by Dan Laurence
PROTEUS. Right. Let us spoil the Egyptians.
BOANERGES [with Roman dignity] My lunch will cost me one and sixpence; and I shall pay for it myself [he stalks out].
AMANDA [calling after him] Dont make a beast of yourself, Bill. Ta ta!
PROTEUS. Come on, come on: it’s ever so late.
They all hurry out. Sempronius and Pamphilius, entering, have to stand aside to let them pass before returning to their desks. Proteus, with Amanda on his arm, stops in the doorway on seeing them.
PROTEUS. Have you two been listening, may I ask?
PAMPHILIUS. Well, it would be rather inconvenient wouldnt it, if we had to be told everything that passed?
SEMPRONIUS. Once for all, Mr Proteus, the King’s private secretaries must hear everything, see everything, and know everything.
PROTEUS. Singularly enough, Mr Sempronius, I havnt the slightest objection [he goes].
AMANDA [going with him] Goodbye, Semmy. So long, Pam.
SEMPRONIUS.
[seating themselves at their writing tables and yawning prodigiously] Ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-fff!!!
PAMPHILIUS.
AN INTERLUDE
* * *
Orinthia’s boudoir at half-past fifteen on the same day. She is at her writing-table scribbling notes. She is romantically beautiful, and beautifully dressed. As the table is against the wall near a corner, with the other wall on her left, her back alone is visible from the middle of the room. The door is near the corner diagonally opposite. There is a large settee in the middle of the room.
The King enters and waits on the threshold.
* * *
ORINTHIA [crossly, without looking round] Who is that?
MAGNUS. His Majesty the King.
ORINTHIA. I dont want to see him.
MAGNUS. How soon will you be disengaged?
ORINTHIA. I didnt say I was engaged. Tell the king I dont want to see him.
MAGNUS. He awaits your pleasure [he comes in and seats himself on the settee].
ORINTHIA. Go away. [A pause]. I wont speak to you. [Another pause]. If my private rooms are to be broken into at any moment because they are in the palace, and the king is not a gentleman, I must take a house outside. I am writing to the agents about one now.
MAGNUS. What is our quarrel today, belovéd ?
ORINTHIA. Ask your conscience.
MAGNUS. I have none when you are concerned. You must tell me.
She takes a book from the table and rises; then sweeps superbly forward to the settee and flings the book into his hands.
ORINTHIA. There!
MAGNUS. What is this?
ORINTHIA. Page 16. Look at it.
MAGNUS [looking at the title on the back of the book] “Songs of our Great Great Grandparents.” What page did you say?
ORINTHIA [between her teeth] Six-teen.
MAGNUS [opening the book and finding the page, his eye lighting up with recognition as he looks at it] Ah! The Pilgrim of Love!
ORINTHIA. Read the first three words—if you dare.
MAGNUS [smiling as he caresses the phrase] “Orinthia, my belovéd”.
ORINTHIA. The name you pretended to invent specially for me, the only woman in the world for you. Picked up out of the rubbish basket in a secondhand bookseller’s! And I thought you were a poet!
MAGNUS. Well, one poet may consecrate a name for another. Orinthia is a name full of magic for me. It could not be that if I had invented it myself. I heard it at a concert of ancient music when I was a child; and I have treasured it ever since.
ORINTHIA. You always have a pretty excuse. You are the King of liars and humbugs. You cannot understand how a falsehood like that wounds me.
MAGNUS [remorsefully, stretching out his arms towards her] Belovéd: I am sorry.
ORINTHIA. Put your hands in your pockets: they shall not touch me ever again.
MAGNUS [obeying] Dont pretend to be hurt unless you really are, dearest. It wrings my heart.
ORINTHIA. Since when have you set up a heart? Did you buy that, too, secondhand?
MAGNUS. I have something in me that winces when you are hurt—or pretend to be.
ORINTHIA [contemptuously] Yes: I have only to squeal, and you will take me up and pet me as you would a puppy run over by a car. [Sitting down beside him, but beyond arm’s length] That is what you give me when my heart demands love. I had rather you kicked me.
MAGNUS. I should like to kick you sometimes, when you are specially aggravating. But I shouldnt do it well. I should be afraid of hurting you all the time.
ORINTHIA. I believe you would sign my death warrant without turning a hair.
MAGNUS. That is true, in a way. It is wonderful how subtle your mind is, as far as it goes.
ORINTHIA. It does not go as far as yours, I suppose.
MAGNUS. I dont know. Our minds go together half way. Whether it is that your mind stops there or else that the road forks, and you take the high road and I take the low road, I cannot say; but somehow after a certain point we lose one another.
ORINTHIA. And then you go back to your Amandas and Lysistratas : creatures whose idea of romance is a minister in love with a department, and whose bedside books are blue books.
