Plays Political

by Dan Laurence

  Someone knocks at the door.

  SHE. Shsh! Someone knocking.

  They separate hastily, he going to the stove and she composing herself in her chair.

  HE. Come in! Entrez! Herein!

  A gaitered English bishop enters. He is old, soft, gentle and rather infirm.

  THE BISHOP. Excuse me; but does anyone here speak English?

  HE [putting on all the style he is capable of] My native language, my lord. Also this lady’s. [Exchange of bows]. Will you take a pew, my lord?

  BISHOP [sitting] Thank you. Your stairs are somewhat trying to me: I am not so young as I was; and they tell me I must be careful not to overstrain my heart. The journey to Geneva is a terrible one for a man of my years. Nothing but the gravest emergency could have forced me to undertake it.

  HE. Is the emergency one in which we can have the honor of assisting you, my lord?

  BISHOP. Your advice would be invaluable to me; for I really dont know what to do or where to go here. I am met with indifference—with apathy—when I reveal a state of things that threatens the very existence of civilized society, of religion, of the family, of the purity of womanhood, and even, they tell me, of our commercial prosperity. Are people mad? Dont they know? Dont they care?

  HE. My! my! my! [He takes a chair to the end of the table nearest the stove] Pray be seated, my lord. What has happened?

  BISHOP [sinking into the chair] Sir: they are actually preaching Communism in my diocese. Communism!!! My butler, who has been in the palace for forty years, a most devoted and respectable man, tells me that my footman—I am the only bishop in England who can afford to keep a footman now—that my footman is a cell.

  HE. A sell? You mean that he has disappointed you?

  BISHOP. No: not that sort of cell. C.E. double L. A communist cell. Like a bee in a hive. Planted on me by the Communists to make their dreadful propaganda in my household! And my grandson at Oxford has joined a Communist club. The Union—the Oxford Union—has raised the red flag. It is dreadful. And my granddaughter a nudist! I was graciously allowed to introduce my daughters to good Queen Victoria. If she could see my granddaughter she would call the police. Is it any wonder that I have a weak heart? Shock after shock. My own footman, son of the most respectable parents, and actually an Anglo-Catholic!

  HE. I can hardly believe it, my lord. What times we are living in!

  SHE [with her most official air] Surely this is a case for the International Court at the Hague, my lord.

  BISHOP. Yes, yes. An invaluable suggestion. The Court must stop the Bolshies from disseminating their horrible doctrines in England. It is in the treaties.

  He is interrupted by the entrance of a very smart Russian gentleman, whom he receives with pleased recognition.

  BISHOP [rising] Ah, my dear sir, we meet again. [To the others] I had the pleasure of making this gentleman’s acquaintance last night at my hotel. His interest in the Church of England kept us up talking long after my usual hour for retirement. [Shaking his hand warmly] How do you do, my dear friend? how do you do?

  RUSSIAN. Quite well, thank you, my lord. Am I interrupting your business?

  BISHOP. No no no no: I beg you to remain. You will help: you will sympathize.

  RUSSIAN. You are very kind, my lord: I am quite at your service.

  BISHOP [murmuring gratefully as he resumes his seat] Thank you. Thank you.

  RUSSIAN. Let me introduce myself. I am Commissar Posky of the Sovnarkom and Politbureau, Soviet delegate to the League Council.

  BISHOP [aghast, staggering to his feet] You are a Bolshevik!

  COMMISSAR. Assuredly.

  The Bishop faints. General concern. The men rush to him.

  COMMISSAR. Do not lift him yet. He will recover best as he is.

  SHE. I have some iced lemonade in my thermos. Shall I give him some?

  BISHOP [supine] Where am I? Has anything happened?

  HE. You are in the office of the Intellectual Co-operation Committee in Geneva. You have had a slight heart attack.

  COMMISSAR. Lie still, comrade. You will be quite yourself presently.

  BISHOP [sitting up] It is not my heart. [To the Commissar] It is moral shock. You presented yourself to me yesterday as a cultivated and humane gentleman, interested in the Church of England. And now it turns out that you are a Bolshie. What right had you to practise such a cruel imposture on me? [He rises: the Commissar helps him] No: I can rise without assistance, thank you. [He attempts to do so, but collapses into the arms of the Commissar].

  COMMISSAR. Steady, comrade.

  BISHOP [regaining his seat with the Commissar’s assistance] Again I must thank you. But I shudder at the touch of your bloodstained hands.

  COMMISSAR. My hands are not bloodstained, comrade. I have not imposed on you. You have not quite recovered yet, I think. I am your friend of last night. Dont you recognize me?

  BISHOP. A Bolshie! If I had known, sir, I should have repudiated your advances with abhorrence.

  HE [again posting himself at the stove] Russia is a member of the League, my lord. This gentleman’s standing here is the same as that of the British Foreign Secretary.

  BISHOP [intensely] Never. Never.

  SHE [airily] And what can we do for you, Mr Posky? I’m sorry I cant offer you a chair. That one isnt safe.

