ACT I

Produced by Eve Sobol

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

A FANTASIA IN THE RUSSIAN MANNER ON ENGLISH THEMES

By Bernard Shaw

1913-1916

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

Where Heartbreak House Stands

Heartbreak House is not merely the name of the play which follows this

preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the

play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional

diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy

even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had

produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of

which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been

performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shown

us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did

not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe

was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and

futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering

the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and

energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken

it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house

standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and

amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated

the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by

seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they

were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these

charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold

up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; and he therefore had no scruple in

exploiting and even flattering their charm.

The Inhabitants

Tchekov's plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts,

got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial

affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared

and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just

as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and

professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays

fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music,

art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting,

fishing, flirting, eating, and drinking. The same nice people, the same

utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could

write; and they were the sole repositories of culture who had social

opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and

newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their

activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They

did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to

realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when

they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing

to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety

theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined

by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our

society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an

economic, political and; as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as

Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with

all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its

best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For

prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.

Horseback Hall

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative

to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for

horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted

them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths

of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity,

churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative

electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two

establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the

music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the

stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the

first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden

of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers

who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were

apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had

to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is

hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.

Revolution on the Shelf

Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper.

It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to

church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.

When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your

bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary

biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself

and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold

Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the

movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson,

Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and,

generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of

the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious

experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday

morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been

brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of

police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might

not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful

Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton

liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The

barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front

bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible

ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from

the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets

instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with

money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other

went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the

medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business

going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as

Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society

going without any instruction in sociology.

The Cherry Orchard

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort.

With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as

the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of

Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and

would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds.

Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through

the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of

Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious

modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a

vacuum would have left them helpless end ineffective in public

affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their

inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even those who

lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors

and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without

continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things

or starve.

From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things

could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government

it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the

electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or

debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a

vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.

Nature's Long Credits

Nature's way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not

one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She

demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls

us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common

domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly

and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil

consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two

generations of medical students way tolerate dirt and carelessness, and

then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh

air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for

plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the

city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital

gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid

for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to

sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.

This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political

science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates

during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the

Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless

affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage,

torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of

ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled

through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or

Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in

1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the

shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the

appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens.

In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against

many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being

slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow.

Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But

when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years

she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never

dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and

came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by

winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the

victors.

The Wicked Half Century

It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than

false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately

suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had

been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a

pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught

that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do

can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue

as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left

him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and

allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might

be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the

middle of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured

the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are

all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion,

inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins

and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions

over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose,

conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions,

produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human

machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process

incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its

competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence

available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our

instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted

with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying

us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent

doubtfully reparable in our time.

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be

accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully

in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the

subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons

than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific

career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless

rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that

this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in

scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great

naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a

barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all

scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries

of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless

method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.

Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and

that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel

Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."

Hypochondria

Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane

alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing

of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by the

doltish materialism of the laboratories as the uncultured world outside.

But being an idle house it was a hypochondriacal house, always running

after cures. It would stop eating meat, not on valid Shelleyan grounds,

but in order to get rid of a bogey called Uric Acid; and it would

actually let you pull all its teeth out to exorcise another demon

named Pyorrhea. It was superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping,

materialization seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the

like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in

the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers, and unregistered

therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this

half century of the drift to the abyss. The registered doctors and

surgeons were hard put to it to compete with the unregistered. They were

not clever enough to appeal to the imagination and sociability of

the Heartbreakers by the arts of the actor, the orator, the poet, the

winning conversationalist. They had to fall back coarsely on the terror

of infection and death. They prescribed inoculations and operations.

Whatever part of a human being could be cut out without necessarily

killing him they cut out; and he often died (unnecessarily of course)

in consequence. From such trifles as uvulas and tonsils they went on

to ovaries and appendices until at last no one's inside was safe. They

explained that the human intestine was too long, and that nothing could

make a child of Adam healthy except short circuiting the pylorus by

cutting a length out of the lower intestine and fastening it directly to

the stomach. As their mechanist theory taught them that medicine was

the business of the chemist's laboratory, and surgery of the carpenter's

shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was

so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual

creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces

of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest

off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they

operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale,

clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies

of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever

have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared

to the General Medical Council.

Those who do not know how to live must make a Merit of Dying

Heartbreak House was far too lazy and shallow to extricate itself from

this palace of evil enchantment. It rhapsodized about love; but it

believed in cruelty. It was afraid of the cruel people; and it saw that

cruelty was at least effective. Cruelty did things that made money,

whereas Love did nothing but prove the soundness of Larochefoucauld's

saying that very few people would fall in love if they had never read

about it. Heartbreak House, in short, did not know how to live, at which

point all that was left to it was the boast that at least it knew how

to die: a melancholy accomplishment which the outbreak of war presently

gave it practically unlimited opportunities of displaying. Thus were the

firstborn of Heartbreak House smitten; and the young, the innocent, the

hopeful, expiated the folly and worthlessness of their elders.

War Delirium

Only those who have lived through a first-rate war, not in the

field, but at home, and kept their heads, can possibly understand

the bitterness of Shakespeare and Swift, who both went through this

experience. The horror of Peer Gynt in the madhouse, when the lunatics,

exalted by illusions of splendid talent and visions of a dawning

millennium, crowned him as their emperor, was tame in comparison. I do

not know whether anyone really kept his head completely except those

who had to keep it because they had to conduct the war at first hand.

I should not have kept my own (as far as I did keep it) if I had not at

once understood that as a scribe and speaker I too was under the most

serious public obligation to keep my grip on realities; but this did

not save me from a considerable degree of hyperaesthesia. There were of

course some happy people to whom the war meant nothing: all political

and general matters lying outside their little circle of interest. But

the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad, the main symptom being a

conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed. All

foods, he felt, must now be adulterated. All schools must be closed.

No advertisements must be sent to the newspapers, of which new editions

must appear and be bought up every ten minutes. Travelling must be

stopped, or, that being impossible, greatly hindered. All pretences

about fine art and culture and the like must be flung off as an

intolerable affectation; and the picture galleries and museums and

schools at once occupied by war workers. The British Museum itself was

saved only by a hair's breadth. The sincerity of all this, and of much

more which would not be believed if I chronicled it, may be established

by one conclusive instance of the general craziness. Men were seized

with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money.

And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no

discoverable object, and to ridiculous voluntary organizations for doing

what was plainly the business of the civil and military authorities,

but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the

presence of mind to pretend that he (or she) was "collecting" it for the

annihilation of the enemy. Swindlers were emboldened to take offices;

label themselves Anti-Enemy Leagues; and simply pocket the money that

was heaped on them. Attractively dressed young women found that they had

nothing to do but parade the streets, collecting-box in hand, and live

gloriously on the profits. Many months elapsed before, as a first sign

of returning sanity, the police swept an Anti-Enemy secretary into

prison pour encourages les autres, and the passionate penny collecting

of the Flag Days was brought under some sort of regulation.

Madness in Court

The demoralization did not spare the Law Courts. Soldiers were

acquitted, even on fully proved indictments for wilful murder, until at

last the judges and magistrates had to announce that what was called the

Unwritten Law, which meant simply that a soldier could do what he liked

with impunity in civil life, was not the law of the land, and that a

Victoria Cross did not carry with it a perpetual plenary indulgence.

Unfortunately the insanity of the juries and magistrates did not always

manifest itself in indulgence. No person unlucky enough to be charged

with any sort of conduct, however reasonable and salutary, that did not

smack of war delirium, had the slightest chance of acquittal. There were

in the country, too, a certain number of people who had conscientious

objections to war as criminal or unchristian. The Act of Parliament

introducing Compulsory Military Service thoughtlessly exempted these

persons, merely requiring them to prove the genuineness of their

convictions. Those who did so were very ill-advised from the point

of view of their own personal interest; for they were persecuted with

savage logicality in spite of the law; whilst those who made no pretence

of having any objection to war at all, and had not only had military

training in Officers' Training Corps, but had proclaimed on public

occasions that they were perfectly ready to engage in civil war on

behalf of their political opinions, were allowed the benefit of the Act

on the ground that they did not approve of this particular war. For the

Christians there was no mercy. In cases where the evidence as to their

being killed by ill treatment was so unequivocal that the verdict

would certainly have been one of wilful murder had the prejudice of

the coroner's jury been on the other side, their tormentors were

gratuitously declared to be blameless. There was only one virtue,

pugnacity: only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of

war; but the Government had not the courage to legislate accordingly;

and its law was set aside for Lynch law.

The climax of legal lawlessness was reached in France. The greatest

Socialist statesman in Europe, Jaures, was shot and killed by a

gentleman who resented his efforts to avert the war. M. Clemenceau was

shot by another gentleman of less popular opinions, and happily came off

no worse than having to spend a precautionary couple of days in bed.

The slayer of Jaures was recklessly acquitted: the would-be slayer of M.

Clemenceau was carefully found guilty. There is no reason to doubt that

the same thing would have happened in England if the war had begun

with a successful attempt to assassinate Keir Hardie, and ended with an

unsuccessful one to assassinate Mr Lloyd George.

The Long Arm of War

The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called

influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made

doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the

battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India.

But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence,

reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever

would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire,

and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders,

where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another

as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it

after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for

relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their

shoulders and saying, "C'est la guerre." England, inviolate for so many

centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be

more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected

to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in

cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst

bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel

on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly

full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and

mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a

good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go

down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America

where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went

beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive

illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me

to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do

that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England,

with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as

unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying

the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether

our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the

newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on

young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were

being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England,

and the more private records of the methods by which the American

War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the

possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.

The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty

Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war

maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of

liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under

which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by

simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without

any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence.

Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased

by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no

fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity

of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory

laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the

loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances

and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the

formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed

that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless

we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and

beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not

change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was

that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that

every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science

and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying

grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and

most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has

been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the

pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like

hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us,

the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek

history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves

into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest,

joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first,

and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with

insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should

ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept

in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of

civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the

very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers,

and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was

crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that

German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by

journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in

fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and

our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they

certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of

German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German

literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant

abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth

in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of

such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the

arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the

appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great

realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily

and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing

the Garter from the Kaiser's leg, striking the German dukes from the

roll of our peerage, changing the King's illustrious and historically

appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against

Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch-Ghibelline) to that of a

traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the

Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving

his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage:

only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as

confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called

themselves patriots.

The Sufferings of the Sane

The mental distress of living amid the obscene din of all these

carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane

people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated

by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The

stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative

were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that

mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the

hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true;

for when nearly every house had a slaughtered son to mourn, we should

all have gone quite out of our senses if we had taken our own and our

friend's bereavements at their peace value. It became necessary to give

them a false value; to proclaim the young life worthily and gloriously

sacrificed to redeem the liberty of mankind, instead of to expiate the

heedlessness and folly of their fathers, and expiate it in vain. We

had even to assume that the parents and not the children had made the

sacrifice, until at last the comic papers were driven to satirize fat

old men, sitting comfortably in club chairs, and boasting of the sons

they had "given" to their country.

No one grudged these anodynes to acute personal grief; but they only

embittered those who knew that the young men were having their teeth

set on edge because their parents had eaten sour political grapes. Then

think of the young men themselves! Many of them had no illusions about

the policy that led to the war: they went clear-sighted to a horribly

repugnant duty. Men essentially gentle and essentially wise, with really

valuable work in hand, laid it down voluntarily and spent months forming

fours in the barrack yard, and stabbing sacks of straw in the public

eye, so that they might go out to kill and maim men as gentle as

themselves. These men, who were perhaps, as a class, our most efficient

soldiers (Frederick Keeling, for example), were not duped for a moment

by the hypocritical melodrama that consoled and stimulated the others.

They left their creative work to drudge at destruction, exactly as they

would have left it to take their turn at the pumps in a sinking ship.

