by Dan Laurence
AUBREY. And the oftener the faces change the more the tips come to, eh?
THE COUNTESS. Oh, it’s not that, though of course that counts. The real secret of it is that though men are awfully nice for the first few days, it doesnt last. You get the best out of men by having them always new. What I say is that a love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up. In all my life I have known only one man that kept it up til he died.
THE PATIENT [interested] Ah! Then the thing is possible?
THE COUNTESS. Yes: it was a man that married my sister: that was how I came to know about it.
AUBREY. And his ardor never palled? Day in and day out, until death did them part, he was the same as on the wedding day? Is that really true, Sweetie?
THE COUNTESS. It is. But then he beat her on their wedding day; and he beat her just as hard every day afterwards. I made her get a separation order; but she went back to him because nobody else paid her any attention.
AUBREY. Why didnt you tell me that before? I’d have beaten you black and blue sooner than lose you. [Sitting up] Would you believe it, Mops, I was in love with this woman: madly in love with her. She was not my intellectual equal; and I had to teach her table manners. But there was an extraordinary sympathy between our lower centres; and when after ten days she threw me over for another man I was restrained from murder and suicide only by the most resolute exercise of my reasoning powers, my determination to be a civilized man, and fear of the police.
THE COUNTESS. Well, I gave you a good time for the ten days, didnt I? Lots of people dont get that much to look back on. Besides, you know it was for your own good, Popsy. We werent really suited, were we?
AUBREY. You had acquired an insatiable taste for commercial travellers. You could sample them at the rate of three a week. I could not help admiring such amazing mobility of the affections. I had heard operatic tenors bawling Woman is Fickle; but it always seemed to me that what was to be dreaded in women was their implacable constancy. But you! Fickle! I should think so.
THE COUNTESS. Well, the travellers were just as bad, you know.
AUBREY. Just as bad! Say just as good. Fickleness means simply mobility, and mobility is a mark of civilization. You should pride yourself on it. If you dont you will lose your self-respect; and I cannot endure a woman who has no self-respect.
THE COUNTESS. Oh, whats the use of us talking about self-respect? You are a thief and so am I. I go a little further than that, myself; and so would you if you were a woman. Dont you be a hypocrite, Popsy: at least not with me.
AUBREY. At least not with you! Sweetie: that touch of concern for my spiritual welfare almost convinces me that you still love me.
THE COUNTESS. Not me. Not much. I’m through with you, my lad. And I cant quite fancy the colonel: he’s too old, and too much the gentleman.
AUBREY. He’s better than nobody. Who else is there?
THE COUNTESS. Well, there’s the sergeant. I daresay I have low tastes; but he’s my sort, and the colonel isnt.
THE PATIENT. Have you fallen in love with Sergeant Fielding, Sweetie?
THE COUNTESS. Well, yes; if you like to call it that.
AUBREY. May I ask have you sounded him on the subject?
THE COUNTESS. How can I? I’m a countess; and he’s only a sergeant. If I as much as let on that I’m conscious of his existence I give away the show to the colonel. I can only look at him. And I cant do even that when anyone else is looking. And all the time I want to hug him [she breaks down in tears].
AUBREY. Oh for Heaven’s sake dont start crying.
THE PATIENT. For all you know, Sweetie, the sergeant may be a happily married man.
THE COUNTESS. What difference does that make to my feelings? I am so lonely. The place is so dull. No pictures. No dances. Nothing to do but be ladylike. And the one really lovable man going to waste! I’d rather be dead.
THE PATIENT. Well, it’s just as bad for me.
THE COUNTESS. No it isnt. Youre a real lady: youre broken in to be dull. Besides, you have Popsy. And youre supposed to be our servant. That gives you the run of the whole camp when youre tired of him. You can pick up a private when you like. Whats to prevent you?
THE PATIENT. My ladylike morals, I suppose.
THE COUNTESS. Morals your grandmother! I thought youd left all that flapdoodle behind you when you came away with us.
THE PATIENT. I meant to. Ive tried to. But you shock me in spite of myself every second time you open your mouth.
THE COUNTESS. Dont you set up to be a more moral woman than I am, because youre not.
THE PATIENT. I dont pretend to be. But I may tell you that my infatuation for Popsy, which I now see was what really nerved me to this astonishing breakaway, has been, so far, quite innocent. Can you believe that, you clod?
THE COUNTESS. Oh yes I can: Popsy’s satisfied as long as you let him talk. What I mean is – and I tell it to you straight – that with all my faults I’m content with one man at a time.
THE PATIENT. Do you suggest that I am carrying on with two men?
THE COUNTESS. I dont suggest anything. I say what I mean straight out; and if you dont like it you can lump it. You may be in love with Popsy; but youre interested in Private Meek, though what you see in that dry little worm beats me.
THE PATIENT. Have you noticed, my Sweetie, that your big strapping splendid sergeant is completely under the thumb of that dry little worm?
