LADY CREECH
[violently]
You’re beside yourself. Isn’t this what we’ve been wanting all the time?
ALMERIC
But slow up a bit — didn’t you say you’d stick?
ETHEL
Any promise I ever made to you is a thousand times cancelled. This is final!
[With concentrated rage, turning to PIKE.]
And as for you — never presume to speak to me again!
ALMERIC
[to LADY CREECH]
Most extraordinary girl — she’s rather dreadful, isn’t she?
LADY CREECH
[with agitation]
Give me your arm, Almeric.
[They go into the hotel.]
ETHEL
[to PIKE]
What have you to say to me?
[PIKE raises his hands slowly, with palms outward, and drops them.]
ETHEL
What explanation have you to make?
PIKE
None.
ETHEL
That’s because you don’t care what I think of you.
[Bitterly.]
Indeed, you’ve already shown that, when you were willing to give me up to those people, and to let me pay them for taking me! You let me romanticize to you about honor and duty and sympathy — about my efforts to make that creature a man — and you pretended to sympathize with me, and you knew all the time it was only the money they were after!
PIKE
[humbly]
Well, I shouldn’t be surprised.
ETHEL
Didn’t you have the faint little understanding of me enough to see that their asking for money, now — would horrify me? Didn’t you know that your consenting to it, leaving me free to give it to them, would release me — make me free to deny everything to them?
PIKE
[slowly]
Well, I shouldn’t be surprised if I had seen that.
ETHEL
[staggered]
You mean you’ve been saving me again from myself, from my silliness, from my romanticism, that you’ve given me another revelation of the falsity, the unreality of my attitude toward these people, and toward life.
PIKE
[placatingly]
No, no!
ETHEL
[vehemently]
You’d always say that, you’d always deny it — it’s like you. You let me make a fool of myself and then you show it to me, and after that you deny it!
[Angrily.]
You’re always exhibiting your superiority! Would you do that to the dream girl you told me of, to the girl at home who plays dream songs for you in the empty house among the beeches? Do you think any girl could love a man for that? Go back to your dream girl, your lady of the picture!
PIKE
[disconsolately]
She won’t be there.
ETHEL
[stubbornly]
She might be.
PIKE
No, there ain’t any chance of that. The house will still be empty.
ETHEL
[almost crying]
Are you sure?
PIKE
[sadly]
There ain’t any doubt of it now.
ETHEL
You might be wrong — for once!
[She gives him a look between tears and laughter, then runs into the hotel.]
[PIKE stands sadly, his head bent, every line of his body expressing dejection; then from within the hotel come the sounds of a piano in the preliminary chords of “Sweet Genevieve.” ETHEL’S voice is lifted in the song, at first faint, somewhat tremulous and quavering, then rising strongly and confidently. PIKE’S face, slowly upraised, becomes transfigured. He crosses the stage spellbound, to the hotel door with the look of a man in a dream. He falls back a step, looking in.]
Beauty and the Jacobin
AN INTERLUDE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
TO
FENTON WHITLOCK BOOTH
The original frontispiece
BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN
THE AUTHOR MAKES his appearance, not now “as a showman before his tent,” nor to entreat his audience to be seated in an orderly manner, but to invite any who may be listening to come upon the very scene itself of this drama, which has nothing to do with the theater, and there, invisible, attend what follows.
Our scene is in a rusty lodging-house of the Lower Town, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and the time, the early twilight of dark November in northern France. This particular November is dark indeed, for it is November of the year 1793, Frimaire of the Terror. The garret room disclosed to us, like the evening lowering outside its one window, and like the times, is mysterious, obscure, smoked with perplexing shadows; these flying and staggering to echo the shiftings of a young man writing at a desk by the light of a candle.
