Plays Extravagant

by Dan Laurence

  ALASTAIR [rising and coming from the other end of the room] That is so, Blenderbland. You havnt a dog’s chance. Next time you see her fist coming in your direction, duck and counter. If you dont get that satisfaction you wont get any. [He sits down next Patricia, on her right].

  PATRICIA. Yes, Mr Blenderbland: Alastair’s right. Ask her nicely, and perhaps she’ll pay your expenses.

  ADRIAN [sitting up and taking his head in his hands, shaken, almost lachrymose] Is there any justice for a man against a woman?

  SAGAMORE [sitting beside him to console him] Believe me: no. Not against a millionairess.

  EPIFANIA. And what justice is there for a millionairess, I should like to know?

  SAGAMORE. In the courts –

  EPIFANIA. I am not thinking of the courts: there is little justice there for anybody. My millions are in themselves an injustice. I speak of the justice of heaven.

  ALASTAIR. Oh Lord! Now we’re for it. [He deliberately puts his arm round Patricia’s waist].

  EPIFANIA. Alastair: how can you jeer at me? Is it just that I, because I am a millionairess, cannot keep my husband, cannot keep even a lover, cannot keep anything but my money? There you sit before my very eyes, snuggling up to that insignificant little nothingness who cannot afford to pay for her own stockings; and you are happy and she is happy. [She turns to Adrian] Here is this suit of clothes on two sticks. What does it contain?

  ADRIAN [broken] Let me alone, will you?

  EPIFANIA. Something that once resembled a man, something that liked lending me five pound notes and never asked me to repay them. Why? Kindness to me? Love of me? No: the swank of a poor man lending to a millionairess. In my divine wrath I smashed him as a child smashes a disappointing toy; and when he was beaten down to his real self I found I was not a woman to him but a bank account with a good cook.

  PATRICIA. Thats all very fine, deary; but the truth is that no one can live with you.

  EPIFANIA. And anyone can live with you. And apparently you can live with anybody.

  ALASTAIR. What Seedy says is God’s truth. Nobody could live with you.

  EPIFANIA. But why? Why? Why?

  SAGAMORE. Do be reasonable, Mrs Fitzfassenden. Can one live with a tornado? with an earthquake? with an avalanche?

  EPIFANIA. Yes. Thousands of people live on the slopes of volcanoes, in the track of avalanches, on land thrown up only yesterday by earthquakes. But with a millionairess who can rise to her destiny and wield the power her money gives her, no. Well, be it so. I shall sit in my lonely house, and be myself, and pile up millions until I find a man good enough to be to me what Alastair is to Seedystockings.

  PATRICIA. Well, I hope you wont have to wait too long.

  EPIFANIA. I never wait. I march on; and when I come upon the things I need I grab them. I grabbed your Alastair. I find that he does not suit me: he beats me –

  ALASTAIR. In self-defence. I never raised a hand to you except in self-defence.

  EPIFANIA. Yes: you are like the great European Powers: you never fight except in self-defence. But you are two stone heavier than I; and I cannot keep my head at infighting as you can. You do not suit. I throw you to Greedy-SeedyStockings: you can punch her to your heart’s content. Mr Sagamore: arrange the divorce. Cruelty and adultery.

  PATRICIA. But I dont like this: it’s not fair to Alastair. Why is he to be divorced instead of you?

  EPIFANIA. Mr Sagamore: take an action against Patricia Smith for alienating my husband’s affections. Damages twenty thousand pounds.

  PATRICIA. Oh! Is such a thing possible, Mr Sagamore?

  SAGAMORE. I am afraid it is, Miss Smith. Quite possible.

  PATRICIA. Well, my dear old father used to say that in the law courts there is only one way to beat the people who have unlimited money; and that is to have no money at all. You cant get twenty thousand out of me. And call it vanity if you will; but I should rather like the world to know that in my little way I was able to take the best and dearest man in England from the richest woman.