MAGNUS. They are not always thinking of some man or other. That is a rather desirable extension of their interests, in my opinion. If Lysistrata had a lover I should not be interested in him in the least; and she would bore me to distraction if she could talk of nothing else. But I am very much interested in her department. Her devotion to it gives us a topic of endless interest.
ORINTHIA. Well, go to her: I am not detaining you. But dont tell her that I have nothing to talk about but men; for that is a lie; and you know it.
MAGNUS. It is, as you say, a lie; and I know it. But I did not say it.
ORINTHIA. You implied it. You meant it. When those ridiculous political women are with us you talk to them all the time, and never say a word to me.
MAGNUS. Nor you to me. We cannot talk to one another in public: we have nothing to say that could be said before other people. Yet we find enough to say to one another when we are alone together. Would you change that if you could?
ORINTHIA. You are as slippery as an eel; but you shall not slip through my fingers. Why do you surround yourself with political bores and frumps and dowdy busybodies who cant talk: they can only debate about their dull departments and their fads and their election chances. [Rising impatiently] Who could talk to such people? If it were not for the nonentities of wives and husbands they drag about with them, there would be nobody to talk to at all. And even they can talk of nothing but the servants and the baby. [Suddenly returning to her seat] Listen to me, Magnus. Why can you not be a real king?
MAGNUS. In what way, belovédest?
ORINTHIA. Send all these stupid people packing. Make them do their drudgeries in their departments without bothering you about it, as you make your servants here sweep the floors and dust the furniture. Live a really noble and beautiful life—a kingly life—with me. What you need to make you a real king is a real queen.
MAGNUS. But I have got one.
ORINTHIA. Oh, you are blind. You are worse than blind: you have low tastes. Heaven is offering you a rose; and you cling to a cabbage.
MAGNUS [laughing] That is a very apt metaphor, belovéd. But what wise man, if you force him to choose between doing without roses and doing without cabbages, would not secure the cabbages? Besides, all these old married cabbages were once roses; and, though young things like you dont remember that, their husbands do. They dont notice the change. Besides, you should know better than anyone else that when a man gets tired of his wife and leaves her it is never because she has lost her good looks. The new love is often older and uglier than the old.
ORINTHIA. Why should I know it better than anyone else?
MAGNUS. Why, because you have been married twice; and both your husbands have run away from you to much plainer and stupider women. When I begged your present husband to come back to
court for a while for the sake of appearances he said no man could call his soul his own in the same house with you. And yet that man was utterly infatuated with your beauty when he married you. Your first husband actually forced a good wife to divorce him so that he might marry you; but before two years were out he went back to her and died in her arms, poor chap.
ORINTHIA. Shall I tell you why these men could not live with me? It was because I am a thoroughbred, and they are only hacks. They had nothing against me: I was perfectly faithful to them. I kept their houses beautifully: I fed them better than they had ever been fed in their lives. But because I was higher than they were, and greater, they could not stand the strain of trying to live up to me. So I let them go their way, poor wretches, back to their cabbages. Look at the old creature Ignatius is living with now! She gives you his real measure.
MAGNUS. An excellent woman. Ignatius is quite happy with her. I never saw a man so changed.
ORINTHIA. Just what he is fit for. Commonplace. Bourgeoise. She trots through the streets shopping. [Rising] I tread the plains of Heaven. Common women cannot come where I am; and common men find themselves out and slink away.
MAGNUS. It must be magnificent to have the consciousness of a goddess without ever doing a thing to justify it.
ORINTHIA. Give me a goddess’s work to do; and I will do it. I will even stoop to a queen’s work if you will share the throne with me. But do not pretend that people become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great, if the great things come along. But they are great just the same when the great things do not come along. If I never did anything but sit in this room and powder my face and tell you what a clever fool you are, I should still be heavens high above the millions of common women who do their domestic duty, and sacrifice themselves, and run Trade departments and all the rest of the vulgarities. Has all the tedious public work you have done made you any the better? I have seen you before and after your boasted strokes of policy; and you were the same man, and would have been the same man to me and to yourself if you had never done them. Thank God my self-consciousness is something nobler than vulgar conceit in having done something. It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me. If you want deeds, go to your men and women of action, as you call them, who are all in a conspiracy to pretend that the mechanical things they do, the foolhardy way they risk their worthless lives, or their getting up in the morning at four and working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, like coral insects, make them great. What are they for? these dull slaves? To keep the streets swept for me. To enable me to reign over them in beauty like the stars without having anything to do with their slavery except to console it, to dazzle it, to enable them to forget it in adoring dreams of me. Am I not worth it? [She sits, fascinating him]. Look into my eyes and tell the truth. Am I worth it or not?
MAGNUS. To me, who love beauty, yes. But you should hear the speeches Balbus makes about your pension.