They did not, like some of the conscientious objectors, hold back

because the ship had been neglected by its officers and scuttled by

its wreckers. The ship had to be saved, even if Newton had to leave his

fluxions and Michael Angelo his marbles to save it; so they threw away

the tools of their beneficent and ennobling trades, and took up the

blood-stained bayonet and the murderous bomb, forcing themselves to

pervert their divine instinct for perfect artistic execution to the

effective handling of these diabolical things, and their economic

faculty for organization to the contriving of ruin and slaughter. For

it gave an ironic edge to their tragedy that the very talents they were

forced to prostitute made the prostitution not only effective, but

even interesting; so that some of them were rapidly promoted, and found

themselves actually becoming artists in wax, with a growing relish for

it, like Napoleon and all the other scourges of mankind, in spite of

themselves. For many of them there was not even this consolation. They

"stuck it," and hated it, to the end.

Evil in the Throne of Good

This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it

in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or

witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their

own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not

easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw

away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of

inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can

answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of

Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of

Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we

are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a

change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.

Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight,

and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable

loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on

destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind

might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors

away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were

Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best

harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the

trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly

civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth

was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in

"German losses." They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the

death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!

Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel

But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a

frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom

an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage

ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a

child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they

had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings

day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious

imprecations on "the Huns" as murderers, and shrieked for savage and

satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths

they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the

cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be

actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances

of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as

sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.

For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of

our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I

will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have

such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I

noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling

beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going

splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly

there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been

torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including

a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been

drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had

only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine

arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing

frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their

heads now lost them utterly. "Killing saloon passengers! What next?" was

the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase

to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me,

with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and

the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a

heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with

the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than

most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim

satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the

civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a

sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my

impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and

natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless

paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything

to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before,

having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They

were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too

big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size

for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just

the same reason pass a vote for £30,000 without a word, and then spend

three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven

shillings for refreshments?

Little Minds and Big Battles

Nobody will be able to understand the vagaries of public feeling during

the war unless they bear constantly in mind that the war in its entire

magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive

even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing

but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of

bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity

of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the

dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce

any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments of

Scarborough and Ramsgate were colossal tragedies, and the battle of

Jutland a mere ballad. The words "after thorough artillery preparation"

in the news from the front meant nothing to us; but when our seaside

trippers learned that an elderly gentleman at breakfast in a week-end

marine hotel had been interrupted by a bomb dropping into his egg-cup,

their wrath and horror knew no bounds. They declared that this would put

a new spirit into the army; and had no suspicion that the soldiers in

the trenches roared with laughter over it for days, and told each other

that it would do the blighters at home good to have a taste of what the

army was up against. Sometimes the smallness of view was pathetic. A man

would work at home regardless of the call "to make the world safe for

democracy." His brother would be killed at the front. Immediately he

would throw up his work and take up the war as a family blood feud

against the Germans. Sometimes it was comic. A wounded man, entitled to

his discharge, would return to the trenches with a grim determination to

find the Hun who had wounded him and pay him out for it.

It is impossible to estimate what proportion of us, in khaki or out

of it, grasped the war and its political antecedents as a whole in the

light of any philosophy of history or knowledge of what war is. I doubt

whether it was as high as our proportion of higher mathematicians.

But there can be no doubt that it was prodigiously outnumbered by the

comparatively ignorant and childish. Remember that these people had to

be stimulated to make the sacrifices demanded by the war, and that this

could not be done by appeals to a knowledge which they did not possess,

and a comprehension of which they were incapable. When the armistice

at last set me free to tell the truth about the war at the following

general election, a soldier said to a candidate whom I was supporting,

"If I had known all that in 1914, they would never have got me into

khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary

to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at.

Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately

propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense,

which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war

before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German

army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very

serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane

European State could afford to do.

The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables

Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the

critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time

was conducting a war which involved the organization of several

millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with

provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been

done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass

from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and

suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to

pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was

to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who

still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency

was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their

business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the

raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide

of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from

operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A

precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "If

you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out

of the way," was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people

went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the

way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very

seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where

the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and

invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor

and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately

intimidating the Government by its blusterings into using the

irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus

enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of

terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word

from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of

courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much

less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by

criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the

Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable

moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a

childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our

great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind

all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the

effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and

activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its

incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its

endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season

and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the

conquest of Europe.

The Practical Business Men

From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical

business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing

their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the

success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them

and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The

pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we

tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the

war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that

they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation

they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.

How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down

Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of

her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to

save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of

the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent

practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional

rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination

of the country and the world in speeches, poems, manifestoes, picture

posters, and newspaper articles. I have had the privilege of hearing

some of our ablest commanders talking about their work; and I have

shared the common lot of reading the accounts of that work given to the

world by the newspapers. No two experiences could be more different. But

in the end the talkers obtained a dangerous ascendancy over the rank and

file of the men of action; for though the great men of action are always

inveterate talkers and often very clever writers, and therefore cannot

have their minds formed for them by others, the average man of action,

like the average fighter with the bayonet, can give no account of

himself in words even to himself, and is apt to pick up and accept what

he reads about himself and other people in the papers, except when the

writer is rash enough to commit himself on technical points. It was not

uncommon during the war to hear a soldier, or a civilian engaged on war

work, describing events within his own experience that reduced to utter

absurdity the ravings and maunderings of his daily paper, and yet echo

the opinions of that paper like a parrot. Thus, to escape from the

prevailing confusion and folly, it was not enough to seek the company of

the ordinary man of action: one had to get into contact with the master

spirits. This was a privilege which only a handful of people could

enjoy. For the unprivileged citizen there was no escape. To him the

whole country seemed mad, futile, silly, incompetent, with no hope of

victory except the hope that the enemy might be just as mad. Only by

very resolute reflection and reasoning could he reassure himself that if

there was nothing more solid beneath their appalling appearances the

war could not possibly have gone on for a single day without a total

breakdown of its organization.

The Mad Election

Happy were the fools and the thoughtless men of action in those days.

The worst of it was that the fools were very strongly represented in

parliament, as fools not only elect fools, but can persuade men of

action to elect them too. The election that immediately followed the

armistice was perhaps the maddest that has ever taken place. Soldiers

who had done voluntary and heroic service in the field were defeated

by persons who had apparently never run a risk or spent a farthing that

they could avoid, and who even had in the course of the election to

apologize publicly for bawling Pacifist or Pro-German at their opponent.

Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk

tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader

will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called,

in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the

coupon." Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them

without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be

fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must

necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and

the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the

opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest

bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the

general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to

pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually

to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had,

in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked,

cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from

this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet;

but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the

heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest

necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded

almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.

The Yahoo and the Angry Ape

Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no

denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing

Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the

superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British

can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the

three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men,

saying that "Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would

ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for

thunder: nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he

had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of

every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters

of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a

finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a

whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may have seen a Stratford cottage struck

by one of Jove's thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted

thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have

said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford, as

French peasants are returning to their homes to-day, to find the old

familiar signpost inscribed "To Stratford, 1 mile," and at the end of

the mile nothing but some holes in the ground and a fragment of a broken

churn here and there? Would not the spectacle of the angry ape endowed

with powers of destruction that Jove never pretended to, have beggared

even his command of words?

And yet, what is there to say except that war puts a strain on human

nature that breaks down the better half of it, and makes the worse half

a diabolical virtue? Better, for us if it broke it down altogether, for

then the warlike way out of our difficulties would be barred to us, and

we should take greater care not to get into them. In truth, it is, as

Byron said, "not difficult to die," and enormously difficult to live:

that explains why, at bottom, peace is not only better than war, but

infinitely more arduous. Did any hero of the war face the glorious

risk of death more bravely than the traitor Bolo faced the ignominious

certainty of it? Bolo taught us all how to die: can we say that he

taught us all how to live? Hardly a week passes now without some soldier

who braved death in the field so recklessly that he was decorated or

specially commended for it, being haled before our magistrates for

having failed to resist the paltriest temptations of peace, with no

better excuse than the old one that "a man must live." Strange that one

who, sooner than do honest work, will sell his honor for a bottle of

wine, a visit to the theatre, and an hour with a strange woman, all

obtained by passing a worthless cheque, could yet stake his life on

the most desperate chances of the battle-field! Does it not seem as if,

after all, the glory of death were cheaper than the glory of life? If

it is not easier to attain, why do so many more men attain it? At all

events it is clear that the kingdom of the Prince of Peace has not yet

become the kingdom of this world. His attempts at invasion have been

resisted far more fiercely than the Kaiser's. Successful as that

resistance has been, it has piled up a sort of National Debt that is not

the less oppressive because we have no figures for it and do not intend

to pay it. A blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the

long run less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw

materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In the

blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many mansions; but I am

afraid they do not include either Heartbreak House or Horseback Hall.

Plague on Both your Houses!

Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the

foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be buried

in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices. Unfortunately

they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they have been demolished

many times by successive Greathearts, and rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and

Presumption, by Feeble Mind and Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of

Vanity Fair. Another generation of "secondary education" at our ancient

public schools and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite

sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the instruction

of that generation I leave these pages as a record of what civilian

life was during the war: a matter on which history is usually silent.

Fortunately it was a very short war. It is true that the people who

thought it could not last more than six months were very signally

refuted by the event. As Sir Douglas Haig has pointed out, its Waterloos

lasted months instead of hours. But there would have been nothing

surprising in its lasting thirty years. If it had not been for the fact

that the blockade achieved the amazing feat of starving out Europe,

which it could not possibly have done had Europe been properly organized

for war, or even for peace, the war would have lasted until the

belligerents were so tired of it that they could no longer be compelled

to compel themselves to go on with it. Considering its magnitude, the

war of 1914-18 will certainly be classed as the shortest in history. The

end came so suddenly that the combatant literally stumbled over it;

and yet it came a full year later than it should have come if the

belligerents had not been far too afraid of one another to face the

situation sensibly. Germany, having failed to provide for the war she

began, failed again to surrender before she was dangerously exhausted.

Her opponents, equally improvident, went as much too close to bankruptcy

as Germany to starvation. It was a bluff at which both were bluffed.

And, with the usual irony of war, it remains doubtful whether Germany

and Russia, the defeated, will not be the gainers; for the victors are

already busy fastening on themselves the chains they have struck from

the limbs of the vanquished.

How the Theatre fared

Let us now contract our view rather violently from the European theatre

of war to the theatre in which the fights are sham fights, and the

slain, rising the moment the curtain has fallen, go comfortably home

to supper after washing off their rose-pink wounds. It is nearly twenty

years since I was last obliged to introduce a play in the form of a

book for lack of an opportunity of presenting it in its proper mode by a

performance in a theatre. The war has thrown me back on this expedient.

Heartbreak House has not yet reached the stage. I have withheld it

because the war has completely upset the economic conditions which

formerly enabled serious drama to pay its way in London. The change is

not in the theatres nor in the management of them, nor in the authors

and actors, but in the audiences. For four years the London theatres

were crowded every night with thousands of soldiers on leave from the

front. These soldiers were not seasoned London playgoers. A childish

experience of my own gave me a clue to their condition. When I was a

small boy I was taken to the opera. I did not then know what an opera

was, though I could whistle a good deal of opera music. I had seen in

my mother's album photographs of all the great opera singers, mostly

in evening dress. In the theatre I found myself before a gilded balcony

filled with persons in evening dress whom I took to be the opera

singers. I picked out one massive dark lady as Alboni, and wondered how

soon she would stand up and sing. I was puzzled by the fact that I was

made to sit with my back to the singers instead of facing them. When the

curtain went up, my astonishment and delight were unbounded.

The Soldier at the Theatre Front

In 1915, I saw in the theatres men in khaki in just the same

predicament. To everyone who had my clue to their state of mind it was

evident that they had never been in a theatre before and did not know

what it was. At one of our great variety theatres I sat beside a young

officer, not at all a rough specimen, who, even when the curtain

rose and enlightened him as to the place where he had to look for his

entertainment, found the dramatic part of it utterly incomprehensible.

He did not know how to play his part of the game. He could understand

the people on the stage singing and dancing and performing gymnastic

feats. He not only understood but intensely enjoyed an artist who

imitated cocks crowing and pigs squeaking. But the people who pretended

that they were somebody else, and that the painted picture behind

them was real, bewildered him. In his presence I realized how very

sophisticated the natural man has to become before the conventions

of the theatre can be easily acceptable, or the purpose of the drama

obvious to him.

