Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has
rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact.
"One of these days," he said, "I shall write a really great drama. No
one will understand the drift of it, but everyone will go back to their
homes with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with their lives and
surroundings. Then they will put up new wall-papers and forget."
"But how about those that have oak panelling all over the house?" said
the Other.
"They can always put down new stair-carpets," pursued Reginald, "and,
anyhow, I'm not responsible for the audience having a happy ending. The
play would be quite sufficient strain on one's energies. I should get a
bishop to say it was immoral and beautiful--no dramatist has thought of
that before, and everyone would come to condemn the bishop, and they
would stay on out of sheer nervousness. After all, it requires a great
deal of moral courage to leave in a marked manner in the middle of the
second act, when your carriage isn't ordered till twelve. And it would
commence with wolves worrying something on a lonely waste--you wouldn't
see them, of course; but you would hear them snarling and scrunching, and
I should arrange to have a wolfy fragrance suggested across the
footlights. It would look so well on the programmes, 'Wolves in the
first act, by Jamrach.' And old Lady Whortleberry, who never misses a
first night, would scream. She's always been nervous since she lost her
first husband. He died quite abruptly while watching a county cricket
match; two and a half inches of rain had fallen for seven runs, and it
was supposed that the excitement killed him. Anyhow, it gave her quite a
shock; it was the first husband she'd lost, you know, and now she always
screams if anything thrilling happens too soon after dinner. And after
the audience had heard the Whortleberry scream the thing would be fairly
launched."
"And the plot?"
"The plot," said Reginald, "would be one of those little everyday
tragedies that one sees going on all round one. In my mind's eye there
is the case of the Mudge-Jervises, which in an unpretentious way has
quite an Enoch Arden intensity underlying it. They'd only been married
some eighteen months or so, and circumstances had prevented their seeing
much of each other. With him there was always a foursome or something
that had to be played and replayed in different parts of the country, and
she went in for slumming quite as seriously as if it was a sport. With
her, I suppose, it was. She belonged to the Guild of the Poor Dear
Souls, and they hold the record for having nearly reformed a washerwoman.
No one has ever really reformed a washerwoman, and that is why the
competition is so keen. You can rescue charwomen by fifties with a
little tea and personal magnetism, but with washerwomen it's different;
wages are too high. This particular laundress, who came from Bermondsey
or some such place, was really rather a hopeful venture, and they thought
at last that she might be safely put in the window as a specimen of
successful work. So they had her paraded at a drawing-room "At Home" at
Agatha Camelford's; it was sheer bad luck that some liqueur chocolates
had been turned loose by mistake among the refreshments--really liqueur
chocolates, with very little chocolate. And of course the old soul found
them out, and cornered the entire stock. It was like finding a whelk-
stall in a desert, as she afterwards partially expressed herself. When
the liqueurs began to take effect, she started to give them imitations of
farmyard animals as they know them in Bermondsey. She began with a
dancing bear, and you know Agatha doesn't approve of dancing, except at
Buckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she got up on the
piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather she went in for realism
rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment of the subject. Finally, she fell
into the piano and said she was a parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu
performance I believe she was very word-perfect; no one had heard
anything like it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attended sittings
of the Austrian Reichsrath. Agatha is trying the Rest-cure at Buxton."
"But the tragedy?"
"Oh, the Mudge-Jervises. Well, they were getting along quite happily,
and their married life was one continuous exchange of picture-postcards;
and then one day they were thrown together on some neutral ground where
foursomes and washerwomen overlapped, and discovered that they were
hopelessly divided on the Fiscal Question. They have thought it best to
separate, and she is to have the custody of the Persian kittens for nine
months in the year--they go back to him for the winter, when she is
abroad. There you have the material for a tragedy drawn straight from
life--and the piece could be called 'The Price They Paid for Empire.' And
of course one would have to work in studies of the struggle of hereditary
tendency against environment and all that sort of thing. The woman's
father could have been an Envoy to some of the smaller German Courts;
that's where she'd get her passion for visiting the poor, in spite of the
most careful upbringing. _C'est le premier pa qui compte_, as the cuckoo
said when it swallowed its foster-parent. That, I think, is quite
clever."
"And the wolves?"
"Oh, the wolves would be a sort of elusive undercurrent in the background
that would never be satisfactorily explained. After all, life teems with
things that have no earthly reason. And whenever the characters could
think of nothing brilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they
could open a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. But that
would be very seldom."