by Unknown
Mrs. Page. Mr. Roche, be merry and gay with Beatrice as you will, but don’t take her seriously. (She gives him back the case.) I think you said you had to catch a train.
Charles (surveying his torn treasure. He is very near to tears, but decides rather recklessly to be a strong man). Not yet; I must speak of her to you now.
Mrs. Page (a strong woman without having to decide). I forbid you.
Charles (who, if he knew himself, might see that a good deal of gloomy entertainment could be got by desisting here and stalking London as the persecuted of his lady’s mamma). I have the right. There is no decent man who hasn’t the right to tell a woman that he loves her daughter.
Mrs. Page (determined to keep him to earth though she has to hold him down). She doesn’t love you, my friend.
Charles (though a hopeless passion would be another rather jolly thing). How do you know? You have already said ——
Mrs. Page (rather desperate). I wish you had never come here.
Charles (manfully). Why are you so set against me? I think if I was a woman I should like at any rate to take a good straight look into the eyes of a man who said he was fond of her daughter. You might have to say ‘No’ to him, but — often you must have had thoughts of the kind of man who would one day take her from you, and though I may not be the kind, I assure you, I — I am just as fond of her as if I were. (Not bad for Charles. Sent up for good this time.)
Mrs. Page (beating her hands together in distress). You are torturing me, Charles.
Charles. But why? Did I tell you my name was Charles? (With a happy thought.) She has spoken of me to you! What did she say?
(If he were thinking less of himself and a little of the woman before him he would see that she has turned into an exquisite supplicant.)
Mrs. Page. Oh, boy — you boy! Don’t say anything more. Go away now.
Charles. I don’t understand.
Mrs. Page. I never had an idea that you cared in that way. I thought we were only jolly friends.
Charles. We?
Mrs. Page (with a wry lip for the word that has escaped her). Charles, if you must know, can’t you help me out a little. Don’t you see at last?
(She has come to him with undulations as lovely as a swallow’s flight, mocking, begging, not at all the woman we have been watching; she has become suddenly a disdainful, melting armful. But Charles does not see.)
Charles (the obtuse). I — I ——
Mrs. Page. Very well. But indeed I am sorry to have to break your pretty toy. (Drooping still farther on her stem.) Beatrice, Mr. Roche, has not had a mother this many a year. Do you see now?
Charles. No.
Mrs. Page. Well, well. (Abjectly) Beatrice, Mr. Roche, is forty and a bittock.
Charles. I — you — but — oh no.
Mrs. Page (for better, for worse). Yes, I am Beatrice. (He looks to the photograph to rise up and give her the lie.) The writing on the photograph? A jest. I can explain that.
Charles. But — but it isn’t only on the stage I have seen her. I know her off too.
Mrs. Page. A little. I can explain that also. (He is a very woeful young man.) I am horribly sorry, Charles.
Charles (with his last kick). Even now ——
Mrs. Page. Do you remember an incident with a pair of scissors one day last June in a boat near Maidenhead?
Charles. When Beatrice — when you — when she — cut her wrist?
Mrs. Page. And you kissed the place to make it well. It left its mark.
Charles. I have seen it since.
Mrs. Page. You may see it again, Charles. (She offers him her wrist, but he does not look. He knows the mark is there. For the moment the comic spirit has deserted her, so anxious is she to help this tragic boy. She speaks in the cooing voice that proves her to be Beatrice better than any wrist-mark.) Am I so terribly unlike her as you knew her?
Charles (Ah, to be stabbed with the voice you have loved.) No, you are very like, only — yes, I know now it’s you.
Mrs. Page (pricked keenly). Only I am looking my age to-day. (Forlorn) This is my real self, Charles — if I have one. Why don’t you laugh, my friend. I am laughing. (No, not yet, though she will be presently.) You won’t give me away, will you? (He shakes his head.) I know you won’t now, but it was my first fear when I saw you. (With a sigh.) And now, I suppose, I owe you an explanation.
Charles (done with the world). Not unless you wish to.
Mrs. Page. Oh yes, I wish to. (The laughter is bubbling up now.) Only it will leave you a wiser and a sadder man. You will never be twenty-three again, Charles.
Charles (recalling his distant youth). No, I know I won’t.
Mrs. Page (now the laughter is playing round her mouth). Ah, don’t take it so lugubriously. You will only jump to twenty-four, say. (She sits down beside him to make full confession.) You must often have heard gossip about actresses’ ages?
Charles. I didn’t join in it.
Mrs. Page. Then you can’t be a member of a club.
Charles. If they began it ——
Mrs. Page. You wouldn’t listen?
Charles. Not about you. I dare say I listened about the others.
Mrs. Page. You nice boy. And now to make you twenty-four. (Involuntarily, true to the calling she adorns, she makes the surgeon’s action of turning up her sleeves.) You have seen lots of plays, Charles?
Charles. Yes, tons.
