JOB ARTHUR: Well — if you’re so pressing. (Helps himself.) Here’s luck, all!
ALL: Thanks.
GERALD: Take a cigar — there’s the box. Go on — take a handful — fill your case.
JOB ARTHUR: They’re a great luxury nowadays, aren’t they? Almost beyond a man like me.
GERALD: Yes, that’s the worst of not being a bloated capitalist. Never mind, you’ll be a Cabinet Minister some day. — Oh, alright — I’ll open the door for you.
JOB ARTHUR: Oh, don’t trouble. Good night — good night.
Exeunt JOB ARTHUR and GERALD.
OLIVER: Oh God, what a world to live in!
ANABEL: I rather liked him. What is he?
OLIVER: Checkweighman — local secretary for the Miners’ Federation — plays the violin well, although he was a collier, and it spoilt his hands. They’re a musical family.
ANABEL: But isn’t he rather nice?
OLIVER: I don’t like him. But I confess he’s a study. He’s the modern Judas.
ANABEL: Don’t you think he likes Gerald?
OLIVER: I’m sure he does. The way he suns himself here — like a cat purring in his luxuriation.
ANABEL: Yes, I don’t mind it. It shows a certain sensitiveness and a certain taste.
OLIVER: Yes, he has both — touch of the artist, as Mrs Barlow says. He loves refinement, culture, breeding, all those things — loves them — and a presence, a fine free manner.
ANABEL: But that is nice in him.
OLIVER: Quite. But what he loves, and what he admires, and what he aspires to, he must betray. It’s his fatality. He lives for the moment when he can kiss Gerald in the Garden of Olives, or wherever it was.
ANABEL: But Gerald shouldn’t be kissed.
OLIVER: That’s what I say.
ANABEL: And that’s what his mother means as well, I suppose.
Enter GERALD.
GERALD: Well — you’ve heard the voice of the people.
ANABEL: He isn’t the people.
GERALD: I think he is, myself — the epitome.
OLIVER: No, he’s a special type.
GERALD: Ineffectual, don’t you think?
ANABEL: How pleased you are, Gerald! How pleased you are with yourself! You love the turn with him.
GERALD: It’s rather stimulating, you know.
ANABEL: It oughtn’t to be, then.
OLIVER: He’s your Judas, and you love him.
GERALD: Nothing so deep. He’s just a sort of Æolian harp that sings to the temper of the wind. I find him amusing.
ANABEL: I think it’s boring.
OLIVER: And I think it’s nasty.
GERALD: I believe you’re both jealous of him. What do you think of the British working man, Oliver?
OLIVER: It seems to me he’s in nearly as bad a way as the British employer: he’s nearly as much beside the point.
GERALD: What point?
OLIVER: Oh, just life.
GERALD: That’s too vague, my boy. Do you think they’ll ever make a bust-up?
OLIVER: I can’t tell. I don’t see any good in it, if they do.
GERALD: It might clear the way — and it might block the way for ever: depends what comes through. But, sincerely, I don’t think they’ve got it in them.
ANABEL: They may have something better.
GERALD: That suggestion doesn’t interest me, Anabel. Ah well, we shall see what we shall see. Have a whisky and soda with me, Oliver, and let the troubled course of this evening run to a smooth close. It’s quite like old times. Aren’t you smoking, Anabel?
ANABEL: No, thanks.
GERALD: I believe you’re a reformed character. So it won’t be like old times, after all.
ANABEL: I don’t want old times. I want new ones.
GERALD: Wait till Job Arthur has risen like Antichrist, and proclaimed the resurrection of the gods. — Do you see Job Arthur proclaiming Dionysus and Aphrodite?
ANABEL: It bores me. I don’t like your mood. Good night.
GERALD: Oh, don’t go.
ANABEL: Yes, good night.
Exit ANABEL.
OLIVER: She’s not reformed, Gerald. She’s the same old moral character — moral to the last bit of her, really — as she always was.
GERALD: Is that what it is? — But one must be moral.
OLIVER: Oh, yes. Oliver Cromwell wasn’t as moral as Anabel is — nor such an iconoclast.
GERALD: Poor old Anabel!
OLIVER: How she hates the dark gods!
GERALD: And yet they cast a spell over her. Poor old Anabel! Well, Oliver, is Bacchus the father of whisky?
OLIVER: I don’t know. — I don’t like you either. You seem to smile all over yourself. It’s objectionable. Good night.
GERALD: Oh, look here, this is censorious.
OLIVER: You smile to yourself.
Exit OLIVER.
CURTAIN
ACT III
SCENE I
An old park. Early evening. In the background a low Georgian hall, which has been turned into offices for the Company, shows windows already lighted. GERALD and ANABEL walk along the path.
