MALISE. I understand.
CLARE. I don't feel. And without--I can't, can't.
MALISE (_bitterly_). Quite right. You've had enough of that.
That speech--"I don't feel. And without--I can't, can't"--is the
key-speech of Clare Dedmond's nature, and, in view of the end of the
play, must be remembered.
Malise, recognizing that Clare cannot happily be his mistress otherwise
than in name, will not accept her offer of physical submission merely
as a return for what he may have to bear in her behalf, and so she
leaves his flat. She obtains employment as a shop-assistant, and is not
seen again, by her family or by Malise, for three months. Then, after
she has encountered a relative, she bolts in a panic from the shop and
returns to Malise's flat. She proposes to do typewriting and asks him
to find employment for her. He gives her some of his own MSS. to type,
and while they are discussing her prospects of employment she reveals
the fact that she now loves him.
MALISE. Can you typewrite where you are?
CLARE. I have to find a new room, anyway. I'm changing--to be
safe. (_She takes a luggage ticket from her glove_). I took
my things to Charing Cross--only a bag and one trunk. (_Then,
with that queer expression on her face which prefaces her
desperations._) You don't want me now, I suppose?
MALISE. What?
CLARE (_hardly above a whisper_). Because--if you still wanted
me--I do--now.
MALISE (_staring hard into her face that is quivering and
smiling_). You mean it? You _do_? You care?
CLARE. I've thought of you--so much. But only--if you're sure.
_He clasps her, and kisses her closed eyes._
That love declaration is singularly unconvincing, more so to the
reader of the play than to the witness of it. It is not unlikely that
Clare's liking for Malise increased during the three months of their
separation, particularly as she regarded him as a benefactor to whom
she had brought trouble, but it seems to me to be improbable that she
would declare her love so casually. Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions
make the puzzle more involved. If Clare were in love with Malise to
the extent of overcoming her hatred of physical contacts, she would
hardly have "that queer expression on her face which prefaces her
desperations." When a man or woman is desperate he or she is hopeless
or almost hopeless, and if Mr. Galsworthy's stage directions are to be
taken seriously then they mean that Clare was willing to become the
mistress of Malise for much the same reason that a rat will fight in
a corner. But if her words mean what they would seem to mean, surely,
given her character and remembering what she has endured, her surrender
to Malise will not be accompanied by any signs of desperation at all,
but in sheer reaction, if nothing else, by every sign of jubilation and
relief.
The attitude of Malise towards Clare does not appear to have undergone
any change at all; he is not any more in love with her in the third
act than he was in the first act, when, indeed, his love had a dubious
aspect. There is no warmth in the man, no glow. He is cold, not with
the hard, sharp, tingling cold of ice, but with the flabby chill of a
dead fish. When George Dedmond institutes divorce proceedings, citing
Malise as co-respondent, the fellow goes to pieces, and whines and
bleats to his charwoman because the proprietors of the review on which
he is employed propose to dismiss him. They have some scruples against
writers who become involved in scandals. The charwoman informs Clare
of Malise's misery, and she, knowing that her husband will abandon
the suit if she leaves Malise, goes quietly from his flat. Her next
appearance is in a restaurant, largely patronized by prostitutes. One
does not know what has happened to her in the meantime, but it is
plain that she must have suffered acutely, for this delicately bred
woman, sensitive to the point of morbidity about sexual relationships,
has decided to become a prostitute! We see her entering "The Gascony"
for the first time when the fourth act begins. A young man, ordinary,
decent, and uncommonly lustful, makes overtures to her, treating her
with kindliness when he discovers that he is her first customer. His
kindliness helps to reconcile her to her position, and she prepares to
leave the restaurant with him. While he is paying the bill two coarse
men leer at her, and one of them accosts her, making an appointment for
the following evening. As she watches his coarse face, inflamed with
lust, she realises the horror of the life she is about to lead, and
suddenly makes a decision--she takes a bottle of poison from her dress,
pours its contents into a wine-glass, and drinks it. She dies while
some sportsmen in an adjoining room play "the last notes of an old song
'This Day a Stag Must Die' on a horn." And that is the end of the play.
It seems to me to be incredible that Clare Dedmond should have gone
to that restaurant to sell herself to any casual purchaser. It seems
to me, given her nature, incredible that she should even have thought
of such a way of life or that, having thought of it, she should
not instantly poison herself rather than endure it. Mr. Galsworthy
insists throughout the play on her exceptional sensitiveness about
sex-relationships. I think that psychologically he has over-stated this
sensitiveness, but, assuming that he has not done so, is it conceivable
that a woman who shivers and twitches her hands when she is kissed by
a man whom she likes will consent to put on fine clothes and go to a
notorious restaurant and sit at a table while men inspect her?... (I
leave out of consideration such questions as: "Where did she obtain the
fine clothes?" "How did she acquire her knowledge of 'The Gascony'?")