  COMMISSAR. Pray dont mention it. My business will take only a moment. As you know, the Soviet Government has gone as far as possible in agreeing not to countenance or subsidize any propaganda of Communism which takes the form of a political conspiracy to overthrow the British National Government.

  BISHOP. And in violation of that agreement you have corrupted my footman and changed him from an honest and respectable young Englishman into a Cell.

  COMMISSAR. Have we? I know nothing of your footman. If he is intelligent enough to become a Communist, as so many famous Englishmen did long before the Russian revolution, we cannot prevent him. But we do not employ him as our agent nor support him financially in any way.

  HE. But what, then, is your difficulty, Comrade Posky ?

  COMMISSAR. We have just discovered that there is a most dangerous organization at work in Russia, financed from the British Isles, having for its object the overthrow of the Soviet system and the substitution of the Church of England and the British Constitution.

  BISHOP. And why not, sir? Why not? Could any object be more desirable, more natural? Would you in your blind hatred of British institutions and of all liberty of thought and speech, make it a crime to advocate a system which is universally admitted to be the the best and freest in the world?

  COMMISSAR. We do not think so. And as the obligation to refrain from this sort of propaganda is reciprocal, you are bound by it just as we are.

  HE. But what is this seditious organization you have just discovered?

  COMMISSAR. It is called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. It has agents everywhere. They call themselves missionaries.

  BISHOP. I cannot bear this: the man is insane. I subscribe to the Society almost beyond my means. It is a body of the highest respectability and piety.

  COMMISSAR. You are misinformed: its doctrines are of the most subversive kind. They have penetrated to my own household. My wife is a busy professional woman, and my time is taken up altogether by public work. We are absolutely dependent for our domestic work on our housekeeper Feodorovna Ballyboushka. We were ideally happy with this excellent woman for years. In her youth she was a udarnik, what you call a shock worker.

  BISHOP. You are all shock workers in Russia now. You have seen the effect on me?

  COMMISSAR. That was in the early days of the revolution, when she was young and ardent. Now she is elderly; and her retirement into domestic service suits her years and her helpful and affectionate temperament. Two months ago an extraordinary change came over her. She refused to do any work that was not immediately necessary, on the ground that the end of the world is at hand. She declared that she was in a condition
which she described as “saved,” and interrupted my work continually with attempts to save me. She had long fits of crying because she could not bear the thought of my wife spending eternity in hell. She accused the Soviets of being the hornets prophesied in the Book of Revelation. We were about to have her certified as insane—most reluctantly; for we loved our dear Ballyboushka—when we discovered that she had been hypnotized by this illegal Society. I warned our Secret Police, formerly known to you as the Gay Pay Ooh. They followed up the clue and arrested four missionaries.

  BISHOP. And shot them. Christian martyrs! All who fall into the hands of the terrible Gay Pay Ooh are shot at once, without trial, without the ministrations of the Church. But I will have a memorial service said for them. To that extent at last I can defeat your Godless tyranny.

  COMMISSAR. You are quite mistaken: they have not been shot. They will be sent back to England: that is all.

  BISHOP [passionately] What right had you to arrest them? How dare you arrest Englishmen? How dare you persecute religion?

  COMMISSAR. They have been very patiently examined by our official psychologists, who report that they can discover nothing that could reasonably be called religion in their minds. They are obsessed with tribal superstitions of the most barbarous kind. They believe in human sacrifices, in what they call the remission of sins by the shedding of blood. No man’s life would be safe in Russia if such doctrines were propagated there.

  BISHOP. But you dont understand. Oh, what dreadful ignorance!

  COMMISSAR. Let us pass on to another point. Our police have found a secret document of your State Church, called the Thirty-nine Articles.

  BISHOP. Secret! It is in the Prayer Book!

  COMMISSAR. It is not read in church. That fact speaks for itself. Our police have found most of the articles incomprehensible; but there is one, the eighteenth, which declares that all Russians are to be held accursed. How would you like it if our chief cultural institution, endowed by our government, the Komintern, were to send its agents into England to teach that every Englishman is to be held accursed?

  BISHOP. But surely, surely, you would not compare the Komintern to the Church of England ! !

  COMMISSAR. Comrade Bishop: the Komintern is the State Church in Russia exactly as the Church of England is the State Church in Britain.

  The Bishop slides to the floor in another faint.

  SHE. Oh! He’s gone off again. Shall I get my thermos?

  HE. I should break things to him more gently, Mr Posky. People die of shock. He maynt recover next time. In fact, he maynt recover this time.

  COMMISSAR. What am I to do? I have said nothing that could possibly shock any educated reasonable person; but this man does not seem to know what sort of world he is living in.

  SHE. He’s an English bishop, you know.

  COMMISSAR. Well? Is he not a rational human being?

  SHE. Oh no: nothing as common as that. I tell you he’s a bishop.

  BISHOP. Where am I? Why am I lying on the floor? What has happened?