ANABEL: How beautiful this old park is!
GERALD: Yes, it is beautiful — seems so far away from everywhere, if one doesn’t remember that the hall is turned into offices. — No one has lived here since I was a little boy. I remember going to a Christmas party at the Walsalls’.
ANABEL: Has it been shut up so long?
GERALD: The Walsalls didn’t like it — too near the ugliness. They were county, you know — we never were: Father never gave Mother a chance, there. And besides, the place is damp, cellars full of water.
ANABEL: Even now?
GERALD: No, not now — they’ve been drained. But the place would be too damp for a dwelling-house. It’s alright as offices. They burn enormous fires. The rooms are quite charming. This is what happens to the stately homes of England — they buzz with inky clerks, or their equivalent. Stateliness is on its last legs.
ANABEL: Yes, it grieves me — though I should be bored if I had to be stately, I think. — Isn’t it beautiful in this light, like an eighteenth-century aquatint? I’m sure no age was as ugly as this, since the world began.
GERALD: For pure ugliness, certainly not. And I believe none has been so filthy to live in. — Let us sit down a minute, shall we? and watch the rooks fly home. It always stirs sad, sentimental feelings in me.
ANABEL: So it does in me. — Listen! one can hear the coal-carts on the road — and the brook — and the dull noise of the town — and the beating of New London pit — and voices — and the rooks — and yet it is so still. We seem so still here, don’t we?
GERALD: Yes.
ANABEL: Don’t you think we’ve been wrong?
GERALD: How?
ANABEL: In the way we’ve lived — and the way we’ve loved.
GERALD: It hasn’t been heaven, has it? Yet, I don’t know that we’ve been wrong, Anabel. We had it to go through.
ANABEL: Perhaps. — And, yes, we’ve been wrong too.
GERALD: Probably. Only, I don’t feel it like that.
ANABEL: Then I think you ought. You ought to feel you’ve been wrong.
GERALD: Yes, probably. Only, I don’t. I can’t help it. I think we’ve gone the way we had to go, following our own natures.
ANABEL: And where has it landed us?
GERALD: Here.
ANABEL: And where is that?
GERALD: Just on this bench in the park, looking at the evening.
ANABEL: But what next?
GERALD: God knows! Why trouble?
ANABEL: One must trouble. I want to feel sure.
GERALD: What of?
ANABEL: Of you — and of myself.
GERALD: Then be sure.
ANABEL: But I can’t. Think of the past — what it’s been.
GERALD: This isn’t the past.
ANABEL: But what is it? Is there anything sure in it? Is there any real happiness?
&n
bsp; GERALD: Why not?
ANABEL: But how can you ask? Think of what our life has been.
GERALD: I don’t want to.
ANABEL: No, you don’t. But what do you want?
GERALD: I’m alright, you know, sitting here like this.
ANABEL: But one can’t sit here for ever, can one?
GERALD: I don’t want to.
ANABEL: And what will you do when we leave here?
GERALD: God knows! Don’t worry me. Be still a bit.
ANABEL: But I’m worried. You don’t love me.
GERALD: I won’t argue it.
ANABEL: And I’m not happy.
GERALD: Why not, Anabel?
ANABEL: Because you don’t love me — and I can’t forget.
GERALD: I do love you — and to-night I’ve forgotten.
ANABEL: Then make me forget, too. Make me happy.
GERALD: I can’t make you — and you know it.
ANABEL: Yes, you can. It’s your business to make me happy. I’ve made you happy.
GERALD: You want to make me unhappy.
ANABEL: I do think you’re the last word in selfishness. If I say I can’t forget, you merely say, “I’ve forgotten”; and if I say I’m unhappy, all you can answer is that I want to make you unhappy. I don’t in the least. I want to be happy myself. But you don’t help me.
GERALD: There is no help for it, you see. If you were happy with me here you’d be happy. As you aren’t, nothing will make you — not genuinely.
ANABEL: And that’s all you care.
GERALD: No — I wish we could both be happy at the same moment. But apparently we can’t.
ANABEL: And why not? — Because you’re selfish, and think of nothing but yourself and your own feelings.
GERALD: If it is so, it is so.
ANABEL: Then we shall never be happy.
GERALD: Then we shan’t. (A pause.)
ANABEL: Then what are we going to do?
GERALD: Do?
ANABEL: Do you want me to be with you?
GERALD: Yes.
ANABEL: Are you sure?
GERALD: Yes.
ANABEL: Then why don’t you want me to be happy?
GERALD: If you’d only be happy, here and now —
ANABEL: How can I?
GERALD: How can’t you? — You’ve got a devil inside you.
