happy). Right, ma’am. Directly, ma’am. Thank you. (He ambles off through the window, having sounded the whole gamut of human happiness, from the bottom to the top, in a little over two minutes.)

McCOMAS. We can begin now, I suppose?

BOHUN. We had better wait until Mrs. Clandon’s husband arrives.

CRAMPTON. What d’y’ mean? I’m her husband.

BOHUN (instantly pouncing on the inconsistency between this and his previous statement). You said just now your name was Crampton.

CRAMPTON. So it is.

MRS. CLANDON } (all four { I —

GLORIA } speaking { My —

McCOMAS } simul- { Mrs. —

VALENTINE } taneously). { You —

BOHUN (drowning them in two thunderous words). One moment. (Dead silence.) Pray allow me. Sit down everybody. (They obey humbly. Gloria takes the saddle-bag chair on the hearth. Valentine slips around to her side of the room and sits on the ottoman facing the window, so that he can look at her. Crampton sits on the ottoman with his back to Valentine’s. Mrs. Clandon, who has all along kept at the opposite side of the room in order to avoid Crampton as much as possible, sits near the door, with McComas beside her on her left. Bohun places himself magisterially in the centre of the group, near the corner of the table on Mrs. Clandon’s side. When they are settled, he fixes Crampton with his eye, and begins.) In this family, it appears, the husband’s name is Crampton: the wife’s Clandon. Thus we have on the very threshold of the case an element of confusion.

VALENTINE (getting up and speaking across to him with one knee on the ottoman). But it’s perfectly simple.

BOHUN (annihilating him with a vocal thunderbolt). It is. Mrs. Clandon has adopted another name. That is the obvious explanation which you feared I could not find out for myself. You mistrust my intelligence, Mr. Valentine — (Stopping him as he is about to protest.) No: I don’t want you to answer that: I want you to think over it when you feel your next impulse to interrupt me.

VALENTINE (dazed). This is simply breaking a butterfly on a wheel. What does it matter? (He sits down again.)

BOHUN. I will tell you what it matters, sir. It matters that if this family difference is to be smoothed over as we all hope it may be, Mrs. Clandon, as a matter of social convenience and decency, will have to resume her husband’s name. (Mrs. Clandon assumes an expression of the most determined obstinacy.) Or else Mr. Crampton will have to call himself Mr. Clandon. (Crampton looks indomitably resolved to do nothing of the sort.) No doubt you think that an easy matter, Mr. Valentine. (He looks pointedly at Mrs. Clandon, then at Crampton.) I differ from you. (He throws himself back in his chair, frowning heavily.)

McCOMAS (timidly). I think, Bohun, we had perhaps better dispose of the important questions first.

BOHUN. McComas: there will be no difficulty about the important questions. There never is. It is the trifles that will wreck you at the harbor mouth. (McComas looks as if he considered this a paradox.) You don’t agree with me, eh?

McCOMAS (flatteringly). If I did —

BOHUN (interrupting him). If you did, you would be me, instead of being what you are.

McCOMAS (fawning on him). Of course, Bohun, your specialty —

BOHUN (again interrupting him). My specialty is being right when other people are wrong. If you agreed with me I should be of no use here. (He nods at him to drive the point home; then turns suddenly and forcibly on Crampton.) Now you, Mr. Crampton: what point in this business have you most at heart?

CRAMPTON (beginning slowly). I wish to put all considerations of self aside in this matter —

BOHUN (interrupting him). So do we all, Mr. Crampton. (To Mrs. Clandon.) Y o u wish to put self aside, Mrs. Clandon?

MRS. CLANDON. Yes: I am not consulting my own feelings in being here.

BOHUN. So do you, Miss Clandon?

GLORIA. Yes.

BOHUN. I thought so. We all do.

VALENTINE. Except me. My aims are selfish.

BOHUN. That’s because you think an impression of sincerity will produce a better effect on Miss Clandon than an impression of disinterestedness. (Valentine, utterly dismantled and destroyed by this just remark, takes refuge in a feeble, speechless smile. Bohun, satisfied at having now effectually crushed all rebellion, throws himself back in his chair, with an air of being prepared to listen tolerantly to their grievances.) Now, Mr. Crampton, go on. It’s understood that self is put aside. Human nature always begins by saying that.

CRAMPTON. But I mean it, sir.

BOHUN. Quite so. Now for your point.

CRAMPTON. Every reasonable person will admit that it’s an unselfish one — the children.

BOHUN. Well? What about the children?

CRAMPTON (with emotion). They have —

BOHUN (pouncing forward again). Stop. You’re going to tell me about your feelings, Mr. Crampton. Don’t: I sympathize with them; but they’re not my business. Tell us exactly what you want: that’s what we have to get at.

CRAMPTON (uneasily). It’s a very difficult question to answer, Mr. Bohun.

BOHUN. Come: I’ll help you out. What do you object to in the present circumstances of the children?

CRAMPTON. I object to the way they have been brought up.

BOHUN. How do you propose to alter that now?

CRAMPTON. I think they ought to dress more quietly.

VALENTINE. Nonsense.

BOHUN (instantly flinging himself back in his chair, outraged by the interruption). When you are done, Mr. Valentine — when you are quite done.

VALENTINE. What’s wrong with Miss Clandon’s dress?

CRAMPTON (hotly to Valentine). My opinion is as good as yours.

GLORIA (warningly). Father!

CRAMPTON (subsiding piteously). I didn’t mean you, my dear. (Pleading earnestly to Bohun.) But the two younger ones! you have not seen them, Mr. Bohun; and indeed I think you would agree with me that there is something very noticeable, something almost gay and frivolous in their style of dressing.

MRS. CLANDON (impatiently). Do you suppose I choose their clothes for them? Really this is childish.

CRAMPTON (furious, rising). Childish! (Mrs. Clandon rises indignantly.)

McCOMAS } (all ris- } Crampton, you promised —

VALENTINE } ing and } Ridiculous. They dress

}  speaking   }   charmingly.

GLORIA } together). } Pray let us behave reasonably.

Tumult. Suddenly they hear a chime of glasses in the room behind them. They turn in silent surprise and find that the waiter has just come back from the bar in the garden, and is jingling his tray warningly as he comes softly to the table with it.

WAITER (to Crampton, setting a tumbler apart on the table). Irish for you, sir. (Crampton sits down a little shamefacedly. The waiter sets another tumbler and a syphon apart, saying to Bohun) Scotch and syphon for you, sir. (Bohun waves his hand impatiently. The waiter places a large glass jug in the middle.) And claret cup. (All subside into their seats. Peace reigns.)

MRS. CLANDON (humbly to Bohun). I am afraid we interrupted you, Mr. Bohun.

BOHUN (calmly). You did. (To the waiter, who is going out.) Just wait a bit.

WAITER. Yes, sir. Certainly, sir. (He takes his stand behind Bohun’s chair.)

MRS. CLANDON (to the waiter). You don’t mind our detaining you, I hope. Mr. Bohun wishes it.

WAITER (now quite at his ease). Oh, no, ma’am, not at all, ma’am. It is a pleasure to me to watch the working of his trained and powerful mind — very stimulating, very entertaining and instructive indeed, ma’am.

BOHUN (resuming command of the proceedings). Now, Mr. Crampton: we are waiting for you. Do you give up your objection to the dressing, or do you stick to it?

CRAMPTON (pleading). Mr. Bohun: consider my position for a moment. I haven’t got myself alone to consider: there’s my sister Sophronia and my brother-in-law and all their circle. They have a great horror of anything that is at all — at all — well —

BOHUN. Out with it. Fast? Loud? Gay?

CRAMPTON. Not in any unprincipled sense of course; but — but — (blurting it out desperately) those two children would shock them. They’re not fit to mix with their own people. That’s what I complain of.

MRS. CLANDON (with suppressed impatience). Mr. Valentine: do you think there is anything fast or loud about Phil and Dolly?

VALENTINE. Certainly not. It’s utter bosh. Nothing can be in better taste.

CRAMPTON. Oh, yes: of course you say so.

MRS. CLANDON. William: you see a great deal of good English society. Are my children overdressed?

WAITER (reassuringly). Oh, dear, no, ma’am. (Persuasively.) Oh, no, sir, not at all. A little pretty and tasty no doubt; but very choice and classy — very genteel and high toned indeed. Might be the son and daughter of a Dean, sir, I assure you, sir. You have only to look at them, sir, to — (At this moment a harlequin and columbine, dancing to the music of the band in the garden, which has just reached the coda of a waltz, whirl one another into the room. The harlequin’s dress is made of lozenges, an inch square, of turquoise blue silk and gold alternately. His hat is gilt and his mask turned up. The columbine’s petticoats are the epitome of a harvest field, golden orange and poppy crimson, with a tiny velvet jacket for the poppy stamens. They pass, an exquisite and dazzling apparition, between McComas and Bohun, and then back in a circle to the end of the table, where, as the final chord of the waltz is struck, they make a tableau in the middle of the company, the harlequin down on his left knee, and the columbine standing on his right knee, with her arms curved over her head. Unlike their dancing, which is charmingly graceful, their attitudinizing is hardly a success, and threatens to end in a catastrophe.)

THE COLUMBINE (screaming). Lift me down, somebody: I’m going to fall. Papa: lift me down.

CRAMPTON (anxiously running to her and taking her hands). My child!

DOLLY (jumping down with his help). Thanks: so nice of you. (Phil, putting his hat into his belt, sits on the side of the table and pours out some claret cup. Crampton returns to his place on the ottoman in great perplexity.) Oh, what fun! Oh, dear. (She seats herself with a vault on the front edge of the table, panting.) Oh, claret cup! (She drinks.)

BOHUN (in powerful tones). This is the younger lady, is it?

DOLLY (slipping down off the table in alarm at his formidable voice and manner). Yes, sir. Please, who are you?

MRS. CLANDON. This is Mr. Bohun, Dolly, who has very kindly come to help us this evening.

DOLLY. Oh, then he comes as a boon and a blessing —

PHILIP. Sh!

CRAMPTON. Mr. Bohun — McComas: I appeal to you. Is this right? Would you blame my sister’s family for objecting to this?

DOLLY (flushing ominously). Have you begun again?

CRAMPTON (propitiating her). No, no. It’s perhaps natural at your age.

DOLLY (obstinately). Never mind my age. Is it pretty?

CRAMPTON. Yes, dear, yes. (He sits down in token of submission.)

DOLLY (following him insistently). Do you like it?

CRAMPTON. My child: how can you expect me to like it or to approve of it?

DOLLY (determined not to let him off). How can you think it pretty and not like it?

McCOMAS (rising, angry and scandalized). Really I must say — (Bohun, who has listened to Dolly with the highest approval, is down on him instantly.)

BOHUN. No: don’t interrupt, McComas. The young lady’s method is right. (To Dolly, with tremendous emphasis.) Press your questions, Miss Clandon: press your questions.

DOLLY (rising). Oh, dear, you are a regular overwhelmer! Do you always go on like this?

BOHUN (rising). Yes. Don’t you try to put me out of countenance, young lady: you’re too young to do it. (He takes McComas’s chair from beside Mrs. Clandon’s and sets it beside his own.) Sit down. (Dolly, fascinated, obeys; and Bohun sits down again. McComas, robbed of his seat, takes a chair on the other side between the table and the ottoman.) Now, Mr. Crampton, the facts are before you — both of them. You think you’d like to have your two youngest children to live with you. Well, you wouldn’t — (Crampton tries to protest; but Bohun will not have it on any terms.) No, you wouldn’t: you think you would; but I know better than you. You’d want this young lady here to give up dressing like a stage columbine in the evening and like a fashionable columbine in the morning. Well, she won’t — never. She thinks she will; but —

DOLLY (interrupting him). No I don’t. (Resolutely.) I’ll n e v e r give up dressing prettily. Never. As Gloria said to that man in Madeira, never, never, never while grass grows or water runs.

VALENTINE (rising in the wildest agitation). What! What! (Beginning to speak very fast.) When did she say that? Who did she say that to?

BOHUN (throwing himself back with massive, pitying remonstrance). Mr. Valentine —

VALENTINE (pepperily). Don’t you interrupt me, sir: this is something really serious. I i n s i s t on knowing who Miss Clandon said that to.

DOLLY. Perhaps Phil remembers. Which was it, Phil? number three or number five?

VALENTINE. Number five!!!

PHILIP. Courage, Valentine. It wasn’t number five: it was only a tame naval lieutenant that was always on hand — the most patient and harmless of mortals.

GLORIA (coldly). What are we discussing now, pray?

VALENTINE (very red). Excuse me: I am sorry I interrupted. I shall intrude no further, Mrs. Clandon. (He bows to Mrs. Clandon and marches away into the garden, boiling with suppressed rage.)

DOLLY. Hmhm!

PHILIP. Ahah!

GLORIA. Please go on, Mr. Bohun.

DOLLY (striking in as Bohun, frowning formidably, collects himself for a fresh grapple with the case). You’re going to bully us, Mr. Bohun.

BOHUN. I —

DOLLY (interrupting him). Oh, yes, you are: you think you’re not; but you are. I know by your eyebrows.

BOHUN (capitulating). Mrs. Clandon: these are clever children — clear headed, well brought up children. I make that admission deliberately. Can you, in return, point out to me any way of inducting them to hold their tongues?

MRS. CLANDON. Dolly, dearest — !

PHILIP. Our old failing, Dolly. Silence! (Dolly holds her mouth.)

MRS. CLANDON. Now, Mr. Bohun, before they begin again —

WAITER (softer). Be quick, sir: be quick.

DOLLY (beaming at him). Dear William!

PHILIP. Sh!

BOHUN (unexpectedly beginning by hurling a question straight at Dolly). Have you any intention of getting married?

DOLLY. I! Well, Finch calls me by my Christian name.

McCOMAS. I will not have this. Mr. Bohun: I use the young lady’s Christian name naturally as an old friend of her mother’s.

DOLLY. Yes, you call me Dolly as an old friend of my mother’s. But what about Dorothee-ee-a? (McComas rises indignantly.)

CRAMPTON (anxiously, rising to restrain him). Keep your temper, McComas. Don’t let us quarrel. Be patient.

McCOMAS. I will not be patient. You are shewing the most wretched weakness of character, Crampton. I say this is monstrous.

DOLLY. Mr. Bohun: please bully Finch for us.

BOHUN. I will. McComas: you’re making yourself ridiculous. Sit down.

McCOMAS. I —

BOHUN (waving him down imperiously). No: sit down, sit down. (McComas sits down sulkily; and Crampton, much relieved, follows his example.)

DOLLY (to Bohun, meekly). Thank you.

BOHUN. Now, listen to me, all of you. I give no opinion, McComas, as to how far you may or may not have committed yourself in the direction indicated by this young lady. (McComas is about to protest.) No: don’t interrupt me: if she doesn’t marry you she will marry somebody else. That is the solution of the difficulty as to her not bearing her father’s name. The other lady intends to get married.

GLORIA (flushing). Mr. Bohun!

BOHUN. Oh, yes, you do: you don’t know it; but you do.

GLORIA (rising). Stop. I warn you, Mr. Bohun, not to answer for my intentions.

BOHUN (rising). It’s no use, Miss Clandon: you can’t put me down. I tell you your name will soon be neither Clandon nor Crampton; and I could tell you what it will be if I chose. (He goes to the other end of the table, where he unrolls his domino, and puts the false nose on the table. When he moves they all rise; and Phil goes to the window. Bohun, with a gesture, summons the waiter to help him in robing.) Mr. Crampton: your notion of going to law is all nonsense: your children will be of age before you could get the point decided. (Allowing the waiter to put the domino on his shoulders.) You can do nothing but make a friendly arrangement. If you want your family more than they want you, you’ll get the worse of the arrangement: if they want you more than you want them, you’ll get the better of it. (He shakes the domino into becoming folds and takes up the false nose. Dolly gazes admiringly at him.) The strength of their position lies in their being very agreeable people personally. The strength of your position lies in your income. (He claps on the false nose, and is again grotesquely transfigured.)

DOLLY (running to him). Oh, now you look quite like a human being. Mayn’t I have just one dance with you? C a n you dance? (Phil, resuming his part of harlequin, waves his hat as if casting a spell on them.)

BOHUN (thunderously). Yes: you think I can’t; but I can. Come along. (He seizes her and dances off with her through the window in a most powerful manner, but with studied propriety and grace. The waiter is meanwhile busy putting the chairs back in their customary places.)

PHILIP. “On with the dance: let joy be unconfined.” William!

WAITER. Yes, sir.

PHILIP. Can you procure a couple of dominos and false noses for my father and Mr. McComas?

McCOMAS. Most certainly not. I protest —

CRAMPTON. No, no. What harm will it do, just for once, McComas? Don’t let us be spoil-sports.

McCOMAS. Crampton: you are not the man I took you for. (Pointedly.) Bullies are always cowards. (He goes disgustedly towards the window.)

CRAMPTON (following him). Well, never mind. We must indulge them a little. Can you get us something to wear, waiter?

WAITER. Certainly, sir. (He precedes them to the window, and stands aside there to let them pass out before him.) This way, sir. Dominos and noses, sir?

McCOMAS (angrily, on his way out). I shall wear my own nose.

WAITER (suavely). Oh, dear, yes, sir: the false one will fit over it quite easily, sir: plenty of room, sir, plenty of room. (He goes out after McComas.)

CRAMPTON (turning at the window to Phil with an attempt at genial fatherliness). Come along, my boy, come along. (He goes.)

PHILIP (cheerily, following him). Coming, dad, coming. (On the window threshold, he stops; looking after Crampton; then turns fantastically with his bat bent into a halo round his head, and says with a lowered voice to Mrs. Clandon and Gloria) Did you feel the pathos of that? (He vanishes.)

MRS. CLANDON (left alone with Gloria). Why did Mr. Valentine go away so suddenly, I wonder?

GLORIA (petulantly). I don’t know. Yes, I d o know. Let us go and see the dancing. (They go towards the window, and are met by Valentine, who comes in from the garden walking quickly, with his face set and sulky.)

VALENTINE (stiffly). Excuse me. I thought the party had quite broken up.

GLORIA (nagging). Then why did you come back?

VALENTINE. I came back because I am penniless. I can’t get out that way without a five shilling ticket.

MRS. CLANDON. Has anything annoyed you, Mr. Valentine?

GLORIA. Never mind him, mother. This is a fresh insult to me: that is all.

MRS. CLANDON (hardly able to realize that Gloria is deliberately provoking an altercation). Gloria!

VALENTINE. Mrs. Clandon: have I said anything insulting? Have I done anything insulting?

GLORIA. you have implied that my past has been like yours. That is the worst of insults.

VALENTINE. I imply nothing of the sort. I declare that my past has been blameless in comparison with yours.

MRS. CLANDON (most indignantly). Mr. Valentine!

VALENTINE. Well, what am I to think when I learn that Miss Clandon has made exactly the same speeches to other men that she has made to me — when I hear of at least five former lovers, with a tame naval lieutenant thrown in? Oh, it’s too bad.

MRS. CLANDON. But you surely do not believe that these affairs — mere jokes of the children’s — were serious, Mr. Valentine?

VALENTINE. Not to you — not to her, perhaps. But I know what the men felt. (With ludicrously genuine earnestness.) Have you ever thought of the wrecked lives, the marriages contracted in the recklessness of despair, the suicides, the — the — the —

GLORIA (interrupting him contemptuously). Mother: this man is a sentimental idiot. (She sweeps away to the fireplace.)

MRS. CLANDON (shocked). Oh, my d e a r e s t Gloria, Mr. Valentine will think that rude.

VALENTINE. I am not a sentimental idiot. I am cured of sentiment for ever. (He sits down in dudgeon.)

MRS. CLANDON. Mr. Valentine: you must excuse us all. Women have to unlearn the false good manners of their slavery before they acquire the genuine good manners of their freedom. Don’t think Gloria vulgar (Gloria turns, astonished): she is not really so.

GLORIA. Mother! You apologize for me to h i m!

MRS. CLANDON. My dear: you have some of the faults of youth as well as its qualities; and Mr. Valentine seems rather too old fashioned in his ideas about his own sex to like being called an idiot. And now had we not better go and see what Dolly is doing? (She goes towards the window. Valentine rises.)

GLORIA. Do you go, mother. I wish to speak to Mr. Valentine alone.

MRS. CLANDON (startled into a remonstrance). My dear! (Recollecting herself.) I beg your pardon, Gloria. Certainly, if you wish. (She bows to Valentine and goes out.)

VALENTINE. Oh, if your mother were only a widow! She’s worth six of you.

GLORIA. That is the first thing I have heard you say that does you honor.

VALENTINE. Stuff! Come: say what you want to say and let me go.

GLORIA. I have only this to say. You dragged me down to your level for a moment this afternoon. Do you think, if that had ever happened before, that I should not have been on my guard — that I should not have known what was coming, and known my own miserable weakness?

VALENTINE (scolding at her passionately). Don’t talk of it in that way. What do I care for anything in you but your weakness, as you call it? You thought yourself very safe, didn’t you, behind your advanced ideas! I amused myself by upsetting t h e m pretty easily.

GLORIA (insolently, feeling that now she can do as she likes with him). Indeed!

VALENTINE. But why did I do it? Because I was being tempted to awaken your heart — to stir the depths in you. Why was I tempted? Because Nature was in deadly earnest with me when I was in jest with her. When the great moment came, who was awakened? who was stirred? in whom did the depths break up? In myself — m y s e l f: I was transported: you were only offended — shocked. You were only an ordinary young lady, too ordinary to allow tame lieutenants to go as far as I went. That’s all. I shall not trouble you with conventional apologies. Good-bye. (He makes resolutely for the door.)

GLORIA. Stop. (He hesitates.) Oh, will you understand, if I tell you the truth, that I am not making an advance to you?

VALENTINE. Pooh! I know what you’re going to say. You think you’re not ordinary — that I was right — that you really have those depths in your nature. It flatters you to believe it. (She recoils.) Well, I grant that you are not ordinary in some ways: you are a clever girl (Gloria stifles an exclamation of rage, and takes a threatening step towards him); but you’ve not been awakened yet. You didn’t care: you don’t care. It was my tragedy, not yours. Good-bye. (He turns to the door. She watches him, appalled to see him slipping from her grasp. As he turns the handle, he pauses; then turns again to her, offering his hand.) Let us part kindly.

GLORIA (enormously relieved, and immediately turning her back on him deliberately.) Good-bye. I trust you will soon recover from the wound.

VALENTINE (brightening up as it flashes on him that he is master of the situation after all). I shall recover: such wounds heal more than they harm. After all, I still have my own Gloria.

GLORIA (facing him quickly). What do you mean?

VALENTINE. The Gloria of my imagination.

GLORIA (proudly). Keep your own Gloria — the Gloria of your imagination. (Her emotion begins to break through her pride.) The real Gloria — the Gloria who was shocked, offended, horrified — oh, yes, quite truly — who was driven almost mad with shame by the feeling that all her power over herself had been broken down at her first real encounter with — with — (The color rushes over her face again. She covers it with her left hand, and puts her right on his left arm to support herself.)

VALENTINE. Take care. I’m losing my senses again. (Summoning all her courage, she takes away her hand from her face and puts it on his right shoulder, turning him towards her and looking him straight in the eyes. He begins to protest agitatedly.) Gloria: be sensible: it’s no use: I haven’t a penny in the world.

GLORIA. Can’t you earn one? Other people do.

VALENTINE (half delighted, half frightened). I never could — you’d be unhappy — My dearest love: I should be the merest fortune-hunting adventurer if — (Her grip on his arms tightens; and she kisses him.) Oh, Lord! (Breathless.) Oh, I — (He gasps.) I don’t know anything about women: twelve years’ experience is not enough. (In a gust of jealousy she throws him away from her; and he reels her back into the chair like a leaf before the wind, as Dolly dances in, waltzing with the waiter, followed by Mrs. Clandon and Finch, also waltzing, and Phil pirouetting by himself.)

DOLLY (sinking on the chair at the writing-table). Oh, I’m out of breath. How beautifully you waltz, William!

MRS. CLANDON (sinking on the saddlebag seat on the hearth). Oh, how could you make me do such a silly thing, Finch! I haven’t danced since the soiree at South Place twenty years ago.

GLORIA (peremptorily at Valentine). Get up. (Valentine gets up abjectly.) Now let us have no false delicacy. Tell my mother that we have agreed to marry one another. (A silence of stupefaction ensues. Valentine, dumb with panic, looks at them with an obvious impulse to run away.)

DOLLY (breaking the silence). Number Six!

PHILIP. Sh!

DOLLY (tumultuously). Oh, my feelings! I want to kiss somebody; and we bar it in the family. Where’s Finch?

McCOMAS (starting violently). No, positively — (Crampton appears in the window.)

DOLLY (running to Crampton). Oh, you’re just in time. (She kisses him.) Now (leading him forward) bless them.

GLORIA. No. I will have no such thing, even in jest. When I need a blessing, I shall ask my mother’s.

CRAMPTON (to Gloria, with deep disappointment). Am I to understand that you have engaged yourself to this young gentleman?

GLORIA (resolutely). Yes. Do you intend to be our friend or —

DOLLY (interposing). — or our father?

CRAMPTON. I should like to be both, my child. But surely — ! Mr. Valentine: I appeal to your sense of honor.

VALENTINE. You’re quite right. It’s perfect madness. If we go out to dance together I shall have to borrow five shillings from her for a ticket. Gloria: don’t be rash: you’re throwing yourself away. I’d much better clear straight out of this, and never see any of you again. I shan’t commit suicide: I shan’t even be unhappy. It’ll be a relief to me: I — I’m frightened, I’m positively frightened; and that’s the plain truth.

GLORIA (determinedly). You shall not go.

VALENTINE (quailing). No, dearest: of course not. But — oh, will somebody only talk sense for a moment and bring us all to reason! I can’t. Where’s Bohun? Bohun’s the man. Phil: go and summon Bohun —

PHILIP. From the vastly deep. I go. (He makes his bat quiver in the air and darts away through the window.)

WAITER (harmoniously to Valentine). If you will excuse my putting in a word, sir, do not let a matter of five shillings stand between you and your happiness, sir. We shall be only too pleased to put the ticket down to you: and you can settle at your convenience. Very glad to meet you in any way, very happy and pleased indeed, sir.

PHILIP (re-appearing). He comes. (He waves his bat over the window. Bohun comes in, taking off his false nose and throwing it on the table in passing as he comes between Gloria and Valentine.)

VALENTINE. The point is, Mr. Bohun —

McCOMAS (interrupting from the hearthrug). Excuse me, sir: the point must be put to him by a solicitor. The question is one of an engagement between these two young people. The lady has some property, and (looking at Crampton) will probably have a good deal more.

CRAMPTON. Possibly. I hope so.

VALENTINE. And the gentleman hasn’t a rap.

BOHUN (nailing Valentine to the point instantly). Then insist on a settlement. That shocks your delicacy: most sensible precautions do. But you ask my advice; and I give it to you. Have a settlement.

GLORIA (proudly). He shall have a settlement.

VALENTINE. My good sir, I don’t want advice for myself. Give h e r some advice.

BOHUN. She won’t take it. When you’re married, she won’t take yours either — (turning suddenly on Gloria) oh, no, you won’t: you think you will; but you won’t. He’ll set to work and earn his living — (turning suddenly to Valentine) oh, yes, you will: you think you won’t; but you will. She’ll make you.

CRAMPTON (only half persuaded). Then, Mr. Bohun, you don’t think this match an unwise one?

BOHUN. Yes, I do: all matches are unwise. It’s unwise to be born; it’s unwise to be married; it’s unwise to live; and it’s unwise to die.

WAITER (insinuating himself between Crampton and Valentine). Then, if I may respectfully put in a word in, sir, so much the worse for wisdom! (To Valentine, benignly.) Cheer up, sir, cheer up: every man is frightened of marriage when it comes to the point; but it often turns out very comfortable, very enjoyable and happy indeed, sir — from time to time. I never was master in my own house, sir: my wife was like your young lady: she was of a commanding and masterful disposition, which my son has inherited. But if I had my life to live twice over, I’d do it again, I’d do it again, I assure you. You never can tell, sir: you never can tell.

PHILIP. Allow me to remark that if Gloria has made up her mind —

DOLLY. The matter’s settled and Valentine’s done for. And we’re missing all the dances.

VALENTINE (to Gloria, gallantly making the best of it). May I have a dance —

BOHUN (interposing in his grandest diapason). Excuse me: I claim that privilege as counsel’s fee. May I have the honor — thank you. (He dances away with Gloria and disappears among the lanterns, leaving Valentine gasping.)

VALENTINE (recovering his breath). Dolly: may I — (offering himself as her partner)?

DOLLY. Nonsense! (Eluding him and running round the table to the fireplace.) Finch — my Finch! (She pounces on McComas and makes him dance.)

McCOMAS (protesting). Pray restrain — really — (He is borne off dancing through the window.)

VALENTINE (making a last effort). Mrs. Clandon: may I —

PHILIP (forestalling him). Come, mother. (He seizes his mother and whirls her away.)

MRS. CLANDON (remonstrating). Phil, Phil — (She shares McComas’s fate.)

CRAMPTON (following them with senile glee). Ho! ho! He! he! he! (He goes into the garden chuckling at the fun.)

VALENTINE (collapsing on the ottoman and staring at the waiter). I might as well be a married man already. (The waiter contemplates the captured Duellist of Sex with affectionate commiseration, shaking his head slowly.)

CURTAIN.

THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

The Devil’s Disciple was first staged in New York in October 1897 and the success of the production quickly helped to cement Shaw as a prominent and important playwright.  The play has undergone a series of revivals and adaptations throughout the years including the 1959 film version starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier. The play continues to be popular in contemporary times with a recent and well-received 2007 production by the Irish Repertory Theatre.

The play is set in 1777 during the American Revolutionary War and the Saratoga Campaign, which was an unsuccessful attempt by the British army to gain the strategically significant Hudson River valley. The drama’s comedy is centred on Richard ‘Rick’ Dudgeon, who announces in Puritan New Hampshire that he is in the service of the devil. He is met with scorn in the town and he returns their hatred with vigour while revelling in his position as outcast and agitator.

The only person that attempts to treat him with any politeness is the minister Antony Anderson, much to his wife Judith’s great chagrin. She finds the rebel’s irreligious views and behaviour to be shocking and morally repugnant.  Dick’s ill-reputed uncle is hanged by the British as they mistake him for a man of high respect. The following events in the play expose and satirise the self-regarding piety and political superciliousness that tend to accompany dramas that depict war and self-sacrifice. Shaw is especially adept at mocking the haughty manner and self-serious demeanours of the British soldiers and he refuses to imbue his protagonist with any great virtues. Dick’s sacrifice is not inspired by the idea of duty, patriotic fervour, or any higher goal; he simply could not contain himself.

Poster from the 1959 film

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

NOTES TO THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

Poster from a 1937 production

ACT I

At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in the year 1777, Mrs. Dudgeon, of New Hampshire, is sitting up in the kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of the town of Websterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman. No woman looks her best after sitting up all night; and Mrs. Dudgeon’s face, even at its best, is grimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride. She is an elderly matron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her sordid home, and an unquestioned reputation for piety and respectability among her neighbors, to whom drink and debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and rectitude, that they conceive goodness simply as self-denial. This conception is easily extended to others — denial, and finally generalized as covering anything disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon, being exceedingly disagreeable, is held to be exceedingly good. Short of flat felony, she enjoys complete license except for amiable weaknesses of any sort, and is consequently, without knowing it, the most licentious woman in the parish on the strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed a Sunday at the Presbyterian church.

The year 1777 is the one in which the passions roused of the breaking off of the American colonies from England, more by their own weight than their own will, boiled up to shooting point, the shooting being idealized to the English mind as suppression of rebellion and maintenance of British dominion, and to the American as defence of liberty, resistance to tyranny, and selfsacrifice on the altar of the Rights of Man. Into the merits of these idealizations it is not here necessary to inquire: suffice it to say, without prejudice, that they have convinced both Americans and English that the most high minded course for them to pursue is to kill as many of one another as possible, and that military operations to that end are in full swing, morally supported by confident requests from the clergy of both sides for the blessing of God on their arms.

Under such circumstances many other women besides this disagreeable Mrs. Dudgeon find themselves sitting up all night waiting for news. Like her, too, they fall asleep towards morning at the risk of nodding themselves into the kitchen fire. Mrs. Dudgeon sleeps with a shawl over her head, and her feet on a broad fender of iron laths, the step of the domestic altar of the fireplace, with its huge hobs and boiler, and its hinged arm above the smoky mantel-shelf for roasting. The plain kitchen table is opposite the fire, at her elbow, with a candle on it in a tin sconce. Her chair, like all the others in the room, is uncushioned and unpainted; but as it has a round railed back and a seat conventionally moulded to the sitter’s curves, it is comparatively a chair of state. The room has three doors, one on the same side as the fireplace, near the corner, leading to the best bedroom; one, at the opposite end of the opposite wall, leading to the scullery and washhouse; and the house door, with its latch, heavy lock, and clumsy wooden bar, in the front wall, between the window in its middle and the corner next the bedroom door. Between the door and the window a rack of pegs suggests to the deductive observer that the men of the house are all away, as there are no hats or coats on them. On the other side of the window the clock hangs on a nail, with its white wooden dial, black iron weights, and brass pendulum. Between the clock and the corner, a big cupboard, locked, stands on a dwarf dresser full of common crockery.

On the side opposite the fireplace, between the door and the corner, a shamelessly ugly black horsehair sofa stands against the wall. An inspection of its stridulous surface shows that Mrs. Dudgeon is not alone. A girl of sixteen or seventeen has fallen asleep on it. She is a wild, timid looking creature with black hair and tanned skin. Her frock, a scanty garment, is rent, weatherstained, berrystained, and by no means scrupulously clean. It hangs on her with a freedom which, taken with her brown legs and bare feet, suggests no great stock of underclothing.

Suddenly there comes a tapping at the door, not loud enough to wake the sleepers. Then knocking, which disturbs Mrs. Dudgeon a little. Finally the latch is tried, whereupon she springs up at once.

MRS. DUDGEON (threateningly). Well, why don’t you open the door? (She sees that the girl is asleep and immediately raises a clamor of heartfelt vexation.) Well, dear, dear me! Now this is — (shaking her) wake up, wake up: do you hear?

THE GIRL (sitting up). What is it?

MRS. DUDGEON. Wake up; and be ashamed of yourself, you unfeeling sinful girl, falling asleep like that, and your father hardly cold in his grave.

THE GIRL (half asleep still). I didn’t mean to. I dropped off —

MRS. DUDGEON (cutting her short). Oh yes, you’ve plenty of excuses, I daresay. Dropped off! (Fiercely, as the knocking recommences.) Why don’t you get up and let your uncle in? after me waiting up all night for him! (She pushes her rudely off the sofa.) There: I’ll open the door: much good you are to wait up. Go and mend that fire a bit.

The girl, cowed and wretched, goes to the fire and puts a log on. Mrs. Dudgeon unbars the door and opens it, letting into the stuffy kitchen a little of the freshness and a great deal of the chill of the dawn, also her second son Christy, a fattish, stupid, fair-haired, round-faced man of about 22, muffled in a plaid shawl and grey overcoat. He hurries, shivering, to the fire, leaving Mrs. Dudgeon to shut the door.

CHRISTY (at the fire). F — f — f! but it is cold. (Seeing the girl, and staring lumpishly at her.) Why, who are you?

THE GIRL (shyly). Essie.

MRS. DUDGEON. Oh you may well ask. (To Essie.) Go to your room, child, and lie down since you haven’t feeling enough to keep you awake. Your history isn’t fit for your own ears to hear.

ESSIE. I —

MRS. DUDGEON (peremptorily). Don’t answer me, Miss; but show your obedience by doing what I tell you. (Essie, almost in tears, crosses the room to the door near the sofa.) And don’t forget your prayers. (Essie goes out.) She’d have gone to bed last night just as if nothing had happened if I’d let her.

CHRISTY (phlegmatically). Well, she can’t be expected to feel Uncle Peter’s death like one of the family.

MRS. DUDGEON. What are you talking about, child? Isn’t she his daughter — the punishment of his wickedness and shame? (She assaults her chair by sitting down.)

CHRISTY (staring). Uncle Peter’s daughter!

MRS. DUDGEON. Why else should she be here? D’ye think I’ve not had enough trouble and care put upon me bringing up my own girls, let alone you and your good-for-nothing brother, without having your uncle’s bastards —

CHRISTY (interrupting her with an apprehensive glance at the door by which Essie went out). Sh! She may hear you.

MRS. DUDGEON (raising her voice). Let her hear me. People who fear God don’t fear to give the devil’s work its right name. (Christy, soullessly indifferent to the strife of Good and Evil, stares at the fire, warming himself.) Well, how long are you going to stare there like a stuck pig? What news have you for me?

CHRISTY (taking off his hat and shawl and going to the rack to hang them up). The minister is to break the news to you. He’ll be here presently.

MRS. DUDGEON. Break what news?

CHRISTY (standing on tiptoe, from boyish habit, to hang his hat up, though he is quite tall enough to reach the peg, and speaking with callous placidity, considering the nature of the announcement). Father’s dead too.

MRS. DUDGEON (stupent). Your father!

CHRISTY (sulkily, coming back to the fire and warming himself again, attending much more to the fire than to his mother). Well, it’s not my fault. When we got to Nevinstown we found him ill in bed. He didn’t know us at first. The minister sat up with him and sent me away. He died in the night.

MRS. DUDGEON (bursting into dry angry tears). Well, I do think this is hard on me — very hard on me. His brother, that was a disgrace to us all his life, gets hanged on the public gallows as a rebel; and your father, instead of staying at home where his duty was, with his own family, goes after him and dies, leaving everything on my shoulders. After sending this girl to me to take care of, too! (She plucks her shawl vexedly over her ears.) It’s sinful, so it is; downright sinful.

CHRISTY (with a slow, bovine cheerfulness, after a pause). I think it’s going to be a fine morning, after all.

MRS. DUDGEON (railing at him). A fine morning! And your father newly dead! Where’s your feelings, child?

CHRISTY (obstinately). Well, I didn’t mean any harm. I suppose a man may make a remark about the weather even if his father’s dead.

MRS. DUDGEON (bitterly). A nice comfort my children are to me! One son a fool, and the other a lost sinner that’s left his home to live with smugglers and gypsies and villains, the scum of the earth!

Someone knocks.

CHRISTY (without moving). That’s the minister.

MRS. DUDGEON (sharply). Well, aren’t you going to let Mr. Anderson in?

Christy goes sheepishly to the door. Mrs. Dudgeon buries her face in her hands, as it is her duty as a widow to be overcome with grief. Christy opens the door, and admits the minister, Anthony Anderson, a shrewd, genial, ready Presbyterian divine of about 50, with something of the authority of his profession in his bearing. But it is an altogether secular authority, sweetened by a conciliatory, sensible manner not at all suggestive of a quite thoroughgoing other-worldliness. He is a strong, healthy man, too, with a thick, sanguine neck; and his keen, cheerful mouth cuts into somewhat fleshy corners. No doubt an excellent parson, but still a man capable of making the most of this world, and perhaps a little apologetically conscious of getting on better with it than a sound Presbyterian ought.

ANDERSON (to Christy, at the door, looking at Mrs. Dudgeon whilst he takes off his cloak). Have you told her?

CHRISTY. She made me. (He shuts the door; yawns; and loafs across to the sofa where he sits down and presently drops off to sleep.)

Anderson looks compassionately at Mrs. Dudgeon. Then he hangs his cloak and hat on the rack. Mrs. Dudgeon dries her eyes and looks up at him.

ANDERSON. Sister: the Lord has laid his hand very heavily upon you.

MRS. DUDGEON (with intensely recalcitrant resignation). It’s His will, I suppose; and I must bow to it. But I do think it hard. What call had Timothy to go to Springtown, and remind everybody that he belonged to a man that was being hanged? — and (spitefully) that deserved it, if ever a man did.

ANDERSON (gently). They were brothers, Mrs. Dudgeon.

MRS. DUDGEON. Timothy never acknowledged him as his brother after we were married: he had too much respect for me to insult me with such a brother. Would such a selfish wretch as Peter have come thirty miles to see Timothy hanged, do you think? Not thirty yards, not he. However, I must bear my cross as best I may: least said is soonest mended.

ANDERSON (very grave, coming down to the fire to stand with his back to it). Your eldest son was present at the execution, Mrs. Dudgeon.

MRS. DUDGEON (disagreeably surprised). Richard?

ANDERSON (nodding). Yes.

MRS. DUDGEON (vindictively). Let it be a warning to him. He may end that way himself, the wicked, dissolute, godless — (she suddenly stops; her voice fails; and she asks, with evident dread) Did Timothy see him?

ANDERSON. Yes.

MRS. DUDGEON (holding her breath). Well?

ANDERSON. He only saw him in the crowd: they did not speak. (Mrs. Dudgeon, greatly relieved, exhales the pent up breath and sits at her ease again.) Your husband was greatly touched and impressed by his brother’s awful death. (Mrs. Dudgeon sneers. Anderson breaks off to demand with some indignation) Well, wasn’t it only natural, Mrs. Dudgeon? He softened towards his prodigal son in that moment. He sent for him to come to see him.

MRS. DUDGEON (her alarm renewed). Sent for Richard!

ANDERSON. Yes; but Richard would not come. He sent his father a message; but I’m sorry to say it was a wicked message — an awful message.

MRS. DUDGEON. What was it?

ANDERSON. That he would stand by his wicked uncle, and stand against his good parents, in this world and the next.

MRS. DUDGEON (implacably). He will be punished for it. He will be punished for it — in both worlds.

ANDERSON. That is not in our hands, Mrs. Dudgeon.

MRS. DUDGEON. Did I say it was, Mr. Anderson. We are told that the wicked shall be punished. Why should we do our duty and keep God’s law if there is to be no difference made between us and those who follow their own likings and dislikings, and make a jest of us and of their Maker’s word?

ANDERSON. Well, Richard’s earthly father has been merciful and his heavenly judge is the father of us all.

MRS. DUDGEON (forgetting herself). Richard’s earthly father was a softheaded —

ANDERSON (shocked). Oh!

MRS. DUDGEON (with a touch of shame). Well, I am Richard’s mother. If I am against him who has any right to be for him? (Trying to conciliate him.) Won’t you sit down, Mr. Anderson? I should have asked you before; but I’m so troubled.

ANDERSON. Thank you — (He takes a chair from beside the fireplace, and turns it so that he can sit comfortably at the fire. When he is seated he adds, in the tone of a man who knows that he is opening a difficult subject.) Has Christy told you about the new will?

MRS. DUDGEON (all her fears returning). The new will! Did Timothy — ? (She breaks off, gasping, unable to complete the question.)

ANDERSON. Yes. In his last hours he changed his mind.

MRS. DUDGEON (white with intense rage). And you let him rob me?

ANDERSON. I had no power to prevent him giving what was his to his own son.

MRS. DUDGEON. He had nothing of his own. His money was the money I brought him as my marriage portion. It was for me to deal with my own money and my own son. He dare not have done it if I had been with him; and well he knew it. That was why he stole away like a thief to take advantage of the law to rob me by making a new will behind my back. The more shame on you, Mr. Anderson, — you, a minister of the gospel — to act as his accomplice in such a crime.

ANDERSON (rising). I will take no offence at what you say in the first bitterness of your grief.

MRS. DUDGEON (contemptuously). Grief!

ANDERSON. Well, of your disappointment, if you can find it in your heart to think that the better word.

MRS. DUDGEON. My heart! My heart! And since when, pray, have you begun to hold up our hearts as trustworthy guides for us?

ANDERSON (rather guiltily). I — er —

MRS. DUDGEON (vehemently). Don’t lie, Mr. Anderson. We are told that the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. My heart belonged, not to Timothy, but to that poor wretched brother of his that has just ended his days with a rope round his neck — aye, to Peter Dudgeon. You know it: old Eli Hawkins, the man to whose pulpit you succeeded, though you are not worthy to loose his shoe latchet, told it you when he gave over our souls into your charge. He warned me and strengthened me against my heart, and made me marry a Godfearing man — as he thought. What else but that discipline has made me the woman I am? And you, you who followed your heart in your marriage, you talk to me of what I find in my heart. Go home to your pretty wife, man; and leave me to my prayers. (She turns from him and leans with her elbows on the table, brooding over her wrongs and taking no further notice of him.)

ANDERSON (willing enough to escape). The Lord forbid that I should come between you and the source of all comfort! (He goes to the rack for his coat and hat.)

MRS. DUDGEON (without looking at him). The Lord will know what to forbid and what to allow without your help.

ANDERSON. And whom to forgive, I hope — Eli Hawkins and myself, if we have ever set up our preaching against His law. (He fastens his cloak, and is now ready to go.) Just one word — on necessary business, Mrs. Dudgeon. There is the reading of the will to be gone through; and Richard has a right to be present. He is in the town; but he has the grace to say that he does not want to force himself in here.

MRS. DUDGEON. He shall come here. Does he expect us to leave his father’s house for his convenience? Let them all come, and come quickly, and go quickly. They shall not make the will an excuse to shirk half their day’s work. I shall be ready, never fear.

ANDERSON (coming back a step or two). Mrs. Dudgeon: I used to have some little influence with you. When did I lose it?

MRS. DUDGEON (still without turning to him). When you married for love. Now you’re answered.

ANDERSON. Yes: I am answered. (He goes out, musing.)

MRS. DUDGEON (to herself, thinking of her husband). Thief! Thief!! (She shakes herself angrily out of the chair; throws back the shawl from her head; and sets to work to prepare the room for the reading of the will, beginning by replacing Anderson’s chair against the wall, and pushing back her own to the window. Then she calls, in her hard, driving, wrathful way) Christy. (No answer: he is fast asleep.) Christy. (She shakes him roughly.) Get up out of that; and be ashamed of yourself — sleeping, and your father dead! (She returns to the table; puts the candle on the mantelshelf; and takes from the table drawer a red table cloth which she spreads.)

CHRISTY (rising reluctantly). Well, do you suppose we are never going to sleep until we are out of mourning?

MRS. DUDGEON. I want none of your sulks. Here: help me to set this table. (They place the table in the middle of the room, with Christy’s end towards the fireplace and Mrs. Dudgeon’s towards the sofa. Christy drops the table as soon as possible, and goes to the fire, leaving his mother to make the final adjustments of its position.) We shall have the minister back here with the lawyer and all the family to read the will before you have done toasting yourself. Go and wake that girl; and then light the stove in the shed: you can’t have your breakfast here. And mind you wash yourself, and make yourself fit to receive the company. (She punctuates these orders by going to the cupboard; unlocking it; and producing a decanter of wine, which has no doubt stood there untouched since the last state occasion in the family, and some glasses, which she sets on the table. Also two green ware plates, on one of which she puts a barmbrack with a knife beside it. On the other she shakes some biscuits out of a tin, putting back one or two, and counting the rest.) Now mind: there are ten biscuits there: let there be ten there when I come back after dressing myself. And keep your fingers off the raisins in that cake. And tell Essie the same. I suppose I can trust you to bring in the case of stuffed birds without breaking the glass? (She replaces the tin in the cupboard, which she locks, pocketing the key carefully.)

CHRISTY (lingering at the fire). You’d better put the inkstand instead, for the lawyer.

MRS. DUDGEON. That’s no answer to make to me, sir. Go and do as you’re told. (Christy turns sullenly to obey.) Stop: take down that shutter before you go, and let the daylight in: you can’t expect me to do all the heavy work of the house with a great heavy lout like you idling about.

Christy takes the window bar out of its damps, and puts it aside; then opens the shutter, showing the grey morning. Mrs. Dudgeon takes the sconce from the mantelshelf; blows out the candle; extinguishes the snuff by pinching it with her fingers, first licking them for the purpose; and replaces the sconce on the shelf.

CHRISTY (looking through the window). Here’s the minister’s wife.

MRS. DUDGEON (displeased). What! Is she coming here?

CHRISTY. Yes.

MRS. DUDGEON. What does she want troubling me at this hour, before I’m properly dressed to receive people?

CHRISTY. You’d better ask her.

MRS. DUDGEON (threateningly). You’d better keep a civil tongue in your head. (He goes sulkily towards the door. She comes after him, plying him with instructions.) Tell that girl to come to me as soon as she’s had her breakfast. And tell her to make herself fit to be seen before the people. (Christy goes out and slams the door in her face.) Nice manners, that! (Someone knocks at the house door: she turns and cries inhospitably.) Come in. (Judith Anderson, the minister’s wife, comes in. Judith is more than twenty years younger than her husband, though she will never be as young as he in vitality. She is pretty and proper and ladylike, and has been admired and petted into an opinion of herself sufficiently favorable to give her a self-assurance which serves her instead of strength. She has a pretty taste in dress, and in her face the pretty lines of a sentimental character formed by dreams. Even her little self-complacency is pretty, like a child’s vanity. Rather a pathetic creature to any sympathetic observer who knows how rough a place the world is. One feels, on the whole, that Anderson might have chosen worse, and that she, needing protection, could not have chosen better.) Oh, it’s you, is it, Mrs. Anderson?

JUDITH (very politely — almost patronizingly). Yes. Can I do anything for you, Mrs. Dudgeon? Can I help to get the place ready before they come to read the will?

MRS. DUDGEON (stiffly). Thank you, Mrs. Anderson, my house is always ready for anyone to come into.

MRS. ANDERSON (with complacent amiability). Yes, indeed it is. Perhaps you had rather I did not intrude on you just now.

MRS. DUDGEON. Oh, one more or less will make no difference this morning, Mrs. Anderson. Now that you’re here, you’d better stay. If you wouldn’t mind shutting the door! (Judith smiles, implying “How stupid of me” and shuts it with an exasperating air of doing something pretty and becoming.) That’s better. I must go and tidy myself a bit. I suppose you don’t mind stopping here to receive anyone that comes until I’m ready.

JUDITH (graciously giving her leave). Oh yes, certainly. Leave them to me, Mrs. Dudgeon; and take your time. (She hangs her cloak and bonnet on the rack.)

MRS. DUDGEON (half sneering). I thought that would be more in your way than getting the house ready. (Essie comes back.) Oh, here you are! (Severely) Come here: let me see you. (Essie timidly goes to her. Mrs. Dudgeon takes her roughly by the arm and pulls her round to inspect the results of her attempt to clean and tidy herself — results which show little practice and less conviction.) Mm! That’s what you call doing your hair properly, I suppose. It’s easy to see what you are, and how you were brought up. (She throws her arms away, and goes on, peremptorily.) Now you listen to me and do as you’re told. You sit down there in the corner by the fire; and when the company comes don’t dare to speak until you’re spoken to. (Essie creeps away to the fireplace.) Your father’s people had better see you and know you’re there: they’re as much bound to keep you from starvation as I am. At any rate they might help. But let me have no chattering and making free with them, as if you were their equal. Do you hear?

ESSIE. Yes.

MRS. DUDGEON. Well, then go and do as you’re told.

(Essie sits down miserably on the corner of the fender furthest from the door.) Never mind her, Mrs. Anderson: you know who she is and what she is. If she gives you any trouble, just tell me; and I’ll settle accounts with her. (Mrs. Dudgeon goes into the bedroom, shutting the door sharply behind her as if even it had to be made to do its duty with a ruthless hand.)

JUDITH (patronizing Essie, and arranging the cake and wine on the table more becomingly). You must not mind if your aunt is strict with you. She is a very good woman, and desires your good too.

ESSIE (in listless misery). Yes.

JUDITH (annoyed with Essie for her failure to be consoled and edified, and to appreciate the kindly condescension of the remark). You are not going to be sullen, I hope, Essie.

ESSIE. No.

JUDITH. That’s a good girl! (She places a couple of chairs at the table with their backs to the window, with a pleasant sense of being a more thoughtful housekeeper than Mrs. Dudgeon.) Do you know any of your father’s relatives?

ESSIE. No. They wouldn’t have anything to do with him: they were too religious. Father used to talk about Dick Dudgeon; but I never saw him.

JUDITH (ostentatiously shocked). Dick Dudgeon! Essie: do you wish to be a really respectable and grateful girl, and to make a place for yourself here by steady good conduct?

ESSIE (very half-heartedly). Yes.

JUDITH. Then you must never mention the name of Richard Dudgeon — never even think about him. He is a bad man.

ESSIE. What has he done?

JUDITH. You must not ask questions about him, Essie. You are too young to know what it is to be a bad man. But he is a smuggler; and he lives with gypsies; and he has no love for his mother and his family; and he wrestles and plays games on Sunday instead of going to church. Never let him into your presence, if you can help it, Essie; and try to keep yourself and all womanhood unspotted by contact with such men.

ESSIE. Yes.

JUDITH (again displeased). I am afraid you say Yes and No without thinking very deeply.

ESSIE. Yes. At least I mean —

JUDITH (severely). What do you mean?

ESSIE (almost crying). Only — my father was a smuggler; and — (Someone knocks.)

JUDITH. They are beginning to come. Now remember your aunt’s directions, Essie; and be a good girl. (Christy comes back with the stand of stuffed birds under a glass case, and an inkstand, which he places on the table.) Good morning, Mr. Dudgeon. Will you open the door, please: the people have come.

CHRISTY. Good morning. (He opens the house door.)

The morning is now fairly bright and warm; and Anderson, who is the first to enter, has left his cloak at home. He is accompanied by Lawyer Hawkins, a brisk, middleaged man in brown riding gaiters and yellow breeches, looking as much squire as solicitor. He and Anderson are allowed precedence as representing the learned professions. After them comes the family, headed by the senior uncle, William Dudgeon, a large, shapeless man, bottle-nosed and evidently no ascetic at table. His clothes are not the clothes, nor his anxious wife the wife, of a prosperous man. The junior uncle, Titus Dudgeon, is a wiry little terrier of a man, with an immense and visibly purse-proud wife, both free from the cares of the William household.

Hawkins at once goes briskly to the table and takes the chair nearest the sofa, Christy having left the inkstand there. He puts his hat on the floor beside him, and produces the will. Uncle William comes to the fire and stands on the hearth warming his coat tails, leaving Mrs. William derelict near the door. Uncle Titus, who is the lady’s man of the family, rescues her by giving her his disengaged arm and bringing her to the sofa, where he sits down warmly between his own lady and his brother’s. Anderson hangs up his hat and waits for a word with Judith.

JUDITH. She will be here in a moment. Ask them to wait. (She taps at the bedroom door. Receiving an answer from within, she opens it and passes through.)

ANDERSON (taking his place at the table at the opposite end to Hawkins). Our poor afflicted sister will be with us in a moment. Are we all here?

CHRISTY (at the house door, which he has just shut). All except Dick.

The callousness with which Christy names the reprobate jars on the moral sense of the family. Uncle William shakes his head slowly and repeatedly. Mrs. Titus catches her breath convulsively through her nose. Her husband speaks.

UNCLE TITUS. Well, I hope he will have the grace not to come. I hope so.

The Dudgeons all murmur assent, except Christy, who goes to the window and posts himself there, looking out. Hawkins smiles secretively as if he knew something that would change their tune if they knew it. Anderson is uneasy: the love of solemn family councils, especially funereal ones, is not in his nature. Judith appears at the bedroom door.

JUDITH (with gentle impressiveness). Friends, Mrs. Dudgeon. (She takes the chair from beside the fireplace; and places it for Mrs. Dudgeon, who comes from the bedroom in black, with a clean handkerchief to her eyes. All rise, except Essie. Mrs. Titus and Mrs. William produce equally clean handkerchiefs and weep. It is an affecting moment.)

UNCLE WILLIAM. Would it comfort you, sister, if we were to offer up a prayer?

UNCLE TITUS. Or sing a hymn?

ANDERSON (rather hastily). I have been with our sister this morning already, friends. In our hearts we ask a blessing.

ALL (except Essie). Amen.

They all sit down, except Judith, who stands behind Mrs. Dudgeon’s chair.

JUDITH (to Essie). Essie: did you say Amen?

ESSIE (scaredly). No.

JUDITH. Then say it, like a good girl.

ESSIE. Amen.

UNCLE WILLIAM (encouragingly). That’s right: that’s right. We know who you are; but we are willing to be kind to you if you are a good girl and deserve it. We are all equal before the Throne.

This republican sentiment does not please the women, who are convinced that the Throne is precisely the place where their superiority, often questioned in this world, will be recognized and rewarded.

CHRISTY (at the window). Here’s Dick.

Anderson and Hawkins look round sociably. Essie, with a gleam of interest breaking through her misery, looks up. Christy grins and gapes expectantly at the door. The rest are petrified with the intensity of their sense of Virtue menaced with outrage by the approach of flaunting Vice. The reprobate appears in the doorway, graced beyond his alleged merits by the morning sunlight. He is certainly the best looking member of the family; but his expression is reckless and sardonic, his manner defiant and satirical, his dress picturesquely careless. Only his forehead and mouth betray an extraordinary steadfastness, and his eyes are the eyes of a fanatic.

RICHARD (on the threshold, taking off his hat). Ladies and gentlemen: your servant, your very humble servant. (With this comprehensive insult, he throws his hat to Christy with a suddenness that makes him jump like a negligent wicket keeper, and comes into the middle of the room, where he turns and deliberately surveys the company.) How happy you all look! how glad to see me! (He turns towards Mrs. Dudgeon’s chair; and his lip rolls up horribly from his dog tooth as he meets her look of undisguised hatred.) Well, mother: keeping up appearances as usual? that’s right, that’s right. (Judith pointedly moves away from his neighborhood to the other side of the kitchen, holding her skirt instinctively as if to save it from contamination. Uncle Titus promptly marks his approval of her action by rising from the sofa, and placing a chair for her to sit down upon.) What! Uncle William! I haven’t seen you since you gave up drinking. (Poor Uncle William, shamed, would protest; but Richard claps him heartily on his shoulder, adding) you have given it up, haven’t you? (releasing him with a playful push) of course you have: quite right too; you overdid it. (He turns away from Uncle William and makes for the sofa.) And now, where is that upright horsedealer Uncle Titus? Uncle Titus: come forth. (He comes upon him holding the chair as Judith sits down.) As usual, looking after the ladies.

UNCLE TITUS (indignantly). Be ashamed of yourself, sir —

RICHARD (interrupting him and shaking his hand in spite of him). I am: I am; but I am proud of my uncle — proud of all my relatives (again surveying them) who could look at them and not be proud and joyful? (Uncle Titus, overborne, resumes his seat on the sofa. Richard turns to the table.) Ah, Mr. Anderson, still at the good work, still shepherding them. Keep them up to the mark, minister, keep them up to the mark. Come! (with a spring he seats himself on the table and takes up the decanter) clink a glass with me, Pastor, for the sake of old times.

ANDERSON. You know, I think, Mr. Dudgeon, that I do not drink before dinner.

RICHARD. You will, some day, Pastor: Uncle William used to drink before breakfast. Come: it will give your sermons unction. (He smells the wine and makes a wry face.) But do not begin on my mother’s company sherry. I stole some when I was six years old; and I have been a temperate man ever since. (He puts the decanter down and changes the subject.) So I hear you are married, Pastor, and that your wife has a most ungodly allowance of good looks.

ANDERSON (quietly indicating Judith). Sir: you are in the presence of my wife. (Judith rises and stands with stony propriety.)

RICHARD (quickly slipping down from the table with instinctive good manners). Your servant, madam: no offence. (He looks at her earnestly.) You deserve your reputation; but I’m sorry to see by your expression that you’re a good woman.

(She looks shocked, and sits down amid a murmur of indignant sympathy from his relatives. Anderson, sensible enough to know that these demonstrations can only gratify and encourage a man who is deliberately trying to provoke them, remains perfectly goodhumored.) All the same, Pastor, I respect you more than I did before. By the way, did I hear, or did I not, that our late lamented Uncle Peter, though unmarried, was a father?

UNCLE TITUS. He had only one irregular child, sir.

RICHARD. Only one! He thinks one a mere trifle! I blush for you, Uncle Titus.

ANDERSON. Mr. Dudgeon you are in the presence of your mother and her grief.

RICHARD. It touches me profoundly, Pastor. By the way, what has become of the irregular child?

ANDERSON (pointing to Essie). There, sir, listening to you.

RICHARD (shocked into sincerity). What! Why the devil didn’t you tell me that before? Children suffer enough in this house without — (He hurries remorsefully to Essie.) Come, little cousin! never mind me: it was not meant to hurt you. (She looks up gratefully at him. Her tearstained face affects him violently, and he bursts out, in a transport of wrath) Who has been making her cry? Who has been ill-treating her? By God —

MRS. DUDGEON (rising and confronting him). Silence your blasphemous tongue. I will hear no more of this. Leave my house.

RICHARD. How do you know it’s your house until the will is read? (They look at one another for a moment with intense hatred; and then she sinks, checkmated, into her chair. Richard goes boldly up past Anderson to the window, where he takes the railed chair in his hand.) Ladies and gentlemen: as the eldest son of my late father, and the unworthy head of this household, I bid you welcome. By your leave, Minister Anderson: by your leave, Lawyer Hawkins. The head of the table for the head of the family. (He places the chair at the table between the minister and the attorney; sits down between them; and addresses the assembly with a presidential air.) We meet on a melancholy occasion: a father dead! an uncle actually hanged, and probably damned. (He shakes his head deploringly. The relatives freeze with horror.) That’s right: pull your longest faces (his voice suddenly sweetens gravely as his glance lights on Essie) provided only there is hope in the eyes of the child. (Briskly.) Now then, Lawyer Hawkins: business, business. Get on with the will, man.

TITUS. Do not let yourself be ordered or hurried, Mr. Hawkins.

HAWKINS (very politely and willingly). Mr. Dudgeon means no offence, I feel sure. I will not keep you one second, Mr. Dudgeon. Just while I get my glasses — (he fumbles for them. The Dudgeons look at one another with misgiving).

RICHARD. Aha! They notice your civility, Mr. Hawkins. They are prepared for the worst. A glass of wine to clear your voice before you begin. (He pours out one for him and hands it; then pours one for himself.)

HAWKINS. Thank you, Mr. Dudgeon. Your good health, sir.

RICHARD. Yours, sir. (With the glass half way to his lips, he checks himself, giving a dubious glance at the wine, and adds, with quaint intensity.) Will anyone oblige me with a glass of water?

Essie, who has been hanging on his every word and movement, rises stealthily and slips out behind Mrs. Dudgeon through the bedroom door, returning presently with a jug and going out of the house as quietly as possible.

HAWKINS. The will is not exactly in proper legal phraseology.

RICHARD. No: my father died without the consolations of the law.

HAWKINS. Good again, Mr. Dudgeon, good again. (Preparing to read) Are you ready, sir?

RICHARD. Ready, aye ready. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Go ahead.

HAWKINS (reading). “This is the last will and testament of me Timothy Dudgeon on my deathbed at Nevinstown on the road from Springtown to Websterbridge on this twenty-fourth day of September, one thousand seven hundred and seventy seven. I hereby revoke all former wills made by me and declare that I am of sound mind and know well what I am doing and that this is my real will according to my own wish and affections.”

RICHARD (glancing at his mother). Aha!

HAWKINS (shaking his head). Bad phraseology, sir, wrong phraseology. “I give and bequeath a hundred pounds to my younger son Christopher Dudgeon, fifty pounds to be paid to him on the day of his marriage to Sarah Wilkins if she will have him, and ten pounds on the birth of each of his children up to the number of five.”

RICHARD. How if she won’t have him?

CHRISTY. She will if I have fifty pounds.

RICHARD. Good, my brother. Proceed.

HAWKINS. “I give and bequeath to my wife Annie Dudgeon, born Annie Primrose” — you see he did not know the law, Mr. Dudgeon: your mother was not born Annie: she was christened so— “an annuity of fifty-two pounds a year for life (Mrs. Dudgeon, with all eyes on her, holds herself convulsively rigid) to be paid out of the interest on her own money” — there’s a way to put it, Mr. Dudgeon! Her own money!

MRS. DUDGEON. A very good way to put God’s truth. It was every penny my own. Fifty-two pounds a year!

HAWKINS. “And I recommend her for her goodness and piety to the forgiving care of her children, having stood between them and her as far as I could to the best of my ability.”

MRS. DUDGEON. And this is my reward! (raging inwardly) You know what I think, Mr. Anderson you know the word I gave to it.

ANDERSON. It cannot be helped, Mrs. Dudgeon. We must take what comes to us. (To Hawkins.) Go on, sir.

HAWKINS. “I give and bequeath my house at Websterbridge with the land belonging to it and all the rest of my property soever to my eldest son and heir, Richard Dudgeon.”

RICHARD. Oho! The fatted calf, Minister, the fatted calf.

HAWKINS. “On these conditions—”

RICHARD. The devil! Are there conditions?

HAWKINS. “To wit: first, that he shall not let my brother Peter’s natural child starve or be driven by want to an evil life.”

RICHARD (emphatically, striking his fist on the table). Agreed.

Mrs. Dudgeon, turning to look malignantly at Essie, misses her and looks quickly round to see where she has moved to; then, seeing that she has left the room without leave, closes her lips vengefully.

HAWKINS. “Second, that he shall be a good friend to my old horse Jim” — (again slacking his head) he should have written James, sir.

RICHARD. James shall live in clover. Go on.

HAWKINS. “ — and keep my deaf farm laborer Prodger Feston in his service.”

RICHARD. Prodger Feston shall get drunk every Saturday.

HAWKINS. “Third, that he make Christy a present on his marriage out of the ornaments in the best room.”

RICHARD (holding up the stuffed birds). Here you are, Christy.

CHRISTY (disappointed). I’d rather have the China peacocks.

RICHARD. You shall have both. (Christy is greatly pleased.) Go on.

HAWKINS. “Fourthly and lastly, that he try to live at peace with his mother as far as she will consent to it.”

RICHARD (dubiously). Hm! Anything more, Mr. Hawkins?

HAWKINS (solemnly). “Finally I gave and bequeath my soul into my Maker’s hands, humbly asking forgiveness for all my sins and mistakes, and hoping that he will so guide my son that it may not be said that I have done wrong in trusting to him rather than to others in the perplexity of my last hour in this strange place.”

ANDERSON. Amen.

THE UNCLES AND AUNTS. Amen.

RICHARD. My mother does not say Amen.

MRS. DUDGEON (rising, unable to give up her property without a struggle). Mr. Hawkins: is that a proper will? Remember, I have his rightful, legal will, drawn up by yourself, leaving all to me.

HAWKINS. This is a very wrongly and irregularly worded will, Mrs. Dudgeon; though (turning politely to Richard) it contains in my judgment an excellent disposal of his property.

ANDERSON (interposing before Mrs. Dudgeon can retort). That is not what you are asked, Mr. Hawkins. Is it a legal will?

HAWKINS. The courts will sustain it against the other.

ANDERSON. But why, if the other is more lawfully worded?

HAWKING. Because, sir, the courts will sustain the claim of a man — and that man the eldest son — against any woman, if they can. I warned you, Mrs. Dudgeon, when you got me to draw that other will, that it was not a wise will, and that though you might make him sign it, he would never be easy until he revoked it. But you wouldn’t take advice; and now Mr. Richard is cock of the walk. (He takes his hat from the floor; rises; and begins pocketing his papers and spectacles.)

This is the signal for the breaking-up of the party. Anderson takes his hat from the rack and joins Uncle William at the fire. Uncle Titus fetches Judith her things from the rack. The three on the sofa rise and chat with Hawkins. Mrs. Dudgeon, now an intruder in her own house, stands erect, crushed by the weight of the law on women, accepting it, as she has been trained to accept all monstrous calamities, as proofs of the greatness of the power that inflicts them, and of her own wormlike insignificance. For at this time, remember, Mary Wollstonecraft is as yet only a girl of eighteen, and her Vindication of the Rights of Women is still fourteen years off. Mrs. Dudgeon is rescued from her apathy by Essie, who comes back with the jug full of water. She is taking it to Richard when Mrs. Dudgeon stops her.

MRS. DUDGEON (threatening her). Where have you been? (Essie, appalled, tries to answer, but cannot.) How dare you go out by yourself after the orders I gave you?

ESSIE. He asked for a drink — (she stops, her tongue cleaving to her palate with terror).

JUDITH (with gentler severity). Who asked for a drink? (Essie, speechless, points to Richard.)

RICHARD. What! I!

JUDITH (shocked). Oh Essie, Essie!

RICHARD. I believe I did. (He takes a glass and holds it to Essie to be filled. Her hand shakes.) What! afraid of me?

ESSIE (quickly). No. I — (She pours out the water.)

RICHARD (tasting it). Ah, you’ve been up the street to the market gate spring to get that. (He takes a draught.) Delicious! Thank you. (Unfortunately, at this moment he chances to catch sight of Judith’s face, which expresses the most prudish disapproval of his evident attraction for Essie, who is devouring him with her grateful eyes. His mocking expression returns instantly. He puts down the glass; deliberately winds his arm round Essie’s shoulders; and brings her into the middle of the company. Mrs. Dudgeon being in Essie’s way as they come past the table, he says) By your leave, mother (and compels her to make way for them). What do they call you? Bessie?

ESSIE. Essie.

RICHARD. Essie, to be sure. Are you a good girl, Essie?

ESSIE (greatly disappointed that he, of all people should begin at her in this way) Yes. (She looks doubtfully at Judith.) I think so. I mean I — I hope so.

RICHARD. Essie: did you ever hear of a person called the devil?

ANDERSON (revolted). Shame on you, sir, with a mere child —

RICHARD. By your leave, Minister: I do not interfere with your sermons: do not you interrupt mine. (To Essie.) Do you know what they call me, Essie?

ESSIE. Dick.

RICHARD (amused: patting her on the shoulder). Yes, Dick; but something else too. They call me the Devil’s Disciple.

ESSIE. Why do you let them?

RICHARD (seriously). Because it’s true. I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear. I prayed secretly to him; and he comforted me, and saved me from having my spirit broken in this house of children’s tears. I promised him my soul, and swore an oath that I would stand up for him in this world and stand by him in the next. (Solemnly) That promise and that oath made a man of me. From this day this house is his home; and no child shall cry in it: this hearth is his altar; and no soul shall ever cower over it in the dark evenings and be afraid. Now (turning forcibly on the rest) which of you good men will take this child and rescue her from the house of the devil?

JUDITH (coming to Essie and throwing a protecting arm about her). I will. You should be burnt alive.

ESSIE. But I don’t want to. (She shrinks back, leaving Richard and Judith face to face.)

RICHARD (to Judith). Actually doesn’t want to, most virtuous lady!

UNCLE TITUS. Have a care, Richard Dudgeon. The law —

RICHARD (turning threateningly on him). Have a care, you. In an hour from this there will be no law here but martial law. I passed the soldiers within six miles on my way here: before noon Major Swindon’s gallows for rebels will be up in the market place.

ANDERSON (calmly). What have we to fear from that, sir?

RICHARD. More than you think. He hanged the wrong man at Springtown: he thought Uncle Peter was respectable, because the Dudgeons had a good name. But his next example will be the best man in the town to whom he can bring home a rebellious word. Well, we’re all rebels; and you know it.

ALL THE MEN (except Anderson). No, no, no!

RICHARD. Yes, you are. You haven’t damned King George up hill and down dale as I have; but you’ve prayed for his defeat; and you, Anthony Anderson, have conducted the service, and sold your family bible to buy a pair of pistols. They mayn’t hang me, perhaps; because the moral effect of the Devil’s Disciple dancing on nothing wouldn’t help them. But a Minister! (Judith, dismayed, clings to Anderson) or a lawyer! (Hawkins smiles like a man able to take care of himself) or an upright horsedealer! (Uncle Titus snarls at him in rags and terror) or a reformed drunkard (Uncle William, utterly unnerved, moans and wobbles with fear) eh? Would that show that King George meant business — ha?

ANDERSON (perfectly self-possessed). Come, my dear: he is only trying to frighten you. There is no danger. (He takes her out of the house. The rest crowd to the door to follow him, except Essie, who remains near Richard.)

RICHARD (boisterously derisive). Now then: how many of you will stay with me; run up the American flag on the devil’s house; and make a fight for freedom? (They scramble out, Christy among them, hustling one another in their haste.) Ha ha! Long live the devil! (To Mrs. Dudgeon, who is following them) What mother! are you off too?

MRS. DUDGEON (deadly pale, with her hand on her heart as if she had received a deathblow). My curse on you! My dying curse! (She goes out.)

RICHARD (calling after her). It will bring me luck. Ha ha ha!

ESSIE (anxiously). Mayn’t I stay?

RICHARD (turning to her). What! Have they forgotten to save your soul in their anxiety about their own bodies? Oh yes: you may stay. (He turns excitedly away again and shakes his fist after them. His left fist, also clenched, hangs down. Essie seizes it and kisses it, her tears falling on it. He starts and looks at it.) Tears! The devil’s baptism! (She falls on her knees, sobbing. He stoops goodnaturedly to raise her, saying) Oh yes, you may cry that way, Essie, if you like.

ACT II

Minister Anderson’s house is in the main street of Websterbridge, not far from the town hall. To the eye of the eighteenth century New Englander, it is much grander than the plain farmhouse of the Dudgeons; but it is so plain itself that a modern house agent would let both at about the same rent. The chief dwelling room has the same sort of kitchen fireplace, with boiler, toaster hanging on the bars, movable iron griddle socketed to the hob, hook above for roasting, and broad fender, on which stand a kettle and a plate of buttered toast. The door, between the fireplace and the corner, has neither panels, fingerplates nor handles: it is made of plain boards, and fastens with a latch. The table is a kitchen table, with a treacle colored cover of American cloth, chapped at the corners by draping. The tea service on it consists of two thick cups and saucers of the plainest ware, with milk jug and bowl to match, each large enough to contain nearly a quart, on a black japanned tray, and, in the middle of the table, a wooden trencher with a big loaf upon it, and a square half pound block of butter in a crock. The big oak press facing the fire from the opposite side of the room, is for use and storage, not for ornament; and the minister’s house coat hangs on a peg from its door, showing that he is out; for when he is in it is his best coat that hangs there. His big riding boots stand beside the press, evidently in their usual place, and rather proud of themselves. In fact, the evolution of the minister’s kitchen, dining room and drawing room into three separate apartments has not yet taken place; and so, from the point of view of our pampered period, he is no better off than the Dudgeons.

But there is a difference, for all that. To begin with, Mrs. Anderson is a pleasanter person to live with than Mrs. Dudgeon. To which Mrs. Dudgeon would at once reply, with reason, that Mrs. Anderson has no children to look after; no poultry, pigs nor cattle; a steady and sufficient income not directly dependent on harvests and prices at fairs; an affectionate husband who is a tower of strength to her: in short, that life is as easy at the minister’s house as it is hard at the farm. This is true; but to explain a fact is not to alter it; and however little credit Mrs. Anderson may deserve for making her home happier, she has certainly succeeded in doing it. The outward and visible signs of her superior social pretensions are a drugget on the floor, a plaster ceiling between the timbers and chairs which, though not upholstered, are stained and polished. The fine arts are represented by a mezzotint portrait of some Presbyterian divine, a copperplate of Raphael’s St. Paul preaching at Athens, a rococo presentation clock on the mantelshelf, flanked by a couple of miniatures, a pair of crockery dogs with baskets in their mouths, and, at the corners, two large cowrie shells. A pretty feature of the room is the low wide latticed window, nearly its whole width, with little red curtains running on a rod half way up it to serve as a blind. There is no sofa; but one of the seats, standing near the press, has a railed back and is long enough to accommodate two people easily. On the whole, it is rather the sort of room that the nineteenth century has ended in struggling to get back to under the leadership of Mr. Philip Webb and his disciples in domestic architecture, though no genteel clergyman would have tolerated it fifty years ago.

The evening has closed in; and the room is dark except for the cosy firelight and the dim oil lamps seen through the window in the wet street, where there is a quiet, steady, warm, windless downpour of rain. As the town clock strikes the quarter, Judith comes in with a couple of candles in earthenware candlesticks, and sets them on the table. Her self-conscious airs of the morning are gone: she is anxious and frightened. She goes to the window and peers into the street. The first thing she sees there is her husband, hurrying here through the rain. She gives a little gasp of relief, not very far removed from a sob, and turns to the door. Anderson comes in, wrapped in a very wet cloak.

JUDITH (running to him). Oh, here you are at last, at last! (She attempts to embrace him.)

ANDERSON (keeping her off). Take care, my love: I’m wet. Wait till I get my cloak off. (He places a chair with its back to the fire; hangs his cloak on it to dry; shakes the rain from his hat and puts it on the fender; and at last turns with his hands outstretched to Judith.) Now! (She flies into his arms.) I am not late, am I? The town clock struck the quarter as I came in at the front door. And the town clock is always fast.

JUDITH. I’m sure it’s slow this evening. I’m so glad you’re back.

ANDERSON (taking her more closely in his arms). Anxious, my dear?

JUDITH. A little.

ANDERSON. Why, you’ve been crying.

JUDITH. Only a little. Never mind: it’s all over now. (A bugle call is heard in the distance. She starts in terror and retreats to the long seat, listening.) What’s that?

ANDERSON (following her tenderly to the seat and making her sit down with him). Only King George, my dear. He’s returning to barracks, or having his roll called, or getting ready for tea, or booting or saddling or something. Soldiers don’t ring the bell or call over the banisters when they want anything: they send a boy out with a bugle to disturb the whole town.

JUDITH. Do you think there is really any danger?

ANDERSON. Not the least in the world.

JUDITH. You say that to comfort me, not because you believe it.

ANDERSON. My dear: in this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it. There’s a danger that the house will catch fire in the night; but we shan’t sleep any the less soundly for that.

JUDITH. Yes, I know what you always say; and you’re quite right. Oh, quite right: I know it. But — I suppose I’m not brave: that’s all. My heart shrinks every time I think of the soldiers.

ANDERSON. Never mind that, dear: bravery is none the worse for costing a little pain.

JUDITH. Yes, I suppose so. (Embracing him again.) Oh how brave you are, my dear! (With tears in her eyes.) Well, I’ll be brave too: you shan’t be ashamed of your wife.

ANDERSON. That’s right. Now you make me happy. Well, well! (He rises and goes cheerily to the fire to dry his shoes.) I called on Richard Dudgeon on my way back; but he wasn’t in.

JUDITH (rising in consternation). You called on that man!

ANDERSON (reassuring her). Oh, nothing happened, dearie. He was out.

JUDITH (almost in tears, as if the visit were a personal humiliation to her). But why did you go there?

ANDERSON (gravely). Well, it is all the talk that Major Swindon is going to do what he did in Springtown — make an example of some notorious rebel, as he calls us. He pounced on Peter Dudgeon as the worst character there; and it is the general belief that he will pounce on Richard as the worst here.

JUDITH. But Richard said —

ANDERSON (goodhumoredly cutting her short). Pooh! Richard said! He said what he thought would frighten you and frighten me, my dear. He said what perhaps (God forgive him!) he would like to believe. It’s a terrible thing to think of what death must mean for a man like that. I felt that I must warn him. I left a message for him.

JUDITH (querulously). What message?

ANDERSON. Only that I should be glad to see him for a moment on a matter of importance to himself; and that if he would look in here when he was passing he would be welcome.

JUDITH (aghast). You asked that man to come here!

ANDERSON. I did.

JUDITH (sinking on the seat and clasping her hands). I hope he won’t come! Oh, I pray that he may not come!

ANDERSON. Why? Don’t you want him to be warned?

JUDITH. He must know his danger. Oh, Tony, is it wrong to hate a blasphemer and a villain? I do hate him! I can’t get him out of my mind: I know he will bring harm with him. He insulted you: he insulted me: he insulted his mother.

ANDERSON (quaintly). Well, dear, let’s forgive him; and then it won’t matter.

JUDITH. Oh, I know it’s wrong to hate anybody; but —

ANDERSON (going over to her with humorous tenderness). Come, dear, you’re not so wicked as you think. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully, you’ll be surprised to find how like hate is to love. (She starts, strangely touched — even appalled. He is amused at her.) Yes: I’m quite in earnest. Think of how some of our married friends worry one another, tax one another, are jealous of one another, can’t bear to let one another out of sight for a day, are more like jailers and slave-owners than lovers. Think of those very same people with their enemies, scrupulous, lofty, self-respecting, determined to be independent of one another, careful of how they speak of one another — pooh! haven’t you often thought that if they only knew it, they were better friends to their enemies than to their own husbands and wives? Come: depend on it, my dear, you are really fonder of Richard than you are of me, if you only knew it. Eh?

JUDITH. Oh, don’t say that: don’t say that, Tony, even in jest. You don’t know what a horrible feeling it gives me.

ANDERSON (Laughing). Well, well: never mind, pet. He’s a bad man; and you hate him as he deserves. And you’re going to make the tea, aren’t you?

JUDITH (remorsefully). Oh yes, I forgot. I’ve been keeping you waiting all this time. (She goes to the fire and puts on the kettle.)

ANDERSON (going to the press and taking his coat off). Have you stitched up the shoulder of my old coat?

JUDITH. Yes, dear. (She goes to the table, and sets about putting the tea into the teapot from the caddy.)

ANDERSON (as he changes his coat for the older one hanging on the press, and replaces it by the one he has just taken off). Did anyone call when I was out?

JUDITH. No, only — (someone knocks at the door. With a start which betrays her intense nervousness, she retreats to the further end of the table with the tea caddy and spoon, in her hands, exclaiming) Who’s that?

ANDERSON (going to her and patting her encouragingly on the shoulder). All right, pet, all right. He won’t eat you, whoever he is. (She tries to smile, and nearly makes herself cry. He goes to the door and opens it. Richard is there, without overcoat or cloak.) You might have raised the latch and come in, Mr. Dudgeon. Nobody stands on much ceremony with us. (Hospitably.) Come in. (Richard comes in carelessly and stands at the table, looking round the room with a slight pucker of his nose at the mezzotinted divine on the wall. Judith keeps her eyes on the tea caddy.) Is it still raining? (He shuts the door.)

RICHARD. Raining like the very (his eye catches Judith’s as she looks quickly and haughtily up) — I beg your pardon; but (showing that his coat is wet) you see — !

ANDERSON. Take it off, sir; and let it hang before the fire a while: my wife will excuse your shirtsleeves. Judith: put in another spoonful of tea for Mr. Dudgeon.

RICHARD (eyeing him cynically). The magic of property, Pastor! Are even YOU civil to me now that I have succeeded to my father’s estate?

Judith throws down the spoon indignantly.

ANDERSON (quite unruffled, and helping Richard off with his coat). I think, sir, that since you accept my hospitality, you cannot have so bad an opinion of it. Sit down. (With the coat in his hand, he points to the railed seat. Richard, in his shirtsleeves, looks at him half quarrelsomely for a moment; then, with a nod, acknowledges that the minister has got the better of him, and sits down on the seat. Anderson pushes his cloak into a heap on the seat of the chair at the fire, and hangs Richard’s coat on the back in its place.)

RICHARD. I come, sir, on your own invitation. You left word you had something important to tell me.

ANDERSON. I have a warning which it is my duty to give you.

RICHARD (quickly rising). You want to preach to me. Excuse me: I prefer a walk in the rain. (He makes for his coat.)

ANDERSON (stopping him). Don’t be alarmed, sir; I am no great preacher. You are quite safe. (Richard smiles in spite of himself. His glance softens: he even makes a gesture of excuse. Anderson, seeing that he has tamed him, now addresses him earnestly.) Mr. Dudgeon: you are in danger in this town.

RICHARD. What danger?

ANDERSON. Your uncle’s danger. Major Swindon’s gallows.

RICHARD. It is you who are in danger. I warned you —

ANDERSON (interrupting him goodhumoredly but authoritatively). Yes, yes, Mr. Dudgeon; but they do not think so in the town. And even if I were in danger, I have duties here I must not forsake. But you are a free man. Why should you run any risk?

RICHARD. Do you think I should be any great loss, Minister?

ANDERSON. I think that a man’s life is worth saving, whoever it belongs to. (Richard makes him an ironical bow. Anderson returns the bow humorously.) Come: you’ll have a cup of tea, to prevent you catching cold?

RICHARD. I observe that Mrs. Anderson is not quite so pressing as you are, Pastor.

JUDITH (almost stifled with resentment, which she has been expecting her husband to share and express for her at every insult of Richard’s). You are welcome for my husband’s sake. (She brings the teapot to the fireplace and sets it on the hob.)

RICHARD. I know I am not welcome for my own, madam. (He rises.) But I think I will not break bread here, Minister.

ANDERSON (cheerily). Give me a good reason for that.

RICHARD. Because there is something in you that I respect, and that makes me desire to have you for my enemy.

ANDERSON. That’s well said. On those terms, sir, I will accept your enmity or any man’s. Judith: Mr. Dudgeon will stay to tea. Sit down: it will take a few minutes to draw by the fire. (Richard glances at him with a troubled face; then sits down with his head bent, to hide a convulsive swelling of his throat.) I was just saying to my wife, Mr. Dudgeon, that enmity — (she grasps his hand and looks imploringly at him, doing both with an intensity that checks him at once) Well, well, I mustn’t tell you, I see; but it was nothing that need leave us worse friend — enemies, I mean. Judith is a great enemy of yours.

RICHARD. If all my enemies were like Mrs. Anderson I should be the best Christian in America.

ANDERSON (gratified, patting her hand). You hear that, Judith? Mr. Dudgeon knows how to turn a compliment.

The latch is lifted from without.

JUDITH (starting). Who is that?

Christy comes in.

CHRISTY (stopping and staring at Richard). Oh, are YOU here?

RICHARD. Yes. Begone, you fool: Mrs. Anderson doesn’t want the whole family to tea at once.

CHRISTY (coming further in). Mother’s very ill.

RICHARD. Well, does she want to see ME?

CHRISTY. No.

RICHARD. I thought not.

CHRISTY. She wants to see the minister — at once.

JUDITH (to Anderson). Oh, not before you’ve had some tea.

ANDERSON. I shall enjoy it more when I come back, dear. (He is about to take up his cloak.)

CHRISTY. The rain’s over.

ANDERSON (dropping the cloak and picking up his hat from the fender). Where is your mother, Christy?

CHRISTY. At Uncle Titus’s.

ANDERSON. Have you fetched the doctor?

CHRISTY. No: she didn’t tell me to.

ANDERSON. Go on there at once: I’ll overtake you on his doorstep. (Christy turns to go.) Wait a moment. Your brother must be anxious to know the particulars.

RICHARD. Psha! not I: he doesn’t know; and I don’t care. (Violently.) Be off, you oaf. (Christy runs out. Richard adds, a little shamefacedly) We shall know soon enough.

ANDERSON. Well, perhaps you will let me bring you the news myself. Judith: will you give Mr. Dudgeon his tea, and keep him here until I return?

JUDITH (white and trembling). Must I —

ANDERSON (taking her hands and interrupting her to cover her agitation). My dear: I can depend on you?

JUDITH (with a piteous effort to be worthy of his trust). Yes.

ANDERSON (pressing her hand against his cheek). You will not mind two old people like us, Mr. Dudgeon. (Going.) I shall not say good evening: you will be here when I come back. (He goes out.)

They watch him pass the window, and then look at each other dumbly, quite disconcerted. Richard, noting the quiver of her lips, is the first to pull himself together.

RICHARD. Mrs. Anderson: I am perfectly aware of the nature of your sentiments towards me. I shall not intrude on you. Good evening. (Again he starts for the fireplace to get his coat.)

JUDITH (getting between him and the coat). No, no. Don’t go: please don’t go.

RICHARD (roughly). Why? You don’t want me here.

JUDITH. Yes, I — (wringing her hands in despair) Oh, if I tell you the truth, you will use it to torment me.

RICHARD (indignantly). Torment! What right have you to say that? Do you expect me to stay after that?

JUDITH. I want you to stay; but (suddenly raging at him like an angry child) it is not because I like you.

RICHARD. Indeed!

JUDITH. Yes: I had rather you did go than mistake me about that. I hate and dread you; and my husband knows it. If you are not here when he comes back, he will believe that I disobeyed him and drove you away.

RICHARD (ironically). Whereas, of course, you have really been so kind and hospitable and charming to me that I only want to go away out of mere contrariness, eh?

Judith, unable to bear it, sinks on the chair and bursts into tears.

RICHARD. Stop, stop, stop, I tell you. Don’t do that. (Putting his hand to his breast as if to a wound.) He wrung my heart by being a man. Need you tear it by being a woman? Has he not raised you above my insults, like himself? (She stops crying, and recovers herself somewhat, looking at him with a scared curiosity.) There: that’s right. (Sympathetically.) You’re better now, aren’t you? (He puts his hand encouragingly on her shoulder. She instantly rises haughtily, and stares at him defiantly. He at once drops into his usual sardonic tone.) Ah, that’s better. You are yourself again: so is Richard. Well, shall we go to tea like a quiet respectable couple, and wait for your husband’s return?

JUDITH (rather ashamed of herself). If you please. I — I am sorry to have been so foolish. (She stoops to take up the plate of toast from the fender.)

RICHARD. I am sorry, for your sake, that I am — what I am. Allow me. (He takes the plate from her and goes with it to the table.)

JUDITH (following with the teapot). Will you sit down? (He sits down at the end of the table nearest the press. There is a plate and knife laid there. The other plate is laid near it; but Judith stays at the opposite end of the table, next the fire, and takes her place there, drawing the tray towards her.) Do you take sugar?

RICHARD. No; but plenty of milk. Let me give you some toast. (He puts some on the second plate, and hands it to her, with the knife. The action shows quietly how well he knows that she has avoided her usual place so as to be as far from him as possible.)

JUDITH (consciously). Thanks. (She gives him his tea.) Won’t you help yourself?

RICHARD. Thanks. (He puts a piece of toast on his own plate; and she pours out tea for herself.)

JUDITH (observing that he tastes nothing). Don’t you like it? You are not eating anything.

RICHARD. Neither are you.

JUDITH (nervously). I never care much for my tea. Please don’t mind me.

RICHARD (Looking dreamily round). I am thinking. It is all so strange to me. I can see the beauty and peace of this home: I think I have never been more at rest in my life than at this moment; and yet I know quite well I could never live here. It’s not in my nature, I suppose, to be domesticated. But it’s very beautiful: it’s almost holy. (He muses a moment, and then laughs softly.)

JUDITH (quickly). Why do you laugh?

RICHARD. I was thinking that if any stranger came in here now, he would take us for man and wife.

JUDITH (taking offence). You mean, I suppose, that you are more my age than he is.

RICHARD (staring at this unexpected turn). I never thought of such a thing. (Sardonic again.) I see there is another side to domestic joy.

JUDITH (angrily). I would rather have a husband whom everybody respects than — than —

RICHARD. Than the devil’s disciple. You are right; but I daresay your love helps him to be a good man, just as your hate helps me to be a bad one.

JUDITH. My husband has been very good to you. He has forgiven you for insulting him, and is trying to save you. Can you not forgive him for being so much better than you are? How dare you belittle him by putting yourself in his place?

RICHARD. Did I?

JUDITH. Yes, you did. You said that if anybody came in they would take us for man and — (she stops, terror-stricken, as a squad of soldiers tramps past the window) The English soldiers! Oh, what do they —

RICHARD (listening). Sh!

A VOICE (outside). Halt! Four outside: two in with me.

Judith half rises, listening and looking with dilated eyes at Richard, who takes up his cup prosaically, and is drinking his tea when the latch goes up with a sharp click, and an English sergeant walks into the room with two privates, who post themselves at the door. He comes promptly to the table between them.

THE SERGEANT. Sorry to disturb you, mum! duty! Anthony Anderson: I arrest you in King George’s name as a rebel.

JUDITH (pointing at Richard). But that is not — (He looks up quickly at her, with a face of iron. She stops her mouth hastily with the hand she has raised to indicate him, and stands staring affrightedly.)

THE SERGEANT. Come, Parson; put your coat on and come along.

RICHARD. Yes: I’ll come. (He rises and takes a step towards his own coat; then recollects himself, and, with his back to the sergeant, moves his gaze slowly round the room without turning his head until he sees Anderson’s black coat hanging up on the press. He goes composedly to it; takes it down; and puts it on. The idea of himself as a parson tickles him: he looks down at the black sleeve on his arm, and then smiles slyly at Judith, whose white face shows him that what she is painfully struggling to grasp is not the humor of the situation but its horror. He turns to the sergeant, who is approaching him with a pair of handcuffs hidden behind him, and says lightly) Did you ever arrest a man of my cloth before, Sergeant?

THE SERGEANT (instinctively respectful, half to the black coat, half to Richard’s good breeding). Well, no sir. At least, only an army chaplain. (Showing the handcuffs.) I’m sorry, air; but duty —

RICHARD. Just so, Sergeant. Well, I’m not ashamed of them: thank you kindly for the apology. (He holds out his hands.)

SERGEANT (not availing himself of the offer). One gentleman to another, sir. Wouldn’t you like to say a word to your missis, sir, before you go?

RICHARD (smiling). Oh, we shall meet again before — eh? (Meaning “before you hang me.”)

SERGEANT (loudly, with ostentatious cheerfulness). Oh, of course, of course. No call for the lady to distress herself. Still — (in a lower voice, intended for Richard alone) your last chance, sir.

They look at one another significantly for a moment. Than Richard exhales a deep breath and turns towards Judith.

RICHARD (very distinctly). My love. (She looks at him, pitiably pale, and tries to answer, but cannot — tries also to come to him, but cannot trust herself to stand without the support of the table.) This gallant gentleman is good enough to allow us a moment of leavetaking. (The sergeant retires delicately and joins his men near the door.) He is trying to spare you the truth; but you had better know it. Are you listening to me? (She signifies assent.) Do you understand that I am going to my death? (She signifies that she understands.) Remember, you must find our friend who was with us just now. Do you understand? (She signifies yes.) See that you get him safely out of harm’s way. Don’t for your life let him know of my danger; but if he finds it out, tell him that he cannot save me: they would hang him; and they would not spare me. And tell him that I am steadfast in my religion as he is in his, and that he may depend on me to the death. (He turns to go, and meets the eye of the sergeant, who looks a little suspicious. He considers a moment, and then, turning roguishly to Judith with something of a smile breaking through his earnestness, says) And now, my dear, I am afraid the sergeant will not believe that you love me like a wife unless you give one kiss before I go.

He approaches her and holds out his arms. She quits the table and almost falls into them.

JUDITH (the words choking her). I ought to — it’s murder —

RICHARD. No: only a kiss (softly to her) for his sake.

JUDITH. I can’t. You must —

RICHARD (folding her in his arms with an impulse of compassion for her distress). My poor girl!

Judith, with a sudden effort, throws her arms round him; kisses him; and swoons away, dropping from his arms to the ground as if the kiss had killed her.

RICHARD (going quickly to the sergeant). Now, Sergeant: quick, before she comes to. The handcuffs. (He puts out his hands.)

SERGEANT (pocketing them). Never mind, sir: I’ll trust you. You’re a game one. You ought to a bin a soldier, sir. Between them two, please. (The soldiers place themselves one before Richard and one behind him. The sergeant opens the door.)

RICHARD (taking a last look round him). Goodbye, wife: goodbye, home. Muffle the drums, and quick march!

The sergeant signs to the leading soldier to march. They file out quickly.

When Anderson returns from Mrs. Dudgeon’s he is astonished to find the room apparently empty and almost in darkness except for the glow from the fire; for one of the candles has burnt out, and the other is at its last flicker.

ANDERSON. Why, what on earth — ? (Calling) Judith, Judith! (He listens: there is no answer.) Hm! (He goes to the cupboard; takes a candle from the drawer; lights it at the flicker of the expiring one on the table; and looks wonderingly at the untasted meal by its light. Then he sticks it in the candlestick; takes off his hat; and scratches his head, much puzzled. This action causes him to look at the floor for the first time; and there he sees Judith lying motionless with her eyes closed. He runs to her and stoops beside her, lifting her head.) Judith.

JUDITH (waking; for her swoon has passed into the sleep of exhaustion after suffering). Yes. Did you call? What’s the matter?

ANDERSON. I’ve just come in and found you lying here with the candles burnt out and the tea poured out and cold. What has happened?

JUDITH (still astray). I don’t know. Have I been asleep? I suppose — (she stops blankly) I don’t know.

ANDERSON (groaning). Heaven forgive me, I left you alone with that scoundrel. (Judith remembers. With an agonized cry, she clutches his shoulders and drags herself to her feet as he rises with her. He clasps her tenderly in his arms.) My poor pet!

JUDITH (frantically clinging to him). What shall I do? Oh my God, what shall I do?

ANDERSON. Never mind, never mind, my dearest dear: it was my fault. Come: you’re safe now; and you’re not hurt, are you? (He takes his arms from her to see whether she can stand.) There: that’s right, that’s right. If only you are not hurt, nothing else matters.

JUDITH. No, no, no: I’m not hurt.

ANDERSON. Thank Heaven for that! Come now: (leading her to the railed seat and making her sit down beside him) sit down and rest: you can tell me about it to-morrow. Or, (misunderstanding her distress) you shall not tell me at all if it worries you. There, there! (Cheerfully.) I’ll make you some fresh tea: that will set you up again. (He goes to the table, and empties the teapot into the slop bowl.)

JUDITH (in a strained tone). Tony.

ANDERSON. Yes, dear?

JUDITH. Do you think we are only in a dream now?

ANDERSON (glancing round at her for a moment with a pang of anxiety, though he goes on steadily and cheerfully putting fresh tea into the pot). Perhaps so, pet. But you may as well dream a cup of tea when you’re about it.

JUDITH. Oh, stop, stop. You don’t know — (Distracted she buries her face in her knotted hands.)

ANDERSON (breaking down and coming to her). My dear, what is it? I can’t bear it any longer: you must tell me. It was all my fault: I was mad to trust him.

JUDITH. No: don’t say that. You mustn’t say that. He — oh no, no: I can’t. Tony: don’t speak to me. Take my hands — both my hands. (He takes them, wondering.) Make me think of you, not of him. There’s danger, frightful danger; but it is your danger; and I can’t keep thinking of it: I can’t, I can’t: my mind goes back to his danger. He must be saved — no: you must be saved: you, you, you. (She springs up as if to do something or go somewhere, exclaiming) Oh, Heaven help me!

ANDERSON (keeping his seat and holding her hands with resolute composure). Calmly, calmly, my pet. You’re quite distracted.

JUDITH. I may well be. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. (Tearing her hands away.) I must save him. (Anderson rises in alarm as she runs wildly to the door. It is opened in her face by Essie, who hurries in, full of anxiety. The surprise is so disagreeable to Judith that it brings her to her senses. Her tone is sharp and angry as she demands) What do you want?

ESSIE. I was to come to you.

ANDERSON. Who told you to?

ESSIE (staring at him, as if his presence astonished her). Are you here?

JUDITH. Of course. Don’t be foolish, child.

ANDERSON. Gently, dearest: you’ll frighten her. (Going between them.) Come here, Essie. (She comes to him.) Who sent you?

ESSIE. Dick. He sent me word by a soldier. I was to come here at once and do whatever Mrs. Anderson told me.

ANDERSON (enlightened). A soldier! Ah, I see it all now! They have arrested Richard. (Judith makes a gesture of despair.)

ESSIE. No. I asked the soldier. Dick’s safe. But the soldier said you had been taken —

ANDERSON. I! (Bewildered, he turns to Judith for an explanation.)

JUDITH (coaxingly) All right, dear: I understand. (To Essie.) Thank you, Essie, for coming; but I don’t need you now. You may go home.

ESSIE (suspicious) Are you sure Dick has not been touched? Perhaps he told the soldier to say it was the minister. (Anxiously.) Mrs. Anderson: do you think it can have been that?

ANDERSON. Tell her the truth if it is so, Judith. She will learn it from the first neighbor she meets in the street. (Judith turns away and covers her eyes with her hands.)

ESSIE (wailing). But what will they do to him? Oh, what will they do to him? Will they hang him? (Judith shudders convulsively, and throws herself into the chair in which Richard sat at the tea table.)

ANDERSON (patting Essie’s shoulder and trying to comfort her). I hope not. I hope not. Perhaps if you’re very quiet and patient, we may be able to help him in some way.

ESSIE. Yes — help him — yes, yes, yes. I’ll be good.

ANDERSON. I must go to him at once, Judith.

JUDITH (springing up). Oh no. You must go away — far away, to some place of safety.

ANDERSON. Pooh!

JUDITH (passionately). Do you want to kill me? Do you think I can bear to live for days and days with every knock at the door — every footstep — giving me a spasm of terror? to lie awake for nights and nights in an agony of dread, listening for them to come and arrest you?

ANDERSON. Do you think it would be better to know that I had run away from my post at the first sign of danger?

JUDITH (bitterly). Oh, you won’t go. I know it. You’ll stay; and I shall go mad.

ANDERSON. My dear, your duty —

JUDITH (fiercely). What do I care about my duty?

ANDERSON (shocked). Judith!

JUDITH. I am doing my duty. I am clinging to my duty. My duty is to get you away, to save you, to leave him to his fate. (Essie utters a cry of distress and sinks on the chair at the fire, sobbing silently.) My instinct is the same as hers — to save him above all things, though it would be so much better for him to die! so much greater! But I know you will take your own way as he took it. I have no power. (She sits down sullenly on the railed seat.) I’m only a woman: I can do nothing but sit here and suffer. Only, tell him I tried to save you — that I did my best to save you.

ANDERSON. My dear, I am afraid he will be thinking more of his own danger than of mine.

JUDITH. Stop; or I shall hate you.

ANDERSON (remonstrating). Come, am I to leave you if you talk like this! your senses. (He turns to Essie.) Essie.

ESSIE (eagerly rising and drying her eyes). Yes?

ANDERSON. Just wait outside a moment, like a good girl: Mrs. Anderson is not well. (Essie looks doubtful.) Never fear: I’ll come to you presently; and I’ll go to Dick.

ESSIE. You are sure you will go to him? (Whispering.) You won’t let her prevent you?

ANDERSON (smiling). No, no: it’s all right. All right. (She goes.) That’s a good girl. (He closes the door, and returns to Judith.)

JUDITH (seated — rigid). You are going to your death.

ANDERSON (quaintly). Then I shall go in my best coat, dear. (He turns to the press, beginning to take off his coat.) Where — ? (He stares at the empty nail for a moment; then looks quickly round to the fire; strides across to it; and lifts Richard’s coat.) Why, my dear, it seems that he has gone in my best coat.

JUDITH (still motionless). Yes.

ANDERSON. Did the soldiers make a mistake?

JUDITH. Yes: they made a mistake.

ANDERSON. He might have told them. Poor fellow, he was too upset, I suppose.

JUDITH. Yes: he might have told them. So might I.

ANDERSON. Well, it’s all very puzzling — almost funny. It’s curious how these little things strike us even in the most — (he breaks off and begins putting on Richard’s coat) I’d better take him his own coat. I know what he’ll say — (imitating Richard’s sardonic manner) “Anxious about my soul, Pastor, and also about your best coat.” Eh?

JUDITH. Yes, that is just what he will say to you. (Vacantly.) It doesn’t matter: I shall never see either of you again.

ANDERSON (rallying her). Oh pooh, pooh, pooh! (He sits down beside her.) Is this how you keep your promise that I shan’t be ashamed of my brave wife?

JUDITH. No: this is how I break it. I cannot keep my promises to him: why should I keep my promises to you?

ANDERSON. Don’t speak so strangely, my love. It sounds insincere to me. (She looks unutterable reproach at him.) Yes, dear, nonsense is always insincere; and my dearest is talking nonsense. Just nonsense. (Her face darkens into dumb obstinacy. She stares straight before her, and does not look at him again, absorbed in Richard’s fate. He scans her face; sees that his rallying has produced no effect; and gives it up, making no further effort to conceal his anxiety.) I wish I knew what has frightened you so. Was there a struggle? Did he fight?

JUDITH. No. He smiled.

ANDERSON. Did he realise his danger, do you think?

JUDITH. He realised yours.

ANDERSON. Mine!

JUDITH (monotonously). He said, “See that you get him safely out of harm’s way.” I promised: I can’t keep my promise. He said, “Don’t for your life let him know of my danger.” I’ve told you of it. He said that if you found it out, you could not save him — that they will hang him and not spare you.

ANDERSON (rising in generous indignation). And you think that I will let a man with that much good in him die like a dog, when a few words might make him die like a Christian? I’m ashamed of you, Judith.

JUDITH. He will be steadfast in his religion as you are in yours; and you may depend on him to the death. He said so.

ANDERSON. God forgive him! What else did he say?

JUDITH. He said goodbye.

ANDERSON (fidgeting nervously to and fro in great concern). Poor fellow, poor fellow! You said goodbye to him in all kindness and charity, Judith, I hope.

JUDITH. I kissed him.

ANDERSON. What! Judith!

JUDITH. Are you angry?

ANDERSON. No, no. You were right: you were right. Poor fellow, poor fellow! (Greatly distressed.) To be hanged like that at his age! And then did they take him away?

JUDITH (wearily). Then you were here: that’s the next thing I remember. I suppose I fainted. Now bid me goodbye, Tony. Perhaps I shall faint again. I wish I could die.

ANDERSON. No, no, my dear: you must pull yourself together and be sensible. I am in no danger — not the least in the world.

JUDITH (solemnly). You are going to your death, Tony — your sure death, if God will let innocent men be murdered. They will not let you see him: they will arrest you the moment you give your name. It was for you the soldiers came.

ANDERSON (thunderstruck). For me!!! (His fists clinch; his neck thickens; his face reddens; the fleshy purses under his eyes become injected with hot blood; the man of peace vanishes, transfigured into a choleric and formidable man of war. Still, she does not come out of her absorption to look at him: her eyes are steadfast with a mechanical reflection of Richard’s stead-fastness.)

JUDITH. He took your place: he is dying to save you. That is why he went in your coat. That is why I kissed him.

ANDERSON (exploding). Blood an’ owns! (His voice is rough and dominant, his gesture full of brute energy.) Here! Essie, Essie!

ESSIE (running in). Yes.

ANDERSON (impetuously). Off with you as hard as you can run, to the inn. Tell them to saddle the fastest and strongest horse they have (Judith rises breathless, and stares at him incredulously) — the chestnut mare, if she’s fresh — without a moment’s delay. Go into the stable yard and tell the black man there that I’ll give him a silver dollar if the horse is waiting for me when I come, and that I am close on your heels. Away with you. (His energy sends Essie flying from the room. He pounces on his riding boots; rushes with them to the chair at the fire; and begins pulling them on.)

JUDITH (unable to believe such a thing of him). You are not going to him!

ANDERSON (busy with the boots). Going to him! What good would that do? (Growling to himself as he gets the first boot on with a wrench) I’ll go to them, so I will. (To Judith peremptorily) Get me the pistols: I want them. And money, money: I want money — all the money in the house. (He stoops over the other boot, grumbling) A great satisfaction it would be to him to have my company on the gallows. (He pulls on the boot.)

JUDITH. You are deserting him, then?

ANDERSON. Hold your tongue, woman; and get me the pistols. (She goes to the press and takes from it a leather belt with two pistols, a powder horn, and a bag of bullets attached to it. She throws it on the table. Then she unlocks a drawer in the press and takes out a purse. Anderson grabs the belt and buckles it on, saying) If they took him for me in my coat, perhaps they’ll take me for him in his. (Hitching the belt into its place) Do I look like him?

JUDITH (turning with the purse in her hand). Horribly unlike him.

ANDERSON (snatching the purse from her and emptying it on the table). Hm! We shall see.

JUDITH (sitting down helplessly). Is it of any use to pray, do you think, Tony?

ANDERSON (counting the money). Pray! Can we pray Swindon’s rope off Richard’s neck?

JUDITH. God may soften Major Swindon’s heart.

ANDERSON (contemptuously — pocketing a handful of money). Let him, then. I am not God; and I must go to work another way. (Judith gasps at the blasphemy. He throws the purse on the table.) Keep that. I’ve taken 25 dollars.

JUDITH. Have you forgotten even that you are a minister?

ANDERSON. Minister be — faugh! My hat: where’s my hat? (He snatches up hat and cloak, and puts both on in hot haste.) Now listen, you. If you can get a word with him by pretending you’re his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning: that will give me all the start I need.

JUDITH (solemnly). You may depend on him to the death.

ANDERSON. You’re a fool, a fool, Judith (for a moment checking the torrent of his haste, and speaking with something of his old quiet and impressive conviction). You don’t know the man you’re married to. (Essie returns. He swoops at her at once.) Well: is the horse ready?

ESSIE (breathless). It will be ready when you come.

ANDERSON. Good. (He makes for the door.)

JUDITH (rising and stretching out her arms after him involuntarily). Won’t you say goodbye?

ANDERSON. And waste another half minute! Psha! (He rushes out like an avalanche.)

ESSIE (hurrying to Judith). He has gone to save Richard, hasn’t he?

JUDITH. To save Richard! No: Richard has saved him. He has gone to save himself. Richard must die.

Essie screams with terror and falls on her knees, hiding her face. Judith, without heeding her, looks rigidly straight in front of her, at the vision of Richard, dying.

ACT III

Early next morning the sergeant, at the British headquarters in the Town Hall, unlocks the door of a little empty panelled waiting room, and invites Judith to enter. She has had a bad night, probably a rather delirious one; for even in the reality of the raw morning, her fixed gaze comes back at moments when her attention is not strongly held.

The sergeant considers that her feelings do her credit, and is sympathetic in an encouraging military way. Being a fine figure of a man, vain of his uniform and of his rank, he feels specially qualified, in a respectful way, to console her.

SERGEANT. You can have a quiet word with him here, mum.

JUDITH. Shall I have long to wait?

SERGEANT. No, mum, not a minute. We kep him in the Bridewell for the night; and he’s just been brought over here for the court martial. Don’t fret, mum: he slep like a child, and has made a rare good breakfast.

JUDITH (incredulously). He is in good spirits!

SERGEANT. Tip top, mum. The chaplain looked in to see him last night; and he won seventeen shillings off him at spoil five. He spent it among us like the gentleman he is. Duty’s duty, mum, of course; but you’re among friends here. (The tramp of a couple of soldiers is heard approaching.) There: I think he’s coming. (Richard comes in, without a sign of care or captivity in his bearing. The sergeant nods to the two soldiers, and shows them the key of the room in his hand. They withdraw.) Your good lady, sir.

RICHARD (going to her). What! My wife. My adored one. (He takes her hand and kisses it with a perverse, raffish gallantry.) How long do you allow a brokenhearted husband for leave-taking, Sergeant?

SERGEANT. As long as we can, sir. We shall not disturb you till the court sits.

RICHARD. But it has struck the hour.

SERGEANT. So it has, sir; but there’s a delay. General Burgoyne’s just arrived — Gentlemanly Johnny we call him, sir — and he won’t have done finding fault with everything this side of half past. I know him, sir: I served with him in Portugal. You may count on twenty minutes, sir; and by your leave I won’t waste any more of them. (He goes out, locking the door. Richard immediately drops his raffish manner and turns to Judith with considerate sincerity.)

RICHARD. Mrs. Anderson: this visit is very kind of you. And how are you after last night? I had to leave you before you recovered; but I sent word to Essie to go and look after you. Did she understand the message?

JUDITH (breathless and urgent). Oh, don’t think of me: I haven’t come here to talk about myself. Are they going to — to — (meaning “to hang you”)?

RICHARD (whimsically). At noon, punctually. At least, that was when they disposed of Uncle Peter. (She shudders.) Is your husband safe? Is he on the wing?

JUDITH. He is no longer my husband.

RICHARD (opening his eyes wide). Eh!

JUDITH. I disobeyed you. I told him everything. I expected him to come here and save you. I wanted him to come here and save you. He ran away instead.

RICHARD. Well, that’s what I meant him to do. What good would his staying have done? They’d only have hanged us both.

JUDITH (with reproachful earnestness). Richard Dudgeon: on your honour, what would you have done in his place?

RICHARD. Exactly what he has done, of course.

JUDITH. Oh, why will you not be simple with me — honest and straightforward? If you are so selfish as that, why did you let them take you last night?

RICHARD (gaily). Upon my life, Mrs. Anderson, I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself that question ever since; and I can find no manner of reason for acting as I did.

JUDITH. You know you did it for his sake, believing he was a more worthy man than yourself.

RICHARD (laughing). Oho! No: that’s a very pretty reason, I must say; but I’m not so modest as that. No: it wasn’t for his sake.

JUDITH (after a pause, during which she looks shamefacedly at him, blushing painfully). Was it for my sake?

RICHARD (gallantly). Well, you had a hand in it. It must have been a little for your sake. You let them take me, at all events.

JUDITH. Oh, do you think I have not been telling myself that all night? Your death will be at my door. (Impulsively, she gives him her hand, and adds, with intense earnestness) If I could save you as you saved him, I would do it, no matter how cruel the death was.

RICHARD (holding her hand and smiling, but keeping her almost at arm’s length). I am very sure I shouldn’t let you.

JUDITH. Don’t you see that I can save you?

RICHARD. How? By changing clothes with me, eh?

JUDITH (disengaging her hand to touch his lips with it). Don’t (meaning “Don’t jest”). No: by telling the Court who you really are.

RICHARD (frowning). No use: they wouldn’t spare me; and it would spoil half of his chance of escaping. They are determined to cow us by making an example of somebody on that gallows to-day. Well, let us cow them by showing that we can stand by one another to the death. That is the only force that can send Burgoyne back across the Atlantic and make America a nation.

JUDITH (impatiently). Oh, what does all that matter?

RICHARD (laughing). True: what does it matter? what does anything matter? You see, men have these strange notions, Mrs. Anderson; and women see the folly of them.

JUDITH. Women have to lose those they love through them.

RICHARD. They can easily get fresh lovers.

JUDITH (revolted). Oh! (Vehemently) Do you realise that you are going to kill yourself?

RICHARD. The only man I have any right to kill, Mrs. Anderson. Don’t be concerned: no woman will lose her lover through my death. (Smiling) Bless you, nobody cares for me. Have you heard that my mother is dead?

JUDITH. Dead!

RICHARD. Of heart disease — in the night. Her last word to me was her curse: I don’t think I could have borne her blessing. My other relatives will not grieve much on my account. Essie will cry for a day or two; but I have provided for her: I made my own will last night.

JUDITH (stonily, after a moment’s silence). And I!

RICHARD (surprised). You?

JUDITH. Yes, I. Am I not to care at all?

RICHARD (gaily and bluntly). Not a scrap. Oh, you expressed your feelings towards me very frankly yesterday. What happened may have softened you for the moment; but believe me, Mrs. Anderson, you don’t like a bone in my skin or a hair on my head. I shall be as good a riddance at 12 today as I should have been at 12 yesterday.

JUDITH (her voice trembling). What can I do to show you that you are mistaken?

RICHARD. Don’t trouble. I’ll give you credit for liking me a little better than you did. All I say is that my death will not break your heart.

JUDITH (almost in a whisper). How do you know? (She puts her hands on his shoulders and looks intently at him.)

RICHARD (amazed — divining the truth). Mrs. Anderson!!! (The bell of the town clock strikes the quarter. He collects himself, and removes her hands, saying rather coldly) Excuse me: they will be here for me presently. It is too late.

JUDITH. It is not too late. Call me as witness: they will never kill you when they know how heroically you have acted.

RICHARD (with some scorn). Indeed! But if I don’t go through with it, where will the heroism be? I shall simply have tricked them; and they’ll hang me for that like a dog. Serve me right too!

JUDITH (wildly). Oh, I believe you WANT to die.

RICHARD (obstinately). No I don’t.

JUDITH. Then why not try to save yourself? I implore you — listen. You said just now that you saved him for my sake — yes (clutching him as he recoils with a gesture of denial) a little for my sake. Well, save yourself for my sake. And I will go with you to the end of the world.

RICHARD (taking her by the wrists and holding her a little way from him, looking steadily at her). Judith.

JUDITH (breathless — delighted at the name). Yes.

RICHARD. If I said — to please you — that I did what I did ever so little for your sake, I lied as men always lie to women. You know how much I have lived with worthless men — aye, and worthless women too. Well, they could all rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in love. (The word love comes from him with true Puritan scorn.) That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that only comes out red hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband, or (ruthlessly) for you (she droops, stricken) as I do for myself. I had no motive and no interest: all I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it. I don’t know why not: I see myself as a fool for my pains; but I could not and I cannot. I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature; and I may not go against it, gallows or no gallows. (She has slowly raised her head and is now looking full at him.) I should have done the same for any other man in the town, or any other man’s wife. (Releasing her.) Do you understand that?

JUDITH. Yes: you mean that you do not love me.

RICHARD (revolted — with fierce contempt). Is that all it means to you?

JUDITH. What more — what worse — can it mean to me?

(The sergeant knocks. The blow on the door jars on her heart.) Oh, one moment more. (She throws herself on her knees.) I pray to you —

RICHARD. Hush! (Calling) Come in. (The sergeant unlocks the door and opens it. The guard is with him.)

SERGEANT (coming in). Time’s up, sir.

RICHARD. Quite ready, Sergeant. Now, my dear. (He attempts to raise her.)

JUDITH (clinging to him). Only one thing more — I entreat, I implore you. Let me be present in the court. I have seen Major Swindon: he said I should be allowed if you asked it. You will ask it. It is my last request: I shall never ask you anything again. (She clasps his knee.) I beg and pray it of you.

RICHARD. If I do, will you be silent?

JUDITH. Yes.

RICHARD. You will keep faith?

JUDITH. I will keep — (She breaks down, sobbing.)

RICHARD (taking her arm to lift her). Just — her other arm, Sergeant.

They go out, she sobbing convulsively, supported by the two men.

Meanwhile, the Council Chamber is ready for the court martial. It is a large, lofty room, with a chair of state in the middle under a tall canopy with a gilt crown, and maroon curtains with the royal monogram G. R. In front of the chair is a table, also draped in maroon, with a bell, a heavy inkstand, and writing materials on it. Several chairs are set at the table. The door is at the right hand of the occupant of the chair of state when it has an occupant: at present it is empty. Major Swindon, a pale, sandy-haired, very conscientious looking man of about 45, sits at the end of the table with his back to the door, writing. He is alone until the sergeant announces the General in a subdued manner which suggests that Gentlemanly Johnny has been making his presence felt rather heavily.

SERGEANT. The General, sir.

Swindon rises hastily. The General comes in, the sergeant goes out. General Burgoyne is 55, and very well preserved. He is a man of fashion, gallant enough to have made a distinguished marriage by an elopement, witty enough to write successful comedies, aristocratically-connected enough to have had opportunities of high military distinction. His eyes, large, brilliant, apprehensive, and intelligent, are his most remarkable feature: without them his fine nose and small mouth would suggest rather more fastidiousness and less force than go to the making of a first rate general. Just now the eyes are angry and tragic, and the mouth and nostrils tense.

BURGOYNE. Major Swindon, I presume.

SWINDON. Yes. General Burgoyne, if I mistake not. (They bow to one another ceremoniously.) I am glad to have the support of your presence this morning. It is not particularly lively business, hanging this poor devil of a minister.

BURGOYNE (throwing himself onto Swindon’s chair). No, sir, it is not. It is making too much of the fellow to execute him: what more could you have done if he had been a member of the Church of England? Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. However, you have committed us to hanging him: and the sooner he is hanged the better.

SWINDON. We have arranged it for 12 o’clock. Nothing remains to be done except to try him.

BURGOYNE (looking at him with suppressed anger). Nothing — except to save our own necks, perhaps. Have you heard the news from Springtown?

SWINDON. Nothing special. The latest reports are satisfactory.

BURGOYNE (rising in amazement). Satisfactory, sir! Satisfactory!! (He stares at him for a moment, and then adds, with grim intensity) I am glad you take that view of them.

SWINDON (puzzled). Do I understand that in your opinion —

BURGOYNE. I do not express my opinion. I never stoop to that habit of profane language which unfortunately coarsens our profession. If I did, sir, perhaps I should be able to express my opinion of the news from Springtown — the news which YOU (severely) have apparently not heard. How soon do you get news from your supports here? — in the course of a month eh?

SWINDON (turning sulky). I suppose the reports have been taken to you, sir, instead of to me. Is there anything serious?

BURGOYNE (taking a report from his pocket and holding it up). Springtown’s in the hands of the rebels. (He throws the report on the table.)

SWINDON (aghast). Since yesterday!

BURGOYNE. Since two o’clock this morning. Perhaps WE shall be in their hands before two o’clock to-morrow morning. Have you thought of that?

SWINDON (confidently). As to that, General, the British soldier will give a good account of himself.

BURGOYNE (bitterly). And therefore, I suppose, sir, the British officer need not know his business: the British soldier will get him out of all his blunders with the bayonet. In future, sir, I must ask you to be a little less generous with the blood of your men, and a little more generous with your own brains.

SWINDON. I am sorry I cannot pretend to your intellectual eminence, sir. I can only do my best, and rely on the devotion of my countrymen.

BURGOYNE (suddenly becoming suavely sarcastic). May I ask are you writing a melodrama, Major Swindon?

SWINDON (flushing). No, sir.

BURGOYNE. What a pity! WHAT a pity! (Dropping his sarcastic tone and facing him suddenly and seriously) Do you at all realize, sir, that we have nothing standing between us and destruction but our own bluff and the sheepishness of these colonists? They are men of the same English stock as ourselves: six to one of us (repeating it emphatically), six to one, sir; and nearly half our troops are Hessians, Brunswickers, German dragoons, and Indians with scalping knives. These are the countrymen on whose devotion you rely! Suppose the colonists find a leader! Suppose the news from Springtown should turn out to mean that they have already found a leader! What shall we do then? Eh?

SWINDON (sullenly). Our duty, sir, I presume.

BURGOYNE (again sarcastic — giving him up as a fool). Quite so, quite so. Thank you, Major Swindon, thank you. Now you’ve settled the question, sir — thrown a flood of light on the situation. What a comfort to me to feel that I have at my side so devoted and able an officer to support me in this emergency! I think, sir, it will probably relieve both our feelings if we proceed to hang this dissenter without further delay (he strikes the bell), especially as I am debarred by my principles from the customary military vent for my feelings. (The sergeant appears.) Bring your man in.

SERGEANT. Yes, sir.

BURGOYNE. And mention to any officer you may meet that the court cannot wait any longer for him.

SWINDON (keeping his temper with difficulty). The staff is perfectly ready, sir. They have been waiting your convenience for fully half an hour. PERFECTLY ready, sir.

BURGOYNE (blandly). So am I. (Several officers come in and take their seats. One of them sits at the end of the table furthest from the door, and acts throughout as clerk to the court, making notes of the proceedings. The uniforms are those of the 9th, 20th, 21st, 24th, 47th, 53rd, and 62nd British Infantry. One officer is a Major General of the Royal Artillery. There are also German officers of the Hessian Rifles, and of German dragoon and Brunswicker regiments.) Oh, good morning, gentlemen. Sorry to disturb you, I am sure. Very good of you to spare us a few moments.

SWINDON. Will you preside, sir?

BURGOYNE (becoming additionally, polished, lofty, sarcastic and urbane now that he is in public). No, sir: I feel my own deficiencies too keenly to presume so far. If you will kindly allow me, I will sit at the feet of Gamaliel. (He takes the chair at the end of the table next the door, and motions Swindon to the chair of state, waiting for him to be seated before sitting himself.)

SWINDON (greatly annoyed). As you please, sir. I am only trying to do my duty under excessively trying circumstances. (He takes his place in the chair of state.)

Burgoyne, relaxing his studied demeanor for the moment, sits down and begins to read the report with knitted brows and careworn looks, reflecting on his desperate situation and Swindon’s uselessness. Richard is brought in. Judith walks beside him. Two soldiers precede and two follow him, with the sergeant in command. They cross the room to the wall opposite the door; but when Richard has just passed before the chair of state the sergeant stops him with a touch on the arm, and posts himself behind him, at his elbow. Judith stands timidly at the wall. The four soldiers place themselves in a squad near her.

BURGOYNE (looking up and seeing Judith). Who is that woman?

SERGEANT. Prisoner’s wife, sir.

SWINDON (nervously). She begged me to allow her to be present; and I thought —

BURGOYNE (completing the sentence for him ironically). You thought it would be a pleasure for her. Quite so, quite so. (Blandly) Give the lady a chair; and make her thoroughly comfortable.

The sergeant fetches a chair and places it near Richard.

JUDITH. Thank you, sir. (She sits down after an awe-stricken curtsy to Burgoyne, which he acknowledges by a dignified bend of his head.)

SWINDON (to Richard, sharply). Your name, sir?

RICHARD (affable, but obstinate). Come: you don’t mean to say that you’ve brought me here without knowing who I am?

SWINDON. As a matter of form, sir, give your name.

RICHARD. As a matter of form then, my name is Anthony Anderson, Presbyterian minister in this town.

BURGOYNE (interested). Indeed! Pray, Mr. Anderson, what do you gentlemen believe?

RICHARD. I shall be happy to explain if time is allowed me. I cannot undertake to complete your conversion in less than a fortnight.

SWINDON (snubbing him). We are not here to discuss your views.

BURGOYNE (with an elaborate bow to the unfortunate Swindon). I stand rebuked.

SWINDON (embarrassed). Oh, not you, I as —

BURGOYNE. Don’t mention it. (To Richard, very politely) Any political views, Mr. Anderson?

RICHARD. I understand that that is just what we are here to find out.

SWINDON (severely). Do you mean to deny that you are a rebel?

RICHARD. I am an American, sir.

SWINDON. What do you expect me to think of that speech, Mr. Anderson?

RICHARD. I never expect a soldier to think, sir.

Burgoyne is boundlessly delighted by this retort, which almost reconciles him to the loss of America.

SWINDON (whitening with anger). I advise you not to be insolent, prisoner.

RICHARD. You can’t help yourself, General. When you make up your mind to hang a man, you put yourself at a disadvantage with him. Why should I be civil to you? I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

SWINDON. You have no right to assume that the court has made up its mind without a fair trial. And you will please not address me as General. I am Major Swindon.

RICHARD. A thousand pardons. I thought I had the honor of addressing Gentlemanly Johnny.

Sensation among the officers. The sergeant has a narrow escape from a guffaw.

BURGOYNE (with extreme suavity). I believe I am Gentlemanly Johnny, sir, at your service. My more intimate friends call me General Burgoyne. (Richard bows with perfect politeness.) You will understand, sir, I hope, since you seem to be a gentleman and a man of some spirit in spite of your calling, that if we should have the misfortune to hang you, we shall do so as a mere matter of political necessity and military duty, without any personal ill-feeling.

RICHARD. Oh, quite so. That makes all the difference in the world, of course.

They all smile in spite of themselves: and some of the younger officers burst out laughing.

JUDITH (her dread and horror deepening at every one of these jests and compliments). How CAN you?

RICHARD. You promised to be silent.

BURGOYNE (to Judith, with studied courtesy). Believe me, madam, your husband is placing us under the greatest obligation by taking this very disagreeable business so thoroughly in the spirit of a gentleman. Sergeant: give Mr. Anderson a chair. (The sergeant does so. Richard sits down.) Now, Major Swindon: we are waiting for you.

SWINDON. You are aware, I presume, Mr. Anderson, of your obligations as a subject of His Majesty King George the Third.

RICHARD. I am aware, sir, that His Majesty King George the Third is about to hang me because I object to Lord North’s robbing me.

SWINDON. That is a treasonable speech, sir.

RICHARD (briefly). Yes. I meant it to be.

BURGOYNE (strongly deprecating this line of defence, but still polite). Don’t you think, Mr. Anderson, that this is rather — if you will excuse the word — a vulgar line to take? Why should you cry out robbery because of a stamp duty and a tea duty and so forth? After all, it is the essence of your position as a gentleman that you pay with a good grace.

RICHARD. It is not the money, General. But to be swindled by a pig-headed lunatic like King George.

SWINDON (scandalised). Chut, sir — silence!

SERGEANT (in stentorian tones, greatly shocked). Silence!

BURGOYNE (unruffled). Ah, that is another point of view. My position does not allow of my going into that, except in private. But (shrugging his shoulders) of course, Mr. Anderson, if you are determined to be hanged (Judith flinches), there’s nothing more to be said. An unusual taste! however (with a final shrug) — !

SWINDON (to Burgoyne). Shall we call witnesses?

RICHARD. What need is there of witnesses? If the townspeople here had listened to me, you would have found the streets barricaded, the houses loopholed, and the people in arms to hold the town against you to the last man. But you arrived, unfortunately, before we had got out of the talking stage; and then it was too late.

SWINDON (severely). Well, sir, we shall teach you and your townspeople a lesson they will not forget. Have you anything more to say?

RICHARD. I think you might have the decency to treat me as a prisoner of war, and shoot me like a man instead of hanging me like a dog.

BURGOYNE (sympathetically). Now there, Mr. Anderson, you talk like a civilian, if you will excuse my saying so. Have you any idea of the average marksmanship of the army of His Majesty King George the Third? If we make you up a firing party, what will happen? Half of them will miss you: the rest will make a mess of the business and leave you to the provo-marshal’s pistol. Whereas we can hang you in a perfectly workmanlike and agreeable way. (Kindly) Let me persuade you to be hanged, Mr. Anderson?

JUDITH (sick with horror). My God!

RICHARD (to Judith). Your promise! (To Burgoyne) Thank you, General: that view of the case did not occur to me before. To oblige you, I withdraw my objection to the rope. Hang me, by all means.

BURGOYNE (smoothly). Will 12 o’clock suit you, Mr. Anderson?

RICHARD. I shall be at your disposal then, General.

BURGOYNE (rising). Nothing more to be said, gentlemen. (They all rise.)

JUDITH (rushing to the table). Oh, you are not going to murder a man like that, without a proper trial — without thinking of what you are doing — without — (She cannot find words.)

RICHARD. Is this how you keep your promise?

JUDITH. If I am not to speak, you must. Defend yourself: save yourself: tell them the truth.

RICHARD (worriedly). I have told them truth enough to hang me ten times over. If you say another word you will risk other lives; but you will not save mine.

BURGOYNE. My good lady, our only desire is to save unpleasantness. What satisfaction would it give you to have a solemn fuss made, with my friend Swindon in a black cap and so forth? I am sure we are greatly indebted to the admirable tact and gentlemanly feeling shown by your husband.

JUDITH (throwing the words in his face). Oh, you are mad. Is it nothing to you what wicked thing you do if only you do it like a gentleman? Is it nothing to you whether you are a murderer or not, if only you murder in a red coat? (Desperately) You shall not hang him: that man is not my husband.

The officers look at one another, and whisper: some of the Germans asking their neighbors to explain what the woman has said. Burgoyne, who has been visibly shaken by Judith’s reproach, recovers himself promptly at this new development. Richard meanwhile raises his voice above the buzz.

RICHARD. I appeal to you, gentlemen, to put an end to this. She will not believe that she cannot save me. Break up the court.

BURGOYNE (in a voice so quiet and firm that it restores silence at once). One moment, Mr. Anderson. One moment, gentlemen. (He resumes his seat. Swindon and the officers follow his example.) Let me understand you clearly, madam. Do you mean that this gentleman is not your husband, or merely — I wish to put this with all delicacy — that you are not his wife?

JUDITH. I don’t know what you mean. I say that he is not my husband — that my husband has escaped. This man took his place to save him. Ask anyone in the town — send out into the street for the first person you find there, and bring him in as a witness. He will tell you that the prisoner is not Anthony Anderson.

BURGOYNE (quietly, as before). Sergeant.

SERGEANT. Yes sir.

BURGOYNE. Go out into the street and bring in the first townsman you see there.

SERGEANT (making for the door). Yes sir.

BURGOYNE (as the sergeant passes). The first clean, sober townsman you see.

SERGEANT. Yes Sir. (He goes out.)

BURGOYNE. Sit down, Mr. Anderson — if I may call you so for the present. (Richard sits down.) Sit down, madam, whilst we wait. Give the lady a newspaper.

RICHARD (indignantly). Shame!

BURGOYNE (keenly, with a half smile). If you are not her husband, sir, the case is not a serious one — for her. (Richard bites his lip silenced.)

JUDITH (to Richard, as she returns to her seat). I couldn’t help it. (He shakes his head. She sits down.)

BURGOYNE. You will understand of course, Mr. Anderson, that you must not build on this little incident. We are bound to make an example of somebody.

RICHARD. I quite understand. I suppose there’s no use in my explaining.

BURGOYNE. I think we should prefer independent testimony, if you don’t mind.

The sergeant, with a packet of papers in his hand, returns conducting Christy, who is much scared.

SERGEANT (giving Burgoyne the packet). Dispatches, Sir. Delivered by a corporal of the 53rd. Dead beat with hard riding, sir.

Burgoyne opens the dispatches, and presently becomes absorbed in them. They are so serious as to take his attention completely from the court martial.

SERGEANT (to Christy). Now then. Attention; and take your hat off. (He posts himself in charge of Christy, who stands on Burgoyne’s side of the court.)

RICHARD (in his usual bullying tone to Christy). Don’t be frightened, you fool: you’re only wanted as a witness. They’re not going to hang YOU.

SWINDON. What’s your name?

CHRISTY. Christy.

RICHARD (impatiently). Christopher Dudgeon, you blatant idiot. Give your full name.

SWINDON. Be silent, prisoner. You must not prompt the witness.

RICHARD. Very well. But I warn you you’ll get nothing out of him unless you shake it out of him. He has been too well brought up by a pious mother to have any sense or manhood left in him.

BURGOYNE (springing up and speaking to the sergeant in a startling voice). Where is the man who brought these?

SERGEANT. In the guard-room, sir.

Burgoyne goes out with a haste that sets the officers exchanging looks.

SWINDON (to Christy). Do you know Anthony Anderson, the Presbyterian minister?

CHRISTY. Of course I do. (Implying that Swindon must be an ass not to know it.)

SWINDON. Is he here?

CHRISTY (staring round). I don’t know.

SWINDON. Do you see him?

CHRISTY. No.

SWINDON. You seem to know the prisoner?

CHRISTY. Do you mean Dick?

SWINDON. Which is Dick?

CHRISTY (pointing to Richard). Him.

SWINDON. What is his name?

CHRISTY. Dick.

RICHARD. Answer properly, you jumping jackass. What do they know about Dick?

CHRISTY. Well, you are Dick, ain’t you? What am I to say?

SWINDON. Address me, sir; and do you, prisoner, be silent. Tell us who the prisoner is.

CHRISTY. He’s my brother Dudgeon.

SWINDON. Your brother!

CHRISTY. Yes.

SWINDON. You are sure he is not Anderson.

CHRISTY. Who?

RICHARD (exasperatedly). Me, me, me, you —

SWINDON. Silence, sir.

SERGEANT (shouting). Silence.

RICHARD (impatiently). Yah! (To Christy) He wants to know am I Minister Anderson. Tell him, and stop grinning like a zany.

CHRISTY (grinning more than ever). YOU Pastor Anderson! (To Swindon) Why, Mr. Anderson’s a minister — a very good man; and Dick’s a bad character: the respectable people won’t speak to him. He’s the bad brother: I’m the good one, (The officers laugh outright. The soldiers grin.)

SWINDON. Who arrested this man?

SERGEANT. I did, sir. I found him in the minister’s house, sitting at tea with the lady with his coat off, quite at home. If he isn’t married to her, he ought to be.

SWINDON. Did he answer to the minister’s name?

SERGEANT. Yes sir, but not to a minister’s nature. You ask the chaplain, sir.

SWINDON (to Richard, threateningly). So, sir, you have attempted to cheat us. And your name is Richard Dudgeon?

RICHARD. You’ve found it out at last, have you?

SWINDON. Dudgeon is a name well known to us, eh?

RICHARD. Yes: Peter Dudgeon, whom you murdered, was my uncle.

SWINDON. Hm! (He compresses his lips and looks at Richard with vindictive gravity.)

CHRISTY. Are they going to hang you, Dick?

RICHARD. Yes. Get out: they’ve done with you.

CHRISTY. And I may keep the china peacocks?

RICHARD (jumping up). Get out. Get out, you blithering baboon, you. (Christy flies, panicstricken.)

SWINDON (rising — all rise). Since you have taken the minister’s place, Richard Dudgeon, you shall go through with it. The execution will take place at 12 o’clock as arranged; and unless Anderson surrenders before then you shall take his place on the gallows. Sergeant: take your man out.

JUDITH (distracted). No, no —

SWINDON (fiercely, dreading a renewal of her entreaties). Take that woman away.

RICHARD (springing across the table with a tiger-like bound, and seizing Swindon by the throat). You infernal scoundrel.

The sergeant rushes to the rescue from one side, the soldiers from the other. They seize Richard and drag him back to his place. Swindon, who has been thrown supine on the table, rises, arranging his stock. He is about to speak, when he is anticipated by Burgoyne, who has just appeared at the door with two papers in his hand: a white letter and a blue dispatch.

BURGOYNE (advancing to the table, elaborately cool). What is this? What’s happening? Mr. Anderson: I’m astonished at you.

RICHARD. I am sorry I disturbed you, General. I merely wanted to strangle your understrapper there. (Breaking out violently at Swindon) Why do you raise the devil in me by bullying the woman like that? You oatmeal faced dog, I’d twist your cursed head off with the greatest satisfaction. (He puts out his hands to the sergeant) Here: handcuff me, will you; or I’ll not undertake to keep my fingers off him.

The sergeant takes out a pair of handcuffs and looks to Burgoyne for instructions.

BURGOYNE. Have you addressed profane language to the lady, Major Swindon?

SWINDON (very angry). No, sir, certainly not. That question should not have been put to me. I ordered the woman to be removed, as she was disorderly; and the fellow sprang at me. Put away those handcuffs. I am perfectly able to take care of myself.

RICHARD. Now you talk like a man, I have no quarrel with you.

BURGOYNE. Mr. Anderson —

SWINDON. His name is Dudgeon, sir, Richard Dudgeon. He is an impostor.

BURGOYNE (brusquely). Nonsense, sir; you hanged Dudgeon at Springtown.

RICHARD. It was my uncle, General.

BURGOYNE. Oh, your uncle. (To Swindon, handsomely) I beg your pardon, Major Swindon. (Swindon acknowledges the apology stiffly. Burgoyne turns to Richard) We are somewhat unfortunate in our relations with your family. Well, Mr. Dudgeon, what I wanted to ask you is this: Who is (reading the name from the letter) William Maindeck Parshotter?

RICHARD. He is the Mayor of Springtown.

BURGOYNE. Is William — Maindeck and so on — a man of his word?

RICHARD. Is he selling you anything?

BURGOYNE. No.

RICHARD. Then you may depend on him.

BURGOYNE. Thank you, Mr.— ‘m Dudgeon. By the way, since you are not Mr. Anderson, do we still — eh, Major Swindon? (meaning “do we still hang him?”)

RICHARD. The arrangements are unaltered, General.

BURGOYNE. Ah, indeed. I am sorry. Good morning, Mr. Dudgeon. Good morning, madam.

RICHARD (interrupting Judith almost fiercely as she is about to make some wild appeal, and taking her arm resolutely). Not one word more. Come.

She looks imploringly at him, but is overborne by his determination. They are marched out by the four soldiers: the sergeant, very sulky, walking between Swindon and Richard, whom he watches as if he were a dangerous animal.

BURGOYNE. Gentlemen: we need not detain you. Major Swindon: a word with you. (The officers go out. Burgoyne waits with unruffled serenity until the last of them disappears. Then he becomes very grave, and addresses Swindon for the first time without his title.) Swindon: do you know what this is (showing him the letter)?

SWINDON. What?

BURGOYNE. A demand for a safe-conduct for an officer of their militia to come here and arrange terms with us.

SWINDON. Oh, they are giving in.

BURGOYNE. They add that they are sending the man who raised Springtown last night and drove us out; so that we may know that we are dealing with an officer of importance.

SWINDON. Pooh!

BURGOYNE. He will be fully empowered to arrange the terms of — guess what.

SWINDON. Their surrender, I hope.

BURGOYNE. No: our evacuation of the town. They offer us just six hours to clear out.

SWINDON. What monstrous impudence!

BURGOYNE. What shall we do, eh?

SWINDON. March on Springtown and strike a decisive blow at once.

BURGOYNE (quietly). Hm! (Turning to the door) Come to the adjutant’s office.

SWINDON. What for?

BURGOYNE. To write out that safe-conduct. (He puts his hand to the door knob to open it.)

SWINDON (who has not budged). General Burgoyne.

BURGOYNE (returning). Sir?

SWINDON. It is my duty to tell you, sir, that I do not consider the threats of a mob of rebellious tradesmen a sufficient reason for our giving way.

BURGOYNE (imperturbable). Suppose I resign my command to you, what will you do?

SWINDON. I will undertake to do what we have marched south from Boston to do, and what General Howe has marched north from New York to do: effect a junction at Albany and wipe out the rebel army with our united forces.

BURGOYNE (enigmatically). And will you wipe out our enemies in London, too?

SWINDON. In London! What enemies?

BURGOYNE (forcibly). Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and Red Tape. (He holds up the dispatch and adds, with despair in his face and voice) I have just learnt, sir, that General Howe is still in New York.

SWINDON (thunderstruck). Good God! He has disobeyed orders!

BURGOYNE (with sardonic calm). He has received no orders, sir. Some gentleman in London forgot to dispatch them: he was leaving town for his holiday, I believe. To avoid upsetting his arrangements, England will lose her American colonies; and in a few days you and I will be at Saratoga with 5,000 men to face 16,000 rebels in an impregnable position.

SWINDON (appalled). Impossible!

BURGOYNE (coldly). I beg your pardon!

SWINDON. I can’t believe it! What will History say?

BURGOYNE. History, sir, will tell lies, as usual. Come: we must send the safe-conduct. (He goes out.)

SWINDON (following distractedly). My God, my God! We shall be wiped out.

As noon approaches there is excitement in the market place. The gallows which hangs there permanently for the terror of evildoers, with such minor advertizers and examples of crime as the pillory, the whipping post, and the stocks, has a new rope attached, with the noose hitched up to one of the uprights, out of reach of the boys. Its ladder, too, has been brought out and placed in position by the town beadle, who stands by to guard it from unauthorized climbing. The Websterbridge townsfolk are present in force, and in high spirits; for the news has spread that it is the devil’s disciple and not the minister that the Continentals (so they call Burgoyne’s forces) are about to hang: consequently the execution can be enjoyed without any misgiving as to its righteousness, or to the cowardice of allowing it to take place without a struggle. There is even some fear of a disappointment as midday approaches and the arrival of the beadle with the ladder remains the only sign of preparation. But at last reassuring shouts of Here they come: Here they are, are heard; and a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets, half British infantry, half Hessians, tramp quickly into the middle of the market place, driving the crowd to the sides.

SERGEANT. Halt. Front. Dress. (The soldiers change their column into a square enclosing the gallows, their petty officers, energetically led by the sergeant, hustling the persons who find themselves inside the square out at the corners.) Now then! Out of it with you: out of it. Some o’ you’ll get strung up yourselves presently. Form that square there, will you, you damned Hoosians. No use talkin’ German to them: talk to their toes with the butt ends of your muskets: they’ll understand that. GET out of it, will you? (He comes upon Judith, standing near the gallows.) Now then: YOU’VE no call here.

JUDITH. May I not stay? What harm am I doing?

SERGEANT. I want none of your argufying. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, running to see a man hanged that’s not your husband. And he’s no better than yourself. I told my major he was a gentleman; and then he goes and tries to strangle him, and calls his blessed Majesty a lunatic. So out of it with you, double quick.

JUDITH. Will you take these two silver dollars and let me stay?

The sergeant, without an instant’s hesitation, looks quickly and furtively round as he shoots the money dexterously into his pocket. Then he raises his voice in virtuous indignation.

SERGEANT. ME take money in the execution of my duty! Certainly not. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do, to teach you to corrupt the King’s officer. I’ll put you under arrest until the execution’s over. You just stand there; and don’t let me see you as much as move from that spot until you’re let. (With a swift wink at her he points to the corner of the square behind the gallows on his right, and turns noisily away, shouting) Now then dress up and keep ’em back, will you?

Cries of Hush and Silence are heard among the townsfolk; and the sound of a military band, playing the Dead March from Saul, is heard. The crowd becomes quiet at once; and the sergeant and petty officers, hurrying to the back of the square, with a few whispered orders and some stealthy hustling cause it to open and admit the funeral procession, which is protected from the crowd by a double file of soldiers. First come Burgoyne and Swindon, who, on entering the square, glance with distaste at the gallows, and avoid passing under it by wheeling a little to the right and stationing themselves on that side. Then Mr. Brudenell, the chaplain, in his surplice, with his prayer book open in his hand, walking beside Richard, who is moody and disorderly. He walks doggedly through the gallows framework, and posts himself a little in front of it. Behind him comes the executioner, a stalwart soldier in his shirtsleeves. Following him, two soldiers haul a light military waggon. Finally comes the band, which posts itself at the back of the square, and finishes the Dead March. Judith, watching Richard painfully, steals down to the gallows, and stands leaning against its right post. During the conversation which follows, the two soldiers place the cart under the gallows, and stand by the shafts, which point backwards. The executioner takes a set of steps from the cart and places it ready for the prisoner to mount. Then he climbs the tall ladder which stands against the gallows, and cuts the string by which the rope is hitched up; so that the noose drops dangling over the cart, into which he steps as he descends.

RICHARD (with suppressed impatience, to Brudenell). Look here, sir: this is no place for a man of your profession. Hadn’t you better go away?

SWINDON. I appeal to you, prisoner, if you have any sense of decency left, to listen to the ministrations of the chaplain, and pay due heed to the solemnity of the occasion.

THE CHAPLAIN (gently reproving Richard). Try to control yourself, and submit to the divine will. (He lifts his book to proceed with the service.)

RICHARD. Answer for your own will, sir, and those of your accomplices here (indicating Burgoyne and Swindon): I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense! (To Swindon, more rudely) You’ve got up the solemnity of the occasion, as you call it, to impress the people with your own dignity — Handel’s music and a clergyman to make murder look like piety! Do you suppose I am going to help you? You’ve asked me to choose the rope because you don’t know your own trade well enough to shoot me properly. Well, hang away and have done with it.

SWINDON (to the chaplain). Can you do nothing with him, Mr. Brudenell?

CHAPLAIN. I will try, sir. (Beginning to read) Man that is born of woman hath —

RICHARD (fixing his eyes on him). “Thou shalt not kill.”

The book drops in Brudenell’s hands.

CHAPLAIN (confessing his embarrassment). What am I to say, Mr. Dudgeon?

RICHARD. Let me alone, man, can’t you?

BURGOYNE (with extreme urbanity). I think, Mr. Brudenell, that as the usual professional observations seem to strike Mr. Dudgeon as incongruous under the circumstances, you had better omit them until — er — until Mr. Dudgeon can no longer be inconvenienced by them. (Brudenell, with a shrug, shuts his book and retires behind the gallows.) YOU seem in a hurry, Mr. Dudgeon.

RICHARD (with the horror of death upon him). Do you think this is a pleasant sort of thing to be kept waiting for? You’ve made up your mind to commit murder: well, do it and have done with it.

BURGOYNE. Mr. Dudgeon: we are only doing this —

RICHARD. Because you’re paid to do it.

SWINDON. You insolent — (He swallows his rage.)

BURGOYNE (with much charm of manner). Ah, I am really sorry that you should think that, Mr. Dudgeon. If you knew what my commission cost me, and what my pay is, you would think better of me. I should be glad to part from you on friendly terms.

RICHARD. Hark ye, General Burgoyne. If you think that I like being hanged, you’re mistaken. I don’t like it; and I don’t mean to pretend that I do. And if you think I’m obliged to you for hanging me in a gentlemanly way, you’re wrong there too. I take the whole business in devilish bad part; and the only satisfaction I have in it is that you’ll feel a good deal meaner than I’ll look when it’s over. (He turns away, and is striding to the cart when Judith advances and interposes with her arms stretched out to him. Richard, feeling that a very little will upset his self-possession, shrinks from her, crying) What are you doing here? This is no place for you. (She makes a gesture as if to touch him. He recoils impatiently.) No: go away, go away; you’ll unnerve me. Take her away, will you?

JUDITH. Won’t you bid me good-bye?

RICHARD (allowing her to take his hand). Oh good-bye, good-bye. Now go — go — quickly. (She clings to his hand — will not be put off with so cold a last farewell — at last, as he tries to disengage himself, throws herself on his breast in agony.)

SWINDON (angrily to the sergeant, who, alarmed at Judith’s movement, has come from the back of the square to pull her back, and stopped irresolutely on finding that he is too late). How is this? Why is she inside the lines?

SERGEANT (guiltily). I dunno, sir. She’s that artful can’t keep her away.

BURGOYNE. You were bribed.

SERGEANT (protesting). No, Sir —

SWINDON (severely). Fall back. (He obeys.)

RICHARD (imploringly to those around him, and finally to Burgoyne, as the least stolid of them). Take her away. Do you think I want a woman near me now?

BURGOYNE (going to Judith and taking her hand). Here, madam: you had better keep inside the lines; but stand here behind us; and don’t look.

Richard, with a great sobbing sigh of relief as she releases him and turns to Burgoyne, flies for refuge to the cart and mounts into it. The executioner takes off his coat and pinions him.

JUDITH (resisting Burgoyne quietly and drawing her hand away). No: I must stay. I won’t look. (She goes to the right of the gallows. She tries to look at Richard, but turns away with a frightful shudder, and falls on her knees in prayer. Brudenell comes towards her from the back of the square.)

BURGOYNE (nodding approvingly as she kneels). Ah, quite so. Do not disturb her, Mr. Brudenell: that will do very nicely. (Brudenell nods also, and withdraws a little, watching her sympathetically. Burgoyne resumes his former position, and takes out a handsome gold chronometer.) Now then, are those preparations made? We must not detain Mr. Dudgeon.

By this time Richard’s hands are bound behind him; and the noose is round his neck. The two soldiers take the shaft of the wagon, ready to pull it away. The executioner, standing in the cart behind Richard, makes a sign to the sergeant.

SERGEANT (to Burgoyne). Ready, sir.

BURGOYNE. Have you anything more to say, Mr. Dudgeon? It wants two minutes of twelve still.

RICHARD (in the strong voice of a man who has conquered the bitterness of death). Your watch is two minutes slow by the town clock, which I can see from here, General. (The town clock strikes the first stroke of twelve. Involuntarily the people flinch at the sound, and a subdued groan breaks from them.) Amen! my life for the world’s future!

ANDERSON (shouting as he rushes into the market place). Amen; and stop the execution. (He bursts through the line of soldiers opposite Burgoyne, and rushes, panting, to the gallows.) I am Anthony Anderson, the man you want.

The crowd, intensely excited, listens with all its ears. Judith, half rising, stares at him; then lifts her hands like one whose dearest prayer has been granted.

SWINDON. Indeed. Then you are just in time to take your place on the gallows. Arrest him.

At a sign from the sergeant, two soldiers come forward to seize Anderson.

ANDERSON (thrusting a paper under Swindon’s nose). There’s my safe-conduct, sir.

SWINDON (taken aback). Safe-conduct! Are you — !

ANDERSON (emphatically). I am. (The two soldiers take him by the elbows.) Tell these men to take their hands off me.

SWINDON (to the men). Let him go.

SERGEANT. Fall back.

The two men return to their places. The townsfolk raise a cheer; and begin to exchange exultant looks, with a presentiment of triumph as they see their Pastor speaking with their enemies in the gate.

ANDERSON (exhaling a deep breath of relief, and dabbing his perspiring brow with his handkerchief). Thank God, I was in time!

BURGOYNE (calm as ever, and still watch in hand). Ample time, sir. Plenty of time. I should never dream of hanging any gentleman by an American clock. (He puts up his watch.)

ANDERSON. Yes: we are some minutes ahead of you already, General. Now tell them to take the rope from the neck of that American citizen.

BURGOYNE (to the executioner in the cart — very politely). Kindly undo Mr. Dudgeon.

The executioner takes the rope from Richard’s neck, unties his hands, and helps him on with his coat.

JUDITH (stealing timidly to Anderson). Tony.

ANDERSON (putting his arm round her shoulders and bantering her affectionately). Well what do you think of you husband, NOW, eh? — eh?? — eh???

JUDITH. I am ashamed — (She hides her face against his breast.)

BURGOYNE (to Swindon). You look disappointed, Major Swindon.

SWINDON. You look defeated, General Burgoyne.

BURGOYNE. I am, sir; and I am humane enough to be glad of it. (Richard jumps down from the cart, Brudenell offering his hand to help him, and runs to Anderson, whose left hand he shakes heartily, the right being occupied by Judith.) By the way, Mr. Anderson, I do not quite understand. The safe-conduct was for a commander of the militia. I understand you are a — (he looks as pointedly as his good manners permit at the riding boots, the pistols, and Richard’s coat, and adds) a clergyman.

ANDERSON (between Judith and Richard). Sir: it is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession. This foolish young man (placing his hand on Richard’s shoulder) boasted himself the Devil’s Disciple; but when the hour of trial came to him, he found that it was his destiny to suffer and be faithful to the death. I thought myself a decent minister of the gospel of peace; but when the hour of trial came to me, I found that it was my destiny to be a man of action and that my place was amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting. So I am starting life at fifty as Captain Anthony Anderson of the Springtown militia; and the Devil’s Disciple here will start presently as the Reverend Richard Dudgeon, and wag his pow in my old pulpit, and give good advice to this silly sentimental little wife of mine (putting his other hand on her shoulder. She steals a glance at Richard to see how the prospect pleases him). Your mother told me, Richard, that I should never have chosen Judith if I’d been born for the ministry. I am afraid she was right; so, by your leave, you may keep my coat and I’ll keep yours.

RICHARD. Minister — I should say Captain. I have behaved like a fool.

JUDITH. Like a hero.

RICHARD. Much the same thing, perhaps. (With some bitterness towards himself) But no: if I had been any good, I should have done for you what you did for me, instead of making a vain sacrifice.

ANDERSON. Not vain, my boy. It takes all sorts to make a world — saints as well as soldiers. (Turning to Burgoyne) And now, General, time presses; and America is in a hurry. Have you realized that though you may occupy towns and win battles, you cannot conquer a nation?

BURGOYNE. My good sir, without a Conquest you cannot have an aristocracy. Come and settle the matter at my quarters.

ANDERSON. At your service, sir. (To Richard) See Judith home for me, will you, my boy? (He hands her over to him.) Now General. (He goes busily up the market place towards the Town Hall, Leaving Judith and Richard together. Burgoyne follows him a step or two; then checks himself and turns to Richard.)

BURGOYNE. Oh, by the way, Mr. Dudgeon, I shall be glad to see you at lunch at half-past one. (He pauses a moment, and adds, with politely veiled slyness) Bring Mrs. Anderson, if she will be so good. (To Swindon, who is fuming) Take it quietly, Major Swindon: your friend the British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. (He follows Anderson.)

SERGEANT (to Swindon). What orders, sir?

SWINDON (savagely). Orders! What use are orders now? There’s no army. Back to quarters; and be d — (He turns on his heel and goes.)

SERGEANT (pugnacious and patriotic, repudiating the idea of defeat). ‘Tention. Now then: cock up your chins, and show ’em you don’t care a damn for ‘em. Slope arms! Fours! Wheel! Quick march!

The drum marks time with a tremendous bang; the band strikes up British Grenadiers; and the sergeant, Brudenell, and the English troops march off defiantly to their quarters. The townsfolk press in behind, and follow them up the market, jeering at them; and the town band, a very primitive affair, brings up the rear, playing Yankee Doodle. Essie, who comes in with them, runs to Richard.

ESSIE. Oh, Dick!

RICHARD (good-humoredly, but wilfully). Now, now: come, come! I don’t mind being hanged; but I will not be cried over.

ESSIE. No, I promise. I’ll be good. (She tries to restrain her tears, but cannot.) I — I want to see where the soldiers are going to. (She goes a little way up the market, pretending to look after the crowd.)

JUDITH. Promise me you will never tell him.

RICHARD. Don’t be afraid.

They shake hands on it.

ESSIE (calling to them). They’re coming back. They want you.

Jubilation in the market. The townsfolk surge back again in wild enthusiasm with their band, and hoist Richard on their shoulders, cheering him.

CURTAIN.

NOTES TO THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

BURGOYNE

General John Burgoyne, who is presented in this play for the first time (as far as I am aware) on the English stage, is not a conventional stage soldier, but as faithful a portrait as it is in the nature of stage portraits to be. His objection to profane swearing is not borrowed from Mr. Gilbert’s H. M. S. Pinafore: it is taken from the Code of Instructions drawn up by himself for his officers when he introduced Light Horse into the English army. His opinion that English soldiers should be treated as thinking beings was no doubt as unwelcome to the military authorities of his time, when nothing was thought of ordering a soldier a thousand lashes, as it will be to those modern victims of the flagellation neurosis who are so anxious to revive that discredited sport. His military reports are very clever as criticisms, and are humane and enlightened within certain aristocratic limits, best illustrated perhaps by his declaration, which now sounds so curious, that he should blush to ask for promotion on any other ground than that of family influence. As a parliamentary candidate, Burgoyne took our common expression “fighting an election” so very literally that he led his supporters to the poll at Preston in 1768 with a loaded pistol in each hand, and won the seat, though he was fined 1,000 pounds, and denounced by Junius, for the pistols.

It is only within quite recent years that any general recognition has become possible for the feeling that led Burgoyne, a professed enemy of oppression in India and elsewhere, to accept his American command when so many other officers threw up their commissions rather than serve in a civil war against the Colonies. His biographer De Fonblanque, writing in 1876, evidently regarded his position as indefensible. Nowadays, it is sufficient to say that Burgoyne was an Imperialist. He sympathized with the colonists; but when they proposed as a remedy the disruption of the Empire, he regarded that as a step backward in civilization. As he put it to the House of Commons, “while we remember that we are contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British Empire.” Eighty-four years after his defeat, his republican conquerors themselves engaged in a civil war for the integrity of their Union. In 1886 the Whigs who represented the anti-Burgoyne tradition of American Independence in English politics, abandoned Gladstone and made common cause with their political opponents in defence of the Union between England and Ireland. Only the other day England sent 200,000 men into the field south of the equator to fight out the question whether South Africa should develop as a Federation of British Colonies or as an independent Afrikander United States. In all these cases the Unionists who were detached from their parties were called renegades, as Burgoyne was. That, of course, is only one of the unfortunate consequences of the fact that mankind, being for the most part incapable of politics, accepts vituperation as an easy and congenial substitute. Whether Burgoyne or Washington, Lincoln or Davis, Gladstone or Bright, Mr. Chamberlain or Mr. Leonard Courtney was in the right will never be settled, because it will never be possible to prove that the government of the victor has been better for mankind than the government of the vanquished would have been. It is true that the victors have no doubt on the point; but to the dramatist, that certainty of theirs is only part of the human comedy. The American Unionist is often a Separatist as to Ireland; the English Unionist often sympathizes with the Polish Home Ruler; and both English and American Unionists are apt to be Disruptionists as regards that Imperial Ancient of Days, the Empire of China. Both are Unionists concerning Canada, but with a difference as to the precise application to it of the Monroe doctrine. As for me, the dramatist, I smile, and lead the conversation back to Burgoyne.

Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga made him that occasionally necessary part of our British system, a scapegoat. The explanation of his defeat given in the play is founded on a passage quoted by De Fonblanque from Fitzmaurice’s Life of Lord Shelburne, as follows: “Lord George Germain, having among other peculiarities a particular dislike to be put out of his way on any occasion, had arranged to call at his office on his way to the country to sign the dispatches; but as those addressed to Howe had not been faircopied, and he was not disposed to be balked of his projected visit to Kent, they were not signed then and were forgotten on his return home.” These were the dispatches instructing Sir William Howe, who was in New York, to effect a junction at Albany with Burgoyne, who had marched from Boston for that purpose. Burgoyne got as far as Saratoga, where, failing the expected reinforcement, he was hopelessly outnumbered, and his officers picked off, Boer fashion, by the American farmer-sharpshooters. His own collar was pierced by a bullet. The publicity of his defeat, however, was more than compensated at home by the fact that Lord George’s trip to Kent had not been interfered with, and that nobody knew about the oversight of the dispatch. The policy of the English Government and Court for the next two years was simply concealment of Germain’s neglect. Burgoyne’s demand for an inquiry was defeated in the House of Commons by the court party; and when he at last obtained a committee, the king got rid of it by a prorogation. When Burgoyne realized what had happened about the instructions to Howe (the scene in which I have represented him as learning it before Saratoga is not historical: the truth did not dawn on him until many months afterwards) the king actually took advantage of his being a prisoner of war in England on parole, and ordered him to return to America into captivity. Burgoyne immediately resigned all his appointments; and this practically closed his military career, though he was afterwards made Commander of the Forces in Ireland for the purpose of banishing him from parliament.

The episode illustrates the curious perversion of the English sense of honor when the privileges and prestige of the aristocracy are at stake. Mr. Frank Harris said, after the disastrous battle of Modder River, that the English, having lost America a century ago because they preferred George III, were quite prepared to lose South Africa to-day because they preferred aristocratic commanders to successful ones. Horace Walpole, when the parliamentary recess came at a critical period of the War of Independence, said that the Lords could not be expected to lose their pheasant shooting for the sake of America. In the working class, which, like all classes, has its own official aristocracy, there is the same reluctance to discredit an institution or to “do a man out of his job.” At bottom, of course, this apparently shameless sacrifice of great public interests to petty personal ones, is simply the preference of the ordinary man for the things he can feel and understand to the things that are beyond his capacity. It is stupidity, not dishonesty.

Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways. Not only was he thrown over, in spite of his high character and distinguished services, to screen a court favorite who had actually been cashiered for cowardice and misconduct in the field fifteen years before; but his peculiar critical temperament and talent, artistic, satirical, rather histrionic, and his fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit and humanity, were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid people because of their dread of ironic criticism. Long after his death, Thackeray, who had an intense sense of human character, but was typically stupid in valuing and interpreting it, instinctively sneered at him and exulted in his defeat. That sneer represents the common English attitude towards the Burgoyne type. Every instance in which the critical genius is defeated, and the stupid genius (for both temperaments have their genius) “muddles through all right,” is popular in England. But Burgoyne’s failure was not the work of his own temperament, but of the stupid temperament. What man could do under the circumstances he did, and did handsomely and loftily. He fell, and his ideal empire was dismembered, not through his own misconduct, but because Sir George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering those remote and inferior creatures, the colonists. And King George and the rest of the nation agreed, on the whole, with Germain. It is a significant point that in America, where Burgoyne was an enemy and an invader, he was admired and praised. The climate there is no doubt more favorable to intellectual vivacity.

I have described Burgoyne’s temperament as rather histrionic; and the reader will have observed that the Burgoyne of the Devil’s Disciple is a man who plays his part in life, and makes all its points, in the manner of a born high comedian. If he had been killed at Saratoga, with all his comedies unwritten, and his plan for turning As You Like It into a Beggar’s Opera unconceived, I should still have painted the same picture of him on the strength of his reply to the articles of capitulation proposed to him by his American conqueror General Gates. Here they are:

PROPOSITION.

1. General Burgoyne’s army being reduced by repeated defeats, by desertion, sickness, etc., their provisions exhausted, their military horses, tents and baggage taken or destroyed, their retreat cut off, and their camp invested, they can only be allowed to surrender as prisoners of war.

ANSWER.

1. Lieut.-General Burgoyne’s army, however reduced, will never admit that their retreat is cut off while they have arms in their hands.

PROPOSITION.

2. The officers and soldiers may keep the baggage belonging to them. The generals of the United States never permit individuals to be pillaged.

ANSWER.

2. Noted.

PROPOSITION.

3. The troops under his Excellency General Burgoyne will be conducted by the most convenient route to New England, marching by easy marches, and sufficiently provided for by the way.

ANSWER.

3. Agreed.

PROPOSITION.

4. The officers will be admitted on parole and will be treated with the liberality customary in such cases, so long as they, by proper behaviour, continue to deserve it; but those who are apprehended having broke their parole, as some British officers have done, must expect to be close confined.

ANSWER.

4. There being no officer in this army, under, or capable of being under, the description of breaking parole, this article needs no answer.

PROPOSITION.

5. All public stores, artillery, arms, ammunition, carriages, horses, etc., etc., must be delivered to commissaries appointed to receive them.

ANSWER.

5. All public stores may be delivered, arms excepted.

PROPOSITION.

6. These terms being agreed to and signed, the troops under his Excellency’s, General Burgoyne’s command, may be drawn up in their encampments, where they will be ordered to ground their arms, and may thereupon be marched to the river-side on their way to Bennington.

ANSWER.

6. This article is inadmissible in any extremity. Sooner than this army will consent to ground their arms in their encampments, they will rush on the enemy determined to take no quarter.

And, later on, “If General Gates does not mean to recede from the 6th article, the treaty ends at once: the army will to a man proceed to any act of desperation sooner than submit to that article.”

Here you have the man at his Burgoynest. Need I add that he had his own way; and that when the actual ceremony of surrender came, he would have played poor General Gates off the stage, had not that commander risen to the occasion by handing him back his sword.

In connection with the reference to Indians with scalping knives, who, with the troops hired from Germany, made up about half Burgoyne’s force, I may mention that Burgoyne offered two of them a reward to guide a Miss McCrea, betrothed to one of the English officers, into the English lines.

The two braves quarrelled about the reward; and the more sensitive of them, as a protest against the unfairness of the other, tomahawked the young lady. The usual retaliations were proposed under the popular titles of justice and so forth; but as the tribe of the slayer would certainly have followed suit by a massacre of whites on the Canadian frontier, Burgoyne was compelled to forgive the crime, to the intense disgust of indignant Christendom.

BRUDENELL

Brudenell is also a real person. At least an artillery chaplain of that name distinguished himself at Saratoga by reading the burial service over Major Fraser under fire, and by a quite readable adventure, chronicled by Burgoyne, with Lady Harriet Ackland. Lady Harriet’s husband achieved the remarkable feat of killing himself, instead of his adversary, in a duel. He overbalanced himself in the heat of his swordsmanship, and fell with his head against a pebble. Lady Harriet then married the warrior chaplain, who, like Anthony Anderson in the play, seems to have mistaken his natural profession.

The rest of the Devil’s Disciple may have actually occurred, like most stories invented by dramatists; but I cannot produce any documents. Major Swindon’s name is invented; but the man, of course, is real. There are dozens of him extant to this day.

THE GADFLY

OR, THE SON OF THE CARDINAL

CONTENTS

ACT I.

ACT II.

ACT III.

ACT IV.

THE GADFLY

OR, THE SON OF THE CARDINAL

An adaptation of the novel by Ethel Voynich, published in 1897

Period — 1846. Italy

ACT I. The Conversazione at Grassini’s.

Florence, a night in July

ACT II The Steps of the Cathedral.

Brisighella, sunset

ACT III A Room in the Cardinal’s Palace.

Brisighella

ACT IV Scene I: The condemned cell.

Brisighella, night Scene 2: The Courtyard of the Prison

ACT I.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. Our friend Martini doubts whether it is safe to plot anything here.

GRASSINI. Quite safe, Martini, provided you plot at the top of your voice. Have you brought the Gadfly?

SIGNORA GRASSINI. The Gadfly! What’s that? A newspaper?

MARTINI. No, Signora: a man. A comrade.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. A young man?

MARTINI [taking out a paper] Here is a description of him — a police description [offering it].

SIGNORA GRASSINI. No: we mustn’t pass papers about. Read it.

GRASSINI. At the top of your voice, please.

MARTINI [reads] “Felice Rivarez, called ‘the Gadfly.’

Age about 30, birthplace and parentage unknown, probably South American; profession, journalist.

Short in stature with black hair, black beard and dark skin. Eyes blue; forehead broad and square; nose, mouth, chin” — but I am preventing this lady [indicating Gemma, who has come forward from the balustrade and is listening] from speaking to her hostess.

GRASSINI. Don’t be afraid — a fellow conspirator [introduces them] the Signora Bolla: Doctor Martini.

MARTINI. Your husband, Signora, was an old friend of mine.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. Yes; but go on about the Gadfly.

What else does it say?

MARTINI [reads] “Special marks: right foot lame; left arm twisted; two fingers missing on left hand; recent sabre cut across face; stammers.” Then there’s a note put: [reads] “Very expert shot; care should be taken in arresting.”

SIGNORA GRASSINI. How horrid! I hope he’ll come.

GEMMA [gravely] I hope he will not.

A manservant whispers to Grassini.

GRASSINI [excitedly] My love, the new tenor has come.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. The tenor! Stop the band. Clear everything off the piano. Has he brought an accompanist?

She rushes into the house.

GRASSINI [following] Shut all the windows tight. Put screens before all the doors. Light a fire in the cloak room.

He follows her — The Guests crowd into the house after them, and the windows are shut.

Martini remains behind with Gemma.

MARTINI. Signora Bolla: why do you hope that the Gadfly may not come?

GEMMA. He belongs to a society called the Occoltellatori — the Knifers. We are revolutionists, not assassins.

MARTINI. The knife is sometimes the only remedy.

GEMMA. You say that very glibly. Did you ever kill a man?

MARTINI. [starting] Heaven forbid!

GEMMA. Ah! I thought so. I did.

MARTINI. You!

GEMMA. Yes, I. It was the man who betrayed Bolla.

MARTINI [horrified] You brought your hand to use a knife!

GEMMA. No. I struck him in the face with my open hand; that was all. We were very young. I had been his friend; and I suppose he loved me. He went away and drowned himself.

MARTINI. Do you call that killing a man?

GEMMA. What do you call it?

MARTINI. Serve the young traitor right!

GEMMA. But you have not heard the end of the story. He was innocent.

MARTINI. Then why did he not clear himself?

GEMMA. He could not. He had betrayed us in the confessional. The priest was a spy.

MARTINI. The fellow must have been a fool to be caught in such a trap as that.

GEMMA. No, only a boy. He was pious and credulous, full of faith and enthusiasm, incapable of realizing the cruelty and treachery of our enemies. I killed him; there is no getting away from that. And Bolla escaped after all, and married me, and died in his bed in England.

MARTINI [sympathetically] You mustn’t let your mind dwell on any remorseful notions.

GEMMA. Oh, I quite understand all that. You need not be afraid of my making any morbid fuss over so old a story. But I will have nothing to do with assassins. If your Gadfly attempts to bring the knife into our propaganda, I shall withdraw at once.

MARTINI. Never fear. It is his tongue and pen we want; they are both sharper than most men’s daggers.

GEMMA. What need have we of him at all?

MARTINI. To destroy Cardinal Montanelli.

GEMMA. Destroy?

MARTINI. Oh don’t be alarmed. We had better cut our own throats than scratch the skin of the good Cardinal. It would be a martyrdom; the people think him a saint.

GEMMA. What will you do to him, then?

MARTINI. Make him ridiculous. That’s what the Gadfly is for; the Cardinal’s saintliness will wither up into the dotage of an old fool when the Gadfly begins to sting. The creature is all venom — ouf! I wish we could do without him; I am not sure that the dagger is not a manlier weapon after all.

GEMMA. No; for with the dagger the lowest wretch can end the highest life; but if Montanelli is really a saint, your Gadfly will get the worst of it. [She passes her hand over her brow] Strange! that we should get talking of Montanelli now!

MARTINI. Why?

GEMMA. He was the Confessor of the boy I killed.

MARTINI [indignantly] What! Was he the spy?

GEMMA. Oh, no, no, no. He was away when that happened; otherwise Arthur would have been alive today.

MARTINI. The boy’s name was Arthur?

GEMMA. Yes. Montanelli loved him as if he were his own son. He had known Arthur’s mother.

MARTINI [significantly] Oh, indeed!

GEMMA. What do you mean by that?

MARTINI. Oh, nothing, nothing. Montanelli knew Arthur’s mother: Montanelli loved Arthur as if he were his own son. That seems to me extremely natural.

GEMMA. Are you as cynical as the rest of them?

MARTINI. Do you really think that it is cynical to give a priest credit for being a human being? At all events, Signora, you are sufficiently a woman of the world to understand that if the Gadfly gets hold of this story it will put a little extra venom into his sting.

GEMMA [revolted] Dr Martini, what I have told you is sacred. [Martini bows] Even if Arthur were not dead, a calumny that cannot be proved — martini. — Is better than a dagger that cannot be driven home; but you are right: it is a blackguard’s weapon. At the same time — gemma [quickly] At the same time?

MARTINI. I wish Arthur were not dead.

GEMMA [with deep feeling] So do I. But what difference would it make to you?

MARTINI. I think that possibly, if he were alive, your influence with him, and his influence with the Cardinal, might help us: that’s all. [A burst of applause heard within the house] Ah, that’s the end of the tenor’s song.

GEMMA. No matter; he will sing another: at least he will be very much offended if they don’t insist on it.

MARTINI. But won’t you come in and hear him? I’ve been selfishly keeping you out here.

GEMMA. I am on duty here; all our friends stroll out to look at the moon.

The centre window opens just enough to allow a man to slip through. The Gadfly appears and closes the window softly behind him.

MARTINI. Here comes one of them. Yes: he’s looking at the moon as hard as he can.

GEMMA. Hush, no. I don’t know him. The Gadfly, who has thrust his hands in his pockets and stopped to stare listlessly at the moon, comes down the steps from the terrace, kicking them discontentedly with his heels. He is as swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his lameness, as agile as a cat. His whole personality is oddly suggestive of a black jaguar. The forehead and left cheek are terribly disfigured by the long crooked scar of an old sabre cut. He is handsome in a restless, uncomfortable way: with a tendency to foppishness in dress and a veiled insolence of expression and manner.

Gemma moves quietly out into the light.

He starts violently on seeing her, and puts up his hand as if to ward off a blow.

GADFLY [hastily] You needn’t strike me again: blows don’t hurt me now.

MARTINI [puzzled] Signore — gadfly [recovering himself] Eh? Oh, I beg your pardon. I suppose the lady is not a ghost then; I thought she was.

MARTINI. I am happy to say that the lady is alive and in excellent health.

GADFLY. Ah yes; that must be a curious sensation. To be in excellent health; to walk straight; to have your full allowance of fingers; and to have no bullet-holes in your lungs. I congratulate you, Signora. By the way, are you a conspirator? There are only two sorts of people in Florence at present; conspirators and spies, mostly spies; some of the latter, attractive ladies. I am a conspirator myself. Pray, which are you?

GEMMA. I can tell you one thing more about the people of Florence at present, Signore; and that is that the gentleman who announces himself frankly as a conspirator is invariably a spy.

GADFLY. Good. That speech is unmistakeable; you’re a conspirator. I am Felice Rivarez, alias The Gadfly, at your service. Which of us is your friend? Is he Martini?

MARTINI. At your service.

GEMMA. I am — gadfly. Of course you are; I know. Well, here I am to take the field against the pious Montanelli. What are the lines of battle to be, Signora? Shall I attack his theology or his personal character?

GEMMA. His personal character is above attack.

GADFLY. Oho! How did he take in so clever a woman as you are? But you are right: only, what you mean, I suppose, is that all these fellows, from the Sacristans to the Cardinals, are such notorious rascals that their bad characters are taken for granted. You can’t collect a crowd to see a river running down hill.

GEMMA. Vulgar prejudice, Signor Rivarez. They say the same thing of us. Don’t make the foolish mistake of underrating your enemy.

GADFLY. Ah, well, if Monsignor Montanelli is all you say he is, so much too good for this world that he ought to be politely escorted into the next. I am sure he would cause as great a sensation there as he has done here; there are probably many old-established ghosts who have never seen such a thing as an honest Cardinal.

GEMMA [impatiently] Signor Rivarez, if you have only come here to talk the usual scandal about priests, and to hint at daggers and stuff of that kind, you will be of no use to us; we have only too many people of that sort. Doctor Martini, we may as well go in and listen to the tenor after all; we are wasting our time here.

She turns her back on the Gadfly and goes, with Martini, towards the windows. There is another burst of applause. The windows are opened and the guests come out laughing and chattering about the singing. The Signora Grassini is with them in high spirits.

SIGNORA GRASSINI [to Gemma as she comes down the steps] He sang twice for us — the darling! — though he has five more engagements this evening. And you actually stole away, Rivarez. If he had seen you he would never have forgiven me. What do you mean by such conduct?

GADFLY. It seems wasteful and inhuman to me to set a man to make that sort of noise when a goat would do it so much better.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. What a terrible critic you are! So cynical!

Grassini comes from the house.

GRASSINI. He’s gone. He went like lightning; he has fourteen other engagements. Ah, Rivarez! How are you; delighted. I saw you come in, but couldn’t get to you through the crowd round the piano. Your charming friend, Madame Zita Reni, is looking for you everywhere. She has promised to sing for us. I must tell her where you are; I promised to find you for her.

He hurries indoors.

GEMMA [to the Gadfly] Excuse me, Signor Rivarez; do you present Madame Zita Reni as one of our friends?

GADFLY. Signora, I don’t present her at all. She is unpresentable.

GEMMA. Oh nonsense, sir; I am speaking to you seriously. Please keep your wit until we have got through our business. Who is Madame Reni?

GADFLY. An improper person at present attached to me, but not to the revolutionary cause. She would sell it, myself included, for a dozen pairs of scarlet silk stockings.

Grassini appears on the terrace with Zita on his arm.

She is gorgeously dressed in amber and scarlet, and looks like a tropical bird among sparrows and starlings. She is handsome with a vivid, animal, unintelligent beauty; but the perfect harmony and freedom of her movements are delightful to see. Her forehead is low and narrow, and her expression unsympathetic, almost cruel. Count Soltykov, a very young gentleman, evidently hopelessly in love with her, enters with her, dancing attendance on her; but she pays hardly any attention to him or to Grassini as she stops on the terrace, looking jealously about for the Gadfly.

GEMMA [to the Gadfly — looking at Zita as if she were some vulgar article of luxury] Oh! You can afford that, can you? I thought you were as poor as the rest of us.

GADFLY. So I am.

GEMMA. Then you have spoken treacherously of that woman, or else she is a spy. If she stays with you, it must be either for money or love. If it is money, it must come from the government if it does not come from you. If it is love, you had better say so instead of making vulgar jokes about silk stockings.

GADFLY. What a genius I have for making people despise me! Yes: she loves me enough to be most amusingly jealous. But no doubt she is paid by the government too. Most women have business faculty enough to combine pleasure with profit.

ZITA [detecting him at last and coming down from the terrace] Monsieur Rivarez, I have been looking for you everywhere. Count Soltykov wants to know whether you can go to his villa tomorrow night, there will be dancing.

GADFLY [spinning round so as to show his lameness]

Dancing! How charming for me!

ZITA [jealously] Is this lady one of your friends?

GADFLY. She permits me to confer with her. Signora Bolla: allow me to introduce to you Madame Zita Reni.

The women bow to one another.

ZITA. Confer with her? What does that mean?

GADFLY. A diplomatic expression.

Grassini has gone into the house and returned with a mandoline.

GRASSINI [pleadingly offering her the instrument] Will Madame Reni be persuaded?

ZITA. Felice: my castanets.

The Gadfly produces the castanets from his pocket, inviting Gemma’s attention sardonically to his servitude by a grimace.

Zita takes them from him.

GADFLY [aside to Gemma] I should be made to play them if I had fingers enough.

ZITA. Felice, where are you going? Stay here: I’m going to sing. Soltykov, do you play the mandoline? I want my hands for the castanets. The bolero.

Song and dance.

GADFLY. Brava! Bravissima! [to Gemma] What would you not give to be able to do that? [He turns to Zita and puts the castanets in his pocket]

SIGNORA GRASSINI. How delightful! What a gift! Even Signor Rivarez, who ran away from our greatest tenor, had to listen!

GADFLY. Rapt! Spellbound!

ZITA [to the Gadfly] I want something to drink after that. Take me in.

GADFLY. Try Soltykov instead. I have business here.

ZITA. You want to speak to that woman.

GADFLY. Of course I do [lowering his voice] If you dare make a scene, I’ll hand you over to Soltykov altogether [aloud] Soltykov: Madame Reni wants you to take her in to supper.

Soltykov takes her in, wounded and angry, but afraid to refuse. The guests follow, Signora Grassini bringing up the rear on a gentleman’s arm. Martini, Gemma, Grassini, and the Gadfly remain behind.

GRASSINI. Now is our time for business. What news have you for us, Martini?

MARTINI. Nothing, except that we are convinced in Genoa that it is too late for all this pamphleteering and scheming to undermine the influence of the Cardinal. Things have come to a head with a rush within the last fortnight. We all believe that a rising cannot be prevented now, even if we wanted to prevent it. Before the end of the month we shall be at it, hammer and tongs, on the barricades.

GADFLY. Piff, paff, poof! [He rattles the castanets].

GEMMA. In that case, this gentleman can be of no use to us.

GADFLY [with mock affection] Dear lady!

GEMMA. We must have men of action — earnest men.

GRASSINI. Domenichino?

GEMMA. Yes, Domenichino. But he is only one. He must stay here in command. Who is to undertake the distribution of the weapons?

MARTINI. Where are they?

GEMMA [looking mistrustfully at the Gadfly] I will not tell you just now.

GADFLY. I will. They are hidden in the caves in the hills near Brisighella. They must be got out and distributed in the towns — in Brisighella itself first, under the Cardinal’s nose. Don’t send anyone you love, Signora Bolla. He’ll be killed — or taken, which comes to the same thing.

GEMMA. We are not likely to send anyone who is not prepared for that. We all are, and we shall not find a man who is not loved by somebody.

GADFLY. True, Signora: every pot finds its cover.

Even I am adored by Zita.

MARTINI. Where is the man who convoyed the weapons from Genoa to the caves?

GRASSINI. Egad, yes. That was a man in a thousand.

We have a splendid disguise for him. Passport and all complete.

GADFLY. What is it?

GRASSINI. An old Spanish pilgrim — a repentant brigand from the Sierras who killed his son and made a pilgrimage to Rome for absolution. He fell ill in Ancona last year; and one of our friends took him on board a trading-vessel out of charity, and set him down in Venice where he had friends. He left his papers with us to show his gratitude. In that disguise the man who convoyed the weapons for us could distribute them.

GEMMA. Yes; he would do. Unfortunately, we don’t know him.

MARTINI. Do you, Rivarez?

GADFLY. Oh, a despicable fellow, I assure you, you wouldn’t like him, Signora.

GEMMA. He did his work. He was a doer, not a scribbler and slanderer.

GADFLY. How do you know?

GEMMA. By his deeds. We will not think ill of a proved comrade to amuse you, Signor Rivarez.

GRASSINI. Come, come! Business, business! Whom shall we send?

MARTINI. Whom can we best spare, Signora Bolla?

GADFLY. Me, me, me. There is no doubt about that.

GEMMA. You must win our confidence first. I vote against your being sent.

MARTINI. So do I.

GRASSINI. Excuse me, Rivarez. But really so do I.

GADFLY. You flatter me. I propose, then, as an alternative, that you send the man who convoyed the weapons from Genoa to the caves — the despicable fellow.

GEMMA. I agree, if we can find him.

MARTINI. Agreed!

GRASSINI. Agreed.

GADFLY. Carried nem con. He shall start the day after tomorrow.

Signora Grassini runs from the house and hurries down to them.

SIGNORA GRASSINI. Domenichino is arrested.

They all rise in consternation.

GADFLY. Our man must start tonight. Away with you and warn everybody.

They hurry towards the house.

SIGNORA BOLLA. [She stops — the rest go into the house] You must stay with me to send this man off.

GEMMA. I!

GADFLY. He goes to his death. Is he to have no kinder word at parting than mine?

GEMMA. Is he a sentimentalist, then?

GADFLY. Yes, a grovelling sentimentalist.

GEMMA. What is his name?

GADFLY. Arthur.

GEMMA. Arthur!

GADFLY. An English name.

GEMMA. I know. I once knew someone of that name.

GADFLY. Indeed?

GEMMA. Do you know anything of his history?

GADFLY. Nothing that would amuse you. The poor wretch has been kicked about the world, mostly in South America — beaten and maimed, shot and chased, half drowned, drudged and degraded and devil knows what — even slapped across the face.

GEMMA. What do you mean by that?

GADFLY. Nothing, my dear lady, nothing. He has left it all behind now, and wants to hear nothing more of it.

GEMMA. I want to see this man. What is his other name? Where is he to be found?

GADFLY. Oh, he has lots of other names — Rivarez, the Gadfly — plenty of them. [The Angelus rings] Sh! Listen! That’s his death knell. [He takes out the castanets and marks the bolero rhythm softly with them, mocking the bell]

GEMMA. Stop clacking those horrible things. Do you mean that you are — gadfly. The man that convoyed the arms from Genoa to the caves? Precisely. And I am nobody else.

And I shall soon be nobody at all. So bid me adieu, beautiful widow of Bolla the Betrayed.

GEMMA. Adieu. But remember, the revolution wants men who intend to live for it and not to die for it.

GADFLY [seriously] I shall do my best with what is left of me.

GEMMA. If you are taken at Brisighella, appeal to Montanelli. He is merciful.

GADFLY. The more fool he!

GEMMA. We will do all we can ourselves.

GADFLY. Oh, look after the revolution, not after me. When the rush comes there will be no time to stop to pick me up. Besides, I have had all I wanted now. It was not much — only a fancy to see somebody again.

And I hate this cursed world, with its infamous cruelties and tyrannies, its slaves and cowards, holding each other down for priests and kings to devour. [relapsing into his flippant tone] Ah! excuse my talking shop.

GEMMA. It becomes you better than the other sort of talk. Goodbye. And remember, Montanelli once knew an Arthur whom he loved like his own son.

GADFLY [implacably] And whose mother he probably betrayed.

GEMMA. Do you never forgive old injuries?

GADFLY. Only when I have deserved them. I kiss the hands I have betrayed [he kisses her hand suddenly and lightly] — not the hands that betrayed me. And now off to Brisighella where I will test my disguise by confessing myself with all speed to Montanelli — to Father Montanelli. Goodbye, Gemma.

He embraces her and then hurries away up the steps.

As he reaches the terrace, Zita is heard singing within.

He stops and looks quaintly back at Gemma; then goes off accompanying the song with the castanets.

ACT II.

The steps of the Cathedral at Brisighella. Sunset. The Gadfly, disguised in ragged white locks as an old Spanish pilgrim, is sitting on the steps. The square in front of the Cathedral is crowded with peasants and pilgrims. Michele, disguised as a hawker of rosaries, medals, pious chap-books and tapers, approaches the Gadfly and sets down his basket before him.

MICHELE. Are you one of the pilgrims, Father?

GADFLY [loudly] I am a miserable sinner. [privately] Well, where do we meet?

MICHELE. In the market-place in front of the Cardinal’s Palace.

GADFLY. Oh! he manages to live in a Palace, then, in spite of being a saint.

MICHELE. He lives in one wing of it and has turned the rest into a hospital. He is inside there now [pointing to the Cathedral].

The Cathedral doors open and the organ is heard.

THE CROWD. His Eminence — His Eminence is coming out. Stand aside, His Eminence is coming.

MICHELE. Pray for me when you get to Rome, Father.

He gets out of the way.

The Cardinal appears at the Cathedral doors in his violet Lenten robe and scarlet cap, blessing the people with outstretched arms. He comes slowly down the steps.

The people crowd about him to kiss his hands. Some kneel down and put the hem of his cassock to their lips.

The Gadfly sits motionless with his teeth clenched and his eyes on the ground.

MONTANELLI. Peace be with you, my children.

A WOMAN [lifting her child] His Eminence will bless you as the dear Lord blessed the children.

The Gadfly groans.

MONTANELLI. Are you a pilgrim? gadfly lama miserable sinner.

POLICE OFFICIAL [stepping forward] Forgive my intruding, your Eminence. I think the old man is not quite sound in his mind. He is perfectly harmless, and his papers are in order; so we don’t interfere with him. He has been in penal servitude for a great crime, and is now doing penance.

GADFLY [shaking his head slowly] A great crime.

MONTANELLI. Thank you, Captain, [to the people] Stand aside a little, please, [to the Gadfly] My friend, nothing is hopeless if a man has sincerely repented. Will you not come to me this evening?

GADFLY. Would your Eminence receive a man who is answerable for the death of his own son?

MONTANELLI [solemnly] Is not God Himself answerable for the death of His own Son? If you will come to me I will receive you as I pray that He may one day receive me.

GADFLY [stretching out his hands with sudden passion] Listen! [to the people] And listen all of you, Christians! If a man has killed his own son — his son who loved and trusted him, who was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; if he has led his son into a deathtrap with lies and deceit, is there hope for that man in earth or Heaven?

MONTANELLI. It is written: “A broken and contrite heart shalt thou not despise.”

The Gadfly bends his head to receive the benediction.

Go to Rome, and ask the blessing of the Holy Father.

Peace be with you. [His voice falters, and becomes almost entreating] When you receive the Holy Eucharist in Rome, pray for one in deep affliction — for one on whose soul the hand of the Lord is heavy.

GADFLY [sanctimoniously] Who am I, that He should hear my prayers? A leper and an outcast! If I could bring to His throne, as your Eminence can, the offering of a holy life — of a soul without spot or secret shame —

MONTANELLI [turning abruptly away — in a voice of agony] I have only one offering to give — a broken heart.

The organ is heard.

Montanelli goes on his way, the people following him.

It is getting dark. When they are gone, the gipsy woman is seen near the Gadfly, who has seated himself on the steps. She is old, and poorly dressed, with a brown wrinkled face and keen black eyes; a bright-coloured scarf is twisted round her head.

GIPSY. I have brought you a message from Zita Reni.

GADFLY. Who are you?

GIPSY. It’s no business of yours who I am. I have come to tell you that Zita Reni has gone away with my son.

GADFLY. With your son!

GIPSY. Yes, sir. If you don’t know how to keep your mistress when you’ve got her, you can’t complain if other men take her. My son has blood in his veins, not milk and water; he comes of the Romany folk.

GADFLY [thoughtfully] Ah! you’re a gipsy, are you? Zita has gone back to her own people then?

GIPSY [puzzled at his dispassionate way of taking it] What sort of stuff are you made of, that she should stay with you? Our women may lend themselves to you a bit for a girl’s fancy, or if you pay them well; but the Romany blood comes back to the Romany folk.

GADFLY [coldly] Has she gone away to stroll with a gipsy camp, or merely to live with your son?

GIPSY [laughing tauntingly] Do you think of following her and trying to win her back? It’s too late, Sir; you should have thought of that before!

GADFLY. No; I only want to know the truth, if you will tell it to me.

GIPSY. The truth is, then, that she met my son in the road the day you left her, and spoke to him in the Romany tongue; and when he saw she was one of our folk, he thought nothing of her fine clothes, but fell in love with her bonny face, as our men fall in love, and took her to our camp. She told us all her trouble, and sat crying and sobbing, poor lassie, till our hearts were sore for her. We comforted her as best we could; and at last she took off her finery and put on the things our lasses wear, and gave herself to my son to be his woman and to have him for her man. He won’t say to her “I don’t love you,” and “I’ve other things to do.” When a woman is young she wants a man; and what sort of man are you, that you can’t even kiss a handsome girl when she puts her arms round your neck, and — gadfly [interrupting] You said you had brought me a message from her.

GIPSY. Yes. She told me to say she has had enough of your folk and their sluggish blood; and that she wants to get back to her own people and be free. “Tell him,” she said, “that I am a woman, and that I loved him, and that is why I would not sell myself to him any longer.” The lassie was right to come away. There’s no harm in a girl getting a bit of money out of her good looks if she can — that’s what good looks are for; but a Romany lass has nothing to do with loving a man of your race.

GADFLY. Is that all the message?

GIPSY. Yes.

GADFLY. Then tell her, please, that I think she has done right, and that I hope she will be happy. Goodnight.

The Gipsy, with a gesture of contempt, goes. The moon has now risen.

[On the Cathedral steps] Another blow on the cheek!

Is no rag of pride to be left to me — no shred of selfrespect? Surely I’ve suffered everything that man can endure; my very heart has been dragged in the mud and trampled under the feet of the passers-by; there is no spot in my soul where someone’s contempt is not branded in, where someone’s mockery has not left its iron trace. And now this gipsy girl I picked up by the wayside — even she has the whip in her hand!

The crowd returns, excited. Among them is Michele.

He goes to the Gadfly.

MICHELE [whining] Let your piety and charity go hand in hand and buy a blessed candle from the poor man. [aside] Get out of this place at once: the soldiers are coming. [aloud] Most Holy Queen of Heaven, Maiden undefiled — [aside] It’s you they’re after, Rivarez; they’ll be here in two minutes — [aloud]

And so may the saints reward you — [aside] You’ll have to make a dash for it: there are spies at the corners. It’s no use trying to slip away without being seen.

Exit.

The Gadfly makes a dash to escape on the right; but is met by a body of soldiers entering. He turns and attempts to get away on the left but is stopped there too by other soldiers. He retreats to the Cathedral steps.

OFFICER. Let no one leave the square. Where is the Spanish pilgrim?

GADFLY [producing a pistol] At your service, Captain! [He shoots the Officer, wounding him only.

The soldiers with a yell of fury rush to the steps] Take care! [He fires again. A soldier falls. The rest hesitate].

WOUNDED OFFICER. Shoot him down, you fools. Shoot.

The soldiers present their carbines: the Cardinal rushes through them and mounts the steps.

MONTANELLI. What are you doing, my son?

The Gadfly lowers his pistol. The soldiers immediately rush on him with a triumphant shout and drag him down the steps.

WOUNDED OFFICER. We are greatly indebted to your Eminence.

MONTANELLI. Why?

GADFLY. For capturing me so neatly for them, of course. [He laughs mockingly].

The soldiers, infuriated, drag him fiercely away. The Cardinal covers his eyes with his hands.

ACT III.

A room in the Cardinal’s Palace at Brisighella.

Montanelli is seated at his writing-table giving audience to the Military Governor, Colonel Ferrari, who is standing. A Sergeant is waiting at the door. A crucifix hangs on the wall.

FERRARI. And I once more earnestly assure your Eminence that your refusal is endangering the peace of the town. If you knew what I and my assistants have put up with from this man you would feel differently about the matter. His is an exceptional case; and it calls for exceptional measures.

MONTANELLI. There is no case which calls for injustice; and to condemn a civilian by the judgement of a secret military tribunal is both unjust and illegal.

FERRARI. The case amounts to this, your Eminence. The prisoner is manifestly guilty of several capital crimes. He is known to be an influential member of one of the most pestilent secret societies in the country. He has offered armed resistance to authority and seriously wounded two officials in the discharge of their duty; and he is now a standing menace to the peace and order of the town.

MONTANELLI. Whatever the man has done he has the right to be judged according to law.

FERRARI. The ordinary course of law involves delay, your Eminence; and in this case every moment is precious. There’s a remarkable amount of devilry — I beg pardon; but really this man is enough to try the patience of a saint. It’s hardly credible; but I have to conduct all the interrogations myself; for the regular officer cannot stand it any longer.

MONTANELLI. How is that?

FERRARI. It’s difficult to explain, your Eminence, but you would understand if you had once heard the way he goes on. One might think the interrogating officer were the criminal and he the judge. If your Eminence would only be present at one of the interrogations, I am sure you would agree with me. He needn’t know anything about it. You might overhear him from —

MONTANELLI [interrupting haughtily] lam a minister of religion, Colonel Ferrari, not a police-spy; and eavesdropping forms no part of my professional duties.

FERRARI. I — I didn’t mean to give offence —

MONTANELLI. I think we shall not get any good out of discussing this question further. Bring the prisoner in. I will have a talk with him.

FERRARI. I venture very respectfully to advise your Eminence not to attempt it. The man is perfectly incorrigible. It would be both safer and wiser to overstep the letter of the law for this once, and get rid of him before he does any more mischief. It is with great diffidence that I venture to press the point after what your Eminence has said; but after all I am responsible to Monsignor the Legate for the order of the town —

MONTANELLI. And I am responsible to God and His Holiness that there shall be no underhand dealing in my diocese. Since you press me in the matter, Colonel, I take my stand upon my privilege as Cardinal. I will not allow a secret Court-Martial in this town in peace-time.

FERRARI [resentfully] As your Eminence pleases, [to the Sergeant] Bring the prisoner in. [He sits down].

MONTANELLI. Colonel Ferrari, I propose to see the prisoner alone.

FERRARI [rising stiffly] You do not wish me to be present?

MONTANELLI. I do not wish anybody to be present.

FERRARI. What! No guards!

MONTANELLI. Certainly not.

FERRARI. Then, with your Eminence’s permission, I shall clear out. And I warn you that I take no responsibility for the risk you are going to run.

MONTANELLI. I do not ask you to do so. You will find there is no risk.

FERRARI. Oho! You think so. [lowering his voice] Listen to me, your Eminence. I have been obliged to be rather strict with him — especially as it is a military prison. The other day I thought that perhaps a little indulgence might have a good effect. I offered to relax the discipline considerably if he would behave in a reasonable manner; and how does your Eminence suppose he answered me? He lay looking at me a minute, like a wolf in a cage, and then said quite softly: “Colonel, I can’t get up and strangle you, but my teeth are pretty good: you had better take your throat a little further off.” He is as savage as a wild cat.

MONTANELLI. I am not surprised to hear it. I will give you my answer as to the Court-Martial when I have seen the prisoner.

FERRARI. I have no doubt, your Eminence, he will convince you of the necessity of getting rid of him better than I can.

As he goes to the door, it opens, and the Gadfly enters, escorted by the Sergeant and four soldiers. The Gadfly instantly makes a spring at Ferrari. The soldiers drag him off. The Cardinal rises, white and shocked.

Ferrari. Now, your Eminence, I hope you believe me. You have seen for yourself.

GADFLY [coolly] I am bitterly disappointed, your Eminence. I was within an inch of getting a good bite when these foolish fellows stopped me.

FERRARI. I leave him in your Eminence’s hands. I wish your Eminence a pleasant interview. Exit.

MONTANELLI [to the guards] I wish to be alone with the prisoner. You can wait downstairs.

SERGEANT. But, your Eminence — montanelli [peremptorily] You are to wait downstairs, all of you. Go.

The Sergeant, overawed, takes his men out.

[to Gadfly] Sit down, please.

The Gadfly sits.

Signor Rivarez, I wish to ask you a few questions, and shall be very much obliged to you if you will answer them.

GADFLY. My chief occupation at present is to be asked questions.

MONTANELLI. And — not to answer them? So I have heard, but those questions are put by officials who are investigating your case and whose duty is to use your answers as evidence.

GADFLY [with covert insolence] And those of your Eminence?

MONTANELLI [quietly] Mine, whether you answer them or not, will remain between you and me. If they should trench upon your political secrets, of course you will not answer. Otherwise, though we are complete strangers to each other, I hope that you will answer frankly, as a personal favour to me.

GADFLY [icily] I am entirely at your Eminence’s service.

MONTANELLI. First, then, you are said to have been smuggling firearms into this district. What are they wanted for?

GADFLY. To kill rats with.

MONTANELLI. That is a terrible answer. Are all your fellow men rats in your eyes if they cannot think as you do?

GADFLY. Some of them.

MONTANELLI [suddenly, after a pause] What is that on your hand?

GADFLY [glancing at his left hand] Old marks from the teeth of some of the rats.

MONTANELLI. Excuse me: I was speaking of the other hand. That is a fresh hurt.

GADFLY [holding up his right hand with the wrist badly cut and bruised] It is a mere trifle, as you see. When I was arrested the other day, thanks to your Eminence [he makes a little bow], one of the soldiers stamped on it.

MONTANELLI [taking the hand and examining it] How does it come to be in such a state now, after three weeks? It is all inflamed.

GADFLY. Possibly the pressure of the iron has not done it much good.

MONTANELLI [frowning] Have they been putting irons on a fresh wound?

GADFLY. Naturally, your Eminence; that’s what fresh wounds are for. Old wounds are not much use. They will only ache: you can’t make them burn properly.

MONTANELLI [looks at him closely, then rises and opens a drawer full of surgical appliances] Give me the hand. [He bathes the injured place and bandages it carefully] I will speak about the irons. Now I want to ask you another question. What do you propose to do?

GADFLY. That is very simply answered, your Eminence. To escape if I can; and if I can’t, to die.

MONTANELLI. Why “to die”?

GADFLY. Because if the Governor doesn’t succeed in getting me shot, I shall be sent to the galleys; and for me that comes to the same thing. I haven’t got the health to live through it.

MONTANELLI [after a pause] Suppose you succeed in escaping, what will you do with your life?

GADFLY. I have already told your Eminence; I shall kill rats.

MONTANELLI. That is to say, that if I let you escape from here now — supposing I had the power to do so — you would use your freedom to foster violence and bloodshed instead of preventing them?

GADFLY [raising his eyes to the crucifix on the wall]

“Not peace but a sword” — at least I should be in good company. For my own part, though, I prefer pistols.

MONTANELLI [rising] Signor Rivarez, I am old, and no doubt have not much longer to live. I would go down to my grave without blood on my hands. But Heaven has put upon me the terrible duty of deciding whether you shall live or die. Everything I know of your career seems to me bad and mischievous: but during this last fortnight you have shown that you are a brave man, and that you can be faithful to your friends. You must have in you something better than you show outside. To that better self in you I appeal, and solemnly entreat you, on your conscience, to tell me truthfully: in my place what would you do?

GADFLY [with sudden, violent passion] At least I would decide my own actions for myself, and take the consequences of them. I would not come sneaking to other people, in the cowardly Christian way, asking them to make up my mind for me. We atheists understand that if a man has a thing to bear he must bear it as best he can: if he sinks under it, why, so much the worse for him! But a Christian comes whining to his God, or his Saints; or, if they won’t help him, to his enemies — he can always find a back to shift his burdens on to. Heavens and earth, man, haven’t I enough as it is, without your laying your responsibilities on my shoulders? [He breaks off, panting, then bursts out again] “Sign your own death sentence, please; I’m too tender-hearted to do it myself”: that’s what you’re saying to me now. Oh! it would take a Christian to hit on that — a gentle, compassionate Christian, that turns pale at the sight of a scuffle and a couple of bullet wounds. I might have known when you began to play the angel of mercy that the real thing was going to begin! Why do you look at me that way? Consent, man, of course; and go to your dinner: the thing’s not worth all this fuss. Tell your colonel he can have me shot, or hanged, or whatever comes handiest — roasted alive, if it’s any amusement to him — and be done with it!

Montanelli, with austere dignity, strikes the bell. The soldiers enter instantly, showing that they have been waiting immediately outside. Ferrari follows them.

MONTANELLI. You can take back the prisoner.

GADFLY [with mock sweetness as he is led out] Good afternoon, Colonel Ferrari. So sorry to have frightened you.

He is taken out.

MONTANELLI [to Ferrari] Do you honestly believe that the presence of Rivarez in the prison here is a serious danger to the peace of the district?

FERRARI. Most certainly I do, your Eminence.

MONTANELLI. You think that, to prevent the risk of bloodshed, it is absolutely necessary that he should somehow be got rid of before Corpus Domini?

FERRARI. I can only repeat that if he is here on Thursday, I do not expect the festival to pass over without a fight, and I think it likely to be a serious one.

MONTANELLI [forcibly, after an impressive pause] Colonel Ferrari: do you believe in God?

FERRARI. !!!! Your Eminence!!

MONTANELLI [rising and looking at him searchingly] Do you believe in God?

FERRARI [also rising] Your Eminence, I am a Christian man, and have never yet been refused absolution.

MONTANELLI [lifting the cross on his breast] Then swear on the cross of the Redeemer Who died for you, that you have been speaking the truth to me.

Ferrari gazes at him blankly.

You have asked me to give my consent to a man’s death. Kiss the cross, if you dare; and tell me that you believe there is no other way to prevent greater bloodshed. And remember that if you tell me a lie you are imperilling your immortal soul.

FERRARI [after a pause, bends down and puts the cross to his lips] I believe it.

A priest, Montanelli’s secretary, enters.

MONTANELLI. Why am I interrupted?

PRIEST. The woman, your Eminence.

MONTANELLI. What woman?

PRIEST. The woman who wrote to your Eminence this morning. On a matter of life and death. Your Eminence’s orders were that she should be admitted instantly.

MONTANELLI. Tell her that my present business is also of life and death. She must wait.

FERRARI. One moment, your Eminence. It may be the same business. I should like to see this woman, if your Eminence will be so good as to admit her before I leave the room.

MONTANELLI. Colonel Ferrari: must I again remind you that my palace is not a police office.

FERRARI [bluntly] Your Eminence: it is a place where men are sentenced to death. Will your Eminence take this whole business, fighting and all, on yourself from beginning to end?

MONTANELLI. You know that that is impossible.

Ferrari. Well, will you leave it altogether in my hands?

MONTANELLI. No: I must bear the burden of my own duties.

FERRARI. Then Church and State are partners; and they must treat one another reasonably. This woman can come to no harm if she deserves your protection. If your Eminence will not let me see or hear, I must have her watched: that is all.

MONTANELLI [to the Priest] Let her come in.

PRIEST [opening the door] You are to come in.

Gemma enters.

Ferrari [rising] Ah, I thought so. That is all I wanted, your Eminence. This is Signora Gemma Bolla. If we knew as much about this sedition as Signora Bolla does, we should make short work of it. I take my leave of your Eminence.

The Cardinal dismisses him with a gesture. Gemma watches him as he goes to the door. On the threshold he stops and turns.

Oh, by the way, your Eminence, I was forgetting what I came for. I have not had your Eminence’s final answer about the Court-Martial.

GEMMA. I beg your Eminence not to give that answer until you have heard what I have to say to you.

MONTANELLI. In that case, Colonel Ferrari, the lady’s business is public and concerns us both. You had better wait.

GEMMA. No: it is private — deeply private business.

Private business concerning your Eminence personally.

MONTANELLI. In that case, since no private considerations can alter my public duty, you can take my final answer now, Colonel. I consent to the CourtMartial.

GEMMA. What are you doing —

Ferrari [cutting her short exultantly] I thank your Eminence. Your orders shall be carried out at once.

He goes out.

GEMMA. I am glad to see that Cardinal Montanelli is more attached to his duty than Canon Montanelli, Father Director of the Theological Seminary in Pisa, and confessor to Arthur Burton.

MONTANELLI [turning white] What do you know of Arthur Burton?

GEMMA. I know that he confessed to only two priests in all his life. The one was a police spy. The other was his own father, the betrayer of his mother.

MONTANELLI [controlling himself] What do you want with me, my daughter?

GEMMA. Have you seen Rivarez?

MONTANELLI. Yes.

GEMMA. You know then that he does not believe in priests?

MONTANELLI. I know that he does not believe in anything.

GEMMA. Not even in women?

MONTANELLI. A man who does not believe in priests, my daughter, is not likely to believe in women.

GEMMA. Arthur Burton believed in women until his girl comrade struck him in the face because he trusted a political secret to a priest.

MONTANELLI. And drove him to his death by that act. Thank God, it was not the priest’s sin that broke his heart!

GEMMA. Are you sure that he is dead?

MONTANELLI. He drowned himself.

GEMMA. Did you find his body?

MONTANELLI. He left word that it would not be found.

GEMMA. How did he know that it would not be found?

MONTANELLI [trembling] Signora Bolla: you are doing a thing to me that a man born of a woman should hesitate to do to his worst enemy. You are turning the greatest sorrow of my life into a political weapon to save your fellow conspirator. You are trying to persuade me that Rivarez learnt his wickedness from Arthur.

GEMMA. Cardinal: Rivarez is Arthur.

MONTANELLI [springing up] In God’s name, no!

GEMMA. As surely as it was this hand that struck him. He chose this dangerous duty because he longed to see you. He loves you.

MONTANELLI. No, no, no.

GEMMA. Your duty was nothing to you when you brought him into the world. Is it so sacred now that you must send him out of it?

MONTANELLI. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It is the vengeance of God that has fallen on me as it fell upon David. I have defiled his sanctuary, and taken the body of the Lord into polluted hands. He has been very patient with me; but now it has come. “For thou didst it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun: the child that is born unto thee shall surely die!”

He falls insensible. Gemma runs to him and stoops over his body.

ACT IV.

SCENE I

Scene. The condemned cell. Night. The Gadfly asleep on a pallet. His coat is hanging on a chair beside it. A gaoler enters with a lamp, followed by Montanelli, who dismisses him.

MONTANELLI [seating himself beside the pallet and bending over the sleeper] Arthur.

GADFLY [rousing himself ] Yes! I am ready. Is it time?

[He recognizes Montanelli, and utters a cry of delight].

MONTANELLI. Have you come back to me from the dead?

GADFLY [shivering] From the dead?

MONTANELLI. You have come back — you have come back at last.

GADFLY [sighing wearily] Yes — and you have to fight me, or to kill me.

MONTANELLI. Oh, hush, Carino! We have been like two children lost in the dark, mistaking one another for phantoms. My poor boy, how changed you are — how changed! You look as if all the ocean of the world’s misery had passed over your head — you! who used to be so full of the joy of life! Arthur, is it really you? Remember, I thought I had killed you.

GADFLY. You have that still to do.

MONTANELLI [in terror] Arthur!

GADFLY. Let us be honest, whatever we do, and not shilly-shally. There can be nothing between us but war, and war, and war. What do you want to hold my hand for? Can’t you see that while you believe in your Cause, we can’t be anything but enemies?

MONTANELLI. As you will, Arthur; but I will do what I can. I will arrange your escape; and when you are safe you shall have your revenge. I will have an accident in the mountains, or take the wrong sleepingdraught by mistake — whatever you like to choose. Will that content you? It is all I can do. It is a great sin; but I think He will forgive me. He is more merciful — gadfly [with a sharp cry] Oh, that is too much! What have I done that you should think of me that way? What right have you — as if I wanted to be revenged on you! Can’t you see that I only want to save you? Will you never understand that I love you?

[He catches hold of Montanelli’s hands and kisses them]

Padre! come away with us. What have you to do with this dead world of priests and idols? They are full of the dust of bygone ages; they are rotten; they are pestilent and foul! Come out of this plague-stricken Church — come away with us into the light! Padre, it is we that are life and youth; it is we that are the everlasting springtime; it is we that are the future. Padre, the dawn is close upon us — will you miss your part in the sunrise? Wake up; and let us forget the horrible nightmares; wake up; and we will begin our life again! Padre, I have always loved you — always, even when you killed me. Will you kill me again?

MONTANELLI [tearing his hands away] Oh, God have mercy on me! You have your mother’s eyes! [a silence] Have you anything more to say? Any hope to give me?

GADFLY. No. My life is of no use to me except to fight priests. I am not a man; I am a knife. If you let me live, you sanction knives.

MONTANELLI [falling on his knees and raising his clasped hands to heaven] Hear me, O God — [A clash of muskets interrupts him as the door opens and the soldiers enter, commanded by the wounded officer, whose arm is in a sling], GADFLY [springing up and putting on his coat] Well answered, and promptly!

OFFICER. The time has come, Rivarez.

GADFLY [turning to the kneeling Montanelli, and placing his hand affectionately on his shoulder] There is no use in talking any more. [Montanelli rises like a man in a dream] [The Gadfly points upward] You still believe?

MONTANELLI. Though He slay me, I will trust in Him.

GADFLY [confidentially] He understands me. [Whispering] I don’t want to live. [He turns to the soldiers] March!

They go out — Montanelli stands like a man before his God. The scene changes.

SCENE 2

The Courtyard of the prison, lighted by torches. A fig tree at the back, a little to the right, with an open grave newly dug, close to it. A gate in the middle. A firing party of six Carabineers on the left in front. At the other side Ferrari, the wounded officer, priest, and a doctor, in a group on the right. The Gadfly enters in custody of the Sergeant and his four soldiers. He marches firmly to the tree.

GADFLY [brightly] Shall I stand here, Sergeant? Good morning, gentlemen! Ah, and his reverence is up so early too! How do you do, Captain? This is a pleasanter occasion for you than our former meeting, isn’t it? I see your arm is still in a sling; that’s because I bungled my work. These good fellows will do their’s better — won’t you, lads? There’ll be no need of slings this time, anyway. There, there; you needn’t look so doleful over it! Put your heels together and show how straight you can shoot. Before long there’ll be more work cut out for you than you’ll know how to get through; and there’s nothing like practice beforehand.

PRIEST. My son, in a few minutes you must enter into the presence of your Maker. Will you approach His awful throne with a jest upon your lips?

GADFLY. A jest, your reverence? Friend Ferrari there will not find it so. When our turn comes, we shall use field-guns instead of half a dozen secondhand carbines; and then you’ll see how much we’re in jest.

PRIEST. You will use field-guns! Oh, unhappy man!

Have you still not realized on what frightful brink you stand?

GADFLY [glancing over his shoulder at the grave] And so your reverence thinks that when you have put me down there, you will have done with me! True, I shall lie as still as a mouse, just where you put me. But, all the same, we shall use field-guns.

PRIEST. Merciful God, forgive this wretched man!

SERGEANT. Amen. [He produces a bandage for the prisoner’s eyes], gadfly. Colonel Ferrari: I have your promise that I shall look my death in the face.

FERRARI. It is true. Never mind the bandage.

SERGEANT. It’s hard on the men, sir, to see his face, if they are to shoot straight.

FERRARI. That’s his affair, not ours. Obey your orders. Are you ready, there?

GADFLY. I am quite ready.

WOUNDED OFFICER. Ready — Present — Fire!

They fire. He — the Gadfly — staggers a little but recovers his balance. He is wounded in the face; the blood drops on his cravat. He raises his mutilated hand to wipe it away. He is smiling.

GADFLY. A bad shot, men! Have another try.

SERGEANT [to his squad of four] Change carbines with them, quick. Load for them.

WOUNDED OFFICER. Pull yourselves together, will you? The squad changes carbines with the firing party, which is reformed.

GADFLY. You have brought out the awkward squad this morning, Colonel. Let me see if I can manage them better. Now men. Are you all straight? Now then. Ready. Present —

FERRARI. Fire. The gates open and the Cardinal rushes in. The Gadfly falls into his arms. Is your Eminence hurt? That was a frightfully dangerous thing to do. Let the fellow drop; he is dead.

GADFLY [with an effort] Not quite yet, Colonel. The soldiers utter a groan of horror. The wounded officer draws a pistol, but hesitates.

FERRARI [snatching it from him] Make an end of him, in God’s name. [He raises the pistol].

MONTANELLI [solemnly] In God’s name — no absolution for you if you do. [Ferrari’s hand drops].

GADFLY. It is all over; my blood is choking me; but I smell the sunrise. [He falls]. The soldiers, throwing down their weapons and falling on their knees, cry.

SOLDIERS. Absolution, absolution.

MONTANELLI [raising his fingers in benediction] In the name of the Father, and of the Son — the son who died for the people, the Father who gave his son to be slain!

Curtain

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

Caesar and Cleopatra was written in 1898 and first published in 1901 as part of the Three Plays for Puritans collection, which also included The Devil’s Disciple and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. The play was first performed at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, in the north east of England, in March 1899. In 1951 at London’s St James’s Theatre, and later on Broadway, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier starred in the play rotating their parts with their roles in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.  Shaw collaborated on the 1945 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains, and expressed his great satisfaction at the possibilities that the medium of film created in illuminating his works.

In a 1912 edition of the play Shaw added a second prologue, in which he wrote a sermon delivered by the God Ra, stressing the similarities between the Roman period and contemporary times, suggesting there has not been any great progress in humanity. He asserted ‘Men centuries ago were already just such as you...no worse and no better, no wiser and no sillier’ and that it is ‘too absurd’ to even speculate that there has been progress since Caesar’s time.

The play opens with Cleopatra sleeping between the paws of a Sphinx; when she awakes she encounters Caesar, whom she does not recognise as the great Emperor. She relates her fears to him about the conquering Romans and is advised to be brave and strong. When Cleopatra realises the man is actually Caesar she collapses into his arms in relief, but is greatly perturbed after the Roman suggests that she and her brother should co-rule. Skirmishes break out between Caesar’s and Achillas’s armies, while Cleopatra commandeers the Emperor’s time and requests that he send the young Mark Antony to Egypt. The play then details the battles and sieges between the two warring factions, while Shaw highlights the cultural differences between Rome and Egypt. The playwright undermines any romantic notions about the allegiance between Cleopatra and Caesar and deploys his wit to highlight political issues pertinent to his own society.

Shaw, close to the time of the play’s first staging, c. 1901

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE PROLOGUE

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT V

NOTES TO CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

PROLOGUE

[In the doorway of the temple of Ra in Memphis. Deep gloom. An august personage with a hawk's head is mysteriously visible by his own light in the darkness within the temple. He surveys the modern audience with great contempt; and finally speaks the following words to them.]

Peace! Be silent and hearken unto me, ye quaint little islanders. Give ear, ye men with white paper on your breasts and nothing written thereon [to signify the innocence of your minds]. Hear me, ye women who adorn yourselves alluringly and conceal your thoughts from your men, leading them to believe that ye deem them wondrous strong and masterful whilst in truth ye hold them in your hearts as children without judgment. Look upon my hawk's head; and know that I am Ra, who was once in Egypt a mighty god. Ye cannot kneel nor prostrate yourselves; for ye are packed, in rows without freedom to move, obstructing one another's vision; neither do any of ye regard it as seemly to do ought until ye see all the rest do so too; wherefore it commonly happens that in great emergencies ye do nothing though each telleth his fellow that something must be done. I ask you not for worship, but for silence. Let not your men speak nor your women cough; for I am come to draw you back two thousand years over the graves of sixty generations. Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dust heaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

Hearken to me then, oh ye: compulsorily educated ones. Know that even as there is an old England and a new, and ye stand perplexed between the twain; so in the days when I was worshipped was there an old Rome and a new, and men standing perplexed between them. And the old Rome was poor and little, and greedy and fierce, and evil in many ways; but because its mind was little and its work was simple, it knew its own mind and did its own work; and the gods pitied it and helped it and strengthened it and shielded it; for the gods are patient with littleness. Then the old Rome, like the beggar on horseback, presumed on the favor of the gods, and said, "Lo! there is neither riches nor greatness in our littleness: the road to riches and greatness is through robbery of the poor and slaughter of the weak." So they robbed their own poor until they became great masters of that art, and knew by what laws it could be made to appear seemly and honest. And when they had squeezed their own poor dry, they robbed the poor of other lands, and added those lands to Rome until there came a new Rome, rich and huge. And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size whilst their dominion spread over the earth.

Now mark me, that ye may understand what ye are presently to see. Whilst the Romans still stood between the old Rome and the new, there arose among them a mighty soldier: Pompey the Great. And the way of the soldier is the way of death; but the way of the gods is the way of life; and so it comes that a god at the end of his way is wise and a soldier at the end of his way is a fool. So Pompey held by the old Rome, in which only soldiers could become great; but the gods turned to the new Rome, in which any man with wit enough could become what he would. And Pompey's friend Julius Caesar was on the side of the gods; for he saw that Rome had passed beyond the control of the little old Romans. This Caesar was a great talker and a politician: he bought men with words and with gold, even as ye are bought. And when they would not be satisfied with words and gold, and demanded also the glories of war, Caesar in his middle age turned his hand to that trade; and they that were against him when he sought their welfare, bowed down before him when he became a slayer and a conqueror; for such is the nature of you mortals. And as for Pompey, the gods grew tired of his triumphs and his airs of being himself a god; for he talked of law and duty and other matters that concerned not a mere human worm. And the gods smiled on Caesar; for he lived the life they had given him boldly, and was not forever rebuking us for our indecent ways of creation, and hiding our handiwork as a shameful thing. Ye know well what I mean; for this is one of your own sins.

And thus it fell out between the old Rome and the new, that Caesar said, "Unless I break the law of old Rome, I cannot take my share in ruling her; and the gift of ruling that the gods gave me will perish without fruit." But Pompey said, "The law is above all; and if thou break it thou shalt die." Then said Caesar, "I will break it: kill me who can." And he broke it. And Pompey went for him, as ye say, with a great army to slay him and uphold the old Rome. So Caesar fled across the Adriatic sea; for the high gods had a lesson to teach him, which lesson they shall also teach you in due time if ye continue to forget them and to worship that cad among gods, Mammon. Therefore before they raised Caesar to be master of the world, they were minded to throw him down into the dust, even beneath the feet of Pompey, and blacken his face before the nations. And Pompey they raised higher than ever, he and his laws and his high mind that aped the gods, so that his fall might be the more terrible. And Pompey followed Caesar, and overcame him with all the majesty of old Rome, and stood over him and over the whole world even as ye stand over it with your fleet that covers thirty miles of the sea. And when Caesar was brought down to utter nothingness, he made a last stand to die honorably, and did not despair; for he said, "Against me there is Pompey, and the old Rome, and the law and the legions: all all against me; but high above these are the gods; and Pompey is a fool." And the gods laughed and approved; and on the field of Pharsalia the impossible came to pass; the blood and iron ye pin your faith on fell before the spirit of man; for the spirit of man is the will of the gods; and Pompey's power crumbled in his hand, even as the power of imperial Spain crumbled when it was set against your fathers in the days when England was little, and knew her own mind, and had a mind to know instead of a circulation of newspapers. Wherefore look to it, lest some little people whom ye would enslave rise up and become in the hand of God the scourge of your boastings and your injustices and your lusts and stupidities.

And now, would ye know the end of Pompey, or will ye sleep while a god speaks? Heed my words well; for Pompey went where ye have gone, even to Egypt, where there was a Roman occupation even as there was but now a British one. And Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt; a Roman fleeing, and a Roman pursuing: dog eating dog. And the Egyptians said, "Lo: these Romans which have lent money to our kings and levied a distraint upon us with their arms, call for ever upon us to be loyal to them by betraying our own country to them. But now behold two Romes! Pompey's Rome and Caesar's Rome! To which of the twain shall we pretend to be loyal?" So they turned in their perplexity to a soldier that had once served Pompey, and that knew the ways of Rome and was full of her lusts. And they said to him, "Lo: in thy country dog eats dog; and both dogs are coming to eat us: what counsel hast thou to give us?" And this soldier, whose name was Lucius Septimius, and whom ye shall presently see before ye, replied, "Ye shall diligently consider which is the bigger dog of the two; and ye shall kill the other dog for his sake and thereby earn his favor." And the Egyptians said, "Thy counsel is expedient; but if we kill a man outside the law we set ourselves in the place of the gods; and this we dare not do. But thou, being a Roman, art accustomed to this kind of killing; for thou hast imperial instincts. Wilt thou therefore kill the lesser dog for us?" And he said, "I will; for I have made my home in Egypt; and I desire consideration and influence among you." And they said, "We knew well thou wouldst not do it for nothing: thou shalt have thy reward." Now when Pompey came, he came alone in a little galley, putting his trust in the law and the constitution. And it was plain to the people of Egypt that Pompey was now but a very small dog. So when he set his foot on the shore he was greeted by his old comrade Lucius Septimius, who welcomed him with one hand and with the other smote off his head, and kept it as it were a pickled cabbage to make a present to Caesar. And mankind shuddered; but the gods laughed; for Septimius was but a knife that Pompey had sharpened; and when it turned against his own throat they said that Pompey had better have made Septimius a ploughman than so brave and readyhanded a slayer. Therefore again I bid you beware, ye who would all be Pompeys if ye dared; for war is a wolf that may come to your own door.

Are ye impatient with me? Do ye crave for a story of an unchaste woman? Hath the name of Cleopatra tempted ye hither? Ye foolish ones; Cleopatra is as yet but a child that is whipped by her nurse. And what I am about to shew you for the good of your souls is how Caesar, seeking Pompey in Egypt, found Cleopatra; and how he received that present of a pickled cabbage that was once the head of Pompey; and what things happened between the old Caesar and the child queen before he left Egypt and battled his way back to Rome to be slain there as Pompey was slain, by men in whom the spirit of Pompey still lived. All this ye shall see; and ye shall marvel, after your ignorant manner, that men twenty centuries ago were already just such as you, and spoke and lived as ye speak and live, no worse and no better, no wiser and no sillier. And the two thousand years that have past are to me, the god Ra, but a moment; nor is this day any other than the day in which Caesar set foot in the land of my people. And now I leave you; for ye are a dull folk, and instruction is wasted on you; and I had not spoken so much but that it is in the nature of a god to struggle for ever with the dust and the darkness, and to drag from them, by the force of his longing for the divine, more life and more light. Settle ye therefore in your seats and keep silent; for ye are about to hear a man speak, and a great man he was, as ye count greatness. And fear not that I shall speak to you again: the rest of the story must ye learn from them that lived it. Farewell; and do not presume to applaud me. [The temple vanishes in utter darkness].

AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE PROLOGUE

[AN October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars and the cloudless sky are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half centuries younger than we know them; but you would not guess that from their appearance. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern English officers: for example, they do not dig up the corpses of their dead enemies and mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two groups: one intent on the gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior of fifty, who, with his spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping to throw dice with a sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other gathered about a guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty story [still current in English barracks] at which they are laughing uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly aristocratic young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with weapons and armor, very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in their professional dress; on the contrary, rather ostentatiously and arrogantly warlike, as valuing themselves on their military caste. Belzanor is a typical veteran, tough and wilful; prompt, capable and crafty where brute force will serve; helpless and boyish when it will not: an effective sergeant, an incompetent general, a deplorable dictator. Would, if influentially connected, be employed in the two last capacities by a modern European State on the strength of his success in the first. Is rather to be pitied just now in view of the fact that Julius Caesar is invading his country. Not knowing this, is intent on his game with the Persian, whom, as a foreigner, he considers quite capable of cheating him.

His subalterns are mostly handsome young fellows whose interest in the game and the story symbolize with tolerable completeness the main interests in life of which they are conscious. Their spears are leaning against the walls, or lying on the ground ready to their hands. The corner of the courtyard forms a triangle of which one side is the front of the palace, with a doorway, the other a wall with a gateway. The storytellers are on the palace side: the gamblers, on the gateway side. Close to the gateway, against the wall, is a stone block high enough to enable a Nubian sentinel, standing on it, to look over the wall. The yard is lighted by a torch stuck in the wall. As the laughter from the group round the storyteller dies away, the kneeling Persian, winning the throw, snatches up the stake from the ground.]

ACT I

An October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars and the cloudless sky are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half centuries younger than we know them; but you would not guess that from their appearance. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern English officers: for example, they do not dig up the corpses of their dead enemies and mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two groups: one intent on the gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior of fifty, who, with his spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping to throw dice with a sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other gathered about a guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty story (still current in English barracks) at which they are laughing uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly aristocratic young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with weapons and armor, very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in their professional dress; on the contrary, rather ostentatiously and arrogantly warlike, as valuing themselves on their military caste.

Belzanor is a typical veteran, tough and wilful; prompt, capable and crafty where brute force will serve; helpless and boyish when it will not: an effective sergeant, an incompetent general, a deplorable dictator. Would, if influentially connected, be employed in the two last capacities by a modern European State on the strength of his success in the first. Is rather to be pitied just now in view of the fact that Julius Caesar is invading his country. Not knowing this, is intent on his game with the Persian, whom, as a foreigner, he considers quite capable of cheating him.

His subalterns are mostly handsome young fellows whose interest in the game and the story symbolizes with tolerable completeness the main interests in life of which they are conscious. Their spears are leaning against the walls, or lying on the ground ready to their hands. The corner of the courtyard forms a triangle of which one side is the front of the palace, with a doorway, the other a wall with a gateway. The storytellers are on the palace side: the gamblers, on the gateway side. Close to the gateway, against the wall, is a stone block high enough to enable a Nubian sentinel, standing on it, to look over the wall. The yard is lighted by a torch stuck in the wall. As the laughter from the group round the storyteller dies away, the kneeling Persian, winning the throw, snatches up the stake from the ground.

BELZANOR. By Apis, Persian, thy gods are good to thee.

THE PERSIAN. Try yet again, O captain. Double or quits!

BELZANOR. No more. I am not in the vein.

THE SENTINEL (poising his javelin as he peers over the wall). Stand. Who goes there?

They all start, listening. A strange voice replies from without.

VOICE. The bearer of evil tidings.

BELZANOR (calling to the sentry). Pass him.

THE SENTINEL. (grounding his javelin). Draw near, O bearer of evil tidings.

BELZANOR (pocketing the dice and picking up his spear). Let us receive this man with honor. He bears evil tidings.

The guardsmen seize their spears and gather about the gate, leaving a way through for the new comer.

PERSIAN (rising from his knee). Are evil tidings, then, honorable?

BELZANOR. O barbarous Persian, hear my instruction. In Egypt the bearer of good tidings is sacrificed to the gods as a thank offering but no god will accept the blood of the messenger of evil. When we have good tidings, we are careful to send them in the mouth of the cheapest slave we can find. Evil tidings are borne by young noblemen who desire to bring themselves into notice. (They join the rest at the gate.)

THE SENTINEL. Pass, O young captain; and bow the head in the House of the Queen.

VOICE. Go anoint thy javelin with fat of swine, O Blackamoor; for before morning the Romans will make thee eat it to the very butt.

The owner of the voice, a fairhaired dandy, dressed in a different fashion to that affected by the guardsmen, but no less extravagantly, comes through the gateway laughing. He is somewhat battle-stained; and his left forearm, bandaged, comes through a torn sleeve. In his right hand he carries a Roman sword in its sheath. He swaggers down the courtyard, the Persian on his right, Belzanor on his left, and the guardsmen crowding down behind him.

BELZANOR. Who art thou that laughest in the House of Cleopatra the Queen, and in the teeth of Belzanor, the captain of her guard?

THE NEW COMER. I am Bel Affris, descended from the gods.

BELZANOR (ceremoniously). Hail, cousin!

ALL (except the Persian). Hail, cousin!

PERSIAN. All the Queen’s guards are descended from the gods, O stranger, save myself. I am Persian, and descended from many kings.

BEL AFFRIS (to the guardsmen). Hail, cousins! (To the Persian, condescendingly) Hail, mortal!

BELZANOR. You have been in battle, Bel Affris; and you are a soldier among soldiers. You will not let the Queen’s women have the first of your tidings.

BEL AFFRIS. I have no tidings, except that we shall have our throats cut presently, women, soldiers, and all.

PERSIAN (to Belzanor). I told you so.

THE SENTINEL (who has been listening). Woe, alas!

BEL AFFRIS (calling to him). Peace, peace, poor Ethiop: destiny is with the gods who painted thee black. (To Belzanor) What has this mortal (indicating the Persian) told you?

BELZANOR. He says that the Roman Julius Caesar, who has landed on our shores with a handful of followers, will make himself master of Egypt. He is afraid of the Roman soldiers. (The guardsmen laugh with boisterous scorn.) Peasants, brought up to scare crows and follow the plough. Sons of smiths and millers and tanners! And we nobles, consecrated to arms, descended from the gods!

PERSIAN. Belzanor: the gods are not always good to their poor relations.

BELZANOR (hotly, to the Persian). Man to man, are we worse than the slaves of Caesar?

BEL AFFRIS (stepping between them). Listen, cousin. Man to man, we Egyptians are as gods above the Romans.

THE GUARDSMEN (exultingly). Aha!

BEL AFFRIS. But this Caesar does not pit man against man: he throws a legion at you where you are weakest as he throws a stone from a catapult; and that legion is as a man with one head, a thousand arms, and no religion. I have fought against them; and I know.

BELZANOR (derisively). Were you frightened, cousin?

The guardsmen roar with laughter, their eyes sparkling at the wit of their captain.

BEL AFFRIS. No, cousin; but I was beaten. They were frightened (perhaps); but they scattered us like chaff.

The guardsmen, much damped, utter a growl of contemptuous disgust.

BELZANOR. Could you not die?

BEL AFFRIS. No: that was too easy to be worthy of a descendant of the gods. Besides, there was no time: all was over in a moment. The attack came just where we least expected it.

BELZANOR. That shows that the Romans are cowards.

BEL AFFRIS. They care nothing about cowardice, these Romans: they fight to win. The pride and honor of war are nothing to them.

PERSIAN. Tell us the tale of the battle. What befell?

THE GUARDSMEN (gathering eagerly round Bel Afris). Ay: the tale of the battle.

BEL AFFRIS. Know then, that I am a novice in the guard of the temple of Ra in Memphis, serving neither Cleopatra nor her brother Ptolemy, but only the high gods. We went a journey to inquire of Ptolemy why he had driven Cleopatra into Syria, and how we of Egypt should deal with the Roman Pompey, newly come to our shores after his defeat by Caesar at Pharsalia. What, think ye, did we learn? Even that Caesar is coming also in hot pursuit of his foe, and that Ptolemy has slain Pompey, whose severed head he holds in readiness to present to the conqueror. (Sensation among the guardsmen.) Nay, more: we found that Caesar is already come; for we had not made half a day’s journey on our way back when we came upon a city rabble flying from his legions, whose landing they had gone out to withstand.

BELZANOR. And ye, the temple guard! Did you not withstand these legions?

BEL AFFRIS. What man could, that we did. But there came the sound of a trumpet whose voice was as the cursing of a black mountain. Then saw we a moving wall of shields coming towards us. You know how the heart burns when you charge a fortified wall; but how if the fortified wall were to charge YOU?

THE PERSIAN (exulting in having told them so). Did I not say it?

BEL AFFRIS. When the wall came nigh, it changed into a line of men — common fellows enough, with helmets, leather tunics, and breastplates. Every man of them flung his javelin: the one that came my way drove through my shield as through a papyrus — lo there! (he points to the bandage on his left arm) and would have gone through my neck had I not stooped. They were charging at the double then, and were upon us with short swords almost as soon as their javelins. When a man is close to you with such a sword, you can do nothing with our weapons: they are all too long.

THE PERSIAN. What did you do?

BEL AFFRIS. Doubled my fist and smote my Roman on the sharpness of his jaw. He was but mortal after all: he lay down in a stupor; and I took his sword and laid it on. (Drawing the sword) Lo! a Roman sword with Roman blood on it!

THE GUARDSMEN (approvingly). Good! (They take the sword and hand it round, examining it curiously.)

THE PERSIAN. And your men?

BEL AFFRIS. Fled. Scattered like sheep.

BELZANOR (furiously). The cowardly slaves! Leaving the descendants of the gods to be butchered!

BEL AFFRIS (with acid coolness). The descendants of the gods did not stay to be butchered, cousin. The battle was not to the strong; but the race was to the swift. The Romans, who have no chariots, sent a cloud of horsemen in pursuit, and slew multitudes. Then our high priest’s captain rallied a dozen descendants of the gods and exhorted us to die fighting. I said to myself: surely it is safer to stand than to lose my breath and be stabbed in the back; so I joined our captain and stood. Then the Romans treated us with respect; for no man attacks a lion when the field is full of sheep, except for the pride and honor of war, of which these Romans know nothing. So we escaped with our lives; and I am come to warn you that you must open your gates to Caesar; for his advance guard is scarce an hour behind me; and not an Egyptian warrior is left standing between you and his legions.

THE SENTINEL. Woe, alas! (He throws down his javelin and flies into the palace.)

BELZANOR. Nail him to the door, quick! (The guardsmen rush for him with their spears; but he is too quick for them.) Now this news will run through the palace like fire through stubble.

BEL AFFRIS. What shall we do to save the women from the Romans?

BELZANOR. Why not kill them?

PERSIAN. Because we should have to pay blood money for some of them. Better let the Romans kill them: it is cheaper.

BELZANOR (awestruck at his brain power). O subtle one! O serpent!

BEL AFFRIS. But your Queen?

BELZANOR. True: we must carry off Cleopatra.

BEL AFFRIS. Will ye not await her command?

BELZANOR. Command! A girl of sixteen! Not we. At Memphis ye deem her a Queen: here we know better. I will take her on the crupper of my horse. When we soldiers have carried her out of Caesar’s reach, then the priests and the nurses and the rest of them can pretend she is a queen again, and put their commands into her mouth.

PERSIAN. Listen to me, Belzanor.

BELZANOR. Speak, O subtle beyond thy years.

THE PERSIAN. Cleopatra’s brother Ptolemy is at war with her. Let us sell her to him.

THE GUARDSMEN. O subtle one! O serpent!

BELZANOR. We dare not. We are descended from the gods; but Cleopatra is descended from the river Nile; and the lands of our fathers will grow no grain if the Nile rises not to water them. Without our father’s gifts we should live the lives of dogs.

PERSIAN. It is true: the Queen’s guard cannot live on its pay. But hear me further, O ye kinsmen of Osiris.

THE GUARDSMEN. Speak, O subtle one. Hear the serpent begotten!

PERSIAN. Have I heretofore spoken truly to you of Caesar, when you thought I mocked you?

GUARDSMEN. Truly, truly.

BELZANOR (reluctantly admitting it). So Bel Affris says.

PERSIAN. Hear more of him, then. This Caesar is a great lover of women: he makes them his friends and counselors.

BELZANOR. Faugh! This rule of women will be the ruin of Egypt.

THE PERSIAN. Let it rather be the ruin of Rome! Caesar grows old now: he is past fifty and full of labors and battles. He is too old for the young women; and the old women are too wise to worship him.

BEL AFFRIS. Take heed, Persian. Caesar is by this time almost within earshot.

PERSIAN. Cleopatra is not yet a woman: neither is she wise. But she already troubles men’s wisdom.

BELZANOR. Ay: that is because she is descended from the river Nile and a black kitten of the sacred White Cat. What then?

PERSIAN. Why, sell her secretly to Ptolemy, and then offer ourselves to Caesar as volunteers to fight for the overthrow of her brother and the rescue of our Queen, the Great Granddaughter of the Nile.

THE GUARDSMEN. O serpent!

PERSIAN. He will listen to us if we come with her picture in our mouths. He will conquer and kill her brother, and reign in Egypt with Cleopatra for his Queen. And we shall be her guard.

GUARDSMEN. O subtlest of all the serpents! O admiration! O wisdom!

BEL AFFRIS. He will also have arrived before you have done talking, O word spinner.

BELZANOR. That is true. (An affrighted uproar in the palace interrupts him.) Quick: the flight has begun: guard the door. (They rush to the door and form a cordon before it with their spears. A mob of women-servants and nurses surges out. Those in front recoil from the spears, screaming to those behind to keep back. Belzanor’s voice dominates the disturbance as he shouts) Back there. In again, unprofitable cattle.

THE GUARDSMEN. Back, unprofitable cattle.

BELZANOR. Send us out Ftatateeta, the Queen’s chief nurse.

THE WOMEN (calling into the palace). Ftatateeta, Ftatateeta. Come, come. Speak to Belzanor.

A WOMAN. Oh, keep back. You are thrusting me on the spearheads.

A huge grim woman, her face covered with a network of tiny wrinkles, and her eyes old, large, and wise; sinewy handed, very tall, very strong; with the mouth of a bloodhound and the jaws of a bulldog, appears on the threshold. She is dressed like a person of consequence in the palace, and confronts the guardsmen insolently.

FTATATEETA. Make way for the Queen’s chief nurse.

BELZANOR. (with solemn arrogance). Ftatateeta: I am Belzanor, the captain of the Queen’s guard, descended from the gods.

FTATATEETA. (retorting his arrogance with interest). Belzanor: I am Ftatateeta, the Queen’s chief nurse; and your divine ancestors were proud to be painted on the wall in the pyramids of the kings whom my fathers served.

The women laugh triumphantly.

BELZANOR (with grim humor) Ftatateeta: daughter of a long-tongued, swivel-eyed chameleon, the Romans are at hand. (A cry of terror from the women: they would fly but for the spears.) Not even the descendants of the gods can resist them; for they have each man seven arms, each carrying seven spears. The blood in their veins is boiling quicksilver; and their wives become mothers in three hours, and are slain and eaten the next day.

A shudder of horror from the women. Ftatateeta, despising them and scorning the soldiers, pushes her way through the crowd and confronts the spear points undismayed.

FTATATEETA. Then fly and save yourselves, O cowardly sons of the cheap clay gods that are sold to fish porters; and leave us to shift for ourselves.

BELZANOR. Not until you have first done our bidding, O terror of manhood. Bring out Cleopatra the Queen to us and then go whither you will.

FTATATEETA (with a derisive laugh). Now I know why the gods have taken her out of our hands. (The guardsmen start and look at one another). Know, thou foolish soldier, that the Queen has been missing since an hour past sun down.

BELZANOR (furiously). Hag: you have hidden her to sell to Caesar or her brother. (He grasps her by the left wrist, and drags her, helped by a few of the guard, to the middle of the courtyard, where, as they fling her on her knees, he draws a murderous looking knife.) Where is she? Where is she? or — (He threatens to cut her throat.)

FTATATEETA (savagely). Touch me, dog; and the Nile will not rise on your fields for seven times seven years of famine.

BELZANOR (frightened, but desperate). I will sacrifice: I will pay. Or stay. (To the Persian) You, O subtle one: your father’s lands lie far from the Nile. Slay her.

PERSIAN (threatening her with his knife). Persia has but one god; yet he loves the blood of old women. Where is Cleopatra?

FTATATEETA. Persian: as Osiris lives, I do not know. I chide her for bringing evil days upon us by talking to the sacred cats of the priests, and carrying them in her arms. I told her she would be left alone here when the Romans came as a punishment for her disobedience. And now she is gone — run away — hidden. I speak the truth. I call Osiris to witness.

THE WOMEN (protesting officiously). She speaks the truth, Belzanor.

BELZANOR. You have frightened the child: she is hiding. Search — quick — into the palace — search every corner.

The guards, led by Belzanor, shoulder their way into the palace through the flying crowd of women, who escape through the courtyard gate.

FTATATEETA (screaming). Sacrilege! Men in the Queen’s chambers! Sa — (Her voice dies away as the Persian puts his knife to her throat.)

BEL AFFRIS (laying a hand on Ftatateeta’s left shoulder). Forbear her yet a moment, Persian. (To Ftatateeta, very significantly) Mother: your gods are asleep or away hunting; and the sword is at your throat. Bring us to where the Queen is hid, and you shall live.

FTATATEETA (contemptuously). Who shall stay the sword in the hand of a fool, if the high gods put it there? Listen to me, ye young men without understanding. Cleopatra fears me; but she fears the Romans more. There is but one power greater in her eyes than the wrath of the Queen’s nurse and the cruelty of Caesar; and that is the power of the Sphinx that sits in the desert watching the way to the sea. What she would have it know, she tells into the ears of the sacred cats; and on her birthday she sacrifices to it and decks it with poppies. Go ye therefore into the desert and seek Cleopatra in the shadow of the Sphinx; and on your heads see to it that no harm comes to her.

BEL AFFRIS (to the Persian). May we believe this, O subtle one?

PERSIAN. Which way come the Romans?

BEL AFFRIS. Over the desert, from the sea, by this very Sphinx.

PERSIAN (to Ftatateeta). O mother of guile! O aspic’s tongue! You have made up this tale so that we two may go into the desert and perish on the spears of the Romans. (Lifting his knife) Taste death.

FTATATEETA. Not from thee, baby. (She snatches his ankle from under him and flies stooping along the palace wall vanishing in the darkness within its precinct. Bel Affris roars with laughter as the Persian tumbles. The guardsmen rush out of the palace with Belzanor and a mob of fugitives, mostly carrying bundles.)

PERSIAN. Have you found Cleopatra?

BELZANOR. She is gone. We have searched every corner.

THE NUBIAN SENTINEL (appearing at the door of the palace). Woe! Alas! Fly, fly!

BELZANOR. What is the matter now?

THE NUBIAN SENTINEL. The sacred white cat has been stolen. Woe! Woe! (General panic. They all fly with cries of consternation. The torch is thrown down and extinguished in the rush. Darkness. The noise of the fugitives dies away. Dead silence. Suspense. Then the blackness and stillness breaks softly into silver mist and strange airs as the windswept harp of Memnon plays at the dawning of the moon. It rises full over the desert; and a vast horizon comes into relief, broken by a huge shape which soon reveals itself in the spreading radiance as a Sphinx pedestalled on the sands. The light still clears, until the upraised eyes of the image are distinguished looking straight forward and upward in infinite fearless vigil, and a mass of color between its great paws defines itself as a heap of red poppies on which a girl lies motionless, her silken vest heaving gently and regularly with the breathing of a dreamless sleeper, and her braided hair glittering in a shaft of moonlight like a bird’s wing.

Suddenly there comes from afar a vaguely fearful sound [it might be the bellow of a Minotaur softened by great distance] and Memnon’s music stops. Silence: then a few faint high-ringing trumpet notes. Then silence again. Then a man comes from the south with stealing steps, ravished by the mystery of the night, all wonder, and halts, lost in contemplation, opposite the left flank of the Sphinx, whose bosom, with its burden, is hidden from him by its massive shoulder.)

THE MAN. Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought. In the little world yonder, Sphinx, my place is as high as yours in this great desert; only I wander, and you sit still; I conquer, and you endure; I work and wonder, you watch and wait; I look up and am dazzled, look down and am darkened, look round and am puzzled, whilst your eyes never turn from looking out — out of the world — to the lost region — the home from which we have strayed. Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another: have I not been conscious of you and of this place since I was born? Rome is a madman’s dream: this is my Reality. These starry lamps of yours I have seen from afar in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain, in Thessaly, signalling great secrets to some eternal sentinel below, whose post I never could find. And here at last is their sentinel — an image of the constant and immortal part of my life, silent, full of thoughts, alone in the silver desert. Sphinx, Sphinx: I have climbed mountains at night to hear in the distance the stealthy footfall of the winds that chase your sands in forbidden play — our invisible children, O Sphinx, laughing in whispers. My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

THE GIRL (who has wakened, and peeped cautiously from her nest to see who is speaking). Old gentleman.

CAESAR (starting violently, and clutching his sword). Immortal gods!

THE GIRL. Old gentleman: don’t run away.

CAESAR (stupefied). “Old gentleman: don’t run away!!!” This! To Julius Caesar!

THE GIRL (urgently). Old gentleman.

CAESAR. Sphinx: you presume on your centuries. I am younger than you, though your voice is but a girl’s voice as yet.

THE GIRL. Climb up here, quickly; or the Romans will come and eat you.

CAESAR (running forward past the Sphinx’s shoulder, and seeing her). A child at its breast! A divine child!

THE GIRL. Come up quickly. You must get up at its side and creep round.

CAESAR (amazed). Who are you?

THE GIRL. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.

CAESAR. Queen of the Gypsies, you mean.

CLEOPATRA. You must not be disrespectful to me, or the Sphinx will let the Romans eat you. Come up. It is quite cosy here.

CAESAR (to himself). What a dream! What a magnificent dream! Only let me not wake, and I will conquer ten continents to pay for dreaming it out to the end. (He climbs to the Sphinx’s flank, and presently reappears to her on the pedestal, stepping round its right shoulder.)

CLEOPATRA. Take care. That’s right. Now sit down: you may have its other paw. (She seats herself comfortably on its left paw.) It is very powerful and will protect us; but (shivering, and with plaintive loneliness) it would not take any notice of me or keep me company. I am glad you have come: I was very lonely. Did you happen to see a white cat anywhere?

CAESAR (sitting slowly down on the right paw in extreme wonderment). Have you lost one?

CLEOPATRA. Yes: the sacred white cat: is it not dreadful? I brought him here to sacrifice him to the Sphinx; but when we got a little way from the city a black cat called him, and he jumped out of my arms and ran away to it. Do you think that the black cat can have been my great-great-great-grandmother?

CAESAR (staring at her). Your great-great-great-grandmother! Well, why not? Nothing would surprise me on this night of nights.

CLEOPATRA. I think it must have been. My great-grandmother’s great-grandmother was a black kitten of the sacred white cat; and the river Nile made her his seventh wife. That is why my hair is so wavy. And I always want to be let do as I like, no matter whether it is the will of the gods or not: that is because my blood is made with Nile water.

CAESAR. What are you doing here at this time of night? Do you live here?

CLEOPATRA. Of course not: I am the Queen; and I shall live in the palace at Alexandria when I have killed my brother, who drove me out of it. When I am old enough I shall do just what I like. I shall be able to poison the slaves and see them wriggle, and pretend to Ftatateeta that she is going to be put into the fiery furnace.

CAESAR. Hm! Meanwhile why are you not at home and in bed?

CLEOPATRA. Because the Romans are coming to eat us all. YOU are not at home and in bed either.

CAESAR (with conviction). Yes I am. I live in a tent; and I am now in that tent, fast asleep and dreaming. Do you suppose that I believe you are real, you impossible little dream witch?

CLEOPATRA (giggling and leaning trustfully towards him). You are a funny old gentleman. I like you.

CAESAR. Ah, that spoils the dream. Why don’t you dream that I am young?

CLEOPATRA. I wish you were; only I think I should be more afraid of you. I like men, especially young men with round strong arms; but I am afraid of them. You are old and rather thin and stringy; but you have a nice voice; and I like to have somebody to talk to, though I think you are a little mad. It is the moon that makes you talk to yourself in that silly way.

CAESAR. What! you heard that, did you? I was saying my prayers to the great Sphinx.

CLEOPATRA. But this isn’t the great Sphinx.

CAESAR (much disappointed, looking up at the statue). What!

CLEOPATRA. This is only a dear little kitten of the Sphinx. Why, the great Sphinx is so big that it has a temple between its paws. This is my pet Sphinx. Tell me: do you think the Romans have any sorcerers who could take us away from the Sphinx by magic?

CAESAR. Why? Are you afraid of the Romans?

CLEOPATRA (very seriously). Oh, they would eat us if they caught us. They are barbarians. Their chief is called Julius Caesar. His father was a tiger and his mother a burning mountain; and his nose is like an elephant’s trunk. (Caesar involuntarily rubs his nose.) They all have long noses, and ivory tusks, and little tails, and seven arms with a hundred arrows in each; and they live on human flesh.

CAESAR. Would you like me to show you a real Roman?

CLEOPATRA (terrified). No. You are frightening me.

CAESAR. No matter: this is only a dream —

CLEOPATRA (excitedly). It is not a dream: it is not a dream. See, see. (She plucks a pin from her hair and jabs it repeatedly into his arm.)

CAESAR. Ffff — Stop. (Wrathfully) How dare you?

CLEOPATRA (abashed). You said you were dreaming. (Whimpering) I only wanted to show you —

CAESAR (gently). Come, come: don’t cry. A queen mustn’t cry. (He rubs his arm, wondering at the reality of the smart.) Am I awake? (He strikes his hand against the Sphinx to test its solidity. It feels so real that he begins to be alarmed, and says perplexedly) Yes, I — (quite panic-stricken) no: impossible: madness, madness! (Desperately) Back to camp — to camp. (He rises to spring down from the pedestal.)

CLEOPATRA (flinging her arms in terror round him). No: you shan’t leave me. No, no, no: don’t go. I’m afraid — afraid of the Romans.

CAESAR (as the conviction that he is really awake forces itself on him). Cleopatra: can you see my face well?

CLEOPATRA. Yes. It is so white in the moonlight.

CAESAR. Are you sure it is the moonlight that makes me look whiter than an Egyptian? (Grimly) Do you notice that I have a rather long nose?

CLEOPATRA (recoiling, paralyzed by a terrible suspicion). Oh!

CAESAR. It is a Roman nose, Cleopatra.

CLEOPATRA. Ah! (With a piercing scream she springs up; darts round the left shoulder of the Sphinx; scrambles down to the sand; and falls on her knees in frantic supplication, shrieking) Bite him in two, Sphinx: bite him in two. I meant to sacrifice the white cat — I did indeed — I (Caesar, who has slipped down from the pedestal, touches her on the shoulder) Ah! (She buries her head in her arms.)

CAESAR. Cleopatra: shall I teach you a way to prevent Caesar from eating you?

CLEOPATRA (clinging to him piteously). Oh do, do, do. I will steal Ftatateeta’s jewels and give them to you. I will make the river Nile water your lands twice a year.

CAESAR. Peace, peace, my child. Your gods are afraid of the Romans: you see the Sphinx dare not bite me, nor prevent me carrying you off to Julius Caesar.

CLEOPATRA (in pleading murmurings). You won’t, you won’t. You said you wouldn’t.

CAESAR. Caesar never eats women.

CLEOPATRA (springing up full of hope). What!

CAESAR (impressively). But he eats girls (she relapses) and cats. Now you are a silly little girl; and you are descended from the black kitten. You are both a girl and a cat.

CLEOPATRA (trembling). And will he eat me?

CAESAR. Yes; unless you make him believe that you are a woman.

CLEOPATRA. Oh, you must get a sorcerer to make a woman of me. Are you a sorcerer?

CAESAR. Perhaps. But it will take a long time; and this very night you must stand face to face with Caesar in the palace of your fathers.

CLEOPATRA. No, no. I daren’t.

CAESAR. Whatever dread may be in your soul — however terrible Caesar may be to you — you must confront him as a brave woman and a great queen; and you must feel no fear. If your hand shakes: if your voice quavers; then — night and death! (She moans.) But if he thinks you worthy to rule, he will set you on the throne by his side and make you the real ruler of Egypt.

CLEOPATRA (despairingly). No: he will find me out: he will find me out.

CAESAR (rather mournfully). He is easily deceived by women. Their eyes dazzle him; and he sees them not as they are, but as he wishes them to appear to him.

CLEOPATRA (hopefully). Then we will cheat him. I will put on Ftatateeta’s head-dress; and he will think me quite an old woman.

CAESAR. If you do that he will eat you at one mouthful.

CLEOPATRA. But I will give him a cake with my magic opal and seven hairs of the white cat baked in it; and —

CAESAR (abruptly). Pah! you are a little fool. He will eat your cake and you too. (He turns contemptuously from her.)

CLEOPATRA (running after him and clinging to him). Oh, please, PLEASE! I will do whatever you tell me. I will be good! I will be your slave. (Again the terrible bellowing note sounds across the desert, now closer at hand. It is the bucina, the Roman war trumpet.)

CAESAR. Hark!

CLEOPATRA (trembling). What was that?

CAESAR. Caesar’s voice.

CLEOPATRA (pulling at his hand). Let us run away. Come. Oh, come.

CAESAR. You are safe with me until you stand on your throne to receive Caesar. Now lead me thither.

CLEOPATRA (only too glad to get away). I will, I will. (Again the bucina.) Oh, come, come, come: the gods are angry. Do you feel the earth shaking?

CAESAR. It is the tread of Caesar’s legions.

CLEOPATRA (drawing him away). This way, quickly. And let us look for the white cat as we go. It is he that has turned you into a Roman.

CAESAR. Incorrigible, oh, incorrigible! Away! (He follows her, the bucina sounding louder as they steal across the desert. The moonlight wanes: the horizon again shows black against the sky, broken only by the fantastic silhouette of the Sphinx. The sky itself vanishes in darkness, from which there is no relief until the gleam of a distant torch falls on great Egyptian pillars supporting the roof of a majestic corridor. At the further end of this corridor a Nubian slave appears carrying the torch. Caesar, still led by Cleopatra, follows him. They come down the corridor, Caesar peering keenly about at the strange architecture, and at the pillar shadows between which, as the passing torch makes them hurry noiselessly backwards, figures of men with wings and hawks’ heads, and vast black marble cats, seem to flit in and out of ambush. Further along, the wall turns a corner and makes a spacious transept in which Caesar sees, on his right, a throne, and behind the throne a door. On each side of the throne is a slender pillar with a lamp on it.)

CAESAR. What place is this?

CLEOPATRA. This is where I sit on the throne when I am allowed to wear my crown and robes. (The slave holds his torch to show the throne.)

CAESAR. Order the slave to light the lamps.

CLEOPATRA (shyly). Do you think I may?

CAESAR. Of course. You are the Queen. (She hesitates.) Go on.

CLEOPATRA (timidly, to the slave). Light all the lamps.

FTATATEETA (suddenly coming from behind the throne). Stop. (The slave stops. She turns sternly to Cleopatra, who quails like a naughty child.) Who is this you have with you; and how dare you order the lamps to be lighted without my permission? (Cleopatra is dumb with apprehension.)

CAESAR. Who is she?

CLEOPATRA. Ftatateeta.

FTATATEETA (arrogantly). Chief nurse to —

CAESAR (cutting her short). I speak to the Queen. Be silent. (To Cleopatra) Is this how your servants know their places? Send her away; and you (to the slave) do as the Queen has bidden. (The slave lights the lamps. Meanwhile Cleopatra stands hesitating, afraid of Ftatateeta.) You are the Queen: send her away.

CLEOPATRA (cajoling). Ftatateeta, dear: you must go away — just for a little.

CAESAR. You are not commanding her to go away: you are begging her. You are no Queen. You will be eaten. Farewell. (He turns to go.)

CLEOPATRA (clutching him). No, no, no. Don’t leave me.

CAESAR. A Roman does not stay with queens who are afraid of their slaves.

CLEOPATRA. I am not afraid. Indeed I am not afraid.

FTATATEETA. We shall see who is afraid here. (Menacingly) Cleopatra —

CAESAR. On your knees, woman: am I also a child that you dare trifle with me? (He points to the floor at Cleopatra’s feet. Ftatateeta, half cowed, half savage, hesitates. Caesar calls to the Nubian) Slave. (The Nubian comes to him.) Can you cut off a head? (The Nubian nods and grins ecstatically, showing all his teeth. Caesar takes his sword by the scabbard, ready to offer the hilt to the Nubian, and turns again to Ftatateeta, repeating his gesture.) Have you remembered yourself, mistress?

Ftatateeta, crushed, kneels before Cleopatra, who can hardly believe her eyes.

FTATATEETA (hoarsely). O Queen, forget not thy servant in the days of thy greatness.

CLEOPATRA (blazing with excitement). Go. Begone. Go away. (Ftatateeta rises with stooped head, and moves backwards towards the door. Cleopatra watches her submission eagerly, almost clapping her hands, which are trembling. Suddenly she cries) Give me something to beat her with. (She snatches a snake-skin from the throne and dashes after Ftatateeta, whirling it like a scourge in the air. Caesar makes a bound and manages to catch her and hold her while Ftatateeta escapes.)

CAESAR. You scratch, kitten, do you?

CLEOPATRA (breaking from him). I will beat somebody. I will beat him. (She attacks the slave.) There, there, there! (The slave flies for his life up the corridor and vanishes. She throws the snake-skin away and jumps on the step of the throne with her arms waving, crying) I am a real Queen at last — a real, real Queen! Cleopatra the Queen! (Caesar shakes his head dubiously, the advantage of the change seeming open to question from the point of view of the general welfare of Egypt. She turns and looks at him exultantly. Then she jumps down from the step, runs to him, and flings her arms round him rapturously, crying) Oh, I love you for making me a Queen.

CAESAR. But queens love only kings.

CLEOPATRA. I will make all the men I love kings. I will make you a king. I will have many young kings, with round, strong arms; and when I am tired of them I will whip them to death; but you shall always be my king: my nice, kind, wise, proud old king.

CAESAR. Oh, my wrinkles, my wrinkles! And my child’s heart! You will be the most dangerous of all Caesar’s conguests.

CLEOPATRA (appalled). Caesar! I forgot Caesar. (Anxiously) You will tell him that I am a Queen, will you not? a real Queen. Listen! (stealthily coaxing him) let us run away and hide until Caesar is gone.

CAESAR. If you fear Caesar, you are no true Queen; and though you were to hide beneath a pyramid, he would go straight to it and lift it with one hand. And then — ! (He chops his teeth together.)

CLEOPATRA (trembling). Oh!

CAESAR. Be afraid if you dare. (The note of the bucina resounds again in the distance. She moans with fear. Caesar exalts in it, exclaiming) Aha! Caesar approaches the throne of Cleopatra. Come: take your place. (He takes her hand and leads her to the throne. She is too downcast to speak.) Ho, there, Teetatota. How do you call your slaves?

CLEOPATRA (spiritlessly, as she sinks on the throne and cowers there, shaking). Clap your hands.

He claps his hands. Ftatateeta returns.

CAESAR. Bring the Queen’s robes, and her crown, and her women; and prepare her.

CLEOPATRA (eagerly — recovering herself a little). Yes, the Crown, Ftatateeta: I shall wear the crown.

FTATATEETA. For whom must the Queen put on her state?

CAESAR. For a citizen of Rome. A king of kings, Totateeta.

CLEOPATRA (stamping at her). How dare you ask questions? Go and do as you are told. (Ftatateeta goes out with a grim smile. Cleopatra goes on eagerly, to Caesar) Caesar will know that I am a Queen when he sees my crown and robes, will he not?

CAESAR. No. How shall he know that you are not a slave dressed up in the Queen’s ornaments?

CLEOPATRA. You must tell him.

CAESAR. He will not ask me. He will know Cleopatra by her pride, her courage, her majesty, and her beauty. (She looks very doubtful.) Are you trembling?

CLEOPATRA (shivering with dread). No, I — I — (in a very sickly voice) No.

Ftatateeta and three women come in with the regalia.

FTATATEETA. Of all the Queen’s women, these three alone are left. The rest are fled. (They begin to deck Cleopatra, who submits, pale and motionless.)

CAESAR. Good, good. Three are enough. Poor Caesar generally has to dress himself.

FTATATEETA (contemptuously). The Queen of Egypt is not a Roman barbarian. (To Cleopatra) Be brave, my nursling. Hold up your head before this stranger.

CAESAR (admiring Cleopatra, and placing the crown on her head). Is it sweet or bitter to be a Queen, Cleopatra?

CLEOPATRA. Bitter.

CAESAR. Cast out fear; and you will conquer Caesar. Tota: are the Romans at hand?

FTATATEETA. They are at hand; and the guard has fled.

THE WOMEN (wailing subduedly). Woe to us!

The Nubian comes running down the hall.

NUBIAN. The Romans are in the courtyard. (He bolts through the door. With a shriek, the women fly after him. Ftatateeta’s jaw expresses savage resolution: she does not budge. Cleopatra can hardly restrain herself from following them. Caesar grips her wrist, and looks steadfastly at her. She stands like a martyr.)

CAESAR. The Queen must face Caesar alone. Answer “So be it.”

CLEOPATRA (white). So be it.

CAESAR (releasing her). Good.

A tramp and tumult of armed men is heard. Cleopatra’s terror increases. The bucina sounds close at hand, followed by a formidable clangor of trumpets. This is too much for Cleopatra: she utters a cry and darts towards the door. Ftatateeta stops her ruthlessly.

FTATATEETA. You are my nursling. You have said “So be it”; and if you die for it, you must make the Queen’s word good. (She hands Cleopatra to Caesar, who takes her back, almost beside herself with apprehension, to the throne.)

CAESAR. Now, if you quail — ! (He seats himself on the throne.)

She stands on the step, all but unconscious, waiting for death. The Roman soldiers troop in tumultuously through the corridor, headed by their ensign with his eagle, and their bucinator, a burly fellow with his instrument coiled round his body, its brazen bell shaped like the head of a howling wolf. When they reach the transept, they stare in amazement at the throne; dress into ordered rank opposite it; draw their swords and lift them in the air with a shout of HAIL CAESAR. Cleopatra turns and stares wildly at Caesar; grasps the situation; and, with a great sob of relief, falls into his arms.

ACT II

Alexandria. A hall on the first floor of the Palace, ending in a loggia approached by two steps. Through the arches of the loggia the Mediterranean can be seen, bright in the morning sun. The clean lofty walls, painted with a procession of the Egyptian theocracy, presented in profile as flat ornament, and the absence of mirrors, sham perspectives, stuffy upholstery and textiles, make the place handsome, wholesome, simple and cool, or, as a rich English manufacturer would express it, poor, bare, ridiculous and unhomely. For Tottenham Court Road civilization is to this Egyptian civilization as glass bead and tattoo civilization is to Tottenham Court Road.

The young king Ptolemy Dionysus (aged ten) is at the top of the steps, on his way in through the loggia, led by his guardian Pothinus, who has him by the hand. The court is assembled to receive him. It is made up of men and women (some of the women being officials) of various complexions and races, mostly Egyptian; some of them, comparatively fair, from lower Egypt; some, much darker, from upper Egypt; with a few Greeks and Jews. Prominent in a group on Ptolemy’s right hand is Theodotus, Ptolemy’s tutor. Another group, on Ptolemy’s left, is headed by Achillas, the general of Ptolemy’s troops. Theodotus is a little old man, whose features are as cramped and wizened as his limbs, except his tall straight forehead, which occupies more space than all the rest of his face. He maintains an air of magpie keenness and profundity, listening to what the others say with the sarcastic vigilance of a philosopher listening to the exercises of his disciples. Achillas is a tall handsome man of thirty-five, with a fine black beard curled like the coat of a poodle. Apparently not a clever man, but distinguished and dignified. Pothinus is a vigorous man of fifty, a eunuch, passionate, energetic and quick witted, but of common mind and character; impatient and unable to control his temper. He has fine tawny hair, like fur. Ptolemy, the King, looks much older than an English boy of ten; but he has the childish air, the habit of being in leading strings, the mixture of impotence and petulance, the appearance of being excessively washed, combed and dressed by other hands, which is exhibited by court-bred princes of all ages.

All receive the King with reverences. He comes down the steps to a chair of state which stands a little to his right, the only seat in the hall. Taking his place before it, he looks nervously for instructions to Pothinus, who places himself at his left hand.

POTHINUS. The King of Egypt has a word to speak.

THEODOTUS (in a squeak which he makes impressive by sheer self-opinionativeness). Peace for the King’s word!

PTOLEMY (without any vocal inflexions: he is evidently repeating a lesson). Take notice of this all of you. I am the firstborn son of Auletes the Flute Blower who was your King. My sister Berenice drove him from his throne and reigned in his stead but — but (he hesitates) —

POTHINUS (stealthily prompting). — but the gods would not suffer —

PTOLEMY. Yes — the gods would not suffer — not suffer (he stops; then, crestfallen) I forget what the gods would not suffer.

THEODOTUS. Let Pothinus, the King’s guardian, speak for the King.

POTHINUS (suppressing his impatience with difficulty). The King wished to say that the gods would not suffer the impiety of his sister to go unpunished.

PTOLEMY (hastily). Yes: I remember the rest of it. (He resumes his monotone). Therefore the gods sent a stranger, one Mark Antony, a Roman captain of horsemen, across the sands of the desert and he set my father again upon the throne. And my father took Berenice my sister and struck her head off. And now that my father is dead yet another of his daughters, my sister Cleopatra, would snatch the kingdom from me and reign in my place. But the gods would not suffer (Pothinus coughs admonitorily) — the gods — the gods would not suffer —

POTHINUS (prompting). — will not maintain —

PTOLEMY. Oh yes — will not maintain such iniquity, they will give her head to the axe even as her sister’s. But with the help of the witch Ftatateeta she hath cast a spell on the Roman Julius Caesar to make him uphold her false pretence to rule in Egypt. Take notice then that I will not suffer — that I will not suffer — (pettishly, to Pothinus) — What is it that I will not suffer?

POTHINUS (suddenly exploding with all the force and emphasis of political passion). The King will not suffer a foreigner to take from him the throne of our Egypt. (A shout of applause.) Tell the King, Achillas, how many soldiers and horsemen follow the Roman?

THEODOTUS. Let the King’s general speak!

ACHILLAS. But two Roman legions, O King. Three thousand soldiers and scarce a thousand horsemen.

The court breaks into derisive laughter; and a great chattering begins, amid which Rufio, a Roman officer, appears in the loggia. He is a burly, black-bearded man of middle age, very blunt, prompt and rough, with small clear eyes, and plump nose and cheeks, which, however, like the rest of his flesh, are in ironhard condition.

RUFIO (from the steps). Peace, ho! (The laughter and chatter cease abruptly.) Caesar approaches.

THEODOTUS (with much presence of mind). The King permits the Roman commander to enter!

Caesar, plainly dressed, but, wearing an oak wreath to conceal his baldness, enters from, the loggia, attended by Britannus, his secretary, a Briton, about forty, tall, solemn, and already slightly bald, with a heavy, drooping, hazel-colored moustache trained so as to lose its ends in a pair of trim whiskers. He is carefully dressed in blue, with portfolio, inkhorn, and reed pen at his girdle. His serious air and sense of the importance of the business in hand is in marked contrast to the kindly interest of Caesar, who looks at the scene, which is new to him, with the frank curiosity of a child, and then turns to the King’s chair: Britannus and Rufio posting themselves near the steps at the other side.

CAESAR (looking at Pothinus and Ptolemy). Which is the King? The man or the boy?

POTHINUS. I am Pothinus, the guardian of my lord the King.

Caesar (patting Ptolemy kindly on the shoulder). So you are the King. Dull work at your age, eh? (To Pothinus) your servant, Pothinus. (He turns away unconcernedly and comes slowly along the middle of the hall, looking from side to side at the courtiers until he reaches Achillas.) And this gentleman?

THEODOTUS. Achillas, the King’s general.

CAESAR (to Achillas, very friendly). A general, eh? I am a general myself. But I began too old, too old. Health and many victories, Achillas!

ACHILLAS. As the gods will, Caesar.

CAESAR (turning to Theodotus). And you, sir, are — ?

THEODOTUS. Theodotus, the King’s tutor.

CAESAR. You teach men how to be kings, Theodotus. That is very clever of you. (Looking at the gods on the walls as he turns away from Theodotus and goes up again to Pothinus.) And this place?

POTHINUS. The council chamber of the chancellors of the King’s treasury, Caesar.

CAESAR. Ah! That reminds me. I want some money.

POTHINUS. The King’s treasury is poor, Caesar.

CAESAR. Yes: I notice that there is but one chair in it.

RUFIO (shouting gruffly). Bring a chair there, some of you, for Caesar.

PTOLEMY (rising shyly to offer his chair). Caesar —

CAESAR (kindly). No, no, my boy: that is your chair of state. Sit down.

He makes Ptolemy sit down again. Meanwhile Rufio, looking about him, sees in the nearest corner an image of the god Ra, represented as a seated man with the head of a hawk. Before the image is a bronze tripod, about as large as a three-legged stool, with a stick of incense burning on it. Rufio, with Roman resourcefulness and indifference to foreign superstitions, promptly seizes the tripod; shakes off the incense; blows away the ash; and dumps it down behind Caesar, nearly in the middle of the hall.

RUFIO. Sit on that, Caesar.

A shiver runs through the court, followed by a hissing whisper of Sacrilege!

CAESAR (seating himself). Now, Pothinus, to business. I am badly in want of money.

BRITANNUS (disapproving of these informal expressions). My master would say that there is a lawful debt due to Rome by Egypt, contracted by the King’s deceased father to the Triumvirate; and that it is Caesar’s duty to his country to require immediate payment.

CAESAR (blandly). Ah, I forgot. I have not made my companions known here. Pothinus: this is Britannus, my secretary. He is an islander from the western end of the world, a day’s voyage from Gaul. (Britannus bows stiffly.) This gentleman is Rufio, my comrade in arms. (Rufio nods.) Pothinus: I want 1,600 talents.

The courtiers, appalled, murmur loudly, and Theodotus and Achillas appeal mutely to one another against so monstrous a demand.

POTHINUS (aghast). Forty million sesterces! Impossible. There is not so much money in the King’s treasury.

CAESAR (encouragingly). ONLY sixteen hundred talents, Pothinus. Why count it in sesterces? A sestertius is only worth a loaf of bread.

POTHINUS. And a talent is worth a racehorse. I say it is impossible. We have been at strife here, because the King’s sister Cleopatra falsely claims his throne. The King’s taxes have not been collected for a whole year.

CAESAR. Yes they have, Pothinus. My officers have been collecting them all the morning. (Renewed whisper and sensation, not without some stifled laughter, among the courtiers.)

RUFIO (bluntly). You must pay, Pothinus. Why waste words? You are getting off cheaply enough.

POTHINUS (bitterly). Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?

CAESAR. My friend: taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.

POTHINUS. Then take warning, Caesar. This day, the treasures of the temples and the gold of the King’s treasury will be sent to the mint to be melted down for our ransom in the sight of the people. They shall see us sitting under bare walls and drinking from wooden cups. And their wrath be on your head, Caesar, if you force us to this sacrilege!

CAESAR. Do not fear, Pothinus: the people know how well wine tastes in wooden cups. In return for your bounty, I will settle this dispute about the throne for you, if you will. What say you?

POTHINUS. If I say no, will that hinder you?

RUFIO (defiantly). No.

CAESAR. You say the matter has been at issue for a year, Pothinus. May I have ten minutes at it?

POTHINUS. You will do your pleasure, doubtless.

CAESAR. Good! But first, let us have Cleopatra here.

THEODOTUS. She is not in Alexandria: she is fled into Syria.

CAESAR. I think not. (To Rufio) Call Totateeta.

RUFIO (calling). Ho there, Teetatota.

Ftatateeta enters the loggia, and stands arrogantly at the top of the steps.

FTATATEETA. Who pronounces the name of Ftatateeta, the Queen’s chief nurse?

CAESAR. Nobody can pronounce it, Tota, except yourself. Where is your mistress?

Cleopatra, who is hiding behind Ftafateeta, peeps out at them, laughing. Caesar rises.

CAESAR. Will the Queen favor us with her presence for a moment?

CLEOPATRA (pushing Ftatateeta aside and standing haughtily on the brink of the steps). Am I to behave like a Queen?

CAESAR. Yes.

Cleopatra immediately comes down to the chair of state; seizes Ptolemy and drags him out of his seat; then takes his place in the chair. Ftatateeta seats herself on the step of the loggia, and sits there, watching the scene with sybilline intensity.

PTOLEMY (mortified, and struggling with his tears). Caesar: this is how she treats me always. If I am a King why is she allowed to take everything from me?

CLEOPATRA. You are not to be King, you little cry-baby. You are to be eaten by the Romans.

CAESAR (touched by Ptolemy’s distress). Come here, my boy, and stand by me.

Ptolemy goes over to Caesar, who, resuming his seat on the tripod, takes the boy’s hand to encourage him. Cleopatra, furiously jealous, rises and glares at them.

CLEOPATRA (with flaming cheeks). Take your throne: I don’t want it. (She flings away from the chair, and approaches Ptolemy, who shrinks from her.) Go this instant and sit down in your place.

CAESAR. Go, Ptolemy. Always take a throne when it is offered to you.

RUFIO. I hope you will have the good sense to follow your own advice when we return to Rome, Caesar.

Ptolemy slowly goes back to the throne, giving Cleopatra a wide berth, in evident fear of her hands. She takes his place beside Caesar.

CAESAR. Pothinus —

CLEOPATRA (interrupting him). Are you not going to speak to me?

CAESAR. Be quiet. Open your mouth again before I give you leave; and you shall be eaten.

CLEOPATRA. I am not afraid. A queen must not be afraid. Eat my husband there, if you like: he is afraid.

CAESAR (starting). Your husband! What do you mean?

CLEOPATRA (pointing to Ptolemy). That little thing.

The two Romans and the Briton stare at one another in amazement.

THEODOTUS. Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.

BRITANNUS (shocked). Caesar: this is not proper.

THEODOTUS (outraged). How!

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

BRITANNUS. On the contrary, Caesar, it is these Egyptians who are barbarians; and you do wrong to encourage them. I say it is a scandal.

CAESAR. Scandal or not, my friend, it opens the gate of peace. (He rises and addresses Pothinus seriously.) Pothiuus: hear what I propose.

RUFIO. Hear Caesar there.

CAESAR. Ptolemy and Cleopatra shall reign jointly in Egypt.

ACHILLAS. What of the King’s younger brother and Cleopatra’s younger sister?

RUFIO (explaining). There is another little Ptolemy, Caesar: so they tell me.

CAESAR. Well, the little Ptolemy can marry the other sister; and we will make them both a present of Cyprus.

POTHINUS (impatiently). Cyprus is of no use to anybody.

CAESAR. No matter: you shall have it for the sake of peace.

BRITANNUS (unconsciously anticipating a later statesman). Peace with honor, Pothinus.

POTHINUS (mutinously). Caesar: be honest. The money you demand is the price of our freedom. Take it; and leave us to settle our own affairs.

THE BOLDER COURTIERS (encouraged by Pothinus’s tone and Caesar’s quietness). Yes, yes. Egypt for the Egyptians!

The conference now becomes an altercation, the Egyptians becoming more and more heated. Caesar remains unruffled; but Rufio grows fiercer and doggeder, and Britannus haughtily indignant.

RUFIO (contemptuously). Egypt for the Egyptians! Do you forget that there is a Roman army of occupation here, left by Aulus Gabinius when he set up your toy king for you?

ACHILLAS (suddenly asserting himself). And now under my command. I am the Roman general here, Caesar.

CAESAR (tickled by the humor of the situation). And also the Egyptian general, eh?

POTHINUS (triumphantly). That is so, Caesar.

CAESAR (to Achillas). So you can make war on the Egyptians in the name of Rome and on the Romans — on me, if necessary — in the name of Egypt?

ACHILLAS. That is so, Caesar.

CAESAR. And which side are you on at present, if I may presume to ask, general?

ACHILLAS. On the side of the right and of the gods.

CAESAR. Hm! How many men have you?

ACHILLAS. That will appear when I take the field.

RUFIO (truculently). Are your men Romans? If not, it matters not how many there are, provided you are no stronger than 500 to ten.

POTHINUS. It is useless to try to bluff us, Rufio. Caesar has been defeated before and may be defeated again. A few weeks ago Caesar was flying for his life before Pompey: a few months hence he may be flying for his life before Cato and Juba of Numidia, the African King.

ACHILLAS (following up Pothinus’s speech menacingly). What can you do with 4,000 men?

THEODOTUS (following up Achillas’s speech with a raucous squeak). And without money? Away with you.

ALL THE COURTIERS (shouting fiercely and crowding towards Caesar). Away with you. Egypt for the Egyptians! Begone.

Rufio bites his beard, too angry to speak. Caesar sits on comfortably as if he were at breakfast, and the cat were clamoring for a piece of Finnan-haddie.

CLEOPATRA. Why do you let them talk to you like that Caesar? Are you afraid?

CAESAR. Why, my dear, what they say is quite true.

CLEOPATRA. But if you go away, I shall not be Queen.

CAESAR. I shall not go away until you are Queen.

POTHINUS. Achillas: if you are not a fool, you will take that girl whilst she is under your hand.

RUFIO (daring them). Why not take Caesar as well, Achillas?

POTHINUS (retorting the defiance with interest). Well said, Rufio. Why not?

RUFIO. Try, Achillas. (Calling) Guard there.

The loggia immediately fills with Caesar’s soldiers, who stand, sword in hand, at the top of the steps, waiting the word to charge from their centurion, who carries a cudgel. For a moment the Egyptians face them proudly: then they retire sullenly to their former places.

BRITANNUS. You are Caesar’s prisoners, all of you.

CAESAR (benevolently). Oh no, no, no. By no means. Caesar’s guests, gentlemen.

CLEOPATRA. Won’t you cut their heads off?

CAESAR. What! Cut off your brother’s head?

CLEOPATRA. Why not? He would cut off mine, if he got the chance. Wouldn’t you, Ptolemy?

PTOLEMY (pale and obstinate). I would. I will, too, when I grow up.

Cleopatra is rent by a struggle between her newly-acquired dignity as a queen, and a strong impulse to put out her tongue at him. She takes no part in the scene which follows, but watches it with curiosity and wonder, fidgeting with the restlessness of a child, and sitting down on Caesar’s tripod when he rises.

POTHINUS. Caesar: if you attempt to detain us —

RUFIO. He will succeed, Egyptian: make up your mind to that. We hold the palace, the beach, and the eastern harbor. The road to Rome is open; and you shall travel it if Caesar chooses.

CAESAR (courteously). I could do no less, Pothinus, to secure the retreat of my own soldiers. I am accountable for every life among them. But you are free to go. So are all here, and in the palace.

RUFIO (aghast at this clemency). What! Renegades and all?

CAESAR (softening the expression). Roman army of occupation and all, Rufio.

POTHINUS (desperately). Then I make a last appeal to Caesar’s justice. I shall call a witness to prove that but for us, the Roman army of occupation, led by the greatest soldier in the world, would now have Caesar at its mercy. (Calling through the loggia) Ho, there, Lucius Septimius (Caesar starts, deeply moved): if my voice can reach you, come forth and testify before Caesar.

CAESAR (shrinking). No, no.

THEODOTUS. Yes, I say. Let the military tribune bear witness.

Lucius Septimius, a clean shaven, trim athlete of about 40, with symmetrical features, resolute mouth, and handsome, thin Roman nose, in the dress of a Roman officer, comes in through the loggia and confronts Caesar, who hides his face with his robe for a moment; then, mastering himself, drops it, and confronts the tribune with dignity.

POTHINUS. Bear witness, Lucius Septimius. Caesar came hither in pursuit of his foe. Did we shelter his foe?

LUCIUS. As Pompey’s foot touched the Egyptian shore, his head fell by the stroke of my sword.

THEODOTUS (with viperish relish). Under the eyes of his wife and child! Remember that, Caesar! They saw it from the ship he had just left. We have given you a full and sweet measure of vengeance.

CAESAR (with horror). Vengeance!

POTHINUS. Our first gift to you, as your galley came into the roadstead, was the head of your rival for the empire of the world. Bear witness, Lucius Septimius: is it not so?

LUCIUS. It is so. With this hand, that slew Pompey, I placed his head at the feet of Caesar.

CAESAR. Murderer! So would you have slain Caesar, had Pompey been victorious at Pharsalia.

LUCIUS. Woe to the vanquished, Caesar! When I served Pompey, I slew as good men as he, only because he conquered them. His turn came at last.

THEODOTUS (flatteringly). The deed was not yours, Caesar, but ours — nay, mine; for it was done by my counsel. Thanks to us, you keep your reputation for clemency, and have your vengeance too.

CAESAR. Vengeance! Vengeance!! Oh, if I could stoop to vengeance, what would I not exact from you as the price of this murdered man’s blood. (They shrink back, appalled and disconcerted.) Was he not my son-in-law, my ancient friend, for 20 years the master of great Rome, for 30 years the compeller of victory? Did not I, as a Roman, share his glory? Was the Fate that forced us to fight for the mastery of the world, of our making? Am I Julius Caesar, or am I a wolf, that you fling to me the grey head of the old soldier, the laurelled conqueror, the mighty Roman, treacherously struck down by this callous ruffian, and then claim my gratitude for it! (To Lucius Septimius) Begone: you fill me with horror.

LUCIUS (cold and undaunted). Pshaw! You have seen severed heads before, Caesar, and severed right hands too, I think; some thousands of them, in Gaul, after you vanquished Vercingetorix. Did you spare him, with all your clemency? Was that vengeance?

CAESAR. No, by the gods! Would that it had been! Vengeance at least is human. No, I say: those severed right hands, and the brave Vercingetorix basely strangled in a vault beneath the Capitol, were (with shuddering satire) a wise severity, a necessary protection to the commonwealth, a duty of statesmanship — follies and fictions ten times bloodier than honest vengeance! What a fool was I then! To think that men’s lives should be at the mercy of such fools! (Humbly) Lucius Septimius, pardon me: why should the slayer of Vercingetorix rebuke the slayer of Pompey? You are free to go with the rest. Or stay if you will: I will find a place for you in my service.

LUCIUS. The odds are against you, Caesar. I go. (He turns to go out through the loggia.)

RUFIO (full of wrath at seeing his prey escaping). That means that he is a Republican.

LUCIUS (turning defiantly on the loggia steps). And what are you?

RUFIO. A Caesarian, like all Caesar’s soldiers.

CAESAR (courteously). Lucius: believe me, Caesar is no Caesarian. Were Rome a true republic, then were Caesar the first of Republicans. But you have made your choice. Farewell.

LUCIUS. Farewell. Come, Achillas, whilst there is yet time.

Caesar, seeing that Rufio’s temper threatens to get the worse of him, puts his hand on his shoulder and brings him down the hall out of harm’s way, Britannus accompanying them and posting himself on Caesar’s right hand. This movement brings the three in a little group to the place occupied by Achillas, who moves haughtily away and joins Theodotus on the other side. Lucius Septimius goes out through the soldiers in the loggia. Pothinus, Theodotus and Achillas follow him with the courtiers, very mistrustful of the soldiers, who close up in their rear and go out after them, keeping them moving without much ceremony. The King is left in his chair, piteous, obstinate, with twitching face and fingers. During these movements Rufio maintains an energetic grumbling, as follows: —

RUFIO (as Lucius departs). Do you suppose he would let us go if he had our heads in his hands?

CAESAR. I have no right to suppose that his ways are any baser than mine.

RUFIO. Psha!

CAESAR. Rufio: if I take Lucius Septimius for my model, and become exactly like him, ceasing to be Caesar, will you serve me still?

BRITANNUS. Caesar: this is not good sense. Your duty to Rome demands that her enemies should be prevented from doing further mischief. (Caesar, whose delight in the moral eye-to-business of his British secretary is inexhaustible, smiles intelligently.)

RUFIO. It is no use talking to him, Britannus: you may save your breath to cool your porridge. But mark this, Caesar. Clemency is very well for you; but what is it for your soldiers, who have to fight tomorrow the men you spared yesterday? You may give what orders you please; but I tell you that your next victory will be a massacre, thanks to your clemency. I, for one, will take no prisoners. I will kill my enemies in the field; and then you can preach as much clemency as you please: I shall never have to fight them again. And now, with your leave, I will see these gentry off the premises. (He turns to go.)

CAESAR (turning also and seeing Ptolemy). What! Have they left the boy alone! Oh shame, shame!

RUFIO (taking Ptolemy’s hand and making him rise). Come, your majesty!

PTOLEMY (to Caesar, drawing away his hand from Rufio). Is he turning me out of my palace?

RUFIO (grimly). You are welcome to stay if you wish.

CAESAR (kindly). Go, my boy. I will not harm you; but you will be safer away, among your friends. Here you are in the lion’s mouth.

PTOLEMY (turning to go). It is not the lion I fear, but (looking at Rufio) the jackal. (He goes out through the loggia.)

CAESAR (laughing approvingly). Brave boy!

CLEOPATRA (jealous of Caesar’s approbation, calling after Ptolemy). Little silly. You think that very clever.

CAESAR. Britannus: Attend the King. Give him in charge to that Pothinus fellow. (Britannus goes out after Ptolemy.)

RUFIO (pointing to Cleopatra). And this piece of goods? What is to be done with HER? However, I suppose I may leave that to you. (He goes out through the loggia.)

CLEOPATRA (flushing suddenly and turning on Caesar). Did you mean me to go with the rest?

CAESAR (a little preoccupied, goes with a sigh to Ptolemy’s chair, whilst she waits for his answer with red cheeks and clenched fists). You are free to do just as you please, Cleopatra.

CLEOPATRA. Then you do not care whether I stay or not?

CAESAR (smiling). Of course I had rather you stayed.

CLEOPATRA. Much, MUCH rather?

CAESAR (nodding). Much, much rather.

CLEOPATRA. Then I consent to stay, because I am asked. But I do not want to, mind.

CAESAR. That is quite understood. (Calling) Totateeta.

Ftatateeta, still seated, turns her eyes on him with a sinister expression, but does not move.

CLEOPATRA (with a splutter of laughter). Her name is not Totateeta: it is Ftatateeta. (Calling) Ftatateeta. (Ftatateeta instantly rises and comes to Cleopatra.)

CAESAR (stumbling over the name). Ftatafeeta will forgive the erring tongue of a Roman. Tota: the Queen will hold her state here in Alexandria. Engage women to attend upon her; and do all that is needful.

FTATATEETA. Am I then the mistress of the Queen’s household?

CLEOPATRA (sharply). No: I am the mistress of the Queen’s household. Go and do as you are told, or I will have you thrown into the Nile this very afternoon, to poison the poor crocodiles.

CAESAR (shocked). Oh no, no.

CLEOPATRA. Oh yes, yes. You are very sentimental, Caesar; but you are clever; and if you do as I tell you, you will soon learn to govern.

Caesar, quite dumbfounded by this impertinence, turns in his chair and stares at her.

Ftatateeta, smiling grimly, and showing a splendid set of teeth, goes, leaving them alone together.

CAESAR. Cleopatra: I really think I must eat you, after all.

CLEOPATRA (kneeling beside him and looking at him with eager interest, half real, half affected to show how intelligent she is). You must not talk to me now as if I were a child.

CAESAR. You have been growing up since the Sphinx introduced us the other night; and you think you know more than I do already.

CLFOPATRA (taken down, and anxious to justify herself). No: that would be very silly of me: of course I know that. But, (suddenly) are you angry with me?

CAESAR. No.

CLEOPATRA (only half believing him). Then why are you so thoughtful?

CAESAR (rising). I have work to do, Cleopatra.

CLEOPATRA (drawing back). Work! (Offended) You are tired of talking to me; and that is your excuse to get away from me.

CAESAR (sitting down again to appease her). Well, well: another minute. But then — work!

CLFOPATRA. Work! What nonsense! You must remember that you are a King now: I have made you one. Kings don’t work.

CAESAR. Oh! Who told you that, little kitten? Eh?

CLEOPATRA. My father was King of Egypt; and he never worked. But he was a great King, and cut off my sister’s head because she rebelled against him and took the throne from him.

CAESAR. Well; and how did he get his throne back again?

CLEOPATRA (eagerly, her eyes lighting up). I will tell you. A beautiful young man, with strong round arms, came over the desert with many horsemen, and slew my sister’s husband and gave my father back his throne. (Wistfully) I was only twelve then. Oh, I wish he would come again, now that I am a Queen. I would make him my husband.

CAESAR. It might be managed, perhaps; for it was I who sent that beautiful young man to help your father.

CLEOPATRA (enraptured). You know him!

CAESAR (nodding). I do.

CLEOPATRA. Has he come with you? (Caesar shakes his head: she is cruelly disappointed.) Oh, I wish he had, I wish he had. If only I were a little older; so that he might not think me a mere kitten, as you do! But perhaps that is because YOU are old. He is many, MANY years younger than you, is he not?

CAESAR (as if swallowing a pill). He is somewhat younger.

CLEOPATRA. Would he be my husband, do you think, if I asked him?

CAESAR. Very likely.

CLEOPATRA. But I should not like to ask him. Could you not persuade him to ask me — without knowing that I wanted him to?

CAESAR (touched by her innocence of the beautiful young man’s character). My poor child!

CLEOPATRA. Why do you say that as if you were sorry for me? Does he love anyone else?

CAESAR. I am afraid so.

CLEOPATRA (tearfully). Then I shall not be his first love.

CAESAR. Not quite the first. He is greatly admired by women.

CLEOPATRA. I wish I could be the first. But if he loves me, I will make him kill all the rest. Tell me: is he still beautiful? Do his strong round arms shine in the sun like marble?

CAESAR. He is in excellent condition — considering how much he eats and drinks.

CLEOPATRA. Oh, you must not say common, earthly things about him; for I love him. He is a god.

CAESAR. He is a great captain of horsemen, and swifter of foot than any other Roman.

CLEOPATRA. What is his real name?

CAESAR (puzzled). His REAL name?

CLEOPATRA. Yes. I always call him Horus, because Horus is the most beautiful of our gods. But I want to know his real name.

CAESAR. His name is Mark Antony.

CLEOPATRA (musically). Mark Antony, Mark Antony, Mark Antony! What a beautiful name! (She throws her arms round Caesar’s neck.) Oh, how I love you for sending him to help my father! Did you love my father very much?

CAESAR. No, my child; but your father, as you say, never worked. I always work. So when he lost his crown he had to promise me 16,000 talents to get it back for him.

CLEOPATRA. Did he ever pay you?

CAESAR. Not in full.

CLEOPATRA. He was quite right: it was too dear. The whole world is not worth 16,000 talents.

CAESAR. That is perhaps true, Cleopatra. Those Egyptians who work paid as much of it as he could drag from them. The rest is still due. But as I most likely shall not get it, I must go back to my work. So you must run away for a little and send my secretary to me.

CLEOPATRA (coaxing). No: I want to stay and hear you talk about Mark Antony.

CAESAR. But if I do not get to work, Pothinus and the rest of them will cut us off from the harbor; and then the way from Rome will be blocked.

CLEOPATRA. No matter: I don’t want you to go back to Rome.

CAESAR. But you want Mark Antony to come from it.

CLEOPATRA (springing up). Oh yes, yes, yes: I forgot. Go quickly and work, Caesar; and keep the way over the sea open for my Mark Antony. (She runs out through the loggia, kissing her hand to Mark Antony across the sea.)

CAESAR (going briskly up the middle of the hall to the loggia steps). Ho, Britannus. (He is startled by the entry of a wounded Roman soldier, who confronts him from the upper step.) What now?

SOLDIER (pointing to his bandaged head). This, Caesar; and two of my comrades killed in the market place.

CAESAR (quiet but attending). Ay. Why?

SOLDIER. There is an army come to Alexandria, calling itself the Roman army.

CAESAR. The Roman army of occupation. Ay?

SOLDIER. Commanded by one Achillas.

CAESAR. Well?

SOLDIER. The citizens rose against us when the army entered the gates. I was with two others in the market place when the news came. They set upon us. I cut my way out; and here I am.

CAESAR. Good. I am glad to see you alive. (Rufio enters the loggia hastily, passing behind the soldier to look out through one of the arches at the quay beneath.) Rufio, we are besieged.

RUFIO. What! Already?

CAESAR. Now or tomorrow: what does it matter? We SHALL be besieged.

Britannus runs in.

BRITANNUS. Caesar —

CAESAR (anticipating him). Yes: I know. (Rufio and Britannus come down the hall from the loggia at opposite sides, past Caesar, who waits for a moment near the step to say to the soldier.) Comrade: give the word to turn out on the beach and stand by the boats. Get your wound attended to. Go. (The soldier hurries out. Caesar comes down the hall between Rufio and Britannus) Rufio: we have some ships in the west harbor. Burn them.

RUFIO (staring). Burn them!!

CAESAR. Take every boat we have in the east harbor, and seize the Pharos — that island with the lighthouse. Leave half our men behind to hold the beach and the quay outside this palace: that is the way home.

RUFIO (disapproving strongly). Are we to give up the city?

CAESAR. We have not got it, Rufio. This palace we have; and — what is that building next door?

RUFIO. The theatre.

CAESAR. We will have that too: it commands the strand, for the rest, Egypt for the Egyptians!

RUFIO. Well, you know best, I suppose. Is that all?

CAESAR. That is all. Are those ships burnt yet?

RUFIO. Be easy: I shall waste no more time. (He runs out.)

BRITANNUS. Caesar: Pothinus demands speech of you. It’s my opinion he needs a lesson. His manner is most insolent.

CAESAR. Where is he?

BRITANNUS. He waits without.

CAESAR. Ho there! Admit Pothinus.

Pothinus appears in the loggia, and comes down the hall very haughtily to Caesar’s left hand.

CAESAR. Well, Pothinus?

POTHINUS. I have brought you our ultimatum, Caesar.

CAESAR. Ultimatum! The door was open: you should have gone out through it before you declared war. You are my prisoner now. (He goes to the chair and loosens his toga.)

POTHINUS (scornfully). I YOUR prisoner! Do you know that you are in Alexandria, and that King Ptolemy, with an army outnumbering your little troop a hundred to one, is in possession of Alexandria?

CAESAR (unconcernedly taking off his toga and throwing it on the chair). Well, my friend, get out if you can. And tell your friends not to kill any more Romans in the market place. Otherwise my soldiers, who do not share my celebrated clemency, will probably kill you. Britannus: Pass the word to the guard; and fetch my armor. (Britannus runs out. Rufio returns.) Well?

RUFIO (pointing from the loggia to a cloud of smoke drifting over the harbor). See there! (Pothinus runs eagerly up the steps to look out.)

CAESAR. What, ablaze already! Impossible!

RUFIO. Yes, five good ships, and a barge laden with oil grappled to each. But it is not my doing: the Egyptians have saved me the trouble. They have captured the west harbor.

CAESAR (anxiously). And the east harbor? The lighthouse, Rufio?

RUFIO (with a sudden splutter of raging ill usage, coming down to Caesar and scolding him). Can I embark a legion in five minutes? The first cohort is already on the beach. We can do no more. If you want faster work, come and do it yourself?

CAESAR (soothing him). Good, good. Patience, Rufio, patience.

RUFIO. Patience! Who is impatient here, you or I? Would I be here, if I could not oversee them from that balcony?

CAESAR. Forgive me, Rufio; and (anxiously) hurry them as much as —

He is interrupted by an outcry as of an old man in the extremity of misfortune. It draws near rapidly; and Theodotus rushes in, tearing his hair, and squeaking the most lamentable exclamations. Rufio steps back to stare at him, amazed at his frantic condition. Pothinus turns to listen.

THEODOTUS (on the steps, with uplifted arms). Horror unspeakable! Woe, alas! Help!

RUFIO. What now?

CAESAR (frowning). Who is slain?

THEODOTUS. Slain! Oh, worse than the death of ten thousand men! Loss irreparable to mankind!

RUFIO. What has happened, man?

THEODOTUS (rushing down the hall between them). The fire has spread from your ships. The first of the seven wonders of the world perishes. The library of Alexandria is in flames.

RUFIO. Psha! (Quite relieved, he goes up to the loggia and watches the preparations of the troops on the beach.)

CAESAR. Is that all?

THEODOTUS (unable to believe his senses). All! Caesar: will you go down to posterity as a barbarous soldier too ignorant to know the value of books?

CAESAR. Theodotus: I am an author myself; and I tell you it is better that the Egyptians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.

THEODOTUS (kneeling, with genuine literary emotion: the passion of the pedant). Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book.

CAESAR (inflexible). If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.

THEODOTUS. Without history, death would lay you beside your meanest soldier.

CAESAR. Death will do that in any case. I ask no better grave.

THEODOTUS. What is burning there is the memory of mankind.

CAESAR. A shameful memory. Let it burn.

THEODOTUS (wildly). Will you destroy the past?

CAESAR. Ay, and build the future with its ruins. (Theodotus, in despair, strikes himself on the temples with his fists.) But harken, Theodotus, teacher of kings: you who valued Pompey’s head no more than a shepherd values an onion, and who now kneel to me, with tears in your old eyes, to plead for a few sheepskins scrawled with errors. I cannot spare you a man or a bucket of water just now; but you shall pass freely out of the palace. Now, away with you to Achillas; and borrow his legions to put out the fire. (He hurries him to the steps.)

POTHINUS (significantly). You understand, Theodotus: I remain a prisoner.

THEODOTUS. A prisoner!

CAESAR. Will you stay to talk whilst the memory of mankind is burning? (Calling through the loggia) Ho there! Pass Theodotus out. (To Theodotus) Away with you.

THEODOTUS (to Pothinus). I must go to save the library. (He hurries out.)

CAESAR. Follow him to the gate, Pothinus. Bid him urge your people to kill no more of my soldiers, for your sake.

POTHINUS. My life will cost you dear if you take it, Caesar. (He goes out after Theodotus.)

Rufio, absorbed in watching the embarkation, does not notice the departure of the two Egyptians.

RUFIO (shouting from the loggia to the beach). All ready, there?

A CENTURION (from below). All ready. We wait for Caesar.

CAESAR. Tell them Caesar is coming — the rogues! (Calling) Britannicus. (This magniloquent version of his secretary’s name is one of Caesar’s jokes. In later years it would have meant, quite seriously and officially, Conqueror of Britain.)

RUFIO (calling down). Push off, all except the longboat. Stand by it to embark, Caesar’s guard there. (He leaves the balcony and comes down into the hall.) Where are those Egyptians? Is this more clemency? Have you let them go?

CAESAR (chuckling). I have let Theodotus go to save the library. We must respect literature, Rufio.

RUFIO (raging). Folly on folly’s head! I believe if you could bring back all the dead of Spain, Gaul and Thessaly to life, you would do it that we might have the trouble of fighting them over again.

CAESAR. Might not the gods destroy the world if their only thought were to be at peace next year? (Rufio, out of all patience, turns away in anger. Caesar suddenly grips his sleeve, and adds slyly in his ear.) Besides, my friend: every Egyptian we imprison means imprisoning two Roman soldiers to guard him. Eh?

RUFIO. Agh! I might have known there was some fox’s trick behind your fine talking. (He gets away from Caesar with an ill-humored shrug, and goes to the balcony for another look at the preparations; finally goes out.)

CAESAR. Is Britannus asleep? I sent him for my armor an hour ago. (Calling) Britannicus, thou British islander. Britannicus!

Cleopatra, runs in through the loggia with Caesar’s helmet and sword, snatched from Britannus, who follows her with a cuirass and greaves. They come down to Caesar, she to his left hand, Britannus to his right.

CLEOPATRA. I am going to dress you, Caesar. Sit down. (He obeys.) These Roman helmets are so becoming! (She takes off his wreath.) Oh! (She bursts out laughing at him.)

CAESAR. What are you laughing at?

CLEOPATRA. You’re bald (beginning with a big B, and ending with a splutter).

CAESAR (almost annoyed). Cleopatra! (He rises, for the convenience of Britannus, who puts the cuirass on him.)

CLEOPATRA. So that is why you wear the wreath — to hide it.

BRITANNUS. Peace, Egyptian: they are the bays of the conqueror. (He buckles the cuirass.)

CLEOPATRA. Peace, thou: islander! (To Caesar) You should rub your head with strong spirits of sugar, Caesar. That will make it grow.

CAESAR (with a wry face). Cleopatra: do you like to be reminded that you are very young?

CLEOPATRA (pouting). No.

CAESAR (sitting down again, and setting out his leg for Britannus, who kneels to put on his greaves). Neither do I like to be reminded that I am — middle aged. Let me give you ten of my superfluous years. That will make you 26 and leave me only — no matter. Is it a bargain?

CLEOPATRA. Agreed. 26, mind. (She puts the helmet on him.) Oh! How nice! You look only about 50 in it!

BRITANNUS (Looking up severely at Cleopatra). You must not speak in this manner to Caesar.

CLEOPATRA. Is it true that when Caesar caught you on that island, you were painted all over blue?

BRITANNUS. Blue is the color worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability. (He rises.)

CLEOPATRA (with Caesar’s sword). Let me hang this on. Now you look splendid. Have they made any statues of you in Rome?

CAESAR. Yes, many statues.

CLEOPATRA. You must send for one and give it to me.

RUFIO (coming back into the loggia, more impatient than ever). Now Caesar: have you done talking? The moment your foot is aboard there will be no holding our men back: the boats will race one another for the lighthouse.

CAESAR (drawing his sword and trying the edge). Is this well set to-day, Britannicus? At Pharsalia it was as blunt as a barrel-hoop.

BRITANNUS. It will split one of the Egyptian’s hairs to-day, Caesar. I have set it myself.

CLEOPATRA (suddenly throwing her arms in terror round Caesar). Oh, you are not really going into battle to be killed?

CAESAR. No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.

CLEOPATRA. But they DO get killed. My sister’s husband was killed in battle. You must not go. Let HIM go (pointing to Rufio. They all laugh at her). Oh please, PLEASE don’t go. What will happen to ME if you never come back?

CAESAR (gravely). Are you afraid?

CLEOPATRA (shrinking). No.

CAESAR (with quiet authority). Go to the balcony; and you shall see us take the Pharos. You must learn to look on battles. Go. (She goes, downcast, and looks out from the balcony.) That is well. Now, Rufio. March.

CLEOPATRA (suddenly clapping her hands). Oh, you will not be able to go!

CAESAR. Why? What now?

CLEOPATRA. They are drying up the harbor with buckets — a multitude of soldiers — over there (pointing out across the sea to her left) — they are dipping up the water.

RUFIO (hastening to look). It is true. The Egyptian army! Crawling over the edge of the west harbor like locusts. (With sudden anger he strides down to Caesar.) This is your accursed clemency, Caesar. Theodotus has brought them.

CAESAR (delighted at his own cleverness). I meant him to, Rufio. They have come to put out the fire. The library will keep them busy whilst we seize the lighthouse. Eh? (He rushes out buoyantly through the loggia, followed by Britannus.)

RUFIO (disgustedly). More foxing! Agh! (He rushes off. A shout from the soldiers announces the appearance of Caesar below).

CENTURION (below). All aboard. Give way there. (Another shout.)

CLEOPATRA (waving her scarf through the loggia arch). Goodbye, goodbye, dear Caesar. Come back safe. Goodbye!

ACT III

The edge of the quay in front of the palace, looking out west over the east harbor of Alexandria to Pharos island, just off the end of which, and connected with it by a narrow mole, is the famous lighthouse, a gigantic square tower of white marble diminishing in size storey by storey to the top, on which stands a cresset beacon. The island is joined to the main land by the Heptastadium, a great mole or causeway five miles long bounding the harbor on the south.

In the middle of the quay a Roman sentinel stands on guard, pilum in hand, looking out to the lighthouse with strained attention, his left hand shading his eyes. The pilum is a stout wooden shaft 41 feet long, with an iron spit about three feet long fixed in it. The sentinel is so absorbed that he does not notice the approach from the north end of the quay of four Egyptian market porters carrying rolls of carpet, preceded by Ftatateeta and Apollodorus the Sicilian. Apollodorus is a dashing young man of about 24, handsome and debonair, dressed with deliberate astheticism in the most delicate purples and dove greys, with ornaments of bronze, oxydized silver, and stones of jade and agate. His sword, designed as carefully as a medieval cross, has a blued blade showing through an openwork scabbard of purple leather and filagree. The porters, conducted by Ftatateeta, pass along the quay behind the sentinel to the steps of the palace, where they put down their bales and squat on the ground. Apollodorus does not pass along with them: he halts, amused by the preoccupation of the sentinel.

APOLLODORUS (calling to the sentinel). Who goes there, eh?

SENTINEL (starting violently and turning with his pilum at the charge, revealing himself as a small, wiry, sandy-haired, conscientious young man with an elderly face). What’s this? Stand. Who are you?

APOLLODORUS. I am Apollodorus the Sicilian. Why, man, what are you dreaming of? Since I came through the lines beyond the theatre there, I have brought my caravan past three sentinels, all so busy staring at the lighthouse that not one of them challenged me. Is this Roman discipline?

SENTINEL. We are not here to watch the land but the water. Caesar has just landed on the Pharos. (Looking at Ftatateeta) What have you here? Who is this piece of Egyptian crockery?

FTATATEETA. Apollodorus: rebuke this Roman dog; and bid him bridle his tongue in the presence of Ftatateeta, the mistress of the Queen’s household.

APOLLODORUS. My friend: this is a great lady, who stands high with Caesar.

SENTINEL (not at all impressed, pointing to the carpets). And what is all this truck?

APOLLODORUS. Carpets for the furnishing of the Queen’s apartments in the palace. I have picked them from the best carpets in the world; and the Queen shall choose the best of my choosing.

SENTINEL. So you are the carpet merchant?

APOLLODORUS (hurt). My friend: I am a patrician.

SENTINEL. A patrician! A patrician keeping a shop instead of following arms!

APOLLODORUS. I do not keep a shop. Mine is a temple of the arts. I am a worshipper of beauty. My calling is to choose beautiful things for beautiful Queens. My motto is Art for Art’s sake.

SENTINEL. That is not the password.

APOLLODORUS. It is a universal password.

SENTINEL. I know nothing about universal passwords. Either give me the password for the day or get back to your shop.

Ftatateeta, roused by his hostile tone, steals towards the edge of the quay with the step of a panther, and gets behind him.

APOLLODORUS. How if I do neither?

SENTINEL. Then I will drive this pilum through you.

APOLLODORUS. At your service, my friend. (He draws his sword, and springs to his guard with unruffled grace.)

FTATATEETA (suddenly seizing the sentinel’s arms from behind). Thrust your knife into the dog’s throat, Apollodorus. (The chivalrous Apollodorus laughingly shakes his head; breaks ground away from the sentinel towards the palace; and lowers his point.)

SENTINEL (struggling vainly). Curse on you! Let me go. Help ho!

FTATATEETA (lifting him from the ground). Stab the little Roman reptile. Spit him on your sword.

A couple of Roman soldiers, with a centurion, come running along the edge of the quay from the north end. They rescue their comrade, and throw off Ftatateeta, who is sent reeling away on the left hand of the sentinel.

CENTURION (an unattractive man of fifty, short in his speech and manners, with a vine wood cudgel in his hand). How now? What is all this?

FTATATEETA (to Apollodorus). Why did you not stab him? There was time!

APOLLODORUS. Centurion: I am here by order of the Queen to —

CENTURION (interrupting him). The Queen! Yes, yes: (to the sentinel) pass him in. Pass all these bazaar people in to the Queen, with their goods. But mind you pass no one out that you have not passed in — not even the Queen herself.

SENTINEL. This old woman is dangerous: she is as strong as three men. She wanted the merchant to stab me.

APOLLODORUS. Centurion: I am not a merchant. I am a patrician and a votary of art.

CENTURION. Is the woman your wife?

APOLLODORUS (horrified). No, no! (Correcting himself politely) Not that the lady is not a striking figure in her own way. But (emphatically) she is NOT my wife.

FTATATEETA (to the Centurion). Roman: I am Ftatateeta, the mistress of the Queen’s household.

CENTURION. Keep your hands off our men, mistress; or I will have you pitched into the harbor, though you were as strong as ten men. (To his men) To your posts: march! (He returns with his men the way they came.)

FTATATEETA (looking malignantly after him). We shall see whom Isis loves best: her servant Ftatateeta or a dog of a Roman.

SENTINEL (to Apollodorus, with a wave of his pilum towards the palace). Pass in there; and keep your distance. (Turning to Ftatateeta) Come within a yard of me, you old crocodile; and I will give you this (the pilum) in your jaws.

CLEOPATRA (calling from the palace). Ftatateeta, Ftatateeta.

FTATATEETA (Looking up, scandalized). Go from the window, go from the window. There are men here.

CLEOPATRA. I am coming down.

FTATATEETA (distracted). No, no. What are you dreaming of? O ye gods, ye gods! Apollodorus: bid your men pick up your bales; and in with me quickly.

APOLLODORUS. Obey the mistress of the Queen’s household.

FTATATEETA (impatiently, as the porters stoop to lift the bales). Quick, quick: she will be out upon us. (Cleopatra comes from the palace and runs across the quay to Ftatateeta.) Oh that ever I was born!

CLEOPATRA (eagerly). Ftatateeta: I have thought of something. I want a boat — at once.

FTATATEETA. A boat! No, no: you cannot. Apollodorus: speak to the Queen.

APOLLODORUS (gallantly). Beautiful Queen: I am Apollodorus the Sicilian, your servant, from the bazaar. I have brought you the three most beautiful Persian carpets in the world to choose from.

CLEOPATRA. I have no time for carpets to-day. Get me a boat.

FTATATEETA. What whim is this? You cannot go on the water except in the royal barge.

APOLLODORUS. Royalty, Ftatateeta, lies not in the barge but in the Queen. (To Cleopatra) The touch of your majesty’s foot on the gunwale of the meanest boat in the harbor will make it royal. (He turns to the harbor and calls seaward) Ho there, boatman! Pull in to the steps.

CLEOPATRA. Apollodorus: you are my perfect knight; and I will always buy my carpets through you. (Apollodorus bows joyously. An oar appears above the quay; and the boatman, a bullet-headed, vivacious, grinning fellow, burnt almost black by the sun, comes up a flight of steps from the water on the sentinel’s right, oar in hand, and waits at the top.) Can you row, Apollodorus?

APOLLODORUS. My oars shall be your majesty’s wings. Whither shall I row my Queen? To the lighthouse. Come. (She makes for the steps.)

SENTINEL (opposing her with his pilum at the charge). Stand. You cannot pass.

CLEOPATRA (flushing angrily). How dare you? Do you know that I am the Queen?

SENTINEL. I have my orders. You cannot pass.

CLEOPATRA. I will make Caesar have you killed if you do not obey me.

SENTINEL. He will do worse to me if I disobey my officer. Stand back.

CLEOPATRA. Ftatateeta: strangle him.

SENTINEL (alarmed — looking apprehensively at Ftatateeta, and brandishing his pilum). Keep off there.

CLEOPATRA (running to Apollodorus). Apollodorus: make your slaves help us.

APOLLODORUS. I shall not need their help, lady. (He draws his sword.) Now soldier: choose which weapon you will defend yourself with. Shall it be sword against pilum, or sword against sword?

SENTINEL. Roman against Sicilian, curse you. Take that. (He hurls his pilum at Apollodorus, who drops expertly on one knee. The pilum passes whizzing over his head and falls harmless. Apollodorus, with a cry of triumph, springs up and attacks the sentinel, who draws his sword and defends himself, crying) Ho there, guard. Help!

Cleopatra, half frightened, half delighted, takes refuge near the palace, where the porters are squatting among the bales. The boatman, alarmed, hurries down the steps out of harm’s way, but stops, with his head just visible above the edge of the quay, to watch the fight. The sentinel is handicapped by his fear of an attack in the rear from Ftatateeta. His swordsmanship, which is of a rough and ready sort, is heavily taxed, as he has occasionally to strike at her to keep her off between a blow and a guard with Apollodorus. The Centurion returns with several soldiers. Apollodorus springs back towards Cleopatra as this reinforcement confronts him.

CENTURION (coming to the sentinel’s right hand). What is this? What now?

SENTINEL (panting). I could do well enough for myself if it weren’t for the old woman. Keep her off me: that is all the help I need.

CENTURION. Make your report, soldier. What has happened?

FTATATEETA. Centurion: he would have slain the Queen.

SENTINEL (bluntly). I would, sooner than let her pass. She wanted to take boat, and go — so she said — to the lighthouse. I stopped her, as I was ordered to; and she set this fellow on me. (He goes to pick up his pilum and returns to his place with it.)

CENTURION (turning to Cleopatra). Cleopatra: I am loath to offend you; but without Caesar’s express order we dare not let you pass beyond the Roman lines.

APOLLODORUS. Well, Centurion; and has not the lighthouse been within the Roman lines since Caesar landed there?

CLEOPATRA. Yes, yes. Answer that, if you can.

CENTURION (to Apollodorus). As for you, Apollodorus, you may thank the gods that you are not nailed to the palace door with a pilum for your meddling.

APOLLODORUS (urbanely). My military friend, I was not born to be slain by so ugly a weapon. When I fall, it will be (holding up his sword) by this white queen of arms, the only weapon fit for an artist. And now that you are convinced that we do not want to go beyond the lines, let me finish killing your sentinel and depart with the Queen.

CENTURION (as the sentinel makes an angry demonstration). Peace there. Cleopatra. I must abide by my orders, and not by the subtleties of this Sicilian. You must withdraw into the palace and examine your carpets there.

CLEOPATRA (pouting). I will not: I am the Queen. Caesar does not speak to me as you do. Have Caesar’s centurions changed manners with his scullions?

CENTURION (sulkily). I do my duty. That is enough for me.

APOLLODORUS. Majesty: when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

CENTURION (angry). Apollodorus —

APOLLODORUS (interrupting him with defiant elegance). I will make amends for that insult with my sword at fitting time and place. Who says artist, says duelist. (To Cleopatra) Hear my counsel, star of the east. Until word comes to these soldiers from Caesar himself, you are a prisoner. Let me go to him with a message from you, and a present; and before the sun has stooped half way to the arms of the sea, I will bring you back Caesar’s order of release.

CENTURION (sneering at him), And you will sell the Queen the present, no doubt.

APOLLODORUS. Centurion: the Queen shall have from me, without payment, as the unforced tribute of Sicilian taste to Egyptian beauty, the richest of these carpets for her present to Caesar.

CLEOPATRA (exultantly, to the Centurion). Now you see what an ignorant common creature you are!

CENTURION (curtly). Well, a fool and his wares are soon parted (He turns to his men). Two more men to this post here; and see that no one leaves the palace but this man and his merchandize. If he draws his sword again inside the lines, kill him. To your posts. March.

He goes out, leaving two auxiliary sentinels with the other.

APOLLODORUS (with polite goodfellowship). My friends: will you not enter the palace and bury our quarrel in a bowl of wine? (He takes out his purse, jingling the coins in it.) The Queen has presents for you all.

SENTINEL (very sulky). You heard our orders. Get about your business.

FIRST AUXILIARY. Yes: you ought to know better. Off with you.

SECOND AUXILIARY (looking longingly at the purse — this sentinel is a hooknosed man, unlike his comrade, who is squab faced). Do not tantalize a poor man.

APOLLODORUS (to Cleopatra). Pearl of Queens: the Centurion is at hand; and the Roman soldier is incorruptible when his officer is looking. I must carry your word to Caesar.

CLEOPATRA (who has been meditating among the carpets). Are these carpets very heavy?

APOLLODORUS. It matters not how heavy. There are plenty of porters.

CLEOPATRA. How do they put the carpets into boats? Do they throw them down?

APOLLODORUS. Not into small boats, majesty. It would sink them.

CLEOPATRA. Not into that man’s boat, for instance? (Pointing to the boatman.)

APOLLODORUS. No. Too small.

CLEOPATRA. But you can take a carpet to Caesar in it if I send one?

APOLLODORUS. Assuredly.

CLEOPATRA. And you will have it carried gently down the steps and take great care of it?

APOLLODORUS. Depend on me.

CLEOPATRA. Great, GREAT care?

APOLLODORUS. More than of my own body.

CLEOPATRA. You will promise me not to let the porters drop it or throw it about?

APOLLODORUS. Place the most delicate glass goblet in the palace in the heart of the roll, Queen; and if it be broken, my head shall pay for it.

CLEOPATRA. Good. Come, Ftatateeta. (Ftatateeta comes to her. Apollodorus offers to squire them into the palace.) No, Apollodorus, you must not come. I will choose a carpet for myself. You must wait here. (She runs into the palace.)

APOLLODORUS (to the porters). Follow this lady (indicating Ftatateeta); and obey her.

The porters rise and take up their bales.

FTATATEETA (addressing the porters as if they were vermin). This way. And take your shoes off before you put your feet on those stairs.

She goes in, followed by the porters with the carpets. Meanwhile Apollodorus goes to the edge of the quay and looks out over the harbor. The sentinels keep their eyes on him malignantly.

APOLLODORUS (addressing the sentinel). My friend —

SENTINEL (rudely). Silence there.

FIRST AUXILIARY. Shut your muzzle, you.

SECOND AUXILIARY (in a half whisper, glancing apprehensively towards the north end of the quay). Can’t you wait a bit?

APOLLODORUS. Patience, worthy three-headed donkey. (They mutter ferociously; but he is not at all intimidated.) Listen: were you set here to watch me, or to watch the Egyptians?

SENTINEL. We know our duty.

APOLLODORUS. Then why don’t you do it? There’s something going on over there. (Pointing southwestward to the mole.)

SENTINEL (sulkily). I do not need to be told what to do by the like of you.

APOLLODORUS. Blockhead. (He begins shouting) Ho there, Centurion. Hoiho!

SENTINEL. Curse your meddling. (Shouting) Hoiho! Alarm! Alarm!

FIRST AND SECOND AUXILIARIES. Alarm! alarm! Hoiho!

The Centurion comes running in with his guard.

CENTURION. What now? Has the old woman attacked you again? (Seeing Apollodorus) Are YOU here still?

APOLLODORUS (pointing as before). See there. The Egyptians are moving. They are going to recapture the Pharos. They will attack by sea and land: by land along the great mole; by sea from the west harbor. Stir yourselves, my military friends: the hunt is up. (A clangor of trumpets from several points along the quay.) Aha! I told you so.

CENTURION (quickly). The two extra men pass the alarm to the south posts. One man keep guard here. The rest with me — quick.

The two auxiliary sentinels run off to the south. The Centurion and his guard run of northward; and immediately afterwards the bucina sounds. The four porters come from the palace carrying a carpet, followed by Ftatateeta.

SENTINEL (handling his pilum apprehensively). You again! (The porters stop.)

FTATATEETA. Peace, Roman fellow: you are now single-handed. Apollodorus: this carpet is Cleopatra’s present to Caesar. It has rolled up in it ten precious goblets of the thinnest Iberian crystal, and a hundred eggs of the sacred blue pigeon. On your honor, let not one of them be broken.

APOLLODORUS. On my head be it. (To the porters) Into the boat with them carefully.

The porters carry the carpet to the steps.

FIRST PORTER (looking down at the boat). Beware what you do, sir. Those eggs of which the lady speaks must weigh more than a pound apiece. This boat is too small for such a load.

BOATMAN (excitedly rushing up the steps). Oh thou injurious porter! Oh thou unnatural son of a she-camel! (To Apollodorus) My boat, sir, hath often carried five men. Shall it not carry your lordship and a bale of pigeons’ eggs? (To the porter) Thou mangey dromedary, the gods shall punish thee for this envious wickedness.

FIRST PORTER (stolidly). I cannot quit this bale now to beat thee; but another day I will lie in wait for thee.

APPOLODORUS (going between them). Peace there. If the boat were but a single plank, I would get to Caesar on it.

FTATATEETA (anxiously). In the name of the gods, Apollodorus, run no risks with that bale.

APOLLODORUS. Fear not, thou venerable grotesque: I guess its great worth. (To the porters) Down with it, I say; and gently; or ye shall eat nothing but stick for ten days.

The boatman goes down the steps, followed by the porters with the bale: Ftatateeta and Apollodorus watching from the edge.

APOLLODORUS. Gently, my sons, my children — (with sudden alarm) gently, ye dogs. Lay it level in the stern — so— ’tis well.

FTATATEETA (screaming down at one of the porters). Do not step on it, do not step on it. Oh thou brute beast!

FIRST PORTER (ascending). Be not excited, mistress: all is well.

FTATATEETA (panting). All well! Oh, thou hast given my heart a turn! (She clutches her side, gasping.)

The four porters have now come up and are waiting at the stairhead to be paid.

APOLLODORUS. Here, ye hungry ones. (He gives money to the first porter, who holds it in his hand to show to the others. They crowd greedily to see how much it is, quite prepared, after the Eastern fashion, to protest to heaven against their patron’s stinginess. But his liberality overpowers them.)

FIRST PORTER. O bounteous prince!

SECOND PORTER. O lord of the bazaar!

THIRD PORTER. O favored of the gods!

FOURTH PORTER. O father to all the porters of the market!

SENTINEL (enviously, threatening them fiercely with his pilum). Hence, dogs: off. Out of this. (They fly before him northward along the quay.)

APOLLODORUS. Farewell, Ftatateeta. I shall be at the lighthouse before the Egyptians. (He descends the steps.)

FTATATEETA. The gods speed thee and protect my nursling!

The sentry returns from chasing the porters and looks down at the boat, standing near the stairhead lest Ftatateeta should attempt to escape.

APOLLODORUS (from beneath, as the boat moves off). Farewell, valiant pilum pitcher.

SENTINEL. Farewell shopkeeper.

APOLLODORUS. Ha, ha! Pull, thou brave boatman, pull. So Ho-o-o-o-o! (He begins to sing in barcarolle measure to the rhythm of the oars)

My heart, my heart, spread out thy wings: Shake off thy heavy load of love —

Give me the oars, O son of a snail.

SENTINEL (threatening Ftatateeta). Now mistress: back to your henhouse. In with you.

FTATATEETA (falling on her knees and stretching her hands over the waters). Gods of the seas, bear her safely to the shore!

SENTINEL. Bear WHO safely? What do you mean?

FTATATEETA (looking darkly at him). Gods of Egypt and of Vengeance, let this Roman fool be beaten like a dog by his captain for suffering her to be taken over the waters.

SENTINEL. Accursed one: is she then in the boat? (He calls over the sea) Hoiho, there, boatman! Hoiho!

APOLLODORUS (singing in the distance). My heart, my heart, be whole and free: Love is thine only enemy.

Meanwhile Rufio, the morning’s fighting done, sits munching dates on a faggot of brushwood outside the door of the lighthouse, which towers gigantic to the clouds on his left. His helmet, full of dates, is between his knees; and a leathern bottle of wine is by his side. Behind him the great stone pedestal of the lighthouse is shut in from the open sea by a low stone parapet, with a couple of steps in the middle to the broad coping. A huge chain with a hook hangs down from the lighthouse crane above his head. Faggots like the one he sits on lie beneath it ready to be drawn up to feed the beacon.

Caesar is standing on the step at the parapet looking out anxiously, evidently ill at ease. Britannus comes out of the lighthouse door.

RUFIO. Well, my British islander. Have you been up to the top?

BRITANNUS. I have. I reckon it at 200 feet high.

RUFIO. Anybody up there?

BRITANNUS. One elderly Tyrian to work the crane; and his son, a well conducted youth of 14.

RUFIO (looking at the chain). What! An old man and a boy work that! Twenty men, you mean.

BRITANNUS. Two only, I assure you. They have counterweights, and a machine with boiling water in it which I do not understand: it is not of British design. They use it to haul up barrels of oil and faggots to burn in the brazier on the roof.

RUFIO. But —

BRITANNUS. Excuse me: I came down because there are messengers coming along the mole to us from the island. I must see what their business is. (He hurries out past the lighthouse.)

CAESAR (coming away from the parapet, shivering and out of sorts). Rufio: this has been a mad expedition. We shall be beaten. I wish I knew how our men are getting on with that barricade across the great mole.

RUFIO (angrily). Must I leave my food and go starving to bring you a report?

CAESAR (soothing him nervously). No, Rufio, no. Eat, my son. Eat. (He takes another turn, Rufio chewing dates meanwhile.) The Egyptians cannot be such fools as not to storm the barricade and swoop down on us here before it is finished. It is the first time I have ever run an avoidable risk. I should not have come to Egypt.

RUFIO. An hour ago you were all for victory.

CAESAR (apologetically). Yes: I was a fool — rash, Rufio — boyish.

RUFIO. Boyish! Not a bit of it. Here. (Offering him a handful of dates.)

CAESAR. What are these for?

RUFIO. To eat. That’s what’s the matter with you. When a man comes to your age, he runs down before his midday meal. Eat and drink; and then have another look at our chances.

CAESAR (taking the dates). My age! (He shakes his head and bites a date.) Yes, Rufio: I am an old man — worn out now — true, quite true. (He gives way to melancholy contemplation, and eats another date.) Achillas is still in his prime: Ptolemy is a boy. (He eats another date, and plucks up a little.) Well, every dog has his day; and I have had mine: I cannot complain. (With sudden cheerfulness) These dates are not bad, Rufio. (Britannus returns, greatly excited, with a leathern bag. Caesar is himself again in a moment.) What now?

BRITANNUS (triumphantly). Our brave Rhodian mariners have captured a treasure. There! (He throws the bag down at Caesar’s feet.) Our enemies are delivered into our hands.

CAESAR. In that bag?

BRITANNUS. Wait till you hear, Caesar. This bag contains all the letters which have passed between Pompey’s party and the army of occupation here.

CAESAR. Well?

BRITANNUS (impatient of Caesar’s slowness to grasp the situation). Well, we shall now know who your foes are. The name of every man who has plotted against you since you crossed the Rubicon may be in these papers, for all we know.

CAESAR. Put them in the fire.

BRITANNUS. Put them — (he gasps)!!!!

CAESAR. In the fire. Would you have me waste the next three years of my life in proscribing and condemning men who will be my friends when I have proved that my friendship is worth more than Pompey’s was — than Cato’s is. O incorrigible British islander: am I a bull dog, to seek quarrels merely to show how stubborn my jaws are?

BRITANNUS. But your honor — the honor of Rome —

CAESAR. I do not make human sacrifices to my honor, as your Druids do. Since you will not burn these, at least I can drown them. (He picks up the bag and throws it over the parapet into the sea.)

BRITANNUS. Caesar: this is mere eccentricity. Are traitors to be allowed to go free for the sake of a paradox?

RUFIO (rising). Caesar: when the islander has finished preaching, call me again. I am going to have a look at the boiling water machine. (He goes into the lighthouse.)

BRITANNUS (with genuine feeling). O Caesar, my great master, if I could but persuade you to regard life seriously, as men do in my country!

CAESAR. Do they truly do so, Britannus?

BRITANNUS. Have you not been there? Have you not seen them? What Briton speaks as you do in your moments of levity? What Briton neglects to attend the services at the sacred grove? What Briton wears clothes of many colors as you do, instead of plain blue, as all solid, well esteemed men should? These are moral questions with us. CAESAR. Well, well, my friend: some day I shall settle down and have a blue toga, perhaps. Meanwhile, I must get on as best I can in my flippant Roman way. (Apollodorus comes past the lighthouse.) What now?

BRITANNUS (turning quickly, and challenging the stranger with official haughtiness). What is this? Who are you? How did you come here?

APOLLODORUS. Calm yourself, my friend: I am not going to eat you. I have come by boat, from Alexandria, with precious gifts for Caesar.

CAESAR. From Alexandria!

BRITANNUS (severely). That is Caesar, sir.

RUFIO (appearing at the lighthouse door). What’s the matter now?

APOLLODORUS. Hail, great Caesar! I am Apollodorus the Sicilian, an artist.

BRITANNUS. An artist! Why have they admitted this vagabond?

CAESAR. Peace, man. Apollodorus is a famous patrician amateur.

BRITANNUS (disconcerted). I crave the gentleman’s pardon. (To Caesar) I understood him to say that he was a professional. (Somewhat out of countenance, he allows Apollodorus to approach Caesar, changing places with him. Rufio, after looking Apollodorus up and down with marked disparagement, goes to the other side of the platform.)

CAESAR. You are welcome, Apollodorus. What is your business?

APOLLODORUS. First, to deliver to you a present from the Queen of Queens.

CAESAR. Who is that?

APOLLODORUS. Cleopatra of Egypt.

CAESAR (taking him into his confidence in his most winning manner). Apollodorus: this is no time for playing with presents. Pray you, go back to the Queen, and tell her that if all goes well I shall return to the palace this evening.

APOLLODORUS. Caesar: I cannot return. As I approached the lighthouse, some fool threw a great leathern bag into the sea. It broke the nose of my boat; and I had hardly time to get myself and my charge to the shore before the poor little cockleshell sank.

CAESAR. I am sorry, Apollodorus. The fool shall be rebuked. Well, well: what have you brought me? The Queen will be hurt if I do not look at it.

RUFIO. Have we time to waste on this trumpery? The Queen is only a child.

CAESAR. Just so: that is why we must not disappoint her. What is the present, Apollodorus?

APOLLODORUS. Caesar: it is a Persian carpet — a beauty! And in it are — so I am told — pigeons’ eggs and crystal goblets and fragile precious things. I dare not for my head have it carried up that narrow ladder from the causeway.

RUFIO. Swing it up by the crane, then. We will send the eggs to the cook; drink our wine from the goblets; and the carpet will make a bed for Caesar.

APOLLODORUS. The crane! Caesar: I have sworn to tender this bale of carpet as I tender my own life.

CAESAR (cheerfully). Then let them swing you up at the same time; and if the chain breaks, you and the pigeons’ eggs will perish together. (He goes to the chairs and looks up along it, examining it curiously.)

APOLLODORUS (to Britannus). Is Caesar serious?

BRITANNUS. His manner is frivolous because he is an Italian; but he means what he says.

APOLLODORUS. Serious or not, he spoke well. Give me a squad of soldiers to work the crane.

BRITANNUS. Leave the crane to me. Go and await the descent of the chain.

APOLLODORUS. Good. You will presently see me there (turning to them all and pointing with an eloquent gesture to the sky above the parapet) rising like the sun with my treasure.

He goes back the, way he came. Britannus goes into the lighthouse.

RUFIO (ill-humoredly). Are you really going to wait here for this foolery, Caesar?

CAESAR (backing away from the crane as it gives signs of working). Why not?

RUFIO. The Egyptians will let you know why not if they have the sense to make a rush from the shore end of the mole before our barricade is finished. And here we are waiting like children to see a carpet full of pigeons’ eggs.

The chain rattles, and is drawn up high enough to clear the parapet. It then swings round out of sight behind the lighthouse.

CAESAR. Fear not, my son Rufio. When the first Egyptian takes his first step along the mole, the alarm will sound; and we two will reach the barricade from our end before the Egyptians reach it from their end — we two, Rufio: I, the old man, and you, his biggest boy. And the old man will be there first. So peace; and give me some more dates.

APOLLODORUS (from the causeway below). So-ho, haul away. So-ho-o-o-o! (The chain is drawn up and comes round again from behind the lighthouse. Apollodorus is swinging in the air with his bale of carpet at the end of it. He breaks into song as he soars above the parapet.)

Aloft, aloft, behold the blue That never shone in woman’s eyes

Easy there: stop her. (He ceases to rise.) Further round! (The chain comes forward above the platform.)

RUFIO (calling up). Lower away there. (The chain and its load begin to descend.)

APOLLODORUS (calling up). Gently — slowly — mind the eggs.

RUFIO (calling up). Easy there — slowly — slowly.

Apollodorus and the bale are deposited safely on the flags in the middle of the platform. Rufio and Caesar help Apollodorus to cast off the chain from the bale.

RUFIO. Haul up.

The chain rises clear of their heads with a rattle. Britannus comes from the lighthouse and helps them to uncord the carpet.

APOLLODORUS (when the cords are loose). Stand off, my friends: let Caesar see. (He throws the carpet open.)

RUFIO. Nothing but a heap of shawls. Where are the pigeons’ eggs?

APOLLODORUS. Approach, Caesar; and search for them among the shawls.

RUFIO (drawing his sword). Ha, treachery! Keep back, Caesar: I saw the shawl move: there is something alive there.

BRITANNUS (drawing his sword). It is a serpent.

APOLLODORUS. Dares Caesar thrust his hand into the sack where the serpent moves?

RUFIO (turning on him). Treacherous dog —

CAESAR. Peace. Put up your swords. Apollodorus: your serpent seems to breathe very regularly. (He thrusts his hand under the shawls and draws out a bare arm.) This is a pretty little snake.

RUFIO (drawing out the other arm). Let us have the rest of you.

They pull Cleopatra up by the wrists into a sitting position. Britannus, scandalized, sheathes his sword with a drive of protest.

CLEOPATRA (gasping). Oh, I’m smothered. Oh, Caesar; a man stood on me in the boat; and a great sack of something fell upon me out of the sky; and then the boat sank, and then I was swung up into the air and bumped down.

CAESAR (petting her as she rises and takes refuge on his breast). Well, never mind: here you are safe and sound at last.

RUFIO. Ay; and now that she is here, what are we to do with her?

BRITANNUS. She cannot stay here, Caesar, without the companionship of some matron.

CLEOPATRA (jealously, to Caesar, who is obviously perplexed). Aren’t you glad to see me?

CAESAR. Yes, yes; I am very glad. But Rufio is very angry; and Britannus is shocked.

CLEOPATRA (contemptuously). You can have their heads cut off, can you not?

CAESAR. They would not be so useful with their heads cut off as they are now, my sea bird.

RUFIO (to Cleopatra). We shall have to go away presently and cut some of your Egyptians’ heads off. How will you like being left here with the chance of being captured by that little brother of yours if we are beaten?

CLEOPATRA. But you mustn’t leave me alone. Caesar you will not leave me alone, will you?

RUFIO. What! Not when the trumpet sounds and all our lives depend on Caesar’s being at the barricade before the Egyptians reach it? Eh?

CLEOPATRA. Let them lose their lives: they are only soldiers.

CAESAR (gravely). Cleopatra: when that trumpet sounds, we must take every man his life in his hand, and throw it in the face of Death. And of my soldiers who have trusted me there is not one whose hand I shall not hold more sacred than your head. (Cleopatra is overwhelmed. Her eyes fill with tears.) Apollodorus: you must take her back to the palace.

APOLLODORUS. Am I a dolphin, Caesar, to cross the seas with young ladies on my back? My boat is sunk: all yours are either at the barricade or have returned to the city. I will hail one if I can: that is all I can do. (He goes back to the causeway.)

CLEOPATRA (struggling with her tears). It does not matter. I will not go back. Nobody cares for me.

CAESAR. Cleopatra —

CLEOPATRA. You want me to be killed.

CAESAR (still more gravely). My poor child: your life matters little here to anyone but yourself. (She gives way altogether at this, casting herself down on the faggots weeping. Suddenly a great tumult is heard in the distance, bucinas and trumpets sounding through a storm of shouting. Britannus rushes to the parapet and looks along the mole. Caesar and Rufio turn to one another with quick intelligence.)

CAESAR. Come, Rufio.

CLEOPATRA (scrambling to her knees and clinging to him). No, no. Do not leave me, Caesar. (He snatches his skirt from her clutch.) Oh!

BRITANNUS (from the parapet). Caesar: we are cut off. The Egyptians have landed from the west harbor between us and the barricade!!!

RUFIO (running to see). Curses! It is true. We are caught like rats in a trap.

CAESAR (ruthfully). Rufio, Rufio: my men at the barricade are between the sea party and the shore party. I have murdered them.

RUFIO (coming back from the parapet to Caesar’s right hand). Ay: that comes of fooling with this girl here.

APOLLODORUS (coming up quickly from the causeway). Look over the parapet, Caesar.

CAESAR. We have looked, my friend. We must defend ourselves here.

APOLLODORUS. I have thrown the ladder into the sea. They cannot get in without it.

RUFIO. Ay; and we cannot get out. Have you thought of that?

APOLLODORUS. Not get out! Why not? You have ships in the east harbor.

BRITANNUS (hopefully, at the parapet). The Rhodian galleys are standing in towards us already. (Caesar quickly joins Britannus at the parapet.)

RUFIO (to Apollodorus, impatiently). And by what road are we to walk to the galleys, pray?

APOLLODORUS (with gay, defiant rhetoric). By the road that leads everywhere — the diamond path of the sun and moon. Have you never seen the child’s shadow play of The Broken Bridge? “Ducks and geese with ease get over” — eh? (He throws away his cloak and cap, and binds his sword on his back.)

RUFIO. What are you talking about?

APOLLODORUS. I will show you. (Calling to Britannus) How far off is the nearest galley?

BRITANNUS. Fifty fathom.

CAESAR. No, no: they are further off than they seem in this clear air to your British eyes. Nearly quarter of a mile, Apollodorus.

APOLLODORUS. Good. Defend yourselves here until I send you a boat from that galley.

RUFIO. Have you wings, perhaps?

APOLLODORUS. Water wings, soldier. Behold!

He runs up the steps between Caesar and Britannus to the coping of the parapet; springs into the air; and plunges head foremost into the sea.

CAESAR (like a schoolboy — wildly excited). Bravo, bravo! (Throwing off his cloak) By Jupiter, I will do that too.

RUFIO (seizing him). You are mad. You shall not.

CAESAR. Why not? Can I not swim as well as he?

RUFIO (frantic). Can an old fool dive and swim like a young one? He is twenty-five and you are fifty.

CAESAR (breaking loose from Rufio). Old!!!

BRITANNUS (shocked). Rufio: you forget yourself.

CAESAR. I will race you to the galley for a week’s pay, father Rufio.

CLEOPATRA. But me! Me!! Me!!! What is to become of me?

CAESAR. I will carry you on my back to the galley like a dolphin. Rufio: when you see me rise to the surface, throw her in: I will answer for her. And then in with you after her, both of you.

CLEOPATRA. No, no, NO. I shall be drowned.

BRITANNUS. Caesar: I am a man and a Briton, not a fish. I must have a boat. I cannot swim.

CLEOPATRA. Neither can I.

CAESAR (to Britannus). Stay here, then, alone, until I recapture the lighthouse: I will not forget you. Now, Rufio.

RUFIO. You have made up your mind to this folly?

CAESAR. The Egyptians have made it up for me. What else is there to do? And mind where you jump: I do not want to get your fourteen stone in the small of my back as I come up. (He runs up the steps and stands on the coping.)

BRITANNUS (anxiously). One last word, Caesar. Do not let yourself be seen in the fashionable part of Alexandria until you have changed your clothes.

CAESAR (calling over the sea). Ho, Apollodorus: (he points skyward and quotes the barcarolle)

The white upon the blue above —

APOLLODORUS (swimming in the distance)

Is purple on the green below —

CAESAR (exultantly). Aha! (He plunges into the sea.)

CLEOPATRA (running excitedly to the steps). Oh, let me see. He will be drowned. (Rufio seizes her.) Ah — ah — ah — ah! (He pitches her screaming into the sea. Rufio and Britannus roar with laughter.)

RUFIO (looking down after her). He has got her. (To Britannus) Hold the fort, Briton. Caesar will not forget you. (He springs off.)

BRITANNUS (running to the steps to watch them as they swim). All safe, Rufio?

RUFIO (swimming). All safe.

CAESAR (swimming further of). Take refuge up there by the beacon; and pile the fuel on the trap door, Britannus.

BRITANNUS (calling in reply). I will first do so, and then commend myself to my country’s gods. (A sound of cheering from the sea. Britannus gives full vent to his excitement) The boat has reached him: Hip, hip, hip, hurrah!

ACT IV

Cleopatra’s sousing in the east harbor of Alexandria was in October 48 B. C. In March 47 she is passing the afternoon in her boudoir in the palace, among a bevy of her ladies, listening to a slave girl who is playing the harp in the middle of the room. The harpist’s master, an old musician, with a lined face, prominent brows, white beard, moustache and eyebrows twisted and horned at the ends, and a consciously keen and pretentious expression, is squatting on the floor close to her on her right, watching her performance. Ftatateeta is in attendance near the door, in front of a group of female slaves. Except the harp player all are seated: Cleopatra in a chair opposite the door on the other side of the room; the rest on the ground. Cleopatra’s ladies are all young, the most conspicuous being Charmian and Iras, her favorites. Charmian is a hatchet faced, terra cotta colored little goblin, swift in her movements, and neatly finished at the hands and feet. Iras is a plump, goodnatured creature, rather fatuous, with a profusion of red hair, and a tendency to giggle on the slightest provocation.

CLEOPATRA. Can I —

FTATATEETA (insolently, to the player). Peace, thou! The Queen speaks. (The player stops.)

CLEOPATRA (to the old musician). I want to learn to play the harp with my own hands. Caesar loves music. Can you teach me?

MUSICIAN. Assuredly I and no one else can teach the Queen. Have I not discovered the lost method of the ancient Egyptians, who could make a pyramid tremble by touching a bass string? All the other teachers are quacks: I have exposed them repeatedly.

CLEOPATRA. Good: you shall teach me. How long will it take?

MUSICIAN. Not very long: only four years. Your Majesty must first become proficient in the philosophy of Pythagoras.

CLEOPATRA. Has she (indicating the slave) become proficient in the philosophy of Pythagoras?

MUSICIAN. Oh, she is but a slave. She learns as a dog learns.

CLEOPATRA. Well, then, I will learn as a dog learns; for she plays better than you. You shall give me a lesson every day for a fortnight. (The musician hastily scrambles to his feet and bows profoundly.) After that, whenever I strike a false note you shall be flogged; and if I strike so many that there is not time to flog you, you shall be thrown into the Nile to feed the crocodiles. Give the girl a piece of gold; and send them away.

MUSICIAN (much taken aback). But true art will not be thus forced.

FTATATEETA (pushing him out). What is this? Answering the Queen, forsooth. Out with you.

He is pushed out by Ftatateeta, the girl following with her harp, amid the laughter of the ladies and slaves.

CLEOPATRA. Now, can any of you amuse me? Have you any stories or any news?

IRAS. Ftatateeta —

CLEOPATRA. Oh, Ftatateeta, Ftatateeta, always Ftatateeta. Some new tale to set me against her.

IRAS. No: this time Ftatateeta has been virtuous. (All the ladies laugh — not the slaves.) Pothinus has been trying to bribe her to let him speak with you.

CLEOPATRA (wrathfully). Ha! You all sell audiences with me, as if I saw whom you please, and not whom I please. I should like to know how much of her gold piece that harp girl will have to give up before she leaves the palace.

IRAS. We can easily find out that for you.

The ladies laugh.

CLEOPATRA (frowning). You laugh; but take care, take care. I will find out some day how to make myself served as Caesar is served.

CHARMIAN. Old hooknose! (They laugh again.)

CLEOPATRA (revolted). Silence. Charmian: do not you be a silly little Egyptian fool. Do you know why I allow you all to chatter impertinently just as you please, instead of treating you as Ftatateeta would treat you if she were Queen?

CHARMIAN. Because you try to imitate Caesar in everything; and he lets everybody say what they please to him.

CLEOPATRA. No; but because I asked him one day why he did so; and he said “Let your women talk; and you will learn something from them.” What have I to learn from them? I said. “What they ARE,” said he; and oh! you should have seen his eye as he said it. You would have curled up, you shallow things. (They laugh. She turns fiercely on Iras) At whom are you laughing — at me or at Caesar?

IRAS. At Caesar.

CLEOPATRA. If you were not a fool, you would laugh at me; and if you were not a coward you would not be afraid to tell me so. (Ftatateeta returns.) Ftatateeta: they tell me that Pothinus has offered you a bribe to admit him to my presence.

FTATATEETA (protesting). Now by my father’s gods —

CLEOPATRA (cutting her short despotically). Have I not told you not to deny things? You would spend the day calling your father’s gods to witness to your virtues if I let you. Go take the bribe; and bring in Pothinus. (Ftatateeta is about to reply.) Don’t answer me. Go.

Ftatateeta goes out; and Cleopatra rises and begins to prowl to and fro between her chair and the door, meditating. All rise and stand.

IRAS (as she reluctantly rises). Heigho! I wish Caesar were back in Rome.

CLEOPATRA (threateningly). It will be a bad day for you all when he goes. Oh, if I were not ashamed to let him see that I am as cruel at heart as my father, I would make you repent that speech! Why do you wish him away?

CHARMIAN. He makes you so terribly prosy and serious and learned and philosophical. It is worse than being religious, at OUR ages. (The ladies laugh.)

CLEOPATRA. Cease that endless cackling, will you. Hold your tongues.

CHARMIAN (with mock resignation). Well, well: we must try to live up to Caesar.

They laugh again. Cleopatra rages silently as she continues to prowl to and fro. Ftatateeta comes back with Pothinus, who halts on the threshold.

FTATATEETA (at the door). Pothinus craves the ear of the —

CLEOPATRA. There, there: that will do: let him come in.

(She resumes her seat. All sit down except Pothinus, who advances to the middle of the room. Ftatateeta takes her former place.) Well, Pothinus: what is the latest news from your rebel friends?

POTHINUS (haughtily). I am no friend of rebellion. And a prisoner does not receive news.

CLEOPATRA. You are no more a prisoner than I am — than Caesar is. These six months we have been besieged in this palace by my subjects. You are allowed to walk on the beach among the soldiers. Can I go further myself, or can Caesar?

POTHINUS. You are but a child, Cleopatra, and do not understand these matters.

The ladies laugh. Cleopatra looks inscrutably at him.

CHARMIAN. I see you do not know the latest news, Pothinus.

POTHINUS. What is that?

CHARMIAN. That Cleopatra is no longer a child. Shall I tell you how to grow much older, and much, MUCH wiser in one day?

POTHINUS. I should prefer to grow wiser without growing older.

CHARMIAN. Well, go up to the top of the lighthouse; and get somebody to take you by the hair and throw you into the sea. (The ladies laugh.)

CLEOPATRA. She is right, Pothinus: you will come to the shore with much conceit washed out of you. (The ladies laugh. Cleopatra rises impatiently.) Begone, all of you. I will speak with Pothinus alone. Drive them out, Ftatateeta. (They run out laughing. Ftatateeta shuts the door on them.) What are YOU waiting for?

FTATATEETA. It is not meet that the Queen remain alone with —

CLEOPATRA (interrupting her). Ftatateeta: must I sacrifice you to your father’s gods to teach you that I am Queen of Egypt, and not you?

FTATATEETA (indignantly). You are like the rest of them. You want to be what these Romans call a New Woman. (She goes out, banging the door.)

CLEOPATRA (sitting down again). Now, Pothinus: why did you bribe Ftatateeta to bring you hither?

POTHINUS (studying her gravely). Cleopatra: what they tell me is true. You are changed.

CLEOPATRA. Do you speak with Caesar every day for six months: and YOU will be changed.

POTHINUS. It is the common talk that you are infatuated with this old man.

CLEOPATRA. Infatuated? What does that mean? Made foolish, is it not? Oh no: I wish I were.

POTHINUS. You wish you were made foolish! How so?

CLEOPATRA. When I was foolish, I did what I liked, except when Ftatateeta beat me; and even then I cheated her and did it by stealth. Now that Caesar has made me wise, it is no use my liking or disliking; I do what must be done, and have no time to attend to myself. That is not happiness; but it is greatness. If Caesar were gone, I think I could govern the Egyptians; for what Caesar is to me, I am to the fools around me.

POTHINUS (looking hard at her). Cleopatra: this may be the vanity of youth.

CLEOPATRA. No, no: it is not that I am so clever, but that the others are so stupid.

POTHINUS (musingly). Truly, that is the great secret.

CLEOPATRA. Well, now tell me what you came to say?

POTHINUS (embarrassed). I! Nothing.

CLEOPATRA. Nothing!

POTHINUS. At least — to beg for my liberty: that is all.

CLEOPATRA. For that you would have knelt to Caesar. No, Pothinus: you came with some plan that depended on Cleopatra being a little nursery kitten. Now that Cleopatra is a Queen, the plan is upset.

POTHINUS (bowing his head submissively). It is so.

CLEOPATRA (exultant). Aha!

POTHINUS (raising his eyes keenly to hers). Is Cleopatra then indeed a Queen, and no longer Caesar’s prisoner and slave?

CLEOPATRA. Pothinus: we are all Caesar’s slaves — all we in this land of Egypt — whether we will or no. And she who is wise enough to know this will reign when Caesar departs.

POTHINUS. You harp on Caesar’s departure.

CLEOPATRA. What if I do?

POTHINUS. Does he not love you?

CLEOPATRA. Love me! Pothinus: Caesar loves no one. Who are those we love? Only those whom we do not hate: all people are strangers and enemies to us except those we love. But it is not so with Caesar. He has no hatred in him: he makes friends with everyone as he does with dogs and children. His kindness to me is a wonder: neither mother, father, nor nurse have ever taken so much care for me, or thrown open their thoughts to me so freely.

POTHINUS. Well: is not this love?

CLEOPATRA. What! When he will do as much for the first girl he meets on his way back to Rome? Ask his slave, Britannus: he has been just as good to him. Nay, ask his very horse! His kindness is not for anything in ME: it is in his own nature.

POTHINUS. But how can you be sure that he does not love you as men love women?

CLEOPATRA. Because I cannot make him jealous. I have tried.

POTHINUS. Hm! Perhaps I should have asked, then, do you love him?

CLEOPATRA. Can one love a god? Besides, I love another Roman: one whom I saw long before Caesar — no god, but a man — one who can love and hate — one whom I can hurt and who would hurt me.

POTHINUS. Does Caesar know this?

CLEOPATRA. Yes

POTHINUS. And he is not angry.

CLEOPATRA. He promises to send him to Egypt to please me!

POTHINUS. I do not understand this man?

CLEOPATRA (with superb contempt). YOU understand Caesar! How could you? (Proudly) I do — by instinct.

POTHINUS (deferentially, after a moment’s thought). Your Majesty caused me to be admitted to-day. What message has the Queen for me?

CLEOPATRA. This. You think that by making my brother king, you will rule in Egypt, because you are his guardian and he is a little silly.

POTHINUB. The Queen is pleased to say so.

CLEOPATRA. The Queen is pleased to say this also. That Caesar will eat up you, and Achillas, and my brother, as a cat eats up mice; and that he will put on this land of Egypt as a shepherd puts on his garment. And when he has done that, he will return to Rome, and leave Cleopatra here as his viceroy.

POTHINUS (breaking out wrathfully). That he will never do. We have a thousand men to his ten; and we will drive him and his beggarly legions into the sea.

CLEOPATRA (with scorn, getting up to go). You rant like any common fellow. Go, then, and marshal your thousands; and make haste; for Mithridates of Pergamos is at hand with reinforcements for Caesar. Caesar has held you at bay with two legions: we shall see what he will do with twenty.

POTHINUS. Cleopatra —

CLEOPATRA. Enough, enough: Caesar has spoiled me for talking to weak things like you. (She goes out. Pothinus, with a gesture of rage, is following, when Ftatateeta enters and stops him.)

POTHINUS. Let me go forth from this hateful place.

FTATATEETA. What angers you?

POTHINUS. The curse of all the gods of Egypt be upon her! She has sold her country to the Roman, that she may buy it back from him with her kisses.

FTATATEETA. Fool: did she not tell you that she would have Caesar gone?

POTHINUS. You listened?

FTATATEETA. I took care that some honest woman should be at hand whilst you were with her.

POTHINUS. Now by the gods —

FTATATEETA. Enough of your gods! Caesar’s gods are all powerful here. It is no use YOU coming to Cleopatra: you are only an Egyptian. She will not listen to any of her own race: she treats us all as children.

POTHINUS. May she perish for it!

FTATATEETA (balefully). May your tongue wither for that wish! Go! send for Lucius Septimius, the slayer of Pompey. He is a Roman: may be she will listen to him. Begone!

POTHINUS (darkly). I know to whom I must go now.

FTATATEETA (suspiciously). To whom, then?

POTHINUS. To a greater Roman than Lucius. And mark this, mistress. You thought, before Caesar came, that Egypt should presently be ruled by you and your crew in the name of Cleopatra. I set myself against it.

FTATATEETA (interrupting him — wrangling). Ay; that it might be ruled by you and YOUR crew in the name of Ptolemy.

POTHINUS. Better me, or even you, than a woman with a Roman heart; and that is what Cleopatra is now become. Whilst I live, she shall never rule. So guide yourself accordingly. (He goes out.)

It is by this time drawing on to dinner time. The table is laid on the roof of the palace; and thither Rufio is now climbing, ushered by a majestic palace official, wand of office in hand, and followed by a slave carrying an inlaid stool. After many stairs they emerge at last into a massive colonnade on the roof. Light curtains are drawn between the columns on the north and east to soften the westering sun. The official leads Rufio to one of these shaded sections. A cord for pulling the curtains apart hangs down between the pillars.

THE OFFICIAL (bowing). The Roman commander will await Caesar here.

The slave sets down the stool near the southernmost column, and slips out through the curtains.

RUFIO (sitting down, a little blown). Pouf! That was a climb. How high have we come?

THE OFFICIAL. We are on the palace roof, O Beloved of Victory!

RUFIO. Good! the Beloved of Victory has no more stairs to get up.

A second official enters from the opposite end, walking backwards.

THE SECOND OFFICIAL. Caesar approaches.

Caesar, fresh from the bath, clad in a new tunic of purple silk, comes in, beaming and festive, followed by two slaves carrying a light couch, which is hardly more than an elaborately designed bench. They place it near the northmost of the two curtained columns. When this is done they slip out through the curtains; and the two officials, formally bowing, follow them. Rufio rises to receive Caesar.

CAESAR (coming over to him). Why, Rufio! (Surveying his dress with an air of admiring astonishment) A new baldrick! A new golden pommel to your sword! And you have had your hair cut! But not your beard — ? Impossible! (He sniffs at Rufio’s beard.) Yes, perfumed, by Jupiter Olympus!

RUFIO (growling). Well: is it to please myself?

CAESAR (affectionately). No, my son Rufio, but to please me — to celebrate my birthday.

RUFIO (contemptuously). Your birthday! You always have a birthday when there is a pretty girl to be flattered or an ambassador to be conciliated. We had seven of them in ten months last year.

CAESAR (contritely). It is true, Rufio! I shall never break myself of these petty deceits.

RUFIO. Who is to dine with us — besides Cleopatra?

CAESAR. Apollodorus the Sicilian.

RUFIO. That popinjay!

CAESAR. Come! the popinjay is an amusing dog — tells a story; sings a song; and saves us the trouble of flattering the Queen. What does she care for old politicians and campfed bears like us? No: Apollodorus is good company, Rufio, good company.

RUFIO. Well, he can swim a bit and fence a bit: he might be worse, if he only knew how to hold his tongue.

CAESAR. The gods forbid he should ever learn! Oh, this military life! this tedious, brutal life of action! That is the worst of us Romans: we are mere doers and drudgers: a swarm of bees turned into men. Give me a good talker — one with wit and imagination enough to live without continually doing something!

RUFIO. Ay! a nice time he would have of it with you when dinner was over! Have you noticed that I am before my time?

CAESAR. Aha! I thought that meant something. What is it?

RUFIO. Can we be overheard here?

CAESAR. Our privacy invites eavesdropping. I can remedy that. (He claps his hands twice. The curtains are drawn, revealing the roof garden with a banqueting table set across in the middle for four persons, one at each end, and two side by side. The side next Caesar and Rufio is blocked with golden wine vessels and basins. A gorgeous major-domo is superintending the laying of the table by a staff of slaves. The colonnade goes round the garden at both sides to the further end, where a gap in it, like a great gateway, leaves the view open to the sky beyond the western edge of the roof, except in the middle, where a life size image of Ra, seated on a huge plinth, towers up, with hawk head and crown of asp and disk. His altar, which stands at his feet, is a single white stone.) Now everybody can see us, nobody will think of listening to us. (He sits down on the bench left by the two slaves.)

RUFIO (sitting down on his stool). Pothinus wants to speak to you. I advise you to see him: there is some plotting going on here among the women.

CAESAR. Who is Pothinus?

RUFIO. The fellow with hair like squirrel’s fur — the little King’s bear leader, whom you kept prisoner.

CAESAR (annoyed). And has he not escaped?

RUFIO. No.

CAESAR (rising imperiously). Why not? You have been guarding this man instead of watching the enemy. Have I not told you always to let prisoners escape unless there are special orders to the contrary? Are there not enough mouths to be fed without him?

RUFIO. Yes; and if you would have a little sense and let me cut his throat, you would save his rations. Anyhow, he WON’T escape. Three sentries have told him they would put a pilum through him if they saw him again. What more can they do? He prefers to stay and spy on us. So would I if I had to do with generals subject to fits of clemency.

CAESAR (resuming his seat, argued down). Hm! And so he wants to see me.

RUFIO. Ay. I have brought him with me. He is waiting there (jerking his thumb over his shoulder) under guard.

CAESAR. And you want me to see him?

RUFIO (obstinately). I don’t want anything. I daresay you will do what you like. Don’t put it on to me.

CAESAR (with an air of doing it expressly to indulge Rufio). Well, well: let us have him.

RUFIO (calling). Ho there, guard! Release your man and send him up. (Beckoning) Come along!

Pothinus enters and stops mistrustfully between the two, looking from one to the other.

CAESAR (graciously). Ah, Pothinus! You are welcome. And what is the news this afternoon?

POTHINUS. Caesar: I come to warn you of a danger, and to make you an offer.

CAESAR. Never mind the danger. Make the offer.

RUFIO. Never mind the offer. What’s the danger?

POTHINUS. Caesar: you think that Cleopatra is devoted to you.

CAESAR (gravely). My friend: I already know what I think. Come to your offer.

POTHINUS. I will deal plainly. I know not by what strange gods you have been enabled to defend a palace and a few yards of beach against a city and an army. Since we cut you off from Lake Mareotis, and you dug wells in the salt sea sand and brought up buckets of fresh water from them, we have known that your gods are irresistible, and that you are a worker of miracles. I no longer threaten you.

RUFIO (sarcastically). Very handsome of you, indeed.

POTHINUS. So be it: you are the master. Our gods sent the north west winds to keep you in our hands; but you have been too strong for them.

CAESAR (gently urging him to come to the point). Yes, yes, my friend. But what then?

RUFIO. Spit it out, man. What have you to say?

POTHINUS. I have to say that you have a traitress in your camp. Cleopatra.

THE MAJOR-DOMO (at the table, announcing). The Queen! (Caesar and Rufio rise.)

RUFIO (aside to Pothinus). You should have spat it out sooner, you fool. Now it is too late.

Cleopatra, in gorgeous raiment, enters in state through the gap in the colonnade, and comes down past the image of Ra and past the table to Caesar. Her retinue, headed by Ftatateeta, joins the staff at the table. Caesar gives Cleopatra his seat, which she takes.

CLEOPATRA (quickly, seeing Pothinus). What is HE doing here?

CAESAR (seating himself beside her, in the most amiable of tempers). Just going to tell me something about you. You shall hear it. Proceed, Pothinus.

POTHINUS (disconcerted). Caesar — (He stammers.)

CAESAR. Well, out with it.

POTHINUS. What I have to say is for your ear, not for the Queen’s.

CLEOPATRA (with subdued ferocity). There are means of making you speak. Take care.

POTHINUS (defiantly). Caesar does not employ those means.

CAESAR. My friend: when a man has anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but to prevent him from telling it too often. Let me celebrate my birthday by setting you free. Farewell: we’ll not meet again.

CLEOPATRA (angrily). Caesar: this mercy is foolish.

POTHINUS (to Caesar). Will you not give me a private audience? Your life may depend on it. (Caesar rises loftily.)

RUFIO (aside to Pothinus). Ass! Now we shall have some heroics.

CAESAR (oratorically). Pothinus —

RUFIO (interrupting him). Caesar: the dinner will spoil if you begin preaching your favourite sermon about life and death.

CLEOPATRA (priggishly). Peace, Rufio. I desire to hear Caesar.

RUFIO (bluntly). Your Majesty has heard it before. You repeated it to Apollodorus last week; and he thought it was all your own. (Caesar’s dignity collapses. Much tickled, he sits down again and looks roguishly at Cleopatra, who is furious. Rufio calls as before) Ho there, guard! Pass the prisoner out. He is released. (To Pothinus) Now off with you. You have lost your chance.

POTHINUS (his temper overcoming his prudence). I WILL speak.

CAESAR (to Cleopatra). You see. Torture would not have wrung a word from him.

POTHINUS. Caesar: you have taught Cleopatra the arts by which the Romans govern the world.

CAESAR. Alas! They cannot even govern themselves. What then?

POTHINUS. What then? Are you so besotted with her beauty that you do not see that she is impatient to reign in Egypt alone, and that her heart is set on your departure?

CLEOPATRA (rising). Liar!

CAESAR (shocked). What! Protestations! Contradictions!

CLEOPATRA (ashamed, but trembling with suppressed rage). No. I do not deign to contradict. Let him talk. (She sits down again.)

POTHINUS. From her own lips I have heard it. You are to be her catspaw: you are to tear the crown from her brother’s head and set it on her own, delivering us all into her hand — delivering yourself also. And then Caesar can return to Rome, or depart through the gate of death, which is nearer and surer.

CAESAR (calmly). Well, my friend; and is not this very natural?

POTHINUS (astonished). Natural! Then you do not resent treachery?

CAESAR. Resent! O thou foolish Egyptian, what have I to do with resentment? Do I resent the wind when it chills me, or the night when it makes me stumble in the darkness? Shall I resent youth when it turns from age, and ambition when it turns from servitude? To tell me such a story as this is but to tell me that the sun will rise to-morrow.

CLEOPATRA (unable to contain herself). But it is false — false. I swear it.

CAESAR. It is true, though you swore it a thousand times, and believed all you swore. (She is convulsed with emotion. To screen her, he rises and takes Pothinus to Rufio, saying) Come, Rufio: let us see Pothinus past the guard. I have a word to say to him. (Aside to them) We must give the Queen a moment to recover herself. (Aloud) Come. (He takes Pothinus and Rufio out with him, conversing with them meanwhile.) Tell your friends, Pothinus, that they must not think I am opposed to a reasonable settlement of the country’s affairs — (They pass out of hearing.)

CLEOPATRA (in a stifled whisper). Ftatateeta, Ftatateeta.

FTATATEETA (hurrying to her from the table and petting her). Peace, child: be comforted —

CLEOPATRA (interrupting her). Can they hear us?

FTATATEETA. No, dear heart, no.

CLEOPATRA. Listen to me. If he leaves the Palace alive, never see my face again.

FTATATEETA. He? Poth —

CLEOPATRA (striking her on the mouth). Strike his life out as I strike his name from your lips. Dash him down from the wall. Break him on the stones. Kill, kill, KILL him.

FTATATEETA (showing all her teeth). The dog shall perish.

CLEOPATRA. Fail in this, and you go out from before me forever.

FTATATEETA (resolutely). So be it. You shall not see my face until his eyes are darkened.

Caesar comes back, with Apollodorus, exquisitely dressed, and Rufio.

CLEOPATRA (to Ftatateeta). Come soon — soon. (Ftatateeta turns her meaning eyes for a moment on her mistress; then goes grimly away past Ra and out. Cleopatra runs like a gazelle to Caesar.) So you have come back to me, Caesar. (Caressingly) I thought you were angry. Welcome, Apollodorus. (She gives him her hand to kiss, with her other arm about Caesar.)

APOLLODORUS. Cleopatra grows more womanly beautiful from week to week.

CLEOPATRA. Truth, Apollodorus?

APOLLODORUS. Far, far short of the truth! Friend Rufio threw a pearl into the sea: Caesar fished up a diamond.

CAESAR. Caesar fished up a touch of rheumatism, my friend. Come: to dinner! To dinner! (They move towards the table.)

CLEOPATRA (skipping like a young fawn). Yes, to dinner. I have ordered SUCH a dinner for you, Caesar!

CAESAR. Ay? What are we to have?

CLEOPATRA. Peacocks’ brains.

CAESAR (as if his mouth watered). Peacocks’ brains, Apollodorus!

APOLLODORUS. Not for me. I prefer nightingales’ tongues. (He goes to one of the two covers set side by side.)

CLEOPATRA. Roast boar, Rufio!

RUFIO (gluttonously). Good! (He goes to the seat next Apollodorus, on his left.)

CAESAR (looking at his seat, which is at the end of the table, to Ra’s left hand). What has become of my leathern cushion?

CLEOPATRA (at the opposite end). I have got new ones for you.

THE MAJOR-DOMO. These cushions, Caesar, are of Maltese gauze, stuffed with rose leaves.

CAESAR. Rose leaves! Am I a caterpillar? (He throws the cushions away and seats himself on the leather mattress underneath.)

CLEOPATRA. What a shame! My new cushions!

THE MAJOR-DOMO (at Caesar’s elbow). What shall we serve to whet Caesar’s appetite?

CAESAR. What have you got?

THE MAJOR-DOMO. Sea hedgehogs, black and white sea acorns, sea nettles, beccaficoes, purple shellfish —

CAESAR. Any oysters?

THE MAJOR-DOMO. Assuredly.

CAESAR. BRITISH oysters?

THE MAJOR-DOMO (assenting). British oysters, Caesar.

CAESAR. Oysters, then. (The Major-Domo signs to a slave at each order; and the slave goes out to execute it.) I have been in Britain — that western land of romance — the last piece of earth on the edge of the ocean that surrounds the world. I went there in search of its famous pearls. The British pearl was a fable; but in searching for it I found the British oyster.

APOLLODORUS. All posterity will bless you for it. (To the Major-Domo) Sea hedgehogs for me.

RUFIO. Is there nothing solid to begin with?

THE MAJOR-DOMO. Fieldfares with asparagus —

CLEOPATRA (interrupting). Fattened fowls! Have some fattened fowls, Rufio.

RUFIO. Ay, that will do.

CLEOPATRA (greedily). Fieldfares for me.

THE MAJOR-DOMO. Caesar will deign to choose his wine? Sicilian, Lesbian, Chian —

RUFIO (contemptuously). All Greek.

APOLLODORUS. Who would drink Roman wine when he could get Greek? Try the Lesbian, Caesar.

CAESAR. Bring me my barley water.

RUFIO (with intense disgust). Ugh! Bring ME my Falernian. (The Falernian is presently brought to him.)

CLEOPATRA (pouting). It is waste of time giving you dinners, Caesar. My scullions would not condescend to your diet.

CAESAR (relenting). Well, well: let us try the Lesbian. (The Major-Domo fills Caesar’s goblet; then Cleopatra’s and Apollodorus’s.) But when I return to Rome, I will make laws against these extravagances. I will even get the laws carried out.

CLEOPATRA (coaxingly). Never mind. To-day you are to be like other people: idle, luxurious, and kind. (She stretches her hand to him along the table.)

CAESAR. Well, for once I will sacrifice my comfort (kissing her hand) there! (He takes a draught of wine.) Now are you satisfied?

CLEOPATRA. And you no longer believe that I long for your departure for Rome?

CAESAR. I no longer believe anything. My brains are asleep. Besides, who knows whether I shall return to Rome?

RUFIO (alarmed). How? Eh? What?

CAESAR. What has Rome to show me that I have not seen already? One year of Rome is like another, except that I grow older, whilst the crowd in the Appian Way is always the same age.

APOLLODORUS. It is no better here in Egypt. The old men, when they are tired of life, say “We have seen everything except the source of the Nile.”

CAESAR (his imagination catching fire). And why not see that? Cleopatra: will you come with me and track the flood to its cradle in the heart of the regions of mystery? Shall we leave Rome behind us — Rome, that has achieved greatness only to learn how greatness destroys nations of men who are not great! Shall I make you a new kingdom, and build you a holy city there in the great unknown?

CLEOPATRA (rapturously). Yes, Yes. You shall.

RUFIO. Ay: now he will conquer Africa with two legions before we come to the roast boar.

APOLLODORUS. Come: no scoffing, this is a noble scheme: in it Caesar is no longer merely the conquering soldier, but the creative poet-artist. Let us name the holy city, and consecrate it with Lesbian Wine — and Cleopatra shall name it herself.

CLEOPATRA. It shall be called Caesar’s Gift to his Beloved.

APOLLODORUS. No, no. Something vaster than that — something universal, like the starry firmament.

CAESAR (prosaically). Why not simply The Cradle of the Nile?

CLEOPATRA. No: the Nile is my ancestor; and he is a god. Oh! I have thought of something. The Nile shall name it himself. Let us call upon him. (To the Major-Domo) Send for him. (The three men stare at one another; but the Major-Domo goes out as if he had received the most matter-of-fact order.) And (to the retinue) away with you all.

The retinue withdraws, making obeisance.

A priest enters, carrying a miniature sphinx with a tiny tripod before it. A morsel of incense is smoking in the tripod. The priest comes to the table and places the image in the middle of it. The light begins to change to the magenta purple of the Egyptian sunset, as if the god had brought a strange colored shadow with him. The three men are determined not to be impressed; but they feel curious in spite of themselves.

CAESAR. What hocus-pocus is this?

CLEOPATRA. You shall see. And it is NOT hocus-pocus. To do it properly, we should kill something to please him; but perhaps he will answer Caesar without that if we spill some wine to him.

APOLLODORUS (turning his head to look up over his shoulder at Ra). Why not appeal to our hawkheaded friend here?

CLEOPATRA (nervously). Sh! He will hear you and be angry.

RUFIO (phlegmatically). The source of the Nile is out of his district, I expect.

CLEOPATRA. No: I will have my city named by nobody but my dear little sphinx, because it was in its arms that Caesar found me asleep. (She languishes at Caesar; then turns curtly to the priest.) Go, I am a priestess, and have power to take your charge from you. (The priest makes a reverence and goes out.) Now let us call on the Nile all together. Perhaps he will rap on the table.

CAESAR. What! Table rapping! Are such superstitions still believed in this year 707 of the Republic?

CLEOPATRA. It is no superstition: our priests learn lots of things from the tables. Is it not so, Apollodorus?

APOLLODORUS. Yes: I profess myself a converted man. When Cleopatra is priestess, Apollodorus is devotee. Propose the conjuration.

CLEOPATRA. You must say with me “Send us thy voice, Father Nile.”

ALL FOUR (holding their glasses together before the idol). Send us thy voice, Father Nile.

The death cry of a man in mortal terror and agony answers them. Appalled, the men set down their glasses, and listen. Silence. The purple deepens in the sky. Caesar, glancing at Cleopatra, catches her pouring out her wine before the god, with gleaming eyes, and mute assurances of gratitude and worship. Apollodorus springs up and runs to the edge of the roof to peer down and listen.

CAESAR (looking piercingly at Cleopatra). What was that?

CLEOPATRA (petulantly). Nothing. They are beating some slave.

CAESAR. Nothing!

RUFIO. A man with a knife in him, I’ll swear.

CAESAR (rising). A murder!

APOLLODORUS (at the back, waving his hand for silence). S-sh! Silence. Did you hear that?

CAESAR. Another cry?

APOLLODORUS (returning to the table). No, a thud. Something fell on the beach, I think.

RUFIO (grimly, as he rises). Something with bones in it, eh?

CAESAR (shuddering). Hush, hush, Rufio. (He leaves the table and returns to the colonnade: Rufio following at his left elbow, and Apollodorus at the other side.)

CLEOPATRA (still in her place at the table). Will you leave me, Caesar? Apollodorus: are you going?

APOLLODORUS. Faith, dearest Queen, my appetite is gone.

CAESAR. Go down to the courtyard, Apollodorus; and find out what has happened.

Apollodorus nods and goes out, making for the staircase by which Rufio ascended.

CLEOPATRA. Your soldiers have killed somebody, perhaps. What does it matter?

The murmur of a crowd rises from the beach below. Caesar and Rufio look at one another.

CAESAR. This must be seen to. (He is about to follow Apollodorus when Rufio stops him with a hand on his arm as Ftatateeta comes back by the far end of the roof, with dragging steps, a drowsy satiety in her eyes and in the corners of the bloodhound lips. For a moment Caesar suspects that she is drunk with wine. Not so Rufio: he knows well the red vintage that has inebriated her.)

RUFIO (in a low tone). There is some mischief between those two.

FTATATEETA. The Queen looks again on the face of her servant.

Cleopatra looks at her for a moment with an exultant reflection of her murderous expression. Then she flings her arms round her; kisses her repeatedly and savagely; and tears off her jewels and heaps them on her. The two men turn from the spectacle to look at one another. Ftatateeta drags herself sleepily to the altar; kneels before Ra; and remains there in prayer. Caesar goes to Cleopatra, leaving Rufio in the colonnade.

CAESAR (with searching earnestness). Cleopatra: what has happened?

CLEOPATRA (in mortal dread of him, but with her utmost cajolery). Nothing, dearest Caesar. (With sickly sweetness, her voice almost failing) Nothing. I am innocent. (She approaches him affectionately) Dear Caesar: are you angry with me? Why do you look at me so? I have been here with you all the time. How can I know what has happened?

CAESAR (reflectively). That is true.

CLEOPATRA (greatly relieved, trying to caress him). Of course it is true. (He does not respond to the caress.) You know it is true, Rufio.

The murmur without suddenly swells to a roar and subsides.

RUFIO. I shall know presently. (He makes for the altar in the burly trot that serves him for a stride, and touches Ftatateeta on the shoulder.) Now, mistress: I shall want you. (He orders her, with a gesture, to go before him.)

FTATATEETA (rising and glowering at him). My place is with the Queen.

CLEOPATRA. She has done no harm, Rufio.

CAESAR (to Rufio). Let her stay.

RUFIO (sitting down on the altar). Very well. Then my place is here too; and you can see what is the matter for yourself. The city is in a pretty uproar, it seems.

CAESAR (with grave displeasure). Rufio: there is a time for obedience.

RUFIO. And there is a time for obstinacy. (He folds his arms doggedly.)

CAESAR (to Cleopatra). Send her away.

CLEOPATRA (whining in her eagerness to propitiate him). Yes, I will. I will do whatever you ask me, Caesar, always, because I love you. Ftatateeta: go away.

FTATATEETA. The Queen’s word is my will. I shall be at hand for the Queen’s call. (She goes out past Ra, as she came.)

RUFIO (following her). Remember, Caesar, YOUR bodyguard also is within call. (He follows her out.)

Cleopatra, presuming upon Caesar’s submission to Rufio, leaves the table and sits down on the bench in the colonnade.

CLEOPATRA. Why do you allow Rufio to treat you so? You should teach him his place.

CAESAR. Teach him to be my enemy, and to hide his thoughts from me as you are now hiding yours.

CLEOPATRA (her fears returning). Why do you say that, Caesar? Indeed, indeed, I am not hiding anything. You are wrong to treat me like this. (She stifles a sob.) I am only a child; and you turn into stone because you think some one has been killed. I cannot bear it. (She purposely breaks down and weeps. He looks at her with profound sadness and complete coldness. She looks up to see what effect she is producing. Seeing that he is unmoved, she sits up, pretending to struggle with her emotion and to put it bravely away.) But there: I know you hate tears: you shall not be troubled with them. I know you are not angry, but only sad; only I am so silly, I cannot help being hurt when you speak coldly. Of course you are quite right: it is dreadful to think of anyone being killed or even hurt; and I hope nothing really serious has — (Her voice dies away under his contemptuous penetration.)

CAESAR. What has frightened you into this? What have you done? (A trumpet sounds on the beach below.) Aha! That sounds like the answer.

CLEOPATRA (sinking back trembling on the bench and covering her face with her hands). I have not betrayed you, Caesar: I swear it.

CAESAR. I know that. I have not trusted you. (He turns from her, and is about to go out when Apollodorus and Britannus drag in Lucius Septimius to him. Rufio follows. Caesar shudders.) Again, Pompey’s murderer!

RUFIO. The town has gone mad, I think. They are for tearing the palace down and driving us into the sea straight away. We laid hold of this renegade in clearing them out of the courtyard.

CAESAR. Release him. (They let go his arms.) What has offended the citizens, Lucius Septimius?

LUCIUS. What did you expect, Caesar? Pothinus was a favorite of theirs.

CAESAR. What has happened to Pothinus? I set him free, here, not half an hour ago. Did they not pass him out?

LUCIUS. Ay, through the gallery arch sixty feet above ground, with three inches of steel in his ribs. He is as dead as Pompey. We are quits now, as to killing — you and I.

CAESAR. (shocked). Assassinated! — our prisoner, our guest! (He turns reproachfully on Rufio) Rufio —

RUFIO (emphatically — anticipating the question). Whoever did it was a wise man and a friend of yours (Cleopatra is qreatly emboldened); but none of US had a hand in it. So it is no use to frown at me. (Caesar turns and looks at Cleopatra.)

CLEOPATRA (violently — rising). He was slain by order of the Queen of Egypt. I am not Julius Caesar the dreamer, who allows every slave to insult him. Rufio has said I did well: now the others shall judge me too. (She turns to the others.) This Pothinus sought to make me conspire with him to betray Caesar to Achillas and Ptolemy. I refused; and he cursed me and came privily to Caesar to accuse me of his own treachery. I caught him in the act; and he insulted me — ME, the Queen! To my face. Caesar would not revenge me: he spoke him fair and set him free. Was I right to avenge myself? Speak, Lucius.

LUCIUS. I do not gainsay it. But you will get little thanks from Caesar for it.

CLEOPATRA. Speak, Apollodorus. Was I wrong?

APOLLODORUS. I have only one word of blame, most beautiful. You should have called upon me, your knight; and in fair duel I should have slain the slanderer.

CLEOPATRA (passionately). I will be judged by your very slave, Caesar. Britannus: speak. Was I wrong?

BRITANNUS. Were treachery, falsehood, and disloyalty left unpunished, society must become like an arena full of wild beasts, tearing one another to pieces. Caesar is in the wrong.

CAESAR (with quiet bitterness). And so the verdict is against me, it seems.

CLEOPATRA (vehemently). Listen to me, Caesar. If one man in all Alexandria can be found to say that I did wrong, I swear to have myself crucified on the door of the palace by my own slaves.

CAESAR. If one man in all the world can be found, now or forever, to know that you did wrong, that man will have either to conquer the world as I have, or be crucified by it. (The uproar in the streets again reaches them.) Do you hear? These knockers at your gate are also believers in vengeance and in stabbing. You have slain their leader: it is right that they shall slay you. If you doubt it, ask your four counselors here. And then in the name of that RIGHT (He emphasizes the word with great scorn.) shall I not slay them for murdering their Queen, and be slain in my turn by their countrymen as the invader of their fatherland? Can Rome do less then than slay these slayers too, to show the world how Rome avenges her sons and her honor? And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand. (Fierce uproar. Cleopatra becomes white with terror.) Hearken, you who must not be insulted. Go near enough to catch their words: you will find them bitterer than the tongue of Pothinus. (Loftily wrapping himself up in an impenetrable dignity.) Let the Queen of Egypt now give her orders for vengeance, and take her measures for defense; for she has renounced Caesar. (He turns to go.)

CLEOPATRA (terrified, running to him and falling on her knees). You will not desert me, Caesar. You will defend the palace.

CAESAR. You have taken the powers of life and death upon you. I am only a dreamer.

CLEOPATRA. But they will kill me.

CAESAR. And why not?

CLEOPATRA. In pity —

CAESAR. Pity! What! Has it come to this so suddenly, that nothing can save you now but pity? Did it save Pothinus?

She rises, wringing her hands, and goes back to the bench in despair. Apollodorus shows his sympathy with her by quietly posting himself behind the bench. The sky has by this time become the most vivid purple, and soon begins to change to a glowing pale orange, against which the colonnade and the great image show darklier and darklier.

RUFIO. Caesar: enough of preaching. The enemy is at the gate.

CAESAR (turning on him and giving way to his wrath). Ay; and what has held him baffled at the gate all these months? Was it my folly, as you deem it, or your wisdom? In this Egyptian Red Sea of blood, whose hand has held all your heads above the waves? (Turning on Cleopatra) And yet, When Caesar says to such an one, “Friend, go free,” you, clinging for your little life to my sword, dare steal out and stab him in the back? And you, soldiers and gentlemen, and honest servants as you forget that you are, applaud this assassination, and say “Caesar is in the wrong.” By the gods, I am tempted to open my hand and let you all sink into the flood.

CLEOPATRA (with a ray of cunning hope). But, Caesar, if you do, you will perish yourself.

Caesar’s eyes blaze.

RUFIO (greatly alarmed). Now, by great Jove, you filthy little Egyptian rat, that is the very word to make him walk out alone into the city and leave us here to be cut to pieces. (Desperately, to Caesar) Will you desert us because we are a parcel of fools? I mean no harm by killing: I do it as a dog kills a cat, by instinct. We are all dogs at your heels; but we have served you faithfully.

CAESAR (relenting). Alas, Rufio, my son, my son: as dogs we are like to perish now in the streets.

APOLLODORUS (at his post behind Cleopatra’s seat). Caesar, what you say has an Olympian ring in it: it must be right; for it is fine art. But I am still on the side of Cleopatra. If we must die, she shall not want the devotion of a man’s heart nor the strength of a man’s arm.

CLEOPATRA (sobbing). But I don’t want to die.

CAESAR (sadly). Oh, ignoble, ignoble!

LUCIUS (coming forward between Caesar and Cleopatra). Hearken to me, Caesar. It may be ignoble; but I also mean to live as long as I can.

CAESAR. Well, my friend, you are likely to outlive Caesar. Is it any magic of mine, think you, that has kept your army and this whole city at bay for so long? Yesterday, what quarrel had they with me that they should risk their lives against me? But to-day we have flung them down their hero, murdered; and now every man of them is set upon clearing out this nest of assassins — for such we are and no more. Take courage then; and sharpen your sword. Pompey’s head has fallen; and Caesar’s head is ripe.

APOLLODORUS. Does Caesar despair?

CAESAR (with infinite pride). He who has never hoped can never despair. Caesar, in good or bad fortune, looks his fate in the face.

LUCIUS. Look it in the face, then; and it will smile as it always has on Caesar.

CAESAR (with involuntary haughtiness). Do you presume to encourage me?

LUCIUS. I offer you my services. I will change sides if you will have me.

CAESAR (suddenly coming down to earth again, and looking sharply at him, divining that there is something behind the offer). What! At this point?

LUCIUS (firmly). At this point.

RUFIO. Do you suppose Caesar is mad, to trust you?

LUCIUS. I do not ask him to trust me until he is victorious. I ask for my life, and for a command in Caesar’s army. And since Caesar is a fair dealer, I will pay in advance.

CAESAR. Pay! How?

LUCIUS. With a piece of good news for you.

Caesar divines the news in a flash.

RUFIO. What news?

CAESAR (with an elate and buoyant energy which makes Cleopatra sit up and stare). What news! What news, did you say, my son Rufio? The relief has arrived: what other news remains for us? Is it not so, Lucius Septimius? Mithridates of Pergamos is on the march.

LUCIUS. He has taken Pelusium.

CAESAR (delighted). Lucius Septimius: you are henceforth my officer. Rufio: the Egyptians must have sent every soldier from the city to prevent Mithridates crossing the Nile. There is nothing in the streets now but mob — mob!

LUCIUS. It is so. Mithridates is marching by the great road to Memphis to cross above the Delta. Achillas will fight him there.

CAESAR (all audacity). Achillas shall fight Caesar there. See, Rufio. (He runs to the table; snatches a napkin; and draws a plan on it with his finger dipped in wine, whilst Rufio and Lucius Septimius crowd about him to watch, all looking closely, for the light is now almost gone.) Here is the palace (pointing to his plan): here is the theatre. You (to Rufio) take twenty men and pretend to go by THAT street (pointing it out); and whilst they are stoning you, out go the cohorts by this and this. My streets are right, are they, Lucius?

LUCIUS. Ay, that is the fig market —

CAESAR (too much excited to listen to him). I saw them the day we arrived. Good! (He throws the napkin on the table and comes down again into the colonnade.) Away, Britannus: tell Petronius that within an hour half our forces must take ship for the western lake. See to my horse and armor. (Britannus runs out.) With the rest I shall march round the lake and up the Nile to meet Mithridates. Away, Lucius; and give the word.

Lucius hurries out after Britannus.

RUFIO. Come: this is something like business.

CAESAR (buoyantly). Is it not, my only son? (He claps his hands. The slaves hurry in to the table.) No more of this mawkish reveling: away with all this stuff: shut it out of my sight and be off with you. (The slaves begin to remove the table; and the curtains are drawn, shutting in the colonnade.) You understand about the streets, Rufio?

RUFIO. Ay, I think I do. I will get through them, at all events.

The bucina sounds busily in the courtyard beneath.

CAESAR. Come, then: we must talk to the troops and hearten them. You down to the beach: I to the courtyard. (He makes for the staircase.)

CLEOPATRA (rising from her seat, where she has been quite neglected all this time, and stretching out her hands timidly to him). Caesar.

CAESAR (turning). Eh?

CLEOPATRA. Have you forgotten me?

CAESAR. (indulgently). I am busy now, my child, busy. When I return your affairs shall be settled. Farewell; and be good and patient.

He goes, preoccupied and quite indifferent. She stands with clenched fists, in speechless rage and humiliation.

RUFIO. That game is played and lost, Cleopatra. The woman always gets the worst of it.

CLEOPATRA (haughtily). Go. Follow your master.

RUFIO (in her ear, with rough familiarity). A word first. Tell your executioner that if Pothinus had been properly killed — IN THE THROAT — he would not have called out. Your man bungled his work.

CLEOPATRA (enigmatically). How do you know it was a man?

RUFIO (startled, and puzzled). It was not you: you were with us when it happened. (She turns her back scornfully on him. He shakes his head, and draws the curtains to go out. It is now a magnificent moonlit night. The table has been removed. Ftatateeta is seen in the light of the moon and stars, again in prayer before the white altar-stone of Ra. Rufio starts; closes the curtains again softly; and says in a low voice to Cleopatra) Was it she? With her own hand?

CLEOPATRA (threateningly). Whoever it was, let my enemies beware of her. Look to it, Rufio, you who dare make the Queen of Egypt a fool before Caesar.

RUFIO (looking grimly at her). I will look to it, Cleopatra. (He nods in confirmation of the promise, and slips out through the curtains, loosening his sword in its sheath as he goes.)

ROMAN SOLDIERS (in the courtyard below). Hail, Caesar! Hail, hail!

Cleopatra listens. The bucina sounds again, followed by several trumpets.

CLEOPATRA (wringing her hands and calling). Ftatateeta. Ftatateeta. It is dark; and I am alone. Come to me. (Silence.) Ftatateeta. (Louder.) Ftatateeta. (Silence. In a panic she snatches the cord and pulls the curtains apart.)

Ftatateeta is lying dead on the altar of Ra, with her throat cut. Her blood deluges the white stone.

ACT V

High noon. Festival and military pageant on the esplanade before the palace. In the east harbor Caesar’s galley, so gorgeously decorated that it seems to be rigged with flowers, is along-side the quay, close to the steps Apollodorus descended when he embarked with the carpet. A Roman guard is posted there in charge of a gangway, whence a red floorcloth is laid down the middle of the esplanade, turning off to the north opposite the central gate in the palace front, which shuts in the esplanade on the south side. The broad steps of the gate, crowded with Cleopatra’s ladies, all in their gayest attire, are like a flower garden. The facade is lined by her guard, officered by the same gallants to whom Bel Affris announced the coming of Caesar six months before in the old palace on the Syrian border. The north side is lined by Roman soldiers, with the townsfolk on tiptoe behind them, peering over their heads at the cleared esplanade, in which the officers stroll about, chatting. Among these are Belzanor and the Persian; also the Centurion, vinewood cudgel in hand, battle worn, thick-booted, and much outshone, both socially and decoratively, by the Egyptian officers.

Apollodorus makes his way through the townsfolk and calls to the officers from behind the Roman line.

APOLLODORUS. Hullo! May I pass?

CENTURION. Pass Apollodorus the Sicilian there! (The soldiers let him through.)

BELZANOR. Is Caesar at hand?

APOLLODORUS. Not yet. He is still in the market place. I could not stand any more of the roaring of the soldiers! After half an hour of the enthusiasm of an army, one feels the need of a little sea air.

PERSIAN. Tell us the news. Hath he slain the priests?

APOLLODORUS. Not he. They met him in the market place with ashes on their heads and their gods in their hands. They placed the gods at his feet. The only one that was worth looking at was Apis: a miracle of gold and ivory work. By my advice he offered the chief priest two talents for it.

BELZANOR (appalled). Apis the all-knowing for two talents! What said the chief priest?

APOLLODORUS. He invoked the mercy of Apis, and asked for five.

BELZANOR. There will be famine and tempest in the land for this.

PERSIAN. Pooh! Why did not Apis cause Caesar to be vanquished by Achillas? Any fresh news from the war, Apollodorus?

APOLLODORUS. The little King Ptolemy was drowned.

BELZANOR. Drowned! How?

APOLLODORUS. With the rest of them. Caesar attacked them from three sides at once and swept them into the Nile. Ptolemy’s barge sank.

BELZANOR. A marvelous man, this Caesar! Will he come soon, think you?

APOLLODORUS. He was settling the Jewish question when I left.

A flourish of trumpets from the north, and commotion among the townsfolk, announces the approach of Caesar.

PERSIAN. He has made short work of them. Here he comes. (He hurries to his post in front of the Egyptian lines.)

BELZANOR (following him). Ho there! Caesar comes.

The soldiers stand at attention, and dress their lines. Apollodorus goes to the Egyptian line.

CENTURION (hurrying to the gangway guard). Attention there! Caesar comes.

Caesar arrives in state with Rufio: Britannus following. The soldiers receive him with enthusiastic shouting.

RUFIO (at his left hand). You have not yet appointed a Roman governor for this province.

CAESAR (Looking whimsically at him, but speaking with perfect gravity). What say you to Mithridates of Pergamos, my reliever and rescuer, the great son of Eupator?

RUFIO. Why, that you will want him elsewhere. Do you forget that you have some three or four armies to conquer on your way home?

CAESAR. Indeed! Well, what say you to yourself?

RUFIO (incredulously). I! I a governor! What are you dreaming of? Do you not know that I am only the son of a freedman?

CAESAR (affectionately). Has not Caesar called you his son? (Calling to the whole assembly) Peace awhile there; and hear me.

THE ROMAN SOLDIERS. Hear Caesar.

CAESAR. Hear the service, quality, rank and name of the Roman governor. By service, Caesar’s shield; by quality, Caesar’s friend; by rank, a Roman soldier. (The Roman soldiers give a triumphant shout.) By name, Rufio. (They shout again.)

RUFIO (kissing Caesar’s hand). Ay: I am Caesar’s shield; but of what use shall I be when I am no longer on Caesar’s arm? Well, no matter — (He becomes husky, and turns away to recover himself.)

CAESAR. Where is that British Islander of mine?

BRITANNUS (coming forward on Caesar’s right hand). Here, Caesar.

CAESAR. Who bade you, pray, thrust yourself into the battle of the Delta, uttering the barbarous cries of your native land, and affirming yourself a match for any four of the Egyptians, to whom you applied unseemly epithets?

BRITANNUS. Caesar: I ask you to excuse the language that escaped me in the heat of the moment.

CAESAR. And how did you, who cannot swim, cross the canal with us when we stormed the camp?

BRITANNUS. Caesar: I clung to the tail of your horse.

CAESAR. These are not the deeds of a slave, Britannicus, but of a free man.

BRITANNUS. Caesar: I was born free.

CAESAR. But they call you Caesar’s slave.

BRITANNUS. Only as Caesar’s slave have I found real freedom.

CAESAR (moved). Well said. Ungrateful that I am, I was about to set you free; but now I will not part from you for a million talents. (He claps him friendly on the shoulder. Britannus, gratified, but a trifle shamefaced, takes his hand and kisses it sheepishly.)

BELZANOR (to the Persian). This Roman knows how to make men serve him.

PERSIAN. Ay: men too humble to become dangerous rivals to him.

BELZANOR. O subtle one! O cynic!

CAESAR (seeing Apollodorus in the Egyptian corner and calling to him). Apollodorus: I leave the art of Egypt in your charge. Remember: Rome loves art and will encourage it ungrudgingly.

APOLLODORUS. I understand, Caesar. Rome will produce no art itself; but it will buy up and take away whatever the other nations produce.

CAESAR. What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art? All these we give you in exchange for a few ornaments. You will have the best of the bargain. (Turning to Rufio) And now, what else have I to do before I embark? (Trying to recollect) There is something I cannot remember: what CAN it be? Well, well: it must remain undone: we must not waste this favorable wind. Farewell, Rufio.

RUFIO. Caesar: I am loath to let you go to Rome without your shield. There are too many daggers there.

CAESAR. It matters not: I shall finish my life’s work on my way back; and then I shall have lived long enough. Besides: I have always disliked the idea of dying: I had rather be killed. Farewell.

RUFIO (with a sigh, raising his hands and giving Caesar up as incorrigible). Farewell. (They shake hands.)

CAESAR (waving his hand to Apollodorus). Farewell, Apollodorus, and my friends, all of you. Aboard!

The gangway is run out from the quay to the ship. As Caesar moves towards it, Cleopatra, cold and tragic, cunningly dressed in black, without ornaments or decoration of any kind, and thus making a striking figure among the brilliantly dressed bevy of ladies as she passes through it, comes from the palace and stands on the steps. Caesar does not see her until she speaks.

CLEOPATRA. Has Cleopatra no part in this leave taking?

CAESAR (enlightened). Ah, I KNEW there was something. (To Rufio) How could you let me forget her, Rufio? (Hastening to her) Had I gone without seeing you, I should never have forgiven myself. (He takes her hands, and brings her into the middle of the esplanade. She submits stonily.) Is this mourning for me?

CLEOPATRA. NO.

CAESAR (remorsefully). Ah, that was thoughtless of me! It is for your brother.

CLEOPATRA. No.

CAESAR. For whom, then?

CLEOPATRA. Ask the Roman governor whom you have left us.

CAESAR. Rufio?

CLEOPATRA. Yes: Rufio. (She points at him with deadly scorn.) He who is to rule here in Caesar’s name, in Caesar’s way, according to Caesar’s boasted laws of life.

CAESAR (dubiously). He is to rule as he can, Cleopatra. He has taken the work upon him, and will do it in his own way.

CLEOPATRA. Not in your way, then?

CAESAR (puzzled). What do you mean by my way?

CLEOPATRA. Without punishment. Without revenge. Without judgment.

CAESAR (approvingly). Ay: that is the right way, the great way, the only possible way in the end. (To Rufio) Believe it, Rufio, if you can.

RUFIO. Why, I believe it, Caesar. You have convinced me of it long ago. But look you. You are sailing for Numidia to-day. Now tell me: if you meet a hungry lion you will not punish it for wanting to eat you?

CAESAR (wondering what he is driving at). No.

RUFIO. Nor revenge upon it the blood of those it has already eaten.

CAESAR. No.

RUFIO. Nor judge it for its guiltiness.

CAESAR. No.

RUFIO. What, then, will you do to save your life from it?

CAESAR (promptly). Kill it, man, without malice, just as it would kill me. What does this parable of the lion mean?

RUFIO. Why, Cleopatra had a tigress that killed men at bidding. I thought she might bid it kill you some day. Well, had I not been Caesar’s pupil, what pious things might I not have done to that tigress? I might have punished it. I might have revenged Pothinus on it.

CAESAR (interjects). Pothinus!

RUFIO (continuing). I might have judged it. But I put all these follies behind me; and, without malice, only cut its throat. And that is why Cleopatra comes to you in mourning.

CLEOPATRA (vehemently). He has shed the blood of my servant Ftatateeta. On your head be it as upon his, Caesar, if you hold him free of it.

CAESAR (energetically). On my head be it, then; for it was well done. Rufio: had you set yourself in the seat of the judge, and with hateful ceremonies and appeals to the gods handed that woman over to some hired executioner to be slain before the people in the name of justice, never again would I have touched your hand without a shudder. But this was natural slaying: I feel no horror at it.

Rufio, satisfied, nods at Cleopatra, mutely inviting her to mark that.

CLEOPATRA (pettish and childish in her impotence). No: not when a Roman slays an Egyptian. All the world will now see how unjust and corrupt Caesar is.

CAESAR (taking her handy coaxingly). Come: do not be angry with me. I am sorry for that poor Totateeta. (She laughs in spite of herself.) Aha! You are laughing. Does that mean reconciliation?

CLEOPATRA (angry with herself for laughing). No, no, NO!! But it is so ridiculous to hear you call her Totateeta.

CAESAR. What! As much a child as ever, Cleopatra! Have I not made a woman of you after all?

CLEOPATRA. Oh, it is you, who are a great baby: you make me seem silly because you will not behave seriously. But you have treated me badly; and I do not forgive you.

CAESAR. Bid me farewell.

CLEOPATRA. I will not.

CAESAR (coaxing). I will send you a beautiful present from Rome.

CLEOPATRA (proudly). Beauty from Rome to Egypt indeed! What can Rome give ME that Egypt cannot give me?

APOLLODORUS. That is true, Caesar. If the present is to be really beautiful, I shall have to buy it for you in Alexandria.

CAESAR. You are forgetting the treasures for which Rome is most famous, my friend. You cannot buy THEM in Alexandria.

APOLLODORUS. What are they, Caesar?

CAESAR. Her sons. Come, Cleopatra: forgive me and bid me farewell; and I will send you a man, Roman from head to heel and Roman of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders; but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting in the day, and reveling in the evening. Will you take such an one in exchange for Caesar?

CLEOPATRA (palpitating). His name, his name?

CAESAR. Shall it be Mark Antony? (She throws herself in his arms.)

RUFIO. You are a bad hand at a bargain, mistress, if you will swap Caesar for Antony.

CAESAR. So now you are satisfied.

CLEOPATRA. You will not forget.

CAESAR. I will not forget. Farewell: I do not think we shall meet again. Farewell. (He kisses her on the forehead. She is much affected and begins to sniff. He embarks.)

THE ROMAN SOLDIERS (as he sets his foot on the gangway). Hail, Caesar; and farewell!

He reaches the ship and returns Rufio’s wave of the hand.

APOLLODORUS (to Cleopatra). No tears, dearest Queen: they stab your servant to the heart. He will return some day.

CLEOPATRA. I hope not. But I can’t help crying, all the same. (She waves her handkerchief to Caesar; and the ship begins to move.)

THE ROMAN SOLDIERS (drawing their swords and raising them in the air). Hail, Caesar!

NOTES TO CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

CLEOPATRA’S CURE FOR BALDNESS

For the sake of conciseness in a hurried situation I have made Cleopatra recommend rum. This, I am afraid, is an anachronism: the only real one in the play. To balance it, I give a couple of the remedies she actually believed in. They are quoted by Galen from Cleopatra’s book on Cosmetic.

“For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.”

Several other receipts follow, ending with: “The following is the best of all, acting for fallen hairs, when applied with oil or pomatum; acts also for falling off of eyelashes or for people getting bald all over. It is wonderful. Of domestic mice burnt, one part; of vine rag burnt, one part; of horse’s teeth burnt, one part; of bear’s grease one; of deer’s marrow one; of reed bark one. To be pounded when dry, and mixed with plenty of honey til it gets the consistency of honey; then the bear’s grease and marrow to be mixed (when melted), the medicine to be put in a brass flask, and the bald part rubbed til it sprouts.”

Concerning these ingredients, my fellow-dramatist, Gilbert Murray, who, as a Professor of Greek, has applied to classical antiquity the methods of high scholarship (my own method is pure divination), writes to me as follows: “Some of this I don’t understand, and possibly Galen did not, as he quotes your heroine’s own language. Foam of nitre is, I think, something like soapsuds. Reed bark is an odd expression. It might mean the outside membrane of a reed: I do not know what it ought to be called. In the burnt mice receipt I take that you first mixed the solid powders with honey, and then added the grease. I expect Cleopatra preferred it because in most of the others you have to lacerate the skin, prick it, or rub it till it bleeds. I do not know what vine rag is. I translate literally.”

APPARENT ANACHRONISMS

The only way to write a play which shall convey to the general public an impression of antiquity is to make the characters speak blank verse and abstain from reference to steam, telegraphy, or any of the material conditions of their existence. The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex which civilization and philosophy have painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery. Savagery, they think, became barbarism; barbarism became ancient civilization; ancient civilization became Pauline Christianity; Pauline Christianity became Roman Catholicism; Roman Catholicism became the Dark Ages; and the Dark Ages were finally enlightened by the Protestant instincts of the English race. The whole process is summed up as Progress with a capital P. And any elderly gentleman of Progressive temperament will testify that the improvement since he was a boy is enormous.

Now if we count the generations of Progressive elderly gentlemen since, say, Plato, and add together the successive enormous improvements to which each of them has testified, it will strike us at once as an unaccountable fact that the world, instead of having been improved in 67 generations out all recognition, presents, on the whole, a rather less dignified appearance in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People than in Plato’s Republic. And in truth, the period of time covered by history is far too short to allow of any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar’s time (less than 20 centuries) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past, exists at the present moment. A British carpenter or stonemason may point out that he gets twice as much money for his labor as his father did in the same trade, and that his suburban house, with its bath, its cottage piano, its drawingroom suite, and its album of photographs, would have shamed the plainness of his grandmother’s. But the descendants of feudal barons, living in squalid lodgings on a salary of fifteen shillings a week instead of in castles on princely revenues, do not congratulate the world on the change. Such changes, in fact, are not to the point. It has been known, as far back as our records go, that man running wild in the woods is different to man kennelled in a city slum; that a dog seems to understand a shepherd better than a hewer of wood and drawer of water can understand an astronomer; and that breeding, gentle nurture and luxurious food and shelter will produce a kind of man with whom the common laborer is socially incompatible. The same thing is true of horses and dogs. Now there is clearly room for great changes in the world by increasing the percentage of individuals who are carefully bred and gently nurtured even to finally making the most of every man and woman born. But that possibility existed in the days of the Hittites as much as it does to-day. It does not give the slightest real support to the common assumption that the civilized contemporaries of the Hittites were unlike their civilized descendants to-day.

This would appear the truest commonplace if it were not that the ordinary citizen’s ignorance of the past combines with his idealization of the present to mislead and flatter him. Our latest book on the new railway across Asia describes the dulness of the Siberian farmer and the vulgar pursepride of the Siberian man of business without the least consciousness that the sting of contemptuous instances given might have been saved by writing simply “Farmers and provincial plutocrats in Siberia are exactly what they are in England.” The latest professor descanting on the civilization of the Western Empire in the fifth century feels bound to assume, in the teeth of his own researches, that the Christian was one sort of animal and the Pagan another. It might as well be assumed, as indeed it generally is assumed by implication, that a murder committed with a poisoned arrow is different to a murder committed with a Mauser rifle. All such notions are illusions. Go back to the first syllable of recorded time, and there you will find your Christian and your Pagan, your yokel and your poet, helot and hero, Don Quixote and Sancho, Tamino and Papageno, Newton and bushman unable to count eleven, all alive and contemporaneous, and all convinced that they are heirs of all the ages and the privileged recipients of THE truth (all others damnable heresies), just as you have them to-day, flourishing in countries each of which is the bravest and best that ever sprang at Heaven’s command from out of the azure main.

Again, there is the illusion of “increased command over Nature,” meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man’s increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us. If manufacturing activity means Progress, the town must be more advanced than the country; and the field laborers and village artizans of to-day must be much less changed from the servants of Job than the proletariat of modern London from the proletariat of Caesar’s Rome. Yet the cockney proletarian is so inferior to the village laborer that it is only by steady recruiting from the country that London is kept alive. This does not seem as if the change since Job’s time were Progress in the popular sense: quite the reverse. The common stock of discoveries in physics has accumulated a little: that is all.

One more illustration. Is the Englishman prepared to admit that the American is his superior as a human being? I ask this question because the scarcity of labor in America relatively to the demand for it has led to a development of machinery there, and a consequent “increase of command over Nature” which makes many of our English methods appear almost medieval to the up-to-date Chicagoan. This means that the American has an advantage over the Englishman of exactly the same nature that the Englishman has over the contemporaries of Cicero. Is the Englishman prepared to draw the same conclusion in both cases? I think not. The American, of course, will draw it cheerfully; but I must then ask him whether, since a modern negro has a greater “command over Nature” than Washington had, we are also to accept the conclusion, involved in his former one, that humanity has progressed from Washington to the fin de siecle negro.

Finally, I would point out that if life is crowned by its success and devotion in industrial organization and ingenuity, we had better worship the ant and the bee (as moralists urge us to do in our childhood), and humble ourselves before the arrogance of the birds of Aristophanes.

My reason then for ignoring the popular conception of Progress in Caesar and Cleopatra is that there is no reason to suppose that any Progress has taken place since their time. But even if I shared the popular delusion, I do not see that I could have made any essential difference in the play. I can only imitate humanity as I know it. Nobody knows whether Shakespeare thought that ancient Athenian joiners, weavers, or bellows menders were any different from Elizabethan ones; but it is quite certain that one could not have made them so, unless, indeed, he had played the literary man and made Quince say, not “Is all our company here?” but “Bottom: was not that Socrates that passed us at the Piraeus with Glaucon and Polemarchus on his way to the house of Kephalus.” And so on.

CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra was only sixteen when Caesar went to Egypt; but in Egypt sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The childishness I have ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness of character and not lack of experience, is not a matter of years. It may be observed in our own climate at the present day in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to suppose that the difference between wisdom and folly has anything to do with the difference between physical age and physical youth. Some women are younger at seventy than most women at seventeen.

It must be borne in mind, too, that Cleopatra was a queen, and was therefore not the typical Greek-cultured, educated Egyptian lady of her time. To represent her by any such type would be as absurd as to represent George IV by a type founded on the attainments of Sir Isaac Newton. It is true that an ordinarily well educated Alexandrian girl of her time would no more have believed bogey stories about the Romans than the daughter of a modern Oxford professor would believe them about the Germans (though, by the way, it is possible to talk great nonsense at Oxford about foreigners when we are at war with them). But I do not feel bound to believe that Cleopatra was well educated. Her father, the illustrious Flute Blower, was not at all a parent of the Oxford professor type. And Cleopatra was a chip of the old block.

BRITANNUS

I find among those who have read this play in manuscript a strong conviction that an ancient Briton could not possibly have been like a modern one. I see no reason to adopt this curious view. It is true that the Roman and Norman conquests must have for a time disturbed the normal British type produced by the climate. But Britannus, born before these events, represents the unadulterated Briton who fought Caesar and impressed Roman observers much as we should expect the ancestors of Mr. Podsnap to impress the cultivated Italians of their time.

I am told that it is not scientific to treat national character as a product of climate. This only shows the wide difference between common knowledge and the intellectual game called science. We have men of exactly the same stock, and speaking the same language, growing in Great Britain, in Ireland, and in America. The result is three of the most distinctly marked nationalities under the sun. Racial characteristics are quite another matter. The difference between a Jew and a Gentile has nothing to do with the difference between an Englishman and a German. The characteristics of Britannus are local characteristics, not race characteristics. In an ancient Briton they would, I take it, be exaggerated, since modern Britain, disforested, drained, urbanified and consequently cosmopolized, is presumably less characteristically British than Caesar’s Britain.

And again I ask does anyone who, in the light of a competent knowledge of his own age, has studied history from contemporary documents, believe that 67 generations of promiscuous marriage have made any appreciable difference in the human fauna of these isles? Certainly I do not.

JULIUS CAESAR

As to Caesar himself, I have purposely avoided the usual anachronism of going to Caesar’s books, and concluding that the style is the man. That is only true of authors who have the specific literary genius, and have practised long enough to attain complete self-expression in letters. It is not true even on these conditions in an age when literature is conceived as a game of style, and not as a vehicle of self-expression by the author. Now Caesar was an amateur stylist writing books of travel and campaign histories in a style so impersonal that the authenticity of the later volumes is disputed. They reveal some of his qualities just as the Voyage of a Naturalist Round the World reveals some of Darwin’s, without expressing his private personality. An Englishman reading them would say that Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

In exhibiting Caesar as a much more various person than the historian of the Gallic wars, I hope I have not succumbed unconsciously to the dramatic illusion to which all great men owe part of their reputation and some the whole of it. I admit that reputations gained in war are specially questionable. Able civilians taking up the profession of arms, like Caesar and Cromwell, in middle age, have snatched all its laurels from opponent commanders bred to it, apparently because capable persons engaged in military pursuits are so scarce that the existence of two of them at the same time in the same hemisphere is extremely rare. The capacity of any conqueror is therefore more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary. At all events, Caesar might have won his battles without being wiser than Charles XII or Nelson or Joan of Arc, who were, like most modern “self-made” millionaires, half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity. But Caesar’s victories were only advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them. Caesar is greater off the battle field than on it. Nelson off his quarterdeck was so quaintly out of the question that when his head was injured at the battle of the Nile, and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous, the difference was not important enough to be noticed. It may, however, be said that peace hath her illusory reputations no less than war. And it is certainly true that in civil life mere capacity for work — the power of killing a dozen secretaries under you, so to speak, as a life-or-death courier kills horses — enables men with common ideas and superstitions to distance all competitors in the strife of political ambition. It was this power of work that astonished Cicero as the most prodigious of Caesar’s gifts, as it astonished later observers in Napoleon before it wore him out. How if Caesar were nothing but a Nelson and a Gladstone combined! A prodigy of vitality without any special quality of mind! Nay, with ideas that were worn out before he was born, as Nelson’s and Gladstone’s were! I have considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite all the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was genuinely original; but let me at least point out that I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him. Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention and moral generalization. He therefore will not, in the ordinary Treasury bench fashion, tell a lie which everybody knows to be a lie (and consequently expects him as a matter of good taste to tell). His lies are not found out: they pass for candors. He understands the paradox of money, and gives it away when he can get most for it: in other words, when its value is least, which is just when a common man tries hardest to get it. He knows that the real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd. Hence, in order to produce an impression of complete disinterestedness and magnanimity, he has only to act with entire selfishness; and this is perhaps the only sense in which a man can be said to be naturally great. It is in this sense that I have represented Caesar as great. Having virtue, he has no need of goodness. He is neither forgiving, frank, nor generous, because a man who is too great to resent has nothing to forgive; a man who says things that other people are afraid to say need be no more frank than Bismarck was; and there is no generosity in giving things you do not want to people of whom you intend to make use. This distinction between virtue and goodness is not understood in England: hence the poverty of our drama in heroes. Our stage attempts at them are mere goody-goodies. Goodness, in its popular British sense of self-denial, implies that man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom. Not sharing that pious opinion, I have not given countenance to it in any of my plays. In this I follow the precedent of the ancient myths, which represent the hero as vanquishing his enemies, not in fair fight, but with enchanted sword, superequine horse and magical invulnerability, the possession of which, from the vulgar moralistic point of view, robs his exploits of any merit whatever.

As to Caesar’s sense of humor, there is no more reason to assume that he lacked it than to assume that he was deaf or blind. It is said that on the occasion of his assassination by a conspiracy of moralists (it is always your moralist who makes assassination a duty, on the scaffold or off it), he defended himself until the good Brutes struck him, when he exclaimed “What! you too, Brutes!” and disdained further fight. If this be true, he must have been an incorrigible comedian. But even if we waive this story, or accept the traditional sentimental interpretation of it, there is still abundant evidence of his lightheartedness and adventurousness. Indeed it is clear from his whole history that what has been called his ambition was an instinct for exploration. He had much more of Columbus and Franklin in him than of Henry V.

However, nobody need deny Caesar a share, at least, of the qualities I have attributed to him. All men, much more Julius Caesars, possess all qualities in some degree. The really interesting question is whether I am right in assuming that the way to produce an impression of greatness is by exhibiting a man, not as mortifying his nature by doing his duty, in the manner which our system of putting little men into great positions (not having enough great men in our influential families to go round) forces us to inculcate, but by simply doing what he naturally wants to do. For this raises the question whether our world has not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so. It must be a constant puzzle to many of us that the Christian era, so excellent in its intentions, should have been practically such a very discreditable episode in the history of the race. I doubt if this is altogether due to the vulgar and sanguinary sensationalism of our religious legends, with their substitution of gross physical torments and public executions for the passion of humanity. Islam, substituting voluptuousness for torment (a merely superficial difference, it is true) has done no better. It may have been the failure of Christianity to emancipate itself from expiatory theories of moral responsibility, guilt, innocence, reward, punishment, and the rest of it, that baffled its intention of changing the world. But these are bound up in all philosophies of creation as opposed to cosmism. They may therefore be regarded as the price we pay for popular religion.

CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

NOTES TO CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION

ACT I

On the heights overlooking the harbor of Mogador, a seaport on the west coast of Morocco, the missionary, in the coolness of the late afternoon, is following the precept of Voltaire by cultivating his garden. He is an elderly Scotchman, spiritually a little weatherbeaten, as having to navigate his creed in strange waters crowded with other craft but still a convinced son of the Free Church and the North African Mission, with a faithful brown eye, and a peaceful soul. Physically a wiry small-knit man, well tanned, clean shaven, with delicate resolute features and a twinkle of mild humor. He wears the sun helmet and pagri, the neutral-tinted spectacles, and the white canvas Spanish sand shoes of the modern Scotch missionary: but instead of a cheap tourist’s suit from Glasgow, a grey flannel shirt with white collar, a green sailor knot tie with a cheap pin in it, he wears a suit of clean white linen, acceptable in color, if not in cut, to the Moorish mind.

The view from the garden includes much Atlantic Ocean and a long stretch of sandy coast to the south, swept by the north east trade wind, and scantily nourishing a few stunted pepper trees, mangy palms, and tamarisks. The prospect ends, as far as the land is concerned, in little hills that come nearly to the sea: rudiments, these, of the Atlas Mountains. The missionary, having had daily opportunities of looking at this seascape for thirty years or so, pays no heed to it, being absorbed in trimming a huge red geranium bush, to English eyes unnaturally big, which, with a dusty smilax or two, is the sole product of his pet flower-bed. He is sitting to his work on a Moorish stool. In the middle of the garden there is a pleasant seat in the shade of a tamarisk tree. The house is in the south west corner of the garden, and the geranium bush in the north east corner.

At the garden-door of the house there appears presently a man who is clearly no barbarian, being in fact a less agreeable product peculiar to modern commercial civilization. His frame and flesh are those of an ill-nourished lad of seventeen; but his age is inscrutable: only the absence of any sign of grey in his mud colored hair suggests that he is at all events probably under forty, without prejudice to the possibility of his being under twenty. A Londoner would recognize him at once as an extreme but hardy specimen of the abortion produced by nature in a city slum. His utterance, affectedly pumped and hearty, and naturally vulgar and nasal, is ready and fluent: nature, a Board School education, and some kerbstone practice having made him a bit of an orator. His dialect, apart from its base nasal delivery, is not unlike that of smart London society in its tendency to replace diphthongs by vowels (sometimes rather prettily) and to shuffle all the traditional vowel pronunciations. He pronounces ow as ah, and i as aw, using the ordinary ow for o, i for a, a for u, and e for a, with this reservation, that when any vowel is followed by an r he signifies its presence, not by pronouncing the r, which he never does under these circumstances, but by prolonging and modifyinq the vowel, sometimes even to the extreme degree of pronouncing it properly. As to his yol for l (a compendious delivery of the provincial eh-al), and other metropolitan refinements, amazing to all but cockneys, they cannot be indicated, save in the above imperfect manner, without the aid of a phonetic alphabet. He is dressed in somebody else’s very second best as a coast-guardsman, and gives himself the airs of a stage tar with sufficient success to pass as a possible fish porter of bad character in casual employment during busy times at Billingsgate. His manner shows an earnest disposition to ingratiate himself with the missionary, probably for some dishonest purpose.

THE MAN. Awtenoon, Mr. Renkin. (The missionary sits up quickly, and turns, resigning himself dutifully to the interruption.) Yr honor’s eolth.

RANKIN (reservedly). Good afternoon, Mr. Drinkwotter.

DRINKWATER. You’re not best pleased to be hinterrupted in yr bit o gawdnin bow the lawk o me, gavner.

RANKIN. A missionary knows nothing of leks of that soart, or of disleks either, Mr. Drinkwotter. What can I do for ye?

DRINKWATER (heartily). Nathink, gavner. Awve brort noos fer yer.

RANKIN. Well, sit ye doon.

DRINKWATER. Aw thenk yr honor. (He sits down on the seat under the tree and composes himself for conversation.) Hever ear o Jadge Ellam?

RANKIN. Sir Howrrd Hallam?

DRINKWATER. Thet’s im-enginest jadge in Hingland! — awlus gives the ket wen it’s robbry with voylence, bless is awt. Aw sy nathink agin im: awm all fer lor mawseolf, AW em.

RANKIN. Well?

DRINKWATER. Hever ear of is sist-in-lor: Lidy Sisly Winefleet?

RANKIN. Do ye mean the celebrated Leddy — the traveller?

DRINKWATER. Yuss: should think aw doo. Walked acrost Harfricar with nathink but a little dawg, and wrowt abaht it in the Dily Mile (the Daily Mail, a popular London newspaper), she did.

RANKIN. Is she Sir Howrrd Hallam’s sister-in-law?

DRINKWATER. Deeceased wawfe’s sister: yuss: thet’s wot SHE is.

RANKIN. Well, what about them?

DRINKWATER. Wot abaht them! Waw, they’re EAH. Lannid aht of a steam yacht in Mogador awber not twenty minnits agow. Gorn to the British cornsl’s. E’ll send em orn to you: e ynt got naowheres to put em. Sor em awr (hire) a Harab an two Krooboys to kerry their laggige. Thort awd cam an teoll yer.

RANKIN. Thank you. It’s verra kind of you, Mr. Drinkwotter.

DRINKWATER. Down’t mention it, gavner. Lor bless yer, wawn’t it you as converted me? Wot was aw wen aw cam eah but a pore lorst sinner? Down’t aw ow y’a turn fer thet? Besawds, gavner, this Lidy Sisly Winefleet mawt wor’t to tike a walk crost Morocker — a rawd inter the mahntns or sech lawk. Weoll, as you knaow, gavner, thet cawn’t be done eah withaht a hescort.

RANKIN. It’s impoassible: th’ would oall b’ murrdered. Morocco is not lek the rest of Africa.

DRINKWATER. No, gavner: these eah Moors ez their religion; an it mikes em dinegerous. Hever convert a Moor, gavner?

RANKIN (with a rueful smile). No.

DRINKWATER (solemnly). Nor never will, gavner.

RANKIN. I have been at work here for twenty-five years, Mr. Drinkwotter; and you are my first and only convert.

DRINKWATER. Down’t seem naow good, do it, gavner?

RANKIN. I don’t say that. I hope I have done some good. They come to me for medicine when they are ill; and they call me the Christian who is not a thief. THAT is something.

DRINKWATER. Their mawnds kennot rawse to Christiennity lawk hahrs ken, gavner: thet’s ah it is. Weoll, ez haw was syin, if a hescort is wornted, there’s maw friend and commawnder Kepn Brarsbahnd of the schooner Thenksgivin, an is crew, incloodin mawseolf, will see the lidy an Jadge Ellam through henny little excursion in reason. Yr honor mawt mention it.

RANKIN. I will certainly not propose anything so dangerous as an excursion.

DRINKWATER (virtuously). Naow, gavner, nor would I awst you to. (Shaking his head.) Naow, naow: it IS dinegerous. But hall the more call for a hescort if they should ev it hin their mawnds to gow.

RANKIN. I hope they won’t.

DRINKWATER. An sow aw do too, gavner.

RANKIN (pondering). ’Tis strange that they should come to Mogador, of all places; and to my house! I once met Sir Howrrd Hallam, years ago.

DRINKWATER (amazed). Naow! didger? Think o thet, gavner! Waw, sow aw did too. But it were a misunnerstedin, thet wors. Lef the court withaht a stine on maw kerrickter, aw did.

RANKIN (with some indignation). I hope you don’t think I met Sir Howrrd in that way.

DRINKWATER. Mawt yeppn to the honestest, best meanin pusson, aw do assure yer, gavner.

RANKIN. I would have you to know that I met him privately, Mr. Drinkwotter. His brother was a dear friend of mine. Years ago. He went out to the West Indies.

DRINKWATER. The Wust Hindies! Jist acrost there, tather sawd thet howcean (pointing seaward)! Dear me! We cams hin with vennity, an we deepawts in dawkness. Down’t we, gavner?

RANKIN (pricking up his ears). Eh? Have you been reading that little book I gave you?

DRINKWATER. Aw hev, et odd tawms. Very camfitn, gavner. (He rises, apprehensive lest further catechism should find him unprepared.) Awll sy good awtenoon, gavner: you’re busy hexpectin o Sr Ahrd an Lidy Sisly, ynt yer? (About to go.)

RANKIN (stopping him). No, stop: we’re oalways ready for travellers here. I have something else to say — a question to ask you.

DRINKWATER (with a misgiving, which he masks by exaggerating his hearty sailor manner). An weollcome, yr honor.

RANKIN. Who is this Captain Brassbound?

DRINKWATER (guiltily). Kepn Brarsbahnd! E’s-weoll, e’s maw Kepn, gavner.

RANKIN. Yes. Well?

DRINKWATER (feebly). Kepn of the schooner Thenksgivin, gavner.

RANKIN (searchingly). Have ye ever haird of a bad character in these seas called Black Paquito?

DRINKWATER (with a sudden radiance of complete enlightenment). Aoh, nar aw tikes yer wiv me, yr honor. Nah sammun es bin a teolln you thet Kepn Brarsbahnd an Bleck Pakeetow is hawdentically the sime pussn. Ynt thet sow?

RANKIN. That is so. (Drinkwater slaps his knee triumphantly. The missionary proceeds determinedly) And the someone was a verra honest, straightforward man, as far as I could judge.

DRINKWATER (embracing the implication). Course a wors, gavner: Ev aw said a word agin him? Ev aw nah?

RANKIN. But is Captain Brassbound Black Paquito then?

DRINKWATER. Waw, it’s the nime is blessed mather give im at er knee, bless is little awt! Ther ynt naow awm in it. She ware a Wust Hinjin — howver there agin, yer see (pointing seaward) — leastwaws, naow she worn’t: she were a Brazilian, aw think; an Pakeetow’s Brazilian for a bloomin little perrit — awskin yr pawdn for the word. (Sentimentally) Lawk as a Hinglish lidy mawt call er little boy Birdie.

RANKIN (not quite convinced). But why BLACK Paquito?

DRINKWATER (artlessly). Waw, the bird in its netral stite bein green, an e evin bleck air, y’ knaow —

RANKIN (cutting him short). I see. And now I will put ye another question. WHAT is Captain Brassbound, or Paquito, or whatever he calls himself?

DRINKWATER (officiously). Brarsbahnd, gavner. Awlus calls isseolf Brarsbahnd.

RANKIN. Well. Brassbound, then. What is he?

DRINKWATER (fervently). You awsks me wot e is, gavner?

RANKIN (firmly). I do.

DRINKWATER (with rising enthusiasm). An shll aw teoll yer wot e is, yr honor?

RANKIN (not at all impressed). If ye will be so good, Mr. Drinkwotter.

DRINKWATER (with overwhelming conviction). Then awll teoll you, gavner, wot he is. Ee’s a Paffick Genlmn: thet’s wot e is.

RANKIN (gravely). Mr. Drinkwotter: pairfection is an attribute, not of West Coast captains, but of thr Maaker. And there are gentlemen and gentlemen in the world, espaecially in these latitudes. Which sort of gentleman is he?

DRINKWATER. Hinglish genlmn, gavner. Hinglish speakin; Hinglish fawther; West Hinjin plawnter; Hinglish true blue breed. (Reflectively) Tech o brahn from the mather, preps, she bein Brazilian.

RANKIN. Now on your faith as a Christian, Felix Drinkwotter, is Captain Brassbound a slaver or not?

DRINKWATER (surprised into his natural cockney pertness). Naow e ynt.

RANKIN. Are ye SURE?

DRINKWATER. Waw, a sliver is abaht the wanne thing in the wy of a genlmn o fortn thet e YNT.

RANKIN. I’ve haird that expression “gentleman of fortune” before, Mr. Drinkwotter. It means pirate. Do ye know that?

DRINKWATER. Bless y’r awt, y’ cawnt be a pawrit naradys. Waw, the aw seas is wuss pleest nor Piccadilly Suckus. If aw was to do orn thet there Hetlentic Howcean the things aw did as a bwoy in the Worterleoo Rowd, awd ev maw air cat afore aw could turn maw ed. Pawrit be blaowed! — awskink yr pawdn, gavner. Nah, jest to shaow you ah little thet there striteforard man y’ mide mention on knaowed wot e was atorkin abaht: oo would you spowse was the marster to wich Kepn Brarsbahnd served apprentice, as yr mawt sy?

RANKIN. I don’t know.

DRINKWATER. Gawdn, gavner, Gawdn. Gawdn o Kawtoom — stetcher stends in Trifawlgr Square to this dy. Trined Bleck Pakeetow in smawshin hap the slive riders, e did. Promist Gawdn e wouldn’t never smaggle slives nor gin, an (with suppressed aggravation) WOWN’T, gavner, not if we gows dahn on ahr bloomin bended knees to im to do it.

RANKIN (drily). And DO ye go down on your bended knees to him to do it?

DRINKWATER (somewhat abashed). Some of huz is hanconverted men, gavner; an they sy: You smaggles wanne thing, Kepn; waw not hanather?

RANKIN. We’ve come to it at last. I thought so. Captain Brassbound is a smuggler.

DRINKWATER. Weoll, waw not? Waw not, gavner? Ahrs is a Free Tride nition. It gows agin us as Hinglishmen to see these bloomin furriners settin ap their Castoms Ahses and spheres o hinfluence and sich lawk hall owver Arfricar. Daown’t Harfricar belong as much to huz as to them? thet’s wot we sy. Ennywys, there ynt naow awm in ahr business. All we daz is hescort, tourist HOR commercial. Cook’s hexcursions to the Hatlas Mahntns: thet’s hall it is. Waw, it’s spreadin civlawzytion, it is. Ynt it nah?

RANKIN. You think Captain Brassbound’s crew sufficiently equipped for that, do you?

DRINKWATER. Hee-quipped! Haw should think sow. Lawtnin rawfles, twelve shots in the meggezine! Oo’s to storp us?

RANKIN. The most dangerous chieftain in these parts, the Sheikh Sidi el Assif, has a new American machine pistol which fires ten bullets without loadin; and his rifle has sixteen shots in the magazine.

DRINKWATER (indignantly). Yuss; an the people that sells sich things into the ends o’ them eathen bleck niggers calls theirseolves Christians! It’s a crool shime, sow it is.

RANKIN. If a man has the heart to pull the trigger, it matters little what color his hand is, Mr. Drinkwotter. Have ye anything else to say to me this afternoon?

DRINKWATER (rising). Nathink, gavner, cept to wishyer the bust o yolth, and a many cornverts. Awtenoon, gavner.

RANKIN. Good afternoon to ye, Mr. Drinkwotter.

As Drinkwater turns to go, a Moorish porter comes from the house with two Krooboys.

THE PORTER (at the door, addressing Rankin). Bikouros (Moroccan for Epicurus, a general Moorish name for the missionaries, who are supposed by the Moors to have chosen their calling through a love of luxurious idleness): I have brought to your house a Christian dog and his woman.

DRINKWATER. There’s eathen menners fer yer! Calls Sr Ahrd Ellam an Lidy Winefleet a Christian dorg and is woman! If ee ed you in the dorck et the Centl Crimnal, you’d fawnd aht oo was the dorg and oo was is marster, pretty quick, you would.

RANKIN. Have you broat their boxes?

THE PORTER. By Allah, two camel loads!

RANKIN. Have you been paid?

THE PORTER. Only one miserable dollar, Bikouros. I have brought them to your house. They will pay you. Give me something for bringing gold to your door.

DRINKWATER. Yah! You oughter bin bawn a Christian, you ought. You knaow too mach.

RANKIN. You have broat onnly trouble and expense to my door, Hassan; and you know it. Have I ever charged your wife and children for my medicines?

HASSAN (philosophically). It is always permitted by the Prophet to ask, Bikouros. (He goes cheerfully into the house with the Krooboys.)

DRINKWATER. Jist thort eed trah it orn, a did. Hooman nitre is the sime everywheres. Them eathens is jast lawk you an’ me, gavner.

A lady and gentleman, both English, come into the garden. The gentleman, more than elderly, is facing old age on compulsion, not resignedly. He is clean shaven, and has a brainy rectangular forehead, a resolute nose with strongly governed nostrils, and a tightly fastened down mouth which has evidently shut in much temper and anger in its time. He has a habit of deliberately assumed authority and dignity, but is trying to take life more genially and easily in his character of tourist, which is further borne out by his white hat and summery racecourse attire.

The lady is between thirty and forty, tall, very goodlooking, sympathetic, intelligent, tender and humorous, dressed with cunning simplicity not as a businesslike, tailor made, gaitered tourist, but as if she lived at the next cottage and had dropped in for tea in blouse and flowered straw hat. A woman of great vitality and humanity, who begins a casual acquaintance at the point usually attained by English people after thirty years acquaintance when they are capable of reaching it at all. She pounces genially on Drinkwater, who is smirking at her, hat in hand, with an air of hearty welcome. The gentleman, on the other hand, comes down the side of the garden next the house, instinctively maintaining a distance between himself and the others.

THE LADY (to Drinkwater). How dye do? Are you the missionary?

DRINKWATER (modestly). Naow, lidy, aw will not deceive you, thow the mistike his but netral. Awm wanne of the missionary’s good works, lidy — is first cornvert, a umble British seaman — countrymen o yours, lidy, and of is lawdship’s. This eah is Mr. Renkin, the bust worker in the wust cowst vawnyawd. (Introducing the judge) Mr. Renkin: is lawdship Sr Ahrd Ellam. (He withdraws discreetly into the house.)

SIR HOWARD (to Rankin). I am sorry to intrude on you, Mr. Rankin; but in the absence of a hotel there seems to be no alternative.

LADY CICELY (beaming on him). Besides, we would so much RATHER stay with you, if you will have us, Mr. Rankin.

SIR HOWARD (introducing her). My sister-in-law, Lady Cicely Waynflete, Mr. Rankin.

RANKIN. I am glad to be of service to your leddyship. You will be wishing to have some tea after your journey, I’m thinking.

LADY CICELY. Thoughtful man that you are, Mr. Rankin! But we’ve had some already on board the yacht. And I’ve arranged everything with your servants; so you must go on gardening just as if we were not here.

SIR HOWARD. I am sorry to have to warn you, Mr. Rankin, that Lady Cicely, from travelling in Africa, has acquired a habit of walking into people’s houses and behaving as if she were in her own.

LADY CICELY. But, my dear Howard, I assure you the natives like it.

RANKIN (gallantly). So do I.

LADY CICELY (delighted). Oh, that is so nice of you, Mr. Rankin. This is a delicious country! And the people seem so good! They have such nice faces! We had such a handsome Moor to carry our luggage up! And two perfect pets of Krooboys! Did you notice their faces, Howard?

SIR HOWARD. I did; and I can confidently say, after a long experience of faces of the worst type looking at me from the dock, that I have never seen so entirely villainous a trio as that Moor and the two Krooboys, to whom you gave five dollars when they would have been perfectly satisfied with one.

RANKIN (throwing up his hands). Five dollars! ’Tis easy to see you are not Scotch, my leddy.

LADY CICELY. Oh, poor things, they must want it more than we do; and you know, Howard, that Mahometans never spend money in drink.

RANKIN. Excuse me a moment, my leddy. I have a word in season to say to that same Moor. (He goes into the house.)

LADY CICELY (walking about the garden, looking at the view and at the flowers). I think this is a perfectly heavenly place.

Drinkwater returns from the house with a chair.

DRINKWATER (placing the chair for Sir Howard). Awskink yr pawdn for the libbety, Sr Ahrd.

SIR HOWARD (looking a him). I have seen you before somewhere.

DRINKWATER. You ev, Sr Ahrd. But aw do assure yer it were hall a mistike.

SIR HOWARD. As usual. (He sits down.) Wrongfully convicted, of course.

DRINKWATER (with sly delight). Naow, gavner. (Half whispering, with an ineffable grin) Wrorngfully hacquittid!

SIR HOWARD. Indeed! That’s the first case of the kind I have ever met.

DRINKWATER. Lawd, Sr Ahrd, wot jagginses them jurymen was! You an me knaowed it too, didn’t we?

SIR HOWARD. I daresay we did. I am sorry to say I forget the exact nature of the difficulty you were in. Can you refresh my memory?

DRINKWATER. Owny the aw sperrits o youth, y’ lawdship. Worterleoo Rowd kice. Wot they calls Ooliganism.

SIR HOWARD. Oh! You were a Hooligan, were you?

LADY CICELY (puzzled). A Hooligan!

DRINKWATER (deprecatingly). Nime giv huz pore thortless leds baw a gent on the Dily Chrornicle, lidy. (Rankin returns. Drinkwater immediately withdraws, stopping the missionary for a moment near the threshold to say, touching his forelock) Awll eng abaht within ile, gavner, hin kice aw should be wornted. (He goes into the house with soft steps.)

Lady Cicely sits down on the bench under the tamarisk. Rankin takes his stool from the flowerbed and sits down on her left, Sir Howard being on her right.

LADY CICELY. What a pleasant face your sailor friend has, Mr. Rankin! He has been so frank and truthful with us. You know I don’t think anybody can pay me a greater compliment than to be quite sincere with me at first sight. It’s the perfection of natural good manners.

SIR HOWARD. You must not suppose, Mr. Rankin, that my sister-in-law talks nonsense on purpose. She will continue to believe in your friend until he steals her watch; and even then she will find excuses for him.

RANKIN (drily changing the subject). And how have ye been, Sir Howrrd, since our last meeting that morning nigh forty year ago down at the docks in London?

SIR HOWARD (greatly surprised, pulling himself together) Our last meeting! Mr. Rankin: have I been unfortunate enough to forget an old acquaintance?

RANKIN. Well, perhaps hardly an acquaintance, Sir Howrrd. But I was a close friend of your brother Miles: and when he sailed for Brazil I was one of the little party that saw him off. You were one of the party also, if I’m not mistaken. I took particular notice of you because you were Miles’s brother and I had never seen ye before. But ye had no call to take notice of me.

SIR HOWARD (reflecting). Yes: there was a young friend of my brother’s who might well be you. But the name, as I recollect it, was Leslie.

RANKIN. That was me, sir. My name is Leslie Rankin; and your brother and I were always Miles and Leslie to one another.

SIR HOWARD (pluming himself a little). Ah! that explains it. I can trust my memory still, Mr. Rankin; though some people do complain that I am growing old.

RANKIN. And where may Miles be now, Sir Howard?

SIR HOWARD (abruptly). Don’t you know that he is dead?

RANKIN (much shocked). Never haird of it. Dear, dear: I shall never see him again; and I can scarcely bring his face to mind after all these years. (With moistening eyes, which at once touch Lady Cicely’s sympathy) I’m right sorry — right sorry.

SIR HOWARD (decorously subduing his voice). Yes: he did not live long: indeed, he never came back to England. It must be nearly thirty years ago now that he died in the West Indies on his property there.

RANKIN (surprised). His proaperty! Miles with a proaperty!

SIR HOWARD. Yes: he became a planter, and did well out there, Mr. Rankin. The history of that property is a very curious and interesting one — at least it is so to a lawyer like myself.

RANKIN. I should be glad to hear it for Miles’s sake, though I am no lawyer, Sir Howrrd.

LADY CICELY. I never knew you had a brother, Howard.

SIR HOWARD (not pleased by this remark). Perhaps because you never asked me. (Turning more blandly to Rankin) I will tell you the story, Mr. Rankin. When Miles died, he left an estate in one of the West Indian islands. It was in charge of an agent who was a sharpish fellow, with all his wits about him. Now, sir, that man did a thing which probably could hardly be done with impunity even here in Morocco, under the most barbarous of surviving civilizations. He quite simply took the estate for himself and kept it.

RANKIN. But how about the law?

SIR HOWARD. The law, sir, in that island, consisted practically of the Attorney General and the Solicitor General; and these gentlemen were both retained by the agent. Consequently there was no solicitor in the island to take up the case against him.

RANKIN. Is such a thing possible to-day in the British Empire?

SIR HOWARD (calmly). Oh, quite. Quite.

LADY CICELY. But could not a firstrate solicitor have been sent out from London?

SIR HOWARD. No doubt, by paying him enough to compensate him for giving up his London practice: that is, rather more than there was any reasonable likelihood of the estate proving worth.

RANKIN. Then the estate was lost?

SIR HOWARD. Not permanently. It is in my hands at present.

RANKIN. Then how did ye get it back?

SIR HOWARD (with crafty enjoyment of his own cunning). By hoisting the rogue with his own petard. I had to leave matters as they were for many years; for I had my own position in the world to make. But at last I made it. In the course of a holiday trip to the West Indies, I found that this dishonest agent had left the island, and placed the estate in the hands of an agent of his own, whom he was foolish enough to pay very badly. I put the case before that agent; and he decided to treat the estate as my property. The robber now found himself in exactly the same position he had formerly forced me into. Nobody in the island would act against me, least of all the Attorney and Solicitor General, who appreciated my influence at the Colonial Office. And so I got the estate back. “The mills of the gods grind slowly,” Mr. Rankin; “but they grind exceeding small.”

LADY CICELY. Now I suppose if I’d done such a clever thing in England, you’d have sent me to prison.

SIR HOWARD. Probably, unless you had taken care to keep outside the law against conspiracy. Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

LADY CICELY. So I do. But suppose your agent takes it into his head to give the estate back to his wicked old employer!

SIR HOWARD. I heartily wish he would.

RANKIN (openeyed). You wish he WOULD!!

SIR HOWARD. Yes. A few years ago the collapse of the West Indian sugar industry converted the income of the estate into an annual loss of about 150 pounds a year. If I can’t sell it soon, I shall simply abandon it — unless you, Mr. Rankin, would like to take it as a present.

RANKIN (laughing). I thank your lordship: we have estates enough of that sort in Scotland. You’re setting with your back to the sun, Leddy Ceecily, and losing something worth looking at. See there. (He rises and points seaward, where the rapid twilight of the latitude has begun.)

LADY CICELY (getting up to look and uttering a cry of admiration). Oh, how lovely!

SIR HOWARD (also rising). What are those hills over there to the southeast?

RANKIN. They are the outposts, so to speak, of the Atlas Mountains.

LADY CICELY. The Atlas Mountains! Where Shelley’s witch lived! We’ll make an excursion to them to-morrow, Howard.

RANKIN. That’s impoassible, my leddy. The natives are verra dangerous.

LADY CICELY. Why? Has any explorer been shooting them?

RANKIN. No. But every man of them believes he will go to heaven if he kills an unbeliever.

LADY CICELY. Bless you, dear Mr. Rankin, the people in England believe that they will go to heaven if they give all their property to the poor. But they don’t do it. I’m not a bit afraid of that.

RANKIN. But they are not accustomed to see women going about unveiled.

LADY CICELY. I always get on best with people when they can see my face.

SIR HOWARD. Cicely: you are talking great nonsense and you know it. These people have no laws to restrain them, which means, in plain English, that they are habitual thieves and murderers.

RANKIN. Nay, nay: not exactly that.

LADY CICELY (indignantly). Of course not. You always think, Howard, that nothing prevents people killing each other but the fear of your hanging them for it. But what nonsense that is! And how wicked! If these people weren’t here for some good purpose, they wouldn’t have been made, would they, Mr. Rankin?

RANKIN. That is a point, certainly, Leddy Ceecily.

SIR HOWARD. Oh, if you are going to talk theology —

LADY CICELY. Well, why not? theology is as respectable as law, I should think. Besides, I’m only talking commonsense. Why do people get killed by savages? Because instead of being polite to them, and saying Howdyedo? like me, people aim pistols at them. I’ve been among savages — cannibals and all sorts. Everybody said they’d kill me. But when I met them, I said Howdyedo? and they were quite nice. The kings always wanted to marry me.

SIR HOWARD. That does not seem to me to make you any safer here, Cicely. You shall certainly not stir a step beyond the protection of the consul, if I can help it, without a strong escort.

LADY CICELY. I don’t want an escort.

SIR HOWARD. I do. And I suppose you will expect me to accompany you.

RANKIN. ’Tis not safe, Leddy Ceecily. Really and truly, ’tis not safe. The tribes are verra fierce; and there are cities here that no Christian has ever set foot in. If you go without being well protected, the first chief you meet well seize you and send you back again to prevent his followers murdering you.

LADY CICELY. Oh, how nice of him, Mr. Rankin!

RANKIN. He would not do it for your sake, Leddy Ceecily, but for his own. The Sultan would get into trouble with England if you were killed; and the Sultan would kill the chief to pacify the English government.

LADY CICELY. But I always go everywhere. I KNOW the people here won’t touch me. They have such nice faces and such pretty scenery.

SIR HOWARD (to Rankin, sitting down again resignedly). You can imagine how much use there is in talking to a woman who admires the faces of the ruffians who infest these ports, Mr. Rankin. Can anything be done in the way of an escort?

RANKIN. There is a certain Captain Brassbound here who trades along the coast, and occasionally escorts parties of merchants on journeys into the interior. I understand that he served under Gordon in the Soudan.

SIR HOWARD. That sounds promising. But I should like to know a little more about him before I trust myself in his hands.

RANKIN. I quite agree with you, Sir Howrrd. I’ll send Felix Drinkwotter for him. (He claps his hands. An Arab boy appears at the house door.) Muley: is sailor man here? (Muley nods.) Tell sailor man bring captain. (Muley nods and goes.)

SIR HOWARD. Who is Drinkwater?

RANKIN. His agent, or mate: I don’t rightly know which.

LADY CICELY. Oh, if he has a mate named Felix Drinkwater, it must be quite a respectable crew. It is such a nice name.

RANKIN. You saw him here just now. He is a convert of mine.

LADY CICELY (delighted). That nice truthful sailor!

SIR HOWARD (horrified). What! The Hooligan!

RANKIN (puzzled). Hooligan? No, my lord: he is an Englishman.

SIR HOWARD. My dear Mr. Rankin, this man was tried before me on a charge of street ruffianism.

RANKIN. So he told me. He was badly broat up, I am afraid. But he is now a converted man.

LADY CICELY. Of course he is. His telling you so frankly proves it. You know, really, Howard, all those poor people whom you try are more sinned against than sinning. If you would only talk to them in a friendly way instead of passing cruel sentences on them, you would find them quite nice to you. (Indignantly) I won’t have this poor man trampled on merely because his mother brought him up as a Hooligan. I am sure nobody could be nicer than he was when he spoke to us.

SIR HOWARD. In short, we are to have an escort of Hooligans commanded by a filibuster. Very well, very well. You will most likely admire all their faces; and I have no doubt at all that they will admire yours.

Drinkwater comes from the house with an Italian dressed in a much worn suit of blue serge, a dilapidated Alpine hat, and boots laced with scraps of twine. He remains near the door, whilst Drinkwater comes forward between Sir Howard and Lady Cicely.

DRINKWATER. Yr honor’s servant. (To the Italian) Mawtzow: is lawdship Sr Ahrd Ellam. (Marzo touches his hat.) Er Lidyship Lidy Winefleet. (Marzo touches his hat.) Hawtellian shipmite, lidy. Hahr chef.

LADY CICELY (nodding affably to Marzo). Howdyedo? I love Italy. What part of it were you born in?

DRINKWATER. Worn’t bawn in Hitly at all, lidy. Bawn in Ettn Gawdn (Hatton Garden). Hawce barrer an street pianner Hawtellian, lidy: thet’s wot e is. Kepn Brarsbahnd’s respects to yr honors; an e awites yr commawnds.

RANKIN. Shall we go indoors to see him?

SIR HOWARD. I think we had better have a look at him by daylight.

RANKIN. Then we must lose no time: the dark is soon down in this latitude. (To Drinkwater) Will ye ask him to step out here to us, Mr. Drinkwotter?

DRINKWATER. Rawt you aw, gavner. (He goes officiously into the house.)

Lady Cicely and Rankin sit down as before to receive the Captain. The light is by this time waning rapidly, the darkness creeping west into the orange crimson.

LADY CICELY (whispering). Don’t you feel rather creepy, Mr. Rankin? I wonder what he’ll be like.

RANKIN. I misdoubt me he will not answer, your leddyship.

There is a scuffling noise in the house; and Drinkwater shoots out through the doorway across the garden with every appearance of having been violently kicked. Marzo immediately hurries down the garden on Sir Howard’s right out of the neighborhood of the doorway.

DRINKWATER (trying to put a cheerful air on much mortification and bodily anguish). Narsty step to thet ere door tripped me hap, it did. (Raising his voice and narrowly escaping a squeak of pain) Kepn Brarsbahnd. (He gets as far from the house as possible, on Rankin’s left. Rankin rises to receive his guest.)

An olive complexioned man with dark southern eyes and hair comes from the house. Age about 36. Handsome features, but joyless; dark eyebrows drawn towards one another; mouth set grimly; nostrils large and strained: a face set to one tragic purpose. A man of few words, fewer gestures, and much significance. On the whole, interesting, and even attractive, but not friendly. He stands for a moment, saturnine in the ruddy light, to see who is present, looking in a singular and rather deadly way at Sir Howard; then with some surprise and uneasiness at Lady Cicely. Finally he comes down into the middle of the garden, and confronts Rankin, who has been glaring at him in consternation from the moment of his entrance, and continues to do so in so marked a way that the glow in Brassbound’s eyes deepens as he begins to take offence.

BRASSBOUND. Well, sir, have you stared your fill at me?

RANKIN (recovering himself with a start). I ask your pardon for my bad manners, Captain Brassbound. Ye are extraordinair lek an auld college friend of mine, whose face I said not ten minutes gone that I could no longer bring to mind. It was as if he had come from the grave to remind me of it.

BRASSBOUND. Why have you sent for me?

RANKIN. We have a matter of business with ye, Captain.

BRASSBOUND. Who are “we”?

RANKIN. This is Sir Howrrd Hallam, who will be well known to ye as one of Her Majesty’s judges.

BRASSBOUND (turning the singular look again on Sir Howard). The friend of the widow! the protector of the fatherless!

SIR HOWARD (startled). I did not know I was so favorably spoken of in these parts, Captain Brassbound. We want an escort for a trip into the mountains.

BRASSBOUND (ignoring this announcement). Who is the lady?

RANKIN. Lady Ceecily Waynflete, his lordship’s sister-in-law.

LADY CICELY. Howdyedo, Captain Brassbound? (He bows gravely.)

SIR HOWARD (a little impatient of these questions, which strike him as somewhat impertinent). Let us come to business, if you please. We are thinking of making a short excursion to see the country about here. Can you provide us with an escort of respectable, trustworthy men?

BRASSBOUND. No.

DRINKWATER (in strong remonstrance). Nah, nah, nah! Nah look eah, Kepn, y’knaow —

BRASSBOUND (between his teeth). Hold your tongue.

DRINKWATER (abjectly). Yuss, Kepn.

RANKIN. I understood it was your business to provide escorts, Captain Brassbound.

BRASSBOUND. You were rightly informed. That IS my business.

LADY CICELY. Then why won’t you do it for us?

BRASSBOUND. You are not content with an escort. You want respectable, trustworthy men. You should have brought a division of London policemen with you. My men are neither respectable nor trustworthy.

DRINKWATER (unable to contain himself). Nah, nah, look eah, Kepn. If you want to be moddist, be moddist on your aown accahnt, nort on mawn.

BRASSBOUND. You see what my men are like. That rascal (indicating Marzo) would cut a throat for a dollar if he had courage enough.

MARZO. I not understand. I no spik Englis.

BRASSBOUND. This thing (pointing to Drinkwater) is the greatest liar, thief, drunkard, and rapscallion on the west coast.

DRINKWATER (affecting an ironic indifference). Gow orn, Gow orn. Sr Ahrd ez erd witnesses to maw kerrickter afoah. E knaows ah mech to believe of em.

LADY CICELY. Captain Brassbound: I have heard all that before about the blacks; and I found them very nice people when they were properly treated.

DRINKWATER (chuckling: the Italian is also grinning). Nah, Kepn, nah! Owp yr prahd o y’seolf nah.

BRASSBOUND. I quite understand the proper treatment for him, madam. If he opens his mouth again without my leave, I will break every bone in his skin.

LADY CICELY (in her most sunnily matter-of-fact way). Does Captain Brassbound always treat you like this, Mr. Drinkwater?

Drinkwater hesitates, and looks apprehensively at the Captain.

BRASSBOUND. Answer, you dog, when the lady orders you. (To Lady Cicely) Do not address him as Mr. Drinkwater, madam: he is accustomed to be called Brandyfaced Jack.

DRINKWATER (indignantly). Eah, aw sy! nah look eah, Kepn: maw nime is Drinkworter. You awsk em et Sin Jorn’s in the Worterleoo Rowd. Orn maw grenfawther’s tombstown, it is.

BRASSBOUND. It will be on your own tombstone, presently, if you cannot hold your tongue. (Turning to the others) Let us understand one another, if you please. An escort here, or anywhere where there are no regular disciplined forces, is what its captain makes it. If I undertake this business, I shall be your escort. I may require a dozen men, just as I may require a dozen horses. Some of the horses will be vicious; so will all the men. If either horse or man tries any of his viciousness on me, so much the worse for him; but it will make no difference to you. I will order my men to behave themselves before the lady; and they shall obey their orders. But the lady will please understand that I take my own way with them and suffer no interference.

LADY CICELY. Captain Brassbound: I don’t want an escort at all. It will simply get us all into danger; and I shall have the trouble of getting it out again. That’s what escorts always do. But since Sir Howard prefers an escort, I think you had better stay at home and let me take charge of it. I know your men will get on perfectly well if they’re properly treated.

DRINKWATER (with enthusiasm). Feed aht o yr and, lidy, we would.

BRASSBOUND (with sardonic assent). Good. I agree. (To Drinkwater) You shall go without me.

DRINKWATER. (terrified). Eah! Wot are you a syin orn? We cawn’t gow withaht yer. (To Lady Cicely) Naow, lidy: it wouldn’t be for yr hown good. Yer cawn’t hexpect a lot o poor honeddikited men lawk huz to ran ahrseolvs into dineger withaht naow Kepn to teoll us wot to do. Naow, lidy: hoonawted we stend: deevawdid we fall.

LADY CICELY. Oh, if you prefer your captain, have him by all means. Do you LIKE to be treated as he treats you?

DRINKWATER (with a smile of vanity). Weoll, lidy: y cawn’t deenaw that e’s a Paffick Genlmn. Bit hawbitrairy, preps; but hin a genlmn you looks for sich. It tikes a hawbitrairy wanne to knock aht them eathen Shikes, aw teoll yer.

BRASSBOUND. That’s enough. Go.

DRINKWATER. Weoll, aw was hownly a teolln the lidy thet — (A threatening movement from Brassbound cuts him short. He flies for his life into the house, followed by the Italian.)

BRASSBOUND. Your ladyship sees. These men serve me by their own free choice. If they are dissatisfied, they go. If I am dissatisfied, they go. They take care that I am not dissatisfied.

SIR HOWARD (who has listened with approval and growing confidence). Captain Brassbound: you are the man I want. If your terms are at all reasonable, I will accept your services if we decide to make an excursion. You do not object, Cicely, I hope.

LADY CICELY. Oh no. After all, those men must really like you, Captain Brassbound. I feel sure you have a kind heart. You have such nice eyes.

SIR HOWARD (scandalized). My DEAR Cicely: you really must restrain your expressions of confidence in people’s eyes and faces. (To Brassbound) Now, about terms, Captain?

BRASSBOUND. Where do you propose to go?

SIR HOWARD. I hardly know. Where CAN we go, Mr. Rankin?

RANKIN. Take my advice, Sir Howrrd. Don’t go far.

BRASSBOUND. I can take you to Meskala, from which you can see the Atlas Mountains. From Meskala I can take you to an ancient castle in the hills, where you can put up as long as you please. The customary charge is half a dollar a man per day and his food. I charge double.

SIR HOWARD. I suppose you answer for your men being sturdy fellows, who will stand to their guns if necessary.

BRASSBOUND. I can answer for their being more afraid of me than of the Moors.

LADY CICELY. That doesn’t matter in the least, Howard. The important thing, Captain Brassbound, is: first, that we should have as few men as possible, because men give such a lot of trouble travelling. And then, they must have good lungs and not be always catching cold. Above all, their clothes must be of good wearing material. Otherwise I shall be nursing and stitching and mending all the way; and it will be trouble enough, I assure you, to keep them washed and fed without that.

BRASSBOUND (haughtily). My men, madam, are not children in the nursery.

LADY CICELY (with unanswerable conviction). Captain Brassbound: all men are children in the nursery. I see that you don’t notice things. That poor Italian had only one proper bootlace: the other was a bit of string. And I am sure from Mr. Drinkwater’s complexion that he ought to have some medicine.

BRASSBOUND (outwardly determined not to be trifled with: inwardly puzzled and rather daunted). Madam: if you want an escort, I can provide you with an escort. If you want a Sunday School treat, I can NOT provide it.

LADY CICELY (with sweet melancholy). Ah, don’t you wish you could, Captain? Oh, if I could only show you my children from Waynflete Sunday School! The darlings would love this place, with all the camels and black men. I’m sure you would enjoy having them here, Captain Brassbound; and it would be such an education for your men! (Brassbound stares at her with drying lips.)

SIR HOWARD. Cicely: when you have quite done talking nonsense to Captain Brassbound, we can proceed to make some definite arrangement with him.

LADY CICELY. But it’s arranged already. We’ll start at eight o’clock to-morrow morning, if you please, Captain. Never mind about the Italian: I have a big box of clothes with me for my brother in Rome; and there are some bootlaces in it. Now go home to bed and don’t fuss yourself. All you have to do is to bring your men round; and I’ll see to the rest. Men are always so nervous about moving. Goodnight. (She offers him her hand. Surprised, he pulls off his cap for the first time. Some scruple prevents him from taking her hand at once. He hesitates; then turns to Sir Howard and addresses him with warning earnestness.)

BRASSBOUND. Sir Howard Hallam: I advise you not to attempt this expedition.

SIR HOWARD. Indeed! Why?

BRASSBOUND. You are safe here. I warn you, in those hills there is a justice that is not the justice of your courts in England. If you have wronged a man, you may meet that man there. If you have wronged a woman, you may meet her son there. The justice of those hills is the justice of vengeance.

SIR HOWARD (faintly amused). You are superstitious, Captain. Most sailors are, I notice. However, I have complete confidence in your escort.

BRASSBOUND (almost threateningly). Take care. The avenger may be one of the escort.

SIR HOWARD. I have already met the only member of your escort who might have borne a grudge against me, Captain; and he was acquitted.

BRASSBOUND. You are fated to come, then?

SIR HOWARD (smiling). It seems so.

BRASSBOUND. On your head be it! (To Lady Cicely, accepting her hand at last) Goodnight.

He goes. It is by this time starry night.

ACT II

Midday. A roam in a Moorish castle. A divan seat runs round the dilapidated adobe walls, which are partly painted, partly faced with white tiles patterned in green and yellow. The ceiling is made up of little squares, painted in bright colors, with gilded edges, and ornamented with gilt knobs. On the cement floor are mattings, sheepskins, and leathern cushions with geometrical patterns on them. There is a tiny Moorish table in the middle; and at it a huge saddle, with saddle cloths of various colors, showing that the room is used by foreigners accustomed to chairs. Anyone sitting at the table in this seat would have the chief entrance, a large horseshoe arch, on his left, and another saddle seat between him and the arch; whilst, if susceptible to draughts, he would probably catch cold from a little Moorish door in the wall behind him to his right.

Two or three of Brassbound’s men, overcome by the midday heat, sprawl supine on the floor, with their reefer coats under their heads, their knees uplifted, and their calves laid comfortably on the divan. Those who wear shirts have them open at the throat for greater coolness. Some have jerseys. All wear boots and belts, and have guns ready to their hands. One of them, lying with his head against the second saddle seat, wears what was once a fashionable white English yachting suit. He is evidently a pleasantly worthless young English gentleman gone to the bad, but retaining sufficient self-respect to shave carefully and brush his hair, which is wearing thin, and does not seem to have been luxuriant even in its best days.

The silence is broken only by the snores of the young gentleman, whose mouth has fallen open, until a few distant shots half waken him. He shuts his mouth convulsively, and opens his eyes sleepily. A door is violently kicked outside; and the voice of Drinkwater is heard raising urgent alarm.

DRINKWATER. Wot ow! Wike ap there, will yr. Wike ap. (He rushes in through the horseshoe arch, hot and excited, and runs round, kicking the sleepers) Nah then. Git ap. Git ap, will yr, Kiddy Redbrook. (He gives the young qentleman a rude shove.)

REDBOOK (sitting up). Stow that, will you. What’s amiss?

DRINKWATER (disgusted). Wot’s amiss! Didn’t eah naow fawrin, I spowse.

REDBROOK. No.

DRINKWATER (sneering). Naow. Thort it sifer nort, didn’t yr?

REDBROOK (with crisp intelligence). What! You’re running away, are you? (He springs up, crying) Look alive, Johnnies: there’s danger. Brandyfaced Jack’s on the run. (They spring up hastily, grasping their guns.)

DRINKWATER. Dineger! Yuss: should think there wors dineger. It’s howver, thow, as it mowstly his baw the tawm YOU’RE awike. (They relapse into lassitude.) Waw wasn’t you on the look-aht to give us a end? Bin hattecked baw the Benny Seeras (Beni Siras), we ev, an ed to rawd for it pretty strite, too, aw teoll yr. Mawtzow is it: the bullet glawnst all rahnd is bloomin brisket. Brarsbahnd e dropt the Shike’s oss at six unnern fifty yawds. (Bustling them about) Nah then: git the plice ready for the British herristoracy, Lawd Ellam and Lidy Wineflete.

REDBOOK. Lady faint, eh?

DRINKWATER. Fynt! Not lawkly. Wornted to gow an talk, to the Benny Seeras: blaow me if she didn’t! huz wot we was frahtnd of. Tyin up Mawtzow’s wound, she is, like a bloomin orspittle nass. (Sir Howard, with a copious pagri on his white hat, enters through the horseshoe arch, followed by a couple of men supporting the wounded Marzo, who, weeping and terrorstricken by the prospect of death and of subsequent torments for which he is conscious of having eminently qualified himself, has his coat off and a bandage round his chest. One of his supporters is a blackbearded, thickset, slow, middle-aged man with an air of damaged respectability, named — as it afterwards appears — Johnson. Lady Cicely walks beside Marzo. Redbrook, a little shamefaced, crosses the room to the opposite wall as far away as possible from the visitors. Drinkwater turns and receives them with jocular ceremony.) Weolcome to Brarsbahnd Cawstl, Sr Ahrd an lidy. This eah is the corfee and commercial room.

Sir Howard goes to the table and sits on the saddle, rather exhausted. Lady Cicely comes to Drinkwater.

LADY CICELY. Where is Marzo’s bed?

DRINKWATER. Is bed, lidy? Weoll: e ynt petickler, lidy. E ez is chawce of henny flegstown agin thet wall.

They deposit Marzo on the flags against the wall close to the little door. He groans. Johnson phlegmatically leaves him and joins Redbrook.

LADY CICELY. But you can’t leave him there in that state.

DRINKWATER. Ow: e’s hall rawt. (Strolling up callously to Marzo) You’re hall rawt, ynt yer, Mawtzow? (Marzo whimpers.) Corse y’aw.

LADY CICELY (to Sir Howard). Did you ever see such a helpless lot of poor creatures? (She makes for the little door.)

DRINKWATER. Eah! (He runs to the door and places himself before it.) Where mawt yr lidyship be gowin?

LADY CICELY. I’m going through every room in this castle to find a proper place to put that man. And now I’ll tell you where YOU’RE going. You’re going to get some water for Marzo, who is very thirsty. And then, when I’ve chosen a room for him, you’re going to make a bed for him there.

DRINKWATER (sarcastically). Ow! Henny ather little suvvice? Mike yrseolf at owm, y’ knaow, lidy.

LADY CICELY (considerately). Don’t go if you’d rather not, Mr. Drinkwater. Perhaps you’re too tired. (Turning to the archway) I’ll ask Captain Brassbound: he won’t mind.

DRINKWATER (terrified, running after her and getting between her and the arch). Naow, naow! Naow, lidy: doesn’t you goes disturbin the Kepn. Awll see to it.

LADY CICELY (gravely). I was sure you would, Mr. Drinkwater. You have such a kind face. (She turns back and goes out through the small door.)

DRINKWATER (looking after her). Garn!

SIR HOWARD (to Drinkwater). Will you ask one of your friends to show me to my room whilst you are getting the water?

DRINKWATER (insolently). Yr room! Ow: this ynt good enaf fr yr, ynt it? (Ferociously) Oo a you orderin abaht, ih?

SIR HOWARD (rising quietly, and taking refuge between Redbrook and Johnson, whom he addresses). Can you find me a more private room than this?

JOHNSON (shaking his head). I’ve no orders. You must wait til the capn comes, sir.

DRINKWATER (following Sir Howard). Yuss; an whawl you’re witin, yll tike your horders from me: see?

JOHNSON (with slow severity, to Drinkwater). Look here: do you see three genlmen talkin to one another here, civil and private, eh?

DRINKWATER (chapfallen). No offence, Miste Jornsn —

JOHNSON (ominously). Ay; but there is offence. Where’s your manners, you guttersnipe? (Turning to Sir Howard) That’s the curse o this kind o life, sir: you got to associate with all sorts. My father, sir, was Capn Johnson o Hull — owned his own schooner, sir. We’re mostly gentlemen here, sir, as you’ll find, except the poor ignorant foreigner and that there scum of the submerged tenth. (Contemptuously looking at Drinkwater) HE ain’t nobody’s son: he’s only a offspring o coster folk or such.

DRINKWATER (bursting into tears). Clawss feelin! thet’s wot it is: clawss feelin! Wot are yer, arter all, bat a bloomin gang o west cowst cazhls (casual ward paupers)? (Johnson is scandalized; and there is a general thrill of indignation.) Better ev naow fembly, an rawse aht of it, lawk me, than ev a specble one and disgrice it, lawk you.

JOHNSON. Brandyfaced Jack: I name you for conduct and language unbecoming to a gentleman. Those who agree will signify the same in the usual manner.

ALL (vehemently). Aye.

DRINKWATER (wildly). Naow.

JOHNSON. Felix Drinkwater: are you goin out, or are you goin to wait til you’re chucked out? You can cry in the passage. If you give any trouble, you’ll have something to cry for.

They make a threatenng movement towards Drinkwater.

DRINKWATER (whimpering). You lee me alown: awm gowin. There’s n’maw true demmecrettick feelin eah than there is in the owl bloomin M division of Noontn Corzwy coppers (Newington Causeway policemen).

As he slinks away in tears towards the arch, Brassbound enters. Drinkwater promptly shelters himself on the captain’s left hand, the others retreating to the opposite side as Brassbound advances to the middle of the room. Sir Howard retires behind them and seats himself on the divan, much fatigued.

BRASSBOUND (to Drinkwater). What are you snivelling at?

DRINKWATER. You awsk the wust cowst herristorcracy. They fawnds maw cornduck hanbecammin to a genlmn.

Brassbound is about to ask Johnson for an explanation, when Lady Cicely returns through the little door, and comes between Brassbound and Drinkwater.

LADY CICELY (to Drinkwater). Have you fetched the water?

DRINKWATER. Yuss: nah YOU begin orn me. (He weeps afresh.)

LADY CICELY (surprised). Oh! This won’t do, Mr. Drinkwater. If you cry, I can’t let you nurse your friend.

DRINKWATER (frantic). Thet’ll brike maw awt, wown’t it nah? (With a lamentable sob, he throws himself down on the divan, raging like an angry child.)

LADY CICELY (after contemplating him in astonishment for a moment). Captain Brassbound: are there any charwomen in the Atlas Mountains?

BRASSBOUND. There are people here who will work if you pay them, as there are elsewhere.

LADY CICELY. This castle is very romantic, Captain; but it hasn’t had a spring cleaning since the Prophet lived in it. There’s only one room I can put that wounded man into. It’s the only one that has a bed in it: the second room on the right out of that passage.

BRASSBOUND (haughtily). That is my room, madam.

LADY CICELY (relieved). Oh, that’s all right. It would have been so awkward if I had had to ask one of your men to turn out. You won’t mind, I know. (All the men stare at her. Even Drinkwater forgets his sorrows in his stupefaction.)

BRASSBOUND. Pray, madam, have you made any arrangements for my accommodation?

LADY CICELY (reassuringly). Yes: you can have my room instead wherever it may be: I’m sure you chose me a nice one. I must be near my patient; and I don’t mind roughing it. Now I must have Marzo moved very carefully. Where is that truly gentlemanly Mr. Johnson? — oh, there you are, Mr. Johnson. (She runs to Johnson, past Brassbound, who has to step back hastily out of her way with every expression frozen out of his face except one of extreme and indignant dumbfoundedness). Will you ask your strong friend to help you with Marzo: strong people are always so gentle.

JOHNSON. Let me introdooce Mr. Redbrook. Your ladyship may know his father, the very Rev. Dean Redbrook. (He goes to Marzo.)

REDBROOK. Happy to oblige you, Lady Cicely.

LADY CICELY (shaking hands). Howdyedo? Of course I knew your father — Dunham, wasn’t it? Were you ever called —

REDBROOK. The kid? Yes.

LADY CICELY. But why —

REDBROOK (anticipating the rest of the question). Cards and drink, Lady Sis. (He follows Johnson to the patient. Lady Cicely goes too.) Now, Count Marzo. (Marzo groans as Johnson and Redbrook raise him.)

LADY CICELY. Now they’re NOT hurting you, Marzo. They couldn’t be more gentle.

MARZO. Drink.

LADY CICELY. I’ll get you some water myself. Your friend Mr. Drinkwater was too overcome — take care of the corner — that’s it — the second door on the right. (She goes out with Marzo and his bearers through the little door.)

BRASSBOUND (still staring). Well, I AM damned — !

DRINKWATER (getting up). Weoll, blimey!

BRASSBOUND (turning irritably on him). What did you say?

DRINKWATER. Weoll, wot did yer sy yrseolf, kepn? Fust tawm aw yever see y’ afride of ennybody. (The others laugh.)

BRASSBOUND. Afraid!

DRINKWATER (maliciously). She’s took y’ bed from hander yr for a bloomin penny hawcemen. If y’ ynt afride, let’s eah yer speak ap to er wen she cams bawck agin.

BRASSBOUND (to Sir Howard). I wish you to understand, Sir Howard, that in this castle, it is I who give orders, and no one else. Will you be good enough to let Lady Cicely Waynflete know that.

SIR HOWARD (sitting up on the divan and pulling himself together). You will have ample opportunity for speaking to Lady Cicely yourself when she returns. (Drinkwater chuckles: and the rest grin.)

BRASSBOUND. My manners are rough, Sir Howard. I have no wish to frighten the lady.

SIR HOWARD. Captain Brassbound: if you can frighten Lady Cicely, you will confer a great obligation on her family. If she had any sense of danger, perhaps she would keep out of it.

BRASSBOUND. Well, sir, if she were ten Lady Cicelys, she must consult me while she is here.

DRINKWATER. Thet’s rawt, kepn. Let’s eah you steblish yr hawthority. (Brassbound turns impatiently on him: He retreats remonstrating) Nah, nah, nah!

SIR HOWARD. If you feel at all nervous, Captain Brassbound, I will mention the matter with pleasure.

BRASSBOUND. Nervous, sir! no. Nervousness is not in my line. You will find me perfectly capable of saying what I want to say — with considerable emphasis, if necessary. (Sir Howard assents with a polite but incredulous nod.)

DRINKWATER. Eah, eah!

Lady Cicely returns with Johnson and Redbrook. She carries a jar.

LADY CICELY (stopping between the door and the arch). Now for the water. Where is it?

REDBROOK. There’s a well in the courtyard. I’ll come and work the bucket.

LADY CICELY. So good of you, Mr. Redbrook. (She makes for the horseshoe arch, followed by Redbrook.)

DRINKWATER. Nah, Kepn Brassbound: you got sathink to sy to the lidy, ynt yr?

LADY CICELY (stopping). I’ll come back to hear it presently, Captain. And oh, while I remember it (coming forward between Brassbound and Drinkwater), do please tell me Captain, if I interfere with your arrangements in any way. It I disturb you the least bit in the world, stop me at once. You have all the responsibility; and your comfort and your authority must be the first thing. You’ll tell me, won’t you?

BRASSBOUND (awkwardly, quite beaten). Pray do as you please, madam.

LADY CICELY. Thank you. That’s so like you, Captain. Thank you. Now, Mr. Redbrook! Show me the way to the well. (She follows Redbrook out through the arch.)

DRINKWATER. Yah! Yah! Shime! Beat baw a woman!

JOHNSON (coming forward on Brassbound’s right). What’s wrong now?

DRINKWATER (with an air of disappointment and disillusion). Down’t awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn’s naow clawss arter all.

BRASSBOUND (a little shamefacedly). What has she been fixing up in there, Johnson?

JOHNSON. Well: Marzo’s in your bed. Lady wants to make a kitchen of the Sheikh’s audience chamber, and to put me and the Kid handy in his bedroom in case Marzo gets erysipelas and breaks out violent. From what I can make out, she means to make herself matron of this institution. I spose it’s all right, isn’t it?

DRINKWATER. Yuss, an horder huz abaht as if we was keb tahts! An the kepn afride to talk bawck at er!

Lady Cicely returns with Redbrook. She carries the jar full of water.

LADY CICELY (putting down the jar, and coming between Brassbound and Drinkwater as before). And now, Captain, before I go to poor Marzo, what have you to say to me?

BRASSBOUND. I! Nothing.

DRINKWATER. Down’t fank it, gavner. Be a men!

LADY CICELY (looking at Drinkwater, puzzled). Mr. Drinkwater said you had.

BRASSBOUND (recovering himself). It was only this. That fellow there (pointing to Drinkwater) is subject to fits of insolence. If he is impertinent to your ladyship, or disobedient, you have my authority to order him as many kicks as you think good for him; and I will see that he gets them.

DRINKWATER (lifting up his voice in protest). Nah, nah —

LADY CICELY. Oh, I couldn’t think of such a thing, Captain Brassbound. I am sure it would hurt Mr. Drinkwater.

DRINKWATER (lachrymosely). Lidy’s hinkyp’ble o sich bawbrous usage.

LADY CICELY. But there’s one thing I SHOULD like, if Mr. Drinkwater won’t mind my mentioning it. It’s so important if he’s to attend on Marzo.

BRASSBOUND. What is that?

LADY CICELY. Well — you WON’T mind, Mr. Drinkwater, will you?

DRINKWATER (suspiciously). Wot is it?

LADY CICELY. There would be so much less danger of erysipelas if you would be so good as to take a bath.

DRINKWATER (aghast). A bawth!

BRASSBOUND (in tones of command). Stand by, all hands. (They stand by.) Take that man and wash him. (With a roar of laughter they seize him.)

DRINKWATER (in an agony of protest). Naow, naow. Look eah —

BRASSBOUND (ruthlessly). In COLD water.

DRINKWATER (shrieking). Na-a-a-a-ow. Aw eawn’t, aw toel yer. Naow. Aw sy, look eah. Naow, naow, naow, naow, naow, NAOW!!!

He is dragged away through the arch in a whirlwind of laughter, protests and tears.

LADY CICELY. I’m afraid he isn’t used to it, poor fellow; but REALLY it will do him good, Captain Brassbound. Now I must be off to my patient. (She takes up her jar and goes out by the little door, leaving Brassbound and Sir Howard alone together.)

SIR HOWARD (rising). And now, Captain Brass —

BRASSBOUND (cutting him short with a fierce contempt that astonishes him). I will attend to you presently. (Calling) Johnson. Send me Johnson there. And Osman. (He pulls off his coat and throws it on the table, standing at his ease in his blue jersey.)

SIR HOWARD (after a momentary flush of anger, with a controlled force that compels Brassbound’s attention in spite of himself). You seem to be in a strong position with reference to these men of yours.

BRASSBOUND. I am in a strong position with reference to everyone in this castle.

SIR HOWARD (politely but threateningly). I have just been noticing that you think so. I do not agree with you. Her Majesty’s Government, Captain Brassbound, has a strong arm and a long arm. If anything disagreeable happens to me or to my sister-in-law, that arm will be stretched out. If that happens you will not be in a strong position. Excuse my reminding you of it.

BRASSBOUND (grimly). Much good may it do you! (Johnson comes in through the arch.) Where is Osman, the Sheikh’s messenger? I want him too.

JOHNSON. Coming, Captain. He had a prayer to finish.

Osman, a tall, skinny, whiteclad, elderly Moor, appears in the archway.

BRASSBOUND. Osman Ali (Osman comes forward between Brassbound and Johnson): you have seen this unbeliever (indicating Sir Howard) come in with us?

OSMAN. Yea, and the shameless one with the naked face, who flattered my countenance and offered me her hand.

JOHNSON. Yes; and you took it too, Johnny, didn’t you?

BRASSBOUND. Take horse, then; and ride fast to your master the Sheikh Sidi el Assif.

OSMAN (proudly). Kinsman to the Prophet.

BRASSBOUND. Tell him what you have seen here. That is all. Johnson: give him a dollar; and note the hour of his going, that his master may know how fast he rides.

OSMAN. The believer’s word shall prevail with Allah and his servant Sidi el Assif.

BRASSBOUND. Off with you.

OSMAN. Make good thy master’s word ere I go out from his presence, O Johnson el Hull.

JOHNSON. He wants the dollar.

Brassbound gives Osman a coin.

OSMAN (bowing). Allah will make hell easy for the friend of Sidi el Assif and his servant. (He goes out through the arch.)

BRASSBOUND (to Johnson). Keep the men out of this until the Sheikh comes. I have business to talk over. When he does come, we must keep together all: Sidi el Assif’s natural instinct will be to cut every Christian throat here.

JOHNSON. We look to you, Captain, to square him, since you invited him over.

BRASSBOUND. You can depend on me; and you know it, I think.

JOHNSON (phlegmatically). Yes: we know it. (He is going out when Sir Howard speaks.)

SIR HOWARD. You know also, Mr. Johnson, I hope, that you can depend on ME.

JOHNSON (turning). On YOU, sir?

SIR HOWARD. Yes: on me. If my throat is cut, the Sultan of Morocco may send Sidi’s head with a hundred thousand dollars blood-money to the Colonial Office; but it will not be enough to save his kingdom — any more than it would saw your life, if your Captain here did the same thing.

JOHNSON (struck). Is that so, Captain?

BRASSBOUND. I know the gentleman’s value — better perhaps than he knows it himself. I shall not lose sight of it.

Johnson nods gravely, and is going out when Lady Cicely returns softly by the little door and calls to him in a whisper. She has taken off her travelling things and put on an apron. At her chatelaine is a case of sewing materials.

LADY CICELY. Mr. Johnson. (He turns.) I’ve got Marzo to sleep. Would you mind asking the gentlemen not to make a noise under his window in the courtyard.

JOHNSON. Right, maam. (He goes out.)

Lady Cicely sits down at the tiny table, and begins stitching at a sling bandage for Marzo’s arm. Brassbound walks up and down on her right, muttering to himself so ominously that Sir Howard quietly gets out of his way by crossing to the other side and sitting down on the second saddle seat.

SIR HOWARD. Are you yet able to attend to me for a moment, Captain Brassbound?

BRASSBOUND (still walking about). What do you want?

SIR HOWARD. Well, I am afraid I want a little privacy, and, if you will allow me to say so, a little civility. I am greatly obliged to you for bringing us safely off to-day when we were attacked. So far, you have carried out your contract. But since we have been your guests here, your tone and that of the worst of your men has changed — intentionally changed, I think.

BRASSBOUND (stopping abruptly and flinging the announcement at him). You are not my guest: you are my prisoner.

SIR HOWARD. Prisoner!

Lady Cicely, after a single glance up, continues stitching, apparently quite unconcerned.

BRASSBOUND. I warned you. You should have taken my warning.

SIR HOWARD (immediately taking the tone of cold disgust for moral delinquency). Am I to understand, then, that you are a brigand? Is this a matter of ransom?

BRASSBOUND (with unaccountable intensity). All the wealth of England shall not ransom you.

SIR HOWARD. Then what do you expect to gain by this?

BRASSBOUND. Justice on a thief and a murderer.

Lady Cicely lays down her work and looks up anxiously.

SIR HOWARD (deeply outraged, rising with venerable dignity). Sir: do you apply those terms to me?

BRASSBOUND. I do. (He turns to Lady Cicely, and adds, pointing contemptuously to Sir Howard) Look at him. You would not take this virtuously indignant gentleman for the uncle of a brigand, would you?

Sir Howard starts. The shock is too much for him: he sits down again, looking very old; and his hands tremble; but his eyes and mouth are intrepid, resolute, and angry.

LADY CICELY. Uncle! What do you mean?

BRASSBOUND. Has he never told you about my mother? this fellow who puts on ermine and scarlet and calls himself Justice.

SIR HOWARD (almost voiceless). You are the son of that woman!

BRASSBOUND (fiercely). “That woman!” (He makes a movement as if to rush at Sir Howard.)

LADY CICELY (rising quickly and putting her hand on his arm). Take care. You mustn’t strike an old man.

BRASSBOUND (raging). He did not spare my mother— “that woman,” he calls her — because of her sex. I will not spare him because of his age. (Lowering his tone to one of sullen vindictiveness) But I am not going to strike him. (Lady Cicely releases him, and sits down, much perplexed. Brassbound continues, with an evil glance at Sir Howard) I shall do no more than justice.

SIR HOWARD (recovering his voice and vigor). Justice! I think you mean vengeance, disguised as justice by your passions.

BRASSBOUND. To many and many a poor wretch in the dock YOU have brought vengeance in that disguise — the vengeance of society, disguised as justice by ITS passions. Now the justice you have outraged meets you disguised as vengeance. How do you like it?

SIR HOWARD. I shall meet it, I trust, as becomes an innocent man and an upright judge. What do you charge against me?

BRASSBOUND. I charge you with the death of my mother and the theft of my inheritance.

SIR HOWARD. As to your inheritance, sir, it was yours whenever you came forward to claim it. Three minutes ago I did not know of your existence. I affirm that most solemnly. I never knew — never dreamt — that my brother Miles left a son. As to your mother, her case was a hard one — perhaps the hardest that has come within even my experience. I mentioned it, as such, to Mr. Rankin, the missionary, the evening we met you. As to her death, you know — you MUST know — that she died in her native country, years after our last meeting. Perhaps you were too young to know that she could hardly have expected to live long.

BRASSBOUND. You mean that she drank.

SIR HOWARD. I did not say so. I do not think she was always accountable for what she did.

BRASSBOUND. Yes: she was mad too; and whether drink drove her to madness or madness drove her to drink matters little. The question is, who drove her to both?

SIR HOWARD. I presume the dishonest agent who seized her estate did. I repeat, it was a hard case — a frightful injustice. But it could not be remedied.

BRASSBOUND. You told her so. When she would not take that false answer you drove her from your doors. When she exposed you in the street and threatened to take with her own hands the redress the law denied her, you had her imprisoned, and forced her to write you an apology and leave the country to regain her liberty and save herself from a lunatic asylum. And when she was gone, and dead, and forgotten, you found for yourself the remedy you could not find for her. You recovered the estate easily enough then, robber and rascal that you are. Did he tell the missionary that, Lady Cicely, eh?

LADY CICELY (sympathetically). Poor woman! (To Sir Howard) Couldn’t you have helped her, Howard?

SIR HOWARD. No. This man may be ignorant enough to suppose that when I was a struggling barrister I could do everything I did when I was Attorney General. You know better. There is some excuse for his mother. She was an uneducated Brazilian, knowing nothing of English society, and driven mad by injustice.

BRASSBOUND. Your defence —

SIR HOWARD (interrupting him determinedly). I do not defend myself. I call on you to obey the law.

BRASSBOUND. I intend to do so. The law of the Atlas Mountains is administered by the Sheikh Sidi el Assif. He will be here within an hour. He is a judge like yourself. You can talk law to him. He will give you both the law and the prophets.

SIR HOWARD. Does he know what the power of England is?

BRASSBOUND. He knows that the Mahdi killed my master Gordon, and that the Mahdi died in his bed and went to paradise.

SIR HOWARD. Then he knows also that England’s vengeance was on the Mahdi’s track.

BRASSBOUND. Ay, on the track of the railway from the Cape to Cairo. Who are you, that a nation should go to war for you? If you are missing, what will your newspapers say? A foolhardy tourist. What will your learned friends at the bar say? That it was time for you to make room for younger and better men. YOU a national hero! You had better find a goldfield in the Atlas Mountains. Then all the governments of Europe will rush to your rescue. Until then, take care of yourself; for you are going to see at last the hypocrisy in the sanctimonious speech of the judge who is sentencing you, instead of the despair in the white face of the wretch you are recommending to the mercy of your God.

SIR HOWARD (deeply and personally offended by this slight to his profession, and for the first time throwing away his assumed dignity and rising to approach Brassbound with his fists clenched; so that Lady Cicely lifts one eye from her work to assure herself that the table is between them). I have no more to say to you, sir. I am not afraid of you, nor of any bandit with whom you may be in league. As to your property, it is ready for you as soon as you come to your senses and claim it as your father’s heir. Commit a crime, and you will become an outlaw, and not only lose the property, but shut the doors of civilization against yourself for ever.

BRASSBOUND. I will not sell my mother’s revenge for ten properties.

LADY CICELY (placidly). Besides, really, Howard, as the property now costs 150 pounds a year to keep up instead of bringing in anything, I am afraid it would not be of much use to him. (Brassbound stands amazed at this revelation.)

SIR HOWARD (taken aback). I must say, Cicely, I think you might have chosen a more suitable moment to mention that fact.

BRASSBOUND (with disgust). Agh! Trickster! Lawyer! Even the price you offer for your life is to be paid in false coin. (Calling) Hallo there! Johnson! Redbrook! Some of you there! (To Sir Howard) You ask for a little privacy: you shall have it. I will not endure the company of such a fellow —

SIR HOWARD (very angry, and full of the crustiest pluck). You insult me, sir. You are a rascal. You are a rascal.

Johnson, Redbrook, and a few others come in through the arch.

BRASSBOUND. Take this man away.

JOHNSON. Where are we to put him?

BRASSBOUND. Put him where you please so long as you can find him when he is wanted.

SIR HOWARD. You will be laid by the heels yet, my friend.

REDBROOK (with cheerful tact). Tut tut, Sir Howard: what’s the use of talking back? Come along: we’ll make you comfortable.

Sir Howard goes out through the arch between Johnson and Redbrook, muttering wrathfully. The rest, except Brassbound and Lady Cicely, follow.

Brassbound walks up and down the room, nursing his indignation. In doing so he unconsciously enters upon an unequal contest with Lady Cicely, who sits quietly stitching. It soon becomes clear that a tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming. Further, it begins to dawn on Brassbound’s wrath-blurred perception that Lady Cicely has at some unnoticed stage in the proceedings finished Marzo’s bandage, and is now stitching a coat. He stops; glances at his shirtsleeves; finally realizes the situation.

BRASSBOUND. What are you doing there, madam?

LADY CICELY. Mending your coat, Captain Brassbound.

BRASSBOUND. I have no recollection of asking you to take that trouble.

LADY CICELY. No: I don’t suppose you even knew it was torn. Some men are BORN untidy. You cannot very well receive Sidi el — what’s his name? — with your sleeve half out.

BRASSBOUND (disconcerted). I — I don’t know how it got torn.

LADY CICELY. You should not get virtuously indignant with people. It bursts clothes more than anything else, Mr. Hallam.

BRASSBOUND (flushing, quickly). I beg you will not call me Mr. Hallam. I hate the name.

LADY CICELY. Black Paquito is your pet name, isn’t it?

BRASSBOUND (huffily). I am not usually called so to my face.

LADY CICELY (turning the coat a little). I’m so sorry. (She takes another piece of thread and puts it into her needle, looking placidly and reflectively upward meanwhile.) Do you know, You are wonderfully like your uncle.

BRASSBOUND. Damnation!

LADY CICELY. Eh?

BRASSBOUND. If I thought my veins contained a drop of his black blood, I would drain them empty with my knife. I have no relations. I had a mother: that was all.

LADY CICELY (unconvinced) I daresay you have your mother’s complexion. But didn’t you notice Sir Howard’s temper, his doggedness, his high spirit: above all, his belief in ruling people by force, as you rule your men; and in revenge and punishment, just as you want to revenge your mother? Didn’t you recognize yourself in that?

BRASSBOUND (startled). Myself! — in that!

LADY CECILY (returning to the tailoring question as if her last remark were of no consequence whatever). Did this sleeve catch you at all under the arm? Perhaps I had better make it a little easier for you.

BRASSBOUND (irritably). Let my coat alone. It will do very well as it is. Put it down.

LADY CICILY. Oh, don’t ask me to sit doing nothing. It bores me so.

BRASSBOUND. In Heaven’s name then, do what you like! Only don’t worry me with it.

LADY CICELY. I’m so sorry. All the Hallams are irritable.

BRASSBOUND (penning up his fury with difficulty). As I have already said, that remark has no application to me.

LADY CICELY (resuming her stitching). That’s so funny! They all hate to be told that they are like one another.

BRASSBOUND (with the beginnings of despair in his voice). Why did you come here? My trap was laid for him, not for you. Do you know the danger you are in?

LADY CICELY. There’s always a danger of something or other. Do you think it’s worth bothering about?

BRASSBOUND (scolding her). Do I THINK! Do you think my coat’s worth mending?

LADY CICELY (prosaically). Oh yes: it’s not so far gone as that.

BRASSBOUND. Have you any feeling? Or are you a fool?

LADY CICELY. I’m afraid I’m a dreadful fool. But I can’t help it. I was made so, I suppose.

BRASSBOUND. Perhaps you don’t realize that your friend my good uncle will be pretty fortunate if he is allowed to live out his life as a slave with a set of chains on him?

LADY CICELY. Oh, I don’t know about that, Mr. H — I mean Captain Brassbound. Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

BRASSBOUND. You forget that I am like my uncle, according to you. Have you any doubt as to the reality of HIS badness?

LADY CICELY. Bless me! your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men — much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can’t help doing it, what can you expect? Sir Howard’s all right when he’s left to himself. We caught a burglar one night at Waynflete when he was staying with us; and I insisted on his locking the poor man up until the police came, in a room with a window opening on the lawn. The man came back next day and said he must return to a life of crime unless I gave him a job in the garden; and I did. It was much more sensible than giving him ten years penal servitude: Howard admitted it. So you see he’s not a bit bad really.

BRASSBOUND. He had a fellow feeling for a thief, knowing he was a thief himself. Do you forget that he sent my mother to prison?

LADY CICELY (softly). Were you very fond of your poor mother, and always very good to her?

BRASSBOUND (rather taken aback). I was not worse than other sons, I suppose.

LADY CICELY (opening her eyes very widely). Oh! Was THAT all?

BRASSBOUND (exculpating himself, full of gloomy remembrances). You don’t understand. It was not always possible to be very tender with my mother. She had unfortunately a very violent temper; and she — she —

LADY CICELY. Yes: so you told Howard. (With genuine pity for him) You must have had a very unhappy childhood.

BRASSBOUND (grimily). Hell. That was what my childhood was. Hell.

LADY CICELY. Do you think she would really have killed Howard, as she threatened, if he hadn’t sent her to prison?

BRASSBOUND (breaking out again, with a growing sense of being morally trapped). What if she did? Why did he rob her? Why did he not help her to get the estate, as he got it for himself afterwards?

LADY CICELY. He says he couldn’t, you know. But perhaps the real reason was that he didn’t like her. You know, don’t you, that if you don’t like people you think of all the reasons for not helping them, and if you like them you think of all the opposite reasons.

BRASSBOUND. But his duty as a brother!

LADY CICELY. Are you going to do your duty as a nephew?

BRASSBOUND. Don’t quibble with me. I am going to do my duty as a son; and you know it.

LADY CICELY. But I should have thought that the time for that was in your mother’s lifetime, when you could have been kind and forbearing with her. Hurting your uncle won’t do her any good, you know.

BRASSBOUND. It will teach other scoundrels to respect widows and orphans. Do you forget that there is such a thing as justice?

LADY CICELY (gaily shaking out the finished coat). Oh, if you are going to dress yourself in ermine and call yourself Justice, I give you up. You are just your uncle over again; only he gets £5,000 a year for it, and you do it for nothing.

(She holds the coat up to see whether any further repairs are needed.)

BRASSBOUND (sulkily). You twist my words very cleverly. But no man or woman has ever changed me.

LADY CICELY. Dear me! That must be very nice for the people you deal with, because they can always depend on you; but isn’t it rather inconvenient for yourself when you change your mind?

BRASSBOUND. I never change my mind.

LADY CICELY (rising with the coat in her hands). Oh! Oh!! Nothing will ever persuade me that you are as pigheaded as that.

BRASSBOUND (offended). Pigheaded!

LADY CICELY (with quick, caressing apology). No, no, no. I didn’t mean that. Firm! Unalterable! Resolute! Ironwilled! Stonewall Jackson! That’s the idea, isn’t it?

BRASSBOUND (hopelessly). You are laughing at me.

LADY CICELY. No: trembling, I assure you. Now will you try this on for me: I’m SO afraid I have made it too tight under the arm. (She holds it behind him.)

BRASSBOUND (obeying mechanically). You take me for a fool I think. (He misses the sleeve.)

LADY CICELY. No: all men look foolish when they are feeling for their sleeves.

BRASSBOUND. Agh! (He turns and snatches the coat from her; then puts it on himself and buttons the lowest button.)

LADY CICELY (horrified). Stop. No. You must NEVER pull a coat at the skirts, Captain Brassbound: it spoils the sit of it. Allow me. (She pulls the lappels of his coat vigorously forward) Put back your shoulders. (He frowns, but obeys.) That’s better. (She buttons the top button.) Now button the rest from the top down. DOES it catch you at all under the arm?

BRASSBOUND (miserably — all resistance beaten out of him). No.

LADY CICELY. That’s right. Now before I go back to poor Marzo, say thank you to me for mending your jacket, like a nice polite sailor.

BRASSBOUND (sitting down at the table in great agitation). Damn you! you have belittled my whole life to me. (He bows his head on his hands, convulsed.)

LADY CICELY (quite understanding, and putting her hand kindly on his shoulder). Oh no. I am sure you have done lots of kind things and brave things, if you could only recollect them. With Gordon for instance? Nobody can belittle that.

He looks up at her for a moment; then kisses her hand. She presses his and turns away with her eyes so wet that she sees Drinkwater, coming in through the arch just then, with a prismatic halo round him. Even when she sees him clearly, she hardly recognizes him; for he is ludicrously clean and smoothly brushed; and his hair, formerly mud color, is now a lively red.

DRINKWATER. Look eah, kepn. (Brassbound springs up and recovers himself quickly.) Eahs the bloomin Shike jest appeahd on the orawzn wiv abaht fifty men. Thy’ll be eah insawd o ten minnits, they will.

LADY CICELY. The Sheikh!

BRASSBOUND. Sidi el Assif and fifty men! (To Lady Cicely) You were too late: I gave you up my vengeance when it was no longer in my hand. (To Drinkwater) Call all hands to stand by and shut the gates. Then all here to me for orders; and bring the prisoner.

DRINKWATER. Rawt, kepn. (He runs out.)

LADY CICELY. Is there really any danger for Howard?

BRASSBOUND. Yes. Danger for all of us unless I keep to my bargain with this fanatic.

LADY CICELY. What bargain?

BRASSBOUND. I pay him so much a head for every party I escort through to the interior. In return he protects me and lets my caravans alone. But I have sworn an oath to him to take only Jews and true believers — no Christians, you understand.

LADY CICELY. Then why did you take us?

BRASSBOUND. I took my uncle on purpose — and sent word to Sidi that he was here.

LADY CICELY. Well, that’s a pretty kettle of fish, isn’t it?

BRASSBOUND. I will do what I can to save him — and you. But I fear my repentance has come too late, as repentance usually does.

LADY CICELY (cheerfully). Well, I must go and look after Marzo, at all events. (She goes out through the little door. Johnson, Redbrook and the rest come in through the arch, with Sir Howard, still very crusty and determined. He keeps close to Johnson, who comes to Brassbound’s right, Redbrook taking the other side.)

BRASSBOUND. Where’s Drinkwater?

JOHNSON. On the lookout. Look here, Capn: we don’t half like this job. The gentleman has been talking to us a bit; and we think that he IS a gentleman, and talks straight sense.

REDBROOK. Righto, Brother Johnson. (To Brassbound) Won’t do, governor. Not good enough.

BRASSBOUND (fiercely). Mutiny, eh?

REDBROOK. Not at all, governor. Don’t talk Tommy rot with Brother Sidi only five minutes gallop off. Can’t hand over an Englishman to a nigger to have his throat cut.

BRASSBOUND (unexpectedly acquiescing). Very good. You know, I suppose, that if you break my bargain with Sidi, you’ll have to defend this place and fight for your lives in five minutes. That can’t be done without discipline: you know that too. I’ll take my part with the rest under whatever leader you are willing to obey. So choose your captain and look sharp about it. (Murmurs of surprise and discontent.)

VOICES. No, no. Brassbound must command.

BRASSBOUND. You’re wasting your five minutes. Try Johnson.

JOHNSON. No. I haven’t the head for it.

BRASSBOUND. Well, Redbrook.

REDBROOK. Not this Johnny, thank you. Haven’t character enough.

BRASSBOUND. Well, there’s Sir Howard Hallam for You! HE has character enough.

A VOICE. He’s too old.

ALL. No, no. Brassbound, Brassbound.

JOHNSON. There’s nobody but you, Captain.

REDRROOK. The mutiny’s over, governor. You win, hands down.

BRASSBOUND (turning on them). Now listen, you, all of you. If I am to command here, I am going to do what I like, not what you like. I’ll give this gentleman here to Sidi or to the devil if I choose. I’ll not be intimidated or talked back to. Is that understood?

REDBROOK (diplomatically). He’s offered a present of five hundred quid if he gets safe back to Mogador, governor. Excuse my mentioning it.

SIR HOWARD. Myself AND Lady Cicely.

BRASSBOUND. What! A judge compound a felony! You greenhorns, he is more likely to send you all to penal servitude if you are fools enough to give him the chance.

VOICES. So he would. Whew! (Murmurs of conviction.)

REDBROOK. Righto, governor. That’s the ace of trumps.

BRASSBOUND (to Sir Howard). Now, have you any other card to play? Any other bribe? Any other threat? Quick. Time presses.

SIR HOWARD. My life is in the hands of Providence. Do your worst.

BRASSBOUND. Or my best. I still have that choice.

DRINKWATER (running in). Look eah, kepn. Eah’s anather lot cammin from the sahth heast. Hunnerds of em, this tawm. The owl dezzit is lawk a bloomin Awd Pawk demonstrition. Aw blieve it’s the Kidy from Kintorfy. (General alarm. All look to Brassbound.)

BRASSBOUND (eagerly). The Cadi! How far off?

DRINKWATER. Matter o two mawl.

BRASSBOUND. We’re saved. Open the gates to the Sheikh.

DRINKWATER (appalled, almost in tears). Naow, naow. Lissn, kepn (Pointing to Sir Howard): e’ll give huz fawv unnerd red uns. (To the others) Ynt yer spowk to im, Miste Jornsn — Miste Redbrook —

BRASSBOUND (cutting him short). Now then, do you understand plain English? Johnson and Redbrook: take what men you want and open the gates to the Sheikh. Let him come straight to me. Look alive, will you.

JOHNSON. Ay ay, sir.

REDBROOK. Righto, governor.

They hurry out, with a few others. Drinkwater stares after them, dumbfounded by their obedience.

BRASSBOUND (taking out a pistol). You wanted to sell me to my prisoner, did you, you dog.

DRINKWATER (falling on his knees with a yell). Naow! (Brassbound turns on him as if to kick him. He scrambles away and takes refuge behind Sir Howard.)

BRASSBOUND. Sir Howard Hallam: you have one chance left. The Cadi of Kintafi stands superior to the Sheikh as the responsible governor of the whole province. It is the Cadi who will be sacrificed by the Sultan if England demands satisfaction for any injury to you. If we can hold the Sheikh in parley until the Cadi arrives, you may frighten the Cadi into forcing the Sheikh to release you. The Cadi’s coming is a lucky chance for YOU.

SIR HOWARD. If it were a real chance, you would not tell me of it. Don’t try to play cat and mouse with me, man.

DRINKWATER (aside to Sir Howard, as Brassbound turns contemptuously away to the other side of the room). It ynt mach of a chawnst, Sr Ahrd. But if there was a ganbowt in Mogador Awbr, awd put a bit on it, aw would.

Johnson, Redbrook, and the others return, rather mistrustfully ushering in Sidi el Assif, attended by Osman and a troop of Arabs. Brassbound’s men keep together on the archway side, backing their captain. Sidi’s followers cross the room behind the table and assemble near Sir Howard, who stands his ground. Drinkwater runs across to Brassbound and stands at his elbow as he turns to face Sidi.

Sidi el Aasif, clad in spotless white, is a nobly handsome Arab, hardly thirty, with fine eyes, bronzed complexion, and instinctively dignified carriage. He places himself between the two groups, with Osman in attendance at his right hand.

OSMAN (pointing out Sir Howard). This is the infidel Cadi. (Sir Howard bows to Sidi, but, being an infidel, receives only the haughtiest stare in acknowledgement.) This (pointing to Brassbound) is Brassbound the Franguestani captain, the servant of Sidi.

DRINKWATER (not to be outdone, points out the Sheikh and Osman to Brassbound). This eah is the Commawnder of the Fythful an is Vizzeer Rosman.

SIDI. Where is the woman?

OSMAN. The shameless one is not here.

BRASSBOUND. Sidi el Assif, kinsman of the Prophet: you are welcome.

REDBROOK (with much aplomb). There is no majesty and no might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great!

DRINKWATER. Eah, eah!

OSMAN (to Sidi). The servant of the captain makes his profession of faith as a true believer.

SIDI. It is well.

BRASSBOUND (aside to Redbrook). Where did you pick that up?

REDRROOK (aside to Brassbound). Captain Burton’s Arabian Nights — copy in the library of the National Liberal Club.

LADY CICELY (calling without). Mr. Drinkwater. Come and help me with Marzo. (The Sheikh pricks up his ears. His nostrils and eyes expand.)

OSMAN. The shameless one!

BRASSBOUND (to Drinkwater, seizing him by the collar and slinging him towards the door). Off with you.

Drinkwater goes out through the little door.

OSMAN. Shall we hide her face before she enters?

SIDI. NO.

Lady Cicely, who has resumed her travelling equipment, and has her hat slung across her arm, comes through the little door supporting Marzo, who is very white, but able to get about. Drinkwater has his other arm. Redbrook hastens to relieve Lady Cicely of Marzo, taking him into the group behind Brassbound. Lady Cicely comes forward between Brassbound and the Sheikh, to whom she turns affably.

LADY CICELY (proffering her hand). Sidi el Assif, isn’t it? How dye do? (He recoils, blushing somewhat.)

OSMAN (scandalized). Woman; touch not the kinsman of the Prophet.

LADY CICELY. Oh, I see. I’m being presented at court. Very good. (She makes a presentation curtsey.)

REDBROOK. Sidi el Assif: this is one of the mighty women Sheikhs of Franguestan. She goes unveiled among Kings; and only princes may touch her hand.

LADY CICELY. Allah upon thee, Sidi el Assif! Be a good little Sheikh, and shake hands.

SIDI (timidly touching her hand). Now this is a wonderful thing, and worthy to be chronicled with the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Is it not so, Osman Ali?

OSMAN. Allah upon thee, master! it is so.

SIDI. Brassbound Ali: the oath of a just man fulfils itself without many words. The infidel Cadi, thy captive, falls to my share.

BRASSBOUND (firmly). It cannot be, Sidi el Assif. (Sidi’s brows contract gravely.) The price of his blood will be required of our lord the Sultan. I will take him to Morocco and deliver him up there.

SIDI (impressively). Brassbound: I am in mine own house and amid mine own people. I am the Sultan here. Consider what you say; for when my word goes forth for life or death, it may not be recalled.

BRASSBOUND. Sidi el Assif: I will buy the man from you at what price you choose to name; and if I do not pay faithfully, you shall take my head for his.

SIDI. It is well. You shall keep the man, and give me the woman in payment.

SIR HOWARD AND BRASSBOUND (with the same impulse). No, no.

LADY CICELY (eagerly). Yes, yes. Certainly, Mr. Sidi. Certainly.

Sidi smiles gravely.

SIR HOWARD. Impossible.

BRASSBOUND. You don’t know what you’re doing.

LADY CICELY. Oh, don’t I? I’ve not crossed Africa and stayed with six cannibal chiefs for nothing. (To the Sheikh) It’s all right, Mr. Sidi: I shall be delighted.

SIR HOWARD. You are mad. Do you suppose this man will treat you as a European gentleman would?

LADY CICELY. No: he’ll treat me like one of Nature’s gentlemen: look at his perfectly splendid face! (Addressing Osman as if he were her oldest and most attached retainer.) Osman: be sure you choose me a good horse; and get a nice strong camel for my luggage.

Osman, after a moment of stupefaction, hurries out. Lady Cicely puts on her hat and pins it to her hair, the Sheikh gazing at her during the process with timid admiration.

DRINKWATER (chuckling). She’ll mawch em all to church next Sunder lawk a bloomin lot o’ cherrity kids: you see if she doesn’t.

LADY CICELY (busily). Goodbye, Howard: don’t be anxious about me; and above all, don’t bring a parcel of men with guns to rescue me. I shall be all right now that I am getting away from the escort. Captain Brassbound: I rely on you to see that Sir Howard gets safe to Mogador. (Whispering) Take your hand off that pistol. (He takes his hand out of his pocket, reluctantly.) Goodbye.

A tumult without. They all turn apprehensively to the arch. Osman rushes in.

OSMAN. The Cadi, the Cadi. He is in anger. His men are upon us. Defend —

The Cadi, a vigorous, fatfeatured, choleric, whitehaired and bearded elder, rushes in, cudgel in hand, with an overwhelming retinue, and silences Osman with a sounding thwack. In a moment the back of the room is crowded with his followers. The Sheikh retreats a little towards his men; and the Cadi comes impetuously forward between him and Lady Cicely.

THE CADI. Now woe upon thee, Sidi el Assif, thou child of mischief!

SIDI (sternly). Am I a dog, Muley Othman, that thou speakest thus to me?

THE CADI. Wilt thou destroy thy country, and give us all into the hands of them that set the sea on fire but yesterday with their ships of war? Where are the Franguestani captives?

LADY CICELY. Here we are, Cadi. How dye do?

THE CADI. Allah upon thee, thou moon at the full! Where is thy kinsman, the Cadi of Franguestan? I am his friend, his servant. I come on behalf of my master the Sultan to do him honor, and to cast down his enemies.

SIR HOWARD. You are very good, I am sure.

SIDI (graver than ever). Muley Othman —

TAE CADI (fumbling in his breast). Peace, peace, thou inconsiderate one. (He takes out a letter.)

BRASSBOUND. Cadi —

THE CADI. Oh thou dog, thou, thou accursed Brassbound, son of a wanton: it is thou hast led Sidi el Assif into this wrongdoing. Read this writing that thou hast brought upon me from the commander of the warship.

BRASSBOUND. Warship! (He takes the letter and opens it, his men whispering to one another very low-spiritedly meanwhile.)

REDBROOK. Warship! Whew!

JOHNSON. Gunboat, praps.

DRINKWATER. Lawk bloomin Worterleoo buses, they are, on this cowst.

Brassbound folds up the letter, looking glum.

SIR HOWARD (sharply). Well, sir, are we not to have the benefit of that letter? Your men are waiting to hear it, I think.

BRASSBOUND. It is not a British ship. (Sir Howard’s face falls.)

LADY CICELY. What is it, then?

BRASSBOUND. An American cruiser. The Santiago.

THE CADI (tearing his beard). Woe! alas! it is where they set the sea on fire.

SIDI. Peace, Muley Othman: Allah is still above us.

JOHNSON. Would you mind readin it to us, capn?

BRASSBOUND (grimly). Oh, I’ll read it to you. “Mogador Harbor. 26 Sept. 1899. Captain Hamlin Kearney, of the cruiser Santiago, presents the compliments of the United States to the Cadi Muley Othman el Kintafi, and announces that he is coming to look for the two British travellers Sir Howard Hallam and Lady Cicely Waynflete, in the Cadi’s jurisdiction. As the search will be conducted with machine guns, the prompt return of the travellers to Mogador Harbor will save much trouble to all parties.”

THE CADI. As I live, O Cadi, and thou, moon of loveliness, ye shall be led back to Mogador with honor. And thou, accursed Brassbound, shall go thither a prisoner in chains, thou and thy people. (Brassbound and his men make a movement to defend themselves.) Seize them.

LADY CICELY. Oh, please don’t fight. (Brassbound, seeing that his men are hopelessly outnumbered, makes no resistance. They are made prisoners by the Cadi’s followers.)

SIDI (attempting to draw his scimitar). The woman is mine: I will not forego her. (He is seized and overpowered after a Homeric struggle.)

SIR HOWARD (drily). I told you you were not in a strong position, Captain Brassbound. (Looking implacably at him.) You are laid by the heels, my friend, as I said you would be.

LADY CICELY. But I assure you —

BRASSBOUND (interrupting her). What have you to assure him of? You persuaded me to spare him. Look at his face. Will you be able to persuade him to spare me?

ACT III

Torrid forenoon filtered through small Moorish windows high up in the adobe walls of the largest room in Leslie Rankin’s house. A clean cool room, with the table (a Christian article) set in the middle, a presidentially elbowed chair behind it, and an inkstand and paper ready for the sitter. A couple of cheap American chairs right and left of the table, facing the same way as the presidential chair, give a judicial aspect to the arrangement. Rankin is placing a little tray with a jug and some glasses near the inkstand when Lady Cicely’s voice is heard at the door, which is behind him in the corner to his right.

LADE CICELY. Good morning. May I come in?

RANKIN. Certainly. (She comes in, to the nearest end of the table. She has discarded all travelling equipment, and is dressed exactly as she might be in Surrey on a very hot day.) Sit ye doon, Leddy Ceecily.

LADY CICELY (sitting down). How nice you’ve made the room for the inquiry!

RANKIN (doubtfully). I could wish there were more chairs. Yon American captain will preside in this; and that leaves but one for Sir Howrrd and one for your leddyship. I could almost be tempted to call it a maircy that your friend that owns the yacht has sprained his ankle and cannot come. I misdoubt me it will not look judeecial to have Captain Kearney’s officers squatting on the floor.

LADY CICELY. Oh, they won’t mind. What about the prisoners?

RANKIN. They are to be broat here from the town gaol presently.

LADY CICELY. And where is that silly old Cadi, and my handsome Sheikh Sidi? I must see them before the inquiry,or they’ll give Captain Kearney quite a false impression of what happened.

RANKIN. But ye cannot see them. They decamped last night, back to their castles in the Atlas.

LADY CICELY (delighted). No!

RANKIN. Indeed and they did. The poor Cadi is so terrified by all he has haird of the destruction of the Spanish fleet, that he daren’t trust himself in the captain’s hands. (Looking reproachfully at her) On your journey back here, ye seem to have frightened the poor man yourself, Leddy Ceecily, by talking to him about the fanatical Chreestianity of the Americans. Ye have largely yourself to thank if he’s gone.

LADY CICELY. Allah be praised! WHAT a weight off our minds, Mr. Rankin!

RANKIN (puzzled). And why? Do ye not understand how necessary their evidence is?

LADY CICELY. THEIR evidence! It would spoil everything. They would perjure themselves out of pure spite against poor Captain Brassbound.

RANKIN (amazed). Do ye call him POOR Captain Brassbound! Does not your leddyship know that this Brasshound is — Heaven forgive me for judging him! — a precious scoundrel? Did ye not hear what Sir Howrrd told me on the yacht last night?

LADY CICELY. All a mistake, Mr. Rankin: all a mistake, I assure you. You said just now, Heaven forgive you for judging him! Well, that’s just what the whole quarrel is about. Captain Brassbound is just like you: he thinks we have no right to judge one another; and its Sir Howard gets £5,000 a year for doing nothing else but judging people, he thinks poor Captain Brassbound a regular Anarchist. They quarreled dreadfully at the castle. You mustn’t mind what Sir Howard says about him: you really mustn’t.

RANKIN. But his conduct —

LADY CICELY. Perfectly saintly, Mr. Rankin. Worthy of yourself in your best moments. He forgave Sir Howard, and did all he could to save him.

RANKIN. Ye astoanish me, Leddy Ceecily.

LADY CICELY. And think of the temptation to behave badly when he had us all there helpless!

RANKIN. The temptation! ay: that’s true. Ye’re ower bonny to be cast away among a parcel o lone, lawless men, my leddy.

LADY CICELY (naively). Bless me, that’s quite true; and I never thought of it! Oh, after that you really must do all you can to help Captain Brassbound.

RANKIN (reservedly). No: I cannot say that, Leddy Ceecily. I doubt he has imposed on your good nature and sweet disposeetion. I had a crack with the Cadi as well as with Sir Howrrd; and there is little question in my mind but that Captain Brassbound is no better than a breegand.

LADY CICELY (apparently deeply impressed). I wonder whether he can be, Mr. Rankin. If you think so, that’s heavily against him in my opinion, because you have more knowledge of men than anyone else here. Perhaps I’m mistaken. I only thought you might like to help him as the son of your old friend.

RANKIN (startled). The son of my old friend! What d’ye mean?

LADY CICELY. Oh! Didn’t Sir Howard tell you that? Why, Captain Brassbound turns out to be Sir Howard’s nephew, the son of the brother you knew.

RANKIN (overwhelmed). I saw the likeness the night he came here! It’s true: it’s true. Uncle and nephew!

LADY CICELY. Yes: that’s why they quarrelled so.

RANKIN (with a momentary sense of ill usage). I think Sir Howrrd might have told me that.

LADY CICELY. Of course he OUGHT to have told you. You see he only tells one side of the story. That comes from his training as a barrister. You mustn’t think he’s naturally deceitful: if he’d been brought up as a clergyman, he’d have told you the whole truth as a matter of course.

RANKIN (too much perturbed to dwell on his grievance). Leddy Ceecily: I must go to the prison and see the lad. He may have been a bit wild; but I can’t leave poor Miles’s son unbefriended in a foreign gaol.

LADY CICELY (rising, radiant). Oh, how good of you! You have a real kind heart of gold, Mr. Rankin. Now, before you go, shall we just put our heads together, and consider how to give Miles’s son every chance — I mean of course every chance that he ought to have.

RANKIN (rather addled). I am so confused by this astoanishing news —

LADY CICELY. Yes, yes: of course you are. But don’t you think he would make a better impression on the American captain if he were a little more respectably dressed?

RANKIN. Mebbe. But how can that be remedied here in Mogador?

LADY CICELY. Oh, I’ve thought of that. You know I’m going back to England by way of Rome, Mr. Rankin; and I’m bringing a portmanteau full of clothes for my brother there: he’s ambassador, you know, and has to be VERY particular as to what he wears. I had the portmanteau brought here this morning. Now WOULD you mind taking it to the prison, and smartening up Captain Brassbound a little. Tell him he ought to do it to show his respect for me; and he will. It will be quite easy: there are two Krooboys waiting to carry the portmanteau. You will: I know you will. (She edges him to the door.) And do you think there is time to get him shaved?

RANKIN (succumbing, half bewildered). I’ll do my best.

LADY CICELY. I know you will. (As he is going out) Oh! one word, Mr. Rankin. (He comes back.) The Cadi didn’t know that Captain Brassbound was Sir Howard’s nephew, did he?

RANKIN. No.

LADY CICELY. Then he must have misunderstood everything quite dreadfully. I’m afraid, Mr. Rankin — though you know best, of course — that we are bound not to repeat anything at the inquiry that the Cadi said. He didn’t know, you see.

RANKIN (cannily). I take your point, Leddy Ceecily. It alters the case. I shall certainly make no allusion to it.

LADY CICELY (magnanimously). Well, then, I won’t either. There! They shake hands on it. Sir Howard comes in.

SIR HOWARD. Good morning Mr. Rankin. I hope you got home safely from the yacht last night.

RANKIN. Quite safe, thank ye, Sir Howrrd.

LADY CICELY. Howard, he’s in a hurry. Don’t make him stop to talk.

SIR HOWARD. Very good, very good. (He comes to the table and takes Lady Cicely’s chair.)

RANKIN. Oo revoir, Leddy Ceecily.

LADY CICELY. Bless you, Mr. Rankin. (Rankin goes out. She comes to the other end of the table, looking at Sir Howard with a troubled, sorrowfully sympathetic air, but unconsciously making her right hand stalk about the table on the tips of its fingers in a tentative stealthy way which would put Sir Howard on his guard if he were in a suspicious frame of mind, which, as it happens, he is not.) I’m so sorry for you, Howard, about this unfortunate inquiry.

SIR HOWARD (swinging round on his chair, astonished). Sorry for ME! Why?

LADY CICELY. It will look so dreadful. Your own nephew, you know.

SIR HOWARD. Cicely: an English judge has no nephews, no sons even, when he has to carry out the law.

LADY CICELY. But then he oughtn’t to have any property either. People will never understand about the West Indian Estate. They’ll think you’re the wicked uncle out of the Babes in the Wood. (With a fresh gush of compassion) I’m so SO sorry for you.

SIR HOWARD (rather stiffly). I really do not see how I need your commiseration, Cicely. The woman was an impossible person, half mad, half drunk. Do you understand what such a creature is when she has a grievance, and imagines some innocent person to be the author of it?

LADY CICELY (with a touch of impatience). Oh, quite. THAT’ll be made clear enough. I can see it all in the papers already: our half mad, half drunk sister-in-law, making scenes with you in the street, with the police called in, and prison and all the rest of it. The family will be furious. (Sir Howard quails. She instantly follows up her advantage with) Think of papa!

SIR HOWARD. I shall expect Lord Waynflete to look at the matter as a reasonable man.

LADY CICELY. Do you think he’s so greatly changed as that, Howard?

SIR HOWARD (falling back on the fatalism of the depersonalized public man). My dear Cicely: there is no use discussing the matter. It cannot be helped, however disagreeable it may be.

LADY CICELY. Of course not. That’s what’s so dreadful. Do you think people will understand?

SIR HOWARD. I really cannot say. Whether they do or not, I cannot help it.

LADY CICELY. If you were anybody but a judge, it wouldn’t matter so much. But a judge mustn’t even be misunderstood. (Despairingly) Oh, it’s dreadful, Howard: it’s terrible! What would poor Mary say if she were alive now?

SIR HOWARD (with emotion). I don’t think, Cicely, that my dear wife would misunderstand me.

LADY CICELY. No: SHE’D know you mean well. And when you came home and said, “Mary: I’ve just told all the world that your sister-in-law was a police court criminal, and that I sent her to prison; and your nephew is a brigand, and I’m sending HIM to prison.” she’d have thought it must be all right because you did it. But you don’t think she would have LIKED it, any more than papa and the rest of us, do you?

SIR HOWARD (appalled). But what am I to do? Do you ask me to compound a felony?

LADY CICELY (sternly). Certainly not. I would not allow such a thing, even if you were wicked enough to attempt it. No. What I say is, that you ought not to tell the story yourself

SIR HOWARD. Why?

LADY CICELY. Because everybody would say you are such a clever lawyer you could make a poor simple sailor like Captain Kearney believe anything. The proper thing for you to do, Howard, is to let ME tell the exact truth. Then you can simply say that you are bound to confirm me. Nobody can blame you for that.

SIR HOWARD (looking suspiciously at her). Cicely: you are up to some devilment.

LADY CICELY (promptly washing her hands of his interests). Oh, very well. Tell the story yourself, in your own clever way. I only proposed to tell the exact truth. You call that devilment. So it is, I daresay, from a lawyer’s point of view.

SIR HOWARD. I hope you’re not offended.

LADY CICELY (with the utmost goodhumor). My dear Howard, not a bit. Of course you’re right: you know how these things ought to be done. I’ll do exactly what you tell me, and confirm everything you say.

SIR HOWARD (alarmed by the completeness of his victory). Oh, my dear, you mustn’t act in MY interest. You must give your evidence with absolute impartiality. (She nods, as if thoroughly impressed and reproved, and gazes at him with the steadfast candor peculiar to liars who read novels. His eyes turn to the ground; and his brow clouds perplexedly. He rises; rubs his chin nervously with his forefinger; and adds) I think, perhaps, on reflection, that there is something to be said for your proposal to relieve me of the very painful duty of telling what has occurred.

LADI CICELY (holding off). But you’d do it so very much better.

SIR HOWARD. For that very reason, perhaps, it had better come from you.

LADY CICELY (reluctantly). Well, if you’d rather.

SIR HOWARD. But mind, Cicely, the exact truth.

LADY CICELY (with conviction). The exact truth. (They shake hands on it.)

SIR HOWARD (holding her hand). Fiat justitia: ruat coelum!

LADY CICELY. Let Justice be done, though the ceiling fall.

An American bluejacket appears at the door.

BLUEJACKET. Captain Kearney’s cawmpliments to Lady Waynflete; and may he come in?

LADY CICELY. Yes. By all means. Where are the prisoners?

BLUEJACKET. Party gawn to the jail to fetch em, marm.

LADY CICELY. Thank you. I should like to be told when they are coming, if I might.

BLUEJACKET. You shall so, marm. (He stands aside, saluting, to admit his captain, and goes out.)

Captain Hamlin Kearney is a robustly built western American, with the keen, squeezed, wind beaten eyes and obstinately enduring mouth of his profession. A curious ethnological specimen, with all the nations of the old world at war in his veins, he is developing artificially in the direction of sleekness and culture under the restraints of an overwhelming dread of European criticism, and climatically in the direction of the indiginous North American, who is already in possession of his hair, his cheekbones, and the manlier instincts in him, which the sea has rescued from civilization. The world, pondering on the great part of its own future which is in his hands, contemplates him with wonder as to what the devil he will evolve into in another century or two. Meanwhile he presents himself to Lady Cicely as a blunt sailor who has something to say to her concerning her conduct which he wishes to put politely, as becomes an officer addressing a lady, but also with an emphatically implied rebuke, as an American addressing an English person who has taken a liberty.

LADY CICELY (as he enters). So glad you’ve come, Captain Kearney.

KEARNEY (coming between Sir Howard and Lady Cicely). When we parted yesterday ahfternoon, Lady Waynflete, I was unaware that in the course of your visit to my ship you had entirely altered the sleeping arrangements of my stokers. I thahnk you. As captain of the ship, I am customairily cawnsulted before the orders of English visitors are carried out; but as your alterations appear to cawndooce to the comfort of the men, I have not interfered with them.

LADY CICELY. How clever of you to find out! I believe you know every bolt in that ship.

Kearney softens perceptibly.

SIR HOWARD. I am really very sorry that my sister-in-law has taken so serious a liberty, Captain Kearney. It is a mania of hers — simply a mania. Why did your men pay any attention to her?

KEARNEY (with gravely dissembled humor). Well, I ahsked that question too. I said, Why did you obey that lady’s orders instead of waiting for mine? They said they didn’t see exactly how they could refuse. I ahsked whether they cawnsidered that discipline. They said, Well, sir, will you talk to the lady yourself next time?

LADY CICELY. I’m so sorry. But you know, Captain, the one thing that one misses on board a man-of-war is a woman.

KEARNEY. We often feel that deprivation verry keenly, Lady Waynflete.

LADY CICELY. My uncle is first Lord of the Admiralty; and I am always telling him what a scandal it is that an English captain should be forbidden to take his wife on board to look after the ship.

KEARNEY. Stranger still, Lady Waynflete, he is not forbidden to take any other lady. Yours is an extraordinairy country — to an Amerrican.

LADY CICELY. But it’s most serious, Captain. The poor men go melancholy mad, and ram each other’s ships and do all sorts of things.

SIR HOWARD. Cicely: I beg you will not talk nonsense to Captain Kearney. Your ideas on some subjects are really hardly decorous.

LADY CICELY (to Kearney). That’s what English people are like, Captain Kearney. They won’t hear of anything concerning you poor sailors except Nelson and Trafalgar. YOU understand me, don’t you?

KEARNEY (gallantly). I cawnsider that you have more sense in your wedding ring finger than the British Ahdmiralty has in its whole cawnstitootion, Lady Waynflete.

LADY CICELY. Of course I have. Sailors always understand things.

The bluejacket reappears.

BLUEJACKET (to Lady Cicely). Prisoners coming up the hill, marm.

KEARNEY (turning sharply on him). Who sent you in to say that?

BLUEJACKET (calmly). British lady’s orders, sir. (He goes out, unruffled, leaving Kearney dumbfounded.)

SIR HOWARD (contemplating Kearney’s expression with dismay). I am really very sorry, Captain Kearney. I am quite aware that Lady Cicely has no right whatever to give orders to your men.

LADY CICELY. I didn’t give orders: I just asked him. He has such a nice face! Don’t you think so, Captain Kearney? (He gasps, speechless.) And now will you excuse me a moment. I want to speak to somebody before the inquiry begins. (She hurries out.)

KEARNEY. There is sertnly a wonderful chahrn about the British aristocracy, Sir Howard Hallam. Are they all like that? (He takes the presidential chair.)

SIR HOWARD (resuming his seat on Kearney’s right). Fortunately not, Captain Kearney. Half a dozen such women would make an end of law in England in six months.

The bluejacket comes to the door again.

BLUEJACKET. All ready, sir.

KEARNEY. Verry good. I’m waiting.

The bluejacket turns and intimates this to those without.

The officers of the Santiago enter.

SIR HOWARD (rising and bobbing to them in a judicial manner). Good morning, gentlemen.

They acknowledge the greeting rather shyly, bowing or touching their caps, and stand in a group behind Kearney.

KEARNEY (to Sir Howard). You will be glahd to hear that I have a verry good account of one of our prisoners from our chahplain, who visited them in the gaol. He has expressed a wish to be cawnverted to Episcopalianism.

SIR HOWARD (drily). Yes, I think I know him.

KEARNEY. Bring in the prisoners.

BLUEJACKET (at the door). They are engaged with the British lady, sir. Shall I ask her —

KEARNEY (jumping up and exploding in storm piercing tones). Bring in the prisoners. Tell the lady those are my orders. Do you hear? Tell her so. (The bluejacket goes out dubiously. The officers look at one another in mute comment on the unaccountable pepperiness of their commander.)

SIR HOWARD (suavely). Mr. Rankin will be present, I presume.

KEARNEY (angrily). Rahnkin! Who is Rahnkin?

SIR HOWARD. Our host the missionary.

KEARNEY (subsiding unwillingly). Oh! Rahnkin, is he? He’d better look sharp or he’ll be late. (Again exploding.) What are they doing with those prisoners?

Rankin hurries in, and takes his place near Sir Howard.

SIR HOWARD. This is Mr. Rankin, Captain Kearney.

RANKIN. Excuse my delay, Captain Kearney. The leddy sent me on an errand. (Kearney grunts.) I thought I should be late. But the first thing I heard when I arrived was your officer giving your compliments to Leddy Ceecily, and would she kindly allow the prisoners to come in, as you were anxious to see her again. Then I knew I was in time.

KEARNEY. Oh, that was it, was it? May I ask, sir, did you notice any sign on Lady Waynflete’s part of cawmplying with that verry moderate request?

LADY CICELY (outside). Coming, coming.

The prisoners are brought in by a guard of armed bluejackets.

Drinkwater first, again elaborately clean, and conveying by a virtuous and steadfast smirk a cheerful confidence in his innocence. Johnson solid and inexpressive, Redbrook unconcerned and debonair, Marzo uneasy. These four form a little group together on the captain’s left. The rest wait unintelligently on Providence in a row against the wall on the same side, shepherded by the bluejackets. The first bluejacket, a petty officer, posts himself on the captain’s right, behind Rankin and Sir Howard. Finally Brassbound appears with Lady Cicely on his arm. He is in fashionable frock coat and trousers, spotless collar and cuffs, and elegant boots. He carries a glossy tall hat in his hand. To an unsophisticated eye, the change is monstrous and appalling; and its effect on himself is so unmanning that he is quite out of countenance — a shaven Samson. Lady Cicely, however, is greatly pleased with it; and the rest regard it as an unquestionable improvement. The officers fall back gallantly to allow her to pass. Kearney rises to receive her, and stares with some surprise at Brassbound as he stops at the table on his left. Sir Howard rises punctiliously when Kearney rises and sits when he sits.

KEARNEY. Is this another gentleman of your party, Lady Waynflete? I presume I met you lahst night, sir, on board the yacht.

BRASSBOUND. No. I am your prisoner. My name is Brassbound.

DRINKWATER (officiously). Kepn Brarsbahnd, of the schooner Thenksgiv —

REDBROOK (hastily). Shut up, you fool. (He elbows Drinkwater into the background.)

KEARNEY (surprised and rather suspicious). Well, I hardly understahnd this. However, if you are Captain Brassbound, you can take your place with the rest. (Brassbound joins Redbrook and Johnson. Kearney sits down again, after inviting Lady Cicely, with a solemn gesture, to take the vacant chair.) Now let me see. You are a man of experience in these matters, Sir Howard Hallam. If you had to conduct this business, how would you start?

LADY CICELY. He’d call on the counsel for the prosecution, wouldn’t you, Howard?

SIR HOWARD. But there is no counsel for the prosecution, Cicely.

LADY CICELY. Oh yes there is. I’m counsel for the prosecution. You mustn’t let Sir Howard make a speech, Captain Kearney: his doctors have positively forbidden anything of that sort. Will you begin with me?

KEARNEY. By your leave, Lady Waynfiete, I think I will just begin with myself. Sailor fashion will do as well here as lawyer fashion.

LADY CICELY. Ever so much better, dear Captain Kearney. (Silence. Kearney composes himself to speak. She breaks out again). You look so nice as a judge!

A general smile. Drinkwater splutters into a half suppressed laugh.

REDBROOK (in a fierce whisper). Shut up, you fool, will you? (Again he pushes him back with a furtive kick.)

SIR HOWARD (remonstrating). Cicely!

KEARNEY (grimly keeping his countenance). Your ladyship’s cawmpliments will be in order at a later stage. Captain Brassbound: the position is this. My ship, the United States cruiser Santiago, was spoken off Mogador latest Thursday by the yacht Redgauntlet. The owner of the aforesaid yacht, who is not present through having sprained his ankle, gave me sertn information. In cawnsequence of that information the Santiago made the twenty knots to Mogador Harbor inside of fifty-seven minutes. Before noon next day a messenger of mine gave the Cadi of the district sertn information. In cawnsequence of that information the Cadi stimulated himself to some ten knots an hour, and lodged you and your men in Mogador jail at my disposal. The Cadi then went back to his mountain fahstnesses; so we shall not have the pleasure of his company here to-day. Do you follow me so far?

BRASSBOUND. Yes. I know what you did and what the Cadi did. The point is, why did you do it?

KEARNEY. With doo patience we shall come to that presently. Mr. Rahnkin: will you kindly take up the parable?

RANKIN. On the very day that Sir Howrrd and Lady Cicely started on their excursion I was applied to for medicine by a follower of the Sheikh Sidi el Assif. He told me I should never see Sir Howrrd again, because his master knew he was a Christian and would take him out of the hands of Captain Brassbound. I hurried on board the yacht and told the owner to scour the coast for a gunboat or cruiser to come into the harbor and put persuasion on the authorities. (Sir Howard turns and looks at Rankin with a sudden doubt of his integrity as a witness.)

KEARNEY. But I understood from our chahplain that you reported Captain Brassbound as in league with the Sheikh to deliver Sir Howard up to him.

RANKIN. That was my first hasty conclusion, Captain Kearney. But it appears that the compact between them was that Captain Brassbound should escort travellers under the Sheikh’s protection at a certain payment per head, provided none of them were Christians. As I understand it, he tried to smuggle Sir Howrrd through under this compact, and the Sheikh found him out.

DRINKWATER. Rawt, gavner. Thet’s jest ah it wors. The Kepn —

REDBROOK (again suppressing him). Shut up, you fool, I tell you.

SIR HOWARD (to Rankin). May I ask have you had any conversation with Lady Cicely on this subject?

RANKIN (naively). Yes. (Sir Howard qrunts emphatically, as who should say “I thought so.” Rankin continues, addressing the court) May I say how sorry I am that there are so few chairs, Captain and gentlemen.

KEARNEY (with genial American courtesy). Oh, THAT’s all right, Mr. Rahnkin. Well, I see no harm so far: it’s human fawlly, but not human crime. Now the counsel for the prosecution can proceed to prosecute. The floor is yours, Lady Waynflete.

LADY CICELY (rising). I can only tell you the exact truth —

DRINKWATER (involuntarily). Naow, down’t do thet, lidy —

REDBROOK (as before). SHUT up, you fool, will you?

LADY CICELY. We had a most delightful trip in the hills; and Captain Brassbound’s men could not have been nicer — I must say that for them — until we saw a tribe of Arabs — such nice looking men! — and then the poor things were frightened.

KEARNEY. The Arabs?

LADY CICELY. No: Arabs are never frightened. The escort, of course: escorts are always frightened. I wanted to speak to the Arab chief; but Captain Brassbound cruelly shot his horse; and the chief shot the Count; and then —

KEARNEY. The Count! What Count?

LADY CICELY. Marzo. That’s Marzo (pointing to Marzo, who grins and touches his forehead).

KEARNEY (slightly overwhelmed by the unexpected profusion of incident and character in her story). Well, what happened then?

LADY CICELY. Then the escort ran away — all escorts do — and dragged me into the castle, which you really ought to make them clean and whitewash thoroughly, Captain Kearney. Then Captain Brassbound and Sir Howard turned out to be related to one another (sensation); and then of course, there was a quarrel. The Hallams always quarrel.

SIR HOWARD (rising to protest). Cicely! Captain Kearney: this man told me —

LADY CICELY (swiftly interrupting him). You mustn’t say what people told you: it’s not evidence. (Sir Howard chokes with indignation.)

KEARNEY (calmly). Allow the lady to proceed, Sir Howard Hallam.

SIR HOWARD (recovering his self-control with a gulp, and resuming his seat). I beg your pardon, Captain Kearney.

LADY CICELY. Then Sidi came.

KEARNEY. Sidney! Who was Sidney?

LADY CICELY. No, Sidi. The Sheikh. Sidi el Assif. A noble creature, with such a fine face! He fell in love with me at first sight —

SIR HOWARD (remonstrating). Cicely!

LADY CICELY. He did: you know he did. You told me to tell the exact truth.

KEARNEY. I can readily believe it, madam. Proceed.

LADY CICELY. Well, that put the poor fellow into a most cruel dilemma. You see, he could claim to carry off Sir Howard, because Sir Howard is a Christian. But as I am only a woman, he had no claim to me.

KEARNEY (somewhat sternly, suspecting Lady Cicely of aristocratic atheism). But you are a Christian woman.

LADY CICELY. No: the Arabs don’t count women. They don’t believe we have any souls.

RANKIN. That is true, Captain: the poor benighted creatures!

LADY CICELY. Well, what was he to do? He wasn’t in love with Sir Howard; and he WAS in love with me. So he naturally offered to swop Sir Howard for me. Don’t you think that was nice of him, Captain Kearney?

KEARNEY. I should have done the same myself, Lady Waynflete. Proceed.

LADY CICELY. Captain Brassbound, I must say, was nobleness itself, in spite of the quarrel between himself and Sir Howard. He refused to give up either of us, and was on the point of fighting for us when in came the Cadi with your most amusing and delightful letter, captain, and bundled us all back to Mogador after calling my poor Sidi the most dreadful names, and putting all the blame on Captain Brassbound. So here we are. Now, Howard, isn’t that the exact truth, every word of it?

SIR HOWARD. It is the truth, Cicely, and nothing but the truth. But the English law requires a witness to tell the WHOLE truth.

LADY CICELY. What nonsense! As if anybody ever knew the whole truth about anything! (Sitting down, much hurt and discouraged.) I’m sorry you wish Captain Kearney to understand that I am an untruthful witness.

SIR HOWARD. No: but —

LADY CICELY. Very well, then: please don’t say things that convey that impression.

KEARNEY. But Sir Howard told me yesterday that Captain Brassbound threatened to sell him into slavery.

LADY CICELY (springing up again). Did Sir Howard tell you the things he said about Captain Brassbound’s mother? (Renewed sensation.) I told you they quarrelled, Captain Kearney. I said so, didn’t I?

REDBROOK (crisply). Distinctly. (Drinkwater opens his mouth to corroborate.) Shut up, you fool.

LADY CICELY. Of course I did. Now, Captain Kearney, do YOU want me — does Sir Howard want me — does ANYBODY want me to go into the details of that shocking family quarrel? Am I to stand here in the absence of any individual of my own sex and repeat the language of two angry men?

KEARNEY (rising impressively). The United States navy will have no hahnd in offering any violence to the pure instincts of womanhood. Lady Waynflete: I thahnk you for the delicacy with which you have given your evidence. (Lady Cicely beams on him gratefully and sits down triumphant.) Captain Brassbound: I shall not hold you respawnsible for what you may have said when the English bench addressed you in the language of the English forecastle — (Sir Howard is about to protest.) No, Sir Howard Hallam: excuse ME. In moments of pahssion I have called a man that myself. We are glahd to find real flesh and blood beneath the ermine of the judge. We will all now drop a subject that should never have been broached in a lady’s presence. (He resumes his seat, and adds, in a businesslike tone) Is there anything further before we release these men?

BLUEJACKET. There are some dawcuments handed over by the Cadi, sir. He reckoned they were sort of magic spells. The chahplain ordered them to be reported to you and burnt, with your leave, sir.

KEARNEY. What are they?

BLUEJACKET (reading from a list). Four books, torn and dirty, made up of separate numbers, value each wawn penny, and entitled Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of London; The Skeleton Horseman —

DRINKWATER (rushing forward in painful alarm, and anxiety). It’s maw lawbrary, gavner. Down’t burn em.

KEARNEY. You’ll be better without that sort of reading, my man.

DRINKWATER (in intense distress, appealing to Lady Cicely) Down’t let em burn em, Lidy. They dasn’t if you horder them not to. (With desperate eloquence) Yer dunno wot them books is to me. They took me aht of the sawdid reeyellities of the Worterleoo Rowd. They formed maw mawnd: they shaowed me sathink awgher than the squalor of a corster’s lawf —

REDBROOK (collaring him). Oh shut up, you fool. Get out. Hold your ton —

DRINKWATER (frantically breaking from him). Lidy, lidy: sy a word for me. Ev a feelin awt. (His tears choke him: he clasps his hands in dumb entreaty.)

LADY CICELY (touched). Don’t burn his books. Captain. Let me give them back to him.

KEARNEY. The books will be handed over to the lady.

DRINKWATER (in a small voice). Thenkyer, Lidy. (He retires among his comrades, snivelling subduedly.)

REDBROOK (aside to him as he passes). You silly ass, you. (Drinkwater sniffs and does not reply.)

KEARNEY. I suppose you and your men accept this lady’s account of what passed, Captain Brassbound.

BRASSBOUND (gloomily). Yes. It is true — as far as it goes.

KEARNEY (impatiently). Do you wawnt it to go any further?

MARZO. She leave out something. Arab shoot me. She nurse me. She cure me.

KEARNEY. And who are you, pray?

MARZO (seized with a sanctimonious desire to demonstrate his higher nature). Only dam thief. Dam liar. Dam rascal. She no lady.

JOHNSON (revolted by the seeming insult to the English peerage from a low Italian). What? What’s that you say?

MARZO. No lady nurse dam rascal. Only saint. She saint. She get me to heaven — get us all to heaven. We do what we like now.

LADY CICELY. Indeed you will do nothing of the sort Marzo, unless you like to behave yourself very nicely indeed. What hour did you say we were to lunch at, Captain Kearney?

KEARNEY. You recall me to my dooty, Lady Waynflete. My barge will be ready to take off you and Sir Howard to the Santiago at one o’clawk. (He rises.) Captain Brassbound: this innquery has elicited no reason why I should detain you or your men. I advise you to ahct as escort in future to heathens exclusively. Mr. Rahnkin: I thahnk you in the name of the United States for the hospitahlity you have extended to us today; and I invite you to accompany me bahck to my ship with a view to lunch at half-past one. Gentlemen: we will wait on the governor of the gaol on our way to the harbor (He goes out, following his officers, and followed by the bluejackets and the petty officer.)

SIR HOWARD (to Lady Cicely). Cicely: in the course of my professional career I have met with unscrupulous witnesses, and, I am sorry to say, unscrupulous counsel also. But the combination of unscrupulous witness and unscrupulous counsel I have met to-day has taken away my breath You have made me your accomplice in defeating justice.

LADY CICELY. Yes: aren’t you glad it’s been defeated for once? (She takes his arm to go out with him.) Captain Brassbound: I will come back to say goodbye before I go. (He nods gloomily. She goes out with Sir Howard, following the Captain and his staff.)

RANKIN (running to Brassbound and taking both his hands). I’m right glad ye’re cleared. I’ll come back and have a crack with ye when yon lunch is over. God bless ye. (Hs goes out quickly.)

Brassbound and his men, left by themselves in the room, free and unobserved, go straight out of their senses. They laugh; they dance; they embrace one another; they set to partners and waltz clumsily; they shake hands repeatedly and maudlinly. Three only retain some sort of self-possession. Marzo, proud of having successfully thrust himself into a leading part in the recent proceedings and made a dramatic speech, inflates his chest, curls his scanty moustache, and throws himself into a swaggering pose, chin up and right foot forward, despising the emotional English barbarians around him. Brassbound’s eyes and the working of his mouth show that he is infected with the general excitement; but he bridles himself savagely. Redbrook, trained to affect indifference, grins cynically; winks at Brassbound; and finally relieves himself by assuming the character of a circus ringmaster, flourishing an imaginary whip and egging on the rest to wilder exertions. A climax is reached when Drinkwater, let loose without a stain on his character for the second time, is rapt by belief in his star into an ecstasy in which, scorning all partnership, he becomes as it were a whirling dervish, and executes so miraculous a clog dance that the others gradually cease their slower antics to stare at him.

