by Unknown
Kate. I, who might have been Lady Sims.
Sir Harry. And you are her typist instead. And she has four men-servants. Oh, I am glad you saw her in her presentation gown.
Kate. I wonder if she would let me do her washing, Sir Harry?
(Her want of taste disgusts him.)
Sir Harry (with dignity). You can go. The mere thought that only a few flights of stairs separates such as you from my innocent children ——
(He will never know why a new light has come into her face.)
Kate (slowly). You have children?
Sir Harry (inflated). Two.
(He wonders why she is so long in answering.)
Kate (resorting to impertinence). Such a nice number.
Sir Harry (with an extra turn of the screw). Both boys.
Kate. Successful in everything. Are they like you, Sir Harry?
Sir Harry (expanding). They are very like me.
Kate. That’s nice.
(Even on such a subject as this she can be ribald.)
Sir Harry. Will you please to go.
Kate. Heigho! What shall I say to my employer?
Sir Harry. That is no affair of mine.
Kate. What will you say to Lady Sims?
Sir Harry. I flatter myself that whatever I say, Lady Sims will accept without comment.
(She smiles, heaven knows why, unless her next remark explains it.)
Kate. Still the same Harry.
Sir Harry. What do you mean?
Kate. Only that you have the old confidence in your profound knowledge of the sex.
Sir Harry (beginning to think as little of her intellect as of her morals). I suppose I know my wife.
Kate (hopelessly dense). I suppose so. I was only remembering that you used to think you knew her in the days when I was the lady. (He is merely wasting his time on her, and he indicates the door. She is not sufficiently the lady to retire worsted.) Well, goodbye, Sir Harry. Won’t you ring, and the four men-servants will show me out?
(But he hesitates.)
Sir Harry (in spite of himself). As you are here, there is something I want to get out of you. (Wishing he could ask it less eagerly) Tell me, who was the man?
(The strange woman — it is evident now that she has always been strange to him — smiles tolerantly.)
Kate. You never found out?
Sir Harry. I could never be sure.
Kate (reflectively). I thought that would worry you.
Sir Harry (sneering). It’s plain that he soon left you.
Kate. Very soon.
Sir Harry. As I could have told you. (But still she surveys him with the smile of Monna Lisa. The badgered man has to entreat) Who was he? It was fourteen years ago, and cannot matter to any of us now. Kate, tell me who he was?
(It is his first youthful moment, and perhaps because of that she does not wish to hurt him.)
Kate (shaking a motherly head). Better not ask.
Sir Harry. I do ask. Tell me.
Kate. It is kinder not to tell you.
Sir Harry (violently). Then, by James, it was one of my own pals. Was it Bernard Roche? (She shakes her head.) It may have been some one who comes to my house still.
Kate. I think not. (Reflecting) Fourteen years! You found my letter that night when you went home?
Sir Harry (impatient). Yes.
Kate. I propped it against the decanters. I thought you would be sure to see it there. It was a room not unlike this, and the furniture was arranged in the same attractive way. How it all comes back to me. Don’t you see me, Harry, in hat and cloak, putting the letter there, taking a last look round, and then stealing out into the night to meet ——
Sir Harry. Whom?
Kate. Him. Hours pass, no sound in the room but the tick-tack of the clock, and then about midnight you return alone. You take ——
Sir Henry (gruffly). I wasn’t alone.
Kate (the picture spoilt). No? oh. (Plaintively) Here have I all these years been conceiving it wrongly. (She studies his face.) I believe something interesting happened?
Sir Harry (growling). Something confoundedly annoying.
Kate (coaxing). Do tell me.
Sir Harry. We won’t go into that. Who was the man? Surely a husband has a right to know with whom his wife bolted.
Kate (who is detestably ready with her tongue). Surely the wife has a right to know how he took it. (The woman’s love of bargaining comes to her aid.) A fair exchange. You tell me what happened, and I will tell you who he was.
Sir Harry. You will? Very well. (It is the first point on which they have agreed, and, forgetting himself, he takes a place beside her on the fire-seat. He is thinking only of what he is to tell her, but she, womanlike, is conscious of their proximity.)
Kate (tastelessly). Quite like old times. (He moves away from her indignantly.) Go on, Harry.
Sir Harry (who has a manful shrinking from saying anything that is to his disadvantage.) Well, as you know, I was dining at the club that night.
Kate. Yes.
Sir Harry. Jack Lamb drove me home. Mabbett Green was with us, and I asked them to come in for a few minutes.
Kate. Jack Lamb, Mabbett Green? I think I remember them. Jack was in Parliament.
Sir Harry. No, that was Mabbett. They came into the house with me and — (with sudden horror) — was it him?
