by Dan Laurence
ALASTAIR. Well, though you mightnt think it, she can be frightfully fascinating when she really wants to be.
EPIFANIA. Why might he not think it? What do you mean?
ALASTAIR. He knows what I mean.
EPIFANIA. Some silly joke, I suppose.
ADRIAN. Dont be absurd, Fitzfassenden. Your wife is the most adorable woman on earth.
EPIFANIA. Not here, Adrian. If you are going to talk like that, take me away to some place where we can be alone.
ALASTAIR. Do, for heaven’s sake, before she drives us all crazy.
SAGAMORE. Steady! steady! I hardly know where I am. You are all consulting me; but none of you has given me any instructions. Had you not better all be divorced?
EPIFANIA. What is the creature to live on? He has nothing: he would have had to become a professional boxer or tennis player if his uncle had not pushed him into an insurance office, where he was perfectly useless.
ALASTAIR. Look here, Eppy: Sagamore doesnt want to hear all this.
EPIFANIA. He does. He shall. Be silent. When Alastair proposed to me – he was too great an idiot to comprehend his own audacity – I kept my promise to my father. I handed him a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds. ‘Make that into fifty thousand within six months’ I said ‘and I am yours.’
ADRIAN. You never told me this.
EPIFANIA. Why should I? It is a revolting story.
ALASTAIR. What is there revolting about it? Did I make good or did I not? Did I go through hell to get that money and win you or did I not?
ADRIAN [amazed] Do I understand you to say, Alastair, that you made fifty thousand pounds in six months?
ALASTAIR. Why not?
EPIFANIA. You may well look incredulous, Adrian. But he did. Yes: this imbecile made fifty thousand pounds and won Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga for his bride. You will not believe me when I tell you that the possession of all that money, and the consciousness of having made it himself, gave him a sort of greatness. I am impulsive: I kept my word and married him instantly. Then, too late, I found out how he had made it.
ALASTAIR. Well, how did I make it? By my own brains.
EPIFANIA. Brains! By your own folly, your ignorance, your criminal instincts, and the luck that attends the half-witted. You won my hand, for which all Europe was on its knees to me. What you deserved was five years penal servitude.
ALASTAIR. Five years! Fifteen, more likely. That was what I risked for you. And what did I get by it? Life with you was worse than any penal servitude.
EPIFANIA. It would have been heaven to you if Nature had fitted you for such a companionship as mine. But what was it for me? No man had been good enough for me. I was like a princess in a fairy tale offering all men alive my hand and fortune if they could turn my hundred and fifty pound cheque into fifty thousand within six months. Able men, brilliant men, younger sons of the noblest families either refused the test or failed. Why? Because they were too honest or too proud. This thing succeeded; and I found myself tied for life to an insect.
ALASTAIR. You may say what you like; but you were just as much in love with me as I was with you.
EPIFANIA. Well, you were young; you were well shaped; your lawn tennis was outstanding; you were a magnificent boxer; and I was excited by physical contact with you.
SAGAMORE. Is it necessary to be so very explicit, Mrs Fitzfassenden?
EPIFANIA. Julius Sagamore: you may be made of sawdust; but I am made of flesh and blood. Alastair is physically attractive: that is my sole excuse for having married him. Will you have the face to pretend that he has any mental charm?
ADRIAN. But how did he make fifty thousand pounds? Was it on the Stock Exchange?
EPIFANIA. Nonsense! the creature does not know the difference between a cumulative preference and a deferred ordinary. He would not know even how to begin.
ADRIAN. But how did he begin? My bank balance at present is somewhere about a hundred and fifty. I should very much like to know how to make it up to fifty thousand. You are so rich, Epifania, that every decent man who approaches you feels like a needy adventurer. You dont know how a man to whom a hundred pounds is a considerable sum feels in the arms of a woman to whom a million is mere pin money.
EPIFANIA. Nor do you know what it feels like to be in the arms of a man and know that you could buy him up twenty times over and never miss the price.
ADRIAN. If I give you my hundred and fifty pounds, will you invest it for me?
EPIFANIA. It is not worth investing. You cannot make money on the Stock Exchange until your weekly account is at least seventy thousand. Do not meddle with money, Adrian: you do not understand it. I will give you all you need.
ADRIAN. No, thank you: I should lose my self-respect. I prefer the poor man’s luxury of paying for your cabs and flowers and theatre tickets and lunches at the Ritz, and lending you all the little sums you have occasion for when we are together.
The rest all stare at this light on Epifania’s habits.
EPIFANIA. It is quite true: I never have any pocket money: I must owe you millions in odd five pound notes. I will tell my bankers that you want a thousand on account.
ADRIAN. But I dont. I love lending you fivers. Only, as they run through my eomparatively slender resources at an appalling rate, I should honestly like a few lessons from Alastair in the art of turning hundreds into tens of thousands.