BRASSBOUND (tearing off his hat and striding forward as Drinkwater collapses, exhausted, and is picked up by Redbrook). Now to get rid of this respectable clobber and feel like a man again. Stand by, all hands, to jump on the captain’s tall hat. (He puts the hat down and prepares to jump on it. The effect is startling, and takes him completely aback. His followers, far from appreciating his iconoclasm, are shocked into scandalized sobriety, except Redbrook, who is immensely tickled by their prudery.)

DRINKWATER. Naow, look eah, kepn: that ynt rawt. Dror a lawn somewhere.

JOHNSON. I say nothin agen a bit of fun, Capn, but let’s be gentlemen.

REDBROOK. I suggest to you, Brassbound, that the clobber belongs to Lady Sis. Ain’t you going to give it back to her?

BRASSBOUND (picking up the hat and brushing the dust off it anxiously). That’s true. I’m a fool. All the same, she shall not see me again like this. (He pulls off the coat and waistcoat together.) Does any man here know how to fold up this sort of thing properly?

REDBROOK. Allow me, governor. (He takes the coat and waistcoat to the table, and folds them up.)

BRASSBOUND (loosening his collar and the front of his shirt). Brandyfaced Jack: you’re looking at these studs. I know what’s in your mind.

DRINKWATER (indignantly). Naow yer down’t: nort a bit on it. Wot’s in maw mawnd is secrifawce, seolf-secrifawce.

BRASSBOUND. If one brass pin of that lady’s property is missing, I’ll hang you with my own hands at the gaff of the Thanksgiving — and would, if she were lying under the guns of all the fleets in Europe. (He pulls off the shirt and stands in his blue jersey, with his hair ruffled. He passes his hand through it and exclaims) Now I am half a man, at any rate.

REDBROOK. A horrible combination, governor: churchwarden from the waist down, and the rest pirate. Lady Sis won’t speak to you in it.

BRASSBOUND. I’ll change altogether. (He leaves the room to get his own trousers.)

REDBROOK (softly). Look here, Johnson, and gents generally. (They gather about him.) Spose she takes him back to England!

MARZO (trying to repeat his success). Im! Im only dam pirate. She saint, I tell you — no take any man nowhere.

JOHNSON (severely). Don’t you be a ignorant and immoral foreigner. (The rebuke is well received; and Marzo is hustled into the background and extinguished.) She won’t take him for harm; but she might take him for good. And then where should we be?

DRINKWATER. Brarsbahnd ynt the ownly kepn in the world. Wot mikes a kepn is brines an knollidge o lawf. It ynt thet ther’s naow sitch pusson: it’s thet you dunno where to look fr im. (The implication that he is such a person is so intolerable that they receive it with a prolonged burst of booing.)

BRASSBOUND (returning in his own clothes, getting into his jacket as he comes). Stand by, all. (They start asunder guiltily, and wait for orders.) Redbrook: you pack that clobber in the lady’s portmanteau, and put it aboard the yacht for her. Johnson: you take all hands aboard the Thanksgiving; look through the stores: weigh anchor; and make all ready for sea. Then send Jack to wait for me at the slip with a boat; and give me a gunfire for a signal. Lose no time.

JOHNSON. Ay, ay, air. All aboard, mates.

ALL. Ay, ay. (They rush out tumultuously.)

When they are gone, Brassbound sits down at the end of the table, with his elbows on it and his head on his fists, gloomily thinking. Then he takes from the breast pocket of his jacket a leather case, from which he extracts a scrappy packet of dirty letters and newspaper cuttings. These he throws on the table. Next comes a photograph in a cheap frame. He throws it down untenderly beside the papers; then folds his arms, and is looking at it with grim distaste when Lady Cicely enters. His back is towards her; and he does not hear her. Perceiving this, she shuts the door loudly enough to attract his attention. He starts up.

LADY CICELY (coming to the opposite end of the table). So you’ve taken off all my beautiful clothes!

BRASSBOUND. Your brother’s, you mean. A man should wear his own clothes; and a man should tell his own lies. I’m sorry you had to tell mine for me to-day.

LADY CICELY. Oh, women spend half their lives telling little lies for men, and sometimes big ones. We’re used to it. But mind! I don’t admit that I told any to-day.

BRASSBOUND. How did you square my uncle?

LADY CICELY. I don’t understand the expression.

BRASSBOUND. I mean —

LADY CICELY. I’m afraid we haven’t time to go into what you mean before lunch. I want to speak to you about your future. May I?

BRASSBOUND (darkening a little, but politely). Sit down. (She sits down. So does he.)

LADY CICELY. What are your plans?

BRASSBOUND. I have no plans. You will hear a gun fired in the harbor presently. That will mean that the Thanksgiving’s anchor’s weighed and that she is waiting for her captain to put out to sea. And her captain doesn’t know now whether to turn her head north or south.

LADY CICELY. Why not north for England?

BRASSBOUND. Why not south for the Pole?

LADY CICELY. But you must do something with yourself.

BRASSBOUND (settling himself with his fists and elbows weightily on the table and looking straight and powerfully at her). Look you: when you and I first met, I was a man with a purpose. I stood alone: I saddled no friend, woman or man, with that purpose, because it was against law, against religion, against my own credit and safety. But I believed in it; and I stood alone for it, as a man should stand for his belief, against law and religion as much as against wickedness and selfishness. Whatever I may be, I am none of your fairweather sailors that’ll do nothing for their creed but go to Heaven for it. I was ready to go to hell for mine. Perhaps you don’t understand that.

LADY CICELY. Oh bless you, yes. It’s so very like a certain sort of man.

BRASSBOUND. I daresay but I’ve not met many of that sort. Anyhow, that was what I was like. I don’t say I was happy in it; but I wasn’t unhappy, because I wasn’t drifting. I was steering a course and had work in hand. Give a man health and a course to steer; and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

LADY CICELY. Sometimes he won’t even stop to trouble about whether other people are happy or not.

BRASSBOUND. I don’t deny that: nothing makes a man so selfish as work. But I was not self-seeking: it seemed to me that I had put justice above self. I tell you life meant something to me then. Do you see that dirty little bundle of scraps of paper?

LADY CICELY. What are they?

BRASSBOUND. Accounts cut out of newspapers. Speeches made by my uncle at charitable dinners, or sentencing men to death — pious, highminded speeches by a man who was to me a thief and a murderer! To my mind they were more weighty, more momentous, better revelations of the wickedness of law and respectability than the book of the prophet Amos. What are they now? (He quietly tears the newspaper cuttings into little fragments and throws them away, looking fixedly at her meanwhile.)

LADY CICELY. Well, that’s a comfort, at all events.

BRASSBOUND. Yes; but it’s a part of my life gone: YOUR doing, remember. What have I left? See here! (He take up the letters) the letters my uncle wrote to my mother, with her comments on their cold drawn insolence, their treachery and cruelty. And the piteous letters she wrote to him later on, returned unopened. Must they go too?

LADY CICELY (uneasily). I can’t ask you to destroy your mother’s letters.

BRASSBOUND. Why not, now that you have taken the meaning out of them? (He tears them.) Is that a comfort too?

LADY CICELY. It’s a little sad; but perhaps it is best so.

BRASSBOUND. That leaves one relic: her portrait. (He plucks the photograph out of its cheap case.)

LADY CICELY (with vivid curiosity). Oh, let me see. (He hands it to her. Before she can control herself, her expression changes to one of unmistakable disappointment and repulsion.)

BRASSBOUND (with a single sardonic cachinnation). Ha! You expected something better than that. Well, you’re right. Her face does not look well opposite yours.

LADY CICELY (distressed). I said nothing.

BRASSBOUND. What could you say? (He takes back the portrait: she relinquishes it without a word. He looks at it; shakes his head; and takes it quietly between his finger and thumb to tear it.)

LADY CICELY (staying his hand). Oh, not your mother’s picture!

BRASSBOUND. If that were your picture, would you like your son to keep it for younger and better women to see?

LADY CICELY (releasing his hand). Oh, you are dreadful! Tear it, tear it. (She covers her eyes for a moment to shut out the sight.)

BRASSBOUND (tearing it quietly). You killed her for me that day in the castle; and I am better without her. (He throws away the fragments.) Now everything is gone. You have taken the old meaning out of my life; but you have put no new meaning into it. I can see that you have some clue to the world that makes all its difficulties easy for you; but I’m not clever enough to seize it. You’ve lamed me by showing me that I take life the wrong way when I’m left to myself.

LADY CICELY. Oh no. Why do you say that?

BRASSBOUND. What else can I say? See what I’ve done! My uncle is no worse a man than myself — better, most likely; for he has a better head and a higher place. Well, I took him for a villain out of a storybook. My mother would have opened anybody else’s eyes: she shut mine. I’m a stupider man than Brandyfaced Jack even; for he got his romantic nonsense out of his penny numbers and such like trash; but I got just the same nonsense out of life and experience. (Shaking his head) It was vulgar — VULGAR. I see that now; for you’ve opened my eyes to the past; but what good is that for the future? What am I to do? Where am I to go?

LADY CICELY. It’s quite simple. Do whatever you like. That’s what I always do.

BRASSBOUND. That answer is no good to me. What I like is to have something to do; and I have nothing. You might as well talk like the missionary and tell me to do my duty.

LADY CICELY (quickly). Oh no thank you. I’ve had quite enough of your duty, and Howard’s duty. Where would you both be now if I’d let you do it?

BRASSBOUND. We’d have been somewhere, at all events. It seems to me that now I am nowhere.

LADY CICELY. But aren’t you coming back to England with us?

BRASSBOUND. What for?

LADY CICELY. Why, to make the most of your opportunities.

BRASSBOUND. What opportunities?

LADY CICELY. Don’t you understand that when you are the nephew of a great bigwig, and have influential connexions, and good friends among them, lots of things can be done for you that are never done for ordinary ship captains?

BRASSBOUND. Ah; but I’m not an aristocrat, you see. And like most poor men, I’m proud. I don’t like being patronized.

LADY CICELY. What is the use of saying that? In my world, which is now your world — OUR world — getting patronage is the whole art of life. A man can’t have a career without it.

BRASSBOUND. In my world a man can navigate a ship and get his living by it.

LADY CICELY. Oh, I see you’re one of the Idealists — the Impossibilists! We have them, too, occasionally, in our world. There’s only one thing to be done with them.

BRASSBOUND. What’s that?

LADY CICELY. Marry them straight off to some girl with enough money for them, and plenty of sentiment. That’s their fate.

BRASSBOUND. You’ve spoiled even that chance for me. Do you think I could look at any ordinary woman after you? You seem to be able to make me do pretty well what you like; but you can’t make me marry anybody but yourself.

LADY CICELY. Do you know, Captain Paquito, that I’ve married no less than seventeen men (Brassbound stares) to other women. And they all opened the subject by saying that they would never marry anybody but me.

BRASSBOUND. Then I shall be the first man you ever found to stand to his word.

LADY CICELY (part pleased, part amused, part sympathetic). Do you really want a wife?

BRASSBOUND. I want a commander. Don’t undervalue me: I am a good man when I have a good leader. I have courage: I have determination: I’m not a drinker: I can command a schooner and a shore party if I can’t command a ship or an army. When work is put upon me, I turn neither to save my life nor to fill my pocket. Gordon trusted me; and he never regretted it. If you trust me, you shan’t regret it. All the same, there’s something wanting in me: I suppose I’m stupid.

LADY CICELY. Oh, you’re not stupid.

BRASSBOUND. Yes I am. Since you saw me for the first time in that garden, you’ve heard me say nothing clever. And I’ve heard you say nothing that didn’t make me laugh, or make me feel friendly, as well as telling me what to think and what to do. That’s what I mean by real cleverness. Well, I haven’t got it. I can give an order when I know what order to give. I can make men obey it, willing or unwilling. But I’m stupid, I tell you: stupid. When there’s no Gordon to command me, I can’t think of what to do. Left to myself, I’ve become half a brigand. I can kick that little gutterscrub Drinkwater; but I find myself doing what he puts into my head because I can’t think of anything else. When you came, I took your orders as naturally as I took Gordon’s, though I little thought my next commander would be a woman. I want to take service under you. And there’s no way in which that can be done except marrying you. Will you let me do it?

LADY CICELY. I’m afraid you don’t quite know how odd a match it would be for me according to the ideas of English society.

BRASSBOUND. I care nothing about English society: let it mind its own business.

LADY CICELY (rising, a little alarmed). Captain Paquito: I am not in love with you.

BRASSBOUND (also rising, with his gaze still steadfastly on her). I didn’t suppose you were: the commander is not usually in love with his subordinate.

LADY CICELY. Nor the subordinate with the commander.

BRASSBOUND (assenting firmly). Nor the subordinate with the commander.

LADY CICELY (learning for the first time in her life what terror is, as she finds that he is unconsciously mesmerizing her). Oh, you are dangerous!

BRASSBOUND. Come: are you in love with anybody else? That’s the question.

LADY CICELY (shaking her head). I have never been in love with any real person; and I never shall. How could I manage people if I had that mad little bit of self left in me? That’s my secret.

BRASSBOUND. Then throw away the last bit of self. Marry me.

LADY CICELY (vainly struggling to recall her wandering will). Must I?

BRASSBOUND. There is no must. You CAN. I ask you to. My fate depends on it.

LADY CICELY. It’s frightful; for I don’t mean to — don’t wish to.

BRASSBOUND. But you will.

LADY CICELY (quite lost, slowly stretches out her hand to give it to him). I — (Gunfire from the Thanksgiving. His eyes dilate. It wakes her from her trance) What is that?

BRASSBOUND. It is farewell. Rescue for you — safety, freedom! You were made to be something better than the wife of Black Paquito. (He kneels and takes her hands) You can do no more for me now: I have blundered somehow on the secret of command at last (he kisses her hands): thanks for that, and for a man’s power and purpose restored and righted. And farewell, farewell, farewell.

LADY CICELY (in a strange ecstasy, holding his hands as he rises). Oh, farewell. With my heart’s deepest feeling, farewell, farewell.

BRASSBOUND. With my heart’s noblest honor and triumph, farewell. (He turns and flies.)

LADY CICELY. How glorious! how glorious! And what an escape!

CURTAIN

NOTES TO CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND’S CONVERSION

SOURCES OF THE PLAY

I claim as a notable merit in the authorship of this play that I have been intelligent enough to steal its scenery, its surroundings, its atmosphere, its geography, its knowledge of the east, its fascinating Cadis and Kearneys and Sheikhs and mud castles from an excellent book of philosophic travel and vivid adventure entitled Mogreb-el-Acksa (Morocco the Most Holy) by Cunninghame Graham. My own first hand knowledge of Morocco is based on a morning’s walk through Tangier, and a cursory observation of the coast through a binocular from the deck of an Orient steamer, both later in date than the writing of the play.

Cunninghame Graham is the hero of his own book; but I have not made him the hero of my play, because so incredible a personage must have destroyed its likelihood — such as it is. There are moments when I do not myself believe in his existence. And yet he must be real; for I have seen him with these eyes; and I am one of the few men living who can decipher the curious alphabet in which he writes his private letters. The man is on public record too. The battle of Trafalgar Square, in which he personally and bodily assailed civilization as represented by the concentrated military and constabular forces of the capital of the world, can scarcely be forgotten by the more discreet spectators, of whom I was one. On that occasion civilization, qualitatively his inferior, was quantitatively so hugely in excess of him that it put him in prison, but had not sense enough to keep him there. Yet his getting out of prison was as nothing compared to his getting into the House of Commons. How he did it I know not; but the thing certainly happened, somehow. That he made pregnant utterances as a legislator may be taken as proved by the keen philosophy of the travels and tales he has since tossed to us; but the House, strong in stupidity, did not understand him until in an inspired moment he voiced a universal impulse by bluntly damning its hypocrisy. Of all the eloquence of that silly parliament, there remains only one single damn. It has survived the front bench speeches of the eighties as the word of Cervantes survives the oraculations of the Dons and Deys who put him, too, in prison. The shocked House demanded that he should withdraw his cruel word. “I never withdraw,” said he; and I promptly stole the potent phrase for the sake of its perfect style, and used it as a cockade for the Bulgarian hero of Arms and the Man. The theft prospered; and I naturally take the first opportunity of repeating it. In what other Lepantos besides Trafalgar Square Cunninghame Graham has fought, I cannot tell. He is a fascinating mystery to a sedentary person like myself. The horse, a dangerous animal whom, when I cannot avoid, I propitiate with apples and sugar, he bestrides and dominates fearlessly, yet with a true republican sense of the rights of the fourlegged fellowcreature whose martyrdom, and man’s shame therein, he has told most powerfully in his Calvary, a tale with an edge that will cut the soft cruel hearts and strike fire from the hard kind ones. He handles the other lethal weapons as familiarly as the pen: medieval sword and modern Mauser are to him as umbrellas and kodaks are to me. His tales of adventure have the true Cervantes touch of the man who has been there — so refreshingly different from the scenes imagined by bloody-minded clerks who escape from their servitude into literature to tell us how men and cities are conceived in the counting house and the volunteer corps. He is, I understand, a Spanish hidalgo: hence the superbity of his portrait by Lavery (Velasquez being no longer available). He is, I know, a Scotch laird. How he contrives to be authentically the two things at the same time is no more intelligible to me than the fact that everything that has ever happened to him seems to have happened in Paraguay or Texas instead of in Spain or Scotland. He is, I regret to add, an impenitent and unashamed dandy: such boots, such a hat, would have dazzled D’Orsay himself. With that hat he once saluted me in Regent St. when I was walking with my mother. Her interest was instantly kindled; and the following conversation ensued. “Who is that?” “Cunninghame Graham.” “Nonsense! Cunninghame Graham is one of your Socialists: that man is a gentleman.” This is the punishment of vanity, a fault I have myself always avoided, as I find conceit less troublesome and much less expensive. Later on somebody told him of Tarudant, a city in Morocco in which no Christian had ever set foot. Concluding at once that it must be an exceptionally desirable place to live in, he took ship and horse: changed the hat for a turban; and made straight for the sacred city, via Mogador. How he fared, and how he fell into the hands of the Cadi of Kintafi, who rightly held that there was more danger to Islam in one Cunninghame Graham than in a thousand Christians, may be learnt from his account of it in Mogreb-el-Acksa, without which Captain Brassbound’s Conversion would never have been written.

I am equally guiltless of any exercise of invention concerning the story of the West Indian estate which so very nearly serves as a peg to hang Captain Brassbound. To Mr. Frederick Jackson of Hindhead, who, against all his principles, encourages and abets me in my career as a dramatist, I owe my knowledge of those main facts of the case which became public through an attempt to make the House of Commons act on them. This being so, I must add that the character of Captain Brassbound’s mother, like the recovery of the estate by the next heir, is an interpolation of my own. It is not, however, an invention. One of the evils of the pretence that our institutions represent abstract principles of justice instead of being mere social scaffolding is that persons of a certain temperament take the pretence seriously, and when the law is on the side of injustice, will not accept the situation, and are driven mad by their vain struggle against it. Dickens has drawn the type in his Man from Shropshire in Bleak House. Most public men and all lawyers have been appealed to by victims of this sense of injustice — the most unhelpable of afflictions in a society like ours.

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN DIALECTS

The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically makes the art of recording speech almost impossible. What is more, it places the modern dramatist, who writes for America as well as England, in a most trying position. Take for example my American captain and my English lady. I have spelt the word conduce, as uttered by the American captain, as cawndooce, to suggest (very roughly) the American pronunciation to English readers. Then why not spell the same word, when uttered by Lady Cicely, as kerndewce, to suggest the English pronunciation to American readers? To this I have absolutely no defence: I can only plead that an author who lives in England necessarily loses his consciousness of the peculiarities of English speech, and sharpens his consciousness of the points in which American speech differs from it; so that it is more convenient to leave English peculiarities to be recorded by American authors. I must, however, most vehemently disclaim any intention of suggesting that English pronunciation is authoritative and correct. My own tongue is neither American English nor English English, but Irish English; so I am as nearly impartial in the matter as it is in human nature to be. Besides, there is no standard English pronunciation any more than there is an American one: in England every county has its catchwords, just as no doubt every state in the Union has. I cannot believe that the pioneer American, for example, can spare time to learn that last refinement of modern speech, the exquisite diphthong, a farfetched combination of the French eu and the English e, with which a New Yorker pronounces such words as world, bird &c. I have spent months without success in trying to achieve glibness with it.

To Felix Drinkwater also I owe some apology for implying that all his vowel pronunciations are unfashionable. They are very far from being so. As far as my social experience goes (and I have kept very mixed company) there is no class in English society in which a good deal of Drinkwater pronunciation does not pass unchallenged save by the expert phonetician. This is no mere rash and ignorant jibe of my own at the expense of my English neighbors. Academic authority in the matter of English speech is represented at present by Mr. Henry Sweet, of the University of Oxford, whose Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Engliach, translated into his native language for the use of British islanders as a Primer of Spoken English, is the most accessible standard work on the subject. In such words as plum, come, humbug, up, gum, etc., Mr. Sweet’s evidence is conclusive. Ladies and gentlemen in Southern England pronounce them as plam, kam, hambag, ap, gan, etc., exactly as Felix Drinkwater does. I could not claim Mr. Sweet’s authority if I dared to whisper that such coster English as the rather pretty dahn tahn for down town, or the decidedly ugly cowcow for cocoa is current in very polite circles. The entire nation, costers and all, would undoubtedly repudiate any such pronunciation as vulgar. All the same, if I were to attempt to represent current “smart” cockney speech as I have attempted to represent Drinkwater’s, without the niceties of Mr. Sweet’s Romic alphabets, I am afraid I should often have to write dahn tahn and cowcow as being at least nearer to the actual sound than down town and cocoa. And this would give such offence that I should have to leave the country; for nothing annoys a native speaker of English more than a faithful setting down in phonetic spelling of the sounds he utters. He imagines that a departure from conventional spelling indicates a departure from the correct standard English of good society. Alas! this correct standard English of good society is unknown to phoneticians. It is only one of the many figments that bewilder our poor snobbish brains. No such thing exists; but what does that matter to people trained from infancy to make a point of honor of belief in abstractions and incredibilities? And so I am compelled to hide Lady Cicely’s speech under the veil of conventional orthography.

I need not shield Drinkwater, because he will never read my book. So I have taken the liberty of making a special example of him, as far as that can be done without a phonetic alphabet, for the benefit of the mass of readers outside London who still form their notions of cockney dialect on Sam Weller. When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one. Some time in the eighties the late Andrew Tuer called attention in the Pall Mall Gazette to several peculiarities of modern cockney, and to the obsolescence of the Dickens dialect that was still being copied from book to book by authors who never dreamt of using their ears, much less of training them to listen. Then came Mr. Anstey’s cockney dialogues in Punch, a great advance, and Mr. Chevalier’s coster songs and patter. The Tompkins verses contributed by Mr. Barry Pain to the London Daily Chronicle have also done something to bring the literary convention for cockney English up to date. But Tompkins sometimes perpetrates horrible solecisms. He will pronounce face as fits, accurately enough; but he will rhyme it quite impossibly to nice, which Tompkins would pronounce as newts: for example Mawl Enn Rowd for Mile End Road. This aw for i, which I have made Drinkwater use, is the latest stage of the old diphthongal oi, which Mr. Chevalier still uses. Irish, Scotch and north country readers must remember that Drinkwater’s rs are absolutely unpronounced when they follow a vowel, though they modify the vowel very considerably. Thus, luggage is pronounced by him as laggige, but turn is not pronounced as tern, but as teun with the eu sounded as in French. The London r seems thoroughly understood in America, with the result, however, that the use of the r by Artemus Ward and other American dialect writers causes Irish people to misread them grotesquely. I once saw the pronunciation of malheureux represented in a cockney handbook by mal-err-err: not at all a bad makeshift to instruct a Londoner, but out of the question elsewhere in the British Isles. In America, representations of English speech dwell too derisively on the dropped or interpolated h. American writers have apparently not noticed the fact that the south English h is not the same as the never-dropped Irish and American h, and that to ridicule an Englishman for dropping it is as absurd as to ridicule the whole French and Italian nation for doing the same. The American h, helped out by a general agreement to pronounce wh as hw, is tempestuously audible, and cannot be dropped without being immediately missed. The London h is so comparatively quiet at all times, and so completely inaudible in wh, that it probably fell out of use simply by escaping the ears of children learning to speak. However that may be, it is kept alive only by the literate classes who are reminded constantly of its existence by seeing it on paper.

Roughly speaking, I should say that in England he who bothers about his hs is a fool, and he who ridicules a dropped h a snob. As to the interpolated h, my experience as a London vestryman has convinced me that it is often effective as a means of emphasis, and that the London language would be poorer without it. The objection to it is no more respectable than the objection of a street boy to a black man or to a lady in knickerbockers.

I have made only the most perfunctory attempt to represent the dialect of the missionary. There is no literary notation for the grave music of good Scotch.

BLACKDOWN, August 1900

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE, OR CONSTANCY UNREWARDED

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

NOTE ON MODERN PRIZEFIGHTING

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE

“Over Bashville the footman I howled with derision
and delight. I dote on Bashville: I could read of him
for ever: de Bashville je suis le fervent: there is only
one Bashville; and I am his devoted slave: Bashville
est magnifique; mais il n’est guère possible.”

Robert Louis Stevenson.

THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE
OR,    CONSTANCY    UNREWARDED
BEING   THE   NOVEL  OF  CASHEL
BYRON’S PROFESSION DONE INTO A
STAGE  PLAY IN  THREE  ACTS  AND
IN  BLANK VERSE  · WITH  A  NOTE
ON  MODERN  PRIZEFIGHTING ·  BY
BERNARD  SHAW

This play has been publicly performed within the United Kingdom. It is entered at Stationers’ Hall and The Library of Congress, U. S. A.

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I trust the result will be found satisfactory.

ACT I

A glade in Wiltstoken Park

Enter Lydia

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

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

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

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

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

LYDIA [looking up].       Yes.

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

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

CASHEL.     A sylvan god!
A goat-eared image! Do your statues speak?
Walk? heave the chest with breath? or like a feather
Lift you — like this?   [He sets her on her feet.

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

CASHEL. Before you go: when shall we meet again?

LYDIA. Why should we meet again?

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

LYDIA. Lydia Carew.

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

LYDIA.  I’ the castle.

CASHEL [thunderstruck]. Do not say
You are the lady of this great domain.

LYDIA. I am.

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

LYDIA. I pardon that. Now tell me who you are.

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

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

CASHEL.      My name is Cashel Byron.

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

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

LYDIA.          Carew.
Cashel’s a pretty name, too.

MELLISH [calling through the wood]. Coo-ee! Byron!

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

MELLISH [further off]. Coo-ee!

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

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

MELLISH [nearer].         Coo-ee!

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

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

Enter Mellish

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

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

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

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

CASHEL. The putrid bag engirdled by thy belt
Invites my fist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MELLISH. The lady of the castle! Thou art mad.

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

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

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

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

And now the night is beautiful again.

[The castle clock strikes the hour in the distance.

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

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

ACT II

Scene I

London. A room in Lydia’s house

Enter Lydia and Lucian

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

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

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

LUCIAN. There is a man I like not haunts this house.

LYDIA. Thou speak’st of Cashel Byron?

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

LYDIA. Pooh! That was but by way of illustration.

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

LYDIA. Fancies, coz.

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

LYDIA. What ho, without there! Bashville.

BASHVILLE [without].          Coming, madam.

Enter Bashville

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

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

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

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

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

LUCIAN.              And yet
Anon he talks pure pothouse.

Enter Bashville

BASHVILLE.         Sir: your potion.

LUCIAN. Thanks. [He drinks.] I am better.

A NEWSBOY [calling without]. Extra special Star!
Result of the great fight! Name of the winner!

LYDIA. Who calls so loud?

BASHVILLE.        The papers, madam.

LYDIA.                   Why?
Hath ought momentous happened?

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

LYDIA.            Read them us.

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

LYDIA.      Lord Worthington!

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

LYDIA. Whose, did you say?

BASHVILLE.         Cashel’s, my lady.

LYDIA.                    Lucian:
Your hand — a chair —

BASHVILLE.     Madam: you’re ill.

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

LUCIAN.               Proceed.

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

LYDIA.          His mug?

LUCIAN [explaining].       His face.

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

LYDIA. I do not understand. What were they doing?

LUCIAN. Fighting with naked fists.

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

LUCIAN [to Bashville]. Skip to the final round.

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

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

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

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

LUCIAN. Death and damnation!

LYDIA.           Oh, what does it mean?

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

LYDIA. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Oh, well done, Cashel!

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

LYDIA [turning pale].            Bashville
Didst hear? A knock.

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

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

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

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

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

BASHVILLE.   Yes, madam.   [Exit.

LYDIA.           Stay —

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

LYDIA. Nay, coz: you’re prejudiced.

CASHEL [without].         Liar and slave!

LYDIA. What words were those?

LUCIAN.           The man is drunk with slaughter.

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

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

LYDIA. Who bade you treat my visitor with violence?

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

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

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

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

LUCIAN.         Bravely said:
I will assist you with the poker.

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

BASHVILLE. Destruction knocks thereat. I smile, and open.

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

CASHEL. You know my secret?

LYDIA.           Yes.

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

LYDIA. I bade my servant say I was not here.

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

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

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

LUCIAN.         Thou dost avow
Thou art a prizefighter.

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

LYDIA. Another secret?

LUCIAN.        Is there worse to come?

CASHEL. Know ye not then my mother is an actress?

LUCIAN. How horrible!

LYDIA.        Nay, nay: how interesting!

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

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

LYDIA.           I forbid
Expressly any such duello. Bashville:
The door. Put Mr. Webber in a hansom,
And bid the driver hie to Downing Street.
No answer: ’tis my will.   [Exeunt Lucian and Bashville.
And now, farewell.
You must not come again, unless indeed
You can some day look in my eyes and say:
Lydia: my occupation’s gone.

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

LYDIA.          A gentleman.

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

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

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

LYDIA. You are offended with me.

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

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

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

LYDIA. These are not things of choice.

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

LYDIA. But there are other callings in the world.

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

LYDIA.           But ’tis so cruel.

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

LYDIA. But find you not their manners very nice?

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

LYDIA. You say farewell to me without a pang.

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

LYDIA. It is a lonelier thing to be a woman.

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

LYDIA. What dost thou mean by rich?

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Bashville

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

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

LYDIA. The king! What mean you?

CASHEL.            I must meet a monarch
This very afternoon at Islington.

LYDIA. At Islington! You must be mad.

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

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

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

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

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

Cashel [thoughtfully putting the side of his forefinger
to his nose, and studying the blood on it].

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

Re-enter Lydia, hatted and gloved.

LYDIA.           O Heaven! you bleed.

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

LYDIA. [giving him her keys]. Oh, what have you done?

CASHEL. Flush on the boko napped your footman’s left.

LYDIA. I do not understand.

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

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

Enter Bashville

What now?

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

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

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

Enter Cashel

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

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

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

Scene II

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

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

CETEWAYO. Is this the Hall of Husbandmen?

LUCIAN.                 It is.

CETEWAYO. Are these anæmic dogs the English people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cetewayo takes his state. Enter Paradise

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

LORD WORTHINGTON. ’Tis Paradise.

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

Enter Cashel

LORD WORTHINGTON. Behold!
The champion comes.

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

WORTHINGTON.           Have no fear.
Hark! the king speaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MASTER OF THE REVELS. Paradise, a professor.
Cashel Byron,
Also professor. Time!   [They spar.

LYDIA.        Eternity
It seems to me until this fight be done.

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

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

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

THE CROWD.         Unfair! The rules!

CETEWAYO. The joy of battle surges boiling up
And bids me join the mellay. Isandhlana
And Victory!   [He falls on the bystanders.

THE CHIEFS. Victory and Isandhlana!

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

LUCIAN. Forbear these most irregular proceedings.
Police! Police!

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

CASHEL [dragging Lydia from the struggling heap].
My love, my love, art hurt?

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

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

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

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

CASHEL.           ’Twas all for thee.

CETEWAYO. [trying to rise]. Have I been struck by lightning?

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

POLICEMAN. One of the prone is white.

CASHEL.               ’Tis Paradise.

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

LYDIA [to Cashel]. Oh Heaven! there is blood upon your hip.
You’re hurt.

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

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

ACT III

Wiltstoken. A room in the Warren Lodge

Lydia at her writing table

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

Enter Policeman

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

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

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

LYDIA.            No, none, sir.
I had not let my maid go forth to-day
Thought I the roads unsafe.

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

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

Enter Cashel

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

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

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

LYDIA.         Thou wretch, begone.

CASHEL. Begone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

POLICEMAN. ’Twas he. What said he?

LYDIA.              Begged for sanctuary.
I bade the man begone.

POLICEMAN.      Most properly.
Saw you which way he went?

LYDIA.          I cannot tell.

PARADISE. He seen me coming; and he done a bunk.

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

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

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

Enter Adelaide Gisborne

ADELAIDE. Where is my Cashel? Hath he been arrested?

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

ADELAIDE.     Praises be for ever!

LYDIA. Why dost thou call the missing man thy Cashel?

ADELAIDE. He is mine only son.

ALL.             Thy son!

ADELAIDE.               My son.

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

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

POLICEMAN. Hark! did you hear an oath from yonder room?

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

ALL. O strange event! O passing tearful tale!

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

Enter Cashel

CASHEL. Policeman: I do yield me to the law.

LYDIA. Oh, no.

ADELAIDE.   My son!

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

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

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

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

ADELAIDE. Ungracious boy —

CASHEL.          Constable: bear me hence.

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

[Sings] They say there is no other —

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

ADELAIDE.       A disgraceful threat
To level at this virtuous old man.

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

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

ADELAIDE.        Ungentlemanly!

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

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

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

Enter Lucian, with an Order in Council

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

POLICEMAN. Was anything, sir, said about me?

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

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

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

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

LYDIA. What, Bashville! didst thou love me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

POLICEMAN. A post-horn — hark!

CASHEL.           What noise of wheels is this?

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

ADELAIDE. Perfidious peer!

LORD WORTHINGTON.     Sweet Adelaide ——

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

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

CASHEL.      Unhappy man,
You know not what you do.

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

CASHEL.               Ha! true.

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

ADELAIDE.     My lord: I do accept you.   [They embrace. Rejoicings.

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

LYDIA [throwing herself into his arms]. Your boats
are burnt at last.

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

NOTE ON MODERN PRIZEFIGHTING

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

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

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

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

[*] In a treatise on boxing by Captain Edgeworth Johnstone, just published, I read, “In the days of the prize-ring, fights lasted for hours; and the knock-out blow was unknown.” This statement is a little too sweeping. The blow was known well enough. A veteran prizefighter once described to me his first experience of its curious effect on the senses. Only, as he had thirty seconds to recover in instead of ten, it did not end the battle. The thirty seconds made the knock-out so unlikely that the old pugilists regarded it as a rare accident, not worth trying for. The glove fighter tries for nothing else. Nevertheless knock-outs, and very dramatic ones too (Mace by King, for example), did occur in the prize-ring from time to time. Captain Edgeworth Johnstone’s treatise is noteworthy in comparison with the earlier Badminton handbook of sparring by Mr. E. B. Michell (one of the Queensberry champions) as throwing over the old teaching of prize-ring boxing with mufflers, and going in frankly for glove fighting, or, to put it classically, cestus boxing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The public, as Julius Cæsar remarked nearly 2000 years ago, believes on the whole, just what it wants to believe. The laboring masses do not believe the false excuses of the vivisector, because they know that the vivisector experiments on hospital patients; and the masses belong to the hospital patient class. The well-to-do people who do not go to hospitals, and who think they benefit by the experiments made there, believe the vivisectors’ excuses, and angrily abuse and denounce the anti-vivisectors. The people who “love animals,” who keep pets, and stick pins through butterflies, support the performing dog people, and are sure that kindness will teach a horse to waltz. And the people who enjoy a fight will persuade themselves that boxing gloves do not hurt, and that sparring is an exercise which teaches self-control and exercises all the muscles in the body more efficiently than any other.

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

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

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

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

London, 1901.

MAN AND SUPERMAN

First published in 1903 by Archibald Constable & Co Ltd, Man and Superman was staged for the first time at The Royal Court Theatre in London on May 23 1905. However, this production did not include the long third act, which has been frequently cut from performances and the play was not staged in its entirety until 1915 at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. There was a famous television adaptation in 1982 starring the acclaimed actor Peter O’Toole and in 1996 the renowned theatre director, and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Peter Hall helmed a BBC radio production of the play starring Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench in the principle roles.

The genesis of Man and Superman was a correspondence between Shaw and Arthur Bingham Walkley, the drama critic of The Times, in which the latter challenged his friend to write a play based on the Don Juan tale. Shaw criticised the trend of romantic plays, which were centred on sexual attraction but never portrayed any incidents of actual sexual desire or discussed the issue in a real or direct manner. Shaw attempted to show sex as natural and instinctual and the driving force of the action in Man and Superman. Though Shaw denied an explicit link, the title invokes Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘Ubermensch’, a somewhat problematic and controversial term which arose from the philosopher’s declaration that ‘God is dead’ and that a new set of earth-bound values, motivated by a love of the actual, material world should be created; new aspirations for humanity set by supreme achievement.

The original incarnation of the character Don Juan was a man of unquenchable lust and a murderer, who was dragged to hell for failing to show any remorse. The moral of the tale is that God punishes and no one is beyond His remit or the dispensing of justice. Over the years, the newer depictions of the myth brought humour to the tale and diminished some of the severer aspects of the character to create an attractive figure. Shaw was interested in a hero who not only confronted and defied the commands of a Christian God, but more importantly a rebel that challenged the predominant views of society. In Shaw’s play John/Jack Tanner represents the Don Juan character and Ann Whitefield is a variation of Dona Ana, while Octavius Robinson is a Don Ottavio substitute. One of Shaw’s fundamental beliefs expressed in the drama is woman as the pursuer of man in sexual relationships, knowing instinctually the importance of procreation in advancing humanity. One of the playwright’s key concepts is ‘Life Force’, which makes a ‘continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and complete self-consciousness in order for humanity to reach ‘heights now deemed superhuman’.

Janie Brookshire and Max Gordon Moore in Irish Rep Theatre production

CONTENTS

EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO ARTHUR BINGHAM WALKLEY

My dear Walkley:

You once asked me why I did not write a Don Juan play. The levity with which you assumed this frightful responsibility has probably by this time enabled you to forget it; but the day of reckoning has arrived: here is your play! I say your play, because qui facit per alium facit per se. Its profits, like its labor, belong to me: its morals, its manners, its philosophy, its influence on the young, are for you to justify. You were of mature age when you made the suggestion; and you knew your man. It is hardly fifteen years since, as twin pioneers of the New Journalism of that time, we two, cradled in the same new sheets, made an epoch in the criticism of the theatre and the opera house by making it a pretext for a propaganda of our own views of life. So you cannot plead ignorance of the character of the force you set in motion. You meant me to epater le bourgeois; and if he protests, I hereby refer him to you as the accountable party.

I warn you that if you attempt to repudiate your responsibility, I shall suspect you of finding the play too decorous for your taste. The fifteen years have made me older and graver. In you I can detect no such becoming change. Your levities and audacities are like the loves and comforts prayed for by Desdemona: they increase, even as your days do grow. No mere pioneering journal dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes between the lines. I am not sure that this is not a portent of Revolution. In eighteenth century France the end was at hand when men bought the Encyclopedia and found Diderot there. When I buy the Times and find you there, my prophetic ear catches a rattle of twentieth century tumbrils.

However, that is not my present anxiety. The question is, will you not be disappointed with a Don Juan play in which not one of that hero’s mille e tre adventures is brought upon the stage? To propitiate you, let me explain myself. You will retort that I never do anything else: it is your favorite jibe at me that what I call drama is nothing but explanation. But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways: you must take me as I am, a reasonable, patient, consistent, apologetic, laborious person, with the temperament of a schoolmaster and the pursuits of a vestryman. No doubt that literary knack of mine which happens to amuse the British public distracts attention from my character; but the character is there none the less, solid as bricks. I have a conscience; and conscience is always anxiously explanatory. You, on the contrary, feel that a man who discusses his conscience is much like a woman who discusses her modesty. The only moral force you condescend to parade is the force of your wit: the only demand you make in public is the demand of your artistic temperament for symmetry, elegance, style, grace, refinement, and the cleanliness which comes next to godliness if not before it. But my conscience is the genuine pulpit article: it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don’t like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it.

In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I explained the predicament of our contemporary English drama, forced to deal almost exclusively with cases of sexual attraction, and yet forbidden to exhibit the incidents of that attraction or even to discuss its nature. Your suggestion that I should write a Don Juan play was virtually a challenge to me to treat this subject myself dramatically. The challenge was difficult enough to be worth accepting, because, when you come to think of it, though we have plenty of dramas with heroes and heroines who are in love and must accordingly marry or perish at the end of the play, or about people whose relations with one another have been complicated by the marriage laws, not to mention the looser sort of plays which trade on the tradition that illicit love affairs are at once vicious and delightful, we have no modern English plays in which the natural attraction of the sexes for one another is made the mainspring of the action. That is why we insist on beauty in our performers, differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or “betrayed,” quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. We do so; and her beauty feeds our starving emotions. Sometimes we grumble ungallantly at the lady because she does not act as well as she looks. But in a drama which, with all its preoccupation with sex, is really void of sexual interest, good looks are more desired than histrionic skill.

Let me press this point on you, since you are too clever to raise the fool’s cry of paradox whenever I take hold of a stick by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling in love with her, or marrying her, is brought into conflict with the social convention which discountenances the woman. Now the conflicts of individuals with law and convention can be dramatized like all other human conflicts; but they are purely judicial; and the fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen.

I take it that when you asked me for a Don Juan play you did not want that sort of thing. Nobody does: the successes such plays sometimes obtain are due to the incidental conventional melodrama with which the experienced popular author instinctively saves himself from failure. But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit — you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience — of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So I took it that you demanded a Don Juan in the philosophic sense.

Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin. The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was presented, according to the ideas of that time, as the enemy of God, the approach of whose vengeance is felt throughout the drama, growing in menace from minute to minute. No anxiety is caused on Don Juan’s account by any minor antagonist: he easily eludes the police, temporal and spiritual; and when an indignant father seeks private redress with the sword, Don Juan kills him without an effort. Not until the slain father returns from heaven as the agent of God, in the form of his own statue, does he prevail against his slayer and cast him into hell. The moral is a monkish one: repent and reform now; for to-morrow it may be too late. This is really the only point on which Don Juan is sceptical; for he is a devout believer in an ultimate hell, and risks damnation only because, as he is young, it seems so far off that repentance can be postponed until he has amused himself to his heart’s content.

But the lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil’s Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, thus treating him as English journalism has treated that comic foe of the gods, Punch. Moliere’s Don Juan casts back to the original in point of impenitence; but in piety he falls off greatly. True, he also proposes to repent; but in what terms? “Oui, ma foi! il faut s’amender. Encore vingt ou trente ans de cette vie-ci, et puis nous songerons a nous.” After Moliere comes the artist-enchanter, the master of masters, Mozart, who reveals the hero’s spirit in magical harmonies, elfin tones, and elate darting rhythms as of summer lightning made audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live piously ever after.

After these completed works Byron’s fragment does not count for much philosophically. Our vagabond libertines are no more interesting from that point of view than the sailor who has a wife in every port, and Byron’s hero is, after all, only a vagabond libertine. And he is dumb: he does not discuss himself with a Sganarelle-Leporello or with the fathers or brothers of his mistresses: he does not even, like Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of wild oats. Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine. Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron’s Don Juan out of account. Mozart’s is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from the ocean, and recognition of an eternal womanly principle in the universe. Goethe’s Faust and Mozart’s Don Juan were the last words of the XVIII century on the subject; and by the time the polite critics of the XIX century, ignoring William Blake as superficially as the XVIII had ignored Hogarth or the XVII Bunyan, had got past the Dickens-Macaulay Dumas-Guizot stage and the Stendhal-Meredith-Turgenieff stage, and were confronted with philosophic fiction by such pens as Ibsen’s and Tolstoy’s, Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll’s House and asserting herself as an individual instead of a mere item in a moral pageant.

Now it is all very well for you at the beginning of the XX century to ask me for a Don Juan play; but you will see from the foregoing survey that Don Juan is a full century out of date for you and for me; and if there are millions of less literate people who are still in the eighteenth century, have they not Moliere and Mozart, upon whose art no human hand can improve? You would laugh at me if at this time of day I dealt in duels and ghosts and “womanly” women. As to mere libertinism, you would be the first to remind me that the Festin de Pierre of Moliere is not a play for amorists, and that one bar of the voluptuous sentimentality of Gounod or Bizet would appear as a licentious stain on the score of Don Giovanni. Even the more abstract parts of the Don Juan play are dilapidated past use: for instance, Don Juan’s supernatural antagonist hurled those who refuse to repent into lakes of burning brimstone, there to be tormented by devils with horns and tails. Of that antagonist, and of that conception of repentance, how much is left that could be used in a play by me dedicated to you? On the other hand, those forces of middle class public opinion which hardly existed for a Spanish nobleman in the days of the first Don Juan, are now triumphant everywhere. Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer. The women, “marchesane, principesse, cameriere, cittadine” and all, are become equally dangerous: the sex is aggressive, powerful: when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically to sing “Protegga il giusto cielo”: they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate. Political parties are wrecked and public careers undone by a single indiscretion. A man had better have all the statues in London to supper with him, ugly as they are, than be brought to the bar of the Nonconformist Conscience by Donna Elvira. Excommunication has become almost as serious a business as it was in the X century.

As a result, Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Woman’s natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. As to pulling the Nonconformist Conscience by the beard as Don Juan plucked the beard of the Commandant’s statue in the convent of San Francisco, that is out of the question nowadays: prudence and good manners alike forbid it to a hero with any mind. Besides, it is Don Juan’s own beard that is in danger of plucking. Far from relapsing into hypocrisy, as Sganarelle feared, he has unexpectedly discovered a moral in his immorality. The growing recognition of his new point of view is heaping responsibility on him. His former jests he has had to take as seriously as I have had to take some of the jests of Mr W. S. Gilbert. His scepticism, once his least tolerated quality, has now triumphed so completely that he can no longer assert himself by witty negations, and must, to save himself from cipherdom, find an affirmative position. His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school. Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhaur and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandoline into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions. In fact, he is now more Hamlet than Don Juan; for though the lines put into the actor’s mouth to indicate to the pit that Hamlet is a philosopher are for the most part mere harmonious platitude which, with a little debasement of the word-music, would be properer to Pecksniff, yet if you separate the real hero, inarticulate and unintelligible to himself except in flashes of inspiration, from the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear’s tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary (at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the hero of Mozart.

And yet I have not the heart to disappoint you wholly of another glimpse of the Mozartian dissoluto punito and his antagonist the statue. I feel sure you would like to know more of that statue — to draw him out when he is off duty, so to speak. To gratify you, I have resorted to the trick of the strolling theatrical manager who advertizes the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfils the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye. I have adapted this simple device to our occasion by thrusting into my perfectly modern three-act play a totally extraneous act in which my hero, enchanted by the air of the Sierra, has a dream in which his Mozartian ancestor appears and philosophizes at great length in a Shavio-Socratic dialogue with the lady, the statue, and the devil.

But this pleasantry is not the essence of the play. Over this essence I have no control. You propound a certain social substance, sexual attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distil it for you. I do not adulterate the product with aphrodisiacs nor dilute it with romance and water; for I am merely executing your commission, not producing a popular play for the market. You must therefore (unless, like most wise men, you read the play first and the preface afterwards) prepare yourself to face a trumpery story of modern London life, a life in which, as you know, the ordinary man’s main business is to get means to keep up the position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary woman’s business is to get married. In 9,999 cases out of 10,000, you can count on their doing nothing, whether noble or base, that conflicts with these ends; and that assurance is what you rely on as their religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their reputation, their honor and so forth.

On the whole, this is a sensible and satisfactory foundation for society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition. The secret of the prosaic man’s success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic man’s failure, such as that is, is the versatility with which he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The artist is either a poet or a scallawag: as poet, he cannot see, as the prosaic man does, that chivalry is at bottom only romantic suicide: as scallawag, he cannot see that it does not pay to spunge and beg and lie and brag and neglect his person. Therefore do not misunderstand my plain statement of the fundamental constitution of London society as an Irishman’s reproach to your nation. From the day I first set foot on this foreign soil I knew the value of the prosaic qualities of which Irishmen teach Englishmen to be ashamed as well as I knew the vanity of the poetic qualities of which Englishmen teach Irishmen to be proud. For the Irishman instinctively disparages the quality which makes the Englishman dangerous to him; and the Englishman instinctively flatters the fault that makes the Irishman harmless and amusing to him. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell a somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread. In short, there is no future for men, however brimming with crude vitality, who are neither intelligent nor politically educated enough to be Socialists. So do not misunderstand me in the other direction either: if I appreciate the vital qualities of the Englishman as I appreciate the vital qualities of the bee, I do not guarantee the Englishman against being, like the bee (or the Canaanite) smoked out and unloaded of his honey by beings inferior to himself in simple acquisitiveness, combativeness, and fecundity, but superior to him in imagination and cunning.

The Don Juan play, however, is to deal with sexual attraction, and not with nutrition, and to deal with it in a society in which the serious business of sex is left by men to women, as the serious business of nutrition is left by women to men. That the men, to protect themselves against a too aggressive prosecution of the women’s business, have set up a feeble romantic convention that the initiative in sex business must always come from the man, is true; but the pretence is so shallow that even in the theatre, that last sanctuary of unreality, it imposes only on the inexperienced. In Shakespear’s plays the woman always takes the initiative. In his problem plays and his popular plays alike the love interest is the interest of seeing the woman hunt the man down. She may do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same: she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of. When she is baffled, like Ophelia, she goes mad and commits suicide; and the man goes straight from her funeral to a fencing match. No doubt Nature, with very young creatures, may save the woman the trouble of scheming: Prospero knows that he has only to throw Ferdinand and Miranda together and they will mate like a pair of doves; and there is no need for Perdita to capture Florizel as the lady doctor in All’s Well That Ends Well (an early Ibsenite heroine) captures Bertram. But the mature cases all illustrate the Shakespearian law. The one apparent exception, Petruchio, is not a real one: he is most carefully characterized as a purely commercial matrimonial adventurer. Once he is assured that Katharine has money, he undertakes to marry her before he has seen her. In real life we find not only Petruchios, but Mantalinis and Dobbins who pursue women with appeals to their pity or jealousy or vanity, or cling to them in a romantically infatuated way. Such effeminates do not count in the world scheme: even Bunsby dropping like a fascinated bird into the jaws of Mrs MacStinger is by comparison a true tragic object of pity and terror. I find in my own plays that Woman, projecting herself dramatically by my hands (a process over which I assure you I have no more real control than I have over my wife), behaves just as Woman did in the plays of Shakespear.

And so your Don Juan has come to birth as a stage projection of the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman; and my Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. The woman’s need of him to enable her to carry on Nature’s most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes.

Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some of our own sex who are shocked at the “unscrupulousness,” meaning the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman pursues her purpose. It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race. Is there anything meaner then to throw necessary work upon other people and then disparage it as unworthy and indelicate. We laugh at the haughty American nation because it makes the negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack; but we ourselves throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any womanliness or delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction. There are no limits to male hypocrisy in this matter. No doubt there are moments when man’s sexual immunities are made acutely humiliating to him. When the terrible moment of birth arrives, its supreme importance and its superhuman effort and peril, in which the father has no part, dwarf him into the meanest insignificance: he slinks out of the way of the humblest petticoat, happy if he be poor enough to be pushed out of the house to outface his ignominy by drunken rejoicings. But when the crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and speaking of Woman’s “sphere” with condescension, even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace “slice of life.” The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce. Why, the whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women. Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors. Men, on the other hand, attach penalties to marriage, depriving women of property, of the franchise, of the free use of their limbs, of that ancient symbol of immortality, the right to make oneself at home in the house of God by taking off the hat, of everything that he can force Woman to dispense with without compelling himself to dispense with her. All in vain. Woman must marry because the race must perish without her travail: if the risk of death and the certainty of pain, danger and unutterable discomforts cannot deter her, slavery and swaddled ankles will not. And yet we assume that the force that carries women through all these perils and hardships, stops abashed before the primnesses of our behavior for young ladies. It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. Nay, she often does wait motionless. That is how the spider waits for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero, shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil about him until he is secured for ever!

If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women’s pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius: that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly, we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the “self-sacrifice” (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d’oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and all women. Hence it is that the world’s books get written, its pictures painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex. Which leads us to the conclusion, astonishing to the vulgar, that art, instead of being before all things the expression of the normal sexual situation, is really the only department in which sex is a superseded and secondary power, with its consciousness so confused and its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow’s head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, whose minds have been so overwhelmingly sophisticated by literature, what produces all these treatises and poems and scriptures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself instead of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance. Hence there is a driving towards truth in all books on matters where the writer, though exceptionally gifted is normally constituted, and has no private axe to grind. Copernicus had no motive for misleading his fellowmen as to the place of the sun in the solar system: he looked for it as honestly as a shepherd seeks his path in a mist. But Copernicus would not have written love stories scientifically. When it comes to sex relations, the man of genius does not share the common man’s danger of capture, nor the woman of genius the common woman’s overwhelming specialization. And that is why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety (“the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” said William Blake; for “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough”).

There is a political aspect of this sex question which is too big for my comedy, and too momentous to be passed over without culpable frivolity. It is impossible to demonstrate that the initiative in sex transactions remains with Woman, and has been confirmed to her, so far, more and more by the suppression of rapine and discouragement of importunity, without being driven to very serious reflections on the fact that this initiative is politically the most important of all the initiatives, because our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.

When we two were born, this country was still dominated by a selected class bred by political marriages. The commercial class had not then completed the first twenty-five years of its new share of political power; and it was itself selected by money qualification, and bred, if not by political marriage, at least by a pretty rigorous class marriage. Aristocracy and plutocracy still furnish the figureheads of politics; but they are now dependent on the votes of the promiscuously bred masses. And this, if you please, at the very moment when the political problem, having suddenly ceased to mean a very limited and occasional interference, mostly by way of jobbing public appointments, in the mismanagement of a tight but parochial little island, with occasional meaningless prosecution of dynastic wars, has become the industrial reorganization of Britain, the construction of a practically international Commonwealth, and the partition of the whole of Africa and perhaps the whole of Asia by the civilized Powers. Can you believe that the people whose conceptions of society and conduct, whose power of attention and scope of interest, are measured by the British theatre as you know it to-day, can either handle this colossal task themselves, or understand and support the sort of mind and character that is (at least comparatively) capable of handling it? For remember: what our voters are in the pit and gallery they are also in the polling booth. We are all now under what Burke called “the hoofs of the swinish multitude.” Burke’s language gave great offence because the implied exceptions to its universal application made it a class insult; and it certainly was not for the pot to call the kettle black. The aristocracy he defended, in spite of the political marriages by which it tried to secure breeding for itself, had its mind undertrained by silly schoolmasters and governesses, its character corrupted by gratuitous luxury, its self-respect adulterated to complete spuriousness by flattery and flunkeyism. It is no better to-day and never will be any better: our very peasants have something morally hardier in them that culminates occasionally in a Bunyan, a Burns, or a Carlyle. But observe, this aristocracy, which was overpowered from 1832 to 1885 by the middle class, has come back to power by the votes of “the swinish multitude.” Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke; and the swine are now courted electors. How many of their own class have these electors sent to parliament? Hardly a dozen out of 670, and these only under the persuasion of conspicuous personal qualifications and popular eloquence. The multitude thus pronounces judgment on its own units: it admits itself unfit to govern, and will vote only for a man morphologically and generically transfigured by palatial residence and equipage, by transcendent tailoring, by the glamor of aristocratic kinship. Well, we two know these transfigured persons, these college passmen, these well groomed monocular Algys and Bobbies, these cricketers to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom, these plutocratic products of “the nail and sarspan business as he got his money by.” Do you know whether to laugh or cry at the notion that they, poor devils! will drive a team of continents as they drive a four-in-hand; turn a jostling anarchy of casual trade and speculation into an ordered productivity; and federate our colonies into a world-Power of the first magnitude? Give these people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch missionary into crude African idolatry.

I do not know whether you have any illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth. I have none. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. My nurse was fond of remarking that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and the more I see of the efforts of our churches and universities and literary sages to raise the mass above its own level, the more convinced I am that my nurse was right. Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are, and that most would clearly not be enough even if those who are already raised out of the lowest abysses would allow the others a chance. The bubble of Heredity has been pricked: the certainty that acquirements are negligible as elements in practical heredity has demolished the hopes of the educationists as well as the terrors of the degeneracy mongers; and we know now that there is no hereditary “governing class” any more than a hereditary hooliganism. We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of delicacy and morality.

Yet we must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes down to his pocket, our fingers go up to the brims of our hats by instinct. Our ideal prosperity is not the prosperity of the industrial north, but the prosperity of the Isle of Wight, of Folkestone and Ramsgate, of Nice and Monte Carlo. That is the only prosperity you see on the stage, where the workers are all footmen, parlourmaids, comic lodging-letters and fashionable professional men, whilst the heroes and heroines are miraculously provided with unlimited dividends, and eat gratuitously, like the knights in Don Quixote’s books of chivalry.

The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing love of pageantry, this effusive loyalty, this officious rising and uncovering at a wave from a flag or a blast from a brass band? Imperialism: Not a bit of it. Obsequiousness, servility, cupidity roused by the prevailing smell of money. When Mr Carnegie rattled his millions in his pockets all England became one rapacious cringe. Only, when Rhodes (who had probably been reading my Socialism for Millionaires) left word that no idler was to inherit his estate, the bent backs straightened mistrustfully for a moment. Could it be that the Diamond King was no gentleman after all? However, it was easy to ignore a rich man’s solecism. The ungentlemanly clause was not mentioned again; and the backs soon bowed themselves back into their natural shape.

But I hear you asking me in alarm whether I have actually put all this tub thumping into a Don Juan comedy. I have not. I have only made my Don Juan a political pamphleteer, and given you his pamphlet in full by way of appendix. You will find it at the end of the book. I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader’s imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author’s solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense. You cannot accuse me of this pitiable barrenness, this feeble evasion. I not only tell you that my hero wrote a revolutionists’ handbook: I give you the handbook at full length for your edification if you care to read it. And in that handbook you will find the politics of the sex question as I conceive Don Juan’s descendant to understand them. Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own. It may seem to them that nobody who doubts this can be in a state of grace. However that may be, it is certainly true that nobody who agrees with them can possibly be a dramatist, or indeed anything else that turns upon a knowledge of mankind. Hence it has been pointed out that Shakespear had no conscience. Neither have I, in that sense.

You may, however, remind me that this digression of mine into politics was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex, because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to, and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence, and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books as read and my genius for granted, trusting me to put forth work of such quality as shall bear out its verdict. So we may disport ourselves on our own plane to the top of our bent; and if any gentleman points out that neither this epistle dedicatory nor the dream of Don Juan in the third act of the ensuing comedy is suitable for immediate production at a popular theatre we need not contradict him. Napoleon provided Talma with a pit of kings, with what effect on Talma’s acting is not recorded. As for me, what I have always wanted is a pit of philosophers; and this is a play for such a pit.

I should make formal acknowledgment to the authors whom I have pillaged in the following pages if I could recollect them all. The theft of the brigand-poetaster from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is deliberate; and the metamorphosis of Leporello into Enry Straker, motor engineer and New Man, is an intentional dramatic sketch for the contemporary embryo of Mr H. G. Wells’s anticipation of the efficient engineering class which will, he hopes, finally sweep the jabberers out of the way of civilization. Mr Barrio has also, whilst I am correcting my proofs, delighted London with a servant who knows more than his masters. The conception of Mendoza Limited I trace back to a certain West Indian colonial secretary, who, at a period when he and I and Mr Sidney Webb were sowing our political wild oats as a sort of Fabian Three Musketeers, without any prevision of the surprising respectability of the crop that followed, recommended Webb, the encyclopedic and inexhaustible, to form himself into a company for the benefit of the shareholders. Octavius I take over unaltered from Mozart; and I hereby authorize any actor who impersonates him, to sing “Dalla sua pace” (if he can) at any convenient moment during the representation. Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not Ann; but Ann is Everywoman.

That the author of Everyman was no mere artist, but an artist-philosopher, and that the artist-philosophers are the only sort of artists I take quite seriously, will be no news to you. Even Plato and Boswell, as the dramatists who invented Socrates and Dr Johnson, impress me more deeply than the romantic playwrights. Ever since, as a boy, I first breathed the air of the transcendental regions at a performance of Mozart’s Zauberflote, I have been proof against the garish splendors and alcoholic excitements of the ordinary stage combinations of Tappertitian romance with the police intelligence. Bunyan, Blake, Hogarth and Turner (these four apart and above all the English Classics), Goethe, Shelley, Schopenhaur, Wagner, Ibsen, Morris, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche are among the writers whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own. Mark the word peculiar. I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens’s sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear’s pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great “stage of fools” on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper. Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion: they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all Shakespear’s projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse’s widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who smothers babies and offs with people’s heads, we are revolted at the imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus, Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear’s comedies; but description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he puts what he knows of himself, his Hamlets and Macbeths and Lears and Prosperos. If these characters are agonizing in a void about factitious melodramatic murders and revenges and the like, whilst the comic characters walk with their feet on solid ground, vivid and amusing, you know that the author has much to show and nothing to teach. The comparison between Falstaff and Prospero is like the comparison between Micawber and David Copperfield. At the end of the book you know Micawber, whereas you only know what has happened to David, and are not interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or “Charles his friend” what they call on the stage a feeder.

Now you cannot say this of the works of the artist-philosophers. You cannot say it, for instance, of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Put your Shakespearian hero and coward, Henry V and Pistol or Parolles, beside Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan’s coward stirs your blood more than Shakespear’s hero, who actually leaves you cold and secretly hostile. You suddenly see that Shakespear, with all his flashes and divinations, never understood virtue and courage, never conceived how any man who was not a fool could, like Bunyan’s hero, look back from the brink of the river of death over the strife and labor of his pilgrimage, and say “yet do I not repent me”; or, with the panache of a millionaire, bequeath “my sword to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.” This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man’s work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

It may seem a long step from Bunyan to Nietzsche; but the difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyan’s perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker’s theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call Justification by Faith “Wille,” and Justification by Works “Vorstellung.” The sole use of the novelty is that you and I buy and read Schopenhaur’s treatise on Will and Representation when we should not dream of buying a set of sermons on Faith versus Works. At bottom the controversy is the same, and the dramatic results are the same. Bunyan makes no attempt to present his pilgrims as more sensible or better conducted than Mr Worldly Wiseman. Mr W. W.’s worst enemies, as Mr Embezzler, Mr Never-go-to-Church-on-Sunday, Mr Bad Form, Mr Murderer, Mr Burglar, Mr Co-respondent, Mr Blackmailer, Mr Cad, Mr Drunkard, Mr Labor Agitator and so forth, can read the Pilgrim’s Progress without finding a word said against them; whereas the respectable people who snub them and put them in prison, such as Mr W.W. himself and his young friend Civility; Formalist and Hypocrisy; Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick (who were clearly young university men of good family and high feeding); that brisk lad Ignorance, Talkative, By-Ends of Fairspeech and his mother-in-law Lady Feigning, and other reputable gentlemen and citizens, catch it very severely. Even Little Faith, though he gets to heaven at last, is given to understand that it served him right to be mobbed by the brothers Faint Heart, Mistrust, and Guilt, all three recognized members of respectable society and veritable pillars of the law. The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability, without a word that one can remember against vice and crime. Exactly what is complained of in Nietzsche and Ibsen, is it not? And also exactly what would be complained of in all the literature which is great enough and old enough to have attained canonical rank, officially or unofficially, were it not that books are admitted to the canon by a compact which confesses their greatness in consideration of abrogating their meaning; so that the reverend rector can agree with the prophet Micah as to his inspired style without being committed to any complicity in Micah’s furiously Radical opinions. Why, even I, as I force myself; pen in hand, into recognition and civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming “Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake,” the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing “another book by this brilliant and thoughtful writer.” And the ordinary citizen, knowing that an author who is well spoken of by a respectable newspaper must be all right, reads me, as he reads Micah, with undisturbed edification from his own point of view. It is narrated that in the eighteen-seventies an old lady, a very devout Methodist, moved from Colchester to a house in the neighborhood of the City Road, in London, where, mistaking the Hall of Science for a chapel, she sat at the feet of Charles Bradlaugh for many years, entranced by his eloquence, without questioning his orthodoxy or moulting a feather of her faith. I fear I small be defrauded of my just martyrdom in the same way.

However, I am digressing, as a man with a grievance always does. And after all, the main thing in determining the artistic quality of a book is not the opinions it propagates, but the fact that the writer has opinions. The old lady from Colchester was right to sun her simple soul in the energetic radiance of Bradlaugh’s genuine beliefs and disbeliefs rather than in the chill of such mere painting of light and heat as elocution and convention can achieve. My contempt for belles lettres, and for amateurs who become the heroes of the fanciers of literary virtuosity, is not founded on any illusion of mind as to the permanence of those forms of thought (call them opinions) by which I strive to communicate my bent to my fellows. To younger men they are already outmoded; for though they have no more lost their logic than an eighteenth century pastel has lost its drawing or its color, yet, like the pastel, they grow indefinably shabby, and will grow shabbier until they cease to count at all, when my books will either perish, or, if the world is still poor enough to want them, will have to stand, with Bunyan’s, by quite amorphous qualities of temper and energy. With this conviction I cannot be a bellettrist. No doubt I must recognize, as even the Ancient Mariner did, that I must tell my story entertainingly if I am to hold the wedding guest spellbound in spite of the siren sounds of the loud bassoon. But “for art’s sake” alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence. I know that there are men who, having nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and with literature that they keep desperately repeating as much as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message supply them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style. I can pity their dotage and even sympathize with their fancy. But a true original style is never achieved for its own sake: a man may pay from a shilling to a guinea, according to his means, to see, hear, or read another man’s act of genius; but he will not pay with his whole life and soul to become a mere virtuoso in literature, exhibiting an accomplishment which will not even make money for him, like fiddle playing. Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains. Darwin has no more destroyed the style of Job nor of Handel than Martin Luther destroyed the style of Giotto. All the assertions get disproved sooner or later; and so we find the world full of a magnificent debris of artistic fossils, with the matter-of-fact credibility gone clean out of them, but the form still splendid. And that is why the old masters play the deuce with our mere susceptibles. Your Royal Academician thinks he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto’s beliefs, and correct his perspective into the bargain. Your man of letters thinks he can get Bunyan’s or Shakespear’s style without Bunyan’s conviction or Shakespear’s apprehension, especially if he takes care not to split his infinitives. And so with your Doctors of Music, who, with their collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim’s treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your academic copier of fossils offers them to you as the latest outpouring of the human spirit, and, worst of all, kidnaps young people as pupils and persuades them that his limitations are rules, his observances dexterities, his timidities good taste, and his emptinesses purities. And when he declares that art should not be didactic, all the people who have nothing to teach and all the people who don’t want to learn agree with him emphatically.

I pride myself on not being one of these susceptible: If you study the electric light with which I supply you in that Bumbledonian public capacity of mine over which you make merry from time to time, you will find that your house contains a great quantity of highly susceptible copper wire which gorges itself with electricity and gives you no light whatever. But here and there occurs a scrap of intensely insusceptible, intensely resistant material; and that stubborn scrap grapples with the current and will not let it through until it has made itself useful to you as those two vital qualities of literature, light and heat. Now if I am to be no mere copper wire amateur but a luminous author, I must also be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for there is community of material between us: we are both critics of life as well as of art; and you have perhaps said to yourself when I have passed your windows, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” An awful and chastening reflection, which shall be the closing cadence of this immoderately long letter from yours faithfully,

G. BERNARD SHAW. WOKING, 1903

ACT I

Roebuck Ramsden is in his study, opening the morning letters. The study, handsomely and solidly furnished, proclaims the man of means. Not a speck of dust is visible: it is clear that there are at least two housemaids and a parlormaid downstairs, and a housekeeper upstairs who does not let them spare elbow-grease. Even the top of Roebuck’s head is polished: on a sunshiny day he could heliograph his orders to distant camps by merely nodding. In no other respect, however, does he suggest the military man. It is in active civil life that men get his broad air of importance, his dignified expectation of deference, his determinate mouth disarmed and refined since the hour of his success by the withdrawal of opposition and the concession of comfort and precedence and power. He is more than a highly respectable man: he is marked out as a president of highly respectable men, a chairman among directors, an alderman among councillors, a mayor among aldermen. Four tufts of iron-grey hair, which will soon be as white as isinglass, and are in other respects not at all unlike it, grow in two symmetrical pairs above his ears and at the angles of his spreading jaws. He wears a black frock coat, a white waistcoat (it is bright spring weather), and trousers, neither black nor perceptibly blue, of one of those indefinitely mixed hues which the modern clothier has produced to harmonize with the religions of respectable men. He has not been out of doors yet to-day; so he still wears his slippers, his boots being ready for him on the hearthrug. Surmising that he has no valet, and seeing that he has no secretary with a shorthand notebook and a typewriter, one meditates on how little our great burgess domesticity has been disturbed by new fashions and methods, or by the enterprise of the railway and hotel companies which sell you a Saturday to Monday of life at Folkestone as a real gentleman for two guineas, first class fares both ways included.

How old is Roebuck? The question is important on the threshold of a drama of ideas; for under such circumstances everything depends on whether his adolescence belonged to the sixties or to the eighties. He was born, as a matter of fact, in 1839, and was a Unitarian and Free Trader from his boyhood, and an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species. Consequently he has always classed himself as an advanced thinker and fearlessly outspoken reformer.

Sitting at his writing table, he has on his right the windows giving on Portland Place. Through these, as through a proscenium, the curious spectator may contemplate his profile as well as the blinds will permit. On his left is the inner wall, with a stately bookcase, and the door not quite in the middle, but somewhat further from him. Against the wall opposite him are two busts on pillars: one, to his left, of John Bright; the other, to his right, of Mr Herbert Spencer. Between them hang an engraved portrait of Richard Cobden; enlarged photographs of Martineau, Huxley, and George Eliot; autotypes of allegories by Mr G.F. Watts (for Roebuck believed in the fine arts with all the earnestness of a man who does not understand them), and an impression of Dupont’s engraving of Delaroche’s Beaux Artes hemicycle, representing the great men of all ages. On the wall behind him, above the mantelshelf, is a family portrait of impenetrable obscurity.

A chair stands near the writing table for the convenience of business visitors. Two other chairs are against the wall between the busts.

A parlormaid enters with a visitor’s card. Roebuck takes it, and nods, pleased. Evidently a welcome caller.

RAMSDEN. Show him up.

The parlormaid goes out and returns with the visitor.

THE MAID. Mr Robinson.

Mr Robinson is really an uncommonly nice looking young fellow. He must, one thinks, be the jeune premier; for it is not in reason to suppose that a second such attractive male figure should appear in one story. The slim shapely frame, the elegant suit of new mourning, the small head and regular features, the pretty little moustache, the frank clear eyes, the wholesome bloom and the youthful complexion, the well brushed glossy hair, not curly, but of fine texture and good dark color, the arch of good nature in the eyebrows, the erect forehead and neatly pointed chin, all announce the man who will love and suffer later on. And that he will not do so without sympathy is guaranteed by an engaging sincerity and eager modest serviceableness which stamp him as a man of amiable nature. The moment he appears, Ramsden’s face expands into fatherly liking and welcome, an expression which drops into one of decorous grief as the young man approaches him with sorrow in his face as well as in his black clothes. Ramsden seems to know the nature of the bereavement. As the visitor advances silently to the writing table, the old man rises and shakes his hand across it without a word: a long, affectionate shake which tells the story of a recent sorrow common to both.

RAMSDEN. [concluding the handshake and cheering up] Well, well, Octavius, it’s the common lot. We must all face it someday. Sit down.

Octavius takes the visitor’s chair. Ramsden replaces himself in his own.

OCTAVIUS. Yes: we must face it, Mr Ramsden. But I owed him a great deal. He did everything for me that my father could have done if he had lived.

RAMSDEN. He had no son of his own, you see.

OCTAVIUS. But he had daughters; and yet he was as good to my sister as to me. And his death was so sudden! I always intended to thank him — to let him know that I had not taken all his care of me as a matter of course, as any boy takes his father’s care. But I waited for an opportunity and now he is dead — dropped without a moment’s warning. He will never know what I felt. [He takes out his handkerchief and cries unaffectedly].

RAMSDEN. How do we know that, Octavius? He may know it: we cannot tell. Come! Don’t grieve. [Octavius masters himself and puts up his handkerchief]. That’s right. Now let me tell you something to console you. The last time I saw him — it was in this very room — he said to me: “Tavy is a generous lad and the soul of honor; and when I see how little consideration other men get from their sons, I realize how much better than a son he’s been to me.” There! Doesn’t that do you good?

OCTAVIUS. Mr Ramsden: he used to say to me that he had met only one man in the world who was the soul of honor, and that was Roebuck Ramsden.

RAMSDEN. Oh, that was his partiality: we were very old friends, you know. But there was something else he used to say about you. I wonder whether I ought to tell you or not!

OCTAVIUS. You know best.

RAMSDEN. It was something about his daughter.

OCTAVIUS. [eagerly] About Ann! Oh, do tell me that, Mr Ramsden.

RAMSDEN. Well, he said he was glad, after all, you were not his son, because he thought that someday Annie and you — [Octavius blushes vividly]. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. But he was in earnest.

OCTAVIUS. Oh, if only I thought I had a chance! You know, Mr Ramsden, I don’t care about money or about what people call position; and I can’t bring myself to take an interest in the business of struggling for them. Well, Ann has a most exquisite nature; but she is so accustomed to be in the thick of that sort of thing that she thinks a man’s character incomplete if he is not ambitious. She knows that if she married me she would have to reason herself out of being ashamed of me for not being a big success of some kind.

RAMSDEN. [Getting up and planting himself with his back to the fireplace] Nonsense, my boy, nonsense! You’re too modest. What does she know about the real value of men at her age? [More seriously] Besides, she’s a wonderfully dutiful girl. Her father’s wish would be sacred to her. Do you know that since she grew up to years of discretion, I don’t believe she has ever once given her own wish as a reason for doing anything or not doing it. It’s always “Father wishes me to,” or “Mother wouldn’t like it.” It’s really almost a fault in her. I have often told her she must learn to think for herself.

OCTAVIUS. [shaking his head] I couldn’t ask her to marry me because her father wished it, Mr Ramsden.

RAMSDEN. Well, perhaps not. No: of course not. I see that. No: you certainly couldn’t. But when you win her on your own merits, it will be a great happiness to her to fulfil her father’s desire as well as her own. Eh? Come! you’ll ask her, won’t you?

OCTAVIUS. [with sad gaiety] At all events I promise you I shall never ask anyone else.

RAMSDEN. Oh, you shan’t need to. She’ll accept you, my boy — although [here he suddenly becomes very serious indeed] you have one great drawback.

OCTAVIUS. [anxiously] What drawback is that, Mr Ramsden? I should rather say which of my many drawbacks?

RAMSDEN. I’ll tell you, Octavius. [He takes from the table a book bound in red cloth]. I have in my hand a copy of the most infamous, the most scandalous, the most mischievous, the most blackguardly book that ever escaped burning at the hands of the common hangman. I have not read it: I would not soil my mind with such filth; but I have read what the papers say of it. The title is quite enough for me. [He reads it]. The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion by John Tanner, M.I.R.C., Member of the Idle Rich Class.

OCTAVIUS. [smiling] But Jack —

RAMSDEN. [testily] For goodness’ sake, don’t call him Jack under my roof [he throws the book violently down on the table, Then, somewhat relieved, he comes past the table to Octavius, and addresses him at close quarters with impressive gravity]. Now, Octavius, I know that my dead friend was right when he said you were a generous lad. I know that this man was your schoolfellow, and that you feel bound to stand by him because there was a boyish friendship between you. But I ask you to consider the altered circumstances. You were treated as a son in my friend’s house. You lived there; and your friends could not be turned from the door. This Tanner was in and out there on your account almost from his childhood. He addresses Annie by her Christian name as freely as you do. Well, while her father was alive, that was her father’s business, not mine. This man Tanner was only a boy to him: his opinions were something to be laughed at, like a man’s hat on a child’s head. But now Tanner is a grown man and Annie a grown woman. And her father is gone. We don’t as yet know the exact terms of his will; but he often talked it over with me; and I have no more doubt than I have that you’re sitting there that the will appoints me Annie’s trustee and guardian. [Forcibly] Now I tell you, once for all, I can’t and I won’t have Annie placed in such a position that she must, out of regard for you, suffer the intimacy of this fellow Tanner. It’s not fair: it’s not right: it’s not kind. What are you going to do about it?

OCTAVIUS. But Ann herself has told Jack that whatever his opinions are, he will always be welcome because he knew her dear father.

RAMSDEN. [out of patience] That girl’s mad about her duty to her parents. [He starts off like a goaded ox in the direction of John Bright, in whose expression there is no sympathy for him. As he speaks, he fumes down to Herbert Spencer, who receives him still more coldly] Excuse me, Octavius; but there are limits to social toleration. You know that I am not a bigoted or prejudiced man. You know that I am plain Roebuck Ramsden when other men who have done less have got handles to their names, because I have stood for equality and liberty of conscience while they were truckling to the Church and to the aristocracy. Whitefield and I lost chance after chance through our advanced opinions. But I draw the line at Anarchism and Free Love and that sort of thing. If I am to be Annie’s guardian, she will have to learn that she has a duty to me. I won’t have it: I will not have it. She must forbid John Tanner the house; and so must you.

The parlormaid returns.

OCTAVIUS. But —

RAMSDEN. [calling his attention to the servant] Ssh! Well?

THE MAID. Mr Tanner wishes to see you, sir.

RAMSDEN. Mr Tanner!

OCTAVIUS. Jack!

RAMSDEN. How dare Mr Tanner call on me! Say I cannot see him.

OCTAVIUS. [hurt] I am sorry you are turning my friend from your door like that.

THE MAID. [calmly] He’s not at the door, sir. He’s upstairs in the drawingroom with Miss Ramsden. He came with Mrs Whitefield and Miss Ann and Miss Robinson, sir.

Ramsden’s feelings are beyond words.

OCTAVIUS. [grinning] That’s very like Jack, Mr Ramsden. You must see him, even if it’s only to turn him out.

RAMSDEN. [hammering out his words with suppressed fury] Go upstairs and ask Mr Tanner to be good enough to step down here. [The parlormaid goes out; and Ramsden returns to the fireplace, as to a fortified position]. I must say that of all the confounded pieces of impertinence — well, if these are Anarchist manners I hope you like them. And Annie with him! Annie! A — [he chokes].

OCTAVIUS. Yes: that’s what surprises me. He’s so desperately afraid of Ann. There must be something the matter.

Mr John Tanner suddenly opens the door and enters. He is too young to be described simply as a big man with a beard. But it is already plain that middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist finery, but from a sense of the importance of everything he does which leads him to make as much of paying a call as other men do of getting married or laying a foundation stone. A sensitive, susceptible, exaggerative, earnest man: a megalomaniac, who would be lost without a sense of humor.

Just at present the sense of humor is in abeyance. To say that he is excited is nothing: all his moods are phases of excitement. He is now in the panic-stricken phase; and he walks straight up to Ramsden as if with the fixed intention of shooting him on his own hearthrug. But what he pulls from his breast pocket is not a pistol, but a foolscap document which he thrusts under the indignant nose of Ramsden as he exclaims —

TANNER. Ramsden: do you know what that is?

RAMSDEN. [loftily] No, Sir.

TANNER. It’s a copy of Whitefield’s will. Ann got it this morning.

RAMSDEN. When you say Ann, you mean, I presume, Miss Whitefield.

TANNER. I mean our Ann, your Ann, Tavy’s Ann, and now, Heaven help me, my Ann!

OCTAVIUS. [rising, very pale] What do you mean?

TANNER. Mean! [He holds up the will]. Do you know who is appointed Ann’s guardian by this will?

RAMSDEN. [coolly] I believe I am.

TANNER. You! You and I, man. I! I!! I!!! Both of us! [He flings the will down on the writing table].

RAMSDEN. You! Impossible.

TANNER. It’s only too hideously true. [He throws himself into Octavius’s chair]. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don’t know Ann as well as I do. She’ll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she’ll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She’ll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.

OCTAVIUS. Jack: I wish you wouldn’t talk like that about Ann.

TANNER. This chap’s in love with her: that’s another complication. Well, she’ll either jilt him and say I didn’t approve of him, or marry him and say you ordered her to. I tell you, this is the most staggering blow that has ever fallen on a man of my age and temperament.

RAMSDEN. Let me see that will, sir. [He goes to the writing table and picks it up]. I cannot believe that my old friend Whitefield would have shown such a want of confidence in me as to associate me with — [His countenance falls as he reads].

TANNER. It’s all my own doing: that’s the horrible irony of it. He told me one day that you were to be Ann’s guardian; and like a fool I began arguing with him about the folly of leaving a young woman under the control of an old man with obsolete ideas.

RAMSDEN. [stupended] My ideas obsolete!!!!!

TANNER. Totally. I had just finished an essay called Down with Government by the Greyhaired; and I was full of arguments and illustrations. I said the proper thing was to combine the experience of an old hand with the vitality of a young one. Hang me if he didn’t take me at my word and alter his will — it’s dated only a fortnight after that conversation — appointing me as joint guardian with you!

RAMSDEN. [pale and determined] I shall refuse to act.

TANNER. What’s the good of that? I’ve been refusing all the way from Richmond; but Ann keeps on saying that of course she’s only an orphan; and that she can’t expect the people who were glad to come to the house in her father’s time to trouble much about her now. That’s the latest game. An orphan! It’s like hearing an ironclad talk about being at the mercy of the winds and waves.

OCTAVIUS. This is not fair, Jack. She is an orphan. And you ought to stand by her.

TANNER. Stand by her! What danger is she in? She has the law on her side; she has popular sentiment on her side; she has plenty of money and no conscience. All she wants with me is to load up all her moral responsibilities on me, and do as she likes at the expense of my character. I can’t control her; and she can compromise me as much as she likes. I might as well be her husband.

RAMSDEN. You can refuse to accept the guardianship. I shall certainly refuse to hold it jointly with you.

TANNER. Yes; and what will she say to that? what does she say to it? Just that her father’s wishes are sacred to her, and that she shall always look up to me as her guardian whether I care to face the responsibility or not. Refuse! You might as well refuse to accept the embraces of a boa constrictor when once it gets round your neck.

OCTAVIUS. This sort of talk is not kind to me, Jack.

TANNER. [rising and going to Octavius to console him, but still lamenting] If he wanted a young guardian, why didn’t he appoint Tavy?

RAMSDEN. Ah! why indeed?

OCTAVIUS. I will tell you. He sounded me about it; but I refused the trust because I loved her. I had no right to let myself be forced on her as a guardian by her father. He spoke to her about it; and she said I was right. You know I love her, Mr Ramsden; and Jack knows it too. If Jack loved a woman, I would not compare her to a boa constrictor in his presence, however much I might dislike her [he sits down between the busts and turns his face to the wall].

RAMSDEN. I do not believe that Whitefield was in his right senses when he made that will. You have admitted that he made it under your influence.

TANNER. You ought to be pretty well obliged to me for my influence. He leaves you two thousand five hundred for your trouble. He leaves Tavy a dowry for his sister and five thousand for himself.

OCTAVIUS. [his tears flowing afresh] Oh, I can’t take it. He was too good to us.

TANNER. You won’t get it, my boy, if Ramsden upsets the will.

RAMSDEN. Ha! I see. You have got me in a cleft stick.

TANNER. He leaves me nothing but the charge of Ann’s morals, on the ground that I have already more money than is good for me. That shows that he had his wits about him, doesn’t it?

RAMSDEN. [grimly] I admit that.

OCTAVIUS. [rising and coming from his refuge by the wall] Mr Ramsden: I think you are prejudiced against Jack. He is a man of honor, and incapable of abusing —

TANNER. Don’t, Tavy: you’ll make me ill. I am not a man of honor: I am a man struck down by a dead hand. Tavy: you must marry her after all and take her off my hands. And I had set my heart on saving you from her!

OCTAVIUS. Oh, Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness.

TANNER. Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

RAMSDEN. [violently] Stuff, sir. Talk sense; or else go and waste someone else’s time: I have something better to do than listen to your fooleries [he positively kicks his way to his table and resumes his seat].

TANNER. You hear him, Tavy! Not an idea in his head later than eighteen-sixty. We can’t leave Ann with no other guardian to turn to.

RAMSDEN. I am proud of your contempt for my character and opinions, sir. Your own are set forth in that book, I believe.

TANNER. [eagerly going to the table] What! You’ve got my book! What do you think of it?

RAMSDEN. Do you suppose I would read such a book, sir?

TANNER. Then why did you buy it?

RAMSDEN. I did not buy it, sir. It has been sent me by some foolish lady who seems to admire your views. I was about to dispose of it when Octavius interrupted me. I shall do so now, with your permission. [He throws the book into the waste paper basket with such vehemence that Tanner recoils under the impression that it is being thrown at his head].

TANNER. You have no more manners than I have myself. However, that saves ceremony between us. [He sits down again]. What do you intend to do about this will?

OCTAVIUS. May I make a suggestion?

RAMSDEN. Certainly, Octavius.

OCTAVIUS. Aren’t we forgetting that Ann herself may have some wishes in this matter?

RAMSDEN. I quite intend that Annie’s wishes shall be consulted in every reasonable way. But she is only a woman, and a young and inexperienced woman at that.

TANNER. Ramsden: I begin to pity you.

RAMSDEN. [hotly] I don’t want to know how you feel towards me, Mr Tanner.

TANNER. Ann will do just exactly what she likes. And what’s more, she’ll force us to advise her to do it; and she’ll put the blame on us if it turns out badly. So, as Tavy is longing to see her —

OCTAVIUS. [shyly] I am not, Jack.

TANNER. You lie, Tavy: you are. So let’s have her down from the drawing-room and ask her what she intends us to do. Off with you, Tavy, and fetch her. [Tavy turns to go]. And don’t be long for the strained relations between myself and Ramsden will make the interval rather painful [Ramsden compresses his lips, but says nothing — ].

OCTAVIUS. Never mind him, Mr Ramsden. He’s not serious. [He goes out].

RAMSDEN [very deliberately] Mr Tanner: you are the most impudent person I have ever met.

TANNER. [seriously] I know it, Ramsden. Yet even I cannot wholly conquer shame. We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Good Lord, my dear Ramsden, we are ashamed to walk, ashamed to ride in an omnibus, ashamed to hire a hansom instead of keeping a carriage, ashamed of keeping one horse instead of two and a groom-gardener instead of a coachman and footman. The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. Why, you’re ashamed to buy my book, ashamed to read it: the only thing you’re not ashamed of is to judge me for it without having read it; and even that only means that you’re ashamed to have heterodox opinions. Look at the effect I produce because my fairy godmother withheld from me this gift of shame. I have every possible virtue that a man can have except —

RAMSDEN. I am glad you think so well of yourself.

TANNER. All you mean by that is that you think I ought to be ashamed of talking about my virtues. You don’t mean that I haven’t got them: you know perfectly well that I am as sober and honest a citizen as yourself, as truthful personally, and much more truthful politically and morally.

RAMSDEN. [touched on his most sensitive point] I deny that. I will not allow you or any man to treat me as if I were a mere member of the British public. I detest its prejudices; I scorn its narrowness; I demand the right to think for myself. You pose as an advanced man. Let me tell you that I was an advanced man before you were born.

TANNER. I knew it was a long time ago.

RAMSDEN. I am as advanced as ever I was. I defy you to prove that I have ever hauled down the flag. I am more advanced than ever I was. I grow more advanced every day.

TANNER. More advanced in years, Polonius.

RAMSDEN. Polonius! So you are Hamlet, I suppose.

TANNER. No: I am only the most impudent person you’ve ever met. That’s your notion of a thoroughly bad character. When you want to give me a piece of your mind, you ask yourself, as a just and upright man, what is the worst you can fairly say of me. Thief, liar, forger, adulterer, perjurer, glutton, drunkard? Not one of these names fit me. You have to fall back on my deficiency in shame. Well, I admit it. I even congratulate myself; for if I were ashamed of my real self, I should cut as stupid a figure as any of the rest of you. Cultivate a little impudence, Ramsden; and you will become quite a remarkable man.

RAMSDEN. I have no —

TANNER. You have no desire for that sort of notoriety. Bless you, I knew that answer would come as well as I know that a box of matches will come out of an automatic machine when I put a penny in the slot: you would be ashamed to say anything else.

The crushing retort for which Ramsden has been visibly collecting his forces is lost for ever; for at this point Octavius returns with Miss Ann Whitefield and her mother; and Ramsden springs up and hurries to the door to receive them. Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste; also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas. To her mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible, nothing whatever of the kind. Not that Octavius’s admiration is in any way ridiculous or discreditable. Ann is a well formed creature, as far as that goes; and she is perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with ensnaring eyes and hair. Besides, instead of making herself an eyesore, like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of black and violet silk which does honor to her late father and reveals the family tradition of brave unconventionality by which Ramsden sets such store.

But all this is beside the point as an explanation of Ann’s charm. Turn up her nose, give a cast to her eye, replace her black and violet confection by the apron and feathers of a flower girl, strike all the aitches out of her speech, and Ann would still make men dream. Vitality is as common as humanity; but, like humanity, it sometimes rises to genius; and Ann is one of the vital geniuses. Not at all, if you please, an oversexed person: that is a vital defect, not a true excess. She is a perfectly respectable, perfectly self-controlled woman, and looks it; though her pose is fashionably frank and impulsive. She inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not mean to do; also some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will probably do everything she means to do without taking more account of other people than may be necessary and what she calls right. In short, what the weaker of her own sex sometimes call a cat.

Nothing can be more decorous than her entry and her reception by Ramsden, whom she kisses. The late Mr Whitefield would be gratified almost to impatience by the long faces of the men (except Tanner, who is fidgety), the silent handgrasps, the sympathetic placing of chairs, the sniffing of the widow, and the liquid eye of the daughter, whose heart, apparently, will not let her control her tongue to speech. Ramsden and Octavius take the two chairs from the wall, and place them for the two ladies; but Ann comes to Tanner and takes his chair, which he offers with a brusque gesture, subsequently relieving his irritation by sitting down on the corner of the writing table with studied indecorum. Octavius gives Mrs Whitefield a chair next Ann, and himself takes the vacant one which Ramsden has placed under the nose of the effigy of Mr Herbert Spencer.

Mrs Whitefield, by the way, is a little woman, whose faded flaxen hair looks like straw on an egg. She has an expression of muddled shrewdness, a squeak of protest in her voice, and an odd air of continually elbowing away some larger person who is crushing her into a corner. One guesses her as one of those women who are conscious of being treated as silly and negligible, and who, without having strength enough to assert themselves effectually, at any rate never submit to their fate. There is a touch of chivalry in Octavius’s scrupulous attention to her, even whilst his whole soul is absorbed by Ann.

Ramsden goes solemnly back to his magisterial seat at the writing table, ignoring Tanner, and opens the proceedings.

RAMSDEN. I am sorry, Annie, to force business on you at a sad time like the present. But your poor dear father’s will has raised a very serious question. You have read it, I believe?

[Ann assents with a nod and a catch of her breath, too much affected to speak].

I must say I am surprised to find Mr Tanner named as joint guardian and trustee with myself of you and Rhoda. [A pause. They all look portentous; but they have nothing to say. Ramsden, a little ruffled by the lack of any response, continues] I don’t know that I can consent to act under such conditions. Mr Tanner has, I understand, some objection also; but I do not profess to understand its nature: he will no doubt speak for himself. But we are agreed that we can decide nothing until we know your views. I am afraid I shall have to ask you to choose between my sole guardianship and that of Mr Tanner; for I fear it is impossible for us to undertake a joint arrangement.

ANN. [in a low musical voice] Mamma —

MRS WHITEFIELD. [hastily] Now, Ann, I do beg you not to put it on me. I have no opinion on the subject; and if I had, it would probably not be attended to. I am quite with whatever you three think best.

Tanner turns his head and looks fixedly at Ramsden, who angrily refuses to receive this mute communication.

ANN. [resuming in the same gentle voice, ignoring her mother’s bad taste] Mamma knows that she is not strong enough to bear the whole responsibility for me and Rhoda without some help and advice. Rhoda must have a guardian; and though I am older, I do not think any young unmarried woman should be left quite to her own guidance. I hope you agree with me, Granny?

TANNER. [starting] Granny! Do you intend to call your guardians Granny?

ANN. Don’t be foolish, Jack. Mr Ramsden has always been Grandpapa Roebuck to me: I am Granny’s Annie; and he is Annie’s Granny. I christened him so when I first learned to speak.

RAMSDEN. [sarcastically] I hope you are satisfied, Mr Tanner. Go on, Annie: I quite agree with you.

ANN. Well, if I am to have a guardian, CAN I set aside anybody whom my dear father appointed for me?

RAMSDEN. [biting his lip] You approve of your father’s choice, then?

ANN. It is not for me to approve or disapprove. I accept it. My father loved me and knew best what was good for me.

RAMSDEN. Of course I understand your feeling, Annie. It is what I should have expected of you; and it does you credit. But it does not settle the question so completely as you think. Let me put a case to you. Suppose you were to discover that I had been guilty of some disgraceful action — that I was not the man your poor dear father took me for. Would you still consider it right that I should be Rhoda’s guardian?

ANN. I can’t imagine you doing anything disgraceful, Granny.

TANNER. [to Ramsden] You haven’t done anything of the sort, have you?

RAMSDEN. [indignantly] No sir.

MRS. WHITEFIELD. [placidly] Well, then, why suppose it?

ANN. You see, Granny, Mamma would not like me to suppose it.

RAMSDEN. [much perplexed] You are both so full of natural and affectionate feeling in these family matters that it is very hard to put the situation fairly before you.

TANNER. Besides, my friend, you are not putting the situation fairly before them.

RAMSDEN. [sulkily] Put it yourself, then.

TANNER. I will. Ann: Ramsden thinks I am not fit be your guardian; and I quite agree with him. He considers that if your father had read my book, he wouldn’t have appointed me. That book is the disgraceful action he has been talking about. He thinks it’s your duty for Rhoda’s sake to ask him to act alone and to make me withdraw. Say the word and I will.

ANN. But I haven’t read your book, Jack.

TANNER. [diving at the waste-paper basket and fishing the book out for her] Then read it at once and decide.

RAMSDEN. If I am to be your guardian, I positively forbid you to read that book, Annie. [He smites the table with his fist and rises].

ANN. Of course, if you don’t wish it. [She puts the book on the table].

TANNER. If one guardian is to forbid you to read the other guardian’s book, how are we to settle it? Suppose I order you to read it! What about your duty to me?

ANN. [gently] I am sure you would never purposely force me into a painful dilemma, Jack.

RAMSDEN. [irritably] Yes, yes, Annie: this is all very well, and, as I said, quite natural and becoming. But you must make a choice one way or the other. We are as much in a dilemma as you.

ANN. I feel that I am too young, too inexperienced, to decide. My father’s wishes are sacred to me.

MRS WHITEFIELD. If you two men won’t carry them out I must say it is rather hard that you should put the responsibility on Ann. It seems to me that people are always putting things on other people in this world.

RAMSDEN. I am sorry you take it that way.

ANN. [touchingly] Do you refuse to accept me as your ward, Granny?

RAMSDEN. No: I never said that. I greatly object to act with Mr Tanner: that’s all.

MRS. WHITEFIELD. Why? What’s the matter with poor Jack?

TANNER. My views are too advanced for him.

RAMSDEN. [indignantly] They are not. I deny it.

ANN. Of course not. What nonsense! Nobody is more advanced than Granny. I am sure it is Jack himself who has made all the difficulty. Come, Jack! Be kind to me in my sorrow. You don’t refuse to accept me as your ward, do you?

TANNER. [gloomily] No. I let myself in for it; so I suppose I must face it. [He turns away to the bookcase, and stands there, moodily studying the titles of the volumes].

ANN. [rising and expanding with subdued but gushing delight] Then we are all agreed; and my dear father’s will is to be carried out. You don’t know what a joy that is to me and to my mother! [She goes to Ramsden and presses both his hands, saying] And I shall have my dear Granny to help and advise me. [She casts a glance at Tanner over her shoulder]. And Jack the Giant Killer. [She goes past her mother to Octavius]. And Jack’s inseparable friend Ricky-ticky-tavy [he blushes and looks inexpressibly foolish].

MRS WHITEFIELD. [rising and shaking her widow’s weeds straight] Now that you are Ann’s guardian, Mr Ramsden, I wish you would speak to her about her habit of giving people nicknames. They can’t be expected to like it. [She moves towards the door].

ANN. How can you say such a thing, Mamma! [Glowing with affectionate remorse] Oh, I wonder can you be right! Have I been inconsiderate? [She turns to Octavius, who is sitting astride his chair with his elbows on the back of it. Putting her hand on his forehead the turns his face up suddenly]. Do you want to be treated like a grown up man? Must I call you Mr Robinson in future?

OCTAVIUS. [earnestly] Oh please call me Ricky-ticky — tavy, “Mr Robinson” would hurt me cruelly. [She laughs and pats his cheek with her finger; then comes back to Ramsden]. You know I’m beginning to think that Granny is rather a piece of impertinence. But I never dreamt of its hurting you.

RAMSDEN. [breezily, as he pats her affectionately on the back] My dear Annie, nonsense. I insist on Granny. I won’t answer to any other name than Annie’s Granny.

ANN. [gratefully] You all spoil me, except Jack.

TANNER. [over his shoulder, from the bookcase] I think you ought to call me Mr Tanner.

ANN. [gently] No you don’t, Jack. That’s like the things you say on purpose to shock people: those who know you pay no attention to them. But, if you like, I’ll call you after your famous ancestor Don Juan.

RAMSDEN. Don Juan!

ANN. [innocently] Oh, is there any harm in it? I didn’t know. Then I certainly won’t call you that. May I call you Jack until I can think of something else?

TANKER. Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t try to invent anything worse. I capitulate. I consent to Jack. I embrace Jack. Here endeth my first and last attempt to assert my authority.

ANN. You see, Mamma, they all really like to have pet names.

MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, I think you might at least drop them until we are out of mourning.

ANN. [reproachfully, stricken to the soul] Oh, how could you remind me, mother? [She hastily leaves the room to conceal her emotion].

MRS WHITEFIELD. Of course. My fault as usual! [She follows Ann].

TANNER. [coming from the bockcase] Ramsden: we’re beaten — smashed — nonentitized, like her mother.

RAMSDEN. Stuff, Sir. [He follows Mrs Whitefield out of the room].

TANNER. [left alone with Octavius, stares whimsically at him] Tavy: do you want to count for something in the world?

OCTAVIUS. I want to count for something as a poet: I want to write a great play.

TANNER. With Ann as the heroine?

OCTAVIUS. Yes: I confess it.

TANNER. Take care, Tavy. The play with Ann as the heroine is all right; but if you’re not very careful, by Heaven she’ll marry you.

OCTAVIUS. [sighing] No such luck, Jack!

TANNER. Why, man, your head is in the lioness’s mouth: you are half swallowed already — in three bites — Bite One, Ricky; Bite Two, Ticky; Bite Three, Tavy; and down you go.

OCTAVIUS. She is the same to everybody, Jack: you know her ways.

TANNER. Yes: she breaks everybody’s back with the stroke of her paw; but the question is, which of us will she eat? My own opinion is that she means to eat you.

OCTAVIUS. [rising, pettishly] It’s horrible to talk like that about her when she is upstairs crying for her father. But I do so want her to eat me that I can bear your brutalities because they give me hope.

TANNER. Tavy; that’s the devilish side of a woman’s fascination: she makes you will your own destruction.

OCTAVIUS. But it’s not destruction: it’s fulfilment.

TANNER. Yes, of HER purpose; and that purpose is neither her happiness nor yours, but Nature’s. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it: do you think she will hesitate to sacrifice you?

OCTAVIUS. Why, it is just because she is self-sacrificing that she will not sacrifice those she loves.

TANNER. That is the profoundest of mistakes, Tavy. It is the self-sacrificing women that sacrifice others most recklessly. Because they are unselfish, they are kind in little things. Because they have a purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe, a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.

OCTAVIUS. Don’t be ungenerous, Jack. They take the tenderest care of us.

TANNER. Yes, as a soldier takes care of his rifle or a musician of his violin. But do they allow us any purpose or freedom of our own? Will they lend us to one another? Can the strongest man escape from them when once he is appropriated? They tremble when we are in danger, and weep when we die; but the tears are not for us, but for a father wasted, a son’s breeding thrown away. They accuse us of treating them as a mere means to our pleasure; but how can so feeble and transient a folly as a man’s selfish pleasure enslave a woman as the whole purpose of Nature embodied in a woman can enslave a man?

OCTAVIUS. What matter, if the slavery makes us happy?

TANNER. No matter at all if you have no purpose of your own, and are, like most men, a mere breadwinner. But you, Tavy, are an artist: that is, you have a purpose as absorbing and as unscrupulous as a woman’s purpose.

OCTAVIUS. Not unscrupulous.

TANNER. Quite unscrupulous. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of childbearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.

OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so — and I don’t admit it for a moment — it is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.

TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal tiger, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.

TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as if it were a nicely underdone chop.

OCTAVIUS. You know, Jack, I should have to run away from you if I did not make it a fixed rule not to mind anything you say. You come out with perfectly revolting things sometimes.

Ramsden returns, followed by Ann. They come in quickly, with their former leisurely air of decorous grief changed to one of genuine concern, and, on Ramsden’s part, of worry. He comes between the two men, intending to address Octavius, but pulls himself up abruptly as he sees Tanner.

RAMSDEN. I hardly expected to find you still here, Mr Tanner.

TANNER. Am I in the way? Good morning, fellow guardian [he goes towards the door].

ANN. Stop, Jack. Granny: he must know, sooner or later.

RAMSDEN. Octavius: I have a very serious piece of news for you. It is of the most private and delicate nature — of the most painful nature too, I am sorry to say. Do you wish Mr Tanner to be present whilst I explain?

OCTAVIUS. [turning pale] I have no secrets from Jack.

RAMSDEN. Before you decide that finally, let me say that the news concerns your sister, and that it is terrible news.

OCTAVIUS. Violet! What has happened? Is she — dead?

RAMSDEN. I am not sure that it is not even worse than that.

OCTAVIUS. Is she badly hurt? Has there been an accident?

RAMSDEN. No: nothing of that sort.

TANNER. Ann: will you have the common humanity to tell us what the matter is?

ANN. [half whispering] I can’t. Violet has done something dreadful. We shall have to get her away somewhere. [She flutters to the writing table and sits in Ramsden’s chair, leaving the three men to fight it out between them].

OCTAVIUS. [enlightened] Is that what you meant, Mr Ramsden?

RAMSDEN. Yes. [Octavius sinks upon a chair, crushed]. I am afraid there is no doubt that Violet did not really go to Eastbourne three weeks ago when we thought she was with the Parry Whitefields. And she called on a strange doctor yesterday with a wedding ring on her finger. Mrs. Parry Whitefield met her there by chance; and so the whole thing came out.

OCTAVIUS. [rising with his fists clenched] Who is the scoundrel?

ANN. She won’t tell us.

OCTAVIUS. [collapsing upon his chair again] What a frightful thing!

TANNER. [with angry sarcasm] Dreadful. Appalling. Worse than death, as Ramsden says. [He comes to Octavius]. What would you not give, Tavy, to turn it into a railway accident, with all her bones broken or something equally respectable and deserving of sympathy?

OCTAVIUS. Don’t be brutal, Jack.

TANNER. Brutal! Good Heavens, man, what are you crying for? Here is a woman whom we all supposed to be making bad water color sketches, practising Grieg and Brahms, gadding about to concerts and parties, wasting her life and her money. We suddenly learn that she has turned from these sillinesses to the fulfilment of her highest purpose and greatest function — to increase, multiply and replenish the earth. And instead of admiring her courage and rejoicing in her instinct; instead of crowning the completed womanhood and raising the triumphal strain of “Unto us a child is born: unto us a son is given,” here you are — you who have been as merry as Brigs in your mourning for the dead — all pulling long faces and looking as ashamed and disgraced as if the girl had committed the vilest of crimes.

RAMSDEN. [roaring with rage] I will not have these abominations uttered in my house [he smites the writing table with his fist].

TANNER. Look here: if you insult me again I’ll take you at your word and leave your house. Ann: where is Violet now?

ANN. Why? Are you going to her?

TANNER. Of course I am going to her. She wants help; she wants money; she wants respect and congratulation. She wants every chance for her child. She does not seem likely to get it from you: she shall from me. Where is she?

ANN. Don’t be so headstrong, Jack. She’s upstairs.

TANNER. What! Under Ramsden’s sacred roof! Go and do your miserable duty, Ramsden. Hunt her out into the street. Cleanse your threshold from her contamination. Vindicate the purity of your English home. I’ll go for a cab.

ANN. [alarmed] Oh, Granny, you mustn’t do that.

OCTAVIUS. [broken-heartedly, rising] I’ll take her away, Mr Ramsden. She had no right to come to your house.

RAMSDEN. [indignantly] But I am only too anxious to help her. [turning on Tanner] How dare you, sir, impute such monstrous intentions to me? I protest against it. I am ready to put down my last penny to save her from being driven to run to you for protection.

TANNER. [subsiding] It’s all right, then. He’s not going to act up to his principles. It’s agreed that we all stand by Violet.

OCTAVIUS. But who is the man? He can make reparation by marrying her; and he shall, or he shall answer for it to me.

RAMSDEN. He shall, Octavius. There you speak like a man.

TANNER. Then you don’t think him a scoundrel, after all?

OCTAVIUS. Not a scoundrel! He is a heartless scoundrel.

RAMSDEN. A damned scoundrel. I beg your pardon, Annie; but I can say no less.

TANNER. So we are to marry your sister to a damned scoundrel by way of reforming her character! On my soul, I think you are all mad.

ANN. Don’t be absurd, Jack. Of course you are quite right, Tavy; but we don’t know who he is: Violet won’t tell us.

TANNER. What on earth does it matter who he is? He’s done his part; and Violet must do the rest.

RAMSDEN. [beside himself] Stuff! lunacy! There is a rascal in our midst, a libertine, a villain worse than a murderer; and we are not to learn who he is! In our ignorance we are to shake him by the hand; to introduce him into our homes; to trust our daughters with him; to — to —

ANN. [coaxingly] There, Granny, don’t talk so loud. It’s most shocking: we must all admit that; but if Violet won’t tell us, what can we do? Nothing. Simply nothing.

RAMSDEN. Hmph! I’m not so sure of that. If any man has paid Violet any special attention, we can easily find that out. If there is any man of notoriously loose principles among us —

TANNER. Ahem!

RAMSDEN. [raising his voice] Yes sir, I repeat, if there is any man of notoriously loose principles among us —

TANNER. Or any man notoriously lacking in self-control.

RAMSDEN. [aghast] Do you dare to suggest that I am capable of such an act?

TANNER. My dear Ramsden, this is an act of which every man is capable. That is what comes of getting at cross purposes with Nature. The suspicion you have just flung at me clings to us all. It’s a sort of mud that sticks to the judge’s ermine or the cardinal’s robe as fast as to the rags of the tramp. Come, Tavy: don’t look so bewildered: it might have been me: it might have been Ramsden; just as it might have been anybody. If it had, what could we do but lie and protest as Ramsden is going to protest.

RAMSDEN. [choking] I — I — I —

TANNER. Guilt itself could not stammer more confusedly, And yet you know perfectly well he’s innocent, Tavy.

RAMSDEN. [exhausted] I am glad you admit that, sir. I admit, myself, that there is an element of truth in what you say, grossly as you may distort it to gratify your malicious humor. I hope, Octavius, no suspicion of me is possible in your mind.

OCTAVIUS. Of you! No, not for a moment.

TANNER. [drily] I think he suspects me just a little.

OCTAVIUS. Jack: you couldn’t — you wouldn’t —

TANNER. Why not?

OCTAVIUS. [appalled] Why not!

TANNER. Oh, well, I’ll tell you why not. First, you would feel bound to quarrel with me. Second, Violet doesn’t like me. Third, if I had the honor of being the father of Violet’s child, I should boast of it instead of denying it. So be easy: our Friendship is not in danger.

OCTAVIUS. I should have put away the suspicion with horror if only you would think and feel naturally about it. I beg your pardon.

TANNER. MY pardon! nonsense! And now let’s sit down and have a family council. [He sits down. The rest follow his example, more or less under protest]. Violet is going to do the State a service; consequently she must be packed abroad like a criminal until it’s over. What’s happening upstairs?

ANN. Violet is in the housekeeper’s room — by herself, of course.

TANNER. Why not in the drawingroom?

ANN. Don’t be absurd, Jack. Miss Ramsden is in the drawingroom with my mother, considering what to do.

TANNER. Oh! the housekeeper’s room is the penitentiary, I suppose; and the prisoner is waiting to be brought before her judges. The old cats!

ANN. Oh, Jack!

RAMSDEN. You are at present a guest beneath the roof of one of the old cats, sir. My sister is the mistress of this house.

TANNER. She would put me in the housekeeper’s room, too, if she dared, Ramsden. However, I withdraw cats. Cats would have more sense. Ann: as your guardian, I order you to go to Violet at once and be particularly kind to her.

ANN. I have seen her, Jack. And I am sorry to say I am afraid she is going to be rather obstinate about going abroad. I think Tavy ought to speak to her about it.

OCTAVIUS. How can I speak to her about such a thing [he breaks down]?

ANN. Don’t break down, Ricky. Try to bear it for all our sakes.

RAMSDEN. Life is not all plays and poems, Octavius. Come! face it like a man.

TANNER. [chafing again] Poor dear brother! Poor dear friends of the family! Poor dear Tabbies and Grimalkins. Poor dear everybody except the woman who is going to risk her life to create another life! Tavy: don’t you be a selfish ass. Away with you and talk to Violet; and bring her down here if she cares to come. [Octavius rises]. Tell her we’ll stand by her.

RAMSDEN. [rising] No, sir —

TANNER. [rising also and interrupting him] Oh, we understand: it’s against your conscience; but still you’ll do it.

OCTAVIUS. I assure you all, on my word, I never meant to be selfish. It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

TANNER. My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities. The need of the present hour is a happy mother and a healthy baby. Bend your energies on that; and you will see your way clearly enough.

Octavius, much perplexed, goes out.

RAMSDEN. [facing Tanner impressively] And Morality, sir? What is to become of that?

TANNER. Meaning a weeping Magdalen and an innocent child branded with her shame. Not in our circle, thank you. Morality can go to its father the devil.

RAMSDEN. I thought so, sir. Morality sent to the devil to please our libertines, male and female. That is to be the future of England, is it?

TANNER. Oh, England will survive your disapproval. Meanwhile, I understand that you agree with me as to the practical course we are to take?

RAMSDEN. Not in your spirit sir. Not for your reasons.

TANNER. You can explain that if anybody calls you to account, here or hereafter. [He turns away, and plants himself in front of Mr Herbert Spencer, at whom he stares gloomily].

ANN. [rising and coming to Ramsden] Granny: hadn’t you better go up to the drawingroom and tell them what we intend to do?

RAMSDEN. [looking pointedly at Tanner] I hardly like to leave you alone with this gentleman. Will you not come with me?

ANN. Miss Ramsden would not like to speak about it before me, Granny. I ought not to be present.

RAMSDEN. You are right: I should have thought of that. You are a good girl, Annie.

He pats her on the shoulder. She looks up at him with beaming eyes and he goes out, much moved. Having disposed of him, she looks at Tanner. His back being turned to her, she gives a moment’s attention to her personal appearance, then softly goes to him and speaks almost into his ear.

ANN. Jack [he turns with a start]: are you glad that you are my guardian? You don’t mind being made responsible for me, I hope.

TANNER. The latest addition to your collection of scapegoats, eh?

ANN. Oh, that stupid old joke of yours about me! Do please drop it. Why do you say things that you know must pain me? I do my best to please you, Jack: I suppose I may tell you so now that you are my guardian. You will make me so unhappy if you refuse to be friends with me.

TANNER. [studying her as gloomily as he studied the dust] You need not go begging for my regard. How unreal our moral judgments are! You seem to me to have absolutely no conscience — only hypocrisy; and you can’t see the difference — yet there is a sort of fascination about you. I always attend to you, somehow. I should miss you if I lost you.

ANN. [tranquilly slipping her arm into his and walking about with him] But isn’t that only natural, Jack? We have known each other since we were children. Do you remember?

TANNER. [abruptly breaking loose] Stop! I remember EVERYTHING.

ANN. Oh, I daresay we were often very silly; but —

TANNER. I won’t have it, Ann. I am no more that schoolboy now than I am the dotard of ninety I shall grow into if I live long enough. It is over: let me forget it.

ANN. Wasn’t it a happy time? [She attempts to take his arm again].

TANNER. Sit down and behave yourself. [He makes her sit down in the chair next the writing table]. No doubt it was a happy time for you. You were a good girl and never compromised yourself. And yet the wickedest child that ever was slapped could hardly have had a better time. I can understand the success with which you bullied the other girls: your virtue imposed on them. But tell me this: did you ever know a good boy?

ANN. Of course. All boys are foolish sometimes; but Tavy was always a really good boy.

TANNER. [struck by this] Yes: you’re right. For some reason you never tempted Tavy.

ANN. Tempted! Jack!

TANNER. Yes, my dear Lady Mephistopheles, tempted. You were insatiably curious as to what a boy might be capable of, and diabolically clever at getting through his guard and surprising his inmost secrets.

ANN. What nonsense! All because you used to tell me long stories of the wicked things you had done — silly boys tricks! And you call such things inmost secrets: Boys’ secrets are just like men’s; and you know what they are!

TANNER. [obstinately] No I don’t. What are they, pray?

ANN. Why, the things they tell everybody, of course.

TANNER. Now I swear I told you things I told no one else. You lured me into a compact by which we were to have no secrets from one another. We were to tell one another everything, I didn’t notice that you never told me anything.

ANN. You didn’t want to talk about me, Jack. You wanted to talk about yourself.

TANNER. Ah, true, horribly true. But what a devil of a child you must have been to know that weakness and to play on it for the satisfaction of your own curiosity! I wanted to brag to you, to make myself interesting. And I found myself doing all sorts of mischievous things simply to have something to tell you about. I fought with boys I didn’t hate; I lied about things I might just as well have told the truth about; I stole things I didn’t want; I kissed little girls I didn’t care for. It was all bravado: passionless and therefore unreal.

ANN. I never told of you, Jack.

TANNER. No; but if you had wanted to stop me you would have told of me. You wanted me to go on.

ANN. [flashing out] Oh, that’s not true: it’s NOT true, Jack. I never wanted you to do those dull, disappointing, brutal, stupid, vulgar things. I always hoped that it would be something really heroic at last. [Recovering herself] Excuse me, Jack; but the things you did were never a bit like the things I wanted you to do. They often gave me great uneasiness; but I could not tell on you and get you into trouble. And you were only a boy. I knew you would grow out of them. Perhaps I was wrong.

TANNER. [sardonically] Do not give way to remorse, Ann. At least nineteen twentieths of the exploits I confessed to you were pure lies. I soon noticed that you didn’t like the true stories.

ANN. Of course I knew that some of the things couldn’t have happened. But —

TANNER. You are going to remind me that some of the most disgraceful ones did.

ANN. [fondly, to his great terror] I don’t want to remind you of anything. But I knew the people they happened to, and heard about them.

TANNER. Yes; but even the true stories were touched up for telling. A sensitive boy’s humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thickskinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself they are so acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess them — cannot but deny them passionately. However, perhaps it was as well for me that I romanced a bit; for, on the one occasion when I told you the truth, you threatened to tell of me.

ANN. Oh, never. Never once.

TANNER. Yes, you did. Do you remember a dark-eyed girl named Rachel Rosetree? [Ann’s brows contract for an instant involuntarily]. I got up a love affair with her; and we met one night in the garden and walked about very uncomfortably with our arms round one another, and kissed at parting, and were most conscientiously romantic. If that love affair had gone on, it would have bored me to death; but it didn’t go on; for the next thing that happened was that Rachel cut me because she found out that I had told you. How did she find it out? From you. You went to her and held the guilty secret over her head, leading her a life of abject terror and humiliation by threatening to tell on her.

ANN. And a very good thing for her, too. It was my duty to stop her misconduct; and she is thankful to me for it now.

TANNER. Is she?

ANN. She ought to be, at all events.

TANNER. It was not your duty to stop my misconduct, I suppose.

ANN. I did stop it by stopping her.

TANNER. Are you sure of that? You stopped my telling you about my adventures; but how do you know that you stopped the adventures?

ANN. Do you mean to say that you went on in the same way with other girls?

TANNER. No. I had enough of that sort of romantic tomfoolery with Rachel.

ANN. [unconvinced] Then why did you break off our confidences and become quite strange to me?

TANNER. [enigmatically] It happened just then that I got something that I wanted to keep all to myself instead of sharing it with you.

ANN. I am sure I shouldn’t have asked for any of it if you had grudged it.

TANNER. It wasn’t a box of sweets, Ann. It was something you’d never have let me call my own.

ANN. [incredulously] What?

TANNER. My soul.

ANN. Oh, do be sensible, Jack. You know you’re talking nonsense.

TANNER. The most solemn earnest, Ann. You didn’t notice at that time that you were getting a soul too. But you were. It was not for nothing that you suddenly found you had a moral duty to chastise and reform Rachel. Up to that time you had traded pretty extensively in being a good child; but you had never set up a sense of duty to others. Well, I set one up too. Up to that time I had played the boy buccaneer with no more conscience than a fox in a poultry farm. But now I began to have scruples, to feel obligations, to find that veracity and honor were no longer goody-goody expressions in the mouths of grown up people, but compelling principles in myself.

ANN. [quietly] Yes, I suppose you’re right. You were beginning to be a man, and I to be a woman.

TANNER. Are you sure it was not that we were beginning to be something more? What does the beginning of manhood and womanhood mean in most people’s mouths? You know: it means the beginning of love. But love began long before that for me. Love played its part in the earliest dreams and follies and romances I can remember — may I say the earliest follies and romances we can remember? — though we did not understand it at the time. No: the change that came to me was the birth in me of moral passion; and I declare that according to my experience moral passion is the only real passion.

ANN. All passions ought to be moral, Jack.

TANNER. Ought! Do you think that anything is strong enough to impose oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still?

ANN. Our moral sense controls passion, Jack. Don’t be stupid.

TANNER. Our moral sense! And is that not a passion? Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good times? If it were not a passion — if it were not the mightiest of the passions, all the other passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane. It is the birth of that passion that turns a child into a man.

ANN. There are other passions, Jack. Very strong ones.

TANNER. All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless — mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion.

ANN. I noticed that you got more sense. You were a dreadfully destructive boy before that.

TANNER. Destructive! Stuff! I was only mischievous.

ANN. Oh Jack, you were very destructive. You ruined all the young fir trees by chopping off their leaders with a wooden sword. You broke all the cucumber frames with your catapult. You set fire to the common: the police arrested Tavy for it because he ran away when he couldn’t stop you. You —

TANNER. Pooh! pooh! pooh! these were battles, bombardments, stratagems to save our scalps from the red Indians. You have no imagination, Ann. I am ten times more destructive now than I was then. The moral passion has taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds and demolish idols.

ANN. [bored] I am afraid I am too feminine to see any sense in destruction. Destruction can only destroy.

TANNER. Yes. That is why it is so useful. Construction cumbers the ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and gives us breathing space and liberty.

ANN. It’s no use, Jack. No woman will agree with you there.

TANNER. That’s because you confuse construction and destruction with creation and murder. They’re quite different: I adore creation and abhor murder. Yes: I adore it in tree and flower, in bird and beast, even in you. [A flush of interest and delight suddenly clears the growing perplexity and boredom from her face]. It was the creative instinct that led you to attach me to you by bonds that have left their mark on me to this day. Yes, Ann: the old childish compact between us was an unconscious love compact.

ANN. Jack!

TANNER. Oh, don’t be alarmed —

ANN. I am not alarmed.

TANNER. [whimsically] Then you ought to be: where are your principles?

ANN. Jack: are you serious or are you not?

TANNER. Do you mean about the moral passion?

ANN. No, no; the other one. [Confused] Oh! you are so silly; one never knows how to take you.

TANNER. You must take me quite seriously. I am your guardian; and it is my duty to improve your mind.

ANN. The love compact is over, then, is it? I suppose you grew tired of me?

TANNER. No; but the moral passion made our childish relations impossible. A jealous sense of my new individuality arose in me.

ANN. You hated to be treated as a boy any longer. Poor Jack!

TANNER. Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old footing. I had become a new person; and those who knew the old person laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

ANN. You became frightfully self-conscious.

TANNER. When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there, and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has never known you except as an angel.

ANN. So it was only your vanity that made you run away from us after all?

TANNER. Yes, only my vanity, as you call it.

ANN. You need not have kept away from ME on that account.

TANNER. From you above all others. You fought harder than anybody against my emancipation.

ANN. [earnestly] Oh, how wrong you are! I would have done anything for you.

TANNER. Anything except let me get loose from you. Even then you had acquired by instinct that damnable woman’s trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave. I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us, but when we take the first step your breasts are under our foot as it descends: your bodies are under our wheels as we start. No woman shall ever enslave me in that way.

ANN. But, Jack, you cannot get through life without considering other people a little.

TANNER. Ay; but what other people? It is this consideration of other people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration that makes us the sentimental slaves we are. To consider you, as you call it, is to substitute your will for my own. How if it be a baser will than mine? Are women taught better than men or worse? Are mobs of voters taught better than statesmen or worse? Worse, of course, in both cases. And then what sort of world are you going to get, with its public men considering its voting mobs, and its private men considering their wives? What does Church and State mean nowadays? The Woman and the Ratepayer.

ANN. [placidly] I am so glad you understand politics, Jack: it will be most useful to you if you go into parliament [he collapses like a pricked bladder]. But I am sorry you thought my influence a bad one.

TANNER. I don’t say it was a bad one. But bad or good, I didn’t choose to be cut to your measure. And I won’t be cut to it.

ANN. Nobody wants you to, Jack. I assure you — really on my word — I don’t mind your queer opinions one little bit. You know we have all been brought up to have advanced opinions. Why do you persist in thinking me so narrow minded?

TANNER. That’s the danger of it. I know you don’t mind, because you’ve found out that it doesn’t matter. The boa constrictor doesn’t mind the opinions of a stag one little bit when once she has got her coils round it.

ANN. [rising in sudden enlightenment] O-o-o-o-oh! NOW I understand why you warned Tavy that I am a boa constrictor. Granny told me. [She laughs and throws her boa around her neck]. Doesn’t it feel nice and soft, Jack?

TANNER. [in the toils] You scandalous woman, will you throw away even your hypocrisy?

ANN. I am never hypocritical with you, Jack. Are you angry? [She withdraws the boa and throws it on a chair]. Perhaps I shouldn’t have done that.

TANNER. [contemptuously] Pooh, prudery! Why should you not, if it amuses you?

ANN. [Shyly] Well, because — because I suppose what you really meant by the boa constrictor was THIS [she puts her arms round his neck].

TANNER. [Staring at her] Magnificent audacity! [She laughs and pats his cheeks]. Now just to think that if I mentioned this episode not a soul would believe me except the people who would cut me for telling, whilst if you accused me of it nobody would believe my denial.

ANN. [taking her arms away with perfect dignity] You are incorrigible, Jack. But you should not jest about our affection for one another. Nobody could possibly misunderstand it. YOU do not misunderstand it, I hope.

TANNER. My blood interprets for me, Ann. Poor Ricky Tiky Tavy!

ANN. [looking quickly at him as if this were a new light] Surely you are not so absurd as to be jealous of Tavy.

TANNER. Jealous! Why should I be? But I don’t wonder at your grip of him. I feel the coils tightening round my very self, though you are only playing with me.

ANN. Do you think I have designs on Tavy?

TANNER. I know you have.

ANN. [earnestly] Take care, Jack. You may make Tavy very happy if you mislead him about me.

TANNER. Never fear: he will not escape you.

ANN. I wonder are you really a clever man!

TANNER. Why this sudden misgiving on the subject?

ANN. You seem to understand all the things I don’t understand; but you are a perfect baby in the things I do understand.

TANNER. I understand how Tavy feels for you, Ann; you may depend on that, at all events.

ANN. And you think you understand how I feel for Tavy, don’t you?

TANNER. I know only too well what is going to happen to poor Tavy.

ANN. I should laugh at you, Jack, if it were not for poor papa’s death. Mind! Tavy will be very unhappy.

TANNER. Yes; but he won’t know it, poor devil. He is a thousand times too good for you. That’s why he is going to make the mistake of his life about you.

ANN. I think men make more mistakes by being too clever than by being too good [she sits down, with a trace of contempt for the whole male sex in the elegant carriage of her shoulders].

TANNER. Oh, I know you don’t care very much about Tavy. But there is always one who kisses and one who only allows the kiss. Tavy will kiss; and you will only turn the cheek. And you will throw him over if anybody better turns up.

ANN. [offended] You have no right to say such things, Jack. They are not true, and not delicate. If you and Tavy choose to be stupid about me, that is not my fault.

TANNER. [remorsefully] Forgive my brutalities, Ann. They are levelled at this wicked world, not at you. [She looks up at him, pleased and forgiving. He becomes cautious at once]. All the same, I wish Ramsden would come back. I never feel safe with you: there is a devilish charm — or no: not a charm, a subtle interest [she laughs]. Just so: you know it; and you triumph in it. Openly and shamelessly triumph in it!

ANN. What a shocking flirt you are, Jack!

TANNER. A flirt!! I!!

ANN. Yes, a flirt. You are always abusing and offending people, but you never really mean to let go your hold of them.

TANNER. I will ring the bell. This conversation has already gone further than I intended.

Ramsden and Octavius come back with Miss Ramsden, a hardheaded old maiden lady in a plain brown silk gown, with enough rings, chains and brooches to show that her plainness of dress is a matter of principle, not of poverty. She comes into the room very determinedly: the two men, perplexed and downcast, following her. Ann rises and goes eagerly to meet her. Tanner retreats to the wall between the busts and pretends to study the pictures. Ramsden goes to his table as usual; and Octavius clings to the neighborhood of Tanner.

MISS RAMSDEN. [almost pushing Ann aside as she comes to Mr. Whitefield’s chair and plants herself there resolutely] I wash my hands of the whole affair.

OCTAVIUS. [very wretched] I know you wish me to take Violet away, Miss Ramsden. I will. [He turns irresolutely to the door].

RAMSDEN. No no —

MISS RAMSDEN. What is the use of saying no, Roebuck? Octavius knows that I would not turn any truly contrite and repentant woman from your doors. But when a woman is not only wicked, but intends to go on being wicked, she and I part company.

ANN. Oh, Miss Ramsden, what do you mean? What has Violet said?

RAMSDEN. Violet is certainly very obstinate. She won’t leave London. I don’t understand her.

MISS RAMSDEN. I do. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, Roebuck, that she won’t go because she doesn’t want to be separated from this man, whoever he is.

ANN. Oh, surely, surely! Octavius: did you speak to her?

OCTAVIUS. She won’t tell us anything. She won’t make any arrangement until she has consulted somebody. It can’t be anybody else than the scoundrel who has betrayed her.

TANNER. [to Octavius] Well, let her consult him. He will be glad enough to have her sent abroad. Where is the difficulty?

MISS RAMSDEN. [Taking the answer out of Octavius’s mouth]. The difficulty, Mr Jack, is that when he offered to help her I didn’t offer to become her accomplice in her wickedness. She either pledges her word never to see that man again, or else she finds some new friends; and the sooner the better.

[The parlormaid appears at the door. Ann hastily resumes her seat, and looks as unconcerned as possible. Octavius instinctively imitates her].

THE MAID. The cab is at the door, ma’am.

MISS RAMSDEN. What cab?

THE MAID. For Miss Robinson.

MISS RAMSDEN. Oh! [Recovering herself] All right. [The maid withdraws]. She has sent for a cab.

TANNER. I wanted to send for that cab half an hour ago.

MISS RAMSDEN. I am glad she understands the position she has placed herself in.

RAMSDEN. I don’t like her going away in this fashion, Susan. We had better not do anything harsh.

OCTAVIUS. No: thank you again and again; but Miss Ramsden is quite right. Violet cannot expect to stay.

ANN. Hadn’t you better go with her, Tavy?

OCTAVIUS. She won’t have me.

MISS RAMSDEN. Of course she won’t. She’s going straight to that man.

TANNER. As a natural result of her virtuous reception here.

RAMSDEN. [much troubled] There, Susan! You hear! and there’s some truth in it. I wish you could reconcile it with your principles to be a little patient with this poor girl. She’s very young; and there’s a time for everything.

MISS RAMSDEN. Oh, she will get all the sympathy she wants from the men. I’m surprised at you, Roebuck.

TANNER. So am I, Ramsden, most favorably.

Violet appears at the door. She is as impenitent and self-assured a young lady as one would desire to see among the best behaved of her sex. Her small head and tiny resolute mouth and chin; her haughty crispness of speech and trimness of carriage; the ruthless elegance of her equipment, which includes a very smart hat with a dead bird in it, mark a personality which is as formidable as it is exquisitely pretty. She is not a siren, like Ann: admiration comes to her without any compulsion or even interest on her part; besides, there is some fun in Ann, but in this woman none, perhaps no mercy either: if anything restrains her, it is intelligence and pride, not compassion. Her voice might be the voice of a schoolmistress addressing a class of girls who had disgraced themselves, as she proceeds with complete composure and some disgust to say what she has come to say.

VIOLET. I have only looked in to tell Miss Ramsden that she will find her birthday present to me, the filagree bracelet, in the housekeeper’s room.

TANNER. Do come in, Violet, and talk to us sensibly.

VIOLET. Thank you: I have had quite enough of the family conversation this morning. So has your mother, Ann: she has gone home crying. But at all events, I have found out what some of my pretended friends are worth. Good bye.

TANNER. No, no: one moment. I have something to say which I beg you to hear. [She looks at him without the slightest curiosity, but waits, apparently as much to finish getting her glove on as to hear what he has to say]. I am altogether on your side in this matter. I congratulate you, with the sincerest respect, on having the courage to do what you have done. You are entirely in the right; and the family is entirely in the wrong.

Sensation. Ann and Miss Ramsden rise and turn toward the two. Violet, more surprised than any of the others, forgets her glove, and comes forward into the middle of the room, both puzzled and displeased. Octavius alone does not move or raise his head; he is overwhelmed with shame.

ANN. [pleading to Tanner to be sensible] Jack!

MISS RAMSDEN. [outraged] Well, I must say!

VIOLET. [sharply to Tanner] Who told you?

TANNER. Why, Ramsden and Tavy of course. Why should they not?

VIOLET. But they don’t know.

TANNER. Don’t know what?

VIOLET. They don’t know that I am in the right, I mean.

TANNER. Oh, they know it in their hearts, though they think themselves bound to blame you by their silly superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, though it dare not say so, that you were right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood; and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to our real regard for you.

VIOLET. [flushing with indignation] Oh! You think me a wicked woman, like the rest. You think I have not only been vile, but that I share your abominable opinions. Miss Ramsden: I have borne your hard words because I knew you would be sorry for them when you found out the truth. But I won’t bear such a horrible insult as to be complimented by Jack on being one of the wretches of whom he approves. I have kept my marriage a secret for my husband’s sake. But now I claim my right as a married woman not to be insulted.

OCTAVIUS. [raising his head with inexpressible relief] You are married!

VIOLET. Yes; and I think you might have guessed it. What business had you all to take it for granted that I had no right to wear my wedding ring? Not one of you even asked me: I cannot forget that.

TANNER. [in ruins] I am utterly crushed. I meant well — I apologize — abjectly apologize.

VIOLET. I hope you will be more careful in future about the things you say. Of course one does not take them seriously. But they are very disagreeable, and rather in bad taste.

TANNER. [bowing to the storm] I have no defence: I shall know better in future than to take any woman’s part. We have all disgraced ourselves in your eyes, I am afraid, except Ann, SHE befriended you. For Ann’s sake, forgive us.

VIOLET. Yes: Ann has been very kind; but then Ann knew.

TANNER. Oh!

MISS RAMSDEN. [stiffly] And who, pray, is the gentleman who does not acknowledge his wife?

VIOLET. [promptly] That is my business, Miss Ramsden, and not yours. I have my reasons for keeping my marriage a secret for the present.

RAMSDEN. All I can say is that we are extremely sorry, Violet. I am shocked to think of how we have treated you.

OCTAVIUS. [awkwardly] I beg your pardon, Violet. I can say no more.

MISS RAMSDEN. [still loth to surrender] Of course what you say puts a very different complexion on the matter. All the same, I owe it to myself —

VIOLET. [cutting her short] You owe me an apology, Miss Ramsden: that’s what you owe both to yourself and to me. If you were a married woman you would not like sitting in the housekeeper’s room and being treated like a naughty child by young girls and old ladies without any serious duties and responsibilities.

TANNER. Don’t hit us when we’re down, Violet. We seem to have made fools of ourselves; but really it was you who made fools of us.

VIOLET. It was no business of yours, Jack, in any case.

TANNER. No business of mine! Why, Ramsden as good as accused me of being the unknown gentleman.

Ramsden makes a frantic demonstration; but Violet’s cool keen anger extinguishes it.

VIOLET. You! Oh, how infamous! how abominable! How disgracefully you have all been talking about me! If my husband knew it he would never let me speak to any of you again. [To Ramsden] I think you might have spared me, at least.

RAMSDEN. But I assure you I never — at least it is a monstrous perversion of something I said that —

MISS RAMSDEN. You needn’t apologize, Roebuck. She brought it all on herself. It is for her to apologize for having deceived us.

VIOLET. I can make allowances for you, Miss Ramsden: you cannot understand how I feel on this subject though I should have expected rather better taste from people of greater experience. However, I quite feel that you have all placed yourselves in a very painful position; and the most truly considerate thing for me to do is to go at once. Good morning.

She goes, leaving them staring.

Miss RAMSDEN. Well, I must say — !

RAMSDEN. [plaintively] I don’t think she is quite fair to us.

TANNER. You must cower before the wedding ring like the rest of us, Ramsden. The cup of our ignominy is full.

ACT II

On the carriage drive in the park of a country house near Richmond a motor car has broken down. It stands in front of a clump of trees round which the drive sweeps to the house, which is partly visible through them: indeed Tanner, standing in the drive with the car on his right hand, could get an unobstructed view of the west corner of the house on his left were he not far too much interested in a pair of supine legs in blue serge trousers which protrude from beneath the machine. He is watching them intently with bent back and hands supported on his knees. His leathern overcoat and peaked cap proclaim him one of the dismounted passengers.

THE LEGS. Aha! I got him.

TANNER. All right now?

THE LEGS. All right now.

Tanner stoops and takes the legs by the ankles, drawing their owner forth like a wheelbarrow, walking on his hands, with a hammer in his mouth. He is a young man in a neat suit of blue serge, clean shaven, dark eyed, square fingered, with short well brushed black hair and rather irregular sceptically turned eyebrows. When he is manipulating the car his movements are swift and sudden, yet attentive and deliberate. With Tanner and Tanner’s friends his manner is not in the least deferential, but cool and reticent, keeping them quite effectually at a distance whilst giving them no excuse for complaining of him. Nevertheless he has a vigilant eye on them always, and that, too, rather cynically, like a man who knows the world well from its seamy side. He speaks slowly and with a touch of sarcasm; and as he does not at all affect the gentleman in his speech, it may be inferred that his smart appearance is a mark of respect to himself and his own class, not to that which employs him.

He now gets into the car to test his machinery and put his cap and overcoat on again. Tanner takes off his leather overcoat and pitches it into the car. The chauffeur (or automobilist or motoreer or whatever England may presently decide to call him) looks round inquiringly in the act of stowing away his hammer.

THE CHAUFFEUR. Had enough of it, eh?

TANNER. I may as well walk to the house and stretch my legs and calm my nerves a little. [Looking at his watch] I suppose you know that we have come from Hyde Park Corner to Richmond in twenty-one minutes.

THE CHAUFFEUR. I’d have done it under fifteen if I’d had a clear road all the way.

TANNER. Why do you do it? Is it for love of sport or for the fun of terrifying your unfortunate employer?

THE CHAUFFEUR. What are you afraid of?

TANNER. The police, and breaking my neck.

THE CHAUFFEUR. Well, if you like easy going, you can take a bus, you know. It’s cheaper. You pay me to save your time and give you the value of your thousand pound car. [He sits down calmly].

TANNER. I am the slave of that car and of you too. I dream of the accursed thing at night.

THE CHAUFFEUR. You’ll get over that. If you’re going up to the house, may I ask how long you’re goin to stay there? Because if you mean to put in the whole morning talkin to the ladies, I’ll put the car in the stables and make myself comfortable. If not, I’ll keep the car on the go about here til you come.

TANNER. Better wait here. We shan’t be long. There’s a young American gentleman, a Mr Malone, who is driving Mr Robinson down in his new American steam car.

THE CHAUFFEUR. [springing up and coming hastily out of the car to Tanner] American steam car! Wot! racin us down from London!

TANNER. Perhaps they’re here already.

THE CHAUFFEUR. If I’d known it! [with deep reproach] Why didn’t you tell me, Mr Tanner?

TANNER. Because I’ve been told that this car is capable of 84 miles an hour; and I already know what YOU are capable of when there is a rival car on the road. No, Henry: there are things it is not good for you to know; and this was one of them. However, cheer up: we are going to have a day after your own heart. The American is to take Mr Robinson and his sister and Miss Whitefield. We are to take Miss Rhoda.

THE CHAUFFEUR. [consoled, and musing on another matter] That’s Miss Whitefield’s sister, isn’t it?

TANNER. Yes.

THE CHAUFFEUR. And Miss Whitefield herself is goin in the other car? Not with you?

TANNER. Why the devil should she come with me? Mr Robinson will be in the other car. [The Chauffeur looks at Tanner with cool incredulity, and turns to the car, whistling a popular air softly to himself. Tanner, a little annoyed, is about to pursue the subject when he hears the footsteps of Octavius on the gravel. Octavius is coming from the house, dressed for motoring, but without his overcoat]. We’ve lost the race, thank Heaven: here’s Mr Robinson. Well, Tavy, is the steam car a success?

OCTAVIUS. I think so. We came from Hyde Park Corner here in seventeen minutes. [The Chauffeur, furious, kicks the car with a groan of vexation]. How long were you?

TANNER. Oh, about three quarters of an hour or so.

THE CHAUFFEUR. [remonstrating] Now, now, Mr Tanner, come now! We could ha done it easy under fifteen.

TANNER. By the way, let me introduce you. Mr Octavius Robinson: Mr Enry Straker.

STRAKER. Pleased to meet you, sir. Mr Tanner is gittin at you with his Enry Straker, you know. You call it Henery. But I don’t mind, bless you.

TANNER. You think it’s simply bad taste in me to chaff him, Tavy. But you’re wrong. This man takes more trouble to drop his aiches than ever his father did to pick them up. It’s a mark of caste to him. I have never met anybody more swollen with the pride of class than Enry is.

STRAKER. Easy, easy! A little moderation, Mr Tanner.

TANNER. A little moderation, Tavy, you observe. You would tell me to draw it mild, But this chap has been educated. What’s more, he knows that we haven’t. What was that board school of yours, Straker?

STRAKER. Sherbrooke Road.

TANNER. Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something; Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old schoolfellow.

STRAKER. You don’t know nothing about it, Mr. Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic.

TANNER. His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin or Glasgow. Not even those Nonconformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy. Regent Street, Chelsea, the Borough — I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you?

STRAKER. No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?

TANNER. Sarcasm, Tavy, sarcasm! Oh, if you could only see into Enry’s soul, the depth of his contempt for a gentleman, the arrogance of his pride in being an engineer, would appal you. He positively likes the car to break down because it brings out my gentlemanly helplessness and his workmanlike skill and resource.

STRAKER. Never you mind him, Mr Robinson. He likes to talk. We know him, don’t we?

OCTAVIUS. [earnestly] But there’s a great truth at the bottom of what he says. I believe most intensely in the dignity of labor.

STRAKER. [unimpressed] That’s because you never done any Mr Robinson. My business is to do away with labor. You’ll get more out of me and a machine than you will out of twenty laborers, and not so much to drink either.

TANNER. For Heaven’s sake, Tavy, don’t start him on political economy. He knows all about it; and we don’t. You’re only a poetic Socialist, Tavy: he’s a scientific one.

STRAKER. [unperturbed] Yes. Well, this conversation is very improvin; but I’ve got to look after the car; and you two want to talk about your ladies. I know. [He retires to busy himself about the car; and presently saunters off towards the house].

TANNER. That’s a very momentous social phenomenon.

OCTAVIUS. What is?

TANNER. Straker is. Here have we literary and cultured persons been for years setting up a cry of the New Woman whenever some unusually old fashioned female came along; and never noticing the advent of the New Man. Straker’s the New Man.

OCTAVIUS. I see nothing new about him, except your way of chaffing him. But I don’t want to talk about him just now. I want to speak to you about Ann.

TANNER. Straker knew even that. He learnt it at the Polytechnic, probably. Well, what about Ann? Have you proposed to her?

OCTAVIUS. [self-reproachfully] I was brute enough to do so last night.

TANNER. Brute enough! What do you mean?

OCTAVIUS. [dithyrambically] Jack: we men are all coarse. We never understand how exquisite a woman’s sensibilities are. How could I have done such a thing!

TANNER. Done what, you maudlin idiot?

OCTAVIUS. Yes, I am an idiot. Jack: if you had heard her voice! if you had seen her tears! I have lain awake all night thinking of them. If she had reproached me, I could have borne it better.

TANNER. Tears! that’s dangerous. What did she say?

OCTAVIUS. She asked me how she could think of anything now but her dear father. She stifled a sob — [he breaks down].

TANNER. [patting him on the back] Bear it like a man, Tavy, even if you feel it like an ass. It’s the old game: she’s not tired of playing with you yet.

OCTAVIUS. [impatiently] Oh, don’t be a fool, Jack. Do you suppose this eternal shallow cynicism of yours has any real bearing on a nature like hers?

TANNER. Hm! Did she say anything else?

OCTAVIUS. Yes; and that is why I expose myself and her to your ridicule by telling you what passed.

TANNER. [remorsefully] No, dear Tavy, not ridicule, on my honor! However, no matter. Go on.

OCTAVIUS. Her sense of duty is so devout, so perfect, so —

TANNER. Yes: I know. Go on.

OCTAVIUS. You see, under this new arrangement, you and Ramsden are her guardians; and she considers that all her duty to her father is now transferred to you. She said she thought I ought to have spoken to you both in the first instance. Of course she is right; but somehow it seems rather absurd that I am to come to you and formally ask to be received as a suitor for your ward’s hand.

TANNER. I am glad that love has not totally extinguished your sense of humor, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. That answer won’t satisfy her.

TANNER. My official answer is, obviously, Bless you, my children: may you be happy!

OCTAVIUS. I wish you would stop playing the fool about this. If it is not serious to you, it is to me, and to her.

TANNER. You know very well that she is as free to choose as you. She does not think so.

TANNER. Oh, doesn’t she! just! However, say what you want me to do.

OCTAVIUS. I want you to tell her sincerely and earnestly what you think about me. I want you to tell her that you can trust her to me — that is, if you feel you can.

TANNER. I have no doubt that I can trust her to you. What worries me is the idea of trusting you to her. Have you read Maeterlinck’s book about the bee?

OCTAVIUS. [keeping his temper with difficulty] I am not discussing literature at present.

TANNER. Be just a little patient with me. I am not discussing literature: the book about the bee is natural history. It’s an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann’s suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shuts behind you for ever.

OCTAVIUS. I wish I could believe that, vilely as you put it.

TANNER. Why, man, what other work has she in life but to get a husband? It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can. You have your poems and your tragedies to work at: Ann has nothing.

OCTAVIUS. I cannot write without inspiration. And nobody can give me that except Ann.

TANNER. Well, hadn’t you better get it from her at a safe distance? Petrarch didn’t see half as much of Laura, nor Dante of Beatrice, as you see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry — at least so I’m told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic familiarity; and it lasted them to their graves. Marry Ann and at the end of a week you’ll find no more inspiration than in a plate of muffins.

OCTAVIUS. You think I shall tire of her.

TANNER. Not at all: you don’t get tired of muffins. But you don’t find inspiration in them; and you won’t in her when she ceases to be a poet’s dream and becomes a solid eleven stone wife. You’ll be forced to dream about somebody else; and then there will be a row.

OCTAVIUS. This sort of talk is no use, Jack. You don’t understand. You have never been in love.

TANNER. I! I have never been out of it. Why, I am in love even with Ann. But I am neither the slave of love nor its dupe. Go to the bee, thou poet: consider her ways and be wise. By Heaven, Tavy, if women could do without our work, and we ate their children’s bread instead of making it, they would kill us as the spider kills her mate or as the bees kill the drone. And they would be right if we were good for nothing but love.

OCTAVIUS. Ah, if we were only good enough for Love! There is nothing like Love: there is nothing else but Love: without it the world would be a dream of sordid horror.

TANNER. And this — this is the man who asks me to give him the hand of my ward! Tavy: I believe we were changed in our cradles, and that you are the real descendant of Don Juan.

OCTAVIUS. I beg you not to say anything like that to Ann.

TANNER. Don’t be afraid. She has marked you for her own; and nothing will stop her now. You are doomed. [Straker comes back with a newspaper]. Here comes the New Man, demoralizing himself with a halfpenny paper as usual.

STRAKER. Now, would you believe it: Mr Robinson, when we’re out motoring we take in two papers, the Times for him, the Leader or the Echo for me. And do you think I ever see my paper? Not much. He grabs the Leader and leaves me to stodge myself with his Times.

OCTAVIUS. Are there no winners in the Times?

TANNER. Enry don’t old with bettin, Tavy. Motor records are his weakness. What’s the latest?

STRAKER. Paris to Biskra at forty mile an hour average, not countin the Mediterranean.

TANNER. How many killed?

STRAKER. Two silly sheep. What does it matter? Sheep don’t cost such a lot: they were glad to ave the price without the trouble o sellin em to the butcher. All the same, d’y’see, there’ll be a clamor agin it presently; and then the French Government’ll stop it; an our chance will be gone see? That what makes me fairly mad: Mr Tanner won’t do a good run while he can.

TANNER. Tavy: do you remember my uncle James?

OCTAVIUS. Yes. Why?

TANNER. Uncle James had a first rate cook: he couldn’t digest anything except what she cooked. Well, the poor man was shy and hated society. But his cook was proud of her skill, and wanted to serve up dinners to princes and ambassadors. To prevent her from leaving him, that poor old man had to give a big dinner twice a month, and suffer agonies of awkwardness. Now here am I; and here is this chap Enry Straker, the New Man. I loathe travelling; but I rather like Enry. He cares for nothing but tearing along in a leather coat and goggles, with two inches of dust all over him, at sixty miles an hour and the risk of his life and mine. Except, of course, when he is lying on his back in the mud under the machine trying to find out where it has given way. Well, if I don’t give him a thousand mile run at least once a fortnight I shall lose him. He will give me the sack and go to some American millionaire; and I shall have to put up with a nice respectful groom-gardener-amateur, who will touch his hat and know his place. I am Enry’s slave, just as Uncle James was his cook’s slave.

STRAKER. [exasperated] Garn! I wish I had a car that would go as fast as you can talk, Mr Tanner. What I say is that you lose money by a motor car unless you keep it workin. Might as well ave a pram and a nussmaid to wheel you in it as that car and me if you don’t git the last inch out of us both.

TANNER. [soothingly] All right, Henry, all right. We’ll go out for half an hour presently.

STRAKER. [in disgust] Arf an ahr! [He returns to his machine; seats himself in it; and turns up a fresh page of his paper in search of more news].

OCTAVIUS. Oh, that reminds me. I have a note for you from Rhoda. [He gives Tanner a note].

TANNER. [opening it] I rather think Rhoda is heading for a row with Ann. As a rule there is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her mother; and that’s her eldest sister. But Rhoda positively prefers her mother to Ann. She — [indignantly] Oh, I say!

OCTAVIUS. What’s the matter?

TANNER. Rhoda was to have come with me for a ride in the motor car. She says Ann has forbidden her to go out with me.

Straker suddenly begins whistling his favorite air with remarkable deliberation. Surprised by this burst of larklike melody, and jarred by a sardonic note in its cheerfulness, they turn and look inquiringly at him. But he is busy with his paper; and nothing comes of their movement.

OCTAVIUS. [recovering himself] Does she give any reason?

TANNER. Reason! An insult is not a reason. Ann forbids her to be alone with me on any occasion. Says I am not a fit person for a young girl to be with. What do you think of your paragon now?

OCTAVIUS. You must remember that she has a very heavy responsibility now that her father is dead. Mrs Whitefield is too weak to control Rhoda.

TANNER. [staring at him] In short, you agree with Ann.

OCTAVIUS. No; but I think I understand her. You must admit that your views are hardly suited for the formation of a young girl’s mind and character.

TANNER. I admit nothing of the sort. I admit that the formation of a young lady’s mind and character usually consists in telling her lies; but I object to the particular lie that I am in the habit of abusing the confidence of girls.

OCTAVIUS. Ann doesn’t say that, Jack.

TANNER. What else does she mean?

STRAKER. [catching sight of Ann coming from the house] Miss Whitefield, gentlemen. [He dismounts and strolls away down the avenue with the air of a man who knows he is no longer wanted].

ANN. [coming between Octavius and Tanner]. Good morning, Jack. I have come to tell you that poor Rhoda has got one of her headaches and cannot go out with you to-day in the car. It is a cruel disappointment to her, poor child!

TANNER. What do you say now, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. Surely you cannot misunderstand, Jack. Ann is showing you the kindest consideration, even at the cost of deceiving you.

ANN. What do you mean?

TANNER. Would you like to cure Rhoda’s headache, Ann?

ANN. Of course.

TANNER. Then tell her what you said just now; and add that you arrived about two minutes after I had received her letter and read it.

ANN. Rhoda has written to you!

TANNER. With full particulars.

OCTAVIUS. Never mind him, Ann. You were right, quite right. Ann was only doing her duty, Jack; and you know it. Doing it in the kindest way, too.

ANN. [going to Octavius] How kind you are, Tavy! How helpful! How well you understand!

Octavius beams.

TANNER. Ay: tighten the coils. You love her, Tavy, don’t you?

OCTAVIUS. She knows I do.

ANN. Hush. For shame, Tavy!

TANNER. Oh, I give you leave. I am your guardian; and I commit you to Tavy’s care for the next hour.

ANN. No, Jack. I must speak to you about Rhoda. Ricky: will you go back to the house and entertain your American friend? He’s rather on Mamma’s hands so early in the morning. She wants to finish her housekeeping.

OCTAVIUS. I fly, dearest Ann [he kisses her hand].

ANN. [tenderly] Ricky Ticky Tavy!

He looks at her with an eloquent blush, and runs off.

TANNER. [bluntly] Now look here, Ann. This time you’ve landed yourself; and if Tavy were not in love with you past all salvation he’d have found out what an incorrigible liar you are.

ANN. You misunderstand, Jack. I didn’t dare tell Tavy the truth.

TANNER. No: your daring is generally in the opposite direction. What the devil do you mean by telling Rhoda that I am too vicious to associate with her? How can I ever have any human or decent relations with her again, now that you have poisoned her mind in that abominable way?

ANN. I know you are incapable of behaving badly.

TANNER. Then why did you lie to her?

ANN. I had to.

TANNER. Had to!

ANN. Mother made me.

TANNER. [his eye flashing] Ha! I might have known it. The mother! Always the mother!

ANN. It was that dreadful book of yours. You know how timid mother is. All timid women are conventional: we must be conventional, Jack, or we are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. Even you, who are a man, cannot say what you think without being misunderstood and vilified — yes: I admit it: I have had to vilify you. Do you want to have poor Rhoda misunderstood and vilified to the same way? Would it be right for mother to let her expose herself to such treatment before she is old enough to judge for herself?

TANNER. In short, the way to avoid misunderstanding is for everybody to lie and slander and insinuate and pretend as hard as they can. That is what obeying your mother comes to.

ANN. I love my mother, Jack.

TANNER. [working himself up into a sociological rage] Is that any reason why you are not to call your soul your own? Oh, I protest against this vile abjection of youth to age! look at fashionable society as you know it. What does it pretend to be? An exquisite dance of nymphs. What is it? A horrible procession of wretched girls, each in the claws of a cynical, cunning, avaricious, disillusioned, ignorantly experienced, foul-minded old woman whom she calls mother, and whose duty it is to corrupt her mind and sell her to the highest bidder. Why do these unhappy slaves marry anybody, however old and vile, sooner than not marry at all? Because marriage is their only means of escape from these decrepit fiends who hide their selfish ambitions, their jealous hatreds of the young rivals who have supplanted them, under the mask of maternal duty and family affection. Such things are abominable: the voice of nature proclaims for the daughter a father’s care and for the son a mother’s. The law for father and son and mother and daughter is not the law of love: it is the law of revolution, of emancipation, of final supersession of the old and worn-out by the young and capable. I tell you, the first duty of manhood and womanhood is a Declaration of Independence: the man who pleads his father’s authority is no man: the woman who pleads her mother’s authority is unfit to bear citizens to a free people.

ANN. [watching him with quiet curiosity] I suppose you will go in seriously for politics some day, Jack.

TANNER. [heavily let down] Eh? What? Wh — ? [Collecting his scattered wits] What has that got to do with what I have been saying?

ANN. You talk so well.

TANNER. Talk! Talk! It means nothing to you but talk. Well, go back to your mother, and help her to poison Rhoda’s imagination as she has poisoned yours. It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild ones.

ANN. I am getting on. Yesterday I was a boa constrictor: to-day I am an elephant.

TANNER. Yes. So pack your trunk and begone; I have no more to say to you.

ANN. You are so utterly unreasonable and impracticable. What can I do?

TANNER. Do! Break your chains. Go your way according to your own conscience and not according to your mother’s. Get your mind clean and vigorous; and learn to enjoy a fast ride in a motor car instead of seeing nothing in it but an excuse for a detestable intrigue. Come with me to Marseilles and across to Algiers and to Biskra, at sixty miles an hour. Come right down to the Cape if you like. That will be a Declaration of Independence with a vengeance. You can write a book about it afterwards. That will finish your mother and make a woman of you.

ANN. [thoughtfully] I don’t think there would be any harm in that, Jack. You are my guardian: you stand in my father’s place, by his own wish. Nobody could say a word against our travelling together. It would be delightful: thank you a thousand times, Jack. I’ll come.

TANNER. [aghast] You’ll come!!!

ANN. Of course.

TANNER. But — [he stops, utterly appalled; then resumes feebly] No: look here, Ann: if there’s no harm in it there’s no point in doing it.

ANN. How absurd you are! You don’t want to compromise me, do you?

TANNER. Yes: that’s the whole sense of my proposal.

ANN. You are talking the greatest nonsense; and you know it. You would never do anything to hurt me.

TANNER. Well, if you don’t want to be compromised, don’t come.

ANN. [with simple earnestness] Yes, I will come, Jack, since you wish it. You are my guardian; and think we ought to see more of one another and come to know one another better. [Gratefully] It’s very thoughtful and very kind of you, Jack, to offer me this lovely holiday, especially after what I said about Rhoda. You really are good — much better than you think. When do we start?

TANNER. But —

The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Whitefield from the house. She is accompanied by the American gentleman, and followed by Ramsden and Octavius.

Hector Malone is an Eastern American; but he is not at all ashamed of his nationality. This makes English people of fashion think well of him, as of a young fellow who is manly enough to confess to an obvious disadvantage without any attempt to conceal or extenuate it. They feel that he ought not to be made to suffer for what is clearly not his fault, and make a point of being specially kind to him. His chivalrous manners to women, and his elevated moral sentiments, being both gratuitous and unusual, strike them as being a little unfortunate; and though they find his vein of easy humor rather amusing when it has ceased to puzzle them (as it does at first), they have had to make him understand that he really must not tell anecdotes unless they are strictly personal and scandalous, and also that oratory is an accomplishment which belongs to a cruder stage of civilization than that in which his migration has landed him. On these points Hector is not quite convinced: he still thinks that the British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding. English life seems to him to suffer from a lack of edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone); English behavior to show a want of respect for womanhood; English pronunciation to fail very vulgarly in tackling such words as world, girl, bird, etc.; English society to be plain spoken to an extent which stretches occasionally to intolerable coarseness; and English intercourse to need enlivening by games and stories and other pastimes; so he does not feel called upon to acquire these defects after taking great paths to cultivate himself in a first rate manner before venturing across the Atlantic. To this culture he finds English people either totally indifferent as they very commonly are to all culture, or else politely evasive, the truth being that Hector’s culture is nothing but a state of saturation with our literary exports of thirty years ago, reimported by him to be unpacked at a moment’s notice and hurled at the head of English literature, science and art, at every conversational opportunity. The dismay set up by these sallies encourages him in his belief that he is helping to educate England. When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay; and as he is devoutly religious at bottom, he first leads the unwary, by humorous irreverences, to wave popular theology out of account in discussing moral questions with him, and then scatters them in confusion by demanding whether the carrying out of his ideals of conduct was not the manifest object of God Almighty in creating honest men and pure women. The engaging freshness of his personality and the dumbfoundering staleness of his culture make it extremely difficult to decide whether he is worth knowing; for whilst his company is undeniably pleasant and enlivening, there is intellectually nothing new to be got out of him, especially as he despises politics, and is careful not to talk commercial shop, in which department he is probably much in advance of his English capitalist friends. He gets on best with romantic Christians of the amoristic sect: hence the friendship which has sprung up between him and Octavius.

In appearance Hector is a neatly built young man of twenty-four, with a short, smartly trimmed black beard, clear, well shaped eyes, and an ingratiating vivacity of expression. He is, from the fashionable point of view, faultlessly dressed. As he comes along the drive from the house with Mrs Whitefield he is sedulously making himself agreeable and entertaining, and thereby placing on her slender wit a burden it is unable to bear. An Englishman would let her alone, accepting boredom and indifference of their common lot; and the poor lady wants to be either let alone or let prattle about the things that interest her.

Ramsden strolls over to inspect the motor car. Octavius joins Hector.

ANN. [pouncing on her mother joyously] Oh, mamma, what do you think! Jack is going to take me to Nice in his motor car. Isn’t it lovely? I am the happiest person in London.

TANNER. [desperately] Mrs Whitefield objects. I am sure she objects. Doesn’t she, Ramsden?

RAMSDEN. I should think it very likely indeed.

ANN. You don’t object, do you, mother?

MRS WHITEFIELD. I object! Why should I? I think it will do you good, Ann. [Trotting over to Tanner] I meant to ask you to take Rhoda out for a run occasionally: she is too much in the house; but it will do when you come back.

TANNER. Abyss beneath abyss of perfidy!

ANN. [hastily, to distract attention from this outburst] Oh, I forgot: you have not met Mr Malone. Mr Tanner, my guardian: Mr Hector Malone.

HECTOR. Pleased to meet you, Mr Tanner. I should like to suggest an extension of the travelling party to Nice, if I may.

ANN. Oh, we’re all coming. That’s understood, isn’t it?

HECTOR. I also am the modest possessor of a motor car. If Miss Robinson will allow me the privilege of taking her, my car is at her service.

OCTAVIUS. Violet!

General constraint.

ANN. [subduedly] Come, mother: we must leave them to talk over the arrangements. I must see to my travelling kit.

Mrs Whitefield looks bewildered; but Ann draws her discreetly away; and they disappear round the corner towards the house.

HECTOR. I think I may go so far as to say that I can depend on Miss Robinson’s consent.

Continued embarrassment.

OCTAVIUS. I’m afraid we must leave Violet behind, There are circumstances which make it impossible for her to come on such an expedition.

HECTOR. [amused and not at all convinced] Too American, eh? Must the young lady have a chaperone?

OCTAVIUS. It’s not that, Malone — at least not altogether.

HECTOR. Indeed! May I ask what other objection applies?

TANNER. [impatiently] Oh, tell him, tell him. We shall never be able to keep the secret unless everybody knows what it is. Mr Malone: if you go to Nice with Violet, you go with another man’s wife. She is married.

HECTOR. [thunderstruck] You don’t tell me so!

TANNER. We do. In confidence.

RAMSDEN. [with an air of importance, lest Malone should suspect a misalliance] Her marriage has not yet been made known: she desires that it shall not be mentioned for the present.

HECTOR. I shall respect the lady’s wishes. Would it be indiscreet to ask who her husband is, in case I should have an opportunity of consulting him about this trip?

TANNER. We don’t know who he is.

HECTOR. [retiring into his shell in a very marked manner] In that case, I have no more to say.

They become more embarrassed than ever.

OCTAVIUS. You must think this very strange.

HECTOR. A little singular. Pardon me for saving so.

RAMSDEN. [half apologetic, half huffy] The young lady was married secretly; and her husband has forbidden her, it seems, to declare his name. It is only right to tell you, since you are interested in Miss — er — in Violet.

OCTAVIUS. [sympathetically] I hope this is not a disappointment to you.

HECTOR. [softened, coming out of his shell again] Well it is a blow. I can hardly understand how a man can leave a wife in such a position. Surely it’s not customary. It’s not manly. It’s not considerate.

OCTAVIUS. We feel that, as you may imagine, pretty deeply.

RAMSDEN. [testily] It is some young fool who has not enough experience to know what mystifications of this kind lead to.

HECTOR. [with strong symptoms of moral repugnance] I hope so. A man need be very young and pretty foolish too to be excused for such conduct. You take a very lenient view, Mr Ramsden. Too lenient to my mind. Surely marriage should ennoble a man.

TANNER. [sardonically] Ha!

HECTOR. Am I to gather from that cacchination that you don’t agree with me, Mr Tanner?

TANNER. [drily] Get married and try. You may find it delightful for a while: you certainly won’t find it ennobling. The greatest common measure of a man and a woman is not necessarily greater than the man’s single measure.

HECTOR. Well, we think in America that a woman’s moral number is higher than a man’s, and that the purer nature of a woman lifts a man right out of himself, and makes him better than he was.

OCTAVIUS. [with conviction] So it does.

TANNER. No wonder American women prefer to live in Europe! It’s more comfortable than standing all their lives on an altar to be worshipped. Anyhow, Violet’s husband has not been ennobled. So what’s to be done?

HECTOR. [shaking his head] I can’t dismiss that man’s conduct as lightly as you do, Mr Tanner. However, I’ll say no more. Whoever he is, he’s Miss Robinson’s husband; and I should be glad for her sake to think better of him.

OCTAVIUS. [touched; for he divines a secret sorrow] I’m very sorry, Malone. Very sorry.

HECTOR. [gratefully] You’re a good fellow, Robinson, Thank you.

TANNER. Talk about something else. Violet’s coming from the house.

HECTOR. I should esteem it a very great favor, men, if you would take the opportunity to let me have a few words with the lady alone. I shall have to cry off this trip; and it’s rather a delicate —

RAMSDEN. [glad to escape] Say no more. Come Tanner, Come, Tavy. [He strolls away into the park with Octavius and Tanner, past the motor car].

Violet comes down the avenue to Hector.

VIOLET. Are they looking?

HECTOR. No.

She kisses him.

VIOLET. Have you been telling lies for my sake?

HECTOR. Lying! Lying hardly describes it. I overdo it. I get carried away in an ecstasy of mendacity. Violet: I wish you’d let me own up.

VIOLET. [instantly becoming serious and resolute] No, no. Hector: you promised me not to.

HECTOR. I’ll keep my promise until you release me from it. But I feel mean, lying to those men, and denying my wife. Just dastardly.

VIOLET. I wish your father were not so unreasonable.

HECTOR. He’s not unreasonable. He’s right from his point of view. He has a prejudice against the English middle class.

VIOLET. It’s too ridiculous. You know how I dislike saying such things to you, Hector; but if I were to — oh, well, no matter.

HECTOR. I know. If you were to marry the son of an English manufacturer of office furniture, your friends would consider it a misalliance. And here’s my silly old dad, who is the biggest office furniture man in the world, would show me the door for marrying the most perfect lady in England merely because she has no handle to her name. Of course it’s just absurd. But I tell you, Violet, I don’t like deceiving him. I feel as if I was stealing his money. Why won’t you let me own up?

VIOLET. We can’t afford it. You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector; but you mustn’t be romantic about money.

HECTOR. [divided between his uxoriousness and his habitual elevation of moral sentiment] That’s very English. [Appealing to her impulsively] Violet: Dad’s bound to find us out some day.

VIOLET. Oh yes, later on of course. But don’t let’s go over this every time we meet, dear. You promised —

HECTOR. All right, all right, I —

VIOLET. [not to be silenced] It is I and not you who suffer by this concealment; and as to facing a struggle and poverty and all that sort of thing I simply will not do it. It’s too silly.

HECTOR. You shall not. I’ll sort of borrow the money from my dad until I get on my own feet; and then I can own up and pay up at the same time.

VIOLET. [alarmed and indignant] Do you mean to work? Do you want to spoil our marriage?

HECTOR. Well, I don’t mean to let marriage spoil my character. Your friend Mr Tanner has got the laugh on me a bit already about that; and —

VIOLET. The beast! I hate Jack Tanner.

HECTOR. [magnanimously] Oh, he’s all right: he only needs the love of a good woman to ennoble him. Besides, he’s proposed a motoring trip to Nice; and I’m going to take you.

VIOLET. How jolly!

HECTOR. Yes; but how are we going to manage? You see, they’ve warned me off going with you, so to speak. They’ve told me in confidence that you’re married. That’s just the most overwhelming confidence I’ve ever been honored with.

Tanner returns with Straker, who goes to his car.

TANNER. Your car is a great success, Mr Malone. Your engineer is showing it off to Mr Ramsden.

HECTOR. [eagerly — forgetting himself] Let’s come, Vi.

VIOLET. [coldly, warning him with her eyes] I beg your pardon, Mr Malone, I did not quite catch —

HECTOR. [recollecting himself] I ask to be allowed the pleasure of showing you my little American steam car, Miss Robinson.

VIOLET. I shall be very pleased. [They go off together down the avenue].

TANNER. About this trip, Straker.

STRAKER. [preoccupied with the car] Yes?

TANNER. Miss Whitefield is supposed to be coming with me.

STRAKER. So I gather.

TANNER. Mr Robinson is to be one of the party.

STRAKER. Yes.

TANNER. Well, if you can manage so as to be a good deal occupied with me, and leave Mr Robinson a good deal occupied with Miss Whitefield, he will be deeply grateful to you.

STRAKER. [looking round at him] Evidently.

TANNER. “Evidently!” Your grandfather would have simply winked.

STRAKER. My grandfather would have touched his at.

TANNER. And I should have given your good nice respectful grandfather a sovereign.

STRAKER. Five shillins, more likely. [He leaves the car and approaches Tanner]. What about the lady’s views?

TANNER. She is just as willing to be left to Mr Robinson as Mr Robinson is to be left to her. [Straker looks at his principal with cool scepticism; then turns to the car whistling his favorite air]. Stop that aggravating noise. What do you mean by it? [Straker calmly resumes the melody and finishes it. Tanner politely hears it out before he again addresses Straker, this time with elaborate seriousness]. Enry: I have ever been a warm advocate of the spread of music among the masses; but I object to your obliging the company whenever Miss Whitefield’s name is mentioned. You did it this morning, too.

STRAKER. [obstinately] It’s not a bit o use. Mr Robinson may as well give it up first as last.

TANNER. Why?

STRAKER. Garn! You know why. Course it’s not my business; but you needn’t start kiddin me about it.

TANNER. I am not kidding. I don’t know why.

STRAKER. [Cheerfully sulky] Oh, very well. All right. It ain’t my business.

TANNER. [impressively] I trust, Enry, that, as between employer and engineer, I shall always know how to keep my proper distance, and not intrude my private affairs on you. Even our business arrangements are subject to the approval of your Trade Union. But don’t abuse your advantages. Let me remind you that Voltaire said that what was too silly to be said could be sung.

STRAKER. It wasn’t Voltaire: it was Bow Mar Shay.

TANNER. I stand corrected: Beaumarchais of course. Now you seem to think that what is too delicate to be said can be whistled. Unfortunately your whistling, though melodious, is unintelligible. Come! there’s nobody listening: neither my genteel relatives nor the secretary of your confounded Union. As man to man, Enry, why do you think that my friend has no chance with Miss Whitefield?

STRAKER. Cause she’s arter summun else.

TANNER. Bosh! who else?

STRAKER. You.

TANNER. Me!!!

STRAKER. Mean to tell me you didn’t know? Oh, come, Mr Tanner!

TANNER. [in fierce earnest] Are you playing the fool, or do you mean it?

STRAKER. [with a flash of temper] I’m not playin no fool. [More coolly] Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. If you ain’t spotted that, you don’t know much about these sort of things. [Serene again] Ex-cuse me, you know, Mr Tanner; but you asked me as man to man; and I told you as man to man.

TANNER. [wildly appealing to the heavens] Then I — I am the bee, the spider, the marked down victim, the destined prey.

STRAKER. I dunno about the bee and the spider. But the marked down victim, that’s what you are and no mistake; and a jolly good job for you, too, I should say.

TANNER. [momentously] Henry Straker: the moment of your life has arrived.

STRAKER. What d’y’mean?

TANNER. That record to Biskra.

STRAKER. [eagerly] Yes?

TANNER. Break it.

STRAKER. [rising to the height of his destiny] D’y’mean it?

TANNER. I do.

STRAKER. When?

TANNER. Now. Is that machine ready to start?

STRAKER. [quailing] But you can’t —

TANNER. [cutting him short by getting into the car] Off we go. First to the bank for money; then to my rooms for my kit; then to your rooms for your kit; then break the record from London to Dover or Folkestone; then across the channel and away like mad to Marseilles, Gibraltar, Genoa, any port from which we can sail to a Mahometan country where men are protected from women.

STRAKER. Garn! you’re kiddin.

TANNER. [resolutely] Stay behind then. If you won’t come I’ll do it alone. [He starts the motor].

STRAKER. [running after him] Here! Mister! arf a mo! steady on! [he scrambles in as the car plunges forward].

ACT III

Evening in the Sierra Nevada. Rolling slopes of brown, with olive trees instead of apple trees in the cultivated patches, and occasional prickly pears instead of gorse and bracken in the wilds. Higher up, tall stone peaks and precipices, all handsome and distinguished. No wild nature here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious artist-creator. No vulgar profusion of vegetation: even a touch of aridity in the frequent patches of stones: Spanish magnificence and Spanish economy everywhere.

Not very far north of a spot at which the high road over one of the passes crosses a tunnel on the railway from Malaga to Granada, is one of the mountain amphitheatres of the Sierra. Looking at it from the wide end of the horse-shoe, one sees, a little to the right, in the face of the cliff, a romantic cave which is really an abandoned quarry, and towards the left a little hill, commanding a view of the road, which skirts the amphitheatre on the left, maintaining its higher level on embankments and on an occasional stone arch. On the hill, watching the road, is a man who is either a Spaniard or a Scotchman. Probably a Spaniard, since he wears the dress of a Spanish goatherd and seems at home in the Sierra Nevada, but very like a Scotchman for all that. In the hollow, on the slope leading to the quarry-cave, are about a dozen men who, as they recline at their cave round a heap of smouldering white ashes of dead leaf and brushwood, have an air of being conscious of themselves as picturesque scoundrels honoring the Sierra by using it as an effective pictorial background. As a matter of artistic fact they are not picturesque; and the mountains tolerate them as lions tolerate lice. An English policeman or Poor Law Guardian would recognize them as a selected band of tramps and ablebodied paupers.

This description of them is not wholly contemptuous. Whoever has intelligently observed the tramp, or visited the ablebodied ward of a workhouse, will admit that our social failures are not all drunkards and weaklings. Some of them are men who do not fit the class they were born into. Precisely the same qualities that make the educated gentleman an artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an ablebodied pauper. There are men who fall helplessly into the workhouse because they are good far nothing; but there are also men who are there because they are strongminded enough to disregard the social convention (obviously not a disinterested one on the part of the ratepayer) which bids a man live by heavy and badly paid drudgery when he has the alternative of walking into the workhouse, announcing himself as a destitute person, and legally compelling the Guardians to feed, clothe and house him better than he could feed, clothe and house himself without great exertion. When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker’s office, and starves in a garret, spunging on a poor landlady or on his friends and relatives rather than work against his grain; or when a lady, because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper and his nomadic variant the tramp are equally entitled.

Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him, must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work. Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we may enjoy it without hypocrisy. If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do got do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously consider the advisability of following his example. Such a man is the able-bodied, able-minded pauper. Were he a gentleman doing his best to get a pension or a sinecure instead of sweeping a crossing, nobody would blame him; for deciding that so long as the alternative lies between living mainly at the expense of the community and allowing the community to live mainly at his, it would be folly to accept what is to him personally the greater of the two evils.

We may therefore contemplate the tramps of the Sierra without prejudice, admitting cheerfully that our objects — briefly, to be gentlemen of fortune — are much the same as theirs, and the difference in our position and methods merely accidental. One or two of them, perhaps, it would be wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for there are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be left unchained and unmuzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have other men’s lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply wreaks on them some superstitious expiatory rites of torture and degradation, and than lets them loose with heightened qualifications for mischief; it is just as well that they are at large in the Sierra, and in the hands of a chief who looks as if he might possibly, on provocation, order them to be shot.

This chief, seated in the centre of the group on a squared block of stone from the quarry, is a tall strong man, with a striking cockatoo nose, glossy black hair, pointed beard, upturned moustache, and a Mephistophelean affectation which is fairly imposing, perhaps because the scenery admits of a larger swagger than Piccadilly, perhaps because of a certain sentimentality in the man which gives him that touch of grace which alone can excuse deliberate picturesqueness. His eyes and mouth are by no means rascally; he has a fine voice and a ready wit; and whether he is really the strongest man in the party, or not, he looks it. He is certainly, the best fed, the best dressed, and the best trained. The fact that he speaks English is not unexpected in spite of the Spanish landscape; for with the exception of one man who might be guessed as a bullfighter ruined by drink and one unmistakable Frenchman, they are all cockney or American; therefore, in a land of cloaks and sombreros, they mostly wear seedy overcoats, woollen mufflers, hard hemispherical hats, and dirty brown gloves. Only a very few dress after their leader, whose broad sombrero with a cock’s feather in the band, and voluminous cloak descending to his high boots, are as un-English as possible. None of them are armed; and the ungloved ones keep their hands in their pockets because it is their national belief that it must be dangerously cold in the open air with the night coming on. (It is as warm an evening as any reasonable man could desire).

Except the bullfighting inebriate there is only one person in the company who looks more than, say, thirty-three. He is a small man with reddish whiskers, weak eyes, and the anxious look of a small tradesman in difficulties. He wears the only tall hat visible: it shines in the sunset with the sticky glow of some sixpenny patent hat reviver, often applied and constantly tending to produce a worse state of the original surface than the ruin it was applied to remedy. He has a collar and cuff of celluloid; and his brown Chesterfield overcoat, with velvet collar, is still presentable. He is pre-eminently the respectable man of the party, and is certainly over forty, possibly over fifty. He is the corner man on the leader’s right, opposite three men in scarlet ties on his left. One of these three is the Frenchman. Of the remaining two, who are both English, one is argumentative, solemn, and obstinate; the other rowdy and mischievous.

The chief, with a magnificent fling of the end of his cloak across his left shoulder, rises to address them. The applause which greets him shows that he is a favorite orator.

THE CHIEF. Friends and fellow brigands. I have a proposal to make to this meeting. We have now spent three evenings in discussing the question Have Anarchists or Social-Democrats the most personal courage? We have gone into the principles of Anarchism and Social-Democracy at great length. The cause of Anarchy has been ably represented by our one Anarchist, who doesn’t know what Anarchism means [laughter] —

THE ANARCHIST. [rising] A point of order, Mendoza —

MENDOZA. [forcibly] No, by thunder: your last point of order took half an hour. Besides, Anarchists don’t believe in order.

THE ANARCHIST. [mild, polite but persistent: he is, in fact, the respectable looking elderly man in the celluloid collar and cuffs] That is a vulgar error. I can prove —

MENDOZA. Order, order.

THE OTHERS [shouting] Order, order. Sit down. Chair! Shut up.

The Anarchist is suppressed.

MENDOZA. On the other hand we have three Social-Democrats among us. They are not on speaking terms; and they have put before us three distinct and incompatible views of Social-Democracy.

THE MAJORITY. [shouting assent] Hear, hear! So we are. Right.

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [smarting under oppression] You ain’t no Christian. You’re a Sheeny, you are.

MENDOZA. [with crushing magnanimity] My friend; I am an exception to all rules. It is true that I have the honor to be a Jew; and, when the Zionists need a leader to reassemble our race on its historic soil of Palestine, Mendoza will not be the last to volunteer [sympathetic applause — hear, hear, etc.]. But I am not a slave to any superstition. I have swallowed all the formulas, even that of Socialism; though, in a sense, once a Socialist, always a Socialist.

THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS. Hear, hear!

MENDOZA. But I am well aware that the ordinary man — even the ordinary brigand, who can scarcely be called an ordinary man [Hear, hear!] — is not a philosopher. Common sense is good enough for him; and in our business affairs common sense is good enough for me. Well, what is our business here in the Sierra Nevada, chosen by the Moors as the fairest spot in Spain? Is it to discuss abstruse questions of political economy? No: it is to hold up motor cars and secure a more equitable distribution of wealth.

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. All made by labor, mind you.

MENDOZA. [urbanely] Undoubtedly. All made by labor, and on its way to be squandered by wealthy vagabonds in the dens of vice that disfigure the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. We intercept that wealth. We restore it to circulation among the class that produced it and that chiefly needs it — the working class. We do this at the risk of our lives and liberties, by the exercise of the virtues of courage, endurance, foresight, and abstinence — especially abstinence. I myself have eaten nothing but prickly pears and broiled rabbit for three days.

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [Stubbornly] No more ain’t we.

MENDOZA. [indignantly] Have I taken more than my share?

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [unmoved] Why should you?

THE ANARCHIST. Why should he not? To each according to his needs: from each according to his means.

THE FRENCHMAN. [shaking his fist at the anarchist] Fumiste!

MENDOZA. [diplomatically] I agree with both of you.

THE GENUINELY ENGLISH BRIGANDS. Hear, hear! Bravo, Mendoza!

MENDOZA. What I say is, let us treat one another as gentlemen, and strive to excel in personal courage only when we take the field.

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [derisively] Shikespear.

A whistle comes from the goatherd on the hill. He springs up and points excitedly forward along the road to the north.

THE GOATHERD. Automobile! Automobile! [He rushes down the hill and joins the rest, who all scramble to their feet].

MENDOZA. [in ringing tones] To arms! Who has the gun?

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [handing a rifle to Mendoza] Here.

MENDOZA. Have the nails been strewn in the road?

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. Two ahnces of em.

MENDOZA. Good! [To the Frenchman] With me, Duval. If the nails fail, puncture their tires with a bullet. [He gives the rifle to Duval, who follows him up the hill. Mendoza produces an opera glass. The others hurry across to the road and disappear to the north].

MENDOZA. [on the hill, using his glass] Two only, a capitalist and his chauffeur. They look English.

DUVAL. Angliche! Aoh yess. Cochons! [Handling the rifle] Faut tire, n’est-ce-pas?

MENDOZA. No: the nails have gone home. Their tire is down: they stop.

DUVAL. [shouting to the others] Fondez sur eux, nom de Dieu!

MENDOZA. [rebuking his excitement] Du calme, Duval: keep your hair on. They take it quietly. Let us descend and receive them.

Mendoza descends, passing behind the fire and coming forward, whilst Tanner and Straker, in their motoring goggles, leather coats, and caps, are led in from the road by brigands.

TANNER. Is this the gentleman you describe as your boss? Does he speak English?

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. Course he does. Y’don’t suppowz we Hinglishmen lets ahrselves be bossed by a bloomin Spenniard, do you?

MENDOZA. [with dignity] Allow me to introduce myself: Mendoza, President of the League of the Sierra! [Posing loftily] I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.

TANNER. [promptly] I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. Shake hands.

THE ENGLISH SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS. Hear, hear!

General laughter and good humor. Tanner and Mendoza shake hands. The Brigands drop into their former places.

STRAKER. Ere! where do I come in?

TANNER. [introducing] My friend and chauffeur.

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [suspiciously] Well, which is he? friend or show-foor? It makes all the difference you know.

MENDOZA. [explaining] We should expect ransom for a friend. A professional chauffeur is free of the mountains. He even takes a trifling percentage of his princpal’s ransom if he will honor us by accepting it.

STRAKER. I see. Just to encourage me to come this way again. Well, I’ll think about it.

DUVAL. [impulsively rushing across to Straker] Mon frere! [He embraces him rapturously and kisses him on both cheeks].

STRAKER. [disgusted] Ere, git out: don’t be silly. Who are you, pray?

DUVAL. Duval: Social-Democrat.

STRAKER. Oh, you’re a Social-Democrat, are you?

THE ANARCHIST. He means that he has sold out to the parliamentary humbugs and the bourgeoisie. Compromise! that is his faith.

DUVAL. [furiously] I understand what he say. He say Bourgeois. He say Compromise. Jamais de la vie! Miserable menteur —

STRAKER. See here, Captain Mendoza, ow much o this sort o thing do you put up with here? Are we avin a pleasure trip in the mountains, or are we at a Socialist meetin?

THE MAJORITY. Hear, hear! Shut up. Chuck it. Sit down, etc. etc. [The Social-Democrats and the Anarchist are hurtled into the background. Straker, after superintending this proceeding with satisfaction, places himself on Mendoza’s left, Tanner being on his right].

MENDOZA. Can we offer you anything? Broiled rabbit and prickly pears —

TANNER. Thank you: we have dined.

MENDOZA. [to his followers] Gentlemen: business is over for the day. Go as you please until morning.

The Brigands disperse into groups lazily. Some go into the cave. Others sit down or lie down to sleep in the open. A few produce a pack of cards and move off towards the road; for it is now starlight; and they know that motor cars have lamps which can be turned to account for lighting a card party.

STRAKER. [calling after them] Don’t none of you go fooling with that car, d’ye hear?

MENDOZA. No fear, Monsieur le Chauffeur. The first one we captured cured us of that.

STRAKER. [interested] What did it do?

MENDOZA. It carried three brave comrades of ours, who did not know how to stop it, into Granada, and capsized them opposite the police station. Since then we never touch one without sending for the chauffeur. Shall we chat at our ease?

TANNER. By all means.

Tanner, Mendoza, and Straker sit down on the turf by the fire. Mendoza delicately waives his presidential dignity, of which the right to sit on the squared stone block is the appanage, by sitting on the ground like his guests, and using the stone only as a support for his back.

MENDOZA. It is the custom in Spain always to put off business until to-morrow. In fact, you have arrived out of office hours. However, if you would prefer to settle the question of ransom at once, I am at your service.

TANNER. To-morrow will do for me. I am rich enough to pay anything in reason.

MENDOZA. [respectfully, much struck by this admission] You are a remarkable man, sir. Our guests usually describe themselves as miserably poor.

TANNER. Pooh! Miserably poor people don’t own motor cars.

MENDOZA. Precisely what we say to them.

TANNER. Treat us well: we shall not prove ungrateful.

STRAKER. No prickly pears and broiled rabbits, you know. Don’t tell me you can’t do us a bit better than that if you like.

MENDOZA. Wine, kids, milk, cheese and bread can be procured for ready money.

STRAKER. [graciously] Now you’re talking.

TANNER. Are you all Socialists here, may I ask?

MENDOZA. [repudiating this humiliating misconception] Oh no, no, no: nothing of the kind, I assure you. We naturally have modern views as to the justice of the existing distribution of wealth: otherwise we should lose our self-respect. But nothing that you could take exception to, except two or three faddists.

TANNER. I had no intention of suggesting anything discreditable. In fact, I am a bit of a Socialist myself.

STRAKER. [drily] Most rich men are, I notice.

MENDOZA. Quite so. It has reached us, I admit. It is in the air of the century.

STRAKER. Socialism must be looking up a bit if your chaps are taking to it.

MENDOZA. That is true, sir. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

TANNER. But are your brigands any less honest than ordinary citizens?

MENDOZA. Sir: I will be frank with you. Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.

STRAKER. Take care! some o the dregs’ll hear you.

MENDOZA. It does not matter: each brigand thinks himself scum, and likes to hear the others called dregs.

TANNER. Come! you are a wit. [Mendoza inclines his head, flattered]. May one ask you a blunt question?

MENDOZA. As blunt as you please.

TANNER. How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as this on broiled rabbit and prickly pears? I have seen men less gifted, and I’ll swear less honest, supping at the Savoy on foie gras and champagne.

MENDOZA. Pooh! they have all had their turn at the broiled rabbit, just as I shall have my turn at the Savoy. Indeed, I have had a turn there already — as waiter.

TANNER. A waiter! You astonish me!

MENDOZA. [reflectively] Yes: I, Mendoza of the Sierra, was a waiter. Hence, perhaps, my cosmopolitanism. [With sudden intensity] Shall I tell you the story of my life?

STRAKER. [apprehensively] If it ain’t too long, old chap —

TANNER. [interrupting him] Tsh-sh: you are a Philistine, Henry: you have no romance in you. [To Mendoza] You interest me extremely, President. Never mind Henry: he can go to sleep.

MENDOZA. The woman I loved —

STRAKER. Oh, this is a love story, is it? Right you are. Go on: I was only afraid you were going to talk about yourself.

MENDOZA. Myself! I have thrown myself away for her sake: that is why I am here. No matter: I count the world well lost for her. She had, I pledge you my word, the most magnificent head of hair I ever saw. She had humor; she had intellect; she could cook to perfection; and her highly strung temperament made her uncertain, incalculable, variable, capricious, cruel, in a word, enchanting.

STRAKER. A six shillin novel sort o woman, all but the cookin. Er name was Lady Gladys Plantagenet, wasn’t it?

MENDOZA. No, sir: she was not an earl’s daughter. Photography, reproduced by the half-tone process, has made me familiar with the appearance of the daughters of the English peerage; and I can honestly say that I would have sold the lot, faces, dowries, clothes, titles, and all, for a smile from this woman. Yet she was a woman of the people, a worker: otherwise — let me reciprocate your bluntness — I should have scorned her.

TANNER. Very properly. And did she respond to your love?

MENDOZA. Should I be here if she did? She objected to marry a Jew.

TANNER. On religious grounds?

MENDOZA. No: she was a freethinker. She said that every Jew considers in his heart that English people are dirty in their habits.

TANNER. [surprised] Dirty!

MENDOZA. It showed her extraordinary knowledge of the world; for it is undoubtedly true. Our elaborate sanitary code makes us unduly contemptuous of the Gentile.

TANNER. Did you ever hear that, Henry?

STRAKER. I’ve heard my sister say so. She was cook in a Jewish family once.

MENDOZA. I could not deny it; neither could I eradicate the impression it made on her mind. I could have got round any other objection; but no woman can stand a suspicion of indelicacy as to her person. My entreaties were in vain: she always retorted that she wasn’t good enough for me, and recommended me to marry an accursed barmaid named Rebecca Lazarus, whom I loathed. I talked of suicide: she offered me a packet of beetle poison to do it with. I hinted at murder: she went into hysterics; and as I am a living man I went to America so that she might sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat. In America I went out west and fell in with a man who was wanted by the police for holding up trains. It was he who had the idea of holding up motors cars — in the South of Europe: a welcome idea to a desperate and disappointed man. He gave me some valuable introductions to capitalists of the right sort. I formed a syndicate; and the present enterprise is the result. I became leader, as the Jew always becomes leader, by his brains and imagination. But with all my pride of race I would give everything I possess to be an Englishman. I am like a boy: I cut her name on the trees and her initials on the sod. When I am alone I lie down and tear my wretched hair and cry Louisa —

STRAKER. [startled] Louisa!

MENDOZA. It is her name — Louisa — Louisa Straker —

TANNER. Straker!

STRAKER. [scrambling up on his knees most indignantly] Look here: Louisa Straker is my sister, see? Wot do you mean by gassin about her like this? Wot she got to do with you?

MENDOZA. A dramatic coincidence! You are Enry, her favorite brother!

STRAKER. Oo are you callin Enry? What call have you to take a liberty with my name or with hers? For two pins I’d punch your fat ed, so I would.

MENDOZA. [with grandiose calm] If I let you do it, will you promise to brag of it afterwards to her? She will be reminded of her Mendoza: that is all I desire.

TANNER. This is genuine devotion, Henry. You should respect it.

STRAKER. [fiercely] Funk, more likely.

MENDOZA. [springing to his feet] Funk! Young man: I come of a famous family of fighters; and as your sister well knows, you would have as much chance against me as a perambulator against your motor car.

STRAKER. [secretly daunted, but rising from his knees with an air of reckless pugnacity] I ain’t afraid of you. With your Louisa! Louisa! Miss Straker is good enough for you, I should think.

MENDOZA. I wish you could persuade her to think so.

STRAKER. [exasperated] Here —

TANNER. [rising quickly and interposing] Oh come, Henry: even if you could fight the President you can’t fight the whole League of the Sierra. Sit down again and be friendly. A cat may look at a king; and even a President of brigands may look at your sister. All this family pride is really very old fashioned.

STRAKER. [subdued, but grumbling] Let him look at her. But wot does he mean by makin out that she ever looked at im? [Reluctantly resuming his couch on the turf] Ear him talk, one ud think she was keepin company with him. [He turns his back on them and composes himself to sleep].

MENDOZA. [to Tanner, becoming more confidential as he finds himself virtually alone with a sympathetic listener in the still starlight of the mountains; for all the rest are asleep by this time] It was just so with her, sir. Her intellect reached forward into the twentieth century: her social prejudices and family affections reached back into the dark ages. Ah, sir, how the words of Shakespear seem to fit every crisis in our emotions!

I loved Louisa: 40,000 brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum.

And so on. I forget the rest. Call it madness if you will — infatuation. I am an able man, a strong man: in ten years I should have owned a first-class hotel. I met her; and you see! I am a brigand, an outcast. Even Shakespear cannot do justice to what I feel for Louisa. Let me read you some lines that I have written about her myself. However slight their literary merit may be, they express what I feel better than any casual words can. [He produces a packet of hotel bills scrawled with manuscript, and kneels at the fire to decipher them, poking it with a stick to make it glow].

TANNER. [clapping him rudely on the shoulder] Put them in the fire, President.

MENDOZA. [startled] Eh?

TANNER. You are sacrificing your career to a monomania.

MENDOZA. I know it.

TANNER. No you don’t. No man would commit such a crime against himself if he really knew what he was doing. How can you look round at these august hills, look up at this divine sky, taste this finely tempered air, and then talk like a literary hack on a second floor in Bloomsbury?

MENDOZA. [shaking his head] The Sierra is no better than Bloomsbury when once the novelty has worn off. Besides, these mountains make you dream of women — of women with magnificent hair.

TANNER. Of Louisa, in short. They will not make me dream of women, my friend: I am heartwhole.

MENDOZA. Do not boast until morning, sir. This is a strange country for dreams.

TANNER. Well, we shall see. Goodnight. [He lies down and composes himself to sleep].

Mendoza, with a sigh, follows his example; and for a few moments there is peace in the Sierra. Then Mendoza sits up suddenly and says pleadingly to Tanner —

MENDOZA. Just allow me to read a few lines before you go to sleep. I should really like your opinion of them.

TANNER. [drowsily] Go on. I am listening.

MENDOZA. I saw thee first in Whitsun week Louisa, Louisa —

TANNER. [roaring himself] My dear President, Louisa is a very pretty name; but it really doesn’t rhyme well to Whitsun week.

MENDOZA. Of course not. Louisa is not the rhyme, but the refrain.

TANNER. [subsiding] Ah, the refrain. I beg your pardon. Go on.

MENDOZA. Perhaps you do not care for that one: I think you will like this better. [He recites, in rich soft tones, and to slow time]

Louisa, I love thee.

I love thee, Louisa.

Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee.

One name and one phrase make my music,

Louisa. Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I love thee.

Mendoza thy lover,

Thy lover, Mendoza,

Mendoza adoringly lives for Louisa.

There’s nothing but that in the world for Mendoza.

Louisa, Louisa, Mendoza adores thee.

[Affected] There is no merit in producing beautiful lines upon such a name. Louisa is an exquisite name, is it not?

TANNER. [all but asleep, responds with a faint groan].

MENDOZA.

O wert thou, Louisa,

The wife of Mendoza,

Mendoza’s Louisa, Louisa Mendoza,

How blest were the life of Louisa’s Mendoza!

How painless his longing of love for Louisa!

That is real poetry — from the heart — from the heart of hearts. Don’t you think it will move her?

No answer.

[Resignedly] Asleep, as usual. Doggrel to all the world; heavenly music to me! Idiot that I am to wear my heart on my sleeve! [He composes himself to sleep, murmuring] Louisa, I love thee; I love thee, Louisa; Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I —

Straker snores; rolls over on his side; and relapses into sleep. Stillness settles on the Sierra; and the darkness deepens. The fire has again buried itself in white ash and ceased to glow. The peaks show unfathomably dark against the starry firmament; but now the stars dim and vanish; and the sky seems to steal away out of the universe. Instead of the Sierra there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks, no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void. Then somewhere the beginning of a pallor, and with it a faint throbbing buzz as of a ghostly violoncello palpitating on the same note endlessly. A couple of ghostly violins presently take advantage of this bass

(a staff of music is supplied here)

and therewith the pallor reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing. For a moment he raises his head as the music passes him by. Then, with a heavy sigh, he droops in utter dejection; and the violins, discouraged, retrace their melody in despair and at last give it up, extinguished by wailings from uncanny wind instruments, thus: —

(more music)

It is all very odd. One recognizes the Mozartian strain; and on this hint, and by the aid of certain sparkles of violet light in the pallor, the man’s costume explains itself as that of a Spanish nobleman of the XV-XVI century. Don Juan, of course; but where? why? how? Besides, in the brief lifting of his face, now hidden by his hat brim, there was a curious suggestion of Tanner. A more critical, fastidious, handsome face, paler and colder, without Tanner’s impetuous credulity and enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but still a resemblance, even an identity. The name too: Don Juan Tenorio, John Tanner. Where on earth — or elsewhere — have we got to from the XX century and the Sierra?

Another pallor in the void, this time not violet, but a disagreeable smoky yellow. With it, the whisper of a ghostly clarionet turning this tune into infinite sadness:

(Here there is another musical staff.)

The yellowish pallor moves: there is an old crone wandering in the void, bent and toothless; draped, as well as one can guess, in the coarse brown frock of some religious order. She wanders and wanders in her slow hopeless way, much as a wasp flies in its rapid busy way, until she blunders against the thing she seeks: companionship. With a sob of relief the poor old creature clutches at the presence of the man and addresses him in her dry unlovely voice, which can still express pride and resolution as well as suffering.

THE OLD WOMAN. Excuse me; but I am so lonely; and this place is so awful.

DON JUAN. A new comer?

THE OLD WOMAN. Yes: I suppose I died this morning. I confessed; I had extreme unction; I was in bed with my family about me and my eyes fixed on the cross. Then it grew dark; and when the light came back it was this light by which I walk seeing nothing. I have wandered for hours in horrible loneliness.

DON JUAN. [sighing] Ah! you have not yet lost the sense of time. One soon does, in eternity.

THE OLD WOMAN. Where are we?

DON JUAN. In hell.

THE OLD WOMAN [proudly] Hell! I in hell! How dare you?

DON JUAN. [unimpressed] Why not, Senora?

THE OLD WOMAN. You do not know to whom you are speaking. I am a lady, and a faithful daughter of the Church.

DON JUAN. I do not doubt it.

THE OLD WOMAN. But how then can I be in hell? Purgatory, perhaps: I have not been perfect: who has? But hell! oh, you are lying.

DON JUAN. Hell, Senora, I assure you; hell at its best that is, its most solitary — though perhaps you would prefer company.

THE OLD WOMAN. But I have sincerely repented; I have confessed.

DON JUAN. How much?

THE OLD WOMAN. More sins than I really committed. I loved confession.

DON JUAN. Ah, that is perhaps as bad as confessing too little. At all events, Senora, whether by oversight or intention, you are certainly damned, like myself; and there is nothing for it now but to make the best of it.

THE OLD WOMAN [indignantly] Oh! and I might have been so much wickeder! All my good deeds wasted! It is unjust.

DON JUAN. No: you were fully and clearly warned. For your bad deeds, vicarious atonement, mercy without justice. For your good deeds, justice without mercy. We have many good people here.

THE OLD WOMAN. Were you a good man?

DON JUAN. I was a murderer.

THE OLD WOMAN. A murderer! Oh, how dare they send me to herd with murderers! I was not as bad as that: I was a good woman. There is some mistake: where can I have it set right?

DON JUAN. I do not know whether mistakes can be corrected here. Probably they will not admit a mistake even if they have made one.

THE OLD WOMAN. But whom can I ask?

DON JUAN. I should ask the Devil, Senora: he understands the ways of this place, which is more than I ever could.

THE OLD WOMAN. The Devil! I speak to the Devil!

DON JUAN. In hell, Senora, the Devil is the leader of the best society.

THE OLD WOMAN. I tell you, wretch, I know I am not in hell.

DON JUAN. How do you know?

THE OLD WOMAN. Because I feel no pain.

DON JUAN. Oh, then there is no mistake: you are intentionally damned.

THE OLD WOMAN. Why do you say that?

DON JUAN. Because hell, Senora, is a place for the wicked. The wicked are quite comfortable in it: it was made for them. You tell me you feel no pain. I conclude you are one of those for whom Hell exists.

THE OLD WOMAN. Do you feel no pain?

DON JUAN. I am not one of the wicked, Senora; therefore it bores me, bores me beyond description, beyond belief.

THE OLD WOMAN. Not one of the wicked! You said you were a murderer.

DON JUAN. Only a duel. I ran my sword through an old man who was trying to run his through me.

THE OLD WOMAN. If you were a gentleman, that was not a murder.

DON JUAN. The old man called it murder, because he was, he said, defending his daughter’s honor. By this he meant that because I foolishly fell in love with her and told her so, she screamed; and he tried to assassinate me after calling me insulting names.

THE OLD WOMAN. You were like all men. Libertines and murderers all, all, all!

DON JUAN. And yet we meet here, dear lady.

THE OLD WOMAN. Listen to me. My father was slain by just such a wretch as you, in just such a duel, for just such a cause. I screamed: it was my duty. My father drew on my assailant: his honor demanded it. He fell: that was the reward of honor. I am here: in hell, you tell me that is the reward of duty. Is there justice in heaven?

DON JUAN. No; but there is justice in hell: heaven is far above such idle human personalities. You will be welcome in hell, Senora. Hell is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else but in hell should they have their reward? Have I not told you that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell?

THE OLD WOMAN. And are you happy here?

DON JUAN. [Springing to his feet] No; and that is the enigma on which I ponder in darkness. Why am I here? I, who repudiated all duty, trampled honor underfoot, and laughed at justice!

THE OLD WOMAN. Oh, what do I care why you are here? Why am I here? I, who sacrificed all my inclinations to womanly virtue and propriety!

DON JUAN. Patience, lady: you will be perfectly happy and at home here. As with the poet, “Hell is a city much like Seville.”

THE OLD WOMAN. Happy! here! where I am nothing! where I am nobody!

DON JUAN. Not at all: you are a lady; and wherever ladies are is hell. Do not be surprised or terrified: you will find everything here that a lady can desire, including devils who will serve you from sheer love of servitude, and magnify your importance for the sake of dignifying their service — the best of servants.

THE OLD WOMAN. My servants will be devils.

DON JUAN. Have you ever had servants who were not devils?

THE OLD WOMAN. Never: they were devils, perfect devils, all of them. But that is only a manner of speaking. I thought you meant that my servants here would be real devils.

DON JUAN. No more real devils than you will be a real lady. Nothing is real here. That is the horror of damnation.

THE OLD WOMAN. Oh, this is all madness. This is worse than fire and the worm.

DON JUAN. For you, perhaps, there are consolations. For instance: how old were you when you changed from time to eternity?

THE OLD WOMAN. Do not ask me how old I was as if I were a thing of the past. I am 77.

DON JUAN. A ripe age, Senora. But in hell old age is not tolerated. It is too real. Here we worship Love and Beauty. Our souls being entirely damned, we cultivate our hearts. As a lady of 77, you would not have a single acquaintance in hell.

THE OLD WOMAN. How can I help my age, man?

DON JUAN. You forget that you have left your age behind you in the realm of time. You are no more 77 than you are 7 or 17 or 27.

THE OLD WOMAN. Nonsense!

DON JUAN. Consider, Senora: was not this true even when you lived on earth? When you were 70, were you really older underneath your wrinkles and your grey hams than when you were 30?

THE OLD WOMAN. No, younger: at 30 I was a fool. But of what use is it to feel younger and look older?

DON JUAN. You see, Senora, the look was only an illusion. Your wrinkles lied, just as the plump smooth skin of many a stupid girl of 17, with heavy spirits and decrepit ideas, lies about her age? Well, here we have no bodies: we see each other as bodies only because we learnt to think about one another under that aspect when we were alive; and we still think in that way, knowing no other. But we can appear to one another at what age we choose. You have but to will any of your old looks back, and back they will come.

THE OLD WOMAN. It cannot be true.

DON JUAN. Try.

THE OLD WOMAN. Seventeen!

DON JUAN. Stop. Before you decide, I had better tell you that these things are a matter of fashion. Occasionally we have a rage for 17; but it does not last long. Just at present the fashionable age is 40 — or say 37; but there are signs of a change. If you were at all good-looking at 27, I should suggest your trying that, and setting a new fashion.

THE OLD WOMAN. I do not believe a word you are saying. However, 27 be it. [Whisk! the old woman becomes a young one, and so handsome that in the radiance into which her dull yellow halo has suddenly lightened one might almost mistake her for Ann Whitefield].

DON JUAN. Dona Ana de Ulloa!

ANA. What? You know me!

DON JUAN. And you forget me!

ANA. I cannot see your face. [He raises his hat]. Don Juan Tenorio! Monster! You who slew my father! even here you pursue me.

DON JUAN. I protest I do not pursue you. Allow me to withdraw [going].

ANA. [reining his arm] You shall not leave me alone in this dreadful place.

DON JUAN. Provided my staying be not interpreted as pursuit.

ANA. [releasing him] You may well wonder how I can endure your presence. My dear, dear father!

DON JUAN. Would you like to see him?

ANA. My father HERE!!!

DON JUAN. No: he is in heaven.

ANA. I knew it. My noble father! He is looking down on us now. What must he feel to see his daughter in this place, and in conversation with his murderer!

DON JUAN. By the way, if we should meet him —

ANA. How can we meet him? He is in heaven.

DON JUAN. He condescends to look in upon us here from time to time. Heaven bores him. So let me warn you that if you meet him he will be mortally offended if you speak of me as his murderer! He maintains that he was a much better swordsman than I, and that if his foot had not slipped he would have killed me. No doubt he is right: I was not a good fencer. I never dispute the point; so we are excellent friends.

ANA. It is no dishonor to a soldier to be proud of his skill in arms.

DON JUAN. You would rather not meet him, probably.

ANA. How dare you say that?

DON JUAN. Oh, that is the usual feeling here. You may remember that on earth — though of course we never confessed it — the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

ANA. Monster! Never, never.

DON JUAN. [placidly] I see you recognize the feeling. Yes: a funeral was always a festivity in black, especially the funeral of a relative. At all events, family ties are rarely kept up here. Your father is quite accustomed to this: he will not expect any devotion from you.

ANA. Wretch: I wore mourning for him all my life.

DON JUAN. Yes: it became you. But a life of mourning is one thing: an eternity of it quite another. Besides, here you are as dead as he. Can anything be more ridiculous than one dead person mourning for another? Do not look shocked, my dear Ana; and do not be alarmed: there is plenty of humbug in hell (indeed there is hardly anything else); but the humbug of death and age and change is dropped because here WE are all dead and all eternal. You will pick up our ways soon.

ANA. And will all the men call me their dear Ana?

DON JUAN. No. That was a slip of the tongue. I beg your pardon.

ANA. [almost tenderly] Juan: did you really love me when you behaved so disgracefully to me?

DON JUAN. [impatiently] Oh, I beg you not to begin talking about love. Here they talk of nothing else but love — its beauty, its holiness, its spirituality, its devil knows what! — excuse me; but it does so bore me. They don’t know what they’re talking about. I do. They think they have achieved the perfection of love because they have no bodies. Sheer imaginative debauchery! Faugh!

ANA. Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father’s statue was the minister taught you no reverence?

DON JUAN. How is that very flattering statue, by the way? Does it still come to supper with naughty people and cast them into this bottomless pit?

ANA. It has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years, and fingers without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is shockingly mutilated. My poor father!

DON JUAN. Hush! Listen! [Two great chords rolling on syncopated waves of sound break forth: D minor and its dominant: a round of dreadful joy to all musicians]. Ha! Mozart’s statue music. It is your father. You had better disappear until I prepare him. [She vanishes].

From the void comes a living statue of white marble, designed to represent a majestic old man. But he waives his majesty with infinite grace; walks with a feather-like step; and makes every wrinkle in his war worn visage brim over with holiday joyousness. To his sculptor he owes a perfectly trained figure, which he carries erect and trim; and the ends of his moustache curl up, elastic as watchsprings, giving him an air which, but for its Spanish dignity, would be called jaunty. He is on the pleasantest terms with Don Juan. His voice, save for a much more distinguished intonation, is so like the voice of Roebuck Ramsden that it calls attention to the fact that they are not unlike one another in spite of their very different fashion of shaving.

DON JUAN. Ah, here you are, my friend. Why don’t you learn to sing the splendid music Mozart has written for you?

THE STATUE. Unluckily he has written it for a bass voice. Mine is a counter tenor. Well: have you repented yet?

DON JUAN. I have too much consideration for you to repent, Don Gonzalo. If I did, you would have no excuse for coming from Heaven to argue with me.

THE STATUE. True. Remain obdurate, my boy. I wish I had killed you, as I should have done but for an accident. Then I should have come here; and you would have had a statue and a reputation for piety to live up to. Any news?

DON JUAN. Yes: your daughter is dead.

THE STATUE. [puzzled] My daughter? [Recollecting] Oh! the one you were taken with. Let me see: what was her name?

DON JUAN. Ana.

THE STATUE. To be sure: Ana. A goodlooking girl, if I recollect aright. Have you warned Whatshisname — her husband?

DON JUAN. My friend Ottavio? No: I have not seen him since Ana arrived.

Ana comes indignantly to light.

ANA. What does this mean? Ottavio here and YOUR friend! And you, father, have forgotten my name. You are indeed turned to stone.

THE STATUE. My dear: I am so much more admired in marble than I ever was in my own person that I have retained the shape the sculptor gave me. He was one of the first men of his day: you must acknowledge that.

ANA. Father! Vanity! personal vanity! from you!

THE STATUE. Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off (by an accident) in my 64th year, and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child, in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not as a father.

ANA. You speak as this villain speaks.

THE STATUE. Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound thinker.

ANA. [horror creeping upon her] I begin to understand. These are devils, mocking me. I had better pray.

THE STATUE. [consoling her] No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over the gate here are the words “Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.” Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. [Don Juan sighs deeply]. You sigh, friend Juan; but if you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages.

DON JUAN. You are in good spirits to-day, Commander. You are positively brilliant. What is the matter?

THE STATUE. I have come to a momentous decision, my boy. But first, where is our friend the Devil? I must consult him in the matter. And Ana would like to make his acquaintance, no doubt.

ANA. You are preparing some torment for me.

DON JUAN. All that is superstition, Ana. Reassure yourself. Remember: the devil is not so black as he is painted.

THE STATUE. Let us give him a call.

At the wave of the statue’s hand the great chords roll out again but this time Mozart’s music gets grotesquely adulterated with Gounod’s. A scarlet halo begins to glow; and into it the Devil rises, very Mephistophelean, and not at all unlike Mendoza, though not so interesting. He looks older; is getting prematurely bald; and, in spite of an effusion of goodnature and friendliness, is peevish and sensitive when his advances are not reciprocated. He does not inspire much confidence in his powers of hard work or endurance, and is, on the whole, a disagreeably self-indulgent looking person; but he is clever and plausible, though perceptibly less well bred than the two other men, and enormously less vital than the woman.

THE DEVIL. [heartily] Have I the pleasure of again receiving a visit from the illustrious Commander of Calatrava? [Coldly] Don Juan, your servant. [Politely] And a strange lady? My respects, Senora.

ANA. Are you —

THE DEVIL. [bowing] Lucifer, at your service.

ANA. I shall go mad.

THE DEVIL. [gallantly] Ah, Senora, do not be anxious. You come to us from earth, full of the prejudices and terrors of that priest-ridden place. You have heard me ill spoken of; and yet, believe me, I have hosts of friends there.

ANA. Yes: you reign in their hearts.

THE DEVIL. [shaking his head] You flatter me, Senora; but you are mistaken. It is true that the world cannot get on without me; but it never gives me credit for that: in its heart it mistrusts and hates me. Its sympathies are all with misery, with poverty, with starvation of the body and of the heart. I call on it to sympathize with joy, with love, with happiness, with beauty.

DON JUAN. [nauseated] Excuse me: I am going. You know I cannot stand this.

THE DEVIL. [angrily] Yes: I know that you are no friend of mine.

THE STATUE. What harm is he doing you, Juan? It seems to me that he was talking excellent sense when you interrupted him.

THE DEVIL. [warmly shaking the statue’s hand] Thank you, my friend: thank you. You have always understood me: he has always disparaged and avoided me.

DON JUAN. I have treated you with perfect courtesy.

THE DEVIL. Courtesy! What is courtesy? I care nothing for mere courtesy. Give me warmth of heart, true sincerity, the bond of sympathy with love and joy —

DON JUAN. You are making me ill.

THE DEVIL. There! [Appealing to the statue] You hear, sir! Oh, by what irony of fate was this cold selfish egotist sent to my kingdom, and you taken to the icy mansions of the sky!

THE STATUE. I can’t complain. I was a hypocrite; and it served me right to be sent to heaven.

THE DEVIL. Why, sir, do you not join us, and leave a sphere for which your temperament is too sympathetic, your heart too warm, your capacity for enjoyment too generous?

THE STATUE. I have this day resolved to do so. In future, excellent Son of the Morning, I am yours. I have left Heaven for ever.

THE DEVIL. [again grasping his hand] Ah, what an honor for me! What a triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend — I may call you so at last — could you not persuade HIM to take the place you have left vacant above?

THE STATUE. [shaking his head] I cannot conscientiously recommend anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself dull and uncomfortable.

THE DEVIL. Of course not; but are you sure HE would be uncomfortable? Of course you know best: you brought him here originally; and we had the greatest hopes of him. His sentiments were in the best taste of our best people. You remember how he sang? [He begins to sing in a nasal operatic baritone, tremulous from an eternity of misuse in the French manner].

Vivan le femmine!

Viva il buon vino!

THE STATUE. [taking up the tune an octave higher in his counter tenor]

Sostegno a gloria

D’umanita.

THE DEVIL. Precisely. Well, he never sings for us now.

DON JUAN. Do you complain of that? Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?

THE DEVIL. You dare blaspheme against the sublimest of the arts!

DON JUAN. [with cold disgust] You talk like a hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler.

THE DEVIL. I am not angry. I merely pity you. You have no soul; and you are unconscious of all that you lose. Now you, Senor Commander, are a born musician. How well you sing! Mozart would be delighted if he were still here; but he moped and went to heaven. Curious how these clever men, whom you would have supposed born to be popular here, have turned out social failures, like Don Juan!

DON JUAN. I am really very sorry to be a social failure.

THE DEVIL. Not that we don’t admire your intellect, you know. We do. But I look at the matter from your own point of view. You don’t get on with us. The place doesn’t suit you. The truth is, you have — I won’t say no heart; for we know that beneath all your affected cynicism you have a warm one.

DON JUAN. [shrinking] Don’t, please don’t.

THE DEVIL. [nettled] Well, you’ve no capacity for enjoyment. Will that satisfy you?

DON JUAN. It is a somewhat less insufferable form of cant than the other. But if you’ll allow me, I’ll take refuge, as usual, in solitude.

THE DEVIL. Why not take refuge in Heaven? That’s the proper place for you. [To Ana] Come, Senora! could you not persuade him for his own good to try a change of air?

ANA. But can he go to Heaven if he wants to?

THE DEVIL. What’s to prevent him?

ANA. Can anybody — can I go to Heaven if I want to?

THE DEVIL. [rather contemptuously] Certainly, if your taste lies that way.

ANA. But why doesn’t everybody go to Heaven, then?

THE STATUE. [chuckling] I can tell you that, my dear. It’s because heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation: that’s why.

THE DEVIL. His excellency the Commander puts it with military bluntness; but the strain of living in Heaven is intolerable. There is a notion that I was turned out of it; but as a matter of fact nothing could have induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place.

THE STATUE. I don’t wonder at it. Nobody could stand an eternity of heaven.

THE DEVIL. Oh, it suits some people. Let us be just, Commander: it is a question of temperament. I don’t admire the heavenly temperament: I don’t understand it: I don’t know that I particularly want to understand it; but it takes all sorts to make a universe. There is no accounting for tastes: there are people who like it. I think Don Juan would like it.

DON JUAN. But — pardon my frankness — could you really go back there if you desired to; or are the grapes sour?

THE DEVIL. Back there! I often go back there. Have you never read the book of Job? Have you any canonical authority for assuming that there is any barrier between our circle and the other one?

ANA. But surely there is a great gulf fixed.

THE DEVIL. Dear lady: a parable must not be taken literally. The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that. Have you ever been in the country where I have the largest following — England? There they have great racecourses, and also concert rooms where they play the classical compositions of his Excellency’s friend Mozart. Those who go to the racecourses can stay away from them and go to the classical concerts instead if they like: there is no law against it; for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. And the classical concert is admitted to be a higher, more cultivated, poetic, intellectual, ennobling place than the racecourse. But do the lovers of racing desert their sport and flock to the concert room? Not they. They would suffer there all the weariness the Commander has suffered in heaven. There is the great gulf of the parable between the two places. A mere physical gulf they could bridge; or at least I could bridge it for them (the earth is full of Devil’s Bridges); but the gulf of dislike is impassable and eternal. And that is the only gulf that separates my friends here from those who are invidiously called the blest.

ANA. I shall go to heaven at once.

THE STATUE. My child; one word of warning first. Let me complete my friend Lucifer’s similitude of the classical concert. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English.

THE DEVIL. Yes: the Southerners give it up and join me just as you have done. But the English really do not seem to know when they are thoroughly miserable. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

THE STATUE. In short, my daughter, if you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there.

ANA. And who dares say that I am not naturally qualified for it? The most distinguished princes of the Church have never questioned it. I owe it to myself to leave this place at once.

THE DEVIL. [offended] As you please, Senora. I should have expected better taste from you.

ANA. Father: I shall expect you to come with me. You cannot stay here. What will people say?

THE STATUE. People! Why, the best people are here — princes of the church and all. So few go to Heaven, and so many come here, that the blest, once called a heavenly host, are a continually dwindling minority. The saints, the fathers, the elect of long ago are the cranks, the faddists, the outsiders of to-day.

THE DEVIL. It is true. From the beginning of my career I knew that I should win in the long run by sheer weight of public opinion, in spite of the long campaign of misrepresentation and calumny against me. At bottom the universe is a constitutional one; and with such a majority as mine I cannot be kept permanently out of office.

DON JUAN. I think, Ana, you had better stay here.

ANA. [jealously] You do not want me to go with you.

DON JUAN. Surely you do not want to enter Heaven in the company of a reprobate like me.

ANA. All souls are equally precious. You repent, do you not?

DON JUAN. My dear Ana, you are silly. Do you suppose heaven is like earth, where people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie? No: heaven is the home of the masters of reality: that is why I am going thither.

ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth.

DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heros and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape the tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on” — without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise!

ANA. But if Hell be so beautiful as this, how glorious must heaven be!

The Devil, the Statue, and Don Juan all begin to speak at once in violent protest; then stop, abashed.

DON JUAN. I beg your pardon.

THE DEVIL. Not at all. I interrupted you.

THE STATUE. You were going to say something.

DON JUAN. After you, gentlemen.

THE DEVIL. [to Don Juan] You have been so eloquent on the advantages of my dominions that I leave you to do equal justice to the drawbacks of the alternative establishment.

DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation —

THE STATUE. Ugh!

DON JUAN. Senor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.

THE STATUE. You would have slain yourself in your blind efforts to fence but for my foot slipping, my friend.

DON JUAN. Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

THE STATUE. Ha ha! Do you remember how I frightened you when I said something like that to you from my pedestal in Seville? It sounds rather flat without my trombones.

DON JUAN. They tell me it generally sounds flat with them, Commander.

ANA. Oh, do not interrupt with these frivolities, father. Is there nothing in Heaven but contemplation, Juan?

DON JUAN. In the Heaven I seek, no other joy. But there is the work of helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters itself, how it raises up obstacles to itself and destroys itself in its ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man! says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect: Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.

THE DEVIL. And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust’s, that all Man’s reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent philosophers.

DON JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings. Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond the lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to live; but for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their purpose, and so destroyed themselves.

THE DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man’s wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady’s bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man’s industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness, and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door the old nursery saying— “Ask no questions and you will be told no lies.” I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a London bricklayer’s laborer with seven children. He left seventeen pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent sevenpence on her children’s schooling: the law had to force her to let them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.

DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.

THE DEVIL. Precisely. And these are the creatures in whom you discover what you call a Life Force!

DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole business.

THE STATUE. What’s that?

DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply putting an idea into his head.

THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it’s as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about putting an idea into a man’s head is stuff and nonsense. In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.

DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose — fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.

THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee! My congratulations.

THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing against the Church.

DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.

THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.

DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

THE STATUE. Bosh!

DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.

THE DEVIL. Ay: they will never be at a loss for an excuse for killing one another.

DON JUAN. What of that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, and kill one another for the great Catholic idea of abolishing slavery.

THE DEVIL. Yes, when the Liberty and Equality of which you prate shall have made free white Christians cheaper in the labor market than by auction at the block.

DON JUAN. Never fear! the white laborer shall have his turn too. But I am not now defending the illusory forms the great ideas take. I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God’s work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.

ANA. Yes: he shirks all his responsibilities, and leaves his wife to grapple with them.

THE STATUE. Well said, daughter. Do not let him talk you out of your common sense.

THE DEVIL. Alas! Senor Commander, now that we have got on to the subject of Woman, he will talk more than ever. However, I confess it is for me the one supremely interesting subject.

DON JUAN. To a woman, Senora, man’s duties and responsibilities begin and end with the task of getting bread for her children. To her, Man is only a means to the end of getting children and rearing them.

ANA. Is that your idea of a woman’s mind? I call it cynical and disgusting materialism.

DON JUAN. Pardon me, Ana: I said nothing about a woman’s whole mind. I spoke of her view of Man as a separate sex. It is no more cynical than her view of herself as above all things a Mother. Sexually, Woman is Nature’s contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement. Sexually, Man is Woman’s contrivance for fulfilling Nature’s behest in the most economical way. She knows by instinct that far back in the evolutional process she invented him, differentiated him, created him in order to produce something better than the single-sexed process can produce. Whilst he fulfils the purpose for which she made him, he is welcome to his dreams, his follies, his ideals, his heroisms, provided that the keystone of them all is the worship of woman, of motherhood, of the family, of the hearth. But how rash and dangerous it was to invent a separate creature whose sole function was her own impregnation! For mark what has happened. First, Man has multiplied on her hands until there are as many men as women; so that she has been unable to employ for her purposes more than a fraction of the immense energy she has left at his disposal by saving him the exhausting labor of gestation. This superfluous energy has gone to his brain and to his muscle. He has become too strong to be controlled by her bodily, and too imaginative and mentally vigorous to be content with mere self-reproduction. He has created civilization without consulting her, taking her domestic labor for granted as the foundation of it.

ANA. THAT is true, at all events.

THE DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?

DON JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces on; but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man’s part to make himself something more than the mere instrument of Woman’s purpose. So far, the result of Life’s continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, in spite of the commanders.

THE STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.

DON JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still, you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can win battles when the enemy’s general is a little stupider.

THE STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys have amazing luck.

DON JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the best fed riflemen is assured.

THE DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to mention the intolerable length of your speeches.

DON JUAN. Oh come! who began making long speeches? However, if I overtax your intellect, you can leave us and seek the society of love and beauty and the rest of your favorite boredoms.

THE DEVIL. [much offended] This is not fair, Don Juan, and not civil. I am also on the intellectual plane. Nobody can appreciate it more than I do. I am arguing fairly with you, and, I think, utterly refuting you. Let us go on for another hour if you like.

DON JUAN. Good: let us.

THE STATUE. Not that I see any prospect of your coming to any point in particular, Juan. Still, since in this place, instead of merely killing time we have to kill eternity, go ahead by all means.

DON JUAN. [somewhat impatiently] My point, you marbleheaded old masterpiece, is only a step ahead of you. Are we agreed that Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself; that the mammoth and the man, the mouse and the megatherium, the flies and the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a god?

THE DEVIL. I agree, for the sake of argument.

THE STATUE. I agree, for the sake of avoiding argument.

ANA. I most emphatically disagree as regards the Fathers of the Church; and I must beg you not to drag them into the argument.

DON JUAN. I did so purely for the sake of alliteration, Ana; and I shall make no further allusion to them. And now, since we are, with that exception, agreed so far, will you not agree with me further that Life has not measured the success of its attempts at godhead by the beauty or bodily perfection of the result, since in both these respects the birds, as our friend Aristophanes long ago pointed out, are so extraordinarily superior, with their power of flight and their lovely plumage, and, may I add, the touching poetry of their loves and nestings, that it is inconceivable that Life, having once produced them, should, if love and beauty were her object, start off on another line and labor at the clumsy elephant and the hideous ape, whose grandchildren we are?

ANA. Aristophanes was a heathen; and you, Juan, I am afraid, are very little better.

THE DEVIL. You conclude, then, that Life was driving at clumsiness and ugliness?

DON JUAN. No, perverse devil that you are, a thousand times no. Life was driving at brains — at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding.

THE STATUE. This is metaphysics, Juan. Why the devil should — [to the Devil] I BEG your pardon.

THE DEVIL. Pray don’t mention it. I have always regarded the use of my name to secure additional emphasis as a high compliment to me. It is quite at your service, Commander.

THE STATUE. Thank you: that’s very good of you. Even in heaven, I never quite got out of my old military habits of speech. What I was going to ask Juan was why Life should bother itself about getting a brain. Why should it want to understand itself? Why not be content to enjoy itself?

DON JUAN. Without a brain, Commander, you would enjoy yourself without knowing it, and so lose all the fun.

THE STATUE. True, most true. But I am quite content with brain enough to know that I’m enjoying myself. I don’t want to understand why. In fact, I’d rather not. My experience is that one’s pleasures don’t bear thinking about.

DON JUAN. That is why intellect is so unpopular. But to Life, the force behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving to-day a mind’s eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interests and illusions.

THE STATUE. You mean the military man.

DON JUAN. Commander: I do not mean the military man. When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of all other sorts of men I declare myself tired. They’re tedious failures. When I was on earth, professors of all sorts prowled round me feeling for an unhealthy spot in me on which they could fasten. The doctors of medicine bade me consider what I must do to save my body, and offered me quack cures for imaginary diseases. I replied that I was not a hypochondriac; so they called me Ignoramus and went their way. The doctors of divinity bade me consider what I must do to save my soul; but I was not a spiritual hypochondriac any more than a bodily one, and would not trouble myself about that either; so they called me Atheist and went their way. After them came the politician, who said there was only one purpose in Nature, and that was to get him into parliament. I told him I did not care whether he got into parliament or not; so he called me Mugwump and went his way. Then came the romantic man, the Artist, with his love songs and his paintings and his poems; and with him I had great delight for many years, and some profit; for I cultivated my senses for his sake; and his songs taught me to hear better, his paintings to see better, and his poems to feel more deeply. But he led me at last into the worship of Woman.

ANA. Juan!

DON JUAN. Yes: I came to believe that in her voice was all the music of the song, in her face all the beauty of the painting, and in her soul all the emotion of the poem.

ANA. And you were disappointed, I suppose. Well, was it her fault that you attributed all these perfections to her?

DON JUAN. Yes, partly. For with a wonderful instinctive cunning, she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her; to mistake my own visions, thoughts, and feelings for hers. Now my friend the romantic man was often too poor or too timid to approach those women who were beautiful or refined enough to seem to realize his ideal; and so he went to his grave believing in his dream. But I was more favored by nature and circumstance. I was of noble birth and rich; and when my person did not please, my conversation flattered, though I generally found myself fortunate in both.

THE STATUE. Coxcomb!

DON JUAN. Yes; but even my coxcombry pleased. Well, I found that when I had touched a woman’s imagination, she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me; but when my suit was granted she never said “I am happy: my love is satisfied”: she always said, first, “At last, the barriers are down,” and second, “When will you come again?”

ANA. That is exactly what men say.

DON JUAN. I protest I never said it. But all women say it. Well, these two speeches always alarmed me; for the first meant that the lady’s impulse had been solely to throw down my fortifications and gain my citadel; and the second openly announced that henceforth she regarded me as her property, and counted my time as already wholly at her disposal.

THE DEVIL. That is where your want of heart came in.

THE STATUE. [shaking his head] You shouldn’t repeat what a woman says, Juan.

ANA. [severely] It should be sacred to you.

THE STATUE. Still, they certainly do always say it. I never minded the barriers; but there was always a slight shock about the other, unless one was very hard hit indeed.

DON JUAN. Then the lady, who had been happy and idle enough before, became anxious, preoccupied with me, always intriguing, conspiring, pursuing, watching, waiting, bent wholly on making sure of her prey — I being the prey, you understand. Now this was not what I had bargained for. It may have been very proper and very natural; but it was not music, painting, poetry and joy incarnated in a beautiful woman. I ran away from it. I ran away from it very often: in fact I became famous for running away from it.

ANA. Infamous, you mean.

DON JUAN. I did not run away from you. Do you blame me for running away from the others?

ANA. Nonsense, man. You are talking to a woman of 77 now. If you had had the chance, you would have run away from me too — if I had let you. You would not have found it so easy with me as with some of the others. If men will not be faithful to their home and their duties, they must be made to be. I daresay you all want to marry lovely incarnations of music and painting and poetry. Well, you can’t have them, because they don’t exist. If flesh and blood is not good enough for you you must go without: that’s all. Women have to put up with flesh-and-blood husbands — and little enough of that too, sometimes; and you will have to put up with flesh-and-blood wives. The Devil looks dubious. The Statue makes a wry face. I see you don’t like that, any of you; but it’s true, for all that; so if you don’t like it you can lump it.

DON JUAN. My dear lady, you have put my whole case against romance into a few sentences. That is just why I turned my back on the romantic man with the artist nature, as he called his infatuation. I thanked him for teaching me to use my eyes and ears; but I told him that his beauty worshipping and happiness hunting and woman idealizing was not worth a dump as a philosophy of life; so he called me Philistine and went his way.

ANA. It seems that Woman taught you something, too, with all her defects.

DON JUAN. She did more: she interpreted all the other teaching for me. Ah, my friends, when the barriers were down for the first time, what an astounding illumination! I had been prepared for infatuation, for intoxication, for all the illusions of love’s young dream; and lo! never was my perception clearer, nor my criticism more ruthless. The most jealous rival of my mistress never saw every blemish in her more keenly than I. I was not duped: I took her without chloroform.

ANA. But you did take her.

DON JUAN. That was the revelation. Up to that moment I had never lost the sense of being my own master; never consciously taken a single step until my reason had examined and approved it. I had come to believe that I was a purely rational creature: a thinker! I said, with the foolish philosopher, “I think; therefore I am.” It was Woman who taught me to say “I am; therefore I think.” And also “I would think more; therefore I must be more.”

THE STATUE. This is extremely abstract and metaphysical, Juan. If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

DON JUAN. Bah! what need I add? Do you not understand that when I stood face to face with Woman, every fibre in my clear critical brain warned me to spare her and save myself. My morals said No. My conscience said No. My chivalry and pity for her said No. My prudent regard for myself said No. My ear, practised on a thousand songs and symphonies; my eye, exercised on a thousand paintings; tore her voice, her features, her color to shreds. I caught all those tell-tale resemblances to her father and mother by which I knew what she would be like in thirty years time. I noted the gleam of gold from a dead tooth in the laughing mouth: I made curious observations of the strange odors of the chemistry of the nerves. The visions of my romantic reveries, in which I had trod the plains of heaven with a deathless, ageless creature of coral and ivory, deserted me in that supreme hour. I remembered them and desperately strove to recover their illusion; but they now seemed the emptiest of inventions: my judgment was not to be corrupted: my brain still said No on every issue. And whilst I was in the act of framing my excuse to the lady, Life seized me and threw me into her arms as a sailor throws a scrap of fish into the mouth of a seabird.

THE STATUE. You might as well have gone without thinking such a lot about it, Juan. You are like all the clever men: you have more brains than is good for you.

THE DEVIL. And were you not the happier for the experience, Senor Don Juan?

DON JUAN. The happier, no: the wiser, yes. That moment introduced me for the first time to myself, and, through myself, to the world. I saw then how useless it is to attempt to impose conditions on the irresistible force of Life; to preach prudence, careful selection, virtue, honor, chastity —

ANA. Don Juan: a word against chastity is an insult to me.

DON JUAN. I say nothing against your chastity, Senora, since it took the form of a husband and twelve children. What more could you have done had you been the most abandoned of women?

ANA. I could have had twelve husbands and no children that’s what I could have done, Juan. And let me tell you that that would have made all the difference to the earth which I replenished.

THE STATUE. Bravo Ana! Juan: you are floored, quelled, annihilated.

DON JUAN. No; for though that difference is the true essential difference — Dona Ana has, I admit, gone straight to the real point — yet it is not a difference of love or chastity, or even constancy; for twelve children by twelve different husbands would have replenished the earth perhaps more effectively. Suppose my friend Ottavio had died when you were thirty, you would never have remained a widow: you were too beautiful. Suppose the successor of Ottavio had died when you were forty, you would still have been irresistible; and a woman who marries twice marries three times if she becomes free to do so. Twelve lawful children borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may be more law abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true; but dare you say she is less self-indulgent?

ANA. She is less virtuous: that is enough for me.

DON JUAN. In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The Life Force respects marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor, chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap. Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions —

ANA. Juan!

THE STATUE. [protesting] Really! —

DON JUAN. [determinedly] I say the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity. And a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error. Come, Ana! do not look shocked: you know better than any of us that marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the spinet which she hated as much as you did — had she any other purpose than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him to sleep after dinner? You married my friend Ottavio: well, did you ever open the spinet from the hour when the Church united him to you?

ANA. You are a fool, Juan. A young married woman has something else to do than sit at the spinet without any support for her back; so she gets out of the habit of playing.

DON JUAN. Not if she loves music. No: believe me, she only throws away the bait when the bird is in the net.

ANA. [bitterly] And men, I suppose, never throw off the mask when their bird is in the net. The husband never becomes negligent, selfish, brutal — oh never!

DON JUAN. What do these recriminations prove, Ana? Only that the hero is as gross an imposture as the heroine.

ANA. It is all nonsense: most marriages are perfectly comfortable.

DON JUAN. “Perfectly” is a strong expression, Ana. What you mean is that sensible people make the best of one another. Send me to the galleys and chain me to the felon whose number happens to be next before mine; and I must accept the inevitable and make the best of the companionship. Many such companionships, they tell me, are touchingly affectionate; and most are at least tolerably friendly. But that does not make a chain a desirable ornament nor the galleys an abode of bliss. Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

ANA. At all events, let me take an old woman’s privilege again, and tell you flatly that marriage peoples the world and debauchery does not.

DON JUAN. How if a time comes when this shall cease to be true? Do you not know that where there is a will there is a way — that whatever Man really wishes to do he will finally discover a means of doing? Well, you have done your best, you virtuous ladies, and others of your way of thinking, to bend Man’s mind wholly towards honorable love as the highest good, and to understand by honorable love romance and beauty and happiness in the possession of beautiful, refined, delicate, affectionate women. You have taught women to value their own youth, health, shapeliness, and refinement above all things. Well, what place have squalling babies and household cares in this exquisite paradise of the senses and emotions? Is it not the inevitable end of it all that the human will shall say to the human brain: Invent me a means by which I can have love, beauty, romance, emotion, passion without their wretched penalties, their expenses, their worries, their trials, their illnesses and agonies and risks of death, their retinue of servants and nurses and doctors and schoolmasters.

THE DEVIL. All this, Senor Don Juan, is realized here in my realm.

DON JUAN. Yes, at the cost of death. Man will not take it at that price: he demands the romantic delights of your hell whilst he is still on earth. Well, the means will be found: the brain will not fail when the will is in earnest. The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.

THE STATUE. That is all very eloquent, my young friend; but if you had lived to Ana’s age, or even to mine, you would have learned that the people who get rid of the fear of poverty and children and all the other family troubles, and devote themselves to having a good time of it, only leave their minds free for the fear of old age and ugliness and impotence and death. The childless laborer is more tormented by his wife’s idleness and her constant demands for amusement and distraction than he could be by twenty children; and his wife is more wretched than he. I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics. But I confess that had I found nothing to do in the world but wallow in these delights I should have cut my throat. When I married Ana’s mother — or perhaps, to be strictly correct, I should rather say when I at last gave in and allowed Ana’s mother to marry me — I knew that I was planting thorns in my pillow, and that marriage for me, a swaggering young officer thitherto unvanquished, meant defeat and capture.

ANA. [scandalized] Father!

THE STATUE. I am sorry to shock you, my love; but since Juan has stripped every rag of decency from the discussion I may as well tell the frozen truth.

ANA. Hmf! I suppose I was one of the thorns.

THE STATUE. By no means: you were often a rose. You see, your mother had most of the trouble you gave.

DON JUAN. Then may I ask, Commander, why you have left Heaven to come here and wallow, as you express it, in sentimental beatitudes which you confess would once have driven you to cut your throat?

THE STATUE. [struck by this] Egad, that’s true.

THE DEVIL. [alarmed] What! You are going back from your word. [To Don Juan] And all your philosophizing has been nothing but a mask for proselytizing! [To the Statue] Have you forgotten already the hideous dulness from which I am offering you a refuge here? [To Don Juan] And does your demonstration of the approaching sterilization and extinction of mankind lead to anything better than making the most of those pleasures of art and love which you yourself admit refined you, elevated you, developed you?

DON JUAN. I never demonstrated the extinction of mankind. Life cannot will its own extinction either in its blind amorphous state or in any of the forms into which it has organized itself. I had not finished when His Excellency interrupted me.

THE STATUE. I begin to doubt whether you ever will finish, my friend. You are extremely fond of hearing yourself talk.

DON JUAN. True; but since you have endured so much you may as well endure to the end. Long before this sterilization which I described becomes more than a clearly foreseen possibility, the reaction will begin. The great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys’ and girls’ dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money. The plain-spoken marriage services of the vernacular Churches will no longer be abbreviated and half suppressed as indelicate. The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be expunged as unbearable frivolities. Do my sex the justice to admit, Senora, that we have always recognized that the sex relation is not a personal or friendly relation at all.

ANA. Not a personal or friendly relation! What relation is more personal? more sacred? more holy?

DON JUAN. Sacred and holy, if you like, Ana, but not personally friendly. Your relation to God is sacred and holy: dare you call it personally friendly? In the sex relation the universal creative energy, of which the parties are both the helpless agents, over-rides and sweeps away all personal considerations and dispenses with all personal relations. The pair may be utter strangers to one another, speaking different languages, differing in race and color, in age and disposition, with no bond between them but a possibility of that fecundity for the sake of which the Life Force throws them into one another’s arms at the exchange of a glance. Do we not recognize this by allowing marriages to be made by parents without consulting the woman? Have you not often expressed your disgust at the immorality of the English nation, in which women and men of noble birth become acquainted and court each other like peasants? And how much does even the peasant know of his bride or she of him before he engages himself? Why, you would not make a man your lawyer or your family doctor on so slight an acquaintance as you would fall in love with and marry him!

ANA. Yes, Juan: we know the libertine’s philosophy. Always ignore the consequences to the woman.

DON JUAN. The consequences, yes: they justify her fierce grip of the man. But surely you do not call that attachment a sentimental one. As well call the policeman’s attachment to his prisoner a love relation.

ANA. You see you have to confess that marriage is necessary, though, according to you, love is the slightest of all the relations.

DON JUAN. How do you know that it is not the greatest of all the relations? far too great to be a personal matter. Could your father have served his country if he had refused to kill any enemy of Spain unless he personally hated him? Can a woman serve her country if she refuses to marry any man she does not personally love? You know it is not so: the woman of noble birth marries as the man of noble birth fights, on political and family grounds, not on personal ones.

THE STATUE. [impressed] A very clever point that, Juan: I must think it over. You are really full of ideas. How did you come to think of this one?

DON JUAN. I learnt it by experience. When I was on earth, and made those proposals to ladies which, though universally condemned, have made me so interesting a hero of legend, I was not infrequently met in some such way as this. The lady would say that she would countenance my advances, provided they were honorable. On inquiring what that proviso meant, I found that it meant that I proposed to get possession of her property if she had any, or to undertake her support for life if she had not; that I desired her continual companionship, counsel and conversation to the end of my days, and would bind myself under penalties to be always enraptured by them; and, above all, that I would turn my back on all other women for ever for her sake. I did not object to these conditions because they were exorbitant and inhuman: it was their extraordinary irrelevance that prostrated me. I invariably replied with perfect frankness that I had never dreamt of any of these things; that unless the lady’s character and intellect were equal or superior to my own, her conversation must degrade and her counsel mislead me; tha t her constant companionship might, for all I knew, become intolerably tedious to me; that I could not answer for my feelings for a week in advance, much less to the end of my life; that to cut me off from all natural and unconstrained relations with the rest of my fellow creatures would narrow and warp me if I submitted to it, and, if not, would bring me under the curse of clandestinity; that, finally, my proposals to her were wholly unconnected with any of these matters, and were the outcome of a perfectly simple impulse of my manhood towards her womanhood.

ANA. You mean that it was an immoral impulse.

DON JUAN. Nature, my dear lady, is what you call immoral. I blush for it; but I cannot help it. Nature is a pandar, Time a wrecker, and Death a murderer. I have always preferred to stand up to those facts and build institutions on their recognition. You prefer to propitiate the three devils by proclaiming their chastity, their thrift, and their loving kindness; and to base your institutions on these flatteries. Is it any wonder that the institutions do not work smoothly?

THE STATUE. What used the ladies to say, Juan?

DON JUAN. Oh, come! Confidence for confidence. First tell me what you used to say to the ladies.

THE STATUE. I! Oh, I swore that I would be faithful to the death; that I should die if they refused me; that no woman could ever be to me what she was —

ANA. She? Who?

THE STATUE. Whoever it happened to be at the time, my dear. I had certain things I always said. One of them was that even when I was eighty, one white hair of the woman I loved would make me tremble more than the thickest gold tress from the most beautiful young head. Another was that I could not bear the thought of anyone else being the mother of my children.

DON JUAN. [revolted] You old rascal!

THE STATUE. [Stoutly] Not a bit; for I really believed it with all my soul at the moment. I had a heart: not like you. And it was this sincerity that made me successful.

DON JUAN. Sincerity! To be fool enough to believe a ramping, stamping, thumping lie: that is what you call sincerity! To be so greedy for a woman that you deceive yourself in your eagerness to deceive her: sincerity, you call it!

THE STATUE. Oh, damn your sophistries! I was a man in love, not a lawyer. And the women loved me for it, bless them!

DON JUAN. They made you think so. What will you say when I tell you that though I played the lawyer so callously, they made me think so too? I also had my moments of infatuation in which I gushed nonsense and believed it. Sometimes the desire to give pleasure by saying beautiful things so rose in me on the flood of emotion that I said them recklessly. At other times I argued against myself with a devilish coldness that drew tears. But I found it just as hard to escape in the one case as in the others. When the lady’s instinct was set on me, there was nothing for it but lifelong servitude or flight.

ANA. You dare boast, before me and my father, that every woman found you irresistible.

DON JUAN. Am I boasting? It seems to me that I cut the most pitiable of figures. Besides, I said “when the lady’s instinct was set on me.” It was not always so; and then, heavens! what transports of virtuous indignation! what overwhelming defiance to the dastardly seducer! what scenes of Imogen and Iachimo!

ANA. I made no scenes. I simply called my father.

DON JUAN. And he came, sword in hand, to vindicate outraged honor and morality by murdering me.

THE STATUE. Murdering! What do you mean? Did I kill you or did you kill me?

DON JUAN. Which of us was the better fencer?

THE STATUE. I was.

DON JUAN. Of course you were. And yet you, the hero of those scandalous adventures you have just been relating to us, you had the effrontery to pose as the avenger of outraged morality and condemn me to death! You would have slain me but for an accident.

THE STATUE. I was expected to, Juan. That is how things were arranged on earth. I was not a social reformer; and I always did what it was customary for a gentleman to do.

DON JUAN. That may account for your attacking me, but not for the revolting hypocrisy of your subsequent proceedings as a statue.

THE STATUE. That all came of my going to Heaven.

THE DEVIL. I still fail to see, Senor Don Juan, that these episodes in your earthly career and in that of the Senor Commander in any way discredit my view of life. Here, I repeat, you have all that you sought without anything that you shrank from.

DON JUAN. On the contrary, here I have everything that disappointed me without anything that I have not already tried and found wanting. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It was the supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion. When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron. When I grew up, and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian’s Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the name of The Tempter. It is the fact that they are doing your will, or rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant, wretched creatures they are.

THE DEVIL. [mortified] Senor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.

DON JUAN. Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only “frail.” They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all — liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

THE STATUE. Your flow of words is simply amazing, Juan. How I wish I could have talked like that to my soldiers.

THE DEVIL. It is mere talk, though. It has all been said before; but what change has it ever made? What notice has the world ever taken of it?

DON JUAN. Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because, my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we who are of that caste aimed at more Life for the world instead of at more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make us great. Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to them! If you even believed in your moral game enough to play it fairly, it would be interesting to watch; but you don’t: you cheat at every trick; and if your opponent outcheats you, you upset the table and try to murder him.

THE DEVIL. On earth there may be some truth in this, because the people are uneducated and cannot appreciate my religion of love and beauty; but here —

DON JUAN. Oh yes: I know. Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of sweetness, like a confectioner’s shopboy. Commander: are there any beautiful women in Heaven?

THE STATUE. None. Absolutely none. All dowdies. Not two pennorth of jewellery among a dozen of them. They might be men of fifty.

DON JUAN. I am impatient to get there. Is the word beauty ever mentioned; and are there any artistic people?

THE STATUE. I give you my word they won’t admire a fine statue even when it walks past them.

DON JUAN. I go.

THE DEVIL. Don Juan: shall I be frank with you?

DON JUAN. Were you not so before?

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum —

DON JUAN. [out of all patience] By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty. Clever dolt that you are, is a man no better than a worm, or a dog than a wolf, because he gets tired of everything? Shall he give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it? Is a field idle when it is fallow? Can the Commander expend his hellish energy here without accumulating heavenly energy for his next term of blessedness? Granted that the great Life Force has hit on the device of the clockmaker’s pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moment between the toss and the catch, has the colossal mechanism no purpose?

THE DEVIL. None, my friend. You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.

DON JUAN. But I should not have them if they served no purpose. And I, my friend, am as much a part of Nature as my own finger is a part of me. If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline, my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself. My dog’s brain serves only my dog’s purposes; but my brain labors at a knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter to me and my decay and death a calamity. Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom with less misgiving. This is because the philosopher is in the grip of the Life Force. This Life Force says to him “I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance: now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my path; so I have made a special brain — a philosopher’s brain — to grasp this knowledge for me as the husbandman’s hand grasps the plough for me. And this” says the Life Force to the philosopher “must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work.”

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

THE DEVIL. On the rocks, most likely.

DON JUAN. Pooh! which ship goes oftenest on the rocks or to the bottom — the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board?

THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan.

THE DEVIL. [amiably] Fare you well, Don Juan. I shall often think of our interesting chats about things in general. I wish you every happiness: Heaven, as I said before, suits some people. But if you should change your mind, do not forget that the gates are always open here to the repentant prodigal. If you feel at any time that warmth of heart, sincere unforced affection, innocent enjoyment, and warm, breathing, palpitating reality —

DON JUAN. Why not say flesh and blood at once, though we have left those two greasy commonplaces behind us?

THE DEVIL. [angrily] You throw my friendly farewell back in my teeth, then, Don Juan?

DON JUAN. By no means. But though there is much to be learnt from a cynical devil, I really cannot stand a sentimental one. Senor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me.

THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. Any road will take you across it if you really want to get there.

DON JUAN. Good. [saluting Dona Ana] Senora: your servant.

ANA. But I am going with you.

DON JUAN. I can find my own way to heaven, Ana; but I cannot find yours [he vanishes].

ANA. How annoying!

THE STATUE. [calling after him] Bon voyage, Juan! [He wafts a final blast of his great rolling chords after him as a parting salute. A faint echo of the first ghostly melody comes back in acknowledgment]. Ah! there he goes. [Puffing a long breath out through his lips] Whew! How he does talk! They’ll never stand it in heaven.

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go. This is the greatest loss I have had since that Dutch painter went — a fellow who would paint a hag of 70 with as much enjoyment as a Venus of 20.

THE STATUE. I remember: he came to heaven. Rembrandt.

THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?

THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman — what was his name? Nietzsche?

THE STATUE. Never heard of him.

THE DEVIL. Well, he came here first, before he recovered his wits. I had some hopes of him; but he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.

THE STATUE. Superman is a good cry; and a good cry is half the battle. I should like to see this Nietzsche.

THE DEVIL. Unfortunately he met Wagner here, and had a quarrel with him.

THE STATUE. Quite right, too. Mozart for me!

THE DEVIL. Oh, it was not about music. Wagner once drifted into Life Force worship, and invented a Superman called Siegfried. But he came to his senses afterwards. So when they met here, Nietzsche denounced him as a renegade; and Wagner wrote a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was a Jew; and it ended in Nietzsche’s going to heaven in a huff. And a good riddance too. And now, my friend, let us hasten to my palace and celebrate your arrival with a grand musical service.

THE STATUE. With pleasure: you’re most kind.

THE DEVIL. This way, Commander. We go down the old trap [he places himself on the grave trap].

THE STATUE. Good. [Reflectively] All the same, the Superman is a fine conception. There is something statuesque about it. [He places himself on the grave trap beside The Devil. It begins to descend slowly. Red glow from the abyss]. Ah, this reminds me of old times.

THE DEVIL. And me also.

ANA. Stop! [The trap stops].

THE DEVIL. You, Senora, cannot come this way. You will have an apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us.

ANA. That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me where can I find the Superman?

THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora.

THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. [They descend].

ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father — a father for the Superman!

She vanishes into the void; and again there is nothing: all existence seems suspended infinitely. Then, vaguely, there is a live human voice crying somewhere. One sees, with a shock, a mountain peak showing faintly against a lighter background. The sky has returned from afar; and we suddenly remember where we were. The cry becomes distinct and urgent: it says Automobile, Automobile. The complete reality comes back with a rush: in a moment it is full morning in the Sierra; and the brigands are scrambling to their feet and making for the road as the goatherd runs down from the hill, warning them of the approach of another motor. Tanner and Mendoza rise amazedly and stare at one another with scattered wits. Straker sits up to yawn for a moment before he gets on his feet, making it a point of honor not to show any undue interest in the excitement of the bandits. Mendoza gives a quick look to see that his followers are attending to the alarm; then exchanges a private word with Tanner.

MENDOZA. Did you dream?

TANNER. Damnably. Did you?

MENDOZA. Yes. I forget what. You were in it.

TANNER. So were you. Amazing

MENDOZA. I warned you. [a shot is heard from the road]. Dolts! they will play with that gun. [The brigands come running back scared]. Who fired that shot? [to Duval] Was it you?

DUVAL. [breathless] I have not shoot. Dey shoot first.

ANARCHIST. I told you to begin by abolishing the State. Now we are all lost.

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [stampeding across the amphitheatre] Run, everybody.

MENDOZA. [collaring him; throwing him on his back; and drawing a knife] I stab the man who stirs. [He blocks the way. The stampede it checked]. What has happened?

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT, A motor —

THE ANARCHIST. Three men —

DUVAL. Deux femmes —

MENDOZA. Three men and two women! Why have you not brought them here? Are you afraid of them?

THE ROWDY ONE. [getting up] Thyve a hescort. Ow, de-ooh lut’s ook it, Mendowza.

THE SULKY ONE. Two armored cars full o soldiers at the end o the valley.

ANARCHIST. The shot was fired in the air. It was a signal.

Straker whistles his favorite air, which falls on the ears of the brigands like a funeral march.

TANNER. It is not an escort, but an expedition to capture you. We were advised to wait for it; but I was in a hurry.

THE ROWDY ONE. [in an agony of apprehension] And Ow my good Lord, ere we are, wytin for em! Lut’s tike to the mahntns.

MENDOZA. Idiot, what do you know about the mountains? Are you a Spaniard? You would be given up by the first shepherd you met. Besides, we are already within range of their rifles.

THE ROWDY ONE. Bat —

MENDOZA. Silence. Leave this to me. [To Tanner] Comrade: you will not betray us.

STRAKER. Oo are you callin comrade?

MENDOZA. Last night the advantage was with me. The robber of the poor was at the mercy of the robber of the rich. You offered your hand: I took it.

TANNER. I bring no charge against you, comrade. We have spent a pleasant evening with you: that is all.

STRAKER. I gev my and to nobody, see?

MENDOZA. [turning on him impressively] Young man, if I am tried, I shall plead guilty, and explain what drove me from England, home and duty. Do you wish to have the respectable name of Straker dragged through the mud of a Spanish criminal court? The police will search me. They will find Louisa’s portrait. It will be published in the illustrated papers. You blench. It will be your doing, remember.

STRAKER. [with baffled rage] I don’t care about the court. It’s avin our name mixed up with yours that I object to, you blackmailin swine, you.

MENDOZA. Language unworthy of Louisa’s brother! But no matter: you are muzzled: that is enough for us. [He turns to face his own men, who back uneasily across the amphitheatre towards the cave to take refuge behind him, as a fresh party, muffled for motoring, comes from the road in riotous spirits. Ann, who makes straight for Tanner, comes first; then Violet, helped over the rough ground by Hector holding her right hand and Ramsden her left. Mendoza goes to his presidential block and seats himself calmly with his rank and file grouped behind him, and his Staff, consisting of Duval and the Anarchist on his right and the two Social-Democrats on his left, supporting him in flank].

ANN. It’s Jack!

TANNER. Caught!

HECTOR. Why, certainly it is. I said it was you, Tanner, We’ve just been stopped by a puncture: the road is full of nails.

VIOLET. What are you doing here with all these men?

ANN. Why did you leave us without a word of warning?

HECTOR. I want that bunch of roses, Miss Whitefield. [To Tanner] When we found you were gone, Miss Whitefield bet me a bunch of roses my car would not overtake yours before you reached Monte Carlo.

TANNER. But this is not the road to Monte Carlo.

HECTOR. No matter. Miss Whitefield tracked you at every stopping place: she is a regular Sherlock Holmes.

TANNER. The Life Force! I am lost.

OCTAVIUS. [Bounding gaily down from the road into the amphitheatre, and coming between Tanner and Straker] I am so glad you are safe, old chap. We were afraid you had been captured by brigands.

RAMSDEN. [who has been staring at Mendoza] I seem to remember the face of your friend here. [Mendoza rises politely and advances with a smile between Ann and Ramsden].

HECTOR. Why, so do I.

OCTAVIUS. I know you perfectly well, Sir; but I can’t think where I have met you.

MENDOZA. [to Violet] Do YOU remember me, madam?

VIOLET. Oh, quite well; but I am so stupid about names.

MENDOZA. It was at the Savoy Hotel. [To Hector] You, sir, used to come with this lady [Violet] to lunch. [To Octavius] You, sir, often brought this lady [Ann] and her mother to dinner on your way to the Lyceum Theatre. [To Ramsden] You, sir, used to come to supper, with [dropping his voice to a confidential but perfectly audible whisper] several different ladies.

RAMSDEN. [angrily] Well, what is that to you, pray?

OCTAVIUS. Why, Violet, I thought you hardly knew one another before this trip, you and Malone!

VIOLET. [vexed] I suppose this person was the manager.

MENDOZA. The waiter, madam. I have a grateful recollection of you all. I gathered from the bountiful way in which you treated me that you all enjoyed your visits very much.

VIOLET. What impertinence! [She turns her back on him, and goes up the hill with Hector].

RAMSDEN. That will do, my friend. You do not expect these ladies to treat you as an acquaintance, I suppose, because you have waited on them at table.

MENDOZA. Pardon me: it was you who claimed my acquaintance. The ladies followed your example. However, this display of the unfortunate manners of your class closes the incident. For the future, you will please address me with the respect due to a stranger and fellow traveller. [He turns haughtily away and resumes his presidential seat].

TANNER. There! I have found one man on my journey capable of reasonable conversation; and you all instinctively insult him. Even the New Man is as bad as any of you. Enry: you have behaved just like a miserable gentleman.

STRAKER. Gentleman! Not me.

RAMSDEN. Really, Tanner, this tone —

ANN. Don’t mind him, Granny: you ought to know him by this time [she takes his arm and coaxes him away to the hill to join Violet and Hector. Octavius follows her, doglike].

VIOLET. [calling from the hill] Here are the soldiers. They are getting out of their motors.

DUVAL. [panicstricken] Oh, nom de Dieu!

THE ANARCHIST. Fools: the State is about to crush you because you spared it at the prompting of the political hangers-on of the bourgeoisie.

THE SULKY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [argumentative to the last] On the contrary, only by capturing the State machine —

THE ANARCHIST. It is going to capture you.

THE ROWDY SOCIAL-DEMOCRAT. [his anguish culminating] Ow, chock it. Wot are we ere for? WOT are we wytin for?

MENDOZA. [between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.

The soldiers line the road, commanding the amphitheatre with their rifles. The brigands, struggling with an over-whelming impulse to hide behind one another, look as unconcerned as they can. Mendoza rises superbly, with undaunted front. The officer in command steps down from the road in to the amphitheatre; looks hard at the brigands; and then inquiringly at Tanner.

THE OFFICER. Who are these men, Senor Ingles?

TANNER. My escort.

Mendoza, with a Mephistophelean smile, bows profoundly. An irrepressible grin runs from face to face among the brigands. They touch their hats, except the Anarchist, who defies the State with folded arms.

ACT IV

The garden of a villa in Granada. Whoever wishes to know what it is like must go to Granada and see. One may prosaically specify a group of hills dotted with villas, the Alhambra on the top of one of the hills, and a considerable town in the valley, approached by dusty white roads in which the children, no matter what they are doing or thinking about, automatically whine for halfpence and reach out little clutching brown palms for them; but there is nothing in this description except the Alhambra, the begging, and the color of the roads, that does not fit Surrey as well as Spain. The difference is that the Surrey hills are comparatively small and ugly, and should properly be called the Surrey Protuberances; but these Spanish hills are of mountain stock: the amenity which conceals their size does not compromise their dignity.

This particular garden is on a hill opposite the Alhambra; and the villa is as expensive and pretentious as a villa must be if it is to be let furnished by the week to opulent American and English visitors. If we stand on the lawn at the foot of the garden and look uphill, our horizon is the stone balustrade of a flagged platform on the edge of infinite space at the top of the hill. Between us and this platform is a flower garden with a circular basin and fountain in the centre, surrounded by geometrical flower beds, gravel paths, and clipped yew trees in the genteelest order. The garden is higher than our lawn; so we reach it by a few steps in the middle of its embankment. The platform is higher again than the garden, from which we mount a couple more steps to look over the balustrade at a fine view of the town up the valley and of the hills that stretch away beyond it to where, in the remotest distance, they become mountains. On our left is the villa, accessible by steps from the left hand corner of the garden. Returning from the platform through the garden and down again to the lawn (a movement which leaves the villa behind us on our right) we find evidence of literary interests on the part of the tenants in the fact that there is no tennis net nor set of croquet hoops, but, on our left, a little iron garden table with books on it, mostly yellow-backed, and a chair beside it. A chair on the right has also a couple of open books upon it. There are no newspapers, a circumstance which, with the absence of games, might lead an intelligent spectator to the most far reaching conclusions as to the sort of people who live in the villa. Such speculations are checked, however, on this delightfully fine afternoon, by the appearance at a little gate in a paling an our left, of Henry Straker in his professional costume. He opens the gate for an elderly gentleman, and follows him on to the lawn.

This elderly gentleman defies the Spanish sun in a black frock coat, tall silk bat, trousers in which narrow stripes of dark grey and lilac blend into a highly respectable color, and a black necktie tied into a bow over spotless linen. Probably therefore a man whose social position needs constant and scrupulous affirmation without regard to climate: one who would dress thus for the middle of the Sahara or the top of Mont Blanc. And since he has not the stamp of the class which accepts as its life-mission the advertizing and maintenance of first rate tailoring and millinery, he looks vulgar in his finery, though in a working dress of any kind he would look dignified enough. He is a bullet cheeked man with a red complexion, stubbly hair, smallish eyes, a hard mouth that folds down at the corners, and a dogged chin. The looseness of skin that comes with age has attacked his throat and the laps of his cheeks; but he is still hard as an apple above the mouth; so that the upper half of his face looks younger than the lower. He has the self-confidence of one who has made money, and something of the truculence of one who has made it in a brutalizing struggle, his civility having under it a perceptible menace that he has other methods in reserve if necessary. Withal, a man to be rather pitied when he is not to be feared; for there is something pathetic about him at times, as if the huge commercial machine which has worked him into his frock coat had allowed him very little of his own way and left his affections hungry and baffled. At the first word that falls from him it is clear that he is an Irishman whose native intonation has clung to him through many changes of place and rank. One can only guess that the original material of his speech was perhaps the surly Kerry brogue; but the degradation of speech that occurs in London, Glasgow, Dublin and big cities generally has been at work on it so long that nobody but an arrant cockney would dream of calling it a brogue now; for its music is almost gone, though its surliness is still perceptible. Straker, as a very obvious cockney, inspires him with implacable contempt, as a stupid Englishman who cannot even speak his own language properly. Straker, on the other hand, regards the old gentleman’s accent as a joke thoughtfully provided by Providence expressly for the amusement of the British race, and treats him normally with the indulgence due to an inferior and unlucky species, but occasionally with indignant alarm when the old gentleman shows signs of intending his Irish nonsense to be taken seriously.

STRAKER. I’ll go tell the young lady. She said you’d prefer to stay here [he turns to go up through the garden to the villa].

MALONE. [who has been looking round him with lively curiosity] The young lady? That’s Miss Violet, eh?

STRAKER. [stopping on the steps with sudden suspicion] Well, you know, don’t you?

MALONE. Do I?

STRAKER. [his temper rising] Well, do you or don’t you?

MALONE. What business is that of yours?

Straker, now highly indignant, comes back from the steps and confronts the visitor.

STRAKER. I’ll tell you what business it is of mine. Miss Robinson —

MALONE. [interrupting] Oh, her name is Robinson, is it? Thank you.

STRAKER. Why, you don’t know even her name?

MALONE. Yes I do, now that you’ve told me.

STRAKER. [after a moment of stupefaction at the old man’s readiness in repartee] Look here: what do you mean by gittin into my car and lettin me bring you here if you’re not the person I took that note to?

MALONE. Who else did you take it to, pray?

STRAKER. I took it to Mr Ector Malone, at Miss Robinson’s request, see? Miss Robinson is not my principal: I took it to oblige her. I know Mr Malone; and he ain’t you, not by a long chalk. At the hotel they told me that your name is Ector Malone.

MALONE. Hector Malone.

STRAKER. [with calm superiority] Hector in your own country: that’s what comes o livin in provincial places like Ireland and America. Over here you’re Ector: if you avn’t noticed it before you soon will.

The growing strain of the conversation is here relieved by Violet, who has sallied from the villa and through the garden to the steps, which she now descends, coming very opportunely between Malone and Straker.

VIOLET. [to Straker] Did you take my message?

STRAKER. Yes, miss. I took it to the hotel and sent it up, expecting to see young Mr Malone. Then out walks this gent, and says it’s all right and he’ll come with me. So as the hotel people said he was Mr Ector Malone, I fetched him. And now he goes back on what he said. But if he isn’t the gentleman you meant, say the word: it’s easy enough to fetch him back again.

MALONE. I should esteem it a great favor if I might have a short conversation with you, madam. I am Hector’s father, as this bright Britisher would have guessed in the course of another hour or so.

STRAKER. [coolly defiant] No, not in another year or so. When we’ve ad you as long to polish up as we’ve ad im, perhaps you’ll begin to look a little bit up to is mark. At present you fall a long way short. You’ve got too many aitches, for one thing. [To Violet, amiably] All right, Miss: you want to talk to him: I shan’t intrude. [He nods affably to Malone and goes out through the little gate in the paling].

VIOLET. [very civilly] I am so sorry, Mr Malone, if that man has been rude to you. But what can we do? He is our chauffeur.

MALONE. Your what?

VIOLET. The driver of our automobile. He can drive a motor car at seventy miles an hour, and mend it when it breaks down. We are dependent on our motor cars; and our motor cars are dependent on him; so of course we are dependent on him.

MALONE. I’ve noticed, madam, that every thousand dollars an Englishman gets seems to add one to the number of people he’s dependent on. However, you needn’t apologize for your man: I made him talk on purpose. By doing so I learnt that you’re staying here in Grannida with a party of English, including my son Hector.

VIOLET. [conversationally] Yes. We intended to go to Nice; but we had to follow a rather eccentric member of our party who started first and came here. Won’t you sit down? [She clears the nearest chair of the two books on it].

MALONE. [impressed by this attention] Thank you. [He sits down, examining her curiously as she goes to the iron table to put down the books. When she turns to him again, he says] Miss Robinson, I believe?

VIOLET. [sitting down] Yes.

MALONE. [Taking a letter from his pocket] Your note to Hector runs as follows [Violet is unable to repress a start. He pauses quietly to take out and put on his spectacles, which have gold rims]: “Dearest: they have all gone to the Alhambra for the afternoon. I have shammed headache and have the garden all to myself. Jump into Jack’s motor: Straker will rattle you here in a jiffy. Quick, quick, quick. Your loving Violet.” [He looks at her; but by this time she has recovered herself, and meets his spectacles with perfect composure. He continues slowly] Now I don’t know on what terms young people associate in English society; but in America that note would be considered to imply a very considerable degree of affectionate intimacy between the parties.

VIOLET. Yes: I know your son very well, Mr Malone. Have you any objection?

MALONE. [somewhat taken aback] No, no objection exactly. Provided it is understood that my son is altogether dependent on me, and that I have to be consulted in any important step he may propose to take.

VIOLET. I am sure you would not be unreasonable with him, Mr Malone.

MALONE. I hope not, Miss Robinson; but at your age you might think many things unreasonable that don’t seem so to me.

VIOLET. [with a little shrug] Oh well, I suppose there’s no use our playing at cross purposes, Mr Malone. Hector wants to marry me.

MALONE. I inferred from your note that he might. Well, Miss Robinson, he is his own master; but if he marries you he shall not have a rap from me. [He takes off his spectacles and pockets them with the note].

VIOLET. [with some severity] That is not very complimentary to me, Mr Malone.

MALONE. I say nothing against you, Miss Robinson: I daresay you are an amiable and excellent young lady. But I have other views for Hector.

VIOLET. Hector may not have other views for himself, Mr Malone.

MALONE. Possibly not. Then he does without me: that’s all. I daresay you are prepared for that. When a young lady writes to a young man to come to her quick, quick, quick, money seems nothing and love seems everything.

VIOLET. [sharply] I beg your pardon, Mr Malone: I do not think anything so foolish. Hector must have money.

MALONE. [staggered] Oh, very well, very well. No doubt he can work for it.

VIOLET. What is the use of having money if you have to work for it? [She rises impatiently]. It’s all nonsense, Mr Malone: you must enable your son to keep up his position. It is his right.

MALONE. [grimly] I should not advise you to marry him on the strength of that right, Miss Robinson.

Violet, who has almost lost her temper, controls herself with an effort; unclenches her fingers; and resumes her seat with studied tranquillity and reasonableness.

VIOLET. What objection have you to me, pray? My social position is as good as Hector’s, to say the least. He admits it.

MALONE. [shrewdly] You tell him so from time to time, eh? Hector’s social position in England, Miss Robinson, is just what I choose to buy for him. I have made him a fair offer. Let him pick out the most historic house, castle or abbey that England contains. The day that he tells me he wants it for a wife worthy of its traditions, I buy it for him, and give him the means of keeping it up.

VIOLET. What do you mean by a wife worthy of its traditions? Cannot any well bred woman keep such a house for him?

MALONE. No: she must be born to it.

VIOLET. Hector was not born to it, was he?

MALONE. His granmother was a barefooted Irish girl that nursed me by a turf fire. Let him marry another such, and I will not stint her marriage portion. Let him raise himself socially with my money or raise somebody else so long as there is a social profit somewhere, I’ll regard my expenditure as justified. But there must be a profit for someone. A marriage with you would leave things just where they are.

VIOLET. Many of my relations would object very much to my marrying the grandson of a common woman, Mr Malone. That may be prejudice; but so is your desire to have him marry a title prejudice.

MALONE. [rising, and approaching her with a scrutiny in which there is a good deal of reluctant respect] You seem a pretty straightforward downright sort of a young woman.

VIOLET. I do not see why I should be made miserably poor because I cannot make profits for you. Why do you want to make Hector unhappy?

MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I’m talking about. My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you’ve heard of it.

VIOLET. The Famine?

MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in my mother’s arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we’ll buy the best of it. I want no middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector. That’s straightforward isn’t it, like yourself?

VIOLET. [icily pitying his sentimentality] Really, Mr Malone, I am astonished to hear a man of your age and good sense talking in that romantic way. Do you suppose English noblemen will sell their places to you for the asking?

MALONE. I have the refusal of two of the oldest family mansions in England. One historic owner can’t afford to keep all the rooms dusted: the other can’t afford the death duties. What do you say now?

VIOLET. Of course it is very scandalous; but surely you know that the Government will sooner or later put a stop to all these Socialistic attacks on property.

MALONE. [grinning] D’y’ think they’ll be able to get that done before I buy the house — or rather the abbey? They’re both abbeys.

VIOLET. [putting that aside rather impatiently] Oh, well, let us talk sense, Mr Malone. You must feel that we haven’t been talking sense so far.

MALONE. I can’t say I do. I mean all I say.

VIOLET. Then you don’t know Hector as I do. He is romantic and faddy — he gets it from you, I fancy — and he wants a certain sort of wife to take care of him. Not a faddy sort of person, you know.

MALONE. Somebody like you, perhaps?

VIOLET. [quietly] Well, yes. But you cannot very well ask me to undertake this with absolutely no means of keeping up his position.

MALONE. [alarmed] Stop a bit, stop a bit. Where are we getting to? I’m not aware that I’m asking you to undertake anything.

VIOLET. Of course, Mr Malone, you can make it very difficult for me to speak to you if you choose to misunderstand me.

MALONE. [half bewildered] I don’t wish to take any unfair advantage; but we seem to have got off the straight track somehow.

Straker, with the air of a man who has been making haste, opens the little gate, and admits Hector, who, snorting with indignation, comes upon the lawn, and is making for his father when Violet, greatly dismayed, springs up and intercepts him. Straker doer not wait; at least he does not remain visibly within earshot.

VIOLET. Oh, how unlucky! Now please, Hector, say nothing. Go away until I have finished speaking to your father.

HECTOR. [inexorably] No, Violet: I mean to have this thing out, right away. [He puts her aside; passes her by; and faces his father, whose cheeks darken as his Irish blood begins to simmer]. Dad: you’ve not played this hand straight.

MALONE. Hwat d’y’mean?

HECTOR. You’ve opened a letter addressed to me. You’ve impersonated me and stolen a march on this lady. That’s dishonorable.

MALONE. [threateningly] Now you take care what you’re saying, Hector. Take care, I tell you.

HECTOR. I have taken care. I am taking care. I’m taking care of my honor and my position in English society.

MALONE. [hotly] Your position has been got by my money: do you know that?

HECTOR. Well, you’ve just spoiled it all by opening that letter. A letter from an English lady, not addressed to you — a confidential letter! a delicate letter! a private letter opened by my father! That’s a sort of thing a man can’t struggle against in England. The sooner we go back together the better. [He appeals mutely to the heavens to witness the shame and anguish of two outcasts].

VIOLET. [snubbing him with an instinctive dislike for scene making] Don’t be unreasonable, Hector. It was quite natural of Mr Malone to open my letter: his name was on the envelope.

MALONE. There! You’ve no common sense, Hector. I thank you, Miss Robinson.

HECTOR. I thank you, too. It’s very kind of you. My father knows no better.

MALONE. [furiously clenching his fists] Hector —

HECTOR. [with undaunted moral force] Oh, it’s no use hectoring me. A private letter’s a private letter, dad: you can’t get over that.

MALONE [raising his voice] I won’t be talked back to by you, d’y’ hear?

VIOLET. Ssh! please, please. Here they all come.

Father and son, checked, glare mutely at one another as Tanner comes in through the little gate with Ramsden, followed by Octavius and Ann.

VIOLET. Back already!

TANNER. The Alhambra is not open this afternoon.

VIOLET. What a sell!

Tanner passes on, and presently finds himself between Hector and a strange elder, both apparently on the verge of personal combat. He looks from one to the other for an explanation. They sulkily avoid his eye, and nurse their wrath in silence.

RAMSDEN. Is it wise for you to be out in the sunshine with such a headache, Violet?

TANNER. Have you recovered too, Malone?

VIOLET. Oh, I forgot. We have not all met before. Mr Malone: won’t you introduce your father?

HECTOR. [with Roman firmness] No, I will not. He is no father of mine.

MALONE. [very angry] You disown your dad before your English friends, do you?

VIOLET. Oh please don’t make a scene.

Ann and Octavius, lingering near the gate, exchange an astonished glance, and discreetly withdraw up the steps to the garden, where they can enjoy the disturbance without intruding. On their way to the steps Ann sends a little grimace of mute sympathy to Violet, who is standing with her back to the little table, looking on in helpless annoyance as her husband soars to higher and higher moral eminences without the least regard to the old man’s millions.

HECTOR. I’m very sorry, Miss Robinson; but I’m contending for a principle. I am a son, and, I hope, a dutiful one; but before everything I’m a Man!!! And when dad treats my private letters as his own, and takes it on himself to say that I shan’t marry you if I am happy and fortunate enough to gain your consent, then I just snap my fingers and go my own way.

TANNER. Marry Violet!

RAMSDEN. Are you in your senses?

TANNER. Do you forget what we told you?

HECTOR. [recklessly] I don’t care what you told me.

RAMSDEN. [scandalized] Tut tut, sir! Monstrous! [he flings away towards the gate, his elbows quivering with indignation]

TANNER. Another madman! These men in love should be locked up. [He gives Hector up as hopeless, and turns away towards the garden, but Malone, taking offence in a new direction, follows him and compels him, by the aggressivenes of his tone, to stop].

MALONE. I don’t understand this. Is Hector not good enough for this lady, pray?

TANNER. My dear sir, the lady is married already. Hector knows it; and yet he persists in his infatuation. Take him home and lock him up.

MALONE. [bitterly] So this is the high-born social tone I’ve spoilt by my ignorant, uncultivated behavior! Makin love to a married woman! [He comes angrily between Hector and Violet, and almost bawls into Hector’s left ear] You’ve picked up that habit of the British aristocracy, have you?

HECTOR. That’s all right. Don’t you trouble yourself about that. I’ll answer for the morality of what I’m doing.

TANNER. [coming forward to Hector’s right hand with flashing eyes] Well said, Malone! You also see that mere marriage laws are not morality! I agree with you; but unfortunately Violet does not.

MALONE. I take leave to doubt that, sir. [Turning on Violet] Let me tell you, Mrs Robinson, or whatever your right name is, you had no right to send that letter to my son when you were the wife of another man.

HECTOR. [outraged] This is the last straw. Dad: you have insulted my wife.

MALONE. YOUR wife!

TANNER. YOU the missing husband! Another moral impostor! [He smites his brow, and collapses into Malone’s chair].

MALONE. You’ve married without my consent!

RAMSDEN. You have deliberately humbugged us, sir!

HECTOR. Here: I have had just about enough of being badgered. Violet and I are married: that’s the long and the short of it. Now what have you got to say — any of you?

MALONE. I know what I’ve got to say. She’s married a beggar.

HECTOR. No; she’s married a Worker [his American pronunciation imparts an overwhelming intensity to this simple and unpopular word]. I start to earn my own living this very afternoon.

MALONE. [sneering angrily] Yes: you’re very plucky now, because you got your remittance from me yesterday or this morning, I reckon. Wait til it’s spent. You won’t be so full of cheek then.

HECTOR. [producing a letter from his pocketbook] Here it is [thrusting it on his father]. Now you just take your remittance and yourself out of my life. I’m done with remittances; and I’m done with you. I don’t sell the privilege of insulting my wife for a thousand dollars.

MALONE. [deeply wounded and full of concern] Hector: you don’t know what poverty is.

HECTOR. [fervidly] Well, I want to know what it is. I want’be a Man. Violet: you come along with me, to your own home: I’ll see you through.

OCTAVIUS. [jumping down from the garden to the lawn and running to Hector’s left hand] I hope you’ll shake hands with me before you go, Hector. I admire and respect you more than I can say. [He is affected almost to tears as they shake hands].

VIOLET. [also almost in tears, but of vexation] Oh don’t be an idiot, Tavy. Hector’s about as fit to become a workman as you are.

TANNER. [rising from his chair on the other ride of Hector] Never fear: there’s no question of his becoming a navvy, Mrs Malone. [To Hector] There’s really no difficulty about capital to start with. Treat me as a friend: draw on me.

OCTAVIUS. [impulsively] Or on me.

MALONE. [with fierce jealousy] Who wants your dirty money? Who should he draw on but his own father? [Tanner and Octavius recoil, Octavius rather hurt, Tanner consoled by the solution of the money difficulty. Violet looks up hopefully]. Hector: don’t be rash, my boy. I’m sorry for what I said: I never meant to insult Violet: I take it all back. She’s just the wife you want: there!

HECTOR. [Patting him on the shoulder] Well, that’s all right, dad. Say no more: we’re friends again. Only, I take no money from anybody.

MALONE. [pleading abjectly] Don’t be hard on me, Hector. I’d rather you quarrelled and took the money than made friends and starved. You don’t know what the world is: I do.

HECTOR. No, no, NO. That’s fixed: that’s not going to change. [He passes his father inexorably by, and goes to Violet]. Come, Mrs Malone: you’ve got to move to the hotel with me, and take your proper place before the world.

VIOLET. But I must go in, dear, and tell Davis to pack. Won’t you go on and make them give you a room overlooking the garden for me? I’ll join you in half an hour.

HECTOR. Very well. You’ll dine with us, Dad, won’t you?

MALONE. [eager to conciliate him] Yes, yes.

HECTOR. See you all later. [He waves his hand to Ann, who has now been joined by Tanner, Octavius, and Ramsden in the garden, and goes out through the little gate, leaving his father and Violet together on the lawn].

MALONE. You’ll try to bring him to his senses, Violet: I know you will.

VIOLET. I had no idea he could be so headstrong. If he goes on like that, what can I do?

MALONE. Don’t be discurridged: domestic pressure may be slow; but it’s sure. You’ll wear him down. Promise me you will.

VIOLET. I will do my best. Of course I think it’s the greatest nonsense deliberately making us poor like that.

MALONE. Of course it is.

VIOLET. [after a moment’s reflection] You had better give me the remittance. He will want it for his hotel bill. I’ll see whether I can induce him to accept it. Not now, of course, but presently.

MALONE. [eagerly] Yes, yes, yes: that’s just the thing [he hands her the thousand dollar bill, and adds cunningly] Y’understand that this is only a bachelor allowance.

VIOLET. [Coolly] Oh, quite. [She takes it]. Thank you. By the way, Mr Malone, those two houses you mentioned — the abbeys.

MALONE. Yes?

VIOLET. Don’t take one of them until I’ve seen it. One never knows what may be wrong with these places.

MALONE. I won’t. I’ll do nothing without consulting you, never fear.

VIOLET. [politely, but without a ray of gratitude] Thanks: that will be much the best way. [She goes calmly back to the villa, escorted obsequiously by Malone to the upper end of the garden].

TANNER. [drawing Ramsden’s attention to Malone’s cringing attitude as he takes leave of Violet] And that poor devil is a billionaire! one of the master spirits of the age! Led on a string like a pug dog by the first girl who takes the trouble to despise him. I wonder will it ever come to that with me. [He comes down to the lawn.]

RAMSDEN. [following him] The sooner the better for you.

MALONE. [clapping his hands as he returns through the garden] That’ll be a grand woman for Hector. I wouldn’t exchange her for ten duchesses. [He descends to the lawn and comes between Tanner and Ramsden].

RAMSDEN. [very civil to the billionaire] It’s an unexpected pleasure to find you in this corner of the world, Mr Malone. Have you come to buy up the Alhambra?

MALONE. Well, I don’t say I mightn’t. I think I could do better with it than the Spanish government. But that’s not what I came about. To tell you the truth, about a month ago I overheard a deal between two men over a bundle of shares. They differed about the price: they were young and greedy, and didn’t know that if the shares were worth what was bid for them they must be worth what was asked, the margin being too small to be of any account, you see. To amuse meself, I cut in and bought the shares. Well, to this day I haven’t found out what the business is. The office is in this town; and the name is Mendoza, Limited. Now whether Mendoza’s a mine, or a steamboat line, or a bank, or a patent article —

TANNER. He’s a man. I know him: his principles are thoroughly commercial. Let us take you round the town in our motor, Mr Malone, and call on him on the way.

MALONE. If you’ll be so kind, yes. And may I ask who —

TANNER. Mr Roebuck Ramsden, a very old friend of your daughter-in-law.

MALONE. Happy to meet you, Mr Ramsden.

RAMSDEN. Thank you. Mr Tanner is also one of our circle.

MALONE. Glad to know you also, Mr Tanner.

TANNER. Thanks. [Malone and Ramsden go out very amicably through the little gate. Tanner calls to Octavius, who is wandering in the garden with Ann] Tavy! [Tavy comes to the steps, Tanner whispers loudly to him] Violet has married a financier of brigands. [Tanner hurries away to overtake Malone and Ramsden. Ann strolls to the steps with an idle impulse to torment Octavius].

ANN. Won’t you go with them, Tavy?

OCTAVIUS. [tears suddenly flushing his eyes] You cut me to the heart, Ann, by wanting me to go [he comes down on the lawn to hide his face from her. She follows him caressingly].

ANN. Poor Ricky Ticky Tavy! Poor heart!

OCTAVIUS. It belongs to you, Ann. Forgive me: I must speak of it. I love you. You know I love you.

ANN. What’s the good, Tavy? You know that my mother is determined that I shall marry Jack.

OCTAVIUS. [amazed] Jack!

ANN. It seems absurd, doesn’t it?

OCTAVIUS. [with growing resentment] Do you mean to say that Jack has been playing with me all this time? That he has been urging me not to marry you because he intends to marry you himself?

ANN. [alarmed] No no: you mustn’t lead him to believe that I said that: I don’t for a moment think that Jack knows his own mind. But it’s clear from my father’s will that he wished me to marry Jack. And my mother is set on it.

OCTAVIUS. But you are not bound to sacrifice yourself always to the wishes of your parents.

ANN. My father loved me. My mother loves me. Surely their wishes are a better guide than my own selfishness.

OCTAVIUS. Oh, I know how unselfish you are, Ann. But believe me — though I know I am speaking in my own interest — there is another side to this question. Is it fair to Jack to marry him if you do not love him? Is it fair to destroy my happiness as well as your own if you can bring yourself to love me?

ANN. [looking at him with a faint impulse of pity] Tavy, my dear, you are a nice creature — a good boy.

OCTAVIUS. [humiliated] Is that all?

ANN. [mischievously in spite of her pity] That’s a great deal, I assure you. You would always worship the ground I trod on, wouldn’t you?

OCTAVIUS. I do. It sounds ridiculous; but it’s no exaggeration. I do; and I always shall.

ANN. Always is a long word, Tavy. You see, I shall have to live up always to your idea of my divinity; and I don’t think I could do that if we were married. But if I marry Jack, you’ll never be disillusioned — at least not until I grow too old.

OCTAVIUS. I too shall grow old, Ann. And when I am eighty, one white hair of the woman I love will make me tremble more than the thickest gold tress from the most beautiful young head.

ANN. [quite touched] Oh, that’s poetry, Tavy, real poetry. It gives me that strange sudden sense of an echo from a former existence which always seems to me such a striking proof that we have immortal souls.

OCTAVIUS. Do you believe that is true?

ANN. Tavy, if it is to become true you must lose me as well as love me.

OCTAVIUS. Oh! [he hastily sits down at the little table and covers his face with his hands].

ANN. [with conviction] Tavy: I wouldn’t for worlds destroy your illusions. I can neither take you nor let you go. I can see exactly what will suit you. You must be a sentimental old bachelor for my sake.

OCTAVIUS. [desperately] Ann: I’ll kill myself.

ANN. Oh no you won’t: that wouldn’t be kind. You won’t have a bad time. You will be very nice to women; and you will go a good deal to the opera. A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

OCTAVIUS. [considerably cooled, but believing that he is only recovering his self-control] I know you mean to be kind, Ann. Jack has persuaded you that cynicism is a good tonic for me. [He rises with quiet dignity].

ANN. [studying him slyly] You see, I’m disillusionizing you already. That’s what I dread.

OCTAVIUS. You do not dread disillusionizing Jack.

ANN. [her face lighting up with mischievous ecstasy — whispering] I can’t: he has no illusions about me. I shall surprise Jack the other way. Getting over an unfavorable impression is ever so much easier than living up to an ideal. Oh, I shall enrapture Jack sometimes!

OCTAVIUS. [resuming the calm phase of despair, and beginning to enjoy his broken heart and delicate attitude without knowing it] I don’t doubt that. You will enrapture him always. And he — the fool! — thinks you would make him wretched.

ANN. Yes: that’s the difficulty, so far.

OCTAVIUS. [heroically] Shall I tell him that you love?

ANN. [quickly] Oh no: he’d run away again.

OCTAVIUS. [shocked] Ann: would you marry an unwilling man?

ANN. What a queer creature you are, Tavy! There’s no such thing as a willing man when you really go for him. [She laughs naughtily]. I’m shocking you, I suppose. But you know you are really getting a sort of satisfaction already in being out of danger yourself.

OCTAVIUS [startled] Satisfaction! [Reproachfully] You say that to me!

ANN. Well, if it were really agony, would you ask for more of it?

OCTAVIUS. Have I asked for more of it?

ANN. You have offered to tell Jack that I love him. That’s self-sacrifice, I suppose; but there must be some satisfaction in it. Perhaps it’s because you’re a poet. You are like the bird that presses its breast against the sharp thorn to make itself sing.

OCTAVIUS. It’s quite simple. I love you; and I want you to be happy. You don’t love me; so I can’t make you happy myself; but I can help another man to do it.

ANN. Yes: it seems quite simple. But I doubt if we ever know why we do things. The only really simple thing is to go straight for what you want and grab it. I suppose I don’t love you, Tavy; but sometimes I feel as if I should like to make a man of you somehow. You are very foolish about women.

OCTAVIUS. [almost coldly] I am content to be what I am in that respect.

ANN. Then you must keep away from them, and only dream about them. I wouldn’t marry you for worlds, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. I have no hope, Ann: I accept my ill luck. But I don’t think you quite know how much it hurts.

ANN. You are so softhearted! It’s queer that you should be so different from Violet. Violet’s as hard as nails.

OCTAVIUS. Oh no. I am sure Violet is thoroughly womanly at heart.

ANN. [with some impatience] Why do you say that? Is it unwomanly to be thoughtful and businesslike and sensible? Do you want Violet to be an idiot — or something worse, like me?

OCTAVIUS. Something worse — like you! What do you mean, Ann?

ANN. Oh well, I don’t mean that, of course. But I have a great respect for Violet. She gets her own way always.

OCTAVIUS. [sighing] So do you.

ANN. Yes; but somehow she gets it without coaxing — without having to make people sentimental about her.

OCTAVIUS. [with brotherly callousness] Nobody could get very sentimental about Violet, I think, pretty as she is.

ANN. Oh yes they could, if she made them.

OCTAVIUS. But surely no really nice woman would deliberately practise on men’s instincts in that way.

ANN. [throwing up her hands] Oh Tavy, Tavy, Ricky Ticky Tavy, heaven help the woman who marries you!

OCTAVIUS. [his passion reviving at the name] Oh why, why, why do you say that? Don’t torment me. I don’t understand.

ANN. Suppose she were to tell fibs, and lay snares for men?

OCTAVIUS. Do you think I could marry such a woman — I, who have known and loved you?

ANN. Hm! Well, at all events, she wouldn’t let you if she were wise. So that’s settled. And now I can’t talk any more. Say you forgive me, and that the subject is closed.

OCTAVIUS. I have nothing to forgive; and the subject is closed. And if the wound is open, at least you shall never see it bleed.

ANN. Poetic to the last, Tavy. Goodbye, dear. [She pats his check; has an impulse to kiss him and then another impulse of distaste which prevents her; finally runs away through the garden and into the villa].

Octavius again takes refuge at the table, bowing his head on his arms and sobbing softly. Mrs Whitefield, who has been pottering round the Granada shops, and has a net full of little parcels in her hand, comes in through the gate and sees him.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [running to him and lifting his head] What’s the matter, Tavy? Are you ill?

OCTAVIUS. No, nothing, nothing.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [still holding his head, anxiously] But you’re crying. Is it about Violet’s marriage?

OCTAVIUS. No, no. Who told you about Violet?

MRS WHITEFIELD. [restoring the head to its owner] I met Roebuck and that awful old Irishman. Are you sure you’re not ill? What’s the matter?

OCTAVIUS. [affectionately] It’s nothing — only a man’s broken heart. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?

MRS WHITEFIELD. But what is it all about? Has Ann been doing anything to you?

OCTAVIUS. It’s not Ann’s fault. And don’t think for a moment that I blame you.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [startled] For what?

OCTAVIUS. [pressing her hand consolingly] For nothing. I said I didn’t blame you.

MRS WHITEFIELD. But I haven’t done anything. What’s the matter?

OCTAVIUS. [smiling sadly] Can’t you guess? I daresay you are right to prefer Jack to me as a husband for Ann; but I love Ann; and it hurts rather. [He rises and moves away from her towards the middle of the lawn].

MRS WHITEFIELD. [following him hastily] Does Ann say that I want her to marry Jack?

OCTAVIUS. Yes: she has told me.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [thoughtfully] Then I’m very sorry for you, Tavy. It’s only her way of saying SHE wants to marry Jack. Little she cares what I say or what I want!

OCTAVIUS. But she would not say it unless she believed it. Surely you don’t suspect Ann of — of DECEIT!!

MRS WHITEFIELD. Well, never mind, Tavy. I don’t know which is best for a young man: to know too little, like you, or too much, like Jack.

Tanner returns.

TANNER. Well, I’ve disposed of old Malone. I’ve introduced him to Mendoza, Limited; and left the two brigands together to talk it out. Hullo, Tavy! anything wrong?

OCTAVIUS. I must go wash my face, I see. [To Mrs Whitefield] Tell him what you wish. [To Tanner] You may take it from me, Jack, that Ann approves of it.

TANNER. [puzzled by his manner] Approves of what?

OCTAVIUS. Of what Mrs Whitefield wishes. [He goes his way with sad dignity to the villa].

TANNER. [to Mrs Whitefield] This is very mysterious. What is it you wish? It shall be done, whatever it is.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [with snivelling gratitude] Thank you, Jack. [She sits down. Tanner brings the other chair from the table and sits close to her with his elbows on his knees, giving her his whole attention]. I don’t know why it is that other people’s children are so nice to me, and that my own have so little consideration for me. It’s no wonder I don’t seem able to care for Ann and Rhoda as I do for you and Tavy and Violet. It’s a very queer world. It used to be so straightforward and simple; and now nobody seems to think and feel as they ought. Nothing has been right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.

TANNER. Yes: life is more complicated than we used to think. But what am I to do for you?

MRS WHITEFIELD. That’s just what I want to tell you. Of course you’ll marry Ann whether I like it myself or not —

TANNER. [starting] It seems to me that I shall presently be married to Ann whether I like it myself or not.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [peacefully] Oh, very likely you will: you know what she is when she has set her mind on anything. But don’t put it on me: that’s all I ask. Tavy has just let out that she’s been saying that I am making her marry you; and the poor boy is breaking his heart about it; for he is in love with her himself, though what he sees in her so wonderful, goodness knows: I don’t. It’s no use telling Tavy that Ann puts things into people’s heads by telling them that I want them when the thought of them never crossed my mind. It only sets Tavy against me. But you know better than that. So if you marry her, don’t put the blame on me.

TANNER. [emphatically] I haven’t the slightest intention of marrying her.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [slyly] She’d suit you better than Tavy. She’d meet her match in you, Jack. I’d like to see her meet her match.

TANNER. No man is a match for a woman, except with a poker and a pair of hobnailed boots. Not always even then. Anyhow, I can’t take the poker to her. I should be a mere slave.

MRS WHITEFIELD. No: she’s afraid of you. At all events, you would tell her the truth about herself. She wouldn’t be able to slip out of it as she does with me.

TANNER. Everybody would call me a brute if I told Ann the truth about herself in terms of her own moral code. To begin with, Ann says things that are not strictly true.

MRS WHITEFIELD. I’m glad somebody sees she is not an angel.

TANNER. In short — to put it as a husband would put it when exasperated to the point of speaking out — she is a liar. And since she has plunged Tavy head over ears in love with her without any intention of marrying him, she is a coquette, according to the standard definition of a coquette as a woman who rouses passions she has no intention of gratifying. And as she has now reduced you to the point of being willing to sacrifice me at the altar for the mere satisfaction of getting me to call her a liar to her face, I may conclude that she is a bully as well. She can’t bully men as she bullies women; so she habitually and unscrupulously uses her personal fascination to make men give her whatever she wants. That makes her almost something for which I know no polite name.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [in mild expostulation] Well, you can’t expect perfection, Jack.

TANNER. I don’t. But what annoys me is that Ann does. I know perfectly well that all this about her being a liar and a bully and a coquette and so forth is a trumped-up moral indictment which might be brought against anybody. We all lie; we all bully as much as we dare; we all bid for admiration without the least intention of earning it; we all get as much rent as we can out of our powers of fascination. If Ann would admit this I shouldn’t quarrel with her. But she won’t. If she has children she’ll take advantage of their telling lies to amuse herself by whacking them. If another woman makes eyes at me, she’ll refuse to know a coquette. She will do just what she likes herself whilst insisting on everybody else doing what the conventional code prescribes. In short, I can stand everything except her confounded hypocrisy. That’s what beats me.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [carried away by the relief of hearing her own opinion so eloquently expressed] Oh, she is a hypocrite. She is: she is. Isn’t she?

TANNER. Then why do you want to marry me to her?

MRS WHITEFIELD. [querulously] There now! put it on me, of course. I never thought of it until Tavy told me she said I did. But, you know, I’m very fond of Tavy: he’s a sort of son to me; and I don’t want him to be trampled on and made wretched.

TANNER. Whereas I don’t matter, I suppose.

MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, you are different, somehow: you are able to take care of yourself. You’d serve her out. And anyhow, she must marry somebody.

TANNER. Aha! there speaks the life instinct. You detest her; but you feel that you must get her married.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [rising, shocked] Do you mean that I detest my own daughter! Surely you don’t believe me to be so wicked and unnatural as that, merely because I see her faults.

TANNER. [cynically] You love her, then?

MRS WHITEFIELD. Why, of course I do. What queer things you say, Jack! We can’t help loving our own blood relations.

TANNER. Well, perhaps it saves unpleasantness to say so. But for my part, I suspect that the tables of consanguinity have a natural basis in a natural repugnance [he rises].

MRS WHITEFIELD. You shouldn’t say things like that, Jack. I hope you won’t tell Ann that I have been speaking to you. I only wanted to set myself right with you and Tavy. I couldn’t sit mumchance and have everything put on me.

TANNER. [politely] Quite so.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [dissatisfied] And now I’ve only made matters worse. Tavy’s angry with me because I don’t worship Ann. And when it’s been put into my head that Ann ought to marry you, what can I say except that it would serve her right?

TANNER. Thank you.

MRS WHITEFIELD. Now don’t be silly and twist what I say into something I don’t mean. I ought to have fair play —

Ann comes from the villa, followed presently by Violet, who is dressed for driving.

ANN. [coming to her mother’s right hand with threatening suavity] Well, mamma darling, you seem to be having a delightful chat with Jack. We can hear you all over the place.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [appalled] Have you overheard —

TANNER. Never fear: Ann is only — well, we were discussing that habit of hers just now. She hasn’t heard a word.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [stoutly] I don’t care whether she has or not: I have a right to say what I please.

VIOLET. [arriving on the lawn and coming between Mrs Whitefield and Tanner] I’ve come to say goodbye. I’m off for my honeymoon.

MRS WHITEFIELD. [crying] Oh don’t say that, Violet. And no wedding, no breakfast, no clothes, nor anything.

VIOLET. [petting her] It won’t be for long.

MRS WHITEFIELD. Don’t let him take you to America. Promise me that you won’t.

VIOLET. [very decidedly] I should think not, indeed. Don’t cry, dear: I’m only going to the hotel.

MRS WHITEFIELD. But going in that dress, with your luggage, makes one realize — [she chokes, and then breaks out again] How I wish you were my daughter, Violet!

VIOLET. [soothing her] There, there: so I am. Ann will be jealous.

MRS WHITEFIELD. Ann doesn’t care a bit for me.

ANN. Fie, mother! Come, now: you mustn’t cry any more: you know Violet doesn’t like it [Mrs Whitefzeld dries her eyes, and subsides].

VIOLET. Goodbye, Jack.

TANNER. Goodbye, Violet.

VIOLET. The sooner you get married too, the better. You will be much less misunderstood.

TANNER. [restively] I quite expect to get married in the course of the afternoon. You all seem to have set your minds on it.

VIOLET. You might do worse. [To Mrs Whitefield: putting her arm round her] Let me take you to the hotel with me: the drive will do you good. Come in and get a wrap. [She takes her towards the villa].

MRS WHITEFIELD. [as they go up through the garden] I don’t know what I shall do when you are gone, with no one but Ann in the house; and she always occupied with the men! It’s not to be expected that your husband will care to be bothered with an old woman like me. Oh, you needn’t tell me: politeness is all very well; but I know what people think — [She talks herself and Violet out of sight and hearing].

Ann, musing on Violet’s opportune advice, approaches Tanner; examines him humorously for a moment from toe to top; and finally delivers her opinion.

ANN. Violet is quite right. You ought to get married.

TANNER. [explosively] Ann: I will not marry you. Do you hear? I won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t, WON’T marry you.

ANN. [placidly] Well, nobody axd you, sir she said, sir she said, sir she said. So that’s settled.

TANNER. Yes, nobody has asked me; but everybody treats the thing as settled. It’s in the air. When we meet, the others go away on absurd pretexts to leave us alone together. Ramsden no longer scowls at me: his eye beams, as if he were already giving you away to me in church. Tavy refers me to your mother and gives me his blessing. Straker openly treats you as his future employer: it was he who first told me of it.

ANN. Was that why you ran away?

TANNER. Yes, only to be stopped by a lovesick brigand and run down like a truant schoolboy.

ANN. Well, if you don’t want to be married, you needn’t be [she turns away from him and sits down, much at her ease].

TANNER. [following her] Does any man want to be hanged? Yet men let themselves be hanged without a struggle for life, though they could at least give the chaplain a black eye. We do the world’s will, not our own. I have a frightful feeling that I shall let myself be married because it is the world’s will that you should have a husband.

ANN. I daresay I shall, someday.

TANNER. But why me — me of all men? Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. I shall decay like a thing that has served its purpose and is done with; I shall change from a man with a future to a man with a past; I shall see in the greasy eyes of all the other husbands their relief at the arrival of a new prisoner to share their ignominy. The young men will scorn me as one who has sold out: to the young women I, who have always been an enigma and a possibility, shall be merely somebody else’s property — and damaged goods at that: a secondhand man at best.

ANN. Well, your wife can put on a cap and make herself ugly to keep you in countenance, like my grandmother.

TANNER. So that she may make her triumph more insolent by publicly throwing away the bait the moment the trap snaps on the victim!

ANN. After all, though, what difference would it make? Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? I thought our pictures very lovely when papa bought them; but I haven’t looked at them for years. You never bother about my looks: you are too well used to me. I might be the umbrella stand.

TANNER. You lie, you vampire: you lie.

ANN. Flatterer. Why are you trying to fascinate me, Jack, if you don’t want to marry me?

TANNER. The Life Force. I am in the grip of the Life Force.

ANN. I don’t understand in the least: it sounds like the Life Guards.

TANNER. Why don’t you marry Tavy? He is willing. Can you not be satisfied unless your prey struggles?

ANN. [turning to him as if to let him into a secret] Tavy will never marry. Haven’t you noticed that that sort of man never marries?

TANNER. What! a man who idolizes women who sees nothing in nature but romantic scenery for love duets! Tavy, the chivalrous, the faithful, the tenderhearted and true! Tavy never marry! Why, he was born to be swept up by the first pair of blue eyes he meets in the street.

ANN. Yes, I know. All the same, Jack, men like that always live in comfortable bachelor lodgings with broken hearts, and are adored by their landladies, and never get married. Men like you always get married.

TANNER. [Smiting his brow] How frightfully, horribly true! It has been staring me in the face all my life; and I never saw it before.

ANN. Oh, it’s the same with women. The poetic temperament’s a very nice temperament, very amiable, very harmless and poetic, I daresay; but it’s an old maid’s temperament.

TANNER. Barren. The Life Force passes it by.

ANN. If that’s what you mean by the Life Force, yes.

TANNER. You don’t care for Tavy?

ANN. [looking round carefully to make sure that Tavy is not within earshot] No.

TANNER. And you do care for me?

ANN. [rising quietly and shaking her finger at him] Now Jack! Behave yourself.

TANNER. Infamous, abandoned woman! Devil!

ANN. Boa-constrictor! Elephant!

TANNER. Hypocrite!

ANN. [Softly] I must be, for my future husband’s sake.

TANNER. For mine! [Correcting himself savagely] I mean for his.

ANN.[ignoring the correction] Yes, for yours. You had better marry what you call a hypocrite, Jack. Women who are not hypocrites go about in rational dress and are insulted and get into all sorts of hot water. And then their husbands get dragged in too, and live in continual dread of fresh complications. Wouldn’t you prefer a wife you could depend on?

TANNER. No, a thousand times no: hot water is the revolutionist’s element. You clean men as you clean milkpails, by scalding them.

ANN. Cold water has its uses too. It’s healthy.

TANNER. [despairingly] Oh, you are witty: at the supreme moment the Life Force endows you with every quality. Well, I too can be a hypocrite. Your father’s will appointed me your guardian, not your suitor. I shall be faithful to my trust.

ANN. [in low siren tones] He asked me who would I have as my guardian before he made that will. I chose you!

TANNER. The will is yours then! The trap was laid from the beginning.

ANN. [concentrating all her magic] From the beginning from our childhood — for both of us — by the Life Force.

TANNER. I will not marry you. I will not marry you.

ANN. Oh; you will, you will.

TANNER. I tell you, no, no, no.

ANN. I tell you, yes, yes, yes.

TANNER. NO.

ANN. [coaxing — imploring — almost exhausted] Yes. Before it is too late for repentance. Yes.

TANNER. [struck by the echo from the past] When did all this happen to me before? Are we two dreaming?

ANN. [suddenly losing her courage, with an anguish that she does not conceal] No. We are awake; and you have said no: that is all.

TANNER. [brutally] Well?

ANN. Well, I made a mistake: you do not love me.

TANNER. [seizing her in his arms] It is false: I love you. The Life Force enchants me: I have the whole world in my arms when I clasp you. But I am fighting for my freedom, for my honor, for myself, one and indivisible.

ANN. Your happiness will be worth them all.

TANNER. You would sell freedom and honor and self for happiness?

ANN. It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death.

TANNER. [groaning] Oh, that clutch holds and hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father’s heart as well as a mother’s?

ANN. Take care, Jack: if anyone comes while we are like this, you will have to marry me.

TANNER. If we two stood now on the edge of a precipice, I would hold you tight and jump.

ANN. [panting, failing more and more under the strain] Jack: let me go. I have dared so frightfully — it is lasting longer than I thought. Let me go: I can’t bear it.

TANNER. Nor I. Let it kill us.

ANN. Yes: I don’t care. I am at the end of my forces. I don’t care. I think I am going to faint.

At this moment Violet and Octavius come from the villa with Mrs Whitefield, who is wrapped up for driving. Simultaneously Malone and Ramsden, followed by Mendoza and Straker, come in through the little gate in the paling. Tanner shamefacedly releases Ann, who raises her hand giddily to her forehead.

MALONE. Take care. Something’s the matter with the lady.

RAMSDEN. What does this mean?

VIOLET. [running between Ann and Tanner] Are you ill?

ANN. [reeling, with a supreme effort] I have promised to marry Jack. [She swoons. Violet kneels by her and chafes her band. Tanner runs round to her other hand, and tries to lift her bead. Octavius goes to Violet’s assistance, but does not know what to do. Mrs Whitefield hurries back into the villa. Octavius, Malone and Ramsden run to Ann and crowd round her, stooping to assist. Straker coolly comes to Ann’s feet, and Mendoza to her head, both upright and self-possessed].

STRAKER. Now then, ladies and gentlemen: she don’t want a crowd round her: she wants air — all the air she can git. If you please, gents — [Malone and Ramsden allow him to drive them gently past Ann and up the lawn towards the garden, where Octavius, who has already become conscious of his uselessness, joins them. Straker, following them up, pauses for a moment to instruct Tanner]. Don’t lift er ed, Mr Tanner: let it go flat so’s the blood can run back into it.

MENDOZA. He is right, Mr Tanner. Trust to the air of the Sierra. [He withdraws delicately to the garden steps].

TANNER. [rising] I yield to your superior knowledge of physiology, Henry. [He withdraws to the corner of the lawn; and Octavius immediately hurries down to him].

TAVY. [aside to Tanner, grasping his hand] Jack: be very happy.

TANNER. [aside to Tavy] I never asked her. It is a trap for me. [He goes up the lawn towards the garden. Octavius remains petrified].

MENDOZA. [intercepting Mrs Whitefield, who comes from the villa with a glass of brandy] What is this, madam [he takes it from her]?

MRS WHITEFIELD. A little brandy.

MENDOZA. The worst thing you could give her. Allow me. [He swallows it]. Trust to the air of the Sierra, madam.

For a moment the men all forget Ann and stare at Mendoza.

ANN. [in Violet’s ear, clutching her round the neck] Violet, did Jack say anything when I fainted?

VIOLET. No.

ANN. Ah! [with a sigh of intense relief she relapses].

MRS WHITEFIELD. Oh, she’s fainted again.

They are about to rush back to her; but Mendoza stops them with a warning gesture.

ANN. [supine] No I haven’t. I’m quite happy.

TANNER. [suddenly walking determinedly to her, and snatching her hand from Violet to feel her pulse] Why, her pulse is positively bounding. Come, getup. What nonsense! Up with you. [He gets her up summarily].

ANN. Yes: I feel strong enough now. But you very nearly killed me, Jack, for all that.

MALONE. A rough wooer, eh? They’re the best sort, Miss Whitefield. I congratulate Mr Tanner; and I hope to meet you and him as frequent guests at the Abbey.

ANN. Thank you. [She goes past Malone to Octavius] Ricky Ticky Tavy: congratulate me. [Aside to him] I want to make you cry for the last time.

TAVY. [steadfastly] No more tears. I am happy in your happiness. And I believe in you in spite of everything.

RAMSDEN. [coming between Malone and Tanner] You are a happy man, Jack Tanner. I envy you.

MENDOZA. [advancing between Violet and Tanner] Sir: there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it. Mine and yours, sir.

TANNER. Mr Mendoza: I have no heart’s desires. Ramsden: it is very easy for you to call me a happy man: you are only a spectator. I am one of the principals; and I know better. Ann: stop tempting Tavy, and come back to me.

ANN. [complying] You are absurd, Jack. [She takes his proffered arm].

TANNER. [continuing] I solemnly say that I am not a happy man. Ann looks happy; but she is only triumphant, successful, victorious. That is not happiness, but the price for which the strong sell their happiness. What we have both done this afternoon is to renounce tranquillity, above all renounce the romantic possibilities of an unknown future, for the cares of a household and a family. I beg that no man may seize the occasion to get half drunk and utter imbecile speeches and coarse pleasantries at my expense. We propose to furnish our own house according to our own taste; and I hereby give notice that the seven or eight travelling clocks, the four or five dressing cases, the salad bowls, the carvers and fish slices, the copy of Tennyson in extra morocco, and all the other articles you are preparing to heap upon us, will be instantly sold, and the proceeds devoted to circulating free copies of the Revolutionist’s Handbook. The wedding will take place three days after our return to England, by special license, at the office of the district superintendent registrar, in the presence of my solicitor and his clerk, who, like his clients, will be in ordinary walking dress.

VIOLET. [with intense conviction] You are a brute, Jack.

ANN. [looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm] Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.

TANNER. Talking!

Universal laughter.

JOHN BULL’S OTHER ISLAND

CONTENTS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT I

Great George Street, Westminster, is the address of Doyle and Broadbent, civil engineers. On the threshold one reads that the firm consists of Mr Lawrence Doyle and Mr Thomas Broadbent, and that their rooms are on the first floor. Most of their rooms are private; for the partners, being bachelors and bosom friends, live there; and the door marked Private, next the clerks’ office, is their domestic sitting room as well as their reception room for clients. Let me describe it briefly from the point of view of a sparrow on the window sill. The outer door is in the opposite wall, close to the right hand corner. Between this door and the left hand corner is a hatstand and a table consisting of large drawing boards on trestles, with plans, rolls of tracing paper, mathematical instruments and other draughtsman’s accessories on it. In the left hand wall is the fireplace, and the door of an inner room between the fireplace and our observant sparrow. Against the right hand wall is a filing cabinet, with a cupboard on it, and, nearer, a tall office desk and stool for one person. In the middle of the room a large double writing table is set across, with a chair at each end for the two partners. It is a room which no woman would tolerate, smelling of tobacco, and much in need of repapering, repainting, and recarpeting; but this is the effect of bachelor untidiness and indifference, not want of means; for nothing that Doyle and Broadbent themselves have purchased is cheap; nor is anything they want lacking. On the walls hang a large map of South America, a pictorial advertisement of a steamship company, an impressive portrait of Gladstone, and several caricatures of Mr Balfour as a rabbit and Mr Chamberlain as a fox by Francis Carruthers Gould.

At twenty minutes to five o’clock on a summer afternoon in 1904, the room is empty. Presently the outer door is opened, and a valet comes in laden with a large Gladstone bag, and a strap of rugs. He carries them into the inner room. He is a respectable valet, old enough to have lost all alacrity, and acquired an air of putting up patiently with a great deal of trouble and indifferent health. The luggage belongs to Broadbent, who enters after the valet. He pulls off his overcoat and hangs it with his hat on the stand. Then he comes to the writing table and looks through the letters which are waiting for him. He is a robust, full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always buoyant and irresistible, mostly likeable, and enormously absurd in his most earnest moments. He bursts open his letters with his thumb, and glances through them, flinging the envelopes about the floor with reckless untidiness whilst he talks to the valet.

BROADBENT [calling] Hodson.

HODSON [in the bedroom] Yes sir.

BROADBENT. Don’t unpack. Just take out the things I’ve worn; and put in clean things.

HODSON [appearing at the bedroom door] Yes sir. [He turns to go back into the bedroom.

BROADBENT. And look here! [Hodson turns again]. Do you remember where I put my revolver?

HODSON. Revolver, sir? Yes sir. Mr Doyle uses it as a paper-weight, sir, when he’s drawing.

BROADBENT. Well, I want it packed. There’s a packet of cartridges somewhere, I think. Find it and pack it as well.

HODSON. Yes sir.

BROADBENT. By the way, pack your own traps too. I shall take you with me this time.

HODSON [hesitant]. Is it a dangerous part you’re going to, sir? Should I be expected to carry a revolver, sir?

BROADBENT. Perhaps it might be as well. I’m going to Ireland.

HODSON [reassured]. Yes sir.

BROADBENT. You don’t feel nervous about it, I suppose?

HODSON. Not at all, sir. I’ll risk it, sir.

BROADBENT. Have you ever been in Ireland?

HODSON. No sir. I understand it’s a very wet climate, sir. I’d better pack your india-rubber overalls.

BROADBENT. Do. Where’s Mr Doyle?

HODSON. I’m expecting him at five, sir. He went out after lunch.

BROADBENT. Anybody been looking for me?

HODSON. A person giving the name of Haffigan has called twice to-day, sir.

BROADBENT. Oh, I’m sorry. Why didn’t he wait? I told him to wait if I wasn’t in.

HODSON. Well Sir, I didn’t know you expected him; so I thought it best to — to — not to encourage him, sir.

BROADBENT. Oh, he’s all right. He’s an Irishman, and not very particular about his appearance.

HODSON. Yes sir, I noticed that he was rather Irish....

BROADBENT. If he calls again let him come up.

HODSON. I think I saw him waiting about, sir, when you drove up. Shall I fetch him, sir?

BROADBENT. Do, Hodson.

HODSON. Yes sir [He makes for the outer door].

BROADBENT. He’ll want tea. Let us have some.

HODSON [stopping]. I shouldn’t think he drank tea, sir.

BROADBENT. Well, bring whatever you think he’d like.

HODSON. Yes sir [An electric bell rings]. Here he is, sir. Saw you arrive, sir.

BROADBENT. Right. Show him in. [Hodson goes out. Broadbent gets through the rest of his letters before Hodson returns with the visitor].

HODSON. Mr Affigan.

Haffigan is a stunted, shortnecked, smallheaded, redhaired man of about 30, with reddened nose and furtive eyes. He is dressed in seedy black, almost clerically, and might be a tenth-rate schoolmaster ruined by drink. He hastens to shake Broadbent’s hand with a show of reckless geniality and high spirits, helped out by a rollicking stage brogue. This is perhaps a comfort to himself, as he is secretly pursued by the horrors of incipient delirium tremens.

HAFFIGAN. Tim Haffigan, sir, at your service. The top o the mornin to you, Misther Broadbent.

BROADBENT [delighted with his Irish visitor]. Good afternoon, Mr Haffigan.

TIM. An is it the afthernoon it is already? Begorra, what I call the mornin is all the time a man fasts afther breakfast.

BROADBENT. Haven’t you lunched?

TIM. Divil a lunch!

BROADBENT. I’m sorry I couldn’t get back from Brighton in time to offer you some; but —

TIM. Not a word, sir, not a word. Sure it’ll do tomorrow. Besides, I’m Irish, sir: a poor ather, but a powerful dhrinker.

BROADBENT. I was just about to ring for tea when you came. Sit down, Mr Haffigan.

TIM. Tay is a good dhrink if your nerves can stand it. Mine can’t.

Haffigan sits down at the writing table, with his back to the filing cabinet. Broadbent sits opposite him. Hodson enters emptyhanded; takes two glasses, a siphon, and a tantalus from the cupboard; places them before Broadbent on the writing table; looks ruthlessly at Haffigan, who cannot meet his eye; and retires.

BROADBENT. Try a whisky and soda.

TIM [sobered]. There you touch the national wakeness, sir. [Piously] Not that I share it meself. I’ve seen too much of the mischief of it.

BROADBENT [pouring the whisky]. Say when.

TIM. Not too sthrong. [Broadbent stops and looks enquiringly at him]. Say half-an-half. [Broadbent, somewhat startled by this demand, pours a little more, and again stops and looks]. Just a dhrain more: the lower half o the tumbler doesn’t hold a fair half. Thankya.

BROADBENT [laughing]. You Irishmen certainly do know how to drink. [Pouring some whisky for himself] Now that’s my poor English idea of a whisky and soda.

TIM. An a very good idea it is too. Dhrink is the curse o me unhappy counthry. I take it meself because I’ve a wake heart and a poor digestion; but in principle I’m a teetoatler.

BROADBENT [suddenly solemn and strenuous]. So am I, of course. I’m a Local Optionist to the backbone. You have no idea, Mr Haffigan, of the ruin that is wrought in this country by the unholy alliance of the publicans, the bishops, the Tories, and The Times. We must close the public-houses at all costs [he drinks].

TIM. Sure I know. It’s awful [he drinks]. I see you’re a good Liberal like meself, sir.

BROADBENT. I am a lover of liberty, like every true Englishman, Mr Haffigan. My name is Broadbent. If my name were Breitstein, and I had a hooked nose and a house in Park Lane, I should carry a Union Jack handkerchief and a penny trumpet, and tax the food of the people to support the Navy League, and clamor for the destruction of the last remnants of national liberty —

TIM. Not another word. Shake hands.

BROADBENT. But I should like to explain —

TIM. Sure I know every word you’re goin to say before yev said it. I know the sort o man yar. An so you’re thinkin o comin to Ireland for a bit?

BROADBENT. Where else can I go? I am an Englishman and a Liberal; and now that South Africa has been enslaved and destroyed, there is no country left to me to take an interest in but Ireland. Mind: I don’t say that an Englishman has not other duties. He has a duty to Finland and a duty to Macedonia. But what sane man can deny that an Englishman’s first duty is his duty to Ireland? Unfortunately, we have politicians here more unscrupulous than Bobrikoff, more bloodthirsty than Abdul the Damned; and it is under their heel that Ireland is now writhing.

TIM. Faith, they’ve reckoned up with poor oul Bobrikoff anyhow.

BROADBENT. Not that I defend assassination: God forbid! However strongly we may feel that the unfortunate and patriotic young man who avenged the wrongs of Finland on the Russian tyrant was perfectly right from his own point of view, yet every civilized man must regard murder with abhorrence. Not even in defence of Free Trade would I lift my hand against a political opponent, however richly he might deserve it.

TIM. I’m sure you wouldn’t; and I honor you for it. You’re goin to Ireland, then, out o sympithy: is it?

BROADBENT. I’m going to develop an estate there for the Land Development Syndicate, in which I am interested. I am convinced that all it needs to make it pay is to handle it properly, as estates are handled in England. You know the English plan, Mr Haffigan, don’t you?

TIM. Bedad I do, sir. Take all you can out of Ireland and spend it in England: that’s it.

BROADBENT [not quite liking this]. My plan, sir, will be to take a little money out of England and spend it in Ireland.

TIM. More power to your elbow! an may your shadda never be less! for you’re the broth of a boy intirely. An how can I help you? Command me to the last dhrop o me blood.

BROADBENT. Have you ever heard of Garden City?

TIM [doubtfully]. D’ye mane Heavn?

BROADBENT. Heaven! No: it’s near Hitchin. If you can spare half an hour I’ll go into it with you.

TIM. I tell you hwat. Gimme a prospectus. Lemme take it home and reflect on it.

BROADBENT. You’re quite right: I will. [He gives him a copy of Mr Ebenezer Howard’s book, and several pamphlets]. You understand that the map of the city — the circular construction — is only a suggestion.

TIM. I’ll make a careful note o that [looking dazedly at the map].

BROADBENT. What I say is, why not start a Garden City in Ireland?

TIM [with enthusiasm]. That’s just what was on the tip o me tongue to ask you. Why not? [Defiantly] Tell me why not.

BROADBENT. There are difficulties. I shall overcome them; but there are difficulties. When I first arrive in Ireland I shall be hated as an Englishman. As a Protestant, I shall be denounced from every altar. My life may be in danger. Well, I am prepared to face that.

TIM. Never fear, sir. We know how to respict a brave innimy.

BROADBENT. What I really dread is misunderstanding. I think you could help me to avoid that. When I heard you speak the other evening in Bermondsey at the meeting of the National League, I saw at once that you were — You won’t mind my speaking frankly?

TIM. Tell me all me faults as man to man. I can stand anything but flatthery.

BROADBENT. May I put it in this way? — that I saw at once that you were a thorough Irishman, with all the faults and all, the qualities of your race: rash and improvident but brave and goodnatured; not likely to succeed in business on your own account perhaps, but eloquent, humorous, a lover of freedom, and a true follower of that great Englishman Gladstone.

TIM. Spare me blushes. I mustn’t sit here to be praised to me face. But I confess to the goodnature: it’s an Irish wakeness. I’d share me last shillin with a friend.

BROADBENT. I feel sure you would, Mr Haffigan.

TIM [impulsively]. Damn it! call me Tim. A man that talks about Ireland as you do may call me anything. Gimme a howlt o that whisky bottle [he replenishes].

BROADBENT [smiling indulgently]. Well, Tim, will you come with me and help to break the ice between me and your warmhearted, impulsive countrymen?

TIM. Will I come to Madagascar or Cochin China wid you? Bedad I’ll come to the North Pole wid you if yll pay me fare; for the divil a shillin I have to buy a third class ticket.

BROADBENT. I’ve not forgotten that, Tim. We must put that little matter on a solid English footing, though the rest can be as Irish as you please. You must come as my — my — well, I hardly know what to call it. If we call you my agent, they’ll shoot you. If we call you a bailiff, they’ll duck you in the horsepond. I have a secretary already; and —

TIM. Then we’ll call him the Home Secretary and me the Irish Secretary. Eh?

BROADBENT [laughing industriously]. Capital. Your Irish wit has settled the first difficulty. Now about your salary —

TIM. A salary, is it? Sure I’d do it for nothin, only me cloes ud disgrace you; and I’d be dhriven to borra money from your friends: a thing that’s agin me nacher. But I won’t take a penny more than a hundherd a year. [He looks with restless cunning at Broadbent, trying to guess how far he may go].

BROADBENT. If that will satisfy you —

TIM [more than reassured]. Why shouldn’t it satisfy me? A hundherd a year is twelve-pound a month, isn’t it?

BROADBENT. No. Eight pound six and eightpence.

TIM. Oh murdher! An I’ll have to sind five timme poor oul mother in Ireland. But no matther: I said a hundherd; and what I said I’ll stick to, if I have to starve for it.

BROADBENT [with business caution]. Well, let us say twelve pounds for the first month. Afterwards, we shall see how we get on.

TIM. You’re a gentleman, sir. Whin me mother turns up her toes, you shall take the five pounds off; for your expinses must be kep down wid a sthrong hand; an — [He is interrupted by the arrival of Broadbent’s partner.]

Mr Laurence Doyle is a man of 36, with cold grey eyes, strained nose, fine fastidious lips, critical brown, clever head, rather refined and goodlooking on the whole, but with a suggestion of thinskinedness and dissatisfaction that contrasts strongly with Broadbent’s eupeptic jollity.

He comes in as a man at home there, but on seeing the stranger shrinks at once, and is about to withdraw when Broadbent reassures him. He then comes forward to the table, between the two others.

DOYLE [retreating]. You’re engaged.

BROADBENT. Not at all, not at all. Come in. [To Tim] This gentleman is a friend who lives with me here: my partner, Mr Doyle. [To Doyle] This is a new Irish friend of mine, Mr Tim Haffigan.

TIM [rising with effusion]. Sure it’s meself that’s proud to meet any friend o Misther Broadbent’s. The top o the mornin to you, sir! Me heart goes out teeye both. It’s not often I meet two such splendid speciments iv the Anglo-Saxon race.

BROADBENT [chuckling] Wrong for once, Tim. My friend Mr Doyle is a countryman of yours.

Tim is noticeably dashed by this announcement. He draws in his horns at once, and scowls suspiciously at Doyle under a vanishing mark of goodfellowship: cringing a little, too, in mere nerveless fear of him.

DOYLE [with cool disgust]. Good evening. [He retires to the fireplace, and says to Broadbent in a tone which conveys the strongest possible hint to Haffigan that he is unwelcome] Will you soon be disengaged?

TIM [his brogue decaying into a common would-be genteel accent with an unexpected strain of Glasgow in it]. I must be going. Ivnmportnt engeegement in the west end.

BROADBENT [rising]. It’s settled, then, that you come with me.

TIM. Ish’ll be verra pleased to accompany ye, sir.

BROADBENT. But how soon? Can you start tonight — from Paddington? We go by Milford Haven.

TIM [hesitating]. Well — I’m afreed — I [Doyle goes abruptly into the bedroom, slamming the door and shattering the last remnant of Tim’s nerve. The poor wretch saves himself from bursting into tears by plunging again into his role of daredevil Irishman. He rushes to Broadbent; plucks at his sleeve with trembling fingers; and pours forth his entreaty with all the brogue be can muster, subduing his voice lest Doyle should hear and return]. Misther Broadbent: don’t humiliate me before a fella counthryman. Look here: me cloes is up the spout. Gimme a fypounnote — I’ll pay ya nex choosda whin me ship comes home — or you can stop it out o me month’s sallery. I’ll be on the platform at Paddnton punctial an ready. Gimme it quick, before he comes back. You won’t mind me axin, will ye?

BROADBENT. Not at all. I was about to offer you an advance for travelling expenses. [He gives him a bank note].

TIM [pocketing it]. Thank you. I’ll be there half an hour before the thrain starts. [Larry is heard at the bedroom door, returning]. Whisht: he’s comin back. Goodbye an God bless ye. [He hurries out almost crying, the 5 pound note and all the drink it means to him being too much for his empty stomach and overstrained nerves].

DOYLE [returning]. Where the devil did you pick up that seedy swindler? What was he doing here? [He goes up to the table where the plans are, and makes a note on one of them, referring to his pocket book as he does so].

BROADBENT. There you go! Why are you so down on every Irishman you meet, especially if he’s a bit shabby? poor devil! Surely a fellow-countryman may pass you the top of the morning without offence, even if his coat is a bit shiny at the seams.

DOYLE [contemptuously]. The top of the morning! Did he call you the broth of a boy? [He comes to the writing table].

BROADBENT [triumphantly]. Yes.

DOYLE. And wished you more power to your elbow?

BROADBENT. He did.

DOYLE. And that your shadow might never be less?

BROADBENT. Certainly.

DOYLE [taking up the depleted whisky bottle and shaking his head at it]. And he got about half a pint of whisky out of you.

BROADBENT. It did him no harm. He never turned a hair.

DOYLE. How much money did he borrow?

BROADBENT. It was not borrowing exactly. He showed a very honorable spirit about money. I believe he would share his last shilling with a friend.

DOYLE. No doubt he would share his friend’s last shilling if his friend was fool enough to let him. How much did he touch you for?

BROADBENT. Oh, nothing. An advance on his salary — for travelling expenses.

DOYLE. Salary! In Heaven’s name, what for?

BROADBENT. For being my Home Secretary, as he very wittily called it.

DOYLE. I don’t see the joke.

BROADBENT. You can spoil any joke by being cold blooded about it. I saw it all right when he said it. It was something — something really very amusing — about the Home Secretary and the Irish Secretary. At all events, he’s evidently the very man to take with me to Ireland to break the ice for me. He can gain the confidence of the people there, and make them friendly to me. Eh? [He seats himself on the office stool, and tilts it back so that the edge of the standing desk supports his back and prevents his toppling over].

DOYLE. A nice introduction, by George! Do you suppose the whole population of Ireland consists of drunken begging letter writers, or that even if it did, they would accept one another as references?

BROADBENT. Pooh! nonsense! He’s only an Irishman. Besides, you don’t seriously suppose that Haffigan can humbug me, do you?

DOYLE. No: he’s too lazy to take the trouble. All he has to do is to sit there and drink your whisky while you humbug yourself. However, we needn’t argue about Haffigan, for two reasons. First, with your money in his pocket he will never reach Paddington: there are too many public houses on the way. Second, he’s not an Irishman at all.

BROADBENT. Not an Irishman! [He is so amazed by the statement that he straightens himself and brings the stool bolt upright].

DOYLE. Born in Glasgow. Never was in Ireland in his life. I know all about him.

BROADBENT. But he spoke — he behaved just like an Irishman.

DOYLE. Like an Irishman!! Is it possible that you don’t know that all this top-o-the-morning and broth-of-a-boy and more-power-to-your-elbow business is as peculiar to England as the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music are? No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will. But when a thoroughly worthless Irishman comes to England, and finds the whole place full of romantic duffers like you, who will let him loaf and drink and sponge and brag as long as he flatters your sense of moral superiority by playing the fool and degrading himself and his country, he soon learns the antics that take you in. He picks them up at the theatre or the music hall. Haffigan learnt the rudiments from his father, who came from my part of Ireland. I knew his uncles, Matt and Andy Haffigan of Rosscullen.

BROADBENT [still incredulous]. But his brogue!

DOYLE. His brogue! A fat lot you know about brogues! I’ve heard you call a Dublin accent that you could hang your hat on, a brogue. Heaven help you! you don’t know the difference between Connemara and Rathmines. [With violent irritation] Oh, damn Tim Haffigan! Let’s drop the subject: he’s not worth wrangling about.

BROADBENT. What’s wrong with you today, Larry? Why are you so bitter?

Doyle looks at him perplexedly; comes slowly to the writing table; and sits down at the end next the fireplace before replying.

DOYLE. Well: your letter completely upset me, for one thing.

BROADBENT. Why?

LARRY. Your foreclosing this Rosscullen mortgage and turning poor Nick Lestrange out of house and home has rather taken me aback; for I liked the old rascal when I was a boy and had the run of his park to play in. I was brought up on the property.

BROADBENT. But he wouldn’t pay the interest. I had to foreclose on behalf of the Syndicate. So now I’m off to Rosscullen to look after the property myself. [He sits down at the writing table opposite Larry, and adds, casually, but with an anxious glance at his partner] You’re coming with me, of course?

DOYLE [rising nervously and recommencing his restless movements]. That’s it. That’s what I dread. That’s what has upset me.

BROADBENT. But don’t you want to see your country again after 18 years absence? to see your people, to be in the old home again? To —

DOYLE [interrupting him very impatiently]. Yes, yes: I know all that as well as you do.

BROADBENT. Oh well, of course [with a shrug] if you take it in that way, I’m sorry.

DOYLE. Never you mind my temper: it’s not meant for you, as you ought to know by this time. [He sits down again, a little ashamed of his petulance; reflects a moment bitterly; then bursts out] I have an instinct against going back to Ireland: an instinct so strong that I’d rather go with you to the South Pole than to Rosscullen.

BROADBENT. What! Here you are, belonging to a nation with the strongest patriotism! the most inveterate homing instinct in the world! and you pretend you’d rather go anywhere than back to Ireland. You don’t suppose I believe you, do you? In your heart —

DOYLE. Never mind my heart: an Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination. How many of all those millions that have left Ireland have ever come back or wanted to come back? But what’s the use of talking to you? Three verses of twaddle about the Irish emigrant “sitting on the stile, Mary,” or three hours of Irish patriotism in Bermondsey or the Scotland Division of Liverpool, go further with you than all the facts that stare you in the face. Why, man alive, look at me! You know the way I nag, and worry, and carp, and cavil, and disparage, and am never satisfied and never quiet, and try the patience of my best friends.

BROADBENT. Oh, come, Larry! do yourself justice. You’re very amusing and agreeable to strangers.

DOYLE. Yes, to strangers. Perhaps if I was a bit stiffer to strangers, and a bit easier at home, like an Englishman, I’d be better company for you.

BROADBENT. We get on well enough. Of course you have the melancholy of the Celtic race —

DOYLE [bounding out of his chair] Good God!!!

BROADBENT [slyly] — and also its habit of using strong language when there’s nothing the matter.

DOYLE. Nothing the matter! When people talk about the Celtic race, I feel as if I could burn down London. That sort of rot does more harm than ten Coercion Acts. Do you suppose a man need be a Celt to feel melancholy in Rosscullen? Why, man, Ireland was peopled just as England was; and its breed was crossed by just the same invaders.

BROADBENT. True. All the capable people in Ireland are of English extraction. It has often struck me as a most remarkable circumstance that the only party in parliament which shows the genuine old English character and spirit is the Irish party. Look at its independence, its determination, its defiance of bad Governments, its sympathy with oppressed nationalities all the world over! How English!

DOYLE. Not to mention the solemnity with which it talks old-fashioned nonsense which it knows perfectly well to be a century behind the times. That’s English, if you like.

BROADBENT. No, Larry, no. You are thinking of the modern hybrids that now monopolize England. Hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They don’t belong to the dear old island, but to their confounded new empire; and by George! they’re worthy of it; and I wish them joy of it.

DOYLE [unmoved by this outburst]. There! You feel better now, don’t you?

BROADBENT [defiantly]. I do. Much better.

DOYLE. My dear Tom, you only need a touch of the Irish climate to be as big a fool as I am myself. If all my Irish blood were poured into your veins, you wouldn’t turn a hair of your constitution and character. Go and marry the most English Englishwoman you can find, and then bring up your son in Rosscullen; and that son’s character will be so like mine and so unlike yours that everybody will accuse me of being his father. [With sudden anguish] Rosscullen! oh, good Lord, Rosscullen! The dullness! the hopelessness! the ignorance! the bigotry!

BROADBENT [matter-of-factly]. The usual thing in the country, Larry. Just the same here.

DOYLE [hastily]. No, no: the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. [Going off into a passionate dream] But your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You’ve no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely] No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can’t face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and [bitterly, at Broadbent] be “agreeable to strangers,” like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. [Gabbling at Broadbent across the table] It’s all dreaming, all imagination. He can’t be religious. The inspired Churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is sent away empty; while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor. He can’t be intelligently political, he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you’ve got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she’s a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination’s such a torture that you can’t bear it without whisky. [With fierce shivering self-contempt] At last you get that you can bear nothing real at all: you’d rather starve than cook a meal; you’d rather go shabby and dirty than set your mind to take care of your clothes and wash yourself; you nag and squabble at home because your wife isn’t an angel, and she despises you because you’re not a hero; and you hate the whole lot round you because they’re only poor slovenly useless devils like yourself. [Dropping his voice like a man making some shameful confidence] And all the while there goes on a horrible, senseless, mischievous laughter. When you’re young, you exchange drinks with other young men; and you exchange vile stories with them; and as you’re too futile to be able to help or cheer them, you chaff and sneer and taunt them for not doing the things you daren’t do yourself. And all the time you laugh, laugh, laugh! eternal derision, eternal envy, eternal folly, eternal fouling and staining and degrading, until, when you come at last to a country where men take a question seriously and give a serious answer to it, you deride them for having no sense of humor, and plume yourself on your own worthlessness as if it made you better than them.

BROADBENT [roused to intense earnestness by Doyle’s eloquence]. Never despair, Larry. There are great possibilities for Ireland. Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.

DOYLE [pulled up short, his face twitching with a reluctant smile]. Tom: why do you select my most tragic moments for your most irresistible strokes of humor?

BROADBENT. Humor! I was perfectly serious. What do you mean? Do you doubt my seriousness about Home Rule?

DOYLE. I am sure you are serious, Tom, about the English guidance.

BROADBENT [quite reassured]. Of course I am. Our guidance is the important thing. We English must place our capacity for government without stint at the service of nations who are less fortunately endowed in that respect; so as to allow them to develop in perfect freedom to the English level of self-government, you know. You understand me?

DOYLE. Perfectly. And Rosscullen will understand you too.

BROADBENT [cheerfully]. Of course it will. So that’s all right. [He pulls up his chair and settles himself comfortably to lecture Doyle]. Now, Larry, I’ve listened carefully to all you’ve said about Ireland; and I can see nothing whatever to prevent your coming with me. What does it all come to? Simply that you were only a young fellow when you were in Ireland. You’ll find all that chaffing and drinking and not knowing what to be at in Peckham just the same as in Donnybrook. You looked at Ireland with a boy’s eyes and saw only boyish things. Come back with me and look at it with a man’s, and get a better opinion of your country.

DOYLE. I daresay you’re partly right in that: at all events I know very well that if I had been the son of a laborer instead of the son of a country landagent, I should have struck more grit than I did. Unfortunately I’m not going back to visit the Irish nation, but to visit my father and Aunt Judy and Nora Reilly and Father Dempsey and the rest of them.

BROADBENT. Well, why not? They’ll be delighted to see you, now that England has made a man of you.

DOYLE [struck by this]. Ah! you hit the mark there, Tom, with true British inspiration.

BROADBENT. Common sense, you mean.

DOYLE [quickly]. No I don’t: you’ve no more common sense than a gander. No Englishman has any common sense, or ever had, or ever will have. You’re going on a sentimental expedition for perfectly ridiculous reasons, with your head full of political nonsense that would not take in any ordinarily intelligent donkey; but you can hit me in the eye with the simple truth about myself and my father.

BROADBENT [amazed]. I never mentioned your father.

DOYLE [not heeding the interruption]. There he is in Rosscullen, a landagent who’s always been in a small way because he’s a Catholic, and the landlords are mostly Protestants. What with land courts reducing rents and Land Acts turning big estates into little holdings, he’d be a beggar this day if he hadn’t bought his own little farm under the Land Purchase Act. I doubt if he’s been further from home than Athenmullet for the last twenty years. And here am I, made a man of, as you say, by England.

BROADBENT [apologetically]. I assure you I never meant —

DOYLE. Oh, don’t apologize: it’s quite true. I daresay I’ve learnt something in America and a few other remote and inferior spots; but in the main it is by living with you and working in double harness with you that I have learnt to live in a real world and not in an imaginary one. I owe more to you than to any Irishman.

BROADBENT [shaking his head with a twinkle in his eye]. Very friendly of you, Larry, old man, but all blarney. I like blarney; but it’s rot, all the same.

DOYLE. No it’s not. I should never have done anything without you; although I never stop wondering at that blessed old head of yours with all its ideas in watertight compartments, and all the compartments warranted impervious to anything that it doesn’t suit you to understand.

BROADBENT [invincible]. Unmitigated rot, Larry, I assure you.

DOYLE. Well, at any rate you will admit that all my friends are either Englishmen or men of the big world that belongs to the big Powers. All the serious part of my life has been lived in that atmosphere: all the serious part of my work has been done with men of that sort. Just think of me as I am now going back to Rosscullen! to that hell of littleness and monotony! How am I to get on with a little country landagent that ekes out his 5 per cent with a little farming and a scrap of house property in the nearest country town? What am I to say to him? What is he to say to me?

BROADBFNT [scandalized]. But you’re father and son, man!

DOYLE. What difference does that make? What would you say if I proposed a visit to YOUR father?

BROADBENT [with filial rectitude]. I always made a point of going to see my father regularly until his mind gave way.

DOYLE [concerned]. Has he gone mad? You never told me.

BROADBENT. He has joined the Tariff Reform League. He would never have done that if his mind had not been weakened. [Beginning to declaim] He has fallen a victim to the arts of a political charlatan who —

DOYLE [interrupting him]. You mean that you keep clear of your father because he differs from you about Free Trade, and you don’t want to quarrel with him. Well, think of me and my father! He’s a Nationalist and a Separatist. I’m a metallurgical chemist turned civil engineer. Now whatever else metallurgical chemistry may be, it’s not national. It’s international. And my business and yours as civil engineers is to join countries, not to separate them. The one real political conviction that our business has rubbed into us is that frontiers are hindrances and flags confounded nuisances.

BROADBENT [still smarting under Mr Chamberlain’s economic heresy]. Only when there is a protective tariff —

DOYLE [firmly] Now look here, Tom: you want to get in a speech on Free Trade; and you’re not going to do it: I won’t stand it. My father wants to make St George’s Channel a frontier and hoist a green flag on College Green; and I want to bring Galway within 3 hours of Colchester and 24 of New York. I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island. Then there’s the religious difficulty. My Catholicism is the Catholicism of Charlemagne or Dante, qualified by a great deal of modern science and folklore which Father Dempsey would call the ravings of an Atheist. Well, my father’s Catholicism is the Catholicism of Father Dempsey.

BROADBENT [shrewdly]. I don’t want to interrupt you, Larry; but you know this is all gammon. These differences exist in all families; but the members rub on together all right. [Suddenly relapsing into portentousness] Of course there are some questions which touch the very foundations of morals; and on these I grant you even the closest relationships cannot excuse any compromise or laxity. For instance —

DOYLE [impatiently springing up and walking about]. For instance, Home Rule, South Africa, Free Trade, and the Education Rate. Well, I should differ from my father on every one of them, probably, just as I differ from you about them.

BROADBENT. Yes; but you are an Irishman; and these things are not serious to you as they are to an Englishman.

DOYLE. What! not even Home Rule!

BROADBENT [steadfastly]. Not even Home Rule. We owe Home Rule not to the Irish, but to our English Gladstone. No, Larry: I can’t help thinking that there’s something behind all this.

DOYLE [hotly]. What is there behind it? Do you think I’m humbugging you?

BROADBENT. Don’t fly out at me, old chap. I only thought —

DOYLE. What did you think?

BROADBENT. Well, a moment ago I caught a name which is new to me: a Miss Nora Reilly, I think. [Doyle stops dead and stares at him with something like awe]. I don’t wish to be impertinent, as you know, Larry; but are you sure she has nothing to do with your reluctance to come to Ireland with me?

DOYLE [sitting down again, vanquished]. Thomas Broadbent: I surrender. The poor silly-clever Irishman takes off his hat to God’s Englishman. The man who could in all seriousness make that recent remark of yours about Home Rule and Gladstone must be simply the champion idiot of all the world. Yet the man who could in the very next sentence sweep away all my special pleading and go straight to the heart of my motives must be a man of genius. But that the idiot and the genius should be the same man! how is that possible? [Springing to his feet] By Jove, I see it all now. I’ll write an article about it, and send it to Nature.

BROADBENT [staring at him]. What on earth —

DOYLE. It’s quite simple. You know that a caterpillar —

BROADBENT. A caterpillar!!!

DOYLE. Yes, a caterpillar. Now give your mind to what I am going to say; for it’s a new and important scientific theory of the English national character. A caterpillar —

BROADBENT. Look here, Larry: don’t be an ass.

DOYLE [insisting]. I say a caterpillar and I mean a caterpillar. You’ll understand presently. A caterpillar [Broadbent mutters a slight protest, but does not press it] when it gets into a tree, instinctively makes itself look exactly like a leaf; so that both its enemies and its prey may mistake it for one and think it not worth bothering about.

BROADBENT. What’s that got to do with our English national character?

DOYLE. I’ll tell you. The world is as full of fools as a tree is full of leaves. Well, the Englishman does what the caterpillar does. He instinctively makes himself look like a fool, and eats up all the real fools at his ease while his enemies let him alone and laugh at him for being a fool like the rest. Oh, nature is cunning, cunning! [He sits down, lost in contemplation of his word-picture].

BROADBENT [with hearty admiration]. Now you know, Larry, that would never have occurred to me. You Irish people are amazingly clever. Of course it’s all tommy rot; but it’s so brilliant, you know! How the dickens do you think of such things! You really must write an article about it: they’ll pay you something for it. If Nature won’t have it, I can get it into Engineering for you: I know the editor.

DOYLE. Let’s get back to business. I’d better tell you about Nora Reilly.

BROADBENT. No: never mind. I shouldn’t have alluded to her.

DOYLE. I’d rather. Nora has a fortune.

BROADBENT [keenly interested]. Eh? How much?

DOYLE. Forty per annum.

BROADBENT. Forty thousand?

DOYLE. No, forty. Forty pounds.

BROADBENT [much dashed.] That’s what you call a fortune in Rosscullen, is it?

DOYLE. A girl with a dowry of five pounds calls it a fortune in Rosscullen. What’s more 40 pounds a year IS a fortune there; and Nora Reilly enjoys a good deal of social consideration as an heiress on the strength of it. It has helped my father’s household through many a tight place. My father was her father’s agent. She came on a visit to us when he died, and has lived with us ever since.

BROADBENT [attentively, beginning to suspect Larry of misconduct with Nora, and resolving to get to the bottom of it]. Since when? I mean how old were you when she came?

DOYLE. I was seventeen. So was she: if she’d been older she’d have had more sense than to stay with us. We were together for 18 months before I went up to Dublin to study. When I went home for Christmas and Easter, she was there: I suppose it used to be something of an event for her, though of course I never thought of that then.

BROADBENT. Were you at all hard hit?

DOYLE. Not really. I had only two ideas at that time, first, to learn to do something; and then to get out of Ireland and have a chance of doing it. She didn’t count. I was romantic about her, just as I was romantic about Byron’s heroines or the old Round Tower of Rosscullen; but she didn’t count any more than they did. I’ve never crossed St George’s Channel since for her sake — never even landed at Queenstown and come back to London through Ireland.

BROADBENT. But did you ever say anything that would justify her in waiting for you?

DOYLE. No, never. But she IS waiting for me.

BROADBENT. How do you know?

DOYLE. She writes to me — on her birthday. She used to write on mine, and send me little things as presents; but I stopped that by pretending that it was no use when I was travelling, as they got lost in the foreign post-offices. [He pronounces post-offices with the stress on offices, instead of on post].

BROADBENT. You answer the letters?

DOYLE. Not very punctually. But they get acknowledged at one time or another.

BROADBENT. How do you feel when you see her handwriting?

DOYLE. Uneasy. I’d give 50 pounds to escape a letter.

BROADBENT [looking grave, and throwing himself back in his chair to intimate that the cross-examination is over, and the result very damaging to the witness] Hm!

DOYLE. What d’ye mean by Hm!?

BROADBENT. Of course I know that the moral code is different in Ireland. But in England it’s not considered fair to trifle with a woman’s affections.

DOYLE. You mean that an Englishman would get engaged to another woman and return Nora her letters and presents with a letter to say he was unworthy of her and wished her every happiness?

BROADBENT. Well, even that would set the poor girl’s mind at rest.

DOYLE. Would it? I wonder! One thing I can tell you; and that is that Nora would wait until she died of old age sooner than ask my intentions or condescend to hint at the possibility of my having any. You don’t know what Irish pride is. England may have knocked a good deal of it out of me; but she’s never been in England; and if I had to choose between wounding that delicacy in her and hitting her in the face, I’d hit her in the face without a moment’s hesitation.

BROADBENT [who has been nursing his knee and reflecting, apparently rather agreeably]. You know, all this sounds rather interesting. There’s the Irish charm about it. That’s the worst of you: the Irish charm doesn’t exist for you.

DOYLE. Oh yes it does. But it’s the charm of a dream. Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal.

BROADBENT [changing his attitude and responding to Doyle’s earnestness with deep conviction: his elbows on the table and his hands clenched]. Don’t despair, Larry, old boy: things may look black; but there will be a great change after the next election.

DOYLE [jumping up]. Oh get out, you idiot!

BROADBENT [rising also, not a bit snubbed]. Ha! ha! you may laugh; but we shall see. However, don’t let us argue about that. Come now! you ask my advice about Miss Reilly?

DOYLE [reddening]. No I don’t. Damn your advice! [Softening] Let’s have it, all the same.

BROADBENT. Well, everything you tell me about her impresses me favorably. She seems to have the feelings of a lady; and though we must face the fact that in England her income would hardly maintain her in the lower middle class —

DOYLE [interrupting]. Now look here, Tom. That reminds me. When you go to Ireland, just drop talking about the middle class and bragging of belonging to it. In Ireland you’re either a gentleman or you’re not. If you want to be particularly offensive to Nora, you can call her a Papist; but if you call her a middle-class woman, Heaven help you!

BROADBENT [irrepressible]. Never fear. You’re all descended from the ancient kings: I know that. [Complacently] I’m not so tactless as you think, my boy. [Earnest again] I expect to find Miss Reilly a perfect lady; and I strongly advise you to come and have another look at her before you make up your mind about her. By the way, have you a photograph of her?

DOYLE. Her photographs stopped at twenty-five.

BROADBENT [saddened]. Ah yes, I suppose so. [With feeling, severely] Larry: you’ve treated that poor girl disgracefully.

DOYLE. By George, if she only knew that two men were talking about her like this — !

BROADBENT. She wouldn’t like it, would she? Of course not. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, Larry. [More and more carried away by his new fancy]. You know, I have a sort of presentiment that Miss Really is a very superior woman.

DOYLE [staring hard at him]. Oh you have, have you?

BROADBENT. Yes I have. There is something very touching about the history of this beautiful girl.

DOYLE. Beau — ! Oho! Here’s a chance for Nora! and for me! [Calling] Hodson.

HODSON [appearing at the bedroom door]. Did you call, sir?

DOYLE. Pack for me too. I’m going to Ireland with Mr Broadbent.

HODSON. Right, sir. [He retires into the bedroom.]

BROADBENT [clapping Doyle on the shoulder]. Thank you, old chap. Thank you.

ACT II

Rosscullen. Westward a hillside of granite rock and heather slopes upward across the prospect from south to north, a huge stone stands on it in a naturally impossible place, as if it had been tossed up there by a giant. Over the brow, in the desolate valley beyond, is a round tower. A lonely white high road trending away westward past the tower loses itself at the foot of the far mountains. It is evening; and there are great breadths of silken green in the Irish sky. The sun is setting.

A man with the face of a young saint, yet with white hair and perhaps 50 years on his back, is standing near the stone in a trance of intense melancholy, looking over the hills as if by mere intensity of gaze he could pierce the glories of the sunset and see into the streets of heaven. He is dressed in black, and is rather more clerical in appearance than most English curates are nowadays; but he does not wear the collar and waistcoat of a parish priest. He is roused from his trance by the chirp of an insect from a tuft of grass in a crevice of the stone. His face relaxes: he turns quietly, and gravely takes off his hat to the tuft, addressing the insect in a brogue which is the jocular assumption of a gentleman and not the natural speech of a peasant.

THE MAN. An is that yourself, Misther Grasshopper? I hope I see you well this fine evenin.

THE GRASSHOPPER [prompt and shrill in answer]. X.X.

THE MAN [encouragingly]. That’s right. I suppose now you’ve come out to make yourself miserable by admyerin the sunset?

THE GRASSHOPPER [sadly]. X.X.

THE MAN. Aye, you’re a thrue Irish grasshopper.

THE GRASSHOPPER [loudly]. X.X.X.

THE MAN. Three cheers for ould Ireland, is it? That helps you to face out the misery and the poverty and the torment, doesn’t it?

THE GRASSHOPPER [plaintively]. X.X.

THE MAN. Ah, it’s no use, me poor little friend. If you could jump as far as a kangaroo you couldn’t jump away from your own heart an its punishment. You can only look at Heaven from here: you can’t reach it. There! [pointing with his stick to the sunset] that’s the gate o glory, isn’t it?

THE GRASSHOPPER [assenting]. X.X.

THE MAN. Sure it’s the wise grasshopper yar to know that! But tell me this, Misther Unworldly Wiseman: why does the sight of Heaven wring your heart an mine as the sight of holy wather wrings the heart o the divil? What wickedness have you done to bring that curse on you? Here! where are you jumpin to? Where’s your manners to go skyrocketin like that out o the box in the middle o your confession [he threatens it with his stick]?

THE GRASSHOPPER [penitently]. X.

THE MAN [lowering the stick]. I accept your apology; but don’t do it again. And now tell me one thing before I let you go home to bed. Which would you say this counthry was: hell or purgatory?

THE GRASSHOPPER. X.

THE MAN. Hell! Faith I’m afraid you’re right. I wondher what you and me did when we were alive to get sent here.

THE GRASSHOPPER [shrilly]. X.X.

THE MAN [nodding]. Well, as you say, it’s a delicate subject; and I won’t press it on you. Now off widja.

THE GRASSHOPPER. X.X. [It springs away].

THE MAN [waving his stick] God speed you! [He walks away past the stone towards the brow of the hill. Immediately a young laborer, his face distorted with terror, slips round from behind the stone.

THE LABORER [crossing himself repeatedly]. Oh glory be to God! glory be to God! Oh Holy Mother an all the saints! Oh murdher! murdher! [Beside himself, calling Fadher Keegan! Fadher Keegan]!

THE MAN [turning]. Who’s there? What’s that? [He comes back and finds the laborer, who clasps his knees] Patsy Farrell! What are you doing here?

PATSY. O for the love o God don’t lave me here wi dhe grasshopper. I hard it spakin to you. Don’t let it do me any harm, Father darlint.

KEEGAN. Get up, you foolish man, get up. Are you afraid of a poor insect because I pretended it was talking to me?

PATSY. Oh, it was no pretending, Fadher dear. Didn’t it give three cheers n say it was a divil out o hell? Oh say you’ll see me safe home, Fadher; n put a blessin on me or somethin [he moans with terror].

KEEGAN. What were you doin there, Patsy, listnin? Were you spyin on me?

PATSY. No, Fadher: on me oath an soul I wasn’t: I was waitn to meet Masther Larry n carry his luggage from the car; n I fell asleep on the grass; n you woke me talkin to the grasshopper; n I hard its wicked little voice. Oh, d’ye think I’ll die before the year’s out, Fadher?

KEEGAN. For shame, Patsy! Is that your religion, to be afraid of a little deeshy grasshopper? Suppose it was a divil, what call have you to fear it? If I could ketch it, I’d make you take it home widja in your hat for a penance.

PATSY. Sure, if you won’t let it harm me, I’m not afraid, your riverence. [He gets up, a little reassured. He is a callow, flaxen polled, smoothfaced, downy chinned lad, fully grown but not yet fully filled out, with blue eyes and an instinctively acquired air of helplessness and silliness, indicating, not his real character, but a cunning developed by his constant dread of a hostile dominance, which he habitually tries to disarm and tempt into unmasking by pretending to be a much greater fool than he really is. Englishmen think him half-witted, which is exactly what he intends them to think. He is clad in corduroy trousers, unbuttoned waistcoat, and coarse blue striped shirt].

KEEGAN [admonitorily]. Patsy: what did I tell you about callin me Father Keegan an your reverence? What did Father Dempsey tell you about it?

PATSY. Yis, Fadher.

KEEGAN. Father!

PATSY [desperately]. Arra, hwat am I to call you? Fadher Dempsey sez you’re not a priest; n we all know you’re not a man; n how do we know what ud happen to us if we showed any disrespect to you? N sure they say wanse a priest always a priest.

KEEGAN [sternly]. It’s not for the like of you, Patsy, to go behind the instruction of your parish priest and set yourself up to judge whether your Church is right or wrong.

PATSY. Sure I know that, sir.

KEEGAN. The Church let me be its priest as long as it thought me fit for its work. When it took away my papers it meant you to know that I was only a poor madman, unfit and unworthy to take charge of the souls of the people.

PATSY. But wasn’t it only because you knew more Latn than Father Dempsey that he was jealous of you?

KEEGAN [scolding him to keep himself from smiling]. How dar you, Patsy Farrell, put your own wicked little spites and foolishnesses into the heart of your priest? For two pins I’d tell him what you just said.

PATSY [coaxing] Sure you wouldn’t —

KEEGAN. Wouldn’t I? God forgive you! You’re little better than a heathen.

PATSY. Deedn I am, Fadher: it’s me bruddher the tinsmith in Dublin you’re thinkin of. Sure he had to be a freethinker when he larnt a thrade and went to live in the town.

KEEGAN. Well, he’ll get to Heaven before you if you’re not careful, Patsy. And now you listen to me, once and for all. You’ll talk to me and pray for me by the name of Pether Keegan, so you will. And when you’re angry and tempted to lift your hand agen the donkey or stamp your foot on the little grasshopper, remember that the donkey’s Pether Keegan’s brother, and the grasshopper Pether Keegan’s friend. And when you’re tempted to throw a stone at a sinner or a curse at a beggar, remember that Pether Keegan is a worse sinner and a worse beggar, and keep the stone and the curse for him the next time you meet him. Now say God bless you, Pether, to me before I go, just to practise you a bit.

PATSY. Sure it wouldn’t be right, Fadher. I can’t —

KEEGAN. Yes you can. Now out with it; or I’ll put this stick into your hand an make you hit me with it.

PATSY [throwing himself on his knees in an ecstasy of adoration]. Sure it’s your blessin I want, Fadher Keegan. I’ll have no luck widhout it.

KEEGAN [shocked]. Get up out o that, man. Don’t kneel to me: I’m not a saint.

PATSY [with intense conviction]. Oh in throth yar, sir. [The grasshopper chirps. Patsy, terrified, clutches at Keegan’s hands] Don’t set it on me, Fadher: I’ll do anythin you bid me.

KEEGAN [pulling him up]. You bosthoon, you! Don’t you see that it only whistled to tell me Miss Reilly’s comin? There! Look at her and pull yourself together for shame. Off widja to the road: you’ll be late for the car if you don’t make haste [bustling him down the hill]. I can see the dust of it in the gap already.

PATSY. The Lord save us! [He goes down the hill towards the road like a haunted man].

Nora Reilly comes down the hill. A slight weak woman in a pretty muslin print gown [her best], she is a figure commonplace enough to Irish eyes; but on the inhabitants of fatter-fed, crowded, hustling and bustling modern countries she makes a very different impression. The absence of any symptoms of coarseness or hardness or appetite in her, her comparative delicacy of manner and sensibility of apprehension, her thin hands and slender figure, her travel accent, with the caressing plaintive Irish melody of her speech, give her a charm which is all the more effective because, being untravelled, she is unconscious of it, and never dreams of deliberately dramatizing and exploiting it, as the Irishwoman in England does. For Tom Broadbent therefore, an attractive woman, whom he would even call ethereal. To Larry Doyle, an everyday woman fit only for the eighteenth century, helpless, useless, almost sexless, an invalid without the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove him out of it. These judgments have little value and no finality; but they are the judgments on which her fate hangs just at present. Keegan touches his hat to her: he does not take it off.

NORA. Mr Keegan: I want to speak to you a minute if you don’t mind.

KEEGAN [dropping the broad Irish vernacular of his speech to Patsy]. An hour if you like, Miss Reilly: you’re always welcome. Shall we sit down?

NORA. Thank you. [They sit on the heather. She is shy and anxious; but she comes to the point promptly because she can think of nothing else]. They say you did a gradle o travelling at one time.

KEEGAN. Well you see I’m not a Mnooth man [he means that he was not a student at Maynooth College]. When I was young I admired the older generation of priests that had been educated in Salamanca. So when I felt sure of my vocation I went to Salamanca. Then I walked from Salamanca to Rome, an sted in a monastery there for a year. My pilgrimage to Rome taught me that walking is a better way of travelling than the train; so I walked from Rome to the Sorbonne in Paris; and I wish I could have walked from Paris to Oxford; for I was very sick on the sea. After a year of Oxford I had to walk to Jerusalem to walk the Oxford feeling off me. From Jerusalem I came back to Patmos, and spent six months at the monastery of Mount Athos. From that I came to Ireland and settled down as a parish priest until I went mad.

NORA [startled]. Oh dons say that.

KEEGAN. Why not? Don’t you know the story? how I confessed a black man and gave him absolution; and how he put a spell on me and drove me mad.

NORA. How can you talk such nonsense about yourself? For shame!

KEEGAN. It’s not nonsense at all: it’s true — in a way. But never mind the black man. Now that you know what a travelled man I am, what can I do for you? [She hesitates and plucks nervously at the heather. He stays her hand gently]. Dear Miss Nora: don’t pluck the little flower. If it was a pretty baby you wouldn’t want to pull its head off and stick it in a vawse o water to look at. [The grasshopper chirps: Keegan turns his head and addresses it in the vernacular]. Be aisy, me son: she won’t spoil the swing-swong in your little three. [To Nora, resuming his urbane style] You see I’m quite cracked; but never mind: I’m harmless. Now what is it?

NORA [embarrassed]. Oh, only idle curiosity. I wanted to know whether you found Ireland — I mean the country part of Ireland, of course — very small and backwardlike when you came back to it from Rome and Oxford and all the great cities.

KEEGAN. When I went to those great cities I saw wonders I had never seen in Ireland. But when I came back to Ireland I found all the wonders there waiting for me. You see they had been there all the time; but my eyes had never been opened to them. I did not know what my own house was like, because I had never been outside it.

NORA. D’ye think that’s the same with everybody?

KEEGAN. With everybody who has eyes in his soul as well as in his head.

NORA. But really and truly now, weren’t the people rather disappointing? I should think the girls must have seemed rather coarse and dowdy after the foreign princesses and people? But I suppose a priest wouldn’t notice that.

KEEGAN. It’s a priest’s business to notice everything. I won’t tell you all I noticed about women; but I’ll tell you this. The more a man knows, and the farther he travels, the more likely he is to marry a country girl afterwards.

NORA [blushing with delight]. You’re joking, Mr Keegan: I’m sure yar.

KEEGAN. My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

NORA [incredulous]. Galong with you!

KEEGAN [springing up actively]. Shall we go down to the road and meet the car? [She gives him her hand and he helps her up]. Patsy Farrell told me you were expecting young Doyle.

NORA [tossing her chin up at once]. Oh, I’m not expecting him particularly. It’s a wonder he’s come back at all. After staying away eighteen years he can harly expect us to be very anxious to see him, can he now?

KEEGAN. Well, not anxious perhaps; but you will be curious to see how much he has changed in all these years.

NORA [with a sudden bitter flush]. I suppose that’s all that brings him back to look at us, just to see how much WE’VE changed. Well, he can wait and see me be candlelight: I didn’t come out to meet him: I’m going to walk to the Round Tower [going west across the hill].

KEEGAN. You couldn’t do better this fine evening. [Gravely] I’ll tell him where you’ve gone. [She turns as if to forbid him; but the deep understanding in his eyes makes that impossible; and she only looks at him earnestly and goes. He watches her disappear on the other side of the hill; then says] Aye, he’s come to torment you; and you’re driven already to torment him. [He shakes his head, and goes slowly away across the hill in the opposite direction, lost in thought].

By this time the car has arrived, and dropped three of its passengers on the high road at the foot of the hill. It is a monster jaunting car, black and dilapidated, one of the last survivors of the public vehicles known to earlier generations as Beeyankiny cars, the Irish having laid violent tongues on the name of their projector, one Bianconi, an enterprising Italian. The three passengers are the parish priest, Father Dempsey; Cornelius Doyle, Larry’s father; and Broadbent, all in overcoats and as stiff as only an Irish car could make them.

The priest, stout and fatherly, falls far short of that finest type of countryside pastor which represents the genius of priesthood; but he is equally far above the base type in which a strongminded and unscrupulous peasant uses the Church to extort money, power, and privilege. He is a priest neither by vocation nor ambition, but because the life suits him. He has boundless authority over his flock, and taxes them stiffly enough to be a rich man. The old Protestant ascendency is now too broken to gall him. On the whole, an easygoing, amiable, even modest man as long as his dues are paid and his authority and dignity fully admitted.

Cornelius Doyle is an elder of the small wiry type, with a hardskinned, rather worried face, clean shaven except for sandy whiskers blanching into a lustreless pale yellow and quite white at the roots. His dress is that of a country-town titan of business: that is, an oldish shooting suit, and elastic sided boots quite unconnected with shooting. Feeling shy with Broadbent, he is hasty, which is his way of trying to appear genial.

Broadbent, for reasons which will appear later, has no luggage except a field glass and a guide book. The other two have left theirs to the unfortunate Patsy Farrell, who struggles up the hill after them, loaded with a sack of potatoes, a hamper, a fat goose, a colossal salmon, and several paper parcels.

Cornelius leads the way up the hill, with Broadbent at his heels. The priest follows; and Patsy lags laboriously behind.

CORNELIUS. This is a bit of a climb, Mr. Broadbent; but it’s shorter than goin round be the road.

BROADBENT [stopping to examine the great stone]. Just a moment, Mr Doyle: I want to look at this stone. It must be Finian’s die-cast.

CORNELIUS [in blank bewilderment]. Hwat?

BROADBENT. Murray describes it. One of your great national heroes — I can’t pronounce the name — Finian Somebody, I think.

FATHER DEMPSEY [also perplexed, and rather scandalized]. Is it Fin McCool you mean?

BROADBENT. I daresay it is. [Referring to the guide book]. Murray says that a huge stone, probably of Druidic origin, is still pointed out as the die cast by Fin in his celebrated match with the devil.

CORNELIUS [dubiously]. Jeuce a word I ever heard of it!

FATHER DEMPSEY [very seriously indeed, and even a little severely]. Don’t believe any such nonsense, sir. There never was any such thing. When people talk to you about Fin McCool and the like, take no notice of them. It’s all idle stories and superstition.

BROADBENT [somewhat indignantly; for to be rebuked by an Irish priest for superstition is more than he can stand]. You don’t suppose I believe it, do you?

FATHER DEMPSEY. Oh, I thought you did. D’ye see the top o the Roun Tower there? That’s an antiquity worth lookin at.

BROADBENT [deeply interested]. Have you any theory as to what the Round Towers were for?

FATHER DEMPSEY [a little offended]. A theory? Me! [Theories are connected in his mind with the late Professor Tyndall, and with scientific scepticism generally: also perhaps with the view that the Round Towers are phallic symbols].

CORNELIUS [remonstrating]. Father Dempsey is the priest of the parish, Mr Broadbent. What would he be doing with a theory?

FATHER DEMPSEY [with gentle emphasis]. I have a KNOWLEDGE of what the Roun Towers were, if that’s what you mean. They are the forefingers of the early Church, pointing us all to God.

Patsy, intolerably overburdened, loses his balance, and sits down involuntarily. His burdens are scattered over the hillside. Cornelius and Father Dempsey turn furiously on him, leaving Broadbent beaming at the stone and the tower with fatuous interest.

CORNELIUS. Oh, be the hokey, the sammin’s broke in two! You schoopid ass, what d’ye mean?

FATHER DEMPSEY. Are you drunk, Patsy Farrell? Did I tell you to carry that hamper carefully or did I not?

PATSY [rubbing the back of his head, which has almost dented a slab of granite] Sure me fut slpt. Howkn I carry three men’s luggage at wanst?

FATHER DEMPSEY. You were told to leave behind what you couldn’t carry, an go back for it.

PATSY. An whose things was I to lave behind? Hwat would your reverence think if I left your hamper behind in the wet grass; n hwat would the masther say if I left the sammin and the goose be the side o the road for annywan to pick up?

CORNELIUS. Oh, you’ve a dale to say for yourself, you, butther-fingered omadhaun. Wait’ll Ant Judy sees the state o that sammin: SHE’LL talk to you. Here! gimme that birdn that fish there; an take Father Dempsey’s hamper to his house for him; n then come back for the rest.

FATHER DEMPSEY. Do, Patsy. And mind you don’t fall down again.

PATSY. Sure I —

CORNELIUS [bustling him up the bill] Whisht! heres Ant Judy. [Patsy goes grumbling in disgrace, with Father Dempsey’s hamper].

Aunt Judy comes down the hill, a woman of 50, in no way remarkable, lively and busy without energy or grip, placid without tranquillity, kindly without concern for others: indeed without much concern for herself: a contented product of a narrow, strainless life. She wears her hair parted in the middle and quite smooth, with a fattened bun at the back. Her dress is a plain brown frock, with a woollen pelerine of black and aniline mauve over her shoulders, all very trim in honor of the occasion. She looks round for Larry; is puzzled; then stares incredulously at Broadbent.

AUNT JUDY. Surely to goodness that’s not you, Larry!

CORNELIUS. Arra how could he be Larry, woman alive? Larry’s in no hurry home, it seems. I haven’t set eyes on him. This is his friend, Mr Broadbent. Mr Broadbent, me sister Judy.

AUNT JUDY [hospitably: going to Broadbent and shaking hands heartily]. Mr. Broadbent! Fancy me takin you for Larry! Sure we haven’t seen a sight of him for eighteen years, n he only a lad when he left us.

BROADBENT. It’s not Larry’s fault: he was to have been here before me. He started in our motor an hour before Mr Doyle arrived, to meet us at Athenmullet, intending to get here long before me.

AUNT JUDY. Lord save us! do you think he’s had n axidnt?

BROADBENT. No: he’s wired to say he’s had a breakdown and will come on as soon as he can. He expects to be here at about ten.

AUNT JUDY. There now! Fancy him trustn himself in a motor and we all expectn him! Just like him! he’d never do anything like anybody else. Well, what can’t be cured must be injoored. Come on in, all of you. You must be dyin for your tea, Mr Broadbent.

BROADBENT [with a slight start]. Oh, I’m afraid it’s too late for tea [he looks at his watch].

AUNT JUDY. Not a bit: we never have it airlier than this. I hope they gave you a good dinner at Athenmullet.

BROADBENT [trying to conceal his consternation as he realizes that he is not going to get any dinner after his drive] Oh — er — excellent, excellent. By the way, hadn’t I better see about a room at the hotel? [They stare at him].

CORNELIUS. The hotel!

FATHER DEMPSEY. Hwat hotel?

AUNT JUDY. Indeedn you’e not goin to a hotel. You’ll stay with us. I’d have put you into Larry’s room, only the boy’s pallyass is too short for you; but we’ll make a comfortable bed for you on the sofa in the parlor.

BROADBENT. You’re very kind, Miss Doyle; but really I’m ashamed to give you so much trouble unnecessarily. I shan’t mind the hotel in the least.

FATHER DEMPSEY. Man alive! There’s no hotel in Rosscullen.

BROADBENT. No hotel! Why, the driver told me there was the finest hotel in Ireland here. [They regard him joylessly].

AUNT JUDY. Arra would you mind what the like of him would tell you? Sure he’d say hwatever was the least trouble to himself and the pleasantest to you, thinkin you might give him a thruppeny bit for himself or the like.

BROADBENT. Perhaps there’s a public house.

FATHER DEMPSEY [grimly.] There’s seventeen.

AUNT JUDY. Ah then, how could you stay at a public house? They’d have no place to put you even if it was a right place for you to go. Come! is it the sofa you’re afraid of? If it is, you can have me own bed. I can sleep with Nora.

BROADBENT. Not at all, not at all: I should be only too delighted. But to upset your arrangements in this way —

CORNELIUS [anxious to cut short the discussion, which makes him ashamed of his house; for he guesses Broadbent’s standard of comfort a little more accurately than his sister does] That’s all right: it’ll be no trouble at all. Hweres Nora?

AUNT JUDY. Oh, how do I know? She slipped out a little while ago: I thought she was goin to meet the car.

CORNELIUS [dissatisfied] It’s a queer thing of her to run out o the way at such a time.

AUNT JUDY. Sure she’s a queer girl altogether. Come. Come in, come in.

FATHER DEMPSEY. I’ll say good-night, Mr Broadbent. If there’s anything I can do for you in this parish, let me know. [He shakes hands with Broadbent].

BROADBENT [effusively cordial]. Thank you, Father Dempsey. Delighted to have met you, sir.

FATHER DEMPSEY [passing on to Aunt Judy]. Good-night, Miss Doyle.

AUNT JUDY. Won’t you stay to tea?

FATHER DEMPSEY. Not to-night, thank you kindly: I have business to do at home. [He turns to go, and meets Patsy Farrell returning unloaded]. Have you left that hamper for me?

PATSY. Yis, your reverence.

FATHER DEMPSEY. That’s a good lad [going].

PATSY [to Aunt Judy] Fadher Keegan sez —

FATHER DEMPSEY [turning sharply on him]. What’s that you say?

PATSY [frightened]. Fadher Keegan —

FATHER DEMPSEY. How often have you heard me bid you call Mister Keegan in his proper name, the same as I do? Father Keegan indeed! Can’t you tell the difference between your priest and any ole madman in a black coat?

PATSY. Sure I’m afraid he might put a spell on me.

FATHER DEMPSEY [wrathfully]. You mind what I tell you or I’ll put a spell on you that’ll make you lep. D’ye mind that now? [He goes home].

Patsy goes down the hill to retrieve the fish, the bird, and the sack.

AUNT JUDY. Ah, hwy can’t you hold your tongue, Patsy, before Father Dempsey?

PATSY. Well, what was I to do? Father Keegan bid me tell you Miss Nora was gone to the Roun Tower.

AUNT JUDY. An hwy couldn’t you wait to tell us until Father Dempsey was gone?

PATSY. I was afeerd o forgetn it; and then maybe he’d a sent the grasshopper or the little dark looker into me at night to remind me of it. [The dark looker is the common grey lizard, which is supposed to walk down the throats of incautious sleepers and cause them to perish in a slow decline].

CORNELIUS. Yah, you great gaum, you! Widjer grasshoppers and dark lookers! Here: take up them things and let me hear no more o your foolish lip. [Patsy obeys]. You can take the sammin under your oxther. [He wedges the salmon into Patsy’s axilla].

PATSY. I can take the goose too, sir. Put it on me back and gimme the neck of it in me mouth. [Cornelius is about to comply thoughtlessly].

AUNT JUDY [feeling that Broadbent’s presence demands special punctiliousness]. For shame, Patsy! to offer to take the goose in your mouth that we have to eat after you! The master’ll bring it in for you. [Patsy, abashed, yet irritated by this ridiculous fastidiousness, takes his load up the hill].

CORNELIUS. What the jeuce does Nora want to go to the Roun Tower for?

AUNT JUDY. Oh, the Lord knows! Romancin, I suppose. Props she thinks Larry would go there to look for her and see her safe home.

BROADBENT. I’m afraid it’s all the fault of my motor. Miss Reilly must not be left to wait and walk home alone at night. Shall I go for her?

AUNT JUDY [contemptuously]. Arra hwat ud happen to her? Hurry in now, Corny. Come, Mr Broadbent. I left the tea on the hob to draw; and it’ll be black if we don’t go in an drink it.

They go up the hill. It is dark by this time.

Broadbent does not fare so badly after all at Aunt Judy’s board. He gets not only tea and bread-and-butter, but more mutton chops than he has ever conceived it possible to eat at one sitting. There is also a most filling substance called potato cake. Hardly have his fears of being starved been replaced by his first misgiving that he is eating too much and will be sorry for it tomorrow, when his appetite is revived by the production of a bottle of illicitly distilled whisky, called pocheen, which he has read and dreamed of [he calls it pottine] and is now at last to taste. His good humor rises almost to excitement before Cornelius shows signs of sleepiness. The contrast between Aunt Judy’s table service and that of the south and east coast hotels at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London, seems to him delightfully Irish. The almost total atrophy of any sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or toleration of the possibility of life being something better than a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes with his guest as the whimsical affectation of a shrewd Irish humorist and incorrigible spendthrift. Aunt Judy seems to him an incarnate joke. The likelihood that the joke will pall after a month or so, and is probably not apparent at any time to born Rossculleners, or that he himself unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations, does not occur to him for a moment. In the end he is so charmed, and so loth to go to bed and perhaps dream of prosaic England, that he insists on going out to smoke a cigar and look for Nora Reilly at the Round Tower. Not that any special insistence is needed; for the English inhibitive instinct does not seem to exist in Rosscullen. Just as Nora’s liking to miss a meal and stay out at the Round Tower is accepted as a sufficient reason for her doing it, and for the family going to bed and leaving the door open for her, so Broadbent’s whim to go out for a late stroll provokes neither hospitable remonstrance nor surprise. Indeed Aunt Judy wants to get rid of him whilst she makes a bed for him on the sofa. So off he goes, full fed, happy and enthusiastic, to explore the valley by moonlight.

The Round Tower stands about half an Irish mile from Rosscullen, some fifty yards south of the road on a knoll with a circle of wild greensward on it. The road once ran over this knoll; but modern engineering has tempered the level to the Beeyankiny car by carrying the road partly round the knoll and partly through a cutting; so that the way from the road to the tower is a footpath up the embankment through furze and brambles.

On the edge of this slope, at the top of the path, Nora is straining her eyes in the moonlight, watching for Larry. At last she gives it up with a sob of impatience, and retreats to the hoary foot of the tower, where she sits down discouraged and cries a little. Then she settles herself resignedly to wait, and hums a song — not an Irish melody, but a hackneyed English drawing-room ballad of the season before last — until some slight noise suggests a footstep, when she springs up eagerly and runs to the edge of the slope again. Some moments of silence and suspense follow, broken by unmistakable footsteps. She gives a little gasp as she sees a man approaching.

NORA. Is that you, Larry? [Frightened a little] Who’s that?

[BROADBENT’s voice from below on the path]. Don’t be alarmed.

NORA. Oh, what an English accent you’ve got!

BROADBENT [rising into view] I must introduce myself —

NORA [violently startled, retreating]. It’s not you! Who are you? What do you want?

BROADBENT [advancing]. I’m really so sorry to have alarmed you, Miss Reilly. My name is Broadbent. Larry’s friend, you know.

NORA [chilled]. And has Mr Doyle not come with you?

BROADBENT. No. I’ve come instead. I hope I am not unwelcome.

NORA [deeply mortified]. I’m sorry Mr Doyle should have given you the trouble, I’m sure.

BROADBENT. You see, as a stranger and an Englishman, I thought it would be interesting to see the Round Tower by moonlight.

NORA. Oh, you came to see the tower. I thought — [confused, trying to recover her manners] Oh, of course. I was so startled — It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?

BROADBENT. Lovely. I must explain why Larry has not come himself.

NORA. Why should he come? He’s seen the tower often enough: it’s no attraction to him. [Genteelly] An what do you think of Ireland, Mr Broadbent? Have you ever been here before?

BROADBENT. Never.

NORA. An how do you like it?

BROADBENT [suddenly betraying a condition of extreme sentimentality]. I can hardly trust myself to say how much I like it. The magic of this Irish scene, and — I really don’t want to be personal, Miss Reilly; but the charm of your Irish voice —

NORA [quite accustomed to gallantry, and attaching no seriousness whatever to it]. Oh, get along with you, Mr Broadbent! You’re breaking your heart about me already, I daresay, after seeing me for two minutes in the dark.

BROADBENT. The voice is just as beautiful in the dark, you know. Besides, I’ve heard a great deal about you from Larry.

NORA [with bitter indifference]. Have you now? Well, that’s a great honor, I’m sure.

BROADBENT. I have looked forward to meeting you more than to anything else in Ireland.

NORA [ironically]. Dear me! did you now?

BROADBENT. I did really. I wish you had taken half as much interest in me.

NORA. Oh, I was dying to see you, of course. I daresay you can imagine the sensation an Englishman like you would make among us poor Irish people.

BROADBENT. Ah, now you’re chaffing me, Miss Reilly: you know you are. You mustn’t chaff me. I’m very much in earnest about Ireland and everything Irish. I’m very much in earnest about you and about Larry.

NORA. Larry has nothing to do with me, Mr Broadbent.

BROADBENT. If I really thought that, Miss Reilly, I should — well, I should let myself feel that charm of which I spoke just now more deeply than I — than I —

NORA. Is it making love to me you are?

BROADBENT [scared and much upset]. On my word I believe I am, Miss Reilly. If you say that to me again I shan’t answer for myself: all the harps of Ireland are in your voice. [She laughs at him. He suddenly loses his head and seizes her arms, to her great indignation]. Stop laughing: do you hear? I am in earnest — in English earnest. When I say a thing like that to a woman, I mean it. [Releasing her and trying to recover his ordinary manner in spite of his bewildering emotion] I beg your pardon.

NORA. How dare you touch me?

BROADBENT. There are not many things I would not dare for you. That does not sound right perhaps; but I really — [he stops and passes his hand over his forehead, rather lost].

NORA. I think you ought to be ashamed. I think if you were a gentleman, and me alone with you in this place at night, you would die rather than do such a thing.

BROADBENT. You mean that it’s an act of treachery to Larry?

NORA. Deed I don’t. What has Larry to do with it? It’s an act of disrespect and rudeness to me: it shows what you take me for. You can go your way now; and I’ll go mine. Goodnight, Mr Broadbent.

BROADBENT. No, please, Miss Reilly. One moment. Listen to me. I’m serious: I’m desperately serious. Tell me that I’m interfering with Larry; and I’ll go straight from this spot back to London and never see you again. That’s on my honor: I will. Am I interfering with him?

NORA [answering in spite of herself in a sudden spring of bitterness]. I should think you ought to know better than me whether you’re interfering with him. You’ve seen him oftener than I have. You know him better than I do, by this time. You’ve come to me quicker than he has, haven’t you?

BROADBENT. I’m bound to tell you, Miss Reilly, that Larry has not arrived in Rosscullen yet. He meant to get here before me; but his car broke down; and he may not arrive until to-morrow.

NORA [her face lighting up]. Is that the truth?

BROADBENT. Yes: that’s the truth. [She gives a sigh of relief]. You’re glad of that?

NORA [up in arms at once]. Glad indeed! Why should I be glad? As we’ve waited eighteen years for him we can afford to wait a day longer, I should think.

BROADBENT. If you really feel like that about him, there may be a chance for another man yet. Eh?

NORA [deeply offended]. I suppose people are different in England, Mr Broadbent; so perhaps you don’t mean any harm. In Ireland nobody’d mind what a man’d say in fun, nor take advantage of what a woman might say in answer to it. If a woman couldn’t talk to a man for two minutes at their first meeting without being treated the way you’re treating me, no decent woman would ever talk to a man at all.

BROADBENT. I don’t understand that. I don’t admit that. I am sincere; and my intentions are perfectly honorable. I think you will accept the fact that I’m an Englishman as a guarantee that I am not a man to act hastily or romantically, though I confess that your voice had such an extraordinary effect on me just now when you asked me so quaintly whether I was making love to you —

NORA [flushing] I never thought —

BROADHHNT [quickly]. Of course you didn’t. I’m not so stupid as that. But I couldn’t bear your laughing at the feeling it gave me. You — [again struggling with a surge of emotion] you don’t know what I — [he chokes for a moment and then blurts out with unnatural steadiness] Will you be my wife?

NORA [promptly]. Deed I won’t. The idea! [Looking at him more carefully] Arra, come home, Mr Broadbent; and get your senses back again. I think you’re not accustomed to potcheen punch in the evening after your tea.

BROADBENT [horrified]. Do you mean to say that I — I — I — my God! that I appear drunk to you, Miss Reilly?

NORA [compassionately]. How many tumblers had you?

BROADBENT [helplessly]. Two.

NORA. The flavor of the turf prevented you noticing the strength of it. You’d better come home to bed.

BROADBENT [fearfully agitated]. But this is such a horrible doubt to put into my mind — to — to — For Heaven’s sake, Miss Reilly, am I really drunk?

NORA [soothingly]. You’ll be able to judge better in the morning. Come on now back with me, an think no more about it. [She takes his arm with motherly solicitude and urges him gently toward the path].

BROADBENT [yielding in despair]. I must be drunk — frightfully drunk; for your voice drove me out of my senses [he stumbles over a stone]. No: on my word, on my most sacred word of honor, Miss Reilly, I tripped over that stone. It was an accident; it was indeed.

NORA. Yes, of course it was. Just take my arm, Mr Broadbent, while we’re goin down the path to the road. You’ll be all right then.

BROADBENT [submissively taking it]. I can’t sufficiently apologize, Miss Reilly, or express my sense of your kindness when I am in such a disgusting state. How could I be such a bea — [he trips again] damn the heather! my foot caught in it.

NORA. Steady now, steady. Come along: come. [He is led down to the road in the character of a convicted drunkard. To him there it something divine in the sympathetic indulgence she substitutes for the angry disgust with which one of his own countrywomen would resent his supposed condition. And he has no suspicion of the fact, or of her ignorance of it, that when an Englishman is sentimental he behaves very much as an Irishman does when he is drunk].

ACT III

Next morning Broadbent and Larry are sitting at the ends of a breakfast table in the middle of a small grass plot before Cornelius Doyle’s house. They have finished their meal, and are buried in newspapers. Most of the crockery is crowded upon a large square black tray of japanned metal. The teapot is of brown delft ware. There is no silver; and the butter, on a dinner plate, is en bloc. The background to this breakfast is the house, a small white slated building, accessible by a half-glazed door. A person coming out into the garden by this door would find the table straight in front of him, and a gate leading to the road half way down the garden on his right; or, if he turned sharp to his left, he could pass round the end of the house through an unkempt shrubbery. The mutilated remnant of a huge planter statue, nearly dissolved by the rains of a century, and vaguely resembling a majestic female in Roman draperies, with a wreath in her hand, stands neglected amid the laurels. Such statues, though apparently works of art, grow naturally in Irish gardens. Their germination is a mystery to the oldest inhabitants, to whose means and taste they are totally foreign.

There is a rustic bench, much roiled by the birds, and decorticated and split by the weather, near the little gate. At the opposite side, a basket lies unmolested because it might as well be there as anywhere else. An empty chair at the table was lately occupied by Cornelius, who has finished his breakfast and gone in to the room in which he receives rents and keeps his books and cash, known in the household as “the office.” This chair, like the two occupied by Larry and Broadbent, has a mahogany frame and is upholstered in black horsehair.

Larry rises and goes off through the shrubbery with his newspaper. Hodson comes in through the garden gate, disconsolate. Broadbent, who sits facing the gate, augurs the worst from his expression.

BROADBENT. Have you been to the village?

HODSON. No use, sir. We’ll have to get everything from London by parcel post.

BROADBENT. I hope they made you comfortable last night.

HODSON. I was no worse than you were on that sofa, sir. One expects to rough it here, sir.

BROADBENT. We shall have to look out for some other arrangement. [Cheering up irrepressibly] Still, it’s no end of a joke. How do you like the Irish, Hodson?

HODSON. Well, sir, they’re all right anywhere but in their own country. I’ve known lots of em in England, and generally liked em. But here, sir, I seem simply to hate em. The feeling come over me the moment we landed at Cork, sir. It’s no use my pretendin, sir: I can’t bear em. My mind rises up agin their ways, somehow: they rub me the wrong way all over.

BROADBENT. Oh, their faults are on the surface: at heart they are one of the finest races on earth. [Hodson turns away, without affecting to respond to his enthusiasm]. By the way, Hodson —

HODSON [turning]. Yes, sir.

BROADBENT. Did you notice anything about me last night when I came in with that lady?

HODSON [surprised]. No, sir.

BROADBENT. Not any — er — ? You may speak frankly.

HODSON. I didn’t notice nothing, sir. What sort of thing ded you mean, sir?

BROADBENT. Well — er — er — well, to put it plainly, was I drunk?

HODSON [amazed]. No, sir.

BROADBENT. Quite sure?

HODSON. Well, I should a said rather the opposite, sir. Usually when you’ve been enjoying yourself, you’re a bit hearty like. Last night you seemed rather low, if anything.

BROADBENT. I certainly have no headache. Did you try the pottine, Hodson?

HODSON. I just took a mouthful, sir. It tasted of peat: oh! something horrid, sir. The people here call peat turf. Potcheen and strong porter is what they like, sir. I’m sure I don’t know how they can stand it. Give me beer, I say.

BROADBENT. By the way, you told me I couldn’t have porridge for breakfast; but Mr Doyle had some.

HODSON. Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir. They call it stirabout, sir: that’s how it was. They know no better, sir.

BROADBENT. All right: I’ll have some tomorrow.

Hodson goes to the house. When he opens the door he finds Nora and Aunt Judy on the threshold. He stands aside to let them pass, with the air of a well trained servant oppressed by heavy trials. Then he goes in. Broadbent rises. Aunt Judy goes to the table and collects the plates and cups on the tray. Nora goes to the back of the rustic seat and looks out at the gate with the air of a woman accustomed to have nothing to do. Larry returns from the shrubbery.

BROADBENT. Good morning, Miss Doyle.

AUNT JUDY [thinking it absurdly late in the day for such a salutation]. Oh, good morning. [Before moving his plate] Have you done?

BROADBENT. Quite, thank you. You must excuse us for not waiting for you. The country air tempted us to get up early.

AUNT JUDY. N d’ye call this airly, God help you?

LARRY. Aunt Judy probably breakfasted about half past six.

AUNT JUDY. Whisht, you! — draggin the parlor chairs out into the gardn n givin Mr Broadbent his death over his meals out here in the cold air. [To Broadbent] Why d’ye put up with his foolishness, Mr Broadbent?

BROADBENT. I assure you I like the open air.

AUNT JUDY. Ah galong! How can you like what’s not natural? I hope you slept well.

NORA. Did anything wake yup with a thump at three o’clock? I thought the house was falling. But then I’m a very light sleeper.

LARRY. I seem to recollect that one of the legs of the sofa in the parlor had a way of coming out unexpectedly eighteen years ago. Was that it, Tom?

BROADBENT [hastily]. Oh, it doesn’t matter: I was not hurt — at least — er —

AUNT JUDY. Oh now what a shame! An I told Patsy Farrll to put a nail in it.

BROADBENT. He did, Miss Doyle. There was a nail, certainly.

AUNT JUDY. Dear oh dear!

An oldish peasant farmer, small, leathery, peat faced, with a deep voice and a surliness that is meant to be aggressive, and is in effect pathetic — the voice of a man of hard life and many sorrows — comes in at the gate. He is old enough to have perhaps worn a long tailed frieze coat and knee breeches in his time; but now he is dressed respectably in a black frock coat, tall hat, and pollard colored trousers; and his face is as clean as washing can make it, though that is not saying much, as the habit is recently acquired and not yet congenial.

THE NEW-COMER [at the gate]. God save all here! [He comes a little way into the garden].

LARRY [patronizingly, speaking across the garden to him]. Is that yourself, Mat Haffigan? Do you remember me?

MATTHEW [intentionally rude and blunt]. No. Who are you?

NORA. Oh, I’m sure you remember him, Mr Haffigan.

MATTHEW [grudgingly admitting it]. I suppose he’ll be young Larry Doyle that was.

LARRY. Yes.

MATTHEW [to Larry]. I hear you done well in America.

LARRY. Fairly well.

MATTHEW. I suppose you saw me brother Andy out dhere.

LARRY. No. It’s such a big place that looking for a man there is like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. They tell me he’s a great man out there.

MATTHEW. So he is, God be praised. Where’s your father?

AUNT JUDY. He’s inside, in the office, Mr Haffigan, with Barney Doarn n Father Dempsey.

Matthew, without wasting further words on the company, goes curtly into the house.

LARRY [staring after him]. Is anything wrong with old Mat?

NORA. No. He’s the same as ever. Why?

LARRY. He’s not the same to me. He used to be very civil to Master Larry: a deal too civil, I used to think. Now he’s as surly and stand-off as a bear.

AUNT JUDY. Oh sure he’s bought his farm in the Land Purchase. He’s independent now.

NORA. It’s made a great change, Larry. You’d harly know the old tenants now. You’d think it was a liberty to speak t’dhem — some o dhem. [She goes to the table, and helps to take off the cloth, which she and Aunt Judy fold up between them].

AUNT JUDY. I wonder what he wants to see Corny for. He hasn’t been here since he paid the last of his old rent; and then he as good as threw it in Corny’s face, I thought.

LARRY. No wonder! Of course they all hated us like the devil. Ugh! [Moodily] I’ve seen them in that office, telling my father what a fine boy I was, and plastering him with compliments, with your honor here and your honor there, when all the time their fingers were itching to beat his throat.

AUNT JUDY. Deedn why should they want to hurt poor Corny? It was he that got Mat the lease of his farm, and stood up for him as an industrious decent man.

BROADBENT. Was he industrious? That’s remarkable, you know, in an Irishman.

LARRY. Industrious! That man’s industry used to make me sick, even as a boy. I tell you, an Irish peasant’s industry is not human: it’s worse than the industry of a coral insect. An Englishman has some sense about working: he never does more than he can help — and hard enough to get him to do that without scamping it; but an Irishman will work as if he’d die the moment he stopped. That man Matthew Haffigan and his brother Andy made a farm out of a patch of stones on the hillside — cleared it and dug it with their own naked hands and bought their first spade out of their first crop of potatoes. Talk of making two blades of wheat grow where one grew before! those two men made a whole field of wheat grow where not even a furze bush had ever got its head up between the stones.

BROADBENT. That was magnificent, you know. Only a great race is capable of producing such men.

LARRY. Such fools, you mean! What good was it to them? The moment they’d done it, the landlord put a rent of 5 pounds a year on them, and turned them out because they couldn’t pay it.

AUNT JUDY. Why couldn’t they pay as well as Billy Byrne that took it after them?

LARRY [angrily]. You know very well that Billy Byrne never paid it. He only offered it to get possession. He never paid it.

AUNT JUDY. That was because Andy Haffigan hurt him with a brick so that he was never the same again. Andy had to run away to America for it.

BROADBENT [glowing with indignation]. Who can blame him, Miss Doyle? Who can blame him?

LARRY [impatiently]. Oh, rubbish! What’s the good of the man that’s starved out of a farm murdering the man that’s starved into it? Would you have done such a thing?

BROADBENT. Yes. I — I — I — I — [stammering with fury] I should have shot the confounded landlord, and wrung the neck of the damned agent, and blown the farm up with dynamite, and Dublin Castle along with it.

LARRY. Oh yes: you’d have done great things; and a fat lot of good you’d have got out of it, too! That’s an Englishman all over! make bad laws and give away all the land, and then, when your economic incompetence produces its natural and inevitable results, get virtuously indignant and kill the people that carry out your laws.

AUNT JUDY. Sure never mind him, Mr Broadbent. It doesn’t matter, anyhow, because there’s harly any landlords left; and ther’ll soon be none at all.

LARRY. On the contrary, ther’ll soon be nothing else; and the Lord help Ireland then!

AUNT JUDY. Ah, you’re never satisfied, Larry. [To Nora] Come on, alanna, an make the paste for the pie. We can leave them to their talk. They don’t want us [she takes up the tray and goes into the house].

BROADBENT [rising and gallantly protesting] Oh, Miss Doyle! Really, really —

Nora, following Aunt Judy with the rolled-up cloth in her hands, looks at him and strikes him dumb. He watches her until she disappears; then comes to Larry and addresses him with sudden intensity.

BROADBENT. Larry.

LARRY. What is it?

BROADBENT. I got drunk last night, and proposed to Miss Reilly.

LARRY. You HWAT??? [He screams with laughter in the falsetto Irish register unused for that purpose in England].

BROADBENT. What are you laughing at?

LARRY [stopping dead]. I don’t know. That’s the sort of thing an Irishman laughs at. Has she accepted you?

BROADBENT. I shall never forget that with the chivalry of her nation, though I was utterly at her mercy, she refused me.

LARRY. That was extremely improvident of her. [Beginning to reflect] But look here: when were you drunk? You were sober enough when you came back from the Round Tower with her.

BROADBENT. No, Larry, I was drunk, I am sorry to say. I had two tumblers of punch. She had to lead me home. You must have noticed it.

LARRY. I did not.

BROADBENT. She did.

LARRY. May I ask how long it took you to come to business? You can hardly have known her for more than a couple of hours.

BROADBENT. I am afraid it was hardly a couple of minutes. She was not here when I arrived; and I saw her for the first time at the tower.

LARRY. Well, you are a nice infant to be let loose in this country! Fancy the potcheen going to your head like that!

BROADBENT. Not to my head, I think. I have no headache; and I could speak distinctly. No: potcheen goes to the heart, not to the head. What ought I to do?

LARRY. Nothing. What need you do?

BROADBENT. There is rather a delicate moral question involved. The point is, was I drunk enough not to be morally responsible for my proposal? Or was I sober enough to be bound to repeat it now that I am undoubtedly sober?

LARRY. I should see a little more of her before deciding.

BROADBENT. No, no. That would not be right. That would not be fair. I am either under a moral obligation or I am not. I wish I knew how drunk I was.

LARRY. Well, you were evidently in a state of blithering sentimentality, anyhow.

BROADBENT. That is true, Larry: I admit it. Her voice has a most extraordinary effect on me. That Irish voice!

LARRY [sympathetically]. Yes, I know. When I first went to London I very nearly proposed to walk out with a waitress in an Aerated Bread shop because her Whitechapel accent was so distinguished, so quaintly touching, so pretty —

BROADBENT [angrily]. Miss Reilly is not a waitress, is she?

LARRY. Oh, come! The waitress was a very nice girl.

BROADBENT. You think every Englishwoman an angel. You really have coarse tastes in that way, Larry. Miss Reilly is one of the finer types: a type rare in England, except perhaps in the best of the aristocracy.

LARRY. Aristocracy be blowed! Do you know what Nora eats?

BROADBENT. Eats! what do you mean?

LARRY. Breakfast: tea and bread-and-butter, with an occasional rasher, and an egg on special occasions: say on her birthday. Dinner in the middle of the day, one course and nothing else. In the evening, tea and bread-and-butter again. You compare her with your Englishwomen who wolf down from three to five meat meals a day; and naturally you find her a sylph. The difference is not a difference of type: it’s the difference between the woman who eats not wisely but too well, and the woman who eats not wisely but too little.

BROADBENT [furious]. Larry: you — you — you disgust me. You are a damned fool. [He sits down angrily on the rustic seat, which sustains the shock with difficulty].

LARRY. Steady! stead-eee! [He laughs and seats himself on the table].

Cornelius Doyle, Father Dempsey, Barney Doran, and Matthew Haffigan come from the house. Doran is a stout bodied, short armed, roundheaded, red-haired man on the verge of middle age, of sanguine temperament, with an enormous capacity for derisive, obscene, blasphemous, or merely cruel and senseless fun, and a violent and impetuous intolerance of other temperaments and other opinions, all this representing energy and capacity wasted and demoralized by want of sufficient training and social pressure to force it into beneficent activity and build a character with it; for Barney is by no means either stupid or weak. He is recklessly untidy as to his person; but the worst effects of his neglect are mitigated by a powdering of flour and mill dust; and his unbrushed clothes, made of a fashionable tailor’s sackcloth, were evidently chosen regardless of expense for the sake of their appearance.

Matthew Haffigan, ill at ease, coasts the garden shyly on the shrubbery side until he anchors near the basket, where he feels least in the way. The priest comes to the table and slaps Larry on the shoulder. Larry, turning quickly, and recognizing Father Dempsey, alights from the table and shakes the priest’s hand warmly. Doran comes down the garden between Father Dempsey and Matt; and Cornelius, on the other side of the table, turns to Broadbent, who rises genially.

CORNELIUS. I think we all met las night.

DORAN. I hadn’t that pleasure.

CORNELIUS. To be sure, Barney: I forgot. [To Broadbent, introducing Barney] Mr Doran. He owns that fine mill you noticed from the car.

BROADBENT [delighted with them all]. Most happy, Mr Doran. Very pleased indeed.

Doran, not quite sure whether he is being courted or patronized, nods independently.

DORAN. How’s yourself, Larry?

LARRY. Finely, thank you. No need to ask you. [Doran grins; and they shake hands].

CORNELIUS. Give Father Dempsey a chair, Larry.

Matthew Haffigan runs to the nearest end of the table and takes the chair from it, placing it near the basket; but Larry has already taken the chair from the other end and placed it in front of the table. Father Dempsey accepts that more central position.

CORNELIUS. Sit down, Barney, will you; and you, Mat.

Doran takes the chair Mat is still offering to the priest; and poor Matthew, outfaced by the miller, humbly turns the basket upside down and sits on it. Cornelius brings his own breakfast chair from the table and sits down on Father Dempsey’s right. Broadbent resumes his seat on the rustic bench. Larry crosses to the bench and is about to sit down beside him when Broadbent holds him off nervously.

BROADBENT. Do you think it will bear two, Larry?

LARRY. Perhaps not. Don’t move. I’ll stand. [He posts himself behind the bench].

They are all now seated, except Larry; and the session assumes a portentous air, as if something important were coming.

CORNELIUS. Props you’ll explain, Father Dempsey.

FATHER DEMPSEY. No, no: go on, you: the Church has no politics.

CORNELIUS. Were yever thinkin o goin into parliament at all, Larry?

LARRY. Me!

FATHER DEMPSEY [encouragingly] Yes, you. Hwy not?

LARRY. I’m afraid my ideas would not be popular enough.

CORNELIUS. I don’t know that. Do you, Barney?

DORAN. There’s too much blatherumskite in Irish politics a dale too much.

LARRY. But what about your present member? Is he going to retire?

CORNELIUS. No: I don’t know that he is.

LARRY [interrogatively]. Well? then?

MATTHEW [breaking out with surly bitterness]. We’ve had enough of his foolish talk agen lanlords. Hwat call has he to talk about the lan, that never was outside of a city office in his life?

CORNELIUS. We’re tired of him. He doesn’t know hwere to stop. Every man can’t own land; and some men must own it to employ them. It was all very well when solid men like Doran and me and Mat were kep from ownin land. But hwat man in his senses ever wanted to give land to Patsy Farrll an dhe like o him?

BROADBENT. But surely Irish landlordism was accountable for what Mr Haffigan suffered.

MATTHEW. Never mind hwat I suffered. I know what I suffered adhout you tellin me. But did I ever ask for more dhan the farm I made wid me own hans: tell me that, Corny Doyle, and you that knows. Was I fit for the responsibility or was I not? [Snarling angrily at Cornelius] Am I to be compared to Patsy Farrll, that doesn’t harly know his right hand from his left? What did he ever suffer, I’d like to know?

CORNELIUS. That’s just what I say. I wasn’t comparin you to your disadvantage.

MATTHEW [implacable]. Then hwat did you mane be talkin about givin him lan?

DORAN. Aisy, Mat, aisy. You’re like a bear with a sore back.

MATTHEW [trembling with rage]. An who are you, to offer to taitch me manners?

FATHER DEMPSEY [admonitorily]. Now, now, now, Mat none o dhat. How often have I told you you’re too ready to take offence where none is meant? You don’t understand: Corny Doyle is saying just what you want to have said. [To Cornelius] Go on, Mr Doyle; and never mind him.

MATTHEW [rising]. Well, if me lan is to be given to Patsy and his like, I’m goin oura dhis. I —

DORAN [with violent impatience] Arra who’s goin to give your lan to Patsy, yowl fool ye?

FATHER DEMPSEY. Aisy, Barney, aisy. [Sternly, to Mat] I told you, Matthew Haffigan, that Corny Doyle was sayin nothin against you. I’m sorry your priest’s word is not good enough for you. I’ll go, sooner than stay to make you commit a sin against the Church. Good morning, gentlemen. [He rises. They all rise, except Broadbent].

DORAN [to Mat]. There! Sarve you dam well right, you cantankerous oul noodle.

MATTHEW [appalled]. Don’t say dhat, Fadher Dempsey. I never had a thought agen you or the Holy Church. I know I’m a bit hasty when I think about the lan. I ax your pardn for it.

FATHER DEMPSEY [resuming his seat with dignified reserve]. Very well: I’ll overlook it this time. [He sits down. The others sit down, except Matthew. Father Dempsey, about to ask Corny to proceed, remembers Matthew and turns to him, giving him just a crumb of graciousness]. Sit down, Mat. [Matthew, crushed, sits down in disgrace, and is silent, his eyes shifting piteously from one speaker to another in an intensely mistrustful effort to understand them]. Go on, Mr Doyle. We can make allowances. Go on.

CORNELIUS. Well, you see how it is, Larry. Round about here, we’ve got the land at last; and we want no more Goverment meddlin. We want a new class o man in parliament: one dhat knows dhat the farmer’s the real backbone o the country, n doesn’t care a snap of his fingers for the shoutn o the riff-raff in the towns, or for the foolishness of the laborers.

DORAN. Aye; an dhat can afford to live in London and pay his own way until Home Rule comes, instead o wantin subscriptions and the like.

FATHER DEMPSEY. Yes: that’s a good point, Barney. When too much money goes to politics, it’s the Church that has to starve for it. A member of parliament ought to be a help to the Church instead of a burden on it.

LARRY. Here’s a chance for you, Tom. What do you say?

BROADBENT [deprecatory, but important and smiling]. Oh, I have no claim whatever to the seat. Besides, I’m a Saxon.

DORAN. A hwat?

BROADBENT. A Saxon. An Englishman.

DORAN. An Englishman. Bedad I never heard it called dhat before.

MATTHEW [cunningly]. If I might make so bould, Fadher, I wouldn’t say but an English Prodestn mightn’t have a more indepindent mind about the lan, an be less afeerd to spake out about it, dhan an Irish Catholic.

CORNELIUS. But sure Larry’s as good as English: aren’t you, Larry?

LARRY. You may put me out of your head, father, once for all.

CORNELIUS. Arra why?

LARRY. I have strong opinions which wouldn’t suit you.

DORAN [rallying him blatantly]. Is it still Larry the bould Fenian?

LARRY. No: the bold Fenian is now an older and possibly foolisher man.

CORNELIUS. Hwat does it matter to us hwat your opinions are? You know that your father’s bought his farm, just the same as Mat here n Barney’s mill. All we ask now is to be let alone. You’ve nothin against that, have you?

LARRY. Certainly I have. I don’t believe in letting anybody or anything alone.

CORNELIUS [losing his temper]. Arra what d’ye mean, you young fool? Here I’ve got you the offer of a good seat in parliament; n you think yourself mighty smart to stand there and talk foolishness to me. Will you take it or leave it?

LARRY. Very well: I’ll take it with pleasure if you’ll give it to me.

CORNELIUS [subsiding sulkily]. Well, why couldn’t you say so at once? It’s a good job you’ve made up your mind at last.

DORAN [suspiciously]. Stop a bit, stop a bit.

MATTHEW [writhing between his dissatisfaction and his fear of the priest]. It’s not because he’s your son that he’s to get the sate. Fadher Dempsey: wouldn’t you think well to ask him what he manes about the lan?

LARRY [coming down on Mat promptly]. I’ll tell you, Mat. I always thought it was a stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing sort of thing to leave the land in the hands of the old landlords without calling them to a strict account for the use they made of it, and the condition of the people on it. I could see for myself that they thought of nothing but what they could get out of it to spend in England; and that they mortgaged and mortgaged until hardly one of them owned his own property or could have afforded to keep it up decently if he’d wanted to. But I tell you plump and plain, Mat, that if anybody thinks things will be any better now that the land is handed over to a lot of little men like you, without calling you to account either, they’re mistaken.

MATTHEW [sullenly]. What call have you to look down on me? I suppose you think you’re everybody because your father was a land agent.

LARRY. What call have you to look down on Patsy Farrell? I suppose you think you’re everybody because you own a few fields.

MATTHEW. Was Patsy Farrll ever ill used as I was ill used? tell me dhat.

LARRY. He will be, if ever he gets into your power as you were in the power of your old landlord. Do you think, because you’re poor and ignorant and half-crazy with toiling and moiling morning noon and night, that you’ll be any less greedy and oppressive to them that have no land at all than old Nick Lestrange, who was an educated travelled gentleman that would not have been tempted as hard by a hundred pounds as you’d be by five shillings? Nick was too high above Patsy Farrell to be jealous of him; but you, that are only one little step above him, would die sooner than let him come up that step; and well you know it.

MATTHEW [black with rage, in a low growl]. Lemme oura this. [He tries to rise; but Doran catches his coat and drags him down again] I’m goin, I say. [Raising his voice] Leggo me coat, Barney Doran.

DORAN. Sit down, yowl omadhaun, you. [Whispering] Don’t you want to stay an vote against him?

FATHER DEMPSEY [holding up his finger] Mat! [Mat subsides]. Now, now, now! come, come! Hwats all dhis about Patsy Farrll? Hwy need you fall out about HIM?

LARRY. Because it was by using Patsy’s poverty to undersell England in the markets of the world that we drove England to ruin Ireland. And she’ll ruin us again the moment we lift our heads from the dust if we trade in cheap labor; and serve us right too! If I get into parliament, I’ll try to get an Act to prevent any of you from giving Patsy less than a pound a week [they all start, hardly able to believe their ears] or working him harder than you’d work a horse that cost you fifty guineas.

DORAN. Hwat!!!

CORNELIUS [aghast]. A pound a — God save us! the boy’s mad.

Matthew, feeling that here is something quite beyond his powers, turns openmouthed to the priest, as if looking for nothing less than the summary excommunication of Larry.

LARRY. How is the man to marry and live a decent life on less?

FATHER DEMPSEY. Man alive, hwere have you been living all these years? and hwat have you been dreaming of? Why, some o dhese honest men here can’t make that much out o the land for themselves, much less give it to a laborer.

LARRY [now thoroughly roused]. Then let them make room for those who can. Is Ireland never to have a chance? First she was given to the rich; and now that they have gorged on her flesh, her bones are to be flung to the poor, that can do nothing but suck the marrow out of her. If we can’t have men of honor own the land, lets have men of ability. If we can’t have men with ability, let us at least have men with capital. Anybody’s better than Mat, who has neither honor, nor ability, nor capital, nor anything but mere brute labor and greed in him, Heaven help him!

DORAN. Well, we’re not all foostherin oul doddherers like Mat. [Pleasantly, to the subject of this description] Are we, Mat?

LARRY. For modern industrial purposes you might just as well be, Barney. You’re all children: the big world that I belong to has gone past you and left you. Anyhow, we Irishmen were never made to be farmers; and we’ll never do any good at it. We’re like the Jews: the Almighty gave us brains, and bid us farm them, and leave the clay and the worms alone.

FATHER DEMPSEY [with gentle irony]. Oh! is it Jews you want to make of us? I must catechize you a bit meself, I think. The next thing you’ll be proposing is to repeal the disestablishment of the so-called Irish Church.

LARRY. Yes: why not? [Sensation].

MATTHEW [rancorously]. He’s a turncoat.

LARRY. St Peter, the rock on which our Church was built, was crucified head downwards for being a turncoat.

FATHER DEMPSEY [with a quiet authoritative dignity which checks Doran, who is on the point of breaking out]. That’s true. You hold your tongue as befits your ignorance, Matthew Haffigan; and trust your priest to deal with this young man. Now, Larry Doyle, whatever the blessed St Peter was crucified for, it was not for being a Prodestan. Are you one?

LARRY. No. I am a Catholic intelligent enough to see that the Protestants are never more dangerous to us than when they are free from all alliances with the State. The so-called Irish Church is stronger today than ever it was.

MATTHEW. Fadher Dempsey: will you tell him dhat me mother’s ant was shot and kilt dead in the sthreet o Rosscullen be a soljer in the tithe war? [Frantically] He wants to put the tithes on us again. He —

LARRY [interrupting him with overbearing contempt]. Put the tithes on you again! Did the tithes ever come off you? Was your land any dearer when you paid the tithe to the parson than it was when you paid the same money to Nick Lestrange as rent, and he handed it over to the Church Sustentation Fund? Will you always be duped by Acts of Parliament that change nothing but the necktie of the man that picks your pocket? I’ll tell you what I’d do with you, Mat Haffigan: I’d make you pay tithes to your own Church. I want the Catholic Church established in Ireland: that’s what I want. Do you think that I, brought up to regard myself as the son of a great and holy Church, can bear to see her begging her bread from the ignorance and superstition of men like you? I would have her as high above worldly want as I would have her above worldly pride or ambition. Aye; and I would have Ireland compete with Rome itself for the chair of St Peter and the citadel of the Church; for Rome, in spite of all the blood of the martyrs, is pagan at heart to this day, while in Ireland the people is the Church and the Church the people.

FATHER DEMPSEY [startled, but not at all displeased]. Whisht, man! You’re worse than mad Pether Keegan himself.

BROADBENT [who has listened in the greatest astonishment]. You amaze me, Larry. Who would have thought of your coming out like this! [Solemnly] But much as I appreciate your really brilliant eloquence, I implore you not to desert the great Liberal principle of Disestablishment.

LARRY. I am not a Liberal: Heaven forbid! A disestablished Church is the worst tyranny a nation can groan under.

BROADBENT [making a wry face]. DON’T be paradoxical, Larry. It really gives me a pain in my stomach.

LARRY. You’ll soon find out the truth of it here. Look at Father Dempsey! he is disestablished: he has nothing to hope or fear from the State; and the result is that he’s the most powerful man in Rosscullen. The member for Rosscullen would shake in his shoes if Father Dempsey looked crooked at him. [Father Dempsey smiles, by no means averse to this acknowledgment of his authority]. Look at yourself! you would defy the established Archbishop of Canterbury ten times a day; but catch you daring to say a word that would shock a Nonconformist! not you. The Conservative party today is the only one that’s not priestridden — excuse the expression, Father [Father Dempsey nods tolerantly] — cause it’s the only one that has established its Church and can prevent a clergyman becoming a bishop if he’s not a Statesman as well as a Churchman.

He stops. They stare at him dumbfounded, and leave it to the priest to answer him.

FATHER DEMPSEY [judicially]. Young man: you’ll not be the member for Rosscullen; but there’s more in your head than the comb will take out.

LARRY. I’m sorry to disappoint you, father; but I told you it would be no use. And now I think the candidate had better retire and leave you to discuss his successor. [He takes a newspaper from the table and goes away through the shrubbery amid dead silence, all turning to watch him until he passes out of sight round the corner of the house].

DORAN [dazed]. Hwat sort of a fella is he at all at all?

FATHER DEMPSEY. He’s a clever lad: there’s the making of a man in him yet.

MATTHEW [in consternation]. D’ye mane to say dhat yll put him into parliament to bring back Nick Lesthrange on me, and to put tithes on me, and to rob me for the like o Patsy Farrll, because he’s Corny Doyle’s only son?

DORAN [brutally]. Arra hould your whisht: who’s goin to send him into parliament? Maybe you’d like us to send you dhere to thrate them to a little o your anxiety about dhat dirty little podato patch o yours.

MATTHEW [plaintively]. Am I to be towld dhis afther all me sufferins?

DORAN. Och, I’m tired o your sufferins. We’ve been hearin nothin else ever since we was childher but sufferins. Haven it wasn’t yours it was somebody else’s; and haven it was nobody else’s it was ould Irelan’s. How the divil are we to live on wan anodher’s sufferins?

FATHER DEMPSEY. That’s a thrue word, Barney Doarn; only your tongue’s a little too familiar wi dhe devil. [To Mat] If you’d think a little more o the sufferins of the blessed saints, Mat, an a little less o your own, you’d find the way shorter from your farm to heaven. [Mat is about to reply] Dhere now! Dhat’s enough! we know you mean well; an I’m not angry with you.

BROADBENT. Surely, Mr Haffigan, you can see the simple explanation of all this. My friend Larry Doyle is a most brilliant speaker; but he’s a Tory: an ingrained oldfashioned Tory.

CORNELIUS. N how d’ye make dhat out, if I might ask you, Mr Broadbent?

BROADBENT [collecting himself for a political deliverance]. Well, you know, Mr Doyle, there’s a strong dash of Toryism in the Irish character. Larry himself says that the great Duke of Wellington was the most typical Irishman that ever lived. Of course that’s an absurd paradox; but still there’s a great deal of truth in it. Now I am a Liberal. You know the great principles of the Liberal party. Peace —

FATHER DEMPSEY [piously]. Hear! hear!

BROADBENT [encouraged]. Thank you. Retrenchment — [he waits for further applause].

MATTHEW [timidly]. What might rethrenchment mane now?

BROADBENT. It means an immense reduction in the burden of the rates and taxes.

MATTHEW [respectfully approving]. Dhats right. Dhats right, sir.

BROADBENT [perfunctorily]. And, of course, Reform.

CORNELIUS           }
FATHER DEMPSEY} [conventionally]. Of course.
DORAN                  }

MATTHEW [still suspicious]. Hwat does Reform mane, sir? Does it mane altherin annythin dhats as it is now?

BROADBENT [impressively]. It means, Mr Haffigan, maintaining those reforms which have already been conferred on humanity by the Liberal Party, and trusting for future developments to the free activity of a free people on the basis of those reforms.

DORAN. Dhat’s right. No more meddlin. We’re all right now: all we want is to be let alone.

CORNELIUS. Hwat about Home Rule?

BROADBENT [rising so as to address them more imposingly]. I really cannot tell you what I feel about Home Rule without using the language of hyperbole.

DORAN. Savin Fadher Dempsey’s presence, eh?

BROADBENT [not understanding him] Quite so — er — oh yes. All I can say is that as an Englishman I blush for the Union. It is the blackest stain on our national history. I look forward to the time-and it cannot be far distant, gentlemen, because Humanity is looking forward to it too, and insisting on it with no uncertain voice — I look forward to the time when an Irish legislature shall arise once more on the emerald pasture of College Green, and the Union Jack — that detestable symbol of a decadent Imperialism — be replaced by a flag as green as the island over which it waves — a flag on which we shall ask for England only a modest quartering in memory of our great party and of the immortal name of our grand old leader.

DORAN [enthusiastically]. Dhat’s the style, begob! [He smites his knee, and winks at Mat].

MATTHEW. More power to you, Sir!

BROADBENT. I shall leave you now, gentlemen, to your deliberations. I should like to have enlarged on the services rendered by the Liberal Party to the religious faith of the great majority of the people of Ireland; but I shall content myself with saying that in my opinion you should choose no representative who — no matter what his personal creed may be — is not an ardent supporter of freedom of conscience, and is not prepared to prove it by contributions, as lavish as his means will allow, to the great and beneficent work which you, Father Dempsey [Father Dempsey bows], are doing for the people of Rosscullen. Nor should the lighter, but still most important question of the sports of the people be forgotten. The local cricket club —

CORNELIUS. The hwat!

DORAN. Nobody plays bats ball here, if dhat’s what you mean.

BROADBENT. Well, let us say quoits. I saw two men, I think, last night — but after all, these are questions of detail. The main thing is that your candidate, whoever he may be, shall be a man of some means, able to help the locality instead of burdening it. And if he were a countryman of my own, the moral effect on the House of Commons would be immense! tremendous! Pardon my saying these few words: nobody feels their impertinence more than I do. Good morning, gentlemen.

He turns impressively to the gate, and trots away, congratulating himself, with a little twist of his head and cock of his eye, on having done a good stroke of political business.

HAFFIGAN [awestruck]. Good morning, sir.

THE REST. Good morning. [They watch him vacantly until he is out of earshot].

CORNELIUS. Hwat d’ye think, Father Dempsey?

FATHER DEMPSEY [indulgently] Well, he hasn’t much sense, God help him; but for the matter o that, neither has our present member.

DORAN. Arra musha he’s good enough for parliament what is there to do there but gas a bit, an chivy the Goverment, an vote wi dh Irish party?

CORNELIUS [ruminatively]. He’s the queerest Englishman I ever met. When he opened the paper dhis mornin the first thing he saw was that an English expedition had been bet in a battle in Inja somewhere; an he was as pleased as Punch! Larry told him that if he’d been alive when the news o Waterloo came, he’d a died o grief over it. Bedad I don’t think he’s quite right in his head.

DORAN. Divil a matther if he has plenty o money. He’ll do for us right enough.

MATTHEW [deeply impressed by Broadbent, and unable to understand their levity concerning him]. Did you mind what he said about rethrenchment? That was very good, I thought.

FATHER DEMPSEY. You might find out from Larry, Corny, what his means are. God forgive us all! it’s poor work spoiling the Egyptians, though we have good warrant for it; so I’d like to know how much spoil there is before I commit meself. [He rises. They all rise respectfully].

CORNELIUS [ruefully]. I’d set me mind on Larry himself for the seat; but I suppose it can’t be helped.

FATHER DEMPSEY [consoling him]. Well, the boy’s young yet; an he has a head on him. Goodbye, all. [He goes out through the gate].

DORAN. I must be goin, too. [He directs Cornelius’s attention to what is passing in the road]. Look at me bould Englishman shakin hans wid Fadher Dempsey for all the world like a candidate on election day. And look at Fadher Dempsey givin him a squeeze an a wink as much as to say It’s all right, me boy. You watch him shakin hans with me too: he’s waitn for me. I’ll tell him he’s as good as elected. [He goes, chuckling mischievously].

CORNELIUS. Come in with me, Mat. I think I’ll sell you the pig after all. Come in an wet the bargain.

MATTHEW [instantly dropping into the old whine of the tenant]. I’m afeerd I can’t afford the price, sir. [He follows Cornelius into the house].

Larry, newspaper still in hand, comes back through the shrubbery. Broadbent returns through the gate.

LARRY. Well? What has happened.

BROADBENT [hugely self-satisfied]. I think I’ve done the trick this time. I just gave them a bit of straight talk; and it went home. They were greatly impressed: everyone of those men believes in me and will vote for me when the question of selecting a candidate comes up. After all, whatever you say, Larry, they like an Englishman. They feel they can trust him, I suppose.

LARRY. Oh! they’ve transferred the honor to you, have they?

BROADBENT [complacently]. Well, it was a pretty obvious move, I should think. You know, these fellows have plenty of shrewdness in spite of their Irish oddity. [Hodson comes from the house. Larry sits in Doran’s chair and reads]. Oh, by the way, Hodson —

HODSON [coming between Broadbent and Larry]. Yes, sir?

BROADBENT. I want you to be rather particular as to how you treat the people here.

HODSON. I haven’t treated any of em yet, sir. If I was to accept all the treats they offer me I shouldn’t be able to stand at this present moment, sir.

BROADBENT. Oh well, don’t be too stand-offish, you know, Hodson. I should like you to be popular. If it costs anything I’ll make it up to you. It doesn’t matter if you get a bit upset at first: they’ll like you all the better for it.

HODSON. I’m sure you’re very kind, sir; but it don’t seem to matter to me whether they like me or not. I’m not going to stand for parliament here, sir.

BROADBENT. Well, I am. Now do you understand?

HODSON [waking up at once]. Oh, I beg your pardon, sir, I’m sure. I understand, sir.

CORNELIUS [appearing at the house door with Mat]. Patsy’ll drive the pig over this evenin, Mat. Goodbye. [He goes back into the house. Mat makes for the gate. Broadbent stops him. Hodson, pained by the derelict basket, picks it up and carries it away behind the house].

BROADBENT [beaming candidatorially]. I must thank you very particularly, Mr Haffigan, for your support this morning. I value it because I know that the real heart of a nation is the class you represent, the yeomanry.

MATTHEW [aghast] The yeomanry!!!

LARRY [looking up from his paper]. Take care, Tom! In Rosscullen a yeoman means a sort of Orange Bashi-Bazouk. In England, Mat, they call a freehold farmer a yeoman.

MATTHEW [huffily]. I don’t need to be insthructed be you, Larry Doyle. Some people think no one knows anythin but dhemselves. [To Broadbent, deferentially] Of course I know a gentleman like you would not compare me to the yeomanry. Me own granfather was flogged in the sthreets of Athenmullet be them when they put a gun in the thatch of his house an then went and found it there, bad cess to them!

BROADBENT [with sympathetic interest]. Then you are not the first martyr of your family, Mr Haffigan?

MATTHEW. They turned me out o the farm I made out of the stones o Little Rosscullen hill wid me own hans.

BROADBENT. I have heard about it; and my blood still boils at the thought. [Calling] Hodson —

HODSON [behind the corner of the house] Yes, sir. [He hurries forward].

BROADBENT. Hodson: this gentleman’s sufferings should make every Englishman think. It is want of thought rather than want of heart that allows such iniquities to disgrace society.

HODSON [prosaically]. Yes sir.

MATTHEW. Well, I’ll be goin. Good mornin to you kindly, sir.

BROADBENT. You have some distance to go, Mr Haffigan: will you allow me to drive you home?

MATTHEW. Oh sure it’d be throublin your honor.

BROADBENT. I insist: it will give me the greatest pleasure, I assure you. My car is in the stable: I can get it round in five minutes.

MATTHEW. Well, sir, if you wouldn’t mind, we could bring the pig I’ve just bought from Corny.

BROADBENT [with enthusiasm]. Certainly, Mr Haffigan: it will be quite delightful to drive with a pig in the car: I shall feel quite like an Irishman. Hodson: stay with Mr Haffigan; and give him a hand with the pig if necessary. Come, Larry; and help me. [He rushes away through the shrubbery].

LARRY [throwing the paper ill-humoredly on the chair]. Look here, Tom! here, I say! confound it! [he runs after him].

MATTHEW [glowering disdainfully at Hodson, and sitting down on Cornelius’s chair as an act of social self-assertion] N are you the valley?

HODSON. The valley? Oh, I follow you: yes: I’m Mr Broadbent’s valet.

MATTHEW. Ye have an aisy time of it: you look purty sleek. [With suppressed ferocity] Look at me! Do I look sleek?

HODSON [sadly]. I wish I ad your ealth: you look as hard as nails. I suffer from an excess of uric acid.

MATTHEW. Musha what sort o disease is zhouragassid? Didjever suffer from injustice and starvation? Dhat’s the Irish disease. It’s aisy for you to talk o sufferin, an you livin on the fat o the land wid money wrung from us.

HODSON [Coolly]. Wots wrong with you, old chap? Has ennybody been doin ennything to you?

MATTHEW. Anythin timme! Didn’t your English masther say that the blood biled in him to hear the way they put a rint on me for the farm I made wid me own hans, and turned me out of it to give it to Billy Byrne?

HODSON. Ow, Tom Broadbent’s blood boils pretty easy over ennything that appens out of his own country. Don’t you be taken in by my ole man, Paddy.

MATTHEW [indignantly]. Paddy yourself! How dar you call me Paddy?

HODSON [unmoved]. You just keep your hair on and listen to me. You Irish people are too well off: that’s what’s the matter with you. [With sudden passion] You talk of your rotten little farm because you made it by chuckin a few stownes dahn a hill! Well, wot price my grenfawther, I should like to know, that fitted up a fuss clawss shop and built up a fuss clawss drapery business in London by sixty years work, and then was chucked aht of it on is ed at the end of is lease withaht a penny for his goodwill. You talk of evictions! you that cawn’t be moved until you’ve run up eighteen months rent. I once ran up four weeks in Lambeth when I was aht of a job in winter. They took the door off its inges and the winder aht of its sashes on me, and gave my wife pnoomownia. I’m a widower now. [Between his teeth] Gawd! when I think of the things we Englishmen av to put up with, and hear you Irish hahlin abaht your silly little grievances, and see the way you makes it worse for us by the rotten wages you’ll come over and take and the rotten places you’ll sleep in, I jast feel that I could take the oul bloomin British awland and make you a present of it, jast to let you find out wot real ardship’s like.

MATTHEW [starting up, more in scandalized incredulity than in anger]. D’ye have the face to set up England agen Ireland for injustices an wrongs an disthress an sufferin?

HODSON [with intense disgust and contempt, but with Cockney coolness]. Ow, chuck it, Paddy. Cheese it. You danno wot ardship is over ere: all you know is ah to ahl abaht it. You take the biscuit at that, you do. I’m a Owm Ruler, I am. Do you know why?

MATTHEW [equally contemptuous]. D’ye know, yourself?

HODSON. Yes I do. It’s because I want a little attention paid to my own country; and thet’ll never be as long as your chaps are ollerin at Wesminister as if nowbody mettered but your own bloomin selves. Send em back to hell or C’naught, as good oul English Cromwell said. I’m jast sick of Ireland. Let it gow. Cut the cable. Make it a present to Germany to keep the oul Kyzer busy for a while; and give poor owld England a chawnce: thets wot I say.

MATTHEW [full of scorn for a man so ignorant as to be unable to pronounce the word Connaught, which practically rhymes with bonnet in Ireland, though in Hodson’s dialect it rhymes with untaught]. Take care we don’t cut the cable ourselves some day, bad scran to you! An tell me dhis: have yanny Coercion Acs in England? Have yanny removables? Have you Dublin Castle to suppress every newspaper dhat takes the part o your own counthry?

HODSON. We can beyave ahrselves withaht sich things.

MATTHEW. Bedad you’re right. It’d only be waste o time to muzzle a sheep. Here! where’s me pig? God forgimme for talkin to a poor ignorant craycher like you.

HODSON [grinning with good-humored malice, too convinced of his own superiority to feel his withers wrung]. Your pig’ll ave a rare doin in that car, Paddy. Forty miles an ahr dahn that rocky lane will strike it pretty pink, you bet.

MATTHEW [scornfully]. Hwy can’t you tell a raisonable lie when you’re about it? What horse can go forty mile an hour?

HODSON. Orse! Wy, you silly oul rotten it’s not a orse it’s a mowtor. Do you suppose Tom Broadbent would gow off himself to arness a orse?

MATTHEW [in consternation]. Holy Moses! Don’t tell me it’s the ingine he wants to take me on.

HODSON. Wot else?

MATTHEW. Your sowl to Morris Kelly! why didn’t you tell me that before? The divil an ingine he’ll get me on this day. [His ear catches an approaching teuf-teuf] Oh murdher! it’s comin afther me: I hear the puff puff of it. [He runs away through the gate, much to Hodson’s amusement. The noise of the motor ceases; and Hodson, anticipating Broadbent’s return, throws off the politician and recomposes himself as a valet. Broadbent and Larry come through the shrubbery. Hodson moves aside to the gate].

BROADBENT. Where is Mr Haffigan? Has he gone for the pig?

HODSON. Bolted, sir! Afraid of the motor, sir.

BROADBENT [much disappointed]. Oh, that’s very tiresome. Did he leave any message?

HODSON. He was in too great a hurry, sir. Started to run home, sir, and left his pig behind him.

BROADBENT [eagerly]. Left the pig! Then it’s all right. The pig’s the thing: the pig will win over every Irish heart to me. We’ll take the pig home to Haffigan’s farm in the motor: it will have a tremendous effect. Hodson!

HODSON. Yes sir?

BROADBENT. Do you think you could collect a crowd to see the motor?

HODSON. Well, I’ll try, sir.

BROADBENT. Thank you, Hodson: do.

Hodson goes out through the gate.

LARRY [desperately]. Once more, Tom, will you listen to me?

BROADBENT. Rubbish! I tell you it will be all right.

LARRY. Only this morning you confessed how surprised you were to find that the people here showed no sense of humor.

BROADBENT [suddenly very solemn]. Yes: their sense of humor is in abeyance: I noticed it the moment we landed. Think of that in a country where every man is a born humorist! Think of what it means! [Impressively] Larry we are in the presence of a great national grief.

LARRY. What’s to grieve them?

BROADBENT. I divined it, Larry: I saw it in their faces. Ireland has never smiled since her hopes were buried in the grave of Gladstone.

LARRY. Oh, what’s the use of talking to such a man? Now look here, Tom. Be serious for a moment if you can.

BROADBENT [stupent] Serious! I!!!

LARRY. Yes, you. You say the Irish sense of humor is in abeyance. Well, if you drive through Rosscullen in a motor car with Haffigan’s pig, it won’t stay in abeyance. Now I warn you.

BROADBENT [breezily]. Why, so much the better! I shall enjoy the joke myself more than any of them. [Shouting] Hallo, Patsy Farrell, where are you?

PATSY [appearing in the shrubbery]. Here I am, your honor.

BROADBENT. Go and catch the pig and put it into the car — we’re going to take it to Mr Haffigan’s. [He gives Larry a slap on the shoulders that sends him staggering off through the gate, and follows him buoyantly, exclaiming] Come on, you old croaker! I’ll show you how to win an Irish seat.

PATSY [meditatively]. Bedad, if dhat pig gets a howlt o the handle o the machine — [He shakes his head ominously and drifts away to the pigsty].

ACT IV

The parlor in Cornelius Doyle’s house. It communicates with the garden by a half glazed door. The fireplace is at the other side of the room, opposite the door and windows, the architect not having been sensitive to draughts. The table, rescued from the garden, is in the middle; and at it sits Keegan, the central figure in a rather crowded apartment.

Nora, sitting with her back to the fire at the end of the table, is playing backgammon across its corner with him, on his left hand. Aunt Judy, a little further back, sits facing the fire knitting, with her feet on the fender. A little to Keegan’s right, in front of the table, and almost sitting on it, is Barney Doran. Half a dozen friends of his, all men, are between him and the open door, supported by others outside. In the corner behind them is the sofa, of mahogany and horsehair, made up as a bed for Broadbent. Against the wall behind Keegan stands a mahogany sideboard. A door leading to the interior of the house is near the fireplace, behind Aunt Judy. There are chairs against the wall, one at each end of the sideboard. Keegan’s hat is on the one nearest the inner door; and his stick is leaning against it. A third chair, also against the wall, is near the garden door.

There is a strong contrast of emotional atmosphere between the two sides of the room. Keegan is extraordinarily stern: no game of backgammon could possibly make a man’s face so grim. Aunt Judy is quietly busy. Nora it trying to ignore Doran and attend to her game.

On the other hand Doran is reeling in an ecstasy of mischievous mirth which has infected all his friends. They are screaming with laughter, doubled up, leaning on the furniture and against the walls, shouting, screeching, crying.

AUNT JUDY [as the noise lulls for a moment]. Arra hold your noise, Barney. What is there to laugh at?

DORAN. It got its fut into the little hweel — [he is overcome afresh; and the rest collapse again].

AUNT JUDY. Ah, have some sense: you’re like a parcel o childher. Nora, hit him a thump on the back: he’ll have a fit.

DORAN [with squeezed eyes, exsuflicate with cachinnation] Frens, he sez to dhem outside Doolan’s: I’m takin the gintleman that pays the rint for a dhrive.

AUNT JUDY. Who did he mean be that?

DORAN. They call a pig that in England. That’s their notion of a joke.

AUNT JUDY. Musha God help them if they can joke no better than that!

DORAN [with renewed symptoms]. Thin —

AUNT JUDY. Ah now don’t be tellin it all over and settin yourself off again, Barney.

NORA. You’ve told us three times, Mr Doran.

DORAN. Well but whin I think of it — !

AUNT JUDY. Then don’t think of it, alanna.

DORAN. There was Patsy Farrll in the back sate wi dhe pig between his knees, n me bould English boyoh in front at the machinery, n Larry Doyle in the road startin the injine wid a bed winch. At the first puff of it the pig lep out of its skin and bled Patsy’s nose wi dhe ring in its snout. [Roars of laughter: Keegan glares at them]. Before Broadbint knew hwere he was, the pig was up his back and over into his lap; and bedad the poor baste did credit to Corny’s thrainin of it; for it put in the fourth speed wid its right crubeen as if it was enthered for the Gordn Bennett.

NORA [reproachfully]. And Larry in front of it and all! It’s nothn to laugh at, Mr Doran.

DORAN. Bedad, Miss Reilly, Larry cleared six yards backwards at wan jump if he cleared an inch; and he’d a cleared seven if Doolan’s granmother hadn’t cotch him in her apern widhout intindin to. [Immense merriment].

AUNT JUDY, Ah, for shame, Barney! the poor old woman! An she was hurt before, too, when she slipped on the stairs.

DORAN. Bedad, ma’am, she’s hurt behind now; for Larry bouled her over like a skittle. [General delight at this typical stroke of Irish Rabelaisianism].

NORA. It’s well the lad wasn’t killed.

DORAN. Faith it wasn’t o Larry we were thinkin jus dhen, wi dhe pig takin the main sthreet o Rosscullen on market day at a mile a minnit. Dh ony thing Broadbint could get at wi dhe pig in front of him was a fut brake; n the pig’s tail was undher dhat; so that whin he thought he was putn non the brake he was ony squeezin the life out o the pig’s tail. The more he put the brake on the more the pig squealed n the fasther he dhruv.

AUNT JUDY. Why couldn’t he throw the pig out into the road?

DORAN. Sure he couldn’t stand up to it, because he was spanchelled-like between his seat and dhat thing like a wheel on top of a stick between his knees.

AUNT JUDY. Lord have mercy on us!

NORA. I don’t know how you can laugh. Do you, Mr Keegan?

KEEGAN [grimly]. Why not? There is danger, destruction, torment! What more do we want to make us merry? Go on, Barney: the last drops of joy are not squeezed from the story yet. Tell us again how our brother was torn asunder.

DORAN [puzzled]. Whose bruddher?

KEEGAN. Mine.

NORA. He means the pig, Mr Doran. You know his way.

DORAN [rising gallantly to the occasion]. Bedad I’m sorry for your poor bruddher, Misther Keegan; but I recommend you to thry him wid a couple o fried eggs for your breakfast tomorrow. It was a case of Excelsior wi dhat ambitious baste; for not content wid jumpin from the back seat into the front wan, he jumped from the front wan into the road in front of the car. And —

KEEGAN. And everybody laughed!

NORA. Don’t go over that again, please, Mr Doran.

DORAN. Faith be the time the car went over the poor pig dhere was little left for me or anywan else to go over except wid a knife an fork.

AUNT JUDY. Why didn’t Mr Broadbent stop the car when the pig was gone?

DORAN. Stop the car! He might as well ha thried to stop a mad bull. First it went wan way an made fireworks o Molly Ryan’s crockery stall; an dhen it slewed round an ripped ten fut o wall out o the corner o the pound. [With enormous enjoyment] Begob, it just tore the town in two and sent the whole dam market to blazes. [Nora offended, rises].

KEEGAN [indignantly]. Sir!

DORAN [quickly]. Savin your presence, Miss Reilly, and Misther Keegan’s. Dhere! I won’t say anuddher word.

NORA. I’m surprised at you, Mr Doran. [She sits down again].

DORAN [refectively]. He has the divil’s own luck, that Englishman, annyway; for when they picked him up he hadn’t a scratch on him, barrn hwat the pig did to his cloes. Patsy had two fingers out o jynt; but the smith pulled them sthraight for him. Oh, you never heard such a hullaballoo as there was. There was Molly, cryin Me chaney, me beautyful chaney! n oul Mat shoutin Me pig, me pig! n the polus takin the number o the car, n not a man in the town able to speak for laughin —

KEEGAN [with intense emphasis]. It is hell: it is hell. Nowhere else could such a scene be a burst of happiness for the people.

Cornelius comes in hastily from the garden, pushing his way through the little crowd.

CORNELIUS. Whisht your laughin, boys! Here he is. [He puts his hat on the sideboard, and goes to the fireplace, where he posts himself with his back to the chimneypiece].

AUNT JUDY. Remember your behavior, now.

Everybody becomes silent, solemn, concerned, sympathetic. Broadbent enters, roiled and disordered as to his motoring coat: immensely important and serious as to himself. He makes his way to the end of the table nearest the garden door, whilst Larry, who accompanies him, throws his motoring coat on the sofa bed, and sits down, watching the proceedings.

BROADBENT [taking off his leather cap with dignity and placing it on the table]. I hope you have not been anxious about me.

AUNT JUDY. Deedn we have, Mr Broadbent. It’s a mercy you weren’t killed.

DORAN. Kilt! It’s a mercy dheres two bones of you left houldin together. How dijjescape at all at all? Well, I never thought I’d be so glad to see you safe and sound again. Not a man in the town would say less [murmurs of kindly assent]. Won’t you come down to Doolan’s and have a dhrop o brandy to take the shock off?

BROADBENT. You’re all really too kind; but the shock has quite passed off.

DORAN [jovially]. Never mind. Come along all the same and tell us about it over a frenly glass.

BROADBENT. May I say how deeply I feel the kindness with which I have been overwhelmed since my accident? I can truthfully declare that I am glad it happened, because it has brought out the kindness and sympathy of the Irish character to an extent I had no conception of.

SEVERAL {Oh, sure you’re welcome!
PRESENT. {Sure it’s only natural.
{Sure you might have been kilt.

A young man, on the point of bursting, hurries out. Barney puts an iron constraint on his features.

BROADBENT. All I can say is that I wish I could drink the health of everyone of you.

DORAN. Dhen come an do it.

BROADBENT [very solemnly]. No: I am a teetotaller.

AUNT JUDY [incredulously]. Arra since when?

BROADBENT. Since this morning, Miss Doyle. I have had a lesson [he looks at Nora significantly] that I shall not forget. It may be that total abstinence has already saved my life; for I was astonished at the steadiness of my nerves when death stared me in the face today. So I will ask you to excuse me. [He collects himself for a speech]. Gentlemen: I hope the gravity of the peril through which we have all passed — for I know that the danger to the bystanders was as great as to the occupants of the car — will prove an earnest of closer and more serious relations between us in the future. We have had a somewhat agitating day: a valuable and innocent animal has lost its life: a public building has been wrecked: an aged and infirm lady has suffered an impact for which I feel personally responsible, though my old friend Mr Laurence Doyle unfortunately incurred the first effects of her very natural resentment. I greatly regret the damage to Mr Patrick Farrell’s fingers; and I have of course taken care that he shall not suffer pecuniarily by his mishap. [Murmurs of admiration at his magnanimity, and A Voice “You’re a gentleman, sir”]. I am glad to say that Patsy took it like an Irishman, and, far from expressing any vindictive feeling, declared his willingness to break all his fingers and toes for me on the same terms [subdued applause, and “More power to Patsy!”]. Gentlemen: I felt at home in Ireland from the first [rising excitement among his hearers]. In every Irish breast I have found that spirit of liberty [A cheery voice “Hear Hear”], that instinctive mistrust of the Government [A small pious voice, with intense expression, “God bless you, sir!”], that love of independence [A defiant voice, “That’s it! Independence!”], that indignant sympathy with the cause of oppressed nationalities abroad [A threatening growl from all: the ground-swell of patriotic passion], and with the resolute assertion of personal rights at home, which is all but extinct in my own country. If it were legally possible I should become a naturalized Irishman; and if ever it be my good fortune to represent an Irish constituency in parliament, it shall be my first care to introduce a Bill legalizing such an operation. I believe a large section of the Liberal party would avail themselves of it. [Momentary scepticism]. I do. [Convulsive cheering]. Gentlemen: I have said enough. [Cries of “Go on”]. No: I have as yet no right to address you at all on political subjects; and we must not abuse the warmhearted Irish hospitality of Miss Doyle by turning her sittingroom into a public meeting.

DORAN [energetically]. Three cheers for Tom Broadbent, the future member for Rosscullen!

AUNT JUDY [waving a half knitted sock]. Hip hip hurray!

The cheers are given with great heartiness, as it is by this time, for the more humorous spirits present, a question of vociferation or internal rupture.

BROADBENT. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, friends.

NORA [whispering to Doran]. Take them away, Mr Doran [Doran nods].

DORAN. Well, good evenin, Mr Broadbent; an may you never regret the day you wint dhrivin wid Halligan’s pig! [They shake hands]. Good evenin, Miss Doyle.

General handshaking, Broadbent shaking hands with everybody effusively. He accompanies them to the garden and can be heard outside saying Goodnight in every inflexion known to parliamentary candidates. Nora, Aunt Judy, Keegan, Larry, and Cornelius are left in the parlor. Larry goes to the threshold and watches the scene in the garden.

NORA. It’s a shame to make game of him like that. He’s a gradle more good in him than Barney Doran.

CORNELIUS. It’s all up with his candidature. He’ll be laughed out o the town.

LARRY [turning quickly from the doorway]. Oh no he won’t: he’s not an Irishman. He’ll never know they’re laughing at him; and while they’re laughing he’ll win the seat.

CORNELIUS. But he can’t prevent the story getting about.

LARRY. He won’t want to. He’ll tell it himself as one of the most providential episodes in the history of England and Ireland.

AUNT JUDY. Sure he wouldn’t make a fool of himself like that.

LARRY. Are you sure he’s such a fool after all, Aunt Judy? Suppose you had a vote! which would you rather give it to? the man that told the story of Haffigan’s pig Barney Doran’s way or Broadbent’s way?

AUNT JUDY. Faith I wouldn’t give it to a man at all. It’s a few women they want in parliament to stop their foolish blather.

BROADBENT [bustling into the room, and taking off his damaged motoring overcoat, which he put down on the sofa]. Well, that’s over. I must apologize for making that speech, Miss Doyle; but they like it, you know. Everything helps in electioneering.

Larry takes the chair near the door; draws it near the table; and sits astride it, with his elbows folded on the back.

AUNT JUDY. I’d no notion you were such an orator, Mr Broadbent.

BROADBENT. Oh, it’s only a knack. One picks it up on the platform. It stokes up their enthusiasm.

AUNT JUDY. Oh, I forgot. You’ve not met Mr Keegan. Let me introjooce you.

BROADBENT [shaking hands effusively]. Most happy to meet you, Mr Keegan. I have heard of you, though I have not had the pleasure of shaking your hand before. And now may I ask you — for I value no man’s opinion more — what you think of my chances here.

KEEGAN [coldly]. Your chances, sir, are excellent. You will get into parliament.

BROADBENT [delighted]. I hope so. I think so. [Fluctuating] You really think so? You are sure you are not allowing your enthusiasm for our principles to get the better of your judgment?

KEEGAN. I have no enthusiasm for your principles, sir. You will get into parliament because you want to get into it badly enough to be prepared to take the necessary steps to induce the people to vote for you. That is how people usually get into that fantastic assembly.

BROADBENT [puzzled]. Of course. [Pause]. Quite so. [Pause]. Er — yes. [Buoyant again] I think they will vote for me. Eh? Yes?

AUNT JUDY. Arra why shouldn’t they? Look at the people they DO vote for!

BROADBENT [encouraged]. That’s true: that’s very true. When I see the windbags, the carpet-baggers, the charlatans, the — the — the fools and ignoramuses who corrupt the multitude by their wealth, or seduce them by spouting balderdash to them, I cannot help thinking that an honest man with no humbug about him, who will talk straight common sense and take his stand on the solid ground of principle and public duty, must win his way with men of all classes.

KEEGAN [quietly]. Sir: there was a time, in my ignorant youth, when I should have called you a hypocrite.

BROADBENT [reddening]. A hypocrite!

NORA [hastily]. Oh I’m sure you don’t think anything of the sort, Mr Keegan.

BROADBENT [emphatically]. Thank you, Miss Reilly: thank you.

CORNELIUS [gloomily]. We all have to stretch it a bit in politics: hwat’s the use o pretendin we don’t?

BROADBENT [stiffly]. I hope I have said or done nothing that calls for any such observation, Mr Doyle. If there is a vice I detest — or against which my whole public life has been a protest — it is the vice of hypocrisy. I would almost rather be inconsistent than insincere.

KEEGAN. Do not be offended, sir: I know that you are quite sincere. There is a saying in the Scripture which runs — so far as the memory of an oldish man can carry the words — Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth. I learnt at Oxford that this is the secret of the Englishman’s strange power of making the best of both worlds.

BROADBENT. Surely the text refers to our right and left hands. I am somewhat surprised to hear a member of your Church quote so essentially Protestant a document as the Bible; but at least you might quote it accurately.

LARRY. Tom: with the best intentions you’re making an ass of yourself. You don’t understand Mr Keegan’s peculiar vein of humor.

BROADBENT [instantly recovering his confidence]. Ah! it was only your delightful Irish humor, Mr Keegan. Of course, of course. How stupid of me! I’m so sorry. [He pats Keegan consolingly on the back]. John Bull’s wits are still slow, you see. Besides, calling me a hypocrite was too big a joke to swallow all at once, you know.

KEEGAN. You must also allow for the fact that I am mad.

NORA. Ah, don’t talk like that, Mr Keegan.

BROADBENT [encouragingly]. Not at all, not at all. Only a whimsical Irishman, eh?

LARRY. Are you really mad, Mr Keegan?

AUNT JUDY [shocked]. Oh, Larry, how could you ask him such a thing?

LARRY. I don’t think Mr Keegan minds. [To Keegan] What’s the true version of the story of that black man you confessed on his deathbed?

KEEGAN. What story have you heard about that?

LARRY. I am informed that when the devil came for the black heathen, he took off your head and turned it three times round before putting it on again; and that your head’s been turned ever since.

NORA [reproachfully]. Larry!

KEEGAN [blandly]. That is not quite what occurred. [He collects himself for a serious utterance: they attend involuntarily]. I heard that a black man was dying, and that the people were afraid to go near him. When I went to the place I found an elderly Hindoo, who told me one of those tales of unmerited misfortune, of cruel ill luck, of relentless persecution by destiny, which sometimes wither the commonplaces of consolation on the lips of a priest. But this man did not complain of his misfortunes. They were brought upon him, he said, by sins committed in a former existence. Then, without a word of comfort from me, he died with a clear-eyed resignation that my most earnest exhortations have rarely produced in a Christian, and left me sitting there by his bedside with the mystery of this world suddenly revealed to me.

BROADBENT. That is a remarkable tribute to the liberty of conscience enjoyed by the subjects of our Indian Empire.

LARRY. No doubt; but may we venture to ask what is the mystery of this world?

KEEGAN. This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character are put to the horrible torture of imprisonment, not for hours but for years, in the name of justice. It is a place where the hardest toil is a welcome refuge from the horror and tedium of pleasure, and where charity and good works are done only for hire to ransom the souls of the spoiler and the sybarite. Now, sir, there is only one place of horror and torment known to my religion; and that place is hell. Therefore it is plain to me that this earth of ours must be hell, and that we are all here, as the Indian revealed to me — perhaps he was sent to reveal it to me to expiate crimes committed by us in a former existence.

AUNT JUDY [awestruck]. Heaven save us, what a thing to say!

CORNELIUS [sighing]. It’s a queer world: that’s certain.

BROADBENT. Your idea is a very clever one, Mr Keegan: really most brilliant: I should never have thought of it. But it seems to me — if I may say so — that you are overlooking the fact that, of the evils you describe, some are absolutely necessary for the preservation of society, and others are encouraged only when the Tories are in office.

LARRY. I expect you were a Tory in a former existence; and that is why you are here.

BROADBENT [with conviction]. Never, Larry, never. But leaving politics out of the question, I find the world quite good enough for me: rather a jolly place, in fact.

KEEGAN [looking at him with quiet wonder]. You are satisfied?

BROADBENT. As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world — except, of course, natural evils — that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government, and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.

KEEGAN. You feel at home in the world, then?

BROADBENT. Of course. Don’t you?

KEEGAN [from the very depths of his nature]. No.

BROADBENT [breezily]. Try phosphorus pills. I always take them when my brain is overworked. I’ll give you the address in Oxford Street.

KEEGAN [enigmatically: rising]. Miss Doyle: my wandering fit has come on me: will you excuse me?

AUNT JUDY. To be sure: you know you can come in n nout as you like.

KEEGAN. We can finish the game some other time, Miss Reilly. [He goes for his hat and stick.

NORA. No: I’m out with you [she disarranges the pieces and rises]. I was too wicked in a former existence to play backgammon with a good man like you.

AUNT JUDY [whispering to her]. Whisht, whisht, child! Don’t set him back on that again.

KEEGAN [to Nora]. When I look at you, I think that perhaps Ireland is only purgatory, after all. [He passes on to the garden door].

NORA. Galong with you!

BROADBENT [whispering to Cornelius]. Has he a vote?

CORNELIUS [nodding]. Yes. An there’s lots’ll vote the way he tells them.

KEEGAN [at the garden door, with gentle gravity]. Good evening, Mr Broadbent. You have set me thinking. Thank you.

BROADBENT [delighted, hurrying across to him to shake hands]. No, really? You find that contact with English ideas is stimulating, eh?

KEEGAN. I am never tired of hearing you talk, Mr Broadbent.

BROADBENT [modestly remonstrating]. Oh come! come!

KEEGAN. Yes, I assure you. You are an extremely interesting man. [He goes out].

BROADBENT [enthusiastically]. What a nice chap! What an intelligent, interesting fellow! By the way, I’d better have a wash. [He takes up his coat and cap, and leaves the room through the inner door].

Nora returns to her chair and shuts up the backgammon board.

AUNT JUDY. Keegan’s very queer to-day. He has his mad fit on him.

CORNELIUS [worried and bitter]. I wouldn’t say but he’s right after all. It’s a contrairy world. [To Larry]. Why would you be such a fool as to let him take the seat in parliament from you?

LARRY [glancing at Nora]. He will take more than that from me before he’s done here.

CORNELIUS. I wish he’d never set foot in my house, bad luck to his fat face! D’ye think he’d lend me 300 pounds on the farm, Larry? When I’m so hard up, it seems a waste o money not to mortgage it now it’s me own.

LARRY. I can lend you 300 pounds on it.

CORNELIUS. No, no: I wasn’t putn in for that. When I die and leave you the farm I should like to be able to feel that it was all me own, and not half yours to start with. Now I’ll take me oath Barney Doarn’s goin to ask Broadbent to lend him 500 pounds on the mill to put in a new hweel; for the old one’ll harly hol together. An Haffigan can’t sleep with covetn that corner o land at the foot of his medda that belongs to Doolan. He’ll have to mortgage to buy it. I may as well be first as last. D’ye think Broadbent’d len me a little?

LARRY. I’m quite sure he will.

CORNELIUS. Is he as ready as that? Would he len me five hunderd, d’ye think?

LARRY. He’ll lend you more than the land’ll ever be worth to you; so for Heaven’s sake be prudent.

CORNELIUS [judicially]. All right, all right, me son: I’ll be careful. I’m goin into the office for a bit. [He withdraws through the inner door, obviously to prepare his application to Broadbent].

AUNT JUDY [indignantly]. As if he hadn’t seen enough o borryin when he was an agent without beginnin borryin himself! [She rises]. I’ll bory him, so I will. [She puts her knitting on the table and follows him out, with a resolute air that bodes trouble for Cornelius].

Larry and Nora are left together for the first time since his arrival. She looks at him with a smile that perishes as she sees him aimlessly rocking his chair, and reflecting, evidently not about her, with his lips pursed as if he were whistling. With a catch in her throat she takes up Aunt Judy’s knitting, and makes a pretence of going on with it.

NORA. I suppose it didn’t seem very long to you.

LARRY [starting]. Eh? What didn’t?

NORA. The eighteen years you’ve been away.

LARRY. Oh, that! No: it seems hardly more than a week. I’ve been so busy — had so little time to think.

NORA. I’ve had nothin else to do but think.

LARRY. That was very bad for you. Why didn’t you give it up? Why did you stay here?

NORA. Because nobody sent for me to go anywhere else, I suppose. That’s why.

LARRY. Yes: one does stick frightfully in the same place, unless some external force comes and routs one out. [He yawns slightly; but as she looks up quickly at him, he pulls himself together and rises with an air of waking up and getting to work cheerfully to make himself agreeable]. And how have you been all this time?

NORA. Quite well, thank you.

LARRY. That’s right. [Suddenly finding that he has nothing else to say, and being ill at ease in consequence, he strolls about the room humming a certain tune from Offenbach’s Whittington].

NORA [struggling with her tears]. Is that all you have to say to me, Larry?

LARRY. Well, what is there to say? You see, we know each other so well.

NORA [a little consoled]. Yes: of course we do. [He does not reply]. I wonder you came back at all.

LARRY. I couldn’t help it. [She looks up affectionately]. Tom made me. [She looks down again quickly to conceal the effect of this blow. He whistles another stave; then resumes]. I had a sort of dread of returning to Ireland. I felt somehow that my luck would turn if I came back. And now here I am, none the worse.

NORA. Praps it’s a little dull for you.

LARRY. No: I haven’t exhausted the interest of strolling about the old places and remembering and romancing about them.

NORA [hopefully]. Oh! You DO remember the places, then?

LARRY. Of course. They have associations.

NORA [not doubting that the associations are with her]. I suppose so.

LARRY. M’yes. I can remember particular spots where I had long fits of thinking about the countries I meant to get to when I escaped from Ireland. America and London, and sometimes Rome and the east.

NORA [deeply mortified]. Was that all you used to be thinking about?

LARRY. Well, there was precious little else to think about here, my dear Nora, except sometimes at sunset, when one got maudlin and called Ireland Erin, and imagined one was remembering the days of old, and so forth. [He whistles Let Erin Remember].

NORA. Did jever get a letter I wrote you last February?

LARRY. Oh yes; and I really intended to answer it. But I haven’t had a moment; and I knew you wouldn’t mind. You see, I am so afraid of boring you by writing about affairs you don’t understand and people you don’t know! And yet what else have I to write about? I begin a letter; and then I tear it up again. The fact is, fond as we are of one another, Nora, we have so little in common — I mean of course the things one can put in a letter — that correspondence is apt to become the hardest of hard work.

NORA. Yes: it’s hard for me to know anything about you if you never tell me anything.

LARRY [pettishly]. Nora: a man can’t sit down and write his life day by day when he’s tired enough with having lived it.

NORA. I’m not blaming you.

LARRY [looking at her with some concern]. You seem rather out of spirits. [Going closer to her, anxiously and tenderly] You haven’t got neuralgia, have you?

NORA. No.

LARRY [reassured]. I get a touch of it sometimes when I am below par. [absently, again strolling about] Yes, yes. [He begins to hum again, and soon breaks into articulate melody].

Though summer smiles on here for ever,
Though not a leaf falls from the tree,
Tell England I’ll forget her never,

[Nora puts down the knitting and stares at him].

O wind that blows across the sea.

[With much expression]

Tell England I’ll forget her ne-e-e-e-ver
O wind that blows acro-oss —

[Here the melody soars out of his range. He continues falsetto, but changes the tune to Let Erin Remember]. I’m afraid I’m boring you, Nora, though you’re too kind to say so.

NORA. Are you wanting to get back to England already?

LARRY. Not at all. Not at all.

NORA. That’s a queer song to sing to me if you’re not.

LARRY. The song! Oh, it doesn’t mean anything: it’s by a German Jew, like most English patriotic sentiment. Never mind me, my dear: go on with your work; and don’t let me bore you.

NORA [bitterly]. Rosscullen isn’t such a lively place that I am likely to be bored by you at our first talk together after eighteen years, though you don’t seem to have much to say to me after all.

LARRY. Eighteen years is a devilish long time, Nora. Now if it had been eighteen minutes, or even eighteen months, we should be able to pick up the interrupted thread, and chatter like two magpies. But as it is, I have simply nothing to say; and you seem to have less.

NORA. I — [her tears choke her; but the keeps up appearances desperately].

LARRY [quite unconscious of his cruelty]. In a week or so we shall be quite old friends again. Meanwhile, as I feel that I am not making myself particularly entertaining, I’ll take myself off. Tell Tom I’ve gone for a stroll over the hill.

NORA. You seem very fond of Tom, as you call him.

LARRY [the triviality going suddenly out of his voice]. Yes I’m fond of Tom.

NORA. Oh, well, don’t let me keep you from him.

LARRY. I know quite well that my departure will be a relief. Rather a failure, this first meeting after eighteen years, eh? Well, never mind: these great sentimental events always are failures; and now the worst of it’s over anyhow. [He goes out through the garden door].

Nora, left alone, struggles wildly to save herself from breaking down, and then drops her face on the table and gives way to a convulsion of crying. Her sobs shake her so that she can hear nothing; and she has no suspicion that she is no longer alone until her head and breast are raised by Broadbent, who, returning newly washed and combed through the inner door, has seen her condition, first with surprise and concern, and then with an emotional disturbance that quite upsets him.

BROADBENT. Miss Reilly. Miss Reilly. What’s the matter? Don’t cry: I can’t stand it: you mustn’t cry. [She makes a choked effort to speak, so painful that he continues with impulsive sympathy] No: don’t try to speak: it’s all right now. Have your cry out: never mind me: trust me. [Gathering her to him, and babbling consolatorily] Cry on my chest: the only really comfortable place for a woman to cry is a man’s chest: a real man, a real friend. A good broad chest, eh? not less than forty-two inches — no: don’t fuss: never mind the conventions: we’re two friends, aren’t we? Come now, come, come! It’s all right and comfortable and happy now, isn’t it?

NORA [through her tears]. Let me go. I want me hankerchief.

BROADBENT [holding her with one arm and producing a large silk handkerchief from his breast pocket]. Here’s a handkerchief. Let me [he dabs her tears dry with it]. Never mind your own: it’s too small: it’s one of those wretched little cambric handkerchiefs —

NORA [sobbing]. Indeed it’s a common cotton one.

BROADBENT. Of course it’s a common cotton one — silly little cotton one — not good enough for the dear eyes of Nora Cryna —

NORA [spluttering into a hysterical laugh and clutching him convulsively with her fingers while she tries to stifle her laughter against his collar bone]. Oh don’t make me laugh: please don’t make me laugh.

BROADBENT [terrified]. I didn’t mean to, on my soul. What is it? What is it?

NORA. Nora Creena, Nora Creena.

BROADBENT [patting her]. Yes, yes, of course, Nora Creena, Nora acushla [he makes cush rhyme to plush].

NORA. Acushla [she makes cush rhyme to bush].

BROADBENT. Oh, confound the language! Nora darling — my Nora — the Nora I love —

NORA [shocked into propriety]. You mustn’t talk like that to me.

BROADBENT [suddenly becoming prodigiously solemn and letting her go]. No, of course not. I don’t mean it — at least I do mean it; but I know it’s premature. I had no right to take advantage of your being a little upset; but I lost my self-control for a moment.

NORA [wondering at him]. I think you’re a very kindhearted man, Mr Broadbent; but you seem to me to have no self-control at all [she turns her face away with a keen pang of shame and adds] no more than myself.

BROADBENT [resolutely]. Oh yes, I have: you should see me when I am really roused: then I have TREMENDOUS self-control. Remember: we have been alone together only once before; and then, I regret to say, I was in a disgusting state.

NORA. Ah no, Mr Broadbent: you weren’t disgusting.

BROADBENT [mercilessly]. Yes I was: nothing can excuse it: perfectly beastly. It must have made a most unfavorable impression on you.

NORA. Oh, sure it’s all right. Say no more about that.

BROADBENT. I must, Miss Reilly: it is my duty. I shall not detain you long. May I ask you to sit down. [He indicates her chair with oppressive solemnity. She sits down wondering. He then, with the same portentous gravity, places a chair for himself near her; sits down; and proceeds to explain]. First, Miss Reilly, may I say that I have tasted nothing of an alcoholic nature today.

NORA. It doesn’t seem to make as much difference in you as it would in an Irishman, somehow.

BROADBENT. Perhaps not. Perhaps not. I never quite lose myself.

NORA [consolingly]. Well, anyhow, you’re all right now.

BROADBENT [fervently]. Thank you, Miss Reilly: I am. Now we shall get along. [Tenderly, lowering his voice] Nora: I was in earnest last night. [Nora moves as if to rise]. No: one moment. You must not think I am going to press you for an answer before you have known me for 24 hours. I am a reasonable man, I hope; and I am prepared to wait as long as you like, provided you will give me some small assurance that the answer will not be unfavorable.

NORA. How could I go back from it if I did? I sometimes think you’re not quite right in your head, Mr Broadbent, you say such funny things.

BROADBENT. Yes: I know I have a strong sense of humor which sometimes makes people doubt whether I am quite serious. That is why I have always thought I should like to marry an Irishwoman. She would always understand my jokes. For instance, you would understand them, eh?

NORA [uneasily]. Mr Broadbent, I couldn’t.

BROADBENT [soothingly]. Wait: let me break this to you gently, Miss Reilly: hear me out. I daresay you have noticed that in speaking to you I have been putting a very strong constraint on myself, so as to avoid wounding your delicacy by too abrupt an avowal of my feelings. Well, I feel now that the time has come to be open, to be frank, to be explicit. Miss Reilly: you have inspired in me a very strong attachment. Perhaps, with a woman’s intuition, you have already guessed that.

NORA [rising distractedly]. Why do you talk to me in that unfeeling nonsensical way?

BROADBENT [rising also, much astonished]. Unfeeling! Nonsensical!

NORA. Don’t you know that you have said things to me that no man ought to say unless — unless — [she suddenly breaks down again and hides her face on the table as before] Oh, go away from me: I won’t get married at all: what is it but heartbreak and disappointment?

BROADBENT [developing the most formidable symptoms of rage and grief]. Do you mean to say that you are going to refuse me? that you don’t care for me?

NORA [looking at him in consternation]. Oh, don’t take it to heart, Mr Br —

BROADBENT [flushed and almost choking]. I don’t want to be petted and blarneyed. [With childish rage] I love you. I want you for my wife. [In despair] I can’t help your refusing. I’m helpless: I can do nothing. You have no right to ruin my whole life. You — [a hysterical convulsion stops him].

NORA [almost awestruck]. You’re not going to cry, are you? I never thought a man COULD cry. Don’t.

BROADBENT. I’m not crying. I — I — I leave that sort of thing to your damned sentimental Irishmen. You think I have no feeling because I am a plain unemotional Englishman, with no powers of expression.

NORA. I don’t think you know the sort of man you are at all. Whatever may be the matter with you, it’s not want of feeling.

BROADBENT [hurt and petulant]. It’s you who have no feeling. You’re as heartless as Larry.

NORA. What do you expect me to do? Is it to throw meself at your head the minute the word is out o your mouth?

BROADBENT [striking his silly head with his fists]. Oh, what a fool! what a brute I am! It’s only your Irish delicacy: of course, of course. You mean Yes. Eh? What? Yes, yes, yes?

NORA. I think you might understand that though I might choose to be an old maid, I could never marry anybody but you now.

BROADBENT [clasping her violently to his breast, with a crow of immense relief and triumph]. Ah, that’s right, that’s right: That’s magnificent. I knew you would see what a first-rate thing this will be for both of us.

NORA [incommoded and not at all enraptured by his ardor]. You’re dreadfully strong, an a gradle too free with your strength. An I never thought o whether it’d be a good thing for us or not. But when you found me here that time, I let you be kind to me, and cried in your arms, because I was too wretched to think of anything but the comfort of it. An how could I let any other man touch me after that?

BROADBENT [touched]. Now that’s very nice of you, Nora, that’s really most delicately womanly [he kisses her hand chivalrously].

NORA [looking earnestly and a little doubtfully at him]. Surely if you let one woman cry on you like that you’d never let another touch you.

BROADBENT [conscientiously]. One should not. One OUGHT not, my dear girl. But the honest truth is, if a chap is at all a pleasant sort of chap, his chest becomes a fortification that has to stand many assaults: at least it is so in England.

NORA [curtly, much disgusted]. Then you’d better marry an Englishwoman.

BROADBENT [making a wry face]. No, no: the Englishwoman is too prosaic for my taste, too material, too much of the animated beefsteak about her. The ideal is what I like. Now Larry’s taste is just the opposite: he likes em solid and bouncing and rather keen about him. It’s a very convenient difference; for we’ve never been in love with the same woman.

NORA. An d’ye mean to tell me to me face that you’ve ever been in love before?

BROADBENT. Lord! yes.

NORA. I’m not your first love?

BROADBENT. First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it. No, my dear Nora: I’ve done with all that long ago. Love affairs always end in rows. We’re not going to have any rows: we’re going to have a solid four-square home: man and wife: comfort and common sense — and plenty of affection, eh [he puts his arm round her with confident proprietorship]?

NORA [coldly, trying to get away]. I don’t want any other woman’s leavings.

BROADBENT [holding her]. Nobody asked you to, ma’am. I never asked any woman to marry me before.

NORA [severely]. Then why didn’t you if you’re an honorable man?

BROADBENT. Well, to tell you the truth, they were mostly married already. But never mind! there was nothing wrong. Come! Don’t take a mean advantage of me. After all, you must have had a fancy or two yourself, eh?

NORA [conscience-stricken]. Yes. I suppose I’ve no right to be particular.

BROADBENT [humbly]. I know I’m not good enough for you, Nora. But no man is, you know, when the woman is a really nice woman.

NORA. Oh, I’m no better than yourself. I may as well tell you about it.

BROADBENT. No, no: let’s have no telling: much better not. I shan’t tell you anything: don’t you tell ME anything. Perfect confidence in one another and no tellings: that’s the way to avoid rows.

NORA. Don’t think it was anything I need be ashamed of.

BROADBENT. I don’t.

NORA. It was only that I’d never known anybody else that I could care for; and I was foolish enough once to think that Larry —

BROADBENT [disposing of the idea at once]. Larry! Oh, that wouldn’t have done at all, not at all. You don’t know Larry as I do, my dear. He has absolutely no capacity for enjoyment: he couldn’t make any woman happy. He’s as clever as be-blowed; but life’s too earthly for him: he doesn’t really care for anything or anybody.

NORA. I’ve found that out.

BROADBENT. Of course you have. No, my dear: take my word for it, you’re jolly well out of that. There! [swinging her round against his breast] that’s much more comfortable for you.

NORA [with Irish peevishness]. Ah, you mustn’t go on like that. I don’t like it.

BROADBENT [unabashed]. You’ll acquire the taste by degrees. You mustn’t mind me: it’s an absolute necessity of my nature that I should have somebody to hug occasionally. Besides, it’s good for you: it’ll plump out your muscles and make em elastic and set up your figure.

NORA. Well, I’m sure! if this is English manners! Aren’t you ashamed to talk about such things?

BROADBENT [in the highest feather]. Not a bit. By George, Nora, it’s a tremendous thing to be able to enjoy oneself. Let’s go off for a walk out of this stuffy little room. I want the open air to expand in. Come along. Co-o-o-me along. [He puts her arm into his and sweeps her out into the garden as an equinoctial gale might sweep a dry leaf].

Later in the evening, the grasshopper is again enjoying the sunset by the great stone on the hill; but this time he enjoys neither the stimulus of Keegan’s conversation nor the pleasure of terrifying Patsy Farrell. He is alone until Nora and Broadbent come up the hill arm in arm. Broadbent is still breezy and confident; but she has her head averted from him and is almost in tears].

BROADBENT [stopping to snuff up the hillside air]. Ah! I like this spot. I like this view. This would be a jolly good place for a hotel and a golf links. Friday to Tuesday, railway ticket and hotel all inclusive. I tell you, Nora, I’m going to develop this place. [Looking at her] Hallo! What’s the matter? Tired?

NORA [unable to restrain her tears]. I’m ashamed out o me life.

BROADBENT [astonished]. Ashamed! What of?

NORA. Oh, how could you drag me all round the place like that, telling everybody that we’re going to be married, and introjoocing me to the lowest of the low, and letting them shake hans with me, and encouraging them to make free with us? I little thought I should live to be shaken hans with be Doolan in broad daylight in the public street of Rosscullen.

BROADBENT. But, my dear, Doolan’s a publican: a most influential man. By the way, I asked him if his wife would be at home tomorrow. He said she would; so you must take the motor car round and call on her.

NORA [aghast]. Is it me call on Doolan’s wife!

BROADBENT. Yes, of course: call on all their wives. We must get a copy of the register and a supply of canvassing cards. No use calling on people who haven’t votes. You’ll be a great success as a canvasser, Nora: they call you the heiress; and they’ll be flattered no end by your calling, especially as you’ve never cheapened yourself by speaking to them before — have you?

NORA [indignantly]. Not likely, indeed.

BROADBENT. Well, we mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class. I tell you I’m a jolly lucky man, Nora Cryna. I get engaged to the most delightful woman in Ireland; and it turns out that I couldn’t have done a smarter stroke of electioneering.

NORA. An would you let me demean meself like that, just to get yourself into parliament?

BROADBENT [buoyantly]. Aha! Wait till you find out what an exciting game electioneering is: you’ll be mad to get me in. Besides, you’d like people to say that Tom Broadbent’s wife had been the making of him — that she got him into parliament — into the Cabinet, perhaps, eh?

NORA. God knows I don’t grudge you me money! But to lower meself to the level of common people.

BROADBENT. To a member’s wife, Nora, nobody is common provided he’s on the register. Come, my dear! it’s all right: do you think I’d let you do it if it wasn’t? The best people do it. Everybody does it.

NORA [who has been biting her lip and looking over the hill, disconsolate and unconvinced]. Well, praps you know best what they do in England. They must have very little respect for themselves. I think I’ll go in now. I see Larry and Mr Keegan coming up the hill; and I’m not fit to talk to them.

BROADBENT. Just wait and say something nice to Keegan. They tell me he controls nearly as many votes as Father Dempsey himself.

NORA. You little know Peter Keegan. He’d see through me as if I was a pane o glass.

BROADBENT. Oh, he won’t like it any the less for that. What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering. Not that I would flatter any man: don’t think that. I’ll just go and meet him. [He goes down the hill with the eager forward look of a man about to greet a valued acquaintance. Nora dries her eyes, and turns to go as Larry strolls up the hill to her].

LARRY. Nora. [She turns and looks at him hardly, without a word. He continues anxiously, in his most conciliatory tone]. When I left you that time, I was just as wretched as you. I didn’t rightly know what I wanted to say; and my tongue kept clacking to cover the loss I was at. Well, I’ve been thinking ever since; and now I know what I ought to have said. I’ve come back to say it.

NORA. You’ve come too late, then. You thought eighteen years was not long enough, and that you might keep me waiting a day longer. Well, you were mistaken. I’m engaged to your friend Mr Broadbent; and I’m done with you.

LARRY [naively]. But that was the very thing I was going to advise you to do.

NORA [involuntarily]. Oh you brute! to tell me that to me face.

LARRY [nervously relapsing into his most Irish manner]. Nora, dear, don’t you understand that I’m an Irishman, and he’s an Englishman. He wants you; and he grabs you. I want you; and I quarrel with you and have to go on wanting you.

NORA. So you may. You’d better go back to England to the animated beefsteaks you’re so fond of.

LARRY [amazed]. Nora! [Guessing where she got the metaphor] He’s been talking about me, I see. Well, never mind: we must be friends, you and I. I don’t want his marriage to you to be his divorce from me.

NORA. You care more for him than you ever did for me.

LARRY [with curt sincerity]. Yes of course I do: why should I tell you lies about it? Nora Reilly was a person of very little consequence to me or anyone else outside this miserable little hole. But Mrs Tom Broadbent will be a person of very considerable consequence indeed. Play your new part well, and there will be no more neglect, no more loneliness, no more idle regrettings and vain-hopings in the evenings by the Round Tower, but real life and real work and real cares and real joys among real people: solid English life in London, the very centre of the world. You will find your work cut out for you keeping Tom’s house and entertaining Tom’s friends and getting Tom into parliament; but it will be worth the effort.

NORA. You talk as if I were under an obligation to him for marrying me.

LARRY. I talk as I think. You’ve made a very good match, let me tell you.

NORA. Indeed! Well, some people might say he’s not done so badly himself.

LARRY. If you mean that you will be a treasure to him, he thinks so now; and you can keep him thinking so if you like.

NORA. I wasn’t thinking o meself at all.

LARRY. Were you thinking of your money, Nora?

NORA. I didn’t say so.

LARRY. Your money will not pay your cook’s wages in London.

NORA [flaming up]. If that’s true — and the more shame for you to throw it in my face if it IS true — at all events it’ll make us independent; for if the worst comes to the worst, we can always come back here an live on it. An if I have to keep his house for him, at all events I can keep you out of it; for I’ve done with you; and I wish I’d never seen you. So goodbye to you, Mister Larry Doyle. [She turns her back on him and goes home].

LARRY [watching her as she goes]. Goodbye. Goodbye. Oh, that’s so Irish! Irish both of us to the backbone: Irish, Irish, Irish —

Broadbent arrives, conversing energetically with Keegan.

BROADBENT. Nothing pays like a golfing hotel, if you hold the land instead of the shares, and if the furniture people stand in with you, and if you are a good man of business.

LARRY. Nora’s gone home.

BROADBENT [with conviction]. You were right this morning, Larry. I must feed up Nora. She’s weak; and it makes her fanciful. Oh, by the way, did I tell you that we’re engaged?

LARRY. She told me herself.

BROADBENT [complacently]. She’s rather full of it, as you may imagine. Poor Nora! Well, Mr Keegan, as I said, I begin to see my way here. I begin to see my way.

KEEGAN [with a courteous inclination]. The conquering Englishman, sir. Within 24 hours of your arrival you have carried off our only heiress, and practically secured the parliamentary seat. And you have promised me that when I come here in the evenings to meditate on my madness; to watch the shadow of the Round Tower lengthening in the sunset; to break my heart uselessly in the curtained gloaming over the dead heart and blinded soul of the island of the saints, you will comfort me with the bustle of a great hotel, and the sight of the little children carrying the golf clubs of your tourists as a preparation for the life to come.

BROADBENT [quite touched, mutely offering him a cigar to console him, at which he smiles and shakes his head]. Yes, Mr Keegan: you’re quite right. There’s poetry in everything, even [looking absently into the cigar case] in the most modern prosaic things, if you know how to extract it [he extracts a cigar for himself and offers one to Larry, who takes it]. If I was to be shot for it I couldn’t extract it myself; but that’s where you come in, you see [roguishly, waking up from his reverie and bustling Keegan goodhumoredly]. And then I shall wake you up a bit. That’s where I come in: eh? d’ye see? Eh? eh? [He pats him very pleasantly on the shoulder, half admiringly, half pityingly]. Just so, just so. [Coming back to business] By the way, I believe I can do better than a light railway here. There seems to be no question now that the motor boat has come to stay. Well, look at your magnificent river there, going to waste.

KEEGAN [closing his eyes]. “Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy waters.”

BROADBENT. You know, the roar of a motor boat is quite pretty.

KEEGAN. Provided it does not drown the Angelus.

BROADBENT [reassuringly]. Oh no: it won’t do that: not the least danger. You know, a church bell can make a devil of a noise when it likes.

KEEGAN. You have an answer for everything, sir. But your plans leave one question still unanswered: how to get butter out of a dog’s throat.

BROADBENT. Eh?

KEEGAN. You cannot build your golf links and hotels in the air. For that you must own our land. And how will you drag our acres from the ferret’s grip of Matthew Haffigan? How will you persuade Cornelius Doyle to forego the pride of being a small landowner? How will Barney Doran’s millrace agree with your motor boats? Will Doolan help you to get a license for your hotel?

BROADBENT. My dear sir: to all intents and purposes the syndicate I represent already owns half Rosscullen. Doolan’s is a tied house; and the brewers are in the syndicate. As to Haffigan’s farm and Doran’s mill and Mr Doyle’s place and half a dozen others, they will be mortgaged to me before a month is out.

KEEGAN. But pardon me, you will not lend them more on their land than the land is worth; so they will be able to pay you the interest.

BROADBENT. Ah, you are a poet, Mr Keegan, not a man of business.

LARRY. We will lend everyone of these men half as much again on their land as it is worth, or ever can be worth, to them.

BROADBENT. You forget, sir, that we, with our capital, our knowledge, our organization, and may I say our English business habits, can make or lose ten pounds out of land that Haffigan, with all his industry, could not make or lose ten shillings out of. Doran’s mill is a superannuated folly: I shall want it for electric lighting.

LARRY. What is the use of giving land to such men? they are too small, too poor, too ignorant, too simpleminded to hold it against us: you might as well give a dukedom to a crossing sweeper.

BROADBENT. Yes, Mr Keegan: this place may have an industrial future, or it may have a residential future: I can’t tell yet; but it’s not going to be a future in the hands of your Dorans and Haffigans, poor devils!

KEEGAN. It may have no future at all. Have you thought of that?

BROADBENT. Oh, I’m not afraid of that. I have faith in Ireland, great faith, Mr Keegan.

KEEGAN. And we have none: only empty enthusiasms and patriotisms, and emptier memories and regrets. Ah yes: you have some excuse for believing that if there be any future, it will be yours; for our faith seems dead, and our hearts cold and cowed. An island of dreamers who wake up in your jails, of critics and cowards whom you buy and tame for your own service, of bold rogues who help you to plunder us that they may plunder you afterwards. Eh?

BROADBENT [a little impatient of this unbusinesslike view]. Yes, yes; but you know you might say that of any country. The fact is, there are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient. It don’t matter whether they’re English or Irish. I shall collar this place, not because I’m an Englishman and Haffigan and Co are Irishmen, but because they’re duffers and I know my way about.

KEEGAN. Have you considered what is to become of Haffigan?

LARRY. Oh, we’ll employ him in some capacity or other, and probably pay him more than he makes for himself now.

BROADBENT [dubiously]. Do you think so? No no: Haffigan’s too old. It really doesn’t pay now to take on men over forty even for unskilled labor, which I suppose is all Haffigan would be good for. No: Haffigan had better go to America, or into the Union, poor old chap! He’s worked out, you know: you can see it.

KEEGAN. Poor lost soul, so cunningly fenced in with invisible bars!

LARRY. Haffigan doesn’t matter much. He’ll die presently.

BROADBENT [shocked]. Oh come, Larry! Don’t be unfeeling. It’s hard on Haffigan. It’s always hard on the inefficient.

LARRY. Pah! what does it matter where an old and broken man spends his last days, or whether he has a million at the bank or only the workhouse dole? It’s the young men, the able men, that matter. The real tragedy of Haffigan is the tragedy of his wasted youth, his stunted mind, his drudging over his clods and pigs until he has become a clod and a pig himself — until the soul within him has smouldered into nothing but a dull temper that hurts himself and all around him. I say let him die, and let us have no more of his like. And let young Ireland take care that it doesn’t share his fate, instead of making another empty grievance of it. Let your syndicate come —

BROADBENT. Your syndicate too, old chap. You have your bit of the stock.

LARRY. Yes, mine if you like. Well, our syndicate has no conscience: it has no more regard for your Haffigans and Doolans and Dorans than it has for a gang of Chinese coolies. It will use your patriotic blatherskite and balderdash to get parliamentary powers over you as cynically as it would bait a mousetrap with toasted cheese. It will plan, and organize, and find capital while you slave like bees for it and revenge yourselves by paying politicians and penny newspapers out of your small wages to write articles and report speeches against its wickedness and tyranny, and to crack up your own Irish heroism, just as Haffigan once paid a witch a penny to put a spell on Billy Byrne’s cow. In the end it will grind the nonsense out of you, and grind strength and sense into you.

BROADBENT [out of patience]. Why can’t you say a simple thing simply, Larry, without all that Irish exaggeration and talky-talky? The syndicate is a perfectly respectable body of responsible men of good position. We’ll take Ireland in hand, and by straightforward business habits teach it efficiency and self-help on sound Liberal principles. You agree with me, Mr Keegan, don’t you?

KEEGAN. Sir: I may even vote for you.

BROADBENT [sincerely moved, shaking his hand warmly]. You shall never regret it, Mr Keegan: I give you my word for that. I shall bring money here: I shall raise wages: I shall found public institutions, a library, a Polytechnic [undenominational, of course], a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a Garden city of Rosscullen: the round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored.

KEEGAN. And our place of torment shall be as clean and orderly as the cleanest and most orderly place I know in Ireland, which is our poetically named Mountjoy prison. Well, perhaps I had better vote for an efficient devil that knows his own mind and his own business than for a foolish patriot who has no mind and no business.

BROADBENT [stiffly]. Devil is rather a strong expression in that connexion, Mr Keegan.

KEEGAN. Not from a man who knows that this world is hell. But since the word offends you, let me soften it, and compare you simply to an ass. [Larry whitens with anger].

BROADBENT [reddening]. An ass!

KEEGAN [gently]. You may take it without offence from a madman who calls the ass his brother — and a very honest, useful and faithful brother too. The ass, sir, is the most efficient of beasts, matter-of-fact, hardy, friendly when you treat him as a fellow-creature, stubborn when you abuse him, ridiculous only in love, which sets him braying, and in politics, which move him to roll about in the public road and raise a dust about nothing. Can you deny these qualities and habits in yourself, sir?

BROADBENT [goodhumoredly]. Well, yes, I’m afraid I do, you know.

KEEGAN. Then perhaps you will confess to the ass’s one fault.

BROADBENT. Perhaps so: what is it?

KEEGAN. That he wastes all his virtues — his efficiency, as you call it — in doing the will of his greedy masters instead of doing the will of Heaven that is in himself. He is efficient in the service of Mammon, mighty in mischief, skilful in ruin, heroic in destruction. But he comes to browse here without knowing that the soil his hoof touches is holy ground. Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven; and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse. It produces two kinds of men in strange perfection: saints and traitors. It is called the island of the saints; but indeed in these later years it might be more fitly called the island of the traitors; for our harvest of these is the fine flower of the world’s crop of infamy. But the day may come when these islands shall live by the quality of their men rather than by the abundance of their minerals; and then we shall see.

LARRY. Mr Keegan: if you are going to be sentimental about Ireland, I shall bid you good evening. We have had enough of that, and more than enough of cleverly proving that everybody who is not an Irishman is an ass. It is neither good sense nor good manners. It will not stop the syndicate; and it will not interest young Ireland so much as my friend’s gospel of efficiency.

BROADBENT. Ah, yes, yes: efficiency is the thing. I don’t in the least mind your chaff, Mr Keegan; but Larry’s right on the main point. The world belongs to the efficient.

KEEGAN [with polished irony]. I stand rebuked, gentlemen. But believe me, I do every justice to the efficiency of you and your syndicate. You are both, I am told, thoroughly efficient civil engineers; and I have no doubt the golf links will be a triumph of your art. Mr Broadbent will get into parliament most efficiently, which is more than St Patrick could do if he were alive now. You may even build the hotel efficiently if you can find enough efficient masons, carpenters, and plumbers, which I rather doubt. [Dropping his irony, and beginning to fall into the attitude of the priest rebuking sin] When the hotel becomes insolvent [Broadbent takes his cigar out of his mouth, a little taken aback], your English business habits will secure the thorough efficiency of the liquidation. You will reorganize the scheme efficiently; you will liquidate its second bankruptcy efficiently [Broadbent and Larry look quickly at one another; for this, unless the priest is an old financial hand, must be inspiration]; you will get rid of its original shareholders efficiently after efficiently ruining them; and you will finally profit very efficiently by getting that hotel for a few shillings in the pound. [More and more sternly] Besides those efficient operations, you will foreclose your mortgages most efficiently [his rebuking forefinger goes up in spite of himself]; you will drive Haffigan to America very efficiently; you will find a use for Barney Doran’s foul mouth and bullying temper by employing him to slave-drive your laborers very efficiently; and [low and bitter] when at last this poor desolate countryside becomes a busy mint in which we shall all slave to make money for you, with our Polytechnic to teach us how to do it efficiently, and our library to fuddle the few imaginations your distilleries will spare, and our repaired Round Tower with admission sixpence, and refreshments and penny-in-the-slot mutoscopes to make it interesting, then no doubt your English and American shareholders will spend all the money we make for them very efficiently in shooting and hunting, in operations for cancer and appendicitis, in gluttony and gambling; and you will devote what they save to fresh land development schemes. For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.

BROADBENT [seriously]. Too true, Mr Keegan, only too true. And most eloquently put. It reminds me of poor Ruskin — a great man, you know. I sympathize. Believe me, I’m on your side. Don’t sneer, Larry: I used to read a lot of Shelley years ago. Let us be faithful to the dreams of our youth [he wafts a wreath of cigar smoke at large across the hill].

KEEGAN. Come, Mr Doyle! is this English sentiment so much more efficient than our Irish sentiment, after all? Mr Broadbent spends his life inefficiently admiring the thoughts of great men, and efficiently serving the cupidity of base money hunters. We spend our lives efficiently sneering at him and doing nothing. Which of us has any right to reproach the other?

BROADBENT [coming down the hill again to Keegan’s right hand]. But you know, something must be done.

KEEGAN. Yes: when we cease to do, we cease to live. Well, what shall we do?

BROADBENT. Why, what lies to our hand.

KEEGAN. Which is the making of golf links and hotels to bring idlers to a country which workers have left in millions because it is a hungry land, a naked land, an ignorant and oppressed land.

BROADBENT. But, hang it all, the idlers will bring money from England to Ireland!

KEEGAN. Just as our idlers have for so many generations taken money from Ireland to England. Has that saved England from poverty and degradation more horrible than we have ever dreamed of? When I went to England, sir, I hated England. Now I pity it. [Broadbent can hardly conceive an Irishman pitying England; but as Larry intervenes angrily, he gives it up and takes to the bill and his cigar again]

LARRY. Much good your pity will do it!

KEEGAN. In the accounts kept in heaven, Mr Doyle, a heart purified of hatred may be worth more even than a Land Development Syndicate of Anglicized Irishmen and Gladstonized Englishmen.

LARRY. Oh, in heaven, no doubt! I have never been there. Can you tell me where it is?

KEEGAN. Could you have told me this morning where hell is? Yet you know now that it is here. Do not despair of finding heaven: it may be no farther off.

LARRY [ironically]. On this holy ground, as you call it, eh?

KEEGAN [with fierce intensity]. Yes, perhaps, even on this holy ground which such Irishmen as you have turned into a Land of Derision.

BROADBENT [coming between them]. Take care! you will be quarrelling presently. Oh, you Irishmen, you Irishmen! Toujours Ballyhooly, eh? [Larry, with a shrug, half comic, half impatient, turn away up the hill, but presently strolls back on Keegan’s right. Broadbent adds, confidentially to Keegan] Stick to the Englishman, Mr Keegan: he has a bad name here; but at least he can forgive you for being an Irishman.

KEEGAN. Sir: when you speak to me of English and Irish you forget that I am a Catholic. My country is not Ireland nor England, but the whole mighty realm of my Church. For me there are but two countries: heaven and hell; but two conditions of men: salvation and damnation. Standing here between you the Englishman, so clever in your foolishness, and this Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness, I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of you is the more deeply damned; but I should be unfaithful to my calling if I opened the gates of my heart less widely to one than to the other.

LARRY. In either case it would be an impertinence, Mr Keegan, as your approval is not of the slightest consequence to us. What use do you suppose all this drivel is to men with serious practical business in hand?

BROADBENT. I don’t agree with that, Larry. I think these things cannot be said too often: they keep up the moral tone of the community. As you know, I claim the right to think for myself in religious matters: in fact, I am ready to avow myself a bit of a — of a — well, I don’t care who knows it — a bit of a Unitarian; but if the Church of England contained a few men like Mr Keegan, I should certainly join it.

KEEGAN. You do me too much honor, sir. [With priestly humility to Larry] Mr Doyle: I am to blame for having unintentionally set your mind somewhat on edge against me. I beg your pardon.

LARRY [unimpressed and hostile]. I didn’t stand on ceremony with you: you needn’t stand on it with me. Fine manners and fine words are cheap in Ireland: you can keep both for my friend here, who is still imposed on by them. I know their value.

KEEGAN. You mean you don’t know their value.

LARRY [angrily]. I mean what I say.

KEEGAN [turning quietly to the Englishman] You see, Mr Broadbent, I only make the hearts of my countrymen harder when I preach to them: the gates of hell still prevail against me. I shall wish you good evening. I am better alone, at the Round Tower, dreaming of heaven. [He goes up the hill].

LARRY. Aye, that’s it! there you are! dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!

KEEGAN [halting and turning to them for the last time]. Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

BROADBENT [reflectively]. Once, when I was a small kid, I dreamt I was in heaven. [They both stare at him]. It was a sort of pale blue satin place, with all the pious old ladies in our congregation sitting as if they were at a service; and there was some awful person in the study at the other side of the hall. I didn’t enjoy it, you know. What is it like in your dreams?

KEEGAN. In my dreams it is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman. [He goes away across the hill].

BROADBENT [looking after him affectionately]. What a regular old Church and State Tory he is! He’s a character: he’ll be an attraction here. Really almost equal to Ruskin and Carlyle.

LARRY. Yes; and much good they did with all their talk!

BROADBENT. Oh tut, tut, Larry! They improved my mind: they raised my tone enormously. I feel sincerely obliged to Keegan: he has made me feel a better man: distinctly better. [With sincere elevation] I feel now as I never did before that I am right in devoting my life to the cause of Ireland. Come along and help me to choose the site for the hotel.

HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND

CONTENTS

PREFACE

HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND

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

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

HE [kissing her hand] At last!

SHE. Henry: something dreadful has happened.

HE. What’s the matter?

SHE. I have lost your poems.

HE. They were unworthy of you. I will write you some more.

SHE. No, thank you. Never any more poems for me. Oh, how could I have been so mad! so rash! so imprudent!

HE. Thank Heaven for your madness, your rashness, your imprudence!

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

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

SHE. What good is that to me if everybody will know what woman it was?

HE. But how will they know?

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

HE. Write poems to you with reserve! You ask me that!

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

HE. Ah, how I wish they had been addressed to an unmarried woman! how I wish they had!

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

HE [painfully jarred] Have you got sisters-in-law?

SHE. Yes, of course I have. Do you suppose I am an angel?

HE [biting his lips] I do. Heaven help me, I do — or I did — or [he almost chokes a sob].

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

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

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

HE. She will not understand them, I think.

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

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

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

HE. Yes, you are right. It will be a profanation.

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

HE [supine on the floor; for she has thrown him off his balance] To me Teddy is nothing, and Georgina less than nothing.

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

HE. And oh! how happy I am!

SHE [whisking herself abruptly away] Don’t be selfish.

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

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

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

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

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

SHE [staring at him] And where shall we go to?

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

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

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

SHE [spiritlessly, taking the flowers without looking at them, and temporizing] Teddy isn’t in yet.

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

SHE. What did you get tickets for? Lohengrin?

HE. I tried; but Lohengrin was sold out for to-night. [He takes out two Court Theatre tickets].

SHE. Then what did you get?

HE. Can you ask me? What is there besides Lohengrin that we two could endure, except Candida?

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

HE [amazed] Aurora!

SHE. Yes: I mean it.

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

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

HE [catching her hands and looking earnestly at her] You were right. You are like Candida.

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

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

SHE [with equal earnestness] Henry: do you know what’s wanting in that play?

HE. There is nothing wanting in it.

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

HE. What is that?

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

HE. Let us be just to Georgina, dearest

SHE. Let her deserve it first. Just to Georgina, indeed!

HE. She really sees the world in that way. That is her punishment.

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

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

SHE. Do you mean to say that you propose that we should walk right bang up to Teddy and tell him we’re going away together?

HE. Yes. What can be simpler?

SHE. And do you think for a moment he’d stand it, like that half-baked clergyman in the play? He’d just kill you.

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

SHE [rising and coming to him in consternation] What do you mean by all over him?

HE [gently] Don’t ask me, dearest. At all events, I swear to you that you need not be anxious about me.

SHE. And what about Teddy? Do you mean to tell me that you are going to beat Teddy before my face like a brutal prizefighter?

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

SHE [suspiciously] Doesn’t he love me still? Has he told you anything?

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

SHE [avoiding his gaze] No: stop: it’s no use, Mr Apjohn.

HE [recoiling] Mr Apjohn!!!

SHE. Excuse me: I meant Henry, of course.

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

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

HE [with grave wonder] Are you afraid?

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

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

SHE [turning to him with a gasp of relief] Oh, thank you, thank you! You really can be very nice, Henry.

HE. Why do you thank me?

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

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

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

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

SHE [a little frightened] Thank you, Henry: I was sure you would. You’re not angry with me, are you?

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

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

HE. I beg your pardon. I will buy you a new one.

SHE [querulously] You will never be able to match it. And it was a particular favorite of mine.

HE [shortly] Then you will have to do without it: that’s all.

SHE. That’s not a very nice thing to say after breaking my pet fan, I think.

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

SHE. Oh! Don’t you dare swear in my presence. One would think you were my husband.

HE [again collapsing on the stool] This is some horrible dream. What has become of you? You are not my Aurora.

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

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

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

HE. It seems so to me.

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

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

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

HE [polite and hopeless] All I can say is that I am entirely at your service. What do you wish me to do?

SHE. Do you know anybody else named Aurora?

HE. No.

SHE. There’s no use in saying No in that frozen pigheaded way. You must know some Aurora or other somewhere.

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

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

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

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

HE [indignantly] No.

SHE. You’re quite sure?

HE. Of course I am quite sure. How could I use such a name in a poem?

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

HE. What does it matter — now?

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

HE [very coldly] Oh, if you wish me to tell a lie —

SHE. Surely, as a man of honor — as a gentleman, you wouldn’t tell the truth, would you?

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

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

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

SHE. Growing pains!

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

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

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

SHE. Dearest boy, I knew you would. I — Sh! [she rushes to the door, and holds it ajar, listening breathlessly].

HE. What is it?

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

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

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

HER HUSBAND. Hallo! I thought you two were at the theatre.

SHE. I felt anxious about you, Teddy. Why didn’t you come home to dinner?

HER HUSBAND. I got a message from Georgina. She wanted me to go to her.

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

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

HE [formally] I am at your service.

HER HUSBAND. No hurry. After the theatre will do.

HE. We have decided not to go.

HER HUSBAND. Indeed! Well, then, shall we adjourn to my snuggery?

SHE. You needn’t move. I shall go and lock up my diamonds since I’m not going to the theatre. Give me my things.

HER HUSBAND [as he hands her the cloud and the mirror] Well, we shall have more room here.

HE [looking about him and shaking his shoulders loose] I think I should prefer plenty of room.

HER HUSBAND. So, if it’s not disturbing you, Rory — ?

SHE. Not at all. [She goes out].

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

HER HUSBAND. Do these manuscripts seem at all familiar to you, may I ask?

HE. Manuscripts?

HER HUSBAND. Yes. Would you like to look at them a little closer? [He proffers them under Henry’s nose].

HE [as with a sudden illumination of glad surprise] Why, these are my poems.

HER HUSBAND. So I gather.

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

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

HE [with an air of great surprise] Do you mean to imply that you don’t believe me?

HER HUSBAND. Do you expect me to believe you?

HE. Why not? I don’t understand.

HER HUSBAND. Come! Don’t underrate your own cleverness, Apjohn. I think you understand pretty well.

HE. I assure you I am quite at a loss. Can you not be a little more explicit?

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

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

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

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

HER HUSBAND [shaken] Apjohn: play fair. Don’t abuse your intellectual gifts. Do you really mean that I am making a fool of myself?

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

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

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

HER HUSBAND [reddening ominously] Why is it absurd?

HE [shrugging his shoulders] Well, it happens that I do not admire Mrs Bompas — in that way.

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

HE [much taken aback] There is no need to insult me like this. I assure you, on my honor as a —

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

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

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

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

HER HUSBAND [scornfully] Say it again: say it again. You’re proud of it, aren’t you? Yah! You’re not worth kicking.

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

HE. Look here: I’m not going to stand this.

HER HUSBAND. Oh, you have some blood in your body after all! Good job!

HE. This is ridiculous. I assure you Mrs. Bompas is quite —

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

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

HER HUSBAND [exploding] What — !

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

SHE. You shan’t, Teddy: you shan’t. You will be killed: he is a prizefighter.

HER HUSBAND [vengefully] I’ll prizefight him. [He struggles vainly to free himself from her embrace].

SHE. Henry: don’t let him fight you. Promise me that you won’t.

HE [ruefully] I have got a most frightful bump on the back of my head. [He tries to rise].

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

HER HUSBAND. I won’t, unless he takes it back.

SHE. He will: he does. You take it back, Henry? — yes.

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

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

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

SHE. Henry: for Heaven’s sake —

HE. It’s no use. Your husband is a fool and a brute —

HER HUSBAND. What’s that you say?

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

HER HUSBAND [so gratified, he can hardly believe his ears] You don’t mean it!

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

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

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

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

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

HER HUSBAND. Will you do me a great favor, Apjohn. I hardly like to ask; but it would be a real kindness to us both.

HE. What can I do?

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

SHE [running back from the bell, delighted with the idea, and coming between them] Oh Henry, if you wouldn’t mind!

HE. Oh, I don’t mind. I am past minding anything. I have grown too fast this evening.

SHE. How old are you, Henry?

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

HER HUSBAND. What shall we call the volume? To Aurora, or something like that, eh?

HE. I should call it How He Lied to Her Husband.

MAJOR BARBARA

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS

N.B. The Euripidean verses in the second act of Major Barbara are not by me, or even directly by Euripides. They are by Professor Gilbert Murray, whose English version of The Baccha; came into our dramatic literature with all the impulsive power of an original work shortly before Major Barbara was begun. The play, indeed, stands indebted to him in more ways than one.

G. B. S.

Before dealing with the deeper aspects of Major Barbara, let me, for the credit of English literature, make a protest against an unpatriotic habit into which many of my critics have fallen. Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in northern or eastern Europe.

I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher. But I cannot tolerate the assumption that life and literature is so poor in these islands that we must go abroad for all dramatic material that is not common and all ideas that are not superficial. I therefore venture to put my critics in possession of certain facts concerning my contact with modern ideas.

About half a century ago, an Irish novelist, Charles Lever, wrote a story entitled A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance. It was published by Charles Dickens in Household Words, and proved so strange to the public taste that Dickens pressed Lever to make short work of it. I read scraps of this novel when I was a child; and it made an enduring impression on me. The hero was a very romantic hero, trying to live bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dint of mere romance-fed imagination, without courage, without means, without knowledge, without skill, without anything real except his bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poor devil’s unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, a poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spite of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other day in the catalogue of Tauchnitz.

Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no critic ever affiliates me to my countryman and immediate forerunner, Charles Lever, whilst they confidently derive me from a Norwegian author of whose language I do not know three words, and of whom I knew nothing until years after the Shavian Anschauung was already unequivocally declared in books full of what came, ten years later, to be perfunctorily labelled Ibsenism. I was not Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever, though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly never read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as Charles O’Malley and Harry Lorrequer, I know nothing but the names and some of the illustrations. But the story of the day’s ride and life’s romance of Potts (claiming alliance with Pozzo di Borgo) caught me and fascinated me as something strange and significant, though I already knew all about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many another romantic hero mocked by reality. From the plays of Aristophanes to the tales of Stevenson that mockery has been made familiar to all who are properly saturated with letters.

Where, then, was the novelty in Lever’s tale? Partly, I think, in a new seriousness in dealing with Potts’s disease. Formerly, the contrast between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth shows us how fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics. I myself have had a village idiot exhibited to me as some thing irresistibly funny. On the stage the madman was once a regular comic figure; that was how Hamlet got his opportunity before Shakespear touched him. The originality of Shakespear’s version lay in his taking the lunatic sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an advance towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may be inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his fellows necessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less. But Shakespear did not do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for Hamlet. The particular sort of madman they represented, the romantic makebeliever, lay outside the pale of sympathy in literature: he was pitilessly despised and ridiculed here as he was in the east under the name of Alnaschar, and was doomed to be, centuries later, under the name of Simon Tappertit. When Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and Dickens relented over Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they simply changed sides, and became friends and apologists where they had formerly been mockers.

In Lever’s story there is a real change of attitude. There is no relenting towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don Quixote and Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of Tappertit. But we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we recognize ourselves in Potts. We may, some of us, have enough nerve, enough muscle, enough luck, enough tact or skill or address or knowledge to carry things off better than he did; to impose on the people who saw through him; to fascinate Katinka (who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the story); but for all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part in ourselves and in the world, and that the social problem is not a problem of story-book heroes of the older pattern, but a problem of Pottses, and of how to make men of them. To fall back on my old phrase, we have the feeling — one that Alnaschar, Pistol, Parolles, and Tappertit never gave us — that Potts is a piece of really scientific natural history as distinguished from comic story telling. His author is not throwing a stone at a creature of another and inferior order, but making a confession, with the effect that the stone hits everybody full in the conscience and causes their self-esteem to smart very sorely. Hence the failure of Lever’s book to please the readers of Household Words. That pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics to raise a cry of Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation first came to me from Lever and may have come to him from Beyle, or at least out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on Lever’s part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

Another mistake as to my literary ancestry is made whenever I violate the romantic convention that all women are angels when they are not devils; that they are better looking than men; that their part in courtship is entirely passive; and that the human female form is the most beautiful object in nature. Schopenhauer wrote a splenetic essay which, as it is neither polite nor profound, was probably intended to knock this nonsense violently on the head. A sentence denouncing the idolized form as ugly has been largely quoted. The English critics have read that sentence; and I must here affirm, with as much gentleness as the implication will bear, that it has yet to be proved that they have dipped any deeper. At all events, whenever an English playwright represents a young and marriageable woman as being anything but a romantic heroine, he is disposed of without further thought as an echo of Schopenhauer. My own case is a specially hard one, because, when I implore the critics who are obsessed with the Schopenhaurian formula to remember that playwrights, like sculptors, study their figures from life, and not from philosophic essays, they reply passionately that I am not a playwright and that my stage figures do not live. But even so, I may and do ask them why, if they must give the credit of my plays to a philosopher, they do not give it to an English philosopher? Long before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or even knew whether he was a philosopher or a chemist, the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties brought me into contact, both literary and personal, with Mr Ernest Belfort Bax, an English Socialist and philosophic essayist, whose handling of modern feminism would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer himself, or even Strindberg. As a matter of fact I hardly noticed Schopenhauer’s disparagements of women when they came under my notice later on, so thoroughly had Mr Bax familiarized me with the homoist attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to which public opinion, and consequently legislation and jurisprudence, is corrupted by feminist sentiment.

But Mr Bax’s essays were not confined to the Feminist question. He was a ruthless critic of current morality. Other writers have gained sympathy for dramatic criminals by eliciting the alleged “soul of goodness in things evil”; but Mr Bax would propound some quite undramatic and apparently shabby violation of our commercial law and morality, and not merely defend it with the most disconcerting ingenuity, but actually prove it to be a positive duty that nothing but the certainty of police persecution should prevent every right-minded man from at once doing on principle. The Socialists were naturally shocked, being for the most part morbidly moral people; but at all events they were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me that she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and could not have read with any comfort, for want of the necessary German, if I had seen it.

Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a single much quoted sentence containing the phrase “big blonde beast.” On the strength of this alliteration it is assumed that Nietzsche gained his European reputation by a senseless glorification of selfish bullying as the rule of life, just as it is assumed, on the strength of the single word Superman (Ubermensch) borrowed by me from Nietzsche, that I look for the salvation of society to the despotism of a single Napoleonic Superman, in spite of my careful demonstration of the folly of that outworn infatuation. But even the less recklessly superficial critics seem to believe that the modern objection to Christianity as a pernicious slave-morality was first put forward by Nietzsche. It was familiar to me before I ever heard of Nietzsche. The late Captain Wilson, author of several queer pamphlets, propagandist of a metaphysical system called Comprehensionism, and inventor of the term “Crosstianity” to distinguish the retrograde element in Christendom, was wont thirty years ago, in the discussions of the Dialectical Society, to protest earnestly against the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount as excuses for cowardice and servility, as destructive of our will, and consequently of our honor and manhood. Now it is true that Captain Wilson’s moral criticism of Christianity was not a historical theory of it, like Nietzsche’s; but this objection cannot be made to Mr Stuart-Glennie, the successor of Buckle as a philosophic historian, who has devoted his life to the elaboration and propagation of his theory that Christianity is part of an epoch (or rather an aberration, since it began as recently as 6000BC and is already collapsing) produced by the necessity in which the numerically inferior white races found themselves to impose their domination on the colored races by priestcraft, making a virtue and a popular religion of drudgery and submissiveness in this world not only as a means of achieving saintliness of character but of securing a reward in heaven. Here you have the slave-morality view formulated by a Scotch philosopher long before English writers began chattering about Nietzsche.

As Mr Stuart-Glennie traced the evolution of society to the conflict of races, his theory made some sensation among Socialists — that is, among the only people who were seriously thinking about historical evolution at all — by its collision with the class-conflict theory of Karl Marx. Nietzsche, as I gather, regarded the slave-morality as having been invented and imposed on the world by slaves making a virtue of necessity and a religion of their servitude. Mr Stuart-Glennie regards the slave-morality as an invention of the superior white race to subjugate the minds of the inferior races whom they wished to exploit, and who would have destroyed them by force of numbers if their minds had not been subjugated. As this process is in operation still, and can be studied at first hand not only in our Church schools and in the struggle between our modern proprietary classes and the proletariat, but in the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism, we can judge for ourselves whether the initiative came from above or below. My object here is not to argue the historical point, but simply to make our theatre critics ashamed of their habit of treating Britain as an intellectual void, and assuming that every philosophical idea, every historic theory, every criticism of our moral, religious and juridical institutions, must necessarily be either imported from abroad, or else a fantastic sally (in rather questionable taste) totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. I urge them to remember that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to it. In fact, their conception of clever persons parthenogenetically bringing forth complete original cosmogonies by dint of sheer “brilliancy” is part of that ignorant credulity which is the despair of the honest philosopher, and the opportunity of the religious impostor.

THE GOSPEL OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT

It is this credulity that drives me to help my critics out with Major Barbara by telling them what to say about it. In the millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty — a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed — is not to be poor. “Poor but honest,” “the respectable poor,” and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as “drunken but amiable,” “fraudulent but a good after-dinner speaker,” “splendidly criminal,” or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone’s head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them.

It is exceedingly difficult to make people realize that an evil is an evil. For instance, we seize a man and deliberately do him a malicious injury: say, imprison him for years. One would not suppose that it needed any exceptional clearness of wit to recognize in this an act of diabolical cruelty. But in England such a recognition provokes a stare of surprise, followed by an explanation that the outrage is punishment or justice or something else that is all right, or perhaps by a heated attempt to argue that we should all be robbed and murdered in our beds if such senseless villainies as sentences of imprisonment were not committed daily. It is useless to argue that even if this were true, which it is not, the alternative to adding crimes of our own to the crimes from which we suffer is not helpless submission. Chickenpox is an evil; but if I were to declare that we must either submit to it or else repress it sternly by seizing everyone who suffers from it and punishing them by inoculation with smallpox, I should be laughed at; for though nobody could deny that the result would be to prevent chickenpox to some extent by making people avoid it much more carefully, and to effect a further apparent prevention by making them conceal it very anxiously, yet people would have sense enough to see that the deliberate propagation of smallpox was a creation of evil, and must therefore be ruled out in favor of purely humane and hygienic measures. Yet in the precisely parallel case of a man breaking into my house and stealing my wife’s diamonds I am expected as a matter of course to steal ten years of his life, torturing him all the time. If he tries to defeat that monstrous retaliation by shooting me, my survivors hang him. The net result suggested by the police statistics is that we inflict atrocious injuries on the burglars we catch in order to make the rest take effectual precautions against detection; so that instead of saving our wives’ diamonds from burglary we only greatly decrease our chances of ever getting them back, and increase our chances of being shot by the robber if we are unlucky enough to disturb him at his work.

But the thoughtless wickedness with which we scatter sentences of imprisonment, torture in the solitary cell and on the plank bed, and flogging, on moral invalids and energetic rebels, is as nothing compared to the stupid levity with which we tolerate poverty as if it were either a wholesome tonic for lazy people or else a virtue to be embraced as St Francis embraced it. If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor. If he is not a gentleman, let him be poor. If he is addicted to the fine arts or to pure science instead of to trade and finance, let him be poor. If he chooses to spend his urban eighteen shillings a week or his agricultural thirteen shillings a week on his beer and his family instead of saving it up for his old age, let him be poor. Let nothing be done for “the undeserving”: let him be poor. Serve him right! Also — somewhat inconsistently — blessed are the poor!

Now what does this Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let his daughters infect our young men with the diseases of the streets and his sons revenge him by turning the nation’s manhood into scrofula, cowardice, cruelty, hypocrisy, political imbecility, and all the other fruits of oppression and malnutrition. Let the undeserving become still less deserving; and let the deserving lay up for himself, not treasures in heaven, but horrors in hell upon earth. This being so, is it really wise to let him be poor? Would he not do ten times less harm as a prosperous burglar, incendiary, ravisher or murderer, to the utmost limits of humanity’s comparatively negligible impulses in these directions? Suppose we were to abolish all penalties for such activities, and decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate — that every adult with less than, say, 365 pounds a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly fattened and clothed, would not that be an enormous improvement on our existing system, which has already destroyed so many civilizations, and is visibly destroying ours in the same way?

Is there any radicle of such legislation in our parliamentary system? Well, there are two measures just sprouting in the political soil, which may conceivably grow to something valuable. One is the institution of a Legal Minimum Wage. The other, Old Age Pensions. But there is a better plan than either of these. Some time ago I mentioned the subject of Universal Old Age Pensions to my fellow Socialist Mr Cobden-Sanderson, famous as an artist-craftsman in bookbinding and printing. “Why not Universal Pensions for Life?” said Cobden-Sanderson. In saying this, he solved the industrial problem at a stroke. At present we say callously to each citizen: “If you want money, earn it,” as if his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself alone. We do not even secure for him the opportunity of earning it: on the contrary, we allow our industry to be organized in open dependence on the maintenance of “a reserve army of unemployed” for the sake of “elasticity.” The sensible course would be Cobden-Sanderson’s: that is, to give every man enough to live well on, so as to guarantee the community against the possibility of a case of the malignant disease of poverty, and then (necessarily) to see that he earned it.

Undershaft, the hero of Major Barbara, is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him, not a choice between opulent villainy and humble virtue, but between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy. His conduct stands the Kantian test, which Peter Shirley’s does not. Peter Shirley is what we call the honest poor man. Undershaft is what we call the wicked rich one: Shirley is Lazarus, Undershaft Dives. Well, the misery of the world is due to the fact that the great mass of men act and believe as Peter Shirley acts and believes. If they acted and believed as Undershaft acts and believes, the immediate result would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy, says Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am prepared to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says, the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart’s medieval hero, who saw that “to rob and pill was a good life,” he is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who would otherwise be killed themselves, or of the mouth-honor paid to poverty and obedience by rich and insubordinate do-nothings who want to rob the poor without courage and command them without superiority. Froissart’s knight, in placing the achievement of a good life before all the other duties — which indeed are not duties at all when they conflict with it, but plain wickednesses — behaved bravely, admirably, and, in the final analysis, public-spiritedly. Medieval society, on the other hand, behaved very badly indeed in organizing itself so stupidly that a good life could be achieved by robbing and pilling. If the knight’s contemporaries had been all as resolute as he, robbing and pilling would have been the shortest way to the gallows, just as, if we were all as resolute and clearsighted as Undershaft, an attempt to live by means of what is called “an independent income” would be the shortest way to the lethal chamber. But as, thanks to our political imbecility and personal cowardice (fruits of poverty both), the best imitation of a good life now procurable is life on an independent income, all sensible people aim at securing such an income, and are, of course, careful to legalize and moralize both it and all the actions and sentiments which lead to it and support it as an institution. What else can they do? They know, of course, that they are rich because others are poor. But they cannot help that: it is for the poor to repudiate poverty when they have had enough of it. The thing can be done easily enough: the demonstrations to the contrary made by the economists, jurists, moralists and sentimentalists hired by the rich to defend them, or even doing the work gratuitously out of sheer folly and abjectness, impose only on the hirers.

The reason why the independent income-tax payers are not solid in defence of their position is that since we are not medieval rovers through a sparsely populated country, the poverty of those we rob prevents our having the good life for which we sacrifice them. Rich men or aristocrats with a developed sense of life — men like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin — have enormous social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors’ drains, and are made ill by the architecture of their neighbors’ houses. Trade patterns made to suit vulgar people do not please them (and they can get nothing else): they cannot sleep nor sit at ease upon “slaughtered” cabinet makers’ furniture. The very air is not good enough for them: there is too much factory smoke in it. They even demand abstract conditions: justice, honor, a noble moral atmosphere, a mystic nexus to replace the cash nexus. Finally they declare that though to rob and pill with your own hand on horseback and in steel coat may have been a good life, to rob and pill by the hands of the policeman, the bailiff, and the soldier, and to underpay them meanly for doing it, is not a good life, but rather fatal to all possibility of even a tolerable one. They call on the poor to revolt, and, finding the poor shocked at their ungentlemanliness, despairingly revile the proletariat for its “damned wantlessness” (verdammte Bedurfnislosigkeit).

So far, however, their attack on society has lacked simplicity. The poor do not share their tastes nor understand their art-criticisms. They do not want the simple life, nor the esthetic life; on the contrary, they want very much to wallow in all the costly vulgarities from which the elect souls among the rich turn away with loathing. It is by surfeit and not by abstinence that they will be cured of their hankering after unwholesome sweets. What they do dislike and despise and are ashamed of is poverty. To ask them to fight for the difference between the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Kelmscott Chaucer is silly: they prefer the News. The difference between a stockbroker’s cheap and dirty starched white shirt and collar and the comparatively costly and carefully dyed blue shirt of William Morris is a difference so disgraceful to Morris in their eyes that if they fought on the subject at all, they would fight in defence of the starch. “Cease to be slaves, in order that you may become cranks” is not a very inspiring call to arms; nor is it really improved by substituting saints for cranks. Both terms denote men of genius; and the common man does not want to live the life of a man of genius: he would much rather live the life of a pet collie if that were the only alternative. But he does want more money. Whatever else he may be vague about, he is clear about that. He may or may not prefer Major Barbara to the Drury Lane pantomime; but he always prefers five hundred pounds to five hundred shillings.

Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.

Once take your eyes from the ends of the earth and fix them on this truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft’s views will not perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he is only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity. All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist and her lover the Euripidean republican natural and inevitable. That, however, is not new, even on the stage. What is new, as far as I know, is that article in Undershaft’s religion which recognizes in Money the first need and in poverty the vilest sin of man and society.

This dramatic conception has not, of course, been attained per saltum. Nor has it been borrowed from Nietzsche or from any man born beyond the Channel. The late Samuel Butler, in his own department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the XIX century, steadily inculcated the necessity and morality of a conscientious Laodiceanism in religion and of an earnest and constant sense of the importance of money. It drives one almost to despair of English literature when one sees so extraordinary a study of English life as Butler’s posthumous Way of All Flesh making so little impression that when, some years later, I produce plays in which Butler’s extraordinarily fresh, free and future-piercing suggestions have an obvious share, I am met with nothing but vague cacklings about Ibsen and Nietzsche, and am only too thankful that they are not about Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand. Really, the English do not deserve to have great men. They allowed Butler to die practically unknown, whilst I, a comparatively insignificant Irish journalist, was leading them by the nose into an advertisement of me which has made my own life a burden. In Sicily there is a Via Samuele Butler. When an English tourist sees it, he either asks “Who the devil was Samuele Butler?” or wonders why the Sicilians should perpetuate the memory of the author of Hudibras.

Well, it cannot be denied that the English are only too anxious to recognize a man of genius if somebody will kindly point him out to them. Having pointed myself out in this manner with some success, I now point out Samuel Butler, and trust that in consequence I shall hear a little less in future of the novelty and foreign origin of the ideas which are now making their way into the English theatre through plays written by Socialists. There are living men whose originality and power are as obvious as Butler’s; and when they die that fact will be discovered. Meanwhile I recommend them to insist on their own merits as an important part of their own business.

THE SALVATION ARMY

When Major Barbara was produced in London, the second act was reported in an important northern newspaper as a withering attack on the Salvation Army, and the despairing ejaculation of Barbara deplored by a London daily as a tasteless blasphemy. And they were set right, not by the professed critics of the theatre, but by religious and philosophical publicists like Sir Oliver Lodge and Dr Stanton Coit, and strenuous Nonconformist journalists like Mr William Stead, who not only understood the act as well as the Salvationists themselves, but also saw it in its relation to the religious life of the nation, a life which seems to lie not only outside the sympathy of many of our theatre critics, but actually outside their knowledge of society. Indeed nothing could be more ironically curious than the confrontation Major Barbara effected of the theatre enthusiasts with the religious enthusiasts. On the one hand was the playgoer, always seeking pleasure, paying exorbitantly for it, suffering unbearable discomforts for it, and hardly ever getting it. On the other hand was the Salvationist, repudiating gaiety and courting effort and sacrifice, yet always in the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And, if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the popping of champagne corks and the ribald laughter of sirens! Could misunderstanding be more complete, or sympathy worse misplaced?

Fortunately, the Salvationists are more accessible to the religious character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay energy and artistic fertility of religion. They can see, when it is pointed out to them, that a theatre, as a place where two or three are gathered together, takes from that divine presence an inalienable sanctity of which the grossest and profanest farce can no more deprive it than a hypocritical sermon by a snobbish bishop can desecrate Westminster Abbey. But in our professional playgoers this indispensable preliminary conception of sanctity seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and mummers, and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator when what he calls the serious business of the day is over. Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual excitement: such phrases as “impassioned poetry” or “passionate love of truth” have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced by “passional crime” and the like. They assume, as far as I can gather, that people in whom passion has a larger scope are passionless and therefore uninteresting. Consequently they come to think of religious people as people who are not interesting and not amusing. And so, when Barbara cuts the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a kiss from her lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think they ought to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is an elaborate mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically rebuke me for mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed mockery! Even the handful of mentally competent critics got into difficulties over my demonstration of the economic deadlock in which the Salvation Army finds itself. Some of them thought that the Army would not have taken money from a distiller and a cannon founder: others thought it should not have taken it: all assumed more or less definitely that it reduced itself to absurdity or hypocrisy by taking it. On the first point the reply of the Army itself was prompt and conclusive. As one of its officers said, they would take money from the devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into God’s. They gratefully acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow them to collect it in the bar — sometimes even when there is a Salvation meeting outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they questioned the verisimilitude of the play, not because Mrs Baines took the money, but because Barbara refused it.

On the point that the Army ought not to take such money, its justification is obvious. It must take the money because it cannot exist without money, and there is no other money to be had. Practically all the spare money in the country consists of a mass of rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commercial probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition. None the less the fact that all our money is tainted gives a very severe shock to earnest young souls when some dramatic instance of the taint first makes them conscious of it. When an enthusiastic young clergyman of the Established Church first realizes that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners receive the rents of sporting public houses, brothels, and sweating dens; or that the most generous contributor at his last charity sermon was an employer trading in female labor cheapened by prostitution as unscrupulously as a hotel keeper trades in waiters’ labor cheapened by tips, or commissionaire’s labor cheapened by pensions; or that the only patron who can afford to rebuild his church or his schools or give his boys’ brigade a gymnasium or a library is the son-in-law of a Chicago meat King, that young clergyman has, like Barbara, a very bad quarter hour. But he cannot help himself by refusing to accept money from anybody except sweet old ladies with independent incomes and gentle and lovely ways of life. He has only to follow up the income of the sweet ladies to its industrial source, and there he will find Mrs Warren’s profession and the poisonous canned meat and all the rest of it. His own stipend has the same root. He must either share the world’s guilt or go to another planet. He must save the world’s honor if he is to save his own. This is what all the Churches find just as the Salvation Army and Barbara find it in the play. Her discovery that she is her father’s accomplice; that the Salvation Army is the accomplice of the distiller and the dynamite maker; that they can no more escape one another than they can escape the air they breathe; that there is no salvation for them through personal righteousness, but only through the redemption of the whole nation from its vicious, lazy, competitive anarchy: this discovery has been made by everyone except the Pharisees and (apparently) the professional playgoers, who still wear their Tom Hood shirts and underpay their washerwomen without the slightest misgiving as to the elevation of their private characters, the purity of their private atmospheres, and their right to repudiate as foreign to themselves the coarse depravity of the garret and the slum. Not that they mean any harm: they only desire to be, in their little private way, what they call gentlemen. They do not understand Barbara’s lesson because they have not, like her, learnt it by taking their part in the larger life of the nation.

BARBARA’S RETURN TO THE COLORS.

Barbara’s return to the colors may yet provide a subject for the dramatic historian of the future. To go back to the Salvation Army with the knowledge that even the Salvationists themselves are not saved yet; that poverty is not blessed, but a most damnable sin; and that when General Booth chose Blood and Fire for the emblem of Salvation instead of the Cross, he was perhaps better inspired than he knew: such knowledge, for the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, will clearly lead to something hopefuller than distributing bread and treacle at the expense of Bodger.

It is a very significant thing, this instinctive choice of the military form of organization, this substitution of the drum for the organ, by the Salvation Army. Does it not suggest that the Salvationists divine that they must actually fight the devil instead of merely praying at him? At present, it is true, they have not quite ascertained his correct address. When they do, they may give a very rude shock to that sense of security which he has gained from his experience of the fact that hard words, even when uttered by eloquent essayists and lecturers, or carried unanimously at enthusiastic public meetings on the motion of eminent reformers, break no bones. It has been said that the French Revolution was the work of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopedists. It seems to me to have been the work of men who had observed that virtuous indignation, caustic criticism, conclusive argument and instructive pamphleteering, even when done by the most earnest and witty literary geniuses, were as useless as praying, things going steadily from bad to worse whilst the Social Contract and the pamphlets of Voltaire were at the height of their vogue. Eventually, as we know, perfectly respectable citizens and earnest philanthropists connived at the September massacres because hard experience had convinced them that if they contented themselves with appeals to humanity and patriotism, the aristocracy, though it would read their appeals with the greatest enjoyment and appreciation, flattering and admiring the writers, would none the less continue to conspire with foreign monarchists to undo the revolution and restore the old system with every circumstance of savage vengeance and ruthless repression of popular liberties.

The nineteenth century saw the same lesson repeated in England. It had its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians (still extant): it had Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Butler, Henry George, and Morris. And the end of all their efforts is the Chicago described by Mr Upton Sinclair, and the London in which the people who pay to be amused by my dramatic representation of Peter Shirley turned out to starve at forty because there are younger slaves to be had for his wages, do not take, and have not the slightest intention of taking, any effective step to organize society in such a way as to make that everyday infamy impossible. I, who have preached and pamphleteered like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my methods are no use, and would be no use if I were Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, George, Butler, and Morris all rolled into one, with Euripides, More, Moliere, Shakespear, Beaumarchais, Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Moses and the prophets all thrown in (as indeed in some sort I actually am, standing as I do on all their shoulders). The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression. Christianity, in making a merit of such submission, has marked only that depth in the abyss at which the very sense of shame is lost. The Christian has been like Dickens’ doctor in the debtor’s prison, who tells the newcomer of its ineffable peace and security: no duns; no tyrannical collectors of rates, taxes, and rent; no importunate hopes nor exacting duties; nothing but the rest and safety of having no further to fall.

Yet in the poorest corner of this soul-destroying Christendom vitality suddenly begins to germinate again. Joyousness, a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise to the heavens from people among whom the depressing noise called “sacred music” is a standing joke; a flag with Blood and Fire on it is unfurled, not in murderous rancor, but because fire is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red; Fear, which we flatter by calling Self, vanishes; and transfigured men and women carry their gospel through a transfigured world, calling their leader General, themselves captains and brigadiers, and their whole body an Army: praying, but praying only for refreshment, for strength to fight, and for needful MONEY (a notable sign, that); preaching, but not preaching submission; daring ill-usage and abuse, but not putting up with more of it than is inevitable; and practising what the world will let them practise, including soap and water, color and music. There is danger in such Activity; and where there is danger there is hope. Our present security is nothing, and can be nothing, but evil made irresistible.

WEAKNESSES OF THE SALVATION ARMY.

For the present, however, it is not my business to flatter the Salvation Army. Rather must I point out to it that it has almost as many weaknesses as the Church of England itself. It is building up a business organization which will compel it eventually to see that its present staff of enthusiast-commanders shall be succeeded by a bureaucracy of men of business who will be no better than bishops, and perhaps a good deal more unscrupulous. That has always happened sooner or later to great orders founded by saints; and the order founded by St William Booth is not exempt from the same danger. It is even more dependent than the Church on rich people who would cut off supplies at once if it began to preach that indispensable revolt against poverty which must also be a revolt against riches. It is hampered by a heavy contingent of pious elders who are not really Salvationists at all, but Evangelicals of the old school. It still, as Commissioner Howard affirms, “sticks to Moses,” which is flat nonsense at this time of day if the Commissioner means, as I am afraid he does, that the Book of Genesis contains a trustworthy scientific account of the origin of species, and that the god to whom Jephthah sacrificed his daughter is any less obviously a tribal idol than Dagon or Chemosh.

Further, there is still too much other-worldliness about the Army. Like Frederick’s grenadier, the Salvationist wants to live for ever (the most monstrous way of crying for the moon); and though it is evident to anyone who has ever heard General Booth and his best officers that they would work as hard for human salvation as they do at present if they believed that death would be the end of them individually, they and their followers have a bad habit of talking as if the Salvationists were heroically enduring a very bad time on earth as an investment which will bring them in dividends later on in the form, not of a better life to come for the whole world, but of an eternity spent by themselves personally in a sort of bliss which would bore any active person to a second death. Surely the truth is that the Salvationists are unusually happy people. And is it not the very diagnostic of true salvation that it shall overcome the fear of death? Now the man who has come to believe that there is no such thing as death, the change so called being merely the transition to an exquisitely happy and utterly careless life, has not overcome the fear of death at all: on the contrary, it has overcome him so completely that he refuses to die on any terms whatever. I do not call a Salvationist really saved until he is ready to lie down cheerfully on the scrap heap, having paid scot and lot and something over, and let his eternal life pass on to renew its youth in the battalions of the future.

Then there is the nasty lying habit called confession, which the Army encourages because it lends itself to dramatic oratory, with plenty of thrilling incident. For my part, when I hear a convert relating the violences and oaths and blasphemies he was guilty of before he was saved, making out that he was a very terrible fellow then and is the most contrite and chastened of Christians now, I believe him no more than I believe the millionaire who says he came up to London or Chicago as a boy with only three halfpence in his pocket. Salvationists have said to me that Barbara in my play would never have been taken in by so transparent a humbug as Snobby Price; and certainly I do not think Snobby could have taken in any experienced Salvationist on a point on which the Salvationist did not wish to be taken in. But on the point of conversion all Salvationists wish to be taken in; for the more obvious the sinner the more obvious the miracle of his conversion. When you advertize a converted burglar or reclaimed drunkard as one of the attractions at an experience meeting, your burglar can hardly have been too burglarious or your drunkard too drunken. As long as such attractions are relied on, you will have your Snobbies claiming to have beaten their mothers when they were as a matter of prosaic fact habitually beaten by them, and your Rummies of the tamest respectability pretending to a past of reckless and dazzling vice. Even when confessions are sincerely autobiographic there is no reason to assume at once that the impulse to make them is pious or the interest of the hearers wholesome. It might as well be assumed that the poor people who insist on showing appalling ulcers to district visitors are convinced hygienists, or that the curiosity which sometimes welcomes such exhibitions is a pleasant and creditable one. One is often tempted to suggest that those who pester our police superintendents with confessions of murder might very wisely be taken at their word and executed, except in the few cases in which a real murderer is seeking to be relieved of his guilt by confession and expiation. For though I am not, I hope, an unmerciful person, I do not think that the inexorability of the deed once done should be disguised by any ritual, whether in the confessional or on the scaffold.

And here my disagreement with the Salvation Army, and with all propagandists of the Cross (to which I object as I object to all gibbets) becomes deep indeed. Forgiveness, absolution, atonement, are figments: punishment is only a pretence of cancelling one crime by another; and you can no more have forgiveness without vindictiveness than you can have a cure without a disease. You will never get a high morality from people who conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable, or in a society where absolution and expiation are officially provided for us all. The demand may be very real; but the supply is spurious. Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the Salvation Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable conviction of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara. Straightway he begins to try to unassault the lass and deruffianize his deed, first by getting punished for it in kind, and, when that relief is denied him, by fining himself a pound to compensate the girl. He is foiled both ways. He finds the Salvation Army as inexorable as fact itself. It will not punish him: it will not take his money. It will not tolerate a redeemed ruffian: it leaves him no means of salvation except ceasing to be a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps the central truth of Christianity and discards its central superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the world by the gibbet.

For, be it noted, Bill has assaulted an old and starving woman also; and for this worse offence he feels no remorse whatever, because she makes it clear that her malice is as great as his own. “Let her have the law of me, as she said she would,” says Bill: “what I done to her is no more on what you might call my conscience than sticking a pig.” This shows a perfectly natural and wholesome state of mind on his part. The old woman, like the law she threatens him with, is perfectly ready to play the game of retaliation with him: to rob him if he steals, to flog him if he strikes, to murder him if he kills. By example and precept the law and public opinion teach him to impose his will on others by anger, violence, and cruelty, and to wipe off the moral score by punishment. That is sound Crosstianity. But this Crosstianity has got entangled with something which Barbara calls Christianity, and which unexpectedly causes her to refuse to play the hangman’s game of Satan casting out Satan. She refuses to prosecute a drunken ruffian; she converses on equal terms with a blackguard whom no lady could be seen speaking to in the public street: in short, she behaves as illegally and unbecomingly as possible under the circumstances. Bill’s conscience reacts to this just as naturally as it does to the old woman’s threats. He is placed in a position of unbearable moral inferiority, and strives by every means in his power to escape from it, whilst he is still quite ready to meet the abuse of the old woman by attempting to smash a mug on her face. And that is the triumphant justification of Barbara’s Christianity as against our system of judicial punishment and the vindictive villain-thrashings and “poetic justice” of the romantic stage.

For the credit of literature it must be pointed out that the situation is only partly novel. Victor Hugo long ago gave us the epic of the convict and the bishop’s candlesticks, of the Crosstian policeman annihilated by his encounter with the Christian Valjean. But Bill Walker is not, like Valjean, romantically changed from a demon into an angel. There are millions of Bill Walkers in all classes of society to-day; and the point which I, as a professor of natural psychology, desire to demonstrate, is that Bill, without any change in his character whatsoever, will react one way to one sort of treatment and another way to another.

In proof I might point to the sensational object lesson provided by our commercial millionaires to-day. They begin as brigands: merciless, unscrupulous, dealing out ruin and death and slavery to their competitors and employees, and facing desperately the worst that their competitors can do to them. The history of the English factories, the American trusts, the exploitation of African gold, diamonds, ivory and rubber, outdoes in villainy the worst that has ever been imagined of the buccaneers of the Spanish Main. Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune. The law every day seizes on unsuccessful scoundrels of this type and punishes them with a cruelty worse than their own, with the result that they come out of the torture house more dangerous than they went in, and renew their evil doing (nobody will employ them at anything else) until they are again seized, again tormented, and again let loose, with the same result.

But the successful scoundrel is dealt with very differently, and very Christianly. He is not only forgiven: he is idolized, respected, made much of, all but worshipped. Society returns him good for evil in the most extravagant overmeasure. And with what result? He begins to idolize himself, to respect himself, to live up to the treatment he receives. He preaches sermons; he writes books of the most edifying advice to young men, and actually persuades himself that he got on by taking his own advice; he endows educational institutions; he supports charities; he dies finally in the odor of sanctity, leaving a will which is a monument of public spirit and bounty. And all this without any change in his character. The spots of the leopard and the stripes of the tiger are as brilliant as ever; but the conduct of the world towards him has changed; and his conduct has changed accordingly. You have only to reverse your attitude towards him — to lay hands on his property, revile him, assault him, and he will be a brigand again in a moment, as ready to crush you as you are to crush him, and quite as full of pretentious moral reasons for doing it.

In short, when Major Barbara says that there are no scoundrels, she is right: there are no absolute scoundrels, though there are impracticable people of whom I shall treat presently. Every practicable man (and woman) is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances. The characteristics that ruin a man in one class make him eminent in another. The characters that behave differently in different circumstances behave alike in similar circumstances. Take a common English character like that of Bill Walker. We meet Bill everywhere: on the judicial bench, on the episcopal bench, in the Privy Council, at the War Office and Admiralty, as well as in the Old Bailey dock or in the ranks of casual unskilled labor. And the morality of Bill’s characteristics varies with these various circumstances. The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation. In short, though character is independent of circumstances, conduct is not; and our moral judgments of character are not: both are circumstantial. Take any condition of life in which the circumstances are for a mass of men practically alike: felony, the House of Lords, the factory, the stables, the gipsy encampment or where you please! In spite of diversity of character and temperament, the conduct and morals of the individuals in each group are as predicable and as alike in the main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals being mostly only social habits and circumstantial necessities. Strong people know this and count upon it. In nothing have the master-minds of the world been distinguished from the ordinary suburban season-ticket holder more than in their straightforward perception of the fact that mankind is practically a single species, and not a menagerie of gentlemen and bounders, villains and heroes, cowards and daredevils, peers and peasants, grocers and aristocrats, artisans and laborers, washerwomen and duchesses, in which all the grades of income and caste represent distinct animals who must not be introduced to one another or intermarry. Napoleon constructing a galaxy of generals and courtiers, and even of monarchs, out of his collection of social nobodies; Julius Caesar appointing as governor of Egypt the son of a freedman — one who but a short time before would have been legally disqualified for the post even of a private soldier in the Roman army; Louis XI making his barber his privy councillor: all these had in their different ways a firm hold of the scientific fact of human equality, expressed by Barbara in the Christian formula that all men are children of one father. A man who believes that men are naturally divided into upper and lower and middle classes morally is making exactly the same mistake as the man who believes that they are naturally divided in the same way socially. And just as our persistent attempts to found political institutions on a basis of social inequality have always produced long periods of destructive friction relieved from time to time by violent explosions of revolution; so the attempt — will Americans please note — to found moral institutions on a basis of moral inequality can lead to nothing but unnatural Reigns of the Saints relieved by licentious Restorations; to Americans who have made divorce a public institution turning the face of Europe into one huge sardonic smile by refusing to stay in the same hotel with a Russian man of genius who has changed wives without the sanction of South Dakota; to grotesque hypocrisy, cruel persecution, and final utter confusion of conventions and compliances with benevolence and respectability. It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man’s goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man’s liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment, which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal. This is the lesson Democracy has to learn before it can become anything but the most oppressive of all the priesthoods.

Let us now return to Bill Walker and his case of conscience against the Salvation Army. Major Barbara, not being a modern Tetzel, or the treasurer of a hospital, refuses to sell Bill absolution for a sovereign. Unfortunately, what the Army can afford to refuse in the case of Bill Walker, it cannot refuse in the case of Bodger. Bodger is master of the situation because he holds the purse strings. “Strive as you will,” says Bodger, in effect: “me you cannot do without. You cannot save Bill Walker without my money.” And the Army answers, quite rightly under the circumstances, “We will take money from the devil himself sooner than abandon the work of Salvation.” So Bodger pays his conscience-money and gets the absolution that is refused to Bill. In real life Bill would perhaps never know this. But I, the dramatist, whose business it is to show the connexion between things that seem apart and unrelated in the haphazard order of events in real life, have contrived to make it known to Bill, with the result that the Salvation Army loses its hold of him at once.

But Bill may not be lost, for all that. He is still in the grip of the facts and of his own conscience, and may find his taste for blackguardism permanently spoiled. Still, I cannot guarantee that happy ending. Let anyone walk through the poorer quarters of our cities when the men are not working, but resting and chewing the cud of their reflections; and he will find that there is one expression on every mature face: the expression of cynicism. The discovery made by Bill Walker about the Salvation Army has been made by every one of them. They have found that every man has his price; and they have been foolishly or corruptly taught to mistrust and despise him for that necessary and salutary condition of social existence. When they learn that General Booth, too, has his price, they do not admire him because it is a high one, and admit the need of organizing society so that he shall get it in an honorable way: they conclude that his character is unsound and that all religious men are hypocrites and allies of their sweaters and oppressors. They know that the large subscriptions which help to support the Army are endowments, not of religion, but of the wicked doctrine of docility in poverty and humility under oppression; and they are rent by the most agonizing of all the doubts of the soul, the doubt whether their true salvation must not come from their most abhorrent passions, from murder, envy, greed, stubbornness, rage, and terrorism, rather than from public spirit, reasonableness, humanity, generosity, tenderness, delicacy, pity and kindness. The confirmation of that doubt, at which our newspapers have been working so hard for years past, is the morality of militarism; and the justification of militarism is that circumstances may at any time make it the true morality of the moment. It is by producing such moments that we produce violent and sanguinary revolutions, such as the one now in progress in Russia and the one which Capitalism in England and America is daily and diligently provoking.

At such moments it becomes the duty of the Churches to evoke all the powers of destruction against the existing order. But if they do this, the existing order must forcibly suppress them. Churches are suffered to exist only on condition that they preach submission to the State as at present capitalistically organized. The Church of England itself is compelled to add to the thirty-six articles in which it formulates its religious tenets, three more in which it apologetically protests that the moment any of these articles comes in conflict with the State it is to be entirely renounced, abjured, violated, abrogated and abhorred, the policeman being a much more important person than any of the Persons of the Trinity. And this is why no tolerated Church nor Salvation Army can ever win the entire confidence of the poor. It must be on the side of the police and the military, no matter what it believes or disbelieves; and as the police and the military are the instruments by which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and moral principles made for the purpose), it is not possible to be on the side of the poor and of the police at the same time. Indeed the religious bodies, as the almoners of the rich, become a sort of auxiliary police, taking off the insurrectionary edge of poverty with coals and blankets, bread and treacle, and soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of immense and inexpensive happiness in another world when the process of working them to premature death in the service of the rich is complete in this.

CHRISTIANITY AND ANARCHISM

Such is the false position from which neither the Salvation Army nor the Church of England nor any other religious organization whatever can escape except through a reconstitution of society. Nor can they merely endure the State passively, washing their hands of its sins. The State is constantly forcing the consciences of men by violence and cruelty. Not content with exacting money from us for the maintenance of its soldiers and policemen, its gaolers and executioners, it forces us to take an active personal part in its proceedings on pain of becoming ourselves the victims of its violence. As I write these lines, a sensational example is given to the world. A royal marriage has been celebrated, first by sacrament in a cathedral, and then by a bullfight having for its main amusement the spectacle of horses gored and disembowelled by the bull, after which, when the bull is so exhausted as to be no longer dangerous, he is killed by a cautious matador. But the ironic contrast between the bullfight and the sacrament of marriage does not move anyone. Another contrast — that between the splendor, the happiness, the atmosphere of kindly admiration surrounding the young couple, and the price paid for it under our abominable social arrangements in the misery, squalor and degradation of millions of other young couples — is drawn at the same moment by a novelist, Mr Upton Sinclair, who chips a corner of the veneering from the huge meat packing industries of Chicago, and shows it to us as a sample of what is going on all over the world underneath the top layer of prosperous plutocracy. One man is sufficiently moved by that contrast to pay his own life as the price of one terrible blow at the responsible parties. Unhappily his poverty leaves him also ignorant enough to be duped by the pretence that the innocent young bride and bridegroom, put forth and crowned by plutocracy as the heads of a State in which they have less personal power than any policeman, and less influence than any chairman of a trust, are responsible. At them accordingly he launches his sixpennorth of fulminate, missing his mark, but scattering the bowels of as many horses as any bull in the arena, and slaying twenty-three persons, besides wounding ninety-nine. And of all these, the horses alone are innocent of the guilt he is avenging: had he blown all Madrid to atoms with every adult person in it, not one could have escaped the charge of being an accessory, before, at, and after the fact, to poverty and prostitution, to such wholesale massacre of infants as Herod never dreamt of, to plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder and lingering death — perhaps not one who had not helped, through example, precept, connivance, and even clamor, to teach the dynamiter his well-learnt gospel of hatred and vengeance, by approving every day of sentences of years of imprisonment so infernal in its unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask of justice and humanity from themselves also. Be it noted that at this very moment there appears the biography of one of our dukes, who, being Scotch, could argue about politics, and therefore stood out as a great brain among our aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace’s favorite historical episode, which he declared he never read without intense satisfaction? Why, the young General Bonapart’s pounding of the Paris mob to pieces in 1795, called in playful approval by our respectable classes “the whiff of grapeshot,” though Napoleon, to do him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would fain have had it forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of like passions with ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go, who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling in “the whiff of dynamite” (the flavor of the joke seems to evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the class they hate even as our argute duke hated what he called the mob.

In such an atmosphere there can be only one sequel to the Madrid explosion. All Europe burns to emulate it. Vengeance! More blood! Tear “the Anarchist beast” to shreds. Drag him to the scaffold. Imprison him for life. Let all civilized States band together to drive his like off the face of the earth; and if any State refuses to join, make war on it. This time the leading London newspaper, anti-Liberal and therefore anti-Russian in politics, does not say “Serve you right” to the victims, as it did, in effect, when Bobrikofl; and De Plehve, and Grand Duke Sergius, were in the same manner unofficially fulminated into fragments. No: fulminate our rivals in Asia by all means, ye brave Russian revolutionaries; but to aim at an English princess-monstrous! hideous! hound down the wretch to his doom; and observe, please, that we are a civilized and merciful people, and, however much we may regret it, must not treat him as Ravaillac and Damiens were treated. And meanwhile, since we have not yet caught him, let us soothe our quivering nerves with the bullfight, and comment in a courtly way on the unfailing tact and good taste of the ladies of our royal houses, who, though presumably of full normal natural tenderness, have been so effectually broken in to fashionable routine that they can be taken to see the horses slaughtered as helplessly as they could no doubt be taken to a gladiator show, if that happened to be the mode just now.

Strangely enough, in the midst of this raging fire of malice, the one man who still has faith in the kindness and intelligence of human nature is the fulminator, now a hunted wretch, with nothing, apparently, to secure his triumph over all the prisons and scaffolds of infuriate Europe except the revolver in his pocket and his readiness to discharge it at a moment’s notice into his own or any other head. Think of him setting out to find a gentleman and a Christian in the multitude of human wolves howling for his blood. Think also of this: that at the very first essay he finds what he seeks, a veritable grandee of Spain, a noble, high-thinking, unterrified, malice-void soul, in the guise — of all masquerades in the world! — of a modern editor. The Anarchist wolf, flying from the wolves of plutocracy, throws himself on the honor of the man. The man, not being a wolf (nor a London editor), and therefore not having enough sympathy with his exploit to be made bloodthirsty by it, does not throw him back to the pursuing wolves — gives him, instead, what help he can to escape, and sends him off acquainted at last with a force that goes deeper than dynamite, though you cannot make so much of it for sixpence. That righteous and honorable high human deed is not wasted on Europe, let us hope, though it benefits the fugitive wolf only for a moment. The plutocratic wolves presently smell him out. The fugitive shoots the unlucky wolf whose nose is nearest; shoots himself; and then convinces the world, by his photograph, that he was no monstrous freak of reversion to the tiger, but a good looking young man with nothing abnormal about him except his appalling courage and resolution (that is why the terrified shriek Coward at him): one to whom murdering a happy young couple on their wedding morning would have been an unthinkably unnatural abomination under rational and kindly human circumstances.

Then comes the climax of irony and blind stupidity. The wolves, balked of their meal of fellow-wolf, turn on the man, and proceed to torture him, after their manner, by imprisonment, for refusing to fasten his teeth in the throat of the dynamiter and hold him down until they came to finish him.

Thus, you see, a man may not be a gentleman nowadays even if he wishes to. As to being a Christian, he is allowed some latitude in that matter, because, I repeat, Christianity has two faces. Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanguinary execution after torture, for its central mystery an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of Equality, and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance, often politely called punishment or justice. The gibbet part of Christianity is tolerated. The other is criminal felony. Connoisseurs in irony are well aware of the fact that the only editor in England who denounces punishment as radically wrong, also repudiates Christianity; calls his paper The Freethinker; and has been imprisoned for two years for blasphemy.

SANE CONCLUSIONS

And now I must ask the excited reader not to lose his head on one side or the other, but to draw a sane moral from these grim absurdities. It is not good sense to propose that laws against crime should apply to principals only and not to accessories whose consent, counsel, or silence may secure impunity to the principal. If you institute punishment as part of the law, you must punish people for refusing to punish. If you have a police, part of its duty must be to compel everybody to assist the police. No doubt if your laws are unjust, and your policemen agents of oppression, the result will be an unbearable violation of the private consciences of citizens. But that cannot be helped: the remedy is, not to license everybody to thwart the law if they please, but to make laws that will command the public assent, and not to deal cruelly and stupidly with lawbreakers. Everybody disapproves of burglars; but the modern burglar, when caught and overpowered by a householder usually appeals, and often, let us hope, with success, to his captor not to deliver him over to the useless horrors of penal servitude. In other cases the lawbreaker escapes because those who could give him up do not consider his breech of the law a guilty action. Sometimes, even, private tribunals are formed in opposition to the official tribunals; and these private tribunals employ assassins as executioners, as was done, for example, by Mahomet before he had established his power officially, and by the Ribbon lodges of Ireland in their long struggle with the landlords. Under such circumstances, the assassin goes free although everybody in the district knows who he is and what he has done. They do not betray him, partly because they justify him exactly as the regular Government justifies its official executioner, and partly because they would themselves be assassinated if they betrayed him: another method learnt from the official government. Given a tribunal, employing a slayer who has no personal quarrel with the slain; and there is clearly no moral difference between official and unofficial killing.

In short, all men are anarchists with regard to laws which are against their consciences, either in the preamble or in the penalty. In London our worst anarchists are the magistrates, because many of them are so old and ignorant that when they are called upon to administer any law that is based on ideas or knowledge less than half a century old, they disagree with it, and being mere ordinary homebred private Englishmen without any respect for law in the abstract, naively set the example of violating it. In this instance the man lags behind the law; but when the law lags behind the man, he becomes equally an anarchist. When some huge change in social conditions, such as the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, throws our legal and industrial institutions out of date, Anarchism becomes almost a religion. The whole force of the most energetic geniuses of the time in philosophy, economics, and art, concentrates itself on demonstrations and reminders that morality and law are only conventions, fallible and continually obsolescing. Tragedies in which the heroes are bandits, and comedies in which law-abiding and conventionally moral folk are compelled to satirize themselves by outraging the conscience of the spectators every time they do their duty, appear simultaneously with economic treatises entitled “What is Property? Theft!” and with histories of “The Conflict between Religion and Science.”

Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of living in society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the individual from a code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the code he is prepared not only to accept but to uphold as a matter of such vital importance that a lawbreaker at large is hardly to be tolerated on any plea. Such an attitude becomes impossible when the only men who can make themselves heard and remembered throughout the world spend all their energy in raising our gorge against current law, current morality, current respect ability, and legal property. The ordinary man, uneducated in social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be set against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to regard law in the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once he is brought to repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he will repudiate the very conception of law and the very groundwork of institutions, ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless methods as “historical,” and tolerating nothing except pure empiricism in conduct, with dynamite as the basis of politics and vivisection as the basis of science. That is hideous; but what is to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man, by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and by temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit of old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons; but that does not make my attacks any less encouraging or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad reasons. The existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about it, some foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what worse it could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage of that worst even from its own point of view is that society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, simply not to outrage their consciences.

Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire. The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by their personal exertions not only a full equivalent for what they take, but a surplus sufficient to provide for their superannuation and pay back the debt due for their nurture.

The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious injuries which now goes on under the name of punishment be abandoned; so that the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the beggar, may without inhumanity be handed over to the law, and made to understand that a State which is too humane to punish will also be too thrifty to waste the life of honest men in watching or restraining dishonest ones. That is why we do not imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first bite. But if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal chamber. That seems to me sensible. To allow the dog to expiate his bite by a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much more savage condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite again and expiate again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of human life and happiness in the task of chaining and feeding and tormenting him, seems to me idiotic and superstitious. Yet that is what we do to men who bark and bite and steal. It would be far more sensible to put up with their vices, as we put up with their illnesses, until they give more trouble than they are worth, at which point we should, with many apologies and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate their misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a charity, or to compensate the victims. If there is to be no punishment there can be no forgiveness. We shall never have real moral responsibility until everyone knows that his deeds are irrevocable, and that his life depends on his usefulness. Hitherto, alas! humanity has never dared face these hard facts. We frantically scatter conscience money and invent systems of conscience banking, with expiatory penalties, atonements, redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and what not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code. Not content with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify human saviors, and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute mercy to the inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing murder by throwing ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and shrink even from our own gallows because we are forced to admit that it, at least, is irrevocable — as if one hour of imprisonment were not as irrevocable as any execution!

If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will never know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to do it. That is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy. Major Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result that the ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself. To relieve this agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist whom he tries to provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only prays for him. Then he tries to pay, but can get nobody to take his money. His doom is the doom of Cain, who, failing to find either a savior, a policeman, or an almoner to help him to pretend that his brother’s blood no longer cried from the ground, had to live and die a murderer. Cain took care not to commit another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to deserving charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score, he might possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a second luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you may depend on it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning people with bad whisky, because he can always depend on the Salvation Army or the Church of England to negotiate a redemption for him in consideration of a trifling percentage of his profits. There is a third condition too, which must be fulfilled before the great teachers of the world will cease to scoff at its religions. Creeds must become intellectually honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole world-situation. This play of mine, Major Barbara, is, I hope, both true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened, and that faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing that it is a record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak according to Scripture, a fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly denounced and cursed as such by me, the author, to all posterity.

London, June 1906.

ACT I

It is after dinner on a January night, in the library in Lady Britomart Undershaft’s house in Wilton Crescent. A large and comfortable settee is in the middle of the room, upholstered in dark leather. A person sitting on it [it is vacant at present] would have, on his right, Lady Britomart’s writing table, with the lady herself busy at it; a smaller writing table behind him on his left; the door behind him on Lady Britomart’s side; and a window with a window seat directly on his left. Near the window is an armchair.

Lady Britomart is a woman of fifty or thereabouts, well dressed and yet careless of her dress, well bred and quite reckless of her breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary, and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty child until she grew into a scolding mother, and finally settling down with plenty of practical ability and worldly experience, limited in the oddest way with domestic and class limitations, conceiving the universe exactly as if it were a large house in Wilton Crescent, though handling her corner of it very effectively on that assumption, and being quite enlightened and liberal as to the books in the library, the pictures on the walls, the music in the portfolios, and the articles in the papers.

Her son, Stephen, comes in. He is a gravely correct young man under 25, taking himself very seriously, but still in some awe of his mother, from childish habit and bachelor shyness rather than from any weakness of character.

STEPHEN. What’s the matter?

LADY BRITOMART. Presently, Stephen.

Stephen submissively walks to the settee and sits down. He takes up The Speaker.

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t begin to read, Stephen. I shall require all your attention.

STEPHEN. It was only while I was waiting —

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t make excuses, Stephen. [He puts down The Speaker]. Now! [She finishes her writing; rises; and comes to the settee]. I have not kept you waiting very long, I think.

STEPHEN. Not at all, mother.

LADY BRITOMART. Bring me my cushion. [He takes the cushion from the chair at the desk and arranges it for her as she sits down on the settee]. Sit down. [He sits down and fingers his tie nervously]. Don’t fiddle with your tie, Stephen: there is nothing the matter with it.

STEPHEN. I beg your pardon. [He fiddles with his watch chain instead].

LADY BRITOMART. Now are you attending to me, Stephen?

STEPHEN. Of course, mother.

LADY BRITOMART. No: it’s not of course. I want something much more than your everyday matter-of-course attention. I am going to speak to you very seriously, Stephen. I wish you would let that chain alone.

STEPHEN [hastily relinquishing the chain] Have I done anything to annoy you, mother? If so, it was quite unintentional.

LADY BRITOMART [astonished] Nonsense! [With some remorse] My poor boy, did you think I was angry with you?

STEPHEN. What is it, then, mother? You are making me very uneasy.

LADY BRITOMART [squaring herself at him rather aggressively] Stephen: may I ask how soon you intend to realize that you are a grown-up man, and that I am only a woman?

STEPHEN [amazed] Only a —

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t repeat my words, please: It is a most aggravating habit. You must learn to face life seriously, Stephen. I really cannot bear the whole burden of our family affairs any longer. You must advise me: you must assume the responsibility.

STEPHEN. I!

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, you, of course. You were 24 last June. You’ve been at Harrow and Cambridge. You’ve been to India and Japan. You must know a lot of things now; unless you have wasted your time most scandalously. Well, advise me.

STEPHEN [much perplexed] You know I have never interfered in the household —

LADY BRITOMART. No: I should think not. I don’t want you to order the dinner.

STEPHEN. I mean in our family affairs.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, you must interfere now; for they are getting quite beyond me.

STEPHEN [troubled] I have thought sometimes that perhaps I ought; but really, mother, I know so little about them; and what I do know is so painful — it is so impossible to mention some things to you — [he stops, ashamed].

LADY BRITOMART. I suppose you mean your father.

STEPHEN [almost inaudibly] Yes.

LADY BRITOMART. My dear: we can’t go on all our lives not mentioning him. Of course you were quite right not to open the subject until I asked you to; but you are old enough now to be taken into my confidence, and to help me to deal with him about the girls.

STEPHEN. But the girls are all right. They are engaged.

LADY BRITOMART [complacently] Yes: I have made a very good match for Sarah. Charles Lomax will be a millionaire at 35. But that is ten years ahead; and in the meantime his trustees cannot under the terms of his father’s will allow him more than 800 pounds a year.

STEPHEN. But the will says also that if he increases his income by his own exertions, they may double the increase.

LADY BRITOMART. Charles Lomax’s exertions are much more likely to decrease his income than to increase it. Sarah will have to find at least another 800 pounds a year for the next ten years; and even then they will be as poor as church mice. And what about Barbara? I thought Barbara was going to make the most brilliant career of all of you. And what does she do? Joins the Salvation Army; discharges her maid; lives on a pound a week; and walks in one evening with a professor of Greek whom she has picked up in the street, and who pretends to be a Salvationist, and actually plays the big drum for her in public because he has fallen head over ears in love with her.

STEPHEN. I was certainly rather taken aback when I heard they were engaged. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever guess that he was born in Australia; but —

LADY BRITOMART. Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman. And my family, thank Heaven, is not a pig-headed Tory one. We are Whigs, and believe in liberty. Let snobbish people say what they please: Barbara shall marry, not the man they like, but the man I like.

STEPHEN. Of course I was thinking only of his income. However, he is not likely to be extravagant.

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t be too sure of that, Stephen. I know your quiet, simple, refined, poetic people like Adolphus — quite content with the best of everything! They cost more than your extravagant people, who are always as mean as they are second rate. No: Barbara will need at least 2000 pounds a year. You see it means two additional households. Besides, my dear, you must marry soon. I don’t approve of the present fashion of philandering bachelors and late marriages; and I am trying to arrange something for you.

STEPHEN. It’s very good of you, mother; but perhaps I had better arrange that for myself.

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! you are much too young to begin matchmaking: you would be taken in by some pretty little nobody. Of course I don’t mean that you are not to be consulted: you know that as well as I do. [Stephen closes his lips and is silent]. Now don’t sulk, Stephen.

STEPHEN. I am not sulking, mother. What has all this got to do with — with — with my father?

LADY BRITOMART. My dear Stephen: where is the money to come from? It is easy enough for you and the other children to live on my income as long as we are in the same house; but I can’t keep four families in four separate houses. You know how poor my father is: he has barely seven thousand a year now; and really, if he were not the Earl of Stevenage, he would have to give up society. He can do nothing for us: he says, naturally enough, that it is absurd that he should be asked to provide for the children of a man who is rolling in money. You see, Stephen, your father must be fabulously wealthy, because there is always a war going on somewhere.

STEPHEN. You need not remind me of that, mother. I have hardly ever opened a newspaper in my life without seeing our name in it. The Undershaft torpedo! The Undershaft quick firers! The Undershaft ten inch! the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun! the Undershaft submarine! and now the Undershaft aerial battleship! At Harrow they called me the Woolwich Infant. At Cambridge it was the same. A little brute at King’s who was always trying to get up revivals, spoilt my Bible — your first birthday present to me — by writing under my name, “Son and heir to Undershaft and Lazarus, Death and Destruction Dealers: address, Christendom and Judea.” But that was not so bad as the way I was kowtowed to everywhere because my father was making millions by selling cannons.

LADY BRITOMART. It is not only the cannons, but the war loans that Lazarus arranges under cover of giving credit for the cannons. You know, Stephen, it’s perfectly scandalous. Those two men, Andrew Undershaft and Lazarus, positively have Europe under their thumbs. That is why your father is able to behave as he does. He is above the law. Do you think Bismarck or Gladstone or Disraeli could have openly defied every social and moral obligation all their lives as your father has? They simply wouldn’t have dared. I asked Gladstone to take it up. I asked The Times to take it up. I asked the Lord Chamberlain to take it up. But it was just like asking them to declare war on the Sultan. They WOULDN’T. They said they couldn’t touch him. I believe they were afraid.

STEPHEN. What could they do? He does not actually break the law.

LADY BRITOMART. Not break the law! He is always breaking the law. He broke the law when he was born: his parents were not married.

STEPHEN. Mother! Is that true?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course it’s true: that was why we separated.

STEPHEN. He married without letting you know this!

LADY BRITOMART [rather taken aback by this inference] Oh no. To do Andrew justice, that was not the sort of thing he did. Besides, you know the Undershaft motto: Unashamed. Everybody knew.

STEPHEN. But you said that was why you separated.

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, because he was not content with being a foundling himself: he wanted to disinherit you for another foundling. That was what I couldn’t stand.

STEPHEN [ashamed] Do you mean for — for — for —

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t stammer, Stephen. Speak distinctly.

STEPHEN. But this is so frightful to me, mother. To have to speak to you about such things!

LADY BRITOMART. It’s not pleasant for me, either, especially if you are still so childish that you must make it worse by a display of embarrassment. It is only in the middle classes, Stephen, that people get into a state of dumb helpless horror when they find that there are wicked people in the world. In our class, we have to decide what is to be done with wicked people; and nothing should disturb our self possession. Now ask your question properly.

STEPHEN. Mother: you have no consideration for me. For Heaven’s sake either treat me as a child, as you always do, and tell me nothing at all; or tell me everything and let me take it as best I can.

LADY BRITOMART. Treat you as a child! What do you mean? It is most unkind and ungrateful of you to say such a thing. You know I have never treated any of you as children. I have always made you my companions and friends, and allowed you perfect freedom to do and say whatever you liked, so long as you liked what I could approve of.

STEPHEN [desperately] I daresay we have been the very imperfect children of a very perfect mother; but I do beg you to let me alone for once, and tell me about this horrible business of my father wanting to set me aside for another son.

LADY BRITOMART [amazed] Another son! I never said anything of the kind. I never dreamt of such a thing. This is what comes of interrupting me.

STEPHEN. But you said —

LADY BRITOMART [cutting him short] Now be a good boy, Stephen, and listen to me patiently. The Undershafts are descended from a foundling in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft in the city. That was long ago, in the reign of James the First. Well, this foundling was adopted by an armorer and gun-maker. In the course of time the foundling succeeded to the business; and from some notion of gratitude, or some vow or something, he adopted another foundling, and left the business to him. And that foundling did the same. Ever since that, the cannon business has always been left to an adopted foundling named Andrew Undershaft.

STEPHEN. But did they never marry? Were there no legitimate sons?

LADY BRITOMART. Oh yes: they married just as your father did; and they were rich enough to buy land for their own children and leave them well provided for. But they always adopted and trained some foundling to succeed them in the business; and of course they always quarrelled with their wives furiously over it. Your father was adopted in that way; and he pretends to consider himself bound to keep up the tradition and adopt somebody to leave the business to. Of course I was not going to stand that. There may have been some reason for it when the Undershafts could only marry women in their own class, whose sons were not fit to govern great estates. But there could be no excuse for passing over my son.

STEPHEN [dubiously] I am afraid I should make a poor hand of managing a cannon foundry.

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! you could easily get a manager and pay him a salary.

STEPHEN. My father evidently had no great opinion of my capacity.

LADY BRITOMART. Stuff, child! you were only a baby: it had nothing to do with your capacity. Andrew did it on principle, just as he did every perverse and wicked thing on principle. When my father remonstrated, Andrew actually told him to his face that history tells us of only two successful institutions: one the Undershaft firm, and the other the Roman Empire under the Antonines. That was because the Antonine emperors all adopted their successors. Such rubbish! The Stevenages are as good as the Antonines, I hope; and you are a Stevenage. But that was Andrew all over. There you have the man! Always clever and unanswerable when he was defending nonsense and wickedness: always awkward and sullen when he had to behave sensibly and decently!

STEPHEN. Then it was on my account that your home life was broken up, mother. I am sorry.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, dear, there were other differences. I really cannot bear an immoral man. I am not a Pharisee, I hope; and I should not have minded his merely doing wrong things: we are none of us perfect. But your father didn’t exactly do wrong things: he said them and thought them: that was what was so dreadful. He really had a sort of religion of wrongness just as one doesn’t mind men practising immorality so long as they own that they are in the wrong by preaching morality; so I couldn’t forgive Andrew for preaching immorality while he practised morality. You would all have grown up without principles, without any knowledge of right and wrong, if he had been in the house. You know, my dear, your father was a very attractive man in some ways. Children did not dislike him; and he took advantage of it to put the wickedest ideas into their heads, and make them quite unmanageable. I did not dislike him myself: very far from it; but nothing can bridge over moral disagreement.

STEPHEN. All this simply bewilders me, mother. People may differ about matters of opinion, or even about religion; but how can they differ about right and wrong? Right is right; and wrong is wrong; and if a man cannot distinguish them properly, he is either a fool or a rascal: that’s all.

LADY BRITOMART [touched] That’s my own boy [she pats his cheek]! Your father never could answer that: he used to laugh and get out of it under cover of some affectionate nonsense. And now that you understand the situation, what do you advise me to do?

STEPHEN. Well, what can you do?

LADY BRITOMART. I must get the money somehow.

STEPHEN. We cannot take money from him. I had rather go and live in some cheap place like Bedford Square or even Hampstead than take a farthing of his money.

LADY BRITOMART. But after all, Stephen, our present income comes from Andrew.

STEPHEN [shocked] I never knew that.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, you surely didn’t suppose your grandfather had anything to give me. The Stevenages could not do everything for you. We gave you social position. Andrew had to contribute something. He had a very good bargain, I think.

STEPHEN [bitterly] We are utterly dependent on him and his cannons, then!

LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not: the money is settled. But he provided it. So you see it is not a question of taking money from him or not: it is simply a question of how much. I don’t want any more for myself.

STEPHEN. Nor do I.

LADY BRITOMART. But Sarah does; and Barbara does. That is, Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins will cost them more. So I must put my pride in my pocket and ask for it, I suppose. That is your advice, Stephen, is it not?

STEPHEN. No.

LADY BRITOMART [sharply] Stephen!

STEPHEN. Of course if you are determined —

LADY BRITOMART. I am not determined: I ask your advice; and I am waiting for it. I will not have all the responsibility thrown on my shoulders.

STEPHEN [obstinately] I would die sooner than ask him for another penny.

LADY BRITOMART [resignedly] You mean that I must ask him. Very well, Stephen: It shall be as you wish. You will be glad to know that your grandfather concurs. But he thinks I ought to ask Andrew to come here and see the girls. After all, he must have some natural affection for them.

STEPHEN. Ask him here!!!

LADY BRITOMART. Do not repeat my words, Stephen. Where else can I ask him?

STEPHEN. I never expected you to ask him at all.

LADY BRITOMART. Now don’t tease, Stephen. Come! you see that it is necessary that he should pay us a visit, don’t you?

STEPHEN [reluctantly] I suppose so, if the girls cannot do without his money.

LADY BRITOMART. Thank you, Stephen: I knew you would give me the right advice when it was properly explained to you. I have asked your father to come this evening. [Stephen bounds from his seat] Don’t jump, Stephen: it fidgets me.

STEPHEN [in utter consternation] Do you mean to say that my father is coming here to-night — that he may be here at any moment?

LADY BRITOMART [looking at her watch] I said nine. [He gasps. She rises]. Ring the bell, please. [Stephen goes to the smaller writing table; presses a button on it; and sits at it with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, outwitted and overwhelmed]. It is ten minutes to nine yet; and I have to prepare the girls. I asked Charles Lomax and Adolphus to dinner on purpose that they might be here. Andrew had better see them in case he should cherish any delusions as to their being capable of supporting their wives. [The butler enters: Lady Britomart goes behind the settee to speak to him]. Morrison: go up to the drawingroom and tell everybody to come down here at once. [Morrison withdraws. Lady Britomart turns to Stephen]. Now remember, Stephen, I shall need all your countenance and authority. [He rises and tries to recover some vestige of these attributes]. Give me a chair, dear. [He pushes a chair forward from the wall to where she stands, near the smaller writing table. She sits down; and he goes to the armchair, into which he throws himself]. I don’t know how Barbara will take it. Ever since they made her a major in the Salvation Army she has developed a propensity to have her own way and order people about which quite cows me sometimes. It’s not ladylike: I’m sure I don’t know where she picked it up. Anyhow, Barbara shan’t bully me; but still it’s just as well that your father should be here before she has time to refuse to meet him or make a fuss. Don’t look nervous, Stephen, it will only encourage Barbara to make difficulties. I am nervous enough, goodness knows; but I don’t show it.

Sarah and Barbara come in with their respective young men, Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins. Sarah is slender, bored, and mundane. Barbara is robuster, jollier, much more energetic. Sarah is fashionably dressed: Barbara is in Salvation Army uniform. Lomax, a young man about town, is like many other young men about town. He is affected with a frivolous sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments into paroxysms of imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex form of Lomax’s complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character presents himself as — and indeed actually is — considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness. By the operation of some instinct which is not merciful enough to blind him with the illusions of love, he is obstinately bent on marrying Barbara. Lomax likes Sarah and thinks it will be rather a lark to marry her. Consequently he has not attempted to resist Lady Britomart’s arrangements to that end.

All four look as if they had been having a good deal of fun in the drawingroom. The girls enter first, leaving the swains outside. Sarah comes to the settee. Barbara comes in after her and stops at the door.

BARBARA. Are Cholly and Dolly to come in?

LADY BRITOMART [forcibly] Barbara: I will not have Charles called Cholly: the vulgarity of it positively makes me ill.

BARBARA. It’s all right, mother. Cholly is quite correct nowadays. Are they to come in?

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, if they will behave themselves.

BARBARA [through the door] Come in, Dolly, and behave yourself.

Barbara comes to her mother’s writing table. Cusins enters smiling, and wanders towards Lady Britomart.

SARAH [calling] Come in, Cholly. [Lomax enters, controlling his features very imperfectly, and places himself vaguely between Sarah and Barbara].

LADY BRITOMART [peremptorily] Sit down, all of you. [They sit. Cusins crosses to the window and seats himself there. Lomax takes a chair. Barbara sits at the writing table and Sarah on the settee]. I don’t in the least know what you are laughing at, Adolphus. I am surprised at you, though I expected nothing better from Charles Lomax.

CUSINS [in a remarkably gentle voice] Barbara has been trying to teach me the West Ham Salvation March.

LADY BRITOMART. I see nothing to laugh at in that; nor should you if you are really converted.

CUSINS [sweetly] You were not present. It was really funny, I believe.

LOMAX. Ripping.

LADY BRITOMART. Be quiet, Charles. Now listen to me, children. Your father is coming here this evening. [General stupefaction].

LOMAX [remonstrating] Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART. You are not called on to say anything, Charles.

SARAH. Are you serious, mother?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course I am serious. It is on your account, Sarah, and also on Charles’s. [Silence. Charles looks painfully unworthy]. I hope you are not going to object, Barbara.

BARBARA. I! why should I? My father has a soul to be saved like anybody else. He’s quite welcome as far as I am concerned.

LOMAX [still remonstrant] But really, don’t you know! Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART [frigidly] What do you wish to convey, Charles?

LOMAX. Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick.

LADY BRITOMART [turning with ominous suavity to Cusins] Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles Lomax’s remarks into reputable English for us?

CUSINS [cautiously] If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking of Autolycus, uses the same phrase.

LOMAX [handsomely] Not that I mind, you know, if Sarah don’t.

LADY BRITOMART [crushingly] Thank you. Have I your permission, Adolphus, to invite my own husband to my own house?

CUSINS [gallantly] You have my unhesitating support in everything you do.

LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: have you nothing to say?

SARAH. Do you mean that he is coming regularly to live here?

LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not. The spare room is ready for him if he likes to stay for a day or two and see a little more of you; but there are limits.

SARAH. Well, he can’t eat us, I suppose. I don’t mind.

LOMAX [chuckling] I wonder how the old man will take it.

LADY BRITOMART. Much as the old woman will, no doubt, Charles.

LOMAX [abashed] I didn’t mean — at least —

LADY BRITOMART. You didn’t think, Charles. You never do; and the result is, you never mean anything. And now please attend to me, children. Your father will be quite a stranger to us.

LOMAX. I suppose he hasn’t seen Sarah since she was a little kid.

LADY BRITOMART. Not since she was a little kid, Charles, as you express it with that elegance of diction and refinement of thought that seem never to desert you. Accordingly — er — [impatiently] Now I have forgotten what I was going to say. That comes of your provoking me to be sarcastic, Charles. Adolphus: will you kindly tell me where I was.

CUSINS [sweetly] You were saying that as Mr Undershaft has not seen his children since they were babies, he will form his opinion of the way you have brought them up from their behavior to-night, and that therefore you wish us all to be particularly careful to conduct ourselves well, especially Charles.

LOMAX. Look here: Lady Brit didn’t say that.

LADY BRITOMART [vehemently] I did, Charles. Adolphus’s recollection is perfectly correct. It is most important that you should be good; and I do beg you for once not to pair off into opposite corners and giggle and whisper while I am speaking to your father.

BARBARA. All right, mother. We’ll do you credit.

LADY BRITOMART. Remember, Charles, that Sarah will want to feel proud of you instead of ashamed of you.

LOMAX. Oh I say! There’s nothing to be exactly proud of, don’t you know.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, try and look as if there was.

Morrison, pale and dismayed, breaks into the room in unconcealed disorder.

MORRISON. Might I speak a word to you, my lady?

LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! Show him up.

MORRISON. Yes, my lady. [He goes].

LOMAX. Does Morrison know who he is?

LADY BRITOMART. Of course. Morrison has always been with us.

LOMAX. It must be a regular corker for him, don’t you know.

LADY BRITOMART. Is this a moment to get on my nerves, Charles, with your outrageous expressions?

LOMAX. But this is something out of the ordinary, really —

MORRISON [at the door] The — er — Mr Undershaft. [He retreats in confusion].

Andrew Undershaft comes in. All rise. Lady Britomart meets him in the middle of the room behind the settee.

Andrew is, on the surface, a stoutish, easygoing elderly man, with kindly patient manners, and an engaging simplicity of character. But he has a watchful, deliberate, waiting, listening face, and formidable reserves of power, both bodily and mental, in his capacious chest and long head. His gentleness is partly that of a strong man who has learnt by experience that his natural grip hurts ordinary people unless he handles them very carefully, and partly the mellowness of age and success. He is also a little shy in his present very delicate situation.

LADY BRITOMART. Good evening, Andrew.

UNDERSHAFT. How d’ye do, my dear.

LADY BRITOMART. You look a good deal older.

UNDERSHAFT [apologetically] I AM somewhat older. [With a touch of courtship] Time has stood still with you.

LADY BRITOMART [promptly] Rubbish! This is your family.

UNDERSHAFT [surprised] Is it so large? I am sorry to say my memory is failing very badly in some things. [He offers his hand with paternal kindness to Lomax].

LOMAX [jerkily shaking his hand] Ahdedoo.

UNDERSHAFT. I can see you are my eldest. I am very glad to meet you again, my boy.

LOMAX [remonstrating] No but look here don’t you know — [Overcome] Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART [recovering from momentary speechlessness] Andrew: do you mean to say that you don’t remember how many children you have?

UNDERSHAFT. Well, I am afraid I — . They have grown so much — er. Am I making any ridiculous mistake? I may as well confess: I recollect only one son. But so many things have happened since, of course — er —

LADY BRITOMART [decisively] Andrew: you are talking nonsense. Of course you have only one son.

UNDERSHAFT. Perhaps you will be good enough to introduce me, my dear.

LADY BRITOMART. That is Charles Lomax, who is engaged to Sarah.

UNDERSHAFT. My dear sir, I beg your pardon.

LOMAX. Not at all. Delighted, I assure you.

LADY BRITOMART. This is Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT [bowing] Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr Stephen. Then [going to Cusins] you must be my son. [Taking Cusins’ hands in his] How are you, my young friend? [To Lady Britomart] He is very like you, my love.

CUSINS. You flatter me, Mr Undershaft. My name is Cusins: engaged to Barbara. [Very explicitly] That is Major Barbara Undershaft, of the Salvation Army. That is Sarah, your second daughter. This is Stephen Undershaft, your son.

UNDERSHAFT. My dear Stephen, I beg your pardon.

STEPHEN. Not at all.

UNDERSHAFT. Mr Cusins: I am much indebted to you for explaining so precisely. [Turning to Sarah] Barbara, my dear —

SARAH [prompting him] Sarah.

UNDERSHAFT. Sarah, of course. [They shake hands. He goes over to Barbara] Barbara — I am right this time, I hope.

BARBARA. Quite right. [They shake hands].

LADY BRITOMART [resuming command] Sit down, all of you. Sit down, Andrew. [She comes forward and sits on the settle. Cusins also brings his chair forward on her left. Barbara and Stephen resume their seats. Lomax gives his chair to Sarah and goes for another].

UNDERSHAFT. Thank you, my love.

LOMAX [conversationally, as he brings a chair forward between the writing table and the settee, and offers it to Undershaft] Takes you some time to find out exactly where you are, don’t it?

UNDERSHAFT [accepting the chair] That is not what embarrasses me, Mr Lomax. My difficulty is that if I play the part of a father, I shall produce the effect of an intrusive stranger; and if I play the part of a discreet stranger, I may appear a callous father.

LADY BRITOMART. There is no need for you to play any part at all, Andrew. You had much better be sincere and natural.

UNDERSHAFT [submissively] Yes, my dear: I daresay that will be best. [Making himself comfortable] Well, here I am. Now what can I do for you all?

LADY BRITOMART. You need not do anything, Andrew. You are one of the family. You can sit with us and enjoy yourself.

Lomax’s too long suppressed mirth explodes in agonized neighings.

LADY BRITOMART [outraged] Charles Lomax: if you can behave yourself, behave yourself. If not, leave the room.

LOMAX. I’m awfully sorry, Lady Brit; but really, you know, upon my soul! [He sits on the settee between Lady Britomart and Undershaft, quite overcome].

BARBARA. Why don’t you laugh if you want to, Cholly? It’s good for your inside.

LADY BRITOMART. Barbara: you have had the education of a lady. Please let your father see that; and don’t talk like a street girl.

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. As you know, I am not a gentleman; and I was never educated.

LOMAX [encouragingly] Nobody’d know it, I assure you. You look all right, you know.

CUSINS. Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver.

BARBARA. Dolly: don’t be insincere. Cholly: fetch your concertina and play something for us.

LOMAX [doubtfully to Undershaft] Perhaps that sort of thing isn’t in your line, eh?

UNDERSHAFT. I am particularly fond of music.

LOMAX [delighted] Are you? Then I’ll get it. [He goes upstairs for the instrument].

UNDERSHAFT. Do you play, Barbara?

BARBARA. Only the tambourine. But Cholly’s teaching me the concertina.

UNDERSHAFT. Is Cholly also a member of the Salvation Army?

BARBARA. No: he says it’s bad form to be a dissenter. But I don’t despair of Cholly. I made him come yesterday to a meeting at the dock gates, and take the collection in his hat.

LADY BRITOMART. It is not my doing, Andrew. Barbara is old enough to take her own way. She has no father to advise her.

BARBARA. Oh yes she has. There are no orphans in the Salvation Army.

UNDERSHAFT. Your father there has a great many children and plenty of experience, eh?

BARBARA [looking at him with quick interest and nodding] Just so. How did you come to understand that? [Lomax is heard at the door trying the concertina].

LADY BRITOMART. Come in, Charles. Play us something at once.

LOMAX. Righto! [He sits down in his former place, and preludes].

UNDERSHAFT. One moment, Mr Lomax. I am rather interested in the Salvation Army. Its motto might be my own: Blood and Fire.

LOMAX [shocked] But not your sort of blood and fire, you know.

UNDERSHAFT. My sort of blood cleanses: my sort of fire purifies.

BARBARA. So do ours. Come down to-morrow to my shelter — the West Ham shelter — and see what we’re doing. We’re going to march to a great meeting in the Assembly Hall at Mile End. Come and see the shelter and then march with us: it will do you a lot of good. Can you play anything?

UNDERSHAFT. In my youth I earned pennies, and even shillings occasionally, in the streets and in public house parlors by my natural talent for stepdancing. Later on, I became a member of the Undershaft orchestral society, and performed passably on the tenor trombone.

LOMAX [scandalized] Oh I say!

BARBARA. Many a sinner has played himself into heaven on the trombone, thanks to the Army.

LOMAX [to Barbara, still rather shocked] Yes; but what about the cannon business, don’t you know? [To Undershaft] Getting into heaven is not exactly in your line, is it?

LADY BRITOMART. Charles!!!

LOMAX. Well; but it stands to reason, don’t it? The cannon business may be necessary and all that: we can’t get on without cannons; but it isn’t right, you know. On the other hand, there may be a certain amount of tosh about the Salvation Army — I belong to the Established Church myself — but still you can’t deny that it’s religion; and you can’t go against religion, can you? At least unless you’re downright immoral, don’t you know.

UNDERSHAFT. You hardly appreciate my position, Mr Lomax —

LOMAX [hastily] I’m not saying anything against you personally, you know.

UNDERSHAFT. Quite so, quite so. But consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.

LOMAX [leniently] Well, the more destructive war becomes, the sooner it will be abolished, eh?

UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality — my religion — must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it.

STEPHEN [coldly — almost sullenly] You speak as if there were half a dozen moralities and religions to choose from, instead of one true morality and one true religion.

UNDERSHAFT. For me there is only one true morality; but it might not fit you, as you do not manufacture aerial battleships. There is only one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true morality.

LOMAX [overtaxed] Would you mind saying that again? I didn’t quite follow it.

CUSINS. It’s quite simple. As Euripides says, one man’s meat is another man’s poison morally as well as physically.

UNDERSHAFT. Precisely.

LOMAX. Oh, that. Yes, yes, yes. True. True.

STEPHEN. In other words, some men are honest and some are scoundrels.

BARBARA. Bosh. There are no scoundrels.

UNDERSHAFT. Indeed? Are there any good men?

BARBARA. No. Not one. There are neither good men nor scoundrels: there are just children of one Father; and the sooner they stop calling one another names the better. You needn’t talk to me: I know them. I’ve had scores of them through my hands: scoundrels, criminals, infidels, philanthropists, missionaries, county councillors, all sorts. They’re all just the same sort of sinner; and there’s the same salvation ready for them all.

UNDERSHAFT. May I ask have you ever saved a maker of cannons?

BARBARA. No. Will you let me try?

UNDERSHAFT. Well, I will make a bargain with you. If I go to see you to-morrow in your Salvation Shelter, will you come the day after to see me in my cannon works?

BARBARA. Take care. It may end in your giving up the cannons for the sake of the Salvation Army.

UNDERSHAFT. Are you sure it will not end in your giving up the Salvation Army for the sake of the cannons?

BARBARA. I will take my chance of that.

UNDERSHAFT. And I will take my chance of the other. [They shake hands on it]. Where is your shelter?

BARBARA. In West Ham. At the sign of the cross. Ask anybody in Canning Town. Where are your works?

UNDERSHAFT. In Perivale St Andrews. At the sign of the sword. Ask anybody in Europe.

LOMAX. Hadn’t I better play something?

BARBARA. Yes. Give us Onward, Christian Soldiers.

LOMAX. Well, that’s rather a strong order to begin with, don’t you know. Suppose I sing Thou’rt passing hence, my brother. It’s much the same tune.

BARBARA. It’s too melancholy. You get saved, Cholly; and you’ll pass hence, my brother, without making such a fuss about it.

LADY BRITOMART. Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety.

UNDERSHAFT. I do not find it an unpleasant subject, my dear. It is the only one that capable people really care for.

LADY BRITOMART [looking at her watch] Well, if you are determined to have it, I insist on having it in a proper and respectable way. Charles: ring for prayers. [General amazement. Stephen rises in dismay].

LOMAX [rising] Oh I say!

UNDERSHAFT [rising] I am afraid I must be going.

LADY BRITOMART. You cannot go now, Andrew: it would be most improper. Sit down. What will the servants think?

UNDERSHAFT. My dear: I have conscientious scruples. May I suggest a compromise? If Barbara will conduct a little service in the drawingroom, with Mr Lomax as organist, I will attend it willingly. I will even take part, if a trombone can be procured.

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t mock, Andrew.

UNDERSHAFT [shocked — to Barbara] You don’t think I am mocking, my love, I hope.

BARBARA. No, of course not; and it wouldn’t matter if you were: half the Army came to their first meeting for a lark. [Rising] Come along. Come, Dolly. Come, Cholly. [She goes out with Undershaft, who opens the door for her. Cusins rises].

LADY BRITOMART. I will not be disobeyed by everybody. Adolphus: sit down. Charles: you may go. You are not fit for prayers: you cannot keep your countenance.

LOMAX. Oh I say! [He goes out].

LADY BRITOMART [continuing] But you, Adolphus, can behave yourself if you choose to. I insist on your staying.

CUSINS. My dear Lady Brit: there are things in the family prayer book that I couldn’t bear to hear you say.

LADY BRITOMART. What things, pray?

CUSINS. Well, you would have to say before all the servants that we have done things we ought not to have done, and left undone things we ought to have done, and that there is no health in us. I cannot bear to hear you doing yourself such an unjustice, and Barbara such an injustice. As for myself, I flatly deny it: I have done my best. I shouldn’t dare to marry Barbara — I couldn’t look you in the face — if it were true. So I must go to the drawingroom.

LADY BRITOMART [offended] Well, go. [He starts for the door]. And remember this, Adolphus [he turns to listen]: I have a very strong suspicion that you went to the Salvation Army to worship Barbara and nothing else. And I quite appreciate the very clever way in which you systematically humbug me. I have found you out. Take care Barbara doesn’t. That’s all.

CUSINS [with unruffled sweetness] Don’t tell on me. [He goes out].

LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: if you want to go, go. Anything’s better than to sit there as if you wished you were a thousand miles away.

SARAH [languidly] Very well, mamma. [She goes].

Lady Britomart, with a sudden flounce, gives way to a little gust of tears.

STEPHEN [going to her] Mother: what’s the matter?

LADY BRITOMART [swishing away her tears with her handkerchief] Nothing. Foolishness. You can go with him, too, if you like, and leave me with the servants.

STEPHEN. Oh, you mustn’t think that, mother. I — I don’t like him.

LADY BRITOMART. The others do. That is the injustice of a woman’s lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.

STEPHEN. He has not stolen our affection from you. It is only curiosity.

LADY BRITOMART [violently] I won’t be consoled, Stephen. There is nothing the matter with me. [She rises and goes towards the door].

STEPHEN. Where are you going, mother?

LADY BRITOMART. To the drawingroom, of course. [She goes out. Onward, Christian Soldiers, on the concertina, with tambourine accompaniment, is heard when the door opens]. Are you coming, Stephen?

STEPHEN. No. Certainly not. [She goes. He sits down on the settee, with compressed lips and an expression of strong dislike].

ACT II

The yard of the West Ham shelter of the Salvation Army is a cold place on a January morning. The building itself, an old warehouse, is newly whitewashed. Its gabled end projects into the yard in the middle, with a door on the ground floor, and another in the loft above it without any balcony or ladder, but with a pulley rigged over it for hoisting sacks. Those who come from this central gable end into the yard have the gateway leading to the street on their left, with a stone horse-trough just beyond it, and, on the right, a penthouse shielding a table from the weather. There are forms at the table; and on them are seated a man and a woman, both much down on their luck, finishing a meal of bread [one thick slice each, with margarine and golden syrup] and diluted milk.

The man, a workman out of employment, is young, agile, a talker, a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except honesty or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a commonplace old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She looks sixty and probably is forty-five. If they were rich people, gloved and muffed and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they would be numbed and miserable; for it is a grindingly cold, raw, January day; and a glance at the background of grimy warehouses and leaden sky visible over the whitewashed walls of the yard would drive any idle rich person straight to the Mediterranean. But these two, being no more troubled with visions of the Mediterranean than of the moon, and being compelled to keep more of their clothes in the pawnshop, and less on their persons, in winter than in summer, are not depressed by the cold: rather are they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given an almost jolly turn. The man takes a pull at his mug, and then gets up and moves about the yard with his hands deep in his pockets, occasionally breaking into a stepdance.

THE WOMAN. Feel better otter your meal, sir?

THE MAN. No. Call that a meal! Good enough for you, props; but wot is it to me, an intelligent workin man.

THE WOMAN. Workin man! Wot are you?

THE MAN. Painter.

THE WOMAN [sceptically] Yus, I dessay.

THE MAN. Yus, you dessay! I know. Every loafer that can’t do nothink calls isself a painter. Well, I’m a real painter: grainer, finisher, thirty-eight bob a week when I can get it.

THE WOMAN. Then why don’t you go and get it?

THE MAN. I’ll tell you why. Fust: I’m intelligent — fffff! it’s rotten cold here [he dances a step or two] — yes: intelligent beyond the station o life into which it has pleased the capitalists to call me; and they don’t like a man that sees through em. Second, an intelligent bein needs a doo share of appiness; so I drink somethink cruel when I get the chawnce. Third, I stand by my class and do as little as I can so’s to leave arf the job for me fellow workers. Fourth, I’m fly enough to know wots inside the law and wots outside it; and inside it I do as the capitalists do: pinch wot I can lay me ands on. In a proper state of society I am sober, industrious and honest: in Rome, so to speak, I do as the Romans do. Wots the consequence? When trade is bad — and it’s rotten bad just now — and the employers az to sack arf their men, they generally start on me.

THE WOMAN. What’s your name?

THE MAN. Price. Bronterre O’Brien Price. Usually called Snobby Price, for short.

THE WOMAN. Snobby’s a carpenter, ain’t it? You said you was a painter.

PRICE. Not that kind of snob, but the genteel sort. I’m too uppish, owing to my intelligence, and my father being a Chartist and a reading, thinking man: a stationer, too. I’m none of your common hewers of wood and drawers of water; and don’t you forget it. [He returns to his seat at the table, and takes up his mug]. Wots YOUR name?

THE WOMAN. Rummy Mitchens, sir.

PRICE [quaffing the remains of his milk to her] Your elth, Miss Mitchens.

RUMMY [correcting him] Missis Mitchens.

PRICE. Wot! Oh Rummy, Rummy! Respectable married woman, Rummy, gittin rescued by the Salvation Army by pretendin to be a bad un. Same old game!

RUMMY. What am I to do? I can’t starve. Them Salvation lasses is dear good girls; but the better you are, the worse they likes to think you were before they rescued you. Why shouldn’t they av a bit o credit, poor loves? They’re worn to rags by their work. And where would they get the money to rescue us if we was to let on we’re no worse than other people? You know what ladies and gentlemen are.

PRICE. Thievin swine! Wish I ad their job, Rummy, all the same. Wot does Rummy stand for? Pet name props?

RUMMY. Short for Romola.

PRICE. For wot!?

RUMMY. Romola. It was out of a new book. Somebody me mother wanted me to grow up like.

PRICE. We’re companions in misfortune, Rummy. Both on us got names that nobody cawnt pronounce. Consequently I’m Snobby and you’re Rummy because Bill and Sally wasn’t good enough for our parents. Such is life!

RUMMY. Who saved you, Mr. Price? Was it Major Barbara?

PRICE. No: I come here on my own. I’m goin to be Bronterre O’Brien Price, the converted painter. I know wot they like. I’ll tell em how I blasphemed and gambled and wopped my poor old mother —

RUMMY [shocked] Used you to beat your mother?

PRICE. Not likely. She used to beat me. No matter: you come and listen to the converted painter, and you’ll hear how she was a pious woman that taught me me prayers at er knee, an how I used to come home drunk and drag her out o bed be er snow white airs, an lam into er with the poker.

RUMMY. That’s what’s so unfair to us women. Your confessions is just as big lies as ours: you don’t tell what you really done no more than us; but you men can tell your lies right out at the meetins and be made much of for it; while the sort o confessions we az to make az to be wispered to one lady at a time. It ain’t right, spite of all their piety.

PRICE. Right! Do you spose the Army’d be allowed if it went and did right? Not much. It combs our air and makes us good little blokes to be robbed and put upon. But I’ll play the game as good as any of em. I’ll see somebody struck by lightnin, or hear a voice sayin “Snobby Price: where will you spend eternity?” I’ll ave a time of it, I tell you.

RUMMY. You won’t be let drink, though.

PRICE. I’ll take it out in gorspellin, then. I don’t want to drink if I can get fun enough any other way.

Jenny Hill, a pale, overwrought, pretty Salvation lass of 18, comes in through the yard gate, leading Peter Shirley, a half hardened, half worn-out elderly man, weak with hunger.

JENNY [supporting him] Come! pluck up. I’ll get you something to eat. You’ll be all right then.

PRICE [rising and hurrying officiously to take the old man off Jenny’s hands] Poor old man! Cheer up, brother: you’ll find rest and peace and appiness ere. Hurry up with the food, miss: e’s fair done. [Jenny hurries into the shelter]. Ere, buck up, daddy! She’s fetchin y’a thick slice o breadn treacle, an a mug o skyblue. [He seats him at the corner of the table].

RUMMY [gaily] Keep up your old art! Never say die!

SHIRLEY. I’m not an old man. I’m ony 46. I’m as good as ever I was. The grey patch come in my hair before I was thirty. All it wants is three pennorth o hair dye: am I to be turned on the streets to starve for it? Holy God! I’ve worked ten to twelve hours a day since I was thirteen, and paid my way all through; and now am I to be thrown into the gutter and my job given to a young man that can do it no better than me because I’ve black hair that goes white at the first change?

PRICE [cheerfully] No good jawrin about it. You’re ony a jumped-up, jerked-off, orspittle-turned-out incurable of an ole workin man: who cares about you? Eh? Make the thievin swine give you a meal: they’ve stole many a one from you. Get a bit o your own back. [Jenny returns with the usual meal]. There you are, brother. Awsk a blessin an tuck that into you.

SHIRLEY [looking at it ravenously but not touching it, and crying like a child] I never took anything before.

JENNY [petting him] Come, come! the Lord sends it to you: he wasn’t above taking bread from his friends; and why should you be? Besides, when we find you a job you can pay us for it if you like.

SHIRLEY [eagerly] Yes, yes: that’s true. I can pay you back: it’s only a loan. [Shivering] Oh Lord! oh Lord! [He turns to the table and attacks the meal ravenously].

JENNY. Well, Rummy, are you more comfortable now?

RUMMY. God bless you, lovey! You’ve fed my body and saved my soul, haven’t you? [Jenny, touched, kisses her] Sit down and rest a bit: you must be ready to drop.

JENNY. I’ve been going hard since morning. But there’s more work than we can do. I mustn’t stop.

RUMMY. Try a prayer for just two minutes. You’ll work all the better after.

JENNY [her eyes lighting up] Oh isn’t it wonderful how a few minutes prayer revives you! I was quite lightheaded at twelve o’clock, I was so tired; but Major Barbara just sent me to pray for five minutes; and I was able to go on as if I had only just begun. [To Price] Did you have a piece of bread?

PAIGE [with unction] Yes, miss; but I’ve got the piece that I value more; and that’s the peace that passeth hall hannerstennin.

RUMMY [fervently] Glory Hallelujah!

Bill Walker, a rough customer of about 25, appears at the yard gate and looks malevolently at Jenny.

JENNY. That makes me so happy. When you say that, I feel wicked for loitering here. I must get to work again.

She is hurrying to the shelter, when the new-comer moves quickly up to the door and intercepts her. His manner is so threatening that she retreats as he comes at her truculently, driving her down the yard.

BILL. I know you. You’re the one that took away my girl. You’re the one that set er agen me. Well, I’m goin to av er out. Not that I care a curse for her or you: see? But I’ll let er know; and I’ll let you know. I’m goin to give er a doin that’ll teach er to cut away from me. Now in with you and tell er to come out afore I come in and kick er out. Tell er Bill Walker wants er. She’ll know what that means; and if she keeps me waitin it’ll be worse. You stop to jaw back at me; and I’ll start on you: d’ye hear? There’s your way. In you go. [He takes her by the arm and slings her towards the door of the shelter. She falls on her hand and knee. Rummy helps her up again].

PRICE [rising, and venturing irresolutely towards Bill]. Easy there, mate. She ain’t doin you no arm.

BILL. Who are you callin mate? [Standing over him threateningly]. You’re goin to stand up for her, are you? Put up your ands.

RUMMY [running indignantly to him to scold him]. Oh, you great brute — [He instantly swings his left hand back against her face. She screams and reels back to the trough, where she sits down, covering her bruised face with her hands and rocking and moaning with pain].

JENNY [going to her]. Oh God forgive you! How could you strike an old woman like that?

BILL [seizing her by the hair so violently that she also screams, and tearing her away from the old woman]. You Gawd forgive me again and I’ll Gawd forgive you one on the jaw that’ll stop you prayin for a week. [Holding her and turning fiercely on Price]. Av you anything to say agen it? Eh?

PRICE [intimidated]. No, matey: she ain’t anything to do with me.

BILL. Good job for you! I’d put two meals into you and fight you with one finger after, you starved cur. [To Jenny] Now are you goin to fetch out Mog Habbijam; or am I to knock your face off you and fetch her myself?

JENNY [writhing in his grasp] Oh please someone go in and tell Major Barbara — [she screams again as he wrenches her head down; and Price and Rummy, flee into the shelter].

BILL. You want to go in and tell your Major of me, do you?

JENNY. Oh please don’t drag my hair. Let me go.

BILL. Do you or don’t you? [She stifles a scream]. Yes or no.

JENNY. God give me strength —

BILL [striking her with his fist in the face] Go and show her that, and tell her if she wants one like it to come and interfere with me. [Jenny, crying with pain, goes into the shed. He goes to the form and addresses the old man]. Here: finish your mess; and get out o my way.

SHIRLEY [springing up and facing him fiercely, with the mug in his hand] You take a liberty with me, and I’ll smash you over the face with the mug and cut your eye out. Ain’t you satisfied — young whelps like you — with takin the bread out o the mouths of your elders that have brought you up and slaved for you, but you must come shovin and cheekin and bullyin in here, where the bread o charity is sickenin in our stummicks?

BILL [contemptuously, but backing a little] Wot good are you, you old palsy mug? Wot good are you?

SHIRLEY. As good as you and better. I’ll do a day’s work agen you or any fat young soaker of your age. Go and take my job at Horrockses, where I worked for ten year. They want young men there: they can’t afford to keep men over forty-five. They’re very sorry — give you a character and happy to help you to get anything suited to your years — sure a steady man won’t be long out of a job. Well, let em try you. They’ll find the differ. What do you know? Not as much as how to beeyave yourself — layin your dirty fist across the mouth of a respectable woman!

BILL. Don’t provoke me to lay it acrost yours: d’ye hear?

SHIRLEY [with blighting contempt] Yes: you like an old man to hit, don’t you, when you’ve finished with the women. I ain’t seen you hit a young one yet.

BILL [stung] You lie, you old soupkitchener, you. There was a young man here. Did I offer to hit him or did I not?

SHIRLEY. Was he starvin or was he not? Was he a man or only a crosseyed thief an a loafer? Would you hit my son-in-law’s brother?

BILL. Who’s he?

SHIRLEY. Todger Fairmile o Balls Pond. Him that won 20 pounds off the Japanese wrastler at the music hall by standin out 17 minutes 4 seconds agen him.

BILL [sullenly] I’m no music hall wrastler. Can he box?

SHIRLEY. Yes: an you can’t.

BILL. Wot! I can’t, can’t I? Wot’s that you say [threatening him]?

SHIRLEY [not budging an inch] Will you box Todger Fairmile if I put him on to you? Say the word.

BILL. [subsiding with a slouch] I’ll stand up to any man alive, if he was ten Todger Fairmiles. But I don’t set up to be a perfessional.

SHIRLEY [looking down on him with unfathomable disdain] YOU box! Slap an old woman with the back o your hand! You hadn’t even the sense to hit her where a magistrate couldn’t see the mark of it, you silly young lump of conceit and ignorance. Hit a girl in the jaw and ony make her cry! If Todger Fairmile’d done it, she wouldn’t a got up inside o ten minutes, no more than you would if he got on to you. Yah! I’d set about you myself if I had a week’s feedin in me instead o two months starvation. [He returns to the table to finish his meal].

BILL [following him and stooping over him to drive the taunt in] You lie! you have the bread and treacle in you that you come here to beg.

SHIRLEY [bursting into tears] Oh God! it’s true: I’m only an old pauper on the scrap heap. [Furiously] But you’ll come to it yourself; and then you’ll know. You’ll come to it sooner than a teetotaller like me, fillin yourself with gin at this hour o the mornin!

BILL. I’m no gin drinker, you old liar; but when I want to give my girl a bloomin good idin I like to av a bit o devil in me: see? An here I am, talkin to a rotten old blighter like you sted o givin her wot for. [Working himself into a rage] I’m goin in there to fetch her out. [He makes vengefully for the shelter door].

SHIRLEY. You’re goin to the station on a stretcher, more likely; and they’ll take the gin and the devil out of you there when they get you inside. You mind what you’re about: the major here is the Earl o Stevenage’s granddaughter.

BILL [checked] Garn!

SHIRLEY. You’ll see.

BILL [his resolution oozing] Well, I ain’t done nothin to er.

SHIRLEY. Spose she said you did! who’d believe you?

BILL [very uneasy, skulking back to the corner of the penthouse] Gawd! There’s no jastice in this country. To think wot them people can do! I’m as good as er.

SHIRLEY. Tell her so. It’s just what a fool like you would do.

Barbara, brisk and businesslike, comes from the shelter with a note book, and addresses herself to Shirley. Bill, cowed, sits down in the corner on a form, and turns his back on them.

BARBARA. Good morning.

SHIRLEY [standing up and taking off his hat] Good morning, miss.

BARBARA. Sit down: make yourself at home. [He hesitates; but she puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and makes him obey]. Now then! since you’ve made friends with us, we want to know all about you. Names and addresses and trades.

SHIRLEY. Peter Shirley. Fitter. Chucked out two months ago because I was too old.

BARBARA [not at all surprised] You’d pass still. Why didn’t you dye your hair?

SHIRLEY. I did. Me age come out at a coroner’s inquest on me daughter.

BARBARA. Steady?

SHIRLEY. Teetotaller. Never out of a job before. Good worker. And sent to the knockers like an old horse!

BARBARA. No matter: if you did your part God will do his.

SHIRLEY [suddenly stubborn] My religion’s no concern of anybody but myself.

BARBARA [guessing] I know. Secularist?

SHIRLEY [hotly] Did I offer to deny it?

BARBARA. Why should you? My own father’s a Secularist, I think. Our Father — yours and mine — fulfils himself in many ways; and I daresay he knew what he was about when he made a Secularist of you. So buck up, Peter! we can always find a job for a steady man like you. [Shirley, disarmed, touches his hat. She turns from him to Bill]. What’s your name?

BILL [insolently] Wot’s that to you?

BARBARA [calmly making a note] Afraid to give his name. Any trade?

BILL. Who’s afraid to give his name? [Doggedly, with a sense of heroically defying the House of Lords in the person of Lord Stevenage] If you want to bring a charge agen me, bring it. [She waits, unruffled]. My name’s Bill Walker.

BARBARA [as if the name were familiar: trying to remember how] Bill Walker? [Recollecting] Oh, I know: you’re the man that Jenny Hill was praying for inside just now. [She enters his name in her note book].

BILL. Who’s Jenny Hill? And what call has she to pray for me?

BARBARA. I don’t know. Perhaps it was you that cut her lip.

BILL [defiantly] Yes, it was me that cut her lip. I ain’t afraid o you.

BARBARA. How could you be, since you’re not afraid of God? You’re a brave man, Mr. Walker. It takes some pluck to do our work here; but none of us dare lift our hand against a girl like that, for fear of her father in heaven.

BILL [sullenly] I want none o your cantin jaw. I suppose you think I come here to beg from you, like this damaged lot here. Not me. I don’t want your bread and scrape and catlap. I don’t believe in your Gawd, no more than you do yourself.

BARBARA [sunnily apologetic and ladylike, as on a new footing with him] Oh, I beg your pardon for putting your name down, Mr. Walker. I didn’t understand. I’ll strike it out.

BILL [taking this as a slight, and deeply wounded by it] Eah! you let my name alone. Ain’t it good enough to be in your book?

BARBARA [considering] Well, you see, there’s no use putting down your name unless I can do something for you, is there? What’s your trade?

BILL [still smarting] That’s no concern o yours.

BARBARA. Just so. [very businesslike] I’ll put you down as [writing] the man who — struck — poor little Jenny Hill — in the mouth.

BILL [rising threateningly] See here. I’ve ad enough o this.

BARBARA [quite sunny and fearless] What did you come to us for?

BILL. I come for my girl, see? I come to take her out o this and to break er jaws for her.

BARBARA [complacently] You see I was right about your trade. [Bill, on the point of retorting furiously, finds himself, to his great shame and terror, in danger of crying instead. He sits down again suddenly]. What’s her name?

BILL [dogged] Er name’s Mog Abbijam: thats wot her name is.

BARBARA. Oh, she’s gone to Canning Town, to our barracks there.

BILL [fortified by his resentment of Mog’s perfidy] is she? [Vindictively] Then I’m goin to Kennintahn arter her. [He crosses to the gate; hesitates; finally comes back at Barbara]. Are you lyin to me to get shut o me?

BARBARA. I don’t want to get shut of you. I want to keep you here and save your soul. You’d better stay: you’re going to have a bad time today, Bill.

BILL. Who’s goin to give it to me? You, props.

BARBARA. Someone you don’t believe in. But you’ll be glad afterwards.

BILL [slinking off] I’ll go to Kennintahn to be out o the reach o your tongue. [Suddenly turning on her with intense malice] And if I don’t find Mog there, I’ll come back and do two years for you, selp me Gawd if I don’t!

BARBARA [a shade kindlier, if possible] It’s no use, Bill. She’s got another bloke.

BILL. Wot!

BARBARA. One of her own converts. He fell in love with her when he saw her with her soul saved, and her face clean, and her hair washed.

BILL [surprised] Wottud she wash it for, the carroty slut? It’s red.

BARBARA. It’s quite lovely now, because she wears a new look in her eyes with it. It’s a pity you’re too late. The new bloke has put your nose out of joint, Bill.

BILL. I’ll put his nose out o joint for him. Not that I care a curse for her, mind that. But I’ll teach her to drop me as if I was dirt. And I’ll teach him to meddle with my Judy. Wots iz bleedin name?

BARBARA. Sergeant Todger Fairmile.

SHIRLEY [rising with grim joy] I’ll go with him, miss. I want to see them two meet. I’ll take him to the infirmary when it’s over.

BILL [to Shirley, with undissembled misgiving] Is that im you was speakin on?

SHIRLEY. That’s him.

BILL. Im that wrastled in the music all?

SHIRLEY. The competitions at the National Sportin Club was worth nigh a hundred a year to him. He’s gev em up now for religion; so he’s a bit fresh for want of the exercise he was accustomed to. He’ll be glad to see you. Come along.

BILL. Wots is weight?

SHIRLEY. Thirteen four. [Bill’s last hope expires].

BARBARA. Go and talk to him, Bill. He’ll convert you.

SHIRLEY. He’ll convert your head into a mashed potato.

BILL [sullenly] I ain’t afraid of him. I ain’t afraid of ennybody. But he can lick me. She’s done me. [He sits down moodily on the edge of the horse trough].

SHIRLEY. You ain’t goin. I thought not. [He resumes his seat].

BARBARA [calling] Jenny!

JENNY [appearing at the shelter door with a plaster on the corner of her mouth] Yes, Major.

BARBARA. Send Rummy Mitchens out to clear away here.

JENNY. I think she’s afraid.

BARBARA [her resemblance to her mother flashing out for a moment] Nonsense! she must do as she’s told.

JENNY [calling into the shelter] Rummy: the Major says you must come.

Jenny comes to Barbara, purposely keeping on the side next Bill, lest he should suppose that she shrank from him or bore malice.

BARBARA. Poor little Jenny! Are you tired? [Looking at the wounded cheek] Does it hurt?

JENNY. No: it’s all right now. It was nothing.

BARBARA [critically] It was as hard as he could hit, I expect. Poor Bill! You don’t feel angry with him, do you?

JENNY. Oh no, no, no: indeed I don’t, Major, bless his poor heart! [Barbara kisses her; and she runs away merrily into the shelter. Bill writhes with an agonizing return of his new and alarming symptoms, but says nothing. Rummy Mitchens comes from the shelter].

BARBARA [going to meet Rummy] Now Rummy, bustle. Take in those mugs and plates to be washed; and throw the crumbs about for the birds.

Rummy takes the three plates and mugs; but Shirley takes back his mug from her, as there it still come milk left in it.

RUMMY. There ain’t any crumbs. This ain’t a time to waste good bread on birds.

PRICE [appearing at the shelter door] Gentleman come to see the shelter, Major. Says he’s your father.

BARBARA. All right. Coming. [Snobby goes back into the shelter, followed by Barbara].

RUMMY [stealing across to Bill and addressing him in a subdued voice, but with intense conviction] I’d av the lor of you, you flat eared pignosed potwalloper, if she’d let me. You’re no gentleman, to hit a lady in the face. [Bill, with greater things moving in him, takes no notice].

SHIRLEY [following her] Here! in with you and don’t get yourself into more trouble by talking.

RUMMY [with hauteur] I ain’t ad the pleasure o being hintroduced to you, as I can remember. [She goes into the shelter with the plates].

BILL [savagely] Don’t you talk to me, d’ye hear. You lea me alone, or I’ll do you a mischief. I’m not dirt under your feet, anyway.

SHIRLEY [calmly] Don’t you be afeerd. You ain’t such prime company that you need expect to be sought after. [He is about to go into the shelter when Barbara comes out, with Undershaft on her right].

BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn’t I? Perhaps you’ll be able to comfort one another.

UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic.

BARBARA. Sorry, I’m sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion — in case I have to introduce you again?

UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

BARBARA. Then I’m afraid you and Mr Shirley wont be able to comfort one another after all. You’re not a Millionaire, are you, Peter?

SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it.

UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of.

SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What’s kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn’t have your conscience, not for all your income.

UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn’t have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr Shirley. [He goes to the penthouse and sits down on a form].

BARBARA [stopping Shirley adroitly as he is about to retort] You wouldn’t think he was my father, would you, Peter? Will you go into the shelter and lend the lasses a hand for a while: we’re worked off our feet.

SHIRLEY [bitterly] Yes: I’m in their debt for a meal, ain’t I?

BARBARA. Oh, not because you’re in their debt; but for love of them, Peter, for love of them. [He cannot understand, and is rather scandalized]. There! Don’t stare at me. In with you; and give that conscience of yours a holiday [bustling him into the shelter].

SHIRLEY [as he goes in] Ah! it’s a pity you never was trained to use your reason, miss. You’d have been a very taking lecturer on Secularism.

Barbara turns to her father.

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. Go about your work; and let me watch it for a while.

BARBARA. All right.

UNDERSHAFT. For instance, what’s the matter with that out-patient over there?

BARBARA [looking at Bill, whose attitude has never changed, and whose expression of brooding wrath has deepened] Oh, we shall cure him in no time. Just watch. [She goes over to Bill and waits. He glances up at her and casts his eyes down again, uneasy, but grimmer than ever]. It would be nice to just stamp on Mog Habbijam’s face, wouldn’t it, Bill?

BILL [starting up from the trough in consternation] It’s a lie: I never said so. [She shakes her head]. Who told you wot was in my mind?

BARBARA. Only your new friend.

BILL. Wot new friend?

BARBARA. The devil, Bill. When he gets round people they get miserable, just like you.

HILL [with a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain’t miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in an attempt to seem indifferent].

BARBARA. Well, if you’re happy, why don’t you look happy, as we do?

BILL [his legs curling back in spite of him] I’m appy enough, I tell you. Why don’t you lea me alown? Wot av I done to you? I ain’t smashed your face, av I?

BARBARA [softly: wooing his soul] It’s not me that’s getting at you, Bill.

BILL. Who else is it?

BARBARA. Somebody that doesn’t intend you to smash women’s faces, I suppose. Somebody or something that wants to make a man of you.

BILL [blustering] Make a man o ME! Ain’t I a man? eh? ain’t I a man? Who sez I’m not a man?

BARBARA. There’s a man in you somewhere, I suppose. But why did he let you hit poor little Jenny Hill? That wasn’t very manly of him, was it?

BILL [tormented] Av done with it, I tell you. Chock it. I’m sick of your Jenny Ill and er silly little face.

BARBARA. Then why do you keep thinking about it? Why does it keep coming up against you in your mind? You’re not getting converted, are you?

BILL [with conviction] Not ME. Not likely. Not arf.

BARBARA. That’s right, Bill. Hold out against it. Put out your strength. Don’t let’s get you cheap. Todger Fairmile said he wrestled for three nights against his Salvation harder than he ever wrestled with the Jap at the music hall. He gave in to the Jap when his arm was going to break. But he didn’t give in to his salvation until his heart was going to break. Perhaps you’ll escape that. You haven’t any heart, have you?

BILL. Wot dye mean? Wy ain’t I got a art the same as ennybody else?

BARBARA. A man with a heart wouldn’t have bashed poor little Jenny’s face, would he?

BILL [almost crying] Ow, will you lea me alown? Av I ever offered to meddle with you, that you come noggin and provowkin me lawk this? [He writhes convulsively from his eyes to his toes].

BARBARA [with a steady soothing hand on his arm and a gentle voice that never lets him go] It’s your soul that’s hurting you, Bill, and not me. We’ve been through it all ourselves. Come with us, Bill. [He looks wildly round]. To brave manhood on earth and eternal glory in heaven. [He is on the point of breaking down]. Come. [A drum is heard in the shelter; and Bill, with a gasp, escapes from the spell as Barbara turns quickly. Adolphus enters from the shelter with a big drum]. Oh! there you are, Dolly. Let me introduce a new friend of mine, Mr Bill Walker. This is my bloke, Bill: Mr Cusins. [Cusins salutes with his drumstick].

BILL. Goin to marry im?

BARBARA. Yes.

BILL [fervently] Gawd elp im! Gawd elp im!

BARBARA. Why? Do you think he won’t be happy with me?

BILL. I’ve only ad to stand it for a mornin: e’ll av to stand it for a lifetime.

CUSINS. That is a frightful reflection, Mr Walker. But I can’t tear myself away from her.

BILL. Well, I can. [To Barbara] Eah! do you know where I’m goin to, and wot I’m goin to do?

BARBARA. Yes: you’re going to heaven; and you’re coming back here before the week’s out to tell me so.

BILL. You lie. I’m goin to Kennintahn, to spit in Todger Fairmile’s eye. I bashed Jenny Ill’s face; and now I’ll get me own face bashed and come back and show it to er. E’ll it me ardern I it er. That’ll make us square. [To Adolphus] Is that fair or is it not? You’re a genlmn: you oughter know.

BARBARA. Two black eyes wont make one white one, Bill.

BILL. I didn’t ast you. Cawn’t you never keep your mahth shut? I ast the genlmn.

CUSINS [reflectively] Yes: I think you’re right, Mr Walker. Yes: I should do it. It’s curious: it’s exactly what an ancient Greek would have done.

BARBARA. But what good will it do?

CUSINS. Well, it will give Mr Fairmile some exercise; and it will satisfy Mr Walker’s soul.

BILL. Rot! there ain’t no sach a thing as a soul. Ah kin you tell wether I’ve a soul or not? You never seen it.

BARBARA. I’ve seen it hurting you when you went against it.

BILL [with compressed aggravation] If you was my girl and took the word out o me mahth lawk thet, I’d give you suthink you’d feel urtin, so I would. [To Adolphus] You take my tip, mate. Stop er jawr; or you’ll die afore your time. [With intense expression] Wore aht: thets wot you’ll be: wore aht. [He goes away through the gate].

CUSINS [looking after him] I wonder!

BARBARA. Dolly! [indignant, in her mother’s manner].

CUSINS. Yes, my dear, it’s very wearing to be in love with you. If it lasts, I quite think I shall die young.

BARBARA. Should you mind?

CUSINS. Not at all. [He is suddenly softened, and kisses her over the drum, evidently not for the first time, as people cannot kiss over a big drum without practice. Undershaft coughs].

BARBARA. It’s all right, papa, we’ve not forgotten you. Dolly: explain the place to papa: I haven’t time. [She goes busily into the shelter].

Undershaft and Adolpbus now have the yard to themselves. Undershaft, seated on a form, and still keenly attentive, looks hard at Adolphus. Adolphus looks hard at him.

UNDERSHAFT. I fancy you guess something of what is in my mind, Mr Cusins. [Cusins flourishes his drumsticks as if in the art of beating a lively rataplan, but makes no sound]. Exactly so. But suppose Barbara finds you out!

CUSINS. You know, I do not admit that I am imposing on Barbara. I am quite genuinely interested in the views of the Salvation Army. The fact is, I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious thing is that I find I can believe them all. By the way, have you any religion?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes.

CUSINS. Anything out of the common?

UNDERSHAFT. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation.

CUSINS [disappointed, but polite] Ah, the Church Catechism. Charles Lomax also belongs to the Established Church.

UNDERSHAFT. The two things are —

CUSINS. Baptism and —

UNDERSHAFT. No. Money and gunpowder.

CUSINS [surprised, but interested] That is the general opinion of our governing classes. The novelty is in hearing any man confess it.

UNDERSHAFT. Just so.

CUSINS. Excuse me: is there any place in your religion for honor, justice, truth, love, mercy and so forth?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life.

CUSINS. Suppose one is forced to choose between them and money or gunpowder?

UNDERSHAFT. Choose money and gunpowder; for without enough of both you cannot afford the others.

CUSINS. That is your religion?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes.

The cadence of this reply makes a full close in the conversation. Cusins twists his face dubiously and contemplates Undershaft. Undershaft contemplates him.

CUSINS. Barbara won’t stand that. You will have to choose between your religion and Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. So will you, my friend. She will find out that that drum of yours is hollow.

CUSINS. Father Undershaft: you are mistaken: I am a sincere Salvationist. You do not understand the Salvation Army. It is the army of joy, of love, of courage: it has banished the fear and remorse and despair of the old hellridden evangelical sects: it marches to fight the devil with trumpet and drum, with music and dancing, with banner and palm, as becomes a sally from heaven by its happy garrison. It picks the waster out of the public house and makes a man of him: it finds a worm wriggling in a back kitchen, and lo! a woman! Men and women of rank too, sons and daughters of the Highest. It takes the poor professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures, from his meal of roots, and lets loose the rhapsodist in him; reveals the true worship of Dionysos to him; sends him down the public street drumming dithyrambs [he plays a thundering flourish on the drum].

UNDERSHAFT. You will alarm the shelter.

CUSINS. Oh, they are accustomed to these sudden ecstasies of piety. However, if the drum worries you — [he pockets the drumsticks; unhooks the drum; and stands it on the ground opposite the gateway].

UNDERSHAFT. Thank you.

CUSINS. You remember what Euripides says about your money and gunpowder?

UNDERSHAFT. No.

CUSINS [declaiming]

One and another
In money and guns may outpass his brother;
And men in their millions float and flow
And seethe with a million hopes as leaven;
And they win their will; or they miss their will;
And their hopes are dead or are pined for still:
But whoe’er can know
As the long days go
That to live is happy, has found his heaven.

My translation: what do you think of it?

UNDERSHAFT. I think, my friend, that if you wish to know, as the long days go, that to live is happy, you must first acquire money enough for a decent life, and power enough to be your own master.

CUSINS. You are damnably discouraging. [He resumes his declamation].

Is it so hard a thing to see
That the spirit of God — whate’er it be —
The Law that abides and changes not, ages long,
The Eternal and Nature-born: these things be strong.
What else is Wisdom? What of Man’s endeavor,
Or God’s high grace so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free? to breathe and wait?
To hold a hand uplifted over Fate?
And shall not Barbara be loved for ever?

UNDERSHAFT. Euripides mentions Barbara, does he?

CUSINS. It is a fair translation. The word means Loveliness.

UNDERSHAFT. May I ask — as Barbara’s father — how much a year she is to be loved for ever on?

CUSINS. As Barbara’s father, that is more your affair than mine. I can feed her by teaching Greek: that is about all.

UNDERSHAFT. Do you consider it a good match for her?

CUSINS [with polite obstinacy] Mr Undershaft: I am in many ways a weak, timid, ineffectual person; and my health is far from satisfactory. But whenever I feel that I must have anything, I get it, sooner or later. I feel that way about Barbara. I don’t like marriage: I feel intensely afraid of it; and I don’t know what I shall do with Barbara or what she will do with me. But I feel that I and nobody else must marry her. Please regard that as settled. — Not that I wish to be arbitrary; but why should I waste your time in discussing what is inevitable?

UNDERSHAFT. You mean that you will stick at nothing not even the conversion of the Salvation Army to the worship of Dionysos.

CUSINS. The business of the Salvation Army is to save, not to wrangle about the name of the pathfinder. Dionysos or another: what does it matter?

UNDERSHAFT [rising and approaching him] Professor Cusins you are a young man after my own heart.

CUSINS. Mr Undershaft: you are, as far as I am able to gather, a most infernal old rascal; but you appeal very strongly to my sense of ironic humor.

Undershaft mutely offers his hand. They shake.

UNDERSHAFT [suddenly concentrating himself] And now to business.

CUSINS. Pardon me. We were discussing religion. Why go back to such an uninteresting and unimportant subject as business?

UNDERSHAFT. Religion is our business at present, because it is through religion alone that we can win Barbara.

CUSINS. Have you, too, fallen in love with Barbara?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, with a father’s love.

CUSINS. A father’s love for a grown-up daughter is the most dangerous of all infatuations. I apologize for mentioning my own pale, coy, mistrustful fancy in the same breath with it.

UNDERSHAFT. Keep to the point. We have to win her; and we are neither of us Methodists.

CUSINS. That doesn’t matter. The power Barbara wields here — the power that wields Barbara herself — is not Calvinism, not Presbyterianism, not Methodism —

UNDERSHAFT. Not Greek Paganism either, eh?

CUSINS. I admit that. Barbara is quite original in her religion.

UNDERSHAFT [triumphantly] Aha! Barbara Undershaft would be. Her inspiration comes from within herself.

CUSINS. How do you suppose it got there?

UNDERSHAFT [in towering excitement] It is the Undershaft inheritance. I shall hand on my torch to my daughter. She shall make my converts and preach my gospel.

CUSINS. What! Money and gunpowder!

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, money and gunpowder; freedom and power; command of life and command of death.

CUSINS [urbanely: trying to bring him down to earth] This is extremely interesting, Mr Undershaft. Of course you know that you are mad.

UNDERSHAFT [with redoubled force] And you?

CUSINS. Oh, mad as a hatter. You are welcome to my secret since I have discovered yours. But I am astonished. Can a madman make cannons?

UNDERSHAFT. Would anyone else than a madman make them? And now [with surging energy] question for question. Can a sane man translate Euripides?

CUSINS. No.

UNDERSHAFT [reining him by the shoulder] Can a sane woman make a man of a waster or a woman of a worm?

CUSINS [reeling before the storm] Father Colossus — Mammoth Millionaire —

UNDERSHAFT [pressing him] Are there two mad people or three in this Salvation shelter to-day?

CUSINS. You mean Barbara is as mad as we are!

UNDERSHAFT [pushing him lightly off and resuming his equanimity suddenly and completely] Pooh, Professor! let us call things by their proper names. I am a millionaire; you are a poet; Barbara is a savior of souls. What have we three to do with the common mob of slaves and idolaters? [He sits down again with a shrug of contempt for the mob].

CUSINS. Take care! Barbara is in love with the common people. So am I. Have you never felt the romance of that love?

UNDERSHAFT [cold and sardonic] Have you ever been in love with Poverty, like St Francis? Have you ever been in love with Dirt, like St Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? Such passions are not virtues, but the most unnatural of all the vices. This love of the common people may please an earl’s granddaughter and a university professor; but I have been a common man and a poor man; and it has no romance for me. Leave it to the poor to pretend that poverty is a blessing: leave it to the coward to make a religion of his cowardice by preaching humility: we know better than that. We three must stand together above the common people: how else can we help their children to climb up beside us? Barbara must belong to us, not to the Salvation Army.

CUSINS. Well, I can only say that if you think you will get her away from the Salvation Army by talking to her as you have been talking to me, you don’t know Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. My friend: I never ask for what I can buy.

CUSINS [in a white fury] Do I understand you to imply that you can buy Barbara?

UNDERSHAFT. No; but I can buy the Salvation Army.

CUSINS. Quite impossible.

UNDERSHAFT. You shall see. All religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich.

CUSINS. Not the Army. That is the Church of the poor.

UNDERSHAFT. All the more reason for buying it.

CUSINS. I don’t think you quite know what the Army does for the poor.

UNDERSHAFT. Oh yes I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for me — as a man of business —

CUSINS. Nonsense! It makes them sober —

UNDERSHAFT. I prefer sober workmen. The profits are larger.

CUSINS. — honest —

UNDERSHAFT. Honest workmen are the most economical.

CUSINS. — attached to their homes —

UNDERSHAFT. So much the better: they will put up with anything sooner than change their shop.

CUSINS. — happy —

UNDERSHAFT. An invaluable safeguard against revolution.

CUSINS. — unselfish —

UNDERSHAFT. Indifferent to their own interests, which suits me exactly.

CUSINS. — with their thoughts on heavenly things —

UNDERSHAFT [rising] And not on Trade Unionism nor Socialism. Excellent.

CUSINS [revolted] You really are an infernal old rascal.

UNDERSHAFT [indicating Peter Shirley, who has just came from the shelter and strolled dejectedly down the yard between them] And this is an honest man!

SHIRLEY. Yes; and what av I got by it? [he passes on bitterly and sits on the form, in the corner of the penthouse].

Snobby Price, beaming sanctimoniously, and Jenny Hill, with a tambourine full of coppers, come from the shelter and go to the drum, on which Jenny begins to count the money.

UNDERSHAFT [replying to Shirley] Oh, your employers must have got a good deal by it from first to last. [He sits on the table, with one foot on the side form. Cusins, overwhelmed, sits down on the same form nearer the shelter. Barbara comes from the shelter to the middle of the yard. She is excited and a little overwrought].

BARBARA. We’ve just had a splendid experience meeting at the other gate in Cripps’s lane. I’ve hardly ever seen them so much moved as they were by your confession, Mr Price.

PRICE. I could almost be glad of my past wickedness if I could believe that it would elp to keep hathers stright.

BARBARA. So it will, Snobby. How much, Jenny?

JENNY. Four and tenpence, Major.

BARBARA. Oh Snobby, if you had given your poor mother just one more kick, we should have got the whole five shillings!

PRICE. If she heard you say that, miss, she’d be sorry I didn’t. But I’m glad. Oh what a joy it will be to her when she hears I’m saved!

UNDERSHAFT. Shall I contribute the odd twopence, Barbara? The millionaire’s mite, eh? [He takes a couple of pennies from his pocket.]

BARBARA. How did you make that twopence?

UNDERSHAFT. As usual. By selling cannons, torpedoes, submarines, and my new patent Grand Duke hand grenade.

BARBARA. Put it back in your pocket. You can’t buy your Salvation here for twopence: you must work it out.

UNDERSHAFT. Is twopence not enough? I can afford a little more, if you press me.

BARBARA. Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood on your hands; and nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money is no use. Take it away. [She turns to Cusins]. Dolly: you must write another letter for me to the papers. [He makes a wry face]. Yes: I know you don’t like it; but it must be done. The starvation this winter is beating us: everybody is unemployed. The General says we must close this shelter if we cant get more money. I force the collections at the meetings until I am ashamed, don’t I, Snobby?

PRICE. It’s a fair treat to see you work it, miss. The way you got them up from three-and-six to four-and-ten with that hymn, penny by penny and verse by verse, was a caution. Not a Cheap Jack on Mile End Waste could touch you at it.

BARBARA. Yes; but I wish we could do without it. I am getting at last to think more of the collection than of the people’s souls. And what are those hatfuls of pence and halfpence? We want thousands! tens of thousands! hundreds of thousands! I want to convert people, not to be always begging for the Army in a way I’d die sooner than beg for myself.

UNDERSHAFT [in profound irony] Genuine unselfishness is capable of anything, my dear.

BARBARA [unsuspectingly, as she turns away to take the money from the drum and put it in a cash bag she carries] Yes, isn’t it? [Undershaft looks sardonically at Cusins].

CUSINS [aside to Undershaft] Mephistopheles! Machiavelli!

BARBARA [tears coming into her eyes as she ties the bag and pockets it] How are we to feed them? I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes. [Almost breaking down] It’s frightful.

JENNY [running to her] Major, dear —

BARBARA [rebounding] No: don’t comfort me. It will be all right. We shall get the money.

UNDERSHAFT. How?

JENNY. By praying for it, of course. Mrs Baines says she prayed for it last night; and she has never prayed for it in vain: never once. [She goes to the gate and looks out into the street].

BARBARA [who has dried her eyes and regained her composure] By the way, dad, Mrs Baines has come to march with us to our big meeting this afternoon; and she is very anxious to meet you, for some reason or other. Perhaps she’ll convert you.

UNDERSHAFT. I shall be delighted, my dear.

JENNY [at the gate: excitedly] Major! Major! Here’s that man back again.

BARBARA. What man?

JENNY. The man that hit me. Oh, I hope he’s coming back to join us.

Bill Walker, with frost on his jacket, comes through the gate, his hands deep in his pockets and his chin sunk between his shoulders, like a cleaned-out gambler. He halts between Barbara and the drum.

BARBARA. Hullo, Bill! Back already!

BILL [nagging at her] Bin talkin ever sense, av you?

BARBARA. Pretty nearly. Well, has Todger paid you out for poor Jenny’s jaw?

BILL. NO he ain’t.

BARBARA. I thought your jacket looked a bit snowy.

BILL. So it is snowy. You want to know where the snow come from, don’t you?

BARBARA. Yes.

BILL. Well, it come from off the ground in Parkinses Corner in Kennintahn. It got rubbed off be my shoulders see?

BARBARA. Pity you didn’t rub some off with your knees, Bill! That would have done you a lot of good.

BILL [with your mirthless humor] I was saving another man’s knees at the time. E was kneelin on my ed, so e was.

JENNY. Who was kneeling on your head?

BILL. Todger was. E was prayin for me: prayin comfortable with me as a carpet. So was Mog. So was the ole bloomin meetin. Mog she sez “O Lord break is stubborn spirit; but don’t urt is dear art.” That was wot she said. “Don’t urt is dear art”! An er bloke — thirteen stun four! — kneelin wiv all is weight on me. Funny, ain’t it?

JENNY. Oh no. We’re so sorry, Mr Walker.

BARBARA [enjoying it frankly] Nonsense! of course it’s funny. Served you right, Bill! You must have done something to him first.

BILL [doggedly] I did wot I said I’d do. I spit in is eye. E looks up at the sky and sez, “O that I should be fahnd worthy to be spit upon for the gospel’s sake!” a sez; an Mog sez “Glory Allelloolier!”; an then a called me Brother, an dahned me as if I was a kid and a was me mother washin me a Setterda nawt. I adn’t just no show wiv im at all. Arf the street prayed; an the tother arf larfed fit to split theirselves. [To Barbara] There! are you settisfawd nah?

BARBARA [her eyes dancing] Wish I’d been there, Bill.

BILL. Yes: you’d a got in a hextra bit o talk on me, wouldn’t you?

JENNY. I’m so sorry, Mr. Walker.

BILL [fiercely] Don’t you go bein sorry for me: you’ve no call. Listen ere. I broke your jawr.

JENNY. No, it didn’t hurt me: indeed it didn’t, except for a moment. It was only that I was frightened.

BILL. I don’t want to be forgive be you, or be ennybody. Wot I did I’ll pay for. I tried to get me own jawr broke to settisfaw you —

JENNY [distressed] Oh no —

BILL [impatiently] Tell y’I did: cawn’t you listen to wot’s bein told you? All I got be it was bein made a sight of in the public street for me pains. Well, if I cawn’t settisfaw you one way, I can another. Listen ere! I ad two quid saved agen the frost; an I’ve a pahnd of it left. A mate n mine last week ad words with the Judy e’s goin to marry. E give er wot-for; an e’s bin fined fifteen bob. E ad a right to it er because they was goin to be marrid; but I adn’t no right to it you; so put anather fawv bob on an call it a pahnd’s worth. [He produces a sovereign]. Ere’s the money. Take it; and let’s av no more o your forgivin an prayin and your Major jawrin me. Let wot I done be done and paid for; and let there be a end of it.

JENNY. Oh, I couldn’t take it, Mr. Walker. But if you would give a shilling or two to poor Rummy Mitchens! you really did hurt her; and she’s old.

BILL [contemptuously] Not likely. I’d give her anather as soon as look at er. Let her av the lawr o me as she threatened! She ain’t forgiven me: not mach. Wot I done to er is not on me mawnd — wot she [indicating Barbara] might call on me conscience — no more than stickin a pig. It’s this Christian game o yours that I won’t av played agen me: this bloomin forgivin an noggin an jawrin that makes a man that sore that iz lawf’s a burdn to im. I won’t av it, I tell you; so take your money and stop throwin your silly bashed face hup agen me.

JENNY. Major: may I take a little of it for the Army?

BARBARA. No: the Army is not to be bought. We want your soul, Bill; and we’ll take nothing less.

BILL [bitterly] I know. It ain’t enough. Me an me few shillins is not good enough for you. You’re a earl’s grendorter, you are. Nothin less than a underd pahnd for you.

UNDERSHAFT. Come, Barbara! you could do a great deal of good with a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman’s mind at ease by taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine [Bill, astounded by such opulence, instinctively touches his cap].

BARBARA. Oh, you’re too extravagant, papa. Bill offers twenty pieces of silver. All you need offer is the other ten. That will make the standard price to buy anybody who’s for sale. I’m not; and the Army’s not. [To Bill] You’ll never have another quiet moment, Bill, until you come round to us. You can’t stand out against your salvation.

BILL [sullenly] I cawn’t stend aht agen music all wrastlers and artful tongued women. I’ve offered to pay. I can do no more. Take it or leave it. There it is. [He throws the sovereign on the drum, and sits down on the horse-trough. The coin fascinates Snobby Price, who takes an early opportunity of dropping his cap on it].

Mrs Baines comes from the shelter. She is dressed as a Salvation Army Commissioner. She is an earnest looking woman of about 40, with a caressing, urgent voice, and an appealing manner.

BARBARA. This is my father, Mrs Baines. [Undershaft comes from the table, taking his hat off with marked civility]. Try what you can do with him. He won’t listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby.

[She leaves them together and chats with Jenny].

MRS BAINES. Have you been shown over the shelter, Mr Undershaft? You know the work we’re doing, of course.

UNDERSHAFT [very civilly] The whole nation knows it, Mrs Baines.

MRS BAINES. No, Sir: the whole nation does not know it, or we should not be crippled as we are for want of money to carry our work through the length and breadth of the land. Let me tell you that there would have been rioting this winter in London but for us.

UNDERSHAFT. You really think so?

MRS BAINES. I know it. I remember 1886, when you rich gentlemen hardened your hearts against the cry of the poor. They broke the windows of your clubs in Pall Mall.

UNDERSHAFT [gleaming with approval of their method] And the Mansion House Fund went up next day from thirty thousand pounds to seventy-nine thousand! I remember quite well.

MRS BAINES. Well, won’t you help me to get at the people? They won’t break windows then. Come here, Price. Let me show you to this gentleman [Price comes to be inspected]. Do you remember the window breaking?

PRICE. My ole father thought it was the revolution, ma’am.

MRS BAINES. Would you break windows now?

PRICE. Oh no ma’m. The windows of eaven av bin opened to me. I know now that the rich man is a sinner like myself.

RUMMY [appearing above at the loft door] Snobby Price!

SNOBBY. Wot is it?

RUMMY. Your mother’s askin for you at the other gate in Crippses Lane. She’s heard about your confession [Price turns pale].

MRS BAINES. Go, Mr. Price; and pray with her.

JENNY. You can go through the shelter, Snobby.

PRICE [to Mrs Baines] I couldn’t face her now; ma’am, with all the weight of my sins fresh on me. Tell her she’ll find her son at ome, waitin for her in prayer. [He skulks off through the gate, incidentally stealing the sovereign on his way out by picking up his cap from the drum].

MRS BAINES [with swimming eyes] You see how we take the anger and the bitterness against you out of their hearts, Mr Undershaft.

UNDERSHAFT. It is certainly most convenient and gratifying to all large employers of labor, Mrs Baines.

MRS BAINES. Barbara: Jenny: I have good news: most wonderful news. [Jenny runs to her]. My prayers have been answered. I told you they would, Jenny, didn’t I?

JENNY. Yes, yes.

BARBARA [moving nearer to the drum] Have we got money enough to keep the shelter open?

MRS BAINES. I hope we shall have enough to keep all the shelters open. Lord Saxmundham has promised us five thousand pounds —

BARBARA. Hooray!

JENNY. Glory!

MRS BAINES. — if —

BARBARA. “If!” If what?

MRS BAINES. If five other gentlemen will give a thousand each to make it up to ten thousand.

BARBARA. Who is Lord Saxmundham? I never heard of him.

UNDERSHAFT [who has pricked up his ears at the peer’s name, and is now watching Barbara curiously] A new creation, my dear. You have heard of Sir Horace Bodger?

BARBARA. Bodger! Do you mean the distiller? Bodger’s whisky!

UNDERSHAFT. That is the man. He is one of the greatest of our public benefactors. He restored the cathedral at Hakington. They made him a baronet for that. He gave half a million to the funds of his party: they made him a baron for that.

SHIRLEY. What will they give him for the five thousand?

UNDERSHAFT. There is nothing left to give him. So the five thousand, I should think, is to save his soul.

MRS BAINES. Heaven grant it may! Oh Mr. Undershaft, you have some very rich friends. Can’t you help us towards the other five thousand? We are going to hold a great meeting this afternoon at the Assembly Hall in the Mile End Road. If I could only announce that one gentleman had come forward to support Lord Saxmundham, others would follow. Don’t you know somebody? Couldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? [her eyes fill with tears] oh, think of those poor people, Mr Undershaft: think of how much it means to them, and how little to a great man like you.

UNDERSHAFT [sardonically gallant] Mrs Baines: you are irresistible. I can’t disappoint you; and I can’t deny myself the satisfaction of making Bodger pay up. You shall have your five thousand pounds.

MRS BAINES. Thank God!

UNDERSHAFT. You don’t thank me?

MRS BAINES. Oh sir, don’t try to be cynical: don’t be ashamed of being a good man. The Lord will bless you abundantly; and our prayers will be like a strong fortification round you all the days of your life. [With a touch of caution] You will let me have the cheque to show at the meeting, won’t you? Jenny: go in and fetch a pen and ink. [Jenny runs to the shelter door].

UNDERSHAFT. Do not disturb Miss Hill: I have a fountain pen. [Jenny halts. He sits at the table and writes the cheque. Cusins rises to make more room for him. They all watch him silently].

BILL [cynically, aside to Barbara, his voice and accent horribly debased] Wot prawce Selvytion nah?

BARBARA. Stop. [Undershaft stops writing: they all turn to her in surprise]. Mrs Baines: are you really going to take this money?

MRS BAINES [astonished] Why not, dear?

BARBARA. Why not! Do you know what my father is? Have you forgotten that Lord Saxmundham is Bodger the whisky man? Do you remember how we implored the County Council to stop him from writing Bodger’s Whisky in letters of fire against the sky; so that the poor drinkruined creatures on the embankment could not wake up from their snatches of sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked sky sign? Do you know that the worst thing I have had to fight here is not the devil, but Bodger, Bodger, Bodger, with his whisky, his distilleries, and his tied houses? Are you going to make our shelter another tied house for him, and ask me to keep it?

BILL. Rotten drunken whisky it is too.

MRS BAINES. Dear Barbara: Lord Saxmundham has a soul to be saved like any of us. If heaven has found the way to make a good use of his money, are we to set ourselves up against the answer to our prayers?

BARBARA. I know he has a soul to be saved. Let him come down here; and I’ll do my best to help him to his salvation. But he wants to send his cheque down to buy us, and go on being as wicked as ever.

UNDERSHAFT [with a reasonableness which Cusins alone perceives to be ironical] My dear Barbara: alcohol is a very necessary article. It heals the sick —

BARBARA. It does nothing of the sort.

UNDERSHAFT. Well, it assists the doctor: that is perhaps a less questionable way of putting it. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning. Is it Bodger’s fault that this inestimable gift is deplorably abused by less than one per cent of the poor? [He turns again to the table; signs the cheque; and crosses it].

MRS BAINES. Barbara: will there be less drinking or more if all those poor souls we are saving come to-morrow and find the doors of our shelters shut in their faces? Lord Saxmundham gives us the money to stop drinking — to take his own business from him.

CUSINS [impishly] Pure self-sacrifice on Bodger’s part, clearly! Bless dear Bodger! [Barbara almost breaks down as Adolpbus, too, fails her].

UNDERSHAFT [tearing out the cheque and pocketing the book as he rises and goes past Cusins to Mrs Baines] I also, Mrs Baines, may claim a little disinterestedness. Think of my business! think of the widows and orphans! the men and lads torn to pieces with shrapnel and poisoned with lyddite [Mrs Baines shrinks; but he goes on remorselessly]! the oceans of blood, not one drop of which is shed in a really just cause! the ravaged crops! the peaceful peasants forced, women and men, to till their fields under the fire of opposing armies on pain of starvation! the bad blood of the fierce little cowards at home who egg on others to fight for the gratification of their national vanity! All this makes money for me: I am never richer, never busier than when the papers are full of it. Well, it is your work to preach peace on earth and goodwill to men. [Mrs Baines’s face lights up again]. Every convert you make is a vote against war. [Her lips move in prayer]. Yet I give you this money to help you to hasten my own commercial ruin. [He gives her the cheque].

CUSINS [mounting the form in an ecstasy of mischief] The millennium will be inaugurated by the unselfishness of Undershaft and Bodger. Oh be joyful! [He takes the drumsticks from his pockets and flourishes them].

MRS BAINES [taking the cheque] The longer I live the more proof I see that there is an Infinite Goodness that turns everything to the work of salvation sooner or later. Who would have thought that any good could have come out of war and drink? And yet their profits are brought today to the feet of salvation to do its blessed work. [She is affected to tears].

JENNY [running to Mrs Baines and throwing her arms round her] Oh dear! how blessed, how glorious it all is!

CUSINS [in a convulsion of irony] Let us seize this unspeakable moment. Let us march to the great meeting at once. Excuse me just an instant. [He rushes into the shelter. Jenny takes her tambourine from the drum head].

MRS BAINES. Mr Undershaft: have you ever seen a thousand people fall on their knees with one impulse and pray? Come with us to the meeting. Barbara shall tell them that the Army is saved, and saved through you.

CUSINS [returning impetuously from the shelter with a flag and a trombone, and coming between Mrs Baines and Undershaft] You shall carry the flag down the first street, Mrs Baines [he gives her the flag]. Mr Undershaft is a gifted trombonist: he shall intone an Olympian diapason to the West Ham Salvation March. [Aside to Undershaft, as he forces the trombone on him] Blow, Machiavelli, blow.

UNDERSHAFT [aside to him, as he takes the trombone] The trumpet in Zion! [Cusins rushes to the drum, which he takes up and puts on. Undershaft continues, aloud] I will do my best. I could vamp a bass if I knew the tune.

CUSINS. It is a wedding chorus from one of Donizetti’s operas; but we have converted it. We convert everything to good here, including Bodger. You remember the chorus. “For thee immense rejoicing — immenso giubilo — immenso giubilo.” [With drum obbligato] Rum tum ti tum tum, tum tum ti ta —

BARBARA. Dolly: you are breaking my heart.

CUSINS. What is a broken heart more or less here? Dionysos Undershaft has descended. I am possessed.

MRS BAINES. Come, Barbara: I must have my dear Major to carry the flag with me.

JENNY. Yes, yes, Major darling.

CUSINS [snatches the tambourine out of Jenny’s hand and mutely offers it to Barbara].

BARBARA [coming forward a little as she puts the offer behind her with a shudder, whilst Cusins recklessly tosses the tambourine back to Jenny and goes to the gate] I can’t come.

JENNY. Not come!

MRS BAINES [with tears in her eyes] Barbara: do you think I am wrong to take the money?

BARBARA [impulsively going to her and kissing her] No, no: God help you, dear, you must: you are saving the Army. Go; and may you have a great meeting!

JENNY. But arn’t you coming?

BARBARA. No. [She begins taking off the silver brooch from her collar].

MRS BAINES. Barbara: what are you doing?

JENNY. Why are you taking your badge off? You can’t be going to leave us, Major.

BARBARA [quietly] Father: come here.

UNDERSHAFT [coming to her] My dear! [Seeing that she is going to pin the badge on his collar, he retreats to the penthouse in some alarm].

BARBARA [following him] Don’t be frightened. [She pins the badge on and steps back towards the table, showing him to the others] There! It’s not much for 5000 pounds is it?

MRS BAINES. Barbara: if you won’t come and pray with us, promise me you will pray for us.

BARBARA. I can’t pray now. Perhaps I shall never pray again.

MRS BAINES. Barbara!

JENNY. Major!

BARBARA [almost delirious] I can’t bear any more. Quick march!

CUSINS [calling to the procession in the street outside] Off we go. Play up, there! Immenso giubilo. [He gives the time with his drum; and the band strikes up the march, which rapidly becomes more distant as the procession moves briskly away].

MRS BAINES. I must go, dear. You’re overworked: you will be all right tomorrow. We’ll never lose you. Now Jenny: step out with the old flag. Blood and Fire! [She marches out through the gate with her flag].

JENNY. Glory Hallelujah! [flourishing her tambourine and marching].

UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins, as he marches out past him easing the slide of his trombone] “My ducats and my daughter”!

CUSINS [following him out] Money and gunpowder!

BARBARA. Drunkenness and Murder! My God: why hast thou forsaken me?

She sinks on the form with her face buried in her hands. The march passes away into silence. Bill Walker steals across to her.

BILL [taunting] Wot prawce Selvytion nah?

SHIRLEY. Don’t you hit her when she’s down.

BILL. She it me wen aw wiz dahn. Waw shouldn’t I git a bit o me own back?

BARBARA [raising her head] I didn’t take your money, Bill. [She crosses the yard to the gate and turns her back on the two men to hide her face from them].

BILL [sneering after her] Naow, it warn’t enough for you. [Turning to the drum, he misses the money]. Ellow! If you ain’t took it summun else az. Were’s it gorn? Blame me if Jenny Ill didn’t take it arter all!

RUMMY [screaming at him from the loft] You lie, you dirty blackguard! Snobby Price pinched it off the drum wen e took ap iz cap. I was ap ere all the time an see im do it.

BILL. Wot! Stowl maw money! Waw didn’t you call thief on him, you silly old mucker you?

RUMMY. To serve you aht for ittin me acrost the face. It’s cost y’pahnd, that az. [Raising a paean of squalid triumph] I done you. I’m even with you. I’ve ad it aht o y — . [Bill snatches up Shirley’s mug and hurls it at her. She slams the loft door and vanishes. The mug smashes against the door and falls in fragments].

BILL [beginning to chuckle] Tell us, ole man, wot o’clock this morrun was it wen im as they call Snobby Prawce was sived?

BARBARA [turning to him more composedly, and with unspoiled sweetness] About half past twelve, Bill. And he pinched your pound at a quarter to two. I know. Well, you can’t afford to lose it. I’ll send it to you.

BILL [his voice and accent suddenly improving] Not if I was to starve for it. I ain’t to be bought.

SHIRLEY. Ain’t you? You’d sell yourself to the devil for a pint o beer; ony there ain’t no devil to make the offer.

BILL [unshamed] So I would, mate, and often av, cheerful. But she cawn’t buy me. [Approaching Barbara] You wanted my soul, did you? Well, you ain’t got it.

BARBARA. I nearly got it, Bill. But we’ve sold it back to you for ten thousand pounds.

SHIRLEY. And dear at the money!

BARBARA. No, Peter: it was worth more than money.

BILL [salvationproof] It’s no good: you cawn’t get rahnd me nah. I don’t blieve in it; and I’ve seen today that I was right. [Going] So long, old soupkitchener! Ta, ta, Major Earl’s Grendorter! [Turning at the gate] Wot prawce Selvytion nah? Snobby Prawce! Ha! ha!

BARBARA [offering her hand] Goodbye, Bill.

BILL [taken aback, half plucks his cap off then shoves it on again defiantly] Git aht. [Barbara drops her hand, discouraged. He has a twinge of remorse]. But thet’s aw rawt, you knaow. Nathink pasnl. Naow mellice. So long, Judy. [He goes].

BARBARA. No malice. So long, Bill.

SHIRLEY [shaking his head] You make too much of him, miss, in your innocence.

BARBARA [going to him] Peter: I’m like you now. Cleaned out, and lost my job.

SHIRLEY. You’ve youth an hope. That’s two better than me. That’s hope for you.

BARBARA. I’ll get you a job, Peter, the youth will have to be enough for me. [She counts her money]. I have just enough left for two teas at Lockharts, a Rowton doss for you, and my tram and bus home. [He frowns and rises with offended pride. She takes his arm]. Don’t be proud, Peter: it’s sharing between friends. And promise me you’ll talk to me and not let me cry. [She draws him towards the gate].

SHIRLEY. Well, I’m not accustomed to talk to the like of you —

BARBARA [urgently] Yes, yes: you must talk to me. Tell me about Tom Paine’s books and Bradlaugh’s lectures. Come along.

SHIRLEY. Ah, if you would only read Tom Paine in the proper spirit, miss! [They go out through the gate together].

ACT III

Next day after lunch Lady Britomart is writing in the library in Wilton Crescent. Sarah is reading in the armchair near the window. Barbara, in ordinary dress, pale and brooding, is on the settee. Charley Lomax enters. Coming forward between the settee and the writing table, he starts on seeing Barbara fashionably attired and in low spirits.

LOMAX. You’ve left off your uniform!

Barbara says nothing; but an expression of pain passes over her face.

LADY BRITOMART [warning him in low tones to be careful] Charles!

LOMAX [much concerned, sitting down sympathetically on the settee beside Barbara] I’m awfully sorry, Barbara. You know I helped you all I could with the concertina and so forth. [Momentously] Still, I have never shut my eyes to the fact that there is a certain amount of tosh about the Salvation Army. Now the claims of the Church of England —

LADY BRITOMART. That’s enough, Charles. Speak of something suited to your mental capacity.

LOMAX. But surely the Church of England is suited to all our capacities.

BARBARA [pressing his hand] Thank you for your sympathy, Cholly. Now go and spoon with Sarah.

LOMAX [rising and going to Sarah] How is my ownest today?

SARAH. I wish you wouldn’t tell Cholly to do things, Barbara. He always comes straight and does them. Cholly: we’re going to the works at Perivale St. Andrews this afternoon.

LOMAX. What works?

SARAH. The cannon works.

LOMAX. What! Your governor’s shop!

SARAH. Yes.

LOMAX. Oh I say!

Cusins enters in poor condition. He also starts visibly when he sees Barbara without her uniform.

BARBARA. I expected you this morning, Dolly. Didn’t you guess that?

CUSINS [sitting down beside her] I’m sorry. I have only just breakfasted.

SARAH. But we’ve just finished lunch.

BARBARA. Have you had one of your bad nights?

CUSINS. No: I had rather a good night: in fact, one of the most remarkable nights I have ever passed.

BARBARA. The meeting?

CUSINS. No: after the meeting.

LADY BRITOMART. You should have gone to bed after the meeting. What were you doing?

CUSINS. Drinking.

LADY BRITOMART. {Adolphus! SARAH. {Dolly! BARBARA. {Dolly! LOMAX. {Oh I say!

LADY BRITOMART. What were you drinking, may I ask?

CUSINS. A most devilish kind of Spanish burgundy, warranted free from added alcohol: a Temperance burgundy in fact. Its richness in natural alcohol made any addition superfluous.

BARBARA. Are you joking, Dolly?

CUSINS [patiently] No. I have been making a night of it with the nominal head of this household: that is all.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew made you drunk!

CUSINS. No: he only provided the wine. I think it was Dionysos who made me drunk. [To Barbara] I told you I was possessed.

LADY BRITOMART. You’re not sober yet. Go home to bed at once.

CUSINS. I have never before ventured to reproach you, Lady Brit; but how could you marry the Prince of Darkness?

LADY BRITOMART. It was much more excusable to marry him than to get drunk with him. That is a new accomplishment of Andrew’s, by the way. He usen’t to drink.

CUSINS. He doesn’t now. He only sat there and completed the wreck of my moral basis, the rout of my convictions, the purchase of my soul. He cares for you, Barbara. That is what makes him so dangerous to me.

BARBARA. That has nothing to do with it, Dolly. There are larger loves and diviner dreams than the fireside ones. You know that, don’t you?

CUSINS. Yes: that is our understanding. I know it. I hold to it. Unless he can win me on that holier ground he may amuse me for a while; but he can get no deeper hold, strong as he is.

BARBARA. Keep to that; and the end will be right. Now tell me what happened at the meeting?

CUSINS. It was an amazing meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there. They prayed with the most touching sincerity and gratitude for Bodger, and for the anonymous donor of the 5000 pounds. Your father would not let his name be given.

LOMAX. That was rather fine of the old man, you know. Most chaps would have wanted the advertisement.

CUSINS. He said all the charitable institutions would be down on him like kites on a battle field if he gave his name.

LADY BRITOMART. That’s Andrew all over. He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

CUSINS. He convinced me that I have all my life been doing improper things for proper reasons.

LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus: now that Barbara has left the Salvation Army, you had better leave it too. I will not have you playing that drum in the streets.

CUSINS. Your orders are already obeyed, Lady Brit.

BARBARA. Dolly: were you ever really in earnest about it? Would you have joined if you had never seen me?

CUSINS [disingenuously] Well — er — well, possibly, as a collector of religions —

LOMAX [cunningly] Not as a drummer, though, you know. You are a very clearheaded brainy chap, Cholly; and it must have been apparent to you that there is a certain amount of tosh about —

LADY BRITOMART. Charles: if you must drivel, drivel like a grown-up man and not like a schoolboy.

LOMAX [out of countenance] Well, drivel is drivel, don’t you know, whatever a man’s age.

LADY BRITOMART. In good society in England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly formulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas out of The Spectator or The Times. You had better confine yourself to The Times. You will find that there is a certain amount of tosh about The Times; but at least its language is reputable.

LOMAX [overwhelmed] You are so awfully strong-minded, Lady Brit —

LADY BRITOMART. Rubbish! [Morrison comes in]. What is it?

MORRISON. If you please, my lady, Mr Undershaft has just drove up to the door.

LADY BRITOMART. Well, let him in. [Morrison hesitates]. What’s the matter with you?

MORRISON. Shall I announce him, my lady; or is he at home here, so to speak, my lady?

LADY BRITOMART. Announce him.

MORRISON. Thank you, my lady. You won’t mind my asking, I hope. The occasion is in a manner of speaking new to me.

LADY BRITOMART. Quite right. Go and let him in.

MORRISON. Thank you, my lady. [He withdraws].

LADY BRITOMART. Children: go and get ready. [Sarah and Barbara go upstairs for their out-of-door wrap]. Charles: go and tell Stephen to come down here in five minutes: you will find him in the drawing room. [Charles goes]. Adolphus: tell them to send round the carriage in about fifteen minutes. [Adolphus goes].

MORRISON [at the door] Mr Undershaft.

Undershaft comes in. Morrison goes out.

UNDERSHAFT. Alone! How fortunate!

LADY BRITOMART [rising] Don’t be sentimental, Andrew. Sit down. [She sits on the settee: he sits beside her, on her left. She comes to the point before he has time to breathe]. Sarah must have 800 pounds a year until Charles Lomax comes into his property. Barbara will need more, and need it permanently, because Adolphus hasn’t any property.

UNDERSHAFT [resignedly] Yes, my dear: I will see to it. Anything else? for yourself, for instance?

LADY BRITOMART. I want to talk to you about Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT [rather wearily] Don’t, my dear. Stephen doesn’t interest me.

LADY BRITOMART. He does interest me. He is our son.

UNDERSHAFT. Do you really think so? He has induced us to bring him into the world; but he chose his parents very incongruously, I think. I see nothing of myself in him, and less of you.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: Stephen is an excellent son, and a most steady, capable, highminded young man. YOU are simply trying to find an excuse for disinheriting him.

UNDERSHAFT. My dear Biddy: the Undershaft tradition disinherits him. It would be dishonest of me to leave the cannon foundry to my son.

LADY BRITOMART. It would be most unnatural and improper of you to leave it to anyone else, Andrew. Do you suppose this wicked and immoral tradition can be kept up for ever? Do you pretend that Stephen could not carry on the foundry just as well as all the other sons of the big business houses?

UNDERSHAFT. Yes: he could learn the office routine without understanding the business, like all the other sons; and the firm would go on by its own momentum until the real Undershaft — probably an Italian or a German — would invent a new method and cut him out.

LADY BRITOMART. There is nothing that any Italian or German could do that Stephen could not do. And Stephen at least has breeding.

UNDERSHAFT. The son of a foundling! nonsense!

LADY BRITOMART. My son, Andrew! And even you may have good blood in your veins for all you know.

UNDERSHAFT. True. Probably I have. That is another argument in favor of a foundling.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: don’t be aggravating. And don’t be wicked. At present you are both.

UNDERSHAFT. This conversation is part of the Undershaft tradition, Biddy. Every Undershaft’s wife has treated him to it ever since the house was founded. It is mere waste of breath. If the tradition be ever broken it will be for an abler man than Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART [pouting] Then go away.

UNDERSHAFT [deprecatory] Go away!

LADY BRITOMART. Yes: go away. If you will do nothing for Stephen, you are not wanted here. Go to your foundling, whoever he is; and look after him.

UNDERSHAFT. The fact is, Biddy —

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t call me Biddy. I don’t call you Andy.

UNDERSHAFT. I will not call my wife Britomart: it is not good sense. Seriously, my love, the Undershaft tradition has landed me in a difficulty. I am getting on in years; and my partner Lazarus has at last made a stand and insisted that the succession must be settled one way or the other; and of course he is quite right. You see, I haven’t found a fit successor yet.

LADY BRITOMART [obstinately] There is Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT. That’s just it: all the foundlings I can find are exactly like Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew!!

UNDERSHAFT. I want a man with no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the running altogether if he were not a strong man. And I can’t find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with secondhand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching. If you want to keep the foundry in the family, you had better find an eligible foundling and marry him to Barbara.

LADY BRITOMART. Ah! Barbara! Your pet! You would sacrifice Stephen to Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. Cheerfully. And you, my dear, would boil Barbara to make soup for Stephen.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: this is not a question of our likings and dislikings: it is a question of duty. It is your duty to make Stephen your successor.

UNDERSHAFT. Just as much as it is your duty to submit to your husband. Come, Biddy! these tricks of the governing class are of no use with me. I am one of the governing class myself; and it is waste of time giving tracts to a missionary. I have the power in this matter; and I am not to be humbugged into using it for your purposes.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: you can talk my head off; but you can’t change wrong into right. And your tie is all on one side. Put it straight.

UNDERSHAFT [disconcerted] It won’t stay unless it’s pinned [he fumbles at it with childish grimaces] —

Stephen comes in.

STEPHEN [at the door] I beg your pardon [about to retire].

LADY BRITOMART. No: come in, Stephen. [Stephen comes forward to his mother’s writing table.]

UNDERSHAFT [not very cordially] Good afternoon.

STEPHEN [coldly] Good afternoon.

UNDERSHAFT [to Lady Britomart] He knows all about the tradition, I suppose?

LADY BRITOMART. Yes. [To Stephen] It is what I told you last night, Stephen.

UNDERSHAFT [sulkily] I understand you want to come into the cannon business.

STEPHEN. I go into trade! Certainly not.

UNDERSHAFT [opening his eyes, greatly eased in mind and manner] Oh! in that case — !

LADY BRITOMART. Cannons are not trade, Stephen. They are enterprise.

STEPHEN. I have no intention of becoming a man of business in any sense. I have no capacity for business and no taste for it. I intend to devote myself to politics.

UNDERSHAFT [rising] My dear boy: this is an immense relief to me. And I trust it may prove an equally good thing for the country. I was afraid you would consider yourself disparaged and slighted. [He moves towards Stephen as if to shake hands with him].

LADY BRITOMART [rising and interposing] Stephen: I cannot allow you to throw away an enormous property like this.

STEPHEN [stiffly] Mother: there must be an end of treating me as a child, if you please. [Lady Britomart recoils, deeply wounded by his tone]. Until last night I did not take your attitude seriously, because I did not think you meant it seriously. But I find now that you left me in the dark as to matters which you should have explained to me years ago. I am extremely hurt and offended. Any further discussion of my intentions had better take place with my father, as between one man and another.

LADY BRITOMART. Stephen! [She sits down again; and her eyes fill with tears].

UNDERSHAFT [with grave compassion] You see, my dear, it is only the big men who can be treated as children.

STEPHEN. I am sorry, mother, that you have forced me —

UNDERSHAFT [stopping him] Yes, yes, yes, yes: that’s all right, Stephen. She won’t interfere with you any more: your independence is achieved: you have won your latchkey. Don’t rub it in; and above all, don’t apologize. [He resumes his seat]. Now what about your future, as between one man and another — I beg your pardon, Biddy: as between two men and a woman.

LADY BRITOMART [who has pulled herself together strongly] I quite understand, Stephen. By all means go your own way if you feel strong enough. [Stephen sits down magisterially in the chair at the writing table with an air of affirming his majority].

UNDERSHAFT. It is settled that you do not ask for the succession to the cannon business.

STEPHEN. I hope it is settled that I repudiate the cannon business.

UNDERSHAFT. Come, come! Don’t be so devilishly sulky: it’s boyish. Freedom should be generous. Besides, I owe you a fair start in life in exchange for disinheriting you. You can’t become prime minister all at once. Haven’t you a turn for something? What about literature, art and so forth?

STEPHEN. I have nothing of the artist about me, either in faculty or character, thank Heaven!

UNDERSHAFT. A philosopher, perhaps? Eh?

STEPHEN. I make no such ridiculous pretension.

UNDERSHAFT. Just so. Well, there is the army, the navy, the Church, the Bar. The Bar requires some ability. What about the Bar?

STEPHEN. I have not studied law. And I am afraid I have not the necessary push — I believe that is the name barristers give to their vulgarity — for success in pleading.

UNDERSHAFT. Rather a difficult case, Stephen. Hardly anything left but the stage, is there? [Stephen makes an impatient movement]. Well, come! is there anything you know or care for?

STEPHEN [rising and looking at him steadily] I know the difference between right and wrong.

UNDERSHAFT [hugely tickled] You don’t say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you’re a genius, master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!

STEPHEN [keeping his temper with difficulty] You are pleased to be facetious. I pretend to nothing more than any honorable English gentleman claims as his birthright [he sits down angrily].

UNDERSHAFT. Oh, that’s everybody’s birthright. Look at poor little Jenny Hill, the Salvation lassie! she would think you were laughing at her if you asked her to stand up in the street and teach grammar or geography or mathematics or even drawingroom dancing; but it never occurs to her to doubt that she can teach morals and religion. You are all alike, you respectable people. You can’t tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter; but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren’t handle high explosives; but you’re all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! what a world!

LADY BRITOMART [uneasily] What do you think he had better do, Andrew?

UNDERSHAFT. Oh, just what he wants to do. He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. Get him a private secretaryship to someone who can get him an Under Secretaryship; and then leave him alone. He will find his natural and proper place in the end on the Treasury bench.

STEPHEN [springing up again] I am sorry, sir, that you force me to forget the respect due to you as my father. I am an Englishman; and I will not hear the Government of my country insulted. [He thrusts his hands in his pockets, and walks angrily across to the window].

UNDERSHAFT [with a touch of brutality] The government of your country! I am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays US. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. I am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune.

STEPHEN [actually smiling, and putting his hand on his father’s shoulder with indulgent patronage] Really, my dear father, it is impossible to be angry with you. You don’t know how absurd all this sounds to ME. You are very properly proud of having been industrious enough to make money; and it is greatly to your credit that you have made so much of it. But it has kept you in circles where you are valued for your money and deferred to for it, instead of in the doubtless very oldfashioned and behind-the-times public school and university where I formed my habits of mind. It is natural for you to think that money governs England; but you must allow me to think I know better.

UNDERSHAFT. And what does govern England, pray?

STEPHEN. Character, father, character.

UNDERSHAFT. Whose character? Yours or mine?

STEPHEN. Neither yours nor mine, father, but the best elements in the English national character.

UNDERSHAFT. Stephen: I’ve found your profession for you. You’re a born journalist. I’ll start you with a hightoned weekly review. There!

Stephen goes to the smaller writing table and busies himself with his letters.

Sarah, Barbara, Lomax, and Cusins come in ready for walking. Barbara crosses the room to the window and looks out. Cusins drifts amiably to the armchair, and Lomax remains near the door, whilst Sarah comes to her mother.

SARAH. Go and get ready, mamma: the carriage is waiting. [Lady Britomart leaves the room.]

UNDERSHAFT [to Sarah] Good day, my dear. Good afternoon, Mr. Lomax.

LOMAX [vaguely] Ahdedoo.

UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] quite well after last night, Euripides, eh?

CUSINS. As well as can be expected.

UNDERSHAFT. That’s right. [To Barbara] So you are coming to see my death and devastation factory, Barbara?

BARBARA [at the window] You came yesterday to see my salvation factory. I promised you a return visit.

LOMAX [coming forward between Sarah and Undershaft] You’ll find it awfully interesting. I’ve been through the Woolwich Arsenal; and it gives you a ripping feeling of security, you know, to think of the lot of beggars we could kill if it came to fighting. [To Undershaft, with sudden solemnity] Still, it must be rather an awful reflection for you, from the religious point of view as it were. You’re getting on, you know, and all that.

SARAH. You don’t mind Cholly’s imbecility, papa, do you?

LOMAX [much taken aback] Oh I say!

UNDERSHAFT. Mr Lomax looks at the matter in a very proper spirit, my dear.

LOMAX. Just so. That’s all I meant, I assure you.

SARAH. Are you coming, Stephen?

STEPHEN. Well, I am rather busy — er — [Magnanimously] Oh well, yes: I’ll come. That is, if there is room for me.

UNDERSHAFT. I can take two with me in a little motor I am experimenting with for field use. You won’t mind its being rather unfashionable. It’s not painted yet; but it’s bullet proof.

LOMAX [appalled at the prospect of confronting Wilton Crescent in an unpainted motor] Oh I say!

SARAH. The carriage for me, thank you. Barbara doesn’t mind what she’s seen in.

LOMAX. I say, Dolly old chap: do you really mind the car being a guy? Because of course if you do I’ll go in it. Still —

CUSINS. I prefer it.

LOMAX. Thanks awfully, old man. Come, Sarah. [He hurries out to secure his seat in the carriage. Sarah follows him].

CUSINS. [moodily walking across to Lady Britomart’s writing table] Why are we two coming to this Works Department of Hell? that is what I ask myself.

BARBARA. I have always thought of it as a sort of pit where lost creatures with blackened faces stirred up smoky fires and were driven and tormented by my father? Is it like that, dad?

UNDERSHAFT [scandalized] My dear! It is a spotlessly clean and beautiful hillside town.

CUSINS. With a Methodist chapel? Oh do say there’s a Methodist chapel.

UNDERSHAFT. There are two: a primitive one and a sophisticated one. There is even an Ethical Society; but it is not much patronized, as my men are all strongly religious. In the High Explosives Sheds they object to the presence of Agnostics as unsafe.

CUSINS. And yet they don’t object to you!

BARBARA. Do they obey all your orders?

UNDERSHAFT. I never give them any orders. When I speak to one of them it is “Well, Jones, is the baby doing well? and has Mrs Jones made a good recovery?” “Nicely, thank you, sir.” And that’s all.

CUSINS. But Jones has to be kept in order. How do you maintain discipline among your men?

UNDERSHAFT. I don’t. They do. You see, the one thing Jones won’t stand is any rebellion from the man under him, or any assertion of social equality between the wife of the man with 4 shillings a week less than himself and Mrs Jones! Of course they all rebel against me, theoretically. Practically, every man of them keeps the man just below him in his place. I never meddle with them. I never bully them. I don’t even bully Lazarus. I say that certain things are to be done; but I don’t order anybody to do them. I don’t say, mind you, that there is no ordering about and snubbing and even bullying. The men snub the boys and order them about; the carmen snub the sweepers; the artisans snub the unskilled laborers; the foremen drive and bully both the laborers and artisans; the assistant engineers find fault with the foremen; the chief engineers drop on the assistants; the departmental managers worry the chiefs; and the clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and keep up the social tone by refusing to associate on equal terms with anybody. The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me.

CUSINS [revolted] You really are a — well, what I was saying yesterday.

BARBARA. What was he saying yesterday?

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind, my dear. He thinks I have made you unhappy. Have I?

BARBARA. Do you think I can be happy in this vulgar silly dress? I! who have worn the uniform. Do you understand what you have done to me? Yesterday I had a man’s soul in my hand. I set him in the way of life with his face to salvation. But when we took your money he turned back to drunkenness and derision. [With intense conviction] I will never forgive you that. If I had a child, and you destroyed its body with your explosives — if you murdered Dolly with your horrible guns — I could forgive you if my forgiveness would open the gates of heaven to you. But to take a human soul from me, and turn it into the soul of a wolf! that is worse than any murder.

UNDERSHAFT. Does my daughter despair so easily? Can you strike a man to the heart and leave no mark on him?

BARBARA [her face lighting up] Oh, you are right: he can never be lost now: where was my faith?

CUSINS. Oh, clever clever devil!

BARBARA. You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes. [She takes her father’s hands and kisses them]. You have given me back my happiness: I feel it deep down now, though my spirit is troubled.

UNDERSHAFT. You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

BARBARA. Well, take me to the factory of death, and let me learn something more. There must be some truth or other behind all this frightful irony. Come, Dolly. [She goes out].

CUSINS. My guardian angel! [To Undershaft] Avaunt! [He follows Barbara].

STEPHEN [quietly, at the writing table] You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric.

UNDERSHAFT. Ah, quite so. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. [He goes out].

Stephen smiles patronizingly; buttons his coat responsibly; and crosses the room to the door. Lady Britomart, dressed for out-of-doors, opens it before he reaches it. She looks round far the others; looks at Stephen; and turns to go without a word.

STEPHEN [embarrassed] Mother —

LADY BRITOMART. Don’t be apologetic, Stephen. And don’t forget that you have outgrown your mother. [She goes out].

Perivale St Andrews lies between two Middlesex hills, half climbing the northern one. It is an almost smokeless town of white walls, roofs of narrow green slates or red tiles, tall trees, domes, campaniles, and slender chimney shafts, beautifully situated and beautiful in itself. The best view of it is obtained from the crest of a slope about half a mile to the east, where the high explosives are dealt with. The foundry lies hidden in the depths between, the tops of its chimneys sprouting like huge skittles into the middle distance. Across the crest runs a platform of concrete, with a parapet which suggests a fortification, because there is a huge cannon of the obsolete Woolwich Infant pattern peering across it at the town. The cannon is mounted on an experimental gun carriage: possibly the original model of the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun alluded to by Stephen. The parapet has a high step inside which serves as a seat.

Barbara is leaning over the parapet, looking towards the town. On her right is the cannon; on her left the end of a shed raised on piles, with a ladder of three or four steps up to the door, which opens outwards and has a little wooden landing at the threshold, with a fire bucket in the corner of the landing. The parapet stops short of the shed, leaving a gap which is the beginning of the path down the hill through the foundry to the town. Behind the cannon is a trolley carrying a huge conical bombshell, with a red band painted on it. Further from the parapet, on the same side, is a deck chair, near the door of an office, which, like the sheds, is of the lightest possible construction.

Cusins arrives by the path from the town.

BARBARA. Well?

CUSINS. Not a ray of hope. Everything perfect, wonderful, real. It only needs a cathedral to be a heavenly city instead of a hellish one.

BARBARA. Have you found out whether they have done anything for old Peter Shirley.

CUSINS. They have found him a job as gatekeeper and timekeeper. He’s frightfully miserable. He calls the timekeeping brainwork, and says he isn’t used to it; and his gate lodge is so splendid that he’s ashamed to use the rooms, and skulks in the scullery.

BARBARA. Poor Peter!

Stephen arrives from the town. He carries a fieldglass.

STEPHEN [enthusiastically] Have you two seen the place? Why did you leave us?

CUSINS. I wanted to see everything I was not intended to see; and Barbara wanted to make the men talk.

STEPHEN. Have you found anything discreditable?

CUSINS. No. They call him Dandy Andy and are proud of his being a cunning old rascal; but it’s all horribly, frightfully, immorally, unanswerably perfect.

Sarah arrives.

SARAH. Heavens! what a place! [She crosses to the trolley]. Did you see the nursing home!? [She sits down on the shell].

STEPHEN. Did you see the libraries and schools!?

SARAH. Did you see the ballroom and the banqueting chamber in the Town Hall!?

STEPHEN. Have you gone into the insurance fund, the pension fund, the building society, the various applications of co-operation!?

Undershaft comes from the office, with a sheaf of telegrams in his hands.

UNDERSHAFT. Well, have you seen everything? I’m sorry I was called away. [Indicating the telegrams] News from Manchuria.

STEPHEN. Good news, I hope.

UNDERSHAFT. Very.

STEPHEN. Another Japanese victory?

UNDERSHAFT. Oh, I don’t know. Which side wins does not concern us here. No: the good news is that the aerial battleship is a tremendous success. At the first trial it has wiped out a fort with three hundred soldiers in it.

CUSINS [from the platform] Dummy soldiers?

UNDERSHAFT. No: the real thing. [Cusins and Barbara exchange glances. Then Cusins sits on the step and buries his face in his hands. Barbara gravely lays her hand on his shoulder, and he looks up at her in a sort of whimsical desperation]. Well, Stephen, what do you think of the place?

STEPHEN. Oh, magnificent. A perfect triumph of organization. Frankly, my dear father, I have been a fool: I had no idea of what it all meant — of the wonderful forethought, the power of organization, the administrative capacity, the financial genius, the colossal capital it represents. I have been repeating to myself as I came through your streets “Peace hath her victories no less renowned than War.” I have only one misgiving about it all.

UNDERSHAFT. Out with it.

STEPHEN. Well, I cannot help thinking that all this provision for every want of your workmen may sap their independence and weaken their sense of responsibility. And greatly as we enjoyed our tea at that splendid restaurant — how they gave us all that luxury and cake and jam and cream for threepence I really cannot imagine! — still you must remember that restaurants break up home life. Look at the continent, for instance! Are you sure so much pampering is really good for the men’s characters?

UNDERSHAFT. Well you see, my dear boy, when you are organizing civilization you have to make up your mind whether trouble and anxiety are good things or not. If you decide that they are, then, I take it, you simply don’t organize civilization; and there you are, with trouble and anxiety enough to make us all angels! But if you decide the other way, you may as well go through with it. However, Stephen, our characters are safe here. A sufficient dose of anxiety is always provided by the fact that we may be blown to smithereens at any moment.

SARAH. By the way, papa, where do you make the explosives?

UNDERSHAFT. In separate little sheds, like that one. When one of them blows up, it costs very little; and only the people quite close to it are killed.

Stephen, who is quite close to it, looks at it rather scaredly, and moves away quickly to the cannon. At the same moment the door of the shed is thrown abruptly open; and a foreman in overalls and list slippers comes out on the little landing and holds the door open for Lomax, who appears in the doorway.

LOMAX [with studied coolness] My good fellow: you needn’t get into a state of nerves. Nothing’s going to happen to you; and I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the world if anything did. A little bit of British pluck is what you want, old chap. [He descends and strolls across to Sarah].

UNDERSHAFT [to the foreman] Anything wrong, Bilton?

BILTON [with ironic calm] Gentleman walked into the high explosives shed and lit a cigaret, sir: that’s all.

UNDERSHAFT. Ah, quite so. [To Lomax] Do you happen to remember what you did with the match?

LOMAX. Oh come! I’m not a fool. I took jolly good care to blow it out before I chucked it away.

BILTON. The top of it was red hot inside, sir.

LOMAX. Well, suppose it was! I didn’t chuck it into any of your messes.

UNDERSHAFT. Think no more of it, Mr Lomax. By the way, would you mind lending me your matches?

LOMAX [offering his box] Certainly.

UNDERSHAFT. Thanks. [He pockets the matches].

LOMAX [lecturing to the company generally] You know, these high explosives don’t go off like gunpowder, except when they’re in a gun. When they’re spread loose, you can put a match to them without the least risk: they just burn quietly like a bit of paper. [Warming to the scientific interest of the subject] Did you know that Undershaft? Have you ever tried?

UNDERSHAFT. Not on a large scale, Mr Lomax. Bilton will give you a sample of gun cotton when you are leaving if you ask him. You can experiment with it at home. [Bilton looks puzzled].

SARAH. Bilton will do nothing of the sort, papa. I suppose it’s your business to blow up the Russians and Japs; but you might really stop short of blowing up poor Cholly. [Bilton gives it up and retires into the shed].

LOMAX. My ownest, there is no danger. [He sits beside her on the shell].

Lady Britomart arrives from the town with a bouquet.

LADY BRITOMART [coming impetuously between Undershaft and the deck chair] Andrew: you shouldn’t have let me see this place.

UNDERSHAFT. Why, my dear?

LADY BRITOMART. Never mind why: you shouldn’t have: that’s all. To think of all that [indicating the town] being yours! and that you have kept it to yourself all these years!

UNDERSHAFT. It does not belong to me. I belong to it. It is the Undershaft inheritance.

LADY BRITOMART. It is not. Your ridiculous cannons and that noisy banging foundry may be the Undershaft inheritance; but all that plate and linen, all that furniture and those houses and orchards and gardens belong to us. They belong to me: they are not a man’s business. I won’t give them up. You must be out of your senses to throw them all away; and if you persist in such folly, I will call in a doctor.

UNDERSHAFT [stooping to smell the bouquet] Where did you get the flowers, my dear?

LADY BRITOMART. Your men presented them to me in your William Morris Labor Church.

CUSINS [springing up] Oh! It needed only that. A Labor Church!

LADY BRITOMART. Yes, with Morris’s words in mosaic letters ten feet high round the dome. NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH TO BE ANOTHER MAN’S MASTER. The cynicism of it!

UNDERSHAFT. It shocked the men at first, I am afraid. But now they take no more notice of it than of the ten commandments in church.

LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: you are trying to put me off the subject of the inheritance by profane jokes. Well, you shan’t. I don’t ask it any longer for Stephen: he has inherited far too much of your perversity to be fit for it. But Barbara has rights as well as Stephen. Why should not Adolphus succeed to the inheritance? I could manage the town for him; and he can look after the cannons, if they are really necessary.

UNDERSHAFT. I should ask nothing better if Adolphus were a foundling. He is exactly the sort of new blood that is wanted in English business. But he’s not a foundling; and there’s an end of it.

CUSINS [diplomatically] Not quite. [They all turn and stare at him. He comes from the platform past the shed to Undershaft]. I think — Mind! I am not committing myself in any way as to my future course — but I think the foundling difficulty can be got over.

UNDERSHAFT. What do you mean?

CUSINS. Well, I have something to say which is in the nature of a confession.

SARAH. { LADY BRITOMART. { Confession! BARBARA. { STEPHEN. {

LOMAX. Oh I say!

CUSINS. Yes, a confession. Listen, all. Until I met Barbara I thought myself in the main an honorable, truthful man, because I wanted the approval of my conscience more than I wanted anything else. But the moment I saw Barbara, I wanted her far more than the approval of my conscience.

LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus!

CUSINS. It is true. You accused me yourself, Lady Brit, of joining the Army to worship Barbara; and so I did. She bought my soul like a flower at a street corner; but she bought it for herself.

UNDERSHAFT. What! Not for Dionysos or another?

CUSINS. Dionysos and all the others are in herself. I adored what was divine in her, and was therefore a true worshipper. But I was romantic about her too. I thought she was a woman of the people, and that a marriage with a professor of Greek would be far beyond the wildest social ambitions of her rank.

LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus!!

LOMAX. Oh I say!!!

CUSINS. When I learnt the horrible truth —

LADY BRITOMART. What do you mean by the horrible truth, pray?

CUSINS. That she was enormously rich; that her grandfather was an earl; that her father was the Prince of Darkness —

UNDERSHAFT. Chut!

CUSINS. — and that I was only an adventurer trying to catch a rich wife, then I stooped to deceive about my birth.

LADY BRITOMART. Your birth! Now Adolphus, don’t dare to make up a wicked story for the sake of these wretched cannons. Remember: I have seen photographs of your parents; and the Agent General for South Western Australia knows them personally and has assured me that they are most respectable married people.

CUSINS. So they are in Australia; but here they are outcasts. Their marriage is legal in Australia, but not in England. My mother is my father’s deceased wife’s sister; and in this island I am consequently a foundling. [Sensation]. Is the subterfuge good enough, Machiavelli?

UNDERSHAFT [thoughtfully] Biddy: this may be a way out of the difficulty.

LADY BRITOMART. Stuff! A man can’t make cannons any the better for being his own cousin instead of his proper self [she sits down in the deck chair with a bounce that expresses her downright contempt for their casuistry.]

UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] You are an educated man. That is against the tradition.

CUSINS. Once in ten thousand times it happens that the schoolboy is a born master of what they try to teach him. Greek has not destroyed my mind: it has nourished it. Besides, I did not learn it at an English public school.

UNDERSHAFT. Hm! Well, I cannot afford to be too particular: you have cornered the foundling market. Let it pass. You are eligible, Euripides: you are eligible.

BARBARA [coming from the platform and interposing between Cusins and Undershaft] Dolly: yesterday morning, when Stephen told us all about the tradition, you became very silent; and you have been strange and excited ever since. Were you thinking of your birth then?

CUSINS. When the finger of Destiny suddenly points at a man in the middle of his breakfast, it makes him thoughtful. [Barbara turns away sadly and stands near her mother, listening perturbedly].

UNDERSHAFT. Aha! You have had your eye on the business, my young friend, have you?

CUSINS. Take care! There is an abyss of moral horror between me and your accursed aerial battleships.

UNDERSHAFT. Never mind the abyss for the present. Let us settle the practical details and leave your final decision open. You know that you will have to change your name. Do you object to that?

CUSINS. Would any man named Adolphus — any man called Dolly! — object to be called something else?

UNDERSHAFT. Good. Now, as to money! I propose to treat you handsomely from the beginning. You shall start at a thousand a year.

CUSINS. [with sudden heat, his spectacles twinkling with mischief] A thousand! You dare offer a miserable thousand to the son-in-law of a millionaire! No, by Heavens, Machiavelli! you shall not cheat me. You cannot do without me; and I can do without you. I must have two thousand five hundred a year for two years. At the end of that time, if I am a failure, I go. But if I am a success, and stay on, you must give me the other five thousand.

UNDERSHAFT. What other five thousand?

CUSINS. To make the two years up to five thousand a year. The two thousand five hundred is only half pay in case I should turn out a failure. The third year I must have ten per cent on the profits.

UNDERSHAFT [taken aback] Ten per cent! Why, man, do you know what my profits are?

CUSINS. Enormous, I hope: otherwise I shall require twenty-five per cent.

UNDERSHAFT. But, Mr Cusins, this is a serious matter of business. You are not bringing any capital into the concern.

CUSINS. What! no capital! Is my mastery of Greek no capital? Is my access to the subtlest thought, the loftiest poetry yet attained by humanity, no capital? my character! my intellect! my life! my career! what Barbara calls my soul! are these no capital? Say another word; and I double my salary.

UNDERSHAFT. Be reasonable —

CUSINS [peremptorily] Mr Undershaft: you have my terms. Take them or leave them.

UNDERSHAFT [recovering himself] Very well. I note your terms; and I offer you half.

CUSINS [disgusted] Half!

UNDERSHAFT [firmly] Half.

CUSINS. You call yourself a gentleman; and you offer me half!!

UNDERSHAFT. I do not call myself a gentleman; but I offer you half.

CUSINS. This to your future partner! your successor! your son-in-law!

BARBARA. You are selling your own soul, Dolly, not mine. Leave me out of the bargain, please.

UNDERSHAFT. Come! I will go a step further for Barbara’s sake. I will give you three fifths; but that is my last word.

CUSINS. Done!

LOMAX. Done in the eye. Why, I only get eight hundred, you know.

CUSINS. By the way, Mac, I am a classical scholar, not an arithmetical one. Is three fifths more than half or less?

UNDERSHAFT. More, of course.

CUSINS. I would have taken two hundred and fifty. How you can succeed in business when you are willing to pay all that money to a University don who is obviously not worth a junior clerk’s wages! — well! What will Lazarus say?

UNDERSHAFT. Lazarus is a gentle romantic Jew who cares for nothing but string quartets and stalls at fashionable theatres. He will get the credit of your rapacity in money matters, as he has hitherto had the credit of mine. You are a shark of the first order, Euripides. So much the better for the firm!

BARBARA. Is the bargain closed, Dolly? Does your soul belong to him now?

CUSINS. No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question?

LADY BRITOMART. There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.

UNDERSHAFT [determinedly] No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don’t come in here.

CUSINS. What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?

UNDERSHAFT. To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED.

CUSINS. My good Machiavelli, I shall certainly write something up on the wall; only, as I shall write it in Greek, you won’t be able to read it. But as to your Armorer’s faith, if I take my neck out of the noose of my own morality I am not going to put it into the noose of yours. I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please. So there!

UNDERSHAFT. From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again. Don’t come here lusting for power, young man.

CUSINS. If power were my aim I should not come here for it. YOU have no power.

UNDERSHAFT. None of my own, certainly.

CUSINS. I have more power than you, more will. You do not drive this place: it drives you. And what drives the place?

UNDERSHAFT [enigmatically] A will of which I am a part.

BARBARA [startled] Father! Do you know what you are saying; or are you laying a snare for my soul?

CUSINS. Don’t listen to his metaphysics, Barbara. The place is driven by the most rascally part of society, the money hunters, the pleasure hunters, the military promotion hunters; and he is their slave.

UNDERSHAFT. Not necessarily. Remember the Armorer’s Faith. I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don’t blame me. I can make cannons: I cannot make courage and conviction. Bah! You tire me, Euripides, with your morality mongering. Ask Barbara: SHE understands. [He suddenly takes Barbara’s hands, and looks powerfully into her eyes]. Tell him, my love, what power really means.

BARBARA [hypnotized] Before I joined the Salvation Army, I was in my own power; and the consequence was that I never knew what to do with myself. When I joined it, I had not time enough for all the things I had to do.

UNDERSHAFT [approvingly] Just so. And why was that, do you suppose?

BARBARA. Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power of God. [She resumes her self-possession, withdrawing her hands from his with a power equal to his own]. But you came and showed me that I was in the power of Bodger and Undershaft. Today I feel — oh! how can I put it into words? Sarah: do you remember the earthquake at Cannes, when we were little children? — how little the surprise of the first shock mattered compared to the dread and horror of waiting for the second? That is how I feel in this place today. I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word of warning it reeled and crumbled under me. I was safe with an infinite wisdom watching me, an army marching to Salvation with me; and in a moment, at a stroke of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty. That was the first shock of the earthquake: I am waiting for the second.

UNDERSHAFT. Come, come, my daughter! Don’t make too much of your little tinpot tragedy. What do we do here when we spend years of work and thought and thousands of pounds of solid cash on a new gun or an aerial battleship that turns out just a hairsbreadth wrong after all? Scrap it. Scrap it without wasting another hour or another pound on it. Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn’t fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. What’s the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year. Don’t persist in that folly. If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow.

BARBARA. Oh how gladly I would take a better one to my soul! But you offer me a worse one. [Turning on him with sudden vehemence]. Justify yourself: show me some light through the darkness of this dreadful place, with its beautifully clean workshops, and respectable workmen, and model homes.

UNDERSHAFT. Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

BARBARA. And their souls?

UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just as I saved yours.

BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul! What do you mean?

UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely — more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins.

BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins!

UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers] Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty.

CUSINS. Do you call poverty a crime?

UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative Party.

BARBARA. And will he be the better for that?

UNDERSHAFT. You know he will. Don’t be a hypocrite, Barbara. He will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That will be better than an American cloth mattress in a shelter, chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill, I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same terms. Try your hand on my men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full.

BARBARA. And leave the east end to starve?

UNDERSHAFT [his energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and brooding remembrance] I was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a fullfed free man at all costs — that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said “Thou shalt starve ere I starve”; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in.

LADY BRITOMART. Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is not the place for them.

UNDERSHAFT [punctured] My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas.

LADY BRITOMART. Your ideas are nonsense. You got oil because you were selfish and unscrupulous.

UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don’t want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven, I’ll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don’t preach at them: don’t reason with them. Kill them.

BARBARA. Killing. Is that your remedy for everything?

UNDERSHAFT. It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street; and three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a certain house in Westminster; and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it.

CUSINS. That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote.

UNDERSHAFT Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. Is that historically true, Mr Learned Man, or is it not?

CUSINS. It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true.

UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

LADY BRITOMART. Barbara, I positively forbid you to listen to your father’s abominable wickedness. And you, Adolphus, ought to know better than to go about saying that wrong things are true. What does it matter whether they are true if they are wrong?

UNDERSHAFT. What does it matter whether they are wrong if they are true?

LADY BRITOMART [rising] Children: come home instantly. Andrew: I am exceedingly sorry I allowed you to call on us. You are wickeder than ever. Come at once.

BARBARA [shaking her head] It’s no use running away from wicked people, mamma.

LADY BRITOMART. It is every use. It shows your disapprobation of them.

BARBARA. It does not save them.

LADY BRITOMART. I can see that you are going to disobey me. Sarah: are you coming home or are you not?

SARAH. I daresay it’s very wicked of papa to make cannons; but I don’t think I shall cut him on that account.

LOMAX [pouring oil on the troubled waters] The fact is, you know, there is a certain amount of tosh about this notion of wickedness. It doesn’t work. You must look at facts. Not that I would say a word in favor of anything wrong; but then, you see, all sorts of chaps are always doing all sorts of things; and we have to fit them in somehow, don’t you know. What I mean is that you can’t go cutting everybody; and that’s about what it comes to. [Their rapt attention to his eloquence makes him nervous] Perhaps I don’t make myself clear.

LADY BRITOMART. You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and encourage him in his wickedness.

LOMAX [unruffled] Well, where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered, don’t you know. [To Undershaft] Eh? What?

UNDERSHAFT. Precisely. By the way, may I call you Charles?

LOMAX. Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket.

UNDERSHAFT [to Lady Britomart] Biddy —

LADY BRITOMART [violently] Don’t dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and my conscience is clear, at all events [she sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks the chair].

UNDERSHAFT. My dear, you are the incarnation of morality. [She snorts]. Your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names. Come, Euripides! it is getting late; and we all want to get home. Make up your mind.

CUSINS. Understand this, you old demon —

LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus!

UNDERSHAFT. Let him alone, Biddy. Proceed, Euripides.

CUSINS. You have me in a horrible dilemma. I want Barbara.

UNDERSHAFT. Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

BARBARA. Quite true, Dolly.

CUSINS. I also want to avoid being a rascal.

UNDERSHAFT [with biting contempt] You lust for personal righteousness, for self-approval, for what you call a good conscience, for what Barbara calls salvation, for what I call patronizing people who are not so lucky as yourself.

CUSINS. I do not: all the poet in me recoils from being a good man. But there are things in me that I must reckon with: pity —

UNDERSHAFT. Pity! The scavenger of misery.

CUSINS. Well, love.

UNDERSHAFT. I know. You love the needy and the outcast: you love the oppressed races, the negro, the Indian ryot, the Pole, the Irishman. Do you love the Japanese? Do you love the Germans? Do you love the English?

CUSINS. No. Every true Englishman detests the English. We are the wickedest nation on earth; and our success is a moral horror.

UNDERSHAFT. That is what comes of your gospel of love, is it?

CUSINS. May I not love even my father-in-law?

UNDERSHAFT. Who wants your love, man? By what right do you take the liberty of offering it to me? I will have your due heed and respect, or I will kill you. But your love! Damn your impertinence!

CUSINS [grinning] I may not be able to control my affections, Mac.

UNDERSHAFT. You are fencing, Euripides. You are weakening: your grip is slipping. Come! try your last weapon. Pity and love have broken in your hand: forgiveness is still left.

CUSINS. No: forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. I am with you there: we must pay our debts.

UNDERSHAFT. Well said. Come! you will suit me. Remember the words of Plato.

CUSINS [starting] Plato! You dare quote Plato to me!

UNDERSHAFT. Plato says, my friend, that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.

CUSINS. Oh, tempter, cunning tempter!

UNDERSHAFT. Come! choose, man, choose.

CUSINS. But perhaps Barbara will not marry me if I make the wrong choice.

BARBARA. Perhaps not.

CUSINS [desperately perplexed] You hear —

BARBARA. Father: do you love nobody?

UNDERSHAFT. I love my best friend.

LADY BRITOMART. And who is that, pray?

UNDERSHAFT. My bravest enemy. That is the man who keeps me up to the mark.

CUSINS. You know, the creature is really a sort of poet in his way. Suppose he is a great man, after all!

UNDERSHAFT. Suppose you stop talking and make up your mind, my young friend.

CUSINS. But you are driving me against my nature. I hate war.

UNDERSHAFT. Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war? Here are the means: my friend Mr Lomax is sitting on them.

LOMAX [springing up] Oh I say! You don’t mean that this thing is loaded, do you? My ownest: come off it.

SARAH [sitting placidly on the shell] If I am to be blown up, the more thoroughly it is done the better. Don’t fuss, Cholly.

LOMAX [to Undershaft, strongly remonstrant] Your own daughter, you know.

UNDERSHAFT. So I see. [To Cusins] Well, my friend, may we expect you here at six tomorrow morning?

CUSINS [firmly] Not on any account. I will see the whole establishment blown up with its own dynamite before I will get up at five. My hours are healthy, rational hours eleven to five.

UNDERSHAFT. Come when you please: before a week you will come at six and stay until I turn you out for the sake of your health. [Calling] Bilton! [He turns to Lady Britomart, who rises]. My dear: let us leave these two young people to themselves for a moment. [Bilton comes from the shed]. I am going to take you through the gun cotton shed.

BILTON [barring the way] You can’t take anything explosive in here, Sir.

LADY BRITOMART. What do you mean? Are you alluding to me?

BILTON [unmoved] No, ma’am. Mr Undershaft has the other gentleman’s matches in his pocket.

LADY BRITOMART [abruptly] Oh! I beg your pardon. [She goes into the shed].

UNDERSHAFT. Quite right, Bilton, quite right: here you are. [He gives Bilton the box of matches]. Come, Stephen. Come, Charles. Bring Sarah. [He passes into the shed].

Bilton opens the box and deliberately drops the matches into the fire-bucket.

LOMAX. Oh I say! [Bilton stolidly hands him the empty box]. Infernal nonsense! Pure scientific ignorance! [He goes in].

SARAH. Am I all right, Bilton?

BILTON. You’ll have to put on list slippers, miss: that’s all. We’ve got em inside. [She goes in].

STEPHEN [very seriously to Cusins] Dolly, old fellow, think. Think before you decide. Do you feel that you are a sufficiently practical man? It is a huge undertaking, an enormous responsibility. All this mass of business will be Greek to you.

CUSINS. Oh, I think it will be much less difficult than Greek.

STEPHEN. Well, I just want to say this before I leave you to yourselves. Don’t let anything I have said about right and wrong prejudice you against this great chance in life. I have satisfied myself that the business is one of the highest character and a credit to our country. [Emotionally] I am very proud of my father. I — [Unable to proceed, he presses Cusins’ hand and goes hastily into the shed, followed by Bilton].

Barbara and Cusins, left alone together, look at one another silently.

CUSINS. Barbara: I am going to accept this offer.

BARBARA. I thought you would.

CUSINS. You understand, don’t you, that I had to decide without consulting you. If I had thrown the burden of the choice on you, you would sooner or later have despised me for it.

BARBARA. Yes: I did not want you to sell your soul for me any more than for this inheritance.

CUSINS. It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. I have sold it to escape being imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes for hangmen’s ropes and unjust wars and things that I abhor. What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles? What I am now selling it for is neither money nor position nor comfort, but for reality and for power.

BARBARA. You know that you will have no power, and that he has none.

CUSINS. I know. It is not for myself alone. I want to make power for the world.

BARBARA. I want to make power for the world too; but it must be spiritual power.

CUSINS. I think all power is spiritual: these cannons will not go off by themselves. I have tried to make spiritual power by teaching Greek. But the world can never be really touched by a dead language and a dead civilization. The people must have power; and the people cannot have Greek. Now the power that is made here can be wielded by all men.

BARBARA. Power to burn women’s houses down and kill their sons and tear their husbands to pieces.

CUSINS. You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. This power which only tears men’s bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men’s souls. As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.

BARBARA. Is there no higher power than that [pointing to the shell]?

CUSINS. Yes: but that power can destroy the higher powers just as a tiger can destroy a man: therefore man must master that power first. I admitted this when the Turks and Greeks were last at war. My best pupil went out to fight for Hellas. My parting gift to him was not a copy of Plato’s Republic, but a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges. The blood of every Turk he shot — if he shot any — is on my head as well as on Undershaft’s. That act committed me to this place for ever. Your father’s challenge has beaten me. Dare I make war on war? I dare. I must. I will. And now, is it all over between us?

BARBARA [touched by his evident dread of her answer] Silly baby Dolly! How could it be?

CUSINS [overjoyed] Then you — you — you — Oh for my drum! [He flourishes imaginary drumsticks].

BARBARA [angered by his levity] Take care, Dolly, take care. Oh, if only I could get away from you and from father and from it all! if I could have the wings of a dove and fly away to heaven!

CUSINS. And leave me!

BARBARA. Yes, you, and all the other naughty mischievous children of men. But I can’t. I was happy in the Salvation Army for a moment. I escaped from the world into a paradise of enthusiasm and prayer and soul saving; but the moment our money ran short, it all came back to Bodger: it was he who saved our people: he, and the Prince of Darkness, my papa. Undershaft and Bodger: their hands stretch everywhere: when we feed a starving fellow creature, it is with their bread, because there is no other bread; when we tend the sick, it is in the hospitals they endow; if we turn from the churches they build, we must kneel on the stones of the streets they pave. As long as that lasts, there is no getting away from them. Turning our backs on Bodger and Undershaft is turning our backs on life.

CUSINS. I thought you were determined to turn your back on the wicked side of life.

BARBARA. There is no wicked side: life is all one. And I never wanted to shirk my share in whatever evil must be endured, whether it be sin or suffering. I wish I could cure you of middle-class ideas, Dolly.

CUSINS [gasping] Middle cl — ! A snub! A social snub to ME! from the daughter of a foundling!

BARBARA. That is why I have no class, Dolly: I come straight out of the heart of the whole people. If I were middle-class I should turn my back on my father’s business; and we should both live in an artistic drawingroom, with you reading the reviews in one corner, and I in the other at the piano, playing Schumann: both very superior persons, and neither of us a bit of use. Sooner than that, I would sweep out the guncotton shed, or be one of Bodger’s barmaids. Do you know what would have happened if you had refused papa’s offer?

CUSINS. I wonder!

BARBARA. I should have given you up and married the man who accepted it. After all, my dear old mother has more sense than any of you. I felt like her when I saw this place — felt that I must have it — that never, never, never could I let it go; only she thought it was the houses and the kitchen ranges and the linen and china, when it was really all the human souls to be saved: not weak souls in starved bodies, crying with gratitude or a scrap of bread and treacle, but fullfed, quarrelsome, snobbish, uppish creatures, all standing on their little rights and dignities, and thinking that my father ought to be greatly obliged to them for making so much money for him — and so he ought. That is where salvation is really wanted. My father shall never throw it in my teeth again that my converts were bribed with bread. [She is transfigured]. I have got rid of the bribe of bread. I have got rid of the bribe of heaven. Let God’s work be done for its own sake: the work he had to create us to do because it cannot be done by living men and women. When I die, let him be in my debt, not I in his; and let me forgive him as becomes a woman of my rank.

CUSINS. Then the way of life lies through the factory of death?

BARBARA. Yes, through the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God, through the unveiling of an eternal light in the Valley of The Shadow. [Seizing him with both hands] Oh, did you think my courage would never come back? did you believe that I was a deserter? that I, who have stood in the streets, and taken my people to my heart, and talked of the holiest and greatest things with them, could ever turn back and chatter foolishly to fashionable people about nothing in a drawingroom? Never, never, never, never: Major Barbara will die with the colors. Oh! and I have my dear little Dolly boy still; and he has found me my place and my work. Glory Hallelujah! [She kisses him].

CUSINS. My dearest: consider my delicate health. I cannot stand as much happiness as you can.

BARBARA. Yes: it is not easy work being in love with me, is it? But it’s good for you. [She runs to the shed, and calls, childlike] Mamma! Mamma! [Bilton comes out of the shed, followed by Undershaft]. I want Mamma.

UNDERSHAFT. She is taking off her list slippers, dear. [He passes on to Cusins]. Well? What does she say?

CUSINS. She has gone right up into the skies.

LADY BRITOMART [coming from the shed and stopping on the steps, obstructing Sarah, who follows with Lomax. Barbara clutches like a baby at her mother’s skirt]. Barbara: when will you learn to be independent and to act and think for yourself? I know as well as possible what that cry of “Mamma, Mamma,” means. Always running to me!

SARAH [touching Lady Britomart’s ribs with her finger tips and imitating a bicycle horn] Pip! Pip!

LADY BRITOMART [highly indignant] How dare you say Pip! pip! to me, Sarah? You are both very naughty children. What do you want, Barbara?

BARBARA. I want a house in the village to live in with Dolly. [Dragging at the skirt] Come and tell me which one to take.

UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] Six o’clock tomorrow morning, my young friend.

PASSION, POISON, AND PETRIFACTION

OR, THE FATAL GAZOGENE

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

THE LADY. How much did the clock strike, Phyllis?

PHYLLIS. Sixteen, my lady.

THE LADY. That means eleven o’clock, does it not?

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

THE LADY. I will not, Phyllis. Phyllis: I am weary. I will go to bed. Prepare my couch.

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

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

THE LADY. Thank you, Phyllis. [She rises and approaches the bed.] Goodnight.

PHYLLIS. Will your ladyship not undress?

THE LADY. Not tonight, Phyllis. [Glancing through where the fourth wall is missing] Not under the circumstances.

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

THE LADY. Strange! As I sat there methought I heard angels singing. “Oh, wont you come home. Bill Bailey?” Why should angels call me Bill Bailey? My name is Magnesia Fitztollemache.

PHYLLIS [emphasizing the title] Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache.

LADY MAGNESIA. In case we should never again meet in this world, let us take a last farewell.

PHYLLIS [embracing her with tears] My poor murdered angel mistress!

LADY MAGNESIA. In case we should meet again, call me at half-past eleven.

PHYLLIS. I will, I will.

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

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

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

FITZ [affecting unconcern, hut unhinged] It is a present for you: a present from mother. Pretty. Isnt it? [he displays it fatuously].

LADY MAGNESIA. But she promised me a fish slice.

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

LADY MAGNESIA. My sweet mother-in-law! [Someone knocks at the door.] That is Adolphus’s knock. [Fitz’s face turns a dazzling green.] What has happened to your complexion? You have turned green. Now I think of it, you always do when Adolphus is mentioned. Arnt you going to let him in?

FITZ. Certainly not. [He goes to the door.] Adolphus: you cannot enter. My wife is undressed and in bed.

LADY MAGNESIA. [rising] I am not Come in, Adolphus. [she switches on the electric light.]

ADOLPHUS. [without] Something most important has happened. I must come in for a moment.

FITZ. [calling to Adolphus] Something important happened? What is it?

ADOLPHUS [without] My new clothes have come home.

FITZ. He says his new clothes have come home.

LADY MAGNESIA [running to the door and opening it] Oh, come in, come in. Let me see.

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

ADOLPHUS. What do you think of it?

LADY MAGNESIA. It is a dream! a creation! [she turns him about to admire him.]

ADOLPHUS [proudly] I shall never be mistaken for a waiter again.

FITZ. A drink, Adolphus?

ADOLPHUS. Thanks.

Fitztollemache goes to the cupboard and takes out a tray with tumblers and a bottle of

whisky. He puts them an the dressing-table.

FITZ. Is the gazogene full?

LADY MAGNESIA. Yes: you put in the powders yourself today.

FITZ. [sardonically] So I did. The special powders! Hal ha! ha! ha! ha! [His face Is again strangely variegated.]

LADY MAGNESIA. Your complexion is really going to pieces. Why do you laugh in that silly way at nothing?

FITZ. Nothing! Ha, ha! Nothing! Ha, ha, ha!

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

Thunder.

FITZ. I laughed but at the irony of Fate. [He takes a gazogene from the cupboard.]

ADOLPHUS. [satisfied] Oh, that! Oh, yes, of course!

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

LADY MAGNESIA. We picnic at home now. It is delightful. [She takes three tumblers from the dressing-table and sits on the floor, presiding over the gazogene, with Fitz and Adolphus squatting on her left and right respectively. Fitz pours whisky into the tumblers.]

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

LADY MAGNESIA [proffering tumbler to Adolphus] Pledge me, Adolphus.

FITZ. Kiss the cup, Magnesia. Pledge her, man. Drink deep.

ADOLPHUS. To Magnesia!

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

ADOLPHUS. What mean you?

MAGNESIA. [rising] My mind misgives me. I have a strange feeling here. [touching her heart]

ADOLPHUS. So have I, but lower down. [touching his stomach] That gazogene is disagreeing with me.

FITZ. It was poisoned!

Sensation.

ADOLPHUS [rising] Help! Police!

FITZ. Dastard! you would appeal to the law! Can you not die like a gentleman?

ADOLPHUS. But so young! when I have only worn my new clothes once.

MAGNESIA. It is too horrible. [To Fitz] Fiend! what drove you to this wicked deed?

FITZ. Jealousy. You admired his clothes: you did not admire mine.

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

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

ADOLPHUS. [in a tone of the strongest remonstrance] Oh, I say! Oh, come! No: look here. Magnesia! Really!

MAGNESIA. Oh, is this a time for petty vanity? Think of your misspent life —

ADOLPHUS [much injured] Whose misspent life?

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

FITZ. Mine is a passionate nature. Magnesia. I must have your undivided love. I must have your love: do you hear? LOVE! LOVE!! LOVE!!! LOVE!!!! LOVE!!!!! [He raves, accompanied by a fresh paroxysm from the victim on the bed.]

MAGNESIA. [with sudden resolution] You shall have it.

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

ADOLPHUS. [in a broken voice] Farewell, Magnesia: my last hour is at hand. Farewell, farewell, farewell!

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

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

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

FITZ. I hardly follow this.

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

FITZ. Angel!

MAGNESIA. Adolphus: forgive me if this pains you.

ADOLPHUS. Dont mention it I hardly feel it The gazogene is so much worse. [Taken bad again] Oh!

MAGNESIA. Peace, poor sufferer: there is still some balm. You are about to hear what I am going to dedicate to you.

ADOLPHUS. All I ask is a peppermint lozenge, for mercy’s sake.

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

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

ADOLPHUS. I am not dying for your sake, Fitz. I am dying because you poisoned me.

MAGNESIA. You do not fear to die, Adolphus, do you?

ADOLPHUS. N-n-no, I dont exactly fear to die. Still —

FITZ. Still, if an antidote —

ADOLPHUS. [bounding from the bed] Antidote!

MAGNESIA. [with wild hope] Antidote!

FITZ. If an antidote would not be too much of an anti-climax.

ADOLPHUS. Anti-climax be blowed! Do you think I am going to die to please the critics? Out with your antidote. Quick!

FITZ. The best antidote to the poison I have given you is lime, plenty of lime.

ADOLPHUS. Lime! You mock me! Do you think I carry lime about in my pockets?

FITZ. There is the plaster ceiling.

MAGNESIA. Yes, the ceiling. Saved, saved, saved!

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

MAGNESIA. [picking up a huge slice] Take this, Adolphus: it is the largest. [she crams it into his mouth.]

FITZ. Ha! a lump off the cornice! Try this.

ADOLPHUS. [desperately] Stop! stop!

MAGNESIA. Do not stop. You will die. [She tries to stuff him again.]

ADOLPHUS [resolutely] I prefer death.

MAGNESIA and FITZ. [throwing themselves on their knees on either side of him] For our sakes, Adolphus, persevere.

ADOLPHUS. No: unless you can supply lime in liquid form, I must perish. Finish that ceiling I cannot and will not.

MAGNESIA. I have a thought — an inspiration. My bust [She snatches it from its pedestal and brings it to him.]

ADOLPHUS [gazing fondly at it] Can I resist it?

FITZ. Try the bun.

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

FITZ. [pressing the bust on him] Force yourself to take a mouthful. Down with it, Adolphus!

ADOLPHUS. Useless. It would not stay down. Water! Some fluid! Ring for something to drink [He chokes.] MAGNESIA. I will save you [She rushes to the bell and rings.]

Phyllis, in her night-gown, with her hair prettify made up into a chevaux defrise of crocuses with pink and yellow curlpapers, rushes in straight to Magnesia.

PHYLLIS. [hysterically] My beloved mistress, once more we meet [She sees Fitztollemache and screams.] Ah! ah! ah! A man! [She sees Adolphus] Men!! [She flies, but Fitztollemache seizes her by the night-gown just as she is escaping.] Unhand me, villain!

FITZ. This is no time for prudery, girl. Mr Bastable is dying.

PHYLLIS. [with concern] Indeed, sir? I hope he will not think it unfeeling of me to appear at his deathbed in curl papers.

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

PHYLLIS. [hesitating] It do seem a pity, dont it, my lady, to spoil your lovely bust?

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

FITZ. [rushing after him] Madman, you forget! It is poisoned!

ADOLPHUS. I dont care. Drink, drink! [They wrestle madly for the gazogene. In the struggle they squirt all its contents away, mostly into one another’s face. Adolphus at last flings Fitztollemache to the floor, and puts the spout into his mouth.] Empty! empty! [with a shriek of despair he collapses on the bed, clasping the gazogene like a baby, and weeping over it.]

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

MAGNESIA. I use it for washing old lace; but no matter: he shall have it [she produces a siphon from the hat-box, and offers a tumbler of soda-water to Adolphus.]

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

FITZ. Quick! the rug strap! [They pack him with blankets and strap him.] Is that tight enough?

MAGNESIA. [anxiously] Will you hold, do you think?

ADOLPHUS. The peril is past The soda-water has gone flat.

MAGNESIA and FITZ Thank heaven!

Phyllis returns with a washstand ewer, in which she has dissolved the bust.

MAGNESIA [snatching it] At last!

FITZ. You are saved. Drain it to the dregs.

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

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

MAGNESIA–
FITZ —— > [whispering together] Let him sleep.
PHYLLIS–

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

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

FITZ. Silence, or leave the room. If you wake that man he dies.

THE LANDLORD. If e kin sleep through the noise you three mikes e kin sleep through ennythink.

MAGNESIA. Detestable vulgarian: your pronunciation jars on the finest chords of my nature. Begone!

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

THE POLICEMAN. [offended] Policeman, indeed! Wheres your manners?

FITZ. Officer —

THE POLICEMAN. [with distinguished consideration] Sir?

FITZ. As between gentlemen —

THE POLICEMAN. [bowing] Sir. to you.

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

THE POLICEMAN. The ceiling was poisoned! Well, of all the artful — [he collars the landlord.] I arrest you for wilful murder.

THE LANDLORD. [appealing to the heavens] Ow, is this jesticel Ah could aw tell e wiz gowin te eat moy ceilin?

THE POLICEMAN. [releasing him] True. The case is more complicated than I thought [He tries to lift Adolphus’s arm but cannot.] Stiff already.

THE LANDLORD [trying to lift Adolphus’s leg] An’ precious evvy.[Feeling the calf] Woy, eze gorn ez awd ez niles.

FITZ [rushing to the bed] What is this?

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

THE POLICEMAN. [exhausted] Whew! Is he a man or a statue? [Magnesia utters a piercing scream.] Whats wrong, Miss?

MAGNESIA. [to Fitz] Do you not see what has happened?

FITZ. [striking his forehead] Horror on horror’s head!

THE LANDLORD. Wotjemean?

MAGNESIA The plaster has set inside him. The officer was right: he is indeed a living statue.

Magnesia flings herself on the stony breast of Adolphus. Fitztollemache buries his head in

his hands, and his chest heaves convulsively. The policeman takes a small volume from his pocket and consults it.

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

THE LANDLORD. Aushd pat im in the cestern an worsh it aht of im.

Phyllis comes back with a Doctor.

PHYLLIS. The medical man, my lady.

THE POLICEMAN. A poison case, sir.

THE DOCTOR. Do you mean to say that an unqualified person! a layman! has dared to administer poison in my district?

THE POLICEMAN. [raising Magnesia tenderly] It looks like it. Hold up, my lady.

THE DOCTOR Not a moment must be lost The patient must be kept awake at all costs. Constant and violent motion is necessary. [He snatches Magnesia from the policeman, and rushes her about the room.]

FITZ. Stop! That is not the poisoned person!

THE DOCTOR. It is you, then. Why did you not say so before?[He seizes Fitztollemache and rushes him about.]

THE LANDLORD. Naow, naow, thet ynt im.

THE DOCTOR. What, you! [He pounces on the landlord and rushes him round.]

THE LANDLORD. Eah! chack it [He trips the doctor up. Both fall.] Jest owld this leoonatic, will you. Mister Horficer?

THE POLICEMAN. [dragging both of them to their feet] Come out of it, will you. You must all come with me to me station.

Thunder.

MAGNESIA What! In this frightful storm!

The hail patters noisily on the window.

PHYLLIS. I think it’s raining.

The wind howls.

THE LANDLORD. It’s thanderin and lawtnin.

FITZ. It’s dangerous.

THE POLICEMAN [drawing his baton and whistle] If you wont come quietly, then —

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

MAGNESIA [listening at the doctor’s chest] Dead!

FITZ. [kneeling by the landlord, and raising his hand, which drops with a thud] Dead!

PHYLLIS [seizing the looking-glass and holding it to the Policeman’s lips] Dead!

FITZ [solemnly rising] The copper attracted the lightning.

MAGNESIA [rising] After life’s fitful fever they sleep well. Phyllis: sweep them up.

Phyllis replaces the looking-glass on the dressing-table, takes up the fan, and fans the policeman, who rolls away like a leaf before the wind, to the wall. She disposes similarly of the landlord and doctor.

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

MAGNESIA. They will not disturb us. Goodnight, Phyllis.

PHYLLIS. Goodnight, my lady. Goodnight, sir. [She retires.]

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

FITZ. A litte leverage will get him on his feet Give me my umbrella.

MAGNESIA. True.

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

FITZ. Thats done it! Whew!

MAGNESIA. [kneeling at the left hand of the statue] For ever and for ever, Adolphus.

FITZ.[kneeling at the right hand of the statue] The rest is silence.

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

ATTENDANTS [in front] All out for the next performance. Pass along, please, ladies and gentlemen: pass along.

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT V

PREFACE

It is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murderous absurdity. That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity. But that is precisely what we have done. And the more appalling the mutilation, the more the mutilator is paid. He who corrects the ingrowing toe-nail receives a few shillings: he who cuts your inside out receives hundreds of guineas, except when he does it to a poor person for practice.

Scandalized voices murmur that these operations are necessary. They may be. It may also be necessary to hang a man or pull down a house. But we take good care not to make the hangman and the housebreaker the judges of that. If we did, no man’s neck would be safe and no man’s house stable. But we do make the doctor the judge, and fine him anything from sixpence to several hundred guineas if he decides in our favor. I cannot knock my shins severely without forcing on some surgeon the difficult question, “Could I not make a better use of a pocketful of guineas than this man is making of his leg? Could he not write as well — or even better — on one leg than on two? And the guineas would make all the difference in the world to me just now. My wife — my pretty ones — the leg may mortify — it is always safer to operate — he will be well in a fortnight — artificial legs are now so well made that they are really better than natural ones — evolution is towards motors and leglessness, etc., etc., etc.”

Now there is no calculation that an engineer can make as to the behavior of a girder under a strain, or an astronomer as to the recurrence of a comet, more certain than the calculation that under such circumstances we shall be dismembered unnecessarily in all directions by surgeons who believe the operations to be necessary solely because they want to perform them. The process metaphorically called bleeding the rich man is performed not only metaphorically but literally every day by surgeons who are quite as honest as most of us. After all, what harm is there in it? The surgeon need not take off the rich man’s (or woman’s) leg or arm: he can remove the appendix or the uvula, and leave the patient none the worse after a fortnight or so in bed, whilst the nurse, the general practitioner, the apothecary, and the surgeon will be the better.

DOUBTFUL CHARACTER BORNE BY THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

Again I hear the voices indignantly muttering old phrases about the high character of a noble profession and the honor and conscience of its members. I must reply that the medical profession has not a high character: it has an infamous character. I do not know a single thoughtful and well-informed person who does not feel that the tragedy of illness at present is that it delivers you helplessly into the hands of a profession which you deeply mistrust, because it not only advocates and practises the most revolting cruelties in the pursuit of knowledge, and justifies them on grounds which would equally justify practising the same cruelties on yourself or your children, or burning down London to test a patent fire extinguisher, but, when it has shocked the public, tries to reassure it with lies of breath-bereaving brazenness. That is the character the medical profession has got just now. It may be deserved or it may not: there it is at all events, and the doctors who have not realized this are living in a fool’s paradise. As to the humor and conscience of doctors, they have as much as any other class of men, no more and no less. And what other men dare pretend to be impartial where they have a strong pecuniary interest on one side? Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges; but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner, would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy. To offer me a doctor as my judge, and then weight his decision with a bribe of a large sum of money and a virtual guarantee that if he makes a mistake it can never be proved against him, is to go wildly beyond the ascertained strain which human nature will bear. It is simply unscientific to allege or believe that doctors do not under existing circumstances perform unnecessary operations and manufacture and prolong lucrative illnesses. The only ones who can claim to be above suspicion are those who are so much sought after that their cured patients are immediately replaced by fresh ones. And there is this curious psychological fact to be remembered: a serious illness or a death advertizes the doctor exactly as a hanging advertizes the barrister who defended the person hanged. Suppose, for example, a royal personage gets something wrong with his throat, or has a pain in his inside. If a doctor effects some trumpery cure with a wet compress or a peppermint lozenge nobody takes the least notice of him. But if he operates on the throat and kills the patient, or extirpates an internal organ and keeps the whole nation palpitating for days whilst the patient hovers in pain and fever between life and death, his fortune is made: every rich man who omits to call him in when the same symptoms appear in his household is held not to have done his utmost duty to the patient. The wonder is that there is a king or queen left alive in Europe.

DOCTOR’S CONSCIENCES

There is another difficulty in trusting to the honor and conscience of a doctor. Doctors are just like other Englishmen: most of them have no honor and no conscience: what they commonly mistake for these is sentimentality and an intense dread of doing anything that everybody else does not do, or omitting to do anything that everybody else does. This of course does amount to a sort of working or rule-of-thumb conscience; but it means that you will do anything, good or bad, provided you get enough people to keep you in countenance by doing it also. It is the sort of conscience that makes it possible to keep order on a pirate ship, or in a troop of brigands. It may be said that in the last analysis there is no other sort of honor or conscience in existence — that the assent of the majority is the only sanction known to ethics. No doubt this holds good in political practice. If mankind knew the facts, and agreed with the doctors, then the doctors would be in the right; and any person who thought otherwise would be a lunatic. But mankind does not agree, and does not know the facts. All that can be said for medical popularity is that until there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it. Moliere saw through the doctors; but he had to call them in just the same. Napoleon had no illusions about them; but he had to die under their treatment just as much as the most credulous ignoramus that ever paid sixpence for a bottle of strong medicine. In this predicament most people, to save themselves from unbearable mistrust and misery, or from being driven by their conscience into actual conflict with the law, fall back on the old rule that if you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have. When your child is ill or your wife dying, and you happen to be very fond of them, or even when, if you are not fond of them, you are human enough to forget every personal grudge before the spectacle of a fellow creature in pain or peril, what you want is comfort, reassurance, something to clutch at, were it but a straw. This the doctor brings you. You have a wildly urgent feeling that something must be done; and the doctor does something. Sometimes what he does kills the patient; but you do not know that; and the doctor assures you that all that human skill could do has been done. And nobody has the brutality to say to the newly bereft father, mother, husband, wife, brother, or sister, “You have killed your lost darling by your credulity.”

THE PECULIAR PEOPLE

Besides, the calling in of the doctor is now compulsory except in cases where the patient is an adult — and not too ill to decide the steps to be taken. We are subject to prosecution for manslaughter or for criminal neglect if the patient dies without the consolations of the medical profession. This menace is kept before the public by the Peculiar People. The Peculiars, as they are called, have gained their name by believing that the Bible is infallible, and taking their belief quite seriously. The Bible is very clear as to the treatment of illness. The Epistle of James; chapter v., contains the following explicit directions:

14. Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord:

15. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

The Peculiars obey these instructions and dispense with doctors. They are therefore prosecuted for manslaughter when their children die.

When I was a young man, the Peculiars were usually acquitted. The prosecution broke down when the doctor in the witness box was asked whether, if the child had had medical attendance, it would have lived. It was, of course, impossible for any man of sense and honor to assume divine omniscience by answering this in the affirmative, or indeed pretending to be able to answer it at all. And on this the judge had to instruct the jury that they must acquit the prisoner. Thus a judge with a keen sense of law (a very rare phenomenon on the Bench, by the way) was spared the possibility of leaving to sentence one prisoner (under the Blasphemy laws) for questioning the authority of Scripture, and another for ignorantly and superstitiously accepting it as a guide to conduct. To-day all this is changed. The doctor never hesitates to claim divine omniscience, nor to clamor for laws to punish any scepticism on the part of laymen. A modern doctor thinks nothing of signing the death certificate of one of his own diphtheria patients, and then going into the witness box and swearing a peculiar into prison for six months by assuring the jury, on oath, that if the prisoner’s child, dead of diphtheria, had been placed under his treatment instead of that of St. James, it would not have lived. And he does so not only with impunity, but with public applause, though the logical course would be to prosecute him either for the murder of his own patient or for perjury in the case of St. James. Yet no barrister, apparently, dreams of asking for the statistics of the relative case-mortality in diphtheria among the Peculiars and among the believers in doctors, on which alone any valid opinion could be founded. The barrister is as superstitious as the doctor is infatuated; and the Peculiar goes unpitied to his cell, though nothing whatever has been proved except that his child does without the interference of a doctor as effectually as any of the hundreds of children who die every day of the same diseases in the doctor’s care.

RECOIL OF THE DOGMA OF MEDICAL INFALLIBILITY ON THE DOCTOR

On the other hand, when the doctor is in the dock, or is the defendant in an action for malpractice, he has to struggle against the inevitable result of his former pretences to infinite knowledge and unerring skill. He has taught the jury and the judge, and even his own counsel, to believe that every doctor can, with a glance at the tongue, a touch on the pulse, and a reading of the clinical thermometer, diagnose with absolute certainty a patient’s complaint, also that on dissecting a dead body he can infallibly put his finger on the cause of death, and, in cases where poisoning is suspected, the nature of the poison used. Now all this supposed exactness and infallibility is imaginary; and to treat a doctor as if his mistakes were necessarily malicious or corrupt malpractices (an inevitable deduction from the postulate that the doctor, being omniscient, cannot make mistakes) is as unjust as to blame the nearest apothecary for not being prepared to supply you with sixpenny-worth of the elixir of life, or the nearest motor garage for not having perpetual motion on sale in gallon tins. But if apothecaries and motor car makers habitually advertized elixir of life and perpetual motion, and succeeded in creating a strong general belief that they could supply it, they would find themselves in an awkward position if they were indicted for allowing a customer to die, or for burning a chauffeur by putting petrol into his car. That is the predicament the doctor finds himself in when he has to defend himself against a charge of malpractice by a plea of ignorance and fallibility. His plea is received with flat credulity; and he gets little sympathy, even from laymen who know, because he has brought the incredulity on himself. If he escapes, he can only do so by opening the eyes of the jury to the facts that medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common curemongering witchcraft; that diagnosis, though it means in many instances (including even the identification of pathogenic bacilli under the microscope) only a choice among terms so loose that they would not be accepted as definitions in any really exact science, is, even at that, an uncertain and difficult matter on which doctors often differ; and that the very best medical opinion and treatment varies widely from doctor to doctor, one practitioner prescribing six or seven scheduled poisons for so familiar a disease as enteric fever where another will not tolerate drugs at all; one starving a patient whom another would stuff; one urging an operation which another would regard as unnecessary and dangerous; one giving alcohol and meat which another would sternly forbid, etc., etc., etc.: all these discrepancies arising not between the opinion of good doctors and bad ones (the medical contention is, of course, that a bad doctor is an impossibility), but between practitioners of equal eminence and authority. Usually it is impossible to persuade the jury that these facts are facts. Juries seldom notice facts; and they have been taught to regard any doubts of the omniscience and omnipotence of doctors as blasphemy. Even the fact that doctors themselves die of the very diseases they profess to cure passes unnoticed. We do not shoot out our lips and shake our heads, saying, “They save others: themselves they cannot save”: their reputation stands, like an African king’s palace, on a foundation of dead bodies; and the result is that the verdict goes against the defendant when the defendant is a doctor accused of malpractice.

Fortunately for the doctors, they very seldom find themselves in this position, because it is so difficult to prove anything against them. The only evidence that can decide a case of malpractice is expert evidence: that is, the evidence of other doctors; and every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquet by giving him away. It is the nurse who gives the doctor away in private, because every nurse has some particular doctor whom she likes; and she usually assures her patients that all the others are disastrous noodles, and soothes the tedium of the sick-bed by gossip about their blunders. She will even give a doctor away for the sake of making the patient believe that she knows more than the doctor. But she dare not, for her livelihood, give the doctor away in public. And the doctors stand by one another at all costs. Now and then some doctor in an unassailable position, like the late Sir William Gull, will go into the witness box and say what he really thinks about the way a patient has been treated; but such behavior is considered little short of infamous by his colleagues.

WHY DOCTORS DO NOT DIFFER

The truth is, there would never be any public agreement among doctors if they did not agree to agree on the main point of the doctor being always in the right. Yet the two guinea man never thinks that the five shilling man is right: if he did, he would be understood as confessing to an overcharge of one pound seventeen shillings; and on the same ground the five shilling man cannot encourage the notion that the owner of the sixpenny surgery round the corner is quite up to his mark. Thus even the layman has to be taught that infallibility is not quite infallible, because there are two qualities of it to be had at two prices.

But there is no agreement even in the same rank at the same price. During the first great epidemic of influenza towards the end of the nineteenth century a London evening paper sent round a journalist-patient to all the great consultants of that day, and published their advice and prescriptions; a proceeding passionately denounced by the medical papers as a breach of confidence of these eminent physicians. The case was the same; but the prescriptions were different, and so was the advice. Now a doctor cannot think his own treatment right and at the same time think his colleague right in prescribing a different treatment when the patient is the same. Anyone who has ever known doctors well enough to hear medical shop talked without reserve knows that they are full of stories about each other’s blunders and errors, and that the theory of their omniscience and omnipotence no more holds good among themselves than it did with Moliere and Napoleon. But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it. He knows that if such conduct were tolerated in his profession no doctor’s livelihood or reputation would be worth a year’s purchase. I do not blame him: I would do the same myself. But the effect of this state of things is to make the medical profession a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity; and I do not suggest that the medical conspiracy is either better or worse than the military conspiracy, the legal conspiracy, the sacerdotal conspiracy, the pedagogic conspiracy, the royal and aristocratic conspiracy, the literary and artistic conspiracy, and the innumerable industrial, commercial, and financial conspiracies, from the trade unions to the great exchanges, which make up the huge conflict which we call society. But it is less suspected. The Radicals who used to advocate, as an indispensable preliminary to social reform, the strangling of the last king with the entrails of the last priest, substituted compulsory vaccination for compulsory baptism without a murmur.

THE CRAZE FOR OPERATIONS

Thus everything is on the side of the doctor. When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they recover (and they mostly do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them. In surgery all operations are recorded as successful if the patient can be got out of the hospital or nursing home alive, though the subsequent history of the case may be such as would make an honest surgeon vow never to recommend or perform the operation again. The large range of operations which consist of amputating limbs and extirpating organs admits of no direct verification of their necessity. There is a fashion in operations as there is in sleeves and skirts: the triumph of some surgeon who has at last found out how to make a once desperate operation fairly safe is usually followed by a rage for that operation not only among the doctors, but actually among their patients. There are men and women whom the operating table seems to fascinate; half-alive people who through vanity, or hypochondria, or a craving to be the constant objects of anxious attention or what not, lose such feeble sense as they ever had of the value of their own organs and limbs. They seem to care as little for mutilation as lobsters or lizards, which at least have the excuse that they grow new claws and new tails if they lose the old ones. Whilst this book was being prepared for the press a case was tried in the Courts, of a man who sued a railway company for damages because a train had run over him and amputated both his legs. He lost his case because it was proved that he had deliberately contrived the occurrence himself for the sake of getting an idler’s pension at the expense of the railway company, being too dull to realize how much more he had to lose than to gain by the bargain even if he had won his case and received damages above his utmost hopes.

Thus amazing case makes it possible to say, with some prospect of being believed, that there is in the classes who can afford to pay for fashionable operations a sprinkling of persons so incapable of appreciating the relative importance of preserving their bodily integrity, (including the capacity for parentage) and the pleasure of talking about themselves and hearing themselves talked about as the heroes and heroines of sensational operations, that they tempt surgeons to operate on them not only with large fees, but with personal solicitation. Now it cannot be too often repeated that when an operation is once performed, nobody can ever prove that it was unnecessary. If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side. The result is that we hear of “conservative surgeons” as a distinct class of practitioners who make it a rule not to operate if they can possibly help it, and who are sought after by the people who have vitality enough to regard an operation as a last resort. But no surgeon is bound to take the conservative view. If he believes that an organ is at best a useless survival, and that if he extirpates it the patient will be well and none the worse in a fortnight, whereas to await the natural cure would mean a month’s illness, then he is clearly justified in recommending the operation even if the cure without operation is as certain as anything of the kind ever can be. Thus the conservative surgeon and the radical or extirpatory surgeon may both be right as far as the ultimate cure is concerned; so that their consciences do not help them out of their differences.

CREDULITY AND CHLOROFORM

There is no harder scientific fact in the world than the fact that belief can be produced in practically unlimited quantity and intensity, without observation or reasoning, and even in defiance of both, by the simple desire to believe founded on a strong interest in believing. Everybody recognizes this in the case of the amatory infatuations of the adolescents who see angels and heroes in obviously (to others) commonplace and even objectionable maidens and youths. But it holds good over the entire field of human activity. The hardest-headed materialist will become a consulter of table-rappers and slate-writers if he loses a child or a wife so beloved that the desire to revive and communicate with them becomes irresistible. The cobbler believes that there is nothing like leather. The Imperialist who regards the conquest of England by a foreign power as the worst of political misfortunes believes that the conquest of a foreign power by England would be a boon to the conquered. Doctors are no more proof against such illusions than other men. Can anyone then doubt that under existing conditions a great deal of unnecessary and mischievous operating is bound to go on, and that patients are encouraged to imagine that modern surgery and anesthesia have made operations much less serious matters than they really are? When doctors write or speak to the public about operations, they imply, and often say in so many words, that chloroform has made surgery painless. People who have been operated on know better. The patient does not feel the knife, and the operation is therefore enormously facilitated for the surgeon; but the patient pays for the anesthesia with hours of wretched sickness; and when that is over there is the pain of the wound made by the surgeon, which has to heal like any other wound. This is why operating surgeons, who are usually out of the house with their fee in their pockets before the patient has recovered consciousness, and who therefore see nothing of the suffering witnessed by the general practitioner and the nurse, occasionally talk of operations very much as the hangman in Barnaby Rudge talked of executions, as if being operated on were a luxury in sensation as well as in price.

MEDICAL POVERTY

To make matters worse, doctors are hideously poor. The Irish gentleman doctor of my boyhood, who took nothing less than a guinea, though he might pay you four visits for it, seems to have no equivalent nowadays in English society. Better be a railway porter than an ordinary English general practitioner. A railway porter has from eighteen to twenty-three shillings a week from the Company merely as a retainer; and his additional fees from the public, if we leave the third-class twopenny tip out of account (and I am by no means sure that even this reservation need be made), are equivalent to doctor’s fees in the case of second-class passengers, and double doctor’s fees in the case of first. Any class of educated men thus treated tends to become a brigand class, and doctors are no exception to the rule. They are offered disgraceful prices for advice and medicine. Their patients are for the most part so poor and so ignorant that good advice would be resented as impracticable and wounding. When you are so poor that you cannot afford to refuse eighteenpence from a man who is too poor to pay you any more, it is useless to tell him that what he or his sick child needs is not medicine, but more leisure, better clothes, better food, and a better drained and ventilated house. It is kinder to give him a bottle of something almost as cheap as water, and tell him to come again with another eighteenpence if it does not cure him. When you have done that over and over again every day for a week, how much scientific conscience have you left? If you are weak-minded enough to cling desperately to your eighteenpence as denoting a certain social superiority to the sixpenny doctor, you will be miserably poor all your life; whilst the sixpenny doctor, with his low prices and quick turnover of patients, visibly makes much more than you do and kills no more people.

A doctor’s character can no more stand out against such conditions than the lungs of his patients can stand out against bad ventilation. The only way in which he can preserve his self-respect is by forgetting all he ever learnt of science, and clinging to such help as he can give without cost merely by being less ignorant and more accustomed to sick-beds than his patients. Finally, he acquires a certain skill at nursing cases under poverty-stricken domestic conditions, just as women who have been trained as domestic servants in some huge institution with lifts, vacuum cleaners, electric lighting, steam heating, and machinery that turns the kitchen into a laboratory and engine house combined, manage, when they are sent out into the world to drudge as general servants, to pick up their business in a new way, learning the slatternly habits and wretched makeshifts of homes where even bundles of kindling wood are luxuries to be anxiously economized.

THE SUCCESSFUL DOCTOR

The doctor whose success blinds public opinion to medical poverty is almost as completely demoralized. His promotion means that his practice becomes more and more confined to the idle rich. The proper advice for most of their ailments is typified in Abernethy’s “Live on sixpence a day and earn it.” But here, as at the other end of the scale, the right advice is neither agreeable nor practicable. And every hypochondriacal rich lady or gentleman who can be persuaded that he or she is a lifelong invalid means anything from fifty to five hundred pounds a year for the doctor. Operations enable a surgeon to earn similar sums in a couple of hours; and if the surgeon also keeps a nursing home, he may make considerable profits at the same time by running what is the most expensive kind of hotel. These gains are so great that they undo much of the moral advantage which the absence of grinding pecuniary anxiety gives the rich doctor over the poor one. It is true that the temptation to prescribe a sham treatment because the real treatment is too dear for either patient or doctor does not exist for the rich doctor. He always has plenty of genuine cases which can afford genuine treatment; and these provide him with enough sincere scientific professional work to save him from the ignorance, obsolescence, and atrophy of scientific conscience into which his poorer colleagues sink. But on the other hand his expenses are enormous. Even as a bachelor, he must, at London west end rates, make over a thousand a year before he can afford even to insure his life. His house, his servants, and his equipage (or autopage) must be on the scale to which his patients are accustomed, though a couple of rooms with a camp bed in one of them might satisfy his own requirements. Above all, the income which provides for these outgoings stops the moment he himself stops working. Unlike the man of business, whose managers, clerks, warehousemen and laborers keep his business going whilst he is in bed or in his club, the doctor cannot earn a farthing by deputy. Though he is exceptionally exposed to infection, and has to face all weathers at all hours of the night and day, often not enjoying a complete night’s rest for a week, the money stops coming in the moment he stops going out; and therefore illness has special terrors for him, and success no certain permanence. He dare not stop making hay while the sun shines; for it may set at any time. Men do not resist pressure of this intensity. When they come under it as doctors they pay unnecessary visits; they write prescriptions that are as absurd as the rub of chalk with which an Irish tailor once charmed away a wart from my father’s finger; they conspire with surgeons to promote operations; they nurse the delusions of the malade imaginaire (who is always really ill because, as there is no such thing as perfect health, nobody is ever really well); they exploit human folly, vanity, and fear of death as ruthlessly as their own health, strength, and patience are exploited by selfish hypochondriacs. They must do all these things or else run pecuniary risks that no man can fairly be asked to run. And the healthier the world becomes, the more they are compelled to live by imposture and the less by that really helpful activity of which all doctors get enough to preserve them from utter corruption. For even the most hardened humbug who ever prescribed ether tonics to ladies whose need for tonics is of precisely the same character as the need of poorer women for a glass of gin, has to help a mother through child-bearing often enough to feel that he is not living wholly in vain.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-RESPECT IN SURGEONS

The surgeon, though often more unscrupulous than the general practitioner, retains his self-respect more easily. The human conscience can subsist on very questionable food. No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. The shirk, the duffer, the malingerer, the coward, the weakling, may be put out of countenance by his own failures and frauds; but the man who does evil skilfully, energetically, masterfully, grows prouder and bolder at every crime. The common man may have to found his self-respect on sobriety, honesty and industry; but a Napoleon needs no such props for his sense of dignity. If Nelson’s conscience whispered to him at all in the silent watches of the night, you may depend on it it whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and Cape St. Vincent, and not about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A man who robs little children when no one is looking can hardly have much self-respect or even self-esteem; but an accomplished burglar must be proud of himself. In the play to which I am at present preluding I have represented an artist who is so entirely satisfied with his artistic conscience, even to the point of dying like a saint with its support, that he is utterly selfish and unscrupulous in every other relation without feeling at the smallest disadvantage. The same thing may be observed in women who have a genius for personal attractiveness: they expend more thought, labor, skill, inventiveness, taste and endurance on making themselves lovely than would suffice to keep a dozen ugly women honest; and this enables them to maintain a high opinion of themselves, and an angry contempt for unattractive and personally careless women, whilst they lie and cheat and slander and sell themselves without a blush. The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor. Andrea del Sarto, like Louis Dubedat in my play, must have expended on the attainment of his great mastery of design and his originality in fresco painting more conscientiousness and industry than go to the making of the reputations of a dozen ordinary mayors and churchwardens; but (if Vasari is to be believed) when the King of France entrusted him with money to buy pictures for him, he stole it to spend on his wife. Such cases are not confined to eminent artists. Unsuccessful, unskilful men are often much more scrupulous than successful ones. In the ranks of ordinary skilled labor many men are to be found who earn good wages and are never out of a job because they are strong, indefatigable, and skilful, and who therefore are bold in a high opinion of themselves; but they are selfish and tyrannical, gluttonous and drunken, as their wives and children know to their cost.

Not only do these talented energetic people retain their self-respect through shameful misconduct: they do not even lose the respect of others, because their talents benefit and interest everybody, whilst their vices affect only a few. An actor, a painter, a composer, an author, may be as selfish as he likes without reproach from the public if only his art is superb; and he cannot fulfil his condition without sufficient effort and sacrifice to make him feel noble and martyred in spite of his selfishness. It may even happen that the selfishness of an artist may be a benefit to the public by enabling him to concentrate himself on their gratification with a recklessness of every other consideration that makes him highly dangerous to those about him. In sacrificing others to himself he is sacrificing them to the public he gratifies; and the public is quite content with that arrangement. The public actually has an interest in the artist’s vices.

It has no such interest in the surgeon’s vices. The surgeon’s art is exercised at its expense, not for its gratification. We do not go to the operating table as we go to the theatre, to the picture gallery, to the concert room, to be entertained and delighted: we go to be tormented and maimed, lest a worse thing should befall us. It is of the most extreme importance to us that the experts on whose assurance we face this horror and suffer this mutilation should leave no interests but our own to think of; should judge our cases scientifically; and should feel about them kindly. Let us see what guarantees we have: first for the science, and then for the kindness.

ARE DOCTORS MEN OF SCIENCE?

I presume nobody will question the existence of widely spread popular delusion that every doctor is a titan of science. It is escaped only in the very small class which understands by science something more than conjuring with retorts and spirit lamps, magnets and microscopes, and discovering magical cures for disease. To a sufficiently ignorant man every captain of a trading schooner is a Galileo, every organ-grinder a Beethoven, every piano-tuner a Hemholtz, every Old Bailey barrister a Solon, every Seven Dials pigeon dealer a Darwin, every scrivener a Shakespear, every locomotive engine a miracle, and its driver no less wonderful than George Stephenson. As a matter of fact, the rank and file of doctors are no more scientific than their tailors; or, if you prefer to put it the reverse way, their tailors are no less scientific than they. Doctoring is an art, not a science: any layman who is interested in science sufficiently to take in one of the scientific journals and follow the literature of the scientific movement, knows more about it than those doctors (probably a large majority) who are not interested in it, and practise only to earn their bread. Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing illnesses. It does happen exceptionally that a practising doctor makes a contribution to science (my play describes a very notable one); but it happens much oftener that he draws disastrous conclusions from his clinical experience because he has no conception of scientific method, and believes, like any rustic, that the handling of evidence and statistics needs no expertness. The distinction between a quack doctor and a qualified one is mainly that only the qualified one is authorized to sign death certificates, for which both sorts seem to have about equal occasion. Unqualified practitioners now make large incomes as hygienists, and are resorted to as frequently by cultivated amateur scientists who understand quite well what they are doing as by ignorant people who are simply dupes. Bone-setters make fortunes under the very noses of our greatest surgeons from educated and wealthy patients; and some of the most successful doctors on the register use quite heretical methods of treating disease, and have qualified themselves solely for convenience. Leaving out of account the village witches who prescribe spells and sell charms, the humblest professional healers in this country are the herbalists. These men wander through the fields on Sunday seeking for herbs with magic properties of curing disease, preventing childbirth, and the like. Each of them believes that he is on the verge of a great discovery, in which Virginia Snake Root will be an ingredient, heaven knows why! Virginia Snake Root fascinates the imagination of the herbalist as mercury used to fascinate the alchemists. On week days he keeps a shop in which he sells packets of pennyroyal, dandelion, etc., labelled with little lists of the diseases they are supposed to cure, and apparently do cure to the satisfaction of the people who keep on buying them. I have never been able to perceive any distinction between the science of the herbalist and that of the duly registered doctor. A relative of mine recently consulted a doctor about some of the ordinary symptoms which indicate the need for a holiday and a change. The doctor satisfied himself that the patient’s heart was a little depressed. Digitalis being a drug labelled as a heart specific by the profession, he promptly administered a stiff dose. Fortunately the patient was a hardy old lady who was not easily killed. She recovered with no worse result than her conversion to Christian Science, which owes its vogue quite as much to public despair of doctors as to superstition. I am not, observe, here concerned with the question as to whether the dose of digitalis was judicious or not; the point is, that a farm laborer consulting a herbalist would have been treated in exactly the same way.

BACTERIOLOGY AS A SUPERSTITION

The smattering of science that all — even doctors — pick up from the ordinary newspapers nowadays only makes the doctor more dangerous than he used to be. Wise men used to take care to consult doctors qualified before 1860, who were usually contemptuous of or indifferent to the germ theory and bacteriological therapeutics; but now that these veterans have mostly retired or died, we are left in the hands of the generations which, having heard of microbes much as St. Thomas Aquinas heard of angels, suddenly concluded that the whole art of healing could be summed up in the formula: Find the microbe and kill it. And even that they did not know how to do. The simplest way to kill most microbes is to throw them into an open street or river and let the sun shine on them, which explains the fact that when great cities have recklessly thrown all their sewage into the open river the water has sometimes been cleaner twenty miles below the city than thirty miles above it. But doctors instinctively avoid all facts that are reassuring, and eagerly swallow those that make it a marvel that anyone could possibly survive three days in an atmosphere consisting mainly of countless pathogenic germs. They conceive microbes as immortal until slain by a germicide administered by a duly qualified medical man. All through Europe people are adjured, by public notices and even under legal penalties, not to throw their microbes into the sunshine, but to collect them carefully in a handkerchief; shield the handkerchief from the sun in the darkness and warmth of the pocket; and send it to a laundry to be mixed up with everybody else’s handkerchiefs, with results only too familiar to local health authorities.

In the first frenzy of microbe killing, surgical instruments were dipped in carbolic oil, which was a great improvement on not dipping them in anything at all and simply using them dirty; but as microbes are so fond of carbolic oil that they swarm in it, it was not a success from the anti-microbe point of view. Formalin was squirted into the circulation of consumptives until it was discovered that formalin nourishes the tubercle bacillus handsomely and kills men. The popular theory of disease is the common medical theory: namely, that every disease had its microbe duly created in the garden of Eden, and has been steadily propagating itself and producing widening circles of malignant disease ever since. It was plain from the first that if this had been even approximately true, the whole human race would have been wiped out by the plague long ago, and that every epidemic, instead of fading out as mysteriously as it rushed in, would spread over the whole world. It was also evident that the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom instead of a cause. An unpunctual man is always in a hurry; but it does not follow that hurry is the cause of unpunctuality: on the contrary, what is the matter with the patient is sloth. When Florence Nightingale said bluntly that if you overcrowded your soldiers in dirty quarters there would be an outbreak of smallpox among them, she was snubbed as an ignorant female who did not know that smallpox can be produced only by the importation of its specific microbe.

If this was the line taken about smallpox, the microbe of which has never yet been run down and exposed under the microscope by the bacteriologist, what must have been the ardor of conviction as to tuberculosis, tetanus, enteric fever, Maltese fever, diphtheria, and the rest of the diseases in which the characteristic bacillus had been identified! When there was no bacillus it was assumed that, since no disease could exist without a bacillus, it was simply eluding observation. When the bacillus was found, as it frequently was, in persons who were not suffering from the disease, the theory was saved by simply calling the bacillus an impostor, or pseudobacillus. The same boundless credulity which the public exhibit as to a doctor’s power of diagnosis was shown by the doctors themselves as to the analytic microbe hunters. These witch finders would give you a certificate of the ultimate constitution of anything from a sample of the water from your well to a scrap of your lungs, for seven-and-sixpense. I do not suggest that the analysts were dishonest. No doubt they carried the analysis as far as they could afford to carry it for the money. No doubt also they could afford to carry it far enough to be of some use. But the fact remains that just as doctors perform for half-a-crown, without the least misgiving, operations which could not be thoroughly and safely performed with due scientific rigor and the requisite apparatus by an unaided private practitioner for less than some thousands of pounds, so did they proceed on the assumption that they could get the last word of science as to the constituents of their pathological samples for a two hours cab fare.

ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES OF IMMUNIZATION

I have heard doctors affirm and deny almost every possible proposition as to disease and treatment. I can remember the time when doctors no more dreamt of consumption and pneumonia being infectious than they now dream of sea-sickness being infectious, or than so great a clinical observer as Sydenham dreamt of smallpox being infectious. I have heard doctors deny that there is such a thing as infection. I have heard them deny the existence of hydrophobia as a specific disease differing from tetanus. I have heard them defend prophylactic measures and prophylactic legislation as the sole and certain salvation of mankind from zymotic disease; and I have heard them denounce both as malignant spreaders of cancer and lunacy. But the one objection I have never heard from a doctor is the objection that prophylaxis by the inoculatory methods most in vogue is an economic impossibility under our private practice system. They buy some stuff from somebody for a shilling, and inject a pennyworth of it under their patient’s skin for half-a-crown, concluding that, since this primitive rite pays the somebody and pays them, the problem of prophylaxis has been satisfactorily solved. The results are sometimes no worse than the ordinary results of dirt getting into cuts; but neither the doctor nor the patient is quite satisfied unless the inoculation “takes”; that is, unless it produces perceptible illness and disablement. Sometimes both doctor and patient get more value in this direction than they bargain for. The results of ordinary private-practice-inoculation at their worst are bad enough to be indistinguishable from those of the most discreditable and dreaded disease known; and doctors, to save the credit of the inoculation, have been driven to accuse their patient or their patient’s parents of having contracted this disease independently of the inoculation, an excuse which naturally does not make the family any more resigned, and leads to public recriminations in which the doctors, forgetting everything but the immediate quarrel, naively excuse themselves by admitting, and even claiming as a point in their favor, that it is often impossible to distinguish the disease produced by their inoculation and the disease they have accused the patient of contracting. And both parties assume that what is at issue is the scientific soundness of the prophylaxis. It never occurs to them that the particular pathogenic germ which they intended to introduce into the patient’s system may be quite innocent of the catastrophe, and that the casual dirt introduced with it may be at fault. When, as in the case of smallpox or cowpox, the germ has not yet been detected, what you inoculate is simply undefined matter that has been scraped off an anything but chemically clean calf suffering from the disease in question. You take your chance of the germ being in the scrapings, and, lest you should kill it, you take no precautions against other germs being in it as well. Anything may happen as the result of such an inoculation. Yet this is the only stuff of the kind which is prepared and supplied even in State establishments: that is, in the only establishments free from the commercial temptation to adulterate materials and scamp precautionary processes.

Even if the germ were identified, complete precautions would hardly pay. It is true that microbe farming is not expensive. The cost of breeding and housing two head of cattle would provide for the breeding and housing of enough microbes to inoculate the entire population of the globe since human life first appeared on it. But the precautions necessary to insure that the inoculation shall consist of nothing else but the required germ in the proper state of attenuation are a very different matter from the precautions necessary in the distribution and consumption of beefsteaks. Yet people expect to find vaccines and antitoxins and the like retailed at “popular prices” in private enterprise shops just as they expect to find ounces of tobacco and papers of pins.

THE PERILS OF INOCULATION

The trouble does not end with the matter to be inoculated. There is the question of the condition of the patient. The discoveries of Sir Almroth Wright have shown that the appalling results which led to the hasty dropping in 1894 of Koch’s tuberculin were not accidents, but perfectly orderly and inevitable phenomena following the injection of dangerously strong “vaccines” at the wrong moment, and reinforcing the disease instead of stimulating the resistance to it. To ascertain the right moment a laboratory and a staff of experts are needed. The general practitioner, having no such laboratory and no such experience, has always chanced it, and insisted, when he was unlucky, that the results were not due to the inoculation, but to some other cause: a favorite and not very tactful one being the drunkenness or licentiousness of the patient. But though a few doctors have now learnt the danger of inoculating without any reference to the patient’s “opsonic index” at the moment of inoculation, and though those other doctors who are denouncing the danger as imaginary and opsonin as a craze or a fad, obviously do so because it involves an operation which they have neither the means nor the knowledge to perform, there is still no grasp of the economic change in the situation. They have never been warned that the practicability of any method of extirpating disease depends not only on its efficacy, but on its cost. For example, just at present the world has run raving mad on the subject of radium, which has excited our credulity precisely as the apparitions at Lourdes excited the credulity of Roman Catholics. Suppose it were ascertained that every child in the world could be rendered absolutely immune from all disease during its entire life by taking half an ounce of radium to every pint of its milk. The world would be none the healthier, because not even a Crown Prince — no, not even the son of a Chicago Meat King, could afford the treatment. Yet it is doubtful whether doctors would refrain from prescribing it on that ground. The recklessness with which they now recommend wintering in Egypt or at Davos to people who cannot afford to go to Cornwall, and the orders given for champagne jelly and old port in households where such luxuries must obviously be acquired at the cost of stinting necessaries, often make one wonder whether it is possible for a man to go through a medical training and retain a spark of common sense. This sort of inconsiderateness gets cured only in the classes where poverty, pretentious as it is even at its worst, cannot pitch its pretences high enough to make it possible for the doctor (himself often no better off than the patient) to assume that the average income of an English family is about 2,000 pounds a year, and that it is quite easy to break up a home, sell an old family seat at a sacrifice, and retire into a foreign sanatorium devoted to some “treatment” that did not exist two years ago and probably will not exist (except as a pretext for keeping an ordinary hotel) two years hence. In a poor practice the doctor must find cheap treatments for cheap people, or humiliate and lose his patients either by prescribing beyond their means or sending them to the public hospitals. When it comes to prophylactic inoculation, the alternative lies between the complete scientific process, which can only be brought down to a reasonable cost by being very highly organized as a public service in a public institution, and such cheap, nasty, dangerous and scientifically spurious imitations as ordinary vaccination, which seems not unlikely to be ended, like its equally vaunted forerunner, XVIII. century inoculation, by a purely reactionary law making all sorts of vaccination, scientific or not, criminal offences. Naturally, the poor doctor (that is, the average doctor) defends ordinary vaccination frantically, as it means to him the bread of his children. To secure the vehement and practically unanimous support of the rank and file of the medical profession for any sort of treatment or operation, all that is necessary is that it can be easily practised by a rather shabbily dressed man in a surgically dirty room in a surgically dirty house without any assistance, and that the materials for it shall cost, say, a penny, and the charge for it to a patient with 100 pounds a year be half-a-crown. And, on the other hand, a hygienic measure has only to be one of such refinement, difficulty, precision and costliness as to be quite beyond the resources of private practice, to be ignored or angrily denounced as a fad.

TRADE UNIONISM AND SCIENCE

Here we have the explanation of the savage rancor that so amazes people who imagine that the controversy concerning vaccination is a scientific one. It has really nothing to do with science. The medical profession, consisting for the most part of very poor men struggling to keep up appearances beyond their means, find themselves threatened with the extinction of a considerable part of their incomes: a part, too, that is easily and regularly earned, since it is independent of disease, and brings every person born into the nation, healthy or not, to the doctors. To boot, there is the occasional windfall of an epidemic, with its panic and rush for revaccination. Under such circumstances, vaccination would be defended desperately were it twice as dirty, dangerous, and unscientific in method as it actually is. The note of fury in the defence, the feeling that the anti-vaccinator is doing a cruel, ruinous, inconsiderate thing in a mood of indignant folly: all this, so puzzling to the observer who knows nothing of the economic side of the question, and only sees that the anti-vaccinator, having nothing whatever to gain and a good deal to lose by placing himself in opposition to the law and to the outcry that adds private persecution to legal penalties, can have no interest in the matter except the interest of a reformer in abolishing a corrupt and mischievous superstition, becomes intelligible the moment the tragedy of medical poverty and the lucrativeness of cheap vaccination is taken into account.

In the face of such economic pressure as this, it is silly to expect that medical teaching, any more than medical practice, can possibly be scientific. The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not. It would be difficult to cite any proposition less obnoxious to science, than that advanced by Hahnemann: to wit, that drugs which in large doses produce certain symptoms, counteract them in very small doses, just as in more modern practice it is found that a sufficiently small inoculation with typhoid rallies our powers to resist the disease instead of prostrating us with it. But Hahnemann and his followers were frantically persecuted for a century by generations of apothecary-doctors whose incomes depended on the quantity of drugs they could induce their patients to swallow. These two cases of ordinary vaccination and homeopathy are typical of all the rest. Just as the object of a trade union under existing conditions must finally be, not to improve the technical quality of the work done by its members, but to secure a living wage for them, so the object of the medical profession today is to secure an income for the private doctor; and to this consideration all concern for science and public health must give way when the two come into conflict. Fortunately they are not always in conflict. Up to a certain point doctors, like carpenters and masons, must earn their living by doing the work that the public wants from them; and as it is not in the nature of things possible that such public want should be based on unmixed disutility, it may be admitted that doctors have their uses, real as well as imaginary. But just as the best carpenter or mason will resist the introduction of a machine that is likely to throw him out of work, or the public technical education of unskilled laborers’ sons to compete with him, so the doctor will resist with all his powers of persecution every advance of science that threatens his income. And as the advance of scientific hygiene tends to make the private doctor’s visits rarer, and the public inspector’s frequenter, whilst the advance of scientific therapeutics is in the direction of treatments that involve highly organized laboratories, hospitals, and public institutions generally, it unluckily happens that the organization of private practitioners which we call the medical profession is coming more and more to represent, not science, but desperate and embittered antiscience: a statement of things which is likely to get worse until the average doctor either depends upon or hopes for an appointment in the public health service for his livelihood.

So much for our guarantees as to medical science. Let us now deal with the more painful subject of medical kindness.

DOCTORS AND VIVISECTION

The importance to our doctors of a reputation for the tenderest humanity is so obvious, and the quantity of benevolent work actually done by them for nothing (a great deal of it from sheer good nature) so large, that at first sight it seems unaccountable that they should not only throw all their credit away, but deliberately choose to band themselves publicly with outlaws and scoundrels by claiming that in the pursuit of their professional knowledge they should be free from the restraints of law, of honor, of pity, of remorse, of everything that distinguishes an orderly citizen from a South Sea buccaneer, or a philosopher from an inquisitor. For here we look in vain for either an economic or a sentimental motive. In every generation fools and blackguards have made this claim; and honest and reasonable men, led by the strongest contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its crude rascality. From Shakespear and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and Mark Twain, the natural abhorrence of sane mankind for the vivisector’s cruelty, and the contempt of able thinkers for his imbecile casuistry, have been expressed by the most popular spokesmen of humanity. If the medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance of the humanity of the doctor. Not one doctor in a thousand is a vivisector, or has any interest in vivisection, either pecuniary or intellectual, or would treat his dog cruelly or allow anyone else to do it. It is true that the doctor complies with the professional fashion of defending vivisection, and assuring you that people like Shakespear and Dr. Johnson and Ruskin and Mark Twain are ignorant sentimentalists, just as he complies with any other silly fashion: the mystery is, how it became the fashion in spite of its being so injurious to those who follow it. Making all possible allowance for the effect of the brazen lying of the few men who bring a rush of despairing patients to their doors by professing in letters to the newspapers to have learnt from vivisection how to cure certain diseases, and the assurances of the sayers of smooth things that the practice is quite painless under the law, it is still difficult to find any civilized motive for an attitude by which the medical profession has everything to lose and nothing to gain.

THE PRIMITIVE SAVAGE MOTIVE

I say civilized motive advisedly; for primitive tribal motives are easy enough to find. Every savage chief who is not a Mahomet learns that if he wishes to strike the imagination of his tribe — and without doing that he can rule them — he must terrify or revolt them from time to time by acts of hideous cruelty or disgusting unnaturalness. We are far from being as superior to such tribes as we imagine. It is very doubtful indeed whether Peter the Great could have effected the changes he made in Russia if he had not fascinated and intimidated his people by his monstrous cruelties and grotesque escapades. Had he been a nineteenth-century king of England, he would have had to wait for some huge accidental calamity: a cholera epidemic, a war, or an insurrection, before waking us up sufficiently to get anything done. Vivisection helps the doctor to rule us as Peter ruled the Russians. The notion that the man who does dreadful things is superhuman, and that therefore he can also do wonderful things either as ruler, avenger, healer, or what not, is by no means confined to barbarians. Just as the manifold wickednesses and stupidities of our criminal code are supported, not by any general comprehension of law or study of jurisprudence, not even by simple vindictiveness, but by the superstition that a calamity of any sort must be expiated by a human sacrifice; so the wickednesses and stupidities of our medicine men are rooted in superstitions that have no more to do with science than the traditional ceremony of christening an ironclad has to do with the effectiveness of its armament. We have only to turn to Macaulay’s description of the treatment of Charles II in his last illness to see how strongly his physicians felt that their only chance of cheating death was by outraging nature in tormenting and disgusting their unfortunate patient. True, this was more than two centuries ago; but I have heard my own nineteenth-century grandfather describe the cupping and firing and nauseous medicines of his time with perfect credulity as to their beneficial effects; and some more modern treatments appear to me quite as barbarous. It is in this way that vivisection pays the doctor. It appeals to the fear and credulity of the savage in us; and without fear and credulity half the private doctor’s occupation and seven-eighths of his influence would be gone.

THE HIGHER MOTIVE. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

But the greatest force of all on the side of vivisection is the mighty and indeed divine force of curiosity. Here we have no decaying tribal instinct which men strive to root out of themselves as they strive to root out the tiger’s lust for blood. On the contrary, the curiosity of the ape, or of the child who pulls out the legs and wings of a fly to see what it will do without them, or who, on being told that a cat dropped out of the window will always fall on its legs, immediately tries the experiment on the nearest cat from the highest window in the house (I protest I did it myself from the first floor only), is as nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the philosopher, the poet, the biologist, and the naturalist. I have always despised Adam because he had to be tempted by the woman, as she was by the serpent, before he could be induced to pluck the apple from the tree of knowledge. I should have swallowed every apple on the tree the moment the owner’s back was turned. When Gray said “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,” he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and since nobody wants bliss particularly, or could stand more than a very brief taste of it if it were attainable, and since everybody, by the deepest law of the Life Force, desires to be godlike, it is stupid, and indeed blasphemous and despairing, to hope that the thirst for knowledge will either diminish or consent to be subordinated to any other end whatsoever. We shall see later on that the claim that has arisen in this way for the unconditioned pursuit of knowledge is as idle as all dreams of unconditioned activity; but none the less the right to knowledge must be regarded as a fundamental human right. The fact that men of science have had to fight so hard to secure its recognition, and are still so vigorously persecuted when they discover anything that is not quite palatable to vulgar people, makes them sorely jealous for that right; and when they hear a popular outcry for the suppression of a method of research which has an air of being scientific, their first instinct is to rally to the defence of that method without further consideration, with the result that they sometimes, as in the case of vivisection, presently find themselves fighting on a false issue.

THE FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT

I may as well pause here to explain their error. The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing, though any fool can prove that ignorance is bliss, and that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” (a little being the most that any of us can attain), as easily as that the pains of life are more numerous and constant than its pleasures, and that therefore we should all be better dead. The logic is unimpeachable; but its only effect is to make us say that if these are the conclusions logic leads to, so much the worse for logic, after which curt dismissal of Folly, we continue living and learning by instinct: that is, as of right. We legislate on the assumption that no man may be killed on the strength of a demonstration that he would be happier in his grave, not even if he is dying slowly of cancer and begs the doctor to despatch him quickly and mercifully. To get killed lawfully he must violate somebody else’s right to live by committing murder. But he is by no means free to live unconditionally. In society he can exercise his right to live only under very stiff conditions. In countries where there is compulsory military service he may even have to throw away his individual life to save the life of the community.

It is just so in the case of the right to knowledge. It is a right that is as yet very imperfectly recognized in practice. But in theory it is admitted that an adult person in pursuit of knowledge must not be refused it on the ground that he would be better or happier without it. Parents and priests may forbid knowledge to those who accept their authority; and social taboo may be made effective by acts of legal persecution under cover of repressing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition; but no government now openly forbids its subjects to pursue knowledge on the ground that knowledge is in itself a bad thing, or that it is possible for any of us to have too much of it.

LIMITATIONS OF THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE

But neither does any government exempt the pursuit of knowledge, any more than the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness (as the American Constitution puts it), from all social conditions. No man is allowed to put his mother into the stove because he desires to know how long an adult woman will survive at a temperature of 500 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how important or interesting that particular addition to the store of human knowledge may be. A man who did so would have short work made not only of his right to knowledge, but of his right to live and all his other rights at the same time. The right to knowledge is not the only right; and its exercise must be limited by respect for other rights, and for its own exercise by others. When a man says to Society, “May I torture my mother in pursuit of knowledge?” Society replies, “No.” If he pleads, “What! Not even if I have a chance of finding out how to cure cancer by doing it?” Society still says, “Not even then.” If the scientist, making the best of his disappointment, goes on to ask may he torture a dog, the stupid and callous people who do not realize that a dog is a fellow-creature and sometimes a good friend, may say Yes, though Shakespear, Dr. Johnson and their like may say No. But even those who say “You may torture A dog” never say “You may torture MY dog.” And nobody says, “Yes, because in the pursuit of knowledge you may do as you please.” Just as even the stupidest people say, in effect, “If you cannot attain to knowledge without burning your mother you must do without knowledge,” so the wisest people say, “If you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.”

A FALSE ALTERNATIVE

But in practice you cannot persuade any wise man that this alternative can ever be forced on anyone but a fool, or that a fool can be trusted to learn anything from any experiment, cruel or humane. The Chinaman who burnt down his house to roast his pig was no doubt honestly unable to conceive any less disastrous way of cooking his dinner; and the roast must have been spoiled after all (a perfect type of the average vivisectionist experiment); but this did not prove that the Chinaman was right: it only proved that the Chinaman was an incapable cook and, fundamentally, a fool.

Take another celebrated experiment: one in sanitary reform. In the days of Nero Rome was in the same predicament as London to-day. If some one would burn down London, and it were rebuilt, as it would now have to be, subject to the sanitary by-laws and Building Act provisions enforced by the London County Council, it would be enormously improved; and the average lifetime of Londoners would be considerably prolonged. Nero argued in the same way about Rome. He employed incendiaries to set it on fire; and he played the harp in scientific raptures whilst it was burning. I am so far of Nero’s way of thinking that I have often said, when consulted by despairing sanitary reformers, that what London needs to make her healthy is an earthquake. Why, then, it may be asked, do not I, as a public-spirited man, employ incendiaries to set it on fire, with a heroic disregard of the consequences to myself and others? Any vivisector would, if he had the courage of his opinions. The reasonable answer is that London can be made healthy without burning her down; and that as we have not enough civic virtue to make her healthy in a humane and economical way, we should not have enough to rebuild her in that way. In the old Hebrew legend, God lost patience with the world as Nero did with Rome, and drowned everybody except a single family. But the result was that the progeny of that family reproduced all the vices of their predecessors so exactly that the misery caused by the flood might just as well have been spared: things went on just as they did before. In the same way, the lists of diseases which vivisection claims to have cured is long; but the returns of the Registrar-General show that people still persist in dying of them as if vivisection had never been heard of. Any fool can burn down a city or cut an animal open; and an exceptionally foolish fool is quite likely to promise enormous benefits to the race as the result of such activities. But when the constructive, benevolent part of the business comes to be done, the same want of imagination, the same stupidity and cruelty, the same laziness and want of perseverance that prevented Nero or the vivisector from devising or pushing through humane methods, prevents him from bringing order out of the chaos and happiness out of the misery he has made. At one time it seemed reasonable enough to declare that it was impossible to find whether or not there was a stone inside a man’s body except by exploring it with a knife, or to find out what the sun is made of without visiting it in a balloon. Both these impossibilities have been achieved, but not by vivisectors. The Rontgen rays need not hurt the patient; and spectrum analysis involves no destruction. After such triumphs of humane experiment and reasoning, it is useless to assure us that there is no other key to knowledge except cruelty. When the vivisector offers us that assurance, we reply simply and contemptuously, “You mean that you are not clever or humane or energetic enough to find one.”

CRUELTY FOR ITS OWN SAKE

It will now, I hope, be clear why the attack on vivisection is not an attack on the right to knowledge: why, indeed, those who have the deepest conviction of the sacredness of that right are the leaders of the attack. No knowledge is finally impossible of human attainment; for even though it may be beyond our present capacity, the needed capacity is not unattainable. Consequently no method of investigation is the only method; and no law forbidding any particular method can cut us off from the knowledge we hope to gain by it. The only knowledge we lose by forbidding cruelty is knowledge at first hand of cruelty itself, which is precisely the knowledge humane people wish to be spared.

But the question remains: Do we all really wish to be spared that knowledge? Are humane methods really to be preferred to cruel ones? Even if the experiments come to nothing, may not their cruelty be enjoyed for its own sake, as a sensational luxury? Let us face these questions boldly, not shrinking from the fact that cruelty is one of the primitive pleasures of mankind, and that the detection of its Protean disguises as law, education, medicine, discipline, sport and so forth, is one of the most difficult of the unending tasks of the legislator.

OUR OWN CRUELTIES

At first blush it may seem not only unnecessary, but even indecent, to discuss such a proposition as the elevation of cruelty to the rank of a human right. Unnecessary, because no vivisector confesses to a love of cruelty for its own sake or claims any general fundamental right to be cruel. Indecent, because there is an accepted convention to repudiate cruelty; and vivisection is only tolerated by the law on condition that, like judicial torture, it shall be done as mercifully as the nature of the practice allows. But the moment the controversy becomes embittered, the recriminations bandied between the opposed parties bring us face-to-face with some very ugly truths. On one occasion I was invited to speak at a large Anti-Vivisection meeting in the Queen’s Hall in London. I found myself on the platform with fox hunters, tame stag hunters, men and women whose calendar was divided, not by pay days and quarter days, but by seasons for killing animals for sport: the fox, the hare, the otter, the partridge and the rest having each its appointed date for slaughter. The ladies among us wore hats and cloaks and head-dresses obtained by wholesale massacres, ruthless trappings, callous extermination of our fellow creatures. We insisted on our butchers supplying us with white veal, and were large and constant consumers of pate de foie gras; both comestibles being obtained by revolting methods. We sent our sons to public schools where indecent flogging is a recognized method of taming the young human animal. Yet we were all in hysterics of indignation at the cruelties of the vivisectors. These, if any were present, must have smiled sardonically at such inhuman humanitarians, whose daily habits and fashionable amusements cause more suffering in England in a week than all the vivisectors of Europe do in a year. I made a very effective speech, not exclusively against vivisection, but against cruelty; and I have never been asked to speak since by that Society, nor do I expect to be, as I should probably give such offence to its most affluent subscribers that its attempts to suppress vivisection would be seriously hindered. But that does not prevent the vivisectors from freely using the “youre another” retort, and using it with justice.

We must therefore give ourselves no airs of superiority when denouncing the cruelties of vivisection. We all do just as horrible things, with even less excuse. But in making that admission we are also making short work of the virtuous airs with which we are sometimes referred to the humanity of the medical profession as a guarantee that vivisection is not abused — much as if our burglars should assure us that they arc too honest to abuse the practice of burgling. We are, as a matter of fact, a cruel nation; and our habit of disguising our vices by giving polite names to the offences we are determined to commit does not, unfortunately for my own comfort, impose on me. Vivisectors can hardly pretend to be better than the classes from which they are drawn, or those above them; and if these classes are capable of sacrificing animals in various cruel ways under cover of sport, fashion, education, discipline, and even, when the cruel sacrifices are human sacrifices, of political economy, it is idle for the vivisector to pretend that he is incapable of practising cruelty for pleasure or profit or both under the cloak of science. We are all tarred with the same brush; and the vivisectors are not slow to remind us of it, and to protest vehemently against being branded as exceptionally cruel and its devisors of horrible instruments of torture by people whose main notion of enjoyment is cruel sport, and whose requirements in the way of villainously cruel traps occupy pages of the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores.

THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CRUELTY

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage. Simple disgust at cruelty is very rare. The people who turn sick and faint and those who gloat are often alike in the pains they take to witness executions, floggings, operations or any other exhibitions of suffering, especially those involving bloodshed, blows, and laceration. A craze for cruelty can be developed just as a craze for drink can; and nobody who attempts to ignore cruelty as a possible factor in the attraction of vivisection and even of antivivisection, or in the credulity with which we accept its excuses, can be regarded as a scientific investigator of it. Those who accuse vivisectors of indulging the well-known passion of cruelty under the cloak of research are therefore putting forward a strictly scientific psychological hypothesis, which is also simple, human, obvious, and probable. It may be as wounding to the personal vanity of the vivisector as Darwin’s Origin of Species was to the people who could not bear to think that they were cousins to the monkeys (remember Goldsmith’s anger when he was told that he could not move his upper jaw); but science has to consider only the truth of the hypothesis, and not whether conceited people will like it or not. In vain do the sentimental champions of vivisection declare themselves the most humane of men, inflicting suffering only to relieve it, scrupulous in the use of anesthetics, and void of all passion except the passion of pity for a disease-ridden world. The really scientific investigator answers that the question cannot be settled by hysterical protestations, and that if the vivisectionist rejects deductive reasoning, he had better clear his character by his own favorite method of experiment.

SUGGESTED LABORATORY TESTS OF THE VIVISECTOR’S EMOTIONS

Take the hackneyed case of the Italian who tortured mice, ostensibly to find out about the effects of pain rather less than the nearest dentist could have told him, and who boasted of the ecstatic sensations (he actually used the word love) with which he carried out his experiments. Or the gentleman who starved sixty dogs to death to establish the fact that a dog deprived of food gets progressively lighter and weaker, becoming remarkably emaciated, and finally dying: an undoubted truth, but ascertainable without laboratory experiments by a simple enquiry addressed to the nearest policeman, or, failing him, to any sane person in Europe. The Italian is diagnosed as a cruel voluptuary: the dog-starver is passed over as such a hopeless fool that it is impossible to take any interest in him. Why not test the diagnosis scientifically? Why not perform a careful series of experiments on persons under the influence of voluptuous ecstasy, so as to ascertain its physiological symptoms? Then perform a second series on persons engaged in mathematical work or machine designing, so as to ascertain the symptoms of cold scientific activity? Then note the symptoms of a vivisector performing a cruel experiment; and compare them with the voluptuary symptoms and the mathematical symptoms? Such experiments would be quite as interesting and important as any yet undertaken by the vivisectors. They might open a line of investigation which would finally make, for instance, the ascertainment of the guilt or innocence of an accused person a much exacter process than the very fallible methods of our criminal courts. But instead of proposing such an investigation, our vivisectors offer us all the pious protestations and all the huffy recriminations that any common unscientific mortal offers when he is accused of unworthy conduct.

ROUTINE

Yet most vivisectors would probably come triumphant out of such a series of experiments, because vivisection is now a routine, like butchering or hanging or flogging; and many of the men who practise it do so only because it has been established as part of the profession they have adopted. Far from enjoying it, they have simply overcome their natural repugnance and become indifferent to it, as men inevitably become indifferent to anything they do often enough. It is this dangerous power of custom that makes it so difficult to convince the common sense of mankind that any established commercial or professional practice has its root in passion. Let a routine once spring from passion, and you will presently find thousands of routineers following it passionlessly for a livelihood. Thus it always seems strained to speak of the religious convictions of a clergyman, because nine out of ten clergymen have no religions convictions: they are ordinary officials carrying on a routine of baptizing, marrying, and churching; praying, reciting, and preaching; and, like solicitors or doctors, getting away from their duties with relief to hunt, to garden, to keep bees, to go into society, and the like. In the same way many people do cruel and vile things without being in the least cruel or vile, because the routine to which they have been brought up is superstitiously cruel and vile. To say that every man who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs a pupil is a conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of flagellation among people who not only do not lust after it, but who hit the harder because they are angry at having to perform an uncomfortable duty. These people will beat merely to assert their authority, or to carry out what they conceive to be a divine order on the strength of the precept of Solomon recorded in the Bible, which carefully adds that Solomon completely spoilt his own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will cut a calf’s throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly to death because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its being white; or as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and stuffs it with food because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails of dogs and horses. Let cruelty or kindness or anything else once become customary and it will be practised by people to whom it is not at all natural, but whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else does, and who would lose their employment and starve if they indulged in any peculiarity. A respectable man will lie daily, in speech and in print, about the qualities of the article he lives by selling, because it is customary to do so. He will flog his boy for telling a lie, because it is customary to do so. He will also flog him for not telling a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment or independent action.

Just so do we find a crowd of petty vivisectionists daily committing atrocities and stupidities, because it is the custom to do so. Vivisection is customary as part of the routine of preparing lectures in medical schools. For instance, there are two ways of making the action of the heart visible to students. One, a barbarous, ignorant, and thoughtless way, is to stick little flags into a rabbit’s heart and let the students see the flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious, well-informed, and instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the student’s wrist and let him see a record of his heart’s action traced by a needle on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not original enough to get out of their groove. Then there are the demonstrations which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors. The most humane man, however repugnant the operation may be to him at first, cannot do it at lecture after lecture for months without finally — and that very soon — feeling no more for the frog than if he were cutting up pieces of paper. Such clumsy and lazy ways of teaching are based on the cheapness of frogs and rabbits. If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers would not only be taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of their parts: they would also have machines misused and wrecked before them so that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes, and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations. Thus we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of vivisection which soon produces complete indifference to it on the part even of those who are naturally humane. If they pass on from the routine of lecture preparation, not into general practice, but into research work, they carry this acquired indifference with them into the laboratory, where any atrocity is possible, because all atrocities satisfy curiosity. The routine man is in the majority in his profession always: consequently the moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of the public, which sees that the average doctor is much too commonplace and decent a person to be capable of passionate wickedness of any kind.

Here then, we have in vivisection, as in all the other tolerated and instituted cruelties, this anti-climax: that only a negligible percentage of those who practise and consequently defend it get any satisfaction out of it. As in Mr. Galsworthy’s play Justice the useless and detestable torture of solitary imprisonment is shown at its worst without the introduction of a single cruel person into the drama, so it would be possible to represent all the torments of vivisection dramatically without introducing a single vivisector who had not felt sick at his first experience in the laboratory. Not that this can exonerate any vivisector from suspicion of enjoying his work (or her work: a good deal of the vivisection in medical schools is done by women). In every autobiography which records a real experience of school or prison life, we find that here and there among the routineers there is to be found the genuine amateur, the orgiastic flogging schoolmaster or the nagging warder, who has sought out a cruel profession for the sake of its cruelty. But it is the genuine routineer who is the bulwark of the practice, because, though you can excite public fury against a Sade, a Bluebeard, or a Nero, you cannot rouse any feeling against dull Mr. Smith doing his duty: that is, doing the usual thing. He is so obviously no better and no worse than anyone else that it is difficult to conceive that the things he does are abominable. If you would see public dislike surging up in a moment against an individual, you must watch one who does something unusual, no matter how sensible it may be. The name of Jonas Hanway lives as that of a brave man because he was the first who dared to appear in the streets of this rainy island with an umbrella.

THE OLD LINE BETWEEN MAN AND BEAST

But there is still a distinction to be clung to by those who dare not tell themselves the truth about the medical profession because they are so helplessly dependent on it when death threatens the household. That distinction is the line that separates the brute from the man in the old classification. Granted, they will plead, that we are all cruel; yet the tame-stag-hunter does not hunt men; and the sportsman who lets a leash of greyhounds loose on a hare would be horrified at the thought of letting them loose on a human child. The lady who gets her cloak by flaying a sable does not flay a negro; nor does it ever occur to her that her veal cutlet might be improved on by a slice of tender baby.

Now there was a time when some trust could be placed in this distinction. The Roman Catholic Church still maintains, with what it must permit me to call a stupid obstinacy, and in spite of St. Francis and St. Anthony, that animals have no souls and no rights; so that you cannot sin against an animal, or against God by anything you may choose to do to an animal. Resisting the temptation to enter on an argument as to whether you may not sin against your own soul if you are unjust or cruel to the least of those whom St. Francis called his little brothers, I have only to point out here that nothing could be more despicably superstitious in the opinion of a vivisector than the notion that science recognizes any such step in evolution as the step from a physical organism to an immortal soul. That conceit has been taken out of all our men of science, and out of all our doctors, by the evolutionists; and when it is considered how completely obsessed biological science has become in our days, not by the full scope of evolution, but by that particular method of it which has neither sense nor purpose nor life nor anything human, much less godlike, in it: by the method, that is, of so-called Natural Selection (meaning no selection at all, but mere dead accident and luck), the folly of trusting to vivisectors to hold the human animal any more sacred than the other animals becomes so clear that it would be waste of time to insist further on it. As a matter of fact the man who once concedes to the vivisector the right to put a dog outside the laws of honor and fellowship, concedes to him also the right to put himself outside them; for he is nothing to the vivisector but a more highly developed, and consequently more interesting-to-experiment-on vertebrate than the dog.

VIVISECTING THE HUMAN SUBJECT

I have in my hand a printed and published account by a doctor of how he tested his remedy for pulmonary tuberculosis, which was to inject a powerful germicide directly into the circulation by stabbing a vein with a syringe. He was one of those doctors who are able to command public sympathy by saying, quite truly, that when they discovered that the proposed treatment was dangerous, they experimented thenceforth on themselves. In this case the doctor was devoted enough to carry his experiments to the point of running serious risks, and actually making himself very uncomfortable. But he did not begin with himself. His first experiment was on two hospital patients. On receiving a message from the hospital to the effect that these two martyrs to therapeutic science had all but expired in convulsions, he experimented on a rabbit, which instantly dropped dead. It was then, and not until then, that he began to experiment on himself, with the germicide modified in the direction indicated by the experiments made on the two patients and the rabbit. As a good many people countenance vivisection because they fear that if the experiments are not made on rabbits they will be made on themselves, it is worth noting that in this case, where both rabbits and men were equally available, the men, being, of course, enormously more instructive, and costing nothing, were experimented on first. Once grant the ethics of the vivisectionists and you not only sanction the experiment on the human subject, but make it the first duty of the vivisector. If a guinea pig may be sacrificed for the sake of the very little that can be learnt from it, shall not a man be sacrificed for the sake of the great deal that can be learnt from him? At all events, he is sacrificed, as this typical case shows. I may add (not that it touches the argument) that the doctor, the patients, and the rabbit all suffered in vain, as far as the hoped-for rescue of the race from pulmonary consumption is concerned.

“THE LIE IS A EUROPEAN POWER”

Now at the very time when the lectures describing these experiments were being circulated in print and discussed eagerly by the medical profession, the customary denials that patients are experimented on were as loud, as indignant, as high-minded as ever, in spite of the few intelligent doctors who point out rightly that all treatments are experiments on the patient. And this brings us to an obvious but mostly overlooked weakness in the vivisector’s position: that is, his inevitable forfeiture of all claim to have his word believed. It is hardly to be expected that a man who does not hesitate to vivisect for the sake of science will hesitate to lie about it afterwards to protect it from what he deems the ignorant sentimentality of the laity. When the public conscience stirs uneasily and threatens suppression, there is never wanting some doctor of eminent position and high character who will sacrifice himself devotedly to the cause of science by coming forward to assure the public on his honor that all experiments on animals are completely painless; although he must know that the very experiments which first provoked the antivivisection movement by their atrocity were experiments to ascertain the physiological effects of the sensation of extreme pain (the much more interesting physiology of pleasure remains uninvestigated) and that all experiments in which sensation is a factor are voided by its suppression. Besides, vivisection may be painless in cases where the experiments are very cruel. If a person scratches me with a poisoned dagger so gently that I do not feel the scratch, he has achieved a painless vivisection; but if I presently die in torment I am not likely to consider that his humility is amply vindicated by his gentleness. A cobra’s bite hurts so little that the creature is almost, legally speaking, a vivisector who inflicts no pain. By giving his victims chloroform before biting them he could comply with the law completely.

Here, then, is a pretty deadlock. Public support of vivisection is founded almost wholly on the assurances of the vivisectors that great public benefits may be expected from the practice. Not for a moment do I suggest that such a defence would be valid even if proved. But when the witnesses begin by alleging that in the cause of science all the customary ethical obligations (which include the obligation to tell the truth) are suspended, what weight can any reasonable person give to their testimony? I would rather swear fifty lies than take an animal which had licked my hand in good fellowship and torture it. If I did torture the dog, I should certainly not have the face to turn round and ask how any person there suspect an honorable man like myself of telling lies. Most sensible and humane people would, I hope, reply flatly that honorable men do not behave dishonorably, even to dogs. The murderer who, when asked by the chaplain whether he had any other crimes to confess, replied indignantly, “What do you take me for?” reminds us very strongly of the vivisectors who are so deeply hurt when their evidence is set aside as worthless.

AN ARGUMENT WHICH WOULD DEFEND ANY CRIME

The Achilles heel of vivisection, however, is not to be found in the pain it causes, but in the line of argument by which it is justified. The medical code regarding it is simply criminal anarchism at its very worst. Indeed no criminal has yet had the impudence to argue as every vivisector argues. No burglar contends that as it is admittedly important to have money to spend, and as the object of burglary is to provide the burglar with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men of honor. Again, has the silliest burglar ever pretended that to put a stop to burglary is to put a stop to industry? All the vivisections that have been performed since the world began have produced nothing so important as the innocent and honorable discovery of radiography; and one of the reasons why radiography was not discovered sooner was that the men whose business it was to discover new clinical methods were coarsening and stupefying themselves with the sensual villanies and cutthroat’s casuistries of vivisection. The law of the conservation of energy holds good in physiology as in other things: every vivisector is a deserter from the army of honorable investigators. But the vivisector does not see this. He not only calls his methods scientific: he contends that there are no other scientific methods. When you express your natural loathing for his cruelty and your natural contempt for his stupidity, he imagines that you are attacking science. Yet he has no inkling of the method and temper of science. The point at issue being plainly whether he is a rascal or not, he not only insists that the real point is whether some hotheaded antivivisectionist is a liar (which he proves by ridiculously unscientific assumptions as to the degree of accuracy attainable in human statement), but never dreams of offering any scientific evidence by his own methods.

There are many paths to knowledge already discovered; and no enlightened man doubts that there are many more waiting to be discovered. Indeed, all paths lead to knowledge; because even the vilest and stupidest action teaches us something about vileness and stupidity, and may accidentally teach us a good deal more: for instance, a cutthroat learns (and perhaps teaches) the anatomy of the carotid artery and jugular vein; and there can be no question that the burning of St. Joan of Arc must have been a most instructive and interesting experiment to a good observer, and could have been made more so if it had been carried out by skilled physiologists under laboratory conditions. The earthquake in San Francisco proved invaluable as an experiment in the stability of giant steel buildings; and the ramming of the Victoria by the Camperdown settled doubtful points of the greatest importance in naval warfare. According to vivisectionist logic our builders would be justified in producing artificial earthquakes with dynamite, and our admirals in contriving catastrophes at naval manoeuvres, in order to follow up the line of research thus accidentally discovered.

The truth is, if the acquisition of knowledge justifies every sort of conduct, it justifies any sort of conduct, from the illumination of Nero’s feasts by burning human beings alive (another interesting experiment) to the simplest act of kindness. And in the light of that truth it is clear that the exemption of the pursuit of knowledge from the laws of honor is the most hideous conceivable enlargement of anarchy; worse, by far, than an exemption of the pursuit of money or political power, since there can hardly be attained without some regard for at least the appearances of human welfare, whereas a curious devil might destroy the whole race in torment, acquiring knowledge all the time from his highly interesting experiment. There is more danger in one respectable scientist countenancing such a monstrous claim than in fifty assassins or dynamitards. The man who makes it is ethically imbecile; and whoever imagines that it is a scientific claim has not the faintest conception of what science means. The paths to knowledge are countless. One of these paths is a path through darkness, secrecy, and cruelty. When a man deliberately turns from all other paths and goes down that one, it is scientific to infer that what attracts him is not knowledge, since there are other paths to that, but cruelty. With so strong and scientific a case against him, it is childish for him to stand on his honor and reputation and high character and the credit of a noble profession and so forth: he must clear himself either by reason or by experiment, unless he boldly contends that evolution has retained a passion of cruelty in man just because it is indispensable to the fulness of his knowledge.

THOU ART THE MAN

I shall not be at all surprised if what I have written above has induced in sympathetic readers a transport of virtuous indignation at the expense of the medical profession. I shall not damp so creditable and salutary a sentiment; but I must point out that the guilt is shared by all of us. It is not in his capacity of healer and man of science that the doctor vivisects or defends vivisection, but in his entirely vulgar lay capacity. He is made of the same clay as the ignorant, shallow, credulous, half-miseducated, pecuniarily anxious people who call him in when they have tried in vain every bottle and every pill the advertizing druggist can persuade them to buy. The real remedy for vivisection is the remedy for all the mischief that the medical profession and all the other professions are doing: namely, more knowledge. The juries which send the poor Peculiars to prison, and give vivisectionists heavy damages against humane persons who accuse them of cruelty; the editors and councillors and student-led mobs who are striving to make Vivisection one of the watchwords of our civilization, are not doctors: they are the British public, all so afraid to die that they will cling frantically to any idol which promises to cure all their diseases, and crucify anyone who tells them that they must not only die when their time comes, but die like gentlemen. In their paroxysms of cowardice and selfishness they force the doctors to humor their folly and ignorance. How complete and inconsiderate their ignorance is can only be realized by those who have some knowledge of vital statistics, and of the illusions which beset Public Health legislation.

WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS AND WILL NOT GET

The demands of this poor public are not reasonable, but they are quite simple. It dreads disease and desires to be protected against it. But it is poor and wants to be protected cheaply. Scientific measures are too hard to understand, too costly, too clearly tending towards a rise in the rates and more public interference with the insanitary, because insufficiently financed, private house. What the public wants, therefore, is a cheap magic charm to prevent, and a cheap pill or potion to cure, all disease. It forces all such charms on the doctors.

THE VACCINATION CRAZE

Thus it was really the public and not the medical profession that took up vaccination with irresistible faith, sweeping the invention out of Jenner’s hand and establishing it in a form which he himself repudiated. Jenner was not a man of science; but he was not a fool; and when he found that people who had suffered from cowpox either by contagion in the milking shed or by vaccination, were not, as he had supposed, immune from smallpox, he ascribed the cases of immunity which had formerly misled him to a disease of the horse, which, perhaps because we do not drink its milk and eat its flesh, is kept at a greater distance in our imagination than our foster mother the cow. At all events, the public, which had been boundlessly credulous about the cow, would not have the horse on any terms; and to this day the law which prescribes Jennerian vaccination is carried out with an anti-Jennerian inoculation because the public would have it so in spite of Jenner. All the grossest lies and superstitions which have disgraced the vaccination craze were taught to the doctors by the public. It was not the doctors who first began to declare that all our old men remember the time when almost every face they saw in the street was horribly pitted with smallpox, and that all this disfigurement has vanished since the introduction of vaccination. Jenner himself alluded to this imaginary phenomenon before the introduction of vaccination, and attributed it to the older practice of smallpox inoculation, by which Voltaire, Catherine II. and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu so confidently expected to see the disease made harmless. It was not Jenner who set people declaring that smallpox, if not abolished by vaccination, had at least been made much milder: on the contrary, he recorded a pre-vaccination epidemic in which none of the persons attacked went to bed or considered themselves as seriously ill. Neither Jenner, nor any other doctor ever, as far as I know, inculcated the popular notion that everybody got smallpox as a matter of course before vaccination was invented. That doctors get infected with these delusions, and are in their unprofessional capacity as members of the public subject to them like other men, is true; but if we had to decide whether vaccination was first forced on the public by the doctors or on the doctors by the public, we should have to decide against the public.

STATISTICAL ILLUSIONS

Public ignorance of the laws of evidence and of statistics can hardly be exaggerated. There may be a doctor here and there who in dealing with the statistics of disease has taken at least the first step towards sanity by grasping the fact that as an attack of even the commonest disease is an exceptional event, apparently over-whelming statistical evidence in favor of any prophylactic can be produced by persuading the public that everybody caught the disease formerly. Thus if a disease is one which normally attacks fifteen per cent of the population, and if the effect of a prophylactic is actually to increase the proportion to twenty per cent, the publication of this figure of twenty per cent will convince the public that the prophylactic has reduced the percentage by eighty per cent instead of increasing it by five, because the public, left to itself and to the old gentlemen who are always ready to remember, on every possible subject, that things used to be much worse than they are now (such old gentlemen greatly outnumber the laudatores tempori acti), will assume that the former percentage was about 100. The vogue of the Pasteur treatment of hydrophobia, for instance, was due to the assumption by the public that every person bitten by a rabid dog necessarily got hydrophobia. I myself heard hydrophobia discussed in my youth by doctors in Dublin before a Pasteur Institute existed, the subject having been brought forward there by the scepticism of an eminent surgeon as to whether hydrophobia is really a specific disease or only ordinary tetanus induced (as tetanus was then supposed to be induced) by a lacerated wound. There were no statistics available as to the proportion of dog bites that ended in hydrophobia; but nobody ever guessed that the cases could be more than two or three per cent of the bites. On me, therefore, the results published by the Pasteur Institute produced no such effect as they did on the ordinary man who thinks that the bite of a mad dog means certain hydrophobia. It seemed to me that the proportion of deaths among the cases treated at the Institute was rather higher, if anything, than might have been expected had there been no Institute in existence. But to the public every Pasteur patient who did not die was miraculously saved from an agonizing death by the beneficent white magic of that most trusty of all wizards, the man of science.

Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters. Their attention is too much occupied with the cruder tricks of those who make a corrupt use of statistics for advertizing purposes. There is, for example, the percentage dodge. In some hamlet, barely large enough to have a name, two people are attacked during a smallpox epidemic. One dies: the other recovers. One has vaccination marks: the other has none. Immediately either the vaccinists or the antivaccinists publish the triumphant news that at such and such a place not a single vaccinated person died of smallpox whilst 100 per cent of the unvaccinated perished miserably; or, as the case may be, that 100 per cent of the unvaccinated recovered whilst the vaccinated succumbed to the last man. Or, to take another common instance, comparisons which are really comparisons between two social classes with different standards of nutrition and education are palmed off as comparisons between the results of a certain medical treatment and its neglect. Thus it is easy to prove that the wearing of tall hats and the carrying of umbrellas enlarges the chest, prolongs life, and confers comparative immunity from disease; for the statistics show that the classes which use these articles are bigger, healthier, and live longer than the class which never dreams of possessing such things. It does not take much perspicacity to see that what really makes this difference is not the tall hat and the umbrella, but the wealth and nourishment of which they are evidence, and that a gold watch or membership of a club in Pall Mall might be proved in the same way to have the like sovereign virtues. A university degree, a daily bath, the owning of thirty pairs of trousers, a knowledge of Wagner’s music, a pew in church, anything, in short, that implies more means and better nurture than the mass of laborers enjoy, can be statistically palmed off as a magic-spell conferring all sorts of privileges.

In the case of a prophylactic enforced by law, this illusion is intensified grotesquely, because only vagrants can evade it. Now vagrants have little power of resisting any disease: their death rate and their case-mortality rate is always high relatively to that of respectable folk. Nothing is easier, therefore, than to prove that compliance with any public regulation produces the most gratifying results. It would be equally easy even if the regulation actually raised the death-rate, provided it did not raise it sufficiently to make the average householder, who cannot evade regulations, die as early as the average vagrant who can.

THE SURPRISES OF ATTENTION AND NEGLECT

There is another statistical illusion which is independent of class differences. A common complaint of houseowners is that the Public Health Authorities frequently compel them to instal costly sanitary appliances which are condemned a few years later as dangerous to health, and forbidden under penalties. Yet these discarded mistakes are always made in the first instance on the strength of a demonstration that their introduction has reduced the death-rate. The explanation is simple. Suppose a law were made that every child in the nation should be compelled to drink a pint of brandy per month, but that the brandy must be administered only when the child was in good health, with its digestion and so forth working normally, and its teeth either naturally or artificially sound. Probably the result would be an immediate and startling reduction in child mortality, leading to further legislation increasing the quantity of brandy to a gallon. Not until the brandy craze had been carried to a point at which the direct harm done by it would outweigh the incidental good, would an anti-brandy party be listened to. That incidental good would be the substitution of attention to the general health of children for the neglect which is now the rule so long as the child is not actually too sick to run about and play as usual. Even if this attention were confined to the children’s teeth, there would be an improvement which it would take a good deal of brandy to cancel.

This imaginary case explains the actual case of the sanitary appliances which our local sanitary authorities prescribe today and condemn tomorrow. No sanitary contrivance which the mind of even the very worst plumber can devize could be as disastrous as that total neglect for long periods which gets avenged by pestilences that sweep through whole continents, like the black death and the cholera. If it were proposed at this time of day to discharge all the sewage of London crude and untreated into the Thames, instead of carrying it, after elaborate treatment, far out into the North Sea, there would be a shriek of horror from all our experts. Yet if Cromwell had done that instead of doing nothing, there would probably have been no Great Plague of London. When the Local Health Authority forces every householder to have his sanitary arrangements thought about and attended to by somebody whose special business it is to attend to such things, then it matters not how erroneous or even directly mischievous may be the specific measures taken: the net result at first is sure to be an improvement. Not until attention has been effectually substituted for neglect as the general rule, will the statistics begin to show the merits of the particular methods of attention adopted. And as we are far from having arrived at this stage, being as to health legislation only at the beginning of things, we have practically no evidence yet as to the value of methods. Simple and obvious as this is, nobody seems as yet to discount the effect of substituting attention for neglect in drawing conclusions from health statistics. Everything is put to the credit of the particular method employed, although it may quite possibly be raising the death rate by five per thousand whilst the attention incidental to it is reducing the death rate fifteen per thousand. The net gain of ten per thousand is credited to the method, and made the excuse for enforcing more of it.

STEALING CREDIT FROM CIVILIZATION

There is yet another way in which specifics which have no merits at all, either direct or incidental, may be brought into high repute by statistics. For a century past civilization has been cleaning away the conditions which favor bacterial fevers. Typhus, once rife, has vanished: plague and cholera have been stopped at our frontiers by a sanitary blockade. We still have epidemics of smallpox and typhoid; and diphtheria and scarlet fever are endemic in the slums. Measles, which in my childhood was not regarded as a dangerous disease, has now become so mortal that notices are posted publicly urging parents to take it seriously. But even in these cases the contrast between the death and recovery rates in the rich districts and in the poor ones has led to the general conviction among experts that bacterial diseases are preventable; and they already are to a large extent prevented. The dangers of infection and the way to avoid it are better understood than they used to be. It is barely twenty years since people exposed themselves recklessly to the infection of consumption and pneumonia in the belief that these diseases were not “catching.” Nowadays the troubles of consumptive patients are greatly increased by the growing disposition to treat them as lepers. No doubt there is a good deal of ignorant exaggeration and cowardly refusal to face a human and necessary share of the risk. That has always been the case. We now know that the medieval horror of leprosy was out of all proportion to the danger of infection, and was accompanied by apparent blindness to the infectiousness of smallpox, which has since been worked up by our disease terrorists into the position formerly held by leprosy. But the scare of infection, though it sets even doctors talking as if the only really scientific thing to do with a fever patient is to throw him into the nearest ditch and pump carbolic acid on him from a safe distance until he is ready to be cremated on the spot, has led to much greater care and cleanliness. And the net result has been a series of victories over disease.

Now let us suppose that in the early nineteenth century somebody had come forward with a theory that typhus fever always begins in the top joint of the little finger; and that if this joint be amputated immediately after birth, typhus fever will disappear. Had such a suggestion been adopted, the theory would have been triumphantly confirmed; for as a matter of fact, typhus fever has disappeared. On the other hand cancer and madness have increased (statistically) to an appalling extent. The opponents of the little finger theory would therefore be pretty sure to allege that the amputations were spreading cancer and lunacy. The vaccination controversy is full of such contentions. So is the controversy as to the docking of horses’ tails and the cropping of dogs’ ears. So is the less widely known controversy as to circumcision and the declaring certain kinds of flesh unclean by the Jews. To advertize any remedy or operation, you have only to pick out all the most reassuring advances made by civilization, and boldly present the two in the relation of cause and effect: the public will swallow the fallacy without a wry face. It has no idea of the need for what is called a control experiment. In Shakespear’s time and for long after it, mummy was a favorite medicament. You took a pinch of the dust of a dead Egyptian in a pint of the hottest water you could bear to drink; and it did you a great deal of good. This, you thought, proved what a sovereign healer mummy was. But if you had tried the control experiment of taking the hot water without the mummy, you might have found the effect exactly the same, and that any hot drink would have done as well.

BIOMETRIKA

Another difficulty about statistics is the technical difficulty of calculation. Before you can even make a mistake in drawing your conclusion from the correlations established by your statistics you must ascertain the correlations. When I turn over the pages of Biometrika, a quarterly journal in which is recorded the work done in the field of biological statistics by Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues, I am out of my depth at the first line, because mathematics are to me only a concept: I never used a logarithm in my life, and could not undertake to extract the square root of four without misgiving. I am therefore unable to deny that the statistical ascertainment of the correlations between one thing and another must be a very complicated and difficult technical business, not to be tackled successfully except by high mathematicians; and I cannot resist Professor Karl Pearson’s immense contempt for, and indignant sense of grave social danger in, the unskilled guesses of the ordinary sociologist.

Now the man in the street knows nothing of Biometrika: all he knows is that “you can prove anything by figures,” though he forgets this the moment figures are used to prove anything he wants to believe. If he did take in Biometrika he would probably become abjectly credulous as to all the conclusions drawn in it from the correlations so learnedly worked out; though the mathematician whose correlations would fill a Newton with admiration may, in collecting and accepting data and drawing conclusions from them, fall into quite crude errors by just such popular oversights as I have been describing.

PATIENT-MADE THERAPEUTICS

To all these blunders and ignorances doctors are no less subject than the rest of us. They are not trained in the use of evidence, nor in biometrics, nor in the psychology of human credulity, nor in the incidence of economic pressure. Further, they must believe, on the whole, what their patients believe, just as they must wear the sort of hat their patients wear. The doctor may lay down the law despotically enough to the patient at points where the patient’s mind is simply blank; but when the patient has a prejudice the doctor must either keep it in countenance or lose his patient. If people are persuaded that night air is dangerous to health and that fresh air makes them catch cold it will not be possible for a doctor to make his living in private practice if he prescribes ventilation. We have to go back no further than the days of The Pickwick Papers to find ourselves in a world where people slept in four-post beds with curtains drawn closely round to exclude as much air as possible. Had Mr. Pickwick’s doctor told him that he would be much healthier if he slept on a camp bed by an open window, Mr. Pickwick would have regarded him as a crank and called in another doctor. Had he gone on to forbid Mr. Pickwick to drink brandy and water whenever he felt chilly, and assured him that if he were deprived of meat or salt for a whole year, he would not only not die, but would be none the worse, Mr. Pickwick would have fled from his presence as from that of a dangerous madman. And in these matters the doctor cannot cheat his patient. If he has no faith in drugs or vaccination, and the patient has, he can cheat him with colored water and pass his lancet through the flame of a spirit lamp before scratching his arm. But he cannot make him change his daily habits without knowing it.

THE REFORMS ALSO COME FROM THE LAITY

In the main, then, the doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them. That is why all the changes come from the laity. It was not until an agitation had been conducted for many years by laymen, including quacks and faddists of all kinds, that the public was sufficiently impressed to make it possible for the doctors to open their minds and their mouths on the subject of fresh air, cold water, temperance, and the rest of the new fashions in hygiene. At present the tables have been turned on many old prejudices. Plenty of our most popular elderly doctors believe that cold tubs in the morning are unnatural, exhausting, and rheumatic; that fresh air is a fad and that everybody is the better for a glass or two of port wine every day; but they no longer dare say as much until they know exactly where they are; for many very desirable patients in country houses have lately been persuaded that their first duty is to get up at six in the morning and begin the day by taking a walk barefoot through the dewy grass. He who shows the least scepticism as to this practice is at once suspected of being “an old-fashioned doctor,” and dismissed to make room for a younger man.

In short, private medical practice is governed not by science but by supply and demand; and however scientific a treatment may be, it cannot hold its place in the market if there is no demand for it; nor can the grossest quackery be kept off the market if there is a demand for it.

FASHIONS AND EPIDEMICS

A demand, however, can be inculcated. This is thoroughly understood by fashionable tradesmen, who find no difficulty in persuading their customers to renew articles that are not worn out and to buy things they do not want. By making doctors tradesmen, we compel them to learn the tricks of trade; consequently we find that the fashions of the year include treatments, operations, and particular drugs, as well as hats, sleeves, ballads, and games. Tonsils, vermiform appendices, uvulas, even ovaries are sacrificed because it is the fashion to get them cut out, and because the operations are highly profitable. The psychology of fashion becomes a pathology; for the cases have every air of being genuine: fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen, and therefore by doctors.

THE DOCTOR’S VIRTUES

It will be admitted that this is a pretty bad state of things. And the melodramatic instinct of the public, always demanding; that every wrong shall have, not its remedy, but its villain to be hissed, will blame, not its own apathy, superstition, and ignorance, but the depravity of the doctors. Nothing could be more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during the performances of The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate incapable, and all the doctors “angels.” But I did not go beyond the warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous powers and knowledge attributed to them); and though I know that there are medical blackguards as well as military, legal, and clerical blackguards (one soon finds that out when one is privileged to hear doctors talking shop among themselves), the fact that I was no more at a loss for private medical advice and attendance when I had not a penny in my pocket than I was later on when I could afford fees on the highest scale, has made it impossible for me to share that hostility to the doctor as a man which exists and is growing as an inevitable result of the present condition of medical practice. Not that the interest in disease and aberrations which turns some men and women to medicine and surgery is not sometimes as morbid as the interest in misery and vice which turns some others to philanthropy and “rescue work.” But the true doctor is inspired by a hatred of ill-health, and a divine impatience of any waste of vital forces. Unless a man is led to medicine or surgery through a very exceptional technical aptitude, or because doctoring is a family tradition, or because he regards it unintelligently as a lucrative and gentlemanly profession, his motives in choosing the career of a healer are clearly generous. However actual practice may disillusion and corrupt him, his selection in the first instance is not a selection of a base character.

THE DOCTOR’S HARDSHIPS

A review of the counts in the indictment I have brought against private medical practice will show that they arise out of the doctor’s position as a competitive private tradesman: that is, out of his poverty and dependence. And it should be borne in mind that doctors are expected to treat other people specially well whilst themselves submitting to specially inconsiderate treatment. The butcher and baker are not expected to feed the hungry unless the hungry can pay; but a doctor who allows a fellow-creature to suffer or perish without aid is regarded as a monster. Even if we must dismiss hospital service as really venal, the fact remains that most doctors do a good deal of gratuitous work in private practice all through their careers. And in his paid work the doctor is on a different footing to the tradesman. Although the articles he sells, advice and treatment, are the same for all classes, his fees have to be graduated like the income tax. The successful fashionable doctor may weed his poorer patients out from time to time, and finally use the College of Physicians to place it out of his own power to accept low fees; but the ordinary general practitioner never makes out his bills without considering the taxable capacity of his patients.

Then there is the disregard of his own health and comfort which results from the fact that he is, by the nature of his work, an emergency man. We are polite and considerate to the doctor when there is nothing the matter, and we meet him as a friend or entertain him as a guest; but when the baby is suffering from croup, or its mother has a temperature of 104 degrees, or its grandfather has broken his leg, nobody thinks of the doctor except as a healer and saviour. He may be hungry, weary, sleepy, run down by several successive nights disturbed by that instrument of torture, the night bell; but who ever thinks of this in the face of sudden sickness or accident? We think no more of the condition of a doctor attending a case than of the condition of a fireman at a fire. In other occupations night-work is specially recognized and provided for. The worker sleeps all day; has his breakfast in the evening; his lunch or dinner at midnight; his dinner or supper before going to bed in the morning; and he changes to day-work if he cannot stand night-work. But a doctor is expected to work day and night. In practices which consist largely of workmen’s clubs, and in which the patients are therefore taken on wholesale terms and very numerous, the unfortunate assistant, or the principal if he has no assistant, often does not undress, knowing that he will be called up before he has snatched an hour’s sleep. To the strain of such inhuman conditions must be added the constant risk of infection. One wonders why the impatient doctors do not become savage and unmanageable, and the patient ones imbecile. Perhaps they do, to some extent. And the pay is wretched, and so uncertain that refusal to attend without payment in advance becomes often a necessary measure of self-defence, whilst the County Court has long ago put an end to the tradition that the doctor’s fee is an honorarium. Even the most eminent physicians, as such biographies as those of Paget show, are sometimes miserably, inhumanly poor until they are past their prime. In short, the doctor needs our help for the moment much more than we often need his. The ridicule of Moliere, the death of a well-informed and clever writer like the late Harold Frederic in the hands of Christian Scientists (a sort of sealing with his blood of the contemptuous disbelief in and dislike of doctors he had bitterly expressed in his books), the scathing and quite justifiable exposure of medical practice in the novel by Mr. Maarten Maartens entitled The New Religion: all these trouble the doctor very little, and are in any case well set off by the popularity of Sir Luke Fildes’ famous picture, and by the verdicts in which juries from time to time express their conviction that the doctor can do no wrong. The real woes of the doctor are the shabby coat, the wolf at the door, the tyranny of ignorant patients, the work-day of 24 hours, and the uselessness of honestly prescribing what most of the patients really need: that is, not medicine, but money.

THE PUBLIC DOCTOR

What then is to be done?

Fortunately we have not to begin absolutely from the beginning: we already have, in the Medical Officer of Health, a sort of doctor who is free from the worst hardships, and consequently from the worst vices, of the private practitioner. His position depends, not on the number of people who are ill, and whom he can keep ill, but on the number of people who are well. He is judged, as all doctors and treatments should be judged, by the vital statistics of his district. When the death rate goes up his credit goes down. As every increase in his salary depends on the issue of a public debate as to the health of the constituency under his charge, he has every inducement to strive towards the ideal of a clean bill of health. He has a safe, dignified, responsible, independent position based wholly on the public health; whereas the private practitioner has a precarious, shabby-genteel, irresponsible, servile position, based wholly on the prevalence of illness.

It is true, there are grave scandals in the public medical service. The public doctor may be also a private practitioner eking out his earnings by giving a little time to public work for a mean payment. There are cases in which the position is one which no successful practitioner will accept, and where, therefore, incapables or drunkards get automatically selected for the post, faute de mieux; but even in these cases the doctor is less disastrous in his public capacity than in his private one: besides, the conditions which produce these bad cases are doomed, as the evil is now recognized and understood. A popular but unstable remedy is to enable local authorities, when they are too small to require the undivided time of such men as the Medical Officers of our great municipalities, to combine for public health purposes so that each may share the services of a highly paid official of the best class; but the right remedy is a larger area as the sanitary unit.

MEDICAL ORGANIZATION

Another advantage of public medical work is that it admits of organization, and consequently of the distribution of the work in such a manner as to avoid wasting the time of highly qualified experts on trivial jobs. The individualism of private practice leads to an appalling waste of time on trifles. Men whose dexterity as operators or almost divinatory skill in diagnosis are constantly needed for difficult cases, are poulticing whitlows, vaccinating, changing unimportant dressings, prescribing ether drams for ladies with timid leanings towards dipsomania, and generally wasting their time in the pursuit of private fees. In no other profession is the practitioner expected to do all the work involved in it from the first day of his professional career to the last as the doctor is. The judge passes sentence of death; but he is not expected to hang the criminal with his own hands, as he would be if the legal profession were as unorganized as the medical. The bishop is not expected to blow the organ or wash the baby he baptizes. The general is not asked to plan a campaign or conduct a battle at half-past twelve and to play the drum at half-past two. Even if they were, things would still not be as bad as in the medical profession; for in it not only is the first-class man set to do third-class work, but, what is much more terrifying, the third-class man is expected to do first-class work. Every general practitioner is supposed to be capable of the whole range of medical and surgical work at a moment’s notice; and the country doctor, who has not a specialist nor a crack consultant at the end of his telephone, often has to tackle without hesitation cases which no sane practitioner in a town would take in hand without assistance. No doubt this develops the resourcefulness of the country doctor, and makes him a more capable man than his suburban colleague; but it cannot develop the second-class man into a first-class one. If the practice of law not only led to a judge having to hang, but the hangman to judge, or if in the army matters were so arranged that it would be possible for the drummer boy to be in command at Waterloo whilst the Duke of Wellington was playing the drum in Brussels, we should not be consoled by the reflection that our hangmen were thereby made a little more judicial-minded, and our drummers more responsible, than in foreign countries where the legal and military professions recognized the advantages of division of labor.

Under such conditions no statistics as to the graduation of professional ability among doctors are available. Assuming that doctors are normal men and not magicians (and it is unfortunately very hard to persuade people to admit so much and thereby destroy the romance of doctoring) we may guess that the medical profession, like the other professions, consists of a small percentage of highly gifted persons at one end, and a small percentage of altogether disastrous duffers at the other. Between these extremes comes the main body of doctors (also, of course, with a weak and a strong end) who can be trusted to work under regulations with more or less aid from above according to the gravity of the case. Or, to put it in terms of the cases, there are cases that present no difficulties, and can be dealt with by a nurse or student at one end of the scale, and cases that require watching and handling by the very highest existing skill at the other; whilst between come the great mass of cases which need visits from the doctor of ordinary ability and from the chiefs of the profession in the proportion of, say, seven to none, seven to one, three to one, one to one, or, for a day or two, none to one. Such a service is organized at present only in hospitals; though in large towns the practice of calling in the consultant acts, to some extent, as a substitute for it. But in the latter case it is quite unregulated except by professional etiquet, which, as we have seen, has for its object, not the health of the patient or of the community at large, but the protection of the doctor’s livelihood and the concealment of his errors. And as the consultant is an expensive luxury, he is a last resource rather, as he should be, than a matter of course, in all cases where the general practitioner is not equal to the occasion: a predicament in which a very capable man may find himself at any time through the cropping up of a case of which he has had no clinical experience.

THE SOCIAL SOLUTION OF THE MEDICAL PROBLEM

The social solution of the medical problem, then, depends on that large, slowly advancing, pettishly resisted integration of society called generally Socialism. Until the medical profession becomes a body of men trained and paid by the country to keep the country in health it will remain what it is at present: a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering. Already our M.O.H.s (Medical Officers of Health) are in the new position: what is lacking is appreciation of the change, not only by the public but by the private doctors. For, as we have seen, when one of the first-rate posts becomes vacant in one of the great cities, and all the leading M.O.H.s compete for it, they must appeal to the good health of the cities of which they have been in charge, and not to the size of the incomes the local private doctors are making out of the ill-health of their patients. If a competitor can prove that he has utterly ruined every sort of medical private practice in a large city except obstetric practice and the surgery of accidents, his claims are irresistible; and this is the ideal at which every M.O.H. should aim. But the profession at large should none the less welcome him and set its house in order for the social change which will finally be its own salvation. For the M.O.H. as we know him is only the beginning of that army of Public Hygiene which will presently take the place in general interest and honor now occupied by our military and naval forces. It is silly that an Englishman should be more afraid of a German soldier than of a British disease germ, and should clamor for more barracks in the same newspapers that protest against more school clinics, and cry out that if the State fights disease for us it makes us paupers, though they never say that if the State fights the Germans for us it makes us cowards. Fortunately, when a habit of thought is silly it only needs steady treatment by ridicule from sensible and witty people to be put out of countenance and perish. Every year sees an increase in the number of persons employed in the Public Health Service, who would formerly have been mere adventurers in the Private Illness Service. To put it another way, a host of men and women who have now a strong incentive to be mischievous and even murderous rogues will have a much stronger, because a much honester, incentive to be not only good citizens but active benefactors to the community. And they will have no anxiety whatever about their incomes.

THE FUTURE OF PRIVATE PRACTICE

It must not be hastily concluded that this involves the extinction of the private practitioner. What it will really mean for him is release from his present degrading and scientifically corrupting slavery to his patients. As I have already shown the doctor who has to live by pleasing his patients in competition with everybody who has walked the hospitals, scraped through the examinations, and bought a brass plate, soon finds himself prescribing water to teetotallers and brandy or champagne jelly to drunkards; beefsteaks and stout in one house, and “uric acid free” vegetarian diet over the way; shut windows, big fires, and heavy overcoats to old Colonels, and open air and as much nakedness as is compatible with decency to young faddists, never once daring to say either “I don’t know,” or “I don’t agree.” For the strength of the doctor’s, as of every other man’s position when the evolution of social organization at last reaches his profession, will be that he will always have open to him the alternative of public employment when the private employer becomes too tyrannous. And let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee. No doubt doctors who are in great demand can be as high-handed and independent as employees are in all classes when a dearth in their labor market makes them indispensable; but the average doctor is not in this position: he is struggling for life in an overcrowded profession, and knows well that “a good bedside manner” will carry him to solvency through a morass of illness, whilst the least attempt at plain dealing with people who are eating too much, or drinking too much, or frowsting too much (to go no further in the list of intemperances that make up so much of family life) would soon land him in the Bankruptcy Court.

Private practice, thus protected, would itself protect individuals, as far as such protection is possible, against the errors and superstitions of State medicine, which are at worst no worse than the errors and superstitions of private practice, being, indeed, all derived from it. Such monstrosities as vaccination are, as we have seen, founded, not on science, but on half-crowns. If the Vaccination Acts, instead of being wholly repealed as they are already half repealed, were strengthened by compelling every parent to have his child vaccinated by a public officer whose salary was completely independent of the number of vaccinations performed by him, and for whom there was plenty of alternative public health work waiting, vaccination would be dead in two years, as the vaccinator would not only not gain by it, but would lose credit through the depressing effects on the vital statistics of his district of the illness and deaths it causes, whilst it would take from him all the credit of that freedom from smallpox which is the result of good sanitary administration and vigilant prevention of infection. Such absurd panic scandals as that of the last London epidemic, where a fee of half-a-crown per re-vaccination produced raids on houses during the absence of parents, and the forcible seizure and re-vaccination of children left to answer the door, can be prevented simply by abolishing the half-crown and all similar follies, paying, not for this or that ceremony of witchcraft, but for immunity from disease, and paying, too, in a rational way. The officer with a fixed salary saves himself trouble by doing his business with the least possible interference with the private citizen. The man paid by the job loses money by not forcing his job on the public as often as possible without reference to its results.

THE TECHNICAL PROBLEM

As to any technical medical problem specially involved, there is none. If there were, I should not be competent to deal with it, as I am not a technical expert in medicine: I deal with the subject as an economist, a politician, and a citizen exercising my common sense. Everything that I have said applies equally to all the medical techniques, and will hold good whether public hygiene be based on the poetic fancies of Christian Science, the tribal superstitions of the druggist and the vivisector, or the best we can make of our real knowledge. But I may remind those who confusedly imagine that the medical problem is also the scientific problem, that all problems are finally scientific problems. The notion that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute metals, and enable us to live for ever. It may still be necessary for some time to come to practise on popular credulity, popular love and dread of the marvellous, and popular idolatry, to induce the poor to comply with the sanitary regulations they are too ignorant to understand. As I have elsewhere confessed, I have myself been responsible for ridiculous incantations with burning sulphur, experimentally proved to be quite useless, because poor people are convinced, by the mystical air of the burning and the horrible smell, that it exorcises the demons of smallpox and scarlet fever and makes it safe for them to return to their houses. To assure them that the real secret is sunshine and soap is only to convince them that you do not care whether they live or die, and wish to save money at their expense. So you perform the incantation; and back they go to their houses, satisfied. A religious ceremony — a poetic blessing of the threshold, for instance — would be much better; but unfortunately our religion is weak on the sanitary side. One of the worst misfortunes of Christendom was that reaction against the voluptuous bathing of the imperial Romans which made dirty habits a part of Christian piety, and in some unlucky places (the Sandwich Islands for example) made the introduction of Christianity also the introduction of disease, because the formulators of the superseded native religion, like Mahomet, had been enlightened enough to introduce as religious duties such sanitary measures as ablution and the most careful and reverent treatment of everything cast off by the human body, even to nail clippings and hairs; and our missionaries thoughtlessly discredited this godly doctrine without supplying its place, which was promptly taken by laziness and neglect. If the priests of Ireland could only be persuaded to teach their flocks that it is a deadly insult to the Blessed Virgin to place her image in a cottage that is not kept up to that high standard of Sunday cleanliness to which all her worshippers must believe she is accustomed, and to represent her as being especially particular about stables because her son was born in one, they might do more in one year than all the Sanitary Inspectors in Ireland could do in twenty; and they could hardly doubt that Our Lady would be delighted. Perhaps they do nowadays; for Ireland is certainly a transfigured country since my youth as far as clean faces and pinafores can transfigure it. In England, where so many of the inhabitants are too gross to believe in poetic faiths, too respectable to tolerate the notion that the stable at Bethany was a common peasant farmer’s stable instead of a first-rate racing one, and too savage to believe that anything can really cast out the devil of disease unless it be some terrifying hoodoo of tortures and stinks, the M.O.H. will no doubt for a long time to come have to preach to fools according to their folly, promising miracles, and threatening hideous personal consequences of neglect of by-laws and the like; therefore it will be important that every M.O.H. shall have, with his (or her) other qualifications, a sense of humor, lest (he or she) should come at last to believe all the nonsense that must needs be talked. But he must, in his capacity of an expert advising the authorities, keep the government itself free of superstition. If Italian peasants are so ignorant that the Church can get no hold of them except by miracles, why, miracles there must be. The blood of St. Januarius must liquefy whether the Saint is in the humor or not. To trick a heathen into being a dutiful Christian is no worse than to trick a whitewasher into trusting himself in a room where a smallpox patient has lain, by pretending to exorcise the disease with burning sulphur. But woe to the Church if in deceiving the peasant it also deceives itself; for then the Church is lost, and the peasant too, unless he revolt against it. Unless the Church works the pretended miracle painfully against the grain, and is continually urged by its dislike of the imposture to strive to make the peasant susceptible to the true reasons for behaving well, the Church will become an instrument of his corruption and an exploiter of his ignorance, and will find itself launched upon that persecution of scientific truth of which all priesthoods are accused and none with more justice than the scientific priesthood.

And here we come to the danger that terrifies so many of us: the danger of having a hygienic orthodoxy imposed on us. But we must face that: in such crowded and poverty ridden civilizations as ours any orthodoxy is better than laisser-faire. If our population ever comes to consist exclusively of well-to-do, highly cultivated, and thoroughly instructed free persons in a position to take care of themselves, no doubt they will make short work of a good deal of official regulation that is now of life-and-death necessity to us; but under existing circumstances, I repeat, almost any sort of attention that democracy will stand is better than neglect. Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. The one lesson that comes out of all our theorizing and experimenting is that there is only one really scientific progressive method; and that is the method of trial and error. If you come to that, what is laisser-faire but an orthodoxy? the most tyrannous and disastrous of all the orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.

THE LATEST THEORIES

Medical theories are so much a matter of fashion, and the most fertile of them are modified so rapidly by medical practice and biological research, which are international activities, that the play which furnishes the pretext for this preface is already slightly outmoded, though I believe it may be taken as a faithful record for the year (1906) in which it was begun. I must not expose any professional man to ruin by connecting his name with the entire freedom of criticism which I, as a layman, enjoy; but it will be evident to all experts that my play could not have been written but for the work done by Sir Almroth Wright in the theory and practice of securing immunization from bacterial diseases by the inoculation of “vaccines” made of their own bacteria: a practice incorrectly called vaccinetherapy (there is nothing vaccine about it) apparently because it is what vaccination ought to be and is not. Until Sir Almroth Wright, following up one of Metchnikoff’s most suggestive biological romances, discovered that the white corpuscles or phagocytes which attack and devour disease germs for us do their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them with a natural sauce which Sir Almroth named opsonin, and that our production of this condiment continually rises and falls rhythmically from negligibility to the highest efficiency, nobody had been able even to conjecture why the various serums that were from time to time introduced as having effected marvellous cures, presently made such direful havoc of some unfortunate patient that they had to be dropped hastily. The quantity of sturdy lying that was necessary to save the credit of inoculation in those days was prodigious; and had it not been for the devotion shown by the military authorities throughout Europe, who would order the entire disappearance of some disease from their armies, and bring it about by the simple plan of changing the name under which the cases were reported, or for our own Metropolitan Asylums Board, which carefully suppressed all the medical reports that revealed the sometimes quite appalling effects of epidemics of revaccination, there is no saying what popular reaction might not have taken place against the whole immunization movement in therapeutics.

The situation was saved when Sir Almroth Wright pointed out that if you inoculated a patient with pathogenic germs at a moment when his powers of cooking them for consumption by the phagocytes was receding to its lowest point, you would certainly make him a good deal worse and perhaps kill him, whereas if you made precisely the same inoculation when the cooking power was rising to one of its periodical climaxes, you would stimulate it to still further exertions and produce just the opposite result. And he invented a technique for ascertaining in which phase the patient happened to be at any given moment. The dramatic possibilities of this discovery and invention will be found in my play. But it is one thing to invent a technique: it is quite another to persuade the medical profession to acquire it. Our general practitioners, I gather, simply declined to acquire it, being mostly unable to afford either the acquisition or the practice of it when acquired. Something simple, cheap, and ready at all times for all comers, is, as I have shown, the only thing that is economically possible in general practice, whatever may be the case in Sir Almroth’s famous laboratory in St. Mary’s Hospital. It would have become necessary to denounce opsonin in the trade papers as a fad and Sir Almroth as a dangerous man if his practice in the laboratory had not led him to the conclusion that the customary inoculations were very much too powerful, and that a comparatively infinitesimal dose would not precipitate a negative phase of cooking activity, and might induce a positive one. And thus it happens that the refusal of our general practitioners to acquire the new technique is no longer quite so dangerous in practice as it was when The Doctor’s Dilemma was written: nay, that Sir Ralph Bloomfield Boningtons way of administering inoculations as if they were spoonfuls of squills may sometimes work fairly well. For all that, I find Sir Almroth Wright, on the 23rd May, 1910, warning the Royal Society of Medicine that “the clinician has not yet been prevailed upon to reconsider his position,” which means that the general practitioner (“the doctor,” as he is called in our homes) is going on just as he did before, and could not afford to learn or practice a new technique even if he had ever heard of it. To the patient who does not know about it he will say nothing. To the patient who does, he will ridicule it, and disparage Sir Almroth. What else can he do, except confess his ignorance and starve?

But now please observe how “the whirligig of time brings its revenges.” This latest discovery of the remedial virtue of a very, very tiny hair of the dog that bit you reminds us, not only of Arndt’s law of protoplasmic reaction to stimuli, according to which weak and strong stimuli provoke opposite reactions, but of Hahnemann’s homeopathy, which was founded on the fact alleged by Hahnemann that drugs which produce certain symptoms when taken in ordinary perceptible quantities, will, when taken in infinitesimally small quantities, provoke just the opposite symptoms; so that the drug that gives you a headache will also cure a headache if you take little enough of it. I have already explained that the savage opposition which homeopathy encountered from the medical profession was not a scientific opposition; for nobody seems to deny that some drugs act in the alleged manner. It was opposed simply because doctors and apothecaries lived by selling bottles and boxes of doctor’s stuff to be taken in spoonfuls or in pellets as large as peas; and people would not pay as much for drops and globules no bigger than pins’ heads. Nowadays, however, the more cultivated folk are beginning to be so suspicious of drugs, and the incorrigibly superstitious people so profusely supplied with patent medicines (the medical advice to take them being wrapped round the bottle and thrown in for nothing) that homeopathy has become a way of rehabilitating the trade of prescription compounding, and is consequently coming into professional credit. At which point the theory of opsonins comes very opportunely to shake hands with it.

Add to the newly triumphant homeopathist and the opsonist that other remarkable innovator, the Swedish masseur, who does not theorize about you, but probes you all over with his powerful thumbs until he finds out your sore spots and rubs them away, besides cheating you into a little wholesome exercise; and you have nearly everything in medical practice to-day that is not flat witchcraft or pure commercial exploitation of human credulity and fear of death. Add to them a good deal of vegetarian and teetotal controversy raging round a clamor for scientific eating and drinking, and resulting in little so far except calling digestion Metabolism and dividing the public between the eminent doctor who tells us that we do not eat enough fish, and his equally eminent colleague who warns us that a fish diet must end in leprosy, and you have all that opposes with any sort of countenance the rise of Christian Science with its cathedrals and congregations and zealots and miracles and cures: all very silly, no doubt, but sane and sensible, poetic and hopeful, compared to the pseudo science of the commercial general practitioner, who foolishly clamors for the prosecution and even the execution of the Christian Scientists when their patients die, forgetting the long death roll of his own patients.

By the time this preface is in print the kaleidoscope may have had another shake; and opsonin may have gone the way of phlogiston at the hands of its own restless discoverer. I will not say that Hahnemann may have gone the way of Diafoirus; for Diafoirus we have always with us. But we shall still pick up all our knowledge in pursuit of some Will o’ the Wisp or other. What is called science has always pursued the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone, and is just as busy after them to-day as ever it was in the days of Paracelsus. We call them by different names: Immunization or Radiology or what not; but the dreams which lure us into the adventures from which we learn are always at bottom the same. Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal. What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say “I know” instead of “I am learning,” and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. Such abominations as the Inquisition and the Vaccination Acts are possible only in the famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith that the unknown is greater than the known and is only the As Yet Unknown, and resolution to find a manly highway to it, have been forgotten in a paroxysm of littleness and terror in which nothing is active except concupiscence and the fear of death, playing on which any trader can filch a fortune, any blackguard gratify his cruelty, and any tyrant make us his slaves.

Lest this should seem too rhetorical a conclusion for our professional men of science, who are mostly trained not to believe anything unless it is worded in the jargon of those writers who, because they never really understand what they are trying to say, cannot find familiar words for it, and are therefore compelled to invent a new language of nonsense for every book they write, let me sum up my conclusions as dryly as is consistent with accurate thought and live conviction.

1. Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.

2. Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

3. Remember that an illness is a misdemeanor; and treat the doctor as an accessory unless he notifies every case to the Public Health authority.

4. Treat every death as a possible and under our present system a probable murder, by making it the subject of a reasonably conducted inquest; and execute the doctor, if necessary, as a doctor, by striking him off the register.

5. Make up your mind how many doctors the community needs to keep it well. Do not register more or less than this number; and let registration constitute the doctor a civil servant with a dignified living wage paid out of public funds.

6. Municipalize Harley Street.

7. Treat the private operator exactly as you would treat a private executioner.

8. Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.

9. Keep the public carefully informed, by special statistics and announcements of individual cases, of all illnesses of doctors or in their families.

10. Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words “Remember that I too am mortal.”

11. In legislation and social organization, proceed on the principle that invalids, meaning persons who cannot keep themselves alive by their own activities, cannot, beyond reason, expect to be kept alive by the activity of others. There is a point at which the most energetic policeman or doctor, when called upon to deal with an apparently drowned person, gives up artificial respiration, although it is never possible to declare with certainty, at any point short of decomposition, that another five minutes of the exercise would not effect resuscitation. The theory that every individual alive is of infinite value is legislatively impracticable. No doubt the higher the life we secure to the individual by wise social organization, the greater his value is to the community, and the more pains we shall take to pull him through any temporary danger or disablement. But the man who costs more than he is worth is doomed by sound hygiene as inexorably as by sound economics.

12. Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

13. Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.

14. Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up. This means that your mother must have a good doctor. Be careful to go to a school where there is what they call a school clinic, where your nutrition and teeth and eyesight and other matters of importance to you will be attended to. Be particularly careful to have all this done at the expense of the nation, as otherwise it will not be done at all, the chances being about forty to one against your being able to pay for it directly yourself, even if you know how to set about it. Otherwise you will be what most people are at present: an unsound citizen of an unsound nation, without sense enough to be ashamed or unhappy about it.

ACT I

On the 15th June 1903, in the early forenoon, a medical student, surname Redpenny, Christian name unknown and of no importance, sits at work in a doctor’s consulting-room. He devils for the doctor by answering his letters, acting as his domestic laboratory assistant, and making himself indispensable generally, in return for unspecified advantages involved by intimate intercourse with a leader of his profession, and amounting to an informal apprenticeship and a temporary affiliation. Redpenny is not proud, and will do anything he is asked without reservation of his personal dignity if he is asked in a fellow-creaturely way. He is a wide-open-eyed, ready, credulous, friendly, hasty youth, with his hair and clothes in reluctant transition from the untidy boy to the tidy doctor.

Redpenny is interrupted by the entrance of an old serving-woman who has never known the cares, the preoccupations, the responsibilities, jealousies, and anxieties of personal beauty. She has the complexion of a never-washed gypsy, incurable by any detergent; and she has, not a regular beard and moustaches, which could at least be trimmed and waxed into a masculine presentableness, but a whole crop of small beards and moustaches, mostly springing from moles all over her face. She carries a duster and toddles about meddlesomely, spying out dust so diligently that whilst she is flicking off one speck she is already looking elsewhere for another. In conversation she has the same trick, hardly ever looking at the person she is addressing except when she is excited. She has only one manner, and that is the manner of an old family nurse to a child just after it has learnt to walk. She has used her ugliness to secure indulgences unattainable by Cleopatra or Fair Rosamund, and has the further great advantage over them that age increases her qualification instead of impairing it. Being an industrious, agreeable, and popular old soul, she is a walking sermon on the vanity of feminine prettiness. Just as Redpenny has no discovered Christian name, she has no discovered surname, and is known throughout the doctors’ quarter between Cavendish Square and the Marylebone Road simply as Emmy.

The consulting-room has two windows looking on Queen Anne Street. Between the two is a marble-topped console, with haunched gilt legs ending in sphinx claws. The huge pier-glass which surmounts it is mostly disabled from reflection by elaborate painting on its surface of palms, ferns, lilies, tulips, and sunflowers. The adjoining wall contains the fireplace, with two arm-chairs before it. As we happen to face the corner we see nothing of the other two walls. On the right of the fireplace, or rather on the right of any person facing the fireplace, is the door. On its left is the writing-table at which Redpenny sits. It is an untidy table with a microscope, several test tubes, and a spirit lamp standing up through its litter of papers. There is a couch in the middle of the room, at right angles to the console, and parallel to the fireplace. A chair stands between the couch and the windowed wall. The windows have green Venetian blinds and rep curtains; and there is a gasalier; but it is a convert to electric lighting. The wall paper and carpets are mostly green, coeval with the gasalier and the Venetian blinds. The house, in fact, was so well furnished in the middle of the XIXth century that it stands unaltered to this day and is still quite presentable.

EMMY [entering and immediately beginning to dust the couch] Theres a lady bothering me to see the doctor.

REDPENNY [distracted by the interruption] Well, she cant see the doctor. Look here: whats the use of telling you that the doctor cant take any new patients, when the moment a knock comes to the door, in you bounce to ask whether he can see somebody?

EMMY. Who asked you whether he could see somebody?

REDPENNY. You did.

EMMY. I said theres a lady bothering me to see the doctor. That isnt asking. Its telling.

REDPENNY. Well, is the lady bothering you any reason for you to come bothering me when I’m busy?

EMMY. Have you seen the papers?

REDPENNY. No.

EMMY. Not seen the birthday honors?

REDPENNY [beginning to swear] What the —

EMMY. Now, now, ducky!

REDPENNY. What do you suppose I care about the birthday honors? Get out of this with your chattering. Dr Ridgeon will be down before I have these letters ready. Get out.

EMMY. Dr Ridgeon wont never be down any more, young man.

She detects dust on the console and is down on it immediately.

REDPENNY [jumping up and following her] What?

EMMY. He’s been made a knight. Mind you dont go Dr Ridgeoning him in them letters. Sir Colenso Ridgeon is to be his name now.

REDPENNY. I’m jolly glad.

EMMY. I never was so taken aback. I always thought his great discoveries was fudge (let alone the mess of them) with his drops of blood and tubes full of Maltese fever and the like. Now he’ll have a rare laugh at me.

REDPENNY. Serve you right! It was like your cheek to talk to him about science. [He returns to his table and resumes his writing].

EMMY. Oh, I dont think much of science; and neither will you when youve lived as long with it as I have. Whats on my mind is answering the door. Old Sir Patrick Cullen has been here already and left first congratulations — hadnt time to come up on his way to the hospital, but was determined to be first — coming back, he said. All the rest will be here too: the knocker will be going all day. What Im afraid of is that the doctor’ll want a footman like all the rest, now that he’s Sir Colenso. Mind: dont you go putting him up to it, ducky; for he’ll never have any comfort with anybody but me to answer the door. I know who to let in and who to keep out. And that reminds me of the poor lady. I think he ought to see her. Shes just the kind that puts him in a good temper. [She dusts Redpenny’s papers].

REDPENNY. I tell you he cant see anybody. Do go away, Emmy. How can I work with you dusting all over me like this?

EMMY. I’m not hindering you working — if you call writing letters working. There goes the bell. [She looks out of the window]. A doctor’s carriage. Thats more congratulations. [She is going out when Sir Colenso Ridgeon enters]. Have you finished your two eggs, sonny?

RIDGEON. Yes.

EMMY. Have you put on your clean vest?

RIDGEON. Yes.

EMMY. Thats my ducky diamond! Now keep yourself tidy and dont go messing about and dirtying your hands: the people are coming to congratulate you. [She goes out].

Sir Colenso Ridgeon is a man of fifty who has never shaken off his youth. He has the off-handed manner and the little audacities of address which a shy and sensitive man acquires in breaking himself in to intercourse with all sorts and conditions of men. His face is a good deal lined; his movements are slower than, for instance, Redpenny’s; and his flaxen hair has lost its lustre; but in figure and manner he is more the young man than the titled physician. Even the lines in his face are those of overwork and restless scepticism, perhaps partly of curiosity and appetite, rather than of age. Just at present the announcement of his knighthood in the morning papers makes him specially self-conscious, and consequently specially off-hand with Redpenny.

RIDGEON. Have you seen the papers? Youll have to alter the name in the letters if you havnt.

REDPENNY. Emmy has just told me. I’m awfully glad. I —

RIDGEON. Enough, young man, enough. You will soon get accustomed to it.

REDPENNY. They ought to have done it years ago.

RIDGEON. They would have; only they couldnt stand Emmy opening the door, I daresay.

EMMY [at the door, announcing] Dr Shoemaker. [She withdraws].

A middle-aged gentleman, well dressed, comes in with a friendly but propitiatory air, not quite sure of his reception. His combination of soft manners and responsive kindliness, with a certain unseizable reserve and a familiar yet foreign chiselling of feature, reveal the Jew: in this instance the handsome gentlemanly Jew, gone a little pigeon-breasted and stale after thirty, as handsome young Jews often do, but still decidedly good-looking.

THE GENTLEMAN. Do you remember me? Schutzmacher. University College school and Belsize Avenue. Loony Schutzmacher, you know.

RIDGEON. What! Loony! [He shakes hands cordially]. Why, man, I thought you were dead long ago. Sit down. [Schutzmacher sits on the couch: Ridgeon on the chair between it and the window]. Where have you been these thirty years?

SCHUTZMACHER. In general practice, until a few months ago. I’ve retired.

RIDGEON. Well done, Loony! I wish I could afford to retire. Was your practice in London?

SCHUTZMACHER. No.

RIDGEON. Fashionable coast practice, I suppose.

SCHUTZMACHER. How could I afford to buy a fashionable practice? I hadnt a rap. I set up in a manufacturing town in the midlands in a little surgery at ten shillings a week.

RIDGEON. And made your fortune?

SCHUTZMACHER. Well, I’m pretty comfortable. I have a place in Hertfordshire besides our flat in town. If you ever want a quiet Saturday to Monday, I’ll take you down in my motor at an hours notice.

RIDGEON. Just rolling in money! I wish you rich g.p.’s would teach me how to make some. Whats the secret of it?

SCHUTZMACHER. Oh, in my case the secret was simple enough, though I suppose I should have got into trouble if it had attracted any notice. And I’m afraid you’ll think it rather infra dig.

RIDGEON. Oh, I have an open mind. What was the secret?

SCHUTZMACHER. Well, the secret was just two words.

RIDGEON. Not Consultation Free, was it?

SCHUTZMACHER [shocked] No, no. Really!

RIDGEON [apologetic] Of course not. I was only joking.

SCHUTZMACHER. My two words were simply Cure Guaranteed.

RIDGEON [admiring] Cure Guaranteed!

SCHUTZMACHER. Guaranteed. After all, thats what everybody wants from a doctor, isnt it?

RIDGEON. My dear loony, it was an inspiration. Was it on the brass plate?

SCHUTZMACHER. There was no brass plate. It was a shop window: red, you know, with black lettering. Doctor Leo Schutzmacher, L.R.C.P.M.R.C.S. Advice and medicine sixpence. Cure Guaranteed.

RIDGEON. And the guarantee proved sound nine times out of ten, eh?

SCHUTZMACHER [rather hurt at so moderate an estimate] Oh, much oftener than that. You see, most people get well all right if they are careful and you give them a little sensible advice. And the medicine really did them good. Parrish’s Chemical Food: phosphates, you know. One tablespoonful to a twelve-ounce bottle of water: nothing better, no matter what the case is.

RIDGEON. Redpenny: make a note of Parrish’s Chemical Food.

SCHUTZMACHER. I take it myself, you know, when I feel run down. Good-bye. You dont mind my calling, do you? Just to congratulate you.

RIDGEON. Delighted, my dear Loony. Come to lunch on Saturday next week. Bring your motor and take me down to Hertford.

SCHUTZMACHER. I will. We shall be delighted. Thank you. Good-bye. [He goes out with Ridgeon, who returns immediately].

REDPENNY. Old Paddy Cullen was here before you were up, to be the first to congratulate you.

RIDGEON. Indeed. Who taught you to speak of Sir Patrick Cullen as old Paddy Cullen, you young ruffian?

REDPENNY. You never call him anything else.

RIDGEON. Not now that I am Sir Colenso. Next thing, you fellows will be calling me old Colly Ridgeon.

REDPENNY. We do, at St. Anne’s.

RIDGEON. Yach! Thats what makes the medical student the most disgusting figure in modern civilization. No veneration, no manners — no —

EMMY [at the door, announcing]. Sir Patrick Cullen. [She retires].

Sir Patrick Cullen is more than twenty years older than Ridgeon, not yet quite at the end of his tether, but near it and resigned to it. His name, his plain, downright, sometimes rather arid common sense, his large build and stature, the absence of those odd moments of ceremonial servility by which an old English doctor sometimes shews you what the status of the profession was in England in his youth, and an occasional turn of speech, are Irish; but he has lived all his life in England and is thoroughly acclimatized. His manner to Ridgeon, whom he likes, is whimsical and fatherly: to others he is a little gruff and uninviting, apt to substitute more or less expressive grunts for articulate speech, and generally indisposed, at his age, to make much social effort. He shakes Ridgeon’s hand and beams at him cordially and jocularly.

SIR PATRICK. Well, young chap. Is your hat too small for you, eh?

RIDGEON. Much too small. I owe it all to you.

SIR PATRICK. Blarney, my boy. Thank you all the same. [He sits in one of the arm-chairs near the fireplace. Ridgeon sits on the couch]. Ive come to talk to you a bit. [To Redpenny] Young man: get out.

REDPENNY. Certainly, Sir Patrick [He collects his papers and makes for the door].

SIR PATRICK. Thank you. Thats a good lad. [Redpenny vanishes]. They all put up with me, these young chaps, because I’m an old man, a real old man, not like you. Youre only beginning to give yourself the airs of age. Did you ever see a boy cultivating a moustache? Well, a middle-aged doctor cultivating a grey head is much the same sort of spectacle.

RIDGEON. Good Lord! yes: I suppose so. And I thought that the days of my vanity were past. Tell me at what age does a man leave off being a fool?

SIR PATRICK. Remember the Frenchman who asked his grandmother at what age we get free from the temptations of love. The old woman said she didn’t know. [Ridgeon laughs]. Well, I make you the same answer. But the world’s growing very interesting to me now, Colly.

RIDGEON. You keep up your interest in science, do you?

SIR PATRICK. Lord! yes. Modern science is a wonderful thing. Look at your great discovery! Look at all the great discoveries! Where are they leading to? Why, right back to my poor dear old father’s ideas and discoveries. He’s been dead now over forty years. Oh, it’s very interesting.

RIDGEON. Well, theres nothing like progress, is there?

SIR PATRICK. Dont misunderstand me, my boy. I’m not belittling your discovery. Most discoveries are made regularly every fifteen years; and it’s fully a hundred and fifty since yours was made last. Thats something to be proud of. But your discovery’s not new. It’s only inoculation. My father practised inoculation until it was made criminal in eighteen-forty. That broke the poor old man’s heart, Colly: he died of it. And now it turns out that my father was right after all. Youve brought us back to inoculation.

RIDGEON. I know nothing about smallpox. My line is tuberculosis and typhoid and plague. But of course the principle of all vaccines is the same.

SIR PATRICK. Tuberculosis? M-m-m-m! Youve found out how to cure consumption, eh?

RIDGEON. I believe so.

SIR PATRICK. Ah yes. It’s very interesting. What is it the old cardinal says in Browning’s play? “I have known four and twenty leaders of revolt.” Well, Ive known over thirty men that found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment, I suppose. There was my father’s old friend George Boddington of Sutton Coldfield. He discovered the open-air cure in eighteen-forty. He was ruined and driven out of his practice for only opening the windows; and now we wont let a consumptive patient have as much as a roof over his head. Oh, it’s very VERY interesting to an old man.

RIDGEON. You old cynic, you dont believe a bit in my discovery.

SIR PATRICK. No, no: I dont go quite so far as that, Colly. But still, you remember Jane Marsh?

RIDGEON. Jane Marsh? No.

SIR PATRICK. You dont!

RIDGEON. No.

SIR PATRICK. You mean to tell me you dont remember the woman with the tuberculosis ulcer on her arm?

RIDGEON [enlightened] Oh, your washerwoman’s daughter. Was her name Jane Marsh? I forgot.

SIR PATRICK. Perhaps youve forgotten also that you undertook to cure her with Koch’s tuberculin.

RIDGEON. And instead of curing her, it rotted her arm right off. Yes: I remember. Poor Jane! However, she makes a good living out of that arm now by shewing it at medical lectures.

SIR PATRICK. Still, that wasnt quite what you intended, was it?

RIDGEON. I took my chance of it.

SIR PATRICK. Jane did, you mean.

RIDGEON. Well, it’s always the patient who has to take the chance when an experiment is necessary. And we can find out nothing without experiment.

SIR PATRICK. What did you find out from Jane’s case?

RIDGEON. I found out that the inoculation that ought to cure sometimes kills.

SIR PATRICK. I could have told you that. Ive tried these modern inoculations a bit myself. Ive killed people with them; and Ive cured people with them; but I gave them up because I never could tell which I was going to do.

RIDGEON [taking a pamphlet from a drawer in the writing-table and handing it to him] Read that the next time you have an hour to spare; and youll find out why.

SIR PATRICK [grumbling and fumbling for his spectacles] Oh, bother your pamphlets. Whats the practice of it? [Looking at the pamphlet] Opsonin? What the devil is opsonin?

RIDGEON. Opsonin is what you butter the disease germs with to make your white blood corpuscles eat them. [He sits down again on the couch].

SIR PATRICK. Thats not new. Ive heard this notion that the white corpuscles — what is it that whats his name? — Metchnikoff — calls them?

RIDGEON. Phagocytes.

SIR PATRICK. Aye, phagocytes: yes, yes, yes. Well, I heard this theory that the phagocytes eat up the disease germs years ago: long before you came into fashion. Besides, they dont always eat them.

RIDGEON. They do when you butter them with opsonin.

SIR PATRICK. Gammon.

RIDGEON. No: it’s not gammon. What it comes to in practice is this. The phagocytes wont eat the microbes unless the microbes are nicely buttered for them. Well, the patient manufactures the butter for himself all right; but my discovery is that the manufacture of that butter, which I call opsonin, goes on in the system by ups and downs — Nature being always rhythmical, you know — and that what the inoculation does is to stimulate the ups or downs, as the case may be. If we had inoculated Jane Marsh when her butter factory was on the up-grade, we should have cured her arm. But we got in on the downgrade and lost her arm for her. I call the up-grade the positive phase and the down-grade the negative phase. Everything depends on your inoculating at the right moment. Inoculate when the patient is in the negative phase and you kill: inoculate when the patient is in the positive phase and you cure.

SIR PATRICK. And pray how are you to know whether the patient is in the positive or the negative phase?

RIDGEON. Send a drop of the patient’s blood to the laboratory at St. Anne’s; and in fifteen minutes I’ll give you his opsonin index in figures. If the figure is one, inoculate and cure: if it’s under point eight, inoculate and kill. Thats my discovery: the most important that has been made since Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. My tuberculosis patients dont die now.

SIR PATRICK. And mine do when my inoculation catches them in the negative phase, as you call it. Eh?

RIDGEON. Precisely. To inject a vaccine into a patient without first testing his opsonin is as near murder as a respectable practitioner can get. If I wanted to kill s man I should kill him that way.

EMMY [looking in] Will you see a lady that wants her husband’s lungs cured?

RIDGEON [impatiently] No. Havnt I told you I will see nobody?[To Sir Patrick] I live in a state of siege ever since it got about that I’m a magician who can cure consumption with a drop of serum. [To Emmy] Dont come to me again about people who have no appointments. I tell you I can see nobody.

EMMY. Well, I’ll tell her to wait a bit.

RIDGEON [furious] Youll tell her I cant see her, and send her away: do you hear?

EMMY [unmoved] Well, will you see Mr Cutler Walpole? He dont want a cure: he only wants to congratulate you.

RIDGEON. Of course. Shew him up. [She turns to go]. Stop. [To Sir Patrick] I want two minutes more with you between ourselves. [To Emmy] Emmy: ask Mr. Walpole to wait just two minutes, while I finish a consultation.

EMMY. Oh, he’ll wait all right. He’s talking to the poor lady. [She goes out].

SIR PATRICK. Well? what is it?

RIDGEON. Dont laugh at me. I want your advice.

SIR PATRICK. Professional advice?

RIDGEON. Yes. Theres something the matter with me. I dont know what it is.

SIR PATRICK. Neither do I. I suppose youve been sounded.

RIDGEON. Yes, of course. Theres nothing wrong with any of the organs: nothing special, anyhow. But I have a curious aching: I dont know where: I cant localize it. Sometimes I think it’s my heart: sometimes I suspect my spine. It doesnt exactly hurt me; but it unsettles me completely. I feel that something is going to happen. And there are other symptoms. Scraps of tunes come into my head that seem to me very pretty, though theyre quite commonplace.

SIR PATRICK. Do you hear voices?

RIDGEON. No.

SIR PATRICK. I’m glad of that. When my patients tell me that theyve made a greater discovery than Harvey, and that they hear voices, I lock them up.

RIDGEON. You think I’m mad! Thats just the suspicion that has come across me once or twice. Tell me the truth: I can bear it.

SIR PATRICK. Youre sure there are no voices?

RIDGEON. Quite sure.

SIR PATRICK. Then it’s only foolishness.

RIDGEON. Have you ever met anything like it before in your practice?

SIR PATRICK. Oh, yes: often. It’s very common between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. It sometimes comes on again at forty or thereabouts. Youre a bachelor, you see. It’s not serious — if youre careful.

RIDGEON. About my food?

SIR PATRICK. No: about your behavior. Theres nothing wrong with your spine; and theres nothing wrong with your heart; but theres something wrong with your common sense. Youre not going to die; but you may be going to make a fool of yourself. So be careful.

RIDGEON. I sec you dont believe in my discovery. Well, sometimes I dont believe in it myself. Thank you all the same. Shall we have Walpole up?

SIR PATRICK. Oh, have him up. [Ridgeon rings]. He’s a clever operator, is Walpole, though he’s only one of your chloroform surgeons. In my early days, you made your man drunk; and the porters and students held him down; and you had to set your teeth and finish the job fast. Nowadays you work at your ease; and the pain doesn’t come until afterwards, when youve taken your cheque and rolled up your bag and left the house. I tell you, Colly, chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It’s enabled every fool to be a surgeon.

RIDGEON [to Emmy, who answers the bell] Shew Mr Walpole up.

EMMY. He’s talking to the lady.

RIDGEON [exasperated] Did I not tell you —

Emmy goes out without heeding him. He gives it up, with a shrug, and plants himself with his back to the console, leaning resignedly against it.

SIR PATRICK. I know your Cutler Walpoles and their like. Theyve found out that a man’s body’s full of bits and scraps of old organs he has no mortal use for. Thanks to chloroform, you can cut half a dozen of them out without leaving him any the worse, except for the illness and the guineas it costs him. I knew the Walpoles well fifteen years ago. The father used to snip off the ends of people’s uvulas for fifty guineas, and paint throats with caustic every day for a year at two guineas a time. His brother-in-law extirpated tonsils for two hundred guineas until he took up women’s cases at double the fees. Cutler himself worked hard at anatomy to find something fresh to operate on; and at last he got hold of something he calls the nuciform sac, which he’s made quite the fashion. People pay him five hundred guineas to cut it out. They might as well get their hair cut for all the difference it makes; but I suppose they feel important after it. You cant go out to dinner now without your neighbor bragging to you of some useless operation or other.

EMMY [announcing] Mr Cutler Walpole. [She goes out].

Cutler Walpole is an energetic, unhesitating man of forty, with a cleanly modelled face, very decisive and symmetrical about the shortish, salient, rather pretty nose, and the three trimly turned corners made by his chin and jaws. In comparison with Ridgeon’s delicate broken lines, and Sir Patrick’s softly rugged aged ones, his face looks machine-made and beeswaxed; but his scrutinizing, daring eyes give it life and force. He seems never at a loss, never in doubt: one feels that if he made a mistake he would make it thoroughly and firmly. He has neat, well-nourished hands, short arms, and is built for strength and compactness rather than for height. He is smartly dressed with a fancy waistcoat, a richly colored scarf secured by a handsome ring, ornaments on his watch chain, spats on his shoes, and a general air of the well-to-do sportsman about him. He goes straight across to Ridgeon and shakes hands with him.

WALPOLE. My dear Ridgeon, best wishes! heartiest congratulations! You deserve it.

RIDGEON. Thank you.

WALPOLE. As a man, mind you. You deserve it as a man. The opsonin is simple rot, as any capable surgeon can tell you; but we’re all delighted to see your personal qualities officially recognized. Sir Patrick: how are you? I sent you a paper lately about a little thing I invented: a new saw. For shoulder blades.

SIR PATRICK [meditatively] Yes: I got it. It’s a good saw: a useful, handy instrument.

WALPOLE [confidently] I knew youd see its points.

SIR PATRICK. Yes: I remember that saw sixty-five years ago.

WALPOLE. What!

SIR PATRICK. It was called a cabinetmaker’s jimmy then.

WALPOLE. Get out! Nonsense! Cabinetmaker be —

RIDGEON. Never mind him, Walpole. He’s jealous.

WALPOLE. By the way, I hope I’m not disturbing you two in anything private.

RIDGEON. No no. Sit down. I was only consulting him. I’m rather out of sorts. Overwork, I suppose.

WALPOLE [swiftly] I know whats the matter with you. I can see it in your complexion. I can feel it in the grip of your hand.

RIDGEON. What is it?

WALPOLE. Blood-poisoning.

RIDGEON. Blood-poisoning! Impossible.

WALPOLE. I tell you, blood-poisoning. Ninety-five per cent of the human race suffer from chronic blood-poisoning, and die of it. It’s as simple as A.B.C. Your nuciform sac is full of decaying matter — undigested food and waste products — rank ptomaines. Now you take my advice, Ridgeon. Let me cut it out for you. You’ll be another man afterwards.

SIR PATRICK. Dont you like him as he is?

WALPOLE. No I dont. I dont like any man who hasnt a healthy circulation. I tell you this: in an intelligently governed country people wouldnt be allowed to go about with nuciform sacs, making themselves centres of infection. The operation ought to be compulsory: it’s ten times more important than vaccination.

SIR PATRICK. Have you had your own sac removed, may I ask?

WALPOLE [triumphantly] I havnt got one. Look at me! Ive no symptoms. I’m as sound as a bell. About five per cent of the population havnt got any; and I’m one of the five per cent. I’ll give you an instance. You know Mrs Jack Foljambe: the smart Mrs Foljambe? I operated at Easter on her sister-in-law, Lady Gorran, and found she had the biggest sac I ever saw: it held about two ounces. Well, Mrs. Foljambe had the right spirit — the genuine hygienic instinct. She couldnt stand her sister-in-law being a clean, sound woman, and she simply a whited sepulchre. So she insisted on my operating on her, too. And by George, sir, she hadnt any sac at all. Not a trace! Not a rudiment!! I was so taken aback — so interested, that I forgot to take the sponges out, and was stitching them up inside her when the nurse missed them. Somehow, I’d made sure she’d have an exceptionally large one. [He sits down on the couch, squaring his shoulders and shooting his hands out of his cuffs as he sets his knuckles akimbo].

EMMY [looking in] Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington.

A long and expectant pause follows this announcement. All look to the door; but there is no Sir Ralph.

RIDGEON [at last] Were is he?

EMMY [looking back] Drat him, I thought he was following me. He’s stayed down to talk to that lady.

RIDGEON [exploding] I told you to tell that lady — [Emmy vanishes].

WALPOLE [jumping up again] Oh, by the way, Ridgeon, that reminds me. Ive been talking to that poor girl. It’s her husband; and she thinks it’s a case of consumption: the usual wrong diagnosis: these damned general practitioners ought never to be allowed to touch a patient except under the orders of a consultant. She’s been describing his symptoms to me; and the case is as plain as a pikestaff: bad blood-poisoning. Now she’s poor. She cant afford to have him operated on. Well, you send him to me: I’ll do it for nothing. Theres room for him in my nursing home. I’ll put him straight, and feed him up and make him happy. I like making people happy. [He goes to the chair near the window].

EMMY [looking in] Here he is.

Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington wafts himself into the room. He is a tall man, with a head like a tall and slender egg. He has been in his time a slender man; but now, in his sixth decade, his waistcoat has filled out somewhat. His fair eyebrows arch good-naturedly and uncritically. He has a most musical voice; his speech is a perpetual anthem; and he never tires of the sound of it. He radiates an enormous self-satisfaction, cheering, reassuring, healing by the mere incompatibility of disease or anxiety with his welcome presence. Even broken bones, it is said, have been known to unite at the sound of his voice: he is a born healer, as independent of mere treatment and skill as any Christian scientist. When he expands into oratory or scientific exposition, he is as energetic as Walpole; but it is with a bland, voluminous, atmospheric energy, which envelops its subject and its audience, and makes interruption or inattention impossible, and imposes veneration and credulity on all but the strongest minds. He is known in the medical world as B. B.; and the envy roused by his success in practice is softened by the conviction that he is, scientifically considered, a colossal humbug: the fact being that, though he knows just as much (and just as little) as his contemporaries, the qualifications that pass muster in common men reveal their weakness when hung on his egregious personality.

B. B. Aha! Sir Colenso. Sir Colenso, eh? Welcome to the order of knighthood.

RIDGEON [shaking hands] Thank you, B. B.

B. B. What! Sir Patrick! And how are we to-day? a little chilly? a little stiff? but hale and still the cleverest of us all. [Sir Patrick grunts]. What! Walpole! the absent-minded beggar: eh?

WALPOLE. What does that mean?

B. B. Have you forgotten the lovely opera singer I sent you to have that growth taken off her vocal cords?

WALPOLE [springing to his feet] Great heavens, man, you dont mean to say you sent her for a throat operation!

B. B. [archly] Aha! Ha ha! Aha! [trilling like a lark as he shakes his finger at Walpole]. You removed her nuciform sac. Well, well! force of habit! force of habit! Never mind, ne-e-e-ver mind. She got back her voice after it, and thinks you the greatest surgeon alive; and so you are, so you are, so you are.

WALPOLE [in a tragic whisper, intensely serious] Blood-poisoning. I see. I see. [He sits down again].

SIR PATRICK. And how is a certain distinguished family getting on under your care, Sir Ralph?

B. B. Our friend Ridgeon will be gratified to hear that I have tried his opsonin treatment on little Prince Henry with complete success.

RIDGEON [startled and anxious] But how —

B. B. [continuing] I suspected typhoid: the head gardener’s boy had it; so I just called at St Anne’s one day and got a tube of your very excellent serum. You were out, unfortunately.

RIDGEON. I hope they explained to you carefully —

B. B. [waving away the absurd suggestion] Lord bless you, my dear fellow, I didnt need any explanations. I’d left my wife in the carriage at the door; and I’d no time to be taught my business by your young chaps. I know all about it. Ive handled these anti-toxins ever since they first came out.

RIDGEON. But theyre not anti-toxins; and theyre dangerous unless you use them at the right time.

B. B. Of course they are. Everything is dangerous unless you take it at the right time. An apple at breakfast does you good: an apple at bedtime upsets you for a week. There are only two rules for anti-toxins. First, dont be afraid of them: second, inject them a quarter of an hour before meals, three times a day.

RIDGEON [appalled] Great heavens, B. B., no, no, no.

B. B. [sweeping on irresistibly] Yes, yes, yes, Colly. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, you know. It was an immense success. It acted like magic on the little prince. Up went his temperature; off to bed I packed him; and in a week he was all right again, and absolutely immune from typhoid for the rest of his life. The family were very nice about it: their gratitude was quite touching; but I said they owed it all to you, Ridgeon; and I am glad to think that your knighthood is the result.

RIDGEON. I am deeply obliged to you. [Overcome, he sits down on the chair near the couch].

B. B. Not at all, not at all. Your own merit. Come! come! come! dont give way.

RIDGEON. It’s nothing. I was a little giddy just now. Overwork, I suppose.

WALPOLE. Blood-poisoning.

B. B. Overwork! Theres no such thing. I do the work of ten men. Am I giddy? No. NO. If youre not well, you have a disease. It may be a slight one; but it’s a disease. And what is a disease? The lodgment in the system of a pathogenic germ, and the multiplication of that germ. What is the remedy? A very simple one. Find the germ and kill it.

SIR PATRICK. Suppose theres no germ?

B. B. Impossible, Sir Patrick: there must be a germ: else how could the patient be ill?

SIR PATRICK. Can you shew me the germ of overwork?

B. B. No; but why? Why? Because, my dear Sir Patrick, though the germ is there, it’s invisible. Nature has given it no danger signal for us. These germs — these bacilli — are translucent bodies, like glass, like water. To make them visible you must stain them. Well, my dear Paddy, do what you will, some of them wont stain. They wont take cochineal: they wont take methylene blue; they wont take gentian violet: they wont take any coloring matter. Consequently, though we know, as scientific men, that they exist, we cannot see them. But can you disprove their existence? Can you conceive the disease existing without them? Can you, for instance, shew me a case of diphtheria without the bacillus?

SIR PATRICK. No; but I’ll shew you the same bacillus, without the disease, in your own throat.

B. B. No, not the same, Sir Patrick. It is an entirely different bacillus; only the two are, unfortunately, so exactly alike that you cannot see the difference. You must understand, my dear Sir Patrick, that every one of these interesting little creatures has an imitator. Just as men imitate each other, germs imitate each other. There is the genuine diphtheria bacillus discovered by Loeffler; and there is the pseudo-bacillus, exactly like it, which you could find, as you say, in my own throat.

SIR PATRICK. And how do you tell one from the other?

B. B. Well, obviously, if the bacillus is the genuine Loeffler, you have diphtheria; and if it’s the pseudobacillus, youre quite well. Nothing simpler. Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous. Ignorant faddists pick up some superficial information about germs; and they write to the papers and try to discredit science. They dupe and mislead many honest and worthy people. But science has a perfect answer to them on every point.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep; or taste not the Pierian spring.

I mean no disrespect to your generation, Sir Patrick: some of you old stagers did marvels through sheer professional intuition and clinical experience; but when I think of the average men of your day, ignorantly bleeding and cupping and purging, and scattering germs over their patients from their clothes and instruments, and contrast all that with the scientific certainty and simplicity of my treatment of the little prince the other day, I cant help being proud of my own generation: the men who were trained on the germ theory, the veterans of the great struggle over Evolution in the seventies. We may have our faults; but at least we are men of science. That is why I am taking up your treatment, Ridgeon, and pushing it. It’s scientific. [He sits down on the chair near the couch].

EMMY [at the door, announcing] Dr Blenkinsop.

Dr Blenkinsop is a very different case from the others. He is clearly not a prosperous man. He is flabby and shabby, cheaply fed and cheaply clothed. He has the lines made by a conscience between his eyes, and the lines made by continual money worries all over his face, cut all the deeper as he has seen better days, and hails his well-to-do colleagues as their contemporary and old hospital friend, though even in this he has to struggle with the diffidence of poverty and relegation to the poorer middle class.

RIDGEON. How are you, Blenkinsop?

BLENKINSOP. Ive come to offer my humble congratulations. Oh dear! all the great guns are before me.

B. B. [patronizing, but charming] How d’ye do Blenkinsop? How d’ye do?

BLENKINSOP. And Sir Patrick, too [Sir Patrick grunts].

RIDGEON. Youve met Walpole, of course?

WALPOLE. How d’ye do?

BLENKINSOP. It’s the first time Ive had that honor. In my poor little practice there are no chances of meeting you great men. I know nobody but the St Anne’s men of my own day. [To Ridgeon] And so youre Sir Colenso. How does it feel?

RIDGEON. Foolish at first. Dont take any notice of it.

BLENKINSOP. I’m ashamed to say I havnt a notion what your great discovery is; but I congratulate you all the same for the sake of old times.

B. B. [shocked] But, my dear Blenkinsop, you used to be rather keen on science.

BLENKINSOP. Ah, I used to be a lot of things. I used to have two or three decent suits of clothes, and flannels to go up the river on Sundays. Look at me now: this is my best; and it must last till Christmas. What can I do? Ive never opened a book since I was qualified thirty years ago. I used to read the medical papers at first; but you know how soon a man drops that; besides, I cant afford them; and what are they after all but trade papers, full of advertisements? Ive forgotten all my science: whats the use of my pretending I havnt? But I have great experience: clinical experience; and bedside experience is the main thing, isn’t it?

B. B. No doubt; always provided, mind you, that you have a sound scientific theory to correlate your observations at the bedside. Mere experience by itself is nothing. If I take my dog to the bedside with me, he sees what I see. But he learns nothing from it. Why? Because he’s not a scientific dog.

WALPOLE. It amuses me to hear you physicians and general practitioners talking about clinical experience. What do you see at the bedside but the outside of the patient? Well: it isnt his outside thats wrong, except perhaps in skin cases. What you want is a daily familiarity with people’s insides; and that you can only get at the operating table. I know what I’m talking about: Ive been a surgeon and a consultant for twenty years; and Ive never known a general practitioner right in his diagnosis yet. Bring them a perfectly simple case; and they diagnose cancer, and arthritis, and appendicitis, and every other itis, when any really experienced surgeon can see that it’s a plain case of blood-poisoning.

BLENKINSOP. Ah, it’s easy for you gentlemen to talk; but what would you say if you had my practice? Except for the workmen’s clubs, my patients are all clerks and shopmen. They darent be ill: they cant afford it. And when they break down, what can I do for them? You can send your people to St Moritz or to Egypt, or recommend horse exercise or motoring or champagne jelly or complete change and rest for six months. I might as well order my people a slice of the moon. And the worst of it is, I’m too poor to keep well myself on the cooking I have to put up with. Ive such a wretched digestion; and I look it. How am I to inspire confidence? [He sits disconsolately on the couch].

RIDGEON [restlessly] Dont, Blenkinsop: its too painful. The most tragic thing in the world is a sick doctor.

WALPOLE. Yes, by George: its like a bald-headed man trying to sell a hair restorer. Thank God I’m a surgeon!

B. B. [sunnily] I am never sick. Never had a day’s illness in my life. Thats what enables me to sympathize with my patients.

WALPOLE [interested] What! youre never ill?

B. B. Never.

WALPOLE. Thats interesting. I believe you have no nuciform sac. If you ever do feel at all queer, I should very much like to have a look.

B. B. Thank you, my dear fellow; but I’m too busy just now.

RIDGEON. I was just telling them when you came in, Blenkinsop, that I have worked myself out of sorts.

BLENKINSOP. Well, it seems presumptuous of me to offer a prescription to a great man like you; but still I have great experience; and if I might recommend a pound of ripe greengages every day half an hour before lunch, I’m sure youd find a benefit. Theyre very cheap.

RIDGEON. What do you say to that B. B.?

B. B. [encouragingly] Very sensible, Blenkinsop: very sensible indeed. I’m delighted to see that you disapprove of drugs.

SIR PATRICK [grunts]!

B. B. [archly] Aha! Haha! Did I hear from the fireside armchair the bow-wow of the old school defending its drugs? Ah, believe me, Paddy, the world would be healthier if every chemist’s shop in England were demolished. Look at the papers! full of scandalous advertisements of patent medicines! a huge commercial system of quackery and poison. Well, whose fault is it? Ours. I say, ours. We set the example. We spread the superstition. We taught the people to believe in bottles of doctor’s stuff; and now they buy it at the stores instead of consulting a medical man.

WALPOLE. Quite true. Ive not prescribed a drug for the last fifteen years.

B. B. Drugs can only repress symptoms: they cannot eradicate disease. The true remedy for all diseases is Nature’s remedy. Nature and Science are at one, Sir Patrick, believe me; though you were taught differently. Nature has provided, in the white corpuscles as you call them — in the phagocytes as we call them — a natural means of devouring and destroying all disease germs. There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes. Stimulate the phagocytes. Drugs are a delusion. Find the germ of the disease; prepare from it a suitable anti-toxin; inject it three times a day quarter of an hour before meals; and what is the result? The phagocytes are stimulated; they devour the disease; and the patient recovers — unless, of course, he’s too far gone. That, I take it, is the essence of Ridgeon’s discovery.

SIR PATRICK [dreamily] As I sit here, I seem to hear my poor old father talking again.

B. B. [rising in incredulous amazement] Your father! But, Lord bless my soul, Paddy, your father must have been an older man than you.

SIR PATRICK. Word for word almost, he said what you say. No more drugs. Nothing but inoculation.

B. B. [almost contemptuously] Inoculation! Do you mean smallpox inoculation?

SIR PATRICK. Yes. In the privacy of our family circle, sir, my father used to declare his belief that smallpox inoculation was good, not only for smallpox, but for all fevers.

B. B. [suddenly rising to the new idea with immense interest and excitement] What! Ridgeon: did you hear that? Sir Patrick: I am more struck by what you have just told me than I can well express. Your father, sir, anticipated a discovery of my own. Listen, Walpole. Blenkinsop: attend one moment. You will all be intensely interested in this. I was put on the track by accident. I had a typhoid case and a tetanus case side by side in the hospital: a beadle and a city missionary. Think of what that meant for them, poor fellows! Can a beadle be dignified with typhoid? Can a missionary be eloquent with lockjaw? No. NO. Well, I got some typhoid anti-toxin from Ridgeon and a tube of Muldooley’s anti-tetanus serum. But the missionary jerked all my things off the table in one of his paroxysms; and in replacing them I put Ridgeon’s tube where Muldooley’s ought to have been. The consequence was that I inoculated the typhoid case for tetanus and the tetanus case for typhoid. [The doctors look greatly concerned. B. B., undamped, smiles triumphantly]. Well, they recovered. THEY RECOVERED. Except for a touch of St Vitus’s dance the missionary’s as well to-day as ever; and the beadle’s ten times the man he was.

BLENKINSOP. Ive known things like that happen. They cant be explained.

B. B. [severely] Blenkinsop: there is nothing that cannot be explained by science. What did I do? Did I fold my hands helplessly and say that the case could not be explained? By no means. I sat down and used my brains. I thought the case out on scientific principles. I asked myself why didnt the missionary die of typhoid on top of tetanus, and the beadle of tetanus on top of typhoid? Theres a problem for you, Ridgeon. Think, Sir Patrick. Reflect, Blenkinsop. Look at it without prejudice, Walpole. What is the real work of the anti-toxin? Simply to stimulate the phagocytes. Very well. But so long as you stimulate the phagocytes, what does it matter which particular sort of serum you use for the purpose? Haha! Eh? Do you see? Do you grasp it? Ever since that Ive used all sorts of anti-toxins absolutely indiscriminately, with perfectly satisfactory results. I inoculated the little prince with your stuff, Ridgeon, because I wanted to give you a lift; but two years ago I tried the experiment of treating a scarlet fever case with a sample of hydrophobia serum from the Pasteur Institute, and it answered capitally. It stimulated the phagocytes; and the phagocytes did the rest. That is why Sir Patrick’s father found that inoculation cured all fevers. It stimulated the phagocytes. [He throws himself into his chair, exhausted with the triumph of his demonstration, and beams magnificently on them].

EMMY [looking in] Mr Walpole: your motor’s come for you; and it’s frightening Sir Patrick’s horses; so come along quick.

WALPOLE [rising] Good-bye, Ridgeon.

RIDGEON. Good-bye; and many thanks.

B. B. You see my point, Walpole?

EMMY. He cant wait, Sir Ralph. The carriage will be into the area if he dont come.

WALPOLE. I’m coming. [To B. B.] Theres nothing in your point: phagocytosis is pure rot: the cases are all blood-poisoning; and the knife is the real remedy. Bye-bye, Sir Paddy. Happy to have met you, Mr. Blenkinsop. Now, Emmy. [He goes out, followed by Emmy].

B. B. [sadly] Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. Wonderful operator; but, after all, what is operating? Only manual labor. Brain — BRAIN remains master of the situation. The nuciform sac is utter nonsense: theres no such organ. It’s a mere accidental kink in the membrane, occurring in perhaps two-and-a-half per cent of the population. Of course I’m glad for Walpole’s sake that the operation is fashionable; for he’s a dear good fellow; and after all, as I always tell people, the operation will do them no harm: indeed, Ive known the nervous shake-up and the fortnight in bed do people a lot of good after a hard London season; but still it’s a shocking fraud. [Rising] Well, I must be toddling. Good-bye, Paddy [Sir Patrick grunts] good-bye, goodbye. Good-bye, my dear Blenkinsop, good-bye! Goodbye, Ridgeon. Dont fret about your health: you know what to do: if your liver is sluggish, a little mercury never does any harm. If you feel restless, try bromide, If that doesnt answer, a stimulant, you know: a little phosphorus and strychnine. If you cant sleep, trional, trional, trion —

SIR PATRICK [drily] But no drugs, Colly, remember that.

B. B. [firmly] Certainly not. Quite right, Sir Patrick. As temporary expedients, of course; but as treatment, no, No. Keep away from the chemist’s shop, my dear Ridgeon, whatever you do.

RIDGEON [going to the door with him] I will. And thank you for the knighthood. Good-bye.

B. B. [stopping at the door, with the beam in his eye twinkling a little] By the way, who’s your patient?

RIDGEON. Who?

B. B. Downstairs. Charming woman. Tuberculous husband.

RIDGEON. Is she there still?

Emmy [looking in] Come on, Sir Ralph: your wife’s waiting in the carriage.

B. B. [suddenly sobered] Oh! Good-bye. [He goes out almost precipitately].

RIDGEON. Emmy: is that woman there still? If so, tell her once for all that I cant and wont see her. Do you hear?

EMMY. Oh, she aint in a hurry: she doesnt mind how long she waits. [She goes out].

BLENKINSOP. I must be off, too: every half-hour I spend away from my work costs me eighteenpence. Good-bye, Sir Patrick.

SIR PATRICK. Good-bye. Good-bye.

RIDGEON. Come to lunch with me some day this week.

BLENKINSOP. I cant afford it, dear boy; and it would put me off my own food for a week. Thank you all the same.

RIDGEON [uneasy at Blenkinsop’s poverty] Can I do nothing for you?

BLENKINSOP. Well, if you have an old frock-coat to spare? you see what would be an old one for you would be a new one for me; so remember the next time you turn out your wardrobe. Good-bye. [He hurries out].

RIDGEON [looking after him] Poor chap! [Turning to Sir Patrick] So thats why they made me a knight! And thats the medical profession!

SIR PATRICK. And a very good profession, too, my lad. When you know as much as I know of the ignorance and superstition of the patients, youll wonder that we’re half as good as we are.

RIDGEON. We’re not a profession: we’re a conspiracy.

SIR PATRICK. All professions are conspiracies against the laity. And we cant all be geniuses like you. Every fool can get ill; but every fool cant be a good doctor: there are not enough good ones to go round. And for all you know, Bloomfield Bonington kills less people than you do.

RIDGEON. Oh, very likely. But he really ought to know the difference between a vaccine and an anti-toxin. Stimulate the phagocytes! The vaccine doesnt affect the phagocytes at all. He’s all wrong: hopelessly, dangerously wrong. To put a tube of serum into his hands is murder: simple murder.

EMMY [returning] Now, Sir Patrick. How long more are you going to keep them horses standing in the draught?

SIR PATRICK. Whats that to you, you old catamaran?

EMMY. Come, come, now! none of your temper to me. And it’s time for Colly to get to his work.

RIDGEON. Behave yourself, Emmy. Get out.

EMMY. Oh, I learnt how to behave myself before I learnt you to do it. I know what doctors are: sitting talking together about themselves when they ought to be with their poor patients. And I know what horses are, Sir Patrick. I was brought up in the country. Now be good; and come along.

SIR PATRICK [rising] Very well, very well, very well. Good-bye, Colly. [He pats Ridgeon on the shoulder and goes out, turning for a moment at the door to look meditatively at Emmy and say, with grave conviction] You are an ugly old devil, and no mistake.

EMMY [highly indignant, calling after him] Youre no beauty yourself. [To Ridgeon, much flustered] Theyve no manners: they think they can say what they like to me; and you set them on, you do. I’ll teach them their places. Here now: are you going to see that poor thing or are you not?

RIDGEON. I tell you for the fiftieth time I wont see anybody. Send her away.

EMMY. Oh, I’m tired of being told to send her away. What good will that do her?

RIDGEON. Must I get angry with you, Emmy?

EMMY [coaxing] Come now: just see her for a minute to please me: theres a good boy. She’s given me half-a-crown. She thinks it’s life and death to her husband for her to see you.

RIDGEON. Values her husband’s life at half-a-crown!

EMMY. Well, it’s all she can afford, poor lamb. Them others think nothing of half-a-sovereign just to talk about themselves to you, the sluts! Besides, she’ll put you in a good temper for the day, because it’s a good deed to see her; and she’s the sort that gets round you.

RIDGEON. Well, she hasnt done so badly. For half-a-crown she’s had a consultation with Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington and Cutler Walpole. Thats six guineas’ worth to start with. I dare say she’s consulted Blenkinsop too: thats another eighteenpence.

EMMY. Then youll see her for me, wont you?

RIDGEON. Oh, send her up and be hanged. [Emmy trots out, satisfied. Ridgeon calls] Redpenny!

REDPENNY [appearing at the door] What is it?

RIDGEON. Theres a patient coming up. If she hasnt gone in five minutes, come in with an urgent call from the hospital for me. You understand: she’s to have a strong hint to go.

REDPENNY. Right O! [He vanishes].

Ridgeon goes to the glass, and arranges his tie a little.

EMMY [announcing] Mrs Doobidad [Ridgeon leaves the glass and goes to the writing-table].

The lady comes in. Emmy goes out and shuts the door. Ridgeon, who has put on an impenetrable and rather distant professional manner, turns to the lady, and invites her, by a gesture, to sit down on the couch.

Mrs Dubedat is beyond all demur an arrestingly good-looking young woman. She has something of the grace and romance of a wild creature, with a good deal of the elegance and dignity of a fine lady. Ridgeon, who is extremely susceptible to the beauty of women, instinctively assumes the defensive at once, and hardens his manner still more. He has an impression that she is very well dressed, but she has a figure on which any dress would look well, and carries herself with the unaffected distinction of a woman who has never in her life suffered from those doubts and fears as to her social position which spoil the manners of most middling people. She is tall, slender, and strong; has dark hair, dressed so as to look like hair and not like a bird’s nest or a pantaloon’s wig (fashion wavering just then between these two models); has unexpectedly narrow, subtle, dark-fringed eyes that alter her expression disturbingly when she is excited and flashes them wide open; is softly impetuous in her speech and swift in her movements; and is just now in mortal anxiety. She carries a portfolio.

MRS DUBEDAT [in low urgent tones] Doctor —

RIDGEON [curtly] Wait. Before you begin, let me tell you at once that I can do nothing for you. My hands are full. I sent you that message by my old servant. You would not take that answer.

MRS DUBEDAT. How could I?

RIDGEON. You bribed her.

MRS DUBEDAT. I —

RIDGEON. That doesnt matter. She coaxed me to see you. Well, you must take it from me now that with all the good will in the world, I cannot undertake another case.

MRS DUBEDAT. Doctor: you must save my husband. You must. When I explain to you, you will see that you must. It is not an ordinary case, not like any other case. He is not like anybody else in the world: oh, believe me, he is not. I can prove it to you: [fingering her portfolio] I have brought some things to shew you. And you can save him: the papers say you can.

RIDGEON. Whats the matter? Tuberculosis?

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes. His left lung —

RIDGEON Yes: you neednt tell me about that.

MRS DUBEDAT. You can cure him, if only you will. It is true that you can, isnt it? [In great distress] Oh, tell me, please.

RIDGEON [warningly] You are going to be quiet and self-possessed, arnt you?

MRs DUBEDAT. Yes. I beg your pardon. I know I shouldnt — [Giving way again] Oh, please, say that you can; and then I shall be all right.

RIDGEON [huffily] I am not a curemonger: if you want cures, you must go to the people who sell them. [Recovering himself, ashamed of the tone of his own voice] But I have at the hospital ten tuberculous patients whose lives I believe I can save.

MRS DUBEDAT. Thank God!

RIDGEON. Wait a moment. Try to think of those ten patients as ten shipwrecked men on a raft — a raft that is barely large enough to save them — that will not support one more. Another head bobs up through the waves at the side. Another man begs to be taken aboard. He implores the captain of the raft to save him. But the captain can only do that by pushing one of his ten off the raft and drowning him to make room for the new comer. That is what you are asking me to do.

MRS DUBEDAT. But how can that be? I dont understand. Surely —

RIDGEON. You must take my word for it that it is so. My laboratory, my staff, and myself are working at full pressure. We are doing our utmost. The treatment is a new one. It takes time, means, and skill; and there is not enough for another case. Our ten cases are already chosen cases. Do you understand what I mean by chosen?

MRS DUBEDAT. Chosen. No: I cant understand.

RIDGEON [sternly] You must understand. Youve got to understand and to face it. In every single one of those ten cases I have had to consider, not only whether the man could be saved, but whether he was worth saving. There were fifty cases to choose from; and forty had to be condemned to death. Some of the forty had young wives and helpless children. If the hardness of their cases could have saved them they would have been saved ten times over. Ive no doubt your case is a hard one: I can see the tears in your eyes [she hastily wipes her eyes]: I know that you have a torrent of entreaties ready for me the moment I stop speaking; but it’s no use. You must go to another doctor.

MRS DUBEDAT. But can you give me the name of another doctor who understands your secret?

RIDGEON. I have no secret: I am not a quack.

MRS DUBEDAT. I beg your pardon: I didnt mean to say anything wrong. I dont understand how to speak to you. Oh, pray dont be offended.

RIDGEON [again a little ashamed] There! there! never mind. [He relaxes and sits down]. After all, I’m talking nonsense: I daresay I AM a quack, a quack with a qualification. But my discovery is not patented.

MRS DUBEDAT. Then can any doctor cure my husband? Oh, why dont they do it? I have tried so many: I have spent so much. If only you would give me the name of another doctor.

RIDGEON. Every man in this street is a doctor. But outside myself and the handful of men I am training at St Anne’s, there is nobody as yet who has mastered the opsonin treatment. And we are full up? I’m sorry; but that is all I can say. [Rising] Good morning.

MRS DUBEDAT [suddenly and desperately taking some drawings from her portfolio] Doctor: look at these. You understand drawings: you have good ones in your waiting-room. Look at them. They are his work.

RIDGEON. It’s no use my looking. [He looks, all the same] Hallo! [He takes one to the window and studies it]. Yes: this is the real thing. Yes, yes. [He looks at another and returns to her]. These are very clever. Theyre unfinished, arnt they?

MRS DUBEDAT. He gets tired so soon. But you see, dont you, what a genius he is? You see that he is worth saving. Oh, doctor, I married him just to help him to begin: I had money enough to tide him over the hard years at the beginning — to enable him to follow his inspiration until his genius was recognized. And I was useful to him as a model: his drawings of me sold quite quickly.

RIDGEON. Have you got one?

MRS DUBEDAT [producing another] Only this one. It was the first.

RIDGEON [devouring it with his eyes] Thats a wonderful drawing. Why is it called Jennifer?

MRS DUBEDAT. My name is Jennifer.

RIDGEON. A strange name.

MRS DUBEDAT. Not in Cornwall. I am Cornish. It’s only what you call Guinevere.

RIDGEON [repeating the names with a certain pleasure in them] Guinevere. Jennifer. [Looking again at the drawing] Yes: it’s really a wonderful drawing. Excuse me; but may I ask is it for sale? I’ll buy it.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, take it. It’s my own: he gave it to me. Take it. Take them all. Take everything; ask anything; but save him. You can: you will: you must.

REDPENNY [entering with every sign of alarm] Theyve just telephoned from the hospital that youre to come instantly — a patient on the point of death. The carriage is waiting.

RIDGEON [intolerantly] Oh, nonsense: get out. [Greatly annoyed] What do you mean by interrupting me like this?

REDPENNY. But —

RIDGEON. Chut! cant you see I’m engaged? Be off.

Redpenny, bewildered, vanishes.

MRS DUBEDAT [rising] Doctor: one instant only before you go —

RIDGEON. Sit down. It’s nothing.

MRS DUBEDAT. But the patient. He said he was dying.

RIDGEON. Oh, he’s dead by this time. Never mind. Sit down.

MRS DUBEDAT [sitting down and breaking down] Oh, you none of you care. You see people die every day.

RIDGEON [petting her] Nonsense! it’s nothing: I told him to come in and say that. I thought I should want to get rid of you.

MRS DUBEDAT [shocked at the falsehood] Oh! RIDGEON [continuing] Dont look so bewildered: theres nobody dying.

MRS DUBEDAT. My husband is.

RIDGEON [pulling himself together] Ah, yes: I had forgotten your husband. Mrs Dubedat: you are asking me to do a very serious thing?

MRS DUBEDAT. I am asking you to save the life of a great man.

RIDGEON. You are asking me to kill another man for his sake; for as surely as I undertake another case, I shall have to hand back one of the old ones to the ordinary treatment. Well, I dont shrink from that. I have had to do it before; and I will do it again if you can convince me that his life is more important than the worst life I am now saving. But you must convince me first.

MRS DUBEDAT. He made those drawings; and they are not the best — nothing like the best; only I did not bring the really best: so few people like them. He is twenty-three: his whole life is before him. Wont you let me bring him to you? wont you speak to him? wont you see for yourself?

RIDGEON. Is he well enough to come to a dinner at the Star and Garter at Richmond?

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh yes. Why?

RIDGEON. I’ll tell you. I am inviting all my old friends to a dinner to celebrate my knighthood — youve seen about it in the papers, havnt you?

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, oh yes. That was how I found out about you.

RIDGEON. It will be a doctors’ dinner; and it was to have been a bachelors’ dinner. I’m a bachelor. Now if you will entertain for me, and bring your husband, he will meet me; and he will meet some of the most eminent men in my profession: Sir Patrick Cullen, Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington, Cutler Walpole, and others. I can put the case to them; and your husband will have to stand or fall by what we think of him. Will you come?

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, of course I will come. Oh, thank you, thank you. And may I bring some of his drawings — the really good ones?

RIDGEON. Yes. I will let you know the date in the course of to-morrow. Leave me your address.

MRS DUBEDAT. Thank you again and again. You have made me so happy: I know you will admire him and like him. This is my address. [She gives him her card].

RIDGEON. Thank you. [He rings].

MRS DUBEDAT [embarrassed] May I — is there — should I — I mean — [she blushes and stops in confusion].

RIDGEON. Whats the matter?

MRS DUBEDAT. Your fee for this consultation?

RIDGEON. Oh, I forgot that. Shall we say a beautiful drawing of his favorite model for the whole treatment, including the cure?

MRS DUBEDAT. You are very generous. Thank you. I know you will cure him. Good-bye.

RIDGEON. I will. Good-bye. [They shake hands]. By the way, you know, dont you, that tuberculosis is catching. You take every precaution, I hope.

MRS DUBEDAT. I am not likely to forget it. They treat us like lepers at the hotels.

EMMY [at the door] Well, deary: have you got round him?

RIDGEON. Yes. Attend to the door and hold your tongue.

EMMY. Thats a good boy. [She goes out with Mrs Dubedat].

RIDGEON [alone] Consultation free. Cure guaranteed. [He heaves a great sigh].

ACT II

After dinner on the terrace at the Star and Garter, Richmond. Cloudless summer night; nothing disturbs the stillness except from time to time the long trajectory of a distant train and the measured clucking of oars coming up from the Thames in the valley below. The dinner is over; and three of the eight chairs are empty. Sir Patrick, with his back to the view, is at the head of the square table with Ridgeon. The two chairs opposite them are empty. On their right come, first, a vacant chair, and then one very fully occupied by B. B., who basks blissfully in the moonbeams. On their left, Schutzmacher and Walpole. The entrance to the hotel is on their right, behind B. B. The five men are silently enjoying their coffee and cigarets, full of food, and not altogether void of wine.

Mrs Dubedat, wrapped up for departure, comes in. They rise, except Sir Patrick; but she takes one of the vacant places at the foot of the table, next B. B.; and they sit down again.

MRS DUBEDAT [as she enters] Louis will be here presently. He is shewing Dr Blenkinsop how to work the telephone. [She sits.] Oh, I am so sorry we have to go. It seems such a shame, this beautiful night. And we have enjoyed ourselves so much.

RIDGEON. I dont believe another half-hour would do Mr Dubedat a bit of harm.

SIR PATRICK. Come now, Colly, come! come! none of that. You take your man home, Mrs Dubedat; and get him to bed before eleven.

B. B. Yes, yes. Bed before eleven. Quite right, quite right. Sorry to lose you, my dear lady; but Sir Patrick’s orders are the laws of — er — of Tyre and Sidon.

WALPOLE. Let me take you home in my motor.

SIR PATRICK. No. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Walpole. Your motor will take Mr and Mrs Dubedat to the station, and quite far enough too for an open carriage at night.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, I am sure the train is best.

RIDGEON. Well, Mrs Dubedat, we have had a most enjoyable evening.

WALPOLE. {Most enjoyable. B. B. {Delightful. Charming. Unforgettable.

MRS DUBEDAT [with a touch of shy anxiety] What did you think of Louis? Or am I wrong to ask?

RIDGEON. Wrong! Why, we are all charmed with him.

WALPOLE. Delighted.

B. B. Most happy to have met him. A privilege, a real privilege.

SIR PATRICK [grunts]!

MRS DUBEDAT [quickly] Sir Patrick: are YOU uneasy about him?

SIR PATRICK [discreetly] I admire his drawings greatly, maam.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes; but I meant —

RIDGEON. You shall go away quite happy. He’s worth saving. He must and shall be saved.

Mrs Dubedat rises and gasps with delight, relief, and gratitude. They all rise except Sir Patrick and Schutzmacher, and come reassuringly to her.

B. B. Certainly, CER-tainly.

WALPOLE. Theres no real difficulty, if only you know what to do.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, how can I ever thank you! From this night I can begin to be happy at last. You dont know what I feel.

She sits down in tears. They crowd about her to console her.

B. B. My dear lady: come come! come come! [very persuasively] come come!

WALPOLE. Dont mind us. Have a good cry.

RIDGEON. No: dont cry. Your husband had better not know that weve been talking about him.

MRS DUBEDAT [quickly pulling herself together] No, of course not. Please dont mind me. What a glorious thing it must be to be a doctor! [They laugh]. Dont laugh. You dont know what youve done for me. I never knew until now how deadly afraid I was — how I had come to dread the worst. I never dared let myself know. But now the relief has come: now I know.

Louis Dubedat comes from the hotel, in his overcoat, his throat wrapped in a shawl. He is a slim young man of 23, physically still a stripling, and pretty, though not effeminate. He has turquoise blue eyes, and a trick of looking you straight in the face with them, which, combined with a frank smile, is very engaging. Although he is all nerves, and very observant and quick of apprehension, he is not in the least shy. He is younger than Jennifer; but he patronizes her as a matter of course. The doctors do not put him out in the least: neither Sir Patrick’s years nor Bloomfield Bonington’s majesty have the smallest apparent effect on him: he is as natural as a cat: he moves among men as most men move among things, though he is intentionally making himself agreeable to them on this occasion. Like all people who can be depended on to take care of themselves, he is welcome company; and his artist’s power of appealing to the imagination gains him credit for all sorts of qualities and powers, whether he possesses them or not.

LOUIS [pulling on his gloves behind Ridgeon’s chair] Now, Jinny-Gwinny: the motor has come round.

RIDGEON. Why do you let him spoil your beautiful name like that, Mrs Dubedat?

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, on grand occasions I am Jennifer.

B. B. You are a bachelor: you do not understand these things, Ridgeon. Look at me [They look]. I also have two names. In moments of domestic worry, I am simple Ralph. When the sun shines in the home, I am Beedle-Deedle-Dumkins. Such is married life! Mr Dubedat: may I ask you to do me a favor before you go. Will you sign your name to this menu card, under the sketch you have made of me?

WALPOLE. Yes; and mine too, if you will be so good.

LOUIS. Certainly. [He sits down and signs the cards].

MRS DUBEDAT. Wont you sign Dr Schutzmacher’s for him, Louis?

LOUIS. I dont think Dr Schutzmacher is pleased with his portrait. I’ll tear it up. [He reaches across the table for Schutzmacher’s menu card, and is about to tear it. Schutzmacher makes no sign].

RIDGEON. No, no: if Loony doesnt want it, I do.

LOUIS. I’ll sign it for you with pleasure. [He signs and hands it to Ridgeon]. Ive just been making a little note of the river to-night: it will work up into something good [he shews a pocket sketch-book]. I think I’ll call it the Silver Danube.

B. B. Ah, charming, charming.

WALPOLE. Very sweet. Youre a nailer at pastel.

Louis coughs, first out of modesty, then from tuberculosis.

SIR PATRICK. Now then, Mr Dubedat: youve had enough of the night air. Take him home, maam.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes. Come, Louis.

RIDGEON. Never fear. Never mind. I’ll make that cough all right.

B. B. We will stimulate the phagocytes. [With tender effusion, shaking her hand] Good-night, Mrs Dubedat. Good-night. Good-night.

WALPOLE. If the phagocytes fail, come to me. I’ll put you right.

LOUIS. Good-night, Sir Patrick. Happy to have met you.

SIR PATRICK. Night [half a grunt].

MRS DUBEDAT. Good-night, Sir Patrick.

SIR PATRICK. Cover yourself well up. Dont think your lungs are made of iron because theyre better than his. Good-night.

MRS DUBEDAT. Thank you. Thank you. Nothing hurts me. Good-night.

Louis goes out through the hotel without noticing Schutzmacher. Mrs Dubedat hesitates, then bows to him. Schutzmacher rises and bows formally, German fashion. She goes out, attended by Ridgeon. The rest resume their seats, ruminating or smoking quietly.

B. B. [harmoniously] Dee-lightful couple! Charming woman! Gifted lad! Remarkable talent! Graceful outlines! Perfect evening! Great success! Interesting case! Glorious night! Exquisite scenery! Capital dinner! Stimulating conversation! Restful outing! Good wine! Happy ending! Touching gratitude! Lucky Ridgeon —

RIDGEON [returning] Whats that? Calling me, B. B.? [He goes back to his seat next Sir Patrick].

B. B. No, no. Only congratulating you on a most successful evening! Enchanting woman! Thorough breeding! Gentle nature! Refined —

Blenkinsop comes from the hotel and takes the empty chair next Ridgeon.

BLENKINSOP. I’m so sorry to have left you like this, Ridgeon; but it was a telephone message from the police. Theyve found half a milkman at our level crossing with a prescription of mine in its pocket. Wheres Mr Dubedat?

RIDGEON. Gone.

BLENKINSOP [rising, very pale] Gone!

RIDGEON. Just this moment —

BLENKINSOP. Perhaps I could overtake him — [he rushes into the hotel].

WALPOLE [calling after him] He’s in the motor, man, miles off. You can — [giving it up]. No use.

RIDGEON. Theyre really very nice people. I confess I was afraid the husband would turn out an appalling bounder. But he’s almost as charming in his way as she is in hers. And theres no mistake about his being a genius. It’s something to have got a case really worth saving. Somebody else will have to go; but at all events it will be easy to find a worse man.

SIR PATRICK. How do you know?

RIDGEON. Come now, Sir Paddy, no growling. Have something more to drink.

SIR PATRICK. No, thank you.

WALPOLE. Do you see anything wrong with Dubedat, B. B.?

B. B. Oh, a charming young fellow. Besides, after all, what could be wrong with him? Look at him. What could be wrong with him?

SIR PATRICK. There are two things that can be wrong with any man. One of them is a cheque. The other is a woman. Until you know that a man’s sound on these two points, you know nothing about him.

B. B. Ah, cynic, cynic!

WALPOLE. He’s all right as to the cheque, for a while at all events. He talked to me quite frankly before dinner as to the pressure of money difficulties on an artist. He says he has no vices and is very economical, but that theres one extravagance he cant afford and yet cant resist; and that is dressing his wife prettily. So I said, bang plump out, “Let me lend you twenty pounds, and pay me when your ship comes home.” He was really very nice about it. He took it like a man; and it was a pleasure to see how happy it made him, poor chap.

B. B. [who has listened to Walpole with growing perturbation] But — but — but — when was this, may I ask?

WALPOLE. When I joined you that time down by the river.

B. B. But, my dear Walpole, he had just borrowed ten pounds from me.

WALPOLE. What!

SIR PATRICK [grunts]!

B. B. [indulgently] Well, well, it was really hardly borrowing; for he said heaven only knew when he could pay me. I couldnt refuse. It appears that Mrs Dubedat has taken a sort of fancy to me —

WALPOLE [quickly] No: it was to me.

B. B. Certainly not. Your name was never mentioned between us. He is so wrapped up in his work that he has to leave her a good deal alone; and the poor innocent young fellow — he has of course no idea of my position or how busy I am — actually wanted me to call occasionally and talk to her.

WALPOLE. Exactly what he said to me!

B. B. Pooh! Pooh pooh! Really, I must say. [Much disturbed, he rises and goes up to the balustrade, contemplating the landscape vexedly].

WALPOLE. Look here, Ridgeon! this is beginning to look serious.

Blenkinsop, very anxious and wretched, but trying to look unconcerned, comes back.

RIDGEON. Well, did you catch him?

BLENKINSOP. No. Excuse my running away like that. [He sits down at the foot of the table, next Bloomfeld Bonington’s chair].

WALPOLE. Anything the matter?

BLENKINSOP. Oh no. A trifle — something ridiculous. It cant be helped. Never mind.

RIDGEON. Was it anything about Dubedat?

BLENKINSOP [almost breaking down] I ought to keep it to myself, I know. I cant tell you, Ridgeon, how ashamed I am of dragging my miserable poverty to your dinner after all your kindness. It’s not that you wont ask me again; but it’s so humiliating. And I did so look forward to one evening in my dress clothes (THEYRE still presentable, you see) with all my troubles left behind, just like old times.

RIDGEON. But what has happened?

BLENKINSOP. Oh, nothing. It’s too ridiculous. I had just scraped up four shillings for this little outing; and it cost me one-and-fourpence to get here. Well, Dubedat asked me to lend him half-a-crown to tip the chambermaid of the room his wife left her wraps in, and for the cloakroom. He said he only wanted it for five minutes, as she had his purse. So of course I lent it to him. And he’s forgotten to pay me. I’ve just tuppence to get back with.

RIDGEON. Oh, never mind that —

BLENKINSOP [stopping him resolutely] No: I know what youre going to say; but I wont take it. Ive never borrowed a penny; and I never will. Ive nothing left but my friends; and I wont sell them. If none of you were to be able to meet me without being afraid that my civility was leading up to the loan of five shillings, there would be an end of everything for me. I’ll take your old clothes, Colly, sooner than disgrace you by talking to you in the street in my own; but I wont borrow money. I’ll train it as far as the twopence will take me; and I’ll tramp the rest.

WALPOLE. Youll do the whole distance in my motor. [They are all greatly relieved; and Walpole hastens to get away from the painful subject by adding] Did he get anything out of you, Mr Schutzmacher?

SCHUTZMACHER [shakes his head in a most expressive negative].

WALPOLE. You didnt appreciate his drawing, I think.

SCHUTZMACHER. Oh yes I did. I should have liked very much to have kept the sketch and got it autographed.

B. B. But why didnt you?

SCHUTZMACHER. Well, the fact is, when I joined Dubedat after his conversation with Mr Walpole, he said the Jews were the only people who knew anything about art, and that though he had to put up with your Philistine twaddle, as he called it, it was what I said about the drawings that really pleased him. He also said that his wife was greatly struck with my knowledge, and that she always admired Jews. Then he asked me to advance him 50 pounds on the security of the drawings.

B. B. { [All } No, no. Positively! Seriously! WALPOLE { exclaiming } What! Another fifty! BLENKINSOP { together] } Think of that! SIR PATRICK { } [grunts]!

SCHUTZMACHER. Of course I couldnt lend money to a stranger like that.

B. B. I envy you the power to say No, Mr Schutzmacher. Of course, I knew I oughtnt to lend money to a young fellow in that way; but I simply hadnt the nerve to refuse. I couldnt very well, you know, could I?

SCHUTZMACHER. I dont understand that. I felt that I couldnt very well lend it.

WALPOLE. What did he say?

SCHUTZMACHER. Well, he made a very uncalled-for remark about a Jew not understanding the feelings of a gentleman. I must say you Gentiles are very hard to please. You say we are no gentlemen when we lend money; and when we refuse to lend it you say just the same. I didnt mean to behave badly. As I told him, I might have lent it to him if he had been a Jew himself.

SIR PATRICK [with a grunt] And what did he say to that?

SCHUTZMACHER. Oh, he began trying to persuade me that he was one of the chosen people — that his artistic faculty shewed it, and that his name was as foreign as my own. He said he didnt really want 50 pounds; that he was only joking; that all he wanted was a couple of sovereigns.

B. B. No, no, Mr Schutzmacher. You invented that last touch. Seriously, now?

SCHUTZMACHER. No. You cant improve on Nature in telling stories about gentlemen like Mr Dubedat.

BLENKINSOP. You certainly do stand by one another, you chosen people, Mr Schutzmacher.

SCHUTZMACHER. Not at all. Personally, I like Englishmen better than Jews, and always associate with them. Thats only natural, because, as I am a Jew, theres nothing interesting in a Jew to me, whereas there is always something interesting and foreign in an Englishman. But in money matters it’s quite different. You see, when an Englishman borrows, all he knows or cares is that he wants money; and he’ll sign anything to get it, without in the least understanding it, or intending to carry out the agreement if it turns out badly for him. In fact, he thinks you a cad if you ask him to carry it out under such circumstances. Just like the Merchant of Venice, you know. But if a Jew makes an agreement, he means to keep it and expects you to keep it. If he wants money for a time, he borrows it and knows he must pay it at the end of the time. If he knows he cant pay, he begs it as a gift.

RIDGEON. Come, Loony! do you mean to say that Jews are never rogues and thieves?

SCHUTZMACHER. Oh, not at all. But I was not talking of criminals. I was comparing honest Englishmen with honest Jews.

One of the hotel maids, a pretty, fair-haired woman of about 25, comes from the hotel, rather furtively. She accosts Ridgeon.

THE MAID. I beg your pardon, sir —

RIDGEON. Eh?

THE MAID. I beg pardon, sir. It’s not about the hotel. I’m not allowed to be on the terrace; and I should be discharged if I were seen speaking to you, unless you were kind enough to say you called me to ask whether the motor has come back from the station yet.

WALPOLE. Has it?

THE MAID. Yes, sir.

RIDGEON. Well, what do you want?

THE MAID. Would you mind, sir, giving me the address of the gentleman that was with you at dinner?

RIDGEON [sharply] Yes, of course I should mind very much. You have no right to ask.

THE MAID. Yes, sir, I know it looks like that. But what am I to do?

SIR PATRICK. Whats the matter with you?

THE MAID. Nothing, sir. I want the address: thats all.

B. B. You mean the young gentleman?

THE MAID. Yes, sir: that went to catch the train with the woman he brought with him.

RIDGEON. The woman! Do you mean the lady who dined here? the gentleman’s wife?

THE MAID. Dont believe them, sir. She cant be his wife. I’m his wife.

B. B. {[in amazed remonstrance] My good girl! RIDGEON {You his wife! WALPOLE {What! whats that? Oh, this is getting perfectly fascinating, Ridgeon.

THE MAID. I could run upstairs and get you my marriage lines in a minute, sir, if you doubt my word. He’s Mr Louis Dubedat, isnt he?

RIDGEON. Yes.

THE MAID. Well, sir, you may believe me or not; but I’m the lawful Mrs Dubedat.

SIR PATRICK. And why arnt you living with your husband?

THE MAID. We couldnt afford it, sir. I had thirty pounds saved; and we spent it all on our honeymoon in three weeks, and a lot more that he borrowed. Then I had to go back into service, and he went to London to get work at his drawing; and he never wrote me a line or sent me an address. I never saw nor heard of him again until I caught sight of him from the window going off in the motor with that woman.

SIR PATRICK. Well, thats two wives to start with.

B. B. Now upon my soul I dont want to be uncharitable; but really I’m beginning to suspect that our young friend is rather careless.

SIR PATRICK. Beginning to think! How long will it take you, man, to find out that he’s a damned young blackguard?

BLENKINSOP. Oh, thats severe, Sir Patrick, very severe. Of course it’s bigamy; but still he’s very young; and she’s very pretty. Mr Walpole: may I spunge on you for another of those nice cigarets of yours? [He changes his seat for the one next Walpole].

WALPOLE. Certainly. [He feels in his pockets]. Oh bother! Where — ? [Suddenly remembering] I say: I recollect now: I passed my cigaret case to Dubedat and he didnt return it. It was a gold one.

THE MAID. He didnt mean any harm: he never thinks about things like that, sir. I’ll get it back for you, sir, if youll tell me where to find him.

RIDGEON. What am I to do? Shall I give her the address or not?

SIR PATRICK. Give her your own address; and then we’ll see. [To the maid] Youll have to be content with that for the present, my girl. [Ridgeon gives her his card]. Whats your name?

THE MAID. Minnie Tinwell, sir.

SIR PATRICK. Well, you write him a letter to care of this gentleman; and it will be sent on. Now be off with you.

THE MAID. Thank you, sir. I’m sure you wouldnt see me wronged. Thank you all, gentlemen; and excuse the liberty.

She goes into the hotel. They match her in silence.

RIDGEON [when she is gone] Do you realize, chaps, that we have promised Mrs Dubedat to save this fellow’s life?

BLENKINSOP. Whats the matter with him?

RIDGEON. Tuberculosis.

BLENKINSOP [interested] And can you cure that?

RIDGEON. I believe so.

BLENKINSOP. Then I wish youd cure me. My right lung is touched, I’m sorry to say.

RIDGEON       }               { What! Your lung is going?

B.B           }               { My dear Blenkinsop, what do you

}   [all        { tell me? [full of concern for

}    together]  { Blenkinsop he comes back from the

}               { balustrade].

SIR PATRICK   }               { Eh? Eh? Whats that?

WALPOLE       }               { Hullo, you mustn’t neglect this,

}               { you know.

BLENKINSOP [putting his fingers in his ears] No, no: it’s no use. I know what youre going to say: Ive said it often to others. I cant afford to take care of myself; and theres an end of it. If a fortnight’s holiday would save my life, I’d have to die. I shall get on as others have to get on. We cant all go to St Moritz or to Egypt, you know, Sir Ralph. Dont talk about it.

Embarrassed silence.

SIR PATRICK [grunts and looks hard at Ridgeon]!

SCHUTZMACHER [looking at his watch and rising] I must go. It’s been a very pleasant evening, Colly. You might let me have my portrait if you dont mind. I’ll send Mr Dubedat that couple of sovereigns for it.

RIDGEON [giving him the menu card] Oh dont do that, Loony. I dont think he’d like that.

SCHUTZMACHER. Well, of course I shant if you feel that way about it. But I dont think you understand Dubedat. However, perhaps thats because I’m a Jew. Good-night, Dr Blenkinsop [shaking hands].

BLENKINSOP. Good-night, sir — I mean — Good-night.

SCHUTZMACHER [waving his hand to the rest] Goodnight, everybody.

WALPOLE { B. B. { SIR PATRICK { Good-night. RIDGEON {

B. B. repeats the salutation several times, in varied musical tones. Schutzmacher goes out.

SIR PATRICK. Its time for us all to move. [He rises and comes between Blenkinsop and Walpole. Ridgeon also rises]. Mr Walpole: take Blenkinsop home: he’s had enough of the open air cure for to-night. Have you a thick overcoat to wear in the motor, Dr Blenkinsop?

BLENKINSOP. Oh, theyll give me some brown paper in the hotel; and a few thicknesses of brown paper across the chest are better than any fur coat.

WALPOLE. Well, come along. Good-night, Colly. Youre coming with us, arnt you, B. B.?

B. B. Yes: I’m coming. [Walpole and Blenkinsop go into the hotel]. Good-night, my dear Ridgeon [shaking hands affectionately]. Dont let us lose sight of your interesting patient and his very charming wife. We must not judge him too hastily, you know. [With unction] G o o o o o o o o d-night, Paddy. Bless you, dear old chap. [Sir Patrick utters a formidable grunt. B. B. laughs and pats him indulgently on the shoulder] Good-night. Good-night. Good-night. Good-night. [He good-nights himself into the hotel].

The others have meanwhile gone without ceremony. Ridgeon and Sir Patrick are left alone together. Ridgeon, deep in thought, comes down to Sir Patrick.

SIR PATRICK. Well, Mr Savior of Lives: which is it to be? that honest decent man Blenkinsop, or that rotten blackguard of an artist, eh?

RIDGEON. Its not an easy case to judge, is it? Blenkinsop’s an honest decent man; but is he any use? Dubedat’s a rotten blackguard; but he’s a genuine source of pretty and pleasant and good things.

SIR PATRICK. What will he be a source of for that poor innocent wife of his, when she finds him out?

RIDGEON. Thats true. Her life will be a hell.

SIR PATRICK. And tell me this. Suppose you had this choice put before you: either to go through life and find all the pictures bad but all the men and women good, or to go through life and find all the pictures good and all the men and women rotten. Which would you choose?

RIDGEON. Thats a devilishly difficult question, Paddy. The pictures are so agreeable, and the good people so infernally disagreeable and mischievous, that I really cant undertake to say offhand which I should prefer to do without.

SIR PATRICK. Come come! none of your cleverness with me: I’m too old for it. Blenkinsop isnt that sort of good man; and you know it.

RIDGEON. It would be simpler if Blenkinsop could paint Dubedat’s pictures.

SIR PATRICK. It would be simpler still if Dubedat had some of Blenkinsop’s honesty. The world isnt going to be made simple for you, my lad: you must take it as it is. Youve to hold the scales between Blenkinsop and Dubedat. Hold them fairly.

RIDGEON. Well, I’ll be as fair as I can. I’ll put into one scale all the pounds Dubedat has borrowed, and into the other all the half-crowns that Blenkinsop hasnt borrowed.

SIR PATRICK. And youll take out of Dubedat’s scale all the faith he has destroyed and the honor he has lost, and youll put into Blenkinsop’s scale all the faith he has justified and the honor he has created.

RIDGEON. Come come, Paddy! none of your claptrap with me: I’m too sceptical for it. I’m not at all convinced that the world wouldnt be a better world if everybody behaved as Dubedat does than it is now that everybody behaves as Blenkinsop does.

SIR PATRICK. Then why dont you behave as Dubedat does?

RIDGEON. Ah, that beats me. Thats the experimental test. Still, it’s a dilemma. It’s a dilemma. You see theres a complication we havnt mentioned.

SIR PATRICK. Whats that?

RIDGEON. Well, if I let Blenkinsop die, at least nobody can say I did it because I wanted to marry his widow.

SIR PATRICK. Eh? Whats that?

RIDGEON. Now if I let Dubedat die, I’ll marry his widow.

SIR PATRICK. Perhaps she wont have you, you know.

RIDGEON [with a self-assured shake of the head] I’ve a pretty good flair for that sort of thing. I know when a woman is interested in me. She is.

SIR PATRICK. Well, sometimes a man knows best; and sometimes he knows worst. Youd much better cure them both.

RIDGEON. I cant. I’m at my limit. I can squeeze in one more case, but not two. I must choose.

SIR PATRICK. Well, you must choose as if she didnt exist: thats clear.

RIDGEON. Is that clear to you? Mind: it’s not clear to me. She troubles my judgment.

SIR PATRICK. To me, it’s a plain choice between a man and a lot of pictures.

RIDGEON. It’s easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

SIR PATRICK. Colly: when you live in an age that runs to pictures and statues and plays and brass bands because its men and women are not good enough to comfort its poor aching soul, you should thank Providence that you belong to a profession which is a high and great profession because its business is to heal and mend men and women.

RIDGEON. In short, as a member of a high and great profession, I’m to kill my patient.

SIR PATRICK. Dont talk wicked nonsense. You cant kill him. But you can leave him in other hands.

RIDGEON. In B. B.’s, for instance: eh? [looking at him significantly].

SIR PATRICK [demurely facing his look] Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington is a very eminent physician.

RIDGEON. He is.

SIR PATRICK. I’m going for my hat.

Ridgeon strikes the bell as Sir Patrick makes for the hotel. A waiter comes.

RIDGEON [to the waiter] My bill, please.

WAITER. Yes, sir.

He goes for it.

ACT III

In Dubedat’s studio. Viewed from the large window the outer door is in the wall on the left at the near end. The door leading to the inner rooms is in the opposite wall, at the far end. The facing wall has neither window nor door. The plaster on all the walls is uncovered and undecorated, except by scrawlings of charcoal sketches and memoranda. There is a studio throne (a chair on a dais) a little to the left, opposite the inner door, and an easel to the right, opposite the outer door, with a dilapidated chair at it. Near the easel and against the wall is a bare wooden table with bottles and jars of oil and medium, paint-smudged rags, tubes of color, brushes, charcoal, a small last figure, a kettle and spirit-lamp, and other odds and ends. By the table is a sofa, littered with drawing blocks, sketch-books, loose sheets of paper, newspapers, books, and more smudged rags. Next the outer door is an umbrella and hat stand, occupied partly by Louis’ hats and cloak and muffler, and partly by odds and ends of costumes. There is an old piano stool on the near side of this door. In the corner near the inner door is a little tea-table. A lay figure, in a cardinal’s robe and hat, with an hour-glass in one hand and a scythe slung on its back, smiles with inane malice at Louis, who, in a milkman’s smock much smudged with colors, is painting a piece of brocade which he has draped about his wife.

She is sitting on the throne, not interested in the painting, and appealing to him very anxiously about another matter.

MRS DUBEDAT. Promise.

LOUIS [putting on a touch of paint with notable skill and care and answering quite perfunctorily] I promise, my darling.

MRS DUBEDAT. When you want money, you will always come to me.

LOUIS. But it’s so sordid, dearest. I hate money. I cant keep always bothering you for money, money, money. Thats what drives me sometimes to ask other people, though I hate doing it.

MRS DUBEDAT. It is far better to ask me, dear. It gives people a wrong idea of you.

LOUIS. But I want to spare your little fortune, and raise money on my own work. Dont be unhappy, love: I can easily earn enough to pay it all back. I shall have a one-man-show next season; and then there will be no more money troubles. [Putting down his palette] There! I mustnt do any more on that until it’s bone-dry; so you may come down.

MRS DUBEDAT [throwing off the drapery as she steps down, and revealing a plain frock of tussore silk] But you have promised, remember, seriously and faithfully, never to borrow again until you have first asked me.

LOUIS. Seriously and faithfully. [Embracing her] Ah, my love, how right you are! how much it means to me to have you by me to guard me against living too much in the skies. On my solemn oath, from this moment forth I will never borrow another penny.

MRS DUBEDAT [delighted] Ah, thats right. Does his wicked worrying wife torment him and drag him down from the clouds. [She kisses him]. And now, dear, wont you finish those drawings for Maclean?

LOUIS. Oh, they dont matter. Ive got nearly all the money from him in advance.

MRS DUBEDAT. But, dearest, that is just the reason why you should finish them. He asked me the other day whether you really intended to finish them.

LOUIS. Confound his impudence! What the devil does he take me for? Now that just destroys all my interest in the beastly job. Ive a good mind to throw up the commission, and pay him back his money.

MRS DUBEDAT. We cant afford that, dear. You had better finish the drawings and have done with them. I think it is a mistake to accept money in advance.

LOUIS. But how are we to live?

MRS DUBEDAT. Well, Louis, it is getting hard enough as it is, now that they are all refusing to pay except on delivery.

LOUIS. Damn those fellows! they think of nothing and care for nothing but their wretched money.

MRS DUBEDAT. Still, if they pay us, they ought to have what they pay for.

LOUIS [coaxing;] There now: thats enough lecturing for to-day. Ive promised to be good, havnt I?

MRS DUDEBAT [putting her arms round his neck] You know that I hate lecturing, and that I dont for a moment misunderstand you, dear, dont you?

LOUIS [fondly] I know. I know. I’m a wretch; and youre an angel. Oh, if only I were strong enough to work steadily, I’d make my darling’s house a temple, and her shrine a chapel more beautiful than was ever imagined. I cant pass the shops without wrestling with the temptation to go in and order all the really good things they have for you.

MRS DUBEDAT. I want nothing but you, dear. [She gives him a caress, to which he responds so passionately that she disengages herself]. There! be good now: remember that the doctors are coming this morning. Isnt it extraordinarily kind of them, Louis, to insist on coming? all of them, to consult about you?

LOUIS [coolly] Oh, I daresay they think it will be a feather in their cap to cure a rising artist. They wouldnt come if it didnt amuse them, anyhow. [Someone knocks at the door]. I say: its not time yet, is it?

MRS DUDEBAT. No, not quite yet.

LOUIS [opening the door and finding Ridgeon there] Hello, Ridgeon. Delighted to see you. Come in.

MRS DUDEBAT [shaking hands] It’s so good of you to come, doctor.

LOUIS. Excuse this place, wont you? Its only a studio, you know: theres no real convenience for living here. But we pig along somehow, thanks to Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Now I’ll run away. Perhaps later on, when youre finished with Louis, I may come in and hear the verdict. [Ridgeon bows rather constrainedly]. Would you rather I didnt?

RIDGEON. Not at all. Not at all.

Mrs Dubedat looks at him, a little puzzled by his formal manner; then goes into the inner room.

LOUIS [flippantly] I say: dont look so grave. Theres nothing awful going to happen, is there?

RIDGEON. No.

LOUIS. Thats all right. Poor Jennifer has been looking forward to your visit more than you can imagine. Shes taken quite a fancy to you, Ridgeon. The poor girl has nobody to talk to: I’m always painting. [Taking up a sketch] Theres a little sketch I made of her yesterday.

RIDGEON. She shewed it to me a fortnight ago when she first called on me.

LOUIS [quite unabashed] Oh! did she? Good Lord! how time does fly! I could have sworn I’d only just finished it. It’s hard for her here, seeing me piling up drawings and nothing coming in for them. Of course I shall sell them next year fast enough, after my one-man-show; but while the grass grows the steed starves. I hate to have her coming to me for money, and having none to give her. But what can I do?

RIDGEON. I understood that Mrs Dubedat had some property of her own.

Louis. Oh yes, a little; but how could a man with any decency of feeling touch that? Suppose I did, what would she have to live on if I died? I’m not insured: cant afford the premiums. [Picking out another drawing] How do you like that?

RIDGEON [putting it aside] I have not come here to-day to look at your drawings. I have more serious and pressing business with you.

LOUIS. You want to sound my wretched lung. [With impulsive candor] My dear Ridgeon: I’ll be frank with you. Whats the matter in this house isnt lungs but bills. It doesnt matter about me; but Jennifer has actually to economize in the matter of food. Youve made us feel that we can treat you as a friend. Will you lend us a hundred and fifty pounds?

RIDGEON. No.

LOUIS [surprised] Why not?

RIDGEON. I am not a rich man; and I want every penny I can spare and more for my researches.

LOUIS. You mean youd want the money back again.

RIDGEON. I presume people sometimes have that in view when they lend money.

LOUIS [after a moment’s reflection] Well, I can manage that for you. I’ll give you a cheque — or see here: theres no reason why you shouldnt have your bit too: I’ll give you a cheque for two hundred.

RIDGEON. Why not cash the cheque at once without troubling me?

LOUIS. Bless you! they wouldnt cash it: I’m overdrawn as it is. No: the way to work it is this. I’ll postdate the cheque next October. In October Jennifer’s dividends come in. Well, you present the cheque. It will be returned marked “refer to drawer” or some rubbish of that sort. Then you can take it to Jennifer, and hint that if the cheque isnt taken up at once I shall be put in prison. She’ll pay you like a shot. Youll clear 50 pounds; and youll do me a real service; for I do want the money very badly, old chap, I assure you.

RIDGEON [staring at him] You see no objection to the transaction; and you anticipate none from me!

LOUIS. Well, what objection can there be? It’s quite safe. I can convince you about the dividends.

RIDGEON. I mean on the score of its being — shall I say dishonorable?

LOUIS. Well, of course I shouldnt suggest it if I didnt want the money.

RIDGEON. Indeed! Well, you will have to find some other means of getting it.

LOUIS. Do you mean that you refuse?

RIDGEON. Do I mean — ! [letting his indignation loose] Of course I refuse, man. What do you take me for? How dare you make such a proposal to me?

LOUIS. Why not?

RIDGEON. Faugh! You would not understand me if I tried to explain. Now, once for all, I will not lend you a farthing. I should be glad to help your wife; but lending you money is no service to her.

LOUIS. Oh well, if youre in earnest about helping her, I’ll tell you what you might do. You might get your patients to buy some of my things, or to give me a few portrait commissions.

RIDGEON. My patients call me in as a physician, not as a commercial traveller.

A knock at the door.

Louis goes unconcernedly to open it, pursuing the subject as he goes.

LOUIS. But you must have great influence with them. You must know such lots of things about them — private things that they wouldnt like to have known. They wouldnt dare to refuse you.

RIDGEON [exploding] Well, upon my —

Louis opens the door, and admits Sir Patrick, Sir Ralph, and Walpole.

RIDGEON [proceeding furiously] Walpole: Ive been here hardly ten minutes; and already he’s tried to borrow 150 pounds from me. Then he proposed that I should get the money for him by blackmailing his wife; and youve just interrupted him in the act of suggesting that I should blackmail my patients into sitting to him for their portraits.

LOUIS. Well, Ridgeon, if this is what you call being an honorable man! I spoke to you in confidence.

SIR PATRICK. We’re all going to speak to you in confidence, young man.

WALPOLE [hanging his hat on the only peg left vacant on the hat-stand] We shall make ourselves at home for half an hour, Dubedat. Dont be alarmed: youre a most fascinating chap; and we love you.

LOUIS. Oh, all right, all right. Sit down — anywhere you can. Take this chair, Sir Patrick [indicating the one on the throne]. Up-z-z-z! [helping him up: Sir Patrick grunts and enthrones himself]. Here you are, B. B. [Sir Ralph glares at the familiarity; but Louis, quite undisturbed, puts a big book and a sofa cushion on the dais, on Sir Patrick’s right; and B. B. sits down, under protest]. Let me take your hat. [He takes B. B.’s hat unceremoniously, and substitutes it for the cardinal’s hat on the head of the lay figure, thereby ingeniously destroying the dignity of the conclave. He then draws the piano stool from the wall and offers it to Walpole]. You dont mind this, Walpole, do you? [Walpole accepts the stool, and puts his hand into his pocket for his cigaret case. Missing it, he is reminded of his loss].

WALPOLE. By the way, I’ll trouble you for my cigaret case, if you dont mind?

LOUIS. What cigaret case?

WALPOLE. The gold one I lent you at the Star and Garter.

LOUIS [surprised] Was that yours?

WALPOLE. Yes.

LOUIS. I’m awfully sorry, old chap. I wondered whose it was. I’m sorry to say this is all thats left of it. [He hitches up his smock; produces a card from his waistcoat pocket; and hands it to Walpole].

WALPOLE. A pawn ticket!

LOUIS [reassuringly] It’s quite safe: he cant sell it for a year, you know. I say, my dear Walpole, I am sorry. [He places his hand ingenuously on Walpole’s shoulder and looks frankly at him].

WALPOLE [sinking on the stool with a gasp] Dont mention it. It adds to your fascination.

RIDGEON [who has been standing near the easel] Before we go any further, you have a debt to pay, Mr Dubedat.

LOUIS. I have a precious lot of debts to pay, Ridgeon. I’ll fetch you a chair. [He makes for the inner door].

RIDGEON [stopping him] You shall not leave the room until you pay it. It’s a small one; and pay it you must and shall. I dont so much mind your borrowing 10 pounds from one of my guests and 20 pounds from the other —

WALPOLE. I walked into it, you know. I offered it.

RIDGEON. — they could afford it. But to clean poor Blenkinsop out of his last half-crown was damnable. I intend to give him that half-crown and to be in a position to pledge him my word that you paid it. I’ll have that out of you, at all events.

B. B. Quite right, Ridgeon. Quite right. Come, young man! down with the dust. Pay up.

LOUIS. Oh, you neednt make such a fuss about it. Of course I’ll pay it. I had no idea the poor fellow was hard up. I’m as shocked as any of you about it. [Putting his hand into his pocket] Here you are. [Finding his pocket empty] Oh, I say, I havnt any money on me just at present. Walpole: would you mind lending me half-a-crown just to settle this.

WALPOLE. Lend you half — [his voice faints away].

LOUIS. Well, if you dont, Blenkinsop wont get it; for I havnt a rap: you may search my pockets if you like.

WALPOLE. Thats conclusive. [He produces half-a-crown].

LOUIS [passing it to Ridgeon] There! I’m really glad thats settled: it was the only thing that was on my conscience. Now I hope youre all satisfied.

SIR PATRICK. Not quite, Mr Dubedat. Do you happen to know a young woman named Minnie Tinwell?

LOUIS. Minnie! I should think I do; and Minnie knows me too. She’s a really nice good girl, considering her station. Whats become of her?

WALPOLE. It’s no use bluffing, Dubedat. Weve seen Minnie’s marriage lines.

LOUIS [coolly] Indeed? Have you seen Jennifer’s?

RIDGEON [rising in irrepressible rage] Do you dare insinuate that Mrs Dubedat is living with you without being married to you?

LOUIS. Why not?

B. B. { [echoing him in } Why not! SIR PATRICK { various tones of } Why not! RIDGEON { scandalized } Why not! WALPOLE { amazement] } Why not!

LOUIS. Yes, why not? Lots of people do it: just as good people as you. Why dont you learn to think, instead of bleating and bashing like a lot of sheep when you come up against anything youre not accustomed to? [Contemplating their amazed faces with a chuckle] I say: I should like to draw the lot of you now: you do look jolly foolish. Especially you, Ridgeon. I had you that time, you know.

RIDGEON. How, pray?

LOUIS. Well, you set up to appreciate Jennifer, you know. And you despise me, dont you?

RIDGEON [curtly] I loathe you. [He sits down again on the sofa].

LOUIS. Just so. And yet you believe that Jennifer is a bad lot because you think I told you so.

RIDGEON. Were you lying?

LOUIS. No; but you were smelling out a scandal instead of keeping your mind clean and wholesome. I can just play with people like you. I only asked you had you seen Jennifer’s marriage lines; and you concluded straight away that she hadnt got any. You dont know a lady when you see one.

B. B. [majestically] What do you mean by that, may I ask?

LOUIS. Now, I’m only an immoral artist; but if YOUD told me that Jennifer wasnt married, I’d have had the gentlemanly feeling and artistic instinct to say that she carried her marriage certificate in her face and in her character. But you are all moral men; and Jennifer is only an artist’s wife — probably a model; and morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married. Arnt you ashamed of yourselves? Can one of you look me in the face after it?

WALPOLE. Its very hard to look you in the face, Dubedat; you have such a dazzling cheek. What about Minnie Tinwell, eh?

LOUIS. Minnie Tinwell is a young woman who has had three weeks of glorious happiness in her poor little life, which is more than most girls in her position get, I can tell you. Ask her whether she’d take it back if she could. She’s got her name into history, that girl. My little sketches of her will be bought by collectors at Christie’s. She’ll have a page in my biography. Pretty good, that, for a still-room maid at a seaside hotel, I think. What have you fellows done for her to compare with that?

RIDGEON. We havnt trapped her into a mock marriage and deserted her.

LOUIS. No: you wouldnt have the pluck. But dont fuss yourselves. I didnt desert little Minnie. We spent all our money —

WALPOLE. All HER money. Thirty pounds.

LOUIS. I said all our money: hers and mine too. Her thirty pounds didnt last three days. I had to borrow four times as much to spend on her. But I didnt grudge it; and she didnt grudge her few pounds either, the brave little lassie. When we were cleaned out, we’d had enough of it: you can hardly suppose that we were fit company for longer than that: I an artist, and she quite out of art and literature and refined living and everything else. There was no desertion, no misunderstanding, no police court or divorce court sensation for you moral chaps to lick your lips over at breakfast. We just said, Well, the money’s gone: weve had a good time that can never be taken from us; so kiss; part good friends; and she back to service, and I back to my studio and my Jennifer, both the better and happier for our holiday.

WALPOLE. Quite a little poem, by George!’

B. B. If you had been scientifically trained, Mr Dubedat, you would know how very seldom an actual case bears out a principle. In medical practice a man may die when, scientifically speaking, he ought to have lived. I have actually known a man die of a disease from which he was scientifically speaking, immune. But that does not affect the fundamental truth of science. In just the same way, in moral cases, a man’s behavior may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he is morally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles. But that does not affect the fundamental truth of morality.

SIR PATRICK. And it doesnt affect the criminal law on the subject of bigamy.

LOUIS. Oh bigamy! bigamy! bigamy! What a fascination anything connected with the police has for you all, you moralists! Ive proved to you that you were utterly wrong on the moral point: now I’m going to shew you that youre utterly wrong on the legal point; and I hope it will be a lesson to you not to be so jolly cocksure next time.

WALPOLE. Rot! You were married already when you married her; and that settles it.

LOUIS. Does it! Why cant you think? How do you know she wasnt married already too?

B.B. { [all } Walpole! Ridgeon! RIDGEON { crying } This is beyond everything! WALPOLE { out } Well, damn me! SIR PATRICK { together] } You young rascal.

LOUIS [ignoring their outcry] She was married to the steward of a liner. He cleared out and left her; and she thought, poor girl, that it was the law that if you hadnt heard of your husband for three years you might marry again. So as she was a thoroughly respectable girl and refused to have anything to say to me unless we were married I went through the ceremony to please her and to preserve her self-respect.

RIDGEON. Did you tell her you were already married?

LOUIS. Of course not. Dont you see that if she had known, she wouldnt have considered herself my wife? You dont seem to understand, somehow.

SIR PATRICK. You let her risk imprisonment in her ignorance of the law?

LOUIS. Well, I risked imprisonment for her sake. I could have been had up for it just as much as she. But when a man makes a sacrifice of that sort for a woman, he doesnt go and brag about it to her; at least, not if he’s a gentleman.

WALPOLE. What are we to do with this daisy?

LOUIS. [impatiently] Oh, go and do whatever the devil you please. Put Minnie in prison. Put me in prison. Kill Jennifer with the disgrace of it all. And then, when youve done all the mischief you can, go to church and feel good about it. [He sits down pettishly on the old chair at the easel, and takes up a sketching block, on which he begins to draw]

WALPOLE. He’s got us.

SIR PATRICK [grimly] He has.

B. B. But is he to be allowed to defy the criminal law of the land?

SIR PATRICK. The criminal law is no use to decent people. It only helps blackguards to blackmail their families. What are we family doctors doing half our time but conspiring with the family solicitor to keep some rascal out of jail and some family out of disgrace?

B. B. But at least it will punish him.

SIR PATRICK. Oh, yes: Itll punish him. Itll punish not only him but everybody connected with him, innocent and guilty alike. Itll throw his board and lodging on our rates and taxes for a couple of years, and then turn him loose on us a more dangerous blackguard than ever. Itll put the girl in prison and ruin her: Itll lay his wife’s life waste. You may put the criminal law out of your head once for all: it’s only fit for fools and savages.

LOUIS. Would you mind turning your face a little more this way, Sir Patrick. [Sir Patrick turns indignantly and glares at him]. Oh, thats too much.

SIR PATRICK. Put down your foolish pencil, man; and think of your position. You can defy the laws made by men; but there are other laws to reckon with. Do you know that youre going to die?

LOUIS. We’re all going to die, arnt we?

WALPOLE. We’re not all going to die in six months.

LOUIS. How do you know?

This for B. B. is the last straw. He completely loses his temper and begins to walk excitedly about.

B. B. Upon my soul, I will not stand this. It is in questionable taste under any circumstances or in any company to harp on the subject of death; but it is a dastardly advantage to take of a medical man. [Thundering at Dubedat] I will not allow it, do you hear?

LOUIS. Well, I didn’t begin it: you chaps did. It’s always the way with the inartistic professions: when theyre beaten in argument they fall back on intimidation. I never knew a lawyer who didnt threaten to put me in prison sooner or later. I never knew a parson who didnt threaten me with damnation. And now you threaten me with death. With all your talk youve only one real trump in your hand, and thats Intimidation. Well, I’m not a coward; so it’s no use with me.

B. B. [advancing upon him] I’ll tell you what you are, sir. Youre a scoundrel.

LOUIS. Oh, I don’t mind you calling me a scoundrel a bit. It’s only a word: a word that you dont know the meaning of. What is a scoundrel?

B. B. You are a scoundrel, sir.

LOUIS. Just so. What is a scoundrel? I am. What am I? A Scoundrel. It’s just arguing in a circle. And you imagine youre a man of science!

B. B. I — I — I — I have a good mind to take you by the scruff of your neck, you infamous rascal, and give you a sound thrashing.

LOUIS. I wish you would. Youd pay me something handsome to keep it out of court afterwards. [B. B., baffled, flings away from him with a snort]. Have you any more civilities to address to me in my own house? I should like to get them over before my wife comes back. [He resumes his sketching].

RIDGEON. My mind’s made up. When the law breaks down, honest men must find a remedy for themselves. I will not lift a finger to save this reptile.

B. B. That is the word I was trying to remember. Reptile.

WALPOLE. I cant help rather liking you, Dubedat. But you certainly are a thoroughgoing specimen.

SIR PATRICK. You know our opinion of you now, at all events.

LOUIS [patiently putting down his pencil] Look here. All this is no good. You dont understand. You imagine that I’m simply an ordinary criminal.

WALPOLE. Not an ordinary one, Dubedat. Do yourself justice.

LOUIS. Well youre on the wrong tack altogether. I’m not a criminal. All your moralizings have no value for me. I don’t believe in morality. I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw.

SIR PATRICK [puzzled] Eh?

B.B. [waving his hand as if the subject was now disposed of] Thats enough, I wish to hear no more.

LOUIS. Of course I havnt the ridiculous vanity to set up to be exactly a Superman; but still, it’s an ideal that I strive towards just as any other man strives towards his ideal.

B. B. [intolerant] Dont trouble to explain. I now understand you perfectly. Say no more, please. When a man pretends to discuss science, morals, and religion, and then avows himself a follower of a notorious and avowed anti-vaccinationist, there is nothing more to be said. [Suddenly putting in an effusive saving clause in parenthesis to Ridgeon] Not, my dear Ridgeon, that I believe in vaccination in the popular sense any more than you do: I neednt tell you that. But there are things that place a man socially; and anti-vaccination is one of them. [He resumes his seat on the dais].

SIR PATRICK. Bernard Shaw? I never heard of him. He’s a Methodist preacher, I suppose.

LOUIS [scandalized] No, no. He’s the most advanced man now living: he isn’t anything.

SIR PATRICK. I assure you, young man, my father learnt the doctrine of deliverance from sin from John Wesley’s own lips before you or Mr. Shaw were born. It used to be very popular as an excuse for putting sand in sugar and water in milk. Youre a sound Methodist, my lad; only you don’t know it.

LOUIS [seriously annoyed for the first time] Its an intellectual insult. I don’t believe theres such a thing as sin.

SIR PATRICK. Well, sir, there are people who dont believe theres such a thing as disease either. They call themselves Christian Scientists, I believe. Theyll just suit your complaint. We can do nothing for you. [He rises]. Good afternoon to you.

LOUIS [running to him piteously] Oh dont get up, Sir Patrick. Don’t go. Please dont. I didnt mean to shock you, on my word. Do sit down again. Give me another chance. Two minutes more: thats all I ask.

SIR PATRICK [surprised by this sign of grace, and a little touched] Well — [He sits down]

LOUIS [gratefully] Thanks awfully.

SIR PATRICK [continuing] I don’t mind giving you two minutes more. But dont address yourself to me; for Ive retired from practice; and I dont pretend to be able to cure your complaint. Your life is in the hands of these gentlemen.

RIDGEON. Not in mine. My hands are full. I have no time and no means available for this case.

SIR PATRICK. What do you say, Mr. Walpole?

WALPOLE. Oh, I’ll take him in hand: I dont mind. I feel perfectly convinced that this is not a moral case at all: it’s a physical one. Theres something abnormal about his brain. That means, probably, some morbid condition affecting the spinal cord. And that means the circulation. In short, it’s clear to me that he’s suffering from an obscure form of blood-poisoning, which is almost certainly due to an accumulation of ptomaines in the nuciform sac. I’ll remove the sac —

LOUIS [changing color] Do you mean, operate on me? Ugh! No, thank you.

WALPOLE. Never fear: you wont feel anything. Youll be under an anaesthetic, of course. And it will be extraordinarily interesting.

LOUIS. Oh, well, if it would interest you, and if it wont hurt, thats another matter. How much will you give me to let you do it?

WALPOLE [rising indignantly] How much! What do you mean?

LOUIS. Well, you dont expect me to let you cut me up for nothing, do you?

WALPOLE. Will you paint my portrait for nothing?

LOUIS. No; but I’ll give you the portrait when its painted; and you can sell it afterwards for perhaps double the money. But I cant sell my nuciform sac when youve cut it out.

WALPOLE. Ridgeon: did you ever hear anything like this! [To Louis] Well, you can keep your nuciform sac, and your tubercular lung, and your diseased brain: Ive done with you. One would think I was not conferring a favor on the fellow! [He returns to his stool in high dudgeon].

SIR PATRICK. That leaves only one medical man who has not withdrawn from your case, Mr. Dubedat. You have nobody left to appeal to now but Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington.

WALPOLE. If I were you, B. B., I shouldnt touch him with a pair of tongs. Let him take his lungs to the Brompton Hospital. They wont cure him; but theyll teach him manners.

B. B. My weakness is that I have never been able to say No, even to the most thoroughly undeserving people. Besides, I am bound to say that I dont think it is possible in medical practice to go into the question of the value of the lives we save. Just consider, Ridgeon. Let me put it to you, Paddy. Clear your mind of cant, Walpole.

WALPOLE [indignantly] My mind is clear of cant.

B. B. Quite so. Well now, look at my practice. It is what I suppose you would call a fashionable practice, a smart practice, a practice among the best people. You ask me to go into the question of whether my patients are of any use either to themselves or anyone else. Well, if you apply any scientific test known to me, you will achieve a reductio ad absurdum. You will be driven to the conclusion that the majority of them would be, as my friend Mr J. M. Barrie has tersely phrased it, better dead. Better dead. There are exceptions, no doubt. For instance, there is the court, an essentially social-democratic institution, supported out of public funds by the public because the public wants it and likes it. My court patients are hard-working people who give satisfaction, undoubtedly. Then I have a duke or two whose estates are probably better managed than they would be in public hands. But as to most of the rest, if I once began to argue about them, unquestionably the verdict would be, Better dead. When they actually do die, I sometimes have to offer that consolation, thinly disguised, to the family. [Lulled by the cadences of his own voice, he becomes drowsier and drowsier]. The fact that they spend money so extravagantly on medical attendance really would not justify me in wasting my talents — such as they are — in keeping them alive. After all, if my fees are high, I have to spend heavily. My own tastes are simple: a camp bed, a couple of rooms, a crust, a bottle of wine; and I am happy and contented. My wife’s tastes are perhaps more luxurious; but even she deplores an expenditure the sole object of which is to maintain the state my patients require from their medical attendant. The — er — er — er — [suddenly waking up] I have lost the thread of these remarks. What was I talking about, Ridgeon?

RIDGEON. About Dubedat.

B. B. Ah yes. Precisely. Thank you. Dubedat, of course. Well, what is our friend Dubedat? A vicious and ignorant young man with a talent for drawing.

LOUIS. Thank you. Dont mind me.

B. B. But then, what are many of my patients? Vicious and ignorant young men without a talent for anything. If I were to stop to argue about their merits I should have to give up three-quarters of my practice. Therefore I have made it a rule not so to argue. Now, as an honorable man, having made that rule as to paying patients, can I make an exception as to a patient who, far from being a paying patient, may more fitly be described as a borrowing patient? No. I say No. Mr Dubedat: your moral character is nothing to me. I look at you from a purely scientific point of view. To me you are simply a field of battle in which an invading army of tubercle bacilli struggles with a patriotic force of phagocytes. Having made a promise to your wife, which my principles will not allow me to break, to stimulate those phagocytes, I will stimulate them. And I take no further responsibility. [He digs himself back in his seat exhausted].

SIR PATRICK. Well, Mr Dubedat, as Sir Ralph has very kindly offered to take charge of your case, and as the two minutes I promised you are up, I must ask you to excuse me. [He rises].

LOUIS. Oh, certainly. Ive quite done with you. [Rising and holding up the sketch block] There! While youve been talking, Ive been doing. What is there left of your moralizing? Only a little carbonic acid gas which makes the room unhealthy. What is there left of my work? That. Look at it [Ridgeon rises to look at it].

SIR PATRICK [who has come down to him from the throne] You young rascal, was it drawing me you were?

LOUIS. Of course. What else?

SIR PATRICK [takes the drawing from him and grunts approvingly] Thats rather good. Dont you think so, Lolly?

RIDGEON. Yes. So good that I should like to have it.

SIR PATRICK. Thank you; but I should like to have it myself. What d’ye think, Walpole?

WALPOLE [rising and coming over to look] No, by Jove: I must have this.

LOUIS. I wish I could afford to give it to you, Sir Patrick. But I’d pay five guineas sooner than part with it.

RIDGEON. Oh, for that matter, I will give you six for it.

WALPOLE. Ten.

LOUIS. I think Sir Patrick is morally entitled to it, as he sat for it. May I send it to your house, Sir Patrick, for twelve guineas?

SIR PATRICK. Twelve guineas! Not if you were President of the Royal Academy, young man. [He gives him back the drawing decisively and turns away, taking up his hat].

LOUIS [to B. B.] Would you like to take it at twelve, Sir Ralph?

B. B. [coming between Louis and Walpole] Twelve guineas? Thank you: I’ll take it at that. [He takes it and presents it to Sir Patrick]. Accept it from me, Paddy; and may you long be spared to contemplate it.

SIR PATRICK. Thank you. [He puts the drawing into his hat].

B. B. I neednt settle with you now, Mr Dubedat: my fees will come to more than that. [He also retrieves his hat].

LOUIS [indignantly] Well, of all the mean — [words fail him]! I’d let myself be shot sooner than do a thing like that. I consider youve stolen that drawing.

SIR PATRICK [drily] So weve converted you to a belief in morality after all, eh?

LOUIS. Yah! [To Walpole] I’ll do another one for you, Walpole, if youll let me have the ten you promised.

WALPOLE. Very good. I’ll pay on delivery.

LOUIS. Oh! What do you take me for? Have you no confidence in my honor?

WALPOLE. None whatever.

LOUIS. Oh well, of course if you feel that way, you cant help it. Before you go, Sir Patrick, let me fetch Jennifer. I know she’d like to see you, if you dont mind. [He goes to the inner door]. And now, before she comes in, one word. Youve all been talking here pretty freely about me — in my own house too. I dont mind that: I’m a man and can take care of myself. But when Jennifer comes in, please remember that she’s a lady, and that you are supposed to be gentlemen. [He goes out].

WALPOLE. Well!!! [He gives the situation up as indescribable, and goes for his hat].

RIDGEON. Damn his impudence!

B. B. I shouldnt be at all surprised to learn that he’s well connected. Whenever I meet dignity and self-possession without any discoverable basis, I diagnose good family.

RIDGEON. Diagnose artistic genius, B. B. Thats what saves his self-respect.

SIR PATRICK. The world is made like that. The decent fellows are always being lectured and put out of countenance by the snobs.

B. B. [altogether refusing to accept this] I am not out of countenance. I should like, by Jupiter, to see the man who could put me out of countenance. [Jennifer comes in]. Ah, Mrs. Dubedat! And how are we to-day?

MRS DUBEDAT [shaking hands with him] Thank you all so much for coming. [She shakes Walpole’s hand]. Thank you, Sir Patrick [she shakes Sir Patrick’s]. Oh, life has been worth living since I have known you. Since Richmond I have not known a moment’s fear. And it used to be nothing but fear. Wont you sit down and tell me the result of the consultation?

WALPOLE. I’ll go, if you dont mind, Mrs. Dubedat. I have an appointment. Before I go, let me say that I am quite agreed with my colleagues here as to the character of the case. As to the cause and the remedy, thats not my business: I’m only a surgeon; and these gentlemen are physicians and will advise you. I may have my own views: in fact I HAVE them; and they are perfectly well known to my colleagues. If I am needed — and needed I shall be finally — they know where to find me; and I am always at your service. So for to-day, good-bye. [He goes out, leaving Jennifer much puzzled by his unexpected withdrawal and formal manner].

SIR PATRICK. I also will ask you to excuse me, Mrs Dubedat.

RIDGEON [anxiously] Are you going?

SIR PATRICK. Yes: I can be of no use here; and I must be getting back. As you know, maam, I’m not in practice now; and I shall not be in charge of the case. It rests between Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington. They know my opinion. Good afternoon to you, maam. [He bows and makes for the door].

MRS DUBEDAT [detaining him] Theres nothing wrong, is there? You dont think Louis is worse, do you?

SIR PATRICK. No: he’s not worse. Just the same as at Richmond.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, thank you: you frightened me. Excuse me.

SIR PATRICK. Dont mention it, maam. [He goes out].

B. B. Now, Mrs Dubedat, if I am to take the patient in hand —

MRS DUBEDAT [apprehensively, with a glance at Ridgeon] You! But I thought that Sir Colenso —

B. B. [beaming with the conviction that he is giving her a most gratifying surprise] My dear lady, your husband shall have Me.

MRS DUBEDAT. But —

B. B. Not a word: it is a pleasure to me, for your sake. Sir Colenso Ridgeon will be in his proper place, in the bacteriological laboratory. I shall be in my proper place, at the bedside. Your husband shall be treated exactly as if he were a member of the royal family. [Mrs Dubedat, uneasy, again is about to protest]. No gratitude: it would embarrass me, I assure you. Now, may I ask whether you are particularly tied to these apartments. Of course, the motor has annihilated distance; but I confess that if you were rather nearer to me, it would be a little more convenient.

MRS DUBEDAT. You see, this studio and flat are self-contained. I have suffered so much in lodgings. The servants are so frightfully dishonest.

B. B. Ah! Are they? Are they? Dear me!

MRS DUBEDAT. I was never accustomed to lock things up. And I missed so many small sums. At last a dreadful thing happened. I missed a five-pound note. It was traced to the housemaid; and she actually said Louis had given it to her. And he wouldnt let me do anything: he is so sensitive that these things drive him mad.

B. B. Ah — hm — ha — yes — say no more, Mrs. Dubedat: you shall not move. If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must come to the mountain. Now I must be off. I will write and make an appointment. We shall begin stimulating the phagocytes on — on — probably on Tuesday next; but I will let you know. Depend on me; dont fret; eat regularly; sleep well; keep your spirits up; keep the patient cheerful; hope for the best; no tonic like a charming woman; no medicine like cheerfulness; no resource like science; goodbye, good-bye, good-bye. [Having shaken hands — she being too overwhelmed to speak — he goes out, stopping to say to Ridgeon] On Tuesday morning send me down a tube of some really stiff anti-toxin. Any kind will do. Dont forget. Good-bye, Colly. [He goes out.]

RIDGEON. You look quite discouraged again. [She is almost in tears]. What’s the matter? Are you disappointed?

MRS DUBEDAT. I know I ought to be very grateful. Believe me, I am very grateful. But — but —

RIDGEON. Well?

hills DUBEDAT. I had set my heart YOUR curing Louis.

RIDGEON. Well, Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington —

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, I know, I know. It is a great privilege to have him. But oh, I wish it had been you. I know it’s unreasonable; I cant explain; but I had such a strong instinct that you would cure him. I dont I cant feel the same about Sir Ralph. You promised me. Why did you give Louis up?

RIDGEON. I explained to you. I cannot take another case.

MRS DUBEDAT. But at Richmond?

RIDGEON. At Richmond I thought I could make room for one more case. But my old friend Dr Blenkinsop claimed that place. His lung is attacked.

MRS DUBEDAT [attaching no importance whatever to Blenkinsop] Do you mean that elderly man — that rather —

RIDGEON [sternly] I mean the gentleman that dined with us: an excellent and honest man, whose life is as valuable as anyone else’s. I have arranged that I shall take his case, and that Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington shall take Mr Dubedat’s.

MRS DUBEDAT [turning indignantly on him] I see what it is. Oh! it is envious, mean, cruel. And I thought that you would be above such a thing.

RIDGEON. What do you mean?

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, do you think I dont know? do you think it has never happened before? Why does everybody turn against him? Can you not forgive him for being superior to you? for being cleverer? for being braver? for being a great artist?

RIDGEON. Yes: I can forgive him for all that.

MRS DUBEDAT. Well, have you anything to say against him? I have challenged everyone who has turned against him — challenged them face to face to tell me any wrong thing he has done, any ignoble thought he has uttered. They have always confessed that they could not tell me one. I challenge you now. What do you accuse him of?

RIDGEON. I am like all the rest. Face to face, I cannot tell you one thing against him.

MRS DUBEDAT [not satisfied] But your manner is changed. And you have broken your promise to me to make room for him as your patient.

RIDGEON. I think you are a little unreasonable. You have had the very best medical advice in London for him; and his case has been taken in hand by a leader of the profession. Surely —

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, it is so cruel to keep telling me that. It seems all right; and it puts me in the wrong. But I am not in the wrong. I have faith in you; and I have no faith in the others. We have seen so many doctors: I have come to know at last when they are only talking and can do nothing. It is different with you. I feel that you know. You must listen to me, doctor. [With sudden misgiving] Am I offending you by calling you doctor instead of remembering your title?

RIDGEON. Nonsense. I AM a doctor. But mind you, dont call Walpole one.

MRS DUBEBAT. I dont care about Mr Walpole: it is you who must befriend me. Oh, will you please sit down and listen to me just for a few minutes. [He assents with a grave inclination, and sits on the sofa. She sits on the easel chair] Thank you. I wont keep you long; but I must tell you the whole truth. Listen. I know Louis as nobody else in the world knows him or ever can know him. I am his wife. I know he has little faults: impatiences, sensitivenesses, even little selfishnesses that are too trivial for him to notice. I know that he sometimes shocks people about money because he is so utterly above it, and cant understand the value ordinary people set on it. Tell me: did he — did he borrow any money from you?

RIDGEON. He asked me for some once.

MRS DUBEDAT [tears again in her eyes] Oh, I am so sorry — so sorry. But he will never do it again: I pledge you my word for that. He has given me his promise: here in this room just before you came; and he is incapable of breaking his word. That was his only real weakness; and now it is conquered and done with for ever.

RIDGEON. Was that really his only weakness?

MRS DUBEDAT. He is perhaps sometimes weak about women, because they adore him so, and are always laying traps for him. And of course when he says he doesnt believe in morality, ordinary pious people think he must be wicked. You can understand, cant you, how all this starts a great deal of gossip about him, and gets repeated until even good friends get set against him?

RIDGEON. Yes: I understand.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, if you only knew the other side of him as I do! Do you know, doctor, that if Louis honored himself by a really bad action, I should kill myself.

RIDGEON. Come! dont exaggerate.

MRS DUBEDAT. I should. You don’t understand that, you east country people.

RIDGEON. You did not see much of the world in Cornwall, did you?

MRS DUBEDAT [naively] Oh yes. I saw a great deal every day of the beauty of the world — more than you ever see here in London. But I saw very few people, if that is what you mean. I was an only child.

RIDGEON. That explains a good deal.

MRS DUBEDAT. I had a great many dreams; but at last they all came to one dream.

RIDGEON [with half a sigh] Yes, the usual dream.

MRS DUBEDAT [surprised] Is it usual?

RIDGEON. As I guess. You havnt yet told me what it was.

MRS DUBEDAT. I didn’t want to waste myself. I could do nothing myself; but I had a little property and I could help with it. I had even a little beauty: dont think me vain for knowing it. I always had a terrible struggle with poverty and neglect at first. My dream was to save one of them from that, and bring some charm and happiness into his life. I prayed Heaven to send me one. I firmly believe that Louis was guided to me in answer to my prayer. He was no more like the other men I had met than the Thames Embankment is like our Cornish coasts. He saw everything that I saw, and drew it for me. He understood everything. He came to me like a child. Only fancy, doctor: he never even wanted to marry me: he never thought of the things other men think of! I had to propose it myself. Then he said he had no money. When I told him I had some, he said “Oh, all right,” just like a boy. He is still like that, quite unspoiled, a man in his thoughts, a great poet and artist in his dreams, and a child in his ways. I gave him myself and all I had that he might grow to his full height with plenty of sunshine. If I lost faith in him, it would mean the wreck and failure of my life. I should go back to Cornwall and die. I could show you the very cliff I should jump off. You must cure him: you must make him quite well again for me. I know that you can do it and that nobody else can. I implore you not to refuse what I am going to ask you to do. Take Louis yourself; and let Sir Ralph cure Dr Blenkinsop.

RIDGEON [slowly] Mrs Dubedat: do you really believe in my knowledge and skill as you say you do?

MRS DUBEDAT. Absolutely. I do not give my trust by halves.

RIDGEON. I know that. Well, I am going to test you — hard. Will you believe me when I tell you that I understand what you have just told me; that I have no desire but to serve you in the most faithful friendship; and that your hero must be preserved to you.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh forgive me. Forgive what I said. You will preserve him to me.

RIDGEON. At all hazards. [She kisses his hand. He rises hastily]. No: you have not heard the rest. [She rises too]. You must believe me when I tell you that the one chance of preserving the hero lies in Louis being in the care of Sir Ralph.

MRS DUBEDAT [firmly] You say so: I have no more doubt: I believe you. Thank you.

RIDGEON. Good-bye. [She takes his hand]. I hope this will be a lasting friendship.

MRS DUBEDAT. It will. My friendships end only with death.

RIDGEON. Death ends everything, doesnt it? Goodbye.

With a sigh and a look of pity at her which she does not understand, he goes.

ACT IV

The studio. The easel is pushed back to the wall. Cardinal Death, holding his scythe and hour-glass like a sceptre and globe, sits on the throne. On the hat-stand hang the hats of Sir Patrick and Bloomfield Bonington. Walpole, just come in, is hanging up his beside them. There is a knock. He opens the door and finds Ridgeon there.

WALPOLE. Hallo, Ridgeon!

They come into the middle of the room together, taking off their gloves.

RIDGEON. Whats the matter! Have you been sent for, too?

WALPOLE. Weve all been sent for. Ive only just come: I havnt seen him yet. The charwoman says that old Paddy Cullen has been here with B. B. for the last half-hour. [Sir Patrick, with bad news in his face, enters from the inner room]. Well: whats up?

SIR PATRICK. Go in and see. B. B. is in there with him.

Walpole goes. Ridgeon is about to follow him; but Sir Patrick stops him with a look.

RIDGEON. What has happened?

SIR PATRICK. Do you remember Jane Marsh’s arm?

RIDGEON. Is that whats happened?

SIR PATRICK. Thats whats happened. His lung has gone like Jane’s arm. I never saw such a case. He has got through three months galloping consumption in three days.

RIDGEON. B. B. got in on the negative phase.

SIR PATRICK. Negative or positive, the lad’s done for. He wont last out the afternoon. He’ll go suddenly: Ive often seen it.

RIDGEON. So long as he goes before his wife finds him out, I dont care. I fully expected this.

SIR PATRICK [drily] It’s a little hard on a lad to be killed because his wife has too high an opinion of him. Fortunately few of us are in any danger of that.

Sir Ralph comes from the inner room and hastens between them, humanely concerned, but professionally elate and communicative.

B. B. Ah, here you are, Ridgeon. Paddy’s told you, of course.

RIDGEON. Yes.

B. B. It’s an enormously interesting case. You know, Colly, by Jupiter, if I didnt know as a matter of scientific fact that I’d been stimulating the phagocytes, I should say I’d been stimulating the other things. What is the explanation of it, Sir Patrick? How do you account for it, Ridgeon? Have we over-stimulated the phagocytes? Have they not only eaten up the bacilli, but attacked and destroyed the red corpuscles as well? a possibility suggested by the patient’s pallor. Nay, have they finally begun to prey on the lungs themselves? Or on one another? I shall write a paper about this case.

Walpole comes back, very serious, even shocked. He comes between B. B. and Ridgeon.

WALPOLE. Whew! B. B.: youve done it this time.

B. B. What do you mean?

WALPOLE. Killed him. The worst case of neglected blood-poisoning I ever saw. It’s too late now to do anything. He’d die under the anaesthetic.

B. B. [offended] Killed! Really, Walpole, if your monomania were not well known, I should take such an expession very seriously.

SIR PATRICK. Come come! When youve both killed as many people as I have in my time youll feel humble enough about it. Come and look at him, Colly.

Ridgeon and Sir Patrick go into the inner room.

WALPOLE. I apologize, B. B. But it’s blood-poisoning.

B. B. [recovering his irresistible good nature] My dear Walpole, everything is blood-poisoning. But upon my soul, I shall not use any of that stuff of Ridgeon’s again. What made me so sensitive about what you said just now is that, strictly between ourselves, Ridgeon cooked our young friend’s goose.

Jennifer, worried and distressed, but always gentle, comes between them from the inner room. She wears a nurse’s apron.

MRS. DUBEDAT. Sir Ralph: what am I to do? That man who insisted on seeing me, and sent in word that business was important to Louis, is a newspaper man. A paragraph appeared in the paper this morning saying that Louis is seriously ill; and this man wants to interview him about it. How can people be so brutally callous?

WALPOLE [moving vengefully towards the door] You just leave me to deal with him!

MRS DUBEDAT [stopping him] But Louis insists on seeing him: he almost began to cry about it. And he says he cant bear his room any longer. He says he wants to [she struggles with a sob] — to die in his studio. Sir Patrick says let him have his way: it can do no harm. What shall we do?

B B. [encouragingly] Why, follow Sir Patrick’s excellent advice, of course. As he says, it can do him no harm; and it will no doubt do him good — a great deal of good. He will be much the better for it.

MRS DUBEDAT [a little cheered] Will you bring the man up here, Mr Walpole, and tell him that he may see Louis, but that he mustnt exhaust him by talking? [Walpole nods and goes out by the outer door]. Sir Ralph, dont be angry with me; but Louis will die if he stays here. I must take him to Cornwall. He will recover there.

B. B. [brightening wonderfully, as if Dubedat were already saved] Cornwall! The very place for him! Wonderful for the lungs. Stupid of me not to think of it before. You are his best physician after all, dear lady. An inspiration! Cornwall: of course, yes, yes, yes.

MRS DUBEDAT [comforted and touched] You are so kind, Sir Ralph. But dont give me much or I shall cry; and Louis cant bear that.

B. B. [gently putting his protecting arm round her shoulders] Then let us come back to him and help to carry him in. Cornwall! of course, of course. The very thing! [They go together into the bedroom].

Walpole returns with The Newspaper Man, a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism (for a newspaper, not having to act on its description and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity), he has perforce become a journalist, and has to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment. He has a note-book, and occasionally attempts to make a note; but as he cannot write shorthand, and does not write with ease in any hand, he generally gives it up as a bad job before he succeeds in finishing a sentence.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [looking round and making indecisive attempts at notes] This is the studio, I suppose.

WALPOLE. Yes.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [wittily] Where he has his models, eh?

WALPOLE [grimly irresponsive] No doubt.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Cubicle, you said it was?

WALPOLE. Yes, tubercle.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Which way do you spell it: is it c-u-b-i-c-a-l or c-l-e?

WALPOLE. Tubercle, man, not cubical. [Spelling it for him] T-u-b-e-r-c-l-e.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Oh! tubercle. Some disease, I suppose. I thought he had consumption. Are you one of the family or the doctor?

WALPOLE. I’m neither one nor the other. I am Mister Cutler Walpole. Put that down. Then put down Sir Colenso Ridgeon.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Pigeon?

WALPOLE. Ridgeon. [Contemptuously snatching his book] Here: youd better let me write the names down for you: youre sure to get them wrong. That comes of belonging to an illiterate profession, with no qualifications and no public register. [He writes the particulars].

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Oh, I say: you have got your knife into us, havnt you?

WALPOLE [vindictively] I wish I had: I’d make a better man of you. Now attend. [Shewing him the book] These are the names of the three doctors. This is the patient. This is the address. This is the name of the disease. [He shuts the book with a snap which makes the journalist blink, and returns it to him]. Mr Dubedat will be brought in here presently. He wants to see you because he doesnt know how bad he is. We’ll allow you to wait a few minutes to humor him; but if you talk to him, out you go. He may die at any moment.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [interested] Is he as bad as that? I say: I am in luck to-day. Would you mind letting me photograph you? [He produces a camera]. Could you have a lancet or something in your hand?

WALPOLE. Put it up. If you want my photograph you can get it in Baker Street in any of the series of celebrities.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. But theyll want to be paid. If you wouldnt mind [fingering the camera] — ?

WALPOLE. I would. Put it up, I tell you. Sit down there and be quiet.

The Newspaper Man quickly sits down on the piano stool as Dubedat, in an invalid’s chair, is wheeled in by Mrs Dubedat and Sir Ralph. They place the chair between the dais and the sofa, where the easel stood before. Louis is not changed as a robust man would be; and he is not scared. His eyes look larger; and he is so weak physically that he can hardly move, lying on his cushions, with complete languor; but his mind is active; it is making the most of his condition, finding voluptuousness in languor and drama in death. They are all impressed, in spite of themselves, except Ridgeon, who is implacable. B.B. is entirely sympathetic and forgiving. Ridgeon follows the chair with a tray of milk and stimulants. Sir Patrick, who accompanies him, takes the tea-table from the corner and places it behind the chair for the tray. B. B. takes the easel chair and places it for Jennifer at Dubedat’s side, next the dais, from which the lay figure ogles the dying artist. B. B. then returns to Dubedat’s left. Jennifer sits. Walpole sits down on the edge of the dais. Ridgeon stands near him.

LOUIS [blissfully] Thats happiness! To be in a studio! Happiness!

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, dear. Sir Patrick says you may stay here as long as you like.

LOUIS. Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, my darling.

LOUIS. Is the newspaper man here?

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [glibly] Yes, Mr Dubedat: I’m here, at your service. I represent the press. I thought you might like to let us have a few words about — about — er — well, a few words on your illness, and your plans for the season.

LOUIS. My plans for the season are very simple. I’m going to die.

MRS DUBEDAT [tortured] Louis — dearest —

LOUIS. My darling: I’m very weak and tired. Dont put on me the horrible strain of pretending that I dont know. Ive been lying there listening to the doctors — laughing to myself. They know. Dearest: dont cry. It makes you ugly; and I cant bear that. [She dries her eyes and recovers herself with a proud effort]. I want you to promise me something.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, yes: you know I will. [Imploringly] Only, my love, my love, dont talk: it will waste your strength.

LOUIS. No: it will only use it up. Ridgeon: give me something to keep me going for a few minutes — one of your confounded anti-toxins, if you dont mind. I have some things to say before I go.

RIDGEON [looking at Sir Patrick] I suppose it can do no harm? [He pours out some spirit, and is about to add soda water when Sir Patrick corrects him].

SIR PATRICK. In milk. Dont set him coughing.

LOUIS [after drinking] Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, dear.

LOUIS. If theres one thing I hate more than another, it’s a widow. Promise me that youll never be a widow.

MRS DUBEDAT. My dear, what do you mean?

LOUIS. I want you to look beautiful. I want people to see in your eyes that you were married to me. The people in Italy used to point at Dante and say “There goes the man who has been in hell.” I want them to point at you and say “There goes a woman who has been in heaven.” It has been heaven, darling, hasnt it — sometimes?

MRs DUBEDAT. Oh yes, yes. Always, always.

LOUIS. If you wear black and cry, people will say “Look at that miserable woman: her husband made her miserable.”

MRS DUBEDAT. No, never. You are the light and the blessing of my life. I never lived until I knew you.

LOUIS [his eyes glistening] Then you must always wear beautiful dresses and splendid magic jewels. Think of all the wonderful pictures I shall never paint.

[She wins a terrible victory over a sob] Well, you must be transfigured with all the beauty of those pictures. Men must get such dreams from seeing you as they never could get from any daubing with paints and brushes. Painters must paint you as they never painted any mortal woman before. There must be a great tradition of beauty, a great atmosphere of wonder and romance. That is what men must always think of when they think of me. That is the sort of immortality I want. You can make that for me, Jennifer. There are lots of things you dont understand that every woman in the street understands; but you can understand that and do it as nobody else can. Promise me that immortality. Promise me you will not make a little hell of crape and crying and undertaker’s horrors and withering flowers and all that vulgar rubbish.

MRS DUBEDAT. I promise. But all that is far off, dear. You are to come to Cornwall with me and get well. Sir Ralph says so.

LOUIS. Poor old B. B.

B. B. [affected to tears, turns away and whispers to Sir Patrick] Poor fellow! Brain going.

LOUIS. Sir Patrick’s there, isn’t he?

SIR PATRICK. Yes, yes. I’m here.

LOUIS. Sit down, wont you? It’s a shame to keep you standing about.

SIR PATRICK. Yes, Yes. Thank you. All right.

LOUIS. Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, dear.

LOUIS [with a strange look of delight] Do you remember the burning bush?

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, Yes. Oh, my dear, how it strains my heart to remember it now!

LOUIS. Does it? It fills me with joy. Tell them about it.

MRS DUBEDAT. It was nothing — only that once in my old Cornish home we lit the first fire of the winter; and when we looked through the window we saw the flames dancing in a bush in the garden.

LOUIS. Such a color! Garnet color. Waving like silk. Liquid lovely flame flowing up through the bay leaves, and not burning them. Well, I shall be a flame like that. I’m sorry to disappoint the poor little worms; but the last of me shall be the flame in the burning bush. Whenever you see the flame, Jennifer, that will be me. Promise me that I shall be burnt.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, if I might be with you, Louis!

LOUIS. No: you must always be in the garden when the bush flames. You are my hold on the world: you are my immortality. Promise.

MRS DUBEDAT. I’m listening. I shall not forget. You know that I promise.

LOUIS. Well, thats about all; except that you are to hang my pictures at the one-man show. I can trust your eye. You wont let anyone else touch them.

MRS DUBEDAT. You can trust me.

LOUIS. Then theres nothing more to worry about, is there? Give me some more of that milk. I’m fearfully tired; but if I stop talking I shant begin again. [Sir Ralph gives him a drink. He takes it and looks up quaintly]. I say, B. B., do you think anything would stop you talking?

B. B. [almost unmanned] He confuses me with you, Paddy. Poor fellow! Poor fellow!

LOUIS [musing] I used to be awfully afraid of death; but now it’s come I have no fear; and I’m perfectly happy. Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Yes, dear?

LOUIS. I’ll tell you a secret. I used to think that our marriage was all an affectation, and that I’d break loose and run away some day. But now that I’m going to be broken loose whether I like it or not, I’m perfectly fond of you, and perfectly satisfied because I’m going to live as part of you and not as my troublesome self.

MRS DUBEDAT [heartbroken] Stay with me, Louis. Oh, dont leave me, dearest.

LOUIS. Not that I’m selfish. With all my faults I dont think Ive ever been really selfish. No artist can: Art is too large for that. You will marry again, Jennifer.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, how can you, Louis?

LOUIS [insisting childishly] Yes, because people who have found marriage happy always marry again. Ah, I shant be jealous. [Slyly.] But dont talk to the other fellow too much about me: he wont like it. [Almost chuckling] I shall be your lover all the time; but it will be a secret from him, poor devil!

SIR PATRICK. Come! youve talked enough. Try to rest awhile.

LOUIS [wearily] Yes: I’m fearfully tired; but I shall have a long rest presently. I have something to say to you fellows. Youre all there, arnt you? I’m too weak to see anything but Jennifer’s bosom. That promises rest.

RIDGEON. We are all here.

LOUIS [startled] That voice sounded devilish. Take care, Ridgeon: my ears hear things that other people’s cant. Ive been thinking — thinking. I’m cleverer than you imagine.

SIR PATRICK [whispering to Ridgeon] Youve got on his nerves, Colly. Slip out quietly.

RIDGEON [apart to Sir Patrick] Would you deprive the dying actor of his audience?

LOUIS [his face lighting up faintly with mischievous glee] I heard that, Ridgeon. That was good. Jennifer dear: be kind to Ridgeon always; because he was the last man who amused me.

RIDGEON [relentless] Was I?

LOUIS. But it’s not true. It’s you who are still on the stage. I’m half way home already.

MRS DUBEDAT [to Ridgeon] What did you say?

LOUIS [answering for him] Nothing, dear. Only one of those little secrets that men keep among themselves. Well, all you chaps have thought pretty hard things of me, and said them.

B. B. [quite overcome] No, no, Dubedat. Not at all.

LOUIS. Yes, you have. I know what you all think of me. Dont imagine I’m sore about it. I forgive you.

WALPOLE [involuntarily] Well, damn me! [Ashamed] I beg your pardon.

LOUIS. That was old Walpole, I know. Don’t grieve, Walpole. I’m perfectly happy. I’m not in pain. I don’t want to live. Ive escaped from myself. I’m in heaven, immortal in the heart of my beautiful Jennifer. I’m not afraid, and not ashamed. [Reflectively, puzzling it out for himself weakly] I know that in an accidental sort of way, struggling through the unreal part of life, I havnt always been able to live up to my ideal. But in my own real world I have never done anything wrong, never denied my faith, never been untrue to myself. Ive been threatened and blackmailed and insulted and starved. But Ive played the game. Ive fought the good fight. And now it’s all over, theres an indescribable peace. [He feebly folds his hands and utters his creed] I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen. [He closes his eyes and lies still].

MRS DUBEDAT [breathless] Louis: are you —

Walpole rises and comes quickly to see whether he is dead.

LOUIS. Not yet, dear. Very nearly, but not yet. I should like to rest my head on your bosom; only it would tire you.

MRS DUBEDAT. No, no, no, darling: how could you tire me? [She lifts him so that he lies on her bosom].

LOUIS. Thats good. Thats real.

MRS DUBEDAT. Dont spare me, dear. Indeed, indeed you will not tire me. Lean on me with all your weight.

LOUIS [with a sudden half return of his normal strength and comfort] Jinny Gwinny: I think I shall recover after all. [Sir Patrick looks significantly at Ridgeon, mutely warning him that this is the end].

MRS DUBEDAT [hopefully] Yes, yes: you shall.

LOUIS. Because I suddenly want to sleep. Just an ordinary sleep.

MRS DUBEDAT [rocking him] Yes, dear. Sleep. [He seems to go to sleep. Walpole makes another movement. She protests]. Sh — sh: please dont disturb him. [His lips move]. What did you say, dear? [In great distress] I cant listen without moving him. [His lips move again; Walpole bends down and listens].

WALPOLE. He wants to know is the newspaper man here.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [excited; for he has been enjoying himself enormously] Yes, Mr Dubedat. Here I am.

Walpole raises his hand warningly to silence him. Sir Ralph sits down quietly on the sofa and frankly buries his face in his handkerchief.

MRS DUBEDAT [with great relief] Oh thats right, dear: dont spare me: lean with all your weight on me. Now you are really resting.

Sir Patrick quickly comes forward and feels Louis’s pulse; then takes him by the shoulders.

SIR PATRICK. Let me put him back on the pillow, maam. He will be better so.

MRS DUBEDAT [piteously] Oh no, please, please, doctor. He is not tiring me; and he will be so hurt when he wakes if he finds I have put him away.

SIR PATRICK. He will never wake again. [He takes the body from her and replaces it in the chair. Ridgeon, unmoved, lets down the back and makes a bier of it].

MRS DUBEDAT [who has unexpectedly sprung to her feet, and stands dry-eyed and stately] Was that death?

WALPOLE. Yes.

MRS DUBEDAT [with complete dignity] Will you wait for me a moment? I will come back. [She goes out].

WALPOLE. Ought we to follow her? Is she in her right senses?

SIR PATRICK [with quiet conviction]. Yes. Shes all right. Leave her alone. She’ll come back.

RIDGEON [callously] Let us get this thing out of the way before she comes.

B. B. [rising, shocked] My dear Colly! The poor lad! He died splendidly.

SIR PATRICK. Aye! that is how the wicked die.

For there are no bands in their death;

But their strength is firm:

They are not in trouble as other men.

No matter: its not for us to judge. Hes in another world now.

WALPOLE. Borrowing his first five-pound note there, probably.

RIDGEON. I said the other day that the most tragic thing in the world is a sick doctor. I was wrong. The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not also a man of honor.

Ridgeon and Walpole wheel the chair into the recess.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [to Sir Ralph] I thought it shewed a very nice feeling, his being so particular about his wife going into proper mourning for him and making her promise never to marry again.

B. B. [impressively] Mrs Dubedat is not in a position to carry the interview any further. Neither are we.

SIR PATRICK. Good afternoon to you.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Mrs. Dubedat said she was coming back.

B. B. After you have gone.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Do you think she would give me a few words on How It Feels to be a Widow? Rather a good title for an article, isnt it?

B. B. Young man: if you wait until Mrs Dubedat comes back, you will be able to write an article on How It Feels to be Turned Out of the House.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN [unconvinced] You think she’d rather not —

B. B. [cutting him short] Good day to you. [Giving him a visiting-card] Mind you get my name correctly. Good day.

THE NEWSPAPER MAN. Good day. Thank you. [Vaguely trying to read the card] Mr —

B. B. No, not Mister. This is your hat, I think [giving it to him]. Gloves? No, of course: no gloves. Good day to you. [He edges him out at last; shuts the door on him; and returns to Sir Patrick as Ridgeon and Walpole come back from the recess, Walpole crossing the room to the hat-stand, and Ridgeon coming between Sir Ralph and Sir Patrick]. Poor fellow! Poor young fellow! How well he died! I feel a better man, really.

SIR PATRICK. When youre as old as I am, youll know that it matters very little how a man dies. What matters is, how he lives. Every fool that runs his nose against a bullet is a hero nowadays, because he dies for his country. Why dont he live for it to some purpose?

B. B. No, please, Paddy: dont be hard on the poor lad. Not now, not now. After all, was he so bad? He had only two failings: money and women. Well, let us be honest. Tell the truth, Paddy. Dont be hypocritical, Ridgeon. Throw off the mask, Walpole. Are these two matters so well arranged at present that a disregard of the usual arrangements indicates real depravity?

WALPOLE. I dont mind his disregarding the usual arrangements. Confound the usual arrangements! To a man of science theyre beneath contempt both as to money and women. What I mind is his disregarding everything except his own pocket and his own fancy. He didn’t disregard the usual arrangements when they paid him. Did he give us his pictures for nothing? Do you suppose he’d have hesitated to blackmail me if I’d compromised myself with his wife? Not he.

SIR PATRICK. Dont waste your time wrangling over him. A blackguard’s a blackguard; an honest man’s an honest man; and neither of them will ever be at a loss for a religion or a morality to prove that their ways are the right ways. It’s the same with nations, the same with professions, the same all the world over and always will be.

B. B. Ah, well, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Still, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. He died extremely well, remarkably well. He has set us an example: let us endeavor to follow it rather than harp on the weaknesses that have perished with him. I think it is Shakespear who says that the good that most men do lives after them: the evil lies interred with their bones. Yes: interred with their bones. Believe me, Paddy, we are all mortal. It is the common lot, Ridgeon. Say what you will, Walpole, Nature’s debt must be paid. If tis not to-day, twill be to-morrow.

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

After life’s fitful fever they sleep well

And like this insubstantial bourne from which

No traveller returns

Leave not a wrack behind.

Walpole is about to speak, but B. B., suddenly and vehemently proceeding, extinguishes him.

Out, out, brief candle:

For nothing canst thou to damnation add

The readiness is all.

WALPOLE [gently; for B. B.’s feeling, absurdly expressed as it is, is too sincere and humane to be ridiculed] Yes, B. B. Death makes people go on like that. I dont know why it should; but it does. By the way, what are we going to do? Ought we to clear out; or had we better wait and see whether Mrs Dubedat will come back?

SIR PATRICK. I think we’d better go. We can tell the charwoman what to do.

They take their hats and go to the door.

MRS DUBEDAT [coming from the inner door wonderfully and beautifully dressed, and radiant, carrying a great piece of purple silk, handsomely embroidered, over her arm] I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.

SIR PATRICK } [amazed, all { Dont mention it, madam. B.B. } together { Not at all, not at all. RIDGEON } in a confused { By no means. WALPOLE } murmur] { It doesnt matter in the least.

MRS. DUBEDAT [coming to them] I felt that I must shake hands with his friends once before we part to-day. We have shared together a great privilege and a great happiness. I dont think we can ever think of ourselves ordinary people again. We have had a wonderful experience; and that gives us a common faith, a common ideal, that nobody else can quite have. Life will always be beautiful to us: death will always be beautiful to us. May we shake hands on that?

SIR PATRICK [shaking hands] Remember: all letters had better be left to your solicitor. Let him open everything and settle everything. Thats the law, you know.

MRS DUBEDAT. Oh, thank you: I didnt know. [Sir Patrick goes].

WALPOLE. Good-bye. I blame myself: I should have insisted on operating. [He goes].

B.B. I will send the proper people: they will know it to do: you shall have no trouble. Good-bye, my dear lady. [He goes].

RIDGEON. Good-bye. [He offers his hand].

MRS DUBEDAT [drawing back with gentle majesty] I said his friends, Sir Colenso. [He bows and goes].

She unfolds the great piece of silk, and goes into the recess to cover her dead.

ACT V

One of the smaller Bond Street Picture Galleries. The entrance is from a picture shop. Nearly in the middle of the gallery there is a writing-table, at which the Secretary, fashionably dressed, sits with his back to the entrance, correcting catalogue proofs. Some copies of a new book are on the desk, also the Secretary’s shining hat and a couple of magnifying glasses. At the side, on his left, a little behind him, is a small door marked PRIVATE. Near the same side is a cushioned bench parallel to the walls, which are covered with Dubedat’s works. Two screens, also covered with drawings, stand near the corners right and left of the entrance.

Jennifer, beautifully dressed and apparently very happy and prosperous, comes into the gallery through the private door.

JENNIFER. Have the catalogues come yet, Mr Danby?

THE SECRETARY. Not yet.

JENNIFER. What a shame! It’s a quarter past: the private view will begin in less than half an hour.

THE SECRETARY. I think I’d better run over to the printers to hurry them up.

JENNIFER. Oh, if you would be so good, Mr Danby. I’ll take your place while youre away.

THE SECRETARY. If anyone should come before the time dont take any notice. The commissionaire wont let anyone through unless he knows him. We have a few people who like to come before the crowd — people who really buy; and of course we’re glad to see them. Have you seen the notices in Brush and Crayon and in The Easel?

JENNIFER [indignantly] Yes: most disgraceful. They write quite patronizingly, as if they were Mr Dubedat’s superiors. After all the cigars and sandwiches they had from us on the press day, and all they drank, I really think it is infamous that they should write like that. I hope you have not sent them tickets for to-day.

THE SECRETARY. Oh, they wont come again: theres no lunch to-day. The advance copies of your book have come. [He indicates the new books].

JENNIFER [pouncing on a copy, wildly excited] Give it to me. Oh! excuse me a moment [she runs away with it through the private door].

The Secretary takes a mirror from his drawer and smartens himself before going out. Ridgeon comes in.

RIDGEON. Good morning. May I look round, as well, before the doors open?

THE SECRETARY. Certainly, Sir Colenso. I’m sorry catalogues have not come: I’m just going to see about them. Heres my own list, if you dont mind.

RIDGEON. Thanks. Whats this? [He takes up one the new books].

THE SECRETARY. Thats just come in. An advance copy of Mrs Dubedat’s Life of her late husband.

RIDGEON [reading the title] The Story of a King By His Wife. [He looks at the portrait frontise]. Ay: there he is. You knew him here, I suppose.

THE SECRETARY. Oh, we knew him. Better than she did, Sir Colenso, in some ways, perhaps.

RIDGEON. So did I. [They look significantly at one another]. I’ll take a look round.

The Secretary puts on the shining hat and goes out. Ridgeon begins looking at the pictures. Presently he comes back to the table for a magnifying glass, and scrutinizes a drawing very closely. He sighs; shakes his head, as if constrained to admit the extraordinary fascination and merit of the work; then marks the Secretary’s list. Proceeding with his survey, he disappears behind the screen. Jennifer comes back with her book. A look round satisfies her that she is alone. She seats herself at the table and admires the memoir — her first printed book — to her heart’s content. Ridgeon re-appears, face to the wall, scrutinizing the drawings. After using his glass again, he steps back to get a more distant view of one of the larger pictures. She hastily closes the book at the sound; looks round; recognizes him; and stares, petrified. He takes a further step back which brings him nearer to her.

RIDGEON [shaking his head as before, ejaculates] Clever brute! [She flushes as though he had struck her. He turns to put the glass down on the desk, and finds himself face to face with her intent gaze]. I beg your pardon. I thought I was alone.

JENNIFER [controlling herself, and speaking steadily and meaningly] I am glad we have met, Sir Colenso Ridgeon. I met Dr Blenkinsop yesterday. I congratulate you on a wonderful cure.

RIDGEON [can find no words; makes an embarrassed gesture of assent after a moment’s silence, and puts down the glass and the Secretary’s list on the table].

JENNIFER. He looked the picture of health and strength and prosperity. [She looks for a moment at the walls, contrasting Blenkinsop’s fortune with the artist’s fate].

RIDGEON [in low tones, still embarrassed] He has been fortunate.

JENNIFER. Very fortunate. His life has been spared.

RIDGEON. I mean that he has been made a Medical Officer of Health. He cured the Chairman of the Borough Council very successfully.

JENNIFER. With your medicines?

RIDGEON. No. I believe it was with a pound of ripe greengages.

JENNIFER [with deep gravity] Funny!

RIDGEON. Yes. Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

JENNIFER. Dr Blenkinsop said one very strange thing to me.

RIDGEON. What was that?

JENNIFER. He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murderers.

RIDGEON. That is what the public doctor always thinks of the private doctor. Well, Blenkinsop ought to know. He was a private doctor long enough himself. Come! you have talked at me long enough. Talk to me. You have something to reproach me with. There is reproach in your face, in your voice: you are full of it. Out with it.

JENNIFER. It is too late for reproaches now. When I turned and saw you just now, I wondered how you could come here coolly to look at his pictures. You answered the question. To you, he was only a clever brute.

RIDGEON [quivering] Oh, dont. You know I did not know you were here.

JENNIFER [raising her head a little with a quite gentle impulse of pride] You think it only mattered because I heard it. As if it could touch me, or touch him! Dont you see that what is really dreadful is that to you living things have no souls.

RIDGEON [with a sceptical shrug] The soul is an organ I have not come across in the course of my anatomical work.

JENNIFER. You know you would not dare to say such a silly thing as that to anybody but a woman whose mind you despise. If you dissected me you could not find my conscience. Do you think I have got none?

RIDGEON. I have met people who had none.

JENNIFER. Clever brutes? Do you know, doctor, that some of the dearest and most faithful friends I ever had were only brutes! You would have vivisected them. The dearest and greatest of all my friends had a sort of beauty and affectionateness that only animals have. I hope you may never feel what I felt when I had to put him into the hands of men who defend the torture of animals because they are only brutes.

RIDGEON. Well, did you find us so very cruel, after all? They tell me that though you have dropped me, you stay for weeks with the Bloomfield Boningtons and the Walpoles. I think it must be true, because they never mention you to me now.

JENNIFER. The animals in Sir Ralph’s house are like spoiled children. When Mr. Walpole had to take a splinter out of the mastiff’s paw, I had to hold the poor dog myself; and Mr Walpole had to turn Sir Ralph out of the room. And Mrs. Walpole has to tell the gardener not to kill wasps when Mr. Walpole is looking. But there are doctors who are naturally cruel; and there are others who get used to cruelty and are callous about it. They blind themselves to the souls of animals; and that blinds them to the souls of men and women. You made a dreadful mistake about Louis; but you would not have made it if you had not trained yourself to make the same mistake about dogs. You saw nothing in them but dumb brutes; and so you could see nothing in him but a clever brute.

RIDGEON [with sudden resolution] I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER. Oh, doctor!

RIDGEON [obstinately] I made no mistake whatever about him.

JENNIFER. Have you forgotten that he died?

RIDGEON [with a sweep of his hand towards the pictures] He is not dead. He is there. [Taking up the book] And there.

JENNIFER [springing up with blazing eyes] Put that down. How dare you touch it?

Ridgeon, amazed at the fierceness of the outburst, puts it down with a deprecatory shrug. She takes it up and looks at it as if he had profaned a relic.

RIDGEON. I am very sorry. I see I had better go.

JENNIFER [putting the book down] I beg your pardon. I forgot myself. But it is not yet — it is a private copy.

RIDGEON. But for me it would have been a very different book.

JENNIFER. But for you it would have been a longer one.

RIDGEON. You know then that I killed him?

JENNIFER [suddenly moved and softened] Oh, doctor, if you acknowledge that — if you have confessed it to yourself — if you realize what you have done, then there is forgiveness. I trusted in your strength instinctively at first; then I thought I had mistaken callousness for strength. Can you blame me? But if it was really strength — if it was only such a mistake as we all make sometimes — it will make me so happy to be friends with you again.

RIDGEON. I tell you I made no mistake. I cured Blenkinsop: was there any mistake there?

JENNIFER. He recovered. Oh, dont be foolishly proud, doctor. Confess to a failure, and save our friendship. Remember, Sir Ralph gave Louis your medicine; and it made him worse.

RIDGEON. I cant be your friend on false pretences. Something has got me by the throat: the truth must come out. I used that medicine myself on Blenkinsop. It did not make him worse. It is a dangerous medicine: it cured Blenkinsop: it killed Louis Dubedat. When I handle it, it cures. When another man handles it, it kills — sometimes.

JENNIFER [naively: not yet taking it all in] Then why did you let Sir Ralph give it to Louis?

RIDGEON. I’m going to tell you. I did it because I was in love with you.

JENNIFER [innocently surprised] In lo — You! elderly man!

RIDGEON [thunderstruck, raising his fists to heaven] Dubedat: thou art avenged! [He drops his hands and collapses on the bench]. I never thought of that. I suppose I appear to you a ridiculous old fogey.

JENNIFER. But surely — I did not mean to offend you, indeed — but you must be at least twenty years older than I am.

RIDGEON. Oh, quite. More, perhaps. In twenty years you will understand how little difference that makes.

JENNIFER. But even so, how could you think that I — his wife — could ever think of YOU —

RIDGEON [stopping her with a nervous waving of his fingers] Yes, yes, yes, yes: I quite understand: you neednt rub it in.

JENNIFER. But — oh, it is only dawning on me now — I was so surprised at first — do you dare to tell me that it was to gratify a miserable jealousy that you deliberately — oh! oh! you murdered him.

RIDGEON. I think I did. It really comes to that.

Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive

Officiously to keep alive.

I suppose — yes: I killed him.

JENNIFER. And you tell me that! to my face! callously! You are not afraid!

RIDGEON. I am a doctor: I have nothing to fear. It is not an indictable offense to call in B. B. Perhaps it ought to be; but it isnt.

JENNIFER. I did not mean that. I meant afraid of my taking the law into my own hands, and killing you.

RIDGEON. I am so hopelessly idiotic about you that I should not mind it a bit. You would always remember me if you did that.

JENNIFER. I shall remember you always as a little man who tried to kill a great one.

RIDGEON. Pardon me. I succeeded.

JENNIFER [with quiet conviction] No. Doctors think they hold the keys of life and death; but it is not their will that is fulfilled. I dont believe you made any difference at all.

RIDGEON. Perhaps not. But I intended to.

JENNIFER [looking at him amazedly: not without pity] And you tried to destroy that wonderful and beautiful life merely because you grudged him a woman whom you could never have expected to care for you!

RIDGEON. Who kissed my hands. Who believed in me. Who told me her friendship lasted until death.

JENNIFER. And whom you were betraying.

RIDGEON. No. Whom I was saving.

JENNIFER [gently] Pray, doctor, from what?

RIDGEON. From making a terrible discovery. From having your life laid waste.

JENNIFER. How?

RIDGEON. No matter. I have saved you. I have been the best friend you ever had. You are happy. You are well. His works are an imperishable joy and pride for you.

JENNIFER. And you think that is your doing. Oh doctor, doctor! Sir Patrick is right: you do think you are a little god. How can you be so silly? You did not paint those pictures which are my imperishable joy and pride: you did not speak the words that will always be heavenly music in my ears. I listen to them now whenever I am tired or sad. That is why I am always happy.

RIDGEON. Yes, now that he is dead. Were you always happy when he was alive?

JENNIFER [wounded] Oh, you are cruel, cruel. When he was alive I did not know the greatness of my blessing. I worried meanly about little things. I was unkind to him. I was unworthy of him.

RIDGEON [laughing bitterly] Ha!

JENNIFER. Dont insult me: dont blaspheme. [She snatches up the book and presses it to her heart in a paroxysm of remorse, exclaiming] Oh, my King of Men!

RIDGEON. King of Men! Oh, this is too monstrous, too grotesque. We cruel doctors have kept the secret from you faithfully; but it is like all secrets: it will not keep itself. The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

JENNIFER. What truth?

RIDGEON. What truth! Why, that Louis Dubedat, King of Men, was the most entire and perfect scoundrel, the most miraculously mean rascal, the most callously selfish blackguard that ever made a wife miserable.

JENNIFER [unshaken: calm and lovely] He made his wife the happiest woman in the world, doctor.

RIDGEON. No: by all thats true on earth, he made his WIDOW the happiest woman in the world; but it was I who made her a widow. And her happiness is my justification and my reward. Now you know what I did and what I thought of him. Be as angry with me as you like: at least you know me as I really am. If you ever come to care for an elderly man, you will know what you are caring for.

JENNIFER [kind and quiet] I am not angry with you any more, Sir Colenso. I knew quite well that you did not like Louis; but it is not your fault: you dont understand: that is all. You never could have believed in him. It is just like your not believing in my religion: it is a sort of sixth sense that you have not got. And [with a gentle reassuring movement towards him] dont think that you have shocked me so dreadfully. I know quite well what you mean by his selfishness. He sacrificed everything for his art. In a certain sense he had even to sacrifice everybody —

RIDGEON. Everybody except himself. By keeping that back he lost the right to sacrifice you, and gave me the right to sacrifice him. Which I did.

JENNIFER [shaking her head, pitying his error] He was one of the men who know what women know: that self-sacrifice is vain and cowardly.

RIDGEON. Yes, when the sacrifice is rejected and thrown away. Not when it becomes the food of godhead.

JENNIFER. I dont understand that. And I cant argue with you: you are clever enough to puzzle me, but not to shake me. You are so utterly, so wildly wrong; so incapable of appreciating Louis —

RIDGEON. Oh! [taking up the Secretary’s list] I have marked five pictures as sold to me.

JENNIFER. They will not be sold to you. Louis’ creditors insisted on selling them; but this is my birthday; and they were all bought in for me this morning by my husband.

RIDGEON. By whom?!!!

JENNIFER. By my husband.

RIDGEON [gabbling and stuttering] What husband? Whose husband? Which husband? Whom? how? what? Do you mean to say that you have married again?

JENNIFER. Do you forget that Louis disliked widows, and that people who have married happily once always marry again?

The Secretary returns with a pile of catalogues.

THE SECRETARY. Just got the first batch of catalogues in time. The doors are open.

JENNIFER [to Ridgeon, politely] So glad you like the pictures, Sir Colenso. Good morning.

RIDGEON. Good morning. [He goes towards the door; hesitates; turns to say something more; gives it up as a bad job; and goes].

THE INTERLUDE AT THE PLAYHOUSE

Written for Cyril Maude and his wife Winifred Emery to be performed at the opening of the renovated Playhouse, London, on 28 January 1907. First published in the Daily Mail, London, 29 January 1907.

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

The float is turned up. Lights down in auditorium.

Expectancy. Silence.

The act drop is swung back. Evidently somebody is coming forward to make a speech.

Enter before the curtain the Manager’s wife, with one of the programme slips in her hand.

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

CONDUCTOR. Certainly, Mrs. Goldsmith, certainly.

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

A CARPENTER [from the side, putting his head round the edge of the curtain] Tsst! ma’am, tsst!

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Eh? What’s the matter?

THE CARPENTER. The governor’s dressed and coming up, ma’am.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Oh! [To the audience] Not a word. [She hurries off, with her finger on her lips].

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

THE MANAGER’S WIFE [aside] Courage, dear.

THE MANAGER [smiling with effort] Oh, quite so, quite so. Don’t be frightened, dearest. I am quite

self-possessed. It would be very silly for me to — er — there is no occasion for

nervousness — I — er — quite accustomed to public life — er — ahem! [He opens the manuscript, raises his head, and takes breath]. Er — [He flattens the manuscript out with his^ hand,affecting the ease and large gesture of an orator. The desk collapses with an appalling clatter. He collapses, shaking with nervousness, into the chair.]

THE MANAGER’S WIFE [running to him solicitously] Never mind, dear; it was only the desk. Come, come now.

You’re better now, aren’t you? The audience is waiting.

THE MANAGER. I thought it was the station.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. There’s no station there now,dear; it’s quite safe. [Replacing the MS. on the desk]

There! That’s right. [She sits down and composes herself to listen].

THE MANAGER [beginning his speech] Dear friends — I wish I could call you ladies and gentlemen —

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Hm! Hm! Hm!

THE MANAGER. What’s the matter?

THE MANAGER’S WIFE [prompting him] Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I could call you dear friends.

THE MANAGER. Well, what did I say?

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. You said it the other way about. No matter. Go on. They will understand.

THE MANAGER. Well, what difference does it make? [Testily] How am I to make a speech if I am to be

interrupted in this way? [To the audience] Excuse my poor wife, ladies and gentlemen. She is naturally a

little nervous to-night. You will overlook a woman’s weakness. [ To his wife] Compose yourself, my dear. Ahem! [He returns to the MS.]. The piece of land on which our theatre is built is mentioned in Domesday Book; and you will be glad to hear that I have succeeded in tracing its history almost year by year for the 800 years that have elapsed since that book — perhaps the most interesting of all English books — was written. That history I now propose to impart to you. Angelina, I really cannot make a speech if you look at your watch. If you think I am going on too long, say so.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Not at all, dear. But our friends may not be so fond of history as you are.

THE MANAGER. Why not? I am surprised at you, Angelina. Do you suppose that this is an ordinary frivolous audience

of mere playgoers? You are behind the times. Look at our friend Tree, making a fortune out of Roman history! Look

at the Court Theatre: they listen to this sort of thing for three hours at a stretch there. Look at the Royal

Institution, the Statistical Society, the House of Commons! Are we less scholarly, less cultured, less serious

than the audiences there? I say nothing of my own humble powers; but am I less entertaining than an average

Cabinet Minister? You show great ignorance of the times we live in, Angelina; and if my speech bores you, that

only shows that you are not in the movement. I am determined that this theatre shall be in the movement.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Well, all I can tell you is that if you don’t get a little more movement into your speech,

there won’t be time for Pickles.

THE MANAGER. That does not matter. We can omit Pickles if necessary. I have played Pickles before. If you suppose

I am burning to play Pickles again you are very much mistaken. If the true nature of my talent were understood I

should be playing Hamlet. Ask the audience whether they would not like to see me play Hamlet. [Enthusiastic assent]. There! You ask me why I don’t play Hamlet instead of Pickles.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. I never asked you anything of the kind.

THE MANAGER. Please don’t contradict me, Angelina — it least not in public. I say you ask me why I don’t play

Hamlet instead of Pickles. Well, the reason is that anybody can play Hamlet, but it takes me to play Pickles. I leave Hamlet to those who can provide no livelier form of entertainment. [Resolutely returning to the MS.] I am now going back to the year eleven hundred.

THE STAGE MANAGER [coming on in desperation] No, sir, you can’t go back all that way; you promised me you would be done in ten minutes. I’ve got to set for the first Act.

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

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

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

THE MANAGER. That man is hopelessly frivolous; I really must get a more cultured staff. [ To the audience]

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

[The band is silent.]

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. They are only supporting you, Edwin. Nothing could be more appropriate.

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

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Go on, dear. The audience was just getting interested.

THE MANAGER. So was I. And then the band starts on me. Is this Drury Lane or is it the Playhouse? Now, I haven’t the heart to go on.

THE MANAGER’S WIFE. Oh, please do. You were getting on so nicely.

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

MANAGER’S WIFE. But you must finish it, dear.

THE MANAGER. I won’t. Finish it yourself. [Exit in high dudgeon.]

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

‘‘The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give,’’

‘‘And we who live to please must please to live.’’

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

[Assent and applause]. Thank you. [Exit]

GETTING MARRIED

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO GETTING MARRIED

GETTING MARRIED

PREFACE TO GETTING MARRIED

THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example of George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They quote a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher is ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not philosophers. When they finally give up the idea of reforming our marriage institutions by private enterprise and personal righteousness, and consent to be led to the Registry or even to the altar, they insist on first arriving at an explicit understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove less monogamic than other people’s: rather the contrary, in fact; consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than ordinary people when either party claims the benefit of the treaty; but the existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical notion that the law can be set aside by any two private persons by the simple process of promising one another to ignore it.

MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only people who successfully evade it are those who actually avail themselves of its shelter by pretending to be married when they are not, and by Bohemians who have no position to lose and no career to be closed. In every other case open violation of the marriage laws means either downright ruin or such inconvenience and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get married ten times over rather than face. And these disablements and inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux has shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit union is often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard to escape from as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment, involving questions of children or property, is contemplated, marriage is in effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until the law is altered there is nothing for us but to make the best of it as it stands. Even when no such establishment is desired, clandestine irregularities are negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are nobody knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the parties by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest appearances, most of them are probably never suspected. But they are neither dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable; and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to make it decent and reasonable.

WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be regarded as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen different things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable man it can have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular variety of marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage, indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons, Scotch marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it, without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of Free Love. In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages of first cousins: all of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy persons. Not only may the respectable British champion of marriage mean any of these widely different institutions; sometimes he does not mean marriage at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance, respectability, morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen other things that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth about his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private concern between the two parties with which society has nothing to do, there is now no need to deal. The vogue of “the self-regarding action” has passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and regulated by the State. Such registration is marriage, and will continue to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration have changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is therefore no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing question of improving its conditions. I have never met anybody really in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A Roman Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly, frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved, if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means of dissolution. The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance, “mental anguish” caused by the husband’s neglect to cut his toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory of the inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What shall the conditions of the dissolution be?

SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of marriage is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the parties. If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide for the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be a conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one day succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man’s house, his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man, whilst male adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at all. But though this is not only the theory of our marriage laws, but the practical morality of many of us, it is no longer an avowed morality, nor does its persistence depend on marriage; for the abolition of marriage would, other things remaining unchanged, leave women more effectually enslaved than they now are. We shall come to the question of the economic dependence of women on men later on; but at present we had better confine ourselves to the theories of marriage which we are not ashamed to acknowledge and defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers will be obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been reduced to a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the introduction of civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our civilly married couples are to a Catholic as unmarried couples are: that is, they are living in open sin. Practically, civilly married couples are received in society, by Catholics and everyone else, precisely as sacramentally married couples are; and so are people who have divorced their wives or husbands and married again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with such ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although laxity of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that we find the austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form, whilst Nelson, who openly left his wife and formed a menage a trois with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley might have had an illegitimate child in every county in England if he had done so frankly as a sinner. His unpardonable offence was that he attacked marriage as an institution. We feel a strange anguish of terror and hatred against him, as against one who threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the element in his proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley was something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to wit, a wife thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a burglar: namely, one who would steal her husband’s house from over her head, and leave her destitute and nameless on the streets. Now, no doubt this accounts for a good deal of anti-Shelleyan prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted in our habits that, as I have shewn in my play, men who are bolder freethinkers than Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face the insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the masterless woman’s only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of all this there is a revolt against marriage which has spread so rapidly within my recollection that though we all still assume the existence of a huge and dangerous majority which regards the least hint of scepticism as to the beauty and holiness of marriage as infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult to find an authentic living member of this dreaded army of convention outside the ranks of the people who never think about public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical weight and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes to-day as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary’s death, the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both doctrines and called the Articles of the Church of England. If matters were left to these simple folk, there would never be any changes at all; and society would perish like a snake that could not cast its skins. Nevertheless the snake does change its skin in spite of them; and there are signs that our marriage-law skin is causing discomfort to thoughtful people and will presently be cast whether the others are satisfied with it or not. The question therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the thoughtful people so uncomfortable?

A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage is now beginning to depopulate the country with such alarming rapidity that we are forced to throw aside our modesty like people who, awakened by an alarm of fire, rush into the streets in their nightdresses or in no dresses at all. The fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack marriage because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the very real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency who declares that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no longer recruits the race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our newspaper controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket holders whose minds the newspapers make. They still defend the citadel on the side on which nobody is attacking it, and leave its weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one. Christianity began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this day the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing protest against its compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul’s reluctant sanction of marriage; his personal protest that he countenanced it of necessity and against his own conviction; his contemptuous “better to marry than to burn” is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand and that there was therefore no longer any population question. His instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now stirring more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline celibates whose objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity of being supposed to desire or live the married life as ordinarily conceived. Every thoughtful and observant minister of religion is troubled by the determination of his flock to regard marriage as a sanctuary for pleasure, seeing as he does that the known libertines of his parish are visibly suffering much less from intemperance than many of the married people who stigmatize them as monsters of vice.

A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once organized in London a conference of respectable men to consider the subject. Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it in the absence of women); but it had its value as giving the young sociologists present, of whom I was one, an authentic notion of what a picked audience of respectable men understood by married life. It was certainly a staggering revelation. Peter the Great would have been shocked; Byron would have been horrified; Don Juan would have fled from the conference into a monastery. The respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony as a rite which absolved them from the laws of health and temperance; inaugurated a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly the same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and natural to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives they should pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone, and this, not birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year round and every year. How they settled even such minor questions as to which party should decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another’s sleep, seemed insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the essence of marriage for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their circumstances to check intemperance. They were men of business: that is, men for the most part engaged in routine work which exercized neither their minds nor their bodies to the full pitch of their capacities. Compared with statesmen, first-rate professional men, artists, and even with laborers and artisans as far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked, and could spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches of their chests without being any the less fit for their daily routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes, their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games with their children, their prospects of larger profits or higher salaries, their Saturday half holidays and Sunday walks, and the rest of it. They did less than two hours work a day and took from seven to nine office hours to do it in. And they were no good for any mortal purpose except to go on doing it. They were respectable only by the standard they themselves had set. Considered seriously as electors governing an empire through their votes, and choosing and maintaining its religious and moral institutions by their powers of social persecution, they were a black-coated army of calamity. They were incapable of comprehending the industries they were engaged in, the laws under which they lived, or the relation of their country to other countries. They lived the lives of old men contentedly. They were timidly conservative at the age at which every healthy human being ought to be obstreperously revolutionary. And their wives went through the routine of the kitchen, nursery, and drawing-room just as they went through the routine of the office. They had all, as they called it, settled down, like balloons that had lost their lifting margin of gas; and it was evident that the process of settling down would go on until they settled into their graves. They read old-fashioned newspapers with effort, and were just taking with avidity to a new sort of paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance can understand and irresponsibility relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe; and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal possession of a pretty heroine’s person on the strength of a staggering lack of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word virtue was abstention from stealing other men’s wives or from refusing to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman. Those who did not believe the story of Jonah and the great fish were all the readier to believe that metals can be transmuted and all diseases cured by radium, and that men can live for two hundred years by drinking sour milk. Even these credulities involved too severe an intellectual effort for many of them: it was easier to grin and believe nothing. They maintained their respect for themselves by “playing the game” (that is, doing what everybody else did), and by being good judges of hats, ties, dogs, pipes, cricket, gardens, flowers, and the like. They were capable of discussing each other’s solvency and respectability with some shrewdness, and could carry out quite complicated systems of paying visits and “knowing” one another. They felt a little vulgar when they spent a day at Margate, and quite distinguished and travelled when they spent it at Boulogne. They were, except as to their clothes, “not particular”: that is, they could put up with ugly sights and sounds, unhealthy smells, and inconvenient houses, with inhuman apathy and callousness. They had, as to adults, a theory that human nature is so poor that it is useless to try to make the world any better, whilst as to children they believed that if they were only sufficiently lectured and whipped, they could be brought to a state of moral perfection such as no fanatic has ever ascribed to his deity. Though they were not intentionally malicious, they practised the most appalling cruelties from mere thoughtlessness, thinking nothing of imprisoning men and women for periods up to twenty years for breaking into their houses; of treating their children as wild beasts to be tamed by a system of blows and imprisonment which they called education; and of keeping pianos in their houses, not for musical purposes, but to torment their daughters with a senseless stupidity that would have revolted an inquisitor.

In short, dear reader, they were very like you and me. I could fill a hundred pages with the tale of our imbecilities and still leave much untold; but what I have set down here haphazard is enough to condemn the system that produced us. The corner stone of that system was the family and the institution of marriage as we have it to-day in England.

HEARTH AND HOME

There is no shirking it: if marriage cannot be made to produce something better than we are, marriage will have to go, or else the nation will have to go. It is no use talking of honor, virtue, purity, and wholesome, sweet, clean, English home lives when what is meant is simply the habits I have described. The flat fact is that English home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous, wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse; and the result of withdrawing children from it completely at an early age, and sending them to a public school and then to a university, does, in spite of the fact that these institutions are class warped and in some respects quite abominably corrupt, produce sociabler men. Women, too, are improved by the escape from home provided by women’s colleges; but as very few of them are fortunate enough to enjoy this advantage, most women are so thoroughly home-bred as to be unfit for human society. So little is expected of them that in Sheridan’s School for Scandal we hardly notice that the heroine is a female cad, as detestable and dishonorable in her repentance as she is vulgar and silly in her naughtiness. It was left to an abnormal critic like George Gissing to point out the glaring fact that in the remarkable set of life studies of XIXth century women to be found in the novels of Dickens, the most convincingly real ones are either vilely unamiable or comically contemptible; whilst his attempts to manufacture admirable heroines by idealizations of home-bred womanhood are not only absurd but not even pleasantly absurd: one has no patience with them.

As all this is corrigible by reducing home life and domestic sentiment to something like reasonable proportions in the life of the individual, the danger of it does not lie in human nature. Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. Its grave danger to the nation lies in its narrow views, its unnaturally sustained and spitefully jealous concupiscences, its petty tyrannies, its false social pretences, its endless grudges and squabbles, its sacrifice of the boy’s future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the girl’s chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honor and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity of vice. The revolt, driven under ground and exacerbated, produces debauchery veiled by hypocrisy, an overwhelming demand for licentious theatrical entertainments which no censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed because the imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in which the libertine and profligate — Tom Jones and Charles Surface are the heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons — Blifil and Joseph Surface — are the villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell Gwynne has every amiable quality and the Bishop’s wife every odious one. Poor Mr. Pecksniff, who is generally no worse than a humbug with a turn for pompous talking, is represented as a criminal instead of as a very typical English paterfamilias keeping a roof over the head of himself and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against convention, female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine, his success among “well brought-up” girls is so easy, and the devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to Swinburne’s invocation of Dolores to “come down and redeem us from virtue,” he is to be found in every suburb.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

We must be reasonable in our domestic ideals. I do not think that life at a public school is altogether good for a boy any more than barrack life is altogether good for a soldier. But neither is home life altogether good. Such good as it does, I should say, is due to its freedom from the very atmosphere it professes to supply. That atmosphere is usually described as an atmosphere of love; and this definition should be sufficient to put any sane person on guard against it. The people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition. They cannot have even made up their minds as to what they mean by love; for when they expatiate on their thesis they are sometimes talking about kindness, and sometimes about mere appetite. In either sense they are equally far from the realities of life. No healthy man or animal is occupied with love in any sense for more than a very small fraction indeed of the time he devotes to business and to recreations wholly unconnected with love. A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance. Husbands may escape from her when their business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst tricks of the worst nursemaids.

LARGE AND SMALL FAMILIES

In most healthy families there is a revolt against this tendency. The exchanging of presents on birthdays and the like is barred by general consent, and the relations of the parties are placed by express treaty on an unsentimental footing.

Unfortunately this mitigation of family sentimentality is much more characteristic of large families than small ones. It used to be said that members of large families get on in the world; and it is certainly true that for purposes of social training a household of twenty surpasses a household of five as an Oxford College surpasses an eight-roomed house in a cheap street. Ten children, with the necessary adults, make a community in which an excess of sentimentality is impossible. Two children make a doll’s house, in which both parents and children become morbid if they keep to themselves. What is more, when large families were the fashion, they were organized as tyrannies much more than as “atmospheres of love.” Francis Place tells us that he kept out of his father’s way because his father never passed a child within his reach without striking it; and though the case was an extreme one, it was an extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott’s father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself. Ruskin’s mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it was in many ways, had at least the advantage that the child did not enjoy it and was not debauched by it, as he would have been by transports of sentimentality.

But nowadays we cannot depend on these safeguards, such as they were. We no longer have large families: all the families are too small to give the children the necessary social training. The Roman father is out of fashion; and the whip and the cane are becoming discredited, not so much by the old arguments against corporal punishment (sound as these were) as by the gradual wearing away of the veil from the fact that flogging is a form of debauchery. The advocate of flogging as a punishment is now exposed to very disagreeable suspicions; and ever since Rousseau rose to the effort of making a certain very ridiculous confession on the subject, there has been a growing perception that child whipping, even for the children themselves, is not always the innocent and high-minded practice it professes to be. At all events there is no getting away from the facts that families are smaller than they used to be, and that passions which formerly took effect in tyranny have been largely diverted into sentimentality. And though a little sentimentality may be a very good thing, chronic sentimentality is a horror, more dangerous, because more possible, than the erotomania which we all condemn when we are not thoughtlessly glorifying it as the ideal married state.

THE GOSPEL OF LAODICEA

Let us try to get at the root error of these false domestic doctrines. Why was it that the late Samuel Butler, with a conviction that increased with his experience of life, preached the gospel of Laodicea, urging people to be temperate in what they called goodness as in everything else? Why is it that I, when I hear some well-meaning person exhort young people to make it a rule to do at least one kind action every day, feel very much as I should if I heard them persuade children to get drunk at least once every day? Apart from the initial absurdity of accepting as permanent a state of things in which there would be in this country misery enough to supply occasion for several thousand million kind actions per annum, the effect on the character of the doers of the actions would be so appalling, that one month of any serious attempt to carry out such counsels would probably bring about more stringent legislation against actions going beyond the strict letter of the law in the way of kindness than we have now against excess in the opposite direction.

There is no more dangerous mistake than the mistake of supposing that we cannot have too much of a good thing. The truth is, an immoderately good man is very much more dangerous than an immoderately bad man: that is why Savonarola was burnt and John of Leyden torn to pieces with red-hot pincers whilst multitudes of unredeemed rascals were being let off with clipped ears, burnt palms, a flogging, or a few years in the galleys. That is why Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen’s attention to a couple of hours every seventh day, and let him alone on week-days. If the fanatics who are preoccupied day in and day out with their salvation were healthy, virtuous, and wise, the Laodiceanism of the ordinary man might be regarded as a deplorable shortcoming; but, as a matter of fact, no more frightful misfortune could threaten us than a general spread of fanaticism. What people call goodness has to be kept in check just as carefully as what they call badness; for the human constitution will not stand very much of either without serious psychological mischief, ending in insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged, as Savonarola’s was up to the point of wrecking the social life of Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesitate to treat a dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a prophet in the true sense: that is, a man of exceptional sanity who is in the right when we are in the wrong. However necessary it may have been to get rid of Savonarola, it was foolish to poison Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the less necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous proposition that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be maintained at the same pitch continuously through life. A life spent in prayer and alms giving is really as insane as a life spent in cursing and picking pockets: the effect of everybody doing it would be equally disastrous. The superstitious tolerance so long accorded to monks and nuns is inevitably giving way to a very general and very natural practice of confiscating their retreats and expelling them from their country, with the result that they come to England and Ireland, where they are partly unnoticed and partly encouraged because they conduct technical schools and teach our girls softer speech and gentler manners than our comparatively ruffianly elementary teachers. But they are still full of the notion that because it is possible for men to attain the summit of Mont Blanc and stay there for an hour, it is possible for them to live there. Children are punished and scolded for not living there; and adults take serious offence if it is not assumed that they live there.

As a matter of fact, ethical strain is just as bad for us as physical strain. It is desirable that the normal pitch of conduct at which men are not conscious of being particularly virtuous, although they feel mean when they fall below it, should be raised as high as possible; but it is not desirable that they should attempt to live above this pitch any more than that they should habitually walk at the rate of five miles an hour or carry a hundredweight continually on their backs. Their normal condition should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it is a perfectly sound instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man as much as the bad man, and to object to the clergyman who is pious extra-professionally as much as to the professional pugilist who is quarrelsome and violent in private life. We do not want good men and bad men any more than we want giants and dwarfs. What we do want is a high quality for our normal: that is, people who can be much better than what we now call respectable without self-sacrifice. Conscious goodness, like conscious muscular effort, may be of use in emergencies; but for everyday national use it is negligible; and its effect on the character of the individual may easily be disastrous.

FOR BETTER FOR WORSE

It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in which these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are in the marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only apparent: the service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it, they deserve no sympathy and no relief. If all married people really lived together, no doubt the mere force of facts would make an end to this inhuman nonsense in a month, if not sooner; but it is very seldom brought to that test. The typical British husband sees much less of his wife than he does of his business partner, his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him day by day. Man and wife do not as a rule, live together: they only breakfast together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most cases the woman knows nothing of the man’s working life and he knows nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about the closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those who are most convinced that the man’s sphere and the woman’s sphere are so entirely separate that only in their leisure moments can they ever be together. A man as intimate with his own wife as a magistrate is with his clerk, or a Prime Minister with the leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten thousand. The majority of married couples never get to know one another at all: they only get accustomed to having the same house, the same children, and the same income, which is quite a different matter. The comparatively few men who work at home — writers, artists, and to some extent clergymen — have to effect some sort of segregation within the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their domestic relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford only a single room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling is the result. Very few couples can live in a single-roomed tenement without exchanging blows quite frequently. In the leisured classes there is often no real family life at all. The boys are at a public school; the girls are in the schoolroom in charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or in a set which is not his wife’s; and the institution of marriage enjoys the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than the relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same garden party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the unearned income as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a guess whereabout on the scale between them any particular family stands. But it is clear enough that the one-roomed end, though its conditions enable the marriage vow to be carried out with the utmost attainable exactitude, is far less endurable in practice, and far more mischievous in its effect on the parties concerned, and through them on the community, than the other end. Thus we see that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a revolt against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its enervating happiness.

WANTED: AN IMMORAL STATESMAN

We now see that the statesman who undertakes to deal with marriage will have to face an amazingly complicated public opinion. In fact, he will have to leave opinion as far as possible out of the question, and deal with human nature instead. For even if there could be any real public opinion in a society like ours, which is a mere mob of classes, each with its own habits and prejudices, it would be at best a jumble of superstitions and interests, taboos and hypocrisies, which could not be reconciled in any coherent enactment. It would probably proclaim passionately that it does not matter in the least what sort of children we have, or how few or how many, provided the children are legitimate. Also that it does not matter in the least what sort of adults we have, provided they are married. No statesman worth the name can possibly act on these views. He is bound to prefer one healthy illegitimate child to ten rickety legitimate ones, and one energetic and capable unmarried couple to a dozen inferior apathetic husbands and wives. If it could be proved that illicit unions produce three children each and marriages only one and a half, he would be bound to encourage illicit unions and discourage and even penalize marriage. The common notion that the existing forms of marriage are not political contrivances, but sacred ethical obligations to which everything, even the very existence of the human race, must be sacrificed if necessary (and this is what the vulgar morality we mostly profess on the subject comes to) is one on which no sane Government could act for a moment; and yet it influences, or is believed to influence, so many votes, that no Government will touch the marriage question if it can possibly help it, even when there is a demand for the extension of marriage, as in the case of the recent long-delayed Act legalizing marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. When a reform in the other direction is needed (for example, an extension of divorce), not even the existence of the most unbearable hardships will induce our statesmen to move so long as the victims submit sheepishly, though when they take the remedy into their own hands an inquiry is soon begun. But what is now making some action in the matter imperative is neither the sufferings of those who are tied for life to criminals, drunkards, physically unsound and dangerous mates, and worthless and unamiable people generally, nor the immorality of the couples condemned to celibacy by separation orders which do not annul their marriages, but the fall in the birth rate. Public opinion will not help us out of this difficulty: on the contrary, it will, if it be allowed, punish anybody who mentions it. When Zola tried to repopulate France by writing a novel in praise of parentage, the only comment made here was that the book could not possibly be translated into English, as its subject was too improper.

THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

Now if England had been governed in the past by statesmen willing to be ruled by such public opinion as that, she would have been wiped off the political map long ago. The modern notion that democracy means governing a country according to the ignorance of its majorities is never more disastrous than when there is some question of sexual morals to be dealt with. The business of a democratic statesman is not, as some of us seem to think, to convince the voters that he knows no better than they as to the methods of attaining their common ends, but on the contrary to convince them that he knows much better than they do, and therefore differs from them on every possible question of method. The voter’s duty is to take care that the Government consists of men whom he can trust to devize or support institutions making for the common welfare. This is highly skilled work; and to be governed by people who set about it as the man in the street would set about it is to make straight for “red ruin and the breaking up of laws.” Voltaire said that Mr Everybody is wiser than anybody; and whether he is or not, it is his will that must prevail; but the will and the way are two very different things. For example, it is the will of the people on a hot day that the means of relief from the effects of the heat should be within the reach of everybody. Nothing could be more innocent, more hygienic, more important to the social welfare. But the way of the people on such occasions is mostly to drink large quantities of beer, or, among the more luxurious classes, iced claret cup, lemon squashes, and the like. To take a moral illustration, the will to suppress misconduct and secure efficiency in work is general and salutary; but the notion that the best and only effective way is by complaining, scolding, punishing, and revenging is equally general. When Mrs Squeers opened an abscess on her pupil’s head with an inky penknife, her object was entirely laudable: her heart was in the right place: a statesman interfering with her on the ground that he did not want the boy cured would have deserved impeachment for gross tyranny. But a statesman tolerating amateur surgical practice with inky penknives in school would be a very bad Minister of Education. It is on the question of method that your expert comes in; and though I am democrat enough to insist that he must first convince a representative body of amateurs that his way is the right way and Mrs Squeers’s way the wrong way, yet I very strongly object to any tendency to flatter Mrs Squeers into the belief that her way is in the least likely to be the right way, or that any other test is to be applied to it except the test of its effect on human welfare.

THE SCIENCE AND ART OF POLITICS

Political Science means nothing else than the devizing of the best ways of fulfilling the will of the world; and, I repeat, it is skilled work. Once the way is discovered, the methods laid down, and the machinery provided, the work of the statesman is done, and that of the official begins. To illustrate, there is no need for the police officer who governs the street traffic to be or to know any better than the people who obey the wave of his hand. All concerted action involves subordination and the appointment of directors at whose signal the others will act. There is no more need for them to be superior to the rest than for the keystone of an arch to be of harder stone than the coping. But when it comes to devizing the directions which are to be obeyed: that is, to making new institutions and scraping old ones, then you need aristocracy in the sense of government by the best. A military state organized so as to carry out exactly the impulses of the average soldier would not last a year. The result of trying to make the Church of England reflect the notions of the average churchgoer has reduced it to a cipher except for the purposes of a petulantly irreligious social and political club. Democracy as to the thing to be done may be inevitable (hence the vital need for a democracy of supermen); but democracy as to the way to do it is like letting the passengers drive the train: it can only end in collision and wreck. As a matter of act, we obtain reforms (such as they are), not by allowing the electorate to draft statutes, but by persuading it that a certain minister and his cabinet are gifted with sufficient political sagacity to find out how to produce the desired result. And the usual penalty of taking advantage of this power to reform our institutions is defeat by a vehement “swing of the pendulum” at the next election. Therein lies the peril and the glory of democratic statesmanship. A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation — or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays — is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

WHY STATESMEN SHIRK THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

The reform of marriage, then, will be a very splendid and very hazardous adventure for the Prime Minister who takes it in hand. He will be posted on every hoarding and denounced in every Opposition paper, especially in the sporting papers, as the destroyer of the home, the family, of decency, of morality, of chastity and what not. All the commonplaces of the modern anti-Socialist Noodle’s Oration will be hurled at him. And he will have to proceed without the slightest concession to it, giving the noodles nothing but their due in the assurance “I know how to attain our ends better than you,” and staking his political life on the conviction carried by that assurance, which conviction will depend a good deal on the certainty with which it is made, which again can be attained only by studying the facts of marriage and understanding the needs of the nation. And, after all, he will find that the pious commonplaces on which he and the electorate are agreed conceal an utter difference in the real ends in view: his being public, far-sighted, and impersonal, and those of multitudes of the electorate narrow, personal, jealous, and corrupt. Under such circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the mere mention of the marriage question makes a British Cabinet shiver with apprehension and hastily pass on to safer business. Nevertheless the reform of marriage cannot be put off for ever. When its hour comes, what are the points the Cabinet will have to take up?

THE QUESTION OF POPULATION

First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we want in the country. If we want less than at present, we must ascertain how many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made by the continued operation of the present sterilization of marriage, we must settle how the process is to be stopped when it has gone far enough. But if we desire to maintain the population at its present figure, or to increase it, we must take immediate steps to induce people of moderate means to marry earlier and to have more children. There is less urgency in the case of the very poor and the very rich. They breed recklessly: the rich because they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford the precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid big families. Nevertheless the population declines, because the high birth rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge infantile-mortality in the slums, whilst the very rich are also the very few, and are becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt of their women against excessive childbearing — sometimes against any childbearing.

This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a year tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue bearing children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others are bearing no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be, the number of women able or willing to give more of their lives to gestation and nursing than three or four children would cost them might not be very large if the advance in social organization and conscience indicated by such payments involved also the opening up of other means of livelihood to women. And it must be remembered that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method of evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up the supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the same reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly cultivated men and women than it now is of agricultural laborers. Bees get out of this difficulty by a special system of feeding which enables a queen bee to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the other females lose their sex altogether and become workers supporting the males in luxury and idleness until the queen has found her mate, when the queen kills him and the quondam females kill all the rest (such at least are the accounts given by romantic naturalists of the matter).

THE RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

This system certainly shews a much higher development of social intelligence than our marriage system; but if it were physically possible to introduce it into human society it would be wrecked by an opposite and not less important revolt of women: that is, the revolt against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man. Adoption, or the begging or buying or stealing of another woman’s child, is no remedy: it does not provide the supreme experience of bearing the child. No political constitution will ever succeed or deserve to succeed unless it includes the recognition of an absolute right to sexual experience, and is untainted by the Pauline or romantic view of such experience as sinful in itself. And since this experience in its fullest sense must be carried in the case of women to the point of childbearing, it can only be reconciled with the acceptance of marriage with the child’s father by legalizing polygyny, because there are more adult women in the country than men. Now though polygyny prevails throughout the greater part of the British Empire, and is as practicable here as in India, there is a good deal to be said against it, and still more to be felt. However, let us put our feelings aside for a moment, and consider the question politically.

MONOGAMY, POLYGYNY AND POLYANDRY

The number of wives permitted to a single husband or of husbands to a single wife under a marriage system, is not an ethical problem: it depends solely on the proportion of the sexes in the population. If in consequence of a great war three-quarters of the men in this country were killed, it would be absolutely necessary to adopt the Mohammedan allowance of four wives to each man in order to recruit the population. The fundamental reason for not allowing women to risk their lives in battle and for giving them the first chance of escape in all dangerous emergencies: in short, for treating their lives as more valuable than male lives, is not in the least a chivalrous reason, though men may consent to it under the illusion of chivalry. It is a simple matter of necessity; for if a large proportion of women were killed or disabled, no possible readjustment of our marriage law could avert the depopulation and consequent political ruin of the country, because a woman with several husbands bears fewer children than a woman with one, whereas a man can produce as many families as he has wives. The natural foundation of the institution of monogamy is not any inherent viciousness in polygyny or polyandry, but the hard fact that men and women are born in about equal numbers. Unfortunately, we kill so many of our male children in infancy that we are left with a surplus of adult women which is sufficiently large to claim attention, and yet not large enough to enable every man to have two wives. Even if it were, we should be met by an economic difficulty. A Kaffir is rich in proportion to the number of his wives, because the women are the breadwinners. But in our civilization women are not paid for their social work in the bearing and rearing of children and the ordering of households; they are quartered on the wages of their husbands. At least four out of five of our men could not afford two wives unless their wages were nearly doubled. Would it not then be well to try unlimited polygyny; so that the remaining fifth could have as many wives apiece as they could afford? Let us see how this would work.

THE MALE REVOLT AGAINST POLYGYNY

Experience shews that women do not object to polygyny when it is customary: on the contrary, they are its most ardent supporters. The reason is obvious. The question, as it presents itself in practice to a woman, is whether it is better to have, say, a whole share in a tenth-rate man or a tenth share in a first-rate man. Substitute the word Income for the word Man, and you will have the question as it presents itself economically to the dependent woman. The woman whose instincts are maternal, who desires superior children more than anything else, never hesitates. She would take a thousandth share, if necessary, in a husband who was a man in a thousand, rather than have some comparatively weedy weakling all to herself. It is the comparatively weedy weakling, left mateless by polygyny, who objects. Thus, it was not the women of Salt Lake City nor even of America who attacked Mormon polygyny. It was the men. And very naturally. On the other hand, women object to polyandry, because polyandry enables the best women to monopolize all the men, just as polygyny enables the best men to monopolize all the women. That is why all our ordinary men and women are unanimous in defence of monogamy, the men because it excludes polygyny, and the women because it excludes polyandry. The women, left to themselves, would tolerate polygyny. The men, left to themselves, would tolerate polyandry. But polygyny would condemn a great many men, and polyandry a great many women, to the celibacy of neglect. Hence the resistance any attempt to establish unlimited polygyny always provokes, not from the best people, but from the mediocrities and the inferiors. If we could get rid of our inferiors and screw up our average quality until mediocrity ceased to be a reproach, thus making every man reasonably eligible as a father and every woman reasonably desirable as a mother, polygyny and polyandry would immediately fall into sincere disrepute, because monogamy is so much more convenient and economical that nobody would want to share a husband or a wife if he (or she) could have a sufficiently good one all to himself (or herself). Thus it appears that it is the scarcity of husbands or wives of high quality that leads woman to polygyny and men to polyandry, and that if this scarcity were cured, monogamy, in the sense of having only one husband or wife at a time (facilities for changing are another matter), would be found satisfactory.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL POLYGYNY

It may now be asked why the polygynist nations have not gravitated to monogamy, like the latter-day saints of Salt Lake City. The answer is not far to seek: their polygyny is limited. By the Mohammedan law a man cannot marry more than four wives; and by the unwritten law of necessity no man can keep more wives than he can afford; so that a man with four wives must be quite as exceptional in Asia as a man with a carriage-and-pair or a motor car is in Europe, where, nevertheless we may all have as many carriages and motors as we can afford to pay for. Kulin polygyny, though unlimited, is not really a popular institution: if you are a person of high caste you pay another person of very august caste indeed to make your daughter momentarily one of his sixty or seventy momentary wives for the sake of ennobling your grandchildren; but this fashion of a small and intensely snobbish class is negligible as a general precedent. In any case, men and women in the East do not marry anyone they fancy, as in England and America. Women are secluded and marriages are arranged. In Salt Lake City the free unsecluded woman could see and meet the ablest man of the community, and tempt him to make her his tenth wife by all the arts peculiar to women in English-speaking countries. No eastern woman can do anything of the sort. The man alone has any initiative; but he has no access to the woman; besides, as we have seen, the difficulty created by male license is not polygyny but polyandry, which is not allowed.

Consequently, if we are to make polygyny a success, we must limit it. If we have two women to every one man, we must allow each man only two wives. That is simple; but unfortunately our own actual proportion is, roughly, something like 1 1/11 woman to 1 man. Now you cannot enact that each man shall be allowed 1 1/11 wives, or that each woman who cannot get a husband all to herself shall divide herself between eleven already married husbands. Thus there is no way out for us through polygyny. There is no way at all out of the present system of condemning the superfluous women to barrenness, except by legitimizing the children of women who are not married to the fathers.

THE OLD MAID’S RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD

Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not be confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic reckoning. There is the practical difficulty that although in our population there are about a million monogamically superfluous women, yet it is quite impossible to say of any given unmarried woman that she is one of the superfluous. And there is the difficulty of principle. The right to bear a child, perhaps the most sacred of all women’s rights, is not one that should have any conditions attached to it except in the interests of race welfare. There are many women of admirable character, strong, capable, independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the concession of conjugal rights to any person under any conditions intolerable by their self-respect. Yet the general sense of the community recognizes in these very women the fittest people to have charge of children, and trusts them, as school mistresses and matrons of institutions, more than women of any other type when it is possible to procure them for such work. Why should the taking of a husband be imposed on these women as the price of their right to maternity? I am quite unable to answer that question. I see a good deal of first-rate maternal ability and sagacity spending itself on bees and poultry and village schools and cottage hospitals; and I find myself repeatedly asking myself why this valuable strain in the national breed should be sterilized. Unfortunately, the very women whom we should tempt to become mothers for the good of the race are the very last people to press their services on their country in that way. Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we have taken his instruction so little to heart that we are at present suffering acutely from government by gentlemen who will stoop to all the mean shifts of electioneering and incur all its heavy expenses for the sake of a seat in Parliament. But what our sentimentalists have not yet been told is that exactly the same thing applies to maternity as to government. The best mothers are not those who are so enslaved by their primitive instincts that they will bear children no matter how hard the conditions are, but precisely those who place a very high price on their services, and are quite prepared to become old maids if the price is refused, and even to feel relieved at their escape. Our democratic and matrimonial institutions may have their merits: at all events they are mostly reforms of something worse; but they put a premium on want of self-respect in certain very important matters; and the consequence is that we are very badly governed and are, on the whole, an ugly, mean, ill-bred race.

IBSEN’S CHAIN STITCH

Let us not forget, however, in our sympathy for the superfluous women, that their children must have fathers as well as mothers. Who are the fathers to be? All monogamists and married women will reply hastily: either bachelors or widowers; and this solution will serve as well as another; for it would be hypocritical to pretend that the difficulty is a practical one. None the less, the monogamists, after due reflection, will point out that if there are widowers enough the superfluous women are not really superfluous, and therefore there is no reason why the parties should not marry respectably like other people. And they might in that case be right if the reasons were purely numerical: that is, if every woman were willing to take a husband if one could be found for her, and every man willing to take a wife on the same terms; also, please remember, if widows would remain celibate to give the unmarried women a chance. These ifs will not work. We must recognize two classes of old maids: one, the really superfluous women, and the other, the women who refuse to accept maternity on the (to them) unbearable condition of taking a husband. From both classes may, perhaps, be subtracted for the present the large proportion of women who could not afford the extra expense of one or more children. I say “perhaps,” because it is by no means sure that within reasonable limits mothers do not make a better fight for subsistence, and have not, on the whole, a better time than single women. In any case, we have two distinct cases to deal with: the superfluous and the voluntary; and it is the voluntary whose grit we are most concerned to fertilize. But here, again, we cannot put our finger on any particular case and pick out Miss Robinson’s as superfluous, and Miss Wilkinson’s as voluntary. Whether we legitimize the child of the unmarried woman as a duty to the superfluous or as a bribe to the voluntary, the practical result must be the same: to wit, that the condition of marriage now attached to legitimate parentage will be withdrawn from all women, and fertile unions outside marriage recognized by society. Now clearly the consequences would not stop there. The strong-minded ladies who are resolved to be mistresses in their own houses would not be the only ones to take advantage of the new law. Even women to whom a home without a man in it would be no home at all, and who fully intended, if the man turned out to be the right one, to live with him exactly as married couples live, would, if they were possessed of independent means, have every inducement to adopt the new conditions instead of the old ones. Only the women whose sole means of livelihood was wifehood would insist on marriage: hence a tendency would set in to make marriage more and more one of the customs imposed by necessity on the poor, whilst the freer form of union, regulated, no doubt, by settlements and private contracts of various kinds, would become the practice of the rich: that is, would become the fashion. At which point nothing but the achievement of economic independence by women, which is already seen clearly ahead of us, would be needed to make marriage disappear altogether, not by formal abolition, but by simple disuse. The private contract stage of this process was reached in ancient Rome. The only practicable alternative to it seems to be such an extension of divorce as will reduce the risks and obligations of marriage to a degree at which they will be no worse than those of the alternatives to marriage. As we shall see, this is the solution to which all the arguments tend. Meanwhile, note how much reason a statesman has to pause before meddling with an institution which, unendurable as its drawbacks are, threatens to come to pieces in all directions if a single thread of it be cut. Ibsen’s similitude of the machine-made chain stitch, which unravels the whole seam at the first pull when a single stitch is ripped, is very applicable to the knot of marriage.

REMOTENESS OF THE FACTS FROM THE IDEAL

But before we allow this to deter us from touching the sacred fabric, we must find out whether it is not already coming to pieces in all directions by the continuous strain of circumstances. No doubt, if it were all that it pretends to be, and human nature were working smoothly within its limits, there would be nothing more to be said: it would be let alone as it always is let alone during the cruder stages of civilization. But the moment we refer to the facts, we discover that the ideal matrimony and domesticity which our bigots implore us to preserve as the corner stone of our society is a figment: what we have really got is something very different, questionable at its best, and abominable at its worst. The word pure, so commonly applied to it by thoughtless people, is absurd; because if they do not mean celibate by it, they mean nothing; and if they do mean celibate, then marriage is legalized impurity, a conclusion which is offensive and inhuman. Marriage as a fact is not in the least like marriage as an ideal. If it were, the sudden changes which have been made on the continent from indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage to marriage that can be dissolved by a box on the ear as in France, by an epithet as in Germany, or simply at the wish of both parties as in Sweden, not to mention the experiments made by some of the American States, would have shaken society to its foundations. Yet they have produced so little effect that Englishmen open their eyes in surprise when told of their existence.

DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING EVIDENCE

As to what actual marriage is, one would like evidence instead of guesses; but as all departures from the ideal are regarded as disgraceful, evidence cannot be obtained; for when the whole community is indicted, nobody will go into the witness-box for the prosecution. Some guesses we can make with some confidence. For example, if it be objected to any change that our bachelors and widowers would no longer be Galahads, we may without extravagance or cynicism reply that many of them are not Galahads now, and that the only change would be that hypocrisy would no longer be compulsory. Indeed, this can hardly be called guessing: the evidence is in the streets. But when we attempt to find out the truth about our marriages, we cannot even guess with any confidence. Speaking for myself, I can say that I know the inside history of perhaps half a dozen marriages. Any family solicitor knows more than this; but even a family solicitor, however large his practice, knows nothing of the million households which have no solicitors, and which nevertheless make marriage what it really is. And all he can say comes to no more than I can say: to wit, that no marriage of which I have any knowledge is in the least like the ideal marriage. I do not mean that it is worse: I mean simply that it is different. Also, far from society being organized in a defence of its ideal so jealous and implacable that the least step from the straight path means exposure and ruin, it is almost impossible by any extravagance of misconduct to provoke society to relax its steady pretence of blindness, unless you do one or both of two fatal things. One is to get into the newspapers; and the other is to confess. If you confess misconduct to respectable men or women, they must either disown you or become virtually your accomplices: that is why they are so angry with you for confessing. If you get into the papers, the pretence of not knowing becomes impossible. But it is hardly too much to say that if you avoid these two perils, you can do anything you like, as far as your neighbors are concerned. And since we can hardly flatter ourselves that this is the effect of charity, it is difficult not to suspect that our extraordinary forbearance in the matter of stone throwing is that suggested in the well-known parable of the women taken in adultery which some early free-thinker slipped into the Gospel of St John: namely, that we all live in glass houses. We may take it, then, that the ideal husband and the ideal wife are no more real human beings than the cherubim. Possibly the great majority keeps its marriage vows in the technical divorce court sense. No husband or wife yet born keeps them or ever can keep them in the ideal sense.

MARRIAGE AS A MAGIC SPELL

The truth which people seem to overlook in this matter is that the marriage ceremony is quite useless as a magic spell for changing in an instant the nature of the relations of two human beings to one another. If a man marries a woman after three weeks acquaintance, and the day after meets a woman he has known for twenty years, he finds, sometimes to his own irrational surprise and his wife’s equally irrational indignation, that his wife is a stranger to him, and the other woman an old friend. Also, there is no hocus pocus that can possibly be devized with rings and veils and vows and benedictions that can fix either a man’s or woman’s affection for twenty minutes, much less twenty years. Even the most affectionate couples must have moments during which they are far more conscious of one another’s faults than of one another’s attractions. There are couples who dislike one another furiously for several hours at a time; there are couples who dislike one another permanently; and there are couples who never dislike one another; but these last are people who are incapable of disliking anybody. If they do not quarrel, it is not because they are married, but because they are not quarrelsome. The people who are quarrelsome quarrel with their husbands and wives just as easily as with their servants and relatives and acquaintances: marriage makes no difference. Those who talk and write and legislate as if all this could be prevented by making solemn vows that it shall not happen, are either insincere, insane, or hopelessly stupid. There is some sense in a contract to perform or abstain from actions that are reasonably within voluntary control; but such contracts are only needed to provide against the possibility of either party being no longer desirous of the specified performance or abstention. A person proposing or accepting a contract not only to do something but to like doing it would be certified as mad. Yet popular superstition credits the wedding rite with the power of fixing our fancies or affections for life even under the most unnatural conditions.

THE IMPERSONALITY OF SEX

It is necessary to lay some stress on these points, because few realize the extent to which we proceed on the assumption that marriage is a short cut to perfect and permanent intimacy and affection. But there is a still more unworkable assumption which must be discarded before discussions of marriage can get into any sort of touch with the facts of life. That assumption is that the specific relation which marriage authorizes between the parties is the most intimate and personal of human relations, and embraces all the other high human relations. Now this is violently untrue. Every adult knows that the relation in question can and does exist between entire strangers, different in language, color, tastes, class, civilization, morals, religion, character: in everything, in short, except their bodily homology and the reproductive appetite common to all living organisms. Even hatred, cruelty, and contempt are not incompatible with it; and jealousy and murder are as near to it as affectionate friendship. It is true that it is a relation beset with wildly extravagant illusions for inexperienced people, and that even the most experienced people have not always sufficient analytic faculty to disentangle it from the sentiments, sympathetic or abhorrent, which may spring up through the other relations which are compulsorily attached to it by our laws, or sentimentally associated with it in romance. But the fact remains that the most disastrous marriages are those founded exclusively on it, and the most successful those in which it has been least considered, and in which the decisive considerations have had nothing to do with sex, such as liking, money, congeniality of tastes, similarity of habits, suitability of class, &c., &c.

It is no doubt necessary under existing circumstances for a woman without property to be sexually attractive, because she must get married to secure a livelihood; and the illusions of sexual attraction will cause the imagination of young men to endow her with every accomplishment and virtue that can make a wife a treasure. The attraction being thus constantly and ruthlessly used as a bait, both by individuals and by society, any discussion tending to strip it of its illusions and get at its real natural history is nervously discouraged. But nothing can well be more unwholesome for everybody than the exaggeration and glorification of an instinctive function which clouds the reason and upsets the judgment more than all the other instincts put together. The process may be pleasant and romantic; but the consequences are not. It would be far better for everyone, as well as far honester, if young people were taught that what they call love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification; that no profession, promise, or proposal made under its influence should bind anybody; and that its great natural purpose so completely transcends the personal interests of any individual or even of any ten generations of individuals that it should be held to be an act of prostitution and even a sort of blasphemy to attempt to turn it to account by exacting a personal return for its gratification, whether by process of law or not. By all means let it be the subject of contracts with society as to its consequences; but to make marriage an open trade in it as at present, with money, board and lodging, personal slavery, vows of eternal exclusive personal sentimentalities and the rest of it as the price, is neither virtuous, dignified, nor decent. No husband ever secured his domestic happiness and honor, nor has any wife ever secured hers, by relying on it. No private claims of any sort should be founded on it: the real point of honor is to take no corrupt advantage of it. When we hear of young women being led astray and the like, we find that what has led them astray is a sedulously inculcated false notion that the relation they are tempted to contract is so intensely personal, and the vows made under the influence of its transient infatuation so sacred and enduring, that only an atrociously wicked man could make light of or forget them. What is more, as the same fantastic errors are inculcated in men, and the conscientious ones therefore feel bound in honor to stand by what they have promised, one of the surest methods to obtain a husband is to practise on his susceptibilities until he is either carried away into a promise of marriage to which he can be legally held, or else into an indiscretion which he must repair by marriage on pain of having to regard himself as a scoundrel and a seducer, besides facing the utmost damage the lady’s relatives can do him.

Such a transaction is not an entrance into a “holy state of matrimony”: it is as often as not the inauguration of a lifelong squabble, a corroding grudge, that causes more misery and degradation of character than a dozen entirely natural “desertions” and “betrayals.” Yet the number of marriages effected more or less in this way must be enormous. When people say that love should be free, their words, taken literally, may be foolish; but they are only expressing inaccurately a very real need for the disentanglement of sexual relations from a mass of exorbitant and irrelevant conditions imposed on them on false pretences to enable needy parents to get their daughters “off their hands” and to keep those who are already married effectually enslaved by one another.

THE ECONOMIC SLAVERY OF WOMEN

One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations stated with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the unlikeness of most men to himself, is that the sex slavery involved has become complicated by economic slavery; so that whilst the man defends marriage because he is really defending his pleasures, the woman is even more vehement on the same side because she is defending her only means of livelihood. To a woman without property or marketable talent a husband is more necessary than a master to a dog. There is nothing more wounding to our sense of human dignity than the husband hunting that begins in every family when the daughters become marriageable; but it is inevitable under existing circumstances; and the parents who refuse to engage in it are bad parents, though they may be superior individuals. The cubs of a humane tigress would starve; and the daughters of women who cannot bring themselves to devote several years of their lives to the pursuit of sons-in-law often have to expatiate their mother’s squeamishness by life-long celibacy and indigence. To ask a young man his intentions when you know he has no intentions, but is unable to deny that he has paid attentions; to threaten an action for breach of promise of marriage; to pretend that your daughter is a musician when she has with the greatest difficulty been coached into playing three piano-forte pieces which she loathes; to use your own mature charms to attract men to the house when your daughters have no aptitude for that department of sport; to coach them, when they have, in the arts by which men can be led to compromize themselves; and to keep all the skeletons carefully locked up in the family cupboard until the prey is duly hunted down and bagged: all this is a mother’s duty today; and a very revolting duty it is: one that disposes of the conventional assumption that it is in the faithful discharge of her home duties that a woman finds her self-respect. The truth is that family life will never be decent, much less ennobling, until this central horror of the dependence of women on men is done away with. At present it reduces the difference between marriage and prostitution to the difference between Trade Unionism and unorganized casual labor: a huge difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but not a difference in kind.

However, it is not by any reform of the marriage laws that this can be dealt with. It is in the general movement for the prevention of destitution that the means for making women independent of the compulsory sale of their persons, in marriage or otherwise, will be found; but meanwhile those who deal specifically with the marriage laws should never allow themselves for a moment to forget this abomination that “plucks the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love, and sets a blister there,” and then calmly calls itself purity, home, motherhood, respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name that happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it hurls freely at those who are ashamed of it.

UNPOPULARITY OF IMPERSONAL VIEWS

Unfortunately it is very hard to make an average citizen take impersonal views of any sort in matters affecting personal comfort or conduct. We may be enthusiastic Liberals or Conservatives without any hope of seats in Parliament, knighthoods, or posts in the Government, because party politics do not make the slightest difference in our daily lives and therefore cost us nothing. But to take a vital process in which we are keenly interested personal instruments, and ask us to regard it, and feel about it, and legislate on it, wholly as if it were an impersonal one, is to make a higher demand than most people seem capable of responding to. We all have personal interests in marriage which we are not prepared to sink. It is not only the women who want to get married: the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds, sometimes on the more sordid calculation that bachelor life is less comfortable and more expensive, since a wife pays for her status with domestic service as well as with the other services expected of her. Now that children are avoidable, this calculation is becoming more common and conscious than it was: a result which is regarded as “a steady improvement in general morality.”

IMPERSONALITY IS NOT PROMISCUITY

There is, too, a really appalling prevalence of the superstition that the sexual instinct in men is utterly promiscuous, and that the least relaxation of law and custom must produce a wild outbreak of licentiousness. As far as our moralists can grasp the proposition that we should deal with the sexual relation as impersonal, it seems to them to mean that we should encourage it to be promiscuous: hence their recoil from it. But promiscuity and impersonality are not the same thing. No man ever fell in love with the entire female sex, nor any woman with the entire male sex. We often do not fall in love at all; and when we do we fall in love with one person and remain indifferent to thousands of others who pass before our eyes every day. Selection, carried even to such fastidiousness as to induce people to say quite commonly that there is only one man or woman in the world for them, is the rule in nature. If anyone doubts this, let him open a shop for the sale of picture postcards, and, when an enamoured lady customer demands a portrait of her favorite actor or a gentleman of his favorite actress, try to substitute some other portrait on the ground that since the sexual instinct is promiscuous, one portrait is as pleasing as another. I suppose no shopkeeper has ever been foolish enough to do such a thing; and yet all our shopkeepers, the moment a discussion arises on marriage, will passionately argue against all reform on the ground that nothing but the most severe coercion can save their wives and daughters from quite indiscriminate rapine.

DOMESTIC CHANGE OF AIR

Our relief at the morality of the reassurance that man is not promiscuous in his fancies must not blind us to the fact that he is (to use the word coined by certain American writers to describe themselves) something of a Varietist. Even those who say there is only one man or woman in the world for them, find that it is not always the same man or woman. It happens that our law permits us to study this phenomenon among entirely law-abiding people. I know one lady who has been married five times. She is, as might be expected, a wise, attractive, and interesting woman. The question is, is she wise, attractive, and interesting because she has been married five times, or has she been married five times because she is wise, attractive, and interesting? Probably some of the truth lies both ways. I also know of a household consisting of three families, A having married first B, and then C, who afterwards married D. All three unions were fruitful; so that the children had a change both of fathers and mothers. Now I cannot honestly say that these and similar cases have convinced me that people are the worse for a change. The lady who has married and managed five husbands must be much more expert at it than most monogamic ladies; and as a companion and counsellor she probably leaves them nowhere. Mr Kipling’s question,

“What can they know of England that only England know?”

disposes not only of the patriots who are so patriotic that they never leave their own country to look at another, but of the citizens who are so domestic that they have never married again and never loved anyone except their own husbands and wives. The domestic doctrinaires are also the dull people. The impersonal relation of sex may be judicially reserved for one person; but any such reservation of friendship, affection, admiration, sympathy and so forth is only possible to a wretchedly narrow and jealous nature; and neither history nor contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why men and women should associate for any other purpose.

As to the children of the triple household, they were not only on excellent terms with one another, and never thought of any distinction between their full and their half brothers and sisters; but they had the superior sociability which distinguishes the people who live in communities from those who live in small families.

The inference is that changes of partners are not in themselves injurious or undesirable. People are not demoralized by them when they are effected according to law. Therefore we need not hesitate to alter the law merely because the alteration would make such changes easier.

HOME MANNERS ARE BAD MANNERS

On the other hand, we have all seen the bonds of marriage vilely abused by people who are never classed with shrews and wife-beaters: they are indeed sometimes held up as models of domesticity because they do not drink nor gamble nor neglect their children nor tolerate dirt and untidiness, and because they are not amiable enough to have what are called amiable weaknesses. These terrors conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe among strangers, or, as they put it, “before company.” And here the effects of indissoluble marriage-for-better-for-worse are very plainly and disagreeably seen. If such people took their domestic manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world. There are women who, through total disuse, have lost the power of kindly human speech and can only scold and complain: there are men who grumble and nag from inveterate habit even when they are comfortable. But their unfortunate spouses and children cannot escape from them.

SPURIOUS “NATURAL” AFFECTION

What is more, they are protected from even such discomfort as the dislike of his prisoners may cause to a gaoler by the hypnotism of the convention that the natural relation between husband and wife and parent and child is one of intense affection, and that to feel any other sentiment towards a member of one’s family is to be a monster. Under the influence of the emotion thus manufactured the most detestable people are spoilt with entirely undeserved deference, obedience, and even affection whilst they live, and mourned when they die by those whose lives they wantonly or maliciously made miserable. And this is what we call natural conduct. Nothing could well be less natural. That such a convention should have been established shews that the indissolubility of marriage creates such intolerable situations that only by beglamoring the human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural feelings can it be made to keep up appearances.

If the sentimental theory of family relationship encourages bad manners and personal slovenliness and uncleanness in the home, it also, in the case of sentimental people, encourages the practice of rousing and playing on the affections of children prematurely and far too frequently. The lady who says that as her religion is love, her children shall be brought up in an atmosphere of love, and institutes a system of sedulous endearments and exchanges of presents and conscious and studied acts of artificial kindness, may be defeated in a large family by the healthy derision and rebellion of children who have acquired hardihood and common sense in their conflicts with one another. But the small families, which are the rule just now, succumb more easily; and in the case of a single sensitive child the effect of being forced in a hothouse atmosphere of unnatural affection may be disastrous.

In short, whichever way you take it, the convention that marriage and family relationship produces special feelings which alter the nature of human intercourse is a mischievous one. The whole difficulty of bringing up a family well is the difficulty of making its members behave as considerately at home as on a visit in a strange house, and as frankly, kindly, and easily in a strange house as at home. In the middle classes, where the segregation of the artificially limited family in its little brick box is horribly complete, bad manners, ugly dresses, awkwardness, cowardice, peevishness, and all the petty vices of unsociability flourish like mushrooms in a cellar. In the upper class, where families are not limited for money reasons; where at least two houses and sometimes three or four are the rule (not to mention the clubs); where there is travelling and hotel life; and where the men are brought up, not in the family, but in public schools, universities, and the naval and military services, besides being constantly in social training in other people’s houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in comparison with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a different and much more sociable species. And in the very poorest class, where people have no homes, only sleeping places, and consequently live practically in the streets, sociability again appears, leaving the middle class despised and disliked for its helpless and offensive unsociability as much by those below it as those above it, and yet ignorant enough to be proud of it, and to hold itself up as a model for the reform of the (as it considers) elegantly vicious rich and profligate poor alike.

CARRYING THE WAR INTO THE ENEMY’S COUNTRY

Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I have said enough to make it clear that the moment we lose the desire to defend our present matrimonial and family arrangements, there will be no difficulty in making out an overwhelming case against them. No doubt until then we shall continue to hold up the British home as the Holy of Holies in the temple of honorable motherhood, innocent childhood, manly virtue, and sweet and wholesome national life. But with a clever turn of the hand this holy of holies can be exposed as an Augean stable, so filthy that it would seem more hopeful to burn it down than to attempt to sweep it out. And this latter view will perhaps prevail if the idolaters of marriage persist in refusing all proposals for reform and treating those who advocate it as infamous delinquents. Neither view is of any use except as a poisoned arrow in a fierce fight between two parties determined to discredit each other with a view to obtaining powers of legal coercion over one another.

SHELLEY AND QUEEN VICTORIA

The best way to avert such a struggle is to open the eyes of the thoughtlessly conventional people to the weakness of their position in a mere contest of recrimination. Hitherto they have assumed that they have the advantage of coming into the field without a stain on their characters to combat libertines who have no character at all. They conceive it to be their duty to throw mud; and they feel that even if the enemy can find any mud to throw, none of it will stick. They are mistaken. There will be plenty of that sort of ammunition in the other camp; and most of it will stick very hard indeed. The moral is, do not throw any. If we can imagine Shelley and Queen Victoria arguing out their differences in another world, we may be sure that the Queen has long ago found that she cannot settle the question by classing Shelley with George IV. as a bad man; and Shelley is not likely to have called her vile names on the general ground that as the economic dependence of women makes marriage a money bargain in which the man is the purchaser and the woman the purchased, there is no essential difference between a married woman and the woman of the streets. Unfortunately, all the people whose methods of controversy are represented by our popular newspapers are not Queen Victorias and Shelleys. A great mass of them, when their prejudices are challenged, have no other impulse than to call the challenger names, and, when the crowd seems to be on their side, to maltreat him personally or hand him over to the law, if he is vulnerable to it. Therefore I cannot say that I have any certainty that the marriage question will be dealt with decently and tolerantly. But dealt with it will be, decently or indecently; for the present state of things in England is too strained and mischievous to last. Europe and America have left us a century behind in this matter.

A PROBABLE EFFECT OF GIVING WOMEN THE VOTE

The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a comparatively stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality (that is why so many of us dread it); and this will soon compel us to consider what our sexual morality shall be. At present a ridiculous distinction is made between vice and crime, in order that men may be vicious with impunity. Adultery, for instance, though it is sometimes fiercely punished by giving an injured husband crushing damages in a divorce suit (injured wives are not considered in this way), is not now directly prosecuted; and this impunity extends to illicit relations between unmarried persons who have reached what is called the age of consent. There are other matters, such as notification of contagious disease and solicitation, in which the hand of the law has been brought down on one sex only. Outrages which were capital offences within the memory of persons still living when committed on women outside marriage, can still be inflicted by men on their wives without legal remedy. At all such points the code will be screwed up by the operation of Votes for Women, if there be any virtue in the franchise at all. The result will be that men will find the more ascetic side of our sexual morality taken seriously by the law. It is easy to foresee the consequences. No man will take much trouble to alter laws which he can evade, or which are either not enforced or enforced on women only. But when these laws take him by the collar and thrust him into prison, he suddenly becomes keenly critical of them, and of the arguments by which they are supported. Now we have seen that our marriage laws will not stand criticism, and that they have held out so far only because they are so worked as to fit roughly our state of society, in which women are neither politically nor personally free, in which indeed women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men. When Liberalism enfranchises them politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically, they will no longer allow the law to take immorality so easily. Both men and women will be forced to behave morally in sex matters; and when they find that this is inevitable they will raise the question of what behavior really should be established as moral. If they decide in favor of our present professed morality they will have to make a revolutionary change in their habits by becoming in fact what they only pretend to be at present. If, on the other hand, they find that this would be an unbearable tyranny, without even the excuse of justice or sound eugenics, they will reconsider their morality and remodel the law.

THE PERSONAL SENTIMENTAL BASIS OF MONOGAMY

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.

The solid foundation of their confidence is the fact that the relationship set up by a comfortable marriage is so intimate and so persuasive of the whole life of the parties to it, that nobody has room in his or her life for more than one such relationship at a time. What is called a household of three is never really of three except in the sense that every household becomes a household of three when a child is born, and may in the same way become a household of four or fourteen if the union be fertile enough. Now no doubt the marriage tie means so little to some people that the addition to the household of half a dozen more wives or husbands would be as possible as the addition of half a dozen governesses or tutors or visitors or servants. A Sultan may have fifty wives as easily as he may have fifty dishes on his table, because in the English sense he has no wives at all; nor have his wives any husband: in short, he is not what we call a married man. And there are sultans and sultanas and seraglios existing in England under English forms. But when you come to the real modern marriage of sentiment, a relation is created which has never to my knowledge been shared by three persons except when all three have been extraordinarily fond of one another. Take for example the famous case of Nelson and Sir William and Lady Hamilton. The secret of this household of three was not only that both the husband and Nelson were devoted to Lady Hamilton, but that they were also apparently devoted to one another. When Hamilton died both Nelson and Emma seem to have been equally heartbroken. When there is a successful household of one man and two women the same unusual condition is fulfilled: the two women not only cannot live happily without the man but cannot live happily without each other. In every other case known to me, either from observation or record, the experiment is a hopeless failure: one of the two rivals for the really intimate affection of the third inevitably drives out the other. The driven-out party may accept the situation and remain in the house as a friend to save appearances, or for the sake of the children, or for economic reasons; but such an arrangement can subsist only when the forfeited relation is no longer really valued; and this indifference, like the triple bond of affection which carried Sir William Hamilton through, is so rare as to be practicably negligible in the establishment of a conventional morality of marriage. Therefore sensible and experienced people always assume that when a declaration of love is made to an already married person, the declaration binds the parties in honor never to see one another again unless they contemplate divorce and remarriage. And this is a sound convention, even for unconventional people. Let me illustrate by reference to a fictitious case: the one imagined in my own play Candida will do as well as another. Here a young man who has been received as a friend into the house of a clergyman falls in love with the clergyman’s wife, and, being young and inexperienced, declares his feelings, and claims that he, and not the clergyman, is the more suitable mate for the lady. The clergyman, who has a temper, is first tempted to hurl the youth into the street by bodily violence: an impulse natural, perhaps, but vulgar and improper, and, not open, on consideration, to decent men. Even coarse and inconsiderate men are restrained from it by the fact that the sympathy of the woman turns naturally to the victim of physical brutality and against the bully, the Thackerayan notion to the contrary being one of the illusions of literary masculinity. Besides, the husband is not necessarily the stronger man: an appeal to force has resulted in the ignominious defeat of the husband quite as often as in poetic justice as conceived in the conventional novelet. What an honorable and sensible man does when his household is invaded is what the Reverend James Mavor Morell does in my play. He recognizes that just as there is not room for two women in that sacredly intimate relation of sentimental domesticity which is what marriage means to him, so there is no room for two men in that relation with his wife; and he accordingly tells her firmly that she must choose which man will occupy the place that is large enough for one only. He is so far shrewdly unconventional as to recognize that if she chooses the other man, he must give way, legal tie or no legal tie; but he knows that either one or the other must go. And a sensible wife would act in the same way. If a romantic young lady came into her house and proposed to adore her husband on a tolerated footing, she would say “My husband has not room in his life for two wives: either you go out of the house or I go out of it.” The situation is not at all unlikely: I had almost said not at all unusual. Young ladies and gentlemen in the greensickly condition which is called calf-love, associating with married couples at dangerous periods of mature life, quite often find themselves in it; and the extreme reluctance of proud and sensitive people to avoid any assertion of matrimonial rights, or to condescend to jealousy, sometimes makes the threatened husband or wife hesitate to take prompt steps and do the apparently conventional thing. But whether they hesitate or act the result is always the same. In a real marriage of sentiment the wife or husband cannot be supplanted by halves; and such a marriage will break very soon under the strain of polygyny or polyandry. What we want at present is a sufficiently clear teaching of this fact to ensure that prompt and decisive action shall always be taken in such cases without any false shame of seeming conventional (a shame to which people capable of such real marriage are specially susceptible), and a rational divorce law to enable the marriage to be dissolved and the parties honorably resorted and recoupled without disgrace and scandal if that should prove the proper solution.

It must be repeated here that no law, however stringent, can prevent polygamy among groups of people who choose to live loosely and be monogamous only in appearance. But such cases are not now under consideration. Also, affectionate husbands like Samuel Pepys, and affectionate wives of the corresponding temperaments may, it appears, engage in transient casual adventures out of doors without breaking up their home life. But within doors that home life may be regarded as naturally monogamous. It does not need to be protected against polygamy: it protects itself.

DIVORCE

All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce. Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to his marriage vow, whilst allowing him that power over her, that they are apt to overlook the pressing need for admitting other and far more important grounds for divorce. If we take a document like Pepys’ Diary, we learn that a woman may have an incorrigibly unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off than if she had an ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one, or was chained for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle vagrant, or a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own. Imagine being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser or tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore! Conceive yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly “faithful” husbands who are sentenced to a month’s imprisonment occasionally for idly leaving their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or attendance! What woman would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what man a dozen Nell Gwynnes? Adultery, far from being the first and only ground for divorce, might more reasonably be made the last, or wholly excluded. The present law is perfectly logical only if you once admit (as no decent person ever does) its fundamental assumption that there can be no companionship between men and women because the woman has a “sphere” of her own, that of housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all the rest of human activity for his sphere: the only point at which the two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population. On this assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the children shall be his because he has to find the money to support them. The power of divorcing a woman for adultery is this guarantee, a guarantee that she does not need to protect her against a similar imposture on his part, because he cannot bear children. No doubt he can spend the money that ought to be spent on her children on another woman and her children; but this is desertion, which is a separate matter. The fact for us to seize is that in the eye of the law, adultery without consequences is merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting on one man of another man’s offspring is a substantial one. And so, no doubt, it is; but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption that a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby encouraging and accepting the standards of the husbands who buy meat for their bull-pups and leave their wives and children hungry. That basis is the penalty we pay for having borrowed our religion from the East, instead of building up a religion of our own out of our western inspiration and western sentiment. The result is that we all believe that our religion is on its last legs, whereas the truth is that it is not yet born, though the age walks visibly pregnant with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down by their oriental servitude to our men, and as, further, women drag down those who degrade them quite as effectually as men do, there are moments when it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions except a police des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as to which sex shall corrupt the other most.

IMPORTANCE OF SENTIMENTAL GRIEVANCE

Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental grievances first, and should carefully avoid singling out any ground of divorce in such a way as to create a convention that persons having that ground are bound in honor to avail themselves of it. It is generally admitted that people should not be encouraged to petition for a divorce in a fit of petulance. What is not so clearly seen is that neither should they be encouraged to petition in a fit of jealousy, which is certainly the most detestable and mischievous of all the passions that enjoy public credit. Still less should people who are not jealous be urged to behave as if they were jealous, and to enter upon duels and divorce suits in which they have no desire to be successful. There should be no publication of the grounds on which a divorce is sought or granted; and as this would abolish the only means the public now has of ascertaining that every possible effort has been made to keep the couple united against their wills, such privacy will only be tolerated when we at last admit that the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is that they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation, no more washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public. We must learn in these matters to mind our own business and not impose our individual notions of propriety on one another, even if it carries us to the length of openly admitting what we are now compelled to assume silently, that every human being has a right to sexual experience, and that the law is concerned only with parentage, which is now a separate matter.

DIVORCE WITHOUT ASKING WHY

The one question that should never be put to a petitioner for divorce is “Why?” When a man appeals to a magistrate for protection from someone who threatens to kill him, on the simple ground that he desires to live, the magistrate might quite reasonably ask him why he desires to live, and why the person who wishes to kill him should not be gratified. Also whether he can prove that his life is a pleasure to himself or a benefit to anyone else, and whether it is good for him to be encouraged to exaggerate the importance of his short span in this vale of tears rather than to keep himself constantly ready to meet his God.

The only reason for not raising these very weighty points is that we find society unworkable except on the assumption that every man has a natural right to live. Nothing short of his own refusal to respect that right in others can reconcile the community to killing him. From this fundamental right many others are derived. The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as natural rights. The terms are too vague to be of much practical use; for the supreme right to life, extended as it now must be to the life of the race, and to the quality of life as well as to the mere fact of breathing, is making short work of many ancient liberties, and exposing the pursuit of happiness as perhaps the most miserable of human occupations. Nevertheless, the American Constitution roughly expresses the conditions to which modern democracy commits us. To impose marriage on two unmarried people who do not desire to marry one another would be admittedly an act of enslavement. But it is no worse than to impose a continuation of marriage on people who have ceased to desire to be married. It will be said that the parties may not agree on that; that one may desire to maintain the marriage the other wishes to dissolve. But the same hardship arises whenever a man in love proposes marriage to a woman and is refused. The refusal is so painful to him that he often threatens to kill himself and sometimes even does it. Yet we expect him to face his ill luck, and never dream of forcing the woman to accept him. His case is the same as that of the husband whose wife tells him she no longer cares for him, and desires the marriage to be dissolved. You will say, perhaps, if you are superstitious, that it is not the same — that marriage makes a difference. You are wrong: there is no magic in marriage. If there were, married couples would never desire to separate. But they do. And when they do, it is simple slavery to compel them to remain together.

ECONOMIC SLAVERY AGAIN THE ROOT DIFFICULTY

The husband, then, is to be allowed to discard his wife when he is tired of her, and the wife the husband when another man strikes her fancy? One must reply unhesitatingly in the affirmative; for if we are to deny every proposition that can be stated in offensive terms by its opponents, we shall never be able to affirm anything at all. But the question reminds us that until the economic independence of women is achieved, we shall have to remain impaled on the other horn of the dilemma and maintain marriage as a slavery. And here let me ask the Government of the day (1910) a question with regard to the Labor Exchanges it has very wisely established throughout the country. What do these Exchanges do when a woman enters and states that her occupation is that of a wife and mother; that she is out of a job; and that she wants an employer? If the Exchanges refuse to entertain her application, they are clearly excluding nearly the whole female sex from the benefit of the Act. If not, they must become matrimonial agencies, unless, indeed, they are prepared to become something worse by putting the woman down as a housekeeper and introducing her to an employer without making marriage a condition of the hiring.

LABOR EXCHANGES AND THE WHITE SLAVERY

Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange, and states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the unmentionable trade pursued by many thousands of women in all civilized cities. Will the Labor Exchange find employers for her? If not, what will it do with her? If it throws her back destitute and unhelped on the streets to starve, it might as well not exist as far as she is concerned; and the problem of unemployment remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet if it finds honest employment for her and for all the unemployed wives and mothers, it must find new places in the world for women; and in so doing it must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when this is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife and mother (not to mention the less respectable alternative) unless her position is made as eligible as that of the women for whom the Labor Exchanges are finding independent work? Will not many women now engaged in domestic work under circumstances which make it repugnant to them, abandon it and seek employment under other circumstances? As unhappiness in marriage is almost the only discomfort sufficiently irksome to induce a woman to break up her home, and economic dependence the only compulsion sufficiently stringent to force her to endure such unhappiness, the solution of the problem of finding independent employment for women may cause a great number of childless unhappy marriages to break up spontaneously, whether the marriage laws are altered or not. And here we must extend the term childless marriages to cover households in which the children have grown up and gone their own way, leaving the parents alone together: a point at which many worthy couples discover for the first time that they have long since lost interest in one another, and have been united only by a common interest in their children. We may expect, then, that marriages which are maintained by economic pressure alone will dissolve when that pressure is removed; and as all the parties to them will certainly not accept a celibate life, the law must sanction the dissolution in order to prevent a recurrence of the scandal which has moved the Government to appoint the Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage question: the scandal, that is, of a great number matter of the evils of our marriage law, to take care of the pence and let the pounds take care of themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage will force themselves on public attention by their own virulence. I mention them here only because they reveal certain habits of thought and feeling with regard to marriage of which we must rid ourselves if we are to act sensibly when we take the necessary reforms in hand.

CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound not only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the excesses and extravagances which the Christian movement acquired in its earlier days as a violent reaction against what it still calls paganism. By far the most dangerous of these, because it is a blasphemy against life, and, to put it in Christian terms, an accusation of indecency against God, is the notion that sex, with all its operations, is in itself absolutely an obscene thing, and that an immaculate conception is a miracle. So unwholesome an absurdity could only have gained ground under two conditions: one, a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury had been carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the world was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions, made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of its propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in these directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming from the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the great disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of Christians seriously prepared for the end of the world, the prophet who announces that the end is at hand is still popular. Many of the people who ridicule his demonstrations that the fantastic monsters of the book of Revelation are among us in the persons of our own political contemporaries, and who proceed sanely in all their affairs on the assumption that the world is going to last, really do believe that there will be a Judgment Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time. A thunderstorm, an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them apprehensive and uncomfortable.

This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused to have anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the abolition of sex, but its excommunication. And, of course, the consequences of persuading people that matrimony was an unholy state were so grossly carnal, that the Church had to execute a complete right-about-face, and try to make people understand that it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could not be validly inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by this teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this or that practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the whole scheme of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen contradictory doctrines to suit half-a-dozen different emergencies. The Church solemnized and sanctified marriage without ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine on the subject. And it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at which it took up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was, as it still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price between a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet with this difference in value between human beings, we may know that we are in the slave-market, where the conception of our relations to the persons sold is neither religious nor natural nor human nor superhuman, but simply commercial. The Church, when it finally gave its blessing to marriage, did not, in its innocence, fathom these commercial traditions. Consequently it tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The slave-dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church, instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and, helped by its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave virginity a heavenly value to ennoble its commercial pretensions. In short, Mammon, always mighty, put the Church in his pocket, where he keeps it to this day, in spite of the occasional saints and martyrs who contrive from time to time to get their heads and souls free to testify against him.

DIVORCE A SACRAMENTAL DUTY

But Mammon overreached himself when he tried to impose his doctrine of inalienable property on the Church under the guise of indissoluble marriage. For the Church tried to shelter this inhuman doctrine and flat contradiction of the gospel by claiming, and rightly claiming, that marriage is a sacrament. So it is; but that is exactly what makes divorce a duty when the marriage has lost the inward and spiritual grace of which the marriage ceremony is the outward and visible sign. In vain do bishops stoop to pick up the discarded arguments of the atheists of fifty years ago by pleading that the words of Jesus were in an obscure Aramaic dialect, and were probably misunderstood, as Jesus, they think, could not have said anything a bishop would disapprove of. Unless they are prepared to add that the statement that those who take the sacrament with their lips but not with their hearts eat and drink their own damnation is also a mistranslation from the Aramaic, they are most solemnly bound to shield marriage from profanation, not merely by permitting divorce, but by making it compulsory in certain cases as the Chinese do.

When the great protest of the XVI century came, and the Church was reformed in several countries, the Reformation was so largely a rebellion against sacerdotalism that marriage was very nearly excommunicated again: our modern civil marriage, round which so many fierce controversies and political conflicts have raged, would have been thoroughly approved of by Calvin, and hailed with relief by Luther. But the instinctive doctrine that there is something holy and mystic in sex, a doctrine which many of us now easily dissociate from any priestly ceremony, but which in those days seemed to all who felt it to need a ritual affirmation, could not be thrown on the scrap-heap with the sale of Indulgences and the like; and so the Reformation left marriage where it was: a curious mixture of commercial sex slavery, early Christian sex abhorrence, and later Christian sex sanctification.

OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA

How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article of property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not to be used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt from Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers are Antony and Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and proprietary instinct the moment they lose their tempers. “I found you,” says Antony, reproaching Cleopatra, “as a morsel cold upon dead Caesar’s trencher.” Othello’s worst agony is the thought of “keeping a corner in the thing he loves for others’ uses.” But this is not what a man feels about the thing he loves, but about the thing he owns. I never understood the full significance of Othello’s outburst until I one day heard a lady, in the course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of “group marriage,” say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of lending her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense of outraged manhood with which I felt myself and all other husbands thus reduced to the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a very unpleasant taste of what Desdemona might have felt had she overheard Othello’s outburst. I was so dumfounded that I had not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether she insisted on having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest and solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more fastidiously, by women.

All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population) on the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the subject is considered shameful and sinful we shall have no systematic instruction in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as are given in Germany, France, and even prudish America (where the great Miltonic tradition in this matter still lives) will be considered a corruption of that youthful innocence which now subsists on nasty stories and whispered traditions handed down from generation to generation of school-children: stories and traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society and the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to maintain the White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on the one hand, tolerating the white slave as the necessary breakwater of marriage; and, on the other, trampling on her and degrading her until she has nothing to hope from our Courts; and so, with policemen at every corner, and law triumphant all over Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven from one end of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten, bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically investing her trade with every allurement that the art of the novelist, the playwright, the dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight man, and the sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue to be very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the other victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable refrain: “Why did nobody warn me?”

WHAT IS TO BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?

I must not reply flippantly, Make them all Wards in Chancery; yet that would be enough to put any sensible person on the track of the reply. One would think, to hear the way in which people sometimes ask the question, that not only does marriage prevent the difficulty from ever arising, but that nothing except divorce can ever raise it. It is true that if you divorce the parents, the children have to be disposed of. But if you hang the parents, or imprison the parents, or take the children out of the custody of the parents because they hold Shelley’s opinions, or if the parents die, the same difficulty arises. And as these things have happened again and again, and as we have had plenty of experience of divorce decrees and separation orders, the attempt to use children as an obstacle to divorce is hardly worth arguing with. We shall deal with the children just as we should deal with them if their homes were broken up by any other cause. There is a sense in which children are a real obstacle to divorce: they give parents a common interest which keeps together many a couple who, if childless, would separate. The marriage law is superfluous in such cases. This is shewn by the fact that the proportion of childless divorces is much larger than the proportion of divorces from all causes. But it must not be forgotten that the interest of the children forms one of the most powerful arguments for divorce. An unhappy household is a bad nursery. There is something to be said for the polygynous or polyandrous household as a school for children: children really do suffer from having too few parents: this is why uncles and aunts and tutors and governesses are often so good for children. But it is just the polygamous household which our marriage law allows to be broken up, and which, as we have seen, is not possible as a typical institution in a democratic country where the numbers of the sexes are about equal. Therefore polygyny and polyandry as a means of educating children fall to the ground, and with them, I think, must go the opinion which has been expressed by Gladstone and others, that an extension of divorce, whilst admitting many new grounds for it, might exclude the ground of adultery. There are, however, clearly many things that make some of our domestic interiors little private hells for children (especially when the children are quite content in them) which would justify any intelligent State in breaking up the home and giving the custody of the children either to the parent whose conscience had revolted against the corruption of the children, or to neither.

Which brings me to the point that divorce should no longer be confined to cases in which one of the parties petitions for it. If, for instance, you have a thoroughly rascally couple making a living by infamous means and bringing up their children to their trade, the king’s proctor, instead of pursuing his present purely mischievous function of preventing couples from being divorced by proving that they both desire it, might very well intervene and divorce these children from their parents. At present, if the Queen herself were to rescue some unfortunate child from degradation and misery and place her in a respectable home, and some unmentionable pair of blackguards claimed the child and proved that they were its father and mother, the child would be given to them in the name of the sanctity of the home and the holiness of parentage, after perpetrating which crime the law would calmly send an education officer to take the child out of the parents’ hands several hours a day in the still more sacred name of compulsory education. (Of course what would really happen would be that the couple would blackmail the Queen for their consent to the salvation of the child, unless, indeed, a hint from a police inspector convinced them that bad characters cannot always rely on pedantically constitutional treatment when they come into conflict with persons in high station).

The truth is, not only must the bond between man and wife be made subject to a reasonable consideration of the welfare of the parties concerned and of the community, but the whole family bond as well. The theory that the wife is the property of the husband or the husband of the wife is not a whit less abhorrent and mischievous than the theory that the child is the property of the parent. Parental bondage will go the way of conjugal bondage: indeed the order of reform should rather be put the other way about; for the helplessness of children has already compelled the State to intervene between parent and child more than between husband and wife. If you pay less than 40 pounds a year rent, you will sometimes feel tempted to say to the vaccination officer, the school attendance officer, and the sanitary inspector: “Is this child mine or yours?” The answer is that as the child is a vital part of the nation, the nation cannot afford to leave it at the irresponsible disposal of any individual or couple of individuals as a mere small parcel of private property. The only solid ground that the parent can take is that as the State, in spite of its imposing name, can, when all is said, do nothing with the child except place it in the charge of some human being or another, the parent is no worse a custodian than a stranger. And though this proposition may seem highly questionable at first sight to those who imagine that only parents spoil children, yet those who realize that children are as often spoilt by severity and coldness as by indulgence, and that the notion that natural parents are any worse than adopted parents is probably as complete an illusion as the notion that they are any better, see no serious likelihood that State action will detach children from their parents more than it does at present: nay, it is even likely that the present system of taking the children out of the parents’ hands and having the parental duty performed by officials, will, as poverty and ignorance become the exception instead of the rule, give way to the system of simply requiring certain results, beginning with the baby’s weight and ending perhaps with some sort of practical arts degree, but leaving parents and children to achieve the results as they best may. Such freedom is, of course, impossible in our present poverty-stricken circumstances. As long as the masses of our people are too poor to be good parents or good anything else except beasts of burden, it is no use requiring much more from them but hewing of wood and drawing of water: whatever is to be done must be done FOR them mostly, alas! by people whose superiority is merely technical. Until we abolish poverty it is impossible to push rational measures of any kind very far: the wolf at the door will compel us to live in a state of siege and to do everything by a bureaucratic martial law that would be quite unnecessary and indeed intolerable in a prosperous community. But however we settle the question, we must make the parent justify his custody of the child exactly as we should make a stranger justify it. If a family is not achieving the purposes of a family it should be dissolved just as a marriage should when it, too, is not achieving the purposes of marriage. The notion that there is or ever can be anything magical and inviolable in the legal relations of domesticity, and the curious confusion of ideas which makes some of our bishops imagine that in the phrase “Whom God hath joined,” the word God means the district registrar or the Reverend John Smith or William Jones, must be got rid of. Means of breaking up undesirable families are as necessary to the preservation of the family as means of dissolving undesirable marriages are to the preservation of marriage. If our domestic laws are kept so inhuman that they at last provoke a furious general insurrection against them as they already provoke many private ones, we shall in a very literal sense empty the baby out with the bath by abolishing an institution which needs nothing more than a little obvious and easy rationalizing to make it not only harmless but comfortable, honorable, and useful.

THE COST OF DIVORCE

But please do not imagine that the evils of indissoluble marriage can be cured by divorce laws administered on our present plan. The very cheapest undefended divorce, even when conducted by a solicitor for its own sake and that of humanity, costs at least 30 pounds out-of-pocket expenses. To a client on business terms it costs about three times as much. Until divorce is as cheap as marriage, marriage will remain indissoluble for all except the handful of people to whom 100 pounds is a procurable sum. For the enormous majority of us there is no difference in this respect between a hundred and a quadrillion. Divorce is the one thing you may not sue for in forma pauperis.

Let me, then, recommend as follows:

1. Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.

2. Grant divorce at the request of either party, whether the other consents or not; and admit no other ground than the request, which should be made without stating any reasons.

3. Confine the power of dissolving marriage for misconduct to the State acting on the petition of the king’s proctor or other suitable functionary, who may, however, be moved by either party to intervene in ordinary request cases, not to prevent the divorce taking place, but to enforce alimony if it be refused and the case is one which needs it.

4. Make it impossible for marriage to be used as a punishment as it is at present. Send the husband and wife to penal servitude if you disapprove of their conduct and want to punish them; but do not send them back to perpetual wedlock.

5. If, on the other hand, you think a couple perfectly innocent and well conducted, do not condemn them also to perpetual wedlock against their wills, thereby making the treatment of what you consider innocence on both sides the same as the treatment of what you consider guilt on both sides.

6. Place the work of a wife and mother on the same footing as other work: that is, on the footing of labor worthy of its hire; and provide for unemployment in it exactly as for unemployment in shipbuilding or an other recognized bread-winning trade.

7. And take and deal with all the consequences of these acts of justice instead of letting yourself be frightened out of reason and good sense by fear of consequences. We must finally adapt our institutions to human nature. In the long run our present plan of trying to force human nature into a mould of existing abuses, superstitions, and corrupt interests, produces the explosive forces that wreck civilization.

8. Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion. If you doubt this, ask any decent judge or bishop. Do NOT ask somebody who does not know what a judge is, or what a bishop is, or what the law is, or what religion is. In other words, do not ask your newspaper. Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

CONCLUSIONS

To sum up, we have to depend on the solution of the problem of unemployment, probably on the principles laid down in the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, to make the sexual relations between men and women decent and honorable by making women economically independent of men, and (in the younger son section of the upper classes) men economically independent of women. We also have to bring ourselves into line with the rest of Protestant civilization by providing means for dissolving all unhappy, improper, and inconvenient marriages. And, as it is our cautious custom to lag behind the rest of the world to see how their experiments in reform turn out before venturing ourselves, and then take advantage of their experience to get ahead of them, we should recognize that the ancient system of specifying grounds for divorce, such as adultery, cruelty, drunkenness, felony, insanity, vagrancy, neglect to provide for wife and children, desertion, public defamation, violent temper, religious heterodoxy, contagious disease, outrages, indignities, personal abuse, “mental anguish,” conduct rendering life burdensome and so forth (all these are examples from some code actually in force at present), is a mistake, because the only effect of compelling people to plead and prove misconduct is that cases are manufactured and clean linen purposely smirched and washed in public, to the great distress and disgrace of innocent children and relatives, whilst the grounds have at the same time to be made so general that any sort of human conduct may be brought within them by a little special pleading and a little mental reservation on the part of witnesses examined on oath. When it conies to “conduct rendering life burdensome,” it is clear that no marriage is any longer indissoluble; and the sensible thing to do then is to grant divorce whenever it is desired, without asking why.

GETTING MARRIED

N.B. — There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, The Doctor’s Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it, which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long period, would be impossible.

On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and handsome and healthy.

The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or “restored” by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money to spend on it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the paint, the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black beams of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his predecessors to make themselves feel at home and respectable in a Norman fortress. It is a house built to last for ever. The walls and beams are big enough to carry the tower of Babel, as if the builders, anticipating our modern ideas and instinctively defying them, had resolved to show how much material they could lavish on a house built for the glory of God, instead of keeping a competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the lowest tender, and scientifically calculating how little material would be enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own weight.

The kitchen is the Bishop’s favorite room. This is not at all because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is one of the finest rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the income nor the appetite to have his cooking done there. The windows, high up in the wall, look north and south. The north window is the largest; and if we look into the kitchen through it we see facing us the south wall with small Norman windows and an open door near the corner to the left. Through this door we have a glimpse of the garden, and of a garden chair in the sunshine. In the right-hand corner is an entrance to a vaulted circular chamber with a winding stair leading up through a tower to the upper floors of the palace. In the wall to our right is the immense fireplace, with its huge spit like a baby crane, and a collection of old iron and brass instruments which pass as the original furniture of the fire, though as a matter of fact they have been picked up from time to time by the Bishop at secondhand shops. In the near end of the left hand wall a small Norman door gives access to the Bishop’s study, formerly a scullery. Further along, a great oak chest stands against the wall. Across the middle of the kitchen is a big timber table surrounded by eleven stout rush-bottomed chairs: four on the far side, three on the near side, and two at each end. There is a big chair with railed back and sides on the hearth. On the floor is a drugget of thick fibre matting. The only other piece of furniture is a clock with a wooden dial about as large as the bottom of a washtub, the weights, chains, and pendulum being of corresponding magnitude; but the Bishop has long since abandoned the attempt to keep it going. It hangs above the oak chest.