If she were prepared to endure that last of all defilements, why did
she run away from her husband? If she were capable of selling her
embraces, why did she shiver and twitch when Malise kissed her? George
Dedmond was not a "bad" man. He did not ill-treat her nor was he
faithless to her. He insisted, indeed, on sexual submissions, but one
has difficulty in believing that her horror of these, "unless I feel,"
was very strong since she was willing to suffer the casual amours of
"The Gascony." There would have been something pitiable in her if,
after leaving Malise, she had returned to George. There would have
been something tragical in her if, reluctant to return to George, she
had killed herself when she found that she could not maintain herself
in decency. But there is nothing either pitiable or tragical in the
end devised for her by Mr. Galsworthy. It is an arranged and schemed
destiny that overwhelms Clare Dedmond, arranged and schemed not by
Circumstance but by Mr. Galsworthy, and having no relation whatever to
the nature of the woman. Mr. Galsworthy wanted to poison her in "The
Gascony," and so he thrust her into the restaurant in plain disregard
of her character and of common facts.
There is a phrase in the play which is intended to illuminate Clare's
nature. "You're too fine," Mrs. Fullarton says to her, "and you're
not fine enough to endure things." How can one be too fine to endure
a thing and yet not fine enough to endure it? And, having begun to
question in that fashion, one goes on again to wonder why she married
her husband. "Five years" (of marriage), she says to her husband, "and
four of them like this!" Here is no case of slow transformation of love
into dislike or of instant disillusionment. Clare does not suddenly
discover or slowly discover that George is not the sort of man she
had imagined him to be, for he remains throughout the play exactly
the sort of man he was when she was wooed and married by him. He did
not become prosaic, unimaginative, and coarse after marriage: he was
always like that; and Clare, so sensitive as she was, must have been
jarred by him as much before marriage as she was a year after marriage.
There is no suggestion in the play that she married for money. Had she
done so, surely she would, when we remember the depths to which she
was subsequently prepared to descend, have borne his dullness and
coarseness, not gladly, perhaps, but with fortitude?
The processes of attraction and repulsion are so complicated that it
is difficult to say where one begins and the other ends, but this
difficulty is hardly to be experienced in cases where the personalities
are so marked and divergent as were the personalities of Clare and
George Dedmond. If one were to take a man like Squire Western in "Tom
Jones" and marry him to Mélisande in "Pelléas et Mélisande," one
could prophesy with some certainty what would be the result of such a
marriage. It would be disastrous. Left to the ordinary processes of
nature, however, such a marriage would not take place at all.
But the difficulty of fathoming Clare's relationships does not end
with her husband. It is equally difficult to understand her attitude
towards Malise. What attracted her to this extraordinarily ill-bred man
who sneers openly at her relatives and friends, mocking and insulting
them to her and to their faces? The Dedmonds, parents and son, are
dense, but they are decent. They live by rule because they cannot live
by any other means. It is not their fault that they cannot understand
Clare's point of view, any more than it is the fault of a blind man
that he falls over an obstacle which he cannot see. Malise regards them
as malignant people, deliberately imprisoning an aspiring woman. His
vision of them is as narrow as is theirs of him, and, since he has not
got their breeding or kindliness, his conduct is caddish where theirs
is merely stupid. There is no magnitude or charity in this man. He
spends his days and nights in writing petulant screeds in the style of
Thomas Carlyle: windy stuff, blowing out of a noisome mind; and when
he has induced one helpless, incompetent woman to follow his creed he
fails her completely.
The last sentences of the play show that Mr. Galsworthy had set his
mind on Clare's death in disregard of the probabilities. Clare, having
swallowed the poison, is lying back in her chair, presumably dead.
_The Young Man has covered his eyes with his hands; Arnaud is
crossing himself fervently; the Languid Lord stands gazing with
one of the dropped gardenias twisted in his fingers; and the woman
bending over Clare, kisses her forehead._
That is a piece of theatricality. It has no relationship to real
things. Those people, in life, would not have stood about in
sentimental attitudes watching a woman die of poison. The young man
would have flown for a doctor; the waiter would have rushed off for an
emetic; the languid lord would have lost his languid airs in his desire
to get away from the restaurant in fear lest he might be summoned as a
witness at the inquest; and the woman would promptly have had hysterics.