We are just under the eaves here; the dim ceiling slants; and there are two doors: that in the rear wall is closed; the other, upon our right, and evidently leading to an inner chamber, we find ajar. The furniture of this mean apartment is chipped, faded, insecure, yet still possessed of a haggard elegance; shamed odds and ends, cheaply acquired by the proprietor of the lodging-house, no doubt at an auction of the confiscated leavings of some emigrant noble. The single window, square and mustily curtained, is so small that it cannot be imagined to admit much light on the brightest of days; however, it might afford a lodger a limited view of the houses opposite and the street below. In fact, as our eyes grow accustomed to the obscurity we discover it serving this very purpose at the present moment, for a tall woman stands close by in the shadow, peering between the curtains with the distrustfulness of a picket thrown far out into an enemy’s country. Her coarse blouse and skirt, new and as ill-fitting as sacks, her shop-woman’s bonnet and cheap veil, and her rough shoes are naively denied by her sensitive, pale hands and the high-bred and in-bred face, long profoundly marked by loss and fear, and now very white, very watchful. She is not more than forty, but her hair, glimpsed beneath the clumsy bonnet, shows much grayer than need be at that age. This is Anne de Laseyne.
The intent young man at the desk, easily recognizable as her brother, fair and of a singular physical delicacy, is a finely completed product of his race; one would pronounce him gentle in each sense of the word. His costume rivals his sister’s in the innocence of its attempt at disguise: he wears a carefully soiled carter’s frock, rough new gaiters, and a pair of dangerously aristocratic shoes, which are not too dusty to conceal the fact that they are of excellent make and lately sported buckles. A tousled cap of rabbit-skin, exhibiting a tricolor cockade, crowns these anomalies, though not at present his thin, blond curls, for it has been tossed upon a dressing-table which stands against the wall to the left. He is younger than Madame de Laseyne, probably by more than ten years; and, though his features so strikingly resemble hers, they are free from the permanent impress of pain which she bears like a mourning-badge upon her own. —
He is expending a feverish attention upon his task, but with patently unsatisfactory results; for he whispers and mutters to himself, bites the feather of his pen, shakes his head forebodingly, and again and again crumples a written sheet and throws it upon the floor. Whenever this happens Anne de Laseyne casts a white glance at him over her shoulder — his desk is in the center of the room — her anxiety is visibly increased, and the temptation to speak less and less easily controlled, until at last she gives way to it. Her voice is low and hurried.
ANNE. Louis, it is growing dark very fast.
LOUIS. I had not observed it, my sister.
[He lights a second candle from the first; then, pen in mouth, scratches at his writing with a little knife.]
ANNE. People are still crowding in front of the wine-shop across the street.
LOUIS [smiling with one side of his mouth]. Naturally. Reading the list of the proscribed that came at noon. Also waiting, amiable vultures, for the next bulletin from Paris. It will give the names of those guillotined day before yesterday. F
or a good bet: our own names [he nods toward the other room] — yes, hers, too — are all three in the former. As for the latter — well, they can’t get us in that now.
ANNE [eagerly]. Then you are certain that we are safe?
LOUIS. I am certain only that they cannot murder us day before yesterday.
[As he bends his head to his writing a woman comes in languidly through the open door, bearing an armful of garments, among which one catches the gleam of fine silk, glimpses of lace and rich furs — a disordered burden which she dumps pell-mell into a large portmanteau lying open upon a chair near the desk. This new-corner is of a startling gold - and - ivory beauty; a beauty quite literally striking, for at the very first glance the whole force of it hits thebe-holder like a snowball in the eye; a beauty so obvious, so completed, so rounded, that it is painful; a beauty to rivet the unenvious stare of women, but from the full blast of which either king or man-peasant would stagger away to the confessional. The egregious luster of it is not breathed upon even by its overspreading of sullen revolt, as its possessor carelessly arranges the garments in the portmanteau. She wears a dress all gray, of a coarse texture, but exquisitely fitted to her; nothing could possibly be plainer, or of a more revealing simplicity. She might be twenty-two; at least it is certain that she is not thirty. At her coming, Louis looks up with a sigh of poignant wistfulness, evidently a habit; for as he leans back to watch her he sighs again. She does not so much as glance at him, but speaks absently to Madame de Laseyne. Her voice is superb, as it should be; deep and musical, with a faint, silvery huskiness.]