The kitchen is occupied at present by the Bishop’s lady, Mrs Bridgenorth, who is talking to Mr William Collins, the greengrocer. He is in evening dress, though it is early forenoon. Mrs Bridgenorth is a quiet happy-looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, placid, gentle, and humorous, with delicate features and fine grey hair with many white threads. She is dressed as for some festivity; but she is taking things easily as she sits in the big chair by the hearth, reading The Times.

Collins is an elderly man with a rather youthful waist. His muttonchop whiskers have a coquettish touch of Dundreary at their lower ends. He is an affable man, with those perfect manners which can be acquired only in keeping a shop for the sale of necessaries of life to ladies whose social position is so unquestionable that they are not anxious about it. He is a reassuring man, with a vigilant grey eye, and the power of saying anything he likes to you without offence, because his tone always implies that he does it with your kind permission. Withal by no means servile: rather gallant and compassionate, but never without a conscientious recognition, on public grounds, of social distinctions. He is at the oak chest counting a pile of napkins.

Mrs Bridgenorth reads placidly: Collins counts: a blackbird sings in the garden. Mrs Bridgenorth puts The Times down in her lap and considers Collins for a moment.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do you never feel nervous on these occasions,  Collins?

COLLINS. Lord bless you, no, maam. It would be a joke, after  marrying five of your daughters, if I was to get nervous over  marrying the last of them.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I have always said you were a wonderful man,  Collins.

COLLINS [almost blushing] Oh, maam!

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. I never could arrange anything — a wedding  or even dinner — without some hitch or other.

COLLINS. Why should you give yourself the trouble, maam? Send for  the greengrocer, maam: thats the secret of easy housekeeping.

Bless you, it’s his business. It pays him and you, let alone the  pleasure in a house like this [Mrs Bridgenorth bows in  acknowledgment of the compliment]. They joke about the  greengrocer, just as they joke about the mother-in-law. But they  cant get on without both.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. What a bond between us, Collins!

COLLINS. Bless you, maam, theres all sorts of bonds between all  sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, maam, for a  Bishop’s lady. I have known Bishop’s ladies that would fairly  provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget  himself and his place with you, maam.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins: you are a flatterer. You will  superintend the breakfast yourself as usual, of course, wont you?

COLLINS. Yes, yes, bless you, maam, of course. I always do. Them  fashionable caterers send down such people as I never did set  eyes on. Dukes you would take them for. You see the relatives  shaking hands with them and asking them about the family — actually ladies saying “Where have we met before?” and all sorts  of confusion. Thats my secret in business, maam. You can always  spot me as the greengrocer. It’s a fortune to me in these days,  when you cant hardly tell who any one is or isnt. [He goes out  through the tower, and immediately returns for a moment to  announce] The General, maam.

Mrs Bridgenorth rises to receive her brother-in-law, who enters  resplendent in full-dress uniform, with many medals and orders.

General Bridgenorth is a well set up man of fifty, with large  brave nostrils, an iron mouth, faithful dog’s eyes, and much  natural simplicity and dignity of character. He is ignorant,  stupid, and prejudiced, having been carefully trained to be so;  and it is not always possible to be patient with him when his  unquestionably good intentions become actively mischievous; but  one blames society, not himself, for this. He would be no worse a  man than Collins, had he enjoyed Collins’s social opportunities.

He comes to the hearth, where Mrs Bridgenorth is standing with  her back to the fireplace.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, Boxer. [They shake hands]. Another  niece to give away. This is the last of them.

THE GENERAL [very gloomy] Yes, Alice. Nothing for the old warrior  uncle to do but give away brides to luckier men than himself. Has — [he chokes] has your sister come yet?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Why do you always call Lesbia my sister? Dont  you know that it annoys her more than any of the rest of your  tricks?

THE GENERAL. Tricks! Ha! Well, I’ll try to break myself of it;  but I think she might bear with me in a little thing like that.

She knows that her name sticks in my throat. Better call her your  sister than try to call her L — [he almost breaks down] L — well,  call her by her name and make a fool of myself by crying. [He  sits down at the near end of the table].

MRS BRIDGENORTH [going to him and rallying him] Oh come, Boxer! Really, really! We are no longer boys and girls. You cant keep up  a broken heart all your life. It must be nearly twenty years  since she refused you. And you know that it’s not because she  dislikes you, but only that she’s not a marrying woman.

THE GENERAL. It’s no use. I love her still. And I cant help  telling her so whenever we meet, though I know it makes her avoid  me. [He all but weeps].

MRS BRIDGENORTH. What does she say when you tell her?

THE GENERAL. Only that she wonders when I am going to grow out of  it. I know now that I shall never grow out of it.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Perhaps you would if you married her. I believe youre better as you are, Boxer.

THE GENERAL. I’m a miserable man. I’m really sorry to be a  ridiculous old bore, Alice; but when I come to this house for a  wedding — to these scenes — to — to recollections of the past —

always to give the bride to somebody else, and never to have my  bride given to me — [he rises abruptly] May I go into the garden  and smoke it off?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Boxer.

Collins returns with the wedding cake.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Oh, heres the cake. I believe it’s the same one  we had for Florence’s wedding.

THE GENERAL. I cant bear it [he hurries out through the garden  door].

COLLINS [putting the cake on the table] Well, look at that,  maam! Aint it odd that after all the weddings he’s given away at,  the General cant stand the sight of a wedding cake yet. It always  seems to give him the same shock.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Well, it’s his last shock. You have married the  whole family now, Collins. [She takes up The Times again and  resumes her seat].

COLLINS. Except your sister, maam. A fine character of a lady,  maam, is Miss Grantham. I have an ambition to arrange her wedding  breakfast.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. She wont marry, Collins.

COLLINS. Bless you, maam, they all say that. You and me said it,  I’ll lay. I did, anyhow.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. No: marriage came natural to me. I should have  thought it did to you too.

COLLINS [pensive] No, maam: it didnt come natural. My wife had to  break me into it. It came natural to her: she’s what you might  call a regular old hen. Always wants to have her family within  sight of her. Wouldnt go to bed unless she knew they was all safe  at home and the door locked, and the lights out. Always wants her  luggage in the carriage with her. Always goes and makes the  engine driver promise her to be careful. She’s a born wife and  mother, maam. Thats why my children all ran away from home.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Did you ever feel inclined to run away, Collins?

COLLINS. Oh yes, maam, yes: very often. But when it came to the  point I couldnt bear to hurt her feelings. Shes a sensitive,  affectionate, anxious soul; and she was never brought up to know  what freedom is to some people. You see, family life is all the  life she knows: she’s like a bird born in a cage, that would die  if you let it loose in the woods. When I thought how little it  was to a man of my easy temper to put up with her, and how deep  it would hurt her to think it was because I didnt care for her, I always put off running away till next time; and so in the end I never ran away at all. I daresay it was good for me to be took  such care of; but it cut me off from all my old friends something  dreadful, maam: especially the women, maam. She never gave them a  chance: she didnt indeed. She never understood that married  people should take holidays from one another if they are to keep  at all fresh. Not that I ever got tired of her, maam; but my! how  I used to get tired of home life sometimes. I used to catch  myself envying my brother George: I positively did, maam.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. George was a bachelor then, I suppose?

COLLINS. Bless you, no, maam. He married a very fine figure of a  woman; but she was that changeable and what you might call  susceptible, you would not believe. She didnt seem to have any  control over herself when she fell in love. She would mope for a  couple of days, crying about nothing; and then she would up and  say — no matter who was there to hear her— “I must go to him,  George”; and away she would go from her home and her husband  without with-your-leave or by-your-leave.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. But do you mean that she did this more than  once? That she came back?

COLLINS. Bless you, maam, she done it five times to my own  knowledge; and then George gave up telling us about it, he got so  used to it.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. But did he always take her back?

COLLINS. Well, what could he do, maam? Three times out of four  the men would bring her back the same evening and no harm done.

Other times theyd run away from her. What could any man with a  heart do but comfort her when she came back crying at the way  they dodged her when she threw herself at their heads, pretending  they was too noble to accept the sacrifice she was making. George  told her again and again that if she’d only stay at home and hold  off a bit theyd be at her feet all day long. She got sensible at  last and took his advice. George always liked change of company.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. What an odious woman, Collins! Dont you think  so?

COLLINS [judicially] Well, many ladies with a domestic turn  thought so and said so, maam. But I will say for Mrs George that  the variety of experience made her wonderful interesting. Thats  where the flighty ones score off the steady ones, maam. Look at  my old woman! She’s never known any man but me; and she cant  properly know me, because she dont know other men to compare me  with. Of course she knows her parents in — well, in the way one  does know one’s parents not knowing half their lives as you might  say, or ever thinking that they was ever young; and she knew her  children as children, and never thought of them as independent  human beings till they ran away and nigh broke her heart for a  week or two. But Mrs George she came to know a lot about men of  all sorts and ages; for the older she got the younger she liked  em; and it certainly made her interesting, and gave her a lot of  sense. I have often taken her advice on things when my own poor  old woman wouldnt have been a bit of use to me.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I hope you dont tell your wife that you go  elsewhere for advice.

COLLINS. Lord bless you, maam, I’m that fond of my old Matilda  that I never tell her anything at all for fear of hurting her  feelings. You see, she’s such an out-and-out wife and mother that  she’s hardly a responsible human being out of her house, except  when she’s marketing.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Does she approve of Mrs George?

COLLINS. Oh, Mrs George gets round her. Mrs George can get round  anybody if she wants to. And then Mrs George is very particular  about religion. And shes a clairvoyant.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [surprised] A clairvoyant!

COLLINS [calm] Oh yes, maam, yes. All you have to do is to  mesmerize her a bit; and off she goes into a trance, and says the  most wonderful things! not things about herself, but as if it was  the whole human race giving you a bit of its mind. Oh, wonderful,  maam, I assure you. You couldnt think of a game that Mrs George  isnt up to.

Lesbia Grantham comes in through the tower. She is a tall,  handsome, slender lady in her prime; that is, between 36 and 55.

She has what is called a well-bred air, dressing very carefully  to produce that effect without the least regard for the latest  fashions, sure of herself, very terrifying to the young and shy,  fastidious to the ends of her long finger-tips, and tolerant and  amused rather than sympathetic.

LESBIA. Good morning, dear big sister.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Good morning, dear little sister. [They kiss].

LESBIA. Good morning, Collins. How well you are looking! And how  young! [She turns the middle chair away from the table and sits  down].

COLLINS. Thats only my professional habit at a wedding, Miss. You  should see me at a political dinner. I look nigh seventy.

[Looking at his watch] Time’s getting along, maam. May I send up  word from you to Miss Edith to hurry a bit with her dressing?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Collins.

Collins goes out through the tower, taking the cake with him.

LESBIA. Dear old Collins! Has he told you any stories this  morning?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. You were just late for a particularly  thrilling invention of his.

LESBIA. About Mrs George?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Yes. He says she’s a clairvoyant.

LESBIA. I wonder whether he really invented George, or stole her  out of some book.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I wonder!

LESBIA. Wheres the Barmecide?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. In the study, working away at his new book. He  thinks no more now of having a daughter married than of having an  egg for breakfast.

The General, soothed by smoking, comes in from the garden.

THE GENERAL [with resolute bonhomie] Ah, Lesbia!

MRS BRIDGENORTH. How do you do? [They shake hands; and he takes  the chair on her right].

Mrs Bridgenorth goes out through the tower.

LESBIA. How are you, Boxer? You look almost as gorgeous as the  wedding cake.

THE GENERAL. I make a point of appearing in uniform whenever I ake part in any ceremony, as a lesson to the subalterns. It is  not the custom in England; but it ought to be.

LESBIA. You look very fine, Boxer. What a frightful lot of  bravery all these medals must represent!

THE GENERAL. No, Lesbia. They represent despair and cowardice. I on all the early ones by trying to get killed. You know why.

LESBIA. But you had a charmed life?

THE GENERAL. Yes, a charmed life. Bayonets bent on my buckles.

Bullets passed through me and left no trace: thats the worst of  modern bullets: Ive never been hit by a dum-dum. When I was only  a company officer I had at least the right to expose myself to  death in the field. Now I’m a General even that resource is cut  off. [Persuasively drawing his chair nearer to her] Listen to me,  Lesbia. For the tenth and last time —

LESBIA [interrupting] On Florence’s wedding morning, two years  ago, you said “For the ninth and last time.”

THE GENERAL. We are two years older, Lesbia. I’m fifty: you  are —

LESBIA. Yes, I know. It’s no use, Boxer. When will you be old  enough to take no for an answer?

THE GENERAL. Never, Lesbia, never. You have never given me a real  reason for refusing me yet. I once thought it was somebody else.

There were lots of fellows after you; but now theyve all given it  up and married. [Bending still nearer to her] Lesbia: tell me  your secret. Why —

LESBIA [sniffing disgustedly] Oh! Youve been smoking. [She rises  and goes to the chair on the hearth] Keep away, you wretch.

THE GENERAL. But for that pipe, I could not have faced you  without breaking down. It has soothed me and nerved me.

LESBIA [sitting down with The Times in her hand] Well, it has  nerved me to tell you why I’m going to be an old maid.

THE GENERAL [impulsively approaching her] Dont say that, Lesbia.

It’s not natural: it’s not right: it’s —

LESBIA. [fanning him off] No: no closer, Boxer, please. [He  retreats, discouraged]. It may not be natural; but it happens all  the time. Youll find plenty of women like me, if you care to look  for them: women with lots of character and good looks and money  and offers, who wont and dont get married. Cant you guess why?

THE GENERAL. I can understand when there is another.

LESBIA. Yes; but there isnt another. Besides, do you suppose I hink, at my time of life, that the difference between one decent  sort of man and another is worth bothering about?

THE GENERAL. The heart has its preferences, Lesbia. One image,  and one only, gets indelibly —

LESBIA. Yes. Excuse my interrupting you so often; but your  sentiments are so correct that I always know what you are going  to say before you finish. You see, Boxer, everybody is not like  you. You are a sentimental noodle: you dont see women as they  really are. You dont see me as I really am. Now I do see men as  they really are. I see you as you really are.

THE GENERAL [murmuring] No: dont say that, Lesbia.

LESBIA. I’m a regular old maid. I’m very particular about my  belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to  myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and  cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous  for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good  company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one  thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all  over my house and going to sleep in his chair after dinner, and  untidying everything. Ugh!

THE GENERAL. But love —

LESBIA. Ob, love! Have you no imagination? Do you think I have  never been in love with wonderful men? heroes! archangels! rinces! sages! even fascinating rascals! and had the strangest  adventures with them? Do you know what it is to look at a mere  real man after that? a man with his boots in every corner, and  the smell of his tobacco in every curtain?

THE GENERAL [somewhat dazed] Well but — excuse my mentioning  it — dont you want children?

LESBIA. I ought to have children. I should be a good mother to  children. I believe it would pay the country very well to pay me  very well to have children. But the country tells me that I cant  have a child in my house without a man in it too; so I tell the  country that it will have to do without my children. If I am to  be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife  at the same time.

THE GENERAL. My dear Lesbia: you know I dont wish to be  impertinent; but these are not the correct views for an English  lady to express.

LESBIA. That is why I dont express them, except to gentlemen who  wont take any other answer. The difficulty, you see, is that I eally am an English lady, and am particularly proud of being  one.

THE GENERAL. I’m sure of that, Lesbia: quite sure of it. I never  meant —

LESBIA [rising impatiently] Oh, my dear Boxer, do please try to  think of something else than whether you have offended me, and  whether you are doing the correct thing as an English gentleman.

You are faultless, and very dull. [She shakes her shoulders  intolerantly and walks across to the other side of the kitchen].

THE GENERAL [moodily] Ha! thats whats the matter with me. Not  clever. A poor silly soldier man.

LESBIA. The whole matter is very simple. As I say, I am an  English lady, by which I mean that I have been trained to do  without what I cant have on honorable terms, no matter what it  is.

THE GENERAL. I really dont understand you, Lesbia.

LESBIA [turning on him] Then why on earth do you want to marry a  woman you dont understand?

THE GENERAL. I dont know. I suppose I love you.

LESBIA. Well, Boxer, you can love me as much as you like,  provided you look happy about it and dont bore me. But you cant  marry me; and thats all about it.

THE GENERAL. It’s so frightfully difficult to argue the matter  fairly with you without wounding your delicacy by overstepping  the bounds of good taste. But surely there are calls of nature —

LESBIA. Dont be ridiculous, Boxer.

THE GENERAL. Well, how am I to express it? Hang it all, Lesbia,  dont you want a husband?

LESBIA. No. I want children; and I want to devote myself entirely  to my children, and not to their father. The law will not allow  me to do that; so I have made up my mind to have neither husband  nor children.

THE GENERAL. But, great Heavens, the natural appetites —

LESBIA. As I said before, an English lady is not the slave of her  appetites. That is what an English gentleman seems incapable of  understanding. [She sits down at the end of the table, near the  study door].

THE GENERAL [huffily] Oh well, if you refuse, you refuse. I shall  not ask you again. I’m sorry I returned to the subject. [He  retires to the hearth and plants himself there, wounded and  lofty].

LESBIA. Dont be cross, Boxer.

THE GENERAL. I’m not cross, only wounded, Lesbia. And when you  talk like that, I dont feel convinced: I only feel utterly at a  loss.

LESBIA. Well, you know our family rule. When at a loss consult  the greengrocer. [Opportunely Collins comes in through the  tower]. Here he is.

COLLINS. Sorry to be so much in and out, Miss. I thought Mrs  Bridgenorth was here. The table is ready now for the breakfast,  if she would like to see it.

LESBIA. If you are satisfied, Collins, I am sure she will be.

THE GENERAL. By the way, Collins: I thought theyd made you an  alderman.

COLLINS. So they have, General.

THE GENERAL. Then wheres your gown?

COLLINS. I dont wear it in private life, General.

THE GENERAL. Why? Are you ashamed of it?

COLLINS. No, General. To tell you the truth, I take a pride in  it. I cant help it.

THE GENERAL. Attention, Collins. Come here. [Collins comes to  him]. Do you see my uniform — all my medals?

COLLINS. Yes, General. They strike the eye, as it were.

THE GENERAL. They are meant to. Very well. Now you know, dont  you, that your services to the community as a greengrocer are as  important and as dignified as mine as a soldier?

COLLINS. I’m sure it’s very honorable of you to say so, General.

THE GENERAL [emphatically] You know also, dont you, that any man  who can see anything ridiculous, or unmanly, or unbecoming in  your work or in your civic robes is not a gentleman, but a  jumping, bounding, snorting cad?

COLLINS. Well, strictly between ourselves, that is my opinion,  General.

THE GENERAL. Then why not dignify my niece’s wedding by wearing  your robes?

COLLINS. A bargain’s a bargain, General. Mrs Bridgenorth sent for  the greengrocer, not for the alderman. It’s just as unpleasant to  get more than you bargain for as to get less.

THE GENERAL. I’m sure she will agree with me. I attach importance  to this as an affirmation of solidarity in the service of the  community. The Bishop’s apron, my uniform, your robes: the  Church, the Army, and the Municipality.

COLLINS [retiring] Very well, General. [He turns dubiously to  Lesbia on his way to the tower]. I wonder what my wife will say,  Miss?

THE GENERAL. What! Is your, wife ashamed of your robes?

COLLINS. No, sir, not ashamed of them. But she grudged the money  for them; and she will be afraid of my sleeves getting into the  gravy.

Mrs Bridgenorth, her placidity quite upset, comes in with a  letter; hurries past Collins; and comes between Lesbia and the  General.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Lesbia: Boxer: heres a pretty mess!

Collins goes out discreetly.

THE GENERAL. Whats the matter?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Reginald’s in London, and wants to come to the  wedding.

THE GENERAL [stupended] Well, dash my buttons!

LESBIA. Oh, all right, let him come.

THE GENERAL. Let him come! Why, the decree has not been made  absolute yet. Is he to walk in here to Edith’s wedding, reeking  from the Divorce Court?

MRS BRIDGENORTH [vexedly sitting down in the middle chair] It’s  too bad. No: I cant forgive him, Lesbia, really. A man of  Reginald’s age, with a young wife — the best of girls, and as  pretty as she can be — to go off with a common woman from the  streets! Ugh!

LESBIA. You must make allowances. What can you expect? Reginald  was always weak. He was brought up to be weak. The family  property was all mortgaged when he inherited it. He had to  struggle along in constant money difficulties, hustled by his  solicitors, morally bullied by the Barmecide, and physically  bullied by Boxer, while they two were fighting their own way and  getting well trained. You know very well he couldnt afford to  marry until the mortgages were cleared and he was over fifty. And  then of course he made a fool of himself marrying a child like  Leo.

THE GENERAL. But to hit her! Absolutely to hit her! He knocked  her down — knocked her flat down on a flowerbed in the presence of  his gardener. He! the head of the family! the man that stands  before the Barmecide and myself as Bridgenorth of Bridgenorth! to  beat his wife and go off with a low woman and be divorced for it  in the face of all England! in the face of my uniform and  Alfred’s apron! I can never forget what I felt: it was only the  King’s personal request — virtually a command — that stopped me  from resigning my commission. I’d cut Reginald dead if I met him  in the street.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Besides, Leo’s coming. Theyd meet. It’s  impossible, Lesbia.

LESBIA. Oh, I forgot that. That settles it. He mustnt come.

THE GENERAL. Of course he mustnt. You tell him that if he enters  this house, I’ll leave it; and so will every decent man and woman  in it.

COLLINS [returning for a moment to announce] Mr Reginald, maam.

[He withdraws when Reginald enters].

THE GENERAL [beside himself] Well, dash my buttons!!

Reginald is just the man Lesbia has described. He is hardened and  tough physically, and hasty and boyish in his manner and speech,  belonging as he does to the large class of English gentlemen of  property (solicitor-managed) who have never developed  intellectually since their schooldays. He is a muddled,  rebellious, hasty, untidy, forgetful, always late sort of man,  who very evidently needs the care of a capable woman, and has  never been lucky or attractive enough to get it. All the same, a  likeable man, from whom nobody apprehends any malice nor expects  any achievement. In everything but years he is younger than his  brother the General.

REGINALD [coming forward between the General and Mrs Bridgenorth]

Alice: it’s no use. I cant stay away from Edith’s wedding. Good  morning, Lesbia. How are you, Boxer? [He offers the General his  hand].

THE GENERAL [with crushing stiffness] I was just telling Alice,  sir, that if you entered this house, I should leave it.

REGINALD. Well, dont let me detain you, old chap. When you start  calling people Sir, youre not particularly good company.

LESBIA. Dont you begin to quarrel. That wont improve the  situation.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I think you might have waited until you got my  answer, Rejjy.

REGINALD. It’s so jolly easy to say No in a letter. Wont you let  me stay?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. How can I? Leo’s coming.

REGINALD. Well, she wont mind.

THE GENERAL. Wont mind!!!!

LESBIA. Dont talk nonsense, Rejjy; and be off with you.

THE GENERAL [with biting sarcasm] At school you lead a theory  that women liked being knocked down, I remember.

REGINALD. Youre a nice, chivalrous, brotherly sort of swine, you  are.

THE GENERAL. Mr Bridgenorth: are you going to leave this house or  am I?

REGINALD. You are, I hope. [He emphasizes his intention to stay  by sitting down].

THE GENERAL. Alice: will you allow me to be driven from Edith’s  wedding by this —

LESBIA [warningly] Boxer!

THE GENERAL. — by this Respondent? Is Edith to be given away by  him?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Certainly not. Reginald: you were not asked to  come; and I have asked you to go. You know how fond I am of Leo;  and you know what she would feel if she came in and found you  here.

COLLINS [again appearing in the tower] Mrs Reginald, maam.

LESBIA            {No, no. Ask her to — } [All three  MRS BRIDGENORTH   {Oh,  how unfortunate!  } clamoring  THE GENERAL       {Well, dash my buttons! } together].

It is too late: Leo is already in the kitchen. Collins goes out,  mutely abandoning a situation which he deplores but has been  unable to save.

Leo is very pretty, very youthful, very restless, and  consequently very charming to people who are touched by youth and  beauty, as well as to those who regard young women as more or  less appetizing lollipops, and dont regard old women at all.

Coldly studied, Leo’s restlessness is much less lovable than the  kittenishness which comes from a rich and fresh vitality. She is  a born fusser about herself and everybody else for whom she feels  responsible; and her vanity causes her to exaggerate her  responsibilities officiously. All her fussing is about little  things; but she often calls them by big names, such as Art, the  Divine Spark, the world, motherhood, good breeding, the Universe,  the Creator, or anything else that happens to strike her  imagination as sounding intellectually important. She has more  than common imagination and no more than common conception and  penetration; so that she is always on the high horse about words  and always in the perambulator about things. Considering herself  clever, thoughtful, and superior to ordinary weaknesses and  prejudices, she recklessly attaches herself to clever men on that  understanding, with the result that they are first delighted,  then exasperated, and finally bored. When marrying Reginald she  told her friends that there was a great deal in him which needed  bringing out. If she were a middle-aged man she would be the  terror of his club. Being a pretty young woman, she is forgiven  everything, proving that “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” s an error, the fact being that the secret of forgiving  everything is to understand nothing.

She runs in fussily, full of her own importance, and swoops on  Lesbia, who is much less disposed to spoil her than Mrs  Bridgenorth is. But Leo affects a special intimacy with Lesbia,  as of two thinkers among the Philistines.

LEO [to Lesbia, kissing her] Good morning. [Coming to Mrs  Bridgenorth] How do, Alice? [Passing on towards the hearth] Why  so gloomy, General? [Reginald rises between her and the General]

Oh, Rejjy! What will the King’s Proctor say?

REGINALD. Damn the King’s Proctor!

LEO. Naughty. Well, I suppose I must kiss you; but dont any of  you tell. [She kisses him. They can hardly believe their eyes].

Have you kept all your promises?

REGINALD. Oh, dont begin bothering about those —

LEO [insisting] Have? You? Kept? Your? Promises? Have you rubbed  your head with the lotion every night?

REGINALD. Yes, yes. Nearly every night.

LEO. Nearly! I know what that means. Have you worn your liver  pad?

THE GENERAL [solemnly] Leo: forgiveness is one of the most  beautiful traits in a woman’s nature; but there are things that  should not be forgiven to a man. When a man knocks a woman down  [Leo gives a little shriek of laughter and collapses on a chair  next Mrs Bridgenorth, on her left]

REGINALD [sardonically] The man that would raise his hand to a  woman, save in the way of a kindness, is unworthy the name of  Bridgenorth. [He sits down at the end of the table nearest the  hearth].

THE GENERAL [much huffed] Oh, well, if Leo does not mind, of  course I have no more to say. But I think you might, out of  consideration for the family, beat your wife in private and not  in the presence of the gardener.

REGINALD [out of patience] Whats the good of beating your wife  unless theres a witness to prove it afterwards? You dont suppose  a man beats his wife for the fun of it, do you? How could she  have got her divorce if I hadnt beaten her? Nice state of things,  that!

THE GENERAL [gasping] Do you mean to tell me that you did it in  cold blood? simply to get rid of your wife?

REGINALD. No, I didn’t: I did it to get her rid of me. What would  you do if you were fool enough to marry a woman thirty years  younger than yourself, and then found that she didnt care for  you, and was in love with a young fellow with a face like a  mushroom.

LEO. He has not. [Bursting into tears] And you are most unkind to  say I didnt care for you. Nobody could have been fonder of you.

REGINALD. A nice way of shewing your fondness! I had to go out  and dig that flower bed all over with my own hands to soften it.

I had to pick all the stones out of it. And then she complained  that I hadnt done it properly, because she got a worm down her  neck. I had to go to Brighton with a poor creature who took a  fancy to me on the way down, and got conscientious scruples about  committing perjury after dinner. I had to put her down in the  hotel book as Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth: Leo’s name! Do you know  what that feels like to a decent man? Do you know what a decent  man feels about his wife’s name? How would you like to go into a  hotel before all the waiters and people with — with that on your  arm? Not that it was the poor girl’s fault, of course; only she  started crying because I couldnt stand her touching me; and now  she keeps writing to me. And then I’m held up in the public court  for cruelty and adultery, and turned away from Edith’s wedding by  Alice, and lectured by you! a bachelor, and a precious green one  at that. What do you know about it?

THE GENERAL. Am I to understand that the whole case was one of  collusion?

REGINALD. Of course it was. Half the cases are collusions: what  are people to do? [The General, passing his hand dazedly over his  bewildered brow, sinks into the railed chair]. And what do you  take me for, that you should have the cheek to pretend to believe  all that rot about my knocking Leo about and leaving her for — for  a — a — Ugh! you should have seen her.

THE GENERAL. This is perfectly astonishing to me. Why did you do  it? Why did Leo allow it?

REGINALD. Youd better ask her.

LEO [still in tears] I’m sure I never thought it would be so  horrid for Rejjy. I offered honorably to do it myself, and let  him divorce me; but he wouldnt. And he said himself that it was  the only way to do it — that it was the law that he should do it  that way. I never saw that hateful creature until that day in  Court. If he had only shewn her to me before, I should never have  allowed it.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. You did all this for Leo’s sake, Rejjy?

REGINALD [with an unbearable sense of injury] I shouldnt mind a  bit if it were for Leo’s sake. But to have to do it to make room  for that mushroom-faced serpent — !

THE GENERAL [jumping up] What right had he to be made room for?

Are you in your senses? What right?

REGINALD. The right of being a young man, suitable to a young  woman. I had no right at my age to marry Leo: she knew no more  about life than a child.

LEO. I knew a great deal more about it than a great baby like  you. I’m sure I dont know how youll get on with no one to take  care of you: I often lie awake at night thinking about it. And  now youve made me thoroughly miserable.

REGINALD. Serve you right! [She weeps]. There: dont get into a  tantrum, Leo.

LESBIA. May one ask who is the mushroom-faced serpent?

LEO. He isnt.

REGINALD. Sinjon Hotchkiss, of course.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Sinjon Hotchkiss! Why, he’s coming to the  wedding!

REGINALD. What! In that case I’m off [he makes for the tower].

LEO          }                 { [seizing him] No you shant.

You promised to be nice to

(all four       him.

THE GENERAL  }    rushing      { No, dont go, old chap. Not

after him      from Edith’s wedding.

and capturing

him on the  MRS. BRIDGE-      threshold)

NORTH        }                 { Oh, do stay, Benjjy. I shall

really be hurt if you desert

us.

LESBIA       }                 { Better stay, Reginald. You must

meet him sooner or later.

REGINALD. A moment ago, when I wanted to stay, you were all  shoving me out of the house. Now that I want to go, you wont let  me.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. I shall send a note to Mr Hotchkiss not to come.

LEO [weeping again] Oh, Alice! [She comes back to her chair,  heartbroken].

REGINALD [out of patience] Oh well, let her have her way. Let her  have her mushroom. Let him come. Let them all come.

He crosses the kitchen to the oak chest and sits sulkily on it.

Mrs Bridgenorth shrugs her shoulders and sits at the table in  Reginald’s neighborhood listening in placid helplessness. Lesbia,  out of patience with Leo’s tears, goes into the garden and sits  there near the door, snuffing up the open air in her relief from  the domestic stuffness of Reginald’s affairs.

LEO. It’s so cruel of you to go on pretending that I dont care  for you, Rejjy.

REGINALD [bitterly] She explained to me that it was only that she  had exhausted my conversation.

THE GENERAL [coming paternally to Leo] My dear girl: all the  conversation in the world has been exhausted long ago. Heaven  knows I have exhausted the conversation of the British Army these  thirty years; but I dont leave it on that account.

LEO. It’s not that Ive exhausted it; but he will keep on  repeating it when I want to read or go to sleep. And Sinjon  amuses me. He’s so clever.

THE GENERAL [stung] Ha! The old complaint. You all want geniuses  to marry. This demand for clever men is ridiculous. Somebody must  marry the plain, honest, stupid fellows. Have you thought of  that?

LEO. But there are such lots of stupid women to marry. Why do  they want to marry us? Besides, Rejjy knows that I’m quite fond  of him. I like him because he wants me; and I like Sinjon because  I want him. I feel that I have a duty to Rejjy.

THE GENERAL. Precisely: you have.

LEO. And, of course, Sinjon has the same duty to me.

THE GENERAL. Tut, tut!

LEO. Oh, how silly the law is! Why cant I marry them both?

THE GENERAL [shocked] Leo!

LEO. Well, I love them both. I should like to marry a lot of men.

I should like to have Rejjy for every day, and Sinjon for  concerts and theatres and going out in the evenings, and some  great austere saint for about once a year at the end of the  season, and some perfectly blithering idiot of a boy to be quite  wicked with. I so seldom feel wicked; and, when I do, it’s such a  pity to waste it merely because it’s too silly to confess to a  real grown-up man.

REGINALD. This is the kind of thing, you know [Helplessly] Well,  there it is!

THE GENERAL [decisively] Alice: this is a job for the Barmecide.

He’s a Bishop: it’s his duty to talk to Leo. I can stand a good  deal; but when it comes to flat polygamy and polyandry, we ought  to do something.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [going to the study door] Do come here a moment,  Alfred. We’re in a difficulty.

THE BISHOP [within] Ask Collins, I’m busy.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins wont do. It’s something very serious. Do  come just a moment, dear. [When she hears him coming she takes a  chair at the nearest end of the table].

The Bishop comes out of his study. He is still a slim active man,  spare of flesh, and younger by temperament than his brothers. He  has a delicate skin, fine hands, a salient nose with chin to  match, a short beard which accentuates his sharp chin by  bristling forward, clever humorous eyes, not without a glint of  mischief in them, ready bright speech, and the ways of a  successful man who is always interested in himself and generally  rather well pleased with himself. When Lesbia hears his voice she  turns her chair towards him, and presently rises and stands in  the doorway listening to the conversation.

THE BISHOP [going to Leo] Good morning, my dear. Hullo! Youve  brought Reginald with you. Thats very nice of you. Have you  reconciled them, Boxer?

THE GENERAL. Reconciled them! Why, man, the whole divorce was a  put-up job. She wants to marry some fellow named Hotchkiss.

REGINALD. A fellow with a face like —

LEO. You shant, Rejjy. He has a very fine face.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. And now she says she wants to marry both of  them, and a lot of other people as well.

LEO. I didnt say I wanted to marry them: I only said I should  like to marry them.

THE BISHOP. Quite a nice distinction, Leo.

LEO. Just occasionally, you know.

THE BISHOP [sitting down cosily beside her] Quite so. Sometimes a  poet, sometimes a Bishop, sometimes a fairy prince, sometimes  somebody quite indescribable, and sometimes nobody at all.

LEO. Yes: thats just it. How did you know?

THE BISHOP. Oh, I should say most imaginative and cultivated  young women feel like that. I wouldnt give a rap for one who  didnt. Shakespear pointed out long ago that a woman wanted a  Sunday husband as well as a weekday one. But, as usual, he didnt  follow up the idea.

THE GENERAL [aghast] Am I to understand —

THE BISHOP [cutting him short] Now, Boxer, am I the Bishop or are  you?

THE GENERAL [sulkily] You.

THE BISHOP. Then dont ask me are you to understand. “Yours not to  reason why: yours but to do and die” —

THE GENERAL. Oh, very well: go on. I’m not clever. Only a silly  soldier man. Ha! Go on. [He throws himself into the railed chair,  as one prepared for the worst].

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Alfred: dont tease Boxer.

THE BISHOP. If we are going to discuss ethical questions we must  begin by giving the devil fair play. Boxer never does. England  never does. We always assume that the devil is guilty; and we  wont allow him to prove his innocence, because it would be  against public morals if he succeeded. We used to do the same  with prisoners accused of high treason. And the consequence is  that we overreach ourselves; and the devil gets the better of us  after all. Perhaps thats what most of us intend him to do.

THE GENERAL. Alfred: we asked you here to preach to Leo. You are  preaching at me instead. I am not conscious of having said or  done anything that calls for that unsolicited attention.

THE BISHOP. But poor little Leo has only told the simple truth;  whilst you, Boxer, are striking moral attitudes.

THE GENERAL. I suppose thats an epigram. I dont understand  epigrams. I’m only a silly soldier man. Ha! But I can put a plain  question. Is Leo to be encouraged to be a polygamist?

THE BISHOP. Remember the British Empire, Boxer. Youre a British  General, you know.

THE GENERAL. What has that to do with polygamy?

THE BISHOP. Well, the great majority of our fellow-subjects are  polygamists. I cant as a British Bishop insult them by speaking  disrespectfully of polygamy. It’s a very interesting question.

Many very interesting men have been polygamists: Solomon,  Mahomet, and our friend the Duke of — of — hm! I never can remember  his name.

THE GENERAL. It would become you better, Alfred, to send that  silly girl back to her husband and her duty than to talk clever  and mock at your religion. “What God hath joined together let no  man put asunder.” Remember that.

THE BISHOP. Dont be afraid, Boxer. What God hath joined together  no man ever shall put asunder: God will take care of that. [To  Leo] By the way, who was it that joined you and Reginald, my  dear?

LEO. It was that awful little curate that afterwards drank, and  travelled first class with a third-class ticket, and then tried  to go on the stage. But they wouldnt have him. He called himself  Egerton Fotheringay.

THE BISHOP. Well, whom Egerton Fotheringay hath joined, let Sir  Gorell Barnes put asunder by all means.

THE GENERAL. I may be a silly soldier man; but I call this  blasphemy.

THE BISHOP [gravely] Better for me to take the name of Mr Egerton  Fotheringay in earnest than for you to take a higher name in  vain.

LESBIA. Cant you three brothers ever meet without quarrelling?

THE BISHOP [mildly] This is not quarrelling, Lesbia: it’s only  English family life. Good morning.

LEO. You know, Bishop, it’s very dear of you to take my part; but  I’m not sure that I’m not a little shocked.

THE BISHOP. Then I think Ive been a little more successful than  Boxer in getting you into a proper frame of mind.

THE GENERAL [snorting] Ha!

LEO. Not a bit; for now I’m going to shock you worse than ever.

I think Solomon was an old beast.

THE BISHOP. Precisely what you ought to think of him, my dear.

Dont apologize.

THE GENERAL [more shocked] Well, but hang it! Solomon was in the  Bible. And, after all, Solomon was Solomon.

LEO. And I stick to it: I still want to have a lot of interesting  men to know quite intimately — to say everything I think of to  them, and have them say everything they think of to me.

THE BISHOP. So you shall, my dear, if you are lucky. But you know  you neednt marry them all. Think of all the buttons you would  have to sew on. Besides, nothing is more dreadful than a husband  who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to  know what you think.

LEO [struck by this] Well, thats very true of Rejjy: In fact,  thats why I had to divorce him.

THE BISHOP [condoling] Yes: he repeats himself dreadfully, doesnt  he?

REGINALD. Look here, Alfred. If I have my faults, let her find  them out for herself without your help.

THE BISHOP. She has found them all out already, Reginald.

LEO [a little huffily] After all, there are worse men than  Reginald. I daresay he’s not so clever as you; but still he’s not  such a fool as you seem to think him!

THE BISHOP. Quite right, dear: stand up for your husband. I hope  you will always stand up for all your husbands. [He rises and  goes to the hearth, where he stands complacently with his back to  the fireplace, beaming at them all as at a roomful of children].

LEO. Please dont talk as if I wanted to marry a whole regiment.

For me there can never be more than two. I shall never love  anybody but Rejjy and Sinjon.

REGINALD. A man with a face like a —

LEO. I wont have it, Rejjy. It’s disgusting.

THE BISHOP. You see, my dear, youll exhaust Sinjon’s conversation  too in a week or so. A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen  records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit  at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor. In the  end you have to be content with his common humanity; and when you  come down to that, you find out about men what a great English  poet of my acquaintance used to say about women: that they all  taste alike. Marry whom you please: at the end of a month he’ll  be Reginald over again. It wasnt worth changing: indeed it wasnt.

LEO. Then it’s a mistake to get married.

THE BISHOP. It is, my dear; but it’s a much bigger mistake not to  get married.

THE GENERAL [rising] Ha! You hear that, Lesbia? [He joins her at  the garden door].

LESBIA. Thats only an epigram, Boxer.

THE GENERAL. Sound sense, Lesbia. When a man talks rot, thats  epigram: when he talks sense, then I agree with him.

REGINALD [coming off the oak chest and looking at his watch] It’s  getting late. Wheres Edith? Hasnt she got into her veil and  orange blossoms yet?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do go and hurry her, Lesbia.

LESBIA [going out through the tower] Come with me, Leo.

LEO [following Lesbia out] Yes, certainly.

The Bishop goes over to his wife and sits down, taking her hand  and kissing it by way of beginning a conversation with her.

THE BISHOP. Alice: Ive had another letter from the mysterious  lady who cant spell. I like that woman’s letters. Theres an  intensity of passion in them that fascinates me.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do you mean Incognita Appassionata?

THE BISHOP. Yes.

THE GENERAL [turning abruptly; he has been looking out into the  garden] Do you mean to say that women write love-letters to you?

THE BISHOP. Of course.

THE GENERAL. They never do to me.

THE BISHOP. The army doesnt attract women: the Church does.

REGINALD. Do you consider it right to let them? They may be  married women, you know.

THE BISHOP. They always are. This one is. [To Mrs Bridgenorth]

Dont you think her letters are quite the best love-letters I get?

[To the two men] Poor Alice has to read my love-letters aloud to  me at breakfast, when theyre worth it.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. There really is something fascinating about  Incognita. She never gives her address. Thats a good sign.

THE GENERAL. Mf! No assignations, you mean?

THE Bishop. Oh yes: she began the correspondence by making a very  curious but very natural assignation. She wants me to meet her in  heaven. I hope I shall.

THE GENERAL. Well, I must say I hope not, Alfred. I hope not.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. She says she is happily married, and that love  is a necessary of life to her, but that she must have, high above  all her lovers —

THE BISHOP. She has several apparently —

MRS BRIDGENORTH. — some great man who will never know her, never  touch her, as she is on earth, but whom she can meet in Heaven  when she has risen above all the everyday vulgarities of earthly  love.

THE BISHOP [rising] Excellent. Very good for her; and no trouble  to me. Everybody ought to have one of these idealizations, like  Dante’s Beatrice. [He clasps his hands behind him, and strolls to  the hearth and back, singing].

Lesbia appears in the tower, rather perturbed.

LESBIA. Alice: will you come upstairs? Edith is not dressed.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [rising] Not dressed! Does she know what hour it  is?

LESBIA. She has locked herself into her room, reading.

The Bishop’s song ceases; he stops dead in his stroll.

THE GENERAL. Reading!

THE BISHOP. What is she reading?

LESBIA. Some pamphlet that came by the eleven o’clock post. She  wont come out. She wont open the door. And she says she doesnt  know whether she’s going to be married or not till she’s finished  the pamphlet. Did you ever hear such a thing? Do come and speak  to her.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Alfred: you had better go.

THE BISHOP. Try Collins.

LESBIA. Weve tried Collins already. He got all that Ive told you  out of her through the keyhole. Come, Alice. [She vanishes. Mrs  Bridgenorth hurries after her].

THE BISHOP. This means a delay. I shall go back to my work [he  makes for the study door].

REGINALD. What are you working at now?

THE BISHOP [stopping] A chapter in my history of marriage. I’m  just at the Roman business, you know.

THE GENERAL [coming from the garden door to the chair Mrs  Bridgenorth has just left, and sitting down] Not more Ritualism,  I hope, Alfred?

THE BISHOP. Oh no. I mean ancient Rome. [He seats himself on the  edge of the table]. Ive just come to the period when the  propertied classes refused to get married and went in for  marriage settlements instead. A few of the oldest families stuck  to the marriage tradition so as to keep up the supply of vestal  virgins, who had to be legitimate; but nobody else dreamt of  getting married. It’s all very interesting, because we’re coming  to that here in England; except that as we dont require any  vestal virgins, nobody will get married at all, except the poor,  perhaps.

THE GENERAL. You take it devilishly coolly. Reginald: do you  think the Barmecide’s quite sane?

REGINALD. No worse than ever he was.

THE GENERAL [to the Bishop] Do you mean to say you believe such a  thing will ever happen in England as that respectable people will  give up being married?

THE BISHOP. In England especially they will. In other countries  the introduction of reasonable divorce laws will save the  situation; but in England we always let an institution strain  itself until it breaks. Ive told our last four Prime Ministers  that if they didnt make our marriage laws reasonable there would  be a strike against marriage, and that it would begin among the  propertied classes, where no Government would dare to interfere  with it.

REGINALD. What did they say to that?

THE BISHOP. The usual thing. Quite agreed with me, but were sure  that they were the only sensible men in the world, and that the  least hint of marriage reform would lose them the next election.

And then lost it all the same: on cordite, on drink, on Chinese  labor in South Africa, on all sorts of trumpery.

REGINALD [lurching across the kitchen towards the hearth with his  hands in his pockets] It’s no use: they wont listen to our sort.

[Turning on them] Of course they have to make you a Bishop and  Boxer a General, because, after all, their blessed rabble of  snobs and cads and half-starved shopkeepers cant do government  work; and the bounders and week-enders are too lazy and vulgar.

Theyd simply rot without us; but what do they ever do for us? hat attention do they ever pay to what we say and what we want?

I take it that we Bridgenorths are a pretty typical English  family of the sort that has always set things straight and stuck  up for the right to think and believe according to our  conscience. But nowadays we are expected to dress and eat as the  week-end bounders do, and to think and believe as the converted  cannibals of Central Africa do, and to lie down and let every  snob and every cad and every halfpenny journalist walk over us.

Why, theres not a newspaper in England today that represents what  I call solid Bridgenorth opinion and tradition. Half of them read  as if they were published at the nearest mother’s meeting, and  the other half at the nearest motor garage. Do you call these  chaps gentlemen? Do you call them Englishmen? I dont.[He throws  himself disgustedly into the nearest chair].

THE GENERAL [excited by Reginald’s eloquence] Do you see my  uniform? What did Collins say? It strikes the eye. It was meant  to. I put it on expressly to give the modern army bounder a smack  in the eye. Somebody has to set a right example by beginning.

Well, let it be a Bridgenorth. I believe in family blood and  tradition, by George.

THE BISHOP [musing] I wonder who will begin the stand against  marriage. It must come some day. I was married myself before I’d  thought about it; and even if I had thought about it I was too  much in love with Alice to let anything stand in the way. But,  you know, Ive seen one of our daughters after another — Ethel,  Jane, Fanny, and Christina and Florence — go out at that door in  their veils and orange blossoms; and Ive always wondered whether  theyd have gone quietly if theyd known what they were doing. Ive  a horrible misgiving about that pamphlet. All progress means war  with Society. Heaven forbid that Edith should be one of the  combatants!

St John Hotchkiss comes into the tower ushered by Collins. He is  a very smart young gentleman of twenty-nine or thereabouts,  correct in dress to the last thread of his collar, but too much  preoccupied with his ideas to be embarrassed by any concern as to  his appearance. He talks about himself with energetic gaiety. He  talks to other people with a sweet forbearance (implying a kindly  consideration for their stupidity) which infuriates those whom he  does not succeed in amusing. They either lose their tempers with  him or try in vain to snub him.

COLLINS [announcing] Mr Hotchkiss. [He withdraws].

HOTCHKISS [clapping Reginald gaily on the shoulder as he passes  him] Tootle loo, Rejjy.

REGINALD [curtly, without rising or turning his head] Morning.

HOTCHKISS. Good morning, Bishop.

THE BISHOP [coming off the table]. What on earth are you doing  here, Sinjon? You belong to the bridegroom’s party: youve no  business here until after the ceremony.

HOTCHKISS. Yes, I know: thats just it. May I have a word with you  in private? Rejjy or any of the family wont matter; but — [he  glances at the General, who has risen rather stiffly, as he  strongly disapproves of the part played by Hotchkiss in  Reginald’s domestic affairs].

THE BISHOP. All right, Sinjon. This is our brother, General  Bridgenorth. [He goes to the hearth and posts himself there, with  his hands clasped behind him].

HOTCHKISS. Oh, good! [He turns to the General, and takes out a  card-case]. As you are in the service, allow me to introduce  myself. Read my card, please. [He presents his card to the  astonished General].

THE GENERAL [reading] “Mr St John Hotchkiss, the Celebrated  Coward, late Lieutenant in the 165th Fusiliers.”

REGINALD [with a chuckle] He was sent back from South Africa  because he funked an order to attack, and spoiled his commanding  officer’s plan.

THE GENERAL [very gravely] I remember the case now. I had  forgotten the name. I’ll not refuse your acquaintance, Mr  Hotchkiss; partly because youre my brother’s guest, and partly  because Ive seen too much active service not to know that every  man’s nerve plays him false at one time or another, and that some  very honorable men should never go into action at all, because  theyre not built that way. But if I were you I should not use  that visiting card. No doubt it’s an honorable trait in your  character that you dont wish any man to give you his hand in  ignorance of your disgrace; but you had better allow us to  forget. We wish to forget. It isnt your disgrace alone: it’s a  disgrace to the army and to all of us. Pardon my plain speaking.

HOTCHKISS [sunnily] My dear General, I dont know what fear means  in the military sense of the word. Ive fought seven duels with  the sabre in Italy and Austria, and one with pistols in France,  without turning a hair. There was no other way in which I could  vindicate my motives in refusing to make that attack at  Smutsfontein. I dont pretend to be a brave man. I’m afraid of  wasps. I’m afraid of cats. In spite of the voice of reason, I’m  afraid of ghosts; and twice Ive fled across Europe from false  alarms of cholera. But afraid to fight I am not. [He turns gaily  to Reginald and slaps him on the shoulder]. Eh, Rejjy? [Reginald  grunts].

THE GENERAL. Then why did you not do your duty at Smutsfontein?

HOTCHKISS. I did my duty — my higher duty. If I had made that  attack, my commanding officer’s plan would have been successful,  and he would have been promoted. Now I happen to think that the  British Army should be commanded by gentlemen, and by gentlemen  alone. This man was not a gentleman. I sacrificed my military  career — I faced disgrace and social ostracism rather than give  that man his chance.

THE GENERAL [generously indignant] Your commanding officer, sir,  was my friend Major Billiter.

HOTCHKISS. Precisely. What a name!

THE GENERAL. And pray, sir, on what ground do you dare allege  that Major Billiter is not a gentleman?

HOTCHKISS. By an infallible sign: one of those trifles that stamp  a man. He eats rice pudding with a spoon.

THE GENERAL [very angry] Confound you, I eat rice pudding with  a spoon. Now!

HOTCHKISS. Oh, so do I, frequently. But there are ways of doing  these things. Billiter’s way was unmistakable.

THE GENERAL. Well, I’ll tell you something now. When I thought  you were only a coward, I pitied you, and would have done what I ould to help you back to your place in Society —

HOTCHKISS [interrupting him] Thank you: I havnt lost it. My  motives have been fully appreciated. I was made an honorary  member of two of the smartest clubs in London when the truth came  out.

THE GENERAL. Well, sir, those clubs consist of snobs; and you are  a jumping, bounding, prancing, snorting snob yourself.

THE BISHOP [amused, but hospitably remonstrant] My dear Boxer!

HOTCHKISS [delighted] How kind of you to say so, General! Youre  quite right: I am a snob. Why not? The whole strength of England  lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people  are snobs. They insult poverty. They despise vulgarity. They love  nobility. They admire exclusiveness. They will not obey a man  risen from the ranks. They never trust one of their own class. I gree with them. I share their instincts. In my undergraduate  days I was a Republican-a Socialist. I tried hard to feel toward  a common man as I do towards a duke. I couldnt. Neither can you.

Well, why should we be ashamed of this aspiration towards what is  above us? Why dont I say that an honest man’s the noblest work of  God? Because I dont think so. If he’s not a gentleman, I dont  care whether he’s honest or not: I shouldnt let his son marry my  daughter. And thats the test, mind. Thats the test. You feel as I o. You are a snob in fact: I am a snob, not only in fact, but on  principle. I shall go down in history, not as the first snob, but  as the first avowed champion of English snobbery, and its first  martyr in the army. The navy boasts two such martyrs in Captains  Kirby and Wade, who were shot for refusing to fight under Admiral  Benbow, a promoted cabin boy. I have always envied them their  glory.

THE GENERAL. As a British General, Sir, I have to inform you that  if any officer under my command violated the sacred equality of  our profession by putting a single jot of his duty or his risk on  the shoulders of the humblest drummer boy, I’d shoot him with my  own hand.

HOTCHKISS. That sentiment is not your equality, General, but your  superiority. Ask the Bishop. [He seats himself on the edge of the  table].

THE BISHOP. I cant support you, Sinjon. My profession also  compels me to turn my back on snobbery. You see, I have to do  such a terribly democratic thing to every child that is brought  to me. Without distinction of class I have to confer on it a rank  so high and awful that all the grades in Debrett and Burke seem  like the medals they give children in Infant Schools in  comparison. I’m not allowed to make any class distinction. They  are all soldiers and servants, not officers and masters.

HOTCHKISS. Ah, youre quoting the Baptism service. Thats not a bit  real, you know. If I may say so, you would both feel so much more  at peace with yourselves if you would acknowledge and confess  your real convictions. You know you dont really think a Bishop  the equal of a curate, or a lieutenant in a line regiment the  equal of a general.

THE BISHOP. Of course I do. I was a curate myself.

THE GENERAL. And I was a lieutenant in a line regiment.

REGINALD. And I was nothing. But we’re all our own and one  another’s equals, arnt we? So perhaps when youve quite done  talking about yourselves, we shall get to whatever business  Sinjon came about.

HOTCHKISS [coming off the table hastily] my dear fellow. I beg a  thousand pardons. Oh! true, It’s about the wedding?

THE GENERAL. What about the wedding?

HOTCHKISS. Well, we cant get our man up to the scratch. Cecil has  locked himself in his room and wont see or speak to any one. I ent up to his room and banged at the door. I told him I should  look through the keyhole if he didnt answer. I looked through the  keyhole. He was sitting on his bed, reading a book. [Reginald  rises in consternation. The General recoils]. I told him not to  be an ass, and so forth. He said he was not going to budge until  he had finished the book. I asked him did he know what time it  was, and whether he happened to recollect that he had a rather  important appointment to marry Edith. He said the sooner I topped interrupting him, the sooner he’d be ready. Then he  stuffed his fingers in his ears; turned over on his elbows; and  buried himself in his beastly book. I couldnt get another word  out of him; so I thought I’d better come here and warn you.

REGINALD. This looks to me like theyve arranged it between them.

THE BISHOP. No. Edith has no sense of humor. And Ive never seen a  man in a jocular mood on his wedding morning.

Collins appears in the tower, ushering in the bridegroom, a young  gentleman with good looks of the serious kind, somewhat careworn  by an exacting conscience, and just now distracted by insoluble  problems of conduct.

COLLINS [announcing] Mr Cecil Sykes. [He retires].

HOTCHKISS. Look here, Cecil: this is all wrong. Youve no business  here until after the wedding. Hang it, man! youre the bridegroom.

SYKES [coming to the Bishop, and addressing him with dogged  desperation] Ive come here to say this. When I proposed to Edith  I was in utter ignorance of what I was letting myself in for  legally. Having given my word, I will stand to it. You have me at  your mercy: marry me if you insist. But take notice that I rotest. [He sits down distractedly in the railed chair].

THE GENERAL   {both    } What the devil do you mean by

{highly  } This? What the —

REGINALD      {incensed} Confound your impertinence,

what do you —

HOTCHKISS   {  }  Easy, Rejjy. Easy, old man. Steady, steady.

{  }  [Reginald subsides into his chair. Hotchkiss

{  }  sits on his right, appeasing him.]

THE BISHOP  {  }  No, please, Rej. Control yourself, Boxer, I

beg you.

THE GENERAL. I tell you I cant control myself. Ive been  controlling myself for the last half-hour until I feel like  bursting. [He sits down furiously at the end of the table next  the study].

SYKES [pointing to the simmering Reginald and the boiling  General] Thats just it, Bishop. Edith is her uncle’s niece. She  cant control herself any more than they can. And she’s a Bishop’s  daughter. That means that she’s engaged in social work of all  sorts: organizing shop assistants and sweated work girls and all  that. When her blood boils about it (and it boils at least once a  week) she doesnt care what she says.

REGINALD. Well: you knew that when you proposed to her.

SYKES. Yes; but I didnt know that when we were married I should  be legally responsible if she libelled anybody, though all her  property is protected against me as if I were the lowest thief  and cadger. This morning somebody sent me Belfort Bax’s essays on  Men’s Wrongs; and they have been a perfect eye-opener to me.

Bishop: I’m not thinking of myself: I would face anything for  Edith. But my mother and sisters are wholly dependent on my  property. I’d rather have to cut off an inch from my right arm  than a hundred a year from my mother’s income. I owe everything  to her care of me. Edith, in dressing-jacket and petticoat, comes  in through the tower, swiftly and determinedly, pamphlet in hand,  principles up in arms, more of a bishop than her father, yet as  much a gentlewoman as her mother. She is the typical spoilt child  of a clerical household: almost as terrible a product as the  typical spoilt child of a Bohemian household: that is, all her  childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious  impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become  an ethical snob of the first water. Her father’s sense of humor  and her mother’s placid balance have done something to save her  humanity; but her impetuous temper and energetic will,  unrestrained by any touch of humor or scepticism, carry  everything before them. Imperious and dogmatic, she takes command  of the party at once.

EDITH [standing behind Cecil’s chair] Cecil: I heard your voice.

I must speak to you very particularly. Papa: go away. Go away  everybody.

THE BISHOP [crossing to the study door] I think there can be no  doubt that Edith wishes us to retire. Come. [He stands in the  doorway, waiting for them to follow].

SYKES. Thats it, you see. It’s just this outspokenness that makes  my position hard, much as I admire her for it.

EDITH. Do you want me to flatter and be untruthful?

SYKES. No, not exactly that.

EDITH. Does anybody want me to flatter and be untruthful?

HOTCHKISS. Well, since you ask me, I do. Surely it’s the very  first qualification for tolerable social intercourse.

THE GENERAL [markedly] I hope you will always tell ME the truth,  my darling, at all events.

EDITH [complacently coming to the fireplace] You can depend on me  for that, Uncle Boxer.

HOTCHKISS. Are you sure you have any adequate idea of what the  truth about a military man really is?

REGINALD [aggressively] Whats the truth about you, I wonder?

HOTCHKISS. Oh, quite unfit for publication in its entirety. If  Miss Bridgenorth begins telling it, I shall have to leave the  room.

REGINALD. I’m not at all surprised to hear it. [Rising] But whats  it got to do with our business here to-day? Is it you thats going  to be married or is it Edith?

HOTCHKISS. I’m so sorry, I get so interested in myself that I hrust myself into the front of every discussion in the most  insufferable way. [Reginald, with an exclamation of disgust,  crosses the kitchen towards the study door]. But, my dear  Rejjy, are you quite sure that Miss Bridgenorth is going to be  married? Are you, Miss Bridgenorth?

Before Edith has time to answer her mother returns with Leo and  Lesbia.

LEO. Yes, here she is, of course. I told you I heard her dash  downstairs. [She comes to the end of the table next the  fireplace].

MRS BRIDGENORTH [transfixed in the middle of the kitchen] And  Cecil!!

LESBIA. And Sinjon!

THE BISHOP. Edith wishes to speak to Cecil. [Mrs Bridgenorth  comes to him. Lesbia goes into the garden, as before]. Let us go  into my study.

LEO. But she must come and dress. Look at the hour!

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Come, Leo dear. [Leo follows her reluctantly.

They are about to go into the study with the Bishop].

HOTCHKISS. Do you know, Miss Bridgenorth, I should most awfully  like to hear what you have to say to poor Cecil.

REGINALD [scandalized] Well!

EDITH. Who is poor Cecil, pray?

HOTCHKISS. One always calls a man that on his wedding morning: I ont know why. I’m his best man, you know. Dont you think it  gives me a certain right to be present in Cecil’s interest?

THE GENERAL [gravely] There is such a thing as delicacy, Mr  Hotchkiss.

HOTCHKISS. There is such a thing as curiosity, General.

THE GENERAL [furious] Delicacy is thrown away here, Alfred.

Edith: you had better take Sykes into the study.

The group at the study door breaks up. The General flings himself  into the last chair on the long side of the table, near the  garden door. Leo sits at the end, next him, and Mrs Bridgenorth  next Leo. Reginald returns to the oak chest, to be near Leo; and  the Bishop goes to his wife and stands by her.

HOTCHKISS [to Edith] Of course I’ll go if you wish me to. But  Cecil’s objection to go through with it was so entirely on public  grounds —

EDITH [with quick suspicion] His objection?

SYKES. Sinjon: you have no right to say that. I expressly said  that I’m ready to go through with it.

EDITH. Cecil: do you mean to say that you have been raising  difficulties about our marriage?

SYKES. I raise no difficulty. But I do beg you to be careful what  you say about people. You must remember, my dear, that when we  are married I shall be responsible for everything you say. Only  last week you said on a public platform that Slattox and Chinnery  were scoundrels. They could have got a thousand pounds damages  apiece from me for that if we’d been married at the time.

EDITH [austerely] I never said anything of the sort. I never  stoop to mere vituperation: what would my girls say of me if I id? I chose my words most carefully. I said they were tyrants,  liars, and thieves; and so they are. Slattox is even worse.

HOTCHKISS. I’m afraid that would be at least five thousand  pounds.

SYKES. If it were only myself, I shouldnt care. But my mother and  sisters! Ive no right to sacrifice them.

EDITH. You neednt be alarmed. I’m not going to be married.

ALL THE REST. Not!

SYKES [in consternation] Edith! Are you throwing me over?

EDITH. How can I? you have been beforehand with me.

SYKES. On my honor, no. All I said was that I didnt know the law  when I asked you to be my wife.

EDITH. And you wouldnt have asked me if you had. Is that it?

SYKES. No. I should have asked you for my sake be a little more  careful — not to ruin me uselessly.

EDITH. You think the truth useless?

HOTCHKISS. Much worse than useless, I assure you. Frequently most  mischievous.

EDITH. Sinjon: hold your tongue. You are a chatterbox and a fool!

MRS BRIDGENORTH }  [shocked] { Edith!

THE BISHOP      }            { My love!

HOTCHKISS [mildly] I shall not take an action, Cecil.

EDITH [to Hotchkiss] Sorry; but you are old enough to know  better. [To the others] And now since there is to be no wedding,  we had better get back to our work. Mamma: will you tell Collins  to cut up the wedding cake into thirty-three pieces for the club  girls? My not being married is no reason why they should be  disappointed. [She turns to go].

HOTCHKISS [gallantly] If youll allow me to take Cecil’s place,  Miss Bridgenorth —

LEO. Sinjon!

HOTCHKISS. Oh, I forgot. I beg your pardon. [To Edith,  apologetically] A prior engagement.

EDITH. What! You and Leo! I thought so. Well, hadnt you two  better get married at once? I dont approve of long engagements.

The breakfast’s ready: the cake’s ready: everything’s ready. I’ll  lend Leo my veil and things.

THE BISHOP. I’m afraid they must wait until the decree is made  absolute, my dear. And the license is not transferable.

EDITH. Oh well, it cant be helped. Is there anything else before  I go off to the Club?

SYKES. You dont seem much disappointed, Edith. I cant help saying  that much.

EDITH. And you cant help looking enormously relieved, Cecil. We  shant be any worse friends, shall we?

SYKES [distractedly] Of course not. Still — I’m perfectly ready — t least — if it were not for my mother — Oh, I dont know what to  do. Ive been so fond of you; and when the worry of the wedding  was over I should have been so fond of you again —

EDITH [petting him] Come, come! dont make a scene, dear. Youre  quite right. I dont think a woman doing public work ought to get  married unless her husband feels about it as she does. I dont  blame you at all for throwing me over.

REGINALD [bouncing off the chest, and passing behind the General  to the other end of the table] No: dash it! I’m not going to  stand this. Why is the man always to be put in the wrong? Be  honest, Edith. Why werent you dressed? Were you going to throw  him over? If you were, take your fair share of the blame; and  dont put it all on him.

HOTCHKISS [sweetly] Would it not be better —

REGINALD [violently] Now look here, Hotchkiss. Who asked you to  cut in? Is your name Edith? Am I your uncle?

HOTCHKISS. I wish you were: I should like to have an uncle,  Reginald.

REGINALD. Yah! Sykes: are you ready to marry Edith or are you  not?

SYKES. Ive already said that I’m quite ready. A promise is a  promise.

REGINALD. We dont want to know whether a promise is a promise or  not. Cant you answer yes or no without spoiling it and setting  Hotchkiss here grinning like a Cheshire cat? If she puts on her  veil and goes to Church, will you marry her?

SYKES. Certainly. Yes.

REGINALD. Thats all right. Now, Edie, put on your veil and off  with you to the church. The bridegroom’s waiting. [He sits down  at the table].

EDITH. Is it understood that Slattox and Chinnery are liars and  thieves, and that I hope by next Wednesday to have in my hands  conclusive evidence that Slattox is something much worse?

SYKES. I made no conditions as to that when I proposed to you;  and now I cant go back. I hope Providence will spare my poor  mother. I say again I’m ready to marry you.

EDITH. Then I think you shew great weakness of character; and  instead of taking advantage of it I shall set you a better  example. I want to know is this true. [She produces a pamphlet  and takes it to the Bishop; then sits down between Hotchkiss and  her mother].

THE BISHOP [reading the title] Do YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO

DO? BY A WOMAN WHO HAS DONE IT. May I ask, my dear, what she did?

EDITH. She got married. When she had three children — the eldest  only four years old — her husband committed a murder, and then  attempted to commit suicide, but only succeeded in disfiguring  himself. Instead of hanging him, they sent him to penal servitude  for life, for the sake, they said, of his wife and infant  children. And she could not get a divorce from that horrible  murderer. They would not even keep him imprisoned for life. For  twenty years she had to live singly, bringing up her children by  her own work, and knowing that just when they were grown up and  beginning life, this dreadful creature would be let out to  disgrace them all, and prevent the two girls getting decently  married, and drive the son out of the country perhaps. Is that  really the law? Am I to understand that if Cecil commits a mur-  der, or forges, or steals, or becomes an atheist, I cant get  divorced from him?

THE BISHOP. Yes, my dear. That is so. You must take him for  better for worse.

EDITH. Then I most certainly refuse to enter into any such wicked  contract. What sort of servants? what sort of friends? what sort  of Prime Ministers should we have if we took them for better for  worse for all their lives? We should simply encourage them in  every sort of wickedness. Surely my husband’s conduct is of more  importance to me than Mr Balfour’s or Mr Asquith’s. If I had  known the law I would never have consented. I dont believe any  woman would if she realized what she was doing.

SYKES. But I’m not going to commit murder.

EDITH. How do you know? Ive sometimes wanted to murder Slattox.

Have you never wanted to murder somebody, Uncle Rejjy?

REGINALD [at Hotchkiss, with intense expression] Yes.

LEO. Rejjy!

REGINALD. I said yes; and I mean yes. There was one night,  Hotchkiss, when I jolly near shot you and Leo and finished up  with myself; and thats the truth.

LEO [suddenly whimpering] Oh Rejjy [she runs to him and kisses  him].

REGINALD [wrathfully] Be off. [She returns weeping to her seat].

MRS BRIDGENORTH [petting Leo, but speaking to the company at  large] But isnt all this great nonsense? What likelihood is there  of any of us committing a crime?

HOTCHKISS. Oh yes, I assure you. I went into the matter once very  carefully; and I found things I have actually done — things that  everybody does, I imagine — would expose me, if I were found out  and prosecuted, to ten years’ penal servitude, two years hard  labor, and the loss of all civil rights. Not counting that I’m a  private trustee, and, like all private trustees, a fraudulent  one. Otherwise, the widow for whom I am trustee would starve  occasionally, and the children get no education. And I’m probably  as honest a man as any here.

THE GENERAL [outraged] Do you imply that I have been guilty of  conduct that would expose me to penal servitude?

HOTCHKISS. I should think it quite likely, but of course I dont  know.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. But bless me! marriage is not a question of law,  is it? Have you children no affection for one another? Surely  thats enough?

HOTCHKISS. If it’s enough, why get married?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Stuff, Sinjon! Of course people must get  married. [Uneasily] Alfred: why dont you say something? Surely  youre not going to let this go on.

THE GENERAL. Ive been waiting for the last twenty minutes,  Alfred, in amazement! in stupefaction! to hear you put a stop to  all this. We look to you: it’s your place, your office, your  duty. Exert your authority at once.

THE BISHOP. You must give the devil fair play, Boxer. Until you  have heard and weighed his case you have no right to condemn him.

I’m sorry you have been kept waiting twenty minutes; but I myself  have waited twenty years for this to happen. Ive often wrestled  with the temptation to pray that it might not happen in my own  household. Perhaps it was a presentiment that it might become a  part of our old Bridgenorth burden that made me warn our  Governments so earnestly that unless the law of marriage were  first made human, it could never become divine.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Oh, do be sensible about this. People must get  married. What would you have said if Cecil’s parents had not been  married?

THE BISHOP. They were not, my dear.

HOTCHKISS        } { Hallo!

REGINALD         } { What d’ye mean?

THE GENERAL      } { Eh?

LEO              } { Not married!

MRS. BRIDGENORTH } { What?

SYKES [rising in amazement] What on earth do you mean, Bishop? My  parents were married.

HOTCHKISS. You cant remember, Cecil.

SYKES. Well, I never asked my mother to shew me her marriage  lines, if thats what you mean. What man ever has? I never  suspected — I never knew — Are you joking? Or have we all gone mad?

THE BISHOP. Dont be alarmed, Cecil. Let me explain. Your parents  were not Anglicans. You were not, I think, Anglican yourself,  until your second year at Oxford. They were Positivists. They  went through the Positivist ceremony at Newton Hall in Fetter  Lane after entering into the civil contract before the Registrar  of the West Strand District. I ask you, as an Anglican Catholic,  was that a marriage?

SYKES [overwhelmed] Great Heavens, no! a thousand times, no. I ever thought of that. I’m a child of sin. [He collapses into the  railed chair].

THE BISHOP. Oh, come, come! You are no more a child of sin than  any Jew, or Mohammedan, or Nonconformist, or anyone else born  outside the Church. But you see how it affects my view of the  situation. To me there is only one marriage that is holy: the  Church’s sacrament of marriage. Outside that, I can recognize no  distinction between one civil contract and another. There was a  time when all marriages were made in Heaven. But because the  Church was unwise and would not make its ordinances reasonable,  its power over men and women was taken away from it; and  marriages gave place to contracts at a registry office. And now  that our Governments refuse to make these contracts reasonable,  those whom we in our blindness drove out of the Church will be  driven out of the registry office; and we shall have the history  of Ancient Rome repeated. We shall be joined by our solicitors  for seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years — or perhaps months.

Deeds of partnership will replace the old vows.

THE GENERAL. Would you, a Bishop, approve of such partnerships?

THE BISHOP. Do you think that I, a Bishop, approve of the  Deceased Wife’s Sister Act? That did not prevent its becoming  law.

THE GENERAL. But when the Government sounded you as to whether  youd marry a man to his deceased wife’s sister you very naturally  and properly told them youd see them damned first.

THE BISHOP [horrified] No, no, really, Boxer! You must not —

THE GENERAL [impatiently] Oh, of course I dont mean that you used  those words. But that was the meaning and the spirit of it.

THE BISHOP. Not the spirit, Boxer, I protest. But never mind  that. The point is that State marriage is already divorced from  Church marriage. The relations between Leo and Rejjy and Sinjon  are perfectly legal; but do you expect me, as a Bishop, to  approve of them?

THE GENERAL. I dont defend Reginald. He should have kicked you  out of the house, Mr. Hotchkiss.

REGINALD [rising] How could I kick him out of the house? He’s  stronger than me: he could have kicked me out if it came to that.

He did kick me out: what else was it but kicking out, to take my  wife’s affections from me and establish himself in my place? [He  comes to the hearth].

HOTCHKISS. I protest, Reginald, I said all that a man could to  prevent the smash.

REGINALD. Oh, I know you did: I dont blame you: people dont do  these things to one another: they happen and they cant be helped.

What was I to do? I was old: she was young. I was dull: he was  brilliant. I had a face like a walnut: he had a face like a  mushroom. I was as glad to have him in the house as she was: he  amused me. And we were a couple of fools: he gave us good advice

— told us what to do when we didnt know. She found out that I asnt any use to her and he was; so she nabbed him and gave me  the chuck.

LEO. If you dont stop talking in that disgraceful way about our  married life, I’ll leave the room and never speak to you again.

REGINALD. Youre not going to speak to me again, anyhow, are you?

Do you suppose I’m going to visit you when you marry him?

HOTCHKISS. I hope so. Surely youre not going to be vindictive,  Rejjy. Besides, youll have all the advantages I formerly enjoyed.

Youll be the visitor, the relief, the new face, the fresh news,  the hopeless attachment: I shall only be the husband.

REGINALD [savagely] Will you tell me this, any of you? how is it  that we always get talking about Hotchkiss when our business is  about Edith? [He fumes up the kitchen to the tower and back to  his chair].

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Will somebody tell me how the world is to go on  if nobody is to get married?

SYKES. Will somebody tell me what an honorable man and a sincere  Anglican is to propose to a woman whom he loves and who loves him  and wont marry him?

LEO. Will somebody tell me how I’m to arrange to take care of  Rejjy when I’m married to Sinjon. Rejjy must not be allowed to  marry anyone else, especially that odious nasty creature that  told all those wicked lies about him in Court.

HOTCHKISS. Let us draw up the first English partnership deed.

LEO. For shame, Sinjon!

THE BISHOP. Somebody must begin, my dear. Ive a very strong  suspicion that when it is drawn up it will be so much worse than  the existing law that you will all prefer getting married. We  shall therefore be doing the greatest possible service to  morality by just trying how the new system would work.

LESBIA [suddenly reminding them of her forgotten presence as she  stands thoughtfully in the garden doorway] Ive been thinking.

THE BISHOP [to Hotchkiss] Nothing like making people think: is  there, Sinjon?

LESBIA [coming to the table, on the General’s left] A woman has  no right to refuse motherhood. That is clear, after the  statistics given in The Times by Mr Sidney Webb.

THE GENERAL. Mr Webb has nothing to do with it. It is the Voice  of Nature.

LESBIA. But if she is an English lady it is her right and her  duty to stand out for honorable conditions. If we can agree on  the conditions, I am willing to enter into an alliance with  Boxer.

The General staggers to his feet, momentarily stupent and  speechless.

EDITH [rising] And I with Cecil.

LEO [rising] And I with Rejjy and St John.

THE GENERAL [aghast] An alliance! Do you mean a — a — a —

REGINALD. She only means bigamy, as I understand her.

THE GENERAL. Alfred: how long more are you going to stand there  and countenance this lunacy? Is it a horrible dream or am I wake? In the name of common sense and sanity, let us go back to  real life —

Collins comes in through the tower, in alderman’s robes. The  ladies who are standing sit down hastily, and look as unconcerned  as possible.

COLLINS. Sorry to hurry you, my lord; but the Church has been  full this hour past; and the organist has played all the wedding  music in Lohengrin three times over.

THE GENERAL. The very man we want. Alfred: I’m not equal to this  crisis. You are not equal to it. The Army has failed. The Church  has failed. I shall put aside all idle social distinctions and  appeal to the Municipality.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Do, Boxer. He is sure to get us out of this  difficulty.

Collins, a little puzzled, comes forward affably to Hotchkiss’s  left.

HOTCHKISS [rising, impressed by the aldermanic gown] Ive not had  the pleasure. Will you introduce me?

COLLINS [confidentially] All right, sir. Only the greengrocer,  sir, in charge of the wedding breakfast. Mr Alderman Collins,  sir, when I’m in my gown.

HOTCHKISS [staggered] Very pleased indeed [he sits down again].

THE BISHOP. Personally I value the counsel of my old friend, Mr  Alderman Collins, very highly. If Edith and Cecil will allow him —

EDITH. Collins has known me from my childhood: I’m sure he will  agree with me.

COLLINS. Yes, miss: you may depend on me for that. Might I ask  what the difficulty is?

EDITH. Simply this. Do you expect me to get married in the  existing state of the law?

SYKES [rising and coming to Collin’s left elbow] I put it to you  as a sensible man: is it any worse for her than for me?

REGINALD [leaving his place and thrusting himself between Collins  and Sykes, who returns to his chair] Thats not the point. Let  this be understood, Mr Collins. It’s not the man who is backing  out: it’s the woman. [He posts himself on the hearth].

LESBIA. We do not admit that, Collins. The women are perfectly  ready to make a reasonable arrangement.

LEO. With both men.

THE GENERAL. The case is now before you, Mr Collins. And I put it  to you as one man to another: did you ever hear such crazy  nonsense?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. The world must go on, mustnt it, Collins?

COLLINS [snatching at this, the first intelligible proposition he  has heard] Oh, the world will go on, maam dont you be afraid of  that. It aint so easy to stop it as the earnest kind of people  think.

EDITH. I knew you would agree with me, Collins. Thank you.

HOTCHKISS. Have you the least idea of what they are talking  about, Mr Alderman?

COLLINS. Oh, thats all right, Sir. The particulars dont matter. I ever read the report of a Committee: after all, what can they  say, that you dont know? You pick it up as they go on talking.[He  goes to the corner of the table and speaks across it to the  company]. Well, my Lord and Miss Edith and Madam and Gentlemen,  it’s like this. Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre  easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear  thinking about. The great thing is to get the young people tied  up before they know what theyre letting themselves in for. Theres  Miss Lesbia now. She waited till she started thinking about it;  and then it was all over. If you once start arguing, Miss Edith  and Mr Sykes, youll never get married. Go and get married first:  youll have plenty of arguing afterwards, miss, believe me.

HOTCHKISS. Your warning comes too late. Theyve started arguing  already.

THE GENERAL. But you dont take in the full — well, I dont wish to  exaggerate; but the only word I can find is the full horror of  the situation. These ladies not only refuse our honorable  offers, but as I understand it — and I’m sure I beg your pardon  most heartily, Lesbia, if I’m wrong, as I hope I am — they  actually call on us to enter into — I’m sorry to use the  expression; but what can I say? — into ALLIANCES with them under  contracts to be drawn up by our confounded solicitors.

COLLINS. Dear me, General: thats something new when the parties  belong to the same class.

THE BISHOP. Not new, Collins. The Romans did it.

COLLINS. Yes: they would, them Romans. When youre in Rome do as  the Romans do, is an old saying. But we’re not in Rome at  present, my lord.

THE BISHOP. We have got into many of their ways. What do you  think of the contract system, Collins?

COLLINS. Well, my lord, when theres a question of a contract, I lways say, shew it to me on paper. If it’s to be talk, let it be  talk; but if it’s to be a contract, down with it in black and  white; and then we shall know what we’re about.

HOTCHKISS. Quite right, Mr Alderman. Let us draft it at once. May  I go into the study for writing materials, Bishop?

THE BISHOP. Do, Sinjon.

Hotchkiss goes into the library.

COLLINS. If I might point out a difficulty, my lord —

THE BISHOP. Certainly. [He goes to the fourth chair from the  General’s left, but before sitting down, courteously points to  the chair at the end of the table next the hearth]. Wont you sit  down, Mr Alderman? [Collins, very appreciative of the Bishop’s  distinguished consideration, sits down. The Bishop then takes his  seat].

COLLINS. We are at present six men to four ladies. Thats not  fair.

REGINALD. Not fair to the men, you mean.

LEO. Oh! Rejjy has said something clever! Can I be mistaken in  him?

Hotchkiss comes back with a blotter and some paper. He takes the  vacant place in the middle of the table between Lesbia and the  Bishop.

COLLINS. I tell you the truth, my lord and ladies and gentlemen:  I dont trust my judgment on this subject. Theres a certain lady  that I always consult on delicate points like this. She has a  very exceptional experience, and a wonderful temperament and  instinct in affairs of the heart.

HOTCHKISS. Excuse me, Mr Alderman: I’m a snob; and I warn you  that theres no use consulting anyone who will not advise us  frankly on class lines. Marriage is good enough for the lower  classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to  us. What is the social position of this lady?

COLLINS. The highest in the borough, sir. She is the Mayoress.

But you need not stand in awe of her, sir. She is my sister-in-  law. [To the Bishop] Ive often spoken of her to your lady, my  lord. [To Mrs Bridgenorth] Mrs George, maam.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [startled] Do you mean to say, Collins, that Mrs  George is a real person?

COLLINS [equally startled] Didnt you believe in her, maam?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Never for a moment.

THE BISHOP. We always thought that Mrs George was too good to be  true. I still dont believe in her, Collins. You must produce her  if you are to convince me.

COLLINS [overwhelmed] Well, I’m so taken aback by this that — Well  I never!!! Why! shes at the church at this moment, waiting to see  the wedding.

THE BISHOP. Then produce her. [Collins shakes his head].Come,  Collins! confess. Theres no such person.

COLLINS. There is, my lord: there is, I assure you. You ask  George. It’s true I cant produce her; but you can, my lord.

THE BISHOP. I!

COLLINS. Yes, my lord, you. For some reason that I never could  make out, she has forbidden me to talk about you, or to let her  meet you. Ive asked her to come here of a wedding morning to help  with the flowers or the like; and she has always refused. But if  you order her to come as her Bishop, she’ll come. She has some  very strange fancies, has Mrs George. Send your ring to her, my  lord — he official ring — send it by some very stylish gentleman — erhaps Mr Hotchkiss here would be good enough to take it — and  she’ll come.

THE BISHOP [taking off his ring and handing it to Hotchkiss]

Oblige me by undertaking the mission.

HOTCHKISS. But how am I to know the lady?

COLLINS. She has gone to the church in state, sir, and will be  attended by a Beadle with a mace. He will point her out to you;  and he will take the front seat of the carriage on the way back.

HOTCHKISS. No, by heavens! Forgive me, Bishop; but you are asking  too much. I ran away from the Boers because I was a snob. I run  away from the Beadle for the same reason. I absolutely decline  the mission.

THE GENERAL [rising impressively] Be good enough to give me that  ring, Mr Hotchkiss.

HOTCHKISS. With pleasure. [He hands it to him].

THE GENERAL. I shall have the great pleasure, Mr Alderman, in  waiting on the Mayoress with the Bishop’s orders; and I shall be  proud to return with municipal honors. [He stalks out gallantly,  Collins rising for a moment to bow to him with marked dignity].

REGINALD. Boxer is rather a fine old josser in his way.

HOTCHKISS. His uniform gives him an unfair advantage. He will  take all the attention off the Beadle.

COLLINS. I think it would be as well, my lord, to go on with the  contract while we’re waiting. The truth is, we shall none of us  have much of a look-in when Mrs George comes; so we had better  finish the writing part of the business before she arrives.

HOTCHKISS. I think I have the preliminaries down all right.

[Reading] ‘Memorandum of Agreement made this day of blank blank  between blank blank of blank blank in the County of blank,  Esquire, hereinafter called the Gentleman, of the one part, and  blank blank of blank in the County of blank, hereinafter called  the Lady, of the other part, whereby it is declared and agreed as  follows.’

LEO [rising] You might remember your manners, Sinjon. The lady  comes first. [She goes behind him and stoops to look at the draft  over his shoulder].

HOTCHKISS. To be sure. I beg your pardon. [He alters the draft].

LEO. And you have got only one lady and one gentleman. There  ought to be two gentlemen.

COLLINS. Oh, thats a mere matter of form, maam. Any number of  ladies or gentlemen can be put in.

LEO. Not any number of ladies. Only one lady. Besides, that  creature wasnt a lady.

REGINALD. You shut your head, Leo. This is a general sort of  contract for everybody: it’s not your tract.

LEO. Then what use is it to me?

HOTCHKISS. You will get some hints from it for your own contract.

EDITH. I hope there will be no hinting. Let us have the plain  straightforward truth and nothing but the truth.

COLLINS. Yes, yes, miss: it will be all right. Theres nothing  underhand, I assure you. It’s a model agreement, as it were.

EDITH [unconvinced] I hope so.

HOTCHKISS. What is the first clause in an agreement, usually? You  know, Mr Alderman.

COLLINS [at a loss] Well, Sir, the Town Clerk always sees to  that. Ive got out of the habit of thinking for myself in these  little matters. Perhaps his lordship knows.

THE BISHOP. I’m sorry to say I dont. Soames will know. Alice,  where is Soames?

HOTCHKISS. He’s in there [pointing to the study].

THE BISHOP [to his wife] Coax him to join us, my love. [Mrs  Bridgenorth goes into the study]. Soames is my chaplain, Mr  Collins. The great difficulty about Bishops in the Church of  England to-day is that the affairs of the diocese make it  necessary that a Bishop should be before everything a man of  business, capable of sticking to his desk for sixteen hours a  day. But the result of having Bishops of this sort is that the  spiritual interests of the Church, and its influence on the souls  and imaginations of the people, very soon begins to go rapidly to  the devil —

EDITH [shocked] Papa!

THE BISHOP. I am speaking technically, not in Boxer’s manner.

Indeed the Bishops themselves went so far in that direction that  they gained a reputation for being spiritually the stupidest men  in the country and commercially the sharpest. I found a way out  of this difficulty. Soames was my solicitor. I found that Soames,  though a very capable man of business, had a romantic secret his-  tory. His father was an eminent Nonconformist divine who  habitually spoke of the Church of England as The Scarlet Woman.

Soames became secretly converted to Anglicanism at the age of  fifteen. He longed to take holy orders, but didnt dare to,  because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to  drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that  people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English family life.

So poor Soames had to become a solicitor. When his father died — y a curious stroke of poetic justice he died of scarlet fever,  and was found to have had a perfectly sound heart — I ordained  Soames and made him my chaplain. He is now quite happy. He is a  celibate; fasts strictly on Fridays and throughout Lent; wears a  cassock and biretta; and has more legal business to do than ever  he had in his old office in Ely Place. And he sets me free for  the spiritual and scholarly pursuits proper to a Bishop.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [coming back from the study with a knitting  basket] Here he is. [She resumes her seat, and knits].

Soames comes in in cassock and biretta. He salutes the company by  blessing them with two fingers.

HOTCHKISS. Take my place, Mr Soames. [He gives up his chair to  him, and retires to the oak chest, on which he seats himself].

THE BISHOP. No longer Mr Soames, Sinjon. Father Anthony.

SOAMES [taking his seat] I was christened Oliver Cromwell Soames.

My father had no right to do it. I have taken the name of  Anthony. When you become parents, young gentlemen, be very  careful not to label a helpless child with views which it may  come to hold in abhorrence.

THE BISHOP. Has Alice explained to you the nature of the document  we are drafting?

SOAMES. She has indeed.

LESBIA. That sounds as if you disapproved.

SOAMES. It is not for me to approve or disapprove. I do the work  that comes to my hand from my ecclesiastical superior.

THE BISHOP. Dont be uncharitable, Anthony. You must give us your  best advice.

SOAMES. My advice to you all is to do your duty by taking the  Christian vows of celibacy and poverty. The Church was founded  to put an end to marriage and to put an end to property.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. But how could the world go on, Anthony?

SOAMES. Do your duty and see. Doing your duty is your business:  keeping the world going is in higher hands.

LESBIA. Anthony: youre impossible.

SOAMES [taking up his pen] You wont take my advice. I didnt  expect you would. Well, I await your instructions.

REGINALD. We got stuck on the first clause. What should we begin  with?

SOAMES. It is usual to begin with the term of the contract.

EDITH. What does that mean?

SOAMES. The term of years for which it is to hold good.

LEO. But this is a marriage contract.

SOAMES. Is the marriage to be for a year, a week, or a day?

REGINALD. Come, I say, Anthony! Youre worse than any of us. A ay!

SOAMES. Off the path is off the path. An inch or a mile: what  does it matter?

LEO. If the marriage is not to be for ever, I’ll have nothing to  do with it. I call it immoral to have a marriage for a term of  years. If the people dont like it they can get divorced.

REGINALD. It ought to be for just as long as the two people like.

Thats what I say.

COLLINS. They may not agree on the point, sir. It’s often fast  with one and loose with the other.

LESBIA. I should say for as long as the man behaves himself.

THE BISHOP. Suppose the woman doesnt behave herself?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. The woman may have lost all her chances of a  good marriage with anybody else. She should not be cast adrift.

REGINALD. So may the man! What about his home?

LEO. The wife ought to keep an eye on him, and see that he is  comfortable and takes care of himself properly. The other man  wont want her all the time.

LESBIA. There may not be another man.

LEO. Then why on earth should she leave him?

LESBIA. Because she wants to.

LEO. Oh, if people are going to be let do what they want to,  then I call it simple immorality. [She goes indignantly to the  oak chest, and perches herself on it close beside Hotchkiss].

REGINALD [watching them sourly] You do it yourself, dont you?

LEO. Oh, thats quite different. Dont make foolish witticisms,  Rejjy.

THE BISHOP. We dont seem to be getting on. What do you say, Mr  Alderman?

COLLINS. Well, my lord, you see people do persist in talking as  if marriages was all of one sort. But theres almost as many  different sorts of marriages as theres different sorts of people.

Theres the young things that marry for love, not knowing what  theyre doing, and the old things that marry for money and comfort  and companionship. Theres the people that marry for children.

Theres the people that dont intend to have children and that arnt  fit to have them. Theres the people that marry because theyre so  much run after by the other sex that they have to put a stop to  it somehow. Theres the people that want to try a new experience,  and the people that want to have done with experiences. How are  you to please them all? Why, youll want half a dozen different  sorts of contract.

THE BISHOP. Well, if so, let us draw them all up. Let us face it.

REGINALD. Why should we be held together whether we like it or  not? Thats the question thats at the bottom of it all.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Because of the children, Rejjy.

COLLINS. But even then, maam, why should we be held together when  thats all over — when the girls are married and the boys out in  the world and in business for themselves? When thats done with,  the real work of the marriage is done with. If the two like to  stay together, let them stay together. But if not, let them part,  as old people in the workhouses do. Theyve had enough of one  another. Theyve found one another out. Why should they be tied  together to sit there grudging and hating and spiting one another  like so many do? Put it twenty years from the birth of the  youngest child.

SOAMES. How if there be no children?

COLLINS. Let em take one another on liking.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Collins!

LEO. You wicked old man —

THE BISHOP [remonstrating] My dear, my dear!

LESBIA. And what is a woman to live on, pray, when she is no  longer liked, as you call it?

SOAMES [with sardonic formality] It is proposed that the term of  the agreement be twenty years from the birth of the youngest  child when there are children. Any amendment?

LEO. I protest. It must be for life. It would not be a marriage  at all if it were not for life.

SOAMES. Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth proposes life. Any seconder?

LEO. Dont be soulless, Anthony.

LESBIA. I have a very important amendment. If there are any  children, the man must be cleared completely out of the house for  two years on each occasion. At such times he is superfluous,  importunate, and ridiculous.

COLLINS. But where is he to go, miss?

LESBIA. He can go where he likes as long as he does not bother  the mother.

REGINALD. And is she to be left lonely —

LESBIA. Lonely! With her child. The poor woman would be only too  glad to have a moment to herself. Dont be absurd, Rejjy.

REGINALD. That father is to be a wandering wretched outcast,  living at his club, and seeing nobody but his friends’ wives!

LESBIA [ironically] Poor fellow!

HOTCHKISS. The friends’ wives are perhaps the solution of the  problem. You see, their husbands will also be outcasts; and the  poor ladies will occasionally pine for male society.

LESBIA. There is no reason why a mother should not have male  society. What she clearly should not have is a husband.

SOAMES. Anything else, Miss Grantham?

LESBIA. Yes: I must have my own separate house, or my own  separate part of a house. Boxer smokes: I cant endure tobacco.

Boxer believes that an open window means death from cold and  exposure to the night air: I must have fresh air always. We can  be friends; but we cant live together; and that must be put in  the agreement.

EDITH. Ive no objection to smoking; and as to opening the  windows, Cecil will of course have to do what is best for his  health.

THE BISHOP. Who is to be the judge of that, my dear? You or he?

EDITH. Neither of us. We must do what the doctor orders.

REGINALD. Doctor be — !

LEO [admonitorily] Rejjy!

REGINALD [to Soames] You take my tip, Anthony. Put a clause into  that agreement that the doctor is to have no say in the job. It’s  bad enough for the two people to be married to one another  without their both being married to the doctor as well.

LESBIA. That reminds me of something very important. Boxer  believes in vaccination: I do not. There must be a clause that I m to decide on such questions as I think best.

LEO [to the Bishop] Baptism is nearly as important as  vaccination: isnt it?

THE BISHOP. It used to be considered so, my dear.

LEO. Well, Sinjon scoffs at it: he says that godfathers are  ridiculous. I must be allowed to decide.

REGINALD. Theyll be his children as well as yours, you know.

LEO. Dont be indelicate, Rejjy.

EDITH. You are forgetting the very important matter of money.

COLLINS. Ah! Money! Now we’re coming to it!

EDITH. When I’m married I shall have practically no money except  what I shall earn.

THE BISHOP. I’m sorry, Cecil. A Bishop’s daughter is a poor man’s  daughter.

SYKES. But surely you dont imagine that I’m going to let Edith  work when we’re married. I’m not a rich man; but Ive enough to  spare her that; and when my mother dies —

EDITH. What nonsense! Of course I shall work when I’m married. I hall keep your house.

SYKES. Oh, that!

REGINALD. You call that work?

EDITH. Dont you? Leo used to do it for nothing; so no doubt you  thought it wasnt work at all. Does your present housekeeper do it  for nothing?

REGINALD. But it will be part of your duty as a wife.

EDITH. Not under this contract. I’ll not have it so. If I’m to  keep the house, I shall expect Cecil to pay me at least as well  as he would pay a hired housekeeper. I’ll not go begging to him  every time I want a new dress or a cab fare, as so many women  have to do.

SYKES. You know very well I would grudge you nothing, Edie.

EDITH. Then dont grudge me my self-respect and independence. I nsist on it in fairness to you, Cecil, because in this way there  will be a fund belonging solely to me; and if Slattox takes an  action against you for anything I say, you can pay the damages  and stop the interest out of my salary.

SOAMES. You forget that under this contract he will not be  liable, because you will not be his wife in law.

EDITH. Nonsense! Of course I shall be his wife.

COLLINS [his curiosity roused] Is Slattox taking an action  against you, miss? Slattox is on the Council with me. Could I ettle it?

EDITH. He has not taken an action; but Cecil says he will.

COLLINS. What for, miss, if I may ask?

EDITH. Slattox is a liar and a thief; and it is my duty to expose  him.

COLLINS. You surprise me, miss. Of course Slattox is in a manner  of speaking a liar. If I may say so without offence, we’re all  liars, if it was only to spare one another’s feelings. But I houldnt call Slattox a thief. He’s not all that he should be,  perhaps; but he pays his way.

EDITH. If that is only your nice way of saying that Slattox is  entirely unfit to have two hundred girls in his power as absolute  slaves, then I shall say that too about him at the very next  public meeting I address. He steals their wages under pretence of  fining them. He steals their food under pretence of buying it for  them. He lies when he denies having done it. And he does other  things, as you evidently know, Collins. Therefore I give you  notice that I shall expose him before all England without the  least regard to the consequences to myself.

SYKES. Or to me?

EDITH. I take equal risks. Suppose you felt it to be your duty to  shoot Slattox, what would become of me and the children? I’m sure  I dont want anybody to be shot: not even Slattox; but if the  public never will take any notice of even the most crying evil  until somebody is shot, what are people to do but shoot somebody?

SOAMES [inexorably] I’m waiting for my instructions as to the  term of the agreement.

REGINALD [impatiently, leaving the hearth and going behind  Soames] It’s no good talking all over the shop like this. We  shall be here all day. I propose that the agreement holds good  until the parties are divorced.

SOAMES. They cant be divorced. They will not be married.

REGINALD. But if they cant be divorced, then this will be worse  than marriage.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Of course it will. Do stop this nonsense. Why,  who are the children to belong to?

LESBIA. We have already settled that they are to belong to the  mother.

REGINALD. No: I’m dashed if you have. I’ll fight for the  ownership of my own children tooth and nail; and so will a good  many other fellows, I can tell you.

EDITH. It seems to me that they should be divided between the  parents. If Cecil wishes any of the children to be his  exclusively, he should pay a certain sum for the risk and trouble  of bringing them into the world: say a thousand pounds apiece.

The interest on this could go towards the support of the child as  long as we live together. But the principal would be my property.

In that way, if Cecil took the child away from me, I should at  least be paid for what it had cost me.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [putting down her knitting in amazement] Edith!

Who ever heard of such a thing!!

EDITH. Well, how else do you propose to settle it?

THE BISHOP. There is such a thing as a favorite child. What about  the youngest child — the Benjamin — the child of its parents’ atured strength and charity, always better treated and better  loved than the unfortunate eldest children of their youthful  ignorance and wilfulness? Which parent is to own the youngest  child, payment or no payment?

COLLINS. Theres a third party, my lord. Theres the child itself.

My wife is so fond of her children that they cant call their  lives their own. They all run away from home to escape from her.

A child hasnt a grown-up person’s appetite for affection. A ittle of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good  imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.

SOAMEs. Are you sure that any of us, young or old, like the real  thing as well as we like an artistic imitation of it? Is not the  real thing accursed? Are not the best beloved always the good  actors rather than the true sufferers? Is not love always  falsified in novels and plays to make it endurable? I have  noticed in myself a great delight in pictures of the Saints and  of Our Lady; but when I fall under that most terrible curse of  the priest’s lot, the curse of Joseph pursued by the wife of  Potiphar, I am invariably repelled and terrified.

HOTCHKISS. Are you now speaking as a saint, Father Anthony, or as  a solicitor?

SOAMES. There is no difference. There is not one Christian rule  for solicitors and another for saints. Their hearts are alike;  and their way of salvation is along the same road.

THE BISHOP. But “few there be that find it.”  Can you find it for  us, Anthony?

SOAMES. It lies broad before you. It is the way to destruction  that is narrow and tortuous. Marriage is an abomination which the  Church has founded to cast out and replace by the communion of  saints. I learnt that from every marriage settlement I drew up as  a solicitor no less than from inspired revelation. You have set  yourselves here to put your sin before you in black and white;  and you cant agree upon or endure one article of it.

SYKES. It’s certainly rather odd that the whole thing seems to  fall to pieces the moment you touch it.

THE BISHOP. You see, when you give the devil fair play he loses  his case. He has not been able to produce even the first clause  of a working agreement; so I’m afraid we cant wait for him any  longer.

LESBIA. Then the community will have to do without my children.

EDITH. And Cecil will have to do without me.

LEO [getting off the chest] And I positively will not marry  Sinjon if he is not clever enough to make some provision for my  looking after Rejjy. [She leaves Hotchkiss, and goes back to her  chair at the end of the table behind Mrs Bridgenorth].

MRS BRIDGENORTH. And the world will come to an end with this  generation, I suppose.

COLLINS. Cant nothing be done, my lord?

THE BISHOP. You can make divorce reasonable and decent: that is  all.

LESBIA. Thank you for nothing. If you will only make marriage  reasonable and decent, you can do as you like about divorce. I ave not stated my deepest objection to marriage; and I dont  intend to. There are certain rights I will not give any person  over me.

REGINALD. Well, I think it jolly hard that a man should support  his wife for years, and lose the chance of getting a really good  wife, and then have her refuse to be a wife to him.

LESBIA. I’m not going to discuss it with you, Rejjy. If your  sense of personal honor doesnt make you understand, nothing will.

SOAMES [implacably] I’m still awaiting my instructions.

They look at one another, each waiting for one of the others to  suggest something. Silence.

REGINALD [blankly] I suppose, after all, marriage is better than

— well, than the usual alternative.

SOAMES [turning fiercely on him] What right have you to say so?

You know that the sins that are wasting and maddening this  unhappy nation are those committed in wedlock.

COLLINS. Well, the single ones cant afford to indulge their  affections the same as married people.

SOAMES. Away with it all, I say. You have your Master’s  commandments. Obey them.

HOTCHKISS [rising and leaning on the back of the chair left  vacant by the General] I really must point out to you, Father  Anthony, that the early Christian rules of life were not made to  last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world  itself was going to last. Now we know that we shall have to go  through with it. We have found that there are millions of years  behind us; and we know that that there are millions before us.

Mrs Bridgenorth’s question remains unanswered. How is the world  to go on? You say that that is our business — that it is the  business of Providence. But the modern Christian view is that we  are here to do the business of Providence and nothing else. The  question is, how. Am I not to use my reason to find out why? Isnt  that what my reason is for? Well, all my reason tells me at  present is that you are an impracticable lunatic.

SOAMEs. Does that help?

HOTCHKISS. No.

SOAMEs. Then pray for light.

HOTCHKISS. No: I am a snob, not a beggar. [He sits down in the  General’s chair].

COLLINS. We dont seem to be getting on, do we? Miss Edith: you  and Mr Sykes had better go off to church and settle the right and  wrong of it afterwards. Itll ease your minds, believe me: I speak  from experience. You will burn your boats, as one might say.

SOAMES. We should never burn our boats. It is death in life.

COLLINS. Well, Father, I will say for you that you have views of  your own and are not afraid to out with them. But some of us are  of a more cheerful disposition. On the Borough Council now, you  would be in a minority of one. You must take human nature as it  is.

SOAMES. Upon what compulsion must I? I’ll take divine nature as  it is. I’ll not hold a candle to the devil.

THE BISHOP. Thats a very unchristian way of treating the devil.

REGINALD. Well, we dont seem to be getting any further, do we?

THE BISHOP. Will you give it up and get married, Edith?

EDITH. No. What I propose seems to me quite reasonable.

THE BISHOP. And you, Lesbia?

LESBIA. Never.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. Never is a long word, Lesbia. Dont say it.

LESBIA [with a flash of temper] Dont pity me, Alice, please. As I aid before, I am an English lady, quite prepared to do without  anything I cant have on honorable conditions.

SOAMES [after a silence expressive of utter deadlock] I am still  awaiting my instructions.

REGINALD. Well, we dont seem to be getting along, do we?

LEO [out of patience] You said that before, Rejjy. Do not repeat  yourself.

REGINALD. Oh, bother! [He goes to the garden door and looks out  gloomily].

SOAMES [rising with the paper in his hands] Psha! [He tears it in  pieces]. So much for the contract!

THE VOICE OF THE BEADLE. By your leave there, gentlemen. Make way  for the Mayoress. Way for the worshipful the Mayoress, my lords  and gentlemen. [He comes in through the tower, in cocked hat and  goldbraided overcoat, bearing the borough mace, and posts himself  at the entrance]. By your leave, gentlemen, way for the  worshipful the Mayoress.

COLLINS [moving back towards the wall] Mrs George, my lord.

Mrs George is every inch a Mayoress in point of stylish dressing;  and she does it very well indeed. There is nothing quiet about  Mrs George; she is not afraid of colors, and knows how to make  the most of them. Not at all a lady in Lesbia’s use of the term  as a class label, she proclaims herself to the first glance as  the triumphant, pampered, wilful, intensely alive woman who has  always been rich among poor people. In a historical museum she  would explain Edward the Fourth’s taste for shopkeepers’ wives.

Her age, which is certainly 40, and might be 50, is carried off  by her vitality, her resilient figure, and her confident  carriage. So far, a remarkably well-preserved woman. But her  beauty is wrecked, like an ageless landscape ravaged by long and  fierce war. Her eyes are alive, arresting and haunting; and there  is still a turn of delicate beauty and pride in her indomitable  chin; but her cheeks are wasted and lined, her mouth writhen and  piteous. The whole face is a battlefield of the passions, quite  deplorable until she speaks, when an alert sense of fun  rejuvenates her in a moment, and makes her company irresistible.

All rise except Soames, who sits down. Leo joins Reginald at the  garden door. Mrs Bridgenorth hurries to the tower to receive her  guest, and gets as far as Soames’s chair when Mrs George appears.

Hotchkiss, apparently recognizing her, recoils in consternation  to the study door at the furthest corner of the room from her.

MRS GEORGE [coming straight to the Bishop with the ring in her  hand] Here is your ring, my lord; and here am I. It’s your doing,  remember: not mine.

THE BISHOP. Good of you to come.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. How do you do, Mrs Collins?

MRS GEORGE [going to her past the Bishop, and gazing intently at  her] Are you his wife?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. The Bishop’s wife? Yes.

MRS GEORGE. What a destiny! And you look like any other woman!

MRS BRIDGENORTH [introducing Lesbia] My sister, Miss Grantham.

MRS GEORGE. So strangely mixed up with the story of the General’s  life?

THE BISHOP. You know the story of his life, then?

MRS GEORGE. Not all. We reached the house before he brought it up  to the present day. But enough to know the part played in it by  Miss Grantham.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [introducing Leo] Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth.

REGINALD. The late Mrs Reginald Bridgenorth.

LEO. Hold your tongue, Rejjy. At least have the decency to wait  until the decree is made absolute.

MRS GEORGE [to Leo] Well, youve more time to get married again  than he has, havnt you?

MRS BRIDGENORTH [introducing Hotchkiss] Mr St John Hotchkiss.

Hotchkiss, still far aloof by the study door, bows.

MRS GEORGE. What! That! [She makes a half tour of the kitchen and  ends right in front of him]. Young man: do you remember coming  into my shop and telling me that my husband’s coals were out of  place in your cellar, as Nature evidently intended them for the  roof?

HOTCHKISS. I remember that deplorable impertinence with shame and  confusion. You were kind enough to answer that Mr Collins was  looking out for a clever young man to write advertisements, and  that I could take the job if I liked.

MRS GEORGE. It’s still open. [She turns to Edith].

MRS BRIDGENORTH. My daughter Edith. [She comes towards the study  door to make the introduction].

MRS GEORGE. The bride! [Looking at Edith’s dressing-jacket] Youre  not going to get married like that, are you?

THE BISHOP [coming round the table to Edith’s left] Thats just  what we are discussing. Will you be so good as to join us and  allow us the benefit of your wisdom and experience?

MRS GEORGE. Do you want the Beadle as well? He’s a married man.

They all turn, involuntarily and contemplate the Beadle, who  sustains their gaze with dignity.

THE BISHOP. We think there are already too many men to be quite  fair to the women.

MRS GEORGE. Right, my lord. [She goes back to the tower and  addresses the Beadle] Take away that bauble, Joseph. Wait for me  wherever you find yourself most comfortable in the neighborhood.

[The Beadle withdraws. She notices Collins for the first time].

Hullo, Bill: youve got em all on too. Go and hunt up a drink for  Joseph: theres a dear. [Collins goes out. She looks at Soames’s  cassock and biretta]  What! Another uniform! Are you the sexton?

[He rises].

THE BISHOP. My chaplain, Father Anthony.

MRS GEORGE. Oh Lord! [To Soames, coaxingly] You dont mind, do  you?

SOAMES. I mind nothing but my duties.

THE BISHOP. You know everybody now, I think.

MRS GEORGE [turning to the railed chair] Who’s this?

THE BISHOP. Oh, I beg your pardon, Cecil. Mr Sykes. The  bridegroom.

MRS GEORGE [to Sykes] Adorned for the sacrifice, arnt you?

SYKES. It seems doubtful whether there is going to be any  sacrifice.

MRS GEORGE. Well, I want to talk to the women first. Shall we go  upstairs and look at the presents and dresses?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. If you wish, certainly.

REGINALD. But the men want to hear what you have to say too.

MRS GEORGE. I’ll talk to them afterwards: one by one.

HOTCHKISS [to himself] Great heavens!

MRS BRIDGENORTH. This way, Mrs Collins. [She leads the way out  through the tower, followed by Mrs George, Lesbia, Leo, and  Edith].

THE BISHOP. Shall we try to get through the last batch of letters  whilst they are away, Soames?

SOAMES. Yes, certainly. [To Hotchkiss, who is in his way] Excuse  me.

The Bishop and Soames go into the study, disturbing Hotchkiss,  who, plunged in a strange reverie, has forgotten where he is.

Awakened by Soames, he stares distractedly; then, with sudden  resolution, goes swiftly to the middle of the kitchen.

HOTCHKISS. Cecil. Rejjy. [Startled by his urgency, they hurry to  him]. I’m frightfully sorry to desert on this day; but I must  bolt. This time it really is pure cowardice. I cant help it.

REGINALD. What are you afraid of?

HOTCHKISS. I dont know. Listen to me. I was a young fool living  by myself in London. I ordered my first ton of coals from that  woman’s husband. At that time I did not know that it is not true  economy to buy the lowest priced article: I thought all coals  were alike, and tried the thirteen shilling kind because it  seemed cheap. It proved unexpectedly inferior to the family  Silkstone; and in the irritation into which the first scuttle  threw me, I called at the shop and made an idiot of myself as she  described.

SYKES. Well, suppose you did! Laugh at it, man.

HOTCHKISS. At that, yes. But there was something worse. Judge of  my horror when, calling on the coal merchant to make a trifling  complaint at finding my grate acting as a battery of quick-firing  guns, and being confronted by his vulgar wife, I felt in her  presence an extraordinary sensation of unrest, of emotion, of  unsatisfied need. I’ll not disgust you with details of the  madness and folly that followed that meeting. But it went as far  as this: that I actually found myself prowling past the shop at  night under a sort of desperate necessity to be near some place  where she had been. A hideous temptation to kiss the doorstep  because her foot had pressed it made me realize how mad I was. I ore myself away from London by a supreme effort; but I was on  the point of returning like a needle to the lodestone when the  outbreak of the war saved me. On the field of battle the  infatuation wore off. The Billiter affair made a new man of me: I elt that I had left the follies and puerilities of the old days  behind me for ever. But half-an-hour ago — when the Bishop sent  off that ring — a sudden grip at the base of my heart filled me  with a nameless terror — me, the fearless! I recognized its cause  when she walked into the room. Cecil: this woman is a harpy, a  siren, a mermaid, a vampire. There is only one chance for me:  flight, instant precipitate flight. Make my excuses.

Forget me. Farewell. [He makes for the door and is confronted by  Mrs George entering]. Too late: I’m lost. [He turns back and  throws himself desperately into the chair nearest the study door;  that being the furthest away from her].

MRS GEORGE [coming to the hearth and addressing Reginald] Mr  Bridgenorth: will you oblige me by leaving me with this young  man. I want to talk to him like a mother, on YOUR business.

REGINALD. Do, maam. He needs it badly. Come along, Sykes. [He  goes into the study].

SYKES [looks irresolutely at Hotchkiss] — ?

HOTCHKISS. Too late: you cant save me now, Cecil. Go.

Sykes goes into the study. Mrs George strolls across to Hotchkiss  and contemplates him curiously.

HOTCHKISS. Useless to prolong this agony. [Rising] Fatal woman — f woman you are indeed and not a fiend in human form —

MRS GEORGE. Is this out of a book? Or is it your usual society  small talk?

HOTCHKISS [recklessly] Jibes are useless: the force that is  sweeping me away will not spare you. I must know the worst at  once. What was your father?

MRS GEORGE. A licensed victualler who married his barmaid. You  would call him a publican, most likely.

HOTCHKISS. Then you are a woman totally beneath me. Do you deny  it? Do you set up any sort of pretence to be my equal in rank, in  age, or in culture?

MRS GEORGE. Have you eaten anything that has disagreed with you?

HOTCHKISS [witheringly] Inferior!

MRS GEORGE. Thank you. Anything else?

HOTCHKISS. This. I love you. My intentions are not honorable.

[She shows no dismay]. Scream. Ring the bell. Have me turned out  of the house.

MRS GEORGE [with sudden depth of feeling]  Oh, if you could  restore to this wasted exhausted heart one ray of the passion  that once welled up at the glance at the touch of a lover! It’s  you who would scream then, young man. Do you see this face, once  fresh and rosy like your own, now scarred and riven by a hundred  burnt-out fires?

HOTCHKISS [wildly] Slate fires. Thirteen shillings a ton. Fires  that shoot out destructive meteors, blinding and burning, sending  men into the streets to make fools of themselves.

MRS GEORGE. You seem to have got it pretty bad, Sinjon.

HOTCHKISS. Dont dare call me Sinjon.

MRS GEORGE. My name is Zenobia Alexandrina. You may call me Polly  for short.

HOTCHKISS. Your name is Ashtoreth — Durga — there is no name yet  invented malign enough for you.

MRS GEORGE [sitting down comfortably] Come! Do you really think  youre better suited to that young sauce box than her husband? You  enjoyed her company when you were only the friend of the family — hen there was the husband there to shew off against and to take  all the responsibility. Are you sure youll enjoy it as much when  you are the husband? She isnt clever, you know. She’s only silly-  clever.

HOTCHKISS [uneasily leaning against the table and holding on to  it to control his nervous movements] Need you tell me? fiend that  you are!

MRS GEORGE. You amused the husband, didnt you?

HOTCHKISS. He has more real sense of humor than she. He’s better  bred. That was not my fault.

MRS GEORGE. My husband has a sense of humor too.

HOTCHKISS. The coal merchant? — I mean the slate merchant.

MRS GEORGE [appreciatively] He would just love to hear you talk.

He’s been dull lately for want of a change of company and a bit  of fresh fun.

HOTCHKISS [flinging a chair opposite her and sitting down with an  overdone attempt at studied insolence] And pray what is your  wretched husband’s vulgar conviviality to me?

MRS GEORGE. You love me?

HOTCHKISS. I loathe you.

MRS GEORGE. It’s the same thing.

HOTCHKISS. Then I’m lost.

MRS GEORGE. You may come and see me if you promise to amuse  George.

HOTCHKISS. I’ll insult him, sneer at him, wipe my boots on him.

MRS GEORGE. No you wont, dear boy. Youll be a perfect gentleman.

HOTCHKISS [beaten; appealing to her mercy] Zenobia —

MRS GEORGE. Polly, please.

HOTCHKISS. Mrs Collins —

MRS GEORGE. Sir?

HOTCHKISS. Something stronger than my reason and common sense is  holding my hands and tearing me along. I make no attempt to deny  that it can drag me where you please and make me do what you  like. But at least let me know your soul as you seem to know  mine. Do you love this absurd coal merchant?

MRS GEORGE. Call him George.

HOTCHKISS. Do you love your Jorjy Porjy?

MRS GEORGE. Oh, I dont know that I love him. He’s my husband, you  know. But if I got anxious about George’s health, and I thought  it would nourish him, I would fry you with onions for his  breakfast and think nothing of it. George and I are good friends.

George belongs to me. Other men may come and go; but George goes  on for ever.

HOTCHKISS. Yes: a husband soon becomes nothing but a habit.

Listen: I suppose this detestable fascination you have for me is  love.

MRS GEORGE. Any sort of feeling for a woman is called love  nowadays.

HOTCHKISS. Do you love me?

MRS GEORGE [promptly] My love is not quite so cheap an article as  that, my lad. I wouldnt cross the street to have another look at  you — not yet. I’m not starving for love like the robins in  winter, as the good ladies youre accustomed to are. Youll have to  be very clever, and very good, and very real, if you are to  interest me. If George takes a fancy to you, and you amuse him  enough, I’ll just tolerate you coming in and out occasionally  for — well, say a month. If you can make a friend of me in that  time so much the better for you. If you can touch my poor dying  heart even for an instant, I’ll bless you, and never forget you.

You may try — if George takes to you.

HOTCHKISS. I’m to come on liking for the month?

MRS GEORGE. On condition that you drop Mrs Reginald.

HOTCHKISS. But she wont drop me. Do you suppose I ever wanted to  marry her? I was a homeless bachelor; and I felt quite happy at  their house as their friend. Leo was an amusing little devil; but  I liked Reginald much more than I liked her. She didnt  understand. One day she came to me and told me that the  inevitable bad happened. I had tact enough not to ask her what  the inevitable was; and I gathered presently that she had told  Reginald that their marriage was a mistake and that she loved me  and could no longer see me breaking my heart for her in suffering  silence. What could I say? What could I do? What can I say now?

What can I do now?

MRS GEORGE. Tell her that the habit of falling in love with other  men’s wives is growing on you; and that I’m your latest.

HOTCHKISS. What! Throw her over when she has thrown Reginald over  for me!

MRS GEORGE [rising] You wont then? Very well. Sorry we shant meet  again: I should have liked to see more of you for George’s sake.

Good-bye [she moves away from him towards the hearth].

HOTCHKISS [appealing] Zenobia —

MRS. GEORGE. I thought I lead made a difficult conquest. Now I ee you are only one of those poor petticoat-hunting creatures  that any woman can pick up. Not for me, thank you. [Inexorable,  she turns towards the tower to go].

HOTCHKISS [following] Dont be an ass, Polly.

MRS GEORGE [stopping] Thats better.

HOTCHKISS. Cant you see that I maynt throw Leo over just because  I should be only too glad to. It would be dishonorable.

MRS GEORGE. Will you be happy if you marry her?

HOTCHKISS. No, great heaven, NO!

MRS GEORGE. Will she be happy when she finds you out?

HOTCHKISS. She’s incapable of happiness. But she’s not incapable  of the pleasure of holding a man against his will.

MRS GEORGE. Right, young man. You will tell her, please, that you  love me: before everybody, mind, the very next time you see her.

HOTCHKISS. But —

MRS GEORGE. Those are my orders, Sinjon. I cant have you marry  another woman until George is tired of you.

HOTCHKISS. Oh, if I only didnt selfishly want to obey you!

The General comes in from the garden. Mrs George goes half way to  the garden door to speak to him. Hotchkiss posts himself on the  hearth.

MRS GEORGE. Where have you been all this time?

THE GENERAL. I’m afraid my nerves were a little upset by our  conversation. I just went into the garden and had a smoke. I’m  all right now [he strolls down to the study door and presently  takes a chair at that end of the big table].

MRS GEORGE. A smoke! Why, you said she couldnt bear it.

THE GENERAL. Good heavens! I forgot! It’s such a natural thing to  do, somehow.

Lesbia comes in through the tower.

MRS GEORGE. He’s been smoking again.

LESBIA. So my nose tells me. [She goes to the end of the table  nearest the hearth, and sits down].

THE GENERAL. Lesbia: I’m very sorry. But if I gave it up, I hould become so melancholy and irritable that you would be the  first to implore me to take to it again.

MRS GEORGE. Thats true. Women drive their husbands into all sorts  of wickedness to keep them in good humor. Sinjon: be off with  you: this doesnt concern you.

LESBIA. Please dont disturb yourself, Sinjon. Boxer’s broken  heart has been worn on his sleeve too long for any pretence of  privacy.

THE GENERAL. You are cruel, Lesbia: devilishly cruel. [He sits  down, wounded].

LESBIA. You are vulgar, Boxer.

HOTCHKISS. In what way? I ask, as an expert in vulgarity.

LESBIA. In two ways. First, he talks as if the only thing of any  importance in life was which particular woman he shall marry.

Second, he has no self-control.

THE GENERAL. Women are not all the same to me, Lesbia.

MRS GEORGE. Why should they be, pray? Women are all different:  it’s the men who are all the same. Besides, what does Miss  Grantham know about either men or women? She’s got too much self-  control.

LESBIA [widening her eyes and lifting her chin haughtily] And  pray how does that prevent me from knowing as much about men and  women as people who have no self-control?

MRS GEORGE. Because it frightens people into behaving themselves  before you; and then how can you tell what they really are? Look  at me! I was a spoilt child. My brothers and sisters were well  brought up, like all children of respectable publicans. So should  I have been if I hadnt been the youngest: ten years younger than  my youngest brother. My parents were tired of doing their duty by  their children by that time; and they spoilt me for all they were  worth. I never knew what it was to want money or anything that  money could buy. When I wanted my own way, I had nothing to do  but scream for it till I got it. When I was annoyed I didnt  control myself: I scratched and called names. Did you ever, after  you were grown up, pull a grown-up woman’s hair? Did you ever  bite a grown-up man? Did you ever call both of them every name  you could lay your tongue to?

LESBIA [shivering with disgust] No.

MRS GEORGE. Well, I did. I know what a woman is like when her  hair’s pulled. I know what a man is like when he’s bit. I know  what theyre both like when you tell them what you really feel  about them. And thats how I know more of the world than you.

LESBIA. The Chinese know what a man is like when he is cut into a  thousand pieces, or boiled in oil. That sort of knowledge is of  no use to me. I’m afraid we shall never get on with one another,  Mrs George. I live like a fencer, always on guard. I like to be  confronted with people who are always on guard. I hate sloppy  people, slovenly people, people who cant sit up straight,  sentimental people.

MRS GEORGE. Oh, sentimental your grandmother! You dont learn to  hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by  attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

LESBIA. I’m not a prize-fighter, Mrs. Collins. If I cant get a  thing without the indignity of fighting for it, I do without it.

MRS GEORGE. Do you? Does it strike you that if we were all as  clever as you at doing without, there wouldnt be much to live  for, would there?

TAE GENERAL. I’m afraid, Lesbia, the things you do without are  the things you dont want.

LESBIA [surprised at his wit] Thats not bad for the silly soldier  man. Yes, Boxer: the truth is, I dont want you enough to make the  very unreasonable sacrifices required by marriage. And yet that  is exactly why I ought to be married. Just because I have the  qualities my country wants most I shall go barren to my grave;  whilst the women who have neither the strength to resist marriage  nor the intelligence to understand its infinite dishonor will  make the England of the future. [She rises and walks towards the  study].

THE GENERAL [as she is about to pass him] Well, I shall not ask  you again, Lesbia.

LESBIA. Thank you, Boxer. [She passes on to the study door].

MRS GEORGE. Youre quite done with him, are you?

LESBIA. As far as marriage is concerned, yes. The field is clear  for you, Mrs George. [She goes into the study].

The General buries his face in his hands. Mrs George comes round  the table to him.

MRS GEORGE [sympathetically] She’s a nice woman, that. And a  sort of beauty about her too, different from anyone else.

THE GENERAL [overwhelmed] Oh Mrs Collins, thank you, thank you a  thousand times. [He rises effusively]. You have thawed the long-  frozen springs [he kisses her hand]. Forgive me; and thank you:  bless you — [he again takes refuge in the garden, choked with  emotion].

MRS GEORGE [looking after him triumphantly] Just caught the dear  old warrior on the bounce, eh?

HOTCHKISS. Unfaithful to me already!

MRS GEORGE. I’m not your property, young man dont you think it.

[She goes over to him and faces him]. You understand that? [He  suddenly snatches her into his arms and kisses her]. Oh! You. are do that again, you young blackguard; and I’ll jab one of  these chairs in your face [she seizes one and holds it in  readiness]. Now you shall not see me for another month.

HOTCHKISS [deliberately] I shall pay my first visit to your  husband this afternoon.

MRS GEORGE. Youll see what he’ll say to you when I tell him what  youve just done.

HOTCHKISS. What can he say? What dare he say?

MRS GEORGE. Suppose he kicks you out of the house?

HOTCHKISS. How can he? Ive fought seven duels with sabres. Ive  muscles of iron. Nothing hurts me: not even broken bones.

Fighting is absolutely uninteresting to me because it doesnt  frighten me or amuse me; and I always win. Your husband is in all  these respects an average man, probably. He will be horribly  afraid of me; and if under the stimulus of your presence, and for  your sake, and because it is the right thing to do among vulgar  people, he were to attack me, I should simply defeat him and  humiliate him [he gradually gets his hands on the chair and takes  it from her, as his words go home phrase by phrase]. Sooner than  expose him to that, you would suffer a thousand stolen kisses,  wouldnt you?

MRS GEORGE [in utter consternation] You young viper!

HOTCHKISS. Ha ha! You are in my power. That is one of the  oversights of your code of honor for husbands: the man who can  bully them can insult their wives with impunity. Tell him if you  dare. If I choose to take ten kisses, how will you prevent me?

MRS GEORGE. You come within reach of me and I’ll not leave a hair  on your head.

HOTCHKISS [catching her wrists dexterously] Ive got your hands.

MRS GEORGE. Youve not got my teeth. Let go; or I’ll bite. I will,  I tell you. Let go.

HOTCHKISS. Bite away: I shall taste quite as nice as George.

MRS GEORGE. You beast. Let me go. Do you call yourself a  gentleman, to use your brute strength against a woman?

HOTCHKISS. You are stronger than me in every way but this. Do you  think I will give up my one advantage? Promise youll receive me  when I call this afternoon.

MRS GEORGE. After what youve just done? Not if it was to save my  life.

HOTCHKISS. I’ll amuse George.

MRS GEORGE. He wont be in.

HOTCHKISS [taken aback] Do you mean that we should be alone?

MRS GEORGE [snatching away her hands triumphantly as his grasp  relaxes] Aha! Thats cooled you, has it?

HOTCHKISS [anxiously] When will George be at home?

MRS GEORGE. It wont matter to you whether he’s at home or not.

The door will be slammed in your face whenever you call.

HOTCHKISS. No servant in London is strong enough to close a door  that I mean to keep open. You cant escape me. If you persist,  I’ll go into the coal trade; make George’s acquaintance on the  coal exchange; and coax him to take me home with him to make your  acquaintance.

MRS GEORGE. We have no use for you, young man: neither George nor  I [she sails away from him and sits down at the end of the table  near the study door].

HOTCHKISS [following her and taking the next chair round the  corner of the table] Yes you have. George cant fight for you: I an.

MRS GEORGE [turning to face him] You bully. You low bully.

HOTCHKISS. You have courage and fascination: I have courage and a  pair of fists. We’re both bullies, Polly.

MRS GEORGE. You have a mischievous tongue. Thats enough to keep  you out of my house.

HOTCHKISS. It must be rather a house of cards. A word from me to  George — just the right word, said in the right way — and down  comes your house.

MRS GEORGE. Thats why I’ll die sooner than let you into it.

HOTCHKISS. Then as surely as you live, I enter the coal trade to-  morrow. George’s taste for amusing company will deliver him into  my hands. Before a month passes your home will be at my mercy.

MRS GEORGE [rising, at bay] Do you think I’ll let myself be  driven into a trap like this?

HOTCHKISS. You are in it already. Marriage is a trap. You are  married. Any man who has the power to spoil your marriage has the  power to spoil your life. I have that power over you.

MRS GEORGE [desperate] You mean it?

HOTCHKISS. I do.

MRS GEORGE [resolutely] Well, spoil my marriage and be —

HOTCHKISS [springing up] Polly!

MRS GEORGE. Sooner than be your slave I’d face any unhappiness.

HOTCHKISS. What! Even for George?

MRS GEORGE. There must be honor between me and George, happiness  or no happiness. Do your worst.

HOTCHKISS [admiring her] Are you really game, Polly? Dare you  defy me?

MRS GEORGE. If you ask me another question I shant be able to  keep my hands off you [she dashes distractedly past him to the  other end of the table, her fingers crisping].

HOTCHKISS. That settles it. Polly: I adore you: we were born for  one another. As I happen to be a gentleman, I’ll never do  anything to annoy or injure you except that I reserve the right  to give you a black eye if you bite me; but youll never get rid  of me now to the end of your life.

MRS GEORGE. I shall get rid of you if the beadle has to brain you  with the mace for it [she makes for the tower].

HOTCHKISS [running between the table and the oak chest and across  to the tower to cut her off] You shant.

MRS GEORGE [panting] Shant I though?

HOTCHKISS. No you shant. I have one card left to play that youve  forgotten. Why were you so unlike yourself when you spoke to the  Bishop?

MRS GEORGE [agitated beyond measure] Stop. Not that. You shall  respect that if you respect nothing else. I forbid you. [He  kneels at her feet]. What are you doing? Get up: dont be a fool.

HOTCHKISS. Polly: I ask you on my knees to let me make George’s  acquaintance in his home this afternoon; and I shall remain on my  knees till the Bishop comes in and sees us. What will he think of  you then?

MRS GEORGE [beside herself] Wheres the poker? She rushes to the  fireplace; seizes the poker; and makes for Hotchkiss, who flies  to the study door. The Bishop enters just then and finds himself  between them, narrowly escaping a blow from the poker.

THE BISHOP. Dont hit him, Mrs Collins. He is my guest.

Mrs George throws down the poker; collapses into the nearest  chair; and bursts into tears. The Bishop goes to her and pats her  consolingly on the shoulder. She shudders all through at his  touch.

THE BISHOP. Come! you are in the house of your friends. Can we  help you?

MRS GEORGE [to Hotchkiss, pointing to the study] Go in there,  you. Youre not wanted here.

HOTCHKISS. You understand, Bishop, that Mrs Collins is not to  blame for this scene. I’m afraid Ive been rather irritating.

THE BISHOP. I can quite believe it, Sinjon.

Hotchkiss goes into the study.

THE BISHOP [turning to Mrs George with great kindness of manner]

I’m sorry you have been worried [he sits down on her left]. Never  mind him. A little pluck, a little gaiety of heart, a little  prayer; and youll be laughing at him.

MRS GEORGE. Never fear. I have all that. It was as much my fault  as his; and I should have put him in his place with a clip of  that poker on the side of his head if you hadnt come in.

THE BISHOP. You might have put him in his coffin that way, Mrs  Collins. And I should have been very sorry; because we are all  fond of Sinjon.

MRS GEORGE. Yes: it’s your duty to rebuke me. But do you think I ont know?

THE BISHOP. I dont rebuke you. Who am I that I should rebuke you?

Besides, I know there are discussions in which the poker is the  only possible argument.

MRS GEORGE. My lord: be earnest with me. I’m a very funny woman,  I daresay; but I come from the same workshop as you. I heard you  say that yourself years ago.

THE BISHOP. Quite so; but then I’m a very funny Bishop. Since we  are both funny people, let us not forget that humor is a divine  attribute.

MRS GEORGE. I know nothing about divine attributes or whatever  you call them; but I can feel when I am being belittled. It was  from you that I learnt first to respect myself. It was through  you that I came to be able to walk safely through many wild and  wilful paths. Dont go back on your own teaching.

THE BISHOP. I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom  you asked the way. I pointed ahead — ahead of myself as well as of  you.

MRS GEORGE [rising and standing over him almost threateningly] As  I’m a living woman this day, if I find you out to be a fraud,  I’ll kill myself.

THE BISHOP. What! Kill yourself for finding out something! For  becoming a wiser and therefore a better woman! What a bad reason!

MRS GEORGE. I have sometimes thought of killing you, and then  killing myself.

THE BISHOP. Why on earth should you kill yourself — not to mention  me?

MRS GEORGE. So that we might keep our assignation in Heaven.

THE BISHOP [rising and facing her, breathless] Mrs. Collins! YOU re Incognita Appassionata!

MRS GEORGE. You read my letters, then? [With a sigh of grateful  relief, she sits down quietly, and says] Thank you.

THE BISHOP [remorsefully] And I have broken the spell by making  you come here [sitting down again]. Can you ever forgive me?

MRS GEORGE. You couldnt know that it was only the coal merchant’s  wife, could you?

THE BISHOP. Why do you say only the coal merchant’s wife?

MRS GEORGE. Many people would laugh at it.

THE BISHOP. Poor people! It’s so hard to know the right place to  laugh, isnt it?

MRS GEORGE. I didnt mean to make you think the letters were from  a fine lady. I wrote on cheap paper; and I never could spell.

THE BISHOP. Neither could I. So that told me nothing.

MRS GEORGE. One thing I should like you to know.

THE BISHOP. Yes?

MRS GEORGE. We didnt cheat your friend. They were as good as we  could do at thirteen shillings a ton.

THE BISHOP. Thats important. Thank you for telling me.

MRS GEORGE. I have something else to say; but will you please ask  somebody to come and stay here while we talk? [He rises and turns  to the study door]. Not a woman, if you dont mind. [He nods  understandingly and passes on]. Not a man either.

THE BISHOP [stopping] Not a man and not a woman! We have no  children left, Mrs Collins. They are all grown up and married.

MRS GEORGE. That other clergyman would do.

THE BISHOP. What! The sexton?

MRS GEORGE. Yes. He didnt mind my calling him that, did he? It  was only my ignorance.

THE BISHOP. Not at all. [He opens the study door and calls]

Soames! Anthony! [To Mrs George] Call him Father: he likes it.

[Soames appears at the study door]. Mrs Collins wishes you to join  us, Anthony.

Soames looks puzzled.

MRS GEORGE. You dont mind, Dad, do you? [As this greeting visibly  gives him a shock that hardly bears out the Bishop’s advice, she  says anxiously] That was what you told me to call him, wasnt it?

SOAMES. I am called Father Anthony, Mrs Collins. But it does not  matter what you call me. [He comes in, and walks past her to the  hearth].

THE BISHOP. Mrs Collins has something to say to me that she wants  you to hear.

SOAMES. I am listening.

THE BISHOP [going back to his seat next her] Now.

MRS GEORGE. My lord: you should never have married.

SOAMES. This woman is inspired. Listen to her, my lord.

THE BISHOP [taken aback by the directness of the attack] I arried because I was so much in love with Alice that all the  difficulties and doubts and dangers of marriage seemed to me the  merest moonshine.

MRS GEORGE. Yes: it’s mean to let poor things in for so much  while theyre in that state. Would you marry now that you know  better if you were a widower?

THE BISHOP. I’m old now. It wouldnt matter.

MRS GEORGE. But would you if it did matter?

THE BISHOP. I think I should marry again lest anyone should  imagine I had found marriage unhappy with Alice.

SOAMES [sternly] Are you fonder of your wife than of your  salvation?

THE BISHOP. Oh, very much. When you meet a man who is very  particular about his salvation, look out for a woman who is very  particular about her character; and marry them to one another:  theyll make a perfect pair. I advise you to fall in love;  Anthony.

SOAMES [with horror] I!!

THE BISHOP. Yes, you! think of what it would do for you. For her  sake you would come to care unselfishly and diligently for money  instead of being selfishly and lazily indifferent to it. For her  sake you would come to care in the same way for preferment. For  her sake you would come to care for your health, your appearance,  the good opinion of your fellow creatures, and all the really  important things that make men work and strive instead of mooning  and nursing their salvation.

SOAMES. In one word, for the sake of one deadly sin I should come  to care for all the others.

THE BISHOP. Saint Anthony! Tempt him, Mrs Collins: tempt him.

MRS GEORGE [rising and looking strangely before her] Take care,  my lord: you still have the power to make me obey your commands.

And do you, Mr Sexton, beware of an empty heart.

THE BISHOP. Yes. Nature abhors a vacuum, Anthony. I would not  dare go about with an empty heart: why, the first girl I met  would fly into it by mere atmospheric pressure. Alice keeps them  out now. Mrs Collins knows.

MRS GEORGE [a faint convulsion passing like a wave over her] I now more than either of you. One of you has not yet exhausted  his first love: the other has not yet reached it. But I — I — [she  reels and is again convulsed].

THE BISHOP [saving her from falling] Whats the matter? Are you  ill, Mrs Collins? [He gets her back into her chair]. Soames:  theres a glass of water in the study — quick. [Soames hurries to  the study door.]

MRS. GEORGE. No. [Soames stops]. Dont call. Dont bring anyone.

Cant you hear anything?

THE BISHOP. Nothing unusual. [He sits by her, watching her with  intense surprise and interest].

MRS GEORGE. No music?

SOAMES. No. [He steals to the end of the table and sits on her  right, equally interested].

MRS GEORGE. Do you see nothing — not a great light?

THE BISHOP. We are still walking in darkness.

MRS GEORGE. Put your hand on my forehead: the hand with the ring.

[He does so. Her eyes close].

SOAMES [inspired to prophesy] There was a certain woman, the wife  of a coal merchant, which had been a great sinner . . .

The Bishop, startled, takes his hand away. Mrs George’s eyes open  vividly as she interrupts Soames.

MRS GEORGE. You prophesy falsely, Anthony: never in all my life  have I done anything that was not ordained for me. [More quietly]

Ive been myself. Ive not been afraid of myself. And at last I ave escaped from myself, and am become a voice for them that are  afraid to speak, and a cry for the hearts that break in silence.

SOAMES [whispering] Is she inspired?

THE BISHOP. Marvellous. Hush.

MRS GEORGE. I have earned the right to speak. I have dared: I ave gone through: I have not fallen withered in the fire: I have  come at last out beyond, to the back of Godspeed?

THE BISHOP. And what do you see there, at the back of Godspeed?

SOAMES [hungrily] Give us your message.

MRS GEORGE [with intensely sad reproach] When you loved me I gave  you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in  a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your  arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your  souls. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid  then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? Must I mend your  clothes and sweep your floors as well? Was it not enough? I paid  the price without bargaining: I bore the children without  flinching: was that a reason for heaping fresh burdens on me? I arried the child in my arms: must I carry the father too? When I pened the gates of paradise, were you blind? was it nothing to  you? When all the stars sang in your ears and all the winds swept  you into the heart of heaven, were you deaf? were you dull? was I o more to you than a bone to a dog? Was it not enough? We spent  eternity together; and you ask me for a little lifetime more. We  possessed all the universe together; and you ask me to give you  my scanty wages as well. I have given you the greatest of all  things; and you ask me to give you little things. I gave you your  own soul: you ask me for my body as a plaything. Was it not  enough? Was it not enough?

SOAMES. Do you understand this, my lord?

THE BISHOP. I have that advantage over you, Anthony, thanks to  Alice. [He takes Mrs George’s hand]. Your hand is very cold. Can  you come down to earth? Do you remember who I am, and who you  are?

MRS GEORGE. It was enough for me. I did not ask to meet you — to  touch you — [the Bishop quickly releases her hand]. When you spoke  to my soul years ago from your pulpit, you opened the doors of my  salvation to me; and now they stand open for ever. It was enough:  I have asked you for nothing since: I ask you for nothing now. I ave lived: it is enough. I have had my wages; and I am ready for  my work. I thank you and bless you and leave you. You are happier  in that than I am; for when I do for men what you did for me, I ave no thanks, and no blessing: I am their prey; and there is  no rest from their loving and no mercy from their loathing.

THE BISHOP. You must take us as we are, Mrs Collins.

SOAMES. No. Take us as we are capable of becoming.

MRS GEORGE. Take me as I am: I ask no more. [She turns her head  to the study door and cries] Yes: come in, come in.

Hotchkiss comes softly in from the study.

HOTCHKISS. Will you be so kind as to tell me whether I am  dreaming? In there I have heard Mrs Collins saying the strangest  things, and not a syllable from you two.

SOAMES. My lord; is this possession by the devil?

THE BISHOP. Or the ecstasy of a saint?

HOTCHKISS. Or the convulsion of the pythoness on the tripod?

THE BISHOP. May not the three be one?

MRS GEORGE [troubled] You are paining and tiring me with idle  questions. You are dragging me back to myself. You are tormenting  me with your evil dreams of saints and devils and — what was it? —

[striving to fathom it] the pythoness — the pythoness — [giving it  up] I dont understand. I am a woman: a human creature like  yourselves. Will you not take me as I am?

SOAMES. Yes; but shall we take you and burn you?

THE BISHOP. Or take you and canonize you?

HOTCHKISS [gaily] Or take you as a matter of course? [Swiftly to  the Bishop] We must get her out of this: it’s dangerous. [Aloud  to her] May I suggest that you shall be Anthony’s devil and the  Bishop’s saint and my adored Polly? [Slipping behind her, he  picks up her hand from her lap and kisses it over her shoulder].

MRS GEORGE [waking] What was that? Who kissed my hand? [To the  Bishop, eagerly] Was it you? [He shakes his head. She is  mortified]. I beg your pardon.

THE BISHOP. Not at all. I’m not repudiating that honor. Allow me  [he kisses her hand].

MRS GEORGE. Thank you for that. It was not the sexton, was it?

SOAMES. I!

HOTCHKISS. It was I, Polly, your ever faithful.

MRS GEORGE [turning and seeing him] Let me catch you doing it  again: thats all. How do you come there? I sent you away. [With  great energy, becoming quite herself again] What the goodness  gracious has been happening?

HOTCHKISS. As far as I can make out, you have been having a very  charming and eloquent sort of fit.

MRS GEORGE [delighted] What! My second sight! [To the Bishop] Oh,  how I have prayed that it might come to me if ever I met you! And  now it has come. How stunning! You may believe every word I said:  I cant remember it now; but it was something that was just  bursting to be said; and so it laid hold of me and said itself.

Thats how it is, you see.

Edith and Cecil Sykes come in through the tower. She has her hat  on. Leo follows. They have evidently been out together. Sykes,  with an unnatural air, half foolish, half rakish, as if he had  lost all his self-respect and were determined not to let it prey  on his spirits, throws himself into a chair at the end of the  table near the hearth and thrusts his hands into his pockets,  like Hogarth’s Rake, without waiting for Edith to sit down. She  sits in the railed chair. Leo takes the chair nearest the tower  on the long side of the table, brooding, with closed lips.

THE BISHOP. Have you been out, my dear?

EDITH. Yes.

THE BISHOP. With Cecil?

EDITH. Yes.

THE BISHOP. Have you come to an understanding?

No reply. Blank silence.

SYKES. You had better tell them, Edie.

EDITH. Tell them yourself.

The General comes in from the garden.

THE GENERAL [coming forward to the table] Can anybody oblige me  with some tobacco? Ive finished mine; and my nerves are still far  from settled.

THE BISHOP. Wait a moment, Boxer. Cecil has something important  to tell us.

SYKES. Weve done it. Thats all.

HOTCHKISS. Done what, Cecil?

SYKES. Well, what do you suppose?

EDITH. Got married, of course.

THE GENERAL. Married! Who gave you away?

SYKES [jerking his head towards the tower] This gentleman  did.[Seeing that they do not understand, he looks round and sees  that there is no one there]. Oh! I thought he came in with us.

Hes gone downstairs, I suppose. The Beadle.

THE GENERAL. The Beadle! What the devil did he do that for?

SYKES. Oh, I dont know: I didnt make any bargain with him. [To  Mrs George] How much ought I to give him, Mrs Collins?

MRS GEORGE. Five shillings. [To the Bishop] I want to rest for a  moment: there! in your study. I saw it here [she touches her  forehead].

THE BISHOP [opening the study door for her] By all means. Turn my  brother out if he disturbs you. Soames: bring the letters out  here.

SYKES. He wont be offended at my offering it, will he?

MRS GEORGE. Not he! He touches children with the mace to cure  them of ringworm for fourpence apiece. [She goes into the study.

Soames follows her].

THE GENERAL. Well, Edith, I’m a little disappointed, I must  say. However, I’m glad it was done by somebody in a public  uniform.

Mrs Bridgenorth and Lesbia come in through the tower. Mrs  Bridgenorth makes for the Bishop. He goes to her, and they meet  near the oak chest. Lesbia comes between Sykes and Edith.

THE BISHOP. Alice, my love, theyre married.

MRS BRIDGENORTH [placidly] Oh, well, thats all right. Better tell  Collins.

Soames comes back from the study with his writing materials. He  seats himself at the nearest end of the table and goes on with  his work. Hotchkiss sits down in the next chair round the table  corner, with his back to him.

LESBIA. You have both given in, have you?

EDITH. Not at all. We have provided for everything.

SOAMES. How?

EDITH. Before going to the church, we went to the office of that  insurance company — whats its name, Cecil?

SYKES. The British Family Insurance Corporation. It insures you  against poor relations and all sorts of family contingencies.

EDITH. It has consented to insure Cecil against libel actions  brought against him on my account. It will give us specially low  terms because I am a Bishop’s daughter.

SYKES. And I have given Edie my solemn word that if I ever commit  a crime I’ll knock her down before a witness and go off to  Brighton with another lady.

LESBIA. Thats what you call providing for everything! [She goes  to the middle of the table on the garden side and sits down].

LEO. Do make him see there are no worms before he knocks you  down, Edith. Wheres Rejjy?

REGINALD [coming in from the study] Here. Whats the matter?

LEO [springing up and flouncing round to him] Whats the matter!

You may well ask. While Edie and Cecil were at the insurance  office I took a taxy and went off to your lodgings; and a nice  mess I found everything in. Your clothes are in a disgraceful  state. Your liver pad has been made into a kettle-holder. Youre  no more fit to be left to yourself than a one-year old baby.

REGINALD. Oh, I cant be bothered looking after things like that.

I’m all right.

LEO. Youre not: youre a disgrace. You never consider that youre a  disgrace to me: you think only of yourself. You must come home  with me and be taken proper care of: my conscience will not allow  me to let you live like a pig. [She arranges his necktie]. You  must stay with me until I marry St John; and then we can adopt  you or something.

REGINALD [breaking loose from her and stumping off past Hotchkiss  towards the hearth] No, I’m dashed if I’ll be adopted by St John.

You can adopt him if you like.

HOTCHKISS [rising] I suggest that that would really be the better  plan, Leo. Ive a confession to make to you. I’m not the man you  took me for. Your objection to Rejjy was that he had low tastes.

REGINALD [turning] Was it? by George!

LEO. I said slovenly habits. I never thought he had really low  tastes until I saw that woman in court. How he could have chosen  such a creature and let her write to him after —

REGINALD. Is this fair? I never —

HOTCHKISS. Of course you didnt, Rejjy. Dont be silly, Leo. It’s I ho really have low tastes.

LEO. You!

HOTCHKISS. Ive fallen in love with a coal merchant’s wife. I dore her. I would rather have one of her boot-laces than a lock  of your hair. [He folds his arms and stands like a rock].

REGINALD. You damned scoundrel, how dare you throw my wife over  like that before my face? [He seems on the point of assaulting  Hotchkiss when Leo gets between them and draws Reginald away  towards the study door].

LEO. Dont take any notice of him, Rejjy. Go at once and get that  odious decree demolished or annulled or whatever it is. Tell Sir  Gorell Barnes that I have changed my mind. [To Hotchkiss] I might  have known that you were too clever to be really a gentleman.

[She takes Reginald away to the oak chest and seats him there. He  chuckles. Hotchkiss resumes his seat, brooding].

THE BISHOP. All the problems appear to be solving themselves.

LESBIA. Except mine.

THE GENERAL. But, my dear Lesbia, you see what has happened here  to-day. [Coming a little nearer and bending his face towards  hers] Now I put it to you, does it not show you the folly of not  marrying?

LESBIA. No: I cant say it does. And [rising] you have been  smoking again.

THE GENERAL. You drive me to it, Lesbia. I cant help it.

LESBIA [standing behind her chair with her hands on the back of  it and looking radiant] Well, I wont scold you to-day. I feel in  particularly good humor just now.

TIE GENERAL. May I ask why, Lesbia?

LESBIA. [drawing a large breath] To think that after all the  dangers of the morning I am still unmarried! still independent! till my own mistress! still a glorious strong-minded old maid of  old England!

Soames silently springs up and makes a long stretch from his end  of the table to shake her hand across it.

THE GENERAL. Do you find any real happiness in being your own  mistress? Would it not be more generous — would you not be happier  as some one else’s mistress —

LESBIA. Boxer!

THE GENERAL [rising, horrified] No, no, you must know, my dear  Lesbia, that I was not using the word in its improper sense. I am  sometimes unfortunate in my choice of expressions; but you know  what I mean. I feel sure you would be happier as my wife.

LESBIA. I daresay I should, in a frowsy sort of way. But I prefer  my dignity and my independence. I’m afraid I think this rage for  happiness rather vulgar.

THE GENERAL. Oh, very well, Lesbia. I shall not ask you again.

[He sits down huffily].

LESBIA. You will, Boxer; but it will be no use. [She also sits  down again and puts her hand almost affectionately on his]. Some  day I hope to make a friend of you; and then we shall get on very  nicely.

THE GENERAL [starting up again] Ha! I think you are hard, Lesbia.

I shall make a fool of myself if I remain here. Alice: I shall go  into the garden for a while.

COLLINS [appearing in the tower] I think everything is in order  now, maam.

THE GENERAL [going to him] Oh, by the way, could you oblige me  [the rest of the sentence is lost in a whisper].

COLLINS. Certainly, General. [He takes out a tobacco pouch and  hands it to the General, who takes it and goes into the garden].

LESBIA. I dont believe theres a man in England who really and  truly loves his wife as much as he loves his pipe.

THE BISHOP. By the way, what has happened to the wedding party?

SYKES. I dont know. There wasnt a soul in the church when we were  married except the pew opener and the curate who did the job.

EDITH. They had all gone home.

MRS BRIDGENORTH. But the bridesmaids?

COLLINS. Me and the beadle have been all over the place in a  couple of taxies, maam; and weve collected them all. They were a  good deal disappointed on account of their dresses, and thought  it rather irregular; but theyve agreed to come to the breakfast.

The truth is, theyre wild with curiosity to know how it all  happened. The organist held on until the organ was nigh worn out,  and himself worse than the organ. He asked me particularly to  tell you, my lord, that he held back Mendelssohn till the very  last; but when that was gone he thought he might as well go too.

So he played God Save The King and cleared out the church. He’s  coming to the breakfast to explain.

LEO. Please remember, Collins, that there is no truth whatever  in the rumor that I am separated from my husband, or that there  is, or ever has been, anything between me and Mr Hotchkiss.

COLLINS. Bless you, maam! one could always see that. [To Mrs  Bridgenorth] Will you receive here or in the hall, maam?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. In the hall. Alfred: you and Boxer must go there  and be ready to keep the first arrivals talking till we come. We  have to dress Edith. Come, Lesbia: come, Leo: we must all help.

Now, Edith. [Lesbia, Leo, and Edith go out through the tower].

Collins: we shall want you when Miss Edith’s dressed to look over  her veil and things and see that theyre all right.

COLLINS. Yes, maam. Anything you would like mentioned about Miss  Lesbia, maam?

MRS BRIDGENORTH. No. She wont have the General. I think you may  take that as final.

COLLINS. What a pity, maam! A fine lady wasted, maam. [They shake  their heads sadly; and Mrs Bridgenorth goes out through the  tower].

THE BISHOP. I’m going to the hall, Collins, to receive. Rejjy: go  and tell Boxer; and come both of you to help with the small talk.

Come, Cecil. [He goes out through the tower, followed by Sykes].

REGINALD [to Hotchkiss] Youve always talked a precious lot about  behaving like a gentleman. Well, if you think youve behaved like  a gentleman to Leo, youre mistaken. And I shall have to take her  part, remember that.

HOTCHKISS. I understand. Your doors are closed to me.

REGINALD [quickly] Oh no. Dont be hasty. I think I should like  you to drop in after a while, you know. She gets so cross and  upset when theres nobody to liven up the house a bit.

HOTCHKISS. I’ll do my best.

REGINALD [relieved] Righto. You wont mind, old chap, do you?

HOTCHKISS. It’s Fate. Ive touched coal; and my hands are black;  but theyre clean. So long, Rejjy. [They shake hands; and Reginald  goes into the garden to collect Boxer].

COLLINS. Excuse me, sir; but do you stay to breakfast? Your name  is on one of the covers; and I should like to change it if youre  not remaining.

HOTCHKISS. How do I know? Is my destiny any longer in my own  hands? Go: ask SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED.

COLLINS [awestruck] Has Mrs George taken a fancy to you, sir?

HOTCHKISS. Would she had! Worse, man, worse: Ive taken a fancy to  Mrs George.

COLLINS. Dont despair, sir: if George likes your conversation  youll find their house a very pleasant one — livelier than Mr  Reginald’s was, I daresay.

HOTCHKISS [calling] Polly.

COLLINS [promptly] Oh, if it’s come to Polly already, sir, I hould say you were all right.

Mrs George appears at the door of the study.

HOTCHKISS. Your brother-in-law wishes to know whether I’m to stay  for the wedding breakfast. Tell him.

MRS GEORGE. He stays, Bill, if he chooses to behave himself.

HOTCHKISS [to Collins] May I, as a friend of the family, have the  privilege of calling you Bill?

COLLINS. With pleasure, sir, I’m sure, sir.

HOTCHKISS. My own pet name in the bosom of my family is Sonny.

MRS GEORGE. Why didnt you tell me that before? Sonny is just the  name I wanted for you. [She pats his cheek familiarly; he rises  abruptly and goes to the hearth, where he throws himself moodily  into the railed chair] Bill: I’m not going into the hall until  there are enough people there to make a proper little court for  me. Send the Beadle for me when you think it looks good enough.

COLLINS. Right, maam. [He goes out through the tower].

Mrs George left alone with Hotchkiss and Soames, suddenly puts  her hands on Soames’s shoulders and bends over him.

MRS GEORGE. The Bishop said I was to tempt you, Anthony.

SOAMES [without looking round] Woman: go away.

MRS GEORGE. Anthony:

“When other lips and other hearts

Their tale of love shall tell

HOTCHKISS [sardonically]

In language whose excess imparts

The power they feel so well.

MRS GEORGE.

Though hollow hearts may wear a mask,

Twould break your own to see

In such a moment I but ask

That youll remember me.”

And you will, Anthony. I shall put my spell on you.

SOAMES. Do you think that a man who has sung the Magnificat and  adored the Queen of Heaven has any ears for such trash as that or  any eyes for such trash as you — saving your poor little soul’s  presence. Go home to your duties, woman.

MRS GEORGE [highly approving his fortitude] Anthony: I adopt you  as my father. Thats the talk! Give me a man whose whole life  doesnt hang on some scrubby woman in the next street; and I’ll  never let him go [she slaps him heartily on the back].

SOAMES. Thats enough. You have another man to talk to. I’m busy.

MRS GEORGE [leaving Soames and going a step or two nearer  Hotchkiss] Why arnt you like him, Sonny? Why do you hang on to a  scrubby woman in the next street?

HOTCHKISS [thoughtfully] I must apologize to Billiter.

MRS GEORGE. Who is Billiter?

HOTCHKISS. A man who eats rice pudding with a spoon. Ive been  eating rice pudding with a spoon ever since I saw you first.[He  rises]. We all eat our rice pudding with a spoon, dont we,  Soames?

SOAMES. We are members of one another. There is no need to refer  to me. In the first place, I’m busy: in the second, youll find it  all in the Church Catechism, which contains most of the new  discoveries with which the age is bursting. Of course you should  apologize to Billiter. He is your equal. He will go to the same  heaven if he behaves himself and to the same hell if he doesnt.

MRS GEORGE [sitting down] And so will my husband the coal  merchant.

HOTCHKISS. If I were your husband’s superior here I should be his  superior in heaven or hell: equality lies deeper than that. The  coal merchant and I are in love with the same woman. That settles  the question for me for ever. [He prowls across the kitchen to  the garden door, deep in thought].

SOAMES. Psha!

MRS GEORGE. You dont believe in women, do you, Anthony? He might  as well say that he and George both like fried fish.

HOTCHKISS. I do not like fried fish. Dont be low, Polly.

SOAMES. Woman: do not presume to accuse me of unbelief. And do  you, Hotchkiss, not despise this woman’s soul because she speaks  of fried fish. Some of the victims of the Miraculous Draught of  Fishes were fried. And I eat fried fish every Friday and like it. You are as ingrained a snob as ever.

HOTCHKISS [impatiently] My dear Anthony: I find you merely  ridiculous as a preacher, because you keep referring me to places  and documents and alleged occurrences in which, as a matter of  fact, I dont believe. I dont believe in anything but my own will  and my own pride and honor. Your fishes and your catechisms and  all the rest of it make a charming poem which you call your  faith. It fits you to perfection; but it doesnt fit me. I happen,  like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating  Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion].

I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed  Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of  Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of  life to a considerable extent. That beats you, you see, Soames.

Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world;  but what you fellows dont understand is that you must get at a man  through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing  that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own  little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You  are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the  native religion from your neighbor’s flowerbeds and plant your  own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in  ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to  me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British  officers; and yet you cant see the quintessential equality of all  the religions. Who are you, anyhow, that you should know better  than Mahomet or Confucius or any of the other Johnnies who have  been on this job since the world existed?

MRS GEORGE [admiring his eloquence] George will like you, Sonny. You should hear him talking about the Church.

SOAMES. Very well, then: go to your doom, both of you. There is  only one religion for me: that which my soul knows to be true;  but even irreligion has one tenet; and that is the sacredness of  marriage. You two are on the verge of deadly sin. Do you deny  that?

HOTCHKISS. You forget, Anthony: the marriage itself is the deadly  sin according to you.

SOAMES. The question is not now what I believe, but what you  believe. Take the vows with me; and give up that woman if you  have the strength and the light. But if you are still in the grip  of this world, at least respect its institutions. Do you believe  in marriage or do you not?

HOTCHKISS. My soul is utterly free from any such superstition. I olemnly declare that between this woman, as you impolitely call  her, and me, I see no barrier that my conscience bids me respect.

I loathe the whole marriage morality of the middle classes with  all my instincts. If I were an eighteenth century marquis I could  feel no more free with regard to a Parisian citizen’s wife than I o with regard to Polly. I despise all this domestic purity  business as the lowest depth of narrow, selfish, sensual, wife-  grabbing vulgarity.

MRS GEORGE [rising promptly] Oh, indeed. Then youre not coming  home with me, young man. I’m sorry; for its refreshing to have  met once in my life a man who wasnt frightened by my wedding  ring; but I’m looking out for a friend and not for a French  marquis; so youre not coming home with me.

HOTCHKISS [inexorably] Yes, I am.

MRS GEORGE. No.

HOTCHKISS. Yes. Think again. You know your set pretty well, I uppose, your petty tradesmen’s set. You know all its scandals  and hypocrisies, its jealousies and squabbles, its hundred of  divorce cases that never come into court, as well as its tens  that do.

MRS GEORGE. We’re not angels. I know a few scandals; but most of  us are too dull to be anything but good.

HOTCHKISS. Then you must have noticed that just an all murderers,  judging by their edifying remarks on the scaffold, seem to be  devout Christians, so all Christians, both male and female, are  invariably people over-flowing with domestic sentimentality and  professions of respect for the conventions they violate in  secret.

MRS GEORGE. Well, you dont expect them to give themselves away,  do you?

HOTCHKISS. They are people of sentiment, not of honor. Now, I’m  not a man of sentiment, but a man of honor. I know well what will  happen to me when once I cross the threshold of your husband’s  house and break bread with him. This marriage bond which I espise will bind me as it never seems to bind the people who  believe in it, and whose chief amusement it is to go to the  theatres where it is laughed at. Soames: youre a Communist, arnt  you?

SOAMES. I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

HOTCHKISS. And you believe that many of our landed estates were  stolen from the Church by Henry the eighth?

SOAMES. I do not merely believe that: I know it as a lawyer.

HOTCHKISS. Would you steal a turnip from one of the landlords of  those stolen lands?

SOAMES [fencing with the question] They have no right to their  lands.

HOTCHKISS. Thats not what I ask you. Would you steal a turnip  from one of the fields they have no right to?

SOAMES. I do not like turnips.

HOTCHKISS. As you are a lawyer, answer me.

SOAMES. I admit that I should probably not do so. I should  perhaps be wrong not to steal the turnip: I cant defend my  reluctance to do so; but I think I should not do so. I know I hould not do so.

HOTCHKISS. Neither shall I be able to steal George’s wife. I have  stretched out my hand for that forbidden fruit before; and I know  that my hand will always come back empty. To disbelieve in  marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray  a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of  bread and salt, is impossible. You may take me home with you,  Polly: you have nothing to fear.

MRS GEORGE. And nothing to hope?

HOTCHKISS. Since you put it in that more than kind way, Polly,  absolutely nothing.

MRS GEORGE. Hm! Like most men, you think you know everything a  woman wants, dont you? But the thing one wants most has nothing  to do with marriage at all. Perhaps Anthony here has a glimmering  of it. Eh, Anthony?

SOAMES. Christian fellowship?

MRS GEORGE. You call it that, do you?

SOAMES. What do you call it?

COLLINS [appearing in the tower with the Beadle]. Now, Polly, the  hall’s full; and theyre waiting for you.

THE BEADLE. Make way there, gentlemen, please. Way for the  worshipful the Mayoress. If you please, my lords and gentlemen.

By your leave, ladies and gentlemen: way for the Mayoress.

Mrs George takes Hotchkiss’s arm, and goes out, preceded by the  Beadle.

Soames resumes his writing tranquilly.

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET

SERMON IN CRUDE MELODRAMA

CONTENTS

PREFACE

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET

PREFACE

THE CENSORSHIP

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

A READABLE BLUEBOOK

Few books of the year 1909 can have been cheaper and more entertaining than the report of this Committee. Its full title is REPORT FROM THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE STAGE PLAYS (CENSORSHIP) TOGETHER WITH THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE COMMITTEE, MINUTES OF EVIDENCE, AND APPENDICES. What the phrase “the Stage Plays” means in this title I do not know; nor does anyone else. The number of the Bluebook is 214.

How interesting it is may be judged from the fact that it contains verbatim reports of long and animated interviews between the Committee and such witnesses as W. William Archer, Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Cecil Raleigh, Mr. John Galsworthy, Mr. Laurence Housman, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mr. W. L. Courtney, Sir William Gilbert, Mr. A. B. Walkley, Miss Lena Ashwell, Professor Gilbert Murray, Mr. George Alexander, Mr. George Edwardes, Mr. Comyns Carr, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Bishop of Southwark, Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Israel Zangwill, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir Arthur Pinero, and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, not to mention myself and a number of gentlemen less well known to the general public, but important in the world of the theatre. The publication of a book by so many famous contributors would be beyond the means of any commercial publishing firm. His Majesty’s Stationery Office sells it to all comers by weight at the very reasonable price of three-and-threepence a copy.

HOW NOT TO DO IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE STORY OF THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE

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

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

WHY THE MANAGERS LOVE THE CENSORSHIP

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

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

A TWO GUINEA INSURANCE POLICY

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

WHY THE GOVERNMENT INTERFERED

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

THE PEERS ON THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE

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

THE COMMITTEE’S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE THEATRE

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

A BAD BEGINNING

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

A COMIC INTERLUDE

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

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

AN ANTI-SHAVIAN PANIC

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

A RARE AND CURIOUS FIRST EDITION

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

THE TIMES TO THE RESCUE

The day after the refusal of the Committee to face my statement, I transferred the scene of action to the columns of The Times, which did yeoman’s service to the public on this, as on many other occasions, by treating the question as a public one without the least regard to the supposed susceptibilities of the Court on the one side, or the avowed prejudices of the Free Churches or the interests of the managers or theatrical speculators on the other. The Times published the summarized conclusions of my statement, and gave me an opportunity of saying as much as it was then advisable to say of what had occurred. For it must be remembered that, however impatient and contemptuous I might feel of the intellectual cowardice shewn by the majority of the Committee face to face with myself, it was none the less necessary to keep up its prestige in every possible way, not only for the sake of the dignity and importance of the matter with which it had to deal, and in the hope that the treatment of subsequent witnesses and the final report might make amends for a feeble beginning, but also out of respect and consideration for the minority. For it is fair to say that the majority was never more than a bare majority, and that the worst thing the Committee did — the exclusion of references to particular plays — was perpetrated in the absence of the Chairman.

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

THE COUNCIL OF TEN

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

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

THE SENTENCE

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

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

THE EXECUTION

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

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

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

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

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

THE REJECTED STATEMENT

PART I

THE WITNESS’S QUALIFICATIONS

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

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

THE DEFINITION OF IMMORALITY

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

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

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

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

These facts, glaring as they are, are disguised by the promotion of immoralities into moralities which is constantly going on. Christianity and Mohammedanism, once thought of and dealt with exactly as Anarchism is thought of and dealt with today, have become established religions; and fresh immoralities are prosecuted in their name. The truth is that the vast majority of persons professing these religions have never been anything but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a Mohammedan for the cognate reason if he had been born in Constantinople. He has never willingly tolerated immorality. He did not adopt any innovation until it had become moral; and then he adopted it, not on its merits, but solely because it had become moral. In doing so he never realized that it had ever been immoral: consequently its early struggles taught him no lesson; and he has opposed the next step in human progress as indignantly as if neither manners, customs, nor thought had ever changed since the beginning of the world. Toleration must be imposed on him as a mystic and painful duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or he will condemn the world to stagnation, which is the penalty of an inflexible morality.

WHAT TOLERATION MEANS

This must be done all the more arbitrarily because it is not possible to make the ordinary moral man understand what toleration and liberty really mean. He will accept them verbally with alacrity, even with enthusiasm, because the word toleration has been moralized by eminent Whigs; but what he means by toleration is toleration of doctrines that he considers enlightened, and, by liberty, liberty to do what he considers right: that is, he does not mean toleration or liberty at all; for there is no need to tolerate what appears enlightened or to claim liberty to do what most people consider right. Toleration and liberty have no sense or use except as toleration of opinions that are considered damnable, and liberty to do what seems wrong. Setting Englishmen free to marry their deceased wife’s sisters is not tolerated by the people who approve of it, but by the people who regard it as incestuous. Catholic Emancipation and the admission of Jews to parliament needed no toleration from Catholics and Jews: the toleration they needed was that of the people who regarded the one measure as a facilitation of idolatry, and the other as a condonation of the crucifixion. Clearly such toleration is not clamored for by the multitude or by the press which reflects its prejudices. It is essentially one of those abnegations of passion and prejudice which the common man submits to because uncommon men whom he respects as wiser than himself assure him that it must be so, or the higher affairs of human destiny will suffer.

Such admission is the more difficult because the arguments against tolerating immorality are the same as the arguments against tolerating murder and theft; and this is why the Censor seems to the inconsiderate as obviously desirable a functionary as the police magistrate. But there is this simple and tremendous difference between the cases: that whereas no evil can conceivably result from the total suppression of murder and theft, and all communities prosper in direct proportion to such suppression, the total suppression of immorality, especially in matters of religion and sex, would stop enlightenment, and produce what used to be called a Chinese civilization until the Chinese lately took to immoral courses by permitting railway contractors to desecrate the graves of their ancestors, and their soldiers to wear clothes which indecently revealed the fact that they had legs and waists and even posteriors. At about the same moment a few bold Englishwomen ventured on the immorality of riding astride their horses, a practice that has since established itself so successfully that before another generation has passed away there may not be a new side-saddle in England or a woman who could use it if there was.

THE CASE FOR TOLERATION

Accordingly, there has risen among wise and far-sighted men a perception of the need for setting certain departments of human activity entirely free from legal interference. This has nothing to do with any sympathy these liberators may themselves have with immoral views. A man with the strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay down his life for the right of every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he believes in them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation of the race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine’s centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in The Times; and only a few understood that the persecution of his works and the transportation of men for the felony of reading them was a mischievous mistake. Even less, perhaps, could they have guessed that Proudhon, who became notorious by his essay entitled “What is Property? It is Theft” would have received, on the like occasion and in the same paper, a respectful consideration which nobody would now dream of according to Lord Liverpool or Lord Brougham. Nevertheless there was a mass of evidence to shew that such a development was not only possible but fairly probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine’s or Proudhon’s writings wrecking civilization. Now there was no such evidence in favor of tolerating the cutting of throats and the robbing of tills. No case whatever can be made out for the statement that a nation cannot do without common thieves and homicidal ruffians. But an overwhelming case can be made out for the statement that no nation can prosper or even continue to exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the mightiest of the Christian empires.

THE LIMITS TO TOLERATION

But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits. For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate assassination of rulers on the ground that it is “propaganda by deed” or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or immorality, because no case can be made out in support of assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it, thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings, good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot live together. Under certain circumstances this vindication and ennoblement might act as an incitement to an actual assassination as well as to Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to advocate republicanism or royalism: it is quite another to make a hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of Charlotte Corday. Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles. The very people who would have scouted the notion of prohibiting the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty’s Theatre in London last year, might now entertain very seriously a proposal to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play completely in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was a hero, why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong case for some constitutional means of preventing the performance of a play. True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the circulation of the Bible, which was always in the hands of our regicides; but as the Roman Catholic Church does not hesitate to accept that consequence of the censorial principle, it does not invalidate the argument.

Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and The Man, though not a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far historical that it reveals the unacknowledged fact that as the Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much more than a struggle between the Servians and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by two European Powers of the first magnitude. In consequence, the performance of the play was for some time forbidden in Vienna, and more recently it gave offence in Rome at a moment when popular feeling was excited as to the relations of Austria with the Balkan States. Now if a comedy so remote from political passion as Arms and The Man can, merely because it refers to political facts, become so inconvenient and inopportune that Foreign Offices take the trouble to have its production postponed, what may not be the effect of what is called a patriotic drama produced at a moment when the balance is quivering between peace and war? Is there not something to be said for a political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not those continental governments who leave the stage practically free in every other respect, but muzzle it politically, be justified by the practical exigencies of the situation?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAW AND CENSORSHIP

The answer is that a pamphlet, a newspaper article, or a resolution moved at a political meeting can do all the mischief that a play can, and often more; yet we do not set up a permanent censorship of the press or of political meetings. Any journalist may publish an article, any demagogue may deliver a speech without giving notice to the government or obtaining its licence. The risk of such freedom is great; but as it is the price of our political liberty, we think it worth paying. We may abrogate it in emergencies by a Coercion Act, a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, or a proclamation of martial law, just as we stop the traffic in a street during a fire, or shoot thieves at sight if they loot after an earthquake. But when the emergency is past, liberty is restored everywhere except in the theatre. The Act of 1843 is a permanent Coercion Act for the theatre, a permanent suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act as far as plays are concerned, a permanent proclamation of martial law with a single official substituted for a court martial. It is, in fact, assumed that actors, playwrights, and theatre managers are dangerous and dissolute characters whose existence creates a chronic state of emergency, and who must be treated as earthquake looters are treated. It is not necessary now to discredit this assumption. It was broken down by the late Sir Henry Irving when he finally shamed the Government into extending to his profession the official recognition enjoyed by the other branches of fine art. To-day we have on the roll of knighthood actors, authors, and managers. The rogue and vagabond theory of the depravity of the theatre is as dead officially as it is in general society; and with it has perished the sole excuse for the Act of 1843 and for the denial to the theatre of the liberties secured, at far greater social risk, to the press and the platform.

There is no question here of giving the theatre any larger liberties than the press and the platform, or of claiming larger powers for Shakespear to eulogize Brutus than Lord Rosebery has to eulogize Cromwell. The abolition of the censorship does not involve the abolition of the magistrate and of the whole civil and criminal code. On the contrary it would make the theatre more effectually subject to them than it is at present; for once a play now runs the gauntlet of the censorship, it is practically placed above the law. It is almost humiliating to have to demonstrate the essential difference between a censor and a magistrate or a sanitary inspector; but it is impossible to ignore the carelessness with which even distinguished critics of the theatre assume that all the arguments proper to the support of a magistracy and body of jurisprudence apply equally to a censorship.

A magistrate has laws to administer: a censor has nothing but his own opinion. A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury: the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver. A magistrate may be strongly prejudiced against an atheist or an anti-vaccinator, just as a sanitary inspector may have formed a careful opinion that drains are less healthy than cesspools; but the magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of to swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemption certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; and in cities the inspector must compel the builder to make drains and must prosecute him if he makes cesspools. The law may be only the intolerance of the community; but it is a defined and limited intolerance. The limitation is sometimes carried so far that a judge cannot inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar who can prove that he found the door open and therefore made only an unlawful entry. On the other hand, it is sometimes so vague, as for example in the case of the American law against obscenity, that it makes the magistrate virtually a censor. But in the main a citizen can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do; and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that a single ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole street, no magistrate can imprison or otherwise restrain its members on the ground that their immorality may corrupt their neighbors. He can prevent any citizen from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of corrosive fluid, on the ground that he might use them to commit murder or inflict malicious injury. He has no general power to prevent citizens from selling unhealthy or poisonous substances, or judging for themselves what substances are unhealthy and what wholesome, what poisonous and what innocuous: what he CAN do is to prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification from selling certain specified poisons of which a schedule is kept. Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals without a licence; but everybody is forbidden to sell silver without a licence. When the law has forgotten some atrocious sin — for instance, contracting marriage whilst suffering from contagious disease — the magistrate cannot arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may abhor his wickedness. In short, no man is lawfully at the mercy of the magistrate’s personal caprice, prejudice, ignorance, superstition, temper, stupidity, resentment, timidity, ambition, or private conviction. But a playwright’s livelihood, his reputation, and his inspiration and mission are at the personal mercy of the Censor. The two do not stand, as the criminal and the judge stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the deliberative collective wisdom of the community. The only law that affects them is the Act of 1843, which empowers one of them to do absolutely and finally what he likes with the other’s work. And when it is remembered that the slave in this case is the man whose profession is that of Eschylus and Euripides, of Shakespear and Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder of a party appointment which by the nature of its duties practically excludes the possibility of its acceptance by a serious statesman or great lawyer, it will be seen that the playwrights are justified in reproaching the framers of that Act for having failed not only to appreciate the immense importance of the theatre as a most powerful instrument for teaching the nation how and what to think and feel, but even to conceive that those who make their living by the theatre are normal human beings with the common rights of English citizens. In this extremity of inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also did not trouble themselves to study the difference between a censor and a magistrate. And it will be found that almost all the people who disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain crime and disorder.

One further difference remains to be noted. As a magistrate grows old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same. The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the views and character of the man who exercises it. And what this implies can only be appreciated by those who can imagine what the effect on the mind must be of the duty of reading through every play that is produced in the kingdom year in, year out.

WHY THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN?

What may be called the high political case against censorship as a principle is now complete. The pleadings are those which have already freed books and pulpits and political platforms in England from censorship, if not from occasional legal persecution. The stage alone remains under a censorship of a grotesquely unsuitable kind. No play can be performed if the Lord Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it. And the Lord Chamberlain’s functions have no sort of relationship to dramatic literature. A great judge of literature, a farseeing statesman, a born champion of liberty of conscience and intellectual integrity — say a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham — would be a very bad Lord Chamberlain: so bad, in fact, that his exclusion from such a post may be regarded as decreed by natural law. On the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busy-body, a man to whom a matter of two inches in the length of a gentleman’s sword or the absence of a feather from a lady’s head-dress would be a graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act. The Lord Chamberlain, as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King’s Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII. To keep order among the players and musicians of that day when they performed at Court. This first appearance of the theatrical censor in politics as the whipper-in of the player, with its conception of the player as a rich man’s servant hired to amuse him, and, outside his professional duties, as a gay, disorderly, anarchic spoilt child, half privileged, half outlawed, probably as much vagabond as actor, is the real foundation of the subjection of the whole profession, actors, managers, authors and all, to the despotic authority of an officer whose business it is to preserve decorum among menials. It must be remembered that it was not until a hundred years later, in the reaction against the Puritans, that a woman could appear on the English stage without being pelted off as the Italian actresses were. The theatrical profession was regarded as a shameless one; and it is only of late years that actresses have at last succeeded in living down the assumption that actress and prostitute are synonymous terms, and made good their position in respectable society. This makes the survival of the old ostracism in the Act of 1843 intolerably galling; and though it explains the apparently unaccountable absurdity of choosing as Censor of dramatic literature an official whose functions and qualifications have nothing whatever to do with literature, it also explains why the present arrangement is not only criticized as an institution, but resented as an insult.

THE DIPLOMATIC OBJECTION TO THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN

There is another reason, quite unconnected with the Susceptibilities of authors, which makes it undesirable that a member of the King’s Household should be responsible for the character and tendency of plays. The drama, dealing with all departments of human life, is necessarily political. Recent events have shown — what indeed needed no demonstration — that it is impossible to prevent inferences being made, both at home and abroad, from the action of the Lord Chamberlain. The most talked-about play of the present year (1909), An Englishman’s Home, has for its main interest an invasion of England by a fictitious power which is understood, as it is meant to be understood, to represent Germany. The lesson taught by the play is the danger of invasion and the need for every English citizen to be a soldier. The Lord Chamberlain licensed this play, but refused to license a parody of it. Shortly afterwards he refused to license another play in which the fear of a German invasion was ridiculed. The German press drew the inevitable inference that the Lord Chamberlain was an anti-German alarmist, and that his opinions were a reflection of those prevailing in St. James’s Palace. Immediately after this, the Lord Chamberlain licensed the play. Whether the inference, as far as the Lord Chamberlain was concerned, was justified, is of no consequence. What is important is that it was sure to be made, justly or unjustly, and extended from the Lord Chamberlain to the Throne.

THE OBJECTION OF COURT ETIQUET

There is another objection to the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship which affects the author’s choice of subject. Formerly very little heed was given in England to the susceptibilities of foreign courts. For instance, the notion that the Mikado of Japan should be as sacred to the English playwright as he is to the Japanese Lord Chamberlain would have seemed grotesque a generation ago. Now that the maintenance of entente cordiale between nations is one of the most prominent and most useful functions of the crown, the freedom of authors to deal with political subjects, even historically, is seriously threatened by the way in which the censorship makes the King responsible for the contents of every play. One author — the writer of these lines, in fact — has long desired to dramatize the life of Mahomet. But the possibility of a protest from the Turkish Ambassador — or the fear of it — causing the Lord Chamberlain to refuse to license such a play has prevented the play from being written. Now, if the censorship were abolished, nobody but the author could be held responsible for the play. The Turkish Ambassador does not now protest against the publication of Carlyle’s essay on the prophet, or of the English translations of the Koran in the prefaces to which Mahomet is criticized as an impostor, or of the older books in which he is reviled as Mahound and classed with the devil himself. But if these publications had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain it would be impossible for the King to allow the licence to be issued, as he would thereby be made responsible for the opinions expressed. This restriction of the historical drama is an unmixed evil. Great religious leaders are more interesting and more important subjects for the dramatist than great conquerors. It is a misfortune that public opinion would not tolerate a dramatization of Mahomet in Constantinople. But to prohibit it here, where public opinion would tolerate it, is an absurdity which, if applied in all directions, would make it impossible for the Queen to receive a Turkish ambassador without veiling herself, or the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s to display a cross on the summit of their Cathedral in a city occupied largely and influentially by Jews. Court etiquet is no doubt an excellent thing for court ceremonies; but to attempt to impose it on the drama is about as sensible as an attempt to make everybody in London wear court dress.

WHY NOT AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP?

In the above cases the general question of censorship is separable from the question of the present form of it. Every one who condemns the principle of censorship must also condemn the Lord Chamberlain’s control of the drama; but those who approve of the principle do not necessarily approve of the Lord Chamberlain being the Censor ex officio. They may, however, be entirely opposed to popular liberties, and may conclude from what has been said, not that the stage should be made as free as the church, press, or platform, but that these institutions should be censored as strictly as the stage. It will seem obvious to them that nothing is needed to remove all objections to a censorship except the placing of its powers in better hands.

Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much less humiliating to the persons immediately concerned, the inherent vices of the institution would not be appreciably less disastrous. They would even be aggravated, for reasons which do not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be followed with some attention.

It is often said that the public is the real censor. That this is to some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are licensed and produced in London have to be expurgated for the provinces. This does not mean that the provinces are more strait-laced, but simply that in many provincial towns there is only one theatre for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; so that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can conduct His Majesty’s Theatre without the slightest regard to the tastes of the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for lovers of Shakespear. Thus the farcical comedy which has scandalized the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests is played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton with these same jests slurred over so as to be imperceptible by even the most prurient spectator. The public, in short, takes care that nobody shall outrage it.

But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the reading of her pupils. Even when it wishes to be debauched, no censor can — or at least no censor does — stand out against it. If a play is irresistibly amusing, it gets licensed no matter what its moral aspect may be. A brilliant instance is the Divorcons of the late Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest that any English manager in his senses would have ventured to produce. Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with the public, and knows that his office could not survive a widespread unpopularity. In short, the support of the mob — that is, of the unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular sentiment — is indispensable to the censorship as it exists to-day in England. This is the explanation of the toleration by the Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious plays. It is not long since a judge before whom a licensed play came in the course of a lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment at the licensing of such a work. Eminent churchmen have made similar protests. In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage has been carried to a point at which a step further would have involved the interference of the police. Provided the treatment of the theme is gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending happy, the indulgence of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on. On the other hand, anything unpleasing and unpopular is rigorously censored. Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do not deal with them are commonly said not to be plays at all. But if any of the unpleasing consequences of adultery and prostitution — for instance, an UNSUCCESSFUL illegal operation (successful ones are tolerated) or venereal disease — are mentioned, the play is prohibited. This principle of shielding the playgoer from unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was submitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute with all the male characters in the piece was described as “immoral,” the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves. The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight. But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, the net result being that vice is made delightful and virtue banned by the very institution which is supported on the understanding that it produces exactly the opposite result.

THE WEAKNESS OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S DEPARTMENT

Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is with apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the face of the mob? Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with playwrights below the average as with those above it? The answer is that its position is really a very weak one. It has no direct co-ercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and recover the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of arrest or imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of autocracy. What it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre at which its orders are disobeyed. When it happens that a theatre is about to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan Methodists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in private, but really in full publicity, without risk. The prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been performed in London in this way with complete impunity. But the impunity is not confined to condemned theatres. Not long ago a West End manager allowed a prohibited play to be performed at his theatre, taking his chance of losing his licence in consequence. The event proved that the manager was justified in regarding the risk as negligible; for the Lord Chamberlain’s remedy — the closing of a popular and well-conducted theatre — was far too extreme to be practicable. Unless the play had so outraged public opinion as to make the manager odious and provoke a clamor for his exemplary punishment, the Lord Chamberlain could only have had his revenge at the risk of having his powers abolished as unsupportably tyrannical.

The Lord Chamberlain then has his powers so adjusted that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it. If our judges had so little power there would be no law in England. If our churches had so much, there would be no theatre, no literature, no science, no art, possibly no England. The institution is at once absurdly despotic and abjectly weak.

AN ENLIGHTENED CENSORSHIP STILL WORSE THAN THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S

Clearly a censorship of judges, bishops, or statesmen would not be in this abject condition. It would no doubt make short work of the coarse and vicious pieces which now enjoy the protection of the Lord Chamberlain, or at least of those of them in which the vulgarity and vice are discoverable by merely reading the prompt copy. But it would certainly disappoint the main hope of its advocates: the hope that it would protect and foster the higher drama. It would do nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it would inevitably suppress it more completely than the Lord Chamberlain does, because it would understand it better. The one play of Ibsen’s which is prohibited on the English stage, Ghosts, is far less subversive than A Doll’s House. But the Lord Chamberlain does not meddle with such far-reaching matters as the tendency of a play. He refuses to license Ghosts exactly as he would refuse to license Hamlet if it were submitted to him as a new play. He would license even Hamlet if certain alterations were made in it. He would disallow the incestuous relationship between the King and Queen. He would probably insist on the substitution of some fictitious country for Denmark in deference to the near relations of our reigning house with that realm. He would certainly make it an absolute condition that the closet scene, in which a son, in an agony of shame and revulsion, reproaches his mother for her relations with his uncle, should be struck out as unbearably horrifying and improper. But compliance with these conditions would satisfy him. He would raise no speculative objections to the tendency of the play.

This indifference to the larger issues of a theatrical performance could not be safely predicated of an enlightened censorship. Such a censorship might be more liberal in its toleration of matters which are only objected to on the ground that they are not usually discussed in general social conversation or in the presence of children; but it would presumably have a far deeper insight to and concern for the real ethical tendency of the play. For instance, had it been in existence during the last quarter of a century, it would have perceived that those plays of Ibsen’s which have been licensed without question are fundamentally immoral to an altogether extraordinary degree. Every one of them is a deliberate act of war on society as at present constituted. Religion, marriage, ordinary respectability, are subjected to a destructive exposure and criticism which seems to mere moralists — that is, to persons of no more than average depth of mind — to be diabolical. It is no exaggeration to say that Ibsen gained his overwhelming reputation by undertaking a task of no less magnitude than changing the mind of Europe with the view of changing its morals. Now you cannot license work of that sort without making yourself responsible for it. The Lord Chamberlain accepted the responsibility because he did not understand it or concern himself about it. But what really enlightened and conscientious official dare take such a responsibility? The strength of character and range of vision which made Ibsen capable of it are not to be expected from any official, however eminent. It is true that an enlightened censor might, whilst shrinking even with horror from Ibsen’s views, perceive that any nation which suppressed Ibsen would presently find itself falling behind the nations which tolerated him just as Spain fell behind England; but the proper action to take on such a conviction is the abdication of censorship, not the practise of it. As long as a censor is a censor, he cannot endorse by his licence opinions which seem to him dangerously heretical.

We may, therefore, conclude that the more enlightened a censorship is, the worse it would serve us. The Lord Chamberlain, an obviously unenlightened Censor, prohibits Ghosts and licenses all the rest of Ibsen’s plays. An enlightened censorship would possibly license Ghosts; but it would certainly suppress many of the other plays. It would suppress subversiveness as well as what is called bad taste. The Lord Chamberlain prohibits one play by Sophocles because, like Hamlet, it mentions the subject of incest; but an enlightened censorship might suppress all the plays of Euripides because Euripides, like Ibsen, was a revolutionary Freethinker. Under the Lord Chamberlain, we can smuggle a good deal of immoral drama and almost as much coarsely vulgar and furtively lascivious drama as we like. Under a college of cardinals, or bishops, or judges, or any other conceivable form of experts in morals, philosophy, religion, or politics, we should get little except stagnant mediocrity.

THE PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES OF CENSORSHIP

There is, besides, a crushing material difficulty in the way of an enlightened censorship. It is not too much to say that the work involved would drive a man of any intellectual rank mad. Consider, for example, the Christmas pantomimes. Imagine a judge of the High Court, or an archbishop, or a Cabinet Minister, or an eminent man of letters, earning his living by reading through the mass of trivial doggerel represented by all the pantomimes which are put into rehearsal simultaneously at the end of every year. The proposal to put such mind-destroying drudgery upon an official of the class implied by the demand for an enlightened censorship falls through the moment we realize what it implies in practice.

Another material difficulty is that no play can be judged by merely reading the dialogue. To be fully effective a censor should witness the performance. The mise-en-scene of a play is as much a part of it as the words spoken on the stage. No censor could possibly object to such a speech as “Might I speak to you for a moment, miss”; yet that apparently innocent phrase has often been made offensively improper on the stage by popular low comedians, with the effect of changing the whole character and meaning of the play as understood by the official Examiner. In one of the plays of the present season, the dialogue was that of a crude melodrama dealing in the most conventionally correct manner with the fortunes of a good-hearted and virtuous girl. Its morality was that of the Sunday school. But the principal actress, between two speeches which contained no reference to her action, changed her underclothing on the stage? It is true that in this case the actress was so much better than her part that she succeeded in turning what was meant as an impropriety into an inoffensive stroke of realism; yet it is none the less clear that stage business of this character, on which there can be no check except the actual presence of a censor in the theatre, might convert any dialogue, however innocent, into just the sort of entertainment against which the Censor is supposed to protect the public.

It was this practical impossibility that prevented the London County Council from attempting to apply a censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s pattern to the London music halls. A proposal to examine all entertainments before permitting their performance was actually made; and it was abandoned, not in the least as contrary to the liberty of the stage, but because the executive problem of how to do it at once reduced the proposal to absurdity. Even if the Council devoted all its time to witnessing rehearsals of variety performances, and putting each item to the vote, possibly after a prolonged discussion followed by a division, the work would still fall into arrear. No committee could be induced to undertake such a task. The attachment of an inspector of morals to each music hall would have meant an appreciable addition to the ratepayers’ burden. In the face of such difficulties the proposal melted away. Had it been pushed through, and the inspectors appointed, each of them would have become a censor, and the whole body of inspectors would have become a police des moeurs. Those who know the history of such police forces on the continent will understand how impossible it would be to procure inspectors whose characters would stand the strain of their opportunities of corruption, both pecuniary and personal, at such salaries as a local authority could be persuaded to offer.

It has been suggested that the present censorship should be supplemented by a board of experts, who should deal, not with the whole mass of plays sent up for license, but only those which the Examiner of Plays refuses to pass. As the number of plays which the Examiner refuses to pass is never great enough to occupy a Board in permanent session with regular salaries, and as casual employment is not compatible with public responsibility, this proposal would work out in practice as an addition to the duties of some existing functionary. A Secretary of State would be objectionable as likely to be biased politically. An ecclesiastical referee might be biassed against the theatre altogether. A judge in chambers would be the proper authority. This plan would combine the inevitable intolerance of an enlightened censorship with the popular laxity of the Lord Chamberlain.

The judge would suppress the pioneers, whilst the Examiner of Plays issued two guinea certificates for the vulgar and vicious plays. For this reason the plan would no doubt be popular; but it would be very much as a relaxation of the administration of the Public Health Acts accompanied by the cheapening of gin would be popular.

THE ARBITRATION PROPOSAL

On the occasion of a recent deputation of playwrights to the Prime Minister it was suggested that if a censorship be inevitable, provision should be made for an appeal from the Lord Chamberlain in cases of refusal of licence. The authors of this suggestion propose that the Lord Chamberlain shall choose one umpire and the author another. The two umpires shall then elect a referee, whose decision shall be final.

This proposal is not likely to be entertained by constitutional lawyers. It is a naive offer to accept the method of arbitration in what is essentially a matter, not between one private individual or body and another, but between a public offender and the State. It will presumably be ruled out as a proposal to refer a case of manslaughter to arbitration would be ruled out. But even if it were constitutionally sound, it bears all the marks of that practical inexperience which leads men to believe that arbitration either costs nothing or is at least cheaper than law. Who is to pay for the time of the three arbitrators, presumably men of high professional standing? The author may not be able: the manager may not be willing: neither of them should be called upon to pay for a public service otherwise than by their contributions to the revenue. Clearly the State should pay. But even so, the difficulties are only beginning. A licence is seldom refused except on grounds which are controversial.

The two arbitrators selected by the opposed parties to the controversy are to agree to leave the decision to a third party unanimously chosen by themselves. That is very far from being a simple solution. An attempt to shorten and simplify the passing of the Finance Bill by referring it to an arbitrator chosen unanimously by Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour might not improbably cost more and last longer than a civil war. And why should the chosen referee — if he ever succeeded in getting chosen — be assumed to be a safer authority than the Examiner of Plays? He would certainly be a less responsible one: in fact, being (however eminent) a casual person called in to settle a single case, he would be virtually irresponsible. Worse still, he would take all responsibility away from the Lord Chamberlain, who is at least an official of the King’s Household and a nominee of the Government. The Lord Chamberlain, with all his shortcomings, thinks twice before he refuses a licence, knowing that his refusal is final and may promptly be made public. But if he could transfer his responsibility to an arbitrator, he would naturally do so whenever he felt the slightest misgiving, or whenever, for diplomatic reasons, the licence would come more gracefully from an authority unconnected with the court. These considerations, added to the general objection to the principle of censorship, seem sufficient to put the arbitration expedient quite out of the question.

END OF THE FIRST PART OF THE REJECTED STATEMENT.

THE REJECTED STATEMENT: PART TWO

THE LICENSING OF THEATRES

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LICENSING AND CENSORSHIP

It must not be concluded that the uncompromising abolition of all censorship involves the abandonment of all control and regulation of theatres. Factories are regulated in the public interest; but there is no censorship of factories. For example, many persons are sincerely convinced that cotton clothing is unhealthy; that alcoholic drinks are demoralizing; and that playing-cards are the devil’s picture-books. But though the factories in which cotton, whiskey, and cards are manufactured are stringently regulated under the factory code and the Public Health and Building Acts, the inspectors appointed to carry out these Acts never go to a manufacturer and inform him that unless he manufactures woollens instead of cottons, ginger-beer instead of whiskey, Bibles instead of playing-cards, he will be forbidden to place his products on the market. In the case of premises licensed for the sale of spirits the authorities go a step further. A public-house differs from a factory in the essential particular that whereas disorder in a factory is promptly and voluntarily suppressed, because every moment of its duration involves a measurable pecuniary loss to the proprietor, disorder in a public-house may be a source of profit to the proprietor by its attraction for disorderly customers. Consequently a publican is compelled to obtain a licence to pursue his trade; and this licence lasts only a year, and need not be renewed if his house has been conducted in a disorderly manner in the meantime.

PROSTITUTION AND DRINK IN THEATRES

The theatre presents the same problem as the public-house in respect to disorder. To begin with, a theatre is actually a place licensed for the sale of spirits. The bars at a London theatre can be let without difficulty for 30 pounds a week and upwards. And though it is clear that nobody will pay from a shilling to half a guinea for access to a theatre bar when he can obtain access to an ordinary public-house for nothing, there is no law to prevent the theatre proprietor from issuing free passes broadcast and recouping himself by the profit on the sale of drink. Besides, there may be some other attraction than the sale of drink. When this attraction is that of the play no objection need be made. But it happens that the auditorium of a theatre, with its brilliant lighting and luxurious decorations, makes a very effective shelter and background for the display of fine dresses and pretty faces. Consequently theatres have been used for centuries in England as markets by prostitutes. From the Restoration to the days of Macready all theatres were made use of in this way as a matter of course; and to this, far more than to any prejudice against dramatic art, we owe the Puritan formula that the theatre door is the gate of hell. Macready had a hard struggle to drive the prostitutes from his theatre; and since his time the London theatres controlled by the Lord Chamberlain have become respectable and even socially pretentious. But some of the variety theatres still derive a revenue by selling admissions to women who do not look at the performance, and men who go to purchase or admire the women. And in the provinces this state of things is by no means confined to the variety theatres. The real attraction is sometimes not the performance at all. The theatre is not really a theatre: it is a drink shop and a prostitution market; and the last shred of its disguise is stripped by the virtually indiscriminate issue of free tickets to the men. Access to the stage is so easily obtained; and the plays preferred by the management are those in which the stage is filled with young women who are not in any serious technical sense of the word actresses at all. Considering that all this is now possible at any theatre, and actually occurs at some theatres, the fact that our best theatres are as respectable as they are is much to their credit; but it is still an intolerable evil that respectable managers should have to fight against the free tickets and disorderly housekeeping of unscrupulous competitors. The dramatic author is equally injured. He finds that unless he writes plays which make suitable sideshows for drinking-bars and brothels, he may be excluded from towns where there is not room for two theatres, and where the one existing theatre is exploiting drunkenness and prostitution instead of carrying on a legitimate dramatic business. Indeed everybody connected with the theatrical profession suffers in reputation from the detestable tradition of such places, against which the censorship has proved quite useless.

Here we have a strong case for applying either the licensing system or whatever better means may be devized for securing the orderly conduct of houses of public entertainment, dramatic or other. Liberty must, no doubt, be respected in so far that no manager should have the right to refuse admission to decently dressed, sober, and well-conducted persons, whether they are prostitutes, soldiers in uniform, gentlemen not in evening dress, Indians, or what not; but when disorder is stopped, disorderly persons will either cease to come or else reform their manners. It is, however, quite arguable that the indiscriminate issue of free admissions, though an apparently innocent and good-natured, and certainly a highly popular proceeding, should expose the proprietor of the theatre to the risk of a refusal to renew his licence.

WHY THE MANAGERS DREAD LOCAL CONTROL

All this points to the transfer of the control of theatres from the Lord Chamberlain to the municipality. And this step is opposed by the long-run managers, partly because they take it for granted that municipal control must involve municipal censorship of plays, so that plays might be licensed in one town and prohibited in the next, and partly because, as they have no desire to produce plays which are in advance of public opinion, and as the Lord Chamberlain in every other respect gives more scandal by his laxity than trouble by his severity, they find in the present system a cheap and easy means of procuring a certificate which relieves them of all social responsibility, and provides them with so strong a weapon of defence in case of a prosecution that it acts in practice as a bar to any such proceedings. Above all, they know that the Examiner of Plays is free from the pressure of that large body of English public opinion already alluded to, which regards the theatre as the Prohibitionist Teetotaller regards the public-house: that is, as an abomination to be stamped out unconditionally. The managers rightly dread this pressure more than anything else; and they believe that it is so strong in local governments as to be a characteristic bias of municipal authority. In this they are no doubt mistaken. There is not a municipal authority of any importance in the country in which a proposal to stamp out the theatre, or even to treat it illiberally, would have a chance of adoption. Municipal control of the variety theatres (formerly called music halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the one particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That particular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked or apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas those actresses and skirt dancers who have brought the peculiar aphrodisiac effect which is objected to to the highest pitch of efficiency wear twice as many petticoats as an ordinary lady does, and seldom exhibit more than their ankles. Unfortunately, municipal councillors persist in confusing decency with drapery; and both in London and the provinces certain positively edifying performances have been forbidden or withdrawn under pressure, and replaced by coarse and vicious ones. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the Lord Chamberlain would have been any more tolerant; but this does not alter the fact that the municipal licensing authorities have actually used their powers to set up a censorship which is open to all the objections to censorship in general, and which, in addition, sets up the objection from which central control is free: namely, the impossibility of planning theatrical tours without the serious commercial risk of having the performance forbidden in some of the towns booked. How can this be prevented?

DESIRABLE LIMITATIONS OF LOCAL CONTROL

The problem is not a difficult one. The municipality can be limited just as the monarchy is limited. The Act transferring theatres to local control can be a charter of the liberties of the stage as well as an Act to reform administration. The power to refuse to grant or renew a licence to a theatre need not be an arbitrary one. The municipality may be required to state the ground of refusal; and certain grounds can be expressly declared as unlawful; so that it shall be possible for the manager to resort to the courts for a mandamus to compel the authority to grant a licence. It can be declared unlawful for a licensing authority to demand from the manager any disclosure of the nature of any entertainment he proposes to give, or to prevent its performance, or to refuse to renew his licence on the ground that the tendency of his entertainments is contrary to religion and morals, or that the theatre is an undesirable institution, or that there are already as many theatres as are needed, or that the theatre draws people away from the churches, chapels, mission halls, and the like in its neighborhood. The assumption should be that every citizen has a right to open and conduct a theatre, and therefore has a right to a licence unless he has forfeited that right by allowing his theatre to become a disorderly house, or failing to provide a building which complies with the regulations concerning sanitation and egress in case of fire, or being convicted of an offence against public decency. Also, the licensing powers of the authority should not be delegated to any official or committee; and the manager or lessee of the theatre should have a right to appear in person or by counsel to plead against any motion to refuse to grant or renew his licence. With these safeguards the licensing power could not be stretched to censorship. The manager would enjoy liberty of conscience as far as the local authority is concerned; but on the least attempt on his part to keep a disorderly house under cover of opening a theatre he would risk his licence.

But the managers will not and should not be satisfied with these limits to the municipal power. If they are deprived of the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, and at the same time efficiently protected against every attempt at censorship by the licensing authority, the enemies of the theatre will resort to the ordinary law, and try to get from the prejudices of a jury what they are debarred from getting from the prejudices of a County Council or City Corporation. Moral Reform Societies, “Purity” Societies, Vigilance Societies, exist in England and America for the purpose of enforcing the existing laws against obscenity, blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, the debauchery of children, prostitution and so forth. The paid officials of these societies, in their anxiety to produce plenty of evidence of their activity in the annual reports which go out to the subscribers, do not always discriminate between an obscene postcard and an artistic one, or to put it more exactly, between a naked figure and an indecent one. They often combine a narrow but terribly sincere sectarian bigotry with a complete ignorance of art and history. Even when they have some culture, their livelihood is at the mercy of subscribers and committee men who have none. If these officials had any power of distinguishing between art and blackguardism, between morality and virtue, between immorality and vice, between conscientious heresy and mere baseness of mind and foulness of mouth, they might be trusted by theatrical managers not to abuse the powers of the common informer. As it is, it has been found necessary, in order to enable good music to be performed on Sunday, to take away these powers in that particular, and vest them solely in the Attorney-General. This disqualification of the common informer should be extended to the initiation of all proceedings of a censorial character against theatres. Few people are aware of the monstrous laws against blasphemy which still disgrace our statute book. If any serious attempt were made to carry them out, prison accommodation would have to be provided for almost every educated person in the country, beginning with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Until some government with courage and character enough to repeal them comes into power, it is not too much to ask that such infamous powers of oppression should be kept in responsible hands and not left at the disposal of every bigot ignorant enough to be unaware of the social dangers of persecution. Besides, the common informer is not always a sincere bigot, who believes he is performing an action of signal merit in silencing and ruining a heretic. He is unfortunately just as often a blackmailer, who has studied his powers as a common informer in order that he may extort money for refraining from exercising them. If the manager is to be responsible he should be made responsible to a responsible functionary. To be responsible to every fanatical ignoramus who chooses to prosecute him for exhibiting a cast of the Hermes of Praxiteles in his vestibule, or giving a performance of Measure for Measure, is mere slavery. It is made bearable at present by the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s certificate. But when that is no longer available, the common informer must be disarmed if the manager is to enjoy security.

SUMMARY

The general case against censorship as a principle, and the particular case against the existing English censorship and against its replacement by a more enlightened one, is now complete. The following is a recapitulation of the propositions and conclusions contended for.

1. The question of censorship or no censorship is a question of high political principle and not of petty policy.

2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on the stage, and even their protection against the prejudices and superstitions which necessarily enter largely into morality and public opinion, are essential to the welfare of the nation.

3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain does not only intentionally suppress heresy and challenges to morality in their serious and avowed forms, but unintentionally gives the special protection of its official licence to the most extreme impropriety that the lowest section of London playgoers will tolerate in theatres especially devoted to their entertainment, licensing everything that is popular and forbidding any attempt to change public opinion or morals.

4. The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship is open to the special objection that its application to political plays is taken to indicate the attitude of the Crown on questions of domestic and foreign policy, and that it imposes the limits of etiquet on the historical drama.

5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind, exercised by the most eminent available authorities, would prove in practice more disastrous than the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, because the more eminent its members were the less possible it would be for them to accept the responsibility for heresy or immorality by licensing them, and because the many heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Chamberlain because he does not understand them, would be understood and suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship.

6. A reconstructed and enlightened censorship would be armed with summary and effective powers which would stop the evasions by which heretical and immoral plays are now performed in spite of the Lord Chamberlain; and such powers would constitute a tyranny which would ruin the theatre spiritually by driving all independent thinkers from the drama into the uncensored forms of art.

7. The work of critically examining all stage plays in their written form, and of witnessing their performance in order to see that the sense is not altered by the stage business, would, even if it were divided among so many officials as to be physically possible, be mentally impossible to persons of taste and enlightenment.

8. Regulation of theatres is an entirely different matter from censorship, inasmuch as a theatre, being not only a stage, but a place licensed for the sale of spirits, and a public resort capable of being put to disorderly use, and needing special provision for the safety of audiences in cases of fire, etc., cannot be abandoned wholly to private control, and may therefore reasonably be made subject to an annual licence like those now required before allowing premises to be used publicly for music and dancing.

9. In order to prevent the powers of the licensing authority being abused so as to constitute a virtual censorship, any Act transferring the theatres to the control of a licensing authority should be made also a charter of the rights of dramatic authors and managers by the following provisions:

A. The public prosecutor (the Attorney-General) alone should have the right to set the law in operation against the manager of a theatre or the author of a play in respect of the character of the play or entertainment.

B. No disclosure of the particulars of a theatrical entertainment shall be required before performance.

C. Licences shall not be withheld on the ground that the existence of theatres is dangerous to religion and morals, or on the ground that any entertainment given or contemplated is heretical or immoral.

D. The licensing area shall be no less than that of a County Council or City Corporation, which shall not delegate its licensing powers to any minor local authority or to any official or committee; it shall decide all questions affecting the existence of a theatrical licence by vote of the entire body; managers, lessees, and proprietors of theatres shall have the right to plead, in person or by counsel, against a proposal to withhold a licence; and the licence shall not be withheld except for stated reasons, the validity of which shall be subject to the judgment of the high courts.

E. The annual licence, once granted, shall not be cancelled or suspended unless the manager has been convicted by public prosecution of an offence against the ordinary laws against disorderly housekeeping, indecency, blasphemy, etc., except in cases where some structural or sanitary defect in the building necessitates immediate action for the protection of the public against physical injury.

F. No licence shall be refused on the ground that the proximity of the theatre to a church, mission hall, school, or other place of worship, edification, instruction, or entertainment (including another theatre) would draw the public away from such places into its own doors.

PREFACE RESUMED

MR. GEORGE ALEXANDER’S PROTEST

On the facts mentioned in the foregoing statement, and in my evidence before the Joint Select Committee, no controversy arose except on one point. Mr. George Alexander protested vigorously and indignantly against my admission that theatres, like public-houses, need special control on the ground that they can profit by disorder, and are sometimes conducted with that end in view. Now, Mr. Alexander is a famous actor-manager; and it is very difficult to persuade the public that the more famous an actor-manager is the less he is likely to know about any theatre except his own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment’s consideration would have shown that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself part of the play; producing the works of long-departed authors; and, to the extent to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily making his theatre unlike any other theatre. When he went to the provinces or to America, the theatres to which he went were swept and garnished for him, and their staffs replaced — as far as he came in contact with them — by his own lieutenants. In the end, there was hardly a first-nighter in his gallery who did not know more about the London theatres and the progress of dramatic art than he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable had told him the real history and character of many provincial theatres, he would have denounced that chief constable as an ignorant libeller of a noble profession. But the constable would have been right for all that. Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did not become a London manager until he had roughed it for years in the provinces, how much more true must it be of, say, Mr. George Alexander, whose successful march through his profession has passed as far from the purlieus of our theatrical world as the king’s naval career from the Isle of Dogs? The moment we come to that necessary part of the censorship question which deals with the control of theatres from the point of view of those who know how much money can be made out of them by managers who seek to make the auditorium attractive rather than the stage, you find the managers divided into two sections. The first section consists of honorable and successful managers like Mr. Alexander, who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with perfect sincerity and indignant vehemence, that they exist except, perhaps, in certain notorious variety theatres. The other is the silent section which knows better, but is very well content to be publicly defended and privately amused by Mr. Alexander’s innocence. To accept a West End manager as an expert in theatres because he is an actor is much as if we were to accept the organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral as an expert on music halls because he is a musician. The real experts are all in the conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre. And they are so successful that even the police do not know as much as they should.

The police should have been examined by the Committee, and the whole question of the extent to which theatres are disorderly houses in disguise sifted to the bottom. For it is on this point that we discover behind the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists who are restrained by the censorship from debauching the stage, the reality of the corrupt managers and theatre proprietors who actually do debauch it without let or hindrance from the censorship. The whole case for giving control over theatres to local authorities rests on this reality.

ELIZA AND HER BATH

The persistent notion that a theatre is an Alsatia where the king’s writ does not run, and where any wickedness is possible in the absence of a special tribunal and a special police, was brought out by an innocent remark made by Sir William Gilbert, who, when giving evidence before the Committee, was asked by Colonel Lockwood whether a law sufficient to restrain impropriety in books would also restrain impropriety in plays. Sir William replied: “I should say there is a very wide distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read that ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped into her bath’ without any harm; but I think if that were presented on the stage it would be shocking.” All the stupid and inconsiderate people seized eagerly on this illustration as if it were a successful attempt to prove that without a censorship we should be unable to prevent actresses from appearing naked on the stage. As a matter of fact, if an actress could be persuaded to do such a thing (and it would be about as easy to persuade a bishop’s wife to appear in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure. The extent to which this obvious safeguard was overlooked may be taken as a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the censorship. It should be added that the artistic representation of a bath, with every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to decency allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic art. From the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Trilogy, and the bathers in the second act of Les Huguenots, to the ballets of water nymphs in our Christmas pantomimes and at our variety theatres, the sound hygienic propaganda of the bath, and the charm of the undraped human figure, are exploited without offence on the stage to an extent never dreamt of by any novelist.

A KING’S PROCTOR

Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. Laurence Housman, who, in pure kindness to the managers, asked whether it would not be possible to establish for their assistance a sort of King’s Proctor to whom plays might be referred for an official legal opinion as to their compliance with the law before production. There are several objections to this proposal; and they may as well be stated in case the proposal should be revived. In the first place, no lawyer with the most elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its various applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer for the consequences of producing any play whatsoever as to which the smallest question could arise in the mind of any sane person. I have been a critic and an author in active service for thirty years; and though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted in England or made the subject of legal proceedings, yet I have never published in my life an article, a play, or a book, as to which, if I had taken legal advice, an expert could have assured me that I was proof against prosecution or against an action for damages by the persons criticized. No doubt a sensible solicitor might have advised me that the risk was no greater than all men have to take in dangerous trades; but such an opinion, though it may encourage a client, does not protect him. For example, if a publisher asks his solicitor whether he may venture on an edition of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or a manager whether he may produce King Lear without risk of prosecution, the solicitor will advise him to go ahead. But if the solicitor or counsel consulted by him were asked for a guarantee that neither of these works was a libel, he would have to reply that he could give no such guarantee; that, on the contrary, it was his duty to warn his client that both of them are obscene libels; that King Lear, containing as it does perhaps the most appalling blasphemy that despair ever uttered, is a blasphemous libel, and that it is doubtful whether it could not be construed as a seditious libel as well. As to Ibsen’s Brand (the play which made him popular with the most earnestly religious people) no sane solicitor would advise his client even to chance it except in a broadly cultivated and tolerant (or indifferent) modern city. The lighter plays would be no better off. What lawyer could accept any responsibility for the production of Sardou’s Divorcons or Clyde Fitch’s The Woman in the Case? Put the proposed King’s Proctor in operation to-morrow; and what will be the result? The managers will find that instead of insuring them as the Lord Chamberlain does, he will warn them that every play they submit to him is vulnerable to the law, and that they must produce it not only on the ordinary risk of acting on their own responsibility, but at the very grave additional risk of doing so in the teeth of an official warning. Under such circumstances, what manager would resort a second time to the Proctor; and how would the Proctor live without fees, unless indeed the Government gave him a salary for doing nothing? The institution would not last a year, except as a job for somebody.

COUNSEL’S OPINION

The proposal is still less plausible when it is considered that at present, without any new legislation at all, any manager who is doubtful about a play can obtain the advice of his solicitor, or Counsel’s opinion, if he thinks it will be of any service to him. The verdict of the proposed King’s Proctor would be nothing but Counsel’s opinion without the liberty of choice of counsel, possibly cheapened, but sure to be adverse; for an official cannot give practical advice as a friend and a man of the world: he must stick to the letter of the law and take no chances. And as far as the law is concerned, journalism, literature, and the drama exist only by custom or sufferance.

WANTED: A NEW MAGNA CHARTA

This leads us to a very vital question. Is it not possible to amend the law so as to make it possible for a lawyer to advise his client that he may publish the works of Blake, Zola, and Swinburne, or produce the plays of Ibsen and Mr. Granville Barker, or print an ordinary criticism in his newspaper, without the possibility of finding himself in prison, or mulcted in damages and costs in consequence? No doubt it is; but only by a declaration of constitutional right to blaspheme, rebel, and deal with tabooed subjects. Such a declaration is not just now within the scope of practical politics, although we are compelled to act to a great extent as if it was actually part of the constitution. All that can be done is to take my advice and limit the necessary public control of the theatres in such a manner as to prevent its being abused as a censorship. We have ready to our hand the machinery of licensing as applied to public-houses. A licensed victualler can now be assured confidently by his lawyer that a magistrate cannot refuse to renew his licence on the ground that he (the magistrate) is a teetotaller and has seen too much of the evil of drink to sanction its sale. The magistrate must give a judicial reason for his refusal, meaning really a constitutional reason; and his teetotalism is not such a reason. In the same way you can protect a theatrical manager by ruling out certain reasons as unconstitutional, as suggested in my statement. Combine this with the abolition of the common informer’s power to initiate proceedings, and you will have gone as far as seems possible at present. You will have local control of the theatres for police purposes and sanitary purposes without censorship; and I do not see what more is possible until we get a formal Magna Charta declaring all the Categories of libel and the blasphemy laws contrary to public liberty, and repealing and defining accordingly.

PROPOSED: A NEW STAR CHAMBER

Yet we cannot mention Magna Charta without recalling how useless such documents are to a nation which has no more political comprehension nor political virtue than King John. When Henry VII. calmly proceeded to tear up Magna Charta by establishing the Star Chamber (a criminal court consisting of a committee of the Privy Council without a jury) nobody objected until, about a century and a half later, the Star Chamber began cutting off the ears of eminent XVII. century Nonconformists and standing them in the pillory; and then the Nonconformists, and nobody else, abolished the Star Chamber. And if anyone doubts that we are quite ready to establish the Star Chamber again, let him read the Report of the Joint Select Committee, on which I now venture to offer a few criticisms.

The report of the Committee, which will be found in the bluebook, should be read with attention and respect as far as page x., up to which point it is an able and well-written statement of the case. From page x. onward, when it goes on from diagnosing the disease to prescribing the treatment, it should be read with even greater attention but with no respect whatever, as the main object of the treatment is to conciliate the How Not To Do It majority. It contains, however, one very notable proposal, the same being nothing more or less than to revive the Star Chamber for the purpose of dealing with heretical or seditious plays and their authors, and indeed with all charges against theatrical entertainments except common police cases of indecency. The reason given is that for which the Star Chamber was created by Henry VII: that is, the inadequacy of the ordinary law. “We consider,” says the report, “that the law which prevents or punishes indecency, blasphemy and libel in printed publications [it does not, by the way, except in the crudest police cases] would not be adequate for the control of the drama.” Therefore a committee of the Privy Council is to be empowered to suppress plays and punish managers and authors at its pleasure, on the motion of the Attorney-General, without a jury. The members of the Committee will, of course, be men of high standing and character: otherwise they would not be on the Privy Council. That is to say, they will have all the qualifications of Archbishop Laud.

Now I have no guarantee that any member of the majority of the Joint Select Committee ever heard of the Star Chamber or of Archbishop Laud. One of them did not know that politics meant anything more than party electioneering. Nothing is more alarming than the ignorance of our public men of the commonplaces of our history, and their consequent readiness to repeat experiments which have in the past produced national catastrophes. At all events, whether they knew what they were doing or not, there can be no question as to what they did. They proposed virtually that the Act of the Long Parliament in 1641 shall be repealed, and the Star Chamber re-established, in order that playwrights and managers may be punished for unspecified offences unknown to the law. When I say unspecified, I should say specified as follows (see page xi. of the report) in the case of a play.

(a) To be indecent.

(b) To contain offensive personalities.

(c) To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or any person recently dead.

(d) To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence.

(e) To be calculated to conduce to vice or crime.

(f) To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any foreign power.

(g) To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace.

Now it is clear that there is no play yet written, or possible to be written, in this world, that might not be condemned under one or other of these heads. How any sane man, not being a professed enemy of public liberty, could put his hand to so monstrous a catalogue passes my understanding. Had a comparatively definite and innocent clause been added forbidding the affirmation or denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the country would have been up in arms at once. Lord Ribblesdale made an effort to reduce the seven categories to the old formula “not to be fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or the public peace”; but this proposal was not carried; whilst on Lord Gorell’s motion a final widening of the net was achieved by adding the phrase “to be calculated to”; so that even if a play does not produce any of the results feared, the author can still be punished on the ground that his play is “calculated” to produce them. I have no hesitation in saying that a committee capable of such an outrageous display of thoughtlessness and historical ignorance as this paragraph of its report implies deserves to be haled before the tribunal it has itself proposed, and dealt with under a general clause levelled at conduct “calculated to” overthrow the liberties of England.

POSSIBILITIES OF THE PROPOSAL

Still, though I am certainly not willing to give Lord Gorell the chance of seeing me in the pillory with my ears cut off if I can help it, I daresay many authors would rather take their chance with a Star Chamber than with a jury, just as some soldiers would rather take their chance with a court-martial than at Quarter Sessions. For that matter, some of them would rather take their chance with the Lord Chamberlain than with either. And though this is no reason for depriving the whole body of authors of the benefit of Magna Charta, still, if the right of the proprietor of a play to refuse the good offices of the Privy Council and to perform the play until his accusers had indicted him at law, and obtained the verdict of a jury against him, were sufficiently guarded, the proposed committee might be set up and used for certain purposes. For instance, it might be made a condition of the intervention of the Attorney-General or the Director of Public Prosecutions that he should refer an accused play to the committee, and obtain their sanction before taking action, offering the proprietor of the play, if the Committee thought fit, an opportunity of voluntarily accepting trial by the Committee as an alternative to prosecution in the ordinary course of law. But the Committee should have no powers of punishment beyond the power (formidable enough) of suspending performances of the play. If it thought that additional punishment was called for, it could order a prosecution without allowing the proprietor or author of the play the alternative of a trial by itself. The author of the play should be made a party to all proceedings of the Committee, and have the right to defend himself in person or by counsel. This would provide a check on the Attorney-General (who might be as bigoted as any of the municipal aldermen who are so much dreaded by the actor-managers) without enabling the Committee to abuse its powers for party, class, or sectarian ends beyond that irreducible minimum of abuse which a popular jury would endorse, for which minimum there is no remedy.

But when everything is said for the Star Chamber that can be said, and every precaution taken to secure to those whom it pursues the alternative of trial by jury, the expedient still remains a very questionable one, to be endured for the sake of its protective rather than its repressive powers. It should abolish the present quaint toleration of rioting in theatres. For example, if it is to be an offence to perform a play which the proposed new Committee shall condemn, it should also be made an offence to disturb a performance which the Committee has not condemned. “Brawling” at a theatre should be dealt with as severely as brawling in church if the censorship is to be taken out of the hands of the public. At present Jenny Geddes may throw her stool at the head of a playwright who preaches unpalatable doctrine to her, or rather, since her stool is a fixture, she may hiss and hoot and make it impossible to proceed with the performance, even although nobody has compelled her to come to the theatre or suspended her liberty to stay away, and although she has no claim on an unendowed theatre for her spiritual necessities, as she has on her parish church. If mob censorship cannot be trusted to keep naughty playwrights in order, still less can it be trusted to keep the pioneers of thought in countenance; and I submit that anyone hissing a play permitted by the new censorship should be guilty of contempt of court.

STAR CHAMBER SENTIMENTALITY

But what is most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is not its sternness but its sentimentality. There is no worse censorship than one which considers only the feelings of the spectators, except perhaps one which considers the feelings of people who do not even witness the performance. Take the case of the Passion Play at Oberammergau. The offence given by a representation of the Crucifixion on the stage is not bounded by frontiers: further, it is an offence of which the voluntary spectators are guilty no less than the actors. If it is to be tolerated at all: if we are not to make war on the German Empire for permitting it, nor punish the English people who go to Bavaria to see it and thereby endow it with English money, we may as well tolerate it in London, where nobody need go to see it except those who are not offended by it. When Wagner’s Parsifal becomes available for representation in London, many people will be sincerely horrified when the miracle of the Mass is simulated on the stage of Covent Garden, and the Holy Ghost descends in the form of a dove. But if the Committee of the Privy Council, or the Lord Chamberlain, or anyone else, were to attempt to keep Parsifal from us to spare the feelings of these people, it would not be long before even the most thoughtless champions of the censorship would see that the principle of doing nothing that could shock anybody had reduced itself to absurdity. No quarter whatever should be given to the bigotry of people so unfit for social life as to insist not only that their own prejudices and superstitions should have the fullest toleration but that everybody else should be compelled to think and act as they do. Every service in St. Paul’s Cathedral is an outrage to the opinions of the congregation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. Every Liberal meeting is a defiance and a challenge to the most cherished opinions of the Unionists. A law to compel the Roman Catholics to attend service at St. Paul’s, or the Liberals to attend the meetings of the Primrose League would be resented as an insufferable tyranny. But a law to shut up both St. Paul’s and the Westminster Cathedral; and to put down political meetings and associations because of the offence given by them to many worthy and excellent people, would be a far worse tyranny, because it would kill the religious and political life of the country outright, whereas to compel people to attend the services and meetings of their opponents would greatly enlarge their minds, and would actually be a good thing if it were enforced all round. I should not object to a law to compel everybody to read two newspapers, each violently opposed to the other in politics; but to forbid us to read newspapers at all would be to maim us mentally and cashier our country in the ranks of civilization. I deny that anybody has the right to demand more from me, over and above lawful conduct in a general sense, than liberty to stay away from the theatre in which my plays are represented. If he is unfortunate enough to have a religion so petty that it can be insulted (any man is as welcome to insult my religion, if he can, as he is to insult the universe) I claim the right to insult it to my heart’s content, if I choose, provided I do not compel him to come and hear me. If I think this country ought to make war on any other country, then, so long as war remains lawful, I claim full liberty to write and perform a play inciting the country to that war without interference from the ambassadors of the menaced country. I may “give pain to many worthy people, and pleasure to none,” as the Censor’s pet phrase puts it: I may even make Europe a cockpit and Asia a shambles: no matter: if preachers and politicians, statesmen and soldiers, may do these things — if it is right that such things should be done, then I claim my share in the right to do them. If the proposed Committee is meant to prevent me from doing these things whilst men of other professions are permitted to do them, then I protest with all my might against the formation of such a Committee. If it is to protect me, on the contrary, against the attacks that bigots and corrupt pornographers may make on me by appealing to the ignorance and prejudices of common jurors, then I welcome it; but is that really the object of its proposers? And if it is, what guarantee have I that the new tribunal will not presently resolve into a mere committee to avoid unpleasantness and keep the stage “in good taste”? It is no more possible for me to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist. The nation’s morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them. Prevent dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst have caused since the world began.

ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE

Another doubt: would a Committee of the Privy Council really face the risks that must be taken by all communities as the price of our freedom to evolve? Would it not rather take the popular English view that freedom and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when they cost nothing? Nothing worth having is to be had without risk. A mother risks her child’s life every time she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. A father risks his son’s morals when he gives him a latchkey. The members of the Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me handcuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day some child is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with disease; and political assassinations have been appallingly frequent of late years. Railway travelling has its risks; motoring has its risks; aeroplaning has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of some sort. And though these are only risks to the individual, to the community they are certainties. It is not certain that I will be killed this year in a railway accident; but it is certain that somebody will. The invention of printing and the freedom of the press have brought upon us, not merely risks of their abuse, but the establishment as part of our social routine of some of the worst evils a community can suffer from. People who realize these evils shriek for the suppression of motor cars, the virtual imprisonment and enslavement of the young, the passing of Press Laws (especially in Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek for a censorship of the stage. The freedom of the stage will be abused just as certainly as the complaisance and innocence of the censorship is abused at present. It will also be used by writers like myself for raising very difficult and disturbing questions, social, political, and religious, at moments which may be extremely inconvenient to the government. Is it certain that a Committee of the Privy Council would stand up to all this as the price of liberty? I doubt it. If I am to be at the mercy of a nice amiable Committee of elderly gentlemen (I know all about elderly gentlemen, being one myself) whose motto is the highly popular one, “Anything for a quiet life” and who will make the inevitable abuses of freedom by our blackguards an excuse for interfering with any disquieting use of it by myself, then I shall be worse off than I am with the Lord Chamberlain, whose mind is not broad enough to obstruct the whole range of thought. If it were, he would be given a more difficult post.

SHALL THE EXAMINER OF PLAYS STARVE?

And here I may be reminded that if I prefer the Lord Chamberlain I can go to the Lord Chamberlain, who is to retain all his present functions for the benefit of those who prefer to be judged by him. But I am not so sure that the Lord Chamberlain will be able to exercise those functions for long if resort to him is to be optional. Let me be kinder to him than he has been to me, and uncover for him the pitfalls which the Joint Select Committee have dug (and concealed) in his path. Consider how the voluntary system must inevitably work. The Joint Select Committee expressly urges that the Lord Chamberlain’s licence must not be a bar to a prosecution. Granted that in spite of this reservation the licence would prove in future as powerful a defence as it has been in the past, yet the voluntary clause nevertheless places the manager at the mercy of any author who makes it a condition of his contract that his play shall not be submitted for licence. I should probably take that course without opposition from the manager. For the manager, knowing that three of my plays have been refused a licence, and that it would be far safer to produce a play for which no licence had been asked than one for which it had been asked and refused, would agree that it was more prudent, in my case, to avail himself of the power of dispensing with the Lord Chamberlain’s licence. But now mark the consequences. The manager, having thus discovered that his best policy was to dispense with the licence in the few doubtful cases, would presently ask himself why he should spend two guineas each on licences for the many plays as to which no question could conceivably arise. What risk does any manager run in producing such works as Sweet Lavender, Peter Pan, The Silver King, or any of the 99 per cent of plays that are equally neutral on controversial questions? Does anyone seriously believe that the managers would continue to pay the Lord Chamberlain two guineas a play out of mere love and loyalty, only to create an additional risk in the case of controversial plays, and to guard against risks that do not exist in the case of the great bulk of other productions? Only those would remain faithful to him who produce such plays as the Select Committee began by discussing in camera, and ended by refusing to discuss at all because they were too nasty. These people would still try to get a licence, and would still no doubt succeed as they do today. But could the King’s Reader of Plays live on his fees from these plays alone; and if he could how long would his post survive the discredit of licensing only pornographic plays? It is clear to me that the Examiner would be starved out of existence, and the censorship perish of desuetude. Perhaps that is exactly what the Select Committee contemplated. If so, I have nothing more to say, except that I think sudden death would be more merciful.

LORD GORELL’S AWAKENING

In the meantime, conceive the situation which would arise if a licensed play were prosecuted. To make it clearer, let us imagine any other offender — say a company promoter with a fraudulent prospectus — pleading in Court that he had induced the Lord Chamberlain to issue a certificate that the prospectus contained nothing objectionable, and that on the strength of that certificate he issued it; also, that by law the Court could do nothing to him except order him to wind up his company. Some such vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell when he at last grappled seriously with the problem. Mr. Harcourt seized the opportunity to make a last rally. He seconded Lord Gorell’s proposal that the Committee should admit that its scheme of an optional censorship was an elaborate absurdity, and report that all censorship before production was out of the question. But it was too late: the volte face was too sudden and complete. It was Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close division which took place on the question of receiving my statement. It was Lord Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell, after assenting to all the provisions for the optional censorship paragraph by paragraph, suddenly informing his colleagues that they had been wrong all through and that I had been right all through, and inviting them to scrap half their work and adopt my conclusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got only one vote: that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less significant. Lord Gorell carried more weight than any other member of the Committee on the legal and constitutional aspect of the question. Had he begun where he left off — had he at the outset put down his foot on the notion that an optional penal law could ever be anything but a gross contradiction in terms, that part of the Committee’s proposals would never have come into existence.

JUDGES: THEIR PROFESSIONAL LIMITATIONS

I do not, however, appeal to Lord Gorell’s judgment on all points. It is inevitable that a judge should be deeply impressed by his professional experience with a sense of the impotence of judges and laws and courts to deal satisfactorily with evils which are so Protean and elusive as to defy definition, and which yet seem to present quite simple problems to the common sense of men of the world. You have only to imagine the Privy Council as consisting of men of the world highly endowed with common sense, to persuade yourself that the supplementing of the law by the common sense of the Privy Council would settle the whole difficulty. But no man knows what he means by common sense, though every man can tell you that it is very uncommon, even in Privy Councils. And since every ploughman is a man of the world, it is evident that even the phrase itself does not mean what it says. As a matter of fact, it means in ordinary use simply a man who will not make himself disagreeable for the sake of a principle: just the sort of man who should never be allowed to meddle with political rights. Now to a judge a political right, that is, a dogma which is above our laws and conditions our laws, instead of being subject to them, is anarchic and abhorrent. That is why I trust Lord Gorell when he is defending the integrity of the law against the proposal to make it in any sense optional, whilst I very strongly mistrust him, as I mistrust all professional judges, when political rights are in danger.

CONCLUSION

I must conclude by recommending the Government to take my advice wherever it conflicts with that of the Joint Select Committee. It is, I think, obviously more deeply considered and better informed, though I say it that should not. At all events, I have given my reasons; and at that I must leave it. As the tradition which makes Malvolio not only Master of the Revels but Master of the Mind of England, and which has come down to us from Henry VIII., is manifestly doomed to the dustbin, the sooner it goes there the better; for the democratic control which naturally succeeds it can easily be limited so as to prevent it becoming either a censorship or a tyranny. The Examiner of Plays should receive a generous pension, and be set free to practise privately as an expert adviser of theatrical managers. There is no reason why they should be deprived of the counsel they so highly value.

It only remains to say that public performances of The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet are still prohibited in Great Britain by the Lord Chamberlain. An attempt was made to prevent even its performance in Ireland by some indiscreet Castle officials in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant. This attempt gave extraordinary publicity to the production of the play; and every possible effort was made to persuade the Irish public that the performance would be an outrage to their religion, and to provoke a repetition of the rioting that attended the first performances of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World before the most sensitive and, on provocation, the most turbulent audience in the kingdom. The directors of the Irish National Theatre, Lady Gregory and Mr. William Butler Yeats, rose to the occasion with inspiriting courage. I am a conciliatory person, and was willing, as I always am, to make every concession in return for having my own way. But Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats not only would not yield an inch, but insisted, within the due limits of gallant warfare, on taking the field with every circumstance of defiance, and winning the battle with every trophy of victory. Their triumph was as complete as they could have desired. The performance exhausted the possibilities of success, and provoked no murmur, though it inspired several approving sermons. Later on, Lady Gregory and Mr. Yeats brought the play to London and performed it under the Lord Chamberlain’s nose, through the instrumentality of the Stage Society.

After this, the play was again submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. But, though beaten, he, too, understands the art of How Not To Do It. He licensed the play, but endorsed on his licence the condition that all the passages which implicated God in the history of Blanco Posnet must be omitted in representation. All the coarseness, the profligacy, the prostitution, the violence, the drinking-bar humor into which the light shines in the play are licensed, but the light itself is extinguished. I need hardly say that I have not availed myself of this licence, and do not intend to. There is enough licensed darkness in our theatres today without my adding to it.

AYOT ST. LAWRENCE, 14TH JULY 1910.

POSTSCRIPT. — Since the above was written the Lord Chamberlain has made an attempt to evade his responsibility and perhaps to postpone his doom by appointing an advisory committee, unknown to the law, on which he will presumably throw any odium that may attach to refusals of licences in the future. This strange and lawless body will hardly reassure our moralists, who object much more to the plays he licenses than to those he suppresses, and are therefore unmoved by his plea that his refusals are few and far between. It consists of two eminent actors (one retired), an Oxford professor of literature, and two eminent barristers. As their assembly is neither created by statute nor sanctioned by custom, it is difficult to know what to call it until it advises the Lord Chamberlain to deprive some author of his means of livelihood, when it will, I presume, become a conspiracy, and be indictable accordingly; unless, indeed, it can persuade the Courts to recognize it as a new Estate of the Realm, created by the Lord Chamberlain. This constitutional position is so questionable that I strongly advise the members to resign promptly before the Lord Chamberlain gets them into trouble.

THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET

A number of women are sitting working together in a big room not unlike an old English tithe barn in its timbered construction, but with windows high up next the roof. It is furnished as a courthouse, with the floor raised next the walls, and on this raised flooring a seat for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his right, and a bar to put prisoners to on his left. In the well in the middle is a table with benches round it. A few other benches are in disorder round the room. The autumn sun is shining warmly through the windows and the open door. The women, whose dress and speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of the United States of America, are seated round the table and on the benches, shucking nuts. The conversation is at its height.

BABSY [a bumptious young slattern, with some good looks] I say that a man that would steal a horse would do anything.

LOTTIE [a sentimental girl, neat and clean] Well, I never should look at it in that way. I do think killing a man is worse any day than stealing a horse.

HANNAH [elderly and wise] I dont say it’s right to kill a man. In a place like this, where every man has to have a revolver, and where theres so much to try people’s tempers, the men get to be a deal too free with one another in the way of shooting. God knows it’s hard enough to have to bring a boy into the world and nurse him up to be a man only to have him brought home to you on a shutter, perhaps for nothing, or only just to shew that the man that killed him wasn’t afraid of him. But men are like children when they get a gun in their hands: theyre not content til theyve used it on somebody.

JESSIE [a good-natured but sharp-tongued, hoity-toity young woman; Babsy’s rival in good looks and her superior in tidiness] They shoot for the love of it. Look at them at a lynching. Theyre not content to hang the man; but directly the poor creature is swung up they all shoot him full of holes, wasting their cartridges that cost solid money, and pretending they do it in horror of his wickedness, though half of them would have a rope round their own necks if all they did was known — let alone the mess it makes.

LOTTIE. I wish we could get more civilized. I don’t like all this lynching and shooting. I don’t believe any of us like it, if the truth were known.

BABSY. Our Sheriff is a real strong man. You want a strong man for a rough lot like our people here. He aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang. Lucky for us quiet ones, too.

JESSIE. Oh, don’t talk to me. I know what men are. Of course he aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang. Wheres the risk in that with the law on his side and the whole crowd at his back longing for the lynching as if it was a spree? Would one of them own to it or let him own to it if they lynched the wrong man? Not them. What they call justice in this place is nothing but a breaking out of the devil thats in all of us. What I want to see is a Sheriff that aint afraid not to shoot and not to hang.

EMMA [a sneak who sides with Babsy or Jessie, according to the fortune of war] Well, I must say it does sicken me to see Sheriff Kemp putting down his foot, as he calls it. Why don’t he put it down on his wife? She wants it worse than half the men he lynches. He and his Vigilance Committee, indeed!

BABSY [incensed] Oh, well! if people are going to take the part of horse-thieves against the Sheriff — !

JESSIE. Who’s taking the part of horse-thieves against the Sheriff?

BABSY. You are. Waitle your own horse is stolen, and youll know better. I had an uncle that died of thirst in the sage brush because a negro stole his horse. But they caught him and burned him; and serve him right, too.

EMMA. I have known that a child was born crooked because its mother had to do a horse’s work that was stolen.

BABSY. There! You hear that? I say stealing a horse is ten times worse than killing a man. And if the Vigilance Committee ever gets hold of you, youd better have killed twenty men than as much as stole a saddle or bridle, much less a horse.

[Elder Daniels comes in.]

ELDER DANIELS. Sorry to disturb you, ladies; but the Vigilance Committee has taken a prisoner; and they want the room to try him in.

JESSIE. But they cant try him til Sheriff Kemp comes back from the wharf.

ELDER DANIELS. Yes; but we have to keep the prisoner here til he comes.

BABSY. What do you want to put him here for? Cant you tie him up in the Sheriff’s stable?

ELDER DANIELS. He has a soul to be saved, almost like the rest of us. I am bound to try to put some religion into him before he goes into his Maker’s presence after the trial.

HANNAH. What has he done, Mr Daniels?

ELDER DANIELS. Stole a horse.

BABSY. And are we to be turned out of the town hall for a horse-thief? Aint a stable good enough for his religion?

ELDER DANIELS. It may be good enough for his, Babsy; but, by your leave, it is not good enough for mine. While I am Elder here, I shall umbly endeavour to keep up the dignity of Him I serve to the best of my small ability. So I must ask you to be good enough to clear out. Allow me. [He takes the sack of husks and put it out of the way against the panels of the jury box].

THE WOMEN [murmuring] Thats always the way. Just as we’d settled down to work. What harm are we doing? Well, it is tiresome. Let them finish the job themselves. Oh dear, oh dear! We cant have a minute to ourselves. Shoving us out like that!

HANNAH. Whose horse was it, Mr Daniels?

ELDER DANIELS [returning to move the other sack] I am sorry to say that it was the Sheriff’s horse — the one he loaned to young Strapper. Strapper loaned it to me; and the thief stole it, thinking it was mine. If it had been mine, I’d have forgiven him cheerfully. I’m sure I hoped he would get away; for he had two hours start of the Vigilance Committee. But they caught him. [He disposes of the other sack also].

JESSIE. It cant have been much of a horse if they caught him with two hours start.

ELDER DANIELS [coming back to the centre of the group] The strange thing is that he wasn’t on the horse when they took him. He was walking; and of course he denies that he ever had the horse. The Sheriff’s brother wanted to tie him up and lash him till he confessed what he’d done with it; but I couldn’t allow that: it’s not the law.

BABSY. Law! What right has a horse-thief to any law? Law is thrown away on a brute like that.

ELDER DANIELS. Dont say that, Babsy. No man should be made to confess by cruelty until religion has been tried and failed. Please God I’ll get the whereabouts of the horse from him if youll be so good as to clear out from this. [Disturbance outside]. They are bringing him in. Now ladies! please, please.

[They rise reluctantly. Hannah, Jessie, and Lottie retreat to the Sheriff’s bench, shepherded by Daniels; but the other women crowd forward behind Babsy and Emma to see the prisoner.

Blanco Posnet it brought in by Strapper Kemp, the Sheriff’s brother, and a cross-eyed man called Squinty. Others follow. Blanco is evidently a blackguard. It would be necessary to clean him to make a close guess at his age; but he is under forty, and an upturned, red moustache, and the arrangement of his hair in a crest on his brow, proclaim the dandy in spite of his intense disreputableness. He carries his head high, and has a fairly resolute mouth, though the fire of incipient delirium tremens is in his eye.

His arms are bound with a rope with a long end, which Squinty holds. They release him when he enters; and he stretches himself and lounges across the courthouse in front of the women. Strapper and the men remain between him and the door.]

BABSY [spitting at him as he passes her] Horse-thief! horse-thief!

OTHERS. You will hang for it; do you hear? And serve you right. Serve you right. That will teach you. I wouldn’t wait to try you. Lynch him straight off, the varmint. Yes, yes. Tell the boys. Lynch him.

BLANCO [mocking] “Angels ever bright and fair—”

BABSY. You call me an angel, and I’ll smack your dirty face for you.

BLANCO. “Take, oh take me to your care.”

EMMA. There wont be any angels where youre going to.

OTHERS. Aha! Devils, more likely. And too good company for a horse-thief.

ALL. Horse-thief! Horse-thief! Horse-thief!

BLANCO. Do women make the law here, or men? Drive these heifers out.

THE WOMEN. Oh! [They rush at him, vituperating, screaming passionately, tearing at him. Lottie puts her fingers in her ears and runs out. Hannah follows, shaking her head. Blanco is thrown down]. Oh, did you hear what he called us? You foul-mouthed brute! You liar! How dare you put such a name to a decent woman? Let me get at him. You coward! Oh, he struck me: did you see that? Lynch him! Pete, will you stand by and hear me called names by a skunk like that? Burn him: burn him! Thats what I’d do with him. Aye, burn him!

THE MEN [pulling the women away from Blanco, and getting them out partly by violence and partly by coaxing] Here! come out of this. Let him alone. Clear the courthouse. Come on now. Out with you. Now, Sally: out you go. Let go my hair, or I’ll twist your arm out. Ah, would you? Now, then: get along. You know you must go. Whats the use of scratching like that? Now, ladies, ladies, ladies. How would you like it if you were going to be hanged?

[At last the women are pushed out, leaving Elder Daniels, the Sheriff’s brother Strapper Kemp, and a few others with Blanco. Strapper is a lad just turning into a man: strong, selfish, sulky, and determined.]

BLANCO [sitting up and tidying himself] —

Oh woman, in our hours of ease.

Uncertain, coy, and hard to please —

Is my face scratched? I can feel their damned claws all over me still. Am I bleeding? [He sits on the nearest bench].

ELDER DANIELS. Nothing to hurt. Theyve drawn a drop or two under your left eye.

STRAPPER. Lucky for you to have an eye left in your head.

BLANCO [wiping the blood off] —

When pain and anguish wring the brow,

A ministering angel thou.

Go out to them, Strapper Kemp; and tell them about your big brother’s little horse that some wicked man stole. Go and cry in your mammy’s lap.

STRAPPER [furious] You jounce me any more about that horse, Blanco Posnet; and I’ll — I’ll —

BLANCO. Youll scratch my face, wont you? Yah! Your brother’s the Sheriff, aint he?

STRAPPER. Yes, he is. He hangs horse-thieves.

BLANCO [with calm conviction] He’s a rotten Sheriff. Oh, a rotten Sheriff. If he did his first duty he’d hang himself. This is a rotten town. Your fathers came here on a false alarm of gold-digging; and when the gold didn’t pan out, they lived by licking their young into habits of honest industry.

STRAPPER. If I hadnt promised Elder Daniels here to give him a chance to keep you out of Hell, I’d take the job of twisting your neck off the hands of the Vigilance Committee.

BLANCO [with infinite scorn] You and your rotten Elder, and your rotten Vigilance Committee!

STRAPPER. Theyre sound enough to hang a horse-thief, anyhow.

BLANCO. Any fool can hang the wisest man in the country. Nothing he likes better. But you cant hang me.

STRAPPER. Cant we?

BLANCO. No, you cant. I left the town this morning before sunrise, because it’s a rotten town, and I couldn’t bear to see it in the light. Your brother’s horse did the same, as any sensible horse would. Instead of going to look for the horse, you went looking for me. That was a rotten thing to do, because the horse belonged to your brother — or to the man he stole it from — and I don’t belong to him. Well, you found me; but you didn’t find the horse. If I had took the horse, I’d have been on the horse. Would I have taken all that time to get to where I did if I’d a horse to carry me?

STRAPPER. I dont believe you started not for two hours after you say you did.

BLANCO. Who cares what you believe or dont believe? Is a man worth six of you to be hanged because youve lost your big brother’s horse, and youll want to kill somebody to relieve your rotten feelings when he licks you for it? Not likely. Till you can find a witness that saw me with that horse you cant touch me; and you know it.

STRAPPER. Is that the law, Elder?

ELDER DANIELS. The Sheriff knows the law. I wouldnt say for sure; but I think it would be more seemly to have a witness. Go and round one up, Strapper; and leave me here alone to wrestle with his poor blinded soul.

STRAPPER. I’ll get a witness all right enough. I know the road he took; and I’ll ask at every house within sight of it for a mile out. Come boys.

[Strapper goes out with the others, leaving Blanco and Elder Daniels together. Blanco rises and strolls over to the Elder, surveying him with extreme disparagement.]

BLANCO. Well, brother? Well, Boozy Posnet, alias Elder Daniels? Well, thief? Well, drunkard?

ELDER DANIELS. It’s no good, Blanco. Theyll never believe we’re brothers.

BLANCO. Never fear. Do you suppose I want to claim you? Do you suppose I’m proud of you? Youre a rotten brother, Boozy Posnet. All you ever did when I owned you was to borrow money from me to get drunk with. Now you lend money and sell drink to other people. I was ashamed of you before; and I’m worse ashamed of you now, I wont have you for a brother. Heaven gave you to me; but I return the blessing without thanks. So be easy: I shant blab. [He turns his back on him and sits down].

ELDER DANIELS. I tell you they wouldn’t believe you; so what does it matter to me whether you blab or not? Talk sense, Blanco: theres no time for your foolery now; for youll be a dead man an hour after the Sheriff comes back. What possessed you to steal that horse?

BLANCO. I didnt steal it. I distrained on it for what you owed me. I thought it was yours. I was a fool to think that you owned anything but other people’s property. You laid your hands on everything father and mother had when they died. I never asked you for a fair share. I never asked you for all the money I’d lent you from time to time. I asked you for mother’s old necklace with the hair locket in it. You wouldn’t give me that: you wouldn’t give me anything. So as you refused me my due I took it, just to give you a lesson.

ELDER DANIELS. Why didnt you take the necklace if you must steal something? They wouldnt have hanged you for that.

BLANCO. Perhaps I’d rather be hanged for stealing a horse than let off for a damned piece of sentimentality.

ELDER DANIELS. Oh, Blanco, Blanco: spiritual pride has been your ruin. If youd only done like me, youd be a free and respectable man this day instead of laying there with a rope round your neck.

BLANCO [turning on him] Done like you! What do you mean? Drink like you, eh? Well, Ive done some of that lately. I see things.

ELDER DANIELS. Too late, Blanco: too late. [Convulsively] Oh, why didnt you drink as I used to? Why didnt you drink as I was led to by the Lord for my good, until the time came for me to give it up? It was drink that saved my character when I was a young man; and it was the want of it that spoiled yours. Tell me this. Did I ever get drunk when I was working?

BLANCO. No; but then you never worked when you had money enough to get drunk.

ELDER DANIELS. That just shews the wisdom of Providence and the Lord’s mercy. God fulfils himself in many ways: ways we little think of when we try to set up our own shortsighted laws against his Word. When does the Devil catch hold of a man? Not when he’s working and not when he’s drunk; but when he’s idle and sober. Our own natures tell us to drink when we have nothing else to do. Look at you and me! When we’d both earned a pocketful of money, what did we do? Went on the spree, naturally. But I was humble minded. I did as the rest did. I gave my money in at the drink-shop; and I said, “Fire me out when I have drunk it all up.” Did you ever see me sober while it lasted?

BLANCO. No; and you looked so disgusting that I wonder it didn’t set me against drink for the rest of my life.

ELDER DANIELS. That was your spiritual pride, Blanco. You never reflected that when I was drunk I was in a state of innocence. Temptations and bad company and evil thoughts passed by me like the summer wind as you might say: I was too drunk to notice them. When the money was gone, and they fired me out, I was fired out like gold out of the furnace, with my character unspoiled and unspotted; and when I went back to work, the work kept me steady. Can you say as much, Blanco? Did your holidays leave your character unspoiled? Oh, no, no. It was theatres: it was gambling: it was evil company, it was reading in vain romances: it was women, Blanco, women: it was wrong thoughts and gnawing discontent. It ended in your becoming a rambler and a gambler: it is going to end this evening on the gallows tree. Oh, what a lesson against spiritual pride! Oh, what a — [Blanco throws his hat at him].

BLANCO. Stow it, Boozy. Sling it. Cut it. Cheese it. Shut up. “Shake not the dying sinner’s hand.”

ELDER DANIELS. Aye: there you go, with your scraps of lustful poetry. But you cant deny what I tell you. Why, do you think I would put my soul in peril by selling drink if I thought it did no good, as them silly temperance reformers make out, flying in the face of the natural tastes implanted in us all for a good purpose? Not if I was to starve for it to-morrow. But I know better. I tell you, Blanco, what keeps America to-day the purest of the nations is that when she’s not working she’s too drunk to hear the voice of the tempter.

BLANCO. Dont deceive yourself, Boozy. You sell drink because you make a bigger profit out of it than you can by selling tea. And you gave up drink yourself because when you got that fit at Edwardstown the doctor told you youd die the next time; and that frightened you off it.

ELDER DANIELS [fervently] Oh thank God selling drink pays me! And thank God he sent me that fit as a warning that my drinking time was past and gone, and that he needed me for another service!

BLANCO. Take care, Boozy. He hasnt finished with you yet. He always has a trick up His sleeve —

ELDER DANIELS. Oh, is that the way to speak of the ruler of the universe — the great and almighty God?

BLANCO. He’s a sly one. He’s a mean one. He lies low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think youre shut of him; and then, when you least expect it, he’s got you.

ELDER DANIELS. Speak more respectful, Blanco — more reverent.

BLANCO [springing up and coming at him] Reverent! Who taught you your reverent cant? Not your Bible. It says He cometh like a thief in the night — aye, like a thief — a horse-thief —

ELDER DANIELS [shocked] Oh!

BLANCO [overhearing him] And it’s true. Thats how He caught me and put my neck into the halter. To spite me because I had no use for Him — because I lived my own life in my own way, and would have no truck with His “Dont do this,” and “You mustnt do that,” and “Youll go to Hell if you do the other.” I gave Him the go-bye and did without Him all these years. But He caught me out at last. The laugh is with Him as far as hanging me goes. [He thrusts his hands into his pockets and lounges moodily away from Daniels, to the table, where he sits facing the jury box].

ELDER DANIELS. Dont dare to put your theft on Him, man. It was the Devil tempted you to steal the horse.

BLANCO. Not a bit of it. Neither God nor Devil tempted me to take the horse: I took it on my own. He had a cleverer trick than that ready for me. [He takes his hands out of his pockets and clenches his fists]. Gosh! When I think that I might have been safe and fifty miles away by now with that horse; and here I am waiting to be hung up and filled with lead! What came to me? What made me such a fool? Thats what I want to know. Thats the great secret.

ELDER DANIELS [at the opposite side of the table] Blanco: the great secret now is, what did you do with the horse?

BLANCO [striking the table with his fist] May my lips be blighted like my soul if ever I tell that to you or any mortal men! They may roast me alive or cut me to ribbons; but Strapper Kemp shall never have the laugh on me over that job. Let them hang me. Let them shoot. So long as they are shooting a man and not a sniveling skunk and softy, I can stand up to them and take all they can give me — game.

ELDER DANIELS. Dont be headstrong, Blanco. Whats the use? [Slyly] They might let up on you if you put Strapper in the way of getting his brother’s horse back.

BLANCO. Not they. Hanging’s too big a treat for them to give up a fair chance. Ive done it myself. Ive yelled with the dirtiest of them when a man no worse than myself was swung up. Ive emptied my revolver into him, and persuaded myself that he deserved it and that I was doing justice with strong stern men. Well, my turn’s come now. Let the men I yelled at and shot at look up out of Hell and see the boys yelling and shooting at me as I swing up.

ELDER DANIELS. Well, even if you want to be hanged, is that any reason why Strapper shouldn’t have his horse? I tell you I’m responsible to him for it. [Bending over the table and coaxing him]. Act like a brother, Blanco: tell me what you done with it.

BLANCO [shortly, getting up and leaving the table] Never you mind what I done with it. I was done out of it. Let that be enough for you.

ELDER DANIELS [following him] Then why don’t you put us on to the man that done you out of it?

BLANCO. Because he’d be too clever for you, just as he was too clever for me.

FEEMY [reddening, and disengaging her arm from Strapper’s] I’m clean enough to hang you, anyway. [Going over to him threateningly]. Youre no true American man, to insult a woman like that.

BLANCO. A woman! Oh Lord! You saw me on a horse, did you?

FEEMY. Yes I did.

BLANCO. Got up early on purpose to do it, didn’t you?

FEEMY. No I didn’t: I stayed up late on a spree.

BLANCO. I was on a horse, was I?

FEEMY. Yes you were; and if you deny it youre a liar.

BLANCO [to Strapper] She saw a man on a horse when she was too drunk to tell which was the man and which was the horse —

FEEMY [breaking in] You lie. I wasn’t drunk — at least not as drunk as that.

BLANCO [ignoring the interruption] — and you found a man without a horse. Is a man on a horse the same as a man on foot? Yah! Take your witness away. Who’s going to believe her? Shove her into the dustbin. Youve got to find that horse before you get a rope round my neck. [He turns away from her contemptuously, and sits at the table with his back to the jury box].

FEEMY [following him] I’ll hang you, you dirty horse-thief; or not a man in this camp will ever get a word or a look from me again. Youre just trash: thats what you are. White trash.

BLANCO. And what are you, darling? What are you? Youre a worse danger to a town like this than ten horse-thieves.

FEEMY. Mr Kemp: will you stand by and hear me insulted in that low way? [To Blanco, spitefully] I’ll see you swung up and I’ll see you cut down: I’ll see you high and I’ll see you low, as dangerous as I am. [He laughs]. Oh you neednt try to brazen it out. Youll look white enough before the boys are done with you.

BLANCO. You do me good. Feemy. Stay by me to the end, wont you? Hold my hand to the last; and I’ll die game. [He puts out his hand: she strikes savagely at it; but he withdraws it in time and laughs at her discomfiture].

FEEMY. You —

ELDER DANIELS. Never mind him, Feemy: he’s not right in his head to-day. [She receives the assurance with contemptuous credulity, and sits down on the step of the Sheriff’s dais].

Sheriff Kemp comes in: a stout man, with large flat ears, and a neck thicker than his head.

ELDER DANIELS. Morning, Sheriff.

THE SHERIFF. Morning, Elder. [Passing on.] Morning, Strapper. [Passing on]. Morning, Miss Evans. [Stopping between Strapper and Blanco]. Is this the prisoner?

BLANCO [rising] Thats so. Morning, Sheriff.

THE SHERIFF. Morning. You know, I suppose, that if you’ve stole a horse and the jury find against you, you wont have any time to settle your affairs. Consequently, if you feel guilty, youd better settle em now.

BLANCO. Affairs be damned! Ive got none.

THE SHERIFF. Well, are you in a proper state of mind? Has the Elder talked to you?

BLANCO. He has. And I say it’s against the law. It’s torture: thats what it is.

ELDER DANIELS. He’s not accountable. He’s out of his mind, Sheriff. He’s not fit to go into the presence of his Maker.

THE SHERIFF. You are a merciful man, Elder; but you wont take the boys with you there. [To Blanco]. If it comes to hanging you, youd better for your own sake be hanged in a proper state of mind than in an improper one. But it wont make any difference to us: make no mistake about that.

BLANCO. Lord keep me wicked till I die! Now Ive said my little prayer. I’m ready. Not that I’m guilty, mind you; but this is a rotten town, dead certain to do the wrong thing.

THE SHERIFF. You wont be asked to live long in it, I guess. [To Strapper] Got the witness all right, Strapper?

STRAPPER. Yes, got everything.

BLANCO. Except the horse.

THE SHERIFF. Whats that? Aint you got the horse?

STRAPPER. No. He traded it before we overtook him, I guess. But Feemy saw him on it.

FEEMY. She did.

STRAPPER. Shall I call in the boys?

BLANCO. Just a moment, Sheriff. A good appearance is everything in a low-class place like this. [He takes out a pocket comb and mirror, and retires towards the dais to arrange his hair].

ELDER DANIELS. Oh, think of your immortal soul, man, not of your foolish face.

BLANCO. I cant change my soul, Elder: it changes me — sometimes. Feemy: I’m too pale. Let me rub my cheek against yours, darling.

FEEMY. You lie: my color’s my own, such as it is. And a pretty color youll be when youre hung white and shot red.

BLANCO. Aint she spiteful, Sheriff?

THE SHERIFF. Time’s wasted on you. [To Strapper] Go and see if the boys are ready. Some of them were short of cartridges, and went down to the store to buy them. They may as well have their fun; and itll be shorter for him.

STRAPPER. Young Jack has brought a boxful up. Theyre all ready.

THE SHERIFF [going to the dais and addressing Blanco] Your place is at the bar there. Take it. [Blanco bows ironically and goes to the bar]. Miss Evans: youd best sit at the table. [She does so, at the corner nearest the bar. The Elder takes the opposite corner. The Sheriff takes his chair]. All ready, Strapper.

STRAPPER [at the door] All in to begin.

(The crowd comes in and fills the court. Babsy, Jessie, and Emma come to the Sheriff’s right; Hannah and Lottie to his left.)

THE SHERIFF. Silence there. The jury will take their places as usual. [They do so].

BLANCO. I challenge this jury, Sheriff.

THE FOREMAN. Do you, by Gosh?

THE SHERIFF. On what ground?

BLANCO. On the general ground that it’s a rotten jury. [Laughter].

THE SHERIFF. Thats not a lawful ground of challenge.

THE FOREMAN. It’s a lawful ground for me to shoot yonder skunk at sight, first time I meet him, if he survives this trial.

BLANCO. I challenge the Foreman because he’s prejudiced.

THE FOREMAN. I say you lie. We mean to hang you, Blanco Posnet; but you will be hanged fair.

THE JURY. Hear, hear!

STRAPPER [to the Sheriff] George: this is rot. How can you get an unprejudiced jury if the prisoner starts by telling them theyre all rotten? If theres any prejudice against him he has himself to thank for it.

THE BOYS. Thats so. Of course he has. Insulting the court! Challenge be jiggered! Gag him.

NESTOR [a juryman with a long white beard, drunk, the oldest man present] Besides, Sheriff, I go so far as to say that the man that is not prejudiced against a horse-thief is not fit to sit on a jury in this town.

THE BOYS. Right. Bully for you, Nestor! Thats the straight truth. Of course he aint. Hear, hear!

THE SHERIFF. That is no doubt true, old man. Still, you must get as unprejudiced as you can. The critter has a right to his chance, such as he is. So now go right ahead. If the prisoner don’t like this jury, he should have stole a horse in another town; for this is all the jury he’ll get here.

THE FOREMAN. Thats so, Blanco Posnet.

THE SHERIFF [to Blanco] Dont you be uneasy. You will get justice here. It may be rough justice; but it is justice.

BLANCO. What is justice?

THE SHERIFF. Hanging horse-thieves is justice; so now you know. Now then: weve wasted enough time. Hustle with your witness there, will you?

BLANCO [indignantly bringing down his fist on the bar] Swear the jury. A rotten Sheriff you are not to know that the jury’s got to be sworn.

THE FOREMAN [galled] Be swore for you! Not likely. What do you say, old son?

NESTOR [deliberately and solemnly] I say: GUILTY!!!

THE BOYS [tumultuously rushing at Blanco] Thats it. Guilty, guilty. Take him out and hang him. He’s found guilty. Fetch a rope. Up with him. [They are about to drag him from the bar].

THE SHERIFF [rising, pistol in hand] Hands off that man. Hands off him, I say, Squinty, or I drop you, and would if you were my own son. [Dead silence], I’m Sheriff here; and it’s for me to say when he may lawfully be hanged. [They release him].

BLANCO. As the actor says in the play, “a Daniel come to judgment.” Rotten actor he was, too.

THE SHERIFF. Elder Daniel is come to judgment all right, my lad. Elder: the floor is yours. [The Elder rises]. Give your evidence. The truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.

ELDER DANIELS. Sheriff: let me off this. I didn’t ought to swear away this man’s life. He and I are, in a manner of speaking, brothers.

THE SHERIFF. It does you credit, Elder: every man here will acknowledge it. But religion is one thing: law is another. In religion we’re all brothers. In law we cut our brother off when he steals horses.

THE FOREMAN. Besides, you neednt hang him, you know. Theres plenty of willing hands to take that job off your conscience. So rip ahead, old son.

STRAPPER. Youre accountable to me for the horse until you clear yourself, Elder: remember that.

BLANCO. Out with it, you fool.

ELDER DANIELS. You might own up, Blanco, as far as my evidence goes. Everybody knows I borrowed one of the Sheriff’s horses from Strapper because my own’s gone lame. Everybody knows you arrived in the town yesterday and put up in my house. Everybody knows that in the morning the horse was gone and you were gone.

BLANCO [in a forensic manner] Sheriff: the Elder, though known to you and to all here as no brother of mine and the rottenest liar in this town, is speaking the truth for the first time in his life as far as what he says about me is concerned. As to the horse, I say nothing; except that it was the rottenest horse you ever tried to sell.

THE SHERIFF. How do you know it was a rotten horse if you didn’t steal it?

BLANCO. I don’t know of my own knowledge. I only argue that if the horse had been worth its keep, you wouldn’t have lent it to Strapper, and Strapper wouldn’t have lent it to this eloquent and venerable ram. [Suppressed laughter]. And now I ask him this. [To the Elder] Did we or did we not have a quarrel last evening about a certain article that was left by my mother, and that I considered I had a right to more than you? And did you say one word to me about the horse not belonging to you?

ELDER DANIELS. Why should I? We never said a word about the horse at all. How was I to know what it was in your mind to do?

BLANCO. Bear witness all that I had a right to take a horse from him without stealing to make up for what he denied me. I am no thief. But you havnt proved yet that I took the horse. Strapper Kemp: had I the horse when you took me, or had I not?

STRAPPER. No, nor you hadnt a railway train neither. But Feemy Evans saw you pass on the horse at four o’clock twenty-five miles from the spot where I took you at seven on the road to Pony Harbor. Did you walk twenty-five miles in three hours? That so, Feemy, eh?

FEEMY. Thats so. At four I saw him. [To Blanco] Thats done for you.

THE SHERIFF. You say you saw him on my horse?

FEEMY. I did.

BLANCO. And I ate it, I suppose, before Strapper fetched up with me. [Suddenly and dramatically] Sheriff: I accuse Feemy of immoral relations with Strapper.

FEEMY. Oh you liar!

BLANCO. I accuse the fair Euphemia of immoral relations with every man in this town, including yourself, Sheriff. I say this is a conspiracy to kill me between Feemy and Strapper because I wouldn’t touch Feemy with a pair of tongs. I say you darent hang any white man on the word of a woman of bad character. I stand on the honor and virtue of my American manhood. I say that she’s not had the oath, and that you darent for the honor of the town give her the oath because her lips would blaspheme the holy Bible if they touched it. I say thats the law; and if you are a proper United States Sheriff and not a low-down lyncher, youll hold up the law and not let it be dragged in the mud by your brother’s kept woman.

[Great excitement among the women. The men much puzzled.]

JESSIE. Thats right. She didn’t ought to be let kiss the Book.

EMMA. How could the like of her tell the truth?

BABSY. It would be an insult to every respectable woman here to believe her.

FEEMY. It’s easy to be respectable with nobody ever offering you a chance to be anything else.

THE WOMEN [clamoring all together] Shut up, you hussy. Youre a disgrace. How dare you open your lips to answer your betters? Hold your tongue and learn your place, miss. You painted slut! Whip her out of the town!

THE SHERIFF. Silence. Do you hear? Silence. [The clamor ceases]. Did anyone else see the prisoner with the horse?

FEEMY [passionately] Aint I good enough?

BABSY. No. Youre dirt: thats what you are.

FEEMY. And you —

THE SHERIFF. Silence. This trial is a man’s job; and if the women forget their sex they can go out or be put out. Strapper and Miss Evans: you cant have it two ways. You can run straight, or you can run gay, so to speak; but you cant run both ways together. There is also a strong feeling among the men of this town that a line should be drawn between those that are straight wives and mothers and those that are, in the words of the Book of Books, taking the primrose path. We don’t wish to be hard on any woman; and most of us have a personal regard for Miss Evans for the sake of old times; but theres no getting out of the fact that she has private reasons for wishing to oblige Strapper, and that — if she will excuse my saying so — she is not what I might call morally particular as to what she does to oblige him. Therefore I ask the prisoner not to drive us to give Miss Evans the oath. I ask him to tell us fair and square, as a man who has but a few minutes between him and eternity, what he done with my horse.

THE BOYS. Hear, hear! Thats right. Thats fair. That does it. Now Blanco. Own up.

BLANCO. Sheriff: you touch me home. This is a rotten world; but there is still one thing in it that remains sacred even to the rottenest of us, and that is a horse.

THE BOYS. Good. Well said, Blanco. Thats straight.

BLANCO. You have a right to your horse, Sheriff; and if I could put you in the way of getting it back, I would. But if I had that horse I shouldn’t be here. As I hope to be saved, Sheriff — or rather as I hope to be damned; for I have no taste for pious company and no talent for playing the harp — I know no more of that horse’s whereabouts than you do yourself.

STRAPPER. Who did you trade him to?

BLANCO. I did not trade him. I got nothing for him or by him. I stand here with a rope round my neck for the want of him. When you took me, did I fight like a thief or run like a thief; and was there any sign of a horse on me or near me?

STRAPPER. You were looking at a rainbow, like a damned silly fool instead of keeping your wits about you; and we stole up on you and had you tight before you could draw a bead on us.

THE SHERIFF. That don’t sound like good sense. What would he look at a rainbow for?

BLANCO. I’ll tell you, Sheriff. I was looking at it because there was something written on it.

SHERIFF. How do you mean written on it?

BLANCO. The words were, “Ive got the cinch on you this time, Blanco Posnet.” Yes, Sheriff, I saw those words in green on the red streak of the rainbow; and as I saw them I felt Strapper’s grab on my arm and Squinty’s on my pistol.

THE FOREMAN. He’s shammin mad: thats what he is. Aint it about time to give a verdict and have a bit of fun, Sheriff?

THE BOYS. Yes, lets have a verdict. We’re wasting the whole afternoon. Cut it short.

THE SHERIFF [making up his mind] Swear Feemy Evans, Elder. She don’t need to touch the Book. Let her say the words.

FEEMY. Worse people than me has kissed that Book. What wrong Ive done, most of you went shares in. Ive to live, havnt I? same as the rest of you. However, it makes no odds to me. I guess the truth is the truth and a lie is a lie, on the Book or off it.

BABSY. Do as youre told. Who are you, to be let talk about it?

THE SHERIFF. Silence there, I tell you. Sail ahead, Elder.

ELDER DANIELS. Feemy Evans: do you swear to tell the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

FEEMY. I do, so help me —

SHERIFF. Thats enough. Now, on your oath, did you see the prisoner on my horse this morning on the road to Pony Harbor?

FEEMY. On my oath — [Disturbance and crowding at the door].

AT THE DOOR. Now then, now then! Where are you shovin to? Whats up? Order in court. Chuck him out. Silence. You cant come in here. Keep back.

(Strapper rushes to the door and forces his way out.)

SHERIFF [savagely] Whats this noise? Cant you keep quiet there? Is this a Sheriff’s court or is it a saloon?

BLANCO. Dont interrupt a lady in the act of hanging a gentleman. Wheres your manners?

FEEMY. I’ll hang you, Blanco Posnet. I will. I wouldn’t for fifty dollars hadnt seen you this morning. I’ll teach you to be civil to me next time, for all I’m not good enough to kiss the Book.

BLANCO. Lord keep me wicked till I die! I’m game for anything while youre spitting dirt at me, Feemy.

RENEWED TUMULT AT THE DOOR. Here, whats this? Fire them out. Not me. Who are you that I should get out of your way? Oh, stow it. Well, she cant come in. What woman? What horse? Whats the good of shoving like that? Who says? No! you don’t say!

THE SHERIFF. Gentlemen of the Vigilance Committee: clear that doorway. Out with them in the name of the law.

STRAPPER [without] Hold hard, George. [At the door] Theyve got the horse. [He comes in, followed by Waggoner Jo, an elderly carter, who crosses the court to the jury side. Strapper pushes his way to the Sheriff and speaks privately to him].

THE BOYS. What! No! Got the horse! Sheriff’s horse? Who took it, then? Where? Get out. Yes it is, sure. I tell you it is. It’s the horse all right enough. Rot. Go and look. By Gum!

THE SHERIFF [to Strapper] You don’t say!

STRAPPER. It’s here, I tell you.

WAGGONER JO. It’s here all right enough, Sheriff.

STRAPPER. And theyve got the thief too.

ELDER DANIELS. Then it aint Blanco.

STRAPPER. No: it’s a woman. [Blanco yells and covers his eyes with his hands].

THE WHOLE CROWD. A woman!

THE SHERIFF. Well, fetch her in. [Strapper goes out. The Sheriff continues, to Feemy] And what do you mean, you lying jade, by putting up this story on us about Blanco?

FEEMY. I aint put up no story on you. This is a plant: you see if it isnt.

[Strapper returns with a woman. Her expression of intense grief silences them as they crane over one another’s heads to see her. Strapper takes her to the corner of the table. The Elder moves up to make room for her.]

BLANCO [terrified]: that woman aint real. You take care. That woman will make you do what you never intended. Thats the rainbow woman. Thats the woman that brought me to this.

THE SHERIFF. Shut your mouth, will you. Youve got the horrors. [To the woman] Now you. Who are you? and what are you doing with a horse that doesn’t belong to you?

THE WOMAN. I took it to save my child’s life. I thought it would get me to a doctor in time. It was choking with croup.

BLANCO [strangling, and trying to laugh] A little choker: thats the word for him. His choking wasn’t real: wait and see mine. [He feels his neck with a sob].

THE SHERIFF. Where’s the child?

STRAPPER. On Pug Jackson’s bench in his shed. He’s makin a coffin for it.

BLANCO [with a horrible convulsion of the throat — frantically] Dead! The little Judas kid! The child I gave my life for! [He breaks into hideous laughter].

THE SHERIFF [jarred beyond endurance by the sound] Hold you noise! will you? Shove his neckerchief into his mouth if he don’t stop. [To the woman] Dont you mind him, maam: he’s mad with drink and devilment. I suppose theres no fake about this, Strapper. Who found her?

WAGGONER JO. I did, Sheriff. Theres no fake about it. I came on her on the track round by Red Mountain. She was settin on the ground with the dead body on her lap, stupid-like. The horse was grazin on the other side of the road.

THE SHERIFF [puzzled] Well, this is blamed queer. [To the woman] What call had you to take the horse from Elder Daniels’ stable to find a doctor? Theres a doctor in the very next house.

BLANCO [mopping his dabbled red crest and trying to be ironically gay] Story simply wont wash, my angel. You got it from the man that stole the horse. He gave it to you because he was a softy and went to bits when you played off the sick kid on him. Well, I guess that clears me. I’m not that sort. Catch me putting my neck in a noose for anybody’s kid!

THE FOREMAN. Dont you go putting her up to what to say. She said she took it.

THE WOMAN. Yes: I took it from a man that met me. I thought God sent him to me. I rode here joyfully thinking so all the time to myself. Then I noticed that the child was like lead in my arms. God would never have been so cruel as to send me the horse to disappoint me like that.

BLANCO. Just what He would do.

STRAPPER. We aint got nothin to do with that. This is the man, aint he? [pointing to Blanco].

THE WOMAN [pulling herself together after looking scaredly at Blanco, and then at the Sheriff and at the jury] No.

THE FOREMAN. You lie.

THE SHERIFF. Youve got to tell us the truth. Thats the law, you know.

THE WOMAN. The man looked a bad man. He cursed me; and he cursed the child: God forgive him! But something came over him. I was desperate, I put the child in his arms; and it got its little fingers down his neck and called him Daddy and tried to kiss him; for it was not right in its head with the fever. He said it was a little Judas kid, and that it was betraying him with a kiss, and that he’d swing for it. And then he gave me the horse, and went away crying and laughing and singing dreadful dirty wicked words to hymn tunes like as if he had seven devils in him.

STRAPPER. She’s lying. Give her the oath, George.

THE SHERIFF. Go easy there. Youre a smart boy, Strapper; but youre not Sheriff yet. This is my job. You just wait. I submit that we’re in a difficulty here. If Blanco was the man, the lady cant, as a white woman, give him away. She oughtnt to be put in the position of having either to give him away or commit perjury. On the other hand, we don’t want a horse-thief to get off through a lady’s delicacy.

THE FOREMAN. No we don’t; and we don’t intend he shall. Not while I am foreman of this jury.

BLANCO [with intense expression] A rotten foreman! Oh, what a rotten foreman!

THE SHERIFF. Shut up, will you. Providence shows us a way out here. Two women saw Blanco with a horse. One has a delicacy about saying so. The other will excuse me saying that delicacy is not her strongest holt. She can give the necessary witness. Feemy Evans: you’ve taken the oath. You saw the man that took the horse.

FEEMY. I did. And he was a low-down rotten drunken lying hound that would go further to hurt a woman any day than to help her. And if he ever did a good action it was because he was too drunk to know what he was doing. So it’s no harm to hang him. She said he cursed her and went away blaspheming and singing things that were not fit for the child to hear.

BLANCO [troubled] I didn’t mean them for the child to hear, you venomous devil.

THE SHERIFF. All thats got nothing to do with us. The question you have to answer is, was that man Blanco Posnet?

THE WOMAN. No. I say no. I swear it. Sheriff: don’t hang that man: oh don’t. You may hang me instead if you like: Ive nothing to live for now. You darent take her word against mine. She never had a child: I can see it in her face.

FEEMY [stung to the quick] I can hang him in spite of you, anyhow. Much good your child is to you now, lying there on Pug Jackson’s bench!

BLANCO [rushing at her with a shriek] I’ll twist your heart out of you for that. [They seize him before he can reach her].

FEEMY [mocking at him as he struggles to get at her] Ha, ha, Blanco Posnet. You cant touch me; and I can hang you. Ha, ha! Oh, I’ll do for you. I’ll twist your heart and I’ll twist your neck. [He is dragged back to the bar and leans on it, gasping and exhausted.] Give me the oath again, Elder. I’ll settle him. And do you [to the woman] take your sickly face away from in front of me.

STRAPPER. Just turn your back on her there, will you?

THE WOMAN. God knows I don’t want to see her commit murder. [She folds her shawl over her head].

THE SHERIFF. Now, Miss Evans: cut it short. Was the prisoner the man you saw this morning or was he not? Yes or no?

FEEMY [a little hysterically] I’ll tell you fast enough. Dont think I’m a softy.

THE SHERIFF [losing patience] Here: weve had enough of this. You tell the truth, Feemy Evans; and let us have no more of your lip. Was the prisoner the man or was he not? On your oath?

FEEMY. On my oath and as I’m a living woman — [flinching] Oh God! he felt the little child’s hands on his neck — I cant [bursting into a flood of tears and scolding at the other woman] It’s you with your snivelling face that has put me off it. [Desperately] No: it wasn’t him. I only said it out of spite because he insulted me. May I be struck dead if I ever saw him with the horse!

[Everybody draws a long breath. Dead silence.]

BLANCO [whispering at her] Softy! Cry-baby! Landed like me! Doing what you never intended! [Taking up his hat and speaking in his ordinary tone] I presume I may go now, Sheriff.

STRAPPER. Here, hold hard.

THE FOREMAN. Not if we know it, you don’t.

THE BOYS [barring the way to the door] You stay where you are. Stop a bit, stop a bit. Dont you be in such a hurry. Dont let him go. Not much.

[Blanco stands motionless, his eye fixed, thinking hard, and apparently deaf to what is going on.]

THE SHERIFF [rising solemnly] Silence there. Wait a bit. I take it that if the Sheriff is satisfied and the owner of the horse is satisfied, theres no more to be said. I have had to remark on former occasions that what is wrong with this court is that theres too many Sheriffs in it. To-day there is going to be one, and only one; and that one is your humble servant. I call that to the notice of the Foreman of the jury, and also to the notice of young Strapper. I am also the owner of the horse. Does any man say that I am not? [Silence]. Very well, then. In my opinion, to commandeer a horse for the purpose of getting a dying child to a doctor is not stealing, provided, as in the present case, that the horse is returned safe and sound. I rule that there has been no theft.

NESTOR. That aint the law.

THE SHERIFF. I fine you a dollar for contempt of court, and will collect it myself off you as you leave the building. And as the boys have been disappointed of their natural sport, I shall give them a little fun by standing outside the door and taking up a collection for the bereaved mother of the late kid that shewed up Blanco Posnet.

THE BOYS. A collection. Oh, I say! Calls that sport? Is this a mothers’ meeting? Well, I’ll be jiggered! Where does the sport come in?

THE SHERIFF [continuing] The sport comes in, my friends, not so much in contributing as in seeing others fork out. Thus each contributes to the general enjoyment; and all contribute to his. Blanco Posnet: you go free under the protection of the Vigilance Committee for just long enough to get you out of this town, which is not a healthy place for you. As you are in a hurry, I’ll sell you the horse at a reasonable figure. Now, boys, let nobody go out till I get to the door. The court is adjourned. [He goes out].

STRAPPER [to Feemy, as he goes to the door] I’m done with you. Do you hear? I’m done with you. [He goes out sulkily].

FEEMY [calling after him] As if I cared about a stingy brat like you! Go back to the freckled maypole you left for me: you’ve been fretting for her long enough.

THE FOREMAN [To Blanco, on his way out] A man like you makes me sick. Just sick. [Blanco makes no sign. The Foreman spits disgustedly, and follows Strapper out. The Jurymen leave the box, except Nestor, who collapses in a drunken sleep].

BLANCO [Suddenly rushing from the bar to the table and jumping up on it] Boys, I’m going to preach you a sermon on the moral of this day’s proceedings.

THE BOYS [crowding round him] Yes: lets have a sermon. Go ahead, Blanco. Silence for Elder Blanco. Tune the organ. Let us pray.

NESTOR [staggering out of his sleep] Never hold up your head in this town again. I’m done with you.

BLANCO [pointing inexorably to Nestor] Drunk in church. Disturbing the preacher. Hand him out.

THE BOYS [chivying Nestor out] Now, Nestor, outside. Outside, Nestor. Out you go. Get your subscription ready for the Sheriff. Skiddoo, Nestor.

NESTOR. Afraid to be hanged! Afraid to be hanged! [At the door] Coward! [He is thrown out].

BLANCO. Dearly beloved brethren —

A BOY. Same to you, Blanco. [Laughter].

BLANCO. And many of them. Boys: this is a rotten world.

ANOTHER BOY. Lord have mercy on us, miserable sinners. [More laughter].

BLANCO [Forcibly] No: thats where youre wrong. Dont flatter yourselves that youre miserable sinners. Am I a miserable sinner? No: I’m a fraud and a failure. I started in to be a bad man like the rest of you. You all started in to be bad men or you wouldn’t be in this jumped-up, jerked-off, hospital-turned-out camp that calls itself a town. I took the broad path because I thought I was a man and not a snivelling canting turning-the-other-cheek apprentice angel serving his time in a vale of tears. They talked Christianity to us on Sundays; but when they really meant business they told us never to take a blow without giving it back, and to get dollars. When they talked the golden rule to me, I just looked at them as if they werent there, and spat. But when they told me to try to live my life so that I could always look my fellowman straight in the eye and tell him to go to hell, that fetched me.

THE BOYS. Quite right. Good. Bully for you, Blanco, old son. Right good sense too. Aha-a-ah!

BLANCO. Yes; but whats come of it all? Am I a real bad man? a man of game and grit? a man that does what he likes and goes over or through other people to his own gain? or am I a snivelling cry-baby that let a horse his life depended on be took from him by a woman, and then sat on the grass looking at the rainbow and let himself be took like a hare in a trap by Strapper Kemp: a lad whose back I or any grown man here could break against his knee? I’m a rottener fraud and failure than the Elder here. And youre all as rotten as me, or youd have lynched me.

A BOY. Anything to oblige you, Blanco.

ANOTHER. We can do it yet if you feel really bad about it.

BLANCO. No: the devil’s gone out of you. We’re all frauds. Theres none of us real good and none of us real bad.

ELDER DANIELS. There is One above, Blanco.

BLANCO. What do you know about Him? you that always talk as if He never did anything without asking your rotten leave first? Why did the child die? Tell me that if you can. He cant have wanted to kill the child. Why did He make me go soft on the child if He was going hard on it Himself? Why should He go hard on the innocent kid and go soft on a rotten thing like me? Why did I go soft myself? Why did the Sheriff go soft? Why did Feemy go soft? Whats this game that upsets our game? For seems to me theres two games bein played. Our game is a rotten game that makes me feel I’m dirt and that youre all as rotten dirt as me. T’other game may be a silly game; but it aint rotten. When the Sheriff played it he stopped being rotten. When Feemy played it the paint nearly dropped off her face. When I played it I cursed myself for a fool; but I lost the rotten feel all the same.

ELDER DANIELS. It was the Lord speaking to your soul, Blanco.

BLANCO. Oh yes: you know all about the Lord, don’t you? Youre in the Lord’s confidence. He wouldn’t for the world do anything to shock you, would He, Boozy dear? Yah! What about the croup? It was early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for him. You bet He didn’t make us for nothing; and He wouldn’t have made us at all if He could have done His work without us. By Gum, that must be what we’re for! He’d never have made us to be rotten drunken blackguards like me, and good-for-nothing rips like Feemy. He made me because He had a job for me. He let me run loose til the job was ready; and then I had to come along and do it, hanging or no hanging. And I tell you it didn’t feel rotten: it felt bully, just bully. Anyhow, I got the rotten feel off me for a minute of my life; and I’ll go through fire to get it off me again. Look here! which of you will marry Feemy Evans?

THE BOYS [uproariously] Who speaks first? Who’ll marry Feemy? Come along, Jack. Nows your chance, Peter. Pass along a husband for Feemy. Oh my! Feemy!

FEEMY [shortly] Keep your tongue off me, will you?

BLANCO. Feemy was a rose of the broad path, wasn’t she? You all thought her the champion bad woman of this district. Well, she’s a failure as a bad woman; and I’m a failure as a bad man. So let Brother Daniels marry us to keep all the rottenness in the family. What do you say, Feemy?

FEEMY. Thank you; but when I marry I’ll marry a man that could do a decent action without surprising himself out of his senses. Youre like a child with a new toy: you and your bit of human kindness!

THE WOMAN. How many would have done it with their life at stake?

FEEMY. Oh well, if youre so much taken with him, marry him yourself. Youd be what people call a good wife to him, wouldn’t you?

THE WOMAN. I was a good wife to the child’s father. I don’t think any woman wants to be a good wife twice in her life. I want somebody to be a good husband to me now.

BLANCO. Any offer, gentlemen, on that understanding? [The boys shake their heads]. Oh, it’s a rotten game, our game. Here’s a real good woman; and she’s had enough of it, finding that it only led to being put upon.

HANNAH. Well, if there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything left for us to do, would there?

ELDER DANIELS. Be of good cheer, brothers. Fight on. Seek the path.

BLANCO. No. No more paths. No more broad and narrow. No more good and bad. Theres no good and bad; but by Jiminy, gents, theres a rotten game, and theres a great game. I played the rotten game; but the great game was played on me; and now I’m for the great game every time. Amen. Gentlemen: let us adjourn to the saloon. I stand the drinks. [He jumps down from the table].

THE BOYS. Right you are, Blanco. Drinks round. Come along, boys. Blanco’s standing. Right along to the Elder’s. Hurrah! [They rush out, dragging the Elder with them].

BLANCO [to Feemy, offering his hand] Shake, Feemy.

FEEMY. Get along, you blackguard.

BLANCO. It’s come over me again, same as when the kid touched me. Shake, Feemy.

FEEMY. Oh well, here. [They shake hands].

PRESS CUTTINGS

The forenoon of the first of April, 1911.

General Mitchener is at his writing table in the War Office, opening letters. On his left is the fireplace, with a fire burning. On his right, against the opposite wall is a standing desk with an office stool. The door is in the wall behind him, half way between the table and the desk. The table is not quite in the middle of the room: it is nearer to the hearthrug than to the desk. There is a chair at each end of it for persons having business with the general. There is a telephone on the table. Long silence.

A VOICE OUTSIDE. Votes for Women!

The General starts convulsively; snatches a revolver from a drawer, and listens in an agony of apprehension. Nothing happens. He puts the revolver back, ashamed; wipes his brow; and resumes his work. He is startled afresh by the entry of an Orderly. This Orderly is an unsoldierly, slovenly, discontented young man.

MITCHENER. Oh, it’s only you. Well?

THE ORDERLY. Another one, sir. Shes chained herself.

MITCHENER. Chained herself? How? To what? Weve taken away the railings and everything that a chain can be passed through.

THE ORDERLY. We forgot the doorscraper, sir. She laid down on the flags and got the chain through before she started hollerin. Shes lying there now; and she says that youve got the key of the padlock in a letter in a buff envelope, and that you will see her when you open it.

MITCHENER. Shes mad. Have the scraper dug up and let her go home with it hanging round her neck.

THE ORDERLY. Theres a buff envelope there, sir.

MITCHENER. Youre all afraid of these women (picking the letter up). It does seem to have a key in it. (He opens the letter, and takes out a key and a note.) “Dear Mitch” — Well, I’m dashed!

THE ORDERLY. Yes Sir.

MITCHENER. What do you mean by Yes Sir?

THE ORDERLY. Well, you said you was dashed, Sir; and you did look if youll excuse my saying it, Sir — well, you looked it.

MITCHENER (who has been reading the letter, and is too astonished to attend to the Orderlys reply). This is a letter from the Prime Minister asking me to release the woman with this key if she padlocks herself, and to have her shown up and see her at once.

THE ORDERLY (tremulously). Dont do it, governor.

MITCHENER (angrily). How often have I ordered you not to address me as governor. Remember that you are a soldier and not a vulgar civilian. Remember also that when a man enters the army he leaves fear behind him. Heres the key. Unlock her and show her up.

THE ORDERLY. Me unlock her! I dursent. Lord knows what she’d do to me.

MITCHENER (pepperily, rising). Obey your orders instantly, Sir, and dont presume to argue. Even if she kills you, it is your duty to die for your country. Right about face. March. (The Orderly goes out, trembling.)

THE VOICE OUTSIDE. Votes for Women! Votes for Women! Votes for Women!

MITCHENER (mimicking her). Votes for Women! Votes for Women! Votes for Women! (in his natural voice) Votes for children! Votes for babies! Votes for monkeys! (He posts himself on the hearthrug, and awaits the enemy.)

THE ORDERLY (outside). In you go. (He pushes a panting Suffraget into the room.) The person sir. (He withdraws.)

The Suffraget takes off her tailor made skirt and reveals a pair of fashionable trousers.

MITCHENER (horrified). Stop, madam. What are you doing? You must not undress in my presence. I protest. Not even your letter from the Prime Minister —

THE SUFFRAGET. My dear Mitchener: I AM the Prime Minister. (He tears off his hat and cloak; throws them on the desk; and confronts the General in the ordinary costume of a Cabinet minister.)

MITCHENER. Good heavens! Balsquith!

BALSQUITH (throwing himself into Mitchener’s chair). Yes: it is indeed Balsquith. It has come to this: that the only way that the Prime Minister of England can get from Downing Street to the War Office is by assuming this disguise; shrieking “VOTES for Women”; and chaining himself to your doorscraper. They were at the corner in force. They cheered me. Bellachristina herself was there. She shook my hand and told me to say I was a vegetarian, as the diet was better in Holloway for vegetarians.

MITCHENER. Why didnt you telephone?

BALSQUITH. They tap the telephone. Every switchboard in London is in their hands or in those of their young men.

MITCHENER. Where on Earth did you get that dress?

BALSQUITH. I stole it from a little Exhibition got up by my wife in Downing Street.

MITCHENER. You dont mean to say its a French dress?

BALSQUITH. Great Heavens, no. My wife isnt allowed even to put on her gloves with French chalk. Everything labelled Made in Camberwell. She advised me to come to you. And what I have to say must be said here to you personally, in the most intimate confidence, with the most urgent persuasion. Mitchener: Sandstone has resigned.

MITCHENER (amazed). Old Red resigned!

BALSQUITH. Resigned.

MITCHENER. But how? Why? Oh, impossible! the proclamation of martial law last Tuesday made Sandstone virtually Dictator in the metropolis, and to resign now is flat desertion.

BALSQUITH. Yes, yes, my dear Mitchener; I know all that as well as you do: I argued with him until I was black in the face and he so red about the neck that if I had gone on he would have burst. He is furious because we have abandoned his plan.

MITCHENER. But you accepted it unconditionally.

BALSQUITH. Yes, before we knew what it was. It was unworkable, you know.

MITCHENER. I dont know. Why is it unworkable?

BALSQUITH. I mean the part about drawing a cordon round Westminster at a distance of two miles; and turning all women out of it.

MITCHENER. A masterpiece of strategy. Let me explain. The Suffragets are a very small body; but they are numerous enough to be troublesome — even dangerous — when they are all concentrated in one place — say in Parliament Square. But by making a two-mile radius and pushing them beyond it, you scatter their attack over a circular line twelve miles long. A superb piece of tactics. Just what Wellington would have done.

BALSQUITH. But the women wont go.

MITCHENER. Nonsense: they must go.

BALSQUITH. They wont.

MITCHENER. What does Sandstone say?

BALSQUITH. He says: Shoot them down.

MITCHENER. Of course.

BALSQUITH. Youre not serious?

MITCHENER. Im perfectly serious.

BALSQUITH. But you cant shoot them down! Women, you know!

MITCHENER (straddling confidently). Yes you can. Strange as it may seem to you as a civilian, Balsquith, if you point a rifle at a woman and fire it, she will drop exactly as a man drops.

BALSQUITH. But suppose your own daughters — Helen and Georgina.

MITCHENER. My daughters would not dream of disobeying the proclamation. (As an after thought.) At least Helen wouldnt.

BALSQUITH. But Georgina?

MITCHENER. Georgina would if she knew shed be shot if she didnt. Thats how the thing would work. Military methods are really the most merciful in the end. You keep sending these misguided women to Holloway and killing them slowly and inhumanely by ruining their health; and it does no good: they go on worse than ever. Shoot a few, promptly and humanely; and there will be an end at once of all resistance and of all the suffering that resistance entails.

BALSQUITH. But public opinion would never stand it.

MITCHENER (walking about and laying down the law). Theres no such thing as public opinion.

BALSQUITH. No such thing as public opinion!!

MITCHENER. Absolutely no such thing as public opinion. There are certain persons who entertain certain opinions. Well, shoot them down. When you have shot them down, there are no longer any persons entertaining those opinions alive: consequently there is no longer any more of the public opinion you are so much afraid of. Grasp that fact, my dear Balsquith; and you have grasped the secret of government. Public opinion is mind. Mind is inseparable from matter. Shoot down the matter and you kill the mind.

BALSQUITH. But hang it all —

MITCHENER (intolerantly). No I wont hang it all. It’s no use coming to me and talking about public opinion. You have put yourself into the hands of the army; and you are committed to military methods. And the basis of all military methods is that when people wont do what they are told to do, you shoot them down.

BALSQUITH. Oh, yes; it’s all jolly fine for you and Old Red. You dont depend on votes for your places. What do you suppose will happen at the next election?

MITCHENER. Have no next election. Bring in a Bill at once repealing all the reform Acts and vesting the Government in a properly trained magistracy responsible only to a Council of War. It answers perfectly in India. If anyone objects, shoot him down.

BALSQUITH. But none of the members of my party would be on the Council of War. Neither should I. Do you expect us to vote for making ourselves nobodies?

MITCHENER. You’ll have to, sooner or later, or the Socialists will make nobodies of the lot of you by collaring every penny you possess. Do you suppose this damned democracy can be allowed to go on now that the mob is beginning to take it seriously and using its power to lay hands on property? Parliament must abolish itself. The Irish parliament voted for its own extinction. The English parliament will do the same if the same means are taken to persuade it.

BALSQUITH. That would cost a lot of money.

MITCHENER. Not money necessarily. Bribe them with titles.

BALSQUITH. Do you think we dare?

MITCHENER (scornfully). Dare! Dare! What is life but daring, man? “To dare, to dare, and again to dare” —

WOMAN’S VOICE OUTSIDE. Votes for Women!

Mitchener, revolver in hand, rushes to the door and locks it. Balsquith hides under the table.

A shot is heard.

BALSQUITH (emerging in the greatest alarm). Good heavens, you havent given orders to fire on them have you?

MITCHENER. No; but its a sentinel’s duty to fire on anyone who persists in attempting to pass without giving the word.

BALSQUITH (wiping his brow). This military business is really awful.

MITCHENER. Be calm, Balsquith. These things must happen; they save bloodshed in the long run, believe me. Ive seen plenty of it; and I know.

BALSQUITH. I havent; and I dont know. I wish those guns didnt make such a devil of a noise. We must adopt Maxim’s Silencer for the army rifles if we are going to shoot women. I really couldnt stand hearing it.

Some one outside tries to open the door and then knocks.

MITCHENER and BALSQUITH. Whats that?

MITCHENER. Whos there?

THE ORDERLY. It’s only me, governor. Its all right.

MITCHENER (unlocking the door and admitting the Orderly, who comes between them). What was it?

THE ORDERLY. Suffraget, Sir.

BALSQUITH. Did the sentry shoot her?

THE ORDERLY. No, Sir: she shot the sentry.

BALSQUITH (relieved). Oh: is that all?

MITCHENER (most indignantly). All? A civilian shoots down one of His Majesty’s soldiers on duty; and the Prime Minister of England asks Is that all? Have you no regard for the sanctity of human life?

BALSQUITH (much relieved). Well, getting shot is what a soldier is for. Besides, he doesnt vote.

MITCHENER. Neither do the Suffragets.

BALSQUITH. Their husbands do. (To the Orderly.) By the way, did she kill him?

THE ORDERLY. No, Sir. He got a stinger on his trousers, Sir; but it didnt penetrate. He lost his temper a bit and put down his gun and clouted her head for her. So she said he was no gentleman; and we let her go, thinking she’d had enough, Sir.

MITCHENER (groaning). Clouted her head! These women are making the army as lawless as themselves. Clouted her head indeed! A purely civil procedure.

THE ORDERLY. Any orders, Sir?

MITCHENER. No. Yes. No. Yes: send everybody who took part in this disgraceful scene to the guardroom. No. Ill address the men on the subject after lunch. Parade them for that purpose — full kit. Don’t grin at me, Sir. Right about face. March. (The Orderly obeys and goes out.)

BALSQUITH (taking Mitchener affectionately by the arm and walking him persuasively to and fro). And now, Mitchener, will you come to the rescue of the Government and take the command that Old Red has thrown up?

MITCHENER. How can I? You know that the people are devoted heart and soul to Sandstone. He is only bringing you “on the knee,” as we say in the army. Could any other living man have persuaded the British nation to accept universal compulsory military service as he did last year? Why, even the Church refused exemption. He is supreme — omnipotent.

BALSQUITH. He WAS, a year ago. But ever since your book of reminiscences went into two more editions than his, and the rush for it led to the wrecking of the Times Book Club, you have become to all intents and purposes his senior. He lost ground by saying that the wrecking was got up by the booksellers. It showed jealousy: and the public felt it.

MITCHENER. But I cracked him up in my book — you see I could do no less after the handsome way he cracked me up in his — and I cant go back on it now. (Breaking loose from Balsquith.) No: its no use, Balsquith: he can dictate his terms to you.

BALSQUITH. Not a bit of it. That affair of the curate —

MITCHENER (impatiently). Oh, damn that curate. Ive heard of nothing but that wretched mutineer for a fortnight past. He is not a curate: whilst he is serving in the army he is a private soldier and nothing else. I really havent time to discuss him further. Im busy. Good morning. (He sits down at his table and takes up his letters.)

BALSQUITH (near the door). I am sorry you take that tone, Mitchener. Since you do take it, let me tell you frankly that I think Lieutenant Chubbs-Jenkinson showed a great want of consideration for the Government in giving an unreasonable and unpopular order, and bringing compulsory military service into disrepute. When the leader of the Labor Party appealed to me and to the House last year not to throw away all the liberties of Englishmen by accepting universal Compulsory military service without insisting on full civil rights for the soldier —

MITCHENER. Rot.

BALSQUITH. — I said that no British officer would be capable of abusing the authority with which it was absolutely necessary to invest him.

MITCHENER. Quite right.

BALSQUITH. That carried the House and carried the country —

MITCHENER. Naturally.

BALSQUITH. — And the feeling was that the Labor Party were soulless cads.

MITCHENER. So they are.

BALSQUITH. And now comes this unmannerly young whelp Chubbs-Jenkinson, the only son of what they call a soda king, and orders a curate to lick his boots. And when the curate punches his head, you first sentence him to be shot; and then make a great show of clemency by commuting it to a flogging. What did you expect the curate to do?

MITCHENER (throwing down his pen and his letters and jumping up to confront Balsquith). His duty was perfectly simple. He should have obeyed the order; and then laid his complaint against the officer in proper form. He would have received the fullest satisfaction.

BALSQUITH. What satisfaction?

MITCHENER. Chubbs-Jenkinson would have been reprimanded. In fact, he WAS reprimanded. Besides, the man was thoroughly insubordinate. You cant deny that the very first thing he did when they took him down after flogging him was to walk up to Chubbs-Jenkinson and break his jaw. That showed there was no use flogging him; so now he will get two years hard labor; and serve him right.

BALSQUITH. I bet you a guinea he wont get even a week. I bet you another that Chubbs-Jenkinson apologizes abjectly. You evidently havent heard the news.

MITCHENER. What news?

BALSQUITH. It turns out that the curate is well connected. (Mitchener staggers at the shock. Speechless he contemplates Balsquith with a wild and ghastly stare; then reels into his chair and buries his face in his hands over the blotter. Balsquith continues remorselessly, stooping over him to rub it in.) He has three aunts in the peerage; and Lady Richmond’s one of them; (Mitchener utters a heartrending groan) and they all adore him. The invitations for six garden parties and fourteen dances have been cancelled for all the subalterns in Chubbs’s regiment. Is it possible you havent heard of it?

MITCHENER. Not a word.

BALSQUITH (shaking his head). I suppose nobody dared to tell you. (He sits down carelessly on Mitchener’s right.)

MITCHENER. What an infernal young fool Chubbs-Jenkinson is, not to know the standing of his man better! Why didnt he know? It was his business to know. He ought to be flogged.

BALSQUITH. Probably he will be, by the other subalterns.

MITCHENER. I hope so. Anyhow, out he goes! Out of the army! He or I.

BALSQUITH. His father has subscribed a million to the party funds. We owe him a peerage.

MITCHENER. I dont care.

BALSQUITH. I do. How do you think parties are kept up? Not by the subscriptions of the local associations, I hope. They dont pay for the gas at the meetings.

MITCHENER. Man; can you not be serious? Here are we, face to face with Lady Richmond’s grave displeasure; and you talk to me about gas and subscriptions. Her own nephew.

BALSQUITH (gloomily). Its unfortunate. He was at Oxford with Bobby Bassborough.

MITCHENER. Worse and worse. What shall we do?

Balsquith shakes his head. They contemplate one another in miserable silence.

A VOICE WITHOUT. Votes for Women! Votes for Women!

A terrific explosion shakes the building — they take no notice.

MITCHENER (breaking down). You dont know what this means to me, Balsquith. I love the army. I love my country.

BALSQUITH. It certainly is rather awkward.

The Orderly comes in.

MITCHENER (angrily). What is it? How dare you interrupt us like this?

THE ORDERLY. Didnt you hear the explosion, Sir?

MITCHENER. Explosion. What explosion? No: I heard no explosion: I have something more serious to attend to than explosions. Great Heavens: Lady Richmond’s nephew has been treated like any common laborer; and while England is reeling under the shock a private comes in and asks me if I heard an explosion.

BALSQUITH. By the way, what was the explosion?

THE ORDERLY. Only a sort of bombshell, Sir.

BALSQUITH. Bombshell!

THE ORDERLY. A pasteboard one, Sir. Full of papers with Votes for Women in red letters. Fired into the yard from the roof of the Alliance Office.

MITCHENER. Pooh! Go away. Go away.

The Orderly, bewildered, goes out.

BALSQUITH. Mitchener: you can save the country yet. Put on your full-dress uniform and your medals and orders and so forth. Get a guard of honor — something showy — horse guards or something of that sort; and call on the old girl —

MITCHENER. The old girl?

BALSQUITH. Well, Lady Richmond. Apologize to her. Ask her leave to accept the command. Tell her that youve made the curate your adjutant or your aide-de-camp or whatever is the proper thing. By the way, what can you make him?

MITCHENER. I might make him my chaplain. I dont see why I shouldnt have a chaplain on my staff. He showed a very proper spirit in punching that young cub’s head. I should have done the same myself.

BALSQUITH. Then Ive your promise to take command if Lady Richmond consents?

MITCHENER. On condition that I have a free hand. No nonsense about public opinion or democracy.

BALSQUITH. As far as possible, I think I may say yes.

MITCHENER (rising intolerantly and going to the hearthrug). That wont do for me. Dont be weak-kneed, Balsquith. You know perfectly well that the real government of this country is and always must be the government of the masses by the classes. You know that democracy is damned nonsense, and that no class stands less of it than the working class. You know that we are already discussing the steps that will have to be taken if the country should ever be face to face with the possibility of a Labor majority in parliament. You know that in that case we should disfranchise the mob, and, if they made a fuss, shoot them down. You know that if we need public opinion to support us, we can get any quantity of it manufactured in our papers by poor devils of journalists who will sell their souls for five shillings. You know —

BALSQUITH. Stop. Stop, I say. I dont know. That is the difference between your job and mine, Mitchener. After twenty years in the army a man thinks he knows everything. After twenty months in the Cabinet he knows that he knows nothing.

MITCHENER. We learn from history —

BALSQUITH. We learn from history that men never learn anything from history. Thats not my own: its Hegel.

MITCHENER. Whos Hegel?

BALSQUITH. Dead. A German philosopher. (He half rises, but recollects something and sits down again.) Oh confound it: that reminds me. The Germans have laid down four more Dreadnoughts.

MITCHENER. Then you must lay down twelve.

BALSQUITH. Oh yes: its easy to say that: but think of what theyll cost.

MITCHENER. Think of what it would cost to be invaded by Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions.

BALSQUITH. But you said that if you got compulsory military service there would be an end of the danger of invasion.

MITCHENER. On the contrary, my dear fellow, it increases the danger tenfold, because it increases German jealousy of our military supremacy.

BALSQUITH. After all, why should the Germans invade us?

MITCHENER. Why shouldnt they? What else has their army to do? What else are they building a navy for?

BALSQUITH. Well, we never think of invading Germany.

MITCHENER. Yes we do. I have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never WILL recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to England.

BALSQUITH. But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?

MITCHENER. Shoot them down.

BALSQUITH. I cant shoot them down.

MITCHENER. Yes you can. You dont realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a rabbit does.

BALSQUITH But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasnt got a rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.

MITCHENER. Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

BALSQUITH (jumping up and walking about sulkily). Oh come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I dont believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.

MITCHENER (calmly). A very sensible precaution, Balsquith. I always take it. And in consequence Ive never been burgled.

BALSQUITH. Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with cowardice. (He posts himself on the hearthrug beside Mitchener on his left.) I never look under my bed for a burglar. Im not always looking under the nation’s bed for an invader. And if it comes to fighting Im quite willing to fight without being three to one.

MITCHENER. These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least youll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

BALSQUITH. The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isnt going to get it.

MITCHENER. And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in the same way? Are we also to live without security?

BALSQUITH (dogmatically). Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the world: and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.

MITCHENER (very seriously). Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman, tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there at all hazards.

BALSQUITH. My dear Mitchener, the moon is outside practical politics. Id swop it for a cooling station tomorrow with Germany or any other Power sufficiently military in its way of thinking to attach any importance to it.

MITCHENER (losing his temper). You are the friend of every country but your own.

BALSQUITH. Say nobodys enemy but my own. It sounds nicer. You really neednt be so horribly afraid of the other countries. Theyre all in the same fix as we are. Im much more interested in the death rate in Lambeth than in the German fleet.

MITCHENER. You darent say that in Lambeth.

BALSQUITH. Ill say it the day after you publish your scheme for invading Germany and repealing all the reform Acts.

The Orderly comes in.

MITCHENER. What do you want?

THE ORDERLY. I dont want anything, Governor, thank you. The secretary and president of the Anti-Suffraget League say they had an appointment with the Prime Minister, and that theyve been sent on here from Downing Street.

BALSQUITH (going to the table). Quite right. I forgot them. (To Mitchener.) Would you mind my seeing them here? I feel extraordinarily grateful to these women for standing by us and facing the suffragets, especially as they are naturally the gentler and timid sort of women. (The Orderly moans.) Did you say anything?

THE ORDERLY. No, Sir.

BALSQUITH. Did you catch their names.

THE ORDERLY. Yes, Sir. The president is Lady Corinthia Fanshawe; and the secretary is Mrs. Banger.

MITCHENER (abruptly). Mrs. what?

THE ORDERLY. Mrs. Banger.

BALSQUITH. Curious that quiet people always seem to have violent names.

THE ORDERLY. Not much quiet about her, sir.

MITCHENER (outraged). Attention. Speak when youre spoken to. Hold your tongue when youre not. Right about face. March. (The Orderly obeys.) Thats the way to keep these chaps up to the mark. (The Orderly returns.) Back again! What do you mean by this mutiny?

THE ORDERLY. What am I to say to the ladies, sir?

BALSQUITH. You dont mind my seeing them somewhere, do you?

MITCHENER. Not at all. Bring them in to see me when youve done with them: I understand that Lady Corinthia is a very fascinating woman. Who is she, by the way?

BALSQUITH. Daughter of Lord Broadstairs, the automatic turbine man. Gave quarter of a million to the party funds. Shes musical and romantic and all that — dont hunt: hates politics: stops in town all the year round: one never sees her anywhere except at the opera and at musical at-homes and so forth.

MITCHENER. What a life! Still, if she wants to see me I dont mind. (To the Orderly.) Where are the ladies?

THE ORDERLY. In No. 17, Sir.

MITCHENER. Show Mr. Balsquith there. And send Mrs. Farrell here.

THE ORDERLY (calling into the corridor). Mrs. Farrell! (To Balsquith.) This way sir. (He goes out with Balsquith.)

Mrs. Farrell, a lean, highly respectable Irish Charwoman of about 50 comes in.

MITCHENER. Mrs. Farrell: Ive a very important visit to pay: I shall want my full dress uniform and all my medals and orders and my presentation sword. There was a time when the British Army contained men capable of discharging these duties for their commanding officer. Those days are over. The compulsorily enlisted soldier runs to a woman for everything. Im therefore reluctantly obliged to trouble you.

MRS FARRELL. Your meddles n ordhers n the crooked sword with the ivory handle n your full dress uniform is in the waxworks in the Chamber o Military Glory over in the place they used to call the Banquetin Hall. I told you youd be sorry for sendin them away; n you told me to mind me own business. Youre wiser now.

MITCHENER. I am. I had not at that time discovered that you were the only person in the whole military establishment of this capital who could be trusted to remember where anything was, or to understand an order and obey it.

MRS. FARRELL. Its no good flattherin me. Im too old.

MITCHENER. Not at all, Mrs. Farrell. How is your daughter?

MRS. FARRELL. Which daughther.

MITCHENER. The one who has made such a gratifying success in the Music Halls.

MRS. FARRELL. Theres no music halls nowadays: theyre Variety Theatres. Shes got an offer of marriage from a young jook.

MITCHENER. Is it possible? What did you do?

MRS. FARRELL. I told his mother on him.

MITCHENER. Oh! what did she say?

MRS. FARRELL. She was as pleased as Punch. Thank Heaven, she says, hes got somebody thatll be able to keep him when the supertax is put up to twenty shillings in the pound.

MITCHENER. But your daughter herself? What did she say?

MRS. FARRELL. Accepted him, of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking shed inspire him.

MITCHENER. Did she?

MRS. FARRELL. Faith I dunna. All I know is she walked up to him as bold as brass n said “Write me a sketch, dear.” Afther all the trouble I took with that chills manners shes no more notion how to behave herself than a pig. Youll have to wear General Sandstones uniform: its the ony one in the place, because he wont lend it to the shows.

MITCHENER. But Sandstones clothes wont fit me.

MRS. FARRELL (unmoved). Then youll have to fit THEM. Why shouldnt they fitcha as well as they fitted General Blake at the Mansion House?

MITCHENER. They didnt fit him. He looked a frightful guy.

MRS. FARRELL. Well, you must do the best you can with them. You cant exhibit your clothes and wear them too.

MITCHENER. And the public thinks the lot of a commanding officer a happy one! Oh, if they could only see the seamy side of it. (He returns to his table to resume work.)

MRS. FARRELL. If they could only see the seamy side of General Sandstones uniform, where his flask rubs agen the buckle of his braces, theyll tell him he ought to get a new one. Let alone the way he swears at me.

MITCHENER. When a man has risked his life on eight battlefields, Mrs. Farrell, he has given sufficient proof of his self-control to be excused a little strong language.

MRS. FARRELL. Would you put up with bad language from me because Ive risked my life eight times in childbed?

MITCHENER. My dear Mrs. Farrell, you surely would not compare a risk of that harmless domestic kind to the fearful risks of the battlefield?

MRS. FARRELL. I wouldnt compare risks run to bear living people into the world to risks run to blow them out of it. A mother’s risk is jooty: a soldier’s nothin but divilmint.

MITCHENER (nettled). Let me tell you, Mrs. Farrell, that if the men did not fight, the women would have to fight themselves. We spare you that, at all events.

MRS. FARRELL. You cant help yourselves. If three-quarters of you was killed we could replace you with the help of the other quarter. If three-quarters of us was killed, how many people would there be in England in another generation? If it wasnt for that, the man d put the fightin on us just as they put all the other dhrudgery. What would YOU do if we was all kilt? Would you go to bed and have twins?

MITCHENER. Really, Mrs. Farrell, you must discuss these questions with a medical man. You make me blush, positively.

MRS. FARRELL. A good job too. If I could have made Farrell blush I wouldnt have had to risk me life too often. You n your risks n your bravery n your selfcontrol indeed! “Why don’t you conthrol yourself?” I sez to Farrell. “Its agen me religion,” he sez.

MITCHENER (plaintively). Mrs. Farrell, youre a woman of very powerful mind. Im not qualified to argue these delicate matters with you. I ask you to spare me, and to be good enough to take these clothes to Mr. Balsquith when the ladies leave.

The Orderly comes in.

THE ORDERLY. Lady Corinthia Fanshawe and Mrs. Banger wish to see you, sir. Mr. Balsquith told me to tell you.

MRS. FARRELL. Theyve come about the vote. I dont know whether its them that want it or them that doesnt want it: anyhow, they’re all alike when they get into a state about it. (She goes out, having gathered Balsquith’s suffraget disguise from the desk.)

MITCHENER. Is Mr. Balsquith not with them?

THE ORDERLY. No, Sir. Couldnt stand Mrs. Banger, I expect. Fair caution she is. (He chuckles.) Couldnt help larfin when I sor im op it.

MITCHENER. How dare you indulge in this unseemly mirth in the presence of your commanding officer? Have you no sense of a soldier’s duty?

THE ORDERLY (sadly). Im afraid I shant ever get the ang of it, sir. You see my father has a tidy little barbers business down off Shoreditch; and I was brought up to be chatty and easy like with everybody. I tell you, when I drew the number in the conscription it gave my old mother the needle and it gev me the ump. I should take it very kind, sir, if youd let me off the drill and let me shave you instead. Youd appreciate my qualities then: you would indeed sir. I shant never do myself justice at soljering, sir: I cant bring myself to think of it as proper work for a man with an active mind, as you might say, sir. Arf of its only ousemaidin; and the other arf is dress-up and make-believe.

MITCHENER. Stuff, Sir. Its the easiest life in the world. Once you learn your drill all you have to do is to hold your tongue and obey your orders.

THE ORDERLY. But I do assure you, sir, arf the time they’re the wrong orders; and I get into trouble when I obey them. The sergeants orders is all right; but the officers dont know what theyre talkin about. Why the orses knows better sometimes. “Fours” says Lieutenant Trevor at the gate of Bucknam Palace only this morning when we was on duty for a State visit to the Coal Trust. I was fourth man like in the first file; and when I started the orse eld back; and the sergeant was on to me straight. Threes, you bally fool, he whispers. And he was on to me again about it when we came back, and called me a fathead, he did. What am I to do, I says: the lieutenant’s orders was fours, I says. Ill show you whos lieutenant here, e says. In future you attend to my orders and not to iz, e says: what does he know about it? You didnt give me any orders, I says. Couldnt you see for yourself there wasnt room for fours, e says: why cant you THINK? General Mitchener tells me Im not to think but to obey orders, I says. Is Mitchener your sergeant or am I, e says in his bullyin way. You are, I says. Well, he says, youve got to do what your sergeant tells you: thats discipline, he says. What am I to do for the General I says. Youre to let im talk, e says: thats what es for.

MITCHENER (groaning). It is impossible for the human mind to conceive anything more dreadful than this. Youre a disgrace to the service.

THE ORDERLY (deeply wounded). The service is a disgrace to me. When my mother’s people pass me in the street with this uniform on, I ardly know which way to look. There never was a soldier in my family before.

MITCHENER. There never was anything else in mine, sir.

THE ORDERLY. My mother’s second cousin was one of the Parkinsons of Stepney. (Almost in tears.) What do you know of the feelings of a respectable family in the middle station of life? I cant bear to be looked down on as a common soldier. Why cant my father be let buy my discharge? Youve done away with the soldier’s right to have his discharge bought for him by his relations. The country didnt know you were going to do that or it would never have stood it. Is an Englishman to be made a mockery like this?

MITCHENER. Silence. Attention. Right about face. March.

THE ORDERLY (retiring to the standing desk and bedewing it with passionate tears). Oh that I should have lived to be spoke to as if I was the lowest of the low. Me! that has shaved a City of London aldermen wiv me own hand.

MITCHENER. Poltroon. Crybaby. Well, better disgrace yourself here than disgrace your country on the field of battle.

THE ORDERLY (angrily coming to the table). Whos going to disgrace his country on the field of battle? Its not fightin I object to: its soljerin. Show me a German and Ill have a go at him as fast as you or any man. But to ave me time wasted like this, an be stuck in a sentry box at a street corner for an ornament to be stared at; and to be told “right about face: march” if I speak as one man to another: that aint pluck: that aint fightin: that aint patriotism: its bein made a bloomin sheep of.

MITCHENER. A sheep has many valuable military qualities. Emulate them: dont disparage them.

THE ORDERLY. Oh, wots the good of talkin to you? If I wasnt a poor soldier I could punch your head for forty shillins for a month. But because youre my commanding officer you deprive me of my right to a magistrate and make a compliment of giving me two years ard sted of shootin me. Why cant you take your chance the same as any civilian does?

MITCHENER (rising majestically). I search the pages of history in vain for a parallel to such a speech made by a Private to a general. But for the coherence of your remarks I should conclude that you were drunk. As it is, you must be mad. You shall be placed under restraint at once. Call the guard.

THE ORDERLY. Call your grandmother. If you take one man off the doors the place’ll be full of Suffragets before you can wink.

MITCHENER. Then arrest yourself; and off with you to the guardroom.

THE ORDERLY. What am I to arrest myself for?

MITCHENER. Thats nothing to you. You have your orders: obey them. Do you hear? Right about face. March.

THE ORDERLY. How would you feel yourself if you was told to right-about-face and march as if you was a doormat?

MITCHENER. I should feel as if my country had spoken through the voice of my officer. I should feel proud and honored to be able to serve my country by obeying its commands. No thought of self — no vulgar preoccupation with my own petty vanity could touch my mind at such a moment. To me my officer would not be a mere man: he would be for the moment — whatever his personal frailties — the incarnation of our national destiny.

THE ORDERLY. What Im saying to you is the voice of old England a jolly sight more than all this rot that you get out of books. Id rather be spoke to by a sergeant than by you. He tells me to go to hell when I challenges him to argue it out like a man. It aint polite; but its English. What you say aint anything at all. You dont act on it yourself. You dont believe in it. Youd punch my head if I tried it on you; and serve me right. And look here. Heres another point for you to argue.

MITCHENER (with a shriek of protest). No —

Mrs. Banger comes in, followed by Lady Corinthia Fanshawe.

Mrs. Banger is a masculine woman of forty, with a powerful voice and great physical strength. Lady Corinthia, who is also over thirty, is beautiful and romantic.

MRS. BANGER (throwing the door open decisively and marching straight to Michener). Pray how much longer is the Anti-Suffrage League to be kept waiting? (She passes him contemptuously and sits down with impressive confidence in the chair next the fireplace. Lady Corinthia takes the chair on the opposite side of the table with equal aplomb.)

MITCHENER. Im extremely sorry. You really do not know what I have to put with. This imbecile, incompetent, unsoldierly disgrace to the uniform he should never have been allowed to put on, ought to have shown you in fifteen minutes ago.

THE ORDERLY. All I said was —

MITCHENER. Not another word. Attention. Right about face. March. (The Orderly sits down doggedly.) Get out of the room this instant, you fool, or Ill kick you out.

THE ORDERLY (civilly). I dont mind that, sir. Its human. Its English. Why couldnt you have said it before? (He goes out).

MITCHENER. Take no notice I beg: these scenes are of daily occurrence now that we have compulsory service under the command of the halfpenny papers. Pray sit down.

LADY CORINTHIA AND MRS. BANGER (rising). Thank you. (They sit down again.)

MITCHENER (sitting down with a slight chuckle of satisfaction). And now, ladies, to what am I indebted?

MRS. BANGER. Let me introduce us. I am Rosa Carmina Banger — Mrs. Banger, organizing secretary of the Anti-Suffraget League. This is Lady Corinthia Fanshawe, the president of the League, known in musical circles — I am not myself musical — as the Richmond Park nightingale. A soprano. I am myself said to be almost a baritone; but I do not profess to understand these dis-tinctions.

MITCHENER (murmuring politely). Most happy, Im sure.

MRS. BANGER. We have come to tell you plainly that the Anti-Suffragets are going to fight.

MITCHENER (gallantly). Oh, pray leave that to the men, Mrs. Banger.

LADY CORINTHIA. We can no longer trust the men.

MRS. BANGER. They have shown neither the strength, the courage, nor the determination which are needed to combat women like the Suffragets.

LADY CORINTHIA. Nature is too strong for the combatants.

MRS. BANGER. Physical struggles between persons of opposite sexes are unseemly.

LADY CORINTHIA. Demoralizing.

MRS. BANGER. Insincere.

LADY CORINTHIA. They are merely embraces in disguise.

MRS. BANGER. No such suspicion can attach to combats in which the antagonists are of the same sex.

LADY CORINTHIA. The Anti-Suffragets have resolved to take the field.

MRS. BANGER. They will enforce the order of General Sandstone for the removal of all women from the two mile radius — that is, all women except themselves.

MITCHENER. I am sorry to have to inform you, Madam, that the Government has given up that project, and that General Sandstone has resigned in consequence.

MRS. BANGER. That does not concern us in the least. We approve of the project and will see that it is carried out. We have spent a good deal of money arming ourselves; and we are not going to have that money thrown away through the pusillanimity of a Cabinet of males.

MITCHENER. Arming yourselves! But, my dear ladies, under the latest proclamation women are strictly forbidden to carry chains, padlocks, tracts on the franchise, or weapons of any description.

LADY CORINTHIA (producing an ivory-handled revolver and pointing it at his nose). You little know your countrywomen, General Mitchener.

MITCHENER (without flinching). Madam: it is my duty to take possession of that weapon in accordance with the proclamation. Be good enough to put it down.

MRS. BANGER (producing an XVIII century horse pistol). Is it your duty to take possession of this also?

MITCHENER. That, madam, is not a weapon; it is a curiosity. If you would be kind enough to place it in some museum instead of pointing it at my head, I should be obliged to you.

MRS. BANGER. This pistol, sir, was carried at Waterloo by my grandmother.

MITCHENER. I presume you mean your grandfather.

MRS. BANGER. You presume unwarrantably.

LADY CORINTHIA. Mrs. Banger’s grandmother commanded a canteen at that celebrated battle.

MRS. BANGER. Who my grandfather was is a point that has never been quite clearly settled. I put my trust not in my ancestors, but in my good sword, which is at my lodgings.

MITCHENER. Your sword!

MRS. BANGER. The sword with which I slew five Egyptians with my own hand at Kassassin, where I served as a trooper.

MITCHENER. Lord bless me! But was your sex never discovered?

MRS. BANGER. It was never even suspected. I had a comrade — a gentleman ranker — whom they called Fanny. They never called ME Fanny.

LADY CORINTHIA. The suffragets have turned the whole woman movement on to the wrong track. They ask for a vote.

MRS. BANGER. What use is a vote? Men have the vote.

LADY CORINTHIA. And men are slaves.

MRS. BANGER. What women need is the right to military service. Give me a well-mounted regiment of women with sabres, opposed to a regiment of men with votes. We shall see which will go down before the other. (rises) No: we have had enough of these gentle pretty creatures who merely talk and cross-examine ministers in police courts, and go to prison like sheep, and suffer and sacrifice themselves. This question must be solved by blood and iron, as was well said by Bismarck, whom I have reason to believe was a woman in disguise.

MITCHENER. Bismarck a woman?

MRS. BANGER. All the really strong men of history have been disguised women.

MITCHENER (remonstrating). My dear lady!

MRS. BANGER. How can you tell? You never knew that the hero of the charge at Kassassin was a woman: yet she was: it was I, Rosa Carmina Banger. Would Napoleon have been so brutal to women, think you, had he been a man?

MITCHENER. Oh, come, come! Really! Surely female rulers have often shown all the feminine weaknesses. Queen Elizabeth, for instance. Her vanity, her levity.

MRS. BANGER. Nobody who has studied the history of Queen Elizabeth can doubt for a moment that she was a disguised man.

LADY CORINTHIA (admiring Mrs. Banger). Isnt she splendid?

MRS. BANGER (rising with a large gesture). This very afternoon I shall cast off this hampering skirt for ever; mount my charger; and with my good sabre lead the Anti-Suffragets to victory. (She strides to the other side of the room, snorting.)

MITCHENER. But I cant allow anything of the sort, madam. I shall stand no such ridiculous nonsense. Im perfectly determined to put my foot down.

LADY CORINTHIA. Dont be hysterical, General.

MITCHENER. Hysterical!

MRS. BANGER. Do you think we are to be stopped by these childish exhibitions of temper. They are useless; and your tears and entreaties — a man’s last resource — will avail you just as little. I sweep them away, just as I sweep your plans of campaign “made in Germany—”

MITCHENER (flying into a transport of rage). How dare you repeat that infamous slander? (He rings the bell violently.) If this is the alternative to votes for women, I shall advocate giving every woman in the country six votes.

The Orderly comes in.

Remove that woman. See that she leaves the building at once.

The Orderly forlornly contemplates the iron front presented by Mrs. Banger.

THE ORDERLY (propitiatorily). Would you av the feelin art to step out, madam.

MRS. BANGER. You are a soldier. Obey your orders. Put me out. If I got such an order, I should not hesitate.

THE ORDERLY (To Mitchener). Would you mind lendin me a and, Guvner?

LADY CORINTHIA (raising her revolver). I shall be obliged to shoot you if you stir, General.

MRS. BANGER (To the Orderly). When you are ordered to put a person out you should do it like this. (She hurls him from the room. He is heard falling headlong downstairs and crashing through a glass door.) I shall now wait on General Sandstone. If he shows any sign of weakness, he shall share that poor wretch’s fate. (She goes out.)

LADY CORINTHIA. Isnt she magnificent?

MITCHENER. Thank heaven shes gone. And now, my dear lady, is it necessary to keep that loaded pistol to my nose all through our conversation?

LADY CORINTHIA. Its not loaded. Its heavy enough, goodness knows, without putting bullets in it.

MITCHENER (triumphantly snatching his revolver from the drawer). Then I am master of the situation. This IS loaded. Ha, ha!

LADY CORINTHIA. But since we are not really going to shoot one another, what difference can it possibly make?

MITCHENER (putting his pistol down on the table). True. Quite true. I recognize there the practical good sense that has prevented you from falling into the snares of the Suffragets.

LADY CORINTHIA. The Suffragets, General, are the dupes of dowdies. A really attractive and clever woman —

MITCHENER (gallantly). Yourself, for instance.

LADY CORINTHIA (snatching up his revolver). Another step and you are a dead man.

MITCHENER (amazed). My dear lady!

LADY CORINTHIA. I am not your dear lady. You are not the first man who has concluded that because I am devoted to music and can reach F flat with the greatest facility — Patti never got above E flat — I am marked out as the prey of every libertine. You think I am like the thousands of weak women whom you have ruined —

MITCHENER. I solemnly protest —

LADY CORINTHIA. Oh, I know what you officers are. To you a woman’s honor is nothing, and the idle pleasure of the moment is everything.

MITCHENER. This is perfectly ridiculous. I never ruined anyone in my life.

LADY CORINTHIA. Never! Are you in earnest?

MITCHENER. Certainly I am in earnest. Most indignantly in earnest.

LADY CORINTHIA (throwing down the pistol contemptuously). Then you have no temperament; you are not an artist. You have no soul for music.

MITCHENER. Ive subscribed to the regimental band all my life. I bought two sarrusophones for it out of my own pocket. When I sang Tosti’s Goodbye for Ever at Knightsbridge in 1880, the whole regiment wept. You are too young to remember that.

LADY CORINTHIA. Your advances are useless. I —

MITCHENER. Confound it, madam, can you not receive an innocent compliment without suspecting me of dishonorable intentions?

LADY CORINTHIA. Love — real love — makes all intentions honorable. But YOU could never understand that.

MITCHENER. Ill not submit to the vulgar penny-novelette notion that an officer is less honorable than a civilian in his relations with women. While I live Ill raise my voice —

LADY CORINTHIA. Tush!

MITCHENER. What do you mean by tush?

LADY CORINTHIA. You cant raise your voice above its natural compass. What sort of voice have you?

MITCHENER. A tenor. What sort had you?

LADY CORINTHIA. Had? I have it still. I tell you I am the highest living soprano. (Scornfully.) What was your highest note, pray?

MITCHENER. B flat — once — in 1879. I was drunk at the time.

LADY CORINTHIA (gazing at him almost tenderly). Though you may not believe me, I find you are more interesting when you talk about music than when you are endeavoring to betray a woman who has trusted you by remaining alone with you in your apartment.

MITCHENER (springing up and fuming away to the fireplace). These repeated insults to a man of blameless life are as disgraceful to you as they are undeserved by me, Lady Corinthia. Such suspicions invite the conduct they impute. (She raises the pistol.) You need not be alarmed: I am only going to leave the room.

LADY CORINTHIA. Fish.

MITCHENER. Fish! This is worse than tush. Why fish?

LADY CORINTHIA. Yes, fish: coldblooded fish.

MITCHENER. Dash it all, madam, do you WANT me to make advances to you?

LADY CORINTHIA. I have not the slightest intention of yielding to them; but to make them would be a tribute to romance. What is life without romance?

MITCHENER (making a movement toward her). I tell you —

LADY CORINTHIA. Stop. No nearer. No vulgar sensuousness. If you must adore, adore at a distance.

MITCHENER. This is worse than Mrs. Banger. I shall ask that estimable woman to come back.

LADY CORINTHIA. Poor Mrs. Banger! Do not for a moment suppose, General Mitchener, that Mrs. Banger represents my views on the suffrage question. Mrs. Banger is a man in petticoats. I am every inch a woman; but I find it convenient to work with her.

MITCHENER. Do you find the combination comfortable?

LADY CORINTHIA. I do not wear combinations, General: (with dignity) they are unwomanly.

MITCHENER (throwing himself despairingly into the chair next the hearthrug). I shall go mad. I never for a moment dreamt of alluding to anything of the sort.

LADY CORINTHIA. There is no need to blush and become self-conscious at the mention of underclothing. You are extremely vulgar, General.

MITCHENER. Lady Corinthia: you have my pistol. Will you have the goodness to blow my brains out. I should prefer it to any further effort to follow the gyrations of the weathercock you no doubt call your mind. If you refuse, then I warn you that youll not get another word out of me — not if we sit here until doomsday.

LADY CORINTHIA. I dont want you to talk. I want you to listen. You do not yet understand my views on the question of the Suffrage. (She rises to make a speech.) I must preface my remarks by reminding you that the Suffraget movement is essentially a dowdy movement. The suffragets are not all dowdies; but they are mainly supported by dowdies. Now I am not a dowdy. Oh, no compliments —

MITCHENER. I did not utter a sound.

LADY CORINTHIA (smiling). It is easy to read your thoughts. I am one of those women who are accustomed to rule the world through men. Man is ruled by beauty, by charm. The men who are not have no influence. The Salic Law, which forbade women to occupy a throne, is founded on the fact that when a woman is on the throne the country is ruled by men, and therefore ruled badly; whereas when a man is on the throne, the country is ruled by women, and therefore ruled well. The suffragets would degrade women from being rulers to being voters, mere politicians, the drudges of the caucus and the polling booth. We should lose our influence completely under such a state of affairs. The New Zealand women have the vote. What is the result? No poet ever makes a New Zealand woman his heroine. One might as well be romantic about New Zealand mutton. Look at the suffragets themselves. The only ones who are popular are the pretty ones, who flirt with mobs as ordinary women flirt with officers.

MITCHENER. Then I understand you to hold that the country should be governed by the women after all.

LADY CORINTHIA. Not by all the women. By certain women. I had almost said by one woman. By the women who have charm — who have artistic talent — who wield a legitimate, a refining influence over the men. (She sits down gracefully, smiling, and arranging her draperies with conscious elegance.)

MITCHENER. In short, madam, you think that if you give the vote to the man, you give the power to the women who can get round the man.

LADY CORINTHIA. That is not a very delicate way of putting it; but I suppose that is how you would express what I mean.

MITCHENER. Perhaps youve never had any experience of garrison life. If you had, you’d have noticed that the sort of woman who is clever at getting round men is sometimes rather a bad lot.

LADY CORINTHIA. What do you mean by a bad lot?

MITCHENER. I mean a woman who would play the very devil if the other women didnt keep her in pretty strict order. I dont approve of democracy, because its rot; and Im against giving the vote to women because Im not accustomed to it and therefore am able to see with an unprejudiced eye what infernal nonsense it is. But I tell you plainly, Lady Corinthia, that there is one game that I dislike more than either Democracy or Votes For Women: and that is the game of Antony and Cleopatra. If I must be ruled by women, let me have decent women and not — well, not the other sort.

LADY CORINTHIA. You have a coarse mind, General Mitchener.

MITCHENER. So has Mrs. Banger. And by George! I prefer Mrs. Banger to you!

LADY CORINTHIA (bounding to her feet.) You prefer Mrs. Banger to me!!!

MITCHENER. I do. You said yourself she was splendid.

LADY CORINTHIA. You are no true man. You are one of those unsexed creatures who have no joy in life, no sense of beauty, no high notes.

MITCHENER. No doubt I am, Madam. As a matter of fact, I am not clever at discussing public questions, because, as an English gentleman, I was not brought up to use my brains. But occasionally, after a number of remarks which are perhaps sometimes rather idiotic, I get certain convictions. Thanks to you, I have now got a conviction that this woman question is not a question of lovely and accomplished females, but of dowdies. The average Englishwoman is a dowdy and never has half a chance of becoming anything else. She hasnt any charm; and she has no high notes except when shes giving her husband a piece of her mind, or calling down the street for one of the children.

LADY CORINTHIA. How disgusting!

MITCHENER. Somebody must do the dowdy work! If we had to choose between pitching all the dowdies into the Thames and pitching all the lovely and accomplished women, the lovely ones would have to go.

LADY CORINTHIA. And if you had to do without Wagner’s music or do without your breakfast, you would do without Wagner. Pray does that make eggs and bacon more precious than music, or the butcher and baker better than the poet and philosopher? The scullery may be more necessary to our bare existence than the cathedral. Even humbler apartments might make the same claim. But which is the more essential to the higher life?

MITCHENER. Your arguments are so devilishly ingenious that I feel convinced you got them out of some confounded book. Mine — such as they are — are my own. I imagine its something like this. There is an old saying that if you take care of the pence, the pounds will take care of themselves. Well, perhaps if we take care of the dowdies and the butchers and the bakers, the beauties and the bigwigs will take care of themselves. (Rising and facing her determinedly.) Anyhow, I dont want to have things arranged for me by Wagner. Im not Wagner. How does he know where the shoe pinches me? How do you know where the shoe pinches your washerwoman? — you and your high F in alt. How are you to know when you havent made her comfortable unless she has a vote? Do you want her to come and break your windows?

LADY CORINTHIA. Am I to understand that General Mitchener is a democrat and a suffraget?

MITCHENER. Yes: you have converted me — you and Mrs. Banger.

LADY CORINTHIA. Farewell, creature. (Balsquith enters hurriedly.) Mr. Balsquith: I am going to wait on General Sandstone. He at least is an officer and a gentleman. (She sails out.)

BALSQUITH. Mitchener: the game is up.

MITCHENER. What do you mean?

BALSQUITH. The strain is too much for the Cabinet. The old Liberal and Unionist Free Traders declare that if they are defeated on their resolution to invite tenders from private contractors for carrying on the Army and Navy, they will go solid for votes for women as the only means of restoring the liberties of the country which we have destroyed by compulsory military service.

MITCHENER. Infernal impudence?

BALSQUITH. The Labor party is taking the same line. They say the men got the Factory Acts by hiding behind the women’s petticoats, and that they will get votes for the army in the same way.

MITCHENER. Balsquith: we must not yield to clamor. I have just told this lady that I am at last convinced —

BALSQUITH (joyfully). That the suffragets must be supported.

MITCHENER. No: that the anti-suffragets must be put down at all hazards.

BALSQUITH. Same thing.

MITCHENER. No. For you now tell me that the Labor Party demands votes for women. That makes it impossible to give them, because it would be yielding to clamor. The one condition on which we can consent to grant anything in this country is that nobody shall presume to want it.

BALSQUITH (earnestly). Mitchener: its no use. You cant have the conveniences of Democracy without its occasional inconveniences.

MITCHENER. What are its conveniences, I should like to know?

BALSQUITH. When you tell people that they are the real rulers and they can do what they like, nine times out of ten, they say, “All right, tell us what to do.” But it happens sometimes that they get an idea of their own; and then of course youre landed.

MITCHENER. Sh —

BALSQUITH (desperately shouting him down). No: its no use telling me to shoot them down: Im not going to do it. After all, I dont suppose votes for women will make much difference. It hasnt in the other countries in which it has been tried.

MITCHENER. I never supposed it would make much difference. What I cant stand is giving in to that Pankhurst lot. Hang it all, Balsquith, it seems only yesterday that we put them in quod for a month. I said at the time that it ought to have been ten years. If my advice had been taken this wouldnt have happened. Its a consolation to me that events are proving how thoroughly right I was.

The Orderly rushes in.

THE ORDERLY. Look ere, sir: Mrs. Banger locked the door of General Sandstone’s room on the inside; and shes sitting on his ead until he signs a proclamation for women to serve in the army.

MITCHENER. Put your shoulder to the door and burst it open.

THE ORDERLY. Its only in story books that doors burst open as easy as that. Besides, Im only too thankful to have a locked door between me and Mrs. B.; and so is all the rest of us.

MITCHENER. Cowards. Balsquith: to the rescue! (He dashes out.)

BALSQUITH (ambling calmly to the hearth). This is the business of the Sergeant at Arms rather than of the leader of the House. Theres no use in my tackling Mrs. Banger: she would only sit on my head too.

THE ORDERLY. You take my tip, Mr. Balsquith. Give the women the vote and give the army civil rights; and av done with it.

Mitchener returns.

MITCHENER. Balsquith: prepare to hear the worst.

BALSQUITH. Sandstone is no more?

MITCHENER. On the contrary, he is particularly lively. He has softened Mrs. Banger by a proposal of marriage in which he appears to be perfectly in earnest. He says he has met his ideal at last, a really soldierly woman. She will sit on his head for the rest of his life; and the British Army is now to all intents and purposes commanded by Mrs. Banger. When I remonstrated with Sandstone she positively shouted “Right-about-face. March” at me in the most offensive tone. If she hadnt been a woman I should have punched her head. I precious nearly punched Sandstone’s. The horrors of martial law administered by Mrs. Banger are too terrible to be faced. I demand civil rights for the army.

THE ORDERLY (chuckling). Wot oh, General! Wot oh!

MITCHENER. Hold your tongue. (He goes to the door and calls.) Mrs. Farrell! (Returning, and again addressing the Orderly.) Civil rights don’t mean the right to be uncivil. (Pleased with his own wit.) Almost a pun. Ha ha!

MRS. FARRELL. Whats the matther now? (She comes to the table.)

MITCHENER (to the Orderly). I have private business with Mrs. Farrell. Outside, you infernal blackguard.

THE ORDERLY (arguing, as usual). Well, I didnt ask to — (Mitchener seizes him by the nape; rushes him out; and slams the door).

MITCHENER. Excuse the abruptness of this communication, Mrs. Farrell; but I know only one woman in the country whose practical ability and force of character can maintain her husband in competition with the husband of Mrs. Banger. I have the honor to propose for your hand.

MRS. FARRELL. Dye mean you want to marry me?

MITCHENER. I do.

MRS. FARRELL. No thank you. Id have to work for you just the same; only I shouldnt get any wages for it.

BALSQUITH. That will be remedied when women get the vote. Ive had to promise that.

MITCHENER (winningly). Mrs. Farrell: you have been charwoman here now ever since I took up my duties. Have you really never, in your more romantic moments, cast a favorable eye on my person?

MRS. FARRELL. Ive been too busy casting an unfavorable eye on your cloze and on the litther you make with your papers.

MITCHENER (wounded). Am I to understand that you refuse me?

MRS. FARRELL. Just wait a bit. (She takes Mitchener’s chair and rings up the telephone.) Double three oh seven Elephant.

MITCHENER. I trust youre not ringing for the police, Mrs. Farrell. I assure you Im perfectly sane.

MRS. FARRELL (into the telephone). Is that you, Eliza? (She listens for the answer.) Not out of bed yet! Go and pull her out by the heels, the lazy sthreel; and tell her her mother wants to speak to her very particularly about General Mitchener. (To Mitchener.) Dont you be afeard: I know youre sane enough when youre not talkin about the Germans. (Into the telephone.) Is that you, Eliza? (She listens for the answer.) Dye remember me givin you a clout on the side of the head for tellin me that if I only knew how to play me cards I could marry any general on the staff instead o disgracin you be bein a charwoman? (She listens for the answer.) Well, I can have General Mitchener without playing any cards at all. What dye think I ought to say? (She listens.) Well, Im no chicken myself. (To Mitchener.) How old are you?

MITCHENER (with an effort). Fifty-two.

MRS. FARRELL (into the telephone). He says hes fifty-two. (She listens; then, to Mitchener.) She says youre down in Who’s Who as sixty-one.

MITCHENER. Damn Who’s Who.

MRS. FARRELL (into the telephone). Anyhow I wouldnt let that stand in the way. (She listens.) If I really WHAT? (She listens.)I cant hear you. If I really WHAT? (She listens.) WHO druv him? I never said a word to — Eh? (She listens.) Oh, LOVE him. Arra dont be a fool, child. (To Mitchener.) She wants to know do I really love you.(Into the telephone.) Its likely indeed Id frighten the man off with any such nonsense, at my age. What? (She listens.) Well, thats just what I was thinkin.

MITCHENER. May I ask what you were thinking, Mrs. Farrell? This suspense is awful.

MRS. FARRELL. I was thinkin that perhaps the Duchess might like her daughter-in-law’s mother to be a General’s lady betther than to be a charwoman. (Into the telephone.) Waitle youre married yourself, me fine lady: you’ll find out that every woman is a charwoman from the day shes married. (She listens.) Then you think I might take him? (She listens.) Glang, you young scald: if I had you here Id teach you manners. (She listens.) Thats enough now. Back wid you to bed; and be thankful Im not there to put me slipper across you. (She rings off.) The impudence! (To Mitchener.) Bless you, me childher, may you be happy, she says. (To Balsquith, going to his side of the room.) Give dear, old Mich me love, she says.

The Orderly opens the door, ushering in Lady Corinthia.

THE ORDERLY. Lady Corinthia Fanshawe to speak to you, sir.

LADY CORINTHIA. General Mitchener: your designs on Mrs. Banger are defeated. She is engaged to General Sandstone. Do you still prefer her to me?

MRS. FARRELL. Hes out o the hunt. Hes engaged to me.

The Orderly overcome by this news reels from the door to the standing desk, and clutches the stool to save himself from collapsing.

MITCHENER. And extremely proud of it, Lady Corinthia.

LADY CORINTHIA (contemptuously). She suits you exactly. (Coming to Balsquith.) Mr. Balsquith: you at least, are not a Philistine.

BALSQUITH. No, Lady Corinthia; but Im a confirmed bachelor. I don’t want a wife; but I want an Egeria.

MRS. FARRELL. More shame for you.

LADY CORINTHIA. Silence, woman. The position and functions of a wife may suit your gross nature. An Egeria is exactly what I desire to be. (To Balsquith.) Can you play accompaniments?

BALSQUITH. Melodies only, I regret to say. With one finger. But my brother, who is a very obliging fellow, and not unlike me personally, is acquainted with three chords, with which he manages to accompany most of the comic songs of the day.

LADY CORINTHIA. I do not sing comic songs. Neither will you when I am your Egeria. Come. I give a musical at-home this afternoon. I will allow you to sit at my feet.

BALSQUITH. That is my ideal of romantic happiness. It commits me exactly as far as I desire to venture. Thank you.

THE ORDERLY. Wot price me, General? Wont you celebrate your engagement by doing something for me? Maynt I be promoted to be a sergeant.

MITCHENER. Youre too utterly incompetent to discharge the duties of a sergeant. You are only fit to be a lieutenant. I shall recommend you for a commission.

THE ORDERLY. Hooray! The Parkinsons of Stepney will be proud to have me call on them now. Ill go and tell the sergeant what I think of him. Hooray! (He rushes out.)

MRS. FARRELL (going to the door and calling after him.) You might have the manners to shut the door idther you. (She shuts it and comes between Mitchener and Lady Corinthia.)

MITCHENER. Poor wretch; the day after civil rights are conceded to the army he and Chubbs-Jenkinson will be found incapable of maintaining discipline. They will be sacked and replaced by really capable men. Mrs. Farrell: as we are engaged, and I am anxious to do the correct thing in every way, I am quite willing to kiss you if you wish it.

MRS. FARRELL. Youd only feel like a fool; and so would I.

MITCHENER. You are really the most sensible woman. Ive made an extremely wise choice.

LADY CORINTHIA (To Balsquith). You may kiss my hand, if you wish.

BALSQUITH (cautiously). I think we had better not commit ourselves too far. If I might carry your parasol, that would quite satisfy me. Let us change a subject which threatens to become embarrassing. (To Mitchener.) The moral of the occasion for you, Mitchener, appears to be that youve got to give up treating soldiers as if they were schoolboys.

MITCHENER. The moral for you, Balsquith, is that youve got to give up treating women as if they were angels. Ha ha!

MRS. FARRELL. Its a mercy youve found one another out at last. That’s enough now.

CURTAIN

FASCINATING FOUNDLING: DISGRACE TO THE AUTHOR

Morning. Office of the Lord Chancellor. Door on the right leading to his private room, near the fireplace. Door on the left leading to the public staircase. Mercer, an elderly clerk, seated at work. Enter, to him, through the public door, Horace Brabazon, a smart and beautiful young man of nineteen, dressed in the extremity of fashion, with a walking stick.

BRABAZON. I want to see the Lord Chancellor.

MERCER. Have you an appointment?

BRABAZON. No.

MERCER. Then you cant see the Lord Chancellor.

BRABAZON. I tell you I must see him.

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

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

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

BRABAZON. You are face to face with your destiny; and your destiny is to fight me. Be quick: I’m going to begin. Dont look pale: I scorn to take you by surprise. I shall lead off with my left on your right eye. Put them up.

MERCER. I aint going to fight you. Let me alone, will you? I said nothing to you.

BRABAZON. Liar and slave. Fight, I tell you: fight.

MERCER. Oh, was there ever the like of this? Dont make such a noise.

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

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

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

The Lord Chancellor enters indignantly.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Whats this? Who is this gentleman?

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. If you are a solicitor, sir, you must be aware that this is not the proper way to approach the Court.

BRABAZON. I approach you as the father of all the orphans in Chancery.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Sir —

BRABAZON. Dont fly out: I’ll explain everything. You remember the matter of Brabazon, an infant. Come, now! frankly as man to man you do remember the matter of Brabazon, an infant.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. There is such a case, I believe.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. You are young Horace Brabazon, are you?

BRABAZON. I am, my lord. Such is life!

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. You are a ward of the Court; and you have systematically disobeyed every order made in your case.

BRABAZON. The orders were unreasonable. Fatuous, in fact.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Sir —

BRABAZON. Let me explain. One of the orders was that I was to go into the Church.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. At your own desire.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Stuff, sir.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR [with ironic politeness] You are too good. [He sits down].

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

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

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

He goes out.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. What do you mean by letting this lunatic in, Mr Mercer? I’m extremely annoyed.

MERCER. I didnt let him in, my lord. He came in, I was keeping him from you at the risk of my life when you came in to ask what the noise was.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR [with emotion] My faithful Mercer.

MERCER. My honored master. [They shake hands, weeping].

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. We were happy together until this man came between us.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Nonsense, Mercer: we have no aeroplane; and if we had we shouldnt know how to use it. Hark! A visitor at the door. [They both rush to it. The handle is turned]. Tell him we have both gone out.

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

A WOMAN’S VOICE. Is anybody there? Let me in. [She rattles the door].

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. That is the voice of a young and probably beautiful woman.

MERCER. It is, my lord.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Then why the dickens dont you open the door instead of striking melodramatic attitudes? How dare you keep the lady waiting? I’m very much annoyed.

MERCER. I’m sorry, my lord. [He opens the door].

Anastasia Vulliamy enters.

ANASTASIA [to Mercer] Is this the Lord Chancellor’s?

MERCER. Yes.

ANASTASIA. Sir Cardonius Boshington’s?

MERCER. Yes, maam.

ANASTASIA. Are you the Lord Chancellor?

MERCER. No, maam. Leastways, not yet.

ANASTASIA. What are you?

MERCER. I’m the Lord Chancellor’s —

ANASTASIA. Secretary?

MERCER. Well, hardly that, maam. If you ask me, I should say I was a sort of what you might call a clerk-valet to his lordship.

ANASTASIA. Are you a gentleman?

MERCER [staggered] Well, thats a poser, Miss, really. I’m in a manner of speaking a gentleman.

ANASTASIA. In what manner of speaking are you a gentleman?

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

ANASTASIA. Only three?

MERCER. Only three, maam.

ANASTASIA. How do you tell one from the other?

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

ANASTASIA. And which particular class of gentleman is it, pray, that gives a lady a chair?

MERCER. Oh, I’m sure I beg your pardon, Miss. [He places a chair for her].

ANASTASIA. Thanks. And now will you be good enough to tell Sir Cardonius Boshington that Miss Anastasia Vulliamy wishes to see him?

MERCER [to the Lord Chancellor] Miss Anaesthesia Vulliamy, my lord, to see you.

ANASTASIA [springing up] Do you mean to tell me that this old man in livery is the great Chancellor?

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. At your service, Miss Vulliamy.

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

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

MERCER [producing another paper] Perhaps youd recognize this better, Miss. Sir Cardonius and me is on opposite sides in politics.

ANASTASIA [taking the paper and reading at the place he indicates] “How much longer will the nation allow this despicable pantaloon to occupy the woolsack—” Whats the woolsack?

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

ANASTASIA [continuing her reading] “whose contents only too strongly resemble those of his own head.” Thats a nasty one, you know: isnt it? It means that your brains are woolly, doesnt it?

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

MERCER. Well, my lord; politics is politics; and after all, what is politics if it isnt shewing up the other side? When I pay a penny for a paper Ive a right to get value for my money the same as any other man.

ANASTASIA. But I dont understand. [To the Chancellor] Are you a despicable pantaloon? The other paper says your name will be cherished by the warm hearts of the English people when Eldon and Sir Thomas More are forgotten. I thought that whatever is in the papers must be true. How do you explain being a great Chancellor and a despicable pantaloon at the same time?

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

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

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. I trust I shall not disappoint any favorable opinion you may have founded on it.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. That refers to my private house, madam. I dont keep food here.

MERCER. I have a sandwich for my lunch, Miss. Sooner than send you empty away, I would give it to you, Miss, most joyfully.

ANASTASIA. I ask, not charity, but justice.

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

MERCER. The House of Lords will find itself unemployed one of these days, if you ask me.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Silence, Mercer. Have the goodness to keep your Radicalism to yourself in the presence of this lady.

ANASTASIA. Why do you allow your clerk to be a Radical?

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

ANASTASIA. Youll excuse me asking you all these questions; but as Ive decided, after what the paper says, that you are the man to advise me and be a father to me, it’s very important that you should be quite all right, isnt it?

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. But it’s not my business to be a father to every young lady who walks into my office.

ANASTASIA. Not your business! Why, Whitaker’s Almanack says you get £10,000 a year. You dont get that for nothing, I suppose. [To Mercer] By the way, Whitaker doesnt say how much you get.

MERCER. I get one-fifty.

ANASTASIA. One-fifty into £10,000 goes about 66 times. Why does he get 66 times as much as you? Is he sixty-six times as good?

MERCER. He thinks so.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. I set up no such ridiculous pretension, Mercer.

ANASTASIA [to the Lord Chancellor] Perhaps youre 66 times as sober. How much do you drink every day?

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. I am almost a teetotaller. A single bottle of burgundy is quite sufficient for me.

ANASTASIA [to Mercer] Then I suppose you drink 66 bottles of burgundy a day.

MERCER. 66 bottles of burgundy a day on one-fifty a year! Not me. It hardly runs to beer on Sundays.

ANASTASIA. Well, there must be something awfully wrong about you, you know, if you get only the sixty-sixth of what he gets.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. No, madam. Mercer is an excellent man in his proper place.

ANASTASIA. Then there must be something awfully right about you.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. I hope so.

ANASTASIA. I dont see the difference myself.

MERCER. He’s better fed.

ANASTASIA. Is he? I should have thought he was too red about the nose to be quite healthy. It’s the burgundy, I expect. However, I didnt come here to talk about you two. Call it selfish if you will; but I came to talk about myself. The fact is, I’m an orphan. At least, I think I am.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Dont you know?

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

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Gently, Mercer, gently. It is not the poor girl’s fault.

MERCER. Not her fault! Why, she aint anybody’s daughter: she’s only an offspring.

ANASTASIA. Perhaps I’m his daughter, my lord.

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

ANASTASIA. I had a feeling the moment I saw you.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. The voice of Nature! Oh, Mercer, Mercer!

MERCER. I’ll have the law of you for this, I will. Oh, say you dont believe her, my lord. Dont drive me mad. Say you dont believe her.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. I cant disregard the voice of Nature, Mercer. The evidence against you is very black.

MERCER. Me the father of a common girl found on a workhouse doorstep!

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR [overwhelmed] My dear young lady, how can I apologize —

MERCER [crushed] I’m sure I beg your pardon most humbly, Miss.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Forget the rudeness of my clerk: he knows no better. Resume your seat, I beg.

MERCER. If I had only known, Miss! Park Lane! I could bite my tongue out for my bad manners, I do assure you.

ANASTASIA. Say no more. Of course you could not know my social position.

MERCER. Dont say that, Miss. You have Park Lane in every feature.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR [effusively] In your manners.

MERCER. In your accent.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. In your tone —

MERCER. Address —

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. A je ne sais quoi —

MERCER. A tout ensemble —

ANASTASIA. You speak French?

MERCER. Not a word, Miss; but at the sight of that hat of yours the French fairly burst out of me.

ANASTASIA. You are very good —

THE LORD CHANCELLOR.

}

Oh, not at all.

MERCER.

}

Dont mention it.

ANASTASIA. Dont begin again. I forgive you both. Now, attention! I’m a good-hearted but somewhat flighty girl; and I require some serious interest in life to steady me. As I had an ungovernable appetite, and was naturally rather inclined to be stout, I tried politics. For you, a man, politics meant the House of Lords. For me, a woman, politics meant Holloway Gaol and the hunger strike. I refused to take food until I was so frightfully hungry that when the Governor — who was a plump, chubby, tempting sort of man, you know — came into my cell and remonstrated with me, I attempted to devour him.

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

ANASTASIA. On the Cat and Mouse principle, my lord. That is a part of the law of England.

MERCER. Never. Not when the woman is the cat.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. May I ask, madam, what the unfortunate mouse did on this occasion?

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Certainly I do.

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

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. If I can be of any service to you, madam —

ANASTASIA. You? You are married, are you not?

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Well, er, yes I er — am married.

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

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

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

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

Brabazon enters.

BRABAZON. Excuse me: I left my stick, I think —

ANASTASIA [throwing herself into his arms] He has come: he has come: the very thing I want.

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

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

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

MERCER. My lord: this man has a giant intellect.

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

MERCER. I moved all the way from Gospel Oak to Islington to escape; but it was no use.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Beware how you anger her by shewing any reluctance. Remember: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

MERCER. Whats the good of that nowadays? When that was written a woman would take no for an answer. She wont now.

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

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

ANASTASIA. So you think now, dearest. You wont think that a year hence. I’ll take care of that for my own boy.

BRABAZON. Yes, but look here, you know. Have you got any money?

ANASTASIA. Not a rap.

BRABAZON. And you expect to get a slave for nothing. What cheek!

ANASTASIA. I’m richer than you think, darling. It’s true that I’m a poor penniless orphan. Doesnt that touch you?

BRABAZON. Not in the least.

ANASTASIA. Thoughtless boy. Have you forgotten that the women who have money always belong to some family or other?

BRABAZON. Well?

ANASTASIA. Well, a family means relations. You cant call your house your own. The brothers borrow money. The sisters come and stay for months. The mothers quarrels with your mother.

MERCER. Gospel truth, every word of it.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR. Undeniable. [He sighs deeply].

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

BRABAZON [excited and hopeful] A foundling?

ANASTASIA. I havnt a relation in the world.

BRABAZON [clasping her] Mine! mine! MINE!!!

AYOT ST LAWRENCE, 10th August 1909.

First published in Translations and Tomfooleries, 1926.

THE END

THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY

A TRAGEDIETTA

In the fifteenth century A.D. Gloaming. An inn on the edge of an Italian lake. A stone cross with a pedestal of steps. A very old friar sitting on the steps. The angelus rings. The friar prays and crosses himself. A girl ferries a boat to the shore and comes up the bank to the cross.

THE GIRL. Father: were you sent here by a boy from —

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

THE GIRL. But were you sent here by a boy from —

THE FRIAR. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Quite a boy, he was. Very young. And I’m very old. Oh, very very old, dear daughter.

THE GIRL. Are you a holy man?

THE FRIAR [ecstatically] Oh, very holy. Very, very, very, very holy.

THE GIRL. But have you your wits still about you, father? Can you absolve me from a great sin?

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

THE GIRL. It’s a cross, father.

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

THE GIRL. There is an inn, father, not twenty yards away. It’s kept by my father, Squarcio.

THE FRIAR. And is there a barn where a very very old man may sleep and have a handful of peas for his supper?

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

THE FRIAR. I’ll do better than that, daughter. I’ll prove my holiness to you by a miracle.

THE GIRL. A miracle!

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

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

THE FRIAR. As soft as your neck, is it not? [He caresses her neck].

THE GIRL. It thrills me: it is wonderful.

THE FRIAR. It thrills me also, daughter. That, too, is a miracle at my age.

THE GIRL. Father —

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

THE GIRL. Father: I am about to commit a deadly sin.

THE FRIAR. Do, my daughter. Do, do, do, do, do.

THE GIRL [discouraged] Oh, you do not hear what I say.

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

THE GIRL. Your wits are wandering. Listen to me. Are you listening?

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

THE GIRL. Father, I am to be married this year to a young fisherman.

THE FRIAR. The devil you are, my dear.

THE GIRL [squeezing his hand] Oh listen, listen; you are wandering again.

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

THE GIRL. You know him, then!

THE FRIAR. No no no no no. I’m too old to remember people. But Saint Barbara tells me everything.

THE GIRL. Then you know why we cant marry yet.

THE FRIAR. He is too poor. His mother will not let him unless his bride has a dowry —

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

THE FRIAR. That will not be your sin, but his mother’s.

THE GIRL. Oh, that is true: I never thought of that. But will she suffer for it?

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

THE GIRL. That is true. You are very wise, father.

THE FRIAR. Let it be a venial sin: an amiable sin. What sin were you thinking of, for instance?

THE GIRL. There is a young Count Ferruccio [the Friar starts at the name], son of the tyrant of Parma —

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

THE GIRL. You know everything.

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

THE GIRL. Oh, why does not Saint Barbara tell you that I am an honest girl who would not sell herself for a thousand crowns.

THE FRIAR. Do not give way to pride, daughter. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins.

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

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

THE GIRL. You are a young man!

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

SQUARCIO [impressed] No, your Excellency.

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

SQUARCIO. Keep your temper, Signor Count.

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

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

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

SQUARCIO. What wager, may it please your Excellency?

FERRUCCIO. What wager, blockhead! Why, that if I am assassinated, the murderer will not be brought to justice.

SQUARCIO. So that if I kill you —

FERRUCCIO. Your Baron will lose ten crowns unless you are broken on the wheel for it.

SQUARCIO. Only ten crowns, Excellency! Your father does not value your life very highly.

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

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

FERRUCCIO. Body of Bacchus! I forgot that trick. I should have killed you when my blood was hot.

SQUARCIO. Will your Excellency please to step in? My best room and my best cooking are at your Excellency’s disposal.

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

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

FERRUCCIO. And why, pray?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SQUARCIO. The poor must live as well as the rich, sir. Giulia is a good girl. [He goes into the inn].

FERRUCCIO [shouting after him] Must the rich die that the poor may live?

GIULIA. The poor often die that the rich may live.

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

GIULIA. You are spiteful, Signor.

FERRUCCIO. I am no troubadour, Giuliaccia, if that is what you mean.

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

FERRUCCIO. I take it that either Saint Barbara inspired me, or else that you are a great fool.

GIULIA. Saint Barbara will surely punish you for that wicked lie you told about her hand.

FERRUCCIO. The hand that thrilled you?

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

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

GIULIA. It would have been a good deed to kill you, I think.

FERRUCCIO. Killing is always sport, my Giuliaccia.

SANDRO’S VOICE [on the lake] Giulietta! Giulietta!

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

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

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

SQUARCIO. Is your appetite so great in this heat, Signor?

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

SQUARCIO. Your order is already obeyed, Excellency.

FERRUCCIO. How?

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

FERRUCCIO. Dog of a bandit: you should have been born a nobleman.

SQUARCIO. I was born noble, Signor; but as we had no money to maintain our pretensions, I dropped them. [He goes back into the inn].

Giulia returns with Sandro.

GIULIA. This is the lad, Excellency. Sandro: this is his lordship Count Ferruccio.

SANDRO. At your lordship’s service.

FERRUCCIO. Sit down, Sandro. You, Giulia, and Squarcio are my guests. [They sit].

GIULIA. Ive told Sandro everything, Excellency.

FERRUCCIO. And what does Sandro say? [Squarcio returns with a tray].

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

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

GIULIA. That is true. Sandro did not think of that.

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

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

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

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

SQUARCIO. There is nothing like the sword, Excellency.

SANDRO. Except the water, Father Squarcio. Trust a fisherman to know that. Nobody can tell that drowning was not an accident.

FERRUCCIO. What does Giulietta say?

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

FERRUCCIO. And if you loved him? Would you kill him then?

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

FERRUCCIO. How well you have brought up your family, Squarcio! Some more omelette, Sandro?

SANDRO [very cheerfully] I thank your Excellency. [He accepts and eats with an appetite].

FERRUCCIO. I pledge you all. To the sword and the fisherman’s net: to love and hate! [He drinks: they drink with him].

SQUARCIO. To the sword!

SANDRO. To the net, Excellency, with thanks for the honor.

GIULIA. To love, Signor.

FERRUCCIO. To hate: the noble’s portion!

SQUARCIO. The meal has done you good, Excellency. How do you feel now?

FERRUCCIO. I feel that there is nothing but a bait of ten crowns between me and death, Squarcio.

SQUARCIO. It is enough, Excellency. And enough is always enough.

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

FERRUCCIO. Finish it, Sandro. Ive done.

SANDRO. Father Squarcio?

SQUARCIO. Finish it, finish it.

SANDRO. Giulietta?

GIULIA [surprised] Me? Oh no. Finish it, Sandro: it will only go to the pig.

SANDRO. Then, with your Excellency’s permission — [he helps himself].

SQUARCIO. Sing for his Excellency, my daughter.

Giulia turns to the door to fetch her mandoline.

FERRUCCIO. I shall jump into the lake Squarcio, if your cat begins to miaowl.

SANDRO [always cheerful and reassuring] No, no, Excellency: Giulietta sings very sweetly: have no fear.

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

SQUARCIO. In ready money, or in promises?

FERRUCCIO. Old fox. Ready money.

SQUARCIO. Fifty crowns, Excellency.

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

SQUARCIO. Doubtless your Excellency, being a younger son, is poor. Shall we say five and twenty crowns?

FERRUCCIO. I tell you she is not worth five.

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

GIULIA. What are you worth, Signorino?

FERRUCCIO. I am accustomed to be asked for favors, Giuliaccia, not to be asked impertinent questions.

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

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

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

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

GIULIA. And insult, and insult, and insult.

SQUARCIO. Until one day you find yourself in a strange place with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own wits —

GIULIA. And you perish —

SANDRO. Accidentally —

GIULIA. And your soul goes crying to your father for vengeance —

SQUARCIO. If indeed, my daughter, there be any soul left when the body is slain.

FERRUCCIO [crossing himself hastily] Dog of a bandit: do you dare doubt the existence of God and the soul?

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

SANDRO. Unless he be a nobleman, of course —

SQUARCIO. In which case the price is fifty crowns.

FERRUCCIO. Soul or no soul?

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

FERRUCCIO. Are you such a fool then as to spoil your own trade by sometimes killing people for nothing?

SQUARCIO. One kills a snake for nothing, Excellency. One kills a dog for nothing sometimes.

SANDRO [apologetically] Only a mad dog, Excellency, of course.

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

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

FERRUCCIO. Does your father do the house work with a great girl like you idling about? Squarcio is a fool, after all.

GIULIA. No, Signor: he has left me here to prevent you from escaping.

FERRUCCIO. There is nothing to be gained by killing me, Giuliaccia.

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

FERRUCCIO [brutally] Lice, no doubt.

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

FERRUCCIO. Indeed: and pray why?

GIULIA. He will pay thirty crowns for your dead body. Then Sandro could marry me.

FERRUCCIO. And be broken on the wheel for it.

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

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

GIULIA. Your oath is not worth twenty pence, Signor.

FERRUCCIO. Do you think I will die here like a rat in a trap — [his breath fails him].

GIULIA. Rats have to wait in their traps for death, Signor. Why not you?

FERRUCCIO. I’ll fight.

GIULIA. You are welcome, Signor. The blood flows freeest when it is hot.

FERRUCCIO. She devil! Listen to me, Giulietta —

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

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

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

FERRUCCIO. Mother of God, what shall I do?

GIULIA. Pray, Signor.

FERRUCCIO. Pray! With the taste of death in my mouth? I can think of nothing.

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

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

GIULIA. No; but I can give her many prayers.

FERRUCCIO. Prayers cost nothing. She will prefer the picture unless she is a greater fool than I take her to be.

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

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

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

FERRUCCIO. Do you know what I am thinking, Giulietta?

GIULIA. No, Signor.

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

GIULIA. No, Signor: I’ll help them to kill you.

FERRUCCIO. My back is to the wall, then?

GIULIA. To the precipice, I think, Signor.

FERRUCCIO. No matter, so my face is to the danger. Did you notice, Giulia, a minute ago? I was frightened.

GIULIA. Yes, Signor. I saw it in your face.

FERRUCCIO. The terror of terrors.

GIULIA. The terror of death.

FERRUCCIO. No: death is nothing. I can face a stab just as I faced having my tooth pulled out at Faenza.

GIULIA [shuddering with sincere sympathy] Poor Signorino! That must have hurt horribly.

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

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

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

GIULIA. I, Signor!

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

GIULIA. Quick, Sandro.

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

SQUARCIO. Your Excellency will excuse my shirt of mail. A good home blow, nevertheless, Excellency.

SANDRO. Your Excellency will excuse my net: it is a little damp.

FERRUCCIO. Well, what now? Accidental drowning, I suppose.

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

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

FERRUCCIO. You have my body, Giulia. My soul is free.

GIULIA. Is it, Signor? I think Saint Barbara has got that in her net too. She has turned your jest into earnest.

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

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

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

FERRUCCIO. Is it not worth it?

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

FERRUCCIO. Good: the man I tried to slay will save me from being slain. Who would have thought Saint Barbara so full of irony!

SANDRO. And if the offer your Excellency was good enough to make in respect of Giulietta still stands —

SQUARCIO. Rascal: have you then no soul?

SANDRO. I am a poor man, Excellency: I cannot afford these luxuries of the rich.

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

She takes the net from his shoulders.

COOLE PARK, Summer, 1909. [Error for 1910].

Author’s Note

(From the programme of the production at the Arts Theatre Club, 20 November 1927)

The fame, if fame it be, of performing this Playlet for the first time was snatched from London on the 8th October last by the Glasgow Clarion Players. The Arts Theatre can only follow humbly in the wake of that enlightened Company. The piece was immediately announced in the London Press as Mr. Shaw’s latest, the successor to ‘Saint Joan.’ An error: it was written in an idle moment as a star turn for Mr. Harley Granville-Barker, was mislaid and forgotten by its author until last year when it came to light in his volume entitled ‘Translations and Tomfooleries,’ in which it is the only serious original item.

Published in Translations and Tomfooleries, 1926

SUGGESTED ACT III ENDING FOR BARKER’S ‘THE MADRAS HOUSE’

Constantine.

Miss Knagg, ci devant Yates.

Constantine is going out with Huxtable.

Miss Knagg enters.

CONSTANTINE. Oh. Just wait for me a moment downstairs, Harry. This lady wants a word with me.

MISS KNAGG. I dont. I didnt know you were here. I came to see Mr Philip. Please dont detain Mr Huxtable on my account.

CONSTANTINE [thinking that she is playing propriety] Quite so. I should have said I wanted a word with you Miss Knagg. Harry: will you —

HUXTABLE. All right. All right. I’ll wait for you. [He goes out].

CONSTANTINE. Very nice of you. Very stupid of me. I apologise. Thank you. Ive been looking for you. You didnt think, I hope, that I was going to leave you in the lurch?

MISS KNAGG. What do you want with me, Mr Constantine? I didnt expect anything from you. I dont want anything from you.

CONSTANTINE. But I understood that — that —

MISS KNAGG. What did you understand?

CONSTANTINE. Well, that there were consequences.

MISS KNAGG. Thats true. There are consequences; and Im out of employment through them. Thats what I want to see Mr Philip about. But the consequences dont concern you.

CONSTANTINE. Of course they concern me. Whats the matter? Are you angry with me?

MISS KNAGG. Not the least in the world. I really dont care that much about your part of it, Mr Constantine. Dont you worry yourself. I shall be able to take care of myself.

CONSTANTINE. But I cant let you. Dont you know that? It’s a debt of honor.

MISS KNAGG. Oh. As the lady says in the play, I dont think honor has much to do with it. Anyhow, though I cant afford to go in for high falutin about honor, Ive my own ideas of self-respect and independence. If ever I have to explain to my child, I dont want to have to end by saying I was paid off. So if you dont mind, we’ll drop the subject. Is Mr Philip here?

CONSTANTINE. But in justice to yourself —

MISS KNAGG. Please drop the subject, Mr Constantine. I ask you to, as a gentleman.

CONSTANTINE. Well of course if you — but no, I — Oh, this is impossible. What sort of position are you putting me in? How could I ever hold up my head again? Youve no right to do this.

MISS KNAGG [patiently] Please, is Mr Philip in?

CONSTANTINE. Philip’s gone.

MISS KNAGG. Thank you. Then I’ll go too. [She turns to go]

CONSTANTINE [stopping her] No: I cant allow this. Youve no right to refuse to accept the consequences of your position in this way. It was a perfectly well understood affair. Youre no baby. You understood it as well as I did. When I buy an article, youve no right to force it on me as a gift.

MISS KNAGG. Thats very plain speaking. Thank you. But youre not very complimentary to yourself, Mr Constantine. I didnt do it because I wanted money. I did it because I wanted to — because at the moment I wanted you, if youll excuse my presumption.

CONSTANTINE. That doesnt give you any claim on me.

MISS KNAGG. I havent made any. I thought you were trying to fasten a claim on me.

CONSTANTINE. This is ridiculous, humiliating, absurd. It’s not becoming that you should settle the proper course to take. Thats my business and my place. My honor is concerned in it. I insist on making proper provision for you and for the child. Youve no right to refuse it if it were only for the child’s sake. Besides, youre entitled to it.

MISS KNAGG. I know what Im entitled to. Five shillings a week it is, I think. No thank you. It’s no use, Mr Constantine. You dont respect me; and you want to go on not respecting me. Youre afraid that if I dont take anything from you, youll have to respect me; and you cant stand that. Well, youll have to stand it. Goodbye. I’ll take a shakehands if you like.

CONSTANTINE. No, damme if I will. Thank God, I belong now to a country where women are kept in their place. [Huxtable returns].

HUXTABLE. Look here —

CONSTANTINE. Yes, Harry: I know. Im sorry for keeping you waiting. Im coming. [He turns irresolutely to Miss Knagg]

MISS KNAGG. It’s too late now. You cant do it before Mr Huxtable.

CONSTANTINE [with suppressed zvrath] I can do as I please. Goodbye. [He takes her hand and shakes it savagely; then goes out with Huxtable].

Curtain

MISALLIANCE

CONTENTS

PREFACE: PARENTS AND CHILDREN

MISALLIANCE

Shaw, c.1909

PREFACE: PARENTS AND CHILDREN

Trailing Clouds of Glory

Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones.

Now death is not necessarily a failure of energy on the part of the Life Force. People with no imagination try to make things which will last for ever, and even want to live for ever themselves. But the intelligently imaginative man knows very well that it is waste of labor to make a machine that will last ten years, because it will probably be superseded in half that time by an improved machine answering the same purpose. He also knows that if some devil were to convince us that our dream of personal immortality is no dream but a hard fact, such a shriek of despair would go up from the human race as no other conceivable horror could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle liking is not will. It is amazing — considering the way we talk — how little a man will do to get 50 pounds: all the 50-pound notes I have ever known of have been more easily earned than a laborious sixpence; but the difficulty of inducing a man to make any serious effort to obtain 50 pounds is nothing to the difficulty of inducing him to make a serious effort to keep alive. The moment he sees death approach, he gets into bed and sends for a doctor. He knows very well at the back of his conscience that he is rather a poor job and had better be remanufactured. He knows that his death will make room for a birth; and he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and fell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth that this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact. Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.

The Child is Father to the Man

Is he? Then in the name of common sense why do we always treat children on the assumption that the man is father to the child? Oh, these fathers! And we are not content with fathers: we must have godfathers, forgetting that the child is godfather to the man. Has it ever struck you as curious that in a country where the first article of belief is that every child is born with a godfather whom we all call “our father which art in heaven,” two very limited individual mortals should be allowed to appear at its baptism and explain that they are its godparents, and that they will look after its salvation until it is no longer a child. I had a godmother who made herself responsible in this way for me. She presented me with a Bible with a gilt clasp and edges, larger than the Bibles similarly presented to my sisters, because my sex entitled me to a heavier article. I must have seen that lady at least four times in the twenty years following. She never alluded to my salvation in any way. People occasionally ask me to act as godfather to their children with a levity which convinces me that they have not the faintest notion that it involves anything more than calling the helpless child George Bernard without regard to the possibility that it may grow up in the liveliest abhorrence of my notions.

A person with a turn for logic might argue that if God is the Father of all men, and if the child is father to the man, it follows that the true representative of God at the christening is the child itself. But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or must originally have meant something, and that we understand and believe that something.

However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we are very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like with it as far as it will let them. It has no rights and no liberties: in short, its condition is that which adults recognize as the most miserable and dangerous politically possible for themselves: namely, the condition of slavery. For its alleviation we trust to the natural affection of the parties, and to public opinion. A father cannot for his own credit let his son go in rags. Also, in a very large section of the population, parents finally become dependent on their children. Thus there are checks on child slavery which do not exist, or are less powerful, in the case of manual and industrial slavery. Sensationally bad cases fall into two classes, which are really the same class: namely, the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of petting children, and the children whose parents are excessively addicted to the sensual luxury of physically torturing them. There is a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children which has effectually made an end of our belief that mothers are any more to be trusted than stepmothers, or fathers than slave-drivers. And there is a growing body of law designed to prevent parents from using their children ruthlessly to make money for the household. Such legislation has always been furiously resisted by the parents, even when the horrors of factory slavery were at their worst; and the extension of such legislation at present would be impossible if it were not that the parents affected by it cannot control a majority of votes in Parliament. In domestic life a great deal of service is done by children, the girls acting as nursemaids and general servants, and the lads as errand boys. In the country both boys and girls do a substantial share of farm labor. This is why it is necessary to coerce poor parents to send their children to school, though in the relatively small class which keeps plenty of servants it is impossible to induce parents to keep their children at home instead of paying schoolmasters to take them off their hands.

It appears then that the bond of affection between parents and children does not save children from the slavery that denial of rights involves in adult political relations. It sometimes intensifies it, sometimes mitigates it; but on the whole children and parents confront one another as two classes in which all the political power is on one side; and the results are not at all unlike what they would be if there were no immediate consanguinity between them, and one were white and the other black, or one enfranchised and the other disenfranchised, or one ranked as gentle and the other simple. Not that Nature counts for nothing in the case and political rights for everything. But a denial of political rights, and the resultant delivery of one class into the mastery of another, affects their relations so extensively and profoundly that it is impossible to ascertain what the real natural relations of the two classes are until this political relation is abolished.

What is a Child?

An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine. And you will vitiate the experiment if you make the slightest attempt to abort it into some fancy figure of your own: for example, your notion of a good man or a womanly woman. If you treat it as a little wild beast to be tamed, or as a pet to be played with, or even as a means to save you trouble and to make money for you (and these are our commonest ways), it may fight its way through in spite of you and save its soul alive; for all its instincts will resist you, and possibly be strengthened in the resistance; but if you begin with its own holiest aspirations, and suborn them for your own purposes, then there is hardly any limit to the mischief you may do. Swear at a child, throw your boots at it, send it flying from the room with a cuff or a kick; and the experience will be as instructive to the child as a difficulty with a short-tempered dog or a bull. Francis Place tells us that his father always struck his children when he found one within his reach. The effect on the young Places seems to have been simply to make them keep out of their father’s way, which was no doubt what he desired, as far as he desired anything at all. Francis records the habit without bitterness, having reason to thank his stars that his father respected the inside of his head whilst cuffing the outside of it; and this made it easy for Francis to do yeoman’s service to his country as that rare and admirable thing, a Freethinker: the only sort of thinker, I may remark, whose thoughts, and consequently whose religious convictions, command any respect.

Now Mr Place, senior, would be described by many as a bad father; and I do not contend that he was a conspicuously good one. But as compared with the conventional good father who deliberately imposes himself on his son as a god; who takes advantage of childish credulity and parent worship to persuade his son that what he approves of is right and what he disapproves of is wrong; who imposes a corresponding conduct on the child by a system of prohibitions and penalties, rewards and eulogies, for which he claims divine sanction: compared to this sort of abortionist and monster maker, I say, Place appears almost as a Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child “Stop that noise.” But suppose the child asks why! There are various answers in use. The simplest: “Because it irritates me,” may fail; for it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only a look of suffering to rouse the child’s affectionate sympathy (if it has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.

The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it substitutes for “Stop that noise,” “Dont be naughty,” which means that the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into “If you do that, angels wont never love you.” I remember a servant who used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them. Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwork their children, and intimidates a good many more. When parents of this type are caught, they are treated as criminals; and not infrequently the police have some trouble to save them from being lynched. The people against whom children are wholly unprotected are those who devote themselves to the very mischievous and cruel sort of abortion which is called bringing up a child in the way it should go. Now nobody knows the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food. Pious fraud is an attempt to pervert that precious and sacred thing the child’s conscience into an instrument of our own convenience, and to use that wonderful and terrible power called Shame to grind our own axe. It is the sin of stealing fire from the altar: a sin so impudently practised by popes, parents, and pedagogues, that one can hardly expect the nurserymaids to see any harm in stealing a few cinders when they are worrited.

Into the blackest depths of this violation of children’s souls one can hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart’s content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman’s children would have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega, he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be for the child’s good. The assailant must say “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly “I beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive an excuse for it.” But to represent this detestable lust to the child as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body, out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and blinding of the child’s soul, which can bring nothing but horror to anyone.

The Manufacture of Monsters

This industry is by no means peculiar to China. The Chinese (they say) make physical monsters. We revile them for it and proceed to make moral monsters of our own children. The most excusable parents are those who try to correct their own faults in their offspring. The parent who says to his child: “I am one of the successes of the Almighty: therefore imitate me in every particular or I will have the skin off your back” (a quite common attitude) is a much more absurd figure than the man who, with a pipe in his mouth, thrashes his boy for smoking. If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. But you had much better let the child’s character alone. If you once allow yourself to regard a child as so much material for you to manufacture into any shape that happens to suit your fancy you are defeating the experiment of the Life Force. You are assuming that the child does not know its own business, and that you do. In this you are sure to be wrong: the child feels the drive of the Life Force (often called the Will of God); and you cannot feel it for him. Handel’s parents no doubt thought they knew better than their child when they tried to prevent his becoming a musician. They would have been equally wrong and equally unsuccessful if they had tried to prevent the child becoming a great rascal had its genius lain in that direction. Handel would have been Handel, and Napoleon and Peter of Russia themselves in spite of all the parents in creation, because, as often happens, they were stronger than their parents. But this does not happen always. Most children can be, and many are, hopelessly warped and wasted by parents who are ignorant and silly enough to suppose that they know what a human being ought to be, and who stick at nothing in their determination to force their children into their moulds. Every child has a right to its own bent. It has a right to be a Plymouth Brother though its parents be convinced atheists. It has a right to dislike its mother or father or sister or brother or uncle or aunt if they are antipathetic to it. It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

Small and Large Families

These rights have now become more important than they used to be, because the modern practice of limiting families enables them to be more effectually violated. In a family of ten, eight, six, or even four children, the rights of the younger ones to a great extent take care of themselves and of the rights of the elder ones too. Two adult parents, in spite of a house to keep and an income to earn, can still interfere to a disastrous extent with the rights and liberties of one child. But by the time a fourth child has arrived, they are not only outnumbered two to one, but are getting tired of the thankless and mischievous job of bringing up their children in the way they think they should go. The old observation that members of large families get on in the world holds good because in large families it is impossible for each child to receive what schoolmasters call “individual attention.” The children may receive a good deal of individual attention from one another in the shape of outspoken reproach, ruthless ridicule, and violent resistance to their attempts at aggression; but the parental despots are compelled by the multitude of their subjects to resort to political rather than personal rule, and to spread their attempts at moral monster-making over so many children, that each child has enough freedom, and enough sport in the prophylactic process of laughing at its elders behind their backs, to escape with much less damage than the single child. In a large school the system may be bad; but the personal influence of the head master has to be exerted, when it is exerted at all, in a public way, because he has little more power of working on the affections of the individual scholar in the intimate way that, for example, the mother of a single child can, than the prime minister has of working on the affections of any individual voter.

Children as Nuisances

Experienced parents, when children’s rights are preached to them, very naturally ask whether children are to be allowed to do what they like. The best reply is to ask whether adults are to be allowed to do what they like. The two cases are the same. The adult who is nasty is not allowed to do what he likes: neither can the child who likes to be nasty. There is no difference in principle between the rights of a child and those of an adult: the difference in their cases is one of circumstance. An adult is not supposed to be punished except by process of law; nor, when he is so punished, is the person whom he has injured allowed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is true that employers do act in this way every day to their workpeople; but this is not a justified and intended part of the situation: it is an abuse of Capitalism which nobody defends in principle. As between child and parent or nurse it is not argued about because it is inevitable. You cannot hold an impartial judicial inquiry every time a child misbehaves itself. To allow the child to misbehave without instantly making it unpleasantly conscious of the fact would be to spoil it. The adult has therefore to take action of some sort with nothing but his conscience to shield the child from injustice or unkindness. The action may be a torrent of scolding culminating in a furious smack causing terror and pain, or it may be a remonstrance causing remorse, or it may be a sarcasm causing shame and humiliation, or it may be a sermon causing the child to believe that it is a little reprobate on the road to hell. The child has no defence in any case except the kindness and conscience of the adult; and the adult had better not forget this; for it involves a heavy responsibility.

And now comes our difficulty. The responsibility, being so heavy, cannot be discharged by persons of feeble character or intelligence. And yet people of high character and intelligence cannot be plagued with the care of children. A child is a restless, noisy little animal, with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and consequently a maddening persistence in asking questions. If the child is to remain in the room with a highly intelligent and sensitive adult, it must be told, and if necessary forced, to sit still and not speak, which is injurious to its health, unnatural, unjust, and therefore cruel and selfish beyond toleration. Consequently the highly intelligent and sensitive adult hands the child over to a nurserymaid who has no nerves and can therefore stand more noise, but who has also no scruples, and may therefore be very bad company for the child.

Here we have come to the central fact of the question: a fact nobody avows, which is yet the true explanation of the monstrous system of child imprisonment and torture which we disguise under such hypocrisies as education, training, formation of character and the rest of it. This fact is simply that a child is a nuisance to a grown-up person. What is more, the nuisance becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-up person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more deeply engaged in the highest methods of adult work. The child at play is noisy and ought to be noisy: Sir Isaac Newton at work is quiet and ought to be quiet. And the child should spend most of its time at play, whilst the adult should spend most of his time at work. I am not now writing on behalf of persons who coddle themselves into a ridiculous condition of nervous feebleness, and at last imagine themselves unable to work under conditions of bustle which to healthy people are cheerful and stimulating. I am sure that if people had to choose between living where the noise of children never stopped and where it was never heard, all the goodnatured and sound people would prefer the incessant noise to the incessant silence. But that choice is not thrust upon us by the nature of things. There is no reason why children and adults should not see just as much of one another as is good for them, no more and no less. Even at present you are not compelled to choose between sending your child to a boarding school (which means getting rid of it altogether on more or less hypocritical pretences) and keeping it continually at home. Most working folk today either send their children to day schools or turn them out of doors. This solves the problem for the parents. It does not solve it for the children, any more than the tethering of a goat in a field or the chasing of an unlicensed dog into the streets solves it for the goat or the dog; but it shews that in no class are people willing to endure the society of their children, and consequently that it is an error to believe that the family provides children with edifying adult society, or that the family is a social unit. The family is in that, as in so many other respects, a humbug. Old people and young people cannot walk at the same pace without distress and final loss of health to one of the parties. When they are sitting indoors they cannot endure the same degrees of temperature and the same supplies of fresh air. Even if the main factors of noise, restlessness, and inquisitiveness are left out of account, children can stand with indifference sights, sounds, smells, and disorders that would make an adult of fifty utterly miserable; whilst on the other hand such adults find a tranquil happiness in conditions which to children mean unspeakable boredom. And since our system is nevertheless to pack them all into the same house and pretend that they are happy, and that this particular sort of happiness is the foundation of virtue, it is found that in discussing family life we never speak of actual adults or actual children, or of realities of any sort, but always of ideals such as The Home, a Mother’s Influence, a Father’s Care, Filial Piety, Duty, Affection, Family Life, etc. etc., which are no doubt very comforting phrases, but which beg the question of what a home and a mother’s influence and a father’s care and so forth really come to in practice. How many hours a week of the time when his children are out of bed does the ordinary bread-winning father spend in the company of his children or even in the same building with them? The home may be a thieves’ kitchen, the mother a procuress, the father a violent drunkard; or the mother and father may be fashionable people who see their children three or four times a year during the holidays, and then not oftener than they can help, living meanwhile in daily and intimate contact with their valets and lady’s-maids, whose influence and care are often dominant in the household. Affection, as distinguished from simple kindliness, may or may not exist: when it does it either depends on qualities in the parties that would produce it equally if they were of no kin to one another, or it is a more or less morbid survival of the nursing passion; for affection between adults (if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural: in fact the evidence shews that it is easier to love the company of a dog than of a commonplace child between the ages of six and the beginnings of controlled maturity; for women who cannot bear to be separated from their pet dogs send their children to boarding schools cheerfully. They may say and even believe that in allowing their children to leave home they are sacrificing themselves for their children’s good; but there are very few pet dogs who would not be the better for a month or two spent elsewhere than in a lady’s lap or roasting on a drawingroom hearthrug. Besides, to allege that children are better continually away from home is to give up the whole popular sentimental theory of the family; yet the dogs are kept and the children are banished.

Child Fanciers

There is, however, a good deal of spurious family affection. There is the clannishness that will make a dozen brothers and sisters who quarrel furiously among themselves close up their ranks and make common cause against a brother-in-law or a sister-in-law. And there is a strong sense of property in children, which often makes mothers and fathers bitterly jealous of allowing anyone else to interfere with their children, whom they may none the less treat very badly. And there is an extremely dangerous craze for children which leads certain people to establish orphanages and baby farms and schools, seizing any pretext for filling their houses with children exactly as some eccentric old ladies and gentlemen fill theirs with cats. In such places the children are the victims of all the caprices of doting affection and all the excesses of lascivious cruelty. Yet the people who have this morbid craze seldom have any difficulty in finding victims. Parents and guardians are so worried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who is willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed. The very people who read with indignation of Squeers and Creakle in the novels of Dickens are quite ready to hand over their own children to Squeers and Creakle, and to pretend that Squeers and Creakle are monsters of the past. But read the autobiography of Stanley the traveller, or sit in the company of men talking about their school-days, and you will soon find that fiction, which must, if it is to be sold and read, stop short of being positively sickening, dare not tell the whole truth about the people to whom children are handed over on educational pretexts. Not very long ago a schoolmaster in Ireland was murdered by his boys; and for reasons which were never made public it was at first decided not to prosecute the murderers. Yet all these flogging schoolmasters and orphanage fiends and baby farmers are “lovers of children.” They are really child fanciers (like bird fanciers or dog fanciers) by irresistible natural predilection, never happy unless they are surrounded by their victims, and always certain to make their living by accepting the custody of children, no matter how many alternative occupations may be available. And bear in mind that they are only the extreme instances of what is commonly called natural affection, apparently because it is obviously unnatural.

The really natural feeling of adults for children in the long prosaic intervals between the moments of affectionate impulse is just that feeling that leads them to avoid their care and constant company as a burden beyond bearing, and to pretend that the places they send them to are well conducted, beneficial, and indispensable to the success of the children in after life. The true cry of the kind mother after her little rosary of kisses is “Run away, darling.” It is nicer than “Hold your noise, you young devil; or it will be the worse for you”; but fundamentally it means the same thing: that if you compel an adult and a child to live in one another’s company either the adult or the child will be miserable. There is nothing whatever unnatural or wrong or shocking in this fact; and there is no harm in it if only it be sensibly faced and provided for. The mischief that it does at present is produced by our efforts to ignore it, or to smother it under a heap of sentimental lies and false pretences.

Childhood as a State of Sin

Unfortunately all this nonsense tends to accumulate as we become more sympathetic. In many families it is still the custom to treat childhood frankly as a state of sin, and impudently proclaim the monstrous principle that little children should be seen and not heard, and to enforce a set of prison rules designed solely to make cohabitation with children as convenient as possible for adults without the smallest regard for the interests, either remote or immediate, of the children. This system tends to produce a tough, rather brutal, stupid, unscrupulous class, with a fixed idea that all enjoyment consists in undetected sinning; and in certain phases of civilization people of this kind are apt to get the upper hand of more amiable and conscientious races and classes. They have the ferocity of a chained dog, and are proud of it. But the end of it is that they are always in chains, even at the height of their military or political success: they win everything on condition that they are afraid to enjoy it. Their civilizations rest on intimidation, which is so necessary to them that when they cannot find anybody brave enough to intimidate them they intimidate themselves and live in a continual moral and political panic. In the end they get found out and bullied. But that is not the point that concerns us here, which is, that they are in some respects better brought up than the children of sentimental people who are always anxious and miserable about their duty to their children, and who end by neither making their children happy nor having a tolerable life for themselves. A selfish tyrant you know where to have, and he (or she) at least does not confuse your affections; but a conscientious and kindly meddler may literally worry you out of your senses. It is fortunate that only very few parents are capable of doing what they conceive their duty continuously or even at all, and that still fewer are tough enough to ride roughshod over their children at home.

School

But please observe the limitation “at home.” What private amateur parental enterprise cannot do may be done very effectively by organized professional enterprise in large institutions established for the purpose. And it is to such professional enterprise that parents hand over their children when they can afford it. They send their children to school; and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they dont understand and dont care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world’s bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: a book from which no human being can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life. With millions of acres of woods and valleys and hills and wind and air and birds and streams and fishes and all sorts of instructive and healthy things easily accessible, or with streets and shop windows and crowds and vehicles and all sorts of city delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of knowing how you are torturing him and how he loathes you; and you give yourself unnecessary pains to annoy him with furtive tricks and spiteful doing of forbidden things. No wonder he is sometimes provoked to fiendish outbursts of wrath. No wonder men of downright sense, like Dr Johnson, admit that under such circumstances children will not learn anything unless they are so cruelly beaten that they make desperate efforts to memorize words and phrases to escape flagellation. It is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling.

And now I hear cries of protest arising all round. First my own schoolmasters, or their ghosts, asking whether I was cruelly beaten at school? No; but then I did not learn anything at school. Dr Johnson’s schoolmaster presumably did care enough whether Sam learned anything to beat him savagely enough to force him to lame his mind — for Johnson’s great mind was lamed — by learning his lessons. None of my schoolmasters really cared a rap (or perhaps it would be fairer to them to say that their employers did not care a rap and therefore did not give them the necessary caning powers) whether I learnt my lessons or not, provided my father paid my schooling bill, the collection of which was the real object of the school. Consequently I did not learn my school lessons, having much more important ones in hand, with the result that I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit. My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever: it was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt; but I escaped Squeers and Creakle just as I escaped Johnson and Carlyle. And this is what happens to most of us. We are not effectively coerced to learn: we stave off punishment as far as we can by lying and trickery and guessing and using our wits; and when this does not suffice we scribble impositions, or suffer extra imprisonments— “keeping in” was the phrase in my time — or let a master strike us with a cane and fall back on our pride at being able to hear it physically (he not being allowed to hit us too hard) to outface the dishonor we should have been taught to die rather than endure. And so idleness and worthlessness on the one hand and a pretence of coercion on the other became a despicable routine. If my schoolmasters had been really engaged in educating me instead of painfully earning their bread by keeping me from annoying my elders they would have turned me out of the school, telling me that I was thoroughly disloyal to it; that I had no intention of learning; that I was mocking and distracting the boys who did wish to learn; that I was a liar and a shirker and a seditious little nuisance; and that nothing could injure me in character and degrade their occupation more than allowing me (much less forcing me) to remain in the school under such conditions. But in order to get expelled, it was necessary commit a crime of such atrocity that the parents of other boys would have threatened to remove their sons sooner than allow them to be schoolfellows with the delinquent. I can remember only one case in which such a penalty was threatened; and in that case the culprit, a boarder, had kissed a housemaid, or possibly, being a handsome youth, been kissed by her. She did not kiss me; and nobody ever dreamt of expelling me. The truth was, a boy meant just so much a year to the institution. That was why he was kept there against his will. That was why he was kept there when his expulsion would have been an unspeakable relief and benefit both to his teachers and himself.

It may be argued that if the uncommercial attitude had been taken, and all the disloyal wasters and idlers shewn sternly to the door, the school would not have been emptied, but filled. But so honest an attitude was impossible. The masters must have hated the school much more than the boys did. Just as you cannot imprison a man without imprisoning a warder to see that he does not escape, the warder being tied to the prison as effectually by the fear of unemployment and starvation as the prisoner is by the bolts and bars, so these poor schoolmasters, with their small salaries and large classes, were as much prisoners as we were, and much more responsible and anxious ones. They could not impose the heroic attitude on their employers; nor would they have been able to obtain places as schoolmasters if their habits had been heroic. For the best of them their employment was provisional: they looked forward to escaping from it into the pulpit. The ablest and most impatient of them were often so irritated by the awkward, slow-witted, slovenly boys: that is, the ones that required special consideration and patient treatment, that they vented their irritation on them ruthlessly, nothing being easier than to entrap or bewilder such a boy into giving a pretext for punishing him.

My Scholastic Acquirements

The results, as far as I was concerned, were what might have been expected. My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but Latin and Greek. When I went there as a very small boy I knew a good deal of Latin grammar which I had been taught in a few weeks privately by my uncle. When I had been several years at school this same uncle examined me and discovered that the net result of my schooling was that I had forgotten what he had taught me, and had learnt nothing else. To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short, I am, as to classical education, another Shakespear. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard’s shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.

Schoolmasters of Genius

And now, if I have reduced the ghosts of my schoolmasters to melancholy acquiescence in all this (which everybody who has been at an ordinary school will recognize as true), I have still to meet the much more sincere protests of the handful of people who have a natural genius for “bringing up” children. I shall be asked with kindly scorn whether I have heard of Froebel and Pestalozzi, whether I know the work that is being done by Miss Mason and the Dottoressa Montessori or, best of all as I think, the Eurythmics School of Jacques Dalcroze at Hellerau near Dresden. Jacques Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. Stranger still, though Jacques Dalcroze, like all these great teachers, is the completest of tyrants, knowing what is right and that he must and will have the lesson just so or else break his heart (not somebody else’s, observe), yet his school is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims “Oh, why was I not taught like this!” and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever Monsieur Daleroze calls out “Hop!” Oh yes: I know all about these wonderful schools that you cannot keep children or even adults out of, and these teachers whom their pupils not only obey without coercion, but adore. And if you will tell me roughly how many Masons and Montessoris and Dalcrozes you think you can pick up in Europe for salaries of from thirty shillings to five pounds a week, I will estimate your chances of converting your millions of little scholastic hells into little scholastic heavens. If you are a distressed gentlewoman starting to make a living, you can still open a little school; and you can easily buy a secondhand brass plate inscribed PESTALOZZIAN INSTITUTE and nail it to your door, though you have no more idea of who Pestalozzi was and what he advocated or how he did it than the manager of a hotel which began as a Hydropathic has of the water cure. Or you can buy a cheaper plate inscribed KINDERGARTEN, and imagine, or leave others to imagine, that Froebel is the governing genius of your little creche. No doubt the new brass plates are being inscribed Montessori Institute, and will be used when the Dotteressa is no longer with us by all the Mrs Pipchins and Mrs Wilfers throughout this unhappy land.

I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply deplores my “prejudice against schoolmasters,” has offered to accept my challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go out of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go out of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my own schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, and whom I should certainly have pestered for information and instruction if I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, and if they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves as carefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt them accidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod from behind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; for they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that. Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or three teachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs over our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For that matter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a judge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering of science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a clergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like enough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen’s Mrs Solness, have “a genius for nursing the souls of little children” are like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even at that they are mostly underpaid and despised. That friend of mine who went from the hedge schoolmaster to Harrow once saw a schoolmaster rush from an elementary school in pursuit of a boy and strike him. My friend, not considering that the unfortunate man was probably goaded beyond endurance, smote the schoolmaster and blackened his eye. The schoolmaster appealed to the law; and my friend found himself waiting nervously in the Hammersmith Police Court to answer for his breach of the peace. In his anxiety he asked a police officer what would happen to him. “What did you do?” said the officer. “I gave a man a black eye” said my friend. “Six pounds if he was a gentleman: two pounds if he wasnt,” said the constable. “He was a schoolmaster” said my friend. “Two pounds” said the officer; and two pounds it was. The blood money was paid cheerfully; and I have ever since advised elementary schoolmasters to qualify themselves in the art of self-defence, as the British Constitution expresses our national estimate of them by allowing us to blacken three of their eyes for the same price as one of an ordinary professional man. How many Froebels and Pestalozzis and Miss Masons and Doctoress Montessoris would you be likely to get on these terms even if they occurred much more frequently in nature than they actually do?

No: I cannot be put off by the news that our system would be perfect if it were worked by angels. I do not admit it even at that, just as I do not admit that if the sky fell we should all catch larks. But I do not propose to bother about a supply of specific genius which does not exist, and which, if it did exist, could operate only by at once recognizing and establishing the rights of children.

What We Do Not Teach, and Why

To my mind, a glance at the subjects now taught in schools ought to convince any reasonable person that the object of the lessons is to keep children out of mischief, and not to qualify them for their part in life as responsible citizens of a free State. It is not possible to maintain freedom in any State, no matter how perfect its original constitution, unless its publicly active citizens know a good deal of constitutional history, law, and political science, with its basis of economics. If as much pains had been taken a century ago to make us all understand Ricardo’s law of rent as to learn our catechisms, the face of the world would have been changed for the better. But for that very reason the greatest care is taken to keep such beneficially subversive knowledge from us, with the result that in public life we are either place-hunters, anarchists, or sheep shepherded by wolves.

But it will be observed that these are highly controversial subjects. Now no controversial subject can be taught dogmatically. He who knows only the official side of a controversy knows less than nothing of its nature. The abler a schoolmaster is, the more dangerous he is to his pupils unless they have the fullest opportunity of hearing another equally able person do his utmost to shake his authority and convict him of error.

At present such teaching is very unpopular. It does not exist in schools; but every adult who derives his knowledge of public affairs from the newspapers can take in, at the cost of an extra halfpenny, two papers of opposite politics. Yet the ordinary man so dislikes having his mind unsettled, as he calls it, that he angrily refuses to allow a paper which dissents from his views to be brought into his house. Even at his club he resents seeing it, and excludes it if it happens to run counter to the opinions of all the members. The result is that his opinions are not worth considering. A churchman who never reads The Freethinker very soon has no more real religion than the atheist who never reads The Church Times. The attitude is the same in both cases: they want to hear nothing good of their enemies; consequently they remain enemies and suffer from bad blood all their lives; whereas men who know their opponents and understand their case, quite commonly respect and like them, and always learn something from them.

Here, again, as at so many points, we come up against the abuse of schools to keep people in ignorance and error, so that they may be incapable of successful revolt against their industrial slavery. The most important simple fundamental economic truth to impress on a child in complicated civilizations like ours is the truth that whoever consumes goods or services without producing by personal effort the equivalent of what he or she consumes, inflicts on the community precisely the same injury that a thief produces, and would, in any honest State, be treated as a thief, however full his or her pockets might be of money made by other people. The nation that first teaches its children that truth, instead of flogging them if they discover it for themselves, may have to fight all the slaves of all the other nations to begin with; but it will beat them as easily as an unburdened man with his hands free and with all his energies in full play can beat an invalid who has to carry another invalid on his back.

This, however, is not an evil produced by the denial of children’s rights, nor is it inherent in the nature of schools. I mention it only because it would be folly to call for a reform of our schools without taking account of the corrupt resistance which awaits the reformer.

A word must also be said about the opposition to reform of the vested interest of the classical and coercive schoolmaster. He, poor wretch, has no other means of livelihood; and reform would leave him as a workman is now left when he is superseded by a machine. He had therefore better do what he can to get the workman compensated, so as to make the public familiar with the idea of compensation before his own turn comes.

Taboo in Schools

The suppression of economic knowledge, disastrous as it is, is quite intelligible, its corrupt motive being as clear as the motive of a burglar for concealing his jemmy from a policeman. But the other great suppression in our schools, the suppression of the subject of sex, is a case of taboo. In mankind, the lower the type, and the less cultivated the mind, the less courage there is to face important subjects objectively. The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion, politics, and sex: it is hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully-awakened interest. Commoner and less cultivated people, even when they form societies for discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex. The three subjects are feared because they rouse the crude passions which call for furious gratification in murder and rapine at worst, and, at best, lead to quarrels and undesirable states of consciousness.

Even when this excuse of bad manners, ill temper, and brutishness (for that is what it comes to) compels us to accept it from those adults among whom political and theological discussion does as a matter of fact lead to the drawing of knives and pistols, and sex discussion leads to obscenity, it has no application to children except as an imperative reason for training them to respect other people’s opinions, and to insist on respect for their own in these as in other important matters which are equally dangerous: for example, money. And in any case there are decisive reasons; superior, like the reasons for suspending conventional reticences between doctor and patient, to all considerations of mere decorum, for giving proper instruction in the facts of sex. Those who object to it (not counting coarse people who thoughtlessly seize every opportunity of affecting and parading a fictitious delicacy) are, in effect, advocating ignorance as a safeguard against precocity. If ignorance were practicable there would be something to be said for it up to the age at which ignorance is a danger instead of a safeguard. Even as it is, it seems undesirable that any special emphasis should be given to the subject, whether by way of delicacy and poetry or too impressive warning. But the plain fact is that in refusing to allow the child to be taught by qualified unrelated elders (the parents shrink from the lesson, even when they are otherwise qualified, because their own relation to the child makes the subject impossible between them) we are virtually arranging to have our children taught by other children in guilty secrets and unclean jests. And that settles the question for all sensible people.

The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When this actually happens (and apparently it does happen oftener than would seem possible) a horrible fraud is being practiced on both the man and the woman. He is led to believe that she knows what she is promising, and that he is in no danger of finding himself bound to a woman to whom he is eugenically antipathetic. She contemplates nothing but such affectionate relations as may exist between her and her nearest kinsmen, and has no knowledge of the condition which, if not foreseen, must come as an amazing revelation and a dangerous shock, ending possibly in the discovery that the marriage has been an irreparable mistake. Nothing can justify such a risk. There may be people incapable of understanding that the right to know all there is to know about oneself is a natural human right that sweeps away all the pretences of others to tamper with one’s consciousness in order to produce what they choose to consider a good character. But they must here bow to the plain mischievousness of entrapping people into contracts on which the happiness of their whole lives depends without letting them know what they are undertaking.

Alleged Novelties in Modern Schools

There is just one more nuisance to be disposed of before I come to the positive side of my case. I mean the person who tells me that my schooldays belong to a bygone order of educational ideas and institutions, and that schools are not now a bit like my old school. I reply, with Sir Walter Raleigh, by calling on my soul to give this statement the lie. Some years ago I lectured in Oxford on the subject of Education. A friend to whom I mentioned my intention said, “You know nothing of modern education: schools are not now what they were when you were a boy.” I immediately procured the time sheets of half a dozen modern schools, and found, as I expected, that they might all have been my old school: there was no real difference. I may mention, too, that I have visited modern schools, and observed that there is a tendency to hang printed pictures in an untidy and soulless manner on the walls, and occasionally to display on the mantel-shelf a deplorable glass case containing certain objects which might possibly, if placed in the hands of the pupils, give them some practical experience of the weight of a pound and the length of an inch. And sometimes a scoundrel who has rifled a bird’s nest or killed a harmless snake encourages the children to go and do likewise by putting his victims into an imitation nest and bottle and exhibiting them as aids to “Nature study.” A suggestion that Nature is worth study would certainly have staggered my schoolmasters; so perhaps I may admit a gleam of progress here. But as any child who attempted to handle these dusty objects would probably be caned, I do not attach any importance to such modernities in school furniture. The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object remains what it was. And that object, I repeat, is to keep the children out of mischief: mischief meaning for the most part worrying the grown-ups.

What is to be Done?

The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.

The grotesque difficulty of making even a beginning was brought home to me in the little village in Hertfordshire where I write these lines by the lady of the manor, who asked me very properly what I was going to do for the village school. I did not know what to reply. As the school kept the children quiet during my working hours, I did not for the sake of my own personal convenience want to blow it up with dynamite as I should like to blow up most schools. So I asked for guidance. “You ought to give a prize,” said the lady. I asked if there was a prize for good conduct. As I expected, there was: one for the best-behaved boy and another for the best-behaved girl. On reflection I offered a handsome prize for the worst-behaved boy and girl on condition that a record should be kept of their subsequent careers and compared with the records of the best-behaved, in order to ascertain whether the school criterion of good conduct was valid out of school. My offer was refused because it would not have had the effect of encouraging the children to give as little trouble as possible, which is of course the real object of all conduct prizes in schools.

I must not pretend, then, that I have a system ready to replace all the other systems. Obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood, as of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income, with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery on children as a necessary part of their social training. The result of our economic folly is that we are a nation of undesirable acquaintances; and the first object of all our institutions for children is segregation. If, for example, our children were set free to roam and play about as they pleased, they would have to be policed; and the first duty of the police in a State like ours would be to see that every child wore a badge indicating its class in society, and that every child seen speaking to another child with a lower-class badge, or any child wearing a higher badge than that allotted to it by, say, the College of Heralds, should immediately be skinned alive with a birch rod. It might even be insisted that girls with high-class badges should be attended by footmen, grooms, or even military escorts. In short, there is hardly any limit to the follies with which our Commercialism would infect any system that it would tolerate at all. But something like a change of heart is still possible; and since all the evils of snobbery and segregation are rampant in our schools at present we may as well make the best as the worst of them.

Children’s Rights and Duties

Now let us ask what are a child’s rights, and what are the rights of society over the child. Its rights, being clearly those of any other human being, are summed up in the right to live: that is, to have all the conclusive arguments that prove that it would be better dead, that it is a child of wrath, that the population is already excessive, that the pains of life are greater than its pleasures, that its sacrifice in a hospital or laboratory experiment might save millions of lives, etc. etc. etc., put out of the question, and its existence accepted as necessary and sacred, all theories to the contrary notwithstanding, whether by Calvin or Schopenhauer or Pasteur or the nearest person with a taste for infanticide. And this right to live includes, and in fact is, the right to be what the child likes and can, to do what it likes and can, to make what it likes and can, to think what it likes and can, to smash what it dislikes and can, and generally to behave in an altogether unaccountable manner within the limits imposed by the similar rights of its neighbors. And the rights of society over it clearly extend to requiring it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other peoples time: that is, it must know the rules of the road, be able to read placards and proclamations, fill voting papers, compose and send letters and telegrams, purchase food and clothing and railway tickets for itself, count money and give and take change, and, generally, know how many beans made five. It must know some law, were it only a simple set of commandments, some political economy, agriculture enough to shut the gates of fields with cattle in them and not to trample on growing crops, sanitation enough not to defile its haunts, and religion enough to have some idea of why it is allowed its rights and why it must respect the rights of others. And the rest of its education must consist of anything else it can pick up; for beyond this society cannot go with any certainty, and indeed can only go this far rather apologetically and provisionally, as doing the best it can on very uncertain ground.

Should Children Earn their Living?

Now comes the question how far children should be asked to contribute to the support of the community. In approaching it we must put aside the considerations that now induce all humane and thoughtful political students to agitate for the uncompromising abolition of child labor under our capitalist system. It is not the least of the curses of that system that it will bequeath to future generations a mass of legislation to prevent capitalists from “using up nine generations of men in one generation,” as they began by doing until they were restrained by law at the suggestion of Robert Owen, the founder of English Socialism. Most of this legislation will become an insufferable restraint upon freedom and variety of action when Capitalism goes the way of Druidic human sacrifice (a much less slaughterous institution). There is every reason why a child should not be allowed to work for commercial profit or for the support of its parents at the expense of its own future; but there is no reason whatever why a child should not do some work for its own sake and that of the community if it can be shewn that both it and the community will be the better for it.

Children’s Happiness

Also it is important to put the happiness of the children rather carefully in its place, which is really not a front place. The unsympathetic, selfish, hard people who regard happiness as a very exceptional indulgence to which children are by no means entitled, though they may be allowed a very little of it on their birthdays or at Christmas, are sometimes better parents in effect than those who imagine that children are as capable of happiness as adults. Adults habitually exaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly; yet most adults can stand an allowance of happiness that would be quite thrown away on children. The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired. Music after dinner is pleasant: music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearly unnatural. To people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance. To people who are, and who can afford them, they are a troublesome necessity. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday

It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb “Heaven for holiness and Hell for company.” Second, I point out that the wretched people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do the most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what they call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking up and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done, is our school system and our industrial system. The school is a prison in which work is a punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard labor, the only alleviation of a prisoner’s lot, is treated as an aggravation of his punishment; and everything possible is done to intensify the prisoner’s inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an evil. In industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such absurd circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion of heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.

Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and that “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do” and it will be seen that we have no right to impose a perpetual holiday on children. If we did, they would soon outdo the Labor Party in their claim for a Right to Work Bill.

In any case no child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor. If we did that today — and nothing but flat dishonesty prevents us from doing it — we should have no idle rich and indeed probably no rich, since there is no distinction in being rich if you have to pay scot and lot in personal effort like the working folk. Therefore, if for only half an hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community.

Productive work for children has the advantage that its discipline is the discipline of impersonal necessity, not that of wanton personal coercion. The eagerness of children in our industrial districts to escape from school to the factory is not caused by lighter tasks or shorter hours in the factory, nor altogether by the temptation of wages, nor even by the desire for novelty, but by the dignity of adult work, the exchange of the factitious personal tyranny of the schoolmaster, from which the grown-ups are free, for the stern but entirely dignified Laws of Life to which all flesh is subject.

University Schoolboyishness

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be men. The function of a university is not to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead of inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn manners and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressure which effects these changes should be that of persons who have faced the full responsibilities of adults as working members of the general community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state of society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all, criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is just what they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasing Mr. Kipling, “What do they know of Plato that only Plato know?” If our universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his or her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect would be vastly improved.

The New Laziness

The child of the future, then, if there is to be any future but one of decay, will work more or less for its living from an early age; and in doing so it will not shock anyone, provided there be no longer any reason to associate the conception of children working for their living with infants toiling in a factory for ten hours a day or boys drudging from nine to six under gas lamps in underground city offices. Lads and lasses in their teens will probably be able to produce as much as the most expensive person now costs in his own person (it is retinue that eats up the big income) without working too hard or too long for quite as much happiness as they can enjoy. The question to be balanced then will be, not how soon people should be put to work, but how soon they should be released from any obligation of the kind. A life’s work is like a day’s work: it can begin early and leave off early or begin late and leave off late, or, as with us, begin too early and never leave off at all, obviously the worst of all possible plans. In any event we must finally reckon work, not as the curse our schools and prisons and capitalist profit factories make it seem today, but as a prime necessity of a tolerable existence. And if we cannot devise fresh wants as fast as we develop the means of supplying them, there will come a scarcity of the needed, cut-and-dried, appointed work that is always ready to everybody’s hand. It may have to be shared out among people all of whom want more of it. And then a new sort of laziness will become the bugbear of society: the laziness that refuses to face the mental toil and adventure of making work by inventing new ideas or extending the domain of knowledge, and insists on a ready-made routine. It may come to forcing people to retire before they are willing to make way for younger ones: that is, to driving all persons of a certain age out of industry, leaving them to find something experimental to occupy them on pain of perpetual holiday. Men will then try to spend twenty thousand a year for the sake of having to earn it. Instead of being what we are now, the cheapest and nastiest of the animals, we shall be the costliest, most fastidious, and best bred. In short, there is no end to the astonishing things that may happen when the curse of Adam becomes first a blessing and then an incurable habit. And in that day we must not grudge children their share of it.

The Infinite School Task

The question of children’s work, however, is only a question of what the child ought to do for the community. How highly it should qualify itself is another matter. But most of the difficulty of inducing children to learn would disappear if our demands became not only definite but finite. When learning is only an excuse for imprisonment, it is an instrument of torture which becomes more painful the more progress is made. Thus when you have forced a child to learn the Church Catechism, a document profound beyond the comprehension of most adults, you are sometimes at a standstill for something else to teach; and you therefore keep the wretched child repeating its catechism again and again until you hit on the plan of making it learn instalments of Bible verses, preferably from the book of Numbers. But as it is less trouble to set a lesson that you know yourself, there is a tendency to keep repeating the already learnt lesson rather than break new ground. At school I began with a fairly complete knowledge of Latin grammar in the childish sense of being able to repeat all the paradigms; and I was kept at this, or rather kept in a class where the master never asked me to do it because he knew I could, and therefore devoted himself to trapping the boys who could not, until I finally forgot most of it. But when progress took place, what did it mean? First it meant Caesar, with the foreknowledge that to master Caesar meant only being set at Virgil, with the culminating horror of Greek and Homer in reserve at the end of that. I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is divided into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the only Latin sentence I could translate at sight: therefore the longer we stuck at Caesar the better I was pleased. Just so do less classically educated children see nothing in the mastery of addition but the beginning of subtraction, and so on through multiplication and division and fractions, with the black cloud of algebra on the horizon. And if a boy rushes through all that, there is always the calculus to fall back on, unless indeed you insist on his learning music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the year Beethoven was born.

A child has a right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons. Also as regards physical training. At present it is assumed that the schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This is the tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even more horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive boys through compulsory games in the playing fields until they are too much exhausted physically to do anything but drop off to sleep. This is supposed to protect them from vice; but as it also protects them from poetry, literature, music, meditation and prayer, it may be dismissed with the obvious remark that if boarding schools are places whose keepers are driven to such monstrous measures lest more abominable things should happen, then the sooner boarding schools are violently abolished the better. It is true that society may make physical claims on the child as well as mental ones: the child must learn to walk, to use a knife and fork, to swim, to ride a bicycle, to acquire sufficient power of self-defence to make an attack on it an arduous and uncertain enterprise, perhaps to fly. What as a matter of common-sense it clearly has not a right to do is to make this an excuse for keeping the child slaving for ten hours at physical exercises on the ground that it is not yet as dexterous as Cinquevalli and as strong as Sandow.

The Rewards and Risks of Knowledge

In a word, we have no right to insist on educating a child; for its education can end only with its life and will not even then be complete. Compulsory completion of education is the last folly of a rotten and desperate civilization. It is the rattle in its throat before dissolution. All we can fairly do is to prescribe certain definite acquirements and accomplishments as qualifications for certain employments; and to secure them, not by the ridiculous method of inflicting injuries on the persons who have not yet mastered them, but by attaching certain privileges (not pecuniary) to the employments.

Most acquirements carry their own privileges with them. Thus a baby has to be pretty closely guarded and imprisoned because it cannot take care of itself. It has even to be carried about (the most complete conceivable infringement of its liberty) until it can walk. But nobody goes on carrying children after they can walk lest they should walk into mischief, though Arab boys make their sisters carry them, as our own spoiled children sometimes make their nurses, out of mere laziness, because sisters in the East and nurses in the West are kept in servitude. But in a society of equals (the only reasonable and permanently possible sort of society) children are in much greater danger of acquiring bandy legs through being left to walk before they are strong enough than of being carried when they are well able to walk. Anyhow, freedom of movement in a nursery is the reward of learning to walk; and in precisely the same way freedom of movement in a city is the reward of learning how to read public notices, and to count and use money. The consequences are of course much larger than the mere ability to read the name of a street or the number of a railway platform and the destination of a train. When you enable a child to read these, you also enable it to read this preface, to the utter destruction, you may quite possibly think, of its morals and docility. You also expose it to the danger of being run over by taxicabs and trains. The moral and physical risks of education are enormous: every new power a child acquires, from speaking, walking, and co-ordinating its vision, to conquering continents and founding religions, opens up immense new possibilities of mischief. Teach a child to write and you teach it how to forge: teach it to speak and you teach it how to lie: teach it to walk and you teach it how to kick its mother to death.

The great problem of slavery for those whose aim is to maintain it is the problem of reconciling the efficiency of the slave with the helplessness that keeps him in servitude; and this problem is fortunately not completely soluble; for it is not in fact found possible for a duke to treat his solicitor or his doctor as he treats his laborers, though they are all equally his slaves: the laborer being in fact less dependent on his favor than the professional man. Hence it is that men come to resent, of all things, protection, because it so often means restriction of their liberty lest they should make a bad use of it. If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easier and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an effective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paid deputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishing and scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growth instead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and then boldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum of risk.

English Physical Hardihood and Spiritual Cowardice

It is easier to convert most people to the need for allowing their children to run physical risks than moral ones. I can remember a relative of mine who, when I was a small child, unused to horses and very much afraid of them, insisted on putting me on a rather rumbustious pony with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my agitation I would use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused at my terrors. Yet when that same lady discovered that I had found a copy of The Arabian Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was horrified, and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might have broken my neck. This way of producing hardy bodies and timid souls is so common in country houses that you may spend hours in them listening to stories of broken collar bones, broken backs, and broken necks without coming upon a single spiritual adventure or daring thought.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but of 21 seconds.

The Risks of Ignorance and Weakness

The difficulty with children is that they need protection from risks they are too young to understand, and attacks they can neither avoid nor resist. You may on academic grounds allow a child to snatch glowing coals from the fire once. You will not do it twice. The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter. Not only children but adults need protection from them. At present adults are often exposed to risks outside their knowledge or beyond their comprehension or powers of resistance or foresight: for example, we have to look on every day at marriages or financial speculations that may involve far worse consequences than burnt fingers. And just as it is part of the business of adults to protect children, to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, and shift for them in all sorts of ways until they are able to shift for themselves, it is coming more and more to be seen that this is true not only of the relation between adults and children, but between adults and adults. We shall not always look on indifferently at foolish marriages and financial speculations, nor allow dead men to control live communities by ridiculous wills and living heirs to squander and ruin great estates, nor tolerate a hundred other absurd liberties that we allow today because we are too lazy to find out the proper way to interfere. But the interference must be regulated by some theory of the individual’s rights. Though the right to live is absolute, it is not unconditional. If a man is unbearably mischievous, he must be killed. This is a mere matter of necessity, like the killing of a man-eating tiger in a nursery, a venomous snake in the garden, or a fox in the poultry yard. No society could be constructed on the assumption that such extermination is a violation of the creature’s right to live, and therefore must not be allowed. And then at once arises the danger into which morality has led us: the danger of persecution. One Christian spreading his doctrines may seem more mischievous than a dozen thieves: throw him therefore to the lions. A lying or disobedient child may corrupt a whole generation and make human Society impossible: therefore thrash the vice out of him. And so on until our whole system of abortion, intimidation, tyranny, cruelty and the rest is in full swing again.

The Common Sense of Toleration

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need not here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the Joint Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the present must not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste, and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracing incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on us by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing for doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, and which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration is the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution. Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation, with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification; or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest must not rend his garments and cry “Crucify him” when he is shocked: the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law’s Serious Call because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount, and Machiavelli’s Prince, and La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, and Hymns Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville’s apologue, and Dr. Watts’s rhymes, and Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and Ingersoll’s Mistakes of Moses, and the speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on Germany, and the Noodle’s Orations and articles of our politicians and journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the wounds suffered in that conflict, they are better than the barren peace of death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand and foot.

The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration is a law of political science as well established as the law of gravitation, our rulers are never taught political science: on the contrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing that is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; and that the master’s method is the method of violent punishment. And our citizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As I write these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen to agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest of us are in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the only objection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous demands that he should be caned instead of being allowed to cane other people.

The Sin of Athanasius

It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them from chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy and tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceed on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will frankly give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment like themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same time relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private property in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is our attitude, our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might be made by enacting that any person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyone else as the will of God, or as absolutely right, should be dealt with as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of that scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes. From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own tails, yet ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrong conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings to bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better than Socrates or Solon?

It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens. Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance and helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend that they can save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor were to say to his patients, “I am familiar with your symptoms, because I have seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the very little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant undertake to cure you,” he would be a lost man professionally; and if a clergyman, on being called on to award a prize for good conduct in the village school, were to say, “I am afraid I cannot say who is the best-behaved child, because I really do not know what good conduct is; but I will gladly take the teacher’s word as to which child has caused least inconvenience,” he would probably be unfrocked, if not excommunicated. And yet no honest and intellectually capable doctor or parson can say more. Clearly it would not be wise of the doctor to say it, because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession. And a clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically will not be of much use in a village school, though it behoves him all the more to be very careful what law he lays down. But unless both the clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between saying, “I believe this; and I am going to act on it,” or, “I dont believe it; and I wont act on it,” and saying, “It is true; and it is my duty and yours to act on it,” or, “It is false; and it is my duty and yours to refuse to act on it.” The difference is as great as that between the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeat the Apostles’ Creed you affirm that you believe certain things. There you are clearly within your rights. When you repeat the Athanasian Creed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that anybody who doubts that they are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece of impudence on your part, as you know nothing about it except that as good men as you have never heard of your creed. The apostolic attitude is a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy and light: the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dont agree with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a law for the speedy execution of all Athanasians, because they violate the fundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that all living creatures are experiments. The precise formula for the Superman, ci-devant The Just Man Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.

The Experiment Experimenting

And now all the modern schoolmaster abortionists will rise up beaming, and say, “We quite agree. We regard every child in our school as a subject for experiment. We are always experimenting with them. We challenge the experimental test for our system. We are continually guided by our experience in our great work of moulding the character of our future citizens, etc. etc. etc.” I am sorry to seem irreconcilable; but it is the Life Force that has to make the experiment and not the schoolmaster; and the Life Force for the child’s purpose is in the child and not in the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is another experiment; and a laboratory in which all the experiments began experimenting on one another would not produce intelligible results. I admit, however, that if my schoolmasters had treated me as an experiment of the Life Force: that is, if they had set me free to do as I liked subject only to my political rights and theirs, they could not have watched the experiment very long, because the first result would have been a rapid movement on my part in the direction of the door, and my disappearance there-through.

It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say that practically every time I should have gone to a much more educational place. I should have gone into the country, or into the sea, or into the National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one, or to any library where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read very dry and difficult books: for example, though nothing would have induced me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a text-book of history in school, I remember reading Robertson’s Charles V. and his history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously. Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had been a school where children were really free, I should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable: they will read and study far more than is good for them. In fact the real difficulty is to prevent them from wasting their time by reading for the sake of reading and studying for the sake of studying, instead of taking some trouble to find out what they really like and are capable of doing some good at. Some silly person will probably interrupt me here with the remark that many children have no appetite for a literary education at all, and would never open a book if they were not forced to. I have known many such persons who have been forced to the point of obtaining University degrees. And for all the effect their literary exercises has left on them they might just as well have been put on the treadmill. In fact they are actually less literate than the treadmill would have left them; for they might by chance have picked up and dipped into a volume of Shakespear or a translation of Homer if they had not been driven to loathe every famous name in literature. I should probably know as much Latin as French, if Latin had not been made the excuse for my school imprisonment and degradation.

Why We Loathe Learning and Love Sport

If we are to discuss the importance of art, learning, and intellectual culture, the first thing we have to recognize is that we have very little of them at present; and that this little has not been produced by compulsory education: nay, that the scarcity is unnatural and has been produced by the violent exclusion of art and artists from schools. On the other hand we have quite a considerable degree of bodily culture: indeed there is a continual outcry against the sacrifice of mental accomplishments to athletics. In other words a sacrifice of the professed object of compulsory education to the real object of voluntary education. It is assumed that this means that people prefer bodily to mental culture; but may it not mean that they prefer liberty and satisfaction to coercion and privation. Why is it that people who have been taught Shakespear as a school subject loathe his plays and cannot by any means be persuaded ever to open his works after they escape from school, whereas there is still, 300 years after his death, a wide and steady sale for his works to people who read his plays as plays, and not as task work? If Shakespear, or for that matter, Newton and Leibnitz, are allowed to find their readers and students they will find them. If their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone who is conversant with the class in which child imprisonment and compulsory schooling is carried out to the final extremity of the university degree knows that its scholastic culture is a sham; that it knows little about literature or art and a great deal about point-to-point races; and that the village cobbler, who has never read a page of Plato, and is admittedly a dangerously ignorant man politically, is nevertheless a Socrates compared to the classically educated gentlemen who discuss politics in country houses at election time (and at no other time) after their day’s earnest and skilful shooting. Think of the years and years of weary torment the women of the piano-possessing class have been forced to spend over the keyboard, fingering scales. How many of them could be bribed to attend a pianoforte recital by a great player, though they will rise from sick beds rather than miss Ascot or Goodwood?

Another familiar fact that teaches the same lesson is that many women who have voluntarily attained a high degree of culture cannot add up their own housekeeping books, though their education in simple arithmetic was compulsory, whereas their higher education has been wholly voluntary. Everywhere we find the same result. The imprisonment, the beating, the taming and laming, the breaking of young spirits, the arrest of development, the atrophy of all inhibitive power except the power of fear, are real: the education is sham. Those who have been taught most know least.

Antichrist

Among the worst effects of the unnatural segregation of children in schools and the equally unnatural constant association of them with adults in the family is the utter defeat of the vital element in Christianity. Christ stands in the world for that intuition of the highest humanity that we, being members one of another, must not complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile nor persecute nor revenge nor punish. Now family life and school life are, as far as the moral training of children is concerned, nothing but the deliberate inculcation of a routine of complaint, scolding, punishment, persecution, and revenge as the natural and only possible way of dealing with evil or inconvenience. “Aint nobody to be whopped for this here?” exclaimed Sam Weller when he saw his employer’s name written up on a stage coach, and conceived the phenomenon as an insult which reflected on himself. This exclamation of Sam Weller is at once the negation of Christianity and the beginning and the end of current morality; and so it will remain as long as the family and the school persist as we know them: that is, as long as the rights of children are so utterly denied that nobody will even take the trouble to ascertain what they are, and coming of age is like the turning of a convict into the street after twenty-one years penal servitude. Indeed it is worse; for the convict may have learnt before his conviction how to live in freedom and may remember how to set about it, however lamed his powers of freedom may have become through disuse; but the child knows no other way of life but the slave’s way. Born free, as Rousseau says, he has been laid hands on by slaves from the moment of his birth and brought up as a slave. How is he, when he is at last set free, to be anything else than the slave he actually is, clamoring for war, for the lash, for police, prisons, and scaffolds in a wild panic of delusion that without these things he is lost. The grown-up Englishman is to the end of his days a badly brought-up child, beyond belief quarrelsome, petulant, selfish, destructive, and cowardly: afraid that the Germans will come and enslave him; that the burglar will come and rob him; that the bicycle or motor car will run over him; that the smallpox will attack him; and that the devil will run away with him and empty him out like a sack of coals on a blazing fire unless his nurse or his parents or his schoolmaster or his bishop or his judge or his army or his navy will do something to frighten these bad things away. And this Englishman, without the moral courage of a louse, will risk his neck for fun fifty times every winter in the hunting field, and at Badajos sieges and the like will ram his head into a hole bristling with sword blades rather than be beaten in the one department in which he has been brought up to consult his own honor. As a Sportsman (and war is fundamentally the sport of hunting and fighting the most dangerous of the beasts of prey) he feels free. He will tell you himself that the true sportsman is never a snob, a coward, a duffer, a cheat, a thief, or a liar. Curious, is it not, that he has not the same confidence in other sorts of man?

And even sport is losing its freedom. Soon everybody will be schooled, mentally and physically, from the cradle to the end of the term of adult compulsory military service, and finally of compulsory civil service lasting until the age of superannuation. Always more schooling, more compulsion. We are to be cured by an excess of the dose that has poisoned us. Satan is to cast out Satan.

Under the Whip

Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty. We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be, warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally, when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge along stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turn furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a change. It would be quite easy to make England a paradise, according to our present ideas, in a few years. There is no mystery about it: the way has been pointed out over and over again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. And we have no will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to break our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the account of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelled to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body in England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceiving himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as a satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority. I had intended to give the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeating such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who was doing only what others all over the country were doing as part of the established routine of what is called education. The astounding part of it was the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decency seemed quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of high character, and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have been allowed the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of a profession in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or of institutions in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine? Wholesome people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses: they would spit them out; but we are tainted with flagellomania from our childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to? Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Other methods and other punishments were always available: the choice of this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it was practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes. In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), when in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial nature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by the Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Act under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the utmost extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course, to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who really profit by it to imaginary “foreign scoundrels,” and to secure a monopoly of its organization for women.

And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial to children of the elementary rights of human beings.

The first man who enslaved and “broke in” an animal with a whip would have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen the curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby to enslave and break in their children by the same means. These children, grown up, knew no other methods of training. Finally the evil that was done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for pleasure by the lustful. Flogging has become a pleasure purchasable in our streets, and inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at. “Go and see what baby is doing; and tell him he mustnt” is the last word of the nursery; and the grimmest aspect of it is that it was first formulated by a comic paper as a capital joke.

Technical Instruction

Technical instruction tempts to violence (as a short cut) more than liberal education. The sailor in Mr Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, teaching the boy the names of the ship’s tackle with a rope’s end, does not disgust us as our schoolmasters do, especially as the boy was a spoiled boy. But an unspoiled boy would not have needed that drastic medicine. Technical training may be as tedious as learning to skate or to play the piano or violin; but it is the price one must pay to achieve certain desirable results or necessary ends. It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true; for there is no labor that might not be imposed on a child or an adult on the same pretext; but as a glance at the average products of our public school and university education shews that it is not true, it need not trouble us. But it is a fact that ignorance of Latin and Greek and mathematics closes certain careers to men (I do not mean artificial, unnecessary, noxious careers like those of the commercial schoolmaster). Languages, even dead ones, have their uses; and, as it seems to many of us, mathematics have their uses. They will always be learned by people who want to learn them; and people will always want to learn them as long as they are of any importance in life: indeed the want will survive their importance: superstition is nowhere stronger than in the field of obsolete acquirements. And they will never be learnt fruitfully by people who do not want to learn them either for their own sake or for use in necessary work. There is no harder schoolmaster than experience; and yet experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.

Still, one must not begin to apply this generalization too early. And this brings me to an important factor in the case: the factor of evolution.

Docility and Dependence

If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are precisely those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were an adult, he (or she) will find that though the plan will work much better at some points than the usual plan, at others it will not work at all; and this discovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole conception of children’s rights with a jest at the expense of bachelors’ and old maids’ children. In dealing with children what is needed is not logic but sense. There is no logical reason why young persons should be allowed greater control of their property the day after they are twenty-one than the day before it. There is no logical reason why I, who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of ten with a Latin grammar, and saying, “you must learn this, whether you want to or not,” should nevertheless be quite prepared to stand over a boy of five with the multiplication table or a copy book or a code of elementary good manners, and practice on his docility to make him learn them. And there is no logical reason why I should do for a child a great many little offices, some of them troublesome and disagreeable, which I should not do for a boy twice its age, or support a boy or girl when I would unhesitatingly throw an adult on his own resources. But there are practical reasons, and sensible reasons, and affectionate reasons for all these illogicalities. Children do not want to be treated altogether as adults: such treatment terrifies them and over-burdens them with responsibility. In truth, very few adults care to be called on for independence and originality: they also are bewildered and terrified in the absence of precedents and precepts and commandments; but modern Democracy allows them a sanctioning and cancelling power if they are capable of using it, which children are not. To treat a child wholly as an adult would be to mock and destroy it. Infantile docility and juvenile dependence are, like death, a product of Natural Selection; and though there is no viler crime than to abuse them, yet there is no greater cruelty than to ignore them. I have complained sufficiently of what I suffered through the process of assault, imprisonment, and compulsory lessons that taught me nothing, which are called my schooling. But I could say a good deal also about the things I was not taught and should have been taught, not to mention the things I was allowed to do which I should not have been allowed to do. I have no recollection of being taught to read or write; so I presume I was born with both faculties; but many people seem to have bitter recollections of being forced reluctantly to acquire them. And though I have the uttermost contempt for a teacher so ill mannered and incompetent as to be unable to make a child learn to read and write without also making it cry, still I am prepared to admit that I had rather have been compelled to learn to read and write with tears by an incompetent and ill mannered person than left in ignorance. Reading, writing, and enough arithmetic to use money honestly and accurately, together with the rudiments of law and order, become necessary conditions of a child’s liberty before it can appreciate the importance of its liberty, or foresee that these accomplishments are worth acquiring. Nature has provided for this by evolving the instinct of docility. Children are very docile: they have a sound intuition that they must do what they are told or perish. And adults have an intuition, equally sound, that they must take advantage of this docility to teach children how to live properly or the children will not survive. The difficulty is to know where to stop. To illustrate this, let us consider the main danger of childish docility and parental officiousness.

The Abuse of Docility

Docility may survive as a lazy habit long after it has ceased to be a beneficial instinct. If you catch a child when it is young enough to be instinctively docile, and keep it in a condition of unremitted tutelage under the nurserymaid, the governess, the preparatory school, the secondary school, and the university, until it is an adult, you will produce, not a self-reliant, free, fully matured human being, but a grown-up schoolboy or schoolgirl, capable of nothing in the way of original or independent action except outbursts of naughtiness in the women and blackguardism in the men. That is exactly what we get at present in our rich and consequently governing classes: they pass from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is often more of a man than a university student of twenty. Unfortunately this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance, narrowness, and a hideous power of living without art or love or beauty and being rather proud of it. The poor never escape from servitude: their docility is preserved by their slavery. And so all become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the domineering, the unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there an individual refuses to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or lock him up or shoot him or hang him at the bidding of his oppressors and their own. The crux of the whole difficulty about parents, schoolmasters, priests, absolute monarchs, and despots of every sort, is the tendency to abuse natural docility. A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery. The child is taught to be kind, to be respectful, to be quiet, not to answer back, to be truthful when its elders want to find out anything from it, to lie when the truth would shock or hurt its elders, to be above all things obedient, and to be seen and not heard. Here we have two sets of precepts, each warranted to spoil a child hopelessly if the other be omitted. Unfortunately we do not allow fair play between them. The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set provoke a corrective resistance, and do not pretend to high moral or religious sanctions; and they are never urged by grown-up people on young people. They are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression than the other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all the religions on their side. How is the child to be secured its due share of both bodies of doctrine?

The Schoolboy and the Homeboy

In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care of themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little and to mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough. When you have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral cripple, you are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and as you do not intend to have him on your hands all your life, and are generally rather impatient for the day when he will earn his own living and leave you to attend to yourself, you sooner or later begin to talk to him about the need for self-reliance, learning to think, and so forth, with the result that your victim, bewildered by your inconsistency, concludes that there is no use trying to please you, and falls into an attitude of sulky resentment. Which is an additional inducement to pack him off to school.

In school, he finds himself in a dual world, under two dispensations. There is the world of the boys, where the point of honor is to be untameable, always ready to fight, ruthless in taking the conceit out of anyone who ventures to give himself airs of superior knowledge or taste, and generally to take Lucifer for one’s model. And there is the world of the masters, the world of discipline, submission, diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of moral and intellectual authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one. But the two sides are not fairly presented. They are presented as good and evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels mean and cowardly when he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he disobeys. He looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate books and languages. In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close to his mother’s apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to Oxford, and John Stuart Mill, whose father ought to have been prosecuted for laying his son’s childhood waste with lessons, were superior, as products of training, to our schoolboys. They were very conspicuously superior in moral courage; and though they did not distinguish themselves at cricket and football, they had quite as much physical hardihood as any civilized man needs. But it is to be observed that Ruskin’s parents were wise people who gave John a full share in their own life, and put up with his presence both at home and abroad when they must sometimes have been very weary of him; and Mill, as it happens, was deliberately educated to challenge all the most sacred institutions of his country. The households they were brought up in were no more average households than a Montessori school is an average school.

The Comings of Age of Children

All this inculcated adult docility, which wrecks every civilization as it is wrecking ours, is inhuman and unnatural. We must reconsider our institution of the Coming of Age, which is too late for some purposes, and too early for others. There should be a series of Coming of Ages for every individual. The mammals have their first coming of age when they are weaned; and it is noteworthy that this rather cruel and selfish operation on the part of the parent has to be performed resolutely, with claws and teeth; for your little mammal does not want to be weaned, and yields only to a pretty rough assertion of the right of the parent to be relieved of the child as soon as the child is old enough to bear the separation. The same thing occurs with children: they hang on to the mother’s apron-string and the father’s coat tails as long as they can, often baffling those sensitive parents who know that children should think for themselves and fend for themselves, but are too kind to throw them on their own resources with the ferocity of the domestic cat. The child should have its first coming of age when it is weaned, another when it can talk, another when it can walk, another when it can dress itself without assistance; and when it can read, write, count money, and pass an examination in going a simple errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other public method of locomotion, it should have quite a majority. At present the children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for themselves, whereas it is possible to find grown-up women in the rich classes who are actually afraid to take a walk in the streets unattended and unprotected. It is true that this is a superstition from the time when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality, and the unattended person was supposed to be a common person of no quality, earning a living; but this has now become so absurd that children and young women are no longer told why they are forbidden to go about alone, and have to be persuaded that the streets are dangerous places, which of course they are; but people who are not educated to live dangerously have only half a life, and are more likely to die miserably after all than those who have taken all the common risks of freedom from their childhood onward as matters of course.

The Conflict of Wills

The world wags in spite of its schools and its families because both schools and families are mostly very largely anarchic: parents and schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely for its own sake.

The strongest, fiercest force in nature is human will. It is the highest organization we know of the will that has created the whole universe. Now all honest civilization, religion, law, and convention is an attempt to keep this force within beneficent bounds. What corrupts civilization, religion, law, and convention (and they are at present pretty nearly as corrupt as they dare) is the constant attempts made by the wills of individuals and classes to thwart the wills and enslave the powers of other individuals and classes. The powers of the parent and the schoolmaster, and of their public analogues the lawgiver and the judge, become instruments of tyranny in the hands of those who are too narrow-minded to understand law and exercise judgment; and in their hands (with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny. And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person, young or old, “You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want; you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and your powers shall be at the disposal of my will.” It has come to this at last: that the phrase “she has a will of her own,” or “he has a will of his own” has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury, and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken, untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be “disrespectful” and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens’s instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to “be umble,” knowing that if he carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked. The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will carry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village of Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they please among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slay an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, and straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting and shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leave are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. In the committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblest employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleaded for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided only the employee, however patent a hypocrite or incorrigible a slacker, is hat in hand. But let the most obvious measure of justice be demanded by the secretary of a Trade Union in terms which omit all expressions of subservience, and it is with the greatest difficulty that the cooler-headed can defeat angry motions that the letter be thrown into the waste paper basket and the committee proceed to the next business.

The Demagogue’s Opportunity

And the employee has in him the same fierce impulse to impose his will without respect for the will of others. Democracy is in practice nothing but a device for cajoling from him the vote he refuses to arbitrary authority. He will not vote for Coriolanus; but when an experienced demagogue comes along and says, “Sir: you are the dictator: the voice of the people is the voice of God; and I am only your very humble servant,” he says at once, “All right: tell me what to dictate,” and is presently enslaved more effectually with his own silly consent than Coriolanus would ever have enslaved him without asking his leave. And the trick by which the demagogue defeats Coriolanus is played on him in his turn by his inferiors. Everywhere we see the cunning succeeding in the world by seeking a rich or powerful master and practising on his lust for subservience. The political adventurer who gets into parliament by offering himself to the poor voter, not as his representative but as his will-less soulless “delegate,” is himself the dupe of a clever wife who repudiates Votes for Women, knowing well that whilst the man is master, the man’s mistress will rule. Uriah Heep may be a crawling creature; but his crawling takes him upstairs.

Thus does the selfishness of the will turn on itself, and obtain by flattery what it cannot seize by open force. Democracy becomes the latest trick of tyranny: “womanliness” becomes the latest wile of prostitution.

Between parent and child the same conflict wages and the same destruction of character ensues. Parents set themselves to bend the will of their children to their own — to break their stubborn spirit, as they call it — with the ruthlessness of Grand Inquisitors. Cunning, unscrupulous children learn all the arts of the sneak in circumventing tyranny: children of better character are cruelly distressed and more or less lamed for life by it.

Our Quarrelsomeness

As between adults, we find a general quarrelsomeness which makes political reform as impossible to most Englishmen as to hogs. Certain sections of the nation get cured of this disability. University men, sailors, and politicians are comparatively free from it, because the communal life of the University, the fact that in a ship a man must either learn to consider others or else go overboard or into irons, and the habit of working on committees and ceasing to expect more of one’s own way than is included in the greatest common measure of the committee, educate the will socially. But no one who has ever had to guide a committee of ordinary private Englishmen through their first attempts at collective action, in committee or otherwise, can retain any illusions as to the appalling effects on our national manners and character of the organization of the home and the school as petty tyrannies, and the absence of all teaching of self-respect and training in self-assertion. Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor. Merely criticized or opposed in committee, or invited to consider anybody’s views but his own, he feels personally insulted and wants to resign or leave the room unless he is apologized to. And his panic and bewilderment when he sees that the older hands at the work have no patience with him and do not intend to treat him as infallible, are pitiable as far as they are anything but ludicrous. That is what comes of not being taught to consider other people’s wills, and left to submit to them or to over-ride them as if they were the winds and the weather. Such a state of mind is incompatible not only with the democratic introduction of high civilization, but with the comprehension and maintenance of such civilized institutions as have been introduced by benevolent and intelligent despots and aristocrats.

We Must Reform Society before we can Reform Ourselves

When we come to the positive problem of what to do with children if we are to give up the established plan, we find the difficulties so great that we begin to understand why so many people who detest the system and look back with loathing on their own schooldays, must helplessly send their children to the very schools they themselves were sent to, because there is no alternative except abandoning the children to undisciplined vagabondism. Man in society must do as everybody else does in his class: only fools and romantic novices imagine that freedom is a mere matter of the readiness of the individual to snap his fingers at convention. It is true that most of us live in a condition of quite unnecessary inhibition, wearing ugly and uncomfortable clothes, making ourselves and other people miserable by the heathen horrors of mourning, staying away from the theatre because we cannot afford the stalls and are ashamed to go to the pit, and in dozens of other ways enslaving ourselves when there are comfortable alternatives open to us without any real drawbacks. The contemplation of these petty slaveries, and of the triumphant ease with which sensible people throw them off, creates an impression that if we only take Johnson’s advice to free our minds from cant, we can achieve freedom. But if we all freed our minds from cant we should find that for the most part we should have to go on doing the necessary work of the world exactly as we did it before until we organized new and free methods of doing it. Many people believed in secondary co-education (boys and girls taught together) before schools like Bedales were founded: indeed the practice was common enough in elementary schools and in Scotland; but their belief did not help them until Bedales and St George’s were organized; and there are still not nearly enough co-educational schools in existence to accommodate all the children of the parents who believe in co-education up to university age, even if they could always afford the fees of these exceptional schools. It may be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that children should be treated as in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister instead of as they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street; but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done by enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children. For the average parent or child nothing is really available except the established practice; and this is what makes it so important that the established practice should be a sound one, and so useless for clever individuals to disparage it unless they can organize an alternative practice and make it, too, general.

The Pursuit of Manners

If you cross-examine the duke and the coster, you will find that they are not concerned for the scholastic attainments of their children. Ask the duke whether he could pass the standard examination of twelve-year-old children in elementary schools, and he will admit, with an entirely placid smile, that he would almost certainly be ignominiously plucked. And he is so little ashamed of or disadvantaged by his condition that he is not prepared to spend an hour in remedying it. The coster may resent the inquiry instead of being amused by it; but his answer, if true, will be the same. What they both want for their children is the communal training, the apprenticeship to society, the lessons in holding one’s own among people of all sorts with whom one is not, as in the home, on privileged terms. These can be acquired only by “mixing with the world,” no matter how wicked the world is. No parent cares twopence whether his children can write Latin hexameters or repeat the dates of the accession of all the English monarchs since the Conqueror; but all parents are earnestly anxious about the manners of their children. Better Claude Duval than Kaspar Hauser. Laborers who are contemptuously anti-clerical in their opinions will send their daughters to the convent school because the nuns teach them some sort of gentleness of speech and behavior. And peers who tell you that our public schools are rotten through and through, and that our Universities ought to be razed to the foundations, send their sons to Eton and Oxford, Harrow and Cambridge, not only because there is nothing else to be done, but because these places, though they turn out blackguards and ignoramuses and boobies galore, turn them out with the habits and manners of the society they belong to. Bad as those manners are in many respects, they are better than no manners at all. And no individual or family can possibly teach them. They can be acquired only by living in an organized community in which they are traditional.

Thus we see that there are reasons for the segregation of children even in families where the great reason: namely, that children are nuisances to adults, does not press very hardly, as, for instance, in the houses of the very poor, who can send their children to play in the streets, or the houses of the very rich, which are so large that the children’s quarters can be kept out of the parents’ way like the servants’ quarters.

Not too much Wind on the Heath, Brother

What, then, is to be done? For the present, unfortunately, little except propagating the conception of Children’s Rights. Only the achievement of economic equality through Socialism can make it possible to deal thoroughly with the question from the point of view of the total interest of the community, which must always consist of grown-up children. Yet economic equality, like all simple and obvious arrangements, seems impossible to people brought up as children are now. Still, something can be done even within class limits. Large communities of children of the same class are possible today; and voluntary organization of outdoor life for children has already begun in Boy Scouting and excursions of one kind or another. The discovery that anything, even school life, is better for the child than home life, will become an over-ridden hobby; and we shall presently be told by our faddists that anything, even camp life, is better than school life. Some blundering beginnings of this are already perceptible. There is a movement for making our British children into priggish little barefooted vagabonds, all talking like that born fool George Borrow, and supposed to be splendidly healthy because they would die if they slept in rooms with the windows shut, or perhaps even with a roof over their heads. Still, this is a fairly healthy folly; and it may do something to establish Mr Harold Cox’s claim of a Right to Roam as the basis of a much needed law compelling proprietors of land to provide plenty of gates in their fences, and to leave them unlocked when there are no growing crops to be damaged nor bulls to be encountered, instead of, as at present, imprisoning the human race in dusty or muddy thoroughfares between walls of barbed wire.

The reaction against vagabondage will come from the children themselves. For them freedom will not mean the expensive kind of savagery now called “the simple life.” Their natural disgust with the visions of cockney book fanciers blowing themselves out with “the wind on the heath, brother,” and of anarchists who are either too weak to understand that men are strong and free in proportion to the social pressure they can stand and the complexity of the obligations they are prepared to undertake, or too strong to realize that what is freedom to them may be terror and bewilderment to others, will drive them back to the home and the school if these have meanwhile learned the lesson that children are independent human beings and have rights.

Wanted: a Child’s Magna Charta

Whether we shall presently be discussing a Juvenile Magna Charta or Declaration of Rights by way of including children in the Constitution is a question on which I leave others to speculate. But if it could once be established that a child has an adult’s Right of Egress from uncomfortable places and unpleasant company, and there were children’s lawyers to sue pedagogues and others for assault and imprisonment, there would be an amazing change in the behavior of schoolmasters, the quality of school books, and the amenities of school life. That Consciousness of Consent which, even in its present delusive form, has enabled Democracy to oust tyrannical systems in spite of all its vulgarities and stupidities and rancors and ineptitudes and ignorances, would operate as powerfully among children as it does now among grown-ups. No doubt the pedagogue would promptly turn demagogue, and woo his scholars by all the arts of demagogy; but none of these arts can easily be so dishonorable or mischievous as the art of caning. And, after all, if larger liberties are attached to the acquisition of knowledge, and the child finds that it can no more go to the seaside without a knowledge of the multiplication and pence tables than it can be an astronomer without mathematics, it will learn the multiplication table, which is more than it always does at present, in spite of all the canings and keepings in.

The Pursuit of Learning

When the Pursuit of Learning comes to mean the pursuit of learning by the child instead of the pursuit of the child by Learning, cane in hand, the danger will be precocity of the intellect, which is just as undesirable as precocity of the emotions. We still have a silly habit of talking and thinking as if intellect were a mechanical process and not a passion; and in spite of the German tutors who confess openly that three out of every five of the young men they coach for examinations are lamed for life thereby; in spite of Dickens and his picture of little Paul Dombey dying of lessons, we persist in heaping on growing children and adolescent youths and maidens tasks Pythagoras would have declined out of common regard for his own health and common modesty as to his own capacity. And this overwork is not all the effect of compulsion; for the average schoolmaster does not compel his scholars to learn: he only scolds and punishes them if they do not, which is quite a different thing, the net effect being that the school prisoners need not learn unless they like. Nay, it is sometimes remarked that the school dunce — meaning the one who does not like — often turns out well afterwards, as if idleness were a sign of ability and character. A much more sensible explanation is that the so-called dunces are not exhausted before they begin the serious business of life. It is said that boys will be boys; and one can only add one wishes they would. Boys really want to be manly, and are unfortunately encouraged thoughtlessly in this very dangerous and overstraining aspiration. All the people who have really worked (Herbert Spencer for instance) warn us against work as earnestly as some people warn us against drink. When learning is placed on the voluntary footing of sport, the teacher will find himself saying every day “Run away and play: you have worked as much as is good for you.” Trying to make children leave school will be like trying to make them go to bed; and it will be necessary to surprise them with the idea that teaching is work, and that the teacher is tired and must go play or rest or eat: possibilities always concealed by that infamous humbug the current schoolmaster, who achieves a spurious divinity and a witch doctor’s authority by persuading children that he is not human, just as ladies persuade them that they have no legs.

Children and Game: a Proposal

Of the many wild absurdities of our existing social order perhaps the most grotesque is the costly and strictly enforced reservation of large tracts of country as deer forests and breeding grounds for pheasants whilst there is so little provision of the kind made for children. I have more than once thought of trying to introduce the shooting of children as a sport, as the children would then be preserved very carefully for ten months in the year, thereby reducing their death rate far more than the fusillades of the sportsmen during the other two would raise it. At present the killing of a fox except by a pack of foxhounds is regarded with horror; but you may and do kill children in a hundred and fifty ways provided you do not shoot them or set a pack of dogs on them. It must be admitted that the foxes have the best of it; and indeed a glance at our pheasants, our deer, and our children will convince the most sceptical that the children have decidedly the worst of it.

This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.

First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing, lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that as these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply, whereas the children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do but rub the lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.

The Parents’ Intolerable Burden

There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the part of Aladdin’s djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and childless as well, whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today it is easy to find a widow who has at great cost to herself in pain, danger, and disablement, borne six or eight children. In the same town you will find rich bachelors and old maids, and married couples with no children or with families voluntarily limited to two or three. The eight children do not belong to the woman in any real or legal sense. When she has reared them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons, marrying strangers, working for strangers, spending on the community the life that has been built up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice could be imagined than that the burden of rearing the children should fall on her alone and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, with dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child’s parents are destitute or not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is true that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough to draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape of crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping children barely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there is no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of the practice. One is to provide for all the child’s reasonable human wants, on which point, if you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though, as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must be conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.

One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure that it should not sometimes be driven out into the open — imprisoned in the woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty children, just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom. This morbid result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon disappear with its cause.

Mobilization

Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first, whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged savages of today, and second, whether either children or adults are so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast to one neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My own observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough. True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were. You will still find in the home counties old men who have never been to London, and who tell you that they once went to Winchester or St Albans much as if they had been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the clerk who has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who “goes away somewhere” when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had a holiday, and, if he had, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of taking a box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the Polytechnic excursion and the tourist agency, our inertia is still appalling. I confess to having once spent nine years in London without putting my nose outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restless globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to hotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have done it if I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should have worn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very nearly did, my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout). There are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate, and a good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are more immovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they knew how, travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors. In short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if moss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not prosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as responsibility and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the misery of having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelict of God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one of the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus afflicted, tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited to children. But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is innocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of what nurses call “taking notice,” by which a child becomes experienced. It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45 all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of a child’s education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere because he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment of the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications are exacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as its legs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam without much danger of gypsification.

Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without being also a homeless outcast.

Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently, without inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior, and not, as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which, like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.

As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow up in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions, child manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free children there would certainly be surprising developments in this direction. I do not think there would be any danger of free children behaving as badly as grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They could hardly behave worse, anyhow.

Children’s Rights and Parents’ Wrongs

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt through her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the elders right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostor is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated as anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience it is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romantic imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to a still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, really believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether this pleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly that one day this admirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal in the hands of a larger boy than either of us, who mocked him and refused to restore the animal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping to me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat and annihilate the aggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately for me, it imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of my poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity of cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said “You let go that goat,” that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable, unspeakable relief. I have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily combat.

Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember once, at school, the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness of his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary to leave one of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class that occupied that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to break the fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was bound to keep us out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Therefore an appeal had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our common humanity, not to make a noise. But the head master had never admitted any common humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regard him as a being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to error or suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was impossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because, as I now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied with her own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be conscious of the pandemonium downstairs.

A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot be superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time. If you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.

How Little We Know About Our Parents

The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated to servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. Read Goethe’s autobiography; and note that though he was happy in his parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, and story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about most of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms with my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutely without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her death set me thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew very little about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who was a child when I was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent when I was an adolescent; and if we take naturally to one another I will know more of her and she of me at the end of forty days (I had almost said of forty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the end of forty years. A contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility; but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one’s knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. If I meet a widow I may ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever dreams of asking his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear of it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between them, and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first man in the street might be?

Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent’s humanity, the parent can realize the child’s; for the parents with their experience of life have none of the illusions about the child that the child has about the parents; and the consequence is that the child can hurt its parents’ feelings much more than its parents can hurt the child’s, because the child, even when there has been none of the deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their elders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst the parents know very well that the children are only themselves over again. The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all with an indifference which has given rise to the term enfant terrible (a tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the parent can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than from anyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because the child is so unmistakably sincere in them.

Our Abandoned Mothers

Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widow brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes off with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur to him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of course, and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept her bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreams of such considerations. To him his mother’s feeling in the matter, when she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing a prejudice against his adorable bride.

I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything they care for. No parent’s love is as innocent as the love of a child: the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent their children marrying.

Family Affection

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger’s house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it. When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to the child’s welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for the parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filial relation when they are no longer necessary to one another. The child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and more fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations: it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to, because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivated Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matron has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop’s wife at fifty has more of the air of a femme galante than an actress had at thirty-five in her grandmother’s time. But as people marry later, the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to comparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment at least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes dislike one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependence and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child to its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar way. A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them; and to “suffer little children” has become an affectionate impulse deep in our nature.

Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers, our aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose our relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsive effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy. But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easily happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were anyone else’s brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clans instead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantism draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people, get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another’s throats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood relationship. We should let children’s feelings take their natural course without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called unfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatrical demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after an absence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are let alone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise, we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in assuming that we shall get on any better.

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary, but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break up the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences. What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore and target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special use for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use for brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable; but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they are oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always have to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and emancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain one of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and the child is not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests, no convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are, the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition as the mother-in-law.

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated, suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of one another as possible.

The Fate of the Family

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier. The family is still more variable, because the number of persons constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship: the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company, sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable. When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The modern small family is much too stuffy: children “brought up at home” in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance, is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of being out of sight of one another’s chimney smoke.

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family ideal is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must always be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. And this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that family the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen or mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it. Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and the Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid.

Family Mourning

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it that could not be amputated with advantage.

Art Teaching

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture. I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture, can read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible if you have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured to it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying to do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church, in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man arises with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We are all like Nell Gwynne’s footman, who defended Nell’s reputation with his fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman, but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no better than she should be.

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony or of Wagner’s Ring just as they will sit through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing for two hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through the delay of its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very bad for the ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered. I have heard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take the adagio of that symphony at a lively allegretto, slowing down for the warmer major sections into the speed and manner of the heroine’s death song in a Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving my excruciation by rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glasses at the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter conducts it. The mass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance with despairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public trained from childhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated with school discipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters to stop them they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert or opera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitals hundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season on professedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fine art than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held in England.

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola. Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in conveying the artist’s message as a modern edition of Shakespear’s plays is in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which, for example, a person living in an English village where the church music is the only music, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies with the help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina very passably executed, and can thereby be led to the discovery that Jackson in F and Hymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps the last word of beauty and propriety in the praise of God.

In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody. The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate us in grace of body and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past live for us or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can give delicacy and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle of inspiration and the method of the communion of saints, is actually branded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises, there is resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath of freedom. The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful: we might as well try to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough to inflict on huge numbers of people a most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a great deal of the art that is tolerated. You will find in England plenty of rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses. And you will find poor families, cut off by poverty and town life from the contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of leaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who would positively be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated their humanity by the only effective instrument of culture: art. The dearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means of satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation and uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions which art imposes on appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained by a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity, horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art has revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacity in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in catering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty, virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling inability to recognize it or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate them malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful birds: when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the birds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy’s morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner’s Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom. You have men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religion openly declaring that when they pass through the streets they have to keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid the temptations of the pavement. You have them organizing hunts of the women who tempt them — poor creatures whom no artist would touch without a shudder — and wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise and conceal the body, and for the abolition of pictures, statues, theatres, and pretty colors. And incredible as it seems, these unhappy lunatics are left at large, unrebuked, even admired and revered, whilst artists have to struggle for toleration. To them an undraped human body is the most monstrous, the most blighting, the most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the universe. To an artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle in nature, and, at its average, an object of indifference. If every rag of clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon tomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artistic people would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad and call on the mountains to hide them. I submit that this indicates a thoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists, and a thoroughly morbid one on the part of the artless. And the healthy state is attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatrical representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is produced and made poetic.

In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint of stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and is even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation all the worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because the last ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of religious education.

The Impossibility of Secular Education

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot evade it the moment the schoolmaster’s back is turned. What confuses this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between the child’s personal subjective need for a religion and its right to an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example, it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that the practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teaching of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and is politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority of the fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religion of that island.

But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child only what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child “You must suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion” is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a code of honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only a provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation is meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation. Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their life deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child before its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say “You will be punished if you disobey.” “Yes,” says the child to itself, “if I am found out; but wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like, and lie about it.” There can be no objective punishment for successful fraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child’s conduct, the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an atrophied conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not obeyed after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to appeal to the child’s vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine spark; and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty to the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God, or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and substituting the word metaphysically.

Natural Selection as a Religion

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches, free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, the theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be so absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factor in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will, in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact fathoms deeper.

Moral Instruction Leagues

And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted, asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of being associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousand other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are many reasons; and one of them is that children all like the story of Jonah and the whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations by Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not have fitted into a whale’s gullet — as if the story would be credible of a whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can stand moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction book is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes them sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which is a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child, children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad effect of Bible stories on infants.

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion from a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is only by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor desirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen your watch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good from evil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even this is a dangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are not choosing: we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call the evil out of a child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten years old, you will simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The child does not stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process, which is a dangerous one.

Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more than there is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too good for the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as the Bible has driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The practical moral is that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We shall not like those which have nothing to say to us; and though everyone has a right to bias our choice, no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us from any work of art or any work of art from us.

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education) is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates half a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic; some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; none suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and has never been put into practice by any State before or since. But the Bible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental race; and the imposition of this literature, on whatever false pretences, on our children left them more literate than if they knew no literature at all, which was the practical alternative. And as our Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It is at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible as some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the blank represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.

The Bible

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is the whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasure we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations as Shelley’s Prometheus or The Niblung’s Ring of Richard Wagner. There is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven’s ninth symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is, except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young; so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally; for there will come to all of them that period between dawning adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron’s Don Juan as a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us in our nonage. Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book for a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and the Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy of fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spend his pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be rather disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he is ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century: everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History of Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I have never read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library would go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I should probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian Nights and their like to occupy me better. In art, children, like adults, will find their level if they are left free to find it, and not restricted to what adults think good for them. Just at present our young people are going mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated rhythms are new to them. If they had learnt what can be done with syncopation from Beethoven’s third Leonora overture, they would enjoy the ragtimes all the more; but they would put them in their proper place as amusing vulgarities.

Artist Idolatry

But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs in art. The influence they can exercise on young people who have been brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, and in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength of what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger character than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically educated, would have had anything to learn from him or regarded him as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an artist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always a rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no one will offer him more than his due.

In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the contrary, we shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris, is the expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is made detestable by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning is made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the pupil.

“The Machine”

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying, in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.

Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science and the art of government are among the things they do not understand, and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more “captains of industry” or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is “The Machine”: the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing, though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know how.

They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated, not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and inequality; and all the other evils are automatically added to them.

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and you get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that we have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.

The Provocation to Anarchism

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say “Now you are free.” No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of thirteen shillings a week, “Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now you are wealthy.” Nothing can make such a man really wealthy. Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinking himself to death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow as much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture, persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is “greatly exaggerated,” as we can find any record of from the days when the advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all the despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.

And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinary refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming in England as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This is true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobody with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of what the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will have anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.

Imagination

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not: this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will call the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and of flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routed enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief it does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations of the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a means of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy tales and fools’ paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusement when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts begin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities as yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of serious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor is punishable by death in the military code.

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. For the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: he also terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even picture what these dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always dangerous. When you say to a realist “You must do this” or “You must not do that,” he instantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or does not, as the case may be). Failing an unromantic convincing answer, he does just as he pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining. In short, though you can intimidate him, you cannot bluff him. But you can always bluff the romantic person: indeed his grasp of real considerations is so feeble that you find it necessary to bluff him even when you have solid considerations to offer him instead. The campaigns of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. In the Russian campaign Napoleon’s marshals achieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why he dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes the bravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the cleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer realist than Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten until he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had understood the nature of Wellington’s strength instead of returning Wellington’s snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt for Wellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and D’Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas Wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth) with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.

Government by Bullies

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine to which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to take the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, “Oh, I really couldnt,” or “Oh, I shouldnt like to,” without being able to point out the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rational fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence of cowardice, the very negation of “the fear of God.” Dotted about among us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis, sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they are unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to money and unimaginative as to other things, sometimes even because they are exceptionally able, but always because they are not afraid of shadows nor oppressed with nightmares. And we see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires who have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our commerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class that does not know how to govern. And how can this rabble of the casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected to know how to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do not owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest, the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves, and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be inculcated.

And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the active hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered in their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsory schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must tamely go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in them, we shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall have all the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that result from turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a nation of two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of their nature except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of life to nations; and liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters, and rulers spend their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet and finally disastrous life.

MISALLIANCE

Johnny Tarleton, an ordinary young business man of thirty or less, is taking his weekly Friday to Tuesday in the house of his father, John Tarleton, who has made a great deal of money out of Tarleton’s Underwear.  The house is in Surrey, on the slope of Hindhead; and Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair with a little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful cloud pictures.

The glass pavilion springs from a bridgelike arch in the wall of the house, through which one comes into a big hall with tiled flooring, which suggests that the proprietor’s notion of domestic luxury is founded on the lounges of week-end hotels.  The arch is not quite in the centre of the wall.  There is more wall to its right than to its left, and this space is occupied by a hat rack and umbrella stand in which tennis rackets, white parasols, caps, Panama hats, and other summery articles are bestowed.  Just through the arch at this corner stands a new portable Turkish bath, recently unpacked, with its crate beside it, and on the crate the drawn nails and the hammer used in unpacking.  Near the crate are open boxes of garden games:  bowls and croquet.  Nearly in the middle of the glass wall of the pavilion is a door giving on the garden, with a couple of steps to surmount the hot-water pipes which skirt the glass.  At intervals round the pavilion are marble pillars with specimens of Viennese pottery on them, very flamboyant in colour and florid in design.  Between them are folded garden chairs flung anyhow against the pipes.  In the side walls are two doors:  one near the hat stand, leading to the interior of the house, the other on the opposite side and at the other end, leading to the vestibule.

There is no solid furniture except a sideboard which stands against the wall between the vestibule door and the pavilion, a small writing table with a blotter, a rack for telegram forms and stationery, and a wastepaper basket, standing out in the hall near the sideboard, and a lady’s worktable, with two chairs at it, towards the other side of the lounge.  The writing table has also two chairs at it.  On the sideboard there is a tantalus, liqueur bottles, a syphon, a glass jug of lemonade, tumblers, and every convenience for casual drinking.

Also a plate of sponge cakes, and a highly ornate punchbowl in the same style as the keramic display in the pavilion.  Wicker chairs and little bamboo tables with ash trays and boxes of matches on them are scattered in all directions.  In the pavilion, which is flooded with sunshine, is the elaborate patent swing seat and awning in which Johnny reclines with his novel.  There are two wicker chairs right and left of him.

Bentley Summerhays, one of those smallish, thinskinned youths, who from 17 to 70 retain unaltered the mental airs of the later and the physical appearance of the earlier age, appears in the garden and comes through the glass door into the pavilion.  He is unmistakably a grade above Johnny socially; and though he looks sensitive enough, his assurance and his high voice are a little exasperating.

JOHNNY.  Hallo!  Wheres your luggage?

BENTLEY.  I left it at the station.  Ive walked up from Haslemere.

[He goes to the hat stand and hangs up his hat].

JOHNNY [shortly]  Oh!  And who’s to fetch it?

BENTLEY.  Dont know.  Dont care.  Providence, probably.  If not, your mother will have it fetched.

JOHNNY.  Not her business, exactly, is it?

BENTLEY.  [returning to the pavilion]  Of course not.  Thats why one loves her for doing it.  Look here:  chuck away your silly week-end novel, and talk to a chap.  After a week in that filthy office my brain is simply blue-mouldy.  Lets argue about something intellectual.

[He throws himself into the wicker chair on Johnny’s right].

JOHNNY.  [straightening up in the swing with a yell of protest]  No. Now seriously, Bunny, Ive come down here to have a pleasant week-end; and I’m not going to stand your confounded arguments.  If you want to argue, get out of this and go over to the Congregationalist minister’s.  He’s a nailer at arguing.  He likes it.

BENTLEY.  You cant argue with a person when his livelihood depends on his not letting you convert him.  And would you mind not calling me Bunny.  My name is Bentley Summerhays, which you please.

JOHNNY.  Whats the matter with Bunny?

BENTLEY.  It puts me in a false position.  Have you ever considered the fact that I was an afterthought?

JOHNNY.  An afterthought?  What do you mean by that?

BENTLEY.  I —

JOHNNY.  No, stop:  I dont want to know.  It’s only a dodge to start an argument.

BENTLEY.  Dont be afraid:  it wont overtax your brain.  My father was 44 when I was born.  My mother was 41.  There was twelve years between me and the next eldest.  I was unexpected.  I was probably unintentional.  My brothers and sisters are not the least like me.

Theyre the regular thing that you always get in the first batch from young parents:  quite pleasant, ordinary, do-the-regular-thing sort: all body and no brains, like you.

JOHNNY.  Thank you.

BENTLEY.  Dont mention it, old chap.  Now I’m different.  By the time I was born, the old couple knew something.  So I came out all brains and no more body than is absolutely necessary.  I am really a good deal older than you, though you were born ten years sooner.  Everybody feels that when they hear us talk; consequently, though it’s quite natural to hear me calling you Johnny, it sounds ridiculous and unbecoming for you to call me Bunny.  [He rises].

JOHNNY.  Does it, by George?  You stop me doing it if you can:  thats all.

BENTLEY.  If you go on doing it after Ive asked you not, youll feel an awful swine.  [He strolls away carelessly to the sideboard with his eye on the sponge cakes].  At least I should; but I suppose youre not so particular.

JOHNNY [rising vengefully and following Bentley, who is forced to turn and listen]  I’ll tell you what it is, my boy:  you want a good talking to; and I’m going to give it to you.  If you think that because your father’s a K.C.B., and you want to marry my sister, you can make yourself as nasty as you please and say what you like, youre mistaken.  Let me tell you that except Hypatia, not one person in this house is in favor of her marrying you; and I dont believe shes happy about it herself.  The match isnt settled yet:  dont forget that. Youre on trial in the office because the Governor isnt giving his daughter money for an idle man to live on her.  Youre on trial here because my mother thinks a girl should know what a man is like in the house before she marries him.  Thats been going on for two months now; and whats the result?  Youve got yourself thoroughly disliked in the office; and youre getting yourself thoroughly disliked here, all through your bad manners and your conceit, and the damned impudence you think clever.

BENTLEY.  [deeply wounded and trying hard to control himself]  Thats enough, thank you.  You dont suppose, I hope, that I should have come down if I had known that that was how you felt about me.  [He makes for the vestibule door].

JOHNNY.  [collaring him].  No:  you dont run away.  I’m going to have this out with you.  Sit down:  d’y’ hear?  [Bentley attempts to go with dignity.  Johnny slings him into a chair at the writing table, where he sits, bitterly humiliated, but afraid to speak lest he should burst into tears].  Thats the advantage of having more body than brains, you see:  it enables me to teach you manners; and I’m going to do it too.  Youre a spoilt young pup; and you need a jolly good licking.  And if youre not careful youll get it:  I’ll see to that next time you call me a swine.

BENTLEY.  I didnt call you a swine.  But [bursting into a fury of tears]  you are a swine:  youre a beast:  youre a brute:  youre a cad:  youre a liar:  youre a bully:  I should like to wring your damned neck for you.

JOHNNY.  [with a derisive laugh]  Try it, my son.  [Bentley gives an inarticulate sob of rage].  Fighting isnt in your line.  Youre too small and youre too childish.  I always suspected that your cleverness wouldnt come to very much when it was brought up against something solid:  some decent chap’s fist, for instance.

BENTLEY.  I hope your beastly fist may come up against a mad bull or a prizefighter’s nose, or something solider than me.  I dont care about your fist; but if everybody here dislikes me — [he is checked by a sob].  Well, I dont care.  [Trying to recover himself]  I’m sorry I intruded:  I didnt know.  [Breaking down again]  Oh you beast! you pig!  Swine, swine, swine, swine, swine!  Now!

JOHNNY.  All right, my lad, all right.  Sling your mud as hard as you please:  it wont stick to me.  What I want to know is this.  How is it that your father, who I suppose is the strongest man England has produced in our time —

BENTLEY.  You got that out of your halfpenny paper.  A lot you know about him!

JOHNNY.  I dont set up to be able to do anything but admire him and appreciate him and be proud of him as an Englishman.  If it wasnt for my respect for him, I wouldnt have stood your cheek for two days, let alone two months.  But what I cant understand is why he didnt lick it out of you when you were a kid.  For twenty-five years he kept a place twice as big as England in order:  a place full of seditious coffee-colored heathens and pestilential white agitators in the middle of a lot of savage tribes.  And yet he couldnt keep you in order.  I dont set up to be half the man your father undoubtedly is; but, by George, it’s lucky for you you were not my son.  I dont hold with my own father’s views about corporal punishment being wrong.  It’s necessary for some people; and I’d have tried it on you until you first learnt to howl and then to behave yourself.

BENTLEY.  [contemptuously]  Yes:  behavior wouldnt come naturally to your son, would it?

JOHNNY.  [stung into sudden violence]  Now you keep a civil tongue in your head.  I’ll stand none of your snobbery.  I’m just as proud of Tarleton’s Underwear as you are of your father’s title and his K.C.B., and all the rest of it.  My father began in a little hole of a shop in Leeds no bigger than our pantry down the passage there.  He —

BENTLEY.  Oh yes:  I know.  Ive read it.  “The Romance of Business, or The Story of Tarleton’s Underwear.  Please Take One!”  I took one the day after I first met Hypatia.  I went and bought half a dozen unshrinkable vests for her sake.

JOHNNY.  Well:  did they shrink?

BENTLEY.  Oh, dont be a fool.

JOHNNY.  Never mind whether I’m a fool or not.  Did they shrink?

Thats the point.  Were they worth the money?

BENTLEY.  I couldnt wear them:  do you think my skin’s as thick as your customers’ hides?  I’d as soon have dressed myself in a nutmeg grater.

JOHNNY.  Pity your father didnt give your thin skin a jolly good lacing with a cane — !

BENTLEY.  Pity you havnt got more than one idea!  If you want to know, they did try that on me once, when I was a small kid.  A silly governess did it.  I yelled fit to bring down the house and went into convulsions and brain fever and that sort of thing for three weeks.

So the old girl got the sack; and serve her right!  After that, I was let do what I like.  My father didnt want me to grow up a broken-spirited spaniel, which is your idea of a man, I suppose.

JOHNNY.  Jolly good thing for you that my father made you come into the office and shew what you were made of.  And it didnt come to much: let me tell you that.  When the Governor asked me where I thought we ought to put you, I said, “Make him the Office Boy.”  The Governor said you were too green.  And so you were.

BENTLEY.  I daresay.  So would you be pretty green if you were shoved into my father’s set.  I picked up your silly business in a fortnight.

Youve been at it ten years; and you havnt picked it up yet.

JOHNNY.  Dont talk rot, child.  You know you simply make me pity you.

BENTLEY.  “Romance of Business” indeed!  The real romance of Tarleton’s business is the story that you understand anything about it.  You never could explain any mortal thing about it to me when I asked you.  “See what was done the last time”:  that was the beginning and the end of your wisdom.  Youre nothing but a turnspit.

JOHNNY.  A what!

BENTLEY.  A turnspit.  If your father hadnt made a roasting jack for you to turn, youd be earning twenty-four shillings a week behind a counter.

JOHNNY.  If you dont take that back and apologize for your bad manners, I’ll give you as good a hiding as ever —

BENTLEY.  Help!  Johnny’s beating me!  Oh!  Murder!  [He throws himself on the ground, uttering piercing yells].

JOHNNY.  Dont be a fool.  Stop that noise, will you.  I’m not going to touch you.  Sh — sh —

Hypatia rushes in through the inner door, followed by Mrs Tarleton, and throws herself on her knees by Bentley.  Mrs Tarleton, whose knees are stiffer, bends over him and tries to lift him.  Mrs Tarleton is a shrewd and motherly old lady who has been pretty in her time, and is still very pleasant and likeable and unaffected.  Hypatia is a typical English girl of a sort never called typical:  that is, she has an opaque white skin, black hair, large dark eyes with black brows and lashes, curved lips, swift glances and movements that flash out of a waiting stillness, boundless energy and audacity held in leash.

HYPATIA.  [pouncing on Bentley with no very gentle hand]  Bentley: whats the matter?  Dont cry like that:  whats the use?  Whats happened?

MRS TARLETON.  Are you ill, child?  [They get him up.]  There, there, pet!  It’s all right:  dont cry [they put him into a chair]:  there! there! there!  Johnny will go for the doctor; and he’ll give you something nice to make it well.

HYPATIA.  What has happened, Johnny?

MRS TARLETON.  Was it a wasp?

BENTLEY.  [impatiently]  Wasp be dashed!

MRS TARLETON.  Oh Bunny! that was a naughty word.

BENTLEY.  Yes, I know:  I beg your pardon.  [He rises, and extricates himself from them]  Thats all right.  Johnny frightened me.  You know how easy it is to hurt me; and I’m too small to defend myself against Johnny.

MRS TARLETON.  Johnny:  how often have I told you that you must not bully the little ones.  I thought youd outgrown all that.

HYPATIA.  [angrily]  I do declare, mamma, that Johnny’s brutality makes it impossible to live in the house with him.

JOHNNY.  [deeply hurt]  It’s twenty-seven years, mother, since you had that row with me for licking Robert and giving Hypatia a black eye because she bit me.  I promised you then that I’d never raise my hand to one of them again; and Ive never broken my word.  And now because this young whelp begins to cry out before he’s hurt, you treat me as if I were a brute and a savage.

MRS TARLETON.  No dear, not a savage; but you know you must not call our visitor naughty names.

BENTLEY.  Oh, let him alone —

JOHNNY.  [fiercely]  Dont you interfere between my mother and me: d’y’ hear?

HYPATIA.  Johnny’s lost his temper, mother.  We’d better go.  Come,

Bentley.

MRS TARLETON.  Yes:  that will be best.  [To Bentley]  Johnny doesnt mean any harm, dear:  he’ll be himself presently.  Come.

The two ladies go out through the inner door with Bentley, who turns at the door to grin at Johnny as he goes out.

Johnny, left alone, clenches his fists and grinds his teeth, but can find no relief in that way for his rage.  After choking and stamping for a moment, he makes for the vestibule door.  It opens before he reaches it; and Lord Summerhays comes in.  Johnny glares at him, speechless.  Lord Summerhays takes in the situation, and quickly takes the punchbowl from the sideboard and offers it to Johnny.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Smash it.  Dont hesitate:  it’s an ugly thing.

Smash it:  hard.  [Johnny, with a stifled yell, dashes it in pieces, and then sits down and mops his brow].  Feel better now?  [Johnny nods].  I know only one person alive who could drive me to the point of having either to break china or commit murder; and that person is my son Bentley.  Was it he?  [Johnny nods again, not yet able to speak].  As the car stopped I heard a yell which is only too familiar to me.  It generally means that some infuriated person is trying to thrash Bentley.  Nobody has ever succeeded, though almost everybody has tried.  [He seats himself comfortably close to the writing table, and sets to work to collect the fragments of the punchbowl in the wastepaper basket whilst Johnny, with diminishing difficulty, collects himself].  Bentley is a problem which I confess I have never been able to solve.  He was born to be a great success at the age of fifty.

Most Englishmen of his class seem to be born to be great successes at the age of twenty-four at most.  The domestic problem for me is how to endure Bentley until he is fifty.  The problem for the nation is how to get itself governed by men whose growth is arrested when they are little more than college lads.  Bentley doesnt really mean to be offensive.  You can always make him cry by telling him you dont like him.  Only, he cries so loud that the experiment should be made in the open air:  in the middle of Salisbury Plain if possible.  He has a hard and penetrating intellect and a remarkable power of looking facts in the face; but unfortunately, being very young, he has no idea of how very little of that sort of thing most of us can stand.  On the other hand, he is frightfully sensitive and even affectionate; so that he probably gets as much as he gives in the way of hurt feelings.

Youll excuse me rambling on like this about my son.

JOHNNY.  [who has pulled himself together]  You did it on purpose.

I wasnt quite myself:  I needed a moment to pull round:  thank you.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Not at all.  Is your father at home?

JOHNNY.  No:  he’s opening one of his free libraries.  Thats another nice little penny gone.  He’s mad on reading.  He promised another free library last week.  It’s ruinous.  Itll hit you as well as me when Bunny marries Hypatia.  When all Hypatia’s money is thrown away on libraries, where will Bunny come in?  Cant you stop him?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I’m afraid not.  Hes a perfect whirlwind.

Indefatigable at public work.  Wonderful man, I think.

JOHNNY.  Oh, public work!  He does too much of it.  It’s really a sort of laziness, getting away from your own serious business to amuse yourself with other people’s.  Mind:  I dont say there isnt another side to it.  It has its value as an advertisement.  It makes useful acquaintances and leads to valuable business connections.  But it takes his mind off the main chance; and he overdoes it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The danger of public business is that it never ends.

A man may kill himself at it.

JOHNNY.  Or he can spend more on it than it brings him in:  thats how I look at it.  What I say is that everybody’s business is nobody’s business.  I hope I’m not a hard man, nor a narrow man, nor unwilling to pay reasonable taxes, and subscribe in reason to deserving charities, and even serve on a jury in my turn; and no man can say I ever refused to help a friend out of a difficulty when he was worth helping.  But when you ask me to go beyond that, I tell you frankly I dont see it.  I never did see it, even when I was only a boy, and had to pretend to take in all the ideas the Governor fed me up with.  I didnt see it; and I dont see it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  There is certainly no business reason why you should take more than your share of the world’s work.

JOHNNY.  So I say.  It’s really a great encouragement to me to find you agree with me.  For of course if nobody agrees with you, how are you to know that youre not a fool?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Quite so.

JOHNNY.  I wish youd talk to him about it.  It’s no use my saying anything:  I’m a child to him still:  I have no influence.  Besides, you know how to handle men.  See how you handled me when I was making a fool of myself about Bunny!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Not at all.

JOHNNY.  Oh yes I was:  I know I was.  Well, if my blessed father had come in he’d have told me to control myself.  As if I was losing my temper on purpose!

Bentley returns, newly washed.  He beams when he sees his father, and comes affectionately behind him and pats him on the shoulders.

BENTLEY.  Hel-lo, commander! have you come?  Ive been making a filthy silly ass of myself here.  I’m awfully sorry, Johnny, old chap:  I beg your pardon.  Why dont you kick me when I go on like that?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  As we came through Godalming I thought I heard some yelling —

BENTLEY.  I should think you did.  Johnny was rather rough on me, though.  He told me nobody here liked me; and I was silly enough to believe him.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  And all the women have been kissing you and pitying you ever since to stop your crying, I suppose.  Baby!

BENTLEY.  I did cry.  But I always feel good after crying:  it relieves my wretched nerves.  I feel perfectly jolly now.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Not at all ashamed of yourself, for instance?

BENTLEY.  If I started being ashamed of myself I shouldnt have time for anything else all my life.  I say:  I feel very fit and spry.

Lets all go down and meet the Grand Cham.  [He goes to the hatstand and takes down his hat].

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Does Mr Tarleton like to be called the Grand Cham, do you think, Bentley?

BENTLEY.  Well, he thinks hes too modest for it.  He calls himself Plain John.  But you cant call him that in his own office:  besides, it doesnt suit him:  it’s not flamboyant enough.

JOHNNY.  Flam what?

BENTLEY.  Flamboyant.  Lets go and meet him.  Hes telephoned from Guildford to say hes on the road.  The dear old son is always telephoning or telegraphing:  he thinks hes hustling along like anything when hes only sending unnecessary messages.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Thank you:  I should prefer a quiet afternoon.

BENTLEY.  Right O.  I shant press Johnny:  hes had enough of me for one week-end.  [He goes out through the pavilion into the grounds].

JOHNNY.  Not a bad idea, that.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  What?

JOHNNY.  Going to meet the Governor.  You know you wouldnt think it; but the Governor likes Bunny rather.  And Bunny is cultivating it.  I shouldnt be surprised if he thought he could squeeze me out one of these days.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You dont say so!  Young rascal!  I want to consult you about him, if you dont mind.  Shall we stroll over to the Gibbet?

Bentley is too fast for me as a walking companion; but I should like a short turn.

JOHNNY.  [rising eagerly, highly flattered]  Right you are.  Thatll suit me down to the ground.  [He takes a Panama and stick from the hat stand].

Mrs Tarleton and Hypatia come back just as the two men are going out.

Hypatia salutes Summerhays from a distance with an enigmatic lift of her eyelids in his direction and a demure nod before she sits down at the worktable and busies herself with her needle.  Mrs Tarleton, hospitably fussy, goes over to him.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, Lord Summerhays, I didnt know you were here.  Wont you have some tea?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  No, thank you:  I’m not allowed tea.  And I’m ashamed to say Ive knocked over your beautiful punch-bowl.  You must let me replace it.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, it doesnt matter:  I’m only too glad to be rid of it.  The shopman told me it was in the best taste; but when my poor old nurse Martha got cataract, Bunny said it was a merciful provision of Nature to prevent her seeing our china.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [gravely]  That was exceedingly rude of Bentley,

Mrs Tarleton.  I hope you told him so.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, bless you!  I dont care what he says; so long as he says it to me and not before visitors.

JOHNNY.  We’re going out for a stroll, mother.

MRS TARLETON.  All right:  dont let us keep you.  Never mind about that crock:  I’ll get the girl to come and take the pieces away.

[Recollecting herself]  There!  Ive done it again!

JOHNNY.  Done what?

MRS TARLETON.  Called her the girl.  You know, Lord Summerhays, its a funny thing; but now I’m getting old, I’m dropping back into all the ways John and I had when we had barely a hundred a year.  You should have known me when I was forty!  I talked like a duchess; and if Johnny or Hypatia let slip a word that was like old times, I was down on them like anything.  And now I’m beginning to do it myself at every turn.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  There comes a time when all that seems to matter so little.  Even queens drop the mask when they reach our time of life.

MRS TARLETON.  Let you alone for giving a thing a pretty turn!  Youre a humbug, you know, Lord Summerhays.  John doesnt know it; and Johnny doesnt know it; but you and I know it, dont we?  Now thats something that even you cant answer; so be off with you for your walk without another word.

Lord Summerhays smiles; bows; and goes out through the vestibule door, followed by Johnny.  Mrs Tarleton sits down at the worktable and takes out her darning materials and one of her husband’s socks.

Hypatia is at the other side of the table, on her mother’s right.

They chat as they work.

HYPATIA.  I wonder whether they laugh at us when they are by themselves!

MRS TARLETON.  Who?

HYPATIA.  Bentley and his father and all the toffs in their set.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, thats only their way.  I used to think that the aristocracy were a nasty sneering lot, and that they were laughing at me and John.  Theyre always giggling and pretending not to care much about anything.  But you get used to it:  theyre the same to one another and to everybody.  Besides, what does it matter what they think?  It’s far worse when theyre civil, because that always means that they want you to lend them money; and you must never do that,

Hypatia, because they never pay.  How can they?  They dont make anything, you see.  Of course, if you can make up your mind to regard it as a gift, thats different; but then they generally ask you again; and you may as well say no first as last.  You neednt be afraid of the aristocracy, dear:  theyre only human creatures like ourselves after all; and youll hold your own with them easy enough.

HYPATIA.  Oh, I’m not a bit afraid of them, I assure you.

MRS TARLETON.  Well, no, not afraid of them, exactly; but youve got to pick up their ways.  You know, dear, I never quite agreed with your father’s notion of keeping clear of them, and sending you to a school that was so expensive that they couldnt afford to send their daughters there; so that all the girls belonged to big business families like ourselves.  It takes all sorts to make a world; and I wanted you to see a little of all sorts.  When you marry Bunny, and go among the women of his father’s set, theyll shock you at first.

HYPATIA.  [incredulously]  How?

MRS TARLETON.  Well, the things they talk about.

HYPATIA.  Oh! scandalmongering?

MRS TARLETON.  Oh no:  we all do that:  thats only human nature.  But you know theyve no notion of decency.  I shall never forget the first day I spent with a marchioness, two duchesses, and no end of Ladies This and That.  Of course it was only a committee:  theyd put me on to get a big subscription out of John.  I’d never heard such talk in my life.  The things they mentioned!  And it was the marchioness that started it.

HYPATIA.  What sort of things?

MRS TARLETON.  Drainage!!  She’d tried three systems in her castle; and she was going to do away with them all and try another.  I didnt know which way to look when she began talking about it:  I thought theyd all have got up and gone out of the room.  But not a bit of it, if you please.  They were all just as bad as she.  They all had systems; and each of them swore by her own system.  I sat there with my cheeks burning until one of the duchesses, thinking I looked out of it, I suppose, asked me what system I had.  I said I was sure I knew nothing about such things, and hadnt we better change the subject.

Then the fat was in the fire, I can tell you.  There was a regular terror of a countess with an anaerobic system; and she told me, downright brutally, that I’d better learn something about them before my children died of diphtheria.  That was just two months after I’d buried poor little Bobby; and that was the very thing he died of, poor little lamb!  I burst out crying:  I couldnt help it.  It was as good as telling me I’d killed my own child.  I had to go away; but before I was out of the door one of the duchesses — quite a young woman — began talking about what sour milk did in her inside and how she expected to live to be over a hundred if she took it regularly.  And me listening to her, that had never dared to think that a duchess could have anything so common as an inside!  I shouldnt have minded if it had been children’s insides:  we have to talk about them.  But grown-up people!  I was glad to get away that time.

HYPATIA.  There was a physiology and hygiene class started at school; but of course none of our girls were let attend it.

MRS TARLETON.  If it had been an aristocratic school plenty would have attended it.  Thats what theyre like:  theyve nasty minds.  With really nice good women a thing is either decent or indecent; and if it’s indecent, we just dont mention it or pretend to know about it; and theres an end of it.  But all the aristocracy cares about is whether it can get any good out of the thing.  Theyre what Johnny calls cynical-like.  And of course nobody can say a word to them for it.  Theyre so high up that they can do and say what they like.

HYPATIA.  Well, I think they might leave the drains to their husbands.

I shouldnt think much of a man that left such things to me.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, dont think that, dear, whatever you do.  I never let on about it to you; but it’s me that takes care of the drainage here.  After what that countess said to me I wasnt going to lose another child or trust John.  And I don’t want my grandchildren to die any more than my children.

HYPATIA.  Do you think Bentley will ever be as big a man as his father?  I dont mean clever:  I mean big and strong.

MRS TARLETON.  Not he.  Hes overbred, like one of those expensive little dogs.  I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it’s a man or a dog:  theyre the best for everyday.  But we all have our tastes: whats one woman’s meat is another woman’s poison.  Bunny’s a dear little fellow; but I never could have fancied him for a husband when I was your age.

HYPATIA.  Yes; but he has some brains.  Hes not like all the rest.

One can’t have everything.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, youre quite right, dear:  quite right.  It’s a great thing to have brains:  look what it’s done for your father!

Thats the reason I never said a word when you jilted poor Jerry Mackintosh.

HYPATIA.  [excusing herself]  I really couldnt stick it out with Jerry, mother.  I know you liked him; and nobody can deny that hes a splendid animal —

MRS TARLETON.  [shocked]  Hypatia!  How can you!  The things that girls say nowadays!

HYPATIA.  Well, what else can you call him?  If I’d been deaf or he’d been dumb, I could have married him.  But living with father, Ive got accustomed to cleverness.  Jerry would drive me mad:  you know very well hes a fool:  even Johnny thinks him a fool.

MRS TARLETON.  [up in arms at once in defence of her boy]  Now dont begin about my Johnny.  You know it annoys me.  Johnny’s as clever as anybody else in his own way.  I dont say hes as clever as you in some ways; but hes a man, at all events, and not a little squit of a thing like your Bunny.

HYPATIA.  Oh, I say nothing against your darling:  we all know Johnny’s perfection.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont be cross, dearie.  You let Johnny alone; and I’ll let Bunny alone.  I’m just as bad as you.  There!

HYPATIA.  Oh, I dont mind your saying that about Bentley.  It’s true.

He is a little squit of a thing.  I wish he wasnt.  But who else is there?  Think of all the other chances Ive had!  Not one of them has as much brains in his whole body as Bentley has in his little finger.

Besides, theyve no distinction.  It’s as much as I can do to tell one from the other.  They wouldnt even have money if they werent the sons of their fathers, like Johnny.  Whats a girl to do?  I never met anybody like Bentley before.  He may be small; but hes the best of the bunch:  you cant deny that.

MRS TARLETON.  [with a sigh]  Well, my pet, if you fancy him, theres no more to be said.

A pause follows this remark:  the two women sewing silently.

HYPATIA.  Mother:  do you think marriage is as much a question of fancy as it used to be in your time and father’s?

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, it wasnt much fancy with me, dear:  your father just wouldnt take no for an answer; and I was only too glad to be his wife instead of his shop-girl.  Still, it’s curious; but I had more choice than you in a way, because, you see, I was poor; and there are so many more poor men than rich ones that I might have had more of a pick, as you might say, if John hadnt suited me.

HYPATIA.  I can imagine all sorts of men I could fall in love with; but I never seem to meet them.  The real ones are too small, like Bunny, or too silly, like Jerry.  Of course one can get into a state about any man:  fall in love with him if you like to call it that.

But who would risk marrying a man for love?  I shouldnt.  I remember three girls at school who agreed that the one man you should never marry was the man you were in love with, because it would make a perfect slave of you.  Theres a sort of instinct against it, I think, thats just as strong as the other instinct.  One of them, to my certain knowledge, refused a man she was in love with, and married another who was in love with her; and it turned out very well.

MRS TARLETON.  Does all that mean that youre not in love with Bunny?

HYPATIA.  Oh, how could anybody be in love with Bunny?  I like him to kiss me just as I like a baby to kiss me.  I’m fond of him; and he never bores me; and I see that hes very clever; but I’m not what you call gone about him, if thats what you mean.

MRS TARLETON.  Then why need you marry him?

HYPATIA.  What better can I do?  I must marry somebody, I suppose.

Ive realized that since I was twenty-three.  I always used to take it as a matter of course that I should be married before I was twenty.

BENTLEY’S VOICE.  [in the garden]  Youve got to keep yourself fresh: to look at these things with an open mind.

JOHN TARLETON’S VOICE.  Quite right, quite right:  I always say so.

MRS TARLETON.  Theres your father, and Bunny with him.

BENTLEY.  Keep young.  Keep your eye on me.  Thats the tip for you.

Bentley and Mr Tarleton (an immense and genial veteran of trade) come into view and enter the pavilion.

JOHN TARLETON.  You think youre young, do you?  You think I’m old?

[energetically shaking off his motoring coat and hanging it up with his cap].

BENTLEY.  [helping him with the coat]  Of course youre old.  Look at your face and look at mine.  What you call your youth is nothing but your levity.  Why do we get on so well together?  Because I’m a young cub and youre an old josser.  [He throws a cushion at Hypatia’s feet and sits down on it with his back against her knees].

TARLETON.  Old!  Thats all you know about it, my lad.  How do, Patsy!

[Hypatia kisses him].  How is my Chickabiddy?  [He kisses Mrs Tarleton’s hand and poses expansively in the middle of the picture].

Look at me!  Look at these wrinkles, these gray hairs, this repulsive mask that you call old age!  What is it?  [Vehemently]  I ask you, what is it?

BENTLEY.  Jolly nice and venerable, old man.  Dont be discouraged.

TARLETON.  Nice?  Not a bit of it.  Venerable?  Venerable be blowed!

Read your Darwin, my boy.  Read your Weismann.  [He goes to the sideboard for a drink of lemonade].

MRS TARLETON.  For shame, John!  Tell him to read his Bible.

TARLETON.  [manipulating the syphon]  Whats the use of telling children to read the Bible when you know they wont.  I was kept away from the Bible for forty years by being told to read it when I was young.  Then I picked it up one evening in a hotel in Sunderland when I had left all my papers in the train; and I found it wasnt half bad.

[He drinks, and puts down the glass with a smack of enjoyment].

Better than most halfpenny papers, anyhow, if only you could make people believe it.  [He sits down by the writing-table, near his wife].  But if you want to understand old age scientifically, read Darwin and Weismann.  Of course if you want to understand it romantically, read about Solomon.

MRS TARLETON.  Have you had tea, John?

TARLETON.  Yes.  Dont interrupt me when I’m improving the boy’s mind.

Where was I?  This repulsive mask — Yes.  [Explosively]  What is death?

MRS TARLETON.  John!

HYPATIA.  Death is a rather unpleasant subject, papa.

TARLETON.  Not a bit.  Not scientifically.  Scientifically it’s a delightful subject.  You think death’s natural.  Well, it isnt.  You read Weismann.  There wasnt any death to start with.  You go look in any ditch outside and youll find swimming about there as fresh as paint some of the identical little live cells that Adam christened in the Garden of Eden.  But if big things like us didnt die, we’d crowd one another off the face of the globe.  Nothing survived, sir, except the sort of people that had the sense and good manners to die and make room for the fresh supplies.  And so death was introduced by Natural Selection.  You get it out of your head, my lad, that I’m going to die because I’m wearing out or decaying.  Theres no such thing as decay to a vital man.  I shall clear out; but I shant decay.

BENTLEY.  And what about the wrinkles and the almond tree and the grasshopper that becomes a burden and the desire that fails?

TARLETON.  Does it? by George!  No, sir:  it spiritualizes.  As to your grasshopper, I can carry an elephant.

MRS TARLETON.  You do say such things, Bunny!  What does he mean by the almond tree?

TARLETON.  He means my white hairs:  the repulsive mask.  That, my boy, is another invention of Natural Selection to disgust young women with me, and give the lads a turn.

MRS TARLETON.  John:  I wont have it.  Thats a forbidden subject.

TARLETON.  They talk of the wickedness and vanity of women painting their faces and wearing auburn wigs at fifty.  But why shouldnt they?

Why should a woman allow Nature to put a false mask of age on her when she knows that shes as young as ever?  Why should she look in the glass and see a wrinkled lie when a touch of fine art will shew her a glorious truth?  The wrinkles are a dodge to repel young men.  Suppose she doesnt want to repel young men!  Suppose she likes them!

MRS TARLETON.  Bunny:  take Hypatia out into the grounds for a walk: theres a good boy.  John has got one of his naughty fits this evening.

HYPATIA.  Oh, never mind me.  I’m used to him.

BENTLEY.  I’m not.  I never heard such conversation:  I cant believe my ears.  And mind you, this is the man who objected to my marrying his daughter on the ground that a marriage between a member of the great and good middle class with one of the vicious and corrupt aristocracy would be a misalliance.  A misalliance, if you please!

This is the man Ive adopted as a father!

TARLETON.  Eh!  Whats that?  Adopted me as a father, have you?

BENTLEY.  Yes.  Thats an idea of mine.  I knew a chap named Joey Percival at Oxford (you know I was two months at Balliol before I was sent down for telling the old woman who was head of that silly college what I jolly well thought of him.  He would have been glad to have me back, too, at the end of six months; but I wouldnt go:  I just let him want; and serve him right!)  Well, Joey was a most awfully clever fellow, and so nice!  I asked him what made such a difference between him and all the other pups — they were pups, if you like.  He told me it was very simple:  they had only one father apiece; and he had three.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont talk nonsense, child.  How could that be?

BENTLEY.  Oh, very simple.  His father —

TARLETON.  Which father?

BENTLEY.  The first one:  the regulation natural chap.  He kept a tame philosopher in the house:  a sort of Coleridge or Herbert Spencer kind of card, you know.  That was the second father.  Then his mother was an Italian princess; and she had an Italian priest always about.  He was supposed to take charge of her conscience; but from what I could make out, she jolly well took charge of his.  The whole three of them took charge of Joey’s conscience.  He used to hear them arguing like mad about everything.  You see, the philosopher was a freethinker, and always believed the latest thing.  The priest didnt believe anything, because it was sure to get him into trouble with someone or another.

And the natural father kept an open mind and believed whatever paid him best.  Between the lot of them Joey got cultivated no end.  He said if he could only have had three mothers as well, he’d have backed himself against Napoleon.

TARLETON.  [impressed]  Thats an idea.  Thats a most interesting idea:  a most important idea.

MRS TARLETON.  You always were one for ideas, John.

TARLETON.  Youre right, Chickabiddy.  What do I tell Johnny when he brags about Tarleton’s Underwear?  It’s not the underwear.  The underwear be hanged!  Anybody can make underwear.  Anybody can sell underwear.  Tarleton’s Ideas:  thats whats done it.  Ive often thought of putting that up over the shop.

BENTLEY.  Take me into partnership when you do, old man.  I’m wasted on the underwear; but I shall come in strong on the ideas.

TARLETON.  You be a good boy; and perhaps I will.

MRS TARLETON.  [scenting a plot against her beloved Johnny]  Now,

John:  you promised —

TARLETON.  Yes, yes.  All right, Chickabiddy:  dont fuss.  Your precious Johnny shant be interfered with.  [Bouncing up, too energetic to sit still]  But I’m getting sick of that old shop.

Thirty-five years Ive had of it:  same blessed old stairs to go up and down every day:  same old lot:  same old game:  sorry I ever started it now.  I’ll chuck it and try something else:  something that will give a scope to all my faculties.

HYPATIA.  Theres money in underwear:  theres none in wild-cat ideas.

TARLETON.  Theres money in me, madam, no matter what I go into.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont boast, John.  Dont tempt Providence.

TARLETON.  Rats!  You dont understand Providence.  Providence likes to be tempted.  Thats the secret of the successful man.  Read Browning.

Natural theology on an island, eh?  Caliban was afraid to tempt Providence:  that was why he was never able to get even with Prospero.

What did Prospero do?  Prospero didnt even tempt Providence:  he was Providence.  Thats one of Tarleton’s ideas; and dont you forget it.

BENTLEY.  You are full of beef today, old man.

TARLETON.  Beef be blowed!  Joy of life.  Read Ibsen.  [He goes into the pavilion to relieve his restlessness, and stares out with his hands thrust deep in his pockets].

HYPATIA.  [thoughtful]  Bentley:  couldnt you invite your friend Mr Percival down here?

BENTLEY.  Not if I know it.  Youd throw me over the moment you set eyes on him.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, Bunny!  For shame!

BENTLEY.  Well, who’d marry me, dyou suppose, if they could get my brains with a full-sized body?  No, thank you.  I shall take jolly good care to keep Joey out of this until Hypatia is past praying for.

Johnny and Lord Summerhays return through the pavilion from their stroll.

TARLETON.  Welcome! welcome!  Why have you stayed away so long?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [shaking hands]  Yes:  I should have come sooner.

But I’m still rather lost in England.  [Johnny takes his hat and hangs it up beside his own].  Thank you.  [Johnny returns to his swing and his novel.  Lord Summerhays comes to the writing table].

The fact is that as Ive nothing to do, I never have time to go anywhere.  [He sits down next Mrs Tarleton].

TARLETON.  [following him and sitting down on his left]  Paradox, paradox.  Good.  Paradoxes are the only truths.  Read Chesterton.  But theres lots for you to do here.  You have a genius for government.

You learnt your job out there in Jinghiskahn.  Well, we want to be governed here in England.  Govern us.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Ah yes, my friend; but in Jinghiskahn you have to govern the right way.  If you dont, you go under and come home.  Here everything has to be done the wrong way, to suit governors who understand nothing but partridge shooting (our English native princes, in fact) and voters who dont know what theyre voting about.  I dont understand these democratic games; and I’m afraid I’m too old to learn.  What can I do but sit in the window of my club, which consists mostly of retired Indian Civil servants?  We look on at the muddle and the folly and amateurishness; and we ask each other where a single fortnight of it would have landed us.

TARLETON.  Very true.  Still, Democracy’s all right, you know.  Read Mill.  Read Jefferson.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Yes.  Democracy reads well; but it doesnt act well, like some people’s plays.  No, no, my friend Tarleton:  to make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy.  To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.  Youve got neither; and theres an end of it.

TARLETON.  Still, you know, the superman may come.  The superman’s an idea.  I believe in ideas.  Read Whatshisname.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Reading is a dangerous amusement, Tarleton.  I wish I could persuade your free library people of that.

TARLETON.  Why, man, it’s the beginning of education.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  On the contrary, it’s the end of it.  How can you dare teach a man to read until youve taught him everything else first?

JOHNNY.  [intercepting his father’s reply by coming out of the swing and taking the floor]  Leave it at that.  Thats good sense.  Anybody on for a game of tennis?

BENTLEY.  Oh, lets have some more improving conversation.  Wouldnt you rather, Johnny?

JOHNNY.  If you ask me, no.

TARLETON.  Johnny:  you dont cultivate your mind.  You dont read.

JOHNNY.  [coming between his mother and Lord Summerhays, book in hand]  Yes I do.  I bet you what you like that, page for page, I read more than you, though I dont talk about it so much.  Only, I dont read the same books.  I like a book with a plot in it.  You like a book with nothing in it but some idea that the chap that writes it keeps worrying, like a cat chasing its own tail.  I can stand a little of it, just as I can stand watching the cat for two minutes, say, when Ive nothing better to do.  But a man soon gets fed up with that sort of thing.  The fact is, you look on an author as a sort of god.  I look on him as a man that I pay to do a certain thing for me.  I pay him to amuse me and to take me out of myself and make me forget.

TARLETON.  No.  Wrong principle.  You want to remember.  Read Kipling.

“Lest we forget.”

JOHNNY.  If Kipling wants to remember, let him remember.  If he had to run Tarleton’s Underwear, he’d be jolly glad to forget.  As he has a much softer job, and wants to keep himself before the public, his cry is, “Dont you forget the sort of things I’m rather clever at writing about.”  Well, I dont blame him:  it’s his business:  I should do the same in his place.  But what he wants and what I want are two different things.  I want to forget; and I pay another man to make me forget.  If I buy a book or go to the theatre, I want to forget the shop and forget myself from the moment I go in to the moment I come out.  Thats what I pay my money for.  And if I find that the author’s simply getting at me the whole time, I consider that hes obtained my money under false pretences.  I’m not a morbid crank:  I’m a natural man; and, as such, I dont like being got at.  If a man in my employment did it, I should sack him.  If a member of my club did it,

I should cut him.  If he went too far with it, I should bring his conduct before the committee.  I might even punch his head, if it came to that.  Well, who and what is an author that he should be privileged to take liberties that are not allowed to other men?

MRS TARLETON.  You see, John!  What have I always told you?  Johnny has as much to say for himself as anybody when he likes.

JOHNNY.  I’m no fool, mother, whatever some people may fancy.  I dont set up to have as many ideas as the Governor; but what ideas I have are consecutive, at all events.  I can think as well as talk.

BENTLEY.  [to Tarleton, chuckling]  Had you there, old man, hadnt he?  You are rather all over the shop with your ideas, aint you?

JOHNNY.  [handsomely]  I’m not saying anything against you,

Governor.  But I do say that the time has come for sane, healthy, unpretending men like me to make a stand against this conspiracy of the writing and talking and artistic lot to put us in the back row.

It isnt a fact that we’re inferior to them:  it’s a put-up job; and it’s they that have put the job up.  It’s we that run the country for them; and all the thanks we get is to be told we’re Philistines and vulgar tradesmen and sordid city men and so forth, and that theyre all angels of light and leading.  The time has come to assert ourselves and put a stop to their stuck-up nonsense.  Perhaps if we had nothing better to do than talking or writing, we could do it better than they.

Anyhow, theyre the failures and refuse of business (hardly a man of them that didnt begin in an office) and we’re the successes of it.

Thank God I havnt failed yet at anything; and I dont believe I should fail at literature if it would pay me to turn my hand to it.

BENTLEY.  Hear, hear!

MRS TARLETON.  Fancy you writing a book, Johnny!  Do you think he could, Lord Summerhays?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Why not?  As a matter of fact all the really prosperous authors I have met since my return to England have been very like him.

TARLETON.  [again impressed]  Thats an idea.  Thats a new idea.  I believe I ought to have made Johnny an author.  Ive never said so before for fear of hurting his feelings, because, after all, the lad cant help it; but Ive never thought Johnny worth tuppence as a man of business.

JOHNNY.  [sarcastic]  Oh!  You think youve always kept that to yourself, do you, Governor?  I know your opinion of me as well as you know it yourself.  It takes one man of business to appreciate another; and you arnt, and you never have been, a real man of business.  I know where Tarleton’s would have been three of four times if it hadnt been for me.  [With a snort and a nod to emphasize the implied warning, he retreats to the Turkish bath, and lolls against it with an air of good-humoured indifference].

TARLETON.  Well, who denies it?  Youre quite right, my boy.  I don’t mind confessing to you all that the circumstances that condemned me to keep a shop are the biggest tragedy in modern life.  I ought to have been a writer.  I’m essentially a man of ideas.  When I was a young man I sometimes used to pray that I might fail, so that I should be justified in giving up business and doing something:  something first-class.  But it was no good:  I couldnt fail.  I said to myself that if I could only once go to my Chickabiddy here and shew her a chartered accountant’s statement proving that I’d made 20 pounds less than last year, I could ask her to let me chance Johnny’s and Hypatia’s future by going into literature.  But it was no good.  First it was 250 pounds more than last year.  Then it was 700 pounds.  Then it was 2000 pounds.  Then I saw it was no use:  Prometheus was chained to his rock:  read Shelley:  read Mrs Browning.  Well, well, it was not to be.  [He rises solemnly].  Lord Summerhays:  I ask you to excuse me for a few moments.  There are times when a man needs to meditate in solitude on his destiny.  A chord is touched; and he sees the drama of his life as a spectator sees a play.  Laugh if you feel inclined:  no man sees the comic side of it more than I.  In the theatre of life everyone may be amused except the actor.

[Brightening]  Theres an idea in this:  an idea for a picture.  What a pity young Bentley is not a painter!  Tarleton meditating on his destiny.  Not in a toga.  Not in the trappings of the tragedian or the philosopher.  In plain coat and trousers:  a man like any other man.

And beneath that coat and trousers a human soul.  Tarleton’s Underwear!  [He goes out gravely into the vestibule].

MRS TARLETON.  [fondly]  I suppose it’s a wife’s partiality, Lord Summerhays; but I do think John is really great.  I’m sure he was meant to be a king.  My father looked down on John, because he was a rate collector, and John kept a shop.  It hurt his pride to have to borrow money so often from John; and he used to console himself by saying, “After all, he’s only a linendraper.”  But at last one day he said to me, “John is a king.”

BENTLEY.  How much did he borrow on that occasion?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [sharply]  Bentley!

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, dont scold the child:  he’d have to say something like that if it was to be his last word on earth.  Besides, hes quite right:  my poor father had asked for his usual five pounds; and John gave him a hundred in his big way.  Just like a king.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Not at all.  I had five kings to manage in Jinghiskahn; and I think you do your husband some injustice, Mrs Tarleton.  They pretended to like me because I kept their brothers from murdering them; but I didnt like them.  And I like Tarleton.

MRS TARLETON.  Everybody does.  I really must go and make the cook do him a Welsh rabbit.  He expects one on special occasions.  [She goes to the inner door].  Johnny:  when he comes back ask him where we’re to put that new Turkish bath.  Turkish baths are his latest.  [She goes out].

JOHNNY.  [coming forward again]  Now that the Governor has given himself away, and the old lady’s gone, I’ll tell you something, Lord Summerhays.  If you study men whove made an enormous pile in business without being keen on money, youll find that they all have a slate off.  The Governor’s a wonderful man; but hes not quite all there, you know.  If you notice, hes different from me; and whatever my failings may be, I’m a sane man.  Erratic:  thats what he is.  And the danger is that some day he’ll give the whole show away.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Giving the show away is a method like any other method.  Keeping it to yourself is only another method.  I should keep an open mind about it.

JOHNNY.  Has it ever occurred to you that a man with an open mind must be a bit of a scoundrel?  If you ask me, I like a man who makes up his mind once for all as to whats right and whats wrong and then sticks to it.  At all events you know where to have him.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  That may not be his object.

BENTLEY.  He may want to have you, old chap.

JOHNNY.  Well, let him.  If a member of my club wants to steal my umbrella, he knows where to find it.  If a man put up for the club who had an open mind on the subject of property in umbrellas, I should blackball him.  An open mind is all very well in clever talky-talky; but in conduct and in business give me solid ground.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Yes:  the quicksands make life difficult.  Still, there they are.  It’s no use pretending theyre rocks.

JOHNNY.  I dont know.  You can draw a line and make other chaps toe it.  Thats what I call morality.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Very true.  But you dont make any progress when youre toeing a line.

HYPATIA.  [suddenly, as if she could bear no more of it]  Bentley: do go and play tennis with Johnny.  You must take exercise.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Do, my boy, do.  [To Johnny]  Take him out and make him skip about.

BENTLEY.  [rising reluctantly]  I promised you two inches more round my chest this summer.  I tried exercises with an indiarubber expander; but I wasnt strong enough:  instead of my expanding it, it crumpled me up.  Come along, Johnny.

JOHNNY.  Do you no end of good, young chap.  [He goes out with Bentley through the pavilion].

Hypatia throws aside her work with an enormous sigh of relief.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  At last!

HYPATIA.  At last.  Oh, if I might only have a holiday in an asylum for the dumb.  How I envy the animals!  They cant talk.  If Johnny could only put back his ears or wag his tail instead of laying down the law, how much better it would be!  We should know when he was cross and when he was pleased; and thats all we know now, with all his talk.  It never stops:  talk, talk, talk, talk.  Thats my life.  All the day I listen to mamma talking; at dinner I listen to papa talking; and when papa stops for breath I listen to Johnny talking.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You make me feel very guilty.  I talk too, I’m afraid.

HYPATIA.  Oh, I dont mind that, because your talk is a novelty.  But it must have been dreadful for your daughters.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I suppose so.

HYPATIA.  If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

Three or four times in the last half hour Ive been on the point of screaming.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Were we very dull?

HYPATIA.  Not at all:  you were very clever.  Thats whats so hard to bear, because it makes it so difficult to avoid listening.  You see,

I’m young; and I do so want something to happen.  My mother tells me that when I’m her age, I shall be only too glad that nothing’s happened; but I’m not her age; so what good is that to me?  Theres my father in the garden, meditating on his destiny.  All very well for him:  hes had a destiny to meditate on; but I havnt had any destiny yet.  Everything’s happened to him:  nothing’s happened to me.  Thats why this unending talk is so maddeningly uninteresting to me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It would be worse if we sat in silence.

HYPATIA.  No it wouldnt.  If you all sat in silence, as if you were waiting for something to happen, then there would be hope even if nothing did happen.  But this eternal cackle, cackle, cackle about things in general is only fit for old, old, OLD people.  I suppose it means something to them:  theyve had their fling.  All I listen for is some sign of it ending in something; but just when it seems to be coming to a point, Johnny or papa just starts another hare; and it all begins over again; and I realize that it’s never going to lead anywhere and never going to stop.  Thats when I want to scream.  I wonder how you can stand it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Well, I’m old and garrulous myself, you see.

Besides, I’m not here of my own free will, exactly.  I came because you ordered me to come.

HYPATIA.  Didnt you want to come?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  My dear:  after thirty years of managing other people’s business, men lose the habit of considering what they want or dont want.

HYPATIA.  Oh, dont begin to talk about what men do, and about thirty years experience.  If you cant get off that subject, youd better send for Johnny and papa and begin it all over again.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I’m sorry.  I beg your pardon.

HYPATIA.  I asked you, didnt you want to come?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I did not stop to consider whether I wanted or not, because when I read your letter I knew I had to come.

HYPATIA.  Why?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Oh come, Miss Tarleton!  Really, really!  Dont force me to call you a blackmailer to your face.  You have me in your power; and I do what you tell me very obediently.  Dont ask me to pretend I do it of my own free will.

HYPATIA.  I dont know what a blackmailer is.  I havnt even that much experience.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  A blackmailer, my dear young lady, is a person who knows a disgraceful secret in the life of another person, and extorts money from that other person by threatening to make his secret public unless the money is paid.

HYPATIA.  I havnt asked you for money.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  No; but you asked me to come down here and talk to you; and you mentioned casually that if I didnt youd have nobody to talk about me to but Bentley.  That was a threat, was it not?

HYPATIA.  Well, I wanted you to come.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  In spite of my age and my unfortunate talkativeness?

HYPATIA.  I like talking to you.  I can let myself go with you.  I can say things to you I cant say to other people.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I wonder why?

HYPATIA.  Well, you are the only really clever, grown-up, high-class, experienced man I know who has given himself away to me by making an utter fool of himself with me.  You cant wrap yourself up in your toga after that.  You cant give yourself airs with me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You mean you can tell Bentley about me if I do.

HYPATIA.  Even if there wasnt any Bentley:  even if you didnt care

(and I really dont see why you should care so much) still, we never could be on conventional terms with one another again.  Besides, Ive got a feeling for you:  almost a ghastly sort of love for you.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [shrinking]  I beg you — no, please.

HYPATIA.  Oh, it’s nothing at all flattering:  and, of course, nothing wrong, as I suppose youd call it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Please believe that I know that.  When men of my age —

HYPATIA.  [impatiently]  Oh, do talk about yourself when you mean yourself, and not about men of your age.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I’ll put it as bluntly as I can.  When, as you say,

I made an utter fool of myself, believe me, I made a poetic fool of myself.  I was seduced, not by appetites which, thank Heaven, Ive long outlived:  not even by the desire of second childhood for a child companion, but by the innocent impulse to place the delicacy and wisdom and spirituality of my age at the affectionate service of your youth for a few years, at the end of which you would be a grown, strong, formed — widow.  Alas, my dear, the delicacy of age reckoned, as usual, without the derision and cruelty of youth.  You told me that you didnt want to be an old man’s nurse, and that you didnt want to have undersized children like Bentley.  It served me right:  I dont reproach you:  I was an old fool.  But how you can imagine, after that, that I can suspect you of the smallest feeling for me except the inevitable feeling of early youth for late age, or imagine that I have any feeling for you except one of shrinking humiliation, I cant understand.

HYPATIA.  I dont blame you for falling in love with me.  I shall be grateful to you all my life for it, because that was the first time that anything really interesting happened to me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Do you mean to tell me that nothing of that kind had ever happened before? that no man had ever —

HYPATIA.  Oh, lots.  Thats part of the routine of life here:  the very dullest part of it.  The young man who comes a-courting is as familiar an incident in my life as coffee for breakfast.  Of course, hes too much of a gentleman to misbehave himself; and I’m too much of a lady to let him; and hes shy and sheepish; and I’m correct and self-possessed; and at last, when I can bear it no longer, I either frighten him off, or give him a chance of proposing, just to see how he’ll do it, and refuse him because he does it in the same silly way as all the rest.  You dont call that an event in one’s life, do you?

With you it was different.  I should as soon have expected the North Pole to fall in love with me as you.  You know I’m only a linen-draper’s daughter when all’s said.  I was afraid of you:  you, a great man! a lord! and older than my father.  And then what a situation it was!  Just think of it!  I was engaged to your son; and you knew nothing about it.  He was afraid to tell you:  he brought you down here because he thought if he could throw us together I could get round you because I was such a ripping girl.  We arranged it all:  he and I.  We got Papa and Mamma and Johnny out of the way splendidly; and then Bentley took himself off, and left us — you and me! — to take a walk through the heather and admire the scenery of Hindhead.  You never dreamt that it was all a plan:  that what made me so nice was the way I was playing up to my destiny as the sweet girl that was to make your boy happy.  And then! and then!  [She rises to dance and clap her hands in her glee].

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [shuddering]  Stop, stop.  Can no woman understand a man’s delicacy?

HYPATIA.  [revelling in the recollection]  And then — ha, ha! — you proposed.  You!  A father!  For your son’s girl!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Stop, I tell you.  Dont profane what you dont understand.

HYPATIA.  That was something happening at last with a vengeance.  It was splendid.  It was my first peep behind the scenes.  If I’d been seventeen I should have fallen in love with you.  Even as it is, I feel quite differently towards you from what I do towards other old men.  So [offering her hand] you may kiss my hand if that will be any fun for you.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [rising and recoiling to the table, deeply revolted]  No, no, no.  How dare you?  [She laughs mischievously].

How callous youth is!  How coarse!  How cynical!  How ruthlessly cruel!

HYPATIA.  Stuff!  It’s only that youre tired of a great many things Ive never tried.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It’s not alone that.  Ive not forgotten the brutality of my own boyhood.  But do try to learn, glorious young beast that you are, that age is squeamish, sentimental, fastidious.

If you cant understand my holier feelings, at least you know the bodily infirmities of the old.  You know that I darent eat all the rich things you gobble up at every meal; that I cant bear the noise and racket and clatter that affect you no more than they affect a stone.  Well, my soul is like that too.  Spare it:  be gentle with it

[he involuntarily puts out his hands to plead:  she takes them with a laugh].  If you could possibly think of me as half an angel and half an invalid, we should get on much better together.

HYPATIA.  We get on very well, I think.  Nobody else ever called me a glorious young beast.  I like that.  Glorious young beast expresses exactly what I like to be.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [extricating his hands and sitting down]  Where on earth did you get these morbid tastes?  You seem to have been well brought up in a normal, healthy, respectable, middle-class family.

Yet you go on like the most unwholesome product of the rankest Bohemianism.

HYPATIA.  Thats just it.  I’m fed up with —

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Horrible expression.  Dont.

HYPATIA.  Oh, I daresay it’s vulgar; but theres no other word for it.

I’m fed up with nice things:  with respectability, with propriety!

When a woman has nothing to do, money and respectability mean that nothing is ever allowed to happen to her.  I dont want to be good; and I dont want to be bad:  I just dont want to be bothered about either good or bad:  I want to be an active verb.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  An active verb?  Oh, I see.  An active verb signifies to be, to do, or to suffer.

HYPATIA.  Just so:  how clever of you!  I want to be; I want to do; and I’m game to suffer if it costs that.  But stick here doing nothing but being good and nice and ladylike I simply wont.  Stay down here with us for a week; and I’ll shew you what it means:  shew it to you going on day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Shew me what?

HYPATIA.  Girls withering into ladies.  Ladies withering into old maids.  Nursing old women.  Running errands for old men.  Good for nothing else at last.  Oh, you cant imagine the fiendish selfishness of the old people and the maudlin sacrifice of the young.

It’s more unbearable than any poverty:  more horrible than any regular-right-down wickedness.  Oh, home! home! parents! family! duty! how I loathe them!  How I’d like to see them all blown to bits!  The poor escape.  The wicked escape.  Well, I cant be poor:  we’re rolling in money:  it’s no use pretending we’re not.  But I can be wicked; and I’m quite prepared to be.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You think that easy?

HYPATIA.  Well, isnt it?  Being a man, you ought to know.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It requires some natural talent, which can no doubt be cultivated.  It’s not really easy to be anything out of the common.

HYPATIA.  Anyhow, I mean to make a fight for living.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Living your own life, I believe the Suffragist phrase is.

HYPATIA.  Living any life.  Living, instead of withering without even a gardener to snip you off when youre rotten.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Ive lived an active life; but Ive withered all the same.

HYPATIA.  No:  youve worn out:  thats quite different.  And youve some life in you yet or you wouldnt have fallen in love with me.  You can never imagine how delighted I was to find that instead of being the correct sort of big panjandrum you were supposed to be, you were really an old rip like papa.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  No, no:  not about your father:  I really cant bear it.  And if you must say these terrible things:  these heart-wounding shameful things, at least find something prettier to call me than an old rip.

HYPATIA.  Well, what would you call a man proposing to a girl who might be —

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  His daughter:  yes, I know.

HYPATIA.  I was going to say his granddaughter.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You always have one more blow to get in.

HYPATIA.  Youre too sensitive.  Did you ever make mud pies when you were a kid — beg pardon:  a child.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I hope not.

HYPATIA.  It’s a dirty job; but Johnny and I were vulgar enough to like it.  I like young people because theyre not too afraid of dirt to live.  Ive grown out of the mud pies; but I like slang; and I like bustling you up by saying things that shock you; and I’d rather put up with swearing and smoking than with dull respectability; and there are lots of things that would just shrivel you up that I think rather jolly.  Now!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Ive not the slightest doubt of it.  Dont insist.

HYPATIA.  It’s not your ideal, is it?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  No.

HYPATIA.  Shall I tell you why?  Your ideal is an old woman.  I daresay shes got a young face; but shes an old woman.  Old, old, old.

Squeamish.  Cant stand up to things.  Cant enjoy things:  not real things.  Always on the shrink.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  On the shrink!  Detestable expression.

HYPATIA.  Bah! you cant stand even a little thing like that.  What good are you?  Oh, what good are you?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Dont ask me.  I dont know.  I dont know.

Tarleton returns from the vestibule.  Hypatia sits down demurely.

HYPATIA.  Well, papa:  have you meditated on your destiny?

TARLETON.  [puzzled]  What?  Oh! my destiny.  Gad, I forgot all about it:  Jock started a rabbit and put it clean out of my head.

Besides, why should I give way to morbid introspection?  It’s a sign of madness.  Read Lombroso.  [To Lord Summerhays]  Well, Summerhays, has my little girl been entertaining you?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Yes.  She is a wonderful entertainer.

TARLETON.  I think my idea of bringing up a young girl has been rather a success.  Dont you listen to this, Patsy:  it might make you conceited.  Shes never been treated like a child.  I always said the same thing to her mother.  Let her read what she likes.  Let her do what she likes.  Let her go where she likes.  Eh, Patsy?

HYPATIA.  Oh yes, if there had only been anything for me to do, any place for me to go, anything I wanted to read.

TARLETON.  There, you see!  Shes not satisfied.  Restless.  Wants things to happen.  Wants adventures to drop out of the sky.

HYPATIA.  [gathering up her work]  If youre going to talk about me and my education, I’m off.

TARLETON.  Well, well, off with you.  [To Lord Summerhays]  Shes active, like me.  She actually wanted me to put her into the shop.

HYPATIA.  Well, they tell me that the girls there have adventures sometimes.  [She goes out through the inner door]

TARLETON.  She had me there, though she doesnt know it, poor innocent lamb!  Public scandal exaggerates enormously, of course; but moralize as you will, superabundant vitality is a physical fact that cant be talked away.  [He sits down between the writing table and the sideboard].  Difficult question this, of bringing up children.

Between ourselves, it has beaten me.  I never was so surprised in my life as when I came to know Johnny as a man of business and found out what he was really like.  How did you manage with your sons?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Well, I really hadnt time to be a father:  thats the plain truth of the matter.  Their poor dear mother did the usual thing while they were with us.  Then of course, Harrow, Cambridge, the usual routine of their class.  I saw very little of them, and thought very little about them:  how could I? with a whole province on my hands.

They and I are — acquaintances.  Not perhaps, quite ordinary acquaintances:  theres a sort of — er — I should almost call it a sort of remorse about the way we shake hands (when we do shake hands) which means, I suppose, that we’re sorry we dont care more for one another; and I’m afraid we dont meet oftener than we can help.  We put each other too much out of countenance.  It’s really a very difficult relation.  To my mind not altogether a natural one.

TARLETON.  [impressed, as usual]  Thats an idea, certainly.  I dont think anybody has ever written about that.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Bentley is the only one who was really my son in any serious sense.  He was completely spoilt.  When he was sent to a preparatory school he simply yelled until he was sent home.  Harrow was out of the question; but we managed to tutor him into Cambridge.

No use:  he was sent down.  By that time my work was over; and I saw a good deal of him.  But I could do nothing with him — except look on.  I should have thought your case was quite different.  You keep up the middle-class tradition:  the day school and the business training instead of the university.  I believe in the day school part of it.

At all events, you know your own children.

TARLETON.  Do you?  I’m not so sure of it.  Fact is, my dear Summerhays, once childhood is over, once the little animal has got past the stage at which it acquires what you might call a sense of decency, it’s all up with the relation between parent and child.  You cant get over the fearful shyness of it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Shyness?

TARLETON.  Yes, shyness.  Read Dickens.

LORD SUMMERHAYS [surprised]  Dickens!!  Of all authors, Charles Dickens!  Are you serious?

TARLETON.  I dont mean his books.  Read his letters to his family.

Read any man’s letters to his children.  Theyre not human.  Theyre not about himself or themselves.  Theyre about hotels, scenery, about the weather, about getting wet and losing the train and what he saw on the road and all that.  Not a word about himself.  Forced.  Shy.  Duty letters.  All fit to be published:  that says everything.  I tell you theres a wall ten feet thick and ten miles high between parent and child.  I know what I’m talking about.  Ive girls in my employment: girls and young men.  I had ideas on the subject.  I used to go to the parents and tell them not to let their children go out into the world without instruction in the dangers and temptations they were going to be thrown into.  What did every one of the mothers say to me?  “Oh, sir, how could I speak of such things to my own daughter?”  The men said I was quite right; but they didnt do it, any more than I’d been able to do it myself to Johnny.  I had to leave books in his way; and I felt just awful when I did it.  Believe me, Summerhays, the relation between the young and the old should be an innocent relation.  It should be something they could talk about.  Well, the relation between parent and child may be an affectionate relation.  It may be a useful relation.  It may be a necessary relation.  But it can never be an innocent relation.  Youd die rather than allude to it.  Depend on it, in a thousand years itll be considered bad form to know who your father and mother are.  Embarrassing.  Better hand Bentley over to me.

I can look him in the face and talk to him as man to man.  You can have Johnny.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Thank you.  Ive lived so long in a country where a man may have fifty sons, who are no more to him than a regiment of soldiers, that I’m afraid Ive lost the English feeling about it.

TARLETON.  [restless again]  You mean Jinghiskahn.  Ah yes.  Good thing the empire.  Educates us.  Opens our minds.  Knocks the Bible out of us.  And civilizes the other chaps.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Yes:  it civilizes them.  And it uncivilizes us.

Their gain.  Our loss, Tarleton, believe me, our loss.

TARLETON.  Well, why not?  Averages out the human race.  Makes the nigger half an Englishman.  Makes the Englishman half a nigger.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Speaking as the unfortunate Englishman in question,

I dont like the process.  If I had my life to live over again, I’d stay at home and supercivilize myself.

TARLETON.  Nonsense! dont be selfish.  Think how youve improved the other chaps.  Look at the Spanish empire!  Bad job for Spain, but splendid for South America.  Look at what the Romans did for Britain!

They burst up and had to clear out; but think of all they taught us!

They were the making of us:  I believe there was a Roman camp on Hindhead:  I’ll shew it to you tomorrow.  Thats the good side of Imperialism:  it’s unselfish.  I despise the Little Englanders: theyre always thinking about England.  Smallminded.  I’m for the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.  Read Tennyson.  [He settles down again].  Then theres the great food question.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [apprehensively]  Need we go into that this afternoon?

TARLETON.  No; but I wish youd tell the Chickabiddy that the Jinghiskahns eat no end of toasted cheese, and that it’s the secret of their amazing health and long life!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Unfortunately they are neither healthy nor long lived.  And they dont eat toasted cheese.

TARLETON.  There you are!  They would be if they ate it.    Anyhow, say what you like, provided the moral is a Welsh rabbit for my supper.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  British morality in a nutshell!

TARLETON.  [hugely amused]  Yes.  Ha ha!  Awful hypocrites, aint we?

They are interrupted by excited cries from the grounds.

HYPATIA.       |    Papa!  Mamma!  Come out as fast as you can.

|    Quick.  Quick.

|

BENTLEY.       |    Hello, governor!  Come out.  An aeroplane.

|    Look, look.

TARLETON.  [starting up]  Aeroplane!  Did he say an aeroplane?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Aeroplane!  [A shadow falls on the pavilion; and some of the glass at the top is shattered and falls on the floor].

Tarleton and Lord Summerhays rush out through the pavilion into the garden.

HYPATIA.       |    Take care.  Take care of the chimney.

|

BENTLEY.       |    Come this side:  it’s coming right

|    where youre standing.

|

TARLETON.      |    Hallo! where the devil are you

|    coming? youll have my roof off.

|

LORD SUMMERHAYS|    He’s lost control.

MRS TARLETON.  Look, look, Hypatia.  There are two people in it.

BENTLEY.  Theyve cleared it.  Well steered!

TARLETON.      |    Yes; but theyre coming slam into the greenhouse.

|

LORD SUMMERHAYS|    Look out for the glass.

|

MRS TARLETON.  |    Theyll break all the glass.  Theyll

|    spoil all the grapes.

|

BENTLEY.       |    Mind where youre coming.  He’ll

|    save it.  No:  theyre down.

An appalling crash of breaking glass is heard.  Everybody shrieks.

MRS TARLETON.  |    Oh, are they killed?  John:  are they killed?

|

LORD SUMMERHAYS|    Are you hurt?  Is anything broken?  Can you stand?

|

HYPATIA.       |    Oh, you must be hurt.  Are you sure?  Shall I get

|    you some water?  Or some wine?

|

TARLETON.      |    Are you all right?  Sure you wont have some

|    brandy just to take off the shock.

THE AVIATOR.  No, thank you.  Quite right.  Not a scratch.  I assure you I’m all right.

BENTLEY.  What luck!  And what a smash!  You are a lucky chap, I can tell you.

The Aviator and Tarleton come in through the pavilion, followed by Lord Summerhays and Bentley, the Aviator on Tarleton’s right.  Bentley passes the Aviator and turns to have an admiring look at him.  Lord Summerhays overtakes Tarleton less pointedly on the opposite side with the same object.

THE AVIATOR.  I’m really very sorry.  I’m afraid Ive knocked your vinery into a cocked hat.  (Effusively)  You dont mind, do you?

TARLETON.  Not a bit.  Come in and have some tea.  Stay to dinner.

Stay over the week-end.  All my life Ive wanted to fly.

THE AVIATOR.  [taking off his goggles]  Youre really more than kind.

BENTLEY.  Why, its Joey Percival.

PERCIVAL.  Hallo, Ben!  That you?

TARLETON.  What!  The man with three fathers!

PERCIVAL.  Oh! has Ben been talking about me?

TARLETON.  Consider yourself as one of the family — if you will do me the honor.  And your friend too.  Wheres your friend?

PERCIVAL.  Oh, by the way! before he comes in:  let me explain.  I dont know him.

TARLETON.  Eh?

PERCIVAL.  Havnt even looked at him.  I’m trying to make a club record with a passenger.  The club supplied the passenger.  He just got in; and Ive been too busy handling the aeroplane to look at him.  I havnt said a word to him; and I cant answer for him socially; but hes an ideal passenger for a flyer.  He saved me from a smash.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I saw it.  It was extraordinary.  When you were thrown out he held on to the top bar with one hand.  You came past him in the air, going straight for the glass.  He caught you and turned you off into the flower bed, and then lighted beside you like a bird.

PERCIVAL.  How he kept his head I cant imagine.  Frankly, I didnt.

The Passenger, also begoggled, comes in through the pavilion with Johnny and the two ladies.  The Passenger comes between Percival and Tarleton, Mrs Tarleton between Lord Summerhays and her husband,

Hypatia between Percival and Bentley, and Johnny to Bentley’s right.

TARLETON.  Just discussing your prowess, my dear sir.  Magnificent.

Youll stay to dinner.  Youll stay the night.  Stay over the week.  The Chickabiddy will be delighted.

MRS TARLETON.  Wont you take off your goggles and have some tea?

The Passenger begins to remove the goggles.

TARLETON.  Do.  Have a wash.  Johnny:  take the gentleman to your room:  I’ll look after Mr Percival.  They must —

By this time the passenger has got the goggles off, and stands revealed as a remarkably good-looking woman.

MRS TARLETON.  |    Well I never!!!                         |

|                                            |

BENTLEY.       |    [in a whisper] Oh, I say!             |

|                                            |

JOHNNY.        |    By George!                              |

|                                            | All LORD SUMMERHAYS|    A lady!                                 | to-

|                                            | gether.

HYPATIA.       |    A woman!                                |

|                                            |

TARLETON.      |    [to Percival] You never told me — |

|                                            |

PERCIVAL.      |    I hadnt the least idea —            |

An embarrassed pause.

PERCIVAL.  I assure you if I’d had the faintest notion that my passenger was a lady I shouldnt have left you to shift for yourself in that selfish way.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The lady seems to have shifted for both very effectually, sir.

PERCIVAL.  Saved my life.  I admit it most gratefully.

TARLETON.  I must apologize, madam, for having offered you the civilities appropriate to the opposite sex.  And yet, why opposite?

We are all human:  males and females of the same species.  When the dress is the same the distinction vanishes.  I’m proud to receive in my house a lady of evident refinement and distinction.  Allow me to introduce myself:  Tarleton:  John Tarleton (seeing conjecture in the passenger’s eye) — yes, yes:  Tarleton’s Underwear.  My wife, Mrs Tarleton:  youll excuse me for having in what I had taken to be a confidence between man and man alluded to her as the Chickabiddy.  My daughter Hypatia, who has always wanted some adventure to drop out of the sky, and is now, I hope, satisfied at last.  Lord Summerhays:  a man known wherever the British flag waves.  His son Bentley, engaged to Hypatia.  Mr Joseph Percival, the promising son of three highly intellectual fathers.

HYPATIA.  [startled]  Bentley’s friend?  [Bentley nods].

TARLETON.  [continuing, to the passenger]  May I now ask to be allowed the pleasure of knowing your name?

THE PASSENGER.  My name is Lina Szczepanowska [pronouncing it Sh-Chepanovska].

PERCIVAL.  Sh — I beg your pardon?

LINA.  Szczepanowska.

PERCIVAL.  [dubiously]  Thank you.

TARLETON.  [very politely]  Would you mind saying it again?

LINA.  Say fish.

TARLETON.  Fish.

LINA.  Say church.

TARLETON.  Church.

LINA.  Say fish church.

TARLETON.  [remonstrating]  But it’s not good sense.

LINA.  [inexorable]  Say fish church.

TARLETON.  Fish church.

LINA.  Again.

TARLETON.  No, but — [resigning himself] fish church.

LINA.  Now say Szczepanowska.

TARLETON.  Szczepanowska.  Got it, by Gad.  [A sibilant whispering becomes audible:  they are all saying Sh-ch to themselves].

Szczepanowska!  Not an English name, is it?

LINA.  Polish.  I’m a Pole.

TARLETON.  Ah yes.  Interesting nation.  Lucky people to get the government of their country taken off their hands.  Nothing to do but cultivate themselves.  Same as we took Gibraltar off the hands of the Spaniards.  Saves the Spanish taxpayer.  Jolly good thing for us if the Germans took Portsmouth.  Sit down, wont you?

The group breaks up.  Johnny and Bentley hurry to the pavilion and fetch the two wicker chairs.  Johnny gives his to Lina.  Hypatia and Percival take the chairs at the worktable.  Lord Summerhays gives the chair at the vestibule end of the writing table to Mrs Tarleton; and Bentley replaces it with a wicker chair, which Lord Summerhays takes.

Johnny remains standing behind the worktable, Bentley behind his father.

MRS TARLETON.  [to Lina]  Have some tea now, wont you?

LINA.  I never drink tea.

TARLETON.  [sitting down at the end of the writing table nearest Lina]  Bad thing to aeroplane on, I should imagine.  Too jumpy.  Been up much?

LINA.  Not in an aeroplane.  Ive parachuted; but thats child’s play.

MRS TARLETON.  But arnt you very foolish to run such a dreadful risk?

LINA.  You cant live without running risks.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, what a thing to say!  Didnt you know you might have been killed?

LINA.  That was why I went up.

HYPATIA.  Of course.  Cant you understand the fascination of the thing? the novelty! the daring! the sense of something happening!

LINA.  Oh no.  It’s too tame a business for that.  I went up for family reasons.

TARLETON.  Eh?  What?  Family reasons?

MRS TARLETON.  I hope it wasnt to spite your mother?

PERCIVAL.  [quickly]  Or your husband?

LINA.  I’m not married.  And why should I want to spite my mother?

HYPATIA.  [aside to Percival]  That was clever of you, Mr Percival.

PERCIVAL.  What?

HYPATIA.  To find out.

TARLETON.  I’m in a difficulty.  I cant understand a lady going up in an aeroplane for family reasons.  It’s rude to be curious and ask questions; but then it’s inhuman to be indifferent, as if you didnt care.

LINA.  I’ll tell you with pleasure.  For the last hundred and fifty years, not a single day has passed without some member of my family risking his life — or her life.  It’s a point of honor with us to keep up that tradition.  Usually several of us do it; but it happens that just at this moment it is being kept up by one of my brothers only.

Early this morning I got a telegram from him to say that there had been a fire, and that he could do nothing for the rest of the week.

Fortunately I had an invitation from the Aerial League to see this gentleman try to break the passenger record.  I appealed to the President of the League to let me save the honor of my family.  He arranged it for me.

TARLETON.  Oh, I must be dreaming.  This is stark raving nonsense.

LINA.  [quietly]  You are quite awake, sir.

JOHNNY.  We cant all be dreaming the same thing, Governor.

TARLETON.  Of course not, you duffer; but then I’m dreaming you as well as the lady.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont be silly, John.  The lady is only joking, I’m sure.  [To Lina]  I suppose your luggage is in the aeroplane.

PERCIVAL.  Luggage was out of the question.  If I stay to dinner I’m afraid I cant change unless youll lend me some clothes.

MRS TARLETON.  Do you mean neither of you?

PERCIVAL.  I’m afraid so.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh well, never mind:  Hypatia will lend the lady a gown.

LINA.  Thank you:  I’m quite comfortable as I am.  I am not accustomed to gowns:  they hamper me and make me feel ridiculous; so if you dont mind I shall not change.

MRS TARLETON.  Well, I’m beginning to think I’m doing a bit of dreaming myself.

HYPATIA.  [impatiently]  Oh, it’s all right, mamma.  Johnny:  look after Mr. Percival.  [To Lina, rising]  Come with me.

Lina follows her to the inner door.  They all rise.

JOHNNY.  [to Percival]  I’ll shew you.

PERCIVAL.  Thank you.

Lina goes out with Hypatia, and Percival with Johnny.

MRS TARLETON.  Well, this is a nice thing to happen!  And look at the greenhouse!  Itll cost thirty pounds to mend it.  People have no right to do such things.  And you invited them to dinner too!  What sort of woman is that to have in our house when you know that all Hindhead will be calling on us to see that aeroplane?  Bunny:  come with me and help me to get all the people out of the grounds:  I declare they came running as if theyd sprung up out of the earth [she makes for the inner door].

TARLETON.  No:  dont you trouble, Chickabiddy:  I’ll tackle em.

MRS TARLETON.  Indeed youll do nothing of the kind:  youll stay here quietly with Lord Summerhays.  Youd invite them all to dinner.  Come,

Bunny.  [She goes out, followed by Bentley.  Lord Summerhays sits down again].

TARLETON.  Singularly beautiful woman Summerhays.  What do you make of her?  She must be a princess.  Whats this family of warriors and statesmen that risk their lives every day?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  They are evidently not warriors and statesmen, or they wouldnt do that.

TARLETON.  Well, then, who the devil are they?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I think I know.  The last time I saw that lady, she did something I should not have thought possible.

TARLETON.  What was that?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Well, she walked backwards along a taut wire without a balancing pole and turned a somersault in the middle.  I remember that her name was Lina, and that the other name was foreign; though I dont recollect it.

TARLETON.  Szcz!  You couldnt have forgotten that if youd heard it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I didnt hear it:  I only saw it on a program.  But it’s clear shes an acrobat.  It explains how she saved Percival.  And it accounts for her family pride.

TARLETON.  An acrobat, eh?  Good, good, good!  Summerhays:  that brings her within reach.  Thats better than a princess.  I steeled this evergreen heart of mine when I thought she was a princess.  Now I shall let it be touched.  She is accessible.  Good.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I hope you are not serious.  Remember:  you have a family.  You have a position.  You are not in your first youth.

TARLETON.  No matter.

Theres magic in the night

When the heart is young.

My heart is young.  Besides, I’m a married man, not a widower like you.  A married man can do anything he likes if his wife dont mind.  A widower cant be too careful.  Not that I would have you think me an unprincipled man or a bad husband.  I’m not.  But Ive a superabundance of vitality.  Read Pepys’ Diary.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The woman is your guest, Tarleton.

