Plays Extravagant

by Dan Laurence

  SWEETIE [with growing misgiving] What are they?

  THE SERGEANT [pointing to them successively] The Bible. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this world to that which is to come.

  SWEETIE [dismayed, trying to rise] Oh, my God!

  THE SERGEANT [holding her ruthlessly in the crook of his elbow] No you dont. Sit quiet: and dont take the name of the Lord your God in vain. If you believe in him, it’s blasphemy: if you dont, it’s nonsense. You must learn to exercise your mind: what is a woman without an active mind to a man but a mere convenience?

  SWEETIE. I have plenty to exercise my mind looking after my own affairs. What I look to you for, my lad, is a bit of fun.

  THE SERGEANT. Quite. But when men and women pick one another up just for a bit of fun, they find theyve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top storey as well as a ground floor; and you cant have the one without the other. Theyre always trying to; but it doesnt work. Youve picked up my mind as well as my body; and youve got to explore it. You thought you could have a face and a figure like mine with the limitations of a gorilla. Youre finding out your mistake: thats all.

  SWEETIE. Oh, let me go: I have had enough of this. If I’d thought you were religious I’d have given you a wide berth, I tell you. Let me go, will you?

  THE SERGEANT. Wait a bit. Nature may be using me as a sort of bait to draw you to take an interest in things of the mind. Nature may be using your pleasant animal warmth to stimulate my mind. I want your advice. I dont say I’ll take it; but it may suggest something to me. You see, I’m in a mess.

  SWEETIE. Well, of course. Youre in the sergeants’ mess.

  THE SERGEANT. Thats not the mess I mean. My mind’s in a mess – a muddle. I used to be a religious man; but I’m not so clear about it as I was.

  SWEETIE. Thank goodness for that, anyhow.

  THE SERGEANT. Look at these two books. I used to believe every word of them because they seemed to have nothing to do with real life. But war brought those old stories home quite real; and then one starts asking questions. Look at this bit here [he points to a page of The Pilgrim’s Progress]. It’s on the very first page of it. ‘I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered.’ Well, London and Paris and Berlin and Rome and the rest of them will be burned with fire from heaven all right in the next war: thats certain. Theyre all Cities of Destruction. And our Government chaps are running about with a great burden of corpses and debts on their backs, crying ‘What must we do to be saved?’ There it is: not a story in a book as it used to be, but God’s truth in the real actual world. And all the comfort they get is ‘Flee from the wrath to come.’ But where are they to flee to? There they are, meeting at Geneva or hobnobbing at Chequers over the weekend, asking one another, like the man in the book, ‘Whither must we flee?’ And nobody can tell them. The man in the book says ‘Do you see yonder shining light?’ Well, today the place is blazing with shining lights: shining lights in parliament, in the papers, in the churches, and in the books that they call Outlines – Outlines of History and Science and what not – and in spite of all their ballyhoo here we are waiting in the City of Destruction like so many sheep for the wrath to come. This uneducated tinker tells me the way is straight before us and so narrow that we cant miss it. But he starts by calling the place the wilderness of this world. Well, theres no road in a wilderness: you have to make one. All the straight roads are made by soldiers; and the soldiers didnt get to heaven along them. A lot of them landed up in the other place. No, John: you could tell a story well; and they say you were a soldier; but soldiers that try to make storytelling do for service end in the clink; and thats where they put you. Twelve years in Bedford Gaol, he got. He used to read the Bible in gaol; and –

  SWEETIE. Well, what else was there to read there? It’s all they give you in some gaols.

  THE SERGEANT. How do you know that?

  SWEETIE. Never you mind how I know it. It’s nothing to do with you.

  THE SERGEANT. Nothing to do with me! You dont know me, my lass. Some men would just order you off; but to me the most interesting thing in the world is the experience of a woman thats been shut up in a cell for years at a time with nothing but a Bible to read.

  SWEETIE. Years! What are you talking about? The longest I ever did was nine months; and if anyone says I ever did a day longer she’s a liar.

  THE SERGEANT [laying his hand on the bible] You could read that book from cover to cover in nine months.

  SWEETIE. Some of it would drive you melancholy mad. It only got me into trouble: it did. The chaplain asked me what I was in for. Spoiling the Egyptians, I says; and heres chapter and verse for it. He went and reported me, the swine; and I lost seven days remission for it.

  THE SERGEANT. Serve you right! I dont hold with spoiling the Egyptians. Before the war, spoiling the Egyptians was something holy. Now I see plainly it’s nothing but thieving.

  SWEETIE [shocked] Oh, you shouldnt say that. But what I say is, if Moses might do it why maynt I?