  EPIFANIA. Damn your dear old father!

  ALASTAIR [laughing boisterously] Ha ha! One for you, Eppy. [He kisses Patricia].

  SAGAMORE [smiling] I am afraid the laugh is with old Mr Smith, Mrs Fitzfassenden. Where there is nothing, the king loses his rights.

  EPIFANIA. Oh, I can bear no more of this. I will not have my life dragged down to planes of vulgarity on which I cannot breathe. I will live in utter loneliness and keep myself sacred until I find the right man – the man who can stand with me on the utmost heights and not lose his head – the mate created for me in heaven. He must be somewhere.

  THE DOCTOR [appearing at the door] The manager says I am wanted here. Who wants me?

  EPIFANIA. I want you. Come here [she stretches out her hand to him imperiously].

  THE DOCTOR [coming to her and feeling her pulse] Something wrong with your blood pressure, eh? [Amazed] Ooooh! I have never felt such a pulse. It is like a slow sledge hammer.

  EPIFANIA. Well, is my pulse my fault?

  THE DOCTOR. No. It is the will of Allah. All our pulses are part of the will of Allah.

  ALASTAIR. Look here, you know, Doc: that wont go down in this country. We dont believe in Allah.

  THE DOCTOR. That does not disconcert Allah in the least, my friend. The pulse beats still, slow, strong. [To Epifania] You are a terrible woman; but I love your pulse. I have never felt anything like it before.

  PATRICIA. Well, just fancy that! He loves her pulse.

  THE DOCTOR. I am a doctor. Women as you fancy them are nothing to me but bundles of ailments. But the life! the pulse! is the heartbeat of Allah, save in Whom there is no majesty and no might. [He drops her hand].

  EPIFANIA. My pulse will never change: this is the love I crave for. I will marry you. Mr Sagamore: see about a special licence the moment you have got rid of Alastair.

  THE DOCTOR. It is not possible. We are bound by our vows.

  EPIFANIA. Well, have I not passed your mother’s test? You shall have an accountant’s certificate. I learned in the first half hour of my search for employment that the living wage for a single woman is five shillings a week. Before the end of the week I had made enough to support me for a hundred years. I did it honestly and legitimately. I explained the way in which it was done.

  THE DOCTOR. It was not the way of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Had you added a farthing an hour to the wages of those sweated women, that wicked business would have crashed on your head. You sold it to the man Superflew for the last penny of his savings; and the women still slave for him at one piastre an hour.

  EPIFANIA. You cannot change the market price of labor: not Allah himself can do that. But I came to this hotel as a scullery maid: the most incompetent scullery maid that ever broke a dinner service. I am now its owner; and there is no tuppencehapeny an hour here.

  THE DOCTOR. The hotel looks well in photographs; and the wages you pay would be a fortune to a laborer on the Nile. But what of the old people whose natural home this place had become? the old man with his paralytic stroke? the old woman gone mad? the cast out creatures in the workhouse? Was not this preying on the poverty of the poor? Shall I, the servant of Allah, live on such gains? Shall I, the healer, the helper, the guardian of life and the counsellor of health, unite with the exploiter of misery?

  EPIFANIA. I have to take the world as I find it.

  THE DOCTOR. The wrath of Allah shall overtake those who leave the world no better than they found it.

  EPIFANIA. I think Allah loves those who make money. SAGAMORE. All the evidence is that way, certainly.

  THE DOCTOR. I do not see it so. I see that riches are a curse; poverty is a curse; only in the service of Allah is there justice, righteousness, and happiness. But all this talk is idle. This lady has easily fulfilled the condition imposed by my mother. But I have not fulfilled the condition imposed by the lady’s father.

  EPIFANIA. You need not trouble about that. The six months have not expired. I will shew you
how to turn your hundred and fifty pounds into fifty thousand.

  THE DOCTOR. You cannot. It is gone.

  EPIFANIA. Oh, you cannot have spent it all: you who live like a mouse. There must be some of it left.