ELOISE [the new-corner]. Is he still there?
ANNE. I lost sight of him in the crowd. I think he has gone. If only he does not come back!
LOUIS [with grim conviction]. He will.
ANNE. I am trying to hope not.
ELOISE. I have told you from the first that you overestimate his importance. Haven’t I said it often enough?
ANNE [under her breath]. You have!
ELOISE [coldly]. He will not harm you.
ANNE [looking out of the window]. More people down there; they are running to the wine-shop.
LOUIS. Gentle idlers!
[The sound of triumphant shouting comes up from the street below.]
That means that the list of the guillotined has arrived from Paris.
ANNE [shivering]. They are posting it in the wine-shop window.
[The shouting increases suddenly to a roar of hilarity, in which the shrilling of women mingles.]
LOUIS. Ah! One remarks that the list is a long one. The good people are well satisfied with it. [To ELOISE.] My cousin, in this amiable populace which you champion, do you never scent something of — well, something of the graveyard scavenger?
[She offers the response of an unmoved glance in his direction, and slowly goes out by the door at which she entered. Louis sighs again and returns to his scribbling.]
ANNE [nervously]. Haven’t you finished, Louis?
LOUIS [indicating the floor strewn with crumpled slips of paper]. A dozen.
ANNE. Not good enough?
LOUIS [with a rueful smile]. I have lived to discover that among all the disadvantages of being a Peer of France the most dangerous is that one is so poor a forger. Truly, however, our parents are not to be blamed for neglecting to have me instructed in this art; evidently they perceived I had no talent for it.
[Lifting a sheet from the desk.] Oh, vile! I am not even an amateur.
[He leans back, tapping the paper thoughtfully with his pen.]
Do you suppose the Fates took all the trouble to make the Revolution simply to teach me that I have no skill in forgery? Listen.
[He reads what he has written.] “Committee of Public Safety. In the name of the Republic. To all Officers, Civil and Military: Permit the Citizen Balsage” — that’s myself, remember— “and the Citizeness Virginie Balsage, his sister” — that’s you, Anne— “and the Citizeness Marie Balsage, his second sister” — that is Eloise, you understand— “to embark in the vessel Jeune Pierrette from the port of Boulogne for Barcelona. Signed: Billaud Varennes. Carnot. Robespierre.” Execrable!
[He tears up the paper, scattering the fragments on the floor.]
I am not even sure it is the proper form. Ah, that Dossonville!
ANNE. But Dossonville helped us —
LOUIS. At a price. Dossonville! An individual of marked attainment, not only in penmanship, but in the art of plausibility. Before I paid him he swore that the passports he forged for us would take us not only out of Paris, but out of the country.
ANNE. Are you sure we must have a separate permit to embark?
LOUIS. The captain of the Jeune Pierrette sent one of his sailors to tell me. There is a new Commissioner from the National Committee, he said, and a special order was issued this morning. They have an officer and a file of the National Guard on the quay to see that the order is obeyed.
ANNE. But we bought passports in Paris. Why can’t we here?
LOUIS. Send out a street-crier for an accomplished forger? My poor Anne! We can only hope that the lieutenant on the quay may be drunk when he examines my dreadful “permit.” Pray a great thirst upon him, my sister!
[He looks at a watch which he draws from beneath his frock.] Four o’clock. At five the tide in the river is poised at its highest; then it must run out, and the Jeune Pierrette with it. We have an hour. I return to my crime.
[He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write.]
ANNE [urgently]. Hurry, Louis!
LOUIS. Watch for Master Spy.
ANNE. I cannot see him.
[There is silence for a time, broken only by the nervous scratching of Louis’s pen.]
LOUIS [at work]. Still you don’t see him?
ANNE. NO. The people are dispersing. They seem in a good humor.
LOUIS. Ah, if they knew —
[He breaks off, examines his latest effort attentively, and finds it unsatisfactory, as is evinced by the noiseless whistle of disgust to which his lips form themselves. He discards the sheet and begins another, speaking rather absently as he does so.]
