by Dan Laurence
THE ELDER. And may I ask, sir, is it your intention not only to condone my son’s frauds, but to take advantage of them to accept a distinction which you have in no way earned?
TALLBOYS. I have earned it, sir, ten times over. Do you suppose, because the brigandage which I am honored for suppressing has no existence, that I have never suppressed real brigands? Do you forget that though this battle of which I am crowned victor was won by a subordinate, I, too, have won real battles, and seen all the honors go to a brigadier who did not even know what was happening? In the army these things average themselves out: merit is rewarded in the long run. Justice is none the less justice though it is always delayed, and finally done by mistake. My turn today: Private Meek’s tomorrow.
THE ELDER. And meanwhile Mr Meek – this humble and worthy soldier – is to remain in obscurity and poverty whilst you are strutting as a K.C.B.
TALLBOYS. How I envy him! Look at me and look at him! I, loaded with responsibilities whilst my hands are tied, my body disabled, my mind crippled because a colonel must not do anything but give orders and look significant and profound when his mind is entirely vacant! he, free to turn his hand to everything and to look like an idiot when he feels like one! I have been driven to sketching in watercolors because I may not use my hands in life’s daily useful business. A commanding officer must not do this, must not do that, must not do the other, must not do anything but tell other men to do it. He may not even converse with them. I see this man Meek doing everything that is natural to a complete man: carpentering, painting, digging, pulling and hauling, fetching and carrying, helping himself and everybody else, whilst I, with a bigger body to exercise and quite as much energy, must loaf and loll, allowed to do nothing but read the papers and drink brandy and water to prevent myself going mad. I should have become a drunkard had it not been for the colors.
THE SERGEANT. Ah yes, sir, the colors. The fear of disgracing them has kept me off the drink many a time.
TALLBOYS. Man: I do not mean the regimental colors, but the watercolors. How willingly would I exchange my pay, my rank, my K.C.B., for Meek’s poverty, his obscurity!
MEEK. But, my dear Colonel – sorry, sir: what I mean to say is that you can become a private if you wish. Nothing easier: I have done it again and again. You resign your commission; take a new and very common name by deed poll; dye your hair and give your age to the recruiting sergeant as twenty-two; and there you are! You can select your own regiment.
TALLBOYS. Meek: you should not tantalize your commanding officer. No doubt you are an extraordinary soldier. But have you ever passed the extreme and final test of manly courage?
MEEK. Which one is that, sir?
TALLBOYS. Have you ever married?
MEEK. No, sir.
TALLBOYS. Then do not ask me why I do not resign my commission and become a free and happy private. My wife would not let me.
THE COUNTESS. Why dont you hit her on the head with your umbrella?
TALLBOYS. I dare not. There are moments when I wish some other man would. But not in my presence. I should kill him.
THE ELDER. We are all slaves. But at least your son is an honest man.
TALLBOYS. Is he? I am glad to hear it. I have not spoken to him since he shirked military service at the beginning of the war and went into trade as a contractor. He is now so enormously rich that I cannot afford to keep up his acquaintance. Neither need you keep up that of your son. By the way, he passes here as the half step-brother of this lady, the Countess Valbrioni.
SWEETIE. Valbrioni be blowed! My name is Susan Simpkins. Being a countess isnt worth a damn. There’s no variety in it: no excitement. What I want is a month’s leave for the sergeant. Wont you give it to him, Colonel?
TALLBOYS. What for?
SWEETIE. Never mind what for. A fortnight might do; but I dont know for certain yet. There’s something steadying about him; and I suppose I will have to settle down some day.
TALLBOYS. Nonsense! The sergeant is a pious man, not your sort. Eh, Sergeant?
THE SERGEANT. Well, sir, a man should have one woman to prevent him from thinking too much about women in general. You cannot read your Bible undisturbed if visions and wandering thoughts keep coming between you and it. And a pious man should not marry a pious woman: two of a trade never agree. Besides, it would give the children a onesided view of life. Life is very mixed, sir: it is not all piety and it is not all gaiety. This young woman has no conscience: but I have enough for two. I have no money; but she seems to have enough for two. Mind: I am not committing myself; but I will go so far as to say that I am not dead set against it. On the plane of this world and its vanities –-and weve got to live in it, you know, sir – she appeals to me.
