by Dan Laurence
THE ELDER. I did not approve. Had I been of military age I should have been a conscientious objector.
AUBREY. Oh, you were a conscientious objector to everything, even to God. But my mother was an enthusiast for everything: that was why you never could get on with her. She would have shoved me into the war if I had needed any shoving. She shoved my brother into it, though he did not believe a word of all the lies we were stuffed with, and didnt want to go. He was killed, and when it came out afterwards that he. was right, and that we were all a parcel of fools killing one another for nothing, she lost the courage to face life, and died of it.
THE SERGEANT. Well, sir, I’d never let a son of mine talk to me like that. Let him have a bit of your Determinism, sir.
THE ELDER [rising impulsively] Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions, evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science I pinned my faith to is bankrupt: its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the atrocities of the Inquisition. Its spread of enlightenment has been a spread of cancer: its counsels that were to have established the millennium have led straight to European suicide. And I – I who believed in it as no religious fanatic has ever believed in his superstition! For its sake I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and behold the supreme tragedy of the atheist who has lost his faith – his faith in atheism, for which more martyrs have perished than for all the creeds put together. Here I stand, dumb before my scoundrel of a son; for that is what you are, boy, a common scoundrel and nothing else.
AUBREY. Well, why not? If I become an honest man I shall become a poor man; and then nobody will respect me: nobody will admire me: nobody will say thank you to me. If on the contrary I am bold, unscrupulous, acquisitive, successful and rich, everyone will respect me, admire me, court me, grovel before me. Then no doubt I shall be able to afford the luxury of honesty. I learnt that from my religious education.
THE ELDER. How dare you say that you had a religious education. I shielded you from that, at least.
AUBREY. You thought you did, old man; but you reckoned without my mother.
THE ELDER. What!
AUBREY. You forbad me to read the Bible; but my mother made me learn three verses of it every day, and whacked me if I could not repeat them without misplacing a word. She threatened to whack me still worse if I told you.
THE ELDER [thunderstruck] Your mother!!!
AUBREY. So I learnt my lesson. Six days on the make, and on the seventh shalt thou rest. I shall spend another six years on the make, and then I shall retire and be a saint.
THE ELDER. A saint! Say rather the ruined son of an incorrigibly superstitious mother. Retire now – from the life you have dishonored. There is the sea. Go. Drown yourself. In that graveyard there are no lying epitaphs. [He mounts to his chapel and again gives way to utter dejection].
AUBREY [unconcerned] I shall do better as a saint. A few thousands to the hospitals and the political party funds will buy me a halo as large as Sweetie’s sun hat. That is my program. What have any of you to say against it?
THE SERGEANT. Not the program of a gentleman, as I understand the word, sir.
AUBREY. You cannot be a gentleman on less than fifty thousand a year nowadays, sergeant.
THE SERGEANT. You can in the army, by God.
AUBREY. Yes: because you drop bombs on sleeping villages. And even then you have to be an officer. Are you a gentleman?
THE SERGEANT. No, sir: it wouldnt pay me. I couldnt afford it.
Disturbance. A voice is heard in complaint and lamentation. It is that of the Elderly Lady, Mrs Mopply. She is pursuing Colonel Tallboys down the path through the gap, the lady distracted and insistent, the colonel almost equally distracted: she clutching him and stopping him: he breaking loose and trying to get away from her. She is dressed in black precisely as if she were in Cheltenham, except that she wears a sun helmet. He is equipped with a box of sketching materials slung over his shoulder, an easel, which he has tucked under his left arm, and a sun umbrella, a substantial affair of fawn lined with red, podgily rolled up, which he carries in his right hand.
MRS MOPPLY. I wont be patient. I wont be quiet. My child is being murdered.
TALLBOYS. I tell you she is not being murdered. Will you be good enough to excuse me whilst I attend to my business.
MRS MOPPLY. Your business is to save my child. She is starving.
TALLBOYS. Nonsense. Nobody starves in this country. There are plenty of dates. Will you be good enough –
MRS MOPPLY. Do you think my child can live on dates? She has to have a sole for breakfast, a cup of nourishing soup at eleven, a nice chop and a sweetbread for lunch, a pint of beef-tea with her ordinary afternoon tea, and a chicken and some lamb or veal –
TALLBOYS. Will you be good enough –
MRS MOPPLY. My poor delicate child with nothing to eat but dates! And she is the only one I have left: they were all delicate –
TALLBOYS. I really must – [He breaks away and hurries off along the beach past the Abode of Love].
MRS MOPPLY [running after him] Colonel, Colonel: you might have the decency to listen to a distracted mother for a moment. Colonel: my child is dying. She may be dead for all I know. And nobody is doing anything: nobody cares. Oh dear, wont you listen – [Her voice is lost in the distance].
Whilst they are staring mutely after the retreating pair, the patient, still in her slave girl attire, but with some brilliant variations, comes down the path.