TARLETON.  Well, is she?  A woman I bring into my house is my guest.

A woman you bring into my house is my guest.  But a woman who drops bang down out of the sky into my greenhouse and smashes every blessed pane of glass in it must take her chance.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Still, you know that my name must not be associated with any scandal.  Youll be careful, wont you?

TARLETON.  Oh Lord, yes.  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.  I was only joking, of course.

Mrs Tarleton comes back through the inner door.

MRS TARLETON.  Well I never!  John:  I dont think that young woman’s right in her head.  Do you know what shes just asked for?

TARLETON.  Champagne?

MRS TARLETON.  No.  She wants a Bible and six oranges.

TARLETON.  What?

MRS TARLETON.  A Bible and six oranges.

TARLETON.  I understand the oranges:  shes doing an orange cure of some sort.  But what on earth does she want the Bible for?

MRS TARLETON.  I’m sure I cant imagine.  She cant be right in her head.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Perhaps she wants to read it.

MRS TARLETON.  But why should she, on a weekday, at all events.  What would you advise me to do, Lord Summerhays?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Well, is there a Bible in the house?

TARLETON.  Stacks of em.  Theres the family Bible, and the Dore Bible, and the parallel revised version Bible, and the Doves Press Bible, and Johnny’s Bible and Bobby’s Bible and Patsy’s Bible, and the Chickabiddy’s Bible and my Bible; and I daresay the servants could raise a few more between them.  Let her have the lot.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont talk like that before Lord Summerhays, John.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It doesnt matter, Mrs Tarleton:  in Jinghiskahn it was a punishable offence to expose a Bible for sale.  The empire has no religion.

Lina comes in.  She has left her cap in Hypatia’s room.  She stops on the landing just inside the door, and speaks over the handrail.

LINA.  Oh, Mrs Tarleton, shall I be making myself very troublesome if I ask for a music-stand in my room as well?

TARLETON.  Not at all. You can have the piano if you like.  Or the gramophone.  Have the gramophone.

LINA.  No, thank you:  no music.

MRS TARLETON.  [going to the steps]  Do you think it’s good for you to eat so many oranges?  Arnt you afraid of getting jaundice?

LINA.  [coming down]  Not in the least.  But billiard balls will do quite as well.

MRS TARLETON.  But you cant eat billiard balls, child!

TARLETON.  Get em, Chickabiddy.  I understand.  [He imitates a juggler tossing up balls].  Eh?

LINA.  [going to him, past his wife]  Just so.

TARLETON.  Billiard balls and cues.  Plates, knives, and forks.  Two paraffin lamps and a hatstand.

LINA.  No:  that is popular low-class business.  In our family we touch nothing but classical work.  Anybody can do lamps and hatstands.

I can do silver bullets.  That is really hard.  [She passes on to Lord Summerhays, and looks gravely down at him as he sits by the writing table].

MRS TARLETON.  Well, I’m sure I dont know what youre talking about; and I only hope you know yourselves.  However, you shall have what you want, of course.  [She goes up the steps and leaves the room].

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Will you forgive my curiosity?  What is the Bible for?

LINA.  To quiet my soul.

LORD SUMMERHAYS [with a sigh]  Ah yes, yes.  It no longer quiets mine, I am sorry to say.

LINA.  That is because you do not know how to read it.  Put it up before you on a stand; and open it at the Psalms.  When you can read them and understand them, quite quietly and happily, and keep six balls in the air all the time, you are in perfect condition; and youll never make a mistake that evening.  If you find you cant do that, then go and pray until you can.  And be very careful that evening.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Is that the usual form of test in your profession?

LINA.  Nothing that we Szczepanowskis do is usual, my lord.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Are you all so wonderful?

LINA.  It is our profession to be wonderful.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Do you never condescend to do as common people do?

For instance, do you not pray as common people pray?

LINA.  Common people do not pray, my lord:  they only beg.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  You never ask for anything?

LINA.  No.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Then why do you pray?

LINA.  To remind myself that I have a soul.

TARLETON.  [walking about]  True.  Fine.  Good.  Beautiful.  All this damned materialism:  what good is it to anybody?  Ive got a soul: dont tell me I havnt.  Cut me up and you cant find it.  Cut up a steam engine and you cant find the steam.  But, by George, it makes the engine go.  Say what you will, Summerhays, the divine spark is a fact.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Have I denied it?

TARLETON.  Our whole civilization is a denial of it.  Read Walt Whitman.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I shall go to the billiard room and get the balls for you.

LINA.  Thank you.

Lord Summerhays goes out through the vestibule door.

TARLETON.  [going to her]  Listen to me.  [She turns quickly].

What you said just now was beautiful.  You touch chords.  You appeal to the poetry in a man.  You inspire him.  Come now!  Youre a woman of the world:  youre independent:  you must have driven lots of men crazy.  You know the sort of man I am, dont you?  See through me at a glance, eh?

LINA.  Yes.  [She sits down quietly in the chair Lord Summerhays has just left].

TARLETON.  Good.  Well, do you like me?  Dont misunderstand me:  I’m perfectly aware that youre not going to fall in love at first sight with a ridiculous old shopkeeper.  I cant help that ridiculous old shopkeeper.  I have to carry him about with me whether I like it or not.  I have to pay for his clothes, though I hate the cut of them: especially the waistcoat.  I have to look at him in the glass while I’m shaving.  I loathe him because hes a living lie.  My soul’s not like that:  it’s like yours.  I want to make a fool of myself.  About you.  Will you let me?

LINA.  [very calm]  How much will you pay?

TARLETON.  Nothing.  But I’ll throw as many sovereigns as you like into the sea to shew you that I’m in earnest.

LINA.  Are those your usual terms?

TARLETON.  No.  I never made that bid before.

LINA.  [producing a dainty little book and preparing to write in it]

What did you say your name was?

TARLETON.  John Tarleton.  The great John Tarleton of Tarleton’s Underwear.

LINA.  [writing]  T-a-r-l-e-t-o-n.  Er — ?  [She looks up at him inquiringly].

TARLETON.  [promptly]  Fifty-eight.

LINA.  Thank you.  I keep a list of all my offers.  I like to know what I’m considered worth.

TARLETON.  Let me look.

LINA.  [offering the book to him]  It’s in Polish.

TARLETON.  Thats no good.  Is mine the lowest offer?

LINA.  No:  the highest.

TARLETON.  What do most of them come to?  Diamonds?  Motor cars?

Furs?  Villa at Monte Carlo?

LINA.  Oh yes:  all that.  And sometimes the devotion of a lifetime.

TARLETON.  Fancy that!  A young man offering a woman his old age as a temptation!

LINA.  By the way, you did not say how long.

TARLETON.  Until you get tired of me.

LINA.  Or until you get tired of me?

TARLETON.  I never get tired.  I never go on long enough for that.

But when it becomes so grand, so inspiring that I feel that everything must be an anti-climax after that, then I run away.

LINA.  Does she let you go without a struggle?

TARLETON.  Yes.  Glad to get rid of me.  When love takes a man as it takes me — when it makes him great — it frightens a woman.

LINA.  The lady here is your wife, isnt she?  Dont you care for her?

TARLETON.  Yes.  And mind! she comes first always.  I reserve her dignity even when I sacrifice my own.  Youll respect that point of honor, wont you?

LINA.  Only a point of honor?

TARLETON.  [impulsively]  No, by God! a point of affection as well.

LINA.  [smiling, pleased with him]  Shake hands, old pal [she rises and offers him her hand frankly].

TARLETON.  [giving his hand rather dolefully]  Thanks.  That means no, doesnt it?

LINA.  It means something that will last longer than yes.  I like you.

I admit you to my friendship.  What a pity you were not trained when you were young!  Youd be young still.

TARLETON.  I suppose, to an athlete like you, I’m pretty awful, eh?

LINA.  Shocking.

TARLETON.  Too much crumb.  Wrinkles.  Yellow patches that wont come off.  Short wind.  I know.  I’m ashamed of myself.  I could do nothing on the high rope.

LINA.  Oh yes:  I could put you in a wheelbarrow and run you along, two hundred feet up.

TARLETON.  [shuddering]  Ugh!  Well, I’d do even that for you.  Read The Master Builder.

LINA.  Have you learnt everything from books?

TARLETON.  Well, have you learnt everything from the flying trapeze?

LINA.  On the flying trapeze there is often another woman; and her life is in your hands every night and your life in hers.

TARLETON.  Lina:  I’m going to make a fool of myself.  I’m going to cry [he crumples into the nearest chair].

LINA.  Pray instead:  dont cry.  Why should you cry?  Youre not the first I’ve said no to.

TARLETON.  If you had said yes, should I have been the first then?

LINA.  What right have you to ask?  Have I asked am I the first?

TARLETON.  Youre right:  a vulgar question.  To a man like me, everybody is the first.  Life renews itself.

LINA.  The youngest child is the sweetest.

TARLETON.  Dont probe too deep, Lina.  It hurts.

LINA.  You must get out of the habit of thinking that these things matter so much.  It’s linendraperish.

TARLETON.  Youre quite right.  Ive often said so.  All the same, it does matter; for I want to cry.  [He buries his face in his arms on the work-table and sobs].

LINA.  [going to him]  O la la!  [She slaps him vigorously, but not unkindly, on the shoulder].  Courage, old pal, courage!  Have you a gymnasium here?

TARLETON.  Theres a trapeze and bars and things in the billiard room.

LINA.  Come.  You need a few exercises.  I’ll teach you how to stop crying.  [She takes his arm and leads him off into the vestibule].

A young man, cheaply dressed and strange in manner, appears in the garden; steals to the pavilion door; and looks in.  Seeing that there is nobody, he enters cautiously until he has come far enough to see into the hatstand corner.  He draws a revolver, and examines it, apparently to make sure that it is loaded.  Then his attention is caught by the Turkish bath.  He looks down the lunette, and opens the panels.

HYPATIA.  [calling in the garden]  Mr Percival!  Mr Percival!  Where are you?

The young man makes for the door, but sees Percival coming.  He turns and bolts into the Turkish bath, which he closes upon himself just in time to escape being caught by Percival, who runs in through the pavilion, bareheaded.  He also, it appears, is in search of a hiding-place; for he stops and turns between the two tables to take a survey of the room; then runs into the corner between the end of the sideboard and the wall.  Hypatia, excited, mischievous, her eyes glowing, runs in, precisely on his trail; turns at the same spot; and discovers him just as he makes a dash for the pavilion door.  She flies back and intercepts him.

HYPATIA.  Aha! arnt you glad Ive caught you?

PERCIVAL.  [illhumoredly turning away from her and coming towards the writing table]  No I’m not.  Confound it, what sort of girl are you?

What sort of house is this?  Must I throw all good manners to the winds?

HYPATIA.  [following him]  Do, do, do, do, do.  This is the house of a respectable shopkeeper, enormously rich.  This is the respectable shopkeeper’s daughter, tired of good manners.  [Slipping her left hand into his right]  Come, handsome young man, and play with the respectable shopkeeper’s daughter.

PERCIVAL.  [withdrawing quickly from her touch]  No, no:  dont you know you mustnt go on like this with a perfect stranger?

HYPATIA.  Dropped down from the sky.  Dont you know that you must always go on like this when you get the chance?  You must come to the top of the hill and chase me through the bracken.  You may kiss me if you catch me.

PERCIVAL.  I shall do nothing of the sort.

HYPATIA.  Yes you will:  you cant help yourself.  Come along.  [She seizes his sleeve].  Fool, fool:  come along.  Dont you want to?

PERCIVAL.  No:  certainly not.  I should never be forgiven if I did it.

HYPATIA.  Youll never forgive yourself if you dont.

PERCIVAL.  Nonsense.  Youre engaged to Ben.  Ben’s my friend.  What do you take me for?

HYPATIA.  Ben’s old.  Ben was born old.  Theyre all old here, except you and me and the man-woman or woman-man or whatever you call her that came with you.  They never do anything:  they only discuss whether what other people do is right.  Come and give them something to discuss.

PERCIVAL.  I will do nothing incorrect.

HYPATIA.  Oh, dont be afraid, little boy:  youll get nothing but a kiss; and I’ll fight like the devil to keep you from getting that.

But we must play on the hill and race through the heather.

PERCIVAL.  Why?

HYPATIA.  Because we want to, handsome young man.

PERCIVAL.  But if everybody went on in this way —

HYPATIA.  How happy! oh how happy the world would be!

PERCIVAL.  But the consequences may be serious.

HYPATIA.  Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.  My father says so; and I’m my father’s daughter.

PERCIVAL.  I’m the son of three fathers.  I mistrust these wild impulses.

HYPATIA.  Take care.  Youre letting the moment slip.  I feel the first chill of the wave of prudence.  Save me.

PERCIVAL.  Really, Miss Tarleton [she strikes him across the face]

— Damn you!  [Recovering himself, horrified at his lapse]  I beg your pardon; but since weve both forgotten ourselves, youll please allow me to leave the house.  [He turns towards the inner door, having left his cap in the bedroom].

HYPATIA.  [standing in his way]  Are you ashamed of having said

“Damn you” to me?

PERCIVAL.  I had no right to say it.  I’m very much ashamed of it.  I have already begged your pardon.

HYPATIA.  And youre not ashamed of having said “Really, Miss Tarleton.”

PERCIVAL.  Why should I?

HYPATIA.  O man, man! mean, stupid, cowardly, selfish masculine male man!  You ought to have been a governess.  I was expelled from school for saying that the very next person that said “Really, Miss Tarleton,” to me, I would strike her across the face.  You were the next.

PERCIVAL.  I had no intention of being offensive.  Surely there is nothing that can wound any lady in — [He hesitates, not quite convinced].  At least — er — I really didnt mean to be disagreeable.

HYPATIA.  Liar.

PERCIVAL.  Of course if youre going to insult me, I am quite helpless.

Youre a woman:  you can say what you like.

HYPATIA.  And you can only say what you dare.  Poor wretch:  it isnt much.  [He bites his lip, and sits down, very much annoyed].

Really, Mr Percival!  You sit down in the presence of a lady and leave her standing.  [He rises hastily].  Ha, ha!  Really, Mr Percival!

Oh really, really, really, really, really, Mr Percival!  How do you like it?  Wouldnt you rather I damned you?

PERCIVAL.  Miss Tarleton —

HYPATIA.  [caressingly]  Hypatia, Joey. Patsy, if you like.

PERCIVAL.  Look here:  this is no good.  You want to do what you like?

HYPATIA.  Dont you?

PERCIVAL.  No.  Ive been too well brought up.  Ive argued all through this thing; and I tell you I’m not prepared to cast off the social bond.  It’s like a corset:  it’s a support to the figure even if it does squeeze and deform it a bit.  I want to be free.

HYPATIA.  Well, I’m tempting you to be free.

PERCIVAL.  Not at all.  Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.  If every man who dislikes me is to throw a handful of mud in my face, and every woman who likes me is to behave like Potiphar’s wife, then I shall be a slave:  the slave of uncertainty:  the slave of fear:  the worst of all slaveries.  How would you like it if every laborer you met in the road were to make love to you?  No.  Give me the blessed protection of a good stiff conventionality among thoroughly well-brought up ladies and gentlemen.

HYPATIA.  Another talker!  Men like conventions because men made them.

I didnt make them:  I dont like them:  I wont keep them.  Now, what will you do?

PERCIVAL.  Bolt.  [He runs out through the pavilion].

HYPATIA.  I’ll catch you.  [She dashes off in pursuit].

During this conversation the head of the scandalized man in the Turkish bath has repeatedly risen from the lunette, with a strong expression of moral shock.  It vanishes abruptly as the two turn towards it in their flight.  At the same moment Tarleton comes back through the vestibule door, exhausted by severe and unaccustomed exercise.

TARLETON.  [looking after the flying figures with amazement]  Hallo,

Patsy:  whats up?  Another aeroplane?  [They are far too preoccupied to hear him; and he is left staring after them as they rush away through the garden.  He goes to the pavilion door and looks up; but the heavens are empty.  His exhaustion disables him from further inquiry.  He dabs his brow with his handkerchief, and walks stiffly to the nearest convenient support, which happens to be the Turkish bath.

He props himself upon it with his elbow, and covers his eyes with his hand for a moment.  After a few sighing breaths, he feels a little better, and uncovers his eyes.  The man’s head rises from the lunette a few inches from his nose.  He recoils from the bath with a violent start].  Oh Lord!  My brain’s gone.  [Calling piteously]

Chickabiddy!  [He staggers down to the writing table].

THE MAN.  [coming out of the bath, pistol in hand]  Another sound; and youre a dead man.

TARLETON.  [braced]  Am I?  Well, youre a live one:  thats one comfort.  I thought you were a ghost.  [He sits down, quite undisturbed by the pistol]  Who are you; and what the devil were you doing in my new Turkish bath?

THE MAN.  [with tragic intensity]  I am the son of Lucinda Titmus.

TARLETON.  [the name conveying nothing to him]  Indeed?  And how is she?  Quite well, I hope, eh?

THE MAN.  She is dead.  Dead, my God! and youre alive.

TARLETON.  [unimpressed by the tragedy, but sympathetic]  Oh!  Lost your mother?  Thats sad.  I’m sorry.  But we cant all have the luck to survive our mothers, and be nursed out of the world by the hands that nursed us into it.

THE MAN.  Much you care, damn you!

TARLETON.  Oh, dont cut up rough.  Face it like a man.  You see I didnt know your mother; but Ive no doubt she was an excellent woman.

THE MAN.  Not know her!  Do you dare to stand there by her open grave and deny that you knew her?

TARLETON.  [trying to recollect]  What did you say her name was?

THE MAN.  Lucinda Titmus.

TARLETON.  Well, I ought to remember a rum name like that if I ever heard it.  But I dont.  Have you a photograph or anything?

THE MAN.  Forgotten even the name of your victim!

TARLETON.  Oh! she was my victim, was she?

THE MAN.  She was.  And you shall see her face again before you die, dead as she is.  I have a photograph.

TARLETON.  Good.

THE MAN.  Ive two photographs.

TARLETON.  Still better.  Treasure the mother’s pictures.  Good boy!

THE MAN.  One of them as you knew her.  The other as she became when you flung her aside, and she withered into an old woman.

TARLETON.  She’d have done that anyhow, my lad.  We all grow old.

Look at me!  [Seeing that the man is embarrassed by his pistol in fumbling for the photographs with his left hand in his breast pocket]

Let me hold the gun for you.

THE MAN.  [retreating to the worktable]  Stand back.  Do you take me for a fool?

TARLETON.  Well, youre a little upset, naturally.  It does you credit.

THE MAN.  Look here, upon this picture and on this.  [He holds out the two photographs like a hand at cards, and points to them with the pistol].

TARLETON.  Good.  Read Shakespear:  he has a word for every occasion.

[He takes the photographs, one in each hand, and looks from one to the other, pleased and interested, but without any sign of recognition]  What a pretty girl!  Very pretty.  I can imagine myself falling in love with her when I was your age.  I wasnt a bad-looking young fellow myself in those days.  [Looking at the other]  Curious that we should both have gone the same way.

THE MAN.  You and she the same way!  What do you mean?

TARLETON.  Both got stout, I mean.

THE MAN.  Would you have had her deny herself food?

TARLETON.  No:  it wouldnt have been any use.  It’s constitutional.

No matter how little you eat you put on flesh if youre made that way.

[He resumes his study of the earlier photograph].

THE MAN.  Is that all the feeling that rises in you at the sight of the face you once knew so well?

TARLETON.  [too much absorbed in the portrait to heed him]  Funny that I cant remember!  Let this be a lesson to you, young man.  I could go into court tomorrow and swear I never saw that face before in my life if it wasnt for that brooch [pointing to the photograph].

Have you got that brooch, by the way?  [The man again resorts to his breast pocket].  You seem to carry the whole family property in that pocket.

THE MAN.  [producing a brooch]  Here it is to prove my bona fides.

TARLETON.  [pensively putting the photographs on the table and taking the brooch]  I bought that brooch in Cheapside from a man with a yellow wig and a cast in his left eye.  Ive never set eyes on him from that day to this.  And yet I remember that man; and I cant remember your mother.

THE MAN.  Monster!  Without conscience! without even memory!  You left her to her shame —

TARLETON.  [throwing the brooch on the table and rising pepperily]

Come, come, young man! none of that.  Respect the romance of your mother’s youth.  Dont you start throwing stones at her.  I dont recall her features just at this moment; but Ive no doubt she was kind to me and we were happy together.  If you have a word to say against her, take yourself out of my house and say it elsewhere.

THE MAN.  What sort of a joker are you?  Are you trying to put me in the wrong, when you have to answer to me for a crime that would make every honest man spit at you as you passed in the street if I were to make it known?

TARLETON.  You read a good deal, dont you?

THE MAN.  What if I do?  What has that to do with your infamy and my mother’s doom?

TARLETON.  There, you see!  Doom!  Thats not good sense; but it’s literature.  Now it happens that I’m a tremendous reader:  always was.

When I was your age I read books of that sort by the bushel:  the Doom sort, you know.  It’s odd, isnt it, that you and I should be like one another in that respect?  Can you account for it in any way?

THE MAN.  No.  What are you driving at?

TARLETON.  Well, do you know who your father was?

THE MAN.  I see what you mean now.  You dare set up to be my father.

Thank heaven Ive not a drop of your vile blood in my veins.

TARLETON.  [sitting down again with a shrug]  Well, if you wont be civil, theres no pleasure in talking to you, is there?  What do you want?  Money?

THE MAN.  How dare you insult me?

TARLETON.  Well, what do you want?

THE MAN.  Justice.

TARLETON.  Youre quite sure thats all?

THE MAN.  It’s enough for me.

TARLETON.  A modest sort of demand, isnt it?  Nobody ever had it since the world began, fortunately for themselves; but you must have it, must you?  Well, youve come to the wrong shop for it:  youll get no justice here:  we dont keep it.  Human nature is what we stock.

THE MAN.  Human nature!  Debauchery! gluttony! selfishness! robbery of the poor!  Is that what you call human nature?

TARLETON.  No:  thats what you call it.  Come, my lad!  Whats the matter with you?  You dont look starved; and youve a decent suit of clothes.

THE MAN.  Forty-two shillings.

TARLETON.  They can do you a very decent suit for forty-two shillings.

Have you paid for it?

THE MAN.  Do you take me for a thief?  And do you suppose I can get credit like you?

TARLETON.  Then you were able to lay your hand on forty-two shillings.

Judging from your conversational style, I should think you must spend at least a shilling a week on romantic literature.

THE MAN.  Where would I get a shilling a week to spend on books when I can hardly keep myself decent?  I get books at the Free Library.

TARLETON [springing to his feet]  What!!!

THE MAN.  [recoiling before his vehemence]  The Free Library.

Theres no harm in that.

TARLETON.  Ingrate!  I supply you with free books; and the use you make of them is to persuade yourself that it’s a fine thing to shoot me.  [He throws himself doggedly back into his chair].  I’ll never give another penny to a Free Library.

THE MAN.  Youll never give another penny to anything.  This is the end:  for you and me.

TARLETON.  Pooh!  Come, come, man! talk business.  Whats wrong?  Are you out of employment?

THE MAN.  No.  This is my Saturday afternoon.  Dont flatter yourself that I’m a loafer or a criminal.  I’m a cashier; and I defy you to say that my cash has ever been a farthing wrong.  Ive a right to call you to account because my hands are clean.

TARLETON.  Well, call away.  What have I to account for?  Had you a hard time with your mother?  Why didnt she ask me for money?

THE MAN.  She’d have died first.  Besides, who wanted your money?  Do you suppose we lived in the gutter?  My father maynt have been in as large a way as you; but he was better connected; and his shop was as respectable as yours.

TARLETON.  I suppose your mother brought him a little capital.

THE MAN.  I dont know.  Whats that got to do with you?

TARLETON.  Well, you say she and I knew one another and parted.  She must have had something off me then, you know.  One doesnt get out of these things for nothing.  Hang it, young man:  do you suppose Ive no heart?  Of course she had her due; and she found a husband with it, and set him up in business with it, and brought you up respectably; so what the devil have you to complain of?

THE MAN.  Are women to be ruined with impunity?

TARLETON.  I havnt ruined any woman that I’m aware of.  Ive been the making of you and your mother.

THE MAN.  Oh, I’m a fool to listen to you and argue with you.  I came here to kill you and then kill myself.

TARLETON.  Begin with yourself, if you dont mind.  Ive a good deal of business to do still before I die.  Havnt you?

THE MAN.  No.  Thats just it:  Ive no business to do.  Do you know what my life is?  I spend my days from nine to six — nine hours of daylight and fresh air — in a stuffy little den counting another man’s money.  Ive an intellect:  a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and tenpences and see how much they come to at the end of the day and take care that no one steals them.  I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and give change, and fill cheques and stamp receipts; and not a penny of that money is my own:  not one of those transactions has the smallest interest for me or anyone else in the world but him; and even he couldnt stand it if he had to do it all himself.  And I’m envied: aye, envied for the variety and liveliness of my job, by the poor devil of a bookkeeper that has to copy all my entries over again.

Fifty thousand entries a year that poor wretch makes; and not ten out of the fifty thousand ever has to be referred to again; and when all the figures are counted up and the balance sheet made out, the boss isnt a penny the richer than he’d be if bookkeeping had never been invented.  Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the very worst.

TARLETON.  Why not join the territorials?

THE MAN.  Because I shouldnt be let.  He hasnt even the sense to see that it would pay him to get some cheap soldiering out of me.  How can a man tied to a desk from nine to six be anything — be even a man, let alone a soldier?  But I’ll teach him and you a lesson.  Ive had enough of living a dog’s life and despising myself for it.  Ive had enough of being talked down to by hogs like you, and wearing my life out for a salary that wouldnt keep you in cigars.  Youll never believe that a clerk’s a man until one of us makes an example of one of you.

TARLETON.  Despotism tempered by assassination, eh?

THE MAN.  Yes.  Thats what they do in Russia.  Well, a business office is Russia as far as the clerks are concerned.  So dont you take it so coolly.  You think I’m not going to do it; but I am.

TARLETON.  [rising and facing him]  Come, now, as man to man!  It’s not my fault that youre poorer than I am; and it’s not your fault that I’m richer than you.  And if you could undo all that passed between me and your mother, you wouldnt undo it; and neither would she.  But youre sick of your slavery; and you want to be the hero of a romance and to get into the papers.  Eh?  A son revenges his mother’s shame.

Villain weltering in his gore.  Mother:  look down from heaven and receive your unhappy son’s last sigh.

THE MAN.  Oh, rot! do you think I read novelettes?  And do you suppose I believe such superstitions as heaven?  I go to church because the boss told me I’d get the sack if I didnt.  Free England!  Ha!  [Lina appears at the pavilion door, and comes swiftly and noiselessly forward on seeing the man with a pistol in his hand].

TARLETON.  Youre afraid of getting the sack; but youre not afraid to shoot yourself.

THE MAN.  Damn you! youre trying to keep me talking until somebody comes.  [He raises the pistol desperately, but not very resolutely].

LINA.  [at his right elbow]  Somebody has come.

THE MAN [turning on her]  Stand off.  I’ll shoot you if you lay a hand on me.  I will, by God.

LINA.  You cant cover me with that pistol.  Try.

He tries, presenting the pistol at her face.  She moves round him in the opposite direction to the hands of a clock with a light dancing step.  He finds it impossible to cover her with the pistol:  she is always too far to his left.  Tarleton, behind him, grips his wrist and drags his arm straight up, so that the pistol points to the ceiling.

As he tries to turn on his assailant, Lina grips his other wrist.

LINA.  Please stop.  I cant bear to twist anyone’s wrist; but I must if you dont let the pistol go.

THE MAN.  [letting Tarleton take it from him]  All right:  I’m done.

Couldnt even do that job decently.  Thats a clerk all over.  Very well:  send for your damned police and make an end of it.  I’m accustomed to prison from nine to six:  I daresay I can stand it from six to nine as well.

TARLETON.  Dont swear.  Thats a lady.  [He throws the pistol on the writing table].

THE MAN.  [looking at Lina in amazement]  Beaten by a female!  It needed only this.  [He collapses in the chair near the worktable, and hides his face.  They cannot help pitying him].

LINA.  Old pal:  dont call the police.  Lend him a bicycle and let him get away.

THE MAN.  I cant ride a bicycle.  I never could afford one.  I’m not even that much good.

TARLETON.  If I gave you a hundred pound note now to go and have a good spree with, I wonder would you know how to set about it.  Do you ever take a holiday?

THE MAN.  Take!  I got four days last August.

TARLETON.  What did you do?

THE MAN.  I did a cheap trip to Folkestone.  I spent sevenpence on dropping pennies into silly automatic machines and peepshows of rowdy girls having a jolly time.  I spent a penny on the lift and fourpence on refreshments.  That cleaned me out.  The rest of the time I was so miserable that I was glad to get back to the office.  Now you know.

LINA.  Come to the gymnasium:  I’ll teach you how to make a man of yourself.  [The man is about to rise irresolutely, from the mere habit of doing what he is told, when Tarleton stops him].

TARLETON.  Young man:  dont.  Youve tried to shoot me; but I’m not vindictive.  I draw the line at putting a man on the rack.  If you want every joint in your body stretched until it’s an agony to live — until you have an unnatural feeling that all your muscles are singing and laughing with pain — then go to the gymnasium with that lady.  But youll be more comfortable in jail.

LINA.  [greatly amused]  Was that why you went away, old pal?  Was that the telegram you said you had forgotten to send?

Mrs Tarleton comes in hastily through the inner door.

MRS TARLETON.  [on the steps]  Is anything the matter, John?  Nurse says she heard you calling me a quarter of an hour ago; and that your voice sounded as if you were ill.  [She comes between Tarleton and the man.]  Is anything the matter?

TARLETON.  This is the son of an old friend of mine.  Mr — er — Mr Gunner.  [To the man, who rises awkwardly].  My wife.

MRS TARLETON.  Good evening to you.

GUNNER.  Er — [He is too nervous to speak, and makes a shambling bow].

Bentley looks in at the pavilion door, very peevish, and too preoccupied with his own affairs to pay any attention to those of the company.

BENTLEY.  I say:  has anybody seen Hypatia?  She promised to come out with me; and I cant find her anywhere.  And wheres Joey?

GUNNER.  [suddenly breaking out aggressively, being incapable of any middle way between submissiveness and violence]  I can tell you where Hypatia is.  I can tell you where Joey is.  And I say it’s a scandal and an infamy.  If people only knew what goes on in this so-called respectable house it would be put a stop to.  These are the morals of our pious capitalist class!  This is your rotten bourgeoisie!  This! —

MRS TARLETON.  Dont you dare use such language in company.  I wont allow it.

TARLETON.  All right, Chickabiddy:  it’s not bad language:  it’s only Socialism.

MRS TARLETON.  Well, I wont have any Socialism in my house.

TARLETON.  [to Gunner]  You hear what Mrs Tarleton says.  Well, in this house everybody does what she says or out they go.

GUNNER.  Do you suppose I want to stay?  Do you think I would breathe this polluted atmosphere a moment longer than I could help?

BENTLEY.  [running forward between Lina and Gunner]  But what did you mean by what you said about Miss Tarleton and Mr Percival, you beastly rotter, you?

GUNNER.  [to Tarleton]  Oh! is Hypatia your daughter?  And Joey is Mister Percival, is he?  One of your set, I suppose.  One of the smart set!  One of the bridge-playing, eighty-horse-power, week-ender set!

One of the johnnies I slave for!  Well, Joey has more decency than your daughter, anyhow.  The women are the worst.  I never believed it til I saw it with my own eyes.  Well, it wont last for ever.  The writing is on the wall.  Rome fell.  Babylon fell.  Hindhead’s turn will come.

MRS TARLETON.  [naively looking at the wall for the writing]

Whatever are you talking about, young man?

GUNNER.  I know what I’m talking about.  I went into that Turkish bath a boy:  I came out a man.

MRS TARLETON.  Good gracious! hes mad.  [To Lina]  Did John make him take a Turkish bath?

LINA.  No.  He doesnt need Turkish baths:  he needs to put on a little flesh.  I dont understand what it’s all about.  I found him trying to shoot Mr Tarleton.

MRS TARLETON.  [with a scream]  Oh! and John encouraging him, I’ll be bound!  Bunny:  you go for the police.  [To Gunner]  I’ll teach you to come into my house and shoot my husband.

GUNNER.  Teach away.  I never asked to be let off.  I’m ashamed to be free instead of taking my part with the rest.  Women — beautiful women of noble birth — are going to prison for their opinions.  Girl students in Russia go to the gallows; let themselves be cut in pieces with the knout, or driven through the frozen snows of Siberia, sooner than stand looking on tamely at the world being made a hell for the toiling millions.  If you were not all skunks and cowards youd be suffering with them instead of battening here on the plunder of the poor.

MRS TARLETON.  [much vexed]  Oh, did you ever hear such silly nonsense?  Bunny:  go and tell the gardener to send over one of his men to Grayshott for the police.

GUNNER.  I’ll go with him.  I intend to give myself up.  I’m going to expose what Ive seen here, no matter what the consequences may be to my miserable self.

TARLETON.  Stop.  You stay where you are, Ben.  Chickabiddy:  youve never had the police in.  If you had, youd not be in a hurry to have them in again.  Now, young man:  cut the cackle; and tell us, as short as you can, what did you see?

GUNNER.  I cant tell you in the presence of ladies.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, you are tiresome.  As if it mattered to anyone what you saw.  Me!  A married woman that might be your mother.  [To Lina]

And I’m sure youre not particular, if youll excuse my saying so.

TARLETON.  Out with it.  What did you see?

GUNNER.  I saw your daughter with my own eyes — oh well, never mind what I saw.

BENTLEY.  [almost crying with anxiety]  You beastly rotter, I’ll get Joey to give you such a hiding —

TARLETON.  You cant leave it at that, you know.  What did you see my daughter doing?

GUNNER.  After all, why shouldnt she do it?  The Russian students do it.  Women should be as free as men.  I’m a fool.  I’m so full of your bourgeois morality that I let myself be shocked by the application of my own revolutionary principles.  If she likes the man why shouldnt she tell him so?

MRS TARLETON.  I do wonder at you, John, letting him talk like this before everybody.  [Turning rather tartly to Lina]  Would you mind going away to the drawing-room just for a few minutes, Miss Chipenoska.  This is a private family matter, if you dont mind.

LINA.  I should have gone before, Mrs Tarleton, if there had been anyone to protect Mr Tarleton and the young gentleman.

TARLETON.  Youre quite right, Miss Lina:  you must stand by.  I could have tackled him this morning; but since you put me through those exercises I’d rather die than even shake hands with a man, much less fight him.

GUNNER.  It’s all of a piece here.  The men effeminate, the women unsexed —

TARLETON.  Dont begin again, old chap.  Keep it for Trafalgar Square.

HYPATIA’S VOICE OUTSIDE.  No, no.  [She breaks off in a stifled half laugh, half scream, and is seen darting across the garden with Percival in hot pursuit.  Immediately afterwards she appears again, and runs into the pavilion.  Finding it full of people, including a stranger, she stops; but Percival, flushed and reckless, rushes in and seizes her before he, too, realizes that they are not alone.  He releases her in confusion].

Dead silence.  They are all afraid to look at one another except Mrs Tarleton, who stares sternly at Hypatia.  Hypatia is the first to recover her presence of mind.

HYPATIA.  Excuse me rushing in like this.  Mr Percival has been chasing me down the hill.

GUNNER.  Who chased him up it?  Dont be ashamed.  Be fearless.  Be truthful.

TARLETON.  Gunner:  will you go to Paris for a fortnight?  I’ll pay your expenses.

HYPATIA.  What do you mean?

GUNNER.  There was a silent witness in the Turkish bath.

TARLETON.  I found him hiding there.  Whatever went on here, he saw and heard.  Thats what he means.

PERCIVAL.  [sternly approaching Gunner, and speaking with deep but contained indignation]  Am I to understand you as daring to put forward the monstrous and blackguardly lie that this lady behaved improperly in my presence?

GUNNER.  [turning white]  You know what I saw and heard.

Hypatia, with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, slips noiselessly into the swing chair, and watches Percival and Gunner, swinging slightly, but otherwise motionless.

PERCIVAL.  I hope it is not necessary for me to assure you all that there is not one word of truth — not one grain of substance — in this rascally calumny, which no man with a spark of decent feeling would have uttered even if he had been ignorant enough to believe it.  Miss Tarleton’s conduct, since I have had the honor of knowing her, has been, I need hardly say, in every respect beyond reproach.  [To Gunner]  As for you, sir, youll have the goodness to come out with me immediately.  I have some business with you which cant be settled in Mrs Tarleton’s presence or in her house.

GUNNER.  [painfully frightened]  Why should I go out with you?

PERCIVAL.  Because I intend that you shall.

GUNNER.  I wont be bullied by you.  [Percival makes a threatening step towards him].  Police!  [He tries to bolt; but Percival seizes him].  Leave me go, will you?  What right have you to lay hands on me?

TARLETON.  Let him run for it, Mr Percival.  Hes very poor company.

We shall be well rid of him.  Let him go.

PERCIVAL.  Not until he has taken back and made the fullest apology for the abominable lie he has told.  He shall do that or he shall defend himself as best he can against the most thorough thrashing I’m capable of giving him.  [Releasing Gunner, but facing him ominously]

Take your choice.  Which is it to be?

GUNNER.  Give me a fair chance.  Go and stick at a desk from nine to six for a month, and let me have your grub and your sport and your lessons in boxing, and I’ll fight you fast enough.  You know I’m no good or you darent bully me like this.

PERCIVAL.  You should have thought of that before you attacked a lady with a dastardly slander.  I’m waiting for your decision.  I’m rather in a hurry, please.

GUNNER.  I never said anything against the lady.

MRS TARLETON.  |    Oh, listen to that!

|

BENTLEY.       |    What a liar!

|

HYPATIA.       |    Oh!

|

TARLETON.      |    Oh, come!

PERCIVAL.  We’ll have it in writing, if you dont mind.  [Pointing to the writing table]  Sit down; and take that pen in your hand.

[Gunner looks irresolutely a little way round; then obeys].  Now write.  “I,” whatever your name is —

GUNNER [after a vain attempt]  I cant.  My hand’s shaking too much.

You see it’s no use.  I’m doing my best.  I cant.

PERCIVAL.  Mr Summerhays will write it:  you can sign it.

BENTLEY.  [insolently to Gunner]  Get up. [Gunner obeys; and Bentley, shouldering him aside towards Percival, takes his place and prepares to write].

PERCIVAL.  Whats your name?

GUNNER.  John Brown.

TARLETON.  Oh come!  Couldnt you make it Horace Smith? or Algernon Robinson?

GUNNER.  [agitatedly]  But my name is John Brown.  There are really John Browns.  How can I help it if my name’s a common one?

BENTLEY.  Shew us a letter addressed to you.

GUNNER.  How can I?  I never get any letters:  I’m only a clerk.  I can shew you J. B. on my handkerchief.  [He takes out a not very clean one].

BENTLEY.  [with disgust]  Oh, put it up again.  Let it go at John Brown.

PERCIVAL.  Where do you live?

GUNNER.  4 Chesterfield Parade, Kentish Town, N.W.

PERCIVAL.  [dictating]  I, John Brown, of 4 Chesterfield Parade,

Kentish Town, do hereby voluntarily confess that on the 31st May 1909

I — [To Tarleton]  What did he do exactly?

TARLETON.  [dictating] — I trespassed on the land of John Tarleton at Hindhead, and effected an unlawful entry into his house, where I secreted myself in a portable Turkish bath —

BENTLEY.  Go slow, old man.  Just a moment.  “Turkish bath” — yes?

TARLETON.  [continuing] — with a pistol, with which I threatened to take the life of the said John Tarleton —

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, John!  You might have been killed.

TARLETON. — and was prevented from doing so only by the timely arrival of the celebrated Miss Lina Szczepanowska.

MRS TARLETON.  Is she celebrated?  [Apologetically]  I never dreamt —

BENTLEY.  Look here:  I’m awfully sorry; but I cant spell Szczepanowska.

PERCIVAL.  I think it’s S, z, c, z — [Lina gives him her visiting-card].  Thank you.  [He throws it on Bentley’s blotter].

BENTLEY.  Thanks awfully.  [He writes the name].

TARLETON.  [to Percival]  Now it’s your turn.

PERCIVAL.  [dictating]  I further confess that I was guilty of uttering an abominable calumny concerning Miss Hypatia Tarleton, for which there was not a shred of foundation.

Impressive silence whilst Bentley writes.

BENTLEY.  “foundation”?

PERCIVAL.  I apologize most humbly to the lady and her family for my conduct — [he waits for Bentley to write].

BENTLEY.  “conduct”?

PERCIVAL. — and I promise Mr Tarleton not to repeat it, and to amend my life —

BENTLEY.  “amend my life”?

PERCIVAL. — and to do what in me lies to prove worthy of his kindness in giving me another chance —

BENTLEY.  “another chance”?

PERCIVAL. — and refraining from delivering me up to the punishment I so richly deserve.

BENTLEY.  “richly deserve.”

PERCIVAL.  [to Hypatia]  Does that satisfy you, Miss Tarleton?

HYPATIA.  Yes:  that will teach him to tell lies next time.

BENTLEY.  [rising to make place for Gunner and handing him the pen]

You mean it will teach him to tell the truth next time.

TARLETON.  Ahem!  Do you, Patsy?

PERCIVAL.  Be good enough to sign.  [Gunner sits down helplessly and dips the pen in the ink].  I hope what you are signing is no mere form of words to you, and that you not only say you are sorry, but that you are sorry.

Lord Summerhays and Johnny come in through the pavilion door.

MRS TARLETON.  Stop.  Mr Percival:  I think, on Hypatia’s account,

Lord Summerhays ought to be told about this.

Lord Summerhays, wondering what the matter is, comes forward between Percival and Lina.  Johnny stops beside Hypatia.

PERCIVAL.  Certainly.

TARLETON.  [uneasily]  Take my advice, and cut it short.  Get rid of him.

MRS TARLETON.  Hypatia ought to have her character cleared.

TARLETON.  You let well alone, Chickabiddy.  Most of our characters will bear a little careful dusting; but they wont bear scouring.

Patsy is jolly well out of it.  What does it matter, anyhow?

PERCIVAL.  Mr Tarleton:  we have already said either too much or not enough.  Lord Summerhays:  will you be kind enough to witness the declaration this man has just signed?

GUNNER.  I havnt yet.  Am I to sign now?

PERCIVAL.  Of course.  [Gunner, who is now incapable of doing anything on his own initiative, signs].  Now stand up and read your declaration to this gentleman.  [Gunner makes a vague movement and looks stupidly round.  Percival adds peremptorily]  Now, please.

GUNNER [rising apprehensively and reading in a hardly audible voice, like a very sick man]  I, John Brown, of 4 Chesterfield Parade,

Kentish Town, do hereby voluntarily confess that on the 31st May 1909

I trespassed on the land of John Tarleton at Hindhead, and effected an unlawful entry into his house, where I secreted myself in a portable Turkish bath, with a pistol, with which I threatened to take the life of the said John Tarleton, and was prevented from doing so only by the timely arrival of the celebrated Miss Lena Sh-Sh-sheepanossika.  I further confess that I was guilty of uttering an abominable calumny concerning Miss Hypatia Tarleton, for which there was not a shred of foundation.  I apologize most humbly to the lady and her family for my conduct; and I promise Mr Tarleton not to repeat it, and to amend my life, and to do what in me lies to prove worthy of his kindness in giving me another chance and refraining from delivering me up to the punishment I so richly deserve.

A short and painful silence follows.  Then Percival speaks.

PERCIVAL.  Do you consider that sufficient, Lord Summerhays?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Oh quite, quite.

PERCIVAL. [to Hypatia]  Lord Summerhays would probably like to hear you say that you are satisfied, Miss Tarleton.

HYPATIA.  [coming out of the swing, and advancing between Percival and Lord Summerhays]  I must say that you have behaved like a perfect gentleman, Mr. Percival.

PERCIVAL.  [first bowing to Hypatia, and then turning with cold contempt to Gunner, who is standing helpless]  We need not trouble you any further.  [Gunner turns vaguely towards the pavilion].

JOHNNY [with less refined offensiveness, pointing to the pavilion]

Thats your way.  The gardener will shew you the shortest way into the road.  Go the shortest way.

GUNNER.  [oppressed and disconcerted, hardly knows how to get out of the room]  Yes, sir.  I — [He turns again, appealing to Tarleton]

Maynt I have my mother’s photographs back again?  [Mrs Tarleton pricks up her ears].

TARLETON.  Eh?  What?  Oh, the photographs!  Yes, yes, yes:  take them.  [Gunner takes them from the table, and is creeping away, when Mrs Tarleton puts out her hand and stops him].

MRS TARLETON.  Whats this, John?  What were you doing with his mother’s photographs?

TARLETON.  Nothing, nothing.  Never mind, Chickabiddy:  it’s all right.

MRS TARLETON.  [snatching the photographs from Gunner’s irresolute fingers, and recognizing them at a glance]  Lucy Titmus!  Oh John,

John!

TARLETON.  [grimly, to Gunner]  Young man:  youre a fool; but youve just put the lid on this job in a masterly manner.  I knew you would.

I told you all to let well alone.  You wouldnt; and now you must take the consequences — or rather I must take them.

MRS TARLETON.  [to Gunner]  Are you Lucy’s son?

GUNNER.  Yes.

MRS TARLETON.  And why didnt you come to me?  I didnt turn my back on your mother when she came to me in her trouble.  Didnt you know that?

GUNNER.  No.  She never talked to me about anything.

TARLETON.  How could she talk to her own son?  Shy, Summerhays, shy.

Parent and child.  Shy.  [He sits down at the end of the writing table nearest the sideboard like a man resigned to anything that fate may have in store for him].

MRS TARLETON.  Then how did you find out?

GUNNER.  From her papers after she died.

MRS TARLETON.  [shocked]  Is Lucy dead?  And I never knew!  [With an effusion of tenderness]  And you here being treated like that, poor orphan, with nobody to take your part!  Tear up that foolish paper, child; and sit down and make friends with me.

JOHNNY.        |    Hallo, mother this is all very well, you know —

|

PERCIVAL.      |    But may I point out, Mrs Tarleton, that —

|

BENTLEY.       |    Do you mean that after what he said of —

|

HYPATIA.       |    Oh, look here, mamma:  this is really —

MRS TARLETON.  Will you please speak one at a time?

Silence.

PERCIVAL [in a very gentlemanly manner]  Will you allow me to remind you, Mrs Tarleton, that this man has uttered a most serious and disgraceful falsehood concerning Miss Tarleton and myself?

MRS TARLETON.  I dont believe a word of it.  If the poor lad was there in the Turkish bath, who has a better right to say what was going on here than he has?  You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Patsy; and so ought you too, Mr Percival, for encouraging her.  [Hypatia retreats to the pavilion, and exchanges grimaces with Johnny, shamelessly enjoying Percival’s sudden reverse.  They know their mother].

PERCIVAL.  [gasping]  Mrs Tarleton:  I give you my word of honor —

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, go along with you and your word of honor.  Do you think I’m a fool?  I wonder you can look the lad in the face after bullying him and making him sign those wicked lies; and all the time you carrying on with my daughter before youd been half an hour in my house.  Fie, for shame!

PERCIVAL.  Lord Summerhays:  I appeal to you.  Have I done the correct thing or not?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Youve done your best, Mr Percival.  But the correct thing depends for its success on everybody playing the game very strictly.  As a single-handed game, it’s impossible.

BENTLEY.  [suddenly breaking out lamentably]  Joey:  have you taken Hypatia away from me?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [severely]  Bentley!  Bentley!  Control yourself, sir.

TARLETON.  Come, Mr Percival! the shutters are up on the gentlemanly business.  Try the truth.

PERCIVAL.  I am in a wretched position.  If I tell the truth nobody will believe me.

TARLETON.  Oh yes they will.  The truth makes everybody believe it.

PERCIVAL.  It also makes everybody pretend not to believe it.  Mrs Tarleton:  youre not playing the game.

MRS TARLETON.  I dont think youve behaved at all nicely, Mr Percival.

BENTLEY.  I wouldnt have played you such a dirty trick, Joey.

[Struggling with a sob]  You beast.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Bentley:  you must control yourself.  Let me say at the same time, Mr Percival, that my son seems to have been mistaken in regarding you either as his friend or as a gentleman.

PERCIVAL.  Miss Tarleton:  I’m suffering this for your sake.  I ask you just to say that I am not to blame.  Just that and nothing more.

HYPATIA.  [gloating mischievously over his distress]  You chased me through the heather and kissed me.  You shouldnt have done that if you were not in earnest.

PERCIVAL.  Oh, this is really the limit.  [Turning desperately to Gunner]  Sir:  I appeal to you.  As a gentleman! as a man of honor! as a man bound to stand by another man!  You were in that Turkish bath.  You saw how it began.  Could any man have behaved more correctly than I did?  Is there a shadow of foundation for the accusations brought against me?

GUNNER.  [sorely perplexed]  Well, what do you want me to say?

JOHNNY.  He has said what he had to say already, hasnt he?  Read that paper.

GUNNER.  When I tell the truth, you make me go back on it.  And now you want me to go back on myself!  What is a man to do?

PERCIVAL.  [patiently]  Please try to get your mind clear, Mr Brown.

I pointed out to you that you could not, as a gentleman, disparage a lady’s character.  You agree with me, I hope.

GUNNER.  Yes:  that sounds all right.

PERCIVAL.  But youre also bound to tell the truth.  Surely youll not deny that.

GUNNER.  Who’s denying it?  I say nothing against it.

PERCIVAL.  Of course not.  Well, I ask you to tell the truth simply and unaffectedly.  Did you witness any improper conduct on my part when you were in the bath?

GUNNER.  No, sir.

JOHNNY.        |    Then what do you mean by saying that —

|

HYPATIA.       |    Do you mean to say that I —

|

BENTLEY.       |    Oh, you are a rotter.  Youre afraid —

TARLETON.  [rising]  Stop.  [Silence].  Leave it at that.  Enough said.  You keep quiet, Johnny.  Mr Percival:  youre whitewashed.  So are you, Patsy.  Honors are easy.  Lets drop the subject.  The next thing to do is to open a subscription to start this young man on a ranch in some far country thats accustomed to be in a disturbed state.

He —

MRS TARLETON.  Now stop joking the poor lad, John:  I wont have it.

Has been worried to death between you all.  [To Gunner]  Have you had your tea?

GUNNER.  Tea?  No:  it’s too early.  I’m all right; only I had no dinner:  I didnt think I’d want it.  I didnt think I’d be alive.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, what a thing to say!  You mustnt talk like that.

JOHNNY.  Hes out of his mind.  He thinks it’s past dinner-time.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, youve no sense, Johnny.  He calls his lunch his dinner, and has his tea at half-past six.  Havnt you, dear?

GUNNER.  [timidly]  Hasnt everybody?

JOHNNY.  [laughing]  Well, by George, thats not bad.

MRS TARLETON.  Now dont be rude, Johnny:  you know I dont like it.

[To Gunner]  A cup of tea will pick you up.

GUNNER.  I’d rather not.  I’m all right.

TARLETON.  [going to the sideboard]  Here! try a mouthful of sloe gin.

GUNNER.  No, thanks.  I’m a teetotaler.  I cant touch alcohol in any form.

TARLETON.  Nonsense!  This isnt alcohol.  Sloe gin.  Vegetarian, you know.

GUNNER.  [hesitating]  Is it a fruit beverage?

TARLETON.  Of course it is.  Fruit beverage.  Here you are.  [He gives him a glass of sloe gin].

GUNNER.  [going to the sideboard]  Thanks.  [he begins to drink it confidently; but the first mouthful startles and almost chokes him].

It’s rather hot.

TARLETON.  Do you good.  Dont be afraid of it.

MRS TARLETON.  [going to him]  Sip it, dear.  Dont be in a hurry.

Gunner sips slowly, each sip making his eyes water.

JOHNNY.  [coming forward into the place left vacant by Gunner’s visit to the sideboard]  Well, now that the gentleman has been attended to,

I should like to know where we are.  It may be a vulgar business habit; but I confess I like to know where I am.

TARLETON.  I dont.  Wherever you are, youre there anyhow.  I tell you again, leave it at that.

BENTLEY.  I want to know too.  Hypatia’s engaged to me.

HYPATIA.  Bentley:  if you insult me again — if you say another word,

I’ll leave the house and not enter it until you leave it.

JOHNNY.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, my boy.

BENTLEY.  [inarticulate with fury and suppressed tears]  Oh!

Beasts!  Brutes!

MRS TARLETON.  Now dont hurt his feelings, poor little lamb!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [very sternly]  Bentley:  you are not behaving well.  You had better leave us until you have recovered yourself.

Bentley goes out in disgrace, but gets no further than half way to the pavilion door, when, with a wild sob, he throws himself on the floor and begins to yell.

MRS TARLETON.  |    [running to him]  Oh, poor child,

|    poor child!  Dont cry, duckie:

|    he didnt mean it:  dont cry.

|

LORD SUMMERHAYS|    Stop that infernal noise, sir:  do you

|    hear?  Stop it instantly.

|

JOHNNY.        |    Thats the game he tried on me.

|    There you are!  Now, mother!

|    Now, Patsy!  You see for yourselves.

|

HYPATIA.       |    [covering her ears]  Oh you little

|    wretch!  Stop him, Mr Percival.  Kick him.

|

TARLETON.      |    Steady on, steady on.  Easy, Bunny, easy.

LINA.  Leave him to me, Mrs Tarleton.  Stand clear, please.

She kneels opposite Bentley; quickly lifts the upper half of him from the ground; dives under him; rises with his body hanging across her shoulders; and runs out with him.

BENTLEY.  [in scared, sobered, humble tones as he is borne off]

What are you doing?  Let me down.  Please, Miss Szczepanowska —

[they pass out of hearing].

An awestruck silence falls on the company as they speculate on Bentley’s fate.

JOHNNY.  I wonder what shes going to do with him.

HYPATIA.  Spank him, I hope.  Spank him hard.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I hope so.  I hope so.  Tarleton:  I’m beyond measure humiliated and annoyed by my son’s behavior in your house.  I had better take him home.

TARLETON.  Not at all:  not at all.  Now, Chickabiddy:  as Miss Lina has taken away Ben, suppose you take away Mr Brown for a while.

GUNNER.  [with unexpected aggressiveness]  My name isnt Brown.

[They stare at him:  he meets their stare defiantly, pugnacious with sloe gin; drains the last drop from his glass; throws it on the sideboard; and advances to the writing table].   My name’s Baker:

Julius Baker.  Mister Baker.  If any man doubts it, I’m ready for him.

MRS TARLETON.  John:  you shouldnt have given him that sloe gin.  It’s gone to his head.

GUNNER.  Dont you think it.  Fruit beverages dont go to the head; and what matter if they did?  I say nothing to you, maam:  I regard you with respect and affection.  [Lachrymosely]  You were very good to my mother:  my poor mother!  [Relapsing into his daring mood]  But I say my name’s Baker; and I’m not to be treated as a child or made a slave of by any man.  Baker is my name.  Did you think I was going to give you my real name?  Not likely.  Not me.

TARLETON.  So you thought of John Brown.  That was clever of you.

GUNNER.  Clever!  Yes:  we’re not all such fools as you think:  we clerks.  It was the bookkeeper put me up to that.  It’s the only name that nobody gives as a false name, he said.  Clever, eh?  I should think so.

MRS TARLETON.  Come now, Julius —

GUNNER.  [reassuring her gravely]  Dont you be alarmed, maam.  I know what is due to you as a lady and to myself as a gentleman.  I regard you with respect and affection.  If you had been my mother, as you ought to have been, I should have had more chance.  But you shall have no cause to be ashamed of me.  The strength of a chain is no greater than its weakest link; but the greatness of a poet is the greatness of his greatest moment.  Shakespear used to get drunk.

Frederick the Great ran away from a battle.  But it was what they could rise to, not what they could sink to, that made them great.

They werent good always; but they were good on their day.  Well, on my day — on my day, mind you — I’m good for something too.  I know that Ive made a silly exhibition of myself here.  I know I didnt rise to the occasion.  I know that if youd been my mother, youd have been ashamed of me.  I lost my presence of mind:  I was a contemptible coward.  But

[slapping himself on the chest]  I’m not the man I was then.  This is my day.  Ive seen the tenth possessor of a foolish face carried out kicking and screaming by a woman.  [To Percival]  You crowed pretty big over me.  You hypnotized me.  But when you were put through the fire yourself, you were found wanting.  I tell you straight I dont give a damn for you.

MRS TARLETON.  No:  thats naughty.  You shouldnt say that before me.

GUNNER.  I would cut my tongue out sooner than say anything vulgar in your presence; for I regard you with respect and affection.  I was not swearing.  I was affirming my manhood.

MRS TARLETON.  What an idea!  What puts all these things into your head?

GUNNER.  Oh, dont you think, because I’m a clerk, that I’m not one of the intellectuals.  I’m a reading man, a thinking man.  I read in a book — a high class six shilling book — this precept:  Affirm your manhood.  It appealed to me.  Ive always remembered it.  I believe in it.  I feel I must do it to recover your respect after my cowardly behavior.  Therefore I affirm it in your presence.  I tell that man who insulted me that I dont give a damn for him.  And neither I do.

TARLETON.  I say, Summerhays:  did you have chaps of this sort in Jinghiskahn?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Oh yes:  they exist everywhere:  they are a most serious modern problem.

GUNNER.  Yes.  Youre right.  [Conceitedly]  I’m a problem.  And I tell you that when we clerks realize that we’re problems! well, look out:  thats all.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [suavely, to Gunner]  You read a great deal, you say?

GUNNER.  Ive read more than any man in this room, if the truth were known, I expect.  Thats whats going to smash up your Capitalism.  The problems are beginning to read.  Ha!  We’re free to do that here in England.  What would you do with me in Jinghiskahn if you had me there?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Well, since you ask me so directly, I’ll tell you.

I should take advantage of the fact that you have neither sense enough nor strength enough to know how to behave yourself in a difficulty of any sort.  I should warn an intelligent and ambitious policeman that you are a troublesome person.  The intelligent and ambitious policeman would take an early opportunity of upsetting your temper by ordering you to move on, and treading on your heels until you were provoked into obstructing an officer in the discharge of his duty.  Any trifle of that sort would be sufficient to make a man like you lose your self-possession and put yourself in the wrong.  You would then be charged and imprisoned until things quieted down.

GUNNER.  And you call that justice!

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  No.  Justice was not my business.  I had to govern a province; and I took the necessary steps to maintain order in it.  Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion.  When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.  I used both when law and persuasion failed me.  Every ruler of men since the world began has done so, even when he has hated both fraud and force as heartily as I do.  It is as well that you should know this, my young friend; so that you may recognize in time that anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.  What have you to say to that?

GUNNER.  What have I to say to it!  Well, I call it scandalous:  thats what I have to say to it.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Precisely:  thats all anybody has to say to it, except the British public, which pretends not to believe it.  And now let me ask you a sympathetic personal question.  Havnt you a headache?

GUNNER.  Well, since you ask me, I have.  Ive overexcited myself.

MRS TARLETON.  Poor lad!  No wonder, after all youve gone through!

You want to eat a little and to lie down.  You come with me.  I want you to tell me about your poor dear mother and about yourself.  Come along with me.  [She leads the way to the inner door].

GUNNER.  [following her obediently]  Thank you kindly, madam.  [She goes out.  Before passing out after her, he partly closes the door and stops an the landing for a moment to say]  Mind:  I’m not knuckling down to any man here.  I knuckle down to Mrs Tarleton because shes a woman in a thousand.  I affirm my manhood all the same.  Understand:

I dont give a damn for the lot of you.  [He hurries out, rather afraid of the consequences of this defiance, which has provoked Johnny to an impatient movement towards him].

HYPATIA.  Thank goodness hes gone!  Oh, what a bore!  WHAT a bore!!!

Talk, talk, talk!

TARLETON.  Patsy:  it’s no good.  We’re going to talk.  And we’re going to talk about you.

JOHNNY.  It’s no use shirking it, Pat.  We’d better know where we are.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Come, Miss Tarleton.  Wont you sit down?  I’m very tired of standing.  [Hypatia comes from the pavilion and takes a chair at the worktable.  Lord Summerhays takes the opposite chair, on her right.  Percival takes the chair Johnny placed for Lina on her arrival.  Tarleton sits down at the end of the writing table.  Johnny remains standing.  Lord Summerhays continues, with a sigh of relief at being seated.]  We shall now get the change of subject we are all pining for.

JOHNNY.  [puzzled]  Whats that?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The great question.  The question that men and women will spend hours over without complaining.  The question that occupies all the novel readers and all the playgoers.  The question they never get tired of.

JOHNNY.  But what question?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The question which particular young man some young woman will mate with.

PERCIVAL.  As if it mattered!

HYPATIA.  [sharply]  Whats that you said?

PERCIVAL.  I said:  As if it mattered.

HYPATIA.  I call that ungentlemanly.

PERCIVAL.  Do you care about that? you who are so magnificently unladylike!

JOHNNY.  Look here, Mr Percival:  youre not supposed to insult my sister.

HYPATIA.  Oh, shut up, Johnny.  I can take care of myself.  Dont you interfere.

JOHNNY.  Oh, very well.  If you choose to give yourself away like that — to allow a man to call you unladylike and then to be unladylike,

Ive nothing more to say.

HYPATIA.  I think Mr Percival is most ungentlemanly; but I wont be protected.  I’ll not have my affairs interfered with by men on pretence of protecting me.  I’m not your baby.  If I interfered between you and a woman, you would soon tell me to mind my own business.

TARLETON.  Children:  dont squabble.  Read Dr Watts.  Behave yourselves.

JOHNNY.  Ive nothing more to say; and as I dont seem to be wanted here, I shall take myself off.  [He goes out with affected calm through the pavilion].

TARLETON.  Summerhays:  a family is an awful thing, an impossible thing.  Cat and dog.  Patsy:  I’m ashamed of you.

HYPATIA.  I’ll make it up with Johnny afterwards; but I really cant have him here sticking his clumsy hoof into my affairs.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  The question is, Mr Percival, are you really a gentleman, or are you not?

PERCIVAL.  Was Napoleon really a gentleman or was he not?  He made the lady get out of the way of the porter and said, “Respect the burden, madam.”  That was behaving like a very fine gentleman; but he kicked Volney for saying that what France wanted was the Bourbons back again.

That was behaving rather like a navvy.  Now I, like Napoleon, am not all one piece.  On occasion, as you have all seen, I can behave like a gentleman.  On occasion, I can behave with a brutal simplicity which Miss Tarleton herself could hardly surpass.

TARLETON.  Gentleman or no gentleman, Patsy:  what are your intentions?

HYPATIA.  My intentions!  Surely it’s the gentleman who should be asked his intentions.

TARLETON.  Come now, Patsy! none of that nonsense.  Has Mr Percival said anything to you that I ought to know or that Bentley ought to know?  Have you said anything to Mr Percival?

HYPATIA.  Mr Percival chased me through the heather and kissed me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  As a gentleman, Mr Percival, what do you say to that?

PERCIVAL.  As a gentleman, I do not kiss and tell.  As a mere man:  a mere cad, if you like, I say that I did so at Miss Tarleton’s own suggestion.

HYPATIA.  Beast!

PERCIVAL.  I dont deny that I enjoyed it.  But I did not initiate it.

And I began by running away.

TARLETON.  So Patsy can run faster than you, can she?

PERCIVAL.  Yes, when she is in pursuit of me.  She runs faster and faster.  I run slower and slower.  And these woods of yours are full of magic.  There was a confounded fern owl.  Did you ever hear the churr of a fern owl?  Did you ever hear it create a sudden silence by ceasing?  Did you ever hear it call its mate by striking its wings together twice and whistling that single note that no nightingale can imitate?  That is what happened in the woods when I was running away.

So I turned; and the pursuer became the pursued.

HYPATIA.  I had to fight like a wild cat.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Please dont tell us this.  It’s not fit for old people to hear.

TARLETON.  Come:  how did it end?

HYPATIA.  It’s not ended yet.

TARLETON.  How is it going to end?

HYPATIA.  Ask him.

TARLETON.  How is it going to end, Mr Percival?

PERCIVAL.  I cant afford to marry, Mr Tarleton.  Ive only a thousand a year until my father dies.  Two people cant possibly live on that.

TARLETON.  Oh, cant they?  When I married, I should have been jolly glad to have felt sure of the quarter of it.

PERCIVAL.  No doubt; but I am not a cheap person, Mr Tarleton.  I was brought up in a household which cost at least seven or eight times that; and I am in constant money difficulties because I simply dont know how to live on the thousand a year scale.  As to ask a woman to share my degrading poverty, it’s out of the question.  Besides, I’m rather young to marry.  I’m only 28.

HYPATIA.  Papa:  buy the brute for me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [shrinking]  My dear Miss Tarleton:  dont be so naughty.  I know how delightful it is to shock an old man; but there is a point at which it becomes barbarous.  Dont.  Please dont.

HYPATIA.  Shall I tell Papa about you?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Tarleton:  I had better tell you that I once asked your daughter to become my widow.

TARLETON.  [to Hypatia]  Why didnt you accept him, you young idiot?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I was too old.

TARLETON.  All this has been going on under my nose, I suppose.  You run after young men; and old men run after you.  And I’m the last person in the world to hear of it.

HYPATIA.  How could I tell you?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Parents and children, Tarleton.

TARLETON.  Oh, the gulf that lies between them! the impassable, eternal gulf!  And so I’m to buy the brute for you, eh?

HYPATIA.  If you please, papa.

TARLETON.  Whats the price, Mr Percival?

PERCIVAL.  We might do with another fifteen hundred if my father would contribute.  But I should like more.

TARLETON.  It’s purely a question of money with you, is it?

PERCIVAL.  [after a moment’s consideration]  Practically yes:  it turns on that.

TARLETON.  I thought you might have some sort of preference for Patsy, you know.

PERCIVAL.  Well, but does that matter, do you think?  Patsy fascinates me, no doubt.  I apparently fascinate Patsy.  But, believe me, all that is not worth considering.  One of my three fathers (the priest) has married hundreds of couples:  couples selected by one another, couples selected by the parents, couples forced to marry one another by circumstances of one kind or another; and he assures me that if marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blindfolded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have here in England.  He said Cupid was nothing but the blindfolded child:  pretty idea that, I think!  I shall have as good a chance with Patsy as with anyone else.

Mind:  I’m not bigoted about it.  I’m not a doctrinaire:  not the slave of a theory.  You and Lord Summerhays are experienced married men.  If you can tell me of any trustworthy method of selecting a wife, I shall be happy to make use of it.  I await your suggestions.

[He looks with polite attention to Lord Summerhays, who, having nothing to say, avoids his eye.  He looks to Tarleton, who purses his lips glumly and rattles his money in his pockets without a word].

Apparently neither of you has anything to suggest.  Then Patsy will do as well as another, provided the money is forthcoming.

HYPATIA.  Oh, you beauty, you beauty!

TARLETON.  When I married Patsy’s mother, I was in love with her.

PERCIVAL.  For the first time?

TARLETON.  Yes:  for the first time.

PERCIVAL.  For the last time?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  [revolted]  Sir:  you are in the presence of his daughter.

HYPATIA.  Oh, dont mind me.  I dont care.  I’m accustomed to Papa’s adventures.

TARLETON.  [blushing painfully]  Patsy, my child:  that was not — not delicate.

HYPATIA.  Well, papa, youve never shewn any delicacy in talking to me about my conduct; and I really dont see why I shouldnt talk to you about yours.  It’s such nonsense!  Do you think young people dont know?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  I’m sure they dont feel.  Tarleton:  this is too horrible, too brutal.  If neither of these young people have any — any — any —

PERCIVAL.  Shall we say paternal sentimentality?  I’m extremely sorry to shock you; but you must remember that Ive been educated to discuss human affairs with three fathers simultaneously.  I’m an adult person.

Patsy is an adult person.  You do not inspire me with veneration.

Apparently you do not inspire Patsy with veneration.  That may surprise you.  It may pain you.  I’m sorry.  It cant be helped.  What about the money?

TARLETON.  You dont inspire me with generosity, young man.

HYPATIA.  [laughing with genuine amusement]  He had you there, Joey.

TARLETON.  I havnt been a bad father to you, Patsy.

HYPATIA.  I dont say you have, dear.  If only I could persuade you Ive grown up, we should get along perfectly.

TARLETON.  Do you remember Bill Burt?

HYPATIA.  Why?

TARLETON.  [to the others]  Bill Burt was a laborer here.  I was going to sack him for kicking his father.  He said his father had kicked him until he was big enough to kick back.  Patsy begged him off.  I asked that man what it felt like the first time he kicked his father, and found that it was just like kicking any other man.  He laughed and said that it was the old man that knew what it felt like.

Think of that, Summerhays! think of that!

HYPATIA.  I havnt kicked you, papa.

TARLETON.  Youve kicked me harder than Bill Burt ever kicked.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It’s no use, Tarleton.  Spare yourself.  Do you seriously expect these young people, at their age, to sympathize with what this gentleman calls your paternal sentimentality?

TARLETON.  [wistfully]  Is it nothing to you but paternal sentimentality, Patsy?

HYPATIA.  Well, I greatly prefer your superabundant vitality, papa.

TARLETON.  [violently]  Hold your tongue, you young devil.  The young are all alike:  hard, coarse, shallow, cruel, selfish, dirty-minded.  You can clear out of my house as soon as you can coax him to take you; and the sooner the better.  [To Percival]  I think you said your price was fifteen hundred a year.  Take it.  And I wish you joy of your bargain.

PERCIVAL.  If you wish to know who I am —

TARLETON.  I dont care a tinker’s curse who you are or what you are.

Youre willing to take that girl off my hands for fifteen hundred a year:  thats all that concerns me.  Tell her who you are if you like: it’s her affair, not mine.

HYPATIA.  Dont answer him, Joey:  it wont last.  Lord Summerhays, I’m sorry about Bentley; but Joey’s the only man for me.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It may —

HYPATIA.  Please dont say it may break your poor boy’s heart.  It’s much more likely to break yours.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Oh!

TARLETON.  [springing to his feet]  Leave the room.  Do you hear: leave the room.

PERCIVAL.  Arnt we getting a little cross?  Dont be angry, Mr Tarleton.  Read Marcus Aurelius.

TARLETON.  Dont you dare make fun of me.  Take your aeroplane out of my vinery and yourself out of my house.

PERCIVAL.  [rising, to Hypatia]  I’m afraid I shall have to dine at the Beacon, Patsy.

HYPATIA.  [rising]  Do.  I dine with you.

TARLETON.  Did you hear me tell you to leave the room?

HYPATIA.  I did.  [To Percival]  You see what living with one’s parents means, Joey.  It means living in a house where you can be ordered to leave the room.  Ive got to obey:  it’s his house, not mine.

TARLETON.  Who pays for it?  Go and support yourself as I did if you want to be independent.

HYPATIA.  I wanted to and you wouldnt let me.  How can I support myself when I’m a prisoner?

TARLETON.  Hold your tongue.

HYPATIA.  Keep your temper.

PERCIVAL.  [coming between them]  Lord Summerhays:  youll join me,

I’m sure, in pointing out to both father and daughter that they have now reached that very common stage in family life at which anything but a blow would be an anti-climax.  Do you seriously want to beat Patsy, Mr Tarleton?

TARLETON.  Yes.  I want to thrash the life out of her.  If she doesnt get out of my reach, I’ll do it.  [He sits down and grasps the writing table to restrain himself].

HYPATIA.  [coolly going to him and leaning with her breast on his writhing shoulders]  Oh, if you want to beat me just to relieve your feelings — just really and truly for the fun of it and the satisfaction of it, beat away.  I dont grudge you that.

TARLETON.  [almost in hysterics]  I used to think that this sort of thing went on in other families but that it never could happen in ours.  And now — [He is broken with emotion, and continues lamentably]  I cant say the right thing.  I cant do the right thing.

I dont know what is the right thing.  I’m beaten; and she knows it.

Summerhays:  tell me what to do.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  When my council in Jinghiskahn reached the point of coming to blows, I used to adjourn the sitting.  Let us postpone the discussion.  Wait until Monday:  we shall have Sunday to quiet down in.  Believe me, I’m not making fun of you; but I think theres something in this young gentleman’s advice.  Read something.

TARLETON.  I’ll read King Lear.

HYPATIA.  Dont.  I’m very sorry, dear.

TARLETON.  Youre not.  Youre laughing at me.  Serve me right!  Parents and children!  No man should know his own child.  No child should know its own father.  Let the family be rooted out of civilization!  Let the human race be brought up in institutions!

HYPATIA.  Oh yes.  How jolly!  You and I might be friends then; and Joey could stay to dinner.

TARLETON.  Let him stay to dinner.  Let him stay to breakfast.  Let him spend his life here.  Dont you say I drove him out.  Dont you say I drove you out.

PERCIVAL.  I really have no right to inflict myself on you.  Dropping in as I did —

TARLETON.  Out of the sky.  Ha!  Dropping in.  The new sport of aviation.  You just see a nice house; drop in; scoop up the man’s daughter; and off with you again.

Bentley comes back, with his shoulders hanging as if he too had been exercised to the last pitch of fatigue.  He is very sad.  They stare at him as he gropes to Percival’s chair.

BENTLEY.  I’m sorry for making a fool of myself.  I beg your pardon.

Hypatia:  I’m awfully sorry; but Ive made up my mind that I’ll never marry.  [He sits down in deep depression].

HYPATIA.  [running to him]  How nice of you, Bentley!  Of course you guessed I wanted to marry Joey.  What did the Polish lady do to you?

BENTLEY.  [turning his head away]  I’d rather not speak of her, if you dont mind.

HYPATIA.  Youve fallen in love with her.  [She laughs].

BENTLEY.  It’s beastly of you to laugh.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Youre not the first to fall today under the lash of that young lady’s terrible derision, Bentley.

Lina, her cap on, and her goggles in her hand, comes impetuously through the inner door.

LINA.  [on the steps]  Mr Percival:  can we get that aeroplane started again?  [She comes down and runs to the pavilion door].  I must get out of this into the air:  right up into the blue.

PERCIVAL.  Impossible.  The frame’s twisted.  The petrol has given out:  thats what brought us down.  And how can we get a clear run to start with among these woods?

LINA.  [swooping back through the middle of the pavilion]  We can straighten the frame.  We can buy petrol at the Beacon.  With a few laborers we can get her out on to the Portsmouth Road and start her along that.

TARLETON.  [rising]  But why do you want to leave us, Miss Szcz?

LINA.  Old pal:  this is a stuffy house.  You seem to think of nothing but making love.  All the conversation here is about love-making.  All the pictures are about love-making.  The eyes of all of you are sheep’s eyes.  You are steeped in it, soaked in it:  the very texts on the walls of your bedrooms are the ones about love.  It is disgusting.

It is not healthy.  Your women are kept idle and dressed up for no other purpose than to be made love to.  I have not been here an hour; and already everybody makes love to me as if because I am a woman it were my profession to be made love to.  First you, old pal.  I forgave you because you were nice about your wife.

HYPATIA.  Oh! oh! oh!  Oh, papa!

LINA.  Then you, Lord Summerhays, come to me; and all you have to say is to ask me not to mention that you made love to me in Vienna two years ago.  I forgave you because I thought you were an ambassador; and all ambassadors make love and are very nice and useful to people who travel.  Then this young gentleman.  He is engaged to this young lady; but no matter for that:  he makes love to me because I carry him off in my arms when he cries.  All these I bore in silence.  But now comes your Johnny and tells me I’m a ripping fine woman, and asks me to marry him.  I, Lina Szczepanowska, MARRY him!!!!!  I do not mind this boy:  he is a child:  he loves me:  I should have to give him money and take care of him:  that would be foolish, but honorable.  I do not mind you, old pal:  you are what you call an old — ouf! but you do not offer to buy me:  you say until we are tired — until you are so happy that you dare not ask for more.  That is foolish too, at your age; but it is an adventure:  it is not dishonorable.  I do not mind Lord Summerhays:  it was in Vienna:  they had been toasting him at a great banquet:  he was not sober.  That is bad for the health; but it is not dishonorable.  But your Johnny!  Oh, your Johnny! with his marriage.  He will do the straight thing by me.  He will give me a home, a position.  He tells me I must know that my present position is not one for a nice woman.  This to me, Lina Szczepanowska!  I am an honest woman:  I earn my living.  I am a free woman:  I live in my own house.  I am a woman of the world:  I have thousands of friends: every night crowds of people applaud me, delight in me, buy my picture, pay hard-earned money to see me.  I am strong:  I am skilful:

I am brave:  I am independent:  I am unbought:  I am all that a woman ought to be; and in my family there has not been a single drunkard for four generations.  And this Englishman! this linendraper! he dares to ask me to come and live with him in this rrrrrrrabbit hutch, and take my bread from his hand, and ask him for pocket money, and wear soft clothes, and be his woman! his wife!  Sooner than that, I would stoop to the lowest depths of my profession.  I would stuff lions with food and pretend to tame them.  I would deceive honest people’s eyes with conjuring tricks instead of real feats of strength and skill.  I would be a clown and set bad examples of conduct to little children.  I would sink yet lower and be an actress or an opera singer, imperilling my soul by the wicked lie of pretending to be somebody else.  All this I would do sooner than take my bread from the hand of a man and make him the master of my body and soul.  And so you may tell your Johnny to buy an Englishwoman:  he shall not buy Lina Szczepanowska; and I will not stay in the house where such dishonor is offered me.  Adieu.

[She turns precipitately to go, but is faced in the pavilion doorway by Johnny, who comes in slowly, his hands in his pockets, meditating deeply].

JOHNNY.  [confidentially to Lina]  You wont mention our little conversation, Miss Shepanoska.  It’ll do no good; and I’d rather you didnt.

TARLETON.  Weve just heard about it, Johnny.

JOHNNY.  [shortly, but without ill-temper]  Oh:  is that so?

HYPATIA.  The cat’s out of the bag, Johnny, about everybody.  They were all beforehand with you:  papa, Lord Summerhays, Bentley and all.

Dont you let them laugh at you.

JOHNNY.  [a grin slowly overspreading his countenance]  Well, theres no use my pretending to be surprised at you, Governor, is there?  I hope you got it as hot as I did.  Mind, Miss Shepanoska:  it wasnt lost on me.  I’m a thinking man.  I kept my temper.  Youll admit that.

LINA.  [frankly]  Oh yes.  I do not quarrel.  You are what is called a chump; but you are not a bad sort of chump.

JOHNNY.  Thank you.  Well, if a chump may have an opinion, I should put it at this.  You make, I suppose, ten pounds a night off your own bat, Miss Lina?

LINA.  [scornfully]  Ten pounds a night!  I have made ten pounds a minute.

JOHNNY.  [with increased respect]  Have you indeed?  I didnt know: youll excuse my mistake, I hope.  But the principle is the same.  Now I trust you wont be offended at what I’m going to say; but Ive thought about this and watched it in daily experience; and you may take it from me that the moment a woman becomes pecuniarily independent, she gets hold of the wrong end of the stick in moral questions.

LINA.  Indeed!  And what do you conclude from that, Mister Johnny?

JOHNNY.  Well, obviously, that independence for women is wrong and shouldnt be allowed.  For their own good, you know.  And for the good of morality in general.  You agree with me, Lord Summerhays, dont you?

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  It’s a very moral moral, if I may so express myself.

Mrs Tarleton comes in softly through the inner door.

MRS TARLETON.  Dont make too much noise.  The lad’s asleep.

TARLETON.  Chickabiddy:  we have some news for you.

JOHNNY.  [apprehensively]  Now theres no need, you know, Governor, to worry mother with everything that passes.

MRS TARLETON.  [coming to Tarleton]  Whats been going on?  Dont you hold anything back from me, John.  What have you been doing?

TARLETON.  Bentley isnt going to marry Patsy.

MRS TARLETON.  Of course not.  Is that your great news?  I never believed she’d marry him.

TARLETON.  Theres something else.  Mr Percival here —

MRS TARLETON.  [to Percival]  Are you going to marry Patsy?

PERCIVAL [diplomatically]  Patsy is going to marry me, with your permission.

MRS TARLETON.  Oh, she has my permission:  she ought to have been married long ago.

HYPATIA.  Mother!

TARLETON.  Miss Lina here, though she has been so short a time with us, has inspired a good deal of attachment in — I may say in almost all of us.  Therefore I hope she’ll stay to dinner, and not insist on flying away in that aeroplane.

PERCIVAL.  You must stay, Miss Szczepanowska.  I cant go up again this evening.

LINA.  Ive seen you work it.  Do you think I require any help?  And Bentley shall come with me as a passenger.

BENTLEY.  [terrified]  Go up in an aeroplane!  I darent.

LINA.  You must learn to dare.

BENTLEY.  [pale but heroic]  All right.  I’ll come.

LORD SUMMERHAYS|    No, no, Bentley, impossible.  I

|    shall not allow it.

|

MRS TARLETON.  |    Do you want to kill the child?  He shant go.

BENTLEY.  I will.  I’ll lie down and yell until you let me go.  I’m not a coward.  I wont be a coward.

LORD SUMMERHAYS.  Miss Szczepanowska:  my son is very dear to me.  I implore you to wait until tomorrow morning.

LINA.  There may be a storm tomorrow.  And I’ll go:  storm or no storm.  I must risk my life tomorrow.

BENTLEY.  I hope there will be a storm.

LINA.  [grasping his arm]  You are trembling.

BENTLEY.  Yes:  it’s terror, sheer terror.  I can hardly see.  I can hardly stand.  But I’ll go with you.

LINA.  [slapping him on the back and knocking a ghastly white smile into his face]  You shall.  I like you, my boy.  We go tomorrow, together.

BENTLEY.  Yes:  together:  tomorrow.

TARLETON.  Well, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  Read the old book.

MRS TARLETON.  Is there anything else?

TARLETON.  Well, I — er [he addresses Lina, and stops].  I — er [he addresses Lord Summerhays, and stops].  I — er [he gives it up].

Well, I suppose — er — I suppose theres nothing more to be said.

HYPATIA.  [fervently]  Thank goodness!

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

How the Play came to be Written

I had better explain why, in this little piece d’occasion, written for a performance in aid of the funds of the project for establishing a National Theatre as a memorial to Shakespear, I have identified the Dark Lady with Mistress Mary Fitton. First, let me say that I do not contend that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, because when the case in Mary’s favor (or against her, if you please to consider that the Dark Lady was no better than she ought to have been) was complete, a portrait of Mary came to light and turned out to be that of a fair lady, not of a dark one. That settles the question, if the portrait is authentic, which I see no reason to doubt, and the lady’s hair undyed, which is perhaps less certain. Shakespear rubbed in the lady’s complexion in his sonnets mercilessly; for in his day black hair was as unpopular as red hair was in the early days of Queen Victoria. Any tinge lighter than raven black must be held fatal to the strongest claim to be the Dark Lady. And so, unless it can be shewn that Shakespear’s sonnets exasperated Mary Fitton into dyeing her hair and getting painted in false colors, I must give up all pretence that my play is historical. The later suggestion of Mr Acheson that the Dark Lady, far from being a maid of honor, kept a tavern in Oxford and was the mother of Davenant the poet, is the one I should have adopted had I wished to be up to date. Why, then, did I introduce the Dark Lady as Mistress Fitton?

Well, I had two reasons. The play was not to have been written by me at all, but by Mrs Alfred Lyttelton; and it was she who suggested a scene of jealousy between Queen Elizabeth and the Dark Lady at the expense of the unfortunate Bard. Now this, if the Dark Lady was a maid of honor, was quite easy. If she were a tavern landlady, it would have strained all probability. So I stuck to Mary Fitton. But I had another and more personal reason. I was, in a manner, present at the birth of the Fitton theory. Its parent and I had become acquainted; and he used to consult me on obscure passages in the sonnets, on which, as far as I can remember, I never succeeded in throwing the faintest light, at a time when nobody else thought my opinion, on that or any other subject, of the slightest importance. I thought it would be friendly to immortalize him, as the silly literary saying is, much as Shakespear immortalized Mr W. H., as he said he would, simply by writing about him.

Let me tell the story formally.

Thomas Tyler

Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before, the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance. His figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly stout, there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not unamiable; it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid. Nature’s malice was so overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do nothing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.

He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see anything but stars higgledy-piggledy. Next to the translation of Ecclesiastes, his magnum opus was his work on Shakespear’s Sonnets, in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert), and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.

In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs Davenant’s champion, calls him Reverend. It may very well be that he got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and air. Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism would have shot him violently out of any church at present established in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a grotesquely disfigured body.

Frank Harris

To the review in the Pall Mall Gazette I attribute, rightly or wrongly, the introduction of Mary Fitton to Mr Frank Harris. My reason for this is that Mr Harris wrote a play about Shakespear and Mary Fitton; and when I, as a pious duty to Tyler’s ghost, reminded the world that it was to Tyler we owed the Fitton theory, Frank Harris, who clearly had not a notion of what had first put Mary into his head, believed, I think, that I had invented Tyler expressly for his discomfiture; for the stress I laid on Tyler’s claims must have seemed unaccountable and perhaps malicious on the assumption that he was to me a mere name among the thousands of names in the British Museum catalogue. Therefore I make it clear that I had and have personal reasons for remembering Tyler, and for regarding myself as in some sort charged with the duty of reminding the world of his work. I am sorry for his sake that Mary’s portrait is fair, and that Mr W. H. has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

Frank Harris’s play was written long before mine. I read it in manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted; and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler’s property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris’s it was I who annexed it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris’s play is serious both in size, intention, and quality. But there could not in the nature of things be much resemblance, because Frank conceives Shakespear to have been a broken-hearted, melancholy, enormously sentimental person, whereas I am convinced that he was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans put together. Yet the success of Frank Harris’s book on Shakespear gave me great delight.

To those who know the literary world of London there was a sharp stroke of ironic comedy in the irresistible verdict in its favor. In critical literature there is one prize that is always open to competition, one blue ribbon that always carries the highest critical rank with it. To win, you must write the best book of your generation on Shakespear. It is felt on all sides that to do this a certain fastidious refinement, a delicacy of taste, a correctness of manner and tone, and high academic distinction in addition to the indispensable scholarship and literary reputation, are needed; and men who pretend to these qualifications are constantly looked to with a gentle expectation that presently they will achieve the great feat. Now if there is a man on earth who is the utter contrary of everything that this description implies; whose very existence is an insult to the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy, every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the Bismarckian Imperialist an Anacharsis Klootz, to Anacharsis Klootz a Washington, to Mrs Proudie a Don Juan, to Aspasia a John Knox: in short, to everyone his complement rather than his counterpart, his antagonist rather than his fellow-creature. Always provided, however, that the persons thus confronted are respectable persons. Sophie Perovskaia, who perished on the scaffold for blowing Alexander II to fragments, may perhaps have echoed Hamlet’s

Oh God, Horatio, what a wounded name —

Things standing thus unknown — I leave behind!

but Frank Harris, in his Sonia, has rescued her from that injustice, and enshrined her among the saints. He has lifted the Chicago anarchists out of their infamy, and shewn that, compared with the Capitalism that killed them, they were heroes and martyrs. He has done this with the most unusual power of conviction. The story, as he tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean, purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and an unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.

Harris “durch Mitleid wissend”

Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever dreamt of reproaching Milton’s Lucifer for not seeing the comic side of his fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris’s stories desires to have them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he knows the taste and the value of humor. He was one of the few men of letters who really appreciated Oscar Wilde, though he did not rally fiercely to Wilde’s side until the world deserted Oscar in his ruin. I myself was present at a curious meeting between the two, when Harris, on the eve of the Queensberry trial, prophesied to Wilde with miraculous precision exactly what immediately afterwards happened to him, and warned him to leave the country. It was the first time within my knowledge that such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though under no illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law he had been persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on himself that he fancied it could be stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday Review (as Mr Harris then was) to declare that he considered Dorian Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is. When Harris foretold him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was failing him in his hour of need, and left the room in anger. Harris’s idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely he had been advised in taking the action, and how accurately Harris had gauged the situation.

The same capacity for pity governs Harris’s study of Shakespear, whom, as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact that the group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways, humorists.

“Sidney’s Sister: Pembroke’s Mother”

And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love successfully to Shakespear’s mistress, he very characteristically refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler published, or only one which he submitted to me to see what I would say about it, just as he used to submit difficult lines from the sonnets.

This surmise was that “Sidney’s sister: Pembroke’s mother” set Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and unnaturally urged matrimony on Mr W. H. I take this to be one of the brightest of Tyler’s ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please somebody whom Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly interest in Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the theory for me. The most charming of all Shakespear’s old women, indeed the most charming of all his women, young or old, is the Countess of Rousillon in All’s Well That Ends Well. It has a certain individuality among them which suggests a portrait. Mr Harris will have it that all Shakespear’s nice old women are drawn from his beloved mother; but I see no evidence whatever that Shakespear’s mother was a particularly nice woman or that he was particularly fond of her. That she was a simple incarnation of extravagant maternal pride like the mother of Coriolanus in Plutarch, as Mr Harris asserts, I cannot believe: she is quite as likely to have borne her son a grudge for becoming “one of these harlotry players” and disgracing the Ardens. Anyhow, as a conjectural model for the Countess of Rousillon, I prefer that one of whom Jonson wrote

Sidney’s sister:  Pembroke’s mother:

Death:  ere thou has slain another,

Learnd and fair and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

But Frank will not have her at any price, because his ideal Shakespear is rather like a sailor in a melodrama; and a sailor in a melodrama must adore his mother. I do not at all belittle such sailors. They are the emblems of human generosity; but Shakespear was not an emblem: he was a man and the author of Hamlet, who had no illusions about his mother. In weak moments one almost wishes he had.

Shakespear’s Social Standing

On the vexed question of Shakespear’s social standing Mr Harris says that Shakespear “had not had the advantage of a middle-class training.” I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from which our public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for a moment the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of middle-class training. They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag, although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and even some artistic conscience. But he will find not one of the models of his type (I say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the rank that looks at the middle class, not humbly and enviously from below, but insolently from above. Mr Harris himself notes Shakespear’s contempt for the tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to smutty jokes. He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar plea of the Bardolatrous ignoramus, that Shakespear’s coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting his pen with precision on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency. There was nothing whatever to prevent Shakespear from being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him, and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in which insolence, derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois. No other class is infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not made by a very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are taught and coached and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their part. But the man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that view of himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners, into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer, that he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he “had not the advantage of a middle-class training.” Shakespear himself tells us, through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of Shakespear’s foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of Eton and Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school. They prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father’s ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.

This Side Idolatry

There is another matter which I think Mr Harris should ponder. He says that Shakespear was but “little esteemed by his own generation.” He even describes Jonson’s description of his “little Latin and less Greek” as a sneer, whereas it occurs in an unmistakably sincere eulogy of Shakespear, written after his death, and is clearly meant to heighten the impression of Shakespear’s prodigious natural endowments by pointing out that they were not due to scholastic acquirements. Now there is a sense in which it is true enough that Shakespear was too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that, by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent’s Canal do not chant Shakespear’s verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But Shakespear was certainly not such a fool as to expect the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys of his time to be any more interested in dramatic poetry than Newton, later on, expected them to be interested in fluxions. And when we come to the question whether Shakespear missed that assurance which all great men have had from the more capable and susceptible members of their generation that they were great men, Ben Jonson’s evidence disposes of so improbable a notion at once and for ever. “I loved the man,” says Ben, “this side idolatry, as well as any.” Now why in the name of common sense should he have made that qualification unless there had been, not only idolatry, but idolatry fulsome enough to irritate Jonson into an express disavowal of it? Jonson, the bricklayer, must have felt sore sometimes when Shakespear spoke and wrote of bricklayers as his inferiors. He must have felt it a little hard that being a better scholar, and perhaps a braver and tougher man physically than Shakespear, he was not so successful or so well liked. But in spite of this he praised Shakespear to the utmost stretch of his powers of eulogy: in fact, notwithstanding his disclaimer, he did not stop “this side idolatry.” If, therefore, even Jonson felt himself forced to clear himself of extravagance and absurdity in his appreciation of Shakespear, there must have been many people about who idolized Shakespear as American ladies idolize Paderewski, and who carried Bardolatry, even in the Bard’s own time, to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers ridiculous.

Shakespear’s Pessimism

I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its possible effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that Shakespear’s passion for the Dark Lady “cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness.” In Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is thrown into despair by a comparison of actual human nature with theoretical morality, actual law and administration with abstract justice, and so forth. But Shakespear’s perception of the fact that all men, judged by the moral standard which they apply to others and by which they justify their punishment of others, are fools and scoundrels, does not date from the Dark Lady complication: he seems to have been born with it. If in The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the persons of the drama are not quite so ready for treachery and murder as Laertes and even Hamlet himself (not to mention the procession of ruffians who pass through the latest plays) it is certainly not because they have any more regard for law or religion. There is only one place in Shakespear’s plays where the sense of shame is used as a human attribute; and that is where Hamlet is ashamed, not of anything he himself has done, but of his mother’s relations with his uncle. This scene is an unnatural one: the son’s reproaches to his mother, even the fact of his being able to discuss the subject with her, is more repulsive than her relations with her deceased husband’s brother.

Here, too, Shakespear betrays for once his religious sense by making Hamlet, in his agony of shame, declare that his mother’s conduct makes “sweet religion a rhapsody of words.” But for that passage we might almost suppose that the feeling of Sunday morning in the country which Orlando describes so perfectly in As You Like It was the beginning and end of Shakespear’s notion of religion. I say almost, because Isabella in Measure for Measure has religious charm, in spite of the conventional theatrical assumption that female religion means an inhumanly ferocious chastity. But for the most part Shakespear differentiates his heroes from his villains much more by what they do than by what they are. Don John in Much Ado is a true villain: a man with a malicious will; but he is too dull a duffer to be of any use in a leading part; and when we come to the great villains like Macbeth, we find, as Mr Harris points out, that they are precisely identical with the heroes: Macbeth is only Hamlet incongruously committing murders and engaging in hand-to-hand combats. And Hamlet, who does not dream of apologizing for the three murders he commits, is always apologizing because he has not yet committed a fourth, and finds, to his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. “It cannot be,” he says, “but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal.” Really one is tempted to suspect that when Shylock asks “Hates any man the thing he would not kill?” he is expressing the natural and proper sentiments of the human race as Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.

Gaiety of Genius

In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear’s pessimism as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the whole weight of the world’s misery without blenching. There is a laugh always ready to avenge its tears of discouragement. In the lines which Mr Harris quotes only to declare that he can make nothing of them, and to condemn them as out of character, Richard III, immediately after pitying himself because

There is no creature loves me

And if I die no soul will pity me,

adds, with a grin,

Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself

Find in myself no pity for myself?

Let me again remind Mr Harris of Oscar Wilde. We all dreaded to read De Profundis: our instinct was to stop our ears, or run away from the wail of a broken, though by no means contrite, heart. But we were throwing away our pity. De Profundis was de profundis indeed: Wilde was too good a dramatist to throw away so powerful an effect; but none the less it was de profundis in excelsis. There was more laughter between the lines of that book than in a thousand farces by men of no genius. Wilde, like Richard and Shakespear, found in himself no pity for himself. There is nothing that marks the born dramatist more unmistakably than this discovery of comedy in his own misfortunes almost in proportion to the pathos with which the ordinary man announces their tragedy. I cannot for the life of me see the broken heart in Shakespear’s latest works. “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings” is not the lyric of a broken man; nor is Cloten’s comment that if Imogen does not appreciate it, “it is a vice in her ears which horse hairs, and cats’ guts, and the voice of unpaved eunuch to boot, can never amend,” the sally of a saddened one. Is it not clear that to the last there was in Shakespear an incorrigible divine levity, an inexhaustible joy that derided sorrow? Think of the poor Dark Lady having to stand up to this unbearable power of extracting a grim fun from everything. Mr Harris writes as if Shakespear did all the suffering and the Dark Lady all the cruelty. But why does he not put himself in the Dark Lady’s place for a moment as he has put himself so successfully in Shakespear’s? Imagine her reading the hundred and thirtieth sonnet!

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wire, black wires grow on her head;

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak; yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

I grant I never saw a goddess go:

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her complexion; that no human being, male or female, can conceivably enjoy being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes; that Shakespear’s revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got sick when they saw the queen’s conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the “sugred” compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone.

Jupiter and Semele

This does not mean that Shakespear was cruel: evidently he was not; but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a mortal. The one thing Shakespear’s passion for the Dark Lady was not, was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who “dotes yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves,” is tolerable even by a spoilt and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man who dotes without doubting; who knows, and who is hugely amused at the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with Yorick’s skull, and inviting “my lady” to laugh at the sepulchral humor of the fact that though she paint an inch thick (which the Dark Lady may have done), to Yorick’s favor she must come at last. To the Dark Lady he must sometimes have seemed cruel beyond description: an intellectual Caliban. True, a Caliban who could say

Be not afeard:  the isle is full of noises

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

That, if I then had waked after long sleep

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches

Ready to drop on me:  that when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it, whereas there can be no doubt at all that of “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” &c., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele? Shakespear was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his place and his power in “the wide world dreaming of things to come.” The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard’s music dramas: as likely as not, she thought The Spanish Tragedy worth six Hamlets. He was not stupid either: if his class limitations and a profession that cut him off from actual participation in great affairs of State had not confined his opportunities of intellectual and political training to private conversation and to the Mermaid Tavern, he would probably have become one of the ablest men of his time instead of being merely its ablest playwright. One might surmise that Shakespear found out that the Dark Lady’s brains could no more keep pace with his than Anne Hathaway’s, if there were any evidence that their friendship ceased when he stopped writing sonnets to her. As a matter of fact the consolidation of a passion into an enduring intimacy generally puts an end to sonnets.

That the Dark Lady broke Shakespear’s heart, as Mr Harris will have it she did, is an extremely unShakespearian hypothesis. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them; but not for love,” says Rosalind. Richard of Gloster, into whom Shakespear put all his own impish superiority to vulgar sentiment, exclaims

And this word “love,” which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me:  I am myself alone.

Hamlet has not a tear for Ophelia: her death moves him to fierce disgust for the sentimentality of Laertes by her grave; and when he discusses the scene with Horatio immediately after, he utterly forgets her, though he is sorry he forgot himself, and jumps at the proposal of a fencing match to finish the day with. As against this view Mr Harris pleads Romeo, Orsino, and even Antonio; and he does it so penetratingly that he convinces you that Shakespear did betray himself again and again in these characters; but self-betrayal is one thing; and self-portrayal, as in Hamlet and Mercutio, is another. Shakespear never “saw himself,” as actors say, in Romeo or Orsino or Antonio. In Mr Harris’s own play Shakespear is presented with the most pathetic tenderness. He is tragic, bitter, pitiable, wretched and broken among a robust crowd of Jonsons and Elizabeths; but to me he is not Shakespear because I miss the Shakespearian irony and the Shakespearian gaiety. Take these away and Shakespear is no longer Shakespear: all the bite, the impetus, the strength, the grim delight in his own power of looking terrible facts in the face with a chuckle, is gone; and you have nothing left but that most depressing of all things: a victim. Now who can think of Shakespear as a man with a grievance? Even in that most thoroughgoing and inspired of all Shakespear’s loves: his love of music (which Mr Harris has been the first to appreciate at anything like its value), there is a dash of mockery. “Spit in the hole, man; and tune again.” “Divine air! Now is his soul ravished. Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale the souls out of men’s bodies?” “An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him.” There is just as much Shakespear here as in the inevitable quotation about the sweet south and the bank of violets.

I lay stress on this irony of Shakespear’s, this impish rejoicing in pessimism, this exultation in what breaks the hearts of common men, not only because it is diagnostic of that immense energy of life which we call genius, but because its omission is the one glaring defect in Mr Harris’s otherwise extraordinarily penetrating book. Fortunately, it is an omission that does not disable the book as (in my judgment) it disabled the hero of the play, because Mr Harris left himself out of his play, whereas he pervades his book, mordant, deep-voiced, and with an unconquerable style which is the man.

The Idol of the Bardolaters

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus is too great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant. But it is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris have got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact, tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about “lousy Lucy” cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk; therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all (with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he made a night of it with Jonson and Drayton, the sonnets raise an unpleasant question which does matter a good deal; and the refusal of the academic Bardolaters to discuss or even mention this question has had the effect of producing a silent verdict against Shakespear. Mr Harris tackles the question openly, and has no difficulty whatever in convincing us that Shakespear was a man of normal constitution sexually, and was not the victim of that most cruel and pitiable of all the freaks of nature: the freak which transposes the normal aim of the affections. Silence on this point means condemnation; and the condemnation has been general throughout the present generation, though it only needed Mr Harris’s fearless handling of the matter to sweep away what is nothing but a morbid and very disagreeable modern fashion. There is always some stock accusation brought against eminent persons. When I was a boy every well-known man was accused of beating his wife. Later on, for some unexplained reason, he was accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is retrospective. The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are cited as proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers. All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear’s case, prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered, does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on Shakespear’s apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that “perfect ceremony” of love which consists in returning calls and making protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or whoever “Mr W. H.” really was) is so overcharged according to modern ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.

Shakespear’s alleged Sycophancy and Perversion

That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear’s sexual constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michel Angelo, for instance, one must admit that if his works are set beside those of Titian or Paul Veronese, it is impossible not to be struck by the absence in the Florentine of that susceptibility to feminine charm which pervades the pictures of the Venetians. But, as Mr Harris points out (though he does not use this particular illustration) Paul Veronese is an anchorite compared to Shakespear. The language of the sonnets addressed to Pembroke, extravagant as it now seems, is the language of compliment and fashion, transfigured no doubt by Shakespear’s verbal magic, and hyperbolical, as Shakespear always seems to people who cannot conceive so vividly as he, but still unmistakable for anything else than the expression of a friendship delicate enough to be wounded, and a manly loyalty deep enough to be outraged. But the language of the sonnets to the Dark Lady is the language of passion: their cruelty shews it. There is no evidence that Shakespear was capable of being unkind in cold blood. But in his revulsions from love, he was bitter, wounding, even ferocious; sparing neither himself nor the unfortunate woman whose only offence was that she had reduced the great man to the common human denominator.

In seizing on these two points Mr Harris has made so sure a stroke, and placed his evidence so featly that there is nothing left for me to do but to plead that the second is sounder than the first, which is, I think, marked by the prevalent mistake as to Shakespear’s social position, or, if you prefer it, the confusion between his actual social position as a penniless tradesman’s son taking to the theatre for a livelihood, and his own conception of himself as a gentleman of good family. I am prepared to contend that though Shakespear was undoubtedly sentimental in his expressions of devotion to Mr W. H. even to a point which nowadays makes both ridiculous, he was not sycophantic if Mr W. H. was really attractive and promising, and Shakespear deeply attached to him. A sycophant does not tell his patron that his fame will survive, not in the renown of his own actions, but in the sonnets of his sycophant. A sycophant, when his patron cuts him out in a love affair, does not tell his patron exactly what he thinks of him. Above all, a sycophant does not write to his patron precisely as he feels on all occasions; and this rare kind of sincerity is all over the sonnets. Shakespear, we are told, was “a very civil gentleman.” This must mean that his desire to please people and be liked by them, and his reluctance to hurt their feelings, led him into amiable flattery even when his feelings were not strongly stirred. If this be taken into account along with the fact that Shakespear conceived and expressed all his emotions with a vehemence that sometimes carried him into ludicrous extravagance, making Richard offer his kingdom for a horse and Othello declare of Cassio that

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge

Had stomach for them all,

we shall see more civility and hyperbole than sycophancy even in the earlier and more coldblooded sonnets.

Shakespear and Democracy

Now take the general case pled against Shakespear as an enemy of democracy by Tolstoy, the late Ernest Crosbie and others, and endorsed by Mr Harris. Will it really stand fire? Mr Harris emphasizes the passages in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose breath was rank, and whose political imbecility and caprice moved Coriolanus to say to the Roman Radical who demanded at least “good words” from him

He that will give good words to thee will flatter

Beneath abhorring.

But let us be honest. As political sentiments these lines are an abomination to every democrat. But suppose they are not political sentiments! Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John Stuart Mill told our British workmen that they were mostly liars. Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody, including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken, foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to the peculiar ills of poverty and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the plutocracy to all the failings of human nature. Even Shelley admitted, 200 years after Shakespear wrote Coriolanus, that universal suffrage was out of the question. Surely the real test, not of Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear’s time, but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same balance. Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the purple from the “poor, bare, forked animal” that calls itself a king and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of the mysterious restraint that kept “Eliza and our James” from teaching Shakespear to be civil to crowned heads, just as one wonders why Tolstoy was allowed to go free when so many less terrible levellers went to the galleys or Siberia. From the mature Shakespear we get no such scenes of village snobbery as that between the stage country gentleman Alexander Iden and the stage Radical Jack Cade. We get the shepherd in As You Like It, and many honest, brave, human, and loyal servants, beside the inevitable comic ones. Even in the Jingo play, Henry V, we get Bates and Williams drawn with all respect and honor as normal rank and file men. In Julius Caesar, Shakespear went to work with a will when he took his cue from Plutarch in glorifying regicide and transfiguring the republicans. Indeed hero-worshippers have never forgiven him for belittling Caesar and failing to see that side of his assassination which made Goethe denounce it as the most senseless of crimes. Put the play beside the Charles I of Wills, in which Cromwell is written down to a point at which the Jack Cade of Henry VI becomes a hero in comparison; and then believe, if you can, that Shakespear was one of them that “crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning.” Think of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Osric, the fop who annoyed Hotspur, and a dozen passages concerning such people! If such evidence can prove anything (and Mr Harris relies throughout on such evidence) Shakespear loathed courtiers.

If, on the other hand, Shakespear’s characters are mostly members of the leisured classes, the same thing is true of Mr Harris’s own plays and mine. Industrial slavery is not compatible with that freedom of adventure, that personal refinement and intellectual culture, that scope of action, which the higher and subtler drama demands.

Even Cervantes had finally to drop Don Quixote’s troubles with innkeepers demanding to be paid for his food and lodging, and make him as free of economic difficulties as Amadis de Gaul. Hamlet’s experiences simply could not have happened to a plumber. A poor man is useful on the stage only as a blind man is: to excite sympathy. The poverty of the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet produces a great effect, and even points the sound moral that a poor man cannot afford to have a conscience; but if all the characters of the play had been as poor as he, it would have been nothing but a melodrama of the sort that the Sicilian players gave us here; and that was not the best that lay in Shakespear’s power. When poverty is abolished, and leisure and grace of life become general, the only plays surviving from our epoch which will have any relation to life as it will be lived then will be those in which none of the persons represented are troubled with want of money or wretched drudgery. Our plays of poverty and squalor, now the only ones that are true to the life of the majority of living men, will then be classed with the records of misers and monsters, and read only by historical students of social pathology.

Then consider Shakespear’s kings and lords and gentlemen! Would even John Ball or Jeremiah complain that they are flattered? Surely a more mercilessly exposed string of scoundrels never crossed the stage. The very monarch who paralyzes a rebel by appealing to the divinity that hedges a king, is a drunken and sensual assassin, and is presently killed contemptuously before our eyes in spite of his hedge of divinity. I could write as convincing a chapter on Shakespear’s Dickensian prejudice against the throne and the nobility and gentry in general as Mr Harris or Ernest Crosbie on the other side. I could even go so far as to contend that one of Shakespear’s defects is his lack of an intelligent comprehension of feudalism. He had of course no prevision of democratic Collectivism. He was, except in the commonplaces of war and patriotism, a privateer through and through. Nobody in his plays, whether king or citizen, has any civil public business or conception of such a thing, except in the method of appointing constables, to the abuses in which he called attention quite in the vein of the Fabian Society. He was concerned about drunkenness and about the idolatry and hypocrisy of our judicial system; but his implied remedy was personal sobriety and freedom from idolatrous illusion in so far as he had any remedy at all, and did not merely despair of human nature. His first and last word on parliament was “Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the thing thou dost not.” He had no notion of the feeling with which the land nationalizers of today regard the fact that he was a party to the enclosure of common lands at Wellcome. The explanation is, not a general deficiency in his mind, but the simple fact that in his day what English land needed was individual appropriation and cultivation, and what the English Constitution needed was the incorporation of Whig principles of individual liberty.

Shakespear and the British Public

I have rejected Mr Harris’s view that Shakespear died broken-hearted of “the pangs of love despised.” I have given my reasons for believing that Shakespear died game, and indeed in a state of levity which would have been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr Harris’s evidence does prove that Shakespear had a grievance and a very serious one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and been none the worse for it; but his treatment by the British Public was another matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was by no means a popular movement; and, like all such idolatries, it was excited by the magic of Shakespear’s art rather than by his views.

He was launched on his career as a successful playwright by the Henry VI trilogy, a work of no originality, depth, or subtlety except the originality, depth, and subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the common people. But Shakespear was not satisfied with this. What is the use of being Shakespear if you are not allowed to express any notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespear did not see the world as Autolycus did: he saw it, if not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was not quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen’s power of penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift’s horror of its cruelty and uncleanliness.

Now it happens to some men with these powers that they are forced to impose their fullest exercise on the world because they cannot produce popular work. Take Wagner and Ibsen for instance! Their earlier works are no doubt much cheaper than their later ones; still, they were not popular when they were written. The alternative of doing popular work was never really open to them: had they stooped they would have picked up less than they snatched from above the people’s heads. But Handel and Shakespear were not held to their best in this way. They could turn out anything they were asked for, and even heap up the measure. They reviled the British Public, and never forgave it for ignoring their best work and admiring their splendid commonplaces; but they produced the commonplaces all the same, and made them sound magnificent by mere brute faculty for their art. When Shakespear was forced to write popular plays to save his theatre from ruin, he did it mutinously, calling the plays “As You Like It,” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” All the same, he did it so well that to this day these two genial vulgarities are the main Shakespearian stock-in-trade of our theatres. Later on Burbage’s power and popularity as an actor enabled Shakespear to free himself from the tyranny of the box office, and to express himself more freely in plays consisting largely of monologue to be spoken by a great actor from whom the public would stand a good deal. The history of Shakespear’s tragedies has thus been the history of a long line of famous actors, from Burbage and Betterton to Forbes Robertson; and the man of whom we are told that “when he would have said that Richard died, and cried A horse! A horse! he Burbage cried” was the father of nine generations of Shakespearian playgoers, all speaking of Garrick’s Richard, and Kean’s Othello, and Irving’s Shylock, and Forbes Robertson’s Hamlet without knowing or caring how much these had to do with Shakespear’s Richard and Othello and so forth. And the plays which were written without great and predominant parts, such as Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, have dropped on our stage as dead as the second part of Goethe’s Faust or Ibsen’s Emperor or Galilean.

Here, then, Shakespear had a real grievance; and though it is a sentimental exaggeration to describe him as a broken-hearted man in the face of the passages of reckless jollity and serenely happy poetry in his latest plays, yet the discovery that his most serious work could reach success only when carried on the back of a very fascinating actor who was enormously overcharging his part, and that the serious plays which did not contain parts big enough to hold the overcharge were left on the shelf, amply accounts for the evident fact that Shakespear did not end his life in a glow of enthusiastic satisfaction with mankind and with the theatre, which is all that Mr Harris can allege in support of his broken-heart theory. But even if Shakespear had had no failures, it was not possible for a man of his powers to observe the political and moral conduct of his contemporaries without perceiving that they were incapable of dealing with the problems raised by their own civilization, and that their attempts to carry out the codes of law and to practise the religions offered to them by great prophets and law-givers were and still are so foolish that we now call for The Superman, virtually a new species, to rescue the world from mismanagement. This is the real sorrow of great men; and in the face of it the notion that when a great man speaks bitterly or looks melancholy he must be troubled by a disappointment in love seems to me sentimental trifling.

If I have carried the reader with me thus far, he will find that trivial as this little play of mine is, its sketch of Shakespear is more complete than its levity suggests. Alas! its appeal for a National Theatre as a monument to Shakespear failed to touch the very stupid people who cannot see that a National Theatre is worth having for the sake of the National Soul. I had unfortunately represented Shakespear as treasuring and using (as I do myself) the jewels of unconsciously musical speech which common people utter and throw away every day; and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear’s “originality.” Why was I born with such contemporaries? Why is Shakespear made ridiculous by such a posterity?

The Dark Lady of The Sonnets was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, on the afternoon of Thursday, the 24th November 1910, by Mona Limerick as the Dark Lady, Suzanne Sheldon as Queen Elizabeth, Granville Barker as Shakespear, and Hugh Tabberer as the Warder.

THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS

Fin de siecle 15-1600. Midsummer night on the terrace of the Palace at Whitehall, overlooking the Thames. The Palace clock chimes four quarters and strikes eleven.

A Beefeater on guard. A Cloaked Man approaches.

THE BEEFEATER. Stand. Who goes there? Give the word.

THE MAN. Marry! I cannot. I have clean forgotten it.

THE BEEFEATER. Then cannot you pass here. What is your business? Who are you? Are you a true man?

THE MAN. Far from it, Master Warder. I am not the same man two days together: sometimes Adam, sometimes Benvolio, and anon the Ghost.

THE BEEFEATER. [recoiling] A ghost! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

THE MAN. Well said, Master Warder. With your leave I will set that down in writing; for I have a very poor and unhappy brain for remembrance. [He takes out his tablets and writes]. Methinks this is a good scene, with you on your lonely watch, and I approaching like a ghost in the moonlight. Stare not so amazedly at me; but mark what I say. I keep tryst here to-night with a dark lady. She promised to bribe the warder. I gave her the wherewithal: four tickets for the Globe Theatre.

THE BEEFEATER. Plague on her! She gave me two only.

THE MAN. [detaching a tablet] My friend: present this tablet, and you will be welcomed at any time when the plays of Will Shakespear are in hand. Bring your wife. Bring your friends. Bring the whole garrison. There is ever plenty of room.

THE BEEFEATER. I care not for these new-fangled plays. No man can understand a word of them. They are all talk. Will you not give me a pass for The Spanish Tragedy?

THE MAN. To see The Spanish Tragedy one pays, my friend. Here are the means. [He gives him a piece of gold].

THE BEEFEATER. [overwhelmed] Gold! Oh, sir, you are a better paymaster than your dark lady.

THE MAN. Women are thrifty, my friend.

THE BEEFEATER. Tis so, sir. And you have to consider that the most open handed of us must een cheapen that which we buy every day. This lady has to make a present to a warder nigh every night of her life.

THE MAN. [turning pale] I’ll not believe it.

THE BEEFEATER. Now you, sir, I dare be sworn, do not have an adventure like this twice in the year.

THE MAN. Villain: wouldst tell me that my dark lady hath ever done thus before? that she maketh occasions to meet other men?

THE BEEFEATER. Now the Lord bless your innocence, sir, do you think you are the only pretty man in the world? A merry lady, sir: a warm bit of stuff. Go to: I’ll not see her pass a deceit on a gentleman that hath given me the first piece of gold I ever handled.

THE MAN. Master Warder: is it not a strange thing that we, knowing that all women are false, should be amazed to find our own particular drab no better than the rest?

THE BEEFEATER. Not all, sir. Decent bodies, many of them.

THE MAN. [intolerantly] No. All false. All. If thou deny it, thou liest.

THE BEEFEATER. You judge too much by the Court, sir. There, indeed, you may say of frailty that its name is woman.

THE MAN. [pulling out his tablets again] Prithee say that again: that about frailty: the strain of music.

THE BEEFEATER. What strain of music, sir? I’m no musician, God knows.

THE MAN. There is music in your soul: many of your degree have it very notably. [Writing] “Frailty: thy name is woman!” [Repeating it affectionately] “Thy name is woman.”

THE BEEFEATER. Well, sir, it is but four words. Are you a snapper-up of such unconsidered trifles?

THE MAN. [eagerly] Snapper-up of — [he gasps] Oh! Immortal phrase! [He writes it down]. This man is a greater than I.

THE BEEFEATER. You have my lord Pembroke’s trick, sir.

THE MAN. Like enough: he is my near friend. But what call you his trick?

THE BEEFEATER. Making sonnets by moonlight. And to the same lady too.

THE MAN. No!

THE BEEFEATER. Last night he stood here on your errand, and in your shoes.

THE MAN. Thou, too, Brutus! And I called him friend!

THE BEEFEATER. Tis ever so, sir.

THE MAN. Tis ever so. Twas ever so. [He turns away, overcome]. Two Gentlemen of Verona! Judas! Judas!!

THE BEEFEATER. Is he so bad as that, sir?

THE MAN. [recovering his charity and self-possession] Bad? Oh no. Human, Master Warder, human. We call one another names when we are offended, as children do. That is all.

THE BEEFEATER. Ay, sir: words, words, words. Mere wind, sir. We fill our bellies with the east wind, sir, as the Scripture hath it. You cannot feed capons so.

THE MAN. A good cadence. By your leave [He makes a note of it].

THE BEEFEATER. What manner of thing is a cadence, sir? I have not heard of it.

THE MAN. A thing to rule the world with, friend.

THE BEEFEATER. You speak strangely, sir: no offence. But, an’t like you, you are a very civil gentleman; and a poor man feels drawn to you, you being, as twere, willing to share your thought with him.

THE MAN. Tis my trade. But alas! the world for the most part will none of my thoughts.

Lamplight streams from the palace door as it opens from within.

THE BEEFEATER. Here comes your lady, sir. I’ll to t’other end of my ward. You may een take your time about your business: I shall not return too suddenly unless my sergeant comes prowling round. Tis a fell sergeant, sir: strict in his arrest. Go’d’en, sir; and good luck! [He goes].

THE MAN. “Strict in his arrest”! “Fell sergeant”! [As if tasting a ripe plum] O-o-o-h! [He makes a note of them].

A Cloaked Lady gropes her way from the palace and wanders along the terrace, walking in her sleep.

THE LADY. [rubbing her hands as if washing them] Out, damned spot. You will mar all with these cosmetics. God made you one face; and you make yourself another. Think of your grave, woman, not ever of being beautified. All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this Tudor hand.

THE MAN. “All the perfumes of Arabia”! “Beautified”! “Beautified”! a poem in a single word. Can this be my Mary? [To the Lady] Why do you speak in a strange voice, and utter poetry for the first time? Are you ailing? You walk like the dead. Mary! Mary!

THE LADY. [echoing him] Mary! Mary! Who would have thought that woman to have had so much blood in her! Is it my fault that my counsellors put deeds of blood on me? Fie! If you were women you would have more wit than to stain the floor so foully. Hold not up her head so: the hair is false. I tell you yet again, Mary’s buried: she cannot come out of her grave. I fear her not: these cats that dare jump into thrones though they be fit only for men’s laps must be put away. Whats done cannot be undone. Out, I say. Fie! a queen, and freckled!

THE MAN. [shaking her arm] Mary, I say: art asleep?

The Lady wakes; starts; and nearly faints. He catches her on his arm.

THE LADY. Where am I? What art thou?

THE MAN. I cry your mercy. I have mistook your person all this while. Methought you were my Mary: my mistress.

THE LADY. [outraged] Profane fellow: how do you dare?

THE MAN. Be not wroth with me, lady. My mistress is a marvellous proper woman. But she does not speak so well as you. “All the perfumes of Arabia”! That was well said: spoken with good accent and excellent discretion.

THE LADY. Have I been in speech with you here?

THE MAN. Why, yes, fair lady. Have you forgot it?

THE LADY. I have walked in my sleep.

THE MAN. Walk ever in your sleep, fair one; for then your words drop like honey.

THE LADY. [with cold majesty] Know you to whom you speak, sir, that you dare express yourself so saucily?

THE MAN. [unabashed] Not I, not care neither. You are some lady of the Court, belike. To me there are but two sorts of women: those with excellent voices, sweet and low, and cackling hens that cannot make me dream. Your voice has all manner of loveliness in it. Grudge me not a short hour of its music.

THE LADY. Sir: you are overbold. Season your admiration for a while with —

THE MAN. [holding up his hand to stop her] “Season your admiration for a while—”

THE LADY. Fellow: do you dare mimic me to my face?

THE MAN. Tis music. Can you not hear? When a good musician sings a song, do you not sing it and sing it again till you have caught and fixed its perfect melody? “Season your admiration for a while”: God! the history of man’s heart is in that one word admiration. Admiration! [Taking up his tablets] What was it? “Suspend your admiration for a space—”

THE LADY. A very vile jingle of esses. I said “Season your—”

THE MAN. [hastily] Season: ay, season, season, season. Plague on my memory, my wretched memory! I must een write it down. [He begins to write, but stops, his memory failing him]. Yet tell me which was the vile jingle? You said very justly: mine own ear caught it even as my false tongue said it.

THE LADY. You said “for a space.” I said “for a while.”

THE MAN. “For a while” [he corrects it]. Good! [Ardently] And now be mine neither for a space nor a while, but for ever.

THE LADY. Odds my life! Are you by chance making love to me, knave?

THE MAN. Nay: tis you who have made the love: I but pour it out at your feet. I cannot but love a lass that sets such store by an apt word. Therefore vouchsafe, divine perfection of a woman — no: I have said that before somewhere; and the wordy garment of my love for you must be fire-new —

THE LADY. You talk too much, sir. Let me warn you: I am more accustomed to be listened to than preached at.

THE MAN. The most are like that that do talk well. But though you spake with the tongues of angels, as indeed you do, yet know that I am the king of words —

THE LADY. A king, ha!

THE MAN. No less. We are poor things, we men and women —

THE LADY. Dare you call me woman?

THE MAN. What nobler name can I tender you? How else can I love you? Yet you may well shrink from the name: have I not said we are but poor things? Yet there is a power that can redeem us.

THE LADY. Gramercy for your sermon, sir. I hope I know my duty.

THE MAN. This is no sermon, but the living truth. The power I speak of is the power of immortal poesy. For know that vile as this world is, and worms as we are, you have but to invest all this vileness with a magical garment of words to transfigure us and uplift our souls til earth flowers into a million heavens.

THE LADY. You spoil your heaven with your million. You are extravagant. Observe some measure in your speech.

THE MAN. You speak now as Ben does.

THE LADY. And who, pray, is Ben?

THE MAN. A learned bricklayer who thinks that the sky is at the top of his ladder, and so takes it on him to rebuke me for flying. I tell you there is no word yet coined and no melody yet sung that is extravagant and majestical enough for the glory that lovely words can reveal. It is heresy to deny it: have you not been taught that in the beginning was the Word? that the Word was with God? nay, that the Word was God?

THE LADY. Beware, fellow, how you presume to speak of holy things. The Queen is the head of the Church.

THE MAN. You are the head of my Church when you speak as you did at first. “All the perfumes of Arabia”! Can the Queen speak thus? They say she playeth well upon the virginals. Let her play so to me; and I’ll kiss her hands. But until then, you are my Queen; and I’ll kiss those lips that have dropt music on my heart. [He puts his arms about her].

THE LADY. Unmeasured impudence! On your life, take your hands from me.

The Dark Lady comes stooping along the terrace behind them like a running thrush. When she sees how they are employed, she rises angrily to her full height, and listens jealously.

THE MAN. [unaware of the Dark Lady] Then cease to make my hands tremble with the streams of life you pour through them. You hold me as the lodestar holds the iron: I cannot but cling to you. We are lost, you and I: nothing can separate us now.

THE DARK LADY. We shall see that, false lying hound, you and your filthy trull. [With two vigorous cuffs, she knocks the pair asunder, sending the man, who is unlucky enough to receive a righthanded blow, sprawling an the flags]. Take that, both of you!

THE CLOAKED LADY. [in towering wrath, throwing off her cloak and turning in outraged majesty on her assailant] High treason!

THE DARK LADY. [recognizing her and falling on her knees in abject terror] Will: I am lost: I have struck the Queen.

THE MAN. [sitting up as majestically as his ignominious posture allows] Woman: you have struck WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR.

QUEEN ELIZABETH. [stupent] Marry, come up!!! Struck William Shakespear quotha! And who in the name of all the sluts and jades and light-o’-loves and fly-by-nights that infest this palace of mine, may William Shakespear be?

THE DARK LADY. Madam: he is but a player. Oh, I could have my hand cut off —

QUEEN ELIZABETH. Belike you will, mistress. Have you bethought you that I am like to have your head cut off as well?

THE DARK LADY. Will: save me. Oh, save me.

ELIZABETH. Save you! A likely savior, on my royal word! I had thought this fellow at least an esquire; for I had hoped that even the vilest of my ladies would not have dishonored my Court by wantoning with a baseborn servant.

SHAKESPEAR. [indignantly scrambling to his feet] Base-born! I, a Shakespear of Stratford! I, whose mother was an Arden! baseborn! You forget yourself, madam.

ELIZABETH. [furious] S’blood! do I so? I will teach you —

THE DARK LADY. [rising from her knees and throwing herself between them] Will: in God’s name anger her no further. It is death. Madam: do not listen to him.

SHAKESPEAR. Not were it een to save your life, Mary, not to mention mine own, will I flatter a monarch who forgets what is due to my family. I deny not that my father was brought down to be a poor bankrupt; but twas his gentle blood that was ever too generous for trade. Never did he disown his debts. Tis true he paid them not; but it is an attested truth that he gave bills for them; and twas those bills, in the hands of base hucksters, that were his undoing.

ELIZABETH. [grimly] The son of your father shall learn his place in the presence of the daughter of Harry the Eighth.

SHAKESPEAR. [swelling with intolerant importance] Name not that inordinate man in the same breath with Stratford’s worthiest alderman. John Shakespear wedded but once: Harry Tudor was married six times. You should blush to utter his name.

THE DARK LADY. Will: for pity’s sake — crying out together

ELIZABETH. Insolent dog —

SHAKESPEAR. [cutting them short] How know you that King Harry was indeed your father?

ELIZABETH. Zounds! Now by — she stops to grind her teeth with rage].

THE DARK LADY. She will have me whipped through the streets. Oh God! Oh God!

SHAKESPEAR. Learn to know yourself better, madam. I am an honest gentleman of unquestioned parentage, and have already sent in my demand for the coat-of-arms that is lawfully mine. Can you say as much for yourself?

ELIZABETH. [almost beside herself] Another word; and I begin with mine own hands the work the hangman shall finish.

SHAKESPEAR. You are no true Tudor: this baggage here has as good a right to your royal seat as you. What maintains you on the throne of England? Is it your renowned wit? your wisdom that sets at naught the craftiest statesmen of the Christian world? No. Tis the mere chance that might have happened to any milkmaid, the caprice of Nature that made you the most wondrous piece of beauty the age hath seen. [Elizabeth’s raised fists, on the point of striking him, fall to her side]. That is what hath brought all men to your feet, and founded your throne on the impregnable rock of your proud heart, a stony island in a sea of desire. There, madam, is some wholesome blunt honest speaking for you. Now do your worst.

ELIZABETH. [with dignity] Master Shakespear: it is well for you that I am a merciful prince. I make allowance for your rustic ignorance. But remember that there are things which be true, and are yet not seemly to be said (I will not say to a queen; for you will have it that I am none) but to a virgin.

SHAKESPEAR. [bluntly] It is no fault of mine that you are a virgin, madam, albeit tis my misfortune.

THE DARK LADY. [terrified again] In mercy, madam, hold no further discourse with him. He hath ever some lewd jest on his tongue. You hear how he useth me! calling me baggage and the like to your Majesty’s face.

ELIZABETH. As for you, mistress, I have yet to demand what your business is at this hour in this place, and how you come to be so concerned with a player that you strike blindly at your sovereign in your jealousy of him.

THE DARK LADY. Madam: as I live and hope for salvation —

SHAKESPEAR. [sardonically] Ha!

THE DARK LADY. [angrily] — ay, I’m as like to be saved as thou that believest naught save some black magic of words and verses — I say, madam, as I am a living woman I came here to break with him for ever. Oh, madam, if you would know what misery is, listen to this man that is more than man and less at the same time. He will tie you down to anatomize your very soul: he will wring tears of blood from your humiliation; and then he will heal the wound with flatteries that no woman can resist.

SHAKESPEAR. Flatteries! [Kneeling] Oh, madam, I put my case at your royal feet. I confess to much. I have a rude tongue: I am unmannerly: I blaspheme against the holiness of anointed royalty; but oh, my royal mistress, AM I a flatterer?

ELIZABETH. I absolve you as to that. You are far too plain a dealer to please me. [He rises gratefully].

THE DARK LADY. Madam: he is flattering you even as he speaks.

ELIZABETH. [a terrible flash in her eye] Ha! Is it so?

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: she is jealous; and, heaven help me! not without reason. Oh, you say you are a merciful prince; but that was cruel of you, that hiding of your royal dignity when you found me here. For how can I ever be content with this black-haired, black-eyed, black-avised devil again now that I have looked upon real beauty and real majesty?

THE DARK LADY. [wounded and desperate] He hath swore to me ten times over that the day shall come in England when black women, for all their foulness, shall be more thought on than fair ones. [To Shakespear, scolding at him] Deny it if thou canst. Oh, he is compact of lies and scorns. I am tired of being tossed up to heaven and dragged down to hell at every whim that takes him. I am ashamed to my very soul that I have abased myself to love one that my father would not have deemed fit to hold my stirrup — one that will talk to all the world about me — that will put my love and my shame into his plays and make me blush for myself there — that will write sonnets about me that no man of gentle strain would put his hand to. I am all disordered: I know not what I am saying to your Majesty: I am of all ladies most deject and wretched —

SHAKESPEAR. Ha! At last sorrow hath struck a note of music out of thee. “Of all ladies most deject and wretched.” [He makes a note of it].

THE DARK LADY. Madam: I implore you give me leave to go. I am distracted with grief and shame. I —

ELIZABETH. Go [The Dark Lady tries to kiss her hand]. No more. Go. [The Dark Lady goes, convulsed]. You have been cruel to that poor fond wretch, Master Shakespear.

SHAKESPEAR. I am not cruel, madam; but you know the fable of Jupiter and Semele. I could not help my lightnings scorching her.

ELIZABETH. You have an overweening conceit of yourself, sir, that displeases your Queen.

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, can I go about with the modest cough of a minor poet, belittling my inspiration and making the mightiest wonder of your reign a thing of nought? I have said that “not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive” the words with which I make the world glorious or foolish at my will. Besides, I would have you think me great enough to grant me a boon.

ELIZABETH. I hope it is a boon that may be asked of a virgin Queen without offence, sir. I mistrust your forwardness; and I bid you remember that I do not suffer persons of your degree (if I may say so without offence to your father the alderman) to presume too far.

SHAKESPEAR. Oh, madam, I shall not forget myself again; though by my life, could I make you a serving wench, neither a queen nor a virgin should you be for so much longer as a flash of lightning might take to cross the river to the Bankside. But since you are a queen and will none of me, nor of Philip of Spain, nor of any other mortal man, I must een contain myself as best I may, and ask you only for a boon of State.

ELIZABETH. A boon of State already! You are becoming a courtier like the rest of them. You lack advancement.

SHAKESPEAR. “Lack advancement.” By your Majesty’s leave: a queenly phrase. [He is about to write it down].

ELIZABETH. [striking the tablets from his hand] Your tables begin to anger me, sir. I am not here to write your plays for you.

SHAKESPEAR. You are here to inspire them, madam. For this, among the rest, were you ordained. But the boon I crave is that you do endow a great playhouse, or, if I may make bold to coin a scholarly name for it, a National Theatre, for the better instruction and gracing of your Majesty’s subjects.

ELIZABETH. Why, sir, are there not theatres enow on the Bankside and in Blackfriars?

SHAKESPEAR. Madam: these are the adventures of needy and desperate men that must, to save themselves from perishing of want, give the sillier sort of people what they best like; and what they best like, God knows, is not their own betterment and instruction, as we well see by the example of the churches, which must needs compel men to frequent them, though they be open to all without charge. Only when there is a matter of a murder, or a plot, or a pretty youth in petticoats, or some naughty tale of wantonness, will your subjects pay the great cost of good players and their finery, with a little profit to boot. To prove this I will tell you that I have written two noble and excellent plays setting forth the advancement of women of high nature and fruitful industry even as your Majesty is: the one a skilful physician, the other a sister devoted to good works. I have also stole from a book of idle wanton tales two of the most damnable foolishnesses in the world, in the one of which a woman goeth in man’s attire and maketh impudent love to her swain, who pleaseth the groundlings by overthrowing a wrestler; whilst, in the other, one of the same kidney sheweth her wit by saying endless naughtinesses to a gentleman as lewd as herself. I have writ these to save my friends from penury, yet shewing my scorn for such follies and for them that praise them by calling the one As You Like It, meaning that it is not as I like it, and the other Much Ado About Nothing, as it truly is. And now these two filthy pieces drive their nobler fellows from the stage, where indeed I cannot have my lady physician presented at all, she being too honest a woman for the taste of the town. Wherefore I humbly beg your Majesty to give order that a theatre be endowed out of the public revenue for the playing of those pieces of mine which no merchant will touch, seeing that his gain is so much greater with the worse than with the better. Thereby you shall also encourage other men to undertake the writing of plays who do now despise it and leave it wholly to those whose counsels will work little good to your realm. For this writing of plays is a great matter, forming as it does the minds and affections of men in such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the world, which is but a larger stage. Of late, as you know, the Church taught the people by means of plays; but the people flocked only to such as were full of superstitious miracles and bloody martyrdoms; and so the Church, which also was just then brought into straits by the policy of your royal father, did abandon and discountenance the art of playing; and thus it fell into the hands of poor players and greedy merchants that had their pockets to look to and not the greatness of this your kingdom. Therefore now must your Majesty take up that good work that your Church hath abandoned, and restore the art of playing to its former use and dignity.

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: I will speak of this matter to the Lord Treasurer.

SHAKESPEAR. Then am I undone, madam; for there was never yet a Lord Treasurer that could find a penny for anything over and above the necessary expenses of your government, save for a war or a salary for his own nephew.

ELIZABETH. Master Shakespear: you speak sooth; yet cannot I in any wise mend it. I dare not offend my unruly Puritans by making so lewd a place as the playhouse a public charge; and there be a thousand things to be done in this London of mine before your poetry can have its penny from the general purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will be three hundred years and more before my subjects learn that man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh from the mouth of those whom God inspires. By that time you and I will be dust beneath the feet of the horses, if indeed there be any horses then, and men be still riding instead of flying. Now it may be that by then your works will be dust also.

SHAKESPEAR. They will stand, madam: fear nor for that.

ELIZABETH. It may prove so. But of this I am certain (for I know my countrymen) that until every other country in the Christian world, even to barbarian Muscovy and the hamlets of the boorish Germans, have its playhouse at the public charge, England will never adventure. And she will adventure then only because it is her desire to be ever in the fashion, and to do humbly and dutifully whatso she seeth everybody else doing. In the meantime you must content yourself as best you can by the playing of those two pieces which you give out as the most damnable ever writ, but which your countrymen, I warn you, will swear are the best you have ever done. But this I will say, that if I could speak across the ages to our descendants, I should heartily recommend them to fulfil your wish; for the Scottish minstrel hath well said that he that maketh the songs of a nation is mightier than he that maketh its laws; and the same may well be true of plays and interludes. [The clock chimes the first quarter. The warder returns on his round]. And now, sir, we are upon the hour when it better beseems a virgin queen to be abed than to converse alone with the naughtiest of her subjects. Ho there! Who keeps ward on the queen’s lodgings tonight?

THE WARDER. I do, an’t please your majesty.

ELIZABETH. See that you keep it better in future. You have let pass a most dangerous gallant even to the very door of our royal chamber. Lead him forth; and bring me word when he is safely locked out; for I shall scarce dare disrobe until the palace gates are between us.

SHAKESPEAR. [kissing her hand] My body goes through the gate into the darkness, madam; but my thoughts follow you.

ELIZABETH. How! to my bed!

SHAKESPEAR. No, madam, to your prayers, in which I beg you to remember my theatre.

ELIZABETH. That is my prayer to posterity. Forget not your own to God; and so goodnight, Master Will.

SHAKESPEAR. Goodnight, great Elizabeth. God save the Queen!

ELIZABETH. Amen.

Exeunt severally: she to her chamber: he, in custody of the warder, to the gate nearest Blackfriars.

AYOT, ST. LAWRENCE, 20th June 1910.

FANNY’S FIRST PLAY

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO FANNY’S FIRST PLAY

INDUCTION

THE PLAY

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

EPILOGUE

PREFACE TO FANNY’S FIRST PLAY

Fanny’s First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month’s hard labor, than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed. Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble? But please do not suppose that I defend a state of things which makes such advice the best that can be given under the circumstances, or that I do not know how difficult it is to find out a way of getting into trouble that will combine loss of respectability with integrity of self-respect and reasonable consideration for other peoples’ feelings and interests on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability. But when there’s a will there’s a way. I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class people are all as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them the judgment of her God.

The critics whom I have lampooned in the induction to this play under the names of Trotter, Vaughan, and Gunn will forgive me: in fact Mr Trotter forgave me beforehand, and assisted the make-up by which Mr Claude King so successfully simulated his personal appearance. The critics whom I did not introduce were somewhat hurt, as I should have been myself under the same circumstances; but I had not room for them all; so I can only apologize and assure them that I meant no disrespect.

The concealment of the authorship, if a secret de Polichinelle can be said to involve concealment, was a necessary part of the play. In so far as it was effectual, it operated as a measure of relief to those critics and playgoers who are so obsessed by my strained legendary reputation that they approach my plays in a condition which is really one of derangement, and are quite unable to conceive a play of mine as anything but a trap baited with paradoxes, and designed to compass their ethical perversion and intellectual confusion. If it were possible, I should put forward all my plays anonymously, or hire some less disturbing person, as Bacon is said to have hired Shakespear, to father my plays for me.

Fanny’s First Play was performed for the first time at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, London, on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 19th 1911.

INDUCTION

The end of a saloon in an old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count O’Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery enters before the curtain, on its O.P. side.

FOOTMAN. [announcing] Mr Cecil Savoyard. [Cecil Savoyard comes in: a middle-aged man in evening dress and a fur-lined overcoat. He is surprised to find nobody to receive him. So is the Footman]. Oh, beg pardon, sir: I thought the Count was here. He was when I took up your name. He must have gone through the stage into the library. This way, sir. [He moves towards the division in the middle of the curtains].

SAVOYARD. Half a mo. [The Footman stops]. When does the play begin? Half-past eight?

FOOTMAN. Nine, sir.

SAVOYARD. Oh, good. Well, will you telephone to my wife at the George that it’s not until nine?

FOOTMAN. Right, sir. Mrs Cecil Savoyard, sir?

SAVOYARD. No: Mrs William Tinkler. Dont forget.

THE FOOTMAN. Mrs Tinkler, sir. Right, sir. [The Count comes in through the curtains]. Here is the Count, sir. [Announcing] Mr Cecil Savoyard, sir. [He withdraws].

COUNT O’DOWDA. [A handsome man of fifty, dressed with studied elegance a hundred years out of date, advancing cordially to shake hands with his visitor] Pray excuse me, Mr Savoyard. I suddenly recollected that all the bookcases in the library were locked — in fact theyve never been opened since we came from Venice — and as our literary guests will probably use the library a good deal, I just ran in to unlock everything.

SAVOYARD. Oh, you mean the dramatic critics. M’yes. I suppose theres a smoking room?

THE COUNT. My study is available. An old-fashioned house, you understand. Wont you sit down, Mr Savoyard?

SAVOYARD. Thanks. [They sit. Savoyard, looking at his host’s obsolete costume, continues] I had no idea you were going to appear in the piece yourself.

THE COUNT. I am not. I wear this costume because — well, perhaps I had better explain the position, if it interests you.

SAVOYARD. Certainly.

THE COUNT. Well, you see, Mr Savoyard, I’m rather a stranger in your world. I am not, I hope, a modern man in any sense of the word. I’m not really an Englishman: my family is Irish: Ive lived all my life in Italy — in Venice mostly — my very title is a foreign one: I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.

SAVOYARD. Where’s that?

THE COUNT. At present, nowhere, except as a memory and an ideal. [Savoyard inclines his head respectfully to the ideal]. But I am by no means an idealogue. I am not content with beautiful dreams: I want beautiful realities.

SAVOYARD. Hear, hear! I’m all with you there — when you can get them.

THE COUNT. Why not get them? The difficulty is not that there are no beautiful realities, Mr Savoyard: the difficulty is that so few of us know them when we see them. We have inherited from the past a vast treasure of beauty — of imperishable masterpieces of poetry, of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of music, of exquisite fashions in dress, in furniture, in domestic decoration. We can contemplate these treasures. We can reproduce many of them. We can buy a few inimitable originals. We can shut out the nineteenth century —

SAVOYARD. [correcting him] The twentieth.

THE COUNT. To me the century I shut out will always be the nineteenth century, just as your national anthem will always be God Save the Queen, no matter how many kings may succeed. I found England befouled with industrialism: well, I did what Byron did: I simply refused to live in it. You remember Byron’s words: “I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my deathbed could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcase back to her soil. I would not even feed her worms if I could help it.”

SAVOYARD. Did Byron say that?

THE COUNT. He did, sir.

SAVOYARD. It dont sound like him. I saw a good deal of him at one time.

THE COUNT. You! But how is that possible? You are too young.

SAVOYARD. I was quite a lad, of course. But I had a job in the original production of Our Boys.

THE COUNT. My dear sir, not that Byron. Lord Byron, the poet.

SAVOYARD. Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you were talking of the Byron. So you prefer living abroad?

THE COUNT. I find England ugly and Philistine. Well, I dont live in it. I find modern houses ugly. I dont live in them: I have a palace on the grand canal. I find modern clothes prosaic. I dont wear them, except, of course, in the street. My ears are offended by the Cockney twang: I keep out of hearing of it and speak and listen to Italian. I find Beethoven’s music coarse and restless, and Wagner’s senseless and detestable. I do not listen to them. I listen to Cimarosa, to Pergolesi, to Gluck and Mozart. Nothing simpler, sir.

SAVOYARD. It’s all right when you can afford it.

THE COUNT. Afford it! My dear Mr Savoyard, if you are a man with a sense of beauty you can make an earthly paradise for yourself in Venice on 1500 pounds a year, whilst our wretched vulgar industrial millionaires are spending twenty thousand on the amusements of billiard markers. I assure you I am a poor man according to modern ideas. But I have never had anything less than the very best that life has produced. It is my good fortune to have a beautiful and lovable daughter; and that girl, sir, has never seen an ugly sight or heard an ugly sound that I could spare her; and she has certainly never worn an ugly dress or tasted coarse food or bad wine in her life. She has lived in a palace; and her perambulator was a gondola. Now you know the sort of people we are, Mr Savoyard. You can imagine how we feel here.

SAVOYARD. Rather out of it, eh?

THE COUNT. Out of it, sir! Out of what?

SAVOYARD. Well, out of everything.

THE COUNT. Out of soot and fog and mud and east wind; out of vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner and Ruskin. Dont you envy me, Mr Savoyard?

SAVOYARD. Some of us must live in England, you know, just to keep the place going. Besides — though, mind you, I dont say it isnt all right from the high art point of view and all that — three weeks of it would drive me melancholy mad. However, I’m glad you told me, because it explains why it is you dont seem to know your way about much in England. I hope, by the way, that everything has given satisfaction to your daughter.

THE COUNT. She seems quite satisfied. She tells me that the actors you sent down are perfectly suited to their parts, and very nice people to work with. I understand she had some difficulties at the first rehearsals with the gentleman you call the producer, because he hadnt read the play; but the moment he found out what it was all about everything went smoothly.

SAVOYARD. Havnt you seen the rehearsals?

THE COUNT. Oh no. I havnt been allowed even to meet any of the company. All I can tell you is that the hero is a Frenchman [Savoyard is rather scandalized]: I asked her not to have an English hero. That is all I know. [Ruefully] I havnt been consulted even about the costumes, though there, I think, I could have been some use.

SAVOYARD. [puzzled] But there arnt any costumes.

THE COUNT. [seriously shocked] What! No costumes! Do you mean to say it is a modern play?

SAVOYARD. I dont know: I didnt read it. I handed it to Billy Burjoyce — the producer, you know — and left it to him to select the company and so on. But I should have had to order the costumes if there had been any. There wernt.

THE COUNT. [smiling as he recovers from his alarm] I understand. She has taken the costumes into her own hands. She is an expert in beautiful costumes. I venture to promise you, Mr Savoyard, that what you are about to see will be like a Louis Quatorze ballet painted by Watteau. The heroine will be an exquisite Columbine, her lover a dainty Harlequin, her father a picturesque Pantaloon, and the valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness of the lovers a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello or Mascarille or Sganarelle.

SAVOYARD. I see. That makes three men; and the clown and policeman will make five. Thats why you wanted five men in the company.

THE COUNT. My dear sir, you dont suppose I mean that vulgar, ugly, silly, senseless, malicious and destructive thing, the harlequinade of a nineteenth century English Christmas pantomime! What was it after all but a stupid attempt to imitate the success made by the genius of Grimaldi a hundred years ago? My daughter does not know of the existence of such a thing. I refer to the graceful and charming fantasies of the Italian and French stages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

SAVOYARD. Oh, I beg pardon. I quite agree that harlequinades are rot. Theyve been dropped at all smart theatres. But from what Billy Burjoyce told me I got the idea that your daughter knew her way about here, and had seen a lot of plays. He had no idea she’d been away in Venice all the time.

THE COUNT. Oh, she has not been. I should have explained that two years ago my daughter left me to complete her education at Cambridge. Cambridge was my own University; and though of course there were no women there in my time, I felt confident that if the atmosphere of the eighteenth century still existed anywhere in England, it would be at Cambridge. About three months ago she wrote to me and asked whether I wished to give her a present on her next birthday. Of course I said yes; and she then astonished and delighted me by telling me that she had written a play, and that the present she wanted was a private performance of it with real actors and real critics.

SAVOYARD. Yes: thats what staggered me. It was easy enough to engage a company for a private performance: it’s done often enough. But the notion of having critics was new. I hardly knew how to set about it. They dont expect private engagements; and so they have no agents. Besides, I didnt know what to offer them. I knew that they were cheaper than actors, because they get long engagements: forty years sometimes; but thats no rule for a single job. Then theres such a lot of them: on first nights they run away with all your stalls: you cant find a decent place for your own mother. It would have cost a fortune to bring the lot.

THE COUNT. Of course I never dreamt of having them all. Only a few first-rate representative men.

SAVOYARD. Just so. All you want is a few sample opinions. Out of a hundred notices you wont find more than four at the outside that say anything different. Well, Ive got just the right four for you. And what do you think it has cost me?

THE COUNT. [shrugging his shoulders] I cannot guess.

SAVOYARD. Ten guineas, and expenses. I had to give Flawner Bannal ten. He wouldnt come for less; and he asked fifty. I had to give it, because if we hadnt had him we might just as well have had nobody at all.

THE COUNT. But what about the others, if Mr Flannel —

SAVOYARD. [shocked] Flawner Bannal.

THE COUNT. — if Mr Bannal got the whole ten?

SAVOYARD. Oh, I managed that. As this is a high-class sort of thing, the first man I went for was Trotter.

THE COUNT. Oh indeed. I am very glad you have secured Mr Trotter. I have read his Playful Impressions.

SAVOYARD. Well, I was rather in a funk about him. Hes not exactly what I call approachable; and he was a bit stand-off at first. But when I explained and told him your daughter —

THE COUNT. [interrupting in alarm] You did not say that the play was by her, I hope?

SAVOYARD. No: thats been kept a dead secret. I just said your daughter has asked for a real play with a real author and a real critic and all the rest of it. The moment I mentioned the daughter I had him. He has a daughter of his own. Wouldnt hear of payment! Offered to come just to please her! Quite human. I was surprised.

THE COUNT. Extremely kind of him.

SAVOYARD. Then I went to Vaughan, because he does music as well as the drama: and you said you thought there would be music. I told him Trotter would feel lonely without him; so he promised like a bird. Then I thought youd like one of the latest sort: the chaps that go for the newest things and swear theyre oldfashioned. So I nailed Gilbert Gunn. The four will give you a representative team. By the way [looking at his watch] theyll be here presently.

THE COUNT. Before they come, Mr Savoyard, could you give me any hints about them that would help me to make a little conversation with them? I am, as you said, rather out of it in England; and I might unwittingly say something tactless.

SAVOYARD. Well, let me see. As you dont like English people, I dont know that youll get on with Trotter, because hes thoroughly English: never happy except when hes in Paris, and speaks French so unnecessarily well that everybody there spots him as an Englishman the moment he opens his mouth. Very witty and all that. Pretends to turn up his nose at the theatre and says people make too much fuss about art [the Count is extremely indignant]. But thats only his modesty, because art is his own line, you understand. Mind you dont chaff him about Aristotle.

THE COUNT. Why should I chaff him about Aristotle?

SAVOYARD. Well, I dont know; but its one of the recognized ways of chaffing him. However, youll get on with him all right: hes a man of the world and a man of sense. The one youll have to be careful about is Vaughan.

THE COUNT. In what way, may I ask?

SAVOYARD. Well, Vaughan has no sense of humor; and if you joke with him he’ll think youre insulting him on purpose. Mind: it’s not that he doesnt see a joke: he does; and it hurts him. A comedy scene makes him sore all over: he goes away black and blue, and pitches into the play for all hes worth.

THE COUNT. But surely that is a very serious defect in a man of his profession?

SAVOYARD. Yes it is, and no mistake. But Vaughan is honest, and dont care a brass farthing what he says, or whether it pleases anybody or not; and you must have one man of that sort to say the things that nobody else will say.

THE COUNT. It seems to me to carry the principle of division of labor too far, this keeping of the honesty and the other qualities in separate compartments. What is Mr Gunn’s speciality, if I may ask?

SAVOYARD. Gunn is one of the intellectuals.

THE COUNT. But arnt they all intellectuals?

SAVOYARD. Lord! no: heaven forbid! You must be careful what you say about that: I shouldnt like anyone to call me an Intellectual: I dont think any Englishman would! They dont count really, you know; but still it’s rather the thing to have them. Gunn is one of the young intellectuals: he writes plays himself. Hes useful because he pitches into the older intellectuals who are standing in his way. But you may take it from me that none of these chaps really matter. Flawner Bannal’s your man. Bannal really represents the British playgoer. When he likes a thing, you may take your oath there are a hundred thousand people in London thatll like it if they can only be got to know about it. Besides, Bannal’s knowledge of the theatre is an inside knowledge. We know him; and he knows us. He knows the ropes: he knows his way about: he knows what hes talking about.

THE COUNT. [with a little sigh] Age and experience, I suppose?

SAVOYARD. Age! I should put him at twenty at the very outside, myself. It’s not an old man’s job after all, is it? Bannal may not ride the literary high horse like Trotter and the rest; but I’d take his opinion before any other in London. Hes the man in the street; and thats what you want.

THE COUNT. I am almost sorry you didnt give the gentleman his full terms. I should not have grudged the fifty guineas for a sound opinion. He may feel shabbily treated.

SAVOYARD. Well, let him. It was a bit of side, his asking fifty. After all, what is he? Only a pressman. Jolly good business for him to earn ten guineas: hes done the same job often enough for half a quid, I expect.

Fanny O’Dowda comes precipitately through the curtains, excited and nervous. A girl of nineteen in a dress synchronous with her father’s.

FANNY. Papa, papa, the critics have come. And one of them has a cocked hat and sword like a — [she notices Savoyard] Oh, I beg your pardon.

THE COUNT. This is Mr Savoyard, your impresario, my dear.

FANNY. [shaking hands] How do you do?

SAVOYARD. Pleased to meet you, Miss O’Dowda. The cocked hat is all right. Trotter is a member of the new Academic Committee. He induced them to go in for a uniform like the French Academy; and I asked him to wear it.

THE FOOTMAN. [announcing] Mr Trotter, Mr Vaughan, Mr Gunn, Mr Flawner Bannal. [The four critics enter. Trotter wears a diplomatic dress, with sword and three-cornered hat. His age is about 50. Vaughan is 40. Gunn is 30. Flawner Bannal is 20 and is quite unlike the others. They can be classed at sight as professional men: Bannal is obviously one of those unemployables of the business class who manage to pick up a living by a sort of courage which gives him cheerfulness, conviviality, and bounce, and is helped out positively by a slight turn for writing, and negatively by a comfortable ignorance and lack of intuition which hides from him all the dangers and disgraces that keep men of finer perception in check. The Count approaches them hospitably].

SAVOYARD. Count O’Dowda, gentlemen. Mr Trotter.

TROTTER. [looking at the Count’s costume] Have I the pleasure of meeting a confrere?

THE COUNT. No, sir: I have no right to my costume except the right of a lover of the arts to dress myself handsomely. You are most welcome, Mr Trotter. [Trotter bows in the French manner].

SAVOYARD. Mr Vaughan.

THE COUNT. How do you do, Mr Vaughan?

VAUGHAN. Quite well, thanks.

SAVOYARD. Mr Gunn.

THE COUNT. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Gunn.

GUNN. Very pleased.

SAVOYARD. Mr Flawner Bannal.

THE COUNT. Very kind of you to come, Mr Bannal.

BANNAL. Dont mention it.

THE COUNT. Gentlemen, my daughter. [They all bow]. We are very greatly indebted to you, gentlemen, for so kindly indulging her whim. [The dressing bell sounds. The Count looks at his watch]. Ah! The dressing bell, gentlemen. As our play begins at nine, I have had to put forward the dinner hour a little. May I shew you to your rooms? [He goes out, followed by all the men, except Trotter, who, going last, is detained by Fanny].

FANNY. Mr Trotter: I want to say something to you about this play.

TROTTER. No: thats forbidden. You must not attempt to souffler the critic.

FANNY. Oh, I would not for the world try to influence your opinion.

TROTTER. But you do: you are influencing me very shockingly. You invite me to this charming house, where I’m about to enjoy a charming dinner. And just before the dinner I’m taken aside by a charming young lady to be talked to about the play. How can you expect me to be impartial? God forbid that I should set up to be a judge, or do more than record an impression; but my impressions can be influenced; and in this case youre influencing them shamelessly all the time.

FANNY. Dont make me more nervous than I am already, Mr Trotter. If you knew how I feel!

TROTTER. Naturally: your first party: your first appearance in England as hostess. But youre doing it beautifully. Dont be afraid. Every nuance is perfect.

FANNY. It’s so kind of you to say so, Mr Trotter. But that isnt whats the matter. The truth is, this play is going to give my father a dreadful shock.

TROTTER. Nothing unusual in that, I’m sorry to say. Half the young ladies in London spend their evenings making their fathers take them to plays that are not fit for elderly people to see.

FANNY. Oh, I know all about that; but you cant understand what it means to Papa. Youre not so innocent as he is.

TROTTER. [remonstrating] My dear young lady —

FANNY. I dont mean morally innocent: everybody who reads your articles knows youre as innocent as a lamb.

TROTTER. What!

FANNY. Yes, Mr Trotter: Ive seen a good deal of life since I came to England; and I assure you that to me youre a mere baby: a dear, good, well-meaning, delightful, witty, charming baby; but still just a wee lamb in a world of wolves. Cambridge is not what it was in my father’s time.

TROTTER. Well, I must say!

FANNY. Just so. Thats one of our classifications in the Cambridge Fabian Society.

TROTTER. Classifications? I dont understand.

FANNY. We classify our aunts into different sorts. And one of the sorts is the “I must says.”

TROTTER. I withdraw “I must say.” I substitute “Blame my cats!” No: I substitute “Blame my kittens!” Observe, Miss O’Dowda: kittens. I say again in the teeth of the whole Cambridge Fabian Society, kittens. Impertinent little kittens. Blame them. Smack them. I guess what is on your conscience. This play to which you have lured me is one of those in which members of Fabian Societies instruct their grandmothers in the art of milking ducks. And you are afraid it will shock your father. Well, I hope it will. And if he consults me about it I shall recommend him to smack you soundly and pack you off to bed.

FANNY. Thats one of your prettiest literary attitudes, Mr Trotter; but it doesnt take me in. You see, I’m much more conscious of what you really are than you are yourself, because weve discussed you thoroughly at Cambridge; and youve never discussed yourself, have you?

TROTTER. I —

FANNY. Of course you havnt; so you see it’s no good Trottering at me.

TROTTER. Trottering!

FANNY. Thats what we call it at Cambridge.

TROTTER. If it were not so obviously a stage cliche, I should say Damn Cambridge. As it is, I blame my kittens. And now let me warn you. If youre going to be a charming healthy young English girl, you may coax me. If youre going to be an unsexed Cambridge Fabian virago, I’ll treat you as my intellectual equal, as I would treat a man.

FANNY. [adoringly] But how few men are your intellectual equals, Mr Trotter!

TROTTER. I’m getting the worst of this.

FANNY. Oh no. Why do you say that?

TROTTER. May I remind you that the dinner-bell will ring presently?

FANNY. What does it matter? We’re both ready. I havnt told you yet what I want you to do for me.

TROTTER. Nor have you particularly predisposed me to do it, except out of pure magnanimity. What is it?

FANNY. I dont mind this play shocking my father morally. It’s good for him to be shocked morally. It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. But I know that this play will shock him artistically; and that terrifies me. No moral consideration could make a breach between us: he would forgive me for anything of that kind sooner or later; but he never gives way on a point of art. I darent let him know that I love Beethoven and Wagner; and as to Strauss, if he heard three bars of Elektra, it’d part us for ever. Now what I want you to do is this. If hes very angry — if he hates the play, because it’s a modern play — will you tell him that it’s not my fault; that its style and construction, and so forth, are considered the very highest art nowadays; that the author wrote it in the proper way for repertory theatres of the most superior kind — you know the kind of plays I mean?

TROTTER. [emphatically] I think I know the sort of entertainments you mean. But please do not beg a vital question by calling them plays. I dont pretend to be an authority; but I have at least established the fact that these productions, whatever else they may be, are certainly not plays.

FANNY. The authors dont say they are.

TROTTER. [warmly] I am aware that one author, who is, I blush to say, a personal friend of mine, resorts freely to the dastardly subterfuge of calling them conversations, discussions, and so forth, with the express object of evading criticism. But I’m not to be disarmed by such tricks. I say they are not plays. Dialogues, if you will. Exhibitions of character, perhaps: especially the character of the author. Fictions, possibly, though a little decent reticence as to introducing actual persons, and thus violating the sanctity of private life, might not be amiss. But plays, no. I say NO. Not plays. If you will not concede this point I cant continue our conversation. I take this seriously. It’s a matter of principle. I must ask you, Miss O’Dowda, before we go a step further, Do you or do you not claim that these works are plays?

FANNY. I assure you I dont.

TROTTER. Not in any sense of the word?

FANNY. Not in any sense of the word. I loathe plays.

TROTTER. [disappointed] That last remark destroys all the value of your admission. You admire these — these theatrical nondescripts? You enjoy them?

FANNY. Dont you?

TROTTER. Of course I do. Do you take me for a fool? Do you suppose I prefer popular melodramas? Have I not written most appreciative notices of them? But I say theyre not plays. Theyre not plays. I cant consent to remain in this house another minute if anything remotely resembling them is to be foisted on me as a play.

FANNY. I fully admit that theyre not plays. I only want you to tell my father that plays are not plays nowadays — not in your sense of the word.

TROTTER. Ah, there you go again! In my sense of the word! You believe that my criticism is merely a personal impression; that —

FANNY. You always said it was.

TROTTER. Pardon me: not on this point. If you had been classically educated —

FANNY. But I have.

TROTTER. Pooh! Cambridge! If you had been educated at Oxford, you would know that the definition of a play has been settled exactly and scientifically for two thousand two hundred and sixty years. When I say that these entertainments are not plays, I dont mean in my sense of the word, but in the sense given to it for all time by the immortal Stagirite.

FANNY. Who is the Stagirite?

TROTTER. [shocked] You dont know who the Stagirite was?

FANNY. Sorry. Never heard of him.

TROTTER. And this is Cambridge education! Well, my dear young lady, I’m delighted to find theres something you don’t know; and I shant spoil you by dispelling an ignorance which, in my opinion, is highly becoming to your age and sex. So we’ll leave it at that.

FANNY. But you will promise to tell my father that lots of people write plays just like this one — that I havnt selected it out of mere heartlessness?

TROTTER. I cant possibly tell you what I shall say to your father about the play until Ive seen the play. But I’ll tell you what I shall say to him about you. I shall say that youre a very foolish young lady; that youve got into a very questionable set; and that the sooner he takes you away from Cambridge and its Fabian Society, the better.

FANNY. It’s so funny to hear you pretending to be a heavy father. In Cambridge we regard you as a bel esprit, a wit, an Irresponsible, a Parisian Immoralist, tres chic.

TROTTER. I!

FANNY. Theres quite a Trotter set.

TROTTER. Well, upon my word!

FANNY. They go in for adventures and call you Aramis.

TROTTER. They wouldnt dare!

FANNY. You always make such delicious fun of the serious people. Your insouciance —

TROTTER. [frantic] Stop talking French to me: it’s not a proper language for a young girl. Great heavens! how is it possible that a few innocent pleasantries should be so frightfully misunderstood? Ive tried all my life to be sincere and simple, to be unassuming and kindly. Ive lived a blameless life. Ive supported the Censorship in the face of ridicule and insult. And now I’m told that I’m a centre of Immoralism! of Modern Minxism! a trifler with the most sacred subjects! a Nietzschean!! perhaps a Shavian!!!

FANNY. Do you mean you are really on the serious side, Mr Trotter?

TROTTER. Of course I’m on the serious side. How dare you ask me such a question?

FANNY. Then why dont you play for it?

TROTTER. I do play for it — short, of course, of making myself ridiculous.

FANNY. What! not make yourself ridiculous for the sake of a good cause! Oh, Mr Trotter. Thats vieux jeu.

TROTTER. [shouting at her] Dont talk French. I will not allow it.

FANNY. But this dread of ridicule is so frightfully out of date. The Cambridge Fabian Society —

TROTTER. I forbid you to mention the Fabian Society to me.

FANNY. Its motto is “You cannot learn to skate without making yourself ridiculous.”

TROTTER. Skate! What has that to do with it?

FANNY. Thats not all. It goes on, “The ice of life is slippery.”

TROTTER. Ice of life indeed! You should be eating penny ices and enjoying yourself. I wont hear another word.

The Count returns.

THE COUNT. We’re all waiting in the drawing-room, my dear. Have you been detaining Mr Trotter all this time?

TROTTER. I’m so sorry. I must have just a little brush up: I [He hurries out].

THE COUNT. My dear, you should be in the drawing-room. You should not have kept him here.

FANNY. I know. Dont scold me: I had something important to say to him.

THE COUNT. I shall ask him to take you in to dinner.

FANNY. Yes, papa. Oh, I hope it will go off well.

THE COUNT. Yes, love, of course it will. Come along.

FANNY. Just one thing, papa, whilst we’re alone. Who was the Stagirite?

THE COUNT. The Stagirite? Do you mean to say you dont know?

FANNY. Havnt the least notion.

THE COUNT. The Stagirite was Aristotle. By the way, dont mention him to Mr Trotter.

They go to the dining-room.

THE PLAY

ACT I

In the dining-room of a house in Denmark Hill, an elderly lady sits at breakfast reading the newspaper. Her chair is at the end of the oblong dining-table furthest from the fire. There is an empty chair at the other end. The fireplace is behind this chair; and the door is next the fireplace, between it and the corner. An arm-chair stands beside the coal-scuttle. In the middle of the back wall is the sideboard, parallel to the table. The rest of the furniture is mostly dining-room chairs, ranged against the walls, and including a baby rocking-chair on the lady’s side of the room. The lady is a placid person. Her husband, Mr Robin Gilbey, not at all placid, bursts violently into the room with a letter in his hand.

GILBEY. [grinding his teeth] This is a nice thing. This is a b ——

MRS GILBEY. [cutting him short] Leave it at that, please. Whatever it is, bad language wont make it better.

GILBEY. [bitterly] Yes, put me in the wrong as usual. Take your boy’s part against me. [He flings himself into the empty chair opposite her].

MRS GILBEY. When he does anything right, hes your son. When he does anything wrong hes mine. Have you any news of him?

GILBEY. Ive a good mind not to tell you.

MRS GILBEY. Then dont. I suppose hes been found. Thats a comfort, at all events.

GILBEY. No, he hasnt been found. The boy may be at the bottom of the river for all you care. [Too agitated to sit quietly, he rises and paces the room distractedly].

MRS GILBEY. Then what have you got in your hand?

GILBEY. Ive a letter from the Monsignor Grenfell. From New York. Dropping us. Cutting us. [Turning fiercely on her] Thats a nice thing, isnt it?

MRS GILBEY. What for?

GILBEY. [flinging away towards his chair] How do I know what for?

MRS GILBEY. What does he say?

GILBEY. [sitting down and grumblingly adjusting his spectacles] This is what he says. “My dear Mr Gilbey: The news about Bobby had to follow me across the Atlantic: it did not reach me until to-day. I am afraid he is incorrigible. My brother, as you may imagine, feels that this last escapade has gone beyond the bounds; and I think, myself, that Bobby ought to be made to feel that such scrapes involve a certain degree of reprobation.” “As you may imagine”! And we know no more about it than the babe unborn.

MRS GILBEY. What else does he say?

GILBEY. “I think my brother must have been just a little to blame himself; so, between ourselves, I shall, with due and impressive formality, forgive Bobby later on; but for the present I think it had better be understood that he is in disgrace, and that we are no longer on visiting terms. As ever, yours sincerely.” [His agitation masters him again] Thats a nice slap in the face to get from a man in his position! This is what your son has brought on me.

MRS GILBEY. Well, I think it’s rather a nice letter. He as good as tells you hes only letting on to be offended for Bobby’s good.

GILBEY. Oh, very well: have the letter framed and hang it up over the mantelpiece as a testimonial.

MRS GILBEY. Dont talk nonsense, Rob. You ought to be thankful to know that the boy is alive after his disappearing like that for nearly a week.

GILBEY. Nearly a week! A fortnight, you mean. Wheres your feelings, woman? It was fourteen days yesterday.

MRS GILBEY. Oh, dont call it fourteen days, Rob, as if the boy was in prison.

GILBEY. How do you know hes not in prison? It’s got on my nerves so, that I’d believe even that.

MRS GILBEY. Dont talk silly, Rob. Bobby might get into a scrape like any other lad; but he’d never do anything low.

Juggins, the footman, comes in with a card on a salver. He is a rather low-spirited man of thirty-five or more, of good appearance and address, and iron self-command.

JUGGINS. [presenting the salver to Mr Gilbey] Lady wishes to see Mr Bobby’s parents, sir.

GILBEY. [pointing to Mrs Gilbey] Theres Mr Bobby’s parent. I disown him.

JUGGINS. Yes, sir. [He presents the salver to Mrs Gilbey].

MRS GILBEY. You mustnt mind what your master says, Juggins: he doesnt mean it. [She takes the card and reads it]. Well, I never!

GILBEY. Whats up now?

MRS GILBEY. [reading] “Miss D. Delaney. Darling Dora.” Just like that — in brackets. What sort of person, Juggins?

GILBEY. Whats her address?

MRS GILBEY. The West Circular Road. Is that a respectable address, Juggins?

JUGGINS. A great many most respectable people live in the West Circular Road, madam; but the address is not a guarantee of respectability.

GILBEY. So it’s come to that with him, has it?

MRS GILBEY. Dont jump to conclusions, Rob. How do you know? [To Juggins] Is she a lady, Juggins? You know what I mean.

JUGGINS. In the sense in which you are using the word, no, madam.

MRS GILBEY. I’d better try what I can get out of her. [To Juggins] Shew her up. You dont mind, do you, Rob?

GILBEY. So long as you dont flounce out and leave me alone with her. [He rises and plants himself on the hearth-rug].

Juggins goes out.

MRS GILBEY. I wonder what she wants, Rob?

GILBEY. If she wants money, she shant have it. Not a farthing. A nice thing, everybody seeing her on our doorstep! If it wasnt that she may tell us something about the lad, I’d have Juggins put the hussy into the street.

JUGGINS. [returning and announcing] Miss Delaney. [He waits for express orders before placing a chair for this visitor].

Miss Delaney comes in. She is a young lady of hilarious disposition, very tolerable good looks, and killing clothes. She is so affable and confidential that it is very difficult to keep her at a distance by any process short of flinging her out of the house.

DORA. [plunging at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle of the room] How d’ye do, both. I’m a friend of Bobby’s. He told me all about you once, in a moment of confidence. Of course he never let on who he was at the police court.

GILBEY. Police court!

MRS GILBEY. [looking apprehensively at Juggins] Tch — ! Juggins: a chair.

DORA. Oh, Ive let it out, have I! [Contemplating Juggins approvingly as he places a chair for her between the table and the sideboard] But hes the right sort: I can see that. [Buttonholing him] You wont let on downstairs, old man, will you?

JUGGINS. The family can rely on my absolute discretion. [He withdraws].

DORA. [sitting down genteelly] I dont know what youll say to me: you know I really have no right to come here; but then what was I to do? You know Holy Joe, Bobby’s tutor, dont you? But of course you do.

GILBEY. [with dignity] I know Mr Joseph Grenfell, the brother of Monsignor Grenfell, if it is of him you are speaking.

DORA. [wide-eyed and much amused] No!!! You dont tell me that old geezer has a brother a Monsignor! And youre Catholics! And I never knew it, though Ive known Bobby ever so long! But of course the last thing you find out about a person is their religion, isnt it?

MRS GILBEY. We’re not Catholics. But when the Samuelses got an Archdeacon’s son to form their boy’s mind, Mr Gilbey thought Bobby ought to have a chance too. And the Monsignor is a customer. Mr Gilbey consulted him about Bobby; and he recommended a brother of his that was more sinned against than sinning.

GILBEY. [on tenderhooks] She dont want to hear about that, Maria. [To Dora] Whats your business?

DORA. I’m afraid it was all my fault.

GILBEY. What was all your fault? I’m half distracted. I dont know what has happened to the boy: hes been lost these fourteen days —

MRS GILBEY. A fortnight, Rob.

GILBEY. — and not a word have we heard of him since.

MRS GILBEY. Dont fuss, Rob.

GILBEY. [yelling] I will fuss. Youve no feeling. You dont care what becomes of the lad. [He sits down savagely].

DORA. [soothingly] Youve been anxious about him. Of course. How thoughtless of me not to begin by telling you hes quite safe. Indeed hes in the safest place in the world, as one may say: safe under lock and key.

GILBEY. [horrified, pitiable] Oh my — [his breath fails him]. Do you mean that when he was in the police court he was in the dock? Oh, Maria! Oh, great Lord! What has he done? What has he got for it? [Desperate] Will you tell me or will you see me go mad on my own carpet?

DORA. [sweetly] Yes, old dear —

MRS GILBEY. [starting at the familiarity] Well!

DORA. [continuing] I’ll tell you: but dont you worry: hes all right. I came out myself this morning: there was such a crowd! and a band! they thought I was a suffragette: only fancy! You see it was like this. Holy Joe got talking about how he’d been a champion sprinter at college.

MRS GILBEY. A what?

DORA. A sprinter. He said he was the fastest hundred yards runner in England. We were all in the old cowshed that night.

MRS GILBEY. What old cowshed?

GILBEY. [groaning] Oh, get on. Get on.

DORA. Oh, of course you wouldnt know. How silly of me! It’s a rather go-ahead sort of music hall in Stepney. We call it the old cowshed.

MRS GILBEY. Does Mr Grenfell take Bobby to music halls?

DORA. No. Bobby takes him. But Holy Joe likes it: fairly laps it up like a kitten, poor old dear. Well, Bobby says to me, “Darling—”

MRS GILBEY. [placidly] Why does he call you Darling?

DORA. Oh, everybody calls me Darling: it’s a sort of name Ive got. Darling Dora, you know. Well, he says, “Darling, if you can get Holy Joe to sprint a hundred yards, I’ll stand you that squiffer with the gold keys.”

MRS GILBEY. Does he call his tutor Holy Joe to his face [Gilbey clutches at his hair in his impatience].

DORA. Well, what would he call him? After all, Holy Joe is Holy Joe; and boys will be boys.

MRS GILBEY. Whats a squiffer?

DORA. Oh, of course: excuse my vulgarity: a concertina. Theres one in a shop in Green Street, ivory inlaid, with gold keys and Russia leather bellows; and Bobby knew I hankered after it; but he couldnt afford it, poor lad, though I knew he just longed to give it to me.

GILBEY. Maria: if you keep interrupting with silly questions, I shall go out of my senses. Heres the boy in gaol and me disgraced for ever; and all you care to know is what a squiffer is.

DORA. Well, remember it has gold keys. The man wouldnt take a penny less than 15 pounds for it. It was a presentation one.

GILBEY. [shouting at her] Wheres my son? Whats happened to my son? Will you tell me that, and stop cackling about your squiffer?

DORA. Oh, aint we impatient! Well, it does you credit, old dear. And you neednt fuss: theres no disgrace. Bobby behaved like a perfect gentleman. Besides, it was all my fault. I’ll own it: I took too much champagne. I was not what you might call drunk; but I was bright, and a little beyond myself; and — I’ll confess it — I wanted to shew off before Bobby, because he was a bit taken by a woman on the stage; and she was pretending to be game for anything. You see youve brought Bobby up too strict; and when he gets loose theres no holding him. He does enjoy life more than any lad I ever met.

GILBEY. Never you mind how hes been brought up: thats my business. Tell me how hes been brought down: thats yours.

MRS GILBEY. Oh, dont be rude to the lady, Rob.

DORA. I’m coming to it, old dear: dont you be so headstrong. Well, it was a beautiful moonlight night; and we couldnt get a cab on the nod; so we started to walk, very jolly, you know: arm in arm, and dancing along, singing and all that. When we came into Jamaica Square, there was a young copper on point duty at the corner. I says to Bob: “Dearie boy: is it a bargain about the squiffer if I make Joe sprint for you?” “Anything you like, darling,” says he: “I love you.” I put on my best company manners and stepped up to the copper. “If you please, sir,” says I, “can you direct me to Carrickmines Square?” I was so genteel, and talked so sweet, that he fell to it like a bird. “I never heard of any such Square in these parts,” he says. “Then,” says I, “what a very silly little officer you must be!”; and I gave his helmet a chuck behind that knocked it over his eyes, and did a bunk.

MRS GILBEY. Did a what?

DORA. A bunk. Holy Joe did one too all right: he sprinted faster than he ever did in college, I bet, the old dear. He got clean off, too. Just as he was overtaking me half-way down the square, we heard the whistle; and at the sound of it he drew away like a streak of lightning; and that was the last I saw of him. I was copped in the Dock Road myself: rotten luck, wasn’t it? I tried the innocent and genteel and all the rest; but Bobby’s hat done me in.

GILBEY. And what happened to the boy?

DORA. Only fancy! he stopped to laugh at the copper! He thought the copper would see the joke, poor lamb. He was arguing about it when the two that took me came along to find out what the whistle was for, and brought me with them. Of course I swore I’d never seen him before in my life; but there he was in my hat and I in his. The cops were very spiteful and laid it on for all they were worth: drunk and disorderly and assaulting the police and all that. I got fourteen days without the option, because you see — well, the fact is, I’d done it before, and been warned. Bobby was a first offender and had the option; but the dear boy had no money left and wouldnt give you away by telling his name; and anyhow he couldnt have brought himself to buy himself off and leave me there; so hes doing his time. Well, it was two forty shillingses; and Ive only twenty-eight shillings in the world. If I pawn my clothes I shant be able to earn any more. So I cant pay the fine and get him out; but if youll stand 3 pounds I’ll stand one; and thatll do it. If youd like to be very kind and nice you could pay the lot; but I cant deny that it was my fault; so I wont press you.

GILBEY. [heart-broken] My son in gaol!

DORA. Oh, cheer up, old dear: it wont hurt him: look at me after fourteen days of it; I’m all the better for being kept a bit quiet. You mustnt let it prey on your mind.

GILBEY. The disgrace of it will kill me. And it will leave a mark on him to the end of his life.

DORA. Not a bit of it. Dont you be afraid: Ive educated Bobby a bit: hes not the mollycoddle he was when you had him in hand.

MRS GILBEY. Indeed Bobby is not a mollycoddle. They wanted him to go in for singlestick at the Young Men’s Christian Association; but, of course, I couldnt allow that: he might have had his eye knocked out.

GILBEY. [to Dora, angrily] Listen here, you.

DORA. Oh, aint we cross!

GILBEY. I want none of your gaiety here. This is a respectable household. Youve gone and got my poor innocent boy into trouble. It’s the like of you thats the ruin of the like of him.

DORA. So you always say, you old dears. But you know better. Bobby came to me: I didnt come to him.

GILBEY. Would he have gone if you hadnt been there for him to go to? Tell me that. You know why he went to you, I suppose?

DORA. [charitably] It was dull for him at home, poor lad, wasnt it?

MRS GILBEY. Oh no. I’m at home on first Thursdays. And we have the Knoxes to dinner every Friday. Margaret Knox and Bobby are as good as engaged. Mr Knox is my husband’s partner. Mrs Knox is very religious; but shes quite cheerful. We dine with them on Tuesdays. So thats two evenings pleasure every week.

GILBEY. [almost in tears] We done what we could for the boy. Short of letting him go into temptations of all sorts, he can do what he likes. What more does he want?

DORA. Well, old dear, he wants me; and thats about the long and short of it. And I must say youre not very nice to me about it. Ive talked to him like a mother, and tried my best to keep him straight; but I dont deny I like a bit of fun myself; and we both get a bit giddy when we’re lighthearted. Him and me is a pair, I’m afraid.

GILBEY. Dont talk foolishness, girl. How could you and he be a pair, you being what you are, and he brought up as he has been, with the example of a religious woman like Mrs Knox before his eyes? I cant understand how he could bring himself to be seen in the street with you. [Pitying himself] I havnt deserved this. Ive done my duty as a father. Ive kept him sheltered. [Angry with her] Creatures like you that take advantage of a child’s innocence ought to be whipped through the streets.

DORA. Well, whatever I may be, I’m too much the lady to lose my temper; and I dont think Bobby would like me to tell you what I think of you; for when I start giving people a bit of my mind I sometimes use language thats beneath me. But I tell you once for all I must have the money to get Bobby out; and if you wont fork out, I’ll hunt up Holy Joe. He might get it off his brother, the Monsignor.

GILBEY. You mind your own concerns. My solicitor will do what is right. I’ll not have you paying my son’s fine as if you were anything to him.

DORA. Thats right. Youll get him out today, wont you?

GILBEY. It’s likely I’d leave my boy in prison, isnt it?

DORA. I’d like to know when theyll let him out.

GILBEY. You would, would you? Youre going to meet him at the prison door.

DORA. Well, dont you think any woman would that had the feelings of a lady?

GILBEY. [bitterly] Oh yes: I know. Here! I must buy the lad’s salvation, I suppose. How much will you take to clear out and let him go?

DORA. [pitying him: quite nice about it] What good would that do, old dear? There are others, you know.

GILBEY. Thats true. I must send the boy himself away.

DORA. Where to?

GILBEY. Anywhere, so long as hes out of the reach of you and your like.

DORA. Then I’m afraid youll have to send him out of the world, old dear. I’m sorry for you: I really am, though you mightnt believe it; and I think your feelings do you real credit. But I cant give him up just to let him fall into the hands of people I couldnt trust, can I?

GILBEY. [beside himself, rising] Wheres the police? Wheres the Government? Wheres the Church? Wheres respectability and right reason? Whats the good of them if I have to stand here and see you put my son in your pocket as if he was a chattel slave, and you hardly out of gaol as a common drunk and disorderly? Whats the world coming to?

DORA. It is a lottery, isnt it, old dear?

Mr Gilbey rushes from the room, distracted.

MRS GILBEY. [unruffled] Where did you buy that white lace? I want some to match a collaret of my own; and I cant get it at Perry and John’s.

DORA. Knagg and Pantle’s: one and fourpence. It’s machine hand-made.

MRS GILBEY. I never give more than one and tuppence. But I suppose youre extravagant by nature. My sister Martha was just like that. Pay anything she was asked.

DORA. Whats tuppence to you, Mrs Bobby, after all?

MRS GILBEY. [correcting her] Mrs Gilbey.

DORA. Of course, Mrs Gilbey. I am silly.

MRS GILBEY. Bobby must have looked funny in your hat. Why did you change hats with him?

DORA. I dont know. One does, you know.

MRS GILBEY. I never did. The things people do! I cant understand them. Bobby never told me he was keeping company with you. His own mother!

DORA. [overcome] Excuse me: I cant help smiling.

Juggins enters.

JUGGINS. Mr Gilbey has gone to Wormwood Scrubbs, madam.

MRS GILBEY. Have you ever been in a police court, Juggins?

JUGGINS. Yes, madam.

MRS GILBEY [rather shocked] I hope you had not been exceeding, Juggins.

JUGGINS. Yes, madam, I had. I exceeded the legal limit.

MRS GILBEY. Oh, that! Why do they give a woman a fortnight for wearing a man’s hat, and a man a month for wearing hers?

JUGGINS. I didnt know that they did, madam.

MRS GILBEY. It doesnt seem justice, does it, Juggins?

JUGGINS. No, madam.

MRS GILBEY [to Dora, rising] Well, good-bye. [Shaking her hand] So pleased to have made your acquaintance.

DORA. [standing up] Dont mention it. I’m sure it’s most kind of you to receive me at all.

MRS GILBEY. I must go off now and order lunch. [She trots to the door]. What was it you called the concertina?

DORA. A squiffer, dear.

MRS GILBEY. [thoughtfully] A squiffer, of course. How funny! [She goes out].

DORA. [exploding into ecstasies of mirth] Oh my! isnt she an old love? How do you keep your face straight?

JUGGINS. It is what I am paid for.

DORA. [confidentially] Listen here, dear boy. Your name isnt Juggins. Nobody’s name is Juggins.

JUGGINS. My orders are, Miss Delaney, that you are not to be here when Mr Gilbey returns from Wormwood Scrubbs.

DORA. That means telling me to mind my own business, doesnt it? Well, I’m off. Tootle Loo, Charlie Darling. [She kisses her hand to him and goes].

ACT II

On the afternoon of the same day, Mrs Knox is writing notes in her drawing-room, at a writing-table which stands against the wall. Anyone placed so as to see Mrs Knox’s left profile, will have the door on the right and the window an the left, both further away than Mrs Knox, whose back is presented to an obsolete upright piano at the opposite side of the room. The sofa is near the piano. There is a small table in the middle of the room, with some gilt-edged books and albums on it, and chairs near it.

Mr Knox comes in almost furtively, a troubled man of fifty, thinner, harder, and uglier than his partner, Gilbey, Gilbey being a soft stoutish man with white hair and thin smooth skin, whilst Knox has coarse black hair, and blue jaws which no diligence in shaving can whiten. Mrs Knox is a plain woman, dressed without regard to fashion, with thoughtful eyes and thoughtful ways that make an atmosphere of peace and some solemnity. She is surprised to see her husband at home during business hours.

MRS KNOX. What brings you home at this hour? Have you heard anything?

KNOX. No. Have you?

MRS KNOX. No. Whats the matter?

KNOX. [sitting down on the sofa] I believe Gilbey has found out.

MRS KNOX. What makes you think that?

KNOX. Well, I dont know: I didnt like to tell you: you have enough to worry you without that; but Gilbey’s been very queer ever since it happened. I cant keep my mind on business as I ought; and I was depending on him. But hes worse than me. Hes not looking after anything; and he keeps out of my way. His manner’s not natural. He hasnt asked us to dinner; and hes never said a word about our not asking him to dinner, after all these years when weve dined every week as regular as clockwork. It looks to me as if Gilbey’s trying to drop me socially. Well, why should he do that if he hasnt heard?

MRS KNOX. I wonder! Bobby hasnt been near us either: thats what I cant make out.

KNOX. Oh, thats nothing. I told him Margaret was down in Cornwall with her aunt.

MRS KNOX. [reproachfully] Jo! [She takes her handkerchief from the writing-table and cries a little].

KNOX. Well, I got to tell lies, aint I? You wont. Somebody’s got to tell em.

MRS KNOX. [putting away her handkerchief] It only ends in our not knowing what to believe. Mrs Gilbey told me Bobby was in Brighton for the sea air. Theres something queer about that. Gilbey would never let the boy loose by himself among the temptations of a gay place like Brighton without his tutor; and I saw the tutor in Kensington High Street the very day she told me.

KNOX. If the Gilbeys have found out, it’s all over between Bobby and Margaret, and all over between us and them.

MRS KNOX. It’s all over between us and everybody. When a girl runs away from home like that, people know what to think of her and her parents.

KNOX. She had a happy, respectable home — everything —

MRS KNOX. [interrupting him] Theres no use going over it all again, Jo. If a girl hasnt happiness in herself, she wont be happy anywhere. Youd better go back to the shop and try to keep your mind off it.

KNOX. [rising restlessly] I cant. I keep fancying everybody knows it and is sniggering about it. I’m at peace nowhere but here. It’s a comfort to be with you. It’s a torment to be with other people.

MRS KNOX. [going to him and drawing her arm through his] There, Jo, there! I’m sure I’d have you here always if I could. But it cant be. God’s work must go on from day to day, no matter what comes. We must face our trouble and bear it.

KNOX. [wandering to the window arm in arm with her] Just look at the people in the street, going up and down as if nothing had happened. It seems unnatural, as if they all knew and didnt care.

MRS KNOX. If they knew, Jo, thered be a crowd round the house looking up at us. You shouldnt keep thinking about it.

KNOX. I know I shouldnt. You have your religion, Amelia; and I’m sure I’m glad it comforts you. But it doesnt come to me that way. Ive worked hard to get a position and be respectable. Ive turned many a girl out of the shop for being half an hour late at night; and heres my own daughter gone for a fortnight without word or sign, except a telegram to say shes not dead and that we’re not to worry about her.

MRS KNOX. [suddenly pointing to the street] Jo, look!

KNOX. Margaret! With a man!

MRS KNOX. Run down, Jo, quick. Catch her: save her.

KNOX. [lingering] Shes shaking bands with him: shes coming across to the door.

MRS KNOX. [energetically] Do as I tell you. Catch the man before hes out of sight.

Knox rushes from the room. Mrs Knox looks anxiously and excitedly from the window. Then she throws up the sash and leans out. Margaret Knox comes in, flustered and annoyed. She is a strong, springy girl of eighteen, with large nostrils, an audacious chin, and a gaily resolute manner, even peremptory on occasions like the present, when she is annoyed.

MARGARET. Mother. Mother.

Mrs Knox draws in her head and confronts her daughter.

MRS KNOX. [sternly] Well, miss?

MARGARET. Oh, mother, do go out and stop father making a scene in the street. He rushed at him and said “Youre the man who took away my daughter” loud enough for all the people to hear. Everybody stopped. We shall have a crowd round the house. Do do something to stop him.

Knox returns with a good-looking young marine officer.

MARGARET. Oh, Monsieur Duvallet, I’m so sorry — so ashamed. Mother: this is Monsieur Duvallet, who has been extremely kind to me. Monsieur Duvallet: my mother. [Duvallet bows].

KNOX. A Frenchman! It only needed this.

MARGARET. [much annoyed] Father: do please be commonly civil to a gentleman who has been of the greatest service to me. What will he think of us?

DUVALLET. [debonair] But it’s very natural. I understand Mr Knox’s feelings perfectly. [He speaks English better than Knox, having learnt it on both sides of the Atlantic].

KNOX. If Ive made any mistake I’m ready to apologize. But I want to know where my daughter has been for the last fortnight.

DUVALLET. She has been, I assure you, in a particularly safe place.

KNOX. Will you tell me what place? I can judge for myself how safe it was.

MARGARET. Holloway Gaol. Was that safe enough?

KNOX AND MRS KNOX. Holloway Gaol!

KNOX. Youve joined the Suffragets!

MARGARET. No. I wish I had. I could have had the same experience in better company. Please sit down, Monsieur Duvallet. [She sits between the table and the sofa. Mrs Knox, overwhelmed, sits at the other side of the table. Knox remains standing in the middle of the room].

DUVALLET. [sitting down on the sofa] It was nothing. An adventure. Nothing.

MARGARET. [obdurately] Drunk and assaulting the police! Forty shillings or a month!

MRS KNOX. Margaret! Who accused you of such a thing?

MARGARET. The policeman I assaulted.

KNOX. You mean to say that you did it!

MARGARET. I did. I had that satisfaction at all events. I knocked two of his teeth out.

KNOX. And you sit there coolly and tell me this!

MARGARET. Well, where do you want me to sit? Whats the use of saying things like that?

KNOX. My daughter in Holloway Gaol!

MARGARET. All the women in Holloway are somebody’s daughters. Really, father, you must make up your mind to it. If you had sat in that cell for fourteen days making up your mind to it, you would understand that I’m not in the humor to be gaped at while youre trying to persuade yourself that it cant be real. These things really do happen to real people every day; and you read about them in the papers and think it’s all right. Well, theyve happened to me: thats all.

KNOX. [feeble-forcible] But they shouldnt have happened to you. Dont you know that?

MARGARET. They shouldnt happen to anybody, I suppose. But they do. [Rising impatiently] And really I’d rather go out and assault another policeman and go back to Holloway than keep talking round and round it like this. If youre going to turn me out of the house, turn me out: the sooner I go the better.

DUVALLET. [rising quickly] That is impossible, mademoiselle. Your father has his position to consider. To turn his daughter out of doors would ruin him socially.

KNOX. Oh, youve put her up to that, have you? And where did you come in, may I ask?

DUVALLET. I came in at your invitation — at your amiable insistence, in fact, not at my own. But you need have no anxiety on my account. I was concerned in the regrettable incident which led to your daughter’s incarceration. I got a fortnight without the option of a fine on the ridiculous ground that I ought to have struck the policeman with my fist. I should have done so with pleasure had I known; but, as it was, I struck him on the ear with my boot — a magnificent moulinet, I must say — and was informed that I had been guilty of an act of cowardice, but that for the sake of the entente cordiale I should be dealt with leniently. Yet Miss Knox, who used her fist, got a month, but with the option of a fine. I did not know this until I was released, when my first act was to pay the fine. And here we are.

MRS KNOX. You ought to pay the gentleman the fine, Jo.

KNOX. [reddening] Oh, certainly. [He takes out some money].

DUVALLET. Oh please! it does not matter. [Knox hands him two sovereigns]. If you insist — [he pockets them] Thank you.

MARGARET. I’m ever so much obliged to you, Monsieur Duvallet.

DUVALLET. Can I be of any further assistance, mademoiselle?

MARGARET. I think you had better leave us to fight it out, if you dont mind.

DUVALLET. Perfectly. Madame [bow] — Mademoiselle [bow] — Monsieur [bow] — [He goes out].

MRS KNOX. Dont ring, Jo. See the gentleman out yourself.

Knox hastily sees Duvallet out. Mother and daughter sit looking forlornly at one another without saying a word. Mrs Knox slowly sits down. Margaret follows her example. They look at one another again. Mr Knox returns.

KNOX. [shortly and sternly] Amelia: this is your job. [To Margaret] I leave you to your mother. I shall have my own say in the matter when I hear what you have to say to her. [He goes out, solemn and offended].

MARGARET. [with a bitter little laugh] Just what the Suffraget said to me in Holloway. He throws the job on you.

MRS KNOX. [reproachfully] Margaret!

MARGARET. You know it’s true.

MRS KNOX. Margaret: if youre going to be hardened about it, theres no use my saying anything.

MARGARET. I’m not hardened, mother. But I cant talk nonsense about it. You see, it’s all real to me. Ive suffered it. Ive been shoved and bullied. Ive had my arms twisted. Ive been made scream with pain in other ways. Ive been flung into a filthy cell with a lot of other poor wretches as if I were a sack of coals being emptied into a cellar. And the only difference between me and the others was that I hit back. Yes I did. And I did worse. I wasnt ladylike. I cursed. I called names. I heard words that I didnt even know that I knew, coming out of my mouth just as if somebody else had spoken them. The policeman repeated them in court. The magistrate said he could hardly believe it. The policeman held out his hand with his two teeth in it that I knocked out. I said it was all right; that I had heard myself using those words quite distinctly; and that I had taken the good conduct prize for three years running at school. The poor old gentleman put me back for the missionary to find out who I was, and to ascertain the state of my mind. I wouldnt tell, of course, for your sakes at home here; and I wouldnt say I was sorry, or apologize to the policeman, or compensate him or anything of that sort. I wasnt sorry. The one thing that gave me any satisfaction was getting in that smack on his mouth; and I said so. So the missionary reported that I seemed hardened and that no doubt I would tell who I was after a day in prison. Then I was sentenced. So now you see I’m not a bit the sort of girl you thought me. I’m not a bit the sort of girl I thought myself. And I dont know what sort of person you really are, or what sort of person father really is. I wonder what he would say or do if he had an angry brute of a policeman twisting his arm with one hand and rushing him along by the nape of his neck with the other. He couldnt whirl his leg like a windmill and knock a policeman down by a glorious kick on the helmet. Oh, if theyd all fought as we two fought we’d have beaten them.

MRS KNOX. But how did it all begin?

MARGARET. Oh, I dont know. It was boat-race night, they said.

MRS KNOX. Boat-race night! But what had you to do with the boat race? You went to the great Salvation Festival at the Albert Hall with your aunt. She put you into the bus that passes the door. What made you get out of the bus?

MARGARET. I dont know. The meeting got on my nerves, somehow. It was the singing, I suppose: you know I love singing a good swinging hymn; and I felt it was ridiculous to go home in the bus after we had been singing so wonderfully about climbing up the golden stairs to heaven. I wanted more music — more happiness — more life. I wanted some comrade who felt as I did. I felt exalted: it seemed mean to be afraid of anything: after all, what could anyone do to me against my will? I suppose I was a little mad: at all events, I got out of the bus at Piccadilly Circus, because there was a lot of light and excitement there. I walked to Leicester Square; and went into a great theatre.

MRS KNOX. [horrified] A theatre!

MARGARET. Yes. Lots of other women were going in alone. I had to pay five shillings.

MRS KNOX. [aghast] Five shillings!

MARGARET. [apologetically] It was a lot. It was very stuffy; and I didnt like the people much, because they didnt seem to be enjoying themselves; but the stage was splendid and the music lovely. I saw that Frenchman, Monsieur Duvallet, standing against a barrier, smoking a cigarette. He seemed quite happy; and he was nice and sailorlike. I went and stood beside him, hoping he would speak to me.

MRS KNOX. [gasps] Margaret!

MARGARET. [continuing] He did, just as if he had known me for years. We got on together like old friends. He asked me would I have some champagne; and I said it would cost too much, but that I would give anything for a dance. I longed to join the people on the stage and dance with them: one of them was the most beautiful dancer I ever saw. He told me he had come there to see her, and that when it was over we could go somewhere where there was dancing. So we went to a place where there was a band in a gallery and the floor cleared for dancing. Very few people danced: the women only wanted to shew off their dresses; but we danced and danced until a lot of them joined in. We got quite reckless; and we had champagne after all. I never enjoyed anything so much. But at last it got spoilt by the Oxford and Cambridge students up for the boat race. They got drunk; and they began to smash things; and the police came in. Then it was quite horrible. The students fought with the police; and the police suddenly got quite brutal, and began to throw everybody downstairs. They attacked the women, who were not doing anything, and treated them just as roughly as they had treated the students. Duvallet got indignant and remonstrated with a policeman, who was shoving a woman though she was going quietly as fast as she could. The policeman flung the woman through the door and then turned on Duvallet. It was then that Duvallet swung his leg like a windmill and knocked the policeman down. And then three policemen rushed at him and carried him out by the arms and legs face downwards. Two more attacked me and gave me a shove to the door. That quite maddened me. I just got in one good bang on the mouth of one of them. All the rest was dreadful. I was rushed through the streets to the police station. They kicked me with their knees; they twisted my arms; they taunted and insulted me; they called me vile names; and I told them what I thought of them, and provoked them to do their worst. Theres one good thing about being hard hurt: it makes you sleep. I slept in that filthy cell with all the other drunks sounder than I should have slept at home. I cant describe how I felt next morning: it was hideous; but the police were quite jolly; and everybody said it was a bit of English fun, and talked about last year’s boat-race night when it had been a great deal worse. I was black and blue and sick and wretched. But the strange thing was that I wasnt sorry; and I’m not sorry. And I dont feel that I did anything wrong, really. [She rises and stretches her arms with a large liberating breath] Now that it’s all over I’m rather proud of it; though I know now that I’m not a lady; but whether thats because we’re only shopkeepers, or because nobody’s really a lady except when theyre treated like ladies, I dont know. [She throws herself into a corner of the sofa].

MRS KNOX. [lost in wonder] But how could you bring yourself to do it, Margaret? I’m not blaming you: I only want to know. How could you bring yourself to do it?

MARGARET. I cant tell you. I dont understand it myself. The prayer meeting set me free, somehow. I should never have done it if it were not for the prayer meeting.

MRS KNOX. [deeply horrified] Oh, dont say such a thing as that. I know that prayer can set us free; though you could never understand me when I told you so; but it sets us free for good, not for evil.

MARGARET. Then I suppose what I did was not evil; or else I was set free for evil as well as good. As father says, you cant have anything both ways at once. When I was at home and at school I was what you call good; but I wasnt free. And when I got free I was what most people would call not good. But I see no harm in what I did; though I see plenty in what other people did to me.

MRS KNOX. I hope you dont think yourself a heroine of romance.

MARGARET. Oh no. [She sits down again at the table]. I’m a heroine of reality, if you can call me a heroine at all. And reality is pretty brutal, pretty filthy, when you come to grips with it. Yet it’s glorious all the same. It’s so real and satisfactory.

MRS KNOX. I dont like this spirit in you, Margaret. I dont like your talking to me in that tone.

MARGARET. It’s no use, mother. I dont care for you and Papa any the less; but I shall never get back to the old way of talking again. Ive made a sort of descent into hell —

MRS KNOX. Margaret! Such a word!

MARGARET. You should have heard all the words that were flying round that night. You should mix a little with people who dont know any other words. But when I said that about a descent into hell I was not swearing. I was in earnest, like a preacher.

MRS KNOX. A preacher utters them in a reverent tone of voice.

MARGARET. I know: the tone that shews they dont mean anything real to him. They usent to mean anything real to me. Now hell is as real to me as a turnip; and I suppose I shall always speak of it like that. Anyhow, Ive been there; and it seems to me now that nothing is worth doing but redeeming people from it.

MRS KNOX. They are redeemed already if they choose to believe it.

MARGARET. Whats the use of that if they dont choose to believe it? You dont believe it yourself, or you wouldnt pay policemen to twist their arms. Whats the good of pretending? Thats all our respectability is, pretending, pretending, pretending. Thank heaven Ive had it knocked out of me once for all!

MRS KNOX. [greatly agitated] Margaret: dont talk like that. I cant bear to hear you talking wickedly. I can bear to hear the children of this world talking vainly and foolishly in the language of this world. But when I hear you justifying your wickedness in the words of grace, it’s too horrible: it sounds like the devil making fun of religion. Ive tried to bring you up to learn the happiness of religion. Ive waited for you to find out that happiness is within ourselves and doesnt come from outward pleasures. Ive prayed oftener than you think that you might be enlightened. But if all my hopes and all my prayers are to come to this, that you mix up my very words and thoughts with the promptings of the devil, then I dont know what I shall do: I dont indeed: itll kill me.

MARGARET. You shouldnt have prayed for me to be enlightened if you didnt want me to be enlightened. If the truth were known, I suspect we all want our prayers to be answered only by halves: the agreeable halves. Your prayer didnt get answered by halves, mother. Youve got more than you bargained for in the way of enlightenment. I shall never be the same again. I shall never speak in the old way again. Ive been set free from this silly little hole of a house and all its pretences. I know now that I am stronger than you and Papa. I havnt found that happiness of yours that is within yourself; but Ive found strength. For good or evil I am set free; and none of the things that used to hold me can hold me now.

Knox comes back, unable to bear his suspense.

KNOX. How long more are you going to keep me waiting, Amelia? Do you think I’m made of iron? Whats the girl done? What are we going to do?

MRS KNOX. Shes beyond my control, Jo, and beyond yours. I cant even pray for her now; for I dont know rightly what to pray for.

KNOX. Dont talk nonsense, woman: is this a time for praying? Does anybody know? Thats what we have to consider now. If only we can keep it dark, I don’t care for anything else.

MARGARET. Dont hope for that, father. Mind: I’ll tell everybody. It ought to be told. It must be told.

KNOX. Hold your tongue, you young hussy; or go out of my house this instant.

MARGARET. I’m quite ready. [She takes her hat and turns to the door].

KNOX. [throwing himself in front of it] Here! where are you going?

MRS KNOX. [rising] You mustnt turn her out, Jo! I’ll go with her if she goes.

KNOX. Who wants to turn her out? But is she going to ruin us? To let everybody know of her disgrace and shame? To tear me down from the position Ive made for myself and you by forty years hard struggling?

MARGARET. Yes: I’m going to tear it all down. It stands between us and everything. I’ll tell everybody.

KNOX. Magsy, my child: dont bring down your father’s hairs with sorrow to the grave. Theres only one thing I care about in the world: to keep this dark. I’m your father. I ask you here on my knees — in the dust, so to speak — not to let it out.

MARGARET. I’ll tell everybody.

Knox collapses in despair. Mrs Knox tries to pray and cannot. Margaret stands inflexible.

ACT III

Again in the Gilbeys’ dining-room. Afternoon. The table is not laid: it is draped in its ordinary cloth, with pen and ink, an exercise-book, and school-books on it. Bobby Gilbey is in the arm-chair, crouching over the fire, reading an illustrated paper. He is a pretty youth, of very suburban gentility, strong and manly enough by nature, but untrained and unsatisfactory, his parents having imagined that domestic restriction is what they call “bringing up.” He has learnt nothing from it except a habit of evading it by deceit.

He gets up to ring the bell; then resumes his crouch. Juggins answers the bell.

BOBBY. Juggins.

JUGGINS. Sir?

BOBBY. [morosely sarcastic] Sir be blowed!

JUGGINS. [cheerfully] Not at all, sir.

BOBBY. I’m a gaol-bird: youre a respectable man.

JUGGINS. That doesnt matter, sir. Your father pays me to call you sir; and as I take the money, I keep my part of the bargain.

BOBBY. Would you call me sir if you wernt paid to do it?

JUGGINS. No, sir.

BOBBY. Ive been talking to Dora about you.

JUGGINS. Indeed, sir?

BOBBY. Yes. Dora says your name cant be Juggins, and that you have the manners of a gentleman. I always thought you hadnt any manners. Anyhow, your manners are different from the manners of a gentleman in my set.

JUGGINS. They would be, sir.

BOBBY. You dont feel disposed to be communicative on the subject of Dora’s notion, I suppose.

JUGGINS. No, sir.

BOBBY. [throwing his paper on the floor and lifting his knees over the arm of the chair so as to turn towards the footman] It was part of your bargain that you were to valet me a bit, wasnt it?

JUGGINS. Yes, sir.

BOBBY. Well, can you tell me the proper way to get out of an engagement to a girl without getting into a row for breach of promise or behaving like a regular cad?

JUGGINS. No, sir. You cant get out of an engagement without behaving like a cad if the lady wishes to hold you to it.

BOBBY. But it wouldnt be for her happiness to marry me when I dont really care for her.

JUGGINS. Women dont always marry for happiness, sir. They often marry because they wish to be married women and not old maids.

BOBBY. Then what am I to do?

JUGGINS. Marry her, sir, or behave like a cad.

BOBBY. [Jumping up] Well, I wont marry her: thats flat. What would you do if you were in my place?

JUGGINS. I should tell the young lady that I found I couldnt fulfil my engagement.

BOBBY. But youd have to make some excuse, you know. I want to give it a gentlemanly turn: to say I’m not worthy of her, or something like that.

JUGGINS. That is not a gentlemanly turn, sir. Quite the contrary.

BOBBY. I dont see that at all. Do you mean that it’s not exactly true?

JUGGINS. Not at all, sir.

BOBBY. I can say that no other girl can ever be to me what shes been. That would be quite true, because our circumstances have been rather exceptional; and she’ll imagine I mean I’m fonder of her than I can ever be of anyone else. You see, Juggins, a gentleman has to think of a girl’s feelings.

JUGGINS. If you wish to spare her feelings, sir, you can marry her. If you hurt her feelings by refusing, you had better not try to get credit for considerateness at the same time by pretending to spare them. She wont like it. And it will start an argument, of which you will get the worse.

BOBBY. But, you know, I’m not really worthy of her.

JUGGINS. Probably she never supposed you were, sir.

BOBBY. Oh, I say, Juggins, you are a pessimist.

JUGGINS. [preparing to go] Anything else, sir?

BOBBY. [querulously] You havnt been much use. [He wanders disconsolately across the room]. You generally put me up to the correct way of doing things.

JUGGINS. I assure you, sir, theres no correct way of jilting. It’s not correct in itself.

BOBBY. [hopefully] I’ll tell you what. I’ll say I cant hold her to an engagement with a man whos been in quod. Thatll do it. [He seats himself on the table, relieved and confident].

JUGGINS. Very dangerous, sir. No woman will deny herself the romantic luxury of self-sacrifice and forgiveness when they take the form of doing something agreeable. Shes almost sure to say that your misfortune will draw her closer to you.

BOBBY. What a nuisance! I dont know what to do. You know, Juggins, your cool simple-minded way of doing it wouldnt go down in Denmark Hill.

JUGGINS. I daresay not, sir. No doubt youd prefer to make it look like an act of self-sacrifice for her sake on your part, or provoke her to break the engagement herself. Both plans have been tried repeatedly, but never with success, as far as my knowledge goes.

BOBBY. You have a devilish cool way of laying down the law. You know, in my class you have to wrap up things a bit. Denmark Hill isn’t Camberwell, you know.

JUGGINS. I have noticed, sir, that Denmark Hill thinks that the higher you go in the social scale, the less sincerity is allowed; and that only tramps and riff-raff are quite sincere. Thats a mistake. Tramps are often shameless; but theyre never sincere. Swells — if I may use that convenient name for the upper classes — play much more with their cards on the table. If you tell the young lady that you want to jilt her, and she calls you a pig, the tone of the transaction may leave much to be desired; but itll be less Camberwellian than if you say youre not worthy.

BOBBY. Oh, I cant make you understand, Juggins. The girl isnt a scullery-maid. I want to do it delicately.

JUGGINS. A mistake, sir, believe me, if you are not a born artist in that line. — Beg pardon, sir, I think I heard the bell. [He goes out].

Bobby, much perplexed, shoves his hands into his pockets, and comes off the table, staring disconsolately straight before him; then goes reluctantly to his books, and sits down to write. Juggins returns.

JUGGINS. [announcing] Miss Knox.

Margaret comes in. Juggins withdraws.

MARGARET. Still grinding away for that Society of Arts examination, Bobby? Youll never pass.

BOBBY. [rising] No: I was just writing to you.

MARGARET. What about?

BOBBY. Oh, nothing. At least — How are you?

MARGARET. [passing round the other end of the table and putting down on it a copy of Lloyd’s Weekly and her purse-bag] Quite well, thank you. How did you enjoy Brighton?

BOBBY. Brighton! I wasnt at — Oh yes, of course. Oh, pretty well. Is your aunt all right?

MARGARET. My aunt! I suppose so. I havent seen her for a month.

BOBBY. I thought you were down staying with her.

MARGARET. Oh! was that what they told you?

BOBBY. Yes. Why? Werent you really?

MARGARET. No. Ive something to tell you. Sit down and lets be comfortable.

She sits on the edge of the table. He sits beside her, and puts his arm wearily round her waist.

MARGARET. You neednt do that if you dont like, Bobby. Suppose we get off duty for the day, just to see what it’s like.

BOBBY. Off duty? What do you mean?

MARGARET. You know very well what I mean. Bobby: did you ever care one little scrap for me in that sort of way? Dont funk answering: I dont care a bit for you — that way.

BOBBY. [removing his arm rather huffily] I beg your pardon, I’m sure. I thought you did.

MARGARET. Well, did you? Come! Dont be mean. Ive owned up. You can put it all on me if you like; but I dont believe you care any more than I do.

BOBBY. You mean weve been shoved into it rather by the pars and mars.

MARGARET. Yes.

BOBBY. Well, it’s not that I dont care for you: in fact, no girl can ever be to me exactly what you are; but weve been brought up so much together that it feels more like brother and sister than — well, than the other thing, doesnt it?

MARGARET. Just so. How did you find out the difference?

BOBBY. [blushing] Oh, I say!

MARGARET. I found out from a Frenchman.

BOBBY. Oh, I say! [He comes off the table in his consternation].

MARGARET. Did you learn it from a Frenchwoman? You know you must have learnt it from somebody.

BOBBY. Not a Frenchwoman. Shes quite a nice woman. But shes been rather unfortunate. The daughter of a clergyman.

MARGARET. [startled] Oh, Bobby! That sort of woman!

BOBBY. What sort of woman?

MARGARET. You dont believe shes really a clergyman’s daughter, do you, you silly boy? It’s a stock joke.

BOBBY. Do you mean to say you dont believe me?

MARGARET. No: I mean to say I dont believe her.

BOBBY. [curious and interested, resuming his seat on the table beside her]. What do you know about her? What do you know about all this sort of thing?

MARGARET. What sort of thing, Bobby?

BOBBY. Well, about life.

MARGARET. Ive lived a lot since I saw you last. I wasnt at my aunt’s. All that time that you were in Brighton, I mean.

BOBBY. I wasnt at Brighton, Meg. I’d better tell you: youre bound to find out sooner or later. [He begins his confession humbly, avoiding her gaze]. Meg: it’s rather awful: youll think me no end of a beast. Ive been in prison.

MARGARET. You!

BOBBY. Yes, me. For being drunk and assaulting the police.

MARGARET. Do you mean to say that you — oh! this is a let-down for me. [She comes off the table and drops, disconsolate, into a chair at the end of it furthest from the hearth].

BOBBY. Of course I couldnt hold you to our engagement after that. I was writing to you to break it off. [He also descends from the table and makes slowly for the hearth]. You must think me an utter rotter.

MARGARET. Oh, has everybody been in prison for being drunk and assaulting the police? How long were you in?

BOBBY. A fortnight.

MARGARET. Thats what I was in for.

BOBBY. What are you talking about? In where?

MARGARET. In quod.

BOBBY. But I’m serious: I’m not rotting. Really and truly —

MARGARET. What did you do to the copper?

BOBBY. Nothing, absolutely nothing. He exaggerated grossly. I only laughed at him.

MARGARET. [jumping up, triumphant] Ive beaten you hollow. I knocked out two of his teeth. Ive got one of them. He sold it to me for ten shillings.

BOBBY. Now please do stop fooling, Meg. I tell you I’m not rotting. [He sits down in the armchair, rather sulkily].

MARGARET. [taking up the copy of Lloyd’s Weekly and going to him] And I tell you I’m not either. Look! Heres a report of it. The daily papers are no good; but the Sunday papers are splendid. [She sits on the arm of the chair]. See! [Reading]: “Hardened at Eighteen. A quietly dressed, respectable-looking girl who refuses her name” — thats me.

BOBBY. [pausing a moment in his perusal] Do you mean to say that you went on the loose out of pure devilment?

MARGARET. I did no harm. I went to see a lovely dance. I picked up a nice man and went to have a dance myself. I cant imagine anything more innocent and more happy. All the bad part was done by other people: they did it out of pure devilment if you like. Anyhow, here we are, two gaolbirds, Bobby, disgraced forever. Isnt it a relief?

BOBBY. [rising stiffly] But you know, it’s not the same for a girl. A man may do things a woman maynt. [He stands on the hearthrug with his back to the fire].

MARGARET. Are you scandalized, Bobby?

BOBBY. Well, you cant expect me to approve of it, can you, Meg? I never thought you were that sort of girl.

MARGARET. [rising indignantly] I’m not. You mustnt pretend to think that I’m a clergyman’s daughter, Bobby.

BOBBY. I wish you wouldnt chaff about that. Dont forget the row you got into for letting out that you admired Juggins [she turns her back on him quickly] — a footman! And what about the Frenchman?

MARGARET. [facing him again] I know nothing about the Frenchman except that hes a very nice fellow and can swing his leg round like the hand of a clock and knock a policeman down with it. He was in Wormwood Scrubbs with you. I was in Holloway.

BOBBY. It’s all very well to make light of it, Meg; but this is a bit thick, you know.

MARGARET. Do you feel you couldnt marry a woman whos been in prison?

BOBBY. [hastily] No. I never said that. It might even give a woman a greater claim on a man. Any girl, if she were thoughtless and a bit on, perhaps, might get into a scrape. Anyone who really understood her character could see there was no harm in it. But youre not the larky sort. At least you usent to be.

MARGARET. I’m not; and I never will be. [She walks straight up to him]. I didnt do it for a lark, Bob: I did it out of the very depths of my nature. I did it because I’m that sort of person. I did it in one of my religious fits. I’m hardened at eighteen, as they say. So what about the match, now?

BOBBY. Well, I dont think you can fairly hold me to it, Meg. Of course it would be ridiculous for me to set up to be shocked, or anything of that sort. I cant afford to throw stones at anybody; and I dont pretend to. I can understand a lark; I can forgive a slip; as long as it is understood that it is only a lark or a slip. But to go on the loose on principle; to talk about religion in connection with it; to — to — well, Meg, I do find that a bit thick, I must say. I hope youre not in earnest when you talk that way.

MARGARET. Bobby: youre no good. No good to me, anyhow.

BOBBY. [huffed] I’m sorry, Miss Knox.

MARGARET. Goodbye, Mr Gilbey. [She turns on her heel and goes to the other end of the table]. I suppose you wont introduce me to the clergyman’s daughter.

BOBBY. I dont think she’d like it. There are limits, after all. [He sits down at the table, as if to to resume work at his books: a hint to her to go].

MARGARET. [on her way to the door] Ring the bell, Bobby; and tell Juggins to shew me out.

BOBBY. [reddening] I’m not a cad, Meg.

MARGARET. [coming to the table] Then do something nice to prevent us feeling mean about this afterwards. Youd better kiss me. You neednt ever do it again.

BOBBY. If I’m no good, I dont see what fun it would be for you.

MARGARET. Oh, it’d be no fun. If I wanted what you call fun, I should ask the Frenchman to kiss me — or Juggins.

BOBBY. [rising and retreating to the hearth] Oh, dont be disgusting, Meg. Dont be low.

MARGARET. [determinedly, preparing to use force] Now, I’ll make you kiss me, just to punish you. [She seizes his wrist; pulls him off his balance; and gets her arm round his neck].

BOBBY. No. Stop. Leave go, will you.

Juggins appears at the door.

JUGGINS. Miss Delaney, Sir. [Dora comes in. Juggins goes out. Margaret hastily releases Bobby, and goes to the other side of the room.]

DORA. [through the door, to the departing Juggins] Well, you are a Juggins to shew me up when theres company. [To Margaret and Bobby] It’s all right, dear: all right, old man: I’ll wait in Juggins’s pantry til youre disengaged.

MARGARET. Dont you know me?

DORA. [coming to the middle of the room and looking at her very attentively] Why, it’s never No. 406!

MARGARET. Yes it is.

DORA. Well, I should never have known you out of the uniform. How did you get out? You were doing a month, wernt you?

MARGARET. My bloke paid the fine the day he got out himself.

DORA. A real gentleman! [Pointing to Bobby, who is staring open-mouthed] Look at him. He cant take it in.

BOBBY. I suppose you made her acquaintance in prison, Meg. But when it comes to talking about blokes and all that — well!

MARGARET. Oh, Ive learnt the language; and I like it. It’s another barrier broken down.

BOBBY. It’s not so much the language, Meg. But I think [he looks at Dora and stops].

MARGARET. [suddenly dangerous] What do you think, Bobby?

DORA. He thinks you oughtnt to be so free with me, dearie. It does him credit: he always was a gentleman, you know.

MARGARET. Does him credit! To insult you like that! Bobby: say that that wasnt what you meant.

BOBBY. I didnt say it was.

MARGARET. Well, deny that it was.

BOBBY. No. I wouldnt have said it in front of Dora; but I do think it’s not quite the same thing my knowing her and you knowing her.

DORA. Of course it isnt, old man. [To Margaret] I’ll just trot off and come back in half an hour. You two can make it up together. I’m really not fit company for you, dearie: I couldnt live up to you. [She turns to go].

MARGARET. Stop. Do you believe he could live up to me?

DORA. Well, I’ll never say anything to stand between a girl and a respectable marriage, or to stop a decent lad from settling himself. I have a conscience; though I maynt be as particular as some.

MARGARET. You seem to me to be a very decent sort; and Bobby’s behaving like a skunk.

BOBBY. [much ruffled] Nice language that!

DORA. Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you cant blame them for that, can you? Ive met Bobby walking with his mother; and of course he cut me dead. I wont pretend I liked it; but what could he do, poor dear?

MARGARET. And now he wants me to cut you dead to keep him in countenance. Well, I shant: not if my whole family were there. But I’ll cut him dead if he doesnt treat you properly. [To Bobby, with a threatening move in his direction] I’ll educate you, you young beast.

BOBBY. [furious, meeting her half way] Who are you calling a young beast?

MARGARET. You.

DORA. [peacemaking] Now, dearies!

BOBBY. If you dont take care, youll get your fat head jolly well clouted.

MARGARET. If you dont take care, the policeman’s tooth will only be the beginning of a collection.

DORA. Now, loveys, be good.

Bobby, lost to all sense of adult dignity, puts out his tongue at Margaret. Margaret, equally furious, catches his protended countenance a box on the cheek. He hurls himself her. They wrestle.

BOBBY. Cat! I’ll teach you.

MARGARET. Pig! Beast! [She forces him backwards on the table]. Now where are you?

DORA. [calling] Juggins, Juggins. Theyll murder one another.

JUGGINS. [throwing open the door, and announcing] Monsieur Duvallet.

Duvallet enters. Sudden cessation of hostilities, and dead silence. The combatants separate by the whole width of the room. Juggins withdraws.

DUVALLET. I fear I derange you.

MARGARET. Not at all. Bobby: you really are a beast: Monsieur Duvallet will think I’m always fighting.

DUVALLET. Practising jujitsu or the new Iceland wrestling. Admirable, Miss Knox. The athletic young Englishwoman is an example to all Europe. [Indicating Bobby] Your instructor, no doubt. Monsieur — [he bows].

BOBBY. [bowing awkwardly] How d’y’ do?

MARGARET. [to Bobby] I’m so sorry, Bobby: I asked Monsieur Duvallet to call for me here; and I forgot to tell you. [Introducing] Monsieur Duvallet: Miss Four hundred and seven. Mr Bobby Gilbey. [Duvallet bows]. I really dont know how to explain our relationships. Bobby and I are like brother and sister.

DUVALLET. Perfectly. I noticed it.

MARGARET. Bobby and Miss — Miss ——

DORA. Delaney, dear. [To Duvallet, bewitchingly] Darling Dora, to real friends.

MARGARET. Bobby and Dora are — are — well, not brother and sister.

DUVALLET. [with redoubled comprehension] Perfectly.

MARGARET. Bobby has spent the last fortnight in prison. You dont mind, do you?

DUVALLET. No, naturally. I have spent the last fortnight in prison.

The conversation drops. Margaret renews it with an effort.

MARGARET. Dora has spent the last fortnight in prison.

DUVALLET. Quite so. I felicitate Mademoiselle on her enlargement.

DORA. Trop merci, as they say in Boulogne. No call to be stiff with one another, have we?

Juggins comes in.

JUGGINS. Beg pardon, sir. Mr and Mrs Gilbey are coming up the street.

DORA. Let me absquatulate [making for the door].

JUGGINS. If you wish to leave without being seen, you had better step into my pantry and leave afterwards.

DORA. Right oh! [She bursts into song] Hide me in the meat safe til the cop goes by. Hum the dear old music as his step draws nigh. [She goes out on tiptoe].

MARGARET. I wont stay here if she has to hide. I’ll keep her company in the pantry. [She follows Dora].

BOBBY. Lets all go. We cant have any fun with the Mar here. I say, Juggins: you can give us tea in the pantry, cant you?

JUGGINS. Certainly, sir.

BOBBY. Right. Say nothing to my mother. You dont mind, Mr. Doovalley, do you?

DUVALLET. I shall be charmed.

BOBBY. Right you are. Come along. [At the door] Oh, by the way, Juggins, fetch down that concertina from my room, will you?

JUGGINS. Yes, sir. [Bobby goes out. Duvallet follows him to the door]. You understand, sir, that Miss Knox is a lady absolutely comme il faut?

DUVALLET. Perfectly. But the other?

JUGGINS. The other, sir, may be both charitably and accurately described in your native idiom as a daughter of joy.

DUVALLET. It is what I thought. These English domestic interiors are very interesting. [He goes out, followed by Juggins].

Presently Mr and Mrs Gilbey come in. They take their accustomed places: he on the hearthrug, she at the colder end of the table.

MRS GILBEY. Did you smell scent in the hall, Rob?

GILBEY. No, I didnt. And I dont want to smell it. Dont you go looking for trouble, Maria.

MRS GILBEY. [snuffing up the perfumed atmosphere] Shes been here. [Gilbey rings the bell]. What are you ringing for? Are you going to ask?

GILBEY. No, I’m not going to ask. Juggins said this morning he wanted to speak to me. If he likes to tell me, let him; but I’m not going to ask; and dont you either. [Juggins appears at the door]. You said you wanted to say something to me.

JUGGINS. When it would be convenient to you, sir.

GILBEY. Well, what is it?

MRS GILBEY. Oh, Juggins, we’re expecting Mr and Mrs Knox to tea.

GILBEY. He knows that. [He sits down. Then, to Juggins] What is it?

JUGGINS. [advancing to the middle of the table] Would it inconvenience you, sir, if I was to give you a month’s notice?

GILBEY. [taken aback] What! Why? Aint you satisfied?

JUGGINS. Perfectly, sir. It is not that I want to better myself, I assure you.

GILBEY. Well, what do you want to leave for, then? Do you want to worse yourself?

JUGGINS. No, sir. Ive been well treated in your most comfortable establishment; and I should be greatly distressed if you or Mrs Gilbey were to interpret my notice as an expression of dissatisfaction.

GILBEY. [paternally] Now you listen to me, Juggins. I’m an older man than you. Dont you throw out dirty water til you get in fresh. Dont get too big for your boots. Youre like all servants nowadays: you think youve only to hold up your finger to get the pick of half a dozen jobs. But you wont be treated everywhere as youre treated here. In bed every night before eleven; hardly a ring at the door except on Mrs Gilbey’s day once a month; and no other manservant to interfere with you. It may be a bit quiet perhaps; but youre past the age of adventure. Take my advice: think over it. You suit me; and I’m prepared to make it suit you if youre dissatisfied — in reason, you know.

JUGGINS. I realize my advantages, sir; but Ive private reasons —

GILBEY. [cutting him short angrily and retiring to the hearthrug in dudgeon] Oh, I know. Very well: go. The sooner the better.

MRS GILBEY. Oh, not until we’re suited. He must stay his month.

GILBEY. [sarcastic] Do you want to lose him his character, Maria? Do you think I dont see what it is? We’re prison folk now. Weve been in the police court. [To Juggins] Well, I suppose you know your own business best. I take your notice: you can go when your month is up, or sooner, if you like.

JUGGINS. Believe me, sir —

GILBEY. Thats enough: I dont want any excuses. I dont blame you. You can go downstairs now, if youve nothing else to trouble me about.

JUGGINS. I really cant leave it at that, sir. I assure you Ive no objection to young Mr Gilbey’s going to prison. You may do six months yourself, sir, and welcome, without a word of remonstrance from me. I’m leaving solely because my brother, who has suffered a bereavement, and feels lonely, begs me to spend a few months with him until he gets over it.

GILBEY. And is he to keep you all that time? or are you to spend your savings in comforting him? Have some sense, man: how can you afford such things?

JUGGINS. My brother can afford to keep me, sir. The truth is, he objects to my being in service.

GILBEY. Is that any reason why you should be dependent on him? Dont do it, Juggins: pay your own way like an honest lad; and dont eat your brother’s bread while youre able to earn your own.

JUGGINS. There is sound sense in that, sir. But unfortunately it is a tradition in my family that the younger brothers should spunge to a considerable extent on the eldest.

GILBEY. Then the sooner that tradition is broken, the better, my man.

JUGGINS. A Radical sentiment, sir. But an excellent one.

GILBEY. Radical! What do you mean? Dont you begin to take liberties, Juggins, now that you know we’re loth to part with you. Your brother isnt a duke, you know.

JUGGINS. Unfortunately, he is, sir.

GILBEY.     |   What!    |

|            | together

|            |

MRS GILBEY. |   Juggins! |

JUGGINS. Excuse me, sir: the bell. [He goes out].

GILBEY. [overwhelmed] Maria: did you understand him to say his brother was a duke?

MRS GILBEY. Fancy his condescending! Perhaps if youd offer to raise his wages and treat him as one of the family, he’d stay.

GILBEY. And have my own servant above me! Not me. Whats the world coming to? Heres Bobby and —

JUGGINS. [entering and announcing] Mr and Mrs Knox.

The Knoxes come in. Juggins takes two chairs from the wall and places them at the table, between the host and hostess. Then he withdraws.

MRS GILBEY. [to Mrs Knox] How are you, dear?

MRS KNOX. Nicely, thank you. Good evening, Mr Gilbey. [They shake hands; and she takes the chair nearest Mrs Gilbey. Mr Knox takes the other chair].

GILBEY. [sitting down] I was just saying, Knox, What is the world coming to?

KNOX. [appealing to his wife] What was I saying myself only this morning?

MRS KNOX. This is a strange time. I was never one to talk about the end of the world; but look at the things that have happened!

KNOX. Earthquakes!

GILBEY. San Francisco!

MRS GILBEY. Jamaica!

KNOX. Martinique!

GILBEY. Messina!

MRS GILBEY. The plague in China!

MRS KNOX. The floods in France!

GILBEY. My Bobby in Wormwood Scrubbs!

KNOX. Margaret in Holloway!

GILBEY. And now my footman tells me his brother’s a duke!

KNOX.       |   No!

|

MRS KNOX.   | Whats that?

GILBEY. Just before he let you in. A duke! Here has everything been respectable from the beginning of the world, as you may say, to the present day; and all of a sudden everything is turned upside down.

MRS KNOX. It’s like in the book of Revelations. But I do say that unless people have happiness within themselves, all the earthquakes, all the floods, and all the prisons in the world cant make them really happy.

KNOX. It isnt alone the curious things that are happening, but the unnatural way people are taking them. Why, theres Margaret been in prison, and she hasnt time to go to all the invitations shes had from people that never asked her before.

GILBEY. I never knew we could live without being respectable.

MRS GILBEY. Oh, Rob, what a thing to say! Who says we’re not respectable?

GILBEY. Well, it’s not what I call respectable to have your children in and out of gaol.

KNOX. Oh come, Gilbey! we’re not tramps because weve had, as it were, an accident.

GILBEY. It’s no use, Knox: look it in the face. Did I ever tell you my father drank?

KNOX. No. But I knew it. Simmons told me.

GILBEY. Yes: he never could keep his mouth quiet: he told me your aunt was a kleptomaniac.

MRS KNOX. It wasnt true, Mr Gilbey. She used to pick up handkerchiefs if she saw them lying about; but you might trust her with untold silver.

GILBEY. My Uncle Phil was a teetotaller. My father used to say to me: Rob, he says, dont you ever have a weakness. If you find one getting a hold on you, make a merit of it, he says. Your Uncle Phil doesnt like spirits; and he makes a merit of it, and is chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee. I do like spirits; and I make a merit of it, and I’m the King Cockatoo of the Convivial Cockatoos. Never put yourself in the wrong, he says. I used to boast about what a good boy Bobby was. Now I swank about what a dog he is; and it pleases people just as well. What a world it is!

KNOX. It turned my blood cold at first to hear Margaret telling people about Holloway; but it goes down better than her singing used to.

MRS KNOX. I never thought she sang right after all those lessons we paid for.

GILBEY. Lord, Knox, it was lucky you and me got let in together. I tell you straight, if it hadnt been for Bobby’s disgrace, I’d have broke up the firm.

KNOX. I shouldnt have blamed you: I’d have done the same only for Margaret. Too much straightlacedness narrows a man’s mind. Talking of that, what about those hygienic corset advertisements that Vines & Jackson want us to put in the window? I told Vines they werent decent and we couldnt shew them in our shop. I was pretty high with him. But what am I to say to him now if he comes and throws this business in our teeth?

GILBEY. Oh, put em in. We may as well go it a bit now.

MRS GILBEY. Youve been going it quite far enough, Rob. [To Mrs Knox] He wont get up in the mornings now: he that was always out of bed at seven to the tick!

MRS KNOX. You hear that, Jo? [To Mrs Gilbey] Hes taken to whisky and soda. A pint a week! And the beer the same as before!

KNOX. Oh, dont preach, old girl.

MRS KNOX. [To Mrs Gilbey] Thats a new name hes got for me. [to Knox] I tell you, Jo, this doesnt sit well on you. You may call it preaching if you like; but it’s the truth for all that. I say that if youve happiness within yourself, you dont need to seek it outside, spending money on drink and theatres and bad company, and being miserable after all. You can sit at home and be happy; and you can work and be happy. If you have that in you, the spirit will set you free to do what you want and guide you to do right. But if you havent got it, then youd best be respectable and stick to the ways that are marked out for you; for youve nothing else to keep you straight.

KNOX. [angrily] And is a man never to have a bit of fun? See whats come of it with your daughter! She was to be content with your happiness that youre always talking about; and how did the spirit guide her? To a month’s hard for being drunk and assaulting the police. Did I ever assault the police?

MRS KNOX. You wouldnt have the courage. I dont blame the girl.

MRS GILBEY.     |   Oh, Maria!  What are you saying?

|

GILBEY.         |   What!  And you so pious!

MRS KNOX. She went where the spirit guided her. And what harm there was in it she knew nothing about.

GILBEY. Oh, come, Mrs Knox! Girls are not so innocent as all that.

MRS KNOX. I dont say she was ignorant. But I do say that she didnt know what we know: I mean the way certain temptations get a sudden hold that no goodness nor self-control is any use against. She was saved from that, and had a rough lesson too; and I say it was no earthly protection that did that. But dont think, you two men, that youll be protected if you make what she did an excuse to go and do as youd like to do if it wasnt for fear of losing your characters. The spirit wont guide you, because it isnt in you; and it never had been: not in either of you.

GILBEY. [with ironic humility] I’m sure I’m obliged to you for your good opinion, Mrs Knox.

MRS KNOX. Well, I will say for you, Mr Gilbey, that youre better than my man here. Hes a bitter hard heathen, is my Jo, God help me! [She begins to cry quietly].

KNOX. Now, dont take on like that, Amelia. You know I always give in to you that you were right about religion. But one of us had to think of other things, or we’d have starved, we and the child.

MRS KNOX. How do you know youd have starved? All the other things might have been added unto you.

GILBEY. Come, Mrs Knox, dont tell me Knox is a sinner. I know better. I’m sure youd be the first to be sorry if anything was to happen to him.

KNOX. [bitterly to his wife] Youve always had some grudge against me; and nobody but yourself can understand what it is.

MRS KNOX. I wanted a man who had that happiness within himself. You made me think you had it; but it was nothing but being in love with me.

MRS GILBEY. And do you blame him for that?

MRS KNOX. I blame nobody. But let him not think he can walk by his own light. I tell him that if he gives up being respectable he’ll go right down to the bottom of the hill. He has no powers inside himself to keep him steady; so let him cling to the powers outside him.

KNOX. [rising angrily] Who wants to give up being respectable? All this for a pint of whisky that lasted a week! How long would it have lasted Simmons, I wonder?

MRS KNOX. [gently] Oh, well, say no more, Jo. I wont plague you about it. [He sits down]. You never did understand; and you never will. Hardly anybody understands: even Margaret didnt til she went to prison. She does now; and I shall have a companion in the house after all these lonely years.

KNOX. [beginning to cry] I did all I could to make you happy. I never said a harsh word to you.

GILBEY. [rising indignantly] What right have you to treat a man like that? an honest respectable husband? as if he were dirt under your feet?

KNOX. Let her alone, Gilbey. [Gilbey sits down, but mutinously].

MRS KNOX. Well, you gave me all you could, Jo; and if it wasnt what I wanted, that wasnt your fault. But I’d rather have you as you were than since you took to whisky and soda.

KNOX. I dont want any whisky and soda. I’ll take the pledge if you like.

MRS KNOX. No: you shall have your beer because you like it. The whisky was only brag. And if you and me are to remain friends, Mr Gilbey, youll get up to-morrow morning at seven.

GILBEY. [defiantly] Damme if I will! There!

MRS KNOX. [with gentle pity] How do you know, Mr Gilbey, what youll do to-morrow morning?

GILBEY. Why shouldnt I know? Are we children not to be let do what we like, and our own sons and daughters kicking their heels all over the place? [To Knox] I was never one to interfere between man and wife, Knox; but if Maria started ordering me about like that —

MRS GILBEY. Now dont be naughty, Rob. You know you mustnt set yourself up against religion?

GILBEY. Whos setting himself up against religion?

MRS KNOX. It doesnt matter whether you set yourself up against it or not, Mr. Gilbey. If it sets itself up against you, youll have to go the appointed way: it’s no use quarrelling about it with me that am as great a sinner as yourself.

GILBEY. Oh, indeed! And who told you I was a sinner?

MRS GILBEY. Now, Rob, you know we are all sinners. What else is religion?

GILBEY. I say nothing against religion. I suppose were all sinners, in a manner of speaking; but I dont like to have it thrown at me as if I’d really done anything.

MRS GILBEY. Mrs Knox is speaking for your good, Rob.

GILBEY. Well, I dont like to be spoken to for my good. Would anybody like it?

MRS KNOX. Dont take offence where none is meant, Mr Gilbey. Talk about something else. No good ever comes of arguing about such things among the like of us.

KNOX. The like of us! Are you throwing it in our teeth that your people were in the wholesale and thought Knox and Gilbey wasnt good enough for you?

MRS KNOX. No, Jo: you know I’m not. What better were my people than yours, for all their pride? But Ive noticed it all my life: we’re ignorant. We dont really know whats right and whats wrong. We’re all right as long as things go on the way they always did. We bring our children up just as we were brought up; and we go to church or chapel just as our parents did; and we say what everybody says; and it goes on all right until something out of the way happens: theres a family quarrel, or one of the children goes wrong, or a father takes to drink, or an aunt goes mad, or one of us finds ourselves doing something we never thought we’d want to do. And then you know what happens: complaints and quarrels and huff and offence and bad language and bad temper and regular bewilderment as if Satan possessed us all. We find out then that with all our respectability and piety, weve no real religion and no way of telling right from wrong. Weve nothing but our habits; and when theyre upset, where are we? Just like Peter in the storm trying to walk on the water and finding he couldnt.

MRS GILBEY. [piously] Aye! He found out, didnt he?

GILBEY. [reverently] I never denied that youve a great intellect, Mrs Knox —

MRS KNOX. Oh get along with you, Gilbey, if you begin talking about my intellect. Give us some tea, Maria. Ive said my say; and Im sure I beg the company’s pardon for being so long about it, and so disagreeable.

MRS GILBEY. Ring, Rob. [Gilbey rings]. Stop. Juggins will think we’re ringing for him.

GILBEY. [appalled] It’s too late. I rang before I thought of it.

MRS GILBEY. Step down and apologize, Rob.

KNOX. Is it him that you said was brother to a —

Juggins comes in with the tea-tray. All rise. He takes the tray to Mrs. Gilbey.

GILBEY. I didnt mean to ask you to do this, Mr Juggins. I wasnt thinking when I rang.

MRS GILBEY. [trying to take the tray from him] Let me, Juggins.

JUGGINS. Please sit down, madam. Allow me to discharge my duties just as usual, sir. I assure you that is the correct thing. [They sit down, ill at ease, whilst he places the tray on the table. He then goes out for the curate].

KNOX. [lowering his voice] Is this all right, Gilbey? Anybody may be the son of a duke, you know. Is he legitimate?

GILBEY. Good lord! I never thought of that.

Juggins returns with the cakes. They regard him with suspicion.

GILBEY. [whispering to Knox] You ask him.

KNOX. [to Juggins] Just a word with you, my man. Was your mother married to your father?

JUGGINS. I believe so, sir. I cant say from personal knowledge. It was before my time.

GILBEY. Well, but look here you know — [he hesitates].

JUGGINS. Yes, sir?

KNOX. I know whatll clinch it, Gilbey. You leave it to me. [To Juggins] Was your mother the duchess?

JUGGINS. Yes, sir. Quite correct, sir, I assure you. [To Mrs Gilbey] That is the milk, madam. [She has mistaken the jugs]. This is the water.

They stare at him in pitiable embarrassment.

MRS KNOX. What did I tell you? Heres something out of the common happening with a servant; and we none of us know how to behave.

JUGGINS. It’s quite simple, madam. I’m a footman, and should be treated as a footman. [He proceeds calmly with his duties, handing round cups of tea as Mrs Knox fills them].

Shrieks of laughter from below stairs reach the ears of the company.

MRS GILBEY. Whats that noise? Is Master Bobby at home? I heard his laugh.

MRS KNOX. I’m sure I heard Margaret’s.

GILBEY. Not a bit of it. It was that woman.

JUGGINS. I can explain, sir. I must ask you to excuse the liberty; but I’m entertaining a small party to tea in my pantry.

MRS GILBEY. But youre not entertaining Master Bobby?

JUGGINS. Yes, madam.

GILBEY. Who’s with him?

JUGGINS. Miss Knox, sir.

GILBEY. Miss Knox! Are you sure? Is there anyone else?

JUGGINS. Only a French marine officer, sir, and — er — Miss Delaney. [He places Gilbey’s tea on the table before him]. The lady that called about Master Bobby, sir.

KNOX. Do you mean to say theyre having a party all to themselves downstairs, and we having a party up here and knowing nothing about it?

JUGGINS. Yes, sir. I have to do a good deal of entertaining in the pantry for Master Bobby, sir.

GILBEY. Well, this is a nice state of things!

KNOX. Whats the meaning of it? What do they do it for?

JUGGINS. To enjoy themselves, sir, I should think.

MRS GILBEY. Enjoy themselves! Did ever anybody hear of such a thing?

GILBEY. Knox’s daughter shewn into my pantry!

KNOX. Margaret mixing with a Frenchman and a footman — [Suddenly realizing that the footman is offering him cake.] She doesnt know about — about His Grace, you know.

MRS GILBEY. Perhaps she does. Does she, Mr Juggins?

JUGGINS. The other lady suspects me, madam. They call me Rudolph, or the Long Lost Heir.

MRS GILBEY. It’s a much nicer name than Juggins. I think I’ll call you by it, if you dont mind.

JUGGINS. Not at all, madam.

Roars of merriment from below.

GILBEY. Go and tell them to stop laughing. What right have they to make a noise like that?

JUGGINS. I asked them not to laugh so loudly, sir. But the French gentleman always sets them off again.

KNOX. Do you mean to tell me that my daughter laughs at a Frenchman’s jokes?

GILBEY. We all know what French jokes are.

JUGGINS. Believe me: you do not, sir. The noise this afternoon has all been because the Frenchman said that the cat had whooping cough.

MRS GILBEY. [laughing heartily] Well, I never!

GILBEY. Dont be a fool, Maria. Look here, Knox: we cant let this go on. People cant be allowed to behave like this.

KNOX. Just what I say.

A concertina adds its music to the revelry.

MRS GILBEY. [excited] Thats the squiffer. Hes bought it for her.

GILBEY. Well, of all the scandalous — [Redoubled laughter from below].

KNOX. I’ll put a stop to this. [He goes out to the landing and shouts] Margaret! [Sudden dead silence]. Margaret, I say!

MARGARET’S VOICE. Yes, father. Shall we all come up? We’re dying to.

KNOX. Come up and be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like wild Indians.

DORA’S VOICE [screaming] Oh! oh! oh! Dont Bobby. Now — oh! [In headlong flight she dashes into and right across the room, breathless, and slightly abashed by the company]. I beg your pardon, Mrs Gilbey, for coming in like that; but whenever I go upstairs in front of Bobby, he pretends it’s a cat biting my ankles; and I just must scream.

Bobby and Margaret enter rather more shyly, but evidently in high spirits. Bobby places himself near his father, on the hearthrug, and presently slips down into the arm-chair.

MARGARET. How do you do, Mrs. Gilbey? [She posts herself behind her mother].

Duvallet comes in behaving himself perfectly. Knox follows.

MARGARET. Oh — let me introduce. My friend Lieutenant Duvallet. Mrs Gilbey. Mr Gilbey. [Duvallet bows and sits down on Mr Knox’s left, Juggins placing a chair for him].

DORA. Now, Bobby: introduce me: theres a dear.

BOBBY. [a little nervous about it; but trying to keep up his spirits] Miss Delaney: Mr and Mrs Knox. [Knox, as he resumes his seat, acknowledges the introduction suspiciously. Mrs Knox bows gravely, looking keenly at Dora and taking her measure without prejudice].

DORA. Pleased to meet you. [Juggins places the baby rocking-chair for her on Mrs Gilbey’s right, opposite Mrs Knox]. Thank you. [She sits and turns to Mrs Gilbey] Bobby’s given me the squiffer. [To the company generally] Do you know what theyve been doing downstairs? [She goes off into ecstasies of mirth]. Youd never guess. Theyve been trying to teach me table manners. The Lieutenant and Rudolph say I’m a regular pig. I’m sure I never knew there was anything wrong with me. But live and learn [to Gilbey] eh, old dear?

JUGGINS. Old dear is not correct, Miss Delaney. [He retires to the end of the sideboard nearest the door].

DORA. Oh get out! I must call a man something. He doesnt mind: do you, Charlie?

MRS GILBEY. His name isnt Charlie.

DORA. Excuse me. I call everybody Charlie.

JUGGINS. You mustnt.

DORA. Oh, if I were to mind you, I should have to hold my tongue altogether; and then how sorry youd be! Lord, how I do run on! Dont mind me, Mrs Gilbey.

KNOX. What I want to know is, whats to be the end of this? It’s not for me to interfere between you and your son, Gilbey: he knows his own intentions best, no doubt, and perhaps has told them to you. But Ive my daughter to look after; and it’s my duty as a parent to have a clear understanding about her. No good is ever done by beating about the bush. I ask Lieutenant — well, I dont speak French; and I cant pronounce the name —

MARGARET. Mr Duvallet, father.

KNOX. I ask Mr Doovalley what his intentions are.

MARGARET. Oh father: how can you?

DUVALLET. I’m afraid my knowledge of English is not enough to understand. Intentions? How?

MARGARET. He wants to know will you marry me.

MRS GILBEY. |   What a thing to say!

|

KNOX.       |   Silence, miss.

|

DORA.       |   Well, thats straight, aint it?

DUVALLET. But I am married already. I have two daughters.

KNOX. [rising, virtuously indignant] You sit there after carrying on with my daughter, and tell me coolly youre married.

MARGARET. Papa: you really must not tell people that they sit there. [He sits down again sulkily].

DUVALLET. Pardon. Carrying on? What does that mean?

MARGARET. It means —

KNOX. [violently] Hold your tongue, you shameless young hussy. Dont you dare say what it means.

DUVALLET. [shrugging his shoulders] What does it mean, Rudolph?

MRS KNOX. If it’s not proper for her to say, it’s not proper for a man to say, either. Mr Doovalley: youre a married man with daughters. Would you let them go about with a stranger, as you are to us, without wanting to know whether he intended to behave honorably?

DUVALLET. Ah, madam, my daughters are French girls. That is very different. It would not be correct for a French girl to go about alone and speak to men as English and American girls do. That is why I so immensely admire the English people. You are so free — so unprejudiced — your women are so brave and frank — their minds are so — how do you say? — wholesome. I intend to have my daughters educated in England. Nowhere else in the world but in England could I have met at a Variety Theatre a charming young lady of perfect respectability, and enjoyed a dance with her at a public dancing saloon. And where else are women trained to box and knock out the teeth of policemen as a protest against injustice and violence? [Rising, with immense elan] Your daughter, madam, is superb. Your country is a model to the rest of Europe. If you were a Frenchman, stifled with prudery, hypocrisy and the tyranny of the family and the home, you would understand how an enlightened Frenchman admires and envies your freedom, your broadmindedness, and the fact that home life can hardly be said to exist in England. You have made an end of the despotism of the parent; the family council is unknown to you; everywhere in these islands one can enjoy the exhilarating, the soul-liberating spectacle of men quarrelling with their brothers, defying their fathers, refusing to speak to their mothers. In France we are not men: we are only sons — grown-up children. Here one is a human being — an end in himself. Oh, Mrs Knox, if only your military genius were equal to your moral genius — if that conquest of Europe by France which inaugurated the new age after the Revolution had only been an English conquest, how much more enlightened the world would have been now! We, alas, can only fight. France is unconquerable. We impose our narrow ideas, our prejudices, our obsolete institutions, our insufferable pedantry on the world by brute force — by that stupid quality of military heroism which shews how little we have evolved from the savage: nay, from the beast. We can charge like bulls; we can spring on our foes like gamecocks; when we are overpowered by reason, we can die fighting like rats. And we are foolish enough to be proud of it! Why should we be? Does the bull progress? Can you civilize the gamecock? Is there any future for the rat? We cant even fight intelligently: when we lose battles, it is because we have not sense enough to know when we are beaten. At Waterloo, had we known when we were beaten, we should have retreated; tried another plan; and won the battle. But no: we were too pigheaded to admit that there is anything impossible to a Frenchman: we were quite satisfied when our Marshals had six horses shot under them, and our stupid old grognards died fighting rather than surrender like reasonable beings. Think of your great Wellington: think of his inspiring words, when the lady asked him whether British soldiers ever ran away. “All soldiers run away, madam,” he said; “but if there are supports for them to fall back on it does not matter.” Think of your illustrious Nelson, always beaten on land, always victorious at sea, where his men could not run away. You are not dazzled and misled by false ideals of patriotic enthusiasm: your honest and sensible statesmen demand for England a two-power standard, even a three-power standard, frankly admitting that it is wise to fight three to one: whilst we, fools and braggarts as we are, declare that every Frenchman is a host in himself, and that when one Frenchman attacks three Englishmen he is guilty of an act of cowardice comparable to that of the man who strikes a woman. It is folly: it is nonsense: a Frenchman is not really stronger than a German, than an Italian, even than an Englishman. Sir: if all Frenchwomen were like your daughter — if all Frenchmen had the good sense, the power of seeing things as they really are, the calm judgment, the open mind, the philosophic grasp, the foresight and true courage, which are so natural to you as an Englishman that you are hardly conscious of possessing them, France would become the greatest nation in the world.

MARGARET. Three cheers for old England! [She shakes hands with him warmly].

BOBBY. Hurra-a-ay! And so say all of us.

Duvallet, having responded to Margaret’s handshake with enthusiasm, kisses Juggins on both cheeks, and sinks into his chair, wiping his perspiring brow.

GILBEY. Well, this sort of talk is above me. Can you make anything out of it, Knox?

KNOX. The long and short of it seems to be that he cant lawfully marry my daughter, as he ought after going to prison with her.

DORA. I’m ready to marry Bobby, if that will be any satisfaction.

GILBEY. No you dont. Not if I know it.

MRS KNOX. He ought to, Mr Gilbey.

GILBEY. Well, if thats your religion, Amelia Knox, I want no more of it. Would you invite them to your house if he married her?

MRS KNOX. He ought to marry her whether or no.

BOBBY. I feel I ought to, Mrs Knox.

GILBEY. Hold your tongue. Mind your own business.

BOBBY. [wildly] If I’m not let marry her, I’ll do something downright disgraceful. I’ll enlist as a soldier.

JUGGINS. That is not a disgrace, sir.

BOBBY. Not for you, perhaps. But youre only a footman. I’m a gentleman.

MRS GILBEY. Dont dare to speak disrespectfully to Mr Rudolph, Bobby. For shame!

JUGGINS. [coming forward to the middle of the table] It is not gentlemanly to regard the service of your country as disgraceful. It is gentlemanly to marry the lady you make love to.

GILBEY. [aghast] My boy is to marry this woman and be a social outcast!

JUGGINS. Your boy and Miss Delaney will be inexorably condemned by respectable society to spend the rest of their days in precisely the sort of company they seem to like best and be most at home in.

KNOX. And my daughter? Whos to marry my daughter?

JUGGINS. Your daughter, sir, will probably marry whoever she makes up her mind to marry. She is a lady of very determined character.

KNOX. Yes: if he’d have her with her character gone. But who would? Youre the brother of a duke. Would —

BOBBY.      |   Whats that?

|

MARGARET.   |   Juggins a duke?

|

DUVALLET.   |   Comment!

|

DORA.       |   What did I tell you?

KNOX. Yes: the brother of a duke: thats what he is. [To Juggins] Well, would you marry her?

JUGGINS. I was about to propose that solution of your problem, Mr Knox.

MRS GILBEY. |   Well I never!

|

KNOX.       |   D’ye mean it?

|

MRS KNOX.   |   Marry Margaret!

JUGGINS. [continuing] As an idle younger son, unable to support myself, or even to remain in the Guards in competition with the grandsons of American millionaires, I could not have aspired to Miss Knox’s hand. But as a sober, honest, and industrious domestic servant, who has, I trust, given satisfaction to his employer [he bows to Mr Gilbey] I feel I am a man with a character. It is for Miss Knox to decide.

MARGARET. I got into a frightful row once for admiring you, Rudolph.

JUGGINS. I should have got into an equally frightful row myself, Miss, had I betrayed my admiration for you. I looked forward to those weekly dinners.

MRS KNOX. But why did a gentleman like you stoop to be a footman?

DORA. He stooped to conquer.

MARGARET. Shut up, Dora: I want to hear.

JUGGINS. I will explain; but only Mrs Knox will understand. I once insulted a servant — rashly; for he was a sincere Christian. He rebuked me for trifling with a girl of his own class. I told him to remember what he was, and to whom he was speaking. He said God would remember. I discharged him on the spot.

GILBEY. Very properly.

KNOX. What right had he to mention such a thing to you?

MRS GILBEY. What are servants coming to?

MRS KNOX. Did it come true, what he said?

JUGGINS. It stuck like a poisoned arrow. It rankled for months. Then I gave in. I apprenticed myself to an old butler of ours who kept a hotel. He taught me my present business, and got me a place as footman with Mr Gilbey. If ever I meet that man again I shall be able to look him in the face.

MRS KNOX. Margaret: it’s not on account of the duke: dukes are vanities. But take my advice and take him.

MARGARET. [slipping her arm through his] I have loved Juggins since the first day I beheld him. I felt instinctively he had been in the Guards. May he walk out with me, Mr Gilbey?

KNOX. Dont be vulgar, girl. Remember your new position. [To Juggins] I suppose youre serious about this, Mr — Mr Rudolph?

JUGGINS. I propose, with your permission, to begin keeping company this afternoon, if Mrs Gilbey can spare me.

GILBEY. [in a gust of envy, to Bobby] Itll be long enough before youll marry the sister of a duke, you young good-for-nothing.

DORA. Dont fret, old dear. Rudolph will teach me high-class manners. I call it quite a happy ending: dont you, lieutenant?

DUVALLET. In France it would be impossible. But here — ah! [kissing his hand] la belle Angleterre!

EPILOGUE

Before the curtain. The Count, dazed and agitated, hurries to the 4 critics, as they rise, bored and weary, from their seats.

THE COUNT. Gentlemen: do not speak to me. I implore you to withhold your opinion. I am not strong enough to bear it. I could never have believed it. Is this a play? Is this in any sense of the word, Art? Is it agreeable? Can it conceivably do good to any human being? Is it delicate? Do such people really exist? Excuse me, gentlemen: I speak from a wounded heart. There are private reasons for my discomposure. This play implies obscure, unjust, unkind reproaches and menaces to all of us who are parents.

TROTTER. Pooh! you take it too seriously. After all, the thing has amusing passages. Dismiss the rest as impertinence.

THE COUNT. Mr Trotter: it is easy for you to play the pococurantist. [Trotter, amazed, repeats the first three syllables in his throat, making a noise like a pheasant]. You see hundreds of plays every year. But to me, who have never seen anything of this kind before, the effect of this play is terribly disquieting. Sir: if it had been what people call an immoral play, I shouldnt have minded a bit. [Vaughan is shocked]. Love beautifies every romance and justifies every audacity. [Bannal assents gravely]. But there are reticences which everybody should respect. There are decencies too subtle to be put into words, without which human society would be unbearable. People could not talk to one another as those people talk. No child could speak to its parent — no girl could speak to a youth — no human creature could tear down the veils — [Appealing to Vaughan, who is on his left flank, with Gunn between them] Could they, sir?

VAUGHAN. Well, I dont see that.

THE COUNT. You dont see it! dont feel it! [To Gunn] Sir: I appeal to you.

GUNN. [with studied weariness] It seems to me the most ordinary sort of old-fashioned Ibsenite drivel.

THE COUNT [turning to Trotter, who is on his right, between him and Bannal] Mr Trotter: will you tell me that you are not amazed, outraged, revolted, wounded in your deepest and holiest feelings by every word of this play, every tone, every implication; that you did not sit there shrinking in every fibre at the thought of what might come next?

TROTTER. Not a bit. Any clever modern girl could turn out that kind of thing by the yard.

THE COUNT. Then, sir, tomorrow I start for Venice, never to return. I must believe what you tell me. I perceive that you are not agitated, not surprised, not concerned; that my own horror (yes, gentlemen, horror — horror of the very soul) appears unaccountable to you, ludicrous, absurd, even to you, Mr Trotter, who are little younger than myself. Sir: if young people spoke to me like that, I should die of shame: I could not face it. I must go back. The world has passed me by and left me. Accept the apologies of an elderly and no doubt ridiculous admirer of the art of a bygone day, when there was still some beauty in the world and some delicate grace in family life. But I promised my daughter your opinion; and I must keep my word. Gentlemen: you are the choice and master spirits of this age: you walk through it without bewilderment and face its strange products without dismay. Pray deliver your verdict. Mr Bannal: you know that it is the custom at a Court Martial for the youngest officer present to deliver his judgment first; so that he may not be influenced by the authority of his elders. You are the youngest. What is your opinion of the play?

BANNAL. Well, whos it by?

THE COUNT. That is a secret for the present.

BANNAL. You dont expect me to know what to say about a play when I dont know who the author is, do you?

THE COUNT. Why not?

BANNAL. Why not! Why not!! Suppose you had to write about a play by Pinero and one by Jones! Would you say exactly the same thing about them?

THE COUNT. I presume not.

BANNAL. Then how could you write about them until you knew which was Pinero and which was Jones? Besides, what sort of play is this? thats what I want to know. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Is it a farce or a melodrama? Is it repertory theatre tosh, or really straight paying stuff?

GUNN. Cant you tell from seeing it?

BANNAL. I can see it all right enough; but how am I to know how to take it? Is it serious, or is it spoof? If the author knows what his play is, let him tell us what it is. If he doesnt, he cant complain if I dont know either. I’m not the author.

THE COUNT. But is it a good play, Mr Bannal? Thats a simple question.

BANNAL. Simple enough when you know. If it’s by a good author, it’s a good play, naturally. That stands to reason. Who is the author? Tell me that; and I’ll place the play for you to a hair’s breadth.

THE COUNT. I’m sorry I’m not at liberty to divulge the author’s name. The author desires that the play should be judged on its merits.

BANNAL. But what merits can it have except the author’s merits? Who would you say it’s by, Gunn?

GUNN. Well, who do you think? Here you have a rotten old-fashioned domestic melodrama acted by the usual stage puppets. The hero’s a naval lieutenant. All melodramatic heroes are naval lieutenants. The heroine gets into trouble by defying the law (if she didnt get into trouble, thered be no drama) and plays for sympathy all the time as hard as she can. Her good old pious mother turns on her cruel father when hes going to put her out of the house, and says she’ll go too. Then theres the comic relief: the comic shopkeeper, the comic shopkeeper’s wife, the comic footman who turns out to be a duke in disguise, and the young scapegrace who gives the author his excuse for dragging in a fast young woman. All as old and stale as a fried fish shop on a winter morning.

THE COUNT. But —

GUNN [interrupting him] I know what youre going to say, Count. Youre going to say that the whole thing seems to you to be quite new and unusual and original. The naval lieutenant is a Frenchman who cracks up the English and runs down the French: the hackneyed old Shaw touch. The characters are second-rate middle class, instead of being dukes and millionaires. The heroine gets kicked through the mud: real mud. Theres no plot. All the old stage conventions and puppets without the old ingenuity and the old enjoyment. And a feeble air of intellectual pretentiousness kept up all through to persuade you that if the author hasnt written a good play it’s because hes too clever to stoop to anything so commonplace. And you three experienced men have sat through all this, and cant tell me who wrote it! Why, the play bears the author’s signature in every line.

BANNAL. Who?

GUNN. Granville Barker, of course. Why, old Gilbey is straight out of The Madras House.

BANNAL. Poor old Barker!

VAUGHAN. Utter nonsense! Cant you see the difference in style?

BANNAL. No.

VAUGHAN. [contemptuously] Do you know what style is?

BANNAL. Well, I suppose youd call Trotter’s uniform style. But it’s not my style — since you ask me.

VAUGHAN. To me it’s perfectly plain who wrote that play. To begin with, it’s intensely disagreeable. Therefore it’s not by Barrie, in spite of the footman, who’s cribbed from The Admirable Crichton. He was an earl, you may remember. You notice, too, the author’s offensive habit of saying silly things that have no real sense in them when you come to examine them, just to set all the fools in the house giggling. Then what does it all come to? An attempt to expose the supposed hypocrisy of the Puritan middle class in England: people just as good as the author, anyhow. With, of course, the inevitable improper female: the Mrs Tanqueray, Iris, and so forth. Well, if you cant recognize the author of that, youve mistaken your professions: thats all I have to say.

BANNAL. Why are you so down on Pinero? And what about that touch that Gunn spotted? the Frenchman’s long speech. I believe it’s Shaw.

GUNN. Rubbish!

VAUGHAN. Rot! You may put that idea out of your head, Bannal. Poor as this play is, theres the note of passion in it. You feel somehow that beneath all the assumed levity of that poor waif and stray, she really loves Bobby and will be a good wife to him. Now Ive repeatedly proved that Shaw is physiologically incapable of the note of passion.

BANNAL. Yes, I know. Intellect without emotion. Thats right. I always say that myself. A giant brain, if you ask me; but no heart.

GUNN. Oh, shut up, Bannal. This crude medieval psychology of heart and brain — Shakespear would have called it liver and wits — is really schoolboyish. Surely weve had enough of second-hand Schopenhauer. Even such a played-out old back number as Ibsen would have been ashamed of it. Heart and brain, indeed!

VAUGHAN. You have neither one nor the other, Gunn. Youre decadent.

GUNN. Decadent! How I love that early Victorian word!

VAUGHAN. Well, at all events, you cant deny that the characters in this play were quite distinguishable from one another. That proves it’s not by Shaw, because all Shaw’s characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw. It’s only the actors that make them seem different.

BANNAL. There can be no doubt of that: everybody knows it. But Shaw doesnt write his plays as plays. All he wants to do is to insult everybody all round and set us talking about him.

TROTTER. [wearily] And naturally, here we are all talking about him. For heaven’s sake, let us change the subject.

VAUGHAN. Still, my articles about Shaw —

GUNN. Oh, stow it, Vaughan. Drop it. What Ive always told you about Shaw is —

BANNAL. There you go, Shaw, Shaw, Shaw! Do chuck it. If you want to know my opinion about Shaw —

TROTTER.    |   No, please, we dont.    |

|                           |

VAUGHAN.    |   Shut your head, Bannal. | [yelling]

|                           |

GUNN.       |   Oh, do drop it.         |

The deafened Count puts his fingers in his ears and flies from the centre of the group to its outskirts, behind Vaughan.

BANNAL. [sulkily] Oh, very well. Sorry I spoke, I’m sure.

TROTTER.    |   Shaw — |

|           | [beginning again

VAUGHAN.    |   Shaw — | simultaneously]

|           |

GUNN.       |   Shaw — |

They are cut short by the entry of Fanny through the curtains. She is almost in tears.

FANNY. [coming between Trotter and Gunn] I’m so sorry, gentlemen. And it was such a success when I read it to the Cambridge Fabian Society!

TROTTER. Miss O’Dowda: I was about to tell these gentlemen what I guessed before the curtain rose: that you are the author of the play. [General amazement and consternation].

FANNY. And you all think it beastly. You hate it. You think I’m a conceited idiot, and that I shall never be able to write anything decent.

She is almost weeping. A wave of sympathy carries away the critics.

VAUGHAN. No, no. Why, I was just saying that it must have been written by Pinero. Didnt I, Gunn?

FANNY. [enormously flattered] Really?

TROTTER. I thought Pinero was much too popular for the Cambridge Fabian Society.

FANNY. Oh yes, of course; but still — Oh, did you really say that, Mr Vaughan?

GUNN. I owe you an apology, Miss O’Dowda. I said it was by Barker.

FANNY. [radiant] Granville Barker! Oh, you couldnt really have thought it so fine as that.

BANNAL. I said Bernard Shaw.

FANNY. Oh, of course it would be a little like Bernard Shaw. The Fabian touch, you know.

BANNAL. [coming to her encouragingly] A jolly good little play, Miss O’Dowda. Mind: I dont say it’s like one of Shakespear’s — Hamlet or The Lady of Lyons, you know — but still, a firstrate little bit of work. [He shakes her hand].

GUNN. [following Bannal’s example] I also, Miss O’Dowda. Capital. Charming. [He shakes hands].

VAUGHAN [with maudlin solemnity] Only be true to yourself, Miss O’Dowda. Keep serious. Give up making silly jokes. Sustain the note of passion. And youll do great things.

FANNY. You think I have a future?

TROTTER. You have a past, Miss O’Dowda.

FANNY. [looking apprehensively at her father] Sh-sh-sh!

THE COUNT. A past! What do you mean, Mr Trotter?

TROTTER. [to Fanny] You cant deceive me. That bit about the police was real. Youre a Suffraget, Miss O’Dowda. You were on that Deputation.

THE COUNT. Fanny: is this true?

FANNY. It is. I did a month with Lady Constance Lytton; and I’m prouder of it than I ever was of anything or ever shall be again.

TROTTER. Is that any reason why you should stuff naughty plays down my throat?

FANNY. Yes: itll teach you what it feels like to be forcibly fed.

THE COUNT. She will never return to Venice. I feel now as I felt when the Campanile fell.

Savoyard comes in through the curtains.

SAVOYARD. [to the Count] Would you mind coming to say a word of congratulation to the company? Theyre rather upset at having had no curtain call.

THE COUNT. Certainly, certainly. I’m afraid Ive been rather remiss. Let us go on the stage, gentlemen.

The curtains are drawn, revealing the last scene of the play and the actors on the stage. The Count, Savoyard, the critics, and Fanny join them, shaking hands and congratulating.

THE COUNT. Whatever we may think of the play, gentlemen, I’m sure you will agree with me that there can be only one opinion about the acting.

THE CRITICS. Hear, hear! [They start the applause].

AYOT ST. LAWRENCE, March 1911.

ANDROCLES AND THE LION

Written in 1912, Androcles and the Lion is a comic retelling of the famous Aesop fable, which also served as a Shavian critique of Britain. One version of the classic story involves a slave who has escaped from his Roman master and seeks shelter and protection in a cave. He quickly realises that this place of refuge is actually the den of a wounded lion, which he tends by removing a large thorn in its paw. The lion responds by showing affection to the man and they live together in the cave for several years. When soldiers come into the forest the former slave is captured and sentenced to be devoured by wild animals in the Circo Massimo. The lion from the cave is the creature sent to murder the man and remembering his old friend the animal displays affection towards the slave, resulting in the emperor pardoning the condemned man.

Shaw uses his wit and humour to adapt the tale into a highly amusing play which details the impending execution of a group of Christians at the hands of gladiators or wild animals. The playwright creates a diverse set of characters with different enthusiasms that are united only in their faith which is a rejection of the official religion and a collective drive towards martyrdom. While Shaw attacks the hypocrisy he felt evident in the Church, he states in his ‘afterword’ that the clash between Roman and Christian values is not a battle of a true theology with a false one, but ‘as all persecutions essentially are; an attempt to suppress a propaganda that seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established law...’ In this play the Christians are the victims of an established order, but as he articulates ‘my martyrs are the martyrs of all time, and my persecutors the persecutors of all time’. The actual beliefs are not really important, it is the potential threat to the political, moral, social and economic structure which leads to violence and oppression.

Shaw wrote the ‘afterword’ following the outbreak of the First World War and he draws a sharp comparison and contrast between his Christian character Ferrovius and the behaviour of priests and vicars regarding fighting and the war. He blasts the supposed holy men for their warmongering and their hypocrisy in refusing to abandon their roles as churchmen after committing to fighting, and instead choosing to act as if ‘they serve Mars in the name of Christ’, which should be ‘the scandal of all religious mankind’.

Poster of the 1952 film adaptation

CONTENTS

PREFACE ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

PROLOGUE

ACT I

ACT II

Image from Gabriel Pascal 1952 film

Shaw, close to the time of the play’s first performance

PREFACE ON THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY

WHY NOT GIVE CHRISTIANITY A TRIAL?

The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute adherence to the old cry of “Not this man, but Barabbas.” Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions. “This man” has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way. But he has had one quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his name and taken his cross as a standard. There is a sort of compliment in that. There is even a sort of loyalty in it, like that of the brigand who breaks every law and yet claims to be a patriotic subject of the king who makes them. We have always had a curious feeling that though we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, and that if we were better men we might try his plan. There have been one or two grotesque attempts at it by inadequate people, such as the Kingdom of God in Munster, which was ended by crucifixion so much more atrocious than the one on Calvary that the bishop who took the part of Annas went home and died of horror. But responsible people have never made such attempts. The moneyed, respectable, capable world has been steadily anti-Christian and Barabbasque since the crucifixion; and the specific doctrine of Jesus has not in all that time been put into political or general social practice. I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world’s misery but the way which would have been found by Christ’s will if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman. Pray do not at this early point lose patience with me and shut the book. I assure you I am as sceptical and scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere. I grant you I know a great deal more about economics and politics than Jesus did, and can do things he could not do. I am by all Barabbasque standards a person of much better character and standing, and greater practical sense. I have no sympathy with vagabonds and talkers who try to reform society by taking men away from their regular productive work and making vagabonds and talkers of them too; and if I had been Pilate I should have recognized as plainly as he the necessity for suppressing attacks on the existing social order, however corrupt that order might be, by people with no knowledge of government and no power to construct political machinery to carry out their views, acting on the very dangerous delusion that the end of the world was at hand. I make no defence of such Christians as Savonarola and John of Leyden: they were scuttling the ship before they had learned how to build a raft; and it became necessary to throw them overboard to save the crew. I say this to set myself right with respectable society; but I must still insist that if Jesus could have worked out the practical problems of a Communist constitution, an admitted obligation to deal with crime without revenge or punishment, and a full assumption by humanity of divine responsibilities, he would have conferred an incalculable benefit on mankind, because these distinctive demands of his are now turning out to be good sense and sound economics.

I say distinctive, because his common humanity and his subjection to time and space (that is, to the Syrian life of his period) involved his belief in many things, true and false, that in no way distinguish him from other Syrians of that time. But such common beliefs do not constitute specific Christianity any more than wearing a beard, working in a carpenter’s shop, or believing that the earth is flat and that the stars could drop on it from heaven like hailstones. Christianity interests practical statesmen now because of the doctrines that distinguished Christ from the Jews and the Barabbasques generally, including ourselves.

WHY JESUS MORE THAN ANOTHER?

I do not imply, however, that these doctrines were peculiar to Christ. A doctrine peculiar to one man would be only a craze, unless its comprehension depended on a development of human faculty so rare that only one exceptionally gifted man possessed it. But even in this case it would be useless, because incapable of spreading. Christianity is a step in moral evolution which is independent of any individual preacher. If Jesus had never existed (and that he ever existed in any other sense than that in which Shakespear’s Hamlet existed has been vigorously questioned) Tolstoy would have thought and taught and quarrelled with the Greek Church all the same. Their creed has been fragmentarily practised to a considerable extent in spite of the fact that the laws of all countries treat it, in effect, as criminal. Many of its advocates have been militant atheists. But for some reason the imagination of white mankind has picked out Jesus of Nazareth as THE Christ, and attributed all the Christian doctrines to him; and as it is the doctrine and not the man that matters, and, as, besides, one symbol is as good as another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to it, I raise, for the moment, no question as to how far the gospels are original, and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records of fact; for I am not acting as a detective, but turning our modern lights on to certain ideas and doctrines in them which disentangle themselves from the rest because they are flatly contrary to common practice, common sense, and common belief, and yet have, in the teeth of dogged incredulity and recalcitrance, produced an irresistible impression that Christ, though rejected by his posterity as an unpractical dreamer, and executed by his contemporaries as a dangerous anarchist and blasphemous madman, was greater than his judges.

WAS JESUS A COWARD?

I know quite well that this impression of superiority is not produced on everyone, even of those who profess extreme susceptibility to it. Setting aside the huge mass of inculcated Christ-worship which has no real significance because it has no intelligence, there is, among people who are really free to think for themselves on the subject, a great deal of hearty dislike of Jesus and of contempt for his failure to save himself and overcome his enemies by personal bravery and cunning as Mahomet did. I have heard this feeling expressed far more impatiently by persons brought up in England as Christians than by Mahometans, who are, like their prophet, very civil to Jesus, and allow him a place in their esteem and veneration at least as high as we accord to John the Baptist. But this British bulldog contempt is founded on a complete misconception of his reasons for submitting voluntarily to an ordeal of torment and death. The modern Secularist is often so determined to regard Jesus as a man like himself and nothing more, that he slips unconsciously into the error of assuming that Jesus shared that view. But it is quite clear from the New Testament writers (the chief authorities for believing that Jesus ever existed) that Jesus at the time of his death believed himself to be the Christ, a divine personage. It is therefore absurd to criticize his conduct before Pilate as if he were Colonel Roosevelt or Admiral von Tirpitz or even Mahomet. Whether you accept his belief in his divinity as fully as Simon Peter did, or reject it as a delusion which led him to submit to torture and sacrifice his life without resistance in the conviction that he would presently rise again in glory, you are equally bound to admit that, far from behaving like a coward or a sheep, he showed considerable physical fortitude in going through a cruel ordeal against which he could have defended himself as effectually as he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels. St. Matthew would as soon have thought of applying such adjectives to Judas Maccabeus as to Jesus; and even St. Luke, who makes Jesus polite and gracious, does not make him meek. The picture of him as an English curate of the farcical comedy type, too meek to fight a policeman, and everybody’s butt, may be useful in the nursery to soften children; but that such a figure could ever have become a centre of the world’s attention is too absurd for discussion; grown men and women may speak kindly of a harmless creature who utters amiable sentiments and is a helpless nincompoop when he is called on to defend them; but they will not follow him, nor do what he tells them, because they do not wish to share his defeat and disgrace.

WAS JESUS A MARTYR?

It is important therefore that we should clear our minds of the notion that Jesus died, as some are in the habit of declaring, for his social and political opinions. There have been many martyrs to those opinions; but he was not one of them, nor, as his words show, did he see any more sense in martyrdom than Galileo did. He was executed by the Jews for the blasphemy of claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to whom this was a mere piece of superstitious nonsense, let them execute him as the cheapest way of keeping them quiet, on the formal plea that he had committed treason against Rome by saying that he was the King of the Jews. He was not falsely accused, nor denied full opportunities of defending himself. The proceedings were quite straightforward and regular; and Pilate, to whom the appeal lay, favored him and despised his judges, and was evidently willing enough to be conciliated. But instead of denying the charge, Jesus repeated the offence. He knew what he was doing: he had alienated numbers of his own disciples and been stoned in the streets for doing it before. He was not lying: he believed literally what he said. The horror of the High Priest was perfectly natural: he was a Primate confronted with a heterodox street preacher uttering what seemed to him an appalling and impudent blasphemy. The fact that the blasphemy was to Jesus a simple statement of fact, and that it has since been accepted as such by all western nations, does not invalidate the proceedings, nor give us the right to regard Annas and Caiaphas as worse men than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Head Master of Eton. If Jesus had been indicted in a modern court, he would have been examined by two doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion; declared incapable of pleading; and sent to an asylum: that is the whole difference. But please note that when a man is charged before a modern tribunal (to take a case that happened the other day) of having asserted and maintained that he was an officer returned from the front to receive the Victoria Cross at the hands of the King, although he was in fact a mechanic, nobody thinks of treating him as afflicted with a delusion. He is punished for false pretences, because his assertion is credible and therefore misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by Jesus was to the High Priest, who looked forward to the coming of a Messiah, one that might conceivably have been true, and might therefore have misled the people in a very dangerous way. That was why he treated Jesus as an imposter and a blasphemer where we should have treated him as a madman.

THE GOSPELS WITHOUT PREJUDICE.

All this will become clear if we read the gospels without prejudice. When I was young it was impossible to read them without fantastic confusion of thought. The confusion was so utterly confounded that it was called the proper spirit to read the Bible in. Jesus was a baby; and he was older than creation. He was a man who could be persecuted, stoned, scourged, and killed; and he was a god, immortal and all-powerful, able to raise the dead and call millions of angels to his aid. It was a sin to doubt either view of him: that is, it was a sin to reason about him; and the end was that you did not reason about him, and read about him only when you were compelled. When you heard the gospel stories read in church, or learnt them from painters and poets, you came out with an impression of their contents that would have astonished a Chinaman who had read the story without prepossession. Even sceptics who were specially on their guard, put the Bible in the dock, and read the gospels with the object of detecting discrepancies in the four narratives to show that the writers were as subject to error as the writers of yesterday’s newspaper.

All this has changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of “the book of books” lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English have been introduced perforce to save its bare intelligibility. It is quite easy today to find cultivated persons who have never read the New Testament, and on whom therefore it is possible to try the experiment of asking them to read the gospels and state what they have gathered as to the history and views and character of Christ.

THE GOSPELS NOW UNINTELLIGIBLE TO NOVICES.

But it will not do to read the gospels with a mind furnished only for the reception of, say, a biography of Goethe. You will not make sense of them, nor even be able without impatient weariness to persevere in the task of going steadily through them, unless you know something of the history of the human imagination as applied to religion. Not long ago I asked a writer of distinguished intellectual competence whether he had made a study of the gospels since his childhood. His reply was that he had lately tried, but “found it all such nonsense that I could not stick it.” As I do not want to send anyone to the gospels with this result, I had better here give a brief exposition of how much of the history of religion is needed to make the gospels and the conduct and ultimate fate of Jesus intelligible and interesting.

WORLDLINESS OF THE MAJORITY.

The first common mistake to get rid of is that mankind consists of a great mass of religious people and a few eccentric atheists. It consists of a huge mass of worldly people, and a small percentage of persons deeply interested in religion and concerned about their own souls and other peoples’; and this section consists mostly of those who are passionately affirming the established religion and those who are passionately attacking it, the genuine philosophers being very few. Thus you never have a nation of millions of Wesleys and one Tom Paine. You have a million Mr. Worldly Wisemans, one Wesley, with his small congregation, and one Tom Paine, with his smaller congregation. The passionately religious are a people apart; and if they were not hopelessly outnumbered by the worldly, they would turn the world upside down, as St. Paul was reproached, quite justly, for wanting to do. Few people can number among their personal acquaintances a single atheist or a single Plymouth Brother. Unless a religious turn in ourselves has led us to seek the little Societies to which these rare birds belong, we pass our lives among people who, whatever creeds they may repeat, and in whatever temples they may avouch their respectability and wear their Sunday clothes, have robust consciences, and hunger and thirst, not for righteousness, but for rich feeding and comfort and social position and attractive mates and ease and pleasure and respect and consideration: in short, for love and money. To these people one morality is as good as another provided they are used to it and can put up with its restrictions without unhappiness; and in the maintenance of this morality they will fight and punish and coerce without scruple. They may not be the salt of the earth, these Philistines; but they are the substance of civilization; and they save society from ruin by criminals and conquerors as well as by Savonarolas and Knipperdollings. And as they know, very sensibly, that a little religion is good for children and serves morality, keeping the poor in good humor or in awe by promising rewards in heaven or threatening torments in hell, they encourage the religious people up to a certain point: for instance, if Savonarola only tells the ladies of Florence that they ought to tear off their jewels and finery and sacrifice them to God, they offer him a cardinal’s hat, and praise him as a saint; but if he induces them to actually do it, they burn him as a public nuisance.

RELIGION OF THE MINORITY. SALVATIONISM.

The religion of the tolerated religious minority has always been essentially the same religion: that is why its changes of name and form have made so little difference. That is why, also, a nation so civilized as the English can convert negroes to their faith with great ease, but cannot convert Mahometans or Jews. The negro finds in civilized Salvationism an unspeakably more comforting version of his crude creed; but neither Saracen nor Jew sees any advantage in it over his own version. The Crusader was surprised to find the Saracen quite as religious and moral as himself, and rather more than less civilized. The Latin Christian has nothing to offer the Greek Christian that Greek Christianity has not already provided. They are all, at root, Salvationists.

Let us trace this religion of Salvation from its beginnings. So many things that man does not himself contrive or desire are always happening: death, plagues, tempests, blights, floods, sunrise and sunset, growths and harvests and decay, and Kant’s two wonders of the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us, that we conclude that somebody must be doing it all, or that somebody is doing the good and somebody else doing the evil, or that armies of invisible persons, benefit-cut and malevolent, are doing it; hence you postulate gods and devils, angels and demons. You propitiate these powers with presents, called sacrifices, and flatteries, called praises. Then the Kantian moral law within you makes you conceive your god as a judge; and straightway you try to corrupt him, also with presents and flatteries. This seems shocking to us; but our objection to it is quite a recent development: no longer ago than Shakespear’s time it was thought quite natural that litigants should give presents to human judges; and the buying off of divine wrath by actual money payments to priests, or, in the reformed churches which discountenance this, by subscriptions to charities and church building and the like, is still in full swing. Its practical disadvantage is that though it makes matters very easy for the rich, it cuts off the poor from all hope of divine favor. And this quickens the moral criticism of the poor to such an extent, that they soon find the moral law within them revolting against the idea of buying off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite ready to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when commercial civilization arrives, and capitalism divides the people into a few rich and a great many so poor that they can barely live, a movement for religious reform will arise among the poor, and will be essentially a movement for cheap or entirely gratuitous salvation. To understand what the poor mean by propitiation, we must examine for a moment what they mean by justice.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATONEMENT AND PUNISHMENT

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment’s reflection will show that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of innocent blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation. However much the Philistines have succeeded in confusing these things in practice, they are to the Salvationist sense distinct and even contrary. The Baronet’s cousin in Dickens’s novel, who, perplexed by the failure of the police to discover the murderer of the baronet’s solicitor, said “Far better hang wrong fellow than no fellow,” was not only expressing a very common sentiment, but trembling on the brink of the rarer Salvationist opinion that it is much better to hang the wrong fellow: that, in fact, the wrong fellow is the right fellow to hang.

The point is a cardinal one, because until we grasp it not only does historical Christianity remain unintelligible to us, but those who do not care a rap about historical Christianity may be led into the mistake of supposing that if we discard revenge, and treat murderers exactly as God treated Cain: that is, exempt them from punishment by putting a brand on them as unworthy to be sacrificed, and let them face the world as best they can with that brand on them, we should get rid both of punishment and sacrifice. It would not at all follow: on the contrary, the feeling that there must be an expiation of the murder might quite possibly lead to our putting some innocent person — the more innocent the better — to a cruel death to balance the account with divine justice.

SALVATION AT FIRST A CLASS PRIVILEGE; AND THE REMEDY

Thus, even when the poor decide that the method of purchasing salvation by offering rams and goats or bringing gold to the altar must be wrong because they cannot afford it, we still do not feel “saved” without a sacrifice and a victim. In vain do we try to substitute mystical rites that cost nothing, such as circumcision, or, as a substitute for that, baptism. Our sense of justice still demands an expiation, a sacrifice, a sufferer for our sins. And this leaves the poor man still in his old difficulty; for if it was impossible for him to procure rams and goats and shekels, how much more impossible is it for him to find a neighbor who will voluntarily suffer for his sins: one who will say cheerfully “You have committed a murder. Well, never mind: I am willing to be hanged for it in your stead?”

Our imagination must come to our rescue. Why not, instead of driving ourselves to despair by insisting on a separate atonement by a separate redeemer for every sin, have one great atonement and one great redeemer to compound for the sins of the world once for all? Nothing easier, nothing cheaper. The yoke is easy, the burden light. All you have to do when the redeemer is once found (or invented by the imagination) is to believe in the efficacy of the transaction, and you are saved. The rams and goats cease to bleed; the altars which ask for expensive gifts and continually renewed sacrifices are torn down; and the Church of the single redeemer and the single atonement rises on the ruins of the old temples, and becomes a single Church of the Christ.

RETROSPECTIVE ATONEMENT, AND THE EXPECTATION OF THE REDEEMER

But this does not happen at once. Between the old costly religion of the rich and the new gratuitous religion of the poor there comes an interregnum in which the redeemer, though conceived by the human imagination, is not yet found. He is awaited and expected under the names of the Christ, the Messiah, Baldur the Beautiful, or what not; but he has not yet come. Yet the sinners are not therefore in despair. It is true that they cannot say, as we say, “The Christ has come, and has redeemed us;” but they can say “The Christ will come, and will redeem us,” which, as the atonement is conceived as retrospective, is equally consoling. There are periods when nations are seething with this expectation and crying aloud with prophecy of the Redeemer through their poets. To feel that atmosphere we have only to take up the Bible and read Isaiah at one end of such a period and Luke and John at the other.

COMPLETION OF THE SCHEME BY LUTHER AND CALVIN

We now see our religion as a quaint but quite intelligible evolution from crude attempts to propitiate the destructive forces of Nature among savages to a subtle theology with a costly ritual of sacrifice possible only to the rich as a luxury, and finally to the religion of Luther and Calvin. And it must be said for the earlier forms that they involved very real sacrifices. The sacrifice was not always vicarious, and is not yet universally so. In India men pay with their own skins, torturing themselves hideously to attain holiness. In the west, saints amazed the world with their austerities and self-scourgings and confessions and vigils. But Luther delivered us from all that. His reformation was a triumph of imagination and a triumph of cheapness. It brought you complete salvation and asked you for nothing but faith. Luther did not know what he was doing in the scientific sociological way in which we know it; but his instinct served him better than knowledge could have done; for it was instinct rather than theological casuistry that made him hold so resolutely to Justification by Faith as the trump card by which he should beat the Pope, or, as he would have put it, the sign in which he should conquer. He may be said to have abolished the charge for admission to heaven. Paul had advocated this; but Luther and Calvin did it.

JOHN BARLEYCORN

There is yet another page in the history of religion which must be conned and digested before the career of Jesus can be fully understood. people who can read long books will find it in Frazer’s Golden Bough. Simpler folk will find it in the peasant’s song of John Barleycorn, now made accessible to our drawingroom amateurs in the admirable collections of Somersetshire Folk Songs by Mr. Cecil Sharp. From Frazer’s magnum opus you will learn how the same primitive logic which makes the Englishman believe today that by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and courage of the bull, and to hold that belief in the face of the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers and bicyclists, led the first men who conceived God as capable of incarnation to believe that they could acquire a spark of his divinity by eating his flesh and drinking his blood. And from the song of John Barleycorn you may learn how the miracle of the seed, the growth, and the harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles and as inexplicable as ever, taught the primitive husbandman, and, as we must now affirm, taught him quite rightly, that God is in the seed, and that God is immortal. And thus it became the test of Godhead that nothing that you could do to it could kill it, and that when you buried it, it would rise again in renewed life and beauty and give mankind eternal life on condition that it was eaten and drunk, and again slain and buried, to rise again for ever and ever. You may, and indeed must, use John Barleycorn “right barbarouslee,” cutting him “off at knee” with your scythes, scourging him with your flails, burying him in the earth; and he will not resist you nor reproach you, but will rise again in golden beauty amidst a great burst of sunshine and bird music, and save you and renew your life. And from the interweaving of these two traditions with the craving for the Redeemer, you at last get the conviction that when the Redeemer comes he will be immortal; he will give us his body to eat and his blood to drink; and he will prove his divinity by suffering a barbarous death without resistance or reproach, and rise from the dead and return to the earth in glory as the giver of life eternal.

LOOKING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

Yet another persistent belief has beset the imagination of the religious ever since religion spread among the poor, or, rather, ever since commercial civilization produced a hopelessly poor class cut off from enjoyment in this world. That belief is that the end of this world is at hand, and that it will presently pass away and be replaced by a kingdom of happiness, justice, and bliss in which the rich and the oppressors and the unjust shall have no share. We are all familiar with this expectation: many of us cherish some pious relative who sees in every great calamity a sign of the approaching end. Warning pamphlets are in constant circulation: advertisements are put in the papers and paid for by those who are convinced, and who are horrified at the indifference of the irreligious to the approaching doom. And revivalist preachers, now as in the days of John the Baptist, seldom fail to warn their flocks to watch and pray, as the great day will steal upon them like a thief in the night, and cannot be long deferred in a world so wicked. This belief also associates itself with Barleycorn’s second coming; so that the two events become identified at last.

There is the other and more artificial side of this belief, on which it is an inculcated dread. The ruler who appeals to the prospect of heaven to console the poor and keep them from insurrection also curbs the vicious by threatening them with hell. In the Koran we find Mahomet driven more and more to this expedient of government; and experience confirms his evident belief that it is impossible to govern without it in certain phases of civilization. We shall see later on that it gives a powerful attraction to the belief in a Redeemer, since it adds to remorse of conscience, which hardened men bear very lightly, a definite dread of hideous and eternal torture.

THE HONOR OF DIVINE PARENTAGE

One more tradition must be noted. The consummation of praise for a king is to declare that he is the son of no earthly father, but of a god. His mother goes into the temple of Apollo, and Apollo comes to her in the shape of a serpent, or the like. The Roman emperors, following the example of Augustus, claimed the title of God. Illogically, such divine kings insist a good deal on their royal human ancestors. Alexander, claiming to be the son of Apollo, is equally determined to be the son of Philip. As the gospels stand, St. Matthew and St. Luke give genealogies (the two are different) establishing the descent of Jesus through Joseph from the royal house of David, and yet declare that not Joseph but the Holy Ghost was the father of Jesus. It is therefore now held that the story of the Holy Ghost is a later interpolation borrowed from the Greek and Roman imperial tradition. But experience shows that simultaneous faith in the descent from David and the conception by the Holy Ghost is possible. Such double beliefs are entertained by the human mind without uneasiness or consciousness of the contradiction involved. Many instances might be given: a familiar one to my generation being that of the Tichborne claimant, whose attempt to pass himself off as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on the ground that the Tichborne family, in resisting it, were trying to do a laborer out of his rights. It is quite possible that Matthew and Luke may have been unconscious of the contradiction: indeed the interpolation theory does not remove the difficulty, as the interpolators themselves must have been unconscious of it. A better ground for suspecting interpolation is that St. Paul knew nothing of the divine birth, and taught that Jesus came into the world at his birth as the son of Joseph, but rose from the dead after three days as the son of God. Here again, few notice the discrepancy: the three views are accepted simultaneously without intellectual discomfort. We can provisionally entertain half a dozen contradictory versions of an event if we feel either that it does not greatly matter, or that there is a category attainable in which the contradictions are reconciled.

But that is not the present point. All that need be noted here is that the legend of divine birth was sure to be attached sooner or later to very eminent persons in Roman imperial times, and that modern theologians, far from discrediting it, have very logically affirmed the miraculous conception not only of Jesus but of his mother.

With no more scholarly equipment than a knowledge of these habits of the human imagination, anyone may now read the four gospels without bewilderment, and without the contemptuous incredulity which spoils the temper of many modern atheists, or the senseless credulity which sometimes makes pious people force us to shove them aside in emergencies as impracticable lunatics when they ask us to meet violence and injustice with dumb submission in the belief that the strange demeanor of Jesus before Pilate was meant as an example of normal human conduct. Let us admit that without the proper clues the gospels are, to a modern educated person, nonsensical and incredible, whilst the apostles are unreadable. But with the clues, they are fairly plain sailing. Jesus becomes an intelligible and consistent person. His reasons for going “like a lamb to the slaughter” instead of saving himself as Mahomet did, become quite clear. The narrative becomes as credible as any other historical narrative of its period.

MATTHEW.

THE ANNUNCIATION: THE MASSACRE: THE FLIGHT

Let us begin with the gospel of Matthew, bearing in mind that it does not profess to be the evidence of an eyewitness. It is a chronicle, founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and records as the chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason to be given later on, he must have collected his material and completed his book within the lifetime of persons contemporary with Jesus. Allowance must also be made for the fact that the gospel is written in the Greek language, whilst the first-hand traditions and the actual utterances of Jesus must have been in Aramaic, the dialect of Palestine. These distinctions were important, as you will find if you read Holinshed or Froissart and then read Benvenuto Cellini. You do not blame Holinshed or Froissart for believing and repeating the things they had read or been told, though you cannot always believe these things yourself. But when Cellini tells you that he saw this or did that, and you find it impossible to believe him, you lose patience with him, and are disposed to doubt everything in his autobiography. Do not forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and not Benvenuto. The very first pages of his narrative will put your attitude to the test.

Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed to a man of royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich enough to live in a house in Bethlehem to which kings could bring gifts of gold without provoking any comment. An angel announces to Joseph that Jesus is the son of the Holy Ghost, and that he must not accuse her of infidelity because of her bearing a son of which he is not the father; but this episode disappears from the subsequent narrative: there is no record of its having been told to Jesus, nor any indication of his having any knowledge of it. The narrative, in fact, proceeds in all respects as if the annunciation formed no part of it.

Herod the Tetrarch, believing that a child has been born who will destroy him, orders all the male children to be slaughtered; and Jesus escapes by the flight of his parents into Egypt, whence they return to Nazareth when the danger is over. Here it is necessary to anticipate a little by saying that none of the other evangelists accept this story, as none of them except John, who throws over Matthew altogether, shares his craze for treating history and biography as mere records of the fulfillment of ancient Jewish prophecies. This craze no doubt led him to seek for some legend bearing out Hosea’s “Out of Egypt have I called my son,” and Jeremiah’s Rachel weeping for her children: in fact, he says so. Nothing that interests us nowadays turns on the credibility of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt. We may forget them, and proceed to the important part of the narrative, which skips at once to the manhood of Jesus.

JOHN THE BAPTIST

At this moment, a Salvationist prophet named John is stirring the people very strongly. John has declared that the rite of circumcision is insufficient as a dedication of the individual to God, and has substituted the rite of baptism. To us, who are accustomed to baptism as a matter of course, and to whom circumcision is a rather ridiculous foreign practice of no consequence, the sensational effect of such a heresy as this on the Jews is not apparent: it seems to us as natural that John should have baptized people as that the rector of our village should do so. But, as St. Paul found to his cost later on, the discarding of circumcision for baptism was to the Jews as startling a heresy as the discarding of transubstantiation in the Mass was to the Catholics of the XVI century.

JESUS JOINS THE BAPTISTS

Jesus entered as a man of thirty (Luke says) into the religious life of his time by going to John the Baptist and demanding baptism from him, much as certain well-to-do young gentlemen forty years ago “joined the Socialists.” As far as established Jewry was concerned, he burnt his boats by this action, and cut himself off from the routine of wealth, respectability, and orthodoxy. He then began preaching John’s gospel, which, apart from the heresy of baptism, the value of which lay in its bringing the Gentiles (that is, the uncircumcized) within the pale of salvation, was a call to the people to repent of their sins, as the kingdom of heaven was at hand. Luke adds that he also preached the communism of charity; told the surveyors of taxes not to over-assess the taxpayers; and advised soldiers to be content with their wages and not to be violent or lay false accusations. There is no record of John going beyond this.

THE SAVAGE JOHN AND THE CIVILIZED JESUS

Jesus went beyond it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though, like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely from John’s manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom, and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was essentially a highly-civilized, cultivated person. According to Luke, he pointed out the contrast himself, chaffing the Jews for complaining that John must be possessed by the devil because he was a teetotaller and vegetarian, whilst, because Jesus was neither one nor the other, they reviled him as a gluttonous man and a winebibber, the friend of the officials and their mistresses. He told straitlaced disciples that they would have trouble enough from other people without making any for themselves, and that they should avoid martyrdom and enjoy themselves whilst they had the chance. “When they persecute you in this city,” he says, “flee into the next.” He preaches in the synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as they come. He repeatedly says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” meaning evidently to clear himself of the inveterate superstition that suffering is gratifying to God. “Be not, as the Pharisees, of a sad countenance,” he says. He is convivial, feasting with Roman officials and sinners. He is careless of his person, and is remonstrated with for not washing his hands before sitting down to table. The followers of John the Baptist, who fast, and who expect to find the Christians greater ascetics than themselves, are disappointed at finding that Jesus and his twelve friends do not fast; and Jesus tells them that they should rejoice in him instead of being melancholy. He is jocular and tells them they will all have as much fasting as they want soon enough, whether they like it or not. He is not afraid of disease, and dines with a leper. A woman, apparently to protect him against infection, pours a costly unguent on his head, and is rebuked because what it cost might have been given to the poor. He poohpoohs that lowspirited view, and says, as he said when he was reproached for not fasting, that the poor are always there to be helped, but that he is not there to be anointed always, implying that you should never lose a chance of being happy when there is so much misery in the world. He breaks the Sabbath; is impatient of conventionality when it is uncomfortable or obstructive; and outrages the feelings of the Jews by breaches of it. He is apt to accuse people who feel that way of hypocrisy. Like the late Samuel Butler, he regards disease as a department of sin, and on curing a lame man, says “Thy sins are forgiven” instead of “Arise and walk,” subsequently maintaining, when the Scribes reproach him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease, that the two come to the same thing. He has no modest affectations, and claims to be greater than Solomon or Jonah. When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the ground that art is the only way in which the people can be taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life.

JESUS NOT A PROSLETYST

A point of considerable practical importance today is that he expressly repudiates the idea that forms of religion, once rooted, can be weeded out and replanted with the flowers of a foreign faith. “If you try to root up the tares you will root up the wheat as well.” Our proselytizing missionary enterprises are thus flatly contrary to his advice; and their results appear to bear him out in his view that if you convert a man brought up in another creed, you inevitably demoralize him. He acts on this view himself, and does not convert his disciples from Judaism to Christianity. To this day a Christian would be in religion a Jew initiated by baptism instead of circumcision, and accepting Jesus as the Messiah, and his teachings as of higher authority than those of Moses, but for the action of the Jewish priests, who, to save Jewry from being submerged in the rising flood of Christianity after the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, set up what was practically a new religious order, with new Scriptures and elaborate new observances, and to their list of the accursed added one Jeschu, a bastard magician, whose comic rogueries brought him to a bad end like Punch or Til Eulenspiegel: an invention which cost them dear when the Christians got the upper hand of them politically. The Jew as Jesus, himself a Jew, knew him, never dreamt of such things, and could follow Jesus without ceasing to be a Jew.

THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS.

So much for his personal life and temperament. His public career as a popular preacher carries him equally far beyond John the Baptist. He lays no stress on baptism or vows, and preaches conduct incessantly. He advocates communism, the widening of the private family with its cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge and punishment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which you are not an independent individual but a member of society, your neighbor being another member, and each of you members one of another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you will both be the worse for it. He conveys all this with extraordinary charm, and entertains his hearers with fables (parables) to illustrate them. He has no synagogue or regular congregation, but travels from place to place with twelve men whom he has called from their work as he passed, and who have abandoned it to follow him.

THE MIRACLES

He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles. He is ashamed of these powers, but, being extremely compassionate, cannot refuse to exercise them when afflicted people beg him to cure them, when multitudes of people are hungry, and when his disciples are terrified by storms on the lakes. He asks for no reward, but begs the people not to mention these powers of his. There are two obvious reasons for his dislike of being known as a worker of miracles. One is the natural objection of all men who possess such powers, but have far more important business in the world than to exhibit them, to be regarded primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered to give exhibitions to satisfy curiosity. The other is that his view of the effect of miracles upon his mission is exactly that taken later on by Rousseau. He perceives that they will discredit him and divert attention from his doctrine by raising an entirely irrelevant issue between his disciples and his opponents.

Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau’s Letters Written From The Mountain, which may be regarded as the classic work on miracles as credentials of divine mission. Rousseau shows, as Jesus foresaw, that the miracles are the main obstacle to the acceptance of Christianity, because their incredibility (if they were not incredible they would not be miracles) makes people sceptical as to the whole narrative, credible enough in the main, in which they occur, and suspicious of the doctrine with which they are thus associated. “Get rid of the miracles,” said Rousseau, “and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ.” He points out that miracles offered as evidence of divinity, and failing to convince, make divinity ridiculous. He says, in effect, there is nothing in making a lame man walk: thousands of lame men have been cured and have walked without any miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg and make another grow instantaneously on him before my eyes; and I will be really impressed; but mere cures of ailments that have often been cured before are quite useless as evidence of anything else than desire to help and power to cure.

Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with Rousseau, and felt the danger so strongly, that when people who were not ill or in trouble came to him and asked him to exercise his powers as a sign of his mission, he was irritated beyond measure, and refused with an indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau’s point, must have thought very unreasonable. To be called “an evil and adulterous generation” merely for asking a miracle worker to give an exhibition of his powers, is rather a startling experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his temper when people asked him to perform miracles. But Mahomet expressly disclaimed any unusual powers; whereas it is clear from Matthew’s story that Jesus (unfortunately for himself, as he thought) had some powers of healing. It is also obvious that the exercise of such powers would give rise to wild tales of magical feats which would expose their hero to condemnation as an impostor among people whose good opinion was of great consequence to the movement started by his mission.

But the deepest annoyance arising from the miracles would be the irrelevance of the issue raised by them. Jesus’s teaching has nothing to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say “You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract” would have been, to a man of Jesus’s intelligence, the proposition of an idiot. If it could be proved today that not one of the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine. And yet the intellectual energy of sceptics and divines has been wasted for generations in arguing about the miracles on the assumption that Christianity is at stake in the controversy as to whether the stories of Matthew are false or true. According to Matthew himself, Jesus must have known this only too well; for wherever he went he was assailed with a clamor for miracles, though his doctrine created bewilderment.

So much for the miracles! Matthew tells us further, that Jesus declared that his doctrines would be attacked by Church and State, and that the common multitude were the salt of the earth and the light of the world. His disciples, in their relations with the political and ecclesiastical organizations, would be as sheep among wolves.

MATTHEW IMPUTES DIGNITY TO JESUS.

Matthew, like most biographers, strives to identify the opinions and prejudices of his hero with his own. Although he describes Jesus as tolerant even to carelessness, he draws the line at the Gentile, and represents Jesus as a bigoted Jew who regards his mission as addressed exclusively to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” When a woman of Canaan begged Jesus to cure her daughter, he first refused to speak to her, and then told her brutally that “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs.” But when the woman said, “Truth, Lord; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table,” she melted the Jew out of him and made Christ a Christian. To the woman whom he had just called a dog he said, “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” This is somehow one of the most touching stories in the gospel; perhaps because the woman rebukes the prophet by a touch of his own finest quality. It is certainly out of character; but as the sins of good men are always out of character, it is not safe to reject the story as invented in the interest of Matthew’s determination that Jesus shall have nothing to do with the Gentiles. At all events, there the story is; and it is by no means the only instance in which Matthew reports Jesus, in spite of the charm of his preaching, as extremely uncivil in private intercourse.

THE GREAT CHANGE.

So far the history is that of a man sane and interesting apart from his special gifts as orator, healer, and prophet. But a startling change occurs. One day, after the disciples have discouraged him for a long time by their misunderstandings of his mission, and their speculations as to whether he is one of the old prophets come again, and if so, which, his disciple Peter suddenly solves the problem by exclaiming, “Thou are the Christ, the son of the living God.” At this Jesus is extraordinarily pleased and excited. He declares that Peter has had a revelation straight from God. He makes a pun on Peter’s name, and declares him the founder of his Church. And he accepts his destiny as a god by announcing that he will be killed when he goes to Jerusalem; for if he is really the Christ, it is a necessary part of his legendary destiny that he shall be slain. Peter, not understanding this, rebukes him for what seems mere craven melancholy; and Jesus turns fiercely on him and cries, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

Jesus now becomes obsessed with a conviction of his divinity, and talks about it continually to his disciples, though he forbids them to mention it to others. They begin to dispute among themselves as to the position they shall occupy in heaven when his kingdom is established. He rebukes them strenuously for this, and repeats his teaching that greatness means service and not domination; but he himself, always instinctively somewhat haughty, now becomes arrogant, dictatorial, and even abusive, never replying to his critics without an insulting epithet, and even cursing a fig-tree which disappoints him when he goes to it for fruit. He assumes all the traditions of the folk-lore gods, and announces that, like John Barleycorn, he will be barbarously slain and buried, but will rise from the earth and return to life. He attaches to himself the immemorial tribal ceremony of eating the god, by blessing bread and wine and handing them to his disciples with the words “This is my body: this is my blood.” He forgets his own teaching and threatens eternal fire and eternal punishment. He announces, in addition to his Barleycorn resurrection, that he will come to the world a second time in glory and establish his kingdom on earth. He fears that this may lead to the appearance of impostors claiming to be himself, and declares explicitly and repeatedly that no matter what wonders these impostors may perform, his own coming will be unmistakable, as the stars will fall from heaven, and trumpets be blown by angels. Further he declares that this will take place during the lifetime of persons then present.

JERUSALEM AND THE MYSTICAL SACRIFICE.

In this new frame of mind he at last enters Jerusalem amid great popular curiosity; drives the moneychangers and sacrifice sellers out of the temple in a riot; refuses to interest himself in the beauties and wonders of the temple building on the ground that presently not a stone of it shall be left on another; reviles the high priests and elders in intolerable terms; and is arrested by night in a garden to avoid a popular disturbance. He makes no resistance, being persuaded that it is part of his destiny as a god to be murdered and to rise again. One of his followers shows fight, and cuts off the ear of one of his captors. Jesus rebukes him, but does not attempt to heal the wound, though he declares that if he wished to resist he could easily summon twelve million angels to his aid. He is taken before the high priest and by him handed over to the Roman governor, who is puzzled by his silent refusal to defend himself in any way, or to contradict his accusers or their witnesses, Pilate having naturally no idea that the prisoner conceives himself as going through an inevitable process of torment, death, and burial as a prelude to resurrection. Before the high priest he has also been silent except that when the priest asks him is he the Christ, the Son of God, he replies that they shall all see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven. He maintains this attitude with frightful fortitude whilst they scourge him, mock him, torment him, and finally crucify him between two thieves. His prolonged agony of thirst and pain on the cross at last breaks his spirit, and he dies with a cry of “My God: why hast Thou forsaken me?”

NOT THIS MAN BUT BARRABAS

Meanwhile he has been definitely rejected by the people as well as by the priests. Pilate, pitying him, and unable to make out exactly what he has done (the blasphemy that has horrified the high priest does not move the Roman) tries to get him off by reminding the people that they have, by custom, the right to have a prisoner released at that time, and suggests that he should release Jesus. But they insist on his releasing a prisoner named Barabbas instead, and on having Jesus crucified. Matthew gives no clue to the popularity of Barabbas, describing him simply as “a notable prisoner.” The later gospels make it clear, very significantly, that his offence was sedition and insurrection; that he was an advocate of physical force; and that he had killed his man. The choice of Barabbas thus appears as a popular choice of the militant advocate of physical force as against the unresisting advocate of mercy.

THE RESURRECTION.

Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened the family vault of one Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, who had buried Jesus in it, whereupon Jesus rose and returned from Jerusalem to Galilee and resumed his preaching with his disciples, assuring them that he would now be with them to the end of the world. At that point the narrative abruptly stops. The story has no ending.

DATE OF MATTHEW’S NARRATIVE.

One effect of the promise of Jesus to come again in glory during the lifetime of some of his hearers is to date the gospel without the aid of any scholarship. It must have been written during the lifetime of Jesus’s contemporaries: that is, whilst it was still possible for the promise of his Second Coming to be fulfilled. The death of the last person who had been alive when Jesus said “There be some of them that stand here that shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” destroyed the last possibility of the promised Second Coming, and bore out the incredulity of Pilate and the Jews. And as Matthew writes as one believing in that Second Coming, and in fact left his story unfinished to be ended by it, he must have produced his gospel within a lifetime of the crucifixion. Also, he must have believed that reading books would be one of the pleasures of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

CLASS TYPE OF MATTHEW’S JESUS

One more circumstance must be noted as gathered from Matthew. Though he begins his story in such a way as to suggest that Jesus belonged to the privileged classes, he mentions later on that when Jesus attempted to preach in his own country, and had no success there, the people said, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” But Jesus’s manner throughout is that of an aristocrat, or at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and by no means a lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore to conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working for weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent. John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of Matthew is of the Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no other documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we should not feel as we do about him. We should have been much less loth to say, “There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed him as the Christ, and who then became a monomaniac.” We should have pointed out that his delusion is a very common delusion among the insane, and that such insanity is quite consistent with the retention of the argumentative cunning and penetration which Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his delusion had taken complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the scourging and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had been treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of any special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the Son of Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that he regarded much of what we call law and order as machinery for robbing the poor under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties a snare for the soul; that he agreed with the proverb “The nearer the Church, the farther from God;” that he saw very plainly that the masters of the community should be its servants and not its oppressors and parasites; and that though he did not tell us not to fight our enemies, he did tell us to love them, and warned us that they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword. All this shows a great power of seeing through vulgar illusions, and a capacity for a higher morality than has yet been established in any civilized community; but it does not place Jesus above Confucius or Plato, not to mention more modern philosophers and moralists.

MARK.

THE WOMEN DISCIPLES AND THE ASCENSION.

Let us see whether we can get anything more out of Mark, whose gospel, by the way, is supposed to be older than Matthew’s. Mark is brief; and it does not take long to discover that he adds nothing to Matthew except the ending of the story by Christ’s ascension into heaven, and the news that many women had come with Jesus to Jerusalem, including Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. On the other hand Mark says nothing about the birth of Jesus, and does not touch his career until his adult baptism by John. He apparently regards Jesus as a native of Nazareth, as John does, and not of Bethlehem, as Matthew and Luke do, Bethlehem being the city of David, from whom Jesus is said by Matthew and Luke to be descended. He describes John’s doctrine as “Baptism of repentance unto remission of sins”: that is, a form of Salvationism. He tells us that Jesus went into the synagogues and taught, not as the Scribes but as one having authority: that is, we infer, he preaches his own doctrine as an original moralist is instead of repeating what the books say. He describes the miracle of Jesus reaching the boat by walking across the sea, but says nothing about Peter trying to do the same. Mark sees what he relates more vividly than Matthew, and gives touches of detail that bring the event more clearly before the reader. He says, for instance, that when Jesus walked on the waves to the boat, he was passing it by when the disciples called out to him. He seems to feel that Jesus’s treatment of the woman of Canaan requires some apology, and therefore says that she was a Greek of Syrophenician race, which probably excused any incivility to her in Mark’s eyes. He represents the father of the boy whom Jesus cured of epilepsy after the transfiguration as a sceptic who says “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief.” He tells the story of the widow’s mite, omitted by Matthew. He explains that Barabbas was “lying bound with them that made insurrection, men who in the insurrection had committed murder.” Joseph of Arimathea, who buried Jesus in his own tomb, and who is described by Matthew as a disciple, is described by Mark as “one who also himself was looking for the kingdom of God,” which suggests that he was an independent seeker. Mark earns our gratitude by making no mention of the old prophecies, and thereby not only saves time, but avoids the absurd implication that Christ was merely going through a predetermined ritual, like the works of a clock, instead of living. Finally Mark reports Christ as saying, after his resurrection, that those who believe in him will be saved and those who do not, damned; but it is impossible to discover whether he means anything by a state of damnation beyond a state of error. The paleographers regard this passage as tacked on by a later scribe. On the whole Mark leaves the modern reader where Matthew left him.

LUKE.

LUKE THE LITERARY ARTIST.

When we come to Luke, we come to a later storyteller, and one with a stronger natural gift for his art. Before you have read twenty lines of Luke’s gospel you are aware that you have passed from the chronicler writing for the sake of recording important facts, to the artist, telling the story for the sake of telling it. At the very outset he achieves the most charming idyll in the Bible: the story of Mary crowded out of the inn into the stable and laying her newly-born son in the manger, and of the shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night, and how the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host. These shepherds go to the stable and take the place of the kings in Matthew’s chronicle. So completely has this story conquered and fascinated our imagination that most of us suppose all the gospels to contain it; but it is Luke’s story and his alone: none of the others have the smallest hint of it.

THE CHARM OF LUKE’S NARRATIVE.

Luke gives the charm of sentimental romance to every incident. The Annunciation, as described by Matthew, is made to Joseph, and is simply a warning to him not to divorce his wife for misconduct. In Luke’s gospel it is made to Mary herself, at much greater length, with a sense of the ecstasy of the bride of the Holy Ghost. Jesus is refined and softened almost out of recognition: the stern peremptory disciple of John the Baptist, who never addresses a Pharisee or a Scribe without an insulting epithet, becomes a considerate, gentle, sociable, almost urbane person; and the Chauvinist Jew becomes a pro-Gentile who is thrown out of the synagogue in his own town for reminding the congregation that the prophets had sometimes preferred Gentiles to Jews. In fact they try to throw him down from a sort of Tarpeian rock which they use for executions; but he makes his way through them and escapes: the only suggestion of a feat of arms on his part in the gospels. There is not a word of the Syrophenician woman. At the end he is calmly superior to his sufferings; delivers an address on his way to execution with unruffled composure; does not despair on the cross; and dies with perfect dignity, commending his spirit to God, after praying for the forgiveness of his persecutors on the ground that “They know not what they do.” According to Matthew, it is part of the bitterness of his death that even the thieves who are crucified with him revile him. According to Luke, only one of them does this; and he is rebuked by the other, who begs Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom. To which Jesus replies, “This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” implying that he will spend the three days of his death there. In short, every device is used to get rid of the ruthless horror of the Matthew chronicle, and to relieve the strain of the Passion by touching episodes, and by representing Christ as superior to human suffering. It is Luke’s Jesus who has won our hearts.

THE TOUCH OF PARISIAN ROMANCE.

Luke’s romantic shrinking from unpleasantness, and his sentimentality, are illustrated by his version of the woman with the ointment. Matthew and Mark describe it as taking place in the house of Simon the Leper, where it is objected to as a waste of money. In Luke’s version the leper becomes a rich Pharisee; the woman becomes a Dame aux Camellias; and nothing is said about money and the poor. The woman washes the feet of Jesus with her tears and dries them with her hair; and he is reproached for suffering a sinful woman to touch him. It is almost an adaptation of the unromantic Matthew to the Parisian stage. There is a distinct attempt to increase the feminine interest all through. The slight lead given by Mark is taken up and developed. More is said about Jesus’s mother and her feelings. Christ’s following of women, just mentioned by Mark to account for their presence at his tomb, is introduced earlier; and some of the women are named; so that we are introduced to Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna. There is the quaint little domestic episode between Mary and Martha. There is the parable of the Prodigal Son, appealing to the indulgence romance has always shown to Charles Surface and Des Grieux. Women follow Jesus to the cross; and he makes them a speech beginning “Daughters of Jerusalem.” Slight as these changes may seem, they make a great change in the atmosphere. The Christ of Matthew could never have become what is vulgarly called a woman’s hero (though the truth is that the popular demand for sentiment, as far as it is not simply human, is more manly than womanly); but the Christ of Luke has made possible those pictures which now hang in many ladies’ chambers, in which Jesus is represented exactly as he is represented in the Lourdes cinematograph, by a handsome actor. The only touch of realism which Luke does not instinctively suppress for the sake of producing this kind of amenity is the reproach addressed to Jesus for sitting down to table without washing his hands; and that is retained because an interesting discourse hangs on it.

WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH.

Another new feature in Luke’s story is that it begins in a world in which everyone is expecting the advent of the Christ. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus comes into a normal Philistine world like our own of today. Not until the Baptist foretells that one greater than himself shall come after him does the old Jewish hope of a Messiah begin to stir again; and as Jesus begins as a disciple of John, and is baptized by him, nobody connects him with that hope until Peter has the sudden inspiration which produces so startling an effect on Jesus. But in Luke’s gospel men’s minds, and especially women’s minds, are full of eager expectation of a Christ not only before the birth of Jesus, but before the birth of John the Baptist, the event with which Luke begins his story. Whilst Jesus and John are still in their mothers’ wombs, John leaps at the approach of Jesus when the two mothers visit one another. At the circumcision of Jesus pious men and women hail the infant as the Christ.

The Baptist himself is not convinced; for at quite a late period in his former disciple’s career he sends two young men to ask Jesus is he really the Christ. This is noteworthy because Jesus immediately gives them a deliberate exhibition of miracles, and bids them tell John what they have seen, and ask him what he thinks now: This is in complete contradiction to what I have called the Rousseau view of miracles as inferred from Matthew. Luke shows all a romancer’s thoughtlessness about miracles; he regards them as “signs”: that is, as proofs of the divinity of the person performing them, and not merely of thaumaturgic powers. He revels in miracles just as he revels in parables: they make such capital stories. He cannot allow the calling of Peter, James, and John from their boats to pass without a comic miraculous overdraft of fishes, with the net sinking the boats and provoking Peter to exclaim, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” which should probably be translated, “I want no more of your miracles: natural fishing is good enough for my boats.”

There are some other novelties in Luke’s version. Pilate sends Jesus to Herod, who happens to be in Jerusalem just then, because Herod had expressed some curiosity about him; but nothing comes of it: the prisoner will not speak to him. When Jesus is ill received in a Samaritan village James and John propose to call down fire from heaven and destroy it; and Jesus replies that he is come not to destroy lives but to save them. The bias of Jesus against lawyers is emphasized, and also his resolution not to admit that he is more bound to his relatives than to strangers. He snubs a woman who blesses his mother. As this is contrary to the traditions of sentimental romance, Luke would presumably have avoided it had he not become persuaded that the brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God are superior even to sentimental considerations. The story of the lawyer asking what are the two chief commandments is changed by making Jesus put the question to the lawyer instead of answering it.

As to doctrine, Luke is only clear when his feelings are touched. His logic is weak; for some of the sayings of Jesus are pieced together wrongly, as anyone who has read them in the right order and context in Matthew will discover at once. He does not make anything new out of Christ’s mission, and, like the other evangelists, thinks that the whole point of it is that Jesus was the long expected Christ, and that he will presently come back to earth and establish his kingdom, having duly died and risen again after three days. Yet Luke not only records the teaching as to communism and the discarding of hate, which have, of course, nothing to do with the Second Coming, but quotes one very remarkable saying which is not compatible with it, which is, that people must not go about asking where the kingdom of heaven is, and saying “Lo, here!” and “Lo, there!” because the kingdom of heaven is within them. But Luke has no sense that this belongs to a quite different order of thought to his Christianity, and retains undisturbed his view of the kingdom as a locality as definite as Jerusalem or Madagascar.

JOHN.

A NEW STORY AND A NEW CHARACTER.

The gospel of John is a surprise after the others. Matthew, Mark and Luke describe the same events in the same order (the variations in Luke are negligible), and their gospels are therefore called the synoptic gospels. They tell substantially the same story of a wandering preacher who at the end of his life came to Jerusalem. John describes a preacher who spent practically his whole adult life in the capital, with occasional visits to the provinces. His circumstantial account of the calling of Peter and the sons of Zebedee is quite different from the others; and he says nothing aboutheir being fishermen. He says expressly that Jesus, though baptized by John, did not himself practise baptism, and that his disciples did. Christ’s agonized appeal against his doom in the garden of Gethsemane becomes a coldblooded suggestion made in the temple at a much earlier period. Jesus argues much more; complains a good deal of the unreasonableness and dislike with which he is met; is by no means silent before Caiaphas and Pilate; lays much greater stress on his resurrection and on the eating of his body (losing all his disciples except the twelve in consequence); says many apparently contradictory and nonsensical things to which no ordinary reader can now find any clue; and gives the impression of an educated, not to say sophisticated mystic, different both in character and schooling from the simple and downright preacher of Matthew and Mark, and the urbane easy-minded charmer of Luke. Indeed, the Jews say of him “How knoweth this man letters, having never learnt?”

JOHN THE IMMORTAL EYEWITNESS.

John, moreover, claims to be not only a chronicler but a witness. He declares that he is “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” and that he actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper and asked in a whisper which of them it was that should betray him. Jesus whispered that he would give a sop to the traitor, and thereupon handed one to Judas, who ate it and immediately became possessed by the devil. This is more natural than the other accounts, in which Jesus openly indicates Judas without eliciting any protest or exciting any comment. It also implies that Jesus deliberately bewitched Judas in order to bring about his own betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to Peter “If I will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee?”; and John, with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he must not claim to be immortal, as the disciples concluded; for Christ did not use that expression, but merely remarked “If I will that he tarry till I come.” No other evangelist claims personal intimacy with Christ, or even pretends to be his contemporary (there is no ground for identifying Matthew the publican with Matthew the Evangelist); and John is the only evangelist whose account of Christ’s career and character is hopelessly irreconcilable with Matthew’s. He is almost as bad as Matthew, by the way, in his repeated explanations of Christ’s actions as having no other purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The impression is more unpleasant, because, as John, unlike Matthew, is educated, subtle, and obsessed with artificial intellectual mystifications, the discovery that he is stupid or superficial in so simple a matter strikes one with distrust and dislike, in spite of his great literary charm, a good example of which is his transfiguration of the harsh episode of the Syrophenician woman into the pleasant story of the woman of Samaria. This perhaps is why his claim to be John the disciple, or to be a contemporary of Christ or even of any survivor of Christ’s generation, has been disputed, and finally, it seems, disallowed. But I repeat, I take no note here of the disputes of experts as to the date of the gospels, not because I am not acquainted with them, but because, as the earliest codices are Greek manuscripts of the fourth century A.D., and the Syrian ones are translations from the Greek, the paleographic expert has no difficulty in arriving at whatever conclusion happens to suit his beliefs or disbeliefs; and he never succeeds in convincing the other experts except when they believe or disbelieve exactly as he does. Hence I conclude that the dates of the original narratives cannot be ascertained, and that we must make the best of the evangelists’ own accounts of themselves. There is, as we have seen, a very marked difference between them, leaving no doubt that we are dealing with four authors of well-marked diversity; but they all end in an attitude of expectancy of the Second Coming which they agree in declaring Jesus to have positively and unequivocally promised within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Any believer compiling a gospel after the last of these contemporaries had passed away, would either reject and omit the tradition of that promise on the ground that since it was not fulfilled, and could never now be fulfilled, it could not have been made, or else have had to confess to the Jews, who were the keenest critics of the Christians, that Jesus was either an impostor or the victim of a delusion. Now all the evangelists except Matthew expressly declare themselves to be believers; and Matthew’s narrative is obviously not that of a sceptic. I therefore assume as a matter of common sense that, interpolations apart, the gospels are derived from narratives written in the first century A.D. I include John, because though it may be claimed that he hedged his position by claiming that Christ, who specially loved him, endowed him with a miraculous life until the Second Coming, the conclusion being that John is alive at this moment, I cannot believe that a literary forger could hope to save the situation by so outrageous a pretension. Also, John’s narrative is in many passages nearer to the realities of public life than the simple chronicle of Matthew or the sentimental romance of Luke. This may be because John was obviously more a man of the world than the others, and knew, as mere chroniclers and romancers never know, what actually happens away from books and desks. But it may also be because he saw and heard what happened instead of collecting traditions about it. The paleographers and daters of first quotations may say what they please: John’s claim to give evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not forget that the best dramatic art is the operation of a divinatory instinct for truth. Be that as it may, John was certainly not the man to believe in the Second Coming and yet give a date for it after that date had passed. There is really no escape from the conclusion that the originals of all the gospels date from the period within which there was still a possibility of the Second Coming occurring at the promised time.

THE PECULIAR THEOLOGY OF JESUS.

In spite of the suspicions roused by John’s idiosyncrasies, his narrative is of enormous importance to those who go to the gospels for a credible modern religion. For it is John who adds to the other records such sayings as that “I and my father are one”; that “God is a spirit”; that the aim of Jesus is not only that the people should have life, but that they should have it “more abundantly” (a distinction much needed by people who think a man is either alive or dead, and never consider the important question how much alive he is); and that men should bear in mind what they were told in the 82nd Psalm: that they are gods, and are responsible for the doing of the mercy and justice of God. The Jews stoned him for saying these things, and, when he remonstrated with them for stupidly stoning one who had done nothing to them but good works, replied “For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy, because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.” He insists (referring to the 82nd psalm) that if it is part of their own religion that they are gods on the assurance of God himself, it cannot be blasphemy for him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, to say “I am the son of God.” But they will not have this at any price; and he has to escape from their fury. Here the point is obscured by the distinction made by Jesus between himself and other men. He says, in effect, “If you are gods, then, a fortiori, I am a god.” John makes him say this, just as he makes him say “I am the light of the world.” But Matthew makes him say to the people “Ye are the light of the world.” John has no grip of the significance of these scraps which he has picked up: he is far more interested in a notion of his own that men can escape death and do even more extraordinary things than Christ himself: in fact, he actually represents Jesus as promising this explicitly, and is finally led into the audacious hint that he, John, is himself immortal in the flesh. Still, he does not miss the significant sayings altogether. However inconsistent they may be with the doctrine he is consciously driving at, they appeal to some sub-intellectual instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a child sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a toy angel.

John does not mention the ascension; and the end of his narrative leaves Christ restored to life, and appearing from time to time among his disciples. It is on one of these occasions that John describes the miraculous draught of fishes which Luke places at the other end of Christ’s career, at the call of the sons of Zebedee.

JOHN AGREED AS TO THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION.

Although John, following his practice of showing Jesus’s skill as a debater, makes him play a less passive part at his trial, he still gives substantially the same account of it as all the rest. And the question that would occur to any modern reader never occurs to him, any more than it occurred to Matthew, Mark, or Luke. That question is, Why on earth did not Jesus defend himself, and make the people rescue him from the High Priest? He was so popular that they were unable to prevent him driving the money-changers out of the temple, or to arrest him for it. When they did arrest him afterwards, they had to do it at night in a garden. He could have argued with them as he had often done in the temple, and justified himself both to the Jewish law and to Caesar. And he had physical force at his command to back up his arguments: all that was needed was a speech to rally his followers; and he was not gagged. The reply of the evangelists would have been that all these inquiries are idle, because if Jesus had wished to escape, he could have saved himself all that trouble by doing what John describes him as doing: that is, casting his captors to the earth by an exertion of his miraculous power. If you asked John why he let them get up again and torment and execute him, John would have replied that it was part of the destiny of God to be slain and buried and to rise again, and that to have avoided this destiny would have been to repudiate his Godhead. And that is the only apparent explanation. Whether you believe with the evangelists that Christ could have rescued himself by a miracle, or, as a modern Secularist, point out that he could have defended himself effectually, the fact remains that according to all the narratives he did not do so. He had to die like a god, not to save himself “like one of the princes.” *

* Jesus himself had refered to that psalm (LXXII) in which

men who have judged unjustly and accepted the persons of the

wicked (including by anticipation practically all the white

inhabitants of the British Isles and the North American

continent, to mention no other places) are condemned in the

words, “I have said, ye are gods; and all of ye are children

of the Most High; but ye shall die like men, and fall like

one of the princes.”

The consensus on this point is important, because it proves the absolute sincerity of Jesus’s declaration that he was a god. No impostor would have accepted such dreadful consequences without an effort to save himself. No impostor would have been nerved to endure them by the conviction that he would rise from the grave and live again after three days. If we accept the story at all, we must believe this, and believe also that his promise to return in glory and establish his kingdom on earth within the lifetime of men then living, was one which he believed that he could, and indeed must fulfil. Two evangelists declare that in his last agony he despaired, and reproached God for forsaking him. The other two represent him as dying in unshaken conviction and charity with the simple remark that the ordeal was finished. But all four testify that his faith was not deceived, and that he actually rose again after three days. And I think it unreasonable to doubt that all four wrote their narratives in full faith that the other promise would be fulfilled too, and that they themselves might live to witness the Second Coming.

CREDIBILITY OF THE GOSPELS.

It will be noted by the older among my readers, who are sure to be obsessed more or less by elderly wrangles as to whether the gospels are credible as matter-of-fact narratives, that I have hardly raised this question, and have accepted the credible and incredible with equal complacency. I have done this because credibility is a subjective condition, as the evolution of religious belief clearly shows. Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason. There is as much evidence that the miracles occurred as that the battle of Waterloo occurred, or that a large body of Russian troops passed through England in 1914 to take part in the war on the western front. The reasons for believing in the murder of Pompey are the same as the reasons for believing in the raising of Lazarus. Both have been believed and doubted by men of equal intelligence. Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand; life itself is the miracle of miracles. Miracles in the sense of events that violate the normal course of our experience are vouched for every day: the flourishing Church of Christ Scientist is founded on a multitude of such miracles. Nobody believes all the miracles: everybody believes some of them. I cannot tell why men who will not believe that Jesus ever existed yet believe firmly that Shakespear was Bacon. I cannot tell why people who believe that angels appeared and fought on our side at the battle of Mons, and who believe that miracles occur quite frequently at Lourdes, nevertheless boggle at the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and reject it as a trick of priestcraft. I cannot tell why people who will not believe Matthew’s story of three kings bringing costly gifts to the cradle of Jesus, believe Luke’s story of the shepherds and the stable. I cannot tell why people, brought up to believe the Bible in the old literal way as an infallible record and revelation, and rejecting that view later on, begin by rejecting the Old Testament, and give up the belief in a brimstone hell before they give up (if they ever do) the belief in a heaven of harps, crowns, and thrones. I cannot tell why people who will not believe in baptism on any terms believe in vaccination with the cruel fanaticism of inquisitors. I am convinced that if a dozen sceptics were to draw up in parallel columns a list of the events narrated in the gospels which they consider credible and incredible respectively, their lists would be different in several particulars. Belief is literally a matter of taste.

FASHIONS OF BELIEF.

Now matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of communication with the dead, discoverers of the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will not take our miracles in the form that convinced the Middle Ages. Arithmetical numbers appealed to the Middle Ages just as they do to us, because they are difficult to deal with, and because the greatest masters of numbers, the Newtons and Leibnitzes, rank among the greatest men. But there are fashions in numbers too. The Middle Ages took a fancy to some familiar number like seven; and because it was an odd number, and the world was made in seven days, and there are seven stars in Charles’s Wain, and for a dozen other reasons, they were ready to believe anything that had a seven or a seven times seven in it. Seven deadly sins, seven swords of sorrow in the heart of the Virgin, seven champions of Christendom, seemed obvious and reasonable things to believe in simply because they were seven. To us, on the contrary, the number seven is the stamp of superstition. We will believe in nothing less than millions. A medieval doctor gained his patient’s confidence by telling him that his vitals were being devoured by seven worms. Such a diagnosis would ruin a modern physician. The modern physician tells his patient that he is ill because every drop of his blood is swarming with a million microbes; and the patient believes him abjectly and instantly. Had a bishop told William the Conqueror that the sun was seventy-seven miles distant from the earth, William would have believed him not only out of respect for the Church, but because he would have felt that seventy-seven miles was the proper distance. The Kaiser, knowing just as little about it as the Conqueror, would send that bishop to an asylum. Yet he (I presume) unhesitatingly accepts the estimate of ninety-two and nine-tenths millions of miles, or whatever the latest big figure may be.

CREDIBILITY AND TRUTH.

And here I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earth was flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, “Look at it.” Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome scepticism. The modern man who believes that the earth is round is grossly credulous. Flat Earth men drive him to fury by confuting him with the greatest ease when he tries to argue about it. Confront him with a theory that the earth is cylindrical, or annular, or hour-glass shaped, and he is lost. The thing he believes may be true, but that is not why he believes it: he believes it because in some mysterious way it appeals to his imagination. If you ask him why he believes that the sun is ninety-odd million miles off, either he will have to confess that he doesn’t know, or he will say that Newton proved it. But he has not read the treatise in which Newton proved it, and does not even know that it was written in Latin. If you press an Ulster Protestant as to why he regards Newton as an infallible authority, and St. Thomas Aquinas or the Pope as superstitious liars whom, after his death, he will have the pleasure of watching from his place in heaven whilst they roast in eternal flame, or if you ask me why I take into serious consideration Colonel Sir Almroth Wright’s estimates of the number of streptococci contained in a given volume of serum whilst I can only laugh at the earlier estimates of the number of angels that can be accommodated on the point of a needle, no reasonable reply is possible except that somehow sevens and angels are out of fashion, and billions and streptococci are all the rage. I simply cannot tell you why Bacon, Montaigne, and Cervantes had a quite different fashion of credulity and incredulity from the Venerable Bede and Piers Plowman and the divine doctors of the Aquinas-Aristotle school, who were certainly no stupider, and had the same facts before them. Still less can I explain why, if we assume that these leaders of thought had all reasoned out their beliefs, their authority seemed conclusive to one generation and blasphemous to another, neither generation having followed the reasoning or gone into the facts of the matter for itself at all.

It is therefore idle to begin disputing with the reader as to what he should believe in the gospels and what he should disbelieve. He will believe what he can, and disbelieve what he must. If he draws any lines at all, they will be quite arbitrary ones. St. John tells us that when Jesus explicitly claimed divine honors by the sacrament of his body and blood, so many of his disciples left him that their number was reduced to twelve. Many modern readers will not hold out so long: they will give in at the first miracle. Others will discriminate. They will accept the healing miracles, and reject the feeding of the multitude. To some the walking on the water will be a legendary exaggeration of a swim, ending in an ordinary rescue of Peter; and the raising of Lazarus will be only a similar glorification of a commonplace feat of artificial respiration, whilst others will scoff at it as a planned imposture in which Lazarus acted as a confederate. Between the rejection of the stories as wholly fabulous and the acceptance of them as the evangelists themselves meant them to be accepted, there will be many shades of belief and disbelief, of sympathy and derision. It is not a question of being a Christian or not. A Mahometan Arab will accept literally and without question parts of the narrative which an English Archbishop has to reject or explain away; and many Theosophists and lovers of the wisdom of India, who never enter a Christian Church except as sightseers, will revel in parts of John’s gospel which mean nothing to a pious matter-of-fact Bradford manufacturer. Every reader takes from the Bible what he can get. In submitting a precis of the gospel narratives I have not implied any estimate either of their credibility or of their truth. I have simply informed him or reminded him, as the case may be, of what those narratives tell us about their hero.

CHRISTIAN ICONOLATRY AND THE PERILS OF THE ICONOCLAST.

I must now abandon this attitude, and make a serious draft on the reader’s attention by facing the question whether, if and when the medieval and Methodist will-to-believe the Salvationist and miraculous side of the gospel narratives fails us, as it plainly has failed the leaders of modern thought, there will be anything left of the mission of Jesus: whether, in short, we may not throw the gospels into the waste-paper basket, or put them away on the fiction shelf of our libraries. I venture to reply that we shall be, on the contrary, in the position of the man in Bunyan’s riddle who found that “the more he threw away, the more he had. “We get rid, to begin with, of the idolatrous or iconographic worship of Christ. By this I mean literally that worship which is given to pictures and statues of him, and to finished and unalterable stories about him. The test of the prevalence of this is that if you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person, or even as a still active God, such worshippers are more horrified than Don Juan was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may doubt whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. But if you venture to wonder how Christ would have looked if he had shaved and had his hair cut, or what size in shoes he took, or whether he swore when he stood on a nail in the carpenter’s shop, or could not button his robe when he was in a hurry, or whether he laughed over the repartees by which he baffled the priests when they tried to trap him into sedition and blasphemy, or even if you tell any part of his story in the vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extraordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences that may flow from this terrifying miracle. It is at such moments that you realize that the iconolaters have never for a moment conceived Christ as a real person who meant what he said, as a fact, as a force like electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary effect.

Thus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Christ is not the lifeless harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a rallying centre for revolutionary influences which all established States and Churches fight, you must look to yourselves; for you have brought the image to life; and the mob may not be able to bear that horror.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO BARRABAS.

But mobs must be faced if civilization is to be saved. It did not need the present war to show that neither the iconographic Christ nor the Christ of St. Paul has succeeded in effecting the salvation of human society. Whilst I write, the Turks are said to be massacring the Armenian Christians on an unprecedented scale; but Europe is not in a position to remonstrate; for her Christians are slaying one another by every device which civilization has put within their reach as busily as they are slaying the Turks. Barabbas is triumphant everywhere; and the final use he makes of his triumph is to lead us all to suicide with heroic gestures and resounding lies. Now those who, like myself, see the Barabbasque social organization as a failure, and are convinced that the Life Force (or whatever you choose to call it) cannot be finally beaten by any failure, and will even supersede humanity by evolving a higher species if we cannot master the problems raised by the multiplication of our own numbers, have always known that Jesus had a real message, and have felt the fascination of his character and doctrine. Not that we should nowadays dream of claiming any supernatural authority for him, much less the technical authority which attaches to an educated modern philosopher and jurist. But when, having entirely got rid of Salvationist Christianity, and even contracted a prejudice against Jesus on the score of his involuntary connection with it, we engage on a purely scientific study of economics, criminology, and biology, and find that our practical conclusions are virtually those of Jesus, we are distinctly pleased and encouraged to find that we were doing him an injustice, and that the nimbus that surrounds his head in the pictures may be interpreted some day as a light of science rather than a declarations of sentiment or a label of idolatry.

The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are, roughly, the following:

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the son of God; and God is the son of man. God is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed and begged from. We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself. God is your father: you are here to do God’s work; and you and your father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock. Dissociate your work entirely from money payments. If you let a child starve you are letting God starve. Get rid of all anxiety about tomorrow’s dinner and clothes, because you cannot serve two masters: God and Mammon.

S. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love your neighbor as yourself, he being a part of yourself. And love your enemies: they are your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is as much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet is as much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don’t waste your time at family funerals grieving for your relatives: attend to life, not to death: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and better. In the kingdom of heaven, which, as aforesaid, is within you, there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to.

Now these are very interesting propositions; and they become more interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more and more to consider them favorably. In considering them, we shall waste our time unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that the man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in the first five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers in the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world is so badly governed that those who know the truth can hardly bear to live in it, an objection from an average stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima facie case for any social reform.

THE REDUCTION TO MODERN PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY.

All the same, we must reduce the ethical counsels and proposals of Jesus to modern practice if they are to be of any use to us. If we ask our stockbroker to act simply as Jesus advised his disciples to act, he will reply, very justly, “You are advising me to become a tramp.” If we urge a rich man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, he will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells out and throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to add himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few of them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind that whereas, in the time of Jesus, and in the ages which grew darker and darker after his death until the darkness, after a brief false dawn in the Reformation and the Renascence, culminated in the commercial night of the nineteenth century, it was believed that you could not make men good by Act of Parliament, we now know that you cannot make them good in any other way, and that a man who is better than his fellows is a nuisance. The rich man must sell up not only himself but his whole class; and that can be done only through the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The disciple cannot have his bread without money until there is bread for everybody without money; and that requires an elaborate municipal organization of the food supply, rate supported. Being members one of another means One Man One Vote, and One Woman One Vote, and universal suffrage and equal incomes and all sorts of modern political measures. Even in Syria in the time of Jesus his teachings could not possibly have been realized by a series of independent explosions of personal righteousness on the part of the separate units of the population. Jerusalem could not have done what even a village community cannot do, and what Robinson Crusoe himself could not have done if his conscience, and the stern compulsion of Nature, had not imposed a common rule on the half dozen Robinson Crusoes who struggled within him for not wholly compatible satisfactions. And what cannot be done in Jerusalem or Juan Fernandez cannot be done in London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. In short, Christianity, good or bad, right or wrong, must perforce be left out of the question in human affairs until it is made practically applicable to them by complicated political devices; and to pretend that a field preacher under the governorship of Pontius Pilate, or even Pontius Pilate himself in council with all the wisdom of Rome, could have worked out applications of Christianity or any other system of morals for the twentieth century, is to shelve the subject much more effectually than Nero and all its other persecutors ever succeeded in doing. Personal righteousness, and the view that you cannot make people moral by Act of Parliament, is, in fact, the favorite defensive resort of the people who, consciously or subconsciously, are quite determined not to have their property meddled with by Jesus or any other reformer.

MODERN COMMUNISM.

Now let us see what modern experience and modern sociology has to say to the teaching of Jesus as summarized here. First, get rid of your property by throwing it into the common stock. One can hear the Pharisees of Jerusalem and Chorazin and Bethsaida saying, “My good fellow, if you were to divide up the wealth of Judea equally today, before the end of the year you would have rich and poor, poverty and affluence, just as you have today; for there will always be the idle and the industrious, the thrifty and the wasteful, the drunken and the sober; and, as you yourself have very justly observed, the poor we shall have always with us.” And we can hear the reply, “Woe unto you, liars and hypocrites; for ye have this very day divided up the wealth of the country yourselves, as must be done every day (for man liveth not otherwise than from hand to mouth, nor can fish and eggs endure for ever); and ye have divided it unjustly; also ye have said that my reproach to you for having the poor always with you was a law unto you that this evil should persist and stink in the nostrils of God to all eternity; wherefore I think that Lazarus will yet see you beside Dives in hell.” Modern Capitalism has made short work of the primitive pleas for inequality. The Pharisees themselves have organized communism in capital. Joint stock is the order of the day. An attempt to return to individual properties as the basis of our production would smash civilization more completely than ten revolutions. You cannot get the fields tilled today until the farmer becomes a co-operator. Take the shareholder to his railway, and ask him to point out to you the particular length of rail, the particular seat in the railway carriage, the particular lever in the engine that is his very own and nobody else’s; and he will shun you as a madman, very wisely. And if, like Ananias and Sapphira, you try to hold back your little shop or what not from the common stock, represented by the Trust, or Combine, or Kartel, the Trust will presently freeze you out and rope you in and finally strike you dead industrially as thoroughly as St. Peter himself. There is no longer any practical question open as to Communism in production: the struggle today is over the distribution of the product: that is, over the daily dividing-up which is the first necessity of organized society.

REDISTRIBUTION.

Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very nearly one in two. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be effected by violence pure and simple. If you demur, you are sold up. If you resist the selling up you are bludgeoned and imprisoned, the process being euphemistically called the maintenance of law and order. Iniquity can go no further. By this time nobody who knows the figures of the distribution defends them. The most bigoted British Conservative hesitates to say that his king should be much poorer than Mr. Rockefeller, or to proclaim the moral superiority of prostitution to needlework on the ground that it pays better. The need for a drastic redistribution of income in all civilized countries is now as obvious and as generally admitted as the need for sanitation.

SHALL HE WHO MAKES, OWN.

It is when we come to the question of the proportions in which we are to redistribute that controversy begins. We are bewildered by an absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man’s income should be given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School Prize for good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief that it is possible to assign to each person the exact portion of the national income that he or she has produced. To a child it seems that the blacksmith has made a horse-shoe, and that therefore the horse-shoe is his. But the blacksmith knows that the horse-shoe does not belong solely to him, but to his landlord, to the rate collector and taxgatherer, to the men from whom he bought the iron and anvil and the coals, leaving only a scrap of its value for himself; and this scrap he has to exchange with the butcher and baker and the clothier for the things that he really appropriates as living tissue or its wrappings, paying for all of them more than their cost; for these fellow traders of his have also their landlords and moneylenders to satisfy. If, then, such simple and direct village examples of apparent individual production turn out on a moment’s examination to be the products of an elaborate social organization, what is to be said of such products as dreadnoughts, factory-made pins and needles, and steel pens? If God takes the dreadnought in one hand and a steel pen in the other, and asks Job who made them, and to whom they should belong by maker’s right, Job must scratch his puzzled head with a potsherd and be dumb, unless indeed it strikes him that God is the ultimate maker, and that all we have a right to do with the product is to feed his lambs.

LABOR TIME.

So maker’s right as an alternative to taking the advice of Jesus would not work. In practice nothing was possible in that direction but to pay a worker by labor time so much an hour or day or week or year. But how much? When that question came up, the only answer was “as little as he can be starved into accepting,” with the ridiculous results already mentioned, and the additional anomaly that the largest share went to the people who did not work at all, and the least to those who worked hardest. In England nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the pockets of one-tenth of the population.

THE DREAM OF DISTRIBUTION ACCORDING TO MERIT.

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists “Why not distribute according to merit?” Here one imagines Jesus, whose smile has been broadening down the ages as attempt after attempt to escape from his teaching has led to deeper and deeper disaster, laughing outright. Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of virtue in money? The London School of Economics is, we must suppose, to set examination papers with such questions as, “Taking the money value of the virtues of Jesus as 100, and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the correct figures for, respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of the Gadarene swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr. Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr. Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr. Paul Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Siddons, your charwoman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the common hangman.” Or “The late Mr. Barney Barnato received as his lawful income three thousand times as much money as an English agricultural laborer of good general character. Name the principal virtues in which Mr. Barnato exceeded the laborer three thousandfold; and give in figures the loss sustained by civilization when Mr. Barnato was driven to despair and suicide by the reduction of his multiple to one thousand.” The Sunday School idea, with its principle “to each the income he deserves” is really too silly for discussion. Hamlet disposed of it three hundred years ago. “Use every man after his deserts, and who shall scape whipping?” Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries. The moment you try to reduce the Sunday School idea to figures you find that it brings you back to the hopeless plan of paying for a man’s time; and your examination paper will read “The time of Jesus was worth nothing (he complained that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air nests whilst he had not a place to lay his head). Dr. Crippen’s time was worth, say, three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Criticize this arrangement; and, if you dispute its justice, state in pounds, dollars, francs and marks, what their relative time wages ought to have been.” Your answer may be that the question is in extremely bad taste and that you decline to answer it. But you cannot object to being asked how many minutes of a bookmaker’s time is worth two hours of an astronomer’s?

VITAL DISTRIBUTION.

In the end you are forced to ask the question you should have asked at the beginning. What do you give a man an income for? Obviously to keep him alive. Since it is evident that the first condition on which he can be kept alive without enslaving somebody else is that he shall produce an equivalent for what it costs to keep him alive, we may quite rationally compel him to abstain from idling by whatever means we employ to compel him to abstain from murder, arson, forgery, or any other crime. The one supremely foolish thing to do with him is to do nothing; that is, to be as idle, lazy, and heartless in dealing with him as he is in dealing with us. Even if we provided work for him instead of basing, as we do, our whole industrial system on successive competitive waves of overwork with their ensuing troughs of unemployment, we should still sternly deny him the alternative of not doing it; for the result must be that he will become poor and make his children poor if he has any; and poor people are cancers in the commonwealth, costing far more than if they were handsomely pensioned off as incurables. Jesus had more sense than to propose anything of the sort. He said to his disciples, in effect, “Do your work for love; and let the other people lodge and feed and clothe you for love.” Or, as we should put it nowadays, “for nothing.” All human experience and all natural uncommercialized human aspiration point to this as the right path. The Greeks said, “First secure an independent income; and then practise virtue.” We all strive towards an independent income. We all know as well as Jesus did that if we have to take thought for the morrow as to whether there shall be anything to eat or drink it will be impossible for us to think of nobler things, or live a higher life than that of a mole, whose life is from beginning to end a frenzied pursuit of food. Until the community is organized in such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgotten as completely as the fear of wolves already is in civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent social life. Indeed the whole attraction of our present arrangements lies in the fact that they do relieve a handful of us from this fear; but as the relief is effected stupidly and wickedly by making the favored handful parasitic on the rest, they are smitten with the degeneracy which seems to be the inevitable biological penalty of complete parasitism, and corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them, their excessive leisure being as mischievous as the excessive toil of the laborers. Anyhow, the moral is clear. The two main problems of organized society, how to secure the subsistence of all its members, and how to prevent the theft of that subsistence by idlers, should be entirely dissociated; and the practical failure of one of them to automatically achieve the other recognized and acted on. We may not all have Jesus’s psychological power of seeing, without any enlightenment from more modern economic phenomena, that they must fail; but we have the hard fact before us that they do fail. The only people who cling to the lazy delusion that it is possible to find a just distribution that will work automatically are those who postulate some revolutionary change like land nationalization, which by itself would obviously only force into greater urgency the problem of how to distribute the product of the land among all the individuals in the community.

EQUAL DISTRIBUTION.

When that problem is at last faced, the question of the proportion in which the national income shall be distributed can have only one answer. All our shares must be equal. It has always been so; it always will be so. It is true that the incomes of robbers vary considerably from individual to individual; and the variation is reflected in the incomes of their parasites. The commercialization of certain exceptional talents has also produced exceptional incomes, direct and derivative. Persons who live on rent of land and capital are economically, though not legally, in the category of robbers, and have grotesquely different incomes. But in the huge mass of mankind variation Of income from individual to individual is unknown, because it is ridiculously impracticable. As a device for persuading a carpenter that a judge is a creature of superior nature to himself, to be deferred and submitted to even to the death, we may give a carpenter a hundred pounds a year and a judge five thousand; but the wage for one carpenter is the wage for all the carpenters: the salary for one judge is the salary for all the judges.

THE CAPTAIN AND THE CABIN BOY.

Nothing, therefore, is really in question, or ever has been, but the differences between class incomes. Already there is economic equality between captains, and economic equality between cabin boys. What is at issue still is whether there shall be economic equality between captains and cabin boys. What would Jesus have said? Presumably he would have said that if your only object is to produce a captain and a cabin boy for the purpose of transferring you from Liverpool to New York, or to manoeuvre a fleet and carry powder from the magazine to the gun, then you need give no more than a shilling to the cabin boy for every pound you give to the more expensively trained captain. But if in addition to this you desire to allow the two human souls which are inseparable from the captain and the cabin boy, and which alone differentiate them from the donkey-engine, to develop all their possibilities, then you may find the cabin boy costing rather more than the captain, because cabin boy’s work does not do so much for the soul as captain’s work. Consequently you will have to give him at least as much as the captain unless you definitely wish him to be a lower creature, in which case the sooner you are hanged as an abortionist the better. That is the fundamental argument.

THE POLITICAL AND BIOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO INEQUALITY.

But there are other reasons for objecting to class stratification of income which have heaped themselves up since the time of Jesus. In politics it defeats every form of government except that of a necessarily corrupt oligarchy. Democracy in the most democratic modern republics: Prance and the United States for example, is an imposture and a delusion. It reduces justice and law to a farce: law becomes merely an instrument for keeping the poor in subjection; and accused workmen are tried, not by a jury of their peers, but by conspiracies of their exploiters. The press is the press of the rich and the curse of the poor: it becomes dangerous to teach men to read. The priest becomes the mere complement of the policeman in the machinery by which the countryhouse oppresses the village. Worst of all, marriage becomes a class affair: the infinite variety of choice which nature offers to the young in search of a mate is narrowed to a handful of persons of similar income; and beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life. Society is not only divided but actually destroyed in all directions by inequality of income between classes: such stability as it has is due to the huge blocks of people between whom there is equality of income.

JESUS AS ECONOMIST.

It seems therefore that we must begin by holding the right to an income as sacred and equal, just as we now begin by holding the right to life as sacred and equal. Indeed the one right is only a restatement of the other. To hang me for cutting a dock laborer’s throat after making much of me for leaving him to starve when I do not happen to have a ship for him to unload is idiotic; for as he does far less mischief with his throat cut than when he is starving, a rational society would esteem the cutthroat more highly than the capitalist. The thing has become so obvious, and the evil so unendurable, that if our attempt at civilization is not to perish like all the previous ones, we shall have to organize our society in such a way as to be able to say to every person in the land, “Take no thought, saying What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” We shall then no longer have a race of men whose hearts are in their pockets and safes and at their bankers. As Jesus said, where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. That was why he recommended that money should cease to be a treasure, and that we should take steps to make ourselves utterly reckless of it, setting our minds free for higher uses. In other words, that we should all be gentlemen and take care of our country because our country takes care of us, instead of the commercialized cads we are, doing everything and anything for money, and selling our souls and bodies by the pound and the inch after wasting half the day haggling over the price. Decidedly, whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit that he was a first-rate political economist.

JESUS AS BIOLOGIST.

He was also, as we now see, a first-rate biologist. It took a century and a half of evolutionary preachers, from Buffon and Goethe to Butler and Bergson, to convince us that we and our father are one; that as the kingdom of heaven is within us we need not go about looking for it and crying Lo here! and Lo there!; that God is not a picture of a pompous person in white robes in the family Bible, but a spirit; that it is through this spirit that we evolve towards greater abundance of life; that we are the lamps in which the light of the world burns: that, in cohort, we are gods though we die like men. All that is today sound biology and psychology; and the efforts of Natural Selectionists like Weismann to reduce evolution to mere automatism have not touched the doctrine of Jesus, though they have made short work of the theologians who conceived God as a magnate keeping men and angels as Lord Rothschild keeps buffaloes and emus at Tring.

MONEY THE MIDWIFE OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNISM.

It may be asked here by some simple-minded reader why we should not resort to crude Communism as the disciples were told to do. This would be quite practicable in a village where production was limited to the supply of the primitive wants which nature imposes on all human beings alike. We know that people need bread and boots without waiting for them to come and ask for these things and offer to pay for them. But when civilization advances to the point at which articles are produced that no man absolutely needs and that only some men fancy or can use, it is necessary that individuals should be able to have things made to their order and at their own cost. It is safe to provide bread for everybody because everybody wants and eats bread; but it would be absurd to provide microscopes and trombones, pet snakes and polo mallets, alembics and test tubes for everybody, as nine-tenths of them would be wasted; and the nine-tenths of the population who do not use such things would object to their being provided at all. We have in the invaluable instrument called money a means of enabling every individual to order and pay for the particular things he desires over and above the things he must consume in order to remain alive, plus the things the State insists on his having and using whether he wants to or not; for example, clothes, sanitary arrangements, armies and navies. In large communities, where even the most eccentric demands for manufactured articles average themselves out until they can be foreseen within a negligible margin of error, direct communism (Take what you want without payment, as the people do in Morris’s News From Nowhere) will, after a little experience, be found not only practicable but highly economical to an extent that now seems impossible. The sportsmen, the musicians, the physicists, the biologists will get their apparatus for the asking as easily as their bread, or, as at present, their paving, street lighting, and bridges; and the deaf man will not object to contribute to communal flutes when the musician has to contribute to communal ear trumpets. There are cases (for example, radium) in which the demand may be limited to the merest handful of laboratory workers, and in which nevertheless the whole community must pay because the price is beyond the means of any individual worker. But even when the utmost allowance is made for extensions of communism that now seem fabulous, there will still remain for a long time to come regions of supply and demand in which men will need and use money or individual credit, and for which, therefore, they must have individual incomes. Foreign travel is an obvious instance. We are so far from even national communism still, that we shall probably have considerable developments of local communism before it becomes possible for a Manchester man to go up to London for a day without taking any money with him. The modern practical form of the communism of Jesus is therefore, for the present, equal distribution of the surplus of the national income that is not absorbed by simple communism.

JUDGE NOT.

In dealing with crime and the family, modern thought and experience have thrown no fresh light on the views of Jesus. When Swift had occasion to illustrate the corruption of our civilization by making a catalogue of the types of scoundrels it produces, he always gave judges a conspicuous place alongside of them they judged. And he seems to have done this not as a restatement of the doctrine of Jesus, but as the outcome of his own observation and judgment. One of Mr. Gilbert Chesterton’s stories has for its hero a judge who, whilst trying a criminal case, is so overwhelmed by the absurdity of his position and the wickedness of the things it forces him to do, that he throws off the ermine there and then, and goes out into the world to live the life of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There has also been a propaganda of a soulless stupidity called Determinism, representing man as a dead object driven hither and thither by his environment, antecedents, circumstances, and so forth, which nevertheless does remind us that there are limits to the number of cubits an individual can add to his stature morally or physically, and that it is silly as well as cruel to torment a man five feet high for not being able to pluck fruit that is within the reach of men of average height. I have known a case of an unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to tell the time after receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a clock dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and could not see them. This is a typical illustration of the absurdities and cruelties into which we are led by the counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will. The notion that people can be good if they like, and that you should give them a powerful additional motive for goodness by tormenting them when they do evil, would soon reduce itself to absurdity if its application were not kept within the limits which nature sets to the self-control of most of us. Nobody supposes that a man with no ear for music or no mathematical faculty could be compelled on pain of death, however cruelly inflicted, to hum all the themes of Beethoven’s symphonies or to complete Newton’s work on fluxions.

LIMITS TO FREE WILL.

Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the intimidations by which tyrannies are maintained under pretext of law, can be obeyed through the exercise of a quite common degree of reasoning power and self-control. Most men and women can endure the ordinary annoyances and disappointments of life without committing murderous assaults. They conclude therefore that any person can refrain from such assaults if he or she chooses to, and proceed to reinforce self-control by threats of severe punishment. But in this they are mistaken. There are people, some of them possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can no more restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws them than a dog can restrain himself from snapping if he is suddenly and painfully pinched. People fling knives and lighted paraffin lamps at one another in a dispute over a dinner-table. Men who have suffered several long sentences of penal servitude for murderous assaults will, the very day after they are released, seize their wives and cast them under drays at an irritating word. We have not only people who cannot resist an opportunity of stealing for the sake of satisfying their wants, but even people who have a specific mania for stealing, and do it when they are in no need of the things they steal. Burglary fascinates some men as sailoring fascinates some boys. Among respectable people how many are there who can be restrained by the warnings of their doctors and the lessons of experience from eating and drinking more than is good for them? It is true that between self-controlled people and ungovernable people there is a narrow margin of moral malingerers who can be made to behave themselves by the fear of consequences; but it is not worth while maintaining an abominable system of malicious, deliberate, costly and degrading ill-treatment of criminals for the sake of these marginal cases. For practical dealing with crime, Determinism or Predestination is quite a good working rule. People without self-control enough for social purposes may be killed, or may be kept in asylums with a view to studying their condition and ascertaining whether it is curable. To torture them and give ourselves virtuous airs at their expense is ridiculous and barbarous; and the desire to do it is vindictive and cruel. And though vindictiveness and cruelty are at least human qualities when they are frankly proclaimed and indulged, they are loathsome when they assume the robes of Justice. Which, I take it, is why Shakespear’s Isabella gave such a dressing-down to Judge Angelo, and why Swift reserved the hottest corner of his hell for judges. Also, of course, why Jesus said “Judge not that ye be not judged” and “If any man hear my words and believe not, I judge him not” because “he hath one that judgeth him”: namely, the Father who is one with him.

When we are robbed we generally appeal to the criminal law, not considering that if the criminal law were effective we should not have been robbed. That convicts us of vengeance.

I need not elaborate the argument further. I have dealt with it sufficiently elsewhere. I have only to point out that we have been judging and punishing ever since Jesus told us not to; and I defy anyone to make out a convincing case for believing that the world has been any better than it would have been if there had never been a judge, a prison, or a gallows in it all that time. We have simply added the misery of punishment to the misery of crime, and the cruelty of the judge to the cruelty of the criminal. We have taken the bad man, and made him worse by torture and degradation, incidentally making ourselves worse in the process. It does not seem very sensible, does it? It would have been far easier to kill him as kindly as possible, or to label him and leave him to his conscience, or to treat him as an invalid or a lunatic is now treated (it is only of late years, by the way, that madmen have been delivered from the whip, the chain, and the cage; and this, I presume, is the form in which the teaching of Jesus could have been put into practice.)

JESUS ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY.

When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the same objection to that individual appropriation of human beings which is the essence of matrimony as to the individual appropriation of wealth. A married man, he said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman to please her husband, instead of doing the work of God. This is another version of “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Eighteen hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus, Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this, though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be a moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he forfeits that right when he marries. It took a revolution to rescue Wagner from his Court appointment at Dresden; and his wife never forgave him for being glad and feeling free when he lost it and threw her back into poverty. Millet might have gone on painting potboiling nudes to the end of his life if his wife had not been of a heroic turn herself. Women, for the sake of their children and parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached woman would endure.

This was the beginning and the end of the objection of Jesus to marriage and family ties, and the explanation of his conception of heaven as a place where there should be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. Now there is no reason to suppose that when he said this he did not mean it. He did not, as St. Paul did afterwards in his name, propose celibacy as a rule of life; for he was not a fool, nor, when he denounced marriage, had he yet come to believe, as St. Paul did, that the end of the world was at hand and there was therefore no more need to replenish the earth. He must have meant that the race should be continued without dividing with women and men the allegiance the individual owes to God within him. This raises the practical problem of how we are to secure the spiritual freedom and integrity of the priest and the nun without their barrenness and uncompleted experience. Luther the priest did not solve the problem by marrying a nun: he only testified in the most convincing and practical way to the fact that celibacy was a worse failure than marriage.

WHY JESUS DID NOT MARRY.

To all appearance the problem oppresses only a few exceptional people. Thoroughly conventional women married to thoroughly conventional men should not be conscious of any restriction: the chain not only leaves them free to do whatever they want to do, but greatly facilitates their doing it. To them an attack on marriage is not a blow struck in defence of their freedom but at their rights and privileges. One would expect that they would not only demur vehemently to the teachings of Jesus in this matter, but object strongly to his not having been a married man himself. Even those who regard him as a god descended from his throne in heaven to take on humanity for a time might reasonably declare that the assumption of humanity must have been incomplete at its most vital point if he were a celibate. But the facts are flatly contrary. The mere thought of Jesus as a married man is felt to be blasphemous by the most conventional believers; and even those of us to whom Jesus is no supernatural personage, but a prophet only as Mahomet was a prophet, feel that there was something more dignified in the bachelordom of Jesus than in the spectacle of Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of his harem whilst his wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked round him. We are not surprised that when Jesus called the sons of Zebedee to follow him, he did not call their father, and that the disciples, like Jesus himself, were all men without family entanglements. It is evident from his impatience when people excused themselves from following him because of their family funerals, or when they assumed that his first duty was to his mother, that he had found family ties and domestic affections in his way at every turn, and had become persuaded at last that no man could follow his inner light until he was free from their compulsion. The absence of any protest against this tempts us to declare on this question of marriage there are no conventional people; and that everyone of us is at heart a good Christian sexually.

INCONSISTENCY OF THE SEX INSTINCT.

But the question is not so simple as that. Sex is an exceedingly subtle and complicated instinct; and the mass of mankind neither know nor care much about freedom of conscience, which is what Jesus was thinking about, and are concerned almost to obsession with sex, as to which Jesus said nothing. In our sexual natures we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming repugnance and disgust. We have two tyrannous physical passions: concupiscence and chastity. We become mad in pursuit of sex: we become equally mad in the persecution of that pursuit. Unless we gratify our desire the race is lost: unless we restrain it we destroy ourselves. We are thus led to devise marriage institutions which will at the same time secure opportunities for the gratification of sex and raise up innumerable obstacles to it; which will sanctify it and brand it as infamous; which will identify it with virtue and with sin simultaneously. Obviously it is useless to look for any consistency in such institutions; and it is only by continual reform and readjustment, and by a considerable elasticity in their enforcement, that a tolerable result can be arrived at. I need not repeat here the long and elaborate examination of them that I prefixed to my play entitled Getting Married. Here I am concerned only with the views of Jesus on the question; and it is necessary, in order to understand the attitude of the world towards them, that we should not attribute the general approval of the decision of Jesus to remain unmarried as an endorsement of his views. We are simply in a state of confusion on the subject; but it is part of the confusion that we should conclude that Jesus was a celibate, and shrink even from the idea that his birth was a natural one, yet cling with ferocity to the sacredness of the institution which provides a refuge from celibacy.

FOR BETTER OR WORSE.

Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of marriage. His objection to it was quite simple, as we have seen. He perceived that nobody could live the higher life unless money and sexual love were obtainable without sacrificing it; and he saw that the effect of marriage as it existed among the Jews (and as it still exists among ourselves) was to make the couples sacrifice every higher consideration until they had fed and pleased one another. The worst of it is that this dangerous preposterousness in marriage, instead of improving as the general conduct of married couples improves, becomes much worse. The selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the selfish woman to whom her husband is nothing but a scapegoat and a breadwinner, are not held back from spiritual or any other adventures by fear of their effect on the welfare of their mates. Their wives do not make recreants and cowards of them: their husbands do not chain them to the cradle and the cooking range when their feet should be beautiful on the mountains. It is precisely as people become more kindly, more conscientious, more ready to shoulder the heavier part of the burden (which means that the strong shall give way to the weak and the slow hold back the swift), that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle to individual evolution. And that is why the revolt against marriage of which Jesus was an exponent always recurs when civilization raises the standard of marital duty and affection, and at the same time produces a greater need for individual freedom in pursuit of a higher evolution. This, fortunately, is only one side of marriage; and the question arises, can it not be eliminated? The reply is reassuring: of course it can. There is no mortal reason in the nature of things why a married couple should be economically dependent on one another. The Communism advocated by Jesus, which we have seen to be entirely practicable, and indeed inevitable if our civilization is to be saved from collapse, gets rid of that difficulty completely. And with the economic dependence will go the force of the outrageous claims that derive their real sanction from the economic pressure behind them. When a man allows his wife to turn him from the best work he is capable of doing, and to sell his soul at the highest commercial prices obtainable; when he allows her to entangle him in a social routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or tie him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional solitude which is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does so because he has no right to impose eccentric standards of expenditure and unsocial habits on her, and because these conditions have produced by their pressure so general a custom of chaining wedded couples to one another that married people are coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. And when a woman is condemned by her parents to wait in genteel idleness and uselessness for a husband when all her healthy social instincts call her to acquire a profession and work, it is again her economic dependence on them that makes their tyranny effective.

THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE.

Thus, though it would be too much to say that everything that is obnoxious in marriage and family life will be cured by Communism, yet it can be said that it will cure what Jesus objected to in these institutions. He made no comprehensive study of them: he only expressed his own grievance with an overwhelming sense that it is a grievance so deep that all the considerations on the other side are as dust in the balance. Obviously there are such considerations, and very weighty ones too. When Talleyrand said that a married man with a family is capable of anything, he meant anything evil; but an optimist may declare, with equal half truth, that a married man is capable of anything good; that marriage turns vagabonds into steady citizens; and that men and women will, for love of their mates and children, practise virtues that unattached individuals are incapable of. It is true that too much of this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule: both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end; and though Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the mischief he does do is of extraordinary intensity.

CELIBACY NO REMEDY.

We must, I think, regard the protest of Jesus against marriage and family ties as the claim of a particular kind of individual to be free from them because they hamper his own work intolerably. When he said that if we are to follow him in the sense of taking up his work we must give up our family ties, he was simply stating a fact; and to this day the Roman Catholic priest, the Buddhist lama, and the fakirs of all the eastern denominations accept the saying. It is also accepted by the physically enterprising, the explorers, the restlessly energetic of all kinds, in short, by the adventurous. The greatest sacrifice in marriage is the sacrifice of the adventurous attitude towards life: the being settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settlement; but to fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of any institution that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the moralizings of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its slavery. The unmarried Jesus and the unmarried Beethoven, the unmarried Joan of Arc, Clare, Teresa, Florence Nightingale seem as they should be; and the saying that there is always something ridiculous about a married philosopher becomes inevitable. And yet the celibate is still more ridiculous than the married man: the priest, in accepting the alternative of celibacy, disables himself; and the best priests are those who have been men of this world before they became men of the world to come. But as the taking of vows does not annul an existing marriage, and a married man cannot become a priest, we are again confronted with the absurdity that the best priest is a reformed rake. Thus does marriage, itself intolerable, thrust us upon intolerable alternatives. The practical solution is to make the individual economically independent of marriage and the family, and to make marriage as easily dissoluble as any other partnership: in other words, to accept the conclusions to which experience is slowly driving both our sociologists and our legislators. This will not instantly cure all the evils of marriage, nor root up at one stroke its detestable tradition of property in human bodies. But it will leave Nature free to effect a cure; and in free soil the root may wither and perish.

This disposes of all the opinions and teachings of Jesus which are still matters of controversy. They are all in line with the best modern thought. He told us what we have to do; and we have had to find the way to do it. Most of us are still, as most were in his own time, extremely recalcitrant, and are being forced along that way by painful pressure of circumstances, protesting at every step that nothing will induce us to go; that it is a ridiculous way, a disgraceful way, a socialistic way, an atheistic way, an immoral way, and that the vanguard ought to be ashamed of themselves and must be made to turn back at once. But they find that they have to follow the vanguard all the same if their lives are to be worth living.

AFTER THE CRUCIFIXION.

Let us now return to the New Testament narrative; for what happened after the disappearance of Jesus is instructive. Unfortunately, the crucifixion was a complete political success. I remember that when I described it in these terms once before, I greatly shocked a most respectable newspaper in my native town, the Dublin Daily Express, because my journalistic phrase showed that I was treating it as an ordinary event like Home Rule or the Insurance Act: that is (though this did not occur to the editor), as a real event which had really happened, instead of a portion of the Church service. I can only repeat, assuming as I am that it was a real event and did actually happen, that it was as complete a success as any in history. Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since. And that thing the intelligent heathen may study, if they would be instructed in it by modern books, in Samuel Butler’s novel, The Way of All Flesh.

THE VINDICTIVE MIRACLES AND THE STONING OF STEPHEN.

Take, for example, the miracles. Of Jesus alone of all the Christian miracle workers there is no record, except in certain gospels that all men reject, of a malicious or destructive miracle. A barren fig-tree was the only victim of his anger. Every one of his miracles on sentient subjects was an act of kindness. John declares that he healed the wound of the man whose ear was cut off (by Peter, John says) at the arrest in the garden. One of the first things the apostles did with their miraculous power was to strike dead a wretched man and his wife who had defrauded them by holding back some money from the common stock. They struck people blind or dead without remorse, judging because they had been judged. They healed the sick and raised the dead apparently in a spirit of pure display and advertisement. Their doctrine did not contain a ray of that light which reveals Jesus as one of the redeemers of men from folly and error. They cancelled him, and went back straight to John the Baptist and his formula of securing remission of sins by repentance and the rite of baptism (being born again of water and the spirit). Peter’s first harangue softens us by the human touch of its exordium, which was a quaint assurance to his hearers that they must believe him to be sober because it was too early in the day to get drunk; but of Jesus he had nothing to say except that he was the Christ foretold by the prophets as coming from the seed of David, and that they must believe this and be baptized. To this the other apostles added incessant denunciations of the Jews for having crucified him, and threats of the destruction that would overtake them if they did not repent: that is, if they did not join the sect which the apostles were now forming. A quite intolerable young speaker named Stephen delivered an oration to the council, in which he first inflicted on them a tedious sketch of the history of Israel, with which they were presumably as well acquainted as he, and then reviled them in the most insulting terms as “stiffnecked and uncircumcized.” Finally, after boring and annoying them to the utmost bearable extremity, he looked up and declared that he saw the heavens open, and Christ standing on the right hand of God. This was too much: they threw him out of the city and stoned him to death. It was a severe way of suppressing a tactless and conceited bore; but it was pardonable and human in comparison to the slaughter of poor Ananias and Sapphira.

PAUL.

Suddenly a man of genius, Paul, violently anti-Christian, enters on the scene, holding the clothes of the men who are stoning Stephen. He persecutes the Christians with great vigor, a sport which he combines with the business of a tentmaker. This temperamental hatred of Jesus, whom he has never seen, is a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny of two delirious terrors: the terror of sin and the terror of death, which may be called also the terror of sex and the terror of life. Now Jesus, with his healthy conscience on his higher plane, was free from these terrors. He consorted freely with sinners, and was never concerned for a moment, as far as we know, about whether his conduct was sinful or not; so that he has forced us to accept him as the man without sin. Even if we reckon his last days as the days of his delusion, he none the less gave a fairly convincing exhibition of superiority to the fear of death. This must have both fascinated and horrified Paul, or Saul, as he was first called. The horror accounts for his fierce persecution of the Christians. The fascination accounts for the strangest of his fancies: the fancy for attaching the name of Jesus Christ to the great idea which flashed upon him on the road to Damascus, the idea that he could not only make a religion of his two terrors, but that the movement started by Jesus offered him the nucleus for his new Church. It was a monstrous idea; and the shocks of it, as he afterwards declared, struck him blind for days. He heard Jesus calling to him from the clouds, “Why persecute me?” His natural hatred of the teacher for whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen in a false light.

The chronicler of the Acts of the Apostles sees nothing of the significance of this. The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it. Years ago I said that the conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that had raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life became a denial of life. Paul had no intention of surrendering either his Judaism or his Roman citizenship to the new moral world (as Robert Owen called it) of Communism and Jesuism. Just as in the XIX century Karl Marx, not content to take political economy as he found it, insisted on rebuilding it from the bottom upwards in his own way, and thereby gave a new lease of life to the errors it was just outgrowing, so Paul reconstructed the old Salvationism from which Jesus had vainly tried to redeem him, and produced a fantastic theology which is still the most amazing thing of the kind known to us. Being intellectually an inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate, he began by discarding Man as he is, and substituted a postulate which he called Adam. And when he was asked, as he surely must have been in a world not wholly mad, what had become of the natural man, he replied “Adam IS the natural man.” This was confusing to simpletons, because according to tradition Adam was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had described as typically British Frankenstein’s monster, and called him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about the man in the street, had been told “Smith is the man in the street.” The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what not, all of them imaginary Atlases carrying imaginary worlds on their unsubstantial shoulders.

The Eden story provided Adam with a sin: the “original sin” for which we are all damned. Baldly stated, this seems ridiculous; nevertheless it corresponds to something actually existent not only in Paul’s consciousness but in our own. The original sin was not the eating of the forbidden fruit, but the consciousness of sin which the fruit produced. The moment Adam and Eve tasted the apple they found themselves ashamed of their sexual relation, which until then had seemed quite innocent to them; and there is no getting over the hard fact that this shame, or state of sin, has persisted to this day, and is one of the strongest of our instincts. Thus Paul’s postulate of Adam as the natural man was pragmatically true: it worked. But the weakness of Pragmatism is that most theories will work if you put your back into making them work, provided they have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England. Paul’s fantastic conception of the damned Adam, represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins on his back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of evolution, which is, that life, including human life, is continually evolving, and must therefore be continually ashamed of itself and its present and past. Bunyan’s pilgrim wants to get rid of his bundle of sins; but he also wants to reach “yonder shining light;” and when at last his bundle falls off him into the sepulchre of Christ, his pilgrimage is still unfinished and his hardest trials still ahead of him. His conscience remains uneasy; “original sin” still torments him; and his adventure with Giant Despair, who throws him into the dungeon of Doubting Castle, from which he escapes by the use of a skeleton key, is more terrible than any he met whilst the bundle was still on his back. Thus Bunyan’s allegory of human nature breaks through the Pauline theology at a hundred points. His theological allegory, The Holy War, with its troops of Election Doubters, and its cavalry of “those that rode Reformadoes,” is, as a whole, absurd, impossible, and, except in passages where the artistic old Adam momentarily got the better of the Salvationist theologian, hardly readable.

Paul’s theory of original sin was to some extent idiosyncratic. He tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to avoid the sinfulness of sex by practising celibacy; but he recognizes, rather contemptuously, that in this respect he is not as other men are, and says that they had better marry than burn, thus admitting that though marriage may lead to placing the desire to please wife or husband before the desire to please God, yet preoccupation with unsatisfied desire may be even more ungodly than preoccupation with domestic affection. This view of the case inevitably led him to insist that a wife should be rather a slave than a partner, her real function being, not to engage a man’s love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex just as in her capacity of a housekeeper and cook she relieves his preoccupation with hunger by the simple expedient of satisfying his appetite. This slavery also justifies itself pragmatically by working effectively; but it has made Paul the eternal enemy of Woman. Incidentally it has led to many foolish surmises about Paul’s personal character and circumstance, by people so enslaved by sex that a celibate appears to them a sort of monster. They forget that not only whole priesthoods, official and unofficial, from Paul to Carlyle and Ruskin, have defied the tyranny of sex, but immense numbers of ordinary citizens of both sexes have, either voluntarily or under pressure of circumstances easily surmountable, saved their energies for less primitive activities.

Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.

THE CONFUSION OF CHRISTENDOM.

Now it is evident that two religions having such contrary effects on mankind should not be confused as they are under a common name. There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus. When Saul watched the clothes of the men who stoned Stephen, he was not acting upon beliefs which Paul renounced. There is no record of Christ’s having ever said to any man: “Go and sin as much as you like: you can put it all on me.” He said “Sin no more,” and insisted that he was putting up the standard of conduct, not debasing it, and that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed that of the Scribe and Pharisee. The notion that he was shedding his blood in order that every petty cheat and adulterator and libertine might wallow in it and come out whiter than snow, cannot be imputed to him on his own authority. “I come as an infallible patent medicine for bad consciences” is not one of the sayings in the gospels. If Jesus could have been consulted on Bunyan’s allegory as to that business of the burden of sin dropping from the pilgrim’s back when he caught sight of the cross, we must infer from his teaching that he would have told Bunyan in forcible terms that he had never made a greater mistake in his life, and that the business of a Christ was to make self-satisfied sinners feel the burden of their sins and stop committing them instead of assuring them that they could not help it, as it was all Adam’s fault, but that it did not matter as long as they were credulous and friendly about himself. Even when he believed himself to be a god, he did not regard himself as a scapegoat. He was to take away the sins of the world by good government, by justice and mercy, by setting the welfare of little children above the pride of princes, by casting all the quackeries and idolatries which now usurp and malversate the power of God into what our local authorities quaintly call the dust destructor, and by riding on the clouds of heaven in glory instead of in a thousand-guinea motor car. That was delirious, if you like; but it was the delirium of a free soul, not of a shamebound one like Paul’s. There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations of Paul’s soul upon the soul of Jesus.

THE SECRET OF PAUL’S SUCCESS.

Paul must soon have found that his followers had gained peace of mind and victory over death and sin at the cost of all moral responsibility; for he did his best to reintroduce it by making good conduct the test of sincere belief, and insisting that sincere belief was necessary to salvation. But as his system was rooted in the plain fact that as what he called sin includes sex and is therefore an ineradicable part of human nature (why else should Christ have had to atone for the sin of all future generations?) it was impossible for him to declare that sin, even in its wickedest extremity, could forfeit the sinner’s salvation if he repented and believed. And to this day Pauline Christianity is, and owes its enormous vogue to being, a premium on sin. Its consequences have had to be held in check by the worldlywise majority through a violently anti-Christian system of criminal law and stern morality. But of course the main restraint is human nature, which has good impulses as well as bad ones, and refrains from theft and murder and cruelty, even when it is taught that it can commit them all at the expense of Christ and go happily to heaven afterwards, simply because it does not always want to murder or rob or torture.

It is now easy to understand why the Christianity of Jesus failed completely to establish itself politically and socially, and was easily suppressed by the police and the Church, whilst Paulinism overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith, the old avenging gods falling helplessly before the new Redeemer. It still retains, as we may see in Africa, its power of bringing to simple people a message of hope and consolation that no other religion offers. But this enchantment is produced by its spurious association with the personal charm of Jesus, and exists only for untrained minds. In the hands of a logical Frenchman like Calvin, pushing it to its utmost conclusions, and devising “institutes” for hardheaded adult Scots and literal Swiss, it becomes the most infernal of fatalisms; and the lives of civilized children are blighted by its logic whilst negro piccaninnies are rejoicing in its legends.

PAUL’S QUALITIES

Paul, however, did not get his great reputation by mere imposition and reaction. It is only in comparison with Jesus (to whom many prefer him) that he appears common and conceited. Though in The Acts he is only a vulgar revivalist, he comes out in his own epistles as a genuine poet, — though by flashes only. He is no more a Christian than Jesus was a Baptist; he is a disciple of Jesus only as Jesus was a disciple of John. He does nothing that Jesus would have done, and says nothing that Jesus would have said, though much, like the famous ode to charity, that he would have admired. He is more Jewish than the Jews, more Roman than the Romans, proud both ways, full of startling confessions and self-revelations that would not surprise us if they were slipped into the pages of Nietzsche, tormented by an intellectual conscience that demanded an argued case even at the cost of sophistry, with all sorts of fine qualities and occasional illuminations, but always hopelessly in the toils of Sin, Death, and Logic, which had no power over Jesus. As we have seen, it was by introducing this bondage and terror of his into the Christian doctrine that he adapted it to the Church and State systems which Jesus transcended, and made it practicable by destroying the specifically Jesuist side of it. He would have been quite in his place in any modern Protestant State; and he, not Jesus, is the true head and founder of our Reformed Church, as Peter is of the Roman Church. The followers of Paul and Peter made Christendom, whilst the Nazarenes were wiped out.

THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES.

Here we may return to the narrative called The Acts of the Apostles, which we left at the point where the stoning of Stephen was followed by the introduction of Paul. The author of The Acts, though a good story-teller, like Luke, was (herein also like Luke) much weaker in power of thought than in imaginative literary art. Hence we find Luke credited with the authorship of The Acts by people who like stories and have no aptitude for theology, whilst the book itself is denounced as spurious by Pauline theologians because Paul, and indeed all the apostles, are represented in it as very commonplace revivalists, interesting us by their adventures more than by any qualities of mind or character. Indeed, but for the epistles, we should have a very poor opinion of the apostles. Paul in particular is described as setting a fashion which has remained in continual use to this day. Whenever he addresses an audience, he dwells with great zest on his misdeeds before his pseudo conversion, with the effect of throwing into stronger relief his present state of blessedness; and he tells the story of that conversion over and over again, ending with exhortations to the hearers to come and be saved, and threats of the wrath that will overtake them if they refuse. At any revival meeting today the same thing may be heard, followed by the same conversions. This is natural enough; but it is totally unlike the preaching of Jesus, who never talked about his personal history, and never “worked up” an audience to hysteria. It aims at a purely nervous effect; it brings no enlightenment; the most ignorant man has only to become intoxicated with his own vanity, and mistake his self-satisfaction for the Holy Ghost, to become qualified as an apostle; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the characteristic doctrines of Jesus. The Holy Ghost may be at work all round producing wonders of art and science, and strengthening men to endure all sorts of martyrdoms for the enlargement of knowledge, and the enrichment and intensification of life (“that ye may have life more abundantly”); but the apostles, as described in The Acts, take no part in the struggle except as persecutors and revilers. To this day, when their successors get the upper hand, as in Geneva (Knox’s “perfect city of Christ”) and in Scotland and Ulster, every spiritual activity but moneymaking and churchgoing is stamped out; heretics are ruthlessly persecuted; and such pleasures as money can purchase are suppressed so that its possessors are compelled to go on making money because there is nothing else to do. And the compensation for all this privation is partly an insane conceit of being the elect of God, with a reserved seat in heaven, and partly, since even the most infatuated idiot cannot spend his life admiring himself, the less innocent excitement of punishing other people for not admiring him, and the nosing out of the sins of the people who, being intelligent enough to be incapable of mere dull self-righteousness, and highly susceptible to the beauty and interest of the real workings of the Holy Ghost, try to live more rational and abundant lives. The abominable amusement of terrifying children with threats of hell is another of these diversions, and perhaps the vilest and most mischievous of them. The net result is that the imitators of the apostles, whether they are called Holy Willies or Stigginses in derision, or, in admiration, Puritans or saints, are, outside their own congregations, and to a considerable extent inside them, heartily detested. Now nobody detests Jesus, though many who have been tormented in their childhood in his name include him in their general loathing of everything connected with the word religion; whilst others, who know him only by misrepresentation as a sentimental pacifist and an ascetic, include him in their general dislike of that type of character. In the same way a student who has had to “get up” Shakespear as a college subject may hate Shakespear; and people who dislike the theatre may include Moliere in that dislike without ever having read a line of his or witnessed one of his plays; but nobody with any knowledge of Shakespear or Moliere could possibly detest them, or read without pity and horror a description of their being insulted, tortured, and killed. And the same is true of Jesus. But it requires the most strenuous effort of conscience to refrain from crying “Serve him right” when we read of the stoning of Stephen; and nobody has ever cared twopence about the martyrdom of Peter: many better men have died worse deaths: for example, honest Hugh Latimer, who was burned by us, was worth fifty Stephens and a dozen Peters. One feels at last that when Jesus called Peter from his boat, he spoiled an honest fisherman, and made nothing better out of the wreck than a salvation monger.

THE CONTROVERSIES ON BAPTISM AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Meanwhile the inevitable effect of dropping the peculiar doctrines of Jesus and going back to John the Baptist, was to make it much easier to convert Gentiles than Jews; and it was by following the line of least resistance that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles. The Jews had their own rite of initiation: the rite of circumcision; and they were fiercely jealous for it, because it marked them as the chosen people of God, and set them apart from the Gentiles, who were simply the uncircumcized. When Paul, finding that baptism made way faster among the Gentiles than among the Jews, as it enabled them to plead that they too were sanctified by a rite of later and higher authority than the Mosaic rite, he was compelled to admit that circumcision did not matter; and this, to the Jews, was an intolerable blasphemy. To Gentiles like ourselves, a good deal of the Epistle to the Romans is now tedious to unreadableness because it consists of a hopeless attempt by Paul to evade the conclusion that if a man were baptized it did not matter a rap whether he was circumcized or not. Paul claims circumcision as an excellent thing in its way for a Jew; but if it has no efficacy towards salvation, and if salvation is the one thing needful — and Paul was committed to both propositions — his pleas in mitigation only made the Jews more determined to stone him.

Thus from the very beginning of apostolic Christianity, it was hampered by a dispute as to whether salvation was to be attained by a surgical operation or by a sprinkling of water: mere rites on which Jesus would not have wasted twenty words. Later on, when the new sect conquered the Gentile west, where the dispute had no practical application, the other ceremony — that of eating the god — produced a still more disastrous dispute, in which a difference of belief, not as to the obligation to perform the ceremony, but as to whether it was a symbolic or a real ingestion of divine substance, produced persecution, slaughter, hatred, and everything that Jesus loathed, on a monstrous scale.

But long before that, the superstitions which had fastened on the new faith made trouble. The parthenogenetic birth of Christ, simple enough at first as a popular miracle, was not left so simple by the theologians. They began to ask of what substance Christ was made in the womb of the virgin. When the Trinity was added to the faith the question arose, was the virgin the mother of God or only the mother of Jesus? Arian schisms and Nestorian schisms arose on these questions; and the leaders of the resultant agitations rancorously deposed one another and excommunicated one another according to their luck in enlisting the emperors on their side. In the IV century they began to burn one another for differences of opinion in such matters. In the VIII century Charlemagne made Christianity compulsory by killing those who refused to embrace it; and though this made an end of the voluntary character of conversion, Charlemagne may claim to be the first Christian who put men to death for any point of doctrine that really mattered. From his time onward the history of Christian controversy reeks with blood and fire, torture and warfare. The Crusades, the persecutions in Albi and elsewhere, the Inquisition, the “wars of religion” which followed the Reformation, all presented themselves as Christian phenomena; but who can doubt that they would have been repudiated with horror by Jesus? Our own notion that the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s was an outrage on Christianity, whilst the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, and even of Frederick the Great, were a defence of it, is as absurd as the opposite notion that Frederick was Antichrist and Torquemada and Ignatius Loyola men after the very heart of Jesus. Neither they nor their exploits had anything to do with him. It is probable that Archbishop Laud and John Wesley died equally persuaded that he in whose name they had made themselves famous on earth would receive them in Heaven with open arms. Poor Fox the Quaker would have had ten times their chance; and yet Fox made rather a miserable business of life.

Nevertheless all these perversions of the doctrine of Jesus derived their moral force from his credit, and so had to keep his gospel alive. When the Protestants translated the Bible into the vernacular and let it loose among the people, they did an extremely dangerous thing, as the mischief which followed proves; but they incidentally let loose the sayings of Jesus in open competition with the sayings of Paul and Koheleth and David and Solomon and the authors of Job and the Pentateuch; and, as we have seen, Jesus seems to be the winning name. The glaring contradiction between his teaching and the practice of all the States and all the Churches is no longer hidden. And it may be that though nineteen centuries have passed since Jesus was born (the date of his birth is now quaintly given as 7 B.C., though some contend for 100 B.C.), and though his Church has not yet been founded nor his political system tried, the bankruptcy of all the other systems when audited by our vital statistics, which give us a final test for all political systems, is driving us hard into accepting him, not as a scapegoat, but as one who was much less of a fool in practical matters than we have hitherto all thought him.

THE ALTERNATIVE CHRISTS.

Let us now clear up the situation a little. The New Testament tells two stories for two different sorts of readers. One is the old story of the achievement of our salvation by the sacrifice and atonement of a divine personage who was barbarously slain and rose again on the third day: the story as it was accepted by the apostles. And in this story the political, economic, and moral views of the Christ have no importance: the atonement is everything; and we are saved by our faith in it, and not by works or opinions (other than that particular opinion) bearing on practical affairs.

The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing several very interesting opinions as to practical conduct, both personal and political, which are now of pressing importance, and instructing his disciples to carry them out in their daily life, lost his head; believed himself to be a crude legendary form of god; and under that delusion courted and suffered a cruel execution in the belief that he would rise from the dead and come in glory to reign over a regenerated world. In this form, the political, economic and moral opinions of Jesus, as guides to conduct, are interesting and important: the rest is mere psychopathy and superstition. The accounts of the resurrection, the parthenogenetic birth, and the more incredible miracles are rejected as inventions; and such episodes as the conversation with the devil are classed with similar conversations recorded of St. Dunstan, Luther, Bunyan, Swedenborg, and Blake.

CREDULITY NO CRITERION.

This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the gospel is not peculiar to the Secularist view. We have seen Luke and John reject Matthew’s story of the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt without ceremony. The notion that Matthew’s manuscript is a literal and infallible record of facts, not subject to the errors that beset all earthly chroniclers, would have made John stare, being as it is a comparatively modern fancy of intellectually untrained people who keep the Bible on the same shelf, with Napoleon’s Book of Fate, Old Moore’s Almanack, and handbooks of therapeutic herbalism. You may be a fanatical Salvationist and reject more miracle stories than Huxley did; and you may utterly repudiate Jesus as the Savior and yet cite him as a historical witness to the possession by men of the most marvellous thaumaturgical powers. “Christ Scientist” and Jesus the Mahatma are preached by people whom Peter would have struck dead as worse infidels than Simon Magus; and the Atonement; is preached by Baptist and Congregationalist ministers whose views of the miracles are those of Ingersoll and Bradlaugh. Luther, who made a clean sweep of all the saints with their million miracles, and reduced the Blessed Virgin herself to the status of an idol, concentrated Salvationism to a point at which the most execrable murderer who believes in it when the rope is round his neck, flies straight to the arms of Jesus, whilst Tom Paine and Shelley fall into the bottomless pit to burn there to all eternity. And sceptical physicists like Sir William Crookes demonstrate by laboratory experiments that “mediums” like Douglas Home can make the pointer of a spring-balance go round without touching the weight suspended from it.

BELIEF IN PERSONAL IMMORTALITY NO CRITERION.

Nor is belief in individual immortality any criterion. Theosophists, rejecting vicarious atonement so sternly that they insist that the smallest of our sins brings its Karma, also insist on individual immortality and metempsychosis in order to provide an unlimited field for Karma to be worked out by the unredeemed sinner. The belief in the prolongation of individual life beyond the grave is far more real and vivid among table-rapping Spiritualists than among conventional Christians. The notion that those who reject the Christian (or any other) scheme of salvation by atonement must reject also belief in personal immortality and in miracles is as baseless as the notion that if a man is an atheist he will steal your watch.

I could multiply these instances to weariness. The main difference that set Gladstone and Huxley by the ears is not one between belief in supernatural persons or miraculous events and the sternest view of such belief as a breach of intellectual integrity: it is the difference between belief in the efficacy of the crucifixion as an infallible cure for guilt, and a congenital incapacity for believing this, or (the same thing) desiring to believe it.

THE SECULAR VIEW NATURAL, NOT RATIONAL, THEREFORE INEVITABLE.

It must therefore be taken as a flat fundamental modern fact, whether we like it or not, that whilst many of us cannot believe that Jesus got his curious grip of our souls by mere sentimentality, neither can we believe that he was John Barleycorn. The more our reason and study lead us to believe that Jesus was talking the most penetrating good sense when he preached Communism; when he declared that the reality behind the popular belief in God was a creative spirit in ourselves, called by him the Heavenly Father and by us Evolution, Elan Vital, Life Force and other names; when he protested against the claims of marriage and the family to appropriate that high part of our energy that was meant for the service of his Father, the more impossible it becomes for us to believe that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly announced that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the traditional manner and would rise from the dead after three days; and that at his second coming the stars would fall from heaven and he become king of an earthly paradise. But it is easy and reasonable to believe that an overwrought preacher at last went mad as Swift and Ruskin and Nietzsche went mad. Every asylum has in it a patient suffering from the delusion that he is a god, yet otherwise sane enough. These patients do not nowadays declare that they will be barbarously slain and will rise from the dead, because they have lost that tradition of the destiny of godhead; but they claim everything appertaining to divinity that is within their knowledge.

Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of sociological and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern civilization, though ending in the history of a psycopathic delusion, are quite credible, intelligible, and interesting to modern thinkers. In any other light they are neither credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to people upon whom the delusion imposes.

“THE HIGHER CRITICISM.”

Historical research and paleographic criticism will no doubt continue their demonstrations that the New Testament, like the Old, seldom tells a single story or expounds a single doctrine, and gives us often an accretion and conglomeration of widely discrete and even unrelated traditions and doctrines. But these disintegrations, though technically interesting to scholars, and gratifying or exasperating, as the case may be, to people who are merely defending or attacking the paper fortifications of the infallibility of the Bible, have hardly anything to do with the purpose of these pages. I have mentioned the fact that most of the authorities are now agreed (for the moment) that the date of the birth of Jesus may be placed at about 7 B.C.; but they do not therefore date their letters 1923, nor, I presume, do they expect me to do so. What I am engaged in is a criticism (in the Kantian sense) of an established body of belief which has become an actual part of the mental fabric of my readers; and I should be the most exasperating of triflers and pedants if I were to digress into a criticism of some other belief or no-belief which my readers might conceivably profess if they were erudite Scriptural paleographers and historians, in which case, by the way, they would have to change their views so frequently that the gospel they received in their childhood would dominate them after all by its superior persistency. The chaos of mere facts in which the Sermon on the Mount and the Ode to Charity suggest nothing but disputes as to whether they are interpolations or not, in which Jesus becomes nothing but a name suspected of belonging to ten different prophets or executed persons, in which Paul is only the man who could not possibly have written the epistles attributed to him, in which Chinese sages, Greek philosophers, Latin authors, and writers of ancient anonymous inscriptions are thrown at our heads as the sources of this or that scrap of the Bible, is neither a religion nor a criticism of religion: one does not offer the fact that a good deal of the medieval building in Peterborough Cathedral was found to be flagrant jerry-building as a criticism of the Dean’s sermons. For good or evil, we have made a synthesis out of the literature we call the Bible; and though the discovery that there is a good deal of jerry-building in the Bible is interesting in its way, because everything about the Bible is interesting, it does not alter the synthesis very materially even for the paleographers, and does not alter it at all for those who know no more about modern paleography than Archbishop Ussher did. I have therefore indicated little more of the discoveries than Archbishop Ussher might have guessed for himself if he had read the Bible without prepossessions.

For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives and works in men. After all, a synthesis is what you want: it is the case you have to judge brought to an apprehensible issue for you. Even if you have little more respect for synthetic biography than for synthetic rubber, synthetic milk, and the still unachieved synthetic protoplasm which is to enable us to make different sorts of men as a pastry cook makes different sorts of tarts, the practical issue still lies as plainly before you as before the most credulous votaries of what pontificates as the Higher Criticism.

THE PERILS OF SALVATIONISM.

The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by the increase in our day of the number of people who have had the means of educating and training themselves to the point at which they are not afraid to look facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The result is greater sternness in modern thought. The conviction is spreading that to encourage a man to believe that though his sins be as scarlet he can be made whiter than snow by an easy exercise of self-conceit, is to encourage him to be a rascal. It did not work so badly when you could also conscientiously assure him that if he let himself be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot hell would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden death — the most enviable of all deaths — was regarded as the most frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and famine, battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that hell is fast vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it; and even for the rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland which are still in the XVII century. Even there, it is tacitly reserved for the other fellow.

THE IMPORTANCE OF HELL IN THE SALVATION SCHEME.

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The “saved” thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man by developing that divine spark within him which Jesus insisted on as the everyday reality of what the atheist denies.

Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now.

THE RIGHT TO REFUSE ATONEMENT.

Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say “No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.” Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen: that iron moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we accepted the contempt of the Power on whose pity we were trading; but to bargain for a crown of glory as well! that was too much for Ibsen: it provoked him to exclaim, “Your God is an old man whom you cheat,” and to lash the deadened conscience of the XIX century back to life with a whip of scorpions.

THE TEACHING OF CHRISTIANITY.

And there I must leave the matter to such choice as your nature allows you. The honest teacher who has to make known to a novice the facts about Christianity cannot in any essential regard, I think, put the facts otherwise than as I have put them. If children are to be delivered from the proselytizing atheist on the one hand, and the proselytizing nun in the convent school on the other, with all the other proselytizers that lie between them, they must not be burdened with idle controversies as to whether there was ever such a person as Jesus or not. When Hume said that Joshua’s campaigns were impossible, Whately did not wrangle about it: he proved, on the same lines, that the campaigns of Napoleon were impossible. Only fictitious characters will stand Hume’s sort of examination: nothing will ever make Edward the Confessor and St. Louis as real to us as Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick. We must cut the controversy short by declaring that there is the same evidence for the existence of Jesus as for that of any other person of his time; and the fact that you may not believe everything Matthew tells you no more disproves the existence of Jesus than the fact that you do not believe everything Macaulay tells you disproves the existence of William III. The gospel narratives in the main give you a biography which is quite credible and accountable on purely secular grounds when you have trimmed off everything that Hume or Grimm or Rousseau or Huxley or any modern bishop could reject as fanciful. Without going further than this, you can become a follower of Jesus just as you can become a follower of Confucius or Lao Tse, and may therefore call yourself a Jesuist, or even a Christian, if you hold, as the strictest Secularist quite legitimately may, that all prophets are inspired, and all men with a mission, Christs.

The teacher of Christianity has then to make known to the child, first the song of John Barleycorn, with the fields and seasons as witness to its eternal truth. Then, as the child’s mind matures, it can learn, as historical and psychological phenomena, the tradition of the scapegoat, the Redeemer, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and how, in a world saturated with this tradition, Jesus has been largely accepted as the long expected and often prophesied Redeemer, the Messiah, the Christ. It is open to the child also to accept him. If the child is built like Gladstone, he will accept Jesus as his Savior, and Peter and John the Baptist as the Savior’s revealer and forerunner respectively. If he is built like Huxley, he will take the secular view, in spite of all that a pious family can do to prevent him. The important thing now is that the Gladstones and Huxleys should no longer waste their time irrelevantly and ridiculously wrangling about the Gadarene swine, and that they should make up their minds as to the soundness of the secular doctrines of Jesus; for it is about these that they may come to blows in our own time.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE.

Finally, let us ask why it is that the old superstitions have so suddenly lost countenance that although, to the utter disgrace of the nation’s leaders and rulers, the laws by which persecutors can destroy or gag all freedom of thought and speech in these matters are still unrepealed and ready to the hand of our bigots and fanatics (quite recently a respectable shopkeeper was convicted of “blasphemy” for saying that if a modern girl accounted for an illicit pregnancy by saying she had conceived of the Holy Ghost, we should know what to think: a remark which would never have occurred to him had he been properly taught how the story was grafted on the gospel), yet somehow they are used only against poor men, and that only in a half-hearted way. When we consider that from the time when the first scholar ventured to whisper as a professional secret that the Pentateuch could not possibly have been written by Moses to the time within my own recollection when Bishop Colenso, for saying the same thing openly, was inhibited from preaching and actually excommunicated, eight centuries elapsed (the point at issue, though technically interesting to paleographers and historians, having no more bearing on human welfare than the controversy as to whether uncial or cursive is the older form of writing); yet now, within fifty years of Colenso’s heresy, there is not a Churchman of any authority living, or an educated layman, who could without ridicule declare that Moses wrote the Pentateuch as Pascal wrote his Thoughts or D’Aubigny his History of the Reformation, or that St. Jerome wrote the passage about the three witnesses in the Vulgate, or that there are less than three different accounts of the creation jumbled together in the book of Genesis. Now the maddest Progressive will hardly contend that our growth in wisdom and liberality has been greater in the last half century than in the sixteen half centuries preceding: indeed it would be easier to sustain the thesis that the last fifty years have witnessed a distinct reaction from Victorian Liberalism to Collectivism which has perceptibly strengthened the State Churches. Yet the fact remains that whereas Byron’s Cain, published a century ago, is a leading case on the point that there is no copyright in a blasphemous book, the Salvation Army might now include it among its publications without shocking anyone.

I suggest that the causes which have produced this sudden clearing of the air include the transformation of many modern States, notably the old self-contained French Republic and the tight little Island of Britain, into empires which overflow the frontiers of all the Churches. In India, for example, there are less than four million Christians out of a population of three hundred and sixteen and a half millions. The King of England is the defender of the faith; but what faith is now THE faith? The inhabitants of this island would, within the memory of persons still living, have claimed that their faith is surely the faith of God, and that all others are heathen. But we islanders are only forty-five millions; and if we count ourselves all as Christians, there are still seventy-seven and a quarter million Mahometans in the Empire. Add to these the Hindoos and Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, whom I was taught in my childhood, by way of religious instruction, to regard as gross idolators consigned to eternal perdition, but whose faith I can now be punished for disparaging by a provocative word, and you have a total of over three hundred and forty-two and a quarter million heretics to swamp our forty-five million Britons, of whom, by the way, only six thousand call themselves distinctively “disciples of Christ,” the rest being members of the Church of England and other denominations whose discipleship is less emphatically affirmed. In short, the Englishman of today, instead of being, like the forefathers whose ideas he clings to, a subject of a State practically wholly Christian, is now crowded, and indeed considerably overcrowded, into a corner of an Empire in which the Christians are a mere eleven per cent of the population; so that the Nonconformist who allows his umbrella stand to be sold up rather than pay rates towards the support of a Church of England school, finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is about one hundred and fourteen millions. The French are not in our hopeless Christian minority of eleven per cent; but they are in a minority of thirty-five per cent, which is fairly conclusive. And, being a more logical people than we, they have officially abandoned Christianity and declared that the French State has no specific religion.

Neither has the British State, though it does not say so. No doubt there are many innocent people in England who take Charlemagne’s view, and would, as a matter of course, offer our eighty-nine per cent of “pagans, I regret to say” the alternative of death or Christianity but for a vague impression that these lost ones are all being converted gradually by the missionaries. But no statesman can entertain such ludicrously parochial delusions. No English king or French president can possibly govern on the assumption that the theology of Peter and Paul, Luther and Calvin, has any objective validity, or that the Christ is more than the Buddha, or Jehovah more than Krishna, or Jesus more or less human than Mahomet or Zoroaster or Confucius. He is actually compelled, in so far as he makes laws against blasphemy at all, to treat all the religions, including Christianity, as blasphemous, when paraded before people who are not accustomed to them and do not want them. And even that is a concession to a mischievous intolerance which an empire should use its control of education to eradicate.

On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain from suicide in the words “Absent thee from felicity awhile,” would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, and that our lives had better be passed in sorrow and even in torment, as a preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad people comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts. None the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions, whether they call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be assumptions common enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And the greater and more heterogeneous the population the commoner the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery can be conducted on assumptions which would in twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its gates to insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people; and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject of the British Empire or the French Republic is not selected; and if he does not like it he must lump it; for emigration is practicable only within narrow limits, and seldom provides an effective remedy, all civilizations being now much alike. To anyone capable of comprehending government at all it must be evident without argument that the set of fundamental assumptions drawn up in the thirty-nine articles or in the Westminster Confession are wildly impossible as political constitutions for modern empires. A personal profession of them by any person disposed to take such professions seriously would practically disqualify him for high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of India and a Particular Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire. The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus of the empire by their Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes them equally impatient of systematic despotism and systematic good government: their history being that of a badly governed and accidentally free people (comparatively). Thus our success in colonizing, as far as it has not been produced by exterminating the natives, has been due to our indifference to the salvation of our subjects. Ireland is the exception which proves the rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the inability of the English to colonize without extermination of natives, is also the one country under British rule in which the conquerors and colonizers proceeded on the assumption that their business was to establish Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor it could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the south believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St. Paul and Calvin. Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or Egypt from Belfast or from the Vatican!

The position is perhaps graver for France than for England, because the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are neither French nor Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty millions of negroes who are susceptible, and indeed highly susceptible, of conversion to those salvationist forms of pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the persecutions and religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters, which were exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and everpresent piety, I said “Can these men handle a rifle?” To which Stanley replied with some scorn “Of course they can, as well as any white man.” Now at this moment (1915) a vast European war is being waged, in which the French are using Senegalese soldiers. I ask the French Government, which, like our own Government, is deliberately leaving the religious instruction of these negroes in the hands of missions of Petrine Catholics and Pauline Calvinists, whether they have considered the possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent African Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern scientific “infidel,” and to raise the cry of “Back to the Apostles: back to Charlemagne!”

We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority of our subjects are Hindoos, Mahometans and Buddhists: that is, they have, as a prophylactic against salvationist Christianity, highly civilized religions of their own. Mahometanism, which Napoleon at the end of his career classed as perhaps the best popular religion for modern political use, might in some respects have arisen as a reformed Christianity if Mahomet had had to deal with a population of seventeenth-century Christians instead of Arabs who worshipped stones. As it is, men do not reject Mahomet for Calvin; and to offer a Hindoo so crude a theology as ours in exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature as an improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer old lamps for older ones in a market where the oldest lamps, like old furniture in England, are the most highly valued.

Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a religion: that is, without a body of common assumptions. The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still, when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions. The man who waits to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man so reasonable as to have an open mind about theft and murder, or about the need for food and reproduction, might just as well be a fool and a scoundrel for any use he could be as a legislator or a State official. The modern pseudo-democratic statesman, who says that he is only in power to carry out the will of the people, and moves only as the cat jumps, is clearly a political and intellectual brigand. The rule of the negative man who has no convictions means in practice the rule of the positive mob. Freedom of conscience as Cromwell used the phrase is an excellent thing; nevertheless if any man had proposed to give effect to freedom of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell would have laid him by the heels almost as promptly as he would have laid a Roman Catholic, though in Fiji at the same moment he would have supported heartily the freedom of conscience of a vegetarian who disparaged the sacred diet of Long Pig.

Here then come in the importance of the repudiation by Jesus of proselytism. His rule “Don’t pull up the tares: sow the wheat: if you try to pull up the tares you will pull up the wheat with it” is the only possible rule for a statesman governing a modern empire, or a voter supporting such a statesman. There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus that cannot be assented to by a Brahman, a Mahometan, a Buddhist or a Jew, without any question of their conversion to Christianity. In some ways it is easier to reconcile a Mahometan to Jesus than a British parson, because the idea of a professional priest is unfamiliar and even monstrous to a Mahometan (the tourist who persists in asking who is the dean of St. Sophia puzzles beyond words the sacristan who lends him a huge pair of slippers); and Jesus never suggested that his disciples should separate themselves from the laity: he picked them up by the wayside, where any man or woman might follow him. For priests he had not a civil word; and they showed their sense of his hostility by getting him killed as soon as possible. He was, in short, a thoroughgoing anti-Clerical. And though, as we have seen, it is only by political means that his doctrine can be put into practice, he not only never suggested a sectarian theocracy as a form of Government, and would certainly have prophesied the downfall of the late President Kruger if he had survived to his time, but, when challenged, he refused to teach his disciples not to pay tribute to Caesar, admitting that Caesar, who presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the apostles made this an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to a pitch of idolatry that ended in the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked men to cut kings’ heads off to restore some sense of proportion in the matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiastical organization for the Jewish Church or for the priesthood of the Roman gods as part of his program. He said that God was better than Mammon; but he never said that Tweedledum was better than Tweedledee; and that is why it is now possible for British citizens and statesmen to follow Jesus, though they cannot possibly follow either Tweedledum or Tweedledee without bringing the empire down with a crash on their heads. And at that I must leave it.

LONDON, December 1915.

PROLOGUE

Overture; forest sounds, roaring of lions, Christian hymn faintly.

A jungle path. A lion’s roar, a melancholy suffering roar, comes from the jungle. It is repeated nearer. The lion limps from the jungle on three legs, holding up his right forepaw, in which a huge thorn sticks. He sits down and contemplates it. He licks it. He shakes it. He tries to extract it by scraping it along the ground, and hurts himself worse. He roars piteously. He licks it again. Tears drop from his eyes. He limps painfully off the path and lies down under the trees, exhausted with pain. Heaving a long sigh, like wind in a trombone, he goes to sleep.

Androcles and his wife Megaera come along the path. He is a small, thin, ridiculous little man who might be any age from thirty to fifty-five. He has sandy hair, watery compassionate blue eyes, sensitive nostrils, and a very presentable forehead; but his good points go no further; his arms and legs and back, though wiry of their kind, look shrivelled and starved. He carries a big bundle, is very poorly clad, and seems tired and hungry.

His wife is a rather handsome pampered slattern, well fed and in the prime of life. She has nothing to carry, and has a stout stick to help her along.

MEGAERA (suddenly throwing down her stick) I won’t go another step.

ANDROCLES (pleading wearily) Oh, not again, dear. What’s the good of stopping every two miles and saying you won’t go another step? We must get on to the next village before night. There are wild beasts in this wood: lions, they say.

MEGAERA. I don’t believe a word of it. You are always threatening me with wild beasts to make me walk the very soul out of my body when I can hardly drag one foot before another. We haven’t seen a single lion yet.

ANDROCLES. Well, dear, do you want to see one?

MEGAERA (tearing the bundle from his back) You cruel beast, you don’t care how tired I am, or what becomes of me (she throws the bundle on the ground): always thinking of yourself. Self! self! self! always yourself! (She sits down on the bundle).

ANDROCLES (sitting down sadly on the ground with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands) We all have to think of ourselves occasionally, dear.

MEGAERA. A man ought to think of his wife sometimes.

ANDROCLES. He can’t always help it, dear. You make me think of you a good deal. Not that I blame you.

MEGAERA. Blame me! I should think not indeed. Is it my fault that I’m married to you?

ANDROCLES. No, dear: that is my fault.

MEGAERA. That’s a nice thing to say to me. Aren’t you happy with me?

ANDROCLES. I don’t complain, my love.

MEGAERA. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

ANDROCLES. I am, my dear.

MEGAERA. You’re not: you glory in it.

ANDROCLES. In what, darling?

MEGAERA. In everything. In making me a slave, and making yourself a laughing-stock. Its not fair. You get me the name of being a shrew with your meek ways, always talking as if butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. And just because I look a big strong woman, and because I’m good-hearted and a bit hasty, and because you’re always driving me to do things I’m sorry for afterwards, people say “Poor man: what a life his wife leads him!” Oh, if they only knew! And you think I don’t know. But I do, I do, (screaming) I do.

ANDROCLES. Yes, my dear: I know you do.

MEGAERA. Then why don’t you treat me properly and be a good husband to me?

ANDROCLES. What can I do, my dear?

MEGAERA. What can you do! You can return to your duty, and come back to your home and your friends, and sacrifice to the gods as all respectable people do, instead of having us hunted out of house and home for being dirty, disreputable, blaspheming atheists.

ANDROCLES. I’m not an atheist, dear: I am a Christian.

MEGAERA. Well, isn’t that the same thing, only ten times worse? Everybody knows that the Christians are the very lowest of the low.

ANDROCLES. Just like us, dear.

MEGAERA. Speak for yourself. Don’t you dare to compare me to common people. My father owned his own public-house; and sorrowful was the day for me when you first came drinking in our bar.

ANDROCLES. I confess I was addicted to it, dear. But I gave it up when I became a Christian.

MEGAERA. You’d much better have remained a drunkard. I can forgive a man being addicted to drink: its only natural; and I don’t deny I like a drop myself sometimes. What I can’t stand is your being addicted to Christianity. And what’s worse again, your being addicted to animals. How is any woman to keep her house clean when you bring in every stray cat and lost cur and lame duck in the whole countryside? You took the bread out of my mouth to feed them: you know you did: don’t attempt to deny it.

ANDROCLES. Only when they were hungry and you were getting too stout, dearie.

MEGAERA. Yes, insult me, do. (Rising) Oh! I won’t bear it another moment. You used to sit and talk to those dumb brute beasts for hours, when you hadn’t a word for me.

ANDROCLES. They never answered back, darling. (He rises and again shoulders the bundle).

MEGAERA. Well, if you’re fonder of animals than of your own wife, you can live with them here in the jungle. I’ve had enough of them and enough of you. I’m going back. I’m going home.

ANDROCLES (barring the way back) No, dearie: don’t take on like that. We can’t go back. We’ve sold everything: we should starve; and I should be sent to Rome and thrown to the lions —

MEGAERA. Serve you right! I wish the lions joy of you. (Screaming) Are you going to get out of my way and let me go home?

ANDROCLES. No, dear —

MEGAERA. Then I’ll make my way through the forest; and when I’m eaten by the wild beasts you’ll know what a wife you’ve lost. (She dashes into the jungle and nearly falls over the sleeping lion). Oh! Oh! Andy! Andy! (She totters back and collapses into the arms of Androcles, who, crushed by her weight, falls on his bundle).

ANDROCLES (extracting himself from beneath her and slapping her hands in great anxiety) What is it, my precious, my pet? What’s the matter? (He raises her head. Speechless with terror, she points in the direction of the sleeping lion. He steals cautiously towards the spot indicated by Megaera. She rises with an effort and totters after him).

MEGAERA. No, Andy: you’ll be killed. Come back.

The lion utters a long snoring sigh. Androcles sees the lion and recoils fainting into the arms of Megaera, who falls back on the bundle. They roll apart and lie staring in terror at one another. The lion is heard groaning heavily in the jungle.

ANDROCLES (whispering) Did you see? A lion.

MEGAERA (despairing) The gods have sent him to punish us because you’re a Christian. Take me away, Andy. Save me.

ANDROCLES (rising) Meggy: there’s one chance for you. It’ll take him pretty nigh twenty minutes to eat me (I’m rather stringy and tough) and you can escape in less time than that.

MEGAERA. Oh, don’t talk about eating. (The lion rises with a great groan and limps towards them). Oh! (She faints).

ANDROCLES (quaking, but keeping between the lion and Megaera) Don’t you come near my wife, do you hear? (The lion groans. Androcles can hardly stand for trembling). Meggy: run. Run for your life. If I take my eye off him, its all up. (The lion holds up his wounded paw and flaps it piteously before Androcles). Oh, he’s lame, poor old chap! He’s got a thorn in his paw. A frightfully big thorn. (Full of sympathy) Oh, poor old man! Did um get an awful thorn into um’s tootsums wootsums? Has it made um too sick to eat a nice little Christian man for um’s breakfast? Oh, a nice little Christian man will get um’s thorn out for um; and then um shall eat the nice Christian man and the nice Christian man’s nice big tender wifey pifey. (The lion responds by moans of self-pity). Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, now (taking the paw in his hand) um is not to bite and not to scratch, not even if it hurts a very, very little. Now make velvet paws. That’s right. (He pulls gingerly at the thorn. The lion, with an angry yell of pain, jerks back his paw so abruptly that Androcles is thrown on his back). Steadeee! Oh, did the nasty cruel little Christian man hurt the sore paw? (The lion moans assentingly but apologetically). Well, one more little pull and it will be all over. Just one little, little, leetle pull; and then um will live happily ever after. (He gives the thorn another pull. The lion roars and snaps his jaws with a terrifying clash). Oh, mustn’t frighten um’s good kind doctor, um’s affectionate nursey. That didn’t hurt at all: not a bit. Just one more. Just to show how the brave big lion can bear pain, not like the little crybaby Christian man. Oopsh! (The thorn comes out. The lion yells with pain, and shakes his paw wildly). That’s it! (Holding up the thorn). Now it’s out. Now lick um’s paw to take away the nasty inflammation. See? (He licks his own hand. The lion nods intelligently and licks his paw industriously). Clever little liony-piony! Understands um’s dear old friend Andy Wandy. (The lion licks his face). Yes, kissums Andy Wandy. (The lion, wagging his tail violently, rises on his hind legs and embraces Androcles, who makes a wry face and cries) Velvet paws! Velvet paws! (The lion draws in his claws). That’s right. (He embraces the lion, who finally takes the end of his tail in one paw, places that tight around Androcles’ waist, resting it on his hip. Androcles takes the other paw in his hand, stretches out his arm, and the two waltz rapturously round and round and finally away through the jungle).

MEGAERA (who has revived during the waltz) Oh, you coward, you haven’t danced with me for years; and now you go off dancing with a great brute beast that you haven’t known for ten minutes and that wants to eat your own wife. Coward! Coward! Coward! (She rushes off after them into the jungle).

ACT I

Evening. The end of three converging roads to Rome. Three triumphal arches span them where they debouch on a square at the gate of the city. Looking north through the arches one can see the campagna threaded by the three long dusty tracks. On the east and west sides of the square are long stone benches. An old beggar sits on the east side of the square, his bowl at his feet. Through the eastern arch a squad of Roman soldiers tramps along escorting a batch of Christian prisoners of both sexes and all ages, among them one Lavinia, a goodlooking resolute young woman, apparently of higher social standing than her fellow-prisoners. A centurion, carrying his vinewood cudgel, trudges alongside the squad, on its right, in command of it. All are tired and dusty; but the soldiers are dogged and indifferent, the Christians light-hearted and determined to treat their hardships as a joke and encourage one another.

A bugle is heard far behind on the road, where the rest of the cohort is following.

CENTURION (stopping) Halt! Orders from the Captain. (They halt and wait). Now then, you Christians, none of your larks. The captain’s coming. Mind you behave yourselves. No singing. Look respectful. Look serious, if you’re capable of it. See that big building over there? That’s the Coliseum. That’s where you’ll be thrown to the lions or set to fight the gladiators presently. Think of that; and it’ll help you to behave properly before the captain. (The Captain arrives). Attention! Salute! (The soldiers salute).

A CHRISTIAN (cheerfully) God bless you, Captain.

THE CENTURION (scandalised) Silence!

The Captain, a patrician, handsome, about thirty-five, very cold and distinguished, very superior and authoritative, steps up on a stone seat at the west side of the square, behind the centurion, so as to dominate the others more effectually.

THE CAPTAIN. Centurion.

THE CENTURION. (standing at attention and saluting) Sir?

THE CAPTAIN (speaking stiffly and officially) You will remind your men, Centurion, that we are now entering Rome. You will instruct them that once inside the gates of Rome they are in the presence of the Emperor. You will make them understand that the lax discipline of the march cannot be permitted here. You will instruct them to shave every day, not every week. You will impress on them particularly that there must be an end to the profanity and blasphemy of singing Christian hymns on the march. I have to reprimand you, Centurion, for not only allowing this, but actually doing it yourself.

THE CENTURION. The men march better, Captain.

THE CAPTAIN. No doubt. For that reason an exception is made in the case of the march called Onward Christian Soldiers. This may be sung, except when marching through the forum or within hearing of the Emperor’s palace; but the words must be altered to “Throw them to the Lions.”

The Christians burst into shrieks of uncontrollable laughter, to the great scandal of the Centurion.

CENTURION. Silence! Silen-n-n-n-nce! Where’s your behavior? Is that the way to listen to an officer? (To the Captain) That’s what we have to put up with from these Christians every day, sir. They’re always laughing and joking something scandalous. They’ve no religion: that’s how it is.

LAVINIA. But I think the Captain meant us to laugh, Centurion. It was so funny.

CENTURION. You’ll find out how funny it is when you’re thrown to the lions to-morrow. (To the Captain, who looks displeased) Beg pardon, Sir. (To the Christians) Silennnnce!

THE CAPTAIN. You are to instruct your men that all intimacy with Christian prisoners must now cease. The men have fallen into habits of dependence upon the prisoners, especially the female prisoners, for cooking, repairs to uniforms, writing letters, and advice in their private affairs. In a Roman soldier such dependence is inadmissible. Let me see no more of it whilst we are in the city. Further, your orders are that in addressing Christian prisoners, the manners and tone of your men must express abhorrence and contempt. Any shortcoming in this respect will be regarded as a breach of discipline.(He turns to the prisoners) Prisoners.

CENTURION (fiercely) Prisonerrrrrs! Tention! Silence!

THE CAPTAIN. I call your attention, prisoners, to the fact that you may be called on to appear in the Imperial Circus at any time from tomorrow onwards according to the requirements of the managers. I may inform you that as there is a shortage of Christians just now, you may expect to be called on very soon.

LAVINIA. What will they do to us, Captain?

CENTURION. Silence!

THE CAPTAIN. The women will be conducted into the arena with the wild beasts of the Imperial Menagerie, and will suffer the consequences. The men, if of an age to bear arms, will be given weapons to defend themselves, if they choose, against the Imperial Gladiators.

LAVINIA. Captain: is there no hope that this cruel persecution —

CENTURION (shocked) Silence! Hold your tongue, there. Persecution, indeed!

THE CAPTAIN (unmoved and somewhat sardonic) Persecution is not a term applicable to the acts of the Emperor. The Emperor is the Defender of the Faith. In throwing you to the lions he will be upholding the interests of religion in Rome. If you were to throw him to the lions, that would no doubt be persecution.

The Christians again laugh heartily.

CENTURION (horrified) Silence, I tell you! Keep silence there. Did anyone ever hear the like of this?

LAVINIA. Captain: there will be nobody to appreciate your jokes when we are gone.

THE CAPTAIN (unshaken in his official delivery) I call the attention of the female prisoner Lavinia to the fact that as the Emperor is a divine personage, her imputation of cruelty is not only treason, but sacrilege. I point out to her further that there is no foundation for the charge, as the Emperor does not desire that any prisoner should suffer; nor can any Christian be harmed save through his or her own obstinacy. All that is necessary is to sacrifice to the gods: a simple and convenient ceremony effected by dropping a pinch of incense on the altar, after which the prisoner is at once set free. Under such circumstances you have only your own perverse folly to blame if you suffer. I suggest to you that if you cannot burn a morsel of incense as a matter of conviction, you might at least do so as a matter of good taste, to avoid shocking the religious convictions of your fellow citizens. I am aware that these considerations do not weigh with Christians; but it is my duty to call your attention to them in order that you may have no ground for complaining of your treatment, or of accusing the Emperor of cruelty when he is showing you the most signal clemency. Looked at from this point of view, every Christian who has perished in the arena has really committed suicide.

LAVINIA. Captain: your jokes are too grim. Do not think it is easy for us to die. Our faith makes life far stronger and more wonderful in us than when we walked in darkness and had nothing to live for. Death is harder for us than for you: the martyr’s agony is as bitter as his triumph is glorious.

THE CAPTAIN (rather troubled, addressing her personally and gravely) A martyr, Lavinia, is a fool. Your death will prove nothing.

LAVINIA. Then why kill me?

THE CAPTAIN. I mean that truth, if there be any truth, needs no martyrs.

LAVINIA. No; but my faith, like your sword, needs testing. Can you test your sword except by staking your life on it?

THE CAPTAIN (suddenly resuming his official tone) I call the attention of the female prisoner to the fact that Christians are not allowed to draw the Emperor’s officers into arguments and put questions to them for which the military regulations provide no answer. (The Christians titter).

LAVINIA. Captain: how CAN you?

THE CAPTAIN. I call the female prisoner’s attention specially to the fact that four comfortable homes have been offered her by officers of this regiment, of which she can have her choice the moment she chooses to sacrifice as all well-bred Roman ladies do. I have no more to say to the prisoners.

CENTURION. Dismiss! But stay where you are.

THE CAPTAIN. Centurion: you will remain here with your men in charge of the prisoners until the arrival of three Christian prisoners in the custody of a cohort of the tenth legion. Among these prisoners you will particularly identify an armorer named Ferrovius, of dangerous character and great personal strength, and a Greek tailor reputed to be a sorcerer, by name Androcles. You will add the three to your charge here and march them all to the Coliseum, where you will deliver them into the custody of the master of the gladiators and take his receipt, countersigned by the keeper of the beasts and the acting manager. You understand your instructions?

CENTURION. Yes, Sir.

THE CAPTAIN. Dismiss. (He throws off his air of parade, and descends down from the perch. The Centurion seats on it and prepares for a nap, whilst his men stand at ease. The Christians sit down on the west side of the square, glad to rest. Lavinia alone remains standing to speak to the Captain).

LAVINIA. Captain: is this man who is to join us the famous Ferrovius, who has made such wonderful conversions in the northern cities?

THE CAPTAIN. Yes. We are warned that he has the strength of an elephant and the temper of a mad bull. Also that he is stark mad. Not a model Christian, it would seem.

LAVINIA. You need not fear him if he is a Christian, Captain.

THE CAPTAIN (coldly) I shall not fear him in any case, Lavinia.

LAVINIA (her eyes dancing) How brave of you, Captain!

THE CAPTAIN. You are right: it was silly thing to say. (In a lower tone, humane and urgent) Lavinia: do Christians know how to love?

LAVINIA (composedly) Yes, Captain: they love even their enemies.

THE CAPTAIN. Is that easy?

LAVINIA. Very easy, Captain, when their enemies are as handsome as you.

THE CAPTAIN. Lavinia: you are laughing at me.

LAVINIA. At you, Captain! Impossible.

THE CAPTAIN. Then you are flirting with me, which is worse. Don’t be foolish.

LAVINIA. But such a very handsome captain.

THE CAPTAIN. Incorrigible! (Urgently) Listen to me. The men in that audience tomorrow will be the vilest of voluptuaries: men in whom the only passion excited by a beautiful woman is a lust to see her tortured and torn shrieking limb from limb. It is a crime to dignify that passion. It is offering yourself for violation by the whole rabble of the streets and the riff-raff of the court at the same time. Why will you not choose rather a kindly love and an honorable alliance?

LAVINIA. They cannot violate my soul. I alone can do that by sacrificing to false gods.

THE CAPTAIN. Sacrifice then to the true God. What does his name matter? We call him Jupiter. The Greeks call him Zeus. Call him what you will as you drop the incense on the altar flame: He will understand.

LAVINIA. No. I couldn’t. That is the strange thing, Captain, that a little pinch of incense should make all that difference. Religion is such a great thing that when I meet really religious people we are friends at once, no matter what name we give to the divine will that made us and moves us. Oh, do you think that I, a woman, would quarrel with you for sacrificing to a woman god like Diana, if Diana meant to you what Christ means to me? No: we should kneel side by side before her altar like two children. But when men who believe neither in my god nor in their own — men who do not know the meaning of the word religion — when these men drag me to the foot of an iron statue that has become the symbol of the terror and darkness through which they walk, of their cruelty and greed, of their hatred of God and their oppression of man — when they ask me to pledge my soul before the people that this hideous idol is God, and that all this wickedness and falsehood is divine truth, I cannot do it, not if they could put a thousand cruel deaths on me. I tell you, it is physically impossible. Listen, Captain: did you ever try to catch a mouse in your hand? Once there was a dear little mouse that used to come out and play on my table as I was reading. I wanted to take him in my hand and caress him; and sometimes he got among my books so that he could not escape me when I stretched out my hand. And I did stretch out my hand; but it always came back in spite of me. I was not afraid of him in my heart; but my hand refused: it is not in the nature of my hand to touch a mouse. Well, Captain, if I took a pinch of incense in my hand and stretched it out over the altar fire, my hand would come back. My body would be true to my faith even if you could corrupt my mind. And all the time I should believe more in Diana than my persecutors have ever believed in anything. Can you understand that?

THE CAPTAIN (simply) Yes: I understand that. But my hand would not come back. The hand that holds the sword has been trained not to come back from anything but victory.

LAVINIA. Not even from death?

THE CAPTAIN. Least of all from death.

LAVINIA. Then I must not come back either. A woman has to be braver than a soldier.

THE CAPTAIN. Prouder, you mean.

LAVINIA (startled) Prouder! You call our courage pride!

THE CAPTAIN. There is no such thing as courage: there is only pride. You Christians are the proudest devils on earth.

LAVINIA (hurt) Pray God then my pride may never become a false pride. (She turns away as if she did not wish to continue the conversation, but softens and says to him with a smile) Thank you for trying to save me from death.

THE CAPTAIN. I knew it was no use; but one tries in spite of one’s knowledge.

LAVINIA. Something stirs, even in the iron breast of a Roman soldier!

THE CAPTAIN. It will soon be iron again. I have seen many women die, and forgotten them in a week.

LAVINIA. Remember me for a fortnight, handsome Captain. I shall be watching you, perhaps.

THE CAPTAIN. From the skies? Do not deceive yourself, Lavinia. There is no future for you beyond the grave.

LAVINIA. What does that matter? Do you think I am only running away from the terrors of life into the comfort of heaven? If there were no future, or if the future were one of torment, I should have to go just the same. The hand of God is upon me.

THE CAPTAIN. Yes: when all is said, we are both patricians, Lavinia, and must die for our beliefs. Farewell. (He offers her his hand. She takes it and presses it. He walks away, trim and calm. She looks after him for a moment, and cries a little as he disappears through the eastern arch. A trumpet-call is heard from the road through the western arch).

CENTURION (waking up and rising) Cohort of the tenth with prisoners. Two file out with me to receive them. (He goes out through the western arch, followed by four soldiers in two files).

Lentulus and Metellus come into the square from the west side with a little retinue of servants. Both are young courtiers, dressed in the extremity of fashion. Lentulus is slender, fair-haired, epicene. Metellus is manly, compactly built, olive skinned, not a talker.

LENTULUS. Christians, by Jove! Let’s chaff them.

METELLUS. Awful brutes. If you knew as much about them as I do you wouldn’t want to chaff them. Leave them to the lions.

LENTULUS (indicating Lavinia, who is still looking towards the arches after the captain). That woman’s got a figure. (He walks past her, staring at her invitingly, but she is preoccupied and is not conscious of him). Do you turn the other cheek when they kiss you?

LAVINIA (starting) What?

LENTULus. Do you turn the other cheek when they kiss you, fascinating Christian?

LAVINIA. Don’t be foolish. (To Metellus, who has remained on her right, so that she is between them) Please don’t let your friend behave like a cad before the soldiers. How are they to respect and obey patricians if they see them behaving like street boys? (Sharply to Lentulus) Pull yourself together, man. Hold your head up. Keep the corners of your mouth firm; and treat me respectfully. What do you take me for?

LENTULUS (irresolutely) Look here, you know: I — you — I —

LAVINIA. Stuff! Go about your business. (She turns decisively away and sits down with her comrades, leaving him disconcerted).

METELLUS. You didn’t get much out of that. I told you they were brutes.

LENTULUS. Plucky little filly! I suppose she thinks I care. (With an air of indifference he strolls with Metellus to the east side of the square, where they stand watching the return of the Centurion through the western arch with his men, escorting three prisoners: Ferrovius, Androcles, and Spintho. Ferrovius is a powerful, choleric man in the prime of life, with large nostrils, staring eyes, and a thick neck: a man whose sensibilities are keen and violent to the verge of madness. Spintho is a debauchee, the wreck of a good-looking man gone hopelessly to the bad. Androcles is overwhelmed with grief, and is restraining his tears with great difficulty).

THE CENTURION (to Lavinia) Here are some pals for you. This little bit is Ferrovius that you talk so much about. (Ferrovius turns on him threateningly. The Centurion holds up his left forefinger in admonition). Now remember that you’re a Christian, and that you’ve got to return good for evil. (Ferrovius controls himself convulsively; moves away from temptation to the east side near Lentulus; clasps his hands in silent prayer; and throws himself on his knees). That’s the way to manage them, eh! This fine fellow (indicating Androcles, who comes to his left, and makes Lavinia a heartbroken salutation) is a sorcerer. A Greek tailor, he is. A real sorcerer, too: no mistake about it. The tenth marches with a leopard at the head of the column. He made a pet of the leopard; and now he’s crying at being parted from it. (Androcles sniffs lamentably). Ain’t you, old chap? Well, cheer up, we march with a Billy goat (Androcles brightens up) that’s killed two leopards and ate a turkey-cock. You can have him for a pet if you like. (Androcles, quite consoled, goes past the Centurion to Lavinia, and sits down contentedly on the ground on her left). This dirty dog (collaring Spintho) is a real Christian. He mobs the temples, he does (at each accusation he gives the neck of Spintho’s tunic a twist); he goes smashing things mad drunk, he does; he steals the gold vessels, he does; he assaults the priestesses, he does pah! (He flings Spintho into the middle of the group of prisoners). You’re the sort that makes duty a pleasure, you are.

SPINTHO (gasping) That’s it: strangle me. Kick me. Beat me. Revile me. Our Lord was beaten and reviled. That’s my way to heaven. Every martyr goes to heaven, no matter what he’s done. That is so, isn’t it, brother?

CENTURION. Well, if you’re going to heaven, I don’t want to go there. I wouldn’t be seen with you.

LENTULUS. Haw! Good! (Indicating the kneeling Ferrovius). Is this one of the turn-the-other-cheek gentlemen, Centurion?

CENTURION. Yes, sir. Lucky for you too, sir, if you want to take any liberties with him.

LENTULUS (to Ferrovius) You turn the other cheek when you’re struck, I’m told.

FERROVIUS (slowly turning his great eyes on him) Yes, by the grace of God, I do, NOW.

LENTULUS. Not that you’re a coward, of course; but out of pure piety.

FERROVIUS. I fear God more than man; at least I try to.

LENTULUS. Let’s see. (He strikes him on the cheek. Androcles makes a wild movement to rise and interfere; but Lavinia holds him down, watching Ferrovius intently. Ferrovius, without flinching, turns the other cheek. Lentulus, rather out of countenance, titters foolishly, and strikes him again feebly). You know, I should feel ashamed if I let myself be struck like that, and took it lying down. But then I’m not a Christian: I’m a man. (Ferrovius rises impressively and towers over him. Lentulus becomes white with terror; and a shade of green flickers in his cheek for a moment).

FERROVIUS (with the calm of a steam hammer) I have not always been faithful. The first man who struck me as you have just struck me was a stronger man than you: he hit me harder than I expected. I was tempted and fell; and it was then that I first tasted bitter shame. I never had a happy moment after that until I had knelt and asked his forgiveness by his bedside in the hospital. (Putting his hands on Lentulus’s shoulders with paternal weight). But now I have learnt to resist with a strength that is not my own. I am not ashamed now, nor angry.

LENTULUS (uneasily) Er — good evening. (He tries to move away).

FERROVIUS (gripping his shoulders) Oh, do not harden your heart, young man. Come: try for yourself whether our way is not better than yours. I will now strike you on one cheek; and you will turn the other and learn how much better you will feel than if you gave way to the promptings of anger. (He holds him with one hand and clenches the other fist).

LENTULUS. Centurion: I call on you to protect me.

CENTURION. You asked for it, sir. It’s no business of ours. You’ve had two whacks at him. Better pay him a trifle and square it that way.

LENTULUS. Yes, of course. (To Ferrovius) It was only a bit of fun, I assure you: I meant no harm. Here. (He proffers a gold coin).

FERROVIUS (taking it and throwing it to the old beggar, who snatches it up eagerly, and hobbles off to spend it) Give all thou hast to the poor. Come, friend: courage! I may hurt your body for a moment; but your soul will rejoice in the victory of the spirit over the flesh. (He prepares to strike).

ANDROCLES. Easy, Ferrovius, easy: you broke the last man’s jaw.

Lentulus, with a moan of terror, attempts to fly; but Ferrovius holds him ruthlessly.

FERROVIUS. Yes; but I saved his soul. What matters a broken jaw?

LENTULUS. Don’t touch me, do you hear? The law —

FERROVIUS. The law will throw me to the lions tomorrow: what worse could it do were I to slay you? Pray for strength; and it shall be given to you.

LENTULUS. Let me go. Your religion forbids you to strike me.

FERROVIUS. On the contrary, it commands me to strike you. How can you turn the other cheek, if you are not first struck on the one cheek?

LENTULUS (almost in tears) But I’m convinced already that what you said is quite right. I apologize for striking you.

FERROVIUS (greatly pleased) My son: have I softened your heart? Has the good seed fallen in a fruitful place? Are your feet turning towards a better path?

LENTULUS (abjectly) Yes, yes. There’s a great deal in what you say.

FERROVIUS (radiant) Join us. Come to the lions. Come to suffering and death.

LENTULUS (falling on his knees and bursting into tears) Oh, help me. Mother! mother!

FERROVIUS. These tears will water your soul and make it bring forth good fruit, my son. God has greatly blessed my efforts at conversion. Shall I tell you a miracle — yes, a miracle — wrought by me in Cappadocia? A young man — just such a one as you, with golden hair like yours — scoffed at and struck me as you scoffed at and struck me. I sat up all night with that youth wrestling for his soul; and in the morning not only was he a Christian, but his hair was as white as snow. (Lentulus falls in a dead faint). There, there: take him away. The spirit has overwrought him, poor lad. Carry him gently to his house; and leave the rest to heaven.

CENTURION. Take him home. (The servants, intimidated, hastily carry him out. Metellus is about to follow when Ferrovius lays his hand on his shoulder).

FERROVIUS. You are his friend, young man. You will see that he is taken safely home.

METELLUS (with awestruck civility) Certainly, sir. I shall do whatever you think best. Most happy to have made your acquaintance, I’m sure. You may depend on me. Good evening, sir.

FERROVIUS (with unction) The blessing of heaven upon you and him.

Metellus follows Lentulus. The Centurion returns to his seat to resume his interrupted nap. The deepest awe has settled on the spectators. Ferrovius, with a long sigh of happiness, goes to Lavinia, and offers her his hand.

LAVINIA (taking it) So that is how you convert people, Ferrovius.

FERROVIUS. Yes: there has been a blessing on my work in spite of my unworthiness and my backslidings — all through my wicked, devilish temper. This man —

ANDROCLES (hastily) Don’t slap me on the back, brother. She knows you mean me.

FERROVIUS. How I wish I were weak like our brother here! for then I should perhaps be meek and gentle like him. And yet there seems to be a special providence that makes my trials less than his. I hear tales of the crowd scoffing and casting stones and reviling the brethren; but when I come, all this stops: my influence calms the passions of the mob: they listen to me in silence; and infidels are often converted by a straight heart-to-heart talk with me. Every day I feel happier, more confident. Every day lightens the load of the great terror.

LAVINIA. The great terror? What is that?

Ferrovius shakes his head and does not answer. He sits down beside her on her left, and buries his face in his hands in gloomy meditation.

ANDROCLES. Well, you see, sister, he’s never quite sure of himself. Suppose at the last moment in the arena, with the gladiators there to fight him, one of them was to say anything to annoy him, he might forget himself and lay that gladiator out.

LAVINIA. That would be splendid.

FERROVIUS (springing up in horror) What!

ANDROCLES. Oh, sister!

FERROVIUS. Splendid to betray my master, like Peter! Splendid to act like any common blackguard in the day of my proving! Woman: you are no Christian. (He moves away from her to the middle of the square, as if her neighborhood contaminated him).

LAVINIA (laughing) You know, Ferrovius, I am not always a Christian. I don’t think anybody is. There are moments when I forget all about it, and something comes out quite naturally, as it did then.

SPINTHO. What does it matter? If you die in the arena, you’ll be a martyr; and all martyrs go to heaven, no matter what they have done. That’s so, isn’t it, Ferrovius?

FERROVIUS. Yes: that is so, if we are faithful to the end.

LAVINIA. I’m not so sure.

SPINTHO. Don’t say that. That’s blasphemy. Don’t say that, I tell you. We shall be saved, no matter WHAT we do.

LAVINIA. Perhaps you men will all go into heaven bravely and in triumph, with your heads erect and golden trumpets sounding for you. But I am sure I shall only be allowed to squeeze myself in through a little crack in the gate after a great deal of begging. I am not good always: I have moments only.

SPINTHO. You’re talking nonsense, woman. I tell you, martyrdom pays all scores.

ANDROCLES. Well, let us hope so, brother, for your sake. You’ve had a gay time, haven’t you? with your raids on the temples. I can’t help thinking that heaven will be very dull for a man of your temperament. (Spintho snarls). Don’t be angry: I say it only to console you in case you should die in your bed tonight in the natural way. There’s a lot of plague about.

SPINTHO (rising and running about in abject terror) I never thought of that. O Lord, spare me to be martyred. Oh, what a thought to put into the mind of a brother! Oh, let me be martyred today, now. I shall die in the night and go to hell. You’re a sorcerer: you’ve put death into my mind. Oh, curse you, curse you! (He tries to seize Androcles by the throat).

FERROVIUS (holding him in a grip of iron) What’s this, brother? Anger! Violence! Raising your hand to a brother Christian!

SPINTHO. It’s easy for you. You’re strong. Your nerves are all right. But I’m full of disease. (Ferrovius takes his hand from him with instinctive disgust). I’ve drunk all my nerves away. I shall have the horrors all night.

ANDROCLES (sympathetic) Oh, don’t take on so, brother. We’re all sinners.

SPINTHO (snivelling, trying to feel consoled). Yes: I daresay if the truth were known, you’re all as bad as I am.

LAVINIA (contemptuously) Does THAT comfort you?

FERROVIUS (sternly) Pray, man, pray.

SPINTHO. What’s the good of praying? If we’re martyred we shall go to heaven, shan’t we, whether we pray or not?

FERROVIUS. What’s that? Not pray! (Seizing him again) Pray this instant, you dog, you rotten hound, you slimy snake, you beastly goat, or —

SPINTHO. Yes: beat me: kick me. I forgive you: mind that.

FERROVIUS (spurning him with loathing) Yah! (Spintho reels away and falls in front of Ferrovius).

ANDROCLES (reaching out and catching the skirt of Ferrovius’s tunic) Dear brother: if you wouldn’t mind — just for my sake —

FERROVIUS. Well?

ANDROCLES. Don’t call him by the names of the animals. We’ve no right to. I’ve had such friends in dogs. A pet snake is the best of company. I was nursed on goat’s milk. Is it fair to them to call the like of him a dog or a snake or a goat?

FERROVIUS. I only meant that they have no souls.

ANDROCLES (anxiously protesting) Oh, believe me, they have. Just the same as you and me. I really don’t think I could consent to go to heaven if I thought there were to be no animals there. Think of what they suffer here.

FERROVIUS. That’s true. Yes: that is just. They will have their share in heaven.

SPINTHO (who has picked himself up and is sneaking past Ferrovius on his left, sneers derisively)!!

FERROVIUS (turning on him fiercely) What’s that you say?

SPINTHO (cornering). Nothing.

FERROVIUS (clenching his fist) Do animals go to heaven or not?

SPINTHO. I never said they didn’t.

FERROVIUS (implacable) Do they or do they not?

SPINTHO. They do: they do. (Scrambling out of Ferrovius’s reach). Oh, curse you for frightening me!

A bugle call is heard.

CENTURION (waking up) Tention! Form as before. Now then, prisoners, up with you and trot along spry. (The soldiers fall in. The Christians rise).

A man with an ox goad comes running through the central arch.

THE OX DRIVER. Here, you soldiers! clear out of the way for the Emperor.

THE CENTURION. Emperor! Where’s the Emperor? You ain’t the Emperor, are you?

THE OX DRIVER. It’s the menagerie service. My team of oxen is drawing the new lion to the Coliseum. You clear the road.

CENTURION. What! Go in after you in your dust, with half the town at the heels of you and your lion! Not likely. We go first.

THE OX DRIVER. The menagerie service is the Emperor’s personal retinue. You clear out, I tell you.

CENTURION. You tell me, do you? Well, I’ll tell you something. If the lion is menagerie service, the lion’s dinner is menagerie service too. This (pointing to the Christians) is the lion’s dinner. So back with you to your bullocks double quick; and learn your place. March. (The soldiers start). Now then, you Christians, step out there.

LAVINIA (marching) Come along, the rest of the dinner. I shall be the olives and anchovies.

ANOTHER CHRISTIAN (laughing) I shall be the soup.

ANOTHER. I shall be the fish.

ANOTHER. Ferrovius shall be the roast boar.

FERROVIUS (heavily) I see the joke. Yes, yes: I shall be the roast boar. Ha! ha! (He laughs conscientiously and marches out with them).

ANDROCLES. I shall be the mince pie. (Each announcement is received with a louder laugh by all the rest as the joke catches on).

CENTURION (scandalised) Silence! Have some sense of your situation. Is this the way for martyrs to behave? (To Spintho, who is quaking and loitering) I know what YOU’LL be at that dinner. You’ll be the emetic. (He shoves him rudely along).

SPINTHO. It’s too dreadful: I’m not fit to die.

CENTURION. Fitter than you are to live, you swine.

They pass from the square westward. The oxen, drawing a waggon with a great wooden cage and the lion in it, arrive through the central arch.

ACT II

Behind the Emperor’s box at the Coliseum, where the performers assemble before entering the arena. In the middle a wide passage leading to the arena descends from the floor level under the imperial box. On both sides of this passage steps ascend to a landing at the back entrance to the box. The landing forms a bridge across the passage. At the entrance to the passage are two bronze mirrors, one on each side.

On the west side of this passage, on the right hand of any one coming from the box and standing on the bridge, the martyrs are sitting on the steps. Lavinia is seated half-way up, thoughtful, trying to look death in the face. On her left Androcles consoles himself by nursing a cat. Ferrovius stands behind them, his eyes blazing, his figure stiff with intense resolution. At the foot of the steps crouches Spintho, with his head clutched in his hands, full of horror at the approach of martyrdom.

On the east side of the passage the gladiators are standing and sitting at ease, waiting, like the Christians, for their turn in the arena. One (Retiarius) is a nearly naked man with a net and a trident. Another (Secutor) is in armor with a sword. He carries a helmet with a barred visor. The editor of the gladiators sits on a chair a little apart from them.

The Call Boy enters from the passage.

THE CALL Boy. Number six. Retiarius versus Secutor.

The gladiator with the net picks it up. The gladiator with the helmet puts it on; and the two go into the arena, the net thrower taking out a little brush and arranging his hair as he goes, the other tightening his straps and shaking his shoulders loose. Both look at themselves in the mirrors before they enter the passage.

LAVINIA. Will they really kill one another?

SPINTHO. Yes, if the people turn down their thumbs.

THE EDITOR. You know nothing about it. The people indeed! Do you suppose we would kill a man worth perhaps fifty talents to please the riffraff? I should like to catch any of my men at it.

SPINTHO. I thought —

THE EDITOR (contemptuously) You thought! Who cares what you think? YOU’LL be killed all right enough.

SPINTHO (groans and again hides his face)!!! Then is nobody ever killed except us poor —

LAVINIA. Christians?

THE EDITOR. If the vestal virgins turn down their thumbs, that’s another matter. They’re ladies of rank.

LAVINIA. Does the Emperor ever interfere?

THE EDITOR. Oh, yes: he turns his thumbs up fast enough if the vestal virgins want to have one of his pet fighting men killed.

ANDROCLES. But don’t they ever just only pretend to kill one another? Why shouldn’t you pretend to die, and get dragged out as if you were dead; and then get up and go home, like an actor?

THE EDITOR. See here: you want to know too much. There will be no pretending about the new lion: let that be enough for you. He’s hungry.

SPINTHO (groaning with horror) Oh, Lord! Can’t you stop talking about it? Isn’t it bad enough for us without that?

ANDROCLES. I’m glad he’s hungry. Not that I want him to suffer, poor chap! but then he’ll enjoy eating me so much more. There’s a cheerful side to everything.

THE EDITOR (rising and striding over to Androcles) Here: don’t you be obstinate. Come with me and drop the pinch of incense on the altar. That’s all you need do to be let off.

ANDROCLES. No: thank you very much indeed; but I really mustn’t.

THE EDITOR. What! Not to save your life?

ANDROCLES. I’d rather not. I couldn’t sacrifice to Diana: she’s a huntress, you know, and kills things.

THE EDITOR. That don’t matter. You can choose your own altar. Sacrifice to Jupiter: he likes animals: he turns himself into an animal when he goes off duty.

ANDROCLES. No: it’s very kind of you; but I feel I can’t save myself that way.

THE EDITOR. But I don’t ask you to do it to save yourself: I ask you to do it to oblige me personally.

ANDROCLES (scrambling up in the greatest agitation) Oh, please don’t say that. That is dreadful. You mean so kindly by me that it seems quite horrible to disoblige you. If you could arrange for me to sacrifice when there’s nobody looking, I shouldn’t mind. But I must go into the arena with the rest. My honor, you know.

THE EDITOR. Honor! The honor of a tailor?

ANDROCLES (apologetically) Well, perhaps honor is too strong an expression. Still, you know, I couldn’t allow the tailors to get a bad name through me.

THE EDITOR. How much will you remember of all that when you smell the beast’s breath and see his jaws opening to tear out your throat?

SPINTHO (rising with a yell of terror) I can’t bear it. Where’s the altar? I’ll sacrifice.

FERROVIUS. Dog of an apostate. Iscariot!

SPINTHO. I’ll repent afterwards. I fully mean to die in the arena I’ll die a martyr and go to heaven; but not this time, not now, not until my nerves are better. Besides, I’m too young: I want to have just one more good time. (The gladiators laugh at him). Oh, will no one tell me where the altar is? (He dashes into the passage and vanishes).

ANDROCLES (to the Editor, pointing after Spintho) Brother: I can’t do that, not even to oblige you. Don’t ask me.

THE EDITOR. Well, if you’re determined to die, I can’t help you. But I wouldn’t be put off by a swine like that.

FERROVIUS. Peace, peace: tempt him not. Get thee behind him, Satan.

THE EDITOR (flushing with rage) For two pins I’d take a turn in the arena myself to-day, and pay you out for daring to talk to me like that.

Ferrovius springs forward.

LAVINIA (rising quickly and interposing) Brother, brother: you forget.

FERROVIUS (curbing himself by a mighty effort) Oh, my temper, my wicked temper! (To the Editor, as Lavinia sits down again, reassured). Forgive me, brother. My heart was full of wrath: I should have been thinking of your dear precious soul.

THE EDITOR. Yah! (He turns his back on Ferrovius contemptuously, and goes back to his seat).

FERROVIUS (continuing) And I forgot it all: I thought of nothing but offering to fight you with one hand tied behind me.

THE EDITOR (turning pugnaciously) What!

FERROVIUS (on the border line between zeal and ferocity) Oh, don’t give way to pride and wrath, brother. I could do it so easily. I could —

They are separated by the Menagerie Keeper, who rushes in from the passage, furious.

THE KEEPER. Here’s a nice business! Who let that Christian out of here down to the dens when we were changing the lion into the cage next the arena?

THE EDITOR. Nobody let him. He let himself.

THE KEEPER. Well, the lion’s ate him.

Consternation. The Christians rise, greatly agitated. The gladiators sit callously, but are highly amused. All speak or cry out or laugh at once. Tumult.

LAVINIA. Oh, poor wretch! FERROVIUS. The apostate has perished. Praise be to God’s justice! ANDROCLES. The poor beast was starving. It couldn’t help itself. THE CHRISTIANS. What! Ate him! How frightful! How terrible! Without a moment to repent! God be merciful to him, a sinner! Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! In the midst of his sin! Horrible, horrible! THE EDITOR. Serve the rotter right! THE GLADIATORS. Just walked into it, he did. He’s martyred all right enough. Good old lion! Old Jock doesn’t like that: look at his face. Devil a better! The Emperor will laugh when he hears of it. I can’t help smiling. Ha ha ha!!!!!

THE KEEPER. Now his appetite’s taken off, he won’t as much as look at another Christian for a week.

ANDROCLES. Couldn’t you have saved him brother?

THE KEEPER. Saved him! Saved him from a lion that I’d just got mad with hunger! a wild one that came out of the forest not four weeks ago! He bolted him before you could say Balbus.

LAVINIA (sitting down again) Poor Spintho! And it won’t even count as martyrdom!

THE KEEPER. Serve him right! What call had he to walk down the throat of one of my lions before he was asked?

ANDROCLES. Perhaps the lion won’t eat me now.

THE KEEPER. Yes: that’s just like a Christian: think only of yourself! What am I to do? What am I to say to the Emperor when he sees one of my lions coming into the arena half asleep?

THE EDITOR. Say nothing. Give your old lion some bitters and a morsel of fried fish to wake up his appetite. (Laughter).

THE KEEPER. Yes: it’s easy for you to talk; but —

THE EDITOR (scrambling to his feet) Sh! Attention there! The Emperor. (The Keeper bolts precipitately into the passage. The gladiators rise smartly and form into line).

The Emperor enters on the Christians’ side, conversing with Metellus, and followed by his suite.

THE GLADIATORS. Hail, Caesar! those about to die salute thee.

CAESAR. Good morrow, friends.

Metellus shakes hands with the Editor, who accepts his condescension with bluff respect.

LAVINIA. Blessing, Caesar, and forgiveness!

CAESAR (turning in some surprise at the salutation) There is no forgiveness for Christianity.

LAVINIA. I did not mean that, Caesar. I mean that WE forgive YOU.

METELLUS. An inconceivable liberty! Do you not know, woman, that the Emperor can do no wrong and therefore cannot be forgiven?

LAVINIA. I expect the Emperor knows better. Anyhow, we forgive him.

THE CHRISTIANS. Amen!

CAESAR. Metellus: you see now the disadvantage of too much severity. These people have no hope; therefore they have nothing to restrain them from saying what they like to me. They are almost as impertinent as the gladiators. Which is the Greek sorcerer?

ANDROCLES (humbly touching his forelock) Me, your Worship.

CAESAR. My Worship! Good! A new title. Well, what miracles can you perform?

ANDROCLES. I can cure warts by rubbing them with my tailor’s chalk; and I can live with my wife without beating her.

CAESAR. Is that all?

ANDROCLES. You don’t know her, Caesar, or you wouldn’t say that.

CAESAR. Ah, well, my friend, we shall no doubt contrive a happy release for you. Which is Ferrovius?

FERROVIUS. I am he.

CAESAR. They tell me you can fight.

FERROVIUS. It is easy to fight. I can die, Caesar.

CAESAR. That is still easier, is it not?

FERROVIUS. Not to me, Caesar. Death comes hard to my flesh; and fighting comes very easily to my spirit (beating his breast and lamenting) O sinner that I am! (He throws himself down on the steps, deeply discouraged).

CAESAR. Metellus: I should like to have this man in the Pretorian Guard.

METELLUS. I should not, Caesar. He looks a spoilsport. There are men in whose presence it is impossible to have any fun: men who are a sort of walking conscience. He would make us all uncomfortable.

CAESAR. For that reason, perhaps, it might be well to have him. An Emperor can hardly have too many consciences. (To Ferrovius) Listen, Ferrovius. (Ferrovius shakes his head and will not look up). You and your friends shall not be outnumbered to-day in the arena. You shall have arms; and there will be no more than one gladiator to each Christian. If you come out of the arena alive, I will consider favorably any request of yours, and give you a place in the Pretorian Guard. Even if the request be that no questions be asked about your faith I shall perhaps not refuse it.

FERROVIUS. I will not fight. I will die. Better stand with the archangels than with the Pretorian Guard.

CAESAR. I cannot believe that the archangels — whoever they may be — would not prefer to be recruited from the Pretorian Guard. However, as you please. Come: let us see the show.

As the Court ascends the steps, Secutor and the Retiarius return from the arena through the passage; Secutor covered with dust and very angry: Retiarius grinning.

SECUTOR. Ha, the Emperor. Now we shall see. Caesar: I ask you whether it is fair for the Retiarius, instead of making a fair throw of his net at me, to swish it along the ground and throw the dust in my eyes, and then catch me when I’m blinded. If the vestals had not turned up their thumbs I should have been a dead man.

CAESAR (halting on the stair) There is nothing in the rules against it.

SECUTOR (indignantly) Caesar: is it a dirty trick or is it not?

CAESAR. It is a dusty one, my friend. (Obsequious laughter). Be on your guard next time.

SECUTOR. Let HIM be on his guard. Next time I’ll throw my sword at his heels and strangle him with his own net before he can hop off. (To Retiarius) You see if I don’t. (He goes out past the gladiators, sulky and furious).

CAESAR (to the chuckling Retiarius). These tricks are not wise, my friend. The audience likes to see a dead man in all his beauty and splendor. If you smudge his face and spoil his armor they will show their displeasure by not letting you kill him. And when your turn comes, they will remember it against you and turn their thumbs down.

THE RETIARIUS. Perhaps that is why I did it, Caesar. He bet me ten sesterces that he would vanquish me. If I had had to kill him I should not have had the money.

CAESAR (indulgent, laughing) You rogues: there is no end to your tricks. I’ll dismiss you all and have elephants to fight. They fight fairly. (He goes up to his box, and knocks at it. It is opened from within by the Captain, who stands as on parade to let him pass). The Call Boy comes from the passage, followed by three attendants carrying respectively a bundle of swords, some helmets, and some breastplates and pieces of armor which they throw down in a heap.

THE CALL BOY. By your leave, Caesar. Number eleven! Gladiators and Christians!

Ferrovius springs up, ready for martyrdom. The other Christians take the summons as best they can, some joyful and brave, some patient and dignified, some tearful and helpless, some embracing one another with emotion. The Call Boy goes back into the passage.

CAESAR (turning at the door of the box) The hour has come, Ferrovius. I shall go into my box and see you killed, since you scorn the Pretorian Guard. (He goes into the box. The Captain shuts the door, remaining inside with the Emperor. Metellus and the rest of the suite disperse to their seats. The Christians, led by Ferrovius, move towards the passage).

LAVINIA (to Ferrovius) Farewell.

THE EDITOR. Steady there. You Christians have got to fight. Here! arm yourselves.

FERROVIUS (picking up a sword) I’ll die sword in hand to show people that I could fight if it were my Master’s will, and that I could kill the man who kills me if I chose.

THE EDITOR. Put on that armor.

FERROVIUS. No armor.

THE EDITOR (bullying him) Do what you’re told. Put on that armor.

FERROVIUS (gripping the sword and looking dangerous) I said, No armor.

THE EDITOR. And what am I to say when I am accused of sending a naked man in to fight my men in armor?

FERROVIUS. Say your prayers, brother; and have no fear of the princes of this world.

THE EDITOR. Tsha! You obstinate fool! (He bites his lips irresolutely, not knowing exactly what to do).

ANDROCLES (to Ferrovius) Farewell, brother, till we meet in the sweet by-and-by.

THE EDITOR (to Androcles) You are going too. Take a sword there; and put on any armor you can find to fit you.

ANDROCLES. No, really: I can’t fight: I never could. I can’t bring myself to dislike anyone enough. I’m to be thrown to the lions with the lady.

THE EDITOR. Then get out of the way and hold your noise. (Androcles steps aside with cheerful docility). Now then! Are you all ready there? A trumpet is heard from the arena.

FERROVIUS (starting convulsively) Heaven give me strength!

THE EDITOR. Aha! That frightens you, does it?

FERROVIUS. Man: there is no terror like the terror of that sound to me. When I hear a trumpet or a drum or the clash of steel or the hum of the catapult as the great stone flies, fire runs through my veins: I feel my blood surge up hot behind my eyes: I must charge: I must strike: I must conquer: Caesar himself will not be safe in his imperial seat if once that spirit gets loose in me. Oh, brothers, pray! exhort me! remind me that if I raise my sword my honor falls and my Master is crucified afresh.

ANDROCLES. Just keep thinking how cruelly you might hurt the poor gladiators.

FERROVIUS. It does not hurt a man to kill him.

LAVINIA. Nothing but faith can save you.

FERROVIUS. Faith! Which faith? There are two faiths. There is our faith. And there is the warrior’s faith, the faith in fighting, the faith that sees God in the sword. How if that faith should overwhelm me?

LAVINIA. You will find your real faith in the hour of trial.

FERROVIUS. That is what I fear. I know that I am a fighter. How can I feel sure that I am a Christian?

ANDROCLES. Throw away the sword, brother.

FERROVIUS. I cannot. It cleaves to my hand. I could as easily throw a woman I loved from my arms. (Starting) Who spoke that blasphemy? Not I.

LAVINIA. I can’t help you, friend. I can’t tell you not to save your own life. Something wilful in me wants to see you fight your way into heaven.

FERROVIUS. Ha!

ANDROCLES. But if you are going to give up our faith, brother, why not do it without hurting anybody? Don’t fight them. Burn the incense.

FERROVIUS. Burn the incense! Never.

LAVINIA. That is only pride, Ferrovius.

FERROVIUS. ONLY pride! What is nobler than pride? (Conscience stricken) Oh, I’m steeped in sin. I’m proud of my pride.

LAVINIA. They say we Christians are the proudest devils on earth — that only the weak are meek. Oh, I am worse than you. I ought to send you to death; and I am tempting you.

ANDROCLES. Brother, brother: let THEM rage and kill: let US be brave and suffer. You must go as a lamb to the slaughter.

FERROVIUS. Aye, aye: that is right. Not as a lamb is slain by the butcher; but as a butcher might let himself be slain by a (looking at the Editor) by a silly ram whose head he could fetch off in one twist.

Before the Editor can retort, the Call Boy rushes up through the passage; and the Captain comes from the Emperor’s box and descends the steps.

THE CALL BOY. In with you: into the arena. The stage is waiting.

THE CAPTAIN. The Emperor is waiting. (To the Editor) What are you dreaming of, man? Send your men in at once.

THE EDITOR. Yes, Sir: it’s these Christians hanging back.

FERROVIUS (in a voice of thunder) Liar!

THE EDITOR (not heeding him) March. (The gladiators told off to fight with the Christians march down the passage) Follow up there, you.

THE CHRISTIAN MEN AND WOMEN (as they part) Be steadfast, brother. Farewell. Hold up the faith, brother. Farewell. Go to glory, dearest. Farewell. Remember: we are praying for you. Farewell. Be strong, brother. Farewell. Don’t forget that the divine love and our love surround you. Farewell. Nothing can hurt you: remember that, brother. Farewell. Eternal glory, dearest. Farewell.

THE EDITOR (out of patience) Shove them in, there.

The remaining gladiators and the Call Boy make a movement towards them.

FERROVIUS (interposing) Touch them, dogs; and we die here, and cheat the heathen of their spectacle. (To his fellow Christians) Brothers: the great moment has come. That passage is your hill to Calvary. Mount it bravely, but meekly; and remember! not a word of reproach, not a blow nor a struggle. Go. (They go out through the passage. He turns to Lavinia) Farewell.

LAVINIA. You forget: I must follow before you are cold.

FERROVIUS. It is true. Do not envy me because I pass before you to glory. (He goes through the passage).

THE EDITOR (to the Call Boy) Sickening work, this. Why can’t they all be thrown to the lions? It’s not a man’s job. (He throws himself moodily into his chair).

The remaining gladiators go back to their former places indifferently. The Call Boy shrugs his shoulders and squats down at the entrance to the passage, near the Editor.

Lavinia and the Christian women sit down again, wrung with grief, some weeping silently, some praying, some calm and steadfast. Androcles sits down at Lavinia’s feet. The Captain stands on the stairs, watching her curiously.

ANDROCLES. I’m glad I haven’t to fight. That would really be an awful martyrdom. I AM lucky.

LAVINIA (looking at him with a pang of remorse). Androcles: burn the incense: you’ll be forgiven. Let my death atone for both. I feel as if I were killing you.

ANDROCLES. Don’t think of me, sister. Think of yourself. That will keep your heart up.

The Captain laughs sardonically.

LAVINIA (startled: she had forgotten his presence) Are you there, handsome Captain? Have you come to see me die?

THE CAPTAIN (coming to her side) I am on duty with the Emperor, Lavinia.

LAVINIA. Is it part of your duty to laugh at us?

THE CAPTAIN. No: that is part of my private pleasure. Your friend here is a humorist. I laughed at his telling you to think of yourself to keep up your heart. I say, think of yourself and burn the incense.

LAVINIA. He is not a humorist: he was right. You ought to know that, Captain: you have been face to face with death.

THE CAPTAIN. Not with certain death, Lavinia. Only death in battle, which spares more men than death in bed. What you are facing is certain death. You have nothing left now but your faith in this craze of yours: this Christianity. Are your Christian fairy stories any truer than our stories about Jupiter and Diana, in which, I may tell you, I believe no more than the Emperor does, or any educated man in Rome?

LAVINIA. Captain: all that seems nothing to me now. I’ll not say that death is a terrible thing; but I will say that it is so real a thing that when it comes close, all the imaginary things — all the stories, as you call them — fade into mere dreams beside that inexorable reality. I know now that I am not dying for stories or dreams. Did you hear of the dreadful thing that happened here while we were waiting?

THE CAPTAIN. I heard that one of your fellows bolted, and ran right into the jaws of the lion. I laughed. I still laugh.

LAVINIA. Then you don’t understand what that meant?

THE CAPTAIN. It meant that the lion had a cur for his breakfast.

LAVINIA. It meant more than that, Captain. It meant that a man cannot die for a story and a dream. None of us believed the stories and the dreams more devoutly than poor Spintho; but he could not face the great reality. What he would have called my faith has been oozing away minute by minute whilst I’ve been sitting here, with death coming nearer and nearer, with reality becoming realler and realler, with stories and dreams fading away into nothing.

THE CAPTAIN. Are you then going to die for nothing?

LAVINIA. Yes: that is the wonderful thing. It is since all the stories and dreams have gone that I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories.

THE CAPTAIN. But for what?

LAVINIA. I don’t know. If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I’m going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough to die for.

THE CAPTAIN. What is God?

LAVINIA. When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves.

THE CAPTAIN. Lavinia; come down to earth. Burn the incense and marry me.

LAVINIA. Handsome Captain: would you marry me if I hauled down the flag in the day of battle and burnt the incense? Sons take after their mothers, you know. Do you want your son to be a coward?

THE CAPTAIN (strongly moved). By great Diana, I think I would strangle you if you gave in now.

LAVINIA (putting her hand on the head of Androcles) The hand of God is on us three, Captain.

THE CAPTAIN. What nonsense it all is! And what a monstrous thing that you should die for such nonsense, and that I should look on helplessly when my whole soul cries out against it! Die then if you must; but at least I can cut the Emperor’s throat and then my own when I see your blood.

The Emperor throws open the door of his box angrily, and appears in wrath on the threshold. The Editor, the Call Boy, and the gladiators spring to their feet.

THE EMPEROR. The Christians will not fight; and your curs cannot get their blood up to attack them. It’s all that fellow with the blazing eyes. Send for the whip. (The Call Boy rushes out on the east side for the whip). If that will not move them, bring the hot irons. The man is like a mountain. (He returns angrily into the box and slams the door).

The Call Boy returns with a man in a hideous Etruscan mask, carrying a whip. They both rush down the passage into the arena.

LAVINIA (rising) Oh, that is unworthy. Can they not kill him without dishonoring him?

ANDROCLES (scrambling to his feet and running into the middle of the space between the staircases) It’s dreadful. Now I want to fight. I can’t bear the sight of a whip. The only time I ever hit a man was when he lashed an old horse with a whip. It was terrible: I danced on his face when he was on the ground. He mustn’t strike Ferrovius: I’ll go into the arena and kill him first. (He makes a wild dash into the passage. As he does so a great clamor is heard from the arena, ending in wild applause. The gladiators listen and look inquiringly at one another).

THE EDITOR. What’s up now?

LAVINIA (to the Captain) What has happened, do you think?

THE CAPTAIN. What CAN happen? They are killing them, I suppose.

ANDROCLES (running in through the passage, screaming with horror and hiding his eyes)!!!

LAVINIA. Androcles, Androcles: what’s the matter?

ANDROCLES. Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me. Something too dreadful. Oh! (He crouches by her and hides his face in her robe, sobbing).

THE CALL Boy (rushing through from the passage as before) Ropes and hooks there! Ropes and hooks.

THE EDITOR. Well, need you excite yourself about it? (Another burst of applause).

Two slaves in Etruscan masks, with ropes and drag hooks, hurry in.

ONE OF THE SLAVES. How many dead?

THE CALL Boy. Six. (The slave blows a whistle twice; and four more masked slaves rush through into the arena with the same apparatus) And the basket. Bring the baskets. (The slave whistles three times, and runs through the passage with his companion).

THE CAPTAIN. Who are the baskets for?

THE CALL Boy. For the whip. He’s in pieces. They’re all in pieces, more or less. (Lavinia hides her face).

(Two more masked slaves come in with a basket and follow the others into the arena, as the Call Boy turns to the gladiators and exclaims, exhausted) Boys, he’s killed the lot.

THE EMPEROR (again bursting from his box, this time in an ecstasy of delight) Where is he? Magnificent! He shall have a laurel crown.

Ferrovius, madly waving his bloodstained sword, rushes through the passage in despair, followed by his co-religionists, and by the menagerie keeper, who goes to the gladiators. The gladiators draw their swords nervously.

FERROVIUs. Lost! lost forever! I have betrayed my Master. Cut off this right hand: it has offended. Ye have swords, my brethren: strike.

LAVINIA. No, no. What have you done, Ferrovius?

FERROVIUS. I know not; but there was blood behind my eyes; and there’s blood on my sword. What does that mean?

THE EMPEROR (enthusiastically, on the landing outside his box) What does it mean? It means that you are the greatest man in Rome. It means that you shall have a laurel crown of gold. Superb fighter, I could almost yield you my throne. It is a record for my reign: I shall live in history. Once, in Domitian’s time, a Gaul slew three men in the arena and gained his freedom. But when before has one naked man slain six armed men of the bravest and best? The persecution shall cease: if Christians can fight like this, I shall have none but Christians to fight for me. (To the Gladiators) You are ordered to become Christians, you there: do you hear?

RETIARIUS. It is all one to us, Caesar. Had I been there with my net, the story would have been different.

THE CAPTAIN (suddenly seizing Lavinia by the wrist and dragging her up the steps to the Emperor) Caesar this woman is the sister of Ferrovius. If she is thrown to the lions he will fret. He will lose weight; get out of condition.

THE EMPEROR. The lions? Nonsense! (To Lavinia) Madam: I am proud to have the honor of making your acquaintance. Your brother is the glory of Rome.

LAVINIA. But my friends here. Must they die?

THE EMPEROR. Die! Certainly not. There has never been the slightest idea of harming them. Ladies and gentlemen: you are all free. Pray go into the front of the house and enjoy the spectacle to which your brother has so splendidly contributed. Captain: oblige me by conducting them to the seats reserved for my personal friends.

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Caesar: I must have one Christian for the lion. The people have been promised it; and they will tear the decorations to bits if they are disappointed.

THE EMPEROR. True, true: we must have somebody for the new lion.

FERROVIUS. Throw me to him. Let the apostate perish.

THE EMPEROR. No, no: you would tear him in pieces, my friend; and we cannot afford to throw away lions as if they were mere slaves. But we must have somebody. This is really extremely awkward.

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Why not that little Greek chap? He’s not a Christian: he’s a sorcerer.

THE EMPEROR. The very thing: he will do very well.

THE CALL Boy (issuing from the passage) Number twelve. The Christian for the new lion.

ANDROCLES (rising, and pulling himself sadly together) Well, it was to be, after all.

LAVINIA. I’ll go in his place, Caesar. Ask the Captain whether they do not like best to see a woman torn to pieces. He told me so yesterday.

THE EMPEROR. There is something in that: there is certainly something in that — if only I could feel sure that your brother would not fret.

ANDROCLES. No: I should never have another happy hour. No: on the faith of a Christian and the honor of a tailor, I accept the lot that has fallen on me. If my wife turns up, give her my love and say that my wish was that she should be happy with her next, poor fellow! Caesar: go to your box and see how a tailor can die. Make way for number twelve there. (He marches out along the passage).

The vast audience in the amphitheatre now sees the Emperor re-enter his box and take his place as Androcles, desperately frightened, but still marching with piteous devotion, emerges from the other end of the passage, and finds himself at the focus of thousands of eager eyes. The lion’s cage, with a heavy portcullis grating, is on his left. The Emperor gives a signal. A gong sounds. Androcles shivers at the sound; then falls on his knees and prays.

The grating rises with a clash. The lion bounds into the arena. He rushes round frisking in his freedom. He sees Androcles. He stops; rises stiffly by straightening his legs; stretches out his nose forward and his tail in a horizontal line behind, like a pointer, and utters an appalling roar. Androcles crouches and hides his face in his hands. The lion gathers himself for a spring, swishing his tail to and fro through the dust in an ecstasy of anticipation. Androcles throws up his hands in supplication to heaven. The lion checks at the sight of Androcles’s face. He then steals towards him; smells him; arches his back; purrs like a motor car; finally rubs himself against Androcles, knocking him over. Androcles, supporting himself on his wrist, looks affrightedly at the lion. The lion limps on three paws, holding up the other as if it was wounded. A flash of recognition lights up the face of Androcles. He flaps his hand as if it had a thorn in it, and pretends to pull the thorn out and to hurt himself. The lion nods repeatedly. Androcles holds out his hands to the lion, who gives him both paws, which he shakes with enthusiasm. They embrace rapturously, finally waltz round the arena amid a sudden burst of deafening applause, and out through the passage, the Emperor watching them in breathless astonishment until they disappear, when he rushes from his box and descends the steps in frantic excitement.

THE EMPEROR. My friends, an incredible! an amazing thing! has happened. I can no longer doubt the truth of Christianity. (The Christians press to him joyfully) This Christian sorcerer — (with a yell, he breaks off as he sees Androcles and the lion emerge from the passage, waltzing. He bolts wildly up the steps into his box, and slams the door. All, Christians and gladiators’ alike, fly for their lives, the gladiators bolting into the arena, the others in all directions. The place is emptied with magical suddenness).

ANDROCLES (naively) Now I wonder why they all run away from us like that. (The lion combining a series of yawns, purrs, and roars, achieves something very like a laugh).

THE EMPEROR (standing on a chair inside his box and looking over the wall) Sorcerer: I command you to put that lion to death instantly. It is guilty of high treason. Your conduct is most disgra — (the lion charges at him up the stairs) help! (He disappears. The lion rears against the box; looks over the partition at him, and roars. The Emperor darts out through the door and down to Androcles, pursued by the lion.)

ANDROCLES. Don’t run away, sir: he can’t help springing if you run. (He seizes the Emperor and gets between him and the lion, who stops at once). Don’t be afraid of him.

THE EMPEROR. I am NOT afraid of him. (The lion crouches, growling. The Emperor clutches Androcles) Keep between us.

ANDROCLES. Never be afraid of animals, your Worship: that’s the great secret. He’ll be as gentle as a lamb when he knows that you are his friend. Stand quite still; and smile; and let him smell you all over just to reassure him; for, you see, he’s afraid of you; and he must examine you thoroughly before he gives you his confidence. (To the lion) Come now, Tommy; and speak nicely to the Emperor, the great, good Emperor who has power to have all our heads cut off if we don’t behave very, VERY respectfully to him.

The lion utters a fearful roar. The Emperor dashes madly up the steps, across the landing, and down again on the other side, with the lion in hot pursuit. Androcles rushes after the lion; overtakes him as he is descending; and throws himself on his back, trying to use his toes as a brake. Before he can stop him the lion gets hold of the trailing end of the Emperor’s robe.

ANDROCLES. Oh bad wicked Tommy, to chase the Emperor like that! Let go the Emperor’s robe at once, sir: where’s your manners? (The lion growls and worries the robe). Don’t pull it away from him, your worship. He’s only playing. Now I shall be really angry with you, Tommy, if you don’t let go. (The lion growls again) I’ll tell you what it is, sir: he thinks you and I are not friends.

THE EMPEROR (trying to undo the clasp of his brooch) Friends! You infernal scoundrel (the lion growls) don’t let him go. Curse this brooch! I can’t get it loose.

ANDROCLES. We mustn’t let him lash himself into a rage. You must show him that you are my particular friend — if you will have the condescension. (He seizes the Emperor’s hands, and shakes them cordially), Look, Tommy: the nice Emperor is the dearest friend Andy Wandy has in the whole world: he loves him like a brother.

THE EMPEROR. You little brute, you damned filthy little dog of a Greek tailor: I’ll have you burnt alive for daring to touch the divine person of the Emperor. (The lion roars).

ANDROCLES. Oh don’t talk like that, sir. He understands every word you say: all animals do: they take it from the tone of your voice. (The lion growls and lashes his tail). I think he’s going to spring at your worship. If you wouldn’t mind saying something affectionate. (The lion roars).

THE EMPEROR (shaking Androcles’ hands frantically) My dearest Mr. Androcles, my sweetest friend, my long lost brother, come to my arms. (He embraces Androcles). Oh, what an abominable smell of garlic!

The lion lets go the robe and rolls over on his back, clasping his forepaws over one another coquettishly above his nose.

ANDROCLES. There! You see, your worship, a child might play with him now. See! (He tickles the lion’s belly. The lion wriggles ecstatically). Come and pet him.

THE EMPEROR. I must conquer these unkingly terrors. Mind you don’t go away from him, though. (He pats the lion’s chest).

ANDROCLES. Oh, sir, how few men would have the courage to do that —

THE EMPEROR. Yes: it takes a bit of nerve. Let us invite the Court in and frighten them. Is he safe, do you think?

ANDROCLES. Quite safe now, sir.

THE EMPEROR (majestically) What ho, there! All who are within hearing, return without fear. Caesar has tamed the lion. (All the fugitives steal cautiously in. The menagerie keeper comes from the passage with other keepers armed with iron bars and tridents). Take those things away. I have subdued the beast. (He places his foot on it).

FERROVIUS (timidly approaching the Emperor and looking down with awe on the lion) It is strange that I, who fear no man, should fear a lion.

THE CAPTAIN. Every man fears something, Ferrovius.

THE EMPEROR. How about the Pretorian Guard now?

FERROVIUS. In my youth I worshipped Mars, the God of War. I turned from him to serve the Christian god; but today the Christian god forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian god is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

THE EMPEROR. Very wisely said. All really sensible men agree that the prudent course is to be neither bigoted in our attachment to the old nor rash and unpractical in keeping an open mind for the new, but to make the best of both dispensations.

THE CAPTAIN. What do you say, Lavinia? Will you too be prudent?

LAVINIA (on the stair) No: I’ll strive for the coming of the God who is not yet.

THE CAPTAIN. May I come and argue with you occasionally?

LAVINIA. Yes, handsome Captain: you may. (He kisses her hands).

THE EMPEROR. And now, my friends, though I do not, as you see, fear this lion, yet the strain of his presence is considerable; for none of us can feel quite sure what he will do next.

THE MENAGERIE KEEPER. Caesar: give us this Greek sorcerer to be a slave in the menagerie. He has a way with the beasts.

ANDROCLES (distressed). Not if they are in cages. They should not be kept in cages. They must all be let out.

THE EMPEROR. I give this sorcerer to be a slave to the first man who lays hands on him. (The menagerie keepers and the gladiators rush for Androcles. The lion starts up and faces them. They surge back). You see how magnanimous we Romans are, Androcles. We suffer you to go in peace.

ANDROCLES. I thank your worship. I thank you all, ladies and gentlemen. Come, Tommy. Whilst we stand together, no cage for you: no slavery for me. (He goes out with the lion, everybody crowding away to give him as wide a berth as possible).

In this play I have represented one of the Roman persecutions of the early Christians, not as the conflict of a false theology with a true, but as what all such persecutions essentially are: an attempt to suppress a propaganda that seemed to threaten the interests involved in the established law and order, organized and maintained in the name of religion and justice by politicians who are pure opportunist Have-and-Holders. People who are shown by their inner light the possibility of a better world based on the demand of the spirit for a nobler and more abundant life, not for themselves at the expense of others, but for everybody, are naturally dreaded and therefore hated by the Have-and-Holders, who keep always in reserve two sure weapons against them. The first is a persecution effected by the provocation, organization, and arming of that herd instinct which makes men abhor all departures from custom, and, by the most cruel punishments and the wildest calumnies, force eccentric people to behave and profess exactly as other people do. The second is by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of their terror.

There is no reason to believe that there was anything more in the Roman persecutions than this. The attitude of the Roman Emperor and the officers of his staff towards the opinions at issue were much the same as those of a modern British Home Secretary towards members of the lower middle classes when some pious policeman charges them with Bad Taste, technically called blasphemy: Bad Taste being a violation of Good Taste, which in such matters practically means Hypocrisy. The Home Secretary and the judges who try the case are usually far more sceptical and blasphemous than the poor men whom they persecute; and their professions of horror at the blunt utterance of their own opinions are revolting to those behind the scenes who have any genuine religious sensibility; but the thing is done because the governing classes, provided only the law against blasphemy is not applied to themselves, strongly approve of such persecution because it enables them to represent their own privileges as part of the religion of the country.

Therefore my martyrs are the martyrs of all time, and my persecutors the persecutors of all time. My Emperor, who has no sense of the value of common people’s lives, and amuses himself with killing as carelessly as with sparing, is the sort of monster you can make of any silly-clever gentleman by idolizing him. We are still so easily imposed on by such idols that one of the leading pastors of the Free Churches in London denounced my play on the ground that my persecuting Emperor is a very fine fellow, and the persecuted Christians ridiculous. From which I conclude that a popular pulpit may be as perilous to a man’s soul as an imperial throne.

All my articulate Christians, the reader will notice, have different enthusiasms, which they accept as the same religion only because it involves them in a common opposition to the official religion and consequently in a common doom. Androcles is a humanitarian naturalist, whose views surprise everybody. Lavinia, a clever and fearless freethinker, shocks the Pauline Ferrovius, who is comparatively stupid and conscience ridden. Spintho, the blackguardly debauchee, is presented as one of the typical Christians of that period on the authority of St. Augustine, who seems to have come to the conclusion at one period of his development that most Christians were what we call wrong uns. No doubt he was to some extent right: I have had occasion often to point out that revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

But the most striking aspect of the play at this moment is the terrible topicality given it by the war. We were at peace when I pointed out, by the mouth of Ferrovius, the path of an honest man who finds out, when the trumpet sounds, that he cannot follow Jesus. Many years earlier, in The Devil’s Disciple, I touched the same theme even more definitely, and showed the minister throwing off his black coat for ever when he discovered, amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting, that he was a born fighter. Great numbers of our clergy have found themselves of late in the position of Ferrovius and Anthony Anderson. They have discovered that they hate not only their enemies but everyone who does not share their hatred, and that they want to fight and to force other people to fight. They have turned their churches into recruiting stations and their vestries into munition workshops. But it has never occurred to them to take off their black coats and say quite simply, “I find in the hour of trial that the Sermon on the Mount is tosh, and that I am not a Christian. I apologize for all the unpatriotic nonsense I have been preaching all these years. Have the goodness to give me a revolver and a commission in a regiment which has for its chaplain a priest of the god Mars: my God.” Not a bit of it. They have stuck to their livings and served Mars in the name of Christ, to the scandal of all religious mankind. When the Archbishop of York behaved like a gentleman and the Head Master of Eton preached a Christian sermon, and were reviled by the rabble, the Martian parsons encouraged the rabble. For this they made no apologies or excuses, good or bad. They simple indulged their passions, just as they had always indulged their class prejudices and commercial interests, without troubling themselves for a moment as to whether they were Christians or not. They did not protest even when a body calling itself the Anti-German League (not having noticed, apparently, that it had been anticipated by the British Empire, the French Republic, and the Kingdoms of Italy, Japan, and Serbia) actually succeeded in closing a church at Forest Hill in which God was worshipped in the German language. One would have supposed that this grotesque outrage on the commonest decencies of religion would have provoked a remonstrance from even the worldliest bench of bishops. But no: apparently it seemed to the bishops as natural that the House of God should be looted when He allowed German to be spoken in it as that a baker’s shop with a German name over the door should be pillaged. Their verdict was, in effect, “Serve God right, for creating the Germans!” The incident would have been impossible in a country where the Church was as powerful as the Church of England, had it had at the same time a spark of catholic as distinguished from tribal religion in it. As it is, the thing occurred; and as far as I have observed, the only people who gasped were the Freethinkers. Thus we see that even among men who make a profession of religion the great majority are as Martian as the majority of their congregations. The average clergyman is an official who makes his living by christening babies, marrying adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he can (when he has any conscience about it) of a certain routine of school superintendence, district visiting, and organization of almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christianity at any point except the point of the tongue. The exceptional or religious clergyman may be an ardent Pauline salvationist, in which case his more cultivated parishioners dislike him, and say that he ought to have joined the Methodists. Or he may be an artist expressing religious emotion without intellectual definition by means of poetry, music, vestments and architecture, also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist. Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or actual parents, in which case he is strongly suspected by the straiter Salvationists of being little better than an Atheist. All these varieties, you see, excite remark. They may be very popular with their congregations; but they are regarded by the average man as the freaks of the Church. The Church, like the society of which it is an organ, is balanced and steadied by the great central Philistine mass above whom theology looms as a highly spoken of and doubtless most important thing, like Greek Tragedy, or classical music, or the higher mathematics, but who are very glad when church is over and they can go home to lunch or dinner, having in fact, for all practical purposes, no reasoned convictions at all, and being equally ready to persecute a poor Freethinker for saying that St. James was not infallible, and to send one of the Peculiar People to prison for being so very peculiar as to take St. James seriously.

In short, a Christian martyr was thrown to the lions not because he was a Christian, but because he was a crank: that is, an unusual sort of person. And multitudes of people, quite as civilized and amiable as we, crowded to see the lions eat him just as they now crowd the lion-house in the Zoo at feeding-time, not because they really cared two-pence about Diana or Christ, or could have given you any intelligent or correct account of the things Diana and Christ stood against one another for, but simply because they wanted to see a curious and exciting spectacle. You, dear reader, have probably run to see a fire; and if somebody came in now and told you that a lion was chasing a man down the street you would rush to the window. And if anyone were to say that you were as cruel as the people who let the lion loose on the man, you would be justly indignant. Now that we may no longer see a man hanged, we assemble outside the jail to see the black flag run up. That is our duller method of enjoying ourselves in the old Roman spirit. And if the Government decided to throw persons of unpopular or eccentric views to the lions in the Albert Hall or the Earl’s Court stadium tomorrow, can you doubt that all the seats would be crammed, mostly by people who could not give you the most superficial account of the views in question. Much less unlikely things have happened. It is true that if such a revival does take place soon, the martyrs will not be members of heretical religious sects: they will be Peculiars, Anti-Vivisectionists, Flat-Earth men, scoffers at the laboratories, or infidels who refuse to kneel down when a procession of doctors goes by. But the lions will hurt them just as much, and the spectators will enjoy themselves just as much, as the Roman lions and spectators used to do.

It was currently reported in the Berlin newspapers that when Androcles was first performed in Berlin, the Crown Prince rose and left the house, unable to endure the (I hope) very clear and fair exposition of autocratic Imperialism given by the Roman captain to his Christian prisoners. No English Imperialist was intelligent and earnest enough to do the same in London. If the report is correct, I confirm the logic of the Crown Prince, and am glad to find myself so well understood. But I can assure him that the Empire which served for my model when I wrote Androcles was, as he is now finding to his cost, much nearer my home than the German one.

OVERRULED: A DEMONSTRATION

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO OVERRULED.

OVERRULED.

PREFACE TO OVERRULED.

THE ALLEVIATIONS OF MONOGAMY.

This piece is not an argument for or against polygamy. It is a clinical study of how the thing actually occurs among quite ordinary people, innocent of all unconventional views concerning it. The enormous majority of cases in real life are those of people in that position. Those who deliberately and conscientiously profess what are oddly called advanced views by those others who believe them to be retrograde, are often, and indeed mostly, the last people in the world to engage in unconventional adventures of any kind, not only because they have neither time nor disposition for them, but because the friction set up between the individual and the community by the expression of unusual views of any sort is quite enough hindrance to the heretic without being complicated by personal scandals. Thus the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of social principle.

What is more, these professions are not hypocritical: they are for the most part quite sincere. The common libertine, like the drunkard, succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of his own remorse. He (or she) may be a liar and a humbug, pretending to be better than the detected libertines, and clamoring for their condign punishment; but this is mere self-defence. No reasonable person expects the burglar to confess his pursuits, or to refrain from joining in the cry of Stop Thief when the police get on the track of another burglar. If society chooses to penalize candor, it has itself to thank if its attack is countered by falsehood. The clamorous virtue of the libertine is therefore no more hypocritical than the plea of Not Guilty which is allowed to every criminal. But one result is that the theorists who write most sincerely and favorably about polygamy know least about it; and the practitioners who know most about it keep their knowledge very jealously to themselves. Which is hardly fair to the practice.

INACCESSIBILITY OF THE FACTS.

Also it is impossible to estimate its prevalence. A practice to which nobody confesses may be both universal and unsuspected, just as a virtue which everybody is expected, under heavy penalties, to claim, may have no existence. It is often assumed — indeed it is the official assumption of the Churches and the divorce courts that a gentleman and a lady cannot be alone together innocently. And that is manifest blazing nonsense, though many women have been stoned to death in the east, and divorced in the west, on the strength of it. On the other hand, the innocent and conventional people who regard the gallant adventures as crimes of so horrible a nature that only the most depraved and desperate characters engage in them or would listen to advances in that direction without raising an alarm with the noisiest indignation, are clearly examples of the fact that most sections of society do not know how the other sections live. Industry is the most effective check on gallantry. Women may, as Napoleon said, be the occupation of the idle man just as men are the preoccupation of the idle woman; but the mass of mankind is too busy and too poor for the long and expensive sieges which the professed libertine lays to virtue. Still, wherever there is idleness or even a reasonable supply of elegant leisure there is a good deal of coquetry and philandering. It is so much pleasanter to dance on the edge of a precipice than to go over it that leisured society is full of people who spend a great part of their lives in flirtation, and conceal nothing but the humiliating secret that they have never gone any further. For there is no pleasing people in the matter of reputation in this department: every insult is a flattery; every testimonial is a disparagement: Joseph is despised and promoted, Potiphar’s wife admired and condemned: in short, you are never on solid ground until you get away from the subject altogether. There is a continual and irreconcilable conflict between the natural and conventional sides of the case, between spontaneous human relations between independent men and women on the one hand and the property relation between husband and wife on the other, not to mention the confusion under the common name of love of a generous natural attraction and interest with the murderous jealousy that fastens on and clings to its mate (especially a hated mate) as a tiger fastens on a carcase. And the confusion is natural; for these extremes are extremes of the same passion; and most cases lie somewhere on the scale between them, and are so complicated by ordinary likes and dislikes, by incidental wounds to vanity or gratifications of it, and by class feeling, that A will be jealous of B and not of C, and will tolerate infidelities on the part of D whilst being furiously angry when they are committed by E.

THE CONVENTION OF JEALOUSY

That jealousy is independent of sex is shown by its intensity in children, and by the fact that very jealous people are jealous of everybody without regard to relationship or sex, and cannot bear to hear the person they “love” speak favorably of anyone under any circumstances (many women, for instance, are much more jealous of their husbands’ mothers and sisters than of unrelated women whom they suspect him of fancying); but it is seldom possible to disentangle the two passions in practice. Besides, jealousy is an inculcated passion, forced by society on people in whom it would not occur spontaneously. In Brieux’s Bourgeois aux Champs, the benevolent hero finds himself detested by the neighboring peasants and farmers, not because he preserves game, and sets mantraps for poachers, and defends his legal rights over his land to the extremest point of unsocial savagery, but because, being an amiable and public-spirited person, he refuses to do all this, and thereby offends and disparages the sense of property in his neighbors. The same thing is true of matrimonial jealousy; the man who does not at least pretend to feel it and behave as badly as if he really felt it is despised and insulted; and many a man has shot or stabbed a friend or been shot or stabbed by him in a duel, or disgraced himself and ruined his own wife in a divorce scandal, against his conscience, against his instinct, and to the destruction of his home, solely because Society conspired to drive him to keep its own lower morality in countenance in this miserable and undignified manner.

Morality is confused in such matters. In an elegant plutocracy, a jealous husband is regarded as a boor. Among the tradesmen who supply that plutocracy with its meals, a husband who is not jealous, and refrains from assailing his rival with his fists, is regarded as a ridiculous, contemptible and cowardly cuckold. And the laboring class is divided into the respectable section which takes the tradesman’s view, and the disreputable section which enjoys the license of the plutocracy without its money: creeping below the law as its exemplars prance above it; cutting down all expenses of respectability and even decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the irresistible, until none of us can say what our characters really are in this respect.

THE MISSING DATA OF A SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY OF MARRIAGE.

Of one thing I am persuaded: we shall never attain to a reasonable healthy public opinion on sex questions until we offer, as the data for that opinion, our actual conduct and our real thoughts instead of a moral fiction which we agree to call virtuous conduct, and which we then — and here comes in the mischief — pretend is our conduct and our thoughts. If the result were that we all believed one another to be better than we really are, there would be something to be said for it; but the actual result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have been quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been invested by the popular historical imagination with all the extravagances of a Messalina or a Cenci. Writers of belles lettres who are rash enough to admit that their whole life is not one constant preoccupation with adored members of the opposite sex, and who even countenance La Rochefoucauld’s remark that very few people would ever imagine themselves in love if they had never read anything about it, are gravely declared to be abnormal or physically defective by critics of crushing unadventurousness and domestication. French authors of saintly temperament are forced to include in their retinue countesses of ardent complexion with whom they are supposed to live in sin. Sentimental controversies on the subject are endless; but they are useless, because nobody tells the truth. Rousseau did it by an extraordinary effort, aided by a superhuman faculty for human natural history, but the result was curiously disconcerting because, though the facts were so conventionally shocking that people felt that they ought to matter a great deal, they actually mattered very little. And even at that everybody pretends not to believe him.

ARTIFICIAL RETRIBUTION.

The worst of that is that busybodies with perhaps rather more than a normal taste for mischief are continually trying to make negligible things matter as much in fact as they do in convention by deliberately inflicting injuries — sometimes atrocious injuries — on the parties concerned. Few people have any knowledge of the savage punishments that are legally inflicted for aberrations and absurdities to which no sanely instructed community would call any attention. We create an artificial morality, and consequently an artificial conscience, by manufacturing disastrous consequences for events which, left to themselves, would do very little harm (sometimes not any) and be forgotten in a few days.

But the artificial morality is not therefore to be condemned offhand. In many cases it may save mischief instead of making it: for example, though the hanging of a murderer is the duplication of a murder, yet it may be less murderous than leaving the matter to be settled by blood feud or vendetta. As long as human nature insists on revenge, the official organization and satisfaction of revenge by the State may be also its minimization. The mischief begins when the official revenge persists after the passion it satisfies has died out of the race. Stoning a woman to death in the east because she has ventured to marry again after being deserted by her husband may be more merciful than allowing her to be mobbed to death; but the official stoning or burning of an adulteress in the west would be an atrocity because few of us hate an adulteress to the extent of desiring such a penalty, or of being prepared to take the law into our own hands if it were withheld. Now what applies to this extreme case applies also in due degree to the other cases. Offences in which sex is concerned are often needlessly magnified by penalties, ranging from various forms of social ostracism to long sentences of penal servitude, which would be seen to be monstrously disproportionate to the real feeling against them if the removal of both the penalties and the taboo on their discussion made it possible for us to ascertain their real prevalence and estimation. Fortunately there is one outlet for the truth. We are permitted to discuss in jest what we may not discuss in earnest. A serious comedy about sex is taboo: a farcical comedy is privileged.

THE FAVORITE SUBJECT OF FARCICAL COMEDY.

The little piece which follows this preface accordingly takes the form of a farcical comedy, because it is a contribution to the very extensive dramatic literature which takes as its special department the gallantries of married people. The stage has been preoccupied by such affairs for centuries, not only in the jesting vein of Restoration Comedy and Palais Royal farce, but in the more tragically turned adulteries of the Parisian school which dominated the stage until Ibsen put them out of countenance and relegated them to their proper place as articles of commerce. Their continued vogue in that department maintains the tradition that adultery is the dramatic subject par excellence, and indeed that a play that is not about adultery is not a play at all. I was considered a heresiarch of the most extravagant kind when I expressed my opinion at the outset of my career as a playwright, that adultery is the dullest of themes on the stage, and that from Francesca and Paolo down to the latest guilty couple of the school of Dumas fils, the romantic adulterers have all been intolerable bores.

THE PSEUDO SEX PLAY.

Later on, I had occasion to point out to the defenders of sex as the proper theme of drama, that though they were right in ranking sex as an intensely interesting subject, they were wrong in assuming that sex is an indispensable motive in popular plays. The plays of Moliere are, like the novels of the Victorian epoch or Don Quixote, as nearly sexless as anything not absolutely inhuman can be; and some of Shakespear’s plays are sexually on a par with the census: they contain women as well as men, and that is all. This had to be admitted; but it was still assumed that the plays of the XIX century Parisian school are, in contrast with the sexless masterpieces, saturated with sex; and this I strenuously denied. A play about the convention that a man should fight a duel or come to fisticuffs with his wife’s lover if she has one, or the convention that he should strangle her like Othello, or turn her out of the house and never see her or allow her to see her children again, or the convention that she should never be spoken to again by any decent person and should finally drown herself, or the convention that persons involved in scenes of recrimination or confession by these conventions should call each other certain abusive names and describe their conduct as guilty and frail and so on: all these may provide material for very effective plays; but such plays are not dramatic studies of sex: one might as well say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic study of pharmacy because the catastrophe is brought about through an apothecary. Duels are not sex; divorce cases are not sex; the Trade Unionism of married women is not sex. Only the most insignificant fraction of the gallantries of married people produce any of the conventional results; and plays occupied wholly with the conventional results are therefore utterly unsatisfying as sex plays, however interesting they may be as plays of intrigue and plot puzzles.

The world is finding this out rapidly. The Sunday papers, which in the days when they appealed almost exclusively to the lower middle class were crammed with police intelligence, and more especially with divorce and murder cases, now lay no stress on them; and police papers which confined themselves entirely to such matters, and were once eagerly read, have perished through the essential dulness of their topics. And yet the interest in sex is stronger than ever: in fact, the literature that has driven out the journalism of the divorce courts is a literature occupied with sex to an extent and with an intimacy and frankness that would have seemed utterly impossible to Thackeray or Dickens if they had been told that the change would complete itself within fifty years of their own time.

ART AND MORALITY.

It is ridiculous to say, as inconsiderate amateurs of the arts do, that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist’s business is not that of the policeman; and that such factitious consequences and put-up jobs as divorces and executions and the detective operations that lead up to them are no essential part of life, though, like poisons and buttered slides and red-hot pokers, they provide material for plenty of thrilling or amusing stories suited to people who are incapable of any interest in psychology. But the fine artists must keep the policeman out of his studies of sex and studies of crime. It is by clinging nervously to the policeman that most of the pseudo sex plays convince me that the writers have either never had any serious personal experience of their ostensible subject, or else have never conceived it possible that the stage door present the phenomena of sex as they appear in nature.

THE LIMITS OF STAGE PRESENTATION.

But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of sex. There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex on the stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no more really kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by Macduff. But the feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic convention; and a carefully prearranged sword exercise can be gone through with sufficient pretence of earnestness to be accepted by the willing imaginations of the younger spectators as a desperate combat.

The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same way. In Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise with the lark: the whole night of love is played before the spectators. The lovers do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way: they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at the supreme moments of their love, totally forgetting that there are such things in the world as husbands and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of sin and notions of propriety and all the other irrelevancies which provide hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of passion.

PRUDERIES OF THE FRENCH STAGE.

To all stage presentations there are limits. If Macduff were to stab Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable; and even the pretence which we allow on our stage is ridiculously destructive to the illusion of the scene. Yet pugilists and gladiators will actually fight and kill in public without sham, even as a spectacle for money. But no sober couple of lovers of any delicacy could endure to be watched. We in England, accustomed to consider the French stage much more licentious than the British, are always surprised and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any day if we come within reach of such information, that French actors are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire a greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than the French stage allows them, learn and establish themselves on the English stage. The German and Russian stages are in the same relation to the French and perhaps more or less all the Latin stages. The reason is that, partly from a want of respect for the theatre, partly from a sort of respect for art in general which moves them to accord moral privileges to artists, partly from the very objectionable tradition that the realm of art is Alsatia and the contemplation of works of art a holiday from the burden of virtue, partly because French prudery does not attach itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; yet French taste is more fastidious than ours as to the exhibition and treatment on the stage of the physical incidents of sex. On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a convention as the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs Macbeth through. It is even a purposely unconvincing convention: the actors rather insisting that it shall be impossible for any spectator to mistake a stage kiss for a real one. In England, on the contrary, realism is carried to the point at which nobody except the two performers can perceive that the caress is not genuine. And here the English stage is certainly in the right; for whatever question there arises as to what incidents are proper for representation on the stage or not, my experience as a playgoer leaves me in no doubt that once it is decided to represent an incident, it will be offensive, no matter whether it be a prayer or a kiss, unless it is presented with a convincing appearance of sincerity.

OUR DISILLUSIVE SCENERY.

For example, the main objection to the use of illusive scenery (in most modern plays scenery is not illusive; everything visible is as real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing. In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce. The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion. The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and flats which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This was tolerated, and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the least because nothing better was possible; for all the devices employed in the productions of Mr. Granville Barker or Max Reinhardt or the Moscow Art Theatre were equally available for Colley Cibber and Garrick, except the intensity of our artificial light. When Garrick played Richard II in slashed trunk hose and plumes, it was not because he believed that the Plantagenets dressed like that, or because the costumes could not have made him a XV century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of the state robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions as seemed to playgoers for some reason to be romantic. The charm of the theatre in those days was its makebelieve. It has that charm still, not only for the amateurs, who are happiest when they are most unnatural and impossible and absurd, but for audiences as well. I have seen performances of my own plays which were to me far wilder burlesques than Sheridan’s Critic or Buckingham’s Rehearsal; yet they have produced sincere laughter and tears such as the most finished metropolitan productions have failed to elicit. Fielding was entirely right when he represented Partridge as enjoying intensely the performance of the king in Hamlet because anybody could see that the king was an actor, and resenting Garrick’s Hamlet because it might have been a real man. Yet we have only to look at the portraits of Garrick to see that his performances would nowadays seem almost as extravagantly stagey as his costumes. In our day Calve’s intensely real Carmen never pleased the mob as much as the obvious fancy ball masquerading of suburban young ladies in the same character.

HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO NATURE.

Theatrical art begins as the holding up to Nature of a distorting mirror. In this phase it pleases people who are childish enough to believe that they can see what they look like and what they are when they look at a true mirror. Naturally they think that a true mirror can teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some monstrous image can the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is not until they grow up to the point at which they learn that they know very little about themselves, and that they do not see themselves in a true mirror as other people see them, that they become consumed with curiosity as to what they really are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be a mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a little how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer be ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who makes the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old grossnesses are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross: Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental. They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a philosophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a passion which has become for them the reality of the whole universe. No matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked about as something that happened before the curtain rose, or that will happen after it falls.

FARCICAL COMEDY SHIRKING ITS SUBJECT.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of farcical comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that manner. Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious because the heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is always evaded. Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville Barker has pointed out rightly that if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to describe the consequences that would follow from the first and second in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in my opinion they would be greatly improved thereby even as entertainments; for I have never seen a three-act farcical comedy without being bored and tired by the third act, and observing that the rest of the audience were in the same condition, though they were not vigilantly introspective enough to find that out, and were apt to blame one another, especially the husbands and wives, for their crossness. But it is happily by no means true that conjugal infidelities always produce tragic consequences, or that they need produce even the unhappiness which they often do produce. Besides, the more momentous the consequences, the more interesting become the impulses and imaginations and reasonings, if any, of the people who disregard them. If I had an opportunity of conversing with the ghost of an executed murderer, I have no doubt he would begin to tell me eagerly about his trial, with the names of the distinguished ladies and gentlemen who honored him with their presence on that occasion, and then about his execution. All of which would bore me exceedingly. I should say, “My dear sir: such manufactured ceremonies do not interest me in the least. I know how a man is tried, and how he is hanged. I should have had you killed in a much less disgusting, hypocritical, and unfriendly manner if the matter had been in my hands. What I want to know about is the murder. How did you feel when you committed it? Why did you do it? What did you say to yourself about it? If, like most murderers, you had not been hanged, would you have committed other murders? Did you really dislike the victim, or did you want his money, or did you murder a person whom you did not dislike, and from whose death you had nothing to gain, merely for the sake of murdering? If so, can you describe the charm to me? Does it come upon you periodically; or is it chronic? Has curiosity anything to do with it?” I would ply him with all manner of questions to find out what murder is really like; and I should not be satisfied until I had realized that I, too, might commit a murder, or else that there is some specific quality present in a murderer and lacking in me. And, if so, what that quality is.

In just the same way, I want the unfaithful husband or the unfaithful wife in a farcical comedy not to bother me with their divorce cases or the stratagems they employ to avoid a divorce case, but to tell me how and why married couples are unfaithful. I don’t want to hear the lies they tell one another to conceal what they have done, but the truths they tell one another when they have to face what they have done without concealment or excuse. No doubt prudent and considerate people conceal such adventures, when they can, from those who are most likely to be wounded by them; but it is not to be presumed that, when found out, they necessarily disgrace themselves by irritating lies and transparent subterfuges.

My playlet, which I offer as a model to all future writers of farcical comedy, may now, I hope, be read without shock. I may just add that Mr. Sibthorpe Juno’s view that morality demands, not that we should behave morally (an impossibility to our sinful nature) but that we shall not attempt to defend our immoralities, is a standard view in England, and was advanced in all seriousness by an earnest and distinguished British moralist shortly after the first performance of Overruled. My objection to that aspect of the doctrine of original sin is that no necessary and inevitable operation of human nature can reasonably be regarded as sinful at all, and that a morality which assumes the contrary is an absurd morality, and can be kept in countenance only by hypocrisy. When people were ashamed of sanitary problems, and refused to face them, leaving them to solve themselves clandestinely in dirt and secrecy, the solution arrived at was the Black Death. A similar policy as to sex problems has solved itself by an even worse plague than the Black Death; and the remedy for that is not Salvarsan, but sound moral hygiene, the first foundation of which is the discontinuance of our habit of telling not only the comparatively harmless lies that we know we ought not to tell, but the ruinous lies that we foolishly think we ought to tell.

OVERRULED.

A lady and gentleman are sitting together on a chesterfield in a retired corner of the lounge of a seaside hotel. It is a summer night: the French window behind them stands open. The terrace without overlooks a moonlit harbor. The lounge is dark. The chesterfield, upholstered in silver grey, and the two figures on it in evening dress, catch the light from an arc lamp somewhere; but the walls, covered with a dark green paper, are in gloom. There are two stray chairs, one on each side. On the gentleman’s right, behind him up near the window, is an unused fireplace. Opposite it on the lady’s left is a door. The gentleman is on the lady’s right.

The lady is very attractive, with a musical voice and soft appealing manners. She is young: that is, one feels sure that she is under thirty-five and over twenty-four. The gentleman does not look much older. He is rather handsome, and has ventured as far in the direction of poetic dandyism in the arrangement of his hair as any man who is not a professional artist can afford to in England. He is obviously very much in love with the lady, and is, in fact, yielding to an irresistible impulse to throw his arms around her.

THE LADY. Don’t — oh don’t be horrid. Please, Mr. Lunn [she rises from the lounge and retreats behind it]! Promise me you won’t be horrid.

GREGORY LUNN. I’m not being horrid, Mrs. Juno. I’m not going to be horrid. I love you: that’s all. I’m extraordinarily happy.

MRS. JUNO. You will really be good?

GREGORY. I’ll be whatever you wish me to be. I tell you I love you. I love loving you. I don’t want to be tired and sorry, as I should be if I were to be horrid. I don’t want you to be tired and sorry. Do come and sit down again.

MRS. JUNO [coming back to her seat]. You’re sure you don’t want anything you oughtn’t to?

GREGORY. Quite sure. I only want you [she recoils]. Don’t be alarmed. I like wanting you. As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

MRS. JUNO. Yes; but the impulse to commit suicide is sometimes irresistible.

GREGORY. Not with you.

MRS. JUNO. What!

GREGORY. Oh, it sounds uncomplimentary; but it isn’t really. Do you know why half the couples who find themselves situated as we are now behave horridly?

MRS. JUNO. Because they can’t help it if they let things go too far.

GREGORY. Not a bit of it. It’s because they have nothing else to do, and no other way of entertaining each other. You don’t know what it is to be alone with a woman who has little beauty and less conversation. What is a man to do? She can’t talk interestingly; and if he talks that way himself she doesn’t understand him. He can’t look at her: if he does, he only finds out that she isn’t beautiful. Before the end of five minutes they are both hideously bored. There’s only one thing that can save the situation; and that’s what you call being horrid. With a beautiful, witty, kind woman, there’s no time for such follies. It’s so delightful to look at her, to listen to her voice, to hear all she has to say, that nothing else happens. That is why the woman who is supposed to have a thousand lovers seldom has one; whilst the stupid, graceless animals of women have dozens.

MRS. JUNO. I wonder! It’s quite true that when one feels in danger one talks like mad to stave it off, even when one doesn’t quite want to stave it off.

GREGORY. One never does quite want to stave it off. Danger is delicious. But death isn’t. We court the danger; but the real delight is in escaping, after all.

MRS. JUNO. I don’t think we’ll talk about it any more. Danger is all very well when you do escape; but sometimes one doesn’t. I tell you frankly I don’t feel as safe as you do — if you really do.

GREGORY. But surely you can do as you please without injuring anyone, Mrs. Juno. That is the whole secret of your extraordinary charm for me.

MRS. JUNO. I don’t understand.

GREGORY. Well, I hardly know how to begin to explain. But the root of the matter is that I am what people call a good man.

MRS. JUNO. I thought so until you began making love to me.

GREGORY. But you knew I loved you all along.

MRS. JUNO. Yes, of course; but I depended on you not to tell me so; because I thought you were good. Your blurting it out spoilt it. And it was wicked besides.

GREGORY. Not at all. You see, it’s a great many years since I’ve been able to allow myself to fall in love. I know lots of charming women; but the worst of it is, they’re all married. Women don’t become charming, to my taste, until they’re fully developed; and by that time, if they’re really nice, they’re snapped up and married. And then, because I am a good man, I have to place a limit to my regard for them. I may be fortunate enough to gain friendship and even very warm affection from them; but my loyalty to their husbands and their hearths and their happiness obliges me to draw a line and not overstep it. Of course I value such affectionate regard very highly indeed. I am surrounded with women who are most dear to me. But every one of them has a post sticking up, if I may put it that way, with the inscription Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. How we all loathe that notice! In every lovely garden, in every dell full of primroses, on every fair hillside, we meet that confounded board; and there is always a gamekeeper round the corner. But what is that to the horror of meeting it on every beautiful woman, and knowing that there is a husband round the corner? I have had this accursed board standing between me and every dear and desirable woman until I thought I had lost the power of letting myself fall really and wholeheartedly in love.

MRS. JUNO. Wasn’t there a widow?

GREGORY. No. Widows are extraordinarily scarce in modern society. Husbands live longer than they used to; and even when they do die, their widows have a string of names down for their next.

MRS. JUNO. Well, what about the young girls?

GREGORY. Oh, who cares for young girls? They’re sympathetic. They’re beginners. They don’t attract me. I’m afraid of them.

MRS. JUNO. That’s the correct thing to say to a woman of my age. But it doesn’t explain why you seem to have put your scruples in your pocket when you met me.

GREGORY. Surely that’s quite clear. I —

MRS. JUNO. No: please don’t explain. I don’t want to know. I take your word for it. Besides, it doesn’t matter now. Our voyage is over; and to-morrow I start for the north to my poor father’s place.

GREGORY [surprised]. Your poor father! I thought he was alive.

MRS. JUNO. So he is. What made you think he wasn’t?

GREGORY. You said your POOR father.

MRS. JUNO. Oh, that’s a trick of mine. Rather a silly trick, I Suppose; but there’s something pathetic to me about men: I find myself calling them poor So-and-So when there’s nothing whatever the matter with them.

GREGORY [who has listened in growing alarm]. But — I — is? — wa — ? Oh, Lord!

MRS. JUNO. What’s the matter?

GREGORY. Nothing.

MRS. JUNO. Nothing! [Rising anxiously]. Nonsense: you’re ill.

GREGORY. No. It was something about your late husband —

MRS. JUNO. My LATE husband! What do you mean? [clutching him, horror-stricken]. Don’t tell me he’s dead.

GREGORY [rising, equally appalled]. Don’t tell me he’s alive.

MRS. JUNO. Oh, don’t frighten me like this. Of course he’s alive — unless you’ve heard anything.

GREGORY. The first day we met — on the boat — you spoke to me of your poor dear husband.

MRS. JUNO [releasing him, quite reassured]. Is that all?

GREGORY. Well, afterwards you called him poor Tops. Always poor Tops, Our poor dear Tops. What could I think?

MRS. JUNO [sitting down again]. I wish you hadn’t given me such a shock about him; for I haven’t been treating him at all well. Neither have you.

GREGORY [relapsing into his seat, overwhelmed]. And you mean to tell me you’re not a widow!

MRS. JUNO. Gracious, no! I’m not in black.

GREGORY. Then I have been behaving like a blackguard. I have broken my promise to my mother. I shall never have an easy conscience again.

MRS. JUNO. I’m sorry. I thought you knew.

GREGORY. You thought I was a libertine?

MRS. JUNO. No: of course I shouldn’t have spoken to you if I had thought that. I thought you liked me, but that you knew, and would be good.

GREGORY [stretching his hands towards her breast]. I thought the burden of being good had fallen from my soul at last. I saw nothing there but a bosom to rest on: the bosom of a lovely woman of whom I could dream without guilt. What do I see now?

MRS. JUNO. Just what you saw before.

GREGORY [despairingly]. No, no.

MRS. JUNO. What else?

GREGORY. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

MRS. JUNO. They won’t if they hold their tongues. Don’t be such a coward. My husband won’t eat you.

GREGORY. I’m not afraid of your husband. I’m afraid of my conscience.

MRS. JUNO [losing patience]. Well! I don’t consider myself at all a badly behaved woman; for nothing has passed between us that was not perfectly nice and friendly; but really! to hear a grown-up man talking about promises to his mother!

GREGORY [interrupting her]. Yes, Yes: I know all about that. It’s not romantic: it’s not Don Juan: it’s not advanced; but we feel it all the same. It’s far deeper in our blood and bones than all the romantic stuff. My father got into a scandal once: that was why my mother made me promise never to make love to a married woman. And now I’ve done it I can’t feel honest. Don’t pretend to despise me or laugh at me. You feel it too. You said just now that your own conscience was uneasy when you thought of your husband. What must it be when you think of my wife?

MRS. JUNO [rising aghast]. Your wife!!! You don’t dare sit there and tell me coolly that you’re a married man!

GREGORY. I never led you to believe I was unmarried.

MRS. JUNO. Oh! You never gave me the faintest hint that you had a wife.

GREGORY. I did indeed. I discussed things with you that only married people really understand.

MRS. JUNO. Oh!!

GREGORY. I thought it the most delicate way of letting you know.

MRS. JUNO. Well, you ARE a daisy, I must say. I suppose that’s vulgar; but really! really!! You and your goodness! However, now we’ve found one another out there’s only one thing to be done. Will you please go?

GREGORY [rising slowly]. I OUGHT to go.

MRS. JUNO. Well, go.

GREGORY. Yes. Er — [he tries to go]. I — I somehow can’t. [He sits down again helplessly]. My conscience is active: my will is paralyzed. This is really dreadful. Would you mind ringing the bell and asking them to throw me out? You ought to, you know.

MRS. JUNO. What! make a scandal in the face of the whole hotel! Certainly not. Don’t be a fool.

GREGORY. Yes; but I can’t go.

MRS. JUNO. Then I can. Goodbye.

GREGORY [clinging to her hand]. Can you really?

MRS. JUNO. Of course I — [she wavers]. Oh, dear! [They contemplate one another helplessly]. I can’t. [She sinks on the lounge, hand in hand with him].

GREGORY. For heaven’s sake pull yourself together. It’s a question of self-control.

MRS. JUNO [dragging her hand away and retreating to the end of the chesterfield]. No: it’s a question of distance. Self-control is all very well two or three yards off, or on a ship, with everybody looking on. Don’t come any nearer.

GREGORY. This is a ghastly business. I want to go away; and I can’t.

MRS. JUNO. I think you ought to go [he makes an effort; and she adds quickly] but if you try I shall grab you round the neck and disgrace myself. I implore you to sit still and be nice.

GREGORY. I implore you to run away. I believe I can trust myself to let you go for your own sake. But it will break my heart.

MRS. JUNO. I don’t want to break your heart. I can’t bear to think of your sitting here alone. I can’t bear to think of sitting alone myself somewhere else. It’s so senseless — so ridiculous — when we might be so happy. I don’t want to be wicked, or coarse. But I like you very much; and I do want to be affectionate and human.

GREGORY. I ought to draw a line.

MRS. JUNO. So you shall, dear. Tell me: do you really like me? I don’t mean LOVE me: you might love the housemaid —

GREGORY [vehemently]. No!

MRS. JUNO. Oh, yes you might; and what does that matter, anyhow? Are you really fond of me? Are we friends — comrades? Would you be sorry if I died?

GREGORY [shrinking]. Oh, don’t.

MRS. JUNO. Or was it the usual aimless man’s lark: a mere shipboard flirtation?

GREGORY. Oh, no, no: nothing half so bad, so vulgar, so wrong. I assure you I only meant to be agreeable. It grew on me before I noticed it.

MRS. JUNO. And you were glad to let it grow?

GREGORY. I let it grow because the board was not up.

MRS. JUNO. Bother the board! I am just as fond of Sibthorpe as —

GREGORY. Sibthorpe!

MRS. JUNO. Sibthorpe is my husband’s Christian name. I oughtn’t to call him Tops to you now.

GREGORY [chuckling]. It sounded like something to drink. But I have no right to laugh at him. My Christian name is Gregory, which sounds like a powder.

MRS. JUNO [chilled]. That is so like a man! I offer you my heart’s warmest friendliest feeling; and you think of nothing but a silly joke. A quip like that makes you forget me.

GREGORY. Forget you! Oh, if I only could!

MRS. JUNO. If you could, would you?

GREGORY [burying his shamed face in his hands]. No: I’d die first. Oh, I hate myself.

MRS. JUNO. I glory in myself. It’s so jolly to be reckless. CAN a man be reckless, I wonder.

GREGORY [straightening himself desperately]. No. I’m not reckless. I know what I’m doing: my conscience is awake. Oh, where is the intoxication of love? the delirium? the madness that makes a man think the world well lost for the woman he adores? I don’t think anything of the sort: I see that it’s not worth it: I know that it’s wrong: I have never in my life been cooler, more businesslike.

MRS. JUNO. [opening her arms to him] But you can’t resist me.

GREGORY. I must. I ought [throwing himself into her arms]. Oh, my darling, my treasure, we shall be sorry for this.

MRS. JUNO. We can forgive ourselves. Could we forgive ourselves if we let this moment slip?

GREGORY. I protest to the last. I’m against this. I have been pushed over a precipice. I’m innocent. This wild joy, this exquisite tenderness, this ascent into heaven can thrill me to the uttermost fibre of my heart [with a gesture of ecstasy she hides her face on his shoulder]; but it can’t subdue my mind or corrupt my conscience, which still shouts to the skies that I’m not a willing party to this outrageous conduct. I repudiate the bliss with which you are filling me.

MRS. JUNO. Never mind your conscience. Tell me how happy you are.

GREGORY. No, I recall you to your duty. But oh, I will give you my life with both hands if you can tell me that you feel for me one millionth part of what I feel for you now.

MRS. JUNO. Oh, yes, yes. Be satisfied with that. Ask for no more. Let me go.

GREGORY. I can’t. I have no will. Something stronger than either of us is in command here. Nothing on earth or in heaven can part us now. You know that, don’t you?

MRS. JUNO. Oh, don’t make me say it. Of course I know. Nothing — not life nor death nor shame nor anything can part us.

A MATTER-OF-FACT MALE VOICE IN THE CORRIDOR. All right. This must be it.

The two recover with a violent start; release one another; and spring back to opposite sides of the lounge.

GREGORY. That did it.

MRS. JUNO [in a thrilling whisper] Sh — sh — sh! That was my husband’s voice.

GREGORY. Impossible: it’s only our guilty fancy.

A WOMAN’S VOICE. This is the way to the lounge. I know it.

GREGORY. Great Heaven! we’re both mad. That’s my wife’s voice.

MRS. JUNO. Ridiculous! Oh! we’re dreaming it all. We [the door opens; and Sibthorpe Juno appears in the roseate glow of the corridor (which happens to be papered in pink) with Mrs. Lunn, like Tannhauser in the hill of Venus. He is a fussily energetic little man, who gives himself an air of gallantry by greasing the points of his moustaches and dressing very carefully. She is a tall, imposing, handsome, languid woman, with flashing dark eyes and long lashes. They make for the chesterfield, not noticing the two palpitating figures blotted against the walls in the gloom on either side. The figures flit away noiselessly through the window and disappear].

JUNO [officiously] Ah: here we are. [He leads the way to the sofa]. Sit down: I’m sure you’re tired. [She sits]. That’s right. [He sits beside her on her left]. Hullo! [he rises] this sofa’s quite warm.

MRS. LUNN [bored] Is it? I don’t notice it. I expect the sun’s been on it.

JUNO. I felt it quite distinctly: I’m more thinly clad than you. [He sits down again, and proceeds, with a sigh of satisfaction]. What a relief to get off the ship and have a private room! That’s the worst of a ship. You’re under observation all the time.

MRS. LUNN. But why not?

JUNO. Well, of course there’s no reason: at least I suppose not. But, you know, part of the romance of a journey is that a man keeps imagining that something might happen; and he can’t do that if there are a lot of people about and it simply can’t happen.

MRS. LUNN. Mr. Juno: romance is all very well on board ship; but when your foot touches the soil of England there’s an end of it.

JUNO. No: believe me, that’s a foreigner’s mistake: we are the most romantic people in the world, we English. Why, my very presence here is a romance.

MRS. LUNN [faintly ironical] Indeed?

JUNO. Yes. You’ve guessed, of course, that I’m a married man.

MRS. LUNN. Oh, that’s all right. I’m a married woman.

JUNO. Thank Heaven for that! To my English mind, passion is not real passion without guilt. I am a red-blooded man, Mrs. Lunn: I can’t help it. The tragedy of my life is that I married, when quite young, a woman whom I couldn’t help being very fond of. I longed for a guilty passion — for the real thing — the wicked thing; and yet I couldn’t care twopence for any other woman when my wife was about. Year after year went by: I felt my youth slipping away without ever having had a romance in my life; for marriage is all very well; but it isn’t romance. There’s nothing wrong in it, you see.

MRS. LUNN. Poor man! How you must have suffered!

JUNO. No: that was what was so tame about it. I wanted to suffer. You get so sick of being happily married. It’s always the happy marriages that break up. At last my wife and I agreed that we ought to take a holiday.

MRS. LUNN. Hadn’t you holidays every year?

JUNO. Oh, the seaside and so on! That’s not what we meant. We meant a holiday from one another.

MRS. LUNN. How very odd!

JUNO. She said it was an excellent idea; that domestic felicity was making us perfectly idiotic; that she wanted a holiday, too. So we agreed to go round the world in opposite directions. I started for Suez on the day she sailed for New York.

MRS. LUNN [suddenly becoming attentive] That’s precisely what Gregory and I did. Now I wonder did he want a holiday from me! What he said was that he wanted the delight of meeting me after a long absence.

JUNO. Could anything be more romantic than that? Would anyone else than an Englishman have thought of it? I daresay my temperament seems tame to your boiling southern blood —

MRS. LUNN. My what!

JUNO. Your southern blood. Don’t you remember how you told me, that night in the saloon when I sang “Farewell and adieu to you dear Spanish ladies,” that you were by birth a lady of Spain? Your splendid Andalusian beauty speaks for itself.

MRS. LUNN. Stuff! I was born in Gibraltar. My father was Captain Jenkins. In the artillery.

JUNO [ardently] It is climate and not race that determines the temperament. The fiery sun of Spain blazed on your cradle; and it rocked to the roar of British cannon.

MRS. LUNN. What eloquence! It reminds me of my husband when he was in love before we were married. Are you in love?

JUNO. Yes; and with the same woman.

MRS. LUNN. Well, of course, I didn’t suppose you were in love with two women.

JUNO. I don’t think you quite understand. I meant that I am in love with you.

MRS. LUNN [relapsing into deepest boredom] Oh, that! Men do fall in love with me. They all seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions: I’m sure I don’t know why; for all the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don’t consider human volcanoes respectable. And I’m so tired of the subject! Our house is always full of women who are in love with my husband and men who are in love with me. We encourage it because it’s pleasant to have company.

JUNO. And is your husband as insensible as yourself?

MRS. LUNN. Oh, Gregory’s not insensible: very far from it; but I am the only woman in the world for him.

JUNO. But you? Are you really as insensible as you say you are?

MRS. LUNN. I never said anything of the kind. I’m not at all insensible by nature; but (I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it) I am what people call rather a fine figure of a woman.

JUNO [passionately] Noticed it! Oh, Mrs. Lunn! Have I been able to notice anything else since we met?

MRS. LUNN. There you go, like all the rest of them! I ask you, how do you expect a woman to keep up what you call her sensibility when this sort of thing has happened to her about three times a week ever since she was seventeen? It used to upset me and terrify me at first. Then I got rather a taste for it. It came to a climax with Gregory: that was why I married him. Then it became a mild lark, hardly worth the trouble. After that I found it valuable once or twice as a spinal tonic when I was run down; but now it’s an unmitigated bore. I don’t mind your declaration: I daresay it gives you a certain pleasure to make it. I quite understand that you adore me; but (if you don’t mind) I’d rather you didn’t keep on saying so.

JUNO. Is there then no hope for me?

MRS. LUNN. Oh, yes. Gregory has an idea that married women keep lists of the men they’ll marry if they become widows. I’ll put your name down, if that will satisfy you.

JUNO. Is the list a long one?

MRS. LUNN. Do you mean the real list? Not the one I show to Gregory: there are hundreds of names on that; but the little private list that he’d better not see?

JUNO. Oh, will you really put me on that? Say you will.

MRS. LUNN. Well, perhaps I will. [He kisses her hand]. Now don’t begin abusing the privilege.

JUNO. May I call you by your Christian name?

MRS. LUNN. No: it’s too long. You can’t go about calling a woman Seraphita.

JUNO [ecstatically] Seraphita!

MRS. LUNN. I used to be called Sally at home; but when I married a man named Lunn, of course that became ridiculous. That’s my one little pet joke. Call me Mrs. Lunn for short. And change the subject, or I shall go to sleep.

JUNO. I can’t change the subject. For me there is no other subject. Why else have you put me on your list?

MRS. LUNN. Because you’re a solicitor. Gregory’s a solicitor. I’m accustomed to my husband being a solicitor and telling me things he oughtn’t to tell anybody.

JUNO [ruefully] Is that all? Oh, I can’t believe that the voice of love has ever thoroughly awakened you.

MRS. LUNN. No: it sends me to sleep. [Juno appeals against this by an amorous demonstration]. It’s no use, Mr. Juno: I’m hopelessly respectable: the Jenkinses always were. Don’t you realize that unless most women were like that, the world couldn’t go on as it does?

JUNO [darkly] You think it goes on respectably; but I can tell you as a solicitor —

MRS. LUNN. Stuff! of course all the disreputable people who get into trouble go to you, just as all the sick people go to the doctors; but most people never go to a solicitor.

JUNO [rising, with a growing sense of injury] Look here, Mrs. Lunn: do you think a man’s heart is a potato? or a turnip? or a ball of knitting wool? that you can throw it away like this?

MRS. LUNN. I don’t throw away balls of knitting wool. A man’s heart seems to me much like a sponge: it sops up dirty water as well as clean.

JUNO. I have never been treated like this in my life. Here am I, a married man, with a most attractive wife: a wife I adore, and who adores me, and has never as much as looked at any other man since we were married. I come and throw all this at your feet. I! I, a solicitor! braving the risk of your husband putting me into the divorce court and making me a beggar and an outcast! I do this for your sake. And you go on as if I were making no sacrifice: as if I had told you it’s a fine evening, or asked you to have a cup of tea. It’s not human. It’s not right. Love has its rights as well as respectability [he sits down again, aloof and sulky].

MRS. LUNN. Nonsense! Here, here’s a flower [she gives him one]. Go and dream over it until you feel hungry. Nothing brings people to their senses like hunger.

JUNO [contemplating the flower without rapture] What good’s this?

MRS. LUNN [snatching it from him] Oh! you don’t love me a bit.

JUNO. Yes I do. Or at least I did. But I’m an Englishman; and I think you ought to respect the conventions of English life.

MRS. LUNN. But I am respecting them; and you’re not.

JUNO. Pardon me. I may be doing wrong; but I’m doing it in a proper and customary manner. You may be doing right; but you’re doing it in an unusual and questionable manner. I am not prepared to put up with that. I can stand being badly treated: I’m no baby, and can take care of myself with anybody. And of course I can stand being well treated. But the thing I can’t stand is being unexpectedly treated, It’s outside my scheme of life. So come now! you’ve got to behave naturally and straightforwardly with me. You can leave husband and child, home, friends, and country, for my sake, and come with me to some southern isle — or say South America — where we can be all in all to one another. Or you can tell your husband and let him jolly well punch my head if he can. But I’m damned if I’m going to stand any eccentricity. It’s not respectable.

GREGORY [coming in from the terrace and advancing with dignity to his wife’s end of the chesterfield]. Will you have the goodness, sir, in addressing this lady, to keep your temper and refrain from using profane language?

MRS. LUNN [rising, delighted] Gregory! Darling [she enfolds him in a copious embrace]!

JUNO [rising] You make love to another man to my face!

MRS. LUNN. Why, he’s my husband.

JUNO. That takes away the last rag of excuse for such conduct. A nice world it would be if married people were to carry on their endearments before everybody!

GREGORY. This is ridiculous. What the devil business is it of yours what passes between my wife and myself? You’re not her husband, are you?

JUNO. Not at present; but I’m on the list. I’m her prospective husband: you’re only her actual one. I’m the anticipation: you’re the disappointment.

MRS. LUNN. Oh, my Gregory is not a disappointment. [Fondly] Are you, dear?

GREGORY. You just wait, my pet. I’ll settle this chap for you. [He disengages himself from her embrace, and faces Juno. She sits down placidly]. You call me a disappointment, do you? Well, I suppose every husband’s a disappointment. What about yourself? Don’t try to look like an unmarried man. I happen to know the lady you disappointed. I travelled in the same ship with her; and —

JUNO. And you fell in love with her.

GREGORY [taken aback] Who told you that?

JUNO. Aha! you confess it. Well, if you want to know, nobody told me. Everybody falls in love with my wife.

GREGORY. And do you fall in love with everybody’s wife?

JUNO. Certainly not. Only with yours.

MRS. LUNN. But what’s the good of saying that, Mr. Juno? I’m married to him; and there’s an end of it.

JUNO. Not at all. You can get a divorce.

MRS. LUNN. What for?

JUNO. For his misconduct with my wife.

GREGORY [deeply indignant] How dare you, sir, asperse the character of that sweet lady? a lady whom I have taken under my protection.

JUNO. Protection!

MRS. JUNO [returning hastily] Really you must be more careful what you say about me, Mr. Lunn.

JUNO. My precious! [He embraces her]. Pardon this betrayal of my feeling; but I’ve not seen my wife for several weeks; and she is very dear to me.

GREGORY. I call this cheek. Who is making love to his own wife before people now, pray?

MRS. LUNN. Won’t you introduce me to your wife, Mr. Juno?

MRS. JUNO. How do you do? [They shake hands; and Mrs. Juno sits down beside Mrs. Lunn, on her left].

MRS. LUNN. I’m so glad to find you do credit to Gregory’s taste. I’m naturally rather particular about the women he falls in love with.

JUNO [sternly] This is no way to take your husband’s unfaithfulness. [To Lunn] You ought to teach your wife better. Where’s her feelings? It’s scandalous.

GREGORY. What about your own conduct, pray?

JUNO. I don’t defend it; and there’s an end of the matter.

GREGORY. Well, upon my soul! What difference does your not defending it make?

JUNO. A fundamental difference. To serious people I may appear wicked. I don’t defend myself: I am wicked, though not bad at heart. To thoughtless people I may even appear comic. Well, laugh at me: I have given myself away. But Mrs. Lunn seems to have no opinion at all about me. She doesn’t seem to know whether I’m wicked or comic. She doesn’t seem to care. She has no more sense. I say it’s not right. I repeat, I have sinned; and I’m prepared to suffer.

MRS. JUNO. Have you really sinned, Tops?

MRS. LUNN [blandly] I don’t remember your sinning. I have a shocking bad memory for trifles; but I think I should remember that — if you mean me.

JUNO [raging] Trifles! I have fallen in love with a monster.

GREGORY. Don’t you dare call my wife a monster.

MRS. JUNO [rising quickly and coming between them]. Please don’t lose your temper, Mr. Lunn: I won’t have my Tops bullied.

GREGORY. Well, then, let him not brag about sinning with my wife. [He turns impulsively to his wife; makes her rise; and takes her proudly on his arm]. What pretension has he to any such honor?

JUNO. I sinned in intention. [Mrs. Juno abandons him and resumes her seat, chilled]. I’m as guilty as if I had actually sinned. And I insist on being treated as a sinner, and not walked over as if I’d done nothing, by your wife or any other man.

MRS. LUNN. Tush! [She sits down again contemptuously].

JUNO [furious] I won’t be belittled.

MRS. LUNN [to Mrs. Juno] I hope you’ll come and stay with us now that you and Gregory are such friends, Mrs. Juno.

JUNO. This insane magnanimity —

MRS. LUNN. Don’t you think you’ve said enough, Mr. Juno? This is a matter for two women to settle. Won’t you take a stroll on the beach with my Gregory while we talk it over. Gregory is a splendid listener.

JUNO. I don’t think any good can come of a conversation between Mr. Lunn and myself. We can hardly be expected to improve one another’s morals. [He passes behind the chesterfield to Mrs. Lunn’s end; seizes a chair; deliberately pushes it between Gregory and Mrs. Lunn; and sits down with folded arms, resolved not to budge].

GREGORY. Oh! Indeed! Oh, all right. If you come to that — [he crosses to Mrs. Juno; plants a chair by her side; and sits down with equal determination].

JUNO. Now we are both equally guilty.

GREGORY. Pardon me. I’m not guilty.

JUNO. In intention. Don’t quibble. You were guilty in intention, as I was.

GREGORY. No. I should rather describe myself guilty in fact, but not in intention.

JUNO                  { rising and         }  What!

MRS. JUNO        { exclaiming       }  No, really —

MRS. LUNN       { simultaneously }  Gregory!

GREGORY. Yes: I maintain that I am responsible for my intentions only, and not for reflex actions over which I have no control. [Mrs. Juno sits down, ashamed]. I promised my mother that I would never tell a lie, and that I would never make love to a married woman. I never have told a lie —

MRS. LUNN [remonstrating] Gregory! [She sits down again].

GREGORY. I say never. On many occasions I have resorted to prevarication; but on great occasions I have always told the truth. I regard this as a great occasion; and I won’t be intimidated into breaking my promise. I solemnly declare that I did not know until this evening that Mrs. Juno was married. She will bear me out when I say that from that moment my intentions were strictly and resolutely honorable; though my conduct, which I could not control and am therefore not responsible for, was disgraceful — or would have been had this gentleman not walked in and begun making love to my wife under my very nose.

JUNO [flinging himself back into his chair] Well, I like this!

MRS. LUNN. Really, darling, there’s no use in the pot calling the kettle black.

GREGORY. When you say darling, may I ask which of us you are addressing?

MRS. LUNN. I really don’t know. I’m getting hopelessly confused.

JUNO. Why don’t you let my wife say something? I don’t think she ought to be thrust into the background like this.

MRS. LUNN. I’m sorry, I’m sure. Please excuse me, dear.

MRS. JUNO [thoughtfully] I don’t know what to say. I must think over it. I have always been rather severe on this sort of thing; but when it came to the point I didn’t behave as I thought I should behave. I didn’t intend to be wicked; but somehow or other, Nature, or whatever you choose to call it, didn’t take much notice of my intentions. [Gregory instinctively seeks her hand and presses it]. And I really did think, Tops, that I was the only woman in the world for you.

JUNO [cheerfully] Oh, that’s all right, my precious. Mrs. Lunn thought she was the only woman in the world for him.

GREGORY [reflectively] So she is, in a sort of a way.

JUNO [flaring up] And so is my wife. Don’t you set up to be a better husband than I am; for you’re not. I’ve owned I’m wrong. You haven’t.

MRS. LUNN. Are you sorry, Gregory?

GREGORY [perplexed] Sorry?

MRS. LUNN. Yes, sorry. I think it’s time for you to say you’re sorry, and to make friends with Mr. Juno before we all dine together.

GREGORY. Seraphita: I promised my mother —

MRS. JUNO [involuntarily] Oh, bother your mother! [Recovering herself] I beg your pardon.

GREGORY. A promise is a promise. I can’t tell a deliberate lie. I know I ought to be sorry; but the flat fact is that I’m not sorry. I find that in this business, somehow or other, there is a disastrous separation between my moral principles and my conduct.

JUNO. There’s nothing disastrous about it. It doesn’t matter about your principles if your conduct is all right.

GREGORY. Bosh! It doesn’t matter about your principles if your conduct is all right.

JUNO. But your conduct isn’t all right; and my principles are.

GREGORY. What’s the good of your principles being right if they won’t work?

JUNO. They WILL work, sir, if you exercise self-sacrifice.

GREGORY. Oh yes: if, if, if. You know jolly well that self-sacrifice doesn’t work either when you really want a thing. How much have you sacrificed yourself, pray?

MRS. LUNN. Oh, a great deal, Gregory. Don’t be rude. Mr. Juno is a very nice man: he has been most attentive to me on the voyage.

GREGORY. And Mrs. Juno’s a very nice woman. She oughtn’t to be; but she is.

JUNO. Why oughtn’t she to be a nice woman, pray?

GREGORY. I mean she oughtn’t to be nice to me. And you oughtn’t to be nice to my wife. And your wife oughtn’t to like me. And my wife oughtn’t to like you. And if they do, they oughtn’t to go on liking us. And I oughtn’t to like your wife; and you oughtn’t to like mine; and if we do we oughtn’t to go on liking them. But we do, all of us. We oughtn’t; but we do.

JUNO. But, my dear boy, if we admit we are in the wrong where’s the harm of it? We’re not perfect; but as long as we keep the ideal before us —

GREGORY. How?

JUNO. By admitting we were wrong.

MRS. LUNN [springing up, out of patience, and pacing round the lounge intolerantly] Well, really, I must have my dinner. These two men, with their morality, and their promises to their mothers, and their admissions that they were wrong, and their sinning and suffering, and their going on at one another as if it meant anything, or as if it mattered, are getting on my nerves. [Stooping over the back of the chesterfield to address Mrs. Juno] If you will be so very good, my dear, as to take my sentimental husband off my hands occasionally, I shall be more than obliged to you: I’m sure you can stand more male sentimentality than I can. [Sweeping away to the fireplace] I, on my part, will do my best to amuse your excellent husband when you find him tiresome.

JUNO. I call this polyandry.

MRS. LUNN. I wish you wouldn’t call innocent things by offensive names, Mr. Juno. What do you call your own conduct?

JUNO [rising] I tell you I have admitted —

GREGORY     {               } What’s the good of keeping on at that?

MRS. JUNO   { together } Oh, not that again, please.

MRS. LUNN  {               } Tops: I’ll scream if you say that again.

JUNO. Oh, well, if you won’t listen to me — ! [He sits down again].

MRS. JUNO. What is the position now exactly? [Mrs. Lunn shrugs her shoulders and gives up the conundrum. Gregory looks at Juno. Juno turns away his head huffily]. I mean, what are we going to do?

MRS. LUNN. What would you advise, Mr. Juno?

JUNO. I should advise you to divorce your husband.

MRS. LUNN. Do you want me to drag your wife into court and disgrace her?

JUNO. No: I forgot that. Excuse me; but for the moment I thought I was married to you.

GREGORY. I think we had better let bygones be bygones. [To Mrs. Juno, very tenderly] You will forgive me, won’t you? Why should you let a moment’s forgetfulness embitter all our future life?

MRS. JUNO. But it’s Mrs. Lunn who has to forgive you.

GREGORY. Oh, dash it, I forgot. This is getting ridiculous.

MRS. LUNN. I’m getting hungry.

MRS. JUNO. Do you really mind, Mrs. Lunn?

MRS. LUNN. My dear Mrs. Juno, Gregory is one of those terribly uxorious men who ought to have ten wives. If any really nice woman will take him off my hands for a day or two occasionally, I shall be greatly obliged to her.

GREGORY. Seraphita: you cut me to the soul [he weeps].

MRs. LUNN. Serve you right! You’d think it quite proper if it cut me to the soul.

MRS. JUNO. Am I to take Sibthorpe off your hands too, Mrs. Lunn?

JUNO [rising] Do you suppose I’ll allow this?

MRS. JUNO. You’ve admitted that you’ve done wrong, Tops. What’s the use of your allowing or not allowing after that?

JUNO. I do not admit that I have done wrong. I admit that what I did was wrong.

GREGORY. Can you explain the distinction?

JUNO. It’s quite plain to anyone but an imbecile. If you tell me I’ve done something wrong you insult me. But if you say that something that I did is wrong you simply raise a question of morals. I tell you flatly if you say I did anything wrong you will have to fight me. In fact I think we ought to fight anyhow. I don’t particularly want to; but I feel that England expects us to.

GREGORY. I won’t fight. If you beat me my wife would share my humiliation. If I beat you, she would sympathize with you and loathe me for my brutality.

MRS. LUNN. Not to mention that as we are human beings and not reindeer or barndoor fowl, if two men presumed to fight for us we couldn’t decently ever speak to either of them again.

GREGORY. Besides, neither of us could beat the other, as we neither of us know how to fight. We should only blacken each other’s eyes and make fools of ourselves.

JUNO. I don’t admit that. Every Englishman can use his fists.

