Antic Hay, Page 21

THE DOCTOR: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.

  THE HUSBAND: But none of them belonged to my harem.

  THE DOCTOR: Each of them was somebody’s wife.

  THE HUSBAND: Doubtless. But the people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.

  THE DOCTOR: Not in the spectator’s eyes.

  THE HUSBAND: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret! . . .

  THE DOCTOR: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.

  THE HUSBAND: The only one!

  THE DOCTOR: But here comes the cow.

  [SHORT-I’-THE-HORN is led in by a YOKEL.]

  THE HUSBAND: Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! [He pats the animal.] She was tested last week, was she not?

  THE YOKEL: Ay, sir.

  THE HUSBAND: And found tubercular. No?

  THE YOKEL: Even in the udders, may it please you.

  THE HUSBAND: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.

  THE YOKEL: I will, sir. [He milks the cow.]

  THE HUSBAND: Her milk – her milk is cold already. All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will make it flow again?

  THE YOKEL: The wash-pot is full, sir.

  THE HUSBAND: Then take the cow away.

  THE YOKEL: Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, Short-i’-the-horn. [He goes out with the cow.]

  THE HUSBAND [pouring the milk into a long-tubed feeding-bottle]: Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own health in. [He gives the bottle to the child.]

  [CURTAIN.]

  ‘A little ponderous, perhaps,’ said Gumbril, as the curtain came down.

  ‘But I liked the cow,’ Mrs Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it in the least,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,’ Gumbril agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since he had been to a Christmas pantomime. Not since Dan Leno’s days. All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them – every year they filled thebest part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grown-ups always wanted to go away before the harlequinade. And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out, trampling and stumbling over everybody else’s feet – and every stumble making the need more agonizingly great – in the middle of the transformation scene. And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody else’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.

  ‘I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.’

  ‘Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,’ said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms.

  ‘None of your cracker mottoes, please,’ protested Mrs Viveash. All the same, she reflected, what was she doing now but waiting for the curtain to go up again, waiting, with what unspeakable weariness of spirit, for the curtain that had rung down, ten centuries ago, on those blue eyes, that bright strawy hair and the weathered face?

  ‘Thank God,’ she said with an expiring earnestness, ‘here’s the second scene!’

  The curtain went up. In a bald room stood the Monster, grown now from an infant into a frail and bent young man with bandy legs. At the back of the stage a large window giving on to a street along which people pass.

  THE MONSTER [solus]: The young girls of Sparta, they say, used to wrestle naked with naked Spartan boys. The sun caressed their skins till they were brown and transparent like amber or a flask of olive oil. Their breasts were hard, their bellies flat. They were pure with the chastity of beautiful animals. Their thoughts were clear, their minds cool and untroubled. I spit blood into my handkerchief and sometimes I feel in my mouth something slimy, soft and disgusting, like a slug – and I have coughed up a shred of my lung. The rickets from which I suffered in childhood have bent my bones and made them old and brittle. All my life I have lived in this huge town, whose domes and spires are wrapped in a cloud of stink that hides the sun. The slug-dank tatters of lung that I spit out are black with the soot I have been breathing all these years. I am now come of age. Long-expected one-and-twenty has made me a fully privileged citizen of this great realm of which the owners of the Daily Mirror, the News of the World and the Daily Express are noble peers. Somewhere, I must logically infer, there must be other cities, built by men for men to live in. Somewhere, in the past, in the future, a very long way off . . . But perhaps the only street improvement schemes that ever really improve the streets are schemes in the minds of those who live in them: schemes of love mostly. Ah! here she comes.

  [The YOUNG LADY enters. She stands outside the window, in the street, paying no attention to the MONSTER; she seems to be waiting for somebody.]

  She is like a pear tree in flower. When she smiles, it is as though there were stars. Her hair is like the harvest in an eclogue, her cheeks are all the fruits of summer. Her arms and thighs are as beautiful as the soul of St Catherine of Siena. And her eyes, her eyes are plumbless with thought and limpidly pure like the water of the mountains.