  THE DOCTOR. Not a penny. Not a piastre. Allah –

  EPIFANIA. Oh, bother Allah! What did you do with it?

  THE DOCTOR. Allah is never bothered. On that afternoon when you left me to earn your own living I called upon the Merciful, the Compassionate, to reveal to me whether you were not one of the strokes of his infinite humor. Then I sat down and took up a newspaper. And behold! a paragraph headed Wills and Bequests. I read a name that I cannot remember: Mrs Somebody of Clapham Park, one hundred and twenty-two thousand pounds. She had never done anything but live in Clapham Park; and she left £122,000. But what was the next name? It was that of the teacher who changed my whole life and gave me a new soul by opening the world of science to me. I was his assistant for four years. He used to make his own apparatus for his experiments; and one day he needed a filament of metal that would resist a temperature that melted platinum like sealing wax.

  EPIFANIA. Buy his patent for me if it has not been snapped up.

  THE DOCTOR. He never took out a patent. He believed that knowledge is no man’s property. And he had neither time nor money to waste in patent offices. Millions have been made out of that discovery of his by people who care nothing about science and everything about money. He left four hundred pounds and a widow: the good woman who had been a second mother to me. A shilling a day for her at most: not even one piastre an hour.

  EPIFANIA. That comes of marrying an incompetent dreamer. Are you going to beg for her? I warn you I am tired of destitute widows. I should be a beggar myself if I took them all on my shoulders.

  THE DOCTOR. Have no fear. The Merciful, the Compassionate heard the prayer of the widow. Listen. I once cured a Prime Minister when he imagined himself to be ill. I went to him and told him that it was the will of Allah that the widow should have a civil list pension. She received it: a hundred pounds a year. I went to the great Metallurgical Trust which exploits his discovery, and told them that her poverty was a scandal in the face of Allah. They were rich and generous: they made a special issue of founders’ shares for her, worth three hundred a year to her. They called it letting her in on the ground floor. May her prayers win them favor from Him save in whom there is no might and no majesty! But all this took time. The illness, the nurse, the funeral, the disposal of the laboratory, the change to a cheaper lodging, had left her without a penny, though no doctor and lawyer took a farthing, and the shopkeepers were patient; for the spirit of Allah worked more strongly upon them than on the British Treasury, which clamored for its little death duty. Between the death and the pensions there was a gap exactly one hundred and fifty pounds wide. He who is just and exact supplied that sum by your chauffeur’s hands and by mine. It rejoiced my heart as money had never rejoiced it before. But instead of coming to you with fifty thousand pounds I am in arrear with my bill for my daily bread in your hotel, and am expecting every day to be told by your manager that this cannot go on: I must settle.

  ALASTAIR. Well, old man, you may not have done a lot for yourself; but you have done damned well for the widow. And you have escaped Eppy. She wont marry you with your pockets empty.

  EPIFANIA. Pray why? Fifty thousand pounds must have been made out of that discovery ten times over. The doctor, in putting my money into the widow’s necessary expenses, may be said to have made a retrospective investment in the discovery. And he has shewn the greatest ability in the affair: has he not, Mr Sagamore?

  SAGAMORE. Unquestionably. He has bowled out the Prime Minister. He has bowled out the Imperial Metallurgical Trust. He has settled the widow’s affairs to perfection.

  THE DOCTOR. But not my own affairs. I am in debt for my food.

  EPIFANIA. Well, if you come to that, I am in debt for my food. I got a letter this morning from my purveyors to say that I have paid them nothing for two years, and unless I let them have something on account they will be obliged to resort to the premises.

  THE DOCTOR. What does that mean?

  EPIFANIA. Sell my furniture.

  THE DOCTOR. You cannot sell mine, I am afraid. I have hardly any.

  BLENDERBLAND. If you have a stick she will sell it. She is the meanest woman in England.

