Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (30 page)

CANDIDA [
after a pause; for she does not take in his meaning at once]
His collar! [
She turns to MORELL, shocked.]
Oh, James: did you—[she stops]?

MORELL [
ashamed
] You know, Candida, that I have a temper to struggle with. And he said
[shuddering]
that you despised me in your heart.

CANDIDA
[turning quickly on EUGENE
] Did you say that?

MARCHBANKS [
terrified
] No!

CANDIDA [
severely
] Then James has just told me a falsehood. Is that what you mean?

MARCHBANKS No, no: I—I—[
blurting out the explanation desperately]
—it was David's wife. And it wasn't at home: it was when she saw him dancing before all the people.

MORELL [
taking the cue with a debater's adroitness]
Dancing before all the people,
^aq
Candida; and thinking he was moving their hearts by his mission when they were only suffering from—Prossy's complaint.
[She is about to protest: he raises his hand to silence her, exclaiming]
Don't try to look indignant, Candida:—

CANDIDA [
interjecting
] Try!

MORELL [
continuing
] Eugene was right. As you told me a few hours after, he is always right. He said nothing that you did not say far better yourself. He is the poet, who sees everything; and I am the poor parson, who understands nothing.

CANDIDA [
remorsefully
] Do you mind what is said by a foolish boy, because I said something like it again in jest?

MORELL That foolish boy can speak with the inspiration of a child and the cunning of a serpent. He has claimed that you belong to him and not to me; and, rightly or wrongly, I have come to fear that it may be true. I will not go about tortured with doubts and suspicions. I will not live with you and keep a secret from you. I will not suffer the intolerable degradation of jealousy. We have agreed—he and I—that you shall choose between us now. I await your decision.

CANDIDA [
slowly recoiling a step, her heart hardened by his rhetoric in
spite
of the sincere feeling behind it]
Oh! I am to choose, am I? I suppose it is quite settled that I must belong to one or the other.

MORELL [
firmly
] Quite. You must choose definitely.

MARCHBANKS [
anxiously
] Morell: you don't understand. She means that she belongs to herself.

CANDIDA
[turning on him]
I mean that and a good deal more, Master Eugene, as you will both find out presently. And pray, my lords and masters, what have you to offer for my choice? I am up for auction, it seems. What do you bid, James?

MORELL [
reproachfully
] Cand—[
He breaks down: his eyes and throat fill with tears: the orator becomes the wounded animal.]
I can't speak—

CANDIDA
[impulsively going to him]
Ah, dearest—

MARCHBANKS
[in wild alarm]
Stop: it's not fair. You mustn't show her that you suffer, Morell. I am on the rack, too; but I am not crying.

MORELL [
rallying all hisforces
] Yes: you are right. It is not for pity that I am bidding. [
He disengages himself from CANDIDA.
]

CANDIDA
[retreating, chilled]
I beg your pardon, James; I did not mean to touch you. I am waiting to hear your bid.

MORELL
[with proud humility]
I have nothing to offer you but my strength for your defence, my honesty of purpose for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer to a woman.

CANDIDA
[quite quietly]
And you, Eugene? What do you offer?

MARCHBANKS My weakness! my desolation! my heart's need!

CANDIDA
[impressed]
That's a good bid, Eugene. Now I know how to make my choice.
She pauses and looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. MORELL, whose lofty confidence has changed into heartbreaking dread at EUGENE's bid, loses all power of concealing his anxiety. EUGENE, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle.

MORELL [
in a suffocated voice
—
the appeal bursting from the depths of his anguish
] Candida!

MARCHBANKS
[aside, in
a
flash of contempt]
Coward!

CANDIDA [
significantly
] I give myself to the weaker of the two. EUGENE
divines her meaning at once: his face whitens like steel in a furnace that cannot melt it.

MORELL [
bowing his head with the calm of collapse]
I accept your sentence, Candida.

CANDIDA Do you understand, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS Oh, I feel I'm lost. He cannot bear the burden.

MORELL [
incredulously, raising his head with prosaic abruptness
]
Do
you mean me, Candida?

CANDIDA [
smiling a little]
Let us sit and talk comfortably over it like three friends. [To MORELL.] Sit down, dear. [MORELL takes the
chair from the fireside
—
the children's chair.
] Bring me that chair, Eugene. [
She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next MORELL, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.]
You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters and successful brothers of yours were your mother's and father's pets: how miserable you were at Eton: how your father is trying to starve you into returning to Oxford: how you have had to live without comfort or welcome or refuge, always lonely, and nearly always disliked and misunderstood, poor boy!

MARCHBANKS
[faithful to the nobility of his lot]
I had my books. I had Nature. And at last I met you.

CANDIDA Never mind that just at present. Now I want you to look at this other boy here—m y boy—spoiled from his cradle. We go once a fortnight to see his parents. You should come with us, Eugene, and see the pictures of the hero of that household. James as a baby! the most wonderful of all babies. James holding his first school prize, won at the ripe age of eight! James as the captain of his eleven! James in his first frock coat! James under all sorts of glorious circumstances! You know how strong he is [I hope he didn't hurt you]—how clever he is—how happy!
[With deepening gravity.
] Ask James's mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask m e what it costs to be James's mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off. When there is money to give, he gives it: when there is money to refuse, I refuse it. I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it, and could not tell you a moment ago how it came to be so. [
With sweet irony.]
And when he thought I might go away with you, his only anxiety was what should become of me ! And to tempt me to stay he offered me
[leaning forward to stroke his hair caressingly at each phrase]
h i s strength for m y defence, his industry for my livelihood, his position for my dignity, his—
[Relenting.]
Ah, I am mixing up your beautiful sentences and spoiling them, am I not, darling?
[She lays her cheek fondly against his.]