  THE YOUNG LADY: If I wait till the summer sale, the crêpe de Chine will be reduced by at least two shillings a yard, and on six camisoles that will mean a lot of money. But the question is: can I go from May till the end of July with the under-clothing I have now?

  THE MONSTER: If I knew her, I should know the universe!

  THE YOUNG LADY: My present ones are so dreadfully middleclass. And if Roger should . . . by any chance . . .

  THE MONSTER: Or, rather, I should be able to ignore it, having a private universe of my own.

  THE YOUNG LADY: If – if he did – well, it might be rather humiliating with these I have . . . like a servant’s almost . . .

  THE MONSTER: Love makes you accept the world; it puts an end to criticism.

  THE YOUNG LADY: His hand already . . .

  THE MONSTER: Dare I, dare I tell her how beautiful she is?

  THE YOUNG LADY: On the whole, I think I’d better get it now, though it will cost more.

  THE MONSTER [desperately advancing to the window as though to assault a battery]: Beautiful! beautiful!

  THE YOUNG LADY [looking at him]: Ha, ha, ha!

  THE MONSTER: But I love you, flowering pear tree; I love you, golden harvest; I love you, fruitage of summer; I love you, body and limbs, with the shape of a saint’s thought.

  THE YOUNG LADY [redoubles her laughter]: Ha, ha, ha!

  THE MONSTER [taking her hand]: You cannot be cruel! [He is seized with a violent paroxysm of coughing which doubles him up, which shakes and torments him. The handkerchief he holds to his mouth is spotted with blood.]

  THE YOUNG LADY: You disgust me! [She draws away her skirts so that they shall not come in contact with him.]

  THE MONSTER: But I swear to you, I love – I – [He is once more interrupted by his cough.]

  THE YOUNG LADY: Please go away. [In a different voice.] Ah, Roger! [She advances to meet a snub-nosed lubber with curly hair and a face like a groom’s, who passes along the street at this moment.]

  ROGER: I’ve got the motor-bike waiting at the corner.

  THE YOUNG LADY: Let’s go, then.

  ROGER [pointing to the MONSTER]: What’s that?

  THE YOUNG LADY: Oh, it’s nothing in particular.

  [Both roar with laughter. ROGER escorts her out, patting her familiarly on the back as
they walk along.]

  THE MONSTER [looking after her]: There is a wound under my left pap. She has deflowered all women. I cannot . . .

  ‘Lord!’ whispered Mrs Viveash, ‘how this young man bores me!’

  ‘I confess,’ replied Gumbril, ‘I have rather a taste for moralities. There is a pleasant uplifting vagueness about these symbolical generalized figures which pleases me.’

  ‘You were always charmingly simple-minded,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘But who’s this? As long as the young man isn’t left alone on the stage, I don’t mind.’

  Another female figure has appeared in the street beyond the window. It is the Prostitute. Her face, painted in two tones of red, white, green, blue and black, is the most tasteful of nature-mortes.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Hullo, duckie!

  THE MONSTER: Hullo!

  THE PROSTITUTE: Are you lonely?

  THE MONSTER: Yes.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Would you like me to come in to see you?

  THE MONSTER: Very well.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Shall we say thirty bob?

  THE MONSTER: As you like.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Come along then.

  [She climbs through the window and they go off together through the door on the left of the stage. The curtains descend for a moment, then rise again. The MONSTER and the PROSTITUTE are seen issuing from the door at which they went out.]

  THE MONSTER [taking out a cheque-book and a fountain-pen]: Thirty shillings . . .

  THE PROSTITUTE: Thank you. Not a cheque. I don’t want any cheques. How do I know it isn’t a dud one that they’ll refuse payment for at the bank? Ready money for me, thanks.

  THE MONSTER: But I haven’t got any cash on me at the moment.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Well, I won’t take a cheque. Once bitten, twice shy, I can tell you.

  THE MONSTER: But I tell you I haven’t got any cash.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Well, all I can say is, here I stay till I get it. And, what’s more, if I don’t get it quick, I’ll make a row.