ORINTHIA. And my debts: do not forget my debts, my mortgages, the bill of sale on my furniture, the thousands I have had from the moneylenders to save me from being sold up because I will not borrow from my friends. Lecture me again about them; but do not dare pretend that the people grudge me my pension. They glory in it, and in my extravagance, as you call it.
MAGNUS [more gravely] By the way, Orinthia, when your dressmakers took up that last bill for you, they were speculating, were they not, in your chances of becoming my queen some day?
ORINTHIA. Well, what if they were?
MAGNUS. They would hardly have ventured on that without a hint from somebody. Was it from you?
ORINTHIA. You think me capable of that! You have a very low side to you, Magnus.
MAGNUS. No doubt: like other mortal fabrics I have a wrong side and a right side. But it is no use your giving yourself airs, belovédest. You are capable of anything. Do you deny that there was some suggestion of the kind?
ORINTHIA. How dare you challenge me to deny it? I never deny. Of course there was a suggestion of the kind.
MAGNUS. I thought so.
ORINTHIA. Oh, stupid! stupid! Go keep a grocer’s shop: that is what you are fit for. Do you suppose that the suggestion came from me? Why, you great oaf, it is in the air: when my dressmaker hinted at it I told her that if she ever dared to repeat such a thing she should never get another order from me. But can I help people seeing what is as plain as the sun in the heavens? [Rising again] Everyone knows that I am the real queen. Everyone treats me as the real queen. They cheer me in the streets. When I open one of the art exhibitions or launch a new ship they crowd the place out. I am one of Nature’s queens; and they know it. If you do not, you are not one of Nature’s kings.
MAGNUS. Sublime! Nothing but genuine inspiration could give a woman such cheek.
ORINTHIA. Yes: inspiration, not cheek. [Sitting as before] Magnus: when are you going to face my destiny, and your own?
MAGNUS. But my wife? the queen? What is to become of my poor dear Jemima?
ORINTHIA. Oh, drown her: shoot her: tell your chauffeur to drive her into the Serpentine and leave her there. The woman makes you ridiculous.
MAGNUS. I dont think I should like that. And the public would think it illnatured.
ORINTHIA. Oh, you know what I mean. Divorce her. Make her divorce you. It is quite easy. That was how Ronny married me. Everybody does it when they need a change.
MAGNUS. But I cant imagine what I should do without Jemima.
ORINTHIA. Nobody else can imagine what you do with her. But you need not do without her. You can see as much of her as you like when we are married. I shall not be jealous and make scenes.
MAGNUS. That is very magnanimous of you. But I am afraid it does not settle the difficulty. Jemima would not think it right to keep up her present intimacy with me if I were married to you.
ORINTHIA. What a woman! Would she be in any worse position then than I am in now?
MAGNUS. No.
ORINTHIA. You mean, then, that you do not mind placing me in a position that you do not think good enough for her?
MAGNUS. Orinthia: I did not place you in your present position. You placed yourself in it. I could not resist you. You gathered me like a daisy.
ORINTHIA. Did you want to resist me?
MAGNUS. Oh no. I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
ORINTHIA. Well, then, what are we talking about?
MAGNUS. I forget. I think I was explaining the impossibility of my wife changing places with you.
ORINTHIA. Why impossible, pray?
MAGNUS. I cannot make you understand: you see you have never been really married, though you have led two captives to the altar, and borne children to one of them. Being your husband is only a job for which one man will do as well as another, and which the last man holds subject to six months notice in the divorce court. Being my wife is something quite different. The smallest derogation to Jemima’s dignity would hit me like the lash of a whip across the face. About yours, somehow, I do not care a rap.
ORINTHIA. Nothing can derogate from my dignity: it is divine. Hers is only a convention: that is why you tremble when it is challenged.
MAGNUS. Not a bit. It is because she is a part of my real workaday self. You belong to fairyland.
ORINTHIA. Suppose she dies! Will you die too?
MAGNUS. Not immediately. I shall have to carry on as best I can without her, though the prospect terrifies me.
ORINTHIA. Might not carrying on without her include marrying me?
MAGNUS. My dear Orinthia, I had rather marry the devil. Being a wife is not your job.
ORINTHIA. You think so because you have no imagination. And you dont know me because I have never let you really possess me. I should make you more happy than any man has ever yet been on earth.
MAGNUS. I defy you to make me more happy than our strangely innocent relations have already made me.
ORINTHIA [rising restlessly] You talk like
a child or a saint. [Turning on him] I can give you a new life: one of which you have no conception. I can give you beautiful, wonderful children: have you ever seen a lovelier boy than my Basil?
MAGNUS. Your children are beautiful; but they are fairy children; and I have several very real ones already. A divorce would not sweep them out of the way of the fairies.
ORINTHIA. In short, when your golden moment comes—when the gates of heaven open before you, you are afraid to come out of your pigsty.
MAGNUS. If I am a pig, a pigsty is the proper place for me.