I suppose I have the distinction to be one of the most hated men in our country, now that all the decent people have left it — so many by a road something of the shortest! Yes, these merry gentlemen below there would be still merrier if they knew they had within their reach a forfeited “Emigrant.” I wonder how long it would take them to climb the breakneck flights to our door. Lord, there’d be a race for it! Prize-money, too, I fancy, for the first with his bludgeon.
ANNE [lamentably]. Louis, Louis! Why didn’t you lie safe in England?
LOUIS [smiling]. Anne, Anne! I had to come back for a good sister of mine.
ANNE. But I could have escaped alone.
LOUIS. That is it— “alone”!
[He lowers his voice as he glances toward the open door.]
For she would not have moved at all if I hadn’t come to bully her into it. A fanatic, a fanatic!
ANNE [brusquely]. She is a fool. Therefore be patient with her.
LOUIS [warningly]. Hush.
ELOISE [in a loud, careless tone from the other room]. Oh, I heard you! What does it matter?
[She returns, carrying a handsome skirt and bodice of brocade and a woman’s long mantle of light-green cloth, hooded and lined with fur. She drops them into the portmanteau and closes it.]
There! I’ve finished your packing for you.
LOUIS [rising]. My cousin, I regret that we could not provide servants for this flight. [Bowing formally.] I regret that we have been compelled to ask you to do a share of what is necessary.
ELOISE [turning to go out again]. That all? LOUIS [lifting the portmanteau]. I fear —
ELOISE [with assumed fatigue]. Yes, you usually do. What now?
LOUIS [flushing painfully]. The portmanteau is too heavy.
[He returns to the desk, sits, and busies himself with his writing, keeping his grieved face from her view.]
&nbs
p; ELOISE. YOU mean you’re too weak to carry it?
LOUIS. Suppose at the last moment it becomes necessary to hasten exceedingly —
ELOISE. YOU mean, suppose you had to run, you’d throw away the portmanteau. [Contemptuously.] Oh, I don’t doubt you’d do it!
LOUIS [forcing himself to look up at her cheerfully]. I dislike to leave my baggage upon the field, but in case of a rout it might be a temptation — if it were an impediment.
ANNE [peremptorily]. Don’t waste time. Lighten the portmanteau.
LOUIS. YOU may take out everything of mine.
ELOISE. There’s nothing of yours in it except your cloak. You don’t suppose —
ANNE. Take out that heavy brocade of mine.
ELOISE. Thank you for not wishing to take out my fur-lined cloak and freezing me at sea!
LOUIS [gently]. Take out both the cloak and the dress.
ELOISE [astounded]. What!
LOUIS. YOU shall have mine. It is as warm, but not so heavy.
ELOISE [angrily]. Oh, I am sick of your eternal packing and unpacking! I am sick of it!
ANNE. Watch at the window, then.
[She goes swiftly to the portmanteau, opens it, tosses out the green mantle and the brocaded skirt and bodice, and tests the weight of the portmanteau.]
I think it will be light enough now, Louis.
LOUIS. DO not leave those things in sight. If our landlord should come in —
ANNE. I’ll hide them in the bed in the next room. Eloise!
[She points imperiously to the window. ELOISE goes to it slowly and for a moment makes a scornful pretense of being on watch there; but as soon as Madame DE LASEYNE has left the room she turns, leaning against the wall and regarding Louis with languid amusement. He continues to struggle with his ill-omened “permit,” but, by and by, becoming aware of her gaze, glances consciously over his shoulder and meets her half-veiled eyes. Coloring, he looks away, stares dreamily at nothing, sighs, and finally writes again, absently, like a man under a spell, which, indeed, he is. The pen drops from his hand with a faint click upon the floor. He makes the movement of a person suddenly wakened, and, holding his last writing near one of the candles, examines it critically. Then he breaks into low, bitter laughter.] ELOISE [unwillingly curious]. You find something amusing?
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 531