Antic Hay (28 page)

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Shall we say thirty bob?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: As you like.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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
M
ONSTER
and the
P
ROSTITUTE
are seen issuing from the door at which they went out.
]

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
taking out a cheque-book and a fountain-pen
]: Thirty shillings . . .

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But I haven't got any cash on me at the moment.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Well, I won't take a cheque. Once bitten, twice shy, I can tell you.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But I tell you I haven't got any cash.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But this is absurd. I offer you a perfectly good cheque . . .

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: And I won't take it. So there!

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Well then, take my watch. It's worth more than thirty bob. [
He pulls out his gold half-hunter
.]

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

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But where the devil do you expect me to get it at this time of night?

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: I don't know. But you've got to get it pretty quick.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: You're unreasonable.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Aren't there any servants in this house?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: Yes.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Well, go and borrow it from one of them.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: But really, that would be too low, too humiliating.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: You really won't take my cheque? I swear to you it's perfectly all right. There's plenty of money to meet it.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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
.]

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: All right. [
He goes out
.]

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: 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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
coming back again
]: Here you are. [
He hands her money
.]

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
[
examining it
]: Thank you, dearie. Any other time you're lonely . . .

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: No, no!

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
: Where did you get it finally?

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: I woke the cook.

T
HE
P
ROSTITUTE
[
goes off into a peal of laughter
]: Well, so long, duckie. [
She goes out
.]

T
HE
M
ONSTER
[
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.

T
HE
M
ONSTER
: 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
M
ONSTER
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
M
ONSTER
,
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 M
ONSTER
reaches, strains and peers.]
And I seize, I seize! [
As he shouts these words, the
M
ONSTER
falls heavily, head foremost, to the floor. He lies there quite still. After a little time the door opens and the
D
OCTOR
of the first scene enters with a
W
ARDER
.]

T
HE
W
ARDER
: I heard a crash.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
[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
M
ONSTER
.]

T
HE
W
ARDER
: He was for ever climbing on to his chair.

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: Well, he won't any more. His neck's broken.

T
HE
W
ARDER
: You don't say so?

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: I do.

T
HE
W
ARDER
: Well, I never!

T
HE
D
OCTOR
: Have it carried down to the dissecting-room.

T
HE
W
ARDER
: I'll send for the porters at once.

[
Exeunt severally, and
C
URTAIN
.]

‘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.

‘These substitutes for the genuine copulative article,' said Coleman to his disciple, ‘are beneath the dignity of hellhounds like you and me.'

Charmed, the young man laughed; he was attentive as though at the feet of Socrates. Coleman had found him in a night club, where he had gone in search of Zoe, found him very drunk in the company of two formidable women fifteen or twenty years his senior, who were looking after him, half maternally out of pure kindness of heart, half professionally; for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after himself. Coleman had pounced on him at once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to deny, and carried him off. There was something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of children tobogganing down into the cesspools.

‘I like this place,' said the young man.

‘Tastes differ!' Coleman shrugged his shoulders. ‘The German professors have catalogued thousands of people whose whole pleasure consists of eating dung.'

The young man smiled and nodded, rather vaguely. ‘Is there anything to drink here?' he asked.

‘Too respectable,' Coleman answered, shaking his head.

‘I think this is a bloody place,' said the young man.

‘Ah! but some people like blood. And some like boots. And some like long gloves and corsets. And some like birch-rods. And some like sliding down slopes and can't look at Michelangelo's “Night” on the Medici Tombs without dying the little death, because the statue seems to be sliding. And some . . .'

‘But I want something to drink,' insisted the young man.

Coleman stamped his feet, waved his arms. ‘
À boire! à boire!'
he shouted, like the newborn Gargantua. Nobody paid any attention.

The music came to an end. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash reappeared.

‘Dante,' said Coleman, ‘calls for drink. We must leave the building.'

‘Yes. Anything to get out of this,' said Mrs Viveash. ‘What's the time?'

Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘Half-past one.'

Mrs Viveash sighed. ‘Can't possibly go to bed,' she said, ‘for another hour at least.'

They walked out into the street. The stars were large and brilliant overhead. There was a little wind that almost seemed to come from the country. Gumbril thought so, at any rate; he thought of the country.