Kate (bewildered). Who?
Sir Harry. Mabbett?
Kate. What?
Sir Harry. The man?
Kate. What man? (understanding) Oh no. I thought you said he came into the house with you.
Sir Harry. It might have been a blind.
Kate. Well, it wasn’t. Go on.
Sir Harry. They came in to finish a talk we had been having at the club.
Kate. An interesting talk, evidently.
Sir Harry. The papers had been full that evening of the elopement of some countess woman with a fiddler. What was her name?
Kate. Does it matter?
Sir Harry. No. (Thus ends the countess.) We had been discussing the thing and — (he pulls a wry face) — and I had been rather warm ——
Kate (with horrid relish). I begin to see. You had been saying it served the husband right, that the man who could not look after his wife deserved to lose her. It was one of your favourite subjects. Oh, Harry, say it was that!
Sir Harry (sourly). It may have been something like that.
Kate. And all the time the letter was there, waiting; and none of you knew except the clock. Harry, it is sweet of you to tell me. (His face is not sweet. The illiterate woman has used the wrong adjective.) I forget what I said precisely in the letter.
Sir Harry (pulverising her). So do I. But I have it still.
Kate (not pulverised). Do let me see it again. (She has observed his eye wandering to the desk.)
Sir Harry. You are welcome to it as a gift. (The fateful letter, a poor little dead thing, is brought to light from a locked drawer.)
Kate (taking it). Yes, this is it. Harry, how you did crumple it! (She reads, not without curiosity.) ‘Dear husband — I call you that for the last time — I am off. I am what you call making a bolt of it. I won’t try to excuse myself nor to explain, for you would not accept the excuses nor understand the explanation. It will be a little shock to you, but only to your pride; what will astound you is that any woman could be such a fool as to leave such a man as you. I am taking nothing with me that belongs to you. May you be very happy. — Your ungrateful Kate. P.S. — You need not try to find out who he is. You will try, but you won’t succeed.’ (She folds the nasty little thing up.) I may really have it for my very own?
Sir Harry. You really may.
Kate (impudently). If you would care for a typed copy —— ?
Sir Harry (in a voice with which he used to frighten his grandmother). None of your sauce. (Wincing) I had to let them see it in the end.
Kate. I can picture Jack Lamb eating it.
Sir Harry. A penniless parson’s daughter.
Sir Harry. We searched for the two of you high and low.
Kate. Private detectives?
Sir Harry. They couldn’t get on the track of you.
Kate (smiling). No?
Sir Harry. But at last the courts let me serve the papers by advertisement on a man unknown, and I got my freedom.
Kate. So I saw. It was the last I heard of you.
Sir Harry (each word a blow for her). And I married again just as soon as ever I could.
Kate. They say that is always a compliment to the first wife.
Sir Harry (violently). I showed them.
Kate. You soon let them see that if one woman was a fool, you still had the pick of the basket to choose from.
Sir Harry. By James, I did.
Kate (bringing him to earth again). But still, you wondered who he was.
Sir Harry. I suspected everybody — even my pals. I felt like jumping at their throats and crying, ‘It’s you!’
Kate. You had been so admirable to me, an instinct told you that I was sure to choose another of the same.
Sir Harry. I thought, it can’t be money, so it must be looks. Some dolly face. (He stares at her in perplexity.) He must have had something wonderful about him to make you willing to give up all that you had with me.
Kate (as if he was the stupid one). Poor Harry.
Sir Harry. And it couldn’t have been going on for long, for I would have noticed the change in you.
Kate. Would you?
Sir Harry. I knew you so well.
Kate. You amazing man.
Sir Harry. So who was he? Out with it.
Kate. You are determined to know?
Sir Harry. Your promise. You gave your word.
Kate. If I must —— (She is the villain of the piece, but it must be conceded that in this matter she is reluctant to pain him.) I am sorry I promised. (Looking at him steadily.) There was no one, Harry; no one at all.
Sir Harry (rising). If you think you can play with me ——
Kate. I told you that you wouldn’t like it.
Sir Harry (rasping). It is unbelievable.
Kate. I suppose it is; but it is true.
Sir Harry. Your letter itself gives you the lie.
Kate. That was intentional. I saw that if the truth were known you might have a difficulty in getting your freedom; and as I was getting mine it seemed fair that you should have yours also. So I wrote my goodbye in words that would be taken to mean what you thought they meant, and I knew the law would back you in your opinion. For the law, like you, Harry, has a profound understanding of women.
Sir Harry (trying to straighten himself). I don’t believe you yet.