Well, from the moment when the routine of leave for our soldiers was

established, such novices, accompanied by damsels (called flappers)

often as innocent as themselves, crowded the theatres to the doors. It

was hardly possible at first to find stuff crude enough to nurse them

on. The best music-hall comedians ransacked their memories for the

oldest quips and the most childish antics to avoid carrying the military

spectators out of their depth. I believe that this was a mistake as far

as the novices were concerned. Shakespeare, or the dramatized histories

of George Barnwell, Maria Martin, or the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,

would probably have been quite popular with them. But the novices were

only a minority after all. The cultivated soldier, who in time of peace

would look at nothing theatrical except the most advanced postIbsen

plays in the most artistic settings, found himself, to his own

astonishment, thirsting for silly jokes, dances, and brainlessly

sensuous exhibitions of pretty girls. The author of some of the most

grimly serious plays of our time told me that after enduring the

trenches for months without a glimpse of the female of his species, it

gave him an entirely innocent but delightful pleasure merely to see

a flapper. The reaction from the battle-field produced a condition of

hyperaesthesia in which all the theatrical values were altered. Trivial

things gained intensity and stale things novelty. The actor, instead of

having to coax his audiences out of the boredom which had driven them to

the theatre in an ill humor to seek some sort of distraction, had only

to exploit the bliss of smiling men who were no longer under fire and

under military discipline, but actually clean and comfortable and in a

mood to be pleased with anything and everything that a bevy of pretty

girls and a funny man, or even a bevy of girls pretending to be pretty

and a man pretending to be funny, could do for them.

Then could be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical

comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a

practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the

bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples

consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night;

mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got

into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting

complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their

equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that

astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in

drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of

his naked person to be descried from time to time.

Heartbreak House

Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and

were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical

comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade

had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing:

these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much

pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what

they thought fresh and clever.

Commerce in the Theatre

Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London

theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must

pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people:

they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable

rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a

guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin

flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the

funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.

Unser Shakespeare

Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a

national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of

Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and

influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national

culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents

of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single

handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated

swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods

lost its tailboard at the top of the hill and let its contents roll

in ruin to the bottom, I can only say, "I cannot do justice to this

situation," and let it pass without another word.

The Higher Drama put out of Action

The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined. The

beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it. Rents

went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices doubled

everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of

management to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every

night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not be attained

without a very wide popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible

to a limited extent before the war was that a play could pay its

way even if the theatre were only half full until Saturday and

three-quarters full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a

desperately hard worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an

artistically disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare

and happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be

potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time a relay

might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise

occurred that remarkable revival of the British drama at the beginning

of the century which made my own career as a playwright possible in

England. In America I had already established myself, not as part of the

ordinary theatre system, but in association with the exceptional genius

of Richard Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the

system of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama

of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the Emperor of

Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a time when the sole

official attention paid me by the British Courts was the announcement

to the English-speaking world that certain plays of mine were unfit for

public performance, a substantial set-off against this being that the

British Court, in the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to

the bad character given me by the chief officer of its household.

Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London stage,

and were presently followed by the plays of Granville Barker, Gilbert

Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence Housman, Arnold

Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and others which would in

the nineteenth century have stood rather less chance of production at a

London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals

of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of

Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible

solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much

money as it cost to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work

appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and

therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators

as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands

of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not

yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the

commercial value of their time and energy too closely. The war struck

this foundation away in the manner I have just described. The expenses

of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded

by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an

ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher

drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation,

now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to

provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory

theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at last

disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom

it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly

made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question

altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.

Church and Theatre

I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to

care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not

born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the

beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note

that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what

a church was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody

had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women

paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like

Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were

read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,

Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by

greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of

pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass

windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of

painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes

produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only

enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous

practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular

troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed

church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which

the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in

churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless

rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on

driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and

partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the

temple had become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions

that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church

were laid on the shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable

place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the

slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls.

When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with

the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the Little Theatre in

the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived

within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers.

In point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the

fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any

operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture

glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres.

It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the Blondin

Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian

decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and care,

the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the gloomiest of little

conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the Puritan point of view,

have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the Little

Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's

Magic or Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why

the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact

remains that the lady to whose public spirit and sense of the national

value of the theatre I owed the first regular public performance of

a play of mine had to conceal her action as if it had been a crime,

whereas if she had given the money to the Church she would have worn

a halo for it. And I admit, as I have always done, that this state of

things may have been a very sensible one. I have asked Londoners again

and again why they pay half a guinea to go to a theatre when they can

go to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey for nothing. Their only possible

reply is that they want to see something new and possibly something

wicked; but the theatres mostly disappoint both hopes. If ever a

revolution makes me Dictator, I shall establish a heavy charge for

admission to our churches. But everyone who pays at the church door

shall receive a ticket entitling him or her to free admission to one

performance at any theatre he or she prefers. Thus shall the sensuous

charms of the church service be made to subsidize the sterner virtue of

the drama.

The Next Phase

The present situation will not last. Although the newspaper I read at

breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation

that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to

confirm the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction

is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible

years. Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the

assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half

full week in and week out. Prices will change. The higher drama will

be at no greater disadvantage than it was before the war; and it may

benefit, first, by the fact that many of us have been torn from the

fools' paradise in which the theatre formerly traded, and thrust upon

the sternest realities and necessities until we have lost both faith in

and patience with the theatrical pretences that had no root either in

reality or necessity; second, by the startling change made by the war

in the distribution of income. It seems only the other day that a

millionaire was a man with £50,000 a year. To-day, when he has paid his

income tax and super tax, and insured his life for the amount of his

death duties, he is lucky if his net income is 10,000 pounds though his

nominal property remains the same. And this is the result of a Budget

which is called "a respite for the rich." At the other end of the scale

millions of persons have had regular incomes for the first time in

their lives; and their men have been regularly clothed, fed, lodged, and

taught to make up their minds that certain things have to be done, also

for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of women have

been taken out of their domestic cages and tasted both discipline and

independence. The thoughtless and snobbish middle classes have been

pulled up short by the very unpleasant experience of being ruined to an

unprecedented extent. We have all had a tremendous jolt; and although

the widespread notion that the shock of the war would automatically make

a new heaven and a new earth, and that the dog would never go back to

his vomit nor the sow to her wallowing in the mire, is already seen to

be a delusion, yet we are far more conscious of our condition than we

were, and far less disposed to submit to it. Revolution, lately only

a sensational chapter in history or a demagogic claptrap, is now a

possibility so imminent that hardly by trying to suppress it in

other countries by arms and defamation, and calling the process

anti-Bolshevism, can our Government stave it off at home.

Perhaps the most tragic figure of the day is the American President who

was once a historian. In those days it became his task to tell us how,

after that great war in America which was more clearly than any other

war of our time a war for an idea, the conquerors, confronted with a

heroic task of reconstruction, turned recreant, and spent fifteen years

in abusing their victory under cover of pretending to accomplish the

task they were doing what they could to make impossible. Alas! Hegel

was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn

anything from history. With what anguish of mind the President sees that

we, the new conquerors, forgetting everything we professed to fight for,

are sitting down with watering mouths to a good square meal of ten years

revenge upon and humiliation of our prostrate foe, can only be guessed

by those who know, as he does, how hopeless is remonstrance, and how

happy Lincoln was in perishing from the earth before his inspired

messages became scraps of paper. He knows well that from the Peace

Conference will come, in spite of his utmost, no edict on which he will

be able, like Lincoln, to invoke "the considerate judgment of mankind:

and the gracious favor of Almighty God." He led his people to destroy

the militarism of Zabern; and the army they rescued is busy in Cologne

imprisoning every German who does not salute a British officer; whilst

the government at home, asked whether it approves, replies that it

does not propose even to discontinue this Zabernism when the Peace is

concluded, but in effect looks forward to making Germans salute British

officers until the end of the world. That is what war makes of men and

women. It will wear off; and the worst it threatens is already proving

impracticable; but before the humble and contrite heart ceases to be

despised, the President and I, being of the same age, will be dotards.

In the meantime there is, for him, another history to write; for me,

another comedy to stage. Perhaps, after all, that is what wars are for,

and what historians and playwrights are for. If men will not learn until

their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own

for preference.

The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre

To the theatre it will not matter. Whatever Bastilles fall, the theatre

will stand. Apostolic Hapsburg has collapsed; All Highest Hohenzollern

languishes in Holland, threatened with trial on a capital charge of

fighting for his country against England; Imperial Romanoff, said to

have perished miserably by a more summary method of murder, is perhaps

alive or perhaps dead: nobody cares more than if he had been a peasant;

the lord of Hellas is level with his lackeys in republican Switzerland;

Prime Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief have passed from a brief glory

as Solons and Caesars into failure and obscurity as closely on one

another's heels as the descendants of Banquo; but Euripides and

Aristophanes, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Ibsen remain fixed in

their everlasting seats.

How War muzzles the Dramatic Poet

As for myself, why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about

the war instead of two pamphlets on it? The answer is significant. You

cannot make war on war and on your neighbor at the same time. War cannot

bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of laughter

that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their

country, it is not the time to show their lovers and wives and fathers

and mothers how they are being sacrificed to the blunders of

boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of conquerors, the

electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and

lies and rancors and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their

prison doors, and sets them in the thrones of power and popularity. For

unless these things are mercilessly exposed they will hide under the

mantle of the ideals on the stage just as they do in real life.

And though there may be better things to reveal, it may not, and indeed

cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the issue is still

in the balance. Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of

the realm. We are just now reading the revelations of our generals and

admirals, unmuzzled at last by the armistice. During the war, General A,

in his moving despatches from the field, told how General B had covered

himself with deathless glory in such and such a battle. He now tells us

that General B came within an ace of losing us the war by disobeying

his orders on that occasion, and fighting instead of running away as he

ought to have done. An excellent subject for comedy now that the war

is over, no doubt; but if General A had let this out at the time, what

would have been the effect on General B's soldiers? And had the stage

made known what the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War

who overruled General A thought of him, and what he thought of them, as

now revealed in raging controversy, what would have been the effect on

the nation? That is why comedy, though sorely tempted, had to be loyally

silent; for the art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism; recognizes

no obligation but truth to natural history; cares not whether Germany

or England perish; is ready to cry with Brynhild, "Lass'uns verderben,

lachend zu grunde geh'n" sooner than deceive or be deceived; and thus

becomes in time of war a greater military danger than poison, steel, or

trinitrotoluene. That is why I had to withhold Heartbreak House from

the footlights during the war; for the Germans might on any night have

turned the last act from play into earnest, and even then might not have

waited for their cues.

June, 1919.

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

ACT I

The hilly country in the middle of the north edge of Sussex, looking

very pleasant on a fine evening at the end of September, is seen through

the windows of a room which has been built so as to resemble the after

part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery; for the

windows are ship built with heavy timbering, and run right across the

room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows. A row

of lockers under the windows provides an unupholstered windowseat

interrupted by twin glass doors, respectively halfway between the stern

post and the sides. Another door strains the illusion a little by being

apparently in the ship's port side, and yet leading, not to the open

sea, but to the entrance hall of the house. Between this door and the

stern gallery are bookshelves. There are electric light switches beside

the door leading to the hall and the glass doors in the stern gallery.

Against the starboard wall is a carpenter's bench. The vice has a board

in its jaws; and the floor is littered with shavings, overflowing from a

waste-paper basket. A couple of planes and a centrebit are on the bench.

In the same wall, between the bench and the windows, is a narrow doorway

with a half door, above which a glimpse of the room beyond shows that it

is a shelved pantry with bottles and kitchen crockery.

On the starboard side, but close to the middle, is a plain oak

drawing-table with drawing-board, T-square, straightedges, set

squares, mathematical instruments, saucers of water color, a tumbler

of discolored water, Indian ink, pencils, and brushes on it. The

drawing-board is set so that the draughtsman's chair has the window on

its left hand. On the floor at the end of the table, on its right, is a

ship's fire bucket. On the port side of the room, near the bookshelves,

is a sofa with its back to the windows. It is a sturdy mahogany article,

oddly upholstered in sailcloth, including the bolster, with a couple of

blankets hanging over the back. Between the sofa and the drawing-table

is a big wicker chair, with broad arms and a low sloping back, with its

back to the light. A small but stout table of teak, with a round top

and gate legs, stands against the port wall between the door and the

bookcase. It is the only article in the room that suggests (not at all

convincingly) a woman's hand in the furnishing. The uncarpeted floor of

narrow boards is caulked and holystoned like a deck.