Mrs. Page. Have you noticed that there are no parts in them for middle-aged ladies?
Charles (who has had too happy a life to notice this or almost anything else). Aren’t there?
Mrs. Page. Oh no, not for ‘stars.’ There is nothing for them between the ages of twenty-nine and sixty. Occasionally one of the less experienced dramatists may write such a part, but with a little coaxing we can always make him say, ‘She needn’t be more than twenty-nine.’ And so, dear Charles, we have succeeded in keeping middle-age for women off the stage. Why, even Father Time doesn’t let on about us. He waits at the wings with a dark cloth for us, just as our dressers wait with dust-sheets to fling over our expensive frocks; but we have a way with us that makes even Father Time reluctant to cast his cloak; perhaps it is the coquettish imploring look we give him as we dodge him; perhaps though he is an old fellow he can’t resist the powder on our pretty noses. And so he says, ‘The enchanting baggage, I’ll give her another year.’ When you come to write my epitaph, Charles, let it be in these delicious words, ‘She had a long twenty-nine.’
Charles. But off the stage — I knew you off. (Recalling a gay phantom) Why, I was one of those who saw you into your train for Monte Carlo.
Mrs. Page. You thought you did. That made it easier for me to deceive you here. But I got out of that train at the next station.
(She makes a movement to get out of the train here. We begin to note how she suits the action to the word in obedience to Shakespeare’s lamentable injunction; she cannot mention the tongs without forking two of her fingers.)
Charles. You came here instead?
Mrs. Page. Yes, stole here.
Charles (surveying the broken pieces of her). Even now I can scarcely — You who seemed so young and gay.
Mrs. Page (who is really very good-natured, else would she clout him on the head). I was a twenty-nine. Oh, don’t look so solemn, Charles. It is not confined to the stage. The stalls are full of twenty-nines. Do you remember what fun it was to help me on with my cloak? Remember why I had to put more powder on my chin one evening?
Charles (with a groan). It was only a few weeks ago.
Mrs. Page. Yes. Sometimes it was Mr. Time I saw in the mirror, but the wretch only winked at me and went his way.
Charles (ungallantly). But your whole appearance — so girlish compared to ——
Mrs. Page (gallantly). To this. I am coming to ‘this,’ Charles. (Confidentially; no one can be quite so delightfully confidential as Beatrice Page.) You see, never having been more than twenty-nine, not even in my sleep — for we have to
keep it up even in our sleep — I began to wonder what middle-age was like. I wanted to feel the sensation. A woman’s curiosity, Charles.
Charles. Still, you couldn’t ——
Mrs. Page. Couldn’t I! Listen. Two summers ago, instead of going to Biarritz — see pictures of me in the illustrated papers stepping into my motor-car, or going a round of country houses — see photograph of us all on the steps — the names, Charles, read from left to right — instead of doing any of these things I pretended I went there, and in reality I came down here, determined for a whole calendar month to be a middle-aged lady. I had to get some new clothes, real, cosy, sloppy, very middle-aged clothes; and that is why I invented mamma; I got them for her, you see. I said she was about my figure, but stouter and shorter, as you see she is.
Charles (his eyes wandering up and down her — and nowhere a familiar place). I can’t make out ——
Mrs. Page. No, you are too nice a boy to make it out. You don’t understand the difference that a sober way of doing one’s hair, and the letting out of a few strings, and sundry other trifles that are no trifles, make; but you see I vowed that if the immortal part of me was to get a novel sort of rest, my figure should get it also. Voila! And thus all cosy within and without, I took lodgings in the most out-of-the-world spot I knew of, in the hope that here I might find the lady of whom I was in search.
Charles. Meaning?
Mrs. Page (rather grimly). Meaning myself. Until two years ago she and I had never met.
Charles (the cynic). And how do you like her?
Mrs. Page. Better than you do, young sir. She is really rather nice. I don’t suppose I could do with her all the year round, but for a month or so I am just wallowing in her. You remember my entrancing little shoes? (she wickedly exposes her flapping slippers). At local dances I sit out deliciously as a wallflower. Drop a tear, Charles, for me as a wallflower. I play cards, and the engaged ladies give me their confidences as a dear old thing; and I never, never dream of setting my cap at their swains.
Charles. How strange. You who, when you liked ——
Mrs. Page (plaintively). Yes, couldn’t I, Charles?
Charles (falling into the snare). It was just the wild gaiety of you.
Mrs. Page (who is in the better position to know). It was the devilry of me.
Charles. Whatever it was, it bewitched us.
Mrs. Page (candidly, but forgiving herself). It oughtn’t to.
Charles. If you weren’t all glee you were the saddest thing on earth.
Mrs. Page. But I shouldn’t have been sad on your shoulders, Charles.
Charles (appealing). You weren’t sad on all our shoulders, were you?
Mrs. Page (reassuring). No, not all.
