MRS. C.:
And so, my boy, goodbye. Good luck. God bless you.
RAYMOND:
You mean it’s over?
MRS. C.:
Charles is coming now.
RAYMOND:
I won’t go now. I won’t go until something at least—
I don’t care what—is clear to me. You’ve told me
Nothing. There’s not a thing I’ve understood.
Why was I brought here? If I am being born,
Into what am I being born, what am I entering?
What world do you belong to? I won’t go
Until you tell me something I understand.
(CHARLES has entered during the last two lines.)
CHARLES:
Aha! A scene! The birthday’s not a success?
KNIGHT (bitterly):
Let’s speak of it rather as a miscarriage, Charles.
(CHARLES laughs delightedly.)
RAYMOND:
How can he laugh?
KNIGHT:
God always laughs, Raymond.
Comedy exists in a distance between two points.
CHARLES:
Well, Raymond, what would you like me to explain?
RAYMOND:
I don’t know why you all have to act as though
I understood. You seem to think it’s an accomplishment.
I’ve understood nothing and I’m glad of that;
I’m bewildered and annoyed and want to forget
Whatever has happened. There’s nothing you can do
To keep me from that.
CHARLES:
So the child enters the world.
There are so many ways of understanding
Bewilderment and anger and forgetfulness
Are ways of understanding. There’s nothing you can do,
To keep yourself from that.
RAYMOND:
It’s cruel, it’s nonsense.
CHARLES:
In spite of all this violence, you shall find—
Walking home tonight, perhaps—against your will
You shall discover something has been shown
Profounder than all your easy barriers.
KNIGHT:
It is only as one scrapes at a frog’s skull, scrapes and scrapes,
Till only the thinnest pane of bone remains
Between the small brain and the instrument;
This breaks at last, and wisdom like a bright dye
Makes every part distinct.
CHARLES:
At any rate,
Goodbye. Good luck. I’ll take you to the door.
(He takes RAYMONDS arm to lead him out, but RAYMOND breaks away in a blind violence?)
RAYMOND:
Don’t ever touch me! (He runs out.)
(CHARLES returns to the center of the room; he is disturbed but not too seriously. There is a pause.)
CHARLES:
Sometimes I feel like saying to hell with it.
MRS. C.:
Then why do you keep on?—Your little party
Has been, as usual, Charles, about as amusing
As a crucifixion.
MAX:
What an interesting simile.
What will happen to him, Charles?
CHARLES (sitting):
I’ve told you already.
He will always be the person you are, Max.
He will always love the wizardry Mr. Knight
Embodies. He will always remember Mrs. Crane.
He will die after a certain amount of joy.
MAX:
Is it always that simple?
CHARLES:
It is always that simple.
MRS. C.:
It’s frightful. Charles, you have never been a person,
Never. I’m sorry I ever came here. You are children
Playing with all the cruelty of children
Who laugh in the face of honor.
CHARLES:
We shan’t squabble.
I’ll see you next week, Mrs. Crane. Good night.
MRS. C.:
If it weren’t so clumsy …
CHARLES:
What can you expect?
MAX (taking his portfolio):
I think I’ll have to be going.
Good night, Charles. I’ll see you soon, I hope.
Would anyone care to join me for a cocktail?
KNIGHT:
I’d be delighted if you don’t mind. Charles,
As I’ve said before, you are an incredible artist.
I understand you, envy you, admire you,
And despise you utterly. You are the evil
That we have sought all through our lives. Good night.
CHARLES:
Good night.
MAX:
Good night, Charles.
CHARLES:
Good night.
(Exit MAX and KNIGHT. MRS. CRANE pauses a moment.)
MRS. C:
Charles, Charles …
(He rises in irritation and pride.)
CHARLES:
What is your anguish and your innocence?
The hall of mirrors that you have not seen
Expands the grey sky like the sight of Echo.
The feasting faces, darting or serene,
Have fallen all to mould and gaze no more.
But reflections have never ceased. Usurping silver,
Blood and bone once thrust itself between
The grey visage of God and This His Glass—
Groping, endearing. For centuries these have been
Forever moving delicately through brightest air
Within my hall, from side to mirrored side.
Their image is their essence, and except
For their brief birth and living they have not died.
(MRS. CRANE can say nothing. She leaves. CHARLES pours himself a glass of wine and, raising it, approaches the audience.)