MORELL
[quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness
] It's all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.

CANDIDA
[in his arms, smiling, to EUGENE
] Am I you r mother and sisters to you, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS [
rising with a fierce gesture of disgust]
Ah, never. Out, then, into the night with me!

CANDIDA
[rising quickly and intercepting him]
You are not going like that, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS [
with the ring of a man's voice
—
no longer a boy‘s
—in the
words
] I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done.

MORELL [
rising from his knee, alarmed
] Candida: don't let him do anything rash.

CANDIDA [consent, smiling at
EUGENE
] Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness.

MARCHBANKS I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that. Parson James: I give you my happiness with both hands: I love you because you have filled the heart of the woman I loved. Good-bye.
[He goes towards the door.]

CANDIDA One last word. [
He stops, but without turning to her.]
How old are you, Eugene?

MARCHBANKS As old as the world now. This morning I was eighteen.

CANDIDA [
going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder]
Eighteen! Will you, for mv sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me?

MARCHBANKS
[without moving
] Say the sentences.

CANDIDA When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.

MARCHBANKS
[turning to her]
In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.

CANDIDA Good-bye.
[She takes his face in her hands; and as he divines her intention and bends his knee, she kisses his forehead. Then he flies out into the night. She turns to MORELL, holding out her arms to him.] Ah, James! [They embrace. But they do not know the secret in the poet's heart.
]

THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE

THREE PLAYS FOR PURITANS

SINCE I GAVE MY Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, to the world two years ago, many things have happened to me. I had then just entered on the fourth year of my activity as a critic of the London theatres. They very nearly killed me. I had survived seven years of London's music, four or five years of London's pictures, and about as much of its current literature, wrestling critically with them with all my force and skill. After that, the criticism of the theatre came to me as a huge relief in point of bodily exertion. The difference between the leisure of a Persian cat and the labor of a cockney cab horse is not greater than the difference between the official weekly or fortnightly
^ar
playgoings of the theatre critic and the restless daily rushing to and fro of the music critic, from the stroke of three in the afternoon, when the concerts begin, to the stroke of twelve at night, when the opera ends. The pictures were nearly as bad. An Alpinist once, noticing the massive soles of my boots, asked me whether I climbed mountains. No, I replied: these boots are for the hard floors of the London galleries. Yet I once dealt with music and pictures together in the spare time of an active young revolutionist, and wrote plays and books and other toilsome things into the bargain. But the theatre struck me down like the veri est weakling. I sank under it like a baby fed on starch. My very bones began to perish, so that I had to get them planed and gouged by accomplished surgeons. I fell from heights and broke my limbs in pieces. The doctors said: This man has not eaten meat for twenty years: he must eat it or die. I said: This man has been going to the London theatres for three years; and the soul of him has become inane and is feeding unnaturally on his body. And I was right. I did not change my diet; but I had myself carried up into a mountain where there was no theatre; and there I began to revive. Too weak to work, I wrote books and plays; hence the second and third plays in this volume. And now I am stronger than I have been at any moment since my feet first carried me as a critic across the fatal threshold of a London playhouse.

Why was this? What is the matter with the theatre, that a strong man can die of it? Well, the answer will make a long story; but it must be told. And, to begin, why have I just called the theatre a playhouse? The well-fed Englishman, though he lives and dies a schoolboy, cannot play. He cannot even play cricket or football: he has to work at them: that is why he beats the foreigner who plays at them. To him playing means playing the fool. He can hunt and shoot and travel and fight; he can, when special holiday festivity is suggested to him, eat and drink, dice and drab,
^as
smoke and lounge. But play he cannot. The moment you make his theatre a place of amusement instead of a place of edification, you make it, not a real playhouse, but a place of excitement for the sportsman and the sensualist.

However, this well-fed grown-up-schoolboy Englishman counts for little in the modern metropolitan audience. In the long lines of waiting playgoers lining the pavements outside our fashionable theatres every evening, the men are only the currants in the dumpling. Women are in the majority; and women and men alike belong to that least robust of all our social classes, the class which earns from eighteen to thirty shillings a week in sedentary employment, and lives in a dull lodging or with its intolerably prosaic families. These people preserve the innocence of the theatre: they have neither the philosopher's impatience to get to realities (reality being the one thing they want to escape from), nor the longing of the sportsman for violent action, nor the fullfed, experienced, disillusioned sensuality of the rich man, whether he be gentleman or sporting publican. They read a good deal, and are at home in the fool's paradise of popular romance. They love the pretty man and the pretty woman, and will have both of them fashionably dressed and exquisitely idle, posing against backgrounds of drawing-room and dainty garden; in love, but sentimentally, romantically; always ladylike and gentlemanlike. Jejunely insipid, all this, to the stalls, which are paid for (when they are paid for) by people who have their own dresses and drawingrooms, and know them to be a mere masquerade behind which there is nothing romantic, and little that is interesting to most of the masqueraders except the clandestine play of natural licentiousness.