AUBREY. Take care, sergeant. Constancy is not Sweetie’s strong point.
THE SERGEANT. Neither is it mine. As a single man and a wandering soldier I am fair game for every woman. But if I settle down with this girl she will keep the others off. I’m a bit tired of adventures.
SWEETIE. Well, if the truth must be told, so am I. We were made for one another, Sergeant. What do you say?
THE SERGEANT. Well, I dont mind keeping company for a while, Susan, just to see how we get along together.
The voice of Mrs Mopply is again heard. Its tone is hardy and even threatening; and its sound is approaching rapidly.
MRS MOPPLY’S VOICE. You just let me alone, will you? Nobody asked you to interfere. Get away with you.
General awe and dismay. Mrs Mopply appears striding resolutely along the beach. She walks straight up to the Colonel, and is about to address him when he rises firmly to the occasion and takes the word out of her mouth.
TALLBOYS. Mrs Mopply: I have a duty to you which I must discharge at once. At out last meeting, I struck you.
MRS MOPPLY. Struck me! You bashed me. Is that what you mean?
TALLBOYS. If you consider my expression inadequate I am willing to amend it. Let us put it that I bashed you. Well, I apologize without reserve, fully and amply. If you wish, I will give it to you in writing.
MRS MOPPLY. Very well. Since you express your regret, I suppose there is nothing more to be said.
TALLBOYS [darkening ominously] Pardon me. I apologized. I did not express my regret.
AUBREY. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Colonel, dont start her again. Dont qualify your apology in any way.
MRS MOPPLY. You shut up, whoever you are.
TALLBOYS. I do not qualify my apology in the least. My apology is complete. The lady has a right to it. My action was inexcusable. But no lady – no human being – has a right to impose a falsehood on me. I do not regret my action. I have never done anything which gave me more thorough and hearty satisfaction. When I was a company officer I once cut down an enemy in the field. Had I not done so he would have cut me down. It gave me no satisfaction: I was half ashamed of it. I have never before spoken of it. But this time I struck with unmixed enjoyment. In fact I am grateful to Mrs Mopply. I owe her one of the very few delightfully satisfactory moments of my life.
MRS MOPPLY. Well, thats a pretty sort of apology, isnt it?
TALLBOYS [firmly] I have nothing to add, madam.
MRS MOPPLY. Well, I forgive you, you peppery old blighter.
Sensation. They catch their breaths, and stare at one another in consternation. The patient arrives.
THE PATIENT. I am sorry to say, Colonel Tallboys, that you have unsettled my mother’s reason. She wont believe that I am her daughter. She’s not a bit like herself.
MRS MOPPLY. Isnt she? What do you know about myself? my real self? They told me lies; and I had to pretend to be somebody quite different.
TALLBOYS. Who told you lies, madam? It was not with my authority.
MRS MOPPLY. I wasnt thinking of you. My mother told me lies. My nurse told me lies. My governess told me lies. Everybody told me lies. The world is not a bit like what they said it was. I wasnt a bit like what they said I ought to be. I thought I had to pretend. And I neednt have pretended at all.
THE ELDER. Another victim! She, too, is falling through the bottomless abyss.
MRS MOPPLY. I dont know who you are or what you think you mean; but you have just hit it: I dont know my head from my heels. Why did they tell me that children couldnt live without medicine and three meat meals a day? Do you know that I have killed two of my children because they told me that? My own children! Murdered them, just!
THE ELDER. Medea! Medea!
MRS MOPPLY. It isnt an idea: it’s the truth. I will never believe anything again as long as I live. I’d have killed the only one I had left if she hadnt run away from me. I was told to sacrifice myself – to live for others; and I did it if ever a woman did. They told me that everyone would love me for it; and I thought they would; but my daughter ran away when I had sacrificed myself to her until I found myself wishing she would die like the others and leave me a little to myself. And now I find it was not only my daughter that hated me but that all my friends, all the time they were pretending to sympathize, were just longing to bash me over the head with their umbrellas. This poor man only did what all the rest would have done if theyd dared. When I said I forgave you I meant it: I am greatly obliged to you. [She kisses him]. But now what am I to do? How am I to behave in a world thats just the opposite of everything I was told about it?