  THE SERGEANT. If thats the effect it had on your mind, it’s a bad effect. Some of this scripture is all right. Do justice; love mercy; and walk humbly before your God. That appeals to a man if only it could be set out in plain army regulations. But all this thieving, and slaughtering your enemies without giving quarter, and offering up human sacrifices, and thinking you can do what you like to other people because youre the chosen people of God, and you are in the right and everyone else is in the wrong: how does that look when you have had four years of the real thing instead of merely reading about it. No: damn it, we’re civilized men; and though it may have gone down with those old Jews it isnt religion. And, if it isnt, where are we? Thats what I want to know.

  SWEETIE. And is this all you care about? Sitting here and thinking of things like that?

  THE SERGEANT. Well, somebody must think about them, or whats going to become of us all? The officers wont think about them. The colonel goes out sketching: the lootnants go out and kill the birds and animals, or play polo. They wont flee from the wrath to come, not they. When they wont do their military duties I have to do them. It’s the same with our religious duties. It’s the chaplain’s job, not mine; but when you get a real religious chaplain you find he doesnt believe any of the old stuff; and if you get a gentleman, all he cares about is to shew you that he’s a real sport and not a mealy mouthed parson. So I have to puzzle it out for myself.

  SWEETIE. Well, God help the woman that marries you: thats all I have to say to you. I dont call you a man. [She rises quickly to escape from him].

  THE SERGEANT [also rising, and seizing her in a very hearty embrace] Not a man, eh? [He kisses her] How does that feel, Judy?

  SWEETIE [struggling, but not very resolutely] You let me go, will you. I dont want you now.

  THE SERGEANT. You will if I kiss you half a dozen times, more than you ever wanted anything in your life before. Thats a hard fact of human nature; and its one of the facts that religion has to make room for.

  SWEETIE. Oh, well, kiss me and have done with it. You cant kiss and talk about religion at the same time.

  THE ELDER [springing from his cell to the platform in front of it] Forbear this fooling, both of you. You, sir, are not an ignorant man: you know that the universe is wrecked.

  SWEETIE [clinging to the sergeant] He’s mad.

  THE ELDER. I am sane in a world of lunatics.

  THE SERGEANT [putting Sweetie away] It’s a queer thing, isnt it, that though there is a point at which I’d rather kiss a woman than do anything else in the world, yet I’d rather be shot than let anyone see me doing it?

  THE ELDER. Sir: women are not, as they suppose, more interesting than the universe. When the universe is crumbling let women be silent; and let men rise to something nobler than kissing them.

&n
bsp; The Sergeant, interested and overawed, sits down quietly and makes Sweetie sit beside him as before. The Elder continues to declaim with fanatical intensity.

  THE ELDER. Yes, sir: the universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years, has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein. Newton’s universe was the stronghold of rational Determinism: the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws; and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms, there too we found the electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal laws, Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must: the commandments were erased from the tables of the law: and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians. Here was my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility: I, who scorned alike the Catholic with his vain dream of responsible Free Will, and the Protestant with his pretence of private judgment. And now – now – what is left of it? The orbit of the electron obeys no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm his hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become incalculable: Purpose and Design, the pretexts for all the vilest superstitions, have risen from the dead to cast down the mighty from their seats and put paper crowns on presumptuous fools. Formerly, when differences with my wife, or business worries, tried me too hard, I sought consolation and reassurance in our natural history museums, where I could forget all common cares in wondering at the diversity of forms and colors in the birds and fishes and animals, all produced without the agency of any designer by the operation of Natural Selection. Today I dare not enter an aquarium, because I can see nothing in those grotesque monsters of the deep but the caricatures of some freakish demon artist: some Zeus-Mephistopheles with paintbox and plasticine, trying to surpass himself in the production of fantastic and laughable creatures to people a Noah’s ark for his baby. I have to rush from the building lest I go mad, crying, like the man in your book, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma. As I stand here I am falling into that abyss, down, down, down. We are all falling into it; and our dizzy brains can utter nothing but madness. My wife has died cursing me. I do not know how to live without her: we were unhappy together for forty years. My son, whom I brought up to be an incorruptible Godfearing atheist, has become a thief and a scoundrel; and I can say nothing to him but ‘Go, boy: perish in your villainy; for neither your father nor anyone else can now give you a good reason for being a man of honor.’

  He turns from them and is rushing distractedly away when Aubrey, in white tropicals, comes strolling along the beach from the St Pauls side, and hails him nonchalantly.

  AUBREY. Hullo, father, is it really you? I thought I heard the old trombone: I couldnt mistake it. How the dickens did you turn up here?

  THE ELDER [to the sergeant] This is my prodigal son.

  AUBREY. I am not a prodigal son. The prodigal son was a spendthrift and neer-do-weel who was reduced to eating the husks that the swine did eat. I am not ruined: I am rolling in money. I have never owed a farthing to any man. I am a model son; but I regret to say that you are very far from being a model father.

  THE ELDER. What right have you to say that, sir? In what way have I fallen short?

  AUBREY. You tried to thwart my manifest destiny. Nature meant me for the Church. I had to get ordained secretly.