EPIFANIA. His example would be useless to you, Adrian, because Alastair is one of Nature’s marvels; and there is nothing marvellous about you except your appetite. Listen. On each of his birthdays his aunt had presented him with a gramophone record of the singing of the celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso. Now it so happens that Nature, in one of her most unaccountable caprices, has endowed Alastair with a startlingly loud singing voice of almost supernatural range. He can sing high notes never before attained by mortal man. He found that he could imitate gramophone records with the greatest facility; and he became convinced that he could make a fortune as an operatic tenor. The first use he made of my money was to give fifty pounds to the manager of some trumpery little opera company which was then on its last legs in the suburbs to allow him to appear for one night in one of Caruso’s most popular roles. He actually took me to hear his performance.
ALASTAIR. It wasnt my fault. I can sing Caruso’s head off. It was a plot. The regular tenor of the company: a swine that could hardly reach B flat without breaking his neck, paid a lot of blackguards to go into the gallery and boo me.
EPIFANIA. My dear Alastair, the simple truth is that Nature, when she endowed you with your amazing voice, unfortunately omitted to provide you with a musical ear. You can bellow loudly enough to drown ten thousand bulls; but you are always at least a quarter tone sharp or flat as the case may be. I laughed until I fell on the floor of my box in screaming hysterics. The audience hooted and booed; but they could not make themselves heard above your roaring. At last the chorus dragged you off the stage; and the regular tenor finished the performance only to find that the manager had absconded with my fifty pounds and left the whole company penniless. The prima donna was deaf in the left ear, into which you had sung with all your force. I had to pay all their salaries and send them home.
ALASTAIR. I tell you it was a plot. Why shouldnt people like my singing? I can sing louder than any tenor on the stage. I can sing higher.
EPIFANIA. Alastair: you cannot resist a plot when the whole world is a party to it.
ADRIAN. Still, this does not explain how Alastair made the fifty thousand pounds.
EPIFANIA. I leave him to tell that disgraceful tale himself. I believe he is proud of it. [She sits down disdainfully in the vacant chair].
ALASTAIR. Well, it worked out all right. But it was a near thing, I tell you. What I did was this. I had a hundred pounds left after the opera stunt. I met an American. I told him I was crazy about a woman who wouldnt marry me unless I made fifty thousand in six months, and that I had only a hundred pounds in the world. He jumped up and said ‘Why, man alive, if
you have a hundred you can open a bank account and get a cheque book.’ I said ‘What good is a cheque book?’ He said ‘Are we partners, fifty fifty?’ So I said yes: what else could I say? That very day we started in. We lodged the money and got a book of a hundred cheques. We took a theatre. We engaged a first rate cast. We got a play. We got a splendid production: the scenery was lovely: the girls were lovely: the principal woman was an angry-eyed creature with a queer foreign voice and a Hollywood accent, just the sort the public loves. We never asked the price of anything: we just went in up to our necks for thousands and thousands.
ADRIAN. But how did you pay for all these things?
ALASTAIR. With our cheques, of course. Didnt I tell you we had a cheque book?
ADRIAN. But when the hundred was gone the cheques must have been dishonored.
ALASTAIR. Not one of them. We kited them all. But it was a heartbreaking job.
ADRIAN. I dont understand. What does kiting mean?
SAGAMORE. It is quite simple. You pay for something with a cheque after the banks have closed for the day: if on Saturday or just before bank holiday all the better. Say the cheque is for a hundred pounds and you have not a penny at the bank. You must then induce a friend or a hotel manager to cash another cheque for one hundred pounds for you. That provides for the previous cheque; but it obliges you, on pain of eighteen months hard labor, to induce another friend or hotel manager to cash another cheque for you for two hundred pounds. And so you go on spending and kiting from hundreds to thousands and from risks of eighteen months imprisonment to five years, ten years, fourteen years even.
ALASTAIR. If you think that was an easy job, just try it yourself: thats all. I dream of it sometimes: it’s my worst nightmare. Why, my partner and I never saw that theatre! never saw the play! until the first night: we were signing cheques and kiting them all the time. Of course it was easier after a while, because as we paid our way all right we found it easier to get credit; and the biggest expenses didnt come until after the play was produced and the money was coming in. I could have done it for half the money; but the American could only keep himself up to the excitement of it by paying twice as much as we needed for everything and shoving shares in it on people for nothing but talk. But it didnt matter when the money began to come in. My! how it did come in! The whole town went mad about the angry-eyed woman. It rained money in bucketsful. It went to my head like drink. It went to the American’s head. It went to the head of the American’s American friends. They bought all the rights: the film rights, the translation rights, the touring rights, all sorts of rights that I never knew existed, and began selling them to one another until everybody in London and New York and Hollywood had a rake-off on them. Then the American bought all the rights back for five hundred thousand dollars, and sold them to an American syndicate for a million. It took six more Americans to do it; and every one of them had to have a rake-off; but all I wanted was fifty thousand pounds; and I cleared out with that and came swanking back to claim Eppy’s hand. She thought I was great. I was great: the money made me great: I tell you I was drunk with it: I was another man. You may believe it or not as you like; but my hats were really too small for me.