CHARLES:
Ladies and gentleman: this has been a play about birth.
(CURTAIN)
THE BAIT
A PLAY
(1953)
Characters
Julie
John, her fiancé
Charles, her husband
Gilbert, her brother
(The action takes place in Venice and in the Gulf Stream. On one side of the stage, a suggestion of the Piazza; on the other, the stern of a fishing boat.)
(Enter, from Venice, JOHN and JULIE. It is a summer afternoon.)
JOHN:
You have never told me this before.
JULIE:
I do not understand what I have told you. That may be why you have not heard it before.
JOHN:
Go on. After you got back to the dock what happened? What happened that night?
JULIE:
Evidently I am not able to tell a story. I feel as if I had been talking ever since lunch. And now I’m all talked out and I’ve missed my siesta.
JOHN:
I know the sense of imprisonment that comes from being in a very small boat, so far from shore. You can see the land, a ribbon of beach with colorless trees. The ocean calls into play our deepest subjectivity. All this might never have happened under different circumstances.
JULIE:
What did happen was that in two weeks I left him.
JOHN:
Left … Charles?
JULIE:
You don’t imagine I’d ever leave Gilbert? Well. One would rather not talk about what one has not understood.
JOHN:
Yet it has given you pleasure to do so.
JULIE:
Are we going to sit down? No. I see only one chair. And we have talked enough.
JOHN:
But could anyone have endured? I mean, was it simply Charles not trying to hold out, when he went into the water? Could anyone have held out? Am I of no help to you?
JULIE:
I don’t see that you need be so solemn,
John.
JOHN:
We have talked of solemn things.
JULIE:
It has, you are right, given me pleasure to talk about what I have not understood. Probably I had known that I should fail, but I feel myself virtuous for trying once again to understand it.
JOHN:
You are not a simple person.
JULIE:
I am. Only I have not been able to simplify. One wants a complicated person to do that. Look at those pigeons, how can they bear it?—eating out of people’s hands. Yes, you have helped me by letting me talk about it. It is less real now that someone other than myself has failed to understand it.
JOHN:
You are not to blame.
JULIE:
Not to blame for leaving my husband?
JOHN:
Not to blame for the circumstances.
JULIE:
That is the kind of remark that never fails to dazzle me. It makes me feel that my total experience is somehow here, within easy reach, like so many rolls of film on a shelf.
JOHN:
I mean simply that the circumstances would seem to narrow down to your brother.
JULIE:
Yes. Gilbert is to blame. I am finer than Gilbert.
JOHN:
I like Gilbert. He makes me laugh.
JULIE:
Gilbert makes everybody laugh. No. He never made Charles laugh. That’s conceivably why they were such good friends.
JOHN:
But I laugh more easily with you. When I’m with Gilbert I’m not really laughing.
JULIE:
Neither am I. It must be a power he has over me. Look! There he sits in the pensione and here I am giggling …
JOHN:
At the risk of irritating you, it does seem curious to me that Gilbert should …
JULIE:
Should what?
JOHN:
That Gilbert should be so much in the picture. He goes everywhere you go, he knows everything you do.
JULIE:
You are possessive!
JOHN:
Do you mind?
JULIE:
No. I think it’s rather sweet. Now what are you saying about Gilbert?
JOHN:
I don’t remember.
JULIE:
He is after all one’s brother.
JOHN:
There are limits. You say he virtually picked out your husband for you.
JULIE:
Well he didn’t pick you out darling. I did that.
JOHN:
I don’t like to believe that you are as close to him as you seem to be.
JULIE:
But isn’t that the delightful thing about relatives? They have to love you, you have to love them! After a certain age one meets few enough people of whom that holds true.
JOHN:
You don’t really think in those terms.
JULIE:
Don’t I? I sometimes think it’s a wonder I think at all.
JOHN:
Did Charles like Gilbert? Afterwards, I mean.
JULIE:
O God in heaven! Did Charles like Gilbert! Does Gilbert like me! Did like them! Why we positively doted upon one another! We shared an eye and a tooth and woe to the unwary stranger who came our way!
JOHN:
Forgive me.
JULIE:
It’s just that I’m so weary! Charles writes, Gilbert talks—
JOHN:
You have had another letter from Charles?
JULIE:
You ask questions!
JOHN:
I feel I have a right to know.