Kate (looking not unkindly into the soul of this man). Perhaps that is the best way to take it. It is less unflattering than the truth. But you were the only one. (Summing up her life.) You sufficed.
Sir Harry. Then what mad impulse ——
Kate. It was no impulse, Harry. I had thought it out for a year.
Sir Harry. A year? (dazed). One would think to hear you that I hadn’t been a good husband to you.
Kate (with a sad smile). You were a good husband according to your lights.
Sir Harry (stoutly). I think so.
Kate. And a moral man, and chatty, and quite the philanthropist.
Sir Harry (on sure ground). All women envied you.
Kate. How you loved me to be envied.
Sir Harry. I swaddled you in luxury.
Kate (making her great revelation). That was it.
Sir Harry (blankly). What?
Kate (who can be serene because it is all over). How you beamed at me when I sat at the head of your fat dinners in my fat jewellery, surrounded by our fat friends.
Sir Harry (aggrieved). They weren’t so fat.
Kate (a side issue). All except those who were so thin. Have you ever noticed, Harry, that many jewels make women either incredibly fat or incredibly thin?
Sir Harry (shouting). I have not. (Is it worth while to argue with her any longer?) We had all the most interesting society of the day. It wasn’t only business men. There were politicians, painters, writers ——
Kate. Only the glorious, dazzling successes. Oh, the fat talk while we ate too much — about who had made a hit and who was slipping back, and what the noo house cost and the noo motor and the gold soup-plates, and who was to be the noo knight.
Sir Harry (who it will be observed is unanswerable from first to last). Was anybody getting on better than me, and consequently you?
Kate. Consequently me! Oh, Harry, you and your sublime religion.
Sir Harry (honest heart). My religion? I never was one to talk about religion, but ——
Kate. Pooh, Harry, you don’t even know what your religion was and is and will be till the day of your expensive funeral. (And here is the lesson that life has taught her). One’s religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success.
Sir Harry (quoting from his morning paper). Ambition — is the last infirmity of noble minds.
Kate. Noble minds!
Sir Harry (at last grasping what she is talking about). You are not saying that you left me because of my success?
Kate. Yes, that was it. (And now she stands revealed to him.) I couldn’t endure it. If a failure had come now and then — but your success was suffocating me. (She is rigid with emotion.) The passionate craving I had to be done with it, to find myself among people who had not got on.
Sir Harry (with proper spirit). There are plenty of them.
Kate. There were none in our set. When they began to go downhill they rolled out of our sight.
Sir Harry (clinching it). I tell you I am worth a quarter of a million.
Kate (unabashed). That is what you are worth to yourself. I’ll tell you what you are worth to me: exactly twelve pounds. For I made up my mind that I could launch myself on the world alone if I first proved my mettle by earning twelve pounds; and as soon as I had earned it I left you.
Sir Harry (in the scales). Twelve pounds!
Kate. That is your value to a woman. If she can’t make it she has to stick to you.
Sir Harry (remembering perhaps a rectory garden). You valued me at more than that when you married me.
Kate (seeing it also). Ah, I didn’t know you then. If only you had been a man, Harry.
Sir Harry. A man? What do you mean by a man?
Kate (leaving the garden). Haven’t you heard of them? They are something fine; and every woman is loath to admit to herself that her husband is not one. When she marries, even though she has been a very trivial person, there is in her some vague stirring toward a worthy life, as well as a fear of her capacity for evil. She knows her chance lies in him. If there is something good in him, what is good in her finds it, and they join forces against the baser parts. So I didn’t give you up willingly, Harry. I invented all sorts of theories to explain you. Your hardness — I said it was a fine want of mawkishness. Your coarseness — I said it goes with strength. Your contempt for the weak — I called it virility. Your want of ideals was clear-sightedness. Your ignoble views of women — I tried to think them funny. Oh, I clung to you to save myself. But I had to let go; you had only the one quality, Harry, success; you had it so strong that it swallowed all the others.
Sir Harry (not to be diverted from the main issue). How did you earn that twelve pounds?
Kate. It took me nearly six months; but I earned it fairly. (She presses her hand on the typewriter as lovingly as many a woman has pressed a rose.) I learned this. I hired it and taught myself. I got some work through a friend, and with my first twelve pounds I paid for my machine. Then I considered that I was free to go, and I went.
Sir Harry. All this going on in my house while you were living in the lap of luxury! (She nods.) By God, you were determined.
Kate (briefly). By God, I was.
Sir Harry (staring). How you must have hated me.
Kate (smiling at
the childish word). Not a bit — after I saw that there was a way out. From that hour you amused me, Harry; I was even sorry for you, for I saw that you couldn’t help yourself. Success is just a fatal gift.