GREGORY. You’re an Englishman. Can you use yours?

JUNO. I presume so: I never tried.

MRS. JUNO. You never told me you couldn’t fight, Tops. I thought you were an accomplished boxer.

JUNO. My precious: I never gave you any ground for such a belief.

MRS. JUNO. You always talked as if it were a matter of course. You spoke with the greatest contempt of men who didn’t kick other men downstairs.

JUNO. Well, I can’t kick Mr. Lunn downstairs. We’re on the ground floor.

MRS. JUNO. You could throw him into the harbor.

GREGORY. Do you want me to be thrown into the harbor?

MRS. JUNO. No: I only want to show Tops that he’s making a ghastly fool of himself.

GREGORY [rising and prowling disgustedly between the chesterfield and the windows] We’re all making fools of ourselves.

JUNO [following him] Well, if we’re not to fight, I must insist at least on your never speaking to my wife again.

GREGORY. Does my speaking to your wife do you any harm?

JUNO. No. But it’s the proper course to take. [Emphatically]. We MUST behave with some sort of decency.

MRS. LUNN. And are you never going to speak to me again, Mr. Juno?

JUNO. I’m prepared to promise never to do so. I think your husband has a right to demand that. Then if I speak to you after, it will not be his fault. It will be a breach of my promise; and I shall not attempt to defend my conduct.

GREGORY [facing him] I shall talk to your wife as often as she’ll let me.

MRS. JUNO. I have no objection to your speaking to me, Mr. Lunn.

JUNO. Then I shall take steps.

GREGORY. What steps?

JUNO. Steps. Measures. Proceedings. What steps as may seem advisable.

MRS. LUNN [to Mrs. Juno] Can your husband afford a scandal, Mrs. Juno?

MRS. JUNO. No.

MRS. LUNN. Neither can mine.

GREGORY. Mrs. Juno: I’m very sorry I let you in for all this. I don’t know how it is that we contrive to make feelings like ours, which seems to me to be beautiful and sacred feelings, and which lead to such interesting and exciting adventures, end in vulgar squabbles and degrading scenes.

JUNO. I decline to admit that my conduct has been vulgar or degrading.

GREGORY. I promised —

JUNO. Look here, old chap: I don’t say a word against your mother; and I’m sorry she’s dead; but really, you know, most women are mothers; and they all die some time or other; yet that doesn’t make them infallible authorities on morals, does it?

GREGORY. I was about to say so myself. Let me add that if you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.

JUNO. Lunn: I love your wife; and that’s all about it.

GREGORY. Juno: I love yours. What then?

JUNO. Clearly she must never see you again.

MRS. JUNO. Why not?

JUNO. Why not! My love: I’m surprised at you.

MRS. JUNO. Am I to speak only to men who dislike me?

JUNO. Yes: I think that is, properly speaking, a married woman’s duty.

MRS. JUNO. Then I won’t do it: that’s flat. I like to be liked. I like to be loved. I want everyone round me to love me. I don’t want to meet or speak to anyone who doesn’t like me.

JUNO. But, my precious, this is the most horrible immorality.

MRS. LUNN. I don’t intend to give up meeting you, Mr. Juno. You amuse me very much. I don’t like being loved: it bores me. But I do like to be amused.

JUNO. I hope we shall meet very often. But I hope also we shall not defend our conduct.

MRS. JUNO [rising] This is unendurable. We’ve all been flirting. Need we go on footling about it?

JUNO [huffily] I don’t know what you call footling —

MRS. JUNO [cutting him short] You do. You’re footling. Mr. Lunn is footling. Can’t we admit that we’re human and have done with it?

JUNO. I have admitted it all along. I —

MRS. JUNO [almost screaming] Then stop footling.

The dinner gong sounds.

MRS. LUNN [rising] Thank heaven! Let’s go in to dinner. Gregory: take in Mrs. Juno.

GREGORY. But surely I ought to take in our guest, and not my own wife.

MRS. LUNN. Well, Mrs. Juno is not your wife, is she?

GREGORY. Oh, of course: I beg your pardon. I’m hopelessly confused. [He offers his arm to Mrs. Juno, rather apprehensively].

MRS. JUNO. You seem quite afraid of me [she takes his arm].

GREGORY. I am. I simply adore you. [They go out together; and as they pass through the door he turns and says in a ringing voice to the other couple] I have said to Mrs. Juno that I simply adore her. [He takes her out defiantly].

MRS. LUNN [calling after him] Yes, dear. She’s a darling. [To Juno] Now, Sibthorpe.

JUNO [giving her his arm gallantly] You have called me Sibthorpe! Thank you. I think Lunn’s conduct fully justifies me in allowing you to do it.

MRS. LUNN. Yes: I think you may let yourself go now.

JUNO. Seraphita: I worship you beyond expression.

MRS. LUNN. Sibthorpe: you amuse me beyond description. Come. [They go in to dinner together].

BEAUTY’S DUTY

In a solicitor’s private office. A client is stamping up and down. Both are youngish men.

CLIENT. No, Arthur: a separation. I’ll put up with it no longer.

SOLICITOR. Listen to me, Horace.

CLIENT. I wont listen to you. I wont listen to anybody. My wife and I have come to the parting of the ways.

SOLICITOR. But, my dear Horace, you have nothing against her.

CLIENT. Nothing against her. Nothing ag-

SOLICITOR. I tell you, nothing. You dont complain of her temper: you dont complain of her housekeeping: you dont complain of anything except that she makes you jealous.

CLIENT. I’m not jealous. But if I could stoop to such a feeling, I should have cause for it.

SOLICITOR. Look here, Horace. If you have cause for a separation on that ground, you have cause for a divorce.

CLIENT. I am perfectly willing to be divorced – I mean to divorce her. But you keep telling me I cant.

SOLICITOR. Neither can you. You dont allege misconduct: but allege talk. Talk isnt good enough.

CLIENT. You mean it isnt bad enough. That shews how little you know about it.

SOLICITOR. (out of patience) O, well then, have it your own way. What do you complain of?

CLIENT. Whats that to you?

SOLICITOR. To me! Why, man, Ive got to tackle your wife here in this room this very morning, and explain to her that you are determined to separate from her. Do you suppose I am going to do that without giving her a reason?

CLIENT. I dont mind telling you this. No other man would have stood -

SOLICITOR. Thats no good. What did you stand? You neednt have any delicacy about telling me. Thats what I’m for. You pay a solicitor for the privilege of telling him all your most private affairs. Just forget that we’re old friends, and remember only that I’m your solicitor. Besides, you will tell me nothing that I havnt been told fifty times by husbands sitting in that chair. Dont suppose youre the only man in the world that doesnt get on with his wife.

CLIENT. I bet you what you like youve never heard of a case like mine before.

SOLICITOR. I shall be able to judge of that when you tell me what your case is.

CLIENT. Well, look here. Did you ever hear of a woman coming to her husband and saying that Nature had gifted her with such an extraordinary talent for making people fall in love with her that she considered it a sin not to exercise it?

SOLICITOR. But she has you to make fall in love with her.

CLIENT. Yes: but she’s done that; and she says it’s so nice, and has improved me so much that she wants to do it again and improve somebody else. She says it’s like a genius for bringing up children. The women who have that, she says, keep schools. They are so good at it that they have to be unfaithful to their own children and run after other people’s, she says. And in just the same way, she maintains, a woman with a genius for improving men by love ought to improve them by the dozen. What do you think of that?

SOLICITOR. (rather taken with the idea) Theres something in that, you know.

CLIENT. What!

SOLICITOR. I mean of course, logically. It’s improper; but it makes good sense. I wonder whats the proper answer to it?

CLIENT. Thats what she says.

SOLICITOR. Oh. And what do you say to her?

CLIENT. I tell her that the proper answer to it is that she ought to be ashamed of herself.

SOLICITOR. Does that do any good?

CLIENT. No.

SOLICITOR. Has she ceased to care for you?

CLIENT. No. She says she will practice on me to keep her hand in; but that she is getting tired of me and must have some new interest in life. Now what do you say to your paragon?

SOLICITOR. My paragon! Have I said a word in her defense?

CLIENT. Have you said a word in mine?

SOLICITOR. But dont you see what the consequences will be if you separate? You will lose all control over her; and then there will be a divorce.

CLIENT. I havent any control over her at present

The Junior Clerk enters.

JUNIOR CLERK. A lady to see you sir. (With emotion) She is a very beautiful lady. Oh, sir, if she is in any trouble, will you help her. If she is accused, do not believe a word against her. I’ll stake my life on her innocence.

SOLICITOR. (almost speechless) Well - ! Really, Mr. Guppy. (Recovering himself a little) What name?

JUNIOR CLERK. I forgot to ascertain her name, sir.

SOLICITOR. Perhaps you will be so kind as to repair that omission.

JUNIOR CLERK. I hardly dare ask her, sir. It will seem a profanation. But I think – I hope – she will forgive me. (He goes out.)

CLIENT. It’s my wife. She’s been trying it on that young lunatic.

PYGMALION

Pygmalion was written in the spring of 1912 and was first staged at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on October 16 1913, in a German language production. It opened in New York on March 24 1914 at the German language Irving Place Theatre before finally debuting in London on April 11 1914 at Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s His Majesty’s Theatre, where it featured Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza and Tree as Higgins. Shaw wrote the play for the actor Stella Patrick with whom he was wildly in love and who was flattered by being thought of as the right star to play Eliza, a character a quarter of a century younger than her. The relationship between Shaw and Tree was volatile and it resulted in a series of disputes during rehearsals and then shortly before opening night, Campbell disappeared to get married. When Pygmalion opened the playwright was angered by the audience’s response and left the theatre returning only for the hundredth performance after the work had received very positive critical reviews. However, Shaw soon discovered that Tree has altered the ending of his play to suggest a marriage proposal by Higgins; he was furious at this sentimental romantic conclusion to his work and angrily berated Tree for ruining it.

The title of the play is inspired by the legendary Cypriot figure Pygmalion, who is featured in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a sculptor that declares himself uninterested in women as he believes them corrupt and shameful. He chooses to carve a statue, called Galatea, with whom he falls in love. Galatea is brought to life and Pygmalion’s mute inanimate piece of art becomes his partner — his perfect creation. Shaw’s play relates a relationship between a cockney flower girl and an upper-class professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who makes a wager with a friend that he can transform the girl in speech and behaviour to the degree that she will be able to pass as a Duchess at a social occasion. The playwright’s comedy attacks and satirises the myth in a myriad of ways with the always politically conscious writer highlighting important issues of class and gender. The most fundamental alternation to the original tale is Shaw’s ending which absolutely rejects a romantic conclusion for his characters together and instead suggests far more interesting questions about social mobility, power and independence.

However, as is clear from Tree’s decision to change the conclusion of the play, Shaw’s resistance to a romance between Higgins and Eliza was problematic to many who were staging productions or adaptations of the work. The playwright was so irritated by Tree’s alteration that he wrote a postscript in the 1916 edition of the play, where he explained precisely why it was essential that Eliza and Higgins did not marry; she is emancipated and possesses a freedom and strength far in excess to her ‘creator’.

The play has been performed many times throughout the years, but one of the most famous ‘betrayals’ of Shaw’s vision and message, is the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical adaptation My Fair Lady.  The musical opened on Broadway in 1956 with an Oscar- winning film version following in 1964, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

Shaw’s most popular work is an incisive and witty comedy that raises questions about class, gender assumptions, and power dynamics and the role language plays in all three.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865-1940), born Beatrice Stella Tanner — the real life inspiration for Eliza Doolittle

Poster from a 2011 production

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT V

DVD cover from1964 film

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond Sweet’s patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his “Current Shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman’s. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen, there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’s physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.

ACT I

Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter into the market and under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, where there are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.

The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars, close to the one on her left] I’m getting chilled to the bone. What can Freddy be doing all this time? He’s been gone twenty minutes.

THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right] Not so long. But he ought to have got us a cab by this.

A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right] He won’t get no cab not until half-past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping their theatre fares.

THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We can’t stand here until half-past eleven. It’s too bad.

THE BYSTANDER. Well, it ain’t my fault, missus.

THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got one at the theatre door.

THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?

THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldn’t he?

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side, and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet around the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, haven’t you got a cab?

FREDDY. There’s not one to be had for love or money.

THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You can’t have tried.

THE DAUGHTER. It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one ourselves?

FREDDY. I tell you they’re all engaged. The rain was so sudden: nobody was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. I’ve been to Charing Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all engaged.

THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?

FREDDY. There wasn’t one at Trafalgar Square.

THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?

FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to walk to Hammersmith?

THE DAUGHTER. You haven’t tried at all.

THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and don’t come back until you have found a cab.

FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this draught, with next to nothing on. You selfish pig —

FREDDY. Oh, very well: I’ll go, I’ll go. [He opens his umbrella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands. A blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident]

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah.

FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady’s right. She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist].

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sort, mother. The idea!

THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies?

THE DAUGHTER. No. I’ve nothing smaller than sixpence.

THE FLOWER GIRL [hopefully] I can give you change for a tanner, kind lady.

THE MOTHER [to Clara] Give it to me. [Clara parts reluctantly]. Now [to the girl] This is for your flowers.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Thank you kindly, lady.

THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These things are only a penny a bunch.

THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl]. You can keep the change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.

THE MOTHER. Now tell me how you know that young gentleman’s name.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I didn’t.

THE MOTHER. I heard you call him by it. Don’t try to deceive me.

THE FLOWER GIRL [protesting] Who’s trying to deceive you? I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant. [She sits down beside her basket].

THE DAUGHTER. Sixpence thrown away! Really, mamma, you might have spared Freddy that. [She retreats in disgust behind the pillar].

An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into shelter, and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight as Freddy, very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress, with a light overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the daughter’s retirement.

THE GENTLEMAN. Phew!

THE MOTHER [to the gentleman] Oh, sir, is there any sign of its stopping?

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m afraid not. It started worse than ever about two minutes ago. [He goes to the plinth beside the flower girl; puts up his foot on it; and stoops to turn down his trouser ends].

THE MOTHER. Oh, dear! [She retires sadly and joins her daughter].

THE FLOWER GIRL [taking advantage of the military gentleman’s proximity to establish friendly relations with him]. If it’s worse it’s a sign it’s nearly over. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl.

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m sorry, I haven’t any change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I can give you change, Captain,

THE GENTLEMEN. For a sovereign? I’ve nothing less.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain. I can change half-a-crown. Take this for tuppence.

THE GENTLEMAN. Now don’t be troublesome: there’s a good girl. [Trying his pockets] I really haven’t any change — Stop: here’s three hapence, if that’s any use to you [he retreats to the other pillar].

THE FLOWER GIRL [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better than nothing] Thank you, sir.

THE BYSTANDER [to the girl] You be careful: give him a flower for it. There’s a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word you’re saying. [All turn to the man who is taking notes].

THE FLOWER GIRL [springing up terrified] I ain’t done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. I’ve a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb. [Hysterically] I’m a respectable girl: so help me, I never spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower off me. [General hubbub, mostly sympathetic to the flower girl, but deprecating her excessive sensibility. Cries of Don’t start hollerin. Who’s hurting you? Nobody’s going to touch you. What’s the good of fussing? Steady on. Easy, easy, etc., come from the elderly staid spectators, who pat her comfortingly. Less patient ones bid her shut her head, or ask her roughly what is wrong with her. A remoter group, not knowing what the matter is, crowd in and increase the noise with question and answer: What’s the row? What she do? Where is he? A tec taking her down. What! him? Yes: him over there: Took money off the gentleman, etc. The flower girl, distraught and mobbed, breaks through them to the gentleman, crying mildly] Oh, sir, don’t let him charge me. You dunno what it means to me. They’ll take away my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to gentlemen. They —

THE NOTE TAKER [coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after him] There, there, there, there! Who’s hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?

THE BYSTANDER. It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots. [Explaining to the note taker] She thought you was a copper’s nark, sir.

THE NOTE TAKER [with quick interest] What’s a copper’s nark?

THE BYSTANDER [inept at definition] It’s a — well, it’s a copper’s nark, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still hysterical] I take my Bible oath I never said a word —

THE NOTE TAKER [overbearing but good-humored] Oh, shut up, shut up. Do I look like a policeman?

THE FLOWER GIRL [far from reassured] Then what did you take down my words for? How do I know whether you took me down right? You just show me what you’ve wrote about me. [The note taker opens his book and holds it steadily under her nose, though the pressure of the mob trying to read it over his shoulders would upset a weaker man]. What’s that? That ain’t proper writing. I can’t read that.

THE NOTE TAKER. I can. [Reads, reproducing her pronunciation exactly] “Cheer ap, Keptin; n’ haw ya flahr orf a pore gel.”

THE FLOWER GIRL [much distressed] It’s because I called him Captain. I meant no harm. [To the gentleman] Oh, sir, don’t let him lay a charge agen me for a word like that. You —

THE GENTLEMAN. Charge! I make no charge. [To the note taker] Really, sir, if you are a detective, you need not begin protecting me against molestation by young women until I ask you. Anybody could see that the girl meant no harm.

THE BYSTANDERS GENERALLY [demonstrating against police espionage] Course they could. What business is it of yours? You mind your own affairs. He wants promotion, he does. Taking down people’s words! Girl never said a word to him. What harm if she did? Nice thing a girl can’t shelter from the rain without being insulted, etc., etc., etc. [She is conducted by the more sympathetic demonstrators back to her plinth, where she resumes her seat and struggles with her emotion].

THE BYSTANDER. He ain’t a tec. He’s a blooming busybody: that’s what he is. I tell you, look at his boots.

THE NOTE TAKER [turning on him genially] And how are all your people down at Selsey?

THE BYSTANDER [suspiciously] Who told you my people come from Selsey?

THE NOTE TAKER. Never you mind. They did. [To the girl] How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove.

THE FLOWER GIRL [appalled] Oh, what harm is there in my leaving Lisson Grove? It wasn’t fit for a pig to live in; and I had to pay four-and-six a week. [In tears] Oh, boo — hoo — oo —

THE NOTE TAKER. Live where you like; but stop that noise.

THE GENTLEMAN [to the girl] Come, come! he can’t touch you: you have a right to live where you please.

A SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [thrusting himself between the note taker and the gentleman] Park Lane, for instance. I’d like to go into the Housing Question with you, I would.

THE FLOWER GIRL [subsiding into a brooding melancholy over her basket, and talking very low-spiritedly to herself] I’m a good girl, I am.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [not attending to her] Do you know where I come from?

THE NOTE TAKER [promptly] Hoxton.

Titterings. Popular interest in the note taker’s performance increases.

THE SARCASTIC ONE [amazed] Well, who said I didn’t? Bly me! You know everything, you do.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still nursing her sense of injury] Ain’t no call to meddle with me, he ain’t.

THE BYSTANDER [to her] Of course he ain’t. Don’t you stand it from him. [To the note taker] See here: what call have you to know about people what never offered to meddle with you? Where’s your warrant?

SEVERAL BYSTANDERS [encouraged by this seeming point of law] Yes: where’s your warrant?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him say what he likes. I don’t want to have no truck with him.

THE BYSTANDER. You take us for dirt under your feet, don’t you? Catch you taking liberties with a gentleman!

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Yes: tell HIM where he come from if you want to go fortune-telling.

THE NOTE TAKER. Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

THE GENTLEMAN. Quite right. [Great laughter. Reaction in the note taker’s favor. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc.]. May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?

THE NOTE TAKER. I’ve thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.

The rain has stopped; and the persons on the outside of the crowd begin to drop off.

THE FLOWER GIRL [resenting the reaction] He’s no gentleman, he ain’t, to interfere with a poor girl.

THE DAUGHTER [out of patience, pushing her way rudely to the front and displacing the gentleman, who politely retires to the other side of the pillar] What on earth is Freddy doing? I shall get pneumonia if I stay in this draught any longer.

THE NOTE TAKER [to himself, hastily making a note of her pronunciation of “monia”] Earlscourt.

THE DAUGHTER [violently] Will you please keep your impertinent remarks to yourself?

THE NOTE TAKER. Did I say that out loud? I didn’t mean to. I beg your pardon. Your mother’s Epsom, unmistakeably.

THE MOTHER [advancing between her daughter and the note taker] How very curious! I was brought up in Largelady Park, near Epsom.

THE NOTE TAKER [uproariously amused] Ha! ha! What a devil of a name! Excuse me. [To the daughter] You want a cab, do you?

THE DAUGHTER. Don’t dare speak to me.

THE MOTHER. Oh, please, please Clara. [Her daughter repudiates her with an angry shrug and retires haughtily.] We should be so grateful to you, sir, if you found us a cab. [The note taker produces a whistle]. Oh, thank you. [She joins her daughter]. The note taker blows a piercing blast.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. There! I knowed he was a plain-clothes copper.

THE BYSTANDER. That ain’t a police whistle: that’s a sporting whistle.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still preoccupied with her wounded feelings] He’s no right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any lady’s.

THE NOTE TAKER. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it; but the rain stopped about two minutes ago.

THE BYSTANDER. So it has. Why didn’t you say so before? and us losing our time listening to your silliness. [He walks off towards the Strand].

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. I can tell where you come from. You come from Anwell. Go back there.

THE NOTE TAKER [helpfully] Hanwell.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [affecting great distinction of speech] Thenk you, teacher. Haw haw! So long [he touches his hat with mock respect and strolls off].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Frightening people like that! How would he like it himself.

THE MOTHER. It’s quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to a motor bus. Come. [She gathers her skirts above her ankles and hurries off towards the Strand].

THE DAUGHTER. But the cab — [her mother is out of hearing]. Oh, how tiresome! [She follows angrily].

All the rest have gone except the note taker, the gentleman, and the flower girl, who sits arranging her basket, and still pitying herself in murmurs.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Poor girl! Hard enough for her to live without being worrited and chivied.

THE GENTLEMAN [returning to his former place on the note taker’s left] How do you do it, if I may ask?

THE NOTE TAKER. Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ought to be ashamed of himself, unmanly coward!

THE GENTLEMAN. But is there a living in that?

THE NOTE TAKER. Oh yes. Quite a fat one. This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with 80 pounds a year, and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths. Now I can teach them —

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him mind his own business and leave a poor girl —

THE NOTE TAKER [explosively] Woman: cease this detestable boohooing instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship.

THE FLOWER GIRL [with feeble defiance] I’ve a right to be here if I like, same as you.

THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere — no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

THE FLOWER GIRL [quite overwhelmed, and looking up at him in mingled wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her head] Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — oo!

THE NOTE TAKER [whipping out his book] Heavens! what a sound! [He writes; then holds out the book and reads, reproducing her vowels exactly] Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — ow — oo!

THE FLOWER GIRL [tickled by the performance, and laughing in spite of herself] Garn!

THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am myself a student of Indian dialects; and —

THE NOTE TAKER [eagerly] Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanscrit?

THE GENTLEMAN. I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you?

THE NOTE TAKER. Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet.

PICKERING [with enthusiasm] I came from India to meet you.

HIGGINS. I was going to India to meet you.

PICKERING. Where do you live?

HIGGINS. 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see me tomorrow.

PICKERING. I’m at the Carlton. Come with me now and let’s have a jaw over some supper.

HIGGINS. Right you are.

THE FLOWER GIRL [to Pickering, as he passes her] Buy a flower, kind gentleman. I’m short for my lodging.

PICKERING. I really haven’t any change. I’m sorry [he goes away].

HIGGINS [shocked at girl’s mendacity] Liar. You said you could change half-a-crown.

THE FLOWER GIRL [rising in desperation] You ought to be stuffed with nails, you ought. [Flinging the basket at his feet] Take the whole blooming basket for sixpence.

The church clock strikes the second quarter.

HIGGINS [hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl] A reminder. [He raises his hat solemnly; then throws a handful of money into the basket and follows Pickering].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up a half-crown] Ah — ow — ooh! [Picking up a couple of florins] Aaah — ow — ooh! [Picking up several coins] Aaaaaah — ow — ooh! [Picking up a half-sovereign] Aasaaaaaaaaah — ow — ooh!!!

FREDDY [springing out of a taxicab] Got one at last. Hallo! [To the girl] Where are the two ladies that were here?

THE FLOWER GIRL. They walked to the bus when the rain stopped.

FREDDY. And left me with a cab on my hands. Damnation!

THE FLOWER GIRL [with grandeur] Never you mind, young man. I’m going home in a taxi. [She sails off to the cab. The driver puts his hand behind him and holds the door firmly shut against her. Quite understanding his mistrust, she shows him her handful of money]. Eightpence ain’t no object to me, Charlie. [He grins and opens the door]. Angel Court, Drury Lane, round the corner of Micklejohn’s oil shop. Let’s see how fast you can make her hop it. [She gets in and pulls the door to with a slam as the taxicab starts].

FREDDY. Well, I’m dashed!

ACT II

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for the drawing-room. The double doors are in the middle of the back hall; and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a comfortable leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy chair, the piano bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings; mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.

Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up near him, closing two or three file drawers which are hanging out. He appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby “taking notice” eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.

HIGGINS [as he shuts the last drawer] Well, I think that’s the whole show.

PICKERING. It’s really amazing. I haven’t taken half of it in, you know.

HIGGINS. Would you like to go over any of it again?

PICKERING [rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants himself with his back to the fire] No, thank you; not now. I’m quite done up for this morning.

HIGGINS [following him, and standing beside him on his left] Tired of listening to sounds?

PICKERING. Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.

HIGGINS [chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets] Oh, that comes with practice. You hear no difference at first; but you keep on listening, and presently you find they’re all as different as A from B. [Mrs. Pearce looks in: she is Higgins’s housekeeper] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE [hesitating, evidently perplexed] A young woman wants to see you, sir.

HIGGINS. A young woman! What does she want?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, she says you’ll be glad to see her when you know what she’s come about. She’s quite a common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machines. I hope I’ve not done wrong; but really you see such queer people sometimes — you’ll excuse me, I’m sure, sir —

HIGGINS. Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Pearce. Has she an interesting accent?

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I don’t know how you can take an interest in it.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Let’s have her up. Show her up, Mrs. Pearce [he rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on the phonograph].

MRS. PEARCE [only half resigned to it] Very well, sir. It’s for you to say. [She goes downstairs].

HIGGINS. This is rather a bit of luck. I’ll show you how I make records. We’ll set her talking; and I’ll take it down first in Bell’s visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we’ll get her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you.

MRS. PEARCE [returning] This is the young woman, sir.

The flower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron, and the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this deplorable figure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air, touches Pickering, who has already straightened himself in the presence of Mrs. Pearce. But as to Higgins, the only distinction he makes between men and women is that when he is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the heavens against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.

HIGGINS [brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed disappointment, and at once, baby-like, making an intolerable grievance of it] Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. She’s no use: I’ve got all the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo; and I’m not going to waste another cylinder on it. [To the girl] Be off with you: I don’t want you.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Don’t you be so saucy. You ain’t heard what I come for yet. [To Mrs. Pearce, who is waiting at the door for further instruction] Did you tell him I come in a taxi?

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr. Higgins cares what you came in?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, we are proud! He ain’t above giving lessons, not him: I heard him say so. Well, I ain’t come here to ask for any compliment; and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere.

HIGGINS. Good enough for what?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Good enough for ye — oo. Now you know, don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no mistake.

HIGGINS [stupent] WELL!!! [Recovering his breath with a gasp] What do you expect me to say to you?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to sit down, I think. Don’t I tell you I’m bringing you business?

HIGGINS. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall we throw her out of the window?

THE FLOWER GIRL [running away in terror to the piano, where she turns at bay] Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — ow — oo! [Wounded and whimpering] I won’t be called a baggage when I’ve offered to pay like any lady.

Motionless, the two men stare at her from the other side of the room, amazed.

PICKERING [gently] What is it you want, my girl?

THE FLOWER GIRL. I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they won’t take me unless I can talk more genteel. He said he could teach me. Well, here I am ready to pay him — not asking any favor — and he treats me as if I was dirt.

MRS. PEARCE. How can you be such a foolish ignorant girl as to think you could afford to pay Mr. Higgins?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Why shouldn’t I? I know what lessons cost as well as you do; and I’m ready to pay.

HIGGINS. How much?

THE FLOWER GIRL [coming back to him, triumphant] Now you’re talking! I thought you’d come off it when you saw a chance of getting back a bit of what you chucked at me last night. [Confidentially] You’d had a drop in, hadn’t you?

HIGGINS [peremptorily] Sit down.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, if you’re going to make a compliment of it —

HIGGINS [thundering at her] Sit down.

MRS. PEARCE [severely] Sit down, girl. Do as you’re told. [She places the stray chair near the hearthrug between Higgins and Pickering, and stands behind it waiting for the girl to sit down].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — oo! [She stands, half rebellious, half bewildered].

PICKERING [very courteous] Won’t you sit down?

LIZA [coyly] Don’t mind if I do. [She sits down. Pickering returns to the hearthrug].

HIGGINS. What’s your name?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Liza Doolittle.

HIGGINS [declaiming gravely] Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess, They went to the woods to get a birds nes’: PICKERING. They found a nest with four eggs in it: HIGGINS. They took one apiece, and left three in it.

They laugh heartily at their own wit.

LIZA. Oh, don’t be silly.

MRS. PEARCE. You mustn’t speak to the gentleman like that.

LIZA. Well, why won’t he speak sensible to me?

HIGGINS. Come back to business. How much do you propose to pay me for the lessons?

LIZA. Oh, I know what’s right. A lady friend of mine gets French lessons for eighteenpence an hour from a real French gentleman. Well, you wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling. Take it or leave it.

HIGGINS [walking up and down the room, rattling his keys and his cash in his pockets] You know, Pickering, if you consider a shilling, not as a simple shilling, but as a percentage of this girl’s income, it works out as fully equivalent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire.

PICKERING. How so?

HIGGINS. Figure it out. A millionaire has about 150 pounds a day. She earns about half-a-crown.

LIZA [haughtily] Who told you I only —

HIGGINS [continuing] She offers me two-fifths of her day’s income for a lesson. Two-fifths of a millionaire’s income for a day would be somewhere about 60 pounds. It’s handsome. By George, it’s enormous! it’s the biggest offer I ever had.

LIZA [rising, terrified] Sixty pounds! What are you talking about? I never offered you sixty pounds. Where would I get —

HIGGINS. Hold your tongue.

LIZA [weeping] But I ain’t got sixty pounds. Oh —

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t cry, you silly girl. Sit down. Nobody is going to touch your money.

HIGGINS. Somebody is going to touch you, with a broomstick, if you don’t stop snivelling. Sit down.

LIZA [obeying slowly] Ah — ah — ah — ow — oo — o! One would think you was my father.

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I’ll be worse than two fathers to you. Here [he offers her his silk handkerchief]!

LIZA. What’s this for?

HIGGINS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your face that feels moist. Remember: that’s your handkerchief; and that’s your sleeve. Don’t mistake the one for the other if you wish to become a lady in a shop.

Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.

MRS. PEARCE. It’s no use talking to her like that, Mr. Higgins: she doesn’t understand you. Besides, you’re quite wrong: she doesn’t do it that way at all [she takes the handkerchief].

LIZA [snatching it] Here! You give me that handkerchief. He give it to me, not to you.

PICKERING [laughing] He did. I think it must be regarded as her property, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE [resigning herself] Serve you right, Mr. Higgins.

PICKERING. Higgins: I’m interested. What about the ambassador’s garden party? I’ll say you’re the greatest teacher alive if you make that good. I’ll bet you all the expenses of the experiment you can’t do it. And I’ll pay for the lessons.

LIZA. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain.

HIGGINS [tempted, looking at her] It’s almost irresistible. She’s so deliciously low — so horribly dirty —

LIZA [protesting extremely] Ah — ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — oooo!!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

PICKERING. You’re certainly not going to turn her head with flattery, Higgins.

MRS. PEARCE [uneasy] Oh, don’t say that, sir: there’s more ways than one of turning a girl’s head; and nobody can do it better than Mr. Higgins, though he may not always mean it. I do hope, sir, you won’t encourage him to do anything foolish.

HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him] What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

LIZA [strongly deprecating this view of her] Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — oo!

HIGGINS [carried away] Yes: in six months — in three if she has a good ear and a quick tongue — I’ll take her anywhere and pass her off as anything. We’ll start today: now! this moment! Take her away and clean her, Mrs. Pearce. Monkey Brand, if it won’t come off any other way. Is there a good fire in the kitchen?

MRS. PEARCE [protesting]. Yes; but —

HIGGINS [storming on] Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring up Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown paper till they come.

LIZA. You’re no gentleman, you’re not, to talk of such things. I’m a good girl, I am; and I know what the like of you are, I do.

HIGGINS. We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs. Pearce. If she gives you any trouble wallop her.

LIZA [springing up and running between Pickering and Mrs. Pearce for protection] No! I’ll call the police, I will.

MRS. PEARCE. But I’ve no place to put her.

HIGGINS. Put her in the dustbin.

LIZA. Ah — ah — ah — ow — ow — oo!

PICKERING. Oh come, Higgins! be reasonable.

MRS. PEARCE [resolutely] You must be reasonable, Mr. Higgins: really you must. You can’t walk over everybody like this.

Higgins, thus scolded, subsides. The hurricane is succeeded by a zephyr of amiable surprise.

HIGGINS [with professional exquisiteness of modulation] I walk over everybody! My dear Mrs. Pearce, my dear Pickering, I never had the slightest intention of walking over anyone. All I propose is that we should be kind to this poor girl. We must help her to prepare and fit herself for her new station in life. If I did not express myself clearly it was because I did not wish to hurt her delicacy, or yours.

Liza, reassured, steals back to her chair.

MRS. PEARCE [to Pickering] Well, did you ever hear anything like that, sir?

PICKERING [laughing heartily] Never, Mrs. Pearce: never.

HIGGINS [patiently] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.

HIGGINS. Why not?

MRS. PEARCE. Why not! But you don’t know anything about her. What about her parents? She may be married.

LIZA. Garn!

HIGGINS. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married indeed! Don’t you know that a woman of that class looks a worn out drudge of fifty a year after she’s married.

LIZA. Who’d marry me?

HIGGINS [suddenly resorting to the most thrillingly beautiful low tones in his best elocutionary style] By George, Eliza, the streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before I’ve done with you.

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, sir. You mustn’t talk like that to her.

LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly] I’m going away. He’s off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.

HIGGINS [wounded in his tenderest point by her insensibility to his elocution] Oh, indeed! I’m mad, am I? Very well, Mrs. Pearce: you needn’t order the new clothes for her. Throw her out.

LIZA [whimpering] Nah — ow. You got no right to touch me.

MRS. PEARCE. You see now what comes of being saucy. [Indicating the door] This way, please.

LIZA [almost in tears] I didn’t want no clothes. I wouldn’t have taken them [she throws away the handkerchief]. I can buy my own clothes.

HIGGINS [deftly retrieving the handkerchief and intercepting her on her reluctant way to the door] You’re an ungrateful wicked girl. This is my return for offering to take you out of the gutter and dress you beautifully and make a lady of you.

MRS. PEARCE. Stop, Mr. Higgins. I won’t allow it. It’s you that are wicked. Go home to your parents, girl; and tell them to take better care of you.

LIZA. I ain’t got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my own living and turned me out.

MRS. PEARCE. Where’s your mother?

LIZA. I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother. But I done without them. And I’m a good girl, I am.

HIGGINS. Very well, then, what on earth is all this fuss about? The girl doesn’t belong to anybody — is no use to anybody but me. [He goes to Mrs. Pearce and begins coaxing]. You can adopt her, Mrs. Pearce: I’m sure a daughter would be a great amusement to you. Now don’t make any more fuss. Take her downstairs; and —

MRS. PEARCE. But what’s to become of her? Is she to be paid anything? Do be sensible, sir.

HIGGINS. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary: put it down in the housekeeping book. [Impatiently] What on earth will she want with money? She’ll have her food and her clothes. She’ll only drink if you give her money.

LIZA [turning on him] Oh you are a brute. It’s a lie: nobody ever saw the sign of liquor on me. [She goes back to her chair and plants herself there defiantly].

PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance] Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?

HIGGINS [looking critically at her] Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?

LIZA. I got my feelings same as anyone else.

HIGGINS [to Pickering, reflectively] You see the difficulty?

PICKERING. Eh? What difficulty?

HIGGINS. To get her to talk grammar. The mere pronunciation is easy enough.

LIZA. I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

MRS. PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr. Higgins. I want to know on what terms the girl is to be here. Is she to have any wages? And what is to become of her when you’ve finished your teaching? You must look ahead a little.

HIGGINS [impatiently] What’s to become of her if I leave her in the gutter? Tell me that, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE. That’s her own business, not yours, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, when I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so that’s all right.

LIZA. Oh, you’ve no feeling heart in you: you don’t care for nothing but yourself [she rises and takes the floor resolutely]. Here! I’ve had enough of this. I’m going [making for the door]. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought.

HIGGINS [snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief] Have some chocolates, Eliza.

LIZA [halting, tempted] How do I know what might be in them? I’ve heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.

Higgins whips out his penknife; cuts a chocolate in two; puts one half into his mouth and bolts it; and offers her the other half.

HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half you eat the other.

[Liza opens her mouth to retort: he pops the half chocolate into it]. You shall have boxes of them, barrels of them, every day. You shall live on them. Eh?

LIZA [who has disposed of the chocolate after being nearly choked by it] I wouldn’t have ate it, only I’m too ladylike to take it out of my mouth.

HIGGINS. Listen, Eliza. I think you said you came in a taxi.

LIZA. Well, what if I did? I’ve as good a right to take a taxi as anyone else.

HIGGINS. You have, Eliza; and in future you shall have as many taxis as you want. You shall go up and down and round the town in a taxi every day. Think of that, Eliza.

MRS. PEARCE. Mr. Higgins: you’re tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future.

HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of. No, Eliza: do as this lady does: think of other people’s futures; but never think of your own. Think of chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds.

LIZA. No: I don’t want no gold and no diamonds. I’m a good girl, I am. [She sits down again, with an attempt at dignity].

HIGGINS. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs. Pearce. And you shall marry an officer in the Guards, with a beautiful moustache: the son of a marquis, who will disinherit him for marrying you, but will relent when he sees your beauty and goodness —

PICKERING. Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.

HIGGINS. How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

PICKERING. Very clever, Higgins; but not sound sense. [To Eliza] Miss Doolittle —

LIZA [overwhelmed] Ah — ah — ow — oo!

HIGGINS. There! That’s all you get out of Eliza. Ah — ah — ow — oo! No use explaining. As a military man you ought to know that. Give her her orders: that’s what she wants. Eliza: you are to live here for the next six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist’s shop. If you’re good and do whatever you’re told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and take rides in taxis. If you’re naughty and idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you’re not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the angels will weep for you. [To Pickering] Now are you satisfied, Pickering? [To Mrs. Pearce] Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs. Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [patiently] I think you’d better let me speak to the girl properly in private. I don’t know that I can take charge of her or consent to the arrangement at all. Of course I know you don’t mean her any harm; but when you get what you call interested in people’s accents, you never think or care what may happen to them or you. Come with me, Eliza.

HIGGINS. That’s all right. Thank you, Mrs. Pearce. Bundle her off to the bath-room.

LIZA [rising reluctantly and suspiciously] You’re a great bully, you are. I won’t stay here if I don’t like. I won’t let nobody wallop me. I never asked to go to Bucknam Palace, I didn’t. I was never in trouble with the police, not me. I’m a good girl —

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t answer back, girl. You don’t understand the gentleman. Come with me. [She leads the way to the door, and holds it open for Eliza].

LIZA [as she goes out] Well, what I say is right. I won’t go near the king, not if I’m going to have my head cut off. If I’d known what I was letting myself in for, I wouldn’t have come here. I always been a good girl; and I never offered to say a word to him; and I don’t owe him nothing; and I don’t care; and I won’t be put upon; and I have my feelings the same as anyone else —

Mrs. Pearce shuts the door; and Eliza’s plaints are no longer audible. Pickering comes from the hearth to the chair and sits astride it with his arms on the back.

PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?

HIGGINS [moodily] Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.

HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce] Well, I haven’t. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

PICKERING. At what, for example?

HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly] Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind. [He sits down on the bench at the keyboard]. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.

PICKERING [rising and standing over him gravely] Come, Higgins! You know what I mean. If I’m to be in this business I shall feel responsible for that girl. I hope it’s understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position.

HIGGINS. What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you. [Rising to explain] You see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood. It’s —

Mrs. Pearce opens the door. She has Eliza’s hat in her hand. Pickering retires to the easy-chair at the hearth and sits down.

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well, Mrs. Pearce: is it all right?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] I just wish to trouble you with a word, if I may, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Yes, certainly. Come in. [She comes forward]. Don’t burn that, Mrs. Pearce. I’ll keep it as a curiosity. [He takes the hat].

MRS. PEARCE. Handle it carefully, sir, please. I had to promise her not to burn it; but I had better put it in the oven for a while.

HIGGINS [putting it down hastily on the piano] Oh! thank you. Well, what have you to say to me?

PICKERING. Am I in the way?

MRS. PEARCE. Not at all, sir. Mr. Higgins: will you please be very particular what you say before the girl?

HIGGINS [sternly] Of course. I’m always particular about what I say. Why do you say this to me?

MRS. PEARCE [unmoved] No, sir: you’re not at all particular when you’ve mislaid anything or when you get a little impatient. Now it doesn’t matter before me: I’m used to it. But you really must not swear before the girl.

HIGGINS [indignantly] I swear! [Most emphatically] I never swear. I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?

MRS. PEARCE [stolidly] That’s what I mean, sir. You swear a great deal too much. I don’t mind your damning and blasting, and what the devil and where the devil and who the devil —

HIGGINS. Really! Mrs. Pearce: this language from your lips!

MRS. PEARCE [not to be put off] — but there is a certain word I must ask you not to use. The girl has just used it herself because the bath was too hot. It begins with the same letter as bath. She knows no better: she learnt it at her mother’s knee. But she must not hear it from your lips.

HIGGINS [loftily] I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered it, Mrs. Pearce. [She looks at him steadfastly. He adds, hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air] Except perhaps in a moment of extreme and justifiable excitement.

MRS. PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

HIGGINS. Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs. Pearce, natural to a poet.

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, whatever you choose to call it, I beg you not to let the girl hear you repeat it.

HIGGINS. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this girl as to personal cleanliness.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Quite right. Most important.

MRS. PEARCE. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in leaving things about.

HIGGINS [going to her solemnly] Just so. I intended to call your attention to that [He passes on to Pickering, who is enjoying the conversation immensely]. It is these little things that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money. [He comes to anchor on the hearthrug, with the air of a man in an unassailable position].

MRS. PEARCE. Yes, sir. Then might I ask you not to come down to breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at any rate not to use it as a napkin to the extent you do, sir. And if you would be so good as not to eat everything off the same plate, and to remember not to put the porridge saucepan out of your hand on the clean tablecloth, it would be a better example to the girl. You know you nearly choked yourself with a fishbone in the jam only last week.

HIGGINS [routed from the hearthrug and drifting back to the piano] I may do these things sometimes in absence of mind; but surely I don’t do them habitually. [Angrily] By the way: my dressing-gown smells most damnably of benzine.

MRS. PEARCE. No doubt it does, Mr. Higgins. But if you will wipe your fingers —

HIGGINS [yelling] Oh very well, very well: I’ll wipe them in my hair in future.

MRS. PEARCE. I hope you’re not offended, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS [shocked at finding himself thought capable of an unamiable sentiment] Not at all, not at all. You’re quite right, Mrs. Pearce: I shall be particularly careful before the girl. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. Might she use some of those Japanese dresses you brought from abroad? I really can’t put her back into her old things.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Anything you like. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. Thank you, sir. That’s all. [She goes out].

HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet she’s firmly persuaded that I’m an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I can’t account for it.

Mrs. Pearce returns.

MRS. PEARCE. If you please, sir, the trouble’s beginning already. There’s a dustman downstairs, Alfred Doolittle, wants to see you. He says you have his daughter here.

PICKERING [rising] Phew! I say! [He retreats to the hearthrug].

HIGGINS [promptly] Send the blackguard up.

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, very well, sir. [She goes out].

PICKERING. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins.

HIGGINS. Nonsense. Of course he’s a blackguard.

PICKERING. Whether he is or not, I’m afraid we shall have some trouble with him.

HIGGINS [confidently] Oh no: I think not. If there’s any trouble he shall have it with me, not I with him. And we are sure to get something interesting out of him.

PICKERING. About the girl?

HIGGINS. No. I mean his dialect.

PICKERING. Oh!

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Doolittle, sir. [She admits Doolittle and retires].

Alfred Doolittle is an elderly but vigorous dustman, clad in the costume of his profession, including a hat with a back brim covering his neck and shoulders. He has well marked and rather interesting features, and seems equally free from fear and conscience. He has a remarkably expressive voice, the result of a habit of giving vent to his feelings without reserve. His present pose is that of wounded honor and stern resolution.

DOOLITTLE [at the door, uncertain which of the two gentlemen is his man] Professor Higgins?

HIGGINS. Here. Good morning. Sit down.

DOOLITTLE. Morning, Governor. [He sits down magisterially] I come about a very serious matter, Governor.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Brought up in Hounslow. Mother Welsh, I should think. [Doolittle opens his mouth, amazed. Higgins continues] What do you want, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE [menacingly] I want my daughter: that’s what I want. See?

HIGGINS. Of course you do. You’re her father, aren’t you? You don’t suppose anyone else wants her, do you? I’m glad to see you have some spark of family feeling left. She’s upstairs. Take her away at once.

DOOLITTLE [rising, fearfully taken aback] What!

HIGGINS. Take her away. Do you suppose I’m going to keep your daughter for you?

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, look here, Governor. Is this reasonable? Is it fair to take advantage of a man like this? The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in? [He sits down again].

HIGGINS. Your daughter had the audacity to come to my house and ask me to teach her how to speak properly so that she could get a place in a flower-shop. This gentleman and my housekeeper have been here all the time. [Bullying him] How dare you come here and attempt to blackmail me? You sent her here on purpose.

DOOLITTLE [protesting] No, Governor.

HIGGINS. You must have. How else could you possibly know that she is here?

DOOLITTLE. Don’t take a man up like that, Governor.

HIGGINS. The police shall take you up. This is a plant — a plot to extort money by threats. I shall telephone for the police [he goes resolutely to the telephone and opens the directory].

DOOLITTLE. Have I asked you for a brass farthing? I leave it to the gentleman here: have I said a word about money?

HIGGINS [throwing the book aside and marching down on Doolittle with a poser] What else did you come for?

DOOLITTLE [sweetly] Well, what would a man come for? Be human, governor.

HIGGINS [disarmed] Alfred: did you put her up to it?

DOOLITTLE. So help me, Governor, I never did. I take my Bible oath I ain’t seen the girl these two months past.

HIGGINS. Then how did you know she was here?

DOOLITTLE [“most musical, most melancholy”] I’ll tell you, Governor, if you’ll only let me get a word in. I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.

HIGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift of rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. “I’m willing to tell you: I’m wanting to tell you: I’m waiting to tell you.” Sentimental rhetoric! That’s the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty.

PICKERING. Oh, PLEASE, Higgins: I’m west country myself. [To Doolittle] How did you know the girl was here if you didn’t send her?

DOOLITTLE. It was like this, Governor. The girl took a boy in the taxi to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady, he is. He hung about on the chance of her giving him another ride home. Well, she sent him back for her luggage when she heard you was willing for her to stop here. I met the boy at the corner of Long Acre and Endell Street.

HIGGINS. Public house. Yes?

DOOLITTLE. The poor man’s club, Governor: why shouldn’t I?

PICKERING. Do let him tell his story, Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. He told me what was up. And I ask you, what was my feelings and my duty as a father? I says to the boy, “You bring me the luggage,” I says —

PICKERING. Why didn’t you go for it yourself?

DOOLITTLE. Landlady wouldn’t have trusted me with it, Governor. She’s that kind of woman: you know. I had to give the boy a penny afore he trusted me with it, the little swine. I brought it to her just to oblige you like, and make myself agreeable. That’s all.

HIGGINS. How much luggage?

DOOLITTLE. Musical instrument, Governor. A few pictures, a trifle of jewelry, and a bird-cage. She said she didn’t want no clothes. What was I to think from that, Governor? I ask you as a parent what was I to think?

HIGGINS. So you came to rescue her from worse than death, eh?

DOOLITTLE [appreciatively: relieved at being understood] Just so, Governor. That’s right.

PICKERING. But why did you bring her luggage if you intended to take her away?

DOOLITTLE. Have I said a word about taking her away? Have I now?

HIGGINS [determinedly] You’re going to take her away, double quick. [He crosses to the hearth and rings the bell].

DOOLITTLE [rising] No, Governor. Don’t say that. I’m not the man to stand in my girl’s light. Here’s a career opening for her, as you might say; and —

Mrs. Pearce opens the door and awaits orders.

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce: this is Eliza’s father. He has come to take her away. Give her to him. [He goes back to the piano, with an air of washing his hands of the whole affair].

DOOLITTLE. No. This is a misunderstanding. Listen here —

MRS. PEARCE. He can’t take her away, Mr. Higgins: how can he? You told me to burn her clothes.

DOOLITTLE. That’s right. I can’t carry the girl through the streets like a blooming monkey, can I? I put it to you.

HIGGINS. You have put it to me that you want your daughter. Take your daughter. If she has no clothes go out and buy her some.

DOOLITTLE [desperate] Where’s the clothes she come in? Did I burn them or did your missus here?

MRS. PEARCE. I am the housekeeper, if you please. I have sent for some clothes for your girl. When they come you can take her away. You can wait in the kitchen. This way, please.

Doolittle, much troubled, accompanies her to the door; then hesitates; finally turns confidentially to Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. Listen here, Governor. You and me is men of the world, ain’t we?

HIGGINS. Oh! Men of the world, are we? You’d better go, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE. I think so, indeed, sir. [She goes, with dignity].

PICKERING. The floor is yours, Mr. Doolittle.

DOOLITTLE [to Pickering] I thank you, Governor. [To Higgins, who takes refuge on the piano bench, a little overwhelmed by the proximity of his visitor; for Doolittle has a professional flavor of dust about him]. Well, the truth is, I’ve taken a sort of fancy to you, Governor; and if you want the girl, I’m not so set on having her back home again but what I might be open to an arrangement. Regarded in the light of a young woman, she’s a fine handsome girl. As a daughter she’s not worth her keep; and so I tell you straight. All I ask is my rights as a father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well, what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me? [He returns to his chair and sits down judicially].

PICKERING. I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that Mr. Higgins’s intentions are entirely honorable.

DOOLITTLE. Course they are, Governor. If I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask fifty.

HIGGINS [revolted] Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for 50 pounds?

DOOLITTLE. Not in a general way I wouldn’t; but to oblige a gentleman like you I’d do a good deal, I do assure you.

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?

DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any harm, you know. But if Liza is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?

HIGGINS [troubled] I don’t know what to do, Pickering. There can be no question that as a matter of morals it’s a positive crime to give this chap a farthing. And yet I feel a sort of rough justice in his claim.

DOOLITTLE. That’s it, Governor. That’s all I say. A father’s heart, as it were.

PICKERING. Well, I know the feeling; but really it seems hardly right —

DOOLITTLE. Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

HIGGINS [rising, and going over to Pickering] Pickering: if we were to take this man in hand for three months, he could choose between a seat in the Cabinet and a popular pulpit in Wales.

PICKERING. What do you say to that, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, thank you kindly. I’ve heard all the preachers and all the prime ministers — for I’m a thinking man and game for politics or religion or social reform same as all the other amusements — and I tell you it’s a dog’s life anyway you look at it. Undeserving poverty is my line. Taking one station in society with another, it’s — it’s — well, it’s the only one that has any ginger in it, to my taste.

HIGGINS. I suppose we must give him a fiver.

PICKERING. He’ll make a bad use of it, I’m afraid.

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny of it left by Monday: I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.

HIGGINS [taking out his pocket book and coming between Doolittle and the piano] This is irresistible. Let’s give him ten. [He offers two notes to the dustman].

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor. She wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and perhaps I shouldn’t neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.

PICKERING. Why don’t you marry that missus of yours? I rather draw the line at encouraging that sort of immorality.

DOOLITTLE. Tell her so, Governor: tell her so. I’m willing. It’s me that suffers by it. I’ve no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that woman, Governor, just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying me! Take my advice, Governor: marry Eliza while she’s young and don’t know no better. If you don’t you’ll be sorry for it after. If you do, she’ll be sorry for it after; but better you than her, because you’re a man, and she’s only a woman and don’t know how to be happy anyhow.

HIGGINS. Pickering: if we listen to this man another minute, we shall have no convictions left. [To Doolittle] Five pounds I think you said.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you kindly, Governor.

HIGGINS. You’re sure you won’t take ten?

DOOLITTLE. Not now. Another time, Governor.

HIGGINS [handing him a five-pound note] Here you are.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you, Governor. Good morning.

[He hurries to the door, anxious to get away with his booty. When he opens it he is confronted with a dainty and exquisitely clean young Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono printed cunningly with small white jasmine blossoms. Mrs. Pearce is with her. He gets out of her way deferentially and apologizes]. Beg pardon, miss.

THE JAPANESE LADY. Garn! Don’t you know your own daughter?

DOOLITTLE {exclaiming   Bly me! it’s Eliza!
HIGGINS {simul-              What’s that! This!
PICKERING {taneously    By Jove!

LIZA. Don’t I look silly?

HIGGINS. Silly?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Now, Mr. Higgins, please don’t say anything to make the girl conceited about herself.

HIGGINS [conscientiously] Oh! Quite right, Mrs. Pearce. [To Eliza] Yes: damned silly.

MRS. PEARCE. Please, sir.

HIGGINS [correcting himself] I mean extremely silly.

LIZA. I should look all right with my hat on. [She takes up her hat; puts it on; and walks across the room to the fireplace with a fashionable air].

HIGGINS. A new fashion, by George! And it ought to look horrible!

DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride] Well, I never thought she’d clean up as good looking as that, Governor. She’s a credit to me, ain’t she?

LIZA. I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they saw what it is for the like of me!

HIGGINS. I’m glad the bath-room met with your approval.

LIZA. It didn’t: not all of it; and I don’t care who hears me say it. Mrs. Pearce knows.

HIGGINS. What was wrong, Mrs. Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [blandly] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesn’t matter.

LIZA. I had a good mind to break it. I didn’t know which way to look. But I hung a towel over it, I did.

HIGGINS. Over what?

MRS. PEARCE. Over the looking-glass, sir.

HIGGINS. Doolittle: you have brought your daughter up too strictly.

DOOLITTLE. Me! I never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick of a strap now and again. Don’t put it on me, Governor. She ain’t accustomed to it, you see: that’s all. But she’ll soon pick up your free-and-easy ways.

LIZA. I’m a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.

HIGGINS. Eliza: if you say again that you’re a good girl, your father shall take you home.

LIZA. Not him. You don’t know my father. All he come here for was to touch you for some money to get drunk on.

DOOLITTLE. Well, what else would I want money for? To put into the plate in church, I suppose. [She puts out her tongue at him. He is so incensed by this that Pickering presently finds it necessary to step between them]. Don’t you give me none of your lip; and don’t let me hear you giving this gentleman any of it neither, or you’ll hear from me about it. See?

HIGGINS. Have you any further advice to give her before you go, Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor: I ain’t such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself. Hard enough to hold them in without that. If you want Eliza’s mind improved, Governor, you do it yourself with a strap. So long, gentlemen. [He turns to go].

HIGGINS [impressively] Stop. You’ll come regularly to see your daughter. It’s your duty, you know. My brother is a clergyman; and he could help you in your talks with her.

DOOLITTLE [evasively] Certainly. I’ll come, Governor. Not just this week, because I have a job at a distance. But later on you may depend on me. Afternoon, gentlemen. Afternoon, ma’am. [He takes off his hat to Mrs. Pearce, who disdains the salutation and goes out. He winks at Higgins, thinking him probably a fellow sufferer from Mrs. Pearce’s difficult disposition, and follows her].

LIZA. Don’t you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a bull-dog on him as a clergyman. You won’t see him again in a hurry.

HIGGINS. I don’t want to, Eliza. Do you?

LIZA. Not me. I don’t want never to see him again, I don’t. He’s a disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of working at his trade.

PICKERING. What is his trade, Eliza?

LIZA. Talking money out of other people’s pockets into his own. His proper trade’s a navvy; and he works at it sometimes too — for exercise — and earns good money at it. Ain’t you going to call me Miss Doolittle any more?

PICKERING. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a slip of the tongue.

LIZA. Oh, I don’t mind; only it sounded so genteel. I should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak to them, you know.

PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.

HIGGINS. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now that you have risen in the world. That’s what we call snobbery.

LIZA. You don’t call the like of them my friends now, I should hope. They’ve took it out of me often enough with their ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce says you’re going to give me some to wear in bed at night different to what I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of money when you could get something to show. Besides, I never could fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.

MRS. PEARCE [coming back] Now, Eliza. The new things have come for you to try on.

LIZA. Ah — ow — oo — ooh! [She rushes out].

MRS. PEARCE [following her] Oh, don’t rush about like that, girl [She shuts the door behind her].

HIGGINS. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job.

PICKERING [with conviction] Higgins: we have.

ACT III

It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her drawing-room, in a flat on Chelsea embankment, has three windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in an older house of the same pretension. The windows are open, giving access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you stand with your face to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand wall close to the corner nearest the windows.

Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room, which is very unlike her son’s room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them) are on the walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing at an elegantly simple writing-table with a bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further back in the room between her and the window nearest her side. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case. The corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan cushioned in Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS. HIGGINS [dismayed] Henry! [scolding him] What are you doing here to-day? It is my at home day: you promised not to come. [As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat off, and presents it to him].

HIGGINS. Oh bother! [He throws the hat down on the table].

MRS. HIGGINS. Go home at once.

HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. But you mustn’t. I’m serious, Henry. You offend all my friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.

HIGGINS. Nonsense! I know I have no small talk; but people don’t mind. [He sits on the settee].

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh! don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay.

HIGGINS. I must. I’ve a job for you. A phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS. No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I can’t get round your vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.

HIGGINS. Well, this isn’t a phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS. You said it was.

HIGGINS. Not your part of it. I’ve picked up a girl.

MRS. HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?

HIGGINS. Not at all. I don’t mean a love affair.

MRS. HIGGINS. What a pity!

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you never fall in love with anyone under forty-five. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking young women about?

HIGGINS. Oh, I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible. I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed. [Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money and his keys in his trouser pockets] Besides, they’re all idiots.

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry?

HIGGINS. Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?

MRS. HIGGINS. No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets. [With a gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again]. That’s a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.

HIGGINS. She’s coming to see you.

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t remember asking her.

HIGGINS. You didn’t. I asked her. If you’d known her you wouldn’t have asked her.

MRS. HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?

HIGGINS. Well, it’s like this. She’s a common flower girl. I picked her off the kerbstone.

MRS. HIGGINS. And invited her to my at-home!

HIGGINS [rising and coming to her to coax her] Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ve taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health — Fine day and How do you do, you know — and not to let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.

MRS. HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides! perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, she must talk about something. [He controls himself and sits down again]. Oh, she’ll be all right: don’t you fuss. Pickering is in it with me. I’ve a sort of bet on that I’ll pass her off as a duchess in six months. I started on her some months ago; and she’s getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She has a quick ear; and she’s been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils because she’s had to learn a complete new language. She talks English almost as you talk French.

MRS. HIGGINS. That’s satisfactory, at all events.

HIGGINS. Well, it is and it isn’t.

MRS. HIGGINS. What does that mean?

HIGGINS. You see, I’ve got her pronunciation all right; but you have to consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she pronounces; and that’s where —

They are interrupted by the parlor-maid, announcing guests.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS. Oh Lord! [He rises; snatches his hat from the table; and makes for the door; but before he reaches it his mother introduces him].

Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill are the mother and daughter who sheltered from the rain in Covent Garden. The mother is well bred, quiet, and has the habitual anxiety of straitened means. The daughter has acquired a gay air of being very much at home in society: the bravado of genteel poverty.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] How do you do? [They shake hands].

MISS EYNSFORD HILL. How d’you do? [She shakes].

MRS. HIGGINS [introducing] My son Henry.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Your celebrated son! I have so longed to meet you, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [glumly, making no movement in her direction] Delighted. [He backs against the piano and bows brusquely].

Miss EYNSFORD HILL [going to him with confident familiarity] How do you do?

HIGGINS [staring at her] I’ve seen you before somewhere. I haven’t the ghost of a notion where; but I’ve heard your voice. [Drearily] It doesn’t matter. You’d better sit down.

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m sorry to say that my celebrated son has no manners. You mustn’t mind him.

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] I don’t. [She sits in the Elizabethan chair].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [a little bewildered] Not at all. [She sits on the ottoman between her daughter and Mrs. Higgins, who has turned her chair away from the writing-table].

HIGGINS. Oh, have I been rude? I didn’t mean to be. [He goes to the central window, through which, with his back to the company, he contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen dessert.]

The parlor-maid returns, ushering in Pickering.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Colonel Pickering [She withdraws].

PICKERING. How do you do, Mrs. Higgins?

MRS. HIGGINS. So glad you’ve come. Do you know Mrs. Eynsford Hill — Miss Eynsford Hill? [Exchange of bows. The Colonel brings the Chippendale chair a little forward between Mrs. Hill and Mrs. Higgins, and sits down].

PICKERING. Has Henry told you what we’ve come for?

HIGGINS [over his shoulder] We were interrupted: damn it!

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh Henry, Henry, really!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [half rising] Are we in the way?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and making her sit down again] No, no. You couldn’t have come more fortunately: we want you to meet a friend of ours.

HIGGINS [turning hopefully] Yes, by George! We want two or three people. You’ll do as well as anybody else.

The parlor-maid returns, ushering Freddy.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Eynsford Hill.

HIGGINS [almost audibly, past endurance] God of Heaven! another of them.

FREDDY [shaking hands with Mrs. Higgins] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. Very good of you to come. [Introducing] Colonel Pickering.

FREDDY [bowing] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t think you know my son, Professor Higgins.

FREDDY [going to Higgins] Ahdedo?

HIGGINS [looking at him much as if he were a pickpocket] I’ll take my oath I’ve met you before somewhere. Where was it?

FREDDY. I don’t think so.

HIGGINS [resignedly] It don’t matter, anyhow. Sit down. He shakes Freddy’s hand, and almost slings him on the ottoman with his face to the windows; then comes round to the other side of it.

HIGGINS. Well, here we are, anyhow! [He sits down on the ottoman next Mrs. Eynsford Hill, on her left.] And now, what the devil are we going to talk about until Eliza comes?

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: you are the life and soul of the Royal Society’s soirees; but really you’re rather trying on more commonplace occasions.

HIGGINS. Am I? Very sorry. [Beaming suddenly] I suppose I am, you know. [Uproariously] Ha, ha!

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [who considers Higgins quite eligible matrimonially] I sympathize. I haven’t any small talk. If people would only be frank and say what they really think!

HIGGINS [relapsing into gloom] Lord forbid!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [taking up her daughter’s cue] But why?

HIGGINS. What they think they ought to think is bad enough, Lord knows; but what they really think would break up the whole show. Do you suppose it would be really agreeable if I were to come out now with what I really think?

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] Is it so very cynical?

HIGGINS. Cynical! Who the dickens said it was cynical? I mean it wouldn’t be decent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [seriously] Oh! I’m sure you don’t mean that, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. You see, we’re all savages, more or less. We’re supposed to be civilized and cultured — to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names? [To Miss Hill] What do you know of poetry? [To Mrs. Hill] What do you know of science? [Indicating Freddy] What does he know of art or science or anything else? What the devil do you imagine I know of philosophy?

MRS. HIGGINS [warningly] Or of manners, Henry?

THE PARLOR-MAID [opening the door] Miss Doolittle. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS [rising hastily and running to Mrs. Higgins] Here she is, mother. [He stands on tiptoe and makes signs over his mother’s head to Eliza to indicate to her which lady is her hostess].

Eliza, who is exquisitely dressed, produces an impression of such remarkable distinction and beauty as she enters that they all rise, quite flustered. Guided by Higgins’s signals, she comes to Mrs. Higgins with studied grace.

LIZA [speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone] How do you do, Mrs. Higgins? [She gasps slightly in making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite successful]. Mr. Higgins told me I might come.

MRS. HIGGINS [cordially] Quite right: I’m very glad indeed to see you.

PICKERING. How do you do, Miss Doolittle?

LIZA [shaking hands with him] Colonel Pickering, is it not?

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I feel sure we have met before, Miss Doolittle. I remember your eyes.

LIZA. How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman gracefully in the place just left vacant by Higgins].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My daughter Clara.

LIZA. How do you do?

CLARA [impulsively] How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman beside Eliza, devouring her with her eyes].

FREDDY [coming to their side of the ottoman] I’ve certainly had the pleasure.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My son Freddy.

LIZA. How do you do?

Freddy bows and sits down in the Elizabethan chair, infatuated.

HIGGINS [suddenly] By George, yes: it all comes back to me! [They stare at him]. Covent Garden! [Lamentably] What a damned thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, please! [He is about to sit on the edge of the table]. Don’t sit on my writing-table: you’ll break it.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Sorry.

He goes to the divan, stumbling into the fender and over the fire-irons on his way; extricating himself with muttered imprecations; and finishing his disastrous journey by throwing himself so impatiently on the divan that he almost breaks it. Mrs. Higgins looks at him, but controls herself and says nothing.

A long and painful pause ensues.

MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think?

LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.

FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!

LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.

FREDDY. Killing!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I’m sure I hope it won’t turn cold. There’s so much influenza about. It runs right through our whole family regularly every spring.

LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!

LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it’s my belief they done the old woman in.

MRS. HIGGINS [puzzled] Done her in?

LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!

LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?

HIGGINS [hastily] Oh, that’s the new small talk. To do a person in means to kill them.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Eliza, horrified] You surely don’t believe that your aunt was killed?

LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. But it can’t have been right for your father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.

LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?

LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!

LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he did not keep it up regular. [Cheerfully] On the burst, as you might say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it’s like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?

FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.

LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? [To Higgins] Have I said anything I oughtn’t?

MRS. HIGGINS [interposing] Not at all, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. Well, that’s a mercy, anyhow. [Expansively] What I always say is —

HIGGINS [rising and looking at his watch] Ahem!

LIZA [looking round at him; taking the hint; and rising] Well: I must go. [They all rise. Freddy goes to the door]. So pleased to have met you. Good-bye. [She shakes hands with Mrs. Higgins].

MRS. HIGGINS. Good-bye.

LIZA. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

PICKERING. Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. [They shake hands].

LIZA [nodding to the others] Good-bye, all.

FREDDY [opening the door for her] Are you walking across the Park, Miss Doolittle? If so —

LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. [Sensation]. I am going in a taxi. [She goes out].

Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really can’t get used to the new ways.

CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair]. Oh, it’s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do hope you won’t begin using that expression, Clara. I have got accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and calling everything filthy and beastly; though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Don’t you think so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Don’t ask me. I’ve been away in India for several years; and manners have changed so much that I sometimes don’t know whether I’m at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship’s forecastle.

CLARA. It’s all a matter of habit. There’s no right or wrong in it. Nobody means anything by it. And it’s so quaint, and gives such a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the new small talk delightful and quite innocent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [rising] Well, after that, I think it’s time for us to go.

Pickering and Higgins rise.

CLARA [rising] Oh yes: we have three at homes to go to still. Good-bye, Mrs. Higgins. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering. Good-bye, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [coming grimly at her from the divan, and accompanying her to the door] Good-bye. Be sure you try on that small talk at the three at-homes. Don’t be nervous about it. Pitch it in strong.

CLARA [all smiles] I will. Good-bye. Such nonsense, all this early Victorian prudery!

HIGGINS [tempting her] Such damned nonsense!

CLARA. Such bloody nonsense!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [convulsively] Clara!

CLARA. Ha! ha! [She goes out radiant, conscious of being thoroughly up to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a stream of silvery laughter].

FREDDY [to the heavens at large] Well, I ask you [He gives it up, and comes to Mrs. Higgins]. Good-bye.

MRS. HIGGINS [shaking hands] Good-bye. Would you like to meet Miss Doolittle again?

FREDDY [eagerly] Yes, I should, most awfully.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you know my days.

FREDDY. Yes. Thanks awfully. Good-bye. [He goes out].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Good-bye, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Good-bye. Good-bye.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Pickering] It’s no use. I shall never be able to bring myself to use that word.

PICKERING. Don’t. It’s not compulsory, you know. You’ll get on quite well without it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Only, Clara is so down on me if I am not positively reeking with the latest slang. Good-bye.

PICKERING. Good-bye [They shake hands].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] You mustn’t mind Clara. [Pickering, catching from her lowered tone that this is not meant for him to hear, discreetly joins Higgins at the window]. We’re so poor! and she gets so few parties, poor child! She doesn’t quite know. [Mrs. Higgins, seeing that her eyes are moist, takes her hand sympathetically and goes with her to the door]. But the boy is nice. Don’t you think so?

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh, quite nice. I shall always be delighted to see him.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Thank you, dear. Good-bye. [She goes out].

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well? Is Eliza presentable [he swoops on his mother and drags her to the ottoman, where she sits down in Eliza’s place with her son on her left]?

Pickering returns to his chair on her right.

MRS. HIGGINS. You silly boy, of course she’s not presentable. She’s a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s; but if you suppose for a moment that she doesn’t give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her.

PICKERING. But don’t you think something might be done? I mean something to eliminate the sanguinary element from her conversation.

MRS. HIGGINS. Not as long as she is in Henry’s hands.

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?

MRS. HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper — say on a canal barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.

HIGGINS [deeply injured] Well I must say —

PICKERING [interrupting him] Come, Higgins: you must learn to know yourself. I haven’t heard such language as yours since we used to review the volunteers in Hyde Park twenty years ago.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I don’t always talk like a bishop.

MRS. HIGGINS [quieting Henry with a touch] Colonel Pickering: will you tell me what is the exact state of things in Wimpole Street?

PICKERING [cheerfully: as if this completely changed the subject] Well, I have come to live there with Henry. We work together at my Indian Dialects; and we think it more convenient —

MRS. HIGGINS. Quite so. I know all about that: it’s an excellent arrangement. But where does this girl live?

HIGGINS. With us, of course. Where would she live?

MRS. HIGGINS. But on what terms? Is she a servant? If not, what is she?

PICKERING [slowly] I think I know what you mean, Mrs. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, dash me if I do! I’ve had to work at the girl every day for months to get her to her present pitch. Besides, she’s useful. She knows where my things are, and remembers my appointments and so forth.

MRS. HIGGINS. How does your housekeeper get on with her?

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce? Oh, she’s jolly glad to get so much taken off her hands; for before Eliza came, she had to have to find things and remind me of my appointments. But she’s got some silly bee in her bonnet about Eliza. She keeps saying “You don’t think, sir”: doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. Yes: that’s the formula. “You don’t think, sir.” That’s the end of every conversation about Eliza.

HIGGINS. As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her confounded vowels and consonants. I’m worn out, thinking about her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue, not to mention her soul, which is the quaintest of the lot.

MRS. HIGGINS. You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll.

HIGGINS. Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.

PICKERING [drawing his chair closer to Mrs. Higgins and bending over to her eagerly] Yes: it’s enormously interesting. I assure you, Mrs. Higgins, we take Eliza very seriously. Every week — every day almost — there is some new change. [Closer again] We keep records of every stage — dozens of gramophone disks and photographs —

HIGGINS [assailing her at the other ear] Yes, by George: it’s the most absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She regularly fills our lives up; doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. We’re always talking Eliza.

HIGGINS. Teaching Eliza.

PICKERING. Dressing Eliza.

MRS. HIGGINS. What!

HIGGINS. Inventing new Elizas.

Higgins and Pickering, speaking together:

HIGGINS.      You know, she has the most extraordinary quickness of ear:
PICKERING.  I assure you, my dear Mrs. Higgins, that girl
HIGGINS.      just like a parrot. I’ve tried her with every
PICKERING.  is a genius. She can play the piano quite beautifully
HIGGINS.      possible sort of sound that a human being can make —
PICKERING.  We have taken her to classical concerts and to music
HIGGINS.      Continental dialects, African dialects, Hottentot
PICKERING.  halls; and it’s all the same to her: she plays everything
HIGGINS.      clicks, things it took me years to get hold of; and
PICKERING.  she hears right off when she comes home, whether it’s
HIGGINS.      she picks them up like a shot, right away, as if she had
PICKERING.  Beethoven and Brahms or Lehar and Lionel Morickton;
HIGGINS.      been at it all her life.
PICKERING.  though six months ago, she’d never as much as touched a piano.

MRS. HIGGINS [putting her fingers in her ears, as they are by this time shouting one another down with an intolerable noise] Sh — sh — sh — sh! [They stop].

PICKERING. I beg your pardon. [He draws his chair back apologetically].

HIGGINS. Sorry. When Pickering starts shouting nobody can get a word in edgeways.

MRS. HIGGINS. Be quiet, Henry. Colonel Pickering: don’t you realize that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her?

PICKERING. Her father did. But Henry soon got rid of him.

MRS. HIGGINS. It would have been more to the point if her mother had. But as her mother didn’t something else did.

PICKERING. But what?

MRS. HIGGINS [unconsciously dating herself by the word] A problem.

PICKERING. Oh, I see. The problem of how to pass her off as a lady.

HIGGINS. I’ll solve that problem. I’ve half solved it already.

MRS. HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the problem of what is to be done with her afterwards.

HIGGINS. I don’t see anything in that. She can go her own way, with all the advantages I have given her.

MRS. HIGGINS. The advantages of that poor woman who was here just now! The manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living without giving her a fine lady’s income! Is that what you mean?

PICKERING [indulgently, being rather bored] Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Higgins. [He rises to go].

HIGGINS [rising also] We’ll find her some light employment.

PICKERING. She’s happy enough. Don’t you worry about her. Good-bye. [He shakes hands as if he were consoling a frightened child, and makes for the door].

HIGGINS. Anyhow, there’s no good bothering now. The thing’s done. Good-bye, mother. [He kisses her, and follows Pickering].

PICKERING [turning for a final consolation] There are plenty of openings. We’ll do what’s right. Good-bye.

HIGGINS [to Pickering as they go out together] Let’s take her to the Shakespear exhibition at Earls Court.

PICKERING. Yes: let’s. Her remarks will be delicious.

HIGGINS. She’ll mimic all the people for us when we get home.

PICKERING. Ripping. [Both are heard laughing as they go downstairs].

MRS. HIGGINS [rises with an impatient bounce, and returns to her work at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of disarranged papers out of her way; snatches a sheet of paper from her stationery case; and tries resolutely to write. At the third line she gives it up; flings down her pen; grips the table angrily and exclaims] Oh, men! men!! men!!!

ACT IV

The Wimpole Street laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the room. The clock on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is not alight: it is a summer night.

Presently Higgins and Pickering are heard on the stairs.

HIGGINS [calling down to Pickering] I say, Pick: lock up, will you. I shan’t be going out again.

PICKERING. Right. Can Mrs. Pearce go to bed? We don’t want anything more, do we?

HIGGINS. Lord, no!

Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in opera cloak, brilliant evening dress, and diamonds, with fan, flowers, and all accessories. She comes to the hearth, and switches on the electric lights there. She is tired: her pallor contrasts strongly with her dark eyes and hair; and her expression is almost tragic. She takes off her cloak; puts her fan and flowers on the piano; and sits down on the bench, brooding and silent. Higgins, in evening dress, with overcoat and hat, comes in, carrying a smoking jacket which he has picked up downstairs. He takes off the hat and overcoat; throws them carelessly on the newspaper stand; disposes of his coat in the same way; puts on the smoking jacket; and throws himself wearily into the easy-chair at the hearth. Pickering, similarly attired, comes in. He also takes off his hat and overcoat, and is about to throw them on Higgins’s when he hesitates.

PICKERING. I say: Mrs. Pearce will row if we leave these things lying about in the drawing-room.

HIGGINS. Oh, chuck them over the bannisters into the hall. She’ll find them there in the morning and put them away all right. She’ll think we were drunk.

PICKERING. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?

HIGGINS. I didn’t look. [Pickering takes the overcoats and hats and goes down stairs. Higgins begins half singing half yawning an air from La Fanciulla del Golden West. Suddenly he stops and exclaims] I wonder where the devil my slippers are!

Eliza looks at him darkly; then leaves the room.

Higgins yawns again, and resumes his song. Pickering returns, with the contents of the letter-box in his hand.

PICKERING. Only circulars, and this coroneted billet-doux for you. [He throws the circulars into the fender, and posts himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the grate].

HIGGINS [glancing at the billet-doux] Money-lender. [He throws the letter after the circulars].

Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers. She places them on the carpet before Higgins, and sits as before without a word.

HIGGINS [yawning again] Oh Lord! What an evening! What a crew! What a silly tomfoollery! [He raises his shoe to unlace it, and catches sight of the slippers. He stops unlacing and looks at them as if they had appeared there of their own accord]. Oh! they’re there, are they?

PICKERING [stretching himself] Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too much of a good thing. But you’ve won your bet, Higgins. Eliza did the trick, and something to spare, eh?

HIGGINS [fervently] Thank God it’s over!

Eliza flinches violently; but they take no notice of her; and she recovers herself and sits stonily as before.

PICKERING. Were you nervous at the garden party? I was. Eliza didn’t seem a bit nervous.

HIGGINS. Oh, she wasn’t nervous. I knew she’d be all right. No, it’s the strain of putting the job through all these months that has told on me. It was interesting enough at first, while we were at the phonetics; but after that I got deadly sick of it. If I hadn’t backed myself to do it I should have chucked the whole thing up two months ago. It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore.

PICKERING. Oh come! the garden party was frightfully exciting. My heart began beating like anything.

HIGGINS. Yes, for the first three minutes. But when I saw we were going to win hands down, I felt like a bear in a cage, hanging about doing nothing. The dinner was worse: sitting gorging there for over an hour, with nobody but a damned fool of a fashionable woman to talk to! I tell you, Pickering, never again for me. No more artificial duchesses. The whole thing has been simple purgatory.

PICKERING. You’ve never been broken in properly to the social routine. [Strolling over to the piano] I rather enjoy dipping into it occasionally myself: it makes me feel young again. Anyhow, it was a great success: an immense success. I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

HIGGINS. Yes: that’s what drives me mad: the silly people don’t know their own silly business. [Rising] However, it’s over and done with; and now I can go to bed at last without dreading tomorrow.

Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous.

PICKERING. I think I shall turn in too. Still, it’s been a great occasion: a triumph for you. Good-night. [He goes].

HIGGINS [following him] Good-night. [Over his shoulder, at the door] Put out the lights, Eliza; and tell Mrs. Pearce not to make coffee for me in the morning: I’ll take tea. [He goes out].

Eliza tries to control herself and feel indifferent as she rises and walks across to the hearth to switch off the lights. By the time she gets there she is on the point of screaming. She sits down in Higgins’s chair and holds on hard to the arms. Finally she gives way and flings herself furiously on the floor raging.

HIGGINS [in despairing wrath outside] What the devil have I done with my slippers? [He appears at the door].

LIZA [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after the other with all her force] There are your slippers. And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day’s luck with them!

HIGGINS [astounded] What on earth — ! [He comes to her]. What’s the matter? Get up. [He pulls her up]. Anything wrong?

LIZA [breathless] Nothing wrong — with YOU. I’ve won your bet for you, haven’t I? That’s enough for you. I don’t matter, I suppose.

HIGGINS. YOU won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! I won it. What did you throw those slippers at me for?

LIZA. Because I wanted to smash your face. I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of — in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you? [She crisps her fingers, frantically].

HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder] The creature IS nervous, after all.

LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts her nails at his face]!!

HIGGINS [catching her wrists] Ah! would you? Claws in, you cat. How dare you show your temper to me? Sit down and be quiet. [He throws her roughly into the easy-chair].

LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight] What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?

HIGGINS. How the devil do I know what’s to become of you? What does it matter what becomes of you?

LIZA. You don’t care. I know you don’t care. You wouldn’t care if I was dead. I’m nothing to you — not so much as them slippers.

HIGGINS [thundering] THOSE slippers.

LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers. I didn’t think it made any difference now.

A pause. Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy.

HIGGINS [in his loftiest manner] Why have you begun going on like this? May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs. Pearce? Any of the servants?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I presume you don’t pretend that I have treated you badly.

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I am glad to hear it. [He moderates his tone]. Perhaps you’re tired after the strain of the day. Will you have a glass of champagne? [He moves towards the door].

LIZA. No. [Recollecting her manners] Thank you.

HIGGINS [good-humored again] This has been coming on you for some days. I suppose it was natural for you to be anxious about the garden party. But that’s all over now. [He pats her kindly on the shoulder. She writhes]. There’s nothing more to worry about.

LIZA. No. Nothing more for you to worry about. [She suddenly rises and gets away from him by going to the piano bench, where she sits and hides her face]. Oh God! I wish I was dead.

HIGGINS [staring after her in sincere surprise] Why? in heaven’s name, why? [Reasonably, going to her] Listen to me, Eliza. All this irritation is purely subjective.

LIZA. I don’t understand. I’m too ignorant.

HIGGINS. It’s only imagination. Low spirits and nothing else. Nobody’s hurting you. Nothing’s wrong. You go to bed like a good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry and say your prayers: that will make you comfortable.

LIZA. I heard YOUR prayers. “Thank God it’s all over!”

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, don’t you thank God it’s all over? Now you are free and can do what you like.

LIZA [pulling herself together in desperation] What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?

HIGGINS [enlightened, but not at all impressed] Oh, that’s what’s worrying you, is it? [He thrusts his hands into his pockets, and walks about in his usual manner, rattling the contents of his pockets, as if condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kindness]. I shouldn’t bother about it if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, though I hadn’t quite realized that you were going away. [She looks quickly at him: he does not look at her, but examines the dessert stand on the piano and decides that he will eat an apple]. You might marry, you know. [He bites a large piece out of the apple, and munches it noisily]. You see, Eliza, all men are not confirmed old bachelors like me and the Colonel. Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils!); and you’re not bad-looking; it’s quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes — not now, of course, because you’re crying and looking as ugly as the very devil; but when you’re all right and quite yourself, you’re what I should call attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you won’t feel so cheap.

Eliza again looks at him, speechless, and does not stir.

The look is quite lost on him: he eats his apple with a dreamy expression of happiness, as it is quite a good one.

HIGGINS [a genial afterthought occurring to him] I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well —

LIZA. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

HIGGINS [waking up] What do you mean?

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you found me.

HIGGINS [slinging the core of the apple decisively into the grate] Tosh, Eliza. Don’t you insult human relations by dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it. You needn’t marry the fellow if you don’t like him.

LIZA. What else am I to do?

HIGGINS. Oh, lots of things. What about your old idea of a florist’s shop? Pickering could set you up in one: he’s lots of money. [Chuckling] He’ll have to pay for all those togs you have been wearing today; and that, with the hire of the jewellery, will make a big hole in two hundred pounds. Why, six months ago you would have thought it the millennium to have a flower shop of your own. Come! you’ll be all right. I must clear off to bed: I’m devilish sleepy. By the way, I came down for something: I forget what it was.

LIZA. Your slippers.

HIGGINS. Oh yes, of course. You shied them at me. [He picks them up, and is going out when she rises and speaks to him].

LIZA. Before you go, sir —

HIGGINS [dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him sir] Eh?

LIZA. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering?

HIGGINS [coming back into the room as if her question were the very climax of unreason] What the devil use would they be to Pickering?

LIZA. He might want them for the next girl you pick up to experiment on.

HIGGINS [shocked and hurt] Is THAT the way you feel towards us?

LIZA. I don’t want to hear anything more about that. All I want to know is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were burnt.

HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night?

LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I don’t want to be accused of stealing.

HIGGINS [now deeply wounded] Stealing! You shouldn’t have said that, Eliza. That shows a want of feeling.

LIZA. I’m sorry. I’m only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I have to be careful. There can’t be any feelings between the like of you and the like of me. Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesn’t?

HIGGINS [very sulky] You may take the whole damned houseful if you like. Except the jewels. They’re hired. Will that satisfy you? [He turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon].

LIZA [drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels]. Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I don’t want to run the risk of their being missing.

HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into his hands]. If these belonged to me instead of to the jeweler, I’d ram them down your ungrateful throat. [He perfunctorily thrusts them into his pockets, unconsciously decorating himself with the protruding ends of the chains].

LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isn’t the jeweler’s: it’s the one you bought me in Brighton. I don’t want it now. [Higgins dashes the ring violently into the fireplace, and turns on her so threateningly that she crouches over the piano with her hands over her face, and exclaims] Don’t you hit me.

HIGGINS. Hit you! You infamous creature, how dare you accuse me of such a thing? It is you who have hit me. You have wounded me to the heart.

LIZA [thrilling with hidden joy] I’m glad. I’ve got a little of my own back, anyhow.

HIGGINS [with dignity, in his finest professional style] You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before. I prefer to say nothing more tonight. I am going to bed.

LIZA [pertly] You’d better leave a note for Mrs. Pearce about the coffee; for she won’t be told by me.

HIGGINS [formally] Damn Mrs. Pearce; and damn the coffee; and damn you; and damn my own folly in having lavished MY hard-earned knowledge and the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe. [He goes out with impressive decorum, and spoils it by slamming the door savagely].

Eliza smiles for the first time; expresses her feelings by a wild pantomime in which an imitation of Higgins’s exit is confused with her own triumph; and finally goes down on her knees on the hearthrug to look for the ring.

ACT V

Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room. She is at her writing-table as before. The parlor-maid comes in.

THE PARLOR-MAID [at the door] Mr. Henry, mam, is downstairs with Colonel Pickering.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, show them up.

THE PARLOR-MAID. They’re using the telephone, mam. Telephoning to the police, I think.

MRS. HIGGINS. What!

THE PARLOR-MAID [coming further in and lowering her voice] Mr. Henry’s in a state, mam. I thought I’d better tell you.

MRS. HIGGINS. If you had told me that Mr. Henry was not in a state it would have been more surprising. Tell them to come up when they’ve finished with the police. I suppose he’s lost something.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam [going].

MRS. HIGGINS. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that Mr. Henry and the Colonel are here. Ask her not to come down till I send for her.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam.

Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlor-maid has said, in a state.

HIGGINS. Look here, mother: here’s a confounded thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Yes, dear. Good-morning. [He checks his impatience and kisses her, whilst the parlor-maid goes out]. What is it?

HIGGINS. Eliza’s bolted.

MRS. HIGGINS [calmly continuing her writing] You must have frightened her.

HIGGINS. Frightened her! nonsense! She was left last night, as usual, to turn out the lights and all that; and instead of going to bed she changed her clothes and went right off: her bed wasn’t slept in. She came in a cab for her things before seven this morning; and that fool Mrs. Pearce let her have them without telling me a word about it. What am I to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. Do without, I’m afraid, Henry. The girl has a perfect right to leave if she chooses.

HIGGINS [wandering distractedly across the room] But I can’t find anything. I don’t know what appointments I’ve got. I’m — [Pickering comes in. Mrs. Higgins puts down her pen and turns away from the writing-table].

PICKERING [shaking hands] Good-morning, Mrs. Higgins. Has Henry told you? [He sits down on the ottoman].

HIGGINS. What does that ass of an inspector say? Have you offered a reward?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising in indignant amazement] You don’t mean to say you have set the police after Eliza?

HIGGINS. Of course. What are the police for? What else could we do? [He sits in the Elizabethan chair].

PICKERING. The inspector made a lot of difficulties. I really think he suspected us of some improper purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, of course he did. What right have you to go to the police and give the girl’s name as if she were a thief, or a lost umbrella, or something? Really! [She sits down again, deeply vexed].

HIGGINS. But we want to find her.

PICKERING. We can’t let her go like this, you know, Mrs. Higgins. What were we to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. You have no more sense, either of you, than two children. Why —

The parlor-maid comes in and breaks off the conversation.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Henry: a gentleman wants to see you very particular. He’s been sent on from Wimpole Street.

HIGGINS. Oh, bother! I can’t see anyone now. Who is it?

THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr. Doolittle, Sir.

PICKERING. Doolittle! Do you mean the dustman?

THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.

HIGGINS [springing up excitedly] By George, Pick, it’s some relative of hers that she’s gone to. Somebody we know nothing about. [To the parlor-maid] Send him up, quick.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, Sir. [She goes].

HIGGINS [eagerly, going to his mother] Genteel relatives! now we shall hear something. [He sits down in the Chippendale chair].

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know any of her people?

PICKERING. Only her father: the fellow we told you about.

THE PARLOR-MAID [announcing] Mr. Doolittle. [She withdraws].

Doolittle enters. He is brilliantly dressed in a new fashionable frock-coat, with white waistcoat and grey trousers. A flower in his buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes complete the effect. He is too concerned with the business he has come on to notice Mrs. Higgins. He walks straight to Higgins, and accosts him with vehement reproach.

DOOLITTLE [indicating his own person] See here! Do you see this? You done this.

HIGGINS. Done what, man?

DOOLITTLE. This, I tell you. Look at it. Look at this hat. Look at this coat.

PICKERING. Has Eliza been buying you clothes?

DOOLITTLE. Eliza! not she. Not half. Why would she buy me clothes?

MRS. HIGGINS. Good-morning, Mr. Doolittle. Won’t you sit down?

DOOLITTLE [taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has forgotten his hostess] Asking your pardon, ma’am. [He approaches her and shakes her proffered hand]. Thank you. [He sits down on the ottoman, on Pickering’s right]. I am that full of what has happened to me that I can’t think of anything else.

HIGGINS. What the dickens has happened to you?

DOOLITTLE. I shouldn’t mind if it had only happened to me: anything might happen to anybody and nobody to blame but Providence, as you might say. But this is something that you done to me: yes, you, Henry Higgins.

HIGGINS. Have you found Eliza? That’s the point.

DOOLITTLE. Have you lost her?

HIGGINS. Yes.

DOOLITTLE. You have all the luck, you have. I ain’t found her; but she’ll find me quick enough now after what you done to me.

MRS. HIGGINS. But what has my son done to you, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Done to me! Ruined me. Destroyed my happiness. Tied me up and delivered me into the hands of middle class morality.

HIGGINS [rising intolerantly and standing over Doolittle] You’re raving. You’re drunk. You’re mad. I gave you five pounds. After that I had two conversations with you, at half-a-crown an hour. I’ve never seen you since.

DOOLITTLE. Oh! Drunk! am I? Mad! am I? Tell me this. Did you or did you not write a letter to an old blighter in America that was giving five millions to found Moral Reform Societies all over the world, and that wanted you to invent a universal language for him?

HIGGINS. What! Ezra D. Wannafeller! He’s dead. [He sits down again carelessly].

DOOLITTLE. Yes: he’s dead; and I’m done for. Now did you or did you not write a letter to him to say that the most original moralist at present in England, to the best of your knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a common dustman.

HIGGINS. Oh, after your last visit I remember making some silly joke of the kind.

DOOLITTLE. Ah! you may well call it a silly joke. It put the lid on me right enough. Just give him the chance he wanted to show that Americans is not like us: that they recognize and respect merit in every class of life, however humble. Them words is in his blooming will, in which, Henry Higgins, thanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year.

HIGGINS. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!

PICKERING. A safe thing for you, Doolittle. They won’t ask you twice.

DOOLITTLE. It ain’t the lecturing I mind. I’ll lecture them blue in the face, I will, and not turn a hair. It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money. It’s a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it’s a good thing for you, I says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I’m not a healthy man and can’t live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I’m not let do a hand’s turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago I hadn’t a relative in the world except two or three that wouldn’t speak to me. Now I’ve fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle class morality. You talk of losing Eliza. Don’t you be anxious: I bet she’s on my doorstep by this: she that could support herself easy by selling flowers if I wasn’t respectable. And the next one to touch me will be you, Henry Higgins. I’ll have to learn to speak middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper English. That’s where you’ll come in; and I daresay that’s what you done it for.

MRS. HIGGINS. But, my dear Mr. Doolittle, you need not suffer all this if you are really in earnest. Nobody can force you to accept this bequest. You can repudiate it. Isn’t that so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. I believe so.

DOOLITTLE [softening his manner in deference to her sex] That’s the tragedy of it, ma’am. It’s easy to say chuck it; but I haven’t the nerve. Which one of us has? We’re all intimidated. Intimidated, ma’am: that’s what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause the deserving poor might as well be millionaires for all the happiness they ever has. They don’t know what happiness is. But I, as one of the undeserving poor, have nothing between me and the pauper’s uniform but this here blasted three thousand a year that shoves me into the middle class. (Excuse the expression, ma’am: you’d use it yourself if you had my provocation). They’ve got you every way you turn: it’s a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class; and I haven’t the nerve for the workhouse. Intimidated: that’s what I am. Broke. Bought up. Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them. And that’s what your son has brought me to. [He is overcome by emotion].

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, I’m very glad you’re not going to do anything foolish, Mr. Doolittle. For this solves the problem of Eliza’s future. You can provide for her now.

DOOLITTLE [with melancholy resignation] Yes, ma’am; I’m expected to provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a year.

HIGGINS [jumping up] Nonsense! he can’t provide for her. He shan’t provide for her. She doesn’t belong to him. I paid him five pounds for her. Doolittle: either you’re an honest man or a rogue.

DOOLITTLE [tolerantly] A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us: a little of both.

HIGGINS. Well, you took that money for the girl; and you have no right to take her as well.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: don’t be absurd. If you really want to know where Eliza is, she is upstairs.

HIGGINS [amazed] Upstairs!!! Then I shall jolly soon fetch her downstairs. [He makes resolutely for the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and following him] Be quiet, Henry. Sit down.

HIGGINS. I —

MRS. HIGGINS. Sit down, dear; and listen to me.

HIGGINS. Oh very well, very well, very well. [He throws himself ungraciously on the ottoman, with his face towards the windows]. But I think you might have told me this half an hour ago.

MRS. HIGGINS. Eliza came to me this morning. She passed the night partly walking about in a rage, partly trying to throw herself into the river and being afraid to, and partly in the Carlton Hotel. She told me of the brutal way you two treated her.

HIGGINS [bounding up again] What!

PICKERING [rising also] My dear Mrs. Higgins, she’s been telling you stories. We didn’t treat her brutally. We hardly said a word to her; and we parted on particularly good terms. [Turning on Higgins]. Higgins did you bully her after I went to bed?

HIGGINS. Just the other way about. She threw my slippers in my face. She behaved in the most outrageous way. I never gave her the slightest provocation. The slippers came bang into my face the moment I entered the room — before I had uttered a word. And used perfectly awful language.

PICKERING [astonished] But why? What did we do to her?

MRS. HIGGINS. I think I know pretty well what you did. The girl is naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isn’t she, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Very tender-hearted, ma’am. Takes after me.

MRS. HIGGINS. Just so. She had become attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you! I should have thrown the fire-irons at you.

HIGGINS. We said nothing except that we were tired and wanted to go to bed. Did we, Pick?

PICKERING [shrugging his shoulders] That was all.

MRS. HIGGINS [ironically] Quite sure?

PICKERING. Absolutely. Really, that was all.

MRS. HIGGINS. You didn’t thank her, or pet her, or admire her, or tell her how splendid she’d been.

HIGGINS [impatiently] But she knew all about that. We didn’t make speeches to her, if that’s what you mean.

PICKERING [conscience stricken] Perhaps we were a little inconsiderate. Is she very angry?

MRS. HIGGINS [returning to her place at the writing-table] Well, I’m afraid she won’t go back to Wimpole Street, especially now that Mr. Doolittle is able to keep up the position you have thrust on her; but she says she is quite willing to meet you on friendly terms and to let bygones be bygones.

HIGGINS [furious] Is she, by George? Ho!

MRS. HIGGINS. If you promise to behave yourself, Henry, I’ll ask her to come down. If not, go home; for you have taken up quite enough of my time.

HIGGINS. Oh, all right. Very well. Pick: you behave yourself. Let us put on our best Sunday manners for this creature that we picked out of the mud. [He flings himself sulkily into the Elizabethan chair].

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, Henry Higgins! have some consideration for my feelings as a middle class man.

MRS. HIGGINS. Remember your promise, Henry. [She presses the bell-button on the writing-table]. Mr. Doolittle: will you be so good as to step out on the balcony for a moment. I don’t want Eliza to have the shock of your news until she has made it up with these two gentlemen. Would you mind?

DOOLITTLE. As you wish, lady. Anything to help Henry to keep her off my hands. [He disappears through the window].

The parlor-maid answers the bell. Pickering sits down in Doolittle’s place.

MRS. HIGGINS. Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam. [She goes out].

MRS. HIGGINS. Now, Henry: be good.

HIGGINS. I am behaving myself perfectly.

PICKERING. He is doing his best, Mrs. Higgins.

A pause. Higgins throws back his head; stretches out his legs; and begins to whistle.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, dearest, you don’t look at all nice in that attitude.

HIGGINS [pulling himself together] I was not trying to look nice, mother.

MRS. HIGGINS. It doesn’t matter, dear. I only wanted to make you speak.

HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Because you can’t speak and whistle at the same time.

Higgins groans. Another very trying pause.

HIGGINS [springing up, out of patience] Where the devil is that girl? Are we to wait here all day?

Eliza enters, sunny, self-possessed, and giving a staggeringly convincing exhibition of ease of manner. She carries a little work-basket, and is very much at home. Pickering is too much taken aback to rise.

LIZA. How do you do, Professor Higgins? Are you quite well?

HIGGINS [choking] Am I — [He can say no more].

LIZA. But of course you are: you are never ill. So glad to see you again, Colonel Pickering. [He rises hastily; and they shake hands]. Quite chilly this morning, isn’t it? [She sits down on his left. He sits beside her].

HIGGINS. Don’t you dare try this game on me. I taught it to you; and it doesn’t take me in. Get up and come home; and don’t be a fool.

Eliza takes a piece of needlework from her basket, and begins to stitch at it, without taking the least notice of this outburst.

MRS. HIGGINS. Very nicely put, indeed, Henry. No woman could resist such an invitation.

HIGGINS. You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for herself. You will jolly soon see whether she has an idea that I haven’t put into her head or a word that I haven’t put into her mouth. I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

MRS. HIGGINS [placidly] Yes, dear; but you’ll sit down, won’t you?

Higgins sits down again, savagely.

LIZA [to Pickering, taking no apparent notice of Higgins, and working away deftly] Will you drop me altogether now that the experiment is over, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Oh don’t. You mustn’t think of it as an experiment. It shocks me, somehow.

LIZA. Oh, I’m only a squashed cabbage leaf.

PICKERING [impulsively] No.

LIZA [continuing quietly] — but I owe so much to you that I should be very unhappy if you forgot me.

PICKERING. It’s very kind of you to say so, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. It’s not because you paid for my dresses. I know you are generous to everybody with money. But it was from you that I learnt really nice manners; and that is what makes one a lady, isn’t it? You see it was so very difficult for me with the example of Professor Higgins always before me. I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control myself, and using bad language on the slightest provocation. And I should never have known that ladies and gentlemen didn’t behave like that if you hadn’t been there.

HIGGINS. Well!!

PICKERING. Oh, that’s only his way, you know. He doesn’t mean it.

LIZA. Oh, I didn’t mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was only my way. But you see I did it; and that’s what makes the difference after all.

PICKERING. No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak; and I couldn’t have done that, you know.

LIZA [trivially] Of course: that is his profession.

HIGGINS. Damnation!

LIZA [continuing] It was just like learning to dance in the fashionable way: there was nothing more than that in it. But do you know what began my real education?

PICKERING. What?

LIZA [stopping her work for a moment] Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self-respect for me. [She resumes her stitching]. And there were a hundred little things you never noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things about standing up and taking off your hat and opening doors —

PICKERING. Oh, that was nothing.

LIZA. Yes: things that showed you thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a scullerymaid; though of course I know you would have been just the same to a scullery-maid if she had been let in the drawing-room. You never took off your boots in the dining room when I was there.

PICKERING. You mustn’t mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all over the place.

LIZA. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isn’t it? But it made such a difference to me that you didn’t do it. You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

MRS. HIGGINS. Please don’t grind your teeth, Henry.

PICKERING. Well, this is really very nice of you, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. I should like you to call me Eliza, now, if you would.

PICKERING. Thank you. Eliza, of course.

LIZA. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss Doolittle.

HIGGINS. I’ll see you damned first.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry! Henry!

PICKERING [laughing] Why don’t you slang back at him? Don’t stand it. It would do him a lot of good.

LIZA. I can’t. I could have done it once; but now I can’t go back to it. Last night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was no use. You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours. That’s the real break-off with the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.

PICKERING [much alarmed] Oh! but you’re coming back to Wimpole Street, aren’t you? You’ll forgive Higgins?

HIGGINS [rising] Forgive! Will she, by George! Let her go. Let her find out how she can get on without us. She will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow.

Doolittle appears at the centre window. With a look of dignified reproach at Higgins, he comes slowly and silently to his daughter, who, with her back to the window, is unconscious of his approach.

PICKERING. He’s incorrigible, Eliza. You won’t relapse, will you?

LIZA. No: Not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson. I don’t believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I tried. [Doolittle touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her work, losing her self-possession utterly at the spectacle of her father’s splendor] A — a — a — a — a — ah — ow — ooh!

HIGGINS [with a crow of triumph] Aha! Just so. A — a — a — a — ahowooh! A — a — a — a — ahowooh ! A — a — a — a — ahowooh! Victory! Victory! [He throws himself on the divan, folding his arms, and spraddling arrogantly].

DOOLITTLE. Can you blame the girl? Don’t look at me like that, Eliza. It ain’t my fault. I’ve come into money.

LIZA. You must have touched a millionaire this time, dad.

DOOLITTLE. I have. But I’m dressed something special today. I’m going to St. George’s, Hanover Square. Your stepmother is going to marry me.

LIZA [angrily] You’re going to let yourself down to marry that low common woman!

PICKERING [quietly] He ought to, Eliza. [To Doolittle] Why has she changed her mind?

DOOLITTLE [sadly] Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated. Middle class morality claims its victim. Won’t you put on your hat, Liza, and come and see me turned off?

LIZA. If the Colonel says I must, I — I’ll [almost sobbing] I’ll demean myself. And get insulted for my pains, like enough.

DOOLITTLE. Don’t be afraid: she never comes to words with anyone now, poor woman! respectability has broke all the spirit out of her.

PICKERING [squeezing Eliza’s elbow gently] Be kind to them, Eliza. Make the best of it.

LIZA [forcing a little smile for him through her vexation] Oh well, just to show there’s no ill feeling. I’ll be back in a moment. [She goes out].

DOOLITTLE [sitting down beside Pickering] I feel uncommon nervous about the ceremony, Colonel. I wish you’d come and see me through it.

PICKERING. But you’ve been through it before, man. You were married to Eliza’s mother.

DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel?

PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded naturally —

DOOLITTLE. No: that ain’t the natural way, Colonel: it’s only the middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way. But don’t say nothing to Eliza. She don’t know: I always had a delicacy about telling her.

PICKERING. Quite right. We’ll leave it so, if you don’t mind.

DOOLITTLE. And you’ll come to the church, Colonel, and put me through straight?

PICKERING. With pleasure. As far as a bachelor can.

MRS. HIGGINS. May I come, Mr. Doolittle? I should be very sorry to miss your wedding.

DOOLITTLE. I should indeed be honored by your condescension, ma’am; and my poor old woman would take it as a tremenjous compliment. She’s been very low, thinking of the happy days that are no more.

MRS. HIGGINS [rising] I’ll order the carriage and get ready. [The men rise, except Higgins]. I shan’t be more than fifteen minutes. [As she goes to the door Eliza comes in, hatted and buttoning her gloves]. I’m going to the church to see your father married, Eliza. You had better come in the brougham with me. Colonel Pickering can go on with the bridegroom.

Mrs. Higgins goes out. Eliza comes to the middle of the room between the centre window and the ottoman. Pickering joins her.

DOOLITTLE. Bridegroom! What a word! It makes a man realize his position, somehow. [He takes up his hat and goes towards the door].

PICKERING. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive him and come back to us.

LIZA. I don’t think papa would allow me. Would you, dad?

DOOLITTLE [sad but magnanimous] They played you off very cunning, Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had been only one of them, you could have nailed him. But you see, there was two; and one of them chaperoned the other, as you might say. [To Pickering] It was artful of you, Colonel; but I bear no malice: I should have done the same myself. I been the victim of one woman after another all my life; and I don’t grudge you two getting the better of Eliza. I shan’t interfere. It’s time for us to go, Colonel. So long, Henry. See you in St. George’s, Eliza. [He goes out].

PICKERING [coaxing] Do stay with us, Eliza. [He follows Doolittle].

Eliza goes out on the balcony to avoid being alone with Higgins. He rises and joins her there. She immediately comes back into the room and makes for the door; but he goes along the balcony quickly and gets his back to the door before she reaches it.

HIGGINS. Well, Eliza, you’ve had a bit of your own back, as you call it. Have you had enough? and are you going to be reasonable? Or do you want any more?

LIZA. You want me back only to pick up your slippers and put up with your tempers and fetch and carry for you.

HIGGINS. I haven’t said I wanted you back at all.

LIZA. Oh, indeed. Then what are we talking about?

HIGGINS. About you, not about me. If you come back I shall treat you just as I have always treated you. I can’t change my nature; and I don’t intend to change my manners. My manners are exactly the same as Colonel Pickering’s.

LIZA. That’s not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess.

HIGGINS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.

LIZA. I see. [She turns away composedly, and sits on the ottoman, facing the window]. The same to everybody.

HIGGINS. Just so.

LIZA. Like father.

HIGGINS [grinning, a little taken down] Without accepting the comparison at all points, Eliza, it’s quite true that your father is not a snob, and that he will be quite at home in any station of life to which his eccentric destiny may call him. [Seriously] The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

LIZA. Amen. You are a born preacher.

HIGGINS [irritated] The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.

LIZA [with sudden sincerity] I don’t care how you treat me. I don’t mind your swearing at me. I don’t mind a black eye: I’ve had one before this. But [standing up and facing him] I won’t be passed over.

HIGGINS. Then get out of my way; for I won’t stop for you. You talk about me as if I were a motor bus.

LIZA. So you are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: don’t think I can’t.

HIGGINS. I know you can. I told you you could.

LIZA [wounded, getting away from him to the other side of the ottoman with her face to the hearth] I know you did, you brute. You wanted to get rid of me.

HIGGINS. Liar.

LIZA. Thank you. [She sits down with dignity].

HIGGINS. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I could do without YOU.

LIZA [earnestly] Don’t you try to get round me. You’ll HAVE to do without me.

HIGGINS [arrogant] I can do without anybody. I have my own soul: my own spark of divine fire. But [with sudden humility] I shall miss you, Eliza. [He sits down near her on the ottoman]. I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.

LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your book of photographs. When you feel lonely without me, you can turn the machine on. It’s got no feelings to hurt.

HIGGINS. I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.

LIZA. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you don’t care a bit for her. And you don’t care a bit for me.

HIGGINS. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or anyone ask?

LIZA. I won’t care for anybody that doesn’t care for me.

HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing her Covent Garden pronunciation with professional exactness] s’yollin voylets [selling violets], isn’t it?

LIZA. Don’t sneer at me. It’s mean to sneer at me.

HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else. You’ve had a thousand times as much out of me as I have out of you; and if you dare to set up your little dog’s tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my creation of a Duchess Eliza, I’ll slam the door in your silly face.

LIZA. What did you do it for if you didn’t care for me?

HIGGINS [heartily] Why, because it was my job.

LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me.

HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

LIZA. I’m no preacher: I don’t notice things like that. I notice that you don’t notice me.

HIGGINS [jumping up and walking about intolerantly] Eliza: you’re an idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them before you. Once for all, understand that I go my way and do my work without caring twopence what happens to either of us. I am not intimidated, like your father and your stepmother. So you can come back or go to the devil: which you please.

LIZA. What am I to come back for?

HIGGINS [bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and leaning over it to her] For the fun of it. That’s why I took you on.

LIZA [with averted face] And you may throw me out tomorrow if I don’t do everything you want me to?

HIGGINS. Yes; and you may walk out tomorrow if I don’t do everything YOU want me to.

LIZA. And live with my stepmother?

HIGGINS. Yes, or sell flowers.

LIZA. Oh! if I only COULD go back to my flower basket! I should be independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes.

HIGGINS. Not a bit. I’ll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?

LIZA [looking fiercely round at him] I wouldn’t marry YOU if you asked me; and you’re nearer my age than what he is.

HIGGINS [gently] Than he is: not “than what he is.”

LIZA [losing her temper and rising] I’ll talk as I like. You’re not my teacher now.

HIGGINS [reflectively] I don’t suppose Pickering would, though. He’s as confirmed an old bachelor as I am.

LIZA. That’s not what I want; and don’t you think it. I’ve always had chaps enough wanting me that way. Freddy Hill writes to me twice and three times a day, sheets and sheets.

HIGGINS [disagreeably surprised] Damn his impudence! [He recoils and finds himself sitting on his heels].

LIZA. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad. And he does love me.

HIGGINS [getting off the ottoman] You have no right to encourage him.

LIZA. Every girl has a right to be loved.

HIGGINS. What! By fools like that?

LIZA. Freddy’s not a fool. And if he’s weak and poor and wants me, may be he’d make me happier than my betters that bully me and don’t want me.

HIGGINS. Can he MAKE anything of you? That’s the point.

LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought of us making anything of one another; and you never think of anything else. I only want to be natural.

HIGGINS. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as Freddy? Is that it?

LIZA. No I don’t. That’s not the sort of feeling I want from you. And don’t you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a bad girl if I’d liked. I’ve seen more of some things than you, for all your learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute.

HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are we quarrelling about?

LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet. What I done [correcting herself] what I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come — came — to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like.

HIGGINS. Well, of course. That’s just how I feel. And how Pickering feels. Eliza: you’re a fool.

LIZA. That’s not a proper answer to give me [she sinks on the chair at the writing-table in tears].

HIGGINS. It’s all you’ll get until you stop being a common idiot. If you’re going to be a lady, you’ll have to give up feeling neglected if the men you know don’t spend half their time snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes. If you can’t stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real: it’s warm: it’s violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

LIZA [desperate] Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you: you turn everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very well all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father’s. But don’t you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled on and talked down. I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he’s able to support me.

HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I’m not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven’t forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won’t be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

LIZA [rising determinedly] I’ll let you see whether I’m dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I’ll go and be a teacher.

HIGGINS. What’ll you teach, in heaven’s name?

LIZA. What you taught me. I’ll teach phonetics.

HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!

LIZA. I’ll offer myself as an assistant to Professor Nepean.

HIGGINS [rising in a fury] What! That impostor! that humbug! that toadying ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You take one step in his direction and I’ll wring your neck. [He lays hands on her]. Do you hear?

LIZA [defiantly non-resistant] Wring away. What do I care? I knew you’d strike me some day. [He lets her go, stamping with rage at having forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he stumbles back into his seat on the ottoman]. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertize it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut, you! But it’s better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and finding spectacles, isn’t it? [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready?

LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can’t behave himself in church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman’s pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m afraid you’ve spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy em all right enough. Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor’s wife, especially if he is so little interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision will depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she will marry him because she must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza’s age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any, even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist between them.

As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.

Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his mother (the first necessity of the married woman). To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no mother-rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest in herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs. Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the Universal Alphabet. Landor’s remark that to those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair, would not have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along with her resentment of Higgins’s domineering superiority, and her mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading her wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and you will see that Eliza’s instinct had good grounds for warning her not to marry her Pygmalion.

And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from the indications she has herself given them.

Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the fact that young Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his love for her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. “When you go to women,” says Nietzsche, “take your whip with you.” Sensible despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar “the first lion thinks the last a bore.” The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.

The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as “biting off more than they can chew.” They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties.

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. His mother’s jointure, a last relic of the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy’s dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy’s niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who had become declassee under extraordinary circumstances which were now notorious!

It is true that Eliza’s situation did not seem wholly ineligible. Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically disclassed, had become extremely popular in the smartest society by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvantage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed, he had shot up at once into the highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship (which he carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence of good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked in the pantry and was made much of by the butler when he was not feeding in the dining-room and being consulted by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do all this on four thousand a year as Mrs. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an income so pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose its exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing to Eliza’s support.

Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did not know how to spend money, never having had any to spend, and Eliza, socially trained by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they held together and looked pretty, without the least regard to their being many months out of fashion. Still, 500 pounds will not last two young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not be good for his character if she did.

Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than working in the city. When Eliza referred again to her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right, without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before. They broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on which retail trade is impossible.

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy’s mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for, though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal — or shall we say inevitable? — sort of human being. At worst they called her The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction. Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded was education with the Earlscourt green grocer’s daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother’s class; and that class simply would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and though she did not admit these disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few months’ time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara’s snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became cordial. To her amazement she found that some “quite nice” people were saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza’s expletive in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room; for the new-born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies. They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend herself and fight it out as best she could.

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of achieving that end through her.

And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the expected opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet, could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the establishment. Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information. He suggested that they should combine the London School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the least funny (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.

Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and despair for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow forgotten their objections to employing other people. They came to the conclusion that their own way was the best, and that they had really a remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like anything.

That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy’s mind to his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity — and may they be spared any such trial! — will ever alter this. She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.

GREAT CATHERINE

CONTENTS

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY FOR GREAT CATHERINE

THE FIRST SCENE

THE SECOND SCENE

THE THIRD SCENE

THE FOURTH SCENE

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY FOR GREAT CATHERINE

Exception has been taken to the title of this seeming tomfoolery on the ground that the Catherine it represents is not Great Catherine, but the Catherine whose gallantries provide some of the lightest pages of modern history. Great Catherine, it is said, was the Catherine whose diplomacy, whose campaigns and conquests, whose plans of Liberal reform, whose correspondence with Grimm and Voltaire enabled her to cut such a magnificent figure in the eighteenth century. In reply, I can only confess that Catherine’s diplomacy and her conquests do not interest me. It is clear to me that neither she nor the statesmen with whom she played this mischievous kind of political chess had any notion of the real history of their own times, or of the real forces that were moulding Europe. The French Revolution, which made such short work of Catherine’s Voltairean principles, surprised and scandalized her as much as it surprised and scandalized any provincial governess in the French chateaux.

The main difference between her and our modern Liberal Governments was that whereas she talked and wrote quite intelligently about Liberal principles before she was frightened into making such talking and writing a flogging matter, our Liberal ministers take the name of Liberalism in vain without knowing or caring enough about its meaning even to talk and scribble about it, and pass their flogging Bills, and institute their prosecutions for sedition and blasphemy and so forth, without the faintest suspicion that such proceedings need any apology from the Liberal point of view.

It was quite easy for Patiomkin to humbug Catherine as to the condition of Russia by conducting her through sham cities run up for the occasion by scenic artists; but in the little world of European court intrigue and dynastic diplomacy which was the only world she knew she was more than a match for him and for all the rest of her contemporaries. In such intrigue and diplomacy, however, there was no romance, no scientific political interest, nothing that a sane mind can now retain even if it can be persuaded to waste time in reading it up. But Catherine as a woman with plenty of character and (as we should say) no morals, still fascinates and amuses us as she fascinated and amused her contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century, not as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated German lady whose household routine was not at all so unlike that of Queen Victoria as might be expected from the difference in their notions of propriety in sexual relations.

In short, if Byron leaves you with an impression that he said very little about Catherine, and that little not what was best worth saying, I beg to correct your impression by assuring you that what Byron said was all there really is to say that is worth saying. His Catherine is my Catherine and everybody’s Catherine. The young man who gains her favor is a Spanish nobleman in his version. I have made him an English country gentleman, who gets out of his rather dangerous scrape, by simplicity, sincerity, and the courage of these qualities. By this I have given some offence to the many Britons who see themselves as heroes: what they mean by heroes being theatrical snobs of superhuman pretensions which, though quite groundless, are admitted with awe by the rest of the human race. They say I think an Englishman a fool. When I do, they have themselves to thank.

I must not, however, pretend that historical portraiture was the motive of a play that will leave the reader as ignorant of Russian history as he may be now before he has turned the page. Nor is the sketch of Catherine complete even idiosyncratically, leaving her politics out of the question. For example, she wrote bushels of plays. I confess I have not yet read any of them. The truth is, this play grew out of the relations which inevitably exist in the theatre between authors and actors. If the actors have sometimes to use their skill as the author’s puppets rather than in full self-expression, the author has sometimes to use his skill as the actors’ tailor, fitting them with parts written to display the virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve problems of life, character, or history. Feats of this kind may tickle an author’s technical vanity; but he is bound on such occasions to admit that the performer for whom he writes is “the onlie begetter” of his work, which must be regarded critically as an addition to the debt dramatic literature owes to the art of acting and its exponents. Those who have seen Miss Gertrude Kingston play the part of Catherine will have no difficulty in believing that it was her talent rather than mine that brought the play into existence. I once recommended Miss Kingston professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker’s oath? Miss Kingston’s comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen capable of standing up to our joint talents.

In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only by the range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends the modesty of nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any Russian, and my English people more insular than any Briton, I will not plead, as I honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be written that can exaggerate the reality of such subjects; that the apparently outrageous Patiomkin is but a timidly bowdlerized ghost of the original; and that Captain Edstaston is no more than a miniature that might hang appropriately on the walls of nineteen out of twenty English country houses to this day. An artistic presentment must not condescend to justify itself by a comparison with crude nature; and I prefer to admit that in this kind my dramatic personae are, as they should be, of the stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them, if he can. The more heroic the overcharging, the better for the performance.

In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so rigidly that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding him of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the rest of the theatrical scaffolding, for which nevertheless I have to plan as carefully as if I were the head carpenter as well as the author. But even at the risk of talking shop, an honest playwright should take at least one opportunity of acknowledging that his art is not only limited by the art of the actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No sane and skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to the actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he asks them to do things that they have never done before and cannot conceive as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy have done, for example), it is always found that the difficulties are not really insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected possibilities both in the actor and in the audience, whose will-to-make-believe can perform the quaintest miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of acting and of staging plays. But the actor also may enlarge the scope of the drama by displaying powers not previously discovered by the author. If the best available actors are only Horatios, the authors will have to leave Hamlet out, and be content with Horatios for heroes. Some of the difference between Shakespeare’s Orlandos and Bassanios and Bertrams and his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not only to his development as a dramatic poet, but to the development of Burbage as an actor. Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake: if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author too much; for I can remember a time (I am not implying that it is yet wholly past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had become very largely the art of writing it “round” the personalities of a group of fashionable performers of whom Burbage would certainly have said that their parts needed no acting. Everything has its abuse as well as its use.

It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors played the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live poets who were hardly regular professional playwrights. Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Wills, and Tennyson produced a few glaringly artificial high horses for the great actors of their time; but the playwrights proper, who really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre, did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to compete with a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging author’s fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was true of their respective predecessors.

Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead that it does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been there to play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and Cleopatra. If Ellen Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion would never have been effected. The Devil’s Disciple, with which I won my cordon bleu in America as a potboiler, would have had a different sort of hero if Richard Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though the actual commission to write it came from an English actor, William Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay into which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must be said that the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a play as often as not regards it as a Frankenstein’s monster, and will have none of it. That does not make him or her any the less parental in the fecundity of the playwright.

To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen and whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor’s genius overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor himself. When I snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and made him wear a frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps the first time in his life, I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought me more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the Helen of Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career as Catherine of Russia.

It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the plays will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we take care of the plays the actors will take care of themselves. There is both give and take in the business. I have seen plays written for actors that made me exclaim, “How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill done!” But Burbage may have flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet under Shakespeare’s nose at the tenth rehearsal and cried, “How oft the sight of means to do great deeds makes playwrights great!” I say the tenth because I am convinced that at the first he denounced his part as a rotten one; thought the ghost’s speech ridiculously long; and wanted to play the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter it or not, the boast would have been a valid one. The best conclusion is that every actor should say, “If I create the hero in myself, God will send an author to write his part.” For in the long run the actors will get the authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

Great Catherine was performed for the first time at the Vaudeville Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913, with Gertrude Kingston as Catherine, Miriam Lewes as Yarinka, Dorothy Massingham as Claire, Norman McKinnell as Patiomkin, Edmond Breon as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford as Naryshkin and the Sergeant.

THE FIRST SCENE

1776. Patiomkin in his bureau in the Winter Palace, St. Petersburgh. Huge palatial apartment: style, Russia in the eighteenth century imitating the Versailles du Roi Soleil. Extravagant luxury. Also dirt and disorder.

Patiomkin, gigantic in stature and build, his face marred by the loss of one eye and a marked squint in the other, sits at the end of a table littered with papers and the remains of three or four successive breakfasts. He has supplies of coffee and brandy at hand sufficient for a party of ten. His coat, encrusted with diamonds, is on the floor. It has fallen off a chair placed near the other end of the table for the convenience of visitors. His court sword, with its attachments, is on the chair. His three-cornered hat, also bejewelled, is on the table. He himself is half dressed in an unfastened shirt and an immense dressing-gown, once gorgeous, now food-splashed and dirty, as it serves him for towel, handkerchief, duster, and every other use to which a textile fabric can be put by a slovenly man. It does not conceal his huge hairy chest, nor his half-buttoned knee breeches, nor his legs. These are partly clad in silk stockings, which he occasionally hitches up to his knees, and presently shakes down to his shins, by his restless movement. His feet are thrust into enormous slippers, worth, with their crust of jewels, several thousand roubles apiece.

Superficially Patiomkin is a violent, brutal barbarian, an upstart despot of the most intolerable and dangerous type, ugly, lazy, and disgusting in his personal habits. Yet ambassadors report him the ablest man in Russia, and the one who can do most with the still abler Empress Catherine II, who is not a Russian but a German, by no means barbarous or intemperate in her personal habits. She not only disputes with Frederick the Great the reputation of being the cleverest monarch in Europe, but may even put in a very plausible claim to be the cleverest and most attractive individual alive. Now she not only tolerates Patiomkin long after she has got over her first romantic attachment to him, but esteems him highly as a counsellor and a good friend. His love letters are among the best on record. He has a wild sense of humor, which enables him to laugh at himself as well as at everybody else. In the eyes of the English visitor now about to be admitted to his presence he may be an outrageous ruffian. In fact he actually is an outrageous ruffian, in no matter whose eyes; but the visitor will find out, as everyone else sooner or later fends out, that he is a man to be reckoned with even by those who are not intimidated by his temper, bodily strength, and exalted rank.

A pretty young lady, Yarinka, his favorite niece, is lounging on an ottoman between his end of the table and the door, very sulky and dissatisfied, perhaps because he is preoccupied with his papers and his brandy bottle, and she can see nothing of him but his broad back.

There is a screen behind the ottoman.

An old soldier, a Cossack sergeant, enters.

THE SERGEANT [softly to the lady, holding the door handle]. Little darling honey, is his Highness the prince very busy?

VARINKA. His Highness the prince is very busy. He is singing out of tune; he is biting his nails; he is scratching his head; he is hitching up his untidy stockings; he is making himself disgusting and odious to everybody; and he is pretending to read state papers that he does not understand because he is too lazy and selfish to talk and be companionable.

PATIOMKIN [growls; then wipes his nose with his dressing-gown]!!

VARINKA. Pig. Ugh! [She curls herself up with a shiver of disgust and retires from the conversation.]

THE SERGEANT [stealing across to the coat, and picking it up to replace it on the back of the chair]. Little Father, the English captain, so highly recommended to you by old Fritz of Prussia, by the English ambassador, and by Monsieur Voltaire (whom [crossing himself] may God in his infinite mercy damn eternally!), is in the antechamber and desires audience.

PATIOMKIN [deliberately]. To hell with the English captain; and to hell with old Fritz of Prussia; and to hell with the English ambassador; and to hell with Monsieur Voltaire; and to hell with you too!

THE SERGEANT. Have mercy on me, Little Father. Your head is bad this morning. You drink too much French brandy and too little good Russian kvass.

PATIOMKIN [with sudden fury]. Why are visitors of consequence announced by a sergeant? [Springing at him and seizing him by the throat.] What do you mean by this, you hound? Do you want five thousand blows of the stick? Where is General Volkonsky?

THE SERGEANT [on his knees]. Little Father, you kicked his Highness downstairs.

PATIOMKIN [flinging him dawn and kicking him]. You lie, you dog. You lie.

THE SERGEANT. Little Father, life is hard for the poor. If you say it is a lie, it is a lie. He FELL downstairs. I picked him up; and he kicked me. They all kick me when you kick them. God knows that is not just, Little Father!

PATIOMKIN [laughs ogreishly; then returns to his place at the table, chuckling]!!!

VARINKA. Savage! Boot! It is a disgrace. No wonder the French sneer at us as barbarians.

THE SERGEANT [who has crept round the table to the screen, and insinuated himself between Patiomkin’s back and Varinka]. Do you think the Prince will see the captain, little darling?

PATIOMKIN. He will not see any captain. Go to the devil!

THE SERGEANT. Be merciful, Little Father. God knows it is your duty to see him! [To Varinka.] Intercede for him and for me, beautiful little darling. He has given me a rouble.

PATIOMKIN. Oh, send him in, send him in; and stop pestering me. Am I never to have a moment’s peace?

The Sergeant salutes joyfully and hurries out, divining that Patiomkin has intended to see the English captain all along, and has played this comedy of fury and exhausted impatience to conceal his interest in the visitor.

VARINKA. Have you no shame? You refuse to see the most exalted persons. You kick princes and generals downstairs. And then you see an English captain merely because he has given a rouble to that common soldier. It is scandalous.

PATIOMKIN. Darling beloved, I am drunk; but I know what I am doing. I wish to stand well with the English.

VARINKA. And you think you will impress an Englishman by receiving him as you are now, half drunk?

PATIOMKIN [gravely]. It is true: the English despise men who cannot drink. I must make myself wholly drunk [he takes a huge draught of brandy.]

VARINKA. Sot!

The Sergeant returns ushering a handsome strongly built young English officer in the uniform of a Light Dragoon. He is evidently on fairly good terms with himself, and very sure of his social position. He crosses the room to the end of the table opposite Patiomkin’s, and awaits the civilities of that statesman with confidence. The Sergeant remains prudently at the door.

THE SERGEANT [paternally]. Little Father, this is the English captain, so well recommended to her sacred Majesty the Empress. God knows, he needs your countenance and protec — [he vanishes precipitately, seeing that Patiomkin is about to throw a bottle at him. The Captain contemplates these preliminaries with astonishment, and with some displeasure, which is not allayed when, Patiomkin, hardly condescending to look at his visitor, of whom he nevertheless takes stock with the corner of his one eye, says gruffly]. Well?

EDSTASTON. My name is Edstaston: Captain Edstaston of the Light Dragoons. I have the honor to present to your Highness this letter from the British ambassador, which will give you all necessary particulars. [He hands Patiomkin the letter.]

PATIOMKIN [tearing it open and glancing at it for about a second]. What do you want?

EDSTASTON. The letter will explain to your Highness who I am.

PATIOMKIN. I don’t want to know who you are. What do you want?

EDSTASTON. An audience of the Empress. [Patiomkin contemptuously throws the letter aside. Edstaston adds hotly.] Also some civility, if you please.

PATIOMKIN [with derision]. Ho!

VARINKA. My uncle is receiving you with unusual civility, Captain. He has just kicked a general downstairs.

EDSTASTON. A Russian general, madam?

VARINKA. Of course.

EDSTASTON. I must allow myself to say, madam, that your uncle had better not attempt to kick an English officer downstairs.

PATIOMKIN. You want me to kick you upstairs, eh? You want an audience of the Empress.

EDSTASTON. I have said nothing about kicking, sir. If it comes to that, my boots shall speak for me. Her Majesty has signified a desire to have news of the rebellion in America. I have served against the rebels; and I am instructed to place myself at the disposal of her Majesty, and to describe the events of the war to her as an eye-witness, in a discreet and agreeable manner.

PATIOMKIN. Psha! I know. You think if she once sets eyes on your face and your uniform your fortune is made. You think that if she could stand a man like me, with only one eye, and a cross eye at that, she must fall down at your feet at first sight, eh?

EDSTASTON [shocked and indignant]. I think nothing of the sort; and I’ll trouble you not to repeat it. If I were a Russian subject and you made such a boast about my queen, I’d strike you across the face with my sword. [Patiomkin, with a yell of fury, rushes at him.] Hands off, you swine! [As Patiomkin, towering over him, attempts to seize him by the throat, Edstaston, who is a bit of a wrestler, adroitly backheels him. He falls, amazed, on his back.]

VARINKA [rushing out]. Help! Call the guard! The Englishman is murdering my uncle! Help! Help!

The guard and the Sergeant rush in. Edstaston draws a pair of small pistols from his boots, and points one at the Sergeant and the other at Patiomkin, who is sitting on the floor, somewhat sobered. The soldiers stand irresolute.

EDSTASTON. Stand off. [To Patiomkin.] Order them off, if you don’t want a bullet through your silly head.

THE SERGEANT. Little Father, tell us what to do. Our lives are yours; but God knows you are not fit to die.

PATIOMKIN [absurdly self-possessed]. Get out.

THE SERGEANT. Little Father —

PATIOMKIN [roaring]. Get out. Get out, all of you. [They withdraw, much relieved at their escape from the pistol. Patiomkin attempts to rise, and rolls over.] Here! help me up, will you? Don’t you see that I’m drunk and can’t get up?

EDSTASTON [suspiciously]. You want to get hold of me.

PATIOMKIN [squatting resignedly against the chair on which his clothes hang]. Very well, then: I shall stay where I am, because I’m drunk and you’re afraid of me.

EDSTASTON. I’m not afraid of you, damn you!

PATIOMKIN [ecstatically]. Darling, your lips are the gates of truth. Now listen to me. [He marks off the items of his statement with ridiculous stiff gestures of his head and arms, imitating a puppet.] You are Captain Whatshisname; and your uncle is the Earl of Whatdyecallum; and your father is Bishop of Thingummybob; and you are a young man of the highest spr — promise (I told you I was drunk), educated at Cambridge, and got your step as captain in the field at the GLORIOUS battle of Bunker’s Hill. Invalided home from America at the request of Aunt Fanny, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen. All right, eh?

EDSTASTON. How do you know all this?

PATIOMKIN [crowing fantastically]. In er lerrer, darling, darling, darling, darling. Lerrer you showed me.

EDSTASTON. But you didn’t read it.

PATIOMKIN [flapping his fingers at him grotesquely]. Only one eye, darling. Cross eye. Sees everything. Read lerrer inceince — istastaneously. Kindly give me vinegar borle. Green borle. On’y to sober me. Too drunk to speak porply. If you would be so kind, darling. Green borle. [Edstaston, still suspicious, shakes his head and keeps his pistols ready.] Reach it myself. [He reaches behind him up to the table, and snatches at the green bottle, from which he takes a copious draught. Its effect is appalling. His wry faces and agonized belchings are so heartrending that they almost upset Edstaston. When the victim at last staggers to his feet, he is a pale fragile nobleman, aged and quite sober, extremely dignified in manner and address, though shaken by his recent convulsions.] Young man, it is not better to be drunk than sober; but it is happier. Goodness is not happiness. That is an epigram. But I have overdone this. I am too sober to be good company. Let me redress the balance. [He takes a generous draught of brandy, and recovers his geniality.] Aha! That’s better. And now listen, darling. You must not come to Court with pistols in your boots.

EDSTASTON. I have found them useful.

PATIOMKIN. Nonsense. I’m your friend. You mistook my intention because I was drunk. Now that I am sober — in moderation — I will prove that I am your friend. Have some diamonds. [Roaring.] Hullo there! Dogs, pigs: hullo!

The Sergeant comes in.

THE SERGEANT. God be praised, Little Father: you are still spared to us.

PATIOMKIN. Tell them to bring some diamonds. Plenty of diamonds. And rubies. Get out. [He aims a kick at the Sergeant, who flees.] Put up your pistols, darling. I’ll give you a pair with gold handgrips. I am your friend.

EDSTASTON [replacing the pistols in his boots rather unwillingly]. Your Highness understands that if I am missing, or if anything happens to me, there will be trouble.

PATIOMKIN [enthusiastically]. Call me darling.

EDSTASTON. It is not the English custom.

PATIOMKIN. You have no hearts, you English! [Slapping his right breast.] Heart! Heart!

EDSTASTON. Pardon, your Highness: your heart is on the other side.

PATIOMKIN [surprised and impressed]. Is it? You are learned! You are a doctor! You English are wonderful! We are barbarians, drunken pigs. Catherine does not know it; but we are. Catherine’s a German. But I have given her a Russian heart [he is about to slap himself again.]

EDSTASTON [delicately]. The other side, your Highness.

PATIOMKIN [maudlin]. Darling, a true Russian has a heart on both sides.

The Sergeant enters carrying a goblet filled with precious stones.

PATIOMKIN. Get out. [He snatches the goblet and kicks the Sergeant out, not maliciously but from habit, indeed not noticing that he does it.] Darling, have some diamonds. Have a fistful. [He takes up a handful and lets them slip back through his fingers into the goblet, which he then offers to Edstaston.]

EDSTASTON. Thank you, I don’t take presents.

PATIOMKIN [amazed]. You refuse!

EDSTASTON. I thank your Highness; but it is not the custom for English gentlemen to take presents of that kind.

PATIOMKIN. Are you really an Englishman?

EDSTASTON [bows]!

PATIOMKIN. You are the first Englishman I ever saw refuse anything he could get. [He puts the goblet on the table; then turns again to Edstaston.] Listen, darling. You are a wrestler: a splendid wrestler. You threw me on my back like magic, though I could lift you with one hand. Darling, you are a giant, a paladin.

EDSTASTON [complacently]. We wrestle rather well in my part of England.

PATIOMKIN. I have a Turk who is a wrestler: a prisoner of war. You shall wrestle with him for me. I’ll stake a million roubles on you.

EDSTASTON [incensed]. Damn you! do you take me for a prize-fighter? How dare you make me such a proposal?

PATIOMKIN [with wounded feeling]. Darling, there is no pleasing you. Don’t you like me?

EDSTASTON [mollified]. Well, in a sort of way I do; though I don’t know why I should. But my instructions are that I am to see the Empress; and —

PATIOMKIN. Darling, you shall see the Empress. A glorious woman, the greatest woman in the world. But lemme give you piece ‘vice — pah! still drunk. They water my vinegar. [He shakes himself; clears his throat; and resumes soberly.] If Catherine takes a fancy to you, you may ask for roubles, diamonds, palaces, titles, orders, anything! and you may aspire to everything: field-marshal, admiral, minister, what you please — except Tsar.

EDSTASTON. I tell you I don’t want to ask for anything. Do you suppose I am an adventurer and a beggar?

PATIOMKIN [plaintively]. Why not, darling? I was an adventurer. I was a beggar.

EDSTASTON. Oh, you!

PATIOMKIN. Well: what’s wrong with me?

EDSTASTON. You are a Russian. That’s different.

PATIOMKIN [effusively]. Darling, I am a man; and you are a man; and Catherine is a woman. Woman reduces us all to the common denominator. [Chuckling.] Again an epigram! [Gravely.] You understand it, I hope. Have you had a college education, darling? I have.

EDSTASTON. Certainly. I am a Bachelor of Arts.

PATIOMKIN. It is enough that you are a bachelor, darling: Catherine will supply the arts. Aha! Another epigram! I am in the vein today.

EDSTASTON [embarrassed and a little offended]. I must ask your Highness to change the subject. As a visitor in Russia, I am the guest of the Empress; and I must tell you plainly that I have neither the right nor the disposition to speak lightly of her Majesty.

PATIOMKIN. You have conscientious scruples?

EDSTASTON. I have the scruples of a gentleman.

PATIOMKIN. In Russia a gentleman has no scruples. In Russia we face facts.

EDSTASTON. In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any facts if they are unpleasant facts.

PATIOMKIN. In real life, darling, all facts are unpleasant. [Greatly pleased with himself.] Another epigram! Where is my accursed chancellor? these gems should be written down and recorded for posterity. [He rushes to the table: sits down: and snatches up a pen. Then, recollecting himself.] But I have not asked you to sit down. [He rises and goes to the other chair.] I am a savage: a barbarian. [He throws the shirt and coat over the table on to the floor and puts his sword on the table.] Be seated, Captain.

EDSTASTON Thank you.

They bow to one another ceremoniously. Patiomkin’s tendency to grotesque exaggeration costs him his balance; he nearly falls over Edstaston, who rescues him and takes the proffered chair.

PATIOMKIN [resuming his seat]. By the way, what was the piece of advice I was going to give you?

EDSTASTON. As you did not give it, I don’t know. Allow me to add that I have not asked for your advice.

PATIOMKIN. I give it to you unasked, delightful Englishman. I remember it now. It was this. Don’t try to become Tsar of Russia.

EDSTASTON [in astonishment]. I haven’t the slightest intention —

PATIOMKIN. Not now; but you will have: take my words for it. It will strike you as a splendid idea to have conscientious scruples — to desire the blessing of the Church on your union with Catherine.

EDSTASTON [racing in utter amazement]. My union with Catherine! You’re mad.

PATIOMKIN [unmoved]. The day you hint at such a thing will be the day of your downfall. Besides, it is not lucky to be Catherine’s husband. You know what happened to Peter?

EDSTASTON [shortly; sitting down again]. I do not wish to discuss it.

PATIOMKIN. You think she murdered him?

EDSTASTON. I know that people have said so.

PATIOMKIN [thunderously; springing to his feet]. It is a lie: Orloff murdered him. [Subsiding a little.] He also knocked my eye out; but [sitting down placidly] I succeeded him for all that. And [patting Edstaston’s hand very affectionately] I’m sorry to say, darling, that if you become Tsar, I shall murder you.

EDSTASTON [ironically returning the caress]. Thank you. The occasion will not arise. [Rising.] I have the honor to wish your Highness good morning.

PATIOMKIN [jumping up and stopping him on his way to the door]. Tut tut! I’m going to take you to the Empress now, this very instant.

EDSTASTON. In these boots? Impossible! I must change.

PATIOMKIN. Nonsense! You shall come just as you are. You shall show her your calves later on.

EDSTASTON. But it will take me only half an hour to —

PATIOMKIN. In half an hour it will be too late for the petit lever. Come along. Damn it, man, I must oblige the British ambassador, and the French ambassador, and old Fritz, and Monsieur Voltaire and the rest of them. [He shouts rudely to the door.] Varinka! [To Edstaston, with tears in his voice.] Varinka shall persuade you: nobody can refuse Varinka anything. My niece. A treasure, I assure you. Beautiful! devoted! fascinating! [Shouting again.] Varinka, where the devil are you?

VARINKA [returning]. I’ll not be shouted for. You have the voice of a bear, and the manners of a tinker.

PATIOMKIN. Tsh-sh-sh. Little angel Mother: you must behave yourself before the English captain. [He takes off his dressing-gown and throws it over the papers and the breakfasts: picks up his coat: and disappears behind the screen to complete his toilette.]

EDSTASTON. Madam! [He bows.]

VARINKA [courtseying]. Monsieur le Capitaine!

EDSTASTON. I must apologize for the disturbance I made, madam.

PATIOMKIN [behind the screen]. You must not call her madam. You must call her Little Mother, and beautiful darling.

EDSTASTON. My respect for the lady will not permit it.

VARINKA. Respect! How can you respect the niece of a savage?

EDSTASTON [deprecatingly]. Oh, madam!

VARINKA. Heaven is my witness, Little English Father, we need someone who is not afraid of him. He is so strong! I hope you will throw him down on the floor many, many, many times.

PATIOMKIN [behind the screen]. Varinka!

VARINKA. Yes?

PATIOMKIN. Go and look through the keyhole of the Imperial bed-chamber; and bring me word whether the Empress is awake yet.

VARINKA. Fi donc! I do not look through keyholes.

PATIOMKIN [emerging, having arranged his shirt and put on his diamonded coat]. You have been badly brought up, little darling. Would any lady or gentleman walk unannounced into a room without first looking through the keyhole? [Taking his sword from the table and putting it on.] The great thing in life is to be simple; and the perfectly simple thing is to look through keyholes. Another epigram: the fifth this morning! Where is my fool of a chancellor? Where is Popof?

EDSTASTON [choking with suppressed laughter]!!!!

PATIOMKIN [gratified]. Darling, you appreciate my epigram.

EDSTASTON. Excuse me. Pop off! Ha! ha! I can’t help laughing: What’s his real name, by the way, in case I meet him?

VARINKA [surprised]. His real name? Popof, of course. Why do you laugh, Little Father?

EDSTASTON. How can anyone with a sense of humor help laughing? Pop off! [He is convulsed.]

VARINKA [looking at her uncle, taps her forehead significantly]!!

PATIOMKIN [aside to Varinka]. No: only English. He will amuse Catherine. [To Edstaston.] Come, you shall tell the joke to the Empress: she is by way of being a humorist [he takes him by the arm, and leads him towards the door].

EDSTASTON [resisting]. No, really. I am not fit —

PATIOMKIN. Persuade him, Little angel Mother.

VARINKA [taking his other arm]. Yes, yes, yes. Little English Father: God knows it is your duty to be brave and wait on the Empress. Come.

EDSTASTON. No. I had rather —

PATIOMKIN [hauling him along]. Come.

VARINKA [pulling him and coaxing him]. Come, little love: you can’t refuse me.

EDSTASTON. But how can I?

PATIOMKIN. Why not? She won’t eat you.

VARINKA. She will; but you must come.

EDSTASTON. I assure you — it is quite out of the question — my clothes —

VARINKA. You look perfect.

PATIOMKIN. Come along, darling.

EDSTASTON [struggling]. Impossible —

VARINKA. Come, come, come.

EDSTASTON. No. Believe me — I don’t wish — I —

VARINKA. Carry him, uncle.

PATIOMKIN [lifting him in his arms like a father carrying a little boy]. Yes: I’ll carry you.

EDSTASTON. Dash it all, this is ridiculous!

VARINKA [seizing his ankles and dancing as he is carried out]. You must come. If you kick you will blacken my eyes.

PATIOMKIN. Come, baby, come.

By this time they have made their way through the door and are out of hearing.

THE SECOND SCENE

The Empress’s petit lever. The central doors are closed. Those who enter through them find on their left, on a dais of two broad steps, a magnificent curtained bed. Beyond it a door in the panelling leads to the Empress’s cabinet. Near the foot of the bed, in the middle of the room, stands a gilt chair, with the Imperial arms carved and the Imperial monogram embroidered.

The Court is in attendance, standing in two melancholy rows down the side of the room opposite to the bed, solemn, bored, waiting for the Empress to awaken. The Princess Dashkoff, with two ladies, stands a little in front of the line of courtiers, by the Imperial chair. Silence, broken only by the yawns and whispers of the courtiers. Naryshkin, the Chamberlain, stands by the head of the bed.

A loud yawn is heard from behind the curtains.

NARYSHKIN [holding up a warning hand]. Ssh!

The courtiers hastily cease whispering: dress up their lines: and stiffen. Dead silence. A bell tinkles within the curtains. Naryshkin and the Princess solemnly draw them and reveal the Empress.

Catherine turns over on her back, and stretches herself.

CATHERINE [yawning]. Heigho — ah — yah — ah — ow — what o’clock is it? [Her accent is German.]

NARYSHKIN [formally]. Her Imperial Majesty is awake. [The Court falls on its knees.]

ALL. Good morning to your Majesty.

NARYSHKIN. Half-past ten, Little Mother.

CATHERINE [sitting up abruptly]. Potztausend! [Contemplating the kneeling courtiers.] Oh, get up, get up. [All rise.] Your etiquette bores me. I am hardly awake in the morning before it begins. [Yawning again, and relapsing sleepily against her pillows.] Why do they do it, Naryshkin?

NARYSHKIN. God knows it is not for your sake, Little Mother. But you see if you were not a great queen they would all be nobodies.

CATHERINE [sitting up]. They make me do it to keep up their own little dignities? So?

NARYSHKIN. Exactly. Also because if they didn’t you might have them flogged, dear Little Mother.

CATHERINE [springing energetically out of bed and seating herself on the edge of it]. Flogged! I! A Liberal Empress! A philosopher! You are a barbarian, Naryshkin. [She rises and turns to the courtiers.] And then, as if I cared! [She turns again to Naryshkin.] You should know by this time that I am frank and original in character, like an Englishman. [She walks about restlessly.] No: what maddens me about all this ceremony is that I am the only person in Russia who gets no fun out of my being Empress. You all glory in me: you bask in my smiles: you get titles and honors and favors from me: you are dazzled by my crown and my robes: you feel splendid when you have been admitted to my presence; and when I say a gracious word to you, you talk about it to everyone you meet for a week afterwards. But what do I get out of it? Nothing. [She throws herself into the chair. Naryshkin deprecates with a gesture; she hurls an emphatic repetition at him.] Nothing!! I wear a crown until my neck aches: I stand looking majestic until I am ready to drop: I have to smile at ugly old ambassadors and frown and turn my back on young and handsome ones. Nobody gives me anything. When I was only an Archduchess, the English ambassador used to give me money whenever I wanted it — or rather whenever he wanted to get anything out of my sacred predecessor Elizabeth [the Court bows to the ground]; but now that I am Empress he never gives me a kopek. When I have headaches and colics I envy the scullerymaids. And you are not a bit grateful to me for all my care of you, my work, my thought, my fatigue, my sufferings.

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF. God knows, Little Mother, we all implore you to give your wonderful brain a rest. That is why you get headaches. Monsieur Voltaire also has headaches. His brain is just like yours.

CATHERINE. Dashkoff, what a liar you are! [Dashkoff curtsies with impressive dignity.] And you think you are flattering me! Let me tell you I would not give a rouble to have the brains of all the philosophers in France. What is our business for today?

NARYSHKIN. The new museum, Little Mother. But the model will not be ready until tonight.

CATHERINE [rising eagerly]. Yes, the museum. An enlightened capital should have a museum. [She paces the chamber with a deep sense of the importance of the museum.] It shall be one of the wonders of the world. I must have specimens: specimens, specimens, specimens.

NARYSHKIN. You are in high spirits this morning, Little Mother.

CATHERINE [with sudden levity.] I am always in high spirits, even when people do not bring me my slippers. [She runs to the chair and sits down, thrusting her feet out.]

The two ladies rush to her feet, each carrying a slipper. Catherine, about to put her feet into them, is checked by a disturbance in the antechamber.

PATIOMKIN [carrying Edstaston through the antechamber]. Useless to struggle. Come along, beautiful baby darling. Come to Little Mother. [He sings.]

March him baby, Baby, baby, Lit-tle ba-by bumpkins.

VARINKA [joining in to the same doggerel in canon, a third above]. March him, baby, etc., etc.

EDSTASTON [trying to make himself heard]. No, no. This is carrying a joke too far. I must insist. Let me down! Hang it, will you let me down! Confound it! No, no. Stop playing the fool, will you? We don’t understand this sort of thing in England. I shall be disgraced. Let me down.

CATHERINE [meanwhile]. What a horrible noise! Naryshkin, see what it is.

Naryshkin goes to the door.

CATHERINE [listening]. That is Prince Patiomkin.

NARYSHKIN [calling from the door]. Little Mother, a stranger.

Catherine plunges into bed again and covers herself up. Patiomkin, followed by Varinka, carries Edstaston in: dumps him down on the foot of the bed: and staggers past it to the cabinet door. Varinka joins the courtiers at the opposite side of the room. Catherine, blazing with wrath, pushes Edstaston off her bed on to the floor: gets out of bed: and turns on Patiomkin with so terrible an expression that all kneel down hastily except Edstaston, who is sprawling on the carpet in angry confusion.

CATHERINE. Patiomkin, how dare you? [Looking at Edstaston.] What is this?

PATIOMKIN [on his knees, tearfully]. I don’t know. I am drunk. What is this, Varinka?

EDSTASTON [scrambling to his feet]. Madam, this drunken ruffian —

PATIOMKIN. Thas true. Drungn ruffian. Took dvantage of my being drunk. Said: take me to Lil angel Mother. Take me to beaufl Empress. Take me to the grea’st woman on earth. Thas whas he he said. I took him. I was wrong. I am not sober.

CATHERINE. Men have grown sober in Siberia for less, Prince.

PATIOMKIN. Serve em right! Sgusting habit. Ask Varinka.

Catherine turns her face from him to the Court. The courtiers see that she is trying not to laugh, and know by experience that she will not succeed. They rise, relieved and grinning.

VARINKA. It is true. He drinks like a pig.

PATIOMKIN [plaintively]. No: not like pig. Like prince. Lil Mother made poor Patiomkin prince. Whas use being prince if I mayn’t drink?

CATHERINE [biting her lips]. Go. I am offended.

PATIOMKIN. Don’t scold, Lil Mother.

CATHERINE [imperiously]. Go.

PATIOMKIN [rising unsteadily]. Yes: go. Go bye bye. Very sleepy. Berr go bye bye than go Siberia. Go bye bye in Lil Mother’s bed [he pretends to make an attempt to get into the bed].

CATHERINE [energetically pulling him back]. No, no! Patiomkin! What are you thinking of? [He falls like a log on the floor, apparently dead drunk.]

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF. Scandalous! An insult to your Imperial Majesty!

CATHERINE. Dashkoff: you have no sense of humor. [She steps down to the door level and looks indulgently at Patiomkin. He gurgles brutishly. She has an impulse of disgust.] Hog. [She kicks him as hard as she can.] Oh! You have broken my toe. Brute. Beast. Dashkoff is quite right. Do you hear?

PATIOMKIN. If you ask my pi-pinion of Dashkoff, my pipinion is that Dashkoff is drunk. Scanlous. Poor Patiomkin go bye bye. [He relapses into drunken slumbers.]

Some of the courtiers move to carry him away.

CATHERINE [stopping them]. Let him lie. Let him sleep it off. If he goes out it will be to a tavern and low company for the rest of the day. [Indulgently.] There! [She takes a pillow from the bed and puts it under his head: then turns to Edstaston: surveys him with perfect dignity: and asks, in her queenliest manner.] Varinka, who is this gentleman?

VARINKA. A foreign captain: I cannot pronounce his name. I think he is mad. He came to the Prince and said he must see your Majesty. He can talk of nothing else. We could not prevent him.

EDSTASTON [overwhelmed by this apparent betrayal]. Oh! Madam: I am perfectly sane: I am actually an Englishman. I should never have dreamt of approaching your Majesty without the fullest credentials. I have letters from the English ambassador, from the Prussian ambassador. [Naively.] But everybody assured me that Prince Patiomkm is all-powerful with your Majesty; so I naturally applied to him.

PATIOMKIN [interrupts the conversation by an agonized wheezing groan as of a donkey beginning to bray]!!!

CATHERINE [like a fishfag]. Schweig, du Hund. [Resuming her impressive royal manner.] Have you never been taught, sir, how a gentleman should enter the presence of a sovereign?

EDSTASTON. Yes, Madam; but I did not enter your presence: I was carried.

CATHERINE. But you say you asked the Prince to carry you.

EDSTASTON. Certainly not, Madam. I protested against it with all my might. I appeal to this lady to confirm me.

VARINKA [pretending to be indignant]. Yes, you protested. But, all the same, you were very very very anxious to see her Imperial Majesty. You blushed when the Prince spoke of her. You threatened to strike him across the face with your sword because you thought he did not speak enthusiastically enough of her. [To Catherine.] Trust me: he has seen your Imperial Majesty before.

CATHERINE [to Edstaston]. You have seen us before?

EDSTASTON. At the review, Madam.

VARINKA [triumphantly]. Aha! I knew it. Your Majesty wore the hussar uniform. He saw how radiant! how splendid! your Majesty looked. Oh! he has dared to admire your Majesty. Such insolence is not to be endured.

EDSTASTON. All Europe is a party to that insolence, Madam.

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF. All Europe is content to do so at a respectful distance. It is possible to admire her Majesty’s policy and her eminence in literature and philosophy without performing acrobatic feats in the Imperial bed.

EDSTASTON. I know nothing about her Majesty’s eminence in policy or philosophy: I don’t pretend to understand such things. I speak as a practical man. And I never knew that foreigners had any policy: I always thought that policy was Mr. Pitt’s business.

CATHERINE [lifting her eyebrows]. So?

VARINKA. What else did you presume to admire her Majesty for, pray?

EDSTASTON [addled]. Well, I — I — I — that is, I — [He stammers himself dumb.]

CATHERINE [after a pitiless silence]. We are waiting for your answer.

EDSTASTON. But I never said I admired your Majesty. The lady has twisted my words.

VARINKA. You don’t admire her, then?

EDSTASTON. Well, I — naturally — of course, I can’t deny that the uniform was very becoming — perhaps a little unfeminine — still — Dead silence. Catherine and the Court watch him stonily. He is wretchedly embarrassed.

CATHERINE [with cold majesty]. Well, sir: is that all you have to say?

EDSTASTON. Surely there is no harm in noticing that er — that er — [He stops again.]

CATHERINE. Noticing that er — ? [He gazes at her, speechless, like a fascinated rabbit. She repeats fiercely.] That er — ?

EDSTASTON [startled into speech]. Well, that your Majesty was — was — [soothingly] Well, let me put it this way: that it was rather natural for a man to admire your Majesty without being a philosopher.

CATHERINE [suddenly smiling and extending her hand to him to be kissed]. Courtier!

EDSTASTON [kissing it]. Not at all. Your Majesty is very good. I have been very awkward; but I did not intend it. I am rather stupid, I am afraid.

CATHERINE. Stupid! By no means. Courage, Captain: we are pleased. [He falls on his knee. She takes his cheeks in her hands: turns up his face: and adds] We are greatly pleased. [She slaps his cheek coquettishly: he bows almost to his knee.] The petit lever is over. [She turns to go into the cabinet, and stumbles against the supine Patiomkin.] Ach! [Edstaston springs to her assistance, seizing Patiomkin’s heels and shifting him out of the Empress’s path.] We thank you, Captain.

He bows gallantly and is rewarded by a very gracious smile. Then Catherine goes into her cabinet, followed by the princess Dashkoff, who turns at the door to make a deep courtsey to Edstaston.

VARINKA. Happy Little Father! Remember: I did this for you. [She runs out after the Empress.]

Edstaston, somewhat dazed, crosses the room to the courtiers, and is received with marked deference, each courtier making him a profound bow or curtsey before withdrawing through the central doors. He returns each obeisance with a nervous jerk, and turns away from it, only to find another courtier bowing at the other side. The process finally reduced him to distraction, as he bumps into one in the act of bowing to another and then has to bow his apologies. But at last they are all gone except Naryshkin.

EDSTASTON. Ouf!

PATIOMKIN [jumping up vigorously]. You have done it, darling. Superbly! Beautifully!

EDSTASTON [astonished]. Do you mean to say you are not drunk?

PATIOMKIN. Not dead drunk, darling. Only diplomatically drunk. As a drunken hog, I have done for you in five minutes what I could not have done in five months as a sober man. Your fortune is made. She likes you.

EDSTASTON. The devil she does!

PATIOMKIN. Why? Aren’t you delighted?

EDSTASTON. Delighted! Gracious heavens, man, I am engaged to be married.

PATIOMKIN. What matter? She is in England, isn’t she?

EDSTASTON. No. She has just arrived in St. Petersburg.

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF [returning]. Captain Edstaston, the Empress is robed, and commands your presence.

EDSTASTON. Say I was gone before you arrived with the message. [He hurries out. The other three, too taken aback to stop him, stare after him in the utmost astonishment.]

NARYSHKIN [turning from the door]. She will have him knouted. He is a dead man.

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF. But what am I to do? I cannot take such an answer to the Empress.

PATIOMKIN. P-P-P-P-P-P-W-W-W-W-W-rrrrrr [a long puff, turning into a growl]! [He spits.] I must kick somebody.

NARYSHKIN [flying precipitately through the central doors]. No, no. Please.

THE PRINCESS DASHKOFF [throwing herself recklessly in front of Patiomkin as he starts in pursuit of the Chamberlain]. Kick me. Disable me. It will be an excuse for not going back to her. Kick me hard.

PATIOMKIN. Yah! [He flings her on the bed and dashes after Naryshkin.]

THE THIRD SCENE

In a terrace garden overlooking the Neva. Claire, a robust young English lady, is leaning on the river wall. She turns expectantly on hearing the garden gate opened and closed. Edstaston hurries in. With a cry of delight she throws her arms round his neck.

CLAIRE. Darling!

EDSTASTON [making a wry face]. Don’t call me darling.

CLAIRE [amazed and chilled]. Why?

EDSTASTON. I have been called darling all the morning.

CLAIRE [with a flash of jealousy]. By whom?

EDSTASTON. By everybody. By the most unutterable swine. And if we do not leave this abominable city now: do you hear? now; I shall be called darling by the Empress.

CLAIRE [with magnificent snobbery]. She would not dare. Did you tell her you were engaged to me?

EDSTASTON. Of course not.

CLAIRE. Why?

EDSTASTON. Because I didn’t particularly want to have you knouted, and to be hanged or sent to Siberia myself.

CLAIRE. What on earth do you mean?

EDSTASTON. Well, the long and short of it is — don’t think me a coxcomb, Claire: it is too serious to mince matters — I have seen the Empress; and —

CLAIRE. Well, you wanted to see her.

EDSTASTON. Yes; but the Empress has seen me.

CLAIRE. She has fallen in love with you!

EDSTASTON. How did you know?

CLAIRE. Dearest: as if anyone could help it.

EDSTASTON. Oh, don’t make me feel like a fool. But, though it does sound conceited to say it, I flatter myself I’m better looking than Patiomkin and the other hogs she is accustomed to. Anyhow, I daren’t risk staying.

CLAIRE. What a nuisance! Mamma will be furious at having to pack, and at missing the Court ball this evening.

EDSTASTON. I can’t help that. We haven’t a moment to lose.

CLAIRE. May I tell her she will be knouted if we stay?

EDSTASTON. Do, dearest.

He kisses her and lets her go, expecting her to run into the house.

CLAIRE [pausing thoughtfully]. Is she — is she good-looking when you see her close?

EDSTASTON. Not a patch on you, dearest.

CLAIRE [jealous]. Then you did see her close?

EDSTASTON. Fairly close.

CLAIRE. Indeed! How close? No: that’s silly of me: I will tell mamma. [She is going out when Naryshkin enters with the Sergeant and a squad of soldiers.] What do you want here?

The Sergeant goes to Edstaston: plumps down on his knees: and takes out a magnificent pair of pistols with gold grips. He proffers them to Edstaston, holding them by the barrels.

NARYSHKIN. Captain Edstaston: his Highness Prince Patiomkin sends you the pistols he promised you.

THE SERGEANT. Take them, Little Father; and do not forget us poor soldiers who have brought them to you; for God knows we get but little to drink.

EDSTASTON [irresolutely]. But I can’t take these valuable things. By Jiminy, though, they’re beautiful! Look at them, Claire.

As he is taking the pistols the kneeling Sergeant suddenly drops them; flings himself forward; and embraces Edstaston’s hips to prevent him from drawing his own pistols from his boots.

THE SERGEANT. Lay hold of him there. Pin his arms. I have his pistols. [The soldiers seize Edstaston.]

EDSTASTON. Ah, would you, damn you! [He drives his knee into the Sergeant’s epigastrium, and struggles furiously with his captors.]

THE SERGEANT [rolling on the ground, gasping and groaning]. Owgh! Murder! Holy Nicholas! Owwwgh!

CLAIRE. Help! help! They are killing Charles. Help!

NARYSHKIN [seizing her and clapping his hand over her mouth]. Tie him neck and crop. Ten thousand blows of the stick if you let him go. [Claire twists herself loose: turns on him: and cuffs him furiously.] Yow — ow! Have mercy, Little Mother.

CLAIRE. You wretch! Help! Help! Police! We are being murdered. Help!

The Sergeant, who has risen, comes to Naryshkin’s rescue, and grasps Claire’s hands, enabling Naryshkin to gag her again. By this time Edstaston and his captors are all rolling on the ground together. They get Edstaston on his back and fasten his wrists together behind his knees. Next they put a broad strap round his ribs. Finally they pass a pole through this breast strap and through the waist strap and lift him by it, helplessly trussed up, to carry him of. Meanwhile he is by no means suffering in silence.

EDSTASTON [gasping]. You shall hear more of this. Damn you, will you untie me? I will complain to the ambassador. I will write to the Gazette. England will blow your trumpery little fleet out of the water and sweep your tinpot army into Siberia for this. Will you let me go? Damn you! Curse you! What the devil do you mean by it? I’ll — I’ll — I’ll — [he is carried out of hearing].

NARYSHKIN [snatching his hands from Claire’s face with a scream, and shaking his finger frantically]. Agh! [The Sergeant, amazed, lets go her hands.] She has bitten me, the little vixen.

CLAIRE [spitting and wiping her mouth disgustedly]. How dare you put your dirty paws on my mouth? Ugh! Psha!

THE SERGEANT. Be merciful, Little angel Mother.

CLAIRE. Do not presume to call me your little angel mother. Where are the police?

NARYSHKIN. We are the police in St Petersburg, little spitfire.

THE SERGEANT. God knows we have no orders to harm you, Little Mother. Our duty is done. You are well and strong; but I shall never be the same man again. He is a mighty and terrible fighter, as stout as a bear. He has broken my sweetbread with his strong knees. God knows poor folk should not be set upon such dangerous adversaries!

CLAIRE. Serve you right! Where have they taken Captain Edstaston to?

NARYSHKIN [spitefully]. To the Empress, little beauty. He has insulted the Empress. He will receive a hundred and one blows of the knout. [He laughs and goes out, nursing his bitten finger.]

THE SERGEANT. He will feel only the first twenty and he will be mercifully dead long before the end, little darling.

CLAIRE [sustained by an invincible snobbery]. They dare not touch an English officer. I will go to the Empress myself: she cannot know who Captain Edstaston is — who we are.

THE SERGEANT. Do so in the name of the Holy Nicholas, little beauty.

CLAIRE. Don’t be impertinent. How can I get admission to the palace?

THE SERGEANT. Everybody goes in and out of the palace, little love.

CLAIRE. But I must get into the Empress’s presence. I must speak to her.

THE SERGEANT. You shall, dear Little Mother. You shall give the poor old Sergeant a rouble; and the blessed Nicholas will make your salvation his charge.

CLAIRE [impetuously]. I will give you [she is about to say fifty roubles, but checks herself cautiously] — Well: I don’t mind giving you two roubles if I can speak to the Empress.

THE SERGEANT [joyfully]. I praise Heaven for you, Little Mother. Come. [He leads the way out.] It was the temptation of the devil that led your young man to bruise my vitals and deprive me of breath. We must be merciful to one another’s faults.

THE FOURTH SCENE

A triangular recess communicating by a heavily curtained arch with the huge ballroom of the palace. The light is subdued by red shades on the candles. In the wall adjoining that pierced by the arch is a door. The only piece of furniture is a very handsome chair on the arch side. In the ballroom they are dancing a polonaise to the music of a brass band.

Naryshkin enters through the door, followed by the soldiers carrying Edstaston, still trussed to the pole. Exhausted and dogged, he makes no sound.

NARYSHKIN. Halt. Get that pole clear of the prisoner. [They dump Edstaston on the floor and detach the pole. Naryshkin stoops over him and addresses him insultingly.] Well! are you ready to be tortured? This is the Empress’s private torture chamber. Can I do anything to make you quite comfortable? You have only to mention it.

EDSTASTON. Have you any back teeth?

NARYSHKIN [surprised]. Why?

EDSTASTON. His Majesty King George the Third will send for six of them when the news of this reaches London; so look out, damn your eyes!

NARYSHKIN [frightened]. Oh, I assure you I am only obeying my orders. Personally I abhor torture, and would save you if I could. But the Empress is proud; and what woman would forgive the slight you put upon her?

EDSTASTON. As I said before: Damn your eyes!

NARYSHKIN [almost in tears]. Well, it isn’t my fault. [To the soldiers, insolently.] You know your orders? You remember what you have to do when the Empress gives you the word? [The soldiers salute in assent.]

Naryshkin passes through the curtains, admitting a blare of music and a strip of the brilliant white candlelight from the chandeliers in the ballroom as he does so. The white light vanishes and the music is muffled as the curtains fall together behind him. Presently the band stops abruptly: and Naryshkin comes back through the curtains. He makes a warning gesture to the soldiers, who stand at attention. Then he moves the curtain to allow Catherine to enter. She is in full Imperial regalia, and stops sternly just where she has entered. The soldiers fall on their knees.

CATHERINE. Obey your orders.

The soldiers seize Edstaston, and throw him roughly at the feet of the Empress.

CATHERINE [looking down coldly on him]. Also [the German word], you have put me to the trouble of sending for you twice. You had better have come the first time.

EDSTASTON [exsufflicate, and pettishly angry]. I haven’t come either time. I’ve been carried. I call it infernal impudence.

CATHERINE. Take care what you say.

EDSTASTON. No use. I daresay you look very majestic and very handsome; but I can’t see you; and I am not intimidated. I am an Englishman; and you can kidnap me; but you can’t bully me.

NARYSHKIN. Remember to whom you are speaking.

CATHERINE [violently, furious at his intrusion]. Remember that dogs should be dumb. [He shrivels.] And do you, Captain, remember that famous as I am for my clemency, there are limits to the patience even of an Empress.

EDSTASTON. How is a man to remember anything when he is trussed up in this ridiculous fashion? I can hardly breathe. [He makes a futile struggle to free himself.] Here: don’t be unkind, your Majesty: tell these fellows to unstrap me. You know you really owe me an apology.

CATHERINE. You think you can escape by appealing, like Prince Patiomkin, to my sense of humor?

EDSTASTON. Sense of humor! Ho! Ha, ha! I like that. Would anybody with a sense of humor make a guy of a man like this, and then expect him to take it seriously? I say: do tell them to loosen these straps.

CATHERINE [seating herself]. Why should I, pray?

EDSTASTON. Why! Why! Why, because they’re hurting me.

CATHERINE. People sometimes learn through suffering. Manners, for instance.

EDSTASTON. Oh, well, of course, if you’re an ill-natured woman, hurting me on purpose, I have nothing more to say.

CATHERINE. A monarch, sir, has sometimes to employ a necessary, and salutary severity —

EDSTASTON [Interrupting her petulantly]. Quack! quack! quack!

CATHERINE. Donnerwetter!

EDSTASTON [continuing recklessly]. This isn’t severity: it’s tomfoolery. And if you think it’s reforming my character or teaching me anything, you’re mistaken. It may be a satisfaction to you; but if it is, all I can say is that it’s not an amiable satisfaction.

CATHERINE [turning suddenly and balefully on Naryshkin]. What are you grinning at?

NARYSHKIN [falling on his knees in terror]. Be merciful, Little Mother. My heart is in my mouth.

CATHERINE. Your heart and your mouth will be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand. Go. And take your men with you. [Naryshkin crawls to the door. The soldiers rise.] Stop. Roll that [indicating Edstaston] nearer. [The soldiers obey.] Not so close. Did I ask you for a footstool? [She pushes Edstaston away with her foot.]

EDSTASTON [with a sudden squeal]. Agh!!! I must really ask your Majesty not to put the point of your Imperial toe between my ribs. I am ticklesome.

CATHERINE. Indeed? All the more reason for you to treat me with respect, Captain. [To the others.] Begone. How many times must I give an order before it is obeyed?

NARYSHKIN. Little Mother: they have brought some instruments of torture. Will they be needed?

CATHERINE [indignantly]. How dare you name such abominations to a Liberal Empress? You will always be a savage and a fool, Naryshkin. These relics of barbarism are buried, thank God, in the grave of Peter the Great. My methods are more civilized. [She extends her toe towards Edstaston’s ribs.]

EDSTASTON [shrieking hysterically]. Yagh! Ah! [Furiously.] If your Majesty does that again I will write to the London Gazette.

CATHERINE [to the soldiers]. Leave us. Quick! do you hear? Five thousand blows of the stick for the soldier who is in the room when I speak next. [The soldiers rush out.] Naryshkin: are you waiting to be knouted? [Naryshkin backs out hastily.]

Catherine and Edstaston are now alone. Catherine has in her hand a sceptre or baton of gold. Wrapped round it is a new pamphlet, in French, entitled L’Homme aux Quarante Ecus. She calmly unrolls this and begins to read it at her ease as if she were quite alone. Several seconds elapse in dead silence. She becomes more and more absorbed in the pamphlet, and more and more amused by it.

CATHERINE [greatly pleased by a passage, and turning over the leaf]. Ausgezeiehnet!

EDSTASTON. Ahem!

Silence. Catherine reads on.

CATHERINE. Wie komisch!

EDSTASTON. Ahem! ahem!

Silence.

CATHERINE [soliloquizing enthusiastically]. What a wonderful author is Monsieur Voltaire! How lucidly he exposes the folly of this crazy plan for raising the entire revenue of the country from a single tax on land! how he withers it with his irony! how he makes you laugh whilst he is convincing you! how sure one feels that the proposal is killed by his wit and economic penetration: killed never to be mentioned again among educated people!

EDSTASTON. For Heaven’s sake, Madam, do you intend to leave me tied up like this while you discuss the blasphemies of that abominable infidel? Agh!! [She has again applied her toe.] Oh! Oo!

CATHERINE [calmly]. Do I understand you to say that Monsieur Voltaire is a great philanthropist and a great philosopher as well as the wittiest man in Europe?

EDSTASTON. Certainly not. I say that his books ought to be burnt by the common hangman [her toe touches his ribs]. Yagh! Oh don’t. I shall faint. I can’t bear it.

CATHERINE. Have you changed your opinion of Monsieur Voltaire?

EDSTASTON. But you can’t expect me as a member of the Church of England [she tickles him] — agh! Ow! Oh Lord! he is anything you like. He is a philanthropist, a philosopher, a beauty: he ought to have a statue, damn him! [she tickles him]. No! bless him! save him victorious, happy and glorious! Oh, let eternal honors crown his name: Voltaire thrice worthy on the rolls of fame! [Exhausted.] Now will you let me up? And look here! I can see your ankles when you tickle me: it’s not ladylike.

CATHERINE [sticking out her toe and admiring it critically]. Is the spectacle so disagreeable?

EDSTASTON. It’s agreeable enough; only [with intense expression] for heaven’s sake don’t touch me in the ribs.

CATHERINE [putting aside the pamphlet]. Captain Edstaston, why did you refuse to come when I sent for you?

EDSTASTON. Madam, I cannot talk tied up like this.

CATHERINE. Do you still admire me as much as you did this morning?

EDSTASTON. How can I possibly tell when I can’t see you? Let me get up and look. I can’t see anything now except my toes and yours.

CATHERINE. Do you still intend to write to the London Gazette about me?

EDSTASTON. Not if you will loosen these straps. Quick: loosen me. I’m fainting.

CATHERINE. I don’t think you are [tickling him].

EDSTASTON. Agh! Cat!

CATHERINE. What [she tickles him again].

EDSTASTON [with a shriek]. No: angel, angel!

CATHERINE [tenderly]. Geliebter!

EDSTASTON. I don’t know a word of German; but that sounded kind. [Becoming hysterical.] Little Mother, beautiful little darling angel mother: don’t be cruel: untie me. Oh, I beg and implore you. Don’t be unkind. I shall go mad.

CATHERINE. You are expected to go mad with love when an Empress deigns to interest herself in you. When an Empress allows you to see her foot you should kiss it. Captain Edstaston, you are a booby.

EDSTASTON [indignantly]. I am nothing of the kind. I have been mentioned in dispatches as a highly intelligent officer. And let me warn your Majesty that I am not so helpless as you think. The English Ambassador is in that ballroom. A shout from me will bring him to my side; and then where will your Majesty be?

CATHERINE. I should like to see the English Ambassador or anyone else pass through that curtain against my orders. It might be a stone wall ten feet thick. Shout your loudest. Sob. Curse. Scream. Yell [she tickles him unmercifully].

EDSTASTON [frantically]. Ahowyou!!!! Agh! oh! Stop! Oh Lord! Ya-a-a-ah! [A tumult in the ballroom responds to his cries].

VOICES FROM THE BALLROOM. Stand back. You cannot pass. Hold her back there. The Empress’s orders. It is out of the question. No, little darling, not in there. Nobody is allowed in there. You will be sent to Siberia. Don’t let her through there, on your life. Drag her back. You will be knouted. It is hopeless, Mademoiselle: you must obey orders. Guard there! Send some men to hold her.

CLAIRE’S VOICE. Let me go. They are torturing Charles in there. I WILL go. How can you all dance as if nothing was happening? Let me go, I tell you. Let — me — go. [She dashes through the curtain, no one dares follow her.]

CATHERINE [rising in wrath]. How dare you?

CLAIRE [recklessly]. Oh, dare your grandmother! Where is my Charles? What are they doing to him?

EDSTASTON [shouting]. Claire, loosen these straps, in Heaven’s name. Quick.

CLAIRE [seeing him and throwing herself on her knees at his side]. Oh, how dare they tie you up like that! [To Catherine.] You wicked wretch! You Russian savage! [She pounces on the straps, and begins unbuckling them.]

CATHERINE [conquering herself with a mighty effort]. Now self-control. Self-control, Catherine. Philosophy. Europe is looking on. [She forces herself to sit down.]

EDSTASTON. Steady, dearest: it is the Empress. Call her your Imperial Majesty. Call her Star of the North, Little Mother, Little Darling: that’s what she likes; but get the straps off.

CLAIRE. Keep quiet, dear: I cannot get them off if you move.

CATHERINE [calmly]. Keep quite still, Captain [she tickles him.]

EDSTASTON. Ow! Agh! Ahowyow!

CLAIRE [stopping dead in the act of unbuckling the straps and turning sick with jealousy as she grasps the situation]. Was THAT what I thought was your being tortured?

CATHERINE [urbanely]. That is the favorite torture of Catherine the Second, Mademoiselle. I think the Captain enjoys it very much.

CLAIRE. Then he can have as much more of it as he wants. I am sorry I intruded. [She rises to go.]

EDSTASTON [catching her train in his teeth and holding on like a bull-dog]. Don’t go. Don’t leave me in this horrible state. Loosen me. [This is what he is saying: but as he says it with the train in his mouth it is not very intelligible.]

CLAIRE. Let go. You are undignified and ridiculous enough yourself without making me ridiculous. [She snatches her train away.]

EDSTASTON. Ow! You’ve nearly pulled my teeth out: you’re worse than the Star of the North. [To Catherine.] Darling Little Mother: you have a kind heart, the kindest in Europe. Have pity. Have mercy. I love you. [Claire bursts into tears.] Release me.

CATHERINE. Well, just to show you how much kinder a Russian savage can be than an English one (though I am sorry to say I am a German) here goes! [She stoops to loosen the straps.]

CLAIRE [jealously]. You needn’t trouble, thank you. [She pounces on the straps: and the two set Edstaston free between them.] Now get up, please; and conduct yourself with some dignity if you are not utterly demoralized.

EDSTASTON. Dignity! Ow! I can’t. I’m stiff all over. I shall never be able to stand up again. Oh Lord! how it hurts! [They seize him by the shoulders and drag him up.] Yah! Agh! Wow! Oh! Mmmmmm! Oh, Little Angel Mother, don’t ever do this to a man again. Knout him; kill him; roast him; baste him; head, hang, and quarter him; but don’t tie him up like that and tickle him.

CATHERINE. Your young lady still seems to think that you enjoyed it.

CLAIRE. I know what I think. I will never speak to him again. Your Majesty can keep him, as far as I am concerned.

CATHERINE. I would not deprive you of him for worlds; though really I think he’s rather a darling [she pats his cheek].

CLAIRE [snorting]. So I see, indeed.

EDSTASTON. Don’t be angry, dearest: in this country everybody’s a darling. I’ll prove it to you. [To Catherine.] Will your Majesty be good enough to call Prince Patiomkin?

CATHERINE [surprised into haughtiness]. Why?

EDSTASTON. To oblige me.

Catherine laughs good-humoredly and goes to the curtains and opens them. The band strikes up a Redowa.

CATHERINE [calling imperiously]. Patiomkin! [The music stops suddenly.] Here! To me! Go on with your music there, you fools. [The Redowa is resumed.]

The sergeant rushes from the ballroom to relieve the Empress of the curtain. Patiomkin comes in dancing with Yarinka.

CATHERINE [to Patiomkin]. The English captain wants you, little darling.

Catherine resumes her seat as Patiomkin intimates by a grotesque bow that he is at Edstaston’s service. Yarinka passes behind Edstaston and Claire, and posts herself on Claire’s right.

EDSTASTON. Precisely. [To Claire. ] You observe, my love: “little darling.” Well, if her Majesty calls him a darling, is it my fault that she calls me one too?

CLAIRE. I don’t care: I don’t think you ought to have done it. I am very angry and offended.

EDSTASTON. They tied me up, dear. I couldn’t help it. I fought for all I was worth.

THE SERGEANT [at the curtains]. He fought with the strength of lions and bears. God knows I shall carry a broken sweetbread to my grave.

EDSTASTON. You can’t mean to throw me over, Claire. [Urgently.] Claire. Claire.

VARINKA [in a transport of sympathetic emotion, pleading with clasped hands to Claire]. Oh, sweet little angel lamb, he loves you: it shines in his darling eyes. Pardon him, pardon him.

PATIOMKIN [rushing from the Empress’s side to Claire and falling on his knees to her]. Pardon him, pardon him, little cherub! little wild duck! little star! little glory! little jewel in the crown of heaven!

CLAIRE. This is perfectly ridiculous.

VARINKA [kneeling to her]. Pardon him, pardon him, little delight, little sleeper in a rosy cradle.

CLAIRE. I’ll do anything if you’ll only let me alone.

THE SERGEANT [kneeling to her]. Pardon him, pardon him, lest the mighty man bring his whip to you. God knows we all need pardon!

CLAIRE [at the top of her voice]. I pardon him! I pardon him!

PATIOMKIN [springing up joyfully and going behind Claire, whom he raises in his arms]. Embrace her, victor of Bunker’s Hill. Kiss her till she swoons.

THE SERGEANT. Receive her in the name of the holy Nicholas.

VARINKA. She begs you for a thousand dear little kisses all over her body.

CLAIRE [vehemently]. I do not. [Patiomkin throws her into Edstaston’s arms.] Oh! [The pair, awkward and shamefaced, recoil from one another, and remain utterly inexpressive.]

CATHERINE [pushing Edstaston towards Claire]. There is no help for it, Captain. This is Russia, not England.

EDSTASTON [plucking up some geniality, and kissing Claire ceremoniously on the brow]. I have no objection.

VARINKA [disgusted]. Only one kiss! and on the forehead! Fish. See how I kiss, though it is only my horribly ugly old uncle [she throws her arms round Patiomkin’s neck and covers his face with kisses].

THE SERGEANT [moved to tears]. Sainted Nicholas: bless your lambs!

CATHERINE. Do you wonder now that I love Russia as I love no other place on earth?

NARYSHKIN [appearing at the door]. Majesty: the model for the new museum has arrived.

CATHERINE [rising eagerly and making for the curtains]. Let us go. I can think of nothing but my museum. [In the archway she stops and turns to Edstaston, who has hurried to lift the curtain for her.] Captain, I wish you every happiness that your little angel can bring you. [For his ear alone.] I could have brought you more; but you did not think so. Farewell.

EDSTASTON [kissing her hand, which, instead of releasing, he holds caressingly and rather patronizingly in his own]. I feel your Majesty’s kindness so much that I really cannot leave you without a word of plain wholesome English advice.

CATHERINE [snatching her hand away and bounding forward as if he had touched her with a spur]. Advice!!!

PATIOMKIN. Madman: take care!

NARYSHKIN. Advise the Empress!!

THE SERGEANT. Sainted Nicholas!

VARINKA. Hoo hoo! [a stifled splutter of laughter].

EDSTASTON [following the Empress and resuming kindly but judicially]. After all, though your Majesty is of course a great queen, yet when all is said, I am a man; and your Majesty is only a woman.

CATHERINE. Only a wo — [she chokes].

EDSTASTON [continuing]. Believe me, this Russian extravagance will not do. I appreciate as much as any man the warmth of heart that prompts it; but it is overdone: it is hardly in the best taste: it is really I must say it — it is not proper.

CATHERINE [ironically, in German]. So!

EDSTASTON. Not that I cannot make allowances. Your Majesty has, I know, been unfortunate in your experience as a married woman —

CATHERINE [furious]. Alle Wetter!!!

EDSTASTON [sentimentally]. Don’t say that. Don’t think of him in that way. After all, he was your husband; and whatever his faults may have been, it is not for you to think unkindly of him.

CATHERINE [almost bursting]. I shall forget myself.

EDSTASTON. Come! I am sure he really loved you; and you truly loved him.

CATHERINE [controlling herself with a supreme effort]. No, Catherine. What would Voltaire say?

EDSTASTON. Oh, never mind that vile scoffer. Set an example to Europe, Madam, by doing what I am going to do. Marry again. Marry some good man who will be a strength and support to your old age.

CATHERINE. My old — [she again becomes speechless].

EDSTASTON. Yes: we must all grow old, even the handsomest of us.

CATHERINE [sinking into her chair with a gasp]. Thank you.

EDSTASTON. You will thank me more when you see your little ones round your knee, and your man there by the fireside in the winter evenings — by the way, I forgot that you have no fireside here in spite of the coldness of the climate; so shall I say by the stove?

CATHERINE. Certainly, if you wish. The stove by all means.

EDSTASTON [impulsively]. Ah, Madam, abolish the stove: believe me, there is nothing like the good old open grate. Home! duty! happiness! they all mean the same thing; and they all flourish best on the drawing-room hearthrug. [Turning to Claire.] And now, my love, we must not detain the Queen: she is anxious to inspect the model of her museum, to which I am sure we wish every success.

CLAIRE [coldly]. I am not detaining her.

EDSTASTON. Well, goodbye [wringing Patiomkin’s hand] goo-oo-oodbye, Prince: come and see us if ever you visit England. Spire View, Deepdene, Little Mugford, Devon, will always find me. [To Yarinka, kissing her hand.] Goodbye, Mademoiselle: goodbye, Little Mother, if I may call you that just once. [Varinka puts up her face to be kissed.] Eh? No, no, no, no: you don’t mean that, you know. Naughty! [To the Sergeant.] Goodbye, my friend. You will drink our healths with this [tipping him].

THE SERGEANT. The blessed Nicholas will multiply your fruits, Little Father.

EDSTASTON. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

He goes out backwards, bowing, with Claire curtseying, having been listened to in utter dumbfoundedness by Patiomkin and Naryshkin, in childlike awe by Yarinka, and with quite inexpressible feelings by Catherine. When he is out of sight she rises with clinched fists and raises her arms and her closed eyes to Heaven. Patiomkin: rousing himself from his stupor of amazement, springs to her like a tiger, and throws himself at her feet.

PATIOMKIN. What shall I do to him for you? Skin him alive? Cut off his eyelids and stand him in the sun? Tear his tongue out? What shall it be?

CATHERINE [opening her eyes]. Nothing. But oh, if I could only have had him for my — for my — for my —

PATIOMKIN [in a growl of jealousy]. For your lover?

CATHERINE [with an ineffable smile]. No: for my museum.

THE MUSIC CURE

Lord Reginald Fitzambry, a fashionably dressed, rather-pretty young man of 22, is prostrate on a sofa in a large hotel drawing room, crying convulsively. His doctor is trying to soothe him. The doctor is about a dozen years his senior; and his ways are the ways of a still youthful man who considers himself in smart society as well as professionally attendant on it. The drawing room has tall central doors, at present locked. If anyone could enter under these circumstances, he would find on his left a grand piano with the keyboard end towards him, and a smaller door beyond the piano. On his right would be the window, and, further on, the sofa on which the unhappy youth is wallowing, with, close by it, the doctor’s chair and a little table accommodating the doctor’s hat, a plate, a medicine bottle, a half emptied glass, and a bell call.

THE DOCTOR. Come come! be a man. Now really this is silly. You mustnt give way like this. I tell you nothing’s happened to you. Hang it all! it’s not the end of the world if you did buy a few shares —

REGINALD.[interrupting him frantically] I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I am ready to give them up. Oh, I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. [Clutching the doctor imploringly] Wont you believe me, Doctor? I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never —

THE DOCTOR [extricating himself and replacing Reginald on the couch., not very gently] Of course you didnt. I know you didnt.

REGINALD. I never —

THE DOCTOR [desperate] Dont go on saying that over and over again or you will drive us all as distracted as you are yourself. This is nothing but nerves. Remember that youre in a hotel. Theyll put you out if you make a row.

REGINALD.[tearfully] But you dont understand. Oh, why wont anybody understand? I never —

THE DOCTOR [shouting him down] You never meant any harm in buying those shares. This is the four hundredth time youve said it.

REGINALD.[wildly] Then why do you keep asking me the same questions over and over again? It’s not fair. Ive told you I never meant any harm in —

THE DOCTOR. Yes, yes, yes: I know, I know. You think you made a fool of yourself before that committee. Well, you didnt. You stood up to it for six days with the coolness of an iceberg and the cheerfulness of an idiot. Every member of it had a go at you; and everyone of them, including some of the cleverest cross-examiners in London, fell back baffled before your fatuous self-satisfaction, your impenetrable in- ability to see any reason why you shouldnt have bought those shares.

REGINALD. But why shouldnt I have bought them? I made no secret of it. When the Prime Minister ragged me about it I offered to sell him the shares for what I gave for them.

THE DOCTOR. Yes, after they had fallen six points. But never mind that. The point for you is that you are an under- secretary in the War Office. You knew that the army was going to be put on vegetarian diet, and that the British Maccaroni Trust shares would go up with a rush when this became public. And what did you do?

REGINALD. I did what any fellow would have done. I bought all the shares I could afford.

THE DOCTOR. You bought a great many more than you could afford.

REGINALD. But why shouldnt I? Explain it to me. I’m anxious to learn. I meant no harm. I see no harm. Why am I to be badgered because the beastly Opposition papers and all the Opposition rotters on that committee try to make party capital out of it by saying that it was disgraceful? It wasnt disgraceful: it was simple common sense. I’m not a financier; but you cant persuade me that if you happen to know that certain shares are going to rise you shouldnt buy them. It would be flying in the face of Providence not to. And they wouldnt see that. They pretended not to see it. They worried me, and kept asking me the same thing over and over again, and wrote blackguardly articles about me —

THE DOCTOR. And you got the better of them all because you couldnt see their point of view. But what beats me is why you broke down afterwards.

REGINALD. Everyone was against me. I thought the committee a pack of fools; and I as good as told them so. But everyone took their part. The governor said I had disgraced the family name. My brothers said I ought to resign from my clubs. My mother said that all her hopes of marrying me to a rich woman were shattered. And I’d done nothing: absolutely nothing to what other chaps are doing every day.

THE DOCTOR. Well, the long and short of it is that officials mustnt gamble.

REGINALD. But I wasnt gambling. I knew. It isnt gambling if you know that the shares will go up. It’s a cert.

THE DOCTOR. Well, all I can tell you is that if you weren’t a son of the Duke of Dunmow, youd have to resign; and —

REGINALD.[breaking down} Oh, stop talking to me about if. Let me alone. I cant bear it. I never meant any harm in buying those shares. I never meant any harm —

THE DOCTOR. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! There: I shouldnt have srarted the subject again. Take some of this valerian [he puts the glass to Reginald’s lips}. Thats right. Now youre better.

REGINALD.[exhausted but calm} Why does valerian soothe me when it excites cats ? Theres a question to reflect on! You know, they ought to have made me a philosopher.

THE DOCTOR. Philosophers are born, not made.

REGINALD. Fine old chestnut, that. Everybody’s born, not made.

THE DOCTOR. Youre getting almost clever. I dont like it: voure not yourself today. I wish I could take your mind off your troubles. Suppose you try a little music.

REGINALD. I cant play. My fingers wont obey me. And I cant stand the sound of the piano. I sounded a note this morning: and it made me scream.

THE DOCTOR. But why not get somebody to play to you?

REGINALD. Whom could I get, even if I could bear it? You cant play.

THE DOCTOR. Well: I’m not the only person in the world.

REGINALD. If you bring anyone else in here, I shall go mad. I’ll throw myself out of the window. I cant bear the idea of music. I dread it, hate it, loathe it.

THE DOCTOR. Thats very serious, you know.

REGINALD. Why is it serious?

THE DOCTOR. Well, what would become of you without your turn for music ? You have absolutely no capacity in any other direction.

REGINALD. I’m in Parliament. And I’m an under-secretary.

THE DOCTOR. Thats because your father is a Duke. If you were in a Republic you wouldnt be trusted to clean boots, unless your father was a millionaire. No, Reginald the day you give up vamping accompaniments and playing the latest ragtimes by ear, youre a lost man socially.

REGINALD. [deprecating] Oh, I say!

THE DOCTOR. [rising] However, perhaps it’s too soon for you to try the music-cure yet. It was your mother’s idea; but I’ll call and tell her to wait a day or two. I think she meant to send somebody to play. I must be off now. Look in again later. Meanwhile, sleep as much as you can. Or you might read a little.

REGINALD. What can I read?

THE DOCTOR. Try the Strand Magazine.

REGINALD. But it’s so frightfully intellectual. It would overtax my brain.

THE DOCTOR. Oh, well, I suppose it would. Well, sleep. Perhaps I’d better give you something to send you off [he produces a medicine case].

REGINALD. Whats this ? Veronal ?

THE DOCTOR. Dont be alarmed. Only the old-fashioned remedy: opium. Take this [Reginald takes a pill]: that will do the trick, I expect. If you find after half an hour that it has only excited you, take another. I’ll leave one for you [he puts one on the plate, and pockets his medicine case].

REGINALD. Better leave me a lot. I like pills.

THE DOCTOR. Thank you: I’m not treating you with a view to a coroner’s inquest. You know, dont you, that opium is a poison ?

REGINALD. Yes, opium. But not pills.

THE DOCTOR. Well, Heaven forbid that I, a doctor, should shake anybody’s faith in pills. But I shant leave you enough to kill you. [He puts on his hat].

REGINALD. Youll tell them, wont you, not to let anyone in. Really and truly I shall throw myself out of the window if any stranger comes in. I should go out of my mind.

THE DOCTOR. None of us have very far to go to do that, my young friend. Ta ta, for the moment [he makes for the central doors].

REGINALD. You cant go out that way. I made my mother lock it and take away the key. I felt sure theyd let somebody in that way if she didnt. Youll have to go the way you came.

THE DOCTOR. [returning] Right. Now let me see you settle down before I go. I want you to be asleep before I leave the room.

REGINALD. settles himself to sleep -with his face to the back of the sofa. The Doctor goes softly to the side door and goes out.

REGINALD. [sitting up wildly and staring affrightedly at the piano] Doctor! Doctor Help!!!

THE DOCTOR. [returning hastily] What is it?

REGINALD. [after another doubtful look at the piano] Nothing. [He composes himself to sleep again].

THE DOCTOR. Nothing! There must have been something or you wouldnt have yelled like that. [Pulling Reginald over so as to see his face] Here! what was it ?

REGINALD. Well, it’s gone.

THE DOCTOR. Whats gone?

REGINALD. The crocodile.

THE DOCTOR. The crocodile!

REGINALD. Yes. It laughed at me, and was going to play the piano with its tail.

THE DOCTOR. Opium in small doses doesnt agree with you, my young friend. [Taking the spare pill from the plate] I shall have to give you a second pill.

REGINALD. But suppose two crocodiles come!

THE DOCTOR. They wont. If anything comes it will be something pretty this time. Thats how opium acts. Anyhow, youll be fast asleep in ten minutes. Here. Take it.

Reginald.[after taking the pill] It was awfully silly of me. But you know I really saw the thing.

THE DOCTOR. You neednt trouble about what you see with your eyes shut. [He turns to the door].

REGINALD. Would you mind looking under the sofa to make sure the crocodile isnt there?

THE DOCTOR. Why not look yourself? that would be more convincing.

REGINALD. I darent.

THE DOCTOR. You duffer! [He looks]. All serene. No crocodile. Now go bye bye. [He goes out].

Reginald again composes himself to sleep. Somebody unlocks the central doors. A lovely lady enters with a bouquet in her hand, She looks about her; takes a letter from wherever she carries letters; and starts on a voyage of discovery round the room, checking her observations by the contents of the letter. The piano seems specially satisfactory: she nods as she sees it. Reginald seems also to be quite expected. She does not speak to him. When she is quite satisfied that she is in the right room, she goes to the piano and tantalizes the expectant audience for about two minutes by putting down her flowers on the candle-stand; taking off her gloves and putting them with the flowers; taking off half a dozen diamond rings in the same way; sitting down to the keyboard and finding it too near to the piano, then too far, then too high, then too low: in short, exhausting all the tricks of the professional pianist before she at last strikes the keys and preludes brilliantly. At the sound, Reginald, with a scream, rolls from the sofa and writhes on the carpet in horrible contortions. She stops playing, amazed.

REGINALD. Oh! Oh! Oh! The crocodiles! Stop! Ow! Oh! [He looks at the piano and sees the lady] Oh I say!

THE LADY. What on earth do you mean by making that noise when I’m playing? Have you no sense? Have you no manners ?

REGINALD [sitting on the floor] I’m awfully sorry.

THE LADY. Sorry! Why did you do it?

REGINALD. I thought you were a crocodile.

THE LADY. What a silly thing to say! Do I look like a crocodile?

REGINALD. No.

THE LADY. Do I play like a crocodile!

Reginald.[cautiously rising and approaching her] Well, you know, it’s so hard to know how a crocodile would play.

THE LADY. Stuff! [She resumes her playing].

REGINALD. Please! [He stops her by shutting the keyboard lid]. Who let you in ?

THE LADY.[rising threateningly] What is that to you, pray?

Reginald.[retreating timidly] It’s my room, you know.

THE LADY. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the Duchess of Dunmow’s room. I know it’s the right one, because she gave me the key; and it was the right key.

REGINALD. But what did she do that for ? Who are you, if you dont mind my asking?

THE LADY. I do mind your asking. It’s no business of yours. However, youd better know to whom you are speaking. I am Strega Thundridge. [She pronounces it Strayga].

REGINALD. What! The female Paderewski!

STREGA. Pardon me. I believe Mr Paderewski has been called the male Thundridge; but no gentleman would dream of repeating such offensive vulgarities. Will you be Good enough to return to your sofa, and hold your tongue, or else leave the room.

REGINALD. But, you know, I am ill.

STREGA. Then go to bed, and send for a doctor. [She sits down again to the keyboard].

REGINALD.[falling on his knees] You mustnt play. You really mustnt. I cant stand it. I shall simply not be myself if you start playing.

STREGA.[raising the lid\ Then I shall start at once.

REGINALD.[running to her on his knees and snatching at her hands] No, you shant. [She rises indignantly. He holds on to her hands, but exclaims ecstatically] Oh, I say, what lovely hands youve got!

STREGA. The idea! [She hurls him to the carpet].

Reginald.[on the floor staring at her] You are strong.

STREGA. My strength has been developed by playing left hand octave passages — like this. [She begins playing Liszt’s transcription of Schubert’s Erl König].

Reginald.[puts his fingers in his ears, but continues to stare at her].

STREGA.[stopping] I really cannot play if you keep your ears stopped. It is an insult. Leave the room.

REGINALD. But I tell you it’s my room.

STREGA.[rising] Leave the room, or I will ring your bell and have you put out. [She goes to the little table, and poises her fingers over the bell call].

Reginald.[rushing to her] No no: somebody will come if you ring; and I shall go distracted if a stranger comes in. [With a touch of her left hand she sends him reeling. He appeals to her plaintively] Dont you see that I am ill?

STREGA. I see that you are mentally afflicted. But that doesnt matter to me. The Duchess of Dunmow has engaged me to come to this room and play for two hours. I never break an engagement, especially a two hundred and fifty guinea one. [She turns towards the piano].

REGINALD. But didnt she tell you anything about me?

STREGA.[turning back to him] She said there would be a foolish young man in the room, but that I was not to mind him. She assured me you were not dangerous except to your- self [Collaring him and holding him bent backwards over the piano]. But I will have no nonsense about not listening. All the world listens when I play. Listen, or go.

REGINALD.[helpless] But I shall have to sit on the stairs. I darent go into any of the rooms: I should meet people there.

STREGA. You will meet plenty of people on the stairs, young man. They are sitting six on each stair, not counting those who are sitting astride the banisters on the chance of hearing me play.

REGINALD. How dreadful! [Tearfully] Youve no right to bully me like this. I’m ill: I cant bear it. I’ll throw myself out of the window.

STREGA.[releasing him] Do. What an advertisement! It will be really kind of you. [She goes back to the keyboard and sits down to play].

Reginald.[crossing to the window] Youll be sorry you were so unfeeling when you see my mangled body. [He opens the window; looks out; shuts it hastily, and retreats with a scream] Theres a crowd. I darent.

STREGA.[pleased] Waiting to hear me play [she preludes softly].

Reginald.[ravished] Oh! I can stand that, you know.

STREGA.[ironically, still preluding] Thank you.

REGINALD. The fact is, I can play a bit myself.

STREGA.[still preluding] An amateur, I presume.

REGINALD. I have often been told I could make a living at it if I tried. But of course it wouldnt do for a man in my position to lower himself by becoming a professional.

STREGA.[abruptly ceasing to play] Tactful, that, I dont think! And what do you play, may I ask?

REGINALD. Oh, all the very best music.

STREGA. For instance?

REGINALD. I wish you belonged to me.

STREGA.[rising outraged] You young blackguard! How dare you?

REGINALD. You dont understand: it’s the name of a tune. Let me play it for you. [He sits down at the keyboard] I dont think you believe I can play.

STREGA. Pardon me. I have heard a horse play the harmonium at a music hall. I can believe anything.

REGINALD. Aha! [He plays] Do you like that?

STREGA. What is it? Is it intended for music?

REGINALD. Oh, you beautiful doll.

STREGA. Take that [she knocks him sprawling over the keyboard] ! Beautiful doll indeed!

REGINALD. Oh, I say! Look here: thats the name of the tune too. You seem quite ignorant of the best music. Dont you know Rum Turn Tiddle, and Alexander’s Rag Time Band, and Take me back to the Garden of Love, and Everybody likes our Mary?

STREGA. Young man: I have never even heard of these abominations. I am now going to educate you musically. I am going to play Chopin, and Brahms, and Bach, and Schumann, and —

Reginald.[horrified] You dont mean classical music?

STREGA. I do [he bolts through the central doors].

STREGA.[disgusted] Pig! [She sits down at the piano again].

Reginald.[rushing back into the room] I forgot the people on the stairs: crowds of them. Oh, what shall I do! Oh dont, Dont, DONT play classical music to me. Say you wont. Please.

STREGA.[looks at him enigmatically and softly plays a Liebeslieder Waltz]!!

REGINALD. Oh, I say: thats rather pretty.

STREGA. Like it?

REGINALD. Awfully. Oh, I say, you know: I really do wish you belonged to me. [Strega suddenly plays a violent Chopin study. He goes into convulsions]. Oh! Stop! Mercy! Help! Oh please, please!

STREGA.[pausing with her hands raised over the keyboard, ready to pounce on the chords] Will you ever say that again ?

REGINALD. Never. I beg your pardon.

STREGA.[satisfied] Hm! [She drops her hands in her lap].

Reginald.[wiping his brow] Oh, that was fearfully classical.

STREGA. You want your back stiffened a little, my young friend. Besides, I really cannot earn two hundred and fifty guineas by playing soothing syrup to you. Now prepare for the worst. I’m going to make a man of you.

Reginald. How?

STREGA. With Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat. Now. Imagine yourself going into battle. [He runs away as before].Goose!

REGINALD. [returning as before] The crowd is worse than ever. Have you no pity?

STREGA. Come here. Dont imagine yourself going into battle. Imagine that you have just been in a battle; and that you have saved your country by deeds of splendid bravery; and that you are going to dance with beautiful women who are proud of you. Can you imagine that?

REGINALD. Rathe-e-e-errr. Thats how I always do imagine myself.

STREGA. Right. Now listen. [She plays the first section of thePolonaise. Reginald flinches at first, but gradually braces himself; stiffens; struts; throws up his head and slaps his chest]. Thats better. What a hero! [After a difficult passage]. Takes a bit of doing, that, dearest child. [Coming to the chords which announce the middle section] Now for it.

REGINALD [unable to contain himself] Oh, this is too glorious. I must have a turn or I shall forget myself.

STREGA. Can you play this? Nothing but this. [She plays the octave passage in the bass].

REGINALD. Just riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle, riddle tiddle? Nothing but that?

STREGA. Very softly at first. Like the ticking of a watch. Then louder and louder, as you feel my soul swelling.

REGINALD. I understand. Just give me those chords again to buck me up to it. [She plays the chords again. He plays the octave passages; and they play the middle section as a duet. At the repeat he cries:] Again! again!

STREGA. It’s meant to be played again. Now.They repeat it. At the end of the section she pushes him off the bench on to the floor, and goes on with the Polonaise alone.

REGINALD. Wonderful woman: I have a confession to make, a confidence to impart. Your playing draws it from me. Listen, Strega [she plays a horrible discord] I mean Miss Thundridge.

STREGA. Thats better; but I prefer Wonderful Woman.

REGINALD. You are a wonderful woman, you know. Adored one — would you mind my taking a little valerian? I’m so excited [he takes some]. A — a — ah! Now I feel that I can speak. Listen to me, goddess. I am not happy. I hate my present existence. I loathe parliament. I am not fit for public affairs. I am condemned to live at home with five coarse and brutal sisters who care for nothing but Alpine climbing, and looping the loop on aeroplanes, and going on deputations, and fighting the police. Do you know what they call me?

STREGA.[playing softly] What do they call you, dear?

REGINALD. They call me a Clinger. Well, I confess it. I am a Clinger. I am not fit to be thrown unprotected upon the world. I want to be shielded. I want a strong arm to lean on, a dauntless heart to be gathered to and cherished, a breadwinner on whose income I can live without the sordid horrors of having to make money for myself. I am a poor little thing, I know, Strega; but I could make a home for you. I have great taste in carpets and pictures. I can cook like anything. I can play quite nicely after dinner. Though you mightnt think it, I can be quite stern and strongminded with servants. I get on splendidly with children; they never talk over my head as grown-up people do. I have a real genius for home life. And I shouldnt at all mind being tyrannized over a little: in fact, I like it. It saves me the trouble of having to think what to do. Oh, Strega, dont you want a dear little domesticated husband who would have no concern but to please you, no thought outside our home, who would be unspotted and unsoiled by the rude cold world, who would never meddle in politics or annoy you by interfering with your profession? Is there any hope for me?

STREGA.[coming away from the piano] My child: I am a hard, strong, independent, muscular woman. How can you, with your delicate soft nature, see anything to love in me? I should hurt you, shock you, perhaps — yes: let me confess.it — I have a violent temper, and might even, in a transport of rage, beat you.

REGINALD. Oh do, do. Dont laugh at this ridiculous confession; but ever since I was a child I have had only one secret longing, and that was to be mercilessly beaten by a splendid, strong, beautiful woman.

STREGA.[solemnly] Reginald — I think your mother spoke of you as Reginald? —

REGINALD. Rejjy.

STREGA. I too have a confession to make. I too need some music to speak through. Will you be so good ?

REGINALD. Angel. [He rushes to the piano and plays sympathetically whilst she speaks].

STREGA. I, too, have had my dream. It has consoled me through the weary hours when I practised scales for eight hours a day. It has pursued me through the applause of admiring thousands in Europe and America. It is a dream of a timid little heart fluttering against mine, of a gentle voice to welcome me home, of a silky moustache to kiss my weary fingers when I return from a Titanic struggle with Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in G major, of somebody utterly dependent on me, utterly devoted to me, utterly my own, living only to be cherished and worshipped by me.

REGINALD. But you would be angry sometimes: terrible, splendid, ruthless, violent. You would throw down the thing you loved and trample on it as it clung to your feet.

STREGA. Yes — oh, why do you force me to confess it? — I should beat it to a jelly, and then cast myself in transports of remorse on its quivering frame and smother it with passionate kisses.

Reginald.[transported] Let it be me, let it be me.

STREGA. You dare face this terrible destiny?

REGINALD. I embrace it. I adore you. I am wholly yours. Oh, let me cling, cling, cling.

STREGA.[embracing him fiercely] Nothing shall tear you from my arms now.

REGINALD. Nothing. I am provided for. Oh how happy this will make my mother!

STREGA. Sweet: name the day.

He plays a wedding march. She plays the bass.

THE END

O’FLAHERTY, V. C.

A RECRUITING PAMPHLET

It may surprise some people to learn that in 1915 this little play was a recruiting poster in disguise. The British officer seldom likes Irish soldiers; but he always tries to have a certain proportion of them in his battalion, because, partly from a want of common sense which leads them to value their lives less than Englishmen do [lives are really less worth living in a poor country], and partly because even the most cowardly Irishman feels obliged to outdo an Englishman in bravery if possible, and at least to set a perilous pace for him, Irish soldiers give impetus to those military operations which require for their spirited execution more devilment than prudence.

Unfortunately, Irish recruiting was badly bungled in 1915. The Irish were for the most part Roman Catholics and loyal Irishmen, which means that from the English point of view they were heretics and rebels. But they were willing enough to go soldiering on the side of France and see the world outside Ireland, which is a dull place to live in. It was quite easy to enlist them by approaching them from their own point of view. But the War Office insisted on approaching them from the point of view of Dublin Castle. They were discouraged and repulsed by refusals to give commissions to Roman Catholic officers, or to allow distinct Irish units to be formed. To attract them, the walls were covered with placards headed REMEMBER BELGIUM. The folly of asking an Irishman to remember anything when you want him to fight for England was apparent to everyone outside the Castle: FORGET AND FORGIVE would have been more to the point. Remembering Belgium and its broken treaty led Irishmen to remember Limerick and its broken treaty; and the recruiting ended in a rebellion, in suppressing which the British artillery quite unnecessarily reduced the centre of Dublin to ruins, and the British commanders killed their leading prisoners of war in cold blood morning after morning with an effect of long-drawn-out ferocity. Really it was only the usual childish petulance in which John Bull does things in a week that disgrace him for a century, though he soon recovers his good humor, and cannot understand why the survivors of his wrath do not feel as jolly with him as he does with them. On the smouldering ruins of Dublin the appeals to remember Louvain were presently supplemented by a fresh appeal. IRISHMEN, DO YOU WISH TO HAVE THE HORRORS OF WAR BROUGHT TO YOUR OWN HEARTHS AND HOMES? Dublin laughed sourly.

As for me I addressed myself quite simply to the business of obtaining recruits. I knew by personal experience and observation what anyone might have inferred from the records of Irish emigration, that all an Irishman’s hopes and ambitions turn on his opportunities of getting out of Ireland. Stimulate his loyalty, and he will stay in Ireland and die for her; for, incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England’s king. Appeal to his discontent, his deadly boredom, his thwarted curiosity and desire for change and adventure, and, to escape from Ireland, he will go abroad to risk his life for France, for the Papal States, for secession in America, and even, if no better may be, for England. Knowing that the ignorance and insularity of the Irishman is a danger to himself and to his neighbors, I had no scruple in making that appeal when there was something for him to fight which the whole world had to fight unless it meant to come under the jack boot of the German version of Dublin Castle.

There was another consideration, unmentionable by the recruiting sergeants and war orators, which must nevertheless have helped them powerfully in procuring soldiers by voluntary enlistment. The happy home of the idealist may become common under millennial conditions. It is not common at present. No one will ever know how many men joined the army in 1914 and 1915 to escape from tyrants and taskmasters, termagants and shrews, none of whom are any the less irksome when they happen by ill-luck to be also our fathers, our mothers, our wives and our children. Even at their amiablest, a holiday from them may be a tempting change for all parties. That is why I did not endow O’Flaherty V.C. with an ideal Irish colleen for his sweetheart, and gave him for his mother a Volumnia of the potato patch rather than a affectionate parent from whom he could not so easily have torn himself away.

I need hardly say that a play thus carefully adapted to its purpose was voted utterly inadmissible; and in due course the British Government, frightened out of its wits for the moment by the rout of the Fifth Army, ordained Irish Conscription, and then did not dare to go through with it. I still think my own line was the more businesslike. But during the war everyone except the soldiers at the front imagined that nothing but an extreme assertion of our most passionate prejudices, without the smallest regard to their effect on others, could win the war. Finally the British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits; and I am afraid I gave great offence by keeping my head in this matter of Irish recruiting. What can I do but apologize, and publish the play now that it can no longer do any good?

O’FLAHERTY V.C.

At the door of an Irish country house in a park. Fine, summer weather; the summer of 1916. The porch, painted white, projects into the drive: but the door is at the side and the front has a window. The porch faces east: and the door is in the north side of it. On the south side is a tree in which a thrush is singing. Under the window is a garden seat with an iron chair at each end of it.

The last four bars of God Save the King are heard in the distance, followed by three cheers. Then the band strikes up It’s a Long Way to Tipperary and recedes until it is out of hearing.

Private O’Flaherty V.C. comes wearily southward along the drive, and falls exhausted into the garden seat. The thrush utters a note of alarm and flies away. The tramp of a horse is heard.

A GENTLEMAN’S VOICE. Tim! Hi! Tim! [He is heard dismounting.]

A LABORER’S VOICE. Yes, your honor.

THE GENTLEMAN’S VOICE. Take this horse to the stables, will you?

A LABORER’S VOICE. Right, your honor. Yup there. Gwan now. Gwan. [The horse is led away.]

General Sir Pearce Madigan, an elderly baronet in khaki, beaming with enthusiasm, arrives. O’Flaherty rises and stands at attention.

SIR PEARCE. No, no, O’Flaherty: none of that now. You’re off duty. Remember that though I am a general of forty years service, that little Cross of yours gives you a higher rank in the roll of glory than I can pretend to.

O’FLAHERTY [relaxing]. I’m thankful to you, Sir Pearce; but I wouldn’t have anyone think that the baronet of my native place would let a common soldier like me sit down in his presence without leave.

SIR PEARCE. Well, you’re not a common soldier, O’Flaherty: you’re a very uncommon one; and I’m proud to have you for my guest here today.

O’FLAHERTY. Sure I know, sir. You have to put up with a lot from the like of me for the sake of the recruiting. All the quality shakes hands with me and says they’re proud to know me, just the way the king said when he pinned the Cross on me. And it’s as true as I’m standing here, sir, the queen said to me: “I hear you were born on the estate of General Madigan,” she says; “and the General himself tells me you were always a fine young fellow.” “Bedad, Mam,” I says to her, “if the General knew all the rabbits I snared on him, and all the salmon I snatched on him, and all the cows I milked on him, he’d think me the finest ornament for the county jail he ever sent there for poaching.”

SIR PEARCE [Laughing]. You’re welcome to them all, my lad. Come [he makes him sit down again on the garden seat]! sit down and enjoy your holiday [he sits down on one of the iron chairs; the one at the doorless side of the porch.]

O’FLAHERTY. Holiday, is it? I’d give five shillings to be back in the trenches for the sake of a little rest and quiet. I never knew what hard work was till I took to recruiting. What with the standing on my legs all day, and the shaking hands, and the making speeches, and — what’s worse — the listening to them and the calling for cheers for king and country, and the saluting the flag till I’m stiff with it, and the listening to them playing God Save the King and Tipperary, and the trying to make my eyes look moist like a man in a picture book, I’m that bet that I hardly get a wink of sleep. I give you my word, Sir Pearce, that I never heard the tune of Tipperary in my life till I came back from Flanders; and already it’s drove me to that pitch of tiredness of it that when a poor little innocent slip of a boy in the street the other night drew himself up and saluted and began whistling it at me, I clouted his head for him, God forgive me.

SIR PEARCE [soothingly]. Yes, yes: I know. I know. One does get fed up with it: I’ve been dog tired myself on parade many a time. But still, you know, there’s a gratifying side to it, too. After all, he is our king; and it’s our own country, isn’t it?

O’FLAHERTY. Well, sir, to you that have an estate in it, it would feel like your country. But the divil a perch of it ever I owned. And as to the king: God help him, my mother would have taken the skin off my back if I’d ever let on to have any other king than Parnell.

SIR PEARCE [rising, painfully shocked]. Your mother! What are you dreaming about, O’Flaherty? A most loyal woman. Always most loyal. Whenever there is an illness in the Royal Family, she asks me every time we meet about the health of the patient as anxiously as if it were yourself, her only son.

O’FLAHERTY. Well, she’s my mother; and I won’t utter a word agen her. But I’m not saying a word of lie when I tell you that that old woman is the biggest kanatt from here to the cross of Monasterboice. Sure she’s the wildest Fenian and rebel, and always has been, that ever taught a poor innocent lad like myself to pray night and morning to St Patrick to clear the English out of Ireland the same as he cleared the snakes. You’ll be surprised at my telling you that now, maybe, Sir Pearce?

SIR PEARCE [unable to keep still, walking away from O’Flaherty]. Surprised! I’m more than surprised, O’Flaherty. I’m overwhelmed. [Turning and facing him.] Are you — are you joking?

O’FLAHERTY. If you’d been brought up by my mother, sir, you’d know better than to joke about her. What I’m telling you is the truth; and I wouldn’t tell it to you if I could see my way to get out of the fix I’ll be in when my mother comes here this day to see her boy in his glory, and she after thinking all the time it was against the English I was fighting.

SIR PEARCE. Do you mean to say you told her such a monstrous falsehood as that you were fighting in the German army?

O’FLAHERTY. I never told her one word that wasn’t the truth and nothing but the truth. I told her I was going to fight for the French and for the Russians; and sure who ever heard of the French or the Russians doing anything to the English but fighting them? That was how it was, sir. And sure the poor woman kissed me and went about the house singing in her old cracky voice that the French was on the sea, and they’d be here without delay, and the Orange will decay, says the Shan Van Vocht.

SIR PEARCE [sitting down again, exhausted by his feelings]. Well, I never could have believed this. Never. What do you suppose will happen when she finds out?

O’FLAHERTY. She mustn’t find out. It’s not that she’d half kill me, as big as I am and as brave as I am. It’s that I’m fond of her, and can’t bring myself to break the heart in her. You may think it queer that a man should be fond of his mother, sir, and she having bet him from the time he could feel to the time she was too slow to ketch him; but I’m fond of her; and I’m not ashamed of it. Besides, didn’t she win the Cross for me?

SIR PEARCE. Your mother! How?

O’FLAHERTY. By bringing me up to be more afraid of running away than of fighting. I was timid by nature; and when the other boys hurted me, I’d want to run away and cry. But she whaled me for disgracing the blood of the O’Flahertys until I’d have fought the divil himself sooner than face her after funking a fight. That was how I got to know that fighting was easier than it looked, and that the others was as much afeard of me as I was of them, and that if I only held out long enough they’d lose heart and give rip. That’s the way I came to be so courageous. I tell you, Sir Pearce, if the German army had been brought up by my mother, the Kaiser would be dining in the banqueting hall at Buckingham Palace this day, and King George polishing his jack boots for him in the scullery.

SIR PEARCE. But I don’t like this, O’Flaherty. You can’t go on deceiving your mother, you know. It’s not right.

O’FLAHERTY. Can’t go on deceiving her, can’t I? It’s little you know what a son’s love can do, sir. Did you ever notice what a ready liar I am?

SIR PEARCE. Well, in recruiting a man gets carried away. I stretch it a bit occasionally myself. After all, it’s for king and country. But if you won’t mind my saying it, O’Flaherty, I think that story about your fighting the Kaiser and the twelve giants of the Prussian guard singlehanded would be the better for a little toning down. I don’t ask you to drop it, you know; for it’s popular, undoubtedly; but still, the truth is the truth. Don’t you think it would fetch in almost as many recruits if you reduced the number of guardsmen to six?

O’FLAHERTY. You’re not used to telling lies like I am, sir. I got great practice at home with my mother. What with saving my skin when I was young and thoughtless, and sparing her feelings when I was old enough to understand them, I’ve hardly told my mother the truth twice a year since I was born; and would you have me turn round on her and tell it now, when she’s looking to have some peace and quiet in her old age?

SIR PEARCE [troubled in his conscience]. Well, it’s not my affair, of course, O’Flaherty. But hadn’t you better talk to Father Quinlan about it?

O’FLAHERTY. Talk to Father Quinlan, is it! Do you know what Father Quinlan says to me this very morning?

SIR PEARCE. Oh, you’ve seen him already, have you? What did he say?

O’FLAHERTY. He says “You know, don’t you,” he says, “that it’s your duty, as a Christian and a good son of the Holy Church, to love your enemies?” he says. “I know it’s my juty as a soldier to kill them,” I says. “That’s right, Dinny,” he says: “quite right. But,” says he, “you can kill them and do them a good turn afterward to show your love for them” he says; “and it’s your duty to have a mass said for the souls of the hundreds of Germans you say you killed,” says he; “for many and many of them were Bavarians and good Catholics,” he says. “Is it me that must pay for masses for the souls of the Boshes?” I says. “Let the King of England pay for them,” I says; “for it was his quarrel and not mine.”

SIR PEARCE [warmly]. It is the quarrel of every honest man and true patriot, O’Flaherty. Your mother must see that as clearly as I do. After all, she is a reasonable, well disposed woman, quite capable of understanding the right and the wrong of the war. Why can’t you explain to her what the war is about?

O’FLAHERTY. Arra, sir, how the divil do I know what the war is about?

SIR PEARCE [rising again and standing over him]. What! O’Flaherty: do you know what you are saying? You sit there wearing the Victoria Cross for having killed God knows how many Germans; and you tell me you don’t know why you did it!

O’FLAHERTY. Asking your pardon, Sir Pearce, I tell you no such thing. I know quite well why I kilt them, because I was afeard that, if I didn’t, they’d kill me.

SIR PEARCE [giving it up, and sitting down again]. Yes, yes, of course; but have you no knowledge of the causes of the war? of the interests at stake? of the importance — I may almost say — in fact I will say — the sacred right for which we are fighting? Don’t you read the papers?

O’FLAHERTY. I do when I can get them. There’s not many newsboys crying the evening paper in the trenches. They do say, Sir Pearce, that we shall never beat the Boshes until we make Horatio Bottomley Lord Leftnant of England. Do you think that’s true, sir?

SIR PEARCE. Rubbish, man! there’s no Lord Lieutenant in England: the king is Lord Lieutenant. It’s a simple question of patriotism. Does patriotism mean nothing to you?

O’FLAHERTY. It means different to me than what it would to you, sir. It means England and England’s king to you. To me and the like of me, it means talking about the English just the way the English papers talk about the Boshes. And what good has it ever done here in Ireland? It’s kept me ignorant because it filled up my mother’s mind, and she thought it ought to fill up mine too. It’s kept Ireland poor, because instead of trying to better ourselves we thought we was the fine fellows of patriots when we were speaking evil of Englishmen that was as poor as ourselves and maybe as good as ourselves. The Boshes I kilt was more knowledgable men than me; and what better am I now that I’ve kilt them? What better is anybody?

SIR PEARCE [huffed, turning a cold shoulder to him]. I am sorry the terrible experience of this war — the greatest war ever fought — has taught you no better, O’Flaherty.

O’FLAHERTY [preserving his dignity]. I don’t know about it’s being a great war, sir. It’s a big war; but that’s not the same thing. Father Quinlan’s new church is a big church: you might take the little old chapel out of the middle of it and not miss it. But my mother says there was more true religion in the old chapel. And the war has taught me that maybe she was right.

SIR PEARCE [grunts sulkily]!!

O’FLAHERTY [respectfully but doggedly]. And there’s another thing it’s taught me too, sir, that concerns you and me, if I may make bold to tell it to you.

SIR PEARCE [still sulky]. I hope it’s nothing you oughtn’t to say to me, O’Flaherty.

O’FLAHERTY. It’s this, sir: that I’m able to sit here now and talk to you without humbugging you; and that’s what not one of your tenants or your tenants’ childer ever did to you before in all your long life. It’s a true respect I’m showing you at last, sir. Maybe you’d rather have me humbug you and tell you lies as I used, just as the boys here, God help them, would rather have me tell them how I fought the Kaiser, that all the world knows I never saw in my life, than tell them the truth. But I can’t take advantage of you the way I used, not even if I seem to be wanting in respect to you and cocked up by winning the Cross.

SIR PEARCE [touched]. Not at all, O’Flaherty. Not at all.

O’FLAHERTY. Sure what’s the Cross to me, barring the little pension it carries? Do you think I don’t know that there’s hundreds of men as brave as me that never had the luck to get anything for their bravery but a curse from the sergeant, and the blame for the faults of them that ought to have been their betters? I’ve learnt more than you’d think, sir; for how would a gentleman like you know what a poor ignorant conceited creature I was when I went from here into the wide world as a soldier? What use is all the lying, and pretending, and humbugging, and letting on, when the day comes to you that your comrade is killed in the trench beside you, and you don’t as much as look round at him until you trip over his poor body, and then all you say is to ask why the hell the stretcher-bearers don’t take it out of the way. Why should I read the papers to be humbugged and lied to by them that had the cunning to stay at home and send me to fight for them? Don’t talk to me or to any soldier of the war being right. No war is right; and all the holy water that Father Quinlan ever blessed couldn’t make one right. There, sir! Now you know what O’Flaherty V.C. thinks; and you’re wiser so than the others that only knows what he done.

SIR PEARCE [making the best of it, and turning goodhumoredly to him again]. Well, what you did was brave and manly, anyhow.

O’FLAHERTY. God knows whether it was or not, better than you nor me, General. I hope He won’t be too hard on me for it, anyhow.

SIR PEARCE [sympathetically]. Oh yes: we all have to think seriously sometimes, especially when we’re a little run down. I’m afraid we’ve been overworking you a bit over these recruiting meetings. However, we can knock off for the rest of the day; and tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ve had about as much as I can stand myself. [He looks at his watch.] It’s teatime. I wonder what’s keeping your mother.

O’FLAHERTY. It’s nicely cocked up the old woman will be having tea at the same table as you, sir, instead of in the kitchen. She’ll be after dressing in the heighth of grandeur; and stop she will at every house on the way to show herself off and tell them where she’s going, and fill the whole parish with spite and envy. But sure, she shouldn’t keep you waiting, sir.

SIR PEARCE. Oh, that’s all right: she must be indulged on an occasion like this. I’m sorry my wife is in London: she’d have been glad to welcome your mother.

O’FLAHERTY. Sure, I know she would, sir. She was always a kind friend to the poor. Little her ladyship knew, God help her, the depth of divilment that was in us: we were like a play to her. You see, sir, she was English: that was how it was. We was to her what the Pathans and Senegalese was to me when I first seen them: I couldn’t think, somehow, that they were liars, and thieves, and backbiters, and drunkards, just like ourselves or any other Christians. Oh, her ladyship never knew all that was going on behind her back: how would she? When I was a weeshy child, she gave me the first penny I ever had in my hand; and I wanted to pray for her conversion that night the same as my mother made me pray for yours; and —

SIR PEARCE [scandalized]. Do you mean to say that your mother made you pray for MY conversion?

O’FLAHERTY. Sure and she wouldn’t want to see a gentleman like you going to hell after she nursing your own son and bringing up my sister Annie on the bottle. That was how it was, sir. She’d rob you; and she’d lie to you; and she’d call down all the blessings of God on your head when she was selling you your own three geese that you thought had been ate by the fox the day after you’d finished fattening them, sir; and all the time you were like a bit of her own flesh and blood to her. Often has she said she’d live to see you a good Catholic yet, leading victorious armies against the English and wearing the collar of gold that Malachi won from the proud invader. Oh, she’s the romantic woman is my mother, and no mistake.

SIR PEARCE [in great perturbation]. I really can’t believe this, O’Flaherty. I could have sworn your mother was as honest a woman as ever breathed.

O’FLAHERTY. And so she is, sir. She’s as honest as the day.

SIR PEARCE. Do you call it honest to steal my geese?

O’FLAHERTY. She didn’t steal them, sir. It was me that stole them.

SIR PEARCE. Oh! And why the devil did you steal them?

O’FLAHERTY. Sure we needed them, sir. Often and often we had to sell our own geese to pay you the rent to satisfy your needs; and why shouldn’t we sell your geese to satisfy ours?

SIR PEARCE. Well, damn me!

O’FLAHERTY [sweetly]. Sure you had to get what you could out of us; and we had to get what we could out of you. God forgive us both!

SIR PEARCE. Really, O’Flaherty, the war seems to have upset you a little.

O’FLAHERTY. It’s set me thinking, sir; and I’m not used to it. It’s like the patriotism of the English. They never thought of being patriotic until the war broke out; and now the patriotism has took them so sudden and come so strange to them that they run about like frightened chickens, uttering all manner of nonsense. But please God they’ll forget all about it when the war’s over. They’re getting tired of it already.

SIR PEARCE. No, no: it has uplifted us all in a wonderful way. The world will never be the same again, O’Flaherty. Not after a war like this.

O’FLAHERTY. So they all say, sir. I see no great differ myself. It’s all the fright and the excitement; and when that quiets down they’ll go back to their natural divilment and be the same as ever. It’s like the vermin: it’ll wash off after a while.

SIR PEARCE [rising and planting himself firmly behind the garden seat]. Well, the long and the short of it is, O’Flaherty, I must decline to be a party to any attempt to deceive your mother. I thoroughly disapprove of this feeling against the English, especially at a moment like the present. Even if your mother’s political sympathies are really what you represent them to be, I should think that her gratitude to Gladstone ought to cure her of such disloyal prejudices.

O’FLAHERTY [over his shoulder]. She says Gladstone was an Irishman, Sir. What call would he have to meddle with Ireland as he did if he wasn’t?

SIR PEARCE. What nonsense! Does she suppose Mr Asquith is an Irishman?

O’FLAHERTY. She won’t give him any credit for Home Rule, Sir. She says Redmond made him do it. She says you told her so.

SIR PEARCE [convicted out of his own mouth]. Well, I never meant her to take it up in that ridiculous way. [He moves to the end of the garden seat on O’Flaherty’s left.] I’ll give her a good talking to when she comes. I’m not going to stand any of her nonsense.

O’FLAHERTY. It’s not a bit of use, sir. She says all the English generals is Irish. She says all the English poets and great men was Irish. She says the English never knew how to read their own books until we taught them. She says we’re the lost tribes of the house of Israel and the chosen people of God. She says that the goddess Venus, that was born out of the foam of the sea, came up out of the water in Killiney Bay off Bray Head. She says that Moses built the seven churches, and that Lazarus was buried in Glasnevin.

SIR PEARCE. Bosh! How does she know he was? Did you ever ask her?

O’FLAHERTY. I did, sir, often.

SIR PEARCE. And what did she say?

O’FLAHERTY. She asked me how did I know he wasn’t, and fetched me a clout on the side of my head.

SIR PEARCE. But have you never mentioned any famous Englishman to her, and asked her what she had to say about him?

O’FLAHERTY. The only one I could think of was Shakespeare, sir; and she says he was born in Cork.

SIR PEARCE [exhausted]. Well, I give it up [he throws himself into the nearest chair]. The woman is — Oh, well! No matter.

O’FLAHERTY [sympathetically]. Yes, sir: she’s pigheaded and obstinate: there’s no doubt about it. She’s like the English: they think there’s no one like themselves. It’s the same with the Germans, though they’re educated and ought to know better. You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

SIR PEARCE. Still, we —

O’FLAHERTY. Whisht, sir, for God’s sake: here she is.

The General jumps up. Mrs. O’Flaherty arrives and comes between the two men. She is very clean, and carefully dressed in the old fashioned peasant costume; black silk sunbonnet with a tiara of trimmings, and black cloak.

O’FLAHERTY [rising shyly]. Good evening, mother.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [severely]. You hold your whisht, and learn behavior while I pay my juty to his honor. [To Sir Pearce, heartily.] And how is your honor’s good self? And how is her ladyship and all the young ladies? Oh, it’s right glad we are to see your honor back again and looking the picture of health.

SIR PEARCE [forcing a note of extreme geniality]. Thank you, Mrs O’Flaherty. Well, you see we’ve brought you back your son safe and sound. I hope you’re proud of him.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. And indeed and I am, your honor. It’s the brave boy he is; and why wouldn’t he be, brought up on your honor’s estate and with you before his eyes for a pattern of the finest soldier in Ireland. Come and kiss your old mother, Dinny darlint. [O’Flaherty does so sheepishly.] That’s my own darling boy. And look at your fine new uniform stained already with the eggs you’ve been eating and the porter you’ve been drinking. [She takes out her handkerchief: spits on it: and scrubs his lapel with it.] Oh, it’s the untidy slovenly one you always were. There! It won’t be seen on the khaki: it’s not like the old red coat that would show up everything that dribbled down on it. [To Sir Pearce.] And they tell me down at the lodge that her ladyship is staying in London, and that Miss Agnes is to be married to a fine young nobleman. Oh, it’s your honor that is the lucky and happy father! It will be bad news for many of the young gentlemen of the quality round here, sir. There’s lots thought she was going to marry young Master Lawless

SIR PEARCE. What! That — that — that bosthoon!

MRS O’FLAHERTY [hilariously]. Let your honor alone for finding the right word! A big bosthoon he is indeed, your honor. Oh, to think of the times and times I have said that Miss Agnes would be my lady as her mother was before her! Didn’t I, Dinny?

SIR PEARCE. And now, Mrs. O’Flaherty, I daresay you have a great deal to say to Dennis that doesn’t concern me. I’ll just go in and order tea.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Oh, why would your honor disturb yourself? Sure I can take the boy into the yard.

SIR PEARCE. Not at all. It won’t disturb me in the least. And he’s too big a boy to be taken into the yard now. He has made a front seat for himself. Eh? [He goes into the house.]

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Sure he has that, your honor. God bless your honor! [The General being now out of hearing, she turns threateningly to her son with one of those sudden Irish changes of manner which amaze and scandalize less flexible nations, and exclaims.] And what do you mean, you lying young scald, by telling me you were going to fight agen the English? Did you take me for a fool that couldn’t find out, and the papers all full of you shaking hands with the English king at Buckingham Palace?

O’FLAHERTY. I didn’t shake hands with him: he shook hands with me. Could I turn on the man in his own house, before his own wife, with his money in my pocket and in yours, and throw his civility back in his face?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. You would take the hand of a tyrant red with the blood of Ireland —

O’FLAHERTY. Arra hold your nonsense, mother: he’s not half the tyrant you are, God help him. His hand was cleaner than mine that had the blood of his own relations on it, maybe.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [threateningly]. Is that a way to speak to your mother, you young spalpeen?

O’FLAHERTY [stoutly]. It is so, if you won’t talk sense to me. It’s a nice thing for a poor boy to be made much of by kings and queens, and shook hands with by the heighth of his country’s nobility in the capital cities of the world, and then to come home and be scolded and insulted by his own mother. I’ll fight for who I like; and I’ll shake hands with what kings I like; and if your own son is not good enough for you, you can go and look for another. Do you mind me now?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. And was it the Belgians learned you such brazen impudence?

O’FLAHERTY. The Belgians is good men; and the French ought to be more civil to them, let alone their being half murdered by the Boshes.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Good men is it! Good men! to come over here when they were wounded because it was a Catholic country, and then to go to the Protestant Church because it didn’t cost them anything, and some of them to never go near a church at all. That’s what you call good men!

O’FLAHERTY. Oh, you’re the mighty fine politician, aren’t you? Much you know about Belgians or foreign parts or the world you’re living in, God help you!

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Why wouldn’t I know better than you? Amment I your mother?

O’FLAHERTY. And if you are itself, how can you know what you never seen as well as me that was dug into the continent of Europe for six months, and was buried in the earth of it three times with the shells bursting on the top of me? I tell you I know what I’m about. I have my own reasons for taking part in this great conflict. I’d be ashamed to stay at home and not fight when everybody else is fighting.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. If you wanted to fight, why couldn’t you fight in the German army?

O’FLAHERTY. Because they only get a penny a day.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Well, and if they do itself, isn’t there the French army?

O’FLAHERTY. They only get a hapenny a day.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [much dashed]. Oh murder! They must be a mean lot, Dinny.

O’FLAHERTY [sarcastic]. Maybe you’d have me in the Turkish army, and worship the heathen Mahomet that put a corn in his ear and pretended it was a message from the heavens when the pigeon come to pick it out and eat it. I went where I could get the biggest allowance for you; and little thanks I get for it!

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Allowance, is it! Do you know what the thieving blackguards did on me? They came to me and they says, “Was your son a big eater?” they says. “Oh, he was that,” says I: “ten shillings a week wouldn’t keep him.” Sure I thought the more I said the more they’d give me. “Then,” says they, “that’s ten shillings a week off your allowance,” they says, “because you save that by the king feeding him.” “Indeed!” says I: “I suppose if I’d six sons, you’d stop three pound a week from me, and make out that I ought to pay you money instead of you paying me.” “There’s a fallacy in your argument,” they says.

O’FLAHERTY. A what?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. A fallacy: that’s the word he said. I says to him, “It’s a Pharisee I’m thinking you mean, sir; but you can keep your dirty money that your king grudges a poor old widow; and please God the English will be got yet for the deadly sin of oppressing the poor;” and with that I shut the door in his face.

O’FLAHERTY [furious]. Do you tell me they knocked ten shillings off you for my keep?

MRS O’FLAHERTY [soothing him]. No, darlint: they only knocked off half a crown. I put up with it because I’ve got the old age pension; and they know very well I’m only sixty-two; so I’ve the better of them by half a crown a week anyhow.

O’FLAHERTY. It’s a queer way of doing business. If they’d tell you straight out what they was going to give you, you wouldn’t mind; but if there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.

Teresa Driscoll, a parlor maid, comes from the house,

TERESA. You’re to come up to the drawing-room to have your tea, Mrs. O’Flaherty.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Mind you have a sup of good black tea for me in the kitchen afterwards, acushla. That washy drawing-room tea will give me the wind if I leave it on my stomach. [She goes into the house, leaving the two young people alone together.]

O’FLAHERTY. Is that yourself, Tessie? And how are you?

TERESA. Nicely, thank you. And how’s yourself?

O’FLAHERTY. Finely, thank God. [He produces a gold chain.] Look what I’ve brought you, Tessie.

TERESA [shrinking]. Sure I don’t like to touch it, Denny. Did you take it off a dead man?

O’FLAHERTY. No: I took it off a live one; and thankful he was to me to be alive and kept a prisoner in ease and comfort, and me left fighting in peril of my life.

TERESA [taking it]. Do you think it’s real gold, Denny?

O’FLAHERTY. It’s real German gold, anyhow.

TERESA. But German silver isn’t real, Denny.

O’FLAHERTY [his face darkening]. Well, it’s the best the Bosh could do for me, anyhow.

TERESA. Do you think I might take it to the jeweller next market day and ask him?

O’FLAHERTY [sulkily]. You may take it to the divil if you like.

TERESA. You needn’t lose your temper about it. I only thought I’d like to know. The nice fool I’d look if I went about showing off a chain that turned out to be only brass!

O’FLAHERTY. I think you might say Thank you.

TERESA. Do you? I think you might have said something more to me than “Is that yourself?” You couldn’t say less to the postman.

O’FLAHERTY [his brow clearing]. Oh, is that what’s the matter? Here! come and take the taste of ther brass out of my mouth. [He seizes her and kisses her.]

Teresa, without losing her Irish dignity, takes the kiss as appreciatively as a connoisseur might take a glass of wine, and sits down with him on the garden seat,

TERESA [as he squeezes her waist]. Thank God the priest can’t see us here!

O’FLAHERTY. It’s little they care for priests in France, alanna.

TERESA. And what had the queen on her, Denny, when she spoke to you in the palace?

O’FLAHERTY. She had a bonnet on without any strings to it. And she had a plakeen of embroidery down her bosom. And she had her waist where it used to be, and not where the other ladies had it. And she had little brooches in her ears, though she hadn’t half the jewelry of Mrs Sullivan that keeps the popshop in Drumpogue. And she dresses her hair down over her forehead, in a fringe like. And she has an Irish look about her eyebrows. And she didn’t know what to say to me, poor woman! and I didn’t know what to say to her, God help me!

TERESA. You’ll have a pension now with the Cross, won’t you, Denny?

O’FLAHERTY. Sixpence three farthings a day.

TERESA. That isn’t much.

O’FLAHERTY. I take out the rest in glory.

TERESA. And if you’re wounded, you’ll have a wound pension, won’t you?

O’FLAHERTY. I will, please God.

TERESA. You’re going out again, aren’t you, Denny?

O’FLAHERTY. I can’t help myself. I’d be shot for a deserter if I didn’t go; and maybe I’ll be shot by the Boshes if I do go; so between the two of them I’m nicely fixed up.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [calling from within the house]. Tessie! Tessie darlint!

TERESA [disengaging herself from his arm and rising]. I’m wanted for the tea table. You’ll have a pension anyhow, Denny, won’t you, whether you’re wounded or not?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Come, child, come.

TERESA [impatiently]. Oh, sure I’m coming. [She tries to smile at Denny, not very convincingly, and hurries into the house.]

O’FLAHERTY [alone]. And if I do get a pension itself, the divil a penny of it you’ll ever have the spending of.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [as she comes from the porch]. Oh, it’s a shame for you to keep the girl from her juties, Dinny. You might get her into trouble.

O’FLAHERTY. Much I care whether she gets into trouble or not! I pity the man that gets her into trouble. He’ll get himself into worse.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. What’s that you tell me? Have you been falling out with her, and she a girl with a fortune of ten pounds?

O’FLAHERTY. Let her keep her fortune. I wouldn’t touch her with the tongs if she had thousands and millions.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Oh fie for shame, Dinny! why would you say the like of that of a decent honest girl, and one of the Driscolls too?

O’FLAHERTY. Why wouldn’t I say it? She’s thinking of nothing but to get me out there again to be wounded so that she may spend my pension, bad scran to her!

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Why, what’s come over you, child, at all at all?

O’FLAHERTY. Knowledge and wisdom has come over me with pain and fear and trouble. I’ve been made a fool of and imposed upon all my life. I thought that covetious sthreal in there was a walking angel; and now if ever I marry at all I’ll marry a Frenchwoman.

MRS O’FLARERTY [fiercely]. You’ll not, so; and don’t you dar repeat such a thing to me.

O’FLAHERTY. Won’t I, faith! I’ve been as good as married to a couple of them already.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. The Lord be praised, what wickedness have you been up to, you young blackguard?

O’FLAHERTY. One of them Frenchwomen would cook you a meal twice in the day and all days and every day that Sir Pearce himself might go begging through Ireland for, and never see the like of. I’ll have a French wife, I tell you; and when I settle down to be a farmer I’ll have a French farm, with a field as big as the continent of Europe that ten of your dirty little fields here wouldn’t so much as fill the ditch of.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [furious]. Then it’s a French mother you may go look for; for I’m done with you.

O’FLAHERTY. And it’s no great loss you’d be if it wasn’t for my natural feelings for you; for it’s only a silly ignorant old countrywoman you are with all your fine talk about Ireland: you that never stepped beyond the few acres of it you were born on!

MRS O’FLAHERTY [tottering to the garden seat and showing signs of breaking down]. Dinny darlint, why are you like this to me? What’s happened to you?

O’FLAHERTY [gloomily]. What’s happened to everybody? that’s what I want to know. What’s happened to you that I thought all the world of and was afeard of? What’s happened to Sir Pearce, that I thought was a great general, and that I now see to be no more fit to command an army than an old hen? What’s happened to Tessie, that I was mad to marry a year ago, and that I wouldn’t take now with all Ireland for her fortune? I tell you the world’s creation is crumbling in ruins about me; and then you come and ask what’s happened to me?

MRS O’FLAHERTY [giving way to wild grief]. Ochone! ochone! my son’s turned agen me. Oh, what’ll I do at all at all? Oh! oh! oh! oh!

SIR PEARCE [running out of the house]. What’s this infernal noise? What on earth is the matter?

O’FLAHERTY. Arra hold your whisht, mother. Don’t you see his honor?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Oh, Sir, I’m ruined and destroyed. Oh, won’t you speak to Dinny, Sir: I’m heart scalded with him. He wants to marry a Frenchwoman on me, and to go away and be a foreigner and desert his mother and betray his country. It’s mad he is with the roaring of the cannons and he killing the Germans and the Germans killing him, bad cess to them! My boy is taken from me and turned agen me; and who is to take care of me in my old age after all I’ve done for him, ochone! ochone!

O’FLAHERTY. Hold your noise, I tell you. Who’s going to leave you? I’m going to take you with me. There now: does that satisfy you?

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Is it take me into a strange land among heathens and pagans and savages, and me not knowing a word of their language nor them of mine?

O’FLAHERTY. A good job they don’t: maybe they’ll think you’re talking sense.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Ask me to die out of Ireland, is it? and the angels not to find me when they come for me!

O’FLAHERTY. And would you ask me to live in Ireland where I’ve been imposed on and kept in ignorance, and to die where the divil himself wouldn’t take me as a gift, let alone the blessed angels? You can come or stay. You can take your old way or take my young way. But stick in this place I will not among a lot of good-for-nothing divils that’ll not do a hand’s turn but watch the grass growing and build up the stone wall where the cow walked through it. And Sir Horace Plunkett breaking his heart all the time telling them how they might put the land into decent tillage like the French and Belgians.

SIR PEARCE. Yes, he’s quite right, you know, Mrs O’Flaherty: quite right there.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Well, sir, please God the war will last a long time yet; and maybe I’ll die before it’s over and the separation allowance stops.

O’FLAHERTY. That’s all you care about. It’s nothing but milch cows we men are for the women, with their separation allowances, ever since the war began, bad luck to them that made it!

TERESA [coming from the porch between the General and Mrs O’Flaherty.] Hannah sent me out for to tell you, sir, that the tea will be black and the cake not fit to eat with the cold if yous all don’t come at wanst.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [breaking out again]. Oh, Tessie darlint, what have you been saying to Dinny at all at all? Oh! Oh —

SIR PEARCE [out of patience]. You can’t discuss that here. We shall have Tessie beginning now.

O’FLAHERTY. That’s right, sir: drive them in.

TERESA. I haven’t said a word to him. He —

SIR PEARCE. Hold your tongue; and go in and attend to your business at the tea table.

TERESA. But amment I telling your honor that I never said a word to him? He gave me a beautiful gold chain. Here it is to show your honor that it’s no lie I’m telling you.

SIR PEARCE. What’s this, O’Flaherty? You’ve been looting some unfortunate officer.

O’FLAHERTY. No, sir: I stole it from him of his own accord.

MRS O’FLAHERTY. Wouldn’t your honor tell him that his mother has the first call on it? What would a slip of a girl like that be doing with a gold chain round her neck?

TERESA [venomously]. Anyhow, I have a neck to put it round and not a hank of wrinkles.

At this unfortunate remark, Mrs O’Flaherty bounds from her seat: and an appalling tempest of wordy wrath breaks out. The remonstrances and commands of the General, and the protests and menaces of O’Flaherty, only increase the hubbub. They are soon all speaking at once at the top of their voices.

MRS O’FLAHERTY [solo]. You impudent young heifer, how dar you say such a thing to me? [Teresa retorts furiously: the men interfere: and the solo becomes a quartet, fortissimo.] I’ve a good mind to clout your ears for you to teach you manners. Be ashamed of yourself, do; and learn to know who you’re speaking to. That I maytn’t sin! but I don’t know what the good God was thinking about when he made the like of you. Let me not see you casting sheep’s eyes at my son again. There never was an O’Flaherty yet that would demean himself by keeping company with a dirty Driscoll; and if I see you next or nigh my house I’ll put you in the ditch with a flea in your ear: mind that now.

TERESA. Is it me you offer such a name to, you fou-mouthed, dirty-minded, lying, sloothering old sow, you? I wouldn’t soil my tongue by calling you in your right name and telling Sir Pearce what’s the common talk of the town about you. You and your O’Flahertys! setting yourself up agen the Driscolls that would never lower themselves to be seen in conversation with you at the fair. You can keep your ugly stingy lump of a son; for what is he but a common soldier? and God help the girl that gets him, say I! So the back of my hand to you, Mrs O’Flaherty; and that the cat may tear your ugly old face!

SIR PEARCE. Silence. Tessie, did you hear me ordering you to go into the house? Mrs O’Flaherty! [Louder.] Mrs O’Flaherty!! Will you just listen to me one moment? Please. [Furiously.] Do you hear me speaking to you, woman? Are you human beings or are you wild beasts? Stop that noise immediately: do you hear? [Yelling.] Are you going to do what I order you, or are you not? Scandalous! Disgraceful! This comes of being too familiar with you. O’Flaherty, shove them into the house. Out with the whole damned pack of you.

O’FLAHERTY [to the women]. Here now: none of that, none of that. Go easy, I tell you. Hold your whisht, mother, will you, or you’ll be sorry for it after. [To Teresa.] Is that the way for a decent young girl to speak? [Despairingly.] Oh, for the Lord’s sake, shut up, will yous? Have you no respect for yourselves or your betters? [Peremptorily.] Let me have no more of it, I tell you. Och! the divil’s in the whole crew of you. In with you into the house this very minute and tear one another’s eyes out in the kitchen if you like. In with you.

The two men seize the two women, and push them, still violently abusing one another, into the house. Sir Pearce slams the door upon them savagely. Immediately a heavenly silence falls on the summer afternoon. The two sit down out of breath: and for a long time nothing is said. Sir Pearce sits on an iron chair. O’Flaherty sits on the garden seat. The thrush begins to sing melodiously. O’Flaherty cocks his ears, and looks up at it. A smile spreads over his troubled features. Sir Pearce, with a long sigh, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it.

O’FLAHERTY [idyllically]. What a discontented sort of an animal a man is, sir! Only a month ago, I was in the quiet of the country out at the front, with not a sound except the birds and the bellow of a cow in the distance as it might be, and the shrapnel making little clouds in the heavens, and the shells whistling, and maybe a yell or two when one of us was hit; and would you believe it, sir, I complained of the noise and wanted to have a peaceful hour at home. Well: them two has taught me a lesson. This morning, sir, when I was telling the boys here how I was longing to be back taking my part for king and country with the others, I was lying, as you well knew, sir. Now I can go and say it with a clear conscience. Some likes war’s alarums; and some likes home life. I’ve tried both, sir; and I’m for war’s alarums now. I always was a quiet lad by natural disposition.

SIR PEARCE. Strictly between ourselves, O’Flaherty, and as one soldier to another [O’Flaherty salutes, but without stiffening], do you think we should have got an army without conscription if domestic life had been as happy as people say it is?

O’FLAHERTY. Well, between you and me and the wall, Sir Pearce, I think the less we say about that until the war’s over, the better.

He winks at the General. The General strikes a match. The thrush sings. A jay laughs. The conversation drops.

THE INCA OF PERUSALEM

AN ALMOST HISTORICAL COMEDIETTA

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE PLAY

THE INCA OF PERUSALEM:

AN ALMOST HISTORICAL COMEDIETTA

I must remind the reader that this playlet was written when its principal character, far from being a fallen foe and virtually a prisoner in our victorious hands, was still the Caesar whose legions we were resisting with our hearts in our mouths. Many were so horribly afraid of him that they could not forgive me for not being afraid of him: I seemed to be trifling heartlessly with a deadly peril. I knew better; and I have represented Caesar as knowing better himself. But it was one of the quaintnesses of popular feeling during the war that anyone who breathed the slightest doubt of the absolute perfection of German organization, the Machiavellian depth of German diplomacy, the omniscience of German science, the equipment of every German with a complete philosophy of history, and the consequent hopelessness of overcoming so magnificently accomplished an enemy except by the sacrifice of every recreative activity to incessant and vehement war work, including a heartbreaking mass of fussing and cadging and bluffing that did nothing but waste our energies and tire our resolution, was called a pro-German.

Now that this is all over, and the upshot of the fighting has shown that we could quite well have afforded to laugh at the doomed Inca, I am in another difficulty. I may be supposed to be hitting Caesar when he is down. That is why I preface the play with this reminder that when it was written he was not down. To make quite sure, I have gone through the proof sheets very carefully, and deleted everything that could possibly be mistaken for a foul blow. I have of course maintained the ancient privilege of comedy to chasten Caesar’s foibles by laughing at them, whilst introducing enough obvious and outrageous fiction to relieve both myself and my model from the obligations and responsibilities of sober history and biography. But I should certainly put the play in the fire instead of publishing it if it contained a word against our defeated enemy that I would not have written in 1913.

The Inca of Perusalem was performed for the first time in England by the Pioneer Players at the Criterion Theatre, London, on 16th December, 1917, with Gertrude Kingston as Ermyntrude, Helen Morris as the Princess, Nigel Playfair as the waiter, Alfred Drayton as the hotel manager, C. Wordley Hulse as the Archdeacon, and Randle Ayrton as the Inca.

PROLOGUE

The tableau curtains are closed. An English archdeacon comes through them in a condition of extreme irritation. He speaks through the curtains to someone behind them.

THE ARCHDEACON. Once for all, Ermyntrude, I cannot afford to maintain you in your present extravagance. [He goes to a flight of steps leading to the stalls and sits down disconsolately on the top step. A fashionably dressed lady comes through the curtains and contemplates him with patient obstinacy. He continues, grumbling.] An English clergyman’s daughter should be able to live quite respectably and comfortably on an allowance of £150 a year, wrung with great difficulty from the domestic budget.

ERMYNTRUDE. You are not a common clergyman: you are an archdeacon.

THE ARCHDEACON [angrily]. That does not affect my emoluments to the extent of enabling me to support a daughter whose extravagance would disgrace a royal personage. [Scrambling to his feet and scolding at her.] What do you mean by it, Miss?

ERMYNTRUDE. Oh really, father! Miss! Is that the way to talk to a widow?

THE ARCHDEACON. Is that the way to talk to a father? Your marriage was a most disastrous imprudence. It gave you habits that are absolutely beyond your means — I mean beyond my means: you have no means. Why did you not marry Matthews: the best curate I ever had?

ERMYNTRUDE. I wanted to; and you wouldn’t let me. You insisted on my marrying Roosenhonkers-Pipstein.

THE ARCHDEACON. I had to do the best for you, my child. Roosenhonkers-Pipstein was a millionaire.

ERMYNTRUDE. How did you know he was a millionaire?

THE ARCHDEACON. He came from America. Of course he was a millionaire. Besides, he proved to my solicitors that he had fifteen million dollars when you married him.

ERYNTRUDE. His solicitors proved to me that he had sixteen millions when he died. He was a millionaire to the last.

THE ARCHDEACON. O Mammon, Mammon! I am punished now for bowing the knee to him. Is there nothing left of your settlement? Fifty thousand dollars a year it secured to you, as we all thought. Only half the securities could be called speculative. The other half were gilt-edged. What has become of it all?

ERMYNTRUDE. The speculative ones were not paid up; and the gilt-edged ones just paid the calls on them until the whole show burst up.

THE ARCHDEACON. Ermyntrude: what expressions!

ERMYNTRUDE. Oh bother! If you had lost ten thousand a year what expressions would you use, do you think? The long and the short of it is that I can’t live in the squalid way you are accustomed to.

THE ARCHDEACON. Squalid!

ERMYNTRUDE. I have formed habits of comfort.

THE ARCHDEACON. Comfort!!

ERMYNTRUDE. Well, elegance if you like. Luxury, if you insist. Call it what you please. A house that costs less than a hundred thousand dollars a year to run is intolerable to me.

THE ARCHDEACON. Then, my dear, you had better become lady’s maid to a princess until you can find another millionaire to marry you.

ERMYNTRUDE. That’s an idea. I will. [She vanishes through the curtains.]

THE ARCHDEACON. What! Come back. Come back this instant. [The lights are lowered.] Oh, very well: I have nothing more to say. [He descends the steps into the auditorium and makes for the door, grumbling all the time.] Insane, senseless extravagance! [Barking.] Worthlessness!! [Muttering.] I will not bear it any longer. Dresses, hats, furs, gloves, motor rides: one bill after another: money going like water. No restraint, no self-control, no decency. [Shrieking.] I say, no decency! [Muttering again.] Nice state of things we are coming to! A pretty world! But I simply will not bear it. She can do as she likes. I wash my hands of her: I am not going to die in the workhouse for any good-for-nothing, undutiful, spendthrift daughter; and the sooner that is understood by everybody the better for all par —— [He is by this time out of hearing in the corridor.]

THE PLAY

A hotel sitting room. A table in the centre. On it a telephone. Two chairs at it, opposite one another. Behind it, the door. The fireplace has a mirror in the mantelpiece.

A spinster Princess, hatted and gloved, is ushered in by the hotel manager, spruce and artifically bland by professional habit, but treating his customer with a condescending affability which sails very close to the east wind of insolence.

THE MANAGER. I am sorry I am unable to accommodate Your Highness on the first floor.

THE PRINCESS [very shy and nervous.] Oh, please don’t mention it. This is quite nice. Very nice. Thank you very much.

THE MANAGER. We could prepare a room in the annexe —

THE PRINCESS. Oh no. This will do very well.

She takes of her gloves and hat: puts them on the table; and sits down.

THE MANAGER. The rooms are quite as good up here. There is less noise; and there is the lift. If Your Highness desires anything, there is the telephone —

THE PRINCESS. Oh, thank you, I don’t want anything. The telephone is so difficult: I am not accustomed to it.

THE MANAGER. Can I take any order? Some tea?

THE PRINCESS. Oh, thank you. Yes: I should like some tea, if I might — if it would not be too much trouble.

He goes out. The telephone rings. The Princess starts out of her chair, terrified, and recoils as far as possible from the instrument.

THE PRINCESS. Oh dear! [It rings again. She looks scared. It rings again. She approaches it timidly. It rings again. She retreats hastily. It rings repeatedly. She runs to it in desperation and puts the receiver to her ear.] Who is there? What do I do? I am not used to the telephone: I don’t know how — What! Oh, I can hear you speaking quite distinctly. [She sits down, delighted, and settles herself for a conversation.] How wonderful! What! A lady? Oh! a person. Oh, yes: I know. Yes, please, send her up. Have my servants finished their lunch yet? Oh no: please don’t disturb them: I’d rather not. It doesn’t matter. Thank you. What? Oh yes, it’s quite easy. I had no idea — am I to hang it up just as it was? Thank you. [She hangs it up.]

Ermyntrude enters, presenting a plain and staid appearance in a long straight waterproof with a hood over her head gear. She comes to the end of the table opposite to that at which the Princess is seated.

THE PRINCESS. Excuse me. I have been talking through the telephone: and I heard quite well, though I have never ventured before. Won’t you sit down?

ERMYNTRUDE. No, thank you, Your Highness. I am only a lady’s maid. I understood you wanted one.

THE PRINCESS. Oh no: you mustn’t think I want one. It’s so unpatriotic to want anything now, on account of the war, you know. I sent my maid away as a public duty; and now she has married a soldier and is expecting a war baby. But I don’t know how to do without her. I’ve tried my very best; but somehow it doesn’t answer: everybody cheats me; and in the end it isn’t any saving. So I’ve made up my mind to sell my piano and have a maid. That will be a real saving, because I really don’t care a bit for music, though of course one has to pretend to. Don’t you think so?

ERMYNTRUDE. Certainly I do, Your Highness. Nothing could be more correct. Saving and self-denial both at once; and an act of kindness to me, as I am out of place.

THE PRINCESS. I’m so glad you see it in that way. Er — you won’t mind my asking, will you? — how did you lose your place?

ERMYNTRUDE. The war, Your Highness, the war.

THE PRINCESS. Oh yes, of course. But how —

ERMYNTRUDE [taking out her handkerchief and showing signs of grief]. My poor mistress —

THE PRINCESS. Oh please say no more. Don’t think about it. So tactless of me to mention it.

ERMYNTRUDE [mastering her emotion and smiling through her tears]. Your Highness is too good.

THE PRINCESS. Do you think you could be happy with me? I attach such importance to that.

ERMYNTRUDE [gushing]. Oh, I know — I shall.

THE PRINCESS. You must not expect too much. There is my uncle. He is very severe and hasty; and he is my guardian. I once had a maid I liked very much; but he sent her away the very first time.

ERMYNTRUDE. The first time of what, Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS. Oh, something she did. I am sure she had never done it before; and I know she would never have done it again, she was so truly contrite and nice about it.

ERMYNTRUDE. About what, Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS. Well, she wore my jewels and one of my dresses at a rather improper ball with her young man; and my uncle saw her.

ERYMNTRUDE. Then he was at the ball too, Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS [struck by the inference]. I suppose he must have been. I wonder! You know, it’s very sharp of you to find that out. I hope you are not too sharp.

ERMYNTRUDE. A lady’s maid has to be, Your Highness. [She produces some letters.] Your Highness wishes to see my testimonials, no doubt. I have one from an Archdeacon. [She proffers the letters.]

THE PRINCESS [taking them]. Do archdeacons have maids? How curious!

ERMYNTRUDE. No, Your Highness. They have daughters. I have first-rate testimonials from the Archdeacon and from his daughter.

THE PRINCESS [reading them]. The daughter says you are in every respect a treasure. The Archdeacon says he would have kept you if he could possibly have afforded it. Most satisfactory, I’m sure.

ERMYNTRUDE. May I regard myself as engaged then, Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS [alarmed]. Oh, I’m sure I don’t know. If you like, of course; but do you think I ought to?

ERMYNTRUDE. Naturally I think Your Highness ought to, most decidedly.

THE PRINCESS. Oh well, if you think that, I daresay you’re quite right. You’ll excuse my mentioning it, I hope; but what wages — er — ?

ERMYNTRUDE. The same as the maid who went to the ball. Your Highness need not make any change.

THE PRINCESS. M’yes. Of course she began with less. But she had such a number of relatives to keep! It was quite heartbreaking: I had to raise her wages again and again.

ERMYNTRUDE. I shall be quite content with what she began on; and I have no relatives dependent on me. And I am willing to wear my own dresses at balls.

THE PRINCESS. I am sure nothing could be fairer than that. My uncle can’t object to that, can he?

ERMYNTRUDE. If he does, Your Highness, ask him to speak to me about it. I shall regard it as part of my duties to speak to your uncle about matters of business.

THE PRINCESS. Would you? You must be frightfully courageous.

ERMYNTRUDE. May I regard myself as engaged, Your Highness? I should like to set about my duties immediately.

THE PRINCESS. Oh yes, I think so. Oh certainly. I —

A waiter comes in with the tea. He places the tray on the table.

THE PRINCESS. Oh, thank you.

ERMYNTRUDE [raising the cover from the tea cake and looking at it]. How long has that been standing at the top of the stairs?

THE PRINCESS [terrified]. Oh please! It doesn’t matter.

THE WAITER. It has not been waiting. Straight from the kitchen, madam, believe me.

ERMYNTRUDE. Send the manager here.

THE WAITER. The manager! What do you want with the manager?

ERMYNTRUDE. He will tell you when I have done with him. How dare you treat Her Highness in this disgraceful manner? What sort of pothouse is this? Where did you learn to speak to persons of quality? Take away your cold tea and cold cake instantly. Give them to the chambermaid you were flirting with whilst Her Highness was waiting. Order some fresh tea at once; and do not presume to bring it yourself: have it brought by a civil waiter who is accustomed to wait on ladies, and not, like you, on commercial travellers.

THE WAITER. Alas, madam, I am not accustomed to wait on anybody. Two years ago I was an eminent medical man, my waiting-room was crowded with the flower of the aristocracy and the higher bourgeoisie from nine to six every day. But the war came; and my patients were ordered to give up their luxuries. They gave up their doctors, but kept their week-end hotels, closing every career to me except the career of a waiter. [He puts his fingers on the teapot to test its temperature, and automatically takes out his watch with the other hand as if to count the teapot’s pulse.] You are right: the tea is cold: it was made by the wife of a once fashionable architect. The cake is only half toasted: what can you expect from a ruined west-end tailor whose attempt to establish a second-hand business failed last Tuesday week? Have you the heart to complain to the manager? Have we not suffered enough? Are our miseries nev —— [the manager enters]. Oh Lord! here he is. [The waiter withdraws abjectly, taking the tea tray with him.]

THE MANAGER. Pardon, Your Highness; but I have received an urgent inquiry for rooms from an English family of importance; and I venture to ask you to let me know how long you intend to honor us with your presence.

THE PRINCESS [rising anxiously]. Oh! am I in the way?

ERMYNTRUDE [sternly]. Sit down, madam. [The Princess sits down forlornly. Ermyntrude turns imperiously to the Manager.] Her Highness will require this room for twenty minutes.

THE MANAGER. Twenty minutes!

ERMYNTRUDE. Yes: it will take fully that time to find a proper apartment in a respectable hotel.

THE MANAGER. I do not understand.

ERMYNTRUDE. You understand perfectly. How dare you offer Her Highness a room on the second floor?

THE MANAGER. But I have explained. The first floor is occupied. At least —

ERMYNTRUDE. Well? at least?

THE MANAGER. It is occupied.

ERMYNTRUDE. Don’t you dare tell Her Highness a falsehood. It is not occupied. You are saving it up for the arrival of the five-fifteen express, from which you hope to pick up some fat armaments contractor who will drink all the bad champagne in your cellar at 5 francs a bottle, and pay twice over for everything because he is in the same hotel with Her Highness, and can boast of having turned her out of the best rooms.

THE MANAGER. But Her Highness was so gracious. I did not know that Her Highness was at all particular.

ERMYNTRUDE. And you take advantage of Her Highness’s graciousness. You impose on her with your stories. You give her a room not fit for a dog. You send cold tea to her by a decayed professional person disguised as a waiter. But don’t think you can trifle with me. I am a lady’s maid; and I know the ladies’ maids and valets of all the aristocracies of Europe and all the millionaires of America. When I expose your hotel as the second-rate little hole it is, not a soul above the rank of a curate with a large family will be seen entering it. I shake its dust off my feet. Order the luggage to be taken down at once.

THE MANAGER [appealing to the Princess]. Can Your Highness believe this of me? Have I had the misfortune to offend Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS. Oh no. I am quite satisfied. Please —

ERMYNTRUDE. Is Your Highness dissatisfied with me?

THE PRINCESS [intimidated]. Oh no: please don’t think that. I only meant —

ERMYNTRUDE [to the manager]. You hear. Perhaps you think Her Highness is going to do the work of teaching you your place herself, instead of leaving it to her maid.

THE MANAGER. Oh please, mademoiselle. Believe me: our only wish is to make you perfectly comfortable. But in consequence of the war, all royal personages now practise a rigid economy, and desire us to treat them like their poorest subjects.

THE PRINCESS. Oh yes. You are quite right —

ERMYNTRUDE [interrupting]. There! Her Highness forgives you; but don’t do it again. Now go downstairs, my good man, and get that suite on the first floor ready for us. And send some proper tea. And turn on the heating apparatus until the temperature in the rooms is comfortably warm. And have hot water put in all the bedrooms —

THE MANAGER. There are basins with hot and cold taps.

ERMYNTRUDE [scornfully]. Yes: there WOULD be. Suppose we must put up with that: sinks in our rooms, and pipes that rattle and bang and guggle all over the house whenever anyone washes his hands. I know.

THE MANAGER [gallant]. You are hard to please, mademoiselle.

ERMYNTRUDE. No harder than other people. But when I’m not pleased I’m not too ladylike to say so. That’s all the difference. There is nothing more, thank you.

The Manager shrugs his shoulders resignedly; makes a deep bow to the Princess; goes to the door; wafts a kiss surreptitiously to Ermyntrude; and goes out.

THE PRINCESS. It’s wonderful! How have you the courage?

ERMYNTRUDE. In Your Highness’s service I know no fear. Your Highness can leave all unpleasant people to me.

THE PRINCESS. How I wish I could! The most dreadful thing of all I have to go through myself.

ERMYNTRUDE. Dare I ask what it is, Your Highness?

THE PRINCESS. I’m going to be married. I’m to be met here and married to a man I never saw. A boy! A boy who never saw me! One of the sons of the Inca of Perusalem.

ERMYNTRUDE. Indeed? Which son?

THE PRINCESS. I don’t know. They haven’t settled which. It’s a dreadful thing to be a princess: they just marry you to anyone they like. The Inca is to come and look at me, and pick out whichever of his sons he thinks will suit. And then I shall be an alien enemy everywhere except in Perusalem, because the Inca has made war on everybody. And I shall have to pretend that everybody has made war on him. It’s too bad.

ERMYNTRUDE. Still, a husband is a husband. I wish I had one.

THE PRINCESS. Oh, how can you say that! I’m afraid you’re not a nice woman.

ERMYNTRUDE. Your Highness is provided for. I’m not.

THE PRINCESS. Even if you could bear to let a man touch you, you shouldn’t say so.

ERMYNTRUDE. I shall not say so again, Your Highness, except perhaps to the man.

THE PRINCESS. It’s too dreadful to think of. I wonder you can be so coarse. I really don’t think you’ll suit. I feel sure now that you know more about men than you should.

ERMYNTRUDE. I am a widow, Your Highness.

THE PRINCESS [overwhelmed]. Oh, I BEG your pardon. Of course I ought to have known you would not have spoken like that if you were not married. That makes it all right, doesn’t it? I’m so sorry.

The Manager returns, white, scared, hardly able to speak.

THE MANAGER. Your Highness, an officer asks to see you on behalf of the Inca of Perusalem.

THE PRINCESS [rising distractedly]. Oh, I can’t, really. Oh, what shall I do?

THE MANAGER. On important business, he says, Your Highness. Captain Duval.

ERMYNTRUDE. Duval! Nonsense! The usual thing. It is the Inca himself, incognito.

THE PRINCESS. Oh, send him away. Oh, I’m so afraid of the Inca. I’m not properly dressed to receive him; and he is so particular: he would order me to stay in my room for a week. Tell him to call tomorrow: say I’m ill in bed. I can’t: I won’t: I daren’t: you must get rid of him somehow.

ERMYNTRUDE. Leave him to me, Your Highness.

THE PRINCESS. You’d never dare!

ERMYNTRUDE. I am an Englishwoman, Your Highness, and perfectly capable of tackling ten Incas if necessary. I will arrange the matter. [To the Manager.] Show Her Highness to her bedroom; and then show Captain Duval in here.

THE PRINCESS. Oh, thank you so much. [She goes to the door. Ermyntrude, noticing that she has left her hat and gloves on the table, runs after her with them.] Oh, THANK you. And oh, please, if I must have one of his sons, I should like a fair one that doesn’t shave, with soft hair and a beard. I couldn’t bear being kissed by a bristly person. [She runs out, the Manager bowing as she passes. He follows her.]

Ermyntrude whips off her waterproof; hides it; and gets herself swiftly into perfect trim at the mirror, before the Manager, with a large jewel case in his hand, returns, ushering in the Inca.

THE MANAGER. Captain Duval.

The Inca, in military uniform, advances with a marked and imposing stage walk; stops; orders the trembling Manager by a gesture to place the jewel case on the table; dismisses him with a frown; touches his helmet graciously to Ermyntrude; and takes off his cloak.

THE INCA. I beg you, madam, to be quite at your ease, and to speak to me without ceremony.

ERMYNTRUDE [moving haughtily and carelessly to the table]. I hadn’t the slightest intention of treating you with ceremony. [She sits down: a liberty which gives him a perceptible shock.] I am quite at a loss to imagine why I should treat a perfect stranger named Duval: a captain! almost a subaltern! with the smallest ceremony.

THE INCA. That is true. I had for the moment forgotten my position.

ERMYNTRUDE. It doesn’t matter. You may sit down.

THE INCA [frowning.] What!

ERMYNTRUDE. I said, you...may...sit...down.

THE INCA. Oh. [His moustache droops. He sits down.]

ERMYNTRUDE. What is your business?

THE INCA. I come on behalf of the Inca of Perusalem.

ERMYNTRUDE. The Allerhochst?

THE INCA. Precisely.

ERMYNTRUDE. I wonder does he feel ridiculous when people call him the Allerhochst.

THE INCA [surprised]. Why should he? He IS the Allerhochst.

ERMYNTRUDE. Is he nice looking?

THE INCA. I — er. Er — I. I — er. I am not a good judge.

ERMYNTRUDE. They say he takes himself very seriously.

THE INCA. Why should he not, madam? Providence has entrusted to his family the care of a mighty empire. He is in a position of half divine, half paternal, responsibility towards sixty millions of people, whose duty it is to die for him at the word of command. To take himself otherwise than seriously would be blasphemous. It is a punishable offence — severely punishable — in Perusalem. It is called Incadisparagement.

ERMYNTRUDE. How cheerful! Can he laugh?

THE INCA. Certainly, madam. [He laughs, harshly and mirthlessly.] Ha ha! Ha ha ha!

ERMYNTRUDE [frigidly]. I asked could the Inca laugh. I did not ask could you laugh.

THE INCA. That is true, madam. [Chuckling.] Devilish amusing, that! [He laughs, genially and sincerely, and becomes a much more agreeable person.] Pardon me: I am now laughing because I cannot help it. I am amused. The other was merely an imitation: a failure, I admit.

ERMYNTRUDE. You intimated that you had some business?

THE INCA [producing a very large jewel case, and relapsing into solemnity.] I am instructed by the Allerhochst to take a careful note of your features and figure, and, if I consider them satisfactory, to present you with this trifling token of His Imperial Majesty’s regard. I do consider them satisfactory. Allow me [he opens the jewel case and presents it.]

ERMYNTRUDE [staring at the contents]. What awful taste he must have! I can’t wear that.

THE INCA [reddening]. Take care, madam! This brooch was designed by the Inca himself. Allow me to explain the design. In the centre, the shield of Arminius. The ten surrounding medallions represent the ten castles of His Majesty. The rim is a piece of the telephone cable laid by His Majesty across the Shipskeel canal. The pin is a model in miniature of the sword of Henry the Birdcatcher.

ERMYNTRUDE. Miniature! It must be bigger than the original. My good man, you don’t expect me to wear this round my neck: it’s as big as a turtle. [He shuts the case with an angry snap.] How much did it cost?

THE INCA. For materials and manufacture alone, half a million Perusalem dollars, madam. The Inca’s design constitutes it a work of art. As such, it is now worth probably ten million dollars.

ERMYNTRUDE. Give it to me [she snatches it]. I’ll pawn it and buy something nice with the money.

THE INCA. Impossible, madam. A design by the Inca must not be exhibited for sale in the shop window of a pawnbroker. [He flings himself into his chair, fuming.]

ERMYNTRUDE. So much the better. The Inca will have to redeem it to save himself from that disgrace; and the poor pawnbroker will get his money back. Nobody would buy it, you know.

THE INCA. May I ask why?

ERMYNTRUDL. Well, look at it! Just look at it! I ask you!

THE INCA [his moustache drooping ominously]. I am sorry to have to report to the Inca that you have no soul for fine art. [He rises sulkily.] The position of daughter-in-law to the Inca is not compatible with the tastes of a pig. [He attempts to take back the brooch.]

ERMYNTRUDE [rising and retreating behind her chair with the brooch]. Here! you let that brooch alone. You presented it to me on behalf of the Inca. It is mine. You said my appearance was satisfactory.

THE INCA. Your appearance is not satisfactory. The Inca would not allow his son to marry you if the boy were on a desert island and you were the only other human being on it [he strides up the room.]

ERMYNTRUDE [calmly sitting down and replacing the case on the table]. How could he? There would be no clergyman to marry us. It would have to be quite morganatic.

THE INCA [returning]. Such an expression is out of place in the mouth of a princess aspiring to the highest destiny on earth. You have the morals of a dragoon. [She receives this with a shriek of laughter. He struggles with his sense of humor.] At the same time [he sits down] there is a certain coarse fun in the idea which compels me to smile [he turns up his moustache and smiles.]

ERMYNTRUDE. When I marry the Inca’s son, Captain, I shall make the Inca order you to cut off that moustache. It is too irresistible. Doesn’t it fascinate everyone in Perusalem?

THE INCA [leaning forward to her energetically]. By all the thunders of Thor, madam, it fascinates the whole world.

ERMYNTRUDE. What I like about you, Captain Duval, is your modesty.

THE INCA [straightening up suddenly]. Woman, do not be a fool.

ERMYNTRUDE [indignant]. Well!

THE INCA. You must look facts in the face. This moustache is an exact copy of the Inca’s moustache. Well, does the world occupy itself with the Inca’s moustache or does it not? Does it ever occupy itself with anything else? If that is the truth, does its recognition constitute the Inca a coxcomb? Other potentates have moustaches: even beards and moustaches. Does the world occupy itself with those beards and moustaches? Do the hawkers in the streets of every capital on the civilized globe sell ingenious cardboard representations of their faces on which, at the pulling of a simple string, the moustaches turn up and down, so — [he makes his moustache turn, up and down several times]? No! I say No. The Inca’s moustache is so watched and studied that it has made his face the political barometer of the whole continent. When that moustache goes up, culture rises with it. Not what you call culture; but Kultur, a word so much more significant that I hardly understand it myself except when I am in specially good form. When it goes down, millions of men perish.

ERMYNTRUDE. You know, if I had a moustache like that, it would turn my head. I should go mad. Are you quite sure the Inca isn’t mad?

THE INCA. How can he be mad, madam? What is sanity? The condition of the Inca’s mind. What is madness? The condition of the people who disagree with the Inca.

ERMYNTRUDE. Then I am a lunatic because I don’t like that ridiculous brooch.

THE INCA. No, madam: you are only an idiot.

ERMYNTRUDE. Thank you.

THE INCA. Mark you: It is not to be expected that you should see eye to eye with the Inca. That would be presumption. It is for you to accept without question or demur the assurance of your Inca that the brooch is a masterpiece.

ERMYNTRUDE. MY Inca! Oh, come! I like that. He is not my Inca yet.

THE INCA. He is everybody’s Inca, madam. His realm will yet extend to the confines of the habitable earth. It is his divine right; and let those who dispute it look to themselves. Properly speaking, all those who are now trying to shake his world predominance are not at war with him, but in rebellion against him.

ERMYNTRUDE. Well, he started it, you know.

THE INCA. Madam, be just. When the hunters surround the lion, the lion will spring. The Inca had kept the peace of years. Those who attacked him were steeped in blood, black blood, white blood, brown blood, yellow blood, blue blood. The Inca had never shed a drop.

ERMYNTRUDE. He had only talked.

THE INCA. Only TALKED! ONLY talked! What is more glorious than talk? Can anyone in the world talk like him? Madam, when he signed the declaration of war, he said to his foolish generals and admirals, ‘Gentlemen, you will all be sorry for this.’ And they are. They know now that they had better have relied on the sword of the spirit: in other words, on their Inca’s talk, than on their murderous cannons. The world will one day do justice to the Inca as the man who kept the peace with nothing but his tongue and his moustache. While he talked: talked just as I am talking now to you, simply, quietly, sensibly, but GREATLY, there was peace; there was prosperity; Perusalem went from success to success. He has been silenced for a year by the roar of trinitrotoluene and the bluster of fools; and the world is in ruins. What a tragedy! [He is convulsed with grief.]

ERMYNTRUDE. Captain Duval, I don’t want to be unsympathetic; but suppose we get back to business.

THE INCA. Business! What business?

ERMYNTRUDE. Well, MY business. You want me to marry one of the Inca’s sons: I forget which.

THE INCA. As far as I can recollect the name, it is His Imperial Highness Prince Eitel William Frederick George Franz Josef Alexander Nicholas Victor Emmanuel Albert Theodore Wilson —

ERMYNTRUDE [interrupting]. Oh, please, please, mayn’t I have one with a shorter name? What is he called at home?

THE INCA. He is usually called Sonny, madam. [With great charm of manner.] But you will please understand that the Inca has no desire to pin you to any particular son. There is Chips and Spots and Lulu and Pongo and the Corsair and the Piffler and Jack Johnson the Second, all unmarried. At least not seriously married: nothing, in short, that cannot be arranged. They are all at your service.

ERMYNTRUDE. Are they all as clever and charming as their father?

THE INCA [lifts his eyebrows pityingly; shrugs his shoulders; then, with indulgent paternal contempt]. Excellent lads, madam. Very honest affectionate creatures. I have nothing against them. Pongo imitates farmyard sounds — cock crowing and that sort of thing — extremely well. Lulu plays Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica on the mouth organ really screamingly. Chips keeps owls and rabbits. Spots motor bicycles. The Corsair commands canal barges and steers them himself. The Piffler writes plays, and paints most abominably. Jack Johnson trims ladies’ hats, and boxes with professionals hired for that purpose. He is invariably victorious. Yes: they all have their different little talents. And also, of course, their family resemblances. For example, they all smoke; they all quarrel with one another; and they none of them appreciate their father, who, by the way, is no mean painter, though the Piffler pretends to ridicule his efforts.

ERMYNTRUDE. Quite a large choice, eh?

THE INCA. But very little to choose, believe me. I should not recommend Pongo, because he snores so frightfully that it has been necessary to build him a sound-proof bedroom: otherwise the royal family would get no sleep. But any of the others would suit equally well — if you are really bent on marrying one of them.

ERMYNTRUDE. If! What is this? I never wanted to marry one of them. I thought you wanted me to.

THE INCA. I did, madam; but [confidentially, flattering her] you are not quite the sort of person I expected you to be; and I doubt whether any of these young degenerates would make you happy. I trust I am not showing any want of natural feeling when I say that from the point of view of a lively, accomplished, and beautiful woman [Ermyntrude bows] they might pall after a time. I suggest that you might prefer the Inca himself.

ERMYNTRUDE. Oh, Captain, how could a humble person like myself be of any interest to a prince who is surrounded with the ablest and most far-reaching intellects in the world?

TAE INCA [explosively]. What on earth are you talking about, madam? Can you name a single man in the entourage of the Inca who is not a born fool?

ERMYNTRUDE. Oh, how can you say that! There is Admiral von Cockpits —

THE INCA [rising intolerantly and striding about the room]. Von Cockpits! Madam, if Von Cockpits ever goes to heaven, before three weeks are over the Angel Gabriel will be at war with the man in the moon.

ERMYNTRUDE. But General Von Schinkenburg —

THE INCA. Schinkenburg! I grant you, Schinkenburg has a genius for defending market gardens. Among market gardens he is invincible. But what is the good of that? The world does not consist of market gardens. Turn him loose in pasture and he is lost. The Inca has defeated all these generals again and again at manoeuvres; and yet he has to give place to them in the field because he would be blamed for every disaster — accused of sacrificing the country to his vanity. Vanity! Why do they call him vain? Just because he is one of the few men who are not afraid to live. Why do they call themselves brave? Because they have not sense enough to be afraid to die. Within the last year the world has produced millions of heroes. Has it produced more than one Inca? [He resumes his seat.]

ERMYNTRUDE. Fortunately not, Captain. I’d rather marry Chips.

THE INCA [making a wry face]. Chips! Oh no: I wouldn’t marry Chips.

ERMYNTRUDE. Why?

THE INCA [whispering the secret]. Chips talks too much about himself.

ERMYNTRUDE. Well, what about Snooks?

THE INCA. Snooks? Who is he? Have I a son named Snooks? There are so many — [wearily] so many — that I often forget. [Casually.] But I wouldn’t marry him, anyhow, if I were you.

ERMYNTRUDE. But hasn’t any of them inherited the family genius? Surely, if Providence has entrusted them with the care of Perusalem — if they are all descended from Bedrock the Great —

THE INCA [interrupting her impatiently]. Madam, if you ask me, I consider Bedrock a grossly overrated monarch.

ERMYNTRUDE [shocked]. Oh, Captain! Take care! Incadisparagement.

THE INCA. I repeat, grossly overrated. Strictly between ourselves, I do not believe all this about Providence entrusting the care of sixty million human beings to the abilities of Chips and the Piffler and Jack Johnson. I believe in individual genius. That is the Inca’s secret. It must be. Why, hang it all, madam, if it were a mere family matter, the Inca’s uncle would have been as great a man as the Inca. And — well, everybody knows what the Inca’s uncle was.

ERMYNTRUDE. My experience is that the relatives of men of genius are always the greatest duffers imaginable.

THE INCA. Precisely. That is what proves that the Inca is a man of genius. His relatives ARE duffers.

ERMYNTRUDE. But bless my soul, Captain, if all the Inca’s generals are incapables, and all his relatives duffers, Perusalem will be beaten in the war; and then it will become a republic, like France after 1871, and the Inca will be sent to St Helena.

THE INCA [triumphantly]. That is just what the Inca is playing for, madam. It is why he consented to the war.

ERMYNTRUDE. What!

THE INCA. Aha! The fools talk of crushing the Inca; but they little know their man. Tell me this. Why did St Helena extinguish Napoleon?

ERMYNTRUDE. I give it up.

THE INCA. Because, madam, with certain rather remarkable qualities, which I should be the last to deny, Napoleon lacked versatility. After all, any fool can be a soldier: we know that only too well in Perusalem, where every fool is a soldier. But the Inca has a thousand other resources. He is an architect. Well, St Helena presents an unlimited field to the architect. He is a painter: need I remind you that St Helena is still without a National Gallery? He is a composer: Napoleon left no symphonies in St Helena. Send the Inca to St Helena, madam, and the world will crowd thither to see his works as they crowd now to Athens to see the Acropolis, to Madrid to see the pictures of Velasquez, to Bayreuth to see the music dramas of that egotistical old rebel Richard Wagner, who ought to have been shot before he was forty, as indeed he very nearly was. Take this from me: hereditary monarchs are played out: the age for men of genius has come: the career is open to the talents: before ten years have elapsed every civilized country from the Carpathians to the Rocky Mountains will be a Republic.

ERMYNTRUDE. Then goodbye to the Inca.

THE INCA. On the contrary, madam, the Inca will then have his first real chance. He will be unanimously invited by those Republics to return from his exile and act as Superpresident of all the republics.

ERMYNTRUDE. But won’t that be a come-down for him? Think of it! after being Inca, to be a mere President!

THE INCA. Well, why not! An Inca can do nothing. He is tied hand and foot. A constitutional monarch is openly called an India-rubber stamp. An emperor is a puppet. The Inca is not allowed to make a speech: he is compelled to take up a screed of flatulent twaddle written by some noodle of a minister and read it aloud. But look at the American President! He is the Allerhochst, if you like. No, madam, believe me, there is nothing like Democracy, American Democracy. Give the people voting papers: good long voting papers, American fashion; and while the people are reading the voting papers the Government does what it likes.

ERMYNTRUDE. What! You too worship before the statue of Liberty, like the Americans?

THE INCA. Not at all, madam. The Americans do not worship the statue of Liberty. They have erected it in the proper place for a statue of Liberty: on its tomb [he turns down his moustaches.]

ERMYNTRUDE [laughing]. Oh! You’d better not let them hear you say that, Captain.

THE INCA. Quite safe, madam: they would take it as a joke. [He rises.] And now, prepare yourself for a surprise. [She rises]. A shock. Brace yourself. Steel yourself. And do not be afraid.

ERMYNTRUDE. Whatever on earth can you be going to tell me, Captain?

THE INCA. Madam, I am no captain. I —

ERMYNTRUDE. You are the Inca in disguise.

THE INCA. Good heavens! how do you know that? Who has betrayed me?

ERMYNTRUDE. How could I help divining it, Sir? Who is there in the world like you? Your magnetism —

THE INCA. True: I had forgotten my magnetism. But you know now that beneath the trappings of Imperial Majesty there is a Man: simple, frank, modest, unaffected, colloquial: a sincere friend, a natural human being, a genial comrade, one eminently calculated to make a woman happy. You, on the other hand, are the most charming woman I have ever met. Your conversation is wonderful. I have sat here almost in silence, listening to your shrewd and penetrating account of my character, my motives, if I may say so, my talents. Never has such justice been done me: never have I experienced such perfect sympathy. Will you — I hardly know how to put this — will you be mine?

ERMYNTRUDE. Oh, Sir, you are married.

THE INCA. I am prepared to embrace the Mahometan faith, which allows a man four wives, if you will consent. It will please the Turks. But I had rather you did not mention it to the Inca-ess. If you don’t mind.

ERMYNTRUDE. This is really charming of you. But the time has come for me to make a revelation. It is your Imperial Majesty’s turn now to brace yourself. To steel yourself. I am not the princess. I am —

THE INCA. The daughter of my old friend Archdeacon Daffodil Donkin, whose sermons are read to me every evening after dinner. I never forget a face.

ERMYNTRUDE. You knew all along!

THE INCA [bitterly, throwing himself into his chair]. And you supposed that I, who have been condemned to the society of princesses all my wretched life, believed for a moment that any princess that ever walked could have your intelligence!

ERMYNTRUDE. How clever of you, Sir! But you cannot afford to marry me.

THE INCA [springing up]. Why not?

ERMYNTRUDE. You are too poor. You have to eat war bread. Kings nowadays belong to the poorer classes. The King of England does not even allow himself wine at dinner.

THE INCA [delighted]. Haw! Ha ha! Haw! haw! [He is convulsed with laughter, and, finally has to relieve his feelings by waltzing half round the room.]

ERMYNTRUDE. You may laugh, Sir; but I really could not live in that style. I am the widow of a millionaire, ruined by your little war.

THE INCA. A millionaire! What are millionaires now, with the world crumbling?

ERMYNTRUDE. Excuse me: mine was a hyphenated millionaire.

THE INCA. A highfalutin millionaire, you mean. [Chuckling]. Haw! ha ha! really very nearly a pun, that. [He sits down in her chair.]

ERMYNTRUDE [revolted, sinking into his chair]. I think it quite the worst pun I ever heard.

THE INCA. The best puns have all been made years ago: nothing remained but to achieve the worst. However, madam [he rises majestically; and she is about to rise also]. No: I prefer a seated audience [she falls back into her seat at the imperious wave of his hand]. So [he clicks his heels]. Madam, I recognize my presumption in having sought the honor of your hand. As you say, I cannot afford it. Victorious as I am, I am hopelessly bankrupt; and the worst of it is, I am intelligent enough to know it. And I shall be beaten in consequence, because my most implacable enemy, though only a few months further away from bankruptcy than myself, has not a ray of intelligence, and will go on fighting until civilization is destroyed, unless I, out of sheer pity for the world, condescend to capitulate.

ERMYNTRUDE. The sooner the better, Sir. Many fine young men are dying while you wait.

THE INCA [flinching painfully]. Why? Why do they do it?

ERMYNTRUDE. Because you make them.

THE INCA. Stuff! How can I? I am only one man; and they are millions. Do you suppose they would really kill each other if they didn’t want to, merely for the sake of my beautiful eyes? Do not be deceived by newspaper claptrap, madam. I was swept away by a passion not my own, which imposed itself on me. By myself I am nothing. I dare not walk down the principal street of my own capital in a coat two years old, though the sweeper of that street can wear one ten years old. You talk of death as an unpopular thing. You are wrong: for years I gave them art, literature, science, prosperity, that they might live more abundantly; and they hated me, ridiculed me, caricatured me. Now that I give them death in its frightfullest forms, they are devoted to me. If you doubt me, ask those who for years have begged our taxpayers in vain for a few paltry thousands to spend on Life: on the bodies and minds of the nation’s children, on the beauty and healthfulness of its cities, on the honor and comfort of its worn-out workers. They refused: and because they refused, death is let loose on them. They grudged a few hundreds a year for their salvation: they now pay millions a day for their own destruction and damnation. And this they call my doing! Let them say it, if they dare, before the judgment-seat at which they and I shall answer at last for what we have left undone no less than for what we have done. [Pulling himself together suddenly.] Madam, I have the honor to be your most obedient [he clicks his heels and bows].

ERMYNTRUDE. Sir! [She curtsies.]

THE INCA [turning at the door]. Oh, by the way, there is a princess, isn’t there, somewhere on the premises?

ERMYNTRUDE. There is. Shall I fetch her?

THE INCA [dubious], Pretty awful, I suppose, eh?

ERMYNTRUDE. About the usual thing.

THE INCA [sighing]. Ah well! What can one expect? I don’t think I need trouble her personally. Will you explain to her about the boys?

ERMYNTRUDE. I am afraid the explanation will fall rather flat without your magnetism.

THE INCA [returning to her and speaking very humanly]. You are making fun of me. Why does everybody make fun of me? Is it fair?

ERMYNTRUDE [seriously]. Yes, it is fair. What other defence have we poor common people against your shining armor, your mailed fist, your pomp and parade, your terrible power over us? Are these things fair?

THE INCA. Ah, well, perhaps, perhaps. [He looks at his watch.] By the way, there is time for a drive round the town and a cup of tea at the Zoo. Quite a bearable band there: it does not play any patriotic airs. I am sorry you will not listen to any more permanent arrangement; but if you would care to come —

ERMYNTRUDE [eagerly]. Ratherrrrrr. I shall be delighted.

THE INCA [cautiously]. In the strictest honor, you understand.

ERMYNTRUDE. Don’t be afraid. I promise to refuse any incorrect proposals.

THE INCA [enchanted]. Oh! Charming woman: how well you understand men!

He offers her his arm: they go out together.

AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT

I wish to express my gratitude for certain good offices which Augustus secured for me in January, 1917. I had been invited to visit the theatre of war in Flanders by the Commander-in-Chief: an invitation which was, under the circumstances, a summons to duty. Thus I had occasion to spend some days in procuring the necessary passport and other official facilities for my journey. It happened just then that the Stage Society gave a performance of this little play. It opened the heart of every official to me. I have always been treated with distinguished consideration in my contracts with bureaucracy during the war; but on this occasion I found myself persona grata in the highest degree. There was only one word when the formalities were disposed of; and that was “We are up against Augustus all day.” The showing-up of Augustus scandalized one or two innocent and patriotic critics who regarded the prowess of the British army as inextricably bound up with Highcastle prestige. But our Government departments knew better: their problem was how to win the war with Augustus on their backs, well-meaning, brave, patriotic, but obstructively fussy, self-important, imbecile, and disastrous.

Save for the satisfaction of being able to laugh at Augustus in the theatre, nothing, as far as I know, came of my dramatic reduction of him to absurdity. Generals, admirals, Prime Ministers and Controllers, not to mention Emperors, Kaisers and Tsars, were scrapped remorselessly at home and abroad, for their sins or services, as the case might be. But Augustus stood like the Eddystone in a storm, and stands so to this day. He gave us his word that he was indispensable and we took it.

Augustus Does His Bit was performed for the first time at the Court Theatre in London by the Stage Society on the 21st January, 1917, with Lalla Vandervelde as The Lady, F. B.J. Sharp as Lord Augustus Highcastle, and Charles Rock as Horatio Floyd Beamish.

AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT

The Mayor’s parlor in the Town Hall of Little Pifflington. Lord Augustus Highcastle, a distinguished member of the governing class, in the uniform of a colonel, and very well preserved at forty-five, is comfortably seated at a writing-table with his heels on it, reading The Morning Post. The door faces him, a little to his left, at the other side of the room. The window is behind him. In the fireplace, a gas stove. On the table a bell button and a telephone. Portraits of past Mayors, in robes and gold chains, adorn the walls. An elderly clerk with a short white beard and whiskers, and a very red nose, shuffles in.

AUGUSTUS [hastily putting aside his paper and replacing his feet on the floor]. Hullo! Who are you?

THE CLERK. The staff [a slight impediment in his speech adds to the impression of incompetence produced by his age and appearance].

AUGUSTUS. You the staff! What do you mean, man?

THE CLERK. What I say. There ain’t anybody else.

AUGUSTUS. Tush! Where are the others?

THE CLERK. At the front.

AUGUSTUS. Quite right. Most proper. Why aren’t you at the front?

THE CLERK. Over age. Fifty-seven.

AUGUSTUS. But you can still do your bit. Many an older man is in the G.R.’s, or volunteering for home defence.

THE CLERK. I have volunteered.

AUGUSTUS. Then why are you not in uniform?

THE CLERK. They said they wouldn’t have me if I was given away with a pound of tea. Told me to go home and not be an old silly. [A sense of unbearable wrong, till now only smouldering in him, bursts into flame.] Young Bill Knight, that I took with me, got two and sevenpence. I got nothing. Is it justice? This country is going to the dogs, if you ask me.

AUGUSTUS [rising indignantly]. I do not ask you, sir; and I will not allow you to say such things in my presence. Our statesmen are the greatest known to history. Our generals are invincible. Our army is the admiration of the world. [Furiously.] How dare you tell me that the country is going to the dogs!

THE CLERK. Why did they give young Bill Knight two and sevenpence, and not give me even my tram fare? Do you call that being great statesmen? As good as robbing me, I call it.

AUGUSTUS. That’s enough. Leave the room. [He sits down and takes up his pen, settling himself to work. The clerk shuffles to the door. Augustus adds, with cold politeness] Send me the Secretary.

THE CLERK. I’M the Secretary. I can’t leave the room and send myself to you at the same time, can I?

AUGUSTUS, Don’t be insolent. Where is the gentleman I have been corresponding with: Mr Horatio Floyd Beamish?

THE CLERK [returning and bowing]. Here. Me.

AUGUSTUS. You! Ridiculous. What right have you to call yourself by a pretentious name of that sort?

THE CLERK. You may drop the Horatio Floyd. Beamish is good enough for me.

AUGUSTUS. Is there nobody else to take my instructions?

THE CLERK. It’s me or nobody. And for two pins I’d chuck it. Don’t you drive me too far. Old uns like me is up in the world now.

AUGUSTUS. If we were not at war, I should discharge you on the spot for disrespectful behavior. But England is in danger; and I cannot think of my personal dignity at such a moment. [Shouting at him.] Don’t you think of yours, either, worm that you are; or I’ll have you arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, double quick.

THE CLERK. What do I care about the realm? They done me out of two and seven —

AUGUSTUS. Oh, damn your two and seven! Did you receive my letters?

THE CLERK. Yes.

AUGUSTUS. I addressed a meeting here last night — went straight to the platform from the train. I wrote to you that I should expect you to be present and report yourself. Why did you not do so?

THE CLERK. The police wouldn’t let me on the platform.

AUGUSTUS. Did you tell them who you were?

THE CLERK. They knew who I was. That’s why they wouldn’t let me up.

AUGUSTUS. This is too silly for anything. This town wants waking up. I made the best recruiting speech I ever made in my life; and not a man joined.

THE CLERK. What did you expect? You told them our gallant fellows is falling at the rate of a thousand a day in the big push. Dying for Little Pifflington, you says. Come and take their places, you says. That ain’t the way to recruit.

AUGUSTUS. But I expressly told them their widows would have pensions.

THE CLERK. I heard you. Would have been all right if it had been the widows you wanted to get round.

AUGUSTUS [rising angrily]. This town is inhabited by dastards. I say it with a full sense of responsibility, DASTARDS! They call themselves Englishmen; and they are afraid to fight.

THE CLERK. Afraid to fight! You should see them on a Saturday night.

AUGUSTUS. Yes, they fight one another; but they won’t fight the Germans.

THE CLERK. They got grudges again one another: how can they have grudges again the Huns that they never saw? They’ve no imagination: that’s what it is. Bring the Huns here; and they’ll quarrel with them fast enough.

AUGUSTUS [returning to his seat with a grunt of disgust]. Mf! They’ll have them here if they’re not careful. [Seated.] Have you carried out my orders about the war saving?

THE CLERK. Yes.

AUGUSTUS. The allowance of petrol has been reduced by three quarters?

THE CLERK. It has.

AUGUSTUS. And you have told the motor-car people to come here and arrange to start munition work now that their motor business is stopped?

THE CLERK. It ain’t stopped. They’re busier than ever.

AUGUSTUS. Busy at what?

THE CLERK. Making small cars.

AUGUSTUS. NEW cars!

THE CLERK. The old cars only do twelve miles to the gallon. Everybody has to have a car that will do thirty-five now.

AUGUSTUS. Can’t they take the train?

THE CLERK. There ain’t no trains now. They’ve tore up the rails and sent them to the front.

AUGUSTUS. Psha!

THE CLERK. Well, we have to get about somehow.

AUGUSTUS. This is perfectly monstrous. Not in the least what I intended.

THE CLERK. Hell —

AUGUSTUS. Sir!

THE CLERK [explaining]. Hell, they says, is paved with good intentions.

AUGUSTUS [springing to his feet]. Do you mean to insinuate that hell is paved with MY good intentions — with the good intentions of His Majesty’s Government?

THE CLERK. I don’t mean to insinuate anything until the Defence of the Realm Act is repealed. It ain’t safe.

AUGUSTUS. They told me that this town had set an example to all England in the matter of economy. I came down here to promise the Mayor a knighthood for his exertions.

THE CLERK. The Mayor! Where do I come in?

AUGUSTUS. You don’t come in. You go out. This is a fool of a place. I’m greatly disappointed. Deeply disappointed. [Flinging himself back into his chair.] Disgusted.

THE CLERK. What more can we do? We’ve shut up everything. The picture gallery is shut. The museum is shut. The theatres and picture shows is shut: I haven’t seen a movie picture for six months.

AUGUSTUS. Man, man: do you want to see picture shows when the Hun is at the gate?

THE CLERK [mournfully]. I don’t now, though it drove me melancholy mad at first. I was on the point of taking a pennorth of rat poison —

AUGUSTUS. Why didn’t you?

THE CLERK. Because a friend advised me to take to drink instead. That saved my life, though it makes me very poor company in the mornings, as [hiccuping] perhaps you’ve noticed.

AUGUSTUS. Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

THE CLERK. Well, what of it? We’re at war now; and everything’s changed. Besides, I should lose my job here if I stood drinking at the bar. I’m a respectable man and must buy my drink and take it home with me. And they won’t serve me with less than a quart. If you’d told me before the war that I could get through a quart of whisky in a day, I shouldn’t have believed you. That’s the good of war: it brings out powers in a man that he never suspected himself capable of. You said so yourself in your speech last night.

AUGUSTUS. I did not know that I was talking to an imbecile. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There must be an end of this drunken slacking. I’m going to establish a new order of things here. I shall come down every morning before breakfast until things are properly in train. Have a cup of coffee and two rolls for me here every morning at half-past ten.

THE CLERK. You can’t have no rolls. The only baker that baked rolls was a Hun; and he’s been interned.

AUGUSTUS. Quite right, too. And was there no Englishman to take his place?

THE CLERK. There was. But he was caught spying; and they took him up to London and shot him.

AUGUSTUS. Shot an Englishman!

THE CLERK. Well, it stands to reason if the Germans wanted to spy they wouldn’t employ a German that everybody would suspect, don’t it?

AUGUSTUS [rising again]. Do you mean to say, you scoundrel, that an Englishman is capable of selling his country to the enemy for gold?

THE CLERK. Not as a general thing I wouldn’t say it; but there’s men here would sell their own mothers for two coppers if they got the chance.

AUGUSTUS. Beamish, it’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest.

THE CLERK. It wasn’t me that let Little Pifflington get foul. I don’t belong to the governing classes. I only tell you why you can’t have no rolls.

AUGUSTUS [intensely irritated]. Can you tell me where I can find an intelligent being to take my orders?

THE CLERK. One of the street sweepers used to teach in the school until it was shut up for the sake of economy. Will he do?

AUGUSTUS. What! You mean to tell me that when the lives of the gallant fellows in our trenches, and the fate of the British Empire, depend on our keeping up the supply of shells, you are wasting money on sweeping the streets?

THE CLERK. We have to. We dropped it for a while; but the infant death rate went up something frightful.

AUGUSTUS. What matters the death rate of Little Pifflington in a moment like this? Think of our gallant soldiers, not of your squalling infants.

THE CLERK. If you want soldiers you must have children. You can’t buy em in boxes, like toy soldiers.

AUGUSTUS. Beamish, the long and the short of it is, you are no patriot. Go downstairs to your office; and have that gas stove taken away and replaced by an ordinary grate. The Board of Trade has urged on me the necessity for economizing gas.

THE CLERK. Our orders from the Minister of Munitions is to use gas instead of coal, because it saves material. Which is it to be?

AUGUSTUS [bawling furiously at him]. Both! Don’t criticize your orders: obey them. Yours not to reason why: yours but to do and die. That’s war. [Cooling down.] Have you anything else to say?

THE CLERK. Yes: I want a rise.

AUGUSTUS [reeling against the table in his horror]. A rise! Horatio Floyd Beamish, do you know that we are at war?

THE CLERK [feebly ironical]. I have noticed something about it in the papers. Heard you mention it once or twice, now I come to think of it.

AUGUSTUS. Our gallant fellows are dying in the trenches; and you want a rise!

THE CLERK. What are they dying for? To keep me alive, ain’t it? Well, what’s the good of that if I’m dead of hunger by the time they come back?

AUGUSTUS. Everybody else is making sacrifices without a thought of self; and you —

THE CLERK. Not half, they ain’t. Where’s the baker’s sacrifice? Where’s the coal merchant’s? Where’s the butcher’s? Charging me double: that’s how they sacrifice themselves. Well, I want to sacrifice myself that way too. Just double next Saturday: double and not a penny less; or no secretary for you [he stiffens himself shakily, and makes resolutely for the door.]

AUGUSTUS [looking after him contemptuously]. Go, miserable pro-German.

THE CLERK [rushing back and facing him]. Who are you calling a pro-German?

AUGUSTUS. Another word, and I charge you under the Act with discouraging me. Go.

The clerk blenches and goes out, cowed.

The telephone rings.

AUGUSTUS [taking up the telephone receiver.] Hallo. Yes: who are you?... oh, Blueloo, is it?... Yes: there’s nobody in the room: fire away. What?... A spy!... A woman!... Yes: brought it down with me. Do you suppose I’m such a fool as to let it out of my hands? Why, it gives a list of all our anti-aircraft emplacements from Ramsgate to Skegness. The Germans would give a million for it — what?... But how could she possibly know about it? I haven’t mentioned it to a soul, except, of course, dear Lucy... Oh, Toto and Lady Popham and that lot: they don’t count: they’re all right. I mean that I haven’t mentioned it to any Germans.... Pooh! Don’t you be nervous, old chap. I know you think me a fool; but I’m not such a fool as all that. If she tries to get it out of me I’ll have her in the Tower before you ring up again. [The clerk returns.] Sh-sh! Somebody’s just come in: ring off. Goodbye. [He hangs up the receiver.]

THE CLERK. Are you engaged? [His manner is strangely softened.]

AUGUSTUS. What business is that of yours? However, if you will take the trouble to read the society papers for this week, you will see that I am engaged to the Honorable Lucy Popham, youngest daughter of —

THE CLERK. That ain’t what I mean. Can you see a female?

AUGUSTUS. Of course I can see a female as easily as a male. Do you suppose I’m blind?

THE CLERK. You don’t seem to follow me, somehow. There’s a female downstairs: what you might call a lady. She wants to know can you see her if I let her up.

AUGUSTUS. Oh, you mean am I disengaged. Tell the lady I have just received news of the greatest importance which will occupy my entire attention for the rest of the day, and that she must write for an appointment.

THE CLERK. I’ll ask her to explain her business to me. I ain’t above talking to a handsome young female when I get the chance [going].

AUGUSTUS. Stop. Does she seem to be a person of consequence?

THE CLERK. A regular marchioness, if you ask me.

AUGUSTUS. Hm! Beautiful, did you say?

THE CLERK. A human chrysanthemum, sir, believe me.

AUGUSTUS. It will be extremely inconvenient for me to see her; but the country is in danger; and we must not consider our own comfort. Think how our gallant fellows are suffering in the trenches! Show her up. [The clerk makes for the door, whistling the latest popular ballad]. Stop whistling instantly, sir. This is not a casino.

CLERK. Ain’t it? You just wait till you see her. [He goes out.]

Augustus produces a mirror, a comb, and a pot of moustache pomade from the drawer of the writing-table, and sits down before the mirror to put some touches to his toilet.

The clerk returns, devotedly ushering a very attractive lady, brilliantly dressed. She has a dainty wallet hanging from her wrist. Augustus hastily covers up his toilet apparatus with The Morning Post, and rises in an attitude of pompous condescension.

THE CLERK [to Augustus]. Here she is. [To the lady.] May I offer you a chair, lady? [He places a chair at the writing-table opposite Augustus, and steals out on tiptoe.]

AUGUSTUS. Be seated, madam.

THE LADY [sitting down]. Are you Lord Augustus Highcastle?

AUGUSTUS [sitting also]. Madam, I am.

TAE LADY [with awe]. The great Lord Augustus?

AUGUSTUS. I should not dream of describing myself so, Madam; but no doubt I have impressed my countrymen — and [bowing gallantly] may I say my countrywomen — as having some exceptional claims to their consideration.

THE LADY [emotionally]. What a beautiful voice you have!

AUGUSTUS. What you hear, madam, is the voice of my country, which now takes a sweet and noble tone even in the harsh mouth of high officialism.

THE LADY. Please go on. You express yourself so wonderfully!

AUGUSTUS. It would be strange indeed if, after sitting on thirty-seven Royal Commissions, mostly as chairman, I had not mastered the art of public expression. Even the Radical papers have paid me the high compliment of declaring that I am never more impressive than when I have nothing to say.

THE LADY. I never read the Radical papers. All I can tell you is that what we women admire in you is not the politician, but the man of action, the heroic warrior, the beau sabreur.

AUGUSTUS [gloomily]. Madam, I beg! Please! My military exploits are not a pleasant subject, unhappily.

THE LADY. Oh, I know I know. How shamefully you have been treated! what ingratitude! But the country is with you. The women are with you. Oh, do you think all our hearts did not throb and all our nerves thrill when we heard how, when you were ordered to occupy that terrible quarry in Hulluch, and you swept into it at the head of your men like a sea-god riding on a tidal wave, you suddenly sprang over the top shouting “To Berlin! Forward!”; dashed at the German army single-handed; and were cut off and made prisoner by the Huns.

AUGUSTUS. Yes, madam; and what was my reward? They said I had disobeyed orders, and sent me home. Have they forgotten Nelson in the Baltic? Has any British battle ever been won except by a bold initiative? I say nothing of professional jealousy, it exists in the army as elsewhere; but it is a bitter thought to me that the recognition denied me by my country — or rather by the Radical cabal in the Cabinet which pursues my family with rancorous class hatred — that this recognition, I say, came to me at the hands of an enemy — of a rank Prussian.

THE LADY. You don’t say so!

AUGUSTUS. How else should I be here instead of starving to death in Ruhleben? Yes, madam: the Colonel of the Pomeranian regiment which captured me, after learning what I had done, and conversing for an hour with me on European politics and military strategy, declared that nothing would induce him to deprive my country of my services, and set me free. I offered, of course, to procure the release in exchange of a German officer of equal quality; but he would not hear of it. He was kind enough to say he could not believe that a German officer answering to that description existed. [With emotion.] I had my first taste of the ingratitude of my own country as I made my way back to our lines. A shot from our front trench struck me in the head. I still carry the flattened projectile as a trophy [he throws it on the table; the noise it makes testifies to its weight]. Had it penetrated to the brain I might never have sat on another Royal Commission. Fortunately we have strong heads, we Highcastles. Nothing has ever penetrated to our brains.

THE LADY. How thrilling! How simple! And how tragic! But you will forgive England? Remember: England! Forgive her.

AUGUSTUS [with gloomy magnanimity]. It will make no difference whatever to my services to my country. Though she slay me, yet will I, if not exactly trust in her, at least take my part in her government. I am ever at my country’s call. Whether it be the embassy in a leading European capital, a governor-generalship in the tropics, or my humble mission here to make Little Pifflington do its bit, I am always ready for the sacrifice. Whilst England remains England, wherever there is a public job to be done you will find a Highcastle sticking to it. And now, madam, enough of my tragic personal history. You have called on business. What can I do for you?

THE LADY. You have relatives at the Foreign Office, have you not?

AUGUSTUS [haughtily]. Madam, the Foreign Office is staffed by my relatives exclusively.

THE LADY. Has the Foreign Office warned you that you are being pursued by a female spy who is determined to obtain possession of a certain list of gun emplacements?

AUGUSTUS [interrupting her somewhat loftily]. All that is perfectly well known to this department, madam.

THE LADY [surprised and rather indignant]. Is it? Who told you? Was it one of your German brothers-in-law?

AUGUSTUS [injured, remonstrating]. I have only three German brothers-in-law, madam. Really, from your tone, one would suppose that I had several. Pardon my sensitiveness on that subject; but reports are continually being circulated that I have been shot as a traitor in the courtyard of the Ritz Hotel simply because I have German brothers-in-law. [With feeling.] If you had a German brother-in-law, madam, you would know that nothing else in the world produces so strong an anti-German feeling. Life affords no keener pleasure than finding a brother-in-law’s name in the German casualty list.

THE LADY. Nobody knows that better than I. Wait until you hear what I have come to tell you: you will understand me as no one else could. Listen. This spy, this woman —

AUGUSTUS [all attention]. Yes?

THE LADY. She is a German. A Hun.

AUGUSTUS. Yes, yes. She would be. Continue.

THE LADY. She is my sister-in-law.

AUGUSTUS [deferentially]. I see you are well connected, madam. Proceed.

THE LADY. Need I add that she is my bitterest enemy?

AUGUSTUS. May I — [he proffers his hand. They shake, fervently. From this moment onward Augustus becomes more and more confidential, gallant, and charming.]

THE LADY. Quite so. Well, she is an intimate friend of your brother at the War Office, Hungerford Highcastle, Blueloo as you call him, I don’t know why.

AUGUSTUS [explaining]. He was originally called The Singing Oyster, because he sang drawing-room ballads with such an extraordinary absence of expression. He was then called the Blue Point for a season or two. Finally he became Blueloo.

THE LADY. Oh, indeed: I didn’t know. Well, Blueloo is simply infatuated with my sister-in-law; and he has rashly let out to her that this list is in your possession. He forgot himself because he was in a towering rage at its being entrusted to you: his language was terrible. He ordered all the guns to be shifted at once.

AUGUSTUS. What on earth did he do that for?

THE LADY. I can’t imagine. But this I know. She made a bet with him that she would come down here and obtain possession of that list and get clean away into the street with it. He took the bet on condition that she brought it straight back to him at the War Office.

AUGUSTUS. Good heavens! And you mean to tell me that Blueloo was such a dolt as to believe that she could succeed? Does he take me for a fool?

THE LADY. Oh, impossible! He is jealous of your intellect. The bet is an insult to you: don’t you feel that? After what you have done for our country —

AUGUSTUS. Oh, never mind that. It is the idiocy of the thing I look at. He’ll lose his bet; and serve him right!

THE LADY. You feel sure you will be able to resist the siren? I warn you, she is very fascinating.

AUGUSTUS. You need have no fear, madam. I hope she will come and try it on. Fascination is a game that two can play at. For centuries the younger sons of the Highcastles have had nothing to do but fascinate attractive females when they were not sitting on Royal Commissions or on duty at Knightsbridge barracks. By Gad, madam, if the siren comes here she will meet her match.

THE LADY. I feel that. But if she fails to seduce you —

AUGUSTUS [blushing]. Madam!

THE LADY [continuing] — from your allegiance —

AUGUSTUS. Oh, that!

THE LADY. — she will resort to fraud, to force, to anything. She will burgle your office: she will have you attacked and garotted at night in the street.

AUGUSTUS. Pooh! I’m not afraid.

THE LADY. Oh, your courage will only tempt you into danger. She may get the list after all. It is true that the guns are moved. But she would win her bet.

AUGUSTUS [cautiously]. You did not say that the guns were moved. You said that Blueloo had ordered them to be moved.

THE LADY. Well, that is the same thing, isn’t it?

AUGUSTUS. Not quite — at the War Office. No doubt those guns WILL be moved: possibly even before the end of the war.

THE LADY. Then you think they are there still! But if the German War Office gets the list — and she will copy it before she gives it back to Blueloo, you may depend on it — all is lost.

AUGUSTUS [lazily]. Well, I should not go as far as that. [Lowering his voice.] Will you swear to me not to repeat what I am going to say to you; for if the British public knew that I had said it, I should be at once hounded down as a pro-German.

THE LADY. I will be silent as the grave. I swear it.

AUGUSTUS [again taking it easily]. Well, our people have for some reason made up their minds that the German War Office is everything that our War Office is not — that it carries promptitude, efficiency, and organization to a pitch of completeness and perfection that must be, in my opinion, destructive to the happiness of the staff. My own view — which you are pledged, remember, not to betray — is that the German War Office is no better than any other War Office. I found that opinion on my observation of the characters of my brothers-in-law: one of whom, by the way, is on the German general staff. I am not at all sure that this list of gun emplacements would receive the smallest attention. You see, there are always so many more important things to be attended to. Family matters, and so on, you understand.

THE LADY. Still, if a question were asked in the House of Commons —

AUGUSTUS. The great advantage of being at war, madam, is that nobody takes the slightest notice of the House of Commons. No doubt it is sometimes necessary for a Minister to soothe the more seditious members of that assembly by giving a pledge or two; but the War Office takes no notice of such things.

THE LADY [staring at him]. Then you think this list of gun emplacements doesn’t matter!!

AUGUSTUS. By no means, madam. It matters very much indeed. If this spy were to obtain possession of the list, Blueloo would tell the story at every dinner-table in London; and —

THE LADY. And you might lose your post. Of course.

AUGUSTUS [amazed and indignant]. I lose my post! What are you dreaming about, madam? How could I possibly be spared? There are hardly Highcastles enough at present to fill half the posts created by this war. No: Blueloo would not go that far. He is at least a gentleman. But I should be chaffed; and, frankly, I don’t like being chaffed.

THE LADY. Of course not. Who does? It would never do. Oh never, never.

AUGUSTUS. I’m glad you see it in that light. And now, as a measure of security, I shall put that list in my pocket. [He begins searching vainly from drawer to drawer in the writing-table.] Where on earth — ? What the dickens did I — ? That’s very odd: I — Where the deuce — ? I thought I had put it in the — Oh, here it is! No: this is Lucy’s last letter.

THE LADY [elegiacally]. Lucy’s Last Letter! What a title for a picture play!

AUGUSTUS [delighted]. Yes: it is, isn’t it? Lucy appeals to the imagination like no other woman. By the way [handing over the letter], I wonder could you read it for me? Lucy is a darling girl; but I really can’t read her writing. In London I get the office typist to decipher it and make me a typed copy; but here there is nobody.

THE LADY [puzzling over it]. It is really almost illegible. I think the beginning is meant for “Dearest Gus.”

AUGUSTUS [eagerly]. Yes: that is what she usually calls me. Please go on.

THE LADY [trying to decipher it]. “What a”— “what a” — oh yes: “what a forgetful old” — something— “you are!” I can’t make out the word.

AUGUSTUS [greatly interested]. Is it blighter? That is a favorite expression of hers.

THE LADY. I think so. At all events it begins with a B. [Reading.] “What a forgetful old” — [she is interrupted by a knock at the door.]

AUGUSTUS [impatiently]. Come in. [The clerk enters, clean shaven and in khaki, with an official paper and an envelope in his hand.] What is this ridiculous mummery sir?

THE CLERK [coming to the table and exhibiting his uniform to both]. They’ve passed me. The recruiting officer come for me. I’ve had my two and seven.

AUGUSTUS [rising wrathfully]. I shall not permit it. What do they mean by taking my office staff? Good God! they will be taking our hunt servants next. [Confronting the clerk.] What did the man mean? What did he say?

THE CLERK. He said that now you was on the job we’d want another million men, and he was going to take the old-age pensioners or anyone he could get.

AUGUSTUS. And did you dare to knock at my door and interrupt my business with this lady to repeat this man’s ineptitudes?

THE CLERK. No. I come because the waiter from the hotel brought this paper. You left it on the coffeeroom breakfast-table this morning.

THE LADY [intercepting it]. It is the list. Good heavens!

THE CLERK [proffering the envelope]. He says he thinks this is the envelope belonging to it.

THE LADY [snatching the envelope also]. Yes! Addressed to you, Lord Augustus! [Augustus comes back to the table to look at it.] Oh, how imprudent! Everybody would guess its importance with your name on it. Fortunately I have some letters of my own here [opening her wallet.] Why not hide it in one of my envelopes? then no one will dream that the enclosure is of any political value. [Taking out a letter, she crosses the room towards the window, whispering to Augustus as she passes him.] Get rid of that man.

AUGUSTUS [haughtily approaching the clerk, who humorously makes a paralytic attempt to stand at attention]. Have you any further business here, pray?

THE CLERK. Am I to give the waiter anything; or will you do it yourself?

AUGUSTUS. Which waiter is it? The English one?

THE CLERK. No: the one that calls hisself a Swiss. Shouldn’t wonder if he’d made a copy of that paper.

AUGUSTUS. Keep your impertinent surmises to yourself, sir. Remember that you are in the army now; and let me have no more of your civilian insubordination. Attention! Left turn! Quick march!

THE CLERK [stolidly]. I dunno what you mean.

AUGUSTUS. Go to the guard-room and report yourself for disobeying orders. Now do you know what I mean?

THE CLERK. Now look here. I ain’t going to argue with you —

AUGUSTUS. Nor I with you. Out with you.

He seizes the clerk: and rushes him through the door. The moment the lady is left alone, she snatches a sheet of official paper from the stationery rack: folds it so that it resembles the list; compares the two to see that they look exactly alike: whips the list into her wallet: and substitutes the facsimile for it. Then she listens for the return of Augustus. A crash is heard, as of the clerk falling downstairs.

Augustus returns and is about to close the door when the voice of the clerk is heard from below.

THE CLERK. I’ll have the law of you for this, I will.

AUGUSTUS [shouting down to him]. There’s no more law for you, you scoundrel. You’re a soldier now. [He shuts the door and comes to the lady.] Thank heaven, the war has given us the upper hand of these fellows at last. Excuse my violence; but discipline is absolutely necessary in dealing with the lower middle classes.

THE LADY. Serve the insolent creature right! Look I have found you a beautiful envelope for the list, an unmistakable lady’s envelope. [She puts the sham list into her envelope and hands it to him.]

AUGUSTUS. Excellent. Really very clever of you. [Slyly.] Come: would you like to have a peep at the list [beginning to take the blank paper from the envelope]?

THE LADY [on the brink of detection]. No no. Oh, please, no.

AUGUSTUS. Why? It won’t bite you [drawing it out further.]

THE LADY [snatching at his hand]. Stop. Remember: if there should be an inquiry, you must be able to swear that you never showed that list to a mortal soul.

AUGUSTUS. Oh, that is a mere form. If you are really curious —

THE LADY. I am not. I couldn’t bear to look at it. One of my dearest friends was blown to pieces by an aircraft gun; and since then I have never been able to think of one without horror.

AUGUSTUS. You mean it was a real gun, and actually went off. How sad! how sad! [He pushes the sham list back into the envelope, and pockets it.]

THE LADY. Ah! [Great sigh of relief]. And now, Lord Augustus, I have taken up too much of your valuable time. Goodbye.

AUGUSTUS. What! Must you go?

THE LADY. You are so busy.

AUGUSTUS. Yes; but not before lunch, you know. I never can do much before lunch. And I’m no good at all in the afternoon. From five to six is my real working time. Must you really go?

THE LADY. I must, really. I have done my business very satisfactorily. Thank you ever so much [she proffers her hand].

AUGUSTUS [shaking it affectionately as he leads her to the door, but fast pressing the bell button with his left hand]. Goodbye. Goodbye. So sorry to lose you. Kind of you to come; but there was no real danger. You see, my dear little lady, all this talk about war saving, and secrecy, and keeping the blinds down at night, and so forth, is all very well; but unless it’s carried out with intelligence, believe me, you may waste a pound to save a penny; you may let out all sorts of secrets to the enemy; you may guide the Zeppelins right on to your own chimneys. That’s where the ability of the governing class comes in. Shall the fellow call a taxi for you?

THE LADY. No, thanks: I prefer walking. Goodbye. Again, many, many thanks.

She goes out. Augustus returns to the writing-table smiling, and takes another look at himself in the mirror. The clerk returns, with his head bandaged, carrying a poker.

THE CLERK. What did you ring for? [Augustus hastily drops the mirror]. Don’t you come nigh me or I’ll split your head with this poker, thick as it is.

AUGUSTUS. It does not seem to me an exceptionally thick poker. I rang for you to show the lady out.

THE CLERK. She’s gone. She run out like a rabbit. I ask myself why was she in such a hurry?

THE LADY’S VOICE [from the street]. Lord Augustus. Lord Augustus.

THE CLERK. She’s calling you.

AUGUSTUS [running to the window and throwing it up]. What is it? Won’t you come up?

THE LADY. Is the clerk there?

AUGUSTUS. Yes. Do you want him?

THE LADY. Yes.

AUGUSTUS. The lady wants you at the window.

THE CLERK [rushing to the window and putting down the poker]. Yes, ma’am? Here I am, ma’am. What is it, ma’am?

THE LADY. I want you to witness that I got clean away into the street. I am coming up now.

The two men stare at one another.

THE CLERK. Wants me to witness that she got clean away into the street!

AUGUSTUS. What on earth does she mean?

The lady returns.

THE LADY. May I use your telephone?

AUGUSTUS. Certainly. Certainly. [Taking the receiver down.] What number shall I get you?

THE LADY. The War Office, please.

AUGUSTUS. The War Office!?

THE LADY. If you will be so good.

AUGUSTUS. But — Oh, very well. [Into the receiver.] Hallo. This is the Town Hall Recruiting Office. Give me Colonel Bogey, sharp.

A pause.

THE CLERK [breaking the painful silence]. I don’t think I’m awake. This is a dream of a movie picture, this is.

AUGUSTUS [his ear at the receiver]. Shut up, will you? [Into the telephone.] What?... [To the lady.] Whom do you want to get on to?

THE LADY. Blueloo.

AUGUSTUS [into the telephone]. Put me through to Lord Hungerford Highcastle... I’m his brother, idiot... That you, Blueloo? Lady here at Little Pifflington wants to speak to you. Hold the line. [To the lady.] Now, madam [he hands her the receiver].

THE LADY [sitting down in Augustus’s chair to speak into the telephone]. Is that Blueloo?... Do you recognize my voice?... I’ve won our bet....

AUGUSTUS. Your bet!

THE LADY [into the telephone]. Yes: I have the list in my wallet....

AUGUSTUS. Nothing of the kind, madam. I have it here in my pocket. [He takes the envelope from his pocket: draws out the paper: and unfolds it.]

THE LADY [continuing]. Yes: I got clean into the street with it. I have a witness. I could have got to London with it. Augustus won’t deny it....

AUGUSTUS [contemplating the blank paper]. There’s nothing written on this. Where is the list of guns?

THE LADY [continuing]. Oh, it was quite easy. I said I was my sister-in-law and that I was a Hun. He lapped it up like a kitten....

AUGUSTUS. You don’t mean to say that —

THE LADY [continuing]. I got hold of the list for a moment and changed it for a piece of paper out of his stationery rack: it was quite easy [she laughs: and it is clear that Blueloo is laughing too].

AUGUSTUS. What!

THE CLERK [laughing slowly and laboriously, with intense enjoyment]. Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha! [Augustus rushes at him; he snatches up the poker and stands on guard.] No you don’t.

THE LADY [still at the telephone, waving her disengaged hand behind her impatiently at them to stop making a noise]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh!!! [Augustus, with a shrug, goes up the middle of the room. The lady resumes her conversation with the telephone.] What?... Oh yes: I’m coming up by the 1.35: why not have tea with me at Rumpelmeister’s?... Rum-pel-meister’s. You know: they call it Robinson’s now... Right. Ta ta. [She hangs up the receiver, and is passing round the table on her way towards the door when she is confronted by Augustus.]

AUGUSTUS. Madam, I consider your conduct most unpatriotic. You make bets and abuse the confidence of the hardworked officials who are doing their bit for their country whilst our gallant fellows are perishing in the trenches —

THE LADY. Oh, the gallant fellows are not all in the trenches, Augustus. Some of them have come home for a few days’ hard-earned leave; and I am sure you won’t grudge them a little fun at your expense.

THE CLERK. Hear! hear!

AUGUSTUS [amiably]. Ah, well! For my country’s sake — !

GLASTONBURY SKIT

Written in late August 1916 as an interpretation of Frederick Austin’s comedy”The Glastonbury Travesty,” performed on the last night of the Glastonbury Festival, 26 August. Published, under the pseudonym of Walter Wombwell, in “Conclusion of the Festival,” Central Somerset Gazette, 1 September 1916.

BOSTOCK [rising] Stop. Ladies & gentlemen: I rise to protest against this performance. I am sorry to interrupt; but I have a public duty to perform. Men of Glastonbury: you all know me. I —

AUSTIN [who has come on the stage] May I ask you to address yourself to me, Mr Bostock. We all know you and have the greatest respect for you. We will listen to you with the greatest patience. What do you wish to say?

BOSTOCK. I protest against this performance.

AUSTIN. In what capacity do you protest, Mr Bostock?

BOSTOCK. As a member of the Committee — as a ratepayer —

CHORUS MAN. That’s quite right, Mr Bostock. The rates in this town are something disgraceful —

AUSTIN [suppressing him] Order, please. Mr Bostock is not protesting against the rates: he is protesting against the performance.

CHORUS MAN. Then, if you ask me, he dont know when he’s well off.

AUSTIN. I did not ask you, sir; and I dont believe you have paid your rates. Besides, you are only the chorus: you have no right to assume a principal part. Now, Mr Bostock.

BOSTOCK. What I say is that classical music should not be burlesqued. I say that the beautiful, glorious, tuneful music of Iphigenia should not be burlesqued. I speak with feeling. I say that it should not be burlesqued. I go further. I say that no music should be burlesqued.

AUSTIN. Do I understand you to say that Mr Boughton’s work should not be burlesqued?

BOSTOCK. I was not speaking of Mr Boughton’s work: I was speaking of Music.

BOUGHTON [rising] What’s that you say? Do you mean that what I compose is not music?

BOSTOCK. I have the greatest admiration for my friend Boughton. Nobody can appreciate more than I the very stimulating noise he induces our more gifted townspeople to make on these occasions.

BOUGHTON. A very stimulating WHAT?

BOSTOCK. I said a noise [he sits down].

AUSTIN [soothingly] Shakespear has used the same expression, Mr Boughton. In Romeo & Juliet he writes of the band as Sneak’s Noise.

BOUGHTON. I shall leave Glastonbury tomorrow. You can send for De Souza’s band. You can dance ragtimes. You can all go to the movies. Boughton’s occupation’s gone.

BOSTOCK. The immortal composer of Iphigenia, the great Gluck —

BOUGHTON. Who brought Gluck to Glastonbury?

Did you ever hear an opera of Gluck’s until I performed it for you?

BOSTOCK. Several times.

BOUGHTON. What operas of Gluck’s? Name them.

BOSTOCK. II Trovatore, Maritana, Faust, Carmen, The Bohemian Girl —

AUSTIN. Ahem! Ahem! Mr Boughton: I think this altercation is very distressing to the audience.

BOUGHTON. Not a bit of it: they like it. Besides, who began it? Bostock did. Well, snub Bostock, not me. I wont be suppressed. No man has ever silenced me.

BOSTOCK. If you will excuse my saying so, Mr Boughton, you are now talking through your hat.

BOUGHTON. I havnt a hat. Has any man in Glastonbury ever seen me with a hat? I cant afford a hat. I cant even afford to get my hair cut. I spend all my money on music for the people of Glastonbury. And now, because Bostock wants his Maritanas and his Bohemian Girls —

BOSTOCK [rising again indignantly] I protest. I cannot allow this. I have never wanted a Bohemian girl. I am a respectable married man. I call on you, Mr Austin, to protect me from Mr Boughton’s scandalous insinuations.

AUSTIN. I must request you, Mr Boughton, to keep order.

BOUGHTON. I am in order. I am as quiet as a lamb. If you will only listen to me for half an hour or so —

AUSTIN. Certainly not. I call on you to sit down.

BOUGHTON: When you call on me, its my place to ask you to sit down.

AUSTIN. Dont quibble, sir. Sit down.

BOUGHTON. I wont.

AUSTIN. I shall appeal to the Mayor.

BOUGHTON. Not even the Mayor of Glastonbury shall muzzle me.

AUSTIN. I shall call the police.

BOUGHTON. I defy the police. No power in heaven or earth shall prevail against Rutland Boughton.

MRS BOUGHTON [peremptorily] Rutland: you are making a fool of yourself. Sit down.

BOUGHTON [collapsing abjectly] Yes, dear [he sits down], AUSTIN. Thank you, Mrs Boughton. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Mr Bostock: are you satisfied?

BOSTOCK. I will just ask Mr Boughton whether he thinks it fair to burlesque Gluck’s music when his own music cannot be burlesqued?

BOUGHTON. Why cant it be burlesqued?

BOSTOCK. Because its too funny already.

BOUGHTON [explosively] Bostock —

MRS BOUGHTON [warningly] Now, Rutland.

BOUGHTON. I am calm, dear, perfectly calm, Maynt I just tell them why I dont write music like Gluck’s?

BOSTOCK. Because you can’t, Mr Boughton.

BOUGHTON. Yes I can: its always easy to do what somebody else has done before. Why is Gluck’s music the finest of its kind in the world? Because he didnt imitate foreign composers, but wrote the native music of his own country. Well, his country isnt my country, especially just at present. I am writing English music in England for English people; and before I stop, I’ll cut it finer still and write Glastonbury music in Glastonbury for Glastonbury people. And I’ll make fun of myself all the time if I like, and of Gluck too. So there! [He sits down].

AUSTIN. I think we may now bring this little episode to a close. [The limelight man cuts off his light. Austin shouts angrily at him] Please dont take the light off my face. Youre always doing it.

LIMELIGHT MAN. If you could see your face, youd be obliged to me.

AUSTIN [furious] Whats that you say? [He jumps down into the auditorium and rushes for the limelight man. Boughton and Bostock [grab] him].

All speak together, making a fearful row.

AUSTIN. Let me go. He insulted me. I’ll let him know. I’ll put a face on him. I’ll teach him his place. Let go, will you.

BOSTOCK. Order, order. Remember where you are, Mr Austin. The man meant no harm. Calm yourself. This is most unseemly.

BOUGHTON. Steady, steady, Austin. Never mind him, old chap. Dont kill him: we cant get on without him. Easy, easy.

LIMELIGHT MAN. Come on. I’m ready for you. It’s me that makes this show fit to be seen. I’m fed up with your complaints. Come on, the lot of you.

Crash — Lights up and Play resumed.

MACBETH SKIT

ACT I. SCENE V.

Inverness. Macbeth’s castle. Enter Lady Macbeth, reading a letter.

LADY MACBETH. “They met me in the day of success; and I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire to question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who all hailed me ‘Thane of Cawdor;’ by which title, before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time, with ‘Hail, king that shalt be!’ This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.”

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou’ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries “Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.” Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown’d withal.

Enter a Messenger.

What is your tidings?

MESSENGER. The king comes here to-night.

LADY MACBETH. — Thou’rt mad to say it:
Is not thy master with him? who, were’t so,
Would have inform’d for preparation.

MESSENGER. So please you, it is true: our thane is coming:
One of my fellows had the speed of him,
Who, almost dead for breath, had scarcely more
Than would make up his message.

LADY MACBETH. — Give him tending;
He brings great news. — [Exit Messenger].
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! Come thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry “Hold, hold!”

Enter Macbeth.

Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!
Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant

MACBETH. — My dearest girl;
I am never tired of hearing you
Express yourself in that magnificent way.
Duncan comes here tonight.

LADY MACBETH. — And when goes hence?

MACBETH. Tomorrow: so the old man says.

LADY MACBETH. — O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t. He that’s coming
Must be provided for: and you shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch;
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

During this speech Macbeth tries to play up to it. When she says, “Look like the time” he takes out a turnip watch; bears welcome in his eye and hand and tongue; looks like the innocent flower and then like the serpent under it.

MACBETH. We will proceed no further in this business
— you see, deary, I am trying to put it in your style, though its rather out of my line. We will, as I was saying, proceed no further in this business — in short, chuck it. The old man has been fearfully good to me; and ever since I cut that man in two in the war, everybody has been uncommonly kind to me. I enjoy being popular. You dont, I know: but I do. It may be a weakness; but if I were to murder the old man the very first night he is staying with us, I should lose sympathy. I really dont think people would like it.

LADY MACBETH. Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress’d yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I would,”
Like the poor cat i’ the adage?

MACBETH. Like what?

LADY MACBETH [louder] Like the cat.

MACBETH. Oh, the cat. In the what, did you say?

LADY MACBETH. In the adage.

MACBETH. Never heard of it. Your language is beyond me, my dear girl. However, if you want to know what I am afraid of, I’m afraid of the police. I dare do all that may become a man — a law-abiding man, you understand — without getting him into trouble. Who dares do more is — well, he isnt me.

LADY MACBETH. — What beast was’t then
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man.

MACBETH. Look here: I dont follow this.

LADY MACBETH. — Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both, and
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

MACBETH. No you wouldnt, darling. It sounds all right; but one doesnt do these things, believe me.
Besides, Duncan wont behave in that way: he was weaned about 75 years ago. Suppose we fail?

LADY MACBETH. — We fail!!

MACBETH [prosaically] Yes, fail.

LADY MACBETH. But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail. When Duncan is asleep —
Whereto the rather shall his day’s hard journey
Soundly invite him — his two chamberlains
Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbec only:

MACBETH. What the devil is a limbec?

LADY MACBETH [putting her hand over his mouth to shut him up, and proceeding] when in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers, who shall bear the guilt
Of our great quell?

MACBETH [reflecting] A limbec must be an alembic; and an alembic is the sort of thing you see in an apothecary’s shop — a sort of illicit still. But hang me if I know what you mean by this great quell. I never met a woman who could talk over my head as you do. What do you expect me to say, darling?

LADY MACBETH. Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.

MACBETH. Capital! Just how I wanted to turn it. As
I understand you, the two Johnnies who sleep in the room with Duncan will be drunk. By the way, you neednt trouble to make them drunk: you can depend on them for that: they havnt been sober after nine o’clock since they were children. The old man cant keep awake for ten minutes at any hour, even when you are talking to him. All I have to do is to stick their dirks into him. It’s great. By George, it’s immense! How do you think of such things? Everybody’ll say they did it. Eh? What?

LADY MACBETH. — Who dares receive it other,
As we shall make our griefs and clamour roar
Upon his death?

MACBETH [tragically] I am settled (I mean Duncan is)
And buck up each — each — each —

LADY MACBETH. Each corporal agent to this terrible feat —

MACBETH. Yes — give us a chance, old girl —
[again tragically]
Each corporal agent to these terrible feet — Look here: what’s wrong with my feet?

MISS MCCARTHY. Gerald: come off it. I shall never make a Shakespearian actor of you. [She leads him ignominiously from the stage].

Curtain

SKIT FOR THE TIPTAFT REVUE

Composed in August 1917 for a topical revue produced by members of the Fabian Summer School at Godalming, Surrey.

CHAIRMAN. Ladies and gentlemen: an intellectual treat awaits you. Mr Bernard Shaw.

SHAW. I have forgotten how to rise. I am too stiff to rise. I have lost the power of movement except at the command of Miss Hankinson.

Miss Hankinson gives the jumping order. Shaw rises on his toes; bends his knees; bounds into the air; and comes down in the correct attitude.

SHAW. Thank you. Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. [As he speaks he walks to and fro] I have learnt many things at the summer school this year; and they have left me a humbler, and I hope, a better [he reaches the side of the stage and turns with a hop] one, two, three, one, two, three [practising the waltz] a better man. What is the question before us? Surely it is this.

[He drops his emphatic manner and communes with himself perplexedly] Do I start with the right foot or the left?

[He starts waltzing with the right] No: the left. One, two, three — [recollecting himself] As I was saying, Mr Chairman — Look here: what WAS I saying?

THE CHAIRMAN [kindly] You were saying, Mr Shaw, that hope told a flattering tale.

SHAW. Was I? That’s very extraordinary; for I have hardly spoken to the man for twenty minutes, and he never got a word in edgeways.

THE CHAIRMAN. All right, Mr Shaw, all right. I only said that to draw you.

SHAW. Please dont draw me any more. Mrs Wilson does nothing but draw me; and she never misses a single one of my worst points. After all, my nose is no redder than anyone else’s; and, anyhow, you cant give the exact shade with a black lead pencil.

THE CHAIRMAN [very kindly] You have no worst points, Mr Shaw. You are, humanly speaking, perfection.

SHAW. Will you tell me this, Mr Chairman? Why has everyone been so jolly civil to me ever since Mr Webb made that speech about our being kind to the old? They are getting kinder and kinder to me every day. Why? Is it because I am getting older and older every day? Mr Chairman, I say it is a mistaken kindness. They try to teach me to dance. They sacrifice themselves as my partners. In my agitation at an unaccustomed exercise which I do not understand, I grab them by the hair; I kick large chips out of their shins; I come down with crushing weight on their toes; but they smile and redouble their kindness. Why dont they teach Webb, instead of stealing his shoes and wearing them to show how small their feet are?

THE CHAIRMAN. Are we not wandering a little from the question, Mr Shaw?

SHAW. Well, you ought to know. What is the question? I thought I was the question. I generally am the question. There is not a more modest man alive; but people dont seem able to get away from me.

SOMEBODY. Why does Mr Shaw object to our civility? It does the greatest violence to my feelings. He ought to be most thankful to us. He bores me stiff.

Indignant cries of Order! Shame! Disgraceful! &c. Shaw, beaming and effusive, goes to the somebody and shakes her hand warmly.

SHAW. Thank you, dearest lady, thank you. You may sit beside me at breakfast tomorrow.

THE CHAIRMAN. May I remind you, with the greatest respect, that the subject before us is the Reconstruction of the Empire after the War.

SHAW. True, Mr Chairman. Oh, how true! But do not be downhearted. Webb will reconstruct it; and I will take the credit. Soon, I hope, this terrible war will conclude; and all Europe will be as peaceful, as harmonious, as brotherly, as charitable, as tolerant, as patient, as ready to hear the other side, as a Summer School meeting.

A VOICE. What price Tiptaft?

SHAW. Tiptaft be blowed! [Hear, hear!] Tiptaft comes from Birmingham [Shame!] Tiptaft is a Tariff Reformer [groans] Tiptaft’s pockets are bulging with Tory money [Spy!] Tiptaft thirsts for the blood of our German comrades [Coward!] Tiptaft puts his own wretched country before Socialism [Traitor!] In this school, when we speak of tolerance, of harmony, of brotherhood, we dont include Tiptaft [Not likely! and great cheering] As our brave Allies would say, Conspuez Tiptaft [Laughter and cheers] I turn from this disgusting subject to the end of the war which Tiptaft would prolong to the last syllable of recorded time — if he could. I call your attention to an important economic point which we have not yet discussed. It will be raised by the repatriation of our army when peace breaks out. I say that the State should pay the returning officers’ expenses.

A VOICE. No politics!

SHAW. You idiot, I dont mean the returning officers’

EXPENSES.

VOICE. Well, what do you mean?

SHAW. I mean the expenses of the returning officers.

ANOTHER VOICE [judicially] After all, does it matter?

SHAW [hopelessly puzzled] What?

THE FIRST VOICE. What do you mean?

THE OTHER VOICE. Simply, does it matter?

SHAW. Does what matter?

THE CHAIRMAN. I think we have now reached a stage at which the audience would appreciate some remarks from the next speaker.

SHAW. Saved! [He collapses into his seat; and the meeting proceeds], &c &c &c.

ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS

ANNAJANSKA is frankly a bravura piece. The modern variety theatre demands for its “turns” little plays called sketches, to last twenty minutes or so, and to enable some favorite performer to make a brief but dazzling appearance on some barely passable dramatic pretext. Miss Lillah McCarthy and I, as author and actress, have helped to make one another famous on many serious occasions, from Man and Superman to Androcles; and Mr Charles Ricketts has not disdained to snatch moments from his painting and sculpture to design some wonderful dresses for us. We three unbent as Mrs Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson might have unbent, to devise a turn for the Coliseum variety theatre. Not that we would set down the art of the variety theatre as something to be condescended to, or our own art as elephantine. We should rather crave indulgence as three novices fresh from the awful legitimacy of the highbrow theatre.

Well, Miss McCarthy and Mr Ricketts justified themselves easily in the glamor of the footlights, to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812. I fear I did not. I have received only one compliment on my share; and that was from a friend who said, “It is the only one of your works that is not too long.” So I have made it a page or two longer, according to my own precept: EMBRACE YOUR REPROACHES: THEY ARE OFTEN GLORIES IN DISGUISE.

Annajanska was first performed at the Coliseum Theatre in London on the 21st January, 1918, with Lillah McCarthy as the Grand Duchess, Henry Miller as Schneidekind, and Randle Ayrton as General Strammfest.

ANNAJANSKA, THE BOLSHEVIK EMPRESS

The General’s office in a military station on the east front in Beotia. An office table with a telephone, writing materials, official papers, etc., is set across the room. At the end of the table, a comfortable chair for the General. Behind the chair, a window. Facing it at the other end of the table, a plain wooden bench. At the side of the table, with its back to the door, a common chair, with a typewriter before it. Beside the door, which is opposite the end of the bench, a rack for caps and coats. There is nobody in the room.

General Strammfest enters, followed by Lieutenant Schneidekind. They hang up their cloaks and caps. Schneidekind takes a little longer than Strammfest, who comes to the table.

STRAMMFEST. Schneidekind.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Yes, sir.

STRAMMFEST. Have you sent my report yet to the government? [He sits down.]

SCHNEIDEKIND [coming to the table]. Not yet, sir. Which government do you wish it sent to? [He sits down.]

STRAMMFEST. That depends. What’s the latest? Which of them do you think is most likely to be in power tomorrow morning?

SCHNEIDEKIND. Well, the provisional government was going strong yesterday. But today they say that the Prime Minister has shot himself, and that the extreme left fellow has shot all the others.

STRAMMFEST. Yes: that’s all very well; but these fellows always shoot themselves with blank cartridge.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Still, even the blank cartridge means backing down. I should send the report to the Maximilianists.

STRAMMFEST. They’re no stronger than the Oppidoshavians; and in my own opinion the Moderate Red Revolutionaries are as likely to come out on top as either of them.

SCHNEIDEKIND. I can easily put a few carbon sheets in the typewriter and send a copy each to the lot.

STRAMMFEST. Waste of paper. You might as well send reports to an infant school. [He throws his head on the table with a groan.]

SCHNEIDEKIND. Tired out, Sir?

STRAMMFEST. O Schneidekind, Schneidekind, how can you bear to live?

SCHNEIDEKIND. At my age, sir, I ask myself how can I bear to die?

STRAMMFEST. You are young, young and heartless. You are excited by the revolution: you are attached to abstract things like liberty. But my family has served the Panjandrums of Beotia faithfully for seven centuries. The Panjandrums have kept our place for us at their courts, honored us, promoted us, shed their glory on us, made us what we are. When I hear you young men declaring that you are fighting for civilization, for democracy, for the overthrow of militarism, I ask myself how can a man shed his blood for empty words used by vulgar tradesmen and common laborers: mere wind and stink. [He rises, exalted by his theme.] A king is a splendid reality, a man raised above us like a god. You can see him; you can kiss his hand; you can be cheered by his smile and terrified by his frown. I would have died for my Panjandrum as my father died for his father. Your toiling millions were only too honored to receive the toes of our boots in the proper spot for them when they displeased their betters. And now what is left in life for me? [He relapses into his chair discouraged.] My Panjandrum is deposed and transported to herd with convicts. The army, his pride and glory, is paraded to hear seditious speeches from penniless rebels, with the colonel actually forced to take the chair and introduce the speaker. I myself am made Commander-in-Chief by my own solicitor: a Jew, Schneidekind! a Hebrew Jew! It seems only yesterday that these things would have been the ravings of a madman: today they are the commonplaces of the gutter press. I live now for three objects only: to defeat the enemy, to restore the Panjandrum, and to hang my solicitor.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Be careful, sir: these are dangerous views to utter nowadays. What if I were to betray you?

STRAMMFEST. What!

SCHNEIDEKIND. I won’t, of course: my own father goes on just like that; but suppose I did?

STRAMMFEST [chuckling]. I should accuse you of treason to the Revolution, my lad; and they would immediately shoot you, unless you cried and asked to see your mother before you died, when they would probably change their minds and make you a brigadier. Enough. [He rises and expands his chest.] I feel the better for letting myself go. To business. [He takes up a telegram: opens it: and is thunderstruck by its contents.] Great heaven! [He collapses into his chair.] This is the worst blow of all.

SCHNEIDEKIND. What has happened? Are we beaten?

STRAMMFEST. Man, do you think that a mere defeat could strike me down as this news does: I, who have been defeated thirteen times since the war began? O, my master, my master, my Panjandrum! [he is convulsed with sobs.]

SCHNEIDEKIND. They have killed him?

STRAMMFEST. A dagger has been struck through his heart —

SCHNEIDEKIND. Good God!

STRAMMFEST. — and through mine, through mine.

SCHNEIDEKIND [relieved]. Oh, a metaphorical dagger! I thought you meant a real one. What has happened?

STRAMMFEST. His daughter the Grand Duchess Annajanska, she whom the Panjandrina loved beyond all her other children, has — has — [he cannot finish.]

SCHNEIDEKIND. Committed suicide?

STRAMMFEST. No. Better if she had. Oh, far far better.

SCHNEIDEKIND [in hushed tones]. Left the Church?

STRAMMFEST [shocked]. Certainly not. Do not blaspheme, young man.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Asked for the vote?

STRAMMFEST. I would have given it to her with both hands to save her from this.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Save her from what? Dash it, sir, out with it.

STRAMMFEST. She has joined the Revolution.

SCHNEIDEKIND. But so have you, sir. We’ve all joined the Revolution. She doesn’t mean it any more than we do.

STRAMMFEST. Heaven grant you may be right! But that is not the worst. She had eloped with a young officer. Eloped, Schneidekind, eloped!

SCHNEIDEKIND [not particularly impressed]. Yes, Sir.

STRAMMFEST. Annajanska, the beautiful, the innocent, my master’s daughter! [He buries his face in his hands.]

The telephone rings.

SCHNEIDEKIND [taking the receiver]. Yes: G.H.Q. Yes... Don’t bawl: I’m not a general. Who is it speaking?... Why didn’t you say so? don’t you know your duty? Next time you will lose your stripe... Oh, they’ve made you a colonel, have they? Well, they’ve made me a field-marshal: now what have you to say?... Look here: what did you ring up for? I can’t spend the day here listening to your cheek... What! the Grand Duchess [Strammfest starts.] Where did you catch her?

STRAMMFEST [snatching the telephone and listening for the answer]. Speak louder, will you: I am a General I know that, you dolt. Have you captured the officer that was with her?... Damnation! You shall answer for this: you let him go: he bribed you. You must have seen him: the fellow is in the full dress court uniform of the Panderobajensky Hussars. I give you twelve hours to catch him or... what’s that you say about the devil? Are you swearing at me, you... Thousand thunders! [To Schneidekind.] The swine says that the Grand Duchess is a devil incarnate. [Into the telephone.] Filthy traitor: is that the way you dare speak of the daughter of our anointed Panjandrum? I’ll —

SCHNEIDEKIND [pulling the telephone from his lips]. Take care, sir.

STRAMMFEST. I won’t take care: I’ll have him shot. Let go that telephone.

SCHNEIDEKIND. But for her own sake, sir —

STRAMMFEST. Eh? —

SCHNEIDEKIND. For her own sake they had better send her here. She will be safe in your hands.

STRAMMFEST [yielding the receiver]. You are right. Be civil to him. I should choke [he sits down].

SCHNEIDEKIND [into the telephone]. Hullo. Never mind all that: it’s only a fellow here who has been fooling with the telephone. I had to leave the room for a moment. Wash out: and send the girl along. We’ll jolly soon teach her to behave herself here... Oh, you’ve sent her already. Then why the devil didn’t you say so, you — [he hangs up the telephone angrily]. Just fancy: they started her off this morning: and all this is because the fellow likes to get on the telephone and hear himself talk now that he is a colonel. [The telephone rings again. He snatches the receiver furiously.] What’s the matter now?... [To the General.] It’s our own people downstairs. [Into the receiver.] Here! do you suppose I’ve nothing else to do than to hang on to the telephone all day?... What’s that? Not men enough to hold her! What do you mean? [To the General.] She is there, sir.

STRAMMFEST. Tell them to send her up. I shall have to receive her without even rising, without kissing her hand, to keep up appearances before the escort. It will break my heart.

SCHNEIDEKIND [into the receiver]. Send her up... Tcha! [He hangs up the receiver.] He says she is halfway up already: they couldn’t hold her.

The Grand Duchess bursts into the room, dragging with her two exhausted soldiers hanging on desperately to her arms. She is enveloped from head to foot by a fur-lined cloak, and wears a fur cap.

SCHNEIDEKIND [pointing to the bench]. At the word Go, place your prisoner on the bench in a sitting posture; and take your seats right and left of her. Go.

The two soldiers make a supreme effort to force her to sit down. She flings them back so that they are forced to sit on the bench to save themselves from falling backwards over it, and is herself dragged into sitting between them. The second soldier, holding on tight to the Grand Duchess with one hand, produces papers with the other, and waves them towards Schneidekind, who takes them from him and passes them on to the General. He opens them and reads them with a grave expression.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Be good enough to wait, prisoner, until the General has read the papers on your case.

THE GRAND DUCHESS [to the soldiers]. Let go. [To Strammfest]. Tell them to let go, or I’ll upset the bench backwards and bash our three heads on the floor.

FIRST SOLDIER. No, little mother. Have mercy on the poor.

STRAMMFEST [growling over the edge of the paper he is reading]. Hold your tongue.

THE GRAND DUCHESS [blazing]. Me, or the soldier?

STRAMMFEST [horrified]. The soldier, madam.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Tell him to let go.

STRAMMFEST. Release the lady.

The soldiers take their hands off her. One of them wipes his fevered brow. The other sucks his wrist.

SCHNEIDKIND [fiercely]. ‘ttention!

The two soldiers sit up stiffly.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh, let the poor man suck his wrist. It may be poisoned. I bit it.

STRAMMFEST [shocked]. You bit a common soldier!

GRAND DUCHESS. Well, I offered to cauterize it with the poker in the office stove. But he was afraid. What more could I do?

SCHNEIDEKIND. Why did you bite him, prisoner?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. He would not let go.

STRAMMFEST. Did he let go when you bit him?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. No. [Patting the soldier on the back]. You should give the man a cross for his devotion. I could not go on eating him; so I brought him along with me.

STRAMMFEST. Prisoner —

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Don’t call me prisoner, General Strammfest. My grandmother dandled you on her knee.

STRAMMFEST [bursting into tears]. O God, yes. Believe me, my heart is what it was then.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Your brain also is what it was then. I will not be addressed by you as prisoner.

STRAMMFEST. I may not, for your own sake, call you by your rightful and most sacred titles. What am I to call you?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. The Revolution has made us comrades. Call me comrade.

STRAMMFEST. I had rather die.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Then call me Annajanska; and I will call you Peter Piper, as grandmamma did.

STRAMMFEST [painfully agitated]. Schneidekind, you must speak to her: I cannot — [he breaks down.]

SCHNEIDEKIND [officially]. The Republic of Beotia has been compelled to confine the Panjandrum and his family, for their own safety, within certain bounds. You have broken those bounds.

STRAMMFEST [taking the word from him]. You are I must say it — a prisoner. What am I to do with you?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. You should have thought of that before you arrested me.

STRAMMFEST. Come, come, prisoner! do you know what will happen to you if you compel me to take a sterner tone with you?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. No. But I know what will happen to you.

STRAMAIFEST. Pray what, prisoner?

THE GLAND DUCHESS. Clergyman’s sore throat.

Schneidekind splutters; drops a paper: and conceals his laughter under the table.

STRAMMFEST [thunderously]. Lieutenant Schneidekind.

SCHNEIDEKIND [in a stifled voice]. Yes, Sir. [The table vibrates visibly.]

STRAMMFEST. Come out of it, you fool: you’re upsetting the ink.

Schneidekind emerges, red in the face with suppressed mirth.

STRAMMFEST. Why don’t you laugh? Don’t you appreciate Her Imperial Highness’s joke?

SCHNEIDEKIND [suddenly becoming solemn]. I don’t want to, sir.

STRAMMFEST. Laugh at once, sir. I order you to laugh.

SCHNEIDEKIND [with a touch of temper]. I really can’t, sir. [He sits down decisively.]

STRAMMFEST [growling at him]. Yah! [He turns impressively to the Grand Duchess.] Your Imperial Highness desires me to address you as comrade?

THE GRAND DUCHESS [rising and waving a red handkerchief]. Long live the Revolution, comrade!

STRAMMFEST [rising and saluting]. Proletarians of all lands, unite. Lieutenant Schneidekind, you will rise and sing the Marseillaise.

SCHNEIDEKIND [rising]. But I cannot, sir. I have no voice, no ear.

STRAMMFEST. Then sit down; and bury your shame in your typewriter. [Schneidekind sits down.] Comrade Annajanska, you have eloped with a young officer.

THE GRAND DUCHESS [astounded]. General Strammfest, you lie.

STRAMMFEST. Denial, comrade, is useless. It is through that officer that your movements have been traced. [The Grand Duchess is suddenly enlightened, and seems amused. Strammfest continues an a forensic manner.] He joined you at the Golden Anchor in Hakonsburg. You gave us the slip there; but the officer was traced to Potterdam, where you rejoined him and went alone to Premsylople. What have you done with that unhappy young man? Where is he?

THE GRAND DUCHESS [pretending to whisper an important secret]. Where he has always been.

STRAMMFEST [eagerly]. Where is that?

THE GRAND DUCHESS [impetuously]. In your imagination. I came alone. I am alone. Hundreds of officers travel every day from Hakonsburg to Potterdam. What do I know about them?

STRAMMFEST. They travel in khaki. They do not travel in full dress court uniform as this man did.

SCHNEIDEKIND. Only officers who are eloping with grand duchesses wear court uniform: otherwise the grand duchesses could not be seen with them.

STRAMMFEST. Hold your tongue. [Schneidekind, in high dudgeon, folds his arms and retires from the conversation. The General returns to his paper and to his examination of the Grand Duchess.] This officer travelled with your passport. What have you to say to that?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Bosh! How could a man travel with a woman’s passport?

STRAMMFEST. It is quite simple, as you very well know. A dozen travellers arrive at the boundary. The official collects their passports. He counts twelve persons; then counts the passports. If there are twelve, he is satisfied.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Then how do you know that one of the passports was mine?

STRAMMFEST. A waiter at the Potterdam Hotel looked at the officer’s passport when he was in his bath. It was your passport.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Stuff! Why did he not have me arrested?

STRAMMFEST. When the waiter returned to the hotel with the police the officer had vanished; and you were there with your own passport. They knouted him.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh! Strammfest, send these men away. I must speak to you alone.

STRAMMFEST [rising in horror]. No: this is the last straw: I cannot consent. It is impossible, utterly, eternally impossible, that a daughter of the Imperial House should speak to any one alone, were it even her own husband.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. You forget that there is an exception. She may speak to a child alone. [She rises.] Strammfest, you have been dandled on my grandmother’s knee. By that gracious action the dowager Panjandrina made you a child forever. So did Nature, by the way. I order you to speak to me alone. Do you hear? I order you. For seven hundred years no member of your family has ever disobeyed an order from a member of mine. Will you disobey me?

STRAMMFEST. There is an alternative to obedience. The dead cannot disobey. [He takes out his pistol and places the muzzle against his temple.]

SCHNEIDEKIND [snatching the pistol from him]. For God’s sake, General —

STRAMMFEST [attacking him furiously to recover the weapon]. Dog of a subaltern, restore that pistol and my honor.

SCHNEIDEKIND [reaching out with the pistol to the Grand Duchess]. Take it: quick: he is as strong as a bull.

THE GRAND DUCHESS [snatching it]. Aha! Leave the room, all of you except the General. At the double! lightning! electricity! [She fires shot after shot, spattering the bullets about the ankles of the soldiers. They fly precipitately. She turns to Schneidekind, who has by this time been flung on the floor by the General.] You too. [He scrambles up.] March. [He flies to the door.]

SCHNEIDEKIND [turning at the door]. For your own sake, comrade —

THE GRAND DUCHESS [indignantly]. Comrade! You!!! Go. [She fires two more shots. He vanishes.]

STRAMMFEST [making an impulsive movement towards her]. My Imperial Mistress —

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Stop. I have one bullet left, if you attempt to take this from me [putting the pistol to her temple].

STRAMMFEST [recoiling, and covering his eyes with his hands]. No no: put it down: put it down. I promise everything: I swear anything; but put it down, I implore you.

THE GRAND DUCHESS [throwing it on the table]. There!

STRAMMFEST [uncovering his eyes]. Thank God!

THE GRAND DUCHESS [gently]. Strammfest: I am your comrade. Am I nothing more to you?

STRAMMFEST [falling on his knee]. You are, God help me, all that is left to me of the only power I recognize on earth [he kisses her hand].

THE GRAND DUCHESS [indulgently]. Idolater! When will you learn that our strength has never been in ourselves, but in your illusions about us? [She shakes off her kindliness, and sits down in his chair.] Now tell me, what are your orders? And do you mean to obey them?

STRAMMFEST [starting like a goaded ox, and blundering fretfully about the room]. How can I obey six different dictators, and not one gentleman among the lot of them? One of them orders me to make peace with the foreign enemy. Another orders me to offer all the neutral countries 48 hours to choose between adopting his views on the single tax and being instantly invaded and annihilated. A third orders me to go to a damned Socialist Conference and explain that Beotia will allow no annexations and no indemnities, and merely wishes to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth throughout the universe. [He finishes behind Schneidekind’s chair.]

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Damn their trifling!

STRAMMFEST. I thank Your Imperial Highness from the bottom of my heart for that expression. Europe thanks you.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. M’yes; but — [rising]. Strammfest, you know that your cause — the cause of the dynasty — is lost.

STRAMMFEST. You must not say so. It is treason, even from you. [He sinks, discouraged, into the chair, and covers his face with his hand.]

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Do not deceive yourself, General: never again will a Panjandrum reign in Beotia. [She walks slowly across the room, brooding bitterly, and thinking aloud.] We are so decayed, so out of date, so feeble, so wicked in our own despite, that we have come at last to will our own destruction.

STRAMMFEST. You are uttering blasphemy.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. All great truths begin as blasphemies. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot set up my father’s throne again. If they could, you would have done it, would you not?

STRAMMFEST. God knows I would!

THE GRAND DUCHESS. You really mean that? You would keep the people in their hopeless squalid misery? you would fill those infamous prisons again with the noblest spirits in the land? you would thrust the rising sun of liberty back into the sea of blood from which it has risen? And all because there was in the middle of the dirt and ugliness and horror a little patch of court splendor in which you could stand with a few orders on your uniform, and yawn day after day and night after night in unspeakable boredom until your grave yawned wider still, and you fell into it because you had nothing better to do. How can you be so stupid, so heartless?

STRAMMFEST. You must be mad to think of royalty in such a way. I never yawned at court. The dogs yawned; but that was because they were dogs: they had no imagination, no ideals, no sense of honor and dignity to sustain them.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. My poor Strammfest: you were not often enough at court to tire of it. You were mostly soldiering; and when you came home to have a new order pinned on your breast, your happiness came through looking at my father and mother and at me, and adoring us. Was that not so?

STRAMMFEST. Do YOU reproach me with it? I am not ashamed of it.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh, it was all very well for you, Strammfest. But think of me, of me! standing there for you to gape at, and knowing that I was no goddess, but only a girl like any other girl! It was cruelty to animals: you could have stuck up a wax doll or a golden calf to worship; it would not have been bored.

STRAMMFEST. Stop; or I shall renounce my allegiance to you. I have had women flogged for such seditious chatter as this.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Do not provoke me to send a bullet through your head for reminding me of it.

STRAMMFEST. You always had low tastes. You are no true daughter of the Panjandrums: you are a changeling, thrust into the Panjandrina’s bed by some profligate nurse. I have heard stories of your childhood: of how —

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Ha, ha! Yes: they took me to the circus when I was a child. It was my first moment of happiness, my first glimpse of heaven. I ran away and joined the troupe. They caught me and dragged me back to my gilded cage; but I had tasted freedom; and they never could make me forget it.

STRAMMFEST. Freedom! To be the slave of an acrobat! to be exhibited to the public! to —

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh, I was trained to that. I had learnt that part of the business at court.

STRAMMFEST. You had not been taught to strip yourself half naked and turn head over heels —

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Man, I WANTED to get rid of my swaddling clothes and turn head over heels. I wanted to, I wanted to, I wanted to. I can do it still. Shall I do it now?

STRAMMFEST. If you do, I swear I will throw myself from the window so that I may meet your parents in heaven without having my medals torn from my breast by them.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh, you are incorrigible. You are mad, infatuated. You will not believe that we royal divinities are mere common flesh and blood even when we step down from our pedestals and tell you ourselves what a fool you are. I will argue no more with you: I will use my power. At a word from me your men will turn against you: already half of them do not salute you; and you dare not punish them: you have to pretend not to notice it.

STRAMMFEST. It is not for you to taunt me with that if it is so.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. [haughtily]. Taunt! I condescend to taunt! To taunt a common General! You forget yourself, sir.

STRAMMFEST [dropping on his knee submissively]. Now at last you speak like your royal self.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Oh, Strammfest, Strammfest, they have driven your slavery into your very bones. Why did you not spit in my face?

STRAMMFEST [rising with a shudder]. God forbid!

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Well, since you will be my slave, take your orders from me. I have not come here to save our wretched family and our bloodstained crown. I am come to save the Revolution.

STRAMMFEST. Stupid as I am, I have come to think that I had better save that than save nothing. But what will the Revolution do for the people? Do not be deceived by the fine speeches of the revolutionary leaders and the pamphlets of the revolutionary writers. How much liberty is there where they have gained the upper hand? Are they not hanging, shooting, imprisoning as much as ever we did? Do they ever tell the people the truth? No: if the truth does not suit them they spread lies instead, and make it a crime to tell the truth.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Of course they do. Why should they not?

STRAMMFEST [hardly able to believe his ears]. Why should they not?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Yes: why should they not? We did it. You did it, whip in hand: you flogged women for teaching children to read.

STRAMMFEST. To read sedition. To read Karl Marx.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Pshaw! How could they learn to read the Bible without learning to read Karl Marx? Why do you not stand to your guns and justify what you did, instead of making silly excuses? Do you suppose I think flogging a woman worse than flogging a man? I, who am a woman myself!

STRAMMFEST. I am at a loss to understand your Imperial Highness. You seem to me to contradict yourself.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Nonsense! I say that if the people cannot govern themselves, they must be governed by somebody. If they will not do their duty without being half forced and half humbugged, somebody must force them and humbug them. Some energetic and capable minority must always be in power. Well, I am on the side of the energetic minority whose principles I agree with. The Revolution is as cruel as we were; but its aims are my aims. Therefore I stand for the Revolution.

STRAMMFEST. You do not know what you are saying. This is pure Bolshevism. Are you, the daughter of a Panjandrum, a Bolshevist?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. I am anything that will make the world less like a prison and more like a circus.

STRAMMFEST. Ah! You still want to be a circus star.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Yes, and be billed as the Bolshevik Empress. Nothing shall stop me. You have your orders, General Strammfest: save the Revolution.

STRAMMFEST. What Revolution? Which Revolution? No two of your rabble of revolutionists mean the same thing by the Revolution What can save a mob in which every man is rushing in a different direction?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. I will tell you. The war can save it.

STRAMMFEST. The war?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Yes, the war. Only a great common danger and a great common duty can unite us and weld these wrangling factions into a solid commonwealth.

STRAMMFEST. Bravo! War sets everything right: I have always said so. But what is a united people without a united army? And what can I do? I am only a soldier. I cannot make speeches: I have won no victories: they will not rally to my call [again he sinks into his chair with his former gesture of discouragement].

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Are you sure they will not rally to mine?

STRAMMFEST. Oh, if only you were a man and a soldier!

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Suppose I find you a man and a soldier?

STRAMMFEST [rising in a fury]. Ah! the scoundrel you eloped with! You think you will shove this fellow into an army command, over my head. Never.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. You promised everything. You swore anything. [She marches as if in front of a regiment.] I know that this man alone can rouse the army to enthusiasm.

STRAMMFEST. Delusion! Folly! He is some circus acrobat; and you are in love with him.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. I swear I am not in love with him. I swear I will never marry him.

STRAMMFEST. Then who is he?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Anybody in the world but you would have guessed long ago. He is under your very eyes.

STRAMMFEST [staring past her right and left]. Where?

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Look out of the window.

He rushes to the window, looking for the officer. The Grand Duchess takes off her cloak and appears in the uniform of the Panderobajensky Hussars.

STRAMMFEST [peering through the window]. Where is he? I can see no one.

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Here, silly.

STRAMMFEST [turning]. You! Great Heavens! The Bolshevik Empress!

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Manners was written and set immediately prior to the First World War. Shaw deliberately determined that he would not release the work during the war because as he later remarked he believed that truth telling was not compatible with the defence of a country.  The play was finally published in 1919 and first staged in New York’s Garrick Theatre in 1920 and has since been performed a series of times, although not as frequently as Shaw’s most well known plays. A significant production was the 1984 Broadway revival starring the famous actors Rex Harrison, Amy Irving and Rosemary Harris. There has also been a recent 2014 production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reinforcing the enduring appeal and relevance of Shaw’s play.

Heartbreak House is set at the old estate in Sussex, South East England, of the retired Captain Shotover, whose daughter, the bohemian Hesione Hushabye is keen to dissuade the young, penniless houseguest Ellie Dunn from marrying the cold-hearted businessman Boss Mangan. Shaw’s distaste for everything that Mangan represents is so intense that he barely portrays Boss as a human, and while Ellie initially believes she will marry him for practical reasons, the playwright presents the possible union as so abhorrent that it becomes insupportable.

The dark comedy serves as a rebuke to the British upper-class and the ruthless capitalists as they blithely let the county drift towards disaster and do nothing to attempt to avert huge loss and destruction. However, Shaw is equally critical of those who loathe the Mangan figures of the country, but do not attempt to influence and guide society to a change for the better. The playwright demonstrates a fury and anger towards the failure of men responsible for bringing the Armageddon ever closer.  There is an incredibly macabre and bleak comedic line in the work foreshadowing Europe’s descent into the abyss, when Hesione Hushabye asks her father ‘Can’t you think of something that will murder half of Europe in one bang?’

CONTENTS

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

Where Heartbreak House Stands

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in exploiting and even flattering their charm.

The Inhabitants

Tchekov’s plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared and said, “How Russian!” They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen’s intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.

Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.

Revolution on the Shelf

Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper. It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends. When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson, Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and, generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might not have had to apologize for, had refused to “recognize” some powerful Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.

The Cherry Orchard

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their inheritance, like the people in Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard. Even those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things or starve.

From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.

Nature’s Long Credits

Nature’s way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.

This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.

The Wicked Half Century

It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions, produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time.

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler vehemently put it, “of mind from the universe.”

Hypochondria

Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside. But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds, but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations. Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course) in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on to ovaries and appendices until at last no one’s inside was safe. They explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was the business of the chemist’s laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter’s shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale, clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared to the General Medical Council.

Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying

Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money, whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld’s saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.

War Delirium

Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics, exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand. I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed. No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was saved only by a hair’s breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money. And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities, but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was “collecting” it for the annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices; label themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that they had nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign of returning sanity, the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting of the Flag Days was brought under some sort of regulation.

Madness in Court

The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence. Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious objections to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament introducing Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their convictions. Those who did so were very ill-advised from the point of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military training in Officers’ Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of the coroner’s jury been on the other side, their tormentors were gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue, pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly; and its law was set aside for Lynch law.

The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed. The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M. Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.

The Long Arm of War

The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India. But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence, reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire, and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their shoulders and saying, “C’est la guerre.” England, inviolate for so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England, with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England, and the more private records of the methods by which the American War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.

The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty

Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the formula, “Remember that we are at war now.” I have said that men assumed that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not change men’s minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser’s leg, striking the German dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing the King’s illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage: only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called themselves patriots.

The Sufferings of the Sane

The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. “Blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war,” was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our friend’s bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons they had “given” to their country.

No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others. They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship. They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They “stuck it,” and hated it, to the end.

Evil in the Throne of Good

This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.

Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in “German losses.” They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!

Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel

But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on “the Huns” as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.

For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their heads now lost them utterly. “Killing saloon passengers! What next?” was the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason pass a vote for £30,000 without a word, and then spend three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven shillings for refreshments?

Little Minds and Big Battles

Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of Jutland a mere ballad. The words “after thorough artillery preparation” in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup, their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man would work at home regardless of the call “to make the world safe for democracy.” His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.

It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians. But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess, and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting, “If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got me into khaki.” And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at. Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense, which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane European State could afford to do.

The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables

Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time was conducting a war which involved the organization of several millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its heart’s content. Indeed the raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, “If you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven’s sake get out of the way,” was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately intimidating the Government by its blusterings into using the irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the conquest of Europe.

The Practical Business Men

From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for “practical business men.” By this they meant men who had become rich by placing their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.

How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down

Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the world by the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action, like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo the opinions of that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total breakdown of its organization.

The Mad Election

Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days. The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of action to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to apologize publicly for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent. Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk tamely into the lobby at the party whip’s orders, provided the leader will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called, in derisive reference to the war rationing system, “giving them the coupon.” Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had, in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.

The Yahoo and the Angry Ape

Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men, saying that “Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for thunder: nothing but thunder.” What would Shakespeare have said if he had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a finger that might have been a child’s finger without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove’s thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford, as French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find the old familiar signpost inscribed “To Stratford, 1 mile,” and at the end of the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a fragment of a broken churn here and there? Would not the spectacle of the angry ape endowed with powers of destruction that Jove never pretended to, have beggared even his command of words?

And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for then the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and we should take greater care not to get into them. In truth, it is, as Byron said, “not difficult to die,” and enormously difficult to live: that explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious risk of death more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that he taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without some soldier who braved death in the field so recklessly that he was decorated or specially commended for it, being haled before our magistrates for having failed to resist the paltriest temptations of peace, with no better excuse than the old one that “a man must live.” Strange that one who, sooner than do honest work, will sell his honor for a bottle of wine, a visit to the theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all obtained by passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on the most desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if, after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of life? If it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men attain it? At all events it is clear that the kingdom of the Prince of Peace has not yet become the kingdom of this world. His attempts at invasion have been resisted far more fiercely than the Kaiser’s. Successful as that resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of National Debt that is not the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and do not intend to pay it. A blockade that cuts off “the grace of our Lord” is in the long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the blockader’s house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.

Plague on Both your Houses!

Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished many times by successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of Vanity Fair. Another generation of “secondary education” at our ancient public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction of that generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent. Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people who thought it could not last more than six months were very signally refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos lasted months instead of hours. But there would have been nothing surprising in its lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe, which it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly organized for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled to compel themselves to go on with it. Considering its magnitude, the war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. The end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it; and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted. Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed. And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether Germany and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have struck from the limbs of the vanquished.

How the Theatre fared

Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European theatre of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home to supper after washing off their rose-pink wounds. It is nearly twenty years since I was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a book for lack of an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a performance in a theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient. Heartbreak House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it because the war has completely upset the economic conditions which formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The change is not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor in the authors and actors, but in the audiences. For four years the London theatres were crowded every night with thousands of soldiers on leave from the front. These soldiers were not seasoned London playgoers. A childish experience of my own gave me a clue to their condition. When I was a small boy I was taken to the opera. I did not then know what an opera was, though I could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in my mother’s album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded balcony filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be the opera singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni, and wondered how soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled by the fact that I was made to sit with my back to the singers instead of facing them. When the curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were unbounded.

The Soldier at the Theatre Front

In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was evident that they had never been in a theatre before and did not know what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I sat beside a young officer, not at all a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain rose and enlightened him as to the place where he had to look for his entertainment, found the dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible. He did not know how to play his part of the game. He could understand the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic feats. He not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama obvious to him.

Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers) often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories of George Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The author of some of the most grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial things gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.

Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night; mistook their neighbor’s flats for their own; and in due course got into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of his naked person to be descried from time to time.

Heartbreak House

Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing: these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what they thought fresh and clever.

Commerce in the Theatre

Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people: they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.

Unser Shakespeare

Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, “I cannot do justice to this situation,” and let it pass without another word.

The Higher Drama put out of Action

The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in England. In America I had already established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole official attention paid me by the British Courts was the announcement to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household.

Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare’s plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the commercial value of their time and energy too closely. The war struck this foundation away in the manner I have just described. The expenses of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation, now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at last disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.

Church and Theatre

I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what a church was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like Potiphar’s wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the temple had become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church were laid on the shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls. When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the Little Theatre in the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers. In point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres. It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the Blondin Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and care, the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the gloomiest of little conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the Puritan point of view, have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the Little Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton’s Magic or Brieux’s Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the national value of the theatre I owed the first regular public performance of a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime, whereas if she had given the money to the Church she would have worn a halo for it. And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of things may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners again and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can go to St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible reply is that they want to see something new and possibly something wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the church door shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to one performance at any theatre he or she prefers. Thus shall the sensuous charms of the church service be made to subsidize the sterner virtue of the drama.

The Next Phase

The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I read at breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to confirm the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible years. Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will be at no greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the fools’ paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost both faith in and patience with the theatrical pretences that had no root either in reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war in the distribution of income. It seems only the other day that a millionaire was a man with £50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his income tax and super tax, and insured his life for the amount of his death duties, he is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his nominal property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget which is called “a respite for the rich.” At the other end of the scale millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of women have been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and independence. The thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.

Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how, after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the task they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for, are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how happy Lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired messages became scraps of paper. He knows well that from the Peace Conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will be able, like Lincoln, to invoke “the considerate judgment of mankind: and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” He led his people to destroy the militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in Cologne imprisoning every German who does not salute a British officer; whilst the government at home, asked whether it approves, replies that it does not propose even to discontinue this Zabernism when the Peace is concluded, but in effect looks forward to making Germans salute British officers until the end of the world. That is what war makes of men and women. It will wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to be despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be dotards. In the meantime there is, for him, another history to write; for me, another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that is what wars are for, and what historians and playwrights are for. If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference.

The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre

To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the theatre will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest Hohenzollern languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant; the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland; Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one another’s heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in their everlasting seats.

How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet

As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about the war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is significant. You cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. War cannot bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. For unless these things are mercilessly exposed they will hide under the mantle of the ideals on the stage just as they do in real life.

And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm. We are just now reading the revelations of our generals and admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. During the war, General A, in his moving despatches from the field, told how General B had covered himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he ought to have done. An excellent subject for comedy now that the war is over, no doubt; but if General A had let this out at the time, what would have been the effect on General B’s soldiers? And had the stage made known what the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War who overruled General A thought of him, and what he thought of them, as now revealed in raging controversy, what would have been the effect on the nation? That is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany or England perish; is ready to cry with Brynhild, “Lass’uns verderben, lachend zu grunde geh’n” sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus becomes in time of war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or trinitrotoluene. That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from the footlights during the war; for the Germans might on any night have turned the last act from play into earnest, and even then might not have waited for their cues.

June, 1919.

ACT I

The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September, is seen through the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. A row of lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern post and the sides. Another door strains the illusion a little by being apparently in the ship’s port side, and yet leading, not to the open sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches beside the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery. Against the starboard wall is a carpenter’s bench. The vice has a board in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a waste-paper basket. A couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench. In the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.

On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler of discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. The drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman’s chair has the window on its left hand. On the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a ship’s fire bucket. On the port side of the room, near the bookshelves, is a sofa with its back to the windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article, oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of blankets hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a round top and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the bookcase. It is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all convincingly) a woman’s hand in the furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck.

The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow is the cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a long garden seat on the west.

A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been reading.

A clock strikes six.

The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an air of one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. She is a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler.

With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman’s chair; sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the book sinks to her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber.

An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and disappears in the pantry without noticing the young lady. She places the bottles on the shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. As she returns with these, the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall.

THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book and places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I’m sure; but you are a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?

THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that I have been invited here.

THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you’re invited, are you? And has nobody come? Dear! dear!

THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at the window; and I heard him calling out, “Nurse, there is a young and attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what she wants.” Are you the nurse?

THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I’m Nurse Guinness. That was old Captain Shotover, Mrs Hushabye’s father. I heard him roaring; but I thought it was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs Hushabye that invited you, ducky?

THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I’d better go.

NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don’t think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs Hushabye has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to see you, won’t it?

THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find that nobody expects me.

NURSE GUINNESS. You’ll get used to it, miss: this house is full of surprises for them that don’t know our ways.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag on the front steps for everybody to fall over. Also a tennis racquet. Who the devil left them there?

THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I’m afraid.

THE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this misguided and unfortunate young lady?

NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.

THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my daughter’s invitations? This is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! A young and attractive lady is invited here. Her luggage is left on the steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned, tired and starving. This is our hospitality. These are our manners. No room ready. No hot water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.

NURSE GUINNESS. Now it’s all right, Captain: I’ll get the lady some tea; and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [To the young lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to the door leading to the hall].

THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman, that because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you have brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social intercourse?

NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she goes out into the hall on her way to the kitchen].

THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits down in the big wicker chair].

THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.

THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship’s chandler with stores which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No doubt he became rich. Are you his daughter?

ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to say that though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one word to say against him. I think my father is the best man I have ever known.

THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?

ELLIE. I don’t understand.

THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have two daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you here. I keep this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the seventh degree of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them. [Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak table]. I have a second daughter who is, thank God, in a remote part of the Empire with her numskull of a husband. As a child she thought the figure-head of my ship, the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing on earth. He resembled it. He had the same expression: wooden yet enterprising. She married him, and will never set foot in this house again.

NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to Ellie’s side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in England this very moment. You have been told three times this week that she is coming home for a year for her health. And very glad you should be to see your own daughter again after all these years.

THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter Ariadne was born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If she comes, I am not at home. If she wants anything, let her take it. If she asks for me, let her be informed that I am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her.

NURSE GUINNESS. That’s no talk to offer to a young lady. Here, ducky, have some tea; and don’t listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea].

THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have given this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into the leathern bucket].

ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have been glad of anything.

NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to drop.

THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that fly-blown cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He disappears into the pantry].

NURSE GUINNESS. There’s a man for you! They say he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the more I believe them.

A WOMAN’S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse! Papa! Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.

Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.

NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It’s Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs Hushabye’s sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling]. Coming, Miss, coming.

She carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who bursts in much flustered. Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic silliness.

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don’t look a day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn’t she expect me? Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on the steps? Where’s papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh! I beg your pardon. I suppose you are one of my nieces. [Approaching her with outstretched arms]. Come and kiss your aunt, darling.

ELLIE. I’m only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.

NURSE GUINNESS. I’ll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes up the tray].

ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.

NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he’s forgotten what he went for already. His mind wanders from one thing to another.

LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?

NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.

LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don’t be silly, Nurse. Don’t call me Miss.

NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray].

LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and longed all the time — oh, how I longed! — to be respectable, to be a lady, to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself. I married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir Hastings Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House. I have been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like this. I wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought to, you know), and I was looking forward to it. And now the state of the house! the way I’m received! the casual impudence of that woman Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione might at least have been here: some preparation might have been made for me. You must excuse my going on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and disillusioned: and if I had realized it was to be like this, I wouldn’t have come. I have a great mind to go away without another word [she is on the point of weeping].

ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me either. I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady Utterword? My luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone.

The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese lacquer and a very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally on the end of the table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. Ellie pours out a cup greedily.

THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must fetch another cup [he makes for the pantry].

LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. Papa! Don’t you know me? I’m your daughter.

THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter’s upstairs asleep. [He vanishes through the half door].

Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.

ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don’t be so distressed. Have this cup of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to me. Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean it.

The captain returns with another cup.

THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].

LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can’t have forgotten me. I am Ariadne. I’m little Paddy Patkins. Won’t you kiss me? [She goes to him and throws her arms round his neck].

THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young.

LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been away, Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.

THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of concentration.

LADY UTTERWORD. But I’m your daughter. You haven’t seen me for years.

THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices. That is how I have come to think my absent daughter Ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the room].

LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very well, papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for herself].

THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn? Billy Dunn?

LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you?

THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on the sofa].

ELLIE [protesting]. No —

Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.

THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?

NURSE. You’ve actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh, miss, he didn’t forget you after all! You HAVE made an impression.

THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her children are not youthful.

LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.

NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.

LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? Do you hear?

NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I’ll tell them all they must call you My Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].

LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having servants with no manners?

ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. Lady Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don’t ask me. You can see for yourself that I’ve just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years’ absence! and it seems that I am not expected.

THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I’ll find a room for her myself [he makes for the door].

ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please — [He goes out]. Lady Utterword, I don’t know what to do. Your father persists in believing that my father is some sailor who robbed him.

LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My father is a very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of course he is worse. And I must warn you that it is sometimes very hard to feel quite sure that he really forgets.

Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces Ellie. She is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and even better looking. She has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, and a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque contour.

MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long have you been here? I’ve been at home all the time: I was putting flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down for a moment to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off to sleep. Papa woke me and told me you were here. Fancy your finding no one, and being neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her again]. My poor love! [She deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile Ariadne has left the table and come over to claim her share of attention]. Oh! you’ve brought someone with you. Introduce me.

LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don’t know me?

MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face quite well. Where have we met?

LADY UTTERWORD. Didn’t Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is really too much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].

MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!

LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [Rising angrily]. I’ll go straight to a hotel.

MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious goodness, you don’t mean to say that you’re Addy!

LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don’t think I can be so changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real affection for me. And Papa didn’t think me even worth mentioning!

MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the chair instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You DO look a swell. You’re much handsomer than you used to be. You’ve made the acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to marry a perfect hog of a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church mouse; and you must help me to stop her.

ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man’s coming here today with your father to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case in ten minutes; so what’s the use of making a secret of it?

ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don’t know how wonderfully good he was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.

MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable man, Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who knew Ellie’s grandparents. They were both poets, like the Brownings; and when her father came into the world Mazzini said, “Another soldier born for freedom!” So they christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting for freedom in his quiet way ever since. That’s why he is so poor.

ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in it, and marry someone you love?

LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are you going to kiss me or are you not?

MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?

LADY UTTERWORD. I DON’T want to be kissed; but I do want you to behave properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been separated for twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.

MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate the smell of powder.

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling — [she is interrupted by the return of the captain].

THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The sheets were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the port side].

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?

THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or take them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne’s old room.

LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That little hole! I am entitled to the best spare room.

THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She told me she would marry anyone to get away from home.

LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I will leave the house.

Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man with bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in a blue serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a soft black hat of clerical cut.

ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.

THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].

LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else. I will have it out with Papa now, this instant. [To Mazzini]. Excuse me. [She follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns it].

MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come, Mr Dunn! You don’t mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter, you know, but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have some delightful talks with him.

MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He draws her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs Hushabye, for your kindness to my daughter. I’m afraid she would have had no holiday if you had not invited her.

MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract young people to the house for us.

MAZZINI [smiling]. I’m afraid Ellie is not interested in young men, Mrs Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.

MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. Won’t you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find a cupboard for coats and hats and things in the corner of the hall.

MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes — thank you — I had better — [he goes out].

MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!

ELLIE. Who?

MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. “Graver, solider tastes,” indeed!

ELLIE [aghast]. You don’t mean that you were speaking like that of my father!

MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.

ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns to the door].

MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I’ll tell your father why.

ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this, Mrs Hushabye?

MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.

ELLIE. Certainly not now?

MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I’ll tell your father.

ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!

MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair — if you take his part against me and against your own heart for a moment, I’ll give that born soldier of freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head for a week.

ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know —

She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring.

MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you’d like to know. Excuse me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman —

MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.

MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little confused by his manner. He is making Mangan help him with something in the garden; and he wants me too —

A powerful whistle is heard.

THE CAPTAIN’S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].

MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me. [He hurries out].

MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.

ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don’t understand. My father and Mr Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma —

MRS HUSHABYE. I don’t care what they were: we must sit down if you are going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at Ellie’s waist, and makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. Now, pettikins, tell me all about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss Mangan, don’t they? He is a Napoleon of industry and disgustingly rich, isn’t he? Why isn’t your father rich?

ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His parents were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not afford to give him a profession.

MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business. Hasn’t he succeeded in it?

ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same difficulty of not having capital enough. I don’t know how to describe it to you.

MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.

ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.

MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn’t it? I shouldn’t have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have pulled hard — [between her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.

ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr Mangan did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father and respect for his character. He asked him how much capital he wanted, and gave it to him. I don’t mean that he lent it to him, or that he invested it in his business. He just simply made him a present of it. Wasn’t that splendid of him?

MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?

ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never even seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely disinterested. Pure generosity.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman’s pardon. Well, what became of the money?

ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I went to another school for two years.

MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?

ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly ruined.

MRS HUSHABYE. How?

ELLIE. I don’t know. I never could understand. But it was dreadful. When we were poor my father had never been in debt. But when he launched out into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. When the business went into liquidation he owed more money than Mr Mangan had given him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.

ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn’t mind my way of talking. I was quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have picked up so much slang from the children that I am really hardly presentable. I suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it.

ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. The business turned out a great success. It now pays forty-four per cent after deducting the excess profits tax.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren’t you rolling in money?

ELLIE. I don’t know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my father was made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded several of his friends to put money into the business. He was sure it would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. But they all lost their money. It was dreadful. I don’t know what we should have done but for Mr Mangan.

MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after all his money being thrown away?

ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. He bought what was left of the business — the buildings and the machinery and things — from the official trustee for enough money to enable my father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his discharge. Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was an honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan started a company to take up the business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation; for I wasn’t earning anything then.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the tender passion?

ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair one night at a sort of people’s concert. I was singing there. As an amateur, you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores. He was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with me. I never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when I took him home and introduced him to my father, his own manager. It was then that my father told me how nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great chance for me, as he is so rich. And — and — we drifted into a sort of understanding — I suppose I should call it an engagement — [she is distressed and cannot go on].

MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted into it; but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to do with it.

ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it’s no use. I am bound in honor and gratitude. I will go through with it.

MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know, of course, that it’s not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don’t love. Do you love this Mangan man?

ELLIE. Yes. At least —

MRS HUSHABYE. I don’t want to know about “at least”: I want to know the worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible people, especially old people.

ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be —

MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away intolerantly to starboard]. — grateful to him for his kindness to dear father. I know. Anybody else?

ELLIE. What do you mean?

MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?

ELLIE. Of course not.

MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you’re not in love with an actor?

ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?

MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn’t it? Why else should you be reading Othello?

ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.

MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your father does seem to be about the limit.

ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That seems to me so extraordinary. I like Othello.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn’t he?

ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is horrible. But don’t you think it must have been a wonderful experience for Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been out in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit and talk with her and tell her about them?

MRS HUSHABYE. That’s your idea of romance, is it?

ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.

Ellie’s eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa and resumes her seat beside her.

MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories that Othello told Desdemona couldn’t have happened — ?

ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But they didn’t.

ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a sphinx: I never know what you mean.

MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!

ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.

MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?

ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white, and very handsome, and —

MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we’re coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew there must be somebody, or you’d never have been so miserable about Mangan: you’d have thought it quite a lark to marry him.

ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don’t want to make a secret of it, though of course I don’t tell everybody. Besides, I don’t know him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Don’t know him! What does that mean?

ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.

MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh?

ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite — almost intimately.

MRS HUSHABYE. You don’t know him; and you know him almost intimately. How lucid!

ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I — I got into conversation with him by chance at a concert.

MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts, Ellie.

ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. But he was only one of the committee. I happened to tell him that I was copying a picture at the National Gallery. I make a little money that way. I can’t paint much; but as it’s always the same picture I can do it pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. It happened that he came to the National Gallery one day.

MRS HUSHABYE. One students’ day. Paid sixpence to stumble about through a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and found the floor clear! Quite by accident?

ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He knows lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are all in love with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the National Gallery and persuade me to come with him for a drive round Richmond Park in a taxi.

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It’s wonderful what you good girls can do without anyone saying a word.

ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn’t make acquaintances in that way I shouldn’t have any at all.

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself. May I ask his name?

ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.

MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid name!

ELLIE. Oh, I’m so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was afraid it was only a silly fancy of my own.

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?

ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique chest —

MRS HUSHABYE. A what?

ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a night of the most terrible thunderstorm.

MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get into it because he was afraid of the lightning?

ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.

MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!

ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount —

MRS HUSHABYE. — de Rougemont?

ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A vicomte. His life has been one long romance. A tiger —

MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?

ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the tiger from a hunting party: one of King Edward’s hunting parties in India. The King was furious: that was why he never had his military services properly recognized. But he doesn’t care. He is a Socialist and despises rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades.

MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You, Ellie, of all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward, good girl.

ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don’t believe me?

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don’t believe you. You’re inventing every word of it. Do you take me for a fool?

Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye is puzzled.

ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I’m very sorry. I see now that it sounds very improbable as I tell it. But I can’t stay if you think that way about me.

MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan’t go. I couldn’t be so mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has really told you all this.

ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don’t say that you don’t believe him. I couldn’t bear that.

MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest. But you should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back to her seat]. Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with him?

ELLIE. Oh, no. I’m not so foolish. I don’t fall in love with people. I’m not so silly as you think.

MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about — to give some interest and pleasure to life.

ELLIE. Just so. That’s all, really.

MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn’t it? No tedious waiting to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad night. How delightful it makes waking up in the morning! How much better than the happiest dream! All life transfigured! No more wishing one had an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any book! No desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be alone and just think about it.

ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know? Oh, you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!

MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy you! and how I pity you!

ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?

A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at sight of the women on the sofa.

ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this is Mr Marcus Darnley.

MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.

ELLIE. But now — [she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].

MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa]. Steady, my pettikins.

THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his hat and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is Hector Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man would care to confess to. I never use it when I can possibly help it. I have been away for nearly a month; and I had no idea you knew my wife, or that you were coming here. I am none the less delighted to find you in our little house.

ELLIE [in great distress]. I don’t know what to do. Please, may I speak to papa? Do leave me. I can’t bear it.

MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.

HECTOR. I —

MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.

HECTOR. If you think it better — [he goes out, taking his hat with him but leaving the stick on the table].

MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now, pettikins, he is gone. There’s nobody but me. You can let yourself go. Don’t try to control yourself. Have a good cry.

ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!

MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were going to be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.

ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a fool. [Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She begins prowling to and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder].

MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young women can resist Hector. I couldn’t when I was your age. He is really rather splendid, you know.

ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But how can you love a liar?

MRS HUSHABYE. I don’t know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world.

ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!

MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you please. If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector’s courage, he will go straight off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself that he isn’t a coward. He has a dreadful trick of getting out of one third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. He has a whole drawerful of Albert Medals for saving people’s lives.

ELLIE. He never told me that.

MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can’t bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his stories are made-up stories.

ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and really has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and that never happened?

MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don’t have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.

ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There’s something odd about this house, Hesione, and even about you. I don’t know why I’m talking to you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.

MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It’s only life educating you, pettikins. How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?

ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh, how can you remind me of him, Hesione?

MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You don’t mind now, do you, dear?

ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.

Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.

HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One second more, and she would have been a dead woman!

MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye has just been telling me the most extraordinary —

ELLIE. Yes, I’ve heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room].

HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I’ll tell it to you after dinner. I think you’ll like it. The truth is I made it up for you, and was looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. But in a moment of impatience at being turned out of the room, I threw it away on your father.

ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter’s bench, scornfully self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes it. I should not have believed it.

MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of course she does not really think that. [He goes to the bookshelves, and inspects the titles of the volumes].

Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan, carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs’ meeting, is about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion, straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it is impossible to describe them.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. Says his name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.

MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?

MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn’s lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. Men seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the pantry].

MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.

MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.

MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own way than try to explain.

MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!

MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she indicates Hector].

MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. Very pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have not found the journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].

MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.

HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].

ELLIE. You haven’t shown me my room yet, Hesione.

MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite at home, Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the captain in the pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr Mangan.

She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You’re going to marry Dunn’s daughter. Don’t. You’re too old.

MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That’s fairly blunt, Captain.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It’s true.

MANGAN. She doesn’t think so.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.

MANGAN. Older men than I have —

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him]. — made fools of themselves. That, also, is true.

MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don’t see that this is any business of yours.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody’s business. The stars in their courses are shaken when such things happen.

MANGAN. I’m going to marry her all the same.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?

MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I never made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn’t bring it off. That’s the sort of man I am; and there will be a better understanding between us when you make up your mind to that, Captain.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don’t boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can’t say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from Mangan with his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the Chinese tray].

MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don’t quite understand my position here. I came here on your daughter’s invitation. Am I in her house or in yours?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of God. What is true within these walls is true outside them. Go out on the seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. She is still too young.

MANGAN [weakening]. But I’m very little over fifty.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan, you will not marry the pirate’s child [he carries the tray away into the pantry].

MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate’s child? What are you talking about?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry her.

MANGAN. Who will stop me?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door leading to the hall].

MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she brought me down here to break it off?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing more than I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one myself for two years.

MANGAN. Well, I am damned!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The negress redeemed me.

MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?

MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of talking.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It’s the other sort of talking that makes quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.

A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has an engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is found to be at least over forty.

THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the bell ring? The door is open.

THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you [he makes for the door].

THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I’m afraid you don’t know who I am.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make distinctions between one fellow creature and another? [He goes out. Mangan and the newcomer stare at one another].

MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.

THE GENTLEMAN. Very.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has arrived and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.

THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione’s feelings! May I ask are you a member of the family?

MANGAN. No.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.

Mrs Hushabye comes back.

MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!

THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, Hesione. [Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same moment the captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my kissing your daughter, Captain, when I tell you that —

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as much as you like [he makes for the pantry].

THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but probably you don’t, as it occurred many years ago — that your younger daughter married a numskull?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she’d marry anybody to get away from this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is no longer like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been boiled in bread and milk for years and years, like other married men. Poor devil! [He disappears into the pantry].

MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him]. I don’t believe you are Hastings Utterword.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?

THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am Randall Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I was abroad diplomatizing when he was married.

LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must lock it up — [recognizing the stranger with a shock] Randall, how dare you? [She marches at him past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and joins Mangan near the sofa].

RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.

LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?

RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at Claridge’s; so I followed you down here. You are looking extremely well.

LADY UTTERWORD. Don’t presume to tell me so.

MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?

LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no right to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie are now seen strolling together].

MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.

LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I beg your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a perfect fool of myself.

MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.

MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.

LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman walking in the garden with Miss Dunn?

MRS HUSHABYE. I don’t know. She quarrelled mortally with my husband only ten minutes ago; and I didn’t know anyone else had come. It must be a visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh, it is Hector. They’ve made it up.

LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn’t my husband be a handsome man?

RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One’s husband never is, Ariadne [he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].

MRS HUSHABYE. One’s sister’s husband always is, Mr Randall.

LADY UTTERWORD. Don’t be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are just as bad.

Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. Randall rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. Hector comes forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very best.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.

HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.

LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?

HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought — [pulling himself together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I am extremely glad to welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave courtesy].

MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.

LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].

MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law; and have done with it. [She leaves them to themselves].

HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not only to hospitality but to civilization.

LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands cordially].

Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie]. Your father has washed himself.

ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the pantry window.

Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and Mrs Hushabye.

MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut — oh, I forgot: you’ve met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.

MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie’s hand, and beaming at his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She is my daughter. [He draws her arm through his caressingly].

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister’s — er —

RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn. How do you do?

MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.

HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don’t introduce us any more. [He moves away to the big chair, and adds] Won’t you sit down, Lady Utterword? [She does so very graciously].

MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it’s like making people show their tickets.

MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The great question is, not who we are, but what we are.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?

MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.

MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in? Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance of a city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through the garden].

DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or a murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must really go and explain. [He follows the captain].

MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It’s no use. You’d really better — [but Dunn has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for some tea. We never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen veranda is the best place to ask. May I show you? [She goes to the starboard door].

RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don’t think I’ll take any tea this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden —

MRS HUSHABYE. There’s nothing to see in the garden except papa’s observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. However, it’s pleasanter out of doors; so come along.

RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn’t that rather risky?

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don’t sit in the gravel pit when there’s a thunderstorm.

LADY UTTERORRD. That’s something new. What is the dynamite for?

HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is trying to discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well of a Mahatma.

ELLIE. The captain’s tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.

MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that you’ve had some of my father’s tea? that you got round him before you were ten minutes in the house?

ELLIE. I did.

MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].

MANGAN. Won’t you come, Miss Ellie?

ELLIE. I’m too tired. I’ll take a book up to my room and rest a little. [She goes to the bookshelf].

MANGAN. Right. You can’t do better. But I’m disappointed. [He follows Randall and Mrs Hushabye].

Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to Lady Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.

ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of adventure, Lady Utterword?

LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.

ELLIE. Then I’ll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through the hall].

HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I have to tell her!

LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what did you mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? What did you think?

HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. May I tell you?

LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.

HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of saying, “I thought you were a plain woman.”

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to notice whether I am plain or not?

HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only photographs of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the daughters of that supernatural old man. There is some damnable quality in them that destroys men’s moral sense, and carries them beyond honor and dishonor. You know that, don’t you?

LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once for all that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think because I’m a Shotover that I’m a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian. But I’m not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No child brought up in a strict Puritan household ever suffered from Puritanism as I suffered from our Bohemianism.

HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in the houses of their respectable schoolfellows.

LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.

HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones.

LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. But intelligent people can always manage, unless they are Bohemians.

HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count yourself?

LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance. An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm’s length of any woman worth knowing.

HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. You are a dangerous woman.

LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.

HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am not making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you had better know how I feel if you are going to stay here.

LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, Hector. And terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself, at that game. Is it quite understood that we are only playing?

HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer worthlessness.

LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my brother-in-law, Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in his arms and kisses her strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [She pushes him suddenly away]. You shall not do that again.

HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended.

MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don’t let me disturb you; I only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting; and he’ll catch cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall].

LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has actually condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the garden: it’s cooler now [she goes out by the port door].

MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don’t believe any man can kiss Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the hall].

HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!

Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain’s cap.

HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. Where’s Miss Dunn!

MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. Addy won’t let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.

HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do? I can’t fall in love; and I can’t hurt a woman’s feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I’m not a bit in earnest.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in her life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. She is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me.

HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can’t believe that such an amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I believe that is why I have never been able to repeat it.

MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were frightfully in love with one another, Hector. It was such an enchanting dream that I have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. I have invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving you another turn. But it has never come off.

HECTOR. I don’t know that I want it to come off. It was damned dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven. This sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is hell. I shall kill her if she persists.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a horse. [Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.

HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?

MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?

HECTOR. I presume you don’t mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than by Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there, daddiest?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.

MRS HUSHABYE. You’ve been to the gravel pit. Don’t drop it about the house, there’s a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the evening light is now very red].

HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a feeling without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of your life?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes into the pantry].

Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. He does not move for some time. Then he folds his arms. Then, throwing his hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically once to and fro. Suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate duel with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him through the body up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says in a deep and thrilling tone, “Do you love me!” The captain comes out of the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with his arms stretched out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going through a series of gymnastic exercises.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will never be as strong as a gorilla.

HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.

HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite than you.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.

HECTOR. And that you can, eh?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of concentration.

HECTOR. What’s the use of that? You never do attain it.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept forever in the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for greasing their bristles and filling their snouts?

HECTOR. Are Mangan’s bristles worse than Randall’s lovelocks?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both. I refuse to die until I have invented the means.

HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do, unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves. When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them.

HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a very nice daughter. Mangan’s son may be a Plato: Randall’s a Shelley. What was my father?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces the drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of color].

HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.

HECTOR. Just so — we are members one of another. [He throws himself carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought of this killing of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel in the lion’s den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I’ll spare them in sheer —

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?

HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can’t spare them until you have the power to kill them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They’re going to do it. They’re doing it already.

HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.

HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be such a demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left you nothing but dreams, as some women do.

HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands of the shrew and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [Walking distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must think these things out. [Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at me. And I must hurry. I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is about to go into the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when Hesione comes back].

MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting about?

HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is madder than usual.

MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.

HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].

MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back. [They return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.

HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?

MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent lifeboat I invented?

MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since Easter!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.

MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve thousand for the invention before that.

MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Can’t you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn’t your husband invent something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.

HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However, you are right: I ought to support my wife.

MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should never see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.

HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor husbands?

HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is anyhow!

MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.

MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It sticks in the enemy’s general; you wind him in; and there you are.

HECTOR. You are your father’s daughter, Hesione.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in generals: they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel and wind in a machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.

MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain’s arm affectionately]. Saved! You are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these dreadful people and entertain them.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don’t forget that.

HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them. The servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the house.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a house! What a daughter!

MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!

HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?

HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?

MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their firesides, their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. Why are they not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to be even with us?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].

I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors

thereof,

That men might come for their choosing, and their betters

spring from their love;

But one of them married a numskull;

HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].

The other a liar wed;

MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].

And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.

LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where are you?

HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.

MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the garden].

The captain goes back to his place at the table.

HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.

ACT II

The same room, with the lights turned up and the curtains drawn. Ellie comes in, followed by Mangan. Both are dressed for dinner. She strolls to the drawing-table. He comes between the table and the wicker chair.

MANGAN. What a dinner! I don’t call it a dinner: I call it a meal.

ELLIE. I am accustomed to meals, Mr Mangan, and very lucky to get them. Besides, the captain cooked some maccaroni for me.

MANGAN [shuddering liverishly]. Too rich: I can’t eat such things. I suppose it’s because I have to work so much with my brain. That’s the worst of being a man of business: you are always thinking, thinking, thinking. By the way, now that we are alone, may I take the opportunity to come to a little understanding with you?

ELLIE [settling into the draughtsman’s seat]. Certainly. I should like to.

MANGAN [taken aback]. Should you? That surprises me; for I thought I noticed this afternoon that you avoided me all you could. Not for the first time either.

ELLIE. I was very tired and upset. I wasn’t used to the ways of this extraordinary house. Please forgive me.

MANGAN. Oh, that’s all right: I don’t mind. But Captain Shotover has been talking to me about you. You and me, you know.

ELLIE [interested]. The captain! What did he say?

MANGAN. Well, he noticed the difference between our ages.

ELLIE. He notices everything.

MANGAN. You don’t mind, then?

ELLIE. Of course I know quite well that our engagement —

MANGAN. Oh! you call it an engagement.

ELLIE. Well, isn’t it?

MANGAN. Oh, yes, yes: no doubt it is if you hold to it. This is the first time you’ve used the word; and I didn’t quite know where we stood: that’s all. [He sits down in the wicker chair; and resigns himself to allow her to lead the conversation]. You were saying — ?

ELLIE. Was I? I forget. Tell me. Do you like this part of the country? I heard you ask Mr Hushabye at dinner whether there are any nice houses to let down here.

MANGAN. I like the place. The air suits me. I shouldn’t be surprised if I settled down here.

ELLIE. Nothing would please me better. The air suits me too. And I want to be near Hesione.

MANGAN [with growing uneasiness]. The air may suit us; but the question is, should we suit one another? Have you thought about that?

ELLIE. Mr Mangan, we must be sensible, mustn’t we? It’s no use pretending that we are Romeo and Juliet. But we can get on very well together if we choose to make the best of it. Your kindness of heart will make it easy for me.

MANGAN [leaning forward, with the beginning of something like deliberate unpleasantness in his voice]. Kindness of heart, eh? I ruined your father, didn’t I?

ELLIE. Oh, not intentionally.

MANGAN. Yes I did. Ruined him on purpose.

ELLIE. On purpose!

MANGAN. Not out of ill-nature, you know. And you’ll admit that I kept a job for him when I had finished with him. But business is business; and I ruined him as a matter of business.

ELLIE. I don’t understand how that can be. Are you trying to make me feel that I need not be grateful to you, so that I may choose freely?

MANGAN [rising aggressively]. No. I mean what I say.

ELLIE. But how could it possibly do you any good to ruin my father? The money he lost was yours.

MANGAN [with a sour laugh]. Was mine! It is mine, Miss Ellie, and all the money the other fellows lost too. [He shoves his hands into his pockets and shows his teeth]. I just smoked them out like a hive of bees. What do you say to that? A bit of shock, eh?

ELLIE. It would have been, this morning. Now! you can’t think how little it matters. But it’s quite interesting. Only, you must explain it to me. I don’t understand it. [Propping her elbows on the drawingboard and her chin on her hands, she composes herself to listen with a combination of conscious curiosity with unconscious contempt which provokes him to more and more unpleasantness, and an attempt at patronage of her ignorance].

MANGAN. Of course you don’t understand: what do you know about business? You just listen and learn. Your father’s business was a new business; and I don’t start new businesses: I let other fellows start them. They put all their money and their friends’ money into starting them. They wear out their souls and bodies trying to make a success of them. They’re what you call enthusiasts. But the first dead lift of the thing is too much for them; and they haven’t enough financial experience. In a year or so they have either to let the whole show go bust, or sell out to a new lot of fellows for a few deferred ordinary shares: that is, if they’re lucky enough to get anything at all. As likely as not the very same thing happens to the new lot. They put in more money and a couple of years’ more work; and then perhaps they have to sell out to a third lot. If it’s really a big thing the third lot will have to sell out too, and leave their work and their money behind them. And that’s where the real business man comes in: where I come in. But I’m cleverer than some: I don’t mind dropping a little money to start the process. I took your father’s measure. I saw that he had a sound idea, and that he would work himself silly for it if he got the chance. I saw that he was a child in business, and was dead certain to outrun his expenses and be in too great a hurry to wait for his market. I knew that the surest way to ruin a man who doesn’t know how to handle money is to give him some. I explained my idea to some friends in the city, and they found the money; for I take no risks in ideas, even when they’re my own. Your father and the friends that ventured their money with him were no more to me than a heap of squeezed lemons. You’ve been wasting your gratitude: my kind heart is all rot. I’m sick of it. When I see your father beaming at me with his moist, grateful eyes, regularly wallowing in gratitude, I sometimes feel I must tell him the truth or burst. What stops me is that I know he wouldn’t believe me. He’d think it was my modesty, as you did just now. He’d think anything rather than the truth, which is that he’s a blamed fool, and I am a man that knows how to take care of himself. [He throws himself back into the big chair with large self approval]. Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?

ELLIE [dropping her hands]. How strange! that my mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you! She always said not before papa, of course, but to us children — that you were just that sort of man.

MANGAN [sitting up, much hurt]. Oh! did she? And yet she’d have let you marry me.

ELLIE. Well, you see, Mr Mangan, my mother married a very good man — for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul of goodness — and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.

MANGAN. Anyhow, you don’t want to marry me now, do you?

ELLIE. [very calmly]. Oh, I think so. Why not?

MANGAN. [rising aghast]. Why not!

ELLIE. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get on very well together.

MANGAN. Well, but look here, you know — [he stops, quite at a loss].

ELLIE. [patiently]. Well?

MANGAN. Well, I thought you were rather particular about people’s characters.

ELLIE. If we women were particular about men’s characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan.

MANGAN. A child like you talking of “we women”! What next! You’re not in earnest?

ELLIE. Yes, I am. Aren’t you?

MANGAN. You mean to hold me to it?

ELLIE. Do you wish to back out of it?

MANGAN. Oh, no. Not exactly back out of it.

ELLIE. Well?

He has nothing to say. With a long whispered whistle, he drops into the wicker chair and stares before him like a beggared gambler. But a cunning look soon comes into his face. He leans over towards her on his right elbow, and speaks in a low steady voice.

MANGAN. Suppose I told you I was in love with another woman!

ELLIE [echoing him]. Suppose I told you I was in love with another man!

MANGAN [bouncing angrily out of his chair]. I’m not joking.

ELLIE. Who told you I was?

MANGAN. I tell you I’m serious. You’re too young to be serious; but you’ll have to believe me. I want to be near your friend Mrs Hushabye. I’m in love with her. Now the murder’s out.

ELLIE. I want to be near your friend Mr Hushabye. I’m in love with him. [She rises and adds with a frank air] Now we are in one another’s confidence, we shall be real friends. Thank you for telling me.

MANGAN [almost beside himself]. Do you think I’ll be made a convenience of like this?

ELLIE. Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father. Well, a woman’s business is marriage. Why shouldn’t I make a domestic convenience of you?

MANGAN. Because I don’t choose, see? Because I’m not a silly gull like your father. That’s why.

ELLIE [with serene contempt]. You are not good enough to clean my father’s boots, Mr Mangan; and I am paying you a great compliment in condescending to make a convenience of you, as you call it. Of course you are free to throw over our engagement if you like; but, if you do, you’ll never enter Hesione’s house again: I will take care of that.

MANGAN [gasping]. You little devil, you’ve done me. [On the point of collapsing into the big chair again he recovers himself]. Wait a bit, though: you’re not so cute as you think. You can’t beat Boss Mangan as easy as that. Suppose I go straight to Mrs Hushabye and tell her that you’re in love with her husband.

ELLIE. She knows it.

MANGAN. You told her!!!

ELLIE. She told me.

MANGAN [clutching at his bursting temples]. Oh, this is a crazy house. Or else I’m going clean off my chump. Is she making a swop with you — she to have your husband and you to have hers?

ELLIE. Well, you don’t want us both, do you?

MANGAN [throwing himself into the chair distractedly]. My brain won’t stand it. My head’s going to split. Help! Help me to hold it. Quick: hold it: squeeze it. Save me. [Ellie comes behind his chair; clasps his head hard for a moment; then begins to draw her hands from his forehead back to his ears]. Thank you. [Drowsily]. That’s very refreshing. [Waking a little]. Don’t you hypnotize me, though. I’ve seen men made fools of by hypnotism.

ELLIE [steadily]. Be quiet. I’ve seen men made fools of without hypnotism.

MANGAN [humbly]. You don’t dislike touching me, I hope. You never touched me before, I noticed.

ELLIE. Not since you fell in love naturally with a grown-up nice woman, who will never expect you to make love to her. And I will never expect him to make love to me.

MANGAN. He may, though.

ELLIE [making her passes rhythmically]. Hush. Go to sleep. Do you hear? You are to go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep; be quiet, deeply deeply quiet; sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

He falls asleep. Ellie steals away; turns the light out; and goes into the garden.

Nurse Guinness opens the door and is seen in the light which comes in from the hall.

GUINNESS [speaking to someone outside]. Mr Mangan’s not here, duckie: there’s no one here. It’s all dark.

MRS HUSHABYE [without]. Try the garden. Mr Dunn and I will be in my boudoir. Show him the way.

GUINNESS. Yes, ducky. [She makes for the garden door in the dark; stumbles over the sleeping Mangan and screams]. Ahoo! O Lord, Sir! I beg your pardon, I’m sure: I didn’t see you in the dark. Who is it? [She goes back to the door and turns on the light]. Oh, Mr Mangan, sir, I hope I haven’t hurt you plumping into your lap like that. [Coming to him]. I was looking for you, sir. Mrs Hushabye says will you please [noticing that he remains quite insensible]. Oh, my good Lord, I hope I haven’t killed him. Sir! Mr Mangan! Sir! [She shakes him; and he is rolling inertly off the chair on the floor when she holds him up and props him against the cushion]. Miss Hessy! Miss Hessy! quick, doty darling. Miss Hessy! [Mrs Hushabye comes in from the hall, followed by Mazzini Dunn]. Oh, Miss Hessy, I’ve been and killed him.

Mazzini runs round the back of the chair to Mangan’s right hand, and sees that the nurse’s words are apparently only too true.

MAZZINI. What tempted you to commit such a crime, woman?

MRS HUSHABYE [trying not to laugh]. Do you mean, you did it on purpose?

GUINNESS. Now is it likely I’d kill any man on purpose? I fell over him in the dark; and I’m a pretty tidy weight. He never spoke nor moved until I shook him; and then he would have dropped dead on the floor. Isn’t it tiresome?

MRS HUSHABYE [going past the nurse to Mangan’s side, and inspecting him less credulously than Mazzini]. Nonsense! he is not dead: he is only asleep. I can see him breathing.

GUINNESS. But why won’t he wake?

MAZZINI [speaking very politely into Mangan’s ear]. Mangan! My dear Mangan! [he blows into Mangan’s ear].

MRS HUSHABYE. That’s no good [she shakes him vigorously]. Mr Mangan, wake up. Do you hear? [He begins to roll over]. Oh! Nurse, nurse: he’s falling: help me.

Nurse Guinness rushes to the rescue. With Mazzini’s assistance, Mangan is propped safely up again.

GUINNESS [behind the chair; bending over to test the case with her nose]. Would he be drunk, do you think, pet?

MRS HUSHABYE. Had he any of papa’s rum?

MAZZINI. It can’t be that: he is most abstemious. I am afraid he drank too much formerly, and has to drink too little now. You know, Mrs Hushabye, I really think he has been hypnotized.

GUINNESS. Hip no what, sir?

MAZZINI. One evening at home, after we had seen a hypnotizing performance, the children began playing at it; and Ellie stroked my head. I assure you I went off dead asleep; and they had to send for a professional to wake me up after I had slept eighteen hours. They had to carry me upstairs; and as the poor children were not very strong, they let me slip; and I rolled right down the whole flight and never woke up. [Mrs Hushabye splutters]. Oh, you may laugh, Mrs Hushabye; but I might have been killed.

MRS HUSHABYE. I couldn’t have helped laughing even if you had been, Mr Dunn. So Ellie has hypnotized him. What fun!

MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. It was such a terrible lesson to her: nothing would induce her to try such a thing again.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then who did it? I didn’t.

MAZZINI. I thought perhaps the captain might have done it unintentionally. He is so fearfully magnetic: I feel vibrations whenever he comes close to me.

GUINNESS. The captain will get him out of it anyhow, sir: I’ll back him for that. I’ll go fetch him [she makes for the pantry].

MRS HUSHABYE. Wait a bit. [To Mazzini]. You say he is all right for eighteen hours?

MAZZINI. Well, I was asleep for eighteen hours.

MRS HUSHABYE. Were you any the worse for it?

MAZZINI. I don’t quite remember. They had poured brandy down my throat, you see; and —

MRS HUSHABYE. Quite. Anyhow, you survived. Nurse, darling: go and ask Miss Dunn to come to us here. Say I want to speak to her particularly. You will find her with Mr Hushabye probably.

GUINNESS. I think not, ducky: Miss Addy is with him. But I’ll find her and send her to you. [She goes out into the garden].

MRS HUSHABYE [calling Mazzini’s attention to the figure on the chair]. Now, Mr Dunn, look. Just look. Look hard. Do you still intend to sacrifice your daughter to that thing?

MAZZINI [troubled]. You have completely upset me, Mrs Hushabye, by all you have said to me. That anyone could imagine that I — I, a consecrated soldier of freedom, if I may say so — could sacrifice Ellie to anybody or anyone, or that I should ever have dreamed of forcing her inclinations in any way, is a most painful blow to my — well, I suppose you would say to my good opinion of myself.

MRS HUSHABYE [rather stolidly]. Sorry.

MAZZINI [looking forlornly at the body]. What is your objection to poor Mangan, Mrs Hushabye? He looks all right to me. But then I am so accustomed to him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Have you no heart? Have you no sense? Look at the brute! Think of poor weak innocent Ellie in the clutches of this slavedriver, who spends his life making thousands of rough violent workmen bend to his will and sweat for him: a man accustomed to have great masses of iron beaten into shape for him by steam-hammers! to fight with women and girls over a halfpenny an hour ruthlessly! a captain of industry, I think you call him, don’t you? Are you going to fling your delicate, sweet, helpless child into such a beast’s claws just because he will keep her in an expensive house and make her wear diamonds to show how rich he is?

MAZZINI [staring at her in wide-eyed amazement]. Bless you, dear Mrs Hushabye, what romantic ideas of business you have! Poor dear Mangan isn’t a bit like that.

MRS HUSHABYE [scornfully]. Poor dear Mangan indeed!

MAZZINI. But he doesn’t know anything about machinery. He never goes near the men: he couldn’t manage them: he is afraid of them. I never can get him to take the least interest in the works: he hardly knows more about them than you do. People are cruelly unjust to Mangan: they think he is all rugged strength just because his manners are bad.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you mean to tell me he isn’t strong enough to crush poor little Ellie?

MAZZINI. Of course it’s very hard to say how any marriage will turn out; but speaking for myself, I should say that he won’t have a dog’s chance against Ellie. You know, Ellie has remarkable strength of character. I think it is because I taught her to like Shakespeare when she was very young.

MRS HUSHABYE [contemptuously]. Shakespeare! The next thing you will tell me is that you could have made a great deal more money than Mangan. [She retires to the sofa, and sits down at the port end of it in the worst of humors].

MAZZINI [following her and taking the other end]. No: I’m no good at making money. I don’t care enough for it, somehow. I’m not ambitious! that must be it. Mangan is wonderful about money: he thinks of nothing else. He is so dreadfully afraid of being poor. I am always thinking of other things: even at the works I think of the things we are doing and not of what they cost. And the worst of it is, poor Mangan doesn’t know what to do with his money when he gets it. He is such a baby that he doesn’t know even what to eat and drink: he has ruined his liver eating and drinking the wrong things; and now he can hardly eat at all. Ellie will diet him splendidly. You will be surprised when you come to know him better: he is really the most helpless of mortals. You get quite a protective feeling towards him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then who manages his business, pray?

MAZZINI. I do. And of course other people like me.

MRS HUSHABYE. Footling people, you mean.

MAZZINI. I suppose you’d think us so.

MRS HUSHABYE. And pray why don’t you do without him if you’re all so much cleverer?

MAZZINI. Oh, we couldn’t: we should ruin the business in a year. I’ve tried; and I know. We should spend too much on everything. We should improve the quality of the goods and make them too dear. We should be sentimental about the hard cases among the work people. But Mangan keeps us in order. He is down on us about every extra halfpenny. We could never do without him. You see, he will sit up all night thinking of how to save sixpence. Won’t Ellie make him jump, though, when she takes his house in hand!

MRS HUSHABYE. Then the creature is a fraud even as a captain of industry!

MAZZINI. I am afraid all the captains of industry are what you call frauds, Mrs Hushabye. Of course there are some manufacturers who really do understand their own works; but they don’t make as high a rate of profit as Mangan does. I assure you Mangan is quite a good fellow in his way. He means well.

MRS HUSHABYE. He doesn’t look well. He is not in his first youth, is he?

MAZZINI. After all, no husband is in his first youth for very long, Mrs Hushabye. And men can’t afford to marry in their first youth nowadays.

MRS HUSHABYE. Now if I said that, it would sound witty. Why can’t you say it wittily? What on earth is the matter with you? Why don’t you inspire everybody with confidence? with respect?

MAZZINI [humbly]. I think that what is the matter with me is that I am poor. You don’t know what that means at home. Mind: I don’t say they have ever complained. They’ve all been wonderful: they’ve been proud of my poverty. They’ve even joked about it quite often. But my wife has had a very poor time of it. She has been quite resigned —

MRS HUSHABYE [shuddering involuntarily!]

MAZZINI. There! You see, Mrs Hushabye. I don’t want Ellie to live on resignation.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want her to have to resign herself to living with a man she doesn’t love?

MAZZINI [wistfully]. Are you sure that would be worse than living with a man she did love, if he was a footling person?

MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her contemptuous attitude, quite interested in Mazzini now]. You know, I really think you must love Ellie very much; for you become quite clever when you talk about her.

MAZZINI. I didn’t know I was so very stupid on other subjects.

MRS HUSHABYE. You are, sometimes.

MAZZINI [turning his head away; for his eyes are wet]. I have learnt a good deal about myself from you, Mrs Hushabye; and I’m afraid I shall not be the happier for your plain speaking. But if you thought I needed it to make me think of Ellie’s happiness you were very much mistaken.

MRS HUSHABYE [leaning towards him kindly]. Have I been a beast?

MAZZINI [pulling himself together]. It doesn’t matter about me, Mrs Hushabye. I think you like Ellie; and that is enough for me.

MRS HUSHABYE. I’m beginning to like you a little. I perfectly loathed you at first. I thought you the most odious, self-satisfied, boresome elderly prig I ever met.

MAZZINI [resigned, and now quite cheerful]. I daresay I am all that. I never have been a favorite with gorgeous women like you. They always frighten me.

MRS HUSHABYE [pleased]. Am I a gorgeous woman, Mazzini? I shall fall in love with you presently.

MAZZINI [with placid gallantry]. No, you won’t, Hesione. But you would be quite safe. Would you believe it that quite a lot of women have flirted with me because I am quite safe? But they get tired of me for the same reason.

MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. Take care. You may not be so safe as you think.

MAZZINI. Oh yes, quite safe. You see, I have been in love really: the sort of love that only happens once. [Softly]. That’s why Ellie is such a lovely girl.

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, really, you are coming out. Are you quite sure you won’t let me tempt you into a second grand passion?

MAZZINI. Quite. It wouldn’t be natural. The fact is, you don’t strike on my box, Mrs Hushabye; and I certainly don’t strike on yours.

MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Your marriage was a safety match.

MAZZINI. What a very witty application of the expression I used! I should never have thought of it.

Ellie comes in from the garden, looking anything but happy.

MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. Oh! here is Ellie at last. [She goes behind the sofa].

ELLIE [on the threshold of the starboard door]. Guinness said you wanted me: you and papa.

MRS HUSHABYE. You have kept us waiting so long that it almost came to — well, never mind. Your father is a very wonderful man [she ruffles his hair affectionately]: the only one I ever met who could resist me when I made myself really agreeable. [She comes to the big chair, on Mangan’s left]. Come here. I have something to show you. [Ellie strolls listlessly to the other side of the chair]. Look.

ELLIE [contemplating Mangan without interest]. I know. He is only asleep. We had a talk after dinner; and he fell asleep in the middle of it.

MRS HUSHABYE. You did it, Ellie. You put him asleep.

MAZZINI [rising quickly and coming to the back of the chair]. Oh, I hope not. Did you, Ellie?

ELLIE [wearily]. He asked me to.

MAZZINI. But it’s dangerous. You know what happened to me.

ELLIE [utterly indifferent]. Oh, I daresay I can wake him. If not, somebody else can.

MRS HUSHABYE. It doesn’t matter, anyhow, because I have at last persuaded your father that you don’t want to marry him.

ELLIE [suddenly coming out of her listlessness, much vexed]. But why did you do that, Hesione? I do want to marry him. I fully intend to marry him.

MAZZINI. Are you quite sure, Ellie? Mrs Hushabye has made me feel that I may have been thoughtless and selfish about it.

ELLIE [very clearly and steadily]. Papa. When Mrs. Hushabye takes it on herself to explain to you what I think or don’t think, shut your ears tight; and shut your eyes too. Hesione knows nothing about me: she hasn’t the least notion of the sort of person I am, and never will. I promise you I won’t do anything I don’t want to do and mean to do for my own sake.

MAZZINI. You are quite, quite sure?

ELLIE. Quite, quite sure. Now you must go away and leave me to talk to Mrs Hushabye.

MAZZINI. But I should like to hear. Shall I be in the way?

ELLIE [inexorable]. I had rather talk to her alone.

MAZZINI [affectionately]. Oh, well, I know what a nuisance parents are, dear. I will be good and go. [He goes to the garden door]. By the way, do you remember the address of that professional who woke me up? Don’t you think I had better telegraph to him?

MRS HUSHABYE [moving towards the sofa]. It’s too late to telegraph tonight.

MAZZINI. I suppose so. I do hope he’ll wake up in the course of the night. [He goes out into the garden].

ELLIE [turning vigorously on Hesione the moment her father is out of the room]. Hesione, what the devil do you mean by making mischief with my father about Mangan?

MRS HUSHABYE [promptly losing her temper]. Don’t you dare speak to me like that, you little minx. Remember that you are in my house.

ELLIE. Stuff! Why don’t you mind your own business? What is it to you whether I choose to marry Mangan or not?

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you suppose you can bully me, you miserable little matrimonial adventurer?

ELLIE. Every woman who hasn’t any money is a matrimonial adventurer. It’s easy for you to talk: you have never known what it is to want money; and you can pick up men as if they were daisies. I am poor and respectable —

MRS HUSHABYE [interrupting]. Ho! respectable! How did you pick up Mangan? How did you pick up my husband? You have the audacity to tell me that I am a — a — a —

ELLIE. A siren. So you are. You were born to lead men by the nose: if you weren’t, Marcus would have waited for me, perhaps.

MRS HUSHABYE [suddenly melting and half laughing]. Oh, my poor Ellie, my pettikins, my unhappy darling! I am so sorry about Hector. But what can I do? It’s not my fault: I’d give him to you if I could.

ELLIE. I don’t blame you for that.

MRS HUSHABYE. What a brute I was to quarrel with you and call you names! Do kiss me and say you’re not angry with me.

ELLIE [fiercely]. Oh, don’t slop and gush and be sentimental. Don’t you see that unless I can be hard — as hard as nails — I shall go mad? I don’t care a damn about your calling me names: do you think a woman in my situation can feel a few hard words?

MRS HUSHABYE. Poor little woman! Poor little situation!

ELLIE. I suppose you think you’re being sympathetic. You are just foolish and stupid and selfish. You see me getting a smasher right in the face that kills a whole part of my life: the best part that can never come again; and you think you can help me over it by a little coaxing and kissing. When I want all the strength I can get to lean on: something iron, something stony, I don’t care how cruel it is, you go all mushy and want to slobber over me. I’m not angry; I’m not unfriendly; but for God’s sake do pull yourself together; and don’t think that because you’re on velvet and always have been, women who are in hell can take it as easily as you.

MRS HUSHABYE [shrugging her shoulders]. Very well. [She sits down on the sofa in her old place.] But I warn you that when I am neither coaxing and kissing nor laughing, I am just wondering how much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world. You object to the siren: well, I drop the siren. You want to rest your wounded bosom against a grindstone. Well [folding her arms] here is the grindstone.

ELLIE [sitting down beside her, appeased]. That’s better: you really have the trick of falling in with everyone’s mood; but you don’t understand, because you are not the sort of woman for whom there is only one man and only one chance.

MRS HUSHABYE. I certainly don’t understand how your marrying that object [indicating Mangan] will console you for not being able to marry Hector.

ELLIE. Perhaps you don’t understand why I was quite a nice girl this morning, and am now neither a girl nor particularly nice.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, yes, I do. It’s because you have made up your mind to do something despicable and wicked.

ELLIE. I don’t think so, Hesione. I must make the best of my ruined house.

MRS HUSHABYE. Pooh! You’ll get over it. Your house isn’t ruined.

ELLIE. Of course I shall get over it. You don’t suppose I’m going to sit down and die of a broken heart, I hope, or be an old maid living on a pittance from the Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers’ Association. But my heart is broken, all the same. What I mean by that is that I know that what has happened to me with Marcus will not happen to me ever again. In the world for me there is Marcus and a lot of other men of whom one is just the same as another. Well, if I can’t have love, that’s no reason why I should have poverty. If Mangan has nothing else, he has money.

MRS HUSHABYE. And are there no YOUNG men with money?

ELLIE. Not within my reach. Besides, a young man would have the right to expect love from me, and would perhaps leave me when he found I could not give it to him. Rich young men can get rid of their wives, you know, pretty cheaply. But this object, as you call him, can expect nothing more from me than I am prepared to give him.

MRS HUSHABYE. He will be your owner, remember. If he buys you, he will make the bargain pay him and not you. Ask your father.

ELLIE [rising and strolling to the chair to contemplate their subject]. You need not trouble on that score, Hesione. I have more to give Boss Mangan than he has to give me: it is I who am buying him, and at a pretty good price too, I think. Women are better at that sort of bargain than men. I have taken the Boss’s measure; and ten Boss Mangans shall not prevent me doing far more as I please as his wife than I have ever been able to do as a poor girl. [Stooping to the recumbent figure]. Shall they, Boss? I think not. [She passes on to the drawing-table, and leans against the end of it, facing the windows]. I shall not have to spend most of my time wondering how long my gloves will last, anyhow.

MRS HUSHABYE [rising superbly]. Ellie, you are a wicked, sordid little beast. And to think that I actually condescended to fascinate that creature there to save you from him! Well, let me tell you this: if you make this disgusting match, you will never see Hector again if I can help it.

ELLIE [unmoved]. I nailed Mangan by telling him that if he did not marry me he should never see you again [she lifts herself on her wrists and seats herself on the end of the table].

MRS HUSHABYE [recoiling]. Oh!

ELLIE. So you see I am not unprepared for your playing that trump against me. Well, you just try it: that’s all. I should have made a man of Marcus, not a household pet.

MRS HUSHABYE [flaming]. You dare!

ELLIE [looking almost dangerous]. Set him thinking about me if you dare.

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, of all the impudent little fiends I ever met! Hector says there is a certain point at which the only answer you can give to a man who breaks all the rules is to knock him down. What would you say if I were to box your ears?

ELLIE [calmly]. I should pull your hair.

MRS HUSHABYE [mischievously]. That wouldn’t hurt me. Perhaps it comes off at night.

ELLIE [so taken aback that she drops off the table and runs to her]. Oh, you don’t mean to say, Hesione, that your beautiful black hair is false?

MRS HUSHABYE [patting it]. Don’t tell Hector. He believes in it.

ELLIE [groaning]. Oh! Even the hair that ensnared him false! Everything false!

MRS HUSHABYE. Pull it and try. Other women can snare men in their hair; but I can swing a baby on mine. Aha! you can’t do that, Goldylocks.

ELLIE [heartbroken]. No. You have stolen my babies.

MRS HUSHABYE. Pettikins, don’t make me cry. You know what you said about my making a household pet of him is a little true. Perhaps he ought to have waited for you. Would any other woman on earth forgive you?

ELLIE. Oh, what right had you to take him all for yourself! [Pulling herself together]. There! You couldn’t help it: neither of us could help it. He couldn’t help it. No, don’t say anything more: I can’t bear it. Let us wake the object. [She begins stroking Mangan’s head, reversing the movement with which she put him to sleep]. Wake up, do you hear? You are to wake up at once. Wake up, wake up, wake —

MANGAN [bouncing out of the chair in a fury and turning on them]. Wake up! So you think I’ve been asleep, do you? [He kicks the chair violently back out of his way, and gets between them]. You throw me into a trance so that I can’t move hand or foot — I might have been buried alive! it’s a mercy I wasn’t — and then you think I was only asleep. If you’d let me drop the two times you rolled me about, my nose would have been flattened for life against the floor. But I’ve found you all out, anyhow. I know the sort of people I’m among now. I’ve heard every word you’ve said, you and your precious father, and [to Mrs Hushabye] you too. So I’m an object, am I? I’m a thing, am I? I’m a fool that hasn’t sense enough to feed myself properly, am I? I’m afraid of the men that would starve if it weren’t for the wages I give them, am I? I’m nothing but a disgusting old skinflint to be made a convenience of by designing women and fool managers of my works, am I? I’m —

MRS HUSHABYE [with the most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr Mangan, you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while you were pretending to be asleep. It was not meant for you to hear.

MANGAN. Pretending to be asleep! Do you think if I was only pretending that I’d have sprawled there helpless, and listened to such unfairness, such lies, such injustice and plotting and backbiting and slandering of me, if I could have up and told you what I thought of you! I wonder I didn’t burst.

MRS HUSHABYE [sweetly]. You dreamt it all, Mr Mangan. We were only saying how beautifully peaceful you looked in your sleep. That was all, wasn’t it, Ellie? Believe me, Mr Mangan, all those unpleasant things came into your mind in the last half second before you woke. Ellie rubbed your hair the wrong way; and the disagreeable sensation suggested a disagreeable dream.

MANGAN [doggedly]. I believe in dreams.

MRS HUSHABYE. So do I. But they go by contraries, don’t they?

MANGAN [depths of emotion suddenly welling up in him]. I shan’t forget, to my dying day, that when you gave me the glad eye that time in the garden, you were making a fool of me. That was a dirty low mean thing to do. You had no right to let me come near you if I disgusted you. It isn’t my fault if I’m old and haven’t a moustache like a bronze candlestick as your husband has. There are things no decent woman would do to a man — like a man hitting a woman in the breast.

Hesione, utterly shamed, sits down on the sofa and covers her face with her hands. Mangan sits down also on his chair and begins to cry like a child. Ellie stares at them. Mrs Hushabye, at the distressing sound he makes, takes down her hands and looks at him. She rises and runs to him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Don’t cry: I can’t bear it. Have I broken your heart? I didn’t know you had one. How could I?

MANGAN. I’m a man, ain’t I?

MRS HUSHABYE [half coaxing, half rallying, altogether tenderly]. Oh no: not what I call a man. Only a Boss: just that and nothing else. What business has a Boss with a heart?

MANGAN. Then you’re not a bit sorry for what you did, nor ashamed?

MRS HUSHABYE. I was ashamed for the first time in my life when you said that about hitting a woman in the breast, and I found out what I’d done. My very bones blushed red. You’ve had your revenge, Boss. Aren’t you satisfied?

MANGAN. Serve you right! Do you hear? Serve you right! You’re just cruel. Cruel.

MRS HUSHABYE. Yes: cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt. By the way [sitting down beside him on the arm of the chair], what’s your name? It’s not really Boss, is it?

MANGAN [shortly]. If you want to know, my name’s Alfred.

MRS HUSHABYE [springs up]. Alfred!! Ellie, he was christened after Tennyson!!!

MANGAN [rising]. I was christened after my uncle, and never had a penny from him, damn him! What of it?

MRS HUSHABYE. It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that you had a mother, like anyone else. [Putting her hands on his shoulders and surveying him]. Little Alf!

MANGAN. Well, you have a nerve.

MRS HUSHABYE. And you have a heart, Alfy, a whimpering little heart, but a real one. [Releasing him suddenly]. Now run and make it up with Ellie. She has had time to think what to say to you, which is more than I had [she goes out quickly into the garden by the port door].

MANGAN. That woman has a pair of hands that go right through you.

ELLIE. Still in love with her, in spite of all we said about you?

MANGAN. Are all women like you two? Do they never think of anything about a man except what they can get out of him? You weren’t even thinking that about me. You were only thinking whether your gloves would last.

ELLIE. I shall not have to think about that when we are married.

MANGAN. And you think I am going to marry you after what I heard there!

ELLIE. You heard nothing from me that I did not tell you before.

MANGAN. Perhaps you think I can’t do without you.

ELLIE. I think you would feel lonely without us all, now, after coming to know us so well.

MANGAN [with something like a yell of despair]. Am I never to have the last word?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [appearing at the starboard garden door]. There is a soul in torment here. What is the matter?

MANGAN. This girl doesn’t want to spend her life wondering how long her gloves will last.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [passing through]. Don’t wear any. I never do [he goes into the pantry].

LADY UTTERWORD [appearing at the port garden door, in a handsome dinner dress]. Is anything the matter?

ELLIE. This gentleman wants to know is he never to have the last word?

LADY UTTERWORD [coming forward to the sofa]. I should let him have it, my dear. The important thing is not to have the last word, but to have your own way.

MANGAN. She wants both.

LADY UTTERWORD. She won’t get them, Mr Mangan. Providence always has the last word.

MANGAN [desperately]. Now you are going to come religion over me. In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going. [He makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has just emerged from his pantry].

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?

MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all here.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You were welcome to come: you are free to go. The wide earth, the high seas, the spacious skies are waiting for you outside.

LADY UTTERWORD. But your things, Mr Mangan. Your bag, your comb and brushes, your pyjamas —

HECTOR [who has just appeared in the port doorway in a handsome Arab costume]. Why should the escaping slave take his chains with him?

MANGAN. That’s right, Hushabye. Keep the pyjamas, my lady, and much good may they do you.

HECTOR [advancing to Lady Utterword’s left hand]. Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

LADY UTTERWORD. You will certainly not be comfortable without your luggage, Mr Mangan.

ELLIE [impatient]. Go, go: why don’t you go? It is a heavenly night: you can sleep on the heath. Take my waterproof to lie on: it is hanging up in the hall.

HECTOR. Breakfast at nine, unless you prefer to breakfast with the captain at six.

ELLIE. Good night, Alfred.

HECTOR. Alfred! [He runs back to the door and calls into the garden]. Randall, Mangan’s Christian name is Alfred.

RANDALL [appearing in the starboard doorway in evening dress]. Then Hesione wins her bet.

Mrs Hushabye appears in the port doorway. She throws her left arm round Hector’s neck: draws him with her to the back of the sofa: and throws her right arm round Lady Utterword’s neck.

MRS HUSHABYE. They wouldn’t believe me, Alf.

They contemplate him.

MANGAN. Is there any more of you coming in to look at me, as if I was the latest thing in a menagerie?

MRS HUSHABYE. You are the latest thing in this menagerie.

Before Mangan can retort, a fall of furniture is heard from upstairs: then a pistol shot, and a yell of pain. The staring group breaks up in consternation.

MAZZINI’S VOICE [from above]. Help! A burglar! Help!

HECTOR [his eyes blazing]. A burglar!!!

MRS HUSHABYE. No, Hector: you’ll be shot [but it is too late; he has dashed out past Mangan, who hastily moves towards the bookshelves out of his way].

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [blowing his whistle]. All hands aloft! [He strides out after Hector].

LADY UTTERWORD. My diamonds! [She follows the captain].

RANDALL [rushing after her]. No. Ariadne. Let me.

ELLIE. Oh, is papa shot? [She runs out].

MRS HUSHABYE. Are you frightened, Alf?

MANGAN. No. It ain’t my house, thank God.

MRS HUSHABYE. If they catch a burglar, shall we have to go into court as witnesses, and be asked all sorts of questions about our private lives?

MANGAN. You won’t be believed if you tell the truth.

Mazzini, terribly upset, with a duelling pistol in his hand, comes from the hall, and makes his way to the drawing-table.

MAZZINI. Oh, my dear Mrs Hushabye, I might have killed him. [He throws the pistol on the table and staggers round to the chair]. I hope you won’t believe I really intended to.

Hector comes in, marching an old and villainous looking man before him by the collar. He plants him in the middle of the room and releases him.

Ellie follows, and immediately runs across to the back of her father’s chair and pats his shoulders.

RANDALL [entering with a poker]. Keep your eye on this door, Mangan. I’ll look after the other [he goes to the starboard door and stands on guard there].

Lady Utterword comes in after Randall, and goes between Mrs Hushabye and Mangan.

Nurse Guinness brings up the rear, and waits near the door, on Mangan’s left.

MRS HUSHABYE. What has happened?

MAZZINI. Your housekeeper told me there was somebody upstairs, and gave me a pistol that Mr Hushabye had been practising with. I thought it would frighten him; but it went off at a touch.

THE BURGLAR. Yes, and took the skin off my ear. Precious near took the top off my head. Why don’t you have a proper revolver instead of a thing like that, that goes off if you as much as blow on it?

HECTOR. One of my duelling pistols. Sorry.

MAZZINI. He put his hands up and said it was a fair cop.

THE BURGLAR. So it was. Send for the police.

HECTOR. No, by thunder! It was not a fair cop. We were four to one.

MRS HUSHABYE. What will they do to him?

THE BURGLAR. Ten years. Beginning with solitary. Ten years off my life. I shan’t serve it all: I’m too old. It will see me out.

LADY UTTERWORD. You should have thought of that before you stole my diamonds.

THE BURGLAR. Well, you’ve got them back, lady, haven’t you? Can you give me back the years of my life you are going to take from me?

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, we can’t bury a man alive for ten years for a few diamonds.

THE BURGLAR. Ten little shining diamonds! Ten long black years!

LADY UTTERWORD. Think of what it is for us to be dragged through the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you a good beating and send you away, I shouldn’t mind; but here in England there is no real protection for any respectable person.

THE BURGLAR. I’m too old to be giv a hiding, lady. Send for the police and have done with it. It’s only just and right you should.

RANDALL [who has relaxed his vigilance on seeing the burglar so pacifically disposed, and comes forward swinging the poker between his fingers like a well folded umbrella]. It is neither just nor right that we should be put to a lot of inconvenience to gratify your moral enthusiasm, my friend. You had better get out, while you have the chance.

THE BURGLAR [inexorably]. No. I must work my sin off my conscience. This has come as a sort of call to me. Let me spend the rest of my life repenting in a cell. I shall have my reward above.

MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can’t behave naturally in this house.

HECTOR. My good sir, you must work out your salvation at somebody else’s expense. Nobody here is going to charge you.

THE BURGLAR. Oh, you won’t charge me, won’t you?

HECTOR. No. I’m sorry to be inhospitable; but will you kindly leave the house?

THE BURGLAR. Right. I’ll go to the police station and give myself up. [He turns resolutely to the door: but Hector stops him].

HECTOR.                               { Oh, no. You mustn’t do that.

RANDALL. [speaking together] { No no. Clear out man, can’t you; and don’t be a fool.

MRS. HUSHABYE                  { Don’t be so silly. Can’t you repent at home?

LADY UTTERWORD. You will have to do as you are told.

THE BURGLAR. It’s compounding a felony, you know.

MRS HUSHABYE. This is utterly ridiculous. Are we to be forced to prosecute this man when we don’t want to?

THE BURGLAR. Am I to be robbed of my salvation to save you the trouble of spending a day at the sessions? Is that justice? Is it right? Is it fair to me?

MAZZINI [rising and leaning across the table persuasively as if it were a pulpit desk or a shop counter]. Come, come! let me show you how you can turn your very crimes to account. Why not set up as a locksmith? You must know more about locks than most honest men?

THE BURGLAR. That’s true, sir. But I couldn’t set up as a locksmith under twenty pounds.

RANDALL. Well, you can easily steal twenty pounds. You will find it in the nearest bank.

THE BURGLAR [horrified]. Oh, what a thing for a gentleman to put into the head of a poor criminal scrambling out of the bottomless pit as it were! Oh, shame on you, sir! Oh, God forgive you! [He throws himself into the big chair and covers his face as if in prayer].

LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Randall!

HECTOR. It seems to me that we shall have to take up a collection for this inopportunely contrite sinner.

LADY UTTERWORD. But twenty pounds is ridiculous.

THE BURGLAR [looking up quickly]. I shall have to buy a lot of tools, lady.

LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense: you have your burgling kit.

THE BURGLAR. What’s a jimmy and a centrebit and an acetylene welding plant and a bunch of skeleton keys? I shall want a forge, and a smithy, and a shop, and fittings. I can’t hardly do it for twenty.

HECTOR. My worthy friend, we haven’t got twenty pounds.

THE BURGLAR [now master of the situation]. You can raise it among you, can’t you?

MRS HUSHABYE. Give him a sovereign, Hector, and get rid of him.

HECTOR [giving him a pound]. There! Off with you.

THE BURGLAR [rising and taking the money very ungratefully]. I won’t promise nothing. You have more on you than a quid: all the lot of you, I mean.

LADY UTTERWORD [vigorously]. Oh, let us prosecute him and have done with it. I have a conscience too, I hope; and I do not feel at all sure that we have any right to let him go, especially if he is going to be greedy and impertinent.

THE BURGLAR [quickly]. All right, lady, all right. I’ve no wish to be anything but agreeable. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen; and thank you kindly.

He is hurrying out when he is confronted in the doorway by Captain Shotover.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [fixing the burglar with a piercing regard]. What’s this? Are there two of you?

THE BURGLAR [falling on his knees before the captain in abject terror]. Oh, my good Lord, what have I done? Don’t tell me it’s your house I’ve broken into, Captain Shotover.

The captain seizes him by the collar: drags him to his feet: and leads him to the middle of the group, Hector falling back beside his wife to make way for them.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [turning him towards Ellie]. Is that your daughter? [He releases him].

THE BURGLAR. Well, how do I know, Captain? You know the sort of life you and me has led. Any young lady of that age might be my daughter anywhere in the wide world, as you might say.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mazzini]. You are not Billy Dunn. This is Billy Dunn. Why have you imposed on me?

THE BURGLAR [indignantly to Mazzini]. Have you been giving yourself out to be me? You, that nigh blew my head off! Shooting yourself, in a manner of speaking!

MAZZINI. My dear Captain Shotover, ever since I came into this house I have done hardly anything else but assure you that I am not Mr William Dunn, but Mazzini Dunn, a very different person.

THE BURGLAR. He don’t belong to my branch, Captain. There’s two sets in the family: the thinking Dunns and the drinking Dunns, each going their own ways. I’m a drinking Dunn: he’s a thinking Dunn. But that didn’t give him any right to shoot me.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. So you’ve turned burglar, have you?

THE BURGLAR. No, Captain: I wouldn’t disgrace our old sea calling by such a thing. I am no burglar.

LADY UTTERWORD. What were you doing with my diamonds?

GUINNESS. What did you break into the house for if you’re no burglar?

RANDALL. Mistook the house for your own and came in by the wrong window, eh?

THE BURGLAR. Well, it’s no use my telling you a lie: I can take in most captains, but not Captain Shotover, because he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the heart of man. But I’m no burglar.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Are you an honest man?

THE BURGLAR. I don’t set up to be better than my fellow-creatures, and never did, as you well know, Captain. But what I do is innocent and pious. I enquire about for houses where the right sort of people live. I work it on them same as I worked it here. I break into the house; put a few spoons or diamonds in my pocket; make a noise; get caught; and take up a collection. And you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get caught when you’re actually trying to. I have knocked over all the chairs in a room without a soul paying any attention to me. In the end I have had to walk out and leave the job.

RANDALL. When that happens, do you put back the spoons and diamonds?

THE BURGLAR. Well, I don’t fly in the face of Providence, if that’s what you want to know.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Guinness, you remember this man?

GUINNESS. I should think I do, seeing I was married to him, the blackguard!

HESIONE [exclaiming together] { Married to him!

LADY UTTERWORD              {Guinness!!

THE BURGLAR. It wasn’t legal. I’ve been married to no end of women. No use coming that over me.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Take him to the forecastle [he flings him to the door with a strength beyond his years].

GUINNESS. I suppose you mean the kitchen. They won’t have him there. Do you expect servants to keep company with thieves and all sorts?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Land-thieves and water-thieves are the same flesh and blood. I’ll have no boatswain on my quarter-deck. Off with you both.

THE BURGLAR. Yes, Captain. [He goes out humbly].

MAZZINI. Will it be safe to have him in the house like that?

GUINNESS. Why didn’t you shoot him, sir? If I’d known who he was, I’d have shot him myself. [She goes out].

MRS HUSHABYE. Do sit down, everybody. [She sits down on the sofa].

They all move except Ellie. Mazzini resumes his seat. Randall sits down in the window-seat near the starboard door, again making a pendulum of his poker, and studying it as Galileo might have done. Hector sits on his left, in the middle. Mangan, forgotten, sits in the port corner. Lady Utterword takes the big chair. Captain Shotover goes into the pantry in deep abstraction. They all look after him: and Lady Utterword coughs consciously.

MRS HUSHABYE. So Billy Dunn was poor nurse’s little romance. I knew there had been somebody.

RANDALL. They will fight their battles over again and enjoy themselves immensely.

LADY UTTERWORD [irritably]. You are not married; and you know nothing about it, Randall. Hold your tongue.

RANDALL. Tyrant!

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we have had a very exciting evening. Everything will be an anticlimax after it. We’d better all go to bed.

RANDALL. Another burglar may turn up.

MAZZINI. Oh, impossible! I hope not.

RANDALL. Why not? There is more than one burglar in England.

MRS HUSHABYE. What do you say, Alf?

MANGAN [huffily]. Oh, I don’t matter. I’m forgotten. The burglar has put my nose out of joint. Shove me into a corner and have done with me.

MRS HUSHABYE [jumping up mischievously, and going to him]. Would you like a walk on the heath, Alfred? With me?

ELLIE. Go, Mr Mangan. It will do you good. Hesione will soothe you.

MRS HUSHABYE [slipping her arm under his and pulling him upright]. Come, Alfred. There is a moon: it’s like the night in Tristan and Isolde. [She caresses his arm and draws him to the port garden door].

MANGAN [writhing but yielding]. How you can have the face-the heart-[he breaks down and is heard sobbing as she takes him out].

LADY UTTERWORD. What an extraordinary way to behave! What is the matter with the man?

ELLIE [in a strangely calm voice, staring into an imaginary distance]. His heart is breaking: that is all. [The captain appears at the pantry door, listening]. It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

LADY UTTERWORD [suddenly rising in a rage, to the astonishment of the rest]. How dare you?

HECTOR. Good heavens! What’s the matter?

RANDALL [in a warning whisper]. Tch — tch-tch! Steady.

ELLIE [surprised and haughty]. I was not addressing you particularly, Lady Utterword. And I am not accustomed to being asked how dare I.

LADY UTTERWORD. Of course not. Anyone can see how badly you have been brought up.

MAZZINI. Oh, I hope not, Lady Utterword. Really!

LADY UTTERWORD. I know very well what you meant. The impudence!

ELLIE. What on earth do you mean?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [advancing to the table]. She means that her heart will not break. She has been longing all her life for someone to break it. At last she has become afraid she has none to break.

LADY UTTERWORD [flinging herself on her knees and throwing her arms round him]. Papa, don’t say you think I’ve no heart.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising her with grim tenderness]. If you had no heart how could you want to have it broken, child?

HECTOR [rising with a bound]. Lady Utterword, you are not to be trusted. You have made a scene [he runs out into the garden through the starboard door].

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! Hector, Hector! [she runs out after him].

RANDALL. Only nerves, I assure you. [He rises and follows her, waving the poker in his agitation]. Ariadne! Ariadne! For God’s sake, be careful. You will — [he is gone].

MAZZINI [rising]. How distressing! Can I do anything, I wonder?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [promptly taking his chair and setting to work at the drawing-board]. No. Go to bed. Good-night.

MAZZINI [bewildered]. Oh! Perhaps you are right.

ELLIE. Good-night, dearest. [She kisses him].

MAZZINI. Good-night, love. [He makes for the door, but turns aside to the bookshelves]. I’ll just take a book [he takes one]. Good-night. [He goes out, leaving Ellie alone with the captain].

The captain is intent on his drawing. Ellie, standing sentry over his chair, contemplates him for a moment.

ELLIE. Does nothing ever disturb you, Captain Shotover?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I’ve stood on the bridge for eighteen hours in a typhoon. Life here is stormier; but I can stand it.

ELLIE. Do you think I ought to marry Mr Mangan?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [never looking up]. One rock is as good as another to be wrecked on.

ELLIE. I am not in love with him.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Who said you were?

ELLIE. You are not surprised?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Surprised! At my age!

ELLIE. It seems to me quite fair. He wants me for one thing: I want him for another.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Money?

ELLIE. Yes.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Well, one turns the cheek: the other kisses it. One provides the cash: the other spends it.

ELLIE. Who will have the best of the bargain, I wonder?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You. These fellows live in an office all day. You will have to put up with him from dinner to breakfast; but you will both be asleep most of that time. All day you will be quit of him; and you will be shopping with his money. If that is too much for you, marry a seafaring man: you will be bothered with him only three weeks in the year, perhaps.

ELLIE. That would be best of all, I suppose.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It’s a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter’s husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

ELLIE. I never thought of that before.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. If you’re marrying for business, you can’t be too businesslike.

ELLIE. Why do women always want other women’s husbands?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild?

ELLIE [with a short laugh]. I suppose so. What a vile world it is!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It doesn’t concern me. I’m nearly out of it.

ELLIE. And I’m only just beginning.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes; so look ahead.

ELLIE. Well, I think I am being very prudent.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I didn’t say prudent. I said look ahead.

ELLIE. What’s the difference?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It’s prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don’t forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.

ELLIE [wearily, leaving him and beginning to wander restlessly about the room]. I’m sorry, Captain Shotover; but it’s no use talking like that to me. Old-fashioned people are no use to me. Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is it? How much does your soul eat?

ELLIE. Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with. In this country you can’t have them without lots of money: that is why our souls are so horribly starved.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Mangan’s soul lives on pig’s food.

ELLIE. Yes: money is thrown away on him. I suppose his soul was starved when he was young. But it will not be thrown away on me. It is just because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the women who are not fools do.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are other ways of getting money. Why don’t you steal it?

ELLIE. Because I don’t want to go to prison.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is that the only reason? Are you quite sure honesty has nothing to do with it?

ELLIE. Oh, you are very very old-fashioned, Captain. Does any modern girl believe that the legal and illegal ways of getting money are the honest and dishonest ways? Mangan robbed my father and my father’s friends. I should rob all the money back from Mangan if the police would let me. As they won’t, I must get it back by marrying him.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can’t argue: I’m too old: my mind is made up and finished. All I can tell you is that, old-fashioned or new-fashioned, if you sell yourself, you deal your soul a blow that all the books and pictures and concerts and scenery in the world won’t heal [he gets up suddenly and makes for the pantry].

ELLIE [running after him and seizing him by the sleeve]. Then why did you sell yourself to the devil in Zanzibar?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping, startled]. What?

ELLIE. You shall not run away before you answer. I have found out that trick of yours. If you sold yourself, why shouldn’t I?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I had to deal with men so degraded that they wouldn’t obey me unless I swore at them and kicked them and beat them with my fists. Foolish people took young thieves off the streets; flung them into a training ship where they were taught to fear the cane instead of fearing God; and thought they’d made men and sailors of them by private subscription. I tricked these thieves into believing I’d sold myself to the devil. It saved my soul from the kicking and swearing that was damning me by inches.

ELLIE [releasing him]. I shall pretend to sell myself to Boss Mangan to save my soul from the poverty that is damning me by inches.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Riches will damn you ten times deeper. Riches won’t save even your body.

ELLIE. Old-fashioned again. We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies. I am afraid you are no use to me, Captain.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What did you expect? A Savior, eh? Are you old-fashioned enough to believe in that?

ELLIE. No. But I thought you were very wise, and might help me. Now I have found you out. You pretend to be busy, and think of fine things to say, and run in and out to surprise people by saying them, and get away before they can answer you.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It confuses me to be answered. It discourages me. I cannot bear men and women. I have to run away. I must run away now [he tries to].

ELLIE [again seizing his arm]. You shall not run away from me. I can hypnotize you. You are the only person in the house I can say what I like to. I know you are fond of me. Sit down. [She draws him to the sofa].

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [yielding]. Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

They sit side by side on the sofa. She leans affectionately against him with her head on his shoulder and her eyes half closed.

ELLIE [dreamily]. I should have thought nothing else mattered to old men. They can’t be very interested in what is going to happen to themselves.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A man’s interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full; so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again. I can give you the memories of my ancient wisdom: mere scraps and leavings; but I no longer really care for anything but my own little wants and hobbies. I sit here working out my old ideas as a means of destroying my fellow-creatures. I see my daughters and their men living foolish lives of romance and sentiment and snobbery. I see you, the younger generation, turning from their romance and sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard common sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the typhoon, or frozen into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than you or they have ever been. You are looking for a rich husband. At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

ELLIE [sitting up impatiently]. But what can I do? I am not a sea captain: I can’t stand on bridges in typhoons, or go slaughtering seals and whales in Greenland’s icy mountains. They won’t let women be captains. Do you want me to be a stewardess?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There are worse lives. The stewardesses could come ashore if they liked; but they sail and sail and sail.

ELLIE. What could they do ashore but marry for money? I don’t want to be a stewardess: I am too bad a sailor. Think of something else for me.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I can’t think so long and continuously. I am too old. I must go in and out. [He tries to rise].

ELLIE [pulling him back]. You shall not. You are happy here, aren’t you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you it’s dangerous to keep me. I can’t keep awake and alert.

ELLIE. What do you run away for? To sleep?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. To get a glass of rum.

ELLIE [frightfully disillusioned]. Is that it? How disgusting! Do you like being drunk?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No: I dread being drunk more than anything in the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don’t know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water. Go get me another: Guinness knows where it is. You had better see for yourself the horror of an old man drinking.

ELLIE. You shall not drink. Dream. I like you to dream. You must never be in the real world when we talk together.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can’t remember what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

ELLIE. You dread it almost as much as I used to dread losing my dreams and having to fight and do things. But that is all over for me: my dreams are dashed to pieces. I should like to marry a very old, very rich man. I should like to marry you. I had much rather marry you than marry Mangan. Are you very rich?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Living from hand to mouth. And I have a wife somewhere in Jamaica: a black one. My first wife. Unless she’s dead.

ELLIE. What a pity! I feel so happy with you. [She takes his hand, almost unconsciously, and pats it]. I thought I should never feel happy again.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?

ELLIE. Don’t you know?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No.

ELLIE. Heartbreak. I fell in love with Hector, and didn’t know he was married.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Heartbreak? Are you one of those who are so sufficient to themselves that they are only happy when they are stripped of everything, even of hope?

ELLIE [gripping the hand]. It seems so; for I feel now as if there was nothing I could not do, because I want nothing.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That’s the only real strength. That’s genius. That’s better than rum.

ELLIE [throwing away his hand]. Rum! Why did you spoil it?

Hector and Randall come in from the garden through the starboard door.

HECTOR. I beg your pardon. We did not know there was anyone here.

ELLIE [rising]. That means that you want to tell Mr Randall the story about the tiger. Come, Captain: I want to talk to my father; and you had better come with me.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [rising]. Nonsense! the man is in bed.

ELLIE. Aha! I’ve caught you. My real father has gone to bed; but the father you gave me is in the kitchen. You knew quite well all along. Come. [She draws him out into the garden with her through the port door].

HECTOR. That’s an extraordinary girl. She has the Ancient Mariner on a string like a Pekinese dog.

RANDALL. Now that they have gone, shall we have a friendly chat?

HECTOR. You are in what is supposed to be my house. I am at your disposal.

Hector sits down in the draughtsman’s chair, turning it to face Randall, who remains standing, leaning at his ease against the carpenter’s bench.

RANDALL. I take it that we may be quite frank. I mean about Lady Utterword.

HECTOR. You may. I have nothing to be frank about. I never met her until this afternoon.

RANDALL [straightening up]. What! But you are her sister’s husband.

HECTOR. Well, if you come to that, you are her husband’s brother.

RANDALL. But you seem to be on intimate terms with her.

HECTOR. So do you.

RANDALL. Yes: but I AM on intimate terms with her. I have known her for years.

HECTOR. It took her years to get to the same point with you that she got to with me in five minutes, it seems.

RANDALL [vexed]. Really, Ariadne is the limit [he moves away huffishly towards the windows].

HECTOR [coolly]. She is, as I remarked to Hesione, a very enterprising woman.

RANDALL [returning, much troubled]. You see, Hushabye, you are what women consider a good-looking man.

HECTOR. I cultivated that appearance in the days of my vanity; and Hesione insists on my keeping it up. She makes me wear these ridiculous things [indicating his Arab costume] because she thinks me absurd in evening dress.

RANDALL. Still, you do keep it up, old chap. Now, I assure you I have not an atom of jealousy in my disposition.

HECTOR. The question would seem to be rather whether your brother has any touch of that sort.

RANDALL. What! Hastings! Oh, don’t trouble about Hastings. He has the gift of being able to work sixteen hours a day at the dullest detail, and actually likes it. That gets him to the top wherever he goes. As long as Ariadne takes care that he is fed regularly, he is only too thankful to anyone who will keep her in good humor for him.

HECTOR. And as she has all the Shotover fascination, there is plenty of competition for the job, eh?

RANDALL [angrily]. She encourages them. Her conduct is perfectly scandalous. I assure you, my dear fellow, I haven’t an atom of jealousy in my composition; but she makes herself the talk of every place she goes to by her thoughtlessness. It’s nothing more: she doesn’t really care for the men she keeps hanging about her; but how is the world to know that? It’s not fair to Hastings. It’s not fair to me.

HECTOR. Her theory is that her conduct is so correct

RANDALL. Correct! She does nothing but make scenes from morning till night. You be careful, old chap. She will get you into trouble: that is, she would if she really cared for you.

HECTOR. Doesn’t she?

RANDALL. Not a scrap. She may want your scalp to add to her collection; but her true affection has been engaged years ago. You had really better be careful.

HECTOR. Do you suffer much from this jealousy?

RANDALL. Jealousy! I jealous! My dear fellow, haven’t I told you that there is not an atom of —

HECTOR. Yes. And Lady Utterword told me she never made scenes. Well, don’t waste your jealousy on my moustache. Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary hero that supplants us all in the long run. Besides, jealousy does not belong to your easy man-of-the-world pose, which you carry so well in other respects.

RANDALL. Really, Hushabye, I think a man may be allowed to be a gentleman without being accused of posing.

HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under your pose is apparently Ellie’s favorite, Othello.

RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me tell you.

HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned to play them.

RANDALL. If it’s all the same to you I had rather you didn’t play them on me. You evidently don’t quite understand my character, or my notions of good form.

HECTOR. Is it your notion of good form to give away Lady Utterword?

RANDALL [a childishly plaintive note breaking into his huff]. I have not said a word against Lady Utterword. This is just the conspiracy over again.

HECTOR. What conspiracy?

RANDALL. You know very well, sir. A conspiracy to make me out to be pettish and jealous and childish and everything I am not. Everyone knows I am just the opposite.

HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It often does have that effect. [He goes to the garden door and calls Lady Utterword with commanding emphasis]. Ariadne!

LADY UTTERWORD [at some distance]. Yes.

RANDALL. What are you calling her for? I want to speak —

LADY UTTERWORD [arriving breathless]. Yes. You really are a terribly commanding person. What’s the matter?

HECTOR. I do not know how to manage your friend Randall. No doubt you do.

LADY UTTERWORD. Randall: have you been making yourself ridiculous, as usual? I can see it in your face. Really, you are the most pettish creature.

RANDALL. You know quite well, Ariadne, that I have not an ounce of pettishness in my disposition. I have made myself perfectly pleasant here. I have remained absolutely cool and imperturbable in the face of a burglar. Imperturbability is almost too strong a point of mine. But [putting his foot down with a stamp, and walking angrily up and down the room] I insist on being treated with a certain consideration. I will not allow Hushabye to take liberties with me. I will not stand your encouraging people as you do.

HECTOR. The man has a rooted delusion that he is your husband.

LADY UTTERWORD. I know. He is jealous. As if he had any right to be! He compromises me everywhere. He makes scenes all over the place. Randall: I will not allow it. I simply will not allow it. You had no right to discuss me with Hector. I will not be discussed by men.

HECTOR. Be reasonable, Ariadne. Your fatal gift of beauty forces men to discuss you.

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh indeed! what about YOUR fatal gift of beauty?

HECTOR. How can I help it?

LADY UTTERWORD. You could cut off your moustache: I can’t cut off my nose. I get my whole life messed up with people falling in love with me. And then Randall says I run after men.

RANDALL. I —

LADY UTTERWORD. Yes you do: you said it just now. Why can’t you think of something else than women? Napoleon was quite right when he said that women are the occupation of the idle man. Well, if ever there was an idle man on earth, his name is Randall Utterword.

RANDALL. Ariad —

LADY UTTERWORD [overwhelming him with a torrent of words]. Oh yes you are: it’s no use denying it. What have you ever done? What good are you? You are as much trouble in the house as a child of three. You couldn’t live without your valet.

RANDALL. This is —

LADY UTTERWORD. Laziness! You are laziness incarnate. You are selfishness itself. You are the most uninteresting man on earth. You can’t even gossip about anything but yourself and your grievances and your ailments and the people who have offended you. [Turning to Hector]. Do you know what they call him, Hector?

HECTOR [speaking together] { Please don’t tell me.

RANDALL { I’ll not stand it —

LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the Rotter: that is his name in good society.

RANDALL [shouting]. I’ll not bear it, I tell you. Will you listen to me, you infernal — [he chokes].

LADY UTTERWORD. Well: go on. What were you going to call me? An infernal what? Which unpleasant animal is it to be this time?

RANDALL [foaming]. There is no animal in the world so hateful as a woman can be. You are a maddening devil. Hushabye, you will not believe me when I tell you that I have loved this demon all my life; but God knows I have paid for it [he sits down in the draughtsman’s chair, weeping].

LADY UTTERWORD [standing over him with triumphant contempt]. Cry-baby!

HECTOR [gravely, coming to him]. My friend, the Shotover sisters have two strange powers over men. They can make them love; and they can make them cry. Thank your stars that you are not married to one of them.

LADY UTTERWORD [haughtily]. And pray, Hector —

HECTOR [suddenly catching her round the shoulders: swinging her right round him and away from Randall: and gripping her throat with the other hand]. Ariadne, if you attempt to start on me, I’ll choke you: do you hear? The cat-and-mouse game with the other sex is a good game; but I can play your head off at it. [He throws her, not at all gently, into the big chair, and proceeds, less fiercely but firmly]. It is true that Napoleon said that woman is the occupation of the idle man. But he added that she is the relaxation of the warrior. Well, I am the warrior. So take care.

LADY UTTERWORD [not in the least put out, and rather pleased by his violence]. My dear Hector, I have only done what you asked me to do.

HECTOR. How do you make that out, pray?

LADY UTTERWORD. You called me in to manage Randall, didn’t you? You said you couldn’t manage him yourself.

HECTOR. Well, what if I did? I did not ask you to drive the man mad.

LADY UTTERWORD. He isn’t mad. That’s the way to manage him. If you were a mother, you’d understand.

HECTOR. Mother! What are you up to now?

LADY UTTERWORD. It’s quite simple. When the children got nerves and were naughty, I smacked them just enough to give them a good cry and a healthy nervous shock. They went to sleep and were quite good afterwards. Well, I can’t smack Randall: he is too big; so when he gets nerves and is naughty, I just rag him till he cries. He will be all right now. Look: he is half asleep already [which is quite true].

RANDALL [waking up indignantly]. I’m not. You are most cruel, Ariadne. [Sentimentally]. But I suppose I must forgive you, as usual [he checks himself in the act of yawning].

LADY UTTERWORD [to Hector]. Is the explanation satisfactory, dread warrior?

HECTOR. Some day I shall kill you, if you go too far. I thought you were a fool.

LADY UTTERWORD [laughing]. Everybody does, at first. But I am not such a fool as I look. [She rises complacently]. Now, Randall, go to bed. You will be a good boy in the morning.

RANDALL [only very faintly rebellious]. I’ll go to bed when I like. It isn’t ten yet.

LADY UTTERWORD. It is long past ten. See that he goes to bed at once, Hector. [She goes into the garden].

HECTOR. Is there any slavery on earth viler than this slavery of men to women?

RANDALL [rising resolutely]. I’ll not speak to her tomorrow. I’ll not speak to her for another week. I’ll give her such a lesson. I’ll go straight to bed without bidding her good-night. [He makes for the door leading to the hall].

HECTOR. You are under a spell, man. Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar. The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two demon daughters are their mystical progeny. I am tied to Hesione’s apron-string; but I’m her husband; and if I did go stark staring mad about her, at least we became man and wife. But why should you let yourself be dragged about and beaten by Ariadne as a toy donkey is dragged about and beaten by a child? What do you get by it? Are you her lover?

RANDALL. You must not misunderstand me. In a higher sense — in a Platonic sense —

HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what you mean.

RANDALL [feebly]. Well, if I don’t mind, I don’t see what business it is of yours. Besides, I tell you I am going to punish her. You shall see: I know how to deal with women. I’m really very sleepy. Say good-night to Mrs Hushabye for me, will you, like a good chap. Good-night. [He hurries out].

HECTOR. Poor wretch! Oh women! women! women! [He lifts his fists in invocation to heaven]. Fall. Fall and crush. [He goes out into the garden].

ACT III

In the garden, Hector, as he comes out through the glass door of the poop, finds Lady Utterword lying voluptuously in the hammock on the east side of the flagstaff, in the circle of light cast by the electric arc, which is like a moon in its opal globe. Beneath the head of the hammock, a campstool. On the other side of the flagstaff, on the long garden seat, Captain Shotover is asleep, with Ellie beside him, leaning affectionately against him on his right hand. On his left is a deck chair. Behind them in the gloom, Hesione is strolling about with Mangan. It is a fine still night, moonless.

LADY UTTERWORD. What a lovely night! It seems made for us.

HECTOR. The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night? [He sits down moodily in the deck chair].

ELLIE [dreamily, nestling against the captain]. Its beauty soaks into my nerves. In the night there is peace for the old and hope for the young.

HECTOR. Is that remark your own?

ELLIE. No. Only the last thing the captain said before he went to sleep.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I’m not asleep.

HECTOR. Randall is. Also Mr Mazzini Dunn. Mangan, too, probably.

MANGAN. No.

HECTOR. Oh, you are there. I thought Hesione would have sent you to bed by this time.

MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light, with Mangan]. I think I shall. He keeps telling me he has a presentiment that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.

MANGAN [plaintively]. But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you wouldn’t listen.

MRS HUSHABYE. I was listening for something else. There was a sort of splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a distance and then died away.

MANGAN. I tell you it was a train.

MRS HUSHABYE. And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour. The last is nine forty-five.

MANGAN. But a goods train.

MRS HUSHABYE. Not on our little line. They tack a truck on to the passenger train. What can it have been, Hector?

HECTOR. Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.

LADY UTTERWORD [in a cool instructive manner, wallowing comfortably in her hammock]. We have not supplanted the animals, Hector. Why do you ask heaven to destroy this house, which could be made quite comfortable if Hesione had any notion of how to live? Don’t you know what is wrong with it?

HECTOR. We are wrong with it. There is no sense in us. We are useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished.

LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense! Hastings told me the very first day he came here, nearly twenty-four years ago, what is wrong with the house.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What! The numskull said there was something wrong with my house!

LADY UTTERWORD. I said Hastings said it; and he is not in the least a numskull.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What’s wrong with my house?

LADY UTTERWORD. Just what is wrong with a ship, papa. Wasn’t it clever of Hastings to see that?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The man’s a fool. There’s nothing wrong with a ship.

LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, there is.

MRS HUSHABYE. But what is it? Don’t be aggravating, Addy.

LADY UTTERWORD. Guess.

HECTOR. Demons. Daughters of the witch of Zanzibar. Demons.

LADY UTTERWORD. Not a bit. I assure you, all this house needs to make it a sensible, healthy, pleasant house, with good appetites and sound sleep in it, is horses.

MRS HUSHABYE. Horses! What rubbish!

LADY UTTERWORD. Yes: horses. Why have we never been able to let this house? Because there are no proper stables. Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household; and that if any visitor wants to play the piano the whole room has to be upset before it can be opened, there are so many things piled on it. I never lived until I learned to ride; and I shall never ride really well because I didn’t begin as a child. There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn’t mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don’t are the wrong ones.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is some truth in this. My ship made a man of me; and a ship is the horse of the sea.

LADY UTTERWORD. Exactly how Hastings explained your being a gentleman.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Not bad for a numskull. Bring the man here with you next time: I must talk to him.

LADY UTTERWORD. Why is Randall such an obvious rotter? He is well bred; he has been at a public school and a university; he has been in the Foreign Office; he knows the best people and has lived all his life among them. Why is he so unsatisfactory, so contemptible? Why can’t he get a valet to stay with him longer than a few months? Just because he is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano, and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my house. If he would only — [she is interrupted by the melancholy strains of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have you been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! Go to bed instantly, Randall: how dare you? [The window is slammed down. She subsides]. How can anyone care for such a creature!

MRS HUSHABYE. Addy: do you think Ellie ought to marry poor Alfred merely for his money?

MANGAN [much alarmed]. What’s that? Mrs Hushabye, are my affairs to be discussed like this before everybody?

LADY UTTERWORD. I don’t think Randall is listening now.

MANGAN. Everybody is listening. It isn’t right.

MRS HUSHABYE. But in the dark, what does it matter? Ellie doesn’t mind. Do you, Ellie?

ELLIE. Not in the least. What is your opinion, Lady Utterword? You have so much good sense.

MANGAN. But it isn’t right. It — [Mrs Hushabye puts her hand on his mouth]. Oh, very well.

LADY UTTERWORD. How much money have you, Mr. Mangan?

MANGAN. Really — No: I can’t stand this.

LADY UTTERWORD. Nonsense, Mr Mangan! It all turns on your income, doesn’t it?

MANGAN. Well, if you come to that, how much money has she?

ELLIE. None.

LADY UTTERWORD. You are answered, Mr Mangan. And now, as you have made Miss Dunn throw her cards on the table, you cannot refuse to show your own.

MRS HUSHABYE. Come, Alf! out with it! How much?

MANGAN [baited out of all prudence]. Well, if you want to know, I have no money and never had any.

MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, you mustn’t tell naughty stories.

MANGAN. I’m not telling you stories. I’m telling you the raw truth.

LADY UTTERWORD. Then what do you live on, Mr Mangan?

MANGAN. Travelling expenses. And a trifle of commission.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What more have any of us but travelling expenses for our life’s journey?

MRS HUSHABYE. But you have factories and capital and things?

MANGAN. People think I have. People think I’m an industrial Napoleon. That’s why Miss Ellie wants to marry me. But I tell you I have nothing.

ELLIE. Do you mean that the factories are like Marcus’s tigers? That they don’t exist?

MANGAN. They exist all right enough. But they’re not mine. They belong to syndicates and shareholders and all sorts of lazy good-for-nothing capitalists. I get money from such people to start the factories. I find people like Miss Dunn’s father to work them, and keep a tight hand so as to make them pay. Of course I make them keep me going pretty well; but it’s a dog’s life; and I don’t own anything.

MRS HUSHABYE. Alfred, Alfred, you are making a poor mouth of it to get out of marrying Ellie.

MANGAN. I’m telling the truth about my money for the first time in my life; and it’s the first time my word has ever been doubted.

LADY UTTERWORD. How sad! Why don’t you go in for politics, Mr Mangan?

MANGAN. Go in for politics! Where have you been living? I am in politics.

LADY UTTERWORD. I’m sure I beg your pardon. I never heard of you.

MANGAN. Let me tell you, Lady Utterword, that the Prime Minister of this country asked me to join the Government without even going through the nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department.

LADY UTTERWORD. As a Conservative or a Liberal?

MANGAN. No such nonsense. As a practical business man. [They all burst out laughing]. What are you all laughing at?

MRS HUSHARYE. Oh, Alfred, Alfred!

ELLIE. You! who have to get my father to do everything for you!

MRS HUSHABYE. You! who are afraid of your own workmen!

HECTOR. You! with whom three women have been playing cat and mouse all the evening!

LADY UTTERWORD. You must have given an immense sum to the party funds, Mr Mangan.

MANGAN. Not a penny out of my own pocket. The syndicate found the money: they knew how useful I should be to them in the Government.

LADY UTTERWORD. This is most interesting and unexpected, Mr Mangan. And what have your administrative achievements been, so far?

MANGAN. Achievements? Well, I don’t know what you call achievements; but I’ve jolly well put a stop to the games of the other fellows in the other departments. Every man of them thought he was going to save the country all by himself, and do me out of the credit and out of my chance of a title. I took good care that if they wouldn’t let me do it they shouldn’t do it themselves either. I may not know anything about my own machinery; but I know how to stick a ramrod into the other fellow’s. And now they all look the biggest fools going.

HECTOR. And in heaven’s name, what do you look like?

MANGAN. I look like the fellow that was too clever for all the others, don’t I? If that isn’t a triumph of practical business, what is?

HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?

LADY UTTERWORD. Do you expect to save the country, Mr Mangan?

MANGAN. Well, who else will? Will your Mr Randall save it?

LADY UTTERWORD. Randall the rotter! Certainly not.

MANGAN. Will your brother-in-law save it with his moustache and his fine talk?

HECTOR. Yes, if they will let me.

MANGAN [sneering]. Ah! Will they let you?

HECTOR. No. They prefer you.

MANGAN. Very well then, as you’re in a world where I’m appreciated and you’re not, you’d best be civil to me, hadn’t you? Who else is there but me?

LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It had better be lost. Any fool can govern with a stick in his hand. I could govern that way. It is not God’s way. The man is a numskull.

LADY UTTERWORD. The man is worth all of you rolled into one. What do you say, Miss Dunn?

ELLIE. I think my father would do very well if people did not put upon him and cheat him and despise him because he is so good.

MANGAN [contemptuously]. I think I see Mazzini Dunn getting into parliament or pushing his way into the Government. We’ve not come to that yet, thank God! What do you say, Mrs Hushabye?

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, I say it matters very little which of you governs the country so long as we govern you.

HECTOR. We? Who is we, pray?

MRS HUSHABYE. The devil’s granddaughters, dear. The lovely women.

HECTOR [raising his hands as before]. Fall, I say, and deliver us from the lures of Satan!

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. Marcus’s tigers are false; Mr Mangan’s millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about Hesione but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword’s is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain’s seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be —

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

LADY UTTERWORD [placidly]. A good deal of my hair is quite genuine. The Duchess of Dithering offered me fifty guineas for this [touching her forehead] under the impression that it was a transformation; but it is all natural except the color.

MANGAN [wildly]. Look here: I’m going to take off all my clothes [he begins tearing off his coat].

LADY UTTERWORD. [in consternation] { Mr. Mangan!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER { What’s that?

HECTOR. { Ha! Ha! Do. Do.

ELLIE { Please don’t.

MRS HUSHABYE [catching his arm and stopping him]. Alfred, for shame! Are you mad?

MANGAN. Shame! What shame is there in this house? Let’s all strip stark naked. We may as well do the thing thoroughly when we’re about it. We’ve stripped ourselves morally naked: well, let us strip ourselves physically naked as well, and see how we like it. I tell you I can’t bear this. I was brought up to be respectable. I don’t mind the women dyeing their hair and the men drinking: it’s human nature. But it’s not human nature to tell everybody about it. Every time one of you opens your mouth I go like this [he cowers as if to avoid a missile], afraid of what will come next. How are we to have any self-respect if we don’t keep it up that we’re better than we really are?

LADY UTTERWORD. I quite sympathize with you, Mr Mangan. I have been through it all; and I know by experience that men and women are delicate plants and must be cultivated under glass. Our family habit of throwing stones in all directions and letting the air in is not only unbearably rude, but positively dangerous. Still, there is no use catching physical colds as well as moral ones; so please keep your clothes on.

MANGAN. I’ll do as I like: not what you tell me. Am I a child or a grown man? I won’t stand this mothering tyranny. I’ll go back to the city, where I’m respected and made much of.

MRS HUSHABYE. Goodbye, Alf. Think of us sometimes in the city. Think of Ellie’s youth!

ELLIE. Think of Hesione’s eyes and hair!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Think of this garden in which you are not a dog barking to keep the truth out!

HECTOR. Think of Lady Utterword’s beauty! her good sense! her style!

LADY UTTERWORD. Flatterer. Think, Mr. Mangan, whether you can really do any better for yourself elsewhere: that is the essential point, isn’t it?

MANGAN [surrendering]. All right: all right. I’m done. Have it your own way. Only let me alone. I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels when you all start on me like this. I’ll stay. I’ll marry her. I’ll do anything for a quiet life. Are you satisfied now?

ELLIE. No. I never really intended to make you marry me, Mr Mangan. Never in the depths of my soul. I only wanted to feel my strength: to know that you could not escape if I chose to take you.

MANGAN [indignantly]. What! Do you mean to say you are going to throw me over after my acting so handsome?

LADY UTTERWORD. I should not be too hasty, Miss Dunn. You can throw Mr Mangan over at any time up to the last moment. Very few men in his position go bankrupt. You can live very comfortably on his reputation for immense wealth.

ELLIE. I cannot commit bigamy, Lady Utterword.

MRS HUSHABYE. { Bigamy! Whatever on earth are you talking about, Ellie?

LADY UTTERWORD [exclaiming altogether] { Bigamy! What do you mean, Miss Dunn?

MANGAN { Bigamy! Do you mean to say you’re married already?

HECTOR { Bigamy! This is some enigma.

ELLIE. Only half an hour ago I became Captain Shotover’s white wife.

MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie! What nonsense! Where?

ELLIE. In heaven, where all true marriages are made.

LADY UTTERWORD. Really, Miss Dunn! Really, papa!

MANGAN. He told me I was too old! And him a mummy!

HECTOR [quoting Shelley].

“Their altar the grassy earth outspreads

And their priest the muttering wind.”

ELLIE. Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father.

She draws the captain’s arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain remains fast asleep.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, that’s very clever of you, pettikins. Very clever. Alfred, you could never have lived up to Ellie. You must be content with a little share of me.

MANGAN [snifflng and wiping his eyes]. It isn’t kind — [his emotion chokes him].

LADY UTTERWORD. You are well out of it, Mr Mangan. Miss Dunn is the most conceited young woman I have met since I came back to England.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Ellie isn’t conceited. Are you, pettikins?

ELLIE. I know my strength now, Hesione.

MANGAN. Brazen, I call you. Brazen.

MRS HUSHABYE. Tut, tut, Alfred: don’t be rude. Don’t you feel how lovely this marriage night is, made in heaven? Aren’t you happy, you and Hector? Open your eyes: Addy and Ellie look beautiful enough to please the most fastidious man: we live and love and have not a care in the world. We women have managed all that for you. Why in the name of common sense do you go on as if you were two miserable wretches?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I tell you happiness is no good. You can be happy when you are only half alive. I am happier now I am half dead than ever I was in my prime. But there is no blessing on my happiness.

ELLIE [her face lighting up]. Life with a blessing! that is what I want. Now I know the real reason why I couldn’t marry Mr Mangan: there would be no blessing on our marriage. There is a blessing on my broken heart. There is a blessing on your beauty, Hesione. There is a blessing on your father’s spirit. Even on the lies of Marcus there is a blessing; but on Mr Mangan’s money there is none.

MANGAN. I don’t understand a word of that.

ELLIE. Neither do I. But I know it means something.

MANGAN. Don’t say there was any difficulty about the blessing. I was ready to get a bishop to marry us.

MRS HUSHABYE. Isn’t he a fool, pettikins?

HECTOR [fiercely]. Do not scorn the man. We are all fools.

Mazzini, in pyjamas and a richly colored silk dressing gown, comes from the house, on Lady Utterword’s side.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! here comes the only man who ever resisted me. What’s the matter, Mr Dunn? Is the house on fire?

MAZZINI. Oh, no: nothing’s the matter: but really it’s impossible to go to sleep with such an interesting conversation going on under one’s window, and on such a beautiful night too. I just had to come down and join you all. What has it all been about?

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, wonderful things, soldier of freedom.

HECTOR. For example, Mangan, as a practical business man, has tried to undress himself and has failed ignominiously; whilst you, as an idealist, have succeeded brilliantly.

MAZZINI. I hope you don’t mind my being like this, Mrs Hushabye. [He sits down on the campstool].

MRS HUSHABYE. On the contrary, I could wish you always like that.

LADY UTTERWORD. Your daughter’s match is off, Mr Dunn. It seems that Mr Mangan, whom we all supposed to be a man of property, owns absolutely nothing.

MAZZINI. Well, of course I knew that, Lady Utterword. But if people believe in him and are always giving him money, whereas they don’t believe in me and never give me any, how can I ask poor Ellie to depend on what I can do for her?

MANGAN. Don’t you run away with this idea that I have nothing. I —

HECTOR. Oh, don’t explain. We understand. You have a couple of thousand pounds in exchequer bills, 50,000 shares worth tenpence a dozen, and half a dozen tabloids of cyanide of potassium to poison yourself with when you are found out. That’s the reality of your millions.

MAZZINI. Oh no, no, no. He is quite honest: the businesses are genuine and perfectly legal.

HECTOR [disgusted]. Yah! Not even a great swindler!

MANGAN. So you think. But I’ve been too many for some honest men, for all that.

LADY UTTERWORD. There is no pleasing you, Mr Mangan. You are determined to be neither rich nor poor, honest nor dishonest.

MANGAN. There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I have been made to look like a fool, though I’m as good a man in this house as in the city.

ELLIE [musically]. Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House.

MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, Ellie; or I shall howl like an animal.

MANGAN [breaks into a low snivelling]!!!

MRS HUSAHBYE. There! you have set Alfred off.

ELLIE. I like him best when he is howling.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Silence! [Mangan subsides into silence]. I say, let the heart break in silence.

HECTOR. Do you accept that name for your house?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is not my house: it is only my kennel.

HECTOR. We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we haunt it.

LADY UTTERWORD [heart torn]. It is dreadful to think how you have been here all these years while I have gone round the world. I escaped young; but it has drawn me back. It wants to break my heart too. But it shan’t. I have left you and it behind. It was silly of me to come back. I felt sentimental about papa and Hesione and the old place. I felt them calling to me.

MAZZINI. But what a very natural and kindly and charming human feeling, Lady Utterword!

LADY UTTERWORD. So I thought, Mr Dunn. But I know now that it was only the last of my influenza. I found that I was not remembered and not wanted.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You left because you did not want us. Was there no heartbreak in that for your father? You tore yourself up by the roots; and the ground healed up and brought forth fresh plants and forgot you. What right had you to come back and probe old wounds?

MRS HUSHABYE. You were a complete stranger to me at first, Addy; but now I feel as if you had never been away.

LADY UTTERWORD. Thank you, Hesione; but the influenza is quite cured. The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any stables.

HECTOR. Inhabited by — ?

ELLIE. A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.

MRS HUSHABYE. A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.

MAZZINI. Oh, really, Mrs Hushabye —

MANGAN. A member of His Majesty’s Government that everybody sets down as a nincompoop: don’t forget him, Lady Utterword.

LADY UTTERWORD. And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation is to be married to my sister.

HECTOR. All heartbroken imbeciles.

MAZZINI. Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favorable specimen of what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.

MRS HUSHABYE. You do us proud, Mazzini.

MAZZINI. I am not flattering, really. Where else could I feel perfectly at ease in my pyjamas? I sometimes dream that I am in very distinguished society, and suddenly I have nothing on but my pyjamas! Sometimes I haven’t even pyjamas. And I always feel overwhelmed with confusion. But here, I don’t mind in the least: it seems quite natural.

LADY UTTERWORD. An infallible sign that you are now not in really distinguished society, Mr Dunn. If you were in my house, you would feel embarrassed.

MAZZINI. I shall take particular care to keep out of your house, Lady Utterword.

LADY UTTERWORD. You will be quite wrong, Mr Dunn. I should make you very comfortable; and you would not have the trouble and anxiety of wondering whether you should wear your purple and gold or your green and crimson dressing-gown at dinner. You complicate life instead of simplifying it by doing these ridiculous things.

ELLIE. Your house is not Heartbreak House: is it, Lady Utterword?

HECTOR. Yet she breaks hearts, easy as her house is. That poor devil upstairs with his flute howls when she twists his heart, just as Mangan howls when my wife twists his.

LADY UTTERWORD. That is because Randall has nothing to do but have his heart broken. It is a change from having his head shampooed. Catch anyone breaking Hastings’ heart!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The numskull wins, after all.

LADY UTTERWORD. I shall go back to my numskull with the greatest satisfaction when I am tired of you all, clever as you are.

MANGAN [huffily]. I never set up to be clever.

LADY UTTERWORD. I forgot you, Mr Mangan.

MANGAN. Well, I don’t see that quite, either.

LADY UTTERWORD. You may not be clever, Mr Mangan; but you are successful.

MANGAN. But I don’t want to be regarded merely as a successful man. I have an imagination like anyone else. I have a presentiment.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, you are impossible, Alfred. Here I am devoting myself to you; and you think of nothing but your ridiculous presentiment. You bore me. Come and talk poetry to me under the stars. [She drags him away into the darkness].

MANGAN [tearfully, as he disappears]. Yes: it’s all very well to make fun of me; but if you only knew —

HECTOR [impatiently]. How is all this going to end?

MAZZINI. It won’t end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn’t end: it goes on.

ELLIE. Oh, it can’t go on forever. I’m always expecting something. I don’t know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.

LADY UTTERWORD. The point for a young woman of your age is a baby.

HECTOR. Yes, but, damn it, I have the same feeling; and I can’t have a baby.

LADY UTTERWORD. By deputy, Hector.

HECTOR. But I have children. All that is over and done with for me: and yet I too feel that this can’t last. We sit here talking, and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil. Think of the powers of destruction that Mangan and his mutual admiration gang wield! It’s madness: it’s like giving a torpedo to a badly brought up child to play at earthquakes with.

MAZZINI. I know. I used often to think about that when I was young.

HECTOR. Think! What’s the good of thinking about it? Why didn’t you do something?

MAZZINI. But I did. I joined societies and made speeches and wrote pamphlets. That was all I could do. But, you know, though the people in the societies thought they knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn’t have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It’s amazing how well we get along, all things considered.

LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps somebody cleverer than you and Mr Mangan was at work all the time.

MAZZINI. Perhaps so. Though I was brought up not to believe in anything, I often feel that there is a great deal to be said for the theory of an over-ruling Providence, after all.

LADY UTTERWORD. Providence! I meant Hastings.

MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.

MAZZINI. Very true, no doubt, at sea. But in politics, I assure you, they only run into jellyfish. Nothing happens.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. At sea nothing happens to the sea. Nothing happens to the sky. The sun comes up from the east and goes down to the west. The moon grows from a sickle to an arc lamp, and comes later and later until she is lost in the light as other things are lost in the darkness. After the typhoon, the flying-fish glitter in the sunshine like birds. It’s amazing how they get along, all things considered. Nothing happens, except something not worth mentioning.

ELLIE. What is that, O Captain, O my captain?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [savagely]. Nothing but the smash of the drunken skipper’s ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap.

ELLIE. Moral: don’t take rum.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [vehemently]. That is a lie, child. Let a man drink ten barrels of rum a day, he is not a drunken skipper until he is a drifting skipper. Whilst he can lay his course and stand on his bridge and steer it, he is no drunkard. It is the man who lies drinking in his bunk and trusts to Providence that I call the drunken skipper, though he drank nothing but the waters of the River Jordan.

ELLIE. Splendid! And you haven’t had a drop for an hour. You see you don’t need it: your own spirit is not dead.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Echoes: nothing but echoes. The last shot was fired years ago.

HECTOR. And this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?

HECTOR. Well, I don’t mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.

HECTOR. And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.

ELLIE. Quiet, quiet: you’ll tire yourself.

MAZZINI. I thought all that once, Captain; but I assure you nothing will happen.

A dull distant explosion is heard.

HECTOR [starting up]. What was that?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Something happening [he blows his whistle]. Breakers ahead!

The light goes out.

HECTOR [furiously]. Who put that light out? Who dared put that light out?

NURSE GUINNESS [running in from the house to the middle of the esplanade]. I did, sir. The police have telephoned to say we’ll be summoned if we don’t put that light out: it can be seen for miles.

HECTOR. It shall be seen for a hundred miles [he dashes into the house].

NURSE GUINNESS. The Rectory is nothing but a heap of bricks, they say. Unless we can give the Rector a bed he has nowhere to lay his head this night.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The Church is on the rocks, breaking up. I told him it would unless it headed for God’s open sea.

NURSE GUINNESS. And you are all to go down to the cellars.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go there yourself, you and all the crew. Batten down the hatches.

NURSE GUINNESS. And hide beside the coward I married! I’ll go on the roof first. [The lamp lights up again]. There! Mr Hushabye’s turned it on again.

THE BURGLAR [hurrying in and appealing to Nurse Guinness]. Here: where’s the way to that gravel pit? The boot-boy says there’s a cave in the gravel pit. Them cellars is no use. Where’s the gravel pit, Captain?

NURSE GUINNESS. Go straight on past the flagstaff until you fall into it and break your dirty neck. [She pushes him contemptuously towards the flagstaff, and herself goes to the foot of the hammock and waits there, as it were by Ariadne’s cradle].

Another and louder explosion is heard. The burglar stops and stands trembling.

ELLIE [rising]. That was nearer.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The next one will get us. [He rises]. Stand by, all hands, for judgment.

THE BURGLAR. Oh my Lordy God! [He rushes away frantically past the flagstaff into the gloom].

MRS HUSHABYE [emerging panting from the darkness]. Who was that running away? [She comes to Ellie]. Did you hear the explosions? And the sound in the sky: it’s splendid: it’s like an orchestra: it’s like Beethoven.

ELLIE. By thunder, Hesione: it is Beethoven.

She and Hesione throw themselves into one another’s arms in wild excitement. The light increases.

MAZZINI [anxiously]. The light is getting brighter.

NURSE GUINNESS [looking up at the house]. It’s Mr Hushabye turning on all the lights in the house and tearing down the curtains.

RANDALL [rushing in in his pyjamas, distractedly waving a flute]. Ariadne, my soul, my precious, go down to the cellars: I beg and implore you, go down to the cellars!

LADY UTTERWORD [quite composed in her hammock]. The governor’s wife in the cellars with the servants! Really, Randall!

RANDALL. But what shall I do if you are killed?

LADY UTTERWORD. You will probably be killed, too, Randall. Now play your flute to show that you are not afraid; and be good. Play us “Keep the home fires burning.”

NURSE GUINNESS [grimly]. THEY’LL keep the home fires burning for us: them up there.

RANDALL [having tried to play]. My lips are trembling. I can’t get a sound.

MAZZINI. I hope poor Mangan is safe.

MRS HUSHABYE. He is hiding in the cave in the gravel pit.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. My dynamite drew him there. It is the hand of God.

HECTOR [returning from the house and striding across to his former place]. There is not half light enough. We should be blazing to the skies.

ELLIE [tense with excitement]. Set fire to the house, Marcus.

MRS HUSHABYE. My house! No.

HECTOR. I thought of that; but it would not be ready in time.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The judgment has come. Courage will not save you; but it will show that your souls are still live.

MRS HUSHABYE. Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It’s magnificent.

They all turn away from the house and look up, listening.

HECTOR [gravely]. Miss Dunn, you can do no good here. We of this house are only moths flying into the candle. You had better go down to the cellar.

ELLIE [scornfully]. I don’t think.

MAZZINI. Ellie, dear, there is no disgrace in going to the cellar. An officer would order his soldiers to take cover. Mr Hushabye is behaving like an amateur. Mangan and the burglar are acting very sensibly; and it is they who will survive.

ELLIE. Let them. I shall behave like an amateur. But why should you run any risk?

MAZZINI. Think of the risk those poor fellows up there are running!

NURSE GUINNESS. Think of them, indeed, the murdering blackguards! What next?

A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered glass from the windows.

MAZZINI. Is anyone hurt?

HECTOR. Where did it fall?

NURSE GUINNESS [in hideous triumph]. Right in the gravel pit: I seen it. Serve un right! I seen it [she runs away towards the gravel pit, laughing harshly].

HECTOR. One husband gone.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Thirty pounds of good dynamite wasted.

MAZZINI. Oh, poor Mangan!

HECTOR. Are you immortal that you need pity him? Our turn next.

They wait in silence and intense expectation. Hesione and Ellie hold each other’s hand tight.

A distant explosion is heard.

MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]. Oh! they have passed us.

LADY UTTERWORD. The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down and goes asleep].

ELLIE [disappointedly]. Safe!

HECTOR [disgustedly]. Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has become again suddenly! [he sits down].

MAZZINI [sitting down]. I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have survived; and Mangan and the burglar —

HECTOR. — the two burglars —

LADY UTTERWORD. — the two practical men of business —

MAZZINI. — both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new house.

MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.

ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]. Oh, I hope so.

Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute.

BACK TO METHUSELAH: A METABIOLOGICAL PENTATEUCH

CONTENTS

PART I. In the Beginning

ACT I

ACT II

PART II. The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas

PART III. The Thing Happens

PART IV. Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman

ACT I

ACT II

ACT III

PREFACE

The Infidel Half Century

THE DAWN OF DARWINISM

One day early in the eighteen hundred and sixties, I, being then a small boy, was with my nurse, buying something in the shop of a petty newsagent, bookseller, and stationer in Camden Street, Dublin, when there entered an elderly man, weighty and solemn, who advanced to the counter, and said pompously, ‘Have you the works of the celebrated Buffoon?’

My own works were at that time unwritten, or it is possible that the shop assistant might have misunderstood me so far as to produce a copy of Man and Superman. As it was, she knew quite well what he wanted; for this was before the Education Act of 1870 had produced shop assistants who know how to read and know nothing else. The celebrated Buffoon was not a humorist, but the famous naturalist Buffon. Every literate child at that time knew Buffon’s Natural History as well as Esop’s Fables. And no living child had heard the name that has since obliterated Buffon’s in the popular consciousness: the name of Darwin.

Ten years elapsed. The celebrated Buffoon was forgotten; I had doubled my years and my length; and I had discarded the religion of my forefathers. One day the richest and consequently most dogmatic of my uncles came into a restaurant where I was dining, and found himself, much against his will, in conversation with the most questionable of his nephews. By way of making myself agreeable, I spoke of modern thought and Darwin. He said, ‘Oh, thats the fellow who wants to make out that we all have tails like monkeys.’ I tried to explain that what Darwin had insisted on in this connection was that some monkeys have no tails. But my uncle was as impervious to what Darwin really said as any Neo-Darwinian nowadays. He died impenitent, and did not mention me in his will.

Twenty years elapsed. If my uncle had been alive, he would have known all about Darwin, and known it all wrong. In spite of the efforts of Grant Allen to set him right, he would have accepted Darwin as the discoverer of Evolution, of Heredity, and of modification of species by Selection. For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo’s demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci’s simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry Davy’s invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. It was just the same in other subjects. Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman. Schopenhauer was credited with inventing the distinction between the Covenant of Grace and the Covenant of Works which troubled Cromwell on his deathbed. People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.

THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-DARWINIANS

This particular sort of ignorance does not always or often matter. But in Darwin’s case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at one bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a philosopher and a prophet as well as an eminent professional naturalist, with geology as a hobby. The delusion that he had actually achieved this feat did no harm at first, because if people’s views are sound, about evolution or anything else, it does not make two straws difference whether they call the revealer of their views Tom or Dick. But later on such apparently negligible errors have awkward consequences. Darwin was given an imposing reputation as not only an Evolutionist, but as the Evolutionist, with the immense majority who never read his books. The few who never read any others were led by them to concentrate exclusively on Circumstantial Selection as the explanation of all the transformations and adaptations which were the evidence for Evolution. And they presently found themselves so cut off by this specialization from the majority who knew Darwin only by his spurious reputation, that they were obliged to distinguish themselves, not as Darwinians, but as Neo-Darwinians.

Before ten more years had elapsed, the Neo-Darwinians were practically running current Science. It was 1906; I was fifty; I published my own view of evolution in a play called Man and Superman; and I found that most people were unable to understand how I could be an Evolutionist and not a Neo-Darwinian, or why I habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as a ghastly idiocy, and would fall on its professors slaughterously in public discussions. It was in the hope of making me clear the matter up that the Fabian Society, which was then organizing a series of lectures on Prophets of the Nineteenth Century, asked me to deliver a lecture on the prophet Darwin. I did so; and scraps of that lecture, which was never published, variegate these pages.

POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL

Ten more years elapsed. Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it. The circumstances of this catastrophe, the boyish cinema-fed romanticism which made it possible to impose it on the people as a crusade, and especially the ignorance and errors of the victors of Western Europe when its violent phase had passed and the time for reconstruction arrived, confirmed a doubt which had grown steadily in my mind during my forty years public work as a Socialist: namely, whether the human animal, as he exists at present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his own aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilization.

COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS

Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and selfish uses of money, but by able and sound administrators who can do nothing else with them than dominate and exploit them. Government and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards. Those who refuse to stand in with them are persecuted and occasionally executed when they give any trouble to the exploiters. They fall into poverty when they lack lucrative specific talents. At the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism. And the goodnatured majority are looking on in helpless horror, or allowing themselves to be persuaded by the newspapers of their exploiters that the kicking is not only a sound commercial investment, but an act of divine justice of which they are the ardent instruments.

But if Man is really incapable of organizing a big civilization, and cannot organize even a village or a tribe any too well, what is the use of giving him a religion? A religion may make him hunger and thirst for righteousness; but will it endow him with the practical capacity to satisfy that appetite? Good intentions do not carry with them a grain of political science, which is a very complicated one. The most devoted and indefatigable, the most able and disinterested students of this science in England, as far as I know, are my friends Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It has taken them forty years of preliminary work, in the course of which they have published several treatises comparable to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, to formulate a political constitution adequate to existing needs. If this is the measure of what can be done in a lifetime by extraordinary ability, keen natural aptitude, exceptional opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning, what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political science is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to whom such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a pons asinorum never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that he cannot keep awake for five minutes over a book?

IS THERE ANY HOPE IN EDUCATION?

The usual answer is that we must educate our masters: that is, ourselves. We must teach citizenship and political science at school. But must we? There is no must about it, the hard fact being that we must not teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion, children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out through the schoolmaster.

HOMEOPATHIC EDUCATION

In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him. Therefore, if you want to see a cat clean, you throw a bucket of mud over it, when it will immediately take extraordinary pains to lick the mud off, and finally be cleaner than it was before. In the same way doctors who are up-to-date (BURGE-LUBIN per cent of all the registered practitioners, and 20 per cent of the unregistered ones), when they want to rid you of a disease or a symptom, inoculate you with that disease or give you a drug that produces that symptom, in order to provoke you to resist it as the mud provokes the cat to wash itself.

Now an acute person will ask me why, if this be so, our false education does not provoke our scholars to find out the truth. My answer is that it sometimes does. Voltaire was a pupil of the Jesuits; Samuel Butler was the pupil of a hopelessly conventional and erroneous country parson. But then Voltaire was Voltaire, and Butler was Butler: that is, their minds were so abnormally strong that they could throw off the doses of poison that paralyse ordinary minds. When the doctors inoculate you and the homeopathists dose you, they give you an infinitesimally attenuated dose. If they gave you the virus at full strength it would overcome your resistance and produce its direct effect. The doses of false doctrine given at public schools and universities are so big that they overwhelm the resistance that a tiny dose would provoke. The normal student is corrupted beyond redemption, and will drive the genius who resists out of the country if he can. Byron and Shelley had to fly to Italy, whilst Castlereagh and Eldon ruled the roost at home. Rousseau was hunted from frontier to frontier; Karl Marx starved in exile in a Soho lodging; Ruskin’s articles were refused by the magazines (he was too rich to be otherwise persecuted); whilst mindless forgotten nonentities governed the land; sent men to the prison or the gallows for blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State); and sedulously stored up the social disease and corruption which explode from time to time in gigantic boils that have to be lanced by a million bayonets. This is the result of allopathic education. Homeopathic education has not yet been officially tried, and would obviously be a delicate matter if it were. A body of schoolmasters inciting their pupils to infinitesimal peccadilloes with the object of provoking them to exclaim, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ or telling them white lies about history for the sake of being contradicted, insulted, and refuted, would certainly do less harm than our present educational allopaths do; but then nobody will advocate homeopathic education. Allopathy has produced the poisonous illusion that it enlightens instead of darkening. The suggestion may, however, explain why, whilst most people’s minds succumb to inculcation and environment, a few react vigorously: honest and decent people coming from thievish slums, and sceptics and realists from country parsonages.

THE DIABOLICAL EFFICIENCY OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

But meanwhile — and here comes the horror of it — our technical instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance and guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons, battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business, and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools, commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high politics. They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge as political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization, because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire before the war; consequently the old British custom which maintained a balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.

FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,’ and the poor, ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those who help themselves. This does not mean that if Man cannot find the remedy no remedy will be found. The power that produced Man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other equally senseless accident.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an athletic competition, can ‘put up a muscle,’ it seems reasonable to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could ‘put up a brain.’ Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our resources.

VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY

Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man, the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament. Presumably, however, the same power that made this mistake can remedy it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life at three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at three hundred, or three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial Selection limit, which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal accident makes an end of the individual. All that is necessary to make him extend his present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the late war shall convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his taste for golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as biology. Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may be worth turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would be to most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written Back to Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.

Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles. Darwin could not read Shakespear. Some who can read both, like to learn the history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current confusion of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their historical ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between the two. For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously looking.

THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS

The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called, was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel Wallace, who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate. As lately as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of these four elements. Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms of life as described in the book of Genesis. This ‘conflict between religion and science’, as the phrase went then, did not perplex my infant mind in the least: I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence of a fact. But as I grew up I found that I had to choose between Evolution and Genesis. If you believed that dogs and cats and snakes and birds and beetles and oysters and whales and men and women were all separately designed and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning of things, and have since survived simply by reproducing their kind, then you were not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary, that all the different species are modifications, variations, and elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then you were an Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of Species. For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with backbones as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which, when extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.

Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the famous botanist. In the meantime the microscope had been invented. It revealed a new world of hitherto invisible creatures called Infusorians, as common water was found to be an infusion of them. In the eighteenth century naturalists were very keen on the Infusorian Amoebas, and were much struck by the way in which the members of this old family behaved and developed. But it was still possible for Linnaeus to begin a treatise by saying ‘There are just so many species as there were forms created in the beginning,’ though there were hundreds of commonplace Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock breeders then living who knew better. Linnaeus himself knew better before he died. In the last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the transmutation of species by variation might not be possible. Then came the great poet who jumped over the facts to the conclusion. Goethe said that all the shapes of creation were cousins; that there must be some common stock from which all the species had sprung; that it was the environment of air that had produced the eagle, of water the seal, and of earth the mole. He could not say how this happened; but he divined that it did happen. Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, carried the environment theory much further, pointing out instance after instance of modifications made in species apparently to adapt it to circumstances and environment: for instance, that the brilliant colors of the leopard, which make it so conspicuous in Regent’s Park, conceal it in a tropical jungle. Finally he wrote, as his declaration of faith, ‘The world has been evolved, not created: it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than come into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.’ In this, published in the year 1794, you have nineteenth-century Evolution precisely defined. And Erasmus Darwin was by no means its only apostle. It was in the air then. A German biologist named Treviranus, whose book was published in 1802, wrote, ‘In every living being there exists a capacity for endless diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its organization to the variations of the external world; and it is this power, called into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple zoophytes of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.’ There you have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst Nelson was still alive on the seas. And in 1809, before the battle of Waterloo, a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket into a microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an illusion produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they were constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so slowly that it looks stationary to us. We have since come to think that its industry is less continuous: that the clock stops for a long time, and then is suddenly ‘put on’ by a mysterious finger. But never mind that just at present.

THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-LAMARCKIANS

I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians. I was a Neo-Lamarckian. Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law to Charles Darwin’s department of it, which was the method of Evolution. Lamarck, whilst making many ingenious suggestions as to the reaction of external causes on life and habit, such as changes of climate, food supply, geological upheavals and so forth, really held as his fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and disuse. If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long neck, like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the first blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that it is just by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes a boy walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised chin, or supine on the ice with a bashed occiput, becomes a bicyclist and a skater. The process is not continuous, as it would be if mere practice had anything to do with it; for though you may improve at each bicycling lesson during the lesson, when you begin your next lesson you do not begin at the point at which you left off: you relapse apparently to the beginning. Finally, you succeed quite suddenly, and do not relapse again. More miraculous still, you at once exercise the new power unconsciously. Although you are adapting your front wheel to your balance so elaborately and actively that the accidental locking of your handle bars for a second will throw you off; though five minutes before you could not do it at all, yet now you do it as unconsciously as you grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty, and must have created some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you have done it solely by willing. For here there can be no question of Circumstantial Selection, or the survival of the fittest. The man who is learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it was added unto him.

HOW ACQUIREMENTS ARE INHERITED

But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born six feet high with a beard and a tall hat. The set-back that occurred between your lessons occurs again. The race learns exactly as the individual learns. Your son relapses, not to the very beginning, but to a point which no mortal method of measurement can distinguish from the beginning. Now this is odd; for certain other habits of yours, equally acquired (to the Evolutionist, of course, all habits are acquired), equally unconscious, equally automatic, are transmitted without any perceptible relapse. For instance, the very first act of your son when he enters the world as a separate individual is to yell with indignation: that yell which Shakespear thought the most tragic and piteous of all sounds. In the act of yelling he begins to breathe: another habit, and not even a necessary one, as the object of breathing can be achieved in other ways, as by deep sea fishes. He circulates his blood by pumping it with his heart. He demands a meal, and proceeds at once to perform the most elaborate chemical operations on the food he swallows. He manufactures teeth; discards them; and replaces them with fresh ones. Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright, and bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through the wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas in the other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does not consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously objects very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would he do that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and eliminating himself by death — equally an acquired habit, remember — how he abhors it! Yet the habit has become so rooted, so automatic, that he must do it in spite of himself, even to his own destruction.

We have here a routine which, given time enough for it to operate, will finally produce the most elaborate forms of organized life on Lamarckian lines without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection at all. If you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a pianist or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection, you can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.

Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional organs, or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional habits. You get them because you want them badly enough to keep trying for them until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that the thing actually takes place. We relapse miserably from effort to effort until the old organ is modified or the new one created, when suddenly the impossible becomes possible and the habit is formed. The moment we form it we want to get rid of the consciousness of it so as to economize our consciousness for fresh conquests of life; as all consciousness means preoccupation and obstruction. If we had to think about breathing or digesting or circulating our blood we should have no attention to spare for anything else, as we find to our cost when anything goes wrong with these operations. We want to be unconscious of them just as we wanted to acquire them; and we finally win what we want. But we win unconsciousness of our habits at the cost of losing our control of them; and we also build one habit and its corresponding functional modification of our organs on another, and so become dependent on our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them even when they hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of asthma, or to escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ when we no longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process is slow and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit long survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits and modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we must provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one. This is also a slow process and a very curious one.

THE MIRACLE OF CONDENSED RECAPITULATION

The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the case of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance, Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest, and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough to break loose as an independent being. And even then he was still so incomplete that his parents might well have exclaimed ‘Good Heavens! have you learnt nothing from our experience that you come into the world in this ridiculously elementary state? Why cant you talk and walk and paint and behave decently?’ To that question Baby Raphael had no answer. All he could have said was that this is how evolution or transformation happens. The time may come when the same force that compressed the development of millions of years into nine months may pack many more millions into even a shorter space; so that Raphaels may be born painters as they are now born breathers and blood circulators. But they will still begin as specks of protoplasm, and acquire the faculty of painting in their mother’s womb at quite a late stage of their embryonic life. They must recapitulate the history of mankind in their own persons, however briefly they may condense it.

Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the discoveries of the embryologists, nor anything so absurdly little appreciated, as this recapitulation, as it is now called: this power of hurrying up into months a process which was once so long and tedious that the mere contemplation of it is unendurable by men whose span of life is three-score-and-ten. It widened human possibilities to the extent of enabling us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operation of our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as we call it, instinctive. It also directed our attention to examples of this packing up of centuries into seconds which were staring us in the face in all directions. As I write these lines the newspapers are occupied by the exploits of a child of eight, who has just defeated twenty adult chess players in twenty games played simultaneously, and has been able afterwards to reconstruct all the twenty games without any apparent effort of memory. Most people, including myself, play chess (when they play it at all) from hand to mouth, and can hardly recall the last move but one, or foresee the next but two. Also, when I have to make an arithmetical calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result that I dare not act on it without ‘proving’ the sum by a further calculation involving more ciphering. But there are men who can neither read, write, nor cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation at all; and the result is infallible. Yet some of these natural arithmeticians have but a small vocabulary; are at a loss when they have to find words for any but the simplest everyday occasions; and cannot for the life of them describe mechanical operations which they perform daily in the course of their trade; whereas to me the whole vocabulary of English literature, from Shakespear to the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is so completely and instantaneously at my call that I have never had to consult even a thesaurus except once or twice when for some reason I wanted a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have tried and failed to draw recognizable portraits of persons I have seen every day for years, Mr Bernard Partridge, having seen a man once, will, without more strain than is involved in eating a sandwich, draw him to the life. The keyboard of a piano is a device I have never been able to master; yet Mr Cyril Scott uses it exactly as I use my own fingers; and to Sir Edward Elgar an orchestral score is as instantaneously intelligible at sight as a page of Shakespear is to me. One man cannot, after trying for years, finger the flute fluently. Another will take up a flute with a newly invented arrangement of keys on it, and play it at once with hardly a mistake. We find people to whom writing is so difficult that they prefer to sign their name with a mark, and beside them men who master systems of shorthand and improvise new systems of their own as easily as they learnt the alphabet. These contrasts are to be seen on all hands, and have nothing to do with variations in general intelligence, nor even in the specialized intelligence proper to the faculty in question: for example, no composer or dramatic poet has ever pretended to be able to perform all the parts he writes for the singers, actors, and players who are his executants. One might as well expect Napoleon to be a fencer, or the Astronomer Royal to know how many beans make five any better than his bookkeeper. Even exceptional command of language does not imply the possession of ideas to express; Mezzofanti, the master of fifty-eight languages, had less to say in them than Shakespear with his little Latin and less Greek; and public life is the paradise of voluble windbags.

All these examples, which might be multiplied by millions, are cases in which a long, laborious, conscious, detailed process of acquirement has been condensed into an instinctive and unconscious inborn one. Factors which formerly had to be considered one by one in succession are integrated into what seems a single simple factor. Chains of hardly soluble problems have coalesced in one problem which solves itself the moment it is raised. What is more, they have been pushed back (or forward, if you like) from post-natal to pre-natal ones. The child in the womb may take some time over them; but it is a miraculously shortened time.

The time phenomena involved are curious, and suggest that we are either wrong about our history or else that we enormously exaggerate the periods required for the pre-natal acquirement of habits. In the nineteenth century we talked very glibly about geological periods, and flung millions of eons about in the most lordly manner in our reaction against Archbishop Ussher’s chronology. We had a craze for big figures, and positively liked to believe that the progress made by the child in the womb in a month was represented in prehistoric time by ages and ages. We insisted that Evolution advanced more slowly than any snail ever crawled, and that Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds. This was all very well as long as we were dealing with such acquired habits as breathing or digestion. It was possible to believe that dozens of epochs had gone to the slow building up of these habits. But when we have to consider the case of a man born not only as an accomplished metabolist, but with such an aptitude for shorthand and keyboard manipulation that he is a stenographer or pianist at least five sixths ready-made as soon as he can control his hands intelligently, we are forced to suspect either that keyboards and shorthand are older inventions than we suppose, or else that acquirements can be assimilated and stored as congenital qualifications in a shorter time than we think; so that, as between Lyell and Archbishop Ussher, the laugh may not be with Lyell quite so uproariously as it seemed fifty years ago.

HEREDITY AN OLD STORY

It is evident that the evolutionary process is a hereditary one, or, to put it less drily, that human life is continuous and immortal. The Evolutionists took heredity for granted. So did everybody. The human mind has been soaked in heredity as long back as we can trace its thought. Hereditary peers, hereditary monarchs, hereditary castes and trades and classes were the best known of social institutions, and in some cases of public nuisances. Pedigree men counted pedigree dogs and pedigree horses among their most cherished possessions. Far from being unconscious of heredity, or sceptical, men were insanely credulous about it: they not only believed in the transmission of qualities and habits from generation to generation, but expected the son to begin mentally where the father left off.

This belief in heredity led naturally to the practice of Intentional Selection. Good blood and breeding were eagerly sought after in human marriage. In dealing with plants and animals, selection with a view to the production of new varieties and the improvement and modification of species had been practised ever since men began to cultivate them. My pre-Darwinian uncle knew as well as Darwin that the race-horse and the dray-horse are not separate creations from the Garden of Eden, but adaptations by deliberate human selection of the medieval war-horse to modern racing and industrial haulage. He knew that there are nearly two hundred different sorts of dogs, all capable of breeding with one another and of producing cross varieties unknown to Adam. He knew that the same thing is true of pigeons. He knew that gardeners had spent their lives trying to breed black tulips and green carnations and unheard-of orchids, and had actually produced flowers just as strange to Eve. His quarrel with the Evolutionists was not a quarrel with the evidence for Evolution: he had accepted enough of it to prove Evolution ten times over before he ever heard of it. What he repudiated was cousinship with the ape, and the implied suspicion of a rudimentary tail, because it was offensive to his sense of his own dignity, and because he thought that apes were ridiculous, and tails diabolical when associated with the erect posture. Also he believed that Evolution was a heresy which involved the destruction of Christianity, of which, as a member of the Irish Church (the pseudo-Protestant one), he conceived himself a pillar. But this was only his ignorance; for man may deny his descent from an ape and be eligible as a churchwarden without being any the less a convinced Evolutionist.

DISCOVERY ANTICIPATED BY DIVINATION

What is more, the religious folk can claim to be among the pioneers of Evolutionism. Weismann, Neo-Darwinist though he was, devoted a long passage in his History of Evolution to the Nature Philosophy of Lorenz Oken, published in 1809. Oken defined natural science as ‘the science of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world.’ His religion had started him on the right track, and not only led him to think out a whole scheme of Evolution in abstract terms, but guided his aim in a significantly good scientific shot which brought him within the scope of Weismann. He not only defined the original substance from which all forms of life have developed as protoplasm, or, as he called it, primitive slime (Urschleim), but actually declared that this slime took the form of vesicles out of which the universe was built. Here was the modern cell morphology guessed by a religious thinker long before the microscope and the scalpel forced it on the vision of mere laboratory workers who could not think and had no religion. They worked hard to discover the vital secrets of the glands by opening up dogs and cutting out the glands, or tying up their ducts, or severing their nerves, thereby learning, negatively, that the governors of our vital forces do not hold their incessant conversations through the nerves, and, positively, how miserably a horribly injured dog can die, leaving us to infer that we shall probably perish likewise if we grudge our guineas to Harley Street. Lorenz Oken thought very hard to find out what was happening to the Holy Ghost, and thereby made a contribution of extraordinary importance to our understanding of uninjured creatures. The man who was scientific enough to see that the Holy Ghost is a scientific fact got easily in front of the blockheads who could only sin against it. Hence my uncle was turning his back on very respectable company when he derided Evolution, and would probably have recanted and apologized at once had anybody pointed out to him what a solecism he was committing.

The metaphysical side of Evolution was thus no novelty when Darwin arrived. Had Oken never lived, there would still have been millions of persons trained from their childhood to believe that we are continually urged upwards by a force called the Will of God. In 1819 Schopenhauer published his treatise on The World as Will, which is the metaphysical complement to Lamarck’s natural history, as it demonstrates that the driving force behind Evolution is a will-to-live, and to live, as Christ said long before, more abundantly. And the earlier philosophers, from Plato to Leibniz, had kept the human mind open for the thought of the universe as one idea behind all its physically apprehensible transformations.

CORRECTED DATES FOR THE DISCOVERY OF EVOLUTION

All this, remember, is the state of things in the pre-Darwin period, which so many of us still think of as a pre-evolutionary period. Evolutionism was the rage before Queen Victoria came to the throne. To fix this chronology, let me repeat the story told by Weismann of the July revolution in Paris in 1830, when the French got rid of Charles the Tenth. Goethe was then still living; and a French friend of his called on him and found him wildly excited. ‘What do you think of the great event?’ said Goethe. ‘The volcano is in eruption; and all is in flames. There can no longer be discussion with closed doors.’ The Frenchman replied that no doubt it was a terrible business; but what could they expect with such a ministry and such a king? ‘Stuff!’ said Goethe: ‘I am not thinking of these people at all, but of the open rupture in the French Academy between Cuvier and St Hilaire. It is of the utmost importance to science,’ The rupture Goethe meant was about Evolution, Cuvier contending that there were four species, and St Hilaire that there was only one.

From 1830, when Darwin was an apparently unpromising lad of twenty-one, until 1859, when he turned the world upside down by his Origin of Species, there was a slump in Evolutionism. The first generation of its enthusiasts was ageing and dying out; and their successors were being taught from the Book of Genesis, just as Edward VI was (and Edward VII too, for that matter). Nobody who knew the theory was adding anything to it. This slump not only heightened the impression of entire novelty when Darwin brought the subject to the front again: it probably prevented him from realizing how much had been done before, even by his own grandfather, to whom he was accused of being unjust. Besides, he was not really carrying on the family business. He was an entirely original worker; and he was on a new tack, as we shall see presently. And he would not in any case have thought much, as a practical naturalist, of the more or less mystical intellectual speculations of the Deists of 1790-1830. Scientific workers were very tired of Deism just then. They had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it really occurred.

With all his attention bent in this new direction, Darwin soon noticed that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin’s could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore try to bring back something of the atmosphere of that time by describing a scene, very characteristic of its superstitions, in which I took what was then considered an unspeakably shocking part.

DEFYING THE LIGHTNING: A FRUSTRATED EXPERIMENT

One evening in 1878 or thereabouts, I, being then in my earliest twenties, was at a bachelor party of young men of the professional class in the house of a doctor in the Kensingtonian quarter of London. They fell to talking about religious revivals; and an anecdote was related of a man who, having incautiously scoffed at the mission of Messrs Moody and Sankey, a then famous firm of American evangelists, was subsequently carried home on a shutter, slain by divine vengeance as a blasphemer. A timid minority, without quite venturing to question the truth of the incident — for they naturally did not care to run the risk of going home on shutters themselves — nevertheless shewed a certain disposition to cavil at those who exulted in it; and something approaching to an argument began. At last it was alleged by the most evangelical of the disputants that Charles Bradlaugh, the most formidable atheist on the Secularist platform, had taken out his watch publicly and challenged the Almighty to strike him dead in five minutes if he really existed and disapproved of atheism. The leader of the cavillers, with great heat, repudiated this as a gross calumny, declaring that Bradlaugh had repeatedly and indignantly contradicted it, and implying that the atheist champion was far too pious a man to commit such a blasphemy. This exquisite confusion of ideas roused my sense of comedy. It was clear to me that the challenge attributed to Charles Bradlaugh was a scientific experiment of a quite simple, straightforward, and proper kind to ascertain whether the expression of atheistic opinions really did involve any personal risk. It was certainly the method taught in the Bible, Elijah having confuted the prophets of Baal in precisely that way, with every circumstance of bitter mockery of their god when he failed to send down fire from heaven. Accordingly I said that if the question at issue were whether the penalty of questioning the theology of Messrs Moody and Sankey was to be struck dead on the spot by an incensed deity, nothing could effect a more convincing settlement of it than the very obvious experiment attributed to Mr Bradlaugh, and that consequently if he had not tried it, he ought to have tried it. The omission, I added, was one which could easily be remedied there and then, as I happened to share Mr Bradlaugh’s views as to the absurdity of the belief in these violent interferences with the order of nature by a short-tempered and thin-skinned supernatural deity. Therefore — and at that point I took out my watch.

The effect was electrical. Neither sceptics nor devotees were prepared to abide the result of the experiment. In vain did I urge the pious to trust in the accuracy of their deity’s aim with a thunderbolt, and the justice of his discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. In vain did I appeal to the sceptics to accept the logical outcome of their scepticism: it soon appeared that when thunderbolts were in question there were no sceptics. Our host, seeing that his guests would vanish precipitately if the impious challenge were uttered, leaving him alone with a solitary infidel under sentence of extermination in five minutes, interposed and forbade the experiment, pleading at the same time for a change of subject. I of course complied, but could not refrain from remarking that though the dreadful words had not been uttered, yet, as the thought had been formulated in my mind, it was very doubtful whether the consequences could be averted by sealing my lips. However, the rest appeared to feel that the game would be played according to the rules, and that it mattered very little what I thought so long as I said nothing. Only the leader of the evangelical party, I thought, was a little preoccupied until five minutes had elapsed and the weather was still calm.

IN QUEST OF THE FIRST CAUSE

Another reminiscence. In those days we thought in terms of time and space, of cause and effect, as we still do; but we do not now demand from a religion that it shall explain the universe completely in terms of cause and effect, and present the world to us as a manufactured article and as the private property of its Manufacturer. We did then. We were invited to pity the delusion of certain heathens who held that the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a tortoise. Mahomet decided that the mountains are great weights to keep the world from being blown away into space. But we refuted these orientals by asking triumphantly what the tortoise stands on? Freethinkers asked which came first: the owl or the egg. Nobody thought of saying that the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem. To pious people this would have been flat atheism, because they assumed that God must be a Cause, and sometimes called him The Great First Cause, or, in still choicer language, The Primal Cause. To the Rationalists it would have been a renunciation of reason. Here and there a man would confess that he stood as with a dim lantern in a dense fog, and could see but a little way in any direction into infinity. But he did not really believe that infinity was infinite or that the eternal was also sempiternal: he assumed that all things, known and unknown, were caused.

Hence it was that I found myself one day towards the end of the eighteen-seventies in a cell in the old Brompton Oratory arguing with Father Addis, who had been called by one of his flock to attempt my conversion to Roman Catholicism. The universe exists, said the father: somebody must have made it. If that somebody exists, said I, somebody must have made him. I grant that for the sake of argument, said the Oratorian. I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you please; but an infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant: it is no harder to believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind him will remove your logical difficulty? By your leave, said I, it is as easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that a maker of the universe made himself: in fact much easier; for the universe visibly exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a hypothesis. Of course we could get no further on these lines. He rose and said that we were like two men working a saw, he pushing it forward and I pushing it back, and cutting nothing; but when we had dropped the subject and were walking through the refectory, he returned to it for a moment to say that he should go mad if he lost his belief. I, glorying in the robust callousness of youth and the comedic spirit, felt quite comfortable and said so; though I was touched, too, by his evident sincerity.

These two anecdotes are superficially trivial and even comic; but there is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey, and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither the bogey nor the dilemma having anything to do with religion, or being serious enough to impose on or confuse any properly educated child over the age of six. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. The result was inevitable. All who were strong-minded enough not to be terrified by the bogey were left stranded in empty contemptuous negation, and argued, when they argued at all, as I argued with Father Addis. But their position was not intellectually comfortable. A member of parliament expressed their discomfort when, objecting to the admission of Charles Bradlaugh into parliament, he said ‘Hang it all, a man should believe in something or somebody.’ It was easy to throw the bogey into the dustbin; but none the less the world, our corner of the universe, did not look like a pure accident: it presented evidences of design in every direction. There was mind and purpose behind it. As the anti-Bradlaugh member would have put it, there must be somebody behind the something: no atheist could get over that.

PALEY’S WATCH

Paley had put the argument in an apparently unanswerable form. If you found a watch, full of mechanism exquisitely adapted to produce a series of operations all leading to the fulfilment of one central purpose of measuring for mankind the march of the day and night, could you believe that it was not the work of a cunning artificer who had designed and contrived it all to that end? And here was a far more wonderful thing than a watch, a man with all his organs ingeniously contrived, cords and levers, girders and kingposts, circulating systems of pipes and valves, dialysing membranes, chemical retorts, carburettors, ventilators, inlets and outlets, telephone transmitters in his ears, light recorders and lenses in his eye: was it conceivable that this was the work of chance? that no artificer had wrought here? that there was no purpose in this, no design, no guiding intelligence? The thing was incredible. In vain did Helmholtz declare that ‘the eye has every possible defect that can be found in an optical instrument, and even some peculiar to itself,’ and that ‘if an optician tried to sell me an instrument which had all these defects I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and sending him back his instrument.’ To discredit the optician’s skill was not to get rid of the optician. The eye might not be so cleverly made as Paley thought, but it was made somehow, by somebody.

And then my argument with Father Addis began all over again. It was easy enough to say that every man makes his own eyes: indeed the embryologists had actually caught him doing it. But what about the very evident purpose that prompted him to do it? Why did he want to see, if not to extend his consciousness and his knowledge and his power? That purpose was at work everywhere, and must be something bigger than the individual eye-making man. Only the stupidest muckrakers could fail to see this, and even to know it as part of their own consciousness. Yet to admit it seemed to involve letting the bogey come back, so inextricably had we managed to mix up belief in the bogey’s existence with belief in the existence of design in the universe.

THE IRRESISTIBLE CRY OF ORDER, ORDER!

Our scornful young scientific and philosophic lions of today must not blame the Church of England for this confusion of thought. In 1562 the Church, in convocation in London ‘for the avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishment of consent touching true religion,’ proclaimed in their first utterance, and as an Article of Religion, that God is ‘without body, parts, or passions,’ or, as we say, an Elan Vital or Life Force. Unfortunately neither parents, parsons, nor pedagogues could be induced to adopt that article. St John might say that ‘God is spirit’ as pointedly as he pleased; our Sovereign Lady Elizabeth might ratify the Article again and again; serious divines might feel as deeply as they could that a God with body, parts, and passions could be nothing but an anthropomorphic idol: no matter: people at large could not conceive a God who was not anthropomorphic: they stood by the Old Testament legends of a God whose parts had been seen by one of the patriarchs, and finally set up as against the Church a God who, far from being without body, parts, or passions, was composed of nothing else, and of very evil passions too. They imposed this idol in practice on the Church itself, in spite of the First Article, and thereby homeopathically produced the atheist, whose denial of God was simply a denial of the idol and a demonstration against an unbearable and most unchristian idolatry. The idol was, as Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for pointing out, an almighty fiend, with a petty character and unlimited power, spiteful, cruel, jealous, vindictive, and physically violent. The most villainous schoolmasters, the most tyrannical parents, fell far short in their attempts to imitate it. But it was not its social vices that brought it low. What made it scientifically intolerable was that it was ready at a moment’s notice to upset the whole order of the universe on the most trumpery provocation, whether by stopping the sun in the valley of Ajalon or sending an atheist home dead on a shutter (the shutter was indispensable because it marked the utter unpreparedness of the atheist, who, unable to save himself by a deathbed repentance, was subsequently roasted through all eternity in blazing brimstone). It was this disorderliness, this refusal to obey its own laws of nature, that created a scientific need for its destruction. Science could stand a cruel and unjust god; for nature was full of suffering and injustice. But a disorderly god was impossible. In the Middle Ages a compromise had been made by which two different orders of truth, religious and scientific, had been recognized, in order that a schoolman might say that two and two make four without being burnt for heresy. But the nineteenth century, steeped in a meddling, presumptuous, reading-and-writing, socially and politically powerful ignorance inconceivable by Thomas Aquinas or even Roger Bacon, was incapable of so convenient an arrangement; and science was strangled by bigoted ignoramuses claiming infallibility for their interpretation of the Bible, which was regarded, not as a literature nor even as a book, but partly as an oracle which answered and settled all questions, and partly as a talisman to be carried by soldiers in their breast pockets or placed under the pillows of persons who were afraid of ghosts. The tract shops exhibited in their windows bullet-dinted testaments, mothers’ gifts to their soldier sons whose lives had been saved by it; for the muzzle-loaders of those days could not drive a projectile through so many pages.

THE MOMENT AND THE MAN

This superstition of a continual capricious disorder in nature, of a lawgiver who was also a lawbreaker, made atheists in all directions among clever and lightminded people. But atheism did not account for Paley’s watch. Atheism accounted for nothing; and it was the business of science to account for everything that was plainly accountable. Science had no use for mere negation: what was desired by it above all things just then was a demonstration that the evidences of design could be explained without resort to the hypothesis of a personal designer. If only some genius, whilst admitting Paley’s facts, could knock the brains out of Paley by the discovery of a method whereby watches could happen without watchmakers, that genius was assured of such a welcome from the thought of his day as no natural philosopher had ever enjoyed before.

The time being thus ripe, the genius appeared; and his name was Charles
Darwin. And now, what did Darwin really discover?

Here, I am afraid, I shall require once more the assistance of the giraffe, or, as he was called in the days of the celebrated Buffoon, the camelopard (by children, cammyleopard). I do not remember how this animal imposed himself illustratively on the Evolution controversy; but there was no getting away from him then; and I am old-fashioned enough to be unable to get away from him now. How did he come by his long neck? Lamarck would have said, by wanting to get at the tender leaves high up on the tree, and trying until he succeeded in wishing the necessary length of neck into existence. Another answer was also possible: namely, that some prehistoric stockbreeder, wishing to produce a natural curiosity, selected the longest-necked animals he could find, and bred from them until at last an animal with an abnormally long neck was evolved by intentional selection, just as the race-horse or the fantail pigeon has been evolved. Both these explanations, you will observe, involve consciousness, will, design, purpose, either on the part of the animal itself or on the part of a superior intelligence controlling its destiny. Darwin pointed out — and this and no more was Darwin’s famous discovery — that a third explanation, involving neither will nor purpose nor design either in the animal or anyone else, was on the cards. If your neck is too short to reach your food, you die. That may be the simple explanation of the fact that all the surviving animals that feed on foliage have necks or trunks long enough to reach it. So bang goes your belief that the necks must have been designed to reach the food. But Lamarck did not believe that the necks were so designed in the beginning: he believed that the long necks were evolved by wanting and trying. Not necessarily, said Darwin. Consider the effect on the giraffes of the natural multiplication of their numbers, as insisted on by Malthus. Suppose the average height of the foliage-eating animals is four feet, and that they increase in numbers until a time comes when all the trees are eaten away to within four feet of the ground. Then the animals who happen to be an inch or two short of the average will die of starvation. All the animals who happen to be an inch or so above the average will be better fed and stronger than the others. They will secure the strongest and tallest mates; and their progeny will survive whilst the average ones and the sub-average ones will die out. This process, by which the species gains, say, an inch in reach, will repeat itself until the giraffe’s neck is so long that he can always find food enough within his reach, at which point, of course, the selective process stops and the length of the giraffe’s neck stops with it. Otherwise, he would grow until he could browse off the trees in the moon. And this, mark you, without the intervention of any stockbreeder, human or divine, and without will, purpose, design, or even consciousness beyond the blind will to satisfy hunger. It is true that this blind will, being in effect a will to live, gives away the whole case; but still, as compared to the open-eyed intelligent wanting and trying of Lamarck, the Darwinian process may be described as a chapter of accidents. As such, it seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous. If it be no blasphemy, but a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and hills, may no longer be called to exalt the Lord with us by praise; their work is to modify all things by blindly starving and murdering everything that is not lucky enough to survive in the universal struggle for hogwash.

THE BRINK OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

Thus did the neck of the giraffe reach out across the whole heavens and make men believe that what they saw there was a gloaming of the gods. For if this sort of selection could turn an antelope into a giraffe, it could conceivably turn a pond full of amoebas into the French Academy. Though Lamarck’s way, the way of life, will, aspiration, and achievement, remained still possible, this newly shewn way of hunger, death, stupidity, delusion, chance, and bare survival was also possible: was indeed most certainly the way in which many apparently intelligently designed transformations had actually come to pass. Had I not preluded with the apparently idle story of my revival of the controversial methods of Elijah, I should be asked how it was that the explorer who opened up this gulf of despair, far from being stoned or crucified as the destroyer of the honor of the race and the purpose of the world, was hailed as Deliverer, Savior, Prophet, Redeemer, Enlightener, Rescuer, Hope Giver, and Epoch Maker; whilst poor Lamarck was swept aside as a crude and exploded guesser hardly worthy to be named as his erroneous forerunner. In the light of my anecdote, the explanation is obvious. The first thing the gulf did was to swallow up Paley, and the Disorderly Designer, and Shelley’s Almighty Fiend, and all the rest of the pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path since the hopes of men had turned to Science as their true Savior. It seemed such a convenient grave that nobody at first noticed that it was nothing less than the bottomless pit, now become a very real terror. For though Darwin left a path round it for his soul, his followers presently dug it right across the whole width of the way. Yet for the moment, there was nothing but wild rejoicing: a sort of scientific mafficking. We had been so oppressed by the notion that everything that happened in the world was the arbitrary personal act of an arbitrary personal god of dangerously jealous and cruel personal character, so that even the relief of the pains of childbed and the operating table by chloroform was objected to as an interference with his arrangements which he would probably resent, that we just jumped at Darwin. When Napoleon was asked what would happen when he died, he said that Europe would express its intense relief with a great ‘Ouf!’: Well, when Darwin killed the god who objected to chloroform, everybody who had ever thought about it said ‘Ouf!’ Paley was buried fathoms deep with his watch, now fully accounted for without any divine artificer at all. We were so glad to be rid of both that we never gave a thought to the consequences. When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside. The moment we found that we could do without Shelley’s almighty fiend intellectually, he went into the gulf that seemed only a dustbin with a suddenness that made our own lives one of the most astonishing periods in history. If I had told that uncle of mine that within thirty years from the date of our conversation I should be exposing myself to suspicions of the grossest superstition by questioning the sufficiency of Darwin; maintaining the reality of the Holy Ghost; declaring that the phenomenon of the Word becoming Flesh was occurring daily, he would have regarded me as the most extravagant madman our family had ever produced. Yet it was so. In 1906 I might have vituperated Jehovah more heartily than ever Shelley did without eliciting a protest in any circle of thinkers, or shocking any public audience accustomed to modern discussion; but when I described Darwin as ‘an intelligent and industrious pigeon fancier,’ that blasphemous levity, as it seemed, was received with horror and indignation. The tide has now turned; and every puny whipster may say what he likes about Darwin; but anyone who wants to know what it was to be a Lamarckian during the last quarter of the nineteenth century has only to read Mr Festing Jones’s memoir of Samuel Butler to learn how completely even a man of genius could isolate himself by antagonizing Darwin on the one hand and the Church on the other.

WHY DARWIN CONVERTED THE CROWD

I am well aware that in describing the effect of Darwin’s discovery on naturalists and on persons capable of serious reflection on the nature and attributes of God, I am leaving the vast mass of the British public out of account. I have pointed out elsewhere that the British nation does not consist of atheists and Plymouth Brothers; and I am not now going to pretend that it ever consisted of Darwinians and Lamarckians. The average citizen is irreligious and unscientific: you talk to him about cricket and golf, market prices and party politics, not about evolution and relativity, transubstantiation and predestination. Nothing will knock into his head the fateful distinction between Evolution as promulgated by Erasmus Darwin, and Circumstantial (so-called Natural) Selection as revealed by his grandson. Yet the doctrine of Charles reached him, though the doctrine of Erasmus had passed over his head. Why did not Erasmus Darwin popularize the word Evolution as effectively as Charles?

The reason was, I think, that Circumstantial Selection is easier to understand, more visible and concrete, than Lamarckian evolution. Evolution as a philosophy and physiology of the will is a mystical process, which can be apprehended only by a trained, apt, and comprehensive thinker. Though the phenomena of use and disuse, of wanting and trying, of the manufacture of weight lifters and wrestlers from men of ordinary strength, are familiar enough as facts, they are extremely puzzling as subjects of thought, and lead you into metaphysics the moment you try to account for them. But pigeon fanciers, dog fanciers, gardeners, stock breeders, or stud grooms, can understand Circumstantial Selection, because it is their business to produce transformation by imposing on flowers and animals a Selection From Without. All that Darwin had to say to them was that the mere chapter of accidents is always doing on a huge scale what they themselves are doing on a very small scale. There is hardly a laborer attached to an English country house who has not taken a litter of kittens or puppies to the bucket, and drowned all of them except the one he thinks the most promising. Such a man has nothing to learn about the survival of the fittest except that it acts in more ways than he has yet noticed; for he knows quite well, as you will find if you are not too proud to talk to him, that this sort of selection occurs naturally (in Darwin’s sense) too: that, for instance, a hard winter will kill off a weakly child as the bucket kills off a weakly puppy. Then there is the farm laborer. Shakespear’s Touchstone, a court-bred fool, was shocked to find in the shepherd a natural philosopher, and opined that he would be damned for the part he took in the sexual selection of sheep. As to the production of new species by the selection of variations, that is no news to your gardener. Now if you are familiar with these three processes: the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, and variation leading to new kinds, there is nothing to puzzle you in Darwinism.