EPIFANIA. It is quite true. The creature was not used to money; and it transfigured him. I, poor innocent, had no suspicion that money could work such miracles; for I had possessed millions in my cradle; and it meant no more to me than the air I breathed.
SAGAMORE. But just now, when I suggested a divorce, you asked how he was to live. What has become of the fifty thousand pounds?
EPIFANIA. He lost it all in three weeks. He bought a circus with it. He thought everything he touched would turn into gold. I had to liquidate that circus a month later. He was about to turn the wild beasts loose and run away when I intervened. I was down four hundred and thirty pounds sixteen and sevenpence by the transaction.
ALASTAIR. Was it my fault? The elephant got influenza. The Ministry of Health closed me down and wouldnt let me move on because the animals might carry foot-and-mouth disease.
EPIFANIA. At all events, the net result was that instead of his being fifty thousand pounds to the good I was four hundred and thirty pounds to the bad. Instead of bringing me the revenues of a prince and a hero he cost me the allowance of a worm. And now he has the audacity to ask for a divorce.
ALASTAIR. No I dont. It was Sagamore who suggested that. How can I afford to let you divorce me? As your husband I enjoy a good deal of social consideration; and the tradesmen give me unlimited credit.
EPIFANIA. For stockings, among other things.
PATRICIA. Oh [she weeps]! Does she pay for them, Ally?
ALASTAIR. Never mind, dear: I have shewn that I can make money when I am put to it; and I will make it again and buy you all the stockings you need out of my own earnings. [He rises and goes behind her chair to take her cheeks in his hands]. There, darling: dont cry.
EPIFANIA. There! They think they are married already!
SAGAMORE. But the matter is not in your hands, Mr Fitzfassenden. Mrs Fitzfassenden can divorce you whether you like it or not. The evidence is that on a recent occasion you left your wife and took refuge in the arms of Miss Smith. The Court will give Mrs Fitzfassenden a decree on that.
PATRICIA [consoled and plucky] Well, let it. I can support Alastair until he has time to make another fortune. You all think him a fool; but he’s a dear good boy; and it just disgusts me the way you all turn against him, and the way his wife treats him as if he were dirt under her feet. What would she be without her money, I’d like to know?
EPIFANIA. Nobody is anybody without money, Seedystockings. My dear old father taught me that. ‘Stick to your money’ he said ‘and all the other things shall be added unto you.’ He said it was in the Bible. I have never verified the quotation; but I have never forgotten it. I have stuck to my money; and I shall continue to stick to it. Rich as I am, I can hardly forgive Alastair for letting me down by four hundred and thirty pounds.
ALASTAIR. Sixteen and sevenpence! Stingy beast. But I will pay it.
PATRICIA. You shall, dear. I will sell out my insurance and give it to you.
EPIFANIA. May I have that in writing, Miss Smith?
ALASTAIR. Oh, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you greedy pig. It was your own fault. Why did you let the elephant go for thirty pounds? He cost two hundred.
SAGAMORE. Do not let us wander from the point.
EPIFANIA. What is the point, pray?
SAGAMORE. The point is that you can obtain a divorce if you wish.
EPIFANIA. I dont wish. Do you think I am going to be dragged through the divorce court and have my picture in the papers with that thing? To have the story of my infatuation told in headlines in every rag in London! Besides, it is convenient to be married. It is respectable. It keeps other men off. It gives me a freedom that I could not enjoy as a single woman. I have become accustomed to a husband. No: decidedly I will not divorce Alastair – at least until I can find a substitute whom I really want.
PATRICIA. You couldnt divorce him unless he chose to let you. Alastair’s too much the gentleman to mention it; but you know very well that your own behavior hasnt been so very nunlike that you dare have it shewn up in court.
EPIFANIA. Alastair was the first man I ever loved; and I hope he will not be the last. But legal difficulties do not exist for people with money. At all events, as Alastair cannot afford to divorce me, and I have no intention of divorcing him, the question does not arise. What o’clock is it?
ALASTAIR. I really think, Eppy, you might buy a wrist watch. I have told you so over and over again.
EPIFANIA. Why should I go to the expense of buying a wrist watch when everyone else has one; and I have nothing to do but ask? I have not carried a watch since I lost the key of my father’s old repeater.
PATRICIA. It is ten minutes past twelve.
EPIFANIA. Gracious! I have missed my lesson. How annoying!
ALASTAIR. Your lesson? What are you learning now, may I
ask?
EPIFANIA. All-in wrestling. When you next indulge in your favorite sport of wife beating, look out for a surprise. What did I come here for, Mr Sagamore?
SAGAMORE. To give me instructions about your will.
ALASTAIR. She makes a new will every time she loses her temper, Sagamore. Jolly good business for you.
EPIFANIA. Do be quiet, Alastair. You forget the dignity of your position as my husband. Mr Sagamore: I have changed my mind about my will. And I shall overlook your attempt to poison me.
SAGAMORE. Thank you.
EPIFANIA. What do I owe you for this abortive consultation?
SAGAMORE. Thirteen and fourpence, if you please.
EPIFANIA. I do not carry money about with me. Adrian: can you lend me thirteen and fourpence?