The garden to which the glass doors lead dips to the south before the

landscape rises again to the hills. Emerging from the hollow is the

cupola of an observatory. Between the observatory and the house is a

flagstaff on a little esplanade, with a hammock on the east side and a

long garden seat on the west.

A young lady, gloved and hatted, with a dust coat on, is sitting in the

window-seat with her body twisted to enable her to look out at the

view. One hand props her chin: the other hangs down with a volume of the

Temple Shakespeare in it, and her finger stuck in the page she has been

reading.

A clock strikes six.

The young lady turns and looks at her watch. She rises with an air of

one who waits, and is almost at the end of her patience. She is a pretty

girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively

dressed, evidently not a smart idler.

With a sigh of weary resignation she comes to the draughtsman's chair;

sits down; and begins to read Shakespeare. Presently the book sinks to

her lap; her eyes close; and she dozes into a slumber.

An elderly womanservant comes in from the hall with three unopened

bottles of rum on a tray. She passes through and disappears in the

pantry without noticing the young lady. She places the bottles on the

shelf and fills her tray with empty bottles. As she returns with these,

the young lady lets her book drop, awakening herself, and startling the

womanservant so that she all but lets the tray fall.

THE WOMANSERVANT. God bless us! [The young lady picks up the book and

places it on the table]. Sorry to wake you, miss, I'm sure; but you are

a stranger to me. What might you be waiting here for now?

THE YOUNG LADY. Waiting for somebody to show some signs of knowing that

I have been invited here.

THE WOMANSERVANT. Oh, you're invited, are you? And has nobody come?

Dear! dear!

THE YOUNG LADY. A wild-looking old gentleman came and looked in at

the window; and I heard him calling out, "Nurse, there is a young and

attractive female waiting in the poop. Go and see what she wants." Are

you the nurse?

THE WOMANSERVANT. Yes, miss: I'm Nurse Guinness. That was old Captain

Shotover, Mrs Hushabye's father. I heard him roaring; but I thought it

was for something else. I suppose it was Mrs Hushabye that invited you,

ducky?

THE YOUNG LADY. I understood her to do so. But really I think I'd better

go.

NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, don't think of such a thing, miss. If Mrs Hushabye

has forgotten all about it, it will be a pleasant surprise for her to

see you, won't it?

THE YOUNG LADY. It has been a very unpleasant surprise to me to find

that nobody expects me.

NURSE GUINNESS. You'll get used to it, miss: this house is full of

surprises for them that don't know our ways.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [looking in from the hall suddenly: an ancient but

still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a

whistle hanging from his neck]. Nurse, there is a hold-all and a handbag

on the front steps for everybody to fall over. Also a tennis racquet.

Who the devil left them there?

THE YOUNG LADY. They are mine, I'm afraid.

THE CAPTAIN [advancing to the drawing-table]. Nurse, who is this

misguided and unfortunate young lady?

NURSE GUINNESS. She says Miss Hessy invited her, sir.

THE CAPTAIN. And had she no friend, no parents, to warn her against my

daughter's invitations? This is a pretty sort of house, by heavens! A

young and attractive lady is invited here. Her luggage is left on the

steps for hours; and she herself is deposited in the poop and abandoned,

tired and starving. This is our hospitality. These are our manners. No

room ready. No hot water. No welcoming hostess. Our visitor is to sleep

in the toolshed, and to wash in the duckpond.

NURSE GUINNESS. Now it's all right, Captain: I'll get the lady some tea;

and her room shall be ready before she has finished it. [To the young

lady]. Take off your hat, ducky; and make yourself at home [she goes to

the door leading to the hall].

THE CAPTAIN [as she passes him]. Ducky! Do you suppose, woman, that

because this young lady has been insulted and neglected, you have the

right to address her as you address my wretched children, whom you

have brought up in ignorance of the commonest decencies of social

intercourse?

NURSE GUINNESS. Never mind him, doty. [Quite unconcerned, she goes out

into the hall on her way to the kitchen].

THE CAPTAIN. Madam, will you favor me with your name? [He sits down in

the big wicker chair].

THE YOUNG LADY. My name is Ellie Dunn.

THE CAPTAIN. Dunn! I had a boatswain whose name was Dunn. He was

originally a pirate in China. He set up as a ship's chandler with stores

which I have every reason to believe he stole from me. No doubt he

became rich. Are you his daughter?

ELLIE [indignant]. No, certainly not. I am proud to be able to say that

though my father has not been a successful man, nobody has ever had one

word to say against him. I think my father is the best man I have ever

known.

THE CAPTAIN. He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh

degree of concentration?

ELLIE. I don't understand.

THE CAPTAIN. But how could he, with a daughter? I, madam, have two

daughters. One of them is Hesione Hushabye, who invited you here. I

keep this house: she upsets it. I desire to attain the seventh degree

of concentration: she invites visitors and leaves me to entertain them.

[Nurse Guinness returns with the tea-tray, which she places on the teak

table]. I have a second daughter who is, thank God, in a remote part of

the Empire with her numskull of a husband. As a child she thought the

figure-head of my ship, the Dauntless, the most beautiful thing

on earth. He resembled it. He had the same expression: wooden yet

enterprising. She married him, and will never set foot in this house

again.

NURSE GUINNESS [carrying the table, with the tea-things on it, to

Ellie's side]. Indeed you never were more mistaken. She is in England

this very moment. You have been told three times this week that she is

coming home for a year for her health. And very glad you should be to

see your own daughter again after all these years.

THE CAPTAIN. I am not glad. The natural term of the affection of the

human animal for its offspring is six years. My daughter Ariadne was

born when I was forty-six. I am now eighty-eight. If she comes, I am not

at home. If she wants anything, let her take it. If she asks for me, let

her be informed that I am extremely old, and have totally forgotten her.

NURSE GUINNESS. That's no talk to offer to a young lady. Here, ducky,

have some tea; and don't listen to him [she pours out a cup of tea].

THE CAPTAIN [rising wrathfully]. Now before high heaven they have given

this innocent child Indian tea: the stuff they tan their own leather

insides with. [He seizes the cup and the tea-pot and empties both into

the leathern bucket].

ELLIE [almost in tears]. Oh, please! I am so tired. I should have been

glad of anything.

NURSE GUINNESS. Oh, what a thing to do! The poor lamb is ready to drop.

THE CAPTAIN. You shall have some of my tea. Do not touch that fly-blown

cake: nobody eats it here except the dogs. [He disappears into the

pantry].

NURSE GUINNESS. There's a man for you! They say he sold himself to the

devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the

more I believe them.

A WOMAN'S VOICE [in the hall]. Is anyone at home? Hesione! Nurse! Papa!

Do come, somebody; and take in my luggage.

Thumping heard, as of an umbrella, on the wainscot.

NURSE GUINNESS. My gracious! It's Miss Addy, Lady Utterword, Mrs

Hushabye's sister: the one I told the captain about. [Calling]. Coming,

Miss, coming.

She carries the table back to its place by the door and is harrying out

when she is intercepted by Lady Utterword, who bursts in much flustered.

Lady Utterword, a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so

precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous)

is one of comic silliness.

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, is that you, Nurse? How are you? You don't look a

day older. Is nobody at home? Where is Hesione? Doesn't she expect me?

Where are the servants? Whose luggage is that on the steps? Where's

papa? Is everybody asleep? [Seeing Ellie]. Oh! I beg your pardon. I

suppose you are one of my nieces. [Approaching her with outstretched

arms]. Come and kiss your aunt, darling.

ELLIE. I'm only a visitor. It is my luggage on the steps.

NURSE GUINNESS. I'll go get you some fresh tea, ducky. [She takes up the

tray].

ELLIE. But the old gentleman said he would make some himself.

NURSE GUINNESS. Bless you! he's forgotten what he went for already. His

mind wanders from one thing to another.

LADY UTTERWORD. Papa, I suppose?

NURSE GUINNESS. Yes, Miss.

LADY UTTERWORD [vehemently]. Don't be silly, Nurse. Don't call me Miss.

NURSE GUINNESS [placidly]. No, lovey [she goes out with the tea-tray].

LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what

you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after

twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the

steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive

anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always

gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the

same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was

used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and

longed all the time--oh, how I longed!--to be respectable, to be a lady,

to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself.

I married at nineteen to escape from it. My husband is Sir Hastings

Utterword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in

succession. I have always been the mistress of Government House. I

have been so happy: I had forgotten that people could live like this. I

wanted to see my father, my sister, my nephews and nieces (one ought

to, you know), and I was looking forward to it. And now the state of

the house! the way I'm received! the casual impudence of that woman

Guinness, our old nurse! really Hesione might at least have been here:

some preparation might have been made for me. You must excuse my

going on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and

disillusioned: and if I had realized it was to be like this, I wouldn't

have come. I have a great mind to go away without another word [she is

on the point of weeping].

ELLIE [also very miserable]. Nobody has been here to receive me either.

I thought I ought to go away too. But how can I, Lady Utterword? My

luggage is on the steps; and the station fly has gone.

The captain emerges from the pantry with a tray of Chinese lacquer and

a very fine tea-set on it. He rests it provisionally on the end of the

table; snatches away the drawing-board, which he stands on the floor

against table legs; and puts the tray in the space thus cleared. Ellie

pours out a cup greedily.

THE CAPTAIN. Your tea, young lady. What! another lady! I must fetch

another cup [he makes for the pantry].

LADY UTTERWORD [rising from the sofa, suffused with emotion]. Papa!

Don't you know me? I'm your daughter.

THE CAPTAIN. Nonsense! my daughter's upstairs asleep. [He vanishes

through the half door].

Lady Utterword retires to the window to conceal her tears.

ELLIE [going to her with the cup]. Don't be so distressed. Have this cup

of tea. He is very old and very strange: he has been just like that to

me. I know how dreadful it must be: my own father is all the world to

me. Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean it.

The captain returns with another cup.

THE CAPTAIN. Now we are complete. [He places it on the tray].

LADY UTTERWORD [hysterically]. Papa, you can't have forgotten me. I am

Ariadne. I'm little Paddy Patkins. Won't you kiss me? [She goes to him

and throws her arms round his neck].

THE CAPTAIN [woodenly enduring her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You

are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, but no longer young.

LADY UTTERWORD. But think of all the years and years I have been away,

Papa. I have had to grow old, like other people.

THE CAPTAIN [disengaging himself]. You should grow out of kissing

strange men: they may be striving to attain the seventh degree of

concentration.

LADY UTTERWORD. But I'm your daughter. You haven't seen me for years.

THE CAPTAIN. So much the worse! When our relatives are at home, we have

to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure

them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence

by dwelling on their vices. That is how I have come to think my absent

daughter Ariadne a perfect fiend; so do not try to ingratiate yourself

here by impersonating her [he walks firmly away to the other side of the

room].

LADY UTTERWORD. Ingratiating myself indeed! [With dignity]. Very

well, papa. [She sits down at the drawing-table and pours out tea for

herself].

THE CAPTAIN. I am neglecting my social duties. You remember Dunn? Billy

Dunn?

LADY UTTERWORD. DO you mean that villainous sailor who robbed you?

THE CAPTAIN [introducing Ellie]. His daughter. [He sits down on the

sofa].

ELLIE [protesting]. No--

Nurse Guinness returns with fresh tea.

THE CAPTAIN. Take that hogwash away. Do you hear?

NURSE. You've actually remembered about the tea! [To Ellie]. Oh, miss,

he didn't forget you after all! You HAVE made an impression.

THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in

this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her

children are not youthful.

LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this

house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that

might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were

certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.

NURSE. You were always for respectability, Miss Addy.

LADY UTTERWORD. Nurse, will you please remember that I am Lady

Utterword, and not Miss Addy, nor lovey, nor darling, nor doty? Do you

hear?

NURSE. Yes, ducky: all right. I'll tell them all they must call you My

Lady. [She takes her tray out with undisturbed placidity].

LADY UTTERWORD. What comfort? what sense is there in having servants

with no manners?