THE PATIENT. Steady, mother! steady! steady! Sit down. [She picks up a heavy stone and places it near the Abode of Love for Mrs Mopply to sit on].
MRS MOPPLY [seating herself] Dont you call me mother. Do you think my daughter could carry rocks about like that? she that had to call the nurse to pick up her Pekingese dog when she wanted to pet it! You think you can get round me by pretending to be my daughter; but that just shews what a fool you are; for I hate my daughter and my daughter hates me, because I sacrificed myself to her. She was a horrid selfish girl, always ill and complaining, and never satisfied, no matter how much you did for her. The only sensible thing she ever did was to steal her own necklace and sell it and run away to spend the money on herself. I expect she’s in bed somewhere with a dozen nurses and six doctors all dancing attendance on her. Youre not a bit like her, thank goodness: thats why Ive taken a fancy to you. You come with me, darling. I have lots of money, and sixty years of a misspent life to make up for; so you will have a good time with me. Come with me as my companion; and lets forget that there are such miserable things in the world as mothers and daughters.
THE PATIENT. What use shall we be to one another?
MRS MOPPLY. None, thank God. We can do without one another if we dont hit it off.
THE PATIENT. Righto! I’ll take you on trial until Ive had time to look about me and see what I’m going to do. But only on trial, mind.
MRS MOPPLY. Just so, darling. We’ll both be on trial. So thats settled.
THE PATIENT. And now, Mr Meek, what about the little commission you promised to do for me? Have you brought back my passport?
THE COUNTESS. Your passport? Whatever for?
AUBREY. What have you been up to, Mops? Are you going to desert me?
Meek advances and empties a heap of passports from his satchel on the sand, kneeling down to sort out the patient’s.
TALLBOYS. What is the meaning of this? Whose passports are these? What are you doing with them? Where did you get them?
MEEK. Everybody within fifty miles is asking me to get a passport visa’d.
TALLBOYS. Visa’d! For what country?
MEEK. For Beotia, sir.
TALLBOYS. Beotia?
MEEK. Yessir. The Union of Federated Sensible Societies, sir. The U.F.S.S. Everybody wants to go there now, sir.
THE COUNTESS. Well I never!
THE ELDER. And what is to become of our unhappy country if all its inhabitants desert it for an outlandish place in which even property is not respected?
MEEK. No fear, sir: they wont have us. They wont admit any more English, sir: they say their lunatic asylums are too full already. I couldnt get a single visa, except [to the Colonel] for you, sir.
TALLBOYS. For me! Damn their impudence! I never asked for one.
MEEK. No, sir; but their people have so much leisure that they are at their wits’ end for some occupation to keep them out of mischief. They want to introduce the only institution of ours that they admire.
THE ELDER. And pray which one is that?
MEEK. The English school of watercolor painting, sir. Theyve seen some of the Colonel’s work; and theyll make him head of their centres of repose and culture if he’ll settle there.
TALLBOYS. This cannot be true, Meek. It indicates a degree of intelligence of which no Government is capable.
MEEK. It’s true, sir, I assure you.
TALLBOYS. But my wife –
MEEK. Yessir: I told them. [He repacks his satchel].
TALLBOYS. Well, well: there is nothing for it but to return to our own country.
THE ELDER. Can our own country return to its senses, sir? that is the question.
TALLBOYS. Ask Meek.
MEEK. No use, sir: all the English privates want to be colonels: there’s no salvation for snobs. [To Tallboys] Shall I see about getting the expedition back to England, sir?
TALLBOYS. Yes. And get me two tubes of rose madder and a big one of Chinese White, will you?
MEEK [about to go] Yessir.
THE ELDER. Stop. There are police in England. What is to become of my son there?
SWEETIE [rising] Make Popsy a preacher, old man. But dont start him until weve gone.
THE ELDER. Preach, my son, preach to your heart’s content. Do anything rather than steal and make your military crimes an excuse for your civil ones. Let men call you the reverend. Let them call you anything rather than thief.
AUBREY [rising] If I may be allowed to improve the occasion for a moment –
General consternation. All who are seated rise in alarm, except the patient, who jumps up and claps her hands in mischievous encouragement to the orator.
MRS MOPPLY [together] You hold your tongue, young man.
SWEETIE Oh Lord! we’re in for it now.
THE ELDER Shame and silence would better become you, sir.