Oh the gladness of her gladness when she’s glad, And the sadness of her sadness when she’s sad, But the gladness of her gladness And the sadness of her sadness Are as nothing, Charles, To the badness of her badness when she’s bad.
(This dagger-to-her-breast business is one of her choicest tricks of fence, and is very dangerous if you can coo like Beatrice.)
Charles (pinked). Not a word against yourself.
Mrs. Page (already seeing what she has been up to). Myself! I suppose even now I am only playing a part.
Charles (who has become her handkerchief). No, no, this is your real self.
Mrs. Page (warily). Is it? I wonder.
Charles. I never knew any one who had deeper feelings.
Mrs. Page. Oh, I am always ready with whatever feeling is called for. I have a wardrobe of them, Charles. Don’t blame me, blame the public of whom you are one; the pitiless public that has made me what I am. I am their slave and their plaything, and when I please them they fling me nuts. (Her voice breaks; no voice can break so naturally as Beatrice’s.) I would have been a darling of a wife — don’t you think so, Charles? — but they wouldn’t let me. I am only a bundle of emotions; I have two characters for each day of the week. Home became a less thing to me than a new part. Charles, if only I could have been a nobody. Can’t you picture me, such a happy, unknown woman, dancing along some sandy shore with half a dozen little boys and girls hanging on to my skirts? When my son was old enough, wouldn’t he and I have made a rather pretty picture for the king the day he joined his ship. And I think most of all I should have loved to deck out my daughter in her wedding-gown.
When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, Tying up her laces, looping up her hair —
But the public wouldn’t have it, and I had to pay the price of my success.
Charles (heartbroken for that wet face). Beatrice!
Mrs. Page. I became a harum-scarum, Charles; sometimes very foolish — (With a queer insight into herself) chiefly through good-nature I think. There were moments when there was nothing I wouldn’t do, so long as I was all right for the play at night. Nothing else seemed to matter. I have kicked over all the traces, my friend. You remember the Scottish poet who
Keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame, But thoughtless follies laid him low And stained his name.
(Sadly enough) Thoughtless follies laid her low, Charles, and stained her name.
Charles (ready to fling down his glove in her defence). I don’t believe it. No, no, Beatrice — Mrs. Page ——
Mrs. Page. Ah, it’s Mrs. Page now.
Charles. You are crying.
Mrs. Page (with some satisfaction). Yes, I am crying.
Charles. This is terrible to me. I never dreamt your life was such a tragedy.
Mrs. Page (coming to). Don’t be so concerned. I am crying, but all the time I am looking at you through the corner of my eye to see if I am doing it well.
Charles (hurt). Don’t — don’t.
Mrs. Page (well aware that she will always be her best audience). Soon I’ll be laughing again. When I have cried, Charles, then it is time for me to laugh.
Charles. Please, I wish you wouldn’t.
Mrs. Page (already in the grip of another devil). And from all this, Charles, you have so nobly offered to save me. You are prepared to take me away from this dreadful life and let me be my real self. (Charles distinctly blanches.) Charles, it is dear and kind of you, and I accept your offer. (She gives him a come-and-take-me curtsy and awaits his rapturous response. The referee counts ten, but Charles has not risen from the floor. Goose that he is; she trills with merriment, though there is a touch of bitterness in it.) You see the time for laughing has come already. You really thought I wanted you, you conceited boy. (Rather grandly) I am not for the likes of you.
Charles (abject). Don’t mock me. I am very unhappy.
Mrs. Page (putting her hand on his shoulder in her dangerous, careless, kindly way). There, there, it is just a game. All life’s a game.
(It is here that the telegram comes. Mrs. Quickly brings it in; and the better to read it, but with a glance at Charles to observe the effect on him, Mrs. Page puts on her large horn spectacles. He sighs.)
Dame. Is there any answer? The girl is waiting.
Mrs. Page. No answer, thank you.
(Mrs. Quickly goes, wondering what those two have had to say to each other.)
Charles (glad to be a thousand miles away from recent matters). Not bad news, I hope?
Mrs. Page (wiping her spectacles). From my manager. It is in cipher, but what it means is that the summer play isn’t drawing, and that they have decided to revive As You Like It. They want me back to rehearse tomorrow at eleven.
Charles (indignant). They can’t even let you have a few weeks.
Mrs. Page (returning from London). What? Heigho, is it not sad. But I had been warned that this might happen.
Charles (evolving schemes). Surely if you ——
(But she has summoned Mrs. Quickly.)
Mrs. Page (plaintively). Alas, Dame, our pleasant gossips have ended for this year. I am called back to London hurriedly.
Dame. Oh dear, the pity! (She has already asked herself what might be in the telegram.) Your girl has come back
, and she wants you? Is that it?
Mrs. Page. That’s about it. (Her quiet, sad manner says that we must all dree our weird.) I must go. Have I time to catch the express?
Charles (dispirited). It leaves at seven.
Mrs. Page (bravely). I think I can do it. Is that the train you are to take?