THE PATIENT. My dream has become a nightmare. My mother has pursued me to these shores. I cannot shake her off. No woman can shake off her mother. There should be no mothers: there should be only women, strong women able to stand by themselves, not clingers. I would kill all the clingers. Mothers cling: daughters cling: we are all like drunken women clinging to lamp posts: none of us stands upright.
THE ELDER. There is great comfort in clinging, and great loneliness in standing alone.
THE PATIENT. Hallo! [She climbs to the St Pauls platform and peers into the cell]. A sententious anchorite! [To Aubrey]. Who is he?
AUBREY. The next worst thing to a mother: a father.
THE ELDER. A most unhappy father.
AUBREY. My father, in fact.
THE PATIENT. If only I had had a father to stand between me and my mother’s care. Oh, that I had been an orphan!
THE SERGEANT. You will be, miss, if the old lady drives the colonel too hard. She has been at him all the morning, ever since she arrived; and I know the colonel. He has a temper; and when it gives way, it’s a bit of high explosive. He’ll kill her if she pushes him too far.
THE PATIENT. Let him kill her. I am young and strong: I want a world without parents: there is no room for them in my dream. I shall found a sisterhood.
AUBREY. All right, Mops. Get thee to a nunnery.
THE PATIENT. It need not be a nunnery if men will come in without spoiling everything. But all the women must be rich. There must be no chill of poverty. There are plenty of rich women like me who hate being devoured by parasites.
AUBREY. Stop. You have the most disgusting mental pictures. I really cannot stand intellectual coarseness. Sweetie’s vulgarity I can forgive and even enjoy. But you say perfectly filthy things that stick in my mind, and break my spirit. I can bear no more of it. [He rises angrily and tries to escape by the beach past the Abode of Love].
SWEETIE. Youre dainty, arnt you? If chambermaids were as dainty as you, youd have to empty your own slops.
AUBREY [recoiling from her with a yell of disgust] You need not throw them in my teeth, you beast. [He sits in his former place, sulking].
THE ELDER. Silence, boy. These are home truths. They are good for you. [To the patient] May I ask young woman, what are the relations between you and my son, whom you seem to know.
THE PATIENT. Popsy stole my necklace, and got me to run away with him
by a wonderful speech he made about freedom and sunshine and lovely scenery. Sweetie made me write it all down and sell it to a tourist agency as an advertisement. And then I was devoured by parasites: by tourist agencies, steamboat companies, railways, motor car people, hotel keepers, dressmakers, servants, all trying to get my money by selling me things I dont really want; shoving me all over the globe to look at what they call new skies, though they know as well as I do that it is only the same old sky everywhere; and disabling me by doing all the things for me that I ought to do for myself to keep myself in health. They preyed on me to keep themselves alive: they pretended they were making me happy when it was only by drinking and drugging – cocktails and cocaine – that I could endure my life.
AUBREY. I regret to have to say it, Mops; but you have not the instincts of a lady. [He sits down moodily on a stone a little way up the path].
THE PATIENT. You fool, there is no such thing as a lady. I have the instincts of a good housekeeper: I want to clean up this filthy world and keep it clean. There must be other women who want it too. Florence Nightingale had the same instinct when she went to clean up the Crimean war. She wanted a sisterhood; but there wasnt one.
THE ELDER. There were several. But steeped in superstition, unfortunately.
THE PATIENT. Yes, all mixed up with things that I dont believe. Women have to set themselves apart to join them. I dont want to set myself apart. I want to have every woman in my sisterhood, and to have all the others strangled.
THE ELDER. Down! down! down! Even the young, the strong, the rich, the beautiful, feel that they are plunging into a bottomless pit.
THE SERGEANT. Your set, miss, if you will excuse me saying so, is only a small bit of the world. If you dont like the officers’ mess, the ranks are open to you. Look at Meek! That man could be an emperor if he laid his mind to it: but he’d rather be a private. He’s happier so.
THE PATIENT. I dont belong to the poor, and dont want to. I always knew that there were thousands of poor people; and I was taught to believe that they were poor because God arranged it that way to punish them for being dirty and drunken and dishonest, and not knowing how to read and write. But I didnt know that the rich were miserable. I didnt know that I was miserable. I didnt know that our respectability was uppish snobbery and our religion gluttonous selfishness, and that my soul was starving on them. I know now. I have found myself out thoroughly – in my dream.
THE ELDER. You are young. Some good man may cure you of this for a few happy years. When you fall in love, life will seem worth living.
THE PATIENT. I did fall in love. With that thing. And though I was never a hotel chambermaid I got tired of him sooner than Sweetie did. Love gets people into difficulties, not out of them. No more lovers for me: I want a sisterhood. Since I came here I have been wanting to join the army, like Joan of Arc. It’s a brotherhood, of a sort.