  THE MONSTER: But this is absurd. I offer you a perfectly good cheque . . .

  THE PROSTITUTE: And I won’t take it. So there!

  THE MONSTER: Well then, take my watch. It’s worth more than thirty bob. [He pulls out his gold half-hunter.]

  THE PROSTITUTE: Thank you, and get myself arrested as soon I take it to the pop-shop! No, I want cash, I tell you.

  THE MONSTER: But where the devil do you expect me to get it at this time of night?

  THE PROSTITUTE: I don’t know. But you’ve got to get it pretty quick.

  THE MONSTER: You’re unreasonable.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Aren’t there any servants in this house?

  THE MONSTER: Yes.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Well, go and borrow it from one of them.

  THE MONSTER: But really, that would be too low, too humiliating.

  THE PROSTITUTE: All right, I’ll begin kicking up a noise. I’ll go to the window and yell till all the neighbours are woken up and the police come to see what’s up. You can borrow it from the copper then.

  THE MONSTER: You really won’t take my cheque? I swear to you it’s perfectly all right. There’s plenty of money to meet it.

  THE PROSTITUTE: Oh, shut up! No more dilly-dallying. Get me my money at once, or I’ll start the row. One, two, three . . . [She opens her mouth wide as if to yell.]

  THE MONSTER: All right. [He goes out.]

  THE PROSTITUTE: Nice state of things we’re coming to, when young rips try and swindle us poor girls out of our money! Mean, stinking skunks! I’d like to slit the throats of some of them.

  THE MONSTER [coming back again]: Here you are. [He hands her money.]

  THE PROSTITUTE [examining it]: Thank you, dearie. Any other time you’re lonely . . .

  THE MONSTER: No, no!

  THE PROSTITUTE: Where did you get it finally?

  THE MONSTER: I woke the cook.

  THE PROSTITUTE [goes off into a peal of laughter]: Well, so long, duckie. [She goes out.]

  THE MONSTER [solus]: Somewhere there must be love like music. Love harmonious and ordered: two spirits, two bodies moving contrapuntally together. Somewhere, the stupid brutish act must be made to make sense, must be enriched, must be made significant. Lust, like Diabelli’s waltz, a stupid air, turned by a genius into three-and-thirty fabulous variations. Somewhere . . .

  ‘Oh dear!’ sighed Mrs Viveash.

  ‘Charming!’ Gumbril protested.

  . . . love like sheets of silky flame; like landscapes brilliant in the sunlight against a background of purple thunder; like the solution of a cosmic problem; like faith . . .

  ‘Crikey!’ said Mrs Viveash.

  . . . Somewhere, somewhere. But in my veins creep the maggots of the pox . . .

  ‘Really, really!’ Mrs Viveash shook her head. ‘Too medical!’

  . . . crawling towards the brain, crawling into the mouth, burrowing into the bones. Insatiably.

  The Monster threw himself to the ground, and the curtain came down.

  ‘And about time too!’ declared Mrs Viveash.

  ‘Charming!’ Gumbril stuck to his guns. ‘Charming! charming!’

  There was a disturbance near the door. Mrs Viveash looked round to see what was happening. ‘And now on top of it all,’ she said, ‘here comes Coleman, raving, with an unknown drunk.’

  ‘Have we missed it?’ Coleman was shouting. ‘Have we missed all the lovely bloody farce?’

  ‘Lovely bloody!’ his companion repeated with drunken raptures, and he went into fits of uncontrollable laughter. He was a very young boy with straight dark hair and a face of Hellenic beauty, now distorted with tipsiness.

  Coleman greeted his acquaintances in the hall, shouting a jovial obscenity to each. ‘And Bumbril-Gumbril,’ he exclaimed, catching sight of him at last in the front row. ‘And Hetaira-Myra!’ He pushed his way through the crowd, followed unsteadily by his young disciple. ‘So you’re here,’ he said, standing over them and looking down with an enigmatic malice in his bright blue eyes. ‘Where’s the physiologue?’