THE COUNTESS. He wont be when I get him under my thumb. But you just be careful. Take this tip from me: one man at a time. I am advising you for your good, because youre only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity. Ive lived at that address myself; and I know. When I love a man now it’s all love and nothing else. It’s the real thing while it lasts. I havnt the least curiosity about my lovely sergeant: I know just what he’ll say and what he’ll do. I just want him to do it.
THE PATIENT [rising, revolted] Sweetie: I really cannot bear any more of this. No doubt it’s perfectly true. It’s quite right that you should say it frankly and plainly. I envy and admire the frightful coolness with which you plump it all out. Perhaps I shall get used to it in time. But at present it knocks me to pieces. I shall simply have to go away if you pursue the subject. [She sits down in the cane chair with her back to them].
AUBREY. Thats the worst of Sweetie. We all have – to put it as nicely as I can – our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with a terrible power that sometimes destroys us; but they dont talk. Speech belongs to the higher centres. In all the great poetry and literature of the world the higher centres speak. In all respectable conversation the higher centres speak, even when they are saying nothing or telling lies. But the lower centres are there all the time: a sort of guilty secret with every one of us, though they are dumb. I remember asking my tutor at college whether, if anyone’s lower centres began to talk, the shock would not be worse than the one Balaam got when his donkey began talking to him. He only told me half a dozen improper stories to shew how open-minded he was. I never mentioned the subject again until I met Sweetie. Sweetie is Balaam’s ass.
THE COUNTESS. Keep a civil tongue in your head, Popsy. Ι –
AUBREY [springing to his feet] Woman: I am paying you a compliment: Balaam’s ass was wiser than Balaam. You should read your Bible. That is what makes Sweetie almost superhuman. Her lower centres speak. Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before – truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore. And now that Sweetie goes shouting them all over the place, the institutions are rocking and splitting and sundering. They leave us no place to live, no certainties, no workable morality, no heaven, no hell, no commandments, and no God.
THE PATIENT. What about the light in our ow
n souls that you were so eloquent about the day before yesterday at lunch when you drank a pint of champagne?
AUBREY. Most of us seem to have no souls. Or if we have them, they have nothing to hang on to. Meanwhile, Sweetie goes on shouting. [He takes refuge in the deck chair].
THE COUNTESS [rising] Oh, what are you gassing about? I am not shouting. I should be a good woman if it wasnt so dull. If youre goodnatured, you just get put upon. Who are the good women? Those that enjoy being dull and like being put upon. Theyve no appetites. Life’s thrown away on them: they get nothing out of it.
THE PATIENT. Well, come, Sweetie! What do you get out of it?
THE COUNTESS. Excitement: thats what I get out of it. Look at Popsy and me! We’re always planning robberies. Of course I know it’s mostly imagination; but the fun is in the planning and the expectation. Even if we did them and were caught, there would be the excitement of being tried and being in all the papers. Look at poor Harry Smiler that murdered the cop in Croydon! When he came and told us what he’d done Popsy offered to go out and get him some cyanide to poison himself; for it was a dead sure thing that he’d be caught and bumped off. ‘What!’ says Harry; ‘and lose the excitement of being tried for my life! I’d rather be hanged’ he says; and hanged he was. And I say it must have been almost worth it. After all, he’d have died anyhow: perhaps of something really painful. Harry wasnt a bad man really; but he couldnt bear dullness. He had a wonderful collection of pistols that he had begun as a boy: he picked up a lot in the war. Just for the romance of it, you know: he meant no harm. But he’d never shot anyone with them; and at last the temptation was too great and he went out and shot the cop. Just for nothing but the feeling that he’d fired the thing off and done somebody in with it. When Popsy asked him why he’d done it, all he could say was that it was a sort of fulfilment. But it gives you an idea, doesnt it, of what I mean? [She sits down again, relieved by her outburst].
AUBREY. All it means is a low vitality. Here is a man with all the miracles of the universe to stagger his imagination and all the problems of human destiny to employ his mind, and he goes out and shoots an innocent policeman because he can think of nothing more interesting to do. Quite right to hang him. And all the people who can find nothing more exciting to do than to crowd into the court to watch him being sentenced to death should have been hanged too. You will be hanged someday, Sweetie, because you have not what people call a richly stored mind. I have tried to educate you –
THE COUNTESS. Yes: you gave me books to read. But I couldnt read them: they were as dull as ditchwater. Ive tried crossword puzzles to occupy my mind and keep me off planning robberies; but what crossword puzzle is half the fun and excitement of picking somebody’s pocket, let alone that you cant live by it? You wanted me to take to drink to keep me quiet. But I dont like being drunk; and what would become of my good looks if I did? Ten bottles of champagne couldnt make you feel as you do when you walk past a policeman who has only to stop you and search you to put you away for three years.
THE PATIENT. Pops: did you really try to set her drinking? What a thoroughpaced blackguard you are!
AUBREY. She is much better company when she’s half drunk. Listen to her now, when she is sober!
THE PATIENT. Sweetie: are you really having such a jolly time after all? You began by threatening to give up our exciting enterprise because it is so dull.
AUBREY. She is free. There is the sergeant. And there is always the hope of something turning up and the sense of being ready for it without having to break all the shackles and throw down all the walls that imprison a respectable woman.