ANABEL: Then make me not have a devil.
GERALD: I’ve known you long enough — and known myself long enough — to know I can make you nothing at all, Anabel: neither can you make me. If the happiness isn’t there — well, we shall have to wait for it, like a dispensation. It probably means we shall have to hate each other a little more. — I suppose hate is a real process.
ANABEL: Yes, I know you believe more in hate than in love.
GERALD: Nobody is more weary of hate than I am — and yet we can’t fix our own hour, when we shall leave off hating and fighting. It has to work itself out in us.
ANABEL: But I don’t want to hate and fight with you any more. I don’t believe in it — not any more.
GERALD: It’s a cleansing process — like Aristotle’s Katharsis. We shall hate ourselves clean at last, I suppose.
ANABEL: Why aren’t you clean now? Why can’t you love? (He laughs.) Do you love me?
GERALD: Yes.
ANABEL: Do you want to be with me for ever?
GERALD: Yes.
ANABEL: Sure?
GERALD: Quite sure.
ANABEL: Why are you so cool about it?
GERALD: I’m not. I’m only sure — which you are not.
ANABEL: Yes, I am — I want to be married to you.
GERALD: I know you want me to want you to be married to me. But whether off your own bat you have a positive desire that way, I’m not sure. You keep something back — some sort of female reservation — like a dagger up your sleeve. You want to see me in transports of love for you.
ANABEL: How can you say so? There — you see — there — this is the man that pretends to love me, and then says I keep a dagger up my sleeve. You liar!
GERALD: I do love you — and you do keep a dagger up your sleeve — some devilish little female reservation which spies at me from a distance, in your soul, all the time, as if I were an enemy.
ANABEL: How can you say so? — Doesn’t it show what you must be yourself? Doesn’t it show? — What is there in your soul?
GERALD: I don’t know.
ANABEL: Love, pure love? — Do you pretend it’s love?
GERALD: I’m so tired of this.
ANABEL: So am I, dead tired: you self-deceiving, self-complacent thing. Ha! — aren’t you just the same. You haven’t altered one scrap, not a scrap.
GERALD: Alright — you are always free to change yourself.
ANABEL: I have changed, I am better, I do love you — I love you wholly and unselfishly — I do — and I want a good new life with you.
GERALD: You’re terribly wrapped up in your new goodness. I wish you’d make up your mind to be downright bad.
ANABEL: Ha! — Do you? — You’d soon see. You’d soon see where you’d be if — There’s somebody coming. (Rises.)
GERALD: Never mind; it’s the clerks leaving work, I suppose. Sit still.
ANABEL: Won’t you go?
GERALD: No. (A man draws near, followed by another.) Good evening.
CLERK: Good evening, sir. (Passes on.) Good evening, Mr Barlow.
ANABEL: They are afraid.
GERALD: I suppose their consciences are uneasy about this strike.
ANABEL: Did you come to sit here just to catch them, like a spider waiting for them?
GERALD: No. I wanted to speak to Breffitt.
ANABEL: I believe you’re capable of any horridness.
GERALD: Alright, you believe it. (Two more figures approach.) Good evening.
CLERKS: Good night, sir. (One passes, one stops.) Good evening, Mr Barlow. Er — did you want to see Mr Breffitt, sir?
GERALD: Not particularly.
CLERK: Oh! He’ll be out directly, sir — if you’d like me to go back and tell him you wanted him.
GERALD: No, thank you.
CLERK: Good night, sir. Excuse me asking.
GERALD: Good night.
ANABEL: Who is Mr Breffitt?
GERALD: He is the chief clerk — and cashier — one of Father’s old pillars of society.
ANABEL: Don’t you like him?
GERALD: Not much.
ANABEL: Why? — You seem to dislike very easily.
GERALD: Oh, they all used to try to snub me, these old buffers. They detest me like poison, because I am different from Father.
ANABEL: I believe you enjoy being detested.
GERALD: I do. (Another clerk approaches — hesitates — stops.)
CLERK: Good evening, sir. Good evening, Mr Barlow. Er — did you want anybody at the office, sir? We’re just closing.
GERALD: No, I didn’t want anybody.
CLERK: Oh, no, sir. I see. Er — by the way, sir — er — I hope you don’t think this — er — bother about an increase — this strike threat — started in the office.
GERALD: Where did it start?
CLERK: I should think it started — where it usually starts, Mr Barlow — among a few loud-mouthed people who think they can do as they like with the men. They’re only using the office men as a cry — that’s all. They’ve no interest in us. They want to show their power. — That’s how it is, sir.
GERALD: Oh, yes.
CLERK: We’re powerless, if they like to make a cry out of us.
GERALD: Quite.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 753