JULIE:
Yes, I have had a letter from Charles. I must really stop going to American Express. Nobody else writes to me there.
JOHN:
You needn’t go. You needn’t accept his letters.
JULIE:
Gilbert says it makes me feel like a bright young person, the kind who would get such letters from her divorced husband.
JOHN:
“Such” letters? Does Gilbert read them?
JULIE:
Do you suppose I do? O what an unkind thing to say! You must not make me talk about Charles. I’ll say anything that comes into my head.
JOHN:
I make you talk? Gilbert makes you laugh? It doesn’t seem to me that you are made to do anything.
JULIE:
Now you’re angry and you don’t love me.
(Enter GILBERT.)
GILBERT:
O! Ben trovato! Ah! Flirting at Florian’s!
My sweet little sister is beautifully bad!
Come with me, cara, we’ll go in a gondola!
Gondoliere!
JULIE:
Gilbert, you’re mad!
GILBERT:
I’ve dawdled all day with impossible people.
John will you join us?
JULIE:
Keep up our morale?
JOHN:
No, I must really—
GILBERT:
Then be a wet blanket,
I’m for a ride down that crazy Canal!
JOHN:
What is this passion of Gilbert’s for boating?
JULIE:
See you are laughing! I knew you would be!
JOHN:
Then why are you laughing?
JULIE:
I’m not really laughing.
But I’m going with Gilbert.
GILBERT:
We’ll meet you for tea! (They go.)
JOHN:
When Julie and I are married I shall urge her to leave Europe and go back with me. Gilbert is very entertaining but I hope he will not follow us. She has gone about with him for so long that now, even when she wants to, she cannot do justice to the beautiful seriousness I know is in her. Gilbert on the other hand belongs in Italy. For myself I do not enjoy living by the sea. I find a warm climate corrupting.
Here in this sweetness I am not quite at ease.
I should prefer Venice in the winter
All flooded and misted and emptied, fixed in a frown,
To this lax glitter, this warm loose life
Of drifting palaces and uprooted foreigners.
Yet these, for they do not flinch at small misfortunes,
Are what endure
While our cold virtues, once thought durable
But now abstract and frail as snowflakes,
Alter to lazy water in the sun.
Fluidity is proof against major disasters.
The marbles melt and wink at me. “Survive,”
They whisper, dimpling, “be like us, straniero!
It won’t be Venice or the foreigners
That have gone up in spray, when the end comes.
Survive! We have foreseen a gondola
And in the gondola a German woman
Grandly rejoicing over whatever cornice
Shall have been left standing to elicit
The warm salt water from her eyes.” Waiter!
A coffee!
A VOICE:
Yes Mister.
JOHN:
I would not speak their language …. And yet it may be that the world is nothing more than an impersonal backdrop, that Venice and the sea discuss endlessly one another, with never a glance at ourselves. But no. To place Julie now against that other setting she described to me this afternoon, can I pretend that I had not somehow foreseen it? It rang a bell, it had to be. Even before she spoke I saw the fishing-boat, felt the brightness of the day, the blueness of the Gulf Stream where they sat trolling for big fish. The things we do not understand are dangerous. All this had positively worked on her. It calls her still over and over back into bewilderment. Over and over she enters that scene to work on it, sounding the motives like a sea, wondering …
JULIE:
Stop!
(In the course of JOHN’s speech the lights have dimmed on Venice and brightened on the other side of the stage.
GILBERT, CHARLES, and JULIE have entered the fishing boat.)
JULIE:
What did they do when I was with them?
What did they mean to do?
GILBERT:
Is he steering us the right way?
I know we’ve passed that patch of seaweed once before, today.
JULIE (sings):
Ah gardez-vous de me guérir!
J’aime mon mal, j’en veux mourir!
GILBERT:
Was that the last beer, Julie?
It seems a pity, don’t you think,
That we have nothing more to drink?
And didn’t I tell you to make more sandwiches?
To be hard of hearing has its advantages.
JULIE:
Desormais je ne parlerai que français.
From now on I shall only speak French.
GILBERT:
And it would serve her right, wouldn’t it, Charles?
It must be by design that nobody speaks to me.
Have I done something wrong? You see
I am reduced to the simplest interrogatives.
JULIE:
We know what happens when we talk to you.
Nous savons bien ce qui arrive—O what’s the use!
Why is Charles frowning?
Collected Novels and Plays Page 46