THE PATIENT. Well, what about me?
AUBREY [puzzled] Well, what about you? You are free, arnt you?
THE PATIENT [rising very deliberately, and going behind him to his left hand, which she picks up and fondles as she sermonizes, seated on the arm of his chair] My angel love, you have rescued me from respectability so completely that I have for a month past been living the life of a mountain goat. I have got rid of my anxious worrying mother as completely as a weaned kid, and I no longer hate her. My slavery to cooks stuffing me with long meals of fish, flesh, and fowl is a thing of the miserable past: I eat dates and bread and water and raw onions when I can get them; and when I cant get them I fast, with the result that I have forgotten what illness means; and if I ran away from you two neither of you could catch me; and if you did I could fight the pair of you with one hand tied behind me. I revel in all your miracles of the universe: the delicious dawns, the lovely sunsets, the changing winds, the cloud pictures, the flowers, the animals and their ways, the birds and insects and reptiles. Every day is a day of adventure with its cold and heat, its light and darkness, its cycles of exultant vigor and exhaustion, hunger and satiety, its longings for action that change into a longing for sleep, its thoughts of heavenly things that change so suddenly into a need for food.
AUBREY. What more could any mortal desire?
THE PATIENT [seizing him by the ears] Liar.
AUBREY. Thank you. You mean, I presume, that these things do not satisfy you: you want me as well.
THE PATIENT. You!! You!!! you selfish lazy sugary tongued blackguard. [Releasing him] No: I included you with the animals and their ways, just as I included Sweetie and the sergeant.
THE COUNTESS. You let Sweetie and her sergeant alone: d’y’hear? I have had enough of that joke on me.
THE PATIENT [rising and taking her by the chin to turn her face up] It is no joke, Sweetiest: it is the dead solemn earnest. I called Pops a liar, Sweetie, because all this is not enough. The glories of nature dont last any decently active person a week, unless theyre professional naturalists or mathematicians or a painter or something. I want something sensible to do. A beaver has a jolly time because it has to build its dam and bring up its family. I want my little job like the beaver. If I do nothing but contemplate the universe there is so much in it that is cruel and terrible and wantonly evil, and so much more that is oppressively astronomical and endless and inconceivable and impossible, that I shall just go stark raving mad and be taken back to my mother with straws in my hair. The truth is, I am free; I am healthy; I am happy; and I am utterly miserable. [Turning on Aubrey] Do you hear? Utterly miserable.
AUBREY [losing his temper] And what do you suppose I am? Here with nothing to do but drag about two damn’ silly women and talk to them.
THE COUNTESS. It’s worse for them. They have to listen to you.
THE PATIENT. I despise you. I hate you. You – you – you – you gentleman thief. What right has a thief to be a gentleman? Sweetie is bad enough, heaven knows, with her vulgarity and her low cunning: always trying to get the better of somebody or to get hold of a man; but at least she’s a woman; and she’s real. Men are not real: theyre all talk, talk, talk –
THE COUNTESS [half rising] You keep a civil tongue in your head: do you hear?
THE PATIENT. Another syllable of your cheek, Sweetie; and I’ll give you a hiding that will keep you screaming for half an hour. [Sweetie subsides]. I want to beat somebody: I want to kill somebody. I shall end by killing the two of you. What are we, we three glorious adventurers? Just three inefficient fertilizers.
AUBREY. What on earth do you mean by that?
THE PATIENT. Yes: inefficient fertilizers. We do nothing but convert good food into bad manure. We are walking factories of bad manure: thats what we are.
THE COUNTESS [rising] Well, I am not going to sit here and listen to that sort of talk. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
AUBREY [rising also, shocked] Miss Mopply: there are certain disgusting truths that no lady would throw in the teeth of her fellow creatures –
THE PATIENT. I am not a lady: I am free now to say what I please. How do you like it?
THE COUNTESS [relenting] Look here, dearie. You mustnt go off at the deep end like this. You – [The patient turns fiercely on her: she screams]. Ah-a-a-ah! Popsy: she’s mad. Save me. [She runs away, out past the pavilion].
AUBREY. What is the matter with you? Are you out of your senses? [He tries to hold her; but she sends him sprawling].
THE PATIENT. No. I am exercising my freedom. The freedom you preached. The freedom you made possible for me. You dont like to hear Sweetie’s lower centres shouting. Well, now you hear my higher centres shouting. You dont seem to like it any better.
AUBREY. Mops: youre hysterical. You felt splendid an hour ago; and you will feel splendid again an hour from now. You will always feel splendid if you keep yourself fit.
THE PATIENT. Fit for what? A lost dog feels fit: thats what makes him stray; but he’s the unhappiest thing alive. I am a lost dog: a tramp, a vagabond. Ive got nothing to do. Ive got nowhere to go. Sweetie’s miserable; and youre miserable; and I’m miserable; and I shall just kick you and beat you to a jelly.
She rushes at him. He dodges her and runs off past the hut. At that moment Tallboys returns with Meek past the other side of the hut; and the patient, unable to check herself, crashes into his arms.