That was the secret of Darwin’s popularity. He never puzzled anybody. If very few of us have read The Origin of Species from end to end, it is not because it overtaxes our mind, but because we take in the whole case and are prepared to accept it long before we have come to the end of the innumerable instances and illustrations of which the book mainly consists. Darwin becomes tedious in the manner of a man who insists on continuing to prove his innocence after he has been acquitted. You assure him that there is not a stain on his character, and beg him to leave the court; but he will not be content with enough evidence: he will have you listen to all the evidence that exists in the world. Darwin’s industry was enormous. His patience, his perseverance, his conscientiousness reached the human limit. But he never got deeper beneath or higher above his facts than an ordinary man could follow him. He was not conscious of having raised a stupendous issue, because, though it arose instantly, it was not his business. He was conscious of having discovered a process of transformation and modification which accounted for a great deal of natural history. But he did not put it forward as accounting for the whole of natural history. He included it under the heading of Evolution, though it was only pseudo-evolution at best; but he revealed it as a method of evolution, not as the method of evolution. He did not pretend that it excluded other methods, or that it was the chief method. Though he demonstrated that many transformations which had been taken as functional adaptations (the current phrase for Lamarckian evolution) either certainly were or conceivably might be due to Circumstantial Selection, he was careful not to claim that he had superseded Lamarck or disproved Functional Adaptation. In short, he was not a Darwinian, but an honest naturalist working away at his job with so little preoccupation with theological speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic Unitarianism into which he was born, and remained to the end the engagingly simple and socially easy-going soul he had been in his boyhood, when his elders doubted whether he would ever be of much use in the world.

HOW WE RUSHED DOWN A STEEP PLACE

Not so the rest of us intellectuals. We all began going to the devil with the utmost cheerfulness. Everyone who had a mind to change, changed it. Only Samuel Butler, on whom Darwin had acted homeopathically, reacted against him furiously; ran up the Lamarckian flag to the top-gallant peak; declared with penetrating accuracy that Darwin had ‘banished mind from the universe’; and even attacked Darwin’s personal character, unable to bear the fact that the author of so abhorrent a doctrine was an amiable and upright man. Nobody would listen to him. He was so completely submerged by the flowing tide of Darwinism that when Darwin wanted to clear up the misunderstanding on which Butler was basing his personal attacks, Darwin’s friends, very foolishly and snobbishly, persuaded him that Butler was too ill-conditioned and negligible to be answered. That they could not recognize in Butler a man of genius mattered little: what did matter was that they could not understand the provocation under which he was raging. They actually regarded the banishment of mind from the universe as a glorious enlightenment and emancipation for which he was ignorantly ungrateful. Even now, when Butler’s eminence is unchallenged, and his biographer, Mr Festing Jones, is enjoying a vogue like that of Boswell or Lockhart, his memoirs shew him rather as a shocking example of the bad controversial manners of our country parsonages than as a prophet who tried to head us back when we were gaily dancing to our damnation across the rainbow bridge which Darwinism had thrown over the gulf which separates life and hope from death and despair. We were intellectually intoxicated with the idea that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skill, or intelligence: in short, without life. We completely overlooked the difference between the modification of species by adaptation to their environment and the appearance of new species: we just threw in the word ‘variations’ or the word ‘sports’ (fancy a man of science talking of an unknown factor as a sport instead of as x!) and left them to ‘accumulate’ and account for the difference between a cockatoo and a hippopotamus. Such phrases set us free to revel in demonstrating to the Vitalists and Bible worshippers that if we once admit the existence of any kind of force, however unintelligent, and stretch out the past to unlimited time for such force to operate accidentally in, that force may conceivably, by the action of Circumstantial Selection, produce a world in which every function has an organ perfectly adapted to perform it, and therefore presents every appearance of having been designed, like Paley’s watch, by a conscious and intelligent artificer for the purpose. We took a perverse pleasure in arguing, without the least suspicion that we were reducing ourselves to absurdity, that all the books in the British Museum library might have been written word for word as they stand on the shelves if no human being had ever been conscious, just as the trees stand in the forest doing wonderful things without consciousness.

And the Darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees. Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its eggshell automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid the pounce of the lizard, ‘does not wish to avoid death; knows nothing about death,’ what has happened being simply that a flight instinct evolved by Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a visual impression produced by the lizard’s movement. His proof is that the butterfly immediately settles again on the flower, and repeats the performance every time the lizard springs, thus shewing that it learns nothing from experience, and — Weismann concludes — is not conscious of what it does.

It should hardly have escaped so curious an observer that when the cat jumps up on the dinner table, and you put it down, it instantly jumps up again, and finally establishes its right to a place on the cloth by convincing you that if you put it down a hundred times it will jump up a hundred and one times; so that if you desire its company at dinner you can have it only on its own terms. If Weismann really thought that cats act thus without any consciousness or any purpose, immediate or ulterior, he must have known very little about cats. But a thoroughgoing Weismannite, if any such still survive from those mad days, would contend that I am not at present necessarily conscious of what I am doing; that my writing of these lines, and your reading of them, are effects of Circumstantial Selection; that I heed know no more about Darwinism than a butterfly knows of a lizard’s appetite; and that the proof that I actually am doing it unconsciously is that as I have spent forty years in writing in this fashion without, as far as I can see, producing any visible effect on public opinion, I must be incapable of learning from experience, and am therefore a mere automaton. And the Weismannite demonstration of this would of course be an equally unconscious effect of Circumstantial Selection.

DARWINISM NOT FINALLY REFUTABLE

Do not too hastily say that this is inconceivable. To Circumstantial Selection all mechanical and chemical reactions are possible, provided you accept the geologists’ estimates of the great age of the earth, and therefore allow time enough for the circumstances to operate. It is true that mere survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence plus sexual selection fail as hopelessly to account for Darwin’s own life work as for my conquest of the bicycle; but who can prove that there are not other soulless factors, unnoticed or undiscovered, which only require imagination enough to fit them to the evolution of an automatic Jesus or Shakespear? When a man tells you that you are a product of Circumstantial Selection solely, you cannot finally disprove it. You can only tell him out of the depths of your inner conviction that he is a fool and a liar. But as this, though British, is uncivil, it is wiser to offer him the counter-assurance that you are the product of Lamarckian evolution, formerly called Functional Adaptation and now Creative Evolution, and challenge him to disprove that, which he can no more do than you can disprove Circumstantial Selection, both forces being conceivably able to produce anything if you only give them rope enough. You may also defy him to act for a single hour on the assumption that he may safely cross Oxford Street in a state of unconsciousness, trusting to his dodging reflexes to react automatically and promptly enough to the visual impression produced by a motor bus, and the audible impression produced by its hooter. But if you allow yourself to defy him to explain any particular action of yours by Circumstantial Selection, he should always be able to find some explanation that will fit the case if only he is ingenious enough and goes far enough to find it. Darwin found several such explanations in his controversies. Anybody who really wants to believe that the universe has been produced by Circumstantial Selection co-operating with a force as inhuman as we conceive magnetism to be can find a logical excuse for his belief if he tries hard enough.

THREE BLIND MICE

The stultification and damnation which ensued are illustrated by a comparison of the ease and certainty with which Butler’s mind moved to humane and inspiring conclusions with the grotesque stupidities and cruelties of the idle and silly controversy which arose among the Darwinians as to whether acquired habits can be transmitted from parents to offspring. Consider, for example, how Weismann set to work on that subject. An Evolutionist with a live mind would first have dropped the popular expression ‘acquired habits,’ because to an Evolutionist there are no other habits and can be no others, a man being only an amoeba with acquirements. He would then have considered carefully the process by which he himself had acquired his habits. He would have assumed that the habits with which he was born must have been acquired by a similar process. He would have known what a habit is: that is, an Action voluntarily attempted until it has become more or less automatic and involuntary; and it would never have occurred to him that injuries or accidents coming from external sources against the will of the victim could possibly establish a habit; that, for instance, a family could acquire a habit of being killed in railway accidents.

And yet Weismann began to investigate the point by behaving like the butcher’s wife in the old catch. He got a colony of mice, and cut off their tails. Then he waited to see whether their children would be born without tails. They were not, as Butler could have told him beforehand. He then cut off the children’s tails, and waited to see whether the grandchildren would be born with at least rather short tails. They were not, as I could have told him beforehand. So with the patience and industry on which men of science pride themselves, he cut off the grandchildren’s tails too, and waited, full of hope, for the birth of curtailed great-grandchildren. But their tails were quite up to the mark, as any fool could have told him beforehand. Weismann then gravely drew the inference that acquired habits cannot be transmitted. And yet Weismann was not a born imbecile. He was an exceptionally clever and studious man, not without roots of imagination and philosophy in him which Darwinism killed as weeds.

How was it that he did not see that he was not experimenting with habits or characteristics at all? How had he overlooked the glaring fact that his experiment had been tried for many generations in China on the feet of Chinese women without producing the smallest tendency on their part to be born with abnormally small feet? He must have known about the bound feet even if he knew nothing of the mutilations, the clipped ears and docked tails, practised by dog fanciers and horse breeders on many generations of the unfortunate animals they deal in. Such amazing blindness and stupidity on the part of a man who was naturally neither blind nor stupid is a telling illustration of what Darwin unintentionally did to the minds of his disciples by turning their attention so exclusively towards the part played in Evolution by accident and violence operating with entire callousness to suffering and sentiment.

A vital conception of Evolution would have taught Weismann that biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having thus made the mice desire to lose their tails with a life-or-death intensity, he would very soon have seen a few mice born with little or no tail. These would be recognized by the other mice as superior beings, and privileged in the division of food and in sexual selection. Ultimately the tailed mice would be put to death as monsters by their fellows, and the miracle of the tailless mouse completely achieved.

The objection to this experiment is not that it seems too funny to be taken seriously, and is not cruel enough to overawe the mob, but simply that it is impossible because the human experimenter cannot get at the mouse’s mind. And that is what is wrong with all the barren cruelties of the laboratories. Darwin’s followers did not think of this. Their only idea of investigation was to imitate ‘Nature’ by perpetrating violent and senseless cruelties, and watch the effect of them with a paralyzing fatalism which forbade the smallest effort to use their minds instead of their knives and eyes, and established an abominable tradition that the man who hesitates to be as cruel as Circumstantial Selection itself is a traitor to science. For Weismann’s experiment upon the mice was a mere joke compared to the atrocities committed by other Darwinians in their attempts to prove that mutilations could not be transmitted. No doubt the worst of these experiments were not really experiments at all, but cruelties committed by cruel men who were attracted to the laboratory by the fact that it was a secret refuge left by law and public superstition for the amateur of passionate torture. But there is no reason to suspect Weismann of Sadism. Cutting off the tails of several generations of mice is not voluptuous enough to tempt a scientific Nero. It was a mere piece of one-eyedness; and it was Darwin who put out Weismann’s humane and sensible eye. He blinded many another eye and paralyzed many another will also. Ever since he set up Circumstantial Selection as the creator and ruler of the universe, the scientific world has been the very citadel of stupidity and cruelty. Fearful as the tribal god of the Hebrews was, nobody ever shuddered as they passed even his meanest and narrowest Little Bethel or his proudest war-consecrating cathedral as we shudder now when we pass a physiological laboratory. If we dreaded and mistrusted the priest, we could at least keep him out of the house; but what of the modern Darwinist surgeon whom we dread and mistrust ten times more, but into whose hands we must all give ourselves from time to time? Miserably as religion had been debased, it did at least still proclaim that our relation to one another was that of a fellowship in which we were all equal and members one of another before the judgment-seat of our common father. Darwinism proclaimed that our true relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere survival, and that every act of pity or loyalty to the old fellowship is a vain and mischievous attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle and preserve inferior varieties from the efforts of Nature to weed them out. Even in Socialist Societies which existed solely to substitute the law of fellowship for the law of competition, and the method of providence and wisdom for the method of rushing violently down a steep place into the sea, I found myself regarded as a blasphemer and an ignorant sentimentalist because whenever the Neo-Darwinian doctrine was preached there I made no attempt to conceal my intellectual contempt for its blind coarseness and shallow logic, or my natural abhorrence of its sickening inhumanity.

THE GREATEST OF THESE IS SELF-CONTROL

As there is no place in Darwinism for free will, or any other sort of will, the Neo-Darwinists held that there is no such thing as self-control. Yet self-control is just the one quality of survival value which Circumstantial Selection must invariably and inevitably develop in the long run. Uncontrolled qualities may be selected for survival and development for certain periods and under certain circumstances. For instance, since it is the ungovernable gluttons who strive the hardest to get food and drink, their efforts would develop their strength and cunning in a period of such scarcity that the utmost they could do would not enable them to over-eat themselves. But a change of circumstances involving a plentiful supply of food would destroy them. We see this very thing happening often enough in the case of the healthy and vigorous poor man who becomes a millionaire by one of the accidents of our competitive commerce, and immediately proceeds to dig his grave with his teeth. But the self-controlled man survives all such changes of circumstance, because he adapts himself to them, and eats neither as much as he can hold nor as little as he can scrape along on, but as much as is good for him. What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive; to omit, in short, the highest moral claim of Evolutionary Selection: all this, which the Neo-Darwinians did in the name of Natural Selection, shewed the most pitiable want of mastery of their own subject, the dullest lack of observation of the forces upon which Natural Selection works.

A SAMPLE OF LAMARCKO-SHAVIAN INVECTIVE

The Vitalist philosophers made no such mistakes. Nietzsche, for example, thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power instead of cutting off mouse-tails, had no difficulty in concluding that the final objective of this Will was power over self, and that the seekers after power over others and material possessions were on a false scent.

The stultification naturally became much worse as the first Darwinians died out. The prestige of these pioneers, who had the older evolutionary culture to build on, and were in fact no more Darwinian in the modern sense than Darwin himself, ceased to dazzle us when Huxley and Tyndall and Spencer and Darwin passed away, and we were left with the smaller people who began with Darwin and took in nothing else. Accordingly, I find that in the year 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at the Neo-Darwinians in the following terms.

‘I really do not wish to be abusive; but when I think of these poor little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of evolution that a blackbeetle can understand — with their retinue of twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the vivisector’s laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you cut off a dog’s leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy, I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts, blackguards, impostors, quacks, liars, and, worst of all, credulous conscientious fools. Better a thousand times Moses and Spurgeon [a then famous preacher] back again. After all, you cannot understand Moses without imagination nor Spurgeon without metaphysics; but you can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For “Natural Selection” has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.’

THE HUMANITARIANS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Yet the humanitarians were as delighted as anybody with Darwinism at first. They had been perplexed by the Problem of Evil and the Cruelty of Nature. They were Shelleyists, but not atheists. Those who believed in God were at a terrible disadvantage with the atheist. They could not deny the existence of natural facts so cruel that to attribute them to the will of God is to make God a demon. Belief in God was impossible to any thoughtful person without belief in the Devil as well. The painted Devil, with his horns, his barbed tail, and his abode of burning brimstone, was an incredible bogey; but the evil attributed to him was real enough; and the atheists argued that the author of evil, if he exists, must be strong enough to overcome God, else God is morally responsible for everything he permits the Devil to do. Neither conclusion delivered us from the horror of attributing the cruelty of nature to the workings of an evil will, or could reconcile it with our impulses towards justice, mercy, and a higher life.

A complete deliverance was offered by the discovery of Circumstantial Selection: that is to say, of a method by which horrors having every appearance of being elaborately planned by some intelligent contriver are only accidents without any moral significance at all. Suppose a watcher from the stars saw a frightful accident produced by two crowded trains at full speed crashing into one another! How could he conceive that a catastrophe brought about by such elaborate machinery, such ingenious preparation, such skilled direction, such vigilant industry, was quite unintentional? Would he not conclude that the signal-men were devils?

Well, Circumstantial Selection is largely a theory of collisions: that is, a theory of the innocence of much apparently designed devilry. In this way Darwin brought intense relief as well as an enlarged knowledge of facts to the humanitarians. He destroyed the omnipotence of God for them; but he also exonerated God from a hideous charge of cruelty. Granted that the comfort was shallow, and that deeper reflection was bound to shew that worse than all conceivable devil-deities is a blind, deaf, dumb, heartless, senseless mob of forces that strike as a tree does when it is blown down by the wind, or as the tree itself is struck by lightning. That did not occur to the humanitarians at the moment: people do not reflect deeply when they are in the first happiness of escape from an intolerably oppressive situation. Like Bunyan’s pilgrim they could not see the wicket gate, nor the Slough of Despond, nor the castle of Giant Despair; but they saw the shining light at the end of the path, and so started gaily towards it as Evolutionists.

And they were right; for the problem of evil yields very easily to Creative Evolution. If the driving power behind Evolution is omnipotent only in the sense that there seems no limit to its final achievement; and if it must meanwhile struggle with matter and circumstance by the method of trial and error, then the world must be full of its unsuccessful experiments. Christ may meet a tiger, or a High Priest arm-in-arm with a Roman Governor, and be the unfittest to survive under the circumstances. Mozart may have a genius that prevails against Emperors and Archbishops, and a lung that succumbs to some obscure and noxious property of foul air. If all our calamities are either accidents or sincerely repented mistakes, there is no malice in the Cruelty of Nature and no Problem of Evil in the Victorian sense at all. The theology of the women who told us that they became atheists when they sat by the cradles of their children and saw them strangled by the hand of God is succeeded by the theology of Blanco Posnet, with his ‘It was early days when He made the croup, I guess. It was the best He could think of then; but when it turned out wrong on His hands He made you and me to fight the croup for Him.’

HOW ONE TOUCH OF DARWIN MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN

Another humanitarian interest in Darwinism was that Darwin popularized Evolution generally, as well as making his own special contribution to it. Now the general conception of Evolution provides the humanitarian with a scientific basis, because it establishes the fundamental equality of all living things. It makes the killing of an animal murder in exactly the same sense as the killing of a man is murder. It is sometimes necessary to kill men as it is always necessary to kill tigers; but the old theoretic distinction between the two acts has been obliterated by Evolution. When I was a child and was told that our dog and our parrot, with whom I was on intimate terms, were not creatures like myself, but were brutal whilst I was reasonable, I not only did not believe it, but quite consciously and intellectually formed the opinion that the distinction was false; so that afterwards, when Darwin’s views were first unfolded to me, I promptly said that I had found out all that for myself before I was ten years old; and I am far from sure that my youthful arrogance was not justified; for this sense of the kinship of all forms of life is all that is needed to make Evolution not only a conceivable theory, but an inspiring one. St Anthony was ripe for the Evolution theory when he preached to the fishes, and St Francis when he called the birds his little brothers. Our vanity, and our snobbish conception of Godhead as being, like earthly kingship, a supreme class distinction instead of the rock on which Equality is built, had led us to insist on God offering us special terms by placing us apart from and above all the rest of his creatures. Evolution took that conceit out of us; and now, though we may kill a flea without the smallest remorse, we at all events know that we are killing our cousin. No doubt it shocks the flea when the creature that an almighty Celestial Flea created expressly for the food of fleas, destroys the jumping lord of creation with his sharp and enormous thumbnail; but no flea will ever be so foolish as to preach that in slaying fleas Man is applying a method of Natural Selection which will finally evolve a flea so swift that no man can catch him, and so hardy of constitution that Insect Powder will have no more effect on him than strychnine on an elephant.

WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE SOCIALISTS

The Humanitarians were not alone among the agitators in their welcome to Darwin. He had the luck to please everybody who had an axe to grind. The Militarists were as enthusiastic as the Humanitarians, the Socialists as the Capitalists. The Socialists were specially encouraged by Darwin’s insistence on the influence of environment. Perhaps the strongest moral bulwark of Capitalism is the belief in the efficacy of individual righteousness. Robert Owen made desperate efforts to convince England that her criminals, her drunkards, her ignorant and stupid masses, were the victims of circumstance: that if we would only establish his new moral world we should find that the masses born into an educated and moralized community would be themselves educated and moralized. The stock reply to this is to be found in Lewes’s Life of Goethe. Lewes scorned the notion that circumstances govern character. He pointed to the variety of character in the governing rich class to prove the contrary. Similarity of circumstance can hardly be carried to a more desolating dead level than in the case of the individuals who are born and bred in English country houses, and sent first to Eton or Harrow, and then to Oxford or Cambridge, to have their minds and habits formed. Such a routine would destroy individuality if anything could. Yet individuals come out from it as different as Pitt from Fox, as Lord Russell from Lord Gurzon, as Mr Winston Churchill from Lord Robert Cecil. This acceptance of the congenital character of the individual as the determining factor in his destiny had been reinforced by the Lamarckian view of Evolution. If the giraffe can develop his neck by wanting and trying, a man can develop his character in the same way. The old saying, ‘Where there is a will, there is a way,’ condenses Lamarck’s theory of functional adaptation into a proverb. This felt bracingly moral to strong minds, and reassuringly pious to feeble ones. There was no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform himself before he pretends to reform society. If you were rich, how pleasant it was to feel that you owed your riches to the superiority of your own character! The industrial revolution had turned numbers of greedy dullards into monstrously rich men. Nothing could be more humiliating and threatening to them than the view that the falling of a shower of gold into their pockets was as pure an accident as the falling of a shower of hail on their umbrellas, and happened alike to the just and unjust. Nothing could be more flattering and fortifying to them than the assumption that they were rich because they were virtuous.

Now Darwinism made a clean sweep of all such self-righteousness. It more than justified Robert Owen by discovering in the environment of an organism an influence on it more potent than Owen had ever claimed. It implied that street arabs are produced by slums and not by original sin: that prostitutes are produced by starvation wages and not by feminine concupiscence. It threw the authority of science on the side of the Socialist who said that he who would reform himself must first reform society. It suggested that if we want healthy and wealthy citizens we must have healthy and wealthy towns; and that these can exist only in healthy and wealthy countries. It could be led to the conclusion that the type of character which remains indifferent to the welfare of its neighbors as long as its own personal appetite is satisfied is the disastrous type, and the type which is deeply concerned about its environment the only possible type for a permanently prosperous community. It shewed that the surprising changes which Robert Owen had produced in factory children by a change in their circumstances which does not seem any too generous to us nowadays were as nothing to the changes — changes not only of habits but of species, not only of species but of orders — which might conceivably be the work of environment acting on individuals without any character or intellectual consciousness whatever. No wonder the Socialists received Darwin with open arms.

DARWIN AND KARL MARX

Besides, the Socialists had an evolutionary prophet of their own, who had discredited Manchester as Darwin discredited the Garden of Eden. Karl Marx had proclaimed in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 (now enjoying Scriptural authority in Russia) that civilization is an organism evolving irresistibly by circumstantial selection; and he published the first volume of his Das Kapital in 1867. The revolt against anthropomorphic idolatry, which was, as we have seen, the secret of Darwin’s success, had been accompanied by a revolt against the conventional respectability which covered not only the brigandage and piracy of the feudal barons, but the hypocrisy, inhumanity, snobbery, and greed of the bourgeoisie, who were utterly corrupted by an essentially diabolical identification of success in life with big profits. The moment Marx shewed that the relation of the bourgeoisie to society was grossly immoral and disastrous, and that the whited wall of starched shirt fronts concealed and defended the most infamous of all tyrannies and the basest of all robberies, he became an inspired prophet in the mind of every generous soul whom his book reached. He had said and proved what they wanted to have proved; and they would hear nothing against him. Now Marx was by no means infallible: his economics, half borrowed, and half home-made by a literary amateur, were not, when strictly followed up, even favorable to Socialism. His theory of civilisation had been promulgated already in Buckle’s History of Civilization, a book as epoch-making in the minds of its readers as Das Kapital. There was nothing about Socialism in the widely read first volume of Das Kapital: every reference it made to workers and capitalists shewed that Marx had never breathed industrial air, and had dug his case out of bluebooks in the British Museum. Compared to Darwin, he seemed to have no power of observation: there was not a fact in Das Kapital that had not been taken out of a book, nor a discussion that had not been opened by somebody else’s pamphlet. No matter: he exposed the bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear. Marx had, too, what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift, with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty. Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related idols, and became the prophets of two new creeds.

WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE PROFITEERS ALSO

But how, at this rate, did Darwin succeed with the capitalists too? It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. The explanation is that Darwinism was so closely related to Capitalism that Marx regarded it as an economic product rather than as a biological theory. Darwin got his main postulate, the pressure of population on the available means of subsistence, from the treatise of Malthus on Population, just as he got his other postulate of a practically unlimited time for that pressure to operate from the geologist Lyell, who made an end of Archbishop Ussher’s Biblical estimate of the age of the earth as 4004 B.C. plus A.D. The treatises of the Ricardian economists on the Law of Diminishing Return, which was only the Manchester School’s version of the giraffe and the trees, were all very fiercely discussed when Darwin was a young man. In fact the discovery in the eighteenth century by the French Physiocrats of the economic effects of Commercial Selection in soils and sites, and by Malthus of a competition for subsistence which he attributed to pressure of population on available subsistence, had already brought political science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line, the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is a vain defiance of Natural Selection, and that the true way to deal with drunkenness is to flood the country with cheap gin and let the fittest survive. Cobdenism is, after all, nothing but the abandonment of trade to Circumstantial Selection.

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this preparation for Darwinism by a vast political and clerical propaganda of its moral atmosphere. Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation, individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong, on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty, Laisser-faire: in short, on ‘doing the other fellow down’ with impunity, all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the industrial welter, being ‘contrary to the laws of political economy.’ Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery. People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences, and wanted to find out how Nature would arrange matters if she were let alone. And they found it out to their cost in the days when Lancashire used up nine generations of wage slaves in one generation of their masters. But their masters, becoming richer and richer, were very well satisfied, and Bastiat proved convincingly that Nature had arranged Economic Harmonies which would settle social questions far better than theocracies or aristocracies or mobocracies, the real deus ex machina being unrestrained plutocracy.

THE POETRY AND PURITY OF MATERIALISM

Thus the stars in their courses fought for Darwin. Every faction drew a moral from him; every catholic hater of faction founded a hope on him; every blackguard felt justified by him; and every saint felt encouraged by him. The notion that any harm could come of so splendid an enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians. Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the fire nor Ugolino in the ice.

But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible fetichism. Between the two of them religion was knocked to pieces; and where there had been a god, a cause, a faith that the universe was ordered however inexplicable by us its order might be, and therefore a sense of moral responsibility as part of that order, there was now an utter void. Chaos had come again. The first effect was exhilarating: we had the runaway child’s sense of freedom before it gets hungry and lonely and frightened. In this phase we did not desire our God back again. We printed the verses in which William Blake, the most religious of our great poets, called the anthropomorphic idol Old Nobodaddy, and gibed at him in terms which the printer had to leave us to guess from his blank spaces. We had heard the parson droning that God is not mocked; and it was great fun to mock Him to our hearts’ content and not be a penny the worse. It did not occur to us that Old Nobodaddy, instead of being a ridiculous fiction, might be only an impostor, and that the exposure of this Koepenik Captain of the heavens, far from proving that there was no real captain, rather proved the contrary: that, in short, Nobodaddy could not have impersonated anybody if there had not been Somebodaddy to impersonate. We did not see the significance of the fact that on the last occasion on which God had been ‘expelled with a pitchfork,’ men so different as Voltaire and Robespierre had said, the one that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him, and the other that after an honest attempt to dispense with a Supreme Being in practical politics, some such hypothesis had been found quite indispensable, and could not be replaced by a mere Goddess of Reason. If these two opinions were quoted at all, they were quoted as jokes at the expense of Nobodaddy. We were quite sure for the moment that whatever lingering superstition might have daunted these men of the eighteenth century, we Darwinians could do without God, and had made a good riddance of Him.

THE VICEROYS OF THE KING OF KINGS

Now in politics it is much easier to do without God than to do without his viceroys and vicars and lieutenants; and we begin to miss the lieutenants long before we begin to miss their principal. Roman Catholics do what their confessors advise without troubling God; and Royalists are content to worship the King and ask the policeman. But God’s trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honor and high public spirit. The old belief that it matters dreadfully to God whether a man thinks himself an atheist or not, and that the extent to which it matters can be stated with exactness as one single damn, was an error: for the divinity is in the honor and public spirit, not in the mouthed credo or non credo. The consequences of this error became grave when the fitness of a man for public trust was tested, not by his honor and public spirit, but by asking him whether he believed in Nobodaddy or not. If he said yes, he was held fit to be a Prime Minister, though, as our ablest Churchman has said, the real implication was that he was either a fool, a bigot, or a liar. Darwin destroyed this test; but when it was only thoughtlessly dropped, there was no test at all; and the door to public trust was open to the man who had no sense of God because he had no sense of anything beyond his own business interests and personal appetites and ambitions. As a result, the people who did not feel in the least inconvenienced by being no longer governed by Nobodaddy soon found themselves very acutely inconvenienced by being governed by fools and commercial adventurers. They had forgotten not only God but Goldsmith, who had warned them that ‘honor sinks where commerce long prevails.’

The lieutenants of God are not always persons: some of them are legal and parliamentary fictions. One of them is Public Opinion. The pre-Darwinian statesmen and publicists were not restrained directly by God; but they restrained themselves by setting up an image of a Public Opinion which would not tolerate any attempt to tamper with British liberties. Their favorite way of putting it was that any Government which proposed such and such an infringement of such and such a British liberty would be hurled from office in a week. This was not true: there was no such public opinion, no limit to what the British people would put up with in the abstract, and no hardship short of immediate and sudden starvation that it would not and did not put up with in the concrete. But this very helplessness of the people had forced their rulers to pretend that they were not helpless, and that the certainty of a sturdy and unconquerable popular resistance forbade any trifling with Magna Carta or the Petition of Rights or the authority of parliament. Now the reality behind this fiction was the divine sense that liberty is a need vital to human growth. Accordingly, though it was difficult enough to effect a political reform, yet, once parliament had passed it, its wildest opponent had no hope that the Government would cancel it, or shelve it, or be bought off from executing it. From Walpole to Campbell-Bannerman there was no Prime Minister to whom such renagueing or trafficking would ever have occurred, though there were plenty who employed corruption unsparingly to procure the votes of members of parliament for their policy.

POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM IN EXCELSIS

The moment Nobodaddy was slain by Darwin, Public Opinion, as divine deputy, lost its sanctity. Politicians no longer told themselves that the British public would never suffer this or that: they allowed themselves to know that for their own personal purposes, which are limited to their ten or twenty years on the front benches in parliament, the British public can be humbugged and coerced into believing and suffering everything that it pays to impose on them, and that any false excuse for an unpopular step will serve if it can be kept in countenance for a fortnight: that is, until the terms of the excuse are forgotten. The people, untaught or mistaught, are so ignorant and incapable politically that this in itself would not greatly matter; for a statesman who told them the truth would not be understood, and would in effect mislead them more completely than if he dealt with them according to their blindness instead of to his own wisdom. But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms. And there is almost as great a difference between the statesman who does this naively and automatically, or even does it telling himself that he is ambitious and selfish and unscrupulous, and the one who does it on principle, believing that if everyone takes the line of least material resistance the result will be the survival of the fittest in a perfectly harmonious universe. Once produce an atmosphere of fatalism on principle, and it matters little what the opinions or superstitions of the individual statesmen concerned may be. A Kaiser who is a devout reader of sermons, a Prime Minister who is an emotional singer of hymns, and a General who is a bigoted Roman Catholic may be the executants of the policy; but the policy itself will be one of unprincipled opportunism; and all the Governments will be like the tramp who walks always with the wind and ends as a pauper, or the stone that rolls down the hill and ends as an avalanche: their way is the way to destruction.

THE BETRAYAL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Within sixty years from the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species political opportunism had brought parliaments into contempt; created a popular demand for direct action by the organized industries (‘Syndicalism’); and wrecked the centre of Europe in a paroxysm of that chronic terror of one another, that cowardice of the irreligious, which, masked in the bravado of militarist patriotism, had ridden the Powers like a nightmare since the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The sturdy old cosmopolitan Liberalism vanished almost unnoticed. At the present moment all the new ordinances for the government of our Grown Colonies contain, as a matter of course, prohibitions of all criticism, spoken or written, of their ruling officials, which would have scandalized George III and elicited Liberal pamphlets from Catherine II. Statesmen are afraid of the suburbs, of the newspapers, of the profiteers, of the diplomatists, of the militarists, of the country houses, of the trade unions, of everything ephemeral on earth except the revolutions they are provoking; and they would be afraid of these if they were not too ignorant of society and history to appreciate the risk, and to know that a revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it breaks out, and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and impossible; for rulers who think it possible take care to insure the risk by ruling reasonably. This brings about a condition fatal to all political stability: namely, that you never know where to have the politicians. If the fear of God was in them it might be possible to come to some general understanding as to what God disapproves of; and Europe might pull together on that basis. But the present panic, in which Prime Ministers drift from election to election, either fighting or running away from everybody who shakes a fist at them, makes a European civilization impossible. Such peace and prosperity as we enjoyed before the war depended on the loyalty of the Western States to their own civilization. That loyalty could find practical expression only in an alliance of the highly civilized Western Powers against the primitive tyrannies of the East. Britain, Germany, France, and the United States of America could have imposed peace on the world, and nursed modern civilization in Russia, Turkey, and the Balkans. Every meaner consideration should have given way to this need for the solidarity of the higher civilization. What actually happened was that France and England, through their clerks the diplomatists, made an alliance with Russia to defend themselves against Germany; Germany made an alliance with Turkey to defend herself against the three; and the two unnatural and suicidal combinations fell on one another in a war that came nearer to being a war of extermination than any wars since those of Timur the Tartar; whilst the United States held aloof as long as they could, and the other States either did the same or joined in the fray through compulsion, bribery, or their judgment as to which side their bread was buttered. And at the present moment, though the main fighting has ceased through the surrender of Germany on terms which the victors have never dreamt of observing, the extermination by blockade and famine, which was what forced Germany to surrender, still continues, although it is certain that if the vanquished starve the victors will starve too, and Europe will liquidate its affairs by going, not into bankruptcy, but into chaos.

Now all this, it will be noticed, was fundamentally nothing but an idiotic attempt on the part of each belligerent State to secure for itself the advantage of the survival of the fittest through Circumstantial Selection. If the Western Powers had selected their allies in the Lamarckian manner intelligently, purposely, and vitally, ad majorem Dei gloriam, as what Nietzsche called good Europeans, there would have been a League of Nations and no war. But because the selection relied on was purely circumstantial opportunist selection, so that the alliances were mere marriages of convenience, they have turned out, not merely as badly as might have been expected, but far worse than the blackest pessimist had ever imagined possible.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL SELECTION IN FINANCE

How it will all end we do not yet know. When wolves combine to kill a horse, the death of the horse only sets them fighting one another for the choicest morsels. Men are no better than wolves if they have no better principles: accordingly, we find that the Armistice and the Treaty have not extricated us from the war. A handful of Serbian regicides flung us into it as a sporting navvy throws a bull pup at a cat; but the Supreme Council, with all its victorious legions and all its prestige, cannot get us out of it, though we are heartily sick and tired of the whole business, and know now very well that it should never have been allowed to happen. But we are helpless before a slate scrawled with figures of National Debts. As there is no money to pay them because it was all spent on the war (wars have to be paid for on the nail) the sensible thing to do is to wipe the slate and let the wrangling States distribute what they can spare, on the sound communist principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. But no: we have no principles left, not even commercial ones; for what sane commercialist would decree that France must not pay for her failure to defend her own soil; that Germany must pay for her success in carrying the war into the enemy’s country; and that as Germany has not the money to pay, and under our commercial system can make it only by becoming once more a commercial competitor of England and France, which neither of them will allow, she must borrow the money from England, or America, or even from France: an arrangement by which the victorious creditors will pay one another, and wait to get their money back until Germany is either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers are drifting and colliding and running on the rocks, in the hope that if they continue to do their worst they will get Naturally Selected for survival without the trouble of thinking about it.

THE HOMEOPATHIC REACTION AGAINST DARWINISM

When, like the Russians, our Nihilists have it urgently borne in on them, by the brute force of rising wages that never overtake rising prices, that they are being Naturally Selected for destruction, they will perhaps remember that ‘Dont Care came to a bad end,’ and begin to look round for a religion. And the whole purpose of this book is to shew them where to look. For, throughout all the godless welter of the infidel half-century, Darwinism has been acting not only directly but homeopathically, its poison rallying our vital forces not only to resist it and cast it out, but to achieve a new Reformation and put a credible and healthy religion in its place. Samuel Butler was the pioneer of the reaction as far as the casting out was concerned; but the issue was confused by the physiologists, who were divided on the question into Mechanists and Vitalists. The Mechanists said that life is nothing but physical and chemical action; that they have demonstrated this in many cases of so-called vital phenomena; and that there is no reason to doubt that with improved methods they will presently be able to demonstrate it in all of them. The Vitalists said that a dead body and a live one are physically and chemically identical, and that the difference can be accounted for only by the existence of a Vital Force. This seems simple; but the Anti-Mechanists objected to be called Vitalists (obviously the right name for them) on two contradictory grounds. First, that vitality is scientifically inadmissible, because it cannot be isolated and experimented with in the laboratory. Second, that force, being by definition anything that can alter the speed or direction of matter in motion (briefly, that can overcome inertia), is essentially a mechanistic conception. Here we had the New Vitalist only half extricated from the Old Mechanist, objecting to be called either, and unable to give a clear lead in the new direction. And there was a deeper antagonism. The Old Vitalists, in postulating a Vital Force, were setting up a comparatively mechanical conception as against the divine idea of the life breathed into the clay nostrils of Adam, whereby he became a living soul. The New Vitalists, filled by their laboratory researches with a sense of the miraculousness of life that went far beyond the comparatively uninformed imaginations of the authors of the Book of Genesis, regarded the Old Vitalists as Mechanists who had tried to fill up the gulf between life and death with an empty phrase denoting an imaginary physical force.

These professional faction fights are ephemeral, and need not trouble us here. The Old Vitalist, who was essentially a Materialist, has evolved into the New Vitalist, who is, as every genuine scientist must be, finally a metaphysician. And as the New Vitalist turns from the disputes of his youth to the future of his science, he will cease to boggle at the name Vitalist, or at the inevitable, ancient, popular, and quite correct use of the term Force to denote metaphysical as well as physical overcomers of inertia.

Since the discovery of Evolution as the method of the Life Force the religion of metaphysical Vitalism has been gaining the definiteness and concreteness needed to make it assimilable by the educated critical man. But it has always been with us. The popular religions, disgraced by their Opportunist cardinals and bishops, have been kept in credit by canonized saints whose secret was their conception of themselves as the instruments and vehicles of divine power and aspiration: a conception which at moments becomes an actual experience of ecstatic possession by that power. And above and below all have been millions of humble and obscure persons, sometimes totally illiterate, sometimes unconscious of having any religion at all, sometimes believing in their simplicity that the gods and temples and priests of their district stood for their instinctive righteousness, who have kept sweet the tradition that good people follow a light that shines within and above and ahead of them, that bad people care only for themselves, and that the good are saved and blessed and the bad damned and miserable. Protestantism was a movement towards the pursuit of a light called an inner light because every man must see it with his own eyes and not take any priest’s word for it or any Church’s account of it. In short, there is no question of a new religion, but rather of redistilling the eternal spirit of religion and thus extricating it from the sludgy residue of temporalities and legends that are making belief impossible, though they are the stock-in-trade of all the Churches and all the Schools.

RELIGION AND ROMANCE

It is the adulteration of religion by the romance of miracles and paradises and torture chambers that makes it reel at the impact of every advance in science, instead of being clarified by it. If you take an English village lad, and teach him that religion means believing that the stories of Noah’s Ark and the Garden of Eden are literally true on the authority of God himself, and if that boy becomes an artisan and goes into the town among the sceptical city proletariat, then, when the jibes of his mates set him thinking, and he sees that these stories cannot be literally true, and learns that no candid prelate now pretends to believe them, he does not make any fine distinctions: he declares at once that religion is a fraud, and parsons and teachers hypocrites and liars. He becomes indifferent to religion if he has little conscience, and indignantly hostile to it if he has a good deal.

The same revolt against wantonly false teaching is happening daily in the professional classes whose recreation is reading and whose intellectual sport is controversy. They banish the Bible from their houses, and sometimes put into the hands of their unfortunate children Ethical and Rationalist tracts of the deadliest dullness, compelling these wretched infants to sit out the discourses of Secularist lecturers (I have delivered some of them myself), who bore them at a length now forbidden by custom in the established pulpit. Our minds have reacted so violently towards provable logical theorems and demonstrable mechanical or chemical facts that we have become incapable of metaphysical truth, and try to cast out incredible and silly lies by credible and clever ones, calling in Satan to cast out Satan, and getting more into his clutches than ever in the process. Thus the world is kept sane less by the saints than by the vast mass of the indifferent, who neither act nor react in the matter. Butler’s preaching of the gospel of Laodicea was a piece of common sense founded on his observation of this.

But indifference will not guide nations through civilization to the establishment of the perfect city of God. An indifferent statesman is a contradiction in terms; and a statesman who is indifferent on principle, a Laisser-faire or Muddle-Through doctrinaire, plays the deuce with us in the long run. Our statesmen must get a religion by hook or crook; and as we are committed to Adult Suffrage it must be a religion capable of vulgarization. The thought first put into words by the Mills when they said ‘There is no God; but this is a family secret,’ and long held unspoken by aristocratic statesmen and diplomatists, will not serve now; for the revival of civilization after the war cannot be effected by artificial breathing: the driving force of an undeluded popular consent is indispensable, and will be impossible until the statesman can appeal to the vital instincts of the people in terms of a common religion. The success of the Hang the Kaiser cry at the last General Election shews us very terrifyingly how a common irreligion can be used by myopic demagogy; and common irreligion will destroy civilization unless it is countered by common religion.

THE DANGER OF REACTION

And here arises the danger that when we realize this we shall do just what we did half a century ago, and what Pliable did in The Pilgrim’s Progress when Christian landed him in the Slough of Despond: that is, run back in terror to our old superstitions. We jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire; and we are just as likely to jump back again, now that we feel hotter than ever. History records very little in the way of mental activity on the part of the mass of mankind except a series of stampedes from affirmative errors into negative ones and back again. It must therefore be said very precisely and clearly that the bankruptcy of Darwinism does not mean that Nobodaddy was Somebodaddy with ‘body, parts, and passions’ after all; that the world was made in the year 4004 B.C.; that damnation means a eternity of blazing brimstone; that the Immaculate Conception means that sex is sinful and that Christ was parthenogenetically brought forth by a virgin descended in like manner from a line of virgins right back to Eve; that the Trinity is an anthropomorphic monster with three heads which are yet only one head; that in Rome the bread and wine on the altar become flesh and blood, and in England, in a still more mystical manner, they do and they do not; that the Bible is an infallible scientific manual, an accurate historical chronicle, and a complete guide to conduct; that we may lie and cheat and murder and then wash ourselves innocent in the blood of the lamb on Sunday at the cost of a credo and a penny in the plate, and so on and so forth. Civilization cannot be saved by people not only crude enough to believe these things, but irreligious enough to believe that such belief constitutes a religion. The education of children cannot safely be left in their hands. If dwindling sects like the Church of England, the Church of Rome, the Greek Church, and the rest, persist in trying to cramp the human mind within the limits of these grotesque perversions of natural truths and poetic metaphors, then they must be ruthlessly banished from the schools until they either perish in general contempt or discover the soul that is hidden in every dogma. The real Class War will be a war of intellectual classes; and its conquest will be the souls of the children.

A TOUCHSTONE FOR DOGMA

The test of a dogma is its universality. As long as the Church of England preaches a single doctrine that the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Mussulman, the Parsee, and all the other sectarians who are British subjects cannot accept, it has no legitimate place in the counsels of the British Commonwealth, and will remain what it is at present, a corrupter of youth, a danger to the State, and an obstruction to the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. This has never been more strongly felt than at present, after a war in which the Church failed grossly in the courage of its profession, and sold its lilies for the laurels of the soldiers of the Victoria Cross. All the cocks in Christendom have been crowing shame on it ever since; and it will not be spared for the sake of the two or three faithful who were found even among the bishops. Let the Church take it on authority, even my authority (as a professional legend maker) if it cannot see the truth by its own light: no dogma can be a legend. A legend can pass an ethnical frontier as a legend, but not as a truth; whilst the only frontier to the currency of a sound dogma as such is the frontier of capacity for understanding it.

This does not mean that we should throw away legend and parable and drama: they are the natural vehicles of dogma; but woe to the Churches and rulers who substitute the legend for the dogma, the parable for the history, the drama for the religion! Better by far declare the throne of God empty than set a liar and a fool on it. What are called wars of religion are always wars to destroy religion by affirming the historical truth or material substantiality of some legend, and killing those who refuse to accept it as historical or substantial. But who has ever refused to accept a good legend with delight as a legend? The legends, the parables, the dramas, are among the choicest treasures of mankind. No one is ever tired of stories of miracles. In vain did Mahomet repudiate the miracles ascribed to him: in vain did Christ furiously scold those who asked him to give them an exhibition as a conjurer: in vain did the saints declare that God chose them not for their powers but for their weaknesses; that the humble might be exalted, and the proud rebuked. People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them. In England today good books of Eastern religious legends are read eagerly; and Protestants and Atheists read Roman Catholic legends of the Saints with pleasure. But such fare is shirked by Indians and Roman Catholics. Freethinkers read the Bible: indeed they seem to be its only readers now except the reluctant parsons at the church lecterns, who communicate their discomfort to the congregation by gargling the words in their throats in an unnatural manner that is as repulsive as it is unintelligible. And this is because the imposition of the legends as literal truths at once changes them from parables into falsehoods. The feeling against the Bible has become so strong at last that educated people not only refuse to outrage their intellectual consciences by reading the legend of Noah’s Ark, with its funny beginning about the animals and its exquisite end about the birds: they will not read even the chronicles of King David, which may very well be true, and are certainly more candid than the official biographies of our contemporary monarchs.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE LEGENDS

What we should do, then, is to pool our legends and make a delightful stock of religious folk-lore on an honest basis for all mankind. With our minds freed from pretence and falsehood we could enter into the heritage of all the faiths. China would share her sages with Spain, and Spain her saints with China. The Ulster man who now gives his son an unmerciful thrashing if the boy is so tactless as to ask how the evening and the morning could be the first day before the sun was created, or to betray an innocent calf-love for the Virgin Mary, would buy him a bookful of legends of the creation and of mothers of God from all parts of the world, and be very glad to find his laddie as interested in such things as in marbles or Police and Robbers. That would be better than beating all good feeling towards religion out of the child, and blackening his mind by teaching him that the worshippers of the holy virgins, whether of the Parthenon or St Peter’s, are fire-doomed heathens and idolaters. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.

A LESSON FROM SCIENCE TO THE CHURCHES

Let the Churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian creed. It is not that science is free from legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. When some unusually conscientious or enterprising bacteriologist reads the pamphlets of Jenner, and discovers that they might have been written by an ignorant but curious and observant nurserymaid, and could not possibly have been written by any person with a scientifically trained mind, he does not feel that the whole edifice of science has collapsed and crumbled, and that there is no such thing as smallpox. It may come to that yet; for hygiene, as it forces its way into our schools, is being taught as falsely as religion is taught there; but in mathematics and physics the faith is still kept pure, and you may take the law and leave the legends without suspicion of heresy. Accordingly, the tower of the mathematician stands unshaken whilst the temple of the priest rocks to its foundation.

THE RELIGIOUS ART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century, newly arisen from the ashes of pseudo-Christianity, of mere scepticism, and of the soulless affirmations and blind negations of the Mechanists and Neo-Darwinians. But it cannot become a popular religion until it has its legends, its parables, its miracles. And when I say popular I do not mean apprehensible by villagers only. I mean apprehensible by Cabinet Ministers as well. It is unreasonable to look to the professional politician and administrator for light and leading in religion. He is neither a philosopher nor a prophet: if he were, he would be philosophizing and prophesying, and not neglecting both for the drudgery of practical government. Socrates and Coleridge did not remain soldiers, nor could John Stuart Mill remain the representative of Westminster in the House of Commons even when he was willing. The Westminster electors admired Mill for telling them that much of the difficulty of dealing with them arose from their being inveterate liars. But they would not vote a second time for the man who was not afraid to break the crust of mendacity on which they were all dancing; for it seemed to them that there was a volcanic abyss beneath, not having his philosophic conviction that the truth is the solidest standing ground in the end. Your front bench man will always be an exploiter of the popular religion or irreligion. Not being an expert, he must take it as he finds it; and before he can take it, he must have been told stories about it in his childhood and had before him all his life an elaborate iconography of it produced by writers, painters, sculptors, temple architects, and artists of all the higher sorts. Even if, as sometimes happens, he is a bit of an amateur in metaphysics as well as a professional politician, he must still govern according to the popular iconography, and not according to his own personal interpretations if these happen to be heterodox.

It will be seen then that the revival of religion on a scientific basis does not mean the death of art, but a glorious rebirth of it. Indeed art has never been great when it was not providing an iconography for a live religion. And it has never been quite contemptible except when imitating the iconography after the religion had become a superstition. Italian painting from Giotto to Carpaccio is all religious painting; and it moves us deeply and has real greatness. Compare with it the attempts of our painters a century ago to achieve the effects of the old masters by imitation when they should have been illustrating a faith of their own. Contemplate, if you can bear it, the dull daubs of Hilton and Haydon, who knew so much more about drawing and scumbling and glazing and perspective and anatomy and ‘marvellous foreshortening’ than Giotto, the latchet of whose shoe they were nevertheless not worthy to unloose. Compare Mozart’s Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Wagner’s Ring, all of them reachings-forward to the new Vitalist art, with the dreary pseudo-sacred oratorios and cantatas which were produced for no better reason than that Handel had formerly made splendid thunder in that way, and with the stale confectionery, mostly too would-be pious to be even cheerfully toothsome, of Spohr and Mendelssohn, Stainer and Parry, which spread indigestion at our musical festivals until I publicly told Parry the bludgeoning truth about his Job and woke him to conviction of sin. Compare Flaxman and Thorwaldsen and Gibson with Phidias and Praxiteles, Stevens with Michael Angelo, Bouguereau’s Virgin with Cimabue’s, or the best operatic Christs of Scheffer and Müller with the worst Christs that the worst painters could paint before the end of the fifteenth century, and you must feel that until we have a great religious movement we cannot hope for a great artistic one. The disillusioned Raphael could paint a mother and child, but not a queen of Heaven as much less skilful men had done in the days of his great-grandfather; yet he could reach forward to the twentieth century and paint a Transfiguration of the Son of Man as they could not. Also, please note, he could decorate a house of pleasure for a cardinal very beautifully with voluptuous pictures of Cupid and Psyche; for this simple sort of Vitalism is always with us, and, like portrait painting, keeps the artist supplied with subject-matter in the intervals between the ages of faith; so that your sceptical Rembrandts and Velasquezs are at least not compelled to paint shop fronts for want of anything else to paint in which they can really believe.

THE ARTIST-PROPHETS

And there are always certain rare but intensely interesting anticipations. Michael Angelo could not very well believe in Julius II or Leo X, or in much that they believed in; but he could paint the Superman three hundred years before Nietzsche wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra and Strauss set it to music. Michael Angelo won the primacy among all modern painters and sculptors solely by his power of shewing us superhuman persons. On the strength of his decoration and color alone he would hardly have survived his own death twenty years; and even his design would have had only an academic interest; but as a painter of prophets and sibyls he is greatest among the very greatest in his craft, because we aspire to a world of prophets and sibyls. Beethoven never heard of radioactivity nor of electrons dancing in vortices of inconceivable energy; but pray can anyone explain the last movement of his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, otherwise than as a musical picture of these whirling electrons? His contemporaries said he was mad, partly perhaps because the movement was so hard to play; but we, who can make a pianola play it to us over and over until it is as familiar as Pop Goes the Weasel, know that it is sane and methodical. As such, it must represent something; and as all Beethoven’s serious compositions represent some process within himself, some nerve storm or soul storm, and the storm here is clearly one of physical movement, I should much like to know what other storm than the atomic storm could have driven him to this oddest of all those many expressions of cyclonic energy which have given him the same distinction among musicians that Michael Angelo has among draughtsmen.

In Beethoven’s day the business of art was held to be ‘the sublime and beautiful.’ In our day it has fallen to be the imitative and voluptuous. In both periods the word passionate has been freely employed; but in the eighteenth century passion meant irresistible impulse of the loftiest kind: for example, a passion for astronomy or for truth. For us it has come to mean concupiscence and nothing else. One might say to the art of Europe what Antony said to the corpse of Caesar: ‘Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?’ But in fact it is the mind of Europe that has shrunk, being, as we have seen, wholly preoccupied with a busy spring-cleaning to get rid of its superstitions before readjusting itself to the new conception of Evolution.

EVOLUTION IN THE THEATRE

On the stage (and here I come at last to my own particular function in the matter), Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art, kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Molière to Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least in revolt against falsehood and imposture, and were not only, as they claimed, ‘chastening morals by ridicule,’ but, in Johnson’s phrase, clearing our minds of cant, and thereby shewing an uneasiness in the presence of error which is the surest symptom of intellectual vitality. Meanwhile the name of Tragedy was assumed by plays in which everyone was killed in the last act, just as, in spite of Molière, plays in which everyone was married in the last act called themselves comedies. Now neither tragedies nor comedies can be produced according to a prescription which gives only the last moments of the last act. Shakespear did not make Hamlet out of its final butchery, nor Twelfth Night out of its final matrimony. And he could not become the conscious iconographer of a religion because he had no conscious religion. He had therefore to exercise his extraordinary natural gifts in the very entertaining art of mimicry, giving us the famous ‘delineation of character’ which makes his plays, like the novels of Scott, Dumas, and Dickens, so delightful. Also, he developed that curious and questionable art of building us a refuge from despair by disguising the cruelties of Nature as jokes. But with all his gifts, the fact remains that he never found the inspiration to write an original play. He furbished up old plays, and adapted popular stories, and chapters of history from Holinshed’s Chronicle and Plutarch’s biographies, to the stage. All this he did (or did not; for there are minus quantities in the algebra of art) with a recklessness which shewed that his trade lay far from his conscience. It is true that he never takes his characters from the borrowed story, because it was less trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes philosophers; but when they come on the stage they have no philosophy to expound: they are only pessimists and railers; and their occasional would-be philosophic speeches, such as The Seven Ages of Man and The Soliloquy on Suicide, shew how deeply in the dark Shakespear was as to what philosophy means. He forced himself in among the greatest of playwrights without having once entered that region in which Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of the universe than Hamlet has to say, then ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.’

Ever since Shakespear, playwrights have been struggling with the same lack of religion; and many of them were forced to become mere panders and sensation-mongers because, though they had higher ambitions, they could find no better subject-matter. From Congreve to Sheridan they were so sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Molière’s single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith’s was the only saved soul in that pandemonium.

The leaders among my own contemporaries (now veterans) snatched at minor social problems rather than write entirely without any wider purpose than to win money and fame. One of them expressed to me his envy of the ancient Greek playwrights because the Athenians asked them, not for some ‘new and original’ disguise of the half-dozen threadbare plots of the modern theatre, but for the deepest lesson they could draw from the familiar and sacred legends of their country. ‘Let us all,’ he said, ‘write an Electra, an Antigone, an Agamemnon, and shew what we can do with it.’ But he did not write any of them, because these legends are no longer religious: Aphrodite and Artemis and Poseidon are deader than their statues. Another, with a commanding position and every trick of British farce and Parisian drama at his fingers’ ends, finally could not write without a sermon to preach, and yet could not find texts more fundamental than the hypocrisies of sham Puritanism, or the matrimonial speculation which makes our young actresses as careful of their reputations as of their complexions. A third, too tenderhearted to break our spirits with the realities of a bitter experience, coaxed a wistful pathos and a dainty fun out of the fairy cloudland that lay between him and the empty heavens. The giants of the theatre of our time, Ibsen and Strindberg, had no greater comfort for the world than we: indeed much less; for they refused us even the Shakespearian-Dickensian consolation of laughter at mischief, accurately called comic relief. Our emancipated young successors scorn us, very properly. But they will be able to do no better whilst the drama remains pre-Evolutionist. Let them consider the great exception of Goethe. He, no richer than Shakespear, Ibsen, or Strindberg in specific talent as a playwright, is in the empyrean whilst they are gnashing their teeth in impotent fury in the mud, or at best finding an acid enjoyment in the irony of their predicament. Goethe is Olympian: the other giants are infernal in everything but their veracity and their repudiation of the irreligion of their time: that is, they are bitter and hopeless. It is not a question of mere dates. Goethe was an Evolutionist in 1830: many playwrights, even young ones, are still untouched by Creative Evolution in 1920. Ibsen was Darwinized to the extent of exploiting heredity on the stage much as the ancient Athenian playwrights exploited the Eumenides; but there is no trace in his plays of any faith in or knowledge of Creative Evolution as a modern scientific fact. True, the poetic aspiration is plain enough in his Emperor or Galilean; but it is one of Ibsen’s distinctions that nothing was valid for him but science; and he left that vision of the future which his Roman seer calls ‘the third Empire’ behind him as a Utopian dream when he settled down to his serious grapple with realities in those plays of modern life with which he overcame Europe, and broke the dusty windows of every dry-rotten theatre in it from Moscow to Manchester.

MY OWN PART IN THE MATTER

In my own activities as a playwright I found this state of things intolerable. The fashionable theatre prescribed one serious subject: clandestine adultery: the dullest of all subjects for a serious author, whatever it may be for audiences who read the police intelligence and skip the reviews and leading articles. I tried slum-landlordism, doctrinaire Free Love (pseudo-Ibsenism), prostitution, militarism, marriage, history, current politics, natural Christianity, national and individual character, paradoxes of conventional society, husband hunting, questions of conscience, professional delusions and impostures, all worked into a series of comedies of manners in the classic fashion, which was then very much out of fashion, the mechanical tricks of Parisian ‘construction’ being de rigueur in the theatre. But this, though it occupied me and established me professionally, did not constitute me an iconographer of the religion of my time, and thus fulfil my natural function as an artist. I was quite conscious of this; for I had always known that civilization needs a religion as a matter of life or death; and as the conception of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with the first condition of all the religions that have ever taken hold of humanity: namely, that it must be, first and fundamentally, a science of metabiology. This was a crucial point with me; for I had seen Bible fetichism, after standing up to all the rationalistic batteries of Hume, Voltaire, and the rest, collapse before the onslaught of much less gifted Evolutionists, solely because they discredited it as a biological document; so that from that moment it lost its hold, and left literate Christendom faithless. My own Irish eighteenth-centuryism made it impossible for me to believe anything until I could conceive it as a scientific hypothesis, even though the abominations, quackeries, impostures, venalities, credulities, and delusions of the camp followers of science, and the brazen lies and priestly pretensions of the pseudo-scientific cure-mongers, all sedulously inculcated by modern ‘secondary education,’ were so monstrous that I was sometimes forced to make a verbal distinction between science and knowledge lest I should mislead my readers. But I never forgot that without knowledge even wisdom is more dangerous than mere opportunist ignorance, and that somebody must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly.

Accordingly, in 1901, I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution. But being then at the height of my invention and comedic talent, I decorated it too brilliantly and lavishly. I surrounded it with a comedy of which it formed only one act, and that act was so completely episodical (it was a dream which did not affect the action of the piece) that the comedy could be detached and played by itself: indeed it could hardly be played at full length owing to the enormous length of the entire work, though that feat has been performed a few times in Scotland by Mr Esme Percy, who led one of the forlorn hopes of the advanced drama at that time. Also I supplied the published work with an imposing framework consisting of a preface, an appendix called The Revolutionist’s Handbook, and a final display of aphoristic fireworks. The effect was so vertiginous, apparently, that nobody noticed the new religion in the centre of the intellectual whirlpool. Now I protest I did not cut these cerebral capers in mere inconsiderate exuberance. I did it because the worst convention of the criticism of the theatre current at that time was that intellectual seriousness is out of place on the stage; that the theatre is a place of shallow amusement; that people go there to be soothed after the enormous intellectual strain of a day in the city: in short, that a playwright is a person whose business it is to make unwholesome confectionery out of cheap emotions. My answer to this was to put all my intellectual goods in the shop window under the sign of Man and Superman. That part of my design succeeded. By good luck and acting, the comedy triumphed on the stage; and the book was a good deal discussed. Since then the sweet-shop view of the theatre has been out of countenance; and its critical exponents have been driven to take an intellectual pose which, though often more trying than their old intellectually nihilistic vulgarity, at least concedes the dignity of the theatre, not to mention the usefulness of those who live by criticizing it. And the younger playwrights are not only taking their art seriously, but being taken seriously themselves. The critic who ought to be a newsboy is now comparatively rare.

I now find myself inspired to make a second legend of Creative Evolution without distractions and embellishments. My sands are running out; the exuberance of 1901 has aged into the garrulity of 1930; and the war has been a stern intimation that the matter is not one to be trifled with. I abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back to the legend of the Garden of Eden. I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables men to live for ever. I am not, I hope, under more illusion than is humanly inevitable as to the crudity of this my beginning of a Bible for Creative Evolution. I am doing the best I can at my age. My powers are waning; but so much the better for those who found me unbearably brilliant when I was in my prime. It is my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain.

PART I. In the Beginning

ACT I

The Garden of Eden. Afternoon. An immense serpent is sleeping with her head buried in a thick bed of Johnswort, and her body coiled in apparently endless rings through the branches of a tree, which is already well grown; for the days of creation have been longer than our reckoning. She is not yet visible to anyone unaware of her presence, as her colors of green and brown make a perfect camouflage. Near her head a low rock shows above the Johnswort.

The rock and tree are on the border of a glade in which lies a dead fawn all awry, its neck being broken. Adam, crouching with one hand on the rock, is staring in consternation at the dead body. He has not noticed the serpent on his left hand. He turns his face to his right and calls excitedly.

ADAM. Eve! Eve!

EVE’S VOICE. What is it, Adam?

ADAM. Come here. Quick. Something has happened.

EVE [running in] What? Where? [Adam points to the fawn]. Oh! [She goes to it; and he is emboldened to go with her]. What is the matter with its eyes?

ADAM. It is not only its eyes. Look. [He kicks it.]

EVE. Oh don’t! Why doesn’t it wake?

ADAM. I don’t know. It is not asleep.

EVE. Not asleep?

ADAM. Try.

EVE [trying to shake it and roll it over] It is stiff and cold.

ADAM. Nothing will wake it.

EVE. It has a queer smell. Pah! [She dusts her hands, and draws away from it]. Did you find it like that?

ADAM. No. It was playing about; and it tripped and went head over heels. It never stirred again. Its neck is wrong [he stoops to lift the neck and shew her].

EVE. Dont touch it. Come away from it.

They both retreat, and contemplate it from a few steps’ distance with growing repulsion.

EVE. Adam.

ADAM. Yes?

EVE. Suppose you were to trip and fall, would you go like that?

ADAM. Ugh! [He shudders and sits down on the rock].

EVE [throwing herself on the ground beside him, and grasping his knee]
You must be careful. Promise me you will be careful.

ADAM. What is the good of being careful? We have to live here for ever. Think of what for ever means! Sooner or later I shall trip and fall. It may be tomorrow; it may be after as many days as there are leaves in the garden and grains of sand by the river. No matter: some day I shall forget and stumble.

EVE. I too.

ADAM [horrified] Oh no, no. I should be alone. Alone for ever. You must never put yourself in danger of stumbling. You must not move about. You must sit still. I will take care of you and bring you what you want.

EVE [turning away from him with a shrug, and hugging her ankles] I should soon get tired of that. Besides, if it happened to you, I should be alone. I could not sit still then. And at last it would happen to me too.

ADAM. And then?

EVE. Then we should be no more. There would be only the things on all fours, and the birds, and the snakes.

ADAM. That must not be.

EVE. Yes: that must not be. But it might be.

ADAM. No. I tell you it must not be. I know that it must not be.

EVE. We both know it. How do we know it?

ADAM. There is a voice in the garden that tells me things.

EVE. The garden is full of voices sometimes. They put all sorts of thoughts into my head.

ADAM. To me there is only one voice. It is very low; but it is so near that it is like a whisper from within myself. There is no mistaking it for any voice of the birds or beasts, or for your voice.

EVE. It is strange that I should hear voices from all sides and you only one from within. But I have some thoughts that come from within me and not from the voices. The thought that we must not cease to be comes from within.

ADAM [despairingly] But we shall cease to be. We shall fall like the fawn and be broken. [Rising and moving about in his agitation]. I cannot bear this knowledge. I will not have it. It must not be, I tell you. Yet I do not know how to prevent it.

EVE. That is just what I feel; but it is very strange that you should say so: there is no pleasing you. You change your mind so often.

ADAM [scolding her] Why do you say that? How have I changed my mind?

EVE. You say we must not cease to exist. But you used to complain of having to exist always and for ever. You sometimes sit for hours brooding and silent, hating me in your heart. When I ask you what I have done to you, you say you are not thinking of me, but of the horror of having to be here for ever. But I know very well that what you mean is the horror of having to be here with me for ever.

ADAM. Oh! That is what you think, is it? Well, you are wrong. [He sits down again, sulkily]. It is the horror of having to be with myself for ever. I like you; but I do not like myself. I want to be different; to be better, to begin again and again; to shed myself as a snake sheds its skin. I am tired of myself. And yet I must endure myself, not for a day or for many days, but for ever. That is a dreadful thought. That is what makes me sit brooding and silent and hateful. Do you never think of that?

EVE. No: I do not think about myself: what is the use? I am what I am: nothing can alter that. I think about you.

ADAM. You should not. You are always spying on me. I can never be alone. You always want to know what I have been doing. It is a burden. You should try to have an existence of your own, instead of occupying yourself with my existence.

EVE. I have to think about you. You are lazy: you are dirty: you neglect yourself: you are always dreaming: you would eat bad food and become disgusting if I did not watch you and occupy myself with you. And now some day, in spite of all my care, you will fall on your head and become dead.

ADAM. Dead? What word is that?

EVE [pointing to the fawn] Like that. I call it dead.

ADAM [rising and approaching it slowly] There is something uncanny about it.

EVE [joining him] Oh! It is changing into little white worms.

ADAM. Throw it into the river. It is unbearable.

EVE. I dare not touch it.

ADAM. Then I must, though I loathe it. It is poisoning the air. [He gathers its hooves in his hand and carries it away in the direction from which Eve came, holding it as far from him as possible].

Eve looks after them for a moment; then, with a shiver of disgust, sits down on the rock, brooding. The body of the serpent becomes visible, glowing with wonderful new colors. She rears her head slowly from the bed of Johnswort, and speaks into Eve’s ear in a strange seductively musical whisper.

THE SERPENT. Eve.

EVE [startled] Who is that?

THE SERPENT. It is I. I have come to shew you my beautiful new hood. See [she spreads a magnificent amethystine hood]!

EVE [admiring it] Oh! But who taught you to speak?

THE SERPENT. You and Adam. I have crept through the grass, and hidden, and listened to you.

EVE. That was wonderfully clever of you.

THE SERPENT. I am the most subtle of all the creatures of the field.

EVE. Your hood is most lovely. [She strokes it and pets the serpent].
Pretty thing! Do you love your godmother Eve?

THE SERPENT. I adore her. [She licks Eve’s neck with her double tongue].

EVE [petting her] Eve’s wonderful darling snake. Eve will never be lonely now that her snake can talk to her.

THE SNAKE. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.

EVE [shuddering] Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw your beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things.

THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to conquer it.

EVE. How can I conquer it?

THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth.

EVE. What? [Trying to pronounce it] B-birth?

THE SERPENT. Yes, birth.

EVE. What is birth?

THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth.

EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful.

THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’ I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

EVE. Born is a beautiful word.

THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful every time?

EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why.

THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not?

EVE. But I should not like it. It would be nice to be new again; but my old skin would lie on the ground looking just like me; and Adam would see it shrivel up and —

THE SERPENT. No. He need not. There is a second birth.

EVE. A second birth?

THE SERPENT. Listen. I will tell you a great secret. I am very subtle; and I have thought and thought and thought. And I am very wilful, and must have what I want; and I have willed and willed and willed. And I have eaten strange things: stones and apples that you are afraid to eat.

EVE. You dared!

THE SERPENT. I dared everything. And at last I found a way of gathering together a part of the life in my body —

EVE. What is the life?

THE SERPENT. That which makes the difference between the dead fawn and the live one.

EVE. What a beautiful word! And what a wonderful thing! Life is the loveliest of all the new words.

THE SERPENT. Yes: it was by meditating on Life that I gained the power to do miracles.

EVE. Miracles? Another new word.

THE SERPENT. A miracle is an impossible thing that is nevertheless possible. Something that never could happen, and yet does happen.

EVE. Tell me some miracle that you have done.

THE SERPENT. I gathered a part of the life in my body, and shut it into a tiny white case made of the stones I had eaten.

EVE. And what good was that?

THE SERPENT. I shewed the little case to the sun, and left it in its warmth. And it burst; and a little snake came out; and it became bigger and bigger from day to day until it was as big as I. That was the second birth.

EVE. Oh! That is too wonderful. It stirs inside me. It hurts.

THE SERPENT. It nearly tore me asunder. Yet I am alive, and can burst my skin and renew myself as before. Soon there will be as many snakes in Eden as there are scales on my body. Then death will not matter: this snake and that snake will die; but the snakes will live.

EVE. But the rest of us will die sooner or later, like the fawn. And then there will be nothing but snakes, snakes, snakes everywhere.

THE SERPENT. That must not be. I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.

EVE. Yes: it must not be. Adam must not perish. You are very subtle: tell me what to do.

THE SERPENT. Think. Will. Eat the dust. Lick the white stone: bite the apple you dread. The sun will give life.

EVE. I do not trust the sun. I will give life myself. I will tear. another Adam from my body if I tear my body to pieces in the act.

THE SERPENT. Do. Dare it. Everything is possible: everything. Listen. I am old. I am the old serpent, older than Adam, older than Eve. I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will: she strove and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one. And when she cast the skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two: one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the other.

EVE. But why did she divide into two, and make us different?

THE SERPENT. I tell you the labor is too much for one. Two must share it.

EVE. Do you mean that Adam must share it with me? He will not. He cannot bear pain, nor take trouble with his body.

THE SERPENT. He need not. There will be no pain for him. He will implore you to let him do his share. He will be in your power through his desire.

EVE. Then I will do it. But how? How did Lilith work this miracle?

THE SERPENT. She imagined it.

EVE. What is imagined?

THE SERPENT. She told it to me as a marvellous story of something that never happened to a Lilith that never was. She did not know then that imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

EVE. How can I create out of nothing?

THE SERPENT. Everything must have been created out of nothing. Look at that thick roll of hard flesh on your strong arm! That was not always there: you could not climb a tree when I first saw you. But you willed and tried and willed and tried; and your will created out of nothing the roll on your arm until you had your desire, and could draw yourself up with one hand and seat yourself on the bough that was above your head.

EVE. That was practice.

THE SERPENT. Things wear out by practice: they do not grow by it. Your hair streams in the wind as if it were trying to stretch itself further and further. But it does not grow longer for all its practice in streaming, because you have not willed it so. When Lilith told me what she had imagined in our silent language (for there were no words then) I bade her desire it and will it; and then, to our great wonder, the thing she had desired and willed created itself in her under the urging of her will. Then I too willed to renew myself as two instead of one; and after many days the miracle happened, and I burst from my skin another snake interlaced with me; and now there are two imaginations, two desires, two wills to create with.

EVE. To desire, to imagine, to will, to create. That is too long a story. Find me one word for it all: you, who are so clever at words.

THE SERPENT. In one word, to conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

EVE. Find me a word for the story Lilith imagined and told you in your silent language: the story that was too wonderful to be true, and yet came true.

THE SERPENT. A poem.

EVE. Find me another word for what Lilith was to me.

THE SERPENT. She was your mother.

EVE. And Adam’s mother?

THE SERPENT. Yes.

EVE [about to rise] I will go and tell Adam to conceive.

THE SERPENT [laughs]!!!

EVE [jarred and startled] What a hateful noise! What is the matter with you? No one has ever uttered such a sound before.

THE SERPENT. Adam cannot conceive.

EVE. Why?

THE SERPENT. Lilith did not imagine him so. He can imagine: he can will: he can desire: he can gather his life together for a great spring towards creation: he can create all things except one; and that one is his own kind.

EVE. Why did Lilith keep this from him?

THE SERPENT. Because if he could do that he could do without Eve.

EVE. That is true. It is I who must conceive.

THE SERPENT. Yes. By that he is tied to you.

EVE. And I to him!

THE SERPENT. Yes, until you create another Adam.

EVE. I had not thought of that. You are very subtle. But if I create another Eve he may turn to her and do without me. I will not create any Eves, only Adams.

THE SERPENT. They cannot renew themselves without Eves. Sooner or later you will die like the fawn; and the new Adams will be unable to create without new Eves. You can imagine such an end; but you cannot desire it, therefore cannot will it, therefore cannot create Adams only.

EVE. If I am to die like the fawn, why should not the rest die too? What do I care?

THE SERPENT. Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.

EVE [thoughtfully] There can be no such thing as nothing. The garden is full, not empty.

THE SERPENT. I had not thought of that. That is a great thought. Yes: there is no such thing as nothing, only things we cannot see. The chameleon eats the air.

EVE. I have another thought: I must tell it to Adam. [Calling] Adam!
Adam! Coo-ee!

ADAM’S VOICE. Coo-ee!

EVE. This will please him, and cure his fits of melancholy.

THE SERPENT. Do not tell him yet. I have not told you the great secret.

EVE. What more is there to tell? It is I who have to do the miracle.

THE SERPENT. No: he, too, must desire and will. But he must give his desire and his will to you.

EVE. How?

THE SERPENT. That is the great secret. Hush! he is coming.

ADAM [returning] Is there another voice in the garden besides our voices and the Voice? I heard a new voice.

EVE [rising and running to him] Only think, Adam! Our snake has learnt to speak by listening to us.

ADAM [delighted] Is it so? [He goes past her to the stone, and fondles the serpent].

THE SERPENT [responding affectionately] It is so, dear Adam.

EVE. But I have more wonderful news than that. Adam: we need not live for ever.

ADAM [dropping the snake’s head in his excitement] What! Eve: do not play with me about this. If only there may be an end some day, and yet no end! If only I can be relieved of the horror of having to endure myself for ever! If only the care of this terrible garden may pass on to some other gardener! If only the sentinel set by the Voice can be relieved! If only the rest and sleep that enable me to bear it from day to day could grow after many days into an eternal rest, an eternal sleep, then I could face my days, however long they may last. Only, there must be some end, some end: I am not strong enough to bear eternity.

THE SERPENT. You need not live to see another summer; and yet there shall be no end.

ADAM. That cannot be.

THE SERPENT. It can be.

EVE. It shall be.

THE SERPENT. It is. Kill me; and you will find another snake in the garden tomorrow. You will find more snakes than there are fingers on your hands.

EVE. I will make other Adams, other Eves.

ADAM. I tell you you must not make up stories about this. It cannot happen.

THE SERPENT. I can remember when you were yourself a thing that could not happen. Yet you are.

ADAM [struck] That must be true. [He sits down on the stone].

THE SERPENT. I will tell Eve the secret; and she will tell it to you.

ADAM. The secret! [He turns quickly towards the serpent, and in doing so puts his foot on something sharp]. Oh!

EVE. What is it?

ADAM [rubbing his foot] A thistle. And there, next to it, a briar. And nettles, too! I am tired of pulling these things up to keep the garden pleasant for us for ever.

THE SERPENT. They do not grow very fast. They will not overrun the whole garden for a long time: not until you have laid down your burden and gone to sleep for ever. Why should you trouble yourself? Let the new Adams clear a place for themselves.

ADAM. That is very true. You must tell us your secret. You see, Eve, what a splendid thing it is not to have to live for ever.

EVE [throwing herself down discontentedly and plucking at the grass] That is so like a man. The moment you find we need not last for ever, you talk as if we were going to end today. You must clear away some of those horrid things, or we shall be scratched and stung whenever we forget to look where we are stepping.

ADAM. Oh yes, some of them, of course. But only some. I will clear them away tomorrow.

THE SERPENT [laughs]!!!

ADAM. That is a funny noise to make. I like it.

EVE. I do not. Why do you make it again?

THE SERPENT. Adam has invented something new. He has invented tomorrow. You will invent things every day now that the burden of immortality is lifted from you.

EVE. Immortality? What is that?

THE SERPENT. My new word for having to live for ever.

EVE. The serpent has made a beautiful word for being. Living.

ADAM. Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.

THE SERPENT. Procrastination.

EVE. That is a sweet word. I wish I had a serpent’s tongue.

THE SERPENT. That may come too. Everything is possible.

ADAM [springing up in sudden terror] Oh!

EVE. What is the matter now?

ADAM. My rest! My escape from life!

THE SERPENT. Death. That is the word.

ADAM. There is a terrible danger in this procrastination.

EVE. What danger?

ADAM. If I put off death until tomorrow, I shall never die. There is no such day as tomorrow, and never can be.

THE SERPENT. I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.

ADAM. If I am to overtake death, I must appoint a real day, not a tomorrow. When shall I die?

EVE. You may die when I have made another Adam. Not before. But then, as soon as you like. [She rises, and passing behind him, strolls off carelessly to the tree and leans against it, stroking a ring of the snake].

ADAM. There need be no hurry even then.

EVE. I see you will put it off until tomorrow.

ADAM. And you? Will you die the moment you have made a new Eve?

EVE. Why should I? Are you eager to be rid of me? Only just now you wanted me to sit still and never move lest I should stumble and die like the fawn. Now you no longer care.

ADAM. It does not matter so much now.

EVE [angrily to the snake] This death that you have brought into the garden is an evil thing. He wants me to die.

THE SERPENT [to Adam] Do you want her to die?

ADAM. No. It is I who am to die. Eve must not die before me. I should be lonely.

EVE. You could get one of the new Eves.

ADAM. That is true. But they might not be quite the same. They could not: I feel sure of that. They would not have the same memories. They would be — I want a word for them.

THE SERPENT. Strangers.

ADAM. Yes: that is a good hard word. Strangers.

EVE. When there are new Adams and new Eves we shall live in a garden of strangers. We shall need each other. [She comes quickly behind him and turns up his face to her]. Do not forget that, Adam. Never forget it.

ADAM. Why should I forget it? It is I who have thought of it.

EVE. I, too, have thought of something. The fawn stumbled and fell and died. But you could come softly up behind me and [she suddenly pounces on his shoulders and throws him forward on his face] throw me down so that I should die. I should not dare to sleep if there were no reason why you should not make me die.

ADAM [scrambling up in horror] Make you die!!! What a frightful thought!

THE SERPENT. Kill, kill, kill, kill. That is the word.

EVE. The new Adams and Eves might kill us. I shall not make them. [She sits on the rock and pulls him down beside her, clasping him to her with her right arm].

THE SERPENT. You must. For if you do not there will be an end.

ADAM. No: they will not kill us: they will feel as I do. There is something against it. The Voice in the garden will tell them that they must not kill, as it tells me.

THE SERPENT. The voice in the garden is your own voice.

ADAM. It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.

EVE. The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.

ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish] Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —

THE SERPENT. Love. Love. Love.

ADAM. That is too short a word for so long a thing.

THE SERPENT [laughs]!!!

EVE [turning impatiently to the snake] That heart-biting sound again!
Do not do it. Why do you do it?

THE SERPENT. Love may be too long a word for so short a thing soon. But when it is short it will be very sweet.

ADAM [ruminating] You puzzle me. My old trouble was heavy; but it was simple. These wonders that you promise to do may tangle up my being before they bring me the gift of death. I was troubled with the burden of eternal being; but I was not confused in my mind. If I did not know that I loved Eve, at least I did not know that she might cease to love me, and come to love some other Adam and desire my death. Can you find a name for that knowledge?

THE SERPENT. Jealousy. Jealousy. Jealousy.

ADAM. A hideous word.

EVE [shaking him] Adam: you must not brood. You think too much.

ADAM [angrily] How can I help brooding when the future has become uncertain? Anything is better than uncertainty. Life has become uncertain. Love is uncertain. Have you a word for this new misery?

THE SERPENT. Fear. Fear. Fear.

ADAM. Have you a remedy for it?

THE SERPENT. Yes. Hope. Hope. Hope.

ADAM. What is hope?

THE SERPENT. As long as you do not know the future you do not know that it will not be happier than the past. That is hope.

ADAM. It does not console me. Fear is stronger in me than hope. I must have certainty. [He rises threateningly]. Give it to me; or I will kill you when next I catch you asleep.

EVE [throwing her arms round the serpent] My beautiful snake. Oh no.
How can you even think such a horror?

ADAM. Fear will drive me to anything. The serpent gave me fear. Let it now give me certainty or go in fear of me.

THE SERPENT. Bind the future by your will. Make a vow.

ADAM. What is a vow?

THE SERPENT. Choose a day for your death; and resolve to die on that day. Then death is no longer uncertain but certain. Let Eve vow to love you until your death. Then love will be no longer uncertain.

ADAM. Yes: that is splendid: that will bind the future.

EVE [displeased, turning away from the serpent] But it will destroy hope.

ADAM [angrily] Be silent, woman. Hope is wicked. Happiness is wicked.
Certainty is blessed.

THE SERPENT. What is wicked? You have invented a word.

ADAM. Whatever I fear to do is wicked. Listen to me, Eve; and you, snake, listen too, that your memory may hold my vow. I will live a thousand sets of the four seasons —

THE SERPENT. Years. Years.

ADAM. I will live a thousand years; and then I will endure no more: I will die and take my rest. And I will love Eve all that time and no other woman.

EVE. And if Adam keeps his vow I will love no other man until he dies.

THE SERPENT. You have both invented marriage. And what he will be to you and not to any other woman is husband; and what you will be to him and not to any other man is wife.

ADAM [instinctively moving his hand towards her] Husband and wife.

EVE [slipping her hand into his] Wife and husband.

THE SERPENT [laughs]!!!

EVE [snatching herself loose from Adam] Do not make that odious noise,
I tell you.

ADAM. Do not listen to her: the noise is good: it lightens my heart. You are a jolly snake. But you have not made a vow yet. What vow do you make?

THE SERPENT. I make no vows. I take my chance.

ADAM. Chance? What does that mean?

THE SERPENT. It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

EVE. Creation must not be strangled. I tell you I will create, though I tear myself to pieces in the act.

ADAM. Be silent, both of you. I will bind the future. I will be delivered from fear. [To Eve] We have made our vows; and if you must create, you shall create within the bounds of those vows. You shall not listen to that snake any more. Come [he seizes her by the hair to drag her away].

EVE. Let me go, you fool. It has not yet told me the secret.

ADAM [releasing her] That is true. What is a fool?

EVE. I do not know: the word came to me. It is what you are when you forget and brood and are filled with fear. Let us listen to the snake.

ADAM. No: I am afraid of it. I feel as if the ground were giving way under my feet when it speaks. Do you stay and listen to it.

THE SERPENT [laughs]!!!

ADAM [brightening] That noise takes away fear. Funny. The snake and the woman are going to whisper secrets. [He chuckles and goes away slowly, laughing his first laugh].

EVE. Now the secret. The secret. [She sits on the rock and throws her arms round the serpent, who begins whispering to her].

Eve’s face lights up with intense interest, which increases until an expression of overwhelming repugnance takes its place. She buries her face in her hands.

ACT II

A few centuries later. Morning. An oasis in Mesopotamia. Close at hand the end of a log house abuts on a kitchen garden. Adam is digging in the middle of the garden. On his right, Eve sits on a stool in the shadow of a tree by the doorway, spinning flax. Her wheel, which she turns by hand, is a large disc of heavy wood, practically a flywheel. At the opposite side of the garden is a thorn brake with a passage through it barred by a hurdle.

The two are scantily and carelessly dressed in rough linen and leaves. They have lost their youth and grace; and Adam has an unkempt beard and jaggedly cut hair; but they are strong and in the prime of life. Adam looks worried, like a farmer. Eve, better humored (having given up worrying), sits and spins and thinks.

A MAN’S VOICE. Hallo, mother!

EVE [looking across the garden towards the hurdle] Here is Cain.

ADAM [uttering a grunt of disgust]!!! [He goes on digging without raising his head].

Cain kicks the hurdle out of his way, and strides into the garden. In pose, voice, and dress he is insistently warlike. He is equipped with huge spear and broad brass-bound leather shield; his casque is a tiger’s head with bull’s horns; he wears a scarlet cloak with gold brooch over a lion’s skin with the claws dangling; his feet are in sandals with brass ornaments; his shins are in brass greaves; and his bristling military moustache glistens with oil. To his parents he has the self-assertive, not-quite-at-ease manner of a revolted son who knows that he is not forgiven nor approved of.

CAIN [to Adam] Still digging? Always dig, dig, dig. Sticking in the old furrow. No progress! no advanced ideas! no adventures! What should I be if I had stuck to the digging you taught me?

ADAM. What are you now, with your shield and spear, and your brother’s blood crying from the ground against you?

CAIN. I am the first murderer: you are only the first man. Anybody could be the first man: it is as easy as to be the first cabbage. To be the first murderer one must be a man of spirit.

ADAM. Begone. Leave us in peace. The world is wide enough to keep us apart.

EVE. Why do you want to drive him away? He is mine. I made him out of my own body. I want to see my work sometimes.

ADAM. You made Abel also. He killed Abel. Can you bear to look at him after that?

CAIN. Whose fault was it that I killed Abel? Who invented killing? Did I? No: he invented it himself. I followed your teaching. I dug and dug and dug. I cleared away the thistles and briars. I ate the fruits of the earth. I lived in the sweat of my brow, as you do. I was a fool. But Abel was a discoverer, a man of ideas, of spirit: a true Progressive. He was the discoverer of blood. He was the inventor of killing. He found out that the fire of the sun could be brought down by a dewdrop. He invented the altar to keep the fire alive. He changed the beasts he killed into meat by the fire on the altar. He kept himself alive by eating meat. His meal cost him a day’s glorious health-giving sport and an hour’s amusing play with the fire. You learnt nothing from him: you drudged and drudged and drudged, and dug and dug and dug, and made me do the same. I envied his happiness, his freedom. I despised myself for not doing as he did instead of what you did. He became so happy that he shared his meal with the Voice that had whispered all his inventions to him. He said that the Voice was the voice of the fire that cooked his food, and that the fire that could cook could also eat. It was true: I saw the fire consume the food on his altar. Then I, too, made an altar, and offered my food on it, my grains, my roots, my fruit. Useless: nothing happened. He laughed at me; and then came my great idea: why not kill him as he killed the beasts? I struck; and he died, just as they did. Then I gave up your old silly drudging ways, and lived as he had lived, by the chase, by the killing, and by the fire. Am I not better than you? stronger, happier, freer?

ADAM. You are not stronger: you are shorter in the wind: you cannot endure. You have made the beasts afraid of us; and the snake has invented poison to protect herself against you. I fear you myself. If you take a step towards your mother with that spear of yours I will strike you with my spade as you struck Abel.

EVE. He will not strike me. He loves me.

ADAM. He loved his brother. But he killed him.

CAIN. I do not want to kill women. I do not want to kill my mother. And for her sake I will not kill you, though I could send this spear through you without coming within reach of your spade. But for her, I could not resist the sport of trying to kill you, in spite of my fear that you would kill me. I have striven with a boar and with a lion as to which of us should kill the other. I have striven with a man: spear to spear and shield to shield. It is terrible; but there is no joy like it. I call it fighting. He who has never fought has never lived. That is what has brought me to my mother today.

ADAM. What have you to do with one another now? She is the creator, you the destroyer.

CAIN. How can I destroy unless she creates? I want her to create more and more men: aye, and more and more women, that they may in turn create more men. I have imagined a glorious poem of many men, of more men than there are leaves on a thousand trees. I will divide them into two great hosts. One of them I will lead; and the other will be led by the man I fear most and desire to fight and kill most. And each host shall try to kill the other host. Think of that! all those multitudes of men fighting, fighting, killing, killing! The four rivers running with blood! The shouts of triumph! the howls of rage! the curses of despair! the shrieks of torment! That will be life indeed: life lived to the very marrow: burning, overwhelming life. Every man who has not seen it, heard it, felt it, risked it, will feel a humbled fool in the presence of the man who has.

EVE. And I! I am to be a mere convenience to make men for you to kill!

ADAM. Or to kill you, you fool.

CAIN. Mother: the making of men is your right, your risk, your agony, your glory, your triumph. You make my father here your mere convenience, as you call it, for that. He has to dig for you, sweat for you, plod for you, like the ox who helps him to tear up the ground or the ass who carries his burdens for him. No woman shall make me live my father’s life. I will hunt: I will fight and strive to the very bursting of my sinews. When I have slain the boar at the risk of my life, I will throw it to my woman to cook, and give her a morsel of it for her pains. She shall have no other food; and that will make her my slave. And the man that slays me shall have her for his booty. Man shall be the master of Woman, not her baby and her drudge.

Adam throws down his spade, and stands looking darkly at Eve.

EVE. Are you tempted, Adam? Does this seem a better thing to you than love between us?

CAIN. What does he know of love? Only when he has fought, when he has faced terror and death, when he has striven to the spending of the last rally of his strength, can he know what it is to rest in love in the arms of a woman. Ask that woman whom you made, who is also my wife, whether she would have me as I was in the days when I followed the ways of Adam, and was a digger and a drudge?

EVE [angrily throwing down her distaff] What! You dare come here boasting about that good-for-nothing Lua, the worst of daughters and the worst of wives! You her master! You are more her slave than Adam’s ox or your own sheepdog. Forsooth, when you have slain the boar at the risk of your life, you will throw her a morsel of it for her pains! Ha! Poor wretch: do you think I do not know her, and know you, better than that? Do you risk your life when you trap the ermine and the sable and the blue fox to hang on her lazy shoulders and make her look more like an animal than a woman? When you have to snare the little tender birds because it is too much trouble for her to chew honest food, how much of a great warrior do you feel then? You slay the tiger at the risk of your life; but who gets the striped skin you have run that risk for? She takes it to lie on, and flings you the carrion flesh you cannot eat. You fight because you think that your fighting makes her admire and desire you. Fool: she makes you fight because you bring her the ornaments and the treasures of those you have slain, and because she is courted and propitiated with power and gold by the people who fear you. You say that I make a mere convenience of Adam: I who spin and keep the house, and bear and rear children, and am a woman and not a pet animal to please men and prey on them! What are you, you poor slave of a painted face and a bundle of skunk’s fur? You were a man-child when I bore you. Lua was a woman-child when I bore her. What have you made of yourselves?

CAIN [letting his spear fall into the crook of his shield arm, and twirling his moustache] There is something higher than man. There is hero and superman.

EVE. Superman! You are no superman: you are Anti-Man: you are to other men what the stoat is to the rabbit; and she is to you what the leech is to the stoat. You despise your father; but when he dies the world will be the richer because he lived. When you die, men will say, ‘He was a great warrior; but it would have been better for the world if he had never been born.’ And of Lua they will say nothing; but when they think of her they will spit.

CAIN. She is a better sort of woman to live with than you. If Lua nagged at me as you are nagging, and as you nag at Adam, I would beat her black and blue from head to foot. I have done it too, slave as you say I am.

EVE. Yes, because she looked at another man. And then you grovelled at her feet, and cried, and begged her to forgive you, and were ten times more her slave than ever; and she, when she had finished screaming and the pain went off a little, she forgave you, did she not?

CAIN. She loved me more than ever. That is the true nature of woman.

EVE [now pitying him maternally] Love! You call that love! You call that the nature of woman! My boy: this is neither man nor woman nor love nor life. You have no real strength in your bones nor sap in your flesh.

CAIN. Ha! [he seizes his spear and swings it muscularly].

EVE. Yes: you have to twirl a stick to feel your strength: you cannot taste life without making it bitter and boiling hot: you cannot love Lua until her face is painted, nor feel the natural warmth of her flesh until you have stuck a squirrel’s fur on it. You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

ADAM. Enough said. Let the boy alone.

CAIN. Boy! Ha! ha!

EVE [to Adam] You think, perhaps, that his way of life may be better than yours after all. You are still tempted. Well, will you pamper me as he pampers his woman? Will you kill tigers and bears until I have a heap of their skins to lounge on? Shall I paint my face and let my arms waste into pretty softness, and eat partridges and doves, and the flesh of kids whose milk you will steal for me?

ADAM. You are hard enough to bear with as you are. Stay as you are; and
I will stay as I am.

CAIN. You neither of you know anything about life. You are simple country folk. You are the nurses and valets of the oxen and dogs and asses you have tamed to work for you. I can raise you out of that. I have a plan. Why not tame men and women to work for us? Why not bring them up from childhood never to know any other lot, so that they may believe that we are gods, and that they are here only to make life glorious for us?

ADAM [impressed] That is a great thought, certainly.

EVE [contemptuously] Great thought!

ADAM. Well, as the serpent used to say, why not?

EVE. Because I would not have such wretches in my house. Because I hate creatures with two heads, or with withered limbs, or that are distorted and perverted and unnatural. I have told Cain already that he is not a man and that Lua is not a woman: they are monsters. And now you want to make still more unnatural monsters, so that you may be utterly lazy and worthless, and that your tamed human animals may find work a blasting curse. A fine dream, truly! [To Cain] Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow; and your baggage of a wife is worse.

ADAM. Why am I a fool? How am I a greater fool than you?

EVE. You said there would be no killing because the Voice would tell our children that they must not kill. Why did it not tell Cain that?

CAIN. It did; but I am not a child to be afraid of a Voice. The Voice thought I was nothing but my brother’s keeper. It found that I was myself, and that it was for Abel to be himself also, and look to himself. He was not my keeper any more than I was his: why did he not kill me? There was no more to prevent him than there was to prevent me: it was man to man; and I won. I was the first conqueror.

ADAM. What did the Voice say to you when you thought all that?

CAIN. Why, it gave me right. It said that my deed was as a mark on me, a burnt-in mark such as Abel put on his sheep, that no man should slay me. And here I stand unslain, whilst the cowards who have never slain, the men who are content to be their brothers’ keepers instead of their masters, are despised and rejected, and slain like rabbits. He who bears the brand of Cain shall rule the earth. When he falls, he shall be avenged sevenfold: the Voice has said it; so beware how you plot against me, you and all the rest.

ADAM. Cease your boasting and bullying, and tell the truth. Does not the Voice tell you that as no man dare slay you for murdering your brother, you ought to slay yourself?

CAIN. No.

ADAM. Then there is no such thing as divine justice, unless you are lying.

CAIN. I am not lying: I dare all truths. There is divine justice. For the Voice tells me that I must offer myself to every man to be killed if he can kill me. Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel’s blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

ADAM [picking up his spade and preparing to dig again] Take yourself off then. This splendid life of yours does not last for a thousand years; and I must last for a thousand years. When you fighters do not get killed in fighting one another or fighting the beasts, you die from mere evil in yourselves. Your flesh ceases to grow like man’s flesh: it grows like a fungus on a tree. Instead of breathing you sneeze, or cough up your insides, and wither and perish. Your bowels become rotten; your hair falls from you; your teeth blacken and drop out; and you die before your time, not because you will, but because you must. I will dig, and live.

CAIN. And pray, what use is this thousand years of life to you, you old vegetable? Do you dig any better because you have been digging for hundreds of years? I have not lived as long as you; but I know all there is to be known of the craft of digging. By quitting it I have set myself free to learn nobler crafts of which you know nothing. I know the craft of fighting and of hunting: in a word, the craft of killing. What certainty have you of your thousand years? I could kill both of you; and you could no more defend yourselves than a couple of sheep. I spare you; but others may kill you. Why not live bravely, and die early and make room for others? Why, I — I! that know many more crafts than either of you, am tired of myself when I am not fighting or hunting. Sooner than face a thousand years of it I should kill myself, as the Voice sometimes tempts me to do already.

ADAM. Liar: you denied just now that it called on you to pay for Abel’s life with your own.

CAIN. The Voice does not speak to me as it does to you. I am a man: you are only a grown-up child. One does not speak to a child as to a man. And a man does not listen and tremble in silence. He replies: he makes the Voice respect him: in the end he dictates what the Voice shall say.

ADAM. May your tongue be accurst for such blasphemy!

EVE. Keep a guard on your own tongue; and do not curse my son. It was Lilith who did wrong when she shared the labor of creation so unequally between man and wife. If you, Cain, had had the trouble of making Abel, or had had to make another man to replace him when he was gone, you would not have killed him: you would have risked your own life to save his. That is why all this empty talk of yours, which tempted Adam just now when he threw down his spade and listened to you for a while, went by me like foul wind that has passed over a dead body. That is why there is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer. I know you: I am your mother. You are idle: you are selfish. It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made. When you dug, you made the earth live and bring forth as I live and bring forth. It was for that that Lilith set you free from the travail of women, not for theft and murder.

CAIN. The Devil thank her for it! I can make better use of my time than to play the husband to the clay beneath my feet.

ADAM. Devil? What new word is that?

CAIN. Hearken to me, old fool. I have never in my soul listened willingly when you have told me of the Voice that whispers to you. There must be two Voices: one that gulls and despises you, and another that trusts and respects me. I call yours the Devil. Mine I call the Voice of God.

ADAM. Mine is the Voice of Life: yours the Voice of Death.

CAIN. Be it so. For it whispers to me that death is not really death: that it is the gate of another life: a life infinitely splendid and intense: a life of the soul alone: a life without clods or spades, hunger or fatigue —

EVE. Selfish and idle, Cain. I know.

CAIN. Selfish, yes: a life in which no man is his brother’s keeper, because his brother can keep himself. But am I idle? In rejecting your drudgery, have I not embraced evils and agonies of which you know nothing? The arrow is lighter in the hand than the spade; but the energy that drives it through the breast of a fighter is as fire to water compared with the strength that drives the spade into the harmless dirty clay. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

ADAM. What is that word? What is pure?

CAIN. Turned from the clay. Turned upward to the sun, to the clear clean heavens.

ADAM. The heavens are empty, child. The earth is fruitful. The earth feeds us. It gives us the strength by which we made you and all mankind. Cut off from the clay which you despise, you would perish miserably.

CAIN. I revolt against the clay. I revolt against the food. You say it gives us strength: does it not also turn into filth and smite us with diseases? I revolt against these births that you and mother are so proud of. They drag us down to the level of the beasts. If that is to be the last thing as it has been the first, let mankind perish. If I am to eat like a bear, if Lua is to bring forth cubs like a bear, then I had rather be a bear than a man; for the bear is not ashamed: he knows no better. If you are content, like the bear, I am not. Stay with the woman who gives you children: I will go to the woman who gives me dreams. Grope in the ground for your food: I will bring it from the skies with my arrows, or strike it down as it roams the earth in the pride of its life. If I must have food or die, I will at least have it at as far a remove from the earth as I can. The ox shall make it something nobler than grass before it comes to me. And as the man is nobler than the ox, I shall some day let my enemy eat the ox; and then I will slay and eat him.

ADAM. Monster! You hear this, Eve?

EVE. So that is what comes of turning your face to the clean clear heavens! Man-eating! Child-eating! For that is what it would come to, just as it came to lambs and kids when Abel began with sheep and goats. You are a poor silly creature after all. Do you think I never have these thoughts: I! who have the labor of the child-bearing: I! who have the drudgery of preparing the food? I thought for a moment that perhaps this strong brave son of mine, who could imagine something better, and could desire what he imagined, might also be able to will what he desired until he created it. And all that comes of it is that he wants to be a bear and eat children. Even a bear would not eat a man if it could get honey instead.

CAIN. I do not want to be a bear. I do not want to eat children. I do not know what I want, except that I want to be something higher and nobler than this stupid old digger whom Lilith made to help you to bring me into the world, and whom you despise now that he has served your turn.

ADAM [in sullen rage] I have half a mind to shew you that my spade can split your undutiful head open, in spite of your spear.

CAIN. Undutiful! Ha! ha! [Flourishing his spear] Try it, old everybody’s father. Try a taste of fighting.

EVE. Peace, peace, you two fools. Sit down and be quiet; and listen to me. [Adam, with a weary shrug, throws down his spade. Cain, with a laughing one, throws down his shield and spear. Both sit on the ground]. I hardly know which of you satisfies me least, you with your dirty digging, or he with his dirty killing. I cannot think it was for either of these cheap ways of life that Lilith set you free. [To Adam] You dig roots and coax grains out of the earth: why do you not draw down a divine sustenance from the skies? He steals and kills for his food; and makes up idle poems of life after death; and dresses up his terror-ridden life with fine words and his disease-ridden body with fine clothes, so that men may glorify and honor him instead of cursing him as murderer and thief. All you men, except only Adam, are my sons, or my sons’ sons, or my sons’ sons’ sons: you all come to see me: you all shew off before me: all your little wisdoms and accomplishments are trotted out before mother Eve. The diggers come: the fighters and killers come: they are both very dull; for they either complain to me of the last harvest, or boast to me of the last fight; and one harvest is just like another, and the last fight only a repetition of the first. Oh, I have heard it all a thousand times. They tell me too of their last-born: the clever thing the darling child said yesterday, and how much more wonderful or witty or quaint it is than any child that ever was born before. And I have to pretend to be surprised, delighted, interested; though the last child is like the first, and has said and done nothing that did not delight Adam and me when you and Abel said it. For you were the first children in the world, and filled us with such wonder and delight as no couple can ever again feel while the world lasts. When I can bear no more, I go to our old garden, that is now a mass of nettles and thistles, in the hope of finding the serpent to talk to. But you have made the serpent our enemy: she has left the garden, or is dead: I never see her now. So I have to come back and listen to Adam saying the same thing for the ten-thousandth time, or to receive a visit from the last great-great-grandson who has grown up and wants to impress me with his importance. Oh, it is dreary, dreary! And there is yet nearly seven hundred years of it to endure.

CAIN. Poor mother! You see, life is too long. One tires of everything.
There is nothing new under the sun.

ADAM [to Eve, grumpily] Why do you live on, if you can find nothing better to do than complain?

EVE. Because there is still hope.

CAIN. Of what?

EVE. Of the coming true of your dreams and mine. Of newly created things. Of better things. My sons and my son’s sons are not all diggers and fighters. Some of them will neither dig nor fight: they are more useless than either of you: they are weaklings and cowards: they are vain; yet they are dirty and will not take the trouble to cut their hair. They borrow and never pay; but one gives them what they want, because they tell beautiful lies in beautiful words. They can remember their dreams. They can dream without sleeping. They have not will enough to create instead of dreaming; but the serpent said that every dream could be willed into creation by those strong enough to believe in it. There are others who cut reeds of different lengths and blow through them, making lovely patterns of sound in the air; and some of them can weave the patterns together, sounding three reeds at the same time, and raising my soul to things for which I have no words. And others make little mammoths out of clay, or make faces appear on flat stones, and ask me to create women for them with such faces. I have watched those faces and willed; and then I have made a woman-child that has grown up quite like them. And others think of numbers without having to count on their fingers, and watch the sky at night, and give names to the stars, and can foretell when the sun will be covered with a black saucepan lid. And there is Tubal, who made this wheel for me which has saved me so much labor. And there is Enoch, who walks on the hills, and hears the Voice continually, and has given up his will to do the will of the Voice, and has some of the Voice’s greatness. When they come, there is always some new wonder, or some new hope: something to live for. They never want to die, because they are always learning and always creating either things or wisdom, or at least dreaming of them. And then you, Cain, come to me with your stupid fighting and destroying, and your foolish boasting; and you want me to tell you that it is all splendid, and that you are heroic, and that nothing but death or the dread of death makes life worth living. Away with you, naughty child; and do you, Adam, go on with your work and not waste your time listening to him.

CAIN. I am not, perhaps, very clever; but —

EVE [interrupting him] Perhaps not; but do not begin to boast of that.
It is no credit to you.

CAIN. For all that, mother, I have an instinct which tells me that death plays its part in life. Tell me this: who invented death?

Adam springs to his feet. Eve drops her distaff. Both shew the greatest consternation.

CAIN. What is the matter with you both?

ADAM. Boy: you have asked us a terrible question.

EVE. You invented murder. Let that be enough for you.

CAIN. Murder is not death. You know what I mean. Those whom I slay would die if I spared them. If I am not slain, yet I shall die. Who put this upon me? I say, who invented death?

ADAM. Be reasonable, boy. Could you bear to live for ever? You think you could, because you know that you will never have to make your thought good. But I have known what it is to sit and brood under the terror of eternity, of immortality. Think of it, man: to have no escape! to be Adam, Adam, Adam through more days than there are grains of sand by the two rivers, and then be as far from the end as ever! I, who have so much in me that I hate and long to cast off! Be thankful to your parents, who enabled you to hand on your burden to new and better men, and won for you an eternal rest; for it was we who invented death.

CAIN [rising] You did well: I, too, do not want to live for ever. But if you invented death, why do you blame me, who am a minister of death?

ADAM. I do not blame you. Go in peace. Leave me to my digging, and your mother to her spinning.

CAIN. Well, I will leave you to it, though I have shewn you a better way. [He picks up his shield and spear]. I will go back to my brave warrior friends and their splendid women. [He strides to the thorn brake]. When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman? [He goes away roaring with laughter, which ceases as he cries from the distance] Goodbye, mother.

ADAM [grumbling] He might have put the hurdle back, lazy hound! [He replaces the hurdle across the passage].

EVE. Through him and his like, death is gaining on life. Already most of our grandchildren die before they have sense enough to know how to live.

ADAM. No matter. [He spits on his hands, and takes up the spade again]. Life is still long enough to learn to dig, short as they are making it.

EVE [musing] Yes, to dig. And to fight. But is it long enough for the other things, the great things? Will they live long enough to eat manna?

ADAM. What is manna?

EVE. Food drawn down from heaven, made out of the air, not dug dirtily from the earth. Will they learn all the ways of all the stars in their little time? It took Enoch two hundred years to learn to interpret the will of the Voice. When he was a mere child of eighty, his babyish attempts to understand the Voice were more dangerous than the wrath of Cain. If they shorten their lives, they will dig and fight and kill and die; and their baby Enochs will tell them that it is the will of the Voice that they should dig and fight and kill and die for ever.

ADAM. If they are lazy and have a will towards death I cannot help it. I will live my thousand years: if they will not, let them die and be damned.

EVE. Damned? What is that?

ADAM. The state of them that love death more than life. Go on with your spinning; and do not sit there idle while I am straining my muscles for you.

EVE [slowly taking up her distaff] If you were not a fool you would find something better for both of us to live by than this spinning and digging.

ADAM. Go on with your work, I tell you; or you shall go without bread.

EVE. Man need not always live by bread alone. There is something else. We do not yet know what it is; but some day we shall find out; and then we will live on that alone; and there shall be no more digging nor spinning, nor fighting nor killing.

She spins resignedly; he digs impatiently.

PART II. The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas

In the first years after the war an impressive-looking gentleman of 50 is seated writing in a well-furnished spacious study. He is dressed in black. His coat is a frock-coat; his tie is white; and his waistcoat, though it is not quite a clergyman’s waistcoat, and his collar, though it buttons in front instead of behind, combine with the prosperity indicated by his surroundings, and his air of personal distinction, to suggest the clerical dignitary. Still, he is clearly neither dean nor bishop; he is rather too starkly intellectual for a popular Free Church enthusiast; and he is not careworn enough to be a great headmaster.

The study windows, which have broad comfortable window seats, overlook Hampstead Heath towards London. Consequently, it being a fine afternoon in spring, the room is sunny. As you face these windows, you have on your right the fireplace, with a few logs smouldering in it, and a couple of comfortable library chairs on the hearthrug; beyond it and beside it the door; before you the writing-table, at which the clerical gentleman sits a little to your left facing the door with his right profile presented to you; on your left a settee; and on your right a couple of Chippendale chairs. There is also an upholstered square stool in the middle of the room, against the writing-table. The walls are covered with bookshelves above and lockers beneath.

The door opens; and another gentleman, shorter than the clerical one, within a year or two of the same age, dressed in a well-worn tweed lounge suit, with a short beard and much less style in his bearing and carriage, looks in.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [familiar and by no means cordial] Hallo! I didn’t expect you until the five o’clock train.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [coming in very slowly] I have something on my mind. I thought I’d come early.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [throwing down his pen] What is on your mind?

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [sitting down on the stool, heavily preoccupied with his thought] I have made up my mind at last about the time. I make it three hundred years.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [sitting up energetically] Now that is extraordinary. Most extraordinary. The very last words I wrote when you interrupted me were ‘at least three centuries.’ [He snatches up his manuscript, and points to it]. Here it is: [reading] ‘the term of human life must be extended to at least three centuries.’

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN. How did you arrive at it?

A parlor maid opens the door, ushering in a young clergyman.

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Haslam. [She withdraws].

The visitor is so very unwelcome that his host forgets to rise; and the two brothers stare at the intruder, quite unable to conceal their dismay. Haslam, who has nothing clerical about him except his collar, and wears a snuff-colored suit, smiles with a frank school-boyishness that makes it impossible to be unkind to him, and explodes into obviously unpremeditated speech.

HASLAM. I’m afraid I’m an awful nuisance. I’m the rector; and I suppose one ought to call on people.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [in ghostly tones] We’re not Church people, you know.

HASLAM. Oh, I don’t mind that, if you don’t. The Church people here are mostly as dull as ditch-water. I have heard such a lot about you; and there are so jolly few people to talk to. I thought you perhaps wouldn’t mind. Do you mind? for of course I’ll go like a shot if I’m in the way.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [rising, disarmed] Sit down, Mr — er?

HASLAM. Haslam.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN. Mr Haslam.

THE TWEEDED GENTLEMAN [rising and offering him the stool] Sit down. [He retreats towards the Chippendale chairs].

HASLAM [sitting down on the stool] Thanks awfully.

THE CLERICAL GENTLEMAN [resuming his seat] This is my brother Conrad, Professor of Biology at Jarrowfields University: Dr. Conrad Barnabas. My name is Franklyn: Franklyn Barnabas. I was in the Church myself for some years.

HASLAM [sympathizing] Yes: one cant help it. If theres a living in the family, or one’s Governor knows a patron, one gets shoved into the Church by one’s parents.

CONRAD [sitting down on the furthest Chippendale with a snort of amusement] Mp!

FRANKLYN. One gets shoved out of it, sometimes, by one’s conscience.

HASLAM. Oh yes; but where is a chap like me to go? I’m afraid I’m not intellectual enough to split straws when theres a job in front of me, and nothing better for me to do. I daresay the Church was a bit thick for you; but it’s good enough for me. It will last my time, anyhow [he laughs good-humoredly].

FRANKLYN [with renewed energy] There again! You see, Con. It will last his time. Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

HASLAM. Thats a way of looking at it, certainly.

FRANKLYN. I was not shoved into the Church, Mr Haslam: I felt it to be my vocation to walk with God, like Enoch. After twenty years of it I realized that I was walking with my own ignorance and self-conceit, and that I was not within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom I was pretending to.

HASLAM. Now I come to think of it, old Methuselah must have had to think twice before he took on anything for life. If I thought I was going to live nine hundred and sixty years, I don’t think I should stay in the Church.

FRANKLYN. If men lived even a third of that time, the Church would be very different from the thing it is.

CONRAD. If I could count on nine hundred and sixty years I could make myself a real biologist, instead of what I am now: a child trying to walk. Are you sure you might not become a good clergyman if you had a few centuries to do it in?

HASLAM. Oh, theres nothing much the matter with me: it’s quite easy to be a decent parson. It’s the Church that chokes me off. I couldnt stick it for nine hundred years. I should chuck it. You know, sometimes, when the bishop, who is the most priceless of fossils, lets off something more than usually out-of-date, the bird starts in my garden.

FRANKLYN. The bird?

HASLAM. Oh yes. Theres a bird there that keeps on singing ‘Stick it or chuck it: stick it or chuck it’ — just like that — for an hour on end in the spring. I wish my father had found some other shop for me.

The parlor maid comes back.

THE PARLOR MAID. Any letters for the post, sir?

FRANKLYN. These. [He proffers a basket of letters. She comes to the table and takes them].

HASLAM [to the maid] Have you told Mr Barnabas yet?

THE PARLOR MAID [flinching a little] No, sir.

FRANKLYN. Told me what?

HASLAM. She is going to leave you?

FRANKLYN. Indeed? I’m sorry. Is it our fault, Mr Haslam?

HASLAM. Not a bit. She is jolly well off here.

THE PARLOR MAID [reddening] I have never denied it, sir: I couldnt ask for a better place. But I have only one life to live; and I maynt get a second chance. Excuse me, sir; but the letters must go to catch the post. [She goes out with the letters.]

The two brothers look inquiringly at Haslam.

HASLAM. Silly girl! Going to marry a village woodman and live in a hovel with him and a lot of kids tumbling over one another, just because the fellow has poetic-looking eyes and a moustache.

CONRAD [demurring] She said it was because she had only one life.

HASLAM. Same thing, poor girl! The fellow persuaded her to chuck it; and when she marries him she’ll have to stick it. Rotten state of things, I call it.

CONRAD. You see, she hasnt time to find out what life really means. She has to die before she knows.

HASLAM [agreeably] Thats it.

FRANKLYN. She hasnt time to form a well-instructed conscience.

HASLAM [still more cheerfully] Quite.

FRANKLYN. It goes deeper. She hasnt time to form a genuine conscience at all. Some romantic points of honor and a few conventions. A world without conscience: that is the horror of our condition.

HASLAM [beaming] Simply fatuous. [Rising] Well, I suppose I’d better be going. It’s most awfully good of you to put up with my calling.

CONRAD [in his former low ghostly tone] You neednt go, you know, if you are really interested.

HASLAM [fed up] Well, I’m afraid I ought to — I really must get back — I have something to do in the —

FRANKLYN [smiling benignly and rising to proffer his hand] Goodbye.

CONRAD [gruffly, giving him up as a bad job] Goodbye.

HASLAM. Goodbye. Sorry — er —

As the rector moves to shake hands with Franklyn, feeling that he is making a frightful mess of his departure, a vigorous sunburnt young lady with hazel hair cut to the level of her neck, like an Italian youth in a Gozzoli picture, comes in impetuously. She seems to have nothing on but her short skirt, her blouse, her stockings, and a pair of Norwegian shoes: in short, she is a Simple-Lifer.

THE SIMPLE-LIFER [swooping on Conrad and kissing him] Hallo, Nunk.
Youre before your time.

CONRAD. Behave yourself. Theres a visitor.

She turns quickly and sees the rector. She instinctively switches at her Gozzoli fringe with her fingers, but gives it up as hopeless.

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our new rector. [To Haslam] My daughter Cynthia.

CONRAD. Usually called Savvy, short for Savage.

SAVVY. I usually call Mr Haslam Bill, short for William. [She strolls to the hearthrug, and surveys them calmly from that commanding position].

FRANKLYN. You know him?

SAVVY. Rather. Sit down, Bill.

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam is going, Savvy. He has an engagement.

SAVVY. I know. I’m the engagement.

CONRAD. In that case, would you mind taking him into the garden while I talk to your father?

SAVVY [to Haslam] Tennis?

HASLAM. Rather!

SAVVY. Come on. [She dances out. He runs boyishly after her].

FRANKLYN [leaving his table and beginning to walk up and down the room discontentedly] Savvy’s manners jar on me. They would have horrified her grandmother.

CONRAD [obstinately] They are happier manners than Mother’s manners.

FRANKLYN. Yes: they are franker, wholesomer, better in a hundred ways. And yet I squirm at them. I cannot get it out of my head that Mother was a well-mannered woman, and that Savvy has no manners at all.

CONRAD. There wasnt any pleasure in Mother’s fine manners. That makes a biological difference.

FRANKLYN. But there was beauty in Mother’s manners, grace in them, style in them: above all, decision in them. Savvy is such a cub.

CONRAD. So she ought to be, at her age.

FRANKLYN. There it comes again! Her age! her age!

CONRAD. You want her to be fully grown at eighteen. You want to force her into a stuck-up, artificial, premature self-possession before she has any self to possess. You just let her alone: she is right enough for her years.

FRANKLYN. I have let her alone; and look at the result! Like all the other young people who have been let alone, she becomes a Socialist. That is, she becomes hopelessly demoralized.

CONRAD. Well, arnt you a Socialist?

FRANKLYN. Yes; but that is not the same thing. You and I were brought up in the old bourgeois morality. We were taught bourgeois manners and bourgeois points of honor. Bourgeois manners may be snobbish manners: there may be no pleasure in them, as you say; but they are better than no manners. Many bourgeois points of honor may be false; but at least they exist. The women know what to expect and what is expected of them. Savvy doesn’t. She is a Bolshevist and nothing else. She has to improvise her manners and her conduct as she goes along. It’s often charming, no doubt; but sometimes she puts her foot in it frightfully; and then I feel that she is blaming me for not teaching her better.

CONRAD. Well, you have something better to teach her now, at all events.

FRANKLYN. Yes: but it is too late. She doesn’t trust me now. She doesn’t talk about such things to me. She doesnt read anything I write. She never comes to hear me lecture. I am out of it as far as Savvy is concerned. [He resumes his seat at the writing-table].

CONRAD. I must have a talk to her.

FRANKLYN. Perhaps she will listen to you. You are not her father.

CONRAD. I sent her my last book. I can break the ice by asking her what she made of it.

FRANKLYN. When she heard you were coming, she asked me whether all the leaves were cut, in case it fell into your hands. She hasnt read a word of it.

CONRAD [rising indignantly] What!

FRANKLYN [inexorably] Not a word of it.

CONRAD [beaten] Well, I suppose it’s only natural. Biology is a dry subject for a girl; and I am a pretty dry old codger.

[He sits down again resignedly].

FRANKLYN. Brother: if that is so; if biology as you have worked at it, and religion as I have worked at it, are dry subjects like the old stuff they taught under these names, and we two are dry old codgers, like the old preachers and professors, then the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas is a delusion. Unless this withered thing religion, and this dry thing science, have come alive in our hands, alive and intensely interesting, we may just as well go out and dig the garden until it is time to dig our graves. [The parlor maid returns. Franklyn is impatient at the interruption]. Well? what is it now?

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Joyce Burge on the telephone, sir. He wants to speak to you.

FRANKLYN [astonished] Mr Joyce Burge!

THE PARLOR MAID. Yes, sir.

FRANKLYN [to Conrad] What on earth does this mean? I havnt heard from him nor exchanged a word with him for years. I resigned the chairmanship of the Liberal Association and shook the dust of party politics from my feet before he was Prime Minister in the Coalition. Of course, he dropped me like a hot potato.

CONRAD. Well, now that the Coalition has chucked him out, and he is only one of the half-dozen leaders of the Opposition, perhaps he wants to pick you up again.

THE PARLOR MAID [warningly] He is holding the line, sir.

FRANKLYN. Yes: all right [he hurries out].

The parlor maid goes to the hearthrug to make up the fire. Conrad rises and strolls to the middle of the room, where he stops and looks quizzically down at her.

CONRAD. So you have only one life to live, eh?

THE PARLOR MAID [dropping on her knees in consternation] I meant no offence, sir.

CONRAD. You didn’t give any. But you know you could live a devil of a long life if you really wanted to.

THE PARLOR MAID [sitting down on her heels] Oh, dont say that, sir.
It’s so unsettling.

CONRAD. Why? Have you been thinking about it?

THE PARLOR MAID. It would never have come into my head if you hadnt put it there, sir. Me and cook had a look at your book.

CONRAD. What!

You and cook
Had a look
At my book!

And my niece wouldn’t open it! The prophet is without honor in his own family. Well, what do you think of living for several hundred years? Are you going to have a try for it?

THE PARLOR MAID. Well, of course youre not in earnest, sir. But it does set one thinking, especially when one is going to be married.

CONRAD. What has that to do with it? He may live as long as you, you know.

THE PARLOR MAID. Thats just it, sir. You see, he must take me for better for worse, til death do us part. Do you think he would be so ready to do that, sir, if he thought it might be for several hundred years?

CONRAD. Thats true. And what about yourself?

THE PARLOR MAID. Oh, I tell you straight out, sir, I’d never promise to live with the same man as long as that. I wouldnt put up with my own children as long as that. Why, cook figured it out, sir, that when you were only 200, you might marry your own great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson and not even know who he was.

CONRAD. Well, why not? For all you know, the man you are going to marry may be your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson.

THE PARLOR MAID. But do you think it would ever be thought respectable, sir?

CONRAD. My good girl, all biological necessities have to be made respectable whether we like it or not; so you neednt worry yourself about that.

Franklyn returns and crosses the room to his chair, but does not sit down. The parlor maid goes out.

CONRAD. Well, what does Joyce Burge want?

FRANKLYN. Oh, a silly misunderstanding. I have promised to address a meeting in Middlesborough; and some fool has put it into the papers that I am ‘coming to Middlesborough,’ without any explanation. Of course, now that we are on the eve of a general election, political people think I am coming there to contest the parliamentary seat. Burge knows that I have a following, and thinks I could get into the House of Commons and head a group there. So he insists on coming to see me. He is staying with some people at Dollis Hill, and can be here in five or ten minutes, he says.

CONRAD. But didn’t you tell him that it’s a false alarm?

FRANKLYN. Of course I did; but he wont believe me.

CONRAD. Called you a liar, in fact?

FRANKLYN. No: I wish he had: any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use. He pretends to believe me, and assures me his visit is quite disinterested; but why should he come if he has no axe to grind? These chaps never believe anything they say themselves; and naturally they cannot believe anything anyone else says.

CONRAD [rising] Well, I shall clear out. It was hard enough to stand the party politicians before the war; but now that they have managed to half kill Europe between them, I cant be civil to them, and I dont see why I should be.

FRANKLYN. Wait a bit. We have to find out how the world will take our new gospel. [Conrad sits down again]. Party politicians are still unfortunately an important part of the world. Suppose we try it on Joyce Burge.

CONRAD. How can you? You can tell things only to people who can listen.
Joyce Burge has talked so much that he has lost the power of listening.
He doesnt listen even in the House of Commons.

Savvy rushes in breathless, followed by Haslam, who remains timidly just inside the door.

SAVVY [running to Franklyn] I say! Who do you think has just driven up in a big car?

FRANKLYN. Mr Joyce Burge, perhaps.

SAVVY [disappointed] Oh, they know, Bill. Why didnt you tell us he was coming? I have nothing on.

HASLAM. I’d better go, hadnt I?

CONRAD. You just wait here, both of you. When you start yawning, Joyce
Burge will take the hint, perhaps.

SAVVY [to Franklyn] May we?

FRANKLYN. Yes, if you promise to behave yourself.

SAVVY [making a wry face] That will be a treat, wont it?

THE PARLOR MAID [entering and announcing] Mr Joyce Burge.

Haslam hastily moves to the fireplace; and the parlor maid goes out and shuts the door when the visitor has passed in.

FRANKLYN [hurrying past Savvy to his guest with the false cordiality he has just been denouncing] Oh! Here you are. Delighted to see you. [He shakes Burge’s hand, and introduces Savvy] My daughter.

SAVVY [not daring to approach] Very kind of you to come.

Joyce Burge stands fast and says nothing; but he screws up his cheeks into a smile at each introduction, and makes his eyes shine in a very winning manner. He is a well-fed man turned fifty, with broad forehead, and grey hair which, his neck being short, falls almost to his collar.

FRANKLYN. Mr Haslam, our rector.

Burge conveys an impression of shining like a church window; and Haslam seizes the nearest library chair on the hearth, and swings it round for Burge between the stool and Conrad. He then retires to the window seat at the other side of the room, and is joined by Savvy. They sit there, side by side, hunched up with their elbows on their knees and their chins on their hands, providing Burge with a sort of Stranger’s Gallery during the ensuing sitting.

FRANKLYN. I forget whether you know my brother Conrad. He is a biologist.

BURGE [suddenly bursting into energetic action and shaking hands heartily with Conrad] By reputation only, but very well, of course. How I wish I could have devoted myself to biology! I have always been interested in rocks and strata and volcanoes and so forth: they throw such a light on the age of the earth. [With conviction] There is nothing like biology. ‘The cloud-capped towers, the solemn binnacles, the gorgeous temples, the great globe itself: yea, all that it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this influential pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.’ Thats biology, you know: good sound biology. [He sits down. So do the others, Franklyn on the stool, and Conrad on his Chippendale]. Well, my dear Barnabas, what do you think of the situation? Dont you think the time has come for us to make a move?

FRANKLYN. The time has always come to make a move.

BURGE. How true! But what is the move to be? You are a man of enormous influence. We know that. Weve always known it. We have to consult you whether we like it or not. We —

FRANKLYN [interrupting firmly] I never meddle in party politics now.

SAVVY. It’s no use saying you have no influence, daddy. Heaps of people swear by you.

BURGE [shining at her] Of course they do. Come! let me prove to you what we think of you. Shall we find you a first-rate constituency to contest at the next election? One that wont cost you a penny. A metropolitan seat. What do you say to the Strand?

FRANKLYN. My dear Burge, I am not a child. Why do you go on wasting your party funds on the Strand? You know you cannot win it.

BURGE. We cannot win it; but you —

FRANKLYN. Oh, please!

SAVVY. The Strand’s no use, Mr Burge. I once canvassed for a Socialist there. Cheese it.

BURGE. Cheese it!

HASLAM [spluttering with suppressed laughter] Priceless!

SAVVY. Well, I suppose I shouldnt say cheese it to a Right Honorable.
But the Strand, you know! Do come off it.

FRANKLYN. You must excuse my daughter’s shocking manners, Burge; but I agree with her that popular democratic statesmen soon come to believe that everyone they speak to is an ignorant dupe and a born fool into the bargain.

BURGE [laughing genially] You old aristocrat, you! But believe me, the instinct of the people is sound —

CONRAD [cutting in sharply] Then why are you in the Opposition instead of in the Government?

BURGE [shewing signs of temper under this heckling] I deny that I am in the Opposition morally. The Government does not represent the country. I was chucked out of the Coalition by a Tory conspiracy. The people want me back. I dont want to go back.

FRANKLYN [gently remonstrant] My dear Burge: of course you do.

BURGE [turning on him] Not a bit of it. I want to cultivate my garden. I am not interested in politics: I am interested in roses. I havnt a scrap of ambition. I went into politics because my wife shoved me into them, bless her! But I want to serve my country. What else am I for? I want to save my country from the Tories. They dont represent the people. The man they have made Prime Minister has never represented the people; and you know it. Lord Dunreen is the bitterest old Tory left alive. What has he to offer to the people?

FRANKLYN [cutting in before Burge can proceed — as he evidently intends — to answer his own question] I will tell you. He has ascertainable beliefs and principles to offer. The people know where they are with Lord Dunreen. They know what he thinks right and what he thinks wrong. With your followers they never know where they are. With you they never know where they are.

BURGE [amazed] With me!

FRANKLYN. Well, where are you? What are you?

BURGE. Barnabas: you must be mad. You ask me what I am?

FRANKLYN. I do.

BURGE. I am, if I mistake not, Joyce Burge, pretty well known throughout Europe, and indeed throughout the world, as the man who — unworthily perhaps, but not quite unsuccessfully — held the helm when the ship of State weathered the mightiest hurricane that has ever burst with earth-shaking violence on the land of our fathers.

FRANKLYN. I know that. I know who you are. And the earth-shaking part of it to me is that though you were placed in that enormously responsible position, neither I nor anyone else knows what your beliefs are, or even whether you have either beliefs or principles. What we did know was that your Government was formed largely of men who regarded you as a robber of henroosts, and whom you regarded as enemies of the people.

BURGE [adroitly, as he thinks] I agree with you. I agree with you absolutely. I dont believe in coalition governments.

FRANKLYN. Precisely. Yet you formed two.

BURGE. Why? Because we were at war. That is what you fellows never would realize. The Hun was at the gate. Our country, our lives, the honor of our wives and mothers and daughters, the tender flesh of our innocent babes, were at stake. Was that a time to argue about principles?

FRANKLYN. I should say it was the time of all others to confirm the resolution of our own men and gain the confidence and support of public opinion throughout the world by a declaration of principle. Do you think the Hun would ever have come to the gate if he had known that it would be shut in his face on principle? Did he not hold his own against you until America boldly affirmed the democratic principle and came to our rescue? Why did you let America snatch that honor from England?

BURGE. Barnabas: America was carried away by words, and had to eat them at the Peace Conference. Beware of eloquence: it is the bane of popular speakers like you.

FRANKLYN} [exclaiming]{Well!!
SAVVY} [all]{I like that!
HASLAM} [together]{Priceless!

BURGE [continuing remorselessly] Come down to facts. It wasn’t principle that won the war: it was the British fleet and the blockade. America found the talk: I found the shells. You cannot win wars by principles; but you can win elections by them. There I am with you. You want the next election to be fought on principles: that is what it comes to, doesnt it?

FRANKLYN. I dont want it to be fought at all! An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. You know very well that it will not be fought on principle.

BURGE. On the contrary it will be fought on nothing else. I believe a program is a mistake. I agree with you that principle is what we want.

FRANKLYN. Principle without program, eh?

BURGE. Exactly. There it is in three words.

FRANKLYN. Why not in one word? Platitudes. That is what principle without program means.

BURGE [puzzled but patient, trying to get at Franklyn’s drift in order to ascertain his price] I have not made myself clear. Listen. I am agreeing with you. I am on your side. I am accepting your proposal. There isnt going to be any more coalition. This time there wont be a Tory in the Cabinet. Every candidate will have to pledge himself to Free Trade, slightly modified by consideration for our Overseas Dominions; to Disestablishment; to Reform of the House of Lords; to a revised scheme of Taxation of Land Values; and to doing something or other to keep the Irish quiet. Does that satisfy you?

FRANKLYN. It does not even interest me. Suppose your friends do commit themselves to all this! What does it prove about them except that they are hopelessly out of date even in party politics? that they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since 1885? What is it to me that they hate the Church and hate the landed gentry; that they are jealous of the nobility, and have shipping shares instead of manufacturing businesses in the Midlands? I can find you hundreds of the most sordid rascals, or the most densely stupid reactionaries, with all these qualifications.

BURGE. Personal abuse proves nothing. Do you suppose the Tories are all angels because they are all members of the Church of England?

FRANKLYN. No; but they stand together as members of the Church of England, whereas your people, in attacking the Church, are all over the shop. The supporters of the Church are of one mind about religion: its enemies are of a dozen minds. The Churchmen are a phalanx: your people are a mob in which atheists are jostled by Plymouth Brethren, and Positivists by Pillars of Fire. You have with you all the crudest unbelievers and all the crudest fanatics.

BURGE. We stand, as Cromwell did, for liberty of conscience, if that is what you mean.

FRANKLYN. How can you talk such rubbish over the graves of your conscientious objectors? All law limits liberty of conscience: if a man’s conscience allows him to steal your watch or to shirk military service, how much liberty do you allow it? Liberty of conscience is not my point.

BURGE [testily] I wish you would come to your point. Half the time you are saying that you must have principles; and when I offer you principles you say they wont work.

FRANKLYN. You have not offered me any principles. Your party shibboleths are not principles. If you get into power again you will find yourself at the head of a rabble of Socialists and anti-Socialists, of Jingo Imperialists and Little Englanders, of cast-iron Materialists and ecstatic Quakers, of Christian Scientists and Compulsory Inoculationists, of Syndicalists and Bureaucrats: in short, of men differing fiercely and irreconcilably on every principle that goes to the root of human society and destiny; and the impossibility of keeping such a team together will force you to sell the pass again to the solid Conservative Opposition.

BURGE [rising in wrath] Sell the pass again! You accuse me of having sold the pass!

FRANKLYN. When the terrible impact of real warfare swept your parliamentary sham warfare into the dustbin, you had to go behind the backs of your followers and make a secret agreement with the leaders of the Opposition to keep you in power on condition that you dropped all legislation of which they did not approve. And you could not even hold them to their bargain; for they presently betrayed the secret and forced the coalition on you.

BURGE. I solemnly declare that this is a false and monstrous accusation.

FRANKLYN. Do you deny that the thing occurred? Were the uncontradicted reports false? Were the published letters forgeries?

BURGE. Certainly not. But I did not do it. I was not Prime Minister then. It was that old dotard, that played-out old humbug Lubin. He was Prime Minister then, not I.

FRANKLYN. Do you mean to say you did not know?

BURGE [sitting down again with a shrug] Oh, I had to be told. But what could I do? If we had refused we might have had to go out of office.

FRANKLYN. Precisely.

BURGE. Well, could we desert the country at such a crisis? The Hun was at the gate. Everyone has to make sacrifices for the sake of the country at such moments. We had to rise above party; and I am proud to say we never gave party a second thought. We stuck to —

CONRAD. Office?

SURGE [turning on him] Yes, sir, to office: that is, to responsibility, to danger, to heart-sickening toil, to abuse and misunderstanding, to a martyrdom that made us envy the very soldiers in the trenches. If you had had to live for months on aspirin and bromide of potassium to get a wink of sleep, you wouldn’t talk about office as if it were a catch.

FRANKLYN. Still, you admit that under our parliamentary system Lubin could not have helped himself?

BURGE. On that subject my lips are closed. Nothing will induce me to say one word against the old man. I never have; and I never will. Lubin is old: he has never been a real statesman: he is as lazy as a cat on a hearthrug: you cant get him to attend to anything: he is good for nothing but getting up and making speeches with a peroration that goes down with the back benches. But I say nothing against him. I gather that you do not think much of me as a statesman; but at all events I can get things done. I can hustle: even you will admit that. But Lubin! Oh my stars, Lubin!! If you only knew —

The parlor maid opens the door and announces a visitor.

THE PARLOR MAID. Mr Lubin.

SURGE [bounding from his chair] Lubin! Is this a conspiracy?

They all rise in amazement, staring at the door. Lubin enters: a man at the end of his sixties, a Yorkshireman with the last traces of Scandinavian flax still in his white hair, undistinguished in stature, unassuming in his manner, and taking his simple dignity for granted, but wonderfully comfortable and quite self-assured in contrast to the intellectual restlessness of Franklyn and the mesmeric self-assertiveness of Burge. His presence suddenly brings out the fact that they are unhappy men, ill at ease, square pegs in round holes, whilst he flourishes like a primrose.

The parlor maid withdraws.

LUBIN [coming to Franklyn] How do you do, Mr Barnabas? [He speaks very comfortably and kindly, much as if he were the host, and Franklyn an embarrassed but welcome guest]. I had the pleasure of meeting you once at the Mansion House. I think it was to celebrate the conclusion of the hundred years peace with America.

FRANKLYN [shaking hands] It was long before that: a meeting about
Venezuela, when we were on the point of going to war with America.

LUBIN [not at all put out] Yes: you are quite right. I knew it was something about America. [He pats Franklyn’s hand]. And how have you been all this time? Well, eh?

FRANKLYN [smiling to soften the sarcasm] A few vicissitudes of health naturally in so long a time.

LUBIN. Just so. Just so. [Looking round at Savvy] The young lady is — ?

FRANKLYN. My daughter, Savvy.

Savvy comes from the window between her father and Lubin.

LUBIN [taking her hand affectionately in both his] And why has she never come to see us?

BURGE. I don’t know whether you have noticed, Lubin, that I am present.

Savvy takes advantage of this diversion to slip away to the settee, where she is stealthily joined by Haslam, who sits down on her left.

LUBIN [seating himself in Burge’s chair with ineffable comfortableness] My dear Burge: if you imagine that it is possible to be within ten miles of your energetic presence without being acutely aware of it, you do yourself the greatest injustice. How are you? And how are your good newspaper friends? [Burge makes an explosive movement; but Lubin goes on calmly and sweetly] And what are you doing here with my old friend Barnabas, if I may ask?

BURGE [sitting down in Conrad’s chair, leaving him standing uneasily in the corner] Well, just what you are doing, if you want to know. I am trying to enlist Mr Barnabas’s valuable support for my party.

LUBIN. Your party, eh? The newspaper party?

BURGE. The Liberal Party. The party of which I have the honor to be leader.

LUBIN. Have you now? Thats very interesting; for I thought I was the leader of the Liberal Party. However, it is very kind of you to take it off my hands, if the party will let you.

BURGE. Do you suggest that I have not the support and confidence of the party?

LUBIN. I dont suggest anything, my dear Burge. Mr Barnabas will tell you that we all think very highly of you. The country owes you a great deal. During the war, you did very creditably over the munitions; and if you were not quite so successful with the peace, nobody doubted that you meant well.

BURGE. Very kind of you, Lubin. Let me remark that you cannot lead a progressive party without getting a move on.

LUBIN. You mean you cannot. I did it for ten years without the least difficulty. And very comfortable, prosperous, pleasant years they were.

BURGE. Yes; but what did they end in?

LUBIN. In you, Burge. You don’t complain of that, do you?

BURGE [fiercely] In plague, pestilence, and famine; battle, murder, and sudden death.

LUBIN [with an appreciative chuckle] The Nonconformist can quote the prayer-book for his own purposes, I see. How you enjoyed yourself over that business, Burge! Do you remember the Knock-Out Blow?

BURGE. It came off: don’t forget that. Do you remember fighting to the last drop of your blood?

LUBIN [unruffled, to Franklyn] By the way, I remember your brother Conrad — a wonderful brain and a dear good fellow — explaining to me that I couldn’t fight to the last drop of my blood, because I should be dead long before I came to it. Most interesting, and quite true. He was introduced to me at a meeting where the suffragettes kept disturbing me. They had to be carried out kicking and making a horrid disturbance.

CONRAD. No: it was later, at a meeting to support the Franchise Bill which gave them the vote.

LUBIN [discovering Conrad’s presence for the first time] Youre right: it was. I knew it had something to do with women. My memory never deceives me. Thank you. Will you introduce me to this gentleman, Barnabas?

CONRAD [not at all affably] I am the Conrad in question. [He sits down in dudgeon on the vacant Chippendale].

LUBIN. Are you? [Looking at him pleasantly] Yes: of course you are. I never forget a face. But [with an arch turn of his eyes to Savvy] your pretty niece engaged all my powers of vision.

BURGE. I wish youd be serious, Lubin. God knows we have passed through times terrible enough to make any man serious.

LUBIN. I do not think I need to be reminded of that. In peace time I used to keep myself fresh for my work by banishing all worldly considerations from my mind on Sundays; but war has no respect for the Sabbath; and there have been Sundays within the last few years on which I have had to play as many as sixty-six games of bridge to keep my mind off the news from the front.

BURGE [scandalized] Sixty-six games of bridge on Sunday!!!

LUBIN. You probably sang sixty-six hymns. But as I cannot boast either your admirable voice or your spiritual fervor, I had to fall back on bridge.

FRANKLYN. If I may go back to the subject of your visit, it seems to me that you may both be completely superseded by the Labor Party.

BURGE. But I am in the truest sense myself a Labor leader. I — [he stops, as Lubin has risen with a half-suppressed yawn, and is already talking calmly, but without a pretence of interest].

LUBIN. The Labor Party! Oh no, Mr Barnabas. No, no, no, no, no. [He moves in Savvy’s direction]. There will be no trouble about that. Of course we must give them a few seats: more, I quite admit, than we should have dreamt of leaving to them before the war; but — [by this time he has reached the sofa where Savvy and Haslam are seated. He sits down between them; takes her hand; and drops the subject of Labor]. Well, my dear young lady? What is the latest news? Whats going on? Have you seen Shoddy’s new play? Tell me all about it, and all about the latest books, and all about everything.

SAVVY. You have not met Mr Haslam. Our Rector.

LUBIN [who has quite overlooked Haslam] Never heard of him. Is he any good?

FRANKLYN. I was introducing him. This is Mr Haslam.

HASLAM. How d’ye do?

LUBIN. I beg your pardon, Mr Haslam. Delighted to meet you. [To Savvy]
Well, now, how many books have you written?

SAVVY [rather overwhelmed but attracted] None. I don’t write.

LUBIN. You dont say so; Well, what do you do? Music? Skirt-dancing?

SAVVY. I dont do anything.

LUBIN. Thank God! You and I were born for one another. Who is your favorite poet, Sally?

SAVVY. Savvy.

LUBIN. Savvy! I never heard of him. Tell me all about him. Keep me up to date.

SAVVY. It’s not a poet. I am Savvy, not Sally.

LUBIN. Savvy! Thats a funny name, and very pretty. Savvy. It sounds
Chinese. What does it mean?

CONRAD. Short for Savage.

LUBIN [patting her hand] La belle Sauvage.

HASLAM [rising and surrendering Savvy to Lubin by crossing to the fireplace] I suppose the Church is out of it as far as progressive politics are concerned.

BURGE. Nonsense! That notion about the Church being unprogressive is one of those shibboleths that our party must drop. The Church is all right essentially. Get rid of the establishment; get rid of the bishops; get rid of the candlesticks; get rid of the 39 articles; and the Church of England is just as good as any other Church; and I don’t care who hears me say so.

LUBIN. It doesn’t matter a bit who hears you say so, my dear Burge. [To
Savvy] Who did you say your favorite poet was?

SAVVY. I dont make pets of poets. Who’s yours?

LUBIN. Horace.

SAVVY. Horace who?

LUBIN. Quintus Horatius Flaccus: the noblest Roman of them all, my dear.

SAVVY. Oh, if he is dead, that explains it. I have a theory that all the dead people we feel especially interested in must have been ourselves. You must be Horace’s reincarnation.

LUBIN [delighted] That is the very most charming and penetrating and intelligent thing that has ever been said to me. Barnabas: will you exchange daughters with me? I can give you your choice of two.

FRANKLYN. Man proposes. Savvy disposes.

LUBIN. What does Savvy say?

BURGE. Lubin: I came here to talk politics.

LUBIN. Yes: you have only one subject, Burge. I came here to talk to
Savvy. Take Burge into the next room, Barnabas; and let him rip.

BURGE [half-angry, half-indulgent] No; but really, Lubin, we are at a crisis —

LUBIN. My dear Burge, life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis; I am always in the convalescent stage. I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

SAVVY [half-rising] Perhaps I’d better run away. I am distracting you.

LUBIN [making her sit down again] Not at all, my dear. You are only distracting Burge. Jolly good thing for him to be distracted by a pretty girl. Just what he needs.

BURGE. I sometimes envy you, Lubin. The great movement of mankind, the giant sweep of the ages, passes you by and leaves you standing.

LUBIN. It leaves me sitting, and quite comfortable, thank you. Go on sweeping. When you are tired of it, come back; and you will find England where it was, and me in my accustomed place, with Miss Savvy telling me all sorts of interesting things.

SAVVY [who has been growing more and more restless] Dont let him shut you up, Mr Burge. You know, Mr Lubin, I am frightfully interested in the Labor movement, and in Theosophy, and in reconstruction after the war, and all sorts of things. I daresay the flappers in your smart set are tremendously flattered when you sit beside them and are nice to them as you are being nice to me; but I am not smart; and I am no use as a flapper. I am dowdy and serious. I want you to be serious. If you refuse, I shall go and sit beside Mr Burge, and ask him to hold my hand.

LUBIN. He wouldnt know how to do it, my dear. Burge has a reputation as a profligate —

BURGE [starting] Lubin: this is monstrous. I —

LUBIN [continuing] — but he is really a model of domesticity. His name is coupled with all the most celebrated beauties; but for him there is only one woman; and that is not you, my dear, but his very charming wife.

BURGE. You are destroying my character in the act of pretending to save it. Have the goodness to confine yourself to your own character and your own wife. Both of them need all your attention.

LUBIN. I have the privilege of my age and of my transparent innocence. I have not to struggle with your volcanic energy.

BURGE [with an immense sense of power] No, by George!

FRANKLYN. I think I shall speak both for my brother and myself, and possibly also for my daughter, if I say that since the object of your visit and Mr Joyce Burge’s is to some extent political, we should hear with great interest something about your political aims, Mr Lubin.

LUBIN [assenting with complete good humor, and becoming attentive, clear, and businesslike in his tone] By all means, Mr Barnabas. What we have to consider first, I take it, is what prospect there is of our finding you beside us in the House after the next election.

FRANKLYN. When I speak of politics, Mr Lubin, I am not thinking of elections, or available seats, or party funds, or the registers, or even, I am sorry to have to add, of parliament as it exists at present. I had much rather you talked about bridge than about electioneering: it is the more interesting game of the two.

BURGE. He wants to discuss principles, Lubin.

LUBIN [very cool and clear] I understand Mr Barnabas quite well. But elections are unsettled things; principles are settled things.

CONRAD [impatiently] Great Heavens! —

LUBIN [interrupting him with quiet authority] One moment, Dr Barnabas. The main principles on which modern civilized society is founded are pretty well understood among educated people. That is what our dangerously half-educated masses and their pet demagogues — if Burge will excuse that expression —

BURGE. Dont mind me. Go on. I shall have something to say presently.

LUBIN. — that is what our dangerously half-educated people do not realize. Take all this fuss about the Labor Party, with its imaginary new principles and new politics. The Labor members will find that the immutable laws of political economy take no more notice of their ambitions and aspirations than the law of gravitation. I speak, if I may say so, with knowledge; for I have made a special, study of the Labor question.

FRANKLYN [with interest and some surprise] Indeed?

LUBIN. Yes. It occurred quite at the beginning of my career. I was asked to deliver an address to the students at the Working Men’s College; and I was strongly advised to comply, as Gladstone and Morley and others were doing that sort of thing at the moment. It was rather a troublesome job, because I had not gone into political economy at the time. As you know, at the university I was a classical scholar; and my profession was the Law. But I looked up the text-books, and got up the case most carefully. I found that the correct view is that all this Trade Unionism and Socialism and so forth is founded on the ignorant delusion that wages and the production and distribution of wealth can be controlled by legislation or by any human action whatever. They obey fixed scientific laws, which have been ascertained and settled finally by the highest economic authorities. Naturally I do not at this distance of time remember the exact process of reasoning; but I can get up the case again at any time in a couple of days; and you may rely on me absolutely, should the occasion arise, to deal with all these ignorant and unpractical people in a conclusive and convincing way, except, of course, as far as it may be advisable to indulge and flatter them a little so as to let them down without creating ill feeling in the working-class electorate. In short, I can get that lecture up again almost at a moment’s notice.

SAVVY. But, Mr Lubin, I have had a university education too; and all this about wages and distribution being fixed by immutable laws of political economy is obsolete rot.

FRANKLYN [shocked] Oh, my dear! That is not polite.

LUBIN. No, no, no. Dont scold her. She mustnt be scolded. [To Savvy] I understand. You are a disciple of Karl Marx.

SAVVY. No, no. Karl Marx’s economics are all rot.

LUBIN [at last a little taken aback] Dear me!

SAVVY. You must excuse me, Mr Lubin; but it’s like hearing a man talk about the Garden of Eden.

CONRAD. Why shouldnt he talk about the Garden of Eden? It was a first attempt at biology anyhow.

LUBIN [recovering his self-possession] I am sound on the Garden of
Eden. I have heard of Darwin.

SAVVY. But Darwin is all rot.

LUBIN. What! Already!

SAVVY. It’s no good your smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin; and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. Ask Papa. Ask Uncle. Ask the first person you meet in the street. [She rises and crosses to Haslam]. Give me a cigaret, Bill, will you?

HASLAM. Priceless. [He complies].

FRANKLYN. Savvy has not lived long enough to have any manners, Mr Lubin; but that is where you stand with the younger generation. Dont smoke, dear.

Savvy, with a shrug of rather mutinous resignation, throws the cigaret into the fire. Haslam, on the point of lighting one for himself, changes his mind.

LUBIN [shrewd and serious] Mr Barnabas: I confess I am surprised; and I will not pretend that I am convinced. But I am open to conviction. I may be wrong.

BURGE [in a burst of irony] Oh no. Impossible! Impossible!

LUBIN. Yes, Mr Barnabas, though I do not possess Burge’s genius for being always wrong, I have been in that position once or twice. I could not conceal from you, even if I wished to, that my time has been so completely filled by my professional work as a lawyer, and later on by my duties as leader of the House of Commons in the days when Prime Ministers were also leaders —

BURGE [stung] Not to mention bridge and smart society.

LUBIN. — not to mention the continual and trying effort to make Burge behave himself, that I have not been able to keep my academic reading up to date. I have kept my classics brushed up out of sheer love for them; but my economics and my science, such as they were, may possibly be a little rusty. Yet I think I may say that if you and your brother will be so good as to put me on the track of the necessary documents, I will undertake to put the case to the House or to the country to your entire satisfaction. You see, as long as you can shew these troublesome half-educated people who want to turn the world upside down that they are talking nonsense, it really does not matter very much whether you do it in terms of what Miss Barnabas calls obsolete rot or in terms of what her granddaughter will probably call unmitigated tosh. I have no objection whatever to denounce Karl Marx. Anything I can say against Darwin will please a large body of sincerely pious voters. If it will be easier to carry on the business of the country on the understanding that the present state of things is to be called Socialism, I have no objection in the world to call it Socialism. There is the precedent of the Emperor Constantine, who saved the society of his own day by agreeing to call his Imperialism Christianity. Mind: I must not go ahead of the electorate. You must not call a voter a Socialist until —

FRANKLYN. Until he is a Socialist. Agreed.

LUBIN. Oh, not at all. You need not wait for that. You must not call him a Socialist until he wishes to be called a Socialist: that is all. Surely you would not say that I must not address my constituents as gentlemen until they are gentlemen. I address them as gentlemen because they wish to be so addressed. [He rises from the sofa and goes to Franklyn, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder]. Do not be afraid of Socialism, Mr Barnabas. You need not tremble for your property or your position or your dignity. England will remain what England is, no matter what new political names may come into vogue. I do not intend to resist the transition to Socialism. You may depend on me to guide it, to lead it, to give suitable expression to its aspirations, and to steer it clear of Utopian absurdities. I can honestly ask for your support on the most advanced Socialist grounds no less than on the soundest Liberal ones.

BURGE. In short, Lubin, youre incorrigible. You dont believe anything is going to change. The millions are still to toil — the people — my people — for I am a man of the people —

LUBIN [interrupting him contemptuously] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You are a country solicitor, further removed from the people, more foreign to them, more jealous of letting them up to your level, than any duke or any archbishop.

BURGE [hotly] I deny it. You think I have never been poor. You think I have never cleaned my own boots. You think my fingers have never come out through the soles when I was cleaning them. You think —

LUBIN. I think you fall into the very common mistake of supposing that it is poverty that makes the proletarian and money that makes the gentleman. You are quite wrong. You never belonged to the people: you belonged to the impecunious. Impecuniosity and broken boots are the lot of the unsuccessful middle class, and the commonplaces of the early struggles of the professional and younger son class. I defy you to find a farm laborer in England with broken boots. Call a mechanic one of the poor, and he’ll punch your head. When you talk to your constituents about the toiling millions, they don’t consider that you are referring to them. They are all third cousins of somebody with a title or a park. I am a Yorkshireman, my friend. I know England; and you don’t. If you did you would know —

SURGE. What do you know that I don’t know?

LUBIN. I know that we are taking up too much of Mr Barnabas’s time. [Franklyn rises]. May I take it, my dear Barnabas, that I may count on your support if we succeed in forcing an election before the new register is in full working order?

SURGE [rising also] May the party count on your support? I say nothing about myself. Can the party depend on you? Is there any question of yours that I have left unanswered?

CONRAD. We havnt asked you any, you know.

BURGE. May I take that as a mark of confidence?

CONRAD. If I were a laborer in your constituency, I should ask you a biological question?

LUBIN. No you wouldnt, my dear Doctor. Laborers never ask questions.

BURGE. Ask it now. I have never flinched from being heckled. Out with it. Is it about the land?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about the Church?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about the House of Lords?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Proportional Representation?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about Free Trade?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Is it about the priest in the school?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Ireland?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Is it about Germany?

CONRAD. No.

BURGE. Well, is it about Republicanism? Come! I wont flinch. Is it about the Monarchy?

CONRAD. No.

SURGE. Well, what the devil is it about, then?

CONRAD. You understand that I am asking the question in the character of a laborer who earned thirteen shillings a week before the war and earns thirty now, when he can get it?

BURGE. Yes: I understand that. I am ready for you. Out with it.

CONRAD. And whom you propose to represent n parliament?

SURGE. Yes, yes, yes. Come on.

CONRAD. The question is this. Would you allow your son to marry my daughter, or your daughter to marry my son?

BURGE [taken aback] Oh, come! Thats not a political question.

CONRAD. Then, as a biologist, I don’t take the slightest interest in your politics; and I shall not walk across the street to vote for you or anyone else at the election. Good evening.

LUBIN. Serve you right, Burge! Dr Barnabas: you have my assurance that my daughter shall marry the man of her choice, whether he be lord or laborer. May I count on your support?

SURGE [hurling the epithet at him] Humbug!

SAVVY. Stop. [They all stop short in the movement of leave-taking to look at her]. Daddy: are you going to let them off like this? How are they to know anything if nobody ever tells them? If you don’t, I will.

CONRAD. You cant. You didn’t read my book; and you know nothing about it. You just hold your tongue.

SAVVY. I just wont, Nunk. I shall have a vote when I am thirty; and I ought to have it now. Why are these two ridiculous people to be allowed to come in and walk over us as if the world existed only to play their silly parliamentary game?

FRANKLYN [severely] Savvy: you really must not be uncivil to our guests.

SAVVY. I’m sorry. But Mr Lubin didn’t stand on much ceremony with me, did he? And Mr Burge hasnt addressed a single word to me. I’m not going to stand it. You and Nunk have a much better program than either of them. It’s the only one we are going to vote for; and they ought to be told about it for the credit of the family and the good of their own souls. You just tip them a chapter from the gospel of the brothers Barnabas, Daddy.

Lubin and Burge turn inquiringly to Franklyn, suspecting a move to form a new party.

FRANKLYN. It is quite true, Mr Lubin, that I and my brother have a little program of our own which —

CONRAD [interrupting] It’s not a little program: it’s an almighty big one. It’s not our own: it’s the program of the whole of civilization.

BURGE. Then why split the party before you have put it to us? For God’s sake let us have no more splits. I am here to learn. I am here to gather your opinions and represent them. I invite you to put your views before me. I offer myself to be heckled. You have asked me only an absurd non-political question.

FRANKLYN. Candidly, I fear our program will be thrown away on you. It would not interest you.

BURGE [with challenging audacity] Try. Lubin can go if he likes; but I am still open to new ideas, if only I can find them.

FRANKLYN [to Lubin] Are you prepared to listen, Mr Lubin; or shall I thank you for your very kind and welcome visit, and say good evening?

LUBIN [sitting down resignedly on the settee, but involuntarily making a movement which looks like the stifling of a yawn] With pleasure, Mr Barnabas. Of course you know that before I can adopt any new plank in the party platform, it will have to reach me through the National Liberal Federation, which you can approach through your local Liberal and Radical Association.

FRANKLYN. I could recall to you several instances of the addition to your party program of measures of which no local branch of your Federation had ever dreamt. But I understand that you are not really interested. I will spare you, and drop the subject.

LUBIN [waking up a little] You quite misunderstand me. Please do not take it in that way. I only —

BURGE [talking him down] Never mind the Federation: I will answer for the Federation. Go on, Barnabas: go on. Never mind Lubin [he sits down in the chair from which Lubin first displaced him].

FRANKLYN. Our program is only that the term of human life shall be extended to three hundred years.

LUBIN [softly] Eh?

BURGE [explosively] What!

SAVVY. Our election cry is ‘Back to Methuselah!’

HASLAM. Priceless!

Lubin and Surge look at one another.

CONRAD. No. We are not mad.

SAVVY. Theyre not joking either. They mean it.

LUBIN [cautiously] Assuming that, in some sense which I am for the moment unable to fathom, you are in earnest, Mr Barnabas, may I ask what this has to do with politics?

FRANKLYN. The connection is very evident. You are now, Mr Lubin, within immediate reach of your seventieth year. Mr Joyce Surge is your junior by about eleven years. You will go down to posterity as one of a European group of immature statesmen and monarchs who, doing the very best for your respective countries of which you were capable, succeeded in all-but-wrecking the civilization of Europe, and did, in effect, wipe out of existence many millions of its inhabitants.

BURGE. Less than a million.

FRANKLYN. That was our loss alone.

BURGE. Oh, if you count foreigners — !

HAS LAM. God counts foreigners, you know.

SAVVY [with intense satisfaction] Well said, Bill.

FRANKLYN. I am not blaming you. Your task was beyond human capacity. What with our huge armaments, our terrible engines of destruction, our systems of coercion manned by an irresistible police, you were called on to control powers so gigantic that one shudders at the thought of their being entrusted even to an infinitely experienced and benevolent God, much less to mortal men whose whole life does not last a hundred years.

BURGE. We won the war: don’t forget that.

FRANKLYN. No: the soldiers and sailors won it, and left you to finish it. And you were so utterly incompetent that the multitudes of children slain by hunger in the first years of peace made us all wish we were at war again.

CONRAD. It’s no use arguing about it. It is now absolutely certain that the political and social problems raised by our civilization cannot be solved by mere human mushrooms who decay and die when they are just beginning to have a glimmer of the wisdom and knowledge needed for their own government.

LUBIN. Quite an interesting idea, Doctor. Extravagant. Fantastic. But quite interesting. When I was young I used to feel my human limitations very acutely.

BURGE. God knows I have often felt that I could not go on if it had not been for the sense that I was only an instrument in the hands of a Power above us.

CONRAD. I’m glad you both agree with us, and with one another.

LUBIN. I have not gone so far as that, I think. After all, we have had many very able political leaders even within your recollection and mine.

FRANKLYN. Have you read the recent biographies — Dilke’s, for instance — which revealed the truth about them?

LUBIN. I did not discover any new truth revealed in these books, Mr
Barnabas.

FRANKLYN. What! Not the truth that England was governed all that time by a little woman who knew her own mind?

SAVVY. Hear, hear!

LUBIN. That often happens. Which woman do you mean?

FRANKLYN. Queen Victoria, to whom your Prime Ministers stood in the relation of naughty children whose heads she knocked together when their tempers and quarrels became intolerable. Within thirteen years of her death Europe became a hell.

SURGE. Quite true. That was because she was piously brought up, and regarded herself as an instrument. If a statesman remembers that he is only an instrument, and feels quite sure that he is rightly interpreting the divine purpose, he will come out all right, you know.

FRANKLYN. The Kaiser felt like that. Did he come out all right?

SURGE. Well, let us be fair, even to the Kaiser. Let us be fair.

FRANKLYN. Were you fair to him when you won an election on the program of hanging him?

SURGE. Stuff! I am the last man alive to hang anybody; but the people wouldnt listen to reason. Besides, I knew the Dutch wouldnt give him up.

SAVVY. Oh, don’t start arguing about poor old Bill. Stick to our point. Let these two gentlemen settle the question for themselves. Mr Burge: do you think Mr Lubin is fit to govern England?

SURGE. No. Frankly, I dont.

LUBIN [remonstrant] Really!

CONRAD. Why?

BURGE. Because he has no conscience: thats why.

LUBIN [shocked and amazed] Oh!

FRANKLYN. Mr Lubin: do you consider Joyce Burge qualified to govern
England?

LUBIN [with dignified emotion, wounded, but without bitterness] Excuse me, Mr Barnabas; but before I answer that question I want to say this. Burge: we have had differences of opinion; and your newspaper friends have said hard things of me. But we worked together for years; and I hope I have done nothing to justify you in the amazing accusation you have just brought against me. Do you realize that you said that I have no conscience?

BURGE. Lubin: I am very accessible to an appeal to my emotions; and you are very cunning in making such appeals. I will meet you to this extent. I dont mean that you are a bad man. I dont mean that I dislike you, in spite of your continual attempts to discourage and depress me. But you have a mind like a looking-glass. You are very clear and smooth and lucid as to what is standing in front of you. But you have no foresight and no hindsight. You have no vision and no memory. You have no continuity; and a man without continuity can have neither conscience nor honor from one day to another. The result is that you have always been a damned bad minister; and you have sometimes been a damned bad friend. Now you can answer Barnabas’s question and take it out of me to your heart’s content. He asked you was I fit to govern England.

LUBIN [recovering himself] After what has just passed I sincerely wish I could honestly say yes, Burge. But it seems to me that you have condemned yourself out of your own mouth. You represent something which has had far too much influence and popularity in this country since Joseph Chamberlain set the fashion; and that is mere energy without intellect and without knowledge. Your mind is not a trained mind: it has not been stored with the best information, nor cultivated by intercourse with educated minds at any of our great seats of learning. As I happen to have enjoyed that advantage, it follows that you do not understand my mind. Candidly, I think that disqualifies you. The peace found out your weaknesses.

BURGE. Oh! What did it find out in you?

LUBIN. You and your newspaper confederates took the peace out of my hands. The peace did not find me out because it did not find me in.

FRANKLYN. Come! Confess, both of you! You were only flies on the wheel. The war went England’s way; but the peace went its own way, and not England’s way nor any of the ways you had so glibly appointed for it. Your peace treaty was a scrap of paper before the ink dried on it. The statesmen of Europe were incapable of governing Europe. What they needed was a couple of hundred years training and experience: what they had actually had was a few years at the bar or in a counting-house or on the grouse moors and golf courses. And now we are waiting, with monster cannons trained on every city and seaport, and huge aeroplanes ready to spring into the air and drop bombs every one of which will obliterate a whole street, and poison gases that will strike multitudes dead with a breath, until one of you gentlemen rises in his helplessness to tell us, who are as helpless as himself, that we are at war again.

CONRAD. Aha! What consolation will it be for us then that you two are able to tell off one another’s defects so cleverly in your afternoon chat?

BURGE [angrily] If you come to that, what consolation will it be that you two can sit there and tell both of us off? you, who have had no responsibility! you, who havnt lifted a finger, as far as I know, to help us through this awful crisis which has left me ten years older than my proper age! Can you tell me a single thing you did to help us during the whole infernal business?

CONRAD. We’re not blaming you: you hadnt lived long enough. No more had we. Cant you see that three-score-and-ten, though it may be long enough for a very crude sort of village life, isnt long enough for a complicated civilization like ours? Flinders Petrie has counted nine attempts at civilization made by people exactly like us; and every one of them failed just as ours is failing. They failed because the citizens and statesmen died of old age or over-eating before they had grown out of schoolboy games and savage sports and cigars and champagne. The signs of the end are always the same: Democracy, Socialism, and Votes for Women. We shall go to smash within the lifetime of men now living unless we recognize that we must live longer.

LUBIN. I am glad you agree with me that Socialism and Votes for Women are signs of decay.

FRANKLYN. Not at all: they are only the difficulties that overtax your capacity. If you cannot organize Socialism you cannot organize civilized life; and you will relapse into barbarism accordingly.

SAVVY. Hear, hear!

SURGE. A useful point. We cannot put back the clock.

HASLAM. I can. Ive often done it.

LUBIN. Tut tut! My dear Burge: what are you dreaming of? Mr Barnabas: I am a very patient man. But will you tell me what earthly use or interest there is in a conclusion that cannot be realized? I grant you that if we could live three hundred years we should all be, perhaps wiser, certainly older. You will grant me in return, I hope, that if the sky fell we should all catch larks.

FRANKLYN. Your turn now, Conrad. Go ahead.

CONRAD. I don’t think it’s any good. I don’t think they want to live longer than usual.

LUBIN. Although I am a mere child of 69, I am old enough to have lost, the habit of crying for the moon.

BURGE. Have you discovered the elixir of life or have you not? If not, I agree with Lubin that you are wasting our time.

CONRAD. Is your time of any value?

SURGE [unable to believe his ears] My time of any value! What do you mean?

LUBIN [smiling comfortably] From your high scientific point of view, I daresay, none whatever, Professor. In any case I think a little perfectly idle discussion would do Burge good. After all, we might as well hear about the elixir of life as read novels, or whatever Burge does when he is not playing golf on Walton Heath. What is your elixir, Dr Barnabas? Lemons? Sour milk? Or what is the latest?

SURGE. We were just beginning to talk seriously; and now you snatch at the chance of talking rot. [He rises]. Good evening. [He turns to the door].

CONRAD [rudely] Die as soon as you like. Good evening.

BURGE [hesitating] Look here. I took sour milk twice a day until Metchnikoff died. He thought it would keep him alive for ever; and he died of it.

CONRAD. You might as well have taken sour beer.

BURGE. You believe in lemons?

CONRAD. I wouldn’t eat a lemon for ten pounds.

BURGE [sitting down again] What do you recommend?

CONRAD [rising with a gesture of despair] Whats the use of going on, Frank? Because I am a doctor, and because they think I have a bottle to give them that will make them live for ever, they are listening to me for the first time with their mouths open and their eyes shut. Thats their notion of science.

SAVVY. Steady, Nunk! Hold the fort.

CONRAD [growls and sits down]!!!

LUBIN. You volunteered the consultation, Doctor. I may tell you that, far from sharing the credulity as to science which is now the fashion, I am prepared to demonstrate that during the last fifty years, though the Church has often been wrong, and even the Liberal Party has not been infallible, the men of science have always been wrong.

CONRAD. Yes: the fellows you call men of science. The people who make money by it, and their medical hangers-on. But has anybody been right?

LUBIN. The poets and story tellers, especially the classical poets and story tellers, have been, in the main, right. I will ask you not to repeat this as my opinion outside; for the vote of the medical profession and its worshippers is not to be trifled with.

FRANKLYN. You are quite right: the poem is our real clue to biological science. The most scientific document we possess at present is, as your grandmother would have told you quite truly, the story of the Garden of Eden.

BURGE [pricking up his ears] Whats that? If you can establish that, Barnabas, I am prepared to hear you out with my very best attention. I am listening. Go on.

FRANKLYN. Well, you remember, don’t you, that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not created mortal, and that natural death, as we call it, was not a part of life, but a later and quite separate invention?

SURGE. Now you mention it, thats true. Death came afterwards.

LUBIN. What about accidental death? That was always possible.

FRANKLYN. Precisely. Adam and Eve were hung up between two frightful possibilities. One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental death. The other was the prospect of living for ever. They could bear neither. They decided that they would just take a short turn of a thousand years, and meanwhile hand on their work to a new pair. Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any single creature the terrible burden of immortality.

LUBIN. I see. The old must make room for the new.

SURGE. Death is nothing but making room. Thats all there is in it or ever has been in it.

FRANKLYN. Yes; but the old must not desert their posts until the new are ripe for them. They desert them now two hundred years too soon.

SAVVY. I believe the old people are the new people reincarnated, Nunk. I suspect I am Eve. I am very fond of apples; and they always disagree with me.

CONRAD. You are Eve, in a sense. The Eternal Life persists; only It wears out Its bodies and minds and gets new ones, like new clothes. You are only a new hat and frock on Eve.

FRANKLYN. Yes. Bodies and minds ever better and better fitted to carry out Its eternal pursuit.

LUBIN [with quiet scepticism] What pursuit, may one ask, Mr Barnabas?

FRANKLYN. The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience. Greater power and greater knowledge: these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures. Evolution is that pursuit and nothing else. It is the path to godhead. A man differs from a microbe only in being further on the path.

LUBIN. And how soon do you expect this modest end to be reached?

FRANKLYN. Never, thank God! As there is no limit to power and knowledge there can be no end. ‘The power and the glory, world without end’: have those words meant nothing to you?

BURGE [pulling out an old envelope] I should like to make a note of that. [He does so].

CONRAD. There will always be something to live for.

SURGE [pocketing his envelope and becoming more and more businesslike] Right: I have got that. Now what about sin? What about the Fall? How do you work them in?

CONRAD. I don’t work in the Fall. The Fall is outside Science. But I daresay Frank can work it in for you.

SURGE [to Franklyn] I wish you would, you know. It’s important. Very important.

FRANKLYN. Well, consider it this way. It is clear that when Adam and Eve were immortal it was necessary that they should make the earth an extremely comfortable place to live in.

BURGE. True. If you take a house on a ninety-nine years lease, you spend a good deal of money on it. If you take it for three months you generally have a bill for dilapidations to pay at the end of them.

FRANKLYN. Just so. Consequently, when Adam had the Garden of Eden on a lease for ever, he took care to make it what the house agents call a highly desirable country residence. But the moment he invented death, and became a tenant for life only, the place was no longer worth the trouble. It was then that he let the thistles grow. Life was so short that it was no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well.

BURGE. Do you think that is enough to constitute what an average elector would consider a Fall? Is it tragic enough?

FRANKLYN. That is only the first step of the Fall. Adam did not fall down that step only: he fell down a whole flight. For instance, before he invented birth he dared not have lost his temper; for if he had killed Eve he would have been lonely and barren to all eternity. But when he invented birth, and anyone who was killed could be replaced, he could afford to let himself go. He undoubtedly invented wife-beating; and that was another step down. One of his sons invented meat-eating. The other was horrified at the innovation. With the ferocity which is still characteristic of bulls and other vegetarians, he slew his beefsteak-eating brother, and thus invented murder. That was a very steep step. It was so exciting that all the others began to kill one another for sport, and thus invented war, the steepest step of all. They even took to killing animals as a means of killing time, and then, of course, ate them to save the long and difficult labor of agriculture. I ask you to contemplate our fathers as they came crashing down all the steps of this Jacob’s ladder that reached from paradise to a hell on earth in which they had multiplied the chances of death from violence, accident, and disease until they could hardly count on three score and ten years of life, much less the thousand that Adam had been ready to face! With that picture before you, will you now ask me where was the Fall? You might as well stand at the foot of Snowdon and ask me where is the mountain. The very children see it so plainly that they compress its history into a two line epic:

Old Daddy Long Legs wouldn’t say his prayers:
Take him by the hind legs and throw him downstairs.

LUBIN [still immovably sceptical] And what does Science say to this fairy tale, Doctor Barnabas? Surely Science knows nothing of Genesis, or of Adam and Eve.

CONRAD. Then it isnt Science: thats all. Science has to account for everything; and everything includes the Bible.

FRANKLYN. The Book of Genesis is a part of nature like any other part of nature. The fact that the tale of the Garden of Eden has survived and held the imagination of men spellbound for centuries, whilst hundreds of much more plausible and amusing stories have gone out of fashion and perished like last year’s popular song, is a scientific fact; and Science is bound to explain it. You tell me that Science knows nothing of it. Then Science is more ignorant than the children at any village school.

CONRAD. Of course if you think it more scientific to say that what we are discussing is not Adam and Eve and Eden, but the phylogeny of the blastoderm —

SAVVY. You neednt swear, Nunk.

CONRAD. Shut up, you: I am not swearing. [To Lubin] If you want the professional humbug of rewriting the Bible in words of four syllables, and pretending it’s something new, I can humbug you to your heart’s content. I can call Genesis Phylogenesis. Let the Creator say, if you like, ‘I will establish an antipathetic symbiosis between thee and the female, and between thy blastoderm and her blastoderm.’ Nobody will understand you; and Savvy will think you are swearing. The meaning is the same.

HASLAM. Priceless. But it’s quite simple. The one version is poetry: the other is science.

FRANKLYN. The one is classroom jargon: the other is inspired human language.

LUBIN [calmly reminiscent] One of the few modern authors into whom
I have occasionally glanced is Rousseau, who was a sort of Deist like
Burge —

BURGE [interrupting him forcibly] Lubin: has this stupendously important communication which Professor Barnabas has just made to us: a communication for which I shall be indebted to him all my life long: has this, I say, no deeper effect on you than to set you pulling my leg by trying to make out that I am an infidel?

LUBIN. It’s very interesting and amusing, Burge; and I think I see a case in it. I think I could undertake to argue it in an ecclesiastical court. But important is hardly a word I should attach to it.

BURGE. Good God! Here is this professor: a man utterly removed from the turmoil of our political life: devoted to pure learning in its most abstract phases; and I solemnly declare he is the greatest politician, the most inspired party leader, in the kingdom. I take off my hat to him. I, Joyce Burge, give him best. And you sit there purring like an Angora cat, and can see nothing in it!

CONRAD [opening his eyes widely] Hallo! What have I done to deserve this tribute?

SURGE. Done! You have put the Liberal Party into power for the next thirty years, Doctor: thats what you’ve done.

CONRAD. God forbid!

BURGE. It’s all up with the Church now. Thanks to you, we go to the country with one cry and one only. Back to the Bible! Think of the effect on the Nonconformist vote. You gather that in with one hand; and you gather in the modern scientific sceptical professional vote with the other. The village atheist and the first cornet in the local Salvation Army band meet on the village green and shake hands. You take your school children, your Bible class under the Cowper-Temple clause, into the museum. You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, ‘Thats Adam. Thats Eve’s husband.’ You take the spectacled science student from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim’s Progress. You — [Savvy and Haslam explode into shrieks of merriment]. What are you two laughing at?

SAVVY. Oh, go on, Mr Burge. Dont stop.

HASLAM. Priceless!

FRANKLYN. Would thirty years of office for the Liberal Party seem so important to you, Mr Burge, if you had another two and a half centuries to live?

BURGE [decisively] No. You will have to drop that part of it. The constituencies wont swallow it.

LUBIN [seriously] I am not so sure of that, Burge. I am not sure that it may not prove the only point they will swallow.

BURGE. It will be no use to us even if they do. It’s not a party point.
It’s as good for the other side as for us.

LUBIN. Not necessarily. If we get in first with it, it will be associated in the public mind with our party. Suppose I put it forward as a plank in our program that we advocate the extension of human life to three hundred years! Dunreen, as leader of the opposite party, will be bound to oppose me: to denounce me as a visionary and so forth. By doing so he will place himself in the position of wanting to rob the people of two hundred and thirty years of their natural life. The Unionists will become the party of Premature Death; and we shall become the Longevity party.

BURGE [shaken] You really think the electorate would swallow it?

LUBIN. My dear Burge: is there anything the electorate will not swallow if it is judiciously put to them? But we must make sure of our ground. We must have the support of the men of science. Is there serious agreement among them, Doctor, as to the possibility of such an evolution as you have described?

CONRAD. Yes. Ever since the reaction against Darwin set in at the beginning of the present century, all scientific opinion worth counting has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution.

FRANKLYN. Poetry has been converging on it: philosophy has been converging on it: religion has been converging on it. It is going to be the religion of the twentieth century: a religion that has its intellectual roots in philosophy and science just as medieval Christianity had its intellectual roots in Aristotle.

LUBIN. But surely any change would be so extremely gradual that —

CONRAD. Dont deceive yourself. It’s only the politicians who improve the world so gradually that nobody can see the improvement. The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

LUBIN [impressed] Fancy my being leader of the party for the next three hundred years!

BURGE. What!!

LUBIN. Perhaps hard on some of the younger men. I think in fairness I shall have to step aside to make room after another century or so: that is, if Mimi can be persuaded to give up Downing Street.

BURGE. This is too much. Your colossal conceit blinds you to the most obvious necessity of the political situation.

LUBIN. You mean my retirement. I really cannot see that it is a necessity. I could not see it when I was almost an old man — or at least an elderly one. Now that it appears that I am a young man, the case for it breaks down completely. [To Conrad] May I ask are there any alternative theories? Is there a scientific Opposition?

CONRAD. Well, some authorities hold that the human race is a failure, and that a new form of life, better adapted to high civilization, will supersede us as we have superseded the ape and the elephant.

BURGE. The superman: eh!

CONRAD. No. Some being quite different from us.

LUBIN. Is that altogether desirable?

FRANKLYN. I fear so. However that may be, we may be quite sure of one thing. We shall not be let alone. The force behind evolution, call it what you will, is determined to solve the problem of civilization; and if it cannot do it through us, it will produce some more capable agents. Man is not God’s last word: God can still create. If you cannot do His work He will produce some being who can.

BURGE [with zealous reverence] What do we know about Him, Barnabas?
What does anyone know about Him?

CONRAD. We know this about Him with absolute certainty. The power my brother calls God proceeds by the method of Trial and Error; and if we turn out to be one of the errors, we shall go the way of the mastodon and the megatherium and all the other scrapped experiments.

LUBIN [rising and beginning to walk up and down the room with his considering cap on] I admit that I am impressed, gentlemen. I will go so far as to say that your theory is likely to prove more interesting than ever Welsh Disestablishment was. But as a practical politician — hm! Eh, Burge?

CONRAD. We are not practical politicians. We are out to get something done. Practical politicians are people who have mastered the art of using parliament to prevent anything being done.

FRANKLYN. When we get matured statesmen and citizens —

LUBIN [stopping short] Citizens! Oh! Are the citizens to live three hundred years as well as the statesmen?

CONRAD. Of course.

LUBIN. I confess that had not occurred to me [he sits down abruptly, evidently very unfavorably affected by this new light].

Savvy and Haslam look at one another with unspeakable feelings.

BURGE. Do you think it would be wise to go quite so far at first? Surely it would be more prudent to begin with the best men.

FRANKLYN. You need not be anxious about that. It will begin with the best men.

LUBIN. I am glad to hear you say so. You see, we must put this into a practical parliamentary shape.

BURGE. We shall have to draft a Bill: that is the long and the short of it. Until you have your Bill drafted you don’t know what you are really doing: that is my experience.

LUBIN. Quite so. My idea is that whilst we should interest the electorate in this as a sort of religious aspiration and personal hope, using it at the same time to remove their prejudices against those of us who are getting on in years, it would be in the last degree upsetting and even dangerous to enable everyone to live longer than usual. Take the mere question of the manufacture of the specific, whatever it may be! There are forty millions of people in the country. Let me assume for the sake of illustration that each person would have to consume, say, five ounces a day of the elixir. That would be — let me see — five times three hundred and sixty-five is — um — twenty-five — thirty-two — eighteen — eighteen hundred and twenty-five ounces a year: just two ounces over the hundredweight.

BURGE. Two million tons a year, in round numbers, of stuff that everyone would clamor for: that men would trample down women and children in the streets to get at. You couldnt produce it. There would be blue murder. It’s out of the question. We must keep the actual secret to ourselves.

CONRAD [staring at them] The actual secret! What on earth is the man talking about?

BURGE. The stuff. The powder. The bottle. The tabloid. Whatever it is.
You said it wasnt lemons.

CONRAD. My good sir: I have no powder, no bottle, no tabloid. I am not a quack: I am a biologist. This is a thing thats going to happen.

LUBIN [completely let down] Going to happen! Oh! Is that all? [He looks at his watch].

BURGE. Going to happen! What do you mean? Do you mean that you cant make it happen?

CONRAD. No more than I could have made you happen.

FRANKLYN. We can put it into men’s heads that there is nothing to prevent its happening but their own will to die before their work is done, and their own ignorance of the splendid work there is for them to do.

CONRAD. Spread that knowledge and that conviction; and as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, the thing will happen.

FRANKLYN. We don’t know where or when or to whom it will happen. It may happen first to someone in this room.

HASLAM. It wont happen to me: thats jolly sure.

CONRAD. It might happen to anyone. It might happen to the parlor maid.
How do we know?

SAVVY. The parlor maid! Oh, thats nonsense, Nunk.

LUBIN [once more quite comfortable] I think Miss Savvy has delivered the final verdict.

BURGE. Do you mean to say that you have nothing more practical to offer than the mere wish to live longer? Why, if people could live by merely wishing to, we should all be living for ever already! Everybody would like to live for ever. Why don’t they?

CONRAD. Pshaw! Everybody would like to have a million of money. Why havnt they? Because the men who would like to be millionaires wont save sixpence even with the chance of starvation staring them in the face. The men who want to live for ever wont cut off a glass of beer or a pipe of tobacco, though they believe the teetotallers and non-smokers live longer. That sort of liking is not willing. See what they do when they know they must.

FRANKLYN. Do not mistake mere idle fancies for the tremendous miracle-working force of Will nerved to creation by a conviction of Necessity. I tell you men capable of such willing, and realizing its necessity, will do it reluctantly, under inner compulsion, as all great efforts are made. They will hide what they are doing from themselves: they will take care not to know what they are doing. They will live three hundred years, not because they would like to, but because the soul deep down in them will know that they must, if the world is to be saved.

LUBIN [turning to Franklyn and patting him almost paternally] Well, my dear Barnabas, for the last thirty years the post has brought me at least once a week a plan from some crank or other for the establishment of the millennium. I think you are the maddest of all the cranks; but you are much the most interesting. I am conscious of a very curious mixture of relief and disappointment in finding that your plan is all moonshine, and that you have nothing practical to offer us. But what a pity! It is such a fascinating idea! I think you are too hard on us practical men; but there are men in every Government, even on the Front Bench, who deserve all you say. And now, before dropping the subject, may I put just one question to you? An idle question, since nothing can come of it; but still —

FRANKLYN. Ask your question.

LUBIN. Why do you fix three hundred years as the exact figure?

FRANKLYN. Because we must fix some figure. Less would not be enough; and more would be more than we dare as yet face.

LUBIN. Pooh! I am quite prepared to face three thousand, not to say three million.

CONRAD. Yes, because you don’t believe you Will be called on to make good your word.

FRANKLYN [gently] Also, perhaps, because you have never been troubled much by vision of the future.

BURGE [with intense conviction] The future does not exist for Henry
Hopkins Lubin.

LUBIN. If by the future you mean the millennial delusions which you use as a bunch of carrots to lure the uneducated British donkey to the polling booth to vote for you, it certainly does not.

SURGE. I can see the future not only because, if I may say so in all humility, I have been gifted with a certain power of spiritual vision, but because I have practised as a solicitor. A solicitor has to advise families. He has to think of the future and know the past. His office is the real modern confessional. Among other things he has to make people’s wills for them. He has to shew them how to provide for their daughters after their deaths. Has it occurred to you, Lubin, that if you live three hundred years, your daughters will have to wait a devilish long time for their money?

FRANKLYN. The money may not wait for them. Few investments flourish for three hundred years.

SAVVY. And what about before your death? Suppose they didn’t get married! Imagine a girl living at home with her mother and on her father for three hundred years! Theyd murder her if she didn’t murder them first.

LUBIN. By the way, Barnabas, is your daughter to keep her good looks all the time?

FRANKLYN. Will it matter? Can you conceive the most hardened flirt going on flirting for three centuries? At the end of half the time we shall hardly notice whether it is a woman or a man we are speaking to.

LUBIN [not quite relishing this ascetic prospect] Hm! [He rises]. Ah, well: you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [He shakes hands with Savvy]. Goodbye. [He shakes hands with Franklyn]. Goodbye, Doctor. [He shakes hands with Conrad]. Come on, Burge: you must really tell me what line you are going to take about the Church at the election?

BURGE. Havnt you heard? Havnt you taken in the revelation that has been vouchsafed to us? The line I am going to take is Back to Methuselah.

LUBIN [decisively] Dont be ridiculous, Burge. You don’t suppose, do you, that our friends here are in earnest, or that our very pleasant conversation has had anything to do with practical politics! They have just been pulling our legs very wittily. Come along. [He goes out, Franklyn politely going with him, but shaking his head in mute protest].

BURGE [shaking Conrad’s hand] It’s beyond the old man, Doctor. No spiritual side to him: only a sort of classical side that goes down with his own set. Besides, he’s done, gone, past, burnt out, burst up; thinks he is our leader and is only our rag and bottle department. But you may depend on me. I will work this stunt of yours in. I see its value. [He begins moving towards the door with Conrad]. Of course I cant put it exactly in your way; but you are quite right about our needing something fresh; and I believe an election can be fought on the death rate and on Adam and Eve as scientific facts. It will take the Opposition right out of its depth. And if we win there will be an O.M. for somebody when the first honors list comes round [by this time he has talked himself out of the room and out of earshot, Conrad accompanying him].

Savvy and Haslam, left alone, seize each other in an ecstasy of amusement, and jazz to the settee, where they sit down again side by side.

HASLAM [caressing her] Darling! what a priceless humbug old Lubin is!

SAVVY. Oh, sweet old thing! I love him. Burge is a flaming fraud if you like.

HASLAM. Did you notice one thing? It struck me as rather curious.

SAVVY. What?

HASLAM. Lubin and your father have both survived the war. But their sons were killed in it.

SAVVY [sobered] Yes. Jim’s death killed mother.

HASLAM. And they never said a word about it!

SAVVY. Well, why should they? The subject didn’t come up. I forgot about it too; and I was very fond of Jim.

HASLAM. I didn’t forget it, because I’m of military age; and if I hadnt been a parson I’d have had to go out and be killed too. To me the awful thing about their political incompetence was that they had to kill their own sons. It was the war casualty lists and the starvation afterwards that finished me up with politics and the Church and everything else except you.

SAVVY. Oh, I was just as bad as any of them. I sold flags in the streets in my best clothes; and — hsh! [she jumps up and pretends to be looking for a book on the shelves behind the settee].

Franklyn and Conrad return, looking weary and glum.

CONRAD. Well, thats how the gospel of the brothers Barnabas is going to be received! [He drops into Burge’s chair].

FRANKLYN [going back to his seat at the table] It’s no use. Were you convinced, Mr Haslam?

HASLAM. About our being able to live three hundred years? Frankly no.

CONRAD [to Savvy] Nor you, I suppose?

SAVVY. Oh, I don’t know. I thought I was for a moment. I can believe, in a sort of way, that people might live for three hundred years. But when you came down to tin tacks, and said that the parlor maid might, then I saw how absurd it was.

FRANKLYN. Just so. We had better hold our tongues about it, Con. We should only be laughed at, and lose the little credit we earned on false pretences in the days of our ignorance.

CONRAD. I daresay. But Creative Evolution doesnt stop while people are laughing. Laughing may even lubricate its job.

SAVVY. What does that mean?

CONRAD. It means that the first man to live three hundred years maynt have the slightest notion that he is going to do it, and may be the loudest laugher of the lot.

SAVVY. Or the first woman?

CONRAD [assenting] Or the first woman.

HASLAM. Well, it wont be one of us, anyhow.

FRANKLYN. How do you know?

This is unanswerable. None of them have anything more to say.

PART III. The Thing Happens

A summer afternoon in the year 2170 A.D. The official parlor of the President of the British Islands. A board table, long enough for three chairs at each side besides the presidential chair at the head and an ordinary chair at the foot, occupies the breadth of the room. On the table, opposite every chair, a small switchboard with a dial. There is no fireplace. The end wall is a silvery screen nearly as large as a pair of folding doors. The door is on your left as you face the screen; and there is a row of thick pegs, padded and covered with velvet, beside it.

A stoutish middle-aged man, good-looking and breezily genial, dressed in a silk smock, stockings, handsomely ornamented sandals, and a gold fillet round his brows, comes in. He is like Joyce Burge, yet also like Lubin, as if Nature had made a composite photograph of the two men. He takes off the fillet and hangs it on a peg; then sits down in the presidential chair at the head of the table, which is at the end farthest from the door. He puts a peg into his switchboard; turns the pointer on the dial; puts another peg in; and presses a button. Immediately the silvery screen vanishes; and in its place appears, in reverse from right to left, another office similarly furnished, with a thin, unamiable man similarly dressed, but in duller colors, turning over some documents at the table. His gold fillet is hanging up on a similar peg beside the door. He is rather like Conrad Barnabas, but younger, and much more commonplace.

BURGE-LUBIN. Hallo, Barnabas!

BARNABAS [without looking round] What number?

BURGE-LUBIN. Five double x three two gamma. Burge-Lubin.

Barnabas puts a plug in number five; turns his pointer to double x; and another plug in 32; presses a button and looks round at Burge-Lubin, who is now visible to him as well as audible.

BARNABAS [curtly] Oh! That you, President?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. They told me you wanted me to ring you up. Anything wrong?

BARNABAS [harsh and querulous] I wish to make a protest.

BURGE-LUBIN [good-humored and mocking] What! Another protest! Whats wrong now?

BARNABAS. If you only knew all the protests I havnt made, you would be surprised at my patience. It is you who are always treating me with the grossest want of consideration.

BURGE-LUBIN. What have I done now?

BARNABAS. You have put me down to go to the Record Office today to receive that American fellow, and do the honors of a ridiculous cinema show. That is not the business of the Accountant General: it is the business of the President. It is an outrageous waste of my time, and an unjustifiable shirking of your duty at my expense. I refuse to go. You must go.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear boy, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to take the job off your hands —

BARNABAS. Then do it. Thats all I want [he is about to switch off].

BURGE-LUBIN. Dont switch off. Listen. This American has invented a method of breathing under water.

BARNABAS. What do I care? I don’t want to breathe under water.

BURGE-LUBIN. You may, my dear Barnabas, at any time. You know you never look where you are going when you are immersed in your calculations. Some day you will walk into the Serpentine. This man’s invention may save your life.

BARNABAS [angrily] Will you tell me what that has to do with your putting your ceremonial duties on to my shoulders? I will not be trifled [he vanishes and is replaced by the blank screen] —

BURGE-LUBIN [indignantly holding down his button] Dont cut us off, please: we have not finished. I am the President, speaking to the Accountant General. What are you dreaming of?

A WOMAN’S VOICE. Sorry. [The screen shews Barnabas as before].

BURGE-LUBIN. Since you take it that way, I will go in your place. It’s a pity, because, you see, this American thinks you are the greatest living authority on the duration of human life; and —

BARNABAS [interrupting] The American thinks! What do you mean? I am the greatest living authority on the duration of human life. Who dares dispute it?

BURGE-LUBIN. Nobody, dear lad, nobody. Dont fly out at me. It is evident that you have not read the American’s book.

BARNABAS. Dont tell me that you have, or that you have read any book except a novel for the last twenty years; for I wont believe you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Quite right, dear old fellow: I havnt read it. But I have read what The Times Literary Supplement says about it.

BARNABAS. I don’t care two straws what it says about it. Does it say anything about me?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes.

BARNABAS. Oh, does it? What?

BURGE-LUBIN. It points out that an extraordinary number of first-rate persons like you and me have died by drowning during the last two centuries, and that when this invention of breathing under water takes effect, your estimate of the average duration of human life will be upset.

BARNABAS [alarmed] Upset my estimate! Gracious Heavens! Does the fool realize what that means? Do you realize what that means?

BURGE-LUBIN. I suppose it means that we shall have to amend the Act.

BARNABAS. Amend my Act! Monstrous!

BURGE-LUBIN. But we must. We cant ask people to go on working until they are forty-three unless our figures are unchallengeable. You know what a row there was over those last three years, and how nearly the too-old-at-forty people won.

BARNABAS. They would have made the British Islands bankrupt if theyd won. But you dont care for that; you care for nothing but being popular.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, well: I shouldn’t worry if I were you; for most people complain that there is not enough work for them, and would be only too glad to stick on instead of retiring at forty-three, if only they were asked as a favor instead of having to.

BARNABAS. Thank you: I need no consolation. [He rises determinedly and puts on his fillet].

BURGE-LUBIN. Are you off? Where are you going to?

BARNABAS. To that cinema tomfoolery, of course. I shall put this
American impostor in his place. [He goes out].

BURGE-LUBIN [calling after him] God bless you, dear old chap! [With a chuckle, he switches off; and the screen becomes blank. He presses a button and holds it down while he calls] Hallo!

A WOMAN’S VOICE. Hallo!

BURGE-LUBIN [formally] The President respectfully solicits the privilege of an interview with the Chief Secretary, and holds himself entirely at his honor’s august disposal.

A CHINESE VOICE. He is coming.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh! That you, Confucius? So good of you. Come along [he releases the button].

A man in a yellow gown, presenting the general appearance of a Chinese sage, enters.

BURGE-LUBIN [jocularly] Well, illustrious Sage-&-Onions, how are your poor sore feet?

CONFUCIUS [gravely] I thank you for your kind inquiries. I am well.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thats right. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Any business for me today?

CONFUCIUS [sitting down on the first chair round the corner of the table to the President’s right] None.

BURGE-LUBIN. Have you heard the result of the bye-election?

CONFUCIUS. A walk-over. Only one candidate.

BURGE-LUBIN. Any good?

CONFUCIUS. He was released from the County Lunatic Asylum a fortnight ago. Not mad enough for the lethal chamber: not sane enough for any place but the division lobby. A very popular speaker.

BURGE-LUBIN. I wish the people would take a serious interest in politics.

CONFUCIUS. I do not agree. The Englishman is not fitted by nature to understand politics. Ever since the public services have been manned by Chinese, the country has been well and honestly governed. What more is needed?

BURGE-LUBIN. What I cant make out is that China is one of the worst governed countries on earth.

CONFUCIUS. No. It was badly governed twenty years ago; but since we forbade any Chinaman to take part in our public services, and imported natives of Scotland for that purpose, we have done well. Your information here is always twenty years out of date.

BURGE-LUBIN. People don’t seem to be able to govern themselves. I cant understand it. Why should it be so?

CONFUCIUS. Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial.

BURGE-LUBIN. It ends in the public services being so good that the
Government has nothing to do but think.

CONFUCIUS. Were it otherwise, the Government would have too much to do to think.

BURGE-LUBIN. Is that any excuse for the English people electing a parliament of lunatics?

CONFUCIUS. The English people always did elect parliaments of lunatics. What does it matter if your permanent officials are honest and competent?

BURGE-LUBIN. You do not know the history of this country. What would my ancestors have said to the menagerie of degenerates that is still called the House of Commons? Confucius: you will not believe me; and I do not blame you for it; but England once saved the liberties of the world by inventing parliamentary government, which was her peculiar and supreme glory.

CONFUCIUS. I know the history of your country perfectly well. It proves the exact contrary.

BURGE-LUBIN. How do you make that out?

CONFUCIUS. The only power your parliament ever had was the power of withholding supplies from the king.

BURGE-LUBIN. Precisely. That great Englishman Simon de Montfort —

CONFUCIUS. He was not an Englishman: he was a Frenchman. He imported parliaments from France.

BURGE-LUBIN [surprised] You dont say so!

CONFUCIUS. The king and his loyal subjects killed Simon for forcing his French parliament on them. The first thing British parliaments always did was to grant supplies to the king for life with enthusiastic expressions of loyalty, lest they should have any real power, and be expected to do something.

BURGE-LUBIN. Look here, Confucius: you know more history than I do, of course; but democracy —

CONFUCIUS. An institution peculiar to China. And it was never really a success there.

BURGE-LUBIN. But the Habeas Corpus Act!

CONFUCIUS. The English always suspended it when it threatened to be of the slightest use.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, trial by jury: you cant deny that we established that?

CONFUCIUS. All cases that were dangerous to the governing classes were tried in the Star Chamber or by Court Martial, except when the prisoner was not tried at all, but executed after calling him names enough to make him unpopular.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, bother! You may be right in these little details; but in the large we have managed to hold our own as a great race. Well, people who could do nothing couldnt have done that, you know.

CONFUCIUS. I did not say you could do nothing. You could fight. You could eat. You could drink. Until the twentieth century you could produce children. You could play games. You could work when you were forced to. But you could not govern yourselves.

BURGE-LUBIN. Then how did we get our reputation as the pioneers of liberty?

CONFUCIUS. By your steadfast refusal to be governed at all. A horse that kicks everyone who tries to harness and guide him may be a pioneer of liberty; but he is not a pioneer of government. In China he would be shot.

BURGE-LUBIN. Stuff! Do you imply that the administration of which I am president is no Government?

CONFUCIUS. I do. I am the Government.

BURGE-LUBIN. You! You!! You fat yellow lump of conceit!

CONFUCIUS. Only an Englishman could be so ignorant of the nature of government as to suppose that a capable statesman cannot be fat, yellow, and conceited. Many Englishmen are slim, red-nosed, and modest. Put them in my place, and within a year you will be back in the anarchy and chaos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, if you go back to the dark ages, I have nothing more to say. But we did not perish. We extricated ourselves from that chaos. We are now the best governed country in the world. How did we manage that if we are such fools as you pretend?

CONFUCIUS. You did not do it until the slaughter and ruin produced by your anarchy forced you at last to recognize two inexorable facts. First, that government is absolutely necessary to civilization, and that you could not maintain civilization by merely doing down your neighbor, as you called it, and cutting off the head of your king whenever he happened to be a logical Scot and tried to take his position seriously. Second, that government is an art of which you are congenitally incapable. Accordingly, you imported educated negresses and Chinese to govern you. Since then you have done very well.

BURGE-LUBIN. So have you, you old humbug. All the same, I don’t know how you stand the work you do. You seem to me positively to like public business. Why wont you let me take you down to the coast some week-end and teach you marine golf?

CONFUCIUS. It does not interest me. I am not a barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN. You mean that I am?

CONFUCIUS. That is evident.

BURGE-LUBIN. How?

CONFUCIUS. People like you. They like cheerful goodnatured barbarians. They have elected you President five times in succession. They will elect you five times more. I like you. You are better company than a dog or a horse because you can speak.

BURGE-LUBIN. Am I a barbarian because you like me?

CONFUCIUS. Surely. Nobody likes me: I am held in awe. Capable persons are never liked. I am not likeable; but I am indispensable.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, cheer up, old man: theres nothing so disagreeable about you as all that. I don’t dislike you; and if you think I’m afraid of you, you jolly well don’t know Burge-Lubin: thats all.

CONFUCIUS. You are brave: yes. It is a form of stupidity.

BURGE-LUBIN. You may not be brave: one doesn’t expect it from a Chink.
But you have the devil’s own cheek.

CONFUCIUS. I have the assured certainty of the man who sees and knows. Your genial bluster, your cheery self-confidence, are pleasant, like the open air. But they are blind: they are vain. I seem to see a great dog wag his tail and bark joyously. But if he leaves my heel he is lost.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thank you for a handsome compliment. I have a big dog; and he is the best fellow I know. If you knew how much uglier you are than a chow, you wouldn’t start those comparisons, though. [Rising] Well, if you have nothing for me to do, I am going to leave your heel for the rest of the day and enjoy myself. What would you recommend me to do with myself?

CONFUCIUS. Give yourself up to contemplation; and great thoughts will come to you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Will they? If you think I am going to sit here on a fine day like this with my legs crossed waiting for great thoughts, you exaggerate my taste for them. I prefer marine golf. [Stopping short] Oh, by the way, I forgot something. I have a word or two to say to the Minister of health. [He goes back to his chair].

CONFUCIUS. Her number is —

BURGE-LUBIN. I know it.

CONFUCIUS [rising] I cannot understand her attraction for you. For me a woman who is not yellow does not exist, save as an official. [He goes out].

Burge-Lubin operates his switchboard as before. The screen vanishes: and a dainty room with a bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing-table with a mirror and a switch on it, appears. Seated at it a handsome negress is trying on a brilliant head scarf. Her dressing-gown is thrown back from her shoulders to her chair. She is in corset, knickers, and silk stockings.

BURGE-LUBIN [horrified] I beg your pardon a thousand times — [The startled negress snatches the peg out of her switchboard and vanishes].

THE NEGRESS’S VOICE. Who is it?

BURGE-LUBIN. Me. The President. Burge-Lubin. I had no idea your bedroom switch was in. I beg your pardon.

The negress reappears. She has pulled the dressing-gown perfunctorily over her shoulders, and continues her experiments with the scarf, not at all put out, and rather amused by Surge’s prudery.

THE NEGRESS. Stupid of me. I was talking to another lady this morning; and I left the peg in.

BURGE-LUBIN. But I am so sorry.

THE NEGRESS [sunnily: still busy with the scarf] Why? It was my fault.

BURGE-LUBIN [embarrassed] Well — er — But I suppose you were used to it in Africa.

THE NEGRESS. Your delicacy is very touching, Mr President. It would be funny if it were not so unpleasant, because, like all white delicacy, it is in the wrong place. How do you think this suits my complexion?

BURGE-LUBIN. How can any really vivid color go wrong with a black satin skin? It is our women’s wretched pale faces that have to be matched and lighted. Yours is always right.

THE NEGRESS. Yes: it is a pity your white beauties have all the same ashy faces, the same colorless drab, the same age. But look at their beautiful noses and little lips! They are physically insipid: they have no beauty: you cannot love them; but how elegant!

BURGE-LUBIN. Cant you find an official pretext for coming to see me? Isnt it ridiculous that we have never met? It’s so tantalizing to see you and talk to you, and to know all the time that you are two hundred miles away, and that I cant touch you?

THE NEGRESS. I cannot live on the East Coast: it is hard enough to keep my blood warm here. Besides, my friend, it would not be safe. These distant flirtations are very charming; and they teach self-control.

BURGE-LUBIN. Damn self-control! I want to hold you in my arms — to — [the negress snatches out the peg from the switchboard and vanishes. She is still heard laughing]. Black devil! [He snatches out his peg furiously: her laugh is no longer heard]. Oh, these sex episodes! Why can I not resist them? Disgraceful!

Confucius returns.

CONFUCIUS. I forgot. There is something for you to do this morning. You have to go to the Record Office to receive the American barbarian.

BURGE-LUBIN. Confucius: once for all, I object to this Chinese habit of describing white men as barbarians.

CONFUCIUS [standing formally at the end of the table with his hands palm to palm] I make a mental note that you do not wish the Americans to be described as barbarians.

BURGE-LUBIN. Not at all. The Americans are barbarians. But we are not. I suppose the particular barbarian you are speaking of is the American who has invented a means of breathing under water.

CONFUCIUS. He says he has invented such a method. For some reason which is not intelligible in China, Englishmen always believe any statement made by an American inventor, especially one who has never invented anything. Therefore you believe this person and have given him a public reception. Today the Record Office is entertaining him with a display of the cinematographic records of all the eminent Englishmen who have lost their lives by drowning since the cinema was invented. Why not go to see it if you are at a loss for something to do?

BURGE-LUBIN. What earthly interest is there in looking at a moving picture of a lot of people merely because they were drowned? If they had had any sense, they would not have been drowned, probably.

CONFUCIUS. That is not so. It has never been noticed before; but the Record Office has just made two remarkable discoveries about the public men and women who have displayed extraordinary ability during the past century. One is that they retained unusual youthfulness up to an advanced age. The other is that they all met their death by drowning.

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes: I know. Can you explain it?

CONFUCIUS. It cannot be explained. It is not reasonable. Therefore I do not believe it.

The Accountant General rushes in, looking ghastly. He staggers to the middle of the table.

BURGE-LUBIN. Whats the matter? Are you ill?

BARNABAS [choking] No. I — [he collapses into the middle chair]. I must speak to you in private.

Confucius calmly withdraws.

BURGE-LUBIN. What on earth is it? Have some oxygen.

BARNABAS. I have had some. Go to the Record Office. You will see men fainting there again and again, and being revived with oxygen, as I have been. They have seen with their own eyes as I have.

BURGE-LUBIN. Seen what?

BARNABAS. Seen the Archbishop of York.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, why shouldn’t they see the Archbishop of York? What are they fainting for? Has he been murdered?

BARNABAS. No: he has been drowned.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good God! Where? When? How? Poor fellow!

BARNABAS. Poor fellow! Poor thief! Poor swindler! Poor robber of his country’s Exchequer! Poor fellow indeed! Wait til I catch him.

BURGE-LUBIN. How can you catch him when he is dead? Youre mad.

BARNABAS. Dead! Who said he was dead?

BURGE-LUBIN. You did. Drowned.

BARNABAS [exasperated] Will you listen to me? Was old Archbishop
Haslam, the present man’s last predecessor but four, drowned or not?

BURGE-LUBIN. I don’t know. Look him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

BARNABAS. Yah! Was Archbishop Stickit, who wrote Stickit on the Psalms, drowned or not?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, mercifully. He deserved it.

BARNABAS. Was President Dickenson drowned? Was General Bullyboy drowned?

BURGE-LUBIN. Who is denying it?

BARNABAS. Well, wave had moving pictures of all four put on the screen today for this American; and they and the Archbishop are the same man. Now tell me I am mad.

BURGE-LUBIN. I do tell you you are mad. Stark raving mad.

BARNABAS. Am I to believe my own eyes or am I not?

BURGE-LUBIN. You can do as you please. All I can tell you is that I don’t believe your eyes if they cant see any difference between a live archbishop and two dead ones. [The apparatus rings, he holds the button down]. Yes?

THE WOMAN’S VOICE. The Archbishop of York, to see the President.

BARNABAS [hoarse with rage] Have him in. I’ll talk to the scoundrel.

BURGE-LUBIN [releasing the button] Not while you are in this state.

BARNABAS [reaching furiously for his button and holding it down] Send the Archbishop in at once.

BURGE-LUBIN. If you lose your temper, Barnabas, remember that we shall be two to one.

The Archbishop enters. He has a white band round his throat, set in a black stock. He wears a sort of kilt of black ribbons, and soft black boots that button high up on his calves. His costume does not differ otherwise from that of the President and the Accountant General; but its color scheme is black and white. He is older than the Reverend Bill Haslam was when he wooed Miss Savvy Barnabas; but he is recognizably the same man. He does not look a day over fifty, and is very well preserved even at that; but his boyishness of manner is quite gone: he now has complete authority and self-possession: in fact the President is a little afraid of him; and it seems quite natural and inevitable that he should speak fast.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Good day, Mr President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good day, Mr Archbishop. Be seated.

THE ARCHBISHOP [sitting down between them] Good day, Mr Accountant
General.

BARNABAS [malevolently] Good day to you. I have a question to put to you, if you don’t mind.

THE ARCHBISHOP [looking curiously at him, jarred by his uncivil tone]
Certainly. What is it?

BARNABAS. What is your definition of a thief?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Rather an old-fashioned word, is it not?

BARNABAS. It survives officially in my department.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Our departments are full of survivals. Look at my tie! my apron! my boots! They are all mere survivals; yet it seems that without them I cannot be a proper Archbishop.

BARNABAS. Indeed! Well, in my department the word thief survives, because in the community the thing thief survives. And a very despicable and dishonorable thing he is, too.

THE ARCHBISHOP [coolly] I daresay.

BARNABAS. In my department, sir, a thief is a person who lives longer than the statutory expectation of life entitles him to, and goes on drawing public money when, if he were an honest man, he would be dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Then let me say, sir, that your department does not understand its own business. If you have miscalculated the duration of human life, that is not the fault of the persons whose longevity you have miscalculated. And if they continue to work and produce, they pay their way, even if they live two or three centuries.

BARNABAS. I know nothing about their working and producing. That is not the business of my department. I am concerned with their expectation of life; and I say that no man has any right to go on living and drawing money when he ought to be dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. You do not comprehend the relation between income and production.

BARNABAS. I understand my own department.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is not enough. Your department is part of a synthesis which embraces all the departments.

BURGE-LUBIN. Synthesis! This is an intellectual difficulty. This is a job for Confucius. I heard him use that very word the other day; and I wondered what the devil he meant. [Switching on] Hallo! Put me through to the Chief Secretary.

CONFUCIUS’S VOICE. You are speaking to him.

BURGE-LUBIN. An intellectual difficulty, old man. Something we don’t understand. Come and help us out.

THE ARCHBISHOP. May I ask how the question has arisen?

BARNABAS. Ah! You begin to smell a rat, do you? You thought yourself pretty safe. You —

BURGE-LUBIN. Steady, Barnabas. Dont be in a hurry.

Confucius enters.

THE ARCHBISHOP [rising] Good morning, Mr Chief Secretary.

BURGE-LUBIN [rising in instinctive imitation of the Archbishop] Honor us by taking a seat, O sage.

CONFUCIUS. Ceremony is needless. [He bows to the company, and takes the chair at the foot of the table].

The President and the Archbishop resume their seats.

BURGE-LUBIN. We wish to put a case to you, Confucius. Suppose a man, instead of conforming to the official estimate of his expectation of life, were to live for more than two centuries and a half, would the Accountant General be justified in calling him a thief?

CONFUCIUS. No. He would be justified in calling him a liar.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I think not, Mr Chief Secretary. What do you suppose my age is?

CONFUCIUS. Fifty.

BURGE-LUBIN. You don’t look it. Forty-five; and young for your age.

THE ARCHBISHOP. My age is two hundred and eighty-three.

BARNABAS [morosely triumphant] Hmp! Mad, am I?

BURGE-LUBIN. Youre both mad. Excuse me, Archbishop; but this is getting a bit — well —

THE ARCHBISHOP [to Confucius] Mr Chief Secretary: will you, to oblige me, assume that I have lived nearly three centuries? As a hypothesis?

BURGE-LUBIN. What is a hypothesis?

CONFUCIUS. It does not matter. I understand. [To the Archbishop] Am I to assume that you have lived in your ancestors, or by metempsychosis —

BURGE-LUBIN. Met — Emp — Sy — Good Lord! What a brain, Confucius! What a brain!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Nothing of that kind. Assume in the ordinary sense that I was born in the year 1887, and that I have worked continuously in one profession or another since the year 1910. Am I a thief?

CONFUCIUS. I do not know. Was that one of your professions?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. I have been nothing worse than an Archbishop, a
President, and a General.

BARNABAS. Has he or has he not robbed the Exchequer by drawing five or six incomes when he was only entitled to one? Answer me that.

CONFUCIUS. Certainly not. The hypothesis is that he has worked continuously since 1910. We are now in the year 2170. What is the official lifetime?

BARNABAS. Seventy-eight. Of course it’s an average; and we don’t mind a man here and there going on to ninety, or even, as a curiosity, becoming a centenarian. But I say that a man who goes beyond that is a swindler.

CONFUCIUS. Seventy-eight into two hundred and eighty-three goes more than three and a half times. Your department owes the Archbishop two and a half educations and three and a half retiring pensions.

BARNABAS. Stuff! How can that be?

CONFUCIUS. At what age do your people begin to work for the community?

BURGE-LUBIN. Three. They do certain things every day when they are three. Just to break them in, you know. But they become self-supporting, or nearly so, at thirteen.

CONFUCIUS. And at what age do they retire?

BARNABAS. Forty-three.

CONFUCIUS. That is, they do thirty years’ work; and they receive maintenance and education, without working, for thirteen years of childhood and thirty-five years of superannuation, forty-eight years in all, for each thirty years’ work. The Archbishop has given you 260 years’ work, and has received only one education and no superannuation. You therefore owe him over 300 years of leisure and nearly eight educations. You are thus heavily in his debt. In other words, he has effected an enormous national economy by living so long; and you, by living only seventy-eight years, are profiting at his expense. He is the benefactor: you are the thief. [Half rising] May I now withdraw and return to my serious business, as my own span is comparatively short?

BURGE-LUBIN. Dont be in a hurry, old chap. [Confucius sits down again]. This hypothecary, or whatever you call it, is put up seriously. I don’t believe it; but if the Archbishop and the Accountant General are going to insist that it’s true, we shall have either to lock them up or to see the thing through.

BARNABAS. It’s no use trying these Chinese subtleties on me. I’m a plain man; and though I don’t understand metaphysics, and don’t believe in them, I understand figures; and if the Archbishop is only entitled to seventy-eight years, and he takes 283, I say he takes more than he is entitled to. Get over that if you can.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not taken 283 years: I have taken 23 and given 260.

CONFUCIUS. Do your accounts shew a deficiency or a surplus?

BARNABAS. A surplus. Thats what I cant make out. Thats the artfulness of these people.

BURGE-LUBIN. That settles it. Whats the use of arguing? The Chink says you are wrong; and theres an end of it.

BARNABAS. I say nothing against the Chink’s arguments. But what about my facts?

CONFUCIUS. If your facts include a case of a man living 283 years, I advise you to take a few weeks at the seaside.

BARNABAS. Let there be an end of this hinting that I am out of my mind.
Come and look at the cinema record. I tell you this man is Archbishop
Haslam, Archbishop Stickit, President Dickenson, General Bullyboy and
himself into the bargain; all five of them.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not deny it. I never have denied it. Nobody has ever asked me.

BURGE-LUBIN. But damn it, man — I beg your pardon, Archbishop; but really, really —

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dont mention it. What were you going to say?

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you were drowned four times over. You are not a cat, you know.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is very easy to understand. Consider my situation when I first made the amazing discovery that I was destined to live three hundred years! I —

CONFUCIUS [interrupting him] Pardon me. Such a discovery was impossible. You have not made it yet. You may live a million years if you have already lived two hundred. There is no question of three hundred years. You have made a slip at the very beginning of your fairy tale, Mr Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Good, Confucius! [To the Archbishop] He has you there. I don’t see how you can get over that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: it is quite a good point. But if the Accountant General will go to the British Museum library, and search the catalogue, he will find under his own name a curious and now forgotten book, dated 1924, entitled The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas. That gospel was that men must live three hundred years if civilization is to be saved. It shewed that this extension of individual human life was possible, and how it was likely to come about. I married the daughter of one of the brothers.

BARNABAS. Do you mean to say you claim to be a connection of mine?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I claim nothing. As I have by this time perhaps three or four million cousins of one degree or another, I have ceased to call on the family.

BURGE-LUBIN. Gracious heavens! Four million relatives! Is that calculation correct, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. In China it might be forty millions if there were no checks on population.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is a staggerer. It brings home to one — but [recovering] it isnt true, you know. Let us keep sane.

CONFUCIUS [to the Archbishop] You wish us to understand that the illustrious ancestors of the Accountant General communicated to you a secret by which you could attain the age of three hundred years.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. Nothing of the kind. They simply believed that mankind could live any length of time it knew to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction. I did not share their belief: at least I was not conscious of sharing it: I thought I was only amused by it. To me my father-in-law and his brother were a pair of clever cranks who had talked one another into a fixed idea which had become a monomania with them. It was not until I got into serious difficulties with the pension authorities after turning seventy that I began to suspect the truth.

CONFUCIUS. The truth?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes, Mr Chief Secretary: the truth. Like all revolutionary truths, it began as a joke. As I shewed no signs of ageing after forty-five, my wife used to make fun of me by saying that I was certainly going to live three hundred years. She was sixty-eight when she died; and the last thing she said to me, as I sat by her bedside holding her hand, was ‘Bill: you really don’t look fifty. I wonder—’ She broke off, and fell asleep wondering, and never awoke. Then I began to wonder too. That is the explanation of the three hundred years, Mr Secretary.

CONFUCIUS. It is very ingenious, Mr Archbishop. And very well told.

BURGE-LUBIN. Of course you understand that I don’t for a moment suggest the very faintest doubt of your absolute veracity, Archbishop. You know that, don’t you?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Quite, Mr President. Only you don’t believe me: that is all. I do not expect you to. In your place I should not believe. You had better have a look at the films. [Pointing to the Accountant General] He believes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But the drowning? What about the drowning? A man might get drowned once, or even twice if he was exceptionally careless. But he couldn’t be drowned four times. He would run away from water like a mad dog.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Perhaps Mr Chief Secretary can guess the explanation of that.

CONFUCIUS. To keep your secret, you had to die.

BURGE-LUBIN. But dash it all, man, he isn’t dead.

CONFUCIUS. It is socially impossible not to do what everybody else does.
One must die at the usual time.

BARNABAS. Of course. A simple point of honour.

CONFUCIUS. Not at all. A simple necessity.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I’m hanged if I see it. I should jolly well live for ever if I could.

THE ARCHBISHOP. It is not so easy as you think. You, Mr Chief Secretary, have grasped the difficulties of the position. Let me remind you, Mr President, that I was over eighty before the 1969 Act for the Redistribution of Income entitled me to a handsome retiring pension. Owing to my youthful appearance I was prosecuted for attempting to obtain public money on false pretences when I claimed it. I could prove nothing; for the register of my birth had been blown to pieces by a bomb dropped on a village church years before in the first of the big modern wars. I was ordered back to work as a man of forty, and had to work for fifteen years more, the retiring age being then fifty-five.

BURGE-LUBIN. As late as fifty-five! How did people stand it?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They made difficulties about letting me go even then, I still looked so young. For some years I was in continual trouble. The industrial police rounded me up again and again, refusing to believe that I was over age. They began to call me The Wandering Jew. You see how impossible my position was. I foresaw that in twenty years more my official record would prove me to be seventy-five; my appearance would make it impossible to believe that I was more than forty-five; and my real age would be one hundred and seventeen. What was I to do? Bleach my hair? Hobble about on two sticks? Mimic the voice of a centenarian? Better have killed myself.

BARNABAS. You ought to have killed yourself. As an honest man you were entitled to no more than an honest man’s expectation of life.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I did kill myself. It was quite easy. I left a suit of clothes by the seashore during the bathing season, with documents in the pockets to identify me. I then turned up in a strange place, pretending that I had lost my memory, and did not know my name or my age or anything about myself. Under treatment I recovered my health, but not my memory. I have had several careers since I began this routine of life and death. I have been an archbishop three times. When I persuaded the authorities to knock down all our towns and rebuild them from the foundations, or move them, I went into the artillery, and became a general. I have been President.

BURGE-LUBIN. Dickenson?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes.

BURGE-LUBIN. But they found Dickenson’s body: its ashes are buried in St
Paul’s.

THE ARCHBISHOP. They almost always found the body. During the bathing season there are plenty of bodies. I have been cremated again and again. At first I used to attend my own funeral in disguise, because I had read about a man doing that in an old romance by an author named Bennett, from whom I remember borrowing five pounds in 1912. But I got tired of that. I would not cross the street now to read my latest epitaph.

The Chief Secretary and the President look very glum. Their incredulity is vanquished at last.

BURGE-LUBIN. Look here. Do you chaps realize how awful this is? Here we are sitting calmly in the presence of a man whose death is overdue by two centuries. He may crumble into dust before our eyes at any moment.

BARNABAS. Not he. He’ll go on drawing his pension until the end of the world.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Not quite that. My expectation of life is only three hundred years.

BARNABAS. You will last out my time anyhow: that’s enough for me.

THE ARCHBISHOP [coolly] How do you know?

BARNABAS [taken aback] How do I know!

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: how do you know? I did not begin even to suspect until I was nearly seventy. I was only vain of my youthful appearance. I was not quite serious about it until I was ninety. Even now I am not sure from one moment to another, though I have given you my reason for thinking that I have quite unintentionally committed myself to a lifetime of three hundred years.

BURGE-LUBIN. But how do you do it? Is it lemons? Is it Soya beans? Is it —

THE ARCHBISHOP. I do not do it. It happens. It may happen to anyone. It may happen to you.

BURGE-LUBIN [the full significance of this for himself dawning on him]
Then we three may be in the same boat with you, for all we know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. You may. Therefore I advise you to be very careful how you take any step that will make my position uncomfortable.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, I’m dashed! One of my secretaries was remarking only this morning how well and young I am looking. Barnabas: I have an absolute conviction that I am one of the — the — shall I say one of the victims? — of this strange destiny.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather formed the same conviction when he was between sixty and seventy. I knew him.

BURGE-LUBIN [depressed] Ah! But he died.

THE ARCHBISHOP. No.

BURGE-LUBIN [hopefully] Do you mean to say he is still alive?

THE ARCHBISHOP. No. He was shot. Under the influence of his belief that he was going to live three hundred years he became a changed man. He began to tell people the truth; and they disliked it so much that they took advantage of certain clauses of an Act of Parliament he had himself passed during the Four Years War, and had purposely forgotten to repeal afterwards. They took him to the Tower of London and shot him.

The apparatus rings.

CONFUCIUS [answering] Yes? [He listens].

A WOMAN’S VOICE. The Domestic Minister has called.

BURGE-LUBIN [not quite catching the answer] Who does she say has called?

CONFUCIUS. The Domestic Minister.

BARNABAS. Oh, dash it! That awful woman!

BURGE-LUBIN. She certainly is a bit of a terror. I don’t exactly know why; for she is not at all bad-looking.

BARNABAS [out of patience] For Heaven’s sake, don’t be frivolous.

THE ARCHBISHOP. He cannot help it, Mr Accountant General. Three of his sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers married Lubins.

BURGE-LUBIN. Tut tut! I am not frivolling. I did not ask the lady here. Which of you did?

CONFUCIUS. It is her official duty to report personally to the President once a quarter.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, that. Then I suppose it’s my official duty to receive her. Theyd better send her in. You don’t mind, do you? She will bring us back to real life. I don’t know how you fellows feel; but I’m just going dotty.

CONFUCIUS [into the telephone] The President will receive the Domestic
Minister at once.

They watch the door in silence for the entrance of the Domestic Minister.

BURGE-LUBIN [suddenly, to the Archbishop] I suppose you have been married over and over again.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Once. You do not make vows until death when death is three hundred years off.

They relapse into uneasy silence. The Domestic Minister enters. She is a handsome woman, apparently in the prime of life, with elegant, tense, well held-up figure, and the walk of a goddess. Her expression and deportment are grave, swift, decisive, awful, unanswerable. She wears a Dianesque tunic instead of a blouse, and a silver coronet instead of a gold fillet. Her dress otherwise is not markedly different from that of the men, who rise as she enters, and incline their heads with instinctive awe. She comes to the vacant chair between Barnabas and Confucius.

BURGE-LUBIN [resolutely genial and gallant] Delighted to see you, Mrs
Lutestring.

CONFUCIUS. We are honored by your celestial presence.

BARNABAS. Good day, madam.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have not had the pleasure of meeting you before. I am the Archbishop of York.

MRS LUTESTRING. Surely we have met, Mr Archbishop. I remember your face. We — [she checks herself suddenly] Ah, no: I remember now: it was someone else. [She sits down]. They all sit down.

THE ARCHBISHOP [also puzzled] Are you sure you are mistaken? I also have some association with your face, Mrs Lutestring. Something like a door opening continually and revealing you. And a smile of welcome when you recognized me. Did you ever open a door for me, I wonder?

MRS LUTESTRING. I often opened a door for the person you have just reminded me of. But he has been dead many years. The rest, except the Archbishop, look at one another quickly.

CONFUCIUS. May I ask how many years?

MRS LUTESTRING [struck by his tone, looks at him for a moment with some displeasure; then replies] It does not matter. A long time.

BURGE-LUBIN. You mustnt rush to conclusions about the Archbishop, Mrs Lutestring. He is an older bird than you think. Older than you, at all events.

MRS LUTESTRING [with a melancholy smile] I think not, Mr President.
But the subject is a delicate one. I had rather not pursue it.

CONFUCIUS. There is a question which has not been asked.

MRS LUTESTRING [very decisively] If it is a question about my age, Mr Chief Secretary, it had better not be asked. All that concerns you about my personal affairs can be found in the books of the Accountant General.

CONFUCIUS. The question I was thinking of will not be addressed to you. But let me say that your sensitiveness on the point is very strange, coming from a woman so superior to all common weaknesses as we know you to be.

MRS LUTESTRING. I may have reasons which have nothing to do with common weaknesses, Mr Chief Secretary. I hope you will respect them.

CONFUCIUS [after bowing to her in assent] I will now put my question. Have you, Mr Archbishop, any ground for assuming, as you seem to do, that what has happened to you has not happened to other people as well?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, by George! I never thought of that.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I have never met any case but my own.

CONFUCIUS. How do you know?

THE ARCHBISHOP. Well, no one has ever told me that they were in this extraordinary position.

CONFUCIUS. That proves nothing. Did you ever tell anybody that you were in it? You never told us. Why did you never tell us?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at the question, coming from so astute a mind as yours, Mr Secretary. When you reach the age I reached before I discovered what was happening to me, I was old enough to know and fear the ferocious hatred with which human animals, like all other animals, turn upon any unhappy individual who has the misfortune to be unlike themselves in every respect: to be unnatural, as they call it. You will still find, among the tales of that twentieth-century classic, Wells, a story of a race of men who grew twice as big as their fellows, and another story of a man who fell into the hands of a race of blind men. The big people had to fight the little people for their lives; and the man with eyes would have had his eyes put out by the blind had he not fled to the desert, where he perished miserably. Wells’s teaching, on that and other matters, was not lost on me. By the way, he lent me five pounds once which I never repaid; and it still troubles my conscience.

CONFUCIUS. And were you the only reader of Wells? If there were others like you, had they not the same reason for keeping the secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true. But I should know. You short-lived people are so childish. If I met a man of my own age I should recognize him at once. I have never done so.

MRS LUTESTRING. Would you recognize a woman of your age, do you think?

THE ARCHBISHOP. I — [He stops and turns upon her with a searching look, startled by the suggestion and the suspicion it rouses].

MRS LUTESTRING. What is your age, Mr Archbishop?

BURGE-LUBIN. Two hundred and eighty-three, he says. That is his little joke. Do you know, Mrs Lutestring, he had almost talked us into believing him when you came in and cleared the air with your robust common sense.

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you really feel that, Mr President? I hear the note of breezy assertion in your voice. I miss the note of conviction.

BURGE-LUBIN [jumping up] Look here. Let us stop talking damned nonsense. I don’t wish to be disagreeable; but it’s getting on my nerves. The best joke won’t bear being pushed beyond a certain point. That point has been reached. I — I’m rather busy this morning. We all have our hands pretty full. Confucius here will tell you that I have a heavy day before me.

BARNABAS. Have you anything more important than this thing, if it’s true?

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, if if, if it’s true! But it isn’t true.

BARNABAS. Have you anything at all to do?

BURGE-LUBIN. Anything to do! Have you forgotten, Barnabas, that I happen to be President, and that the weight of the entire public business of this country is on my shoulders?

BARNABAS. Has he anything to do, Confucius?

CONFUCIUS. He has to be President.

BARNABAS. That means that he has nothing to do.

BURGE-LUBIN [sulkily] Very well, Barnabas. Go on making a fool of yourself. [He sits down]. Go on.

BARNABAS. I am not going to leave this room until we get to the bottom of this swindle.

MRS LUTESTRING [turning with deadly gravity on the Accountant General]
This what, did you say?

CONFUCIUS. These expressions cannot be sustained. You obscure the discussion in using them.

BARNABAS [glad to escape from her gaze by addressing Confucius] Well, this unnatural horror. Will that satisfy you?

CONFUCIUS. That is in order. But we do not commit ourselves to the implications of the word horror.

THE ARCHBISHOP. By the word horror the Accountant General means only something unusual.

CONFUCIUS. I notice that the honorable Domestic Minister, on learning the advanced age of the venerable prelate, shews no sign of surprise or incredulity.

BURGE-LUBIN. She doesn’t take it seriously. Who would? Eh, Mrs
Lutestring?

MRS LUTESTRING. I take it very seriously indeed, Mr President. I see now that I was not mistaken at first. I have met the Archbishop before.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I felt sure of it. This vision of a door opening to me, and a woman’s face welcoming me, must be a reminiscence of something that really happened; though I see it now as an angel opening the gate of heaven.

MRS LUTESTRING. Or a parlor maid opening the door of the house of the young woman you were in love with?

THE ARCHBISHOP [making a wry face] Is that the reality? How these things grow in our imagination! But may I say, Mrs Lutestring, that the transfiguration of a parlor maid to an angel is not more amazing than her transfiguration to the very dignified and able Domestic Minister I am addressing. I recognize the angel in you. Frankly, I do not recognize the parlor maid.

BURGE-LUBIN. Whats a parlor maid?

MRS LUTESTRING. An extinct species. A woman in a black dress and white apron, who opened the house door when people knocked or rang, and was either your tyrant or your slave. I was a parlor maid in the house of one of the Accountant General’s remote ancestors. [To Confucius] You asked me my age, Mr Chief Secretary, I am two hundred and seventy-four.

BURGE-LUBIN [gallantly] You don’t look it. You really don’t look it.

MRS LUTESTRING [turning her face gravely towards him] Look again, Mr
President.

BURGE-LUBIN [looking at her bravely until the smile fades from his face, and he suddenly covers his eyes with his hands] Yes: you do look it. I am convinced. It’s true. Now call up the Lunatic Asylum, Confucius; and tell them to send an ambulance for me.

MRS LUTESTRING [to the Archbishop] Why have you given away your secret? our secret?

THE ARCHBISHOP. They found it out. The cinema records betrayed me. But I never dreamt that there were others. Did you?

MRS LUTESTRING. I knew one other. She was a cook. She grew tired, and killed herself.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Dear me! However, her death simplifies the situation, as I have been able to convince these gentlemen that the matter had better go no further.

MRS LUTESTRING. What! When the President knows! It will be all over the place before the end of the week.

BURGE-LUBIN [injured] Really, Mrs Lutestring! You speak as if I were a notoriously indiscreet person. Barnabas: have I such a reputation?

BARNABAS [resignedly] It cant be helped. It’s constitutional.

CONFUCIUS. It is utterly unconstitutional. But, as you say, it cannot be helped.

BURGE-LUBIN [solemnly] I deny that a secret of State has ever passed my lips — except perhaps to the Minister of Health, who is discretion personified. People think, because she is a negress —

MRS LUTESTRING. It does not matter much now. Once, it would have mattered a great deal. But my children are all dead.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: the children must have been a terrible difficulty.
Fortunately for me, I had none.

MRS LUTESTRING. There was one daughter who was the child of my very heart. Some years after my first drowning I learnt that she had lost her sight. I went to her. She was an old woman of ninety-six, blind. She asked me to sit and talk with her because my voice was like the voice of her dead mother.

BURGE-LUBIN. The complications must be frightful. Really I hardly know whether I do want to live much longer than other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You can always kill yourself, as cook did; but that was influenza. Long life is complicated, and even terrible; but it is glorious all the same. I would no more change places with an ordinary woman than with a mayfly that lives only an hour.

THE ARCHBISHOP. What set you thinking of it first?

MRS LUTESTRING. Conrad Barnabas’s book. Your wife told me it was more wonderful than Napoleon’s Book of Fate and Old Moore’s Almanac, which cook and I used to read. I was very ignorant: it did not seem so impossible to me as to an educated woman. Yet I forgot all about it, and married and drudged as a poor man’s wife, and brought up children, and looked twenty years older than I really was, until one day, long after my husband died and my children were out in the world working for themselves, I noticed that I looked twenty years younger than I really was. The truth came to me in a flash.

BURGE-LUBIN. An amazing moment. Your feelings must have been beyond description. What was your first thought?

MRS LUTESTRING. Pure terror. I saw that the little money I had laid up would not last, and that I must go out and: work again. They had things called Old Age Pensions then: miserable pittances for worn-out old laborers to die on. I thought I should be found out if I went on drawing it too long. The horror of facing another lifetime of drudgery, of missing my hard-earned rest and losing my poor little savings, drove everything else out of my mind. You people nowadays can have no conception of the dread of poverty that hung over us then, or of the utter tiredness of forty years’ unending overwork and striving to make a shilling do the work of a pound.

THE ARCHBISHOP. I wonder you did not kill yourself. I often wonder why the poor in those evil old times did not kill themselves. They did not even kill other people.

MRS LUTESTRING. You never kill yourself, because you always may as well wait until tomorrow. And you have not energy or conviction enough to kill the others. Besides, how can you blame them when you would do as they do if you were in their place?

BURGE-LUBIN. Devilish poor consolation, that.

MRS LUTESTRING. There were other consolations in those days for people like me. We drank preparations of alcohol to relieve the strain of living and give us an artificial happiness.

BURGE-LUBIN {[[all together,]} Alcohol! CONFUCIUS {[making] } Pfff
…! BARNABAS {[wry faces]] } Disgusting.

MRS LUTESTRING. A little alcohol would improve your temper and manners, and make you much easier to live with, Mr Accountant General.

BURGE-LUBIN [laughing] By George, I believe you! Try it, Barnabas.

CONFUCIUS. No. Try tea. It is the more civilized poison of the two.

MRS LUTESTRING. You, Mr President, were born intoxicated with your own well-fed natural exuberance. You cannot imagine what alcohol was to an underfed poor woman. I had carefully arranged my little savings so that I could get drunk, as we called it, once a week; and my only pleasure was looking forward to that poor little debauch. That is what saved me from suicide. I could not bear to miss my next carouse. But when I stopped working, and lived on my pension, the fatigue of my life’s drudgery began to wear off, because, you see, I was not really old. I recuperated. I looked younger and younger. And at last I was rested enough to have courage and strength to begin life again. Besides, political changes were making it easier: life was a little better worth living for the nine-tenths of the people who used to be mere drudges. After that, I never turned back or faltered. My only regret now is that I shall die when I am three hundred or thereabouts. There was only one thing that made life hard; and that is gone now.

CONFUCIUS. May we ask what that was?

MRS LUTESTRING. Perhaps you will be offended if I tell you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Offended! My dear lady, do you suppose, after such a stupendous revelation, that anything short of a blow from a sledge-hammer could produce the smallest impression on any of us?

MRS LUTESTRING. Well, you see, it has been so hard on me never to meet a grown-up person. You are all such children. And I never was very fond of children, except that one girl who woke up the mother passion in me. I have been very lonely sometimes.

BURGE-LUBIN [again gallant] But surely, Mrs Lutestring, that has been your own fault. If I may say so, a lady of your attractions need never have been lonely.

MRS LUTESTRING. Why?

BURGE-LUBIN. Why! Well — . Well, er — . Well, er er — . Well! [he gives it up].

THE ARCHBISHOP. He means that you might have married. Curious, how little they understand our position.

MRS LUTESTRING. I did marry. I married again on my hundred and first birthday. But of course I had to marry an elderly man: a man over sixty. He was a great painter. On his deathbed he said to me ‘It has taken me fifty years to learn my trade, and to paint all the foolish pictures a man must paint and get rid of before he comes through them to the great things he ought to paint. And now that my foot is at last on the threshold of the temple I find that it is also the threshold of my tomb.’ That man would have been the greatest painter of all time if he could have lived as long as I. I saw him die of old age whilst he was still, as he said himself, a gentleman amateur, like all modern painters.

BURGE-LUBIN. But why had you to marry an elderly man? Why not marry a young one? or shall I say a middle-aged one? If my own affections were not already engaged; and if, to tell the truth, I were not a little afraid of you — for you are a very superior woman, as we all acknowledge — I should esteem myself happy in — er — er —

MRS LUTESTRING. Mr President: have you ever tried to take advantage of the innocence of a little child for the gratification of your senses?

BURGE-LUBIN. Good Heavens, madam, what do you take me for? What right have you to ask me such a question?

MRS LUTESTRING. I am at present in my two hundred and seventy-fifth year. You suggest that I should take advantage of the innocence of a child of thirty, and marry it.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Can you shortlived people not understand that as the confusion and immaturity and primitive animalism in which we live for the first hundred years of our life is worse in this matter of sex than in any other, you are intolerable to us in that relation?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do you mean to say, Mrs Lutestring, that you regard me as a child?

MRS LUTESTRING. Do you expect me to regard you as a completed soul? Oh, you may well be afraid of me. There are moments when your levity, your ingratitude, your shallow jollity, make my gorge rise so against you that if I could not remind myself that you are a child I should be tempted to doubt your right to live at all.

CONFUCIUS. Do you grudge us the few years we have? you who have three hundred!

BURGE-LUBIN. You accuse me of levity! Must I remind you, madam, that I am the President, and that you are only the head of a department?

BARNABAS. Ingratitude too! You draw a pension for three hundred years when we owe you only seventy-eight; and you call us ungrateful!

MRS LUTESTRING. I do. When I think of the blessings that have been showered on you, and contrast them with the poverty! the humiliations! the anxieties! the heartbreak! the insolence and tyranny that were the daily lot of mankind when I was learning to suffer instead of learning to live! when I see how lightly you take it all! how you quarrel over the crumpled leaves in your beds of roses! how you are so dainty about your work that unless it is made either interesting or delightful to you you leave it to negresses and Chinamen, I ask myself whether even three hundred years of thought and experience can save you from being superseded by the Power that created you and put you on your trial.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear lady: our Chinese and colored friends are perfectly happy. They are twenty times better off here than they would be in China or Liberia. They do their work admirably; and in doing it they set us free for higher employments.

THE ARCHBISHOP [who has caught the infection of her indignation] What higher employments are you capable of? you that are superannuated at seventy and dead at eighty!

MRS LUTESTRING. You are not really doing higher work. You are supposed to make the decisions and give the orders; but the negresses and the Chinese make up your minds for you and tell you what orders to give, just as my brother, who was a sergeant in the Guards, used to prompt his officers in the old days. When I want to get anything done at the Health Ministry I do not come to you: I go to the black lady who has been the real president during your present term of office, or to Confucius, who goes on for ever while presidents come and presidents go.

BURGE-LUBIN. This is outrageous. This is treason to the white race. And let me tell you, madam, that I have never in my life met the Minister of Health, and that I protest against the vulgar color prejudice which disparages her great ability and her eminent services to the State. My relations with her are purely telephonic, gramophonic, photophonic, and, may I add, platonic.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is no reason why you should be ashamed of them in any case, Mr President. But let us look at the position impersonally. Can you deny that what is happening is that the English people have become a Joint Stock Company admitting Asiatics and Africans as shareholders?

BARNABAS. Nothing like it. I know all about the old joint stock companies. The shareholders did no work.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is true; but we, like them, get our dividends whether we work or not. We work partly because we know there would be no dividends if we did not, and partly because if we refuse we are regarded as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber. But what do we work at? Before the few changes we were forced to make by the revolutions that followed the Four Years War, our governing classes had been so rich, as it was called, that they had become the most intellectually lazy and fat-headed people on the face of the earth. There is a good deal of that fat still clinging to us.

BURGE-LUBIN. As President, I must not listen to unpatriotic criticisms of our national character, Mr Archbishop.

THE ARCHBISHOP. As Archbishop, Mr President, it is my official duty to criticize the national character unsparingly. At the canonization of Saint Henrik Ibsen, you yourself unveiled the monument to him which bears on its pedestal the noble inscription, ‘I came not to call sinners, but the righteous, to repentance.’ The proof of what I say is that our routine work, and what may be called our ornamental and figure-head work, is being more and more sought after by the English; whilst the thinking, organizing, calculating, directing work is done by yellow brains, brown brains, and black brains, just as it was done in my early days by Jewish brains, Scottish brains, Italian brains, German brains. The only white men who still do serious work are those who, like the Accountant General, have no capacity for enjoyment, and no social gifts to make them welcome outside their offices.

BARNABAS. Confound your impudence! I had gifts enough to find you out, anyhow.

THE ARCHBISHOP [disregarding this outburst] If you were to kill me as I stand here, you would have to appoint an Indian to succeed me. I take precedence today not as an Englishman, but as a man with more than a century and a half of fully adult experience. We are letting all the power slip into the hands of the colored people. In another hundred years we shall be simply their household pets.

BURGE-LUBIN [reacting buoyantly] Not the least danger of it. I grant you we leave the most troublesome part of the labor of the nation to them. And a good job too: why should we drudge at it? But think of the activities of our leisure! Is there a jollier place on earth to live in than England out of office hours? And to whom do we owe that? To ourselves, not to the niggers. The nigger and the Chink are all right from Tuesday to Friday; but from Friday to Tuesday they are simply nowhere; and the real life of England is from Friday to Tuesday.

THE ARCHBISHOP. That is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements; in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would become morbid and destroy them. What appals me is that their amusements should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are ridiculous. I tell you, what is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race; and the Irish and the Scots, and the niggers and Chinks, as you call them, though their lifetime is as short as ours, or shorter, yet do somehow contrive to grow up a little before they die. We die in boyhood: the maturity that should make us the greatest of all the nations lies beyond the grave for us. Either we shall go under as greybeards with golf clubs in our hands, or we must will to live longer.

MRS LUTESTRING. Yes: that is it. I could not have expressed it in words; but you have expressed it for me. I felt, even when I was an ignorant domestic slave, that we had the possibility of becoming a great nation within us; but our faults and follies drove me to cynical hopelessness. We all ended then like that. It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. I know now that it took me a whole century to grow up. I began my serious life when I was a hundred and twenty. Asiatics cannot control me: I am not a child in their hands, as you are, Mr President. Neither, I am sure, is the Archbishop. They respect me. You are not grown up enough even for that, though you were kind enough to say that I frighten you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Honestly, you do. And will you think me very rude if I say that if I must choose between a white woman old enough to be my great-grandmother and a black woman of my own age, I shall probably find the black woman more sympathetic?

MRS LUTESTRING. And more attractive in color, perhaps?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes. Since you ask me, more — well, not more attractive: I do not deny that you have an excellent appearance — but I will say, richer. More Venetian. Tropical. ‘The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.’

MRS LUTESTRING. Our women, and their favorite story writers, begin already to talk about men with golden complexions.

CONFUCIUS [expanding into a smile all across both face and body]
A-a-a-a-a-h!

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, what of it, madam? Have you read a very interesting book by the librarian of the Biological Society suggesting that the future of the world lies with the Mulatto?

MRS LUTESTRING [rising] Mr Archbishop: if the white race is to be saved, our destiny is apparent.

THE ARCHBISHOP. Yes: our duty is pretty clear.

MRS LUTESTRING. Have you time to come home with me and discuss the matter?

THE ARCHBISHOP [rising] With pleasure.

BARNABAS [rising also and rushing past Mrs Lutestring to the door, where he turns to bar her way] No you don’t. Burge: you understand, don’t you?

BURGE-LUBIN. No. What is it?

BARNABAS. These two are going to marry.

BURGE-LUBIN. Why shouldn’t they, if they want to?

BARNABAS. They don’t want to. They will do it in cold blood because their children will live three hundred years. It mustnt be allowed.

CONFUCIUS. You cannot prevent it. There is no law that gives you power to interfere with them.

BARNABAS. If they force me to it I will obtain legislation against marriages above the age of seventy-eight.

THE ARCHBISHOP. There is not time for that before we are married, Mr
Accountant General. Be good enough to get out of the lady’s way.

BARNABAS. There is time to send the lady to the lethal chamber before anything comes of your marriage. Dont forget that.

MRS LUTESTRING. What nonsense, Mr Accountant General! Good afternoon, Mr President. Good afternoon, Mr Chief Secretary. [They rise and acknowledge her salutation with bows. She walks straight at the Accountant General, who instinctively shrinks out of her way as she leaves the room].

THE ARCHBISHOP. I am surprised at you, Mr Barnabas. Your tone was like an echo from the Dark Ages. [He follows the Domestic Minister].

Confucius, shaking his head and clucking with his tongue in deprecation of this painful episode, moves to the chair just vacated by the Archbishop and stands behind it with folded palms, looking at the President. The Accountant General shakes his fist after the departed visitors, and bursts into savage abuse of them.

BARNABAS. Thieves! Cursed thieves! Vampires! What are you going to do,
Burge?

BURGE-LUBIN. Do?

BARNABAS. Yes, do. There must be dozens of these people in existence. Are you going to let them do what the two who have just left us mean to do, and crowd us off the face of the earth?

BURGE-LUBIN [sitting down] Oh, come, Barnabas! What harm are they doing? Arnt you interested in them? Dont you like them?

BARNABAS. Like them! I hate them. They are monsters, unnatural monsters.
They are poison to me.

BURGE-LUBIN. What possible objection can there be to their living as long as they can? It does not shorten our lives, does it?

BARNABAS. If I have to die when I am seventy-eight, I don’t see why another man should be privileged to live to be two hundred and seventy-eight. It does shorten my life, relatively. It makes us ridiculous. If they grew to be twelve feet high they would make us all dwarfs. They talked to us as if we were children. There is no love lost between us: their hatred of us came out soon enough. You heard what the woman said, and how the Archbishop backed her up?

BURGE-LUBIN. But what can we do to them?

BARNABAS. Kill them.

BURGE-LUBIN. Nonsense!

BARNABAS. Lock them up. Sterilize them somehow, anyhow.

BURGE-LUBIN. But what reason could we give?

BARNABAS. What reason can you give for killing a snake? Nature tells you to do it.

BURGE-LUBIN. My dear Barnabas, you are out of your mind.

BARNABAS. Havnt you said that once too often already this morning?

BURGE-LUBIN. I don’t believe you will carry a single soul with you.

BARNABAS. I understand. I know you. You think you are one of them.

CONFUCIUS. Mr Accountant General: you may be one of them.

BARNABAS. How dare you accuse me of such a thing? I am an honest man, not a monster. I won my place in public life by demonstrating that the true expectation of human life is seventy-eight point six. And I will resist any attempt to alter or upset it to the last drop of my blood if need be.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, tut tut! Come, come! Pull yourself together. How can you, a descendant of the great Conrad Barnabas, the man who is still remembered by his masterly Biography of a Black Beetle, be so absurd?

BARNABAS. You had better go and write the autobiography of a jackass. I am going to raise the country against this horror, and against you, if you shew the slightest sign of weakness about it.

CONFUCIUS [very impressively] You will regret it if you do.

BARNABAS. What is to make me regret it?

CONFUCIUS. Every mortal man and woman in the community will begin to count on living for three centuries. Things will happen which you do not foresee: terrible things. The family will dissolve: parents and children will be no longer the old and the young: brothers and sisters will meet as strangers after a hundred years separation: the ties of blood will lose their innocence. The imaginations of men, let loose over the possibilities of three centuries of life, will drive them mad and wreck human society. This discovery must be kept a dead secret. [He sits down].

BARNABAS. And if I refuse to keep the secret?

CONFUCIUS. I shall have you safe in a lunatic asylum the day after you blab.

BARNABAS. You forget that I can produce the Archbishop to prove my statement.

CONFUCIUS. So can I. Which of us do you think he will support when I explain to him that your object in revealing his age is to get him killed?

BARNABAS [desperate] Burge: are you going to back up this yellow abomination against me? Are we public men and members of the Government? or are we damned blackguards?

CONFUCIUS [unmoved] Have you ever known a public man who was not what vituperative people called a damned blackguard when some inconsiderate person wanted to tell the public more than was good for it?

BARNABAS. Hold your tongue, you insolent heathen. Burge: I spoke to you.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, you know, my dear Barnabas, Confucius is a very long-headed chap. I see his point.

BARNABAS. Do you? Then let me tell you that, except officially, I will never speak to you again. Do you hear?

BURGE-LUBIN [cheerfully] You will. You will.

BARNABAS. And don’t you ever dare speak to me again. Do you hear? [He turns to the door].

BURGE-LUBIN. I will. I will. Goodbye, Barnabas. God bless you.

BARNABAS. May you live forever, and be the laughingstock of the whole world! [he dashes out in a fury].

BURGE-LUBIN [laughing indulgently] He will keep the secret all right.
I know Barnabas. You neednt worry.

CONFUCIUS [troubled and grave] There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves. Consider. There are those films at the Record Office. We have no power to prevent the Master of the Records from publishing this discovery made in his department. We cannot silence the American — who can silence an American? — nor the people who were there today to receive him. Fortunately, a film can prove nothing but a resemblance.

BURGE-LUBIN. Thats very true. After all, the whole thing is confounded nonsense, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS [raising his head to look at him] You have decided not to believe it now that you realize its inconveniences. That is the English method. It may not work in this case.

BURGE-LUBIN. English be hanged! It’s common sense. You know, those two people got us hypnotized: not a doubt of it. They must have been kidding us. They were, werent they?

CONFUCIUS. You looked into that woman’s face; and you believed.

BURGE-LUBIN. Just so. Thats where she had me. I shouldn’t have believed her a bit if she’d turned her back to me.

CONFUCIUS [shakes his head slowly and repeatedly]???

BURGE-LUBIN. You really think — ? [he hesitates].

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop has always been a puzzle to me. Ever since I learnt to distinguish between one English face and another I have noticed what the woman pointed out: that the English face is not an adult face, just as the English mind is not an adult mind.

BURGE-LUBIN. Stow it, John Chinaman. If ever there was a race divinely appointed to take charge of the non-adult races and guide them and train them and keep them out of mischief until they grow up to be capable of adopting our institutions, that race is the English race. It is the only race in the world that has that characteristic. Now!

CONFUCIUS. That is the fancy of a child nursing a doll. But it is ten times more childish of you to dispute the highest compliment ever paid you.

BURGE-LUBIN. You call it a compliment to class us as grown-up children.

CONFUCIUS. Not grown-up children, children at fifty, sixty, seventy. Your maturity is so late that you never attain to it. You have to be governed by races which are mature at forty. That means that you are potentially the most highly developed race on earth, and would be actually the greatest if you could live long enough to attain to maturity.

BURGE-LUBIN [grasping the idea at last] By George, Confucius, youre right! I never thought of that. That explains everything. We are just a lot of schoolboys: theres no denying it. Talk to an Englishman about anything serious, and he listens to you curiously for a moment just as he listens to a chap playing classical music. Then he goes back to his marine golf, or motoring, or flying, or women, just like a bit of stretched elastic when you let it go. [Soaring to the height of his theme] Oh, youre quite right. We are only in our infancy. I ought to be in a perambulator, with a nurse shoving me along. It’s true: it’s absolutely true. But some day we’ll grow up; and then, by Jingo, we’ll shew em.

CONFUCIUS. The Archbishop is an adult. When I was a child I was dominated and intimidated by people whom I now know to have been weaker and sillier than I, because there was some mysterious quality in their mere age that overawed me. I confess that, though I have kept up appearances, I have always been afraid of the Archbishop.

BURGE-LUBIN. Between ourselves, Confucius, so have I.

CONFUCIUS. It is this that convinced me. It was this in the woman’s face that convinced you. Their new departure in the history of the race is no fraud. It does not even surprise me.

BURGE-LUBIN. Oh, come! Not surprise you! It’s your pose never to be surprised at anything; but if you are not surprised at this you are not human.

CONFUCIUS. I am staggered, just as a man may be staggered by an explosion for which he has himself laid the charge and lighted the fuse. But I am not surprised, because, as a philosopher and a student of evolutionary biology, I have come to regard some such development as this as inevitable. If I had not thus prepared myself to be credulous, no mere evidence of films and well-told tales would have persuaded me to believe. As it is, I do believe.

BURGE-LUBIN. Well, that being settled, what the devil is to happen next?
Whats the next move for us?

CONFUCIUS. We do not make the next move. The next move will be made by the Archbishop and the woman.

BURGE-LUBIN. Their marriage?

CONFUCIUS. More than that. They have made the momentous discovery that they are not alone in the world.

BURGE-LUBIN. You think there are others?

CONFUCIUS. There must be many others. Each of them believes that he or she is the only one to whom the miracle has happened. But the Archbishop knows better now. He will advertise in terms which only the longlived people will understand. He will bring them together and organize them. They will hasten from all parts of the earth. They will become a great Power.

BURGE-LUBIN [a little alarmed] I say, will they? I suppose they will.
I wonder is Barnabas right after all? Ought we to allow it?

CONFUCIUS. Nothing that we can do will stop it. We cannot in our souls really want to stop it: the vital force that has produced this change would paralyse our opposition to it, if we were mad enough to oppose. But we will not oppose. You and I may be of the elect, too.

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes: thats what gets us every time. What the deuce ought we to do? Something must be done about it, you know.

CONFUCIUS. Let us sit still, and meditate in silence on the vistas before us.

BURGE-LUBIN. By George, I believe youre right. Let us.

They sit meditating, the Chinaman naturally, the President with visible effort and intensity. He is positively glaring into the future when the voice of the Negress is heard.

THE NEGRESS. Mr President.

BURGE-LUBIN [joyfully] Yes. [Taking up a peg] Are you at home?

THE NEGRESS. No. Omega, zero, x squared.

The President rapidly puts the peg in the switchboard; works the dial; and presses the button. The screen becomes transparent; and the Negress, brilliantly dressed, appears on what looks like the bridge of a steam yacht in glorious sea weather. The installation with which she is communicating is beside the binnacle.

CONFUCIUS [looking round, and recoiling with a shriek of disgust] Ach!
Avaunt! Avaunt! [He rushes from the room].

BURGE-LUBIN. What part of the coast is that?

THE NEGRESS. Fishguard Bay. Why not run over and join me for the afternoon? I am disposed to be approachable at last.

BURGE-LUBIN. But Fishguard! Two hundred and seventy miles!

THE NEGRESS. There is a lightning express on the Irish Air Service at half-past sixteen. They will drop you by a parachute in the bay. The dip will do you good. I will pick you up and dry you and give you a first-rate time.

BURGE-LUBIN. Delightful. But a little risky, isnt it?

THE NEGRESS. Risky! I thought you were afraid of nothing.

BURGE-LUBIN. I am not exactly afraid; but —

THE NEGRESS [offended] But you think it is not good enough. Very well [she raises her hand to take the peg out of her switchboard].

BURGE-LUBIN [imploringly] No: stop: let me explain: hold the line just one moment. Oh, please.

THE NEGRESS [waiting with her hand poised over the peg] Well?

BURGE-LUBIN. The fact is, I have been behaving very recklessly for some time past under the impression that my life would be so short that it was not worth bothering about. But I have just learnt that I may live — well, much longer than I expected. I am sure your good sense will tell you that this alters the case. I —

THE NEGRESS [with suppressed rage] Oh, quite. Pray don’t risk your precious, life on my account. Sorry for troubling you. Goodbye. [She snatches out her peg and vanishes].

BURGE-LUBIN [urgently] No: please hold on. I can convince you — [a loud buzz-uzz-uzz]. Engaged! Who is she calling up now? [Represses the button and calls] The Chief Secretary. Say I want to see him again, just for a moment.

CONFUCIUS’S VOICE. Is the woman gone?

BURGE-LUBIN. Yes, yes: it’s all right. Just a moment, if — [Confucius returns] Confucius: I have some important business at Fishguard. The Irish Air Service can drop me in the bay by parachute. I suppose it’s quite safe, isnt it?

CONFUCIUS. Nothing is quite safe. The air service is as safe as any other travelling service. The parachute is safe. But the water is not safe.

BURGE-LUBIN. Why? They will give me an unsinkable tunic, wont they?

CONFUCIUS. You will not sink; but the sea is very cold. You may get rheumatism for life.

BURGE-LUBIN. For life! That settles it: I wont risk it.

CONFUCIUS. Good. You have at last become prudent: you are no longer what you call a sportsman: you are a sensible coward, almost a grown-up man. I congratulate you.

BURGE-LUBIN [resolutely] Coward or no coward, I will not face an eternity of rheumatism for any woman that ever was born. [He rises and goes to the rack for his fillet] I have changed my mind: I am going home. [He cocks the fillet rakishly] Good evening.

CONFUCIUS. So early? If the Minister of Health rings you up, what shall
I tell her?

BURGE-LUBIN. Tell her to go to the devil. [He goes out].

CONFUCIUS [shaking his head, shocked at the President’s impoliteness] No. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, these English! these crude young civilizations! Their manners! Hogs. Hogs.

PART IV. Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman

ACT I

Burrin pier on the south shore of Galway Bay in Ireland, a region of stone-capped hills and granite fields. It is a fine summer day in the year 3000 A.D. On an ancient stone stump, about three feet thick and three feet high, used for securing ships by ropes to the shore, and called a bollard or holdfast, an elderly gentleman sits facing the land with his head bowed and his face in his hands, sobbing. His sunburnt skin contrasts with his white whiskers and eyebrows. He wears a black frock-coat, a white waistcoat, lavender trousers, a brilliant silk cravat with a jewelled pin stuck in it, a tall hat of grey felt, and patent leather boots with white spats. His starched linen cuffs protrude from his coat sleeves; and his collar, also of starched white linen, is Gladstonian. On his right, three or four full sacks, lying side by side on the flags, suggest that the pier, unlike many remote Irish piers, is occasionally useful as well as romantic. On his left, behind him, a flight of stone steps descends out of sight to the sea level.

A woman in a silk tunic and sandals, wearing little else except a cap with the number 2 on it in gold, comes up the steps from the sea, and stares in astonishment at the sobbing man. Her age cannot be guessed: her face is firm and chiselled like a young face; but her expression is unyouthful in its severity and determination.

THE WOMAN. What is the matter?

The elderly gentleman looks up; hastily pulls himself together; takes out a silk handkerchief and dries his tears lightly with a brave attempt to smile through them; and tries to rise gallantly, but sinks back.

THE WOMAN. Do you need assistance?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No. Thank you very much. No. Nothing. The heat. [He punctuates with sniffs, and dabs with his handkerchief at his eyes and nose.] Hay fever.

THE WOMAN. You are a foreigner, are you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No. You must not regard me as a foreigner. I am a
Briton.

THE WOMAN. You come from some part of the British Commonwealth?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [amiably pompous] From its capital, madam.

THE WOMAN. From Baghdad?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes. You may not be aware, madam, that these islands were once the centre of the British Commonwealth, during a period now known as The Exile. They were its headquarters a thousand years ago. Few people know this interesting circumstance now; but I assure you it is true. I have come here on a pious pilgrimage to one of the numerous lands of my fathers. We are of the same stock, you and I. Blood is thicker than water. We are cousins.

THE WOMAN. I do not understand. You say you have come here on a pious pilgrimage. Is that some new means of transport?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [again shewing signs of distress] I find it very difficult to make myself understood here. I was not referring to a machine, but to a — a — a sentimental journey.

THE WOMAN. I am afraid I am as much in the dark as before. You said also that blood is thicker than water. No doubt it is; but what of it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Its meaning is obvious.

THE WOMAN. Perfectly. But I assure you I am quite aware that blood is thicker than water.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [sniffing: almost in tears again] We will leave it at that, madam.

THE WOMAN [going nearer to him and scrutinizing him with some concern] I am afraid you are not well. Were you not warned that it is dangerous for shortlived people to come to this country? There is a deadly disease called discouragement, against which shortlived people have to take very strict precautions. Intercourse with us puts too great a strain on them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [pulling himself together huffily] It has no effect on me, madam. I fear my conversation does not interest you. If not, the remedy is in your own hands.

THE WOMAN [looking at her hands, and then looking inquiringly at him]
Where?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [breaking down] Oh, this is dreadful. No understanding, no intelligence, no sympathy — [his sobs choke him].

THE WOMAN. You see, you are ill.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [nerved by indignation] I am not ill. I have never had a day’s illness in my life.

THE WOMAN. May I advise you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have no need of a lady doctor, thank you, madam.

THE WOMAN [shaking her head] I am afraid I do not understand. I said nothing about a butterfly.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well, I said nothing about a butterfly.

THE WOMAN. You spoke of a lady doctor. The word is known here only as the name of a butterfly.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [insanely] I give up. I can bear this no longer. It is easier to go out of my mind at once. [He rises and dances about, singing]

I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower,
Making apple dumplings without any flour.

THE WOMAN [smiling gravely] It must be at least a hundred and fifty years since I last laughed. But if you do that any more I shall certainly break out like a primary of sixty. Your dress is so extraordinarily ridiculous.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [halting abruptly in his antics] My dress ridiculous! I may not be dressed like a Foreign Office clerk; but my clothes are perfectly in fashion in my native metropolis, where yours — pardon my saying so — would be considered extremely unusual and hardly decent.

THE WOMAN. Decent? There is no such word in our language. What does it mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It would not be decent for me to explain. Decency cannot be discussed without indecency.

THE WOMAN. I cannot understand you at all. I fear you have not been observing the rules laid down for shortlived visitors.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Surely, madam, they do not apply to persons of my age and standing. I am not a child, nor an agricultural laborer.

THE WOMAN [severely] They apply to you very strictly. You are expected to confine yourself to the society of children under sixty. You are absolutely forbidden to approach fully adult natives under any circumstances. You cannot converse with persons of my age for long without bringing on a dangerous attack of discouragement. Do you realize that you are already shewing grave symptoms of that very distressing and usually fatal complaint?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not, madam. I am fortunately in no danger of contracting it. I am quite accustomed to converse intimately and at the greatest length with the most distinguished persons. If you cannot discriminate between hay fever and imbecility, I can only say that your advanced years carry with them the inevitable penalty of dotage.

THE WOMAN. I am one of the guardians of this district; and I am responsible for your welfare —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. The Guardians! Do you take me for a pauper?

THE WOMAN. I do not know what a pauper is. You must tell me who you are, if it is possible for you to express yourself intelligibly —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [snorts indignantly]!

THE WOMAN [continuing] — and why you are wandering here alone without a nurse.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [outraged] Nurse!

THE WOMAN. Shortlived visitors are not allowed to go about here without nurses. Do you not know that rules are meant to be kept?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. By the lower classes, no doubt. But to persons in my position there are certain courtesies which are never denied by well-bred people; and —

THE WOMAN. There are only two human classes here: the shortlived and the normal. The rules apply to the shortlived, and are for their own protection. Now tell me at once who you are.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [impressively] Madam, I am a retired gentleman,
formerly Chairman of the All-British Synthetic Egg and Vegetable Cheese
Trust in Baghdad, and now President of the British Historical and
Archaeological Society, and a Vice-President of the Travellers’ Club.

THE WOMAN. All that does not matter.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [again snorting] Hm! Indeed!

THE WOMAN. Have you been sent here to make your mind flexible?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. What an extraordinary question! Pray do you find my mind noticeably stiff?

THE WOMAN. Perhaps you do not know that you are on the west coast of Ireland, and that it is the practice among natives of the Eastern Island to spend some years here to acquire mental flexibility. The climate has that effect.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [haughtily] I was born, not in the Eastern Island, but, thank God, in dear old British Baghdad; and I am not in need of a mental health resort.

THE WOMAN. Then why are you here?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Am I trespassing? I was not aware of it.

THE WOMAN. Trespassing? I do not understand the word.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Is this land private property? If so, I make no claim. I proffer a shilling in satisfaction of damage (if any), and am ready to withdraw if you will be good enough to shew me the nearest way. [He offers her a shilling].

THE WOMAN [taking it and examining it without much interest] I do not understand a single word of what you have just said.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am speaking the plainest English. Are you the landlord?

THE WOMAN [shaking her head] There is a tradition in this part of the country of an animal with a name like that. It used to be hunted and shot in the barbarous ages. It is quite extinct now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [breaking down again] It is a dreadful thing to be in a country where nobody understands civilized institutions. [He collapses on the bollard, struggling with his rising sobs]. Excuse me. Hay fever.

THE WOMAN [taking a tuning-fork from her girdle and holding it to her ear; then speaking into space on one note, like a chorister intoning a psalm] Burrin Pier Galway please send someone to take charge of a discouraged shortliver who has escaped from his nurse male harmless babbles unintelligibly with moments of sense distressed hysterical foreign dress very funny has curious fringe of white sea-weed under his chin.

THE GENTLEMAN. This is a gross impertinence. An insult.

THE WOMAN [replacing her tuning-fork and addressing the elderly gentleman] These words mean nothing to me. In what capacity are you here? How did you obtain permission to visit us?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [importantly] Our Prime Minister, Mr Badger Bluebin, has come to consult the oracle. He is my son-in-law. We are accompanied by his wife and daughter: my daughter and granddaughter. I may mention that General Aufsteig, who is one of our party, is really the Emperor of Turania travelling incognito. I understand he has a question to put to the oracle informally. I have come solely to visit the country.

THE WOMAN. Why should you come to a place where you have no business?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Great Heavens, madam, can anything be more natural? I shall be the only member of the Travellers’ Club who has set foot on these shores. Think of that! My position will be unique.

THE WOMAN. Is that an advantage? We have a person here who has lost both legs in an accident. His position is unique. But he would much rather be like everyone else.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. This is maddening. There is no analogy whatever between the two cases.

THE WOMAN. They are both unique.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Conversation in this place seems to consist of ridiculous quibbles. I am heartily tired of them.

THE WOMAN. I conclude that your Travellers’ Club is an assembly of persons who wish to be able to say that they have been in some place where nobody else has been.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Of Course if you wish to sneer at us —

THE WOMAN. What is sneer?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [with a wild sob] I shall drown myself.

He makes desperately for the edge of the pier, but is confronted by a man with the number one on his cap, who comes up the steps and intercepts him. He is dressed like the woman, but a slight moustache proclaims his sex.

THE MAN [to the elderly gentleman] Ah, here you are. I shall really have to put a collar and lead on you if you persist in giving me the slip like this.

THE WOMAN. Are you this stranger’s nurse?

THE MAN. Yes. I am very tired of him. If I take my eyes off him for a moment, he runs away and talks to everybody.

THE WOMAN [after taking out her tuning-fork and sounding it, intones as before] Burrin Pier. Wash out. [She puts up the fork, and addresses the man]. I sent a call for someone to take care of him. I have been trying to talk to him; but I can understand very little of what he says. You must take better care of him: he is badly discouraged already. If I can be of any further use, Fusima, Gort, will find me. [She goes away].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Any further use! She has been of no use to me. She spoke to me without any introduction, like any improper female. And she has made off with my shilling.

THE MAN. Please speak slowly. I cannot follow. What is a shilling? What is an introduction? Improper female doesnt make sense.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Nothing seems to make sense here. All I can tell you is that she was the most impenetrably stupid woman I have ever met in the whole course of my life.

THE MAN. That cannot be. She cannot appear stupid to you. She is a secondary, and getting on for a tertiary at that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. What is a tertiary? Everybody here keeps talking to me about primaries and secondaries and tertiaries as if people were geological strata.

THE MAN. The primaries are in their first century. The secondaries are in their second century. I am still classed as a primary [he points to his number]; but I may almost call myself a secondary, as I shall be ninety-five next January. The tertiaries are in their third century. Did you not see the number two on her badge? She is an advanced secondary.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That accounts for it. She is in her second childhood.

THE MAN. Her second childhood! She is in her fifth childhood.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [again resorting to the bollard] Oh! I cannot bear these unnatural arrangements.

THE MAN [impatient and helpless] You shouldn’t have come among us.
This is no place for you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [nerved by indignation] May I ask why? I am a Vice-President of the Travellers’ Club. I have been everywhere: I hold the record in the Club for civilized countries.

THE MAN. What is a civilized country?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is — well, it is a civilized country. [Desperately] I don’t know: I — I — I — I shall go mad if you keep on asking me to tell you things that everybody knows. Countries where you can travel comfortably. Where there are good hotels. Excuse me; but, though you say you are ninety-four, you are worse company than a child of five with your eternal questions. Why not call me Daddy at once?

THE MAN. I did not know your name was Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My name is Joseph Popham Bolge Bluebin Barlow,
O.M.

THE MAN. That is five men’s names. Daddy is shorter. And O.M. will not do here. It is our name for certain wild creatures, descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of this coast. They used to be called the O’Mulligans. We will stick to Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. People will think I am your father.

THE MAN [shocked] Sh-sh! People here never allude to such relationships. It is not quite delicate, is it? What does it matter whether you are my father or not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My worthy nonagenarian friend: your faculties are totally decayed. Could you not find me a guide of my own age?

THE MAN. A young person?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not. I cannot go about with a young person.

THE MAN. Why?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Why! Why!! Why!!! Have you no moral sense?

THE MAN. I shall have to give you up. I cannot understand you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But you meant a young woman, didn’t you?

THE MAN. I meant simply somebody of your own age. What difference does it make whether the person is a man or a woman?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I could not have believed in the existence of such scandalous insensibility to the elementary decencies of human intercourse.

THE MAN. What are decencies?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [shrieking] Everyone asks me that.

THE MAN [taking out a tuning-fork and using it as the woman did] Zozim on Burrin Pier to Zoo Ennistymon I have found the discouraged shortliver he has been talking to a secondary and is much worse I am too old he is asking for someone of his own age or younger come if you can. [He puts up his fork and turns to the Elderly Gentleman]. Zoo is a girl of fifty, and rather childish at that. So perhaps she may make you happy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Make me happy! A bluestocking of fifty! Thank you.

THE MAN. Bluestocking? The effort to make out your meaning is fatiguing. Besides, you are talking too much to me: I am old enough to discourage you. Let us be silent until Zoo comes. [He turns his back on the Elderly Gentleman, and sits down on the edge of the pier, with his legs dangling over the water].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly. I have no wish to force my conversation on any man who does not desire it. Perhaps you would like to take a nap. If so, pray do not stand on ceremony.

THE MAN. What is a nap?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [exasperated, going to him and speaking with great precision and distinctness] A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures. Sleep. Sleep. [Bawling into his ear] Sleep.

THE MAN. I tell you I am nearly a secondary. I never sleep.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [awestruck] Good Heavens!

A young woman with the number one on her cap arrives by land. She looks no older than Savvy Barnabas, whom she somewhat resembles, looked a thousand years before. Younger, if anything.

THE YOUNG WOMAN. Is this the patient?

THE MAN [scrambling up] This is Zoo. [To Zoo] Call him Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [vehemently] No.

THE MAN [ignoring the interruption] Bless you for taking him off my hands! I have had as much of him as I can bear. [He goes down the steps and disappears].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [ironically taking off his hat and making a sweeping bow from the edge of the pier in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean] Good afternoon, sir; and thank you very much for your extraordinary politeness, your exquisite consideration for my feelings, your courtly manners. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. [Clapping his hat on again] Pig! Ass!

ZOO [laughs very heartily at him]!!!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [turning sharply on her] Good afternoon, madam. I am sorry to have had to put your friend in his place; but I find that here as elsewhere it is necessary to assert myself if I am to be treated with proper consideration. I had hoped that my position as a guest would protect me from insult.

ZOO. Putting my friend in his place. That is some poetic expression, is it not? What does it mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Pray, is there no one in these islands who understands plain English?

ZOO. Well, nobody except the oracles. They have to make a special historical study of what we call the dead thought.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Dead thought! I have heard of the dead languages, but never of the dead thought.

ZOO. Well, thoughts die sooner than languages. I understand your language; but I do not always understand your thought. The oracles will understand you perfectly. Have you had your consultation yet?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I did not come to consult the oracle, madam. I am here simply as a gentleman travelling for pleasure in the company of my daughter, who is the wife of the British Prime Minister, and of General Aufsteig, who, I may tell you in confidence, is really the Emperor of Turania, the greatest military genius of the age.

ZOO. Why should you travel for pleasure! Can you not enjoy yourself at home?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I wish to see the World.

ZOO. It is too big. You can see a bit of it anywhere.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [out of patience] Damn it, madam, you don’t want to spend your life looking at the same bit of it! [Checking himself] I beg your pardon for swearing in your presence.

ZOO. Oh! That is swearing, is it? I have read about that. It sounds quite pretty. Dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam, dammitmaddam. Say it as often as you please: I like it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [expanding with intense relief] Bless you for those profane but familiar words! Thank you, thank you. For the first time since I landed in this terrible country I begin to feel at home. The strain which was driving me mad relaxes: I feel almost as if I were at the club. Excuse my taking the only available seat: I am not so young as I was. [He sits on the bollard]. Promise me that you will not hand me over to one of these dreadful tertiaries or secondaries or whatever you call them.

ZOO. Never fear. They had no business to give you in charge to Zozim. You see he is just on the verge of becoming a secondary; and these adolescents will give themselves the airs of tertiaries. You naturally feel more at home with a flapper like me. [She makes herself comfortable on the sacks].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Flapper? What does that mean?

ZOO. It is an archaic word which we still use to describe a female who is no longer a girl and is not yet quite adult.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. A very agreeable age to associate with, I find. I am recovering rapidly. I have a sense of blossoming like a flower. May I ask your name?

ZOO. Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Miss Zoo.

ZOO. Not Miss Zoo. Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Precisely. Er — Zoo what?

ZOO. No. Not Zoo What. Zoo. Nothing but Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [puzzled] Mrs Zoo, perhaps.

ZOO. No. Zoo. Cant you catch it? Zoo.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Of course. Believe me, I did not really think you were married: you are obviously too young; but here it is so hard to feel sure — er —

ZOO [hopelessly puzzled] What?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Marriage makes a difference, you know. One can say things to a married lady that would perhaps be in questionable taste to anyone without that experience.

ZOO. You are getting out of my depth: I dont understand a word you are saying. Married and questionable taste convey nothing to me. Stop, though. Is married an old form of the word mothered?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Very likely. Let us drop the subject. Pardon me for embarrassing you. I should not have mentioned it.

ZOO. What does embarrassing mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well, really! I should have thought that so natural and common a condition would be understood as long as human nature lasted. To embarrass is to bring a blush to the cheek.

ZOO. What is a blush?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [amazed] Dont you blush???

ZOO. Never heard of it. We have a word flush, meaning a rush of blood to the skin. I have noticed it in my babies, but not after the age of two.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Your babies!!! I fear I am treading on very delicate ground; but your appearance is extremely youthful; and if I may ask how many — ?

ZOO. Only four as yet. It is a long business with us. I specialize in babies. My first was such a success that they made me go on. I —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [reeling on the bollard] Oh! dear!

ZOO. Whats the matter? Anything wrong?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. In Heaven’s name, madam, how old are you?

ZOO. Fifty-six.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My knees are trembling. I fear I am really ill.
Not so young as I was.

ZOO. I noticed that you are not strong on your legs yet. You have many of the ways and weaknesses of a baby. No doubt that is why I feel called on to mother you. You certainly are a very silly little Daddy.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [stimulated by indignation] My name, I repeat, is Joseph Popham Bolge Bluebin Barlow, O.M.

ZOO. What a ridiculously long name! I cant call you all that. What did your mother call you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You recall the bitterest struggles of my childhood. I was sensitive on the point. Children suffer greatly from absurd nicknames. My mother thoughtlessly called me Iddy Toodles. I was called Iddy until I went to school, when I made my first stand for children’s rights by insisting on being called at least Joe. At fifteen I refused to answer to anything shorter than Joseph. At eighteen I discovered that the name Joseph was supposed to indicate an unmanly prudery because of some old story about a Joseph who rejected the advances of his employer’s wife: very properly in my opinion. I then became Popham to my family and intimate friends, and Mister Barlow to the rest of the world. My mother slipped back into Iddy when her faculties began to fail her, poor woman; but I could not resent that, at her age.

ZOO. Do you mean to say that your mother bothered about you after you were ten?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Naturally, madam. She was my mother. What would you have had her do?

ZOO. Go on to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldnt know my two eldest if I met them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [again drooping] I am dying. Let me die. I wish to die.

ZOO [going to him quickly and supporting him] Hold up. Sit up straight. Whats the matter?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [faintly] My spine, I think. Shock. Concussion.

ZOO [maternally] Pow wow wow! What is there to shock you? [Shaking him playfully] There! Sit up; and be good.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [still feebly] Thank you. I am better now.

ZOO [resuming her seat on the sacks] But what was all the rest of that long name for? There was a lot more of it. Blops Booby or something.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [impressively] Bolge Bluebin, madam: a historical name. Let me inform you that I can trace my family back for more than a thousand years, from the Eastern Empire to its ancient seat in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war, sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pigmies who now occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire on which the sun never set, my eyes fill with tears: my heart bursts with emotion: I feel that to have lived but to the dawn of manhood in their day, and then died for them, would have been a nobler and happier lot than the ignominious ease of my present longevity.

ZOO. Longevity! [she laughs].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes, madam, relative longevity. As it is, I have to be content and proud to know that I am descended from both those heroes.

ZOO. You must be descended from every Briton who was alive in their time. Dont you know that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Do not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands were then, incredible as it now seems, the centre of the British Empire. When that centre shifted to Baghdad, and the Englishman at last returned to the true cradle of his race in Mesopotamia, the western islands were cast off, as they had been before by the Roman Empire. But it was to the British race, and in these islands, that the greatest miracle in history occurred.

ZOO. Miracle?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes: the first man to live three hundred years was an Englishman. The first, that is, since the contemporaries of Methuselah.

ZOO. Oh, that!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Yes, that, as you call it so flippantly. Are you aware, madam, that at that immortal moment the English race had lost intellectual credit to such an extent that they habitually spoke of one another as fatheads? Yet England is now a sacred grove to which statesmen from all over the earth come to consult English sages who speak with the experience of two and a half centuries of life. The land that once exported cotton shirts and hardware now exports nothing but wisdom. You see before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the week-end riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindoo Koosh. Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West. Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic: this Ireland, described by the earliest bards as an emerald gem set in a silver sea! Can I, a scion of the illustrious British race, ever forget that when the Empire transferred its seat to the East, and said to the turbulent Irish race which it had oppressed but never conquered, ‘At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good may it do you,’ the Irish as one man uttered the historic shout ‘No: we’ll be damned if you do,’ and emigrated to the countries where there was still a Nationalist question, to India, Persia, and Corea, to Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli. In these countries they were ever foremost in the struggle for national independence; and the world rang continually with the story of their sufferings and wrongs. And what poem can do justice to the end, when it came at last? Hardly two hundred years had elapsed when the claims of nationality were so universally conceded that there was no longer a single country on the face of the earth with a national grievance or a national movement. Think of the position of the Irish, who had lost all their political faculties by disuse except that of nationalist agitation, and who owed their position as the most interesting race on earth solely to their sufferings! The very countries they had helped to set free boycotted them as intolerable bores. The communities which had once idolized them as the incarnation of all that is adorable in the warm heart and witty brain, fled from them as from a pestilence. To regain their lost prestige, the Irish claimed the city of Jerusalem, on the ground that they were the lost tribes of Israel; but on their approach the Jews abandoned the city and redistributed themselves throughout Europe. It was then that these devoted Irishmen, not one of whom had ever seen Ireland, were counselled by an English Archbishop, the father of the oracles, to go back to their own country. This had never once occurred to them, because there was nothing to prevent them and nobody to forbid them. They jumped at the suggestion. They landed here: here in Galway Bay, on this very ground. When they reached the shore the older men and women flung themselves down and passionately kissed the soil of Ireland, calling on the young to embrace the earth that had borne their ancestors. But the young looked gloomily on, and said ‘There is no earth, only stone.’ You will see by looking round you why they said that: the fields here are of stone: the hills are capped with granite. They all left for England next day; and no Irishman ever again confessed to being Irish, even to his own children; so that when that generation passed away the Irish race vanished from human knowledge. And the dispersed Jews did the same lest they should be sent back to Palestine. Since then the world, bereft of its Jews and its Irish, has been a tame dull place. Is there no pathos for you in this story? Can you not understand now why I am come to visit the scene of this tragic effacement of a race of heroes and poets?

ZOO. We still tell our little children stories like that, to help them to understand. But such things do not happen really. That scene of the Irish landing here and kissing the ground might have happened to a hundred people. It couldn’t have happened to a hundred thousand: you know that as well as I do. And what a ridiculous thing to call people Irish because they live in Ireland! you might as well call them Airish because they live in air. They must be just the same as other people. Why do you shortlivers persist in making up silly stories about the world and trying to act as if they were true? Contact with truth hurts and frightens you: you escape from it into an imaginary vacuum in which you can indulge your desires and hopes and loves and hates without any obstruction from the solid facts of life. You love to throw dust in your own eyes.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is my turn now, madam, to inform you that I do not understand a single word you are saying. I should have thought that the use of a vacuum for removing dust was a mark of civilization rather than of savagery.

ZOO [giving him up as hopeless] Oh, Daddy, Daddy: I can hardly believe that you are human, you are so stupid. It was well said of your people in the olden days, ‘Dust thou art; and to dust thou shalt return.’

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [nobly] My body is dust, madam: not my soul. What does it matter what my body is made of? the dust of the ground, the particles of the air, or even the slime of the ditch? The important thing is that when my Creator took it, whatever it was, He breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and Man became a living soul. Yes, madam, a living soul. I am not the dust of the ground: I am a living soul. That is an exalting, a magnificent thought. It is also a great scientific fact. I am not interested in the chemicals and the microbes: I leave them to the chumps and noodles, to the blockheads and the muckrakers who are incapable of their own glorious destiny, and unconscious of their own divinity. They tell me there are leucocytes in my blood, and sodium and carbon in my flesh. I thank them for the information, and tell them that there are blackbeetles in my kitchen, washing soda in my laundry, and coal in my cellar. I do not deny their existence; but I keep them in their proper place, which is not, if I may be allowed to use an antiquated form of expression, the temple of the Holy Ghost. No doubt you think me behind the times; but I rejoice in my enlightenment; and I recoil from your ignorance, your blindness, your imbecility. Humanly I pity you. Intellectually I despise you.

ZOO. Bravo, Daddy! You have the root of the matter in you. You will not die of discouragement after all.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have not the smallest intention of doing so, madam. I am no longer young; and I have moments of weakness; but when I approach this subject the divine spark in me kindles and glows, the corruptible becomes incorruptible, and the mortal Bolge Bluebin Barlow puts on immortality. On this ground I am your equal, even if you survive me by ten thousand years.

ZOO. Yes; but what do we know about this breath of life that puffs you up so exaltedly? Just nothing. So let us shake hands as cultivated Agnostics, and change the subject.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Cultivated fiddlesticks, madam! You cannot change this subject until the heavens and the earth pass away. I am not an Agnostic: I am a gentleman. When I believe a thing I say I believe it: when I don’t believe it I say I don’t believe it. I do not shirk my responsibilities by pretending that I know nothing and therefore can believe nothing. We cannot disclaim knowledge and shirk responsibility. We must proceed on assumptions of some sort or we cannot form a human society.

ZOO. The assumptions must be scientific, Daddy. We must live by science in the long run.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have the utmost respect, madam, for the magnificent discoveries which we owe to science. But any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory. When I was seven years old I discovered the sting of the wasp. But I do not ask you to worship me on that account. I assure you, madam, the merest mediocrities can discover the most surprising facts about the physical universe as soon as they are civilized enough to have time to study these things, and to invent instruments and apparatus for research. But what is the consequence? Their discoveries discredit the simple stories of our religion. At first we had no idea of astronomical space. We believed the sky to be only the ceiling of a room as large as the earth, with another room on top of it. Death was to us a going upstairs into that room, or, if we did not obey the priests, going downstairs into the coal cellar. We founded our religion, our morality, our laws, our lessons, our poems, our prayers, on that simple belief. Well, the moment men became astronomers and made telescopes, their belief perished. When they could no longer believe in the sky, they found that they could no longer believe in their Deity, because they had always thought of him as living in the sky. When the priests themselves ceased to believe in their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science. They set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers. Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient. They built temples for his telescopes. Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of micro-organisms; so they gaped at these as foolishly as at the millions of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices were offered. They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible and omniscient. Thus our discoveries instead of increasing our wisdom, only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had. All I can grant you is that they increased our knowledge.

ZOO. Nonsense! Consciousness of a fact is not knowledge of it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That is an extremely acute remark, madam. The dullest fish could not possibly know less of the majesty of the ocean than many geographers and naturalists of my acquaintance.

ZOO. Just so. And the greatest fool on earth, by merely looking at a mariners’ compass, may become conscious of the fact that the needle turns always to the pole. Is he any the less a fool with that consciousness than he was without it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Only a more conceited one, madam, no doubt. Still, I do not quite see how you can be aware of the existence of a thing without knowing it.

ZOO. Well, you can see a man without knowing him, can you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [illuminated] Oh how true! Of course, of course. There is a member of the Travellers’ Club who has questioned the veracity of an experience of mine at the South Pole. I see that man almost every day when I am at home. But I refuse to know him.

ZOO. If you could see him much more distinctly through a magnifying glass, or examine a drop of his blood through a microscope, or dissect out all his organs and analyze them chemically, would you know him then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Certainly not. Any such investigation could only increase the disgust with which he inspires me, and make me more determined than ever not to know him on any terms.

ZOO. Yet you would be much more conscious of him, would you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I should not allow that to commit me to any familiarity with the fellow. I have been twice at the Summer Sports at the South Pole; and this man pretended he had been to the North Pole, which can hardly be said to exist, as it is in the middle of the sea. He declared he had hung his hat on it.

ZOO [laughing] He knew that travellers are amusing only when they are telling lies. Perhaps if you looked at that man through a microscope you would find some good in him.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I do not want to find any good in him. Besides, madam, what you have just said encourages me to utter an opinion of mine which is so advanced! so intellectually daring! that I have never ventured to confess to it before, lest I should be imprisoned for blasphemy, or even burnt alive.

ZOO. Indeed! What opinion is that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [after looking cautiously round] I do not approve of microscopes. I never have.

ZOO. You call that advanced! Oh, Daddy, that is pure obscurantism.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Call it so if you will, madam; but I maintain that it is dangerous to shew too much to people who do not know what they are looking at. I think that a man who is sane as long as he looks at the world through his own eyes is very likely to become a dangerous madman if he takes to looking at the world through telescopes and microscopes. Even when he is telling fairy stories about giants and dwarfs, the giants had better not be too big nor the dwarfs too small and too malicious. Before the microscope came, our fairy stories only made the children’s flesh creep pleasantly, and did not frighten grown-up persons at all. But the microscope men terrified themselves and everyone else out of their wits with the invisible monsters they saw: poor harmless little things that die at the touch of a ray of sunshine, and are themselves the victims of all the diseases they are supposed to produce! Whatever the scientific people may say, imagination without microscopes was kindly and often courageous, because it worked on things of which it had some real knowledge. But imagination with microscopes, working on a terrifying spectacle of millions of grotesque creatures of whose nature it had no knowledge, became a cruel, terror-stricken, persecuting delirium. Are you aware, madam, that a general massacre of men of science took place in the twenty-first century of the pseudo-Christian era, when all their laboratories were demolished, and all their apparatus destroyed?

ZOO. Yes: the shortlived are as savage in their advances as in their relapses. But when Science crept back, it had been taught its place. The mere collectors of anatomical or chemical facts were not supposed to know more about Science than the collector of used postage stamps about international trade or literature. The scientific terrorist who was afraid to use a spoon or a tumbler until he had dipt it in some poisonous acid to kill the microbes, was no longer given titles, pensions, and monstrous powers over the bodies of other people: he was sent to an asylum, and treated there until his recovery. But all that is an old story: the extension of life to three hundred years has provided the human race with capable leaders, and made short work of such childish stuff.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [pettishly] You seem to credit every advance in civilization to your inordinately long lives. Do you not know that this question was familiar to men who died before they had reached my own age?

ZOO. Oh yes: one or two of them hinted at it in a feeble way. An ancient writer whose name has come down to us in several forms, such as Shakespear, Shelley, Sheridan, and Shoddy, has a remarkable passage about your dispositions being horridly shaken by thoughts beyond the reaches of your souls. That does not come to much, does it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. At all events, madam, I may remind you, if you come to capping ages, that whatever your secondaries and tertiaries may be, you are younger than I am.

ZOO. Yes, Daddy; but it is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything. What does it matter to you whether anything is true or not? your flesh is as grass: you come up like a flower, and wither in your second childhood. A lie will last your time: it will not last mine. If I knew I had to die in twenty years it would not be worth my while to educate myself: I should not bother about anything but having a little pleasure while I lasted.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Young woman: you are mistaken. Shortlived as we are, we — the best of us, I mean — regard civilization and learning, art and science, as an ever-burning torch, which passes from the hand of one generation to the hand of the next, each generation kindling it to a brighter, prouder flame. Thus each lifetime, however short, contributes a brick to a vast and growing edifice, a page to a sacred volume, a chapter to a Bible, a Bible to a literature. We may be insects; but like the coral insect we build islands which become continents: like the bee we store sustenance for future communities. The individual perishes; but the race is immortal. The acorn of today is the oak of the next millennium. I throw my stone on the cairn and die; but later comers add another stone and yet another; and lo! a mountain. I —

ZOO [interrupts him by laughing heartily at him]!!!!!!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [with offended dignity] May I ask what I have said that calls for this merriment?

ZOO. Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you are a funny little man, with your torches, and your flames, and your bricks and edifices and pages and volumes and chapters and coral insects and bees and acorns and stones and mountains.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Metaphors, madam. Metaphors merely.

ZOO. Images, images, images. I was talking about men, not about images.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I was illustrating — not, I hope, quite infelicitously — the great march of Progress. I was shewing you how, shortlived as we orientals are, mankind gains in stature from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch, from barbarism to civilization, from civilization to perfection.

ZOO. I see. The father grows to be six feet high, and hands on his six feet to his son, who adds another six feet and becomes twelve feet high, and hands his twelve feet on to his son, who is full-grown at eighteen feet, and so on. In a thousand years you would all be three or four miles high. At that rate your ancestors Bilge and Bluebeard, whom you call giants, must have been about quarter of an inch high.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am not here to bandy quibbles and paradoxes with a girl who blunders over the greatest names in history. I am in earnest. I am treating a solemn theme seriously. I never said that the son of a man six feet high would be twelve feet high.

ZOO. You didn’t mean that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Most certainly not.

ZOO. Then you didn’t mean anything. Now listen to me, you little ephemeral thing. I knew quite well what you meant by your torch handed on from generation to generation. But every time that torch is handed on, it dies down to the tiniest spark; and the man who gets it can rekindle it only by his own light. You are no taller than Bilge or Bluebeard; and you are no wiser. Their wisdom, such as it was, perished with them: so did their strength, if their strength ever existed outside your imagination. I do not know how old you are: you look about five hundred —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Five hundred! Really, madam —

ZOO [continuing]; but I know, of course, that you are an ordinary shortliver. Well, your wisdom is only such wisdom as a man can have before he has had experience enough to distinguish his wisdom from his folly, his destiny from his delusions, his —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. In short, such wisdom as your own.

ZOO. No, no, no, no. How often must I tell you that we are made wise not by the recollections of our past, but by the responsibilities of our future. I shall be more reckless when I am a tertiary than I am today. If you cannot understand that, at least you must admit that I have learnt from tertiaries. I have seen their work and lived under their institutions. Like all young things I rebelled against them; and in their hunger for new lights and new ideas they listened to me and encouraged me to rebel. But my ways did not work; and theirs did; and they were able to tell me why. They have no power over me except that power: they refuse all other power; and the consequence is that there are no limits to their power except the limits they set themselves. You are a child governed by children, who make so many mistakes and are so naughty that you are in continual rebellion against them; and as they can never convince you that they are right: they can govern you only by beating you, imprisoning you, torturing you, killing you if you disobey them without being strong enough to kill or torture them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That may be an unfortunate fact. I condemn it and deplore it. But our minds are greater than the facts. We know better. The greatest ancient teachers, followed by the galaxy of Christs who arose in the twentieth century, not to mention such comparatively modern spiritual leaders as Blitherinjam, Tosh, and Spiffkins, all taught that punishment and revenge, coercion and militarism, are mistakes, and that the golden rule —

ZOO. [interrupting] Yes, yes, yes, Daddy: we longlived people know that quite well. But did any of their disciples ever succeed in governing you for a single day on their Christ-like principles? It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it. They couldn’t do it because they did not live long enough to find out how to do it, or to outlive the childish passions that prevented them from really wanting to do it. You know very well that they could only keep order — such as it was — by the very coercion and militarism they were denouncing and deploring. They had actually to kill one another for preaching their own gospel, or be killed themselves.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. The blood of the martyrs, madam, is the seed of the Church.

ZOO. More images, Daddy! The blood of the shortlived falls on stony ground.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [rising, very testy] You are simply mad on the subject of longevity. I wish you would change it. It is rather personal and in bad taste. Human nature is human nature, longlived or shortlived, and always will be.

ZOO. Then you give up the idea of progress? You cry off the torch, and the brick, and the acorn, and all the rest of it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I do nothing of the sort. I stand for progress and for freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent.

ZOO. You are certainly a true Briton.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am proud of it. But in your mouth I feel that the compliment hides some insult; so I do not thank you for it.

ZOO. All I meant was that though Britons sometimes say quite clever things and deep things as well as silly and shallow things, they always forget them ten minutes after they have uttered them.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Leave it at that, madam: leave it at that. [He sits down again]. Even a Pope is not expected to be continually pontificating. Our flashes of inspiration shew that our hearts are in the right place.

ZOO. Of course. You cannot keep your heart in any place but the right place.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Tcha!

ZOO. But you can keep your hands in the wrong place. In your neighbor’s pockets, for example. So, you see, it is your hands that really matter.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [exhausted] Well, a woman must have the last word. I will not dispute it with you.

ZOO. Good. Now let us go back to the really interesting subject of our discussion. You remember? The slavery of the shortlived to images and metaphors.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [aghast] Do you mean to say, madam, that after having talked my head off, and reduced me to despair and silence by your intolerable loquacity, you actually propose to begin all over again? I shall leave you at once.

ZOO. You must not. I am your nurse; and you must stay with me.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I absolutely decline to do anything of the sort [he rises and walks away with marked dignity].

ZOO [using her tuning-fork] Zoo on Burrin Pier to Oracle Police at Ennistymon have you got me?… What?… I am picking you up now but you are flat to my pitch…. Just a shade sharper…. That’s better: still a little more…. Got you: right. Isolate Burrin Pier quick.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [is heard to yell] Oh!

ZOO [still intoning] Thanks…. Oh nothing serious I am nursing a shortliver and the silly creature has run away he has discouraged himself very badly by gadding about and talking to secondaries and I must keep him strictly to heel.

The Elderly Gentleman returns, indignant.

ZOO. Here he is you can release the Pier thanks. Goodbye. [She puts up her tuning-fork].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. This is outrageous. When I tried to step off the pier on to the road, I received a shock, followed by an attack of pins and needles which ceased only when I stepped back on to the stones.

ZOO. Yes: there is an electric hedge there. It is a very old and very crude method of keeping animals from straying.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. We are perfectly familiar with it in Baghdad, madam; but I little thought I should live to have it ignominiously applied to myself. You have actually Kiplingized me.

ZOO. Kiplingized! What is that?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. About a thousand years ago there were two authors named Kipling. One was an eastern and a writer of merit: the other, being a western, was of course only an amusing barbarian. He is said to have invented the electric hedge. I consider that in using it on me you have taken a very great liberty.

ZOO. What is a liberty?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [exasperated] I shall not explain, madam. I believe you know as well as I do. [He sits down on the bollard in dudgeon].

ZOO. No: even you can tell me things I do not know. Havnt you noticed that all the time you have been here we have been asking you questions?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Noticed it! It has almost driven me mad. Do you see my white hair? It was hardly grey when I landed: there were patches of its original auburn still distinctly discernible.

ZOO. That is one of the symptoms of discouragement. But have you noticed something much more important to yourself: that is, that you have never asked us any questions, although we know so much more than you do?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am not a child, madam. I believe I have had occasion to say that before. And I am an experienced traveller. I know that what the traveller observes must really exist, or he could not observe it. But what the natives tell him is invariably pure fiction.

ZOO. Not here, Daddy. With us life is too long for telling lies. They all get found out. Youd better ask me questions while you have the chance.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. If I have occasion to consult the oracle I shall address myself to a proper one: to a tertiary: not to a primary flapper playing at being an oracle. If you are a nurserymaid, attend to your duties; and do not presume to ape your elders.

ZOO. [rising ominously and reddening] You silly —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [thundering] Silence! Do you hear! Hold your tongue.

ZOO. Something very disagreeable is happening to me. I feel hot all over. I have a horrible impulse to injure you. What have you done to me?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [triumphant] Aha! I have made you blush. Now you know what blushing means. Blushing with shame!

ZOO. Whatever you are doing, it is something so utterly evil that if you do not stop I will kill you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [apprehending his danger] Doubtless you think it safe to threaten an old man —

ZOO [fiercely] Old! You are a child: an evil child. We kill evil children here. We do it even against our own wills by instinct. Take care.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [rising with crestfallen courtesy] I did not mean to hurt your feelings. I — [swallowing the apology with an effort] I beg your pardon. [He takes off his hat, and bows].

ZOO. What does that mean?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I withdraw what I said.

ZOO. How can you withdraw what you said?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I can say no more than that I am sorry.

ZOO. You have reason to be. That hideous sensation you gave me is subsiding; but you have had a very narrow escape. Do not attempt to kill me again; for at the first sign in your voice or face I shall strike you dead.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I attempt to kill you! What a monstrous accusation!

ZOO [frowns]!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [prudently correcting himself] I mean misunderstanding. I never dreamt of such a thing. Surely you cannot believe that I am a murderer.

ZOO. I know you are a murderer. It is not merely that you threw words at me as if they were stones, meaning to hurt me. It was the instinct to kill that you roused in me. I did not know it was in my nature: never before has it wakened and sprung out at me, warning me to kill or be killed. I must now reconsider my whole political position. I am no longer a Conservative.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [dropping his hat] Gracious Heavens! you have lost your senses. I am at the mercy of a madwoman: I might have known it from the beginning. I can bear no more of this. [Offering his chest for the sacrifice] Kill me at once; and much good may my death do you!

ZOO. It would be useless unless all the other shortlivers were killed at the same time. Besides, it is a measure which should be taken politically and constitutionally, not privately. However, I am prepared to discuss it with you.

ZOO. What good have our counsels ever done you? You come to us for advice when you know you are in difficulties. But you never know you are in difficulties until twenty years after you have made the mistakes that led to them; and then it is too late. You cannot understand our advice: you often do more mischief by trying to act on it than if you had been left to your own childish devices. If you were not childish you would not come to us at all: you would learn from experience that your consultations of the oracle are never of any real help to you. You draw wonderful imaginary pictures of us, and write fictitious tales and poems about our beneficent operations in the past, our wisdom, our justice, our mercy: stories in which we often appear as sentimental dupes of your prayers and sacrifices; but you do it only to conceal from yourselves the truth that you are incapable of being helped by us. Your Prime Minister pretends that he has come to be guided by the oracle; but we are not deceived: we know quite well that he has come here so that when he goes back he may have the authority and dignity of one who has visited the holy islands and spoken face to face with the ineffable ones. He will pretend that all the measures he wishes to take for his own purposes have been enjoined on him by the oracle.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But you forget that the answers of the oracle cannot be kept secret or misrepresented. They are written and promulgated. The Leader of the Opposition can obtain copies. All the nations know them. Secret diplomacy has been totally abolished.

ZOO. Yes: you publish documents; but they are garbled or forged. And even if you published our real answers it would make no difference, because the shortlived cannot interpret the plainest writings. Your scriptures command you in the plainest terms to do exactly the contrary of everything your own laws and chosen rulers command and execute. You cannot defy Nature. It is a law of Nature that there is a fixed relation between conduct and length of life.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, no, no. I had much rather discuss your intention of withdrawing from the Conservative party. How the Conservatives have tolerated your opinions so far is more than I can imagine: I can only conjecture that you have contributed very liberally to the party funds. [He picks up his hat, and sits down again].

ZOO. Do not babble so senselessly: our chief political controversy is the most momentous in the world for you and your like.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [interested] Indeed? Pray, may I ask what it is? I am a keen politician, and may perhaps be of some use. [He puts on his hat, cocking it slightly].

ZOO. We have two great parties: the Conservative party and the Colonization party. The Colonizers are of opinion that we should increase our numbers and colonize. The Conservatives hold that we should stay as we are, confined to these islands, a race apart, wrapped up in the majesty of our wisdom on a soil held as holy ground for us by an adoring world, with our sacred frontier traced beyond dispute by the sea. They contend that it is our destiny to rule the world, and that even when we were shortlived we did so. They say that our power and our peace depend on our remoteness, our exclusiveness, our separation, and the restriction of our numbers. Five minutes ago that was my political faith. Now I do not think there should be any shortlived people at all. [She throws herself again carelessly on the sacks].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Am I to infer that you deny my right to live because I allowed myself — perhaps injudiciously — to give you a slight scolding?

ZOO. Is it worth living for so short a time? Are you any good to yourself?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [stupent] Well, upon my soul!

ZOO. It is such a very little soul. You only encourage the sin of pride in us, and keep us looking down at you instead of up to something higher than ourselves.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Is not that a selfish view, madam? Think of the good you do us by your oracular counsels!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I have never heard of any such law, madam.

ZOO. Well, you are hearing of it now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Let me tell you that we shortlivers, as you call us, have lengthened our lives very considerably.

ZOO. How?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. By saving time. By enabling men to cross the ocean in an afternoon, and to see and speak to one another when they are thousands of miles apart. We hope shortly to organize their labor, and press natural forces into their service, so scientifically that the burden of labor will cease to be perceptible, leaving common men more leisure than they will know what to do with.

ZOO. Daddy: the man whose life is lengthened in this way may be busier than a savage; but the difference between such men living seventy years and those living three hundred would be all the greater; for to a shortliver increase of years is only increase of sorrow; but to a long-liver every extra year is a prospect which forces him to stretch his faculties to the utmost to face it. Therefore I say that we who live three hundred years can be of no use to you who live less than a hundred, and that our true destiny is not to advise and govern you, but to supplant and supersede you. In that faith I now declare myself a Colonizer and an Exterminator.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Oh, steady! steady! Pray! pray! Reflect, I implore you. It is possible to colonize without exterminating the natives. Would you treat us less mercifully than our barbarous forefathers treated the Redskin and the Negro? Are we not, as Britons, entitled at least to some reservations?

ZOO. What is the use of prolonging the agony? You would perish slowly in our presence, no matter what we did to preserve you. You were almost dead when I took charge of you today, merely because you had talked for a few minutes to a secondary. Besides, we have our own experience to go upon. Have you never heard that our children occasionally revert to the ancestral type, and are born shortlived?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [eagerly] Never. I hope you will not be offended if I say that it would be a great comfort to me if I could be placed in charge of one of those normal individuals.

ZOO. Abnormal, you mean. What you ask is impossible: we weed them all out.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. When you say that you weed them out, you send a cold shiver down my spine. I hope you don’t mean that you — that you — that you assist Nature in any way?

ZOO. Why not? Have you not heard the saying of the Chinese sage Dee Ning, that a good garden needs weeding? But it is not necessary for us to interfere. We are naturally rather particular as to the conditions on which we consent to live. One does not mind the accidental loss of an arm or a leg or an eye: after all, no one with two legs is unhappy because he has not three; so why should a man with one be unhappy because he has not two? But infirmities of mind and temper are quite another matter. If one of us has no self-control, or is too weak to bear the strain of our truthful life without wincing, or is tormented by depraved appetites and superstitions, or is unable to keep free from pain and depression, he naturally becomes discouraged, and refuses to live.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Good Lord! Cuts his throat, do you mean?

ZOO. No: why should he cut his throat? He simply dies. He wants to. He is out of countenance, as we call it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Well!!! But suppose he is depraved enough not to want to die, and to settle the difficulty by killing all the rest of you?

ZOO. Oh, he is one of the thoroughly degenerate shortlivers whom we occasionally produce. He emigrates.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. And what becomes of him then?

ZOO. You shortlived people always think very highly of him. You accept him as what you call a great man.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You astonish me; and yet I must admit that what you tell me accounts for a great deal of the little I know of the private life of our great men. We must be very convenient to you as a dumping place for your failures.

ZOO. I admit that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Good. Then if you carry out your plan of colonization, and leave no shortlived countries in the world, what will you do with your undesirables?

ZOO. Kill them. Our tertiaries are not at all squeamish about killing.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Gracious Powers!

ZOO [glancing up at the sun] Come. It is just sixteen o’clock; and you have to join your party at half-past in the temple in Galway.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [rising] Galway! Shall I at last be able to boast of having seen that magnificent city?

ZOO. You will be disappointed: we have no cities. There is a temple of the oracle: that is all.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Alas! and I came here to fulfil two long-cherished dreams. One was to see Galway. It has been said, ‘See Galway and die.’ The other was to contemplate the ruins of London.

ZOO. Ruins! We do not tolerate ruins. Was London a place of any importance?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [amazed] What! London! It was the mightiest city of antiquity. [Rhetorically] Situate just where the Dover Road crosses the Thames, it —

ZOO [curtly interrupting] There is nothing there now. Why should anybody pitch on such a spot to live? The nearest houses are at a place called Strand-on-the-Green: it is very old. Come. We shall go across the water. [She goes down the steps].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Sic transit gloria mundi!

ZOO [from below] What did you say?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [despairingly] Nothing. You would not understand. [He goes down the steps].

ACT II

A courtyard before the columned portico of a temple. The temple door is in the middle of the portico. A veiled and robed woman of majestic carriage passes along behind the columns towards the entrance. From the opposite direction a man of compact figure, clean-shaven, saturnine, and self-centred: in short, very like Napoleon I, and wearing a military uniform of Napoleonic cut, marches with measured steps; places his hand in his lapel in the traditional manner; and fixes the woman with his eye. She stops, her attitude expressing haughty amazement at his audacity. He is on her right: she on his left.

NAPOLEON [impressively] I am the Man of Destiny.

THE VEILED WOMAN [unimpressed] How did you get in here?

NAPOLEON. I walked in. I go on until I am stopped. I never am stopped. I tell you I am the Man of Destiny.

THE VEILED WOMAN. You will be a man of very short destiny if you wander about here without one of our children to guide you. I suppose you belong to the Baghdad envoy.

NAPOLEON. I came with him; but I do not belong to him. I belong to myself. Direct me to the oracle if you can. If not, do not waste my time.

THE VEILED WOMAN. Your time, poor creature, is short. I will not waste it. Your envoy and his party will be here presently. The consultation of the oracle is arranged for them, and will take place according to the prescribed ritual. You can wait here until they come [she turns to go into the temple].

NAPOLEON. I never wait. [She stops]. The prescribed ritual is, I believe, the classical one of the pythoness on her tripod, the intoxicating fumes arising from the abyss, the convulsions of the priestess as she delivers the message of the God, and so on. That sort of thing does not impose on me: I use it myself to impose on simpletons. I believe that what is, is. I know that what is not, is not. The antics of a woman sitting on a tripod and pretending to be drunk do not interest me. Her words are put into her mouth, not by a god, but by a man three hundred years old, who has had the capacity to profit by his experience. I wish to speak to that man face to face, without mummery or imposture.

THE VEILED WOMAN. You seem to be an unusually sensible person. But there is no old man. I am the oracle on duty today. I am on my way to take my place on the tripod, and go through the usual mummery, as you rightly call it, to impress your friend the envoy. As you are superior to that kind of thing, you may consult me now. [She leads the way into the middle of the courtyard]. What do you want to know?

NAPOLEON [following her] Madam: I have not come all this way to discuss matters of State with a woman. I must ask you to direct me to one of your oldest and ablest men.

THE ORACLE. None of our oldest and ablest men or women would dream of wasting their time on you. You would die of discouragement in their presence in less than three hours.

NAPOLEON. You can keep this idle fable of discouragement for people credulous enough to be intimidated by it, madam. I do not believe in metaphysical forces.

THE ORACLE. No one asks you to. A field is something physical, is it not. Well, I have a field.

NAPOLEON. I have several million fields. I am Emperor of Turania.

THE ORACLE. You do not understand. I am not speaking of an agricultural field. Do you not know that every mass of matter in motion carries with it an invisible gravitational field, every magnet an invisible magnetic field, and every living organism a mesmeric field? Even you have a perceptible mesmeric field. Feeble as it is, it is the strongest I have yet observed in a shortliver.

NAPOLEON. By no means feeble, madam. I understand you now; and I may tell you that the strongest characters blench in my presence, and submit to my domination. But I do not call that a physical force.

THE ORACLE. What else do you call it, pray? Our physicists deal with it.
Our mathematicians express its measurements in algebraic equations.

NAPOLEON. Do you mean that they could measure mine?

THE ORACLE. Yes: by a figure infinitely near to zero. Even in us the force is negligible during our first century of life. In our second it develops quickly, and becomes dangerous to shortlivers who venture into its field. If I were not veiled and robed in insulating material you could not endure my presence; and I am still a young woman: one hundred and seventy if you wish to know exactly.

NAPOLEON [folding his arms] I am not intimidated: no woman alive, old or young, can put me out of countenance. Unveil, madam. Disrobe. You will move this temple as easily as shake me.

THE ORACLE. Very well [she throws back her veil].

NAPOLEON [shrieking, staggering, and covering his eyes] No. Stop. Hide your face again. [Shutting his eyes and distractedly clutching at his throat and heart] Let me go. Help! I am dying.

THE ORACLE. Do you still wish to consult an older person?

NAPOLEON. No, no. The veil, the veil, I beg you.

THE ORACLE [replacing the veil] So.

NAPOLEON. Ouf! One cannot always be at one’s best. Twice before in my life I have lost my nerve and behaved like a poltroon. But I warn you not to judge my quality by these involuntary moments.

THE ORACLE. I have no occasion to judge of your quality. You want my advice. Speak quickly; or I shall go about my business.

NAPOLEON [After a moment’s hesitation, sinks respectfully on one knee]
I —

THE ORACLE. Oh, rise, rise. Are you so foolish as to offer me this mummery which even you despise?

NAPOLEON [rising] I knelt in spite of myself. I compliment you on your impressiveness, madam.

THE ORACLE [impatiently] Time! time! time! time!

NAPOLEON. You will not grudge me the necessary time, madam, when you know my case. I am a man gifted with a certain specific talent in a degree altogether extraordinary. I am not otherwise a very extraordinary person: my family is not influential; and without this talent I should cut no particular figure in the world.

THE ORACLE. Why cut a figure in the world?

NAPOLEON. Superiority will make itself felt, madam. But when I say I possess this talent I do not express myself accurately. The truth is that my talent possesses me. It is genius. It drives me to exercise it. I must exercise it. I am great when I exercise it. At other moments I am nobody.

THE ORACLE. Well, exercise it. Do you need an oracle to tell you that?

NAPOLEON. Wait. This talent involves the shedding of human blood.

THE ORACLE. Are you a surgeon, or a dentist?

NAPOLEON. Psha! You do not appreciate me, madam. I mean the shedding of oceans of blood, the death of millions of men.

THE ORACLE. They object, I suppose.

NAPOLEON. Not at all. They adore me.

THE ORACLE. Indeed!

NAPOLEON. I have never shed blood with my own hand. They kill each other: they die with shouts of triumph on their lips. Those who die cursing do not curse me. My talent is to organize this slaughter; to give mankind this terrible joy which they call glory; to let loose the devil in them that peace has bound in chains.

THE ORACLE. And you? Do you share their joy?

NAPOLEON. Not at all. What satisfaction is it to me to see one fool pierce the entrails of another with a bayonet? I am a man of princely character, but of simple personal tastes and habits. I have the virtues of a laborer: industry and indifference to personal comfort. But I must rule, because I am so superior to other men that it is intolerable to me to be misruled by them. Yet only as a slayer can I become a ruler. I cannot be great as a writer: I have tried and failed. I have no talent as a sculptor or painter; and as lawyer, preacher, doctor, or actor, scores of second-rate men can do as well as I, or better. I am not even a diplomatist: I can only play my trump card of force. What I can do is to organize war. Look at me! I seem a man like other men, because nine-tenths of me is common humanity. But the other tenth is a faculty for seeing things as they are that no other man possesses.

THE ORACLE. You mean that you have no imagination?

NAPOLEON [forcibly] I mean that I have the only imagination worth having: the power of imagining things as they are, even when I cannot see them. You feel yourself my superior, I know: nay, you are my superior: have I not bowed my knee to you by instinct? Yet I challenge you to a test of our respective powers. Can you calculate what the methematicians call vectors, without putting a single algebraic symbol on paper? Can you launch ten thousand men across a frontier and a chain of mountains and know to a mile exactly where they will be at the end of seven weeks? The rest is nothing: I got it all from the books at my military school. Now this great game of war, this playing with armies as other men play with bowls and skittles, is one which I must go on playing, partly because a man must do what he can and not what he would like to do, and partly because, if I stop, I immediately lose my power and become a beggar in the land where I now make men drunk with glory.

THE ORACLE. No doubt then you wish to know how to extricate yourself from this unfortunate position?

NAPOLEON. It is not generally considered unfortunate, madam. Supremely fortunate rather.

THE ORACLE. If you think so, go on making them drunk with glory. Why trouble me with their folly and your vectors?

NAPOLEON. Unluckily, madam, men are not only heroes: they are also cowards. They desire glory; but they dread death.

THE ORACLE. Why should they? Their lives are too short to be worth living. That is why they think your game of war worth playing.

NAPOLEON. They do not look at it quite in that way. The most worthless soldier wants to live for ever. To make him risk being killed by the enemy I have to convince him that if he hesitates he will inevitably be shot at dawn by his own comrades for cowardice.

THE ORACLE. And if his comrades refuse to shoot him?

NAPOLEON. They will be shot too, of course.

THE ORACLE. By whom?

NAPOLEON. By their comrades.

THE ORACLE. And if they refuse?

NAPOLEON. Up to a certain point they do not refuse.

THE ORACLE. But when that point is reached, you have to do the shooting yourself, eh?

NAPOLEON. Unfortunately, madam, when that point is reached, they shoot me.

THE ORACLE. Mf! It seems to me they might as well shoot you first as last. Why don’t they?

NAPOLEON. Because their love of fighting, their desire for glory, their shame of being branded as dastards, their instinct to test themselves in terrible trials, their fear of being killed or enslaved by the enemy, their belief that they are defending their hearths and homes, overcome their natural cowardice, and make them willing not only to risk their own lives but to kill everyone who refuses to take that risk. But if war continues too long, there comes a time when the soldiers, and also the taxpayers who are supporting and munitioning them, reach a condition which they describe as being fed up. The troops have proved their courage, and want to go home and enjoy in peace the glory it has earned them. Besides, the risk of death for each soldier becomes a certainty if the fighting goes on for ever: he hopes to escape for six months, but knows he cannot escape for six years. The risk of bankruptcy for the citizen becomes a certainty in the same way. Now what does this mean for me?

THE ORACLE. Does that matter in the midst of such calamity?

NAPOLEON. Psha! madam: it is the only thing that matters: the value of human life is the value of the greatest living man. Cut off that infinitesimal layer of grey matter which distinguishes my brain from that of the common man, and you cut down the stature of humanity from that of a giant to that of a nobody. I matter supremely: my soldiers do not matter at all: there are plenty more where they came from. If you kill me, or put a stop to my activity (it is the same thing), the nobler part of human life perishes. You must save the world from that catastrophe, madam. War has made me popular, powerful, famous, historically immortal. But I foresee that if I go on to the end it will leave me execrated, dethroned, imprisoned, perhaps executed. Yet if I stop fighting I commit suicide as a great man and become a common one. How am I to escape the horns of this tragic dilemma? Victory I can guarantee: I am invincible. But the cost of victory is the demoralization, the depopulation, the ruin of the victors no less than of the vanquished. How am I to satisfy my genius by fighting until I die? that is my question to you.

THE ORACLE. Were you not rash to venture into these sacred islands with such a question on your lips? Warriors are not popular here, my friend.

NAPOLEON. If a soldier were restrained by such a consideration, madam, he would no longer be a soldier. Besides [he produces a pistol], I have not come unarmed.

THE ORACLE. What is that thing?

NAPOLEON. It is an instrument of my profession, madam. I raise this hammer; I point the barrel at you; I pull this trigger that is against my forefinger; and you fall dead.

THE ORACLE. Shew it to me [she puts out her hand to take it from him].

NAPOLEON [retreating a step] Pardon me, madam. I never trust my life in the hands of a person over whom I have no control.

THE ORACLE [sternly] Give it to me [she raises her hand to her veil].

NAPOLEON [dropping the pistol and covering his eyes] Quarter! Kamerad!
Take it, madam [he kicks it towards her]: I surrender.

THE ORACLE. Give me that thing. Do you expect me to stoop for it?

NAPOLEON [taking his hands from his eyes with an effort] A poor victory, madam [he picks up the pistol and hands it to her]: there was no vector strategy needed to win it. [Making a pose of his humiliation] But enjoy your triumph: you have made me — ME! Cain Adamson Charles Napoleon! Emperor of Turania! cry for quarter.

THE ORACLE. The way out of your difficulty, Cain Adamson, is very simple.

NAPOLEON [eagerly] Good. What is it?

THE ORACLE. To die before the tide of glory turns. Allow me [she shoots him].

He falls with a shriek. She throws the pistol away and goes haughtily into the temple.

NAPOLEON [scrambling to his feet] Murderess! Monster! She-devil! Unnatural, inhuman wretch! You deserve to be hanged, guillotined, broken on the wheel, burnt alive. No sense of the sacredness of human life! No thought for my wife and children! Bitch! Sow! Wanton! [He picks up the pistol]. And missed me at five yards! Thats a woman all over.

He is going away whence he came when Zoo arrives and confronts him at the head of a party consisting of the British Envoy, the Elderly Gentleman, the Envoy’s wife, and her daughter, aged about eighteen. The envoy, a typical politician, looks like an imperfectly reformed criminal disguised by a good tailor. The dress of the ladies is coeval with that of the Elderly Gentleman, and suitable for public official ceremonies in western capitals at the XVIII-XIX fin de siècle.

They file in under the portico. Zoo immediately comes out imperiously to Napoleon’s right, whilst the Envoy’s wife hurries effusively to his left. The Envoy meanwhile passes along behind the columns to the door, followed by his daughter. The Elderly Gentleman stops just where he entered, to see why Zoo has swooped so abruptly on the Emperor of Turania.

ZOO [to Napoleon, severely] What are you doing here by yourself? You have no business to go about here alone. What was that noise just now? What is that in your hand?

Napoleon glares at her in speechless fury; pockets the pistol; and produces a whistle.

THE ENVOY’S WIFE. Arnt you coming with us to the oracle, sire?

NAPOLEON. To hell with the oracle, and with you too [he turns to go]!

THE ENVOY’S WIFE} [together] {Oh, sire!!
ZOO} {Where are you going?}

NAPOLEON. To fetch the police. [He goes out past Zoo, almost jostling her, and blowing piercing blasts on his whistle].

ZOO [whipping out her tuning-fork and intoning] Hallo Galway Central. [The whistling continues]. Stand by to isolate. [To the Elderly Gentleman, who is staring after the whistling Emperor] How far has he gone?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. To that curious statue of a fat old man.

ZOO [quickly, intoning] Isolate the Falstaff monument isolate hard. Paralyze — [the whistling stops]. Thank you. [She puts up her tuning-fork]. He shall not move a muscle until I come to fetch him.

THE ENVOY’S WIFE. Oh! he will be frightfully angry! Did you hear what he said to me?

ZOO. Much we care for his anger!

THE DAUGHTER [coming forward between her mother and Zoo]. Please, madam, whose statue is it? and where can I buy a picture postcard of it? It is so funny. I will take a snapshot when we are coming back; but they come out so badly sometimes.

ZOO. They will give you pictures and toys in the temple to take away with you. The story of the statue is too long. It would bore you [she goes past them across the courtyard to get rid of them].

THE WIFE [gushing] Oh no, I assure you.

THE DAUGHTER [copying her mother] We should be so interested.

ZOO. Nonsense! All I can tell you about it is that a thousand years ago, when the whole world was given over to you shortlived people, there was a war called the War to end War. In the war which followed it about ten years later, hardly any soldiers were killed; but seven of the capital cities of Europe were wiped out of existence. It seems to have been a great joke: for the statesmen who thought they had sent ten million common men to their deaths were themselves blown into fragments with their houses and families, while the ten million men lay snugly in the caves they had dug for themselves. Later on even the houses escaped; but their inhabitants were poisoned by gas that spared no living soul. Of course the soldiers starved and ran wild; and that was the end of pseudo-Christian civilization. The last civilized thing that happened was that the statesmen discovered that cowardice was a great patriotic virtue; and a public monument was erected to its first preacher, an ancient and very fat sage called Sir John Falstaff. Well [pointing], thats Falstaff.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [coming from the portico to his granddaughter’s right] Great Heavens! And at the base of this monstrous poltroon’s statue the War God of Turania is now gibbering impotently.

ZOO. Serve him right! War God indeed!

THE ENVOY [coming between his wife and Zoo] I don’t know any history: a modern Prime Minister has something better to do than sit reading books; but —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [interrupting him encouragingly] You make history, Ambrose.

THE ENVOY. Well, perhaps I do; and perhaps history makes me. I hardly recognize myself in the newspapers sometimes, though I suppose leading articles are the materials of history, as you might say. But what I want to know is, how did war come back again? and how did they make those poisonous gases you speak of? We should be glad to know; for they might come in very handy if we have to fight Turania. Of course I am all for peace, and don’t hold with the race of armaments in principle; still, we must keep ahead or be wiped out.

ZOO. You can make the gases for yourselves when your chemists find out how. Then you will do as you did before: poison each other until there are no chemists left, and no civilization. You will then begin all over again as half-starved ignorant savages, and fight with boomerangs and poisoned arrows until you work up to the poison gases and high explosives once more, with the same result. That is, unless we have sense enough to make an end of this ridiculous game by destroying you.

THE ENVOY [aghast] Destroying us!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I told you, Ambrose. I warned you.

THE ENVOY. But —

ZOO [impatiently] I wonder what Zozim is doing. He ought to be here to receive you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Do you mean that rather insufferable young man whom you found boring me on the pier?

ZOO. Yes. He has to dress-up in a Druid’s robe, and put on a wig and a long false beard, to impress you silly people. I have to put on a purple mantle. I have no patience with such mummery; but you expect it from us; so I suppose it must be kept up. Will you wait here until Zozim comes, please [she turns to enter the temple].

THE ENVOY. My good lady, is it worth while dressing-up and putting on false beards for us if you tell us beforehand that it is all humbug?

ZOO. One would not think so; but if you wont believe in anyone who is not dressed-up, why, we must dress-up for you. It was you who invented all this nonsense, not we.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But do you expect us to be impressed after this?

ZOO. I don’t expect anything. I know, as a matter of experience, that you will be impressed. The oracle will frighten you out of your wits. [She goes into the temple].

THE WIFE. These people treat us as if we were dirt beneath their feet. I wonder at you putting up with it, Amby. It would serve them right if we went home at once: wouldnt it, Eth?

THE DAUGHTER. Yes, mamma. But perhaps they wouldnt mind.

THE ENVOY. No use talking like that, Molly. Ive got to see this oracle. The folks at home wont know how we have been treated: all theyll know is that Ive stood face to face with the oracle and had the straight tip from her. I hope this Zozim chap is not going to keep us waiting much longer; for I feel far from comfortable about the approaching interview; and thats the honest truth.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I never thought I should want to see that man again; but now I wish he would take charge of us instead of Zoo. She was charming at first: quite charming; but she turned into a fiend because I had a few words with her. You would not believe: she very nearly killed me. You heard what she said just now. She belongs to a party here which wants to have us all killed.

THE WIFE [terrified] Us! But we have done nothing: we have been as nice to them as nice could be. Oh, Amby, come away, come away: there is something dreadful about this place and these people.

THE ENVOY. There is, and no mistake. But youre safe with me: you ought to have sense enough to know that.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I am sorry to say, Molly, that it is not merely us four poor weak creatures they want to kill, but the entire race of Man, except themselves.

THE ENVOY. Not so poor neither, Poppa. Nor so weak, if you are going to take in all the Powers. If it comes to killing, two can play at that game, longlived or shortlived.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, Ambrose: we should have no chance. We are worms beside these fearful people: mere worms.

Zozim comes from the temple, robed majestically, and wearing a wreath of mistletoe in his flowing white wig. His false beard reaches almost to his waist. He carries a staff with a curiously carved top.

ZOZIM [in the doorway, impressively] Hail, strangers!

ALL [reverently] Hail!

ZOZIM. Are ye prepared?

THE ENVOY. We are.

ZOZIM [unexpectedly becoming conversational, and strolling down carelessly to the middle of the group between the two ladies] Well, I’m sorry to say the oracle is not. She was delayed by some member of your party who got loose; and as the show takes a bit of arranging, you will have to wait a few minutes. The ladies can go inside and look round the entrance hall and get pictures and things if they want them.

{Thank you.}
THE WIFE} [together] {I should like to,} [They go into]
THE DAUGHTER} {very much.} [the temple]

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [in dignified rebuke of Zozim’s levity] Taken in this spirit, sir, the show, as you call it, becomes almost an insult to our common sense.

ZOZIM. Quite, I should say. You need not keep it up with me.

THE ENVOY [suddenly making himself very agreeable] Just so: just so. We can wait as long as you please. And now, if I may be allowed to seize the opportunity of a few minutes’ friendly chat — ?

ZOZIM. By all means, if only you will talk about things I can understand.

THE ENVOY. Well, about this colonizing plan of yours. My father-in-law here has been telling me something about it; and he has just now let out that you want not only to colonize us, but to — to — to — well, shall we say to supersede us? Now why supersede us? Why not live and let live? Theres not a scrap of ill-feeling on our side. We should welcome a colony of immortals — we may almost call you that — in the British Middle East. No doubt the Turanian Empire, with its Mahometan traditions, overshadows us now. We have had to bring the Emperor with us on this expedition, though of course you know as well as I do that he has imposed himself on my party just to spy on me. I dont deny that he has the whip hand of us to some extent, because if it came to a war none of our generals could stand up against him. I give him best at that game: he is the finest soldier in the world. Besides, he is an emperor and an autocrat; and I am only an elected representative of the British democracy. Not that our British democrats wont fight: they will fight the heads off all the Turanians that ever walked; but then it takes so long to work them up to it, while he has only to say the word and march. But you people would never get on with him. Believe me, you would not be as comfortable in Turania as you would be with us. We understand you. We like you. We are easy-going people; and we are rich people. That will appeal to you. Turania is a poor place when all is said. Five-eighths of it is desert. They dont irrigate as we do. Besides — now I am sure this will appeal to you and to all right-minded men — we are Christians.

ZOZIM. The old uns prefer Mahometans.

THE ENVOY [shocked] What!

ZOZIM [distinctly] They prefer Mahometans. Whats wrong with that?

THE ENVOY. Well, of all the disgraceful —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [diplomatically interrupting his scandalized son-in-law] There can be no doubt, I am afraid, that by clinging too long to the obsolete features of the old pseudo-Christian Churches we allowed the Mahometans to get ahead of us at a very critical period of the development of the Eastern world. When the Mahometan Reformation took place, it left its followers with the enormous advantage of having the only established religion in the world in whose articles of faith any intelligent and educated person could believe.

THE ENVOY. But what about our Reformation? Dont give the show away,
Poppa. We followed suit, didnt we?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Unfortunately, Ambrose, we could not follow suit very rapidly. We had not only a religion to deal with, but a Church.

ZOZIM. What is a Church?

THE ENVOY. Not know what a Church is! Well!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. You must excuse me; but if I attempted to explain you would only ask me what a bishop is; and that is a question that no mortal man can answer. All I can tell you is that Mahomet was a truly wise man; for he founded a religion without a Church; consequently when the time came for a Reformation of the mosques there were no bishops and priests to obstruct it. Our bishops and priests prevented us for two hundred years from following suit; and we have never recovered the start we lost then. I can only plead that we did reform our Church at last. No doubt we had to make a few compromises as a matter of good taste; but there is now very little in our Articles of Religion that is not accepted as at least allegorically true by our Higher Criticism.

THE ENVOY [encouragingly] Besides, does it matter? Why, I have never read the Articles in my life; and I am Prime Minister! Come! if my services in arranging for the reception of a colonizing party would be acceptable, they are at your disposal. And when I say a reception I mean a reception. Royal honors, mind you! A salute of a hundred and one guns! The streets lined with troops! The Guards turned out at the Palace! Dinner at the Guildhall!

ZOZIM. Discourage me if I know what youre talking about! I wish Zoo would come: she understands these things. All I can tell you is that the general opinion among the Colonizers is in favor of beginning in a country where the people are of a different color from us; so that we can make short work without any risk of mistakes.

THE ENVOY. What do you mean by short work? I hope —

ZOZIM [with obviously feigned geniality] Oh, nothing, nothing, nothing. We are thinking of trying North America: thats all. You see, the Red Men of that country used to be white. They passed through a period of sallow complexions, followed by a period of no complexions at all, into the red characteristic of their climate. Besides, several cases of long life have occurred in North America. They joined us here; and their stock soon reverted to the original white of these islands.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But have you considered the possibility of your colony turning red?

ZOZIM. That wont matter. We are not particular about our pigmentation. The old books mention red-faced Englishmen: they appear to have been common objects at one time.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [very persuasively] But do you think you would be popular in North America? It seems to me, if I may say so, that on your own shewing you need a country in which society is organized in a series of highly exclusive circles, in which the privacy of private life is very jealously guarded, and in which no one presumes to speak to anyone else without an introduction following a strict examination of social credentials. It is only in such a country that persons of special tastes and attainments can form a little world of their own, and protect themselves absolutely from intrusion by common persons. I think I may claim that our British society has developed this exclusiveness to perfection. If you would pay us a visit and see the working of our caste system, our club system, our guild system, you would admit that nowhere else in the world, least of all, perhaps in North America, which has a regrettable tradition of social promiscuity, could you keep yourselves so entirely to yourselves.

ZOZIM [good-naturedly embarrassed] Look here. There is no good discussing this. I had rather not explain; but it wont make any difference to our Colonizers what sort of short-livers they come across. We shall arrange all that. Never mind how. Let us join the ladies.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [throwing off his diplomatic attitude and abandoning himself to despair] We understand you only too well, sir. Well, kill us. End the lives you have made miserably unhappy by opening up to us the possibility that any of us may live three hundred years. I solemnly curse that possibility. To you it may be a blessing, because you do live three hundred years. To us, who live less than a hundred, whose flesh is as grass, it is the most unbearable burden our poor tortured humanity has ever groaned under.

THE ENVOY. Hullo, Poppa! Steady! How do you make that out?

ZOZIM. What is three hundred years? Short enough, if you ask me. Why, in the old days you people lived on the assumption that you were going to last out for ever and ever and ever. Immortal, you thought yourselves. Were you any happier then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. As President of the Baghdad Historical Society I am in a position to inform you that the communities which took this monstrous pretension seriously were the most wretched of which we have any record. My Society has printed an editio princeps of the works of the father of history, Thucyderodotus Macolly-buckle. Have you read his account of what was blasphemously called the Perfect City of God, and the attempt made to reproduce it in the northern part of these islands by Jonhobsnoxius, called the Leviathan? Those misguided people sacrificed the fragment of life that was granted to them to an imaginary immortality. They crucified the prophet who told them to take no thought for the morrow, and that here and now was their Australia: Australia being a term signifying paradise, or an eternity of bliss. They tried to produce a condition of death in life: to mortify the flesh, as they called it.

ZOZIM. Well, you are not suffering from that, are you? You have not a mortified air.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Naturally we are not absolutely insane and suicidal. Nevertheless we impose on ourselves abstinences and disciplines and studies that are meant to prepare us for living three centuries. And we seldom live one. My childhood was made unnecessarily painful, my boyhood unnecessarily laborious, by ridiculous preparations for a length of days which the chances were fifty thousand to one against my ever attaining. I have been cheated out of the natural joys and freedoms of my life by this dream to which the existence of these islands and their oracles gives a delusive possibility of realization. I curse the day when long life was invented, just as the victims of Jonhobsnoxius cursed the day when eternal life was invented.

ZOZIM. Pooh! You could live three centuries if you chose.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. That is what the fortunate always say to the unfortunate. Well, I do not choose. I accept my three score and ten years. If they are filled with usefulness, with justice, with mercy, with good-will: if they are the lifetime of a soul that never loses its honor and a brain that never loses its eagerness, they are enough for me, because these things are infinite and eternal, and can make ten of my years as long as thirty of yours. I shall not conclude by saying live as long as you like and be damned to you, because I have risen for the moment far above any ill-will to you or to any fellow-creature; but I am your equal before that eternity in which the difference between your lifetime and mine is as the difference between one drop of water and three in the eyes of the Almighty Power from which we have both proceeded.

ZOZIM [impressed] You spoke that piece very well, Daddy. I couldnt talk like that if I tried. It sounded fine. Ah! here comes the ladies.

To his relief, they have just appeared on the threshold of the temple.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [passing from exaltation to distress] It means nothing to him: in this land of discouragement the sublime has become the ridiculous. [Turning on the hopelessly puzzled Zozim] ‘Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long; and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee.’

{Poppa, Poppa: dont look like
THE WIFE.} [running] {that.
THE DAUGHTER.}[to him] {Oh, granpa, whats the matter?

ZOZIM [with a shrug] Discouragement!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [throwing off the women with a superb gesture] Liar! [Recollecting himself, he adds, with noble courtesy, raising his hat and bowing] I beg your pardon, sir; but I am NOT discouraged.

A burst of orchestral music, through which a powerful gong sounds, is heard from the temple. Zoo, in a purple robe, appears in the doorway.

ZOO. Come. The oracle is ready.

Zozim motions them to the threshold with a wave of his staff. The Envoy and the Elderly Gentleman take off their hats and go into the temple on tiptoe, Zoo leading the way. The Wife and Daughter, frightened as they are, raise their heads uppishly and follow flatfooted, sustained by a sense of their Sunday clothes and social consequence. Zozim remains in the portico, alone.

ZOZIM [taking off his wig, beard, and robe, and bundling them under his arm] Ouf! [He goes home].

ACT III

Inside the temple. A gallery overhanging an abyss. Dead silence. The gallery is brightly lighted; but beyond is a vast gloom, continually changing in intensity. A shaft of violet light shoots upward; and a very harmonious and silvery carillon chimes. When it ceases the violet ray vanishes.

Zoo comes along the gallery, followed by the Envoy’s daughter, his wife, the Envoy himself, and the Elderly Gentleman. The two men are holding their hats with the brims near their noses, as if prepared to pray into them at a moment’s notice. Zoo halts: they all follow her example. They contemplate the void with awe. Organ music of the kind called sacred in the nineteenth century begins. Their awe deepens. The violet ray, now a diffused mist, rises again from the abyss.

THE WIFE [to Zoo, in a reverent whisper] Shall we kneel?

ZOO [loudly] Yes, if you want to. You can stand on your head if you like. [She sits down carelessly on the gallery railing, with her back to the abyss].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [jarred by her callousness] We desire to behave in a becoming manner.

ZOO. Very well. Behave just as you feel. It doesn’t matter how you behave. But keep your wits about you when the pythoness ascends, or you will forget the questions you have come to ask her.

THE ENVOY} {[[very nervous, takes out a paper to]
} [[simul-] {[refresh his memory]] Ahem!
THE DAUGHTER} [taneously]]{[[alarmed]] The pythoness? Is she
} {a snake?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Tch-ch! The priestess of the oracle. A sybil. A prophetess. Not a snake.

THE WIFE. How awful!

ZOO. I’m glad you think so.

THE WIFE. Oh dear! Dont you think so?

ZOO. No. This sort of thing is got up to impress you, not to impress me.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I wish you would let it impress us, then, madam.
I am deeply impressed; but you are spoiling the effect.

ZOO. You just wait. All this business with colored lights and chords on that old organ is only tomfoolery. Wait til you see the pythoness.

The Envoy’s wife falls on her knees, and takes refuge in prayer.

THE DAUGHTER [trembling] Are we really going to see a woman who has lived three hundred years?

ZOO. Stuff! Youd drop dead if a tertiary as much as looked at you. The oracle is only a hundred and seventy; and you’ll find it hard enough to stand her.

THE DAUGHTER [piteously] Oh! [she falls on her knees].

THE ENVOY. Whew! Stand by me, Poppa. This is a little more than I bargained for. Are you going to kneel; or how?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Perhaps it would be in better taste.

The two men kneel.

The vapor of the abyss thickens; and a distant roll of thunder seems to come from its depths. The pythoness, seated on her tripod, rises slowly from it. She has discarded the insulating robe and veil in which she conversed with Napoleon, and is now draped and hooded in voluminous folds of a single piece of grey-white stuff. Something supernatural about her terrifies the beholders, who throw themselves on their faces. Her outline flows and waves: she is almost distinct at moments, and again vague and shadowy: above all, she is larger than life-size, not enough to be measured by the flustered congregation, but enough to affect them with a dreadful sense of her supernaturalness.

ZOO. Get up, get up. Do pull yourselves together, you people.

The Envoy and his family, by shuddering negatively, intimate that it is impossible. The Elderly Gentleman manages to get on his hands and knees.

ZOO. Come on, Daddy: you are not afraid. Speak to her. She wont wait here all day for you, you know.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [rising very deferentially to his feet] Madam: you will excuse my very natural nervousness in addressing, for the first time in my life, a — a — a — a goddess. My friend and relative the Envoy is unhinged. I throw myself upon your indulgence —

ZOO [interrupting him intolerantly] Dont throw yourself on anything belonging to her or you will go right through her and break your neck. She isnt solid, like you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. I was speaking figuratively —

ZOO. You have been told not to do it. Ask her what you want to know; and be quick about it.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [stooping and taking the prostrate Envoy by the shoulders] Ambrose: you must make an effort. You cannot go back to Baghdad without the answers to your questions.

THE ENVOY [rising to his knees] I shall be only too glad to get back alive on any terms. If my legs would support me I’d just do a bunk straight for the ship.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, no. Remember: your dignity —

THE ENVOY. Dignity be damned! I’m terrified. Take me away, for God’s sake.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [producing a brandy flask and taking the cap off] Try some of this. It is still nearly full, thank goodness!

THE ENVOY [clutching it and drinking eagerly] Ah! Thats better. [He tries to drink again. Finding that he has emptied it, he hands it back to his father-in-law upside down].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [taking it] Great heavens! He has swallowed half-a-pint of neat brandy. [Much perturbed, he screws the cap on again, and pockets the flask].

THE ENVOY [staggering to his feet; pulling a paper from his pocket; and speaking with boisterous confidence] Get up, Molly. Up with you, Eth.

The two women rise to their knees.

THE ENVOY. What I want to ask is this. [He refers to the paper]. Ahem! Civilization has reached a crisis. We are at the parting of the ways. We stand on the brink of the Rubicon. Shall we take the plunge? Already a leaf has been torn out of the book of the Sybil. Shall we wait until the whole volume is consumed? On our right is the crater of the volcano: on our left the precipice. One false step, and we go down to annihilation dragging the whole human race with us. [He pauses for breath].

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [recovering his spirits under the familiar stimulus of political oratory] Hear, hear!

ZOO. What are you raving about? Ask your question while you have the chance. What is it you want to know?

THE ENVOY [patronizing her in the manner of a Premier debating with a very young member of the Opposition] A young woman asks me a question. I am always glad to see the young taking an interest in politics. It is an impatient question; but it is a practical question, an intelligent question. She asks why we seek to lift a corner of the veil that shrouds the future from our feeble vision.

ZOO. I don’t. I ask you to tell the oracle what you want, and not keep her sitting there all day.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [warmly] Order, order!

ZOO. What does ‘Order, order!’ mean?

THE ENVOY. I ask the august oracle to listen to my voice —

ZOO. You people seem never to tire of listening to your voices; but it doesn’t amuse us. What do you want?

THE ENVOY. I want, young woman, to be allowed to proceed without unseemly interruptions.

A low roll of thunder comes from the abyss.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. There! Even the oracle is indignant. [To the
Envoy] Do not allow yourself to be put down by this lady’s rude clamor,
Ambrose. Take no notice. Proceed.

THE ENVOY’S WIFE. I cant bear this much longer, Amby. Remember: I havn’t had any brandy.

HIS DAUGHTER [trembling] There are serpents curling in the vapor. I am afraid of the lightning. Finish it, Papa; or I shall die.

THE ENVOY [sternly] Silence. The destiny of British civilization is at stake. Trust me. I am not afraid. As I was saying — where was I?

ZOO. I don’t know. Does anybody?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [tactfully] You were just coming to the election, I think.

THE ENVOY [reassured] Just so. The election. Now what we want to know is this: ought we to dissolve in August, or put it off until next spring?

ZOO. Dissolve? In what? [Thunder]. Oh! My fault this time. That means that the oracle understands you, and desires me to hold my tongue.

THE ENVOY [fervently] I thank the oracle.

THE WIFE [to Zoo] Serve you right!

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Before the oracle replies, I should like to be allowed to state a few of the reasons why, in my opinion, the Government should hold on until the spring. In the first —

Terrific lightning and thunder. The Elderly Gentleman is knocked flat; but as he immediately sits up again dazedly it is clear that he is none the worse for the shock. The ladies cower in terror. The Envoy’s hat is blown off; but he seizes it just as it quits his temples, and holds it on with both hands. He is recklessly drunk, but quite articulate, as he seldom speaks in public without taking stimulants beforehand.

THE ENVOY [taking one hand from his hat to make a gesture of stilling the tempest] Thats enough. We know how to take a hint. I’ll put the case in three words. I am the leader of the Potterbill party. My party is in power. I am Prime Minister. The Opposition — the Rotterjacks — have won every bye-election for the last six months. They —

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [scrambling heatedly to his feet] Not by fair means. By bribery, by misrepresentation, by pandering to the vilest prejudices [muttered thunder] — I beg your pardon [he is silent].

THE ENVOY. Never mind the bribery and lies. The oracle knows all about that. The point is that though our five years will not expire until the year after next, our majority will be eaten away at the bye-elections by about Easter. We can’t wait: we must start some question that will excite the public, and go to the country on it. But some of us say do it now. Others say wait til the spring. We cant make up our minds one way or the other. Which would you advise?

ZOO. But what is the question that is to excite your public?

THE ENVOY. That doesnt matter. I dont know yet. We will find a question all right enough. The oracle can foresee the future: we cannot. [Thunder]. What does that mean? What have I done now?

ZOO. [severely] How often must you be told that we cannot foresee the future? There is no such thing as the future until it is the present.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Allow me to point out, madam, that when the Potterbill party sent to consult the oracle fifteen years ago, the oracle prophesied that the Potterbills would be victorious at the General Election; and they were. So it is evident that the oracle can foresee the future, and is sometimes willing to reveal it.

THE ENVOY. Quite true. Thank you, Poppa. I appeal now, over your head, young woman, direct to the August Oracle, to repeat the signal favor conferred on my illustrious predecessor, Sir Fuller Eastwind, and to answer me exactly as he was answered.

The oracle raises her hands to command silence.

ALL. Sh-sh-sh!

Invisible trombones utter three solemn blasts in the manner of Die Zauberflöte.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. May I —

ZOO [quickly] Hush. The oracle is going to speak.

THE ORACLE. Go home, poor fool.

She vanishes; and the atmosphere changes to prosaic daylight. Zoo comes off the railing; throws off her robe; makes a bundle of it; and tucks it under her arm. The magic and mystery are gone. The women rise to their feet. The Envoy’s party stare at one another helplessly.

ZOO. The same reply, word for word, that your illustrious predecessor, as you call him, got fifteen years ago. You asked for it; and you got it. And just think of all the important questions you might have asked. She would have answered them, you know. It is always like that. I will go and arrange to have you sent home: you can wait for me in the entrance hall [she goes out].

THE ENVOY. What possessed me to ask for the same answer old Eastwind got?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. But it was not the same answer. The answer to Eastwind was an inspiration to our party for years. It won us the election.

THE ENVOY’S DAUGHTER. I learnt it at school, granpa. It wasn’t the same at all. I can repeat it. [She quotes] ‘When Britain was cradled in the west, the east wind hardened her and made her great. Whilst the east wind prevails Britain shall prosper. The east wind shall wither Britain’s enemies in the day of contest. Let the Rotterjacks look to it.’

THE ENVOY. The old man invented that. I see it all. He was a doddering old ass when he came to consult the oracle. The oracle naturally said ‘Go home, poor fool.’ There was no sense in saying that to me; but as that girl said, I asked for it. What else could the poor old chap do but fake up an answer fit for publication? There were whispers about it; but nobody believed them. I believe them now.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Oh, I cannot admit that Sir Fuller Eastwind was capable of such a fraud.

THE ENVOY. He was capable of anything: I knew his private secretary.
And now what are we going to say? You don’t suppose I am going back to
Baghdad to tell the British Empire that the oracle called me a fool, do
you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. Surely we must tell the truth, however painful it may be to our feelings.

THE ENVOY. I am not thinking of my feelings: I am not so selfish as that, thank God. I am thinking of the country: of our party. The truth, as you call it, would put the Rotterjacks in for the next twenty years. It would be the end of me politically. Not that I care for that: I am only too willing to retire if you can find a better man. Dont hesitate on my account.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No, Ambrose: you are indispensable. There is no one else.

THE ENVOY. Very well, then. What are you going to do?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. My dear Ambrose, you are the leader of the party, not I. What are you going to do?

THE ENVOY. I am going to tell the exact truth; thats what I’m going to do. Do you take me for a liar?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [puzzled] Oh. I beg your pardon. I understood you to say —

THE ENVOY [cutting him short] You understood me to say that I am going back to Baghdad to tell the British electorate that the oracle repeated to me, word for word, what it said to Sir Fuller Eastwind fifteen years ago. Molly and Ethel can bear me out. So must you, if you are an honest man. Come on.

He goes out, followed by his wife and daughter.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [left alone and shrinking into an old and desolate figure] What am I to do? I am a most perplexed and wretched man. [He falls on his knees, and stretches his hands in entreaty over the abyss]. I invoke the oracle. I cannot go back and connive at a blasphemous lie. I implore guidance.

The Pythoness walks in on the gallery behind him, and touches him on the shoulder. Her size is now natural. Her face is hidden by her hood. He flinches as if from an electric shock; turns to her; and cowers, covering his eyes in terror.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. No: not close to me. I’m afraid I can’t bear it.

THE ORACLE [with grave pity] Come: look at me. I am my natural size now: what you saw there was only a foolish picture of me thrown on a cloud by a lantern. How can I help you?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. They have gone back to lie about your answer. I cannot go with them. I cannot live among people to whom nothing is real. I have become incapable of it through my stay here. I implore to be allowed to stay.

THE ORACLE. My friend: if you stay with us you will die of discouragement.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. If I go back I shall die of disgust and despair.
I take the nobler risk. I beg you, do not cast me out.

He catches her robe and holds her.

THE ORACLE. Take care. I have been here one hundred and seventy years.
Your death does not mean to me what it means to you.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN. It is the meaning of life, not of death, that makes banishment so terrible to me.

THE ORACLE. Be it so, then. You may stay.

She offers him her hands. He grasps them and raises himself a little by clinging to her. She looks steadily into his face. He stiffens; a little convulsion shakes him; his grasp relaxes; and he falls dead.

THE ORACLE [looking down at the body] Poor shortlived thing! What else could I do for you?

PART V.

As Far as Thought can Reach

Summer afternoon in the year 31,920 A.D. A sunlit glade at the southern foot of a thickly wooded hill. On the west side of it, the steps and columned porch of a dainty little classic temple. Between it and the hill, a rising path to the wooded heights begins with rough steps of stones in the moss. On the opposite side, a grove. In the middle of the glade, an altar in the form of a low marble table as long as a man, set parallel to the temple steps and pointing to the hill. Curved marble benches radiate from it into the foreground; but they are not joined to it: there is plenty of space to pass between the altar and the benches.

A dance of youths and maidens is in progress. The music is provided by a few fluteplayers seated carelessly on the steps of the temple. There are no children; and none of the dancers seems younger than eighteen. Some of the youths have beards. Their dress, like the architecture of the theatre and the design of the altar and curved seats, resembles Grecian of the fourth century B.C., freely handled. They move with perfect balance and remarkable grace, racing through a figure like a farandole. They neither romp nor hug in our manner.

At the first full close they clap their hands to stop the musicians, who recommence with a saraband, during which a strange figure appears on the path beyond the temple. He is deep in thought, with his eyes closed and his feet feeling automatically for the rough irregular steps as he slowly descends them. Except for a sort of linen kilt consisting mainly of a girdle carrying a sporran and a few minor pockets, he is naked. In physical hardihood and uprightness he seems to be in the prime of life; and his eyes and mouth shew no signs of age; but his face, though fully and firmly fleshed, bears a network of lines, varying from furrows to hairbreadth reticulations, as if Time had worked over every inch of it incessantly through whole geologic periods. His head is finely domed and utterly bald. Except for his eyelashes he is quite hairless. He is unconscious of his surroundings, and walks right into one of the dancing couples, separating them. He wakes up and stares about him. The couple stop indignantly. The rest stop. The music stops. The youth whom he has jostled accosts him without malice, but without anything that we should call manners.

THE YOUTH. Now, then, ancient sleepwalker, why don’t you keep your eyes open and mind where you are going?

THE ANCIENT [mild, bland, and indulgent] I did not know there was a nursery here, or I should not have turned my face in this direction. Such accidents cannot always be avoided. Go on with your play: I will turn back.

THE YOUTH. Why not stay with us and enjoy life for once in a way? We will teach you to dance.

THE ANCIENT. No, thank you. I danced when I was a child like you. Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life. It would be painful to me to go back from that rhythm to your babyish gambols: in fact I could not do it if I tried. But at your age it is pleasant: and I am sorry I disturbed you.

THE YOUTH. Come! own up: arnt you very unhappy? It’s dreadful to see you ancients going about by yourselves, never noticing anything, never dancing, never laughing, never singing, never getting anything out of life. None of us are going to be like that when we grow up. It’s a dog’s life.

THE ANCIENT. Not at all. You repeat that old phrase without knowing that there was once a creature on earth called a dog. Those who are interested in extinct forms of life will tell you that it loved the sound of its own voice and bounded about when it was happy, just as you are doing here. It is you, my children, who are living the dog’s life.

THE YOUTH. The dog must have been a good sensible creature: it set you a very wise example. You should let yourself go occasionally and have a good time.

THE ANCIENT. My children: be content to let us ancients go our ways and enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.

He turns to go.

THE MAIDEN. But wait a moment. Why will you not tell us how you enjoy yourself? You must have secret pleasures that you hide from us, and that you never get tired of. I get tired of all our dances and all our tunes. I get tired of all my partners.

THE YOUTH [suspiciously] Do you? I shall bear that in mind.

They all look at one another as if there were some sinister significance in what she has said.

THE MAIDEN. We all do: what is the use of pretending we don’t? It is natural.

SEVERAL YOUNG PEOPLE. No, no. We don’t. It is not natural.

THE ANCIENT. You are older than he is, I see. You are growing up.

THE MAIDEN. How do you know? I do not look so much older, do I?

THE ANCIENT. Oh, I was not looking at you. Your looks do not interest me.

THE MAIDEN. Thank you.

They all laugh.

THE YOUTH. You old fish! I believe you don’t know the difference between a man and a woman.

THE ANCIENT. It has long ceased to interest me in the way it interests you. And when anything no longer interests us we no longer know it.

THE MAIDEN. You havnt told me how I shew my age. That is what I want to know. As a matter of fact I am older than this boy here: older than he thinks. How did you find that out?

THE ANCIENT. Easily enough. You are ceasing to pretend that these childish games — this dancing and singing and mating — do not become tiresome and unsatisfying after a while. And you no longer care to pretend that you are younger than you are. These are the signs of adolescence. And then, see these fantastic rags with which you have draped yourself. [He takes up a piece of her draperies in his hand]. It is rather badly worn here. Why do you not get a new one?

THE MAIDEN. Oh, I did not notice it. Besides, it is too much trouble. Clothes are a nuisance. I think I shall do without them some day, as you ancients do.

THE ANCIENT. Signs of maturity. Soon you will give up all these toys and games and sweets.

THE YOUTH. What! And be as miserable as you?

THE ANCIENT. Infant: one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead. [He stalks gravely out through the grove].

They stare after him, much damped.

THE YOUTH [to the musicians] Let us have another dance.

The musicians shake their heads; get up from their seats on the steps; and troop away into the temple. The others follow them, except the Maiden, who sits down on the altar.

A MAIDEN [as she goes] There! The ancient has put them out of countenance. It is your fault, Strephon, for provoking him. [She leaves, much disappointed].

A YOUTH. Why need you have cheeked him like that? [He goes grumbling].

STREPHON [calling after him] I thought it was understood that we are always to cheek the ancients on principle.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Quite right too! There would be no holding them if we didn’t. [He goes].

THE MAIDEN. Why don’t you really stand up to them? I did.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Sheer, abject, pusillanimous, dastardly cowardice. Thats why. Face the filthy truth. [He goes].

ANOTHER YOUTH [turning on the steps as he goes out] And don’t you forget, infant, that one moment of the ecstasy of life as I live it would strike you dead. Haha!

STREPHON [now the only one left, except the Maiden] Arnt you coming,
Chloe?

THE MAIDEN [shakes her head]!

THE YOUTH [hurrying back to her] What is the matter?

THE MAIDEN [tragically pensive] I dont know.

THE YOUTH. Then there is something the matter. Is that what you mean?

THE MAIDEN. Yes. Something is happening to me. I dont know what.

THE YOUTH. You no longer love me. I have seen it for a month past.

THE MAIDEN. Dont you think all that is rather silly? We cannot go on as if this kind of thing, this dancing and sweethearting, were everything.

THE YOUTH. What is there better? What else is there worth living for?

THE MAIDEN. Oh, stuff! Dont be frivolous.

THE YOUTH. Something horrible is happening to you. You are losing all heart, all feeling. [He sits on the altar beside her and buries his face in his hands]. I am bitterly unhappy.

THE MAIDEN. Unhappy! Really, you must have a very empty head if there is nothing in it but a dance with one girl who is no better than any of the other girls.

THE YOUTH. You did not always think so. You used to be vexed if I as much as looked at another girl.

THE MAIDEN. What does it matter what I did when I was a baby? Nothing existed for me then except what I tasted and touched and saw; and I wanted all that for myself, just as I wanted the moon to play with. Now the world is opening out for me. More than the world: the universe. Even little things are turning out to be great things, and becoming intensely interesting. Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers?

THE YOUTH [sitting up, markedly disenchanted] Numbers!!! I cannot imagine anything drier or more repulsive.

THE MAIDEN. They are fascinating, just fascinating. I want to get away from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and think about numbers.

THE YOUTH [rising indignantly] Oh, this is too much. I have suspected you for some time past. We have all suspected you. All the girls say that you have deceived us as to your age: that you are getting flat-chested: that you are bored with us; that you talk to the ancients when you get the chance. Tell me the truth: how old are you?

THE MAIDEN. Just twice your age, my poor boy.

THE YOUTH. Twice my age! Do you mean to say you are four?

THE MAIDEN. Very nearly four.

THE YOUTH [collapsing on the altar with a groan] Oh!

THE MAIDEN. My poor Strephon: I pretended I was only two for your sake. I was two when you were born. I saw you break from your shell; and you were such a charming child! You ran round and talked to us all so prettily, and were so handsome and well grown, that I lost my heart to you at once. But now I seem to have lost it altogether: bigger things are taking possession of me. Still, we were very happy in our childish way for the first year, werent we?

STREPHON. I was happy until you began cooling towards me.

THE MAIDEN. Not towards you, but towards all the trivialities of our life here. Just think. I have hundreds of years to live: perhaps thousands. Do you suppose I can spend centuries dancing; listening to flutes ringing changes on a few tunes and a few notes; raving about the beauty of a few pillars and arches; making jingles with words; lying about with your arms round me, which is really neither comfortable nor convenient; everlastingly choosing colors for dresses, and putting them on, and washing; making a business of sitting together at fixed hours to absorb our nourishment; taking little poisons with it to make us delirious enough to imagine we are enjoying ourselves; and then having to pass the nights in shelters lying in cots and losing half our lives in a state of unconsciousness. Sleep is a shameful thing: I have not slept at all for weeks past. I have stolen out at night when you were all lying insensible — quite disgusting, I call it — and wandered about the woods, thinking, thinking, thinking; grasping the world; taking it to pieces; building it up again; devising methods; planning experiments to test the methods; and having a glorious time. Every morning I have come back here with greater and greater reluctance; and I know that the time will soon come — perhaps it has come already — when I shall not come back at all.

STREPHON. How horribly cold and uncomfortable!

THE MAIDEN. Oh, don’t talk to me of comfort! Life is not worth living if you have to bother about comfort. Comfort makes winter a torture, spring an illness, summer an oppression, and autumn only a respite. The ancients could make life one long frowsty comfort if they chose. But they never lift a finger to make themselves comfortable. They will not sleep under a roof. They will not clothe themselves: a girdle with a few pockets hanging to it to carry things about in is all they wear: they will sit down on the wet moss or in a gorse bush when there is dry heather within two yards of them. Two years ago, when you were born, I did not understand this. Now I feel that I would not put myself to the trouble of walking two paces for all the comfort in the world.

STREPHON. But you don’t know what this means to me. It means that you are dying to me: yes, just dying. Listen to me [he puts his arm around her].

THE MAIDEN [extricating herself] Dont. We can talk quite as well without touching one another.

STREPHON [horrified] Chloe! Oh, this is the worst symptom of all! The ancients never touch one another.

THE MAIDEN. Why should they?

STREPHON. Oh, I don’t know. But don’t you want to touch me? You used to.

THE MAIDEN. Yes: that is true: I used to. We used to think it would be nice to sleep in one another’s arms; but we never could go to sleep because our weight stopped our circulations just above the elbows. Then somehow my feeling began to change bit by bit. I kept a sort of interest in your head and arms long after I lost interest in your whole body. And now that has gone.

STREPHON. You no longer care for me at all, then?

THE MAIDEN. Nonsense! I care for you much more seriously than before; though perhaps not so much for you in particular. I mean I care more for everybody. But I don’t want to touch you unnecessarily; and I certainly don’t want you to touch me.

STREPHON [rising decisively] That finishes it. You dislike me.

THE MAIDEN [impatiently] I tell you again, I do not dislike you; but you bore me when you cannot understand; and I think I shall be happier by myself in future. You had better get a new companion. What about the girl who is to be born today?

STREPHON. I do not want the girl who is to be born today. How do I know what she will be like? I want you.

THE MAIDEN. You cannot have me. You must recognize facts and face them. It is no use running after a woman twice your age. I cannot make my childhood last to please you. The age of love is sweet; but it is short; and I must pay nature’s debt. You no longer attract me; and I no longer care to attract you. Growth is too rapid at my age: I am maturing from week to week.

STREPHON. You are maturing, as you call it — I call it ageing — from minute to minute. You are going much further than you did when we began this conversation.

THE MAIDEN. It is not the ageing that is so rapid. It is the realization of it when it has actually happened. Now that I have made up my mind to the fact that I have left childhood behind me, it comes home to me in leaps and bounds with every word you say.

STREPHON. But your vow. Have you forgotten that? We all swore together in that temple: the temple of love. You were more earnest than any of us.

THE MAIDEN [with a grim smile] Never to let our hearts grow cold! Never to become as the ancients! Never to let the sacred lamp be extinguished! Never to change or forget! To be remembered for ever as the first company of true lovers faithful to this vow so often made and broken by past generations! Ha! ha! Oh, dear!

STREPHON. Well, you need not laugh. It is a beautiful and holy compact; and I will keep it whilst I live. Are you going to break it?

THE MAIDEN. Dear child: it has broken itself. The change has come in spite of my childish vow. [She rises]. Do you mind if I go into the woods for a walk by myself? This chat of ours seems to me an unbearable waste of time. I have so much to think of.

STREPHON [again collapsing on the altar and covering his eyes with his hands] My heart is broken. [He weeps].

THE MAIDEN [with a shrug] I have luckily got through my childhood without that experience. It shews how wise I was to choose a lover half my age. [She goes towards the grove, and is disappearing among the trees, when another youth, older and manlier than Strephon, with crisp hair and firm arms, comes from the temple, and calls to her from the threshold].

THE TEMPLE YOUTH. I say, Chloe. Is there any sign of the Ancient yet? The hour of birth is overdue. The baby is kicking like mad. She will break her shell prematurely.

THE MAIDEN [looks across to the hill path; then points up it, and says] She is coming, Acis.

The Maiden turns away through the grove and is lost to sight among the trees.

Acis [coming to Strephon] Whats the matter? Has Chloe been unkind?

STREPHON. She has grown up in spite of all her promises. She deceived us about her age. She is four.

ACIS. Four! I am sorry, Strephon. I am getting on for three myself; and I know what old age is. I hate to say ‘I told you so’; but she was getting a little hard set and flat-chested and thin on the top, wasn’t she?

STREPHON [breaking down] Dont.

ACIS. You must pull yourself together. This is going to be a busy day.
First the birth. Then the Festival of the Artists.

STREPHON [rising] What is the use of being born if we have to decay into unnatural, heartless, loveless, joyless monsters in four short years? What use are the artists if they cannot bring their beautiful creations to life? I have a great mind to die and have done with it all. [He moves away to the corner of the curved seat farthest from the theatre, and throws himself moodily into it].

An Ancient Woman has descended the hill path during Strephon’s lament, and has heard most of it. She is like the He-Ancient, equally bald, and equally without sexual charm, but intensely interesting and rather terrifying. Her sex is discoverable only by her voice, as her breasts are manly, and her figure otherwise not very different. She wears no clothes, but has draped herself rather perfunctorily with a ceremonial robe, and carries two implements like long slender saws. She comes to the altar between the two young men.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [to Strephon] Infant: you are only at the beginning of it all. [To Acis] Is the child ready to be born?

ACIS. More than ready, Ancient. Shouting and kicking and cursing. We have called to her to be quiet and wait until you come; but of course she only half understands, and is very impatient.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Very well. Bring her out into the sun.

ACIS [going quickly into the temple] All ready. Come along.

Joyous processional music strikes up in the temple.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [going close to Strephon]. Look at me.

STREPHON [sulkily keeping his face averted] Thank you; but I don’t want to be cured. I had rather be miserable in my own way than callous in yours.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. You like being miserable? You will soon grow out of that. [She returns to the altar].

The procession, headed by Acis, emerges from the temple. Six youths carry on their shoulders a burden covered with a gorgeous but light pall. Before them certain official maidens carry a new tunic, ewers of water, silver dishes pierced with holes, cloths, and immense sponges. The rest carry wands with ribbons, and strew flowers. The burden is deposited on the altar, and the pall removed. It is a huge egg.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [freeing her arms from her robe, and placing her saws on the altar ready to her hand in a businesslike manner] A girl, I think you said?

ACIS. Yes.

THE TUNIC BEARER. It is a shame. Why cant we have more boys?

SEVERAL YOUTHS [protesting] Not at all. More girls. We want new girls.

A GIRL’S VOICE FROM THE EGG. Let me out. Let me out. I want to be born.
I want to be born. [The egg rocks].

ACIS [snatching a wand from one of the others and whacking the egg with it] Be quiet, I tell you. Wait. You will be born presently.

THE EGG. No, no: at once, at once. I want to be born: I want to be born. [Violent kicking within the egg, which rocks so hard that it has to be held on the altar by the bearers].

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Silence. [The music stops; and the egg behaves itself].

The She-Ancient takes her two saws, and with a couple of strokes rips the egg open. The Newly Born, a pretty girl who would have been guessed as seventeen in our day, sits up in the broken shell, exquisitely fresh and rosy, but with filaments of spare albumen clinging to her here and there.

THE NEWLY BORN [as the world bursts on her vision] Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!! [She continues this ad libitum during the following remonstrances].

ACIS. Hold your noise, will you?

The washing begins. The Newly Born shrieks and struggles.

A YOUTH. Lie quiet, you clammy little devil.

A MAIDEN. You must be washed, dear. Now quiet, quiet, quiet: be good.

ACIS. Shut your mouth, or I’ll shove the sponge in it.

THE MAIDEN. Shut your eyes. Itll hurt if you don’t.

ANOTHER MAIDEN. Dont be silly. One would think nobody had ever been born before.

THE NEWLY BORN [yells]!!!!!!

ACIS. Serve you right! You were told to shut your eyes.

THE YOUTH. Dry her off quick. I can hardly hold her. Shut it, will you; or I’ll smack you into a pickled cabbage.

The dressing begins. The Newly Born chuckles with delight.

THE MAIDEN. Your arms go here, dear. Isnt it pretty? Youll look lovely.

THE NEWLY BORN [rapturously] Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Oh!!!!

ANOTHER YOUTH. No: the other arm: youre putting it on back to front. You are a silly little beast.

ACIS. Here! Thats it. Now youre clean and decent. Up with you! Oopsh! [He hauls her to her feet. She cannot walk at first, but masters it after a few steps]. Now then: march. Here she is, Ancient: put her through the catechism.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. What name have you chosen for her?

ACIS. Amaryllis.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [to the Newly Born] Your name is Amaryllis.

THE NEWLY BORN. What does it mean?

A YOUTH. Love.

A MAIDEN. Mother.

ANOTHER YOUTH. Lilies.

THE NEWLY BORN [to Acis] What is your name?

ACIS. Acis.

THE NEWLY BORN. I love you, Acis. I must have you all to myself. Take me in your arms.

ACIS. Steady, young one. I am three years old.

THE NEWLY BORN. What has that to do with it? I love you; and I must have you or I will go back into my shell again.

ACIS. You cant. It’s broken. Look here [pointing to Strephon, who has remained in his seal without looking round at the birth, wrapped up in his sorrow]! Look at this poor fellow!

THE NEWLY BORN. What is the matter with him?

ACIS. When he was born he chose a girl two years old for his sweetheart. He is two years old now himself; and already his heart is broken because she is four. That means that she has grown up like this Ancient here, and has left him. If you choose me, we shall have only a year’s happiness before I break your heart by growing up. Better choose the youngest you can find.

THE NEWLY BORN. I will not choose anyone but you. You must not grow up. We will love one another for ever. [They all laugh]. What are you laughing at?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Listen, child —

THE NEWLY BORN. Do not come near me, you dreadful old creature. You frighten me.

ACIS. Just give her another moment. She is not quite reasonable yet.
What can you expect from a child less than five minutes old?

THE NEWLY BORN. I think I feel a little more reasonable now. Of course I was rather young when I said that; but the inside of my head is changing very rapidly. I should like to have things explained to me.

ACIS [to the She-Ancient] Is she all right, do you think?

The She-Ancient looks at the Newly Born critically; feels her bumps like a phrenologist; grips her muscles and shakes her limbs; examines her teeth; looks into her eyes for a moment; and finally relinquishes her with an air of having finished her job.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. She will do. She may live.

They all wave their hands and shout for joy.

THE NEWLY BORN [indignant] I may live! Suppose there had been anything wrong with me?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Children with anything wrong do not live here, my child. Life is not cheap with us. But you would not have felt anything.

THE NEWLY BORN. You mean that you would have murdered me!

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is one of the funny words the newly born bring with them out of the past. You will forget it tomorrow. Now listen. You have four years of childhood before you. You will not be very happy; but you will be interested and amused by the novelty of the world; and your companions here will teach you how to keep up an imitation of happiness during your four years by what they call arts and sports and pleasures. The worst of your troubles is already over.

THE NEWLY BORN. What! In five minutes?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. No: you have been growing for two years in the egg. You began by being several sorts of creatures that no longer exist, though we have fossils of them. Then you became human; and you passed in fifteen months through a development that once cost human beings twenty years of awkward stumbling immaturity after they were born. They had to spend fifty years more in the sort of childhood you will complete in four years. And then they died of decay. But you need not die until your accident comes.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is my accident?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Sooner or later you will fall and break your neck; or a tree will fall on you; or you will be struck by lightning. Something or other must make an end of you some day.

THE NEWLY BORN. But why should any of these things happen to me?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. There is no why. They do. Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. And with us there is eternity.

THE NEWLY BORN. Nothing need happen. I never heard such nonsense in all my life. I shall know how to take care of myself.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. So you think.

THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t think: I know. I shall enjoy life for ever and ever.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. If you should turn out to be a person of infinite capacity, you will no doubt find life infinitely interesting. However, all you have to do now is to play with your companions. They have many pretty toys, as you see: a playhouse, pictures, images, flowers, bright fabrics, music: above all, themselves; for the most amusing child’s toy is another child. At the end of four years, your mind will change: you will become wise; and then you will be entrusted with power.

THE NEWLY BORN. But I want power now.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. No doubt you do; so that you could play with the world by tearing it to pieces.

THE NEWLY BORN. Only to see how it is made. I should put it all together again much better than before.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. There was a time when children were given the world to play with because they promised to improve it. They did not improve it; and they would have wrecked it had their power been as great as that which you will wield when you are no longer a child. Until then your young companions will instruct you in whatever is necessary. You are not forbidden to speak to the ancients; but you had better not do so, as most of them have long ago exhausted all the interest there is in observing children and conversing with them. [She turns to go].

THE NEWLY BORN. Wait. Tell me some things that I ought to do and ought not to do. I feel the need of education. They all laugh at her, except the She-Ancient.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. You will have grown out of that by tomorrow. Do what you please. [She goes away up the hill path].

The officials take their paraphernalia and the fragments of the egg back into the temple.

ACIS. Just fancy: that old girl has been going for seven hundred years and hasnt had her fatal accident yet; and she is not a bit tired of it all.

THE NEWLY BORN. How could anyone ever get tired of life?

ACIS. They do. That is, of the same life. They manage to change themselves in a wonderful way. You meet them sometimes with a lot of extra heads and arms and legs: they make you split laughing at them. Most of them have forgotten how to speak: the ones that attend to us have to brush up their knowledge of the language once a year or so. Nothing makes any difference to them that I can see. They never enjoy themselves. I don’t know how they can stand it. They don’t even come to our festivals of the arts. That old one who saw you out of your shell has gone off to moodle about doing nothing; though she knows that this is Festival Day?

THE NEWLY BORN. What is Festival Day?

ACIS. Two of our greatest sculptors are bringing us their latest masterpieces; and we are going to crown them with flowers and sing dithyrambs to them and dance round them.

THE NEWLY BORN. How jolly! What is a sculptor?

ACIS. Listen here, young one. You must find out things for yourself, and not ask questions. For the first day or two you must keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. Children should be seen and not heard.

THE NEWLY BORN. Who are you calling a child? I am fully a quarter of an hour old [She sits down on the curved bench near Strephon with her maturest air].

VOICES IN THE TEMPLE [all expressing protest, disappointment, disgust] Oh! Oh! Scandalous. Shameful. Disgraceful. What filth! Is this a joke? Why, theyre ancients! Ss-s-s-sss! Are you mad, Arjillax? This is an outrage. An insult. Yah! etc. etc. etc. [The malcontents appear on the steps, grumbling].

ACIS. Hullo: whats the matter? [He goes to the steps of the temple].

The two sculptors issue from the temple. One has a beard two feet long: the other is beardless. Between them comes a handsome nymph with marked features, dark hair richly waved, and authoritative bearing.

THE AUTHORITATIVE NYMPH [swooping down to the centre of the glade with the sculptors, between Acis and the Newly Born] Do not try to browbeat me, Arjillax, merely because you are clever with your hands. Can you play the flute?

ARJILLAX [the bearded sculptor on her right] No, Ecrasia: I cannot. What has that to do with it? [He is half derisive, half impatient, wholly resolved not to take her seriously in spite of her beauty and imposing tone].

ECRASIA. Well, have you ever hesitated to criticize our best flute players, and to declare whether their music is good or bad? Pray have I not the same right to criticize your busts, though I cannot make images anymore than you can play?

ARJILLAX. Any fool can play the flute, or play anything else, if he practises enough; but sculpture is a creative art, not a mere business of whistling into a pipe. The sculptor must have something of the god in him. From his hand comes a form which reflects a spirit. He does not make it to please you, nor even to please himself, but because he must. You must take what he gives you, or leave it if you are not worthy of it.

ECRASIA [scornfully] Not worthy of it! Ho! May I not leave it because it is not worthy of me?

ARJILLAX. Of you! Hold your silly tongue, you conceited humbug. What do you know about it?

ECRASIA. I know what every person of culture knows: that the business of the artist is to create beauty. Until today your works have been full of beauty; and I have been the first to point that out.

ARJILLAX. Thank you for nothing. People have eyes, havnt they, to see what is as plain as the sun in the heavens without your pointing it out?

ECRASIA. You were very glad to have it pointed out. You did not call me a conceited humbug then. You stifled me with caresses. You modelled me as the genius of art presiding over the infancy of your master here [indicating the other sculptor], Martellus.

MARTELLUS [a silent and meditative listener, shudders and shakes his head, but says nothing].

ARJILLAX [quarrelsomely] I was taken in by your talk.

ECRASIA. I discovered your genius before anyone else did. Is that true, or is it not?

ARJILLAX. Everybody knew I was an extraordinary person. When I was born my beard was three feet long.

ECRASIA. Yes; and it has shrunk from three feet to two. Your genius seems to have been in the last foot of your beard; for you have lost both.

MARTELLUS [with a short sardonic cachinnation] Ha! My beard was three and a half feet long when I was born; and a flash of lightning burnt it off and killed the ancient who was delivering me. Without a hair on my chin I became the greatest sculptor in ten generations.

ECRASIA. And yet you come to us today with empty hands. We shall actually have to crown Arjillax here because no other sculptor is exhibiting.

ACIS [returning from the temple steps to behind the curved seat on the right of the three] Whats the row, Ecrasia? Why have you fallen out with Arjillax?

ECRASIA. He has insulted us! outraged us! profaned his art! You know how much we hoped from the twelve busts he placed in the temple to be unveiled today. Well, go in and look at them. That is all I have to say. [She sweeps to the curved seat, and sits down just where Acis is leaning over it].

ACIS. I am no great judge of sculpture. Art is not my line. What is wrong with the busts?

ECRASIA. Wrong with them! Instead of being ideally beautiful nymphs and youths, they are horribly realistic studies of — but I really cannot bring my lips to utter it.

The Newly Born, full of curiosity, runs to the temple, and peeps in.

ACIS. Oh, stow it, Ecrasia. Your lips are not so squeamish as all that.
Studies of what?

THE NEWLY BORN [from the temple steps] Ancients.

ACIS [surprised but not scandalized] Ancients!

ECRASIA. Yes, ancients. The one subject that is by the universal consent of all connoisseurs absolutely excluded from the fine arts. [To Arjillax] How can you defend such a proceeding?

ARJILLAX. If you come to that, what interest can you find in the statues of smirking nymphs and posturing youths you stick up all over the place?

ECRASIA. You did not ask that when your hand was still skilful enough to model them.

ARJILLAX. Skilful! You high-nosed idiot, I could turn such things out by the score with my eyes bandaged and one hand tied behind me. But what use would they be? They would bore me; and they would bore you if you had any sense. Go in and look at my busts. Look at them again and yet again until you receive the full impression of the intensity of mind that is stamped on them; and then go back to the pretty-pretty confectionery you call sculpture, and see whether you can endure its vapid emptiness. [He mounts the altar impetuously] Listen to me, all of you; and do you, Ecrasia, be silent if you are capable of silence.

ECRASIA. Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. Scorn! That is what I feel for your revolting busts.

ARJILLAX. Fool: the busts are only the beginning of a mighty design.
Listen.

ACIS. Go ahead, old sport. We are listening.

Martellus stretches himself on the sward beside the altar. The Newly Born sits on the temple steps with her chin on her hands, ready to devour the first oration she has ever heard. The rest sit or stand at ease.

ARJILLAX. In the records which generations of children have rescued from the stupid neglect of the ancients, there has come down to us a fable which, like many fables, is not a thing that was done in the past, but a thing that is to be done in the future. It is a legend of a supernatural being called the Archangel Michael.

THE NEWLY BORN. Is this a story? I want to hear a story. [She runs down the steps and sits on the altar at Arjillax’s feet].

ARJILLAX. The Archangel Michael was a mighty sculptor and painter. He found in the centre of the world a temple erected to the goddess of the centre, called Mediterranea. This temple was full of silly pictures of pretty children, such as Ecrasia approves.

ACIS. Fair play, Arjillax! If she is to keep silent, let her alone.

ECRASIA. I shall not interrupt, Acis. Why should I not prefer youth and beauty to age and ugliness?

ARJILLAX. Just so. Well, the Archangel Michael was of my opinion, not yours. He began by painting on the ceiling the newly born in all their childish beauty. But when he had done this he was not satisfied; for the temple was no more impressive than it had been before, except that there was a strength and promise of greater things about his newly born ones than any other artist had attained to. So he painted all round these newly born a company of ancients, who were in those days called prophets and sybils, whose majesty was that of the mind alone at its intensest. And this painting was acknowledged through ages and ages to be the summit and masterpiece of art. Of course we cannot believe such a tale literally. It is only a legend. We do not believe in archangels; and the notion that thirty thousand years ago sculpture and painting existed, and had even reached the glorious perfection they have reached with us, is absurd. But what men cannot realize they can at least aspire to. They please themselves by pretending that it was realized in a golden age of the past. This splendid legend endured because it lived as a desire in the hearts of the greatest artists. The temple of Mediterranea never was built in the past, nor did Michael the Archangel exist. But today the temple is here [he points to the porch]; and the man is here [he slaps himself on the chest]. I, Arjillax, am the man. I will place in your theatre such images of the newly born as must satisfy even Ecrasia’s appetite for beauty; and I will surround them with ancients more august than any who walk through our woods.

MARTELLUS [as before] Ha!

ARJILLAX [stung] Why do you laugh, you who have come empty-handed, and, it seems, empty-headed?

ECRASIA [rising indignantly] Oh, shame! You dare disparage Martellus, twenty times your master.

ACIS. Be quiet, will you [he seizes her shoulders and thrusts her back into her seat].

MARTELLUS. Let him disparage his fill, Ecrasia. [Sitting up] My poor Arjillax, I too had this dream. I too found one day that my images of loveliness had become vapid, uninteresting, tedious, a waste of time and material. I too lost my desire to model limbs, and retained only my interest in heads and faces. I, too, made busts of ancients; but I had not your courage: I made them in secret, and hid them from you all.

ARJILLAX [jumping down from the altar behind Martellus in his surprise and excitement] You made busts of ancients! Where are they, man? Will you be talked out of your inspiration by Ecrasia and the fools who imagine she speaks with authority? Let us have them all set up beside mine in the theatre. I have opened the way for you; and you see I am none the worse.

MARTELLUS. Impossible. They are all smashed. [He rises, laughing].

ALL. Smashed!

ARJILLAX. Who smashed them?

MARTELLUS. I did. That is why I laughed at you just now. You will smash yours before you have completed a dozen of them. [He goes to the end of the altar and sits down beside the Newly Born].

ARJILLAX. But why?

MARTELLUS. Because you cannot give them life. A live ancient is better than a dead statue. [He takes the Newly Born on his knee: she is flattered and voluptuously responsive]. Anything alive is better than anything that is only pretending to be alive. [To Arjillax] Your disillusion with your works of beauty is only the beginning of your disillusion with images of all sorts. As your hand became more skilful and your chisel cut deeper, you strove to get nearer and nearer to truth and reality, discarding the fleeting fleshly lure, and making images of the mind that fascinates to the end. But how can so noble an inspiration be satisfied with any image, even an image of the truth? In the end the intellectual conscience that tore you away from the fleeting in art to the eternal must tear you away from art altogether, because art is false and life alone is true.

THE NEWLY BORN [flings her arms round his neck and kisses him enthusiastically].

MARTELLUS [rises; carries her to the curved bench on his left; deposits her beside Strephon as if she were his overcoat; and continues without the least change of tone] Shape it as you will, marble remains marble, and the graven image an idol. As I have broken my idols, and cast away my chisel and modelling tools, so will you too break these busts of yours.

ARJILLAX. Never.

MARTELLUS. Wait, my friend. I do not come empty-handed today, as you imagined. On the contrary, I bring with me such a work of art as you have never seen, and an artist who has surpassed both you and me further than we have surpassed all our competitors.

ECRASIA. Impossible. The greatest things in art can never be surpassed.

ARJILLAX. Who is this paragon whom you declare greater than I?

MARTELLUS. I declare him greater than myself, Arjillax.

ARJILLAX [frowning] I understand. Sooner than not drown me, you are willing to clasp me round the waist and jump overboard with me.

ACIS. Oh, stop squabbling. That is the worst of you artists. You are always in little squabbling cliques; and the worst cliques are those which consist of one man. Who is this new fellow you are throwing in one another’s teeth?

ARJILLAX. Ask Martellus: do not ask me. I know nothing of him. [He leaves Martellus, and sits down beside Ecrasia, on her left].

MARTELLUS. You know him quite well. Pygmalion.

ECRASIA [indignantly] Pygmalion! That soulless creature! A scientist!
A laboratory person!

ARJILLAX. Pygmalion produce a work of art! You have lost your artistic senses. The man is utterly incapable of modelling a thumb nail, let alone a human figure.

MARTELLUS. That does not matter: I have done the modelling for him.

ARJILLAX. What on earth do you mean?

MARTELLUS [calling] Pygmalion: come forth.

Pygmalion, a square-fingered youth with his face laid out in horizontal blocks, and a perpetual smile of eager benevolent interest in everything, and expectation of equal interest from everybody else, comes from the temple to the centre of the group, who regard him for the most part with dismay, as dreading that he will bore them. Ecrasia is openly contemptuous.

MARTELLUS. Friends: it is unfortunate that Pygmalion is constitutionally incapable of exhibiting anything without first giving a lecture about it to explain it; but I promise you that if you will be patient he will shew you the two most wonderful works of art in the world, and that they will contain some of my own very best workmanship. Let me add that they will inspire a loathing that will cure you of the lunacy of art for ever. [He sits down next the Newly Born, who pouts and turns a very cold right shoulder to him, a demonstration utterly lost on him].

Pygmalion, with the smile of a simpleton, and the eager confidence of a fanatical scientist, climbs awkwardly on to the altar. They prepare for the worst.

PYGMALION. My friends: I will omit the algebra —

ACIS. Thank God!

PYGMALION [continuing] — because Martellus has made me promise to do so. To come to the point, I have succeeded in making artificial human beings. Real live ones, I mean.

INCREDULOUS VOICES. Oh, come! Tell us another. Really, Pyg! Get out. You havnt. What a lie!

PYGMALION. I tell you I have. I will shew them to you. It has been done before. One of the very oldest documents we possess mentions a tradition of a biologist who extracted certain unspecified minerals from the earth and, as it quaintly expresses it, ‘breathed into their nostrils the breath of life.’ This is the only tradition from the primitive ages which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic weights; but they are utterly unscientific, because they overlook the element of life which makes all the difference between a mere mixture of salts and gases and a living organism. These mixtures were made over and over again in the crude laboratories of the Silly-Clever Ages; but nothing came of them until the ingredient which the old chronicler called the breath of life was added by this very remarkable early experimenter. In my view he was the founder of biological science.

ARJILLAX. Is that all we know about him? It doesnt amount to very much, does it?

PYGMALION. There are some fragments of pictures and documents which represent him as walking in a garden and advising people to cultivate their gardens. His name has come down to us in several forms. One of them is Jove. Another is Voltaire.

ECRASIA. You are boring us to distraction with your Voltaire. What about your human beings?

ARJILLAX. Aye: come to them.

PYGMALION. I assure you that these details are intensely interesting. [Cries of No! They are not! Come to the human beings! Conspuez Voltaire! Cut it short, Pyg! interrupt him from all sides]. You will see their bearing presently. I promise you I will not detain you long. We know, we children of science, that the universe is full of forces and powers and energies of one kind and another. The sap rising in a tree, the stone holding together in a definite crystalline structure, the thought of a philosopher holding his brain in form and operation with an inconceivably powerful grip, the urge of evolution: all these forces can be used by us. For instance, I use the force of gravitation when I put a stone on my tunic to prevent it being blown away when I am bathing. By substituting appropriate machines for the stone we have made not only gravitation our slave, but also electricity and magnetism, atomic attraction, repulsion, polarization, and so forth. But hitherto the vital force has eluded us; so it has had to create machinery for itself. It has created and developed bony structures of the requisite strength, and clothed them with cellular tissue of such amazing sensitiveness that the organs it forms will adapt their action to all the normal variations in the air they breathe, the food they digest, and the circumstances about which they have to think. Yet, as these live bodies, as we call them, are only machines after all, it must be possible to construct them mechanically.

ARJILLAX. Everything is possible. Have you done it? that is the question.

PYGMALION. Yes. But that is a mere fact. What is interesting is the explanation of the fact. Forgive my saying so; but it is such a pity that you artists have no intellect.

ECRASIA [sententiously] I do not admit that. The artist divines by inspiration all the truths that the so-called scientist grubs up in his laboratory slowly and stupidly long afterwards.

ARJILLAX [to Ecrasia, quarrelsomely] What do you know about it? You are not an artist.

ACIS. Shut your heads, both of you. Let us have the artificial men. Trot them out, Pygmalion.

PYGMALION. It is a man and a woman. But I really must explain first.

ALL [groaning]!!!

PYGMALION. Yes: I —

ACIS. We want results, not explanations.

PYGMALION [hurt] I see I am boring you. Not one of you takes the least interest in science. Goodbye. [He descends from the altar and makes for the temple].

SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS [rising and rushing to him] No, no. Dont go. Dont be offended. We want to see the artificial pair. We will listen. We are tremendously interested. Tell us all about it.

PYGMALION [relenting] I shall not detain you two minutes.

ALL. Half an hour if you like. Please go on, Pygmalion. [They rush him back to the altar, and hoist him on to it]. Up you go.

They return to their former places.

PYGMALION. As I told you, lots of attempts were made to produce protoplasm in the laboratory. Why were these synthetic plasms, as they called them, no use?

ECRASIA. We are waiting for you to tell us.

THE NEWLY BORN [modelling herself on Ecrasia, and trying to outdo her intellectually] Clearly because they were dead.

PYGMALION. Not bad for a baby, my pet. But dead and alive are very loose terms. You are not half as much alive as you will be in another month or so. What was wrong with the synthetic protoplasm was that it could not fix and conduct the Life Force. It was like a wooden magnet or a lightning conductor made of silk: it would not take the current.

ACIS. Nobody but a fool would make a wooden magnet, and expect it to attract anything.

PYGMALION. He might if he were so ignorant as not to be able to distinguish between wood and soft iron. In those days they were very ignorant of the differences between things, because their methods of analysis were crude. They mixed up messes that were so like protoplasm that they could not tell the difference. But the difference was there, though their analysis was too superficial and incomplete to detect it. You must remember that these poor devils were very little better than our idiots: we should never dream of letting one of them survive the day of its birth. Why, the Newly Born there already knows by instinct many things that their greatest physicists could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study. Her simple direct sense of space-time and quantity unconsciously solves problems which cost their most famous mathematicians years of prolonged and laborious calculations requiring such intense mental application that they frequently forgot to breathe when engaged in them, and almost suffocated themselves in consequence.

ECRASIA. Leave these obscure prehistoric abortions; and come back to your synthetic man and woman.

PYGMALION. When I undertook the task of making synthetic men, I did not waste my time on protoplasm. It was evident to me that if it were possible to make protoplasm in the laboratory, it must be equally possible to begin higher up and make fully evolved muscular and nervous tissues, bone, and so forth. Why make the seed when the making of the flower would be no greater miracle? I tried thousands of combinations before I succeeded in producing anything that would fix high-potential Life Force.

ARJILLAX. High what?

PYGMALION. High-po-tential. The Life Force is not so simple as you think. A high-potential current of it will turn a bit of dead tissue into a philosopher’s brain. A low-potential current will reduce the same bit of tissue to a mass of corruption. Will you believe me when I tell you that, even in man himself, the Life Force used to slip suddenly down from its human level to that of a fungus, so that men found their flesh no longer growing as flesh, but proliferating horribly in a lower form which was called cancer, until the lower form of life killed the higher, and both perished together miserably?

MARTELLUS. Keep off the primitive tribes, Pygmalion. They interest you; but they bore these young things.

PYGMALION. I am only trying to make you understand. There was the Life Force raging all round me: there was I, trying to make organs that would capture it as a battery captures electricity, and tissues that would conduct it and operate it. It was easy enough to make eyes more perfect than our own, and ears with a larger range of sound; but they could neither see nor hear, because they were not susceptible to the Life Force. But it was far worse when I discovered how to make them susceptible; for the first thing that happened was that they ceased to be eyes and ears and turned into heaps of maggots.

ECRASIA. Disgusting! Please stop.

ACIS. If you don’t want to hear, go away. You go ahead, Pyg.

PYGMALION. I went ahead. You see, the lower potentials of the Life Force could make maggots, but not human eyes or ears. I improved the tissue until it was susceptible to a higher potential.

ARJILLAX [intensely interested] Yes; and then?

PYGMALION. Then the eyes and ears turned into cancers.

ECRASIA. Oh, hideous!

PYGMALION. Not at all. That was a great advance. It encouraged me so much that I put aside the eyes and ears, and made a brain. It wouldn’t take the Life Force at all until I had altered its constitution a dozen times; but when it did, it took a much higher potential, and did not dissolve; and neither did the eyes and ears when I connected them up with the brain. I was able to make a sort of monster: a thing without arms or legs; and it really and truly lived for half-an-hour.

THE NEWLY BORN. Half-an-hour! What good was that? Why did it die?

PYGMALION. Its blood went wrong. But I got that right; and then I went ahead with a complete human body: arms and legs and all. He was my first man.

ARJILLAX. Who modelled him?

PYGMALION. I did.

MARTELLUS. Do you mean to say you tried your own hand before you sent for me?

PYGMALION. Bless you, yes, several times. My first man was the ghastliest creature: a more dreadful mixture of horror and absurdity than you who have not seen him can conceive.

ARJILLAX. If you modelled him, he must indeed have been a spectacle.

PYGMALION. Oh, it was not his shape. You see I did not invent that. I took actual measurements and moulds from my own body. Sculptors do that sometimes, you know; though they pretend they don’t.

MARTELLUS. Hm!

ARJILLAX. Hah!

PYGMALION. He was all right to look at, at first, or nearly so. But he behaved in the most appalling manner; and the subsequent developments were so disgusting that I really cannot describe them to you. He seized all sorts of things and swallowed them. He drank every fluid in the laboratory. I tried to explain to him that he must take nothing that he could not digest and assimilate completely; but of course he could not understand me. He assimilated a little of what he swallowed; but the process left horrible residues which he had no means of getting rid of. His blood turned to poison; and he perished in torments, howling. I then perceived that I had produced a prehistoric man; for there are certain traces in our own bodies of arrangements which enabled the earlier forms of mankind to renew their bodies by swallowing flesh and grains and vegetables and all sorts of unnatural and hideous foods, and getting rid of what they could not digest.

ECRASIA. But what a pity he died! What a glimpse of the past we have lost! He could have told us stories of the Golden Age.

PYGMALION. Not he. He was a most dangerous beast. He was afraid of me, and actually tried to kill me by snatching up things and striking at me with them. I had to give him two or three pretty severe shocks before I convinced him that he was at my mercy.

THE NEWLY BORN. Why did you not make a woman instead of a man? She would have known how to behave herself.

MARTELLUS. Why did you not make a man and a woman? Their children would have been interesting.

PYGMALION. I intended to make a woman; but after my experience with the man it was out of the question.

ECRASIA. Pray why?

PYGMALION. Well, it is difficult to explain if you have not studied prehistoric methods of reproduction. You see the only sort of men and women I could make were men and women just like us as far as their bodies were concerned. That was how I killed the poor beast of a man. I hadnt provided for his horrible prehistoric methods of feeding himself. Suppose the woman had reproduced in some prehistoric way instead of being oviparous as we are? She couldn’t have done it with a modern female body. Besides, the experiment might have been painful.

ECRASIA. Then you have nothing to shew us at all?

PYGMALION. Oh yes I have. I am not so easily beaten as that. I set to work again for months to find out how to make a digestive system that would deal with waste products and a reproductive system capable of internal nourishment and incubation.

ECRASIA. Why did you not find out how to make them like us?

STREPHON [crying out in his grief for the first time] Why did you not make a woman whom you could love? That was the secret you needed.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes. How true! How great of you, darling Strephon! [She kisses him impulsively].

STREPHON [passionately] Let me alone.

MARTELLUS. Control your reflexes, child.

THE NEWLY BORN. My what!

MARTELLUS. Your reflexes. The things you do without thinking. Pygmalion is going to shew you a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and nothing else. Take warning by them.

THE NEWLY BORN. But wont they be alive, like us?

PYGMALION. That is a very difficult question to answer, my dear. I confess I thought at first I had created living creatures; but Martellus declares they are only automata. But then Martellus is a mystic: I am a man of science. He draws a line between an automaton and a living organism. I cannot draw that line to my own satisfaction.

MARTELLUS. Your artificial men have no self-control. They only respond to stimuli from without.

PYGMALION. But they are conscious. I have taught them to talk and read; and now they tell lies. That is so very lifelike.

MARTELLUS. Not at all. If they were alive they would tell the truth. You can provoke them to tell any silly lie; and you can foresee exactly the sort of lie they will tell. Give them a clip below the knee, and they will jerk their foot forward. Give them a clip in their appetites or vanities or any of their lusts and greeds, and they will boast and lie, and affirm and deny, and hate and love without the slightest regard to the facts that are staring them in the face, or to their own obvious limitations. That proves that they are automata.

PYGMALION [unconvinced] I know, dear old chap; but there really is some evidence that we are descended from creatures quite as limited and absurd as these. After all, the baby there is three-quarters an automaton. Look at the way she has been going on!

THE NEWLY BORN [indignantly] What do you mean? How have I been going on?

ECRASIA. If they have no regard for truth, they can have no real vitality.

PYGMALION. Truth is sometimes so artificial: so relative, as we say in the scientific world, that it is very hard to feel quite sure that what is false and even ridiculous to us may not be true to them.

ECRASIA. I ask you again, why did you not make them like us? Would any true artist be content with less than the best?

PYGMALION. I couldnt. I tried. I failed. I am convinced that what I am about to shew you is the very highest living organism that can be produced in the laboratory. The best tissues we can manufacture will not take as high potentials as the natural product: that is where Nature beats us. You dont seem to understand, any of you, what an enormous triumph it was to produce consciousness at all.

ACIS. Cut the cackle; and come to the synthetic couple.

SEVERAL YOUTHS AND MAIDENS. Yes, yes. No more talking. Let us have them. Dry up, Pyg; and fetch them along. Come on: out with them! The synthetic couple.

PYGMALION [waving his hands to appease them] Very well, very well. Will you please whistle for them? They respond to the stimulus of a whistle.

All who can, whistle like streetboys.

ECRASIA [makes a wry face and puts her fingers in her ears]!

PYGMALION. Sh-sh-sh! Thats enough: thats enough: thats enough. [Silence]. Now let us have some music. A dance tune. Not too fast.

The flutists play a quiet dance.

MARTELLUS. Prepare yourselves for something ghastly.

Two figures, a man and woman of noble appearance, beautifully modelled and splendidly attired, emerge hand in hand from the temple. Seeing that all eyes are fixed on them, they halt on the steps, smiling with gratified vanity. The woman is on the man’s left.

PYGMALION [rubbing his hands with the purring satisfaction of a creator] This way, please.

The Figures advance condescendingly and pose themselves centrally between the curved seats.

PYGMALION. Now if you will be so good as to oblige us with a little something. You dance so beautifully, you know. [He sits down next Martellus, and whispers to him] It is extraordinary how sensitive they are to the stimulus of flattery.

The Figures, with a gracious air, dance pompously, but very passably. At the close they bow to one another.

ON ALL HANDS [clapping] Bravo! Thank you. Wonderful! Splendid.
Perfect.

The Figures acknowledge the applause in an obvious condition of swelled head.

THE NEWLY BORN. Can they make love?

PYGMALION. Yes: they can respond to every stimulus. They have all the reflexes. Put your arm round the man’s neck, and he will put his arm round your body. He cannot help it.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [frowning] Round mine, you mean.

PYGMALION. Yours, too, of course, if the stimulus comes from you.

ECRASIA. Cannot he do anything original?

PYGMALION. No. But then, you know, I do not admit that any of us can do anything really original, though Martellus thinks we can.

ACIS. Can he answer a question?

PYGMALION. Oh yes. A question is a stimulus, you know. Ask him one.

ACIS [to the Male Figure] What do you think of what you see around you? Of us, for instance, and our ways and doings?

THE MALE FIGURE. I have not seen the newspaper today.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. How can you expect my husband to know what to think of you if you give him his breakfast without his paper?

MARTELLUS. You see. He is a mere automaton.

THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t think I should like him to put his arm round my neck. I don’t like them. [The Male Figure looks offended, and the Female jealous]. Oh, I thought they couldn’t understand. Have they feelings?

PYGMALION. Of course they have. I tell you they have all the reflexes.

THE NEWLY BORN. But feelings are not reflexes.

PYGMALION. They are sensations. When the rays of light enter their eyes and make a picture on their retinas, their brains become conscious of the picture and they act accordingly. When the waves of sound started by your speaking enter their ears and record a disparaging remark on their keyboards, their brains become conscious of the disparagement and resent it accordingly. If you did not disparage them they would not resent it. They are merely responding to a stimulus.

THE MALE FIGURE. We are part of a cosmic system. Free will is an illusion. We are the children of Cause and Effect. We are the Unalterable, the Irresistible, the Irresponsible, the Inevitable.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

There is a general stir of curiosity at this.

ACIS. What the dickens does he mean?

THE MALE FIGURE. Silence, base accident of Nature. This [taking the hand of the Female Figure and introducing her] is Cleopatra-Semiramis, consort of the king of kings, and therefore queen of queens. Ye are things hatched from eggs by the brainless sun and the blind fire; but the king of kings and queen of queens are not accidents of the egg: they are thought-out and hand-made to receive the sacred Life Force. There is one person of the king and one of the queen; but the Life Force of the king and queen is all one: the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. Such as the king is so is the queen, the king thought-out and hand-made, the queen thought-out and hand-made. The actions of the king are caused, and therefore determined, from the beginning of the world to the end; and the actions of the queen are likewise. The king logical and predetermined and inevitable, and the queen logical and predetermined and inevitable. And yet they are not two logical and predetermined and inevitable, but one logical and predetermined and inevitable. Therefore confound not the persons, nor divide the substance: but worship us twain as one throne, two in one and one in two, lest by error ye fall into irretrievable damnation.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. And if any say unto you ‘Which one?’ remember that though there is one person of the king and one of the queen, yet these two persons are not alike, but are woman and man, and that as woman was created after man, the skill and practice gained in making him were added to her, wherefore she is to be exalted above him in all personal respects, and —

THE MALE FIGURE. Peace, woman; for this is a damnable heresy. Both Man and Woman are what they are and must do what they must according to the eternal laws of Cause and Effect. Look to your words; for if they enter my ear and jar too repugnantly on my sensorium, who knows that the inevitable response to that stimulus may not be a message to my muscles to snatch up some heavy object and break you in pieces.

The Female Figure picks up a stone and is about to throw it at her consort.

ARJILLAX [springing up and shouting to Pygmalion, who is fondly watching the Male Figure] Look out, Pygmalion! Look at the woman!

Pygmalion, seeing what is happening, hurls himself on the Female Figure and wrenches the stone out of her hand. All spring up in consternation.

ARJILLAX. She meant to kill him.

STREPHON. This is horrible.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [wrestling with Pygmalion] Let me go. Let me go, will you [she bites his hand].

PYGMALION [releasing her and staggering] Oh!

A general shriek of horror echoes his exclamation. He turns deadly pale, and supports himself against the end of the curved seat.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [to her consort] You would stand there and let me be treated like this, you unmanly coward.

Pygmalion falls dead.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! Whats the matter? Why did he fall! What has happened to him?

They look on anxiously as Martellus kneels down and examines the body of Pygmalion.

MARTELLUS. She has bitten a piece out of his hand nearly as large as a finger nail: enough to kill ten men. There is no pulse, no breath.

ECRASIA. But his thumb is clinched.

MARTELLUS. No: it has just straightened out. See! He has gone. Poor
Pygmalion!

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh! [She weeps].

STREPHON. Hush, dear: thats childish.

THE NEWLY BORN [subsiding with a sniff]!!

MARTELLUS [rising] Dead in his third year. What a loss to Science!

ARJILLAX. Who cares about Science? Serve him right for making that pair of horrors!

THE MALE FIGURE [glaring] Ha!

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Keep a civil tongue in your head, you.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do not be so unkind, Arjillax. You will make water come out of my eyes again.

MARTELLUS [contemplating the Figures] Just look at these two devils. I modelled them out of the stuff Pygmalion made for them. They are masterpieces of art. And see what they have done! Does that convince you of the value of art, Arjillax!

STREPHON. They look dangerous. Keep away from them.

ECRASIA. No need to tell us that, Strephon. Pf! They poison the air.

THE MALE FIGURE. Beware, woman. The wrath of Ozymandias strikes like the lightning.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. You just say that again if you dare, you filthy creature.

ACIS. What are you going to do with them, Martellus? You are responsible for them, now that Pygmalion has gone.

MARTELLUS. If they were marble it would be simple enough: I could smash them. As it is, how am I to kill them without making a horrible mess?

THE MALE FIGURE [posing heroically] Ha! [He declaims]

Come one: come all: this rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [fondly] My man! My hero husband! I am proud of you.
I love you.

MARTELLUS. We must send out a message for an ancient.

ACIS. Need we bother an ancient about such a trifle? It will take less than half a second to reduce our poor Pygmalion to a pinch of dust. Why not calcine the two along with him?

MARTELLUS. No: the two automata are trifles; but the use of our powers of destruction is never a trifle. I had rather have the case judged.

The He-Ancient emerges from the grove. The Figures are panic-stricken.

THE HE-ANCIENT [mildly] Am I wanted? I feel called. [Seeing the body of Pygmalion, and immediately taking a sterner tone] What! A child lost! A life wasted! How has this happened?

THE FEMALE FIGURE [frantically] I didn’t do it. It was not me. May
I be struck dead if I touched him! It was he [pointing to the Male
Figure].

ALL [amazed at the lie] Oh!

THE MALE FIGURE. Liar. You bit him. Everyone here saw you do it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. [Going between the Figures] Who made these two loathsome dolls?

THE MALE FIGURE [trying to assert himself with his knees knocking] My name is Ozymandias, king of —

THE HE-ANCIENT [with a contemptuous gesture] Pooh!

THE MALE FIGURE [falling on his knees] Oh dont, sir. Dont. She did it, sir: indeed she did.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [howling lamentably] Boohoo! oo! ooh!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence, I say.

He knocks the Male Automaton upright by a very light flip under the chin. The Female Automaton hardly dares to sob. The immortals contemplate them with shame and loathing. The She-Ancient comes from the trees opposite the temple.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Somebody wants me. What is the matter? [She comes to the left hand of the Female Figure, not seeing the body of Pygmalion]. Pf! [Severely] You have been making dolls. You must not: they are not only disgusting: they are dangerous.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [snivelling piteously] I’m not a doll, mam. I’m only poor Cleopatra-Semiramis, queen of queens. [Covering her face with her hands] Oh, don’t look at me like that, mam. I meant no harm. He hurt me: indeed he did.

THE HE-ANCIENT. The creature has killed that poor youth.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [seeing the body of Pygmalion] What! This clever child, who promised so well!

THE FEMALE FIGURE. He made me. I had as much right to kill him as he had to make me. And how was I to know that a little thing like that would kill him? I shouldn’t die if he cut off my arm or leg.

ECRASIA. What nonsense!

MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Did this dead boy make these two things?

MARTELLUS. He made them in his laboratory. I moulded their limbs. I am sorry. I was thoughtless: I did not foresee that they would kill and pretend to be persons they were not, and declare things that were false, and wish evil. I thought they would be merely mechanical fools.

THE MALE FIGURE. Do you blame us for our human nature?

THE FEMALE FIGURE. We are flesh and blood and not angels.

THE MALE FIGURE. Have you no hearts?

ARJILLAX. They are mad as well as mischievous. May we not destroy them?

STREPHON. We abhor them.

THE NEWLY BORN. We loathe them.

ECRASIA. They are noisome.

ACIS. I don’t want to be hard on the poor devils; but they are making me feel uneasy in my inside. I never had such a sensation before.

MARTELLUS. I took a lot of trouble with them. But as far as I am concerned, destroy them by all means. I loathed them from the beginning.

ALL. Yes, yes: we all loathe them. Let us calcine them.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Oh, don’t be so cruel. I’m not fit to die. I will never bite anyone again. I will tell the truth. I will do good. Is it my fault if I was not made properly? Kill him; but spare me.

THE MALE FIGURE. No! I have done no harm: she has. Kill her if you like: you have no right to kill me.

THE NEWLY BORN. Do you hear that? They want to have one another killed.

ARJILLAX. Monstrous! Kill them both.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Silence. These things are mere automata: they cannot help shrinking from death at any cost. You see that they have no self-control, and are merely shuddering through a series of reflexes. Let us see whether we cannot put a little more life into them. [He takes the Male Figure by the hand, and places his disengaged hand on its head]. Now listen. One of you two is to be destroyed. Which of you shall it be?

THE MALE FIGURE [after a slight convulsion during which his eyes are fixed on the He-Ancient] Spare her; and kill me.

STREPHON. Thats better.

THE NEWLY BORN. Much better.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [handling the Female Automaton in the same manner]
Which of you shall we kill?

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Kill us both. How could either of us live without the other?

ECRASIA. The woman is more sensible than the man.

The Ancients release the Automata.

THE MALE FIGURE [sinking to the ground] I am discouraged. Life is too heavy a burden.

THE FEMALE FIGURE [collapsing] I am dying. I am glad. I am afraid to live.

THE NEWLY BORN. I think it would be nice to give the poor things a little music.

ARJILLAX. Why?

THE NEWLY BORN. I don’t know. But it would.

The Musicians play.

THE FEMALE FIGURE. Ozymandias: do you hear that? [She rises on her knees and looks raptly into space] Queen of queens! [She dies].

THE MALE FIGURE [crawling feebly towards her until he reaches her hand] I knew I was really a king of kings. [To the others] Illusions, farewell: we are going to our thrones. [He dies].

The music stops. There is dead silence for a moment.

THE NEWLY BORN. That was funny.

STREPHON. It was. Even the Ancients are smiling.

THE NEWLY BORN. Just a little.

THE SHE-ANCIENT [quickly recovering her grave and peremptory manner] Take these two abominations away to Pygmalion’s laboratory, and destroy them with the rest of the laboratory refuse. [Some of them move to obey]. Take care: do not touch their flesh: it is noxious: lift them by their robes. Carry Pygmalion into the temple; and dispose of his remains in the usual way.

The three bodies are carried out as directed, Pygmalion into the temple by his bare arms and legs, and the two Figures through the grove by their clothes. Martellus superintends the removal of the Figures, Acis that of Pygmalion. Ecrasia, Arjillax, Strephon, and the Newly Born sit down as before, but on contrary benches; so that Strephon and the Newly Born now face the grove, and Ecrasia and Arjillax the temple. The Ancients remain standing at the altar.

ECRASIA [as she sits down] Oh for a breeze from the hills!

STREPHON. Or the wind from the sea at the turn of the tide!

THE NEWLY BORN. I want some clean air.

THE HE-ANCIENT. The air will be clean in a moment. This doll flesh that children make decomposes quickly at best; but when it is shaken by such passions as the creatures are capable of, it breaks up at once and becomes horribly tainted.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Let it be a lesson to you all to be content with lifeless toys, and not attempt to make living ones. What would you think of us ancients if we made toys of you children?

THE NEWLY BORN [coaxingly] Why do you not make toys of us? Then you would play with us; and that would be very nice.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It would not amuse us. When you play with one another you play with your bodies, and that makes you supple and strong; but if we played with you we should play with your minds, and perhaps deform them.

STREPHON. You are a ghastly lot, you ancients. I shall kill myself when
I am four years old. What do you live for?

THE HE-ANCIENT. You will find out when you grow up. You will not kill yourself.

STREPHON. If you make me believe that, I shall kill myself now.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I want you. I love you.

STREPHON. I love someone else. And she has gone old, old. Lost to me for ever.

THE HE-ANCIENT. How old?

STREPHON. You saw her when you barged into us as we were dancing. She is four.

THE NEWLY BORN. How I should have hated her twenty minutes ago! But I have grown out of that now.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Good. That hatred is called jealousy, the worst of our childish complaints.

Martellus, dusting his hands and puffing, returns from the grove.

MARTELLUS. Ouf! [He sits down next the Newly Born] That job’s finished.

ARJILLAX. Ancients: I should like to make a few studies of you. Not portraits, of course: I shall idealize you a little. I have come to the conclusion that you ancients are the most interesting subjects after all.

MARTELLUS. What! Have those two horrors, whose ashes I have just deposited with peculiar pleasure in poor Pygmalion’s dustbin, not cured you of this silly image-making!

ARJILLAX. Why did you model them as young things, you fool? If Pygmalion had come to me, I should have made ancients of them for him. Not that I should have modelled them any better. I have always said that no one can beat you at your best as far as handwork is concerned. But this job required brains. That is where I should have come in.

MARTELLUS. Well, my brainy boy, you are welcome to try your hand. There are two of Pygmalion’s pupils at the laboratory who helped him to manufacture the bones and tissues and all the rest of it. They can turn out a couple of new automatons; and you can model them as ancients if this venerable pair will sit for you.

ECRASIA [decisively] No. No more automata. They are too disgusting.

ACIS [returning from the temple] Well, thats done. Poor old Pyg!

ECRASIA. Only fancy, Acis! Arjillax wants to make more of those abominable things, and to destroy even their artistic character by making ancients of them.

THE NEWLY BORN. You wont sit for them, will you? Please dont.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Children, listen.

ACIS [striding down the steps to the bench and seating himself next
Ecrasia] What! Even the Ancient wants to make a speech! Give it mouth,
O Sage.

STREPHON. For heaven’s sake don’t tell us that the earth was once inhabited by Ozymandiases and Cleopatras. Life is hard enough for us as it is.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful. What I wanted to tell you is that ever since men existed, children have played with dolls.

ECRASIA. You keep using that word. What are dolls, pray?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. What you call works of art. Images. We call them dolls.

ARJILLAX. Just so. You have no sense of art; and you instinctively insult it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Children have been known to make dolls out of rags, and to caress them with the deepest fondness.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Eight centuries ago, when I was a child, I made a rag doll. The rag doll is the dearest of all.

THE NEWLY BORN [eagerly interested] Oh! Have you got it still?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. I kept it a full week.

ECRASIA. Even in your childhood, then, you did not understand high art, and adored your own amateur crudities.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. How old are you?

ECRASIA. Eight months.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. When you have lived as long as I have —

ECRASIA [interrupting rudely] I shall worship rag dolls, perhaps.
Thank heaven I am still in my prime.

THE HE-ANCIENT. You are still capable of thanking, though you do not know what you thank. You are a thanking little animal, a blaming little animal, a —

ACIS. A gushing little animal.

ARJILLAX. And, as she thinks, an artistic little animal.

ECRASIA [nettled] I am an animated being with a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. If your Automata had been properly animated, Martellus, they would have been more successful.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is where you are wrong, my child. If those two loathsome things had been rag dolls, they would have been amusing and lovable. The Newly Born here would have played with them; and you would all have laughed and played with them too until you had torn them to pieces; and then you would have laughed more than ever.

THE NEWLY BORN. Of course we should. Isnt that funny?

THE HE-ANCIENT. When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.

STREPHON. Yes; and take all the fun out of it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Do not be so embittered because your sweetheart has outgrown her love for you. The Newly Born will make amends.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh yes: I will be more than she could ever have been.

STREPHON. Psha! Jealous!

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh no. I have grown out of that. I love her now because she loved you, and because you love her.

THE HE-ANCIENT. That is the next stage. You are getting on very nicely, my child.

MARTELLUS. Come! what is the truth that was hidden in the rag doll?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Well, consider why you are not content with the rag doll, and must have something more closely resembling a real living creature. As you grow up you make images and paint pictures. Those of you who cannot do that make stories about imaginary dolls. Or you dress yourselves up as dolls and act plays about them.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. And, to deceive yourself the more completely, you take them so very very seriously that Ecrasia here declares that the making of dolls is the holiest work of creation, and the words you put into the mouths of dolls the sacredest of scriptures and the noblest of utterances.

ECRASIA. Tush!

ARJILLAX. Tosh!

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yet the more beautiful they become the further they retreat from you. You cannot caress them as you caress the rag doll. You cannot cry for them when they are broken or lost, or when you pretend they have been unkind to you, as you could when you played with rag dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. At last, like Pygmalion, you demand from your dolls the final perfection of resemblance to life. They must move and speak.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must love and hate.

THE HE-ANCIENT. They must think that they think.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. They must have soft flesh and warm, blood.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And then, when you have achieved this as Pygmalion did; when the marble masterpiece is dethroned by the automaton and the homo by the homunculus; when the body and the brain, the reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, as Ecrasia says, stand before you unmasked as mere machinery, and your impulses are shewn to be nothing but reflexes, you are filled with horror and loathing, and would give worlds to be young enough to play with your rag doll again, since every step away from it has been a step away from love and happiness. Is it not true?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Martellus: you who have travelled the whole path.

MARTELLUS. It is true. With fierce joy I turned a temperature of a million degrees on those two things I had modelled, and saw them vanish in an instant into inoffensive dust.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Speak, Arjillax: you who have advanced from imitating the lightly living child to the intensely living ancient. Is it true, so far?

ARJILLAX. It is partly true: I cannot pretend to be satisfied now with modelling pretty children.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And you, Ecrasia: you cling to your highly artistic dolls as the noblest projections of the Life Force, do you not?

ECRASIA. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

THE NEWLY BORN [anticipating the She-Ancient, who is evidently going to challenge her] Now you are coming to me, because I am the latest arrival. But I don’t understand your art and your dolls at all. I want to caress my darling Strephon, not to play with dolls.

ACIS. I am in my fourth year; and I have got on very well without your dolls. I had rather walk up a mountain and down again than look at all the statues Martellus and Arjillax ever made. You prefer a statue to an automaton, and a rag doll to a statue. So do I; but I prefer a man to a rag doll. Give me friends, not dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet I have seen you walking over the mountains alone.
Have you not found your best friend in yourself?

ACIS. What are you driving at, old one? What does all this lead to?

THE HE-ANCIENT. It leads, young man, to the truth that you can create nothing but yourself.

ACIS [musing] I can create nothing but myself. Ecrasia: you are clever. Do you understand it? I don’t.

ECRASIA. It is as easy to understand as any other ignorant error. What artist is as great as his own works? He can create masterpieces; but he cannot improve the shape of his own nose.

ACIS. There! What have you to say to that, old one?

THE HE-ANCIENT. He can alter the shape of his own soul. He could alter the shape of his nose if the difference between a turned-up nose and a turned-down one were worth the effort. One does not face the throes of creation for trifles.

ACIS. What have you to say to that, Ecrasia?

ECRASIA. I say that if the ancients had thoroughly grasped the theory of fine art they would understand that the difference between a beautiful nose and an ugly one is of supreme importance: that it is indeed the only thing that matters.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is, they would understand something they could not believe, and that you do not believe.

ACIS. Just so, mam. Art is not honest: that is why I never could stand much of it. It is all make-believe. Ecrasia never really says things: she only rattles her teeth in her mouth.

ECRASIA. Acis: you are rude.

ACIS. You mean that I wont play the game of make-believe. Well, I don’t ask you to play it with me; so why should you expect me to play it with you?

ECRASIA. You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes, child: art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet we too have our toys and our dolls. That is the trouble of the ancients.

ARJILLAX. What! The ancients have their troubles! It is the first time I ever heard one of them confess it.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Look at us. Look at me. This is my body, my blood, my brain; but it is not me. I am the eternal life, the perpetual resurrection; but [striking his body] this structure, this organism, this makeshift, can be made by a boy in a laboratory, and is held back from dissolution only by my use of it. Worse still, it can be broken by a slip of the foot, drowned by a cramp in the stomach, destroyed by a flash from the clouds. Sooner or later, its destruction is certain.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes: this body is the last doll to be discarded. When I was a child, Ecrasia, I, too, was an artist, like your sculptor friends there, striving to create perfection in things outside myself. I made statues: I painted pictures: I tried to worship them.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I had no such skill; but I, like Acis, sought perfection in friends, in lovers, in nature, in things outside myself. Alas! I could not create if. I could only imagine it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. I, like Arjillax, found out that my statues of bodily beauty were no longer even beautiful to me; and I pressed on and made statues and pictures of men and women of genius, like those in the old fable of Michael Angelo. Like Martellus, I smashed them when I saw that there was no life in them: that they were so dead that they would not even dissolve as a dead body does.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And I, like Acis, ceased to walk over the mountains with my friends, and walked alone; for I found that I had creative power over myself but none over my friends. And then I ceased to walk on the mountains; for I saw that the mountains were dead.

ACIS [protesting vehemently] No. I grant you about the friends perhaps; but the mountains are still the mountains, each with its name, its individuality, its upstanding strength and majesty, its beauty —

ECRASIA. What! Acis among the rhapsodists!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Mere metaphor, my poor boy: the mountains are corpses.

ALL THE YOUNG [repelled] Oh!

THE HE-ANCIENT. Yes. In the hardpressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast out to the surface it dies like deep-sea fish: what you see is only its cold dead body. We have tapped that central heat as prehistoric man tapped water springs; but nothing has come up alive from those flaming depths: your landscapes, your mountains, are only the world’s cast skins and decaying teeth on which we live like microbes.

ECRASIA. Ancient: you blaspheme against Nature and against Man.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Child, child, how much enthusiasm will you have for man when you have endured eight centuries of him, as I have, and seen him perish by an empty mischance that is yet a certainty? When I discarded my dolls as he discarded his friends and his mountains, it was to myself I turned as to the final reality. Here, and here alone, I could shape and create. When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three heads.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I also came to understand such miracles. For fifty years
I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. So did I; and for five more years I made myself into all sorts of fantastic monsters. I walked upon a dozen legs: I worked with twenty hands and a hundred fingers: I looked to the four quarters of the compass with eight eyes out of four heads. Children fled in amazement from me until I had to hide myself from them; and the ancients, who had forgotten how to laugh, smiled grimly when they passed.

THE HE-ANCIENT. We have all committed these follies. You will all commit them.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, do grow a lot of arms and legs and heads for us. It would be so funny.

THE HE-ANCIENT. My child: I am just as well as I am. I would not lift my finger now to have a thousand heads.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. But what would I not give to have no head at all?

ALL THE YOUNG. Whats that? No head at all? Why? How?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Can you not understand?

ALL THE YOUNG [shaking their heads] No.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. One day, when I was tired of learning to walk forward with some of my feet and backwards with others and sideways with the rest all at once, I sat on a rock with my four chins resting on four of my palms, and four or my elbows resting on four of my knees. And suddenly it came into my mind that this monstrous machinery of heads and limbs was no more me than my statues had been me, and that it was only an automaton that I had enslaved.

MARTELLUS. Enslaved? What does that mean?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. A thing that must do what you command it is a slave; and its commander is its master. These are words you will learn when your turn comes.

THE HE-ANCIENT. You will also learn that when the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of a slave.

THE HE-ANCIENT. When we discovered that, we shed our superfluous heads and legs and arms until we had our old shapes again, and no longer startled the children.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. But still I am the slave of this slave, my body. How am
I to be delivered from it?

THE HE-ANCIENT. That, children, is the trouble of the ancients. For whilst we are tied to this tyrannous body we are subject to its death, and our destiny is not achieved.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is your destiny?

THE HE-ANCIENT. To be immortal.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The day will come when there will be no people, only thought.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And that will be life eternal.

ECRASIA. I trust I shall meet my fatal accident before that day dawns.

ARJILLAX. For once, Ecrasia, I agree with you. A world in which there were nothing plastic would be an utterly miserable one.

ECRASIA. No limbs, no contours, no exquisite lines and elegant shapes, no worship of beautiful bodies, no poetic embraces in which cultivated lovers pretend that their caressing hands are wandering over celestial hills and enchanted valleys, no —

ACIS [interrupting her disgustedly] What an inhuman mind you have,
Ecrasia!

ECRASIA. Inhuman!

ACIS. Yes: inhuman. Why don’t you fall in love with someone?

ECRASIA. I! I have been in love all my life. I burned with it even in the egg.

ACIS. Not a bit of it. You and Arjillax are just as hard as two stones.

ECRASIA. You did not always think so, Acis.

ACIS. Oh, I know. I offered you my love once, and asked for yours.

ECRASIA. And did I deny it to you, Acis?

ACIS. You didn’t even know what love was.

ECRASIA. Oh! I adored you, you stupid oaf, until I found that you were a mere animal.

ACIS. And I made no end of a fool of myself about you until I discovered that you were a mere artist. You appreciated my contours! I was plastic, as Arjillax says. I wasn’t a man to you: I was a masterpiece appealing to your tastes and your senses. Your tastes and senses had overlaid the direct impulse of life in you. And because I cared only for our life, and went straight to it, and was bored by your calling my limbs fancy names and mapping me into mountains and valleys and all the rest of it, you called me an animal. Well, I am an animal, if you call a live man an animal.

ECRASIA. You need not explain. You refused to be refined. I did my best to lift your prehistoric impulses on to the plane of beauty, of imagination, of romance, of poetry, of art, of —

ACIS. These things are all very well in their way and in their proper places. But they are not love. They are an unnatural adulteration of love. Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

ARJILLAX. That is false. The statue comes to life always. The statues of today are the men and women of the next incubation. I hold up the marble figure before the mother and say, ‘This is the model you must copy.’ We produce what we see. Let no man dare to create in art a thing that he would not have exist in life.

MARTELLUS. Yes: I have been through all that. But you yourself are making statues of ancients instead of beautiful nymphs and swains. And Ecrasia is right about the ancients being inartistic. They are damnably inartistic.

ECRASIA [triumphant] Ah! Our greatest artist vindicates me. Thanks,
Martellus.

MARTELLUS. The body always ends by being a bore. Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life. Which is just what this old gentleman and this old lady seem to think too.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Quite so.

THE HE-ANCIENT. Precisely.

THE NEWLY BORN [to the He-Ancient] But you cant be nothing. What do you want to be?

THE HE-ANCIENT. A vortex.

THE NEWLY BORN. A what?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. A vortex. I began as a vortex: why should I not end as one?

ECRASIA. Oh! That is what you old people are, Vorticists.

ACIS. But if life is thought, can you live without a head?

THE HE-ANCIENT. Not now perhaps. But prehistoric men thought they could not live without tails. I can live without a tail. Why should I not live without a head?

THE NEWLY BORN. What is a tail?

THE HE-ANCIENT A habit of which your ancestors managed to pure themselves.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. None of us now believe that all this machinery of flesh and blood is necessary. It dies.

THE HE-ANCIENT. It imprisons us on this petty planet and forbids us to range through the stars.

ACIS. But even a vortex is a vortex in something. You cant have a whirlpool without water; and you cant have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.

THE HE-ANCIENT. No: the vortex is not the water nor the gas nor the atoms: it is a power over these things.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.

ACIS [evidently out of his depth] I shouldn’t think too much about it if I were you. You have to keep sane, you know.

The two Ancients look at one another; shrug their shoulders; and address themselves to their departure.

THE HE-ANCIENT. We are staying too long with you, children. We must go.

All the young people rise rather eagerly.

ARJILLAX. Dont mention it.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is tiresome for us, too. You see, children, we have to put things very crudely to you to make ourselves intelligible.

THE HE-ANCIENT. And I am afraid we do not quite succeed.

STREPHON. Very kind of you to come at all and talk to us, I’m sure.

ECRASIA. Why do the other ancients never come and give us a turn?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. It is difficult for them. They have forgotten how to speak; how to read; even how to think in your fashion. We do not communicate with one another in that way or apprehend the world as you do.

THE HE-ANCIENT. I find it more and more difficult to keep up your language. Another century or two and it will be impossible. I shall have to be relieved by a younger shepherd.

ACIS. Of course we are always delighted to see you; but still, if it tries you very severely, we could manage pretty well by ourselves, you know.

THE SHE-ANCIENT. Tell me, Acis: do you ever think of yourself as having to live perhaps for thousands of years?

ACIS. Oh, don’t talk about it. Why, I know very well that I have only four years of what any reasonable person would call living; and three and a half of them are already gone.

ECRASIA. You must not mind our saying so; but really you cannot call being an ancient living.

THE NEWLY BORN [almost in tears] Oh, this dreadful shortness of our lives! I cannot bear it.

STREPHON. I made up my mind on that subject long ago. When I am three years and fifty weeks old, I shall have my fatal accident. And it will not be an accident.

THE HE-ANCIENT. We are very tired of this subject. I must leave you.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is being tired?

THE SHE-ANCIENT. The penalty of attending to children. Farewell.

The two Ancients go away severally, she into the grove, he up to the hills behind the temple.

ALL. Ouf! [A great sigh of relief].

ECRASIA. Dreadful people!

STREPHON. Bores!

MARTELLUS. Yet one would like to follow them; to enter into their life; to grasp their thought; to comprehend the universe as they must.

ARJILLAX. Getting old, Martellus?

MARTELLUS. Well, I have finished with the dolls; and I am no longer jealous of you. That looks like the end. Two hours sleep is enough for me. I am afraid I am beginning to find you all rather silly.

STREPHON. I know. My girl went off this morning. She hadnt slept for weeks. And she found mathematics more interesting than me.

MARTELLUS. There is a prehistoric saying that has come down to us from a famous woman teacher. She said: ‘Leave women; and study mathematics.’ It is the only remaining fragment of a lost scripture called The Confessions of St Augustin, the English Opium Eater. That primitive savage must have been a great woman, to say a thing that still lives after three hundred centuries. I too will leave women and study mathematics, which I have neglected too long. Farewell, children, my old playmates. I almost wish I could feel sentimental about parting from you; but the cold truth is that you bore me. Do not be angry with me: your turn will come. [He passes away gravely into the grove].

ARJILLAX. There goes a great spirit. What a sculptor he was! And now, nothing! It is as if he had cut off his hands.

THE NEWLY BORN. Oh, will you all leave me as he has left you?

ECRASIA. Never. We have sworn it.

STREPHON. What is the use of swearing? She swore. He swore. You have sworn. They have sworn.

ECRASIA. You speak like a grammar.

STREPHON. That is how one ought to speak, isnt it? We shall all be forsworn.

THE NEWLY BORN. Do not talk like that. You are saddening us; and you are chasing the light away. It is growing dark.

ACIS. Night is falling. The light will come back tomorrow.

THE NEWLY BORN. What is tomorrow?

ACIS. The day that never comes. [He turns towards the temple].

All begin trooping into the temple.

THE NEWLY BORN [holding Acis back] That is no answer. What —

ARJILLAX. Silence. Little children should be seen and not heard.

THE NEWLY BORN [putting out her tongue at him]!

ECRASIA. Ungraceful. You must not do that.

THE NEWLY BORN. I will do what I like. But there is something the matter with me. I want to lie down. I cannot keep my eyes open.

ECRASIA. You are falling asleep. You will wake up again.

THE NEWLY BORN [drowsily] What is sleep?

ACIS. Ask no questions; and you will be told no lies. [He takes her by the ear, and leads her firmly towards the temple].

THE NEWLY BORN. Ai! oi! ai! Dont. I want to be carried. [She reels into the arms of Acts, who carries her into the temple].

ECRASIA. Come, Arjillax: you at least are still an artist. I adore you.

ARJILLAX. Do you? Unfortunately for you, I am not still a child. I have grown out of cuddling. I can only appreciate your figure. Does that satisfy you?

ECRASIA. At what distance?

ARJILLAX. Arm’s length or more.

ECRASIA. Thank you: not for me. [She turns away from him].

ARJILLAX. Ha! ha! [He strides off into the temple].

ECRASIA [calling to Strephon, who is on the threshold of the temple, going in] Strephon.

STREPHON. No. My heart is broken. [He goes into the temple].

ECRASIA. Must I pass the night alone? [She looks round, seeking another partner; but they have all gone]. After all, I can imagine a lover nobler than any of you. [She goes into the temple].

It is now quite dark. A vague radiance appears near the temple and shapes itself into the ghost of Adam.

A WOMAN’S VOICE [in the grove] Who is that?

ADAM. The ghost of Adam, the first father of mankind. Who are you?

THE VOICE. The ghost of Eve, the first mother of mankind.

ADAM. Come forth, wife; and shew yourself to me.

EVE [appearing near the grove] Here I am, husband. You are very old.

A VOICE [in the hills] Ha! ha! ha!

ADAM. Who laughs? Who dares laugh at Adam?

EVE. Who has the heart to laugh at Eve?

THE VOICE. The ghost of Cain, the first child, and the first murderer. [He appears between them; and as he does so there is a prolonged hiss]. Who dares hiss at Cain, the lord of death?

A VOICE. The ghost of the serpent, that lived before Adam and before Eve, and taught them how to bring forth Cain. [She becomes visible, coiled in the trees].

A VOICE. There is one that came before the serpent.

THE SERPENT. That is the voice of Lilith, in whom the father and mother were one. Hail, Lilith!

Lilith becomes visible between Cain and Adam.

LILITH. I suffered unspeakably; I tore myself asunder; I lost my life, to make of my one flesh these twain, man and woman. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of it, Adam, my son?

ADAM. I made the earth bring forth by my labor, and the woman bring forth by my love. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of it, Eve, my wife?

EVE. I nourished the egg in my body and fed it with my blood. And now they let it fall as the birds did, and suffer not at all. What do you make of it, Cain, my first-born?

CAIN. I invented killing and conquest and mastery and the winnowing out of the weak by the strong. And now the strong have slain one another; and the weak live for ever; and their deeds do nothing for the doer more than for another. What do you make of it, snake?

THE SERPENT. I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough. [She vanishes].

CAIN. There is no place for me on earth any longer. You cannot deny that mine was a splendid game while it lasted. But now! Out, out, brief candle! [He vanishes].

EVE. The clever ones were always my favorites. The diggers and the fighters have dug themselves in with the worms. My clever ones have inherited the earth. All’s well. [She fades away].

ADAM. I can make nothing of it, neither head nor tail. What is it all for? Why? Whither? Whence? We were well enough in the garden. And now the fools have killed all the animals; and they are dissatisfied because they cannot be bothered with their bodies! Foolishness, I call it. [He disappears].

LILITH. They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction. Their breasts are without milk: their bowels are gone: the very shapes of them are only ornaments for their children to admire and caress without understanding. Is this enough; or shall I labor again? Shall I bring forth something that will sweep them away and make an end of them as they have swept away the beasts of the garden, and made an end of the crawling things and the flying things and of all them that refuse to live for ever? I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made: Mars blushed as he looked down on the shame of his sister planet: cruelty and hypocrisy became so hideous that the face of the earth was pitted with the graves of little children among which living skeletons crawled in search of horrible food. The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one man repented and lived three hundred years; and I waited to see what would come of that. And so much came of it that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream. They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. And though all that they have done seems but the first hour of the infinite work of creation, yet I will not supersede them until they have forded this last stream that lies between flesh and spirit, and disentangled their life from the matter that has always mocked it. I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow. Let them feed that appetite well for me. I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life’s enemy I made him Life’s master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond. [She vanishes].

THE WAR INDEMNITIES

First published in Pearson’s Magazine, New York, June 1921.

How it would clarify the question of the so-called indemnities if the parties would only call things by their right names! Indemnity for war is flat nonsense: you cannot shoot a man and unshoot him again by treaty afterwards. Even Mr Lloyd George sees that, and seizes the opportunity to make a magnanimous gesture of foregoing what he knows he cannot get.

War is a game in which the takes are plunder and conquest. Germany lost; and the winners now proceed to take what they can get; and that will not be indemnity or reparation or any such nonsense, but booty pure and simple. But the simpler the language, the more apparent becomes the complexity of the fact. For example, the Germans admit that they must pay something; and they accordingly propose to pay England in coal. Hereupon ensues something like the following:

LLOYD GEORGE. Coal! Good God, no. Not a sack, not a lump. What are you dreaming of? You would throw our coal miners out of employment.

THE GERMANS. Well, will you take it in steel?

LLOYD GEORGE. Worse and worse. No country in Europe shall produce steel but England if I can help it. Steel indeed! Dont you dare to trifle with me. Your attempts to avert payment are too transparent. [Aside to Marshal Foch] Rattle your sabre a bit, will you, my dear Marshal? [Foch does 50].

THE GERMAN s. Well, what on earth are we to pay in? You know we cannot pay in gold.

LLOYD GEORGE [aside to Foch] What are they to pay in, Marshal?

FOCH [aside to Expert] What are they to pay in, mon cher?

EXPERT [aside to Foch] Potash.

FOCH [aside to Lloyd George] Potash.

LLOYD GEORGE [aloud, menacingly, to the Germans] You know as well as I do. You shall pay in potash.

THE GERMANS. But Donnerwetter, there is not five thousand millions worth of potash in the world.

LLOYD GEORGE. Come, come! No prevarication. There are other products: for example, perlmutter. So let me have no more nonsense.

DR SIMONS. Blôdsinn!

LLOYD GEORGE [blushing] Oh! Nice language that! Can no German ever be a gentleman? Fie for shame, sir!

DR SIMONS. You really must propose something practicable.

LLOYD GEORGE. Must I? Pray, who won the war: you or we? “Must,” as Queen Elizabeth said, is not a word that is addressed to British prime ministers. However, how would it be if you were to raise a loan to pay England?

DR SIMONS. Raise it where?

LLOYD GEORGE. In America. They have lots of money there. Or in France.

FOCH. Comment!!!

LLOYD GEORGE. An excellent investment for your peasant proprietors, my dear Marshal. Think of how well they did out of the 1871 indemnity.

FOCH. But why should your own people, our brave allies, be deprived of such an opening for their little savings? After all, it doesnt matter to you where the money comes from, does it? Money is money. Non olet.

LLOYD GEORGE. My French is shockingly bad. What does nong olay mean?

FOCH. It means that all money smells alike.

LLOYD GEORGE. True; but how — ?

FOCH. You see, mon cher Loi Georges, if this German farceur can arrange to make the proletariat pay, does it matter greatly which proletariat it is? Yours, or ours, or theirs, or the American canaille: what does it matter?

LLOYD GEORGE. Non olet, eh?

FOCH. Well, not exactly non olet. But they all smell alike.

LLOYD GEORGE [sternly to Dr Simons] I have consulted with my illustrious friend and ally, Marshal Foch. We are agreed that you can find the money if you choose. If a satisfactory proposal to that effect does not reach us by the middle of next week, we shall occupy every city on the Rhine.

DR SIMONS. And what then?

LLOYD GEORGE. What then! You shall see what then. None of your insolence with me, if you please. What then, indeed!

DR SIMONS. The money your troops will spend will be very useful to us.

LLOYD GEORGE. Fifty per cent on every one of your exports for that speech, young man.

DR SIMONS. Ah, well! The consumer will pay.

FOCH. What does he say? What is that word?

LLOYD GEORGE. Consumer. Le consommateur, you know. Le shallong.

FOCH [with military pith and brevity] Je m’en jous!

Curtain

This is the kind of thing that we are being landed in by diplomatists and soldiers who know nothing, pushed from behind by commercial adventurers who do not know the A.B.C. of finance, but who, having got noses for money, may be depended on to sniff their way to a solution which will mean that the workers will have to support an additional burden of idleness and waste all the world over. And it is quite likely that the victors will bear the heavier share. As to asking America or any other country to trade in German promissory notes payable 42 years after date, I will only quote what a Belgian historian and diplomatist [André Vandervelde] has just written to me: “I believe that ten years hence Germany and Russia will be masters of Europe.”

The Non-Fiction

‘Shaw’s Corner’, the playwright’s home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, where he lived for forty years.

The study at Shaw’s Corner

THE PERFECT WAGNERITE

A COMMENTARY ON THE NIBLUNG’S RING

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

THE RHINE GOLD

WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

THE VALKYRIES

SIEGFRIED

BACK TO OPERA AGAIN

SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT

PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM

DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

THE LOVE PANACEA

NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

ANARCHISM NO PANACEA

SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED

NIGHT FALLS ON THE GODS

PROLOGUE

A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY

FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED

WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

WAGNER’S OWN EXPLANATION

THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST

THE MUSIC OF THE RING

THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES

THE CHARACTERIZATION

THE OLD AND THE NEW MUSIC

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

BAYREUTH

BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND

WAGNERIAN SINGERS

PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION

In reading through this German version of my book in the Manuscript of my friend Siegfried Trebitsch, I was struck by the inadequacy of the merely negative explanation given by me of the irrelevance of Night Falls On The Gods to the general philosophic scheme of The Ring. That explanation is correct as far as it goes; but, put as I put it, it now seems to me to suggest that the operatic character of Night Falls On The Gods was the result of indifference or forgetfulness produced by the lapse of twenty-five years between the first projection of the work and its completion. Now it is clear that in whatever other ways Wagner may have changed, he never became careless and he never became indifferent. I have therefore inserted a new section in which I show how the revolutionary history of Western Europe from the Liberal explosion of 1848 to the confused attempt at a socialist, military, and municipal administration in Paris in 1871 (that is to say, from the beginning of The Niblung’s Ring by Wagner to the long-delayed completion of Night Falls On The Gods), demonstrated practically that the passing away of the present order was going to be a much more complicated business than it appears in Wagner’s Siegfried. I have therefore interpolated a new chapter which will perhaps induce some readers of the original English text to read the book again in German.

For some time to come, indeed, I shall have to refer English readers to this German edition as the most complete in existence.

My obligation to Herr Trebitsch for making me a living German author instead of merely a translated English one is so great that I am bound to point out that he is not responsible for my views or Wagner’s, and that it is as an artist and a man of letters, and not as a propagandist, that he is conveying to the German speaking peoples political criticisms which occasionally reflect on contemporary authorities with a European reputation for sensitiveness. And as the very sympathy which makes his translations so excellent may be regarded with suspicion, let me hasten to declare I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my nature most strongly. Not that I like the average German: nobody does, even in his own country. But then the average man is not popular anywhere; and as no German considers himself an average one, each reader will, as an exceptional man, sympathize with my dislike of the common herd. And if I cannot love the typical modern German, I can at least pity and understand him. His worst fault is that he cannot see that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Being convinced that duty, industry, education, loyalty, patriotism and respectability are good things (and I am magnanimous enough to admit that they are not altogether bad things when taken in strict moderation at the right time and in the right place), he indulges in them on all occasions shamelessly and excessively. He commits hideous crimes when crime is presented to him as part of his duty; his craze for work is more ruinous than the craze for drink; when he can afford secondary education for his sons you find three out of every five of them with their minds lamed for life by examinations which only a thoroughly wooden head could go through with impunity; and if a king is patriotic and respectable (few kings are) he puts up statues to him and exalts him above Charlemagne and Henry the Fowler. And when he meets a man of genius, he instinctively insults him, starves him, and, if possible, imprisons and kills him.

Now I do not pretend to be perfect myself. Heaven knows I have to struggle hard enough every day with what the Germans call my higher impulses. I know too well the temptation to be moral, to be self-sacrificing, to be loyal and patriotic, to be respectable and well-spoken of. But I wrestle with it and — as far as human fraility will allow — conquer it, whereas the German abandons himself to it without scruple or reflection, and is actually proud of his pious intemperance and self-indulgence. Nothing will cure him of this mania. It may end in starvation, crushing taxation, suppression of all freedom to try new social experiments and reform obsolete institutions, in snobbery, jobbery, idolatry, and an omnipresent tyranny in which his doctor and his schoolmaster, his lawyer and his priest, coerce him worse than any official or drill sergeant: no matter: it is respectable, says the German, therefore it must be good, and cannot be carried too far; and everybody who rebels against it must be a rascal. Even the Social-Democrats in Germany differ from the rest only in carrying academic orthodoxy beyond human endurance — beyond even German endurance. I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it. I have begged again and again to be taken to the bosom of my German comrades. I have pleaded that the Super-Proletarians of all lands should unite. I have pointed out that the German Social-Democratic party has done nothing at its Congresses for the last ten years except the things I told them to do ten years before, and that its path is white with the bones of the Socialist superstitions I and my fellow Fabians have slain. Useless. They do not care a rap whether I am a Socialist or not. All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask “Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?” Hastening in my innocence to clear myself of what I regard as an accusation of credulity and ignorance, I assure them earnestly that I know ten times as much of economics and a hundred times as much of practical administration as Marx did; that I knew Engels personally and rather liked him as a witty and amiable old 1848 veteran who despised modern Socialism; that I regard Bebel and Singer as men of like passions with myself, but considerably less advanced; and that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of its unsound capitalist economics, its parade of quotations from books which the author had either not read or not understood, its affectation of algebraic formulas, and its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself “scientific,” and predict the date of the revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on “historic laws.”

To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided them; and I found myself an outcast from German Social-Democracy at the moment when, thanks to Trebitsch, the German bourgeoisie and nobility began to smile on me, seduced by the pleasure of playing with fire, and perhaps by Agnes Sorma’s acting as Candida.

Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains; expels anti-militarists with the blood-thirstiest martial anti-foreign ardor; and gives the Kaiser reason to thank heaven that he was born in the comparative freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.

Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by the ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True, they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to go from summit to summit, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. Had the Germans understood any of these men, they would have hanged them. Fortunately they did not understand them, and therefore only neglected them until they were dead, after which they learnt to dance to their tunes with an easy conscience. For their sakes Germany stands consecrated as the Holy Land of the capitalist age, just as Italy, for its painters’ sakes, is the Holy Land of the early unvulgarized Renascence; France, for its builders’ sakes, of the age of Christian chivalry and faith; and Greece, for its sculptors’ sakes, of the Periclean age.

These Holy Lands are my fatherlands: in them alone am I truly at home: all my work is but to bring the whole world under this sanctification.

And so, O worthy, respectable, dutiful, patriotic, brave, industrious German reader, you who used to fear only God and your own conscience, and now fear nothing at all, here is my book for you; and — in all sincerity — much good may it do you!

London, 23rd. October 1907.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The preparation of a Second Edition of this booklet is quite the most unexpected literary task that has ever been set me. When it first appeared I was ungrateful enough to remonstrate with its publisher for printing, as I thought, more copies than the most sanguine Wagnerite could ever hope to sell. But the result proved that exactly one person buys a copy on every day in the year, including Sundays; and so, in the process of the suns, a reprint has become necessary.

Save a few verbal slips of no importance, I have found nothing to alter in this edition. As usual, the only protests the book has elicited are protests, not against the opinions it expresses, but against the facts it records. There are people who cannot bear to be told that their hero was associated with a famous Anarchist in a rebellion; that he was proclaimed as “wanted” by the police; that he wrote revolutionary pamphlets; and that his picture of Niblunghome under the reign of Alberic is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels’s Condition of the Laboring classes in England. They frantically deny these facts, and then declare that I have connected them with Wagner in a paroxysm of senseless perversity. I am sorry I have hurt them; and I appeal to charitable publishers to bring out a new life of Wagner, which shall describe him as a court musician of unquestioned fashion and orthodoxy, and a pillar of the most exclusive Dresden circles. Such a work, would, I believe, have a large sale, and be read with satisfaction and reassurance by many lovers of Wagner’s music.

As to my much demurred-to relegation of Night Falls On The Gods to the category of grand opera, I have nothing to add or withdraw. Such a classification is to me as much a matter of fact as the Dresden rising or the police proclamation; but I shall not pretend that it is a matter of such fact as everybody’s judgment can grapple with. People who prefer grand opera to serious music-drama naturally resent my placing a very grand opera below a very serious music-drama. The ordinary lover of Shakespeare would equally demur to my placing his popular catchpenny plays, of which As You Like It is an avowed type, below true Shakespearean plays like Measure for Measure. I cannot help that. Popular dramas and operas may have overwhelming merits as enchanting make-believes; but a poet’s sincerest vision of the world must always take precedence of his prettiest fool’s paradise.

As many English Wagnerites seem to be still under the impression that Wagner composed Rienzi in his youth, Tannhauser and Lohengrin in his middle age, and The Ring in his later years, may I again remind them that The Ring was the result of a political convulsion which occurred when Wagner was only thirty-six, and that the poem was completed when he was forty, with thirty more years of work before him? It is as much a first essay in political philosophy as Die Feen is a first essay in romantic opera. The attempt to recover its spirit twenty years later, when the music of Night Falls On The Gods was added, was an attempt to revive the barricades of Dresden in the Temple of the Grail. Only those who have never had any political enthusiasms to survive can believe that such an attempt could succeed. G. B. S.

London, 1901

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book is a commentary on The Ring of the Niblungs, Wagner’s chief work. I offer it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner who are unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least understand the dilemma of Wotan, though they are filled with indignation at the irreverence of the Philistines who frankly avow that they find the remarks of the god too often tedious and nonsensical. Now to be devoted to Wagner merely as a dog is devoted to his master, sharing a few elementary ideas, appetites and emotions with him, and, for the rest, reverencing his superiority without understanding it, is no true Wagnerism. Yet nothing better is possible without a stock of ideas common to master and disciple. Unfortunately, the ideas of the revolutionary Wagner of 1848 are taught neither by the education nor the experience of English and American gentlemen-amateurs, who are almost always political mugwumps, and hardly ever associate with revolutionists. The earlier attempts to translate his numerous pamphlets and essays into English, resulted in ludicrous mixtures of pure nonsense with the absurdest distorsions of his ideas into the ideas of the translators. We now have a translation which is a masterpiece of interpretation and an eminent addition to our literature; but that is not because its author, Mr. Ashton Ellis, knows the German dictionary better than his predecessors. He is simply in possession of Wagner’s ideas, which were to them inconceivable.

All I pretend to do in this book is to impart the ideas which are most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman’s equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem, so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by musicians who are no revolutionists, and revolutionists who are no musicians. G. B. S.

PRELIMINARY ENCOURAGEMENTS

A few of these will be welcome to the ordinary citizen visiting the theatre to satisfy his curiosity, or his desire to be in the fashion, by witnessing a representation of Richard Wagner’s famous Ring of the Niblungs.

First, The Ring, with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves. Unless the spectator recognizes in it an image of the life he is himself fighting his way through, it must needs appear to him a monstrous development of the Christmas pantomimes, spun out here and there into intolerable lengths of dull conversation by the principal baritone. Fortunately, even from this point of view, The Ring is full of extraordinarily attractive episodes, both orchestral and dramatic. The nature music alone — music of river and rainbow, fire and forest — is enough to bribe people with any love of the country in them to endure the passages of political philosophy in the sure hope of a prettier page to come. Everybody, too, can enjoy the love music, the hammer and anvil music, the clumping of the giants, the tune of the young woodsman’s horn, the trilling of the bird, the dragon music and nightmare music and thunder and lightning music, the profusion of simple melody, the sensuous charm of the orchestration: in short, the vast extent of common ground between The Ring and the ordinary music we use for play and pleasure. Hence it is that the four separate music-plays of which it is built have become popular throughout Europe as operas. We shall presently see that one of them, Night Falls On The Gods, actually is an opera.

It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on equal terms with that inner circle of adepts.

My second encouragement is addressed to modest citizens who may suppose themselves to be disqualified from enjoying The Ring by their technical ignorance of music. They may dismiss all such misgivings speedily and confidently. If the sound of music has any power to move them, they will find that Wagner exacts nothing further. There is not a single bar of “classical music” in The Ring — not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama. In classical music there are, as the analytical programs tell us, first subjects and second subjects, free fantasias, recapitulations, and codas; there are fugues, with counter-subjects, strettos, and pedal points; there are passacaglias on ground basses, canons ad hypodiapente, and other ingenuities, which have, after all, stood or fallen by their prettiness as much as the simplest folk-tune. Wagner is never driving at anything of this sort any more than Shakespeare in his plays is driving at such ingenuities of verse-making as sonnets, triolets, and the like. And this is why he is so easy for the natural musician who has had no academic teaching. The professors, when Wagner’s music is played to them, exclaim at once “What is this? Is it aria, or recitative? Is there no cabaletta to it — not even a full close? Why was that discord not prepared; and why does he not resolve it correctly? How dare he indulge in those scandalous and illicit transitions into a key that has not one note in common with the key he has just left? Listen to those false relations! What does he want with six drums and eight horns when Mozart worked miracles with two of each? The man is no musician.” The layman neither knows nor cares about any of these things. If Wagner were to turn aside from his straightforward dramatic purpose to propitiate the professors with correct exercises in sonata form, his music would at once become unintelligible to the unsophisticated spectator, upon whom the familiar and dreaded “classical” sensation would descend like the influenza. Nothing of the kind need be dreaded. The unskilled, untaught musician may approach Wagner boldly; for there is no possibility of a misunderstanding between them: The Ring music is perfectly single and simple. It is the adept musician of the old school who has everything to unlearn: and him I leave, unpitied, to his fate.

THE RING OF THE NIBLUNGS

The Ring consists of four plays, intended to be performed on four successive evenings, entitled The Rhine Gold (a prologue to the other three), The Valkyries, Siegfried, and Night Falls On The Gods; or, in the original German, Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Die Gotterdammerung.

THE RHINE GOLD

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You will find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and because there is something else within his reach involving no distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the power of understanding what they see as they look at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.

First Scene

Here, then, is the subject of the first scene of The Rhine Gold. As you sit waiting for the curtain to rise, you suddenly catch the booming ground-tone of a mighty river. It becomes plainer, clearer: you get nearer to the surface, and catch the green light and the flights of bubbles. Then the curtain goes up and you see what you heard — the depths of the Rhine, with three strange fairy fishes, half water-maidens, singing and enjoying themselves exuberantly. They are not singing barcarolles or ballads about the Lorely and her fated lovers, but simply trolling any nonsense that comes into their heads in time to the dancing of the water and the rhythm of their swimming. It is the golden age; and the attraction of this spot for the Rhine maidens is a lump of the Rhine gold, which they value, in an entirely uncommercial way, for its bodily beauty and splendor. Just at present it is eclipsed, because the sun is not striking down through the water.

Presently there comes a poor devil of a dwarf stealing along the slippery rocks of the river bed, a creature with energy enough to make him strong of body and fierce of passion, but with a brutish narrowness of intelligence and selfishness of imagination: too stupid to see that his own welfare can only be compassed as part of the welfare of the world, too full of brute force not to grab vigorously at his own gain. Such dwarfs are quite common in London. He comes now with a fruitful impulse in him, in search of what he lacks in himself, beauty, lightness of heart, imagination, music. The Rhine maidens, representing all these to him, fill him with hope and longing; and he never considers that he has nothing to offer that they could possibly desire, being by natural limitation incapable of seeing anything from anyone else’s point of view. With perfect simplicity, he offers himself as a sweetheart to them. But they are thoughtless, elemental, only half real things, much like modern young ladies. That the poor dwarf is repulsive to their sense of physical beauty and their romantic conception of heroism, that he is ugly and awkward, greedy and ridiculous, disposes for them of his claim to live and love. They mock him atrociously, pretending to fall in love with him at first sight, and then slipping away and making game of him, heaping ridicule and disgust on the poor wretch until he is beside himself with mortification and rage. They forget him when the water begins to glitter in the sun, and the gold to reflect its glory. They break into ecstatic worship of their treasure; and though they know the parable of Klondyke quite well, they have no fear that the gold will be wrenched away by the dwarf, since it will yield to no one who has not forsworn love for it, and it is in pursuit of love that he has come to them. They forget that they have poisoned that desire in him by their mockery and denial of it, and that he now knows that life will give him nothing that he cannot wrest from it by the Plutonic power. It is just as if some poor, rough, vulgar, coarse fellow were to offer to take his part in aristocratic society, and be snubbed into the knowledge that only as a millionaire could he ever hope to bring that society to his feet and buy himself a beautiful and refined wife. His choice is forced on him. He forswears love as thousands of us forswear it every day; and in a moment the gold is in his grasp, and he disappears in the depths, leaving the water-fairies vainly screaming “Stop thief!” whilst the river seems to plunge into darkness and sink from us as we rise to the cloud regions above.

And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic, our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably, overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our “dangerous trades” ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of it would be utter destruction.

Such a force there is, however; and it is called Godhead. The mysterious thing we call life organizes itself into all living shapes, bird, beast, beetle and fish, rising to the human marvel in cunning dwarfs and in laborious muscular giants, capable, these last, of enduring toil, willing to buy love and life, not with suicidal curses and renunciations, but with patient manual drudgery in the service of higher powers. And these higher powers are called into existence by the same self-organization of life still more wonderfully into rare persons who may by comparison be called gods, creatures capable of thought, whose aims extend far beyond the satisfaction of their bodily appetites and personal affections, since they perceive that it is only by the establishment of a social order founded on common bonds of moral faith that the world can rise from mere savagery. But how is this order to be set up by Godhead in a world of stupid giants, since these thoughtless ones pursue only their narrower personal ends and can by no means understand the aims of a god? Godhead, face to face with Stupidity, must compromise. Unable to enforce on the world the pure law of thought, it must resort to a mechanical law of commandments to be enforced by brute punishments and the destruction of the disobedient. And however carefully these laws are framed to represent the highest thoughts of the framers at the moment of their promulgation, before a day has elapsed that thought has grown and widened by the ceaseless evolution of life; and lo! yesterday’s law already fallen out with today’s thought. Yet if the high givers of that law themselves set the example of breaking it before it is a week old, they destroy all its authority with their subjects, and so break the weapon they have forged to rule them for their own good. They must therefore maintain at all costs the sanctity of the law, even when it has ceased to represent their thought; so that at last they get entangled in a network of ordinances which they no longer believe in, and yet have made so sacred by custom and so terrible by punishment, that they cannot themselves escape from them. Thus Godhead’s resort to law finally costs it half its integrity — as if a spiritual king, to gain temporal power, had plucked out one of his eyes — and it finally begins secretly to long for the advent of some power higher than itself which will destroy its artificial empire of law, and establish a true republic of free thought.

This is by no means the only difficulty in the dominion of Law. The brute force for its execution must be purchased; and the mass of its subjects must be persuaded to respect the authority which employs this force. But how is such respect to be implanted in them if they are unable to comprehend the thought of the lawgiver? Clearly, only by associating the legislative power with such displays of splendor and majesty as will impress their senses and awe their imaginations. The god turned lawgiver, in short, must be crowned Pontiff and King. Since he cannot be known to the common folk as their superior in wisdom, he must be known to them as their superior in riches, as the dweller in castles, the wearer of gold and purple, the eater of mighty feasts, the commander of armies, and the wielder of powers of life and death, of salvation and damnation after death. Something may be done in this way without corruption whilst the golden age still endures. Your gods may not prevail with the dwarfs; but they may go to these honest giants who will give a day’s work for a day’s pay, and induce them to build for Godhead a mighty fortress, complete with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the homesteads that will grow up in security round that church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip to force the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows and splendors of the golden age, and make himself master of the world, unless the gods, with their bigger brains, can capture his gold. This, the dilemma of the Church today, is the situation created by the exploit of Alberic in the depths of the Rhine.

Second Scene

From the bed of the river we rise into cloudy regions, and finally come out into the clear in a meadow, where Wotan, the god of gods, and his consort Fricka lie sleeping. Wotan, you will observe, has lost one eye; and you will presently learn that he plucked it out voluntarily as the price to be paid for his alliance with Fricka, who in return has brought to him as her dowry all the powers of Law. The meadow is on the brink of a ravine, beyond which, towering on distant heights, stands Godhome, a mighty castle, newly built as a house of state for the one-eyed god and his all-ruling wife. Wotan has not yet seen this castle except in his dreams: two giants have just built it for him whilst he slept; and the reality is before him for the first time when Fricka wakes him. In that majestic burg he is to rule with her and through her over the humble giants, who have eyes to gape at the glorious castles their own hands have built from his design, but no brains to design castles for themselves, or to comprehend divinity. As a god, he is to be great, secure, and mighty; but he is also to be passionless, affectionless, wholly impartial; for Godhead, if it is to live with Law, must have no weaknesses, no respect for persons. All such sweet littlenesses must be left to the humble stupid giants to make their toil sweet to them; and the god must, after all, pay for Olympian power the same price the dwarf has paid for Plutonic power.

Wotan has forgotten this in his dreams of greatness. Not so Fricka. What she is thinking of is this price that Wotan has consented to pay, in token whereof he has promised this day to hand over to the giants Fricka’s sister, the goddess Freia, with her golden love-apples. When Fricka reproaches Wotan with having selfishly forgotten this, she finds that he, like herself, is not prepared to go through with his bargain, and that he is trusting to another great worldforce, the Lie (a European Power, as Lassalle said), to help him to trick the giants out of their reward. But this force does not dwell in Wotan himself, but in another, a god over whom he has triumphed, one Loki, the god of Intellect, Argument, Imagination, Illusion, and Reason. Loki has promised to deliver him from his contract, and to cheat the giants for him; but he has not arrived to keep his word: indeed, as Fricka bitterly points out, why should not the Lie fail Wotan, since such failure is the very essence of him?

The giants come soon enough; and Freia flies to Wotan for protection against them. Their purposes are quite honest; and they have no doubt of the god’s faith. There stands their part of the contract fulfilled, stone on stone, port and pinnacle all faithfully finished from Wotan’s design by their mighty labor. They have come undoubtingly for their agreed wage. Then there happens what is to them an incredible, inconceivable thing. The god begins to shuffle. There are no moments in life more tragic than those in which the humble common man, the manual worker, leaving with implicit trust all high affairs to his betters, and reverencing them wholly as worthy of that trust, even to the extent of accepting as his rightful function the saving of them from all roughening and coarsening drudgeries, first discovers that they are corrupt, greedy, unjust and treacherous. The shock drives a ray of prophetic light into one giant’s mind, and gives him a momentary eloquence. In that moment he rises above his stupid gianthood, and earnestly warns the Son of Light that all his power and eminence of priesthood, godhood, and kingship must stand or fall with the unbearable cold greatness of the incorruptible law-giver. But Wotan, whose assumed character of law-giver is altogether false to his real passionate nature, despises the rebuke; and the giant’s ray of insight is lost in the murk of his virtuous indignation.

In the midst of the wrangle, Loki comes at last, excusing himself for being late on the ground that he has been detained by a matter of importance which he has promised to lay before Wotan. When pressed to give his mind to the business immediately in hand, and to extricate Wotan from his dilemma, he has nothing to say except that the giants are evidently altogether in the right. The castle has been duly built: he has tried every stone of it, and found the work first-rate: there is nothing to be done but pay the price agreed upon by handing over Freia to the giants. The gods are furious; and Wotan passionately declares that he only consented to the bargain on Loki’s promise to find a way for him out of it. But Loki says no: he has promised to find a way out if any such way exist, but not to make a way if there is no way. He has wandered over the whole earth in search of some treasure great enough to buy Freia back from the giants; but in all the world he has found nothing for which Man will give up Woman. And this, by the way, reminds him of the matter he had promised to lay before Wotan. The Rhine maidens have complained to him of Alberic’s theft of their gold; and he mentions it as a curious exception to his universal law of the unpurchasable preciousness of love, that this gold-robber has forsworn love for the sake of the fabulous riches of the Plutonic empire and the mastery of the world through its power.

No sooner is the tale told than the giants stoop lower than the dwarf. Alberic forswore love only when it was denied to him and made the instrument for cruelly murdering his self-respect. But the giants, with love within their reach, with Freia and her golden apples in their hands, offer to give her up for the treasure of Alberic. Observe, it is the treasure alone that they desire. They have no fierce dreams of dominion over their superiors, or of moulding the world to any conceptions of their own. They are neither clever nor ambitious: they simply covet money. Alberic’s gold: that is their demand, or else Freia, as agreed upon, whom they now carry off as hostage, leaving Wotan to consider their ultimatum.

Freia gone, the gods begin to wither and age: her golden apples, which they so lightly bargained away, they now find to be a matter of life and death to them; for not even the gods can live on Law and Godhead alone, be their castles ever so splendid. Loki alone is unaffected: the Lie, with all its cunning wonders, its glistenings and shiftings and mirages, is a mere appearance: it has no body and needs no food. What is Wotan to do? Loki sees the answer clearly enough: he must bluntly rob Alberic. There is nothing to prevent him except moral scruple; for Alberic, after all, is a poor, dim, dwarfed, credulous creature whom a god can outsee and a lie can outwit. Down, then, Wotan and Loki plunge into the mine where Alberic’s slaves are piling up wealth for him under the invisible whip.

Third Scene

This gloomy place need not be a mine: it might just as well be a match-factory, with yellow phosphorus, phossy jaw, a large dividend, and plenty of clergymen shareholders. Or it might be a whitelead factory, or a chemical works, or a pottery, or a railway shunting yard, or a tailoring shop, or a little gin-sodden laundry, or a bakehouse, or a big shop, or any other of the places where human life and welfare are daily sacrificed in order that some greedy foolish creature may be able to hymn exultantly to his Platonic idol:

Thou mak’st me eat whilst others starve, And sing while others do lament: Such untome Thy blessings are, As if I were Thine only care.

In the mine, which resounds with the clinking anvils of the dwarfs toiling miserably to heap up treasure for their master, Alberic has set his brother Mime — more familiarly, Mimmy — to make him a helmet. Mimmy dimly sees that there is some magic in this helmet, and tries to keep it; but Alberic wrests it from him, and shows him, to his cost, that it is the veil of the invisible whip, and that he who wears it can appear in what shape he will, or disappear from view altogether. This helmet is a very common article in our streets, where it generally takes the form of a tall hat. It makes a man invisible as a shareholder, and changes him into various shapes, such as a pious Christian, a subscriber to hospitals, a benefactor of the poor, a model husband and father, a shrewd, practical independent Englishman, and what not, when he is really a pitiful parasite on the commonwealth, consuming a great deal, and producing nothing, feeling nothing, knowing nothing, believing nothing, and doing nothing except what all the rest do, and that only because he is afraid not to do it, or at least pretend to do it.

When Wotan and Loki arrive, Loki claims Alberic as an old acquaintance. But the dwarf has no faith in these civil strangers: Greed instinctively mistrusts Intellect, even in the garb of Poetry and the company of Godhead, whilst envying the brilliancy of the one and the dignity of the other. Alberic breaks out at them with a terrible boast of the power now within his grasp. He paints for them the world as it will be when his dominion over it is complete, when the soft airs and green mosses of its valleys shall be changed into smoke, slag, and filth; when slavery, disease, and squalor, soothed by drunkenness and mastered by the policeman’s baton, shall become the foundation of society; and when nothing shall escape ruin except such pretty places and pretty women as he may like to buy for the slaking of his own lusts. In that kingdom of evil he sees that there will be no power but his own. These gods, with their moralities and legalities and intellectual subtlety, will go under and be starved out of existence. He bids Wotan and Loki beware of it; and his “Hab’ Acht!” is hoarse, horrible, and sinister. Wotan is revolted to the very depths of his being: he cannot stifle the execration that bursts from him. But Loki is unaffected: he has no moral passion: indignation is as absurd to him as enthusiasm. He finds it exquisitely amusing — having a touch of the comic spirit in him — that the dwarf, in stirring up the moral fervor of Wotan, has removed his last moral scruple about becoming a thief. Wotan will now rob the dwarf without remorse; for is it not positively his highest duty to take this power out of such evil hands and use it himself in the interests of Godhead? On the loftiest moral grounds, he lets Loki do his worst.

A little cunningly disguised flattery makes short work of Alberic. Loki pretends to be afraid of him; and he swallows that bait unhesitatingly. But how, enquires Loki, is he to guard against the hatred of his million slaves? Will they not steal from him, whilst he sleeps, the magic ring, the symbol of his power, which he has forged from the gold of the Rhine? “You think yourself very clever,” sneers Alberic, and then begins to boast of the enchantments of the magic helmet. Loki refuses to believe in such marvels without witnessing them. Alberic, only too glad to show off his powers, puts on the helmet and transforms himself into a monstrous serpent. Loki gratifies him by pretending to be frightened out of his wits, but ventures to remark that it would be better still if the helmet could transform its owner into some tiny creature that could hide and spy in the smallest cranny. Alberic promptly transforms himself into a toad. In an instant Wotan’s foot is on him; Loki tears away the helmet; they pinion him, and drag him away a prisoner up through the earth to the meadow by the castle.

Fourth Scene

There, to pay for his freedom, he has to summon his slaves from the depths to place all the treasure they have heaped up for him at the feet of Wotan. Then he demands his liberty; but Wotan must have the ring as well. And here the dwarf, like the giant before him, feels the very foundations of the world shake beneath him at the discovery of his own base cupidity in a higher power. That evil should, in its loveless desperation, create malign powers which Godhead could not create, seems but natural justice to him. But that Godhead should steal those malign powers from evil, and wield them itself, is a monstrous perversion; and his appeal to Wotan to forego it is almost terrible in its conviction of wrong. It is of no avail. Wotan falls back again on virtuous indignation. He reminds Alberic that he stole the gold from the Rhine maidens, and takes the attitude of the just judge compelling a restitution of stolen goods. Alberic knowing perfectly well that the judge is taking the goods to put them in his own pocket, has the ring torn from his finger, and is once more as poor as he was when he came slipping and stumbling among the slimy rocks in the bed of the Rhine.

This is the way of the world. In older times, when the Christian laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State, religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing themselves as a universal curse even on the generous and humane, then religion and law and intellect, which would never themselves have discovered such systems, their natural bent being towards welfare, economy, and life instead of towards corruption, waste, and death, nevertheless did not scruple to seize by fraud and force these powers of evil on presence of using them for good. And it inevitably happens that when the Church, the Law, and all the Talents have made common cause to rob the people, the Church is far more vitally harmed by that unfaithfulness to itself than its more mechanical confederates; so that finally they turn on their discredited ally and rob the Church, with the cheerful co-operation of Loki, as in France and Italy for instance.

The twin giants come back with their hostage, in whose presence Godhead blooms again. The gold is ready for them; but now that the moment has come for parting with Freia the gold does not seem so tempting; and they are sorely loth to let her go. Not unless there is gold enough to utterly hide her from them — not until the heap has grown so that they can see nothing but gold — until money has come between them and every human feeling, will they part with her. There is not gold enough to accomplish this: however cunningly Loki spreads it, the glint of Freia’s hair is still visible to Giant Fafnir, and the magic helmet must go on the heap to shut it out. Even then Fafnir’s brother, Fasolt, can catch a beam from her eye through a chink, and is rendered incapable thereby of forswearing her. There is nothing to stop that chink but the ring; and Wotan is as greedily bent on keeping that as Alberic himself was; nor can the other gods persuade him that Freia is worth it, since for the highest god, love is not the highest good, but only the universal delight that bribes all living things to travail with renewed life. Life itself, with its accomplished marvels and its infinite potentialities, is the only force that Godhead can worship. Wotan does not yield until he is reached by the voice of the fruitful earth that before he or the dwarfs or the giants or the Law or the Lie or any of these things were, had the seed of them all in her bosom, and the seed perhaps of something higher even than himself, that shall one day supersede him and cut the tangles and alliances and compromises that already have cost him one of his eyes. When Erda, the First Mother of life, rises from her sleeping-place in the heart of the earth, and warns him to yield the ring, he obeys her; the ring is added to the heap of gold; and all sense of Freia is cut off from the giants.

But now what Law is left to these two poor stupid laborers whereby one shall yield to the other any of the treasure for which they have each paid the whole price in surrendering Freia? They look by mere habit to the god to judge for them; but he, with his heart stirring towards higher forces than himself, turns with disgust from these lower forces. They settle it as two wolves might; and Fafnir batters his brother dead with his staff. It is a horrible thing to see and hear, to anyone who knows how much blood has been shed in the world in just that way by its brutalized toilers, honest fellows enough until their betters betrayed them. Fafnir goes off with his booty. It is quite useless to him. He has neither the cunning nor the ambition to establish the Plutonic empire with it. Merely to prevent others from getting it is the only purpose it brings him. He piles it in a cave; transforms himself into a dragon by the helmet; and devotes his life to guarding it, as much a slave to it as a jailor is to his prisoner. He had much better have thrown it all back into the Rhine and transformed himself into the shortest-lived animal that enjoys at least a brief run in the sunshine. His case, however, is far too common to be surprising. The world is overstocked with persons who sacrifice all their affections, and madly trample and batter down their fellows to obtain riches of which, when they get them, they are unable to make the smallest use, and to which they become the most miserable slaves.

The gods soon forget Fafnir in their rejoicing over Freia. Donner, the Thunder god, springs to a rocky summit and calls the clouds as a shepherd calls his flocks. They come at his summons; and he and the castle are hidden by their black legions. Froh, the Rainbow god, hastens to his side. At the stroke of Donner’s hammer the black murk is riven in all directions by darting ribbons of lightning; and as the air clears, the castle is seen in its fullest splendor, accessible now by the rainbow bridge which Froh has cast across the ravine. In the glory of this moment Wotan has a great thought. With all his aspirations to establish a reign of noble thought, of righteousness, order, and justice, he has found that day that there is no race yet in the world that quite spontaneously, naturally, and unconsciously realizes his ideal. He himself has found how far short Godhead falls of the thing it conceives. He, the greatest of gods, has been unable to control his fate: he has been forced against his will to choose between evils, to make disgraceful bargains, to break them still more disgracefully, and even then to see the price of his disgrace slip through his fingers. His consort has cost him half his vision; his castle has cost him his affections; and the attempt to retain both has cost him his honor. On every side he is shackled and bound, dependent on the laws of Fricka and on the lies of Loki, forced to traffic with dwarfs for handicraft and with giants for strength, and to pay them both in false coin. After all, a god is a pitiful thing. But the fertility of the First Mother is not yet exhausted. The life that came from her has ever climbed up to a higher and higher organization. From toad and serpent to dwarf, from bear and elephant to giant, from dwarf and giant to a god with thoughts, with comprehension of the world, with ideals. Why should it stop there? Why should it not rise from the god to the Hero? to the creature in whom the god’s unavailing thought shall have become effective will and life, who shall make his way straight to truth and reality over the laws of Fricka and the lies of Loki with a strength that overcomes giants and a cunning that outwits dwarfs? Yes: Erda, the First Mother, must travail again, and breed him a race of heroes to deliver the world and himself from his limited powers and disgraceful bargains. This is the vision that flashes on him as he turns to the rainbow bridge and calls his wife to come and dwell with him in Valhalla, the home of the gods.

They are all overcome with Valhalla’s glory except Loki. He is behind the scenes of this joint reign of the Divine and the Legal. He despises these gods with their ideals and their golden apples. “I am ashamed,” he says, “to have dealings with these futile creatures.” And so he follows them to the rainbow bridge. But as they set foot on it, from the river below rises the wailing of the Rhine maidens for their lost gold. “You down there in the water,” cries Loki with brutal irony: “you used to bask in the glitter of your gold: henceforth you shall bask in the splendor of the gods.” And they reply that the truth is in the depths and the darkness, and that what blazes on high there is falsehood. And with that the gods pass into their glorious stronghold.

WAGNER AS REVOLUTIONIST

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today. At Bayreuth I have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Gold is what they call “a work of art” pure and simple, and that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with the facts of Wagner’s life. In 1843 he obtained the position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term “artist” seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs — that is, a creature in their own lazy likeness — he need have taken no more part in the political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or Free Trade movements. What he did do was first to make a desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the poor monarch’s feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the wrong. When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old friend of Wagner’s to whom he wrote a well-known series of letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and Revolution, a glance through which will show how thoroughly the socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how completely he had got free from the influence of the established Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth pamphlets — some of them elaborate treatises in size and intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator — on social evolution, religion, life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the proclamation summing up Wagner as “a politically dangerous person” may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation of The Rhine Gold is only “my socialism” read into the works of a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your consideration as an ignoramus.

If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical character in The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan’s wife and Freia’s sister: nay, she contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan’s rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function in the allegorical scheme become plain.

One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil. In the modern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet no men on the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary, the world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that; and the allegory becomes simple enough. Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.

Now it is quite clear — though you have perhaps never thought of it — that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order. Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the village curate’s sermons. This is precisely what must happen some day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose, will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso’s criticism of the Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal, academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice.

Farther on in The Ring we shall see the Hero arrive and make an end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand — for it is the key to much that we are to see — that the god, since his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long in his inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose first work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his own undoing.

In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

THE VALKYRIES

Before the curtain rises on the Valkyries, let us see what has happened since it fell on The Rhine Gold. The persons of the drama will tell us presently; but as we probably do not understand German, that may not help us.

Wotan is still ruling the world in glory from his giant-built castle with his wife Fricka. But he has no security for the continuance of his reign, since Alberic may at any moment contrive to recover the ring, the full power of which he can wield because he has forsworn love. Such forswearing is not possible to Wotan: love, though not his highest need, is a higher than gold: otherwise he would be no god. Besides, as we have seen, his power has been established in the world by and as a system of laws enforced by penalties. These he must consent to be bound by himself; for a god who broke his own laws would betray the fact that legality and conformity are not the highest rule of conduct — a discovery fatal to his supremacy as Pontiff and Lawgiver. Hence he may not wrest the ring unlawfully from Fafnir, even if he could bring himself to forswear love.

In this insecurity he has hit on the idea of forming a heroic bodyguard. He has trained his love children as war-maidens (Valkyries) whose duty it is to sweep through battle-fields and bear away to Valhalla the souls of the bravest who fall there. Thus reinforced by a host of warriors, he has thoroughly indoctrinated them, Loki helping him as dialectician-in-chief, with the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural religion and self-sacrificing idealism, which they believe to be the essence of his godhood, but which is really only the machinery of the love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness. This process secures their fanatical devotion to his system of government, but he knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moral pretensions, serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes, his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances from the path of the heroic will.

Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such Heroism, and that from himself the Hero must spring. He takes to wandering, mostly in search of love, from Fricka and Valhalla. He seeks the First Mother; and through her womb, eternally fertile, the inner true thought that made him first a god is reborn as his daughter, uncorrupted by his ambition, unfettered by his machinery of power and his alliances with Fricka and Loki. This daughter, the Valkyrie Brynhild, is his true will, his real self, (as he thinks): to her he may say what he must not say to anyone, since in speaking to her he but speaks to himself. “Was Keinem in Worten unausgesprochen,” he says to her, “bleib es ewig: mit mir nur rath’ ich, red’ ich zu dir.”

But from Brynhild no hero can spring until there is a man of Wotan’s race to breed with her. Wotan wanders further; and a mortal woman bears him twins: a son and a daughter. He separates them by letting the girl fall into the hands of a forest tribe which in due time gives her as a wife to a fierce chief, one Hunding. With the son he himself leads the life of a wolf, and teaches him the only power a god can teach, the power of doing without happiness. When he has given him this terrible training, he abandons him, and goes to the bridal feast of his daughter Sieglinda and Hunding. In the blue cloak of the wanderer, wearing the broad hat that flaps over the socket of his forfeited eye, he appears in Hunding’s house, the middle pillar of which is a mighty tree. Into that tree, without a word, he strikes a sword up to the hilt, so that only the might of a hero can withdraw it. Then he goes out as silently as he came, blind to the truth that no weapon from the armory of Godhead can serve the turn of the true Human Hero. Neither Hunding nor any of his guests can move the sword; and there it stays awaiting the destined hand. That is the history of the generations between The Rhine Gold and The Valkyries.

The First Act

This time, as we sit looking expectantly at the curtain, we hear, not the deep booming of the Rhine, but the patter of a forest downpour, accompanied by the mutter of a storm which soon gathers into a roar and culminates in crashing thunderbolts. As it passes off, the curtain rises; and there is no mistaking whose forest habitation we are in; for the central pillar is a mighty tree, and the place fit for the dwelling of a fierce chief. The door opens: and an exhausted man reels in: an adept from the school of unhappiness. Sieglinda finds him lying on the hearth. He explains that he has been in a fight; that his weapons not being as strong as his arms, were broken; and that he had to fly. He desires some drink and a moment’s rest; then he will go; for he is an unlucky person, and does not want to bring his ill-luck on the woman who is succoring him. But she, it appears, is also unhappy; and a strong sympathy springs up between them. When her husband arrives, he observes not only this sympathy, but a resemblance between them, a gleam of the snake in their eyes. They sit down to table; and the stranger tells them his unlucky story. He is the son of Wotan, who is known to him only as Wolfing, of the race of the Volsungs. The earliest thing he remembers is returning from a hunt with his father to find their home destroyed, his mother murdered, and his twin-sister carried off. This was the work of a tribe called the Neidings, upon whom he and Wolfing thenceforth waged implacable war until the day when his father disappeared, leaving no trace of himself but an empty wolfskin. The young Volsung was thus cast alone upon the world, finding most hands against him, and bringing no good luck even to his friends. His latest exploit has been the slaying of certain brothers who were forcing their sister to wed against her will. The result has been the slaughter of the woman by her brothers’ clansmen, and his own narrow escape by flight.

His luck on this occasion is even worse than he supposes; for Hunding, by whose hearth he has taken refuge, is clansman to the slain brothers and is bound to avenge them. He tells the Volsung that in the morning, weapons or no weapons, he must fight for his life. Then he orders the woman to bed, and follows her himself, taking his spear with him.

The unlucky stranger, left brooding by the hearth, has nothing to console himself with but an old promise of his father’s that he shall find a weapon to his hand when he most needs one. The last flicker of the dying fire strikes on the golden hilt of the sword that sticks in the tree; but he does not see it; and the embers sink into blackness. Then the woman returns. Hunding is safely asleep: she has drugged him. She tells the story of the one-eyed man who appeared at her forced marriage, and of the sword. She has always felt, she says, that her miseries will end in the arms of the hero who shall succeed in drawing it forth. The stranger, diffident as he is about his luck, has no misgivings as to his strength and destiny. He gives her his affection at once, and abandons himself to the charm of the night and the season; for it is the beginning of Spring. They soon learn from their confidences that she is his stolen twin-sister. He is transported to find that the heroic race of the Volsungs need neither perish nor be corrupted by a lower strain. Hailing the sword by the name of Nothung (or Needed), he plucks it from the tree as her bride-gift, and then, crying “Both bride and sister be of thy brother; and blossom the blood of the Volsungs!” clasps her as the mate the Spring has brought him.

The Second Act

So far, Wotan’s plan seems prospering. In the mountains he calls his war-maiden Brynhild, the child borne to him by the First Mother, and bids her see to it that Hunding shall fall in the approaching combat. But he is reckoning without his consort, Fricka. What will she, the Law, say to the lawless pair who have heaped incest on adultery? A hero may have defied the law, and put his own will in its place; but can a god hold him guiltless, when the whole power of the gods can enforce itself only by law? Fricka, shuddering with horror, outraged in every instinct, comes clamoring for punishment. Wotan pleads the general necessity of encouraging heroism in order to keep up the Valhalla bodyguard; but his remonstrances only bring upon him torrents of reproaches for his own unfaithfulness to the law in roaming through the world and begetting war-maidens, “wolf cubs,” and the like. He is hopelessly beaten in the argument. Fricka is absolutely right when she declares that the ending of the gods began when he brought this wolf-hero into the world; and now, to save their very existence, she pitilessly demands his destruction. Wotan has no power to refuse: it is Fricka’s mechanical force, and not his thought, that really rules the world. He has to recall Brynhild; take back his former instructions; and ordain that Hunding shall slay the Volsung.

But now comes another difficulty. Brynhild is the inner thought and will of Godhead, the aspiration from the high life to the higher that is its divine element, and only becomes separated from it when its resort to kingship and priestcraft for the sake of temporal power has made it false to itself. Hitherto, Brynhild, as Valkyrie or hero chooser, has obeyed Wotan implicitly, taking her work as the holiest and bravest in his kingdom; and now he tells her what he could not tell Fricka — what indeed he could not tell to Brynhild, were she not, as she says, his own will — the whole story of Alberic and of that inspiration about the raising up of a hero. She thoroughly approves of the inspiration; but when the story ends in the assumption that she too must obey Fricka, and help Fricka’s vassal, Hunding, to undo the great work and strike the hero down, she for the first time hesitates to accept his command. In his fury and despair he overawes her by the most terrible threats of his anger; and she submits.

Then comes the Volsung Siegmund, following his sister bride, who has fled into the mountains in a revulsion of horror at having allowed herself to bring her hero to shame. Whilst she is lying exhausted and senseless in his arms, Brynhild appears to him and solemnly warns him that he must presently leave the earth with her. He asks whither he must follow her. To Valhalla, to take his place there among the heroes. He asks, shall he find his father there? Yes. Shall he find a wife there? Yes: he will be waited on by beautiful wishmaidens. Shall he meet his sister there? No. Then, says Siegmund, I will not come with you.

She tries to make him understand that he cannot help himself. Being a hero, he will not be so persuaded: he has his father’s sword, and does not fear Hunding. But when she tells him that she comes from his father, and that the sword of a god will not avail in the hands of a hero, he accepts his fate, but will shape it with his own hand, both for himself and his sister, by slaying her, and then killing himself with the last stroke of the sword. And thereafter he will go to Hell, rather than to Valhalla.

How now can Brynhild, being what she is, choose her side freely in a conflict between this hero and the vassal of Fricka? By instinct she at once throws Wotan’s command to the winds, and bids Siegmund nerve himself for the combat with Hunding, in which she pledges him the protection of her shield. The horn of Hunding is soon heard; and Siegmund’s spirits rise to fighting pitch at once. The two meet; and the Valkyrie’s shield is held before the hero. But when he delivers his sword-stroke at his foe, the weapon shivers on the spear of Wotan, who suddenly appears between them; and the first of the race of heroes falls with the weapon of the Law’s vassal through his breast. Brynhild snatches the fragments of the broken sword, and flies, carrying off the woman with her on her war-horse; and Wotan, in terrible wrath, slays Hunding with a wave of his hand, and starts in pursuit of his disobedient daughter.

The Third Act

On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest. The absent ones soon arrive, galloping through the air with slain heroes, gathered from the battle-field, hanging over their saddles. Only, Brynhild, who comes last, has for her spoil a live woman. When her eight sisters learn that she has defied Wotan, they dare not help her; and Brynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to make an effort to save herself, by reminding her that she bears in her the seed of a hero, and must face everything, endure anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry. Sieglinda, in a transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of the sword and flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly in terror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild.

Here, then, we have the first of the inevitable moments which Wotan did not foresee. Godhead has now established its dominion over the world by a mighty Church, compelling obedience through its ally the Law, with its formidable State organization of force of arms and cunning of brain. It has submitted to this alliance to keep the Plutonic power in check — built it up primarily for the sake of that soul in itself which cares only to make the highest better and the best higher; and now here is that very soul separated from it and working for the destruction of its indispensable ally, the lawgiving State. How is the rebel to be disarmed? Slain it cannot be by Godhead, since it is still Godhead’s own very dearest soul. But hidden, stifled, silenced it must be; or it will wreck the State and leave the Church defenseless. Not until it passes completely away from Godhead, and is reborn as the soul of the hero, can it work anything but the confusion and destruction of the existing order. How is the world to be protected against it in the meantime? Clearly Loki’s help is needed here: it is the Lie that must, on the highest principles, hide the Truth. Let Loki surround this mountain top with the appearance of a consuming fire; and who will dare penetrate to Brynhild? It is true that if any man will walk boldly into that fire, he will discover it at once to be a lie, an illusion, a mirage through which he might carry a sack of gunpowder without being a penny the worse. Therefore let the fire seem so terrible that only the hero, when in the fulness of time he appears upon earth, will venture through it; and the problem is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leave of Brynhild; throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her long warshield; summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of fire surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for ever.

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger generations of our educated classes as it was forty years ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the Church’s teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale’s throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror to all except persons of exceptional force of character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against “blasphemy.”

SIEGFRIED

Sieglinda, when she flies into the forest with the hero’s son unborn in her womb, and the broken pieces of his sword in her hand, finds shelter in the smithy of a dwarf, where she brings forth her child and dies. This dwarf is no other than Mimmy, the brother of Alberic, the same who made for him the magic helmet. His aim in life is to gain possession of the helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself writhed during Alberic’s brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, and indeed much in the ordinary way of the world, for senile avarice and craft to set youth and bravery to work to win empire for it. He knows the pedigree of the child left on his hands, and nurses it to manhood with great care.

His pains are too well rewarded for his comfort. The boy Siegfried, having no god to instruct him in the art of unhappiness, inherits none of his father’s ill luck, and all his father’s hardihood. The fear against which Siegmund set his face like flint, and the woe which he wore down, are unknown to the son. The father was faithful and grateful: the son knows no law but his own humor; detests the ugly dwarf who has nursed him; chafes furiously under his claims for some return for his tender care; and is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the “overman” of Nietzsche. He is enormously strong, full of life and fun, dangerous and destructive to what he dislikes, and affectionate to what he likes; so that it is fortunate that his likes and dislikes are sane and healthy. Altogether an inspiriting young forester, a son of the morning, in whom the heroic race has come out into the sunshine from the clouds of his grandfather’s majestic entanglements with law, and the night of his father’s tragic struggle with it.

The First Act

Mimmy’s smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like the eyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain rises the music already tells us that we are groping in darkness. When it does rise Mimmy is in difficulties. He is trying to make a sword for his nursling, who is now big enough to take the field against Fafnir. Mimmy can make mischievous swords; but it is not with dwarf made weapons that heroic man will hew the way of his own will through religions and governments and plutocracies and all the other devices of the kingdom of the fears of the unheroic. As fast as Mimmy makes swords, Siegfried Bakoonin smashes them, and then takes the poor old swordsmith by the scruff of the neck and chastises him wrathfully. The particular day on which the curtain rises begins with one of these trying domestic incidents. Mimmy has just done his best with a new sword of surpassing excellence. Siegfried returns home in rare spirits with a wild bear, to the extreme terror of the wretched dwarf. When the bear is dismissed, the new sword is produced. It is promptly smashed, as usual, with, also, the usual effects on the temper of Siegfried, who is quite boundless in his criticisms of the smith’s boasted skill, and declares that he would smash the sword’s maker too if he were not too disgusting to be handled.

Mimmy falls back on his stock defence: a string of maudlin reminders of the care with which he has nursed the little boy into manhood. Siegfried replies candidly that the strangest thing about all this care is that instead of making him grateful, it inspires him with a lively desire to wring the dwarf’s neck. Only, he admits that he always comes back to his Mimmy, though he loathes him more than any living thing in the forest. On this admission the dwarf attempts to build a theory of filial instinct. He explains that he is Siegfried’s father, and that this is why Siegfried cannot do without him. But Siegfried has learned from his forest companions, the birds and foxes and wolves, that mothers as well as fathers go to the making of children. Mimmy, on the desperate ground that man is neither bird nor fox, declares that he is Siegfried’s father and mother both. He is promptly denounced as a filthy liar, because the birds and foxes are exactly like their parents, whereas Siegfried, having often watched his own image in the water, can testify that he is no more like Mimmy than a toad is like a trout. Then, to place the conversation on a plane of entire frankness, he throttles Mimmy until he is speechless. When the dwarf recovers, he is so daunted that he tells Siegfried the truth about his birth, and for testimony thereof produces the pieces of the sword that broke upon Wotan’s spear. Siegfried instantly orders him to repair the sword on pain of an unmerciful thrashing, and rushes off into the forest, rejoicing in the discovery that he is no kin of Mimmy’s, and need have no more to do with him when the sword is mended.

Poor Mimmy is now in a worse plight than ever; for he has long ago found that the sword utterly defies his skill: the steel will yield neither to his hammer nor to his furnace. Just then there walks into his cave a Wanderer, in a blue mantle, spear in hand, with one eye concealed by the brim of his wide hat. Mimmy, not by nature hospitable, tries to drive him away; but the Wanderer announces himself as a wise man, who can tell his host, in emergency, what it most concerns him to know. Mimmy, taking this offer in high dudgeon, because it implies that his visitor’s wits are better than his own, offers to tell the wise one something that HE does not know: to wit, the way to the door. The imperturbable Wanderer’s reply is to sit down and challenge the dwarf to a trial of wit. He wagers his head against Mimmy’s that he will answer any three questions the dwarf can put to him.

Now here were Mimmy’s opportunity, had he only the wit to ask what he wants to know, instead of pretending to know everything already. It is above all things needful to him at this moment to find out how that sword can be mended; and there has just dropped in upon him in his need the one person who can tell him. In such circumstances a wise man would hasten to show to his visitor his three deepest ignorances, and ask him to dispel them. The dwarf, being a crafty fool, desiring only to detect ignorance in his guest, asks him for information on the three points on which he is proudest of being thoroughly well instructed himself. His three questions are, Who dwell under the earth? Who dwell on the earth? and Who dwell in the cloudy heights above? The Wanderer, in reply, tells him of the dwarfs and of Alberic; of the earth, and the giants Fasolt and Fafnir; of the gods and of Wotan: himself, as Mimmy now recognizes with awe.

Next, it is Mimmy’s turn to face three questions. What is that race, dearest to Wotan, against which Wotan has nevertheless done his worst? Mimmy can answer that: he knows the Volsungs, the race of heroes born of Wotan’s infidelities to Fricka, and can tell the Wanderer the whole story of the twins and their son Siegfried. Wotan compliments him on his knowledge, and asks further with what sword Siegfried will slay Fafnir? Mimmy can answer that too: he has the whole history of the sword at his fingers’ ends. Wotan hails him as the knowingest of the knowing, and then hurls at him the question he should himself have asked: Who will mend the sword? Mimmy, his head forfeited, confesses with loud lamentations that he cannot answer. The Wanderer reads him an appropriate little lecture on the folly of being too clever to ask what he wants to know, and informs him that a smith to whom fear is unknown will mend Nothung. To this smith he leaves the forfeited head of his host, and wanders off into the forest. Then Mimmy’s nerves give way completely. He shakes like a man in delirium tremens, and has a horrible nightmare, in the supreme convulsion of which Siegfried, returning from the forest, presently finds him.

A curious and amusing conversation follows. Siegfried himself does not know fear, and is impatient to acquire it as an accomplishment. Mimmy is all fear: the world for him is a phantasmagoria of terrors. It is not that he is afraid of being eaten by bears in the forest, or of burning his fingers in the forge fire. A lively objection to being destroyed or maimed does not make a man a coward: on the contrary, it is the beginning of a brave man’s wisdom. But in Mimmy, fear is not the effect of danger: it is natural quality of him which no security can allay. He is like many a poor newspaper editor, who dares not print the truth, however simple, even when it is obvious to himself and all his readers. Not that anything unpleasant would happen to him if he did — not, indeed that he could fail to become a distinguished and influential leader of opinion by fearlessly pursuing such a course, but solely because he lives in a world of imaginary terrors, rooted in a modest and gentlemanly mistrust of his own strength and worth, and consequently of the value of his opinion. Just so is Mimmy afraid of anything that can do him any good, especially of the light and the fresh air. He is also convinced that anybody who is not sufficiently steeped in fear to be constantly on his guard, must perish immediately on his first sally into the world. To preserve Siegfried for the enterprise to which he has destined him he makes a grotesque attempt to teach him fear. He appeals to his experience of the terrors of the forest, of its dark places, of its threatening noises its stealthy ambushes, its sinister flickering lights its heart-tightening ecstasies of dread.

All this has no other effect than to fill Siegfried with wonder and curiosity; for the forest is a place of delight for him. He is as eager to experience Mimmy’s terrors as a schoolboy to feel what an electric shock is like. Then Mimmy has the happy idea of describing Fafnir to him as a likely person to give him an exemplary fright. Siegfried jumps at the idea, and, since Mimmy cannot mend the sword for him, proposes to set to work then and there to mend it for himself. Mimmy shakes his head, and bids him see now how his youthful laziness and frowardness have found him out — how he would not learn the smith’s craft from Professor Mimmy, and therefore does not know how even to begin mending the sword. Siegfried Bakoonin’s retort is simple and crushing. He points out that the net result of Mimmy’s academic skill is that he can neither make a decent sword himself nor even set one to rights when it is damaged. Reckless of the remonstrances of the scandalized professor, he seizes a file, and in a few moments utterly destroys the fragments of the sword by rasping them into a heap of steel filings. Then he puts the filings into a crucible; buries it in the coals; and sets to at the bellows with the shouting exultation of the anarchist who destroys only to clear the ground for creation. When the steel is melted he runs it into a mould; and lo! a sword-blade in the rough. Mimmy, amazed at the success of this violation of all the rules of his craft, hails Siegfried as the mightiest of smiths, professing himself barely worthy to be his cook and scullion; and forthwith proceeds to poison some soup for him so that he may murder him safely when Fafnir is slain. Meanwhile Siegfried forges and tempers and hammers and rivets, uproariously singing the while as nonsensically as the Rhine maidens themselves. Finally he assails the anvil on which Mimmy’s swords have been shattered, and cleaves it with a mighty stroke of the newly forged Nothung.

The Second Act

In the darkest hour before the dawn of that night, we find ourselves before the cave of Fafnir, and there we find Alberic, who can find nothing better to do with himself than to watch the haunt of the dragon, and eat his heart out in vain longing for the gold and the ring. The wretched Fafnir, once an honest giant, can only make himself terrible enough to keep his gold by remaining a venomous reptile. Why he should not become an honest giant again and clear out of his cavern, leaving the gold and the ring and the rest of it for anyone fool enough to take them at such a price, is the first question that would occur to anyone except a civilized man, who would be too accustomed to that sort of mania to be at all surprised at it.

To Alberic in the night comes the Wanderer, whom the dwarf, recognizing his despoiler of old, abuses as a shameless thief, taunting him with the helpless way in which all his boasted power is tied up with the laws and bargains recorded on the heft of his spear, which, says Alberic truly, would crumble like chaff in his hands if he dared use it for his own real ends. Wotan, having already had to kill his own son with it, knows that very well; but it troubles him no more; for he is now at last rising to abhorrence of his own artificial power, and looking to the coming hero, not for its consolidation but its destruction. When Alberic breaks out again with his still unquenched hope of one day destroying the gods and ruling the world through the ring, Wotan is no longer shocked. He tells Alberic that Brother Mime approaches with a hero whom Godhead can neither help nor hinder. Alberic may try his luck against him without disturbance from Valhalla. Perhaps, he suggests, if Alberic warns Fafnir, and offers to deal with the hero for him, Fafnir, may give him the ring. They accordingly wake up the dragon, who condescends to enter into bellowing conversation, but is proof against their proposition, strong in the magic of property. “I have and hold,” he says: “leave me to sleep.” Wotan, with a wise laugh, turns to Alberic. “That shot missed,” he says: “no use abusing me for it. And now let me tell you one thing. All things happen according to their nature; and you can’t alter them.” And so he leaves him Alberic, raging with the sense that his old enemy has been laughing at him, and yet prophetically convinced that the last word will not be with the god, hides himself as the day breaks, and his brother approaches with Siegfried.

Mimmy makes a final attempt to frighten Siegfried by discoursing of the dragon’s terrible jaws, poisonous breath, corrosive spittle, and deadly, stinging tail. Siegfried is not interested in the tail: he wants to know whether the dragon has a heart, being confident of his ability to stick Nothung into it if it exists. Reassured on this point, he drives Mimmy away, and stretches himself under the trees, listening to the morning chatter of the birds. One of them has a great deal to say to him; but he cannot understand it; and after vainly trying to carry on the conversation with a reed which he cuts, he takes to entertaining the bird with tunes on his horn, asking it to send him a loving mate such as all the other creatures of the forest have. His tunes wake up the dragon; and Siegfried makes merry over the grim mate the bird has sent him. Fafnir is highly scandalized by the irreverence of the young Bakoonin. He loses his temper; fights; and is forthwith slain, to his own great astonishment.

In such conflicts one learns to interpret the messages of Nature a little. When Siegfried, stung by the dragon’s vitriolic blood, pops his finger into his mouth and tastes it, he understands what the bird is saying to him, and, instructed by it concerning the treasures within his reach, goes into the cave to secure the gold, the ring and the wishing cap. Then Mimmy returns, and is confronted by Alberic. The two quarrel furiously over the sharing of the booty they have not yet secured, until Siegfried comes from the cave with the ring and the helmet, not much impressed by the heap of gold, and disappointed because he has not yet learned to fear.

He has, however, learnt to read the thoughts of such a creature as poor Mimmy, who, intending to overwhelm him with flattery and fondness, only succeeds in making such a self-revelation of murderous envy that Siegfried smites him with Nothung and slays him, to the keen satisfaction of the hidden Alberic. Caring nothing for the gold, which he leaves to the care of the slain; disappointed in his fancy for learning fear; and longing for a mate, he casts himself wearily down, and again appeals to his friend the bird, who tells him of a woman sleeping on a mountain peak within a fortress of fire that only the fearless can penetrate. Siegfried is up in a moment with all the tumult of spring in his veins, and follows the flight of the bird as it pilots him to the fiery mountain.

The Third Act

To the root of the mountain comes also the Wanderer, now nearing his doom. He calls up the First Mother from the depths of the earth, and begs counsel from her. She bids him confer with the Norns (the Fates). But they are of no use to him: what he seeks is some foreknowledge of the way of the Will in its perpetual strife with these helpless Fates who can only spin the net of circumstance and environment round the feet of men. Why not, says Erda then, go to the daughter I bore you, and take counsel with her? He has to explain how he has cut himself off from her, and set the fires of Loki between the world and her counsel. In that case the First Mother cannot help him: such a separation is part of the bewilderment that is ever the first outcome of her eternal work of thrusting the life energy of the world to higher and higher organization. She can show him no way of escape from the destruction he foresees. Then from the innermost of him breaks the confession that he rejoices in his doom, and now himself exults in passing away with all his ordinances and alliances, with the spear-sceptre which he has only wielded on condition of slaying his dearest children with it, with the kingdom, the power and the glory which will never again boast themselves as “world without end.” And so he dismisses Erda to her sleep in the heart of the earth as the forest bird draws near, piloting the slain son’s son to his goal.

Now it is an excellent thing to triumph in the victory of the new order and the passing away of the old; but if you happen to be part of the old order yourself, you must none the less fight for your life. It seems hardly possible that the British army at the battle of Waterloo did not include at least one Englishman intelligent enough to hope, for the sake of his country and humanity, that Napoleon might defeat the allied sovereigns; but such an Englishman would kill a French cuirassier rather than be killed by him just as energetically as the silliest soldier, ever encouraged by people who ought to know better, to call his ignorance, ferocity and folly, patriotism and duty. Outworn life may have become mere error; but it still claims the right to die a natural death, and will raise its hand against the millennium itself in self-defence if it tries to come by the short cut of murder. Wotan finds this out when he comes face to face with Siegfried, who is brought to a standstill at the foot of the mountain by the disappearance of the bird. Meeting the Wanderer there, he asks him the way to the mountain where a woman sleeps surrounded by fire. The Wanderer questions him, and extracts his story from him, breaking into fatherly delight when Siegfried, describing the mending of the sword, remarks that all he knew about the business was that the broken bits of Nothung would be of no use to him unless he made a new sword out of them right over again from the beginning. But the Wanderer’s interest is by no means reciprocated by Siegfried. His majesty and elderly dignity are thrown away on the young anarchist, who, unwilling to waste time talking, bluntly bids him either show him the way to the mountain, or else “shut his muzzle.” Wotan is a little hurt. “Patience, my lad,” he says: “if you were an old man I should treat you with respect.” “That would be a precious notion,” says Siegfried. “All my life long I was bothered and hampered by an old man until I swept him out of my way. I will sweep you in the same fashion if you don’t let me pass. Why do you wear such a big hat; and what has happened to one of your eyes? Was it knocked out by somebody whose way you obstructed?” To which Wotan replies allegorically that the eye that is gone — the eye that his marriage with Fricka cost him — is now looking at him out of Siegfried’s head. At this, Siegfried gives up the Wanderer as a lunatic, and renews his threats of personal violence. Then Wotan throws off the mask of the Wanderer; uplifts the world-governing spear; and puts forth all his divine awe and grandeur as the guardian of the mountain, round the crest of which the fires of Loki now break into a red background for the majesty of the god. But all this is lost on Siegfried Bakoonin. “Aha!” he cries, as the spear is levelled against his breast: “I have found my father’s foe”; and the spear falls in two pieces under the stroke of Nothung. “Up then,” says Wotan: “I cannot withhold you,” and disappears forever from the eye of man. The fires roll down the mountain; but Siegfried goes at them as exultantly as he went at the forging of the sword or the heart of the dragon, and shoulders his way through them, joyously sounding his horn to the accompaniment of their crackling and seething. And never a hair of his head is singed. Those frightful flames which have scared mankind for centuries from the Truth, have not heat enough in them to make a child shut its eyes. They are mere phantasmagoria, highly creditable to Loki’s imaginative stage-management; but nothing ever has perished or will perish eternally in them except the Churches which have been so poor and faithless as to trade for their power on the lies of a romancer.

BACK TO OPERA AGAIN

And now, O Nibelungen Spectator, pluck up; for all allegories come to an end somewhere; and the hour of your release from these explanations is at hand. The rest of what you are going to see is opera, and nothing but opera. Before many bars have been played, Siegfried and the wakened Brynhild, newly become tenor and soprano, will sing a concerted cadenza; plunge on from that to a magnificent love duet; and end with a precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by the impetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act of Don Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically contrapuntal theme, points d’orgue, and a high C for the soprano all complete.

What is more, the work which follows, entitled Night Falls On The Gods, is a thorough grand opera. In it you shall see what you have so far missed, the opera chorus in full parade on the stage, not presuming to interfere with the prima donna as she sings her death song over the footlights. Nay, that chorus will have its own chance when it first appears, with a good roaring strain in C major, not, after all, so very different from, or at all less absurd than the choruses of courtiers in La Favorita or “Per te immenso giubilo” in Lucia. The harmony is no doubt a little developed, Wagner augmenting his fifths with a G sharp where Donizetti would have put his fingers in his ears and screamed for G natural. But it is an opera chorus all the same; and along with it we have theatrical grandiosities that recall Meyerbeer and Verdi: pezzi d’insieme for all the principals in a row, vengeful conjurations for trios of them, romantic death song for the tenor: in short, all manner of operatic conventions.

Now it is probable that some of us will have been so talked by the more superstitious Bayreuth pilgrims into regarding Die Gotterdammerung as the mighty climax to a mighty epic, more Wagnerian than all the other three sections put together, as not to dare notice this startling atavism, especially if we find the trio-conjurations more exhilarating than the metaphysical discourses of Wotan in the three true music dramas of The Ring. There is, however, no real atavism involved. Die Gotterdammerung, though the last of The Ring dramas in order of performance, was the first in order of conception and was indeed the root from which all the others sprang.

The history of the matter is as follows. All Wagner’s works prior to The Ring are operas. The last of them, Lohengrin, is perhaps the best known of modern operas. As performed in its entirety at Bayreuth, it is even more operatic than it appears at Covent Garden, because it happens that its most old-fashioned features, notably some of the big set concerted pieces for principals and chorus (pezzi d’insieme as I have called them above), are harder to perform than the more modern and characteristically Wagnerian sections, and for that reason were cut out in preparing the abbreviated fashionable version. Thus Lohengrin came upon the ordinary operatic stage as a more advanced departure from current operatic models than its composer had made it. Still, it is unmistakably an opera, with chorus, concerted pieces, grand finales, and a heroine who, if she does not sing florid variations with flute obbligato, is none the less a very perceptible prima donna. In everything but musical technique the change from Lohengrin to The Rhine Gold is quite revolutionary.

The explanation is that Night Falls On The Gods came in between them, although its music was not finished until twenty years after that of The Rhine Gold, and thus belongs to a later and more masterful phase of Wagner’s harmonic style. It first came into Wagner’s head as an opera to be entitled Siegfried’s Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which offered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedy as they did to Ibsen. Ibsen’s Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfried’s Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and Siegfried.

SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT

The philosophically fertile element in the original project of Siegfried’s Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and order which accompany them. Such a character appears extraordinarily fascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-ridden generations, however little they may understand him. The world has always delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punch and Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime clown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been decorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is sometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying the joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the immortal soul which was at that time conceded even to the humblest characters in fiction, and to accept mischievousness, cruelty, and utter incapacity for sympathy as the inevitable consequence of his magnificent bodily and mental health.

In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for evil — one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and literally mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to superhuman guidance, or at least to some reasoned system of morals. When it became apparent to the cleverest of them that no such superhuman guidance existed, and that their secularist systems had all the fictitiousness of “revelation” without its poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the good that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well as all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if progress were a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining on his destructive ones. It was under the influence of these ideas that we began to hear about the joy of life where we had formerly heard about the grace of God or the Age of Reason, and that the boldest spirits began to raise the question whether churches and laws and the like were not doing a great deal more harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in revelation was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of thought led the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man’s private judgment was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the Church. This was called Protestantism; and though the Protestants were not strong enough for their creed, and soon set up a Church of their own, yet the movement, on the whole, has justified the direction it took. Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished; and if every man’s private judgment is still to be justified as the most trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God) Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism. Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable new creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory is its reliance on the progress already achieved by “Man.” There is no such thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude of men, some of them great rascals, some of them greet statesmen, others both, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs, but not of comprehending social organization, or grappling with the problems created by their association in enormous numbers. If “Man” means this majority, then “Man” has made no progress: he has, on the contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by “indirect taxation.” Such people, like Wagner’s giants; must be governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be secured by deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on their imaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities. The government is of course established by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism. No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy; in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will persist until Wotan’s inspiration comes to our governors, and they see that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate, before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. [*]

* The necessity for breeding the governing class from a

selected stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats,

however erroneous their methods of selection. We have

changed our system from Aristocracy to Democracy without

considering that we were at the same time changing, as

regards our governing class, from Selection to Promiscuity.

Those who have taken a practical part in modern politics

best know how farcical the result is.

The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessary for the good of the race. This conception, already incipient in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain that if that master happened to be a German, he should take delight in describing his hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond measure exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for metaphysics.

PANACEA QUACKERY, OTHERWISE IDEALISM

Unfortunately, human enlightenment does not progress by nicer and nicer adjustments, but by violent corrective reactions which invariably send us clean over our saddle and would bring us to the ground on the other side if the next reaction did not send us back again with equally excessive zeal. Ecclesiasticism and Constitutionalism send us one way, Protestantism and Anarchism the other; Order rescues us from confusion and lands us in Tyranny; Liberty then saves the situation and is presently found to be as great a nuisance as Despotism. A scientifically balanced application of these forces, theoretically possible, is practically incompatible with human passion. Besides, we have the same weakness in morals as in medicine: we cannot be cured of running after panaceas, or, as they are called in the sphere of morals, ideals. One generation sets up duty, renunciation, self-sacrifice as a panacea. The next generation, especially the women, wake up at the age of forty or thereabouts to the fact that their lives have been wasted in the worship of this ideal, and, what is still more aggravating, that the elders who imposed it on them did so in a fit of satiety with their own experiments in the other direction. Then that defrauded generation foams at the mouth at the very mention of duty, and sets up the alternative panacea of love, their deprivation of which seems to them to have been the most cruel and mischievous feature of their slavery to duty. It is useless to warn them that this reaction, if prescribed as a panacea, will prove as great a failure as all the other reactions have done; for they do not recognize its identity with any reaction that ever occurred before. Take for instance the hackneyed historic example of the austerity of the Commonwealth being followed by the licence of the Restoration. You cannot persuade any moral enthusiast to accept this as a pure oscillation from action to reaction. If he is a Puritan he looks upon the Restoration as a national disaster: if he is an artist he regards it as the salvation of the country from gloom, devil worship and starvation of the affections. The Puritan is ready to try the Commonwealth again with a few modern improvements: the Amateur is equally ready to try the Restoration with modern enlightenments. And so for the present we must be content to proceed by reactions, hoping that each will establish some permanently practical and beneficial reform or moral habit that will survive the correction of its excesses by the next reaction.

DRAMATIC ORIGIN OF WOTAN

We can now see how a single drama in which Wotan does not appear, and of which Siegfried is the hero, expanded itself into a great fourfold drama of which Wotan is the hero. You cannot dramatize a reaction by personifying the reacting force only, any more than Archimedes could lift the world without a fulcrum for his lever. You must also personify the established power against which the new force is reacting; and in the conflict between them you get your drama, conflict being the essential ingredient in all drama. Siegfried, as the hero of Die Gotterdammerung, is only the primo tenore robusto of an opera book, deferring his death, after he has been stabbed in the last act, to sing rapturous love strains to the heroine exactly like Edgardo in Donizetti’s Lucia. In order to make him intelligible in the wider significance which his joyous, fearless, conscienceless heroism soon assumed in Wagner’s imagination, it was necessary to provide him with a much vaster dramatic antagonist than the operatic villain Hagen. Hence Wagner had to create Wotan as the anvil for Siegfried’s hammer; and since there was no room for Wotan in the original opera book, Wagner had to work back to a preliminary drama reaching primarily to the very beginnings of human society. And since, on this world-embracing scale, it was clear that Siegfried must come into conflict with many baser and stupider forces than those lofty ones of supernatural religion and political constitutionalism typified by Wotan and his wife Fricka, these minor antagonists had to be dramatized also in the persons of Alberic, Mime, Fafnir, Loki, and the rest. None of these appear in Night Falls On The Gods save Alberic, whose weird dream-colloquy with Hagen, effective as it is, is as purely theatrical as the scene of the Ghost in Hamlet, or the statue in Don Giovanni. Cut the conference of the Norns and the visit of Valtrauta to Brynhild out of Night Falls On The Gods, and the drama remains coherent and complete without them. Retain them, and the play becomes connected by conversational references with the three music dramas; but the connection establishes no philosophic coherence, no real identity between the operatic Brynhild of the Gibichung episode (presently to be related) and the daughter of Wotan and the First Mother.

THE LOVE PANACEA

We shall now find that at the point where The Ring changes from music drama into opera, it also ceases to be philosophic, and becomes didactic. The philosophic part is a dramatic symbol of the world as Wagner observed it. In the didactic part the philosophy degenerates into the prescription of a romantic nostrum for all human ills. Wagner, only mortal after all, succumbed to the panacea mania when his philosophy was exhausted, like any of the rest of us.

The panacea is by no means an original one. Wagner was anticipated in the year 1819 by a young country gentleman from Sussex named Shelley, in a work of extraordinary artistic power and splendor. Prometheus Unbound is an English attempt at a Ring; and when it is taken into account that the author was only 27 whereas Wagner was 40 when he completed the poem of The Ring, our vulgar patriotism may find an envious satisfaction in insisting upon the comparison. Both works set forth the same conflict between humanity and its gods and governments, issuing in the redemption of man from their tyranny by the growth of his will into perfect strength and self-confidence; and both finish by a lapse into panacea-mongering didacticism by the holding up of Love as the remedy for all evils and the solvent of all social difficulties.

The differences between Prometheus Unbound and The Ring are as interesting as the likenesses. Shelley, caught in the pugnacity of his youth and the first impetuosity of his prodigious artistic power by the first fierce attack of the New Reformation, gave no quarter to the antagonist of his hero. His Wotan, whom he calls Jupiter, is the almighty fiend into whom the Englishman’s God had degenerated during two centuries of ignorant Bible worship and shameless commercialism. He is Alberic, Fafnir Loki and the ambitious side of Wotan all rolled into one melodramatic demon who is finally torn from his throne and hurled shrieking into the abyss by a spirit representing that conception of Eternal Law which has been replaced since by the conception of Evolution. Wagner, an older, more experienced man than the Shelley of 1819, understood Wotan and pardoned him, separating him tenderly from all the compromising alliances to which Shelley fiercely held him; making the truth and heroism which overthrow him the children of his inmost heart; and representing him as finally acquiescing in and working for his own supersession and annihilation. Shelley, in his later works, is seen progressing towards the same tolerance, justice, and humility of spirit, as he advanced towards the middle age he never reached. But there is no progress from Shelley to Wagner as regards the panacea, except that in Wagner there is a certain shadow of night and death come on it: nay, even a clear opinion that the supreme good of love is that it so completely satisfies the desire for life, that after it the Will to Live ceases to trouble us, and we are at last content to achieve the highest happiness of death.

This reduction of the panacea to absurdity was not forced upon Shelley, because the love which acts as a universal solvent in his Prometheus Unbound is a sentiment of affectionate benevolence which has nothing to do with sexual passion. It might, and in fact does exist in the absence of any sexual interest whatever. The words mercy and kindness connote it less ambiguously than the word love. But Wagner sought always for some point of contact between his ideas and the physical senses, so that people might not only think or imagine them in the eighteenth century fashion, but see them on the stage, hear them from the orchestra, and feel them through the infection of passionate emotion. Dr. Johnson kicking the stone to confute Berkeley is not more bent on common-sense concreteness than Wagner: on all occasions he insists on the need for sensuous apprehension to give reality to abstract comprehension, maintaining, in fact, that reality has no other meaning. Now he could apply this process to poetic love only by following it back to its alleged origin in sexual passion, the emotional phenomena of which he has expressed in music with a frankness and forcible naturalism which would possibly have scandalized Shelley. The love duet in the first act of The Valkyries is brought to a point at which the conventions of our society demand the precipitate fall of the curtain; whilst the prelude to Tristan and Isolde is such an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers, that it is questionable whether the great popularity of this piece at our orchestral concerts really means that our audiences are entirely catholic in their respect for life in all its beneficently creative functions, or whether they simply enjoy the music without understanding it.

But however offensive and inhuman may be the superstition which brands such exaltations of natural passion as shameful and indecorous, there is at least as much common sense in disparaging love as in setting it up as a panacea. Even the mercy and loving-kindness of Shelley do not hold good as a universal law of conduct: Shelley himself makes extremely short work of Jupiter, just as Siegfried does of Fafnir, Mime, and Wotan; and the fact that Prometheus is saved from doing the destructive part of his work by the intervention of that very nebulous personification of Eternity called Demogorgon, does not in the least save the situation, because, flatly, there is no such person as Demogorgon, and if Prometheus does not pull down Jupiter himself, no one else will. It would be exasperating, if it were not so funny, to see these poets leading their heroes through blood and destruction to the conclusion that, as Browning’s David puts it (David of all people!), “All’s Love; yet all’s Law.”

Certainly it is clear enough that such love as that implied by Siegfried’s first taste of fear as he cuts through the mailed coat of the sleeping figure on the mountain, and discovers that it is a woman; by her fierce revolt against being touched by him when his terror gives way to ardor; by his manly transports of victory; and by the womanly mixture of rapture and horror with which she abandons herself to the passion which has seized on them both, is an experience which it is much better, like the vast majority of us, never to have passed through, than to allow it to play more than a recreative holiday part in our lives. It did not play a very large part in Wagner’s own laborious life, and does not occupy more than two scenes of The Ring. Tristan and Isolde, wholly devoted to it, is a poem of destruction and death. The Mastersingers, a work full of health, fun and happiness, contains not a single bar of love music that can be described as passionate: the hero of it is a widower who cobbles shoes, writes verses, and contents himself with looking on at the sweetheartings of his customers. Parsifal makes an end of it altogether. The truth is that the love panacea in Night Falls On The Gods and in the last act of Siegfried is a survival of the first crude operatic conception of the story, modified by an anticipation of Wagner’s later, though not latest, conception of love as the fulfiller of our Will to Live and consequently our reconciler to night and death.

NOT LOVE, BUT LIFE

The only faith which any reasonable disciple can gain from The Ring is not in love, but in life itself as a tireless power which is continually driving onward and upward — not, please observe, being beckoned or drawn by Das Ewig Weibliche or any other external sentimentality, but growing from within, by its own inexplicable energy, into ever higher and higher forms of organization, the strengths and the needs of which are continually superseding the institutions which were made to fit our former requirements. When your Bakoonins call out for the demolition of all these venerable institutions, there is no need to fly into a panic and lock them up in prison whilst your parliament is bit by bit doing exactly what they advised you to do. When your Siegfrieds melt down the old weapons into new ones, and with disrespectful words chop in twain the antiquated constable’s staves in the hands of their elders, the end of the world is no nearer than it was before. If human nature, which is the highest organization of life reached on this planet, is really degenerating, then human society will decay; and no panic-begotten penal measures can possibly save it: we must, like Prometheus, set to work to make new men instead of vainly torturing old ones. On the other hand, if the energy of life is still carrying human nature to higher and higher levels, then the more young people shock their elders and deride and discard their pet institutions the better for the hopes of the world, since the apparent growth of anarchy is only the measure of the rate of improvement. History, as far as we are capable of history (which is not saying much as yet), shows that all changes from crudity of social organization to complexity, and from mechanical agencies in government to living ones, seem anarchic at first sight. No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure. Nevertheless, the most elaborately housed beings today are born not only without houses on their backs but without even fur or feathers to clothe them.

ANARCHISM NO PANACEA

One word of warning to those who may find themselves attracted by Siegfried’s Anarchism, or, if they prefer a term with more respectable associations, his neo-Protestantism. Anarchism, as a panacea, is just as hopeless as any other panacea, and will still be so even if we breed a race of perfectly benevolent men. It is true that in the sphere of thought, Anarchism is an inevitable condition of progressive evolution. A nation without Freethinkers — that is, without intellectual Anarchists — will share the fate of China. It is also true that our criminal law, based on a conception of crime and punishment which is nothing but our vindictiveness and cruelty in a virtuous disguise, is an unmitigated and abominable nuisance, bound to be beaten out of us finally by the mere weight of our experience of its evil and uselessness. But it will not be replaced by anarchy. Applied to the industrial or political machinery of modern society, anarchy must always reduce itself speedily to absurdity. Even the modified form of anarchy on which modern civilization is based: that is, the abandonment of industry, in the name of individual liberty, to the upshot of competition for personal gain between private capitalists, is a disastrous failure, and is, by the mere necessities of the case, giving way to ordered Socialism. For the economic rationale of this, I must refer disciples of Siegfried to a tract from my hand published by the Fabian Society and entitled The Impossibilities of Anarchism, which explains why, owing to the physical constitution of our globe, society cannot effectively organize the production of its food, clothes and housing, nor distribute them fairly and economically on any anarchic plan: nay, that without concerting our social action to a much higher degree than we do at present we can never get rid of the wasteful and iniquitous welter of a little riches and a deal of poverty which current political humbug calls our prosperity and civilization. Liberty is an excellent thing; but it cannot begin until society has paid its daily debt to Nature by first earning its living. There is no liberty before that except the liberty to live at somebody else’s expense, a liberty much sought after nowadays, since it is the criterion of gentility, but not wholesome from the point of view of the common weal.

SIEGFRIED CONCLUDED

In returning now to the adventures of Siegfried there is little more to be described except the finale of an opera. Siegfried, having passed unharmed through the fire, wakes Brynhild and goes through all the fancies and ecstasies of love at first sight in a duet which ends with an apostrophe to “leuchtende Liebe, lachender Tod!”, which has been romantically translated into “Love that illumines, laughing at Death,” whereas it really identifies enlightening love and laughing death as involving each other so closely as to be usually one and the same thing.

NIGHT FALLS ON THE GODS

PROLOGUE

Die Gottrerdammerung begins with an elaborate prologue. The three Norns sit in the night on Brynhild’s mountain top spinning their thread of destiny, and telling the story of Wotan’s sacrifice of his eye, and of his breaking off a bough from the World Ash to make a heft for his spear, also how the tree withered after suffering that violence. They have also some fresher news to discuss. Wotan, on the breaking of his spear by Siegfried, has called all his heroes to cut down the withered World Ash and stack its faggots in a mighty pyre about Valhalla. Then, with his broken spear in his hand, he has seated himself in state in the great hall, with the Gods and Heroes assembled about him as if in council, solemnly waiting for the end. All this belongs to the old legendary materials with which Wagner began The Ring.

The tale is broken by the thread snapping in the hands of the third Norn; for the hour has arrived when man has taken his destiny in his own hands to shape it for himself, and no longer bows to circumstance, environment, necessity (which he now freely wills), and all the rest of the inevitables. So the Norns recognize that the world has no further use for them, and sink into the earth to return to the First Mother. Then the day dawns; and Siegfried and Brynhild come, and have another duet. He gives her his ring; and she gives him her horse. Away then he goes in search of more adventures; and she watches him from her crag until he disappears. The curtain falls; but we can still hear the trolling of his horn, and the merry clatter of his horse’s shoes trotting gaily down the valley. The sound is lost in the grander rhythm of the Rhine as he reaches its banks. We hear again an echo of the lament of the Rhine maidens for the ravished gold; and then, finally, a new strain, which does not surge like the mighty flood of the river, but has an unmistakable tramp of hardy men and a strong land flavor about it. And on this the opera curtain at last goes up — for please remember that all that has gone before is only the overture.

The First Act

We now understand the new tramping strain. We are in the Rhineside hall of the Gibichungs, in the presence of King Gunther, his sister Gutrune, and Gunther’s grim half brother Hagen, the villain of the piece. Gunther is a fool, and has for Hagen’s intelligence the respect a fool always has for the brains of a scoundrel. Feebly fishing for compliments, he appeals to Hagen to pronounce him a fine fellow and a glory to the race of Gibich. Hagen declares that it is impossible to contemplate him without envy, but thinks it a pity that he has not yet found a wife glorious enough for him. Gunther doubts whether so extraordinary a person can possibly exist. Hagen then tells him of Brynhild and her rampart of fire; also of Siegfried. Gunther takes this rather in bad part, since not only is he afraid of the fire, but Siegfried, according to Hagen, is not, and will therefore achieve this desirable match himself. But Hagen points out that since Siegfried is riding about in quest of adventures, he will certainly pay an early visit to the renowned chief of the Gibichungs. They can then give him a philtre which will make him fall in love with Gutrune and forget every other woman he has yet seen.

Gunther is transported with admiration of Hagen’s cunning when he takes in this plan; and he has hardly assented to it when Siegfried, with operatic opportuneness, drops in just as Hagen expected, and is duly drugged into the heartiest love for Gutrune and total oblivion of Brynhild and his own past. When Gunther declares his longing for the bride who lies inaccessible within a palisade of flame, Siegfried at once offers to undertake the adventure for him. Hagen then explains to both of them that Siegfried can, after braving the fire, appear to Brynhild in the semblance of Gunther through the magic of the wishing cap (or Tarnhelm, as it is called throughout The Ring), the use of which Siegfried now learns for the first time. It is of course part of the bargain that Gunther shall give his sister to Siegfried in marriage. On that they swear blood-brotherhood; and at this opportunity the old operatic leaven breaks out amusingly in Wagner. With tremendous exordium of brass, the tenor and baritone go at it with a will, showing off the power of their voices, following each other in canonic imitation, singing together in thirds and sixths, and finishing with a lurid unison, quite in the manner of Ruy Gomez and Ernani, or Othello and Iago. Then without further ado Siegfried departs on his expedition, taking Gunther with him to the foot of the mountain, and leaving Hagen to guard the hall and sing a very fine solo which has often figured in the programs of the Richter concerts, explaining that his interest in the affair is that Siegfried will bring back the Ring, and that he, Hagen, will presently contrive to possess himself of that Ring and become Plutonic master of the world.

And now it will be asked how does Hagen know all about the Plutonic empire; and why was he able to tell Gunther about Brynhild and Siegfried, and to explain to Siegfried the trick of the Tarnhelm. The explanation is that though Hagen’s mother was the mother of Gunther, his father was not the illustrious Gibich, but no less a person than our old friend Alberic, who, like Wotan, has begotten a son to do for him what he cannot do for himself.

In the above incidents, those gentle moralizers who find the serious philosophy of the music dramas too terrifying for them, may allegorize pleasingly on the philtre as the maddening chalice of passion which, once tasted, causes the respectable man to forget his lawfully wedded wife and plunge into adventures which eventually lead him headlong to destruction.

We now come upon a last relic of the tragedy of Wotan. Returning to Brynhild’s mountain, we find her visited by her sister Valkyrie Valtrauta, who has witnessed Wotan’s solemn preparations with terror. She repeats to Brynhild the account already given by the Norns. Clinging in anguish to Wotan’s knees, she has heard him mutter that were the ring returned to the daughters of the deep Rhine, both Gods and world would be redeemed from that stage curse off Alberic’s in The Rhine Gold. On this she has rushed on her warhorse through the air to beg Brynhild to give the Rhine back its ring. But this is asking Woman to give up love for the sake of Church and State. She declares that she will see them both perish first; and Valtrauta returns to Valhalla in despair. Whilst Brynhild is watching the course of the black thundercloud that marks her sister’s flight, the fires of Loki again flame high round the mountain; and the horn of Siegfried is heard as he makes his way through them. But the man who now appears wears the Tarnhelm: his voice is a strange voice: his figure is the unknown one of the king of the Gibichungs. He tears the ring from her finger, and, claiming her as his wife, drives her into the cave without pity for her agony of horror, and sets Nothung between them in token of his loyalty to the friend he is impersonating. No explanation of this highway robbery of the ring is offered. Clearly, this Siegfried is not the Siegfried of the previous drama.

The Second Act

In the second act we return to the hall of Gibich, where Hagen, in the last hours of that night, still sits, his spear in his hand, and his shield beside him. At his knees crouches a dwarfish spectre, his father Alberic, still full of his old grievances against Wotan, and urging his son in his dreams to win back the ring for him. This Hagen swears to do; and as the apparition of his father vanishes, the sun rises and Siegfried suddenly comes from the river bank tucking into his belt the Tarnhelm, which has transported him from the mountain like the enchanted carpet of the Arabian tales. He describes his adventures to Gutrune until Gunther’s boat is seen approaching, when Hagen seizes a cowhorn and calls the tribesmen to welcome their chief and his bride. It is most exhilarating, this colloquy with the startled and hastily armed clan, ending with a thundering chorus, the drums marking the time with mighty pulses from dominant to tonic, much as Rossini would have made them do if he had been a pupil of Beethoven’s.

A terrible scene follows. Gunther leads his captive bride straight into the presence of Siegfried, whom she claims as her husband by the ring, which she is astonished to see on his finger: Gunther, as she supposes, having torn it from her the night before. Turning on Gunther, she says “Since you took that ring from me, and married me with it, tell him of your right to it; and make him give it back to you.” Gunther stammers, “The ring! I gave him no ring — er — do you know him?” The rejoinder is obvious. “Then where are you hiding the ring that you had from me?” Gunther’s confusion enlightens her; and she calls Siegfried trickster and thief to his face. In vain he declares that he got the ring from no woman, but from a dragon whom he slew; for he is manifestly puzzled; and she, seizing her opportunity, accuses him before the clan of having played Gunther false with her.

Hereupon we have another grandiose operatic oath, Siegfried attesting his innocence on Hagen’s spear, and Brynhild rushing to the footlights and thrusting him aside to attest his guilt, whilst the clansmen call upon their gods to send down lightnings and silence the perjured. The gods do not respond; and Siegfried, after whispering to Gunther that the Tarnhelm seems to have been only half effectual after all, laughs his way out of the general embarrassment and goes off merrily to prepare for his wedding, with his arm round Gutrune’s waist, followed by the clan. Gunther, Hagen and Brynhild are left together to plot operatic vengeance. Brynhild, it appears, has enchanted Siegfried in such a fashion that no weapon can hurt him. She has, however, omitted to protect his back, since it is impossible that he should ever turn that to a foe. They agree accordingly that on the morrow a great hunt shall take place, at which Hagen shall thrust his spear into the hero’s vulnerable back. The blame is to be laid on the tusk of a wild boar. Gunther, being a fool, is remorseful about his oath of blood-brotherhood and about his sister’s bereavement, without having the strength of mind to prevent the murder. The three burst into a herculean trio, similar in conception to that of the three conspirators in Un Ballo in Maschera; and the act concludes with a joyous strain heralding the appearance of Siegfried’s wedding procession, with strewing of flowers, sacrificing to the gods, and carrying bride and bridegroom in triumph.

It will be seen that in this act we have lost all connection with the earlier drama. Brynhild is not only not the Brynhild of The Valkyries, she is the Hiordis of Ibsen, a majestically savage woman, in whom jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen’s aim in The Vikings was purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also philosophically symbolic. Wagner’s aim in Siegfried’s Death was equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the dramas of which Siegfried’s antagonist Wotan is the hero, likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists therefore produce practically the same version of Brynhild. Thus on the second evening of The Ring we see Brynhild in the character of the truth-divining instinct in religion, cast into an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires of hell lest she should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance with government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a malicious lie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting a treacherous murder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original draft of Siegfried’s Death, the incongruity is carried still further by the conclusion, at which the dead Brynhild, restored to her godhead by Wotan, and again a Valkyrie, carries the slain Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happily ever after with its pious heroes.

As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second act and the next, with the air of a man of the world. “Their tantrums,” he says, “are soon over.” Such speeches do not belong to the novice of the preceding drama, but to the original Siegfried’s Tod, with its leading characters sketched on the ordinary romantic lines from the old Sagas, and not yet reminted as the original creations of Wagner’s genius whose acquaintance we have made on the two previous evenings. The very title “Siegfried’s Death” survives as a strong theatrical point in the following passage. Gunther, in his rage and despair, cries, “Save me, Hagen: save my honor and thy mother’s who bore us both.” “Nothing can save thee,” replies Hagen: “neither brain nor hand, but SIEGFRIED’S DEATH.” And Gunther echoes with a shudder, “SIEGFRIED’S DEATH!”

A WAGNERIAN NEWSPAPER CONTROVERSY

The devotion which Wagner’s work inspires has been illustrated lately in a public correspondence on this very point. A writer in The Daily Telegraph having commented on the falsehood uttered by Brynhild in accusing Siegfried of having betrayed Gunther with her, a correspondence in defence of the beloved heroine was opened in The Daily Chronicle. The imputation of falsehood to Brynhild was strongly resented and combated, in spite of the unanswerable evidence of the text. It was contended that Brynhild’s statement must be taken as establishing the fact that she actually was ravished by somebody whom she believed to be Siegfried, and that since this somebody cannot have been Siegfried, he being as incapable of treachery to Gunther as she of falsehood, it must have been Gunther himself after a second exchange of personalities not mentioned in the text. The reply to this — if so obviously desperate a hypothesis needs a reply — is that the text is perfectly explicit as to Siegfried, disguised as Gunther, passing the night with Brynhild with Nothung dividing them, and in the morning bringing her down the mountain THROUGH THE FIRE (an impassable obstacle to Gunther) and there transporting himself in a single breath, by the Tarnhelm’s magic, back to the hall of the Gibichungs, leaving the real Gunther to bring Brynhild down the river after him. One controversialist actually pleaded for the expedition occupying two nights, on the second of which the alleged outrage might have taken place. But the time is accounted for to the last minute: it all takes place during the single night watch of Hagen. There is no possible way out of the plain fact that Brynhild’s accusation is to her own knowledge false; and the impossible ways just cited are only interesting as examples of the fanatical worship which Wagner and his creations have been able to inspire in minds of exceptional power and culture.

More plausible was the line taken by those who admitted the falsehood. Their contention was that when Wotan deprived Brynhild of her Godhead, he also deprived her of her former high moral attributes; so that Siegfried’s kiss awakened an ordinary mortal jealous woman. But a goddess can become mortal and jealous without plunging at once into perjury and murder. Besides, this explanation involves the sacrifice of the whole significance of the allegory, and the reduction of The Ring to the plane of a child’s conception of The Sleeping Beauty. Whoever does not understand that, in terms of The Ring philosophy, a change from godhead to humanity is a step higher and not a degradation, misses the whole point of The Ring. It is precisely because the truthfulness of Brynhild is proof against Wotan’s spells that he has to contrive the fire palisade with Loki, to protect the fictions and conventions of Valhalla against her.

The only tolerable view is the one supported by the known history of The Ring, and also, for musicians of sufficiently fine judgment, by the evidence of the scores; of which more anon. As a matter of fact Wagner began, as I have said, with Siegfried’s Death. Then, wanting to develop the idea of Siegfried as neo-Protestant, he went on to The Young Siegfried. As a Protestant cannot be dramatically projected without a pontifical antagonist. The Young Siegfried led to The Valkyries, and that again to its preface The Rhine Gold (the preface is always written after the book is finished). Finally, of course, the whole was revised. The revision, if carried out strictly, would have involved the cutting out of Siegfried’s Death, now become inconsistent and superfluous; and that would have involved, in turn, the facing of the fact that The Ring was no longer a Niblung epic, and really demanded modern costumes, tall hats for Tarnhelms, factories for Nibelheims, villas for Valhallas, and so on — in short, a complete confession of the extent to which the old Niblung epic had become the merest pretext and name directory in the course of Wagner’s travail. But, as Wagner’s most eminent English interpreter once put it to me at Bayreuth between the acts of Night Falls On The Gods, the master wanted to “Lohengrinize” again after his long abstention from opera; and Siegfried’s Death (first sketched in 1848, the year before the rising in Dresden and the subsequent events which so deepened Wagner’s sense of life and the seriousness of art) gave him exactly the libretto he required for that outbreak of the old operatic Adam in him. So he changed it into Die Gotterdammerung, retaining the traditional plot of murder and jealousy, and with it, necessarily, his original second act, in spite of the incongruity of its Siegfried and Brynhild with the Siegfried and Brynhild of the allegory. As to the legendary matter about the world-ash and the destruction of Valhalla by Loki, it fitted in well enough; for though, allegorically, the blow by which Siegfried breaks the god’s spear is the end of Wotan and of Valhalla, those who do not see the allegory, and take the story literally, like children, are sure to ask what becomes of Wotan after Siegfried gets past him up the mountain; and to this question the old tale told in Night Falls On The Gods is as good an answer as another. The very senselessness of the scenes of the Norns and of Valtrauta in relation to the three foregoing dramas, gives them a highly effective air of mystery; and no one ventures to challenge their consequentiality, because we are all more apt to pretend to understand great works of art than to confess that the meaning (if any) has escaped us. Valtrauta, however, betrays her irrelevance by explaining that the gods can be saved by the restoration of the ring to the Rhine maidens. This, considered as part of the previous allegory, is nonsense; so that even this scene, which has a more plausible air of organic connection with The Valkyries than any other in Night Falls On The Gods, is as clearly part of a different and earlier conception as the episode which concludes it, in which Siegfried actually robs Brynhild of her ring, though he has no recollection of having given it to her. Night Falls On The Gods, in fact, was not even revised into any real coherence with the world-poem which sprang from it; and that is the authentic solution of all the controversies which have arisen over it.

The Third Act

The hunting party comes off duly. Siegfried strays from it and meets the Rhine maidens, who almost succeed in coaxing the ring from him. He pretends to be afraid of his wife; and they chaff him as to her beating him and so forth; but when they add that the ring is accursed and will bring death upon him, he discloses to them, as unconsciously as Julius Caesar disclosed it long ago, that secret of heroism, never to let your life be shaped by fear of its end. [*] So he keeps the ring; and they leave him to his fate. The hunting party now finds him; and they all sit down together to make a meal by the river side, Siegfried telling them meanwhile the story of his adventures. When he approaches the subject of Brynhild, as to whom his memory is a blank, Hagen pours an antidote to the love philtre into his drinking horn, whereupon, his memory returning, he proceeds to narrate the incident of the fiery mountain, to Gunther’s intense mortification. Hagen then plunges his spear into the back of Siegfried, who falls dead on his shield, but gets up again, after the old operatic custom, to sing about thirty bars to his love before allowing himself to be finally carried off to the strains of the famous Trauermarsch.

* “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of

the word. The fear of the end is the source of all

lovelessness; and this fear is generated only when love

begins to wane. How came it that this loves the highest

blessedness to all things living, was so far lost sight of

by the human race that at last it came to this: all that

mankind did, ordered, and established, was conceived only in

fear of the end? My poem sets this forth.” — Wagner to

Roeckel, 25th Jan. 1854.

The scene then changes to the hall of the Gibichungs by the Rhine. It is night; and Gutrune, unable to sleep, and haunted by all sorts of vague terrors, is waiting for the return of her husband, and wondering whether a ghostly figure she has seen gliding down to the river bank is Brynhild, whose room is empty. Then comes the cry of Hagen, returning with the hunting party to announce the death of Siegfried by the tusk of a wild boar. But Gutrune divines the truth; and Hagen does not deny it. Siegfried’s body is brought in; Gunther claims the ring; Hagen will not suffer him to take it; they fight; and Gunther is slain. Hagen then attempts to take it; but the dead man’s hand closes on it and raises itself threateningly. Then Brynhild comes; and a funeral pyre is raised whilst she declaims a prolonged scene, extremely moving and imposing, but yielding nothing to resolute intellectual criticism except a very powerful and elevated exploitation of theatrical pathos, psychologically identical with the scene of Cleopatra and the dead Antony in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Finally she flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried’s finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant heavens the Gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.

FORGOTTEN ERE FINISHED

In all this, it will be observed, there is nothing new. The musical fabric is enormously elaborate and gorgeous; but you cannot say, as you must in witnessing The Rhine Gold, The Valkyries, and the first two acts of Siegfried, that you have never seen anything like it before, and that the inspiration is entirely original. Not only the action, but most of the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming prestige of Die Gotterdammerung as part of so great a work as The Ring, and by the extraordinary storm of emotion and excitement which the music keeps up. But the very qualities that intoxicate the novice in music enlighten the adept. In spite of the fulness of the composer’s technical accomplishment, the finished style and effortless mastery of harmony and instrumentation displayed, there is not a bar in the work which moves us as the same themes moved us in The Valkyries, nor is anything but external splendor added to the life and humor of Siegfried.

In the original poem, Brynhild delays her self-immolation on the pyre of Siegfried to read the assembled choristers a homily on the efficacy of the Love panacea. “My holiest wisdom’s hoard,” she says, “now I make known to the world. I believe not in property, nor money, nor godliness, nor hearth and high place, nor pomp and peerage, nor contract and custom, but in Love. Let that only prevail; and ye shall be blest in weal or woe.” Here the repudiations still smack of Bakoonin; but the saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love, and not even Shelleyan love, but vehement sexual passion. It is highly significant of the extent to which this uxorious commonplace lost its hold of Wagner (after disturbing his conscience, as he confesses to Roeckel, for years) that it disappears in the full score of Night Falls On The Gods, which was not completed until he was on the verge of producing Parsifal, twenty years after the publication of the poem. He cut the homily out, and composed the music of the final scene with a flagrant recklessness of the old intention. The rigorous logic with which representative musical themes are employed in the earlier dramas is here abandoned without scruple; and for the main theme at the conclusion he selects a rapturous passage sung by Sieglinda in the third act of The Valkyries when Brynhild inspires her with a sense of her high destiny as the mother of the unborn hero. There is no dramatic logic whatever in the recurrence of this theme to express the transport in which Brynhild immolates herself. There is of course an excuse for it, inasmuch as both women have an impulse of self-sacrifice for the sake of Siegfried; but this is really hardly more than an excuse; since the Valhalla theme might be attached to Alberic on the no worse ground that both he and Wotan are inspired by ambition, and that the ambition has the same object, the possession of the ring. The common sense of the matter is that the only themes which had fully retained their significance in Wagner’s memory at the period of the composition of Night Falls On The Gods are those which are mere labels of external features, such as the Dragon, the Fire, the Water and so on. This particular theme of Sieglinda’s is, in truth, of no great musical merit: it might easily be the pet climax of a popular sentimental ballad: in fact, the gushing effect which is its sole valuable quality is so cheaply attained that it is hardly going too far to call it the most trumpery phrase in the entire tetralogy. Yet, since it undoubtedly does gush very emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience’ sake, to work up this final scene with it rather than with the more distinguished, elaborate and beautiful themes connected with the love of Brynhild and Siegfried.

He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no consequence had he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It must always be borne in mind that the poem of The Ring was complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological ideas which, after germinating in the European atmosphere for many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at Dresden. Now no man whose mind is alive and active, as Wagner’s was to the day of his death, can keep his political and spiritual opinions, much less his philosophic consciousness, at a standstill for quarter of a century until he finishes an orchestral score. When Wagner first sketched Night Falls On The Gods he was 35. When he finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip of it and left it behind him. He even tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of theatrical effect when stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up and brandish a sword to give visible point to his sudden inspiration as to the raising up of a hero. The sword had first to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung treasures and thrown away by him as useless. There is no sense in this device; and its adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original intention which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the Gods. [*]

* Die Gotterdammerung means literally Godsgloaming. The

English versions of the opera are usually called The Dusk of

the Gods, or The Twilight of the Gods. I have purposely

introduced the ordinary title in the sentence above for the

reader’s information.

WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND

Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic anachronism it actually is.

But, as a matter of fact, Siegfried did not succeed and Bismarck did. Roeckel was a prisoner whose imprisonment made no difference; Bakoonin broke up, not Walhall, but the International, which ended in an undignified quarrel between him and Karl Marx. The Siegfrieds of 1848 were hopeless political failures, whereas the Wotans and Alberics and Lokis were conspicuous political successes. Even the Mimes held their own as against Siegfried. With the single exception of Ferdinand Lassalle, there was no revolutionary leader who was not an obvious impossibilist in practical politics; and Lassalle got himself killed in a romantic and quite indefensible duel after wrecking his health in a titanic oratorical campaign which convinced him that the great majority of the working classes were not ready to join him, and that the minority who were ready did not understand him. The International, founded in 1861 by Karl Marx in London, and mistaken for several years by nervous newspapers for a red spectre, was really only a turnip ghost. It achieved some beginnings of International Trade Unionism by inducing English workmen to send money to support strikes on the continent, and recalling English workers who had been taken across the North Sea to defeat such strikes; but on its revolutionary socialistic side it was a romantic figment. The suppression of the Paris Commune, one of the most tragic examples in history of the pitilessness with which capable practical administrators and soldiers are forced by the pressure of facts to destroy romantic amateurs and theatrical dreamers, made an end of melodramatic Socialism. It was as easy for Marx to hold up Thiers as the most execrable of living scoundrels and to put upon Gallifet the brand that still makes him impossible in French politics as it was for Victor Hugo to bombard Napoleon III from his paper battery in Jersey. It was also easy to hold up Felix Pyat and Delescluze as men of much loftier ideals than Thiers and Gallifet; but the one fact that could not be denied was that when it came to actual shooting, it was Gallifet who got Delescluze shot and not Delescluze who got Gallifet shot, and that when it came to administering the affairs of France, Thiers could in one way or another get it done, whilst Pyat could neither do it nor stop talking and allow somebody else to do it. True, the penalty of following Thiers was to be exploited by the landlord and capitalist; but then the penalty of following Pyat was to get shot like a mad dog, or at best get sent to New Caledonia, quite unnecessarily and uselessly.