  ‘Am I the physiologue’s keeper?’ asked Gumbril. ‘He’s with his glands and his hormones, I suppose. Not to mention his wife.’ He smiled to himself.

  ‘Where the hormones, there moan I,’ said Coleman, skidding off sideways along the slippery word. ‘I hear, by the way, that there’s a lovely prostitute in this play.’

  ‘You’ve missed her,’ said Mrs Viveash.

  ‘What a misfortune,’ said Coleman. ‘We’ve missed the delicious trull,’ he said, turning to the young man.

  The young man only laughed.

  ‘Let me introduce, by the way,’ said Coleman. ‘This is Dante,’ he pointed to the dark-haired boy; ‘and I am Virgil. We’re making a round tour – or, rather, a descending spiral tour of hell. But we’re only at the first circle so far. These, Alighieri, are two damned souls, though not, as you might suppose, Paolo and Francesca.’

  The boy continued to laugh, happily and uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Another of these interminable entr’actes,’ complained Mrs Viveash. ‘I was just saying to Theodore here that if there’s one thing I dislike more than another, it’s a long entr’acte.’ Would hers ever come to an end?

  ‘And if there’s one thing I dislike more than another,’ said the boy, breaking silence for the first time, with an air of the greatest earnestness, ‘it’s . . . it’s one thing more than another.’

  ‘And you’re perfectly right in doing so,’ said Coleman. ‘Perfectly right.’

  ‘I know,’ the boy replied modestly.

  When the curtain rose again it was on an aged Monster, with a black patch over the left side of his nose, no hair, no teeth, and sitting harmlessly behind the bars of an asylum.

  THE MONSTER: Asses, apes and dogs! Milton called them that; he should have known. Somewhere there must be men, however. The variations on Diabelli prove it. Brunelleschi’s dome is more than the magnification of Cléo de Mérode’s breast. Somewhere there are men with
power, living reasonably. Like our mythical Greeks and Romans. Living cleanly. The images of the gods are their portraits. They walk under their own protection. [The MONSTER climbs on to a chair and stands in the posture of a statue.] Jupiter, father of gods, a man, I bless myself, I throw bolts at my own disobedience, I answer my own prayers, I pronounce oracles to satisfy the questions I myself propound. I abolish all tetters, poxes, blood-spitting, rotting of bones. With love I recreate the world from within. Europa puts an end to squalor, Leda does away with tyranny, Danae tempers stupidity. After establishing these reforms in the social sewer, I climb, I climb, up through the manhole, out of the manhole, beyond humanity. For the manhole, even the manhole, is dark; though not so dingy as the doghole it was before I altered it. Up through the manhole, towards the air. Up, up! [And the MONSTER, suiting the action to his words, climbs up the runged back of his chair and stands, by a miraculous feat of acrobacy, on the topmost bar.] I begin to see the stars through other eyes than my own. More than dog already, I become more than man. I begin to have inklings of the shape and sense of things. Upwards, upwards I strain, I peer, I reach aloft. [The balanced MONSTER reaches, strains and peers.] And I seize, I seize! [As he shouts these words, the MONSTER falls heavily, head foremost, to the floor. He lies there quite still. After a little time the door opens and the DOCTOR of the first scene enters with a WARDER.]

  THE WARDER: I heard a crash.

  THE DOCTOR [who has by this time become immensely old and has a beard like Father Thames]: It looks as though you were right. [He examines the MONSTER.]

  THE WARDER: He was for ever climbing on to his chair.

  THE DOCTOR: Well, he won’t any more. His neck’s broken.

  THE WARDER: You don’t say so?

  THE DOCTOR: I do.

  THE WARDER: Well, I never!

  THE DOCTOR: Have it carried down to the dissecting-room.

  THE WARDER: I’ll send for the porters at once.

  [Exeunt severally, and CURTAIN.]

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’

  The music struck up again, saxophone and ‘cello, with the thin draught of the violin to cool their ecstasies and the thumping piano to remind them of business. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash slid out into the dancing crowd, revolving as though by force of habit.