THE SERGEANT. Yes, miss: that is so; and there used to be a peace of mind in the army that you could find nowhere else. But the war made an end of that. You see, miss, the great principle of soldiering, I take it, is that the world is kept going by the people who want the right thing killing the people who want the wrong thing. When the soldier is doing that, he is doing the work of God, which my mother brought me up to do. But thats a very different thing from killing a man because he’s a German and he killing you because youre an Englishman. We were not killing the right people in 1915. We werent even killing the wrong people. It was innocent men killing one another.
THE PATIENT. Just for the fun of it.
THE SERGEANT. No, miss: it was no fun. For the misery of it.
THE PATIENT. For the devilment of it, then.
THE SERGEANT. For the devilment of the godless rulers of this world. Those that did the killing hadnt even the devilment to comfort them: what comfort is there in screwing on a fuse or pulling a string when the devilment it makes is from three to forty miles off, and you dont know whether you have only made a harmless hole in the ground or blown up a baby in its cradle that might have been your own? That wasnt devilment: it was damnation. No, miss: the bottom has come out of soldiering. What the gentleman here said about our all falling into a bottomless pit came home to me. I feel like that too.
THE ELDER. Lost souls, all of us.
THE PATIENT. No: only lost dogs. Cheer up, old man: the lost dogs always find their way home. [The voice of the Elderly Lady is heard returning]. Oh! here she comes again!
Mrs Mopply is still pursuing the colonel, who is walking doggedly and steadily away from her, with closed lips and a dangerous expression on his set features.
MRS MOPPLY. You wont even speak to me. It’s a disgrace. I will send a cable message home to the Government about it. You were sent out here to rescue my daughter from these dreadful brigands. Why is nothing being done? What are the relations between yourself and that disgraceful countess who ought to have her coronet stripped off her back? You are all in a conspiracy to murder my poor lost darling child. You are in league with the brigands. You are –
The Colonel turns at bay, and brings down his umbrella whack on poor Mrs Mopply’s helmet.
MRS MOPPLY. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! [With a series of short, dry, detached screams she totters and flutters back along the beach out of sight like a wounded bird].
General stupefaction. All stare at the Colonel aghast. The Sergeant rises in amazement, and remains standing afterwards as a matter of military etiquette.
THE PATIENT. Oh, if only someone had done that to her twenty years ago, how different my childhood would have been! But I must see to the poor old dear. [She runs after her mother].
AUBREY. Colonel: you have our full, complete, unreserved sympathy. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. But that does not alter the fact that the man who would raise his hand to a woman, save in the way of kindness, is unworthy the name of Briton.
TALLBOYS. I am perfectly aware of that, sir. I need no reminder. The lady is entitled to an apology. She shall have it.
THE ELDER. But have you considered the possibility of a serious injury –
TALLBOYS [cutting him short] My umbrella is quite uninjured, thank you. The subject is now closed. [He sits down on the stone below St Pauls recently vacated by Aubrey. His manner is so decisive that nobody dares carry the matter further].
As they sit uneasily seeking one another’s eyes and avoiding them again, dumbfounded by the violence of the catastrophe, a noise like that of a machine gun in action reaches their ears from afar. It increases to shattering intensity as it approaches. They all put their fingers to their ears. It diminishes slightly, then suddenly rises to a climax of speed and uproar, and stops.
TALLBOYS. Meek.
AUBREY. Meek.
SWEETIE. Meek.
THE ELDER. What is this? Why do you all say Meek?
Meek, dusty and gritty, but very alert, comes down the path through the gap with a satchel of papers.
TALLBOYS. My dear Meek, can you not be content with a motor cycle of ordinary horse power? Must you always travel at eighty miles an hour?
MEEK. I have good news for you, Colonel; and good news should travel fast.
TALLBOYS. For me?
MEEK. Your K.C.B., sir. [Presenting a paper] Honors list by wireless.
TALLBOYS [rising joyously to take the paper] Ah! Congratulate me, my friends. My dear Sarah is Lady Tallboys at last. [He resumes his seat and pores over the paper].
AUBREY
[together]
Splendid!
THE SERGEANT
You deserve it, sir, if I may say so.
SWEETIE
Delighted, I am sure.
THE ELDER. May I crave to know the nature of the distinguished service which has won this official recognition, sir?
TALLBOYS. I have won the battle of the maroons. I have suppressed brigandage here. I have rescued a British lady from the clutches of the brigands. The Government is preparing for a general election, and has had to make the most of these modest achievements.
THE ELDER. Brigands! Are there any here?
TALLBOYS. None.
THE ELDER. But – ? The British lady? In their clutches?
TALLBOYS. She has been in my clutches, and perfecty safe, all the time.
THE ELDER [more and more puzzled] Oh! Then the battle of the –
TALLBOYS. Won by Private Meek. I had nothing whatever to do with it.
AUBREY. I invented the brigands and the British lady. [To Tallboys] By the way, Colonel, the impressive old party in the shrine is my father.
TALLBOYS. Indeed! Happy to meet you, sir, though I cannot congratulate you on your son, except in so far as you have brought into the world the most abandoned liar I have ever met.