ELLIE [rising and coming to the table to put down her empty cup]. Lady

Utterword, do you think Mrs Hushabye really expects me?

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, don't ask me. You can see for yourself that I've

just arrived; her only sister, after twenty-three years' absence! and it

seems that I am not expected.

THE CAPTAIN. What does it matter whether the young lady is expected or

not? She is welcome. There are beds: there is food. I'll find a room for

her myself [he makes for the door].

ELLIE [following him to stop him]. Oh, please--[He goes out]. Lady

Utterword, I don't know what to do. Your father persists in believing

that my father is some sailor who robbed him.

LADY UTTERWORD. You had better pretend not to notice it. My father is a

very clever man; but he always forgot things; and now that he is old, of

course he is worse. And I must warn you that it is sometimes very hard

to feel quite sure that he really forgets.

Mrs Hushabye bursts into the room tempestuously and embraces Ellie. She

is a couple of years older than Lady Utterword, and even better looking.

She has magnificent black hair, eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, and

a nobly modelled neck, short at the back and low between her shoulders

in front. Unlike her sister she is uncorseted and dressed anyhow in a

rich robe of black pile that shows off her white skin and statuesque

contour.

MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie, my darling, my pettikins [kissing her], how long

have you been here? I've been at home all the time: I was putting

flowers and things in your room; and when I just sat down for a moment

to try how comfortable the armchair was I went off to sleep. Papa woke

me and told me you were here. Fancy your finding no one, and being

neglected and abandoned. [Kissing her again]. My poor love! [She

deposits Ellie on the sofa. Meanwhile Ariadne has left the table and

come over to claim her share of attention]. Oh! you've brought someone

with you. Introduce me.

LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione, is it possible that you don't know me?

MRS HUSHABYE [conventionally]. Of course I remember your face quite

well. Where have we met?

LADY UTTERWORD. Didn't Papa tell you I was here? Oh! this is really too

much. [She throws herself sulkily into the big chair].

MRS HUSHABYE. Papa!

LADY UTTERWORD. Yes, Papa. Our papa, you unfeeling wretch! [Rising

angrily]. I'll go straight to a hotel.

MRS HUSHABYE [seizing her by the shoulders]. My goodness gracious

goodness, you don't mean to say that you're Addy!

LADY UTTERWORD. I certainly am Addy; and I don't think I can be so

changed that you would not have recognized me if you had any real

affection for me. And Papa didn't think me even worth mentioning!

MRS HUSHABYE. What a lark! Sit down [she pushes her back into the chair

instead of kissing her, and posts herself behind it]. You DO look

a swell. You're much handsomer than you used to be. You've made the

acquaintance of Ellie, of course. She is going to marry a perfect hog

of a millionaire for the sake of her father, who is as poor as a church

mouse; and you must help me to stop her.

ELLIE. Oh, please, Hesione!

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, the man's coming here today with your father

to begin persecuting you; and everybody will see the state of the case

in ten minutes; so what's the use of making a secret of it?

ELLIE. He is not a hog, Hesione. You don't know how wonderfully good he

was to my father, and how deeply grateful I am to him.

MRS HUSHABYE [to Lady Utterword]. Her father is a very remarkable man,

Addy. His name is Mazzini Dunn. Mazzini was a celebrity of some kind who

knew Ellie's grandparents. They were both poets, like the Brownings; and

when her father came into the world Mazzini said, "Another soldier born

for freedom!" So they christened him Mazzini; and he has been fighting

for freedom in his quiet way ever since. That's why he is so poor.

ELLIE. I am proud of his poverty.

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course you are, pettikins. Why not leave him in it, and

marry someone you love?

LADY UTTERWORD [rising suddenly and explosively]. Hesione, are you going

to kiss me or are you not?

MRS HUSHABYE. What do you want to be kissed for?

LADY UTTERWORD. I DON'T want to be kissed; but I do want you to behave

properly and decently. We are sisters. We have been separated for

twenty-three years. You OUGHT to kiss me.

MRS HUSHABYE. To-morrow morning, dear, before you make up. I hate the

smell of powder.

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! you unfeeling--[she is interrupted by the return of

the captain].

THE CAPTAIN [to Ellie]. Your room is ready. [Ellie rises]. The sheets

were damp; but I have changed them [he makes for the garden door on the

port side].

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh! What about my sheets?

THE CAPTAIN [halting at the door]. Take my advice: air them: or take

them off and sleep in blankets. You shall sleep in Ariadne's old room.

LADY UTTERWORD. Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. That little hole!

I am entitled to the best spare room.

THE CAPTAIN [continuing unmoved]. She married a numskull. She told me

she would marry anyone to get away from home.

LADT UTTERWORD. You are pretending not to know me on purpose. I will

leave the house.

Mazzini Dunn enters from the hall. He is a little elderly man with

bulging credulous eyes and earnest manners. He is dressed in a blue

serge jacket suit with an unbuttoned mackintosh over it, and carries a

soft black hat of clerical cut.

ELLIE. At last! Captain Shotover, here is my father.

THE CAPTAIN. This! Nonsense! not a bit like him [he goes away through

the garden, shutting the door sharply behind him].

LADY UTTERWORD. I will not be ignored and pretended to be somebody else.

I will have it out with Papa now, this instant. [To Mazzini]. Excuse me.

[She follows the captain out, making a hasty bow to Mazzini, who returns

it].

MRS HUSHABYE [hospitably shaking hands]. How good of you to come, Mr

Dunn! You don't mind Papa, do you? He is as mad as a hatter, you know,

but quite harmless and extremely clever. You will have some delightful

talks with him.

MAZZINI. I hope so. [To Ellie]. So here you are, Ellie, dear. [He draws

her arm affectionately through his]. I must thank you, Mrs Hushabye, for

your kindness to my daughter. I'm afraid she would have had no holiday

if you had not invited her.

MRS HUSHABYE. Not at all. Very nice of her to come and attract young

people to the house for us.

MAZZINI [smiling]. I'm afraid Ellie is not interested in young men, Mrs

Hushabye. Her taste is on the graver, solider side.

MRS HUSHABYE [with a sudden rather hard brightness in her manner]. Won't

you take off your overcoat, Mr Dunn? You will find a cupboard for coats

and hats and things in the corner of the hall.

MAZZINI [hastily releasing Ellie]. Yes--thank you--I had better-- [he

goes out].

MRS HUSHABYE [emphatically]. The old brute!

ELLIE. Who?

MRS HUSHABYE. Who! Him. He. It [pointing after Mazzini]. "Graver,

solider tastes," indeed!

ELLIE [aghast]. You don't mean that you were speaking like that of my

father!

MRS HUSHABYE. I was. You know I was.

ELLIE [with dignity]. I will leave your house at once. [She turns to the

door].

MRS HUSHABYE. If you attempt it, I'll tell your father why.

ELLIE [turning again]. Oh! How can you treat a visitor like this, Mrs

Hushabye?

MRS HUSHABYE. I thought you were going to call me Hesione.

ELLIE. Certainly not now?

MRS HUSHABYE. Very well: I'll tell your father.

ELLIE [distressed]. Oh!

MRS HUSHABYE. If you turn a hair--if you take his part against me and

against your own heart for a moment, I'll give that born soldier of

freedom a piece of my mind that will stand him on his selfish old head

for a week.

ELLIE. Hesione! My father selfish! How little you know--

She is interrupted by Mazzini, who returns, excited and perspiring.

MAZZINI. Ellie, Mangan has come: I thought you'd like to know. Excuse

me, Mrs Hushabye, the strange old gentleman--

MRS HUSHABYE. Papa. Quite so.

MAZZINI. Oh, I beg your pardon, of course: I was a little confused by

his manner. He is making Mangan help him with something in the garden;

and he wants me too--

A powerful whistle is heard.

THE CAPTAIN'S VOICE. Bosun ahoy! [the whistle is repeated].

MAZZINI [flustered]. Oh dear! I believe he is whistling for me. [He

hurries out].

MRS HUSHABYE. Now MY father is a wonderful man if you like.

ELLIE. Hesione, listen to me. You don't understand. My father and Mr

Mangan were boys together. Mr Ma--

MRS HUSHABYE. I don't care what they were: we must sit down if you are

going to begin as far back as that. [She snatches at Ellie's waist, and

makes her sit down on the sofa beside her]. Now, pettikins, tell me all

about Mr Mangan. They call him Boss Mangan, don't they? He is a Napoleon

of industry and disgustingly rich, isn't he? Why isn't your father rich?

ELLIE. My poor father should never have been in business. His parents

were poets; and they gave him the noblest ideas; but they could not

afford to give him a profession.

MRS HUSHABYE. Fancy your grandparents, with their eyes in fine frenzy

rolling! And so your poor father had to go into business. Hasn't he

succeeded in it?

ELLIE. He always used to say he could succeed if he only had some

capital. He fought his way along, to keep a roof over our heads

and bring us up well; but it was always a struggle: always the same

difficulty of not having capital enough. I don't know how to describe it

to you.

MRS HUSHABYE. Poor Ellie! I know. Pulling the devil by the tail.

ELLIE [hurt]. Oh, no. Not like that. It was at least dignified.

MRS HUSHABYE. That made it all the harder, didn't it? I shouldn't

have pulled the devil by the tail with dignity. I should have pulled

hard--[between her teeth] hard. Well? Go on.

ELLIE. At last it seemed that all our troubles were at an end. Mr Mangan

did an extraordinarily noble thing out of pure friendship for my father

and respect for his character. He asked him how much capital he wanted,

and gave it to him. I don't mean that he lent it to him, or that he

invested it in his business. He just simply made him a present of it.

Wasn't that splendid of him?

MRS HUSHABYE. On condition that you married him?

ELLIE. Oh, no, no, no! This was when I was a child. He had never even

seen me: he never came to our house. It was absolutely disinterested.

Pure generosity.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh! I beg the gentleman's pardon. Well, what became of the

money?

ELLIE. We all got new clothes and moved into another house. And I went

to another school for two years.

MRS HUSHABYE. Only two years?

ELLIE. That was all: for at the end of two years my father was utterly

ruined.

MRS HUSHABYE. How?

ELLIE. I don't know. I never could understand. But it was dreadful. When

we were poor my father had never been in debt. But when he launched out

into business on a large scale, he had to incur liabilities. When the

business went into liquidation he owed more money than Mr Mangan had

given him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Bit off more than he could chew, I suppose.

ELLIE. I think you are a little unfeeling about it.

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you mustn't mind my way of talking. I was

quite as sensitive and particular as you once; but I have picked up

so much slang from the children that I am really hardly presentable. I

suppose your father had no head for business, and made a mess of it.

ELLIE. Oh, that just shows how entirely you are mistaken about him. The

business turned out a great success. It now pays forty-four per cent

after deducting the excess profits tax.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then why aren't you rolling in money?

ELLIE. I don't know. It seems very unfair to me. You see, my father

was made bankrupt. It nearly broke his heart, because he had persuaded

several of his friends to put money into the business. He was sure it

would succeed; and events proved that he was quite right. But they all

lost their money. It was dreadful. I don't know what we should have done

but for Mr Mangan.

MRS HUSHABYE. What! Did the Boss come to the rescue again, after all his

money being thrown away?

ELLIE. He did indeed, and never uttered a reproach to my father. He

bought what was left of the business--the buildings and the machinery

and things--from the official trustee for enough money to enable my

father to pay six-and-eight-pence in the pound and get his discharge.

Everyone pitied Papa so much, and saw so plainly that he was an

honorable man, that they let him off at six-and-eight-pence instead

of ten shillings. Then Mr. Mangan started a company to take up the

business, and made my father a manager in it to save us from starvation;

for I wasn't earning anything then.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Quite a romance. And when did the Boss develop the tender

passion?

ELLIE. Oh, that was years after, quite lately. He took the chair one

night at a sort of people's concert. I was singing there. As an amateur,

you know: half a guinea for expenses and three songs with three encores.

He was so pleased with my singing that he asked might he walk home with

me. I never saw anyone so taken aback as he was when I took him home and

introduced him to my father, his own manager. It was then that my father

told me how nobly he had behaved. Of course it was considered a great

chance for me, as he is so rich. And--and--we drifted into a sort

of understanding--I suppose I should call it an engagement--[she is

distressed and cannot go on].