  THE ELDER. Ordained! You dared to get ordained without my knowledge!

  AUBREY. Of course. You objected. How could I have done it with your knowledge? You would have stopped my allowance.

  THE ELDER [sitting down on the nearest stone, overwhelmed] My son a clergyman! This will kill me.

  AUBREY [coolly taking another stone, on his father’s right] Not a bit of it: fathers are not so easily killed. It was at the university that I became what was then called a sky pilot. When the war took me it seemed natural that I should pursue that avocation as a member of the air force. As a flying ace I won a very poorly designed silver medal for committing atrocities which were irreconcilable with the profession of a Christian clergyman. When I was wounded and lost my nerve for flying, I became an army chaplain. I then found myself obliged to tell mortally wounded men that they were dying in a state of grace and were going straight to heaven when as a matter of fact they were dying in mortal sin and going elsewhere. To expiate this blasphemy I kept as much under fire as possible; but my nerve failed again: I had to take three months leave and go into a nursing home. In that home I met my doom.

  THE ELDER. What do you mean by your doom? You are alive and well, to my sorrow and shame.

  AUBREY. To be precise, I met Sweetie. Thats Sweetie.

  SWEETIE. Very pleased to meet Popsy’s father, I’m sure.

  THE ELDER. My son was called Popsy in his infancy, I put a stop to it, on principle, when he entered on his sixth year. It is strange to hear the name from your lips after so long an interval.

  SWEETIE. I always ask a man what his mother called him, and call him that. It takes the starch out of him, somehow.

  AUBREY [resuming his narrative] Sweetie was quite the rottenest nurse that ever raised the mortality of a hospital by ten per cent. But –

  SWEETIE. Oh, what a lie! It was the other nurses that killed the men: waking them up at six in the morning and washing them! Half of them died of chills.

  AUBREY. Well, you will not deny that you were the prettiest woman in the place.

  SWEETIE. You thought so, anyhow.

  THE ELDER. Oh, cease – cease this trifling. I cannot endure this unending sex appeal.

  AUBREY. During the war it was found that sex appeal was as necessary for wounded or shellshocked soldiers as skilled nursing; so pretty girls were allowed to pose as nurses because they could sit about on beds and prevent the men from going mad. Sweetie did not prevent me going mad: on the contrary, she drove me mad. I saw in Sweetie not only every charm, but every virtue. And she returned my love. When I left that nursing home, she left it too. I was discharged as cured on the third of the month: she had been kicked out on the first. The trained staff could stand a good deal; but they could not stand Sweetie.

  SWEETIE. They were jealous; and you know it.

  AUBREY. I daresay they were. Anyhow, Sweetie and I took the same lodgings; and she was faithful to me for ten days. It was a record for her.

  SWEETIE. Popsy: are you going to give the whole show away, or only part of it? The Countess Valbrioni would like to know.

  AUBREY. We may as well be frank up to the point at which we should lose money by it. But perhaps I am boring the company.

  THE ELDER. Complete your confession, sir. You have just said that you and this lady took the same lodging. Am I to understand that you are husband and wife.

  SWEETIE. We might have been if we could have depended on you for a good time. But how could I marry an army chaplain with nothing but his pay and an atheist for his father?

  AUBREY. So that was the calculation, Sweetie, was it? I never dreamt that the idea of marriage had occurred to either of us. It certainly never occurred to me. I went to live with you quite simply because I felt I could not live without you. The improbability of that statement is the measure of my infatuation.

  SWEETIE. Dont you be so spiteful. Did I give you a good time or did I not?

  AUBREY. Heavenly. That also seems improbable; but it is gospel truth.

  THE ELDER. Wretched boy: do not dare to trifle with me. You said just now that you owe no man anything, and that you are rolling in money. Where did you get that money?

  AUBREY. I stole a very valuable pearl necklace and restored it to the owner. She reward
ed me munificently. Hence my present opulence. Honesty is the best policy – sometimes.

  THE ELDER. Worse even than a clergyman! A thief!

  AUBREY. Why make such a fuss about nothing?

  THE ELDER. Do you call the theft of a pearl necklace nothing?

  AUBREY. Less than nothing, compared to the things I have done with your approval. I was hardly more than a boy when I first dropped a bomb on a sleeping village. I cried all night after doing that. Later on I swooped into a street and sent machine gun bullets into a crowd of civilians: women, children, and all. I was past crying by that time. And now you preach to me about stealing a pearl necklace! Doesnt that seem a little ridiculous?

  THE SERGEANT. That was war, sir.

  AUBREY. It was me, sergeant: ME. You cannot divide my conscience into a war department and a peace department. Do you suppose that a man who will commit murder for political ends will hesitate to commit theft for personal ends? Do you suppose you can make a man the mortal enemy of sixty millions of his fellow creatures without making him a little less scrupulous about his next door neighbor?