  EPIFANIA. That is why I am also the richest. Mr Sagamore: my mind is made up: I will marry this doctor. Ascertain his name and make the necessary arrangements.

  BLENDERBLAND. You take care, doctor. She is unfaithful to her husband in wanting to marry you. She flirted with me: took me down the river and made me believe I was to be Alastair’s successor before ever she saw you. See what she has done to me! She will do it to you when the next man takes her fancy.

  THE DOCTOR [to Epifania] What have you to say to that?

  EPIFANIA. You must learn to take chances in this world. This disappointed philanderer tries to frighten you with my unfaithfulness. He has never been married: I have. And I tell you that in the very happiest marriages not a day passes without a thousand moments of unfaithfulness. You begin by thinking you have only one husband: you find you have a dozen. There is a creature you hate and despise and are tied to for life; and before breakfast is over the fool says something nice and becomes a man whom you admire and love; and between these extremes there are a thousand degrees with a different man and woman at each of them. A wife is all women to one man: she is everything that is devilish: the thorn in his flesh, the jealous termagant, the detective dogging all his movements, the nagger, the scolder, the worrier. He has only to tell her an affectionate lie and she is his comfort, his helper, at best his greatest treasure, at worst his troublesome but beloved child. All wives are all these women in one, all husbands all these men in one. What do the unmarried know of this infinitely dangerous heart tearing everchanging life of adventure that we call marriage? Face it as you would face a dangerous operation: have you not performed hundreds of them?

  THE DOCTOR. Of a surety there is no wit and no wisdom like that of a woman ensnaring the mate chosen for her by Allah. Yet I am very well as I am. Why should I change? I shall be very happy as an old bachelor.

  EPIFANIA [flinging out her wrists at him] Can you feel my pulse every day as an old bachelor?

  THE DOCTOR [taking her wrist and mechanically taking out his watch at the same time] Ah! I had forgotten the pulse. One, two, three: it is irresistible: it is a pulse in a hundred thousand. I love it: I cannot give it up.

  BLENDERBLAND. You will regret it to the last day of your life.

  EPIFANIA. Mr Sagamore: you have your instructions.

  SAGAMORE [bows].

  PATRICIA. Congratulations, darling.

  And that is how the story ends in capitalist countries. In Russia, however, and in countries with Communist sympathies, the people demand that the tale shall have an edifying moral. Accordingly, when the doctor, feeling Epifania’s pulse, says that he loves it and cannot give it up, Blenderbland continues the conversation as follows.

  BLENDERBLAND. Take care. Her hand is accursed. It is the hand of Midas: it turns everything it touches to gold.

  THE DOCTOR. My hand is more deeply accursed. Gold flies away from it. Why am I always poor? I do not like being poor.

  EPIFANIA. Why am I always rich? I do not like being rich.

  ALASTAIR. Youd better both go to Russia, where there are neither rich nor poor.

  EPIFANIA. Why not? I buy nothing but Russian stock now.

  BLENDERBLAND. The Russians would shoot you as they would a mad dog. You are a bloated capitalist, you know.

  EPIFANIA. I am a capitalist here; but in Russia I should be a worker. And what a worker! My brains are wasted here: the wealth they create is thrown away on idlers and their parasites, whilst poverty, dirt, disease, misery and slavery surround me like a black sea in which I may be engulfed at any moment by a turn of the money market. Russia needs managing women like me. In Mosco
w I shall not be a millionairess; but I shall be in the Sovnarkom within six months and in the Politbureau before the end of the year. Here I have no real power, no real freedom, and no security at all: we may all die in the workhouse. In Russia I shall have such authority! such scope for my natural powers! as the Empress Catharine never enjoyed. I swear that before I have been twenty years in Russia every Russian baby shall weigh five pounds heavier and every Russian man and woman live ten years longer. I shall not be an empress; and I may work myself to death; but in a thousand years from now holy Russia shall again have a patron saint, and her name shall be Saint Epifania.