MRS HUSHABYE [rising and marching about]. You may have drifted into it;

but you will bounce out of it, my pettikins, if I am to have anything to

do with it.

ELLIE [hopelessly]. No: it's no use. I am bound in honor and gratitude.

I will go through with it.

MRS HUSHABYE [behind the sofa, scolding down at her]. You know, of

course, that it's not honorable or grateful to marry a man you don't

love. Do you love this Mangan man?

ELLIE. Yes. At least--

MRS HUSHABYE. I don't want to know about "at least": I want to know

the worst. Girls of your age fall in love with all sorts of impossible

people, especially old people.

ELLIE. I like Mr Mangan very much; and I shall always be--

MRS HUSHABYE [impatiently completing the sentence and prancing away

intolerantly to starboard]. --grateful to him for his kindness to dear

father. I know. Anybody else?

ELLIE. What do you mean?

MRS HUSHABYE. Anybody else? Are you in love with anybody else?

ELLIE. Of course not.

MRS HUSHABYE. Humph! [The book on the drawing-table catches her eye. She

picks it up, and evidently finds the title very unexpected. She looks at

Ellie, and asks, quaintly] Quite sure you're not in love with an actor?

ELLIE. No, no. Why? What put such a thing into your head?

MRS HUSHABYE. This is yours, isn't it? Why else should you be reading

Othello?

ELLIE. My father taught me to love Shakespeare.

MRS HUSHAYE [flinging the book down on the table]. Really! your father

does seem to be about the limit.

ELLIE [naively]. Do you never read Shakespeare, Hesione? That seems to

me so extraordinary. I like Othello.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you, indeed? He was jealous, wasn't he?

ELLIE. Oh, not that. I think all the part about jealousy is horrible.

But don't you think it must have been a wonderful experience for

Desdemona, brought up so quietly at home, to meet a man who had been

out in the world doing all sorts of brave things and having terrible

adventures, and yet finding something in her that made him love to sit

and talk with her and tell her about them?

MRS HUSHABYE. That's your idea of romance, is it?

ELLIE. Not romance, exactly. It might really happen.

Ellie's eyes show that she is not arguing, but in a daydream. Mrs

Hushabye, watching her inquisitively, goes deliberately back to the sofa

and resumes her seat beside her.

MRS HUSHABYE. Ellie darling, have you noticed that some of those stories

that Othello told Desdemona couldn't have happened--?

ELLIE. Oh, no. Shakespeare thought they could have happened.

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Desdemona thought they could have happened. But they

didn't.

ELLIE. Why do you look so enigmatic about it? You are such a sphinx: I

never know what you mean.

MRS HUSHABYE. Desdemona would have found him out if she had lived, you

know. I wonder was that why he strangled her!

ELLIE. Othello was not telling lies.

MRS HUSHABYE. How do you know?

ELLIE. Shakespeare would have said if he was. Hesione, there are men who

have done wonderful things: men like Othello, only, of course, white,

and very handsome, and--

MRS HUSHABYE. Ah! Now we're coming to it. Tell me all about him. I knew

there must be somebody, or you'd never have been so miserable about

Mangan: you'd have thought it quite a lark to marry him.

ELLIE [blushing vividly]. Hesione, you are dreadful. But I don't want to

make a secret of it, though of course I don't tell everybody. Besides, I

don't know him.

MRS HUSHABYE. Don't know him! What does that mean?

ELLIE. Well, of course I know him to speak to.

MRS HUSHABYE. But you want to know him ever so much more intimately, eh?

ELLIE. No, no: I know him quite--almost intimately.

MRS HUSHABYE. You don't know him; and you know him almost intimately.

How lucid!

ELLIE. I mean that he does not call on us. I--I got into conversation

with him by chance at a concert.

MRS HUSHABYE. You seem to have rather a gay time at your concerts,

Ellie.

ELLIE. Not at all: we talk to everyone in the greenroom waiting for our

turns. I thought he was one of the artists: he looked so splendid. But

he was only one of the committee. I happened to tell him that I was

copying a picture at the National Gallery. I make a little money that

way. I can't paint much; but as it's always the same picture I can do it

pretty quickly and get two or three pounds for it. It happened that he

came to the National Gallery one day.

MRS HUSHABYE. One students' day. Paid sixpence to stumble about through

a crowd of easels, when he might have come in next day for nothing and

found the floor clear! Quite by accident?

ELLIE [triumphantly]. No. On purpose. He liked talking to me. He knows

lots of the most splendid people. Fashionable women who are all in love

with him. But he ran away from them to see me at the National Gallery

and persuade me to come with him for a drive round Richmond Park in a

taxi.

MRS HUSHABYE. My pettikins, you have been going it. It's wonderful what

you good girls can do without anyone saying a word.

ELLIE. I am not in society, Hesione. If I didn't make acquaintances in

that way I shouldn't have any at all.

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, no harm if you know how to take care of yourself.

May I ask his name?

ELLIE [slowly and musically]. Marcus Darnley.

MRS HUSHABYE [echoing the music]. Marcus Darnley! What a splendid name!

ELLIE. Oh, I'm so glad you think so. I think so too; but I was afraid it

was only a silly fancy of my own.

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! Is he one of the Aberdeen Darnleys?

ELLIE. Nobody knows. Just fancy! He was found in an antique chest--

MRS HUSHABYE. A what?

ELLIE. An antique chest, one summer morning in a rose garden, after a

night of the most terrible thunderstorm.

MRS HUSHABYE. What on earth was he doing in the chest? Did he get into

it because he was afraid of the lightning?

ELLIE. Oh, no, no: he was a baby. The name Marcus Darnley was

embroidered on his baby clothes. And five hundred pounds in gold.

MRS HUSHABYE [Looking hard at her]. Ellie!

ELLIE. The garden of the Viscount--

MRS HUSHABYE. --de Rougemont?

ELLIE [innocently]. No: de Larochejaquelin. A French family. A vicomte.

His life has been one long romance. A tiger--

MRS HUSHABYE. Slain by his own hand?

ELLIE. Oh, no: nothing vulgar like that. He saved the life of the tiger

from a hunting party: one of King Edward's hunting parties in India.

The King was furious: that was why he never had his military services

properly recognized. But he doesn't care. He is a Socialist and despises

rank, and has been in three revolutions fighting on the barricades.

MRS HUSHABYE. How can you sit there telling me such lies? You, Ellie, of

all people! And I thought you were a perfectly simple, straightforward,

good girl.

ELLIE [rising, dignified but very angry]. Do you mean you don't believe

me?

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course I don't believe you. You're inventing every word

of it. Do you take me for a fool?

Ellie stares at her. Her candor is so obvious that Mrs Hushabye is

puzzled.

ELLIE. Goodbye, Hesione. I'm very sorry. I see now that it sounds very

improbable as I tell it. But I can't stay if you think that way about

me.

MRS HUSHABYE [catching her dress]. You shan't go. I couldn't be so

mistaken: I know too well what liars are like. Somebody has really told

you all this.

ELLIE [flushing]. Hesione, don't say that you don't believe him. I

couldn't bear that.

MRS HUSHABYE [soothing her]. Of course I believe him, dearest. But you

should have broken it to me by degrees. [Drawing her back to her seat].

Now tell me all about him. Are you in love with him?

ELLIE. Oh, no. I'm not so foolish. I don't fall in love with people. I'm

not so silly as you think.

MRS HUSHABYE. I see. Only something to think about--to give some

interest and pleasure to life.

ELLIE. Just so. That's all, really.

MRS HUSHABYE. It makes the hours go fast, doesn't it? No tedious waiting

to go to sleep at nights and wondering whether you will have a bad

night. How delightful it makes waking up in the morning! How much better

than the happiest dream! All life transfigured! No more wishing one had

an interesting book to read, because life is so much happier than any

book! No desire but to be alone and not to have to talk to anyone: to be

alone and just think about it.

ELLIE [embracing her]. Hesione, you are a witch. How do you know? Oh,

you are the most sympathetic woman in the world!

MRS HUSHABYE [caressing her]. Pettikins, my pettikins, how I envy you!

and how I pity you!

ELLIE. Pity me! Oh, why?

A very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing

a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate

walking-stick, comes into the room from the hall, and stops short at

sight of the women on the sofa.

ELLIE [seeing him and rising in glad surprise]. Oh! Hesione: this is Mr

Marcus Darnley.

MRS HUSHABYE [rising]. What a lark! He is my husband.

ELLIE. But now--[she stops suddenly: then turns pale and sways].

MRS HUSHABYE [catching her and sitting down with her on the sofa].

Steady, my pettikins.

THE MAN [with a mixture of confusion and effrontery, depositing his

hat and stick on the teak table]. My real name, Miss Dunn, is Hector

Hushabye. I leave you to judge whether that is a name any sensitive man

would care to confess to. I never use it when I can possibly help it. I

have been away for nearly a month; and I had no idea you knew my wife,

or that you were coming here. I am none the less delighted to find you

in our little house.

ELLIE [in great distress]. I don't know what to do. Please, may I speak

to papa? Do leave me. I can't bear it.

MRS HUSHABYE. Be off, Hector.

HECTOR. I--

MRS HUSHABYE. Quick, quick. Get out.

HECTOR. If you think it better--[he goes out, taking his hat with him

but leaving the stick on the table].

MRS HUSHABYE [laying Ellie down at the end of the sofa]. Now, pettikins,

he is gone. There's nobody but me. You can let yourself go. Don't try to

control yourself. Have a good cry.

ELLIE [raising her head]. Damn!

MRS HUSHABYE. Splendid! Oh, what a relief! I thought you were going to

be broken-hearted. Never mind me. Damn him again.

ELLIE. I am not damning him. I am damning myself for being such a fool.

[Rising]. How could I let myself be taken in so? [She begins prowling to

and fro, her bloom gone, looking curiously older and harder].

MRS HUSHABYE [cheerfully]. Why not, pettikins? Very few young women

can resist Hector. I couldn't when I was your age. He is really rather

splendid, you know.

ELLIE [turning on her]. Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But

how can you love a liar?

MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there

wouldn't be much love in the world.

ELLIE. But to lie like that! To be a boaster! a coward!

MRS HUSHABYE [rising in alarm]. Pettikins, none of that, if you please.

If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector's courage, he will go straight

off and do the most horribly dangerous things to convince himself

that he isn't a coward. He has a dreadful trick of getting out of one

third-floor window and coming in at another, just to test his nerve. He

has a whole drawerful of Albert Medals for saving people's lives.

ELLIE. He never told me that.

MRS HUSHABYE. He never boasts of anything he really did: he can't

bear it; and it makes him shy if anyone else does. All his stories are

made-up stories.

ELLIE [coming to her]. Do you mean that he is really brave, and really

has adventures, and yet tells lies about things that he never did and

that never happened?

MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, pettikins, I do. People don't have their virtues and

vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.

ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There's something odd about this

house, Hesione, and even about you. I don't know why I'm talking to

you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that

heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.

MRS HUSHABYE [fondling her]. It's only life educating you, pettikins.

How do you feel about Boss Mangan now?

ELLIE [disengaging herself with an expression of distaste]. Oh, how can

you remind me of him, Hesione?

MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry, dear. I think I hear Hector coming back. You don't

mind now, do you, dear?

ELLIE. Not in the least. I am quite cured.

Mazzini Dunn and Hector come in from the hall.

HECTOR [as he opens the door and allows Mazzini to pass in]. One second

more, and she would have been a dead woman!

MAZZINI. Dear! dear! what an escape! Ellie, my love, Mr Hushabye has

just been telling me the most extraordinary--

ELLIE. Yes, I've heard it [she crosses to the other side of the room].

HECTOR [following her]. Not this one: I'll tell it to you after dinner.

I think you'll like it. The truth is I made it up for you, and was

looking forward to the pleasure of telling it to you. But in a moment

of impatience at being turned out of the room, I threw it away on your

father.

ELLIE [turning at bay with her back to the carpenter's bench, scornfully

self-possessed]. It was not thrown away. He believes it. I should not

have believed it.

MAZZINI [benevolently]. Ellie is very naughty, Mr Hushabye. Of course

she does not really think that. [He goes to the bookshelves, and

inspects the titles of the volumes].