  HE. You are in the Intellectual Co-operation Bureau in Geneva; and you have just been told that the Russian Komintern is analogous to the Church of England.

  BISHOP [springing to his feet unaided, his eyes blazing] I still have life enough left in me to deny it. Karl Marx—Antichrist—said that the sweet and ennobling consolations of our faith are opium given to the poor to enable them to endure the hardships of that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them. Does your Komintern teach that blasphemy or does it not?

  COMMISSAR. Impossible. There are no poor in Russia.

  BISHOP. Oh! [he drops dead].

  HE [feeling his pulse] I am afraid you have shocked him once too often, Comrade. His pulse has stopped. He is dead.

  POSKY. Was he ever alive? To me he was incredible.

  SHE. I suppose my thermos is of no use now. Shall I ring up a doctor?

  HE. I think you had better ring up the police. But I say, Mr Posky, what a scoop!

  COMMISSAR. A scoop? I do not understand. What is a scoop?

  HE. Read all the European papers tomorrow and youll see.

  [ ACT II ]

  * * *

  Office of the secretary of the League of Nations. Except for the small writing table at which the secretary is seated there is no office furniture. The walls are covered with engraved prints or enlarged photographs of kings, presidents, and dictators, mostly in military uniforms. Above these bellicose pictures the cornice is decorated with a row of plaster doves in low relief. There is one large picture in oils, representing a lifesize Peace, with tiny figures, also in military uniforms, kneeling round her feet and bowing their heads piously beneath the wreath which she offers them. This picture faces the secretary from the other side of the room as he sits at his table with his back to the window presenting his left profile to anyone entering from the door, which is in the middle of the wall between them. A suite of half a dozen chairs is ranged round the walls, except one, which stands near the writing table for the convenience of people interviewing the secretary.

  He is a disillusioned official with a habit of dogged patience acquired in the course of interviews with distinguished statesmen of different nations, all in a condition of invincible ignorance as to the spirit of Geneva and the constitution of the League of Nations, and each with a national axe to grind. On this occasion he is rather exceptionally careworn. One pities him, as he is of a refined type, and, one guesses, began as a Genevan idealist. Age fifty or thereabouts.

  There is a telephone on the table which he is at present using.

  * * *

  THE SECRETARY. Yes: send her up instantly. Remind me of her name. What?! … Ammonia? Nonsense! that cant be her name. Spell it…VE? … Oh, B E. Do you mean to say that her name is Begonia? Begonia Brown? … Farcical.

  He replaces the receiver as Begonia enters. She is the Intellectual Co-operation typist. She is in walking dress, cheap, but very smart.

  THE SECRETARY. Miss Brown?

  BEGONIA [with her best smile] Yes.

  THE SECRETARY. Sit down.

  BEGONIA [complying] Kew [short for Thank you].

  THE SECRETARY [gravely] You have heard the news, no doubt?

  BEGONIA. Oh yes. Jack Palamedes has won the dancing tournament. I had ten francs on him; and I have won a hundred. Had you anything on?

  THE SECRETARY [still more gravely] I am afraid you will think me very ignorant, Miss Brown; but I have never heard of Mr Palamedes.

  BEGONIA. Fancy that! He’s the talk of Geneva, I assure you.

  THE SECRETARY. There are other items of news, Miss Brown. Germany has withdrawn from the League.

  BEGONIA. And a good riddance, if you ask me. My father lost a lot of money through the war. Otherwise—you wont mind my telling you—youd never have got me slaving at a typewriter here for my living.

  THE SECRETARY. No doubt. A further item is that the British Empire has declared war on Russia.

  BEGONIA. Well, what could you expect us to do with those awful Bolshies ? We should have done it long ago. But thank goodness we’re safe in Geneva, you and I.

  THE SECRETARY. We are safe enough everywhere, so far. The war is one of sanctions only.

  BEGONIA. More shame for us, say I. I should give those Bolshies the bayonet: thats the way to talk to scum of that sort. I cant contain myself when I think of all the murder and slavery of them Soviets—[CORRECTING HERSELF] those Soviets.

  THE SECRETARY. In consequence Japan has declared war on Russia and is therefore in military alliance with Britain. And the result of that is that Australia, New Zealand and Canada have repudiated the war and formed an anti-Japanese alliance with the United States under the title of the New British Federation. South Africa may join them at any moment.

  BEGONIA [flushing with indignation] Do you mean that theyve broken up our dear Empire?

  THE SECRETARY. They have said nothing about that.

  BEGONIA. Oh, then thats quite all right. You know, when I
was at school I was chosen five times to recite on Empire Day; and in my very first year, when I was the smallest child there, I presented the bouquet to King George’s sister, who came to our prize giving. Say a word against the Empire, and you have finished with Begonia Brown.

  THE SECRETARY. Then you went to school, did you?

  BEGONIA. Well, of course: what do you take me for? I went to school for seven years and never missed a single day. I got fourteen prizes for regular attendance.

  THE SECRETARY. Good God!