THE PATIENT Go on, Pops. It’s the only thing you do well.
AUBREY [continuing] – it is clear to me that though we seem to be dispersing quietly to do very ordinary things: Sweetie and the Sergeant to get married [the Sergeant hastily steals down from his grotto, beckoning to Sweetie to follow him. They both escape along the beach] the colonel to his wife, his watercolors, and his K.C.B. [the colonel hurries away noiselessly in the opposite direction] Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek to his job of repatriating the expedition [Meek takes to flight up the path through the gap] Mops, like Saint Teresa, to found an unladylike sisterhood with her mother as cook-housekeeper [Mrs Mopply hastily follows the sergeant, dragging with her the patient, who is listening to Aubrey with signs of becoming rapt in his discourse] yet they are all, like my father here, falling, falling, falling endlessly and hopelessly through a void in which they can find no footing. [The Elder vanishes into the recesses of St Pauls, leaving his son to preach in solitude]. There is something fantastic about them, something unreal and perverse, something profoundly unsatisfactory. They are too absurd to be believed in: yet they are not fictions: the newspapers are full of them: what storyteller, however reckless a liar, would dare to invent figures so improbable as men and women with their minds stripped naked? Naked bodies no longer shock us: our sunbathers, grinning at us from every illustrated summer number of our magazines, are nuder than shorn lambs. But the horror of the naked mind is still more than we can bear. Throw off the last rag of your bathing costume; and I shall not blench nor expect you to blush. You may even throw away the outer garments of your souls: the manners, the morals, the decencies. Swear; use dirty words; drink cocktails; kiss and caress and cuddle until girls who are like roses at eighteen are like battered demireps at twenty-two: in all these ways the bright young things of the victory have scandalized their dull old p
rewar elders and left nobody but their bright young selves a penny the worse. But how are we to bear this dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who until now have always disguised themselves from one another in beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another’s company. The iron lightning of war has burnt great rents in these angelic veils, just as it has smashed great holes in our cathedral roofs and torn great gashes in our hillsides. Our souls go in rags now; and the young are spying through the holes and getting glimpses of the reality that was hidden. And they are not horrified: they exult in having found us out: they expose their own souls: and when we their elders desperately try to patch our torn clothes with scraps of the old material, the young lay violent hands on us and tear from us even the rags that were left to us. But when they have stripped themselves and us utterly naked, will they be able to bear the spectacle? You have seen me try to strip my soul before my father; but when these two young women stripped themselves more boldly than I – when the old woman had the mask struck from her soul and revelled in it instead of dying of it – I shrank from the revelation as from a wind bringing from the unknown regions of the future a breath which may be a breath of life, but of a life too keen for me to bear, and therefore for me a blast of death. I stand midway between youth and age like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last and too early for the next. What am I to do? What am I? A soldier who has lost his nerve, a thief who at his first great theft has found honesty the best policy and restored his booty to its owner. Nature never intended me for soldiering or thieving: I am by nature and destiny a preacher. I am the new Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands. The war has been a fiery forcing house in which we have grown with a rush like flowers in a late spring following a terrible winter. And with what result? This: that we have outgrown our religion, outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and character. The fatal word NOT has been miraculously inserted into all our creeds: in the desecrated temples where we knelt murmuring ‘I believe’ we stand with stiff knees and stiffer necks shouting ‘Up, all! the erect posture is the mark of the man: let lesser creatures kneel and crawl: we will not kneel and we do not believe.’ But what next? Is No enough? For a boy, yes: for á man, never. Are we any the less obsessed with a belief when we are denying it than when we were affirming it? No: I must have affirmations to preach. Without them the young will not listen to me; for even the young grow tired of denials. The negativemonger falls before the soldiers, the men of action, the fighters, strong in the old uncompromising affirmations which give them status, duties, certainty of consequences; so that the pugnacious spirit of man in them can reach out and strike deathblows with steadfastly closed minds. Their way is straight and sure: but it is the way of death; and the preacher must preach the way of life. Oh, if I could only find it! [A white sea fog swirls up from the beach to his feet, rising and thickening round him]. I am ignorant: I have lost my nerve and am intimidated: all I know is that I must find the way of life, for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish. And meanwhile my gift has possession of me: I must preach and preach and preach no matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter whether I have nothing to say –