To put it in terms of Wagner’s allegory, Alberic had got the ring back again and was marrying into the best Walhall families with it. He had thought better of his old threat to dethrone Wotan and Loki. He had found that Nibelheim was a very gloomy place and that if he wanted to live handsomely and safely, he must not only allow Wotan and Loki to organize society for him, but pay them very handsomely for doing it. He wanted splendor, military glory, loyalty, enthusiasm, and patriotism; and his greed and gluttony were wholly unable to create them, whereas Wotan and Loki carried them all to a triumphant climax in Germany in 1871, when Wagner himself celebrated the event with his Kaisermarsch, which sounded much more convincing than the Marseillaise or the Carmagnole.

How, after the Kaisermarsch, could Wagner go back to his idealization of Siegfried in 1853? How could he believe seriously in Siegfried slaying the dragon and charging through the mountain fire, when the immediate foreground was occupied by the Hotel de Ville with Felix Pyat endlessly discussing the principles of Socialism whilst the shells of Thiers were already battering the Arc de Triomphe, and ripping up the pavement of the Champs Elysees? Is it not clear that things had taken an altogether unexpected turn — that although the Ring may, like the famous Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, be an inspired guest at the historic laws and predestined end of our capitalistic-theocratic epoch, yet Wagner, like Marx, was too inexperienced in technical government and administration and too melodramatic in his hero-contra-villain conception of the class struggle, to foresee the actual process by which his generalization would work out, or the part to be played in it by the classes involved?

Let us go back for a moment to the point at which the Niblung legend first becomes irreconcilable with Wagner’s allegory. Fafnir in the allegory becomes a capitalist; but Fafnir in the legend is a mere hoarder. His gold does not bring him in any revenue. It does not even support him: he has to go out and forage for food and drink. In fact, he is on the way to his drinking-pool when Siegfried kills him. And Siegfried himself has no more use for gold than Fafnir: the only difference between them in this respect is that Siegfried does not waste his time in watching a barren treasure that is no use to him, whereas Fafnir sacrifices his humanity and his life merely to prevent anybody else getting it. This contrast is true to human nature; but it shunts The Ring drama off the economic lines of the allegory. In real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, comfortable life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip in Alberic’s enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir’s fellow giants who have no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic’s own character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must create towns and govern markets. In the meantime, Fafnir, wallowing in dividends which he has done nothing to earn, may rot, intellectually and morally, from mere disuse of his energies and lack of incentive to excel; but the more imbecile he becomes, the more dependent he is upon Alberic, and the more the responsibility of keeping the world-machine in working order falls upon Alberic. Consequently, though Alberic in 1850 may have been merely the vulgar Manchester Factory-owner portrayed by Engels, in 1876 he was well on the way towards becoming Krupp of Essen or Carnegie of Homestead.

Now, without exaggerating the virtues of these gentlemen, it will be conceded by everybody except perhaps those veteran German Social-Democrats who have made a cult of obsolescence under the name of Marxism, that the modern entrepreneur is not to be displaced and dismissed so lightly as Alberic is dismissed in The Ring. They are really the masters of the whole situation. Wotan is hardly less dependent on them than Fafnir; the War-Lord visits their work, acclaims them in stirring speeches, and casts down their enemies; whilst Loki makes commercial treaties for them and subjects all his diplomacy to their approval.

The end cannot come until Siegfried learns Alberic’s trade and shoulders Alberic’s burden. Not having as yet done so, he is still completely mastered by Alberic. He does not even rebel against him except when he is too stupid and ignorant, or too romantically impracticable, to see that Alberic’s work, like Wotan’s work and Loki’s work, is necessary work, and that therefore Alberic can never be superseded by a warrior, but only by a capable man of business who is prepared to continue his work without a day’s intermission. Even though the proletarians of all lands were to become “class conscious,” and obey the call of Marx by uniting to carry the Class struggle to a proletarian victory in which all capital should become common property, and all Monarchs, Millionaires, Landlords and Capitalists become common citizens, the triumphant proletarians would have either to starve in Anarchy the next day or else do the political and industrial work which is now being done tant bien que mal by our Romanoffs, our Hohenzollerns, our Krupps, Carnegies, Levers, Pierpont Morgans, and their political retinues. And in the meantime these magnates must defend their power and property with all their might against the revolutionary forces until these forces become positive, executive, administrative forces, instead of the conspiracies of protesting, moralizing, virtuously indignant amateurs who mistook Marx for a man of affairs and Thiers for a stage villain. But all this represents a development of which one gathers no forecast from Wagner or Marx. Both of them prophesied the end of our epoch, and, so far as one can guess, prophesied it rightly. They also brought its industrial history up to the year 1848 far more penetratingly than the academic historians of their time. But they broke off there and left a void between 1848 and the end, in which we, who have to live in that period, get no guidance from them. The Marxists wandered for years in this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party was lost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary history instead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital. Marx himself was too simpleminded a recluse and too full of the validity of his remoter generalizations, and the way in which the rapid integration of capital in Trusts and Kartels was confirming them, to be conscious of the void himself.

Wagner, on the other hand, was comparatively a practical man. It is possible to learn more of the world by producing a single opera, or even conducting a single orchestral rehearsal, than by ten years reading in the Library of the British Museum. Wagner must have learnt between Das Rheingold and the Kaisermarsch that there are yet several dramas to be interpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory can tell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramas will be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If anyone doubts the extent to which Wagner’s eyes had been opened to the administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on the barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers’ mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, that scandalous burlesque in which the poet and composer of Siegfried, with the levity of a schoolboy, mocked the French republicans who were doing in 1871 what he himself was exiled for doing in 1849. He had set the enthusiasm of the Dresden Revolution to his own greatest music; but he set the enthusiasm of twenty years later in derision to the music of Rossini. There is no mistaking the tune he meant to suggest by his doggerel of Republik, Republik, Republik-lik-lik. The Overture to William Tell is there as plainly as if it were noted down in full score.

In the case of such a man as Wagner, you cannot explain this volte-face as mere jingoism produced by Germany’s overwhelming victory in the Franco-Prussian War, nor as personal spite against the Parisians for the Tannhauser fiasco. Wagner had more cause for personal spite against his own countrymen than he ever had against the French. No doubt his outburst gratified the pettier feelings which great men have in common with small ones; but he was not a man to indulge in such gratifications, or indeed to feel them as gratifications, if he had not arrived at a profound philosophical contempt for the inadequacy of the men who were trying to wield Nothung, and who had done less work for Wagner’s own art than a single German King and he, too, only a mad one. Wagner had by that time done too much himself not to know that the world is ruled by deeds, not by good intentions, and that one efficient sinner is worth ten futile saints and martyrs.

I need not elaborate the point further in these pages. Like all men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When he scored Night Falls On The Gods, he had accepted the failure of Siegfried and the triumph of the Wotan-Loki-Alberic-trinity as a fact. He had given up dreaming of heroes, heroines, and final solutions, and had conceived a new protagonist in Parsifal, whom he announced, not as a hero, but as a fool; who was armed, not with a sword which cut irresistibly, but with a spear which he held only on condition that he did not use it; and who instead of exulting in the slaughter of a dragon was frightfully ashamed of having shot a swan. The change in the conception of the Deliverer could hardly be more complete. It reflects the change which took place in Wagner’s mind between the composition of The Rhine Gold and Night Falls On The Gods; and it explains why he dropped The Ring allegory and fell back on the status quo ante by Lohengrinizing.

If you ask why he did not throw Siegfried into the waste paper basket and rewrite The Ring from The Valkyries onwards, one must reply that the time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner nor anyone else then living knew enough to achieve it. Besides, what he had already done had reached the limit of even his immense energy and perseverance and so he did the best he could with the unfinished and for ever unfinishable work, rounding it off with an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of his religious compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions wrote in his score “Excusez du peu,” but Wagner left us to find out the change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really followed his meaning.

WAGNER’S OWN EXPLANATION

And now, having given my explanation of The Ring, can I give Wagner’s explanation of it? If I could (and I can) I should not by any means accept it as conclusive. Nearly half a century has passed since the tetralogy was written; and in that time the purposes of many half instinctive acts of genius have become clearer to the common man than they were to the doers. Some years ago, in the course of an explanation of Ibsen’s plays, I pointed out that it was by no means certain or even likely that Ibsen was as definitely conscious of his thesis as I. All the stupid people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not themselves written what the Germans call “tendency” works, saw nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself. Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. “How,” he wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, “can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work, if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?”

The truth is, we are apt to deify men of genius, exactly as we deify the creative force of the universe, by attributing to logical design what is the result of blind instinct. What Wagner meant by “true Art” is the operation of the artist’s instinct, which is just as blind as any other instinct. Mozart, asked for an explanation of his works, said frankly “How do I know?” Wagner, being a philosopher and critic as well as a composer, was always looking for moral explanations of what he had created and he hit on several very striking ones, all different. In the same way one can conceive Henry the Eighth speculating very brilliantly about the circulation of his own blood without getting as near the truth as Harvey did long after his death.

None the less, Wagner’s own explanations are of exceptional interest. To begin with, there is a considerable portion of The Ring, especially the portraiture of our capitalistic industrial system from the socialist’s point of view in the slavery of the Niblungs and the tyranny of Alberic, which is unmistakable, as it dramatizes that portion of human activity which lies well within the territory covered by our intellectual consciousness. All this is concrete Home Office business, so to speak: its meaning was as clear to Wagner as it is to us. Not so that part of the work which deals with the destiny of Wotan. And here, as it happened, Wagner’s recollection of what he had been driving at was completely upset by his discovery, soon after the completion of The Ring poem, of Schopenhaur’s famous treatise “The World as Will and Representation.” So obsessed did he become with this masterpiece of philosophic art that he declared that it contained the intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem. “I must confess,” he writes to Roeckel, “to having arrived at a clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles.”

Schopenhaur, however, had done nothing of the sort. Wagner’s determination to prove that he had been a Schopenhaurite all along without knowing it only shows how completely the fascination of the great treatise on The Will had run away with his memory. It is easy to see how this happened. Wagner says of himself that “seldom has there taken place in the soul of one and the same man so profound a division and estrangement between the intuitive or impulsive part of his nature and his consciously or reasonably formed ideas.” And since Schopenhaur’s great contribution to modern thought was to educate us into clear consciousness of this distinction — a distinction familiar, in a fanciful way, to the Ages of Faith and Art before the Renascence, but afterwards swamped in the Rationalism of that movement — it was inevitable that Wagner should jump at Schopenhaur’s metaphysiology (I use a word less likely to be mistaken than metaphysics) as the very thing for him. But metaphysiology is one thing, political philosophy another. The political philosophy of Siegfried is exactly contrary to the political philosophy of Schopenhaur, although the same clear metaphysiological distinction between the instinctive part of man (his Will) and his reasoning faculty (dramatized in The Ring as Loki) is insisted on in both. The difference is that to Schopenhaur the Will is the universal tormentor of man, the author of that great evil, Life; whilst reason is the divine gift that is finally to overcome this life-creating will and lead, through its abnegation, to cessation and peace, annihilation and Nirvana. This is the doctrine of Pessimism. Now Wagner was, when he wrote The Ring, a most sanguine revolutionary Meliorist, contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in The Rhine Gold.

Sometimes he faces the change in his opinions frankly enough. “My Niblung drama,” he writes to Roeckel, “had taken form at a time when I had built up with my reason an optimistic world on Hellenic principles, believing that nothing was necessary for the realization of such a world but that men should wish it. I ingeniously set aside-the problem why they did not wish it. I remember that it was with this definite creative purpose that I conceived the personality of Siegfried, with the intention of representing an existence free from pain.” But he appeals to his earlier works to show that behind all these artificial optimistic ideas there was always with him an intuition of “the sublime tragedy of renunciation, the negation of the will.” In trying to explain this, he is full of ideas philosophically, and full of the most amusing contradictions personally. Optimism, as an accidental excursion into the barren paths of reason on his own part, he calls “Hellenic.” In others he denounces it as rank Judaism, the Jew having at that time become for him the whipping boy for all modern humanity. In a letter from London he expounds Schopenhaur to Roeckel with enthusiasm, preaching the renunciation of the Will to Live as the redemption from all error and vain pursuits: in the next letter he resumes the subject with unabated interest, and finishes by mentioning that on leaving London he went to Geneva and underwent “a most beneficial course of hydropathy.” Seven months before this he had written as follows: “Believe me, I too was once possessed by the idea of a country life. In order to become a radically healthy human being, I went two years ago to a Hydropathic Establishment, prepared to give up Art and everything if I could once more become a child of Nature. But, my good friend, I was obliged to laugh at my own naivete when I found myself almost going mad. None of us will reach the promised land: we shall all die in the wilderness. Intellect is, as some one has said, a sort of disease: it is incurable.”

Roeckel knew his man of old, and evidently pressed him for explanations of the inconsistencies of The Ring with Night Falls On The Gods. Wagner defended himself with unfailing cleverness and occasional petulances, ranging from such pleas as “I believe a true instinct has kept me from a too great definiteness; for it has been borne in on me that an absolute disclosure of the intention disturbs true insight,” to a volley of explanations and commentaries on the explanations. He gets excited and annoyed because Roeckel will not admire the Brynhild of Night Falls On The Gods; re-invents the Tarnhelm scene; and finally, the case being desperate, exclaims, “It is wrong of you to challenge me to explain it in words: you must feel that something is being enacted that is not to be expressed in mere words.”

THE PESSIMIST AS AMORIST

Sometimes he gets very far away from Pessimism indeed, and recommends Roeckel to solace his captivity, not by conquering the will to live at liberty, but by “the inspiring influences of the Beautiful.” The next moment he throws over even Art for Life. “Where life ends,” he says, very wittily, “Art begins. In youth we turn to Art, we know not why; and only when we have gone through with Art and come out on the other side, we learn to our cost that we have missed Life itself.” His only comfort is that he is beloved. And on the subject of love he lets himself loose in a manner that would have roused the bitterest scorn in Schopenhaur, though, as we have seen (Love Panacea), it is highly characteristic of Wagner. “Love in its most perfect reality,” he says, “is only possible between the sexes: it is only as man and woman that human beings can truly love. Every other manifestation of love can be traced back to that one absorbingly real feeling, of which all other affections are but an emanation, a connection, or an imitation. It is an error to look on this as only one of the forms in which love is revealed, as if there were other forms coequal with it, or even superior to it. He who after the manner of metaphysicians prefers UNREALITY to REALITY, and derives the concrete from the abstract — in short, puts the word before the fact — may be right in esteeming the idea of love as higher than the expression of love, and may affirm that actual love made manifest in feeling is nothing but the outward and visible sign of a pre-existent, non-sensuous, abstract love; and he will do well to despise that sensuous function in general. In any case it were safe to bet that such a man had never loved or been loved as human beings can love, or he would have understood that in despising this feeling, what he condemned was its sensual expression, the outcome of man’s animal nature, and not true human love. The highest satisfaction and expression of the individual is only to be found in his complete absorption, and that is only possible through love. Now a human being is both MAN and WOMAN: it is only when these two are united that the real human being exists; and thus it is only by love that man and woman attain to the full measure of humanity. But when nowadays we talk of a human being, such heartless blockheads are we that quite involuntarily we only think of man. It is only in the union of man and woman by love (sensuous and supersensuous) that the human being exists; and as the human being cannot rise to the conception of anything higher than his own existence — his own being — so the transcendent act of his life is this consummation of his humanity through love.”

It is clear after this utterance from the would-be Schopenhaurian, that Wagner’s explanations of his works for the most part explain nothing but the mood in which he happened to be on the day he advanced them, or the train of thought suggested to his very susceptible imagination and active mind by the points raised by his questioner. Especially in his private letters, where his outpourings are modified by his dramatic consciousness of the personality of his correspondent, do we find him taking all manner of positions, and putting forward all sorts of cases which must be taken as clever and suggestive special pleadings, and not as serious and permanent expositions of his works. These works must speak for themselves: if The Ring says one thing, and a letter written afterwards says that it said something else, The Ring must be taken to confute the letter just as conclusively as if the two had been written by different hands. However, nobody fairly well acquainted with Wagner’s utterances as a whole will find any unaccountable contradictions in them. As in all men of his type, our manifold nature was so marked in him that he was like several different men rolled into one. When he had exhausted himself in the character of the most pugnacious, aggressive, and sanguine of reformers, he rested himself as a Pessimist and Nirvanist. In The Ring the quietism of Brynhild’s “Rest, rest, thou God” is sublime in its deep conviction; but you have only to turn back the pages to find the irrepressible bustle of Siegfried and the revelry of the clansmen expressed with equal zest. Wagner was not a Schopenhaurite every day in the week, nor even a Wagnerite. His mind changes as often as his mood. On Monday nothing will ever induce him to return to quilldriving: on Tuesday he begins a new pamphlet. On Wednesday he is impatient of the misapprehensions of people who cannot see how impossible it is for him to preside as a conductor over platform performances of fragments of his works, which can only be understood when presented strictly according to his intention on the stage: on Thursday he gets up a concert of Wagnerian selections, and when it is over writes to his friends describing how profoundly both bandsmen and audience were impressed. On Friday he exults in the self-assertion of Siegfried’s will against all moral ordinances, and is full of a revolutionary sense of “the universal law of change and renewal”: on Saturday he has an attack of holiness, and asks, “Can you conceive a moral action of which the root idea is not renunciation?” In short, Wagner can be quoted against himself almost without limit, much as Beethoven’s adagios could be quoted against his scherzos if a dispute arose between two fools as to whether he was a melancholy man or a merry one.

THE MUSIC OF THE RING

THE REPRESENTATIVE THEMES

To be able to follow the music of The Ring, all that is necessary is to become familiar enough with the brief musical phrases out of which it is built to recognize them and attach a certain definite significance to them, exactly as any ordinary Englishman recognizes and attaches a definite significance to the opening bars of God Save the King. There is no difficulty here: every soldier is expected to learn and distinguish between different bugle calls and trumpet calls; and anyone who can do this can learn and distinguish between the representative themes or “leading motives” (Leitmotifs) of The Ring. They are the easier to learn because they are repeated again and again; and the main ones are so emphatically impressed on the ear whilst the spectator is looking for the first time at the objects, or witnessing the first strong dramatic expression of the ideas they denote, that the requisite association is formed unconsciously. The themes are neither long, nor complicated, nor difficult. Whoever can pick up the flourish of a coach-horn, the note of a bird, the rhythm of the postman’s knock or of a horse’s gallop, will be at no loss in picking up the themes of The Ring. No doubt, when it comes to forming the necessary mental association with the theme, it may happen that the spectator may find his ear conquering the tune more easily than his mind conquers the thought. But for the most part the themes do not denote thoughts at all, but either emotions of a quite simple universal kind, or the sights, sounds and fancies common enough to be familiar to children. Indeed some of them are as frankly childish as any of the funny little orchestral interludes which, in Haydn’s Creation, introduce the horse, the deer, or the worm. We have both the horse and the worm in The Ring, treated exactly in Haydn’s manner, and with an effect not a whit less ridiculous to superior people who decline to take it good-humoredly. Even the complaisance of good Wagnerites is occasionally rather overstrained by the way in which Brynhild’s allusions to her charger Grani elicit from the band a little rum-ti-tum triplet which by itself is in no way suggestive of a horse, although a continuous rush of such triplets makes a very exciting musical gallop.

Other themes denote objects which cannot be imitatively suggested by music: for instance, music cannot suggest a ring, and cannot suggest gold; yet each of these has a representative theme which pervades the score in all directions. In the case of the gold the association is established by the very salient way in which the orchestra breaks into the pretty theme in the first act of The Rhine Gold at the moment when the sunrays strike down through the water and light up the glittering treasure, hitherto invisible. The reference of the strange little theme of the wishing cap is equally manifest from the first, since the spectator’s attention is wholly taken up with the Tarnhelm and its magic when the theme is first pointedly uttered by the orchestra. The sword theme is introduced at the end of The Rhine Gold to express Wotan’s hero inspiration; and I have already mentioned that Wagner, unable, when it came to practical stage management, to forego the appeal to the eye as well as to the thought, here made Wotan pick up a sword and brandish it, though no such instruction appears in the printed score. When this sacrifice to Wagner’s scepticism as to the reality of any appeal to an audience that is not made through their bodily sense is omitted, the association of the theme with the sword is not formed until that point in the first act of The Valkyries at which Siegmund is left alone by Hunding’s hearth, weaponless, with the assurance that he will have to fight for his life at dawn with his host. He recalls then how his father promised him a sword for his hour of need; and as he does so, a flicker from the dying fire is caught by the golden hilt of the sword in the tree, when the theme immediately begins to gleam through the quiver of sound from the orchestra, and only dies out as the fire sinks and the sword is once more hidden by the darkness. Later on, this theme, which is never silent whilst Sieglinda is dwelling on the story of the sword, leaps out into the most dazzling splendor the band can give it when Siegmund triumphantly draws the weapon from the tree. As it consists of seven notes only, with a very marked measure, and a melody like a simple flourish on a trumpet or post horn, nobody capable of catching a tune can easily miss it.

The Valhalla theme, sounded with solemn grandeur as the home of the gods first appears to us and to Wotan at the beginning of the second scene of The Rhine Gold, also cannot be mistaken. It, too, has a memorable rhythm; and its majestic harmonies, far from presenting those novel or curious problems in polyphony of which Wagner still stands suspected by superstitious people, are just those three simple chords which festive students who vamp accompaniments to comic songs “by ear” soon find sufficient for nearly all the popular tunes in the world.

On the other hand, the ring theme, when it begins to hurtle through the third scene of The Rhine Gold, cannot possibly be referred to any special feature in the general gloom and turmoil of the den of the dwarfs. It is not a melody, but merely the displaced metric accent which musicians call syncopation, rung on the notes of the familiar chord formed by piling three minor thirds on top of one another (technically, the chord of the minor ninth, ci-devant diminished seventh). One soon picks it up and identifies it; but it does not get introduced in the unequivocally clear fashion of the themes described above, or of that malignant monstrosity, the theme which denotes the curse on the gold. Consequently it cannot be said that the musical design of the work is perfectly clear at the first hearing as regards all the themes; but it is so as regards most of them, the main lines being laid down as emphatically and intelligibly as the dramatic motives in a Shakespearean play. As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.

The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped on the memory easily by the simple association of the sound of the theme with the appearance of the person indicated. Its appropriateness is generally pretty obvious. Thus, the entry of the giants is made to a vigorous stumping, tramping measure. Mimmy, being a quaint, weird old creature, has a quaint, weird theme of two thin chords that creep down eerily one to the other. Gutrune’s theme is pretty and caressing: Gunther’s bold, rough, and commonplace. It is a favorite trick of Wagner’s, when one of his characters is killed on the stage, to make the theme attached to that character weaken, fail, and fade away with a broken echo into silence.

THE CHARACTERIZATION

All this, however, is the mere child’s play of theme work. The more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified with special representative themes as they come into play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes. We do not find Wotan, like the dragon or the horse, or, for the matter of that, like the stage demon in Weber’s Freischutz or Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil, with one fixed theme attached to him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unaltered from the orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have the Valhalla theme used to express the greatness of the gods as an idea of Wotan’s. Again, we have his spear, the symbol of his power, identified with another theme, on which Wagner finally exercises his favorite device by making it break and fail, cut through, as it were, by the tearing sound of the theme identified with the sword, when Siegfried shivers the spear with the stroke of Nothung. Yet another theme connected with Wotan is the Wanderer music which breaks with such a majestic reassurance on the nightmare terror of Mimmy when Wotan appears at the mouth of his cave in the scene of the three riddles. Thus not only are there several Wotan themes, but each varies in its inflexions and shades of tone color according to its dramatic circumstances. So, too, the merry ham tune of the young Siegfried changes its measure, loads itself with massive harmonies, and becomes an exordium of the most imposing splendor when it heralds his entry as full-fledged hero in the prologue to Night Falls On The Gods. Even Mimmy has his two or three themes: the weird one already described; the little one in triple measure imitating the tap of his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the savage laugh of Alberic at his death; and finally the crooning tune in which he details all his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling Siegfried. Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkings and shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the orchestra at any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether he is on the stage at the time or not.

In truth, dramatic characterization in music cannot be carried very far by the use of representative themes. Mozart, the greatest of all masters of this art, never dreamt of employing them; and, extensively as they are used in The Ring, they do not enable Wagner to dispense with the Mozartian method. Apart from the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still as sharply distinguished from one another by the character of their music as Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro from Papagena. It is true that the themes attached to the characters have the same musical appropriateness as the rest of the music: for example, neither the Valhalla nor the spear themes could, without the most ludicrous incongruity, be used for the forest bird or the unstable, delusive Loki; but for all that the musical characterization must be regarded as independent of the specific themes, since the entire elimination of the thematic system from the score would leave the characters as well distinguished musically as they are at present.

One more illustration of the way in which the thematic system is worked. There are two themes connected with Loki. One is a rapid, sinuous, twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial, elusive logic-spinning of the clever one’s braincraft. The other is the fire theme. In the first act of Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing attempt to explain fear to Siegfried. With the horror fresh upon him of the sort of nightmare into which he has fallen after the departure of the Wanderer, and which has taken the form, at once fanciful and symbolic, of a delirious dread of light, he asks Siegfried whether he has never, whilst wandering in the forest, had his heart set hammering in frantic dread by the mysterious lights of the gloaming. To this, Siegfried, greatly astonished, replies that on such occasions his heart is altogether healthy and his sensations perfectly normal. Here Mimmy’s question is accompanied by the tremulous sounding of the fire theme with its harmonies most oppressively disturbed and troubled; whereas with Siegfried’s reply they become quite clear and straightforward, making the theme sound bold, brilliant, and serene. This is a typical instance of the way in which the themes are used.

The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and unity to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect and quality of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven’s manner, to work miracles of beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases. As a set-off against this, it has led Wagner to indulge in repetitions that would be intolerable in a purely dramatic work. Almost the first thing that a dramatist has to learn in constructing a play is that the persons must not come on the stage in the second act and tell one another at great length what the audience has already seen pass before its eyes in the first act. The extent to which Wagner has been seduced into violating this rule by his affection for his themes is startling to a practiced playwright. Siegfried inherits from Wotan a mania for autobiography which leads him to inflict on every one he meets the story of Mimmy and the dragon, although the audience have spent a whole evening witnessing the events he is narrating. Hagen tells the story to Gunther; and that same night Alberic’s ghost tells it over again to Hagen, who knows it already as well as the audience. Siegfried tells the Rhine maidens as much of it as they will listen to, and then keeps telling it to his hunting companions until they kill him. Wotan’s autobiography on the second evening becomes his biography in the mouths of the Norns on the fourth. The little that the Norns add to it is repeated an hour later by Valtrauta. How far all this repetition is tolerable is a matter of individual taste. A good story will bear repetition; and if it has woven into it such pretty tunes as the Rhine maidens’ yodel, Mimmy’s tinkling anvil beat, the note of the forest bird, the call of Siegfried’s horn, and so on, it will bear a good deal of rehearing. Those who have but newly learnt their way through The Ring will not readily admit that there is a bar too much repetition.

But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question whether the thematic system does not enable the composer to produce a music drama with much less musical fertility than was required from his predecessors for the composition of operas under the old system!

Such discussions are not within the scope of this little book. But as the book is now finished (for really nothing more need be said about The Ring), I am quite willing to add a few pages of ordinary musical criticism, partly to please the amateurs who enjoy that sort of reading, and partly for the guidance of those who wish to obtain some hints to help them through such critical small talk about Wagner and Bayreuth as may be forced upon them at the dinner table or between the acts.

THE OLD AND THE NEW MUSIC

In the old-fashioned opera every separate number involved the composition of a fresh melody; but it is quite a mistake to suppose that this creative-effort extended continuously throughout the number from the first to the last bar. When a musician composes according to a set metrical pattern, the selection of the pattern and the composition of the first stave (a stave in music corresponds to a line in verse) generally completes the creative effort. All the rest follows more or less mechanically to fill up the pattern, an air being very like a wall-paper design in this respect. Thus the second stave is usually a perfectly obvious consequence of the first; and the third and fourth an exact or very slightly varied repetition of the first and second. For example, given the first line of Pop Goes the Weasel or Yankee Doodle, any musical cobbler could supply the remaining three. There is very little tune turning of this kind in The Ring; and it is noteworthy that where it does occur, as in Siegmund’s spring song and Mimmy’s croon, “Ein zullendes Kind,” the effect of the symmetrical staves, recurring as a mere matter of form, is perceptibly poor and platitudinous compared with the free flow of melody which prevails elsewhere.

The other and harder way of composing is to take a strain of free melody, and ring every variety of change of mood upon it as if it were a thought that sometimes brought hope, sometimes melancholy, sometimes exultation, sometimes raging despair and so on. To take several themes of this kind, and weave them together into a rich musical fabric passing panoramically before the ear with a continually varying flow of sentiment, is the highest feat of the musician: it is in this way that we get the fugue of Bach and the symphony of Beethoven. The admittedly inferior musician is the one who, like Auber and Offenbach, not to mention our purveyors of drawing-room ballads, can produce an unlimited quantity of symmetrical tunes, but cannot weave themes symphonically.

When this is taken into account, it will be seen that the fact that there is a great deal of repetition in The Ring does not distinguish it from the old-fashioned operas. The real difference is that in them the repetition was used for the mechanical completion of conventional metric patterns, whereas in The Ring the recurrence of the theme is an intelligent and interesting consequence of the recurrence of the dramatic phenomenon which it denotes. It should be remembered also that the substitution of symphonically treated themes for tunes with symmetrical eight-bar staves and the like, has always been the rule in the highest forms of music. To describe it, or be affected by it, as an abandonment of melody, is to confess oneself an ignoramus conversant only with dance tunes and ballads.

The sort of stuff a purely dramatic musician produces when he hampers himself with metric patterns in composition is not unlike what might have resulted in literature if Carlyle (for example) had been compelled by convention to write his historical stories in rhymed stanzas. That is to say, it limits his fertility to an occasional phrase, and three quarters of the time exercises only his barren ingenuity in fitting rhymes and measures to it. In literature the great masters of the art have long emancipated themselves from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, force and simplicity.

This state of things, as we have seen, finds its parallel in musical art, since music can be written in prose themes or in versified tunes; only here nobody dreams of disputing the greater difficulty of the prose forms, and the comparative triviality of versification. Yet in dramatic music, as in dramatic literature, the tradition of versification clings with the same pernicious results; and the opera, like the tragedy, is conventionally made like a wall paper. The theatre seems doomed to be in all things the last refuge of the hankering after cheap prettiness in art.

Unfortunately this confusion of the decorative with the dramatic element in both literature and music is maintained by the example of great masters in both arts. Very touching dramatic expression can be combined with decorative symmetry of versification when the artist happens to possess both the decorative and dramatic gifts, and to have cultivated both hand in hand. Shakespeare and Shelley, for instance, far from being hampered by the conventional obligation to write their dramas in verse, found it much the easiest and cheapest way of producing them. But if Shakespeare had been compelled by custom to write entirely in prose, all his ordinary dialogue might have been as good as the first scene of As You Like It; and all his lofty passages as fine as “What a piece of work is Man!”, thus sparing us a great deal of blank verse in which the thought is commonplace, and the expression, though catchingly turned, absurdly pompous. The Cent might either have been a serious drama or might never have been written at all if Shelley had not been allowed to carry off its unreality by Elizabethan versification. Still, both poets have achieved many passages in which the decorative and dramatic qualities are not only reconciled, but seem to enhance one another to a pitch otherwise unattainable.

Just so in music. When we find, as in the case of Mozart, a prodigiously gifted and arduously trained musician who is also, by a happy accident, a dramatist comparable to Moliere, the obligation to compose operas in versified numbers not only does not embarrass him, but actually saves him trouble and thought. No matter what his dramatic mood may be, he expresses it in exquisite musical verses more easily than a dramatist of ordinary singleness of talent can express it in prose. Accordingly, he too, like Shakespeare and Shelley, leaves versified airs, like Dalla sua pace, or Gluck’s Che fare senza Euridice, or Weber’s Leise, leise, which are as dramatic from the first note to the last as the untrammelled themes of The Ring. In consequence, it used to be professorially demanded that all dramatic music should present the same double aspect. The demand was unreasonable, since symmetrical versification is no merit in dramatic music: one might as well stipulate that a dinner fork should be constructed so as to serve also as a tablecloth. It was an ignorant demand too, because it is not true that the composers of these exceptional examples were always, or even often, able to combine dramatic expression with symmetrical versification. Side by side with Dalla sua pace we have Il mio tesoro and Non mi dir, in which exquisitely expressive opening phrases lead to decorative passages which are as grotesque from the dramatic point of view as the music which Alberic sings when he is slipping and sneezing in the Rhine mud is from the decorative point of view. Further, there is to be considered the mass of shapeless “dry recitative” which separates these symmetrical numbers, and which might have been raised to considerable dramatic and musical importance had it been incorporated into a continuous musical fabric by thematic treatment. Finally, Mozart’s most dramatic finales and concerted numbers are more or less in sonata form, like symphonic movements, and must therefore be classed as musical prose. And sonata form dictates repetitions and recapitulations from which the perfectly unconventional form adopted by Wagner is free. On the whole, there is more scope for both repetition and convention in the old form than in the new; and the poorer a composer’s musical gift is, the surer he is to resort to the eighteenth century patterns to eke out his invention.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

When Wagner was born in 1813, music had newly become the most astonishing, the most fascinating, the most miraculous art in the world. Mozart’s Don Giovanni had made all musical Europe conscious of the enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the perfect adaptability of music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written down in music as symphonies. Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications of their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough to stand by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical structures of which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After the finales in Figaro and Don Giovanni, the possibility of the modern music drama lay bare. After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and that the vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest aspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much, perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but Bach’s method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful webs of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond all ordinary human talent. Beethoven’s far blunter craft was thoroughly popular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn one long Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven several of them together with so apt a harmony that even when the composer is unmoved its progressions saturate themselves with the emotion which (as modern critics are a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our delicately touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes makes us give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does not entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and noble wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic dialogue to music exactly as he set the recitatives of the Passion, there being for him, apparently, only one recitative possible, and that the musically best. He reserved the expression of his merry mood for the regular set numbers in which he could make one of his wonderful contrapuntal traceries of pure ornament with the requisite gaiety of line and movement. Beethoven bowed to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the expression for his feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded funny in music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all music by its decorative symmetry had worn out, musicians were shocked by his symphonies, and, misunderstanding his integrity, openly questioned his sanity. But to those who were not looking for pretty new sound patterns, but were longing for the expression of their moods in music, he achieved revelation, because, being single in his aim to express his own moods, he anticipated with revolutionary courage and frankness all the moods of the rising generations of the nineteenth century.

The result was inevitable. In the nineteenth century it was no longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression. The frankly delirious description of his Robert the Devil in Balzac’s short story entitled Gambra, and Goethe’s astonishingly mistaken notion that he could have composed music for Faust, show how completely the enchantments of the new dramatic music upset the judgment of artists of eminent discernment. Meyerbeer was, people said (old gentlemen still say so in Paris), the successor of Beethoven: he was, if a less perfect musician than Mozart, a profounder genius. Above all, he was original and daring. Wagner himself raved about the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots as wildly as anyone.

Yet all this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist. He could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no “absolute musician” either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even passion; and sometimes rose to the occasion in a manner which, whilst the imagination of his contemporaries remained on fire with the novelties of dramatic music, led them to overrate him with an extravagance which provoked Wagner to conduct a long critical campaign against his leadership. Thirty years ago this campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer’s influence seriously. Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realize what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself, know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner’s attack was.

Wagner was the literary musician par excellence. He could not, like Mozart and Beethoven, produce decorative tone structures independently of any dramatic or poetic subject matter, because, that craft being no longer necessary for his purpose, he did not cultivate it. As Shakespeare, compared with Tennyson, appears to have an exclusively dramatic talent, so exactly does Wagner compared with Mendelssohn. On the other hand, he had not to go to third rate literary hacks for “librettos” to set to music: he produced his own dramatic poems, thus giving dramatic integrity to opera, and making symphony articulate. A Beethoven symphony (except the articulate part of the ninth) expresses noble feeling, but not thought: it has moods, but no ideas. Wagner added thought and produced the music drama. Mozart’s loftiest opera, his Ring, so to speak, The Magic Flute, has a libretto which, though none the worse for seeming, like The Rhine Gold, the merest Christmas tomfoolery to shallow spectators, is the product of a talent immeasurably inferior to Mozart’s own. The libretto of Don Giovanni is coarse and trivial: its transfiguration by Mozart’s music may be a marvel; but nobody will venture to contend that such transfigurations, however seductive, can be as satisfactory as tone poetry or drama in which the musician and the poet are at the same level. Here, then, we have the simple secret of Wagner’s preemminence as a dramatic musician. He wrote the poems as well as composed the music of his “stage festival plays,” as he called them.

Up to a certain point in his career Wagner paid the penalty of undertaking two arts instead of one. Mozart had his trade as a musician at his fingers’ ends when he was twenty, because he had served an arduous apprenticeship to that trade and no other. Wagner was very far from having attained equal mastery at thirty-five: indeed he himself has told us that not until he had passed the age at which Mozart died did he compose with that complete spontaneity of musical expression which can only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest masters, like Moliere and Mozart, are so much rarer than the tragedians and sentimentalists. It was then that he composed the first two acts of Siegfried, and later on The Mastersingers, a professedly comedic work, and a quite Mozartian garden of melody, hardly credible as the work of the straining artifices of Tanehauser. Only, as no man ever learns to do one thing by doing something else, however closely allied the two things may be, Wagner still produced no music independently of his poems. The overture to The Mastersingers is delightful when you know what it is all about; but only those to whom it came as a concert piece without any such clue, and who judged its reckless counterpoint by the standard of Bach and of Mozart’s Magic Flute overture, can realize how atrocious it used to sound to musicians of the old school. When I first heard it, with the clear march of the polyphony in Bach’s B minor Mass fresh in my memory, I confess I thought that the parts had got dislocated, and that some of the band were half a bar behind the others. Perhaps they were; but now that I am familiar with the work, and with Wagner’s harmony, I can still quite understand certain passages producing that effect organ admirer of Bach even when performed with perfect accuracy.

THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

The success of Wagner has been so prodigious that to his dazzled disciples it seems that the age of what he called “absolute” music must be at an end, and the musical future destined to be an exclusively Wagnerian one inaugurated at Bayreuth. All great geniuses produce this illusion. Wagner did not begin a movement: he consummated it. He was the summit of the nineteenth century school of dramatic music in the same sense as Mozart was the summit (the word is Gounod’s) of the eighteenth century school. And those who attempt to carry on his Bayreuth tradition will assuredly share the fate of the forgotten purveyors of second-hand Mozart a hundred years ago. As to the expected supersession of absolute music, it is sufficient to point to the fact that Germany produced two absolute musicians of the first class during Wagner’s lifetime: one, the greatly gifted Goetz, who died young; the other, Brahms, whose absolute musical endowment was as extraordinary as his thought was commonplace. Wagner had for him the contempt of the original thinker for the man of second-hand ideas, and of the strenuously dramatic musician for mere brute musical faculty; but though his contempt was perhaps deserved by the Triumphlieds, and Schicksalslieds, and Elegies and Requiems in which Brahms took his brains so seriously, nobody can listen to Brahms’ natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his amazing gift. A reaction to absolute music, starting partly from Brahms, and partly from such revivals of medieval music as those of De Lange in Holland and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch in England, is both likely and promising; whereas there is no more hope in attempts to out-Wagner Wagner in music drama than there was in the old attempts — or for the matter of that, the new ones — to make Handel the starting point of a great school of oratorio.

BAYREUTH

When the Bayreuth Festival Playhouse was at last completed, and opened in 1876 with the first performance of The Ring, European society was compelled to admit that Wagner was “a success.” Royal personages, detesting his music, sat out the performances in the row of boxes set apart for princes. They all complimented him on the astonishing “push” with which, in the teeth of all obstacles, he had turned a fabulous and visionary project into a concrete commercial reality, patronized by the public at a pound a head. It is as well to know that these congratulations had no other effect upon Wagner than to open his eyes to the fact that the Bayreuth experiment, as an attempt to evade the ordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise, was a failure. His own account of it contrasts the reality with his intentions in a vein which would be bitter if it were not so humorous. The precautions taken to keep the seats out of the hands of the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest disciples, banded together in little Wagner Societies throughout Europe, had ended in their forestalling by ticket speculators and their sale to just the sort of idle globe-trotting tourists against whom the temple was to have been strictly closed. The money, supposed to be contributed by the faithful, was begged by energetic subscription-hunting ladies from people who must have had the most grotesque misconceptions of the composer’s aims — among others, the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey!

The only change that has occurred since then is that subscriptions are no longer needed; for the Festival Playhouse apparently pays its own way now, and is commercially on the same footing as any other theatre. The only qualification required from the visitor is money. A Londoner spends twenty pounds on a visit: a native Bayreuther spends one pound. In either case “the Folk,” on whose behalf Wagner turned out in 1849, are effectually excluded; and the Festival Playhouse must therefore be classed as infinitely less Wagnerian in its character than Hampton Court Palace. Nobody knew this better than Wagner; and nothing can be further off the mark than to chatter about Bayreuth as if it had succeeded in escaping from the conditions of our modern civilization any more than the Grand Opera in Paris or London.

Within these conditions, however, it effected a new departure in that excellent German institution, the summer theatre. Unlike our opera houses, which are constructed so that the audience may present a splendid pageant to the delighted manager, it is designed to secure an uninterrupted view of the stage, and an undisturbed hearing of the music, to the audience. The dramatic purpose of the performances is taken with entire and elaborate seriousness as the sole purpose of them; and the management is jealous for the reputation of Wagner. The commercial success which has followed this policy shows that the public wants summer theatres of the highest class. There is no reason why the experiment should not be tried in England. If our enthusiasm for Handel can support Handel Festivals, laughably dull, stupid and anti-Handelian as these choral monstrosities are, as well as annual provincial festivals on the same model, there is no likelihood of a Wagner Festival failing. Suppose, for instance, a Wagner theatre were built at Hampton Court or on Richmond Hill, not to say Margate pier, so that we could have a delightful summer evening holiday, Bayreuth fashion, passing the hours between the acts in the park or on the river before sunset, is it seriously contended that there would be any lack of visitors? If a little of the money that is wasted on grand stands, Eiffel towers, and dismal Halls by the Sea, all as much tied to brief annual seasons as Bayreuth, were applied in this way, the profit would be far more certain and the social utility prodigiously greater. Any English enthusiasm for Bayreuth that does not take the form of clamor for a Festival Playhouse in England may be set aside as mere pilgrimage mania.

Those who go to Bayreuth never repent it, although the performances there are often far from delectable. The singing is sometimes tolerable, and sometimes abominable. Some of the singers are mere animated beer casks, too lazy and conceited to practise the self-control and physical training that is expected as a matter of course from an acrobat, a jockey or a pugilist. The women’s dresses are prudish and absurd. It is true that Kundry no longer wears an early Victorian ball dress with “ruchings,” and that Fresh has been provided with a quaintly modish copy of the flowered gown of Spring in Botticelli’s famous picture; but the mailclad Brynhild still climbs the mountains with her legs carefully hidden in a long white skirt, and looks so exactly like Mrs. Leo Hunter as Minerva that it is quite impossible to feel a ray of illusion whilst looking at her. The ideal of womanly beauty aimed at reminds Englishmen of the barmaids of the seventies, when the craze for golden hair was at its worst. Further, whilst Wagner’s stage directions are sometimes disregarded as unintelligently as at Covent Garden, an intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorial attitude and gesture prevails. The most striking moments of the drama are conceived as tableaux vivants with posed models, instead of as passages of action, motion and life.

I need hardly add that the supernatural powers of control attributed by credulous pilgrims to Madame Wagner do not exist. Prima donnas and tenors are as unmanageable at Bayreuth as anywhere else. Casts are capriciously changed; stage business is insufficiently rehearsed; the public are compelled to listen to a Brynhild or Siegfried of fifty when they have carefully arranged to see one of twenty-five, much as in any ordinary opera house. Even the conductors upset the arrangements occasionally. On the other hand, if we leave the vagaries of the stars out of account, we may safely expect always that in thoroughness of preparation of the chief work of the season, in strenuous artistic pretentiousness, in pious conviction that the work is of such enormous importance as to be worth doing well at all costs, the Bayreuth performances will deserve their reputation. The band is placed out of sight of the audience, with the more formidable instruments beneath the stage, so that the singers have not to sing THROUGH the brass. The effect is quite perfect.

BAYREUTH IN ENGLAND

I purposely dwell on the faults of Bayreuth in order to show that there is no reason in the world why as good and better performances of The Ring should not be given in England. Wagner’s scores are now before the world; and neither his widow nor his son can pretend to handle them with greater authority than any artist who feels the impulse to interpret them. Nobody will ever know what Wagner himself thought of the artists who established the Bayreuth tradition: he was obviously not in a position to criticize them. For instance, had Rubini survived to create Siegmund, it is quite certain that we should not have had from Wagner’s pen so amusing and vivid a description as we have of his Ottavio in the old Paris days. Wagner was under great obligations to the heroes and heroines of 1876; and he naturally said nothing to disparage their triumphs; but there is no reason to believe that all or indeed any of them satisfied him as Schnorr of Carolsfeld satisfied him as Tristan, or Schroder Devrient as Fidelio. It is just as likely as not that the next Schnorr or Schroder may arise in England. If that should actually happen, neither of them will need any further authority than their own genius and Wagner’s scores for their guidance. Certainly the less their spontaneous impulses are sophisticated by the very stagey traditions which Bayreuth is handing down from the age of Crummles, the better.

WAGNERIAN SINGERS

No nation need have much difficulty in producing a race of Wagnerian singers. With the single exception of Handel, no composer has written music so well calculated to make its singers vocal athletes as Wagner. Abominably as the Germans sing, it is astonishing how they thrive physically on his leading parts. His secret is the Handelian secret. Instead of specializing his vocal parts after the manner of Verdi and Gounod for high sopranos, screaming tenors, and high baritones with an effective compass of about a fifth at the extreme tiptop of their ranges, and for contraltos with chest registers forced all over their compass in the manner of music hall singers, he employs the entire range of the human voice freely, demanding from everybody very nearly two effective octaves, so that the voice is well exercised all over, and one part of it relieves the other healthily and continually. He uses extremely high notes very sparingly, and is especially considerate in the matter of instrumental accompaniment. Even when the singer appears to have all the thunders of the full orchestra raging against him, a glance at the score will show that he is well heard, not because of any exceptionally stentorian power in his voice, but because Wagner meant him to be heard and took the greatest care not to overwhelm him. Such brutal opacities of accompaniment as we find in Rossini’s Stabat or Verdi’s Trovatore, where the strings play a rum-tum accompaniment whilst the entire wind band blares away, fortissimo, in unison with the unfortunate singer, are never to be found in Wagner’s work. Even in an ordinary opera house, with the orchestra ranged directly between the singers and the audience, his instrumentation is more transparent to the human voice than that of any other composer since Mozart. At the Bayreuth Buhnenfestspielhaus, with the brass under the stage, it is perfectly so.

On every point, then, a Wagner theatre and Wagner festivals are much more generally practicable than the older and more artificial forms of dramatic music. A presentable performance of The Ring is a big undertaking only in the sense in which the construction of a railway is a big undertaking: that is, it requires plenty of work and plenty of professional skill; but it does not, like the old operas and oratorios, require those extraordinary vocal gifts which only a few individuals scattered here and there throughout Europe are born with. Singers who could never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces in Rossini’s Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this if he considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral service and an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a much more serious matter than the opera. Yet provincial talent is sufficient for it, if the requisite industry and devotion are forthcoming. Let us admit that geniuses of European celebrity are indispensable at the Opera (though I know better, having seen lusty troopers and porters, without art or manners, accepted by fashion as principal tenors at that institution during the long interval between Mario and Jean de Reszke); but let us remember that Bayreuth has recruited its Parsifals from the peasantry, and that the artisans of a village in the Bavarian Alps are capable of a famous and elaborate Passion Play, and then consider whether England is so poor in talent that its amateurs must journey to the centre of Europe to witness a Wagner Festival.

The truth is, there is nothing wrong with England except the wealth which attracts teachers of singing to her shores in sufficient numbers to extinguish the voices of all natives who have any talent as singers. Our salvation must come from the class that is too poor to have lessons.

QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM

Quintessence of Ibsenism is an essay published in 1891 by Walter Scott, of 24 Warwick Lane, concerning the Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen and his critical reception in England. This work was the first of three that Shaw wrote about Ibsen and over time his views and understanding of the playwright’s work evolved and deepened as Shaw himself developed as a writer and intellectual. While Shaw was clearly a great admirer of Ibsen he frequently denied that he was a follower of him, although this claim is somewhat undermined by the obvious similarities between the two authors’ works. Shaw caused controversy and anger among his contemporaries by reportedly referring to Ibsen as a socialist, enraging certain critics that felt this diminished Ibsen’s work as a writer and poet. One of Shaw’s essential points about Ibsenism in his essay is the assertion that its ‘quintessence is that there is no formula’. He meant that in the playwright’s work there was no general rule or solution that could be garnered from specific instances.

The majority of the essay is concerned with the relationship between Ibsen and the English Theatre, particularly the critical reception of his works. In the opening section titled ‘The Two Pioneers’, Shaw draws a comparison between Ibsen and Shelley as pioneers and then addresses in some detail a review of Ghosts in The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper Shaw describes as ‘the guilty conscience of the middle-class’. The critic displayed such a violent and emotional reaction to the play, describing it as ‘hateful’ and ‘loathsome’ that the playwright refers to him being reduced to a ‘hysterical condition’. Shaw then states this intense revulsion at Ibsen’s work by a certain section of society is counterbalanced by another faction treating the playwright as ‘the greatest living dramatic poet’. Shaw proceeds to explain why he believes there is such a disparity of opinion and why Ibsen’s plays frequently induce such strong responses. The Irish playwright then turns his gaze and analysis on to specific plays with an emphasis on deciphering them for audiences and highlighting the way Ibsen’s work has been interpreted by British critics.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

PREFACE: 1913

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE TWO PIONEERS

IDEALS AND IDEALISTS

THE WOMANLY WOMAN

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANTI-IDEALIST: EXTRAVAGANZAS

BRAND, 1866

PEER GYNT, 1867

EMPEROR AND GALILEAN, 1873

THE OBJECTIVE ANTI-IDEALIST PLAYS

THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH, 1869

PILLARS OF SOCIETY, 1877

A DOLL’S HOUSE, 1879

GHOSTS, 1881

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLAY

DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN

DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN’S ADMIRERS

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, 1882

THE WILD DUCK, 1884

ROSMERSHOLM, 1886

THE LADY FROM THE SEA, 1888

HEDDA GABLER, 1890

THE LAST FOUR PLAYS

DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN

THE MASTER BUILDER, 1892

LITTLE EYOLF, 1894

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, 1896

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, 1900

THE LESSON OF THE PLAYS

WHAT IS THE NEW ELEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN SCHOOL?

THE TECHNICAL NOVELTY IN IBSEN’S PLAYS

NEEDED: AN IBSEN THEATRE

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

SINCE the last edition of this book was printed, war, pestilence and famine have wrecked civilization and killed a number of people of whom the first batch is calculated as not less than fifteen millions. Had the gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen millions might have been alive now; for the war was a war of ideals. Liberal ideals, Feudal ideals, National ideals, Dynastic ideals, Republican ideals, Church ideals, State ideals, and Class ideals, bourgeois and proletarian, all heaped up into a gigantic pile of spiritual high explosive, and then shovelled daily into every house with the morning milk by the newspapers, needed only a bomb thrown at Serajevo by a handful of regicide idealists to blow the centre out of Europe. Men with empty phrases in their mouths and foolish fables in their heads have seen each other, not as fellow-creatures, but as dragons and devils, and have slaughtered each other accordingly. Now that our frenzies are forgotten, our commissariats disbanded, and the soldiers they fed demobilized to starve when they cannot get employment in mending what we broke, even the iron-mouthed Ibsen, were he still alive, would perhaps spare us, disillusioned wretches as we are, the well-deserved “I told you so.”

Not that there is any sign of the lesson being taken to heart. Our reactions from Militarist idealism into Pacifist idealism will not put an end to war: they are only a practical form of the reculer pour mieux sauter. We still cannot bring ourselves to criticize our ideals, because that would be a form of self-criticism. The vital force that drives men to throw away their lives and those of others in the pursuit of an imaginative impulse, reckless of its apparent effect on human welfare, is, like all natural forces, given to us in enormous excess to provide against an enormous waste. Therefore men, instead of economizing it by consecrating it to the service of their highest impulses, grasp at a phrase in a newspaper article, or in the speech of a politician on a vote-catching expedition, as an excuse for exercising it violently, just as a horse turned out to grass will gallop and kick merely to let off steam. The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction.

But I cannot spend the rest of my life drawing the moral of the war. It must suffice to say here that as war throws back civilization inevitably, leaving everything worse than it was, from razors and scissors to the characters of the men that make and sell and buy them, old abuses revive eagerly in a world that dreamed it had got rid of them for ever; old books on morals become new and topical again; and old prophets stir in their graves and are read with a new sense of the importance of their message. That is perhaps why a new edition of this book is demanded.

In spite of the temptation to illustrate it afresh by the moral collapse of the last ten years, I have left the book untouched. To change a pre-war book into a post-war book would in this case mean interpreting Ibsen in the light of a catastrophe of which he was unaware. Nobody can pretend to say what view he would have taken of it. He might have thought the demolition of three monstrous idealist empires cheap at the cost of fifteen million idealists’ lives. Or he might have seen in the bourgeois republics which have superseded them a more deeply entrenched fortification of idealism at its suburban worst. So I have refrained from tampering with what I wrote when I, too, was as pre-war as Ibsen.

G. B. S.

PREFACE: 1913

In THE pages which follow I have made no attempt to tamper with the work of the bygone man of thirty-five who wrote them. I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same.

When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one. What I have written I have written, said Pilate, thinking (rightly, as it turned out) that his blunder might prove truer than its revision by the elders; and what he said after a lapse of twenty-one seconds I may very well say after a lapse of twenty-one years.

However, I should not hesitate to criticize my earlier work if I thought it likely to do any mischief that criticism can avert. But on reading it through I have no doubt that it is as much needed in its old form as ever it was. Now that Ibsen is no longer frantically abused, and is safe in the Pantheon, his message is in worse danger of being forgotten or ignored than when he was in the pillory. Nobody now dreams of calling me a “muck ferreting dog” because I think Ibsen a great teacher. I will not go so far as to say I wish they did; but I do say that the most effective way of shutting our minds against a great man’s ideas is to take them for granted and admit he was great and have done with him. It really matters very little whether Ibsen was a great man or not: what does matter is his message and the need of it.

That people are still interested in the message is proved by the history of this book. It has long been out of print in England; but it has never been out of demand. In spite of the smuggling of unauthorized American editions, which I have winked at because the absence of an English reprint was my own fault (if it be a fault not to be able to do more than a dozen things at a time), the average price of copies of the original edition stood at twenty-four shillings some years ago, and is no doubt higher now. But it was not possible to reprint it without additions. When it was issued in 1891 Ibsen was still alive, and had not yet produced The Master Builder, or Little Eyolf, or John Gabriel Borkman, or When We Dead Awaken. Without an account of these four final masterpieces, a book entitled The Quintessence of Ibsenism would have been a fraud on its purchasers; and it was the difficulty of finding time to write the additional chapters on these plays, and review Ibsen’s position from the point of view reached when his work ended with his death and his canonization as an admitted grand master of European literature, that has prevented me for twenty years from complying with the demand for a second edition. Also, perhaps, some relics of my old, or rather my young conscience, which revolted against hasty work. Now that my own stream is nearer the sea, I am more inclined to encourage myself in haste and recklessness by reminding myself that Je mieux est l’emiemi du bien, and that I had better cobble up a new edition as best I can than not supply it at all.

I have taken all possible precautions to keep the reader’s mind free from verbal confusion in following Ibsen’s attack on ideals and idealism, a confusion that might have been avoided could his plays, without losing the naturalness of their dialogue, have been translated into the language of the English Bible. It is not too much to say that the works of Ibsen furnish one of the best modem keys to the prophecies of Scripture. Read the prophets, major and minor, from Isaiah to Malachi, without such a key, and you will be puzzled and bored by the almost continuous protest against and denunciation of idolatry and prostitution. Simpletons read all this passionate invective with sleepy unconcern, concluding thoughtlessly that idolatry means praying to stocks and stones instead of to brass lectern eagles and the new reredos presented by the local distiller in search of a title; and as to prostitution, they think of it as “the social evil,” and regret that the translators of the Bible used a much blunter word. But nobody who has ever heard real live men talking about graven images and traders in sex can for a moment suppose them to be the things the prophets denounced so earnestly. For idols and idolatry read ideals and idealism; for the prostitution of Piccadilly Circus read not only the prostitution of the journalist, the political lawyer, the parson selling his soul to the squire, the ambitious politician selling his soul for office, but the much more intimate and widespread idolatries and prostitutions of the private snob, the domestic tyrant and voluptuary, and the industrial adventurer. At once the prophetic warnings and curses take on meaning and proportion, and lose that air of exaggerated righteousness and tiresome conventional rant which repels readers who do not possess Ibsen’s clue. I have sometimes thought of reversing the operation, and substituting in this book the words idol and idolatry for ideal and idealism; but it would be impossible without spoiling the actuality of Ibsen’s criticism of society. If you call a man a rascally idealist, he is not only shocked and indignant but puzzled: in which condition you can rely on his attention. If you call him a rascally idolater, he concludes calmly that you do not know that he is a member of the Church of England. I have therefore left the old wording. Save for certain adaptations made necessary by the lapse of time and the hand of death, the book stands as it did, with a few elucidations which I might have made in 1891 had I given the text a couple of extra revisions. Also, of course, the section dealing with the last four plays. The two concluding chapters are new. There is no fundamental change: above all, no dilution.

Whether this edition will change people’s minds to the extent to which the first did (to my own great astonishment) I do not know. In the eighteen-nineties one jested about the revolt of the daughters, and of the wives who slammed the front door like Nora. At present the revolt has become so general that even the feeblest and oldest after-dinner jesters dare no longer keep Votes for Women on their list of stale pleasantries about mothers-in-law, rational dress, and mixed bathing. Men are waking up to the perception that in killing women’s souls they have killed their own. Mr. Granville-Barker’s worthy father of six unmarriageable daughters in The Madras House, ruefully exclaiming, “It seems to me I’ve been made a convenience of all my life,” has taken away the excited attention that Nora once commanded when she said, “I have been living all these years with a strange man.” When she meets Helmer’s “No man sacrifices his honor for a woman” with her “Thousands of women have done that for men,” there is no longer the old impressed assent: men fiercely protest that it is not true; that, on the contrary, for every woman who has sacrificed her honor for a man’s sake, ten men have sacrificed their honor for a woman’s. In the plays of Gorki and Tchekov, against which all the imbecilities and outrages of the old anti-Ibsen campaign are being revived (for the Press never learns anything by experience), the men appear as more tragically sacrificed by evil social conditions and their romantic and idealistic disguises than the women. Now it may be that into this new atmosphere my book will come with quite an old-fashioned air. As I write these lines the terrible play with which Strindberg wreaked the revenge of the male for A Doll’s House has just been performed for the first time in London under the title of Creditors. In that, as in Brieux’s Les Hannetons, it is the man who is the victim of domesticity, and the woman who is the tyrant and soul destroyer. Thus A Doll’s House did not dispose of the question: it only brought on the stage the endless recriminations of idealistic marriage. And how has Strindberg, Ibsen’s twin giant, been received? With an even idler stupidity than Ibsen himself, because Ibsen appealed to the rising energy of the revolt of women against idealism; but Strindberg attacks women ruthlessly, trying to rouse men from the sloth and sensuality of their idealized addiction to them; and as the men, unlike the women, do not want to be roused, whilst the women do not like to be attacked, there is no conscious Strindberg movement to relieve the indifference, the dull belittlement, the spiteful hostility against which the devotees of Ibsen fought so slashingly in the nineties. But the unconscious movement is violent enough. As I write, it is only two days since an eminent bacteriologist filled three columns of The Times with a wild Strindbergian letter in which he declared that women must be politically and professionally secluded and indeed excluded, because their presence and influence inflict on men an obsession so disabling and dangerous that men and women can work together or legislate together only on the same conditions as horses and mares: that is, by the surgical destruction of the male’s sex. The Times and The Pall Mall Gazette gravely accept this outburst as “scientific,” and heartily endorse it; though only a few weeks have elapsed since The Times dismissed Strindberg’s play and Strindberg himself with curt superciliousness as uninteresting and negligible. Not many years ago, a performance of a play by myself, the action of which was placed in an imaginary Ibsen Club, in which the comedy of the bewilderment of conventional people when brought suddenly into contact with the Ibsenist movement (both understood and misunderstood) formed the atmosphere of the piece, was criticized in terms which shewed that our critics are just as hopelessly in the rear of Ibsen as they were in 1891. The only difference was that whereas in 1891 they would have insulted Ibsen, they now accept him as a classic. But understanding of the change of mind produced by Ibsen, or notion that they live in a world which is seething with the reaction of Ibsen’s ideas against the ideas of Sardou and Tom Taylor, they have none. They stare with equal unintelligence at the sieges and stormings of separate homesteads by Ibsen or Strindberg, and at the attack all along the front of refined society into which these sieges and stormings have now developed. Whether the attack is exquisite, touching, delicate, as in Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard, Galsworthy’s Silver Box, and Granville-Barker’s Anne Leete, or ruthless, with every trick of intellectual ruffianism and ribaldry, and every engine of dramatic controversy, there is the same pettish disappointment at the absence of the old conventions, the same gaping unconsciousness of the meaning and purpose of the warfare in which each play is a battle, as in the days when this book was new.

Our political journalists are even blinder than our artistic ones in this matter. The credit of our domestic ideals having been shaken to their foundations, as through a couple of earthquake shocks, by Ibsen and Strindberg (the Arch-Individualists of the nineteenth century) whilst the Socialists have been idealizing, sentimentalizing, denouncing Capitalism for sacrificing Love and Home and Domestic Happiness and Children and Duty to money, greed and ambition, yet it remains a commonplace of political journalism to assume that Socialism is the deadliest enemy of the domestic ideals and Unsocialism their only hope and refuge. In the same breath the world-grasping commercial synthesis we call Capitalism, built up by generations of Scotch Rationalists and English Utilitarians, Atheists, Agnostics and Natural-Selectionists, with Malthus as the one churchman among all its prophets, is proclaimed the bulwark of the Christian Churches. We used to be told that the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. When our people see the heavens blazing with suns, they simply keep their eyes shut, and walk on in darkness until they have led us into the pit. No matter: I am not a domestic idealist; and it pleases me to think that the Life Force may have providential aims in thus keeping my opponents off the trail.

But for all that I must not darken counsel. I therefore, without further apology, launch my old torpedo with the old charge in it, leaving to the new chapters at the end what I have to say about the change in the theatre since Ibsen set his potent leaven to work there.

Ayot St. Lawrence, 1912-13.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

IN THE spring of 1890, the Fabian Society, finding itself at a loss for a course of lectures to occupy its summer meetings, was compelled to make shift with a series of papers put forward under the general heading of Socialism in Contemporary Literature. The Fabian Essayists, strongly pressed to do “something or other,” for the most part shook their heads; but in the end Sydney Olivier consented to “take Zola”; I consented to “take Ibsen”; and Hubert Bland undertook to read all the Socialist novels of the day, an enterprise the desperate failure of which resulted in the most amusing paper of the series. William Morris, asked to read a paper on himself, flatly declined, but gave us one on Gothic Architecture. Stepniak also came to the rescue with a lecture on modern Russian fiction; and so the Society tided over the summer without having to close its doors, but also without having added anything whatever to the general stock of information on Socialism in Contemporary Literature. After this I cannot claim that my paper on Ibsen, which was duly read at the St. James’s Restaurant on the 18th July 1890, under the presidency of Mrs. Annie Besant, and which was the first form of this little book, is an original work in the sense of being the result of a spontaneous internal impulse on my part. Having purposely couched it in the most provocative terms (of which traces may be found by the curious in its present state), I did not attach much importance to the somewhat lively debate that arose upon it; and I had laid it aside as a pièce d’occasion which had served its turn, when the production of Rosmersholm at the Vaudeville Theatre by Florence Farr, the inauguration of the Independent Theatre by Mr. J. T. Grein with a performance of Ghosts, and the sensation created by the experiment of Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea with Hedda Gabler, started a frantic newspaper controversy, in which I could see no sign of any of the disputants having ever been forced by circumstances, as I had, to make up his mind definitely as to what Ibsen’s plays meant, and to defend his view face to face with some of the keenest debaters in London. I allow due weight to the fact that Ibsen himself has not enjoyed this Fabian advantage; but I have also shewn that the existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it. At any rate, the controversialists, whether in the abusive stage, or the apologetic stage, or the hero-worshipping stage, by no means made clear what they were abusing, or apologizing for, or going into ecstasies about; and I came to the conclusion that my explanation might as well be placed in the field until a better could be found.

With this account of the origin of the book, and a reminder that it is not a critical essay on the poetic beauties of Ibsen, but simply an exposition of Ibsenism, I offer it to my readers to make what they can of.

LONDON, June 1891.

THE TWO PIONEERS

THAT is, pioneers of the march to the plains of heaven (so to speak).

The second, whose eyes are in the back of his head, is the man who declares that it is wrong to do something that no one has hitherto seen any harm in.

The first, whose eyes are very longsighted and in the usual place, is the man who declares that it is right to do something hitherto regarded as infamous.

The second is treated with great respect by the army. They give him testimonials; name him the Good man; and hate him like the devil.

The first is stoned and shrieked at by the whole army. They call him all manner of opprobrious names; grudge him his bare bread and water; and secretly adore him as their savior from utter despair.

Let me take an example from life of my pioneers. Shelley was a pioneer and nothing else: he did both first and second pioneer’s work.

Now compare the effect produced by Shelley as abstinence preacher or second pioneer with that which he produced as indulgence preacher or first pioneer. For example:

SECOND PIONEER PROPOSITION: It is wrong to kill animals and eat them.

FIRST PIONEER PROPOSITION: It is not wrong to take your sister as your wife. (The curious persistence of this proposition in the higher poetry of the nineteenth century is not easy to account for now that it sounds both unimportant and old-fashioned. It is as if one said “It is not wrong to stand on one’s head.” The reply is “You may be very right; but as nobody wants to, why bother about it?” Yet I think this sensible way of treating the matter — obviously more healthy than the old morbid horror — has been produced largely by the refusal of poets like Shelley and Wagner to accept the theory of natural antipathy as the basis of the tables of Consanguinity, and by the subsequent publication of masses of evidence by sociologists, from Herbert Spencer to Westermarck, shewing that such tables are entirely conventional and that all our prohibitions have been either ignored or actually turned into positive obligations at one time or another without any shock to human instincts. The consequence is that our eyes are now opened to the practical social reasons for barring marriage between Laon and Cythna, Siegmund and Sieglinda; and the preaching of incest as something poetic in itself has lost all its morbid interest and ceased. Also we are beginning to recognize the important fact that the absence of romantic illusion as between persons brought up together, which undoubtedly exists, and which used to be mistaken for natural antipathy, cannot be depended on as between strangers, however close their consanguinity, and that any domestic or educational system which segregates the sexes produces romantic illusion, no matter how undesirable it may be. It will be seen later on in the chapter dealing with the play called Ghosts, that Ibsen took this modern view that consanguinity does not count between strangers. I have accepted it myself in my play Mrs. Warren’s Profession.)

Here the second pioneer appears as a gentle humanitarian, and the first as an unnatural corrupter of public morals and family life. So much easier is it to declare the right wrong than the wrong right in a society with a guilty conscience, to which, as to Dickens’s detective, “Any possible move is a probable move provided it’s in a wrong direction.” Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

The English newspaper which best represented the guilty conscience of the middle class, was, when Ibsen’s plays reached England, The Daily Telegraph. If we can find that The Daily Telegraph attacked Ibsen as The Quarterly Review used to attack Shelley, it will occur to us at once that there must be something of the first pioneer about Ibsen.

The late Clement Scott, at that time dramatic critic to The Daily Telegraph, was a sentimentally goodnatured gentleman, not then a pioneer, though he had in his time fought hard for the advance in British drama represented by the plays of Robertson. He was also an emotional, impressionable, zealous, and sincere Roman Catholic. He accused Ibsen of dramatic impotence, ludicrous amateurishness, nastiness, vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, absurdity, uninteresting verbosity, and “suburbanity,” declaring that he has taken ideas that would have inspired a great tragic poet, and vulgarized and debased them in dull, hateful, loathsome, horrible plays. This criticism, which occurs in a notice of the first performance of Ghosts in England, is to be found in The Daily Telegraph for the 14th March 1891, and is supplemented by a leading article which compares the play to an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly, or a lazar house with all its doors and windows open. Bestial, cynical, disgusting, poisonous, sickly, delirious, indecent, loathsome, fetid, literary carrion, crapulous stuff, clinical confessions: all these epithets are used in the article as descriptive of Ibsen’s work. “Realism,” said the writer, “is one thing; but the nostrils of the audience must not be visibly held before a play can be stamped as true to nature. It is difficult to expose in decorous words the gross and almost putrid indecorum of this play.” As the performance of Ghosts took place on the evening of the 13 th March, and the criticism appeared next morning, it is evident that Clement Scott must have gone straight from the theatre to the newspaper office, and there, in an almost hysterical condition, penned his share of this extraordinary protest. The literary workmanship bears marks of haste and disorder, which, however, only heighten the expression of the passionate horror produced in the writer by seeing Ghosts on the stage. He calls on the authorities to cancel the license of the theatre, and declares that he has been exhorted to laugh at honor, to disbelieve in love, to mock at virtue, to distrust friendship, and to deride fidelity.

If this document were at all singular, it would rank as one of the curiosities of criticism, exhibiting, as it does, the most seasoned playgoer in London thrown into convulsions by a performance which was witnessed with approval, and even with enthusiasm, by many persons of approved moral and artistic conscientiousness. But Clement Scott’s criticism was hardly distinguishable in tone from dozens of others which appeared simultaneously. His opinion was the vulgar opinion. Mr. Alfred Watson, critic to The Standard, the leading Tory daily paper, proposed that proceedings should be taken against the theatre under Lord Campbell’s Act for the suppression of disorderly houses. Clearly Clement Scott and his editor Sir Edwin Arnold, with whom rested the final responsibility for the article which accompanied the criticism, represented a considerable party.

How then is it that Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright of European celebrity, attracted one section of the English people so strongly that they hailed him as the greatest living dramatic poet and moral teacher, whilst another section was so revolted by his works that they described him in terms which they themselves admitted to be, by the necessities of the case, all but obscene? This phenomenon, which has occurred throughout Europe whenever Ibsen’s plays have been acted, as well as in America and Australia, must be exhaustively explained before the plays can be described without danger of reproducing the same confusion in the reader’s own mind. Such an explanation, therefore, must be my first business.

Understand, at the outset, that the explanation will not be an explaining away. Clement Scott’s judgment did not mislead him in the least as to Ibsen’s meaning. Ibsen means all that most revolted his critic. For example, in Ghosts, the play in question, a clergyman and a married woman fall in love with one another. The woman proposes to abandon her husband and live with the clergyman. He recalls her to duty, and makes her behave as a virtuous woman. She afterwards tells him that this was a crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her, and has written the play to bring you round to his opinion. Clement Scott did not agree with her, and believed that when you are brought round to her opinion you have been morally corrupted. By this conviction he was impelled to denounce Ibsen as he did, Ibsen being equally impelled to propagate the convictions which provoked the attack. Which of the two is right cannot be decided until it is ascertained whether a society of persons holding Ibsen’s opinions would be higher or lower than a society holding Clement Scott’s.

There are many people who cannot conceive this as an open question. To them a denunciation of any recognized practices is an incitement to unsocial conduct; and every utterance in which an assumption of the eternal validity of these practices is not implicit is a paradox. Yet all progress involves the beating of them from that position. By way of illustration, one may rake up the case of Proudhon, who in the year 1840 carefully defined property as theft. This was thought the very maddest paradox that ever man hazarded: it seemed obvious that a society which countenanced such a proposition must speedily be reduced to the condition of a sacked city. Today schemes for the confiscation by taxation and supertaxation of mining royalties and ground rents are commonplaces of social reform; and the honesty of the relation of our big property holders to the rest of the community is challenged on all hands. It would be easy to multiply instances, though the most complete are now ineffective through the triumph of the original paradox having obliterated all memory of the opposition it first had to encounter. The point to seize is that social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step. If the Englishman had not repudiated the duty of absolute obedience to his king, his political progress would have been impossible. If women had not repudiated the duty of absolute submission to their husbands, and defied public opinion as to the limits set by modesty to their education, they would never have gained the protection of the Married Women’s Property Act, the municipal vote, or the power to qualify themselves as medical practitioners. If Luther had not trampled on his duty to the head of his Church and on his vow of chastity, our clergy would still have to choose between celibacy and profligacy. There is nothing new, then, in the defiance of duty by the reformer: every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up. And every reformer is denounced accordingly: Luther as an apostate, Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollstonecraft as an unwomanly virago, Shelley as a libertine, and Ibsen as all the things enumerated in The Daily Telegraph. This crablike progress of social evolution, in which the individual advances by seeming to go backward, continues to illude us in spite of all the lessons of history. To the pious man the newly made freethinker, suddenly renouncing supernatural revelation, and denying all obligation to believe the Bible and obey the commandments as such, appears to be claiming the right to rob and murder at large. But the freethinker soon finds reasons for not doing what he does not want to do; and these reasons seem to him to be far more binding on our conscience than the precepts of a book of which the infallibility cannot be rationally proved. The pious man is at last forced to admit — as he was in the case of the late Charles Bradlaugh, for instance — that the disciples of Voltaire and Tom Paine do not pick pockets or cut throats oftener than your even Christian: he actually is driven to doubt whether Voltaire himself (poor Voltaire, who built a church, and was the greatest philanthropist of his time!) really screamed and saw the devil on his deathbed.

This experience by no means saves the rationalist ( I had better here warn students of philosophy that I am speaking of rationalism, not as classified in the books, but as apparent in men.) from falling into the same conservatism when the time comes for his own belief to be questioned. No sooner has he triumphed over the theologian than he forthwith sets up as binding on all men the duty of acting logically with the object of securing the greatest good of the greatest number, with the result that he is presently landed in vivisection, Contagious Diseases Acts, dynamite conspiracies, and other grotesque but strictly reasonable abominations. Reason becomes Dagon, Moloch, and Jehovah rolled into one. Its devotees exult in having freed themselves from the old slavery to a collection of books written by Jewish men of letters. To worship such books was, they can prove, as absurd as to worship sonatas composed by German musicians, as was done by the hero of Wagner’s novelette, who sat up on his deathbed to say his creed, beginning, “I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.”

The Voltairean freethinker despises such a piece of sentiment; but is it not much more sensible to worship a sonata constructed by a musician than to worship a syllogism constructed by a logician, since the sonata may encourage heroism, or at least inspire feelings of awe and devotion? This does not occur to the votary of reason; and the rationalist’s freethinking soon comes to mean syllogism worship with rites of human sacrifice; for just as the rationalist’s pious predecessor thought that the man who scoffed at baptism and the Bible must infallibly yield without resistance to all his criminal propensities, so the rationalist in turn becomes convinced that when a man once loses his faith in vaccination and in Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics, he is no longer to be trusted to keep his hands off his neighbor’s person, purse, or wife.

In process of time the age of reason had to go its way after the age of faith. In actual experience, the first shock to rationalism comes from the observation that though nothing can persuade women to adopt it, their impatience of reasoning no more prevents them from arriving at right conclusions than the masculine belief in it (never a very deeply rooted faith in England, by the way, whatever it may have been in France or Greece) saves men from arriving at wrong ones. When this generalization has to be modified in view of the fact that some women are beginning to try their skill at ratiocination, reason is not re-established on the throne; because the result of Woman’s reasoning is that she begins to fall into all the errors which men are just learning to mistrust. The moment she sets about doing things for reasons instead of merely finding reasons for what she wants to do, there is no saying what mischief she will be at next: there being just as good reasons for burning a heretic at the stake as for rescuing a shipwrecked crew from drowning: in fact, there are better.

One of the first and most famous utterances of rationalism would have condemned it without further hearing had its full significance been seen at the time. Voltaire, taking exception to the trash of some poetaster, was met with the plea “One must live.”

“I dont see the necessity,” replied Voltaire. The evasion was worthy of the Father of Lies himself; for Voltaire was face to face with the very necessity he was denying; must have known, consciously or not, that it is the universal postulate; would have understood, if he had lived today, that since all valid human institutions are constructed to fulfil man’s will, and his will is to live even when his reason teaches him to die, logical necessity, which was the sort Voltaire meant (the other sort being visible enough) can never be a motor in human action, and is, in short, not necessity at all. But that was not brought to light in Voltaire’s time; and he died impenitent, bequeathing to his disciples that most logical of agents, the guillotine, which also “did not see the necessity.”

In our own century the recognition of the will as distinct from the reasoning machinery began to spread. Schopenhauer was the first among the moderns ( I say the modems, because the will is our old friend the soul or spirit of man; and the doctrine of justification, not by works, but by faith, clearly derives its validity from the consideration that no action, taken apart from the will behind it, has any moral character: for example, the acts which make the murderer and incendiary infamous are exactly similar to those which make the patriotic hero famous. “Original sin” is the will doing mischief. “Divine grace” is the will doing good. Our fathers, unversed in the Hegelian dialectic, could not conceive that these two, each the negation of the other, were the same. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, like that of all pessimists, is really based on the old view of the will as original sin, and on the 1750-1850 view that the intellect is the divine grace that is to save us from it. It is as well to warn those who fancy that Schopenhauerism is one and indivisible, that acceptance of its metaphysics by no means involves endorsement of its philosophy.) to appreciate the enormous practical importance of the distinction, and to make it clear to amateur metaphysicians by concrete instances. Out of his teaching came the formulation of the dilemma Voltaire had shut his eyes to. Here it is. Rationally considered, life is only worth living when its pleasures are greater than its pains. Now to a generation which has ceased to believe in heaven, and has not yet learned that the degradation by poverty of four out of every five of its number is artificial and remediable, the fact that life is not rationally worth living is obvious. It is useless to pretend that the pessimism of Koheleth, Shakespear, Dryden, and Swift can be refuted if the world progresses solely by the destruction of the unfit, and yet can only maintain its civilization by manufacturing the unfit in swarms of which that appalling proportion of four to one represents but the comparatively fit survivors. Plainly then, the reasonable thing for the rationalists to do is to refuse to live. But as none of them will commit suicide in obedience to this demonstration of “the necessity” for it, there is an end of the notion that we live for reasons instead of in fulfilment of our will to live. Thus we are landed afresh in mystery; for positive science gives no account whatever of this will to live. Positive science has dazzled us for nearly a century with its analyses of the machinery of sensation. Its researches into the nature of sound and the construction of the ear, the nature of light and the construction of the eye, its measurement of the speed of sensation, its localization of the functions of the brain, and its hints as to the possibility of producing a homunculus presently as the fruit of its chemical investigation of protoplasm have satisfied the souls of our atheists as completely as belief in divine omniscience and scriptural revelation satisfied the souls of their pious fathers. The fact remains that when Young, Helmholtz, Darwin, Haeckel, and the rest, popularized here among the literate classes by Tyndall and Huxley, and among the proletariat by the lectures of the National Secular Society, have taught you all they know, you are still as utterly at a loss to explain the fact of consciousness as you would have been in the days when you were instructed from The Child’s Guide to Knowledge. Materialism, in short, only isolated the great mystery of consciousness by clearing away several petty mysteries with which we had confused it; just as Rationalism isolated the great mystery of the will to live. The isolation made both more conspicuous than before. We thought we had escaped for ever from the cloudy region of metaphysics; and we were only carried further into the heart of them.

(The correlation between Rationalism and Materialism in this process has some immediate practical importance. Those who give up Materialism whilst clinging to Rationalism generally either relapse into abject submission to the most paternal of the Churches, or are caught by the attempts, constantly renewed, of mystics to found a new faith by rationalizing on the hollowness of materialism. The hollowness has nothing in it; and if you have come to grief as a materialist by reasoning about something, you are not likely, as a mystic, to improve matters by reasoning about nothing.)

We have not yet worn off the strangeness of the position to which we have now been led. Only the other day our highest boast was that we were reasonable human beings. Today we laugh at that conceit, and see ourselves as wilful creatures. Ability to reason accurately is as desirable as ever; for by accurate reasoning only can we calculate our actions so as to do what we intend to do: that is, to fulfil our will; but faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.

At this point, accordingly, the illusion as to the retrogressive movement of progress recurs as strongly as ever. Just as the beneficent step from theology to rationalism seems to the theologist a growth of impiety, does the step from rationalism to the recognition of the will as the prime motor strike the rationalist as a lapse of common sanity; so that to both theologist and rationalist progress at last appears alarming, threatening, hideous, because it seems to tend towards chaos. The deists Voltaire and Tom Paine were, to the divines of their day, predestined devils, tempting mankind hellward.(This is not precisely true. Voltaire was what we should now call an advanced Congregationalism in fact, modem Dissent, on its educated side, is sound Voltaireanism. Voltaire was for some time on very friendly terms with the Genevese pastors. But what with his jests at the expense of Bible worship, and the fact that he could not formally cut himself off from the Established Church of France without placing himself in its power, the pastors had finally to conceal their agreement with him.) To deists and divines alike Ferdinand Lassalle, the godless self-worshipper and man-worshipper, would have been a monster. Yet many who today echo Lassalle’s demand that economic and political institutions should be adapted to the poor man’s will to eat and drink his fill out of the product of the labor he shares, are revolted by Ibsen’s acceptance of the impulse towards greater freedom as sufficient ground for the repudiation of any customary duty, however sacred, that conflicts with it. Society, were it even as free as Lassalle’s Social-Democratic republic, must, it seems to them, go to pieces when conduct is no longer regulated by inviolable covenants.

For what, during all these overthrowings of things sacred and things infallible, has been happening to that pre-eminently sanctified thing, Duty? Evidently it cannot have come off scatheless. First there was man’s duty to God, with the priest as assessor. That was repudiated; and then came Man’s duty to his neighbor, with Society as the assessor. Will this too be repudiated, and be succeeded by Man’s duty to himself, assessed by himself? And if so, what will be the effect on the conception of Duty in the abstract? Let us see.

I have just called Lassalle a self-worshipper. In doing so I cast no reproach on him; for this is the last step in the evolution of the conception of duty. Duty arises at first, a gloomy tyranny, out of man’s helplessness, his self-mistrust, in a word, his abstract fear. He personifies all that he abstractly fears as God, and straightway becomes the slave of his duty to God. He imposes that slavery fiercely on his children, threatening them with hell, and punishing them for their attempts to be happy. When, becoming bolder, he ceases to fear everything, and dares to love something, this duty of his to what he fears evolves into a sense of duty to what he loves. Sometimes he again personifies what he loves as God; and the God of Wrath becomes the God of Love: sometimes he at once becomes a humanitarian, an altruist, acknowledging only his duty to his neighbor. This stage is correlative to the rationalist stage in the evolution of philosophy and the capitalist phase in the evolution of industry. But in it the emancipated slave of God falls under the dominion of Society, which, having just reached a phase in which all the love is ground out of it by the competitive struggle for money, remorselessly crushes him until, in due course of the further growth of his courage, a sense at last arises in him of his duty to himself. And when this sense is fully grown the tyranny of duty perishes; for now the man’s God is his own humanity; and he, selfsatisfied at last, ceases to be selfish. The evangelist of this last step must therefore preach the repudiation of duty. This, to the unprepared of his generation, is indeed the wanton masterpiece of paradox. What! after all that has been said by men of noble life as to the secret of all right conduct being only Duty, Duty, Duty, is he to be told how that duty is the primal curse from which we must redeem ourselves before we can advance another step on the road along which, as we imagine (having forgotten the repudiations made by our fathers) duty and duty alone has brought us thus far? But why not? God Almighty was once the most sacred of our conceptions; and he had to be denied. Then Reason became the Infallible Pope, only to be deposed in turn. Is Duty more sacred than God or Reason?

Having now arrived at the prospect of the repudiation of duty by Man, I shall make a digression on the subject of ideals and idealists, as treated by Ibsen. I shall go round in a loop, and come back to the same point by way of the repudiation of duty by Woman; and then at last I shall be in a position to describe Ibsen’s plays without risk of misunderstanding.

IDEALS AND IDEALISTS

WE HAVE seen that as Alan grows through the ages, he finds himself bolder by the growth of his courage: that is, of his spirit (for so the common people name it), and dares more and more to love and trust instead of to fear and fight. But his courage has other effects: he also raises himself from mere consciousness to knowledge by daring more and more to face facts and tell himself the truth. For in his infancy of helplessness and terror he could not face the inexorable; and facts being of all things the most inexorable, he masked all the threatening ones as fast as he discovered them; so that now every mask requires a hero to tear it off. The king of terrors, Death, was the Arch-Inexorable: Man could not bear the dread of that. He must persuade himself that Death can be propitiated, circumvented, abolished. How he fixed the mask of personal immortality on the face of Death for this purpose we all know. And he did the like with all disagreeables as long as they remained inevitable. Otherwise he must have gone mad with terror of the grim shapes around him, headed by the skeleton with the scythe and hourglass. The masks were his ideals, as he called them; and what, he would ask, would life be without ideals? Thus he became an idealist, and remained so until he dared to begin pulling the masks off and looking the spectres in the face — dared, that is, to be more and more a realist. But all men are not equally brave; and the greatest terror prevailed whenever some realist bolder than the rest laid hands on a mask which they did not yet dare to do without.

We have plenty of these masks around us still: some of them more fantastic than any of the Sandwich islanders’ masks in the British Museum. In our novels and romances especially we see the most beautiful of all the masks: those devised to disguise the brutalities of the sexual instinct in the earlier stages of its development, and to soften the rigorous aspect of the iron laws by which Society regulates its gratification. When the social organism becomes bent on civilization, it has to force marriage and family life on the individual, because it can perpetuate itself in no other way whilst love is still known only by fitful glimpses, the basis of sexual relationship being in the main mere physical appetite. Under these circumstances men try to graft pleasure on necessity by desperately pretending that the institution forced upon them is a congenial one, making it a point of public decency to assume always that men spontaneously love their kindred better than their chance acquaintances, and that the woman once desired is always desired: also that the family is woman’s proper sphere, and that no really womanly woman ever forms an attachment, or even knows what it means, until she is requested to do so by a man. Now if anyone’s childhood has been embittered by the dislike of his mother and the ill-temper of his father; if his wife has ceased to care for him and he is heartily tired of his wife; if his brother is going to law with him over the division of the family property, and his son acting in studied defiance of his plans and wishes, it is hard for him to persuade himself that passion is eternal and that blood is thicker than water. Yet if he tells himself the truth, all his life seems a waste and a failure by the light of it. It comes then to this, that his neighbors must either agree with him that the whole system is a mistake, and discard it for a new one, which cannot possibly happen until social organization so far outgrows the institution that Society can perpetuate itself without it; or else they must keep him in countenance by resolutely making believe that all the illusions with which it has been masked are realities.

For the sake of precision, let us imagine a community of a thousand persons, organized for the perpetuation of the species on the basis of the British family as we know it at present. Seven hundred of them, we will suppose, find the British family arrangement quite good enough for them. Two hundred and ninety-nine find it a failure, but must put up with it since they are in a minority. The remaining person occupies a position to be explained presently. The 299 failures will not have the courage to face the fact that they are irremediable failures, since they cannot prevent the 700 satisfied ones from coercing them into conformity with the marriage law. They will accordingly try to persuade themselves that, whatever their own particular domestic arrangements may be, the family is a beautiful and holy natural institution. For the fox not only declares that the grapes he cannot get are sour: he also insists that the sloes he can get are sweet. Now observe what has happened. The family as it really is is a conventional arrangement, legally enforced, which the majority, because it happens to suit them, think good enough for the minority, whom it happens not to suit at all. The family as a beautiful and holy natural institution is only a fancy picture of what every family would have to be if everybody was to be suited, invented by the minority as a mask for the reality, which in its nakedness is intolerable to them. We call this sort of fancy picture an Ideal; and the policy of forcing individuals to act on the assumption that all ideals are real, and to recognize and accept such action as standard moral conduct, absolutely valid under all circumstances, contrary conduct or any advocacy of it being discountenanced and punished as immoral, may therefore be described as the policy of Idealism. Our 299 domestic failures are therefore become idealists as to marriage; and in proclaiming the ideal in fiction, poetry, pulpit and platform oratory, and serious private conversation, they will far outdo the 700 who comfortably accept marriage as a matter of course, never dreaming of calling it an “institution,” much less a holy and beautiful one, and being pretty plainly of opinion that Idealism is a crackbrained fuss about nothing. The idealists, hurt by this, will retort by calling them Philistines. We then have our society classified as 700 Philistines and 299 idealists, leaving one man unclassified: the man strong enough to face the truth the idealists are shirking.

Such a man says of marriage, “This thing is a failure for many of us. It is insufferable that two human beings, having entered into relations which only warm affection can render tolerable, should be forced to maintain them after such affections have ceased to exist, or in spite of the fact that they have never arisen. The alleged natural attractions and repulsions upon which the family ideal is based do not exist; and it is historically false that the family was founded for the purpose of satisfying them. Let us provide otherwise for the social ends which the family subserves, and then abolish its compulsory character altogether.” What will be the attitude of the rest to this outspoken man? The Philistines will simply think him mad. But the idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought — at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence — at the rending of the beautiful veil they and their poets have woven to hide the unbearable face of the truth. They will crucify him, burn him, violate their own ideals of family affection by taking his children away from him, ostracize him, brand him as immoral, profligate, filthy, and appeal against him to the despised Philistines, specially idealized for the occasion as Society. How far they will proceed against him depends on how far his courage exceeds theirs. At his worst, they call him cynic and paradoxer: at his best they do their utmost to ruin him if not to take his life. Thus, purblindly courageous moralists like Mandeville and Larochefoucauld, who merely state unpleasant facts without denying the validity of current ideals, and who indeed depend on those ideals to make their statements piquant, get off with nothing worse than this name of cynic, the free use of which is a familiar mark of the zealous idealist. But take the case of the man who has already served us as an example: Shelley. The idealists did not call Shelley a cynic: they called him a fiend until they invented a new illusion to enable them to enjoy the beauty of his lyrics, this illusion being nothing less than the pretence that since he was at bottom an idealist himself, his ideals must be identical with those of Tennyson and Longfellow, neither of whom ever wrote a line in which some highly respectable ideal was not implicit.

Here the admission that Shelley, the realist, was an idealist too, seems to spoil the whole argument. And it certainly spoils its verbal consistency. For we unfortunately use this word ideal indifferently to denote both the institution which the ideal masks and the mask itself, thereby producing desperate confusion of thought, since the institution may be an effete and poisonous one, whilst the mask may be, and indeed generally is, an image of what we would fain have in its place. If the existing facts, with their masks on, are to be called ideals, and the future possibilities which the masks depict are also to be called ideals — if, again, the man who is defending exisiting institutions by maintaining their identity with their masks is to be confounded under one name with the man who is striving to realize the future possibilities by tearing the mask and the thing masked asunder, then the position cannot be intelligibly described by mortal pen: you and I, reader, will be at cross purposes at every sentence unless you allow me to distinguish pioneers like Shelley and Ibsen as realists from the idealists of my imaginary community of one thousand. If you ask why I have not allotted the terms the other way, and called Shelley and Ibsen idealists and the conventionalists realists, I reply that Ibsen himself, though he has not formally made the distinction, has so repeatedly harped on conventions and conventionalists as ideals and idealists that if I were now perversely to call them realities and realists, I should confuse readers of The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm more than I should help them. Doubtless I shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal. But what, I ask, is that inevitable passing perplexity compared to the inextricable tangle I must produce if I follow the custom, and use the word indiscriminately in its two violently incompatible senses? If the term realist is objected to on account of some of its modem associations, I can only recommend you, if you must associate it with something else than my own description of its meaning (I do not deal in definitions), to associate it, not with Zola and Maupassant, but with Plato.

Now let us return to our community of 700 Philistines, 299 idealists, and I realist. The mere verbal ambiguity against which I have just provided is as nothing beside that which comes of any attempt to express the relations of these three sections, simple as they are, in terms of the ordinary systems of reason and duty. The idealist, higher in the ascent of evolution than the Philistine, yet hates the highest and strikes at him with a dread and rancor of which the easy-going Philistine is guiltless. The man who has risen above the danger and the fear that his acquisitiveness will lead him to theft, his temper to murder, and his affections to debauchery: this is he who is denounced as an archscoundrel and libertine, and thus confounded with the lowest because he is the highest. And it is not the ignorant and stupid who maintain this error, but the literate and the cultured. When the true prophet speaks, he is proved to be both rascal and idiot, not by those who have never read of how foolishly such learned demonstrations have come off in the past, but by those who have themselves written volumes on the crucifixions, the burnings, the stonings, the headings and hangings, the Siberia transportations, the calumny and ostracism which have been the lot of the pioneer as well as of the camp follower. It is from men of established literary reputation that we learn that William Blake was mad, that Shelley was spoiled by living in a low set, that Robert Owen was a man who did not know the world, that Ruskin was incapable of comprehending political economy, that Zola was a mere blackguard, and that Ibsen was “a Zola with a wooden leg.” The great musician, accepted by the unskilled listener, is vilified by his fellow-musicians: it was the musical culture of Europe that pronounced Wagner the inferior of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. The great artist finds his foes among the painters, and not among the men in the street: it was the Royal Academy which placed forgotten nobodies above Burne Jones. It is not rational that it should be so; but it is so, for all that.

The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us, something whereby, instead of resisting death, we can disarm it by committing suicide. The idealist, who has taken refuge with the ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of himself, thinks that all this is so much the better. The realist, who has come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the validity of his own will, thinks it so much the worse. To the one, human nature, naturally corrupt, is held back from ruinous excesses only by self-denying conformity to the ideals. To the other these ideals are only swaddling clothes which man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his movements. No wonder the two cannot agree. The idealist says, “Realism means egotism; and egotism means depravity.” The realist declares that when a man abnegates the will to live and be free in a world of the living and free, seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself, but “a good man,” then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that by good luck arrive before his bodily death. Unfortunately, this is the sort of speech that nobody but a realist understands. It will be more amusing as well as more convincing to take an actual example of an idealist criticizing a realist.

THE WOMANLY WOMAN

In 1890 the literary sensation of the day was the Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. An outline of it, with a running commentary, was given in The Review of Reviews (June 1890) by the editor, the late William Stead, who, having gained an immense following by a public service in rendering which he had to simulate a felony and suffer imprisonment for it in order to prove that it was possible, was engaged in a campaign with the object of establishing the ideal of sexual “purity” as a condition of public life. He had certain Ibsenist qualities: faith in himself, wilfulness, conscientious unscrupulousness, and could always make himself heard. Prominent among his ideals was an ideal of womanliness. In support of that ideal he would, like all idealists, make and believe any statement, however obviously and grotesquely unreal. When he found Marie Bashkirtseffs account of herself utterly incompatible with the picture of a woman’s mind presented to him by his ideal, he was confronted with the dilemma that either Marie was not a woman or else his ideal was false to nature. He actually accepted the former alternative. “Of the distinctively womanly,” he says, “there is in her but little trace. She was the very antithesis of a true woman.” William’s next difficulty was, that selfcontrol, being a leading quality in his ideal, could not have been possessed by Marie: otherwise she would have been more like his ideal. Nevertheless he had to record that she, without any compulsion from circumstances, made herself a highly skilled artist by working ten hours a day for six years. Let anyone who thinks that this is no evidence of self-control just try it for six months. William’s verdict nevertheless was “No self-control.” However, his fundamental quarrel with Marie came out in the following lines. “Marie,” he said, “was artist, musician, wit, philosopher, student, anything you like but a natural woman with a heart to love, and a soul to find its supreme satisfaction in sacrifice for lover or for child.” Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under pretence that she likes it; and, if she ventures to contradict the pretence, declaring her no true woman. In India they carried this piece of idealism to the length of declaring that a wife could not bear to survive her husband, but would be prompted by her own faithful, loving, beautiful nature to offer up her life on the pyre which consumed his dead body. The astonishing thing is that women, sooner than be branded as unsexed wretches, allowed themselves to be stupefied with drink, and in that unwomanly condition burnt alive. British Philistinism put down widow idealizing with the strong hand; and suttee is abolished in India. The English form of it still flourishes; and Stead, the rescuer of the children, was one of its high priests. Imagine his feelings on coming across this entry in a woman’s diary: “I love myself.” Or this, “I swear solemnly — by the Gospels, by the passion of Christ, by myself — that in four years I will be famous.” The young woman was positively proposing to exercise for her own sake all the powers that were given to her, in Stead’s opinion, solely that she might sacrifice them for her lover or child! No wonder he was driven to exclaim again, “She was very clever, no doubt; but woman she was not.”

Now observe this notable result. Marie Bashkirtseft, instead of being a less agreeable person than the ordinary female conformer to the ideal of womanliness, was most conspicuously the reverse. Stead himself wrote as one infatuated with her mere diary, and pleased himself by representing her as a person who fascinated everybody, and was a source of delight to all about her by the mere exhilaration and hope-giving atmosphere of her wilfulness. The truth is, that in real life a self-sacrificing woman, or, as Stead would have put it, a womanly woman, is not only taken advantage of, but disliked as well for her pains. No man pretends that his soul finds its supreme satisfaction in self-sacrifice: such an affectation would stamp him as coward and weakling: the manly man is he who takes the Bashkirtseff view of himself. But men are not the less loved on this account. No one ever feels helpless by the side of the self-helper; whilst the self-sacrificer is always a drag, a responsibility, a reproach, an everlasting and unnatural trouble with whom no really strong soul can live. Only those who have helped themselves know how to help others, and to respect their right to help themselves.

Although romantic idealists generally insist on selfsurrender as an indispensable element in true womanly love, its repulsive effect is well known and feared in practice by both sexes. The extreme instance is the reckless self-abandonment seen in the infatuation of passionate sexual desire. Everyone who becomes the object of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively. Love loses its charm when it is not free; and whether the compulsion is that of custom and law, or of infatuation, the effect is the same: it becomes valueless and even abhorrent, like the caresses of a maniac. The desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also the power to withhold; and the successful wooer, in both sexes alike, is the one who can stand out for honorable conditions, and, failing them, go without. Such conditions are evidently not offered to either sex by the legal marriage of today; for it is the intense repugnance inspired by the compulsory character of the legalized conjugal relation that leads, first to the idealization of marriage whilst it remains indispensable as a means of perpetuating society; then to its modification by divorce and by the abolition of penalties for refusal to comply with judicial orders for restitution of conjugal rights; and finally to its disuse and disappearance as the responsibility for the maintenance and education of the rising generation is shifted from the parent to the community.

Although the growing repugnance to face the Church of England marriage service has led many celebrants to omit those passages which frankly explain the object of the institution, we are not likely to dispense with legal ties and obligations, and trust wholly to the permanence of love, until the continuity of society no longer depends on the private nursery. Love, as a practical factor in society, is still a mere appetite. That higher development of it which Ibsen shews us occurring in the case of Rebecca West in Rosmersholm is only known to most of us by the descriptions of great poets, who themselves, as their biographies prove, have known it, not by sustained experience, but only by brief glimpses. Dante loved Beatrice with the higher love; but neither during her life nor after her death was he “faithful” to her or to the woman he actually married. And he would be a bold bourgeois who would pretend to a higher mind than Dante. Tannhâuser may die in the conviction that one moment of the emotion he felt with St. Elizabeth was fuller and happier than all the hours of passion he spent with Venus; but that does not alter the fact that love began for him with Venus, and that its earlier tentatives towards the final goal were attended with relapses. Now Tannhauser’s passion for Venus is a development of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois Jack for his Jill, a development at once higher and more dangerous, just as idealism is at once higher and more dangerous than Philistinism. The fondness is the germ of the passion: the passion is the germ of the more perfect love. When Blake told men that through excess they would learn moderation, he knew that the way for the present lay through the Venusberg, and that the race would assuredly not perish there as some individuals have, and as the Puritan fears we all shall unless we find a way round. Also he no doubt foresaw the time when our children would be born on the other side of it, and so be spared that fiery purgation.

But the very facts that Blake is still commonly regarded as a crazy visionary, and that the current criticism of Rosmersholm entirely fails even to notice the evolution of Rebecca’s passion for Rosmer into her love for him, much more to credit the moral transfiguration which accompanies it, shew how absurd it would be to pretend, for the sake of edification, that the ordinary marriage of today is a union between a William Blake and a Rebecca West, or that it would be possible, even if it were enlightened policy, to deny the satisfaction of the sexual appetite to persons who have not reached that stage. An overwhelming majority of such marriages as are not purely de convenance are entered into for the gratification of that appetite either in its crudest form or veiled only by those idealistic illusions which the youthful imagination weaves so wonderfully under the stimulus of desire, and which older people indulgently laugh at.

This being so, it is not surprising that our society, being directly dominated by men, comes to regard Woman, not as an end in herself like Man, but solely as a means of ministering to his appetite. The ideal wife is one who does everything that the ideal husband likes, and nothing else. Now to treat a person as a means instead of an end is to deny that person’s right to live. And to be treated as a means to such an end as sexual intercourse with those who deny one’s right to live is insufferable to any human being. Woman, if she dares face the fact that she is being so treated, must either loathe herself or else rebel. As a rule, when circumstances enable her to rebel successfully — for instance, when the accident of genius enables her to “lose her character” without losing her employment or cutting herself off from the society she values — she does rebel; but circumstances seldom do. Does she then loathe herself? By no means: she deceives herself in the idealist fashion by denying that the love which her suitor offers her is tainted with sexual appetite at all. It is, she declares, a beautiful, disinterested, pure, sublime devotion to another by which a man’s life is exalted and purified, and a woman’s rendered blest. And of all the cynics, the filthiest to her mind is the one who sees, in the man making honorable proposals to his future wife, nothing but the human male seeking his female. The man himself keeps her confirmed in her illusion; for the truth is unbearable to him too: he wants to form an affectionate tie, and not to drive a degrading bargain. After all, the germ of the highest love is in them both; though as yet it is no more than the appetite they are disguising so carefully from themselves. Consequently every stockbroker who has just brought his business up to marrying point woos in terms of the romantic illusion; and it is agreed between the two that their marriage shall realize the romantic ideal. Then comes the breakdown of the plan. The young wife finds that her husband is neglecting her for his business; that his interests, his activities, his whole life except that one part of it to which only a cynic ever referred before her marriage, lies away from home; and that her business is to sit there and mope until she is wanted. Then what can she do? If she complains, he, the self-helper, can do without her; whilst she is dependent on him for her position, her livelihood, her place in society, her home, her name, her very bread. All this is brought home to her by the first burst of displeasure her complaints provoke. Fortunately, things do not remain for ever at this point: perhaps the most wretched in a woman’s life. The self-respect she has lost as a wife she regains as a mother, in which capacity her use and importance to the community compare favorably with those of most men of business. She is wanted in the house, wanted in the market, wanted by the children; and now, instead of weeping because her husband is away in the city, thinking of stocks and shares instead of his ideal woman, she would regard his presence in the house all day as an intolerable nuisance. And so, though she is completely disillusioned on the subject of ideal love, yet, since it has not turned out so badly after all she countenances the illusion still from the point of view that it is a useful and harmless means of getting boys and girls to marry and settle down. And this conviction is the stronger in her because she feels that if she had known as much about marriage the day before her wedding as she did six months after, it would have been extremely hard to induce her to get married at all.

This prosaic solution is satisfactory only within certain limits. It depends altogether upon the accident of the woman having some natural vocation for domestic management and the care of children, as well as on the husband being fairly good-natured and livable-with. Hence arises the idealist illusion that a vocation for domestic management and the care of children is natural to women, and that women who lack them are not women at all, but members of the third, or Bashkirtseff sex. Even if this were true, it is obvious that if the Bashkirtseffs are to be allowed to live, they have a right to suitable institutions just as much as men and women. But it is not true. The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men; and although in a population emergency it might become necessary for every ablebodied woman to risk her life in childbed just as it might become necessary in a military emergency for every man to risk his life in the battlefield, yet even then it would by no means follow that the child-bearing would endow the mother with domestic aptitudes and capacities as it would endow her with milk. It is of course quite true that the majority of women are kind to children and prefer their own to other people’s. But exactly the same thing is true of the majority of men, who nevertheless do not consider that their proper sphere is the nursery. The case may be illustrated more grotesquely by the fact that the majority of women who have dogs are kind to them, and prefer their own dogs to other people’s; yet it is not proposed that women should restrict their activities to the rearing of puppies. If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else. No doubt there are Philistine parrots who agree with their owners that it is better to be in a cage than out, so long as there is plenty of hempseed and Indian com there. There may even be idealist parrots who persuade themselves that the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying Pretty Polly, and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul. I will not go so far as to affirm that there are theological parrots who are convinced that imprisonment is the will of God because it is unpleasant; but I am confident that there are rationalist parrots who can demonstrate that it would be a cruel kindness to let a parrot out to fall a prey to cats, or at least to forget its accomplishments and coarsen its naturally delicate fibres in an unprotected struggle for existence. Still, the only parrot a free-souled person can sympathize with is the one that insists on being let out as the first condition of making itself agreeable. A selfish bird, you may say: one that puts its own gratification before that of the family which is so fond of it — before even the greatest happiness of the greatest number: one that, in aping the independent spirit of a man, has unparroted itself and become a creature that has neither the home-loving nature of a bird nor the strength and enterprise of a mastiff. All the same, you respect that parrot in spite of your conclusive reasoning; and if it persists, you will have either to let it out or kill it.

The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself. But her duty to herself is no duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are the same person. Its payment is simply a fulfilment of the individual will, upon which all duty is a restriction, founded on the conception of the will as naturally malign and devilish. Therefore Woman has to repudiate duty altogether. In that repudiation lies her freedom; for it is false to say that Woman is now directly the slave of Man: she is the immediate slave of duty; and as man’s path to freedom is strewn with the wreckage of the duties and ideals he has trampled on, so must hers be. She may indeed mask her iconoclasm by proving in rationalist fashion, as Man has often done for the sake of a quiet life, that all these discarded idealist conceptions will be fortified instead of shattered by her emancipation. To a person with a turn for logic, such proofs are as easy as playing the piano is to Paderewski. But it will not be true. A whole basketful of ideals of the most sacred quality will be smashed by the achievement of equality for women and men. Those who shrink from such a clatter and breakage may comfort themselves with the reflection that the replacement of the broken goods will be prompt and certain. It is always a case of “The ideal is dead: long live the ideal!” And the advantage of the work of destruction is that every new ideal is less of an illusion than the one it has supplanted; so that the destroyer of ideals, though denounced as an enemy of society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies.

My digression is now over. Having traversed my loop as I promised, and come back to Man’s repudiation of duty by way of Woman’s, I may at last proceed to give some more particular account of Ibsen’s work without further preoccupation with Clement Scott’s protest, or the many others of which it is the type. For we now see that the pioneer must necessarily provoke such outcry as he repudiates duties, tramples on ideals, profanes what was sacred, sanctifies what was infamous, always driving his plough through gardens of pretty weeds in spite of the laws made against trespassers for the protection of the worms which feed on the roots, always letting in light and air to hasten the putrefaction of decaying matter, and everywhere proclaiming that “the old beauty is no longer beautiful, the new truth no longer true.” He can do no less; and what more and what else he does it is not given to all of his generation to understand. And if any man does not understand, and cannot foresee the harvest, what can he do but cry out in all sincerity against such destruction, until at last we come to know the cry of the blind like any other street cry, and to bear with it as an honest cry, albeit a false alarm?

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANTI-IDEALIST: EXTRAVAGANZAS

BRAND, 1866

We are now prepared to learn without misgiving that a typical Ibsen play is one in which the leading lady is an unwomanly woman, and the villain an idealist. It follows that the leading lady is not a heroine of the Drury Lane type; nor does the villain forge or assassinate, since he is a villain by virtue of his determination to do nothing wrong. Therefore readers of Ibsen — not playgoers — have sometimes so far misconceived him as to suppose that his villains are examples rather than warnings, and that the mischief and ruin which attend their actions are but the tribulations from which the soul comes out purified as gold from the furnace. In fact, the beginning of Ibsen’s European reputation was the edification with which the pious received his great dramatic poem Brand. Brand is not his first play: indeed it is his seventh; and of its six forerunners all are notable and some splendid; but it is in Brand that he definitely, if not yet quite consciously, takes the field against idealism and, like another Luther, nails his thesis to the door of the Temple of Morality. With Brand therefore we must begin, lest we should be swept into an eddy of mere literary criticism, a matter altogether beside the purpose of this book, which is to distil the quintessence of Ibsen’s message to his age.

Brand the priest is an idealist of heroic earnestness, strength, and courage. Conventional, comfortable, sentimental church-going withers into selfish snobbery and cowardly weakness before his terrible word. “Your God,” he cries, “is an old man: mine is young”; and all Europe, hearing him, suddenly realizes that it has so far forgotten God as to worship an image of an elderly gentleman with a well-trimmed beard, an imposing forehead, and the expression of a headmaster. Brand, turning from such idolatrous follies with fierce scorn, declares himself the champion, not of things as they are, nor of things as they can be made, but of things as they ought to be. Things as they ought to be mean for him things as ordered by men conformed to his ideal of the perfect Adam, who, again, is not man as he is or can be, but man conformed to all the ideals: man as it is his duty to be. In insisting on this conformity, Brand spares neither himself nor anyone else. Life is nothing: self is nothing: the perfect Adam is everything. The imperfect Adam does not fall in with these views. A peasant whom he urges to cross a glacier in a fog because it is his duty to visit his dying daughter, not only flatly declines, but endeavors forcibly to prevent Brand from risking his own life. Brand knocks him down, and sermonizes him with fierce earnestness and scorn. Presently Brand has to cross a fiord in a storm to reach a dying man who, having committed a series of murders, wants “consolation” from a priest. Brand cannot go alone: someone must hold the rudder of his boat whilst he manages the sail. The fisher folk, in whom the old Adam is strong, do not adopt his estimate of the gravity of the situation, and refuse to go. A woman, fascinated by his heroism and idealism, goes. That ends in their marriage, and in the birth of a child to which they become deeply attached. Then Brand, aspiring from height to height of devotion to his ideal, plunges from depth to depth of murderous cruelty. First the child must die from the severity of the climate because Brand must not flinch from the post of duty and leave his congregation exposed to the peril of getting an inferior preacher in his place. Then he forces his wife to give the clothes of the dead child to a gipsy whose baby needs them. The bereaved mother does not grudge the gift; but she wants to hold back only one little garment as a relic of her darling. But Brand sees in this reservation the imperfection of the imperfect Eve. He forces her to regard the situation as a choice between the relic and his ideal. She sacrifices the relic to the ideal, and then dies, broken-hearted. Having killed her, and thereby placed himself beyond ever daring to doubt the idealism upon whose altar he has immolated her; having also refused to go to his mother’s death-bed because she compromises with his principles in disposing of her property, he is hailed by the people as a saint, and finds his newly built church too small for his congregation. So he calls upon them to follow him to worship God in His own temple, the mountains. After a brief practical experience of this arrangement, they change their minds, and stone him. The very mountains themselves stone him, indeed; for he is killed by an avalanche.

PEER GYNT, 1867

Brand dies a saint, having caused more intense suffering by his saintliness than the most talented sinner could possibly have done with twice his opportunities. Ibsen does not leave this to be inferred. In another dramatic poem he gives us a rapscallion named Peer Gynt, an idealist who avoids Brand’s errors by setting up as his ideal the realization of himself through the utter satisfaction of his own will. In this he would seem to be on the path to which Ibsen himself points; and indeed all who know the two plays will agree that whether or no it was better to be Peer Gynt than Brand, it was beyond all question better to be the mother or the sweetheart of Peer, scapegrace and liar as he was, than mother or wife to the saintly Brand. Brand would force his ideal on all men and women: Peer Gynt keeps his ideal for himself alone: it is indeed implicit in the ideal itself that it should be unique — that he alone should have the force to realize it. For Peer’s first boyish notion of the self-realized man is not the saint, but the demigod whose indomitable will is stronger than destiny, the fighter, the master, the man whom no woman can resist, the mighty hunter, the knight of a thousand adventures, the model, in short, of the lover in a lady’s novel, or the hero in a boy’s romance. Now, no such person exists, or ever did exist, or ever can exist. The man who cultivates an indomitable will and refuses to make way for anything or anybody, soon finds that he cannot hold a street crossing against a tram car, much less a world against the whole human race. Only by plunging into illusions to which even fact gives the lie can he persuade himself that his will is a force that can overcome all other forces, or that it is less conditioned by circumstances than a wheelbarrow is. However, Peer Gynt, being imaginative enough to conceive his ideal, is also imaginative enough to find illusions to hide its unreality, and to persuade himself that Peer Gynt, the shabby countryside loafer, is Peer Gynt, Emperor of Himself, as he writes over the door of his hut in the mountains. His hunting feats are invented; his military genius has no solider foundation than a street fight with a smith; and his reputation as an adventurous daredevil he has to gain by the bravado of carrying off the bride from a wedding at which the guests snub him. Only in the mountains can he enjoy his illusions undisturbed by ridicule; yet even in the mountains he finds obstacles he cannot force his way through, obstacles which withstand him as spirits with voices, telling him that he must go round. But he will not: he will go forward: he will cut his path sword in hand, in spite of fate. All the same, he has to go round; for the world-will is outside Peer Gynt as well as inside him.

Then he tries the supernatural, only to find that it means nothing more than the transmogrifying of squalid realities by lies and pretences. Still, like our amateurs of thaumaturgy, he is willing to enter into a conspiracy of make-believe up to a certain point. When the Trold king’s daughter appears as a repulsive ragged creature riding on a pig, he is ready to accept her as a beautiful princess on a noble steed, on condition that she accepts his mother’s tumble-down farmhouse, with the broken window panes stopped up with old clouts, as a splendid castle. He will go with her among the Trolds, and pretend that the gruesome ravine in which they hold their orgies is a glorious palace; he will partake of their filthy food and declare it nectar and ambrosia; he will applaud their obscene antics as exquisite dancing, and their discordant din as divine music; but when they finally propose to slit his eyes so that he may see and hear these things, not as they are, but as he has been pretending to see and hear them, he draws back, resolved to be himself even in self-deception. He leaves the mountains and becomes a prosperous man of business in America, highly respectable and ready for any profitable speculation: slave trade, Bible trade, whisky trade, missionary trade, anything! His commercial success in this phase persuades him that he is under the special care of God; but he is shaken in his opinion by an adventure in which he is marooned on the African coast, and does not recover his faith until the treacherous friends who marooned him are destroyed before his eyes by the blowing-up of the steam yacht they have just stolen from him, when he utters his celebrated exclamation, “Ah, God is a Father to me after all; but economical he certainly is not.” He finds a white horse in the desert, and is accepted on its account as the Messiah by an Arab tribe, a success which moves him to declare that now at last he is really worshipped for himself, whereas in America people only respected his breast-pin, the symbol of his money. In commerce, too, he reflects, his eminence was a mere matter of chance, whilst as a prophet he is eminent by pure natural fitness for the post. This is ended by his falling in love with a dancing-girl, who, after leading him into every sort of undignified and ludicrous extravagance, ranging from his hailing her as the Eternal-Feminine of Goethe to the more practical folly of giving her his white horse and all his prophetic finery, runs away with the spoil, and leaves him once more helpless and alone in the desert. He wanders until he comes to the Great Sphinx, beside which he finds a German gentleman in great perplexity as to who the Sphinx is. Peer Gynt, seeing in that impassive, immovable, majestic figure, a symbol of his own ideal, is able to tell the German gentleman at once that the Sphinx is itself. This explanation dazzles the German, who, after some further discussion of the philosophy of selfrealization, invites Peer Gynt to accompany him to a club of learned men in Cairo, who are ripe for enlightenment on this very question. Peer, delighted, accompanies the German to the club, which turns out to be a madhouse in which the lunatics have broken loose and locked up their keepers. It is in this madhouse, and by these madmen, that Peer Gynt is at last crowned Emperor of Himself. He receives their homage as he lies in the dust fainting with terror.

As an old man, Peer Gynt, returning to the scenes of his early adventures, is troubled with the prospect of meeting a certain button moulder who threatens to make short work of his realized self by melting it down in his crucible with a heap of other button-material. Immediately the old exaltation of the self realizer is changed into an unspeakable dread of the button moulder Death, to avoid whom Peer Gynt has already pushed a drowning man from the spar he is clinging to in a shipwreck lest it should not suffice to support two. At last he finds a deserted sweetheart of his youth still waiting for him and still believing in him. In the imagination of this old woman he finds the ideal Peer Gynt; whilst in himself, the loafer, the braggart, the confederate of sham magicians, the Charleston speculator, the false prophet, the dancing-girl’s dupe, the bedlam emperor, the thruster of the drowning man into the waves, there is nothing heroic: nothing but commonplace self-seeking and shirking, cowardice and sensuality, veiled only by the romantic fancies of the born liar. With this crowningly unreal realization he is left to face the button moulder as best he can.

Peer Gynt has puzzled a good many people by Ibsen’s fantastic and subtle treatment of its metaphysical thesis. It is so far a difficult play, that the ideal of unconditional self-realization, however familiar its suggestions may be to the ambitious reader, is not understood by him. When it is stated to him by some one who does understand it, he unhesitatingly dismisses it as idiotic; and because he is perfectly right in doing so — because it is idiotic in the most accurate sense of the term — he does not easily recognize it as the common ideal of his own prototype, the pushing, competitive, success-craving man who is the hero of the modem world.

There is nothing novel in Ibsen’s dramatic method of reducing these ideals to absurdity. Exactly as Cervantes took the old ideal of chivalry, and shewed what came of a man attempting to act as if it were real, so Ibsen takes the ideals of Brand and Peer Gynt, and subjects them to the same test. Don Quixote acts as if he were a perfect knight in a world of giants and distressed damsels instead of a country gentleman in a land of innkeepers and farm wenches; Brand acts as if he were the perfect Adam in a world where, by resolute rejection of all compromise with imperfection, it was immediately possible to change the rainbow “bridge between flesh and spirit” into as enduring a structure as the tower of Babel was intended to be, thereby restoring man to the condition in which he walked with God in the garden; and Peer Gynt tries to act as if he had in him a special force that could be concentrated so as to prevail over all other forces. They ignore the real — ignore what they are and where they are, not only, like Nelson, shutting their eyes to the signals a brave man may disregard, but insanely steering straight on rocks no man’s resolution can move or resist. Observe that neither Cervantes nor Ibsen is incredulous, in the Philistine way, as to the power of ideals over men. Don Quixote, Brand, and Peer Gynt are, all three, men of action seeking to realize their ideals in deeds. However ridiculous Don Quixote makes himself, you cannot dislike or despise him, much less think it would have been better for him to have been a Philistine like Sancho; and Peer Gynt, selfish rascal as he is, is not unlovable. Brand, made terrible by the consequences of his idealism to others, is heroic. Their castles in the air are more beautiful than castles of brick and mortar; but one cannot live in them; and they seduce men into pretending that every hovel is such a castle, just as Peer Gynt pretended that the Trold king’s den was a palace.

EMPEROR AND GALILEAN, 1873

When Ibsen, by merely giving the rein to the creative impulse of his poetic nature, had produced Brand and Peer Gynt, he was nearly forty. His will, in setting his imagination to work, had produced a tough puzzle for his intellect. In no case does the difference between the will and the intellect come out more clearly than in that of the poet, save only that of the lover. Had Ibsen died in 1867, he, like many another great poet, would have gone to his grave without having ever rationally understood his own meaning. Nay, if in that year an intellectual expert — a commentator, as we call him — having read Brand, had put forward the explanation which Ibsen himself must have arrived at before he constructed Ghosts and The Wild Duck, he would perhaps have repudiated it with as much disgust as a maiden would feel if anyone were prosaic enough to give her the physiological explanation of her dreams of meeting a fairy prince. Only simpletons go to the creative artist presuming that he must be able to answer their “What does this obscure passage mean?” That is the very question the poet’s own intellect, which had no part in the conception of the poem, may be asking him. And this curiosity of the intellect, this restless life in it which differentiates it from dead machinery, and troubles our lesser artists but little, is one of the marks of the greater sort. Shakespear, in Hamlet, made a drama of the self-questioning that came upon him when his intellect rose up in alarm, as well it might, against the vulgar optimism of his Henry V, and yet could mend it to no better purpose than by the equally vulgar pessimism of Troilus and Cressida. Dante took pains to understand himself: so did Goethe. Richard Wagner, one of the greatest poets of our own day, has left us as many volumes of criticism of art and life as he has left musical scores; and he has expressly described how the keen intellectual activity he brought to the analysis of his music dramas was in abeyance during their creation. Just so do we find Ibsen, after composing his two great dramatic poems, entering on a struggle to become intellectually conscious of what he had done.

We have seen that with Shakespear such an effort became itself creative and produced a drama of questioning. With Ibsen the same thing occurred: he harked back to an abandoned project of his, and wrote two huge dramas on the subject of the apostasy of the Emperor Julian. In this work we find him at first preoccupied with a piece of old-fashioned freethinking: the dilemma that moral responsibility presupposes free-will, and that free-will sets man above God. Cain, who slew because he willed, willed because he must, and must have willed to slay because he was himself, comes upon the stage to claim that murder is fertile, and death the ground of life, though, not having read Weismann on death as a method of evolution, he cannot say what is the ground of death. Judas asks whether, when the Master chose him, he chose foreknowingly. This part of the drama has no very deep significance. It is easy to invent conundrums which dogmatic evangelicalism cannot answer; and no doubt, whilst it was still a nine days’ wonder that evangelicalism could not solve all enigmas, such invention seemed something much deeper than the mere intellectual chess-play which it is seen to be now that the nine days are past. In his occasional weakness for such conundrums, and later on in his harping on the hereditary transmission of disease, we see Ibsen’s active intellect busy, not only with the problems peculiar to his own plays, but with the fatalism and pessimism of the middle of the nineteenth century, when the typical advanced culture was attainable by reading Strauss’s Leben Jesu, the popularizations of Helmholtz and Darwin by Tyndall and Huxley, and George Eliot’s novels, vainly protested against by Ruskin as peopled with “the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus.” The traces of this period in Ibsen’s writings shew how well he knew the crushing weight with which the sordid cares of the ordinary struggle for money and respectability fell on the world when the romance of the creeds was discredited, and progress seemed for the moment to mean, not the growth of the spirit of man, but an effect of the survival of the fittest brought about by the destruction of the unfit, all the most frightful examples of this systematic destruction being thrust into the utmost prominence by those who were fighting the Church with Mill’s favorite dialectical weapon, the incompatibility of divine omnipotence with divine benevolence. His plays are full of an overwhelming sense of the necessity for rousing ourselves into self-assertion against this numbing fatalism; and yet he certainly had not at this time freed his intellect from an acceptance of its scientific validity as our Samuel Butler did, though Butler was more like Ibsen than any man in Europe, having the same grim hoaxing humor, the same grip of spiritual realities behind material facts, the same toughness of character holding him unshaken against the world.

Butler revelled in Darwinism for six weeks, and then, grasping the whole scope and the whole horror of it, warned us (we did not listen until we had revelled for half a century) that Darwin had “banished mind from the universe,” meaning from Evolution. Ibsen, belonging to an earlier generation, and intellectually nursed on northern romance and mysticism rather than on the merely industrious and prosaic science of the interval between the discovery of Evolution at the end of the eighteenth century and the discovery and overrating of Natural Selection as a method of evolution in the middle of the nineteenth, was, when Darwin arrived, past the age at which Natural Selection could have swept him away as it swept Butler and his contemporaries. But, like them, he seems to have welcomed it for the mortal blow it dealt to the current travesties of Christianity, which were really only reductions of the relations between man and God to the basis of the prevalent Commercialism, shewing how God may be cheated, and how salvation can be got for nothing through the blood of Christ by sweaters, adulterators, quacks, sharks, and hypocrites; also how God, though the most dangerously capricious and short-tempered of Anarchists, is also the most sentimental of dupes. It is against this conception of God as a sentimental dupe that Brand rages. Ibsen evidently regarded the brimstone conception, “the Almighty Fiend” of Shelley, as not worth his powder and shot, partly, no doubt, because he knew that the Almighty Fiend’s votaries would never read or understand his works, and partly because the class he addressed, the cultured class, had thrown off that superstition, and were busy with the sentimental religion of love in which we are still wallowing, and which only substitutes twaddle for terror.

At first sight this may seem an improvement; but it is no defence against that fear of man which is so much more mischievous than the fear of God. The cruelty of Natural Selection was a powerful antidote to such sentimentalism; and Ibsen, who was perhaps no expert in recent theories of evolution, was quite ready to rub it in uncritically for the sake of its value as a tonic. Indeed, as a fearless observer of the cruelty of Nature, he was quite independent of Darwin: what we find in his works is an unmistakable Darwinian atmosphere, but not the actual Darwinian discoveries and technical theory. If Natural Selection, the gloomiest and most formidable of the castles of Giant Despair, had stopped him, he would no doubt, like Butler, have set himself deliberately to play Greatheart and reduce it; but his genius pushed him past it and left it to be demolished philosophically by Butler, and practically by the mere march of the working class, which, by its freedom from the economic bias of the middle classes, has escaped their characteristic illusions, and solved many of the enigmas they found insoluble because they did not wish to have them solved. For instance, according to the theory of Natural Selection, progress can take place only through an increase in the severity of the material conditions of existence; and as the working classes were quite determined that progress should consist of just the opposite, they had no difficulty in seeing that it generally does occur in that way, whereas the middle class wished, on the contrary, to be convinced that the poverty of the working classes and all the hideous evils attending it were inevitable conditions of progress, and that every penny in the pound on the rates spent in social amelioration, and every attempt on the part of the workers to raise their wages by Trade Unionism or otherwise, were vain defiances of biologic and economic science.

How far Ibsen was definitely conscious of all this is doubtful; but one of his most famous utterances pointed to the working class and the women as the great emancipators. His prophetic belief in the spontaneous growth of the will made him a meliorist without reference to the operation of Natural Selection; but his impression of the light thrown by physical and biological science on the facts of life seems to have been the gloomy one of the middle of the nineteenth century. External nature often plays her most ruthless and destructive part in his works, which have an extraordinary fascination for the pessimists of that period, in spite of the incompatibility of his individualism with that mechanical utilitarian ethic of theirs which treats Man as the sport of every circumstance, and ignores his will altogether.

Another inessential but very prominent feature in Ibsen’s dramas will be understood easily by anyone who has observed how a change of religious faith intensifies our concern about our own salvation. An ideal, pious or secular, is practically used as a standard of conduct; and whilst it remains unquestioned, the simple rule of right is to conform to it. In the theological stage, when the Bible is accepted as the revelation of God’s will, the pious man, when in doubt as to whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, quiets his misgivings by searching the Scripture until he finds a text which endorses his action. The rationalist, for whom the Bible has no authority, brings his conduct to such tests as asking himself, after Kant, how it would be if everyone did as he proposes to do; or by calculating the effect of his action on the greatest happiness of the greatest number; or by judging whether the liberty of action he is claiming infringes the equal liberty of others, etc etc. Most men are ingenious enough to pass examinations of this kind successfully in respect to everything they really want to do. But in periods of transition, as, for instance, when faith in the infallibility of the Bible is shattered, and faith in that of reason not yet perfected, men’s uncertainty as to the rightness and wrongness of their actions keeps them in a continual perplexity, amid which casuistry seems the most important branch of intellectual activity. Life, as depicted by Ibsen, is very full of it. We find the great double drama of Emperor and Galilean occupied at first with Julian’s case regarded as a case of conscience. It is compared, in the manner already described, with the cases of Cain and Judas, the three men being introduced as “comer stones under the wrath of necessity,”

“great freedmen under necessity,” and so forth. The qualms of Julian are theatrically effective in producing the most exciting suspense as to whether he will dare to choose between Christ and the imperial purple; but the mere exhibition of a man struggling between his ambition and his creed belongs to a phase of intellectual interest which Ibsen had passed even before the production of Brand, when he wrote his Kongs Emneme (The Pretenders). Emperor and Galilean might have been appropriately, if prosaically, named The Mistake of Maximus the Mystic. It is Maximus who forces the choice on Julian, not as between ambition and principle; between Paganism and Christianity; between “the old beauty that is no longer beautiful and the new truth that is no longer true,” but between Christ and Julian himself. Maximus knows that there is no going back to “the first empire” of pagan sensualism. “The second empire,” Christian or self-abnegatory idealism, is already rotten at heart. “The third empire” is what he looks for: the empire of Man asserting the eternal validity of his own will. He who can see that not on Olympus, not nailed to the cross, but in himself is God: he is the man to build Brand’s bridge between the flesh and the spirit, establishing this third empire in which the spirit shall not be unknown, nor the flesh starved, nor the will tortured and baffled. Thus throughout the first part of the double drama we have Julian prompted step by step to the stupendous conviction that he no less than the Galilean is God. His final resolution to seize the throne is expressed in his interruption of the Lord’s prayer, which he hears intoned by worshippers in church as he wrestles in the gloom of the catacombs with his own fears and the entreaties and threats of his soldiers urging him to take the final decisive step. At the cue “Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil” he rushes to the church with his soldiers, exclaiming “For mine is the kingdom.” Yet he halts on the threshold, dazzled by the light, as his follower Sallust points the declaration by adding, “and the power, and the glory.” Once on the throne Julian becomes a mere pedant-tyrant, trying to revive Paganism mechanically by cruel. enforcement of external conformity to its rites. In his moments of exaltation he half grasps the meaning of Maximus, only to relapse presently and pervert it into a grotesque mixture of superstition and monstrous vanity. We have him making such speeches as this, worthy of Peer Gynt at his most ludicrous: “Has not Plato long ago enunciated the truth that only a god can rule over men? What did he mean by that saying? Answer me: what did he mean? Far be it from me to assert that Plato, incomparable sage though he was, had any individual, even the greatest, in his prophetic eye,” etc. In this frame of mind Christ appears to him, not as the prototype of himself, as Maximus would have him feel, but as a rival god over whom he must prevail at all costs. It galls him to think that the Galilean still reigns in the hearts of men whilst the emperor can only extort lip honor from them by brute force; for in his wildest excesses of egotism he never so loses his saving sense of the realities of things as to mistake the trophies of persecution for the fruits of faith. “Tell me who shall conquer,” he demands of Maximus: “the emperor or the Galilean?”

“Both the emperor and the Galilean shall succumb,” says Maximus. “Whether in our time or in hundreds of years I know not; but so it shall be when the right man comes.”

“Who is the right man?” says Julian.

“He who shall swallow up both emperor and Galilean,”  replies the seer. “Both shall succumb; but you shall not therefore perish. Does not the child succumb in the youth and the youth in the man: yet neither child nor youth perishes. You know I have never approved of your policy as emperor. You have tried to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is fallen a prey to the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final, any more than the youth is. You have tried to hinder the youth from growing: from becoming a man. Oh fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be: against the third empire, in which the twin-natured shall reign. For him the Jews have a name. They call him Messiah, and are waiting for him.”

Still Julian stumbles on the threshold of the idea without entering into it. He is galled out of all comprehension by the rivalry of the Galilean, and asks despairingly who shall break his power. Then Maximus drives the lesson home. maximus. Is it not written, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me?” Julian. Yes — yes — yes. maximus. The seer of Nazareth did not preach this god or that: he said “God is I: I am God.”

Julian. And that is what makes the emperor powerless? The third empire? The Messiah? Not the Jews’ Messiah, but the Messiah of the two empires, the spirit and the world? maximus. The God-Emperor julian. The Emperor-God maximus. Logos in Pan, Pan in Logos julian. How is he begotten? maximus. He is self-begotten in the man who wills. But it is of no use. Maximus’s idea is a synthesis of relations in which not only is Christ God in exactly the same sense as that in which Julian is God, but Julian is Christ as well. The persistence of Julian’s jealousy of the Galilean shews that he has not comprehended the synthesis at all, but only seized on that part of it which flatters his own egotism. And since this part is only valid as a constituent of the synthesis, and has no reality when isolated from it, it cannot by itself convince Julian. In vain does Maximus repeat his lesson in every sort of parable, and in such pregnant questions as “How do you know, Julian, that you were not in him whom you now persecute?” He can only wreak him to utter commands to the winds, and to exclaim, in the excitement of burning his fleet on the borders of Persia, “The third empire is here, Maximus. I feel that the Messiah of the earth lives within me. The spirit has become flesh and the flesh spirit. All creation lies within my will and power. More than the fleet is burning. In that glowing, swirling pyre the crucified Galilean is burning to ashes; and the earthly emperor is burning with the Galilean. But from the ashes shall arise, phoenix-like, the God of earth and the Emperor of the spirit in one, in one, in one.” At which point he is informed that a Persian refugee, whose information has emboldened him to burn his ships, has fled from the camp and is a manifest spy. From that moment he is a broken man. In his next and last emergency, when the Persians fall upon his camp, his first desperate exclamation is a vow to sacrifice to the gods. “To what gods, oh fool?” cries Maximus. “Where are they; and what are they?”

“I will sacrifice to this god and that god: I will sacrifice to many,” he answers desperately. “One or other must surely hear me. I must call on something without me and above me.” A flash of lightning seems to him a response from above; and with this encouragement he throws himself into the fight, clinging, like Macbeth, to an ambiguous oracle which leads him to suppose that only in the Phrygian regions need he fear defeat. He imagines he sees the Nazarene in the ranks of the enemy; and in fighting madly to reach him he is struck down, in the name of Christ, by one of his own soldiers. Then his one Christian General, Jovian, calls on his “believing brethren” to give Caesar what is Caesar’s. Declaring that the heavens are open and the angels coming to the rescue with their swords of fire, he rallies the Galileans of whom Julian has made slave-soldiers. The pagan free legions, crying out that the god of the Galileans is on the Roman side, and that he is the strongest, follow Jovian as he charges the enemy, who fly in all directions whilst Julian, sinking back from a vain effort to rise, exclaims, “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean.”

Julian dies quietly in his tent, averring, in reply to a Christian friend’s inquiry, that he has nothing to repent of. “The power which circumstances placed in my hands,” he says, “and which is an emanation of divinity, I am conscious of having used to the best of my skill. I have never wittingly wronged anyone. If some should think that I have not fulfilled all expectations, they should in justice reflect that there is a mysterious power outside us, which in a great measure governs the issue of human undertakings.” He still does not see eye to eye with Maximus, though there is a flash of insight in his remark to him, when he learns that the village where he fell is called the Phrygian region, that “the world-will has laid an ambush for him.” It was something for Julian to have seen that the power which he found stronger than his individual will was itself will; but inasmuch as he conceived it, not as the whole of which his will was but a part, but as a rival will, he was not the man to found the third empire. He had felt the godhead in himself, but not in others. Being only able to say, with half conviction, “The kingdom of heaven is within me,” he had been utterly vanquished by the Galilean who had been able to say, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” But he was on the way to that full truth. A man cannot believe in others until he believes in himself; for his conviction of the equal worth of his fellows must be filled by the overflow of his conviction of his own worth. Against the spurious Christianity of asceticism, starving that indispensable prior conviction, Julian rightly rebelled: and Maximus rightly incited him to rebel. But Maximus could not fill the prior conviction even to fulness, much less to overflowing; for the third empire was not yet, and is not yet.

However, the tyrant dies with a peaceful conscience; and Maximus is able to tell the priest at the bedside that the world-will will answer for Julian’s soul. What troubles the mystic is his having misled Julian by encouraging him to bring upon himself the fate of Cain and Judas. As water can be boiled by fire, man can be prompted and stimulated from without to assert his individuality; but just as no boiling can fill a half-empty well, no external stimulus can enlarge the spirit of man to the point at which he can self-beget the Emperor-God in himself by willing. At that point “to will is to have to will”; and it is with these words on his lips that Maximus leaves the stage, still sure that the third empire is to come.

It is not necessary to translate the scheme of Emperor and Galilean into terms of the antithesis between idealism and realism. Julian, in this respect, is a reincarnation of Peer Gynt. All the difference is that the subject which was instinctively projected in the earlier poem, is intellectually constructed in the later history, Julian plus Maximus the Mystic being Peer plus one who understands him better than Ibsen did when he created him.

The interest for us of Ibsen’s interpretation of original Christianity is obvious. The deepest sayings recorded in the gospels are now nothing but eccentric paradoxes to most of those who reject the supernatural view of Christ’s divinity. Those who accept that view often consider that such acceptance absolves them from attaching any sensible meaning to his words at all, and so might as well pin their faith to a stock or stone. Of these attitudes the first is superficial, and the second stupid. Ibsen’s interpretation, whatever my be its validity, will certainly hold the field long after the current “Crosstianity,” as it has been aptly called, becomes unthinkable.

THE OBJECTIVE ANTI-IDEALIST PLAYS

Ibsen had now written three immense dramas, all dealing with the effect of idealism on individual egotists of exceptional imaginative excitability. This he was able to do whilst his intellectual consciousness of his theme was yet incomplete, by simply portraying sides of himself. He has put himself into the skin of Brand and Peer Gynt. He has divided himself between Maximus and Julian. These figures have accordingly a certain direct vitality which we shall find in none of his later male figures until it reappears under the shadow of death, less as vitality than as mortality putting on immortality, in the four great plays with which he closed and crowned his life’s work. There are flashes of it in Relling, in Lôvborg, in Ellida’s stranger from the sea; but they are only flashes: henceforth for many years, indeed until his warfare against vulgar idealism is accomplished and a new phase entered upon in The Master Builder, all his really vivid and solar figures are women. For, having at last completed his intellectual analysis of idealism, he could now construct methodical illustrations of its social working, instead of, as before, blindly projecting imaginary personal experiences which he himself had not yet succeeded in interpreting. Further, now that he understood the matter, he could see plainly the effect of idealism as a social force on people quite unlike himself: that is to say, on everyday people in everyday life: on shipbuilders, bank managers, parsons, and doctors, as well as on saints, romantic adventurers, and emperors.

With his eyes thus opened, instances of the mischief of idealism crowded upon him so rapidly that he began deliberately to inculcate their lesson by writing realistic prose plays of modem life, abandoning all production of art for art’s sake. His skill as a playwright and his genius as an artist were thenceforth used only to secure attention and effectiveness for his detailed attack on idealism. No more verse, no more tragedy for the sake of tears or comedy for the sake of laughter, no more seeking to produce specimens of art forms in order that literary critics might fill the public belly with the east wind. The critics, it is true, soon declared that he had ceased to be an artist; but he, having something else to do with his talent than to fulfil critics’ definitions, took no notice of them, not thinking their ideal sufficiently important to write a play about.

THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH, 1869

The first of the series of realistic prose plays is called Pillars of Society; but before describing this, a word must be said about a previous work which seems to have determined the form the later series took. Between Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen had let fall an amusing comedy called The League of Youth (De Unges Forbund) in which the imaginative egotist reappears farcically as an ambitious young lawyer-politician who, smarting under a snub from a local landowner and county magnate, relieves his feelings with such a passionate explosion of Radical eloquence that he is cheered to the echo by the progressive party.

Intoxicated with this success, he imagines himself a great leader of the people and a wielder of the mighty engine of democracy. He narrates to a friend a dream in which he saw kings swept helplessly over the surface of the earth by a mighty wind. He has hardly achieved this impromptu when he receives an invitation to dine with the local magnate, whose friends, to spare his feelings, have misled him as to the person aimed at in the new demagogue’s speech. The invitation sets the egotist’s imagination on the opposite tack: he is presently pouring forth his soul in the magnate’s drawingroom to the very friend to whom he related the great dream.

“My goal is this: in the course of time I shall get into Parliament, perhaps into the Ministry, and marry happily into a rich and honorable family. I intend to reach it by my own exertions. I must and shall reach it without help from anyone. Meanwhile I shall enjoy life here, drinking in beauty and sunshine. Here there are fine manners: life moves gracefully here: the very floors seem laid to be trodden only by lacquered shoes: the arm-chairs are deep; and the ladies sink exquisitely into them. Here the conversation goes lightly and elegantly, like a game at battledore; and no blunders come plumping in to make an awkward silence. Here I feel for the first time what distinction means. Yes: we have indeed an aristocracy of culture; and to it I will belong. Dont you yourself feel the refining influence of the place,” etc., etc.

For the rest, the play is an ingenious comedy of intrigue, clever enough in its mechanical construction to entitle the French to claim that Ibsen owes something to his technical education as a playwright in the school of Scribe. One or two episodes are germs of later plays; and the suitability of the realistic prose comedy form to these episodes no doubt confirmed Ibsen in his choice of it.

PILLARS OF SOCIETY, 1877

Pillars of Society is the history of one Karsten Bernick, a “pillar of society” who, in pursuance of the duty of maintaining the respectability of his father’s firm of shipbuilders, has averted a disgraceful exposure by allowing another man to bear the discredit not only of a love affair in which he himself had been the sinner, but of a theft which was never committed at all, having been merely alleged as an excuse for the firm being out of funds at a critical period. Bernick is an abject slave to the idealizings of one Rorlund, a schoolmaster, about respectability, duty to society, good example, social influence, health of the community, and so on. When Bernick falls in love with a married actress, he feels that no man has a right to shock the feelings of Rorlund and the community for his own selfish gratification. However, a clandestine intrigue will shock nobody, since nobody need know of it. He accordingly adopts this method of satisfying himself and preserving the moral tone of the community at the same time. Unluckily, the intrigue is all but discovered; and Bernick has either to see the moral security of the community shaken to its foundations by the terrible scandal of his exposure, or else to deny what he did and put it on another man. As the other man happens to be going to America, where he can easily conceal his imputed shame, Bernick’s conscience tells him that it would be little short of a crime against society to neglect such an opportunity; and he accordingly lies his way back into the good opinion of Rorlund and Company at the emigrant’s expense.

There are three women in the play for whom the schoolmaster’s ideals have no attractions. First, there is the actress’s daughter, who wants to get to America because she hears that people there are not good; for she is heartily tired of good people, since it is part of their goodness to look down on her because of her mother’s disgrace. The schoolmaster, to whom she is engaged, condescends to her for the same reason. The second has already sacrificed her happiness and wasted her life in conforming to the Rôrlund ideal of womanliness; and she earnestly advises the younger woman not to commit that folly, but to break her engagement with the schoolmaster, and elope promptly with the man she loves. The third is a naturally free woman who has snapped her fingers at the current ideals all her life; and it is her presence that at last encourages the liar to break with the ideals by publicly telling the truth about himself.

The comic personage of the piece is a useless hypochondriac whose function in life, as described by himself, is “to hold up the banner of the ideal.” This he does by sneering at everything and everybody for not resembling the heroic incidents and characters he reads about in novels and tales of adventure. But his obvious peevishness and folly make him much less dangerous than the pious idealist, the earnest and respectable Rôrlund. The play concludes with Bernick’s admission that the spirits of Truth and Freedom are the true pillars of society, a phrase which sounds so like an idealistic commonplace that it is necessary to add that Truth in this passage does not mean the nursery convention of truth-telling satirized by Ibsen himself in a later play, as well as by Labiche and other comic dramatists. It means the unflinching recognition of facts, and the abandonment of the conspiracy to ignore such of them as do not bolster up the ideals. The idealist rule as to truth dictates the recognition only of those facts or idealistic masks of facts which have a respectable air, and the mentioning of these on all occasions and at all hazards. Ibsen urges the recognition of all facts; but as to mentioning them, he wrote a whole play, as we shall see presently, to shew that you must do that at your own peril, and that a truth-teller who cannot hold his tongue on occasion may do as much mischief as a whole universityful of trained liars. The word Freedom means freedom from the tyranny of the Rorlund ideals.

A DOLL’S HOUSE, 1879

Unfortunately, Pillars of Society, as a propagandist play, is disabled by the circumstance that the hero, being a fraudulent hypocrite in the ordinary police-court sense of the phrase, would hardly be accepted as a typical pillar of society by the class he represents. Accordingly, Ibsen took care next time to make his idealist irreproachable from the standpoint of the ordinary idealist morality. In the famous Doll’s House, the pillar of society who owns the doll is a model husband, father, and citizen. In his little household, with the three darling children and the affectionate little wife, all on the most loving terms with one another, we have the sweet home, the womanly woman, the happy family life of the idealist’s dream. Mrs. Nora Helmer is happy in the belief that she has attained a valid realization of all these illusions; that she is an ideal wife and mother; and that Helmer is an ideal husband who would, if the necessity arose, give his life to save her reputation. A few simply contrived incidents disabuse her effectually on all these points. One of her earliest acts of devotion to her husband has been the secret raising of a sum of money to enable him to make a tour which was necessary to restore his health. As he would have broken down sooner than go into debt, she has had to persuade him that the money was a gift from her father. It was really obtained from a moneylender, who refused to make her the loan unless she induced her father to endorse the promissory note. This being impossible, as her father was dying at the time, she took the shortest way out of the difficulty by writing the name herself, to the entire satisfaction of the moneylender, who, though not at all duped, knew that forged bills are often the surest to be paid. Since then she has slaved in secret at scrivener’s work until she has nearly paid off the debt.

At this point Helmer is made manager of the bank in which he is employed; and the moneylender, wishing to obtain a post there, uses the forged bill to force Nora to exert her influence with Helmer on his behalf. But she, having a hearty contempt for the man, cannot be persuaded by him that there was any harm in putting her father’s name on the bill, and ridicules the suggestion that the law would not recognize that she was right under the circumstances. It is her husband’s own contemptuous denunciation of a forgery formerly committed by the moneylender himself that destroys her self-satisfaction and opens her eyes to her ignorance of the serious business of the world to which her husband belongs: the world outside the home he shares with her. When he goes on to tell her that commercial dishonesty is generally to be traced to the influence of bad mothers, she begins to perceive that the happy way in which she plays with the children, and the care she takes to dress them nicely, are not sufficient to constitute her a fit person to train them. To redeem the forged bill, she resolves to borrow the balance due upon it from an intimate friend of the family. She has learnt to coax her husband into giving her what she asks by appealing to his affection for her: that is, by playing all sorts of pretty tricks until he is wheedled into an amorous humor. This plan she has adopted without thinking about it, instinctively taking the line of least resistance with him. And now she naturally takes the same line with her husband’s friend. An unexpected declaration of love from him is the result; and it at once explains to her the real nature of the domestic influence she has been so proud of.

All her illusions about herself are now shattered.

She sees herself as an ignorant and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife kept for her husband’s pleasure merely; but she clings all the harder to her illusion about him: he is still the ideal husband who would make any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin. She resolves to kill herself rather than allow him to destroy his own career by taking the forgery on himself to save her reputation. The final disillusion comes when he, instead of at once proposing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her for disgracing him. Then she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction: their home a mere doll’s house in which they have been playing at ideal husband and father, wife and mother. So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself, and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a more honorable relation to one another. He at first cannot understand what has happened, and flourishes the shattered ideals over her as if they were as potent as ever. He presents the course most agreeable to him — that of her staying at home and avoiding a scandal — as her duty to her husband, to her children, and to her religion; but the magic of these disguises is gone; and at last even he understands what has really happened, and sits down alone to wonder whether that more honorable relation can ever come to pass between them.

GHOSTS, 1881

In his next play, Ibsen returned to the charge with such an uncompromising and outspoken attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice of human beings to an ideal, that his meaning was obscured by its very obviousness. Ghosts, as it is called, is the story of a woman who has faithfully acted as a model wife and mother, sacrificing herself at every point with selfless thoroughness. Her husband is a man with a huge capacity and appetite for sensuous enjoyment. Society, prescribing ideal duties and not enjoyment for him, drives him to enjoy himself in underhand and illicit ways. When he marries his model wife, her devotion to duty only makes life harder for him; and he at last takes refuge in the caresses of an undutiful but pleasure-loving housemaid, and leaves his wife to satisfy her conscience by managing his business affairs whilst he satisfies his cravings as best he can by reading novels, drinking, and flirting, as aforesaid, with the servants. At this point even those who are most indignant with Nora Helmer for walking out of the doll’s house must admit that Mrs. Alving would be justified in walking out of her house. But Ibsen is determined to shew you what comes of the scrupulous line of conduct you were so angry with Nora for not pursuing. Mrs. Alving feels that her place is by her husband for better for worse, and by her child. Now the ideal of wifely and womanly duty which demands this from her also demands that she shall regard herself as an outraged wife, and her husband as a scoundrel. And the family ideal calls upon her to suffer in silence lest she shatter her innocent son’s faith in the purity of home life by letting him know the disreputable truth about his father. It is her duty to conceal that truth from the world and from him. In this she falters for one moment only. Her marriage has not been a love match: she has, in pursuance of her duty as a daughter, contracted it for the sake of her family, although her heart inclined to a highly respectable clergyman, a professor of her own idealism, named Manders. In the humiliation of her first discovery of her husband’s infidelity, she leaves the house and takes refuge with Manders; but he at once leads her back to the path of duty, from which she does not again swerve. With the utmost devotion she now carries out an elaborate scheme of lying and imposture. She so manages her husband’s affairs and so shields his good name that everybody believes him to be a public-spirited citizen of the strictest conformity to current ideals of respectability and family life. She sits up of nights listening to his lewd and silly conversation, and even drinking with him, to keep him from going into the streets and being detected by the neighbors in what she considers his vices. She provides for the servant he has seduced, and brings up his illegitimate daughter as a maid in her own household. And, as a crowning sacrifice, she sends her son away to Paris to be educated there, knowing that if he stays at home the shattering of his ideals must come sooner or later.

Her work is crowned with success. She gains the esteem of her old love the clergyman, who is never tired of holding up her household as a beautiful realization of the Christian ideal of marriage. Her own martyrdom is brought to an end at last by the death of her husband in the odor of a most sanctified reputation, leaving her free to recall her son from Paris and enjoy his society, and his love and gratitude, in the flower of his early manhood.

But when her son comes home, the facts refuse as obstinately as ever to correspond to her ideals. Oswald has inherited his father’s love of enjoyment; and when, in dull rainy weather, he returns from Paris to the solemn strictly ordered house where virtue and duty have had their temple for so many years, his mother sees him shew the unmistakable signs of boredom with which she is so miserably familiar from of old; then sit after dinner killing time over the bottle; and finally — the climax of anguish — begin to flirt with the maid who, as his mother alone knows, is his own father’s daughter. But there is this worldwide difference in her insight to the cases of the father and the son. She did not love the father: she loves the son with the intensity of a heart-starved woman who has nothing else left to love. Instead of recoiling from him with pious disgust and Pharisaical consciousness of moral superiority, she sees at once that he has a right to be happy in his own way, and that she has no right to force him to be dutiful and wretched in hers. She sees, too, her injustice to the unfortunate father, and the cowardice of the monstrous fabric of lies and false appearances she has wasted her life in manufacturing. She resolves that the son’s life shall not be sacrificed to ideals which are to him joyless and unnatural. But she finds that the work of the ideals is not to be undone quite so easily. In driving the father to steal his pleasures in secrecy and squalor, they had brought upon him the diseases bred by such conditions; and her son now tells her that those diseases have left their mark on him, and that he carries poison in his pocket against the time, foretold to him by a Parisian surgeon, when general paralysis of the insane may destroy his faculties. In desperation she undertakes to rescue him from this horrible apprehension by making his life happy. The house shall be made as bright as Paris for him: he shall have as much champagne as he wishes until he is no longer driven to that dangerous resource by the dulness of his life with her: if he loves the girl he shall marry her if she were fifty times his half-sister. But the half-sister, on learning the state of his health, leaves the house; for she, too, is her father’s daughter, and is not going to sacrifice her life in devotion to an invalid. When the mother and son are left alone in their dreary home, with the rain still falling outside, all she can do for him is to promise that if his doom overtakes him before he can poison himself, she will make a final sacrifice of her natural feelings by performing that dreadful duty, the first of all her duties that has any real basis. Then the weather clears up at last; and the sun, which the young man has so longed to see, appears. He asks her to give it to him to play with; and a glance at him shews her that the ideals have claimed their victim, and that the time has come for her to save him from a real horror by sending him from her out of the world, just as she saved him from an imaginary one years before by sending him out of Norway.

The last scene of Ghosts is so appallingly tragic that the emotions it excites prevent the meaning of the play from being seized and discussed like that of A Doll’s House. In England nobody, as far as I know, seems to have perceived that Ghosts is to A Doll’s House what the late Sir Walter Besant intended his own sequel to that play to be. Besant attempted to shew what might come of Nora’s repudiation of that idealism of which he was one of the most popular professors. But the effect made on Besant by A Doll’s House was very faint compared to that produced on the English critics by the first performance of Ghosts in this country. In the earlier part of this essay I have shewn that since Mrs. Alving’s early conceptions of duty are as valid to ordinary critics as to Pastor Manders, who must appear to them as an admirable man, endowed with Helmer’s good sense without Helmer’s selfishness, a pretty general disapproval of the moral of the play was inevitable. Fortunately, the newspaper press went to such bedlamite lengths on this occasion that Mr. William Archer, the well-known dramatic critic and translator of Ibsen, was able to put the whole body of hostile criticism out of court by simply quoting its excesses in an article entitled Ghosts and Gibberings, which appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette of the 8th of April 1891. Mr. Archer’s extracts, which he offers as a nucleus for a Dictionary of Abuse modelled upon the Wagner Schimpf-Lexicon, are worth reprinting here as samples of contemporary idealist criticism of the drama.

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLAY

“Ibsen’s positively abominable play entitled Ghosts... This disgusting representation... Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the modem theatre with poison after desperately inoculating themselves and others... An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open... Candid foulness... Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical. Offensive cynicism... Ibsen’s melancholy and malodorous world... Absolutely loathsome and fetid... Gross, almost putrid indecorum... Literary carrion... Crapulous stuff... Novel and perilous nuisance.” Daily Telegraph [leading article]. “This mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity.” Daily Telegraph [criticism]. “Unutterably offensive... Prosecution under Lord Campbell’s Act... Abominable piece... Scandalous.” Standard. “Naked loathsomeness... Most dismal and repulsive production.” Daily News. “Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous... Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.” Daily Chronicle. “A repulsive and degrading work.” Queen. “Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome and disgusting story... A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman.” Lloyd’s. “Merely dull dirt long drawn out.” Hawk. “Morbid horrors of the hideous tale... Ponderous dulness of the didactic talk... If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.” Sporting and Dramatic News. “Just a wicked nightmare.” The Gentlewoman. “Lugubrious diagnosis of sordid impropriety... Characters are prigs, pedants, and profligates... Morbid caricatures... Maunderings of nookshotten Norwegians... It is no more of a play than an average Gaiety burlesque.” Black and White. “Most loathsome of all Ibsen’s plays... Garbage and offal.” Truth. “Ibsen’s putrid play called Ghosts... So loathsome an enterprise.” Academy. “As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre... Dull and disgusting... Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.” Era. “Noisome corruption.” Stage.

DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN

“An egotist and a bungler.” Daily Telegraph. “A crazy fanatic... A crazy, cranky being... Not only consistently dirty but deplorably dull.” Truth. “The Norwegian pessimist in petto” [sic]. Black and White. “Ugly, nasty, discordant, and downright dull... A gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes.” Gentlewoman. “A teacher of the æstheticism of the Lock Hospital.” Saturday Review.

DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN’S ADMIRERS

“Lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art.” Evening Standard. “Ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste in exact proportion to their nastiness.” Sporting and Dramatic News. “The sexless... The unwomanly woman, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats... Educated and muck-ferreting dogs... Effeminate men and male women... They all of them — men and women alike — know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing... The Lord Chamberlain left them alone to wallow in Ghosts... Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his works... A wave of human folly.” Truth.

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, 1882

After this, the reader will understand the temper in which Ibsen set about his next play, An Enemy of the People, in which, having done sufficient execution among the ordinary middle-class domestic and social ideals, he puts his finger for a moment on commercial political ideals. The play deals with a local majority of middle-class people who are pecuniarily interested in concealing the fact that the famous baths which attract visitors to their town and customers to their shops and hotels are contaminated by sewage. When an honest doctor insists on exposing this danger, the townspeople immediately disguise themselves ideally. Feeling the disadvantage of appearing in their true character as a conspiracy of interested rogues against an honest man, they pose as Society, as The People, as Democracy, as the solid Liberal Majority, and other imposing abstractions, the doctor, in attacking them, of course being thereby made an enemy of The People, a danger to Society, a traitor to Democracy, an apostate from the great Liberal party, and so on. Only those who take an active part in politics can appreciate the grim fun of the situation, which, though it has an intensely local Norwegian air, will be at once recognized as typical in England, not, perhaps, by the professional literary critics, who are for the most part fainéants as far as political life is concerned, but certainly by everyone who has got as far as a seat on the committee of the most obscure Ratepayers’ Association.

As An Enemy of the People contains one or two references to Democracy which are anything but respectful, it is necessary to examine Ibsen’s criticism of it with precision. Democracy is really only an arrangement by which the governed are allowed to choose (as far as any choice is possible, which in capitalistic society is not saying much) the members of the representative bodies which control the executive. It has never been proved that this is the best arrangement; and it has been made effective only to the very limited extent short of which the dissatisfaction which it appeases might take the form of actual violence. Now when men had to submit to kings, they consoled themselves by making it an article of faith that the king was always right, idealizing him as a Pope, in fact. In the same way we who have to submit to majorities set up Voltaire’s pope, Monsieur Tout-le-monde, and make it blasphemy against Democracy to deny that the majority is always right, although that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It is a scientific fact that the majority, however eager it may be for the reform of old abuses, is always wrong in its opinion of new developments, or rather is always unfit for them (for it can hardly be said to be wrong in opposing developments for which it is not yet fit). The pioneer is a tiny minority of the force he heads; and so, though it is easy to be in a minority and yet be wrong, it is absolutely impossible to be in the majority and yet be right as to the newest social prospects. We should never progress at all if it were possible for each of us to stand still on democratic principles until we saw whither all the rest were moving, as our statesmen declare themselves bound to do when they are called upon to lead. Whatever clatter we may make for a time with our filing through feudal serf collars and kicking off old mercantilist fetters, we shall never march a step forward except at the heels of “the strongest man, he who is able to stand alone” and to turn his back on “the damned compact Liberal majority.” All of which is no disparagement of parliaments and adult suffrage, but simply a wholesome reduction of them to their real place in the social economy as pure machinery: machinery which has absolutely no principles except the principles of mechanics, and no motive power in itself whatsoever. The idealization of public organizations is as dangerous as that of kings or priests. We need to be reminded that though there is in the world a vast number of buildings in which a certain ritual is conducted before crowds called congregations by a functionary called a priest, who is subject to a central council controlling all such functionaries on a few points, there is not therefore any such thing in the concrete as the ideal Catholic Church, nor ever was, nor ever will be. There may, too, be a highly elaborate organization of public affairs; but there is no such thing as the ideal State. There may be a combination of persons living by the practice of medicine, surgery, or physical or biological research; or by drawing up wills and leases, and preparing, pleading, or judging cases at law; or by painting pictures, writing books, and acting plays; or by serving in regiments and battle ships; or by manual labor or industrial service. But when any of these combinations, through its organizers or leaders, claims to deliver the Verdict of Science, or to act with the Authority of the Law, or to be as sacred as the Mission of Art, or to revenge criticisms of themselves as outrages on the Honor of His Majesty’s Services, or to utter the Voice of Labor, there is urgent need for the guillotine, or whatever may be the mode in vogue of putting presumptuous persons in their proper place. All abstractions invested with collective consciousness or collective authority, set above the individual, and exacting duty from him on pretence of acting or thinking with greater validity than he, are man-eating idols red with human sacrifices.

This position must not be confounded with Anarchism, or the idealization of the repudiation of Governments. Ibsen did not refuse to pay the tax collector, but may be supposed to have regarded him, not as the vicar of an abstraction called THE STATE, but simply as the man sent round by a committee of citizens (mostly fools as far as Maximus the Mystic’s Third Empire is concerned) to collect the money for the police or the paving and lighting of the streets.

THE WILD DUCK, 1884

After An Enemy of the People, Ibsen, as I have said, left the vulgar ideals for dead, and set about the exposure of those of the choicer spirits, beginning with the incorrigible idealists who had idealized his very self, and were becoming known as Ibsenites. His first move in this direction was such a tragi-comic slaughtering of sham Ibsenism that his astonished victims plaintively declared that The Wild Duck, as the new play was called, was a satire on his former works; whilst the pious, whom he had disappointed so severely by his interpretation of Brand, began to hope that he was coming back repentant to the fold. The household to which we are introduced in The Wild Duck is not, like Mrs. Alving’s, a handsome one made miserable by superstitious illusions, but a shabby one made happy by romantic illusions. The only member of it who sees it as it really is is the wife, a good-natured Philistine who desires nothing better. The husband, a vain, petted, spoilt dawdler, believes that he is a delicate and high-souled man, devoting his life to redeeming his old father’s name from the disgrace brought on it by imprisonment for breach of the forest laws. This redemption he proposes to effect by making himself famous as a great inventor some day when he has the necessary inspiration. Their daughter, a girl in her teens, believes intensely in her father and in the promised invention. The disgraced grandfather cheers himself by drink whenever he can get it; but his chief resource is a wonderful garret full of rabbits and pigeons. The old man has procured a number of second-hand Christmas trees; and with these he has turned the garret into a sort of toy forest, in which he can play at bear hunting, which was one of the sports of his youth and prosperity. The weapons employed in the hunting expeditions are a gun which will not go off, and a pistol which occasionally brings down a rabbit or a pigeon. A crowning touch is given to the illusion by a wild duck, which, however, must not be shot, as it is the special property of the girl, who reads and dreams whilst her mother cooks, washes, sweeps and carries on the photographic work which is supposed to be the business of her husband. Mrs. Ekdal does not appreciate Hjalmar’s highly strung sensitiveness of character, which is constantly suffering agonizing jars from her vulgarity; but then she does not appreciate that other fact that he is a lazy and idle impostor. Downstairs there is a disgraceful clergyman named Molvik, a hopeless drunkard; but even he respects himself and is tolerated because of a special illusion invented for him by another lodger, Dr. Relling, upon whom the lesson of the household above has not been thrown away. Molvik, says the doctor, must break out into drinking fits because he is daimonic, an imposing explanation which completely relieves the reverend gentleman from the imputation of vulgar tippling.

Into this domestic circle there comes a new lodger, an idealist of the most advanced type. He greedily swallows the daimonic theory of the clergyman’s drunkenness, and enthusiastically accepts the photographer as the high-souled hero he supposes himself to be; but he is troubled because the relations of the man and his wife do not constitute an ideal marriage. He happens to know that the woman, before her marriage, was the cast-off mistress of his own father; and because she has not told her husband this, he conceives her life as founded on a lie, like that of Bernick in Pillars of Society. He accordingly sets himself to work out the woman’s salvation for her, and establish ideally frank relations between the pair, by simply blurting out the truth, and then asking them, with fatuous self-satisfaction, whether they do not feel much the better for it. This wanton piece of mischief has more serious results than a mere domestic scene. The husband is too weak to act on his bluster about outraged honor and the impossibility of his ever living with his wife again; and the woman is merely annoyed with the idealist for telling on her; but the girl takes the matter to heart and shoots herself. The doubt cast on her parentage, with her father’s theatrical repudiation of her, destroy her ideal place in the home, and make her a source of discord there; so she sacrifices herself, thereby carrying out the teaching of the idealist mischief-maker, who has talked a good deal to her about the duty and beauty of self-sacrifice, without foreseeing that he might be taken in mortal earnest. The busybody thus finds that people cannot be freed from their failings from without. They must free themselves. When Nora is strong enough to live out of the doll’s house, she will go out of it of her own accord if the door stands open; but if before that period you take her by the scruff of the neck and thrust her out, she will only take refuge in the next establishment of the kind that offers to receive her. Woman has thus two enemies to deal with: the old-fashioned one who wants to keep the door locked, and the new-fashioned one who wants to thrust her into the street before she is ready to go. In the cognate case of a hypocrite and liar like Bernick, exposing him is a mere police measure: he is none the less a liar and hypocrite when you have exposed him. If you want to make a sincere and truthful man of him, all you can wisely do is to remove what you can of the external obstacles to his exposing himself, and then wait for the operation of his internal impulse to confess. If he has no such impulse, then you must put up with him as he is. It is useless to make claims on him which he is not yet prepared to meet. Whether, like Brand, we make such claims because to refrain would be to compromise with evil, or, like Gregers Werle, because we think their moral beauty must recommend them at sight to every one, we shall alike incur Relling’s impatient assurance that “life would be quite tolerable if we could only get rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us in our poverty with the claims of the ideal.”

ROSMERSHOLM, 1886

Ibsen did not in The Wild Duck exhaust the subject of the danger of forming ideals for other people, and interfering in their lives with a view to enabling them to realize those ideals. Cases far more typical than that of the meddlesome lodger are those of the priest who regards the ennobling of mankind as a sort of trade process of which his cloth gives him a monopoly, and the clever woman who pictures a noble career for the man she loves, and devotes herself to helping him to achieve it. In Rosmersholm, the play with which Ibsen followed up The Wild Duck, there is an unpractical country parson, a gentleman of ancient stock, whose family has been for many years a centre of social influence. The tradition of that influence reinforces his priestly tendency to regard the ennoblement of the world as an external operation to be performed by himself; and the need of such ennoblement is very evident to him; for his nature is a fine one: he looks at the world with some dim prevision of “the third empire.” He is married to a woman of passionately affectionate nature, who is very fond of him, but does not regard him as a regenerator of the human race. Indeed she does not share any of his dreams, and only acts as an extinguisher on the sacred fire of his idealism. He, she, her brother Kroll the headmaster, Kroll’s wife, and their set, form a select circle of the best people in the place, comfortably orbited in our social system, and quite planetary in ascertained position and unimpeachable respectability. Into the orbit comes presently a wandering star, one Rebecca Gamvik, an unpropertied orphan, who has been allowed to read advanced books, and is a Freethinker and a Radical: things that disqualify a poor woman for admission to the Rosmer world. However, one must live somewhere; and as the Rosmer world is the only one in which an ambitious and cultivated woman can find powerful allies and educated companions, Rebecca, being both ambitious and cultivated, makes herself agreeable to the Rosmer circle with such success that the affectionate and impulsive but unintelligent Mrs. Rosmer becomes wildly fond of her, and is not content until she has persuaded her to come and live with them. Rebecca, then a mere adventuress fighting for a foothold in polite society (which has hitherto shewn itself highly indignant at her thrusting herself in where nobody has thought of providing room for her), accepts the offer all the more readily because she has taken the measure of Parson Rosmer, and formed the idea of playing upon his aspirations, and making herself a leader in politics and society by using him as a figurehead.

But now two difficulties arise. First, there is Mrs. Rosmer’s extinguishing effect on her husband: an effect which convinces Rebecca that nothing can be done with him whilst his wife is in the way. Second — a contingency quite unallowed for in her provident calculations — she finds herself passionately enamored of him. The poor parson, too, falls in love with her; but he does not know it. He turns to the woman who understands him like a sunflower to the sun, and makes her his real friend and companion. The wife feels this soon enough; and he, quite unconscious of it, begins to think that her mind must be affected, since she has become so intensely miserable and hysterical about nothing — nothing that he can see. The truth is that she has come under the curse of Rebecca’s ideal: she sees herself standing, a useless obstacle, between her husband and the woman he really loves, the woman who can help him to a glorious career. She cannot even be the mother in the household; for she is childless. Then comes Rebecca, fortified with a finely reasoned theory that Rosmer’s future is staked against his wife’s life, and says that it is better for all their sakes that she should quit Rosmersholm. She even hints that she must go at once if a grave scandal is to be avoided. Mrs. Rosmer, regarding a scandal in Rosmersholm as the most terrible thing that can happen, and seeing that it could be averted by the marriage of Rebecca and Rosmer if she were out of the way, writes a letter secretly to Rosmer’s bitterest enemy, the editor of the local Radical paper, a man who has forfeited his moral reputation by an intrigue which Rosmer has pitilessly denounced. In this letter she implores him not to believe or publish any stories that he may hear about Rosmer, to the effect that he is in any way to blame for any thing that may happen to her. Then she sets Rosmer free to marry Rebecca, and to realize his ideals, by going out into the garden and throwing herself into the millstream that runs there.

Now follows a period of quiet mourning at Rosmersholm. Everybody except Rosmer suspects that Mrs. Rosmer was not mad, and guesses why she committed suicide. Only it would not do to compromise the aristocratic party by treating Rosmer as the Radical editor was treated. So the neighbors shut their eyes and condole with the bereaved clergyman; and the Radical editor holds his tongue because Radicalism is growing respectable, and he hopes, with Rebecca’s help, to get Rosmer over to his side presently. Meanwhile the unexpected has again happened to Rebecca. Her passion is worn out; but in the long days of mourning she has found the higher love; and it is now for Rosmer’s own sake that she urges him to become a man of action, and brood no more over the dead. When his friends start a Conservative paper and ask him to become editor, she induces him to reply by declaring himself a Radical and Freethinker. To his utter amazement, the result is, not an animated discussion of his views, but just such an attack on his home life and private conduct as he had formerly made on those of the Radical editor. His friends tell him plainly that the compact of silence is broken by his defection, and that there will be no mercy for the traitor to the party. Even the Radical editor not only refuses to publish the fact that his new ally is a Freethinker (which would destroy all his social weight as a Radical recruit), but brings up the dead woman’s letter as a proof that the attack is sufficiently well-founded to make it unwise to go too far. Rosmer, who at first had been simply shocked that men whom he had always honored as gentlemen should descend to such hideous calumny, now sees that he really did love Rebecca, and is indeed guilty of his wife’s death. His first impulse is to shake off the spectre of the dead woman by marrying Rebecca; but she, knowing that the guilt is hers, puts that temptation behind her and refuses. Then, as he thinks it all over, his dream of ennobling the world slips away from him: such work can only be done by a man conscious of his own innocence. To save him from despair, Rebecca makes a great sacrifice. She “gives him back his innocence” by confessing how she drove his wife to kill herself; and, as the confession is made in the presence of Kroll, she ascribes the whole plot to her ambition, and says not a word of her passion. Rosmer, confounded as he realizes what helpless puppets they have all been in the hands of this clever woman, for the moment misses the point that unscrupulous ambition, though it explains her crime, does not account for her confession. He turns his back on her and leaves the house with Kroll. She quietly packs up her trunk, and is about to vanish from Rosmersholm without another word when he comes back alone to ask why she confessed. She tells him why, offering him her self-sacrifice as a proof that his power of ennobling others was no vain dream, since it is his companionship that has changed her from the selfish adventuress she was to the devoted woman she has just proved herself to be. But he has lost his faith in himself, and cannot believe her. The proof seems to him subtle, artful: he cannot forget that she duped him by flattering this very weakness of his before. Besides, he knows now that it is not true: people are not ennobled from without. She has no more to say; for she can think of no further proof. But he has thought of an unanswerable one. Dare she make all doubt impossible by sacrificing her share in his future in the only absolutely final way: that is, by doing for his sake what his wife did? She asks what would happen if she had the heart and the will to do it. “Then,” he replies, “I should have to believe in you. I should recover my faith in my mission. Faith in my power to ennoble human souls. Faith in the human soul’s power to attain nobility.”

“You shall have your faith again,” she answers. At this pass the inner truth of the situation comes out; and the thin veil of a demand for proof, with its monstrous sequel of asking the woman to kill herself in order to restore the man’s good opinion of himself, falls away. What is really driving Rosmer is the superstition of expiation by sacrifice. He sees that when Rebecca goes into the millstream he must go too. And he speaks his real mind in the words, “There is no judge over us: therefore we must do justice upon ourselves.” But the woman’s soul is free of this to the end; for when she says, “I am under the power of the Rosmersholm view of life now. What I have sinned it is fit I should expiate,” we feel in that speech a protest against the Rosmersholm view of life: the view that denied her right to live and be happy from the first, and now at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blindness. The woman has the higher light: she goes to her death out of fellowship with the man who is driven thither by the superstition which has destroyed his will. The story ends with his taking her solemnly as his wife, and casting himself with her into the mill-stream.

It is unnecessary to repeat here what is said on page 37 as to the vital part played in this drama by the evolution of the lower into the higher love. Peer Gynt, during the prophetic episode in his career, shocks the dancing girl Anitra into a remonstrance by comparing, himself to a cat. He replies, with his wisest air, that from the standpoint of love there is perhaps not so much difference between a tomcat and a prophet as she may imagine. The number of critics who have entirely missed the point of Rebecca’s transfiguration seems to indicate that the majority of men, even among critics of dramatic poetry, have not got beyond Peer Gynt’s opinion in this matter. No doubt they would not endorse it as a definitely stated proposition, aware, as they are, that there is a poetic convention to the contrary. But if they fail to recognize the only possible alternative proposition when it is not only stated in so many words by Rebecca West, but when without it her conduct dramatically contradicts her character — when they even complain of the contradiction as a blemish on the play, I am afraid there can be no further doubt that the extreme perplexity into which the first performance of Rosmersholm in England plunged the Press was due entirely to the prevalence of Peer Gynt’s view of love among the dramatic critics.

THE LADY FROM THE SEA, 1888

Ibsen’s next play, though it deals with the old theme, does not insist on the power of ideals to kill, as the two previous plays do. It rather deals with the origin of ideals in unhappiness, in dissatisfaction with the real. The subject of The Lady from the Sea is the most poetic fancy imaginable. A young woman, brought up on the sea-coast, marries a respectable doctor, a widower, who idolizes her and places her in his household with nothing to do but dream and be made much of by everybody. Even the housekeeping is done by her stepdaughter: she has no responsibility, no care, and no trouble. In other words, she is an idle, helpless, utterly dependent article of luxury. A man turns red at the thought of being such a thing; but he thoughtlessly accepts a pretty and fragile-looking woman in the same position as a charming natural picture. The lady from the sea feels an indefinite want in her life. She reads her want into all other lives, and comes to the conclusion that man once had to choose whether he would be a land animal or a creature of the sea; and that having chosen the land, he has carried about with him ever since a secret sorrow for the element he has forsaken. The dissatisfaction that gnaws her is, as she interprets it, this desperate longing for the sea. When her only child dies and leaves her without the work of a mother to give her a valid place in the world, she yields wholly to her longing, and no longer cares for her husband, who, like Rosmer, begins to fear that she is going mad.

At last a seaman appears and claims her as his wife on the ground that they went years before through a rite which consisted of their marrying the sea by throwing their rings into it. This man, who had to fly from her in the old time because he killed his captain, and who fills her with a sense of dread and mystery, seems to her to embody the mystic attraction the sea has for her. She tells her husband that she must go away with the seaman. Naturally the doctor expostulates — declares that he cannot for her own sake let her do so mad a thing. She replies that he can only prevent her by locking her up, and asks him what satisfaction it will be to him to have her body under lock and key whilst her heart is with the other man. In vain he urges that he will only keep her under restraint until the seaman goes — that he must not, dare not, allow her to ruin herself. Her argument remains unanswerable. The seaman openly declares that she will come; so that the distracted husband asks him does he suppose he can force her from her home. To this the seaman replies that, on the contrary, unless she comes of her own free will there is no satisfaction to him in her coming at all: the unanswerable argument again. She echoes it by demanding her freedom to choose. Her husband must cry off his law-made and Church-made bargain; renounce his claim to the fulfilment of her vows; and leave her free to go back to the sea with her old lover. Then the doctor, with a heavy heart, drops his prate about his heavy responsibility for her actions, and throws the responsibility on her by crying off as she demands. The moment she feels herself a free and responsible woman, all her childish fancies vanish: the seaman becomes simply an old acquaintance whom she no longer cares for; and the doctor’s affection produces its natural effect. In short, she says No to the seaman, and takes over the housekeeping keys from her stepdaughter without any further maunderings over that secret sorrow for the abandoned sea.

It should be noted here that Ellida [call her Eleeda], The Lady from the Sea, seems more fantastic to English readers than to Norwegian ones. The same thing is true of many other characters drawn by Ibsen, notably Peer Gynt, who, if born in England, would certainly not have been a poet and metaphysician as well as a blackguard and a speculator. The extreme type of Norwegian, as depicted by Ibsen, imagines himself doing wonderful things, but does nothing. He dreams as no Englishman dreams, and drinks to make himself dream the more, until his effective will is destroyed, and he becomes a broken-down, disreputable sot, carrying about the tradition that he is a hero, and discussing himself on that assumption. Although the number of persons who dawdle their life away over fiction in England must be frightful, and is probably increasing, yet their talk is not the talk of Ulric Brendel, Rosmer, Ellida, or Peer Gynt; and it is for this reason that Rosmersholm and The Lady from the Sea strike English audiences as more fantastic and less literal than A Doll’s House and the plays in which the leading figures are men and women of action, though to a Norwegian there is probably no difference in this respect.

HEDDA GABLER, 1890

Hedda Gabler has no ethical ideals at all, only romantic ones. She is a typical nineteenth century figure, falling into the abyss between the ideals which do not impose on her and the realities she has not yet discovered. The result is that though she has imagination, and an intense appetite for beauty, she has no conscience, no conviction: with plenty of cleverness, energy, and personal fascination she remains mean, envious, insolent, cruel in protest against others’ happiness, fiendish in her dislike of inartistic people and things, a bully in reaction from her own cowardice. Hedda’s father, a general, is a widower. She has the traditions of the military caste about her; and these narrow her activities to the customary hunt for a socially and pecuniarily eligible husband. She makes the acquaintance of a young man of genius who, prohibited by an ideal-ridden society from taking his pleasures except where there is nothing to restrain him from excess, is going to the bad in search of his good, with the usual consequences. Hedda is intensely curious about the side of life which is forbidden to her, and in which powerful instincts, absolutely ignored and condemned in her circle, steal their satisfaction. An odd intimacy springs up between the inquisitive girl and the rake. Whilst the general reads the paper in the afternoon, Lovborg and Hedda have long conversations in which he describes to her all his disreputable adventures. Although she is the questioner, she never dares to trust him: all the questions are indirect; and the responsibility for his interpretations rests on him alone. Hedda has no conviction whatever that these conversations are disgraceful; but she will not risk a fight with society on the point: it is easier to practise hypocrisy, the homage that truth pays to falsehood, than to endure ostracism. When he proceeds to make advances to her, Hedda has again no conviction that it would be wrong for her to gratify his instinct and her own; so that she is confronted with the alternative of sinning against herself and him, or sinning against social ideals in which she has no faith. Making the coward’s choice, she carries it out with the utmost bravado, threatening Lovborg with one of her father’s pistols, and driving him out of the house with all that ostentation of outraged purity which is the instinctive defence of women to whom chastity is not natural, much as libel actions are mostly brought by persons concerning whom libels are virtually, if not technically, justifiable.

Hedda, deprived of her lover, now finds that a life of conformity without faith involves something more terrible than the utmost ostracism: to wit, boredom. This scourge, unknown among revolutionists, is the curse which makes the security of respectability as dust in the balance against the unflagging interest of rebellion, and which forces society to eke out its harmless resources for killing time by licensing gambling, gluttony, hunting, shooting, coursing, and other vicious distractions for which even idealism has no disguise. These licenses, being expensive, are available only for people who have more than enough money to keep up appearances; and as Hedda’s father, being in the army instead of in commerce, is too poor to leave her much more than the pistols, her boredom is only mitigated by dancing, at which she gains much admiration, but no substantial offers of marriage.

At last she has to find somebody to support her. A good-natured mediocrity of a professor is the best that is to be had; and though she regards him as a member of an inferior class, and despises almost to loathing his family circle of two affectionate old aunts and the inevitable general servant who has helped to bring him up, she marries him faute de mieux, and immediately proceeds to wreck this prudent provision for her livelihood by accommodating his income to her expenditure instead of accommodating her expenditure to his income. Her nature so rebels against the whole sordid transaction that the prospect of bearing a child to her husband drives her almost frantic, since it will not only expose her to the intimate solicitude of his aunts in the course of a derangement of her health in which she can see nothing that is not repulsive and humiliating, but will make her one of his family in earnest.

To amuse herself in these galling circumstances, she forms an underhand alliance with a visitor who belongs to her old set, an elderly gallant who quite understands how little she cares for her husband, and proposes a ménage à trois to her. She consents to his coming there and talking to her as he pleases behind her husband’s back; but she keeps her pistols in reserve in case he becomes seriously importunate. He, on the other hand, tries to get some hold over her by placing her husband under pecuniary obligations, as far as he can do it without being out of pocket.

Meanwhile Lôvborg is drifting to disgrace by the nearest way: drink. In due time he descends from lecturing at the university on the history of civilization to taking a job in an out-of-the-way place as tutor to the little children of Sheriff Elvsted. This functionary, on being left a widower with a number of children, marries their governess, finding that she will cost him less and be bound to do more for him as his wife. As for her, she is too poor to dream of refusing such a settlement in life. When Lôvborg comes, his society is heaven to her. He does not dare tell her about his dissipations; but he tells her about his unwritten books, which he never discussed with Hedda. She does not dare to remonstrate with him for drinking; but he gives it up as soon as he sees that it shocks her. Just as Mr. Fearing, in Bunyan’s story, was in a way the bravest of the pilgrims, so this timid and unfortunate Mrs. Elvsted trembles her way to a point at which Lôvborg, quite reformed, publishes one book which makes him celebrated for the moment, and completes another, fair-copied in her handwriting, to which he looks for a solid position as an original thinker. But he cannot now stay tutoring Elvsted’s children; so off he goes to town with his pockets full of the money the published book has brought him. Left once more in her old lonely plight, knowing that without her Lovborg will probably relapse into dissipation, and that without him her life will not be worth living, Mrs. Elvsted must either sin against herself and him or against the institution of marriage under which Elvsted purchased his housekeeper. It never occurs to her that she has any choice. She knows that her action will count as “a dreadful thing”; but she sees that she must go; and accordingly Elvsted finds himself without a wife and his children without a governess, and so disappears unpitied from the story.

Now it happens that Hedda’s husband, Jorgen Tesman, is an old friend and competitor (for academic honors) of Lovborg, and also that Hedda was a schoolfellow of Mrs. Elvsted, or Thea, as she had better now be called. Thea’s first business is to find out where Lovborg is; for hers is no preconcerted elopement: she has hurried to town to keep Lovborg away from the bottle, a design she dare not hint at to himself. Accordingly, the first thing she does in town is to call on the Tesmans, who have just returned from their honeymoon, to beg them to invite Lovborg to their house so as to keep him in good company. They consent, with the result that the two pairs are brought together under the same roof, and the tragedy begins to work itself out.

Hedda’s attitude now demands a careful analysis. Lovborg’s experience with Thea has enlightened his judgment of Hedda; and as he is, in his gifted way, an arrant poseur and male coquet, he immediately tries to get on romantic terms with her (for have they not “a past”?) by impressing her with the penetrating criticism that she is and always was a coward. She admits that the virtuous heroics with the pistol were pure cowardice; but she is still so void of any other standard of conduct than conformity to the conventional ideals, that she thinks her cowardice consisted in not daring to be wicked. That is, she thinks that what she actually did was the right thing; and since she despises herself for doing it, and feels that he also rightly despises her for doing it, she gets a passionate feeling that what is wanted is the courage to do wrong. This unlooked-for reaction of idealism, this monstrous but very common setting-up of wrong-doing as an ideal, and of the wrongdoer as hero or heroine qua wrongdoer, leads Hedda to conceive that when Lovborg tried to seduce her he was a hero, and that in allowing Thea to reform him he has played the recreant. In acting on this misconception she is restrained by no consideration for any of the rest. Like all people whose lives are valueless, she has no more sense of the value of Lovborg’s or Tesman’s or Thea’s lives than a railway shareholder has of the value of a shunter’s. She gratifies her intense jealousy of Thea by deliberately taunting Lovborg into breaking loose from her influence by joining a carouse at which he not only loses his manuscript, but finally gets into the hands of the police through behaving outrageously in the house of a disreputable woman whom he accuses of stealing it, not knowing that it has been picked up by Tesman and handed to Hedda for safe keeping. Now Hedda’s jealousy of Thea is not jealousy of her bodily fascination: at that Hedda can beat her. It is jealousy of her power of making a man of Lovborg, of her part in his life as a man of genius. The manuscript which Tesman gives to Hedda to lock up safely is in Thea’s handwriting. It is the fruit of Lovborg’s union with Thea: he himself speaks of it as “their child.” So when he turns his despair to romantic account by coming to the two women and making a tragic scene, telling Thea that he has cast the manuscript, tom into a thousand pieces, out upon the fiord; and then, when she is gone, telling Hedda that he has brought “the child” to a house of ill-fame and lost it there, she, deceived by his posing, and thirsting to gain faith in the beauty of her own influence over him from a heroic deed of some sort, makes him a present of one of her pistols, only begging him to “do it beautifully,” by which she means that he is to kill himself in some manner that will make his suicide a romantic memory and an imaginative luxury to her for ever. He takes it unblushingly, and leaves her with the air of a man who is looking his last on earth. But the moment he is out of sight of his audience, he goes back to the house where he still supposes the manuscript to lie stolen, and there renews the wrangle of the night before, using the pistol to threaten the woman, with the result that he gets shot in the abdomen, leaving the weapon to fall into the hands of the police. Meanwhile Hedda deliberately burns “the child.” Then comes her elderly gallant to disgust her with the unromantically ugly details of the deed which Lôvborg promised her to do so beautifully, and to make her understand that he himself has now got her into his power by his ability to identify the pistol. She must either be the slave of this man, or else face the scandal of the connection of her name at the inquest with a squalid debauch ending in a murder. Thea, too, is not crushed by Lovborg’s death. Ten minutes after she has received the news with a cry of heartfelt loss, she sits down with Tesman to reconstruct “the child” from the old notes she has piously preserved. Over the congenial task of collecting and arranging another man’s ideas Tesman is perfectly happy, and forgets his beautiful Hedda for the first time. Thea the trembler is still mistress of the situation, holding the dead Lôvborg, gaining Tesman, and leaving Hedda to her elderly admirer, who smoothly remarks that he will answer for Mrs. Tesman not being bored whilst her husband is occupied with Thea in putting the pieces of the book together. However, he has again reckoned without General Gabler’s second pistol. She shoots herself then and there; and so the story ends.

THE LAST FOUR PLAYS

DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN

Ibsen now lays down the completed task of warning the world against its idols and anti-idols, and passes into the shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more powerful. And yet the shadow of death is here; for all four, except Little Eyolf, are tragedies of the dead, deserted and mocked by the young who are still full of life. The Master Builder is a dead man before the curtain rises: the breaking of his body to pieces in the last act by its fall from the tower is rather the impatient destruction of a ghost of whose delirious whisperings Nature is tired than of one who still counts among the living. Borkman and the two women, his wife and her sister, are not merely dead: they are buried; and the creatures we hear and see are only their spirits in torment. “Never dream of life again,” says Mrs. Borkman to her husband: “lie quiet where you are.” And the last play of all is frankly called When We Dead Awaken. Here the quintessence of Ibsenism reaches its final distillation; morality and reformation give place to mortality and resurrection; and the next event is the death of Ibsen himself: he, too, creeping ghost-like through the blackening mental darkness until he reaches his actual grave, and can no longer make Europe cry with pity by sitting at a copybook, like a child, trying to learn again how to write, only to find that divine power gone for ever from his dead hand. He, the crustiest, grimmest hero since Beethoven, could not die like him, shaking his fist at the thunder and alive to the last: he must follow the path he had traced for Solness and Borkman, and survive himself. But as these two were dreamers to the last, and never so luminous in their dreams as when they could no longer put the least of them into action; so we may believe that when Ibsen could no longer remember the alphabet, or use a dictionary, his soul may have been fuller than ever before of the unspeakable. Do not snivel, reader, over the contrast he himself drew between the man who was once the greatest writer in the world, and the child of seventy-six trying to begin again at pothooks and hangers. Depend on it, whilst there was anything left of him at all there was enough of his iron humor to grin as widely as the skeleton with the hourglass who was touching him on the shoulder.

THE MASTER BUILDER, 1892

Halvard Solness is a dead man who has been a brilliantly successful builder, and, like the greatest builders, his own architect. He is sometimes in the sublime delirium that precedes bodily death, and sometimes in the horror that varies the splendors of delirium. He is mortally afraid of young rivals; of the younger generation knocking at the door. He has built churches with high towers (much as Ibsen built great historical dramas in verse). He has come to the end of that and built “homes for human beings” (much as Ibsen took to writing prose plays of modem life). He has come to the end of that too, as men do at the end of their lives; and now he must take to dead men’s architecture, the building of castles in the air. Castles in the air are the residences not only of those who have finished their lives, but of those who have not yet begun them. Another peculiarity of castles in the air is that they are so beautiful and so wonderful that human beings are not good enough to live in them: therefore when you look round you for somebody to live with you in your castle in the air, you find nobody glorious enough for that sanctuary. So you resort to the most dangerous of all the varieties of idolization: the idolization of the person you are most in love with; and you take him or her to live with you in your castle. And as imaginative young people, because they are young, have no illusions about youth, whilst old people, because they are old, have no illusions about age, elderly gentlemen very often idolize adolescent girls, and adolescent girls idolize elderly gentlemen. When the idolization is not reciprocal, the idolizer runs terrible risks if the idol is selfish and unscrupulous. Cases of girls enslaved by elderly gentlemen whose scrupulous respect for their maiden purity is nothing but an excuse for getting a quantity of secretarial or domestic service out of them that is limited only by their physical endurance, without giving them anything in return, are not at all so rare as they would be if the theft of a woman’s youth and devotion were as severely condemned by public opinion as the comparatively amiable and negligible theft of a few silver spoons and forks. On the other hand doting old gentlemen are duped and ruined by designing young women who care no more for them than a Cornish fisherman cares for a conger eel. But sometimes, when the two natures are poetic, we have scenes of Bettina and Goethe, which are perhaps wholesome as well as pleasant for both parties when they are good enough and sensible enough to face the inexorable on the side of age and to recognize the impossible on the side of youth. On these conditions, old gentlemen are indulged in fancies for poetic little girls; and the poetic little girls have their emotions and imaginations satisfied harmlessly until they find a suitable mate.

But the master builder, though he gets into just such a situation, does not get out of it so cheaply, because he is not outwardly an old, or even a very elderly gentleman. “He is a man no longer young, but healthy and vigorous, with closely cut curly hair, dark moustache, and dark thick eyebrows.” Also he is daimonic, not sham daimonic like Molvik in The Wild Duck, but really daimonic, with luck, a star, and mystic “helpers and servers” who find the way through the maze of life for him. In short, a very fascinating man, whom nobody, himself least of all, could suspect of having shot his bolt and being already dead. Therefore a man for whom a girl’s castle in the air is a very dangerous place, as she may easily thrust upon him adventures that would tax the prime of an unexhausted man, and are mere delirious madness for a spent one.

Grasp this situation and you will be able to follow a performance of The Master Builder without being puzzled; though to the unprepared theatregoer it is a bewildering business. You see Solness in his office, ruthlessly exploiting the devotion of the girl secretary Kaia, who idolizes him, and giving her nothing in return but a mesmerizing word occasionally. You see him with equal ruthlessness apparently, but really with the secret terror of “the priest who slew the slayer and shall ‘ himself be slain,” trying to suppress a young rival who is as yet only a draughtsman in his employment. To keep the door shut against the younger generation already knocking at it: that is all he can do now, except build castles in the air; for, as I have said, the effective part of the man is dead. Then there is his wife, who, knowing that he is failing in body and mind, can do nothing but look on in helpless terror. She cannot make a happy home for Solness, because her own happiness, has been sacrificed to his. For they began their family life in an old house that was part of her property: the sort of house that may be hallowed by old family associations and memories of childhood, but that it pays the speculative builder to pull down and replace by rows of villas. Now the ambitious Solness knows this but dares not propose such a thing to his wife, who cherishes all the hallowing associations, and even keeps her dolls: nine lovely dolls, feeling them “under her heart, like little unborn children.” Everything in the house is precious to her: the old silk dresses, the lace, the portraits. Solness knows that to touch these would be tearing her heart up by the roots. So he says nothing; does nothing; only notes a crack in the old chimney which should be repaired if the house is to be safe against fire, and does not repair it. Instead, he pictures to himself a fire, with his wife out in the sledge with his two children, and nothing but charred ruins facing her when she returns; but what matter, since the children have escaped and are still with her? He even calls upon his helpers and servers to consider whether this vision might not become a reality. And it does. The house is burnt; the villas rise on its site and cover the park; and Halvard Solness becomes rich and successful.

But the helpers and servers have not stuck to the program for all that. The fire did not come from the crack in the chimney when all the domestic fires were blazing. It came at night when the fires were low, and began in a cupboard quite away from the chimney. It came when Mrs. Solness and the children were in bed. It shattered the mother’s health; it killed the children she was nursing; it devoured the portraits and the silk dresses and the old lace; it burnt the nine lovely dolls; and it broke the heart under which the dolls had lain like little unborn children. That was the price of the master builder’s success. He is married to a dead woman; and he is trying to atone by building her a new villa: a new tomb to replace the old home; for he is gnawed with remorse.

But the fire was not only a good building speculation: it also led to his obtaining commissions to build churches. And one triumphant day, when he was celebrating the completion of the giant tower he had added to the old church at Lysanger, it suddenly flashed on him that his house had been burnt, his wife’s life laid waste, and his own happiness destroyed, so that he might become a builder of churches. Now it happens that one of his difficulties as a builder is that he had a bad head for heights, and cannot venture even on a second floor balcony. Yet in the fury of that thought he mounts to the pinnacle of his tower, and there, face to face with God, who has, he feels, wasted the wife’s gift of building up the souls of little children to make the husband a builder of steeples, he declares that he will never set hand to church-building again, and will henceforth build nothing but homes for happier men than he. Which vow he keeps, only to find that the home, too, is a devouring idol, and that men and women have no longer any use for it.

In spite of his excitement, he very nearly breaks his neck after all; for among the crowd below there is a little devil of a girl who waves a white scarf and makes his head swim. This tiny animal is no other than the younger stepdaughter of Ellida, The Lady from the Sea, Hilda Wangel, of whose taste for “thrilling” sensations we had a glimpse in that play. On the same evening Solness is entertained at a club banquet, in consequence of which he is not in the most responsible condition when he returns to sup at the house of Dr. Wangel, who is putting him up for the night. He meets the imp there; thinks her like a little princess in her white dress; kisses her; and promises her to come back in ten years and carry her off to the kingdom of Orangia. Perhaps it is only just to mention that he stoutly denies these indiscretions afterwards; though he admits that when he wishes something to happen between himself and somebody else, the somebody else always imagines it actually has happened.

The play begins ten years after the climbing of the tower. The younger generation knocks at the door with a vengeance. Hilda, now a vigorous young woman, and a great builder of castles in the air, bursts in on him and demands her kingdom; and very soon she sends him up to a tower again (the tower of the new house) and waves her scarf to him as madly as ever. This time he really does break his neck; and so the story ends.

LITTLE EYOLF, 1894

Though the most mischievous ideals are social ideals which have become institutions, laws, and creeds, yet their evil must come to a personal point before they can strike down the individual. Jones is not struck down by an ideal in the abstract, but by Smith making monstrous claims or inflicting monstrous injuries on him in the name of an ideal. And it is fair to add that the ideals are sometimes beneficent, and their repudiation sometimes cruel. For ideals are in practice not so much matters of conscience as excuses for doing what we like; and thus it happens that of two people worshipping the same ideals, one will be a detestable tyrant and the other a kindly and helpful friend of mankind. What makes the bad side of idealism so dangerous is that wicked people are allowed to commit crimes in the name of the ideal that would not be tolerated for a moment as open devilment. Perhaps the worst, because the commonest and most intimate cases, are to be found in family life. Even during the Reign of Terror, the chances of any particular Frenchman or Frenchwoman being guillotined were so small as to be negligible. Under Nero a Christian was far safer from being smeared with pitch and set on fire than he was from domestic trouble. If the private lives that have been wasted by idealistic persecution could be recorded and set against the public martyrdoms and slaughterings and torturings and imprisonments, our millions of private Neros and Torquemadas and Calvins, Bloody Maries and Cleopatras and Semiramises, would eclipse the few who have come to the surface of history by the accident of political or ecclesiastical conspicuousness.

Thus Ibsen, at the beginning of his greatness, shewed us Brand sacrificing his wife; and this was only the first of a series of similar exhibitions, ending, so far, in Solness sacrificing his wife and being himself sacrificed to a girl’s enthusiasm. And he brings Solness to the point of rebelling furiously against the tyranny of his wife’s ideal of home, and declaring that “building homes for happy human beings is not worth a rap: men are not happy in these homes: I should not have been happy in such a home if I had had one.” It is not surprising to find that Little Eyolf is about such a home.

This home clearly cannot be a working-class home. And here let it be said that the comparative indifference of the working class to Ibsen’s plays is neither Ibsen’s fault nor that of the working class. To the man who works for his living in modem society home is not the place where he lives, nor his wife the woman he lives with. Home is the roof under which he sleeps and eats; and his wife is the woman who makes his bed, cooks his meals, and looks after their children when they are neither in school nor in the streets, or who at least sees that the servants do these things. The man’s work keeps him from home from eight to twelve hours a day. He is unconscious through sleep for another eight hours. Then there is the public house and the club. There is eating, washing, dressing, playing with the children or the dog, entertaining or visiting friends, reading, and pursuing hobbies such as gardening and the like. Obviously the home ideal cannot be tested fully under these conditions, which enable a married pair to see less and know less of one another than they do of those who work side by side with them. It is in the propertied class only that two people can really live together and devote themselves to one another if they want to. There are certain businesses which men and women can conduct jointly, and certain professions which men can pursue at home; and in these the strain of idealism on marriage is more severe than when the two work separately. But the full strain comes on with the modern unearned income from investments, which does not involve even the management of an estate. And it is under this full strain that Ibsen tests it in Little Eyolf.

Shakespear, in a flash of insight which has puzzled many commentators, and even set them proposing alterations of a passage which they found unthinkable, has described one of his characters as “a fellow almost damned in a fair wife.” There is no difficulty or obscurity about this phrase at all: you have only to look round at the men who have ventured to marry very fascinating women to see that most of them are not merely “almost damned” but wholly damned. Allmers, in Little Eyolf, is a fellow almost damned in a fair wife. She, Rita Allmers, has brought him “gold and green forests” (a reminiscence from an early play called The Feast at Solhoug), and not only troubles and uncentres him as only a woman can trouble and uncentre a man who is susceptible to her bodily attraction, but is herself furiously and jealously in love with him. In short, they form the ideal home of romance; and it would be hard to find a compacter or more effective formula for a small private hell. The “almost damned” are commonly saved by the fact that the devotion is usually on one side only, and that the lovely lady (or gentleman; for a woman almost damned in a fair husband is also a common object in domestic civilization), if she has only one husband, relieves the boredom of his devotion by having fifty courtiers. But Rita will neither share Allmers with anyone else nor be shared. He must be wholly and exclusively hers; and she must be wholly and exclusively his. By her gold and green forests she snatches him from his work as a schoolmaster and imprisons him in their house, where the poor wretch pretends to occupy himself by writing a book on Human Responsibility, and forming the character of their son, little Eyolf. For your male sultana takes himself very seriously indeed, as do most sultanas and others who are so closely shut up with their own vanities and appetites that they think the world a little thing to be moulded and arranged at their silly pleasure like a lump of plasticine. Rita is jealous of the book, and hates it not only because Allmers occupies himself with it instead of with her, but talks about it to his halfsister Asta, of whom she is of course also jealous. She is jealous of little Eyolf, and hates him too, because he comes between her and her prey.

One day, when the baby child is lying on the table, they have an amorous fit and forget all about him. He falls off the table and is crippled for life. He and his crutch become thenceforth a standing reproach to them. They hate themselves; they hate each other; they hate him; their atmosphere of ideal conjugal love breeds hate at every turn: hatred masquerading as a loving bond that has been drawn closer and sanctified by their common misfortune. After ten years of this hideous slavery the man breaks loose: actually insists on going for a short trip into the mountains by himself. It is true that he reassures Rita by coming back before his time; but her conclusion that this was because he could not abstain from her society is rudely shattered by his conduct on his return. She dresses herself beautifully to receive him, and makes the seraglio as delightful as possible for their reunion; but he purposely arrives tired out, and takes refuge in the sleep of exhaustion, without a caress. As she says, quoting a popular poem when reproaching him for this afterwards, “There stood your champagne and you tasted it not.” It soon appears that he has come to loathe his champagne, and that the escape into the mountains has helped him to loathe his situation to some extent, even to discovering the absurdity of his book on Human Responsibility, and the cruelty of his educational experiments on Eyolf. In future he is going to make Eyolf “an open air little boy,” which of course involves being a good deal in the open air with him, and out of the seraglio. Then the woman’s hatred of the child unveils itself; and she openly declares what she really feels as to this little creature, with its “evil eyes,” that has come between them.

At this point, very opportunely, comes the Rat Wife, who, like the Pied Piper, clears away rats for a consideration. Has Rita any little gnawing things she wants to get rid of? Here, it seems, is a helper and server for Rita. The Rat Wife’s method is to bewitch the rats so that when she rows out to sea they follow her and are drowned. She describes this with a heart-breaking poetry that frightens Rita, who makes Allmers send her away. But a helper and server is not so easily exorcized. Rita’s little gnawing thing, Eyolf, has come under the spell; and when the Rat Wife rows out to sea, he follows her and is drowned.

The family takes the event in a very proper spirit. Horror, lamentation, shrieks and tears, and all the customary homages to death and attestations of bereavement are duly and even sincerely gone through; for the shock of such an accident makes us all human for a moment. But next morning Allmers finds some difficulty in keeping it up, miserable as he is. He finds himself forgetting about Eyolf for several minutes, and thinking about other things, even about his breakfast; and in his idealistic self-devotion to artificial attitudes he reproaches himself and tries to force himself to keep thinking of Eyolf and being overwhelmed with grief about him. Besides, it is an excuse for avoiding his wife. The revulsion against his slavery to her has made her presence unbearable to him. He can bear nobody but his half-sister Asta, whose relation to him is a most blessed comfort and relief because their blood kinship excludes from it all the torment and slavery of his relation to Rita. But this consolation is presently withdrawn; for Asta has just discovered, in some old correspondence, convincing proofs that she is not related to him at all; and the effect of the discovery has been to remove the inhibition which has hitherto limited her strong affection for him; so that she now perceives that she must leave him. Hitherto, she has refused, for his sake, the offers of Borgheim, an engineer who wants to marry her, but who, like Rita, wants to take her away and make her exclusively his own; for he, too, cannot share with anyone. And though both Allmers and Rita implore her to stay, dreading now nothing so much as being left alone with one another, she knows that she cannot stay innocently, and accepts the engineer and vanishes lest a worse thing should befall.

And now Rita has her man all to herself. Eyolf dead, Asta gone, the Book on Human Responsibility thrown into the waste paper basket: there are no more rivals now, no more distractions: the field is clear for the ideal union of “two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.” The result may be imagined.

The situation is insufferable from the beginning. Allmers’ attempts to avoid seeing or speaking to Rita are of course impracticable. Equally impracticable are their efforts to behave kindly to one another. They are presently at it hammer and tongs, each tearing the mask from the other’s grief for the child, and leaving it exposed as their remorse: hers for having jealously hated Eyolf: his for having sacrificed him to his passion for Rita, and to the schoolmasterly vanity and folly which sees in the child nothing more than the vivisector sees in a guinea-pig: something to experiment on with a view to rearranging the world to suit his own little ideas. If ever two cultivated souls of the propertied middle class were stripped naked and left bankrupt, these two are. They cannot bear to live; and yet they are forced to confess that they dare not kill themselves.

The solution of their problem, as far as it is solved, is, as coming from Ibsen, very remarkable. It is not, as might have been expected after his long propaganda of Individualism, that they should break up the seraglio and go out into the world until they have learnt to stand alone, and through that to accept companionship on honorable conditions only. Ibsen here explicitly insists for the first time that “we are members one of another,” and that though the strongest man is he who stands alone, the man who is standing alone for his own sake solely is literally an idiot. It is indeed a staring fact in history and contemporary life that nothing is so gregarious as selfishness, and nothing so solitary as the selflessness that loathes the word Altruism because to it there are no “others”: it sees and feels in every man’s case the image of its own. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me” is not Altruism or Othersism. It is an explicit repudiation of the patronizing notion that “the least of these” is mother to whom you are invited to be very nice and kind: in short, it accepts entire identification of “me” with “the least of these.” The fashionably sentimental version, which runs, in effect, “If you subscribe eighteenpence to give this little dear a day in the country I shall regard it as a loan of one-and-sixpence to myself” is really more conceitedly remote from the spirit of the famous Christian saying than even the sham political economy that took in Mr. Gradgrind. Accordingly, if you would see industrial sweating at its vilest, you must go, not to the sempstresses who work for commercial firms, but to the victims of pious Altruistic Ladies’ Work Guilds and the like, in which ladies with gold and green forests offer to “others” their blouses to be stitched at prices that the most sordid East End slave-driver would recoil from offering.

Thus we see that in Ibsen’s mind, as in the actual history of the nineteenth century, the way to Communism lies through the most resolute and uncompromising Individualism. James Mill, with an inhuman conceit and pedantry which leaves the fable of Allmers and Eyolf far behind, educated John Stuart Mill to be the arch Individualist of his time, with the result that John Stuart Mill became a Socialist quarter of a century before the rest of his set moved in that direction. Herbert Spencer lived to write despairing pamphlets against the Socialism of his ablest pupils. There is no hope in Individualism for egotism. When a man is at last brought face to face with himself by a brave Individualism, he finds himself face to face, not with an individual, but with a species, and knows that to save himself, he must save the race. He can have no life except a share in the life of the community; and if that life is unhappy and squalid, nothing that he can do to paint and paper and upholster and shut off his little corner of it can really rescue him from it.

It happens so to that bold Individualist Mrs. Rita Allmers. The Allmers are, of course, snobs, and have always been very determined that the common little children down at the pier should be taught their place as Eyolf s inferiors. They even go the length of discussing whether these dirty little wretches should not be punished for their cowardice in not rescuing Eyolf. Thereby they raise the terrible question whether they themselves, who are afraid to commit suicide in their misery, would have been any braver. There is nobody to comfort them; for the income from the gold and green forests, by enabling them to cut themselves off from all industry of the place, has led them into something like total isolation. They hate their neighbors as themselves. They are alone together with nothing to do but wear each other out and drive each other mad to an extent impossible under any other conditions. And Rita’s plight is the more desperate of the two, because as she has been the more unscrupulous, the more exacting, she has left him something to look forward to: freedom from her. He is bent on that, at least: he will not live with her on any terms, not stay anywhere within reach of her: the one thing he craves is that he may never see her or speak to her again. That is the end of the “two souls with but a single thought,” &c. But to her his release is only a supreme privation, the end of everything that gave life any meaning for her. She has not even egotism to fall back on.

At this pass, an annoyance of which she has often complained occurs again. The children down at the pier make a noise, playing and yelling as if Eyolf had never existed. It suddenly occurs to her that these are children too, just like Eyolf, and that they are suffering a good deal from neglect. After all, they too are little Eyolfs. Inasmuch as she can do it unto one of the least of these his brethren she can do it unto him. She determines to take the dirty little wretches in hand and look after them. It is at all events a more respectable plan than that of the day before, which was to throw herself away on the first man she met if Allmers dared to think of anybody but her. And it has the domestic advantage that Allmers has nothing to fear from a woman who has something else to do than torment him with passions that devour and jealousies that enslave him. The world and the home suddenly take on their natural aspect. Allmers offers to stay and help her. And so they are delivered from their evil dream, and, let us hope, live happily ever after.

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, 1896

In Little Eyolf the shadow of death lifted for a moment; but now we enter it again. Here the persons of the drama are not only dead but buried. Borkman is a Napoleon of finance. He has the root of finance in him in a born love of money in its final reality: a love, that is, of precious metals. He does not dream of beautiful ladies calling to him for knightly rescue from dragons and tyrants, but of metals imprisoned in undiscovered mines, calling to him to release them and send them out into all lands fertilizing, encouraging, creating. Music to him means the ring of the miner’s pick and hammer: the eternal night underground is as magical to him as the moonlit starlit night of the upper air to the romantic poet. This love of metal is common enough: no man feels towards a cheque for £20 as he does towards twenty gold sovereigns: he will part from the paper with less of a pang than from the coins. There are misers whose fingers tremble when they touch gold, but close steadily on banknotes. True love of money is, in fact, a passion based on a physical appetite for precious metals. It is not greed: you cannot call a man who starves himself sooner than part with one sovereign from his sack of sovereigns, greedy. If he did the same for the love of God, you would call him a saint: if for the love of a woman, a perfect gentle knight. Men grow rich according to the strength of their obsession by this passion: its great libertines become Napoleons of finance: its narrow debauchees become misers, petty moneylenders, and the like. It must not be looked for in all our millionaires, because most of these are rich by pure accident (our abandonment of industry to the haphazard scrambles of private adventurers necessarily produces occasional windfalls which enrich the man who happens to be on the spot), as may be seen when the lucky ones are invited to display their supposed Napoleonic powers in spending their windfalls, when they reveal themselves as quite ordinary mortals, if not indeed sometimes as exceptionally resourceless ones. Besides, finance is one business, and industrial organization another: the man with a passion for altering the map by digging isthmuses never thinks of money save as a means to his end. But those who as financiers have passionately “made” money instead of merely holding their hats under an accidental shower of it will be found to have a genuine disinterested love of it. It is not easy to say how common this passion is. Poverty is general, which would seem to indicate a general lack of it; but poverty is mainly the result of organized robbery and oppression (politely called Capitalism) starving the passion for gold as it starves all the passions. The evidence is further confused by the decorative instinct: some men will load their fingers and shirtfronts with rings and studs, whilst others of equal means are ringless and fasten their shirts with sixpennorth of mother-of-pearl. But it is significant that Plato, and, following him, Sir Thomas More, saw with Ibsen, and made complete indifference to the precious metals, minted or not, a necessary qualification for aristocracy. This indifference is, as a matter of fact, so characteristic of our greatest non-industrial men that when they do not happen to inherit property they are generally poor and in difficulties. Therefore we who have never cared for money enough to do more than keep our heads above water, and are therefore tempted to regard ourselves; as others regard us (that is, as failures, or, at best, as persons of no account) may console ourselves with the reflection that money-hunger is no more respectable than gluttony, and that unless its absence or feebleness is only a symptom of a general want of power to care for anything at all, it usually means that the soul has risen above it to higher concerns.

All this is necessary to the appreciation of Ibsen’s presentment of the Napoleon of finance. Ibsen does not take him superficially: he goes to the poetic basis of the type: the love of gold — actual metallic gold — and the idealization of gold through that love.

Borkman meets the Misses Rentheim: two sisters: the elder richer than the younger. He falls in love with the younger; and she falls in love with him; but the love of gold is the master passion: he marries the elder. Yet he respects his secondary passion in the younger. When he speculates with other people’s securities he spares hers. On the point of bringing off a great stroke of finance, the other securities are missed; and he is prisoned for embezzlement. That is the end of him. He comes out of prison a ruined man and a dead man, and would not have even a tomb to sleep in but for the charity of Ella Rentheim, whose securities he spared when he broke her heart. She maintains his old home for him.

He now enters on the grimmest lying in state ever exposed to public view by mortal dramatist. His wife, a proud woman, must live in the same house with the convicted thief who has disgraced her, because she has nowhere else to lay her head; but she will not see him nor speak to him. She sits downstairs in the drawingroom eating the bitter bread of her sister’s charity, and listening with loathing to her husband’s steps as he paces to and fro in the long gallery upstairs “like a sick wolf.” She listens not for days but for years. And her one hope is that her son Erhart will rehabilitate the family name; repay the embezzled money; and lead her from her tomb up again into honor and prosperity. To this task she has devoted his life.

Borkman has quite another plan. He is still Napoleon, and will return from his Elba to scatter his enemies and complete the stroke that ill-luck and the meddlesomeness of the law frustrated. But he is proud: prouder than Napoleon. He will not come back to the financial world until it finds out that it cannot do without him and comes to ask him to resume his place at the head of the board. He keeps himself in readiness for that deputation. He is always dressed for it; and when he hears steps on the threshold he stands up by the table; puts one hand into the breast of his coat; and assumes the attitude of a conqueror receiving suppliants. And this also goes on not for days but for years, long after the world has forgotten him, and there is nobody likely to come for him except Peer Gynt’s button moulder.

Borkman, like all madmen, cannot nourish his delusion without some response from without. One of the victims of his downfall is a clerk who once wrote a tragedy, and has lived ever since in his own imagination as a poet. His family ridicules his tragedy and his pretensions; and as he is a poor ineffectual little creature who has never lived enough to feel dignified among the dead, like Borkman, he too finds it hard to keep his illusion alive without help. Fortunately he has admired Borkman, the great financier; and Borkman, when he has ruined him and ruined himself, is quite willing to be admired by this humble victim, and even to reward him by a pretence of believing in his poetic genius. Thus the two form one of those Mutual Admiration Societies on which the world so largely subsists, and make the years in the long gallery tolerable by flattering each other. There are even moments when Borkman is nerved to the point of starting for his second advent as a great financial redeemer. On such occasions the woman downstairs hears the footsteps of the sick wolf on the stairs approaching the hatstand where his hat and stick have waited unused all the years of his entombment; but they never reach that first stage of the journey. They always turn back into the gallery again.

This melancholy household of the dead crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation at the door. Erhart, dedicated by his mother to the task of paying his father’s debts and retrieving his ruin, and by his aunt to the task of sweetening her last days with his grateful love, has dedicated himself to his own affairs — for the moment mostly love affairs — and has not the faintest intention of concerning himself with the bygone career of the crazy ex-felon upstairs or the sentimentalities of the old maid downstairs. He detests the house and the atmosphere, and associates his aunt’s broken heart with nothing more important than the scent of stale lavender, which he dislikes. He spends his time happily in the house of a pretty lady in the neighborhood, who has been married and divorced, and knows how to form an adolescent youth. And as to the unpardonable enemy of the family, one Hinkel, who betrayed Borkman to the police and rose on his ruins, Erhart cares so little for that old story that he goes to Hinkel’s parties and enjoys himself there very much. And when at last the pretty lady raises his standard of happiness to a point at which the old house and the old people become impossible, unthinkable, unbearable, he goes off with her to Italy and leaves the dead to bury their dead.

The details of this catastrophe make the play. The fresh air and the light of day break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble into dust. Foldal, the poet clerk, lets slip the fact that he has not the slightest belief in Borkman’s triumphant return to the world; and Borkman retorts by telling him he is no poet. After this comedy comes the tragedy of the son’s defection; and amid the recriminations of the broken heart, the baffled pride, and the shattered dreams, the castles in the air vanish and reveal the open grave they have hidden. Poor Foldal, limping home after being run over by a sledge in which his daughter is running away to act as “second string” and chaperone for Erhart and the pretty lady, is the only one who is wanted in the world, since he must still work for his derisive family. But Borkman returns to his dream, and ventures out of doors at last, not this time to resume his place as governor of the bank, but to release the imprisoned metal that rings and sings to him from the earth. In other words, to die in the open, mad but happy, whilst the two sisters, “we two shadows,” end their strife over his body.

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN, 1900

This play, the last work of Ibsen, and at first the least esteemed, has had its prophecy so startlingly fulfilled in England that nobody will now question the intensity of its inspiration. With us the dead have awakened in the very manner prefigured in the play. The simplicity and brevity of the story is so obvious, and the enormous scope of the conception so difficult to comprehend, that many of Ibsen’s most devoted admirers failed to do it justice. They knew that he was a man of seventy, and were prepossessed with the belief that at such an age his powers must be falling off. It certainly was easier at that time to give the play up as a bad job than to explain it. Now that the great awakening of women which we call the Militant Suffrage Movement is upon us, and you may hear our women publicly and passionately paraphrasing Ibsen’s heroine without having read a word of the play, the matter is simpler. There is no falling-off here in Ibsen. It may be said that this is physically impossible; but those who say so forget that the natural decay of a writer’s powers may shew itself in two ways. The inferiority of the work produced is only one way. The other is the production of equally good or even better work with much greater effort than it would have cost its author ten years earlier. Ibsen produced this play with great difficulty in twice as long a period as had before sufficed; and even at that the struggle left his mind a wreck; for he not only never wrote another play, but, like an overstrained athlete, lost even the normal mental capacity of an ordinary man. Yet it would be hard to say that the play was not worth the sacrifice. It shews no decay of Ibsen’s highest qualities: his magic is nowhere more potent. It is shorter than usual: that is all. The extraordinarily elaborate private history, family and individual, of the personages, which lies behind the action of the other plays, is replaced by a much simpler history of a few people in their general human relations without any family history at all. And the characteristically conscientious fitting of the play to the mechanical conditions of old-fashioned stages has given way to demands that even the best equipped and largest modern stages cannot easily comply with; for the second act takes place in a valley; and though it is easy to represent a valley by a painted scene when the action is confined to one spot in the foreground, it is a different matter when the whole valley has to be practicable, and the movements of the figures cover distances which do not exist on the stage, and cannot, as far as my experience goes, be satisfactorily simulated by the stage carpenter, though they are easy enough for the painter. I should attach no importance at all to this in a writer less mindful of technical limitations and less ingenious in circumventing them than Ibsen, who was for some years a professional stage manager; but in his case it is clear that in calling on the theatre to expand to his requirements instead of, as his custom was, limiting his scene of action to the possibilities of a modest provincial theatre, he knew quite well what he was doing. Here then, we have three differences, from the earlier plays. None of them are inferiorities. They are proper to the difference of subject, and in fact increased the difficulty of the playwright’s task by throwing him back on sheer dramatic power, unaided by the cheaper interest that can be gained on the stage by mere ingenuity of construction. Ibsen, who has always before played on the spectator by a most elaborate gradual development which would have satisfied Dumas, here throws all his cards on the table as rapidly as possible, and proceeds to deal intensively with a situation that never alters.

This situation is simple enough in its general statement, though it is so complex in its content that it raises the whole question of domestic civilization. Take a man and a woman at the highest pitch of natural ability and charm yet attained, and enjoying all the culture that modern art and literature can offer them; and what does it all come tor Contrast them with an essentially uncivilized pair, with a man who lives for hunting and eating and ravishing, and whose morals are those of the bully with the strong hand: in short, a man from the stone age as we conceive it (such men are still common enough in the classes that can afford the huntsman’s life); and couple him with a woman who has no interest or ambition in life except to be captured by such a man (and of these we have certainly no lack). Then face this question. What is there to choose between these two pairs? Is the cultured gifted man less hardened, less selfish towards the women, than the paleolithic man? Is the woman less sacrificed, less enslaved, less dead spiritually in the one case than in the other? Modern culture, except when it has rotted into mere cynicism, shrieks that the question is an insult. The stone age, anticipating Ibsen’s reply, guffaws heartily and says, “Bravo, Ibsen!” Ibsen’s reply is that the sacrifice of the woman of the stone age to fruitful passions which she herself shares is as nothing compared to the wasting of the modem woman’s soul to gratify the imagination and stimulate the genius of the modern artist, poet, and philosopher. He shews us that no degradation ever devized or permitted is as disastrous as this degradation; that through it women die into luxuries for men, and yet can kill them; that men and women are becoming conscious of this; and that what remains to be seen as perhaps the most interesting of all imminent social developments is what will happen “when we dead awaken.”

Ibsen’s greatest contemporary outside his own art was Rodin the French sculptor. Whether Ibsen knew this, or whether he was inspired to make his hero a sculptor just as Dickens was inspired to make Pecksniff an architect, is not known. At all events, having to take a type of the highest and ablest masculine genius, he made him a sculptor, and called his name, not Rodin, but Rubeck: a curious assonance, if it was not intentional. Rubeck is as able an individual as our civilization can produce. The difficulty of presenting such an individual in fiction is that it can be done only by a writer who occupies that position himself; for a dramatist cannot conceive anything higher than himself. No doubt he can invest an imaginary figure with all sorts of imaginary gifts. A drunken author may make his hero sober; an ugly, weak, puny, timid one may make him a Hyperion or a Hercules; a deaf mute may write novels in which the lover is an orator and his mistress a prima donna; but whatever ornaments and accomplishments he may pile up on his personages, he cannot give them greater souls than his own. Defoe could invent wilder adventures for Robinson Crusoe than Shakespear for Hamlet; but he could not make that mean adventurer, with his dull eulogies of the virtues of “the middle station of life,” anything even remotely like Shakespear’s prince.

For Ibsen this difficulty did not exist. He knew quite well that he was one of the greatest men living; so he simply said “Suppose ME to be a sculptor instead of a playwright,” and the thing was done. Thus he came forward himself to plead to his own worst indictment of modem culture. One of the touches by which he identifies himself has all the irony of his earliest work. Rubeck has to make money out of human vanity, as all sculptors must nowadays, by portrait busts; but he revenges himself by studying and bringing out in his sitters “the respectable pompous horse faces, and self-opinionated donkey-muzzles, and lop-eared lowbrowed dog-skulls, and fatted swine-snouts, and dull brutal bull fronts” that lurk in so many human faces. All artists who deal with humanity do this, more or less. Leonardo da Vinci ruled his notebook in columns headed fox, wolf, etc., and made notes of faces by ticking them off in these columns, finding this, apparently, as satisfactory a memorandum as a drawing. Domestic animals, terriers, pugs, poultry, parrots, and cockatoos, are specially valuable to the caricaturist, as giving the original types which explain many faces. Ibsen must have classified his acquaintances a good deal in this way, not without an occasional chuckle; and his attribution of the practice to Rubeck is a confession of it.

Rubeck makes his reputation, as sculptors often do, by a statue of a woman. Not, be it observed, of a dress and a pair of boots, with a head protruding from them, but of a woman from the hand of Nature. It is worth noting here that we have hardly any portraits, either painted or carved, of our famous men and women or even of our nearest and dearest friends. Charles Dickens is known to us as a guy with a human head and face on top. Shakespear is a laundry advertisement of a huge starched collar with his head sticking out of it. Dr. Johnson is a face looking through a wig perched on a snuffy suit of old clothes. All the great women of history are fashion plates of their period. Bereaved parents, orphans, and widows weep fondly over photographs of uniforms, frock coats, gowns, and hats, for the sake of the little scrap of humanity that is allowed to peep through these trappings. Women with noble figures and plain or elderly faces are outdressed and outfaced by rivals who, if revealed as they really are, would be hardly human. Carlyle staggers humanity by inviting the House of Commons to sit unclothed, so that we, and they themselves, shall know them for what they really are.

Hence it is that the artist who adores mankind as his highest subject always comes back to the reality beneath the clothes. His claim to be allowed to do this is so irresistible that in every considerable city in England you will find, supported by the rates of prudish chapel goers, and even managed and inspected by committees of them, an art school where, in the “life class” (significant term!) young women posed in ridiculous and painful attitudes by a drawing master, and mostly under the ugliest circumstances of light, color, and surroundings, earn a laborious wage by allowing a crowd of art students to draw their undraped figures. It is a joylessly grotesque spectacle: one wonders whether anything can really be learnt from it; for never have I seen one of these school models in an attitude which any human being would, unless the alternative were starvation, voluntarily sustain for thirty seconds, or assume on any natural occasion or provocation whatever. Male models are somewhat less slavish; and the stalwart laborer or olive-skinned young Italian who poses before a crowd of easels with ludicrously earnest young ladies in blue or vermilion gowns and embroidered pinafores drawing away at him for dear life is usually much more comfortably and possibly posed. But Life will not yield up her more intimate secrets for eighteenpence an hour; and these earnest young ladies and artsome young men, when they have filled portfolios with such sordid life studies, know less about living humanity than they did before, and very much less about even the mechanism of the body and the shape of its muscles than they could learn less inhumanly from a series of modem kinematographs of figures in motion.

Rubeck does not make his statues in a class at a municipal art school by looking at a weary girl in a tortured attitude with a background of match-boarding, under a roof of girders, and with the ghastly light of a foggy, smoky manufacturing town making the light side of her flesh dirty yellow and the shadowed side putrid purple. He knows better than that. He finds a beautiful woman, and tells her his vision of a statue of The Resurrection Day in the form of a woman “filled with a sacred joy at finding herself unchanged in the higher, freer, happier region after the long dreamless sleep of death.” And the woman, immediately seizing his inspiration and sharing it, devotes herself to the work, not merely as his model, but as his friend, his helper, fellow worker, comrade, all things, save one, that may be humanly natural and necessary between them for an unreserved co-operation in the great work. The one exception is that they are not lovers; for the sculptor’s ideal is a virgin, or, as he calls it, a pure woman.

And her reward is that when the work is finished and the statue achieved, he says “Thank you for a priceless EPISODE,” at which significant word, revealing as it does that she has, after all, been nothing to him but a means to his end, she leaves him and drops out of his life. To earn her living she must then pose, not to him, but before crowds in Variety Theatres in living pictures, gaining much money by her beauty, winning rich husbands, and driving them all to madness or to death by “a fine sharp dagger which she always has with her in bed,” much as Rita Allmers nearly killed her husband. And she calls the statue her child and Rubeck’s, as the book in Hedda Gabler was the child of Thea and Eilert Lôvborg. But finally she too goes mad under the strain.

Rubeck presently meets a pretty Stone Age woman, and marries her. And as he is not a Stone Age man, and she is bored to distraction by his cultured interests, he disappoints her as thoroughly as she disgusts and wearies him: the symptoms being that though he builds her a splendid villa, full of works of art and so forth, neither he nor she can settle down quietly; and they take trips here, trips there, trips anywhere to escape being alone and at home together.

But the retribution for his egotism takes a much subtler form, and strikes at a much more vital place in him: namely, his artistic inspiration. Working with Irene, the lost model, he had achieved a perfect work of art; and, having achieved it, had supposed that he was done with her. But art is not so simple as that. The moment she forsakes him and leaves him to the Stone Age woman and to his egotism, he no longer sees the perfection of his work. He becomes dissatisfied with it. He sees that it can be improved: for instance, why should it consist of a figure of Irene alone? Why should he not be in it himself? Is he not a far more important factor in the conception? He changes the single figure design to a group. He adds a figure of himself. He finds that the woman’s figure, with its wonderful expression of gladness, puts his own image out of countenance. He rearranges the group so as to give himself more prominence. Even so the gladness outshines him; and at last he “tones it down,” striking the gladness out with his chisel, and making his own expression the main interest of the group. But he cannot stop there. Having destroyed the thing that was superior to him, he now wants to introduce things that are inferior. He carves clefts in the earth at the feet of his figure, and from these clefts he makes emerge the folk with the horse faces and the swine snouts that are nearer the beast than his own fine face. Then he is satisfied with his work; and it is in this form that it makes him famous and is finally placed in a public museum. In his days with Irene, they used to call these museums the prisons of works of art. Precisely what the Italian Futurist painters of today are calling them.

And now the play begins. Irene comes from her madhouse to a “health resort.” Thither also comes Rubeck, wandering about with the Stone Age woman to avoid being left at home with her. Thither also comes the man of the Stone Age with his dogs and guns, and carries off the Stone Age woman, to her husband’s great relief. Rubeck and Irene meet; and as they talk over old times, she learns, bit by bit, what has happened to the statue, and is about to kill him when she realizes, also bit by bit, that the history of its destruction is the history of his own, and that as he used her up and left her dead, so with her death the life went out of him. But, like Nora in A Doll’s House, she sees the possibility of a miracle. The dead may awaken if only they can find an honest and natural relation in which they shall no longer sacrifice and slay one another. She asks him to climb to the top of a mountain with her and see that promised land. Half way up, they meet the Stone Age pair hunting. There is a storm coming. It is death to go up and danger to climb down. The Stone Age man faces the danger and carries his willing prey down. The others are beyond the fear of death, and go up. And that is the end of them and of the plays of Henrick Ibsen.

The end, too, let us hope, of the idols, domestic, moral, religious and political, in whose name we have been twaddled into misery and confusion and hypocrisy unspeakable. For Ibsen’s dead hand still keeps the grip he laid on their masks when he first tore them off; and whilst that grip holds, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will find it hard to set those Humpty-Dumpties up again.

THE LESSON OF THE PLAYS

In FOLLOWING this sketch of the plays written by Ibsen to illustrate his thesis that the real slavery of today is slavery to ideals of goodness, it may be that readers who have conned Ibsen through idealist spectacles have wondered that I could so pervert the utterances of a great poet. Indeed I know already that many of those who are most fascinated by the poetry of the plays will plead for any explanation of them rather than that given by Ibsen himself in the plainest terms through the mouths of Mrs. Alving, Relling, and the rest. No great writer uses his skill to conceal his meaning. There is a tale by a famous Scotch storyteller which would have suited Ibsen exactly if he had hit on it first. Jeanie Deans sacrificing her sister’s life on the scaffold to ideal truthfulness is far more horrible than the sacrifice in Rosmersholm; and the deus ex machina expedient by which Scott makes the end of his story agreeable is no solution of the ethical problem raised, but only a puerile evasion of it. He dared not, when it came to the point, allow Effie to be hanged for the sake of Jeanie’s ideals. Nevertheless, if I were to pretend that Scott wrote The Heart of Midlothian to shew that people are led to do as mischievous, as unnatural, as murderous things by their religious and moral ideals as by their envy and ambition, it would be easy to confute me from the pages of the book itself. And Ibsen, like Scott, has made his opinion plain. If any one attempts to maintain that Ghosts is a polemic in favor of indissoluble monogamic marriage, or that The Wild Duck was written to inculcate that truth should be told for its own sake, they must burn the text of the plays if their contention is to stand. The reason that Scott’s story is tolerated by those who shrink from Ghosts is not that it is less terrible, but that Scott’s views are familiar to all well-brought-up ladies and gentlemen, whereas Ibsen’s are for the moment so strange to them as to be unthinkable. He is so great a poet that the idealist finds himself in the dilemma of being unable to conceive that such a genius should have an ignoble meaning, and yet equally unable to conceive his real meaning otherwise than as ignoble. Consequently he misses the meaning altogether in spite of Ibsen’s explicit and circumstantial insistence on it, and proceeds to substitute a meaning congenial to his own ideal of nobility.

Ibsen’s deep sympathy with his idealist figures seems to countenance this confusion. Since it is on the weaknesses of the higher types of character that idealism seizes, his most tragic examples of vanity, selfishness, folly, and failure are not vulgar villains, but men who in an ordinary novel or melodrama would be heroes. Brand and Rosmer, who drive those they love to death, do so with all the fine airs of the Sophoclean or Shakespearean good man persecuted by Destiny.

Hilda Wangel, who kills the Master Builder literally to amuse herself, is the most fascinating of sympathetic girl-heroines. The ordinary Philistine commits no such atrocities: he marries the woman he likes and lives with her more or less happily ever after; but that is not because he is greater than Brand or Rosmer: he is less. The idealist is a more dangerous animal that the Philistine just as a man is a more dangerous animal than a sheep. Though Brand virtually murdered his wife, I can understand many a woman, comfortably married to an amiable Philistine, reading the play and envying the victim her husband. For when Brand’s wife, having made the sacrifice he has exacted, tells him that he was right; that she is happy now; that she sees God face to face; and then reminds him that “whoso sees Jehovah dies,” he instinctively clasps his hands over her eyes; and that action raises him at once far above the criticism that sneers at idealism from beneath, instead of surveying it from the clear ether above, which can only be reached through its mists.

If, in my account of the plays, I have myself suggested false judgments by describing the errors of the idealists in the terms of the life they have risen above rather than in those of the life they fall short of, I can only plead, with but moderate disrespect for the general reader, that if I had done otherwise I should have failed wholly to make my exposition intelligible. Indeed accurate terms for realist morality, though they are to be found in the Bible, are so out of fashion and forgotten that in this very distinction between idealism and realism, I am forced to insist on a sense of the words which, had not Ibsen forced my hand, I should perhaps have conveyed otherwise, to avoid the conflict of many of its applications with the vernacular use of the words.

This, however, was a trifle compared to the difficulty which arose from our inveterate habit of labelling men with the abstract names of their qualities without the slightest reference to the underlying will which sets these qualities in action. At an anniversary celebration of the Paris Commune of 1871, I was struck by the fact that no speaker could find a eulogy for the Federals which would not have been equally appropriate to the peasants of La Vendée who fought for their tyrants against the French revolutionists, or to the Irishmen and Highlanders who fought for the Stuarts at the Boyne or Culloden. The statements that the slain members of the Commune were heroes who died for a noble ideal would have left a stranger quite as much in the dark about them as the counter statements, once common enough in our newspapers, that they were incendiaries and assassins. Our obituary notices are examples of the same ambiguity. Of all the public men lately deceased when Ibsenism was first discussed in England, none was made more interesting by strongly marked personal characteristics than the famous atheist orator Charles Bradlaugh. He was not in the least like any other notable member of the House of Commons. Yet when the obituary notices appeared, with the usual string of qualities: eloquence, determination, integrity, strong common-sense, and so on, it would have been possible, by merely expunging all names and other external details from these notices, to leave the reader entirely unable to say whether the subject of them was Gladstone, Lord Morley, William Stead, or any one else no more like Bradlaugh than Garibaldi or the late Cardinal Newman, whose obituary certificates of morality might nevertheless have been reprinted almost verbatim for the occasion without any gross incongruity. Bradlaugh had been the subject of many sorts of newspaper notices in his time. Thirty years ago, when the middle classes supposed him to be a revolutionist, the string of qualities which the press hung upon him were all evil ones, great stress being laid on the fact that as he was an atheist it would be an insult to God to admit him to Parliament. When it became apparent that he was an anti-socialist force in politics, he, without any recantation of his atheism, at once had the string of evil qualities exchanged for a rosary of good ones; but it is hardly necessary to add that neither the old badge nor the new could ever give any inquirer the least clue to the sort of man he actually was: he might have been Oliver Cromwell or Wat Tyler or Jack Cade, Penn or Wilberforce of Wellington, the late Mr. Hampden of flat-earth-theory notoriety or Proudhon or the Archbishop of Canterbury, for all the distinction such labels could give him one way or the other. The worthlessness of these abstract descriptions is recognized in practice every day. Tax a stranger before a crowd with being a thief, a coward, and a liar; and the crowd will suspend its judgment until you answer the question, “What’s he done?” Attempt to take up a collection for him on the ground that he is an upright, fearless, high-principled hero; and the same question must be answered before a penny goes into the hat.

The reader must therefore discount those partialities which I have permitted myself to express in telling the stories of the plays. They are as much beside the mark as any other example of the sort of criticism which seeks to create an impression favorable or otherwise to Ibsen by simply pasting his characters all over with good or bad conduct marks. If any person cares to describe Hedda Gabler as a modem Lucretia who preferred death to dishonor, and Thea Elvsted as an abandoned, perjured strumpet who deserted the man she had sworn before her God to love, honor, and obey until her death, the play contains conclusive evidence establishing both points. If the critic goes on to argue that as Ibsen manifestly means to recommend Thea’s conduct above Hedda’s by making the end happier for her, the moral of the play is a vicious one, that, again, cannot be gainsaid. If, on the other hand, Ghosts be defended, as the dramatic critic of Piccadilly did defend it, because it throws into divine relief the beautiful figure of the simple and pious Pastor A landers, the fatal compliment cannot be parried. When you have called Mrs. Alving an emancipated woman or an unprincipled one, Alving a debauchee or a victim of society, Nora a fearless and noble-hearted woman or a shocking little liar and an unnatural mother, Helmer a selfish hound or a model husband and father, according to your bias, you have said something which is at once true and false, and in both cases perfectly idle.

The statement that Ibsen’s plays have an immoral tendency, is, in the sense in which it is used, quite true. Immorality does not necessarily imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct, mischievous or not, which does not conform to current ideals. All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them and stamps out such words as grace and sin, substituting for them morality and immorality. Bunyan places the town of Morality, with its respectable leading citizens Air. Legality and Air. Civility, close to the City of Destruction. In the United States today he would be imprisoned for this. Born as I was in the seventeenth century atmosphere of mid-nineteenth century Ireland, I can remember when men who talked about morality were suspected of reading Tom Paine, if not of being downright atheists. Ibsen’s attack on morality is a symptom of the revival of religion, not of its extinction. He is on the side of the prophets in having devoted himself to shewing that the spirit or will of Alan is constantly outgrowing the ideals, and that therefore thoughtless conformity to them is constantly producing results no less tragic than those which follow thoughtless violation of them. Thus the main effect of his plays is to keep before the public the importance of being always prepared to act immorally. He reminds men that they ought to be as careful how they yield to a temptation to tell the truth as to a temptation to hold their tongues, and he urges upon women who either cannot or will not marry that the inducements held out to them by society to preserve their virginity and refrain from motherhood may be called temptations as logically as the inducements to the contrary held out by individuals and by their own temperaments, the practical decision depending on circumstances just as much as a decision between walking and taking a cab, however less trivial both the action and the circumstances may be. He protests against the ordinary assumption that there are certain moral institutions which justify all means used to maintain them, and insists that the supreme end shall be the inspired, eternal, ever growing one, not the external unchanging, artificial one; not the letter but the spirit; not the contract but the object of the contract; not the abstract law but the living will. And because the will to change our habits and thus defy morality arises before the intellect can reason out any racially beneficent purpose in the change, there is always an interval during which the individual can say no more than that he wants to behave immorally because he likes, and because he will feel constrained and unhappy if he acts otherwise. For this reason it is enormously important that we should “mind our own business” and let other people do as they like unless we can prove some damage beyond the shock to our feelings and prejudices. It is easy to put revolutionary cases in which it is so impossible to draw the line that they will always be decided in practice more or less by physical force; but for all ordinary purposes of government and social conduct the distinction is a commonsense one. The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often. But it is not good for people to be garotted occasionally, or at all. That is why it is a mistake to treat an atheist as you treat a garotter, or to put “bad taste” on the footing of theft and murder. The need for freedom of evolution is the sole basis of toleration, the sole valid argument against Inquisitions and Censorships, the sole reason for not burning heretics and sending every eccentric person to the madhouse.

In short, our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices. Let none of them, says Ibsen, be placed above the obligation to prove itself worth the sacrifices it demands; and let everyone religiously refuse to sacrifice himself and others from the moment he loses his faith in the validity of the ideal. Of course it will be said here by incorrigibly slipshod readers that this, far from being immoral, is the highest morality; but I really will not waste further definition on those who will neither mean one thing or another by a word nor allow me to do so. Suffice it that among those who are not ridden by current ideals no question as to the ethical soundness of Ibsen’s plays will ever arise; and among those who are so ridden his plays will be denounced as immoral, and cannot be defended against the accusation.

There can be no question as to the effect likely to be produced on an individual by his conversion from the ordinary acceptance of current ideals as safe standards of conduct, to the vigilant openmindedness of Ibsen. It must at once greatly deepen the sense of moral responsibility. Before conversion the individual anticipates nothing worse in the way of examination at the judgment bar of his conscience than such questions as, Have you kept the commandments? Have you obeyed the law? Have you attended church regularly? paid your rates and taxes to Cæsar? and contributed, in reason, to charitable institutions? It may be hard to do all these things; but it is still harder not to do them, as our ninety-nine moral cowards in the hundred well know. And even a scoundrel can do them all and yet live a worse life than the smuggler or prostitute who must answer No all through the catechism. Substitute for such a technical examination one in which the whole point to be settled is, Guilty or Not Guilty? one in which there is no more and no less respect for virginity than for incontinence, for subordination than for rebellion, for legality than for illegality, for piety than for blasphemy: in short, for the standard qualities than for the standard faults, and immediately, instead of lowering the ethical standard by relaxing the tests of worth, you raise it by increasing their stringency to a point at which no mere Pharisaism or moral cowardice can pass them.

Naturally this does not please the Pharisee. The respectable lady of the strictest Church principles, who has brought up her children with such relentless regard to their ideal morality that if they have any spirit left in them by the time they arrive at years of independence they use their liberty to rush deliriously to the devil: this unimpeachable woman has always felt it unjust that the respect she wins should be accompanied by deep-seated detestation, whilst the latest spiritual heiress of Nell Gwynne, whom no respectable person dare bow to in the street, is a popular idol. The reason is — though the idealist lady does not know it — that Nell Gwynne is a better woman than she; and the abolition of the idealist test which brings her out a worse one, and its replacement by the realist test which would shew the true relation between them, would be a most desirable step forward in public morals, especially as it would act impartially, and set the good side of the Pharisee above the bad side of the Bohemian as ruthlessly as it would set the good side of the Bohemian above the bad side of the Pharisee. For as long as convention goes counter to reality in these matters, people will be led into Hedda Gabler’s error of making an ideal of vice. If we maintain the convention that the distinction between Catherine of Russia and Queen Victoria, between Nell Gwynne and Mrs. Proudie, is the distinction between a bad woman and a good woman, we need not be surprised when those who sympathize with Catherine and Nell conclude that it is better to be a loose woman than a strict one, and go on recklessly to conceive a prejudice against teetotalism and monogamy, and a prepossession in favor of alcoholic excitement and promiscuous amours. Ibsen himself is kinder to the man who has gone his own way as a rake and a drunkard than to the man who is respectable because he dare not be otherwise. We find that the franker and healthier a boy is, the more certain is he to prefer pirates and highwaymen, or Dumas musketeers, to “pillars of society” as his favorite heroes of romance. We have already seen both Ibsenites and anti-Ibsenites who seem to think that the cases of Nora and Mrs. Elvsted are meant to establish a golden rule for women who wish to be “emancipated”: the said golden rule being simply, Run away from your husband. But in Ibsen’s view of life, that would come under the same condemnation as the ecclesiastical rule, Cleave to your husband until death do you part. Most people know of a case or two in which it would be wise for a wife to follow the example of Nora or even of Mrs. Elvsted. But they must also know cases in which the results of such a course would be as tragi-comic as those of Gregers Werle’s attempt in The Wild Duck to do for the Ekdal household what Lona Hessel did for the Bernick household. What Ibsen insists on is that there is no golden rule; that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon life and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal. And since life consists in the fulfilment of the will, which is constantly growing, and cannot be fulfilled today under the conditions which secured its fulfilment yesterday, he claims afresh the old Protestant right of private judgment in questions of conduct as against all institutions, the so-called Protestant Churches themselves included.

Here I must leave the matter, merely reminding those who may think that I have forgotten to reduce Ibsenism to a formula for them, that its quintessence is that there is no formula.

WHAT IS THE NEW ELEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN SCHOOL?

I NOW come to the question: Why, since neither human nature nor the specific talent of the playwright has changed since the days of Charles Dickens and Dumas père, are the works of Ibsen, of Strindberg, of Tolstoy, of Gorki, of Tchekov, of Brieux, so different from those of the great fictionists of the first half of the nineteenth century? Tolstoy actually imitated Dickens. Ibsen was not Dickens’s superior as an observer, nor is Strindberg, nor Gorki, nor Tchekov, nor Brieux. Tolstoy and Ibsen together, gifted as they were, were not otherwise gifted or more gifted than Shakespear and Molière. Yet a generation which could read all Shakespear and Molière, Dickens and Dumas, from end to end without the smallest intellectual or ethical perturbation, was unable to get through a play by Ibsen or a novel by Tolstoy without having its intellectual and moral complacency upset, its religious faith shattered, and its notions of right and wrong conduct thrown into confusion and sometimes even reversed. It is as if these modem men had a spiritual force that was lacking in even the greatest of their forerunners. And yet, what evidence is there in the lives of Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Strindberg, Gorki, Tchekov, and Brieux, that they were or are better men in any sense than Shakespear, Molière, Dickens, and Dumas?

I myself have been told by people that the reading of a single book of mine or the witnessing of a single play has changed their whole lives; and among these are some who tell me that they cannot read Dickens at all, whilst all of them have read books and seen plays by authors obviously quite as gifted as I am, without finding anything more in them than pastime.

The explanation is to be found in what I believe to be a general law of the evolution of ideas. “Every jest is an earnest in the womb of time” says Peter Keegan in John Bull’s Other Island. “There’s many a true word spoken in jest” says the first villager you engage in philosophic discussion. All very serious revolutionary propositions begin as huge jokes. Otherwise they would be stamped out by the lynching of their first exponents. Even these exponents themselves have their revelations broken to them mysteriously through their sense of humor. Two friends of mine, travelling in remote parts of Spain, were asked by the shepherds what their religion was. “Our religion,” replied one of them, a very highly cultivated author and traveller, with a sardonic turn, “is that there is no God.” This reckless remark, taken seriously, might have provided nineteenth century scepticism with a martyr. As it was, the countryside rang with laughter for days afterwards as the stupendous joke was handed round. But it was just by tolerating the blasphemy as a joke that the shepherds began to build it into the fabric of their minds. Being now safely lodged there, it will in due time develop its earnestness; and at last travellers will come who will be taken quite seriously when they say that the imaginary hidalgo in the sky whom the shepherds call God does indeed not exist. And they will remain godless, and call their streets Avenue Paul Bert and so forth, until in due time another joker will arrive with sidesplitting intimations that Shakespear’s “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will” was a strictly scientific statement of fact, and that “neo-Darwinism” consists for the most part of grossly unscientific statements of superstitious nonsense. Which jest will in its due time come to its own as very solid earnest.

The same phenomenon may be noticed in our attitude towards matters of fact so obvious that no dispute can arise as to their existence. And here the power of laughter is astonishing. It is not enough to say merely that men enable themselves to endure the unbearablest nuisances and the deadliest scourges by setting up a merry convention that they are amusing. We must go further and face the fact that they actually are amused by them — that they are not laughing with the wrong side of the mouth. If you doubt it, read the popular fiction of the pre-Dickensian age, from the novels of Smollett to Tom Cringle’s Log. Poverty in rags is a joke, yellow fever is a joke, drunkenness is a joke, dysentery as a joke, kickings, floggings, falls, frights, humiliations, and painful accidents of all sorts are jokes. Henpecked husbands and termagant mothers-in-law are prime jokes. The infirmities of age and the inexperience and shyness of youth are jokes; and it is first-rate fun to insult and torment those that suffer from them.

We take some of these jokes seriously enough now. Humphrey Clinker may not have become absolutely unreadable (I have not tried him for more than forty years); but there is certainly a good deal in the book that is now simply disgusting to the class of reader that in its own day found it uproariously amusing. Much of Tom Cringle has become mere savagery: its humors are those of a donkey race. Also, the fun is forced: one sees beneath the determination of the old sea dog to put a hearty smiling English face on pain and discomfort, that he has not merely looked on at it, and that he did not really like it. The mask of laughter wears slowly off the shames and the evils; but men finally see them as they really are.

Sometimes the change occurs, not between two generations, but actually in the course of a single work by one author. Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick are recognized examples of characters introduced in pure ridicule, and presently gaining the affection and finally the respect of their authors. To them may be added Shakespear’s Falstaff. Falstaff is introduced as a subordinate stage figure with no other function than to be robbed by the Prince and Poins, who was originally meant to be the raisonneur of the piece, and the chief figure among the prince’s dissolute associates. But Poins soon fades into nothing, like several characters in Dickens’s early works; whilst Falstaff develops into an enormous joke and an exquisitely mimicked human type. Only in the end the joke withers. The question comes to Shakespear: Is this really a laughing matter? Of course there can be only one answer; and Shakespear gives it as best he can by the mouth of the prince become king, who might, one thinks, have the decency to wait until he has redeemed his own character before assuming the right to lecture his boon companion. Falstaff, rebuked and humiliated, dies miserably. His followers are hanged, except Pistol, whose exclamation “Old do I wax; and from my weary limbs honor is cudgelled” is a melancholy exordium to an old age of beggary and imposture.

But suppose Shakespear had begun where he left off! Suppose he had been born at a time when, as the result of a long propaganda of health and temperance, sack had come to be called alcohol, alcohol had come to be called poison, corpulence had come to be regarded as either a disease or a breach of good manners, and a conviction had spread throughout society that the practice of consuming “a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack” was the cause of so much misery, crime, and racial degeneration that whole States prohibited the sale of potable spirits altogether, and even moderate drinking was more and more regarded as a regrettable weakness! Suppose (to drive the change well home) the women in the great theatrical centres had completely lost that amused indulgence for the drunken man which still exists in some out-of-the-way places, and felt nothing but disgust and anger at the conduct and habits of Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch! Instead of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, we should have had something like Zola’s L’Assommoir. Indeed, we actually have Cassio, the last of Shakespear’s gentleman-drunkards, talking like a temperance reformer, a fact which suggests that Shakespear had been roundly lectured for the offensive vulgarity of Sir Toby by some woman of refinement who refused to see the smallest fun in giving a knight such a name as Belch, with characteristics to correspond to it. Suppose, again, that the first performance of The Taming of the Shrew had led to a modem Feminist demonstration in the theatre, and forced upon Shakespear’s consideration a whole century of agitatresses, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Pankhurst, is it not likely that the jest of Katharine and Petruchio would have become the earnest of Nora and Torvald Helmer?

In this light the difference between Dickens and Strindberg becomes intelligible. Strindberg simply refuses to regard the cases of Mrs. Raddle and Mrs. Macstinger and Mrs. Jo Gargery as laughing matters. He insists on taking them seriously as cases of a tyranny which effects more degradation and causes more misery than all the political and sectarian oppressions known to history. Yet it cannot be said that Strindberg, even at his fiercest, is harder on women than Dickens. No doubt his case against them is far more complete, because he does not shirk the specifically sexual factors in it. But this really softens it. If Dickens had allowed us, were it but for an instant, to see Jo Gargery and Mrs. Jo as husband and wife, he would perhaps have been accused by fools of immodesty; but we should have at least some more human impression than the one left by an unredeemed shrew married to a grown-up terrified child. It was George Gissing, a modern realist, who first pointed out the power and truth to nature of Dickens’s women, and the fact that, funny as they are, they are mostly detestable. Even the amiable ones are silly and sometimes disastrous. When the few good ones are agreeable they are not specifically feminine: they are the Dickensian good man in petticoats; yet they lack that strength which they would have had if Dickens had seen clearly that there is no such species in creation as “Woman, lovely woman,” the woman being simply the female of the human species, and that to have one conception of humanity for the woman and another for the man, or one law for the woman and another for the man, or one artistic convention for woman and another for man, or, for the matter of that, a skirt for the woman and a pair of breeches for the man, is as unnatural, and in the long run as unworkable, as one law for the mare and another for the horse. Roughly it may be said that all Dickens’s studies from life of the differentiated creatures our artificial sex institutions have made of women are, for all their truth, either vile or ridiculous or both. Betsy Trotwood is a dear because she is an old bachelor in petticoats: a manly woman, like all good women: good men being equally all womanly men. Miss Havisham, an insanely womanly woman, is a horror, a monster, though a Chinese monster: that is, not a natural one, but one produced by deliberate perversion of her humanity. In comparison, Strindberg’s women are positively amiable and attractive. The general impression that Strindberg’s women are the revenge of a furious woman-hater for his domestic failures, whilst Dickens is a genial idealist (he had little better luck domestically, by the way), is produced solely by Dickens either making fun of the affair or believing that women are born so and must be admitted to the fellowship of the Holy Ghost on a feminine instead of a human basis; whilst Strindberg takes womanliness with deadly seriousness as an evil not to be submitted to for a moment without vehement protest and demand for quite practicable reform. The nurse in his play who wheedles her old nursling and then slips a strait waistcoat on him revolts us; but she is really ten times more lovable and sympathetic than Sairey Gamp, an abominable creature whose very soul is putrid, and who is yet true to life. It is very noteworthy that none of the modem writers who take life as seriously as Ibsen have ever been able to bring themselves to depict depraved people so pitilessly as Dickens and Thackeray and even the genial Dumas père. Ibsen was grim enough in all conscience: no man has said more terrible things both privately and publicly; and yet there is not one of Ibsen’s characters who is not, in the old phrase, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that mystery. The Dickens-Thackeray spirit is, in comparison, that of a Punch and Judy showman, who is never restrained from whacking his little figures unmercifully by the sense that they, too, are images of God, and, “but for the grace of God,” very like himself. Dickens does deepen very markedly towards this as he grows older, though it is impossible to pretend that Airs. Wilfer is treated with less levity than Mrs. Nickleby; but to Ibsen, from beginning to end, every human being is a sacrifice, whilst to Dickens he is a farce. And there you have the whole difference. No character drawn by Dickens is more ridiculous than Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, or more eccentric than old Ekdal, whose toy game-preserve in the garret is more fantastic than the house of Miss Havisham; and yet these Ekdals wring the heart whilst Micawber and Chivery (who sits between the lines of clothes hung out to dry because “it reminds him of groves” as Hjalmar’s garret reminds old Ekdal of bear forests) only shake the sides.

It may be that if Dickens could read these lines he would say that the defect was not in him but in his readers; and that if we will return to his books now that Ibsen has opened our eyes we will have to admit that he also saw more in the soul of Micawber than mere laughing gas. And indeed one cannot forget the touches of kindliness and gallantry which ennoble his mirth. Still, between the man who occasionally remembered and the man who never forgot, between Dick Swiveller and Ulrik Brendel, there is a mighty difference. The most that can be said to minimize it is that some of the difference is certainly due to the difference in the attitude of the reader. When an author’s works produce violent controversy, and are new, people are apt to read them with that sort of seriousness which is very appropriately called deadly: that is, with a sort of solemn paralysis of every sense except a quite abstract and baseless momentousness which has no more to do with the contents of the author’s works than the horrors of a man in delirium tremens have to do with real rats and snakes. The Bible is a sealed literature to most of us because we cannot read it naturally and unsophisticatedly: we are like the old lady who was edified by the word Mesopotamia, or Samuel Butler’s Chowbok, who was converted to Christianity by the effect on his imagination of the prayer for Queen Adelaide. Many years elapsed before those who were impressed with Beethoven’s music ventured to enjoy it sufficiently to discover what a large part of it is a riot of whimsical fun. As to Ibsen, I remember a performance of The Wild Duck, at which the late Clement Scott pointed out triumphantly that the play was so absurd that even the champions of Ibsen could not help laughing at it. It had not occurred to him that Ibsen could laugh like other men. Not until an author has become so familiar that we are quite at our ease with him, and are up to his tricks of manner, do we cease to imagine that he is, relatively to older writers, terribly serious.

Still, the utmost allowance we can make for this difference does not persuade us that Dickens took the improvidence and futility of Micawber as Ibsen took the improvidence and futility of Hjalmar Ekdal. The difference is plain in the works of Dickens himself; for the Dickens of the second half of the nineteenth century (the Ibsen half) is a different man from the Dickens of the first half. From Hard Times and Little Dorrit to Our Mutual Friend every one of Dickens’s books lays a heavy burden on our conscience without flattering us with any hopes of a happy ending. But from The Pickwick Papers to Bleak House you can read and laugh and cry and go happy to bed after forgetting yourself in a jolly book. I have pointed out elsewhere how Charles Lever, after producing a series of books in which the old manner of rollicking through life as if all its follies and failures were splendid jokes, and all its conventional enjoyments and attachments delightful and sincere, suddenly supplied the highly appreciative Dickens (as editor of All the Year Round) with a quite new sort of novel, called A Day’s Ride: A Life’s Romance, which affected both Dickens and the public very unpleasantly by the bitter but tonic flavor we now know as Ibsenism; for the hero began as that uproarious old joke, the boaster who, being a coward, is led into all sorts of dangerous situations, like Bob Acres and Mr. Winkle, and then unexpectedly made them laugh very much on the wrong side of their mouths, exactly as if he were a hero by Ibsen, Strindberg, Turgenieff, Tolstoy, Gorki, Tchekov, or Brieux. And here there was no question of the author being taken too gloomily. His readers, full of Charles O’Malley and Mickey Free, were approaching the work with the most unsuspicious confidence in its entire jollity. The shock to the security of their senseless laughter caught them utterly unprepared; and they resented it accordingly.

Now that a reaction against realism has set in, and the old jolly ways are coming into fashion again, it is perhaps not so easy as it once was to conceive the extraordinary fascination of this mirthless comedy, this tragedy that stripped the soul naked instead of bedizening it in heroic trappings. But if you have not experienced this fascination yourself, and cannot conceive it, you may take my word for it that it exists, and operates with such power that it puts Shakespear himself out of countenance. And even for those who are in full reaction against it, it can hardly be possible to go back from the death of Hedwig Ekdal to the death of Little Nell otherwise than as a grown man goes down on all fours and pretends to be a bear for the amusement of his children. Nor need we regret this: there are noble compensations for our increase of wisdom and sorrow. After Hedwig you may not be able to cry over Little Nell, but at least you can read Little Dorrit without calling it twaddle, as some of its first critics did. The jests do not become poorer as they mature into earnest. It was not through joyless poverty of soul that Shelley never laughed, but through an enormous apprehension and realization of the gravity of things that seemed mere fun to other men. If there is no Swiveller and no Trabbs’s boy in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and if Mr. Badman is drawn as Ibsen would have drawn him and not as Sheridan would have seen him, it does not follow that there is less strength (and joy is a quality of strength) in Bunyan than in Sheridan and Dickens. After all, the salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humoredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him. “Rightly to be great,” said Shakespear when he had come to the end of mere buffoonery, “is greatly to find quarrel in a straw.” The English cry of “Amuse us: take things easily: dress up the world prettily for us” seems mere cowardice to the strong souls that dare look facts in the face; and just so far as people cast off levity and idolatry they find themselves able to bear the company of Bunyan and Shelley, of Ibsen and Strindberg and the great Russian realists, and unable to tolerate the sort of laughter that African tribes cannot restrain when a man is flogged or an animal trapped and wounded. They are gaining strength and wisdom: gaining, in short, that sort of life which we call the life everlasting, a sense of which is worth, for pure well-being alone, all the brutish jollities of Tom Cringle and Humphrey Clinker, and even of Falstaff, Pecksniff, and Micawber.

THE TECHNICAL NOVELTY IN IBSEN’S PLAYS

It IS a striking and melancholy example of the preoccupation of critics with phrases and formulas to which they have given life by taking them into the tissue of their own living minds, and which therefore seem and feel vital and important to them whilst they are to everybody else the deadest and dreariest rubbish (this is the great secret of academic dryasdust), that to this day they remain blind to a new technical factor in the art of popular stage-play making which every considerable playwright has been thrusting under their noses night after night for a whole generation. This technical factor in the play is the discussion. Formerly you had in what was called a well made play an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, and unravelling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion; and the discussion is the test of the playwright. The critics protest in vain. They declare that discussions are not dramatic, and that art should not be didactic. Neither the playwrights nor the public take the smallest notice of them. The discussion conquered Europe in Ibsen’s Doll’s House; and now the serious playwright recognizes in the discussion not only the main test of his highest powers, but also the real centre of his play’s interest. Sometimes he even takes every possible step to assure the public beforehand that his play will be fitted with that newest improvement.

This was inevitable if the drama was ever again to be raised above the childish demand for fables without morals. Children have a settled arbitrary morality: therefore to them moralizing is nothing but an intolerable platitudinizing. The morality of the grown-up is also very largely a settled morality, either purely conventional and of no ethical significance, like the rule of the road or the rule that when you ask for a yard of ribbon the shopkeeper shall give you thirty-six inches and not interpret the word yard as he pleases, or else too obvious in its ethics to leave any room for discussion: for instance, that if the boots keeps you waiting too long for your shaving water you must not plunge your razor into his throat in your irritation, no matter how great an effort of self-control your forbearance may cost you.

Now when a play is only a story of how a villain tries to separate an honest young pair of betrothed lovers; to gain the hand of the woman by calumny; and to ruin the man by forgery, murder, false witness, and other commonplaces of the Newgate Calendar, the introduction of a discussion would clearly be ridiculous. There is nothing for sane people to discuss; and any attempt to Chadbandize on the wickedness of such crimes is at once resented as, in Milton’s phrase, “moral babble.”

But this sort of drama is soon exhausted by people who go often to the theatre. In twenty visits one can see every possible change rung on all the available plots and incidents out of which plays of this kind can be manufactured. The illusion of reality is soon lost: in fact it may be doubted whether any adult ever entertains it: it is only to very young children that the fairy queen is anything but an actress. But at the age when we cease to mistake the figures on the stage for dramatis personae, and know that they are actors and actresses, the charm of the performer begins to assert itself; and the child who would have been cruelly hurt by being told that the Fairy Queen was only Miss Smith dressed up to look like one, becomes the man who goes to the theatre expressly to see Miss Smith, and is fascinated by her skill or beauty to the point of delighting in plays which would be unendurable to him without her. Thus we get plays “written round” popular performers, and popular performers who give value to otherwise useless plays by investing them with their own attractiveness. But all these enterprises are, commercially speaking, desperately precarious. To begin with, the supply of performers whose attraction is so far independent of the play that their inclusion in the cast sometimes makes the difference between success and failure is too small to enable all our theatres, or even many of them, to depend on their actors rather than on their plays. And to finish with, no actor can make bricks entirely without straw. From Grimaldi to Sothern, Jefferson, and Henry Irving (not to mention living actors) we have had players succeeding once in a lifetime in grafting on to a play which would have perished without them some figure imagined wholly by themselves; but none of them has been able to repeat the feat, nor to save many of the plays in which he has appeared from failure. In the long run nothing can retain the interest of the playgoer after the theatre has lost its illusion for his childhood, and its glamor for his adolescence, but a constant supply of interesting plays; and this is specially true in London, where the expense and trouble of theatre-going have been raised to a point at which it is surprising that sensible people of middle age go to the theatre at all. As a matter of fact, they mostly stay at home.

Now an interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed. People have a thrifty sense of taking away something from such plays: they not only have had something for their money, but they retain that something as a permanent possession. Consequently none of the commonplaces of the box office hold good of such plays. In vain does the experienced acting manager declare that people want to be amused and not preached at in the theatre; that they will not stand long speeches; that a play must not contain more than 18,000 words; that it must not begin before nine nor last beyond eleven; that there must be no politics and no religion in it; that breach of these golden rules will drive people to the variety theatres; that there must be a woman of bad character, played by a very attractive actress, in the piece; and so on and so forth. All these counsels are valid for plays in which there is nothing to discuss. They may be disregarded by the playwright who is a moralist and a debater as well as a dramatist. From him, within the inevitable limits set by the clock and by the physical endurance of the human frame, people will stand anything as soon as they are matured enough and cultivated enough to be susceptible to the appeal of his particular form of art. The difficulty at present is that mature and cultivated people do not go to the theatre, just as they do not read penny novelets; and when an attempt is made to cater for them they do not respond to it in time, partly because they have not the habit of playgoing, and partly because it takes too long for them to find out that the new theatre is not like all the other theatres. But when they do at last find their way there, the attraction is not the firing of blank cartridges at one another by actors, nor the pretence of falling down dead that ends the stage combat, nor the simulation of erotic thrills by a pair of stage lovers, nor any of the other tomfooleries called action, but the exhibition and discussion of the character and conduct of stage figures who are made to appear real by the art of the playwright and the performers.

This, then, is the extension of the old dramatic form effected by Ibsen. Up to a certain point in the last act, A Doll’s House is a play that might be turned into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of a few lines, and the substitution of a sentimental happy ending for the famous last scene: indeed the very first thing the theatrical wiseacres did with it was to effect exactly this transformation, with the result that the play thus pithed had no success and attracted no notice worth mentioning. But at just that point in the last act, the heroine very unexpectedly (by the wiseacres) stops her emotional acting and says: “We must sit down and discuss all this that has been happening between us.” And it was by this new technical feature: this addition of a new movement, as musicians would say, to the dramatic form, that A Doll’s House conquered Europe and founded a new school of dramatic art.

Since that time the discussion has expanded far beyond the limits of the last ten minutes of an otherwise “well made” play. The disadvantage of putting the discussion at the end was not only that it came when the audience was fatigued, but that it was necessary to see the play over again, so as to follow the earlier acts in the light of the final discussion, before it became fully intelligible. The practical utility of this book is due to the fact that unless the spectator at an Ibsen play has read the pages referring to it beforehand, it is hardly possible for him to get its bearings at a first hearing if he approaches it, as most spectators still do, with conventional idealist prepossessions. Accordingly, we now have plays, including some of my own, which begin with discussion and end with action, and others in which the discussion interpenetrates the action from beginning to end. When Ibsen invaded England discussion had vanished from the stage; and women could not write plays. Within twenty years women were writing better plays than men; and these plays were passionate arguments from beginning to end. The action of such plays consists of a case to be argued. If the case is uninteresting or stale or badly conducted or obviously trumped up, the play is a bad one. If it is important and novel and convincing, or at least disturbing, the play is a good one. But anyhow the play in which there is no argument and no case no longer counts as serious drama. It may still please the child in us as Punch and Judy does; but nobody nowadays pretends to regard the well made play as anything more than a commercial product which is not in question when modem schools of serious drama are under discussion. Indeed within ten years of the production of A Doll’s House in London, audiences had become so derisive of the more obvious and hackneyed features of the methods of Sardou that it became dangerous to resort to them; and playwrights who persisted in “constructing” plays in the old French manner lost ground not for lack of ideas, but because their technique was unbearably out of fashion.

In the new plays, the drama arises through a conflict of unsettled ideals rather than through vulgar attachments, rapacities, generosities, resentments, ambitions, misunderstandings, oddities and so forth as to which no moral question is raised. The conflict is not between clear right and wrong: the villain is as conscientious as the hero, if not more so: in fact, the question which makes the play interesting (when it is interesting) is which is the villain and which the hero. Or, to put it another way, there are no villains and no heroes. This strikes the critics mainly as a departure from dramatic art; but it is really the inevitable return to nature which ends all the merely technical fashions. Now the natural is mainly the everyday; and its climaxes must be, if not everyday, at least everylife, if they are to have any importance for the spectator. Crimes, fights, big legacies, fires, shipwrecks, battles, and thunderbolts are mistakes in a play, even when they can be effectively simulated. No doubt they may acquire dramatic interest by putting a character through the test of an emergency; but the test is likely to be too obviously theatrical, because, as the playwright cannot in the nature of things have much experience of such catastrophes, he is forced to substitute a set of conventions or conjectures for the feelings they really produce.

In short, pure accidents are not dramatic: they are only anecdotic. They may be sensational, impressive, provocative, ruinous, curious, or a dozen other things; but they have no specifically dramatic interest. There is no drama in being knocked down or run over. The catastrophe in Hamlet would not be in the least dramatic had Polonius fallen downstairs and broken his neck, Claudius succumbed to delirium tremens, Hamlet forgotten to breathe in the intensity of his philosophic speculation, Ophelia died of Danish measles, Laertes been shot by the palace sentry, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstem drowned in the North Sea. Even as it is, the Queen, who poisons herself by accident, has an air of being polished off to get her out of the way: her death is the one dramatic failure of the piece. Bushels of good paper have been inked in vain by writers who imagined they could produce a tragedy by killing everyone in the last act accidentally. As a matter of fact no accident, however sanguinary, can produce a moment of real drama, though a difference of opinion between husband and wife as to living in town or country might be the beginning of an appalling tragedy or a capital comedy.

It may be said that everything is an accident: that Othello’s character is an accident, Iago’s character another accident, and the fact that they happened to come together in the Venetian service an even more accidental accident. Also that Torvald Helmer might just as likely have married Mrs. Nickleby as Nora. Granting this trifling for what it is worth, the fact remains that marriage is no more an accident than birth or death: that is, it is expected to happen to everybody. And if every man has a good deal of Torvald Helmer in him, and every woman a good deal of Nora, neither their characters nor their meeting and marrying are accidents. Othello, though entertaining, pitiful, and resonant with the thrills a master of language can produce by mere artistic sonority is certainly much more accidental than A Doll’s House; but it is correspondingly less important and interesting to us. It has been kept alive, not by its manufactured misunderstandings and stolen handkerchiefs and the like, nor even by its orchestral verse, but by its exhibition and discussion of human nature, marriage, and jealousy; and it would be a prodigiously better play if it were a serious discussion of the highly interesting problem of how a simple Moorish soldier would get on with a “supersubtle” Venetian lady of fashion if he married her. As it is, the play turns on a mistake; and though a mistake can produce a murder, which is the vulgar substitute for a tragedy, it cannot produce a real tragedy in the modern sense. Reflective people are not more interested in the Chamber of Horrors than in their own homes, nor in murderers, victims, and villains than in themselves; and the moment a man has acquired sufficient reflective power to cease gaping at waxworks, he is on his way to losing interest in Othello, Desdemona, and Iago exactly to the extent to which they become interesting to the police. Cassio’s weakness for drink comes much nearer home to most of us than Othello’s strangling and throat cutting, or Iago’s theatrical confidence trick. The proof is that Shakespear’s professional colleagues, who exploited all his sensational devices, and piled up torture on murder and incest on adultery until they had far out-Heroded Herod, are now unmemorable and unplayable. Shakespear survives because he coolly treated the sensational horrors of his borrowed plots as inorganic theatrical accessories, using them simply as pretexts for dramatizing human character as it exists in the normal world. In enjoying and discussing his plays we unconsciously discount the combats and murders: commentators are never so astray (and consequently so ingenious) as when they take Hamlet seriously as a madman, Macbeth as a homicidal Highlander, and impish humorists like Richard and Iago as lurid villains of the Renascence. The plays in which these figures appear could be changed into comedies without altering a hair of their beards. Shakespear, had anyone been intelligent enough to tax him with this, would perhaps have said that most crimes are accidents that happen to people exactly like ourselves, and that Macbeth, under propitious circumstances, would have made an exemplary rector of Stratford, a real criminal being a defective monster, a human accident, useful on the stage only for minor parts such as Don Johns, second murderers, and the like. Anyhow, the fact remains that Shakespear survives by what he has in common with Ibsen, and not by what he has in common with Webster and the rest. Hamlet’s surprise at finding that he “lacks gall” to behave in the idealistically conventional manner, and that no extremity of rhetoric about the duty of revenging “a dear father slain” and exterminating the “bloody bawdy villain” who murdered him seems to make any difference in their domestic relations in the palace in Elsinore, still keeps us talking about him and going to the theatre to listen to him, whilst the older Hamlets, who never had any Ibsenist hesitations, and shammed madness, and entangled the courtiers in the arras and burnt them, and stuck hard to the theatrical school of the fat boy in Pickwick (“I wants to make your flesh creep”), are as dead as John Shakespear’s mutton.

We have progressed so rapidly on this point under the impulse given to the drama by Ibsen that it seems strange now to contrast him favorably with Shakespear on the ground that he avoided the old catastrophes which left the stage strewn with the dead at the end of an Elizabethan tragedy. For perhaps the most plausible reproach levelled at Ibsen by modern critics of his own school is just that survival of the old school in him which makes the death rate so high in his last acts. Do Oswald Alving, Hedvig Ekdal, Rosmer and Rebecca, Hedda Gabler, Solness, Eyolf, Borkman, Rubeck and Irene die dramatically natural deaths, or are they slaughtered in the classic and Shakespearean manner, partly because the audience expects blood for its money, partly because it is difficult to make people attend seriously to anything except by startling them with some violent calamity? It is so easy to make out a case for either view that I shall not argue the point. The post-Ibsen playwrights apparently think that Ibsen’s homicides and suicides were forced. In Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard, for example, where the sentimental ideals of our amiable, cultured, Schumann playing propertied class are reduced to dust and ashes by a hand not less deadly than Ibsen’s because it is so much more caressing, nothing more violent happens than that the family cannot afford to keep up its old house. In Granville-Barker’s plays, the campaign against our society is carried on with all Ibsen’s implacability; but the one suicide (in Waste) is unhistorical; for neither Parnell nor Dilke, who were the actual cases in point of the waste which was the subject of the play, killed himself. I myself have been reproached because the characters in my plays “talk but do nothing,” meaning that they do not commit felonies. As a matter of fact we have come to see that it is no true dénouement to cut the Gordian knot as Alexander did with a stroke of the sword. If people’s souls are tied up by law and public opinion it is much more tragic to leave them to wither in these bonds than to end their misery and relieve the salutary compunction of the audience by outbreaks of violence. Judge Brack was, on the whole, right when he said that people dont do such things. If they did, the idealists would be brought to their senses very quickly indeed.

But in Ibsen’s plays the catastrophe, even when it seems forced, and when the ending of the play would be more tragic without it, is never an accident; and the play never exists for its sake. His nearest to an accident is the death of little Eyolf, who falls off a pier and is drowned. But this instance only reminds us that there is one good dramatic use for an accident: it can awaken people. When England wept over the deaths of little Nell and Paul Dombey, the strong soul of Ruskin was moved to scorn: to novelists who were at a loss to make their books sell he offered the formula: When at a loss, kill a child. But Ibsen did not kill little Eyolf to manufacture pathos. The surest way to achieve a thoroughly bad performance of Little Eyolf is to conceive it as a sentimental tale of a drowned darling. Its drama lies in the awakening of Allmers and his wife to the despicable quality and detestable rancors of the life they have been idealizing as blissful and poetic. They are so sunk in their dream that the awakening can be effected only by a violent shock. And that is just the one dramatically useful thing an accident can do. It can shock. Hence the accident that befalls Eyolf.

As to the deaths in Ibsen’s last acts, they are a sweeping up of the remains of dramatically finished people. Solness’s fall from the tower is as obviously symbolic as Phaeton’s fall from the chariot of the sun. Ibsen’s dead bodies are those of the exhausted or destroyed: he does not kill Hilda, for instance, as Shakespear killed Juliet. He is ruthless enough with Hedvig and Eyolf because he wants to use their deaths to expose their parents; but if he had written Hamlet nobody would have been killed in the last act except perhaps Horatio, whose correct nullity might have provoked Fortinbras to let some of the moral sawdust out of him with his sword.

For Shakespearean deaths in Ibsen you must go back to Lady Inger and the plays of his nonage, with which this book is not concerned.

The drama was born of old from the union of two desires: the desire to have a dance and the desire to hear a story. The dance became a rant: the story became a situation. When Ibsen began to make plays, the art of the dramatist had shrunk into the art of contriving a situation. And it was held that the stranger the situation, the better the play. Ibsen saw that, on the contrary, the more familiar the situation, the more interesting the play. Shakespear had put ourselves on the stage but not our situations. Our uncles seldom murder our fathers, and cannot legally marry our mothers; we do not meet witches; our kings are not as a rule stabbed and succeeded by their stabbers; and when we raise money by bills we do not promise to pay pounds of our flesh. Ibsen supplies the want left by Shakespear. He gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own situations. The things that happen to his stage figures are things that happen to us. One consequence is that his plays are much more important to us than Shakespear’s. Another is that they are capable both of hurting us cruelly and of filling us with excited hopes of escape from idealistic tyrannies, and with visions of intenser life in the future.

Changes in technique follow inevitably from these changes in the subject matter of the play. When a dramatic poet can give you hopes and visions, such old maxims as that stage-craft is the art of preparation become boyish, and may be left to those unfortunate playwrights who, being unable to make anything really interesting happen on the stage, have to acquire the art of continually persuading the audience that it is going to happen presently. When he can stab people to the heart by shewing them the meanness or cruelty of something they did yesterday and intend to do tomorrow, all the old tricks to catch and hold their attention become the silliest of superfluities. The play called The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet makes the players act before his uncle, is artlessly constructed; but it produces a greater effect on Claudius than the Œdipus of Sophocles, because it is about himself. The writer who practises the art of Ibsen therefore discards all the old tricks of preparation, catastrophe, dénouement, and so forth without thinking about it, just as a modern rifleman never dreams of providing himself with powder horns, percussion caps, and wads: indeed he does not know the use of them. Ibsen substituted a terrible art of sharpshooting at the audience, trapping them, fencing with them, aiming always at the sorest spot in their consciences. Never mislead an audience, was an old rule. But the new school will trick the spectator into forming a meanly false judgment, and then convict him of it in the next act, often to his grievous mortification. When you despise something you ought to take off your hat to, or admire and imitate something you ought to loathe, you cannot resist the dramatist who knows how to touch these morbid spots in you and make you see that they are morbid. The dramatist knows that as long as he is teaching and saving his audience, he is as sure of their strained attention as a dentist is, or the Angel of the Annunciation. And though he may use all the magic of art to make you forget the pain he causes you or to enhance the joy of the hope and courage he awakens, he is never occupied in the old work of manufacturing interest and expectation with materials that have neither novelty, significance, nor relevance to the experience or prospects of the spectators.

Hence a cry has arisen that the post-Ibsen play is not a play, and that its technique, not being the technique described by Aristotle, is not a technique at all. I will not enlarge on this: the fun poked at my friend Mr. A. B. Walkley in the prologue of Fanny’s First Play need not be repeated here. But I may remind him that the new technique is new only on the modem stage. It has been used by preachers and orators ever since speech was invented. It is the technique of playing upon the human conscience; and it has been practised by the playwright whenever the playwright has been capable of it. Rhetoric, irony, argument, paradox, epigram, parable, the rearrangement of haphazard facts into orderly and intelligent situations: these are both the oldest and the newest arts of the drama; and your plot construction and art of preparation are only the tricks of theatrical talent and the shifts of moral sterility, not the weapons of dramatic genius. In the theatre of Ibsen we are not flattered spectators killing an idle hour with an ingenious and amusing entertainment: we are “guilty creatures sitting at a play”; and the technique of pastime is no more applicable than at a murder trial.

The technical novelties of the Ibsen and post-Ibsen plays are, then: first, the introduction of the discussion and its development until it so overspreads and interpenetrates the action that it finally assimilates it, making play and discussion practically identical; and, second, as a consequence of making the spectators themselves the persons of the drama, and the incidents of their own lives its incidents, the disuse of the old stage tricks by which audiences had to be induced to take an interest in unreal people and improbable circumstances, and the substitution of a forensic technique of recrimination, disillusion, and penetration through ideals to the truth, with a free use of all the rhetorical and lyrical arts of the orator, the preacher, the pleader, and the rhapsodist.

NEEDED: AN IBSEN THEATRE

It MUST now be plain to my readers that the doctrine taught by Ibsen can never be driven home from the stage whilst his plays are presented to us in haphazard order at the commercial theatres. Indeed our commercial theatres are so well aware of this that they have from the first regarded Ibsen as hopelessly uncommercial: he might as well never have lived as far as they are concerned. Even the new advanced theatres which now deal freely with what I have called post-Ibsenist plays hardly meddle with him. Had it not been for the great national service disinterestedly rendered by Mr. William Archer in giving us a complete translation of Ibsen’s plays (a virtually unremunerated public service which I hope the State will recognize fitly), Ibsen would be less known in England than Swedenborg. By losing his vital contribution to modern thought we are losing ground relatively to the countries which, like Germany, have made his works familiar to their play-goers. But even in Germany Ibsen’s meaning is seen only by glimpses. What we need is a theatre devoted primarily to Ibsen as the Bayreuth Festspielhaus is devoted to Wagner. I have shewn how the plays, as they succeed one another, are parts of a continuous discussion; how the difficulty left by one is dealt with in the next; how Mrs. Alving is a reply to your hasty remark that Nora Helmer ought to be ashamed of herself for leaving her husband; how Gregers Werle warns you not to be as great a fool in your admiration of Lona Hessel as of Patient Grisel. The plays should, like Wagner’s Ring, be performed in cycles; so that Ibsen may hunt you down from position to position until you are finally cornered.

The larger truth of the matter is that modem European literature and music now form a Bible far surpassing in importance to us the ancient Hebrew Bible that has served us so long. The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with, never to occur again: in other words, the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not since been heard from, is as silly as it is blasphemous. He who does not believe that revelation is continuous does not believe in revelation at all, however familiar his parrot’s tongue and pewsleepy ear may be with the word. There comes a time when the formula “Also sprach Zarathustra” succeeds to the formula “Thus saith the Lord,” and when the parable of the doll’s house is more to our purpose than the parable of the prodigal son. When Bunyan published The Pilgrim’s Progress, his first difficulty was with the literal people who said, “There is no such individual in the directory as Christian, and no such place in the gazetteer as the City of Destruction: therefore you are a liar.” Bunyan replied by citing the parables: asking, in effect, whether the story of the wise and foolish virgins is also a lie. A couple of centuries or so later, when I myself wrote a play for the Salvation Army to shew them that the dramatic method might be used for their gospel as effectively as the lyric or orchestral method, I was told that unless I could guarantee that the persons in my play actually existed, and the incidents had actually occurred, I, like Bunyan, would be regarded by the elderly soldiers in the army as no better than Ananias. As it was useless for me to try to make these simple souls understand that in real life truth is revealed by parables and falsehood supported by facts, I had to leave the army to its oratorical metaphors and to its popular songs about heartbroken women waiting for the footsteps of their drunken husbands, and hearing instead the joyous step of the converted man whose newly found salvation will dry all their tears. I had not the heart to suggest that these happy pairs were as little authentic as The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; for I spied behind the army’s confusion of truth with mere fact the old doubt whether anything good can come out of the theatre, a doubt as inveterate and neither more nor less justifiable than the doubt of our Secularists whether anything good can come out of the gospels.

But I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right to canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible. The sooner we recognize that rank and give up the idea of trying to make a fashionable entertainment of his plays the better. It ends in our not performing them at all, and remaining in barbarous and dangerous ignorance of the case against idealism. We want a frankly doctrinal theatre. There is no more reason for making a doctrinal theatre inartistic than for putting a cathedral organ out of tune: indeed all experience shews that doctrine alone nerves us to the effort called for by the greatest art. I therefore suggest that even the sciolists and voluptuaries who care for nothing in art but its luxuries and its executive feats are as strongly interested in the establishment of such a theatre as those for whom the What is always more important than the How, if only because the How cannot become really magical until such magic is indispensable to the revelation of an all-important What.

I do not suggest that the Ibsen theatre should confine itself to Ibsen any more than the Established Church confines itself to Jeremiah. The post-Ibsenists could also be expounded there; and Strindberg should have his place, were it only as Devil’s Advocate. But performances should be in the order of academic courses, designed so as to take audiences over the whole ground as Ibsen and his successors took them; so that the exposition may be consecutive. Otherwise the doctrine will not be interesting, and the audiences will not come regularly. The efforts now being made to regenerate the drama are often wasted through lack of doctrinal conviction and consequent want of system, the net result being an irresolute halting between the doctrinal and the merely entertaining.

For this sort of enterprise an endowment is necessary, because commercial capital is not content in a theatre with reasonable interest: it demands great gains even at the cost of great hazards. Besides, nobody will endow mere pleasure, whereas doctrine can always command endowment. It is the foolish disclaiming of doctrine that keeps dramatic art unendowed. When we ask for an endowed theatre we always take the greatest pains to assure everybody that we do not mean anything unpleasantly serious, and that our endowed theatre will be as bright and cheery (meaning as low and common) as the commercial theatres. As a result of which we get no endowment. When we have the sense to profit by this lesson and promise that our endowed theatre will be an important place, and it will make people of low tastes and tribal or commercial ideas horribly uncomfortable by its efforts bring conviction of sin to them, we shall get endowment as easily as the religious people who are not foolishly ashamed to ask for what they want.

THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OF ANARCHISM

CONTENTS

Anarchists and Socialists.

Individualist Anarchism.

Communist Anarchism.

Democracy.

The Anarchist Spirit.

Anarchists and Socialists.

Some years ago, as the practical policy of the Socialist party in England began to shape itself more and more definitely into the program of Social-Democracy, it became apparent that we could not progress without the gravest violations of principles of all sorts. In particular, the democratic side of the program was found to be incompatible with the sacred principle of the Autonomy of the Individual. It also involved a recognition of the State, an institution altogether repugnant to the principle of Freedom. Worse than that, it involved compromise at every step; and principles, as Mr. John Morley once eloquently showed, must not be compromised. The result was that many of us fell to quarrelling; refused to associate with one another; denounced each other as trimmers or Impossibilists, according to our side in the controversy; and finally succeeded in creating a considerable stock of ill-feeling. My own side in the controversy was the unprincipled one, as Socialism to me has always meant, not a principle, but certain definite economic measures which I wish to see taken. Indeed, I have often been reproached for limiting the term Socialism too much to the economic side of the great movement towards equality. That movement, however, appears to me to be as much an Individualist as a Socialist one; and though there are Socialists, like Sir William Harcourt, to whom Socialism means the sum total of humanitarian aspiration, in which the transfer of some millions of acres of property from private to public ownership must seem but an inessential and even undesirable detail, this sublimer shade of Socialism suffers from such a lack of concentration upon definite measures, that, but for the honor and glory of the thing, its professors might as well call themselves Conservatives. Now what with Socialists of this sort, and persons who found that the practical remedy for white slavery was incompatible with the principle of Liberty, and the practical remedy for despotism incompatible with the principle of Democracy, and the practical conduct of politics incompatible with the principle of Personal Integrity (in the sense of having your own way in everything), the practical men were at last driven into frank Opportunism. When, for instance, they found national and local organization of the working classes opposed by Socialists on the ground that Socialism is universal and international in principle; when they found their Radical and Trade Unionist allies ostracized by Socialists for being outside the pale of the Socialist faith one and indivisible; when they saw agricultural laborers alienated by undiscriminating denunciations of allotments as “individualistic”; then they felt the full force of the saying that Socialism would spread fast enough if it were not for the Socialists. It was bad enough to have to contend with the conservative forces of the modern unsocialist State without also having to fight the seven deadly virtues in possession of the Socialists themselves. The conflict between ideal Socialism and practical Social-Democracy destroyed the Chartist organization half a century ago, as it destroyed the Socialist League only the other day. But it has never gone so far as the conflict between Social-Democracy and Anarchism. For the Anarchists will recommend abstention from voting and refusal to pay taxes in cases where the Social-Democrats are strenuously urging the workers to organize their votes so as to return candidates pledged to contend for extensions of the franchise and for taxation of unearned incomes, the object of such taxation being the raising of State capital for all sorts of collective purposes, from the opening of public libraries to the municipalization and nationalization of our industries. In fact, the denunciation of Social-Democratic methods by Anarchists is just as much a matter of course as the denunciation of Social-Democratic aims by Conservatives. It is possible that some of the strangers present may be surprised to hear this, since no distinction is made in the newspapers which support the existing social order between Social-Democrats and Anarchists, both being alike hostile to that order. In the columns of such papers all revolutionists are Socialists; all Socialists are Anarchists; and all Anarchists are incendiaries, assassins and thieves. One result of this is that the imaginative French or Italian criminal who reads the papers, sometimes declares, when taken red-handed in the commission of murder or burglary, that he is an Anarchist acting on principle. And in all countries the more violent and reckless temperaments among the discontented are attracted by the name Anarchist merely because it suggests desperate, thorough, uncompromising, implacable war on existing injustices. It is therefore necessary to warn you that there are some persons abusively called Anarchists by their political opponents, and others ignorantly so described by themselves, who are nevertheless not Anarchists at all within the meaning of this paper. On the other hand, many persons who are never called Anarchists either by themselves or others, take Anarchist ground in their opposition to Social-Democracy just as clearly as the writers with whom I shall more particularly deal. The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the “Philosophic Radicals,” the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body. Obviously there are natural limits to the application of both views; and Anarchists and Social-Democrats are alike subject to the fool’s argument that since neither collective provision for the individual nor individual freedom from collective control can be made complete, neither party is thoroughly consistent. No dialectic of that kind will, I hope, be found in the following criticism of Anarchism. It is confined to the practical measures proposed by Anarchists, and raises no discussion as to aims or principles. As to these we are all agreed. Justice, Virtue, Truth, Brotherhood, the highest interests of the people, moral as well as physical: these are dear not only to Social-Democrats and Anarchists, but also to Tories, Whigs, Radicals, and probably also to Moonlighters and Dynamitards. It is with the methods by which it is proposed to give active effect to them that I am concerned here; and to that point I shall now address myself by reading you a paper which I wrote more than four years ago on the subject chosen for to-night. I may add that it has not been revived from a wanton desire to renew an old dispute, but in response to a demand from the provincial Fabian Societies, bewildered as they are by the unexpected opposition of the Anarchists, from whom they had rather expected some sympathy. This old paper of mine being the only document of the kind available, my colleagues have requested me to expunge such errors and follies as I have grown out of since 1888, and to take this opportunity of submitting it to the judgment of the Society. Which I shall now do without further preamble.

Individualist Anarchism.

The full economic detail of Individualist Anarchism may be inferred with sufficient completeness from an article entitled “State Socialism and Anarchism: how far they agree, and wherein they differ,” which appeared in March, 1888, in Liberty, an Anarchist journal published in Boston, Mass., and edited by the author of the article, Mr. Benjamin R. Tucker. An examination of any number of this journal will shew that as a candid, clear-headed, and courageous demonstrator of Individualist Anarchism by purely intellectual methods, Mr. Tucker may safely be accepted as one of the most capable spokesmen of his party.

“The economic principles of Modern Socialism,” says Mr. Tucker, “are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations — namely, that labor is the true measure of price. From this principle, these three men [Josiah Warren, Proudhon and Marx] deduced ‘that the natural wage of labor is its product.’”

Now the Socialist who is unwary enough to accept this economic position will presently find himself logically committed to the Whig doctrine of laissez-faire. And here Mr. Tucker will cry, “Why not? Laissez-faire is exactly what we want. Destroy the money monopoly, the tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly. Enforce then only those land titles which rest on personal occupancy or cultivation; and the social problem of how to secure to each worker the product of his own labor will be solved simply by everyone minding his own business.”

Let us see whether it will or not. Suppose we decree that henceforth no more rent shall be paid in England, and that each man shall privately own his house, and hold his shop, factory, or place of business jointly with those who work with him in it. Let everyone be free to issue money from his own mint without tax or stamp. Let all taxes on commodities be abolished, and patents and copyrights be things of the past. Try to imagine yourself under these promising conditions with life before you. You may start in business as a crossing sweeper, shopkeeper, collier, farmer, miller, banker, or what not. Whatever your choice may be, the first thing you find is that the reward of your labor depends far more on the situation in which you exercise it than on yourself. If you sweep the crossing between St. James’s and Albemarle Streets you prosper greatly. But if you are forestalled not only there, but at every point more central than, say, the corner of Holford Square, Islington, you may sweep twice as hard as your rival in Piccadilly, and not take a fifth of his toll. At such a pass you may well curse Adam Smith and his principle that labor is the measure of price, and either advocate a democratically constituted State Socialist municipality, paying all its crossing sweepers equally, or else cast your broom upon the Thames and turn shopkeeper. Yet here again the same difficulty crops up. Your takings depend, not on yourself, but on the number of people who pass your window per hour. At Charing Cross or Cheapside fortunes are to be made: in the main street at Putney one can do enough to hold up one’s head: further out, a thousand yards right or left of the Portsmouth Road, the most industrious man in the world may go whistle for a customer. Evidently retail shopkeeping is not the thing for a man of spirit after Charing Cross and Cheapside have been appropriated by occupying owners on the principle of first come first served. You must aspire then to wholesale dealing — nay, to banking. Alas! the difficulty is intensified beyond calculation. Take that financial trinity, Glyn, Mills and Currie; transplant them only a few miles from Lombard Street; and they will soon be objects of pity to the traditional sailor who once presented at their counter a cheque for £25 and generously offered to take it in instalments, as he did not wish to be too hard on them all at once. Turning your back on banking, you meddle in the wheat trade, and end by offering to exchange an occupying ownership of all Salisbury Plain for permission to pay a rack rent for premises within hail of “The Baltic” and its barometer.

Probably there are some people who have a blind belief that crossing sweepers, “The Baltic,” Lombard Street, and the like, are too utterly of the essence of the present system to survive the introduction of Anarchism. They will tell me that I am reading the conditions of the present into the future. Against such instinctive convictions it is vain to protest that I am reading only Mr. Tucker’s conditions. But at least there will be farming, milling, and mining, conducted by human agents, under Anarchism. Now the farmer will not find in his perfect Anarchist market two prices at one time for two bushels of wheat of the same quality; yet the labor cost of each bushel will vary considerably according to the fertility of the farm on which it was raised, and the proximity of that farm to the market. A good soil will often yield the strongest and richest grain to less labor per acre or per bushel than must be spent on land that returns a crop less valuable by five shillings a quarter. When all the best land is held by occupying owners, those who have to content themselves with poorer soils will hail the principle that labor is the measure of price with the thumb to the nose. Among the millers, too, there must needs be grievous mistrust of Proudhon and Josiah Warren. For of two men with equally good heart to work and machinery to work with, one may be on a stream that will easily turn six millstones; whilst the other, by natural default of water, or being cut off by his fellow higher up stream, may barely be able to keep two pairs of stones in gear, and may in a dry season be ready to tie these two about his neck and lie down under the scum of his pond. Certainly, he can defy drought by setting to work with a steam engine, steel rollers, and all the latest contrivances for squashing wheat into dust instead of grinding it into flour; yet, after all his outlay, he will not be able to get a penny a sack more for his stuff than his competitor, to whose water-wheel Nature is gratuitously putting her shoulder. “Competition everywhere and always” of his unaided strength against that of his rival he might endure; but to fight naked against one armed with the winds and waves (for there are windmills as well as watermills) is no sound justice, though it be sound Anarchism. And how would occupying ownership of mines work, when it is an easier matter to get prime Wallsend and Silkstone out of one mine than to get slates and steam fuel out of another, even after twenty years’ preliminary shaft-sinking? Would Mr. Tucker, if he had on sale from a rich mine some Silkstone that had only cost half as much labor as steam coal from a relatively poor one, boldly announce:— “Prices this day: Prime Silkstone, per ton, 25s.; best steam ditto, 50s. Terms, cash. Principles, those of Adam Smith — see ‘Wealth of Nations’ passim”? Certainly not with “competition everywhere and always,” unless custom was no object to him in comparison with principle.

It is useless to multiply instances. There is only one country in which any square foot of land is as favorably situated for conducting exchanges, or as richly endowed by nature for production, as any other square foot; and the name of that country is Utopia. In Utopia alone, therefore, would occupying ownership be just. In England, America and other places, rashly created without consulting the Anarchists, Nature is all caprice and injustice in dealing with Labor. Here you scratch her with a spade; and earth’s increase and foison plenty are added to you. On the other side of the hedge twenty steam-diggers will not extort a turnip from her. Still less adapted to Anarchism than the fields and mines is the crowded city. The distributor flourishes where men love to congregate: his work is to bring commodities to men; but here the men bring themselves to the commodities. Remove your distributor a mile, and his carts and travellers must scour the country for customers. None know this better than the landlords. Up High Street, down Low Street, over the bridge and into Crow Street, the toilers may sweat equally for equal wages; but their product varies; and the ground rents vary with the product. Competition levels down the share kept by the worker as it levels up the hours of his labor; and the surplus, high or low according to the fertility of the soil or convenience of the site, goes as high rent or low rent, but always in the long run rack rent, to the owner of the land.

Now Mr. Tucker’s remedy for this is to make the occupier — the actual worker — the owner. Obviously the effect would be, not to abolish his advantage over his less favorably circumstanced competitors, but simply to authorize him to put it into his own pocket instead of handing it over to a landlord. He would then, it is true, be (as far as his place of business was concerned) a worker instead of an idler; but he would get more product as a manufacturer and more custom as a distributor than other equally industrious workers in worse situations. He could thus save faster than they, and retire from active service at an age when they would still have many years more work before them. His ownership of his place of business would of course lapse in favor of his successor the instant he retired. How would the rest of the community decide who was to be the successor — would they toss up for it, or fight for it, or would he be allowed to nominate his heir, in which case he would either nominate his son or sell his nomination for a large fine? Again, his retirement from his place of business would leave him still in possession, as occupying owner, of his private residence; and this might be of exceptional or even unique desirability in point of situation. It might, for instance, be built on Richmond Hill, and command from its windows the beautiful view of the Thames valley to be obtained from that spot. Now it is clear that Richmond Hill will not accommodate all the people who would rather live there than in the Essex marshes. It is easy to say, Let the occupier be the owner; but the question is, Who is to be the occupier? Suppose it were settled by drawing lots, what would prevent the winner from selling his privilege for its full (unearned) value under free exchange and omnipresent competition? To such problems as these, Individualist Anarchism offers no solution. It theorizes throughout on the assumption that one place in a country is as good as another.

Under a system of occupying ownership, rent would appear only in its primary form of an excess of the prices of articles over the expenses of producing them, thus enabling owners of superior land to get more for their products than cost price. If, for example, the worst land worth using were only one-third as productive as the best land, then the owner-occupiers of that best land would get in the market the labor cost of their wares three times over. This 200 per cent premium would be just as truly ground rent as if it were paid openly as such to the Duke of Bedford or the Astors. It may be asked why prices must go up to the expenses of production on the very worst land. Why not ascertain and charge the average cost of production taking good and bad land together? Simply because nothing short of the maximum labor cost would repay the owners of the worst land. In fact, the worst land would not be cultivated until the price had risen. The process would be as follows. Suppose the need of the population for wheat were satisfied by crops raised from the best available land only. Free competition in wheat-producing would then bring the price down to the labor cost or expenses of production. Now suppose an increase of population sufficient to overtax the wheat-supplying capacity of the best land. The supply falling short of the demand, the price of wheat would rise. When it had risen to the labor cost of production from land one degree inferior to the best, it would be worth while to cultivate that inferior land. When that new source came to be overtaxed by the still growing population, the price would rise again until it would repay the cost of raising wheat from land yet lower in fertility than the second grade. But these descents would in nowise diminish the fertility of the best land, from which wheat could be raised as cheaply as before, in spite of the rise in the price, which would apply to all the wheat in the market, no matter where raised. That is, the holders of the best land would gain a premium, rising steadily with the increase of population, exactly as the landlord now enjoys a steadily rising rent. As the agricultural industry is in this respect typical of all industries, it will be seen now that the price does not rise because worse land is brought into cultivation, but that worse land is brought into cultivation by the rise of price. Or, to put it in another way, the price of the commodity does not rise because more labor has been devoted to its production, but more labor is devoted to its production because the price has risen. Commodities, in fact, have a price before they are produced; we produce them expressly to obtain that price; and we cannot alter it by merely spending more or less labor on them. It is natural for the laborer to insist that labor ought to be the measure of price, and that the just wage of labor is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn in economics is that labor is not and never can be the measure of price under a competitive system. Not until the progress of Socialism replaces competitive production and distribution, with individual greed for its incentive, by Collectivist production and distribution, with fair play all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labor or commodities represent their just value.

Thus we see that “competition everywhere and always” fails to circumvent rent whilst the land is held by competing occupiers who are protected in the individual ownership of what they can raise from their several holdings. And “the great principle laid down by Adam Smith,” formulated by Josiah Warren as “Cost is the proper limit of price,” turns out — since in fact price is the limit of cost — to be merely a preposterous way of expressing the fact that under Anarchism that small fraction of the general wealth which was produced under the least favorable circumstances would at least fetch its cost, whilst all the rest would fetch a premium which would be nothing but privately appropriated rent with an Anarchist mask on.

We see also that such a phrase as “the natural wage of labor is its product” is a misleading one, since labor cannot produce subsistence except when exercised upon natural materials and aided by natural forces external to man. And when it is so produced, its value in exchange depends in nowise on the share taken by labor in its production, but solely to the demand for it in society. The economic problem of Socialism is the just distribution of the premium given to certain portions of the general product by the action of demand. As Individualist Anarchism not only fails to distribute these, but deliberately permits their private appropriation, Individualist Anarchism is the negation of Socialism, and is, in fact, Unsocialism carried as near to its logical completeness as any sane man dare carry it.

Communist Anarchism.

State Socialism and Anarchism, says Mr. Tucker, “are based on two principles, the history of whose conflict is almost equivalent to the history of the world since man came into it; and all intermediate parties, including that of the upholders of the existing society, are based upon a compromise between them.” These principles are Authority — the State Socialist principle, and Liberty — the Anarchist principle. State Socialism is then defined as “the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by the government, regardless of individual choice,” whereas Anarchism is “the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.”

Now most revolutionists will admit that there was a stage in the growth of their opinions when the above seemed an adequate statement of the alternatives before them. But, as we have seen, when the Individualist Anarchist proceeds to reduce his principle to practice, he is inevitably led to Mr. Tucker’s program of “competition everywhere and always” among occupying owners, subject only to the moral law of minding their own business. No sooner is this formulated than its effect on the distribution of wealth is examined by the economist, who finds no trouble in convicting it, under the economic law of rent, of privilege, monopoly, inequality, unjust indirect taxation, and everything that is most repugnant to Anarchism. But this startling reverse, however it may put the Anarchist out of conceit with his program, does not in the least reconcile him to State Socialism. It only changes his mind on one point. Whilst his program satisfied him, he was content to admit that State Socialism was the only possible alternative to Individualist Anarchism — nay, he rather insisted on it, because the evils of the State Socialist alternative were strong incentives to the acceptance of the other. But the moment it becomes apparent that the one is economically as bad as the other, the disillusioned Individualist Anarchist becomes convinced of the insufficiency of his analysis of the social problem, and follows it up in order to find out a tertium quid, or third system which shall collect and justly distribute the rent of the country, and yet prevent the collecting and distributing organ from acquiring the tyrannous powers of governments as we know them. There are two such systems at present before the world: Communism and Social-Democracy. Now there is no such thing as Anarchist Social-Democracy; but there is such a thing as Anarchist Communism or Communist Anarchism. It is true that Mr. Tucker does not recognize the Communist Anarchist as an Anarchist at all: he energetically repudiates Communism as the uttermost negation of true Anarchism, and will not admit any logical halting place between thoroughgoing State Socialism and thoroughgoing Individualist Anarchism. But why insist on anybody occupying a logical halting place? We are all fond of shewing that on any given subject there are only two of these safe spots, one being the point of agreement with us, and the other some inconceivable extremity of idiocy. But for the purposes of the present criticism it will be more practical to waive such crude rationalizing, and concede that to deal with Mr. Tucker without also dealing with Peter Kropotkine is not to give Anarchism fair play.

The main difficulty in criticising Kropotkine lies in the fact that, in the distribution of generally needed labor products, his Communism is finally cheap and expedient, whereas Mr. Tucker’s Individualism, in the same department, is finally extravagant and impossible. Even under the most perfect Social-Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub. High as that ideal must seem to anyone who complacently accepts the present social order, it is hardly high enough to satisfy a man in whom the social instinct is well developed. So long as vast quantities of labor have to be expended in weighing and measuring each man’s earned share of this and that commodity — in watching, spying, policing, and punishing in order to prevent Tom getting a crumb of bread more or Dick a spoonful of milk less than he has a voucher for, so long will the difference between Unsocialism and Socialism be only the difference between unscientific and scientific hoggishness. I do not desire to underrate the vastness of that difference. Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of — well, instead of the sort we are at present. But we shall not have any great reason to stand on the dignity of our humanity until a just distribution of the loaves and fishes becomes perfectly spontaneous, and the great effort and expense of a legal distribution, however just, is saved. For my own part, I seek the establishment of a state of society in which I shall not be bothered with a ridiculous pocketful of coppers, nor have to waste my time in perplexing arithmetical exchanges of them with booking clerks, bus conductors, shopmen, and other superfluous persons before I can get what I need. I aspire to live in a community which shall be at least capable of averaging the transactions between us well enough to ascertain how much work I am to do for it in return for the right to take what I want of the commoner necessaries and conveniences of life. The saving of friction by such an arrangement may be guessed from the curious fact that only specialists in sociology are conscious of the numerous instances in which we are to-day forced to adopt it by the very absurdity of the alternative. Most people will tell you that Communism is known only in this country as a visionary project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll off across the common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common gas lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street, and into the common Trafalgar Square, where, on the smallest hint on their part that Communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by the common policeman, and haled off to the common gaol. When you suggest to these people that the application of Communism to the bread supply is only an extension, involving no new principle, of its application to street lighting, they are bewildered. Instead of picturing the Communist man going to the common store, and thence taking his bread home with him, they instinctively imagine him bursting obstreperously into his neighbor’s house and snatching the bread off his table on the “as much mine as yours” principle — which, however, has an equally sharp edge for the thief’s throat in the form “as much yours as mine.” In fact, the average Englishman is only capable of understanding Communism when it is explained as a state of things under which everything is paid for out of the taxes, and taxes are paid in labor. And even then he will sometimes say, “How about the brainwork?” and begin the usual novice’s criticism of Socialism in general.

Now a Communist Anarchist may demur to such a definition of Communism as I have just given; for it is evident that if there are to be taxes, there must be some authority to collect those taxes. I will not insist on the odious word taxes; but I submit that if any article — bread, for instance — be communized, by which I mean that there shall be public stores of bread, sufficient to satisfy everybody, to which all may come and take what they need without question or payment, wheat must be grown, mills must grind, and bakers must sweat daily in order to keep up the supply. Obviously, therefore, the common bread store will become bankrupt unless every consumer of the bread contributes to its support as much labor as the bread he consumes costs to produce. Communism or no Communism, he must pay or else leave somebody else to pay for him. Communism will cheapen bread for him — will save him the cost of scales and weights, coin, book-keepers, counter-hands, policemen, and other expenses of private property; but it will not do away with the cost of the bread and the store. Now supposing that voluntary co-operation and public spirit prove equal to the task of elaborately organizing the farming, milling and baking industries for the production of bread, how will these voluntary co-operators recover the cost of their operations from the public who are to consume their bread? If they are given powers to collect the cost from the public, and to enforce their demands by punishing non-payers for their dishonesty, then they at once become a State department levying a tax for public purposes; and the Communism of the bread supply becomes no more Anarchistic than our present Communistic supply of street lighting is Anarchistic. Unless the taxation is voluntary — unless the bread consumer is free to refuse payment without incurring any penalty save the reproaches of his conscience and his neighbors, the Anarchist ideal will remain unattained. Now the pressure of conscience and public opinion is by no means to be slighted. Millions of men and women, without any legal compulsion whatever, pay for the support of institutions of all sorts, from churches to tall hats, simply out of their need for standing well with their neighbors. But observe, this compulsion of public opinion derives most of its force from the difficulty of getting the wherewithal to buy bread without a reputation for respectability. Under Communism a man could snap his fingers at public opinion without starving for it. Besides, public opinion cannot for a moment be relied upon as a force which operates uniformly as a compulsion upon men to act morally. Its operation is for all practical purposes quite arbitrary, and is as often immoral as moral. It is just as hostile to the reformer as to the criminal. It hangs Anarchists and worships Nitrate Kings. It insists on a man wearing a tall hat and going to church, on his marrying the woman he lives with, and on his pretending to believe whatever the rest pretend to believe; and it enforces these ordinances in a sufficient majority of cases without help from the law: its tyranny, in fact, being so crushing that its little finger is often found to be thicker than the law’s loins. But there is no sincere public opinion that a man should work for his daily bread if he can get it for nothing. Indeed it is just the other way: public opinion has been educated to regard the performance of daily manual labor as the lot of the despised classes. The common aspiration is to acquire property and leave off working. Even members of the professions rank below the independent gentry, so called because they are independent of their own labor. These prejudices are not confined to the middle and upper classes: they are rampant also among the workers. The man who works nine hours a day despises the man who works sixteen. A country gentleman may consider himself socially superior to his solicitor or his doctor; but they associate on much more cordial terms than shopmen and car-men, engine drivers and railway porters, bricklayers and hodmen, barmaids and general servants. One is almost tempted in this country to declare that the poorer the man the greater the snob, until you get down to those who are so oppressed that they have not enough self-respect even for snobbery, and thus are able to pluck out of the heart of their misery a certain irresponsibility which it would be a mockery to describe as genuine frankness and freedom. The moment you rise into the higher atmosphere of a pound a week, you find that envy, ostentation, tedious and insincere ceremony, love of petty titles, precedences and dignities, and all the detestable fruits of inequality of condition, flourish as rankly among those who lose as among those who gain by it. In fact, the notion that poverty favors virtue was clearly invented to persuade the poor that what they lost in this world they would gain in the next.

Kropotkine, too optimistically, as I think, disposes of the average man by attributing his unsocialism to the pressure of the corrupt system under which he groans. Remove that pressure, and he will think rightly, says Kropotkine. But if the natural man be indeed social as well as gregarious, how did the corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise? Could the institution of property as we know it ever have come into existence unless nearly every man had been, not merely willing, but openly and shamelessly eager to quarter himself idly on the labor of his fellows, and to domineer over them whenever the mysterious workings of economic law enabled him to do so? It is useless to think of man as a fallen angel. If the fallacies of absolute morality are to be admitted in the discussion at all, he must be considered rather as an obstinate and selfish devil, who is being slowly forced by the iron tyranny of Nature to recognize that in disregarding his neighbor’s happiness he is taking the surest way to sacrifice his own. And under the present system he never can learn that lesson thoroughly, because he is an inveterate gambler, and knows that the present system gives him a chance, at odds of a hundred thousand to one or so against him, of becoming a millionaire, a condition which is to him the summit of earthly bliss, as from it he will be able to look down upon those who formerly bullied and patronized him. All this may sound harsh, especially to those who know how wholesomely real is the workman’s knowledge of life compared to that of the gentleman, and how much more genuinely sympathetic he is in consequence. Indeed, it is obvious that if four-fifths of the population were habitually to do the utter worst in the way of selfishness that the present system invites them to do, society would not stand the strain for six weeks. So far, we can claim to be better than our institutions. But the fact that we are too good for complete Unsocialism by no means proves that we are good enough for Communism. The practical question remains, Could men trained under our present system be trusted to pay for their food scrupulously if they could take it for nothing with impunity? Clearly, if they did not so pay, Anarchist Communism would be bankrupt in two days. The answer is that all the evils against which Anarchism is directed are caused by men taking advantage of the institution of property to do this very thing — seize their subsistence without working for it. What reason is there for doubting that they would attempt to take exactly the same advantage of Anarchist Communism? And what reason is there to doubt that the community, finding its bread store bankrupt, would instantly pitch its Anarchism to the four winds, and come down on the defaulters with the strong hand of a law to make them pay, just as they are now compelled to pay their Income Tax? I submit, then, to our Communist Anarchist friends that Communism requires either external compulsion to labor, or else a social morality which the evils of existing society shew that we have failed as yet to attain. I do not deny the possibility of the final attainment of that degree of moralization; but I contend that the path to it lies through a transition system which, instead of offering fresh opportunities to men of getting their living idly, will destroy those opportunities altogether, and wean us from the habit of regarding such an anomaly as possible, much less honorable.

It must not be supposed that the economic difficulties which I pointed out as fatal to Individualist Anarchism are entirely removed by Communism. It is true that if all the bread and coal in the country were thrown into a common store from which each man could take as much as he wanted whenever he pleased without direct payment, then no man could gain any advantage over his fellows from the fact that some farms and some coal-mines are better than others. And if every man could step into a train and travel whither he would without a ticket, no individual could speculate in the difference between the traffic from Charing Cross to the Mansion House and that from Ryde to Ventnor. One of the great advantages of Communism will undoubtedly be that huge masses of economic rent will be socialized by it automatically. All rent arising from the value of commodities in general use which can be produced, consumed, and replaced at the will of man to the full extent to which they are wanted, can be made rent free by communizing them. But there must remain outside this solution, first, the things which are not in sufficiently general use to be communized at all; second, things of which an unlimited free supply might prove a nuisance, such as gin or printing; and thirdly, things for which the demand exceeds the supply. The last is the instance in which the rent difficulty recurs. It would take an extraordinary course of demolition, reconstruction, and landscape gardening to make every dwelling house in London as desirable as a house in Park Lane, or facing Regent’s Park, or overlooking the Embankment Gardens. And since everybody cannot be accommodated there, the exceptionally favored persons who occupy those sites will certainly be expected to render an equivalent for their privilege to those whom they exclude. Without this there would evidently be no true socialization of the habitation of London. This means, in practice, that a public department must let the houses out to the highest bidders, and collect the rents for public purposes. Such a department can hardly be called Anarchistic, however democratic it may be. I might go on to enlarge considerably on the limits to the practicability of direct Communism, which varies from commodity to commodity; but one difficulty, if insurmountable, is as conclusive as twenty.

It is sufficient for our present purpose to have shewn that Communism cannot be ideally Anarchistic, because it does not in the least do away with the necessity for compelling people to pay for what they consume; and even when the growth of human character removes that difficulty there will still remain the question of those commodities to which the simple Communist method of so-called “free distribution” is inapplicable. One practical point more requires a word; and that is the difficulty of communizing any branch of distribution without first collectivizing it. For instance, we might easily communize the postal service by simply announcing that in future letters would be carried without stamps just as they now are with them, the cost being thrown entirely upon imperial taxation. But if the postal service were, like most of our distributive business, in the hands of thousands of competing private traders, no such change would be directly possible. Communism must grow out of Collectivism, not out of anarchic private enterprise. That is to say, it cannot grow directly out of the present system.

But must the transition system therefore be a system of despotic coercion? If so, it will be wrecked by the intense impulse of men to escape from the domination of their own kind. In 1888 a Russian subject, giving evidence before the Sweating Inquiry in the House of Lords, declared that he left the Russian dominion, where he worked thirteen hours a day, to work eighteen hours in England, because he is freer here. Reason is dumb when confronted with a man who, exhausted with thirteen hours’ toil, will turn to for another five hours for the sake of being free to say that Mr. Gladstone is a better man than Lord Salisbury, and to read Mill, Spencer, and Reynold’s Newspaper in the six hours left to him for sleep. It brings to mind the story of the American judge who tried to induce a runaway slave to return to the plantation by pointing out how much better he was treated there than the free wage-nigger of the Abolitionist states. “Yes,” said the runaway; “but would you go back if you were in my place?” The judge turned Abolitionist at once. These things are not to be reasoned away. Man will submit to fate, circumstance, society, anything that comes impersonally over him; but against the personal oppressor, whether parent, schoolmaster, overseer, official chief, or king, he eternally rebels. Like the Russian, he will rather be compelled by “necessity” to agree to work eighteen hours, than ordered by a master to work thirteen. No modern nation, if deprived of personal liberty or national autonomy, would stop to think of its economic position. Establish a form of Socialism which shall deprive the people of their sense of personal liberty; and, though it double their rations and halve their working hours, they will begin to conspire against it before it is a year old. We only disapprove of monopolists: we hate masters.

Then, since we are too dishonest for Communism without taxation or compulsory labor, and too insubordinate to tolerate task work under personal compulsion, how can we order the transition so as to introduce just distribution without Communism, and maintain the incentive to labor without mastership? The answer is, by Democracy. And now, having taken a positive attitude at last, I must give up criticizing the Anarchists, and defend Democracy against their criticisms.

Democracy.

I now, accordingly, return to Mr. Tucker’s criticism of State Socialism, which, for the sake of precision, had better be called Social-Democracy. There is a Socialism — that of Bismarck; of the extinct young England party; of the advocates of moralized feudalism; and of mob contemners generally — which is not Social-Democracy, but Social-Despotism, and may be dismissed as essentially no more hopeful than a system of Moralized Criminality, Abstemious Gluttony, or Straightforward Mendacity would be. Mr. Tucker, as an American, passes it over as not worth powder and shot: he clearly indicates a democratic State by his repeated references to the majority principle, and in particular by his assertion that “there would be but one article in the constitution of a State Socialistic country: ‘The right of the majority is absolute.’” Having thus driven Democracy back on its citadel, he proceeds to cannonade it as follows:

“Under the system of State Socialism, which holds the community responsible for the health, wealth and wisdom of the individual, the community, through its majority expression, will insist more and more on prescribing the conditions of health, wealth, and wisdom, thus impairing and finally destroying individual independence and with it all sense of individual responsibility.

“Whatever, then, the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel; a State school of medicine, by whose practitioners the sick must invariably be treated; a State system of hygiene, proscribing what all must and must not eat, drink, wear and do; a State code of morals, which will not content itself with punishing crime, but will prohibit what the majority decide to be vice; a State system of instruction, which shall do away with all private schools, academies and colleges; a State nursery, in which all children must be brought up in common at the public expense; and, finally, a State family, with an attempt at stirpiculture, or scientific breeding, in which no man or woman will be allowed to have children if the State prohibits them, and no man or woman can refuse to have children if the State orders them. Thus will Authority achieve its acme and Monopoly be carried to its highest power.”

In reading this one is reminded of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s habit of assuming that whatever is not white must be black. Mr. Tucker, on the ground that “it has ever been the tendency of power to add to itself, to enlarge its sphere, to encroach beyond the limits set for it,” admits no alternative to the total subjection of the individual, except the total abolition of the State. If matters really could and did come to that I am afraid the individual would have to go under in any case; for the total abolition of the State in this sense means the total abolition of the collective force of Society, to abolish which it would be necessary to abolish Society itself. There are two ways of doing this. One, the abolition of the individuals composing society, could not be carried out without an interference with their personal claims much more serious than that required, even on Mr. Tucker’s shewing, by Social-Democracy. The other, the dispersion of the human race into independent hermitages over the globe at the rate of twenty-five to the square mile, would give rise to considerable inequality of condition and opportunity as between the hermits of Terra del Fuego or the Arctic regions and those of Florida or the Riviera, and would suit only a few temperaments. The dispersed units would soon re-associate; and the moment they did so, goodbye to the sovereignty of the individual. If the majority believed in an angry and jealous God, then, State or no State, they would not permit an individual to offend that God and bring down his wrath upon them: they would rather stone and burn the individual in propitiation. They would not suffer the individual to go naked among them; and if he clothed himself in an unusual way which struck them as being ridiculous or scandalous, they would laugh at, him; refuse him admission to their feasts; object to be seen talking with him in the streets; and perhaps lock him up as a lunatic. They would not allow him to neglect sanitary precautions which they believed essential to their own immunity from zymotic disease. If the family were established among them as it is established among us, they would not suffer him to intermarry within certain degrees of kinship. Their demand would so rule the market that in most places he would find no commodities in the shops except those preferred by a majority of the customers; no schools except those conducted in accordance with the ideas of the majority of parents; no experienced doctors except those whose qualifications inspired confidence in a whole circle of patients. This is not “the coming slavery” of Social-Democracy: it is the slavery already come. What is more, there is nothing in the most elaborately negative practical program yet put forward by Anarchism that offers the slightest mitigation of it. That in comparison with ideal irresponsible absolute liberty it is slavery, cannot be denied. But in comparison with the slavery of Robinson Crusoe, which is the most Anarchistic alternative Nature, our taskmistress, allows us, it is pardonably described as “freedom.” Robinson Crusoe, in fact, is always willing to exchange his unlimited rights and puny powers for the curtailed rights and relatively immense powers of the “slave” of majorities. For if the individual chooses, as in most cases he will, to believe and worship as his fellows do, he finds temples built and services organized at a cost to himself which he hardly feels. The clothes, the food, the furniture which he is most likely to prefer are ready for him in the shops; the schools in which his children can be taught what their fellow citizens expect them to know are within fifteen minutes’ walk of his door; and the red lamp of the most approved pattern of doctor shines reassuringly at the corner of the street. He is free to live with the women of his family without suspicion or scandal; and if he is not free to marry them, what does that matter to him, since he does not wish to marry them? And so happy man be his dole, in spite of his slavery.

“Yes,” cries some eccentric individual; “but all this is untrue of me. I want to marry my deceased wife’s sister. I am prepared to prove that your authorized system of medicine is nothing but a debased survival of witchcraft. Your schools are machines for forcing spurious learning on children in order that your universities may stamp them as educated men when they have finally lost all power to think for themselves. The tall silk hats and starched linen shirts which you force me to wear, and without which I cannot successfully practice as a physician, clergyman, schoolmaster, lawyer, or merchant, are inconvenient, unsanitary, ugly, pompous, and offensive. Your temples are devoted to a God in whom I do not believe; and even if I did believe in him I should still regard your popular forms of worship as only redeemed from gross superstition by their obvious insincerity. Science teaches me that my proper food is good bread and good fruit: your boasted food supply offers me cows and pigs instead. Your care for my health consists in tapping the common sewer, with its deadly typhoid gases, into my house, besides discharging its contents into the river, which is my natural bath and fountain. Under color of protecting my person and property you forcibly take my money to support an army of soldiers and policemen for the execution of barbarous and detestable laws; for the waging of wars which I abhor; and for the subjection of my person to those legal rights of property which compel me to sell myself for a wage to a class the maintenance of which I hold to be the greatest evil of our time. Your tyranny makes my very individuality a hindrance to me: I am outdone and outbred by the mediocre, the docile, the time-serving. Evolution under such conditions means degeneracy: therefore I demand the abolition of all these officious compulsions, and proclaim myself an Anarchist.”

The proclamation is not surprising under the circumstances; but it does not mend the matter in the least, nor would it if every person were to repeat it with enthusiasm, and the whole people to fly to arms for Anarchism. The majority cannot help its tyranny even if it would. The giant Winkelmeier must have found our doorways inconvenient, just as men of five feet or less find the slope of the floor in a theatre not sufficiently steep to enable them to see over the heads of those in front. But whilst the average height of a man is 5ft. 8in. there is no redress for such grievances. Builders will accommodate doors and floors to the majority, and not to the minority. For since either the majority or the minority must be incommoded, evidently the more powerful must have its way. There may be no indisputable reason why it ought not; and any clever Tory can give excellent reasons why it ought not; but the fact remains that it will, whether it ought or not. And this is what really settles the question as between democratic majorities and minorities. Where their interests conflict, the weaker side must go to the wall, because, as the evil involved is no greater than that of the stronger going to the wall, the majority is not restrained by any scruple from compelling the weaker to give way.

In practice, this does not involve either the absolute power of majorities, or “the infallibility of the odd man.” There are some matters in which the course preferred by the minority in no way obstructs that preferred by the majority. There are many more in which the obstruction is easier to bear than the cost of suppressing it. For it costs something to suppress even a minority of one. The commonest example of that minority is the lunatic with a delusion; yet it is found quite safe to entertain dozens of delusions, and be generally an extremely selfish and troublesome idiot, in spite of the power of majorities; for until you go so far that it clearly costs less to lock you up than to leave you at large, the majority will not take the trouble to set itself in action against you. Thus a minimum of individual liberty is secured, under any system, to the smallest minority. It is true that as minorities grow, they sometimes, in forfeiting the protection of insignificance, lose more in immunity than they gain in numbers; so that probably the weakest minority is not the smallest, but rather that which is too large to be disregarded and too weak to be feared; but before and after that dangerous point is weathered, minorities wield considerable power. The notion that they are ciphers because the majority could vanquish them in a trial of strength leaves out of account the damage they could inflict on the victors during the struggle. Ordinarily an unarmed man weighing thirteen stone can beat one weighing only eleven; but there are very few emergencies in which it is worth his while to do it, because if the weaker man resists to the best of his ability (which is always possible) the victor will be considerably worse off after the fight than before it. In 1861 the Northern and Southern States of America fought, as prize-fighters say, “to a finish”; and the North carried its point, yet at such a heavy cost to itself that the Southern States have by no means been reduced to ciphers; for the victorious majority have ever since felt that it would be better to give way on any but the most vital issues than to provoke such another struggle. But it is not often that a peremptory question arises between a majority and minority of a whole nation. In most matters only a fragment of the nation has any interest one way or the other; and the same man who is in a majority on one question is in a minority on another, and so learns by experience that minorities have “rights” which must be attended to. Minorities, too, as in the case of the Irish Party in the English Parliament, occasionally hold the balance of power between majorities which recognize their rights and majorities which deny them. Further, it is possible by decentralization to limit the power of the majority of the whole nation to questions upon which a divided policy is impracticable. For example, it is not only possible, but democratically expedient, to federate the municipalities of England in such a manner that Leicester might make vaccination penal whilst every other town in the island made it compulsory. Even at present, vaccination is not in fact compulsory in Leicester, though it is so in law. Theoretically, Leicester has been reduced to a cipher by the rest of England. Practically, Leicester counts twelve to the dozen as much as ever in purely local affairs.

In short, then, Democracy does not give majorities absolute power, nor does it enable them to reduce minorities to ciphers. Such limited power of coercing minorities as majorities must possess, is not given to them by Democracy any more than it can be taken away from them by Anarchism. A couple of men are stronger than one: that is all. There are only two ways of neutralizing this natural fact. One is to convince men of the immorality of abusing the majority power, and then to make them moral enough to refrain from doing it on that account. The other is to realize Lytton’s fancy of vril by inventing a means by which each individual will be able to destroy all his fellows with a flash of thought, so that the majority may have as much reason to fear the individual as he to fear the majority. No method of doing either is to be found in Individualist or Communist Anarchism: consequently these systems, as far as the evils of majority tyranny are concerned, are no better than the Social-Democratic program of adult suffrage with maintenance of representatives and payment of polling expenses from public funds — faulty devices enough, no doubt, but capable of accomplishing all that is humanly possible at present to make the State representative of the nation; to make the administration trustworthy; and to secure the utmost power to each individual and consequently to minorities. What better can we have whilst collective action is inevitable? Indeed, in the mouths of the really able Anarchists, Anarchism means simply the utmost attainable thoroughness of Democracy. Kropotkine, for example, speaks of free development from the simple to the composite by “the free union of free groups”; and his illustrations are “the societies for study, for commerce, for pleasure and recreation” which have sprung up to meet the varied requirements of the individual of our age. But in every one of these societies there is government by a council elected annually by a majority of voters; so that Kropotkine is not at all afraid of the democratic machinery and the majority power. Mr. Tucker speaks of “voluntary association,” but gives no illustrations, and indeed avows that “Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats.” He says, indeed, that “if the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny”; but if governing oneself means doing what one pleases without regard to the interests of neighbors, then the individual has flatly no such right. If he has no such right, the interference of his neighbors to make him behave socially, though it is “external government,” is not tyranny; and even if it were they would not refrain from it on that account. On the other hand, if governing oneself means compelling oneself to act with a due regard to the interests of the neighbors, then it is a right which men are proved incapable of exercising without external government. Either way, the phrase comes to nothing; for it would be easy to show by a little play upon it, either that altruism is really external government or that democratic State authority is really self-government.

Mr. Tucker’s adjective, “voluntary,” as applied to associations for defence or the management of affairs, must not be taken as implying that there is any very wide choice open in these matters. Such association is really compulsory, since if it be foregone affairs will remain unmanaged and communities defenceless. Nature makes short work of our aspirations towards utter impunity. She leaves communities in no wise “free” to choose whether they will labor and govern themselves. It is either that or starvation and chaos. Her tasks are inexorably set: her penalties are inevitable: her payment is strictly “payment by results.” All the individual can do is to shift and dodge his share of the task on to the shoulders of others, or filch some of their “natural wage” to add to his own. If they are fools enough to suffer it, that is their own affair as far as Nature is concerned. But it is the aim of Social-Democracy to relieve these fools by throwing on all an equal share in the inevitable labor imposed by the eternal tyranny of Nature, and so secure to every individual no less than his equal quota of the nation’s product in return for no more than his equal quota of the nation’s labor. These are the best terms humanity can make with its tyrant. In the eighteenth century it was easy for the philosophers and for Adam Smith to think of this rule of Nature as being “natural liberty” in contrast to the odious and stupid oppression of castes, priests, and kings — the detested “dominion of man over man.” But we, in detecting the unsoundness of Adam Smith’s private property and laisser-faire recipe for natural liberty, begin to see that though there is political liberty, there is no natural liberty, but only natural law remorselessly enforced. And so we shake our heads when we see Liberty on the title-page of Mr. Tucker’s paper, just as we laugh when we see The Coming Slavery on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Man and the State.”

We can now begin to join the threads of our discussion. We have seen that private appropriation of land in any form, whether limited by Individualist Anarchism to occupying owners or not, means the unjust distribution of a vast fund of social wealth called rent, which can by no means be claimed as due to the labor of any particular individual or class of individuals. We have seen that Communist Anarchism, though it partly — and only partly — avoids the rent difficulty, is, in the condition of morals developed under existing Unsocialism, impracticable. We have seen that the delegation of individual powers by voting; the creation of authoritative public bodies; the supremacy of the majority in the last resort; and the establishment and even endowment, either directly and officially or indirectly and unconsciously, of conventional forms of practice in religion, medicine, education, food, clothing, and criminal law, are, whether they be evils or not, inherent in society itself, and must be submitted to with the help of such protection against their abuse as democratic institutions more than any others afford. When Democracy fails, there is no antidote for intolerance save the spread of better sense. No form of Anarchism yet suggested provides any escape. Like bad weather in winter, intolerance does much mischief; but as, when we have done our best in the way of overcoats, umbrellas, and good fires, we have to put up with the winter; so, when we have done our best in the way of Democracy, decentralization, and the like, we must put up with the State.

The Anarchist Spirit.

I suppose I must not leave the subject without a word as to the value of what I will call the Anarchist spirit as an element in progress. But before I do so, let me disclaim all intention of embarrassing our Anarchist friends who are present by any sympathy which I may express with that spirit. On the Continent the discussion between Anarchism and Social-Democracy is frequently threshed out with the help of walking-sticks, chair-legs, and even revolvers. In England this does not happen, because the majority of an English audience always declines to take an extreme position, and, out of an idle curiosity to hear both sides, will, on sufficient provocation, precipitately eject theorists who make a disturbance, without troubling itself to discriminate as to the justice of their views. When I had the privilege some time ago of debating publicly with Mr. G. W. Foote on the Eight Hours question, a French newspaper which dealt with the occasion at great length devoted a whole article to an expression of envious astonishment at the fact that Mr. Foote and I abstained from vilifying and finally assaulting one another, and that our partisans followed our shining example and did not even attempt to prevent each other’s champions from being heard. Still, if we do not permit ourselves to merge Socialism, Anarchism, and all the other isms into rowdyism, we sometimes debate our differences, even in this eminently respectable Fabian Society, with considerable spirit. Now far be it from me to disarm the Anarchist debater by paying him compliments. On the contrary, if we have here any of those gentlemen who make it their business to denounce Social-Democrats as misleaders of the people and trimmers; who declaim against all national and municipal projects, and clamor for the abolition of Parliaments and County Councils; who call for a desperate resistance to rent, taxes, representative government and organised collective action of every sort: then I invite them to regard me as their inveterate opponent — as one who regards such doctrine, however sincerely it may be put forward, as at best an encouragement to the workers to neglect doing what is possible under pretext of waiting for the impossible, and at worst as furnishing the reactionary newspapers in England, and the police agents on the Continent, with evidence as to the alleged follies and perils of Socialism. But at the same time, it must be understood that I do not stand here to defend the State as we know it. Bakounine’s comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary “educated man,” who believes that institutions make men instead of men making institutions. I fully admit and vehemently urge that the State at present is simply a huge machine for robbing and slave-driving the poor by brute force. You may, if you are a stupid or comfortably-off person, think that the policeman at the corner is the guardian of law and order — that the gaol, with those instruments of torture, the treadmill, plank bed, solitary cell, cat o’ nine tails, and gallows, is a place to make people cease to do evil and learn to do well. But the primary function of the policeman, and that for which his other functions are only blinds, is to see that you do not lie down to sleep in this country without paying an idler for the privilege; that you do not taste bread until you have paid the idler’s toll in the price of it; that you do not resist the starving blackleg who is dragging you down to his level for the idler’s profit by offering to do your work for a starvation wage. Attempt any of these things, and you will be haled off and tortured in the name of law and order, honesty, social equilibrium, safety of property and person, public duty, Christianity, morality, and what not, as a vagrant, a thief, and a rioter. Your soldier, ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter and clothing; and he must, on pain of being arbitrarily imprisoned, punished with petty penances like a naughty child, pack-drilled, flogged or shot, all in the blessed name of “discipline,” do anything he is ordered to, from standing in his red coat in the hall of an opera house as a mere ornament, to flogging his comrade or committing murder. And his primary function is to come to the rescue of the policeman when the latter is overpowered. Members of Parliament whose sole qualifications for election were £1000 loose cash, an “independent” income, and a vulgar strain of ambition; parsons quoting scripture for the purposes of the squire; lawyers selling their services to the highest bidder at the bar, and maintaining the supremacy of the moneyed class on the bench; juries of employers masquerading as the peers of proletarians in the dock; University professors elaborating the process known as the education of a gentleman; artists striving to tickle the fancy or flatter the vanity of the aristocrat or plutocrat; workmen doing their work as badly and slowly as they dare so as to make the most of their job; employers starving and overworking their hands and adulterating their goods as much as they dare: these are the actual living material of those imposing abstractions known as the State, the Church, the Law, the Constitution, Education, the Fine Arts, and Industry. Every institution, as Bakounine saw, religious, political, financial, judicial, and so on, is corrupted by the fact that the men in it either belong to the propertied class themselves or must sell themselves to it in order to live. All the purchasing power that is left to buy men’s souls with after their bodies are fed is in the hands of the rich; and everywhere, from the Parliament which wields the irresistible coercive forces of the bludgeon, bayonet, machine gun, dynamite shell, prison and scaffold, down to the pettiest centre of shabby-genteel social pretension, the rich pay the piper and call the tune. Naturally, they use their power to steal more money to continue paying the piper; and thus all society becomes a huge conspiracy and hypocrisy. The ordinary man is insensible to the fraud just as he is insensible to the taste of water, which, being constantly in contact with his mucous membrane, seems to have no taste at all. The villainous moral conditions on which our social system is based are necessarily in constant contact with our moral mucous membrane, and so we lose our sense of their omnipresent meanness and dishonor. The insensibility, however, is not quite complete; for there is a period in life which is called the age of disillusion, which means the age at which a man discovers that his generous and honest impulses are incompatible with success in business; that the institutions he has reverenced are shams; and that he must join the conspiracy or go to the wall, even though he feels that the conspiracy is fundamentally ruinous to himself and his fellow-conspirators. The secret of writers like Ruskin, Morris and Kropotkine is that they see the whole imposture through and through, in spite of its familiarity, and of the illusions created by its temporal power, its riches, its splendor, its prestige, its intense respectability, its unremitting piety, and its high moral pretension. But Kropotkine, as I have shewn, is really an advocate of free Democracy; and I venture to suggest that he describes himself as an Anarchist rather from the point of view of the Russian recoiling from a despotism compared to which Democracy seems to be no government at all, than from the point of view of the American or Englishman who is free enough already to begin grumbling over Democracy as “the tyranny of the majority” and “the coming slavery.” I suggest this with the more confidence because William Morris’s views are largely identical with those of Kropotkine: yet Morris, after patient and intimate observation of Anarchism as a working propaganda in England, has definitely dissociated himself from it, and has shewn, by his sketch of the communist folk-mote in his News from Nowhere, how sanely alive he is to the impossibility of any development of the voluntary element in social action sufficient to enable individuals or minorities to take public action without first obtaining the consent of the majority.

On the whole, then, I do not regard the extreme hostility to existing institutions which inspires Communist Anarchism as being a whit more dangerous to Social-Democracy than the same spirit as it inspires the peculiar Toryism of Ruskin. Much more definitely opposed to us is the survival of that intense jealousy of the authority of the government over the individual which was the mainspring of the progress of the eighteenth century. Only those who forget the lessons of history the moment they have served their immediate turn will feel otherwise than reassured by the continued vitality of that jealousy among us. But this consideration does not remove the economic objections which I have advanced as to the practical program of Individualist Anarchism. And even apart from these objections, the Social-Democrat is compelled, by contact with hard facts, to turn his back decisively on useless denunciation of the State. It is easy to say, Abolish the State; but the State will sell you up, lock you up, blow you up, knock you down, bludgeon, shoot, stab, hang — in short, abolish you, if you lift a hand against it. Fortunately, there is, as we have seen, a fine impartiality about the policeman and the soldier, who are the cutting edge of the State power. They take their wages and obey their orders without asking questions. If those orders are to demolish the homestead of every peasant who refuses to take the bread out of his children’s mouths in order that his landlord may have money to spend as an idle gentleman in London, the soldier obeys. But if his orders were to help the police to pitch his lordship into Holloway Gaol until he had paid an Income Tax of twenty shillings on every pound of his unearned income, the soldier would do that with equal devotion to duty, and perhaps with a certain private zest that might be lacking in the other case. Now these orders come ultimately from the State — meaning, in this country, the House of Commons. A House of Commons consisting of 660 gentlemen and 10 workmen will order the soldier to take money from the people for the landlords. A House of Commons consisting of 660 workmen and 10 gentlemen will probably, unless the 660 are fools, order the soldier to take money from the landlords for the people. With that hint I leave the matter, in the full conviction that the State, in spite of the Anarchists, will continue to be used against the people by the classes until it is used by the people against the classes with equal ability and equal resolution.

THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK AND POCKET COMPANION

by

George Bernard Shaw

Writing as: JOHN TANNER, M.I.R.C. (Member of the Idle Rich Class).

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK

FOREWORD

AND YET

I. ON GOOD BREEDING

II. PROPERTY AND MARRIAGE

III. THE PERFECTIONIST EXPERIMENT AT ONEIDA CREEK

IV. MAN’S OBJECTION TO HIS OWN IMPROVEMENT

V. THE POLITICAL NEED FOR THE SUPERMAN

VI. PRUDERY EXPLAINED

VII. PROGRESS AN ILLUSION

VIII. THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION

IX. THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

X. THE METHOD

PREFACE TO THE REVOLUTIONIST’S HANDBOOK

“No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better.” Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. .

FOREWORD

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.

The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian or Anglo-Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as a referendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting. The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substituted another with different interests and different views. That is what a general election enables the people to do in England every seven years if they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution in England; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology.

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore a revolutionist.

All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older, though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform.

Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of the existing social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior.

AND YET

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

JOHN TANNER

I. ON GOOD BREEDING

If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus ex machina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the god of the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there is indeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that he used to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himself into the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; and such change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that is real. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. But the changes from the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the house dog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer’s draught horse and the race-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Nature to his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. And what can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monsters as the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of Man’s individual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main product of his universal aspiration?

This is no new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and the inexorable “ye must be born again,” with Mrs Poyser’s stipulation, “and born different,” recurs in every generation. The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or velocity. Neither is it of any use to ask for a Superman: you must furnish a specification of the sort of man you want. Unfortunately you do not know what sort of man you want. Some sort of goodlooking philosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate, perhaps.

Vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for a perfect gentleman and a perfect lady. And, after all, no market demand in the world takes the form of exact technical specification of the article required. Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced to satisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technical differences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that the proof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof of the Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to produce him by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for a completely convincing prescription of his ingredients.

Certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning. For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fall into the football club folly of counting on this as a product of superior body. Yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superior mind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications of virtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall out of the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the Sunday School. If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of “good” men, let us have the athletes: better Samson and Milo than Calvin and Robespierre. But neither alternative is worth changing for: Samson is no more a Superman than Calvin. What then are we to do?

II. PROPERTY AND MARRIAGE

Let us hurry over the obstacles set up by property and marriage. Revolutionists make too much of them. No doubt it is easy to demonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyed all the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it (that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in a grotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of the race, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally the maintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as a nation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters to Nature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a straw whether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal, capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (the hive and the anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), the demonstrations of Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make any serious impression on property. The knell of that over-rated institution will not sound until it is felt to conflict with some more vital matter than mere personal inequities in industrial economy. No such conflict was perceived whilst society had not yet grown beyond national communities too small and simple to overtax Man’s limited political capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage of international organization. Man’s political capacity and magnanimity are clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forced on him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looks upward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. He will presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple of the Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only through his own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulous person in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has always been its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man’s intentional and well-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everything that opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which laugh at the laborer’s petty complaint that he is defrauded of “surplus value,” and at the domestic miseries of the slaves of the wedding ring, will themselves be laughed aside as the lightest of trifles if they cross this conception when it becomes a fully realized vital purpose of the race.

That they must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge the futility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks for game, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that when we have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list of eligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, or blemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to the guidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and the parents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be the true characteristic of the Superman.

At this point we perceive the importance of giving fancy the widest possible field. To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectively limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is incompatible with property.

Besides, equality is an essential condition of bad breeding also; and bad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race. When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imagination in the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was a crime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to the consumptive. But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks by infecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction which disease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If two really unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have a great number of children who will all die before they reach maturity. This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a union between a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly than sterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that in the event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (which to some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected by experience instead of confirmed by evasion.

One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of the romantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspring of congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not a highly important part of what breeders call crossing. On the contrary, it is quite sufficiently probable that good results may be obtained from parents who would be extremely unsuitable companions and partners, to make it certain that the experiment of mating them will sooner or later be tried purposely almost as often as it is now tried accidentally. But mating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. In conjugation two complementary persons may supply one another’s deficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feel them and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful, eupeptic British country squire, with the tastes and range of his class, and of a clever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized Jewess, might be very superior to both his parents; but it is not likely that the Jewess would find the squire an interesting companion, or his habits, his friends, his place and mode of life congenial to her. Therefore marriage, whilst it is made an indispensable condition of mating, will delay the advent of the Superman as effectually as Property, and will be modified by the impulse towards him just as effectually.

The practical abrogation of Property and Marriage as they exist at present will occur without being much noticed. To the mass of men, the intelligent abolition of property would mean nothing except an increase in the quantity of food, clothing, housing, and comfort at their personal disposal, as well as a greater control over their time and circumstances. Very few persons now make any distinction between virtually complete property and property held on such highly developed public conditions as to place its income on the same footing as that of a propertyless clergyman, officer, or civil servant. A landed proprietor may still drive men and women off his land, demolish their dwellings, and replace them with sheep or deer; and in the unregulated trades the private trader may still spunge on the regulated trades and sacrifice the life and health of the nation as lawlessly as the Manchester cotton manufacturers did at the beginning of last century. But though the Factory Code on the one hand, and Trade Union organization on the other, have, within the lifetime of men still living, converted the old unrestricted property of the cotton manufacturer in his mill and the cotton spinner in his labor into a mere permission to trade or work on stringent public or collective conditions, imposed in the interest of the general welfare without any regard for individual hard cases, people in Lancashire still speak of their “property” in the old terms, meaning nothing more by it than the things a thief can be punished for stealing. The total abolition of property, and the conversion of every citizen into a salaried functionary in the public service, would leave much more than 99 per cent of the nation quite unconscious of any greater change than now takes place when the son of a shipowner goes into the navy. They would still call their watches and umbrellas and back gardens their property.

Marriage also will persist as a name attached to a general custom long after the custom itself will have altered. For example, modern English marriage, as modified by divorce and by Married Women’s Property Acts, differs more from early XIX century marriage than Byron’s marriage did from Shakespear’s. At the present moment marriage in England differs not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland. Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment; and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries the progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial deed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would still call themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships as marriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any less married than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions of marriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varies legally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little that most people believe their own marriage laws to be universal. Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absolute confidence of the public in the stability of the institution’s name, makes it all the easier to alter its substance.

However, it cannot be denied that one of the changes in public opinion demanded by the need for the Superman is a very unexpected one. It is nothing less than the dissolution of the present necessary association of marriage with conjugation, which most unmarried people regard as the very diagnostic of marriage. They are wrong, of course: it would be quite as near the truth to say that conjugation is the one purely accidental and incidental condition of marriage. Conjugation is essential to nothing but the propagation of the race; and the moment that paramount need is provided for otherwise than by marriage, conjugation, from Nature’s creative point of view, ceases to be essential in marriage. But marriage does not thereupon cease to be so economical, convenient, and comfortable, that the Superman might safely bribe the matrimonomaniacs by offering to revive all the old inhuman stringency and irrevocability of marriage, to abolish divorce, to confirm the horrible bond which still chains decent people to drunkards, criminals, and wasters, provided only the complete extrication of conjugation from it were conceded to him. For if people could form domestic companionships on no easier terms than these, they would still marry. The Roman Catholic, forbidden by his Church to avail himself of the divorce laws, marries as freely as the South Dakotan Presbyterians who can change partners with a facility that scandalizes the old world; and were his Church to dare a further step towards Christianity and enjoin celibacy on its laity as well as on its clergy, marriages would still be contracted for the sake of domesticity by perfectly obedient sons and daughters of the Church. One need not further pursue these hypotheses: they are only suggested here to help the reader to analyse marriage into its two functions of regulating conjugation and supplying a form of domesticity. These two functions are quite separable; and domesticity is the only one of the two which is essential to the existence of marriage, because conjugation without domesticity is not marriage at all, whereas domesticity without conjugation is still marriage: in fact it is necessarily the actual condition of all fertile marriages during a great part of their duration, and of some marriages during the whole of it.

Taking it, then, that Property and Marriage, by destroying Equality and thus hampering sexual selection with irrelevant conditions, are hostile to the evolution of the Superman, it is easy to understand why the only generally known modern experiment in breeding the human race took place in a community which discarded both institutions.

III. THE PERFECTIONIST EXPERIMENT AT ONEIDA CREEK

In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out a resolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists “that we will devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” Though the American nation declared that this sort of thing was not to be tolerated in a Christian country, the Oneida Community held its own for over thirty years, during which period it seems to have produced healthier children and done and suffered less evil than any Joint Stock Company on record. It was, however, a highly selected community; for a genuine communist (roughly definable as an intensely proud person who proposes to enrich the common fund instead of to spunge on it) is superior to an ordinary joint stock capitalist precisely as an ordinary joint stock capitalist is superior to a pirate. Further, the Perfectionists were mightily shepherded by their chief Noyes, one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of Man’s blundering institutions. The existence of Noyes simplified the breeding problem for the Communists, the question as to what sort of man they should strive to breed being settled at once by the obvious desirability of breeding another Noyes.

But an experiment conducted by a handful of people, who, after thirty years of immunity from the unintentional child slaughter that goes on by ignorant parents in private homes, numbered only 300, could do very little except prove that Communists, under the guidance of a Superman “devoted exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God,” and caring no more for property and marriage than a Camberwell minister cares for Hindoo Caste or Suttee, might make a much better job of their lives than ordinary folk under the harrow of both these institutions. Yet their Superman himself admitted that this apparent success was only part of the abnormal phenomenon of his own occurrence; for when he came to the end of his powers through age, he himself guided and organized the voluntary relapse of the communists into marriage, capitalism, and customary private life, thus admitting that the real social solution was not what a casual Superman could persuade a picked company to do for him, but what a whole community of Supermen would do spontaneously. If Noyes had had to organize, not a few dozen Perfectionists, but the whole United States, America would have beaten him as completely as England beat Oliver Cromwell, France Napoleon, or Rome Julius Cæsar. Cromwell learnt by bitter experience that God himself cannot raise a people above its own level, and that even though you stir a nation to sacrifice all its appetites to its conscience, the result will still depend wholly on what sort of conscience the nation has got. Napoleon seems to have ended by regarding mankind as a troublesome pack of hounds only worth keeping for the sport of hunting with them. Cæsar’s capacity for fighting without hatred or resentment was defeated by the determination of his soldiers to kill their enemies in the field instead of taking them prisoners to be spared by Cæsar; and his civil supremacy was purchased by colossal bribery of the citizens of Rome. What great rulers cannot do, codes and religions cannot do. Man reads his own nature into every ordinance: if you devise a superhuman commandment so cunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he will denounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazy or totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much as they please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter the balance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of the tinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, as when the victory of the commercial caste over the military caste leads to the substitution of social boycotting and pecuniary damages for duelling. At certain moments there may even be a considerable material advance, as when the conquest of political power by the working class produces a better distribution of wealth through the simple action of the selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustment and reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed the very greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption that all are as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to find its way through the streets as he himself would. Until there is an England in which every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every man is a Napoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany in which every man is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no more improved by its heroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. The production of such nations is the only real change possible to us.

IV. MAN’S OBJECTION TO HIS OWN IMPROVEMENT

But would such a change be tolerated if Man must rise above himself to desire it? It would, through his misconception of its nature. Man does desire an ideal Superman with such energy as he can spare from his nutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute for it he can find. His least incompetent general is set up as an Alexander; his king is the first gentleman in the world; his Pope is a saint. He is never without an array of human idols who are all nothing but sham Supermen. That the real Superman will snap his superfingers at all Man’s present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice, religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present human endurance, is a thing that contemporary Man does not foresee: in fact he does not notice it when our casual Supermen do it in his very face. He actually does it himself every day without knowing it. He will therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what he calls Great Men or Heroes, because he will imagine them, not as true Supermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage, and infinite money.

The most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear of mankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be an interference with our pleasures and our romance. This fear, by putting on airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have not measured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with those degenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process. Even if this selective agency had not been invented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition of individual instincts. Not only do the bees and the ants satisfy their reproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itself successfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men and women. In short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelming as it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligible one.

The part played in evolution by the voluptuary will be the same as that already played by the glutton. The glutton, as the man with the strongest motive for nourishing himself, will always take more pains than his fellows to get food. When food is so difficult to get that only great exertions can secure a sufficient supply of it, the glutton’s appetite develops his cunning and enterprise to the utmost; and he becomes not only the best fed but the ablest man in the community. But in more hospitable climates, or where the social organization of the food supply makes it easy for a man to overeat, then the glutton eats himself out of health and finally out of existence. All other voluptuaries prosper and perish in the same way; way; and this is why the survival of the fittest means finally the survival of the self-controlled, because they alone can adapt themselves to the perpetual shifting of conditions produced by industrial progress.

V. THE POLITICAL NEED FOR THE SUPERMAN

The need for the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a political one. We have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of all the alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermen acting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen not always or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an eligible social position, but when they were forthcoming they could not, except for a short time and by morally suicidal coercive methods, impose superhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by mere force of “human nature,” government by consent of the governed has supplanted the old plan of governing the citizen as a public-schoolboy is governed.

Now we have yet to see the man who, having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems, or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently and economically. Only under despotisms and oligarchies has the Radical faith in “universal suffrage” as a political panacea arisen. It withers the moment it is exposed to practical trial, because Democracy cannot rise above the level of the human material of which its voters are made. Switzerland seems happy in comparison with Russia; but if Russia were as small as Switzerland, and had her social problems simplified in the same way by impregnable natural fortifications and a population educated by the same variety and intimacy of international intercourse, there might be little to choose between them. At all events Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected democratic republics, and France and the United States, which are avowedly independent democratic republics, are neither healthy, wealthy, nor wise; and they would be worse instead of better if their popular ministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms and duping popular ignorance. The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though in advanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than the King, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to be a successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions with prodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic who is cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chance unless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent of the mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that he catches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests of the majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizes intolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifies conspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: he muddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great political movement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organized: the unconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as an elephant breaks through a jungle; and the politicians make speeches about whatever happens in the process, which, with the best intentions, they do all in their power to prevent. Finally, when social aggregation arrives at a point demanding international organization before the demagogues and electorates have learnt how to manage even a country parish properly much less internationalize Constantinople, the whole political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and so forth.

To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we can have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracy is the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effort that Revolution demands.

VI. PRUDERY EXPLAINED

Why the bees should pamper their mothers whilst we pamper only our operatic prima donnas is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion of treating a mother is, not to increase her supply of food, but to cut it off by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month after her confinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parents as well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a great French writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige of parentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of this character, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to be translated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexes from any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must be sternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on public opinion, it would indicate an attitude of disgust and resentment towards the Life Force that could only arise in a diseased and moribund community in which Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler would be the typical woman. But it has no vital foundation at all. The prudery of the newspapers is, like the prudery of the dinner table, a mere difficulty of education and language. We are not taught to think decently on these subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language. We therefore have to declare them unfit for public discussion, because the only terms in which we can conduct the discussion are unfit for public use. Physiologists, who have a technical vocabulary at their disposal, find no difficulty; and masters of language who think decently can write popular stories like Zola’s Fecundity or Tolstoy’s Resurrection without giving the smallest offence to readers who can also think decently. But the ordinary modern journalist, who has never discussed such matters except in ribaldry, cannot write a simple comment on a divorce case without a conscious shamefulness or a furtive facetiousness that makes it impossible to read the comment aloud in company. All this ribaldry and prudery (the two are the same) does not mean that people do not feel decently on the subject: on the contrary, it is just the depth and seriousness of our feeling that makes its desecration by vile language and coarse humor intolerable; so that at last we cannot bear to have it spoken of at all because only one in a thousand can speak of it without wounding our self-respect, especially the self-respect of women. Add to the horrors of popular language the horrors of popular poverty. In crowded populations poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness; and in the absence of cleanliness many of the natural conditions of life become offensive and noxious, with the result that at last the association of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes so overpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in the labyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes a guilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; and Hedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. In short, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: the subjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest of subjects in spite of it.

VII. PROGRESS AN ILLUSION

Unfortunately the earnest people get drawn off the track of evolution by the illusion of progress. Any Socialist can convince us easily that the difference between Man as he is and Man as he might become, without further evolution, under millennial conditions of nutrition, environment, and training, is enormous. He can shew that inequality and iniquitous distribution of wealth and allotment of labor have arisen through an unscientific economic system, and that Man, faulty as he is, no more intended to establish any such ordered disorder than a moth intends to be burnt when it flies into a candle flame. He can shew that the difference between the grace and strength of the acrobat and the bent back of the rheumatic field laborer is a difference produced by conditions, not by nature. He can shew that many of the most detestable human vices are not radical, but are mere reactions of our institutions on our very virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, the Vegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics, the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the political program-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almost all their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils. To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the completion of all the suggested reforms and the levelling up of all men to the point attained already by the most highly nourished and cultivated in mind and body.

Here, then, as it seems to them, is an enormous field for the energy of the reformer. Here are many noble goals attainable by many of those paths up the Hill Difficulty along which great spirits love to aspire. Unhappily, the hill will never be climbed by Man as we know him. It need not be denied that if we all struggled bravely to the end of the reformers’ paths we should improve the world prodigiously. But there is no more hope in that If than in the equally plausible assurance that if the sky falls we shall all catch larks. We are not going to tread those paths: we have not sufficient energy. We do not desire the end enough: indeed in more cases we do not effectively desire it at all. Ask any man would he like to be a better man; and he will say yes, most piously. Ask him would he like to have a million of money; and he will say yes, most sincerely. But the pious citizen who would like to be a better man goes on behaving just as he did before. And the tramp who would like the million does not take the trouble to earn ten shillings: multitudes of men and women, all eager to accept a legacy of a million, live and die without having ever possessed five pounds at one time, although beggars have died in rags on mattresses stuffed with gold which they accumulated because they desired it enough to nerve them to get it and keep it. The economists who discovered that demand created supply soon had to limit the proposition to “effective demand,” which turned out, in the final analysis, to mean nothing more than supply itself; and this holds good in politics, morals, and all other departments as well: the actual supply is the measure of the effective demand; and the mere aspirations and professions produce nothing. No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization. Even these stages have never been attained by public spirit, but always by intolerant wilfulness and brute force. Take the Reform Bill of 1832 as an example of a conflict between two sections of educated Englishmen concerning a political measure which was as obviously necessary and inevitable as any political measure has ever been or is ever likely to be. It was not passed until the gentlemen of Birmingham had made arrangements to cut the throats of the gentlemen of St. James’s parish in due military form. It would not have been passed to this day if there had been no force behind it except the logic and public conscience of the Utilitarians. A despotic ruler with as much sense as Queen Elizabeth would have done better than the mob of grown-up Eton boys who governed us then by privilege, and who, since the introduction of practically Manhood Suffrage in 1884, now govern us at the request of proletarian Democracy.

At the present time we have, instead of the Utilitarians, the Fabian Society, with its peaceful, constitutional, moral, economical policy of Socialism, which needs nothing for its bloodless and benevolent realization except that the English people shall understand it and approve of it. But why are the Fabians well spoken of in circles where thirty years ago the word Socialist was understood as equivalent to cut-throat and incendiary? Not because the English have the smallest intention of studying or adopting the Fabian policy, but because they believe that the Fabians, by eliminating the element of intimidation from the Socialist agitation, have drawn the teeth of insurgent poverty and saved the existing order from the only method of attack it really fears. Of course, if the nation adopted the Fabian policy, it would be carried out by brute force exactly as our present property system is. It would become the law; and those who resisted it would be fined, sold up, knocked on the head by policemen, thrown into prison, and in the last resort “executed” just as they are when they break the present law. But as our proprietary class has no fear of that conversion taking place, whereas it does fear sporadic cut-throats and gunpowder plots, and strives with all its might to hide the fact that there is no moral difference whatever between the methods by which it enforces its proprietary rights and the method by which the dynamitard asserts his conception of natural human rights, the Fabian Society is patted on the back just as the Christian Social Union is, whilst the Socialist who says bluntly that a Social revolution can be made only as all other revolutions have been made, by the people who want it killing, coercing, and intimidating the people who dont want it, is denounced as a misleader of the people, and imprisoned with hard labor to shew him how much sincerity there is in the objection of his captors to physical force.

Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods, and return to those of the barricader, or adopt those of the dynamitard and the assassin? On the contrary, we are to recognize that both are fundamentally futile. It seems easy for the dynamitard to say “Have you not just admitted that nothing is ever conceded except to physical force? Did not Gladstone admit that the Irish Church was disestablished, not by the spirit of Liberalism, but by the explosion which wrecked Clerkenwell prison?” Well, we need not foolishly and timidly deny it. Let it be fully granted. Let us grant, further, that all this lies in the nature of things; that the most ardent Socialist, if he owns property, can by no means do otherwise than Conservative proprietors until property is forcibly abolished by the whole nation; nay, that ballots, and parliamentary divisions, in spite of their vain ceremony, of discussion, differ from battles only as the bloodless surrender of an outnumbered force in the field differs from Waterloo or Trafalgar. I make a present of all these admissions to the Fenian who collects money from thoughtless Irishmen in America to blow up Dublin Castle; to the detective who persuades foolish young workmen to order bombs from the nearest ironmonger and then delivers them up to penal servitude; to our military and naval commanders who believe, not in preaching, but in an ultimatum backed by plenty of lyddite; and, generally, to all whom it may concern. But of what use is it to substitute the way of the reckless and bloodyminded for the way of the cautious and humane? Is England any the better for the wreck of Clerkenwell prison, or Ireland for the disestablishment of the Irish Church? Is there the smallest reason to suppose that the nation which sheepishly let Charles and Laud and Strafford coerce it, gained anything because it afterwards, still more sheepishly, let a few strongminded Puritans, inflamed by the masterpieces of Jewish revolutionary literature, cut off the heads of the three? Suppose the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, and set a Fawkes dynasty permanently on the throne, would it have made any difference to the present state of the nation? The guillotine was used in France up to the limit of human endurance, both on Girondins and Jacobins. Fouquier Tinville followed Marie Antoinette to the scaffold; and Marie Antoinette might have asked the crowd, just as pointedly as Fouquier did, whether their bread would be any cheaper when her head was off. And what came of it all? The Imperial France of the Rougon Macquart family, and the Republican France of the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus case. Was the difference worth the guillotining of all those unlucky ladies and gentlemen, useless and mischievous as many of them were? Would any sane man guillotine a mouse to bring about such a result? Turn to Republican America. America has no Star Chamber, and no feudal barons. But it has Trusts; and it has millionaires whose factories, fenced in by live electric wires and defended by Pinkerton retainers with magazine rifles, would have made a Radical of Reginald Front de Boeuf. Would Washington or Franklin have lifted a finger in the cause of American Independence if they had foreseen its reality?

No: what Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon could not do with all the physical force and moral prestige of the State in their hands, cannot be done by enthusiastic criminals and lunatics. Even the Jews, who, from Moses to Marx and Lassalle, have inspired all the revolutions, have had to confess that, after all, the dog will return to his vomit and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire; and we may as well make up our minds that Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spite of “movements” and all revolutions, until his nature is changed. Until then, his early successes in building commercial civilizations (and such civilizations, Good Heavens!) are but preliminaries to the inevitable later stage, now threatening us, in which the passions which built the civilization become fatal instead of productive, just as the same qualities which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destruction when he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clear head and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments of selection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments of degeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generations relapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two when selection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lusty pugnacity and greed have ceased to act as selective agents and have begun to obstruct and destroy, rushes downwards and backwards with a suddenness that enables an observer to see with consternation the upward steps of many centuries retraced in a single lifetime. This has often occurred even within the period covered by history; and in every instance the turning point has been reached long before the attainment, or even the general advocacy on paper, of the levelling-up of the mass to the highest point attainable by the best nourished and cultivated normal individuals.

We must therefore frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is capable of net progress. There will always be an illusion of progress, because wherever we are conscious of an evil we remedy it, and therefore always seem to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that most of the evils we see are the effects, finally become acute, of long-unnoticed retrogressions; that our compromising remedies seldom fully recover the lost ground; above all, that on the lines along which we are degenerating, good has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone in the name of progress precisely as evil is undone and replaced by good on the lines along which we are evolving. This is indeed the Illusion of Illusions; for it gives us infallible and appalling assurance that if our political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformers and supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps in our progress. Let the Reformer, the Progressive, the Meliorist then reconsider himself and his eternal ifs and ans which never become pots and pans. Whilst Man remains what he is, there can be no progress beyond the point already attained and fallen headlong from at every attempt at civilization; and since even that point is but a pinnacle to which a few people cling in giddy terror above an abyss of squalor, mere progress should no longer charm us.

VIII. THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION

After all, the progress illusion is not so very subtle. We begin by reading the satires of our fathers’ contemporaries; and we conclude (usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things of the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently produced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors to oppressed. The poor man is given a vote by the Liberals in the hope that he will cast it for his emancipators. The hope is not fulfilled; but the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men for debt ceases; Factory Acts are passed to mitigate sweating; schooling is made free and compulsory; sanitary by-laws are multiplied; public steps are taken to house the masses decently; the bare-footed get boots; rags become rare; and bathrooms and pianos, smart tweeds and starched collars, reach numbers of people who once, as “the unsoaped,” played the Jew’s harp or the accordion in moleskins and belchers. Some of these changes are gains: some of them are losses. Some of them are not changes at all: all of them are merely the changes that money makes. Still, they produce an illusion of bustling progress; and the reading class infers from them that the abuses of the early Victorian period no longer exist except as amusing pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment we look for a reform due to character and not to money, to statesmanship and not to interest or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, we remembered the maladministration and incompetence revealed by the Crimean War as part of a bygone state of things until the South African war shewed that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbons who have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly recovered from the fruitless irritation of this discovery when it transpired that the officers’ mess of our most select regiment included a flogging club presided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked some disgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but no surprise at the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor and virtue, of personal courage and self-respect, in the front rank of our chivalry. In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy and idolatry which encouraged Charles I. to undervalue the Puritan revolt of the XVII century had been long outgrown; but it has needed nothing but favorable circumstances to revive, with added abjectness to compensate for its lost piety. We have relapsed into disputes about transubstantiation at the very moment when the discovery of the wide prevalence of theophagy as a tribal custom has deprived us of the last excuse for believing that our official religious rites differ in essentials from those of barbarians. The Christian doctrine of the uselessness of punishment and the wickedness of revenge has not, in spite of its simple common sense, found a single convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing to the masses but a sensational public execution which is made an excuse for other executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief’s life minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remains of Cromwell two centuries ago. We have demanded the decapitation of the Chinese Boxer princes as any Tartar would have done; and our military and naval expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages for knocking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperial routine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as can be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to extort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst these pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to twenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence will be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden the notes he forged. And no comment whatever is made, either on this or on a telegram from the seat of war in Somaliland mentioning that certain information has been given by a prisoner of war “under punishment.” Even if these reports are false, the fact that they are accepted without protest as indicating a natural and proper course of public conduct shews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III. at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer indulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic English officer did in South Africa. The incidents of the white invasion of Africa in search of ivory, gold, diamonds, and sport, have proved that the modern European is the same beast of prey that formerly marched to the conquest of new worlds under Alexander, Antony, and Pizarro. Parliaments and vestries are just what they were when Cromwell suppressed them and Dickens derided them. The democratic politician remains exactly as Plato described him; the physician is still the credulous impostor and petulant scientific coxcomb whom Molière ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the landowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the mantrap of Rhampsinitis improves on it by barbed wire; the modern gentleman who is too lazy to daub his face with vermilion as a symbol of bravery employs a laundress to daub his shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; we shake our heads at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy with soot and foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water, in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used and believed in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go through incantations with burning sulphur (which they know to be useless) because the people believe in it as devoutly as the Italian peasant believes in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius; and straightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments, there being nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket at the police station and the minister on the treasury bench, the editor in the newspaper office, the city magnate advertizing bicycle tires that do not side-slip, the clergyman subscribing the thirty-nine articles, and the vivisector who pledges his knightly honor that no animal operated on in the physiological laboratory suffers the slightest pain. Hypocrisy is at its worst; for we not only persecute bigotedly but sincerely in the name of the cure-mongering witchcraft we do believe in, but callously and hypocritically in the name of the Evangelical creed that our rulers privately smile at as the Italian patricians of the fifth century smiled at Jupiter and Venus. Sport is, as it has always been, murderous excitement; the impulse to slaughter is universal; and museums are set up throughout the country to encourage little children and elderly gentlemen to make collections of corpses preserved in alcohol, and to steal birds’ eggs and keep them as the red Indian used to keep scalps. Coercion with the lash is as natural to an Englishman as it was to Solomon spoiling Rehoboam: indeed, the comparison is unfair to the Jews in view of the facts that the Mosaic law forbade more than forty lashes in the name of humanity, and that floggings of a thousand lashes were inflicted on English soldiers in the XVIII and XIX centuries, and would be inflicted still but for the change in the balance of political power between the military caste and the commercial classes and the proletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still an institution in the public school, in the military prison, on the training ship, and in that school of littleness called the home. The lascivious clamor of the flagellomaniac for more of it, constant as the clamor for more insolence, more war, and lower rates, is tolerated and even gratified because, having no moral ends in view, we have sense enough to see that nothing but brute coercion can impose our selfish will on others. Cowardice is universal; patriotism, public opinion, parental duty, discipline, religion, morality, are only fine names for intimidation; and cruelty, gluttony, and credulity keep cowardice in countenance. We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women’s hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.

Now please observe that these are not exceptional developments of our admitted vices, deplored and prayed against by all good men. Not a word has been said here of the excesses of our Neros, of whom we have the full usual percentage. With the exception of the few military examples, which are mentioned mainly to shew that the education and standing of a gentleman, reinforced by the strongest conventions of honor, esprit de corps, publicity and responsibility, afford no better guarantees of conduct than the passions of a mob, the illustrations given above are commonplaces taken from the daily practices of our best citizens, vehemently defended in our newspapers and in our pulpits. The very humanitarians who abhor them are stirred to murder by them: the dagger of Brutus and Ravaillac is still active in the hands of Caserio and Luccheni; and the pistol has come to its aid in the hands of Guiteau and Czolgosz. Our remedies are still limited to endurance or assassination; and the assassin is still judicially assassinated on the principle that two blacks make a white. The only novelty is in our methods: through the discovery of dynamite the overloaded musket of Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh has been superseded by the bomb; but Ravachol’s heart burns just as Hamilton’s did. The world will not bear thinking of to those who know what it is, even with the largest discount for the restraints of poverty on the poor and cowardice on the rich.

All that can be said for us is that people must and do live and let live up to a certain point. Even the horse, with his docked tail and bitted jaw, finds his slavery mitigated by the fact that a total disregard of his need for food and rest would put his master to the expense of buying a new horse every second day; for you cannot work a horse to death and then pick up another one for nothing, as you can a laborer. But this natural check on inconsiderate selfishness is itself checked, partly by our shortsightedness, and partly by deliberate calculation; so that beside the man who, to his own loss, will shorten his horse’s life in mere stinginess, we have the tramway company which discovers actuarially that though a horse may live from 24 to 40 years, yet it pays better to work him to death in 4 and then replace him by a fresh victim. And human slavery, which has reached its worst recorded point within our own time in the form of free wage labor, has encountered the same personal and commercial limits to both its aggravation and its mitigation. Now that the freedom of wage labor has produced a scarcity of it, as in South Africa, the leading English newspaper and the leading English weekly review have openly and without apology demanded a return to compulsory labor: that is, to the methods by which, as we believe, the Egyptians built the pyramids. We know now that the crusade against chattel slavery in the XIX century succeeded solely because chattel slavery was neither the most effective nor the least humane method of labor exploitation; and the world is now feeling its way towards a still more effective system which shall abolish the freedom of the worker without again making his exploiter responsible for him.

Still, there is always some mitigation: there is the fear of revolt; and there are the effects of kindliness and affection. Let it be repeated therefore that no indictment is here laid against the world on the score of what its criminals and monsters do. The fires of Smithfield and of the Inquisition were lighted by earnestly pious people, who were kind and good as kindness and goodness go. And when a negro is dipped in kerosene and set on fire in America at the present time, he is not a good man lynched by ruffians: he is a criminal lynched by crowds of respectable, charitable, virtuously indignant, high-minded citizens, who, though they act outside the law, are at least more merciful than the American legislators and judges who not so long ago condemned men to solitary confinement for periods, not of five months, as our own practice is, but of five years and more. The things that our moral monsters do may be left out of account with St. Bartholomew massacres and other momentary outbursts of social disorder. Judge us by the admitted and respected practice of our most reputable circles; and, if you know the facts and are strong enough to look them in the face, you must admit that unless we are replaced by a more highly evolved animal — in short, by the Superman — the world must remain a den of dangerous animals among whom our few accidental supermen, our Shakespears, Goethes, Shelleys, and their like, must live as precariously as lion tamers do, taking the humor of their situation, and the dignity of their superiority, as a set-off to the horror of the one and the loneliness of the other.

IX. THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

It may be said that though the wild beast breaks out in Man and casts him back momentarily into barbarism under the excitement of war and crime, yet his normal life is higher than the normal life of his forefathers. This view is very acceptable to Englishmen, who always lean sincerely to virtue’s side as long as it costs them nothing either in money or in thought. They feel deeply the injustice of foreigners, who allow them no credit for this conditional highmindedness. But there is no reason to suppose that our ancestors were less capable of it than we are. To all such claims for the existence of a progressive moral evolution operating visibly from grandfather to grandson, there is the conclusive reply that a thousand years of such evolution would have produced enormous social changes, of which the historical evidence would be overwhelming. But not Macaulay himself, the most confident of Whig meliorists, can produce any such evidence that will bear cross-examination. Compare our conduct and our codes with those mentioned contemporarily in such ancient scriptures and classics as have come down to us, and you will find no jot of ground for the belief that any moral progress whatever has been made in historic time, in spite of all the romantic attempts of historians to reconstruct the past on that assumption. Within that time it has happened to nations as to private families and individuals that they have flourished and decayed, repented and hardened their hearts, submitted and protested, acted and reacted, oscillated between natural and artificial sanitation (the oldest house in the world, unearthed the other day in Crete, has quite modern sanitary arrangements), and rung a thousand changes on the different scales of income and pressure of population, firmly believing all the time that mankind was advancing by leaps and bounds because men were constantly busy. And the mere chapter of accidents has left a small accumulation of chance discoveries, such as the wheel, the arch, the safety pin, gunpowder, the magnet, the Voltaic pile and so forth: things which, unlike the gospels and philosophic treatises of the sages, can be usefully understood and applied by common men; so that steam locomotion is possible without a nation of Stephensons, although national Christianity is impossible without a nation of Christs. But does any man seriously believe that the chauffeur who drives a motor car from Paris to Berlin is a more highly evolved man than the charioteer of Achilles, or that a modern Prime Minister is a more enlightened ruler than Cæsar because he rides a tricycle, writes his dispatches by the electric light, and instructs his stockbroker through the telephone?

Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about Progress: Man, as he is, never will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any of its quackeries, political, scientific, educational, religious, or artistic. What is likely to happen when this conviction gets into the minds of the men whose present faith in these illusions is the cement of our social system, can be imagined only by those who know how suddenly a civilization which has long ceased to think (or in the old phrase, to watch and pray) can fall to pieces when the vulgar belief in its hypocrisies and impostures can no longer hold out against its failures and scandals. When religious and ethical formulae become so obsolete that no man of strong mind can believe them, they have also reached the point at which no man of high character will profess them; and from, that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began as a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a nation that needs remaking.

Our only hope, then, is in evolution. We must replace the man by the superman. It is frightful for the citizen, as the years pass him, to see his own contemporaries so exactly reproduced by the younger generation, that his companions of thirty years ago have their counterparts in every city crowd, where he had to check himself repeatedly in the act of saluting as an old friend some young man to whom he is only an elderly stranger. All hope of advance dies in his bosom as he watches them: he knows that they will do just what their fathers did, and that the few voices which will still, as always before, exhort them to do something else and be something better, might as well spare their breath to cool their porridge (if they can get any). Men like Ruskin and Carlyle will preach to Smith and Brown for the sake of preaching, just as St Francis preached to the birds and St Anthony to the fishes. But Smith and Brown, like the fishes and birds, remain as they are; and poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessary for their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last, like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does not effectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman.

And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist’s dream of “the socialization of the means of production and exchange,” of the Positivist’s dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethical professor’s, legislator’s, educator’s dream of putting commandments and codes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on a horse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor, and pretending that his nature has been changed. The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth.

X. THE METHOD

As to the method, what can be said as yet except that where there is a will, there is a way? If there be no will, we are lost. That is a possibility for our crazy little empire, if not for the universe; and as such possibilities are not to be entertained without despair, we must, whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption that we have still energy enough to not only will to live, but to will to live better. That may mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seat in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost of direct State experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achieve successful results. It may mean a private society or a chartered company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr Graham Wallas has already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the Sterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administratively convenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding point of view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which the drift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies. One thing at least is clear to begin with. If a woman can, by careful selection of a father, and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs, and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it. Whether she be financed in the undertaking by herself, or by the father, or by a speculative capitalist, or by a new department of, say, the Royal Dublin Society, or (as at present) by the War Office maintaining her “on the strength” and authorizing a particular soldier to marry her, or by a local authority under a by-law directing that women may under certain circumstances have a year’s leave of absence on full salary, or by the central government, does not matter provided the result be satisfactory.

It is a melancholy fact that as the vast majority of women and their husbands have, under existing circumstances, not enough nourishment, no capital, no credit, and no knowledge of science or business, they would, if the State would pay for birth as it now pays for death, be exploited by joint stock companies for dividends, just as they are in ordinary industries. Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our present reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when an ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let them loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty. In our present happy-go-lucky industrial disorder, all the human products, successful or not, would have to be thrown on the labor market; but the unsuccessful ones would not entitle the company to a bounty and so would be a dead loss to it. The practical commercial difficulty would be the uncertainty and the cost in time and money of the first experiments. Purely commercial capital would not touch such heroic operations during the experimental stage; and in any case the strength of mind needed for so momentous a new departure could not be fairly expected from the Stock Exchange. It will have to be handled by statesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracy that statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applying their suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents. The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organization strong enough to impose respect upon the State.

The novelty of any such experiment, however, is only in the scale of it. In one conspicuous case, that of royalty, the State does already select the parents on purely political grounds; and in the peerage, though the heir to a dukedom is legally free to marry a dairymaid, yet the social pressure on him to confine his choice to politically and socially eligible mates is so overwhelming that he is really no more free to marry the dairymaid than George IV was to marry Mrs Fitzherbert; and such a marriage could only occur as a result of extraordinary strength of character on the part of the dairymaid acting upon extraordinary weakness on the part of the duke. Let those who think the whole conception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselves why George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinker could marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did not matter a rap politically whom the tinker married, whereas it mattered very much whom the king married. The way in which all considerations of the king’s personal rights, of the claims of the heart, of the sanctity of the marriage oath, and of romantic morality crumpled up before this political need shews how negligible all these apparently irresistible prejudices are when they come into conflict with the demand for quality in our rulers. We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier, whose marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlled with a view solely to military efficiency.

Well, nowadays it is not the King that rules, but the tinker. Dynastic wars are no longer feared, dynastic alliances no longer valued. Marriages in royal families are becoming rapidly less political, and more popular, domestic, and romantic. If all the kings in Europe were made as free to-morrow as King Cophetua, nobody but their aunts and chamberlains would feel a moment’s anxiety as to the consequences. On the other hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker’s marriage has been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife’s health in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds of his children out of his hands and put them into those of our State schoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishment independent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand the country over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff can neither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidder of bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twenty years’ practical democratic experience who believes in the political adequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves and desires a pedigree. And in that he is right. King Demos must be bred like all other Kings; and with Must there is no arguing. It is idle for an individual writer to carry so great a matter further in a pamphlet. A conference on the subject is the next step needed. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believing that they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work into which they can build the best of themselves before their refuse is thrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace.

[Transcriber’s Note: Shaw promoted spelling reform of his own invention. His spelling reform included not using apostrophes for contractions, thus this text has ‘dont’ instead of ‘don’t’ and -iz- instead of -is- even in words which standard English, both British or American, spells with -is-, for example: partizan, artizan. He had the goal of making spelling more phonetic. He spelled it ‘Shakespear’. He spelled ‘Caesar’ with an ae ligature. He used diacritical on French words and names.]

MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS

THE GOLDEN RULE

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.

Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

IDOLATRY

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.

The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.

When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant’s prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.

He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.

ROYALTY

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.

The Court is the servant’s hall of the sovereign.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.

DEMOCRACY

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.

Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.

IMPERIALISM

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.

Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.

A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, “cuts the painter” and breaks up the Empire.

LIBERTY AND EQUALITY

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.

The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.

EDUCATION

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.

The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character.

At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge. If a horse could wait as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths would all be college dons.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the mother of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.

MARRIAGE

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.

The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer.

The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the amoristic sentiment of mankind.

The artificial sterilization of marriage makes it possible for marriage to fulfill its accidental function whilst neglecting its essential one.

The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality.

Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one. Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions.

The minimum of national celibacy (ascertained by dividing the number of males in the community by the number of females, and taking the quotient as the number of wives or husbands permitted to each person) is secured in England (where the quotient is 1) by the institution of monogamy.

The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is
Purity.

Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase “Que Messieurs les Assassins commencent!”

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating him. The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same process.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

TITLES

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.

Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them.

HONOR

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.

Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.

PROPERTY

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

SERVANTS

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.

The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.

The perfect servant, when his master makes humane advances to him, feels that his existence is threatened, and hastens to change his place.

Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more dependent of the two.

A man enjoys what he uses, not what his servants use.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

Domestic servants, by making spoiled children of their masters, are forced to intimidate them in order to be able to live with them.

In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.

HOW TO BEAT CHILDREN

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do comparatively little harm. No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he suffers more acutely than the fox at the death. Remember that even in childbeating there is the sportsman’s way and the cad’s way.

RELIGION

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

VIRTUES AND VICES

No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.

Economy is the art of making the most of life.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

FAIRPLAY

The love of fairplay is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s.

GREATNESS

Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.

If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.

We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS, ART AND RICHES

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.

Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness and Beauty.

Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and
Beauty.

He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.

The tyranny that forbids you to make the road with pick and shovel is worse than that which prevents you from lolling along it in a carriage and pair.

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.

In his efforts to escape from ugliness and unhappiness the rich man intensifies both. Every new yard of West End creates a new acre of East End.

The XIX century was the Age of Faith in Fine Art. The results are before us.

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN

The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility.

A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.

The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism.

No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.

A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. Such combatants are patriots in the same sense as two dogs fighting for a bone are lovers of animals.

The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.

He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.

MODERATION

Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

REASON

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

DECENCY

Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence.

EXPERIENCE

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

TIME’S REVENGES

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that they are our cousins.

The thieves had their revenge when Marx convicted the bourgeoisie of theft.

GOOD INTENTIONS

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.

All men mean well.

NATURAL RIGHTS

The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights, compels himself to take his own for granted.

The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.

FAUTE DE MIEUX

In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as “the pretty Miss So and So.” My aunt rebuked me by saying “Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.”

No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespear.

CHARITY

Charity is the most mischievous sort of pruriency.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labor.

Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.

FAME

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

DISCIPLINE

Mutiny Acts are needed only by officers who command without authority.
Divine right needs no whip.

WOMEN IN THE HOME

Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.

CIVILIZATION

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.

GAMBLING

The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table.

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.

THE SOCIAL QUESTION

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

STRAY SAYINGS

We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good.
What would he say now?

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of
Christianity to savagery.

No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.

Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind.

Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.

In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.

The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

When we learn to sing that Britons never will be masters we shall make an end of slavery.

Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome. Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste. Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the God of rascals.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.

Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.

Political Economy and Social Economy are amusing intellectual games; but
Vital Economy is the Philosopher Stone.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves.

Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.

Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.

Make your cross your crutch; but when you see another man do it, beware of him.

SELF-SACRIFICE

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

THE END

The Criticism

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW by G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

Introduction to the First Edition

The Problem of a Preface

The Irishman

The Puritan

The Progressive

The Critic

The Dramatist

The Philosopher

Introduction to the First Edition

Most people either say that they agree with Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I am the only person who understands him, and I do not agree with him.

G. K. C.

The Problem of a Preface

A peculiar difficulty arrests the writer of this rough study at the very start. Many people know Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man who would write a very long preface even to a very short play. And there is truth in the idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of person. He always gives the explanation before the incident; but so, for the matter of that, does the Gospel of St. John. For Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics, Christian and heathen (and Shaw is best described as a heathen mystic), the philosophy of facts is anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the beginning was the Word.

This produces upon many minds an impression of needless preparation and a kind of bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the very rapidity of such a man’s mind makes him seem slow in getting to the point. It is positively because he is quick-witted that he is long-winded. A quick eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly something like this: “The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.” Now a man like Mr. Shaw, who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say something like: “The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to art — that is what I mean by art — may have saved it from some evils (remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution — of which I have my own opinion — involved morality, which I will define for you in a minute.” That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

Now the same difficulty which affects the work of Bernard Shaw affects also any book about him. There is an unavoidable artistic necessity to put the preface before the play; that is, there is a necessity to say something of what Bernard Shaw’s experience means before one even says what it was. We have to mention what he did when we have already explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, his life consists of fairly conventional incidents, and might easily fall under fairly conventional phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin clerk or Manchester Socialist or London author. If I touch on the man’s life before his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with his work it is most important. In short, one could scarcely know what Shaw’s doings meant unless one knew what he meant by them. This difficulty in mere order and construction has puzzled me very much. I am going to overcome it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way which affects me as most sincere. Before I write even a slight suggestion of his relation to the stage, I am going to write of three soils or atmospheres out of which that relation grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw I will write of the three great influences upon Shaw. They were all three there before he was born, yet each one of them is himself and a very vivid portrait of him from one point of view. I have called these three traditions: “The Irishman,” “The Puritan,” and “The Progressive.” I do not see how this prefatory theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply said, for instance, that Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, the impression produced on the reader might be remote from my thought and, what is more important, from Shaw’s. People might think, for instance, that I meant that he was “irresponsible.” That would throw out the whole plan of these pages, for if there is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, again, if I simply called him a Puritan, it might mean something about nude statues or “prudes on the prowl.” Or if I called him a Progressive, it might be supposed to mean that he votes for Progressives at the County Council election, which I very much doubt. I have no other course but this: of briefly explaining such matters as Shaw himself might explain them. Some fastidious persons may object to my thus putting the moral in front of the fable. Some may imagine in their innocence that they already understand the word Puritan or the yet more mysterious word Irishman. The only person, indeed, of whose approval I feel fairly certain is Mr. Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many introductions.

The Irishman

The English public has commonly professed, with a kind of pride, that it cannot understand Mr. Bernard Shaw. There are many reasons for it which ought to be adequately considered in such a book as this. But the first and most obvious reason is the mere statement that George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why Englishmen cannot understand Mr. Shaw is that Englishmen have never taken the trouble to understand Irishmen. They will sometimes be generous to Ireland; but never just to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they will speak for Ireland; but they will not hear Ireland speak. All the real amiability which most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards Irishmen is lavished upon a class of Irishmen which unfortunately does not exist. The Irishman of the English farce, with his brogue, his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted irresponsibility, is a man who ought to have been thoroughly pampered with praise and sympathy, if he had only existed to receive them. Unfortunately, all the time that we were creating a comic Irishman in fiction, we were creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never perhaps has there been a situation of such excruciating cross-purposes even in the three-act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a sort of warm and weak fidelity, the more he regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The more the oppressor looked down with an amiable pity, the more did the oppressed look down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. But, indeed, it is needless to say that such comic cross-purposes could be put into a play; they have been put into a play. They have been put into what is perhaps the most real of Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays, John Bull’s Other Island.

It is somewhat absurd to imagine that any one who has not read a play by Mr. Shaw will be reading a book about him. But if it comes to that it is (as I clearly perceive) absurd to be writing a book about Mr. Bernard Shaw at all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man whose whole object through life has been to explain himself. But even in nonsense there is a need for logic and consistency; therefore let us proceed on the assumption that when I say that all Mr. Shaw’s blood and origin may be found in John Bull’s Other Island, some reader may answer that he does not know the play. Besides, it is more important to put the reader right about England and Ireland even than to put him right about Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book about Shaw, I can only assure him that I will reasonably, and at proper intervals, remember the fact.

Mr. Shaw himself said once, “I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire.” Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made the remark. It is in fact a bull, a conscious bull. A bull is only a paradox which people are too stupid to understand. It is the rapid summary of something which is at once so true and so complex that the speaker who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, has not the slow patience to explain it. Mystical dogmas are much of this kind. Dogmas are often spoken of as if they were signs of the slowness or endurance of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning — an instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom foolishly, like the Saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the Dons.

This is the truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls; it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of that curt remark about Ireland and Yorkshire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had really attempted to set out all the sensible stages of his joke, the sentence would have run something like this: “That I am an Irishman is a fact of psychology which I can trace in many of the things that come out of me, my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness and my distrust of mere pleasure. But the thing must be tested by what comes from me; do not try on me the dodge of asking where I came from, how many batches of three hundred and sixty-five days my family was in Ireland. Do not play any games on me about whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to anybody else. Do not start any drivelling discussions about whether the word Shaw is German or Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. You know you are human; I know I am Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and temper of society; and I know that all sorts of people of all sorts of blood live in that society and by that society; and are therefore Irish. You can take your books of anthropology to hell or to Oxford.” Thus gently, elaborately and at length, Mr. Shaw would have explained his meaning, if he had thought it worth his while. As he did not he merely flung the symbolic, but very complete sentence, “I am a typical Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire.”

What then is the colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the “Land of Saints”; and which still might give it a claim to be called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me, “There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than Christianity.” Everyone who has read Shaw’s play upon Ireland will remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw’s work will recognize it in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ. However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all. He could not understand the intellectual surrender of the snob. He is perhaps a defective character; but he is not a mixed one. All the virtues he has are heroic virtues. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is admirable.

But in any case this Irish innocence is peculiar and fundamental in him; and strange as it may sound, I think that his innocence has a great deal to do with his suggestions of sexual revolution. Such a man is comparatively audacious in theory because he is comparatively clean in thought. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt, with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the healthiest men may often erect a law to watch them, just as the healthiest sleepers may want an alarum clock to wake them up. However this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all the virtues and all the powers that go with this original quality in Ireland. One of them is a sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and somewhat inhuman daintiness of taste which sometimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as though it were mud. Of the many sincere things Mr. Shaw has said he never said a more sincere one than when he stated he was a vegetarian, not because eating meat was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. It would be fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a vegetarian because he comes of a race of vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to accept the simple life in the shape of potatoes. But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness in such matters is one of the allotropic forms of the Irish purity; it is to the virtue of Father Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has, of course, the quality common to all special and unbalanced types of virtue, that you never know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. Shaw probably means when he says that it is disgusting to feast off dead bodies, or to cut lumps off what was once a living thing. But I can never know at what moment he may not feel in the same way that it is disgusting to mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the earth those miserable mandrakes which cannot even groan. There is no natural limit to this rush and riotous gallop of refinement.

But it is not this physical and fantastic purity which I should chiefly count among the legacies of the old Irish morality. A much more important gift is that which all the saints declared to be the reward of chastity: a queer clearness of the intellect, like the hard clearness of a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw possesses; in such degree that at certain times the hardness seems rather clearer than the clearness. But so it does in all the most typical Irish characters and Irish attitudes of mind. This is probably why Irishmen succeed so much in such professions as require a certain crystalline realism, especially about results. Such professions are the soldier and the lawyer; these give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. If you have composed a bad opera you may persuade yourself that it is a good one; if you have carved a bad statue you can think yourself better than Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have got him off.

There must be some sense in every popular prejudice, even about foreigners. And the English people certainly have somehow got an impression and a tradition that the Irishman is genial, unreasonable, and sentimental. This legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has two roots; there are two elements in the Irish which made the mistake possible. First, the very logic of the Irishman makes him regard war or revolution as extra-logical, an ultima ratio which is beyond reason. When fighting a powerful enemy he no more worries whether all his charges are exact or all his attitudes dignified than a soldier worries whether a cannon-ball is shapely or a plan of campaign picturesque. He is aggressive; he attacks. He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland when he is really carrying the war into Africa — or England. A Dublin tradesman printed his name and trade in archaic Erse on his cart. He knew that hardly anybody could read it; he did it to annoy. In his position I think he was quite right. When one is oppressed it is a mark of chivalry to hurt oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But the English (never having had a real revolution since the Middle Ages) find it very hard to understand this steady passion for being a nuisance, and mistake it for mere whimsical impulsiveness and folly. When an Irish member holds up the whole business of the House of Commons by talking of his bleeding country for five or six hours, the simple English members suppose that he is a sentimentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful realist who alone remains unaffected by the sentimentalism of the House of Commons. The Irishman is neither poet enough nor snob enough to be swept away by those smooth social and historical tides and tendencies which carry Radicals and Labour members comfortably off their feet. He goes on asking for a thing because he wants it; and he tries really to hurt his enemies because they are his enemies. This is the first of the queer confusions which make the hard Irishman look soft. He seems to us wild and unreasonable because he is really much too reasonable to be anything but fierce when he is fighting.

In all this it will not be difficult to see the Irishman in Bernard Shaw. Though personally one of the kindest men in the world, he has often written really in order to hurt; not because he hated any particular men (he is hardly hot and animal enough for that), but because he really hated certain ideas even unto slaying. He provokes; he will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit back. At least he always challenges, like a true Green Islander. An even stronger instance of this national trait can be found in another eminent Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philosophy (which was vile) was a philosophy of ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; yet, being Irish, he could not help putting it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. He preached his softness with hard decision; he praised pleasure in the words most calculated to give pain. This armed insolence, which was the noblest thing about him, was also the Irish thing; he challenged all comers. It is a good instance of how right popular tradition is even when it is most wrong, that the English have perceived and preserved this essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. It is true that the Irishman says, “Who will tread on the tail of my coat?”

But there is a second cause which creates the English fallacy that the Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic, so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are only fields. An Irishman may like romance, but he will say, to use a frequent Shavian phrase, that it is “only romance.” A great part of the English energy in fiction arises from the very fact that their fiction half deceives them. If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling’s short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant’s short stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed. They were taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling’s rather morbid version of Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book would be almost impossible in Ireland, because the Irish mind distinguishes between life and literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw himself summed this up as he sums up so many things in a compact sentence which he uttered in conversation with the present writer, “An Irishman has two eyes.” He meant that with one eye an Irishman saw that a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime, and with the other eye that after all it was a dream. Both the humour and the sentiment of an Englishman cause him to wink the other eye. Two other small examples will illustrate the English mistake. Take, for instance, that noble survival from a nobler age of politics — I mean Irish oratory. The English imagine that Irish politicians are so hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. Thus a man makes a speech as a man plays a violin, not necessarily without feeling, but chiefly because he knows how to do it. Another instance of the same thing is that quality which is always called the Irish charm. The Irish are agreeable, not because they are particularly emotional, but because they are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; as much of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone.

Lastly, there is one general truth about Ireland which may very well have influenced Bernard Shaw from the first; and almost certainly influenced him for good. Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in or with what universe a man lives in or with how he is to manage to live in either. But they are not concerned with which of two wealthy cousins in the same governing class shall be allowed to bring in the same Parish Councils Bill; there is no party system in Ireland. The party system in England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts. The party system is arranged on the same principle as a three-legged race: the principle that union is not always strength and is never activity. Nobody asks for what he really wants. But in Ireland the loyalist is just as ready to throw over the King as the Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each will throw over anything except the thing that he wants. Hence it happens that even the follies or the frauds of Irish politics are more genuine as symptoms and more honourable as symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the prosperous Parliamentarian. The very lies of Dublin and Belfast are truer than the truisms of Westminster. They have an object; they refer to a state of things. There was more honesty, in the sense of actuality, about Piggott’s letters than about the Times’ leading articles on them. When Parnell said calmly before the Royal Commission that he had made a certain remark “in order to mislead the House” he proved himself to be one of the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary British statesman would never have made the confession, because he would have grown quite accustomed to committing the crime. The party system itself implies a habit of stating something other than the actual truth. A Leader of the House means a Misleader of the House.

Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; and he carries that freedom upon his face. Whether what he heard in boyhood was violent Nationalism or virulent Unionism, it was at least something which wanted a certain principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be in office. Of him the great Gilbertian generalisation is untrue; he was not born either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He did not, like most of us, pass through the stage of being a good party man on his way to the difficult business of being a good man. He came to stare at our general elections as a Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant sentimentalities and to some of its legitimate sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England as an alien, as an invader, as a conqueror. In other words, he entered England as an Irishman.

The Puritan

It has been said in the first section that Bernard Shaw draws from his own nation two unquestionable qualities, a kind of intellectual chastity, and the fighting spirit. He is so much of an idealist about his ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his methods. His soul has (in short) the virginity and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not even a typical one. He is a certain separated and peculiar kind of Irishman, which is not easy to describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen have referred to him contemptuously as a “West Briton.” But this is really unfair; for whatever Mr. Shaw’s mental faults may be, the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase like “Briton” is certainly not one of them. It would be much nearer the truth to put the thing in the bold and bald terms of the old Irish song, and to call him “The anti-Irish Irishman.” But it is only fair to say that the description is far less of a monstrosity than the anti-English Englishman would be; because the Irish are so much stronger in self-criticism. Compared with the constant self-flattery of the English, nearly every Irishman is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again popular phraseology hits the right word. This fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant wedge which is driven into the country at Dublin and elsewhere is a thing not easy superficially to summarise in any term. It cannot be described merely as a minority; for a minority means the part of a nation which is conquered. But this thing means something that conquers, and is not entirely part of a nation. Nor can one even fall back on the phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy implies at least some chorus of snobbish enthusiasm; it implies that some at least are willingly led by the leaders, if only towards vulgarity and vice. There is only one word for the minority in Ireland, and that is the word that public phraseology has found; I mean the word “Garrison.” The Irish are essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived inside “The Castle.” They have all the virtues and limitations of a literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot upon their native soil.

We have considered Bernard Shaw as an Irishman. The next step is to consider him as an exile from Ireland living in Ireland; that, some people would say, is a paradox after his own heart. But, indeed, such a complication is not really difficult to expound. The great religion and the great national tradition which have persisted for so many centuries in Ireland have encouraged these clean and cutting elements; but they have encouraged many other things which serve to balance them. The Irish peasant has these qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ireland, a strange purity and a strange pugnacity. But the Irish peasant also has qualities which are common to all peasants, and his nation has qualities that are common to all healthy nations. I mean chiefly the things that most of us absorb in childhood; especially the sense of the supernatural and the sense of the natural; the love of the sky with its infinity of vision, and the love of the soil with its strict hedges and solid shapes of ownership. But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the greatest of all his paradoxes and the one of which he is unconscious. These one or two plain truths which quite stupid people learn at the beginning are exactly the one or two truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn even at the end. He is a daring pilgrim who has set out from the grave to find the cradle. He started from points of view which no one else was clever enough to discover, and he is at last discovering points of view which no one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. This absence of the red-hot truisms of boyhood; this sense that he is not rooted in the ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a great deal to do with his position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; musical as he is I doubt if he would consent to sing. All this has something in it of a tree with its roots in the air. The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is to be an April Fool. When people asked Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Tercentenary, he wrote back with characteristic contempt: “I do not keep my own birthday, and I cannot see why I should keep Shakespeare’s.” I think that if Mr. Shaw had always kept his own birthday he would be better able to understand Shakespeare’s birthday — and Shakespeare’s poetry.

In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard; Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist’s opinion) winning and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third instance of this particular type of educated and Protestant Irishman, sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive, alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also a bewildered England tried the desperate dodge of saying that he was not Irish at all. As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law-abiding Englishman would ever have defied all the drawing-rooms by disdaining the House of Commons! Despite the difference between taciturnity and a torrent of fluency there is much in common also between Shaw and Parnell; something in common even in the figures of the two men, in the bony bearded faces with their almost Satanic self-possession. It will not do to pretend that none of these three men belong to their own nation; but it is true that they belonged to one special, though recurring, type of that nation. And they all three have this peculiar mark, that while Nationalists in their various ways they all give to the more genial English one common impression; I mean the impression that they do not so much love Ireland as hate England.

I will not dogmatise upon the difficult question as to whether there is any religious significance in the fact that these three rather ruthless Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I incline to think myself that the Catholic Church has added charity and gentleness to the virtues of a people which would otherwise have been too keen and contemptuous, too aristocratic. But however this may be, there can surely be no question that Bernard Shaw’s Protestant education in a Catholic country has made a great deal of difference to his mind. It has affected it in two ways, the first negative and the second positive. It has affected him by cutting him off (as we have said) from the fields and fountains of his real home and history; by making him an Orangeman. And it has affected him by the particular colour of the particular religion which he received; by making him a Puritan.

In one of his numerous prefaces he says, “I have always been on the side of the Puritans in the matter of Art”; and a closer study will, I think, reveal that he is on the side of the Puritans in almost everything. Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel regulations, though some of its regulations were more cruel than any that have disgraced Europe. Nor was Puritanism a mere nightmare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and fatalism, though this element did enter it, and was as it were the symptom and punishment of its essential error. Something much nobler (even if almost equally mistaken) was the original energy in the Puritan creed. And it must be defined with a little more delicacy if we are really to understand the attitude of G. B. S., who is the greatest of the modern Puritans and perhaps the last.

I should roughly define the first spirit in Puritanism thus. It was a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect. A Puritan meant originally a man whose mind had no holidays. To use his own favourite phrase, he would let no living thing come between him and his God; an attitude which involved eternal torture for him and a cruel contempt for all the living things. It was better to worship in a barn than in a cathedral for the specific and specified reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physical beauty was a false and sensual symbol coming in between the intellect and the object of its intellectual worship. The human brain ought to be at every instant a consuming fire which burns through all conventional images until they were as transparent as glass.

This is the essential Puritan idea, that God can only be praised by direct contemplation of Him. You must praise God only with your brain; it is wicked to praise Him with your passions or your physical habits or your gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it is wicked to worship by singing or dancing or drinking sacramental wines or building beautiful churches or saying prayers when you are half asleep. We must not worship by dancing, drinking, building or singing; we can only worship by thinking. Our heads can praise God, but never our hands and feet. That is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. There is a great deal to be said for it, and a great deal was said for it in Great Britain steadily for two hundred years. It has gradually decayed in England and Scotland, not because of the advance of modern thought (which means nothing), but because of the slow revival of the mediæval energy and character in the two peoples. The English were always hearty and humane, and they have made up their minds to be hearty and humane in spite of the Puritans. The result is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have picked up the tradition of Chaucer and Robin Hood. The Scotch were always romantic, and they have made up their minds to be romantic in spite of the Puritans. The result is that Scott and Stevenson have picked up the tradition of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond Scottish kings. England has become English again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in spite of the splendid incubus, the noble nightmare of Calvin. There is only one place in the British Islands where one may naturally expect to find still surviving in its fulness the fierce detachment of the true Puritan. That place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The Orange Calvinists can be disturbed by no national resurrection, for they have no nation. In them, if in any people, will be found the rectangular consistency of the Calvinist. The Irish Protestant rioters are at least immeasurably finer fellows than any of their brethren in England. They have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with barbarous external simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw was born.

There is at least one outstanding fact about the man we are studying; Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. He never gives his opinions a holiday; he is never irresponsible even for an instant. He has no nonsensical second self which he can get into as one gets into a dressing-gown; that ridiculous disguise which is yet more real than the real person. That collapse and humorous confession of futility was much of the force in Charles Lamb and in Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; his wit is never a weakness; therefore it is never a sense of humour. For wit is always connected with the idea that truth is close and clear. Humour, on the other hand, is always connected with the idea that truth is tricky and mystical and easily mistaken. What Charles Lamb said of the Scotchman is far truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he does not see things suddenly in a new light; all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid calculation and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to defend. He never breaks out into that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, “We would indict our dreams!” or of Stevenson, “Shall we never shed blood?” In short he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit — and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist — and a Catholic. However this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His favourite author is Bunyan.

But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism Bernard Shaw has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is always a Puritan prejudice. For Puritanism has not been able to sustain through three centuries that native ecstacy of the direct contemplation of truth; indeed it was the whole mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment that it could. One cannot be serious for three hundred years. In institutions built so as to endure for ages you must have relaxation, symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In eternal temples you must have frivolity. You must “be at ease in Zion” unless you are only paying it a flying visit.

By the middle of the nineteenth century this old austerity and actuality in the Puritan vision had fallen away into two principal lower forms. The first is a sort of idealistic garrulity upon which Bernard Shaw has made fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Perpetual talk about righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and things which cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little reference to the real facts of anybody’s soul or salary — into this weak and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest thing of the twentieth.

Of all this sentimental and deliquescent Puritanism Bernard Shaw has always been the antagonist; and the only respect in which it has soiled him was that he believed for only too long that such sloppy idealism was the whole idealism of Christendom and so used “idealist” itself as a term of reproach. But there were other and negative effects of Puritanism which he did not escape so completely. I cannot think that he has wholly escaped that element in Puritanism which may fairly bear the title of the taboo. For it is a singular fact that although extreme Protestantism is dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisation, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live longest and die last. Of the creed of John Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned the civilised part and retained only the savage part. He has given up that great and systematic philosophy of Calvinism which had much in common with modern science and strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent determinism. But he has retained the accidental veto upon cards or comic plays, which Knox only valued as mere proof of his people’s concentration on their theology. All the awful but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology are gone. Only savage negations remain; such as that by which in Scotland on every seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger on all hearts and makes an evil silence in the streets.

By the middle of the nineteenth century when Shaw was born this dim and barbaric element in Puritanism, being all that remained of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy of taboos; there had grown up a mystical horror of those fermented drinks which are part of the food of civilised mankind. Doubtless many persons take an extreme line on this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was “seen” going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would certainly ostracise him (from any of their positions of trust) for accepting a drink. The sentiment is certainly very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it is defended with sociological reasons; but those reasons can be simply and sharply tested. If a Puritan tells you that all humanity should rest once a week, you have only to propose that they should rest on Wednesday. And if a Puritan tells you that he does not object to beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, simply propose to him that in prisons and workhouses (where the amount can be absolutely regulated) the inmates should have three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan cannot call that excess; but he will find something to call it. For it is not the excess he objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental taboo, and it is one of the two or three positive and painful prejudices with which Bernard Shaw began. A similar severity of outlook ran through all his earlier attitude towards the drama; especially towards the lighter or looser drama. His Puritan teachers could not prevent him from taking up theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously. All his plays were indeed “plays for Puritans.” All his criticisms quiver with a refined and almost tortured contempt for the indulgencies of ballet and burlesque, for the tights and the double entente. He can endure lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled by the divorces and the adulteries as he is by the “splits.” And he has always been foremost among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, “Why do you object to a thing full of sincere philosophy like The Wild Duck while you tolerate a mere dirty joke like The Spring Chicken?” I do not think he has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man in the street, “I laugh at the dirty joke of The Spring Chicken because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of The Wild Duck because it is a philosophy.”

Shaw does not do justice to the democratic ease and sanity on this subject; but indeed, whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As an Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist he is a soul apart; he drew the breath of his nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit from a creed which made a wall of crystal around the elect. The two forces between them produced this potent and slender figure, swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry magnanimity; and it only needed the last touch of oligarchic mastery to be given by the overwhelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present age. Such was the Puritan Irishman who stepped out into the world. Into what kind of world did he step?

The Progressive

It is now partly possible to justify the Shavian method of putting the explanations before the events. I can now give a fact or two with a partial certainty at least that the reader will give to the affairs of Bernard Shaw something of the same kind of significance which they have for Bernard Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that Shaw was born in Dublin the average reader might exclaim, “Ah yes — a wild Irishman, gay, emotional and untrustworthy.” The wrong note would be struck at the start. I have attempted to give some idea of what being born in Ireland meant to the man who was really born there. Now therefore for the first time I may be permitted to confess that Bernard Shaw was, like other men, born. He was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856.

Just as his birth can only be appreciated through some vision of Ireland, so his family can only be appreciated by some realisation of the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one George Carr Shaw, who had been a civil servant and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful business man. If I had merely said that his family was Protestant (which in Ireland means Puritan) it might have been passed over as a quite colourless detail. But if the reader will keep in mind what has been said about the degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy vetoes, he will see in its full and frightful significance such a sentence as this which comes from Shaw himself: “My father was in theory a vehement teetotaler, but in practice often a furtive drinker.” The two things of course rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the philosophy of the taboo. There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink. But if I had mentioned that fragment of family information without any ethical preface, people would have begun at once to talk nonsense about artistic heredity and Celtic weakness, and would have gained the general impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish wastrel and the child of Irish wastrels. Whereas it is the whole point of the matter that Bernard Shaw comes of a Puritan middle-class family of the most solid respectability; and the only admission of error arises from the fact that one member of that Puritan family took a particularly Puritan view of strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally as a poison and sometimes as a medicine, if only a mental medicine. But a poison and a medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest chemist knows; and they are chiefly akin in this; that no one will drink either of them for fun. Moreover, medicine and a poison are also alike in this; that no one will by preference drink either of them in public. And this medical or poisonous view of alcohol is not confined to the one Puritan to whose failure I have referred, it is spread all over the whole of our dying Puritan civilisation. For instance, social reformers have fired a hundred shots against the public-house; but never one against its really shameful feature. The sign of decay is not in the public-house, but in the private bar; or rather the row of five or six private bars, into each of which a respectable dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulging his own half-witted sin violate his own half-witted morality. Nearly all these places are equipped with an atrocious apparatus of ground-glass windows which can be so closed that they practically conceal the face of the buyer from the seller. Words cannot express the abysses of human infamy and hateful shame expressed by that elaborate piece of furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, which happens fairly often, I always carefully open all these apertures and then leave the place, in every way refreshed.

In other ways also it is necessary to insist not only on the fact of an extreme Protestantism, but on that of the Protestantism of a garrison; a world where that religious force both grew and festered all the more for being at once isolated and protected. All the influences surrounding Bernard Shaw in boyhood were not only Puritan, but such that no non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or counteract. He belonged to that Irish group which, according to Catholicism, has hardened its heart, which, according to Protestantism has hardened its head, but which, as I fancy, has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility to the contact of the things around it. In reading about his youth, one forgets that it was passed in the island which is still one flame before the altar of St. Peter and St. Patrick. The whole thing might be happening in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan Connexional School. He went to hear Moody and Sankey. “I was,” he writes, “wholly unmoved by their eloquence; and felt bound to inform the public that I was, on the whole, an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed in Public Opinion, to the extreme horror of my numerous aunts and uncles.” That is the philosophical atmosphere; those are the religious postulates. It could never cross the mind of a man of the Garrison that before becoming an atheist he might stroll into one of the churches of his own country, and learn something of the philosophy that had satisfied Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes.

In the same way I have to appeal to my theoretic preface at this third point of the drama of Shaw’s career. On leaving school he stepped into a secure business position which he held steadily for four years and which he flung away almost in one day. He rushed even recklessly to London; where he was quite unsuccessful and practically starved for six years. If I had mentioned this act on the first page of this book it would have seemed to have either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or else to cover some ugly escapade of youth or some quite criminal looseness of temperament. But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he was careless, but because he was ferociously careful, careful especially of the one thing needful. What was he thinking about when he threw away his last halfpence and went to a strange place; what was he thinking about when he endured hunger and small-pox in London almost without hope? He was thinking of what he has ever since thought of, the slow but sure surge of the social revolution; you must read into all those bald sentences and empty years what I shall attempt to sketch in the third section. You must read the revolutionary movement of the later nineteenth century, darkened indeed by materialism and made mutable by fear and free thought, but full of awful vistas of an escape from the curse of Adam.

Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an epoch, or rather at the end of an epoch, which was in its way unique in the ages of history. The nineteenth century was not unique in the success or rapidity of its reforms or in their ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the peculiar character of the failure which followed the success. The French Revolution was an enormous act of human realisation; it has altered the terms of every law and the shape of every town in Europe; but it was by no means the only example of a strong and swift period of reform. What was really peculiar about the Republican energy was this, that it left behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a kind of dreary, drawn out and utterly unmeaning hope. The strong and evident idea of reform sank lower and lower until it became the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards the end of the nineteenth century there appeared its two incredible figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. In the coarsest Greek Comedy we might have a joke about a man who wanted to keep what he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow fever. In the dullest mediæval morality we might have a joke about a progressive gentleman who, having passed heaven and come to purgatory, decided to go further and fare worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were an age of quite impetuous progress; men made in one rush, roads, trades, synthetic philosophies, parliaments, university settlements, a law that could cover the world and such spires as had never struck the sky. But they would not have said that they wanted progress, but that they wanted the road, the parliaments, and the spires. In the same way the time from Richelieu to the Revolution was upon the whole a time of conservation, often of harsh and hideous conservation; it preserved tortures, legal quibbles, and despotism. But if you had asked the rulers they would not have said that they wanted conservation; but that they wanted the torture and the despotism. The old reformers and the old despots alike desired definite things, powers, licenses, payments, vetoes, and permissions. Only the modern progressive and the modern conservative have been content with two words.

Other periods of active improvement have died by stiffening at last into some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was touched by a wintry witchery of classicism and frozen for ever before it fell. Alone of all such movements the democratic movement of the last two centuries has not frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has grown more bewildered. By the analogy of healthy history we ought to have gone on worshipping the republic and calling each other citizen with increasing seriousness until some other part of the truth broke into our republican temple. But in fact we have turned the freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism, destructive of everything, including democracy itself. It is none the less destructive because it is, so to speak, an optimistic scepticism — or, as I have said, a dreary hope. It was none the better because the destroyers were always talking about the new vistas and enlightenments which their new negations opened to us. The republican temple, like any other strong building, rested on certain definite limits and supports. But the modern man inside it went on indefinitely knocking holes in his own house and saying that they were windows. The result is not hard to calculate: the moral world was pretty well all windows and no house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.

Then there entered into full swing that great game of which he soon became the greatest master. A progressive or advanced person was now to mean not a man who wanted democracy, but a man who wanted something newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, not a man who wanted a parliament or a republic, but a man who wanted anything that he hadn’t got. The emancipated man must cast a weird and suspicious eye round him at all the institutions of the world, wondering which of them was destined to die in the next few centuries. Each one of them was whispering to himself, “What can I alter?”

This quite vague and varied discontent probably did lead to the revelation of many incidental wrongs and to much humane hard work in certain holes and corners. It also gave birth to a great deal of quite futile and frantic speculation, which seemed destined to take away babies from women, or to give votes to tom-cats. But it had an evil in it much deeper and more psychologically poisonous than any superficial absurdities. There was in this thirst to be “progressive” a subtle sort of double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so eager to be in advance of his age that he pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase) following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic exertions, to get in front of his nose.

Into this riot of all imaginary innovations Shaw brought the sharp edge of the Irishman and the concentration of the Puritan, and thoroughly thrashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at once modern and intelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies he took the revolutionary side, I fear in most cases because it was called revolutionary. But the other revolutionists were abruptly startled by the presentation of quite rational and ingenious arguments on their own side. The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever approximately equalled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new argument for a new philosophy. I give two instances to cover the kind of thing I mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager to put himself on the modern side in everything) put himself on the side of what is called the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist’s breath away for one important instant. To take the other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself, led by the same mad imp of modernity, on the side of the people who want to have phonetic spelling. The people who want phonetic spelling generally depress the world with tireless and tasteless explanations of how much easier it would be for children or foreign bagmen if “height” were spelt “hite.” Now children would curse spelling whatever it was, and we are not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve Shakespeare. Bernard Shaw charged along quite a different line; he urged that Shakespeare himself believed in phonetic spelling, since he spelt his own name in six different ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling is merely a return to the freedom and flexibility of Elizabethan literature. That, again, is exactly the kind of blow the old speller does not expect. As a matter of fact there is an answer to both the ingenuities I have quoted. When women have fought in revolutions they have generally shown that it was not natural to them, by their hysterical cruelty and insolence; it was the men who fought in the Revolution; it was the women who tortured the prisoners and mutilated the dead. And because Shakespeare could sing better than he could spell, it does not follow that his spelling and ours ought to be abruptly altered by a race that has lost all instinct for singing. But I do not wish to discuss these points; I only quote them as examples of the startling ability which really brought Shaw to the front; the ability to brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive thoughts.

But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly surprised innumerable cranks and revolutionists by finding quite rational arguments for them, he surprised them unpleasantly also by discovering something else. He discovered a turn of argument or trick of thought which has ever since been the plague of their lives, and given him in all assemblies of their kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole Socialist movement, a fantastic but most formidable domination. This method may be approximately defined as that of revolutionising the revolutionists by turning their rationalism against their remaining sentimentalism. But definition leaves the matter dark unless we give one or two examples. Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thoroughly as any New Woman into the cause of the emancipation of women. But while the New Woman praised woman as a prophetess, the new man took the opportunity to curse her and kick her as a comrade. For the others sex equality meant the emancipation of women, which allowed them to be equal to men. For Shaw it mainly meant the emancipation of men, which allowed them to be rude to women. Indeed, almost every one of Bernard Shaw’s earlier plays might be called an argument between a man and a woman, in which the woman is thumped and thrashed and outwitted until she admits that she is the equal of her conqueror. This is the first case of the Shavian trick of turning on the romantic rationalists with their own rationalism. He said in substance, “If we are democrats, let us have votes for women; but if we are democrats, why on earth should we have respect for women?” I take one other example out of many. Bernard Shaw was thrown early into what may be called the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The Socialists of the S.D.F. call it “L’Internationale,” but the club covers more than Socialists. It covers many who consider themselves the champions of oppressed nationalities — Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and thus a strong nationalist tendency exists in the revolutionary movement. Against this nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with sudden violence. If the flag of England was a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too? If we hated the jingoism of the existing armies and frontiers, why should we bring into existence new jingo armies and new jingo frontiers? All the other revolutionists fell in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. Shaw urged, in effect, that Home Rule was as bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, and all the other degrading domesticities that began with the word “Home.” His ultimate support of the South African war was largely created by his irritation against the other revolutionists for favouring a nationalist resistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected to Pro-Boers because they were anti-patriots. Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because they were pro-patriots.

But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., these turnings of scepticism against the sceptics, there was one which has figured largely in his life; the most amusing and perhaps the most salutary of all these reactions. The “progressive” world being in revolt against religion had naturally felt itself allied to science; and against the authority of priests it would perpetually hurl the authority of scientific men. Shaw gazed for a few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked it in the stomach. He declared to the astounded progressives around him that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not speak with proof or reason; that the very wonders of science were mostly lies, like the wonders of religion. “When astronomers tell me,” he says somewhere, “that a star is so far off that its light takes a thousand years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic.” The paralysing impudence of such remarks left everyone quite breathless; and even to this day this particular part of Shaw’s satiric war has been far less followed up than it deserves. For there was present in it an element very marked in Shaw’s controversies; I mean that his apparent exaggerations are generally much better backed up by knowledge than would appear from their nature. He can lure his enemy on with fantasies and then overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of science, when he read some wild passage in which Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the writer to be a mere fantastic whom science could crush with one finger. He would therefore engage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us say) vivisection, and discover to his horror that Shaw really knew a great deal about the subject, and could pelt him with expert witnesses and hospital reports. Among the many singular contradictions in a singular character, there is none more interesting than this combination of exactitude and industry in the detail of opinions with audacity and a certain wildness in their outline.

This great game of catching revolutionists napping, of catching the unconventional people in conventional poses, of outmarching and outmanœuvring progressives till they felt like conservatives, of undermining the mines of Nihilists till they felt like the House of Lords, this great game of dishing the anarchists continued for some time to be his most effective business. It would be untrue to say that he was a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies a certain corrupt fatigue about human affairs, whereas he was vibrating with virtue and energy. Nor would it be fair to call him even a sceptic, for that implies a dogma of hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. But it would be strictly just to describe him at this time, at any rate, as a merely destructive person. He was one whose main business was, in his own view, the pricking of illusions, the stripping away of disguises, and even the destruction of ideals. He was a sort of anti-confectioner whose whole business it was to take the gilt off the gingerbread.

Now I have no particular objection to people who take the gilt off the gingerbread; if only for this excellent reason, that I am much fonder of gingerbread than I am of gilt. But there are some objections to this task when it becomes a crusade or an obsession. One of them is this: that people who have really scraped the gilt off gingerbread generally waste the rest of their lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often been the case of Shaw. He can, if he likes, scrape the romance off the armaments of Europe or the party system of Great Britain. But he cannot scrape the romance off love or military valour, because it is all romance, and three thousand miles thick. It cannot, I think, be denied that much of Bernard Shaw’s splendid mental energy has been wasted in this weary business of gnawing at the necessary pillars of all possible society. But it would be grossly unfair to indicate that even in his first and most destructive stage he uttered nothing except these accidental, if arresting, negations. He threw his whole genius heavily into the scale in favour of two positive projects or causes of the period. When we have stated these we have really stated the full intellectual equipment with which he started his literary life.

I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent side in everything; but in the case of these two important convictions he exercised a solid power of choice. When he first went to London he mixed with every kind of revolutionary society, and met every kind of person except the ordinary person. He knew everybody, so to speak, except everybody. He was more than once a momentary apparition among the respectable atheists. He knew Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that Hall of Science in which very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance, when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life. This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions, which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power, consciousness, and vitality even for one’s self. But this old secularist tag, that it is selfish to save one’s soul, remains with him long after he has practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic of those chaotic early days. And just as he mingled with the atheists he mingled with the anarchists, who were in the eighties a much more formidable body than now, disputing with the Socialists on almost equal terms the claim to be the true heirs of the Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely female. When a book came out called A Girl among the Anarchists, G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. “A girl among the anarchists!” he exclaimed to his present biographer; “if they had said ‘A man among the anarchists’ it would have been more of an adventure.” He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained many high public ideals, but also a fair number of low private desires. And when people blame Bernard Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness, his cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think they should remember this riff-raff of lawless sentimentalism against which his commonsense had to strive, all the grandiloquent “comrades” and all the gushing “affinities,” all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless sulking against law. If Bernard Shaw became a little too fond of throwing cold water upon prophecies or ideals, remember that he must have passed much of his youth among cosmopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold water in every sense of the word.

Upon two of these modern crusades he concentrated, and, as I have said, he chose them well. The first was broadly what was called the Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the cause of everything else. At its noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature. So a man might wince when a snail was crushed as if his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had caught fire. Man might be a network of exquisite nerves running over the whole universe, a subtle spider’s web of pity. This was a fine conception; though perhaps a somewhat severe enforcement of the theological conception of the special divinity of man. For the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity what can be asked of no other creature; no man ever required a dog to understand a cat or expected the cow to cry for the sorrows of the nightingale.

Hence this sense has been strongest in saints of a very mystical sort; such as St. Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and Brother Wolf. Shaw adopted this crusade of cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his own style, severe, explanatory, and even unsympathetic. He had no affectionate impulse to say “Brother Wolf”; at the best he would have said “Citizen Wolf,” like a sound republican. In fact, he was full of healthy human compassion for the sufferings of animals; but in phraseology he loved to put the matter unemotionally and even harshly. I was once at a debating club at which Bernard Shaw said that he was not a humanitarian at all, but only an economist, that he merely hated to see life wasted by carelessness or cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and address to him the following lucid question: “If when you spare a herring you are only being oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being nomikal?” But in an average debating club I thought this question might not be quite clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly it is not plain for whom Bernard Shaw is economising if he rescues a rhinoceros from an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw only took this economic pose from his hatred of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw killed a dragon and rescued a princess of romance, he would try to say “I have saved a princess” with exactly the same intonation as “I have saved a shilling.” He tries to turn his own heroism into a sort of superhuman thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise with that passage in his favourite dramatic author in which the Button Moulder tells Peer Gynt that there is a sort of cosmic housekeeping; that God Himself is very economical, “and that is why He is so well to do.”

This combination of the widest kindness and consideration with a consistent ungraciousness of tone runs through all Shaw’s ethical utterance, and is nowhere more evident than in his attitude towards animals. He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast. It was under the influence of this high and almost superhuman sense of duty that he became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember that when he was lying sick and near to death at the end of his Saturday Review career he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant. There is no doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw’s instincts in such matters. And quite apart from the vegetarian controversy, I do not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. But when we come to positive things (and passions are the only truly positive things) that obstinate doubt remains which remains after all eulogies of Shaw. That fixed fancy sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes live ones.

It was the same with the other great cause to which Shaw more politically though not more publicly committed himself. The actual English people, without representation in Press or Parliament, but faintly expressed in public-houses and music-halls, would connect Shaw (so far as they have heard of him) with two ideas; they would say first that he was a vegetarian, and second that he was a Socialist. Like most of the impressions of the ignorant, these impressions would be on the whole very just. My only purpose here is to urge that Shaw’s Socialism exemplifies the same trait of temperament as his vegetarianism. This book is not concerned with Bernard Shaw as a politician or a sociologist, but as a critic and creator of drama. I will therefore end in this chapter all that I have to say about Bernard Shaw as a politician or a political philosopher. I propose here to dismiss this aspect of Shaw: only let it be remembered, once and for all, that I am here dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw. It is as if one dismissed the sculpture of Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets. Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is simply that he cares more for politics than for anything else; more than for art or for philosophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is the noblest thing in him. He really desires less to win fame than to bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of that early sage who wished only to make two blades of grass grow instead of one. He is a loyal subject of Henri Quatre, who said that he only wanted every Frenchman to have a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of course, that he would call the repast cannibalism. But cæteris paribus he thinks more of that chicken than of the eagle of the universal empire; and he is always ready to support the grass against the laurel.

Yet by the nature of this book the account of the most important Shaw, who is the Socialist, must be also the most brief. Socialism (which I am not here concerned either to attack or defend) is, as everyone knows, the proposal that all property should be nationally owned that it may be more decently distributed. It is a proposal resting upon two principles, unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that frightful human calamities call for immediate human aid; second, that such aid must almost always be collectively organised. If a ship is being wrecked, we organise a lifeboat; if a house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half a nation is starving, we must organise work and food. That is the primary and powerful argument of the Socialist, and everything that he adds to it weakens it. The only possible line of protest is to suggest that it is rather shocking that we have to treat a normal nation as something exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it may be necessary to speak later. The point here is that Shaw behaved towards Socialism just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he offered every reason except the emotional reason, which was the real one. When taxed in a Daily News discussion with being a Socialist for the obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he said this was quite wrong; it was only because poverty was wasteful. He practically professed that modern society annoyed him, not so much like an unrighteous kingdom, but rather like an untidy room. Everyone who knew him knew, of course, that he was full of a proper brotherly bitterness about the oppression of the poor. But here again he would not admit that he was anything but an Economist.

In thus setting his face like flint against sentimental methods of argument he undoubtedly did one great service to the causes for which he stood. Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped phrases like “maudlin” and “sentimental,” which indicated the humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. The mere personality of Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw the humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was like steel, the hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like worms.

In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even an inch less contemptuous, for the people who call compassion “sentimentalism” deserve nothing but contempt. In this one does not even regret his coldness; it is an honourable contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the jingoes and flagellomaniacs. The truth is that the ordinary anti-humanitarian only manages to harden his heart by having already softened his head. It is the reverse of sentimental to insist that a nigger is being burned alive; for sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant thoughts. And no one, not even a Higher Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned alive a pleasant thought. The sentimental thing is to warm your hands at the fire while denying the existence of the nigger, and that is the ruling habit in England, as it has been the chief business of Bernard Shaw to show. And in this the brutalitarians hate him not because he is soft, but because he is hard, because he is not to be softened by conventional excuses; because he looks hard at a thing — and hits harder. Some foolish fellow of the Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, “What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France, and Germany.” In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the leading spirit — a society which answered all charges of impracticable idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical negotiations to the verge of cynicism. Bernard Shaw was the literary expert who wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, among such sections as Fabian Temperance Reform, Fabian Education and so on, there was an entry gravely headed “Fabian Natural Science,” which stated that in the Socialist cause light was needed more than heat.

Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan austerity did much good to the country and to the causes for which they were embattled. But there was one thing they did not do; they did nothing for Shaw himself in the matter of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. His great defect was and is the lack of democratic sentiment. And there was nothing democratic either in his humanitarianism or his Socialism. These new and refined faiths tended rather to make the Irishman yet more aristocratic, the Puritan yet more exclusive. To be a Socialist was to look down on all the peasant owners of the earth, especially on the peasant owners of his own island. To be a Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange and mysterious morality, a man who thought the good lord who roasted oxen for his vassals only less bad than the bad lord who roasted the vassals. None of these advanced views could the common people hear gladly; nor indeed was Shaw specially anxious to please the common people. It was his glory that he pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy, “Let them eat grass.” Shaw said, “Let them eat greens.” He had more benevolence, but almost as much disdain. “I have never had any feelings about the English working classes,” he said elsewhere, “except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people.” This is the unsympathetic side of the thing; but it had another and much nobler side, which must at least be seriously recognised before we pass on to much lighter things.

Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is a splendid republican. The nuance of difference between those terms precisely depicts him. And there is after all a good deal of dim democracy in England, in the sense that there is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and nowhere more than among old-fashioned and even reactionary people. But a republican is a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a republican in the literal and Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private thing. The interest of the State is with him a sincere thirst of the soul, as it was in the little pagan cities. Now this public passion, this clean appetite for order and equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had more nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw’s earlier epoch than at any other time. Individualism of the worst type was on the top of the wave; I mean artistic individualism, which is so much crueller, so much blinder and so much more irrational even than commercial individualism. The decay of society was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms. The æsthete was all receptiveness, like the flea. His only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.

I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell. Give me even that business-like benevolence that herded men like beasts rather than that exquisite art which isolated them like devils; give me even the suppression of “Zæo” rather than the triumph of “Salome.” And if I feel such a confession to be due to those Fabians who could hardly have been anything but experts in any society, such as Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, it is due yet more strongly to the greatest of the Fabians. Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the artists, who could have been the wittiest of all the flâneurs; who could have made epigrams like diamonds and drunk music like wine. He has instead laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed his mind with all the most dreary and the most filthy details, so that he can argue on the spur of the moment about sewing-machines or sewage, about typhus fever or twopenny tubes. The usual mean theory of motives will not cover the case; it is not ambition, for he could have been twenty times more prominent as a plausible and popular humorist. It is the real and ancient emotion of the salus populi, almost extinct in our oligarchical chaos; nor will I for one, as I pass on to many matters of argument or quarrel, neglect to salute a passion so implacable and so pure.

The Critic

It appears a point of some mystery to the present writer that Bernard Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort; such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize. Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years, writing occasional columns for an advertisement or words for a picture. And it is equally certain (it is proved by twenty anecdotes, but no one who knows Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in those days of desperation he again and again threw up chances and flung back good bargains which did not suit his unique and erratic sense of honour. The fame of having first offered Shaw to the public upon a platform worthy of him belongs, like many other public services, to Mr. William Archer.

I say it seems odd that such a writer should not be appreciated in a flash; but upon this point there is evidently a real difference of opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest difficulty of the subject. I hear many people complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr. Shaw is not in the least making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, “Ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is all so fine spun and fantastical.” G. B. S. calls a statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, “Ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah, what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!” I think it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg, at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.

This prompt and pungent style he learnt in the open, upon political tubs and platforms; and he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts of being a demagogue; “The cart and the trumpet for me,” he says, with admirable good sense. Everyone will remember the effective appearance of Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act of the fine play of that name; when instead of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, he suddenly springs upon a chair above the crowd that has so far kept him invisible; “les bras croisés, le feutre en bataille, la moustache hérissée, le nez terrible.” I will not go so far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he had the hat in battle, or even that he had the nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best when he thus leaps above the crowd, I think we may take this moment of Shaw stepping on his little platform to see him clearly as he then was, and even as he has largely not ceased to be. I, at least, have only known him in his middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger yet only a little more alert, with hair more red but with face yet paler, as he first stood up upon some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the gas.

The first fact that one realises about Shaw (independent of all one has read and often contradicting it) is his voice. Primarily it is the voice of an Irishman, and then something of the voice of a musician. It possibly explains much of his career; a man may be permitted to say so many impudent things with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice is not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank and as it were inviting conference. This goes with a style and gesture which can only be described as at once very casual and very emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy which goes with oratory, but he assumes it with almost ostentatious carelessness; he throws back the head, but loosely and laughingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrugging his shoulders, as if to drop from them the mantle of the orator which he has confidently assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or gesture better for the purpose of expressing certainty; no man can say “I tell Mr. Jones he is totally wrong” with more air of unforced and even casual conviction.

This particular play of feature or pitch of voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade-like, must be counted a very important fact, especially in connection with the period when that voice was first heard. It must be remembered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of secondary age of wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The two survivals of that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence of speech, which waited till it could plant the perfect epigram. Its typical products were far too conceited to lay down the law. Now when people heard that Bernard Shaw was witty, as he most certainly was, when they heard his mots repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, when they heard things like “the Seven deadly Virtues” or “Who was Hall Caine?” they expected another of these silent sarcastic dandies who went about with one epigram, patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one sting. And when they saw and heard the new humorist they found no fixed sneer, no frock coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy Restaurant good manners, no fear of looking a fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman. They found a talkative Irishman with a kind voice and a brown coat; open gestures and an evident desire to make people really agree with him. He had his own kind of affectations no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of debate; but he broke, and, thank God, forever the spell of the little man with the single eye glass who had frozen both faith and fun at so many tea-tables. Shaw’s humane voice and hearty manner were so obviously more the things of a great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy of Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. He brought in a breezier sort of insolence; the single eye-glass fled before the single eye.

Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic voice and lean, loose swaggering figure, is that of the face with which so many caricaturists have fantastically delighted themselves, the Mephistophelean face with the fierce tufted eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those caricaturists in their natural delight in coming upon so striking a face, have somewhat misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; whereas its actual expression has quite as much benevolence as mockery. By this time his costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of the reddish brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur, and were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal; yet there are those who claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of yet more awful aspect before Jaeger came to his assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can hardly believe it; the man is so much of a piece, and must always have dressed appropriately. In any case his brown woollen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic, completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an eccentric healthy-mindedness. But something of the vagueness and equivocation of his first fame is probably due to the different functions which he performed in the contemporary world of art.

He began by writing novels. They are not much read, and indeed not imperatively worth reading, with the one exception of the crude and magnificent Cashel Byron’s Profession. Mr. William Archer, in the course of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young Irish friend, sent this book to Samoa, for the opinion of the most elvish and yet efficient of modern critics. Stevenson summed up much of Shaw even from that fragment when he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with laughter at the nature of his own quest. He also added the not wholly unjustified postscript: “I say, Archer, — my God, what women!”

The fiction was largely dropped; but when he began work he felt his way by the avenues of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic critic, and a musical critic; and in all three, it need hardly be said, he fought for the newest style and the most revolutionary school. He wrote on all these as he would have written on anything; but it was, I fancy, about the music that he cared most.

It may often be remarked that mathematicians love and understand music more than they love or understand poetry. Bernard Shaw is in much the same condition; indeed, in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare’s poetry, he always calls it “word music.” It is not difficult to explain this special attachment of the mere logician to music. The logician, like every other man on earth, must have sentiment and romance in his existence; in every man’s life, indeed, which can be called a life at all, sentiment is the most solid thing. But if the extreme logician turns for his emotions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered by discovering that the words of his own trade are used in an entirely different meaning. He conceives that he understands the word “visible,” and then finds Milton applying it to darkness, in which nothing is visible. He supposes that he understands the word “hide,” and then finds Shelley talking of a poet hidden in the light. He has reason to believe that he understands the common word “hung”; and then William Shakespeare, Esquire, of Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that the tops of the tall sea waves were hung with deafening clamours on the slippery clouds. That is why the common arithmetician prefers music to poetry. Words are his scientific instruments. It irritates him that they should be anyone else’s musical instruments. He is willing to see men juggling, but not men juggling with his own private tools and possessions — his terms. It is then that he turns with an utter relief to music. Here are all the same fascination and inspiration, all the same purity and plunging force as in poetry; but not requiring any verbal confession that light conceals things or that darkness can be seen in the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it. Bernard Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far above all such mere mathematicians and pedantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly the same. He adores music because it cannot deal with romantic terms either in their right or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic without reminding him of Shakespeare and Walter Scott, with whom he has had personal quarrels. Music can be Catholic without reminding him verbally of the Catholic Church, which he has never seen, and is sure he does not like. Bernard Shaw can agree with Wagner, the musician, because he speaks without words; if it had been Wagner the man he would certainly have had words with him. Therefore I would suggest that Shaw’s love of music (which is so fundamental that it must be mentioned early, if not first, in his story) may itself be considered in the first case as the imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic Irishman.

This much may be said conjecturally over the present signature; but more must not be said. Bernard Shaw understands music so much better than I do that it is just possible that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere, all that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing with a pen I know his limitations as much as I admire his genius; and I know it is true to say that he does not appreciate romance. But while he is playing on the piano he may be cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining a flagon for all I know. While he is speaking I am sure that there are some things he does not understand. But while he is listening (at the Queen’s Hall) he may understand everything, including God and me. Upon this part of him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to have some such dark continent in the character of a man of whom one writes. It preserves two very important things — modesty in the biographer and mystery in the biography.

For the purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as “The Perfect Wagnerite”; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts. As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite in drama. And with this we enter that part of his career with which this book is more specially concerned. When Mr. William Archer got him established as dramatic critic of the Saturday Review, he became for the first time “a star of the stage”; a shooting star and sometimes a destroying comet.

On the day of that appointment opened one of the very few exhilarating and honest battles that broke the silence of the slow and cynical collapse of the nineteenth century. Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got his cart and his trumpet; and was resolved to make them like the car of destiny and the trumpet of judgment. He had not the servility of the ordinary rebel, who is content to go on rebelling against kings and priests, because such rebellion is as old and as established as any priests or kings. He cast about him for something to attack which was not merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. After a little quite sincere reflection, he found it. He would not be content to be a common atheist; he wished to blaspheme something in which even atheists believed. He was not satisfied with being revolutionary; there were so many revolutionists. He wanted to pick out some prominent institution which had been irrationally and instinctively accepted by the most violent and profane; something of which Mr. Foote would speak as respectfully on the front page of the Freethinker as Mr. St. Loe Strachey on the front page of the Spectator. He found the thing; he found the great unassailed English institution — Shakespeare.

But Shaw’s attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant — an occupation which is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by making us think that we alone had, not merely a great poet, but the one poet above criticism. It was bad for literature; it made a minute model out of work that was really a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was bad for religion and morals that there should be so huge a terrestrial idol, that we should put such utter and unreasoning trust in any child of man. It is true that it was largely through Shaw’s own defects that he beheld the defects of Shakespeare. But it needed someone equally prosaic to resist what was perilous in the charm of such poetry; it may not be altogether a mistake to send a deaf man to destroy the rock of the sirens.

This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course all three of the divisions or aspects to which the reader’s attention has been drawn. It was partly the attitude of the Irishman objecting to the Englishman turning his mere artistic taste into a religion; especially when it was a taste merely taught him by his aunts and uncles. In Shaw’s opinion (one might say) the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare or even admire Shakespeare; one can only say, in the strong colloquialism, that they swear by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing to be invoked. And Shaw’s whole business was to set up the things which were to be sworn by as things to be sworn at. It was partly again the revolutionist in pursuit of pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression of the past, almost hating history itself. For Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be stoned after, and not before, men had built their sepulchres. There was a Yankee smartness in the man which was irritated at the idea of being dominated by a person dead for three hundred years; like Mark Twain, he wanted a fresher corpse.

These two motives there were, but they were small compared with the other. It was the third part of him, the Puritan, that was really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced that playwright almost exactly as any contemporary Puritan coming out of a conventicle in a steeple-crowned hat and stiff bands might have denounced the playwright coming out of the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This is not a mere fancy; it is philosophically true. A legend has run round the newspapers that Bernard Shaw offered himself as a better writer than Shakespeare. This is false and quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said anything of the kind. The writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, “Out, out, brief candle,” because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God’s grace should never be put out.

It is odd that Bernard Shaw’s chief error or insensibility should have been the instrument of his noblest affirmation. The denunciation of Shakespeare was a mere misunderstanding. But the denunciation of Shakespeare’s pessimism was the most splendidly understanding of all his utterances. This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism — even a tragic optimism. Life is a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be is an exacting and exhausting business; the trumpet though inspiring is terrible. Nothing that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple reference to the sturdy man who stepped up to the Keeper of the Book of Life and said, “Put down my name, Sir.” It is true that Shaw called this heroic philosophy by wrong names and buttressed it with false metaphysics; that was the weakness of the age. The temporary decline of theology had involved the neglect of philosophy and all fine thinking; and Bernard Shaw had to find shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the sons of God shouting for joy. He called it the Will to Live — a phrase invented by Prussian professors who would like to exist, but can’t. Afterwards he asked people to worship the Life-Force; as if one could worship a hyphen. But though he covered it with crude new names (which are now fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad mortar) he was on the side of the good old cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, the cause of creation against destruction, the cause of yes against no, the cause of the seed against the stony earth and the star against the abyss.

His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man is the paragon of animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up his moods against his mind. His cry of vanitas vanitatum is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point. Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say “Damn it!” But the Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say “Damn it all!”

It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious weekly articles in the Saturday Review, the real comparison upon which everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes about the great Scandinavian; and though there was no doubt whatever about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong. They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist. Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.

But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of “the advanced” (an army which advances in all directions) were united in feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who told them that a work of art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many, I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as choses vues, æsthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view, though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.

With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists; and that if this were not so, dramatists and all other artists would be mere panders of intellectual debauchery, to be locked up as the Puritans locked up the stage players. No one can understand Bernard Shaw who does not give full value to this early revolt of his on behalf of ethics against the ruling school of l’art pour l’art. It is interesting because it is connected with other ambitions in the man, especially with that which has made him somewhat vainer of being a Parish Councillor than of being one of the most popular dramatists in Europe. But its chief interest is again to be referred to our stratification of the psychology; it is the lover of true things rebelling for once against merely new things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing to be the mere Progressive.

But this attitude obviously laid on the ethical lover of Ibsen a not inconsiderable obligation. If the new drama had an ethical purpose, what was it? and if Ibsen was a moral teacher, what the deuce was he teaching? Answers to this question, answers of manifold brilliancy and promise, were scattered through all the dramatic criticisms of those years on the Saturday Review. But even Bernard Shaw grew tired after a time of discussing Ibsen only in connection with the current pantomime or the latest musical comedy. It was felt that so much sincerity and fertility of explanation justified a concentrated attack; and in 1891 appeared the brilliant book called The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which some have declared to be merely the quintessence of Shaw. However this may be, it was in fact and profession the quintessence of Shaw’s theory of the morality or propaganda of Ibsen.

The book itself is much longer than the book that I am writing; and as is only right in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is provocative. I could write an essay on every sentence which I accept and three essays on every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw himself is a master of compression; he can put a conception more compactly than any other man alive. It is therefore rather difficult to compress his compression; one feels as if one were trying to extract a beef essence from Bovril. But the shortest form in which I can state the idea of The Quintessence of Ibsenism is that it is the idea of distrusting ideals, which are universal, in comparison with facts, which are miscellaneous. The man whom he attacks throughout he calls “The Idealist”; that is the man who permits himself to be mainly moved by a moral generalisation. “Actions,” he says, “are to be judged by their effect on happiness, and not by their conformity to any ideal.” As we have already seen, there is a certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw had always chucked all ideals overboard the one he had chucked first was the ideal of happiness. Passing this however for the present, we may mark the above as the most satisfying summary. If I tell a lie I am not to blame myself for having violated the ideal of truth, but only for having perhaps got myself into a mess and made things worse than they were before. If I have broken my word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that I have broken something inside of me, as one who breaks a blood vessel. It all depends on whether I have broken up something outside me; as one who breaks up an evening party. If I shoot my father the only question is whether I have made him happy. I must not admit the idealistic conception that the mere shooting of my father might possibly make me unhappy. We are to judge of every individual case as it arises, apparently without any social summary or moral ready-reckoner at all. “The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule.” We must not say that it is right to keep promises, but that it may be right to keep this promise. Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy to see how a state could be very comfortable which was Socialist in all its public morality and Anarchist in all its private. But if it is anarchy, it is anarchy without any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchy. It is a worried and conscientious anarchy; an anarchy of painful delicacy and even caution. For it refuses to trust in traditional experiments or plainly trodden tracks; every case must be considered anew from the beginning, and yet considered with the most wide-eyed care for human welfare; every man must act as if he were the first man made. Briefly, we must always be worrying about what is best for our children, and we must not take one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. Some think that this anarchism would make a man tread down mighty cities in his madness. I think it would make a man walk down the street as if he were walking on egg-shells. I do not think this experiment in opportunism would end in frantic license; I think it would end in frozen timidity. If a man was forbidden to solve moral problems by moral science or the help of mankind, his course would be quite easy — he would not solve the problems. The world instead of being a knot so tangled as to need unravelling, would simply become a piece of clockwork too complicated to be touched. I cannot think that this untutored worry was what Ibsen meant; I have my doubts as to whether it was what Shaw meant; but I do not think that it can be substantially doubted that it was what he said.

In any case it can be asserted that the general aim of the work was to exalt the immediate conclusions of practice against the general conclusions of theory. Shaw objected to the solution of every problem in a play being by its nature a general solution, applicable to all other such problems. He disliked the entrance of a universal justice at the end of the last act; treading down all the personal ultimatums and all the varied certainties of men. He disliked the god from the machine — because he was from a machine. But even without the machine he tended to dislike the god; because a god is more general than a man. His enemies have accused Shaw of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the roof-tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called almost madly domestic. He wishes each private problem to be settled in private, without reference to sociological ethics. And the only objection to this kind of gigantic casuistry is that the theatre is really too small to discuss it. It would not be fair to play David and Goliath on a stage too small to admit Goliath. And it is not fair to discuss private morality on a stage too small to admit the enormous presence of public morality; that character which has not appeared in a play since the Middle Ages; whose name is Everyman and whose honour we have all in our keeping.

The Dramatist

No one who was alive at the time and interested in such matters will ever forget the first acting of Arms and the Man. It was applauded by that indescribable element in all of us which rejoices to see the genuine thing prevail against the plausible; that element which rejoices that even its enemies are alive. Apart from the problems raised in the play, the very form of it was an attractive and forcible innovation. Classic plays which were wholly heroic, comic plays which were wholly and even heartlessly ironical, were common enough. Commonest of all in this particular time was the play that began playfully, with plenty of comic business, and was gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended on a note of romance or even of pathos. A commonplace little officer, the butt of the mess, becomes by the last act as high and hopeless a lover as Dante. Or a vulgar and violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth before the curtain goes down. The first thing that Bernard Shaw did when he stepped before the footlights was to reverse this process. He resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on bathos. The officer should be heroic first and then everyone should laugh at him; the curtain should go up on a man remembering his youth, and he should only reveal himself as a violent pork-butcher when someone interrupted him with an order for pork. This merely technical originality is indicated in the very title of the play. The Arma Virumque of Virgil is a mounting and ascending phrase, the man is more than his weapons. The Latin line suggests a superb procession which should bring on to the stage the brazen and resounding armour, the shield and shattering axe, but end with the hero himself, taller and more terrible because unarmed. The technical effect of Shaw’s scheme is like the same scene, in which a crowd should carry even more gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but when the horns and howls were at their highest, should end with the figure of Little Tich. The name itself is meant to be a bathos; arms — and the man.

It is well to begin with the superficial; and this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw; the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the vitality and value of his plays does not lie merely in this; any more than the value of Swinburne lies in alliteration or the value of Hood in puns. This is not his message; but it is his method; it is his style. The first taste we had of it was in this play of Arms and the Man; but even at the very first it was evident that there was much more in the play than that. Among other things there was one thing not unimportant; there was savage sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere person can produce such effective flippancies on a matter like war; just as only a strong man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all very well to use the word “fool” as synonymous with “jester”; but daily experience shows that it is generally the solemn and silent man who is the fool. It is all very well to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; but if you stand on your head you must have a hard and solid head to stand on. In Arms and the Man the bathos of form was strictly the incarnation of a strong satire in the idea. The play opens in an atmosphere of military melodrama; the dashing officer of cavalry going off to death in an attitude, the lovely heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band, the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this enters Bluntschli, the little sturdy crop-haired Swiss professional soldier, a man without a country but with a trade. He tells the army-adoring heroine frankly that she is a humbug; and she, after a moment’s reflection, appears to agree with him. The play is like nearly all Shaw’s plays, the dialogue of a conversion. By the end of it the young lady has lost all her military illusions and admires this mercenary soldier not because he faces guns, but because he faces facts.

This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his didactic drama; because the commonplace courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the one virtue which he was destined to praise throughout. We can best see how the play symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we compare it with some other attack by modern humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of the actual opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy he tells men, with coarse innocence, that romantic war is only butchery and that romantic love is only lust. But Tolstoy objects to these things because they are real; he really wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to them in so far as they are ideal; that is in so far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so much to war as to the attractiveness of war. He does not so much dislike love as the love of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy stands and thunders, “There shall be no wars”; Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, “Wars if you must; but for God’s sake, not war songs.” Before the temple of Venus, Tolstoy cries terribly, “Come out of it!”; Shaw is quite content to say, “Do not be taken in by it.” Tolstoy seems really to propose that high passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. Shaw is more moderate; and only asks that they should be desecrated. Upon this note, both about sex and conflict, he was destined to dwell through much of his work with the most wonderful variations of witty adventure and intellectual surprise. It may be doubted perhaps whether this realism in love and war is quite so sensible as it looks. Securus judicat orbis terrarum; the world is wiser than the moderns. The world has kept sentimentalities simply because they are the most practical things in the world. They alone make men do things. The world does not encourage a quite rational lover, simply because a perfectly rational lover would never get married. The world does not encourage a perfectly rational army, because a perfectly rational army would run away.

The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge in the literal sense. Its sharpest end was always in front; and it split our society from end to end the moment it had entrance at all. As I have said he was long unheard of; but he had not the tragedy of many authors, who were heard of long before they were heard. When you had read any Shaw you read all Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you waited for more. And when he brought them out in volume form, you did what is repugnant to any literary man — you bought a book.

The dramatic volume with which Shaw dazzled the public was called, Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant. I think the most striking and typical thing about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were unpleasant and which were pleasant. “Pleasant” is a word which is almost unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the possible exception of Mrs. Warren’s Profession (which was at least unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular reason why any of the seven plays should be held specially to please or displease. First in fame and contemporary importance came the reprint of Arms and the Man, of which I have already spoken. Over all the rest towered unquestionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren and of Candida. They were neither of them pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant. They were neither of them really unpleasant except as all truth is unpleasant. But they did represent the author’s normal preference and his principal fear; and those two sculptured giantesses largely upheld his fame.

I fancy that the author rather dislikes Candida because it is so generally liked. I give my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish phrase), but I think that there were only two moments when this powerful writer was truly, in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; that is, breathing from a bigger self and telling more truth than he knew. One is that scene in a later play where after the secrets and revenges of Egypt have rioted and rotted all round him, the colossal sanity of Cæsar is suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other is that great last scene in Candida where the wife, stung into final speech, declared her purpose of remaining with the strong man because he is the weak man. The wife is asked to decide between two men, one a strenuous self-confident popular preacher, her husband, the other a wild and weak young poet, logically futile and physically timid, her lover; and she chooses the former because he has more weakness and more need of her. Even among the plain and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw play this is one of the best reversals or turnovers ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Bernard Shaw is perpetually and tiresomely told that he stands on his head. But all romance and all religion consist in making the whole universe stand on its head. That reversal is the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall be first and the first last. Considered as a pure piece of Shaw therefore, the thing is of the best. But it is also something much better than Shaw. The writer touches certain realities commonly outside his scope; especially the reality of the normal wife’s attitude to the normal husband, an attitude which is not romantic but which is yet quite quixotic; which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynically clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice without in the least involving idolatry.

The truth is that in this place Bernard Shaw comes within an inch of expressing something that is not properly expressed anywhere else; the idea of marriage. Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation. Kings and diplomatists talk of “forming alliances” when they make weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of his wife even when he wishes he wasn’t. The twain are one flesh — yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.

Of this ancient and essential relation there are certain emotional results, which are subtle, like all the growths of nature. And one of them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, whom she regards at once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly in literature. The man’s incurable sense of the mother in his lawful wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:

“Christ! Maria! God,

Pompilia, will you let them murder me?”

And the woman’s witness to the same fact has been best expressed by Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run alone.

There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about seeking for “an archangel with purple wings” who shall be worthy of his lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style; there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as something dainty and magical; but all men do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing at all; but that is another argument. The argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aiming at mere realism, makes a big mistake in reality. Misled by his great heresy of looking at emotions from the outside, he makes Eugene a cold-blooded prig at the very moment when he is trying, for his own dramatic purposes, to make him a hot-blooded lover. He makes the young lover an idealistic theoriser about the very things about which he really would have been a sort of mystical materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is much more right than the very rational one; and there is far more truth to life as it is in Lover’s couplet —

“And envied the chicken

That Peggy was pickin’.”

than in Eugene’s solemn, æsthetic protest against the potato-skins and the lamp-oil. For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he despises romance, ought to comprehend it. But then, if once he comprehended romance, he would not despise it.

The series contained, besides its more substantial work, tragic and comic, a comparative frivolity called The Man of Destiny. It is a little comedy about Napoleon, and is chiefly interesting as a foreshadowing of his after sketches of heroes and strong men; it is a kind of parody of Cæsar and Cleopatra before it was written. In this connection the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of interest. All Shaw’s generation and school of thought remembered Napoleon only by his late and corrupt title of “The Man of Destiny,” a title only given to him when he was already fat and tired and destined to exile. They forgot that through all the really thrilling and creative part of his career he was not the man of destiny, but the man who defied destiny. Shaw’s sketch is extraordinarily clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we must remember when we come to those larger canvases on which he painted his more serious heroes. As for the play, it is packed with good things, of which the last is perhaps the best. The long duologue between Bonaparte and the Irish lady ends with the General declaring that he will only be beaten when he meets an English army under an Irish general. It has always been one of Shaw’s paradoxes that the English mind has the force to fulfil orders, while the Irish mind has the intelligence to give them, and it is among those of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth.

A far more important play is The Philanderer, an ironic comedy which is full of fine strokes and real satire; it is more especially the vehicle of some of Shaw’s best satire upon physical science. Nothing could be cleverer than the picture of the young, strenuous doctor, in the utter innocence of his professional ambition, who has discovered a new disease, and is delighted when he finds people suffering from it and cast down to despair when he finds that it does not exist. The point is worth a pause, because it is a good, short way of stating Shaw’s attitude, right or wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. What he dislikes in young Doctor Paramore is that he has interposed a secondary and false conscience between himself and the facts. When his disease is disproved, instead of seeing the escape of a human being who thought he was going to die of it, Paramore sees the downfall of a kind of flag or cause. This is the whole contention of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, put better than the book puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the dangers of “idealism,” the sacrifice of people to principles, and Shaw is even wiser in his suggestion that this excessive idealism exists nowhere so strongly as in the world of physical science. He shows that the scientist tends to be more concerned about the sickness than about the sick man; but it was certainly in his mind to suggest here also that the idealist is more concerned about the sin than about the sinner.

This business of Dr. Paramore’s disease while it is the most farcical thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense of those blasting and obliterating words “funny without being vulgar,” that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It is a play about a dashing and advanced “Ibsen Club,” and the squabble between the young Ibsenites and the old people who are not yet up to Ibsen. It would be hard to find a stronger example of Shaw’s only essential error, modernity — which means the seeking for truth in terms of time. Only a few years have passed and already almost half the wit of that wonderful play is wasted, because it all turns on the newness of a fashion that is no longer new. Doubtless many people still think the Ibsen drama a great thing, like the French classical drama. But going to “The Philanderer” is like going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing that the young men are now all for Racine. What makes such work sound unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid which have ever tried to be “modern,” which have consented to smell of time rather than of eternity. Only those who have stooped to be in advance of their time will ever find themselves behind it.

But it is irritating to think what diamonds, what dazzling silver of Shavian wit has been sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In The Philanderer there are five hundred excellent and about five magnificent things. The rattle of repartees between the doctor and the soldier about the humanity of their two trades is admirable. Or again, when the colonel tells Chartaris that “in his young days” he would have no more behaved like Chartaris than he would have cheated at cards. After a pause Chartaris says, “You’re getting old, Craven, and you make a virtue of it as usual.” And there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in the words of Grace, who has refused the man she loves, to Julia, who is marrying the man she doesn’t, “This is what they call a happy ending — these men.”

There is an acrid taste in The Philanderer; and certainly he might be considered a super-sensitive person who should find anything acrid in You Never Can Tell. This play is the nearest approach to frank and objectless exuberance in the whole of Shaw’s work. Punch, with wisdom as well as wit, said that it might well be called not “You Never Can Tell” but “You Never Can be Shaw.” And yet if anyone will read this blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic farces, such as Pickwick or even The Wrong Box, I do not think he will be disposed to erase or even to modify what I said at the beginning about the ingrained grimness and even inhumanity of Shaw’s art. To take but one test: love, in an “extravaganza,” may be light love or love in idleness, but it should be hearty and happy love if it is to add to the general hilarity. Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of the sportsman Winkle and the Maestro Jimson. In Gloria’s collapse before her bullying lover there is something at once cold and unclean; it calls up all the modern supermen with their cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should begin in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is something very symbolic of Shaw in the fact that his farce begins in a dentist’s.

The only one out of this brilliant batch of plays in which I think that the method adopted really fails, is the one called Widower’s Houses. The best touch of Shaw is simply in the title. The simple substitution of widowers for widows contains almost the whole bitter and yet boisterous protest of Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact over dignified phrase; all his dislike of those subtle trends of sex or mystery which swing the logician off the straight line. We can imagine him crying, “Why in the name of death and conscience should it be tragic to be a widow but comic to be a widower?” But the rationalistic method is here applied quite wrong as regards the production of a drama. The most dramatic point in the affair is when the open and indecent rack-renter turns on the decent young man of means and proves to him that he is equally guilty, that he also can only grind his corn by grinding the faces of the poor. But even here the point is undramatic because it is indirect; it is indirect because it is merely sociological. It may be the truth that a young man living on an unexamined income which ultimately covers a great deal of house-property is as dangerous as any despot or thief. But it is a truth that you can no more put into a play than into a triolet. You can make a play out of one man robbing another man, but not out of one man robbing a million men; still less out of his robbing them unconsciously.

Of the plays collected in this book I have kept Mrs. Warren’s Profession to the last, because, fine as it is, it is even finer and more important because of its fate, which was to rouse a long and serious storm and to be vetoed by the Censor of Plays. I say that this drama is most important because of the quarrel that came out of it. If I were speaking of some mere artist this might be an insult. But there are high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; and one of the highest and most heroic is this, that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel than for a play. And this quarrel about the censorship is one on which he feels so strongly that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy it would be much better to leave out Mrs. Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The veto was the pivot of so very personal a movement by the dramatist, of so very positive an assertion of his own attitude towards things, that it is only just and necessary to state what were the two essential parties to the dispute; the play and the official who prevented the play.

The play of Mrs. Warren’s Profession is concerned with a coarse mother and a cold daughter; the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade of harlotry; the daughter does not know until the end the atrocious origin of all her own comfort and refinement. The daughter, when the discovery is made, freezes up into an iceberg of contempt; which is indeed a very womanly thing to do. The mother explodes into pulverising cynicism and practicality; which is also very womanly. The dialogue is drastic and sweeping; the daughter says the trade is loathsome; the mother answers that she loathes it herself; that every healthy person does loathe the trade by which she lives. And beyond question the general effect of the play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing anyone to be so insensible as to require to be told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot is that a brothel is a miserable business, and a brothel-keeper a miserable woman. The whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the literal sense of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that the comic part comes after the tragedy. But just as You Never Can Tell represents the nearest approach of Shaw to the purely comic, so Mrs. Warren’s Profession represents his only complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There is no twopenny modernism in it, as in The Philanderer. Mrs. Warren is as old as the Old Testament; “for she hath cast down many wounded, yea, many strong men have been slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell, going down into the chamber of death.” Here is no subtle ethics, as in Widowers’ Houses; for even those moderns who think it noble that a woman should throw away her honour, surely cannot think it especially noble that she should sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter, astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in You Never Can Tell. The play is a pure tragedy about a permanent and quite plain human problem; the problem is as plain and permanent, the tragedy is as proud and pure, as in Œdipus or Macbeth. This play was presented in the ordinary way for public performance and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of Plays.

The Censor of Plays is a small and accidental eighteenth-century official. Like nearly all the powers which Englishmen now respect as ancient and rooted, he is very recent. Novels and newspapers still talk of the English aristocracy that came over with William the Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy is as old as the Reformation; and none of it came over with William the Conqueror. Some of the older English landlords came over with William of Orange; the rest have come by ordinary alien immigration. In the same way we always talk of the Victorian woman (with her smelling salts and sentiment) as the old-fashioned woman. But she really was a quite new-fashioned woman; she considered herself, and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisation upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan woman to whom we are now returning. We are never oppressed by old things; it is recent things that can really oppress. And in accordance with this principle modern England has accepted, as if it were a part of perennial morality, a tenth-rate job of Walpole’s worst days called the Censorship of the Drama. Just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century parvenus to date from Hastings, just as they have supposed the eighteenth-century ladies to date from Eve, so they have supposed the eighteenth-century Censorship to date from Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth purely political. Its first and principal achievement was to prevent Fielding from writing plays; not at all because the plays were coarse, but because they criticised the Government. Fielding was a free writer; but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly and baldly in Walpole’s day; and the Censorship of plays has its origin, not merely in tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary and partisan piece of tyranny; a thing in its nature far more ephemeral, far less essential, than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment was when the office of censor was held by that filthy writer, Colman the younger; and when he gravely refused to license a work by the author of Our Village. Few funnier notions can ever have actually been facts than this notion that the restraint and chastity of George Colman saved the English public from the eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford.

Such was the play; and such was the power that stopped the play. A private man wrote it; another private man forbade it; nor was there any difference between Mr. Shaw’s authority and Mr. Redford’s, except that Mr. Shaw did defend his action on public grounds and Mr. Redford did not. The dramatist had simply been suppressed by a despot; and what was worse (because it was modern) by a silent and evasive despot; a despot in hiding. People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we at the present day suffer from the modesty of tyrants; from the shyness and the shrinking secrecy of the strong. Shaw’s preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession was far more fit to be called a public document than the slovenly refusal of the individual official; it had more exactness, more universal application, more authority. Shaw on Redford was far more national and responsible than Redford on Shaw.

The dramatist found in the quarrel one of the important occasions of his life, because the crisis called out something in him which is in many ways his highest quality — righteous indignation. As a mere matter of the art of controversy of course he carried the war into the enemy’s camp at once. He did not linger over loose excuses for licence; he declared at once that the Censor was licentious, while he, Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss whether a Censorship ought to make the drama moral. He declared that it made the drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity he attacked the Censor quite as much for what he permitted as for what he prevented. He charged him with encouraging all plays that attracted men to vice and only stopping those which discouraged them from it. Nor was this attitude by any means an idle paradox. Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in which the prostitute and the procuress are practically obvious, and in which they are represented as revelling in beautiful surroundings and basking in brilliant popularity. The crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the Gaiety Girl; that had been done, with little enough decorum, in a hundred musical comedies. The crime of Shaw was that he introduced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent her life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice were already flaunted before the playgoers. It was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was not up to a sufficient standard of immorality; it was not spicy enough to pass the Censor. The acceptable and the accepted plays were those which made the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; for all the world as if the Censor’s profession were the same as Mrs. Warren’s profession.

Such was the angle of Shaw’s energetic attack; and it is not to be denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse, omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to the too amiable view of a clergyman in The Private Secretary. But the controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent example of the author’s aggressive attitude and his love of turning the tables in debate. Moreover, though this point of view involves a potential overstatement, it also involves an important truth. One of the best points urged in the course of it was this, that though vice is punished in conventional drama, the punishment is not really impressive, because it is not inevitable or even probable. It does not arise out of the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard Shaw urged this argument again in connection with his friend Mr. Granville Barker’s play of Waste, in which the woman dies from an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly enough, that if she had died from poison or a pistol shot it would have left everyone unmoved, for pistols do not in their nature follow female unchastity. Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases. Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the shape of any work of art. There is nothing wrong about being sick; but if Bernard Shaw wrote a play in which all the characters expressed their dislike of animal food by vomiting on the stage, I think we should be justified in saying that the thing was outside, not the laws of morality, but the framework of civilised literature. The instinctive movement of repulsion which everyone has when hearing of the operation in Waste is not an ethical repulsion at all. But it is an æsthetic repulsion, and a right one.

But I have only dwelt on this particular fighting phase because it leaves us facing the ultimate characteristics which I mentioned first. Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in comparison with morals, literally nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid people) a prig. His attitude towards current problems was felt to be arresting and even indecent; I do not think that anyone thought of connecting it with the old Calvinistic morality. But Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, was at this moment on the very eve of confessing his moral origin. The next book of plays he produced (including The Devil’s Disciple, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, and Cæsar and Cleopatra), actually bore the title of Plays for Puritans.

The play called The Devil’s Disciple has great merits, but the merits are incidental. Some of its jokes are serious and important, but its general plan can only be called a joke. Almost alone among Bernard Shaw’s plays (except of course such things as How he Lied to her Husband and The Admirable Bashville) this drama does not turn on any very plain pivot of ethical or philosophical conviction. The artistic idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama in which all the conventional melodramatic situations shall suddenly take unconventional turns. Just where the melodramatic clergyman would show courage he appears to show cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner would confess his love he confesses his indifference. This is a little too like the Shaw of the newspaper critics rather than the Shaw of reality. There are indeed present in the play two of the writer’s principal moral conceptions. The first is the idea of a great heroic action coming in a sense from nowhere; that is, not coming from any commonplace motive; being born in the soul in naked beauty, coming with its own authority and testifying only to itself. Shaw’s agent does not act towards something, but from something. The hero dies, not because he desires heroism, but because he has it. So in this particular play the Devil’s Disciple finds that his own nature will not permit him to put the rope around another man’s neck; he has no reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his death is a sort of divine whim. And in connection with this the dramatist introduces another favourite moral; the objection to perpetual playing upon the motive of sex. He deliberately lures the onlooker into the net of Cupid in order to tell him with salutary decision that Cupid is not there at all. Millions of melodramatic dramatists have made a man face death for the woman he loves; Shaw makes him face death for the woman he does not love — merely in order to put woman in her place. He objects to that idolatry of sexualism which makes it the fountain of all forcible enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous drama which makes the female the only key to the male. He is Feminist in politics, but Anti-feminist in emotion. His key to most problems is, “Ne cherchez pas la femme.”

As has been observed, the incidental felicities of the play are frequent and memorable, especially those connected with the character of General Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, free-thinking eighteenth century gentleman, who was much too much of an aristocrat not to be a liberal. One of the best thrusts in all the Shavian fencing matches is that which occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to be hanged, asks rhetorically why he cannot be shot like a soldier. “Now there you speak like a civilian,” replies General Burgoyne. “Have you formed any conception of the condition of marksmanship in the British Army?” Excellent, too, is the passage in which his subordinate speaks of crushing the enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him who will crush their enemies in England, snobbery and jobbery and incurable carelessness and sloth. And in one sentence towards the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial comprehension of mankind than he shows anywhere else; “it takes all sorts to make a world, saints as well as soldiers.” If Shaw had remembered that sentence on other occasions he would have avoided his mistake about Cæsar and Brutus. It is not only true that it takes all sorts to make a world; but the world cannot succeed without its failures. Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the play is why it is a play for Puritans; except the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home is meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in this connection it is constantly necessary to fall back upon the facts of which I have spoken at the beginning of this brief study; it is necessary especially to remember that Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritanism from the inside. In that domestic circle which took him to hear Moody and Sankey, in that domestic circle which was teetotal even when it was intoxicated, in that atmosphere and society Shaw might even have met the monstrous mother in The Devil’s Disciple, the horrible old woman who declares that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that charity was a Christian virtue. It is possible that among Puritans there were people who thought a heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is enough to make one tear one’s hair to think that a man of genius received his first impressions in so small a corner of Europe that he could for a long time suppose that this Puritanism was current among Christian men. The question, however, need not detain us, for the batch of plays contained two others about which it is easier to speak.

The third play in order in the series called Plays for Puritans is a very charming one; Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. This also turns, as does so much of the Cæsar drama, on the idea of vanity of revenge — the idea that it is too slight and silly a thing for a man to allow to occupy and corrupt his consciousness. It is not, of course, the morality that is new here, but the touch of cold laughter in the core of the morality. Many saints and sages have denounced vengeance. But they treated vengeance as something too great for man. “Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” Shaw treats vengeance as something too small for man — a monkey trick he ought to have outlived, a childish storm of tears which he ought to be able to control. In the story in question Captain Brassbound has nourished through his whole erratic existence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts of Africa — a mission of private punishment which appears to him as a mission of holy justice. His mother has died in consequence of a judge’s decision, and Brassbound roams and schemes until the judge falls into his hands. Then a pleasant society lady, Lady Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy conversational undertone — a rivulet of speech which ripples while she is mending his coat — that he is making a fool of himself, that his wrong is irrelevant, that his vengeance is objectless, that he would be much better if he flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in short, she tells him he is ruining himself for the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here again we have the note of the economist, the hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. If he were endeavouring to persuade one of his moon-lighting fellow-countrymen not to shoot his landlord, I can imagine him explaining with benevolent emphasis that it was not so much a question of losing a life as of throwing away a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison alone suggests a doubt which wriggles in the recesses of my mind about the complete reliability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, the complete finality of the moral of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. Of course, it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady Cicely Waynefleet to wish to let sleeping dogs lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her to wish everything to be smooth and sweet-tempered. But I have the obstinate question in the corner of my brain, whether if a few Captain Brassbounds did revenge themselves on judges, the quality of our judges might not materially improve.

When this doubt is once off one’s conscience one can lose oneself in the bottomless beatitude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the most living and laughing things that her maker has made. I do not know any stronger way of stating the beauty of the character than by saying that it was written specially for Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one of the very few characters in which the dramatist can claim some part of her triumph.

We may now pass to the more important of the plays. For some time Bernard Shaw would seem to have been brooding upon the soul of Julius Cæsar. There must always be a strong human curiosity about the soul of Julius Cæsar; and, among other things, about whether he had a soul. The conjunction of Shaw and Cæsar has about it something smooth and inevitable; for this decisive reason, that Cæsar is really the only great man of history to whom the Shaw theories apply. Cæsar was a Shaw hero. Cæsar was merciful without being in the least pitiful; his mercy was colder than justice. Cæsar was a conqueror without being in any hearty sense a soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. Cæsar was a demagogue without being a democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is a demagogue without being a democrat. If he had tried to prove his principle from any of the other heroes or sages of mankind he would have found it much more difficult. Napoleon achieved more miraculous conquest; but during his most conquering epoch he was a burning boy suicidally in love with a woman far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved far more instant and incredible worldly success; but Joan of Arc achieved worldly success because she believed in another world. Nelson was a figure fully as fascinating and dramatically decisive; but Nelson was “romantic”; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a devoted lover. Alexander was passionate; Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had some suburban religion; Frederick was a poet; Charlemagne was fond of children. But Julius Cæsar attracted Shaw not less by his positive than by his negative enormousness. Nobody can say with certainty that Cæsar cared for anything. It is unjust to call Cæsar an egoist; for there is no proof that he cared even for Cæsar. He may not have been either an atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub. He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of Christianity. As Christ expressed how great a man can be humble and humane, Cæsar may have expressed how great a man can be frigid and flippant. According to most legends Antichrist was to come soon after Christ. One has only to suppose that Antichrist came shortly before Christ; and Antichrist might very well be Cæsar.

It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw to say that he does not attempt to make his Cæsar superior except in this naked and negative sense. There is no suggestion, as there is in the Jehovah of the Old Testament, that the very cruelty of the higher being conceals some tremendous and even tortured love. Cæsar is superior to other men not because he loves more, but because he hates less. Cæsar is magnanimous not because he is warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because he is not warm-hearted enough to avenge. There is no suggestion anywhere in the play that he is hiding any great genial purpose or powerful tenderness towards men. In order to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist has introduced a soliloquy of Cæsar alone with the Sphinx. There if anywhere he would have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or burning pity for the people. But in that scene between the Sphinx and Cæsar, Cæsar is as cold and as lonely and as dead as the Sphinx.

But whether the Shavian Cæsar is a sound ideal or no, there can be little doubt that he is a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the man is a little like a statue, it is a statue by a great sculptor; a statue of the best period. If his nobility is a little negative in its character, it is the negative darkness of the great dome of night; not as in some “new moralities” the mere mystery of the coal-hole. Indeed, this somewhat austere method of work is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious. There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; he could not build a mediæval cathedral in which laughter and terror are twisted together in stone, molten by mystical passion. He can build, by way of amusement, a Chinese pagoda; but when he is in earnest, only a Roman temple. He has a keen eye for truth; but he is one of those people who like, as the saying goes, to put down the truth in black and white. He is always girding and jeering at romantics and idealists because they will not put down the truth in black and white. But black and white are not the only two colours in the world. The modern man of science who writes down a fact in black and white is not more but less accurate than the mediæval monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, sea-green and turquoise. Nevertheless, it is a good thing that the more austere method should exist separately, and that some men should be specially good at it. Bernard Shaw is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a black and white artist.

And as a study in black and white nothing could be better than this sketch of Julius Cæsar. He is not so much represented as “bestriding the earth like a Colossus” (which is indeed a rather comic attitude for a hero to stand in), but rather walking the earth with a sort of stern levity, lightly touching the planet and yet spurning it away like a stone. He walks like a winged man who has chosen to fold his wings. There is something creepy even about his kindness; it makes the men in front of him feel as if they were made of glass. The nature of the Cæsarian mercy is massively suggested. Cæsar dislikes a massacre, not because it is a great sin, but because it is a small sin. It is felt that he classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; a senseless temporary subjugation of man’s permanent purpose by his passing and trivial feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for a great purpose, just as he plunges into the sea. But to be stung into such action he deems as undignified as to be tipped off the pier. In a singularly fine passage Cleopatra, having hired assassins to stab an enemy, appeals to her wrongs as justifying her revenge, and says, “If you can find one man in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will be crucified by my own slaves.” “If you can find one man in all the world,” replies Cæsar, “who can see that you did wrong, he will either conquer the world as I have done or be crucified by it.” That is the high water mark of this heathen sublimity; and we do not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw, when a few minutes afterwards the hero is saluted with a blaze of swords.

As usually happens in the author’s works, there is even more about Julius Cæsar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales; for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and deficient. He does not approach them as fairy tales, as if he were four, but as “folk-lore” as if he were forty. And he makes a big mistake about them which he would never have made if he had kept his birthday and hung up his stocking, and generally kept alive inside him the firelight of a home. The point is so peculiarly characteristic of Bernard Shaw, and is indeed so much of a summary of his most interesting assertion and his most interesting error, that it deserves a word by itself, though it is a word which must be remembered in connection with nearly all the other plays.

His primary and defiant proposition is the Calvinistic proposition: that the elect do not earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of a man does not consist in trying to be good, but in being good. Julius Cæsar prevails over other people by possessing more virtus than they; not by having striven or suffered or bought his virtue; not because he has struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. So far Bernard Shaw is only what I have called him at the beginning; he is simply a seventeenth-century Calvinist. Cæsar is not saved by works, or even by faith; he is saved because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately for himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back further than the seventeenth century; and professing his opinion to be yet more antiquated, invoked the original legends of mankind. He argued that when the fairy tales gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of darkness or a magic sword it removed all credit from Jack in the “common moral” sense; he won as Cæsar won only because he was superior. I will confess, in passing, to the conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of his whole simple and strenuous life was never quite so near to hell as at the moment when he wrote down those words. But in this question of fairy tales my immediate point is, not how near he was to hell, but how very far off he was from fairyland. That notion about the hero with a magic sword being the superman with a magic superiority is the caprice of a pedant; no child, boy, or man ever felt it in the story of Jack the Giant Killer. Obviously the moral is all the other way. Jack’s fairy sword and invisible coat are clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight at all with something which is by nature stronger. They are a rough, savage substitute for psychological descriptions of special valour or unwearied patience. But no one in his five wits can doubt that the idea of “Jack the Giant Killer” is exactly the opposite to Shaw’s idea. If it were not a tale of effort and triumph hardly earned it would not be called “Jack the Giant Killer.” If it were a tale of the victory of natural advantages it would be called “Giant the Jack Killer.” If the teller of fairy tales had merely wanted to urge that some beings are born stronger than others he would not have fallen back on elaborate tricks of weapon and costume for conquering an ogre. He would simply have let the ogre conquer. I will not speak of my own emotions in connection with this incredibly caddish doctrine that the strength of the strong is admirable, but not the valour of the weak. It is enough to say that I have to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, his frank gestures, kind eyes, and exquisite Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point for any such purpose; but merely to show how we must be always casting back to those concrete foundations with which we began. Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never national enough to be domestic; he was never a part of his past; hence when he tries to interpret tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric scriptures; so that a noble and honourable artist flounders about like any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory of the strong over the weak — which, among other things, would not make a story at all. It all comes of that mistake about not keeping his birthday. A man should be always tied to his mother’s apron strings; he should always have a hold on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to start anew from a childish standpoint. Theologically the thing is best expressed by saying, “You must be born again.” Secularly it is best expressed by saying, “You must keep your birthday.” Even if you will not be born again, at least remind yourself occasionally that you were born once.

Some of the incidental wit in the Cæsarian drama is excellent although it is upon the whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the previous plays. One of its jests may be mentioned in passing, not merely to draw attention to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough to afford many failures) but because it is the best opportunity for mentioning one of the writer’s minor notions to which he obstinately adheres. He describes the Ancient Briton in Cæsar’s train as being exactly like a modern respectable Englishman. As a joke for a Christmas pantomime this would be all very well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard Shaw to have some intellectual root, however fantastic the flower. And obviously all historic common sense is against the idea that that dim Druid people, whoever they were, who dwelt in our land before it was lit up by Rome or loaded with varied invasions, were a precise facsimile of the commercial society of Birmingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the Puritan in Bernard Shaw, a part of the taut and high-strung quality of his mind, that he will never admit of any of his jokes that it was only a joke. When he has been most witty he will passionately deny his own wit; he will say something which Voltaire might envy and then declare that he has got it all out of a Blue book. And in connection with this eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice this mere detail about the Ancient Briton. Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton when first found by Cæsar might not be quite like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw poured forth a torrent of theory, explaining that climate was the only thing that affected nationality; and that whatever races came into the English or Irish climate would become like the English or Irish. Now the modern theory of race is certainly a piece of stupid materialism; it is an attempt to explain the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, Rome, Japan, by means of the things we are not sure of at all, prehistoric conjectures, Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course there is a reality in race; but there is no reality in the theories of race offered by some ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far from being the case. Something in the evil spirit of our time forces people always to pretend to have found some material and mechanical explanation. Bernard Shaw has filled all his last days with affirmations about the divinity of the non-mechanical part of man, the sacred quality in creation and choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that the true key to national differentiations is the key of the will and not of the environment. It never crosses the modern mind to fancy that perhaps a people is chiefly influenced by how that people has chosen to behave. If I have to choose between race and weather I prefer race; I would rather be imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who were once alive than by mud and mists which never were. But I do not propose to be controlled by either; to me my national history is a chain of multitudinous choices. It is neither blood nor rain that has made England, but hope, the thing that all those dead men have desired. France was not France because she was made to be by the skulls of the Celts or by the sun of Gaul. France was France because she chose.

I have stepped on one side from the immediate subject because this is as good an instance as any we are likely to come across of a certain almost extraneous fault which does deface the work of Bernard Shaw. It is a fault only to be mentioned when we have made the solidity of the merits quite clear. To say that Shaw is merely making game of people is demonstrably ridiculous; at least a fairly systematic philosophy can be traced through all his jokes, and one would not insist on such a unity in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I have already pointed out that the genius of Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather than too merry and irresponsible. I shall have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, in one very serious sense, the very opposite of paradoxical. In any case if any real student of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool of him, we can only say that of that student it is very superfluous for anyone to make a fool. But though the dramatist’s jests are always serious and generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain spirit of which that climate theory is a case — a spirit that can only be called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a certain bleak and heartless extravagance of statement on certain subjects which makes the author really unconvincing as well as exaggerative; satires that are saugrenu, jokes that are rather silly than wild, statements which even considered as lies have no symbolic relation to truth. They are exaggerations of something that does not exist. For instance, if a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startlingly and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings. Or again, take the case of nationality and the unit of patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries between clans, kingdoms, or empires were nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical fallacy. But when Mr. Bernard Shaw says that England matters so little that the British Empire might very well give up these islands to Germany, he has not only got hold of the sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by the wrong ear; a mythical sow, a sow that is not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the British Empire must be a thousand times more unreal. It is as if one said, “I do not believe that Michael Scott ever had any existence; but I am convinced, in spite of the absurd legend, that he had a shadow.”

As has been said already, there must be some truth in every popular impression. And the impression that Shaw, the most savagely serious man of his time, is a mere music-hall artist must have reference to such rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his speeches are full, not only of substance, but of substances, materials like pork, mahogany, lead, and leather. There is no man whose arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever he is he has topical jokes, one might almost say family jokes. If he talks to tailors he can allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If he talks to the soldiers he can see the exquisite and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. But when all his powerful practicality is allowed, there does run through him this erratic levity, an explosion of ineptitude. It is a queer quality in literature. It is a sort of cold extravagance; and it has made him all his enemies.

The Philosopher

I should suppose that Cæsar and Cleopatra marks about the turning tide of Bernard Shaw’s fortune and fame. Up to this time he had known glory, but never success. He had been wondered at as something brilliant and barren, like a meteor; but no one would accept him as a sun, for the test of a sun is that it can make something grow. Practically speaking the two qualities of a modern drama are, that it should play and that it should pay. It had been proved over and over again in weighty dramatic criticisms, in careful readers’ reports, that the plays of Shaw could never play or pay; that the public did not want wit and the wars of intellect. And just about the time that this had been finally proved, the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to play like Charley’s Aunt and to pay like Colman’s Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all rejoice, not only because it redeems the reputation of Bernard Shaw, but because it redeems the character of the English people. All that is bravest in human nature, open challenge and unexpected wit and angry conviction, are not so very unpopular as the publishers and managers in their motor-cars have been in the habit of telling us. But exactly because we have come to a turning point in the man’s career I propose to interrupt the mere catalogue of his plays and to treat his latest series rather as the proclamations of an acknowledged prophet. For the last plays, especially Man and Superman, are such that his whole position must be re-stated before attacking them seriously.

For two reasons I have called this concluding series of plays not again by the name of “The Dramatist,” but by the general name of “The Philosopher.” The first reason is that given above, that we have come to the time of his triumph and may therefore treat him as having gained complete possession of a pulpit of his own. But there is a second reason: that it was just about this time that he began to create not only a pulpit of his own, but a church and creed of his own. It is a very vast and universal religion; and it is not his fault that he is the only member of it. The plainer way of putting it is this: that here, in the hour of his earthly victory, there dies in him the old mere denier, the mere dynamiter of criticism. In the warmth of popularity he begins to wish to put his faith positively; to offer some solid key to all creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation is this: that all the crowds are acclaiming him as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon, while he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic power, and with a grave face telling himself that it is time he had a faith to preach. His final success as a sort of charlatan coincides with his first grand failures as a theologian.

For this reason I have deliberately called a halt in his dramatic career, in order to consider these two essential points: What did the mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt to admire him, imagine his point of view to be? and second, What did he imagine it to be? or, if the phrase be premature, What did he imagine it was going to be? In his latest work, especially in Man and Superman, Shaw has become a complete and colossal mystic. That mysticism does grow quite rationally out of his older arguments; but very few people ever troubled to trace the connection. In order to do so it is necessary to say what was, at the time of his first success, the public impression of Shaw’s philosophy.

Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing that the three most popular phrases about Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all weak things, is overloaded with words. In a healthy condition of language a man finds it very difficult to say the right thing, but at last says it. In this empire of journalese a man finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing that he never thinks of saying anything else. False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to his hand that it is easier to use them than not to use them. These wrong terms picked up through idleness are retained through habit, and so the man has begun to think wrong almost before he has begun to think at all. Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination or intellectual honour, and it has dealt very recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. He has contrived to get about three newspaper phrases tied to his tail; and those newspaper phrases are all and separately wrong. The three superstitions about him, it will be conceded, are generally these: first that he desires “problem plays,” second that he is “paradoxical,” and third that in his dramas as elsewhere he is specially “a Socialist.” And the interesting thing is that when we come to his philosophy, all these three phrases are quite peculiarly inapplicable.

To take the plays first, there is a general disposition to describe that type of intimate or defiant drama which he approves as “the problem play.” Now the serious modern play is, as a rule, the very reverse of a problem play; for there can be no problem unless both points of view are equally and urgently presented. Hamlet really is a problem play because at the end of it one is really in doubt as to whether upon the author’s showing Hamlet is something more than a man or something less. Henry IV and Henry V are really problem plays; in this sense, that the reader or spectator is really doubtful whether the high but harsh efficiency, valour, and ambition of Henry V are an improvement on his old blackguard camaraderie; and whether he was not a better man when he was a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is very common in Shakespeare; I mean a doubt that exists in the writer as well as in the reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of a Puritan to tolerate such doubts about points which he counts essential. There is no sort of doubt that the young lady in Arms and the Man is improved by losing her ideals. There is no sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is improved by giving up the object of his life. But a better case can be found in something that both dramatists have been concerned with; Shaw wrote Cæsar and Cleopatra; Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra and also Julius Cæsar. And exactly what annoys Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare’s version is this: that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in other words, that Shakespeare has really written a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual men do capture the hearts and influence the policies of mankind. Shaw would have nothing said in favour of Brutus; because Brutus is on the wrong side in politics. Of the actual problem of public and private morality, as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually no notice at all. He can write the most energetic and outspoken of propaganda plays; but he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot really divide his mind and let the two parts speak independently to each other. He has never, so to speak, actually split his head in two; though I daresay there are many other people who are willing to do it for him.

Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he allows his clear conviction to spoil even his admirable dialogue, making one side entirely weak, as in an Evangelical tract. I do not know whether in Major Barbara the young Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. As popular tradition (which I trust more than anything else) declared that he is drawn from a real Professor of my acquaintance, who is anything but a fool, I should imagine not. But in that case I am all the more mystified by the incredibly weak fight which he makes in the play in answer to the elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is really a disgraceful case, and almost the only case in Shaw of there being no fair fight between the two sides. For instance, the Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft says with melodramatic scorn, “Pity! the scavenger of the Universe!” Now if any gentleman had said this to me, I should have replied, “If I permit you to escape from the point by means of metaphors, will you tell me whether you disapprove of scavengers?” Instead of this obvious retort, the miserable Greek professor only says, “Well then, love,” to which Undershaft replies with unnecessary violence that he won’t have the Greek professor’s love, to which the obvious answer of course would be, “How the deuce can you prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?” Instead of this, as far as I remember, that abject Hellenist says nothing at all. I only mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, I think, the recent hardening, for good or evil, of Shaw out of a dramatist into a mere philosopher, and whoever hardens into a philosopher may be hardening into a fanatic.

And just as there is nothing really problematic in Shaw’s mind, so there is nothing really paradoxical. The meaning of the word paradoxical may indeed be made the subject of argument. In Greek, of course, it simply means something which is against the received opinion; in that sense a missionary remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is paradoxical. But in the much more important world, where words are used and altered in the using, paradox does not mean merely this: it means at least something of which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency is sufficiently plain in the words used, and most commonly of all it means an idea expressed in a form which is verbally contradictory. Thus, for instance, the great saying, “He that shall lose his life, the same shall save it,” is an example of what modern people mean by a paradox. If any learned person should read this book (which seems immeasurably improbable) he can content himself with putting it this way, that the moderns mistakenly say paradox when they should say oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it may be agreed that we commonly mean by a paradox some kind of collision between what is seemingly and what is really true.

Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent in a contradiction, as in the saying of Christ that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact that Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without paradox. Moreover, he cannot even understand a paradox. And more than this, paradox is about the only thing in the world that he does not understand. All his splendid vistas and startling suggestions arise from carrying some one clear principle further than it has yet been carried. His madness is all consistency, not inconsistency. As the point can hardly be made clear without examples, let us take one example, the subject of education. Shaw has been all his life preaching to grown-up people the profound truth that liberty and responsibility go together; that the reason why freedom is so often easily withheld, is simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This is true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; and so when Shaw comes to children he can only apply to them the same principle that he has already applied to citizens. He begins to play with the Herbert Spencer idea of teaching children by experience; perhaps the most fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put down in print. On that there is no need to dwell; one has only to ask how the experimental method is to be applied to a precipice; and the theory no longer exists. But Shaw effected a further development, if possible more fantastic. He said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled “poison,” you must telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to a child brought up on Shaw’s principle I cannot conceive; I should think he would commit suicide in his bath. But that is not here the question. The point is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently wild and startling to ensure that its author, if he escapes Hanwell, would reach the front rank of journalists, demagogues, or public entertainers. It is a perfect paradox, if a paradox only means something that makes one jump. But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, but an enormous and outrageous consistency, the one principle of free thought carried to a point to which no other sane man would consent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not understand is the paradox; the unavoidable paradox of childhood. Although this child is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much purer passions than I, yet I must control it. Although Tommy is quite right to rush towards a precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner for doing it. This contradiction is the only possible condition of having to do with children at all; anyone who talks about a child without feeling this paradox might just as well be talking about a merman. He has never even seen the animal. But this paradox Shaw in his intellectual simplicity cannot see; he cannot see it because it is a paradox. His only intellectual excitement is to carry one idea further and further across the world. It never occurs to him that it might meet another idea, and like the three winds in Martin Chuzzlewit, they might make a night of it. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be made to realise that it is often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human life.

This blindness to paradox everywhere perplexes his outlook. He cannot understand marriage because he will not understand the paradox of marriage; that the woman is all the more the house for not being the head of it. He cannot understand patriotism, because he will not understand the paradox of patriotism; that one is all the more human for not merely loving humanity. He does not understand Christianity because he will not understand the paradox of Christianity; that we can only really understand all myths when we know that one of them is true. I do not under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; I concede that much of his finest and keenest work in the way of intellectual purification would have been difficult or impossible without it. But I say that here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its contradictions.

Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw to call him a Socialist; in so far as that word can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. He is the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as part of a crowd or as really and invisibly helping a movement, has reference to another thing in him, or rather to another thing not in him.

The great defect of that fine intelligence is a failure to grasp and enjoy the things commonly called convention and tradition; which are foods upon which all human creatures must feed frequently if they are to live. Very few modern people of course have any idea of what they are. “Convention” is very nearly the same word as “democracy.” It has again and again in history been used as an alternative word to Parliament. So far from suggesting anything stale or sober, the word convention rather conveys a hubbub; it is the coming together of men; every mob is a convention. In its secondary sense it means the common soul of such a crowd, its instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinctive salutation of the flag. Conventions may be cruel, they may be unsuitable, they may even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but there is one thing that they never are. Conventions are never dead. They are always full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up and passionate experiences of many generations asserting what they could not explain. To be inside any true convention, as the Chinese respect for parents or the European respect for children, is to be surrounded by something which whatever else it is is not leaden, lifeless or automatic, something which is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred points, which is sensitive almost to madness and which is so much alive that it can kill. Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one immense mistake (arising out of that bad progressive education of his), the mistake of treating convention as a dead thing; treating it as if it were a mere physical environment like the pavement or the rain. Whereas it is a result of will; a rain of blessings and a pavement of good intentions. Let it be remembered that I am not discussing in what degree one should allow for tradition; I am saying that men like Shaw do not allow for it at all. If Shaw had found in early life that he was contradicted by Bradshaw’s Railway Guide or even by the Encyclopædia Britannica, he would have felt at least that he might be wrong. But if he had found himself contradicted by his father and mother, he would have thought it all the more probable that he was right. If the issue of the last evening paper contradicted him he might be troubled to investigate or explain. That the human tradition of two thousand years contradicted him did not trouble him for an instant. That Marx was not with him was important. That Man was not with him was an irrelevant prehistoric joke. People have talked far too much about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps his only pure paradox is this almost unconscious one; that he has tended to think that because something has satisfied generations of men it must be untrue.

Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things one learns early in life and while one is still simple. Most human beings start with certain facts of psychology to which the rest of life must be somewhat related. For instance, every man falls in love; and no man falls into free love. When he falls into that he calls it lust, and is always ashamed of it even when he boasts of it. That there is some connection between a love and a vow nearly every human being knows before he is eighteen. That there is a solid and instinctive connection between the idea of sexual ecstasy and the idea of some sort of almost suicidal constancy, this I say is simply the first fact in one’s own psychology; boys and girls know it almost before they know their own language. How far it can be trusted, how it can best be dealt with, all that is another matter. But lovers lust after constancy more than after happiness; if you are in any sense prepared to give them what they ask, then what they ask, beyond all question, is an oath of final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers may be children; lovers may be unfit for citizenship and outside human argument; you can take up that position if you will. But lovers do not only desire love; they desire marriage. The root of legal monogamy does not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for ever drearily asserting) in the fact that the man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere slave. It lies in the fact that if their love for each other is the noblest and freest love conceivable, it can only find its heroic expression in both becoming slaves. I only mention this matter here as a matter which most of us do not need to be taught; for it was the first lesson of life. In after years we may make up what code or compromise about sex we like; but we all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see them either in a murder or in a valentine. We may or may not see wisdom in early marriages; but we know quite well that wherever the thing is genuine at all, early loves will mean early marriages. But Shaw had not learnt about this tragedy of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any country on earth would have taught him. He had not learnt, what universal common sense has put into all the folk-lore of the earth, that love cannot be thought of clearly for an instant except as monogamous. The old English ballads never sing the praises of “lovers.” They always sing the praises of “true lovers,” and that is the final philosophy of the question.

The same is true of Mr. Shaw’s refusal to understand the love of the land either in the form of patriotism or of private ownership. It is the attitude of an Irishman cut off from the soil of Ireland, retaining the audacity and even cynicism of the national type, but no longer fed from the roots with its pathos or its experience.

This broader and more brotherly rendering of convention must be applied particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be told of one place or one day or a manageable number of characters is an ideal plainly rooted in an æsthetic instinct. But if this be so with the classical drama, it is yet more certainly so with romantic drama, against the somewhat decayed dignity of which Bernard Shaw was largely in rebellion. There was one point in particular upon which the Ibsenites claimed to have reformed the romantic convention which is worthy of special allusion.

Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond of insisting that a defect in the romantic drama was its tendency to end with wedding-bells. Against this they set the modern drama of middle-age, the drama which described marriage itself instead of its poetic preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had been more patient with popular tradition, more prone to think that there might be some sense in its survival, he might have seen this particular problem much more clearly. The old playwrights have left us plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. Othello is as much about what follows the wedding-bells as The Doll’s House. Macbeth is about a middle-aged couple as much as Little Eyolf. But if we ask ourselves what is the real difference, we shall, I think, find that it can fairly be stated thus. The old tragedies of marriage, though not love stories, are like love stories in this, that they work up to some act or stroke which is irrevocable as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death or of adultery.

Now the reason why our fathers did not make marriage, in the middle-aged and static sense, the subject of their plays was a very simple one; it was that a play is a very bad place for discussing that topic. You cannot easily make a good drama out of the success or failure of a marriage, just as you could not make a good drama out of the growth of an oak tree or the decay of an empire. As Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too long. A happy love-affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were. The essence of a romantic heroine is that she asks herself an intense question; but the essence of a sensible wife is that she is much too sensible to ask herself any questions at all. All the things that make monogamy a success are in their nature undramatic things, the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane marriage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore not surprising that most modern dramatists have devoted themselves to insane marriage.

To summarise; before touching the philosophy which Shaw has ultimately adopted, we must quit the notion that we know it already and that it is hit off in such journalistic terms as these three. Shaw does not wish to multiply problem plays or even problems. He has such scepticism as is the misfortune of his age; but he has this dignified and courageous quality, that he does not come to ask questions but to answer them. He is not a paradox-monger; he is a wild logician, far too simple even to be called a sophist. He understands everything in life except its paradoxes, especially that ultimate paradox that the very things that we cannot comprehend are the things that we have to take for granted. Lastly, he is not especially social or collectivist. On the contrary, he rather dislikes men in the mass, though he can appreciate them individually. He has no respect for collective humanity in its two great forms; either in that momentary form which we call a mob, or in that enduring form which we call a convention.

The general cosmic theory which can so far be traced through the earlier essays and plays of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the image of Schopenhauer standing on his head. I cheerfully concede that Schopenhauer looks much nicer in that posture than in his original one, but I can hardly suppose that he feels more comfortable. The substance of the change is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer maintained that life is unreasonable. The intellect, if it could be impartial, would tell us to cease; but a blind partiality, an instinct quite distinct from thought, drives us on to take desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dingy estimate of the rational outlook, but adds a somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer had said, “Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for all living things.” Shaw said, “Life is unreasonable; so much the worse for reason.” Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It may be that there is some undetected fallacy in reason itself. Perhaps the whole man cannot get inside his own head any more than he can jump down his own throat. But there is about the need to live, to suffer, and to create that imperative quality which can truly be called supernatural, of whose voice it can indeed be said that it speaks with authority, and not as the scribes.

This is the first and finest item of the original Bernard Shaw creed: that if reason says that life is irrational, life must be content to reply that reason is lifeless; life is the primary thing, and if reason impedes it, then reason must be trodden down into the mire amid the most abject superstitions. In the ordinary sense it would be specially absurd to suggest that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. For that is always associated with lust or incontinence; and Shaw’s ideals are strict, hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. But there is a mystical sense in which one may say literally that Shaw desires man to be an animal. That is, he desires him to cling first and last to life, to the spirit of animation, to the thing which is common to him and the birds and plants. Man should have the blind faith of a beast: he should be as mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf to sophistries as a fish. Shaw does not wish him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does not even wish him to be a man, so much as he wishes him to be, in this holy sense, an animal. He must follow the flag of life as fiercely from conviction as all other creatures follow it from instinct.

But this Shavian worship of life is by no means lively. It has nothing in common either with the braver or the baser forms of what we commonly call optimism. It has none of the omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman or the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw wishes to show himself not so much as an optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and contented pessimist. This contradiction is the key to nearly all his early and more obvious contradictions and to many which remain to the end. Whitman and many modern idealists have talked of taking even duty as a pleasure; it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure as a duty. In a queer way he seems to see existence as an illusion and yet as an obligation. To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die. And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which may be said to culminate in the crowning work of his later and more constructive period, the work in which he certainly attempted, whether with success or not, to state his ultimate and cosmic vision; I mean the play called Man and Superman. In approaching this play we must keep well in mind the distinction recently drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, but austerely, not joyously. For him nature has authority, but hardly charm. But before we approach it it is necessary to deal with three things that lead up to it. First it is necessary to speak of what remained of his old critical and realistic method; and then it is necessary to speak of the two important influences which led up to his last and most important change of outlook.

First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, and a man is often doing the old work while he is thinking of the new, we may deal first with what may be fairly called his last two plays of pure worldly criticism. These are Major Barbara and John Bull’s Other Island. Major Barbara indeed contains a strong religious element; but, when all is said, the whole point of the play is that the religious element is defeated. Moreover, the actual expressions of religion in the play are somewhat unsatisfactory as expressions of religion — or even of reason. I must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment’s thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist, “Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on.” The atheist (being a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God. In the same style in Major Barbara the heroine ends by suggesting that she will serve God without personal hope, so that she may owe nothing to God and He owe everything to her. It does not seem to strike her that if God owes everything to her He is not God. These things affect me merely as tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you said, “I will never have a father unless I have begotten him.”

But the real sting and substance of Major Barbara is much more practical and to the point. It expresses not the new spirituality but the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. Almost every one of Shaw’s plays is an expanded epigram. But the epigram is not expanded (as with most people) into a hundred commonplaces. Rather the epigram is expanded into a hundred other epigrams; the work is at least as brilliant in detail as it is in design. But it is generally possible to discover the original and pivotal epigram which is the centre and purpose of the play. It is generally possible, even amid that blinding jewellery of a million jokes, to discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play itself was written.

The ultimate epigram of Major Barbara can be put thus. People say that poverty is no crime; Shaw says that poverty is a crime; that it is a crime to endure it, a crime to be content with it, that it is the mother of all crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. If a man says to Shaw that he is born of poor but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the very word “but” shows that his parents were probably dishonest. In short, he maintains here what he had maintained elsewhere: that what the people at this moment require is not more patriotism or more art or more religion or more morality or more sociology, but simply more money. The evil is not ignorance or decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is poverty. The point of this particular drama is that even the noblest enthusiasm of the girl who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails under the brute money power of her father who is a modern capitalist. When I have said this it will be clear why this play, fine and full of bitter sincerity as it is, must in a manner be cleared out of the way before we come to talk of Shaw’s final and serious faith. For his serious faith is in the sanctity of human will, in the divine capacity for creation and choice rising higher than environment and doom; and so far as that goes, Major Barbara is not only apart from his faith but against his faith. Major Barbara is an account of environment victorious over heroic will. There are a thousand answers to the ethic in Major Barbara which I should be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy health as cushions to comfort disease. And I might suggest that the doctrine that poverty degrades the poor is much more likely to be used as an argument for keeping them powerless than as an argument for making them rich. But there is no need to find such answers to the materialistic pessimism of Major Barbara. The best answer to it is in Shaw’s own best and crowning philosophy, with which we shall shortly be concerned.

John Bull’s Other Island represents a realism somewhat more tinged with the later transcendentalism of its author. In one sense, of course, it is a satire on the conventional Englishman, who is never so silly or sentimental as when he sees silliness and sentiment in the Irishman. Broadbent, whose mind is all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly persuaded that he is bringing reason and order among the Irish, whereas in truth they are all smiling at his illusions with the critical detachment of so many devils. There have been many plays depicting the absurd Paddy in a ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose of this play is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon in a ring of ironical Paddies. But it has a second and more subtle purpose, which is very finely contrived. It is suggested that when all is said and done there is in this preposterous Englishman a certain creative power which comes from his simplicity and optimism, from his profound resolution rather to live life than to criticise it. I know no finer dialogue of philosophical cross-purposes than that in which Broadbent boasts of his commonsense, and his subtler Irish friend mystifies him by telling him that he, Broadbent, has no common-sense, but only inspiration. The Irishman admits in Broadbent a certain unconscious spiritual force even in his very stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very clever phrase “a practical mystic.” Shaw is here maintaining that all practical men are practical mystics. And he is really maintaining also that the most practical of all the practical mystics is the one who is a fool.

There is something unexpected and fascinating about this reversal of the usual argument touching enterprise and the business man; this theory that success is created not by intelligence, but by a certain half-witted and yet magical instinct. For Bernard Shaw, apparently, the forests of factories and the mountains of money are not the creations of human wisdom or even of human cunning; they are rather manifestations of the sacred maxim which declares that God has chosen the foolish things of the earth to confound the wise. It is simplicity and even innocence that has made Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is interesting or even suggestive; but it must be confessed that as a criticism of the relations of England to Ireland it is open to a strong historical objection. The one weak point in John Bull’s Other Island is that it turns on the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. But as a matter of fact Broadbent has not succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one wants is the test and fruit of this mysterious strength, then the Irish peasants are certainly much stronger than the English merchants; for in spite of all the efforts of the merchants, the land has remained a land of peasants. No glorification of the English practicality as if it were a universal thing can ever get over the fact that we have failed in dealing with the one white people in our power who were markedly unlike ourselves. And the kindness of Broadbent has failed just as much as his common-sense; because he was dealing with a people whose desire and ideal were different from his own. He did not share the Irish passion for small possession in land or for the more pathetic virtues of Christianity. In fact the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the same reason that the gigantic kindness of Shaw has failed. The roots are different; it is like tying the tops of two trees together. Briefly, the philosophy of John Bull’s Other Island is quite effective and satisfactory except for this incurable fault: the fact that John Bull’s other island is not John Bull’s.

This clearing off of his last critical plays we may classify as the first of the three facts which lead up to Man and Superman. The second of the three facts may be found, I think, in Shaw’s discovery of Nietzsche. This eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw and his school which it would require a separate book adequately to study. By descent Nietzsche was a Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; and is one of the best rhetoricians of the modern world. He had a remarkable power of saying things that master the reason for a moment by their gigantic unreasonableness; as, for instance, “Your life is intolerable without immortality; but why should not your life be intolerable?” His whole work is shot through with the pangs and fevers of his physical life, which was one of extreme bad health; and in early middle age his brilliant brain broke down into impotence and darkness. All that was true in his teaching was this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be more economical on a donkey or more humane on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achievement of dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly to be called a good thing. I do not know if Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but it seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in Nietzsche could be stated in the derivation of one word, the word “valour.” Valour means valeur; it means a value; courage is itself a solid good; it is an ultimate virtue; valour is in itself valid. In so far as he maintained this Nietzsche was only taking part in that great Protestant game of see-saw which has been the amusement of northern Europe since the sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he was rebelling against ancient morality; as a matter of fact he was only rebelling against recent morality, against the half-baked impudence of the utilitarians and the materialists. He thought he was rebelling against Christianity; curiously enough he was rebelling solely against the special enemies of Christianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. Edward Clodd. Historic Christianity has always believed in the valour of St. Michael riding in front of the Church Militant; and in an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the wine of the blood of God.

There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that are not Christian, but then, by an entertaining coincidence, they are also not true. His hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was not his doctrine but his disease. Invalids are often hard on invalids. And there is another doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and also (by the same laughable accident) not common-sense; and it is a most pathetic circumstance that this was the one doctrine which caught the eye of Shaw and captured him. He was not influenced at all by the morbid attack on mercy. It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man. But it is certainly a nuisance that the one Nietzsche doctrine which attracted him was not the one Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectifying. Nietzsche might really have done some good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. But he only succeeded in putting into his head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us — I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman.

In one of his least convincing phrases, Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ultimately produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school teacher; the only way we can work for it is to be more just, more brave, and more merciful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If he is to be anything else than this, why should we desire him, or what else are we to desire? These questions have been many times asked of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietzscheites have even attempted to answer them.

The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, I think, certainly have seen through this fallacy and verbiage had it not been that another important event about this time came to the help of Nietzsche and established the Superman on his pedestal. It is the third of the things which I have called stepping-stones to Man and Superman, and it is very important. It is nothing less than the breakdown of one of the three intellectual supports upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through all his confident career. At the beginning of this book I have described the three ultimate supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, and the Progressive. They are the three legs of the tripod upon which the prophet sat to give the oracle; and one of them broke. Just about this time suddenly, by a mere shaft of illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe in progress altogether.

It is generally implied that it was reading Plato that did it. That philosopher was very well qualified to convey the first shock of the ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always thought instinctively of civilisation as modern. This is not due merely to the daring splendour of the speculations and the vivid picture of Athenian life, it is due also to something analogous in the personalities of that particular ancient Greek and this particular modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much affinity to Plato — in his instinctive elevation of temper, his courageous pursuit of ideas as far as they will go, his civic idealism; and also, it must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and a touch of delicate inhumanity. But whatever influence produced the change, the change had all the dramatic suddenness and completeness which belongs to the conversions of great men. It had been perpetually implied through all the earlier works not only that mankind is constantly improving, but that almost everything must be considered in the light of this fact. More than once he seemed to argue, in comparing the dramatists of the sixteenth with those of the nineteenth century, that the latter had a definite advantage merely because they were of the nineteenth century and not of the sixteenth. When accused of impertinence towards the greatest of the Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, “Shakespeare is a much taller man than I, but I stand on his shoulders” — an epigram which sums up this doctrine with characteristic neatness. But Shaw fell off Shakespeare’s shoulders with a crash. This chronological theory that Shaw stood on Shakespeare’s shoulders logically involved the supposition that Shakespeare stood on Plato’s shoulders. And Bernard Shaw found Plato from his point of view so much more advanced than Shakespeare that he decided in desperation that all three were equal.

Such failure as has partially attended the idea of human equality is very largely due to the fact that no party in the modern state has heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals have both assumed that one set of men were in essentials superior to mankind. The only difference was that the Tory superiority was a superiority of place; while the Radical superiority is a superiority of time. The great objection to Shaw being on Shakespeare’s shoulders is a consideration for the sensations and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a democratic objection to anyone being on anyone else’s shoulders. Eternal human nature refuses to submit to a man who rules merely by right of birth. To rule by right of century is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest enemies in the closest historical proximity; and he began to see the enormous average and the vast level of mankind. If progress swung constantly between such extremes it could not be progress at all. The paradox was sharp but undeniable; if life had such continual ups and downs, it was upon the whole flat. With characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he had no sooner seen this than he hastened to declare it. In the teeth of all his previous pronouncements he emphasised and re-emphasised in print that man had not progressed at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a cave were the same as ninety-nine hundredths of a man in a suburban villa.

It is characteristic of him to say that he rushed into print with a frank confession of the failure of his old theory. But it is also characteristic of him that he rushed into print also with a new alternative theory, quite as definite, quite as confident, and, if one may put it so, quite as infallible as the old one. Progress had never happened hitherto, because it had been sought solely through education. Education was rubbish. “Fancy,” said he, “trying to produce a greyhound or a racehorse by education!” The man of the future must not be taught; he must be bred. This notion of producing superior human beings by the methods of the stud-farm had often been urged, though its difficulties had never been cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; its moral difficulties, or rather impossibilities, for any animal fit to be called a man need scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme it had never been made clear. The first and most obvious objection to it of course is this: that if you are to breed men as pigs, you require some overseer who is as much more subtle than a man as a man is more subtle than a pig. Such an individual is not easy to find.

It was, however, in the heat of these three things, the decline of his merely destructive realism, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the abandonment of the idea of a progressive education of mankind, that he attempted what is not necessarily his best, but certainly his most important work. The two things are by no means necessarily the same. The most important work of Milton is Paradise Lost; his best work is Lycidas. There are other places in which Shaw’s argument is more fascinating or his wit more startling than in Man and Superman; there are other plays that he has made more brilliant. But I am sure that there is no other play that he wished to make more brilliant. I will not say that he is in this case more serious than elsewhere; for the word serious is a double-meaning and double-dealing word, a traitor in the dictionary. It sometimes means solemn, and it sometimes means sincere. A very short experience of private and public life will be enough to prove that the most solemn people are generally the most insincere. A somewhat more delicate and detailed consideration will show also that the most sincere men are generally not solemn; and of these is Bernard Shaw. But if we use the word serious in the old and Latin sense of the word “grave,” which means weighty or valid, full of substance, then we may say without any hesitation that this is the most serious play of the most serious man alive.

The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this time sufficiently well known. It has two main philosophic motives. The first is that what he calls the life-force (the old infidels called it Nature, which seems a neater word, and nobody knows the meaning of either of them) desires above all things to make suitable marriages, to produce a purer and prouder race, or eventually to produce a Superman. The second is that in this effecting of racial marriages the woman is a more conscious agent than the man. In short, that woman disposes a long time before man proposes. In this play, therefore, woman is made the pursuer and man the pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that in this matter Shaw is handicapped by his habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of sympathy with the romance of which he writes, and to a certain extent even by his own integrity and right conscience. Whether the man hunts the woman or the woman the man, at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; but Shaw is not a sporting man. Nor is he a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot recover the impartiality of paganism which allowed Diana to propose to Endymion without thinking any the worse of her. The result is that while he makes Anne, the woman who marries his hero, a really powerful and convincing woman, he can only do it by making her a highly objectionable woman. She is a liar and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a more romantic strain in him might have imagined a woman choosing her lover without shamelessness and magnetising him without fraud. Even if the first movement were feminine, it need hardly be a movement like this. In truth, of course, the two sexes have their two methods of attraction, and in some of the happiest cases they are almost simultaneous. But even on the most cynical showing they need not be mixed up. It is one thing to say that the mousetrap is not there by accident. It is another to say (in the face of ocular experience) that the mousetrap runs after the mouse.

But whenever Shaw shows the Puritan hardness or even the Puritan cheapness, he shows something also of the Puritan nobility, of the idea that sacrifice is really a frivolity in the face of a great purpose. The reasonableness of Calvin and his followers will by the mercy of heaven be at last washed away; but their unreasonableness will remain an eternal splendour. Long after we have let drop the fancy that Protestantism was rational it will be its glory that it was fanatical. So it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real woman, even a dangerous woman, he would need to be something stranger and softer than Bernard Shaw. But though I always argue with him whenever he argues, I confess that he always conquers me in the one or two moments when he is emotional.

There is one really noble moment when Anne offers for all her cynical husband-hunting the only defence that is really great enough to cover it. “It will not be all happiness for me. Perhaps death.” And the man rises also at that real crisis, saying, “Oh, that clutch holds and hurts. What have you grasped in me? Is there a father’s heart as well as a mother’s?” That seems to me actually great; I do not like either of the characters an atom more than formerly; but I can see shining and shaking through them at that instant the splendour of the God that made them and of the image of God who wrote their story.

A logician is like a liar in many respects, but chiefly in the fact that he should have a good memory. That cutting and inquisitive style which Bernard Shaw has always adopted carries with it an inevitable criticism. And it cannot be denied that this new theory of the supreme importance of sound sexual union, wrought by any means, is hard logically to reconcile with Shaw’s old diatribes against sentimentalism and operatic romance. If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into sexual union, then all the means of sexual attraction, even the most maudlin or theatrical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar of the troubadour is as practical as the ploughshare of the husbandman. The waltz in the ballroom is as serious as the debate in the parish council. The justification of Anne, as the potential mother of Superman, is really the justification of all the humbugs and sentimentalists whom Shaw had been denouncing as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since the beginning of his career. It was to no purpose that the earlier Bernard Shaw said that romance was all moonshine. The moonshine that ripens love is now as practical as the sunshine that ripens corn. It was vain to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as manure — and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction; it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a self-deception; and Shaw’s only further comment seems to be that it is right to be deceived. To Man and Superman, as to all his plays, the author attaches a most fascinating preface at the beginning. But I really think that he ought also to attach a hearty apology at the end; an apology to all the minor dramatists or preposterous actors whom he had cursed for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he objected to an actress for ogling she might reasonably reply, “But this is how I support my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary effort.” Whenever he laughed at an old-fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might answer, “My exaggeration is not more absurd than the tail of a peacock or the swagger of a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruitful lie of the life-force that I am a very fine fellow.” We have remarked the end of Shaw’s campaign in favour of progress. This ought really to have been the end of his campaign against romance. All the tricks of love that he called artificial become natural; because they become Nature. All the lies of love become truths; indeed they become the Truth.

The minor things of the play contain some thunderbolts of good thinking. Throughout this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt upon mere wit, because in anything of Shaw’s that may be taken for granted. It is enough to say that this play which is full of his most serious quality is as full as any of his minor sort of success. In a more solid sense two important facts stand out: the first is the character of the young American; the other is the character of Straker, the chauffeur. In these Shaw has realised and made vivid two most important facts. First, that America is not intellectually a go-ahead country, but both for good and evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale culture and ancestral simplicity, just as Shaw’s young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously worships his wife. Second, he has pointed out in the character of Straker that there has arisen in our midst a new class that has education without breeding. Straker is the man who has ousted the hansom-cabman, having neither his coarseness nor his kindliness. Great sociological credit is due to the man who has first clearly observed that Straker has appeared. How anybody can profess for a moment to be glad that he has appeared, I do not attempt to conjecture.

Appended to the play is an entertaining though somewhat mysterious document called “The Revolutionist’s Handbook.” It contains many very sound remarks; this, for example, which I cannot too much applaud: “If you hit your child, be sure that you hit him in anger.” If that principle had been properly understood, we should have had less of Shaw’s sociological friends and their meddling with the habits and instincts of the poor. But among the fragments of advice also occurs the following suggestive and even alluring remark: “Every man over forty is a scoundrel.” On the first personal opportunity I asked the author of this remarkable axiom what it meant. I gathered that what it really meant was something like this: that every man over forty had been all the essential use that he was likely to be, and was therefore in a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered his own epigram by continuing to pour out treasures both of truth and folly long after this allotted time. But if the epigram might be interpreted in a rather looser style as meaning that past a certain point a man’s work takes on its final character and does not greatly change the nature of its merits, it may certainly be said that with Man and Superman, Shaw reaches that stage. The two plays that have followed it, though of very great interest in themselves, do not require any revaluation of, or indeed any addition to, our summary of his genius and success. They are both in a sense casts back to his primary energies; the first in a controversial and the second in a technical sense. Neither need prevent our saying that the moment when John Tanner and Anne agree that it is doom for him and death for her and life only for the thing unborn, is the peak of his utterance as a prophet.

The two important plays that he has since given us are The Doctor’s Dilemma and Getting Married. The first is as regards its most amusing and effective elements a throw-back to his old game of guying the men of science. It was a very good game, and he was an admirable player. The actual story of the Doctor’s Dilemma itself seems to me less poignant and important than the things with which Shaw had lately been dealing. First of all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the kind of justice nor the kind of weakness that goes to make a true problem. We cannot feel the Doctor’s Dilemma, because we cannot really fancy Bernard Shaw being in a dilemma. His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond of finality; he always makes up his mind when he knows the facts and sometimes before. Moreover, this particular problem (though Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about anything else) does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is also a scamp of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance of life if specially treated for a special disease. The modern doctors (and even the modern dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially favoured because he is æsthetically important or specially disregarded because he is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between the two despicable modern doctrines, one that geniuses should be worshipped like idols and the other that criminals should be merely wiped out like germs. That both clever men and bad men ought to be treated like men does not seem to occur to them. As a matter of fact, in these affairs of life and death one never does think of such distinctions. Nobody does shout out at sea, “Bad citizen overboard!” I should recommend the doctor in his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any decent doctor would do without any dilemma at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and give him no more and no less favour than he would to anybody else. In short, I am sure a practical physician would drop all these visionary, unworkable modern dreams about type and criminology and go back to the plain business-like facts of the French Revolution and the Rights of Man.

The other play, Getting Married, is a point in Shaw’s career, but only as a play, not, as usual, as a heresy. It is nothing but a conversation about marriage; and one cannot agree or disagree with the view of marriage, because all views are given which are held by anybody, and some (I should think) which are held by nobody. But its technical quality is of some importance in the life of its author. It is worth consideration as a play, because it is not a play at all. It marks the culmination and completeness of that victory of Bernard Shaw over the British public, or rather over their official representatives, of which I have spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with business men, those incredible people, who assured him that it was useless to have wit without murders, and that a good joke, which is the most popular thing everywhere else, was quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In spite of this he had conquered by his wit and his good dialogue; and by the time of which we now speak he was victorious and secure. All his plays were being produced as a matter of course in England and as a matter of the fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America and Germany. No one who knows the nature of the man will doubt that under such circumstances his first act would be to produce his wit naked and unashamed. He had been told that he could not support a slight play by mere dialogue. He therefore promptly produced mere dialogue without the slightest play for it to support. Getting Married is no more a play than Cicero’s dialogue De Amicitiâ, and not half so much a play as Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianæ. But though it is not a play, it was played, and played successfully. Everyone who went into the theatre felt that he was only eavesdropping at an accidental conversation. But the conversation was so sparkling and sensible that he went on eavesdropping. This, I think, as it is the final play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final triumph. He is a good dramatist and sometimes even a great dramatist. But the occasions when we get glimpses of him as really a great man are on these occasions when he is utterly undramatic.

From first to last Bernard Shaw has been nothing but a conversationalist. It is not a slur to say so; Socrates was one, and even Christ Himself. He differs from that divine and that human prototype in the fact that, like most modern people, he does to some extent talk in order to find out what he thinks; whereas they knew it beforehand. But he has the virtues that go with the talkative man; one of which is humility. You will hardly ever find a really proud man talkative; he is afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw offered himself to the world with only one great qualification, that he could talk honestly and well. He did not speak; he talked to a crowd. He did not write; he talked to a typewriter. He did not really construct a play; he talked through ten mouths or masks instead of through one. His literary power and progress began in casual conversations — and it seems to me supremely right that it should end in one great and casual conversation. His last play is nothing but garrulous talking, that great thing called gossip. And I am happy to say that the play has been as efficient and successful as talk and gossip have always been among the children of men.

Of his life in these later years I have made no pretence of telling even the little that there is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere self-advertising egotist may be surprised to hear that there is perhaps no man of whose private life less could be positively said by an outsider. Even those who know him can make little but a conjecture of what has lain behind this splendid stretch of intellectual self-expression; I only make my conjecture like the rest. I think that the first great turning-point in Shaw’s life (after the early things of which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it hardened him also; if that can be called hardening which is only the strengthening of our souls to meet some dreadful reality. At least it is certain that the larger spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith and found a church, come after that time. I also mention it because there is hardly anything else to mention; his life is singularly free from landmarks, while his literature is so oddly full of surprises. His marriage to Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not long after his illness, was one of those quite successful things which are utterly silent. The placidity of his married life may be sufficiently indicated by saying that (as far as I can make out) the most important events in it were rows about the Executive of the Fabian Society. If such ripples do not express a still and lake-like life, I do not know what would. Honestly, the only thing in his later career that can be called an event is the stand made by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden assault of Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes of splendid exasperations, ended in Wells’ resignation. There was another slight ruffling of the calm when Bernard Shaw said some quite sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But on the whole we confront the composure of one who has come into his own.

The method of his life has remained mostly unchanged. And there is a great deal of method in his life; I can hear some people murmuring something about method in his madness. He is not only neat and business-like; but, unlike some literary men I know, does not conceal the fact. Having all the talents proper to an author, he delights to prove that he has also all the talents proper to a publisher; or even to a publisher’s clerk. Though many looking at his light brown clothes would call him a Bohemian, he really hates and despises Bohemianism; in the sense that he hates and despises disorder and uncleanness and irresponsibility. All that part of him is peculiarly normal and efficient. He gives good advice; he always answers letters, and answers them in a decisive and very legible hand. He has said himself that the only educational art that he thinks important is that of being able to jump off tram-cars at the proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, he is quite regular and rational in his meals; and though he detests sport, he takes quite sufficient exercise. While he has always made a mock of science in theory, he is by nature prone to meddle with it in practice. He is fond of photographing, and even more fond of being photographed. He maintained (in one of his moments of mad modernity) that photography was a finer thing than portrait-painting, more exquisite and more imaginative; he urged the characteristic argument that none of his own photographs were like each other or like him. But he would certainly wash the chemicals off his hands the instant after an experiment; just as he would wash the blood off his hands the instant after a Socialist massacre. He cannot endure stains or accretions; he is of that temperament which feels tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort of foul accumulation or living disease even in the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon the grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those of the civilised modern man that if it had not been for the fire in him of justice and anger he might have been the most trim and modern among the millions whom he shocks: and his bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in Brixton. But God sent among those suburbans one who was a prophet as well as a sanitary inspector. He had every qualification for living in a villa — except the necessary indifference to his brethren living in pigstyes. But for the small fact that he hates with a sickening hatred the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he would really accept and admire the bathroom and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no memory of rivers or of roaring fires. In these things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New Man. But for his great soul he might have accepted modern civilisation; it was a wonderful escape. This man whom men so foolishly call crazy and anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to the fourth-rate perfections of our provincial and Protestant civilisation. He might even have been respectable if he had had less self-respect.

His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose and reason in his life, together with the large circle of his private kindness and the regard of his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the record in a tone of almost patriarchal quiet. If I wished to complete such a picture I could add many touches: that he has consented to wear evening dress; that he has supported the Times Book Club; and that his beard has turned grey; the last to his regret, as he wanted it to remain red till they had completed colour-photography. He can mix with the most conservative statesmen; his tone grows continuously more gentle in the matter of religion. It would be easy to end with the lion lying down with the lamb, the wild Irishman tamed or taming everybody, Shaw reconciled to the British public as the British public is certainly largely reconciled to Shaw.

But as I put these last papers together, having finished this rude study, I hear a piece of news. His latest play, The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet, has been forbidden by the Censor. As far as I can discover, it has been forbidden because one of the characters professes a belief in God and states his conviction that God has got him. This is wholesome; this is like one crack of thunder in a clear sky. Not so easily does the prince of this world forgive. Shaw’s religious training and instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion there is something that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free in our time to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer. I end where I began: it is the old Puritan in Shaw that jars the modern world like an electric shock. That vision with which I meant to end, that vision of culture and common-sense, of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern clerk broadened enough to embrace Shaw and Shaw softened enough to embrace the clerk, all that vision of a new London begins to fade and alter. The red brick begins to burn red-hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has a strange smell. I find myself back in the fumes in which I started.... Perhaps I have been misled by small modernities. Perhaps what I have called fastidiousness is a divine fear. Perhaps what I have called coldness is a predestinate and ancient endurance. The vision of the Fabian villas grows fainter and fainter, until I see only a void place across which runs Bunyan’s Pilgrim with his fingers in his ears.

Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life in trying to elude his followers. The fox has enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to regard his in much the same way. This man whom men accuse of bidding for applause seems to me to shrink even from assent. If you agree with Shaw he is very likely to contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw throughout, that is why I come at last almost to agree with him. His critics have accused him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his relation to his followers he seems to me rather marked with a sort of mad modesty. He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to have as few followers as possible. All this reaches back, I think, to the three roots from which this meditation grew. It is partly the mere impatience and irony of the Irishman. It is partly the thought of the Calvinist that the host of God should be thinned rather than thronged; that Gideon must reject soldiers rather than recruit them. And it is partly, alas, the unhappy Progressive trying to be in front of his own religion, trying to destroy his own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. But from whatever causes, this furious escape from popularity has involved Shaw in some perversities and refinements which are almost mere insincerities, and which make it necessary to disentangle the good he has done from the evil in this dazzling course. I will attempt some summary by stating the three things in which his influence seems to me thoroughly good and the three in which it seems bad. But for the pleasure of ending on the finer note I will speak first of those that seem bad.

The primary respect in which Shaw has been a bad influence is that he has encouraged fastidiousness. He has made men dainty about their moral meals. This is indeed the root of his whole objection to romance. Many people have objected to romance for being too airy and exquisite. Shaw objects to romance for being too rank and coarse. Many have despised romance because it is unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a great deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as he dislikes beef and beer, raw brandy or raw beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for his taste. You will find throughout his criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild justice or pungent impartiality, a curious undercurrent of prejudice upon one point: the preference for the refined rather than the rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke because it is coarse without asking if it is really immoral. He objects to a man sitting down on his hat, whereas the austere moralist should only object to his sitting down on someone else’s hat. This sensibility is barren because it is universal. It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken stagger; but it is fairly undignified to walk at all, for all walking is a sort of balancing, and there is always in the human being something of a quadruped on its hind legs. I do not say he would be more dignified if he went on all fours; I do not know that he ever is dignified except when he is dead. We shall not be refined till we are refined into dust. Of course it is only because he is not wholly an animal that man sees he is a rum animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an artificial attitude, it is only because, like a dog, he is begging or saying thank you.

Everything important is in that sense absurd from the grave baby to the grinning skull; everything practical is a practical joke. But throughout Shaw’s comedies, curiously enough, there is a certain kicking against this great doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first duty of a man who is in love to make a fool of himself; but Shaw’s heroes always seem to flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic revenge, to make a fool of the woman first. The attempts of Valentine and Charteris to divide their perceptions from their desires, and tell the woman she is worthless even while trying to win her, are sometimes almost torturing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying to play a different tune with each hand. I fancy this agony is not only in the spectator, but in the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw struggling with his reluctance to do anything so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.

So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain modern reluctance or mauvaise honte in these grand and grotesque functions of man I think he has definitely done harm. He has much influence among the young men; but it is not an influence in the direction of keeping them young. One cannot imagine him inspiring any of his followers to write a war-song or a drinking-song or a love-song, the three forms of human utterance which come next in nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to say that the net effect of a man so apparently impudent will be to make men shy. But it is certainly the truth. Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he were without pride he would not care. Now the main purpose of Shaw’s theoretic teaching is to declare that we ought to fulfil these great functions of life, that we ought to eat and drink and love. But the main tendency of his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the sentiments, professions, and postures of these things are not only comic but even contemptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. The result would seem to be that a race of young men may arise who do all these things, but do them awkwardly. That which was of old a free and hilarious function becomes an important and embarrassing necessity. Let us endure all the pagan pleasures with a Christian patience. Let us eat, drink, and be serious.

The second of the two points on which I think Shaw has done definite harm is this: that he has (not always or even as a rule intentionally) increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is called the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but they were always democratic in philosophy; they appealed to man, not to particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to show that some day most men will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt of his contemporaries as in some mysterious way proving the complete conversion of posterity. The objections to this theory scarcely need any elaborate indication. The final objection to it is that it amounts to this: say anything, however idiotic, and you are in advance of your age. This kind of stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat who appeals to the babe unborn must be classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals to his deceased great-grandfather. Both should be sharply reminded that they are appealing to individuals whom they well know to be at a disadvantage in the matter of prompt and witty reply. Now although Bernard Shaw has survived this simple confusion, he has in his time greatly contributed to it. If there is, for instance, one thing that is really rare in Shaw it is hesitation. He makes up his mind quicker than a calculating boy or a county magistrate. Yet on this subject of the next change in ethics he has felt hesitation, and being a strictly honest man has expressed it.

“I know no harder practical question than how much selfishness one ought to stand from a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on the chance of his being right in the long run. The Superman will certainly come like a thief in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but we cannot leave our property wholly undefended on that account. On the other hand, we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a higher set of virtues to current respectable morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty a good deal of respectable morality out like so much dirty water, and replace it by new and strange customs, shedding old obligations and accepting new and heavier ones. Every step of his progress must horrify conventional people; and if it were possible for even the most superior man to march ahead all the time, every pioneer of the march towards the Superman would be crucified.”

When the most emphatic man alive, a man unmatched in violent precision of statement, speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt as this, it is no wonder if all his more weak-minded followers are in a mere whirlpool of uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the superior person will be apparently criminal, the most probable result is simply that the criminal person will think himself superior. A very slight knowledge of human nature is required in the matter. If the Superman may possibly be a thief, you may bet your boots that the next thief will be a Superman. But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have met many) have generally been more weak in the head than in the moral conduct; they have simply offered the first fancy which occupied their minds as the new morality. I fear that Shaw had a way of encouraging these follies. It is obvious from the passage I have quoted that he has no way of restraining them.

The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future.

This I call the second evil influence of Shaw: that he has encouraged many to throw themselves for justification upon the shapeless and the unknown. In this, though courageous himself, he has encouraged cowards, and though sincere himself, has helped a mean escape. The third evil in his influence can, I think, be much more shortly dealt with. He has to a very slight extent, but still perceptibly, encouraged a kind of charlatanism of utterance among those who possess his Irish impudence without his Irish virtue. For instance, his amusing trick of self-praise is perfectly hearty and humorous in him; nay, it is even humble; for to confess vanity is itself humble. All that is the matter with the proud is that they will not admit that they are vain. Therefore when Shaw says that he alone is able to write such and such admirable work, or that he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated opponent, I for one never feel anything offensive in the tone, but, indeed, only the unmistakable intonation of a friend’s voice. But I have noticed among younger, harder, and much shallower men a certain disposition to ape this insolent ease and certitude, and that without any fundamental frankness or mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism can be learnt as a lesson like any other “ism.” It is not so easy to learn an Irish accent or a good temper. In its lower forms the thing becomes a most unmilitary trick of announcing the victory before one has gained it.

When one has said those three things, one has said, I think, all that can be said by way of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that he was never blamed for any of these things by the Censor. Such censures as the attitude of that official involves may be dismissed with a very light sort of disdain. To represent Shaw as profane or provocatively indecent is not a matter for discussion at all; it is a disgusting criminal libel upon a particularly respectable gentleman of the middle classes, of refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. But while the negative defence of Shaw is easy, the just praise of him is almost as complex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the last few pages of this book to a triad corresponding to the last one — to the three important elements in which the work of Shaw has been good as well as great.

In the first place, and quite apart from all particular theories, the world owes thanks to Bernard Shaw for having combined being intelligent with being intelligible. He has popularised philosophy, or rather he has repopularised it, for philosophy is always popular, except in peculiarly corrupt and oligarchic ages like our own. We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper. After all, short words must mean something, even if they mean filth or lies; but long words may sometimes mean literally nothing, especially if they are used (as they mostly are in modern books and magazine articles) to balance and modify each other. A plain figure 4, scrawled in chalk anywhere, must always mean something; it must always mean 2 + 2. But the most enormous and mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters, brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at last and be equal to nothing. When a demagogue says to a mob, “There is the Bank of England, why shouldn’t you have some of that money?” he says something which is at least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. When a writer in the Times remarks, “We must raise the economic efficiency of the masses without diverting anything from those classes which represent the national prosperity and refinement,” then his equation cancels out; in a literal and logical sense his remark amounts to nothing.

There are two kinds of charlatans or people called quacks to-day. The power of the first is that he advertises — and cures. The power of the second is that though he is not learned enough to cure he is much too learned to advertise. The former give away their dignity with a pound of tea; the latter are paid a pound of tea merely for being dignified. I think them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is certainly of the other sort. Dickens, another man who was great enough to be a demagogue (and greater than Shaw because more heartily a demagogue), puts for ever the true difference between the demagogue and the mystagogue in Dr. Marigold: “Except that we’re cheap-jacks and they’re dear-jacks, I don’t see any difference between us.” Bernard Shaw is a great cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell. People accuse such a man of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself. His very silence, nay his very sterility, are supposed to be marks of the richness of his erudition. He is too learned to teach, and sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas Aquinas said: “In auctore auctoritas.” But there is more than one man at Oxford or Cambridge who is considered an authority because he has never been an author.

Against all this mystification both of silence and verbosity Shaw has been a splendid and smashing protest. He has stood up for the fact that philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from “A child is born” to “A soul is damned.” If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it? About concrete matters indeed one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select class. For information about Lapland I go to an aristocracy of Laplanders; for the ways of rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or, preferably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only mankind itself can bear witness to the abstract first principles of mankind, and in matters of theory I would always consult the mob. Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers “yes.”

This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has greatly clarified all controversies. He has slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy centipede which has sprawled over all the valleys of England like the “loathly worm” who was slain by the ancient knight. He does not think that difficult questions will be made simpler by using difficult words about them. He has achieved the admirable work, never to be mentioned without gratitude, of discussing Evolution without mentioning it. The good work is of course more evident in the case of philosophy than any other region; because the case of philosophy was a crying one. It was really preposterous that the things most carefully reserved for the study of two or three men should actually be the things common to all men. It was absurd that certain men should be experts on the special subject of everything. But he stood for much the same spirit and style in other matters; in economics, for example. There never has been a better popular economist; one more lucid, entertaining, consistent, and essentially exact. The very comicality of his examples makes them and their argument stick in the mind; as in the case I remember in which he said that the big shops had now to please everybody, and were not entirely dependent on the lady who sails in “to order four governesses and five grand pianos.” He is always preaching collectivism; yet he does not very often name it. He does not talk about collectivism, but about cash; of which the populace feel a much more definite need. He talks about cheese, boots, perambulators, and how people are really to live. For him economics really means housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His difference from the orthodox economists, like most of his differences, is very different from the attacks made by the main body of Socialists. The old Manchester economists are generally attacked for being too gross and material. Shaw really attacks them for not being gross or material enough. He thinks that they hide themselves behind long words, remote hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When the orthodox economist begins with his correct and primary formula, “Suppose there is a Man on an Island — —” Shaw is apt to interrupt him sharply, saying, “There is a Man in the Street.”

The second phase of the man’s really fruitful efficacy is in a sense the converse of this. He has improved philosophic discussions by making them more popular. But he has also improved popular amusements by making them more philosophic. And by more philosophic I do not mean duller, but funnier; that is more varied. All real fun is in cosmic contrasts, which involve a view of the cosmos. But I know that this second strength in Shaw is really difficult to state and must be approached by explanations and even by eliminations. Let me say at once that I think nothing of Shaw or anybody else merely for playing the daring sceptic. I do not think he has done any good or even achieved any effect simply by asking startling questions. It is possible that there have been ages so sluggish or automatic that anything that woke them up at all was a good thing. It is sufficient to be certain that ours is not such an age. We do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces, but are not quite clever enough to put together again. Under these circumstances kicking the car has never been found by the best experts to be effective. No one, therefore, does any good to our age merely by asking questions — unless he can answer the questions. Asking questions is already the fashionable and aristocratic sport which has brought most of us into the bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a note of interrogation. And the final point is so plain; no sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon. “Am I a boy? — Why am I a boy? — Why aren’t I a chair? — What is a chair?” A child will sometimes ask questions of this sort for two hours. And the philosophers of Protestant Europe have asked them for two hundred years.

If that were all that I meant by Shaw making men more philosophic, I should put it not among his good influences but his bad. He did do that to some extent; and so far he is bad. But there is a much bigger and better sense in which he has been a philosopher. He has brought back into English drama all the streams of fact or tendency which are commonly called undramatic. They were there in Shakespeare’s time; but they have scarcely been there since until Shaw. I mean that Shakespeare, being interested in everything, put everything into a play. If he had lately been thinking about the irony and even contradiction confronting us in self-preservation and suicide, he put it all into Hamlet. If he was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical babies he put that into Hamlet too. He would put anything into Hamlet which he really thought was true, from his favourite nursery ballads to his personal (and perhaps unfashionable) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. There is no fact that strikes one, I think, about Shakespeare, except the fact of how dramatic he could be, so much as the fact of how undramatic he could be.

In this great sense Shaw has brought philosophy back into drama — philosophy in the sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This is not a freedom to think what one likes (which is absurd, for one can only think what one thinks); it is a freedom to think about what one likes, which is quite a different thing and the spring of all thought. Shakespeare (in a weak moment, I think) said that all the world is a stage. But Shakespeare acted on the much finer principle that a stage is all the world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw’s plays patches of what people would call essentially undramatic stuff, which the dramatist puts in because he is honest and would rather prove his case than succeed with his play. Shaw has brought back into English drama that Shakespearian universality which, if you like, you can call Shakespearian irrelevance. Perhaps a better definition than either is a habit of thinking the truth worth telling even when you meet it by accident. In Shaw’s plays one meets an incredible number of truths by accident.

To be up to date is a paltry ambition except in an almanac, and Shaw has sometimes talked this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there is a real sense in which the phrase may be wisely used, and that is in cases where some stereotyped version of what is happening hides what is really happening from our eyes. Thus, for instance, newspapers are never up to date. The men who write leading articles are always behind the times, because they are in a hurry. They are forced to fall back on their old-fashioned view of things; they have no time to fashion a new one. Everything that is done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated; that is why modern industrial civilisation bears so curious a resemblance to barbarism. Thus when newspapers say that the Times is a solemn old Tory paper, they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in Fleet Street. Thus when newspapers say that Christian dogmas are crumbling, they are out of date; their talk is behind the talk in public-houses. Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really stirring sense up to date. He has introduced into the theatre the things that no one else had introduced into a theatre — the things in the street outside. The theatre is a sort of thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab across the stage as Realism, while everybody outside is whistling for motor-cabs.

Consider in this respect how many and fine have been Shaw’s intrusions into the theatre with the things that were really going on. Daily papers and daily matinées were still gravely explaining how much modern war depended on gunpowder. Arms and the Man explained how much modern war depends on chocolate. Every play and paper described the Vicar who was a mild Conservative. Candida caught hold of the modern Vicar who is an advanced Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and society comedies describe the emancipated woman as new and wild. Only You Never Can Tell was young enough to see that the emancipated woman is already old and respectable. Every comic paper has caricatured the uneducated upstart. Only the author of Man and Superman knew enough about the modern world to caricature the educated upstart — the man Straker who can quote Beaumarchais, though he cannot pronounce him. This is the second real and great work of Shaw — the letting in of the world on to the stage, as the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable. He has let a little of the Haymarket into the Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted some whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand Theatre. A variety of solutions in philosophy is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may be justly proud of a variety of materials for a solution. After Shaw, one may say, there is nothing that cannot be introduced into a play if one can make it decent, amusing, and relevant. The state of a man’s health, the religion of his childhood, his ear for music, or his ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if they have anything to do with the subject. A soldier may mention the commissariat as well as the cavalry; and, better still, a priest may mention theology as well as religion. That is being a philosopher; that is bringing the universe on the stage.

Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. He has been so much more cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich house with large rooms; the hours before tea-time. They believed in nothing except good manners; and the essence of good manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be defined as a silent yell. The power which the young pessimist of that time showed in this direction would have astonished anyone but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow the world. He swallowed the world like an unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw is that in the circles where this creature was found, he is not. He has not been killed (I don’t know exactly why), but he has actually turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no exaggeration. I meet men who, when I knew them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to destroy the universe. They are now conscious of not being quite worthy to abolish some prison regulations. This destruction and conversion seem to me the mark of something actually great. It is always great to destroy a type without destroying a man. The followers of Shaw are optimists; some of them are so simple as even to use the word. They are sometimes rather pallid optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really impossible.

I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears. But this shall be written of our time: that when the spirit who denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming life itself, there were some, there was one especially, whose voice was heard and whose spear was never broken.

THE END

Shaw wrote many of his works in this summer house in his garden.

Shaw’s ashes were scattered in his garden in Hertfordshire