Boss Mangan comes in from the hall, followed by the captain. Mangan,

carefully frock-coated as for church or for a diHECTORs' meeting, is

about fifty-five, with a careworn, mistrustful expression, standing

a little on an entirely imaginary dignity, with a dull complexion,

straight, lustreless hair, and features so entirely commonplace that it

is impossible to describe them.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [to Mrs Hushabye, introducing the newcomer]. Says his

name is Mangan. Not able-bodied.

MRS HUSHABYE [graciously]. How do you do, Mr Mangan?

MANGAN [shaking hands]. Very pleased.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dunn's lost his muscle, but recovered his nerve. Men

seldom do after three attacks of delirium tremens [he goes into the

pantry].

MRS HUSHABYE. I congratulate you, Mr Dunn.

MAZZINI [dazed]. I am a lifelong teetotaler.

MRS HUSHABYE. You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own

way than try to explain.

MAZZINI. But three attacks of delirium tremens, really!

MRS HUSHABYE [to Mangan]. Do you know my husband, Mr Mangan [she

indicates Hector].

MANGAN [going to Hector, who meets him with outstretched hand]. Very

pleased. [Turning to Ellie]. I hope, Miss Ellie, you have not found the

journey down too fatiguing. [They shake hands].

MRS HUSHABYE. Hector, show Mr Dunn his room.

HECTOR. Certainly. Come along, Mr Dunn. [He takes Mazzini out].

ELLIE. You haven't shown me my room yet, Hesione.

MRS HUSHABYE. How stupid of me! Come along. Make yourself quite at home,

Mr Mangan. Papa will entertain you. [She calls to the captain in the

pantry]. Papa, come and explain the house to Mr Mangan.

She goes out with Ellie. The captain comes from the pantry.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You're going to marry Dunn's daughter. Don't. You're

too old.

MANGAN [staggered]. Well! That's fairly blunt, Captain.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It's true.

MANGAN. She doesn't think so.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. She does.

MANGAN. Older men than I have--

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [finishing the sentence for him].--made fools of

themselves. That, also, is true.

MANGAN [asserting himself]. I don't see that this is any business of

yours.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. It is everybody's business. The stars in their courses

are shaken when such things happen.

MANGAN. I'm going to marry her all the same.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. How do you know?

MANGAN [playing the strong man]. I intend to. I mean to. See? I never

made up my mind to do a thing yet that I didn't bring it off. That's the

sort of man I am; and there will be a better understanding between us

when you make up your mind to that, Captain.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You frequent picture palaces.

MANGAN. Perhaps I do. Who told you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Talk like a man, not like a movie. You mean that you

make a hundred thousand a year.

MANGAN. I don't boast. But when I meet a man that makes a hundred

thousand a year, I take off my hat to that man, and stretch out my hand

to him and call him brother.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Then you also make a hundred thousand a year, hey?

MANGAN. No. I can't say that. Fifty thousand, perhaps.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. His half brother only [he turns away from Mangan with

his usual abruptness, and collects the empty tea-cups on the Chinese

tray].

MANGAN [irritated]. See here, Captain Shotover. I don't quite understand

my position here. I came here on your daughter's invitation. Am I in her

house or in yours?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are beneath the dome of heaven, in the house of

God. What is true within these walls is true outside them. Go out on the

seas; climb the mountains; wander through the valleys. She is still too

young.

MANGAN [weakening]. But I'm very little over fifty.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You are still less under sixty. Boss Mangan, you will

not marry the pirate's child [he carries the tray away into the pantry].

MANGAN [following him to the half door]. What pirate's child? What are

you talking about?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [in the pantry]. Ellie Dunn. You will not marry her.

MANGAN. Who will stop me?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [emerging]. My daughter [he makes for the door leading

to the hall].

MANGAN [following him]. Mrs Hushabye! Do you mean to say she brought me

down here to break it off?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [stopping and turning on him]. I know nothing more than

I have seen in her eye. She will break it off. Take my advice: marry

a West Indian negress: they make excellent wives. I was married to one

myself for two years.

MANGAN. Well, I am damned!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I thought so. I was, too, for many years. The negress

redeemed me.

MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why?

MANGAN. Well, many men would be offended by your style of talking.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Nonsense! It's the other sort of talking that makes

quarrels. Nobody ever quarrels with me.

A gentleman, whose first-rate tailoring and frictionless manners

proclaim the wellbred West Ender, comes in from the hall. He has an

engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is

found to be at least over forty.

THE GENTLEMAN. Excuse my intruding in this fashion, but there is no

knocker on the door and the bell does not seem to ring.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Why should there be a knocker? Why should the bell

ring? The door is open.

THE GENTLEMAN. Precisely. So I ventured to come in.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Quite right. I will see about a room for you [he makes

for the door].

THE GENTLEMAN [stopping him]. But I'm afraid you don't know who I am.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. DO you suppose that at my age I make distinctions

between one fellow creature and another? [He goes out. Mangan and the

newcomer stare at one another].

MANGAN. Strange character, Captain Shotover, sir.

THE GENTLEMAN. Very.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [shouting outside]. Hesione, another person has arrived

and wants a room. Man about town, well dressed, fifty.

THE GENTLEMAN. Fancy Hesione's feelings! May I ask are you a member of

the family?

MANGAN. No.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am. At least a connection.

Mrs Hushabye comes back.

MRS HUSHABYE. How do you do? How good of you to come!

THE GENTLEMAN. I am very glad indeed to make your acquaintance, Hesione.

[Instead of taking her hand he kisses her. At the same moment the

captain appears in the doorway]. You will excuse my kissing your

daughter, Captain, when I tell you that--

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Stuff! Everyone kisses my daughter. Kiss her as much

as you like [he makes for the pantry].

THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and

turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but

probably you don't, as it occurred many years ago-- that your younger

daughter married a numskull?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she'd marry anybody to get away from

this house. I should not have recognized you: your head is no longer

like a walnut. Your aspect is softened. You have been boiled in bread

and milk for years and years, like other married men. Poor devil! [He

disappears into the pantry].

MRS HUSHABYE [going past Mangan to the gentleman and scrutinizing him].

I don't believe you are Hastings Utterword.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am not.

MRS HUSHABYE. Then what business had you to kiss me?

THE GENTLEMAN. I thought I would like to. The fact is, I am Randall

Utterword, the unworthy younger brother of Hastings. I was abroad

diplomatizing when he was married.

LADY UTTERWORD [dashing in]. Hesione, where is the key of the wardrobe

in my room? My diamonds are in my dressing-bag: I must lock it

up--[recognizing the stranger with a shock] Randall, how dare you? [She

marches at him past Mrs Hushabye, who retreats and joins Mangan near the

sofa].

RANDALL. How dare I what? I am not doing anything.

LADY UTTERWORD. Who told you I was here?

RANDALL. Hastings. You had just left when I called on you at Claridge's;

so I followed you down here. You are looking extremely well.

LADY UTTERWORD. Don't presume to tell me so.

MRS HUSHABYE. What is wrong with Mr Randall, Addy?

LADY UTTERWORD [recollecting herself]. Oh, nothing. But he has no right

to come bothering you and papa without being invited [she goes to the

window-seat and sits down, turning away from them ill-humoredly and

looking into the garden, where Hector and Ellie are now seen strolling

together].

MRS HUSHABYE. I think you have not met Mr Mangan, Addy.

LADY UTTERWORD [turning her head and nodding coldly to Mangan]. I beg

your pardon. Randall, you have flustered me so: I make a perfect fool of

myself.

MRS HUSHABYE. Lady Utterword. My sister. My younger sister.

MANGAN [bowing]. Pleased to meet you, Lady Utterword.

LADY UTTERWORD [with marked interest]. Who is that gentleman walking in

the garden with Miss Dunn?

MRS HUSHABYE. I don't know. She quarrelled mortally with my husband only

ten minutes ago; and I didn't know anyone else had come. It must be a

visitor. [She goes to the window to look]. Oh, it is Hector. They've

made it up.

LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband! That handsome man?

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, why shouldn't my husband be a handsome man?

RANDALL [joining them at the window]. One's husband never is, Ariadne

[he sits by Lady Utterword, on her right].

MRS HUSHABYE. One's sister's husband always is, Mr Randall.

LADY UTTERWORD. Don't be vulgar, Randall. And you, Hesione, are just as

bad.

Ellie and Hector come in from the garden by the starboard door. Randall

rises. Ellie retires into the corner near the pantry. Hector comes

forward; and Lady Utterword rises looking her very best.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Hector, this is Addy.

HECTOR [apparently surprised]. Not this lady.

LADY UTTERWORD [smiling]. Why not?

HECTOR [looking at her with a piercing glance of deep but respectful

admiration, his moustache bristling]. I thought-- [pulling himself

together]. I beg your pardon, Lady Utterword. I am extremely glad

to welcome you at last under our roof [he offers his hand with grave

courtesy].

MRS HUSHABYE. She wants to be kissed, Hector.

LADY UTTERWORD. Hesione! [But she still smiles].

MRS HUSHABYE. Call her Addy; and kiss her like a good brother-in-law;

and have done with it. [She leaves them to themselves].

HECTOR. Behave yourself, Hesione. Lady Utterword is entitled not only to

hospitality but to civilization.

LADY UTTERWORD [gratefully]. Thank you, Hector. [They shake hands

cordially].

Mazzini Dunn is seen crossing the garden from starboard to port.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [coming from the pantry and addressing Ellie]. Your

father has washed himself.

ELLIE [quite self-possessed]. He often does, Captain Shotover.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A strange conversion! I saw him through the pantry

window.

Mazzini Dunn enters through the port window door, newly washed and

brushed, and stops, smiling benevolently, between Mangan and Mrs

Hushabye.

MRS HUSHABYE [introducing]. Mr Mazzini Dunn, Lady Ut--oh, I forgot:

you've met. [Indicating Ellie] Miss Dunn.

MAZZINI [walking across the room to take Ellie's hand, and beaming at

his own naughty irony]. I have met Miss Dunn also. She is my daughter.

[He draws her arm through his caressingly].

MRS HUSHABYE. Of course: how stupid! Mr Utterword, my sister's--er--

RANDALL [shaking hands agreeably]. Her brother-in-law, Mr Dunn. How do

you do?

MRS HUSHABYE. This is my husband.

HECTOR. We have met, dear. Don't introduce us any more. [He moves away

to the big chair, and adds] Won't you sit down, Lady Utterword? [She

does so very graciously].

MRS HUSHABYE. Sorry. I hate it: it's like making people show their

tickets.

MAZZINI [sententiously]. How little it tells us, after all! The great

question is, not who we are, but what we are.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ha! What are you?

MAZZINI [taken aback]. What am I?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. A thief, a pirate, and a murderer.

MAZZINI. I assure you you are mistaken.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. An adventurous life; but what does it end in?

Respectability. A ladylike daughter. The language and appearance of a

city missionary. Let it be a warning to all of you [he goes out through

the garden].

DUNN. I hope nobody here believes that I am a thief, a pirate, or a

murderer. Mrs Hushabye, will you excuse me a moment? I must really go

and explain. [He follows the captain].

MRS HUSHABYE [as he goes]. It's no use. You'd really better-- [but Dunn

has vanished]. We had better all go out and look for some tea. We

never have regular tea; but you can always get some when you want: the

servants keep it stewing all day. The kitchen veranda is the best place

to ask. May I show you? [She goes to the starboard door].

RANDALL [going with her]. Thank you, I don't think I'll take any tea

this afternoon. But if you will show me the garden--

MRS HUSHABYE. There's nothing to see in the garden except papa's

observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and

things of that sort. However, it's pleasanter out of doors; so come

along.

RANDALL. Dynamite! Isn't that rather risky?

MRS HUSHABYE. Well, we don't sit in the gravel pit when there's a

thunderstorm.

LADY UTTERORRD. That's something new. What is the dynamite for?

HECTOR. To blow up the human race if it goes too far. He is trying to

discover a psychic ray that will explode all the explosive at the well

of a Mahatma.

ELLIE. The captain's tea is delicious, Mr Utterword.

MRS HUSHABYE [stopping in the doorway]. Do you mean to say that you've

had some of my father's tea? that you got round him before you were ten

minutes in the house?

ELLIE. I did.

MRS HUSHABYE. You little devil! [She goes out with Randall].

MANGAN. Won't you come, Miss Ellie?

ELLIE. I'm too tired. I'll take a book up to my room and rest a little.

[She goes to the bookshelf].

MANGAN. Right. You can't do better. But I'm disappointed. [He follows

Randall and Mrs Hushabye].

Ellie, Hector, and Lady Utterword are left. Hector is close to Lady

Utterword. They look at Ellie, waiting for her to go.

ELLIE [looking at the title of a book]. Do you like stories of

adventure, Lady Utterword?

LADY UTTERWORD [patronizingly]. Of course, dear.

ELLIE. Then I'll leave you to Mr Hushabye. [She goes out through the

hall].

HECTOR. That girl is mad about tales of adventure. The lies I have to

tell her!

LADY UTTERWORD [not interested in Ellie]. When you saw me what did you

mean by saying that you thought, and then stopping short? What did you

think?

HECTOR [folding his arms and looking down at her magnetically]. May I

tell you?

LADY UTTERWORD. Of course.

HECTOR. It will not sound very civil. I was on the point of saying, "I

thought you were a plain woman."

LADY UTTERWORD. Oh, for shame, Hector! What right had you to notice

whether I am plain or not?

HECTOR. Listen to me, Ariadne. Until today I have seen only photographs

of you; and no photograph can give the strange fascination of the

daughters of that supernatural old man. There is some damnable quality

in them that destroys men's moral sense, and carries them beyond honor

and dishonor. You know that, don't you?

LADY UTTERWORD. Perhaps I do, Hector. But let me warn you once for all

that I am a rigidly conventional woman. You may think because I'm a

Shotover that I'm a Bohemian, because we are all so horribly Bohemian.

But I'm not. I hate and loathe Bohemianism. No child brought up in a

strict Puritan household ever suffered from Puritanism as I suffered

from our Bohemianism.

HECTOR. Our children are like that. They spend their holidays in the

houses of their respectable schoolfellows.

LADY UTTERWORD. I shall invite them for Christmas.

HECTOR. Their absence leaves us both without our natural chaperones.

LADY UTTERWORD. Children are certainly very inconvenient sometimes. But

intelligent people can always manage, unless they are Bohemians.

HECTOR. You are no Bohemian; but you are no Puritan either: your

attraction is alive and powerful. What sort of woman do you count

yourself?

LADY UTTERWORD. I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure

you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly

correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just

what you like. An ill-conducted, careless woman gets simply no chance.

An ill-conducted, careless man is never allowed within arm's length of

any woman worth knowing.

HECTOR. I see. You are neither a Bohemian woman nor a Puritan woman. You

are a dangerous woman.

LADY UTTERWORD. On the contrary, I am a safe woman.

HECTOR. You are a most accursedly attractive woman. Mind, I am not

making love to you. I do not like being attracted. But you had better

know how I feel if you are going to stay here.

LADY UTTERWORD. You are an exceedingly clever lady-killer, Hector. And

terribly handsome. I am quite a good player, myself, at that game. Is it

quite understood that we are only playing?

HECTOR. Quite. I am deliberately playing the fool, out of sheer

worthlessness.

LADY UTTERWORD [rising brightly]. Well, you are my brother-in-law,

Hesione asked you to kiss me. [He seizes her in his arms and kisses her

strenuously]. Oh! that was a little more than play, brother-in-law. [She

pushes him suddenly away]. You shall not do that again.

HECTOR. In effect, you got your claws deeper into me than I intended.

MRS HUBHABYE [coming in from the garden]. Don't let me disturb you; I

only want a cap to put on daddiest. The sun is setting; and he'll catch

cold [she makes for the door leading to the hall].

LADY UTTERWORD. Your husband is quite charming, darling. He has actually

condescended to kiss me at last. I shall go into the garden: it's cooler

now [she goes out by the port door].

MRS HUSHABYE. Take care, dear child. I don't believe any man can kiss

Addy without falling in love with her. [She goes into the hall].

HECTOR [striking himself on the chest]. Fool! Goat!

Mrs Hushabye comes back with the captain's cap.

HECTOR. Your sister is an extremely enterprising old girl. Where's Miss

Dunn!

MRS HUSHABYE. Mangan says she has gone up to her room for a nap. Addy

won't let you talk to Ellie: she has marked you for her own.

HECTOR. She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love

to her automatically. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't

hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with

me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get

landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm

not a bit in earnest.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, neither is Addy. She has never been in love in her

life, though she has always been trying to fall in head over ears. She

is worse than you, because you had one real go at least, with me.

HECTOR. That was a confounded madness. I can't believe that such an

amazing experience is common. It has left its mark on me. I believe that

is why I have never been able to repeat it.

MRS HUSHABYE [laughing and caressing his arm]. We were frightfully in

love with one another, Hector. It was such an enchanting dream that I

have never been able to grudge it to you or anyone else since. I have

invited all sorts of pretty women to the house on the chance of giving

you another turn. But it has never come off.

HECTOR. I don't know that I want it to come off. It was damned

dangerous. You fascinated me; but I loved you; so it was heaven. This

sister of yours fascinates me; but I hate her; so it is hell. I shall

kill her if she persists.

MRS. HUSHABYE. Nothing will kill Addy; she is as strong as a horse.

[Releasing him]. Now I am going off to fascinate somebody.

HECTOR. The Foreign Office toff? Randall?

MRS HUSHABYE. Goodness gracious, no! Why should I fascinate him?

HECTOR. I presume you don't mean the bloated capitalist, Mangan?

MRS HUSHABYE. Hm! I think he had better be fascinated by me than by

Ellie. [She is going into the garden when the captain comes in from it

with some sticks in his hand]. What have you got there, daddiest?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Dynamite.

MRS HUSHABYE. You've been to the gravel pit. Don't drop it about the

house, there's a dear. [She goes into the garden, where the evening

light is now very red].

HECTOR. Listen, O sage. How long dare you concentrate on a feeling

without risking having it fixed in your consciousness all the rest of

your life?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Ninety minutes. An hour and a half. [He goes into the

pantry].

Hector, left alone, contracts his brows, and falls into a day-dream. He

does not move for some time. Then he folds his arms. Then, throwing his

hands behind him, and gripping one with the other, he strides tragically

once to and fro. Suddenly he snatches his walking stick from the teak

table, and draws it; for it is a swordstick. He fights a desperate

duel with an imaginary antagonist, and after many vicissitudes runs him

through the body up to the hilt. He sheathes his sword and throws it on

the sofa, falling into another reverie as he does so. He looks straight

into the eyes of an imaginary woman; seizes her by the arms; and says

in a deep and thrilling tone, "Do you love me!" The captain comes out

of the pantry at this moment; and Hector, caught with his arms stretched

out and his fists clenched, has to account for his attitude by going

through a series of gymnastic exercises.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That sort of strength is no good. You will never be as

strong as a gorilla.

HECTOR. What is the dynamite for?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. To kill fellows like Mangan.

HECTOR. No use. They will always be able to buy more dynamite than you.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. I will make a dynamite that he cannot explode.

HECTOR. And that you can, eh?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes: when I have attained the seventh degree of

concentration.

HECTOR. What's the use of that? You never do attain it.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What then is to be done? Are we to be kept forever in

the mud by these hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for

greasing their bristles and filling their snouts?

HECTOR. Are Mangan's bristles worse than Randall's lovelocks?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER,. We must win powers of life and death over them both.

I refuse to die until I have invented the means.

HECTOR. Who are we that we should judge them?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. What are they that they should judge us? Yet they do,

unhesitatingly. There is enmity between our seed and their seed. They

know it and act on it, strangling our souls. They believe in themselves.

When we believe in ourselves, we shall kill them.

HECTOR. It is the same seed. You forget that your pirate has a very nice

daughter. Mangan's son may be a Plato: Randall's a Shelley. What was my

father?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. The damnedst scoundrel I ever met. [He replaces the

drawing-board; sits down at the table; and begins to mix a wash of

color].

HECTOR. Precisely. Well, dare you kill his innocent grandchildren?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They are mine also.

HECTOR. Just so--we are members one of another. [He throws himself

carelessly on the sofa]. I tell you I have often thought of this killing

of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel

in the lion's den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always

survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as

they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the

lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and

the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What

are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I'll

spare them in sheer--

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]. Fellow feeling?

HECTOR. No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that

my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their

door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. You can't spare them until you have the power to kill

them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions

of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They're

going to do it. They're doing it already.

HECTOR. They are too stupid to use their power.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the

sofa]. Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half

of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these

people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having

the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they

bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and

singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.

HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]. May not Hesione be such a

demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. That is possible. She has used you up, and left you

nothing but dreams, as some women do.

HECTOR. Vampire women, demon women.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it

accordingly. Who are the men that do things? The husbands of the shrew

and of the drunkard, the men with the thorn in the flesh. [Walking

distractedly away towards the pantry]. I must think these things out.

[Turning suddenly]. But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will

discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the

ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at

me. And I must hurry. I am old: I have no time to waste in talk [he is

about to go into the pantry, and Hector is making for the hall, when

Hesione comes back].

MRS HUSHABYE. Daddiest, you and Hector must come and help me to

entertain all these people. What on earth were you shouting about?

HECTOR [stopping in the act of turning the door handle]. He is madder

than usual.

MRS HUSHABYE. We all are.

HECTOR. I must change [he resumes his door opening].

MRS HUSHABYE. Stop, stop. Come back, both of you. Come back. [They

return, reluctantly]. Money is running short.

HECTOR. Money! Where are my April dividends?

MRS HUSHABYE. Where is the snow that fell last year?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Where is all the money you had for that patent

lifeboat I invented?

MRS HUSHABYE. Five hundred pounds; and I have made it last since Easter!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Since Easter! Barely four months! Monstrous

extravagance! I could live for seven years on 500 pounds.

MRS HUSHABYE. Not keeping open house as we do here, daddiest.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Only 500 pounds for that lifeboat! I got twelve

thousand for the invention before that.

MRS HUSHABYE. Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic

keel that sucked up submarines. Living at the rate we do, you cannot

afford life-saving inventions. Can't you think of something that will

murder half Europe at one bang?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on

slaughter as it did when I was a boy. Why doesn't your husband invent

something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.

HECTOR. Well, that is a form of invention, is it not? However, you are

right: I ought to support my wife.

MRS HUSHABYE. Indeed you shall do nothing of the sort: I should never

see you from breakfast to dinner. I want my husband.

HECTOR [bitterly]. I might as well be your lapdog.

MRS HUSHABYE. Do you want to be my breadwinner, like the other poor

husbands?

HECTOR. No, by thunder! What a damned creature a husband is anyhow!

MRS HUSHABYE [to the captain]. What about that harpoon cannon?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No use. It kills whales, not men.

MRS HUSHABYE. Why not? You fire the harpoon out of a cannon. It sticks

in the enemy's general; you wind him in; and there you are.

HECTOR. You are your father's daughter, Hesione.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. There is something in it. Not to wind in generals:

they are not dangerous. But one could fire a grapnel and wind in a

machine gun or even a tank. I will think it out.

MRS HUSHABYE [squeezing the captain's arm affectionately]. Saved! You

are a darling, daddiest. Now we must go back to these dreadful people

and entertain them.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. They have had no dinner. Don't forget that.

HECTOR. Neither have I. And it is dark: it must be all hours.

MRS HUSHABYE. Oh, Guinness will produce some sort of dinner for them.

The servants always take jolly good care that there is food in the

house.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [raising a strange wail in the darkness]. What a house!

What a daughter!

MRS HUSHABYE [raving]. What a father!

HECTOR [following suit]. What a husband!

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Is there no thunder in heaven?

HECTOR. Is there no beauty, no bravery, on earth?

MRS HUSHABYE. What do men want? They have their food, their firesides,

their clothes mended, and our love at the end of the day. Why are they

not satisfied? Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them

into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to

be even with us?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [weirdly chanting].

I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors

thereof,

That men might come for their choosing, and their betters

spring from their love;

But one of them married a numskull;

HECTOR [taking up the rhythm].

The other a liar wed;

MRS HUSHABYE [completing the stanza].

And now must she lie beside him, even as she made her bed.

LADY UTTERWORD [calling from the garden]. Hesione! Hesione! Where are

you?

HECTOR. The cat is on the tiles.

MRS HUSHABYE. Coming, darling, coming [she goes quickly into the

garden].

The captain goes back to his place at the table.

HECTOR [going out into the hall]. Shall I turn up the lights for you?

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the

light.