Antic Hay (27 page)

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: But you won't to-morrow.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: To-morrow! But I don't want to live to see tomorrow.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: You will to-morrow.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: You will not be slow to survive her.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Christ have mercy upon us!

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: You would do better to think of the child.

T
HE
H
USBAND
[
rising and standing menacingly over the cradle
]: Is that the monster?

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: No worse than others.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: The child must be fed.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Fed? With what?

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: With milk.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Her milk is cold in her breasts.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: There are still cows.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Tubercular shorthorns. [
Calling.
] Let Short-i'-the-horn be brought!

V
OICES
[off]:
Short-i'-the-horn! Short-i'-the-horn! [
Fadingly
.] Short-i'-the . . .

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: But none of them belonged to my harem.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: Each of them was somebody's wife.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Doubtless. But the people we don't know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: Not in the spectator's eyes.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret! . . .

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: The only one!

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: But here comes the cow.

[S
HORT
-
I
'-
THE
-H
ORN
is led in by a
Y
OKEL
.]

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Ah, good Short-i'-the-horn! [
He pats the animal
.] She was tested last week, was she not?

T
HE
Y
OKEL
: Ay, sir.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: And found tubercular. No?

T
HE
Y
OKEL
: Even in the udders, may it please you.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.

T
HE
Y
OKEL
: I will, sir. [
He milks the cow
.]

T
HE
H
USBAND
: 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?

T
HE
Y
OKEL
: The wash-pot is full, sir.

T
HE
H
USBAND
: Then take the cow away.

T
HE
Y
OKEL
: Come, Short-i'-the-horn; come up, Short-i'-the-horn. [
He goes out with the cow
.]

T
HE
H
USBAND
[
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
.]

[C
URTAIN
.]

‘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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
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
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
enters. She stands outside the window, in the street, paying no attention to the
M
ONSTER
;
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.

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: 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?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: If I knew her, I should know the universe!

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: My present ones are so dreadfully middleclass. And if Roger should . . . by any chance . . .

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Or, rather, I should be able to ignore it, having a private universe of my own.

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: If – if he did – well, it might be rather humiliating with these I have . . . like a servant's almost . . .

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Love makes you accept the world; it puts an end to criticism.

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: His hand already . . .

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Dare I, dare I tell her how beautiful she is?

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: On the whole, I think I'd better get it now, though it will cost more.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
desperately advancing to the window as though to assault a battery
]: Beautiful! beautiful!

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
[
looking at him
]: Ha, ha, ha!

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: 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.

T
HE
Y
OUNG LADY
[
redoubles her laughter
]: Ha, ha, ha!

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
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.
]

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: You disgust me! [
She draws away her skirts so that they shall not come in contact with him.
]

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But I swear to you, I love – I – [
He is once more interrupted by his cough.
]

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: 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.
]

R
OGER
: I've got the motor-bike waiting at the corner.

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: Let's go, then.

R
OGER
[
pointing to the
M
ONSTER
]: What's that?

T
HE
Y
OUNG
L
ADY
: Oh, it's nothing in particular.

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

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
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
.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Hullo, duckie!

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Hullo!

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Are you lonely?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Yes.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Would you like me to come in to see you?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Very well.