Antic Hay

The blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room—“making two worlds,” Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, “where only one grew before—and one of them a better world,” he added too philosophically, “because unreal.” There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again. On a narrow bed—on a bier perhaps—the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby. THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! THE DOCTOR: She is dead. THE HUSBAND: Margaret! THE DOCTOR: Of septicæmia, I tell you. THE HUSBAND: I wish that I too were dead! THE DOCTOR: But you won’t to-morrow. THE HUSBAND: To-morrow! But I don’t want to live to see to-morrow. THE DOCTOR: You will to-morrow. THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale. THE DOCTOR: You will not be slow to survive her. THE HUSBAND: Christ have mercy upon us! THE DOCTOR: You would do better to think of the child. THE HUSBAND (_rising and standing menacingly over the cradle_): Is that the monster? THE DOCTOR: No worse than others. THE HUSBAND: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity! THE DOCTOR: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes! THE HUSBAND: Murderer, slowly die all your life long! THE DOCTOR: The child must be fed. THE HUSBAND: Fed? With what? THE DOCTOR: With milk. THE HUSBAND: Her milk is cold in her breasts. THE DOCTOR: There are still cows. THE HUSBAND: Tubercular shorthorns. (_Calling._) Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought! VOICES (_off_): Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! (_Fadingly_) Short-i’-the.... 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, good 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 the best 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 underclothing I have now? THE MONSTER: If I knew her, I should know the universe! THE YOUNG LADY: My present ones are so dreadfully middle-class. 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: